IVITALY

Arise (depart), north wind; and come, O south wind; blow through my garden, and let the aromatical spices thereof flow (Canticles iv. 16).

“My Shakespeare is upside down.

At Christmas I no more desire a roseThan wish a snow in May’s new-fangled mirth.—Love’s Labour’s Lost.

“Here roses load the Christmas air with sweetness, and May ushers in the snow upon the mountains.

When proud-pied April, dress’d in all his trim,Hath put a spirit of youth in everything.—Sonnet.

“Here April is in the ‘sear and yellow.’

“Yesterday a furnace-blast swooped down upon us from the great deserts to the north, and I feel I shall never be myself while I continue to see my shadow at noonday projected southward. But enough of grumbling for the present.

“Nowhere have I seen such starlight as streams upon the earth from the Milky Way, which beltsthe whole heavens here with silver. I don’t know why I have never seen the Milky Way so distinct and splendid in the Northern Hemisphere. It is the glory of the South African nights, and I have the pleasure, too, of seeing the entire sweep of the ‘Scorpion’s’ tail, superb scroll of blazing stars. I knew the Southern Cross would be disappointing, and so was not disappointed.

“It gyrates over the Pole in a way to greatly astonish the uninitiated. The other evening, dressing for an evening function, I saw it before my window upright, and on coming home in the small hours, behold it on its head!

“I cannot hope ever to convey to the mind of those who have not experienced Cape Colony the extraordinarily powerful local feeling of these days and nights. Melancholy they are—at least to me—but most, most beautiful andpungentlypoetical. The aromatic quality of the odours that permeate the air suggests that word. Yet all is too strange to win the heart of a newcomer, however much his eyes and mind may be captivated.

“If an artist wanted to accomplish that apparently impossible feat of painting Fairyland direct from Nature, without one touch suppliedout of his own fancy, he would only have to come here. There are effects of light and colour on these landscapes that I never saw elsewhere. The ordinary laws seem set aside. For instance, you expect a palm-tree to tell dark against the sunset. Oh, dear me no, not necessarily here. I saw one a tender green, and the sand about it was in a haze of softest rose-colour, through which shone the vivid orange light of the sunset behind it. Incredible altogether are the colours at sunset, but all so fleeting. And there is no after-glow here as in Egypt and Italy; the instant the glory of the setting sun is gone all is over and all is grey.

“Even the melancholy-quaint sound of the frogs through the night suggests fairy tales. It is appealing in its own way. I thought the Italian maremma frog noisy, but no one can imagine what an orgy of shrill croaking fills the nights here. They are everywhere, these irrepressibles, though invisible; near your head, far away, under your feet, at your side, in the tree-tops, in the streams, for ever springing their rattles with renewed zest. I shall never hear nocturnal frogs again without being transported to these regions of strange and melancholy nights.

“Table Mountain rises square and precipitousabove our garden, far above the simmer of the frogs, and looks like an altar in the pure white light that falls upon it from the Milky Way. How still, how holy in its repose of the long ages it looks, and the thought comes to one’s mind, ‘Would that all the evil brought to South Africa by the finding of the gold could be gathered together and burnt on that altar as a peace offering!’

“On this Rosebank side there is nothing that jars with the majestic feeling of Table Mountain, but to see what we English have done at its base on the other side, at Cape Town, is to see what man can do in his little way to outrage Nature’s dignity. The Dutch never jarred; their old farm-houses with white walls, thatched roofs, green shutters, and rounded Flemish gables look most harmonious in this landscape. Wherever we have colonized there you will see the corrugated iron dwelling, the barbed-wire fence, the loathsome advertisement. We talk so much of the love of the beautiful, and yet no people do so much to spoil beauty as we do wherever we settle down, all the world over. I respect the Dutch saying; ‘The eye must have something’—beauty is a necessity to moral health. A clear sky and a farhorizon have more value to the national mind than we care to recognize, and though the smoking factory that falsifies England’s skies and blurs her horizons may fill our pockets with gold, it makes us poorer by dulling our natures. I am sure that a clear physical horizon induces a clear mental one.

“As you gaze, enraptured, at the rosy flush of evening on the mountains across “False Bay” from some vantage point on the road to Simon’s Town, your eye is caught by staring letters in blatant colours in the foreground. “Keller’s boots are the best”; “Guinea Gold Cigarettes”; “Go to the Little Dust Pan, Cape Town, for your Kitchen things.” Iwon’tgo to the Little Dust Pan. Of all the horrors, a dust pan at Cape Town, where your eyes are probably full enough of dust already from the arid streets, and your face stinging with the pebbles blown into it by a bitter “sou’easter”? I once said in Egypt I knew nothing more trying than paying calls in a “hamseem,” but a Cape Town “sou’easter” disarraying you, under similar circumstances, is a great deal more exasperating.

“I am told the Old Cape Town, when Johannesburg was as yet dormant, was a simple and comely place—its white houses, so well adapted to this intensely sunny climate, were deep set in woodedgardens, a few of which have so far escaped the claws of the jerry builder. (O United States, what things you send us—“jerry,” “shoddy” ——!) But now the glaring streets, much too wide, and left unfinished, are lined with American “Stores” with cast-iron porticoes, above which rise buildings of most pretentious yet nondescript architecture, and the ragged outskirts present stretches of corrugated iron shanties which positively rattle back the clatter of a passing train or tram-car. And all around lie the dust bins of the population, the battered tin can, the derelict boot. No authorities seem yet to have been established to prevent the populace, white, brown, and black, from throwing out all their old refuse where they like. Some day things may be taken in hand, but at present this half-baked civilization produces very dreadful results. There is promise of what, some day, may be done in the pleasing red Parliament House and the beautiful public gardens of the upper town. There is such a rush for gold, you see! No one cares for poor Cape Townasa town. The adventurer is essentially a bird of passage. Man and Nature contrast more unfavourably to the former here than elsewhere, and the lines,

Where every prospect pleasesAnd only man is vile,

ring in my ears all day.

“Altogether our Eden here is sadly damaged, and I am sorry it should be my compatriots who are chiefly answerable for the ugly patches on so surpassingly beautiful a scene. Our sophisticated life, too, is out of place in this unfinished country, and we ought to live more simply, as the Dutch do, and not feel it necessary to carry on the sameménageas in London. Liveried servants in tall hats and cockades irritate me under such a sun, and the butler in his white choker makes me gasp. An extravagant London-trained cook is more than ever trying where all provisions are so absurdly dear. The native servant in his own suitable dress, as in India and Egypt, does not exist down here.

“One of the chief reasons, I find, as I settle down in my new surroundings, for the feeling of incompleteness which I experience, is the fact of this country’s having no history. We get forlorn glimpses of the Past, when the old Dutch settlers used to hear the roar of the lions outside Cape Town Fort of nights; and, further back, we get such peeps as the quaint narratives of theearly explorers allow us, but beyond those there is the great dark void.

THE INVERTED CRESCENTTHE INVERTED CRESCENT

“This is all from my own point of view, and I know there is one, an Africander born,[1]who, with strong and vivid pen, writes with sympathy of the charms of Italy, but only expands into heartfelt home-fervour when returning to the red soil and atmospheric glamour of her native veldt. This personal way of looking at things makes the value of all art, literary and pictorial, to my mind. Set two artists of equal merit to paint the same scene together; the two pictures will be quite unlike each other. I am of those who believe that picture will live longest which contains the most of the author’s own thought, provided the author’s thought is worthy, and the technical qualities are good, well understood.”

