From sketch-book and diary Part 8

Like all Italian cities, Perugia has a strongly marked character of its own. This local character of her cities is one of Italy's richest possessions. Genoa, brilliant in white, salmon-pink, and buff, the colouring of her palaces, and scintillating in the sun as it beats upon her pearl-grey roofs; Florence, sombre with the brown of her local _pietra serena_ and roofed with the richer brown of her Tuscan tiles; Verona, regal and stately, throned on the foothills of the Alps, her rich colouring focussed in the red and tawny curtains which the Veronese hang before their church doors; Padua, shady with trees, sedate and academic, on the level, and uniform in tone, a city of arcades; Perugia, a mountain fortress of brown bricks, her austerity mellowed by the centuries--what a series they make! How carefully the "Young Nation"

should deal with these precious things that have all come into her hands! Almost every great city in this land was once a capital. If only the Italians would build as they used to I should rejoice in seeing lovely things rising new and strong in the place of decay and thus giving promise of a new lease of architectural beauty for Italy. But the pity of it is that most of the new things are characterless and dreary.

Every cultivated Italian deplores the fact and one wonders who the Goths in authority are that have the doing of these things.

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

[Ill.u.s.tration: THE BERSAGLIERI AT THE FOUNTAIN, PERUGIA]

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

A BIT OF DIARY

"23_rd April_ 1900.--All day 'on the wander' through ripe old Perugia. A silent city, full of memories, br.i.m.m.i.n.g over with history, lapped in Art! Everywhere the flowering fruit-trees showed over the brown walls, the sunshine fell pleasantly on the ma.s.ses of old unfinished brickwork and lent them a charm which on a wet day must vanish and leave them in a grim severity. Quiet tone everywhere; no ornament in the Roman sense, but here and there exquisite bits of carving and detail such as one can only find in the flat-surfaced Italian Gothic which is here seen in its very home. How that flat surface of blank wall s.p.a.ces and the horizontal tendency of the design suit the Italian light. Architecture may well be placed as the most important of the Arts. It adds, if beautiful, to nature's beauty, showing the height to which the human hand may dare to rise so as to join hands with the Divine Architect Himself. How it can disgrace His work we have only too many opportunities of judging!

"We visited my well-loved church of San Pietro, that treasure-house left undespoiled by the Italian Government--safeguarded, _not_ as a place of worship--let that be well understood--but as 'an Art Monument.' So its pictures and carvings are left in the places their authors intended them for and not nailed up stark and shivering in a cold, staring museum, like the poor altar pieces and modest bits of delicate carving that have been wrenched from their life-long homes in so many churches throughout this country. True, in the museum the light is good, far better for showing the artist's work than the 'dim religious light' of a church.

But the painter knew all about the bad light, and still painted his picture for such and such an altar, not to his own glory, but to the glory of G.o.d.

"As we were pa.s.sing once more the rich-toned Duomo and Nicola Pisano's lovely fountain that stands before it, we saw the fountain suddenly surrounded by an eruption of Bersaglieri, who woke the echoes of that erst-while silent Piazza with their songs and chaff. They were on manuvres and were halting here for the day. Shedding heavy hats and knapsacks, they had run down to fill their canteens and water-barrels.

_Toujours gais_ are the Bersaglieri, and a very pretty sight it was to see those good-looking healthy lads in their red fatigue fezes unbending in this picturesque manner. In the evening they were off again with the fanfaronade of their ma.s.sed trumpets spurring their _pas gymnastique_ to the farthest point of swagger, and Perugia returned to its repose.

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

VESUVIUS

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

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

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

"But nothing impressed me into silence so heavily as the sight, later on, of a lava stream, lower down the mountain-side, issuing in thick ooze, and crawling slowly from out a gaping cavern. Liquid, deep scarlet fire was this, of the density, apparently, of oil, advancing like a fiery death to scorch and consume with slow and even flow--inexorable.

