The Barber’s Shop.
“To tell you the truth,” said the young stranger to Nello, as they got
a little clearer of the entangled vehicles and mules, “I am not sorry
to be handed over by that patron of mine to one who has a less
barbarous accent, and a less enigmatical business. Is it a common thing
among you Florentines for an itinerant trafficker in broken glass and
rags to talk of a shop where he sells lutes and swords?”
“Common? No: our Bratti is not a common man. He has a theory, and lives
up to it, which is more than I can say for any philosopher I have the
honour of shaving,” answered Nello, whose loquacity, like an over-full
bottle, could never pour forth a small dose. “Bratti means to extract
the utmost possible amount of pleasure, that is to say, of hard
bargaining, out of this life; winding it up with a bargain for the
easiest possible passage through purgatory, by giving Holy Church his
winnings when the game is over. He has had his will made to that effect
on the cheapest terms a notary could be got for. But I have often said
to him, ‘Bratti, thy bargain is a limping one, and thou art on the lame
side of it. Does it not make thee a little sad to look at the pictures
of the Paradiso? Thou wilt never be able there to chaffer for rags and
rusty nails: the saints and angels want neither pins nor tinder; and
except with San Bartolommeo, who carries his skin about in an
inconvenient manner, I see no chance of thy making a bargain for
second-hand clothing.’ But God pardon me,” added Nello, changing his
tone, and crossing himself, “this light talk ill beseems a morning when
Lorenzo lies dead, and the Muses are tearing their hair—always a
painful thought to a barber; and you yourself, Messere, are probably
under a cloud, for when a man of your speech and presence takes up with
so sorry a night’s lodging, it argues some misfortune to have befallen
him.”
“What Lorenzo is that whose death you speak of?” said the stranger,
appearing to have dwelt with too anxious an interest on this point to
have noticed the indirect inquiry that followed it.
“What Lorenzo? There is but one Lorenzo, I imagine, whose death could
throw the Mercato into an uproar, set the lantern of the Duomo leaping
in desperation, and cause the lions of the Republic to feel under an
immediate necessity to devour one another. I mean Lorenzo de’ Medici,
the Pericles of our Athens—if I may make such a comparison in the ear
of a Greek.”
“Why not?” said the other, laughingly; “for I doubt whether Athens,
even in the days of Pericles, could have produced so learned a barber.”
“Yes, yes; I thought I could not be mistaken,” said the rapid Nello,
“else I have shaved the venerable Demetrio Calcondila to little
purpose; but pardon me, I am lost in wonder: your Italian is better
than his, though he has been in Italy forty years—better even than that
of the accomplished Marullo, who may be said to have married the Italic
Muse in more senses than one, since he has married our learned and
lovely Alessandra Scala.”
“It will lighten your wonder to know that I come of a Greek stock
planted in Italian soil much longer than the mulberry-trees which have
taken so kindly to it. I was born at Bari, and my—I mean, I was brought
up by an Italian—and, in fact, I am a Greek, very much as your peaches
are Persian. The Greek dye was subdued in me, I suppose, till I had
been dipped over again by long abode and much travel in the land of
gods and heroes. And, to confess something of my private affairs to
you, this same Greek dye, with a few ancient gems I have about me, is
the only fortune shipwreck has left me. But—when the towers fall, you
know it is an ill business for the small nest-builders—the death of
your Pericles makes me wish I had rather turned my steps towards Rome,
as I should have done but for a fallacious Minerva in the shape of an
Augustinian monk. ‘At Rome,’ he said, ‘you will be lost in a crowd of
hungry scholars; but at Florence, every corner is penetrated by the
sunshine of Lorenzo’s patronage: Florence is the best market in Italy
for such commodities as yours.’”
“_Gnaffè_, and so it will remain, I hope,” said Nello, “Lorenzo was not
the only patron and judge of learning in our city—heaven forbid!
