English Poets in Florence
Casa Guidi--The Brownings--Giotto's missing spire--James Russell
Lowell--Lander's early life--Fra Bartolommeo before Raphael--The Tuscan
gardener--The "Villa Landor" to-day--Storms on the hillside--Pastoral
poetry--Italian memories in England--The final outburst--Last days
in Florence--The old lion's beguilements--The famous epitaph.
On a house in the Piazza S. Felice, obliquely facing the Pitti, with
windows both in the Via Maggio and Via Mazzetta, is a tablet, placed
there by grateful Florence, stating that it was the home of Robert
and of Elizabeth Barrett Browning and that her verse made a golden
ring to link England to Italy. In other words, this is Casa Guidi.
A third member of the family, Flush the spaniel, was also with them,
and they moved here in 1848, and it was here that Mrs. Browning
died, in 1861. But it was not their first Florentine home, for in
1847 they had gone into rooms in the Via delle Belle Donne--the
Street of Beautiful Ladies--whose name so fascinated Ruskin, near
S. Maria Novella. At Casa Guidi Browning wrote, among other poems,
"Christinas Eve and Easter Day," "The Statue and the Bust" of which I
have said something in chapter XIX, and the "Old Pictures in Florence,"
that philosophic commentary on Vasari, which ends with the spirited
appeal for the crowning of Giotto's Campanile with the addition of
the golden spire that its builder intended--
Fine as the beak of a young beccaccia
The campanile, the Duomo's fit ally,
Shall soar up in gold full fifty braccia,
Completing Florence, as Florence Italy.
But I suppose that the monologues "Andrea del Sarto" and "Fra Lippo
Lippi" would be considered the finest fruit of Browning's Florentine
sojourn, as "Casa Guidi Windows" is of Mrs. Browning's. Her great poem
is indeed as passionate a plea for Italian liberty as anything by an
Italian poet. Here also she wrote much if not all of "Aurora Leigh,"
"The Poems before Congress," and those other Italian political pieces
which when her husband collected them as "Last Poems" he dedicated
"to 'grateful Florence'".
In these Casa Guidi rooms the happiest days of both lives were
spent, and many a time have the walls resounded to the great voice,
laughing, praising or condemning, of Walter Savage Landor; while the
shy Hawthorne has talked here too. Casa Guidi lodged not only the
Brownings, but, at one time, Lowell, who was not, however, a very
good Florentine. "As for pictures," I find him writing, in 1874,
on a later visit, "I am tired to death of 'em,... and then most of
them are so bad. I like best the earlier ones, that say so much in
their half-unconscious prattle, and talk nature to me instead of
high art." But "the older streets," he says, "have a noble mediaeval
distance and reserve for me--a frown I was going to call it, not
of hostility, but of haughty doubt. These grim palace fronts meet
you with an aristocratic start that puts you to the proof of your
credentials. There is to me something wholesome in that that makes
you feel your place."
The Brownings are the two English poets who first spring to mind
in connexion with Florence; but they had had very illustrious
predecessors. In August and September, 1638, during the reign
of Ferdinand II, John Milton was here, and again in the spring of
1639. He read Latin poems to fellow-scholars in the city and received
complimentary sonnets in reply. Here he met Galileo, and from here
he made the excursion to Vallombrosa which gave him some of his most
famous lines. He also learned enough of the language to write love
poetry to a lady in Bologna, although he is said to have offended
Italians generally by his strict morality.
Skipping a hundred and eighty years we find Shelley in Florence,
in 1819, and it was here that his son was born, receiving the names
Percy Florence. Here he wrote, as I have said, his "Ode to the West
Wind" and that grimly comic work "Peter Bell the Third".
But next the Brownings it is Walter Savage Landor of whom I always
think as the greatest English Florentine. Florence became his second
home when he was middle-aged and strong; and then again, when he was
a very old man, shipwrecked by his impulsive and impossible temper,
it became his last haven. It was Browning who found him his final
resting-place--a floor of rooms not far from where we now stand,
in the Via Nunziatina.