No possibility of approaching its borders; even where we stood the rocks began to burn our feet. A guide flung a log of wood on the river, and it spontaneously burst into vivid flame, shrivelled up, and was gone in a puff of smoke. Turning for rest and solace from the lurid spectacle, the fact.i.tious horrors of the congealed lava all around one only deepened the sense of gloom. Curling and curdling as they cooled, the lava streams of bygone times have hardened into the most weird shapes the imagination could conceive. We seemed to be on a battlefield where t.i.tan warriors lay distorted in their death agony; enormous mothers clasped their babies in the embrace of death, and the war-horses were monsters of pre-historic stature, petrified in the last throes.

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

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

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

[Ill.u.s.tration]

CHAPTER III

ROME

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

[Ill.u.s.tration: A MEETING ON THE PINCIAN: FRENCH AND GERMAN SEMINARISTS]

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

But the joy of the eye soon banishes for me the sorrow of the mind, and there is joy enough for the eye in Rome!

Although I have revisited the well-loved city several times since those early days, the first visit stands out so much more fully coloured and intense in local sentiment than the subsequent ones, which seem almost insipid by comparison. You and I then saw her as she can never be seen again; we were just in time to know her under the old Papal regime, and we left three months before the Italians came in and began to rob her of her unique character. I cannot be too thankful that we have _that_ put safely away in the treasury of our memories. We saw the Roman citizens kneeling in ma.s.ses along the streets as the Pope's mounted _Cha.s.seur_, in c.o.c.ked hats and feathers, heralded the approach of Pio Nono's ponderous coach, in which His Holiness was taking his afternoon airing.

We saw the stately cardinals and bishops in their daily stroll on the Pincian, receiving the salutes of soldiers and civilians. There were such constant salutations everywhere, all day long, and such punctilious acknowledgments from the ecclesiastics that on closing my eyes at night I always saw shovel hats rising and sinking like flocks of crows hovering over a harvest-field.

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

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

[Ill.u.s.tration: A LENTEN SERMON IN THE COLOSSEUM]

The open-air incidents connected with the great Church functions have left an extraordinarily vivid impression on my mind on account of their eminently pictorial qualities. I see again the archaic "gla.s.s coaches"

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

Times are changed at home as well as in Rome. Where are the gorgeous equipages I used to wonder at as a child on drawing-room days, that made St. James' Street a scene of gold and colour of surpa.s.sing richness?

Where are the bewigged coachmen stiff with bullion, throned on the resplendent hammercloths of their boxes? Where the six-foot footmen hanging on in bunches behind, in liveries pushed to the utmost limit of extravagant finery? We only see these things on exceptional occasions (certainly the six-footers are not grown nowadays), and the quiet landau or motor harmonises better with our modern taste.

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

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

As a postscript, do not let us forget the races of the riderless horses that took place at the end of Carnival. Those scenes are before me now, quite fresh, revived by the little old diary. I am glad I have still my sketch-books that give me the outlines of these and other scenes that are gone for ever from the world.

There is the wide round Piazza del Popolo, like an amphitheatre; the sun, near its setting, is tinging the upper portion of the great Egyptian obelisk, which is the starting-post for the occasion, with crimson, the base remaining in cool grey shade. Much stamping of hoofs and champing of bits in the ranks of the Dragoons, who are preparing to clear the Corso; French infantry forming up on either side of the starting-place; the crowds in the stands expectant, many units in carnival costume, and masked. Away go the Dragoons, splitting the crowd that blocks the entrance to the darkening, narrow Corso. They return at a gallop, having ridden to the end and back, and divide to take up their positions. Then the barbs, painted in spots and stripes, are brought on gingerly. The least jerk and it's no use trying to form a line; they must be let go; the spiked b.a.l.l.s, now unfastened and dangling, are beginning to p.r.i.c.k in spite of all the care. One after the other the maddened creatures plunge and tug at the restraining grip of the convicts who act as grooms on this occasion, and who literally hold their lives in their hands,--it all pa.s.ses in a quarter of a minute; down goes the rope, a gun is fired, shouts and clapping of hands ring through the chilly air, and the eleven furious horses plunge into the dark street, the squibs and tin-foil on their backs explode and crackle, the spiked b.a.l.l.s bang against their sides. Spurts of sparks fly from their iron heels brightly in the twilight. One horse, perhaps, slips on the cobblestones, rolls over, picks himself up, and follows the others, straining every nerve. They are gone--engulfed in the dark pa.s.sage, some to be recovered only after several days, wandering in the Campagna, having burst through the sheet spread to stop them at the finish.

