“Eternal Power,Grant me through obvious clouds one transient glimpseOf thy bright presence in my dying hour.”
“Eternal Power,Grant me through obvious clouds one transient glimpseOf thy bright presence in my dying hour.”
“Eternal Power,Grant me through obvious clouds one transient glimpseOf thy bright presence in my dying hour.”
“Eternal Power,
Grant me through obvious clouds one transient glimpse
Of thy bright presence in my dying hour.”
After some weeks at Bath I went to Germany, staying with my daughter, Mrs. Dupré, at Stassfurt, where, underground, had been achieved one of Nature’s most wonderful geological operations. A tidal sea, once extending over many hundred square miles of Prussian Saxony, was gradually blocked out fromits connection with the Baltic, and had evaporated, depositing its salts in the order of their solubility, but still replenished at high tide through countless ages, until at last, cut off from its connection with the main waters, it dried up, and during other countless ages became covered two hundred feet deep with soil. The first deposit in this vast bed of salts was common salt (chloride of sodium), a deposit so thick that it has been drilled to a depth of one thousand feet, and not yet pierced through. On the surface of this deposit is found a considerable bed of chloride of potash, with boracic salts, bromides, and others of great commercial value.
Stassfurt is an ancient village some twenty miles from Magdeburg. It has a fine old church, unwittingly founded on a rock of salt, or at least above one; not the same thing as a rock, for the miners have been under the church’s foundations, and the earth has quaked and the walls have been split and shaken, almost to falling. The stork has built its nest upon its tower from time immemorial, and is the sacred bird of Stassfurt.
And that vast salt bed, now a mine whose streets reach for miles under the town and country! By torchlight it glitters with reflected flame, surpassing in brilliancy all fairy land! There lies a dead sea, with salt enough to supply the world for ever.
Thirty or forty lofty chimneys are erected over it, and are, as new monuments, strangely marking the spot where a sea had laid buried for ages unknown.
This is in Prussian Saxony, whence came our invaders in the olden time. There is to be seen an old Saxon church in a village just outside the town; one descends into it by steps. A dust of ages, vagrant as the wind, but which loves to take shelter against walls, and to bury them as time goes on, has settled itself for the time to come. Churches exactly like this church are to be seen on the hills of Bath, with their Saxon tower. Inside it are the high pews and the gallery, at one end of which, on the right, near the pulpit, is the pew of the squire. It is old England before it migrated to our shores.
Thus our ancestors brought their institutions here; so we in turn take them with us to newer lands.
My son-in-law was Professor of Chemistry at the Westminster, in succession to the gifted Dr. Marcet, whose assistant he had been for some years. He resigned his place, and his brother Augustus Dupré was elected in his stead, while he went to Stassfurt to do chemistry on a larger scale, extricating tens of thousands of tons of potash from its chlorine. He was then the father of a baby, he has now two grown-up daughters and three grown-up sons.
I stayed several weeks at Stassfurt. My son Cecil was there under Dupré. He had been a student at the Westminster laboratory; he is now Chief Inspector of Explosives at Melbourne in Victoria.
My daughter was very happy in her domestic life in Stassfurt. She was married from Lady Ripon’s house on Putney Heath, where a grand breakfast was provided for a large party of friends. Lady de Grey, Lord Goderich, Colonel Bertie Gordon, Mr. and Mrs. Dupré, my sons, George, Egmont and Henry, Mr. and Mrs. William Hake (my brother and his wife) and other members of my family and friends, with myself, were there, the good countess presiding with her usual kindness and grace.
The tables were hung round with festoons of grapes, beneath which the guests were seated.
Every one was struck by the likeness of Mr. Dupré to Bonaparte without any knowledge of the reason, which was that they had a common ancestor in the female line of Feisch, mother of the cardinal of that name. When Mr. Dupré was page to the King of Wurtemberg, Jerome Bonaparte, through this connection, the guard often presented arms as he passed, mistaking him for one of the royal house.
He belonged to an old French family, that of Dupré de St. Maur, with the rank of marquis, a title never entirely dropped, and to which my son-in-law now stands next in succession, though he may never use it.
There was once an event of moment to the Protestants of France, the revocation of the Edictof Nantes: this drove my son’s branch of the Duprés into Germany and another to England, whose descendants are settled in Buckinghamshire.
I went with all my family to the Harz, a mountain which is like a large purse full of uncoined money; it is said to contain every metal. Men whistle when they have nothing better to do, and they puff out their cheeks when they are hot. This they are taught by Nature: she whistles and behold a Vesuvius in full blast; she puffs out her cheeks and behold the Harz mountains.
In England no place is more than 100 miles from the sea; but except a strip of the Baltic all the salt water of Germany is inland, and where its waves spout out, the people have towns, which, like our horse-troughs, are called Watering Places. In Germany those who can afford the luxury of gradual suicide, caused by over-good drinking and eating, go there yearly to settle accounts with their system.
These towns have their pilgrims from many lands, who go as to Æsculapian Temples to repent of their Hoch: but their sins are very curious; they break out all over and all inside their bodies. There are reddish and purple sins; these do penance sometimes on the nose, sometimes on the large toes, and other joints; sometimes they blossom all over the skin. Then there are sins of the stomachic, hepatic, renal, and pulmonic kind, each symbolizing local contrition; and the penitents, with their sins thus upon them, go every season to drink of thoseholy waters, and some of them, for a time, are forgiven.
Midway between Stassfurt and Magdeburg there is a sort of park, called Schönebeck, where people go for an idle day. It is bounded by a noted salt-water evaporator which is a wall a mile long. There is an hotel, and stalls for the sale of ephemeral goods, as books, toys, and drinks, and a band plays all day the music of the best composers. George, who went with me by way of Hamburg, returned with me to England by way of Cologne and Brussels.
My Roehampton days were now over. After a stay in London, Brighton, and elsewhere, I went to Bath early in 1873, and spent the August of that year at Dover in company with my son Egmont; I then went to Paris, where my eldest son, Thomas St. Edmund, joined me, making the very naïve remark during our walks, that one learns a good deal of French out of doors. This I capped by saying that English, too, might be learnt on the shop-windows; but it was broken English, for the gold letters stuck on the glass, of “English spoken here,” often got loose, while some were missing. My next movement was through the Cenis Tunnel to Turin, where I met my youngest son, Henry, who was a student of chemistry at the University of Giesen, under Dr. Will.
