My Own, Own Beloved: Say that my being away does not seem too long? I have
not had a letter yet, and that makes me somehow not anxious but
compunctious; only writing to you of all I do helps to keep me in good
conscience. Not the other foot gone to the mender's, I hope, with the same
obstructive accompaniments as went to the setting-up again of the last? If
I don't hear soon, you will have me dancing on wires, which cost as much
by the word as a gondola by the hour.
Yesterday we went to see Carpaccio at his best in San Giorgio di
Schiavone: two are St. George pictures, three St. Jeromes, and two of some
other saint unknown to me. The St. Jerome series is really a homily on the
love and pathos of animals. First is St. Jerome in his study with a sort
of unclipped white poodle in the pictorial place of honor, all alone on a
floor beautifully swept and garnished, looking up wistfully to his master
busy at writing (a Benjy saying, "Come and take me for a walk, there's a
good saint!"). Scattered among the adornments of the room are small
bronzes of horses and, I think, birds. So, of course, these being his
tastes, when St. Jerome goes into the wilderness, a lion takes to him, and
accompanies him when he pays a call on the monks in a neighboring
monastery. Thereupon, holy men of little faith, the entire fraternity take
to their heels and rush upstairs, the hindermost clinging to the skirts of
the formermost to be hauled the quicker out of harm's way. And all the
while the lion stands incorrectly offering the left paw, and Jerome with
shrugs tries to explain that even the best butter wouldn't melt in his
dear lion's mouth. After that comes the tragedy. St. Jerome lies dying in
excessive odor of sanctity, and all the monks crowd round him with prayers
and viaticums, and the ordinary stuffy pieties of a "happy death," while
Jerome wonders feebly what it is he misses in all this to-do for which he
cares so little. And there, elbowed far out into the cold, the lion lies
and lifts his poor head and howls because he knows his master is being
taken from him. Quite near to him, fastened to a tree, a queer,
nondescript, crocodile-shaped dog runs out the length of its tether to
comfort the disconsolate beast: but _la bête humaine_ has got the
whip-hand of the situation. In another picture is a parrot that has just
mimicked a dog, or called "Carlo!" and then laughed: the dog turns his
head away with a sleek, sheepish, shy look, exactly as a sensitive dog
does when you make fun of him.
These are, perhaps, mere undercurrents of pictures which are quite
glorious in color and design, but they help me to love Carpaccio to
distraction; and when the others lose me, they hunt through all the
Carpaccios in Venice till they find me!
Love me a little more if possible while I am so long absent from you! What
I do and what I think go so much together now, that you will take what I
write as the most of me that it is possible to cram in, coming back to you
to share everything.
Under such an Italian sky as to-day how I would like to see your face!
Here, dearest, among these palaces you would be in your peerage, for I
think you have some southern blood in you.
Curious that, with all my fairness, somebody said to me to-day, "But you
are not quite English, are you?" And I swore by the nine gods of my
ancestry that I was nothing else. But the look is in us: my father had a
foreign air, but made up for it by so violent a patriotism that Uncle N.
used to call him "John Bull let loose."
My love to England. Is it showing much autumn yet? My eyes long for green
fields again. Since I have been in Italy I had not seen one until the
other day from the top of St. Giorgio Maggiore, where one lies in hiding
under the monastery walls.
All that I see now quickens me to fresh thoughts of you. Yet do not expect
me to come back wiser: my last effort at wisdom was to fall in love with
you, and there I stopped for good and all. There I am still, everything
included: what do you want more? My letter and my heart both threaten to
be over-weight, so no more of them this time. Most dearly do I love you.