I
I had scanted charming Pisa even as I had scanted great Siena in my
original small report of it, my scarce more than stammering notes of
years before; but even if there had been meagreness of mere gaping
vision--which there in fact hadn’t been--as well as insufficiency of
public tribute, the indignity would soon have ceased to weigh on my
conscience. For to this affection I was to return again still oftener
than to the strong call of Siena my eventual frequentations of Pisa, all
merely impressionistic and amateurish as they might be--and I pretended,
up and down the length of the land, to none other--leave me at the
hither end of time with little more than a confused consciousness of
exquisite _quality_ on the part of the small sweet scrap of a place of
ancient glory; a consciousness so pleadingly content to be general and
vague that I shrink from pulling it to pieces. The Republic of Pisa
fought with the Republic of Florence, through the ages so ferociously
and all but invincibly that what is so pale and languid in her to-day
may well be the aspect of any civil or, still more, military creature
bled and bled and bled at the “critical” time of its life. She has
verily a just languor and is touchingly anæmic; the past history, or
at any rate the present perfect acceptedness, of which condition hangs
about her with the last grace of weakness, making her state in this
particular the very secret of her irresistible appeal. I was to find the
appeal, again and again, one of the sweetest, tenderest, even if not
one of the fullest and richest impressions possible; and if I went back
whenever I could it was very much as one doesn’t indecently neglect a
gentle invalid friend. The couch of the invalid friend, beautifully,
appealingly resigned, has been wheeled, say, for the case, into the warm
still garden, and your visit but consists of your sitting beside it with
kind, discreet, testifying silences. Such is the figurative form under
which the once rugged enemy of Florence, stretched at her length by the
rarely troubled Arno, to-day presents herself; and I find my analogy
complete even to my sense of the mere mild _séance_, the inevitably
tacit communion or rather blank interchange, between motionless cripple
and hardly more incurable admirer.
The terms of my enjoyment of Pisa scarce departed from that ideal--slow
contemplative perambulations, rather late in the day and after work done
mostly in the particular decent inn-room that was repeatedly my portion;
where the sunny flicker of the river played up from below to the very
ceiling, which, by the same sign, anciently and curiously raftered and
hanging over my table at a great height, had been colour-pencilled into
ornament as fine (for all practical purposes) as the page of a missal.
I add to this, for remembrance, an inveteracy of evening idleness and of
reiterated ices in front of one of the quiet cafés--quiet as everything
at Pisa is quiet, or will certainly but in these latest days have ceased
to be; one in especial so beautifully, so mysteriously void of bustle
that almost always the neighbouring presence and admirable chatter of
some group of the local University students would fall upon my ear, by
the half-hour at a time, not less as a privilege, frankly, than as a
clear-cut image of the young Italian mind and life, by which I lost
nothing. I use such terms as “admirable” and “privilege,” in this last
most casual of connections--which was moreover no connection at all but
what my attention made it--simply as an acknowledgment of the interest
that might play there through some inevitable thoughts. These were, for
that matter, intensely in keeping with the ancient scene and air:
they dealt with the exquisite difference between that tone and type of
ingenuous adolescence--in the mere relation of charmed _audition_--and
other forms of juvenility of whose mental and material accent one had
elsewhere met the assault. Civilised, charmingly civilised, were my
loquacious neighbours--as how had n’t they to be, one asked one’s self,
through the use of a medium of speech that is in itself a sovereign
saturation? _There_ was the beautiful congruity of the happily-caught
impression; the fact of my young men’s general Tuscanism of tongue,
which related them so on the spot to the whole historic consensus
of things. It wasn’t dialect--as it of course easily might have been
elsewhere, at Milan, at Turin, at Bologna, at Naples; it was the clear
Italian in which all the rest of the surrounding story was told, all
the rest of the result of time recorded; and it made them delightful,
prattling, unconscious men of the particular little constituted and
bequeathed world which everything else that was charged with old
meanings and old beauty referred to--all the more that their talk was
never by any chance of romping games or deeds of violence, but kept
flowering, charmingly and incredibly, into eager ideas and literary
opinions and philosophic discussions and, upon my honour, vital
questions.
They have taken me too far, for so light a reminiscence; but I claim
for the loose web of my impressions at no point a heavier texture. Which
comes back to what I was a moment ago saying--that just in proportion
as you “feel” the morbid charm of Pisa you press on it gently, and this
somehow even under stress of whatever respectful attention. I found
this last impulse, at all events, so far as I was concerned, quite
contentedly spend itself in a renewed sense of the simple large pacified
felicity of such an afternoon aspect as that of the Lung’ Arno, taken up
or down its course; whether to within sight of small Santa Maria della
Spina, the tiny, the delicate, the exquisite Gothic chapel perched where
the quay drops straight, or, in the other direction, toward the melting
perspective of the narrow local pleasure-ground, the rather thin and
careless bosky grace of which recedes, beside the stream whose very
turbidity pleases, to a middle distance of hot and tangled and exuberant
rural industry and a proper blue horizon of Carrara mountains. The Pisan
Lung’ Arno is shorter and less featured and framed than the Florentine,
but it has the fine accent of a marked curve and is quite as bravely
Tuscan; witness the type of river-fronting palace which, in half-a-dozen
massive specimens, the last word of the anciently “handsome,” are of
the essence of the physiognomy of the place. In the glow of which
retrospective admission I ask myself how I came, under my first flush,
reflected in other pages, to fail of justice to so much proud domestic
architecture--in the very teeth moreover of the fact that I was for ever
paying my compliments, in a wistful, wondering way, to the fine Palazzo
Lanfranchi, occupied in 1822 by the migratory Byron, and whither Leigh
Hunt, as commemorated in the latter’s Autobiography, came out to join
him in an odd journalistic scheme.
Of course, however, I need scarcely add, the centre of my daily
revolution--quite thereby on the circumference--was the great Company of
Four in their sequestered corner; objects of regularly recurrent pious
pilgrimage, if for no other purpose than to see whether each would
each time again so inimitably carry itself as one of a group of
wonderfully-worked old ivories. Their charm of relation to each other
and to everything else that concerns them, that of the quartette of
monuments, is more or less inexpressible all round; but not the least of
it, ever, is in their beautiful secret for taking at different hours
and seasons, in different states of the light, the sky, the wind, the
weather--in different states, even, it used verily to seem to me, of
an admirer’s imagination or temper or nerves--different complexional
appearances, different shades and pallors, different glows and chills.
I have seen them look almost viciously black, and I have seen them as
clear and fair as pale gold. And these things, for the most part, off on
the large grassy carpet spread for them, and with the elbow of the old
city-wall, not elsewhere erect, respectfully but protectingly crooked
about, to the tune of a usual unanimity save perhaps in the case of
the Leaning Tower--so abnormal a member of any respectable family this
structure at best that I always somehow fancied its three companions,
the Cathedral, the Baptistery and the Campo Santo, capable of quiet
common understandings, for the major or the minor effect, into which
their odd fellow, no hint thrown out to him, was left to enter as he
might. If one haunted the place, one ended by yielding to the conceit
that, beautifully though the others of the group may be said to behave
about him, one sometimes caught them in the act of tacitly combining to
ignore him--as if he had, after so long, begun to give on their nerves.
Or is that absurdity but my shamefaced form of admission that, for all
the wonder of him, he finally gave on mine? Frankly--I would put it at
such moments--he becomes at last an optical bore or _betise_.
{Illustration: THE LOGGIA, LUCCA.}