in front of the bathing-machines. Rows of little faces wait for their
turn, watching the dash of the waves beneath the wheels, peeping at the
black-robed figures who are bobbing up and down in the sea, half longing
for their dip, half shrinking as the inevitable moment comes nearer and
nearer, dashing forward joyously at last as the door opens and the
bathing woman's "Now, my dear," summons them to the quaint little box.
One lingers over the sight as one lingers over a bed of flowers. There
is all the fragrance, the colour, the sweet caprice, the wilfulness, the
delight of childhood in the tiny figures that meet us on the return from
their bath, with dancing eyes and flushed cheeks and hair streaming over
their shoulders. What a hero the group finds in the urchin who never
cries! With what envy they regard the big sister who never wants to come
out of the water! It is pleasant to listen to their prattle as they
stroll over the sands with a fresh life running through every vein, to
hear their confession of fright at the first dip, their dislike of
putting their head under water, their chaff of the delicate little
sister who "will only bathe with mamma." Mammas are always good-humoured
by the sea; papas come out of their eternal newspaper and toss the wee
brats on their shoulders, uncles drop down on the merry little group
with fresh presents every day. The restraint, the distance of home
vanishes with the practical abolition of the nursery and the schoolroom.
Home, schoolroom, nursery, all are crammed together in the little
cockleshell of a boat where the little ones are packed round father and
mother and tossing gaily over the waves. What endless fun in the rising
and falling, the creaking of the sail, the gruff voice of the boatman,
the sight of the distant cliffs, the flock of sea-gulls nestling in the
wave-hollows! The little ones trail their hands in the cool water and
fancy they see mermaids in the cool green depths. The big boy watches
the boatman and studies navigation. The little brother dips a hook now
and then in a fond hope of whiting. The tide has come in ere they
return, and the little voyagers are lifted out, tired and sleepy, in
the boatman's arms, to dream that night of endless sailings over endless
seas.
It is a terrible morning that brings the children news of their recall
to the smoke and din of town. They wander for a last visit down to the
beach, listen for the last time to the young bandit in his Spanish
sombrero who charms the nursery-maids with lays of love, club their
pence for a last interview with the itinerant photographer. It is all
over; the sands are thinner now, group after group is breaking up,
autumn is dying into winter, and rougher winds are blowing over the sea.
But the sea is never too rough for the little ones. With hair blown
wildly about their faces they linger disconsolately along the brink,
count the boats they shall never see again, make pilgrimages to the rock
caves to tell its separate story of enjoyment in each of them, and fling
themselves with a last kiss on the dear, dear sands! Then they shoulder
their spade and rake, and with one fond look at the cliffs turn their
backs on the sea. But the sea is with them still, even when the crowded
train has whirled them far from waves that the white gull skims over.
They have their tales of it to tell to their governess, their memories
of it to count over before they fall asleep, their dreams of it as they
lie asleep, their hopes of seeing it again when weary winter and spring
and summer have at last slipped away. They listen to stories of wrecks,
and find a halfpenny for the sham sailor who trolls his ballads in the
street. Now and then they look lovingly at the ships and the
sand-buckets piled away in the play-cupboard. So with one abiding
thought at their little hearts the long days glide away till autumn
finds them again children by the sea.
THE FLORENCE OF DANTE.
The one story in the history of the modern world which rivals in
concentrated interest the story of Athens is the story of Florence in
the years just before and after the opening of the fourteenth
century--the few years, that is, of its highest glory in freedom, in
letters, in art. Never since the days of Pericles had such a varied
outburst of human energy been summed up in so short a space.
Architecture reared the noble monuments of the Duomo and Santa Croce.
Cimabue revolutionized painting, and then "the cry was Giotto's."
Italian poetry, preluded by the canzonets of Guido Cavalcanti and his
rivals, rose to its fullest grandeur in the 'Commedia' of Dante. Italian
prose was born in the works of Malaspina and Dino. Within, the
Florentines worked out patiently and bravely amidst a thousand obstacles
the problem of free and popular government. Without, they covered sea
and land with their commerce; their agents supplied the Papal treasury,
while private firms were already beginning that career of vast foreign
loans which at a later time enabled the victor of Crecy to equip his
armies with Florentine gold.
