Roman Holidays, and Others Part 10

VIII. OVER AT PISA

If the half-hour between Leghorn and Pisa had been spent in any less lovely transit, I should still be grieving for the loss of the thirty minutes which might so much better have been given to either place. But with the constant line of mountains enclosing the landscape on the right, in all its variety of tillage, pasture-land, vineyard, and orchard, and the unchanging level which had once been the bed of the sea, we were gainers in sort beyond the gift of those cities. We had the company, great part of the way, of more stone-pines than we had seen even between Naples and Rome, here gathering into thick woods, with the light beautiful beneath the spread of their horizontal boughs, there grouped in cla.s.sic groves, and yonder straying off in twos and threes.

We had the ca.n.a.l that of old time made Pisa a port of the Mediterranean, with Leghorn for her servant on the sh.o.r.e (or, if it was not this ca.n.a.l, it was another as straight and long), with a peasant walking beside it, under a light-green umbrella, in the showers which threatened our start but spared our arrival. We had then the city, with its domes and towers, grown full height out of the plain through which the Arno curves in the stateliest crescent of all its course.

The day had turned finer than any other day I can now think of in my whole life, and I was once more in Pisa without the care for its history or art or even novelty which had corroded my mind in former visits. I had been there twice before--once in 1864, when I had done its wonders with all the wonder they merited, and again in 1883, when I had lived its memories on the scene of its manifold and mighty experiences. No distinct light from that learning vexed my present vision, but an agreeable mist of a.s.sociation, nothing certain, nothing tangible remaining, but only a gentle vague involving everything, in which I could possess my soul in peace. In this glimmer I recognized a certain cabman as having been waiting there from the dawn of time, with his dark-eyed little son, to make me his willing captive at something above the tariff rates, but destined by the same fate to serve me well, and to part with me friends at the close of the day for a franc more than the excess agreed upon. It costs so small a sum to corrupt the common carrier in Italy that I hold it wrong to fail of any chance, and this driver had not only a horse of uncommon qualities, but he spoke a beautiful Tuscan, and he had his Pisa at his fingers' ends.

[Ill.u.s.tration: 47 THE CATHEDRAL, BAPTISTERY, AND LEANING TOWER, PISA]

We were of one mind about driving without delay to the famous group which is without rival on the earth, though there may be a.s.sociated edifices in the red planet Mars that surpa.s.s the Cathedral, the Leaning Tower, the Baptistery, and the Campo Santo at Pisa. What genius it was imagined placing them in the pleasant meadow where they sit, just beyond the city streets, I do not know, but it was inspiration beyond any effect of mere taste, and it commanded my wors.h.i.+p as much the last as the first time. The meadow still swims round them and breaks in a foam of daisies at their feet; for I take it that it is always mid-April there, and that the gra.s.s is as green and the sun as yellow on it as the afternoon we saw it. The sacred edifices are as golden as the light on them, and there is such a joyous lift in the air that it is a wonder they do not swing loose from their foundations and soar away into the celestial blue. For travellers in our willing mood there was, of course, the predestined cicerone waiting for us at the door of the cathedral, who would fix no price for the pleasure he was born to do us, yet still consented to take more than twice that he ought to have had at parting.

But he was worth the money; he was worth quite two francs, and, though he was not without the fault of his calling and would have c.u.mbered us with instruction, I will not blame him, for after a moment I perceived that his intelligence was such that I might safely put my hands in my pocket on my shut guide-book and follow him from point to point without fear of missing anything worth noting. Among the things worthiest noting, I saw, as if I had never seen them before, the unforgettable, forgotten Andrea del Sartos, especially the St. Agnes, in whose face you recognize the well-known features of the painter's wife, but with a gentler look than they usually wore in his Madonnas, perhaps because he happened to study these from that difficult lady when she was in her least celestial moods. Besides the masterpieces of other masters, there is a most n.o.ble Sodoma, which the great Napoleon carried away to Paris and which the greater French people afterward restored. At every step in the beautiful temple you may well pause, for it abounds in pictures and sculptures, the least of which would enrich St. Peter's at Rome beyond the proudest effect of its poverty-stricken grandeur. Ghirlandajo, Michelangelo, Gaddo Gaddi, John of Bologna--the names came back to me out of a past of my own almost as remote as theirs, while our guide repeated them, in their relation to the sculptures or pictures or architecture, with those of lesser lights of art, and that school of Giotto, of all whose frescos once covering its walls the fire of three hundred years ago has left a few figures clinging to one of the pillars, faint and uncertain as the memories of my own former visits to the church. I did, indeed, remember me of an old bronze lamp, by Vincenzo Possenti, hanging from the roof, which I now revered the third time, at intervals of twenty years; from its oscillation Galileo is said to have got the notion of the pendulum; but it is now tied back with a wire, being no longer needed for such an inspiration. Mostly in this last visit I took Pisa as lightly as at the first, when, as I have noted from the printed witness, I was gayly indifferent to the claims of her objects of interest. If they came in my way, I looked at them, but I did not put myself much about for them. I rested mostly in the twilight of old a.s.sociations, trusting to the guidance of our cicerone, whom, in some form or under some name, the reader will find waiting for him at the cathedral door as we did. But I have since recurred to the record of my second visit in 1883, with amazement at the exact knowledge of events shown there, which became, in 1908, all a blur of dim conjecture. It appears that I was then acquainted with much more Pisan history than any other author I have found own to. I had also surprising adventures of different kinds, such as my poorer experience of the present cannot parallel. I find, for instance, that in 1883 I gave a needy crone in the cathedral a franc instead of the piece of five centimes which I meant for her, and that the lamp of Galileo did nothing to light the gloom into which this error plunged my spirit.