Because he was a large melon, every other Florentine is not a pumpkin,
I suppose. Have we not Bernardo Rucellai, and Alamanno Rinuccini, and
plenty more? And if you want to be informed on such matters, I, Nello,
am your man. It seems to me a thousand years till I can be of service
to a _bel erudito_ like yourself. And, first of all, in the matter of
your hair. That beard, my fine young man, must be parted with, were it
as dear to you as the nymph of your dreams. Here at Florence, we love
not to see a man with his nose projecting over a cascade of hair. But,
remember, you will have passed the Rubicon, when once you have been
shaven: if you repent, and let your beard grow after it has acquired
stoutness by a struggle with the razor, your mouth will by-and-by show
no longer what Messer Angelo calls the divine prerogative of lips, but
will appear like a dark cavern fringed with horrent brambles.”
“That is a terrible prophecy,” said the Greek, “especially if your
Florentine maidens are many of them as pretty as the little Tessa I
stole a kiss from this morning.”
“Tessa? she is a rough-handed contadina: you will rise into the favour
of dames who bring no scent of the mule-stables with them. But to that
end, you must not have the air of a _sgherro_, or a man of evil repute:
you must look like a courtier, and a scholar of the more polished sort,
such as our Pietro Crinito—like one who sins among well-bred, well-fed
people, and not one who sucks down vile _vino di sotto_ in a chance
tavern.”
“With all my heart,” said the stranger. “If the Florentine Graces
demand it, I am willing to give up this small matter of my beard, but—”
“Yes, yes,” interrupted Nello. “I know what you would say. It is the
_bella zazzera_—the hyacinthine locks, you do not choose to part with;
and there is no need. Just a little pruning—ecco!—and you will look not
unlike the illustrious prince Pico di Mirandola in his prime. And here
we are in good time in the Piazza San Giovanni, and at the door of my
shop. But you are pausing, I see: naturally, you want to look at our
wonder of the world, our Duomo, our Santa Maria del Fiore. Well, well,
a mere glance; but I beseech you to leave a closer survey till you have
been shaved: I am quivering with the inspiration of my art even to the
very edge of my razor. Ah, then, come round this way.”
The mercurial barber seized the arm of the stranger, and led him to a
point, on the south side of the piazza, from which he could see at once
the huge dark shell of the cupola, the slender soaring grace of
Giotto’s campanile, and the quaint octagon of San Giovanni in front of
them, showing its unique gates of storied bronze, which still bore the
somewhat dimmed glory of their original gilding. The inlaid marbles
were then fresher in their pink, and white, and purple, than they are
now, when the winters of four centuries have turned their white to the
rich ochre of well-mellowed meerschaum; the façade of the cathedral did
not stand ignominious in faded stucco, but had upon it the magnificent
promise of the half-completed marble inlaying and statued niches, which
Giotto had devised a hundred and fifty years before; and as the
campanile in all its harmonious variety of colour and form led the eyes
upward, high into the clear air of this April morning, it seemed a
prophetic symbol, telling that human life must somehow and some time
shape itself into accord with that pure aspiring beauty.
But this was not the impression it appeared to produce on the Greek.
His eyes were irresistibly led upward, but as he stood with his arms
folded and his curls falling backward, there was a slight touch of
scorn on his lip, and when his eyes fell again they glanced round with
a scanning coolness which was rather piquing to Nello’s Florentine
spirit.
“Well, my fine young man,” he said, with some impatience, “you seem to
make as little of our Cathedral as if you were the Angel Gabriel come
straight from Paradise. I should like to know if you have ever seen
finer work than our Giotto’s tower, or any cupola that would not look a
mere mushroom by the side of Brunelleschi’s there, or any marbles finer
or more cunningly wrought than these that our Signoria got from far-off
quarries, at a price that would buy a dukedom. Come, now, have you ever
seen anything to equal them?”
