‘So sit two Kings of Brentford on one throne!’
‘So sit two Kings of Brentford on one throne!’
‘So sit two Kings of Brentford on one throne!’
‘So sit two Kings of Brentford on one throne!’
The only thing unpleasant in the motley assemblage of persons at Rome, is the number of pilgrims with their greasy oil-skin cloaks. They are a dirty, disgusting set, with a look of sturdy hypocrisy about them. The Pope (pro formâ) washes their feet; the Nuns, when they come, have even a less delicate office to perform. Religion, in the depth of its humility, ought not to forget decorum. But I am a traveller, and not a reformer.
The picture-galleries in Rome disappointed me quite. I was told there were a dozen at least, equal to the Louvre; there is not one. I shall not dwell long upon them, for they gave me little pleasure. At the Ruspigliosi Palace (near the Monte Cavallo, where are the famous Colossal groups, said to be by Phidias and Praxiteles, of one of which we have a cast in Hyde Park) are the Aurora and the Andromeda, by Guido. The first is a most splendid composition (like the Daughter of the Dawn) but painted in fresco; and the artist has, in my mind, failed through want of practice in the grace and colouring of most of the figures. They are a clumsy, gloomy-looking set, and not like Guido’s females. The Andromeda has all the charm and sweetness of his pencil, in its pearly tones, its graceful timid action, and its lovely expression of gentleness and terror. The face, every part of the figure, has a beauty and softness not to be described. This one figure is worth all the other group, and the Apollo, the horses and the azure sea to boot. People talk of the insipidity of Guido. Oh! let me drink long, repeated, relishing draughts of such insipidity! If delicacy, beauty, and grace are insipidity, I too profess myself an idolizer of insipidity: I will venture one assertion, which is, that no other painter has expressed the female character so well, so truly, so entirely in its fragile, lovely essence, neither Raphael, nor Titian, nor Correggio; and, after these, it is needless to mention any more. Raphael’s women are Saints; Titian’s are courtesans; Correggio’s an affected mixture of both; Guido’s are the true heroines of romance, the brides of the fancy, such as ‘youthful poets dream of when they love,’ or as a Clarissa, a Julia de Roubigne, or a Miss Milner would turn out to be! They are not only angels, but young ladies into the bargain, which is more than can be said for any of the others, and yet it is something to say. Vandyke sometimes gave this effect in portrait, but his historical figures are fanciful and sprawling. Under the Andromeda is a portrait by Nicholas Poussin of himself (a duplicate of that in the Louvre), and an infant Cupid or Bacchus, by the same artist, finely coloured, and executed in the manner of Titian. There is in another room an unmeaning picture, by Annibal Caracci, of Samson pulling down the temple of the Philistines, and also a finedead Christ by him; add to these a Diana and Endymion by Guercino, in which the real sentiment of the story is thrown into the landscape and figures. The Ruspigliosi Pavilion, containing these and some inferior pictures, is situated near the remains of Constantine’s Bath in a small raised garden or terrace, in which the early violets and hyacinths blossom amidst broken cisterns and defaced statues. It is a pretty picture; art decays, but nature still survives through all changes. At the Doria Palace, there is nothing remarkable but the two Claudes, and these are much injured in colour. The trees are black, and the water looks like lead. There are several Garofolos, which are held in esteem here (not unjustly) and one fine head by Titian. The Velasquez (InnocentX.), so much esteemed by Sir Joshua, is a spirited sketch. The Borghese Palace has three fine pictures, and only three—the Diana and Actæon of Domenichino; the Taking down from the Cross, by Raphael; and Titian’s Sacred and Profane Love. This last picture has a peculiar and inexpressible charm about it. It is something between portrait and allegory, a mixture of history and landscape, simple and yet quaint, fantastical yet without meaning to be so, but as if a sudden thought had struck the painter, and he could not help attempting to execute it out of curiosity, and finishing it from the delight it gave him. It is full of sweetness and solemnity. The Diana of Domenichino is just the reverse of it. Every thing here is arranged methodically, and is the effect of study and forethought. Domenichino was a painter of sense, feeling, and taste; but his pencil was meagre, and his imagination dispirited and impoverished. In Titian, the execution surpassed the design, and the force of his hand and eye, as he went on, enriched the most indifferent outline: in Domenichino, the filling up fell short of the conception and of his own wishes. He was a man of great modesty and merit; and when others expressed an admiration of his talents, they were obliged to reckon up a number of hischef-d’œuvresto convince him that they were in earnest. He could hardly believe that any one else thought much of his works, when he thought so little of them himself. Raphael’s Taking down from the Cross is in his early manner, and the outlines of the limbs are like the edges of plates of tin; but it has what was inseparable from his productions, first and last, pregnant expression and careful drawing. I ought to mention that there is, by the same master-hand, a splendid portrait of Cæsar Borgia, which is an addition to my list. The complexion is a strange mixture of orange and purple. The hair of his sister, Lucretia Borgia (the friend and mistress of Cardinal Bembo) is still preserved in Italy, and a lock of it was in the possession of Lord Byron. I lately saw it in company with that of Miltonand of Bonaparte, looking calm, golden, beautiful, a smiling trophy from the grave! The number and progressive improvement of Raphael’s works in Italy is striking. It might teach our holiday artists that to do well is to do much. Excellence springs up behind us, not before us; and is the result of what we have done, not of what we intend to do. Many artists (especially those abroad, who are distracted with a variety of styles and models) never advance beyond the contemplation of some great work, and think to lay in an unexampled store of accomplishments, before they commence any undertaking. That is where they ought to end; to begin with it is too much. It is as if the foundation-stone should form the cupola of St. Peter’s. Great works are the result of much labour and of many failures, and not of pompous pretensions and fastidious delicacy.
