enough to those who have seen its glories in Rome--the crowded Corso,
the rush of the maddened horses, the firefly twinklings of the
Maccoletti. A single evening of simple fun, a few peasants laughing in
the sunshine, a few children scrambling for bonbons, form an almost
ridiculous contrast to the gorgeous outburst of revelry and colour that
ushers in Lent at the capital. But there are some people after all who
still find a charm in the simple and the commonplace, and to whom the
everyday life of Italy is infinitely pleasanter than the stately
ceremonial of Rome. At any rate the stranger who has fled from Northern
winters to the shelter of the Riviera is ready to greet in the
homeliest Carnival the incoming of spring. His first months of exile
have probably been months of a little disappointment. He is far from
having found the perpetual sunshine which poets and guide-books led him
to hope for. He has shivered at Christmas just as he shivered at home,
he has had his days of snowfall and his weeks of rain. If he is
thoroughly British, he has growled and grumbled, and written to expose
"the humbug of the sunny South" in the _Times_; if he is patient, he has
jotted down day after day in his diary, and found a cold sort of
statistical comfort in the discovery that the sunny days after all
outnumbered the gloomy ones. The worst winter of the Riviera, he is
willing to admit, would be a very mild winter at home, but still, after
each concession to one's diary and common sense, there remains a latent
feeling of disappointment and deception.
But Carnival sweeps all this feeling away with the coming of the spring.
From the opening of February week follows week in a monotony of warm
sunshine. Day after day there is the same cloudless cope of blue
overhead, the same marvellous colour in the sea, the same blaze of
roses in the gardens, the same scent of violets in every lazy breath of
air that wanders down from the hills. Every almond-tree is a mass of
white bloom. The narcissus has found a rival along the terraces in the
anemone, and already the wild tulip is preparing to dispute the palm of
supremacy with both. It is the time for picnics, for excursions, for
donkey-rides, for dreams beneath the clump of cypresses that shoot up
black into the sky, for siestas beneath the olives. It is wonderful what
a prodigious rush of peace and good temper follows on the first rush of
spring. The very doctors of the winter resort shake hands with one
another, the sermons of the chaplain lose their frost-bitten savour and
die down into something like charity, scandal and tittle-tattle go to
sleep in the sunshine. The stolid, impassive English nature blooms into
a life strangely unlike its own. Papas forget their _Times_. Mammas
forget their propriety. The stout British merchant finds himself astride
of a donkey, and exchanging good-humoured badinage with the labourers in
the olive-terraces. The Dorcas of Exeter Hall leaves her tracts at home,
and passes without a groan the pictured Madonna on every wall. Carnival
comes, and completes the wreck of the proprieties. The girls secure
their window and pelt their black-bearded Professor in the street below
without dread of a scolding on the "convenances." The impassive spinster
whose voice never rises at home above the most polite whisper screams
with delight at the first sugarplum that hits her, and furtively
supplies her nieces with ammunition to carry on the war. "It is such
fun, isn't it, papa?" shout the boys as they lean breathless over the
balcony, laughing and pelting at the crowd that laughs and pelts back
again. And papa, who "puts down" fairs in England, and wonders what
amusement people can find in peepshows and merry-go-rounds, finds
himself surprised into a "Very jolly, indeed!"
It is the same welcome to the spring that gives its charm to the
Carnival in the minds of the Italians themselves. To the priest of
course Carnival is simply a farewell to worldly junketings and a welcome
to Lent, but like every other Church festival it is flinging off its
ecclesiastical disguise and donning among the people themselves its old
mask as a sheer bit of nature-worship. The women still observe Lent, and
their power as housekeepers forces its observance to a certain extent
on their husbands and sons. The Italian shrugs his shoulders and submits
in a humorous way to what is simply a bit of domestic discipline,
revenges himself by a jest on the priesthood, and waits with his quiet
"pazienza" till the progress of education shall have secured him a wife
who won't grudge him his dinner. But Lent is no reality to him, and
spring is a very real thing indeed. The winter is so short that the
whole habit of his life and the very fabric of his home is framed on the
apparent supposition that there is no such thing as winter at all. His
notion of life is life in the open air, life in the sunshine. The
peasant of the Cornice looks on with amazement at an Englishman tramping
along in the rain. A little rainfall or a little snow keeps every
labourer at home with a murmur of "cattivo Dio" between his teeth. A
Scotchman or a Yorkshireman wraps his plaid around him and looks with
contempt on an idle race who are "afraid of a sprinkle." But the peasant
of North Italy is no more of an idler than the peasant of the Lowlands.