We can only realize the attitude of Florence at this moment by its
contrast with the rest of Europe. It was a time when Germany was sinking
down into feudal chaos under the earlier Hapsburgs. The system of
despotic centralization invented by St. Louis and perfected by Philippe
le Bel was crushing freedom and vigour out of France. If Parliamentary
life was opening in England, literature was dead, and a feudalism which
had become embittered by the new forms of law which the legal spirit of
the age gave it was pressing harder and harder on the peasantry. Even in
Italy Florence stood alone. The South lay crushed beneath the oppression
of its French conquerors. In the North the earlier communal freedom had
already made way for the rule of tyrants when it was just springing into
life in the city by the Arno. For it is noteworthy that of all the
cities of Italy Florence is the most modern. Genoa and Pisa had been
rivals in commercial activity a hundred years before the merchants of
Florence were known out of Tuscany. Sicily had caught the gift of song
from the Provencal troubadours half a century before the Florentine
singers. Too insignificant to share in the great struggle of the Empire
and the Papacy, among the last to be divided into Guelph and Ghibelline,
Florence emerged into communal greatness when that of Milan or Bologna
was already in decay.
The City of the Lily came late to the front to inherit and give fresh
vigour to the gifts of all. As the effigies of Byzantine art became
living men and women beneath the pencil of Giotto, so the mere imitative
poetry of the Sicilian Court became Italian literature in Dante and
Boccaccio. Freedom, slow as it seemed in awakening, nowhere awakened so
grandly, nowhere fought so long and stubbornly for life. Dino Compagni
sets us face to face with this awakening, with this patient pitiful
struggle. His 'Chronicle' indeed has been roughly attacked of late by
the sweeping scepticism of German critics, but the attack has proved an
unsuccessful one. The strongest evidence of its genuineness indeed lies
in the impression of a distinct personality which is left on us by a
simple perusal of the 'Chronicle' itself. Some of its charm no doubt
rises from the naive simplicity of Dino's story-telling. With him and
with his contemporaries, Malaspina, Dante, and Villani, Italian prose
begins; and we can hardly fancy a better training in style for any young
Italian than to be brought face to face in Dino with the nervous
picturesque accents that marked the birth of his mother-tongue. But the
charm is more one of character than one of style. Throughout we feel the
man, a man whose temper is so strongly and clearly marked in its
contrast with so reflective a temper as Villani's that the German theory
which makes his chronicle a mere cento from the later work hardly needs
discussion. Dino has the quaint directness, the dramatic force, the
tenderness of Froissart, but it is a nobler and more human tenderness; a
pity not for the knight only, but for knight and burgher as well. The
sham tinsel of chivalry which flutters over the pages of the gay Canon
of Liege is exchanged in Dino for a manly patriotism, a love of civic
freedom, of justice, of religion. In his quiet way he is a great artist.
There is an Herodotean picturesqueness as well as an Herodotean
simplicity in such a picture as that of Dante's first battle-field, the
Florentine victory of Campaldino:--
"On the appointed day the men of Florence advanced their
standards to go into the enemies' land, and passed by
Casentino along an ill road where, had the enemy found them,
they had received no little damage; but such was not the will
of God. And they came near to Bibbiena, at a place called
Campaldino where was the enemy, and there they halted in array
of battle. The captains of war sent the light-armed foot to
the front; and each man's shield, with a red lily on a white
ground, was stretched out well before him. Then the Bishop,
who was short-sighted, asked, 'Those there: what walls be
they?' They answered him, 'The shields of the enemy.' Messer
Barone de' Mangiadori da San Miniato, a chevalier frank and
well skilled in deeds of arms, gathered his men-at-arms
together and said to them, 'My masters, in Tuscan wars men
were wont to conquer by making a stout onset, and that lasted
but a while, and few men died, for it was not in use to kill.