After some stay at Turin we visited Genoa; passing the month of November there, during which I was bitten by mosquitos over the face in a manner expressive of small-pox.
The most pleasurable recollection of this period was a day spent at Nervi, ten miles from Genoa on theRiviera Levante.
The lovely bay of Nervi, on a sunny day, is enriched with every colour: the steep shores of black, veined with white, a magnesian limestone, worn by the waves into waves; the blue waters breaking over projecting rocks, curdling into white, while pools of foamy green fill the basins. It was here that I collected my colours and ideas for “The Painter” in “New Symbols,” which I wrote on returning to Genoa, a place not so attractive as some Italian cities, though the Palazzo Rosso, with its art collection, is never to be forgotten.
There is no sea coast worth visiting at Genoa, scarcely a bathing place; all occupied and spoilt by fortifications. Nevertheless we wandered among the vineyards and villas, our eyes doing honour to the one that had belonged to Paganini.
On a descending road we walked along a festooned vineyard, regarding the ripe fruit with longing eyes, for it was sultry weather, and our great contribution to it was thirst. At the bottom of the hill was a fruiterer’s shop, where a barrowful of grapes had just arrived, and we gained permission to eat. Our thirst was slaked and we asked what we owed in payment; it was a few coppers, and we took from our pockets at random,a good half-dozen times the amount demanded. For such small pay, we witnessed a rapture such as no stage exhibits.
On reaching the streets of the city we encountered a crowd, in the midst of which two men, a large and a small one, were wrestling in an agony of rage. The big man suddenly wrested a knife from the hand of the little one, and flung it far from him, pointing at it in triumphant scorn.
The little man, all over in a fury that actor never attained to, rushed to his house close by, imploring his wife, who was at the door, to give him another knife; but she refused, so the fight was over.
We have not forgotten the Via Nuova, that narrow street of palaces of which our Pall Mall is a resemblance; and we have not forgotten the statue of Columbus,—it was nearly opposite our hotel.
More of Genoa I do not care to note, except that the villas of various colours, red, blue, green, and yellow, surrounding it, look suited to the climate; that of Novello more picturesque than the shop in London where he gathered together all his money.
Henry toiled up the hill to inspect the cemetery.
It is a saying, rife at Genoa, that it takes three Jews to cheat one Genoese. The inhabitants are, certainly, a very business-like people.
The remembrance comes up in my mind that the cactus grows wild here on the old crumbling walls; as the houseleek does on our tiles.
We crossed the mountain that separates Genoaand Spezia—a picturesque journey, with frequent sea-views. The only conveyance was by Diligence, and there is danger; the driving becoming furious as soon as the descent into Spezia begins; nevertheless, we entered the town in safety.
Spezia has its charm; the old streets at the back, the new ones in front near the sea, the temple of Venus on the hill to the right of the shore, Lerici on the left, where Shelley died. But those marble hills that surround the place! As the sun sets, they and the sea become of one pink colour; as the sun sinks deeper, the brilliance quits the water, except where the little waves rise and just dip their crests into it once more.
We took the train to Florence, Henry getting out at Pisa to join me again.
I had returned to Florence after over forty years. Not a soul that I formerly knew was there; all had vanished, lost in the crowd of the absent or dead.
I felt like the last man! But I met with new friends there; the truest of all, Madame Mazzini, was almost the first of these. During my forty years’ absence she had been born, had married, and become a mother, and then a widow, afterwards to become the wife of an illustrious Italian, Signor Villari, senator, and now, in ’91, a member of the Government, as Minister of Education.
She, like her husband, a distinguished author, has been my sincere friend for twenty years.
There was nothing to take me to Florence,nothing but a longing that time could not extinguish, a longing to see again its palaces, its churches, its Palazzo Vecchio in its over-powering might of grandeur embossing architecture on the sky; the Palazzo Strozzi, so defiant of all that is plebeian; the Casa Ricarsoli, so graceful as almost to say a house may be of the fairer sex! The Duomo, the Campanile, not yet under a glass case, as Michael Angelo said playfully, it was worthy to be; and the Sacristy at its side. These and more I longed to see again, with a passion that impels the wanderer to return to his native land. And those delicious walks to Fiesole and Bellosguardo, whence, from summits, one gazes on Florence as on an enchanted city!
Then the Tuscans, with their bright intellects and fine faces, from prince to peasant; their gentleness towards the stranger; their melodious, grammatical enunciation of the one sweet language perfected in the course of ages out of the beautiful words handed down from Greece and Rome.
I had thus reached Florence by Mont Cenis, Turin, Alexandria, and Pisa. At Genoa I inquired of a peasant my way; he took me to the place I wanted, a steep ascent. I offered him a gratuity, which he refused, saying, “The signor is a stranger!” Forty years before, one dark night, I asked a Prince Corsini, not knowing whom he was, to direct me to the Via Maggio where I lived. He turned out of his path and escorted me home.
It was in September, ’73; I had much worldly business on hand for present time, and much that was prospective. I was sixty-three years old, yet in my prime; for I felt as if what Montaigne said was my case: every man thinks he has twenty years more to live—and I have done it, so at eighty-three, I have yet twenty before me! Yet, four days ago, December 4, ’91, was the third anni-re-versary of my broken leg, which will imprison me (without hard labour, unless word-picking and hemp-picking are one) for the term of my natural life!
Henry’s stay with me in Florence was short, but he went over the galleries with me, and the walks, then returned to Germany, while I settled myself down in pleasant rooms on the Lungarno Acciajoli (No. 18), overlooking river, bridges, heights of Boboli, Bellosguardo, and St. Miniato, my new and cheerful winter home, the air bright, the temperature 68° F., sun shining all day on my delightful windows.
What walks I thence took; often to the Boboli Gardens, whence falls on the vision a superb view of the city with its various tints of brown and white, so chaste, so compact, as to look like a massive cameo!