It appears to have jaundiced my view of the whole cathedral, which I did not find at all comparable to that of Siena, whereas in 1908 I thought it all beautiful. This may have been because I was so newly from the ugliness of the Eoman churches; though I felt, as I had felt before, that the whole group of sacred edifices at Pisa was too suggestive of decorative pastry and confectionery. No more than at the second view of it did I now attempt the ascent of the Leaning Tower; I had discharged this duty for life when I first saw it; with my seventy-one years upon me, I was not willing to climb its winding stairs, and I doubted if I could keep it from falling, as I then did, by inclining myself the other way. I resolved that I would leave this to the new-comer; but I gladly followed our cicerone across the daisied green from the cathedral to the baptistery, where I found the famous echo waiting to welcome me back, and greet me with its angelic sweetness, when the custodian who has it in charge appealed to it; though its voice seemed to have been weakened and coa.r.s.ened in its forced replies to some rude Americans there, who shouted out to it and mocked at it. One wished to ask them if they did not know that this echo was sacred, and that their challenges of it were a species of sacrilege. But doubtless that would not have availed to silence them. By-and-by they went away, and then we were aware of an interesting group of people by the font near the lovely Lombardic pulpit of Nicola Pisano. They were peasants, by their dress--a young father and mother and a little girl or two, and then a gentle, elderly woman, with a baby in her arms, at which she looked proudly down. They were in their simple best, and they had good Tuscan faces, full of kindness. I ventured some propitiatory coppers with the children, and, when the old woman made them thank me, I thought I could not be mistaken and I ventured further: "You are the grandmother?"

"Yes, signer," she answered; and then we had some talk about the age and the beauty of the baby, which I declared wonderful for both, in praises loud enough for the father and mother to hear. After that they seemed to hold a family council, from which I thought it respectful to stand apart until the grandmother spoke to me again.

I did not understand, and I appealed to our guide for help.

"She wishes you to be G.o.dfather to the child."

I had never yet been a G.o.dfather, but I had the belief that it brought grave responsibilities, which in the very casual and impermanent circ.u.mstances I did not see how I was to meet. Yet how to refuse without wounding these kind people who had so honored me I did not know until a sudden inspiration came to my rescue.

"Tell them," I said, "and be careful to make them understand, that I am very grateful and very sorry, but that I am a Protestant, and that I suppose I cannot, for that reason, be G.o.dfather to their child."

He explained, and they received my thanks and regrets with smiling acquiescence; and just then a very stout little old priest (who has baptized nearly all the babies in Pisa for fifty years) came in, and the baptism proceeded without my intervention. But I remained, somehow, disappointed; it would have been pleasant to leave a G.o.dchild behind me there in the neighborhood of Pisa; to have sent him from time to time some little remembrance of this remote America, and, perhaps, when he grew up and came to Pisa, and learned the art of the statuary, to have had from him a Leaning Tower which he had cut in alabaster for me. I was taking it for granted he was a boy, but he may not have been; there is always that chance.

If I had been alone, I suppose I should still have gone into the Campo Santo, from mere force of habit; I always go, in Pisa, but I had now with me clearer eyes for art than mine are, and I wished to have their light on the great allegories and histories frescoed round the cloisters, and test with them the objects of my tacit and explicit reserves and misgivings. I needed such eyes, and even some such powerful gla.s.ses as would have pierced through the faded and wasted pictures and shown them at least as I had first seen them. They were then in such reasonable disrepair as one might expect after three or four centuries, but in the last thirty years a ruinous waste has set in before which not only the colors have faded, but the surfaces have crumbled under the colors; and as yet no man knows how to stop the ravage. I think I have read that it is caused by a germ; but, if not, the loss is the same, and until a parasite for the germ is found the loss must go on, and the work of Giotto, of Benozzo Gozzoli, of Memmi, must perish with that of the Orgagnas, which may indeed go, for all me. Bible stories, miracles, allegories--they are all hasting to decay, and it can be but a few years until they shall vanish like the splendors of the dawn which they typify in art.

