(to cull an incomparable phrase from one of the secular poems of Dr.
Isaac Watts). And now there are more ladies behind me, filling the
doorway with hushed expectation. For in the appalling silence, a young
sad-orbed creature is lifting a violin delicately from its case on
the Bechstein, at which waits a sister-spirit. “Do tell me,” says
an American voice, intrepidly breasting the silence, “what was that
perfectly heavenly thing you played last night--was it Debussy? We
thought it must be Debussy.” And the violinist answers: “No; I expect
you mean the Goltermann. It _is_ pretty, isn’t it?” And as she holds
up the violin, interrogating its strings with an anxious and a critical
ear, I observe that beneath the strings lies a layer of rosin-dust.
Thirty years ago, in the fastnesses of the Five Towns, amateurs used to
deem it necessary to keep their violins dirty in order to play with the
soulfulness of a Norman Neruda. I would have been ready to affirm that
observation of the cleanliness of the instruments of professionals had
killed the superstition long since; but lo, I have tunnelled the Simplon
to meet it again!
I go. Somehow, I depart, beaten off as it were with great loss. I plunge
out into dark Florence, walking under the wide projecting eaves
of Florence to avoid the rain. And in my mind I can still see the
drawing-room, a great cube of light, with its crowded frocks whose
folds merge one into the next, and the Bechstein, and the strains of
Goltermann, and the attentive polite faces, and that sole man in the
corner like a fly on a pin. I have run away from it. But I know that I
shall go back to it, and that my curiosity will drink it to the dregs.
For that drawing-room is to the working artist in me the most impressive
and the most interesting thing in Florence. And when I reflect that
there are dozens and dozens of it in Florence, I say that this age is
the most romantic age that ever was.
*****
I know where I am going, for my first business in entering a town,
whether Florence, Hull, or Constantine, is always to examine the
communicative posters on its walls and to glance through its newspapers.
There is a performance of Spontini’s _La Vestale_ at the Teatro Verdi.
Nothing, hardly, could have kept me away from that performance, which in
every word of its announcement seems to me overpoweringly romantic. The
name of Verdi alone.... I heard Verdi late in my life, and in Italy,
long after I knew by rote all the themes in _Tristan_ and _Die
Meistersinger_, after _Pelleas et Mêlisande_ had ceased to be a novelty
at the Paris Opéra Comique, after even the British discovery of Richard
Strauss, and I shall never forget the ravishing effect on me of the
first act of _La Traviata_; no, nor the tedium of the other acts. I
would go to any theatre named Verdi. Then Spontini! What is Spontini but
a name? Was it possible that I was about to hear an actual opera by this
antique mediocrity whose music Berlioz loved beyond its deserts? Had
anybody ever heard an opera by Spontini?
The shabbiness of the _façade_ and of the box-office, and of the suits
of the disillusioned but genial men within the box-office--men who
knew the full meaning of existence. A seat in the _parterre_ for two
lire--say one and sevenpence halfpenny--it is making a gift of
the spectacle! The men take my two lire with an indulgent gesture,
exclaiming softly with their eyes and hands: “What are two lire more or
less in the vast abyss of our deficit? Throw them down!” Then I observe
that my ticket is marked _posto distinto_--prominent seat, distinguished
seat. Useless to tell me that it means nothing! It means much to me:
another example of Italian politeness, at once exquisite and futile.
Would the earl in the gate at Covent Garden, even for thirty-two lire on
a Melba night, offer me a distinguished seat?.. . Long stone corridors,
steps up, steps down, turnings, directive cries echoing amid arches; and
then I am in the auditorium, vast.
