I had my note-book with me on this journey, and pledged myself to
make notes in it. And, indeed, I did really do something of the kind,
though the result of my labors is by no means so voluminous as I would
like it to be, now when the work of wishing there were more notes is
so easy. We spent but one day in Genoa, and I find such a marvelous
succinct record of this in my book that I am tempted to give it here,
after the fashion of that Historical Heavyweight who writes the Life
of "Frederick the Great."
"_Genoa, November 13_.--Breakfast _à la fourchette_ excellently
and cheaply. I buy a hat. We go to seek the Consul, and, after
finding every thing else for two hours, find him. Genoa is the
most magnificent city I ever saw; and the new monument to
Columbus about the weakest possible monument. Walk through the
city with Consul; Doge's palace; cathedral; girl turning
somersaults in the street; blind madman on the cathedral steps.
We leave for Naples at twelve midnight."
As for the breakfast, it was eaten at one of the many good caffè in
Genoa, and perhaps some statistician will like to know that for a
beefsteak and potatoes, with a half-bottle of Ligurian wine, we paid a
franc. For this money we had also the society of an unoccupied waiter,
who leaned against a marble column and looked on, with that gentle,
half-compassionate interest in our appetites, which seems native
to the tribe of waiters. A slight dash of surprise is in this
professional manner; and there is a faint smile on the solemn,
professional countenance, which is perhaps prompted by too intimate
knowledge of the mysteries of the kitchen and the habits of the cook.
The man who passes his life among beefsteaks cannot be expected to
love them, or to regard without wonder the avidity with which others
devour them. I imagine that service in restaurants must beget simple
and natural tastes in eating, and that the jaded men who minister
there to our pampered appetites demand only for themselves--
"A scrip with herbs and fruits supplied,
And water from the spring."
Turning from this thought to the purchase of my hat, I do not believe
that literary art can interest the reader in that purely personal
transaction, though I have no doubt that a great deal might be said
about buying hats as a principle. I prefer, therefore, to pass to our
search for the Consul.
A former Consul at ----, whom I know, has told me a good many stories
about the pieces of popular mind which he received at different times
from the travelling public, in reproof of his difficulty of discovery;
and I think it must be one of the most jealously guarded rights
of American citizens in foreign lands to declare the national
representative hard to find, if there is no other complaint to
lodge against him. It seems to be, in peculiar degree, a quality of
consulship at ----, to be found remote and inaccessible. My friend
says that even at New York, before setting out for his post, when
inquiring into the history of his predecessors, he heard that they
were one and all hard to find; and he relates that on the steamer,
going over, there was a low fellow who set the table in a roar by a
vulgar anecdote to this effect:--
"There was once a consul at ----, who indicated his office-hours by
the legend on his door, 'In from ten to one.' An old ship-captain,
who kept coming for about a week without finding the Consul, at last
furiously wrote, in the terms of wager, under this legend, 'Ten to one
you're out!'"
My friend also states that one day a visitor of his remarked: "I'm
rather surprised to find you in. As a general rule, I never do find
consuls in." Habitually, his fellow-countrymen entertained him with
accounts of their misadventures in reaching him. It was useless to
represent to them that his house was in the most convenient locality
in ----, where, indeed, no stranger can walk twenty rods from his
hotel without losing himself; that their guide was an ass, or their
courier a rogue. They listened to him politely, but they never
pardoned him in the least; and neither will I forgive the Consul at
Genoa. I had no earthly consular business with him, but a private
favor to ask. It was Sunday, and I could not reasonably expect to find
him at his office, or any body to tell me where he lived; but I have
seldom had so keen a sense of personal wrong and national neglect as
in my search for that Consul's house.
In Italy there is no species of fact with which any human being you
meet will not pretend to have perfect acquaintance, and, of course,
the driver whose fiacre we took professed himself a complete guide to
the Consul's whereabouts, and took us successively to the residences
of the consuls of all the South American republics. It occurred to
me that it might be well to inquire of these officials where their
colleague was to be found; but it is true that not one consul of them
was at home! Their doors were opened by vacant old women, in whom
a vague intelligence feebly guttered, like the wick of an expiring
candle, and who, after feigning to throw floods of light on the
object of my search, successively flickered out, and left me in total
darkness.