The truth is, that both he and his home are absolutely unprepared for
bad weather. His clothes are thin and scanty. His diet is low. The
wonder is how he gets through a hard day's work on food which an
English pauper would starve upon. He has no fireplace at home, and, if
he had, he has no fuel. Wood is very dear, and coal there is none. If he
gets wet through there is no hearth to dry himself or his clothes at.
Cold means fever, and fever with low diet means death. Besides, there is
little loss in staying at home on rainy days. In England or the Lowlands
the peasant farmer who couldn't "bide a shower" would lose half the
year, but a rainy day along the Cornice is so rare a thing that it makes
little difference in the year's account.
It is much the same with the townsman, the trader, the professional man.
When work in the shop or office is over his life circles round the cafe.
Society and home mean for him the chatty, gesticulating group of friends
camped out round their little tables on the pavement under the huge
awning that gives them shade. When winter breaks up the pleasant circle,
and the dark, chilly evenings drive him, as we say, "home," he has no
home to flee unto. He is not used to domestic life, or to conversation
with his wife or his children. Above all there is no fire, no "hearth
and home." Going home in fact means going to bed. An Italian doctor or
an Italian lawyer knows nothing of the cosy evenings of the North, of
the bright fire, the brighter chat round it, or the quiet book till
sleep comes. Somebody has said truly enough that if a man wanted to see
human life at its best he would spend his winters in England and his
summers in Italy. We have so much winter that we have faced it, made a
study of it, and beaten it. Our houses are a great nuisance in warm
weather, but their thick walls and close-fitting windows and broad
fireplaces are admirably adapted for cold. Italians, on the other hand,
have so little winter that when the cold does come it is completely
their master. The large, dark, cool rooms that are so grateful in July
are simply ice-houses in December. The large windows are full of
crevices and draughts. An ordinary Italian positively dreads a fire from
his knowledge of the perils it entails in rooms so draughty as Italian
rooms commonly are. He infinitely prefers to rub his blue little hands
and wait till this inscrutable mystery of bad weather be overpast. But
it is only the thought of what he suffers during the winter, short as it
is in comparison with our own, that enables us to understand the ecstasy
of his joy at the reappearance of the spring. Everybody meets everybody
with greetings on the warmth and the sunshine. The mother comes down
again to bask herself at every doorstep, and the little street is once
more alive with chat and laughter. The very beggars exchange their whine
for a more cheerful tone of insidious persuasion. The women sing as they
jog down the hill-paths with the big baskets of olives on their heads.
The old dispossessed friar slumbers happily by the roadside. The little
tables come out on to the pavement, and the society of the place forms
itself afresh into buzzing groups of energetic conversers. The
dormouse-life of winter is over, and the spring and the Carnival has
come.
Carnival in a little Italian town, as we have said, is no very grand
thing, and as a mere question of fun it is no doubt amusing only to
people who are ready to be amused. And yet there is a quaint fascination
in it as a whole, in the rows of old women with demure little children
in their laps ranged on the stone seats along the bridge, the girls on
the pavement, the grotesque figures dancing along the road, the
harlequins, the mimic Capuchins, the dominoes with big noses, the
carriages rolling along amidst a fire of sugarplums, the boys darting
in and out and smothering one with their handfuls of flour, the sham
cook with his pots and pans wreathed with vine-branches, the sham
cavalier in theatrical cloak and trunk hose who dashes about on a pony,
the solemn group tossing a doll to a church-like chant in a blanket, the
chaff and violet bunches flung from the windows, the fun and life and
buzz and colour of it all. It is something very different, one feels,
from the common country fair of home. In the first place it is eminently
picturesque. As one looks down from the balcony through a storm of
sugarplums the eye revels in a perfect feast of colour. Even the
russet-brown of every old woman's dress glows in the sunshine into a
strange beauty. Every little touch of red or blue in the girls'
head-dresses shines out in the intense light. As the oddly attired
maskers dart in and out or whirl past in the dance the little street
seems like a gay ribbon of shifting hues winding between its grey old
houses with touches of fresh tints at every window and balcony. The
crimson caps of the peasants stand out in bold relief against the dark
green of the lemon-garden behind them. Overhead the wind is just
stirring in the big pendant leaves of the two palm-trees in the centre
of the street, and the eye once caught by them ranges on to the white
mass of the town as it stands glowing on its hill-side and thence to the
brown hilltops, and the intense blue of the sky.