“If you asked me that question with a scimitar at my throat, after the
Turkish fashion, or even your own razor,” said the young Greek, smiling
gaily, and moving on towards the gates of the Baptistery, “I daresay
you might get a confession of the true faith from me. But with my
throat free from peril, I venture to tell you that your buildings smack
too much of Christian barbarism for my taste. I have a shuddering sense
of what there is inside—hideous smoked Madonnas; fleshless saints in
mosaic, staring down idiotic astonishment and rebuke from the apse;
skin-clad skeletons hanging on crosses, or stuck all over with arrows,
or stretched on gridirons; women and monks with heads aside in
perpetual lamentation. I have seen enough of those wry-necked
favourites of heaven at Constantinople. But what is this bronze door
rough with imagery? These women’s figures seem moulded in a different
spirit from those starved and staring saints I spoke of: these heads in
high relief speak of a human mind within them, instead of looking like
an index to perpetual spasms and colic.”
“Yes, yes,” said Nello, with some triumph. “I think we shall show you
by-and-by that our Florentine art is not in a state of barbarism. These
gates, my fine young man, were moulded half a century ago, by our
Lorenzo Ghiberti, when he counted hardly so many years as you do.”
“Ah, I remember,” said the stranger, turning away, like one whose
appetite for contemplation was soon satisfied. “I have heard that your
Tuscan sculptors and painters have been studying the antique a little.
But with monks for models, and the legends of mad hermits and martyrs
for subjects, the vision of Olympus itself would be of small use to
them.”
“I understand,” said Nello, with a significant shrug, as they walked
along. “You are of the same mind as Michele Marullo, ay, and as Angelo
Poliziano himself, in spite of his canonicate, when he relaxes himself
a little in my shop after his lectures, and talks of the gods awaking
from their long sleep and making the woods and streams vital once more.
But he rails against the Roman scholars who want to make us all talk
Latin again: ‘My ears,’ he says, ‘are sufficiently flayed by the
barbarisms of the learned, and if the vulgar are to talk Latin I would
as soon have been in Florence the day they took to beating all the
kettles in the city because the bells were not enough to stay the wrath
of the saints.’ Ah, Messer Greco, if you want to know the flavour of
our scholarship, you must frequent my shop: it is the focus of
Florentine intellect, and in that sense the navel of the earth—as my
great predecessor, Burchiello, said of _his_ shop, on the more
frivolous pretension that his street of the Calimara was the centre of
our city. And here we are at the sign of ‘Apollo and the Razor.’
Apollo, you see, is bestowing the razor on the Triptolemus of our
craft, the first reaper of beards, the sublime _Anonimo_, whose
mysterious identity is indicated by a shadowy hand.”
“I see thou hast had custom already, Sandro,” continued Nello,
addressing a solemn-looking dark-eyed youth, who made way for them on
the threshold. “And now make all clear for this signor to sit down. And
prepare the finest-scented lather, for he has a learned and a handsome
chin.”
“You have a pleasant little adytum there, I see,” said the stranger,
looking through a latticed screen which divided the shop from a room of
about equal size, opening into a still smaller walled enclosure, where
a few bays and laurels surrounded a stone Hermes. “I suppose your
conclave of _eruditi_ meets there?”
“There, and not less in my shop,” said Nello, leading the way into the
inner room, in which were some benches, a table, with one book in
manuscript and one printed in capitals lying open upon it, a lute, a
few oil-sketches, and a model or two of hands and ancient masks. “For
my shop is a no less fitting haunt of the Muses, as you will
acknowledge when you feel the sudden illumination of understanding and
the serene vigour of inspiration that will come to you with a clear
chin. Ah! you can make that lute discourse, I perceive. I, too, have
some skill that way, though the serenata is useless when daylight
discloses a visage like mine, looking no fresher than an apple that has
stood the winter. But look at that sketch: it is a fancy of Piero di
Cosimo’s, a strange freakish painter, who says he saw it by long
looking at a mouldy wall.”