Till that day, I never knew of what lofty flights stairs were capable.
As out-of-doors, in Genoa, it is either all up or down hill, so
in-doors it is either all up or down stairs. Ascending and descending,
in one palace after another, those infinite marble steps, it became
a question not solved to this hour, whether it was worse to ascend or
descend,--each ordeal in its turn seemed so much more terrible than
the other.
At last I resolved to come to an understanding with the driver, and
I spent what little breath I had left--it was dry and hot as the
simoom--in blowing up that infamous man. "You are a great driver," I
said, "not to know your own city. What are you good for if you can't
take a foreigner to his consul's?" "Signore," answered the driver
patiently, "you would have to get a book in two volumes by heart,
in order to be able to find everybody in Genoa. This city is a
labyrinth."
Truly, it had so proved, and I could scarcely believe in my good luck
when I actually found my friend, and set out with him on a ramble
through its toils.
A very great number of the streets in Genoa are footways merely,
and these are as narrow, as dark, as full of jutting chimney-places,
balconies, and opened window-shutters, and as picturesque as the
little alleys in Venice. They wander at will around the bases of the
gloomy old stone palaces, and seem to have a vagabond fondness for
creeping down to the port, and losing themselves there in a certain
cavernous arcade which curves round the water with the flection of the
shore, and makes itself a twilight at noonday. Under it are clangorous
shops of iron-smiths, and sizzling shops of marine cooks, and, looking
down its dim perspective, one beholds chiefly sea-legs coming and
going, more or less affected by strong waters; and as the faces to
which these sea-legs belong draw near, one discerns sailors from all
parts of the world,--tawny men from Sicily and Norway, as diverse in
their tawniness as olive and train-oil; sharp faces from Nantucket
and from the Piraeus, likewise mightily different in their sharpness;
blonde Germans and blonde Englishmen; and now and then a colored
brother also in the seafaring line, with sea-legs, also, more or less
affected by strong waters like the rest.
What curious people are these seafarers! They coast the whole world,
and know nothing of it, being more ignorant and helpless than children
on shore. I spoke with the Yankee mate of a ship one day at Venice,
and asked him how he liked the city.
Well, he had not been ashore yet.
He was told he had better go ashore; that the Piazza San Marco was
worth seeing.
Well, he knew it; he had seen pictures of it; but he guessed he
wouldn't go ashore.
Why not, now he was here?
Well, he laid out to go ashore the next time he came to Venice.
And so, bless his honest soul, he lay three weeks at Venice with his
ship, after a voyage of two months, and he sailed away without ever
setting his foot on that enchanted ground.
I should have liked to stop some of those seafarers and ask them what
they thought of Genoa.
It must have been in the little streets--impassable for horses--that
the people sat and talked, as Heine fabled, in their doorways, and
touched knees with the people sitting and talking on the thresholds
of the opposite side. But we saw no gossipers there on our Sunday in
Genoa; and I think the domestic race of Heine's day no longer lives in
Genoa, for every body we saw on the streets was gayly dressed in the
idea of the last fashions, and was to be met chiefly in the public
promenades. The fashions were French; but here still lingers the
lovely phantom of the old national costume of Genoa, and snow-white
veils fluttered from many a dark head, and caressed many an olive
cheek. It is the kindest and charitablest of attirements, this white
veil, and, while decking beauty to the most perilous effect, befriends
and modifies age and ugliness.
The pleasure with which I look at the splendor of an Italian crowd in
winter is always touched with melancholy. I know that, at the time
of its noonday promenade, it has nothing but a cup of coffee in its
stomach; that it has emerged from a house as cold and dim as a cellar;
and that it will presently go home to dine on rice and boiled beef. I
know that chilblains secretly gnaw the hands inside of its kid gloves,
and I see in the rawness of its faces the anguish of winter-long
suffering from cold. But I also look at many in this crowd with the
eye of the economist, and wonder how people practicing even so great
self-denial as they can contrive to make so much display on their
little means,--how those clerks of public offices, who have rarely an
income of five hundred dollars a year, can dress with such peerless
gorgeousness. I suppose the national instinct teaches them ways and
means unknown to us. The passion for dress is universal: the men are
as fond of it as the women; and, happily, clothes are comparatively
cheap. It is no great harm in itself, this display: it is only a pity
that there is often nothing, or worse than nothing, under the shining
surface.