The whole setting of the scene is un-English, and the scene itself is as
un-English as its setting. The fun, the enjoyment, is universal. There
is nothing of the complicated apparatus which an English fair requires,
none of the contrivances to make people laugh--the clowns, the
cheap-jacks, the moveable theatres, the vans with fat women and
two-headed calves, the learned pigs, the peepshows, the peripatetic
photographers, the weighing-machines, the swings, the merry-go-rounds.
And so there are none of the groups of vacant faces, the joyless
chawbacons lounging gloomily from stall to stall, the settled inanity
and dreariness of the crowd that drifts through an English fair. An
English peasant goes to be amused, and the clown finds it wonderfully
hard work to amuse him. The peasant of Italy goes to Carnival to amuse
himself and to amuse everybody else. He is full of joyousness and fun,
and he wishes everybody to be as funny and as joyous as himself. He has
no notion of doing his merriment by deputy. He claps his mask on his
face or takes his bag of flour in his hand, and is himself the fun of
the fair. His neighbour does precisely the same. The two farmers who
were yesterday chaffering over the price of maize meet each other in
Carnival as Punch and Harlequin. Every boy has his false nose or his
squeaking whistle. The quiet little maiden whom you saw yesterday
washing her clothes in the torrent comes tripping up the street with a
mask on her face. The very mothers with their little ones in their laps
throw in their contribution of smart speeches and merry taunts to the
fun of the affair. It is wonderful how simple the elements of their
amusement are and how perfectly they are amused. A little masquerading,
a little dancing, a little pelting with flour and sugarplums, and
everybody is as happy as possible.
And it is a happiness that is free from any coarse intermixture. The
badinage is childish enough, but it has none of the foul slang in which
an English crowd delights to express its notions of humour. The girls
bandy "chaff" with their disguised lovers, but the "chaff" is what their
mothers might hear. There is none of the brutal horseplay of home.
Harlequin goes by with his little bladder suspended from a string, but
the dexterous little touch is a touch and no more. The tiny sugarplums
rain like hail on one's face, but there is the fun of catching them and
seeing the children hunt after them in the dust. The flour-pelting is
the hardest to bear, but the annoyance is redeemed by the burst of
laughter from the culprit and the bystanders. It is a rare thing to see
anybody lose his temper. It is a yet rarer thing to see anybody drunk.
The sulky altercations, the tipsy squabbles, of Northern amusements are
unknown. The characteristic "prudence" of the Italian is never better
displayed than in his merriment. He knows how far to carry his badinage.
He knows when to have done with his fun. The tedious length of an
English merry-making would be unintelligible to him; he doesn't care to
spoil the day's enjoyment by making a night of it. A few hours of
laughter satisfy him, and when evening falls and the sunshine goes, he
goes with the sunshine.
It is in the Carnival that one sees most conspicuously displayed that
habit of social equality which is one of the special features of Italian
life. Nothing is more unlike the social jealousy of the Frenchman, or
the surly incivility with which a Lancashire operative thinks proper to
show the world that he is as good a man as his master. In either case
one feels the taint of a mere spirit of envious levelling, and a latent
confession that the levelling process has still in reality to be
accomplished. But the ordinary Italian has nothing of the leveller about
him. The little town is proud of its Marchese and of the great palazzo
that has entertained a King. It is a matter of public concern when the
Count gambles away his patrimony. An Italian noble is no object of
jealousy to his fellow-citizens, but then no one gives himself less of
the airs of a privileged or exclusive caste. Cavour was a popular man
because, noble as he was, he would smoke a cigar or stop for a chat with
anybody. The Carnival brings out this characteristic of Italian manners
amusingly enough. The mask, the disguise, levels all distinctions. The
Count's whiskers are white with the flour just flung at him by the
town-crier. The young nephews of the Baron are the two harlequins who
are exchanging badinage with the group of country girls at the corner. A
general pelting of sugarplums salutes the appearance of the Marchese's
four-in-hand with the Marchese himself in an odd mufti on the box.
