“Really!” Politeness masking boredom.
The opera is not appraised in the guide-books. The opera is no part of
the official museum. Florence is a museum, and nothing but a museum.
Beyond the museum they do not admit that anything exists; hence nothing
exists beyond it. They do not scorn the rest of Florence. The rest of
Florence simply has not occurred to them. Pride of the Medicis, bow
before this pride, sublime in its absolute unconsciousness!
*****
That morning I made my way in the rain to the Strozzi Palace, which
palace is for me the great characteristic building of Florence. When I
think of Florence, I do not expire in ecstasy on the syllables of Duomo,
Baptistery, or Palazzo Vecchio, or even Bargello. The Strozzi Palace is
in my mind. Possibly I merely prefer it to the Riccardi Palace because I
cannot by paying fivepence invade it and add it up. The Strozzi Palace
still holds out against the northern hordes. Filippo Strozzi, as to whom
my ignorance is immaculate, must have united in a remarkable degree the
qualities of savagery, austere arrogance, and fine taste; otherwise he
would never have approved Maiano’s plans for this residence and castle.
The dimensions of it remind you of the Comédie Humaine, and it carries
rectangularity and uncompromising sharpness of corners to the last
limit. In form it is simply a colossal cube, of which you can only
appreciate the height by standing immediately beneath the unfinished
roof-cornice, the latter so vast in its beautiful enlargement of a Roman
model that nobody during five hundred years has had the pluck to set
about and finish it. Then you can see that in size the Strozzi ranks
with cathedrals, and that the residential part of it, up in the air,
only begins where three-story houses end.
To appreciate its beauty and its moral you must get away from it,
opposite one of its corners, so as to have two _façades_ in perspective.
The small arched windows of the first and second storeys are all that it
shows of a curve. Rather finicking these windows, the elegant trifling
of a spirit essentially grim; some are bricked up, some show a gleam of
white-painted interior woodwork, and others have the old iron-studded
shutters. The lower windows are monstrously netted in iron to resist the
human storm. The upper windows may each be ten feet high, but they are
mere details of the _façades_, and the lower windows might be square
port-holes. See the two perspectives sloping away from you under the
tremendous eaves, a state-entrance in the middle of each! See the three
rows of torch or banner holders and the marvellous iron lanterns at the
corners! Imagine the place lit up with flame on some night of the early
sixteenth century, human beings swarming about its base as at the foot
of precipices. Imagine the lights out, and the dawn, and the day-gloom
of those ill-lighted and splendid apartments. Imagine the traditional
enemies of the Medicis trying to keep themselves warm therein during a
windy Florentine winter! Imagine, from the Strozzi Palace, the ferocious
altercations, and the artistic connoisseurship, and the continuous
ruthless sweating of the common people, which made up the lives of the
masters of Florence--and you will formulate a better idea of what life
was than from any church! This palace is a supreme monument of grim
force tempered by an exquisite sense of beauty. With the exception of
an intervening cornice which has had a piece knocked out of it, and the
damaged plinth, it stands now as it did at the commencement. Time has
not accepted the challenge of its sharp corners. It might have been
constructed ten years ago by Foster and Dicksee.
I go up to one of the state entrances and peep in, shamefacedly. For it
is a private house. At the far end of the archway is a magnificent iron
grille, and I can see a delicately arched courtyard, utterly different
in style from the exterior, fruit of another brain; and beyond the
courtyard, a glimpse of a fresco and the vista of the state entrance
in the opposite _façade_. At each corner of the courtyard the rain is
splashing down, evidently from high open spouts, splashing with a loud,
careless, insolent noise, and the middle of the courtyard is a pool
continuously pricked by thousands of raindrops. The glass of the large
lamp swinging in the draught of the archway is broken. A huge lackey
in uniform strolls in front of the grille and lolls there. I move
instinctively away, for if anybody recoils before a lackey it is your
socialist.
Then I see a lady hurrying across the square enveloped in a great cloak
and sheltered beneath an umbrella. She makes straight for the state
entrance, and passes me, dripping up the archway. I say to myself:
“She belongs to the house. Now I am going to see the gates yield. The
lackey was expecting her.” And I had quite a thrill at sight of this
living inhabitant of the Strozzi Palace.
But not She went right up to the grille, as though the lackey was in
prison and she visiting him, and stopped there and stared silently into
the courtyard. The lackey, dumbfounded and craven, moved off. She had
only come to look. This was her manner of coming to look. I ought to
have divined by the solidity of her heels that she was one of ours; not
one of my particular band at breakfast, but in Florence there are dozens
upon dozens of such breakfasts every morning, and from some Anglican
breakfast she had risen.
*****
Our breakfast took place in a palace. Not the Strozzi, not nearly so
large nor so fine as the Strozzi, but a real Florentine palazzo. It
has been transformed within to suit the needs and the caprices of those
stern ladies. They have come, and they have come again, and they have
calmly insisted, and they have had their will. Hygienic appliances
authentically signed by the great English artists in this _genre!_
Radiators in each room! Electric bulbs over the bed and in the ceiling!
Iron beds! The inconvenient height of the windows from the floor
lessened by a little wooden platform on which are a little chair and
a little table and a little piece of needlework and a little vase of
flowers!... Steadily they are occupying the palaces, each lady in her
nook, and the slow force of their will moulds even the granite to the
desired uses.
[Illustration: 0221]
Why do they come? It cannot be out of passion for the great art of the
world. Nobody who had a glimmering of the real sense of beauty could
dress as they dress, move as they move, buy what they buy, or talk
as they talk. They mingle in their heads Goltermann with Debussy, and
Botticelli with Maude Goodman. Their drawing-room is full of Maude
Goodman in her rich first period.. .. It cannot be out of a love of
history, for they never unseal their lips in a spot where history has
been made without demonstrating in the most painful manner an entire
lack of historical imagination. They nibble daintily at crumbs of art
and of archæology in special booklets which some of themselves have
written and others of themselves have illustrated, and which make the
coarse male turn with an almost animal satisfaction to Carl Baedeker or
even the Reverend Herbert H.
Jeaffreson, M. A. It is impossible that these excellent creatures, whose
only real defect has to do with the hooks and eyes down their spines,
can ever comprehend the beauty and the significance of that by which
they are surrounded. They have not the temperament. Temperamentally,
they would be much more at home in Riga. Also it is impossible to
believe that they are happy in Florence. They do not wear the look of
joy. Their gestures are not those of happiness. Nevertheless they can
only be in Florence because they have discovered that they are less
unhappy here than at home. What deep malady of society is it that drives
them out of their natural frame--the frame in which they are comely
and even delectable, the frame which best sets off their finer
qualities--into unnatural exile and the poor despised companionship of
their own sex?
And what must be the force of that malady which drives them I The long
levers that ultimately exert their power on the palaces of Florence
are worked from England. Behind each of these solitary ladies, in the
English background, there must be a mysterious male--relative, friend,
lawyer, stockbroker--advising, controlling, forwarding cheques and
cheques and cheques, always. These ladies, economically, are dolls of
a financial system. Or you may call them the waste products of an
arthritic civilisation. What a force is behind them, that they should
possess themselves of another age and genius, and live in it as
conquerors, modifying manners, architecture, and even perhaps language!
The cloaked lady in front of the grille shall, if you choose, fairly be
likened to a barbarian on the threshold of a philosopher’s dead court;
hut as regards mere force, one may say that in her the Strozzis are up
against an equal.