Florence is so intimately associated with Landor, and Landor was
so happy in Florence, that a brief outline of his life seems to
be imperative. Born in 1775, the heir to considerable estates,
the boy soon developed that whirlwind headstrong impatience which
was to make him as notorious as his exquisite genius has made him
famous. He was sent to Rugby, but disapproving of the headmaster's
judgment of his Latin verses, he produced such a lampoon upon him,
also in Latin, as made removal or expulsion a necessity. At Oxford
his Latin and Greek verses were still his delight, but he took
also to politics, was called a mad Jacobin, and, in order to prove
his sanity and show his disapproval of a person obnoxious to him,
fired a gun at his shutters and was sent down for a year. He never
returned. After a period of strained relations with his father
and hot repudiations of all the plans for his future which were
made for him--such as entering the militia, reading law, and so
forth--he retired to Wales on a small allowance and wrote "Gebir"
which came out in 1798, when its author was twenty-three. In 1808
Landor threw in his lot with the Spaniards against the French, saw
some fighting and opened his purse for the victims of the war; but
the usual personal quarrel intervened. Returning to England he bought
Llanthony Abbey, stocked it with Spanish sheep, planted extensively,
and was to be the squire of squires; and at the same time seeing a
pretty penniless girl at a ball in Bath, he made a bet he would marry
her, and won it. As a squire he became quickly involved with neighbours
(an inevitable proceeding with him) and also with a Bishop concerning
the restoration of the church. Lawsuits followed, and such expenses
and vexations occurred that Landor decided to leave England--always
a popular resource with his kind. His mother took over the estate
and allowed him an income upon which he travelled from place to
place for a few years, quarrelling with his wife and making it up,
writing Latin verses everywhere and on everything, and coming into
collision not only with individuals but with municipalities.
He settled in Florence in 1821, finding rooms in the Palazzo Medici,
or, rather, Riccardi. There he remained for five years, which no doubt
would have been a longer period had he not accused his landlord,
the Marquis, who was then the head of the family, of seducing away
his coachman. Landor wrote stating the charge; the Marquis, calling
in reply, entered the room with his hat on, and Landor first knocked
it off and then gave notice. It was at the Palazzo Medici that Landor
was visited by Hazlitt in 1825, and here also he began the "Imaginary
Conversations," his best-known work, although it is of course such
brief and faultless lyrics as "Rose Aylmer" and "To Ianthe" that have
given him his widest public.
On leaving the Palazzo, Landor acquired the Villa Gherardesca, on
the hill-side below Fiesole, and a very beautiful little estate in
which the stream Affrico rises.
Crabb Robinson, the friend of so many men of genius, who was in
Florence in 1880, in rooms at 1341 Via della Nuova Vigna, met Landor
frequently at his villa and has left his impressions. Landor had
made up his mind to live and die in Italy, but hated the Italians. He
would rather, he said, follow his daughter to the grave than to her
wedding with an Italian husband. Talking on art, he said he preferred
John of Bologna to Michelangelo, a statement he repeated to Emerson,
but afterwards, I believe, recanted. He said also to Robinson that
he would not give 1000 Pounds for Raphael's "Transfiguration," but
ten times that sum for Fra Bartolommeo's picture of S. Mark in the
Pitti. Next to Raphael and Fra Bartolommeo he loved Perugino.
Landor soon became quite the husbandman. Writing to his sisters in
1831, he says: "I have planted 200 cypresses, 600 vines, 400 roses,
200 arbutuses, and 70 bays, besides laurustinas, etc., etc., and
60 fruit trees of the best qualities from France. I have not had
a moment's illness since I resided here, nor have the children. My
wife runs after colds; it would be strange if she did not take them;
but she has taken none here; hers are all from Florence. I have the
best water, the best air, and the best oil in the world. They speak
highly of the wine too; but here I doubt. In fact, I hate wine,
unless hock or claret....
"Italy is a fine climate, but Swansea better. That however is the
only spot in Great Britain where we have warmth without wet. Still,
Italy is the country I would live in.... In two [years] I hope to
have a hundred good peaches every day at table during two months:
at present I have had as many bad ones. My land is said to produce
the best figs in Tuscany; I have usually six or seven bushels of them."
