I remember recovering private judgment indeed in the course of two or
three days following the excursion I have just noted; which must have
shaped themselves in some sort of consonance with the idea that as we
were hereabouts in the very middle of dim Etruria a common self-respect
prescribed our somehow profiting by the fact. This kindled in us the
spirit of exploration, but with results of which I here attempt to
record, so utterly does the whole impression swoon away, for present
memory, into vagueness, confusion and intolerable heat, Our self-respect
was of the common order, but the blaze of the July sun was, even for
Tuscany, of the uncommon; so that the project of a trudging quest for
Etruscan tombs in shadeless wastes yielded to its own temerity.
There comes back to me nevertheless at the same time, from the mild
misadventure, and quite as through this positive humility of failure,
the sense of a supremely intimate revelation of Italy in undress, so
to speak (the state, it seemed, in which one would most fondly, most
ideally, enjoy her); Italy no longer in winter starch and sobriety, with
winter manners and winter prices and winter excuses, all addressed to
the _forestieri_ and the philistines; but lolling at her length, with
her graces all relaxed, and thereby only the more natural; the brilliant
performer, in short, _en famille_, the curtain down and her salary
stopped for the season--thanks to which she is by so much more the easy
genius and the good creature as she is by so much less the advertised
_prima donna_. She received us nowhere more sympathetically, that is
with less ceremony or self-consciousness, I seem to recall, than at
Montepulciano, for instance--where it was indeed that the recovery of
private judgment I just referred to couldn’t help taking place. What we
were doing, or what we expected to do, at Montepulciano I keep no other
trace of than is bound up in a present quite tender consciousness that I
wouldn’t for the world not have been there. I think my reason must have
been largely just in the beauty of the name (for could any beauty be
greater?), reinforced no doubt by the fame of the local vintage and the
sense of how we should quaff it on the spot. Perhaps we quaffed it too
constantly; since the romantic picture reduces itself for me but to two
definite appearances; that of the more priggish discrimination so far
reasserting itself as to advise me that Montepulciano was dirty, even
remarkably dirty; and that of her being not much else besides but
perched and brown and queer and crooked, and noble withal (which is what
almost any Tuscan city more easily than not acquits herself of; all the
while she may on such occasions figure, when one looks off from her to
the end of dark street-vistas or catches glimpses through high arcades,
some big battered, blistered, overladen, overmasted ship, swimming in a
violet sea).
If I have lost the sense of what we were doing, that could at all suffer
commemoration, at Montepulciano, so I sit helpless before the memory
of small stewing Torrita, which we must somehow have expected to yield,
under our confidence, a view of shy charms, but which did n’t yield, to
my recollection, even anything that could fairly be called a breakfast
or a dinner. There may have been in the neighbourhood a rumour
of Etruscan tombs; the neighbourhood, however, was vast, and that
possibility not to be verified, in the conditions, save after due
refreshment. Then it was, doubtless, that the question of refreshment so
beckoned us, by a direct appeal, straight across country, from Perugia,
that, casting consistency, if not to the winds, since alas there were
none, but to the lifeless air, we made the sweltering best of our way
(and it took, for the distance, a terrible time) to the Grand Hotel of
that city. This course shines for me, in the retrospect, with a light
even more shameless than that in which my rueful conscience then saw it;
since we thus exchanged again, at a stroke, the tousled _bonne fille_ of
our vacational Tuscany for the formal and figged-out presence of Italy
on her good behaviour. We had never seen her conform more to all the
proprieties, we felt, than under this aspect of lavish hospitality to
that now apparently quite inveterate swarm of pampered _forestieri_,
English and Americans in especial, who, having had Roman palaces and
villas deliciously to linger in, break the northward journey, when once
they decide to take it, in the Umbrian paradise. They were, goodness
knows, within their rights, and we profited, as anyone may easily and
cannily profit at that time, by the sophistications paraded for them;
only I feel, as I pleasantly recover it all, that though we had arrived
perhaps at the most poetical of watering-places we had lost our finer
clue. (The difference from other days was immense, all the span of
evolution from the ancient malodorous inn which somehow did n’t matter,
to that new type of polyglot caravanserai which everywhere insists on
mattering--mattering, even in places where other interests abound, so
much more than anything else.) That clue, the finer as I say, I would
fain at any rate to-day pick up for its close attachment to another
Tuscan city or two--for a felt pull from strange little San Gimignano
delle belle Torre in especial; by which I mean from the memory of a
summer Sunday spent there during a stay at Siena. But I have already
superabounded, for mere love of my general present rubric--the real
thickness of experience having a good deal evaporated, so that the Tiny
Town of the Many Towers hangs before me, not to say, rather, far
behind me, after the manner of an object directly meeting the wrong or
diminishing lens of one’s telescope.
