On the study of music in the Marche—Neglect of painting—The
young artist—His hopeless love—His jealousy—His subsequent
struggles and constancy.
I must now devote a little space to speak of the cultivation of the
fine arts in the Marche; which, judging by the limited patronage and
still scantier remuneration accorded to their professors, would seem
to be considered by many as dangerous as reading to a maiden's peace
of mind. Of late years, however, music enters much more frequently
into the Italian programme of female education. Though not yet
introduced into the native convents, it is taught at the Sacré Cœur
at Loretto, and in many private families, happily as yet with more
discrimination than in England—the absence of voice or ear being
considered insurmountable disqualifications. The art, especially
in its vocal department, can boast, even in so remote a corner of
Italy, of instructors superior to any procurable in England, except
at those rates which some parents complacently mention as if to set
a higher value on their daughters' acquirements. Blessings on the
Italians in this respect, for they have no purse-pride! If you admire
a lady's singing—and it is no rarity to hear streams of melody poured
from those full rounded throats, such as would electrify a London
drawing-room—some member of her family will not immediately inform you
that she learned from the first masters at two guineas a lesson; that
no expense was spared, and so forth. They do not understand John Bull's
delight at framing all he does in rich gilding, and can enjoy the fine
singing of their country-women, notwithstanding that, in Ancona at
least, instruction from no mean professor was attainable at two _pauls_
(ten-pence) a lesson.
The music-master who taught my cousins was director of the opera,
composed and understood music thoroughly, and devoted himself, heart
and soul, to his profession: to these recommendations he added a
very handsome exterior, great attention to his dress, gentlemanly and
respectful bearing, and, nevertheless, gave twelve lessons, of an hour
each, for a sum equivalent to ten shillings, and thought himself lucky
too to get pupils at that rate!
Painting, the twin-sister of Music, does not enjoy the same amount of
popularity. In a country, of which the churches and palaces teem with
evidences of the estimation in which it was held scarcely two centuries
ago, I saw only one instance, that of Volunnia's miniatures, where,
even in its humblest branches, it was studied by one of the higher
ranks. It is cast as a reproach upon the modern Italians that they can
no longer furnish good painters; but the censure is more applicable
to those who do not care to foster the talent so often doomed to
languish in the ungenial atmosphere of poverty and neglect. The young
artist, whose only pupils in Ancona were those furnished by my uncle's
family, had studied several years in Rome, Florence, and Venice, had
distinguished himself in his academical career, was full of enthusiasm
and feeling, and yet so little encouragement did he receive in his
native city, that it was difficult for him to earn his bread. It is
almost superfluous to add that he was as poor as any painter need be.
He had one coat for all seasons; never ate but once a day, besides a
cup of coffee at six in the morning, which he procured at a caffè, no
fire being lighted so early at his mother's, where he lived; and had a
starved, hungry look, like a lean grey-hound, with large hollow eyes,
and an attempt at an artistic beard. Poor fellow! his story presents so
perfect an illustration of a new phase of Italian life, that I must not
be considered too discursive if I fill this chapter with an account of
it.
He had known my uncle's family for years, and considered himself
under obligations to them, so that a little of the old Roman patron
and client system was kept up in their intercourse; a respectful
affection on his side, and a kindly interest in his welfare on theirs.
His knowledge of art was really wonderful. As a boy, he had drawn
his first inspirations from Raphael's frescoes in the Vatican, and
worshipped him almost as a divinity; then ascending a step higher in
_purista_ principles, he devoted himself to the study of that branch
of the Florentine school of which “Il Beato Angelico da Fiesole” is
the chief; and to hear him descant on his purity of outline and grace
of composition, was in itself a lecture on design. A timely removal to
Venice luckily saved him from the exaggerations into which all votaries
of any peculiar style, however excellent in itself, must inevitably
fall; on which, in fact, he was fast verging, as two or three
pictures he had in his possession, painted while the impressions of
Florence were still predominant, of ashy-hued saints, with marble-like
draperies, abundantly testified: and leaving his legitimate admiration
for the Beato Angelico unsubdued, yet sent him back, at the conclusion
of his studies, glowing with rapture for Titian and Paolo Veronese.
From the great works of the former, he had made a number of sketches
and spirited copies; while he thought—as what young artist does
not think?—that he had discovered his peculiar secret of colouring,
detailed to us as he held forth triumphantly upon his flesh-tints and
_impasto_. In addition to all these artistic disquisitions, he used,
while we were taking our lessons, to give us all the political news,
or rather the whispers which were stealthily in circulation, and often
repeated that ours was the only house in which it was safe to express
an opinion.
Then he would tell us a great deal about the crying evils of his
country, much to the purport of what I have already stated; the
ignorance of the women, the idleness of the nobles, the extortion and
injustice of the Government, and the insolence of the Austrians who
supported it—all being related in beautiful and poetic Italian; for he
spoke his own language with great refinement, although he did not spell
it correctly.