The Corsini pictures are another large and very indifferent collection. All I can recollect worth mentioning are, a very sweet and silvery-toned Herodias, by Guido; a fine landscape, by Gaspar Poussin; an excellent sketch from Ariosto of the Giant Orgagna; and the Plague of Milan by a modern artist, a work of great invention and judgment, and in which the details of the subject are so managed as to affect, and not to shock. The Campidoglio collection is better. There is a large and admirable Guercino, an airy and richly-coloured Guido, some capital little Garofolos, a beautiful copy of a Repose of Titian’s by Pietro da Cortona, several Giorgiones, and a number of antique busts of the most interesting description. Here is the bronze She-Wolf that suckled Romulus and Remus, and the Geese that cackled in the Capitol. I find nothing so delightful as these old Roman heads of Senators, Warriors, Philosophers. They have all the freshness of truth and nature. They shew something substantial in mortality. They are the only things that do not crush and overturn our sense of personal identity; and are a fine relief to the mouldering relics of antiquity, and to the momentary littleness of modern things! The little Farnese contains the Galatea and the Cupid and Psyche. If any thing could have raised my idea of Raphael higher, it would have been some of these frescoes. I would mention the group of the Graces in particular; they are true Goddesses. The fine flowing outline of the limbs, the variety of attitudes, the unconscious grace, the charming unaffected glow of the expression, are inimitable. Raphael never perhaps escaped so completely from the trammels of his first manner, as in this noble series of designs. The Galatea has been injured in colour by the stoves which the Germans, who were quartered there, lighted in the apartment. In the same room is the famous chalk head, said to have been sketched upon the wall by Michael Angelo. The story isprobably a fabrication; the head is as coarse and mechanical as any thing can be. Raphael’s Loggia in the corridors of the Vatican (the subjects of what is called his Bible) appear to me divine in form, relief, conception—above all, the figure of Eve at the forbidden tree; his Stanzas there appear to me divine, more particularly the Heliodorus, the School of Athens, and the Miracle of Bolseno, with all the truth and force of character of Titian’s portraits (I see nothing, however, of his colouring) and his own purity, sweetness, and lofty invention, added to them. His oil pictures there are divine. The Transfiguration is a wonderful collection of fine heads and figures: their fault is, that they are too detached and bare, but it is not true that it embraces two distinct points of time. The event below is going on in the Gospel account, at the same time with the miracle of the Transfiguration above. But I almost prefer to this the Foligno picture: the child with the casket below is of all things the most Raphaelesque, for the sweetness of expression, and the rich pulpy texture of the flesh; and perhaps I prefer even to this the Crowning of the Virgin, with that pure dignified figure of the Madonna sitting in the clouds, and that wonderous emanation of sentiment in the crowd below, near the vase of flowers, all whose faces are bathed in one feeling of ecstatic devotion, as the stream of inspiration flows over them. There is a singular effect of colouring in the lower part of this picture, as if it were painted on slate, and from this cold chilly ground the glow of sentiment comes out perhaps the more strong and effectual. In the same suite of apartments (accessible to students and copyists) are the Death of St. Jerome, by Domenichino; and the Vision of St. Romuald, by Andrea Sacchi, the last of the Italian painters. Five nobler or more impressive pictures are not in the world. A single figure of St. Michelle (as a pilgrim among the Alps) is a pure rich offering of the pencil to legendary devotion, and remarkable for the simplicity of the colouring, sweetness of the expression, and the gloomy splendour of the background. There are no others equally good. The Vatican contains numberless fine statues and other remains of antiquity, elegant and curious. The Apollo I do not admire, but the Laocoon appears to me admirable, for the workmanship, for the muscular contortions of the father’s figure, and the divine expression of the sentiment of pain and terror in the children. They are, however, rather small than young. Canova’s figures here seem to me the work of an accomplished sculptor, but not of a great man. Michael Angelo’s figures of Day and Night, at the Chapel of St. Lorenzo at Florence, are those of a great man; whether of a perfect sculptor or not, I will not pretend to say. The neck of the Night is curved like thehorse’s, the limbs have the involution of serpents. These two figures and his transporting the Pantheon to the top of St. Peter’s, have settled my wavering idea of this mighty genius, which his David and early works at Florence had staggered. His Adam receiving life from his Creator, in the Sistine Chapel, for boldness and freedom, is more like the Elgin Theseus than any other figure I have seen. The Jeremiah in the same ceiling droops and bows the head like a willow-tree surcharged with showers. Whether there are any faces worthy of these noble figures I have not been near enough to see. Those near the bottom of the Last Judgment are hideous, vulgar caricatures of demons and cardinals, and the whole is a mass of extravagance and confusion. I shall endeavour to get a nearer view of the Prophets and Sybils in the Capella Sistina. And if I can discover an expression and character of thought in them equal to their grandeur of form, I shall not be slow to acknowledge it. Michael Angelo is one of those names that cannot be shaken without pulling down Fame itself. The Vatican is rich in pictures, statuary, tapestry, gardens, and in the views from it; but its immense size is divided into too many long and narrow compartments, and it wants the unity of effect and imposing gravity of the Louvre.