[1]Olive Schreiner.

I will end my South African sketch by one more page of diary, which, in recording a day’s expedition to the Paarl, gives an impression of the Cape landscape which may stand as typical of all its inland scenery.

“On Whitsun-eve we had a most enchanting expedition to Stellenbosch and the Paarl, which I will describe here. W., I, the children, and theB.’s, formed the party. We left home just at sunrise, the heavy dew warning us of a very hot winter’s day, though it was then cold enough. We took the train to Stellenbosch, and I was in ecstasies over the perfect loveliness of the scenes we passed through as the train climbed the incline towards those deeply serrated mountains which we were to pierce by and by. Looking back as we rose I could more fully appreciate the majestic proportions of Table Mountain, at whose base we live, and, when a long way off it stood above the plain in solitude, disclosed in its entirety, pale amethyst in the white morning light, I was more than ever filled with a sense of the majesty of this land which this dominating mountain seemed to gather up into itself and typify.

“Quite different in outline are the fantastic mountains we passed athwart to-day, and nowhere have I seen such intense unmixed ultramarine shadows as those that palpitate in their deep kloofs in contrast with the rosy warmth of their sunlit buttresses and jagged peaks. And as to the foregrounds here, when you get into the primeval wilderness, what words can I find to give an idea of their colouring, and of the profusion of the wild shrubs, all so spiky and aromatic, and some soweird, so strange, that cover the sandy plains? Here are some notes. In distance, blue mountains; middle distance, pine woods, dark; in foreground, gold-coloured shrubs, islanded in masses of bronze foliage full of immense thistle-shaped pink and white flowers; bright green rushes standing eight feet high, with brown heads waving; black cattle knee-deep in the rich herbage and a silver-grey stork slowly floating across the blue of the still sky.

“But this most paintable and decorative vegetation is not friendly to the intruder. These exquisitely toned shrubs with wild strong forms are full of repellent spikes which, like bayonets, they seem to level at you if, lured by the gentle perfume of their blossoms, you approach eye and nose too near. Depend upon it, this country was intended for thick-skinned blacks.

“As you get farther from town influences there appear much better human forms in the landscape, and to-day I was greatly struck with the appearance of an ox-waggon drawn by twelve big-horned beasts, and upon its piled-up load stood picturesque male and female Malays in white and gay colours—quite a triumphal car. A negro with immense whip walked by the side, and behind rose a long avenue of old stone-pines, and at the end of thevista the blue sky. These stone-pine avenues that border the red-earthed highways are among the most delightful of the many local beauties of the Cape, and such stone-pines! Old giants bigger than any I have seen on the Riviera. There are dense forests of them here, lovely things to look down on, with their soft, velvety masses of round tops of a rich dark green, looking like one solid mass. The wise Dutch who planted them had a law whereby any one felling one of these pines was bound to plant two saplings in its stead. We are doing a great deal of the felling without the planting.

“At Stellenbosch we got out, and, to my pleasure, I saw a long sort of char-à-banc driven at a hand gallop into the station yard, drawn by three mules and three horses—the vehicle ordered by W. to convey us to the ‘Paarl.’ And why ‘Paarl’? Deep among the mountains rises a double peak, bearing imbedded in each summit an immense smooth rock rounded like a black titanic ‘Pearl’ that glistens in the sun as it beats on its polished surface. Thither we blithely sped, one driver holding the multitudinous reins of our mixed team, the other manœuvering with both hands his immensely long whip, the gyrations of thethong being an interesting thing to watch as he touched up now this beast and now that. They have a way in this country of keeping up a uniform trot uphill, downhill, and on the level, but stopping frequently to breathe the team.” (Ah! give me road travel with horses—it is morehumanthan the motor!) “After an enchanting stage through wild mountain gorges we came to an oak fixed upon by W. beforehand as marking our halting place, and there the six beasts were ‘out-spanned.’ The simple harness was just slipped off and laid along on the road where the animals stood, and then they were allowed to stray into the wild, tumbling bush as they liked and have a roll, if so minded. Then we lit a fire and spread our repast under the shade of the oak at the edge of a wood that sloped down to a mountain stream. All round the solemn mountains, all about us fragrant aromatic flowers and the call of wild African birds! I can well understand the passionate love an Africander-born must feel for his country. I know none that has such strong, saturating local sentiment. The horses and mules, whose feet I had espied several times waving in spurts of rolling above the undergrowth, being collected and ‘in-spanned,’ we set off for the Paarl Station and descended back intothe Plain by rail at sunset; and as we left the mountains behind us they were flushing in the glory from the West, their shadows remaining of the same astonishing ultramarine they had kept all day. In any other country the blue would have changed somewhat, but here I don’t expect anything to follow any known rules—I accept the phenomena of things around me as time goes on, and have ceased to wonder. Oh! vision of loveliness, strange and unique, which this day has given me, never to be forgotten.”

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My great regret is that I had so little time to ply my paints and try at least to make studies which would now be very precious to me. How little I knew the shortness of my sojourn! The two little Cape ponies (with much of the Arab in them) were in almost daily requisition along those great pine-bordered, red-earthed roads, to take me for my return calls, or a portion of them. I fear I left many unreturned towards the end. There were the Dutch as well as the English, a large circle. I had sketching expeditions projected which never came off, with a clever Dutch lady, who did charming water-colours of beautiful Constantia and the striking country aboveSimon’s Bay, and the true “Cape of Good Hope” beyond. She had battled with snakes in the pursuit of her art, and in the woods had sustained the stone-throwing of the baboons, who made a target of her as she sat at work. I was willing for the baboon bombardment, and even would chance the snakes, as one chances everything, to wrest but a poor little water-colour from nature.

Two events which, in that tremendous year ‘99, were of more than usual importance loom large in my memory of the Cape—that is, the Queen’s Birthday Review in May, and the opening of Parliament on the 14th July. The Birthday Review on the Plain at Green Point was the ditto of others I had seen on the sands of Egypt, on the green sward of Laffan’s Plain at Aldershot, on the Dover Esplanade, and wherever W. had been in command; but this time, as he rode up on his big grey to give the Governor the Royal Salute before leading the “Three Cheers for Her Majesty the Queen!” a prophet might have seen the War Spectre moving through the ranks of red-coats behind the General.

At the opening of Parliament we ladies almost filled the centre of the “House,” and I was able to study the scene from very close. The DutchMembers, on being presented to the Speaker, took the oath by raising the right hand, whereas the English, of course, kissed the Book. The proceedings were all on the lines followed at Westminster, the Governor keeping his hat on as representing the Sovereign. The opening words of “the Speech from the Throne” sounded hollow. They proclaimed amongst other thingsurbi et orbi, that we were at peace with the South African Republics.

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“And now,” says the diary, “Good-bye, South Africa, for ever! I am glad that in you I have had experience of one of the most enchanting portions of this earth!”

