_To Charles Eliot Norton._
Hotel de Sienne, Siena.
July 4th, 1892.
My dear Charles,
Too long have I owed you a letter and too many times have your
generosities made me blush for my silence. I have received beautiful
books from you and they have given me almost more pleasure as signs of
your remembrance than as symbols of your wisdom and worth. The
Purgatorio reached me just before I came abroad--or a short time--and I
was delighted to know that you continue to find time and strength for
labours so various and so arduous. Great glory is yours--for making
something else come out of America than railway-smashes and young ladies
for lords. During a singularly charming month that I have been spending
in this most loveable old city I have often thought of you and wished I
had a small fraction of your power to put the soul of history into
Italian things. But I believe I shouldn't love Siena any better even if
I knew it better. I am very happy indeed to feel that--as I grow
older--many things come and go, but Italy remains. I have been here many
times--regularly every year or almost, for many years now, but the
spell, the charm, the magic is still in the air. I always try, between
May and August, to give London a wide berth, and I find these parts far
and away most pleasant when the summer has begun and the barbarians have
fled. As one stays and stays on here--I mean on _this_ spot--one feels
how untouched Siena really is by the modern hand. Yesterday was the
Palio of the ten contrade, and though I believe it is not so intense a
festival as the second one--of Aug. 15th (you have probably--or
certainly--seen them both)--it was a most curious and characteristic (of
an uninterrupted tradition) spectacle. The Marchese Chigi asked me and a
couple of friends--or rather asked _them_, and me with them--to see it
from the balcony of his extraordinarily fine old palace, where by the
way he has a large collection of Etruscan and Tarentine treasures--a
collection to break the heart of envy. My friends were Paul Bourget, the
French essayist and novelist (some of whose work you probably know,) and
his very remarkably charming, cultivated and interesting young wife.
They have been living in Italy these two years--ever since their
marriage, and I have been living much _with_ them here. Bourget is a
very interesting mind--and figure altogether--and the first--easily, to
my sense--of all the talkers I have ever encountered. But it would take
me much too far to _begin_ to give you a portrait of such a complicated
cosmopolitan Frenchman as he! But they departed, alas, this morning, for
the Piedmontese Alps, and I take my way, in a couple of hours, to
Venice, where I spend but a few days--with perhaps a few more at
Asolo--before joining my brother William and his wife for a month in
Switzerland. After that I expect to return to London for the last of the
summer and the early autumn--the season I prefer there above all others.
But before I do this I wish I could talk to you more about this sweet
old Siena. I have been talking for a month about it with Bourget--but
how much better it would have been for both of us if you could have
broken in and taken up the tale! But you did, sometimes, very
happily--for Mme. Paul knows you by heart (she is the Madonna of
cosmopolitan culture) and cites you with great effect. Have you read P.
B.'s _Sensations d'Italie_? If you haven't, do--it is one of the most
exquisite of books. Have you read any of his novels? If you haven't,
_don't_, though they have remarkable parts. Make an exception, however,
for _Terre Promise_, which is to appear a few months hence, and which I
have been reading in proof, here--if on trial, indeed, you find you can
stand so suffocating an analysis. It is perhaps "psychology" gone
mad--but it is an extraordinary production. A fortnight ago, on a
singularly lovely Sunday, we drove to San Gimignano and back. I had
never been there before, and the whole day was a delight. There are of
course four Americans living at San G.--one of whom proved afterwards to
have been an American "lady-newspaper-correspondent" furious at having
missed two such birds as Bourget and me--whom a single stone from that
rugged old quarry would have brought down. But she didn't know us until
we had departed and we fortunately didn't suspect her till a suppliant
card reached us two days later at Siena. We were in the hands of the
good old Canonico--the proposito, as they call him--and he put us gently
through. You remember well enough of course--though to such a far-away
world your Siena summer must seem to belong--the rich loveliness, at
this moment, of this exquisite old Tuscany. One can't say enough about
it, and the way the great sea of growing things--the corn and the vines
and the olives--breaks in green surges at the very foot of the old
golden-brown ramparts, is one of the most enchanting features of Siena.
There is still never a suburb to speak of save in the quarter of the
railway-station, and everywhere you look out of back-windows and
back-doors and off terraces and over parapets straight down into the
golden grain and the tangled poderi. Every evening we have gone to walk
in the Lizza and hang over the bastions of the Castello; where the near
views and the far, and the late afternoons and the sunsets and the
mountains have made us say again and again that we could never, never go
away. But we are coming back, and I greatly wish _you_ were. We went the
other day to the archivio, which I had never seen before, and where I
was amazed and fascinated. (It is a great luxury to be in Italy with a
French celebrity--he is so tremendously known and well treated, as the
"likes" of _us_ can never be, and one comes in for some of his
privileges.) You of course probably know, however, what the fullness,
detail, continuity and curiosity of the records of this place
are--filling with their visible, palpable medievalism the great upper
chamber of Pal. Piccolomini.
Basta--I have my trunk to pack and my reckoning to pay. I am very glad
to have shaken hands with you before I go. I saw dear Burne-Jones
tolerably often this spring--often unwell, but almost always stippling
away. He is the most loveable of men and the most disinterested of
artists, but sometimes I wish that he set himself a different order of
tasks. _Painting_--as I feel it most--it is true I have ceased to feel
it very much--is, with him, more and more "out of it." There remains,
however, a beautiful poetry.... I want to ask you 20 questions about
[Lowell's] papers--but I feel it isn't fair--and I must wait and see. I
hope this work--and your masses of other work--don't take all your
holiday.... I shall send this to Ashfield, and if you are there will you
give, for me, a very cordial greeting to that mythical man George
Curtis? I embrace all your house and am, my dear Charles, very
affectionately yours,