There are two things that an Englishman understands, hard words and hard blows. Nothing short of this (generally speaking) excites his attention or interests him in the least. His neighbours have the benefit of the one in war time, and his own countrymen of the other in time of peace. The French express themselves astonished at the feats which our Jack Tars have so often performed. A fellow in that class of life in England will strike his hand through a deal board—first, to shew his strength, which he is proud of; secondly, to give him a sensation, which he is in want of; lastly to prove his powers of endurance, which he also makes a boast of. So qualified, a controversy with a cannon-ball is not much out of his way: a thirty-two pounder is rather anugly customer, but it presents him with a tangible idea (a thing he is always in search of)—and, should it take off his head or carry away one of his limbs, he does not feel the want of the one or care for that of the other. Naturally obtuse, his feelings become hardened by custom; or if there are any qualms of repugnance or dismay left, a volley of oaths, a few coarse jests, and a double allowance of grog soon turn the affair into a pastime. Stung withwounds, stunned with bruises, bleeding and mangled, an English sailor never finds himself so much alive as when he is flung half dead into the cockpit; for he then perceives the extreme consciousness of his existence in his conflict with external matter, in the violence of his will, and his obstinate contempt for suffering. He feels his personal identity on the side of the disagreeable and repulsive; and it is better to feel it so than to be a stock or a stone, which is his ordinary state. Pain puts life into him; action, soul: otherwise, he is a mere log. The English are not like a nation of women. They are not thin-skinned, nervous, or effeminate, but dull and morbid: they look danger and difficulty in the face, and shake hands with death as with a brother. They do not hold up their heads, but they will turn their backs on no man: they delight in doing and in bearing more than others: what every one else shrinks from through aversion to labour or pain, they are attracted to, and go through with, and so far (and so far only) they are a great people. At least, it cannot be denied that they are apugnaciousset. Their heads are so full of this, that if a Frenchman speaks ofScribe, the celebrated farce-writer, a young Englishman present will suppose he means Cribb the boxer; and ten thousand people assembled at a prize-fight will witness an exhibition of pugilism with the same breathless attention and delight as the audience at theThéatre Françaislisten to the dialogue of Racine or Molière. Assuredly,wedo not pay the same attention to Shakspeare: but at a boxing-match every Englishman feels his power to give and take blows increased by sympathy, as at a French theatre every spectator fancies that the actors on the stage talk, laugh, and make love as he would. A metaphysician might say, that the English perceive objects chiefly by their mere material qualities of solidity, inertness, and impenetrability, or by their own muscular resistance to them; that they do not care about the colour, taste, smell, the sense of luxury or pleasure:—they require the heavy, hard, and tangible only, something for them to grapple with and resist, to try their strength and their unimpressibility upon. They do not like to smell to a rose, or to taste of made-dishes, or to listen to soft music, or to look at fine pictures, or to make or hear fine speeches, or to enjoy themselves or amuse others; but they will knock any man down who tells them so, and their sole delight is to be as uncomfortable and disagreeable as possible. To them the greatest labour is to be pleased: they hate to have nothing to find fault with: to expect them to smile or to converse on equal terms, is the heaviest tax you can levy on their want of animal spirits or intellectual resources. A drop of pleasure is the most difficult thing to extract from their hard, dry, mechanical, husky frame; a civil word or look is the last thingthey can part with. Hence thematter-of-factnessof their understandings, their tenaciousness of reason or prejudice, their slowness to distinguish, their backwardness to yield, their mechanical improvements, their industry, their courage, their blunt honesty, their dislike to the frivolous and florid, their love of liberty out of hatred to oppression, and their love of virtue from their antipathy to vice. Hence also their philosophy, from their distrust of appearances and unwillingness to be imposed upon; and even their poetry has its probable source in the same repining, discontented humour, which flings them from cross-grained realities into the region of lofty and eager imaginations.[44]—A French gentleman, a man of sense and wit, expressed his wonder that all the English did not go and live in the South of France, where they would have a beautiful country, a fine climate, and every comfort almost for nothing. He did not perceive that they would go back in shoals from this scene of fancied contentment to their fogs and sea-coal fires, and that no Englishman can live without something to complain of. Some persons are sorry to see our countrymen abroad cheated, laughed at, quarrelling at all the inns they stop at:—while they are inhot-water, while they think themselves ill-used and have but the spirit to resent it, they are happy. As long as they can swear, they are excused from being complimentary: if they have to fight, they need not think: while they are provoked beyond measure, they are released from the dreadful obligation of being pleased. Leave them to themselves, and they are dull: introduce them into company, and they are worse. It is the incapacity of enjoyment that makes them sullen and ridiculous; the mortification they feel at not having their own way in everything, and at seeing others delighted without asking their leave, that makes them haughty and distant. An Englishman is silent abroad from having nothing to say; and he looks stupid, because he is so. It is kind words and graceful acts that afflict his soul—an appearance of happiness, which he suspects to be insincere because he cannot enter into it, and a flow of animal spirits which dejects him the more frommaking him feel the want of it in himself; pictures that he does not understand, music that he does not feel, love that he cannot make, suns that shine out of England, and smiles more radiant than they! Do not stifle him with roses: do not kill him with kindness: leave him some pretext to grumble, to fret, and torment himself. Point at him as he drives an English mail-coach about the streets of Paris or of Rome, to relieve his despair oféclatby affording him a pretence to horsewhip some one. Be disagreeable, surly, lying, knavish, impertinent out of compassion; insult, rob him, and he will thank you; take any thing from him (nay even his life) sooner than his opinion of himself and his prejudices against others, his moody dissatisfaction and his contempt for every one who is not in as ill a humour as he is.