We walked with the brilliant Genoese crowd upon the hill where the
public promenade overlooks a landscape of city and country, houses and
gardens, vines and olives, which it makes the heart ache to behold, it
is so faultlessly beautiful. Behind us the fountain was--
"Shaking its loosened silver in the sun;"
the birds were singing; and there were innumerable fair girls going
by, about whom one might have made romances if one had not known
better. Our friend pointed out to us the "pink jail" in which Dickens
lived while at Genoa; and showed us on the brow of a distant upland
the villa, called _Il Paradiso_, which Byron had occupied. I dare
say this Genoese joke is already in print: That the Devil reëntered
Paradise when Byron took this villa. Though, in loveliest Italy, one
is half-persuaded that the Devil had never left Paradise.
After lingering a little longer on that delicious height, we turned
and went down for a stroll through the city.
My note-book says that Genoa is the most magnificent city I ever saw,
and I hold by my note-book, though I hardly know how to prove it.
Venice is, and remains, the most beautiful city in the world; but her
ancient rival impresses you with greater splendor. I suppose that
the exclusively Renaissance architecture, which Ruskin declares the
architecture of pride, lends itself powerfully to this effect in
Genoa. It is here in its best mood, and there is little grotesque
Renaissance to be seen, though the palaces are, as usual, loaded with
ornament. The Via Nuova is the chief thoroughfare of the city, and the
crowd pours through this avenue between long lines of palaces. Height
on height rise the stately, sculptured façades, colonnaded, statued,
pierced by mighty doorways and lofty windows; and the palaces seem to
gain a kind of aristocratic _hauteur_ from the fact that there are for
the most part no sidewalks, and that the carriages, rolling insolently
through the crowd, threaten constantly to grind the pedestrian up
against their carven marbles, and immolate him to their stony pride.
There is something gracious and gentle in the grandeur of Venice,
and much that the heart loves to cling to; but in Genoa no sense of
kindliness is touched by the magnificence of the city.
It was an unspeakable relief, after such a street, to come, on a
sudden, upon the Duomo, one of the few Gothic buildings in Genoa, and
rest our jaded eyes on that architecture which Heaven seems truly to
have put into the thoughts of man together with the Christian faith.
O beloved beauty of aspiring arches, of slender and clustered columns,
of flowering capitals and window-traceries, of many-carven breadths
and heights, wherein all Nature breathes and blossoms again! There is
neither Greek perfection, nor winning Byzantine languor, nor insolent
Renaissance opulence, which may compare with this loveliness of yours!
Alas that the interior of this Gothic temple of Genoa should abound in
the abomination of rococo restoration! They say that the dust of St.
John the Baptist lies there within a costly shrine; and I wonder that
it can sleep in peace amid all that heathenish show of bad taste. But
the poor saints have to suffer a great deal in Italy.
Outside, in the piazza before the church, there was an idle, cruel
crowd, amusing itself with the efforts of a blind old man to find
the entrance. He had a number of books which he desperately laid down
while he ran his helpless hands over the clustered columns, and which
he then desperately caught up again, in fear of losing them. At other
times he paused, and wildly clasped his hands upon his eyes, or wildly
threw up his arms; and then began to run to and fro again uneasily,
while the crowd laughed and jeered. Doubtless a taint of madness
afflicted him; but not the less he seemed the type of a blind soul
that gropes darkly about through life, to find the doorway of some
divine truth or beauty,--touched by the heavenly harmonies from
within, and miserably failing, amid the scornful cries and bitter glee
of those who have no will but to mock aspiration.
