To Lucca I was not to return often--I was to return only once; when that
compact and admirable little city, the very model of a small _pays de
Cocagne_, overflowing with everything that makes for ease, for plenty,
for beauty, for interest and good example, renewed for me, in the
highest degree, its genial and robust appearance. The perfection of
this renewal must indeed have been, at bottom, the ground of my rather
hanging back from possible excess of acquaintance--with the instinct
that so right and rich and rounded a little impression had better be
left than endangered. I remember positively saying to myself the second
time that no brown-and-gold Tuscan city, even, could _be_ as happy as
Lucca looked--save always, exactly, Lucca; so that, on the chance of any
shade of human illusion in the case, I wouldn’t, as a brooding analyst,
go within fifty miles of it again. Just so, I fear I must confess, it
was this mere face-value of the place that, when I went back, formed my
sufficiency; I spent all my scant time--or the greater part, for I took
a day to drive over to the Bagni--just gaping at its visible attitude.
This may be described as that of simply sitting there, through the
centuries, at the receipt of perfect felicity; on its splendid solid
seat of russet masonry, that is--for its great republican ramparts of
long ago still lock it tight--with its wide garden-land, its ancient
appanage or hereditary domain, teeming and blooming with everything that
is good and pleasant for man, all about, and with a ring of graceful and
noble, yet comparatively unbeneficed uplands and mountains watching
it, for very envy, across the plain, as a circle of bigger boys, in
the playground, may watch a privileged or pampered smaller one munch a
particularly fine apple. Half smothered thus in oil and wine and
corn and all the fruits of the earth, Lucca seems fairly to laugh for
good-humour, and it’s as if one can’t say more for her than that, thanks
to her putting forward for you a temperament somehow still richer than
her heritage, you forgive her at every turn her fortune. She smiles up
at you her greeting as you dip into her wide lap, out of which you may
select almost any rare morsel whatever. Looking back at my own choice
indeed I see it must have suffered a certain embarrassment--that of the
sense of too many things; for I scarce remember choosing at all, any
more than I recall having had to go hungry. I turned into all the
churches--taking care, however, to pause before one of them, though
before which I now irrecoverably forget, for verification of Ruskin’s so
characteristically magnified rapture over the high and rather narrow
and obscure hunting-frieze on its front--and in the Cathedral paid my
respects at every turn to the greatest of Lucchesi, Matteo Civitale,
wisest, sanest, homeliest, kindest of _quattro-cento_ sculptors, to
whose works the Duomo serves almost as a museum. But my nearest approach
to anything so invidious as a discrimination or a preference, under the
spell of so felt an equilibrium, must have been the act of engaging a
carriage for the Baths.
That inconsequence once perpetrated, let me add, the impression was as
right as any other--the impression of the drive through the huge general
tangled and fruited _podere_ of the countryside; that of the pair of
jogging hours that bring the visitor to where the wideish gate of the
valley of the Serchio opens. The question after this became quite other;
the narrowing, though always more or less smiling gorge that draws you
on and on is a different, a distinct proposition altogether, with its
own individual grace of appeal and association. It is the association,
exactly, that would even now, on this page, beckon me forward, or
perhaps I should rather say backward--weren’t more than a glance at it
out of the question--to a view of that easier and not so inordinately
remote past when “people spent the summer” in these perhaps slightly
stuffy shades. I speak of that age, I think of it at least, as easier
than ours, in spite of the fact that even as I made my pilgrimage the
mark of modern change, the railway in construction, had begun to be
distinct, though the automobile was still pretty far in the future. The
relations and proportions of everything are of course now altered--I
indeed, I confess, wince at the vision of the cloud of motor-dust that
must in the fine season hang over the whole connection. That represents
greater promptness of approach to the bosky depths of Ponte-a-Serraglio
and the Bagni Caldi, but it throws back the other time, that of the
old jogging relation, of the Tuscan grand-ducal “season” and the small
cosmopolite sociability, into quite Arcadian air and the comparatively
primitive scale. The “easier” Italy of our infatuated precursors
there wears its glamour of facility not through any question of “the
development of communications,” but through the very absence of the
dream of that boon, thanks to which every one (among the infatuated)
lived on terms of so much closer intercourse with the general object of
their passion. After we had crossed the Serchio that beautiful day we
passed into the charming, the amiably tortuous, the thickly umbrageous,
valley of the Lima, and then it was that I seemed fairly to remount the
stream of time; figuring to myself wistfully, at the small scattered
centres of entertainment--modest inns, pensions and other places of
convenience clustered where the friendly torrent is bridged or the
forested slopes adjust themselves--what the summer days and the summer
rambles and the summer dreams must have been, in the blest place, when
“people” (by which I mean the contingent of beguiled barbarians) didn’t
know better, as we say, than to content themselves with such a mild
substitute, such a soft, sweet and essentially elegant apology, for
adventure. One wanted not simply to hang about a little, but really to
live back, as surely one might, have done by staying on, into the so
romantically strong, if mechanically weak, Italy of the associations of
one’s youth. It was a pang to have to revert to the present even in the
form of Lucca--which says everything.