John Bull is certainly a singular animal. It is the being the beast he is that has made a man of him. If he do not take care what he is about, the same ungoverned humour will be his ruin. He must have something to butt at; and it matters little to him whether it be friend or foe, provided only he canrun-a-muck. He must have a grievance to solace him, a bugbear of some sort or other to keep himself in breath: otherwise, he droops and hangs the head—he is no longer John Bull, but John Ox, according to a happy allusion of the Poet-Laureate’s. This necessity of John’s to be repulsive (right or wrong) has been lately turned against himself, to the detriment of others, and his proper cost. Formerly, the Pope, the Devil, the Inquisition, and the Bourbons, served the turn, with all of whom he is at present sworn friends, unless Mr. Canning should throw out atub to a whalein South America: then Bonaparte took the lead for awhile in John’s panic-struck brain; and latterly, the Whigs and theExaminernewspaper have borne the bell before all other topics of abuse and obloquy. Formerly, liberty was the word with John,—now it has become a bye-word. Whoever is not determined to make a slave and a drudge of him, he defies, he sets at, he tosses in the air, he tramples under foot; and after having mangled and crushed whom he pleases, stands stupid and melancholy (fænum in cornu) over the lifeless remains of his victim. When his fury is over, he repents of what he has done—too late. In his tame fit, and having made a clear stage of all who would or could direct him right, he is led gently by the nose by Mr. Croker; and the ‘Stout Gentleman’ gets upon his back, making a monster of him. Why is there a tablet stuck up in St. Peter’s at Rome, to the memory of the three last of the Stuarts? Is it abaisés mainsto the Pope, or a compromise with legitimacy? Is the dread of usurpation become so strong, that a reigning family are half-ready to acknowledge themselves usurpers, in favour of those who arenot likely to come back to assert their claim, and to countenance the principles that may keep them on a throne, in lieu of the paradoxes that placed them there? It is a handsome way of paying for a kingdom with an epitaph, and of satisfying the pretensions of the living and the dead. But we did not expel the slavish and tyrannical Stuarts from our soil by the volcanic eruption of 1688, to send a whining Jesuitical recantation andwrit of errorafter them to the other world a hundred years afterwards. But it may be said that the inscription is merely a tribute of respect to misfortune. What! from that quarter? No! it is a ‘lily-livered,’ polished, courtly, pious monument to the fears that have so long beset the hearts of Monarchs, to the pale apparitions of Kings dethroned or beheaded in time past or to come (from that sad example) to the crimson flush of victory, which has put out the light of truth, and to the reviving hope of that deathless night of ignorance and superstition, when they shall once more reign as Gods upon the earth, and make of their enemies their footstool! Foreigners cannot comprehend this bear-garden work of ours at all: they ‘perceive a fury, but nothing wherefore.’ They cannot reconcile the violence of our wills with the dulness of our apprehensions, nor account for the fuss we make about nothing; our convulsions and throes without end or object, the pains we take to defeat ourselves and others, and to undo all that we have ever done, sooner than any one else should share the benefit of it. They think it is strange, that out of mere perversity and contradiction we would rather be slaves ourselves, than suffer others to be free; that webackout of our most heroic acts and disavow our favourite maxims (the blood-stained devices in our national coat of arms) the moment we find others disposed to assent to or imitate us, and that we would willingly see the last hope of liberty and independence extinguished, sooner than give the smallest credit to those who sacrifice every thing to keep the spark alive, or abstain from joining in every species of scurrility, insult, and calumny against them, if the word is once given by the whippers-in of power. The English imagination is notriante: it inclines to the gloomy and morbid with a heavy instinctive bias, and when fear and interest are thrown into the scale, down it goes with a vengeance that is not to be resisted, and from the effects of which it is not easy to recover. The enemies of English liberty are aware of this weakness in the public mind, and make a notable use of it.
‘But that two-handed engine at the doorStands ready to smite once and smite no more.’
‘But that two-handed engine at the doorStands ready to smite once and smite no more.’
‘But that two-handed engine at the doorStands ready to smite once and smite no more.’
‘But that two-handed engine at the door
Stands ready to smite once and smite no more.’
Give a dog an ill name, and hang him—so says the proverb. The courtiers say, ‘Give apatriotan ill name, and ruin him’ alike withWhig and Tory—with the last, because he hates you as a friend to freedom; with the first, because he is afraid of being implicated in the same obloquy with you. This is the reason why the Magdalen Muse of Mr. Thomas Moore finds a taint in theLiberal; why Mr. Hobhouse visits Pisa, to dissuade Lord Byron from connecting himself with any but gentlemen-born, for the credit of the popular cause. Set about a false report or insinuation, and the effect is instantaneous and universally felt—prove that there is nothing in it, and you are just where you were. Something wrong somewhere, in reality or imagination, in public or in private, is necessary to the minds of the English people: bring a charge against any one, and they hug you to their breasts: attempt to take it from them, and they resist it as they would an attack upon their persons or property: a nickname is to their moody, splenetic humour a freehold estate, from which they will not be ejected by fair means or foul: they conceive they have avested rightin calumny. No matter how base the lie, how senseless the jest, ittells—because the public appetite greedily swallows whatever is nauseous and disgusting, and refuses, through weakness or obstinacy, to disgorge it again. Therefore Mr. Croker plies his dirty task—and is a Privy-councillor; Mr. Theodore Hook calls Mr. Waithman ‘Lord Waithman’ once a week, and passes for a wit!
I had the good fortune to meet the other day at Paris with my old fellow-student Dr. E——, after a lapse of thirty years; he is older than I by a year or two, and makes it five-and-twenty. He had not been idle since we parted. He sometimes looked in, after having paid La Place a visit; and I told him it was almost as if he had called on a star in his way. It is wonderful how friendship, that has long lain unused, accumulates like money at compound interest. We had to settle a long account, and to compare old times and new. He was naturally anxious to learn the state of our politics and literature, and was not a little mortified to hear that England, ‘whose boast it was to give out reformation to the world,’ had changed her motto, and was now bent on propping up the continental despotisms, and on lashing herself to them. He was particularly mortified at the degraded state of our public press—at the systematic organization of a corps of government-critics to decry every liberal sentiment, and proscribe every liberal writer as an enemy to the person of the reigning sovereign, only because he did not avow the principles of the Stuarts. I had some difficulty in making him understand the full lengths of the malice, the lying, the hypocrisy, the sleek adulation, the meanness, equivocation, and skulking concealment, of aQuarterly Reviewer,[45]
the reckless blackguardism ofMr. Blackwood, and the obtuse drivelling profligacy of theJohn Bull. He said, ‘It is worse with you than with us: here an author is obliged to sacrifice twenty mornings and twenty pair of black silk-stockings, in paying his court to the Editors of different journals, to ensure a hearing from the public; but with you, it seems, he must give up his understanding and his character, to establish a claim to taste or learning.’ He asked if the scandal could not be disproved, and retorted on the heads of the aggressors: but I said that these were persons of no character, or studiously screened by their employers; and besides, the English imagination was a bird of heavy wing, that, if once dragged through the kennel of Billingsgate abuse, could not well raise itself out of it again. He could hardly believe that under the Hanover dynasty (a dynasty founded to secure us against tyranny) a theatrical licenser had struck the word ‘tyrant’ out of Mr. Shee’s tragedy, as offensive to ears polite, or as if from this time forward there could be supposed to be no such thing inrerum naturâ; and that the common ejaculation, ‘Good God!’ was erased from the same piece, as in a strain of too great levity in this age of cant. I told him that public opinion in England was at present governed by half a dozen miscreants, who undertook to bait, hoot, and worry every man out of his country, or into an obscure grave, with lies and nicknames, who was not prepared to take the political sacrament of the day, and use his best endeavours (he and his friends) to banish the last traces of freedom, truth, and honesty from the land. ‘To be direct and honest is not safe.’ To be a Reformer, the friend of a Reformer, or the friend’s friend of a Reformer, is as much as a man’s peace, reputation, or even life is worth. Answer, if it is not so, pale shade of Keats, or living mummy of William Gifford! Dr. E—— was unwilling to credit this statement, but the proofs were too flagrant. He asked me what became of that band of patriots that swarmed inouryounger days, that were so glowing-hot, desperate, and noisy in the year 1794? I said I could not tell; but referred him to our present Poet-Laureate for an account of them!