The sketch Nello pointed to represented three masks—one a drunken
laughing Satyr, another a sorrowing Magdalen, and the third, which lay
between them, the rigid, cold face of a Stoic: the masks rested
obliquely on the lap of a little child, whose cherub features rose
above them with something of the supernal promise in the gaze which
painters had by that time learned to give to the Divine Infant.
“A symbolical picture, I see,” said the young Greek, touching the lute
while he spoke, so as to bring out a slight musical murmur. “The child,
perhaps, is the Golden Age, wanting neither worship nor philosophy. And
the Golden Age can always come back as long as men are born in the form
of babies, and don’t come into the world in cassock or furred mantle.
Or, the child may mean the wise philosophy of Epicurus, removed alike
from the gross, the sad, and the severe.”
“Ah! everybody has his own interpretation for that picture,” said
Nello; “and if you ask Piero himself what he meant by it, he says his
pictures are an appendix which Messer Domeneddio has been pleased to
make to the universe, and if any man is in doubt what they mean, he had
better inquire of Holy Church. He has been asked to paint a picture
after the sketch, but he puts his fingers to his ears and shakes his
head at that; the fancy is past, he says—a strange animal, our Piero.
But now all is ready for your initiation into the mysteries of the
razor.”
“Mysteries they may well be called,” continued the barber, with rising
spirits at the prospect of a long monologue, as he imprisoned the young
Greek in the shroud-like shaving-cloth; “mysteries of Minerva and the
Graces. I get the flower of men’s thoughts, because I seize them in the
first moment after shaving. (Ah! you wince a little at the lather: it
tickles the outlying limits of the nose, I admit.) And that is what
makes the peculiar fitness of a barber’s shop to become a resort of wit
and learning. For, look now at a druggist’s shop: there is a dull
conclave at the sign of ‘The Moor,’ that pretends to rival mine; but
what sort of inspiration, I beseech you, can be got from the scent of
nauseous vegetable decoctions?—to say nothing of the fact that you no
sooner pass the threshold than you see a doctor of physic, like a
gigantic spider disguised in fur and scarlet, waiting for his prey; or
even see him blocking up the doorway seated on a bony hack, inspecting
saliva. (Your chin a little elevated, if it please you: contemplate
that angel who is blowing the trumpet at you from the ceiling. I had it
painted expressly for the regulation of my clients’ chins.) Besides,
your druggist, who herborises and decocts, is a man of prejudices: he
has poisoned people according to a system, and is obliged to stand up
for his system to justify the consequences. Now a barber can be
dispassionate; the only thing he necessarily stands by is the razor,
always providing he is not an author. That was the flaw in my great
predecessor Burchiello: he was a poet, and had consequently a prejudice
about his own poetry. I have escaped that; I saw very early that
authorship is a narrowing business, in conflict with the liberal art of
the razor, which demands an impartial affection for all men’s chins.
Ecco, Messer! the outline of your chin and lip is as clear as a
maiden’s; and now fix your mind on a knotty question—ask yourself
whether you are bound to spell Virgil with an _i_ or an _e_, and say if
you do not feel an unwonted clearness on the point. Only, if you decide
for the _i_, keep it to yourself till your fortune is made, for the _e_
hath the stronger following in Florence. Ah! I think I see a gleam of
still quicker wit in your eye. I have it on the authority of our young
Niccolò Macchiavelli, himself keen enough to discern _il pelo nell’
uovo_, as we say, and a great lover of delicate shaving, though his
beard is hardly of two years’ date, that no sooner do the hairs begin
to push themselves, than he perceives a certain grossness of
apprehension creeping over him.”
“Suppose you let me look at myself,” said the stranger, laughing. “The
happy effect on my intellect is perhaps obstructed by a little doubt as
to the effect on my appearance.”
“Behold yourself in this mirror, then; it is a Venetian mirror from
Murano, the true _nosce teipsum_, as I have named it, compared with
which the finest mirror of steel or silver is mere darkness. See now,
how by diligent shaving, the nether region of your face may preserve
its human outline, instead of presenting no distinction from the
physiognomy of a bearded owl or a Barbary ape. I have seen men whose
beards have so invaded their cheeks, that one might have pitied them as
the victims of a sad, brutalising chastisement befitting our Dante’s
Inferno, if they had not seemed to strut with a strange triumph in
their extravagant hairiness.”