I have walked through Lander's little paradise--now called the Villa
Landor and reached by the narrow rugged road to the right just below
the village of S. Domenico. Its cypresses, planted, as I imagine,
by Lander's own hand, are stately as minarets and its lawn is as
green and soft as that of an Oxford college. The orchard, in April,
was a mass of blossom. Thrushes sang in the evergreens and the first
swallow of the year darted through the cypresses just as we reached
the gates. It is truly a poet's house and garden.
In 1833 a French neighbour accused Landor of robbing him of water by
stopping an underground stream, and Landor naturally challenged him to
a duel. The meeting was avoided through the tact of Lander's second,
the English consul at Florence, and the two men became friends. At his
villa Landor wrote much of his best prose--the "Pentameron," "Pericles
and Aspasia" and the "Trial of Shakespeare for Deer-stealing "--and he
was in the main happy, having so much planting and harvesting to do,
his children to play with, and now and then a visitor. In the main
too he managed very well with the country people, but one day was
amused to overhear a conversation over the hedge between two passing
contadini. "All the English are mad," said one, "but as for this
one...!" There was a story of Landor current in Florence in those
days which depicted him, furious with a spoiled dish, throwing his
cook out of the window, and then, realizing where he would fall,
exclaiming in an agony, "Good God, I forgot the violets!"
Such was Landor's impossible way on occasion that he succeeded in
getting himself exiled from Tuscany; but the Grand Duke was called in
as pacificator, and, though the order of expulsion was not rescinded,
it was not carried out.
In 1835 Landor wrote some verses to his friend Ablett, who had lent
him the money to buy the villa, professing himself wholly happy--
Thou knowest how, and why, are dear to me
My citron groves of Fiesole,
My chirping Affrico, my beechwood nook,
My Naiads, with feet only in the brook,
Which runs away and giggles in their faces;
Yet there they sit, nor sigh for other places--
but later in the year came a serious break. Landor's relations with
Mrs. Landor, never of such a nature as to give any sense of security,
had grown steadily worse as he became more explosive, and they now
reached such a point that he flung out of the house one day and did
not return for many years, completing the action by a poem in which
he took a final (as he thought) farewell of Italy:--
I leave thee, beauteous Italy! No more
From the high terraces, at even-tide,
To look supine into thy depths of sky,
The golden moon between the cliff and me,
Or thy dark spires of fretted cypresses
Bordering the channel of the milky way.
Fiesole and Valdarno must be dreams,
Hereafter, and my own lost Affrico
Murmur to me but the poet's song.
Landor gave his son Arnold the villa, settling a sum on his wife
for the other children's maintenance, and himself returned to Bath,
where he added to his friends Sir William Napier (who first found
a resemblance to a lion in Landor's features), John Forster, who
afterwards wrote his life, and Charles Dickens, who named a child
after him and touched off his merrier turbulent side most charmingly
as Leonard Boythom in "Bleak House". But his most constant companion
was a Pomeranian dog; in dogs indeed he found comfort all his life,
right to the end.
Landor's love of his villa and estate finds expression again and again
in his verse written at this time. The most charming of all these
charming poems--the perfection of the light verse of a serious poet--is
the letter from England to his youngest boy, speculating on his
Italian pursuits. I begin at the passage describing the villa's cat:--
Does Cincirillo follow thee about,
Inverting one swart foot suspensively,
And wagging his dread jaw at every chirp
Of bird above him on the olive-branch?
Frighten him then away! 'twas he who slew
Our pigeons, our white pigeons peacock-tailed,
That feared not you and me--alas, nor him!
I flattened his striped sides along my knee,
And reasoned with him on his bloody mind,
Till he looked blandly, and half-closed his eyes
To ponder on my lecture in the shade.
I doubt his memory much, his heart a little,
And in some minor matters (may I say it?)
Could wish him rather sager. But from thee
God hold back wisdom yet for many years!
Whether in early season or in late
It always comes high-priced. For thy pure breast
I have no lesson; it for me has many.
Come throw it open then! What sports, what cares
(Since there are none too young for these) engage
Thy busy thoughts? Are you again at work,
Walter and you, with those sly labourers,
Geppo, Giovanni, Cecco, and Poeta,
To build more solidly your broken dam
Among the poplars, whence the nightingale
Inquisitively watch'd you all day long?
