I
Yesterday that languid organism known as the Florentine Carnival put on
a momentary semblance of vigour, and decreed a general _corso_ through
the town. The spectacle was not brilliant, but it suggested some natural
reflections. I encountered the line of carriages in the square before
Santa Croce, of which they were making the circuit. They rolled solemnly
by, with their inmates frowning forth at each other in apparent wrath
at not finding each other more worth while. There were no masks, no
costumes, no decorations, no throwing of flowers or sweetmeats. It was
as if each carriageful had privately and not very heroically resolved
not to be at costs, and was rather discomfited at finding that it was
getting no better entertainment than it gave. The middle of the piazza
was filled with little tables, with shouting mountebanks, mostly
disguised in battered bonnets and crinolines, offering chances in
raffles for plucked fowls and kerosene lamps. I have never thought the
huge marble statue of Dante, which overlooks the scene, a work of the
last refinement; but, as it stood there on its high pedestal, chin in
hand, frowning down on all this cheap foolery, it seemed to have a great
moral intention. The carriages followed a prescribed course--through Via
Ghibellina, Via del Proconsolo, past the Badia and the Bargello, beneath
the great tessellated cliffs of the Cathedral, through Via Tornabuoni
and out into ten minutes’ sunshine beside the Arno. Much of all this
is the gravest and stateliest part of Florence, a quarter of supreme
dignity, and there was an almost ludicrous incongruity in seeing
Pleasure leading her train through these dusky historic streets. It was
most uncomfortably cold, and in the absence of masks many a fair
nose was fantastically tipped with purple. But as the carriages crept
solemnly along they seemed to keep a funeral march--to follow an antique
custom, an exploded faith, to its tomb. The Carnival is dead, and these
good people who had come abroad to make merry were funeral mutes and
grave-diggers. Last winter in Rome it showed but a galvanised life, yet
compared with this humble exhibition it was operatic. At Rome indeed
it was too operatic. The knights on horseback there were a bevy of
circus-riders, and I’m sure half the mad revellers repaired every night
to the Capitol for their twelve sous a day.
I have just been reading over the Letters of the President de Brosses.
A hundred years ago, in Venice, the Carnival lasted six months; and at
Rome for many weeks each year one was free, under cover of a mask,
to perpetrate the most fantastic follies and cultivate the most
remunerative vices. It’s very well to read the President’s notes, which
have indeed a singular interest; but they make us ask ourselves why we
should expect the Italians to persist in manners and practices which
we ourselves, if we had responsibilities in the matter, should find
intolerable. The Florentines at any rate spend no more money nor faith
on the carnivalesque. And yet this truth has a qualification; for
what struck me in the whole spectacle yesterday, and prompted these
observations, was not at all the more or less of costume of the
occupants of the carriages, but the obstinate survival of the
merrymaking instinct in the people at large. There could be no better
example of it than that so dim a shadow of entertainment should keep all
Florence standing and strolling, densely packed for hours, in the cold
streets. There was nothing to see that mightn’t be seen on the Cascine
any fine day in the year--nothing but a name, a tradition, a pretext for
sweet staring idleness. The faculty of making much of common things
and converting small occasions into great pleasures is, to a son
of communities strenuous as ours are strenuous, the most salient
characteristic of the so-called Latin civilisations. It charms him and
vexes him, according to his mood; and for the most part it represents a
moral gulf between his own temperamental and indeed spiritual sense
of race, and that of Frenchmen and Italians, far wider than the watery
leagues that a steamer may annihilate. But I think his mood is wisest
when he accepts the “foreign” easy surrender to _all_ the senses as the
sign of an unconscious philosophy of life, instilled by the experience
of centuries--the philosophy of people who have lived long and much,
who have discovered no short cuts to happiness and no effective
circumvention of effort, and so have come to regard the average lot as a
ponderous fact that absolutely calls for a certain amount of sitting on
the lighter tray of the scales. Florence yesterday then took its holiday
in a natural, placid fashion that seemed to make its own temper an
affair quite independent of the splendour of the compensation decreed on
a higher line to the weariness of its legs. That the _corso_ was stupid
or lively was the shame or the glory of the powers “above”--the fates,
the gods, the _forestieri_, the town-councilmen, the rich or the stingy.
Common Florence, on the narrow footways, pressed against the houses,
obeyed a natural need in looking about complacently, patiently, gently,
and never pushing, nor trampling, nor swearing, nor staggering. This
liberal margin for festivals in Italy gives the masses a more than
man-of-the-world urbanity in taking their pleasure.
Meanwhile it occurs to me that by a remote New England fireside an
unsophisticated young person of either sex is reading in an old volume
of travels or an old romantic tale some account of these anniversaries
and appointed revels as old Catholic lands offer them to view. Across
the page swims a vision of sculptured palace-fronts draped in crimson
and gold and shining in a southern sun; of a motley train of maskers
sweeping on in voluptuous confusion and pelting each other with nosegays
and love-letters. Into the quiet room, quenching the rhythm of the
Connecticut clock, floats an uproar of delighted voices, a medley of
stirring foreign sounds, an echo of far-heard music of a strangely alien
cadence. But the dusk is falling, and the unsophisticated young person
closes the book wearily and wanders to the window. The dusk is falling
on the beaten snow. Down the road is a white wooden meeting-house,
looking grey among the drifts. The young person surveys the prospect
a while, and then wanders back and stares at the fire. The Carnival of
Venice, of Florence, of Rome; colour and costume, romance and rapture!
The young person gazes in the firelight at the flickering chiaroscuro
of the future, discerns at last the glowing phantasm of opportunity,
and determines with a wild heart-beat to go and see it all--twenty years
hence!