And yet, notwithstanding these constant discussions and conversations,
never was he known to pass the limits of difference tacitly laid
down, never once to venture on the verge of familiarity: years
of intercourse, resumed at intervals since his boyhood, made no
difference. He never came to the house but as a teacher; and at the end
of each lesson, he always bowed with the same ceremonious respect, and
backed out of the room with the same “servo umilissimo” as if he had
been a mere stranger.
I wish I could detail some of the stories we heard from him—little
romances in themselves, and, admirably illustrative of the quick
feelings and exaggerated sensibility of the Italian temperament,
allowed more room for the development in the _mezzo cetto_ than in
the strict etiquette of the nobility. How a young cousin, becoming
desperately in love with a young man she had only seen from an opposite
window, pined rapidly away; and on hearing he was already affianced,
insisted on taking the veil in a convent of a very strict order: how
his own sister, a very beautiful girl, nearly broke her heart from
the cruelty exercised by her mother-in-law, who tried to sow discord
between her and her husband, opened all the letters she received from
her parents, took away all her best clothes, and distributed them
among her own daughters—in fact, behaved like a _suocera_ in all the
acceptation of the term. But nothing interested us so much as his own
history, in which he at last made us the recipients of the misery and
uncertainty that were destined to be inseparable from his existence.
We had observed that for some weeks he looked more than ordinarily
woe-begone, scarcely spoke, and his unbrushed hair stood erect with
an air of distraction it was pitiable to witness. The usual inquiries
about England, the lectures upon art, the pæans to Raphael, were all
at an end, and our lessons were becoming very stupid, common-place
affairs, when, one day, as he was cutting a crayon, he suddenly laid it
down, and said, falteringly: “Signorine, will you excuse my temerity,
if, knowing all your benevolent interest in me, I tell you what makes
me so ill. I have fallen in love.”
“Indeed!” we exclaimed; “tell us all about it. Where is the lady?—how
long has it been going on?—when will the _sposalizio_ take place?”
“Alas!” he replied, “what can I say? I have never spoken to her; it is
two months since I first saw her; it was one evening outside the gates:
she was with her mother. I beheld that modest ingenuous face, and my
fate was decided. Miserable was I born, miserable have I always been,
but never so miserable as now.”
“Wherefore?” I inquired, with a perplexed expression.
“Because I have no means of maintaining her—not even a few hundred
dollars of my own: therefore it is of no use attempting to make
the acquaintance of her family, or presenting myself as a suitor. O
signorine! I have suffered so long, my secret was wearing me to the
grave.”
“But you have an _avvenire_—a future, at least,” said my cousin Lucy,
who, under all her sedateness, was rather of an enthusiastic turn.
“Ah!” answered he, shaking his head, “that is easy to say for you
English: we poor Italians have no future; we never can rise; we are but
fools to dream of it.”
“Then do you not mean even to try to improve your fortunes, so as one
day to be able to marry?”
“Heaven knows whether I do not try,” was the rueful response; “but
the days for art in Italy are gone by. You are witness, ladies, to the
patronage accorded to me here. What have I to look back upon since I
established myself in Ancona? One or two commissions from convents
for the apotheosis of some new saint—a few portraits—at such rare
intervals, and on such hard terms, that I verily believe, if I were a
house-painter, I should succeed better than with my aspirations to be
an historical one.”
“Yet, why despair?” I persisted; “why not obtain an introduction to the
family of the fair _incognita_, explain your views, and if they hold
out any hopes of your ultimately being accepted, you will work away
with redoubled energy. You might go and paint signs in California.”
(That was all the rage just then.)
“The signorina is laughing at me, I see; but it would not be right
according to our ideas. _She_ had better know nothing of me; her
peace of mind might be disturbed. Those friends whom I have consulted,
tell me I ought even to avoid passing her when she is out walking, or
going to look at her at mass. Her character is evidently so full of
sensibility that it would be easy to destroy her happiness.”
“How can you be so sure of all this, if you have never spoken to her?”
“I see it all perfectly in her face,” he answered, with a determined
belief in his own powers of observation, which no ridicule or reasoning
could shake. His romantic passion amused us all excessively, and as he
evidently liked to talk of it, the disclosure having been once made,
we were in future kept fully informed of all his tortures, fears, and
despondency; but fancied that an attachment, hopeless and baseless
as this, could not be of long duration. Contrary, however, to what
we anticipated, he became more and more in love; he looked every day
thinner, his hair more wiry, his eyes unnaturally brilliant and deeper
sunk.
One morning—a real wintry morning, one of the few we ever saw—he came
in, livid and trembling, with a wildness in his appearance that was
startling. He did not leave his hat in the hall, as was his custom,
but entered with it in his hand, and making a few steps forward, paused
abruptly, and said in a hoarse voice:
“The signorine will excuse me if I pray them to dispense me from my
attendance for a few days. I am going into the country—yes, into the
country!”
When an Italian goes into the country at such a season of the year, he
must be in a desperate plight, and we anxiously demanded the reason of
this rash step.