And I walked to all the old places, to Fiesole and back, the walk of many hours, but enchanting all the way; now past the villa of Walter SavageLandor, now the Villa Palmieri, the scene of the Decameron.
Then the walk over the Viale, then the walk along the sweet, soft Certosa Road, the monastery now inhabited by a single monk, the caretaker of the past. These walks and many others made Florence an ideal native land.
Then I settled down to my table to take stock of my work. I had, while at Bath, received many reviews of my last volume, always favourable; and I now contemplated a further adventure.
During a visit to Kelmscott, I wrote “Reminiscence,” a poem describing the manor-house, the river, and surrounding scenery.
I took this to Florence with me, together with “Ecce Homo,” “The Exile,” and “Ortrud’s Vision;” there I added others, “The Painter,” “Michael Angelo,” and one or two besides, to my little store; and some I wrote on my return to London, the next year, making in all a dozen poems, which came out, not before 1876, as “New Symbols.”
My correspondence with Rossetti from Florence was constant; it was after his reading “The Painter” that he offered a suggestion to me to write “The Sculptor,” which I did, giving it the name of his idol, “Michael Angelo.”
This poem I sent to Rossetti in manuscript, and he was pleased to return me the following gracious reply, which I extract from a long letter.
“I read ‘The Sculptor,’ which may perhaps rankas the most masterly of your poems; some passages (as stanza three) having absolutely a new and valuable image in every couplet, and being as perfect in expression as words can make them. I found the poem still further a gainer on being submitted to the ordeal ofvivâ vocereading, on the occasion of Brown’s being here lately, when the whole was encored and several stanzas more than encored.”
I sketched out the “Birth of Venus” while in Italy; this time I had seen that imaginary drama acted, in the waters of Nervi. In reply to a copy I sent Rossetti of it, he remarked on two lines in the thirty-eighth stanza, where the goddess sees herself reflected in the water. “It is an idea so beautiful,” he said, “as to seldom occur to any poet during a lifetime.” The lines are—
“Under her rose-dipped feet, the mirror showsA form divine, enamelled in the sky.”
“Under her rose-dipped feet, the mirror showsA form divine, enamelled in the sky.”
“Under her rose-dipped feet, the mirror showsA form divine, enamelled in the sky.”
“Under her rose-dipped feet, the mirror shows
A form divine, enamelled in the sky.”
He wrote in exactly the same tone of a verse in “Michael Angelo,” the four last lines of stanza three.
Should the reader trouble himself to run his mind over the early stanzas he will recall the writer’s visit to Spezia, among the marble hills: before then he had no conception of the mountains themselves being of that precious stone; he had only pictured to himself the quarries whence it was drawn.
Mr. William Rossetti, in a review in theAcademy, of 1886, was so complimentary as tocall “Michael Angelo” “a sculptured poem.” The introductory lines preceding stanza one greatly pleased Dante Rossetti.
I visited the monument of the Duke d’Urbino in the Capella dei Medici, until I had well mastered Angelo’s greatest work, and interpreted and translated it into metaphoric thought. I went to the opera to set my thoughts to music, the language of verse.
We are all musicians, not that we all compose or play—except on each other’s feelings. The nervous system is the one marvellous harmonium. Its strings are more in number than those of a thousand harps, and all that is most exquisite, most exalted, and beautiful, can be performed upon it with a vehemence that incites to merriment or rends the heart. It can receive and realize the concert of a thousand voices!
All this we experience in our intercourse of every day; at the sight of a beloved one, we extemporize some pleasing harmony.
But this human harp has not all its rich notes attuned and struck by others; it is more often Eolian, and spontaneously pours out its emotions in the solitude of its sorrow and its joy; and it is not always music set in words or confined to our own sphere of being. This the poet feels when,resting in his chamber, his spirit passes into that of others, drawn by a divine sympathy. It becomes a concert then with many others’ trials. The sufferings are reverberated within him, like the sound of distant music.
How easy is it in this way to enter another’s soul, to share in its tribulation, to sink as deeply into it as to reach its self-love, and learn how like it is to our own!
My friend Dr. Ewart, a physician now to St. George’s Hospital, and a distinguished writer on chest-affections, sent me a friendly letter to Professor Schiff of Florence, of which I availed myself largely. It was at that time, too, that Madox Brown sent me a letter to Colonel Gillum, at whose house I first met Madame Mazzini. Dr. Schiff had the lead in science on nerve-function, and I constantly attended his demonstrations. They were always performed on anæstheticized dogs. I learned much of him. He was greatly esteemed by the Florentine Government, by whom he was given apartments in the vacated convent of Sta. Annunciata, together with the extensive garden.
Professor Schiff was not a man of the Majendie kind who could drown all consciousness of animal suffering in the pleasure of reading science out of a living book; he was benevolent, and he guarded carefully against the creature on which he operated being alive to pain. But his emotional enemies were too strong for him; they were chiefly some English of fashion, and they got Capponi ontheir side; the most deservedly esteemed of Florentine nobles, whose residence was opposite to that of the professor.
This led to a correspondence between the neighbours, which ended for a time in Schiff convincing Capponi that no cruelty was practised, and that the operations on animals were painless.
However, Schiff had many animals; the municipality had ordered the police to supply the professor with all stray dogs, for which they could discover no owner. There was one dog amongst these that would bay the moon in spite of every effort to silence its superstitious moanings; and the enemy hearing this, interviewed Capponi again, and told him that Schiff was known to torture his dogs in the night season.
Capponi, in his palace opposite, had only too surely heard those midnight wailings.
The appointment of Professor Schiff to a chair of physiology and to the hospital was a Government one; his diagnosis of disease was regarded as remarkably rapid and successful. At his house, which was graced by Madame Schiff and her daughter, ladies of high culture, I met many interesting persons, one especially, a Moscow lady, who every year went to St. Petersburg, thence to Florence, thence to the Isle of Wight, where she had grandchildren at school and where she visited her friends, Lord and Lady Cottenham.
I speak of this lady because her love of our country almost amounted to a passion. The people,she said, were so kind; strangers would stop to help her from a railway carriage! Then the Isle of Wight, how lovely! Fuchsias flowering in the hedgerows, and climbing up the cottage walls!