In some things the ruin is not altogether to be regretted. It has softened certain loathsome details of the charnel facts portrayed, and in other pictures the torment and anguish of the lost souls are no longer so painful as the old painters ascertained them. h.e.l.l in the Campo Santo is not now the h.e.l.l of other days, just as the h.e.l.l of Christian doctrine is not the h.e.l.l it used to be. Death and the world are indeed immitigable; the corpses in their coffins are as terrifying to the gay lords and ladies who come suddenly upon them as ever they were, though doubtless of no more lasting effect with such sinners than they would be nowadays. But what one must chiefly lament is the waste of the whole quaint and charming series of Scripture incidents by Benozzo Gozzoli. This is indeed most lamentable, and after realizing the loss one is only a little heartened by the gayety of certain grieving widows, sitting in marble for monuments to their husbands at several points under the arcades. What cheer they might have brought us was impaired by the sight of the sarcophaguses and the other antiques against the walls, which inflicted an inappeasable ache for the city where such things abound, and brought our refluent Romesickness back full tide upon us.

More than once Pisa elsewhere did us the like involuntary unkindness; she, too, is yellow and mellow like Rome, and she had moments of the Piazza Navona and the Piazza di Spagna which were poignant. But she had moments of her own when Rome could not rival her--such, for instance, as that when she invited us from the peris.h.i.+ng frescos of her Campo Santo to turn our eyes on the flower-strewn field of death which the cloisters surrounded, and where in the hallowed earth which her galleys brought from Jerusalem her children, in their several turns, used to sleep so sweetly and safely.

The afternoon sunlight was prolonging the day there as well as it could, and we should have liked to linger with it as late as it would, but there were other places in Pisa calling us, and we must go. We found our driver, and his black-eyed boy beside him on the box, waiting for us at the cathedral door, and we seem to have left it pretty much to them where we should go. They decided us, if we really left it to them, mainly for the outside of things, so that we might see as much of Pisa as possible; but it appears to have been their notion that we ought to visit, at least, the inside of the Church of the Knights of St.

Stephen. I do not know whether I protested or not that I had abundantly seen this already, but, at any rate, I am now glad that they took us there. As every traveller will pretend to remember, the main business of the knights was to fight the Barbary pirates, and the main business of their church is now to serve as a repository of the prows of the galleys and the flags which they took in their battles with the infidels. There are other monuments of their valor, but by all odds the flags will be the most interesting to the American visitor, because of the start that many of them will give him by their resemblance to our own banner, with their red-and-white stripes, which the eye follows in vivid expectation of finding the blue field of stars in the upper left-hand corner. It never does find this, and that is the sufficient reason for holding to the theory that our flag was copied from the armorial bearings of the Was.h.i.+ngton family, and not taken from the standard of those paynim corsairs; but there is poignant instant when one trembles.

We viewed, of course, the exterior of the edifice standing on the site of the Tower of Famine, where the cruel archbishop starved the Count Ugolino and his grandchildren to death; and we drove by the buildings of Pisa's famous university, which we afterward fancied rather pervaded the city with the young and ardent life of its students. It is no great architectural presence, but there are churches and palaces to make up for that. Everywhere you chance on them in the narrow streets and the ample piazzas, but the palaces follow mostly the stately curve of the Arno, where some of them have condescended to the office of hotels, and where, I believe, one might live in economy and comfort; or, at any rate, I should like to try. It would get rather warm there in May, and July and August are not to be thought of, but all the other year it would be divine, with such a prospect as can hardly be matched anywhere else. Pisa used once to be the resort of many seeking health or warmth, and for mere climate it ought again to come into favor. Probably there is reasonably accessible society there, and, as the Livornese believe, there is at least excellent opera. The time might grow long, but ought not to be very heavy, and there is a cafe, at the very finest point of the curve, where you can get an excellent cup of tea. Whether this attests the resort or sojourn of many English, or the growth of the tea-habit among the Pisans, I cannot say, but that cafe is very charming, with students standing about in it and admiring the ladies who come in to buy pastry, and who do not suppose there is any one there to look at them. I am sure that the handsome mother with the pretty daughter who lingered so long over their choice of little cakes could not have imagined any one was looking, or she would at once have taken macaroons and hurried away: at that cafe they have macaroons almost three inches across, and delicious.