Now is the fashion changed, and men conquer by holding their
ground stoutly, wherefore I counsel you that ye stand firm and
let them assault you.' And so they settled to do. The men of
Arezzo made their onset with such vigour and so great force
that the body of the Florentines fell back not a little. The
fight was hard and keen. Messer Corso Donati with a brigade of
the men of Pistoja charged the enemy in flank; the quarrels
from the crossbows poured down like rain; the men of Arezzo
had few of them, and were withal charged in flank where they
were exposed; the air was covered with clouds, and there was a
very great dust. Then the footmen of Arezzo set themselves to
creep under the bellies of the horses, knife in hand, and
disembowelled them, and some of them penetrated so far that in
the very midst of the battalion were many dead of either part.
Many that were counted of great prowess were shown vile that
day, and many of whom none spoke word won honour.... The men
of Arezzo were broken, not by cowardice or little prowess, but
by the greater number of their enemies were they put to the
rout and slain. The soldiers of Florence that were used to
fighting slew them; the villeins had no pity."
"Pity" is almost the characteristic word of Dino Compagni--pity alike
for foe or friend; for the warriors of Arezzo or the starved-out
patriots of Pistoja as well as for the heroes of his own Florence; pity
for the victims of her feuds, and even for the men who drove them into
exile; pity, most of all, for Florence herself. We read his story indeed
at first with a strange sense of disappointment and surprise. To the
modern reader the story of Florence in the years which Dino covers is
above all the story of Dante. As the 'Chronicle' jots patiently down the
hopes and fears, the failures and successes of the wiser citizens in
that struggle for order and good government which brought Dante to his
long exile, we feel ourselves standing in the very midst of events out
of which grew the threefold Poem of the After-World and face to face
with the men who front us in the 'Inferno' and 'Paradise.' But this is
not the world Dino stands in. Of what seem to us the greater elements of
the life around him he sees and tells us nothing. Of art or letters his
'Chronicle' says never a word. The name of Dante is mentioned but once
and then without a syllable of comment. It is not in Dante that Dino
interests himself: his one interest, his one passion is Florence.
And yet as we read page after page a new interest in the story grows on
us, the interest that Dino himself felt in the tragedy around him. Our
sympathies go with that earnest group of men to which he belonged, men
who struggled honestly to reconcile freedom and order in a State torn
with antipathies of the past, with jealousies and ambitions and feuds of
the present. The terrible sadness of the 'Divina Commedia' becomes more
intelligible as we follow step by step the ruin of those hopes for his
country which Dante entertained as well as Dino. And beyond this
interest there is the social picture of the Florence of the fourteenth
century itself, its strange medley of past and present, the old world of
feudalism jostling with the new world of commerce, the trader elbowing
the noble and the artisan the trader, an enthusiastic mystical devotion
jealous of the new classicalism or the scepticism of men like Guido
Cavalcanti, the petty rivalries of great houses alternating with large
schemes of public policy, the tenderest poetry with brutal outrage and
lust, the art of Giotto with the slow, patient bloodthirst of the
vendetta.
What was the cause--the question presses on us through every page of
Dino or of Dante--what was the cause of that ruin which waited in
Florence as in every Italian city on so short a burst of freedom? What
was it that foiled alike the counsel of statesmen and the passionate
love of liberty in the people at large? What was it which drove Dante
into exile and stung the simple-hearted Dino into a burst of eloquent
despair? The answer--if we set aside the silly talk about "democracy"
and look simply at the facts themselves--is a very simple one. The ruin
of Florentine liberty, like the ruin of liberty elsewhere throughout
Italy, lay wholly with its _noblesse_. It was equally perilous for an
Italian town to leave its nobles without the walls or to force them to
reside within. In their own robber-holds or their own country estates
they were a scourge to the trader whose wains rolled temptingly past
their walls. Florence, like its fellow Italian States, was driven to the
demolition of the feudal castles, and to enforcing the residence of
their lords within its own civic bounds. But the danger was only brought
nearer home. Excluded by civic jealousy, wise or unwise, from all share
in municipal government, their huge palazzi rose like fortresses in
every quarter of the city. Within them lay the noble, a wild beast all
the fiercer for his confinement in so narrow a den, with the old tastes,
hatreds, preferences utterly unchanged, at feud as of old with his
fellow-nobles, knit to them only by a common scorn of the burghers and
the burgher life around them, stung to madness by his exclusion from all
rule in the commonwealth, bitter, revengeful, with the wilfulness of a
child, shameless, false, unprincipled.