The girl turning somersaults in another place had far more popular
sympathy than the blind madman at the temple door, but she was hardly
a more cheerful spectacle. For all her festive spangles and fairy-like
brevity of skirts, she had quite a work-a-day look upon her honest,
blood-red face, as if this were business though it looked like sport,
and her part of the diversion were as practical as that of the famous
captain of the waiters, who gave the act of peeling a sack of potatoes
a playful effect by standing on his head. The poor damsel was going
over and over, to the sound of most dismal drumming and braying,
in front of the immense old palace of the Genoese Doges,--a classic
building, stilted on a rustic base, and quite worthy of Palladio, if
any body thinks that is praise.
There was little left of our day when we had dined; but having seen
the outside of Genoa, and not hoping to see the inside, we found even
this little heavy on our hands, and were glad as the hour drew near
when we were to take the steamer for Naples.
It had been one of the noisiest days spent during several years in
clamorous Italy, whose voiceful uproar strikes to the summits of her
guardian Alps, and greets the coming stranger, and whose loud Addio
would stun him at parting, if he had not meanwhile become habituated
to the operatic pitch of her every-day tones. In Genoa, the hotels,
taking counsel of the vagabond streets, stand about the cavernous
arcade already mentioned, and all the noise of the shipping reaches
their guests. We rose early that Sunday morning to the sound of a
fleet unloading cargoes of wrought-iron, and of the hard swearing of
all nations of seafaring men. The whole day long the tumult followed
us, and seemed to culminate at last in the screams of a parrot, who
thought it fine to cry, "_Piove! piove! piove_!"--"It rains! it
rains! it rains!"--and had, no doubt, a secret interest in some
umbrella-shop. This unprincipled bird dwelt somewhere in the
neighborhood of the street where you see the awful tablet in the wall
devoting to infamy the citizens of the old republic that were false to
their country. The sight of that pitiless stone recalls with a thrill
the picturesque, unhappy past, with all the wandering, half-benighted
efforts of the people to rend their liberty from now a foreign and now
a native lord. At best, they only knew how to avenge their wrongs; but
now, let us hope, they have learnt, with all Italy, to prevent them.
The will was never wanting of old to the Ligurian race, and in this
time they have done their full share to establish Italian freedom.
I do not know why it should have been so surprising to hear the
boatman who rowed us to the steamer's anchorage speak English; but,
after his harsh Genoese profanity in getting his boat into open water,
it was the last thing we expected from him. It had somehow the effect
of a furious beast addressing you in your native tongue, and
telling you it was "Wary poordy wedder;" and it made us cling to his
good-nature with the trembling solicitude of Little Red-Riding-Hood,
when she begins to have the first faint suspicions of her grandmother.
However, our boatman was no wild beast, but took our six cents of
_buonamano_ with the base servility of a Christian man, when he had
put our luggage in the cabin of the steamer. I wonder how he should
have known us for Americans? He did so know us, and said he had been
at New York in better days, when he voyaged upon higher seas than
those he now navigated.
On board, we watched with compassion an old gentleman in the cabin
making a hearty meal of sardines and fruit-pie, and I asked him if
he had ever been at sea. No, he said. I could have wept over that
innocent old gentleman's childlike confidence of appetite, and
guileless trust of the deep.
We went on deck, where one of the gentle beings of our party declared
that she would remain as long as Genoa was in sight; and to tell the
truth, the scene was worthy of the promised devotion. There, in a
half-circle before us, blazed the lights of the quay; above these
twinkled the lamps of the steep streets and climbing palaces; over
and behind all hung the darkness on the heights,--a sable cloud dotted
with ruddy points of flame burning in the windows of invisible houses.
"Merrily did we drop"
down the bay, and presently caught the heavy swell of the open sea.
The other gentle being of our party then clutched my shoulder with a
dreadful shudder, and after gasping, "O Mr. Scribbler, why _will_ the
ship roll so?" was meekly hurried below by her sister, who did not
return for a last glimpse of Genoa the Proud.
In a moment heaven's sweet pity flapped away as with the sea-gull's
wings, and I too felt that there was no help for it, and that I must
go and lie down in the cabin. With anguished eyes I beheld upon the
shelf opposite to mine the innocent old gentleman who had lately
supped so confidently on sardines and fruit-pie. He lay upon his back,
groaning softly to himself.