[Ill.u.s.tration: 48 WITH ALMOST ANY OF MY BACKGROUNDS]

The whole keeping was so pleasant that we hated to leave it to the lengthening shadows from the other sh.o.r.e, but we were to drive down the Arno into the promenade that follows it, I do not know how far; with the foolish greed of travel, we wanted to get in all of Pisa that we could, even if we tore ourselves from its most tempting morsel. But it was all joy, and I should like, at this moment, to be starting on that enchanting drive again. I leave the reader to imagine the lovely scenery for himself; almost any of my many backgrounds will serve; but I will supply him with a piece of statistics such as does not fall in everybody's way. We noted the great number of anglers who lined the opposite bank, with no appearance of catching anything, and I asked our driver if they never happened to get a bite. "Not in the daytime," he explained, compa.s.sionately, "but as soon as the evening comes they get all the fish they want."

I could pour out on the reader many other Pisan statistics, but they would be at second-hand. After long vicissitude, the city is again almost as prosperous as she was in the heyday of her national greatness, when she had commerce with every Levantine and Oriental port. We ourselves saw a silk factory pouring forth a tide of pretty girls from their work at the end of the day; there was no ruin or disrepair noticeable anywhere, and the whole city was as clean as Rome, with streets paved with broad, smooth flagstones where you never missed the rubber tires which your carriage failed of. But Pisa had a great air of resting, of taking life easily after a tumultuous existence in the long past which she had put behind her. Throughout the Middle Ages she was always fighting foreign foes without her walls or domestic factions within, now the Saracens wherever she could find them or they could find her, now the Normans in Naples, now the Cor-sicans and Sardinians, now Lucca, now Genoa, now Florence, and now all three. Her wars with these republics were really incessant; they were not so much wars as battles in one long war, with a peace occasionally made during the five or ten or fifteen years, which was no better than a truce. When she fell under the Medici, together with her enemy Florence, she shared the death-quiet the tyrants brought that prepotent republic, and it was the Medicean strength probably which saved her from Lucca and Genoa, though it left them to continue republics down to the nineteenth century. She was at one time an oligarchy, and at another a democracy, and at another the liege of this prince or that priest, but she was never out of trouble as long as she possessed independence or the shadow of it. In the safe hold of united Italy she now sits by her Arno and draws long, deep breaths, which you may almost hear as you pa.s.s; and I hope the prospect of increasing prosperity will not tempt her to work too hard. It does not look as if it would.

We were getting a little anxious, but not very anxious, for that one cannot be in Pisa, about our train back to Leghorn; though we did not wish to go, we did not wish to be left; but our driver rea.s.sured us, and would not let us s.h.i.+rk the duty of seeing the house where Galileo was born. We found it in a long street on the thither side of the river, and in such a poor quarter that our driver could himself afford to live only a few doors from it. As if they had expected him to pa.s.s about this time, his wife and his five children were sitting at his door and playing before it. He proudly pointed them out with his whip, and one of the little ones followed on foot far enough to levy tribute. They were sufficiently comely children, but blond, whereas the boy on the box was both black-eyed and black-haired. When we required an explanation of the mystery, the father easily solved it; this boy was the child of his first wife. If there were other details, I have forgotten them, but we made our romance to the effect that the boy, to whose beautiful eyes we now imputed a lurking sadness, was not happy with his step-mother, and that he took refuge from her on the box with his father. They seemed very good comrades; the boy had shared with his father the small cakes we had given him at the cafe. At the station, in recognition of his hapless lot, I gave him half a franc. By that time his father was radiant from the small extortion I had suffered him to practice with me, and he bade the boy thank me, which he did so charmingly that I almost, but not quite, gave him another half-franc. Now I am sorry I did not.

Pisa was worth it.

IX. BACK AT GENOA

There is an old saying, probably as old as Genoa's first loot of her step-sister republic, "If you want to see Pisa, you must go to Genoa,"

which may have obscurely governed us in our purpose of stopping there on our way up out of Italy. We could not have too much of Pisa, as apparently the Genoese could not; but before our journey ended I decided that they would have thought twice before plundering Pisa if they had been forced to make their forays by means of the present railroad connection between the two cities. At least there would have been but one of the many wars of murder and rapine between the republics, and that would have been the first. After a single experience of the eighty tunnels on that line, with the perpetually recurring necessity of putting down and putting up the car-window, no army would have repeated the invasion; and, though we might now be without that satirical old saying, mankind would, on the whole, have been the gainer. As it was, the enemies could luxuriously go and come in their galleys and enjoy the fresh sea-breezes both ways, instead of stifling in the dark and gasping for breath as they came into the light, while their train ran in and out under the serried peaks that form the Mediterranean sh.o.r.e. I myself wished to take a galley from Leghorn, or even a small steamer, but I was overruled by less hardy but more obdurate spirits, and so we took the Florentine express at Pisa, where we changed cars.