The story which lies at the opening of the great feud between Guelph and
Ghibelline in Florence throws a picturesque light on the temper of its
nobility. Buondelmonte, the betrothed lover of a daughter of Oderigo
Giantrufetti, passes beneath a palace of the Donati at whose window
stands Madonna Aldruda with her two fair daughters. Seeing him pass by
Aldruda calls aloud to him, pointing with her finger to the damsel by
her side. "Whom have you taken to wife?" she says, "This is the wife I
kept for you." The damsel pleased the youth, but his troth bound him,
and he answered, "I can wed none other, now at any rate!" "Yes," cried
Aldruda, "for I will pay the penalty for thee." "Then will I have her,"
said Buondelmonte. "Cosa fatta capo ha," was the famous comment of the
outraged house--"stone dead has no fellow"--and as Dino puts it, in the
most ordinary way in the world, "they settled to kill him the day he
was to have married the damsel, and so they did." "Kill, kill," echoes
everywhere through the story of these Florentine nobles. Assassination
is an event of every day. Corso Donati sends murderers to kill an enemy
among the Cerchi. Guido Cavalcanti strives to stab Corso in the back as
he passes him. Where the dagger fails, they try poison without scruple.
The best of them decline a share in a murder much as an Irish peasant
may decline a share in an agrarian outrage, with a certain delicacy and
readiness to stand by and see it done. When the assassination of the
Bishop of Arezzo was decided on, Guglielmo da Pazzi, who was in the
counsel, protested "he would have been content had it been done without
his knowledge, but were the question put to him he might not be guilty
of his blood."
Among such men even Corso Donati towers into a certain grandeur:--
"Knight he was of great valour and renown, gentle of blood and
manners, of a most fair body even to old age, comely in
figure, with delicate features, and a white skin; a pleasing,
prudent, and eloquent speaker; one who ever aimed at great
ends; friend and comrade of great lords and nobles; a man too
of many friends and great fame throughout all Italy. Foe he
was of the people and its leaders; the darling of soldiers,
full of evil devices, evil-hearted, cunning."
Such was the man who drove Dante into exile:--
"Who for his pride was called 'Il Barone,' so that when he
passed through the land many cried 'Viva Il Barone!' and the
land seemed all his own."
He stood not merely at the head of the Florentine nobility, but at the
head of the great Guelph organization which extended from city to city
throughout Tuscany--a league with its own leaders, its own policy, its
own treasure. In the attempt to seize this treasure for the general
service of the State the most popular of Florentine leaders, Giano della
Bella, had been foiled and driven into exile. An honest attempt to
secure the peace of the city by the banishment of Corso and his friends
brought about the exile of Dante. It is plain that powerless as they
were before the united forces of the whole people the nobles were strong
enough by simply biding their time and availing themselves of popular
divisions to crush one opponent after another. And yet the struggle
against them was one of life and death for the city. No atom of the new
civilization, the new spirit of freedom or humanity, seems to have
penetrated among them. Behind the gloomy walls of their city fortresses
they remained the mere murderous tyrants of a brutal feudalism. "I
counsel, lords, that we free ourselves from this slavery," cried Berto
Frescobaldi to his brother nobles in the church of San Jacopo; "let us
arm ourselves and run on to the Piazza, and there kill friend and foe
alike as many as we find, so that neither we nor our children be ever
subject to them more." Those who, like Sismondi, censure the sternness
of the laws which pressed upon the nobles forget what wild beasts they
were intended to hold down. Their outbreaks were the blind outbreaks of
mere ruffians. The victory of Corso over Dante and the wiser citizens
was followed by a carnival of bloodshed, firing of houses, pillage and
lawlessness which wrings from Dino curses as bitter as those of the
'Inferno.'