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As you know that experience only lasted five months after all. We left on the 23rd August ‘99 on a day of blinding rain, which, as the ship moved off, drew like a curtain across that country which I felt we were leaving to a fast-approaching trouble. The war cloud was descending. It burst in blood and fire a few weeks later and deepened the sense of melancholy with which I shall ever think of that far-away land.

THE CAPE “FLATS”THE CAPE “FLATS”

BRINGING IN THE GRAPESBRINGING IN THE GRAPES

ADESCENTfrom the Apennine on a September evening into Tuscany, with the moon nearly full—that moon which in a few days will be shining in all its power upon the delights of the vintage week—this I want to recall to you who have shared the pleasure of such an experience with me.

A descent into the Garden of Italy, spread out wide in a haze of warm air—can custom stale the feeling which that brings to heart and mind?

Railway travel has its poetry, its sudden and emotional contrasts and surprises. But a few hours ago we were in the foggy drizzle of an autumn morning at Charing Cross, and, ere we have time to be fagged by a too-long journey, our eyes and brain receive the image of the Tuscan plain!

The train slows down for a moment on emerging from the last tunnel at the top of the mountain barrier; the grinding brakes are still, and for a precious instant we listen at the window for the old summer night sounds we remember and love. Yes! there they are; thereheis, the dear old chirping, drumming, droning night-beetle in myriads at his old penetrating song, persistent as the sicala’s through the dog days, local in its suggestiveness as the corncrake’s endless saw among the meadow-sweet all through the Irish summer night.

But,avanti!Down the winding track with flying sparks from the locked wheels, every metre to the good; down to the red domes of Pistoja;forward, then, on the level, to Florence and all it holds.

How we English do love Italy! Somewhere in our colder nature flows a warm Gulf Stream of love for what is sunny and clear-skied and genial, and I think I may say, though my compatriots little realize it, that the evidences of a living faith which are inseparable from Italian landscape greatly add to the charm that attracts us to this land. What would her hills be if decapitated of the convents on their summits, with each its cypress-linedVia Cruciswinding up the hillside? The time of the after-glow would be voiceless if deprived of the ringing of the Angelus. Dimly we perceive these things, or hardly recognise them as facts—nay, many of us still protest,but they draw us to Italy.

And now the arrival at Florence. The pleasure of dwelling on that arrival, when on the platform our friends await us with the sun of Italy in their looks! Then away we go with them in carriages drawn by those fast-trotting Tuscan ponies that are my wonder and admiration, with crack of whip and jingle of bells along the white moon-lit road to the great villa at Signa, where the vintage is about to begin.

To recall the happy labour of those precious three days of grape-picking in the mellow heat on the hillside, and then the all-pervading fumes of fermenting wine of the succeeding period in the courtyard of theFattoria; the dull red hue of the crushed grapes that dyes all things, animate and inanimate, within the sphere of work, is one of the most grateful efforts of my memory. I see again the handsome laughing peasants, the white oxen, the flights of pigeons across the blue of the sky. The mental relaxation amidst all this activity of wholesome and natural labour, the complete change of scene, afford a blessed rest to one who has worked hard through a London winter and got very tired of a London season. It is a patriarchal life here, and the atmosphere of good humour between landlord and tenant seems to show the land laws and customs of Tuscany to be in need of no reformer, the master and the man appearing to be nearer contentment than is the case anywhere else that I know of. You and I saw a very cheery specimen of the land system at grand old Caravaggio.

A SON OF THE SOIL, RIVIERA DI LEVANTEA SON OF THE SOIL, RIVIERA DI LEVANTE

Then the evenings! I know it is trite to talk of guitars and tenor voices under the moonlight, but Italy woos you back to many things we call“used up” elsewhere, and there is positive refreshment in hearing those light tenor voices, expressive of the light heart, singing the ever-charmingstornellosof the country as we sit under the pergola after dinner each evening. The neighbours drop in and the guitar goes round with the coffee. Everybody sings who can, and, truth to say, some who can’t. Many warm thanks to our kind friends, English and Italian (some are gone!), who gave you and me such unforgettable hospitality in ‘75, ‘76.

But lest all these guitarings and airy nothings of the gentle social life here should become oversweet, we can slip away from the rose-garden and climb up into the vineyards of the rusticpoderethat speak of wholesome peasant labour, of tillage—the first principle of man’s existence on earth—and, among the practical pole-vines that bear the true wine-making grapes (not the dessert fruit of the gardenpergola), have a quiet talk.

The starry sky is disclosed almost round the entire circle of the horizon, with “Firenze la gentile” in the distance on our right, the Apennine in front, and the sleeping plain trending away to the left to be lost in mystery. I want to talk to you of our experience of Italy the Beloved, from our earliest childhood until to-day.

What a happy chance it was that our parents should have been so taken with theRiviera di Levanteas to return there winter after winter, alternately with the summers spent in gentle Kent or Surrey, during our childhood; not the French Riviera which has since become so sophisticated, but that purely Italian stretch of coast to the east of Genoa, ending in Porto Fino, that promontory which you and I will always hold as a sacred bit of the world. Why? There are as lovely promontories jutting out into the Mediterranean elsewhere? The child’s love for the scenes of its early friendships with nature is a jealous love.

Our relations by marriage with the B. family admitted us into the centre of a very typical Italian home of the old order. I suppose that life was very like the life of eighteenth-century England—the domestic habits were curiously alike, and I cannot say I regret that their vogue is passing. We are thought to be so ridiculously fastidious,noi altri inglesi, and our parents were certainly not exceptional in this respect, and suffered accordingly.

The master of the house, the autocraticpadrone, had been in the Italian Legion in Napoleon’s Russian campaign, as you may remember, and the retreat from Moscow had apparently left certainindelible cicatrices on the old gentleman’s temper. I can hear his stentorian voice even now calling to the servant (I think there was only one “living in,” though there were about a dozen hangers-on) in the rambling old Palazzo without bells. “O—O—O, Mariuccia!” “Padrone!” you heard in a feminine treble from the remote regions of the kitchen upstairs, somewhere. Mariuccia would generally get a bit of the Italian legionary’s mind when she came tumbling down the marble stairs. Madame la Generale appeared in the morning with a red handkerchief on her head and remained in corsetlessdéshabillétill the afternoon. Genoese was the home language, French was for society. No one spoke real Italian. They had not yet begun to “Toscaneggiare,” as it grew to be the fashion to do when Italy became united. Don’t you dislike to hear them?

What recollections our parents carried away from those visits to the Nervi household! How we used to love to hear mamma’s accounts, for instance, of the night Lord Minto came to tea. Madame Gioconda had put the whole pound of choice green tea which she had bought at the English shop in Genoa into a large tea-pot requisitioned for this rare English occasion. Poormamma had the pouring of it out, and no deluges of hot water, brought by the astonished Mariuccia, could tame that ferocious beverage. I am sure the brave General never got more completely “bothered” by the Russian cannon than he did by the “gun-powder” that evening. Nowadays such a mistake could not happen whenil thèis quite the fashion.

Italians still think it the right thing to visit England in November and go to Liverpool, Manchester, and Birmingham for their informing little tour. In those remote days it was the only way in which the few that ever ventured so far saw our lovely land. Mamma was constantly sent into a state of suppressed indignation by the stereotyped question, “Are there any flowers in England?” But I have not done with the old General. I remember we were so frightened of that Tartar that Papa used to have to propel us into the Presence, when, in the evenings, every one, big and little, sat down to dominoes or “tombola.” Syrup and water and little cakes made of chestnut flour refreshed the company. The General’s snuff was in the syrup, I firmly believed. We looked like two little martyrs as we went up to salute those shaking yellow cheeks on beingsent to bed. Why are children put to these ordeals?