The Italian government had providently arranged that the car we changed into should be standing beyond the station in the dash of an unexpected shower, and that it should be provided with steps so high and steep, with Italian ladies standing all over them and sticking their umbrellas into the faces of American citizens trying to get in after them, that it was a feat of something like mountain-climbing to reach the corridor, and then of daring-do to secure a compartment. Though a collectivist, with a firm belief in the government owners.h.i.+p of railroads everywhere, I might have been tempted at times in Italy to abjure my creed if I had not always reflected that the state there had just come into possession of the roads, with all their capitalistic faults of management and outwear of equipment which it would doubtless soon reform and repair. I venture to suggest now, however, that its prime duty is to have platforms level with the car-doors, as they are in England, and not to let Italian ladies stand in the doorways with their umbrellas. I do not insist that it shall impose silence and sobriety upon a party of young French people in the next compartment, but I do think it should remove those mountains back from the sea so that the trains carrying cultivated Americans can run along the open sh.o.r.e the whole way to Genoa. Pending this, it should provide strong and watchful employees to lower and raise the windows at the mouth of each of the eighty tunnels in every car. I do not demand that it shall change the site of the station in Genoa so that it shall not always be the city's whole length away from the hotel you have chosen, but I think this would be a desirable improvement, especially if it is after dark when you arrive and raining a peculiarly cold, disagreeable rain.

That rain was very disappointing; for, in the intervals between tunnels, we had fancied, from the few brief glimpses we caught of the landscape, that the April so backward elsewhere in Italy was forwarder in the blossomed trees along the eastern Riviera; and we learned at our hotel that the steam-heat had just been taken off because the day had been so hot and dry, though the evening was now so cold and wet. It was fitfully put on and off during the chilly week that ensued, though in our fifth-story garden, to which we sometimes resorted, there was a mildness in the air that was absent in-doors. The hotel itself was disappointing; any hotel would be after our hotel in Leghorn; and, though there was the good-will of former days, there was not the former effect. The corridors crashed and clattered all day long and well into the night with the gayety of some cheap incursion of German tourists, who seemed, indeed, to fill the whole city with their clamor. They were given a long table to themselves, and when they were set at it and began to ply their knives and tongues the din was deafening. That would not have been so bad if they had not been so plain, or if, when they happened, in a young girl or two, to be pretty, they had not guttled and guzzled so like the plainest of their number. One such pretty girl was really beautiful, with a bloom perhaps already too rich, which, as she abandoned herself to her meat and drink, reddened downward over her lily neck and upward to her golden hair, past the brows under which her blue, blue eyes protruded painfully, all in a frightful prophecy of what she would be when the bud of her spring should be the full-blown cabbage-rose of her summer.

I dare say those people were not typical of their civilization. Probably modern enterprise makes travel easy to sorts and conditions of Germans who once would not have dreamed of leaving home, and now tempts these rude Teutonic hordes over or under the Alps and pours them out on the Peninsula, far out-deluging the once-prevalent Anglo-Saxons. The first night there was an Englishman at dinner, but he vanished after breakfast; the next day an Italian officer was at lunch, but he came no more; we were the only Americans, and now we had the sole society of those German tourists. Perhaps it was national vanity, but I could not at the moment think of an equal number of our fellow-citizens of any condition who would not have been less molestively happy. One forgot what one was eating, and left the table bruised as if physically beaten upon by those sound-waves and sight-waves. But our companions must have made themselves acceptable to the city they had come to visit; Genoa is very noisy, and they could not be heard above the trams and omnibuses, and in the streets they could not be seen at table; when I ventured to note to a sacristan, here and there, that there seemed to be a great many Germans in town, the fact apparently roused nothing of the old-time Italian antipathy for the Tedeschi. Severally they may have been cultivated and interesting people; and that blooming maiden may really have been the Blue Flower of Romance that she looked before she began to dine.

[Ill.u.s.tration: 49 WAs.h.i.+NG IN THE RIVER, GENOA]

We were entering upon our third view of Genoa with the zest of our first, and I was glad to find there were so many things I had left unseen or had forgotten. First of all the Campo Santo allured me, and I went at once to verify the impressions of former years in a tram following the bed of a torrential river which was now dry except in the pools where the laundresses were at work, picturesquely as always in Italy. But here they were not alone the worthy theme of art; their husbands and fathers, and perhaps even their _fiances,_ were at work with them, not, indeed, was.h.i.+ng the linen, but spreading to dry it in snowy s.p.a.ces over the clean gravel. On either bank of the stream newly finished or partly finished apartment-houses testified to the prosperity of the city, which seemed to be growing everywhere, and it would not be too bold to imagine this a favorite quarter because of its convenience to the Cam-po Santo. Already in the early forenoon our train was carrying people to that popular resort, who seemed to be intending to spend the day there. Some had wreaths and flowers, and were clearly sorrowing friends of the dead; others, with their guide-books, were as plainly mere sight-seers, and these were Italians as well as strangers, gratifying what seems the universal pa.s.sion for cemeteries. In our own villages the graveyards are the favorite Sunday haunt of the young people and the scene of their love-making; and it has been the complaint of English visitors to our cities that the first thing their hosts took them to see was the cemetery. They did not realize that this was often the thing best worth showing them, for our feeble aesthetic instincts found their first expression in the attempt to dignify or beautify the homes of the dead. Each mourner grieved in marble as fitly as he knew how, and, if there was sometimes a rivalry in vaults and shafts, the effect was of a collective interest which all could feel. Sometimes it was touching, sometimes it was revolting; and in Italy it is not otherwise. The Campo Santo of San Miniato at Florence, the Campo Santo at Bologna, the Campo Santo wherever else you find it, you find of one quality with the Campo Santo at Genoa. It makes you the helpless confidant of family pride, of bruised and lacerated love, of fond aspiration, of religious longing, of striving faith, of foolish vanity and vulgar pretence, but, if the traveller would read the local civilization aright, he cannot do better than go to study it there.