——‘Can these things be,And overcome us like a summer-cloud,Without a special wonder?’
——‘Can these things be,And overcome us like a summer-cloud,Without a special wonder?’
——‘Can these things be,And overcome us like a summer-cloud,Without a special wonder?’
——‘Can these things be,
And overcome us like a summer-cloud,
Without a special wonder?’
I suspect it is peculiar to the English not to answer the letters of their friends abroad. They know you are anxious to hear, and have a surly, sullen pleasure in disappointing you. To oblige is a thing abhorrent to their imaginations; to be uneasy at not hearing from home just when one wishes, is a weakness which they cannot encourage. Any thing like a responsibility attached to their writing is a kind of restraint upon their free-will, an interference with their independence. There is a sense of superiority in not letting you know what you wish to know, and in keeping you in a state of helpless suspense. Besides, they think you are angry at their not writing, and would make themif you could; and they show their resentment of your impatience and ingratitude by continuing not to write.—One thing truly edifying in the accounts from England, is the number of murders and robberies with which the newspapers abound. One would suppose that the repetition of the details, week after week, and day after day, might stagger us a little as to our superlative idea of the goodness, honesty, and industry of the English people. No such thing: whereas one similar fact occurring once a year abroad fills us with astonishment, and makes us ready todubthe Italians (without any further inquiry) a nation of assassins and banditti. It is not safe to live or travel among them. Is it not strange, that we should persist in drawing such wilful conclusions from such groundless premises? A murder or a street-robbery in London is a matter of course[46]: accumulate a score of these under the most aggravated circumstances one upon the back of the other, in town and country, in the course of a few weeks—they all go for nothing; they make nothing against the English character in the abstract; the force of prejudice is stronger than the weight of evidence. The process of the mind is this; and absurd as it appears, is natural enough. We say (to ourselves) we are English,weare good people, and therefore the English are good people. We carry a proxy in our bosoms for the national character in general. Our own motives are ‘very stuff o’ the conscience,’ and not like those of barbarous foreigners. Besides, we know many excellent English people, and the mass of the population cannot be affected in the scale of morality by the outrages of a few ruffians, which instantly meet with the reward they merit from wholesome and excellent laws. We are not to be moved from this position, that the great body of the British public do not live by thieving and cutting the throats of their neighbours,whatever the accounts in the newspapers might lead us to suspect. The streets are lined with bakers’, butchers’, and haberdashers’ shops, instead of night-cellars and gaming-houses; and are crowded with decent, orderly, well-dressed people, instead of being rendered impassable by gangs of swindlers and pickpockets.The exception does not make the rule.Nothing can be more clear or proper; and yet if a single Italian commit a murder or a robbery, we immediately form an abstraction of this individual case, and because we are ignorant of the real character of the people or state of manners in a million of instances, take upon us, like true Englishmen, to fill up the blank, which is left at the mercy of our horror-struck imaginations, with bugbears and monsters of every description. We should extend to others the toleration and the suspense of judgment we claim; and I am sure we stand in need of it from those who read the important head of ‘Accidents and Offences’ in our Journals. It is true an Italian baker, some time ago, shut his wife up in an oven, where she was burnt to death; the heir of a noble family stabbed an old woman to rob her of her money; a lady of quality had her step-daughter chained to a bed of straw, and fed on bread and water till she lost her senses. This translated into vulgar English means that all the bakers’ wives in Italy are burnt by their husbands at a slow fire; that all the young nobility are common bravoes; that all the step-mothers exercise unheard-of and unrelenting cruelty on the children of a former marriage. We only want a striking frontispiece to make out a tragic volume. As the traveller advances into the country, robbers and rumours of robbers fly before him with the horizon. In Italy,
‘Man seldom is—but always to berobbed.’
‘Man seldom is—but always to berobbed.’
‘Man seldom is—but always to berobbed.’
‘Man seldom is—but always to berobbed.’
At Turin, they told me it was not wise to travel by a vetturino to Florence without arms. At Florence, I was told one could not walk out to look at an old ruin in Rome, without expecting to see a Lazzaroni start from behind some part of it with a pistol in his hand. ‘There’s no such thing;’ but hatred has its phantoms as well as fear; and the English traduce and indulge their prejudices against other nations in order to have a pretence for maltreating them. This moral delicacy plays an under-game to their political profligacy. I am at present kept from proceeding forward to Naples byimaginarybands of brigands that infest the road the whole way. The fact is, that a gang of banditti, who had committed a number of atrocities and who had their haunts in the mountains near Sonino, were taken up about three years ago, to the amount of two and thirty: four of them were executed at Rome, and their wives still get their livingin this city by sitting as models to artists, on account of the handsomeness of their features and the richness of their dresses. As to courtesans, from which one cannot separate the name of Italy even in idea, I have seen but one person answering to this description since I came, and I do not even know that this was one. But I saw a girl in white (an unusual thing) standing at some distance at the corner of one of the bye-streets in Rome; after looking round her for a moment, she ran hastily up the street again, as if in fear of being discovered, and a countryman who was passing with a cart at the time, stopped to look and hiss after her. If the draymen in London were to stop to gape and hoot at all the girls they see standing at the corners of streets in a doubtful capacity, they would have enough to do. But the tide of public prostitution that pours down all our streets is considered by some moralists as a drain to carry off the peccant humours of private life, and to keep the inmost recesses of the female breast sweet and pure from blemish! If this is to be the test, we have indeed nearly arrived at the idea of a perfect commonwealth.