[Ill.u.s.tration: THE START FOR THE HORSE RACE, ROME]

I often wondered which ordeal a horse would prefer, if he were given the choice--this one, for a mile, or that of a great English race, with a jockey on his back with thousands of pounds to win or lose, armed with a steel whip and a pair of severe spurs! I never wholly enjoy a horse-race in any shape because of these goads in various forms.

Anyhow, I am glad these Roman races have been abolished.

I felt greatly elated when setting up work on my own account, which I did very soon after my arrival from Florence and Bellucci. He had told me at parting that I could "walk by myself" now, and I very soon walked up the steps of the Trinita to choose my first model. You remember how those costumed loafers used to sun themselves on the steps at that time?

I had a half-frightened, half-delighted thrill when choosing my first _Ciociaro_. It was the Judgment of Paris transposed. Three of them, in peaked hats and goatskins, stood grinning and posing before the English _signorina_ while the Papal zouave sentry and the whole lot of male and female models looked on and listened. When I gave the apple to Antonio on account of his good brown face and read waistcoat, and engaged him for the morrow, I felt I had started.

What trouble mamma and I had had in trying to find a studio. A young lady working by herself! A thing unknown--no one would let me a studio, so we ended with the makeshift you remember in our apartment. "That comes of being a woman at starting," exclaimed mamma.

I can never pa.s.s No. 56 Via Babuino without pausing and looking up at one of the top windows where my head hung out one morning, watching my model in the street below for half an hour and wondering how long he meant to saunter up and down with his eye on the Church clock opposite instead of coming up. I had engaged him for eight o'clock for an eight-hour day (_giornata finita_), and there he was, strolling away a franc's worth of sitting on purpose. "But, Signorina, one cannot always arrive to the very instant," was the villain's excuse on coming in. I said nothing of what I had seen out of the window. Dear old Francesco, he was much prized for his laugh, which he could keep up for twenty minutes at a time. I had already seen it in a picture in London. Of course I had a try, too, and it brought me luck, for the picture where it appears was the first Oil I sold.

Let me remind you of the Pope's International Exhibition of Ecclesiastical Art held that winter, for which I painted "The Visitation." The Fine Art section was shown in the Cloisters of Sa.

Maria degli Angeli in the Baths of Diocletian. I laugh even now when I recall the way in which my poor picture was launched into the world.

After its acceptance by the committee, I had to get a pa.s.s for its admission into the exhibition building from the Minister of Commerce, the Most Eminent and Most Reverend Cardinal B. Mamma and I had to wait an age in his ante-room, conscious of being objects of extraordinary curiosity to the crowd of men artists who were there on the same errand as myself. Evidently artists of our s.e.x were rarities in Italy. At last our turn came to go in, and, after many formalities and much polite bowing from l_'Eminentissimo_ and _riverendissimo_, I signed the several papers, and proudly followed my mamma back through the waiting artists, holding my roll of papers before me. We were informed that, being women, we could not take the picture ourselves into the Cloisters, as no order had been given to admit ladies into the monastic precincts before the opening. So our dear father sallied forth on foot with my pa.s.s to Sa.

Maria, mamma and I following in a little hired Victoria, holding the big picture before us (no mean handful) to keep it from tumbling out, while hidden, ourselves, from the public eye by the carriage hood. We arrived at the entrance to the forbidden cloisters too soon, as papa had not arrived, and the gendarmes stopped us and told us to drive out of the court again. We pulled up, therefore, on the threshold, with our faces turned in the contrary direction, when the horrible hood flew back and revealed us, holding on to the picture with straining arms and knitted brows, to the grinning soldiers gathered about the place. Our dear father and Mr. Severn (Keats' friend in youth) soon came to the rescue, and, with the aid of two _facchini_, they took my _magnum opus_ and disappeared with it into the gloom of the _Thermae_.

Dear, kind old Mr. Severn, he seemed so pleased to help me in my initial struggles in Rome! When I next visited Keats' grave there, long years afterwards with W., I found another tombstone alongside of the Poet's.