My third experience of the Genoese Campo Santo was different only in quant.i.ty from the first and second. There seemed more of the things, better and worse, but the increasing witness was of the art which rendered the fact with unsparing realism, sometimes alloyed with allegory and sometimes not, but always outright, literal, strong, rank.

The hundreds of groups, reliefs, statues, busts; the long aisles where the dead are sealed in the tableted shelves of the wall, like the dead in the catacombs, the ample s.p.a.ce of open ground enclosed by the cloisters and set thick with white crosses, are all dominated by a colossal Christ which, in my fancy, remains of very significant effect.

It is as if no presence less mighty and impressive could centre in itself the mult.i.tudinous pa.s.sions, wills, and hopes expressed in those incongruous monuments and reduce them to that unity of meaning which one cannot deny them.

[Ill.u.s.tration: 50 REALISTIC GROUP IN THE CAMPO SANTO]

The Campo Santo of Genoa is a mortuary gloss of Genoese history: of the long succession of civic strifes and foreign wars common to all the Italian republics, now pacified at last by a spirit of unity, of brotherhood. At Genoa, more than anywhere else in Italy except Milan, you are aware of the North--its strenuousness, its enterprise, its restless outstretching for worlds beyond itself. Columbus came with the gift of a New World in his hand, and, in the fulness of time, Mazzini came with the gift of a Newer World in his hand: the realization of Christ in the ideal of duties without which the old ideal of rights is heathen and helpless. Against the rude force of Genoa, the aristocratic beauty of such a place as Pisa was nothing; only Florence and Venice might vie with her. But she had not the inspiration of Florence, her art, her literature; the dialect in which she uttered herself is harsh and crabbed, and no poet known beyond it has breathed his soul into it; her architecture was first the Gothic from over the Alps, and then of the Renaissance which built the palaces of her merchants in a giant bulk and of a brutal grandeur. She had not the political genius of Venice, the oligarchic instinct of self-preservation from popular misgovernment and princely aggression. Her story is the usual Italian story of a people jealous of each other, and, in their fear of a native tyrant, impatiently calling in one foreign tyrant after another and then furiously expelling him. When she would govern herself, she first made her elective chief magistrate Doge for life, and then for two years; under both forms she submitted and rebelled at will from 1359 till 1802, when, after having accepted the French notion of freedom from Bonaparte, she enjoyed a lion's share of his vicissitudes. For a hundred years before that the warring powers had fought over her in their various quarrels about successions, and she ought to have been well inured to suffering when, in 1800, the English and the Austrians besieged her French garrison, and twenty thousand of her people starved in a cause not their own. The English restored the Doges, and the Republic of Genoa fell at last nineteen years after the Republic of Venice and three hundred years after the Republic of Florence. She was given to Piedmont in 1815 by the Congress of Vienna, and she has formed part of Italy ever since the unification. I believe that now she is of rather radical opinions in politics, though the bookseller who found on his shelves a last copy of the interesting sketch of Genoese history which I have profited by so little, said that the Genoese had been disappointed in the Socialists, lately in power, and were now voting Clerical by a large majority.