The living was frugal, the real “simple life” which some of us in England are pretending to lead to-day. But on certain occasions, such as Shrove Tuesday, for instance, ah! no effects of oriental feasting could surpass the repletion with which each guest left the festive board. Mariuccia had help for three days previous to such regalings, during which one heard the tapping of the chopper in the kitchen, preparing the force-meat for the national dish, the succulentravioli, as one passed within earshot of that remote vaulted hall.

And do you remember (you are a year my junior, and a year makes a great difference in the child’s mind) a certain night when there was a ball at our villa on the Albaro shore, and the shutters of the great “sala” were thrown open to let in the moonlight at midnight? A small barque lay in the offing, surrounded by little boats, and a cheer came over the sea in answer to what the people over there, seeing the sudden illumination from the chandeliers, took for our flashing signal of “God-speed!” They were a detachment of Garibaldi’s Redshirts on their way to liberate Southern Italy. The grown-ups on our side went down to supper, and our little croppedheads remained looking at the barque in the moon’s broad reflection long after we were supposed to be asleep. I had seen the Liberator himself talking to the gardener at the ——’s villa, where he was staying, at Quarto, the day before he sailed for Messina.

We were certainly an unconventional family, and we were so happy in our rovings through the land of sun. But if you and I are inclined to bemoan too much modernism in that Italy we so jealously love, oh! do not let us forget the gloom of some of those old palaces which we had a mind to inhabit al’Italienne, on bad winter nights—the old three-beaked oil lamps in the bedrooms serving, as our dear father used to say, only to “make darkness visible”—the wind during the great storms setting some loose shutter flapping in uninhabited upper regions of the house; the dark places which Charles Dickens in hisPictures from Italysays he noticed in all the Italian houses he slept in on his tour, which were not wholly innocent of scorpions. The marble floors and the paucity of fireplaces did not give comfort for the short winters; but how glorious those old houses became as soon as the cold was gone; shabby, ramshackle, and splendid, we loved them “for all in all.”

In certain things modern Italy affords us an easier life. We are given to nagging at the Italians for their dreadful want of taste in spoiling the beauty of their cities, but in the old days we were nagging at them for their dirt. Now Rome is the cleanest capital in the world. Some one said it is more than clean, it is dusted. And is not the Society for the Protection of Animals inexistence, at least? With what derision such an institution would have been heard of in our childhood’s days—a suggestion of those “mad English.”

Do you call to mind what scenes used to occur whenever mamma came out with us, between her and the muleteers? I can see her now, in the fulness of her English beauty, flying out one day at a carter for flogging and kicking his mules that were hardly able to drag a load up the Albaro Hill. This was the dialogue. Mamma—“Voi siete un cattivo!” Muleteer—“E voi siete bella!” Mamma—“Voi siete un birbante!” Muleteer—“E voi siete bella!” Mamma—“Voi siete uno scelerato!” Muleteer—“E voi siete bella!” And so on, till we had reached the bottom of the cruel hill, mamma at the end of hercrescendoof fulminations and the man’s voice, still calling “E voi siete bella” in imitation of her un-Genoese phraseology, lost in distance at the top. “I shall get a fit some day,” were her first English words. Poor dear mother, the shooting of the singing-birds in spring, the dirt, the noise, the flies, the mosquitoes—so many thorns in her Italian rose! Yet how she loved that rose, but not more than the sweet violet of our England that had no such thorns. The music in the churches, too, was trying in those days, and to none more so than to that music-loving soul. We have seen her doing her best to fix her mind on her devotions, with her fingers in her ears, and her face puckered up into an excruciated bunch. I hope Pius X. has enforced the plain-chant everywhere, and stopped those raspings of secular waltzes on sour fiddles that were supposed to aid our fervour. But I am nagging. As a Northerner, I have no right to lecture the Italians as to what sort of music is best for devotion, nor to tell them that the dressing of their sacred images in gaudy finery on festival days is not the way to deepen reverence. The Italians do what suits them best in these matters, and if our English taste is offended let us stay at home.

Well, well, here below there is nothing bright without its shadow. When we had the deliciousnational costumes we had the dirt and the cruelty. But why, I ask, cannot we keep the national dress, the local customs, the picturesqueness while we gain the cleanly and the kind? Every time I revisit Italy I miss another bit of colour and pleasing form amongst the populations. In Rome not a cloak is to be seen on the citizens, that black cloak lined with red or green they used to throw over the left shoulder, toga-wise—only old left-off ulsters or overcoats from Paris or Berlin. Not a red cap on the men of Genoa; thepezzottoandmezzero, most feminine headgear for the women, are extinct there. Ladies in Rome are even shy of wearing the black mantilla to go to the Vatican, and put it on in the cloak-room of the palace, removing it again to put on the barbarous Parisian hat for the streets. When we foreign ladies drive in our mantillas to the Audiences we are stared at! Even my old friends the red, blue, and green umbrellas of portly dimensions, formerly dear to the clergy, no longer light up the sombre clerical garb. Did I not see a flight of bare-footed Capuchins, last time in Rome, put up, every monk of them, a black Gingham when a shower came on, and I was expecting an efflorescence of my fondly-remembered Gamps? Next time I go the otherbit of clerical colour will have vanished, and I shall find them using white pocket-handkerchiefs instead of the effective red bandana.

Well, but, you are told, the beggars are cleared out, those persistent unfortunates who used to thrust their deformities and diseases before you wherever you turned, with the wailing refrain, “Misericordia, signore!” “Un povero zoppo!” “Un cieco!” “Ho fame!” etc. etc. But they sunned themselves and ate their bread and onions where they liked (not whereweliked) in perfect liberty. Where are they now? In dreary poorhouses, I suppose, out of sight, regularly fed and truly miserable. I am afraid that much of our modern comfort is owing simply to the covering up of unpleasantnesses. In the East, especially, life is seen with the cover taken off, and many painful sights and many startling bits of the reality of life spoil the sunshine for us there for a while. But worse things are in the London streets, only “respectably” covered up, and I am sure that more cruelty is committed by the ever-increasing secret work of the vivisector than ever wrung the heart of the compassionate in the old days in the open street.

And there, as we sit on the hillside above Signa,lies Florence, just discernible in the far-off plain, where I learnt so much of my art. Those frescoes of Masaccio, Andrea del Sarto, and all those masters of the human face who revelled in painting every variety of human type, how they augmented my taste that way! Nothing annoyed me so much as the palpable use of one model in a crowded composition. Take a dinner-party at table—will you ever see two noses alike as you run your eye along the guests? Even in a regiment of evenly matched troops, all of one nationality, I ask you to show me two men in the ranks sharing the same nose!

Ah! those days I spent in the cloisters of the SS. Annuziata, making pencil copies of Andrea’s figures in the series of frescoes illustrating the life of St Philip. It was summer-time, and the tourists only came bothering me towards the end. That hot summer, when I used to march into Florence, accompanied by little Majolina, in the still-early mornings, when the sicala was not yet in full chirp for the day! Four days a week to my master’s studio under the shadow of the Medici Chapel, and two to my dear cloisters; the Sunday at our villa under Fiesole. Happy girl!