Cicisbeismis still kept up in Italy, though somewhat on the decline. I have nothing to say in favour of that anomaly in vice and virtue. The English women are particularly shocked at it, who are allowed to hate their husbands, provided they do not like any body else. It is a kind ofmarriage within a marriage; it begins with infidelity to end in constancy; it is not a state of licensed dissipation, but is a real chain of the affections, superadded to the first formal one, and that often lasts for life. A gay captain in the Pope’s Guard is selected by a lady as hercavalier serventein the prime of life, and is seen digging in the garden of the family in a grey jacket and white hairs thirty years after. This does not look like a love of change. The husband is of course always afixture; not so thecavalier servente, who is liable to be removed for a new favourite. In noble families the lover must be noble; and he must be approved by the husband. A young officer, who the other day volunteered this service to a beautiful Marchioness without either of these titles, and was a sort of interloper on the intended gallant, was sent to Volterra. Whatever is the height to which this system has been carried, or the level to which it has sunk, it does not appear to have extinguished jealousy in all its excess as a part of the national character, as the following story will shew: it is related by M. Beyle, in his charming little work, entitledDe l’Amour, as a companion to the famous one in Dante; and I shall give the whole passage in his words, as placing the Italian character (in former as well as latter times) in a striking point of view.
‘I allude,’ he says, ‘to those touching lines of Dante;—
‘Deh! quando tu sarai tornato al mondo,Ricordati di me, che son la Pia;Sienna mi fê: disfecemi Maremma:Salsi colui, che inannellata pria,Disposando, m’avea con la sua gemma.’—Purgatorio,c.5.
‘Deh! quando tu sarai tornato al mondo,Ricordati di me, che son la Pia;Sienna mi fê: disfecemi Maremma:Salsi colui, che inannellata pria,Disposando, m’avea con la sua gemma.’—Purgatorio,c.5.
‘Deh! quando tu sarai tornato al mondo,Ricordati di me, che son la Pia;Sienna mi fê: disfecemi Maremma:Salsi colui, che inannellata pria,Disposando, m’avea con la sua gemma.’—Purgatorio,c.5.
‘Deh! quando tu sarai tornato al mondo,
Ricordati di me, che son la Pia;
Sienna mi fê: disfecemi Maremma:
Salsi colui, che inannellata pria,
Disposando, m’avea con la sua gemma.’—Purgatorio,c.5.
‘The woman who speaks with so much reserve, had in secret undergone the fate of Desdemona, and had it in her power, by a single word, to have revealed her husband’s crime to the friends whom she had left upon earth.
‘Nello della Pietra obtained in marriage the hand of Madonna Pia, sole heiress of the Ptolomei, the richest and most noble family of Sienna. Her beauty, which was the admiration of all Tuscany, gave rise to a jealousy in the breast of her husband, that, envenomed by false reports and by suspicions continually reviving, led to a frightful catastrophe. It is not easy to determine at this day if his wife was altogether innocent; but Dante has represented her as such. Her husband carried her with him into the marshes of Volterra, celebrated then, as now, for the pestiferous effects of the air. Never would he tell his unhappy wife the reason of her banishment into so dangerous a place. His pride did not deign to pronounce either complaint or accusation. He lived with her alone, in a deserted tower, of which I have been to see the ruins on the sea-shore; here he never broke his disdainful silence, never replied to the questions of his youthful bride, never listened to her entreaties. He waited unmoved by her for the air to produce its fatal effects. The vapours of this unwholesome swamp were not long in tarnishing features the most beautiful, they say, that in that age had appeared upon earth. In a few months she died. Some chroniclers of these remote times report, that Nello employed the dagger to hasten her end: she died in the marshes in some horrible manner; but the mode of her death remained a mystery, even to her contemporaries. Nello della Pietra survived to pass the rest of his days in a silence which was never broken.
‘Nothing can be conceived more noble or more delicate than the manner in which the ill-fated Pia addresses herself to Dante. She desires to be recalled to the memory of the friends whom she had quitted so young: at the same time, in telling her name and alluding to her husband, she does not allow herself the smallest complaint against a cruelty unexampled, but thenceforth irreparable; and merely intimates that he knows the history of her death. This constancy in vengeance and in suffering is to be met with, I believe, only amongthe people of the South. In Piedmont, I found myself the involuntary witness of a fact almost similar; but I was at the time ignorant of the details. I was ordered with five-and-twenty dragoons into the woods that border the Sesia, to prevent the contraband traffic. On my arrival in the evening at this wild and solitary place, I distinguished among the trees the ruins of an old castle: I went to it: to my great surprise, it was inhabited. I there found a Nobleman of the country, of a very unpromising aspect; a man six feet in height, and forty years of age: he allowed me a couple of apartments with a very ill grace. Here I entertained myself by getting up some pieces of music with my quarter-master: after the expiration of some days, we discovered that our host kept guard over a woman whom we called Camilla in jest: we were far from suspecting the dreadful truth. She died at the end of six weeks. I had the melancholy curiosity to see her in her coffin; I bribed a monk who had charge of it, and towards midnight, under pretext of sprinkling the holy water, he conducted me into the chapel. I there saw one of those fine faces, which are beautiful even in the bosom of death: she had a large aquiline nose, of which I never shall forget the noble and expressive outline. I quitted this mournful spot; but five years after, a detachment of my regiment accompanying the Emperor to his coronation as King of Italy, I had the whole story recounted to me. I learned that the jealous husband, the Count of ——, had one morning found, hanging to his wife’s bedside, an English watch belonging to a young man in the little town where they lived. The same day he took her to the ruined castle, in the midst of the forests of the Sesia. Like Nello della Pietra, he uttered not a single word. If she made him any request, he presented to her sternly and in silence the English watch, which he had always about him. In this manner he passed nearly three years with her. She at length fell a victim to despair, in the flower of her age. Her husband attempted to dispatch the owner of the watch with a stiletto, failed, fled to Genoa, embarked there, and no tidings have been heard of him since. His property was confiscated.’—De l’Amour, vol i. p. 131.