The fact may have been colored by the book-seller's feelings. If the Clericals are in superior force, the clerics are not: nowhere in Italy did I see so few priests. All other orders of people throng the narrow, noisy, lofty streets, where the crash of feet and hoofs and wheels beats to the topmost stories of the palaces towering overhead in their stony grandiosity. Everywhere in the structures dating after the Gothic period there is want of sensibility; the art of the Renaissance was not moulded here in the moods of a refined and effeminate patriciate, such as in Venice tempered it to beauty; but it renders in marble the prepotence of a commercialized n.o.bility, and makes good in that form the right of the city to be called Genoa the Proud. Perhaps she would not wish to be called proud because of these palaces alone. It is imaginable that she would like the stranger to remember the magnificence with which she rewarded the patriotism of her greatest citizen after Columbus and Mazzini: that mighty admiral, Andrea Doria, who freed this country first from the rule of Charles V. and then from the rule of Francis I.; who swept the Barbary corsairs from the seas; who beat the Turks in battles on s.h.i.+p and on sh.o.r.e; who took Corsica from the French when he was eighty-eight years old; who suffered from civil faction; who outlived exile as he had outlived war, and who died at the age of ninety-four, after he had refused the sovereignty of the country he had served so long; who was the Was.h.i.+ngton of his day, and was equally statesman and soldier, and, above all, patriot. It is his portrait that you see in that old palace (called the Palace of the Prince because Charles V. had called him Prince) overlooking the port, where he sits an old, old man, very weary, in the sole society of his sarcastic cat, as I have noted before. The cat seems to have just pa.s.sed some ironical reflection on the vanity of human things and to be studying him for the effect. Both appear indifferent to the spectator, but perhaps they are not, and you must not for all that fail of a visit to the Church of San Matteo, set round with the palaces of the Doria family--the palace which his grateful country gave the Admiral after he refused to be her master, and the palaces of his kindred neighboring it round.

I do not remember any equal s.p.a.ce in all Europe which, through a very little knowledge, so takes the heart as the gentle little church founded by an earlier Doria, and, after four hundred years, restored by a later, and then environed with the stately homes of the race, where they could be domesticated in the honor and reverence of their countrymen because of the goodness and greatness of the loftiest of their line. It is such a place as one may revere and yet possess one's soul in self-respect, very much as one may revere Mount Vernon. The church, as well as the piazza, is full of Dorian memories, and the cloister must be visited not only for its rather damp beauty, but for the full meaning of the irony which Doria's cat in the portrait wished to convey: against the wall here are gathered the fragments of the statue of Doria which, when the French Revolution came to Genoa, the patriots threw out of the ducal palace and broke in the street below.

We were some time in finding our way into the magnificent hall of the Great Council where this statue once stood, with the statues of many other Genoese heroes and statesmen, and I am not sure that it was worth all our trouble. Magnificent it certainly was, but coa.r.s.ely magnificent, like so much elsewhere in Genoa; but, if we had been at ten times the trouble we were in seeing the Palace of the Munic.i.p.ality, I should not think it too much. There in the great hall are the monuments of those Genoese notables whose munificence their country wished to remember in the order of their generosity. I do not remember just what the maximum was, but the Doge or other leading citizen who gave, say, twenty-five thousand ducats to the state had a statue erected to him; one who gave fifteen, a bust; and one who gave five, an honorary tablet. The surprising thing is that nearly all the statues and busts, whether good likenesses or not, are delightful art: it is as if the n.o.ble acts of the benefactors of their country had inspired the sculptors to reproduce them not only in true character, but in due dignity. To the American who views them and remembers that we have now so much money that some of us do not know what to do with it, they will suggest that our millionaires have an unrivalled opportunity of immortality in the same sort. There is hardly a town of ten thousand inhabitants in the country where there are not men who could easily afford to give a hundred thousand dollars, or fifty, or twenty to their native or adoptive place and so enter upon a new life in bronze or marble. This would enrich us beyond the dreams of avarice in a high-grade portrait statuary; it would give work to hundreds of sculptors who now have little or nothing to do, and would revive or create the supplementary industries of casting in metal or carving in stone.

The time was in Genoa, it seems, as the time is now with us, when a great many people did not know what to do with their money. There were sumptuary laws which forbade their spending it, either they or their wives or daughters, in dress; apparently they could not even wear Genoa velvet, which had to be sold abroad for the corruption of the outside world; and this is said to be the reason why there were so many palaces built in Genoa in the days of the republic. People who did not wish to figure in that hall of fame put their surplus into the immense and often ugly edifices which we still see ministering to their pride in the wide and narrow streets of the city. Now and then a devout family built or rebuilt a church and gave it to the public; but by far the greater number put up palaces, where, after the house-warming, they dwelt in a cold and economical seclusion. Some of their palaces are now devoted to public uses; they are galleries of pictures and statues most worthy to be seen, or they are munic.i.p.al offices, or museums, or schools of art or science; but part are still in the keeping of the families that contributed them to the splendor of their city. The streets in which they stand are loud with transit and traffic, but the palaces hold aloof from the turmoil and lift their lofty heads to the level of the gardens behind them. Huge, heavy they are, according to the local ideal, and always wanting the delicacy of Venetian architecture, where something in the native genius tempered to gentleness the cold severity of Palladio, and where Sansovino knew how to bridge the gulf between the Gothic and the Renascent art that would have been Greek but halted at being Roman.