I see in my diary this brilliant adaptation of Coleridge’s lines—

“’Tis sweet to him who all the weekThrough city crowds must push his way, etc.”’Tis sweet to her who all the weekWith brush and paint must work her wayTo stroll thro’ florence vineyards coolAnd hallow thus the Sabbath Day.

“’Tis sweet to him who all the weekThrough city crowds must push his way, etc.”

’Tis sweet to her who all the weekWith brush and paint must work her wayTo stroll thro’ florence vineyards coolAnd hallow thus the Sabbath Day.

I have much to thank my master Guiseppe Bellucci for, who drilled me so severely, carrying on the instruction I had the advantage to receive from thorough-going Richard Burchett the head-master at South Kensington—never-to-be-forgotten South Kensington.

It seems a shame to be saying so much about Florence and not to pause a few minutes to give the other a little hand-shake in passing. There I began my art-student life, than which no part of an artist’s career can be more free from care or more buoyed up with aspirations for the future. Dear early days spent with those bright and generous comrades, my fellow-students, so full of enthusiasm over what they called my “promise”—I have all those days chronicled in the old diaries. There I recall the day I was promoted to the “Life Class” from the “Antique”—a joyful epoch; and the Sketching Club where “old D——,” the second master, used to give “Best” nearly every time to Kate Greenaway and “Second Best” to me.What joy when I got a “Best” one fine day. She and I raced neck and neck with those sketches after that. The “Life Class” was absorbingly interesting. But how nervous and excited I felt at grappling with my first living model. He was a fine old man (but with a bibulous eye) costumed to represent “Cranmer walking to the Tower.” I see in the diary, “Cranmer walked rather unsteadily to the Tower to-day, and we all did badly in consequence.” Then came one of Cromwell’s Ironsides whose morion gave him a perpetual headache, followed by my first full-length, a costume model in tights and slashed doublet whom we spitefully called “Spindle-Shanks” and greatly disliked. What was my surprise, long years afterwards, to stumble upon my “Spindle-Shanks” as “‘Christopher Columbus,’ by the celebrated painter of etc. etc.” I then remembered I had made a present of him, when finished, to our “char,” much to her embarrassment, I should think. However, she seems to have got rid of the “white elephant” with profit to herself in course of time. But I must not let myself loose on those glorious student days, so full of work and of play, otherwise I would wander too far away from my subject. It was tempting to linger over that hand-shake.

I don’t think I ever felt such heat as in Florence. As the July sun was sending every one out of the baking city, shutting up the House of Deputies, and generally taking the pith out of things, I remember Bellucci coming into the studio one day with his hair in wisps, and hinting that it would be as well for me to give myselfun mesetto di riposo. I did take that “little month of rest” at our villa, and sketched the people and the oxen, and mixed a great deal in peasant society, benefitting thereby in the loss of my Genoese twang under the influence of their most grammatical Tuscan. The peasant is the most honourable, religious, and philosophical of mankind. I feel always safe with peasants and like their conversation and ways. They lead the natural life. Before daylight, in midsummer, one heard them directing their oxen at the plough, and after the mid-day siesta they were back at their work till the Ave Maria. It was a large family that inhabited the peasant quarters of our villa and worked the landlord’s vineyards. How they delighted in my sketches, in giving me sittings in the intervals of work, in seeing me doing amateur harvesting with a sickle and helping (?) them to bind the wheat sheaves and sift the grain. I mustoften have been in the way, now I think of it, but never a hint did these ladies and gentlemen of the horny hand allow to escape to my confusion. Carlotta, the eldest girl, read me some of the “Jerusalem Delivered” one full-moon night, to show me how easily one could read small print by the Italian moonlight. Her mother invited me to dine with the family one day as they were having a rare repast. Cencio had found two hedgehogs in a hollow olive-tree, and theragoutthat ensued must be tasted by thesignorina. Through the door of the kitchen where we dined on that occasion the two white oxen were seen reposing in the next apartment after their morning’s work. After tasting thespinosostew, I begged to be allowed to take a stool in the corner and sketch the whole family at table, and with the perfect grace of those people I was welcomed to do so, and I got them all in as they sucked their hedgehog bones in concert. You were reading Keats in one of the arbours, meanwhile, I remember.

I loved those days at Florence where I felt I was making the most of my time and getting on towards the day when I should paint my first “real” picture. When next I visited Florence with you for those memorable vintages at Caravaggio in‘75, ‘76, which I recalled just now to your remembrance, I had painted my first “real” picture and received in London more welcome than I deserved or hoped for.

Twice I have revisited the outside of my Florentine studio in recent years, not daring to go in. Bellucci is long dead and I don’t know who is there now. Standing under that tall window I have reviewed my career since the days I worked there. I rejoice to know that my best works are nearly all in public galleries or in the keeping of my Sovereign. To the artist, the idea of his works changing hands is never a restful one.

ATWOdays’ excursion to Sienna at the close of our second vintage at Caravaggio was a fitfinaleto the last visit you and I ever paid to Italyen garçon.

From Tuscany to Etruria—deeper still into the luxury of associating with the past. Honey-coloured Sienna! It dwells in my memory bathed in sunshine; the little city like a golden cup overflowing with the riches it can scarcely hold; the home of St. Catherine and the scene of her ecstasies and superhuman endeavours: the battlefield of St. Bernardine’s manful struggle against vice andluxury and gambling, so rampant and unabashed in his time. Everywhere in this city you see, sculptured on circular plaques of old white marble, let into the walls in street and square, that monogram which all denominations of Christians know so well, the I.H.S. with the Cross—Jesus Hominum Salvator. Whether the engraved characters seen on the tombs in the Roman Catacombs were or were not identical with those three initials and their significance, they were so regarded by all the Churches for centuries, and the monogram which St. Bernardine caused to be set up in this way throughout Sienna was moulded on them in that belief. It was he who caused this emblem to be so placed that the reluctant public eye could not wholly avoid it, and who had it illuminated on tablets which he held up to his congregations at the end of his rousing sermons, thus making that appeal to the mind through the eye which he relied upon as one of his most effectual levers. One may say he morally forced the people to recognise and venerate that Name once more.

Upon the carved coats-of-arms of Guelph and Ghibelline, which seemed to gird at each other from the walls, he imposed this sign of peace, and hence the multiplicity of these lovely symbols I am tryingto recall. They are seals which his strong hand stamped upon his native place.

PLOUGHING IN TUSCANYPLOUGHING IN TUSCANY

Like all the great saints, Bernardine was practical. The manufacturers of playing-cards and dice, finding their customers leaving them in ever-increasing numbers to follow the Franciscan with a fervour which reached to extraordinary heights, brought their complaints to him. Bankruptcy was upon them. “Turn your talent to painting this Name on cards and sell them to the people.” This was done, and these little tablets with the “I.H.S.” became endowed with a peculiar sanctity to the purchasers and sold well, so that little fortunes flowed in to fill the void left by the fall in playing-cards. All these we spoke of on the spot, I remember, and I write these words to you who know it all better than I do, to show you I have not forgotten.