This story is interesting and well told. One such incident, or one page in Dante or in Spenser is worth all the route between this and Paris, and all the sights in all the post-roads in Europe. Oh Sienna! if I felt charmed with thy narrow, tenantless streets, or looked delighted through thy arched gateway over the subjected plain, it was that some recollections of Madonna Pia hung upon the beatings of my spirit, and converted a barren waste into the regions of romance!
CHAPTER XXI
We had some thoughts of taking a lodging at L’Ariccia, at the Caffé del Piazza, for a month, but the deep sandy roads, the centinels posted every half-mile on this, which is the route for Naples (which shewed that it was not very safe to leave them), the loose, straggling woods sloping down to the dreary marshes, and the story of Hippolitus painted on the walls of the inn (who, it seems, was ‘native to the manner here’), deterred us. L’Ariccia, besides being, after Cortona, the oldest place in Italy, is also one step towards Naples, which I had a strong desire to see—its brimming shores, its sky which glows like one entire sun, Vesuvius, the mouth of Hell, and Sorrentum, like the Islands of the Blest—yet here again the reports of robbers, exaggerated alike by foreigners and natives, who wish to keep you where you are, the accounts of hogs without hair, and children without clothes to their backs, the vermin (animal as well as human), the gilded hams and legs of mutton that Forsyth speaks of, gave me a distaste to the journey, and I turned back to put an end to the question. I am fond of the sun, though I do not like to see him and the assassin’s knife glaring over my head together. As to the real amount of the danger of travelling this road, as far as I can learn, it is this—there is at present a possibility but no probability of your being robbed or kidnapped, if you go in the day-time and by the common method of a Vetturino, stopping two nights on the road. If you go alone, and with a determination to set time, place, and circumstances at defiance, like a personified representation of John Bull, maintaining the character of your countrymen for sturdiness and independence of spirit, you stand a very good chance of being shot through the head: the same thing might happen to you, if you refused your money to an English footpad; but if you give it freely, like a gentleman, and do not stand too nicely upon a punctilio, they let you pass like one. If you have no money about you, you must up into the mountain, and wait till you can get it. For myself, my remittances have not been very regular even in walled towns; how I should fare in this respect upon the forked mountain, I cannot tell, and certainly I have no wish to try. A friend of mine said that he thought itthe only romantic thing going, this of being carried off by the banditti; that life was become too tame and insipid without such accidents, and that it would not be amiss to put one’s-self in the way of such an adventure, like putting in for the grand prize in the lottery. Assuredly, one is not likely to go to sleep in such circumstances: one person who was detainedin this manner, and threatened every hour with being despatched, went mad in consequence. A French Artist was laid hold of by a gang of the outlaws, as he was sketching in the neighbourhood of their haunts, about a year ago; he did not think their mode of life at all agreeable. As he had no money, they employed him in making sketches of their heads, with which they were exceedingly delighted. Their vanity kept him continually on the alert when they had a moment’s leisure; and, besides, he was fatigued almost to death, for they made long marches of from forty to fifty miles a day, and scarcely ever rested more than one night in the same place. They travelled through bye-roads (in constant apprehension of the military) in parties of five or six, and met at some common rendezvous at night-fall. He was in no danger from them in the day-time; but at night they sat up drinking and carousing, and when they were in this state of excitement, he was in considerable jeopardy from their violence or sportive freaks: they amused themselves with presenting their loaded pieces at his breast, or threatened to dispatch him if he did not promise to procure ransom. At last he effected his escape in one of their drunken bouts. Their seizure of the Austrian officer last year was singular enough: they crept for above a mile on their hands and knees, from the foot of the mountain which was their place of retreat, and carried off their prize in the same manner, so as to escape the notice of the sentinels who were stationed at short distances on the road side. Some years since a plan was laid to carry off Lucien Buonaparte from his villa at Frascati, about eleven miles from Rome, on the Albano side, where the same range of Apennines begins: he was walking in his garden and saw them approaching through some trees, for his glance is quick and furtive; he retired into the house, his valet came out to meet them, who passed himself off for his master, they were delighted with their sham-prize, and glad to take 4,000 crowns to release him. Since then Lucien Buonaparte has lived in Rome. I remember once meeting this celebrated character in the streets of Paris, walking arm in arm with Maria Cosway, with whom I had drunk tea the evening before. He was dressed in a light drab-coloured great-coat, and was then a spirited, dashing-looking young man. I believe I am the only person in England who ever read hisCharlemagne. It is as clever a poem as can be written by a man who is not a poet. It came out in two volumes quarto, and several individuals were applied to by the publishers to translate it; among others Sir Walter Scott, who gave for answer, ‘that as to Mister Buonaparte’s poem, he should have nothing to do with it.’ Such was the petty spite of this understrapper of greatness and of titles, himself since titled, the scale of whose intellect can be equalledby nothing but the pitifulness and rancour of his prejudices! The last account I have heard of the exploits of Neapolitan banditti is, that they had seized upon two out of three Englishmen, who had determined upon passing through Calabria on their way to Sicily, and were proceeding beyond Pæstum for this purpose. They were told by the Commandant there, that this was running into the lion’s mouth, that there were no patrols to protect them farther, and that they were sure to be intercepted; but an Englishman’s will is his law—they went forward—and succeeded in getting themselves intothe only remaining romantic situation. I have not heard whether they have yet got out of it. The national propensity to contend with difficulty and to resist obstacles is curious, perhaps praiseworthy. A young Englishman returned the other day to Italy with a horse that he had brought with him for more than two thousand miles on the other side of Grand Cairo; and poor Bowdich gave up the ghost in a second attempt to penetrate to the source of the Niger, the encouragement to persevere being in proportion to the impossibility of success! I am myself somewhat effeminate, and would rather ‘the primrose path of dalliance tread;’ or the height of my ambition in this line would be to track the ancient route up the valley of the Simplon, leaving the modern road (much as I admire the work and the workman), and clambering up the ledges of rocks, and over broken bridges, at the risk of a sprained ankle or a broken limb, to return to a late, but excellent dinner at the post-house at Brigg!