I was not of your council in the scheme,
Or might have saved you silver without end,
And sighs too without number. Art thou gone
Below the mulberry, where that cold pool
Urged to devise a warmer, and more fit
For mighty swimmers, swimming three abreast?
Or art though panting in this summer noon
Upon the lowest step before the hall,
Drawing a slice of watermelon, long
As Cupid's bow, athwart thy wetted lips
(Like one who plays Pan's pipe), and letting drop
The sable seeds from all their separate cells,
And leaving bays profound and rocks abrupt,
Redder than coral round Calypso's cave?
In 1853 Landor put forth what he thought his last book, under the title
"Last Fruit off an Old Tree". Unhappily it was not his last, for in
1858 he issued yet one more, "Dry Sticks faggotted by W. S. Landor,"
in which was a malicious copy of verses reflecting upon a lady. He
was sued for libel, lost the case with heavy damages, and once
more and for the last time left England for Florence. He was now
eighty-three. At first he went to the Villa Gherardesco, then the
home of his son Arnold, but his outbursts were unbearable, and three
times he broke away, to be three times brought back. In July, 1859,
he made a fourth escape, and then escaped altogether, for Browning
took the matter in hand and established him, after a period in Siena,
in lodgings in the Via Nunziatina. From this time till his death in
1864 Landor may be said at last to have been at rest. He had found
safe anchorage and never left it. Many friends came to see him, chief
among them Browning, who was at once his adviser, his admirer and his
shrewd observer. Landor, always devoted to pictures, but without much
judgment, now added to his collection; Browning in one of his letters
to Forster tells how he has found him "particularly delighted by the
acquisition of three execrable daubs by Domenichino and Gaspar Poussin
most benevolently battered by time". Another friend says that he had
a habit of attributing all his doubtful pictures to Corregoio. "He
cannot," Browning continues, "in the least understand that he is at
all wrong, or injudicious, or unfortunate in anything.... Whatever
he may profess, the thing he really loves is a pretty girl to talk
nonsense with."
Of the old man in the company of fair listeners we have glimpses
in the reminiscences of Mrs. Fields in the "Atlantic Monthly" in
1866. She also describes him as in a cloud of pictures. There with
his Pomeranian Giallo within fondling distance, the poet, seated in
his arm-chair, fired comments upon everything. Giallo's opinion was
asked on all subjects, and Landor said of him that an approving wag
of his tail was worth all the praise of all the "Quarterlies ". It
was Giallo who led to the profound couplet--
He is foolish who supposes
Dogs are ill that have hot noses.
Mrs. Fields tells how, after some classical or fashionable music had
been played, Landor would come closer to the piano and ask for an
old English ballad, and when "Auld Robin Gray," his favourite of all,
was sung, the tears would stream down his face. "Ah, you don't know
what thoughts you are recalling to the troublesome old man."
But we have Browning's word that he did not spend much time in remorse
or regret, while there was the composition of the pretty little tender
epigrams of this last period to amuse him and Italian politics to
enchain his sympathy. His impulsive generosity led him to give his old
and trusted watch to the funds for Garibaldi's Sicilian expedition;
but Browning persuaded him to take it again. For Garibaldi's wounded
prisoners he wrote an Italian dialogue between Savonarola and the
Prior of S. Marco. The death of Mrs. Browning in 1861 sent Browning
back to England, and Landor after that was less cheerful and rarely
left the house. His chief solace was the novels of Anthony Trollope
and G.P.R. James. In his last year he received a visit from a young
English poet and enthusiast for poetry, one Algernon Charles Swinburne,
who arrived in time to have a little glowing talk with the old lion and
thus obtain inspiration for some fine memorial stanzas. On September
17th, 1864, Death found Landor ready--as nine years earlier he had
promised it should--
To my ninth decade I have totter'd on,
And no soft arm bends now my steps to steady;
She who once led me where she would, is gone,
So when he calls me, Death shall find me ready.
Landor was buried, as we saw, in the English cemetery within the city,
whither his son Arnold was borne less than seven years later. Here is
his own epitaph, one of the most perfect things in form and substance
in the English language:--
I strove with none, for none was worth my strife,
Nature I loved, and next to Nature, Art;
I warmed both hands before the fire of life,
It sinks, and I am ready to depart.
It should be cut on his tombstone.