Sometimes the monogram is inserted in the marble discs in gold on a blue ground. Do you see again those circles of warm white marble, those shining letters surrounded with golden rays on the blue centre, the reflected light in the hollows of the carving, the Italian sky above? These Siennese blank walls are better employed than those of modern Rome, where we may see somebody’s soap or blacking belauded in our mother tonguead nauseam.

“A city set on a hill cannot be hid.” How high Sienna is set! A lovelier bit of man’s workmanship was never held aloft for man to see.

“To appreciate the outside aspect of Sienna we drove out” (I see in my diary) “to the fortress-villa of Belcaro, with an introduction to the owner, a recluse, who, though he has been to London once, somewhere in the ‘forties, has never been to Sienna.

“The drive to this historic villa was through a perfect Pre-Raphaelite landscape, full of highly-cultivated hillocks, above which the grander distant country unfolded itself. I apologized to the old Masters for what I had said of their landscape backgrounds before I had seen the Siennese middle distances whose type seems to have inspired so many of them.

“Each turn in the road gave us a new aspect of the golden-brown city behind us, on its steep hill. Perhaps the most effective view of it is from near Belcaro, where you get the dark stone-pines in the immediate foreground.

“And the interior of the city! Those narrow streets they call hererugheandcostarelleare fascinating, dipping down to some archway throughwhich you see, far below, the sudden misty distance of the rolling campagna, or a peep of a piazza in dazzling sunlight contrasting with the semi-darkness of the narrow stone lane. So narrow are these lanes that a pair of oxen drawing a cart all but scrape the side walls with the points of their enormous horns, and you must manage to avoid a collision by obliterating yourself in the nearest doorway. We found the people beautiful. There are no modern abominations in the way of buildings here, so that one enjoys Sienna with unalloyed pleasure.” ... At last!

I suppose nothing could be more satisfying to the lover of beauty and of that dignity which belongs to the great works of architecture of the past than the aspect of Sienna Cathedral in the light of a September moon, the planets and stars watching with her over that sanctuary in the cloudless heavens.

The silence of a little Italian city like this at night, when the full moon dispenses with the artificial lighting, is always taking. To-night the urban silence is broken perhaps by a burst of singing and the thrumming of a guitar; young fellows with apparently plenty of leisure are coming jauntily along the pavement singing, “Oi! Oi! Oi! Tiramila gamba se tu puoi,” and suddenly dive down a pitch-dark alley; then a burst of laughter from a cavernous wine-shop; then stillness again. A dog barks in a garden over whose walls you see where the “blessed moon tips with silver all these fruit-tree tops.” A fountain bubbles and gushes softly as you come upon its hiding-place in the deep shadow from a bit of loopholed wall that you scarcely recognize as the one you were sketching this morning. Hither a few fire-flies, remnants of the summer host, have strayed from beyond the city ramparts. Footsteps echo in the silence more than in the day-time; not a wheel is heard, but the campagna below is heard. It is murmuring with its invisible life of insects all awake and full of shrill energy—goodness knows about what. Your own energy is ebbing after the day’s enchantment and you feel that to stroll and sit and look is all the bliss you need.

I had a revelation at Sienna about frescoes. In this extraordinarily dry atmosphere you can see, as nowhere else, the fresco as it was originally intended to appear. I do not know that I liked the effect as I came into the sacristy of the cathedral and saw Pinturicchio’s apparently freshly painted scenes. These were so true, not only in their linear, but(strange to say) in their aërial, perspective that the effect was as if the walls had opened to show us these crowds of figures in gorgeous halls or airy landscapesoutsidethe building, and the eye was deceived by a positive illusion. One wants tofeelthe walls of an apartment, and when its frescoes are flat and faded, and appearing more as lovely bits of decorative colour, as we see elsewhere, the eye is better satisfied. But, looked at as pictures, these richly coloured works are truly masterly, full of character and natural, realistic action.

Much of the beauty of the Middle Ages which we delight in is owing to the mellowing of Time. When first turned out by painter or mason this beauty would not so charm the artist. A brandnew feudal castle must have looked very hard and staring; a walled city like a Brobdingnagian toy town in a round box. No lichens on those walls; no ivy, no clumps of wallflowers, or any of those compassionate veils that Nature, if allowed a free hand, gently lays upon our crudities, and which the modern ItalianSindacocalls “indecenza” and commands to be scraped away. The mind recognises the rightness of the inevitable bare look of a new building, but a scraped ruin offends both mind and eye.

ONEday in April ‘99 I was reading a fascinating little book by Miss Duff Gordon on Perugia as I sat on a fallen pine-tree trunk in our wood at Rosebank in remote Cape Colony. I read it with intenser longing than ever to be back in the world of art, of history, of culture, of well-known and well-loved things, and, thinking we were likely to be in our lovely exile for at least three years (with a short flight home to England in the interval, perhaps), I thought of several precious things I would give to be at Perugia in reality. That very day in that very month of the following year I was there!

Why do we fret about the future? Vain weakness! In my experience the future has brought more than I wished for and better things, and the sad things that have come have been those I had not feared.

It is a lovely journey from Florence to Perugia—all beautiful, and one wants to be at both ends of the railway carriage at once so as to miss nothing. The old brown cities along the route are as frequent as the Rhine castles; they still have their battlemented walls and gateways to delight the artist fora long while yet. Perugia did not frown upon us so mediævally this time, as we drove up the long zigzag to it, as when you and I first saw it. I think some of the frown has been demolished since those days, and indeed I do not regret this. They are raising some good public buildings where, I am told, the old castle stood, and in these you see lovely pillars of rosy marble or granite quarried from Assisi. That old castle had gloomy memories for the Italians and had no claim to stay.

Like all Italian cities, Perugia has a strongly marked character of its own. This local character of her cities is one of Italy’s richest possessions. Genoa, brilliant in white, salmon-pink, and buff, the colouring of her palaces, and scintillating in the sun as it beats upon her pearl-grey roofs; Florence, sombre with the brown of her localpietra serenaand roofed with the richer brown of her Tuscan tiles; Verona, regal and stately, throned on the foothills of the Alps, her rich colouring focussed in the red and tawny curtains which the Veronese hang before their church doors; Padua, shady with trees, sedate and academic, on the level, and uniform in tone, a city of arcades; Perugia, a mountain fortress of brown bricks, her austerity mellowed by the centuries—what a series they make! Howcarefully the “Young Nation” should deal with these precious things that have all come into her hands! Almost every great city in this land was once a capital. If only the Italians would build as they used to I should rejoice in seeing lovely things rising new and strong in the place of decay and thus giving promise of a new lease of architectural beauty for Italy. But the pity of it is that most of the new things are characterless and dreary. Every cultivated Italian deplores the fact and one wonders who the Goths in authority are that have the doing of these things.

To you and me there are certain conjunctions of words that carry a swift sense of delight to the mind. Amongst these none are more appealing than “the Umbrian Hills.” Here in Perugia we are seated amongst them, and when I saw them again on that magic April day it was towards evening, and in despairing haste I made the best sketch I could on arriving, from the hotel window, to try and record those soft sunset tones on the Perugino landscape. When next morning we were being shown the treasures in the church of San Pietro, and I was particularly directed to examine the lovely paintings on the shutters of the sacristy windows, I found it hard to look at the shuttersof windows that opened upon such a prospect, where lay Assisi on the slopes of the “Umbrian Hills”!