It is as big as Covent Garden, and nearly as big as La Scala. It has
six galleries, about a hundred boxes, and four varieties of seats on the
ground floor. My distinguished seat is without the first quality of a
seat--yieldingness. It does not acquiesce. It is as hard as seasoned
wood can be, though roomy and well situated. And in a corner, lying
against the high rampart of a box for ten people, I see negligently
piled a great pyramid of ancient red cushions, scores and scores of
them. And a little old ragged attendant comes and whispers alluringly,
delicately in my ear: “_Cuscina_.” Two sous would hire it and a smile
thrown in. But no, I won’t have it. I am too English to have that
cushion.. . . The immense theatre, faced all in white marble, with
traces here and there in a box of crimson upholstery, is as dim as a
church. There are hundreds of electric bulbs, but unlighted: the sole
illumination comes from a row of perfectly mediæval gas-burners along
the first gallery. After all, economy must obtain somewhere. I count an
orchestra of over seventy living players; the most numerous body in
the place: somehow they must support life. Over the acreage of the
_parterre_ are sprinkled a few dozens of audience. There is a serried
ring of faces lining the fifth gallery, to which admittance is tenpence,
and another lining the sixth gallery, to which admittance is sixpence.
The rest is not even paper.
Yet a spruce and elegant conductor rises and the overture begins, and
the orchestra proves that its instruments are real; and I hear Spontini,
and for a little while enjoy his faded embroideries. And the curtain
goes up on “a public place in Rome,” upon a scale as spacious as Rome
itself. Everything is genuine. There are two leading sopranos, one of
whom is young and attractive, and they both have powerful and trained
voices, and sing like the very dickens. No amateurishness about them!
They know their business; they are accomplished and experienced artists.
No hesitations, no timidities, no askings for indulgence because really
I have only paid two lire! Their fine voices fill the theatre with ease,
and would easily fill Covent Garden to the back row of the half-crown
gallery. The same with the tenor, the same with the bass. Spontini
surges onward in an excellent concourse of multitudinous sound, and I
wonder what it is all about. I have a book of the words, but owing to
the unfortunate absence of Welsbach mantles I cannot read it. I know it
must be all about a vestal who objected to being a vestal, on account of
a military uniform, and I content myself with this grand central fact.
Then the stage brightens, and choruses begin to march on; one after
another; at least a dozen: soldiers, wrestlers, populace, dancers,
children. Yes, the show is complete even to ragamuffins larking about in
the public place in Rome. I count a hundred people on the stage. And
all the properties are complete. It is a complete production and an
expensive production--except probably in the detail of wages. For
in Italy _prime donne_ with a _répertoire_ of a dozen or fifteen
first-class rôles seem to go about the streets dressed like shop-girls.
I have seen it. All this is just as exciting to me as the Church of S.
Croce, even as explained by John Ruskin with a schoolmaster’s cane in
his lily-hand.
Interval I I go to the refreshment _foyer_ to see life. And now I can
perceive that quite a crowd of people has been hidden somewhere in
the nooks of the tremendous theatre. The large _caffé_ is crammed. Of
course, it is vaulted, like everything in Florence. The furniture of the
caffé is strangely pathetic in its forlornness: marble-topped mahogany
tables, and mahogany chairs in faded and frayed crimson rep. Furniture
that ought to have been dead and buried long ago! The marble is
yellow with extreme age and use. These tables and chairs are a most
extraordinary survival; in a kind of Italian Loins Philippe style,
debased First Empire; or it might be likened to earliest Victorian. Once
they were new; once they were the latest thing. For fifty years perhaps
the management has been meaning to refurnish the _caffé_ as soon as it
could afford. The name of the theatre has been changed, but not those
chairs nor that marble. And conceivably the sole waiter, gliding swiftly
to and fro with indestructible politeness, is their contemporary. The
customers are the equivalent of a music-hall audience in these isles.
They smoke, drink, and expectorate with the casualness of men who are
taking a rest after Little Tich. They do not go to the opera with prayer
and fasting and the score. They just stroll into the opera. Nor does the
conductor, nor do the players, have the air of high priests of art who
have brought miracles to pass. And I know what those two sopranos are
talking about upstairs. Here opera is in the bones of the rabble. It
is a tradition: a tradition in a very bad way of decayed splendour, but
alive yet.