From the hopeless task of curbing the various elements of disorder by
the single force of each isolated city the wiser and more patriotic
among the men of that day turned in despair to the Empire. Guelph and
Ghibelline, Papalist and Imperialist, were words which as Dante saw had
now lost their old meaning. In the twelfth century the Emperor was at
once the foe of religion and the one obstacle to the rising freedom of
the towns. In the fourteenth that freedom had either perished by its own
excesses, or, as at Florence, was strong enough to defy even an Imperial
assailant. Religion found its bitterest enemy in such a Pope as Boniface
VIII., or the church over which he ruled. Whatever might have been its
fortune under happier circumstances, the great experiment of democratic
self-government, of free and independent city-states, had failed,
whether from the wars of city with city, or from the civil feuds that
rent each in sunder. The papacy could furnish no centre of union; its
old sanctity was gone, its greed and worldliness weakened it every day.
On the other hand, the remembrance of the tyranny of Barbarossa, of the
terrible struggle by which the peace of Constance had been won, had
grown faint and dim in the course of years. It was long since Italy had
seen an Emperor at all.
But the old Ghibellinism had recovered new vigour from an unlooked-for
quarter. As the revival of the Roman law had given an artificial
prestige to the Empire in the twelfth century, so the revival of
classical literature threw a new halo around it in the fourteenth. To
Dante, penetrated with the greater Latin authors, Henry of Luxemburg is
no stranger from over the Alps, but the descendant of the Augustus whom
his own Vergil had loved and sung. The same classical feeling tells on
Dino. With him Florence is "the daughter of Rome." The pages of Sallust
and of Livy have stirred him to undertake her annals. "The remembrance
of ancient histories has long spurred my mind to write the events, full
of danger yet reaching to no prosperous end, that this noble city,
daughter of Rome, has encountered." It was the same sense that united
with his own practical appreciation of the necessities of the time in
his impatient longing for the intervention of the new Emperor. As Prior,
Dino had acted the part of a brave and honest man, striving to
conciliate party with party, refusing to break the law, chased at last
with the rest of the magistracy from the Palace of the Signory by the
violence of Corso Donati and the nobles. If he did not share Dante's
exile, he had at any rate acted with Dante in the course of policy
which brought that penalty on him. Both were Priors together in 1300;
both have the same passionate love of Florence, the same haughty disdain
of the factions that tore it to pieces. If the appeal of Dino to his
fellows in Santa Trinita is less thrilling than the verse of Dante, it
has its own pathetic force:--"My masters, why will ye confound and undo
so good a city? Against whom do ye will to fight? Against your brethren?
What victory will ye gain?--none other than weeping!" The words fell on
deaf ears, and the smoke of burning streets, slaughter, and exile forced
Dino to look to the stranger. There is something strangely touching in
the dry, passionless way in which he tracks Henry of Luxemburg from city
to city, the fire of his real longing only breaking out here and there
in pettish outbursts at each obstacle the Emperor finds. The weary
waiting came to nothing. Dino leaves us still looking for Henry's
coming; Dante tells us of the death that dashed all hope to the ground.
Even in the hour of his despair the poet could console himself by
setting his "divino Arrigo" in the regions of the blest. What comfort
the humble chronicler found whose work we have been studying none can
know.
BUTTERCUPS.
It is not the least debt we owe to the holidays that they give us our
buttercups back again. Few faces have stirred us with a keener touch of
pity through the whole of the season than the face of the pale, awkward
girl who slips by us now and then on the stairs, a face mutinous in
revolt against its imprisonment in brick and mortar, dull with the
boredom of the schoolroom, weary of the formal walk, the monotonous
drive, the inevitable practice on that hated piano, the perpetual round
of lessons from the odd creatures who leave their odder umbrellas in the
hall. It is amazingly pleasant to meet the same little face on the lawn,
and to see it blooming with new life at the touch of freedom and fresh
air. It blooms with a sense of individuality, a sense of power. In the
town the buttercup was nobody, silent, unnoticed, lost in the bustle and
splendour of elder sisterdom. Here among the fields and the hedges she
is queen. Her very laugh, the reckless shout that calls for mamma's
frown and dooms the governess to a headache, rings out like a claim of
possession. Here in her own realm she rushes at once to the front, and
if we find ourselves enjoying a scamper over the common or a run down
the hill-side, it is the buttercup that leads the way.