What increases the alarm of robbers in the South of Italy, is the reviving of old stories, like the multiplication of echoes, and shifting their dates indefinitely, so as to excite the fears of the listener, or answer the purposes of the speaker. About three years ago, a desperate gang of ruffians infested the passes of the Abruzzi, and committed a number of atrocities; but this gang, to the amount of about thirty, were seized and broken up, their ringleaders beheaded in the Square di Popolo at Rome, and their wives or mistresses now live there by sitting for their pictures to English artists. The remainder figure as convicts in striped yellow and brown dresses in the streets of Rome, and very civilly pull off their hats to strangers as they pass. By the way, I cannot help reprobating this practice of employing felons as common labourers in places of public resort. Either you must be supposed to keep up your feelings of dislike and indignation against them while thus mixing with the throng and innocently employed, which is a disagreeable and forced operation of the sense of justice; or if you retain no such feelings towards these victims of the law, then why do they retain the chains on their feet and ugly badges on their shoulders? If the thing is to be treatedseriously, it is painful: if lightly and good-humouredly, it turns the whole affair into a farce or drama, with as little of the useful as the pleasant in it. I know nothing of these people that I see manacled and branded, but that they are labouring in a broiling sun for my convenience; if one of them were to break loose, I should not care to stop him. When we witness the punishments of individuals, we should know their crimes; or at least their punishment and their delinquency should not be mixed up indiscriminately with the ordinary gaieties and business of human life. It is a chapter of the volume that should be read apart! About six months ago, twenty-two brigands came down from the mountains at Velletri, and carried off four young women from the village. A Vetturino, who wished me to return with him to Florence, spoke of this as having happened the week before. There is a band of about ninety banditti scattered through the mountains near Naples. Some years ago they were the terror of travellers: at present they are more occupied in escaping from the police themselves. But by thus confounding dates and names, all parts of the road are easily filled all the year round with nothing but robbers and rumours of robbers. In short, any one I believe can pass with proper precaution from Rome to Naples and back again, with tolerable, if not with absolute security. If he can guard equally against petty thieving and constant imposition for the rest of his route, it will be well.
Before leaving Rome, we went to Tivoli, of which so much has been said. The morning was bright and cloudless; but a thick mist rose from the low, rank, marshy grounds of the Campagna, and enveloped a number of curious objects to the right and left, till we approached the sulphurous stream of Solfatara, which we could distinguish at some distance by its noise and smell, and which crossing the road like a blue ugly snake, infects the air in its hasty progress to the sea. The bituminous lake from which it springs is about a mile distant, and has the remains of an ancient temple on its borders. Farther on is a round brick tower, the tomb of the Plautian family, and Adrian’s villa glimmers with its vernal groves and nodding arches to the right. In Rome, around it nothing strikes the eye, nothing rivets the attention but ruins, the fragments of what has been; the past is like ahaloforever surrounding and obscuring the present! Ruins should be seen in a desert, like those of Palmyra, and a pilgrimage should be made to them; but who would take up his abode among tombs? Or if there be a country and men in it, why have they nothing to shew but the relics of antiquity, or why are the living contented to crawl about like worms, or to hover like shadows in the monuments of the dead? Every object he sees reminds the modernRoman that he is nothing—the spirits of former times overshadow him, and dwarf his pigmy efforts: every object he sees reminds the traveller that greatness is its own grave. Glory cannot last; for when a thing is once done, it need not be done again, and with the energy to act, a people lose the privilegeto be. They repose upon the achievements of their ancestors; and because every thing has been done for them, sink into torpor, and dwindle into the counterfeits of what they were. The Greeks will not recover their freedom till they forget that they had ancestors, for nothingistwice because itwasonce. The Americans will perhaps lose theirs, when they begin fully to reap all the fruits of it; for the energy necessary to acquire freedom, and the ease that follows the enjoyment of it, are almost incompatible. If Italy should ever be any thing again, it will be when the tokens of her former glory, pictures, statues, triumphal arches are mouldered in the dust, and she has to re-tread the gradual stages of civilization, from primeval barbarism to the topmost round of luxury and refinement; or when some new light gives her a new impulse; or when the last oppression (such as in all probability impends over her) equally contrary to former independence, to modern apathy, stinging her to the quick, once more kindles the fire in her eye, and twines the deadly terrors on her brow. Then she might have music in her streets, the dance beneath her vines, inhabitants in her houses, business in her shops, passengers in her roads, commerce on her shores, honesty in her dealings, openness in her looks, books for the censorship, the love of right for the fear of power, and a calculation of consequences from a knowledge of principles—and England, like the waning moon, would grow pale in the rising dawn of liberty, that she had in vain tried to tarnish and obscure!Mais assez des reflexions pour un voyageur.
Tivoli is an enchanting—a fairy spot. Its rocks, its grottos, its temples, its waterfalls, and the rainbows reflected on them, answer to the description, and make a perfect play upon the imagination. Every object is light and fanciful, yet steeped in classic recollections. The whole is a fine net-work—a rare assemblage of intricate and high-wrought beauties. To do justice to the scene would require the pen of Mr. Moore, minute and striking as it is, sportive yet romantic, displaying all the fascinations of sense, and unfolding the mysteries of sentiment,