As in Germany the “Vicar of Wakefield” is in every cottage, so, she said, is “Paradise Lost” in every Russian home.
I wish that I could give her name.
The last I heard of Professor Schiff was that his enemies had prevailed, and that he had returned to Berne, welcomed by his own people.
In the November of this year, I revised “Ecce Homo,” and composed the “Double Soul,” both of which are in “New Symbols.” I also wrote “Lucilla, the First Saved,” at that time, a favourite of the good and gifted Christina Rossetti.
It was at this period that I was engaged on “The Sculptor” (M. Angelo). I sat in the Hall of Niobe for the manner, and stood in the Chapel of the Medici for the matter, of this little poem. I sent it as aforesaid, to Rossetti, who was at Kelmscott.
“Pythagoras,” too, was of this period.
In February, 1874, I wrote an article on some of Professor Schiff’s work, and sent it to Dr. Anstey, to be inserted inThe Practitioner, in which it shortly appeared, giving much satisfaction to Schiff himself.
During this visit to “Florence my Fair,” I was in constant correspondence with D. G. Rossetti, Theodore Watts, and other friends; and I left behind me many there whom I had reason to esteem.Colonel and Mrs. Gillum showed me many kindly attentions, not the least of which was that of asking me to meet Madame Mazzini at their table. He, in common with that lady, took a deep interest in a recently deceased friend, Miss Blagden, who, through Mr. Watts, had appointed to meet me at Florence. She was an authoress of promise. But, before I reached Italy, she was lying in the English cemetery at Florence, where, with her friends, I visited her grave.
It was, however, as a social centre that she took her high position in Florence. She was the intimate friend of Mr. and Mrs. Browning, and she is the heroine of Madame Villari’s novel, “In Change Unchanged.”
I left Florence for Venice on the 2nd of March, 1874.
In leaving Florence I seemed to be leaving home; on reaching Venice I seemed only on a visit, and so I felt as long as I was there. So striking is this city, that all who reach it determine to remain for a length of time; but it palls upon them, and a fortnight is generally the limit of their stay.
But it is always great in memory.
Venice! One sits in peaceful repose, no sound of voices, or wheels, or hoofs, in the Piazza San Marco, over coffee, which the place turns to nectar.One swallows with insatiate mental appetite the Duomo; and what a breakfast it is for hungry eyes! One walks round the palace of those Doges, more majestic than man ever was or can ever be; a prison on the right side for the commission of cruel sins, a cathedral round the corner for their pardon, and that even up to plenary indulgence.
What a curious thing it is not to be at home, but how most curious of all it is to be at Venice! Would you know what it is to be there, imagine such a town as Brighton, with all the streets filled with water and changed to canals, with little bridges everywhere to enable you to cross from one side of the way to the other! Then, to turn the sea into a Grand Canal, imagine a row of palaces outside the piers, from Hove to Kemptown, and you are at Venice!
I walked all over Venice, where walking was possible: downcalle, or lanes, with opposite houses so near to each other that a good harlequin might turn a somersault across from one window to another!
Edmund Kean would have done this, though the windows were closed.
One gets fromcalletocalleover the daintiest little bridges, some of white chiselled marble; from these you look up and down a canal between towering houses, and here and there see a family keep its gondola, as some of us at home keep our carriage. There the gondolas are tethered to the house steps, as our horses are to the manger.
When there is no more walking possible, one takes to a gondola at the Piazzetta, which sweeps by palaces of loveliest architecture on both sides of the Grand Canal. A sort of Thames, down stream, reaches the Rialto bridge, not built so early as Shakespeare’s time; still, there was a bank of that name, Riva Alto, where the merchants of Venice met, close by; but it is a scanty spot, and little suited to business transactions.
At the Rialto one gets out of the gondola and crosses the bridge. It has paltry shops on either side, that might have been stocked from the vast surplus of Manchester or Birmingham. One returns to one’s gondola, ready to drop a mean opinion, and resume one’s sense of beauty. “What palace is this, O songless Signor Gondolier?” “The General Post Office, signor,” answers the gondolier. We glide to and fro, we pause before the Fondaco dei Turchi, and look at it until we feel that its beauty can never be erased from our mental vision.
We pause before the Palazzo Pesaro, before La Ça Doro, Il Palazzo Guistiniani, Il Palazzo Foscari. We think we should like to live in them all, and we think what a great lord it would take to live in any one of them.
A tremendous organization is that of Venice still. The fine arsenal that stands boldly out, as one looks down the canal, might sayaut pax, aut bellum! The Gallery, a convent turned into a palace of art. It supplied me with an answer once,when I was shown a property in Titians by a friend in London. He confidently inquired of me if I did not think they were genuine works. My answer was, “Go to Venice, look at the Titians there, and on your return ask me the question again.”
Then the churches; they are of course noble, but I cannot love anything that is angular, which to me—but I am only one!—is the fault of ecclesiastical architecture in Italy. I could say much of angularity: all that ranks beneath the human form is angular. As a type, study the features of a cat! Its ears are angular, its eyes are angularly set, its nose, its mouth all form angles. I love the dome,—my own St. Paul’s, St. Peter’s at Rome, S. Maria del Fiore at Florence, the Basilica di San Marco, and the S. Maria della Salute at Venice—all noble churches; and yet the wonderful St. Mark’s is provokingly like the Pavilion at Brighton, only it is not Chinese but Byzantine.
The Doge’s palace, empty but full of reminiscences! Art there takes the place of old Reality: it laughs at the security of living queens and kings. St. Mark’s Square is like another and more charming Palais Royal; its arched windows soothe and fascinate the eyes.
There is a long, broad street in Venice—the Via Garibaldi. It is sixty of my feet wide; and there are two good squares, the Piazza Santo Maurizio and the Piazza Santo Stefano.
I had a very odd sensation on reaching these squares: I felt just as if I was on dry land!
When one thinks of a city of solid houses situated on a network of water, it may naturally recall the moats that surround fortified castles. But an enemy could cross a moat: could he riddle his way through the countless canals of Venezia? How safe must the inhabitants of the interior feel in time of war! If an army starting from the square of St. Marco reached thecalle, it would have to march in single file between windows that might be used as loopholes.