“It seems to me,” said the Greek, still looking into the mirror, “that
you have taken away some of my capital with your razor—I mean a year or
two of age, which might have won me more ready credit for my learning.
Under the inspection of a patron whose vision has grown somewhat dim, I
shall have a perilous resemblance to a maiden of eighteen in the
disguise of hose and jerkin.”
“Not at all,” said Nello, proceeding to clip the too extravagant curls;
“your proportions are not those of a maiden. And for your age, I myself
remember seeing Angelo Poliziano begin his lectures on the Latin
language when he had a younger beard than yours; and between ourselves,
his juvenile ugliness was not less signal than his precocious
scholarship. Whereas you—no, no, your age is not against you; but
between ourselves, let me hint to you that your being a Greek, though
it be only an Apulian Greek, is not in your favour. Certain of our
scholars hold that your Greek learning is but a wayside degenerate
plant until it has been transplanted into Italian brains, and that now
there is such a plentiful crop of the superior quality, your native
teachers are mere propagators of degeneracy. Ecco! your curls are now
of the right proportion to neck and shoulders; rise, Messer, and I will
free you from the encumbrance of this cloth. _Gnaffè_! I almost advise
you to retain the faded jerkin and hose a little longer; they give you
the air of a fallen prince.”
“But the question is,” said the young Greek, leaning against the high
back of a chair, and returning Nello’s contemplative admiration with a
look of inquiring anxiety; “the question is, in what quarter I am to
carry my princely air, so as to rise from the said fallen condition. If
your Florentine patrons of learning share this scholarly hostility to
the Greeks, I see not how your city can be a hospitable refuge for me,
as you seemed to say just now.”
“_Pian piano_—not so fast,” said Nello, sticking his thumbs into his
belt and nodding to Sandro to restore order. “I will not conceal from
you that there is a prejudice against Greeks among us; and though, as a
barber unsnared by authorship, I share no prejudices, I must admit that
the Greeks are not always such pretty youngsters as yourself: their
erudition is often of an uncombed, unmannerly aspect, and encrusted
with a barbarous utterance of Italian, that makes their converse hardly
more euphonious than that of a Tedesco in a state of vinous loquacity.
And then, again, excuse me—we Florentines have liberal ideas about
speech, and consider that an instrument which can flatter and promise
so cleverly as the tongue, must have been partly made for those
purposes; and that truth is a riddle for eyes and wit to discover,
which it were a mere spoiling of sport for the tongue to betray. Still
we have our limits beyond which we call dissimulation treachery. But it
is said of the Greeks that their honesty begins at what is the hanging
point with us, and that since the old Furies went to sleep, your
Christian Greek is of so easy a conscience that he would make a
stepping-stone of his father’s corpse.”
The flush on the stranger’s face indicated what seemed so natural a
movement of resentment, that the good-natured Nello hastened to atone
for his want of reticence.
“Be not offended, _bel giovane_; I am but repeating what I hear in my
shop; as you may perceive, my eloquence is simply the cream which I
skim off my clients’ talk. Heaven forbid I should fetter my
impartiality by entertaining an opinion. And for that same scholarly
objection to the Greeks,” added Nello, in a more mocking tone, and with
a significant grimace, “the fact is, you are heretics, Messer; jealousy
has nothing to do with it: if you would just change your opinion about
leaven, and alter your Doxology a little, our Italian scholars would
think it a thousand years till they could give up their chairs to you.
Yes, yes; it is chiefly religious scruple, and partly also the
authority of a great classic,—Juvenal, is it not? He, I gather, had his
bile as much stirred by the swarm of Greeks as our Messer Angelo, who
is fond of quoting some passage about their incorrigible
impudence—_audacia perdita_.”