THE BERSAGLIERI AT THE FOUNTAIN, PERUGIATHE BERSAGLIERI AT THE FOUNTAIN, PERUGIA

In the Uffizi, in the Vatican Galleries, it is the same—one eye roving out of the open windows at the reality that is there! A Lung’ Arno with Bello Sguardo calling to you over the pink almond blossoms on its slopes; a dome of St. Peter’s, silky in its grey sunlit sheen against the Roman sky—too much, to have such things outside the gallery windows, distracting you from your studies within. But, of course, it is the right setting, and if you feel it gives you too much, call to mind the prospect outside one of the British Museum windows. That, certainly, will never inconvenience you with distractions; so be thankful for the “too much.”

A BIT OFDIARY

“23rd April1900.—All day ‘on the wander’ through ripe old Perugia. A silent city, full of memories, brimming over with history, lapped in Art! Everywhere the flowering fruit-trees showed over the brown walls, the sunshine fell pleasantly on the masses of old unfinished brickwork and lent them a charm which on a wet day mustvanish and leave them in a grim severity. Quiet tone everywhere; no ornament in the Roman sense, but here and there exquisite bits of carving and detail such as one can only find in the flat-surfaced Italian Gothic which is here seen in its very home. How that flat surface of blank wall spaces and the horizontal tendency of the design suit the Italian light. Architecture may well be placed as the most important of the Arts. It adds, if beautiful, to nature’s beauty, showing the height to which the human hand may dare to rise so as to join hands with the Divine Architect Himself. How it can disgrace His work we have only too many opportunities of judging!

“We visited my well-loved church of San Pietro, that treasure-house left undespoiled by the Italian Government—safeguarded,notas a place of worship—let that be well understood—but as ‘an Art Monument.’ So its pictures and carvings are left in the places their authors intended them for and not nailed up stark and shivering in a cold, staring museum, like the poor altar pieces and modest bits of delicate carving that have been wrenched from their life-long homes in so many churches throughout this country. True, in the museum the light is good, far better for showing the artist’s work thanthe ‘dim religious light’ of a church. But the painter knew all about the bad light, and still painted his picture for such and such an altar, not to his own glory, but to the glory of God.

“As we were passing once more the rich-toned Duomo and Nicola Pisano’s lovely fountain that stands before it, we saw the fountain suddenly surrounded by an eruption of Bersaglieri, who woke the echoes of that erst-while silent Piazza with their songs and chaff. They were on manœuvres and were halting here for the day. Shedding heavy hats and knapsacks, they had run down to fill their canteens and water-barrels.Toujours gaisare the Bersaglieri, and a very pretty sight it was to see those good-looking healthy lads in their red fatigue fezes unbending in this picturesque manner. In the evening they were off again with the fanfaronade of their massed trumpets spurring theirpas gymnastiqueto the farthest point of swagger, and Perugia returned to its repose.

“We strolled about the streets by the light of the moon andfeltthe silence of those narrow ways. Now a cat would run into the light and disappear into blackness; a man in a cloak would emerge from a dark alley, as it were at the back of a stage, and, coming forward into the moonlight of an open space,look ready to begin a tenor love-song to an overhanging balcony (the lady not yet to the fore)—the opening scene in an opera after the overture of the Bersaglieri trumpets. Assuredly this was old Italy. The one modern touch is a very lovely one. In place of the old and rank olive-oil lamps of my first visit, burning at street corners under the little holy images and in the recesses of the wine-shops, there are drops of exquisite electric light. Thank goodness, the hideous interval of gas is nearing its extinction in Italy and the blessed ‘white coal’ which this country can generate so cheaply by her abundant water-power, will e’er very long become the agent of her machine-driven industries and illuminate with soft radiance her gracious cities. I think the Via Nuova at Genoa, that street of palaces, glowing in the light of those great electric globes, swung across from side to side, is a quite splendid bit of modernity, for which I tender the Genoese my hearty thanks. ‘Grazie, Signori!’”

COMMENDme to a darkening winter afternoon amidst the fires of Vesuvius for bringing the mind down to first principles! This is what we poetise,and paint, and dance on—this Thing that we are come to gaze at here in silence, as it shows through certain cracks in this shell we call the solid earth! “You are here on sufferance,” the Thing says to us, “and you do well to come and see where I show a little bit of myself. May it do you good. Remember, I am under your feet wherever you go!”

Jan. ‘96—“To-day the fumes from the nether fires came in gusts through the snorting crater, sending sulphurous smoke rolling down on the keen north wind straight into our labouring lungs as we pounded through the ashes on our way up the ‘cone.’ There is no getting at all near the hideous mouth; in attempting any such thing one would very soon be over head and ears in the yellow sulphur and lost beyond recall. I thought of the fate of a ‘mad Englishman,’ who, in spite of the warning cries of the native guides, made a dart for some outlying lesser crater, declaring he saw a shoe floating in it. Trying to hook out this precious ‘shoe’ with his walking-stick, he fell in and withered away like a moth in a candle-flame.

“I was cheered on to fresh exertions by W.’s encouraging words, otherwise I think I would have reposed by the wayside at an early stage of theascent, yet too proud for a litter. Many of the party went up in litters ignominiously carried on men’s shoulders, but I went through the whole routine on foot, as I began; only I was inclined to halt at retardingly frequent intervals. The growls of the mountain every now and then warned us that a volley of rocks and stones was coming, and, behold! the bunch of them shot up in a wide arc over our heads. The crater is a spectacle that gives the mind such occupation as it has not had before. Talk of the Pyramids and the Sphinx that so overpowered me at Gizeh! That crater would think it a good joke to chuck them up in the air.

“But nothing impressed me into silence so heavily as the sight, later on, of a lava stream, lower down the mountain-side, issuing in thick ooze, and crawling slowly from out a gaping cavern. Liquid, deep scarlet fire was this, of the density, apparently, of oil, advancing like a fiery death to scorch and consume with slow and even flow—inexorable. No possibility of approaching its borders; even where we stood the rocks began to burn our feet. A guide flung a log of wood on the river, and it spontaneously burst into vivid flame, shrivelled up, and was gone in a puffof smoke. Turning for rest and solace from the lurid spectacle, the factitious horrors of the congealed lava all around one only deepened the sense of gloom. Curling and curdling as they cooled, the lava streams of bygone times have hardened into the most weird shapes the imagination could conceive. We seemed to be on a battlefield where Titan warriors lay distorted in their death agony; enormous mothers clasped their babies in the embrace of death, and the war-horses were monsters of pre-historic stature, petrified in the last throes.

“We could see far, far down on the plain the skeleton of poor little Pompeii like a minute raised plan delicately modelled in plaster.

“The thunders of the Bible will reverberate in my mind with more vitality since our excursion to Vesuvius.”

I found balm in Capri, Amalfi, and all the supreme lovelinesses of the Neapolitan Riviera to soothe the blisters of the volcano; and if I had trembled at the thunders of the Bible I was reassured by its blessings, which seemed embodied in those scenes of Eden.