Venice was very cold in the month of March. I complained. “Never mind,” was the reply; “we shall have the mosquitoes in April, and they will bring six months of warm weather!”
This is Italy: cold winters and no provision against cold! The natives get hot-through in the six spring and summer months, and it takes the remaining six to cool them.
If I ascended in a captive balloon which broke loose, making me a prisoner, to undergo the sentence of transportation with hard-breathing in the cold, scant air; and if offered a ticket-of-leave and a parachute, with a choice of where I would descend, it would be in St. Mark’s Square, the sun shining, the band playing, the cup of hot coffee on the table just poured out. It is the only perfect square upon earth—no dust, no noisy cabs to run over your toes as you stretch out your legs on the smoothly paved ground.
Seated in the Piazza San Marco over coffee and cigar, one reflects how Venice has more than oneShakespearian interest: how the Rialto, now a bridge, was in our dramatist’s day a bank of the Grand Canal, theriva alto. But a yet greater interest attaches to the circumstance which led him wrong, yet right, in his not knowing that there were two Othello families, one of which was distinguished as Il Moro, the Mulberry, because they held estates in the Morea.
And this was Shakespeare’s Moor!
London is dusty, every other town is dusty; Venice is not. London registers a good one death per diem under cab wheels. In Venice a cab wheel is never seen; but whether the bicycle has reached it now I do not know.
I went one evening to the Malibran theatre, and on Sunday to the Fenice opera house. I had indulged my eyes to the full, so I gave my ears a turn, and they were gratified in hearing William Tell. I did not fail to visit the island of Lido in a steam ’bus to see the true Adriatic. The clean sands, whence no land is visible, is all that is to be seen there, though, as I did, you walk across from shore to shore.
I scarcely completed the traditional fortnight at Venice, but it was not my last visit there. What had I seen? It was like something colossal, though only human; it was like having turned over a huge book of wonderful pictures, leaf after leaf: the first an enchanted square, its mosque, its more than kingly palace, its obtrusive campanile; lastly, a wonderful line of arches, a mile long betweenVenice and the coast, along which glided a railway train.
When I had dwelt on every page of the volume and reached the end, I had no desire to begin again, but took the treasured-up remembrance of it across the Brenner.
Sleeping at Verona, I stayed there for a day that I might see the great fortress, which forms part of the quadrilateral, and also the Roman coliseum there, which is in a very perfect state. The town must have suffered much from time, even since Shakespeare’s “Two Gentlemen” left it to make the acquaintance of Sylvia. As I stood on the bridge and looked about me, the houses seemed to be crumbling before my very eyes. This done, I proceeded to Stassfurt, taking Munich on my way.
I remained for several months at Stassfurt, the summers in Germany always being for the most part fine. I made excursions with some of my family into the Harz, went up and round the mountains, spent a night on the Brocken, witnessed the sun rise from beneath my feet, and made a stay afterwards at Thale, ascending the picturesque heights from that locality. We took our route to the Harz by the weird Affenthaler valley, visiting the admirable old lordly castle of Falconstein on our way, and not for the last time. The sombre hills, the narrow pass, the pine forest on either side, the river, once seen can never but be recalled to mind again.
The Brocken is covered with huge masses ofstone, evidently the work of a volcano. Other masses have been hurled downwards, rudely paving the pine-covered descent. I suggested that the scattered heaps on the summit should be piled up as a rude and lasting monument to Goethe.
I had yet to make my visit to Rome; it was from Stassfurt again. The weather in October was getting cold over the plains of Saxony, and my son-in-law, Dr. Dupré, reminded me that it would be still colder on the Alps. He went with me on part of my journey; we took train from Leipsic to Munich, arriving at dark, and renewed our tickets for Botzen. There we had supper in company with a smart English-Greek, a native of Corfu, and his friend, together with a French lady of fine proportions and laughing face, besides a young Bavarian officer of the rapid-mannered kind.
There were other rooms in the hotel besides the one in which we supped, and to which the three gentlemen described followed the lady wherever she went, her laughter taking the form of fits. And such is the politeness of what we call foreigners, they accompanied her even to her chamber door. She returned to the supper-room after all this. Dr. Dupré was there alone, and she told him, half in complaint, the other half in fun, what had been going on.
With this company of three I found myself in the same carriage the next day, the Greek and his friend leaving us the following day, at noon, at ahouse in that wonderful Alpine gorge between Botzen and Verona.
Dr. Dupré was on his return home,viâStrasburg, where he went to purchase a horse from the king’s stables. I proceeded with the young officer and the lady.
The journey to Bologna which we made together was a comedy in a hundred acts, as long as a great Chinese drama. The gentleman perched himself on the arm of the seat, and took out a well-thumbed book of conversations in the usual four languages, to practise himself in the Italian, and from this he read aloud to the lady, who sat opposite to him, in the tone of one earnestly addressing another, now on business as if she were hotel-keeper, waiter, chambermaid, jeweller, dressmaker, or barber. She heartily enjoyed his frankness, and laughed over every question and answer.
That night we slept at Bologna, the lady proceeding to Naples, the officer taking down her address and promising to pay her a visit there before long.
When I left the German side of the Brenner it was in the cold season; the leaves were colouring, drooping, and falling. When I reached the plain of Lombardy the summer had not stirred, all was green and warm.
I went from Bologna to Florence (the beloved) with my Bavarian. There were two English ladies and their brother, a surgeon-major of artillery, inthe same carriage with us, and we entered into a rapid acquaintance, I and the gentleman through professional, and the young officer and the ladies through moral, sympathy. He amused them as effectually as he had done the madame. We proceeded to the same hotel at Florence, the Porta Rossa. My German took the ladies about, with his open Bädeker, and showed them all the sights. They were single ladies, and, therefore, very much charmed. One day, walking with them on a country stroll, it evidently occurred to him that it was his duty to tell them who he was, and his way of doing this afforded them much amusement. He suddenly stopped before a cluster of violets, and bending his head to address them, said, “Sweet flowers, I dare say you would be pleased to know my name, who and what I am. My name is ⸺, and I am a captain in the Bavarian army!”