It did everything, on the occasion of that pilgrimage, that it was
expected to do, presenting itself more or less in the guise of some rare
silvery shell, washed up by the sea of time, cracked and battered and
dishonoured, with its mutilated marks of adjustment to the extinct
type of creature it once harboured figuring against the sky as maimed
gesticulating arms flourished in protest against fate. If the centuries,
however, had pretty well cleaned out, vulgarly speaking, this amazing
little fortress-town, it wasn’t that a mere aching void was bequeathed
us, I recognise as I consult a somewhat faded impression; the whole
scene and occasion come back to me as the exhibition, on the contrary,
of a stage rather crowded and agitated, of no small quantity of sound
and fury, of concussions, discussions, vociferations, hurryings to and
fro, that could scarce have reached a higher pitch in the old days of
the siege and the sortie. San Gimignano affected me, to a certainty,
as not dead, I mean, but as inspired with that strange and slightly
sinister new life that is now, in case after case, up and down the
peninsula, and even in presence of the dryest and most scattered bones,
producing the miracle of resurrection. The effect is often--and I find
it strikingly involved in this particular reminiscence--that of the
buried hero himself positively waking up to show you his bones for a
fee, and almost capering about in his appeal to your attention. What
has become of the soul of San Gimignano who shall say?--but, of a genial
modern Sunday, it is as if the heroic skeleton, risen from the dust,
were in high activity, officious for your entertainment and your
detention, clattering and changing plates at the informal friendly inn,
personally conducting you to a sight of the admirable Santa Fina of
Ghirlandaio, as I believe is supposed, in a dim chapel of the Collegiata
church; the poor young saint, on her low bed, in a state of ecstatic
vision (the angelic apparition is given), acconpanied by a few figures
and accessories of the most beautiful and touching truth. This image
is what has most vividly remained with me, of the day I thus so
ineffectually recover; the precious ill-set gem or domestic treasure of
Santa Fina, and then the wonderful drive, at eventide, back to Siena:
the progress through the darkening land that was like a dense fragrant
garden, all fireflies and warm emanations and dimly-seen motionless
festoons, extravagant vines and elegant branches intertwisted for miles,
with couples and companies of young countryfolk almost as fondly united
and raising their voices to the night as if superfluously to sing out at
you that they were happy, and above all were Tuscan. On reflection, and
to be just, I connect the slightly incongruous loudness that hung about
me under the Beautiful Towers with the really too coarse competition for
my favour among the young vetturini who lay in wait for my approach,
and with an eye to my subsequent departure, on my quitting, at some
unremembered spot, the morning train from Siena, from which point there
was then still a drive. That onset was of a fine mediaeval violence, but
the subsiding echoes of it alone must have afterwards borne me company;
mingled, at the worst, with certain reverberations of the animated
rather than concentrated presence of sundry young sketchers and copyists
of my own nationality, which element in the picture conveyed beyond
anything else how thoroughly it was all to sit again henceforth in the
eye of day. My final vision perhaps was of a sacred reliquary not so
much rudely as familiarly and “humorously” torn open. The note had, with
all its references, its own interest; but I never went again.
{Illustration: TOWERS OF SAN GIMIGNANO.}