For the second act the auditorium is brighter, and fuller, though the
total receipts would not pay for five minutes of Caruso alone. The place
looks half full and is perhaps a third full. Behind me a whole series
of first-tier boxes are occupied by a nice, cheerful, chattering
shop-keeping class of persons, simple folk that I like. A few soldiers
are near. Also there is a man next but one to me who cannot any longer
deprive himself of a cigarette. He bows his head and furtively strikes
a match, right in the middle of the theatre, and for every puff he bows
his head, and then looks up with an innocent air, as though repudiating
any connection with the wisp of smoke that is floating aloft. Nobody
minds. The curtain rises on the interior of the Temple, a beautiful and
solid architectural scene, much superior to anything in the first act,
whose effect was rich and complex without being harmonious. The vestal
is attending to the fire. When the military uniform unostentatiously
enters, I feel that during an impassioned dialogue she will go and let
that fire out. And she does. Such is the second act., I did not see
the third. I shall never see it. I convinced myself that two acts of
Spontini were enough for me. It was astonishing that even in Florence
Spontini had not been interred. But clearly, from the efficiency,
assurance, and completeness of its production, _La Vestale_ must have
been in the Florentine _répertoire_ perhaps ever, since its composition,
and a management selling seats at two lire finds it so much easier to
keep an old opera in the _répertoire_ than to kick it out and bring in
a new one. I had savoured the theatre, and I went, satisfied; also much
preoccupied with the financial enigma of the enterprise, where indeed
the real poetry of this age resides. Whence came the money to pay the
wages of at least a couple of hundred skilled persons, and the lighting
and the heating and the rent, and the advertisement, and the thousand
minor expenses of such an affair?
When I reached the abode of the ladies it was all dark and silent. I
rang, intimidated. And one of those young and beautiful girls (no, not
so young and not so beautiful, but still--) in her exotic English attire
opened the door. And with her sleepy eyes she looked at me as if saying:
“Once in a way this sort of thing is all very well, but please don’t
let it occur too often. I suffer.” A shame! And I crept contrite up the
stairs, and along passages between hidden rows of sleeping ladies. And
there was my Baedeker lying on the night-table, and not a word in it
about Florentine opera and the romance thereof.
*****
Rain still! Florentine rain, the next morning, steady and implacable!
They come down to breakfast, those fifty ladies; not in a cohort, but in
ones and twos and threes, appearing and disappearing, so that there are
never more than half a dozen hovering together over the white and almost
naked tables. They glance momentarily at the high windows and glance
away, crushing by a heroic effort of self-control, impossible to any but
women of the north, the impulse to criticise the order of the universe.
Calm, angular, ungainly, long-suffering, and morose, Cimabue might have
painted them; not Giotto. Their garb is austere, flannel above the zone
and stuff below; no ornament, no fluffiness, no enticement; but passably
neat, save for the untidy, irregular buttoning of the bodice down the
spine. And note that they are fully and finally dressed to be seen
of men; all the chill rites have been performed; they have not leapt
straight from the couch into a peignoir, after the manner of Latin
women--those odalisques at heart! They are astoundingly gentle with each
other, cooing sympathetic inquiries, emitting kind altruistic hopes,
leaning intimately towards each other, fondling each other, and even
sweetly kissing. They know by experience that strict observance of a
strict code is the price of peace. In that voluntary mutual captivity,
so full of enforced, familiar contacts, the error of a moment might
produce a thousand hours of purgatory.... A fresh young girl comes
swinging in, and with a gesture of which in a few years she will be
incapable, caresses the chin of her desiccated mamma. And the contrast
between the two figures, the thought of what lies behind the one
and what lies before the other, inured so soon to this existence--is
poignant. The girl perceptibly droops in that atmosphere; flourish in
it she cannot. And the smiles and the sweetness continue in profusion.
Nevertheless I feel that I am amid loose nitro-glycerine: one jar, and
the whole affair might be blown to atoms, and the papers would be
full of “mysterious fatal explosion in a _pension_ at Florence.” The
danger-points are the jampots and the honey-pots and the marmalade-pots,
of which each lady apparently has her own. And when one of them says to
the maid (all in white at this hour, as is meet): “This is not my jam--I
had more,” I quake at the conception of the superhuman force which
restrains the awful bitterness in her voice. A matter of an instant; but
in that instant, in that fraction of an instant, the tigress has snarled
at the bars of the cage and been dragged back. It is marvellous. It is
terrifying.
We talk. We talk to prove our virtuosity in the nice conduct of the
early meal. I learn that they have been here for months, and that they
will be here for months. And that next year it may be Rome, or more
possibly Florence again. Florence is inexhaustible, inexhaustible.