“Signorine, I am mad—I am jealous! Yesterday I was looking up furtively
at her window; another man was standing in the street near me; I
fancied I had seen him there before: still a suspicion never crossed my
brain when the window opened, and she looked out. Never had she deigned
to do this for me. As I live, her eyes rested upon him! All the furies
seized me; I rushed to the house of my friend, my best friend, the
Avvocato D——. I raved, I tore my hair, I imprecated curses upon her. He
took me by the arm. 'To-morrow, you must go into the country,' he said;
'I will accompany you.' Yes, signorine, with twelve inches of snow upon
the ground, I go into the country!”
And into the country he went, and from the country he returned in two
or three weeks' time, unrecovered; although convinced that his jealousy
was groundless, the national specific had failed in this case. Then
I fear we did him harm, for on the “nothing venture, nothing have”
principle we counselled him to embody his hopes, prospects, and honest
determinations in a letter to be submitted to the young lady's family,
belonging, like his own, to the middle classes, though more affluent in
their circumstances.
Taking an injudicious _mezzo termine_, he humbly presented this epistle
to the fair Dulcinea herself, as she was coming one day out of church
under the care of some aunt or elderly female relation.
Haughtily flinging it on the ground, the damsel indignantly said, “I
do not know how to read letters of this description,” and passed on.
Her virtue and discretion increased his admiration, while the repulse
almost broke his heart. He never made any further attempt to press
his suit, but moped and pined away perceptibly; in fact, he was dying
of mortification and grief—so common an occurrence in this part of
Italy, that they have a distinct name for the affection, and call it
_passione_.
At this juncture, some friends of his, who had emigrated to Tunis
in the recent troubles of Italy, wrote to recommend his joining them
there; and urged on by the representations of all who were interested
in his welfare—his desperate condition sanctioning so desperate a step
as foreign travel was usually looked upon—encouraged especially by
ourselves, with our restless, enterprising British notions, he embarked
in a small trading-vessel, almost reduced to a skeleton.
Months, nay, years have passed since then, and it seemed as if all clue
to the poor young painter were completely lost, when, by a strange
coincidence, I received a letter from him at the very moment when
the ink was still wet upon the page where I had been relating his
ill-starred attachment. I wish I could transcribe the whole of this
letter—I wish it could be laid tangibly before my readers—so clumsily,
squarely folded, with its coarse red seal, stamped with some copper
coin very probably, its stiff handwriting and deficient orthography;
and its contents, so simple, so poetical, so unassuming, of which a few
extracts, to give the continuation of his vicissitudes, can furnish but
a very imperfect idea.
After relating the failure of the hopes with which he had landed at
Tunis, he says that, resolved to leave no path that might lead to
independence unexplored, he even set his beloved art comparatively
aside, and had betaken himself to whatever honest employment he might
find. Entering the service of the Pacha of Tripoli, he had been sent as
a mineralogist—“for amongst the Turks,” he naïvely remarks, “one may
do anything—far into the interior, amongst men and manners completely
different from our own, to explore a mine reported to be of silver,
but which, with my usual ill-luck, turned out of very inferior iron.”
Then, encouraged by the Pacha's promises, he accompanied him to
Constantinople, where, finding to his cost that he must put no faith
in princes, he turned to his painting again. But the city was swarming
with Italian refugees, artists among the rest, all contending for the
bare means of subsistence; so, after a few months of painful struggles,
he went back to Africa, and entered into some trading speculations.
Neither in this new career was he successful. Perhaps he worked with
a sinking heart, for the tidings reached him that the young girl so
faithfully loved was about to be married; and “what imbittered this
announcement, was learning that the character of her future husband
offered but slender prospects for her happiness.” His little ventures
failed; his resources were exhausted; and he was under the necessity
of returning to his native country. There he found strange reverses
had suddenly befallen her whom he had schooled himself to look upon
as irrevocably lost. Her parents were both dead; the marriage had
been broken off; and from comparative affluence she was so reduced as,
jointly with a widowed sister, to have opened a day-school for little
girls.
“I saw her then,” he goes on, “under the pressure of sorrow. I found
her, in the words of Petrarch, _più bella, ma meno altera_; and yet,
even at that moment, my cruel destiny prevented me from saying, 'I am
here to comfort and sustain you!'”
Once more he went forth, hoping against hope, with the aim of
establishing himself as a portrait-painter and drawing-master at ——, on
the shores of the Mediterranean, whither many English families annually
resort; and the object of his letter was modestly and unaffectedly to
request that if I knew any of my country-people intending to winter
there, I would recommend him to their notice.
I felt very sad to perceive how he overrated the _signorina
forestiera's_ influence, and the extent of her acquaintance; or else
in his simplicity imagining that to be English is synonymous with
belonging to a vast brotherhood, giving and demanding the hand of
fellowship on every side. I wish it were thus in this instance at
least, for the first use I should make of this blissful state of
fraternity, would be to claim patronage and encouragement for the
poor artist, whose history then could soon be pleasantly wound up like
orthodox story-books, in these words, “and so they were married, and
lived very happily all the rest of their days.”