ROME! I am almost inclined to leave out this central fact, although I never kept a fuller diary than I did during those seven months of my student life there that followed Florence. How can I approach it and say anything but platitudes on the subject? Every one has tried his or her hand upon this theme, and many dreadful banalities have come of it; many pert assertions, ignorant statements, sentimentalities. Rome has always impressed me as being the centre of the world—not as the Ancient Romans boasted when they set up their Golden Milestone, but in a higher sense; and to the artist her atmosphere is known to beexhilarating, some say “intoxicating.” We all feel that physical delight in being there, whatever views we may entertain in a spiritual sense. Who was the writer who said that every morning on waking she said to herself, “I am in Rome!” I believe many tacitly, at least, like to register that fact at each awakening to another Roman day.

A MEETING ON THE PINCIAN: FRENCH AND GERMAN SEMINARISTSA MEETING ON THE PINCIAN: FRENCH AND GERMAN SEMINARISTS

You and I have of late years seenl’Eternamuch changed in her physical aspect, and have grieved over the fact; yet it is only another of her many phases that is slowly developing before our eyes. At the earliest period of which we know enough to imagine her aspect she was colonnaded, porticoed and white; and the horrible time of her luxurious decadence saw very much the same huge tenement “sky-scrapers” run up as we are weeping over to-day. These jerry-buildings tumbled down occasionally just as they are doing now. Then I see Rome in the Middle Ages a city of square fortified towers—where are they all? Then comes the florid period when the dome was dominant as we see it in our time, and much exuberant bad taste dressed her out fantastically. Now some very dreadful things in the way of monster houses and wide, straight, shadeless streets are being committed; but they, too, will pass; but Romewill remain. Eternal as to the soul the city is ever changing as to the body. How ugly she must have been when rebuilt in a year after one of her burnings. There was jerry-building if you like! How awful after her sack by the Constable of Bourbon when “there was silence in her streets for three days”! I remember, when I used to look down on the city from a height in my very early days, wondering whether I had not been instructed too much in Roman history to enjoy that view to the extent I should have wished, as an art student, to do. So much cruelty and suffering had been concentrated in that little space I saw below me. But the joy of the eye soon banishes for me the sorrow of the mind, and there is joy enough for the eye in Rome!

Although I have revisited the well-loved city several times since those early days, the first visit stands out so much more fully coloured and intense in local sentiment than the subsequent ones, which seem almost insipid by comparison. You and I then saw her as she can never be seen again; we were just in time to know her under the old Papal régime, and we left three months before the Italians came in and began to rob her of her unique character. I cannot be too thankful thatwe havethatput safely away in the treasury of our memories. We saw the Roman citizens kneeling in masses along the streets as the Pope’s mountedChasseur, in cocked hats and feathers, heralded the approach of Pio Nono’s ponderous coach, in which His Holiness was taking his afternoon airing. We saw the stately cardinals and bishops in their daily stroll on the Pincian, receiving the salutes of soldiers and civilians. There were such constant salutations everywhere, all day long, and such punctilious acknowledgments from the ecclesiastics that on closing my eyes at night I always saw shovel hats rising and sinking like flocks of crows hovering over a harvest-field.

We saw the sentries on Good Friday mounting guard with arms reversed and all the flags that day flying at half-mast: the Colosseum was in those days treated as consecrated ground; more as the scene of Christian martyrdoms than as a Pagan antiquity. There stood the stations of the Cross, and there a friar preached every Wednesday during Lent. That fearsome ruin was then warmly lined with rich flora and various lusty trees and shrubs that have all been scraped and scoured away in harmony with the spirit of modern Italy.

What luck it was for us to be in Rome thatwonderful year of 1870, when the Œcumenical Council filled her streets and churches with every type of episcopal ecclesiastic from the four quarters of the globe, each accompanied by his “theologian” and by secretaries in every variety of dress, from the modern American to the pig-tailed Chinaman. Great times for the art student, with all these types and colours as subjects for his pencil! The characteristics and the colour of Rome were thus multiplied and elaborated to the utmost possible point, up to the very verge of the Great Cleavage; and we saw it all.

A LENTEN SERMON IN THE COLOSSEUMA LENTEN SERMON IN THE COLOSSEUM

The open-air incidents connected with the great Church functions have left an extraordinarily vivid impression on my mind on account of their eminently pictorial qualities. I see again the archaic “glass coaches” of Pope and cardinals, high-swung and seeming to bubble over with gilding, rumbling slowly up to the Church door where the ceremony is to take place, over the cobblestones, behind teams of fat black steeds, the leaders’ scarlet traces sweeping the ground. The occupants of these wonderful vehicles are glowing like rubies in their ardent robes, which flood their faces with red reflections in the searching sunshine. A prelate in exquisite lilac, mounted on a white mule withblack housings, bears a jewelled cross, sparkling in the sun, before the Pope’s carriage; the postilions, coachmen, and lackeys are eighteenth-century figures come to life again, and, truth to tell, they might have brought their liveries over with them, furbished up for the occasion. Not much public money seems appropriated for new liveries in the Papal household, nor in that of the College of Cardinals. Then, the medley of modern soldiers that take part officially and unofficially in these scenes—the off-duty zouaves, with bare necks outstretched, cheering frantically, “Long live the Pope-King,” in many languages; the French Legion inclined to criticise the old liveries—it all seems to me like the happening of yesterday! And I see the rain of flowers falling on the kindly old Pope from the spectators in the balconies, where rich draperies give harmonious backgrounds to all this colour.

Times are changed at home as well as in Rome. Where are the gorgeous equipages I used to wonder at as a child on drawing-room days, that made St. James’ Street a scene of gold and colour of surpassing richness? Where are the bewigged coachmen stiff with bullion, throned on the resplendent hammercloths of their boxes? Where thesix-foot footmen hanging on in bunches behind, in liveries pushed to the utmost limit of extravagant finery? We only see these things on exceptional occasions (certainly the six-footers are not grown nowadays), and the quiet landau or motor harmonises better with our modern taste.

Finally, we saw the last Papal Benediction to be given from the façade of St. Peter’s on that memorable Easter Sunday, 1870. The scene was made especially notable in its pictorial effect by the masses of bishops, all in snow-white copes and mitres, who completely filled the terrace above the colonnade on the Vatican side of the Piazza. What a symphony of white they made up there, partly in the luminous shadow of the long awning, partly in the blazing sunshine. Some of the illuminated ones used their mitres as parasols. Such a hugeparterreof prelates had never been beheld before. It was aparterreof human lilies. My diary exclaims, “Oh! for Leighton’s genius to paint it. It was entirely in his style—composition, colour, and sentiment. The balustrade was hung with mellow, old, faded tapestry, and above the bishops’ heads rose those dark old stone statues that tell so well against the sky.” I remember the moment of intense silence that fell on the multitudea little before Pio Nono, wearing the Triple Crown, stood up and, in a loud voice, gave forth “to the city and to the world” the mighty words of blessing from the little balcony far up aloft. And I remember, too, how that sudden silence seemed to cause a strange uneasiness amongst the cavalry and artillery horses, which all began to neigh.

On this great day the white and yellow flag, emblem of the Temporal Power, waved upon the light spring breeze wherever one turned. How little we dreamt that in a few months that flag was to be hauled down, drawn under by the fall of the greatest military Empire then in existence!

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