I lingered at Florence for a month, looking at my favourite models of art, the chief of which now was the Perseus, by Cellini, and what I loved to linger over, never tiring, the Six Vestals, of Greek sculpture in the Loggia dei Lanzi.
But to dwell too long on such exquisite works of man’s genius almost infatuates; whilst gazing on a single object one seems to frame from memory an old and new testament of the inspired artists, and to call some of them evangelists, and some apostles.
Look at Leonardo da Vinci’s Last Supper at Milan, in the refectory of Santa Maria delle Grazie:it is amongst the finest pictures in the world. And was it not inspired?
Look at the Twilight and the Dawn, the Night and Morning, of Michael Angelo: would it not illustrate the book of the creation?
Look at the Paradiso of Fra Angelico for a new art testament, and for an old one go back to the Parthenon, to the sculptures of ancient Greece.
During my short stay I visited all my most valued friends, and on the 21st of November I took train to Rome.
It is an amusing journey from Firenze to Rome. The Apennines, no longer imposing to one familiar with the Alps, spin with you; arches that you see above you go round and return nearer to you; then, swinging round once more, you are upon them, and finally above them.
A young Jesuit sat in the corner of the carriage opposite to my corner. On my first sight of him his eyes were closed, and his lips were moving as one sees in the low muttering delirium of the semi-conscious sick. In due time he took out a breviary, counted the beads on a string that hung from him, played with them as a child with sugar-plums, and pursued the silent muttering, as if reading a delirious dream. This went on for a fatiguing length of time. Being unaccustomed to religious manners, I feltsorry, because I thought the good man was fatuously disposed, when suddenly he, having counted his last bead, shut his book joyfully, and his intellect seemed restored.
He addressed me in sweet Italian, inla lingua Toscana in bocca Romana. We were gliding alongside the lake of Perugia, and from that time he did not cease to instruct me until our journey’s end.
A Jesuit is never wanting in knowledge, whatever a priest may be.
If we swept by a ruined bridge, he told me to what period of history it pertained, and to what event it owed its smashed condition; if we came to a hillside town, I heard from him its name, and for what it had been famed. So, as if school itself had become a delicious holiday, we passed by Perugia and Assisi and Terni, and other of these storied towns.
Italians tell one what they are. He was a Jesuit; he had found shelter among the nobles of Florence, who loved their old Government and hated their new, and who were generous to the clergy who had been turned out of their monasteries, then all empty. But a few months of employment awaited him; the libraries had been removed from the monasteries to the capital, and he had been summoned to assist in their arrangement.
“Non mi piace la vostra Roma,” said Victor Emmanuel, after his first session there as king. It gave great offence; yet must I humbly repeat his words on my own account.
I have imagined ancient Rome; I have seen a picture of it restored in all its grandeur. What does it look like now? A grand city that had been lifted bodily from the seven hills and valleys into the air, and let to fall, smashed in pieces, like a service of crockery.
“… Non mi piace la vostra Roma” were the words of the king, so I may venture to repeat them.
The place is very disappointing at first, but they say it grows upon you. The misfortune is that it is called Rome instead of Popesburg—ancient Rome is squeezed out; but Popesburg is a picturesque old Italian town, interspersed scantily with remains yet older. The Pantheon stands up complete on its old pillars, only stripped of all its outside marble; then, near Santa Maria in Cosmedia, there is a lovely little temple of Vesta, encircled by its Corinthian marble columns, but its surroundings are of mud and slush at this hour.
These interspersed antiquities, of which there are many in the form of columns, with a pediment sadly bruised and broken through age and fight, are the most picturesque of the remains. Where they turn up as forums, the wreck is exhibited some twelve or twenty feet deep in large walled-in pits, like outdoor museums—bits of columns arranged in old order, like skittles, ready to be bowled over again. Perhaps the most curious thing of all is to see modern Rome from the bridges, itself decaying and crumbling, when the ancient city has already crumbled and decayed.
During the last eight hundred years there has been a sort of rebuilding, but it is not theurbs reconditaof Augustus, whose Pantheon is still standing to connect the present with the past. Why, the columns of that temple, as I paced them, measured a diameter of eight feet! Where other temples had stood, churches have sprung up; and where the sherds of foundations remained, there are palaces now; but the palace of the Cæsars is empty space; the Forum is a skeleton exhumed for show. The gaps will never be filled again; Rome will remain a ruin; its architectural condition only such as one might conceive of Hades, where Hercules wanders still in disaffection. How unlike its later contemporary, Venice, that has been preserved, perfect, under a blue-glass sky!
The antiquarian genius is always very busy at Rome, because its exhumations supply food to greedy minds bent on recovering the earliest history of our race, as if the future of mankind would one day turn up engraved on tiles. These sort of enthusiasts do not comprehend that the further they go back, the greater grows the historic lie, and that as far as it concerns true knowledge, their labours are utterly fruitless. Antiquarians and geologists are both earth-searchers; but does the ruin-grubber deem himself on a par with the inspector of organic remains?
I took my view of the Transfiguration of Rome, moulded by the avenger in a way no man could paint or model. I wanted to see the other Transfiguration,which art-genius pronounced the finest picture in the known world, as if it were as great a miracle as the one it represents.
Rome is rich in metamorphoses, besides being one itself: the fine bronze statue in the cathedral, a figure of Jupiter, has been transfigured into Peter, who reigns in its stead.
But the most valued Transfiguration of all is Raphael’s: it has a fault of the first magnitude, a ghastly fault that hands it over to the ruins.
The great painter was but a fragmentary genius, or he would not have made that hideous epileptic the conspicuous rival of Christ. Our eyes join the eyes of the painted crowd in looking at a sight so loathsome, and that in so healing a Presence.
But let us be thankful: Raphael has left us his mighty cartoons, his portraits, his Madonnas.
There were other treasures of art in the Vatican, notably the Laocoon, that I desired earnestly to examine. I had need to speak of it in my “sculptured poem,” but could draw no inspiration from it in the copy at Florence. Strange to say, though the copy and the original are so alike, the moment I saw this last its life passed into me. I required also to look at the Apollo Belvidere, but found it to be only Lord Chesterfield during his apotheosis.