Social equality is possible, because among rich and poor alike there is
the same social ease. Barber or donkey-driver chats to you with a
perfect frankness and unconsciousness of any need of reserve. In both
rich and poor, too, there is the same social taste and refinement. The
coarse dress of the peasant girl is worn with as native a dignity as the
robe of a queen. An unconscious elegance breathes through the very
disguises of the Carnival, grotesque as many of them are. The young
fellow who has wreathed himself with flowers and vine-leaves shows a
knowledge of colour and effect which an artist might envy him. But there
is not one among the roughest of the peasants or of the townsfolk who
has not that indescribable thing we call manner, or who would betray our
insular awkwardness when we speak to a lord. And, besides this social
equality, there is a family equality too. In England old people enjoy
fun, but it is held to be indecorous in them to afford amusement to
others. A Palmerston may be a jester at eighty, but the jest must never
go beyond words. But in an Italian Carnival the old claim just as much a
part in the fun as the young. Grandfathers and grandmothers think it the
most natural thing in the world to turn out in odd costumes to give a
good laugh to the grandchildren. Papa pops on the most comical mask he
can find, and walks down the street arm-in-arm with his boy. In no
country perhaps is the filial regard stronger than in Italy; nowhere do
mothers claim authority so long over their sons. But this seems to be
compatible with a domestic liberty and ease which would be impossible in
the graver nations of the North. If once we laughed at our mother's
absurdities a mother's influence would be gone. But an Italian will
laugh and go on reverencing and obeying in a way we should never dream
of. Altogether, it is wonderful how many sides of social life and
national character find their illustration in a country carnival.
SKETCHES IN SUNSHINE.
III.
TWO PIRATE TOWNS OF THE RIVIERA.
The view of Monaco, as one looks down on it from the mountain road which
leads to Turbia, is unquestionably the most picturesque among all the
views of the Riviera. The whole coast-line lies before us for a last
look as far as the hills above San Remo, headland after headland running
out into blue water, white little towns nestling in the depth of sunny
bays or clinging to the brown hill-side, villas peeping white from the
dark olive masses, sails gleaming white against the purple sea. The
brilliancy of light, the purity and intensity of colour, the clear
freshness of the mountain air, tempered as it is by the warm sun-glow,
make the long rise from Mentone hard to forget. Mentone itself steals
out again and again from under its huge red cliffs to look up at us; we
pass by Roccabruna, half rock, half village, hanging high on the
hill-side; we leave the orange groves beneath us studded with golden
fruit; even the silvery wayward olives fail us, even the pines grow thin
and stunted. At last the mountain rises bare above us with only a red
rock jutting here and there from its ashen-coloured front. We reach the
top, and right in our road rises a vast fragment of Roman masonry, the
tower of Turbia, while, thousands of feet beneath, Monaco glows "like a
gem" in its setting of dark blue sea. We are on the track of "The
Daisy," and the verse of Tennyson's gay little poem comes back to us:--
What Roman strength Turbia showed
In ruin, by the mountain road;
How like a gem, beneath, the city
Of little Monaco basking glowed.
Monaco stands on a promontory of rock which falls in bold cliffs into
the sea; as one climbs to it from the bay one sees the citadel with its
huge bastions frowning on the white buildings of the palace, the long
line of grey, ivy-crested walls topping the cliffs, and above them the
mass of the little town, broken by a single campanile and a few
cypresses. Its situation at once marks the character of the place. It
is the one town of the Riviera which, instead of lying screened in the
hollow of some bay, as though eager to escape from pirate or Saracen,
juts boldly out into the sea as if on the look-out for prey. Its grim
walls, the guns still mounted and shot piled on its battlements, mark
the pirate town of the past. At its feet, in trim square of hotel and
gambling-house, with a smart Parisian look about it as if the whole had
been just caught up out of the Boulevards and dropped on this Italian
coast, lies the new Monaco, the pirate town of the present.