The grandeur of those streets of palaces in Genoa cannot be denied, but perhaps, if the visitor quite consulted his preference or indulged his humor, he would wander rather through the arcades of the busy port, up the chasmal alleys of little shops into the tiny piazzas, no bigger than a good-sized room, opening before some ancient church and packed with busy, noisy people. The perspective there is often like the perspective in old Naples, but the uproar in Genoa does not break in music as it does in Naples, and the chill lingering in the sunless depths of those chasms is the cold of a winter that begins earlier and a spring that loiters later than the genial seasons of the South.

X. EDEN AFTER THE FALL

A few years ago an Englishman who had lived our neighbor in the same villa at San Remo, came and said that he was going away because it was so dull at San Remo. He was going with his wife to Monte Carlo, because you could find amus.e.m.e.nt every day in the week at the tables of the different games of chance, and Sundays there was a very nice little English church. He did not seem to think there was anything out of the way in his grouping of these advantages, but he did not strongly urge them upon us, and we restricted ourselves in turn to our tacit reflections on the indifference of the English to a point of morals on which the American conscience is apt to suffer more or less anguish if it offends. So far as I know they do not think it wrong to take money won at any game; but possibly their depravity in this matter rather comforted us than offended. At any rate, I am sure of the superiority of our own morals in visiting Monte Carlo after we left Genoa. If we did not look forward with our Englishman's complacency to the nice little church there, we certainly did not mean to risk our money at the tables of Roulette, nor yet at the tables of Trente et Quarante, in the Casino.

What we really wished to do was to look on in the spiritual security of saints while the sinners of both s.e.xes lost and gained to the equal hurt of their souls. We perhaps expected to hear the report of a pistol in the gardens of the Casino, if we did not actually see the ruined gambler falling among the flowers, or if not so much as this, we thought we might witness his dramatic despair as the croupier drew in the last remnant of his fortune and mechanically invited the other Messieurs and Mesdames to make their game; secretly, we might even have been willing to see something hysterical on the part of the Mesdames if fate frowned upon them, or something scandalously exuberant if it smiled. If our motives were not the worst, they were, at any rate, not the best; I suppose they were the usual human motives, and I am afraid they were mixed.

We found it rather long from Genoa to Monte Carlo, but this was not so much because of the distance as because of the delays of our train, which, having started late, grew reckless on the way, and before we reached the Italian frontier at Ventimiglia, had lost all shame and failed to connect there with the French train for the rest of our journey. So, instead of having barely time to affirm our innocence of tobacco, spirits, or perfumes to the customs officers, and to wash down a sandwich with a cup of coffee at the restaurant, we had an hour and forty minutes at Ventimiglia, which I partly spent in vain attempts to buy the poverty of the inspector so far as to prevail with him not to delay the examination of our baggage, but to proceed to it at once, in order that we might have it all off our minds, and devote our long leisure to the inquiry by what steps the ancient Ligurian tribe of the Intemelii lost their name in its actual corruption of Ventimiglia. It is a charming old town, far more charming than the stranger who never has time to walk into it from the station can imagine, and there is a palm-bordered avenue leading from the railway to the sea, with the shops and cafes of Italy on one side and the shops and cafes of France on the other. So late as six o'clock in the evening those cafes and shops preserved a reciprocal integrity which I could not praise too highly, but after dark there must be a ghostly interchange of forbidden commodities among them which no force of customs officers could wholly suppress. At any rate, I should have liked to see them try it, though I should not have liked to be kept in Ventimiglia overnight for any less reason; it seemed a lonesome place, though mighty picturesque, with old walls, and a magnificent old fort toward the sea, and a fine bridge spanning, though for the moment superfluously spanning, the perfectly dry bed of a river.

I wished to ask what the name of the river was, but out of all the files of people coming and going I chose an aged man who could not tell me; he excused himself with real regret on the ground that he was a stranger in those parts. Then there was nothing for me to do but go back to the station and renew my attempt on the inspector, who still remained proof against me. What added to the hards.h.i.+p of the situation was that it was Italy at one end of the station and France at the other, and in one extremity it was an hour earlier than it was at the other, by the time of Central Europe at the east and by the time of Paris at the west, so that I do not know but we were two hours and forty minutes at Ventimiglia instead of one hour and forty minutes. Of this period little could be employed at tea, and we were not otherwise hungry; we could give something of our interminable leisure to counting our baggage and suffering unfounded alarms at failing to make it come out right, but we could not give much.

The weather had turned chilly, the long station was full of draughts, and the invalid of the party, without whom no American party is perfectly national, was rapidly taking cold. We were quite incredulous when the examination actually began, but at last it really did, and it began with our pieces, with such a show of favoring us on the inspector's part, that when it was over, in about two minutes, one trunk serving as a type of the innocence of all, I furtively held up a piece of five francs in recognition of his kindness. But he slowly shook his head, whether in regret or whether in stern refusal I shall never know.