In the Doge’s palace in Venice there is a striking picture of Ariadne. I knew there was a sculpture of the same in the Vatican gallery, a place which may be called an indoor street of marbles: this, too, I found. Then I made my way to the very endof this Via di Scolpitura, where stood the Athlete. How long I stayed with my eyes and heart upon it, I know not; but while looking at that most natural of all marble wonders, every Apollo had disappeared from mythology, from this world itself.
But now to the Barberini Palace, to visit the apocryphal portrait of Beatrice Cenci. We could kiss the very canvas did we not know that her tragedy is but a myth. She breathed into Shelley her tragic breath, so we all go to see the familiar face; and, hard by the Ghetto, the Cenci palace, too. But this, how changed. It was let out to the dirtier class by its then owner—a cardinal, too; and I saw that the grand entrance at the back was used for a dust-heap. All the property of a cardinal, all going to decay; yet is there a cleanly church opposite, built at the cost of a Cenci.
It is with some loss of equanimity that one thinks of Roma and finds that its citizens are proud of it in its humbled and chastised condition. It is like the worn-out pedigree of a once illustrious name. They may be proud of their tombs, for one is of the Scipios, of Seneca another; but their ruins are a disgrace, the work of their avenging, conquering foes, such as Guiscard in the eleventh century, who battered down every wall that it might never be defended again. But they are proud of their ruins! Their Forum, a bit of Palmyra; their Coliseum, a broken cup; their ghost of the palace of the Cæsars, its own burial-place; of their Baths of Caracalla, an artificial desert;of their Theatre of Marcellus, in one of the fine arches of which I saw a flourishing blacksmith’s forge, blazing to the memory of a glorious past.
Imagine the Florentines proud of their Palazzo Vecchio, with its mighty tower on the pavement; imagine the Venetians proud of a once Doge’s palace, the magnificent court where it was with only a wall or two standing, and the giant’s staircase, like Goliath, in the dust!
There are some old words that one likes better than the new ones: the name of the gate, nowdel Popolo, does not, to me, sound so æsthetically asFlaminia, its ancient name! Yet it took centuries to turn the one into the other for the worst, with the patriotic intention of being for the best! The popes do not pretend to be Cæsars, like the latter-day Napoleon, with his Dutch physiognomy; but they have now and then done their best to rebuild. Pius VII., so heavily handicapped by the Corsicanparvenu, did much to lay the saddened ghost of Cæsarean times, by beautifying the Piazza del Popolo. Through him, Augustus might have looked on it again with composure. Its semicircular form, its fountains, its statues, would pacify the imperial rebuilder.
From the Porta del Popolo to the Capitol is a line ending in a steep ascent, one of the seven hills, the Capitoline: this long street is the backbone of Rome, from which its ribs more or less radiate. It is not gigantic with a broad stride, like the Via Larga (now Cavoura) at Florence; it is notbeautiful, like the Genoese Via Nuova; it is more of a Bond Street, but a long one, with some fine buildings, and, as all long streets should be, it is cut in half by a good big square, the Piazza Colonna. Here we stumble against a column, look up, and for a minute or two we are in ancient Rome. It was set up by Marcus Aurelius Antoninus, a man of fight, in order that his victories might not be forgotten. Its inside is hollow, except that it has steps up it, nearly two hundred—for we always count. We go up these steps, full of the Roman sensation, when, lo, and behold! (En et ecce! as Marcus Aurelius would now say with a stare), St. Paul has got up before us; has been turned into bronze, and gilded! Still there is something in it; he has made conquests over the Germans better than those of Marcus, so we may let him stay at the top, and be thankful; odd as it seems.
The obelisk which we come upon in the square of Monte Clitorio, was brought to Rome by Augustus, as Cleopatra’s Needle was brought to London by Sir Erasmus Wilson, Kt., F.R.C.S.; the one set up in the Campus Martius, the other on the Thames Embankment. That of Augustus got buried, and by a sort of lucky miracle was raised again by the sixth of the Pius popes.
But now stop a little longer than usual: this is the Palazzo Doria Pamfili.
One wants all the time to get up to the top of the Capitoline Hill; so, seeing a tremendous flight of steps, one goes upstairs. The things stuck inone’s way to arrest one’s progress towards the square at the top are first of all two lions. These, notwithstanding they are created out of black granite, and are therefore really dumb animals, unlike live lions, spout water at you, by way of making themselves heard: and this Keats should have done into the public ear, instead of letting his name be writ in the water itself.
But even now we cannot leave the last step to the Campidoglio; we are arrested by Castor and Pollux, two giants. We then look with much interest to see what sort of horses theirs were, and they rise in our estimation, tall as they are already, when we find that their nags are of the true Arab breed, thick-necked and straight-backed, not a bit like the flesh and blood abnormals of Newmarket Heath.
The Campidoglio is a fine square, and one has at least the satisfaction of feeling that the hill it surmounts is a part of ancient Rome. But where is the old Temple of Jupiter? we ask.
No answer.
However, here is something Roman: it is the equestrian statue of Marcus Aurelius—a survival.
There are other things up here of the Antonine brand, to show that Rome was once Rome; but there is such a variety of job lots here, all curiosities, swept by time into heaps, that the best course is not to puzzle one’s brains about them.
I, for one, wanted to see three things in this Capitol, still so called, but not recalling anythingthat existed under that name before Boniface IX. took to rebuilding. It is a museum containing a good deal of the private property of the old Roman lords, which belongs now to their natural heirs, and farthest off of kin, the people.
These people had ancestors who were the hereditary property of some seventy or eighty emperors. They are now owners of all these emperors’ heads, and of the heads of all these emperors’ families, which they keep on shelves in their Capitol museum, in a room that makes a sort of Golgotha.
At last we come upon the Dying Gladiator, one of the three figures I was in search of. We have all seen its shadow in casts and engravings; this is the unique original.
Another figure that I had occasion to see was La Bacchante, a marble figure, which is locked up and only shown on the payment of a fee; it is a most expressive statue.
These two figures I have delineated in my “sculptured poem” of Michael Angelo.