Even the least among Italian cities yields so much of interest in its
past that we turn with disappointment from the history of Monaco. The
place has always been a mere pirate haunt, without a break of liberty or
civic life; and yet there is a certain fascination in the perfect
uniformity of its existence. The town from which Caesar sailed to Genoa
and Rome vanished before the ravages of the Saracens, and the spot
remained desert till it passed by Imperial cession to Genoa, and the
Genoese Commune erected a fort which became a refuge alternately for its
Guelf or Ghibelline exiles, its Spinolas or its Grimaldis. A church of
fine twelfth-century work is the only monument which remains of this
earlier time; at the opening of the fourteenth century Monaco passed
finally to the Grimaldis, and became in their hands a haunt of
buccaneers. Only one of their line rises into historic fame, and he is
singularly connected with a great event in English history. Charles
Grimaldi was one of the foremost leaders in the Italian wars of his day;
he passed as a mercenary into the service of France in her combat with
Edward III., and his seventy-two galleys set sail from Monaco with the
fifteen thousand Genoese bowmen who appear so unexpectedly in the
forefront of the battle of Crecy. The massacre of these forces drove him
home again to engage in attacks on the Catalans and Venetians and
struggles with Genoa, till the wealth which his piracy had accumulated
enabled him to add Mentone and Roccabruna to his petty dominions. It is
needless to trace the history of his house any further; corsairs,
soldiers of fortune, trimming adroitly in the struggles of the sixteenth
century between France and Spain, sinking finally into mere vassals of
Louis XIV. and hangers-on at the French Court, the family history of the
Grimaldis is one of treason and blood--brother murdering brother, nephew
murdering uncle, assassination by subjects avenging the honour of
daughters outraged by their master's lust.
Of the town itself, as we have said, there is no history at all; it
consists indeed only of a few petty streets streaming down the hill from
the palace square. The palace, though spoilt by a gaudy modern
restoration, is externally a fine specimen of Italian Renascence work,
its court painted all over with arabesques of a rough Caravaggio order,
while the State-rooms within have a thoroughly French air, as if to
embody the double character of their occupants, at once Lords of Monaco
and Ducs de Valentinois. The palace is encircled with a charming little
garden, a bit of colour and greenery squeezed in, as it were, between
cliff and fortress, from which one looks down over precipices of red
rock with the prickly pear clinging to their clefts and ledges, or
across a rift of sea to the huge bare front of the Testa del Cane with
gigantic euphorbias, cactus, and orange-gardens fringing its base. A
bribe administered to Talleyrand is said to have saved the political
existence of Monaco at the Congress of Vienna: but it is far more
wonderful that, after all the annexations of late years, it should still
remain an independent, though the smallest, principality in the world.
But even the Grimaldis have not managed wholly to escape from the
general luck of their fellow-rulers; Mentone and Roccabruna were ceded
to France some few years back for a sum of four million francs, and the
present lord of Monaco is the ruler of but a few streets and some two
thousand subjects. His army reminds one of the famous war establishment
of the older German princelings; one year indeed to the amazement of
beholders it rose to the gigantic force of four-and-twenty men; but
then, as we were gravely told by an official, "it had been doubled in
consequence of the war." Idler and absentee as he is, the Prince is
faithful to the traditions of his house; the merchant indeed sails
without dread beneath the once dreaded rocks of the pirate haunt; but a
new pirate town has risen on the shores of its bay. It is the pillage of
a host of gamblers that maintains the heroic army of Monaco, that
cleanses its streets, and fills the exchequer of its lord.
There is something exquisitely piquant in the contrast between the
gloomy sternness of the older robber-hold and the gaiety and
attractiveness of the new. Nothing can be prettier than the gardens,
rich in fountains and statues and tropical plants, which surround the
neat Parisian square of buildings. The hotel is splendidly decorated and
its _cuisine_ claims to be the best in Europe; there is a pleasant cafe;
the doors of the Casino itself stand hospitably open, and strangers may
wander without a question from hall to reading-room, or listen in the
concert-room to an excellent band which plays twice a-day. The salon
itself, the terrible "Hell" which one has pictured with all sorts of
Dantesque accompaniments, is a pleasant room, gaily painted, with cosies
all round it and a huge mass of gorgeous flowers in the centre. Nothing
can be more unlike one's preconceived ideas than the gambling itself, or
the aspect of the gamblers around the tables. Of the wild excitement,
the frenzy of gain, the outbursts of despair which one has come prepared
to witness, there is not a sign. The games strike the bystander as
singularly dull and uninteresting; one wearies of the perpetual deal and
turn-up of the cards at rouge-et-noir, of the rattle of the ball as it
dances into its pigeonhole at roulette, of the monotonous chant of "Make
your game, gentlemen," or "The game is made." The croupiers rake in
their gains or poke out the winnings with the passive regularity of
machines; the gamblers sit round the table with the vacant solemnity of
undertakers. The general air of the company is that of a number of
well-to-do people bored out of their lives, and varying their boredom
with quiet nods to the croupier and assiduous prickings of little cards.