“Pooh! the passage is a compliment,” said the Greek, who had recovered
himself, and seemed wise enough to take the matter gaily—
“‘Ingenium velox, audacia perdita, sermo
Promptus, et Isaeo torrentior.’
“A rapid intellect and ready eloquence may carry off a little
impudence.”
“Assuredly,” said Nello. “And since, as I see, you know Latin
literature as well as Greek, you will not fall into the mistake of
Giovanni Argiropulo, who ran full tilt against Cicero, and pronounced
him all but a pumpkin-head. For, let me give you one bit of advice,
young man—trust a barber who has shaved the best chins, and kept his
eyes and ears open for twenty years—oil your tongue well when you talk
of the ancient Latin writers, and give it an extra dip when you talk of
the modern. A wise Greek may win favour among us; witness our excellent
Demetrio, who is loved by many, and not hated immoderately even by the
most renowned scholars.”
“I discern the wisdom of your advice so clearly,” said the Greek, with
the bright smile which was continually lighting up the fine form and
colour of his young face, “that I will ask you for a little more. Who
now, for example, would be the most likely patron for me? Is there a
son of Lorenzo who inherits his tastes? Or is there any other wealthy
Florentine specially addicted to purchasing antique gems? I have a fine
Cleopatra cut in sardonyx, and one or two other intaglios and cameos,
both curious and beautiful, worthy of being added to the cabinet of a
prince. Happily, I had taken the precaution of fastening them within
the lining of my doublet before I set out on my voyage. Moreover, I
should like to raise a small sum for my present need on this ring of
mine,” (here he took out the ring and replaced it on his finger), “if
you could recommend me to any honest trafficker.”
“Let us see, let us see,” said Nello, perusing the floor, and walking
up and down the length of his shop. “This is no time to apply to Piero
de’ Medici, though he has the will to make such purchases if he could
always spare the money; but I think it is another sort of Cleopatra
that he covets most... Yes, yes, I have it. What you want is a man of
wealth, and influence, and scholarly tastes—not one of your learned
porcupines, bristling all over with critical tests, but one whose Greek
and Latin are of a comfortable laxity. And that man is Bartolommeo
Scala, the secretary of our Republic. He came to Florence as a poor
adventurer himself—a miller’s son—a ‘branny monster,’ as he has been
nicknamed by our honey-lipped Poliziano, who agrees with him as well as
my teeth agree with lemon-juice. And, by the by, that may be a reason
why the secretary may be the more ready to do a good turn to a strange
scholar. For, between you and me, _bel giovane_—trust a barber who has
shaved the best scholars—friendliness is much such a steed as Ser
Benghi’s: it will hardly show much alacrity unless it has got the
thistle of hatred under its tail. However, the secretary is a man
who’ll keep his word to you, even to the halving of a fennel-seed; and
he is not unlikely to buy some of your gems.”
“But how am I to get at this great man?” said the Greek, rather
impatiently.
“I was coming to that,” said Nello. “Just now everybody of any public
importance will be full of Lorenzo’s death, and a stranger may find it
difficult to get any notice. But in the meantime, I could take you to a
man who, if he has a mind, can help you to a chance of a favourable
interview with Scala sooner than anybody else in Florence—worth seeing
for his own sake too, to say nothing of his collections, or of his
daughter Romola, who is as fair as the Florentine lily before it got
quarrelsome and turned red.”
“But if this father of the beautiful Romola makes collections, why
should he not like to buy some of my gems himself?”
Nello shrugged his shoulders. “For two good reasons—want of sight to
look at the gems, and want of money to pay for them. Our old Bardo de’
Bardi is so blind that he can see no more of his daughter than, as he
says, a glimmering of something bright when she comes very near him:
doubtless her golden hair, which, as Messer Luigi Pulci says of his
Meridiana’s, ‘_raggia come stella per sereno_.’ Ah! here come some
clients of mine, and I shouldn’t wonder if one of them could serve your
turn about that ring.”