A third figure, the Faun, I readily found. It is a celebrated statue, and I desired to ascertain whether the ears were formed correctly; but they were not. In accordance with anatomical structure they should have pointed backwards, but they are erect. Some would say, “Yes; for the ears of lower animals at times are pricked.” But I say (it is in “Valdarno”), the end of all art is repose.
In the human ear may be seen a small rudiment of the elongated ear; it is so placed that, if redeveloped,it would point posteriorly, after the fashion of the lower animals, to the cervix, beneath the occipital bone.
Was it prophetic that, in digging the foundations of the Capitol, when it was first designed, a skull was turned out (caput), whence the name.
Nevertheless, the Capitol was founded upon a rock, though it was the Tarpeian.
“What come ye for to see?” It is a wider question than was intended on its first ironical utterance, and many answers are always ready. A medical ignoramus of ability was asked if there was any danger. His answer was, “That depends on the event.” So it is in museum life; the majority know nothing of what they go to see, and what they do see depends on the event. But the specialists know exactly what go they for to see; and I am one of these. Relying on presumptive evidence, if a “Sir Leighton,” as the French would say, goes to Rome, it may be for to make a study of painted eyes, in some ten or a dozen galleries, to determine whether black, brown, or blue predominates. If a “Sir Boehm” goes to Rome, it may be for to inspect the lost head and legs of a Farnesian Hercules. If a “Sir Barry” goes to Rome, it is for to examine which of the stones in the Palazzo di Venezia were stolen by a pope from the Coliseum,and which were honestly got. However, we have no “Sir Barry” nowadays; premiers do not build houses, so that they do not baronetize architecture in lieu of fees. They take physic; they stand in need of bulletins when, on the eve of an unpleasant debate, a strong voice is weak. Being ourselves of physic and a little deaf, a clergyman once bawled into our best ear, in a voice so thunderous yet so piercing that had it been a prayer it might almost have been heard in heaven, “Doctor! can you give me something to strengthen my voice?”
Premiers are perfect artists in the baronetizing line; nay, they can even chisel a peer in invisible gold. A president of a royal academy, of a royal society, of a royal college of surgeons or physicians, fills a genteel trade; rank fits him well.
An oculist, if a premier has bad eyes and is going blind, may, like other professionals, be ennobled; but an aurist and a dentist, there is something in these—it is hard to say what—that does not ennoble well, which shows how greater are eyes than ears or teeth.
If a premier is not a teetotaler, he makes lords out of brewers, and yet not out of distillers, whose images are quite as golden. He does not mind it being thought that he takes a glass of pale ale, but whisky—that would not do.
All these industries, like myself, go to Rome chiefly on their own business. But what a wonderful crowd there is flocking there to see all that is left—the fragments of Cæsar’s lost compositions.
We business men, when we have found all we want, go the round; it is like walking through the street, looking at everybody, sometimes stopping to speak.
We meet a picture, a statue, a vase, an arch, a column, a palace, as we might do a friend; but those who undertake to see all might as well undertake to read the two or three billion letters that pass through the post-office in a year.
I set myself to visit the grave of poor Keats. He was sick of many griefs, but the greatest of these was that he could not make the vulgar howl their applause. He had all the enjoyment of a Divine gift; it could only be the bodily sickness affecting the mind when his heart was bitter, and he exclaimed his name was writ in water. Yet they have graved those feeble words on his tombstone!
Were I dying for praise, I should show my insight into man, and say, “My name is writ in brandy and water.” How that would be swallowed down!
I visited Keats’s grave from very mixed motives; life is sad enough without being sentimental. To stand before the grave is a little dangerous; if one walked backwards for a short distance in an absent fit, he would precipitate himself over a sunk wall into the adjoining cemetery, and lie there for good, like Shelley.
As in duty bound, I visited the tomb of Shelley also.
I was on my way to the church of St. Paolofuori, a sight not to be neglected by any species of pilgrim whatever.
On one’s way one can leave a card on the Scipios; their tomb is handy, but they are always out, those wonderful people called the “authorities” having removed the sarcophagi and busts. But you will be asked in; and you can go down the windings by torchlight, and say you did it. Then,en route, one can pay one’s respects to the early Christians who owned some uncomfortable catacombs hereabout, in which they resided.
For an account of these and of how they shelved their dead,videsome more gushing writer.
St. Paolo is too magnificent for a church. It has a fine architectural pedigree up to Constantine, having endured all the horrors for generations of decay and fire, to be only rebuilt at greater cost than before.
I did not go on purpose to behold the church, but to almost adore the ancient cloisters at the back. The delicately twisted columns of the arches are so winning, they actually awake one’s affections; and if thinking of a thing ever after is love, they fill you with this fondest of recollections.
A good many of us rise in life. Wolsey, he rose; the Bonapartes rose; Coke rose (upon Littleton); the Gladstones rose; Lazarus rose; but no man, priest, soldier, lawyer, M.P., or resurrect, ever rose in death, as did St. Peter. Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John; writers as eminently inspired as Isaiah; Paul, the most gifted of apostles, whose ideas oncharity lifted Christianity miles over the heads of all other religious or moral founders, had no such rise in death as Peter; but it was the keys that did it.
Peter has a palace, and a church, and a museum, such as monarchs envy in vain. Let us hope, pray, and entreat that it may never be demolished, like the palace of the Cæsars; that no republican Guiscard may arise; but that the President of the Future may take up his residence there, should the popes vacate it.
My friend, Theodore Watts, was at Rome with me a part of the time. I forget what he thought of it all; it is so long ago. I know we visited the poets’ tombs together, and St. Paolofuori.
Pio Nino must have had a temper, because he studied the inconvenience of strangers by making them take tickets of admission in front of the Vatican, while he vaticinated that the back entrance not being handy, but involving a long walk, would excite irritation, so he admitted visitors only at his back door. The elliptical columns forming the portico in the Piazza S. Pietro, look like out-bent arms for receiving and hugging the flock.
I was with Watts, one day in December, on this little round. We stood with our backs against a wall, for shelter against a bitter wind, the sun shining through snow, and the warmth, so long as we remained there, delicious.
We went the usual round of the loggie, Raphaelizing, and of the indoor statuary squares and streets; and got into the Sixtine, on the roof of which Michael Angelo re-created the world.