The Note-Books of Samuel Butler Part 48

"Millet's picture of the Angelus sold for 700,000 francs. Now that,"

he said, "is genius."

After which I was very civil to him.

At Bellinzona a man told me that one of the two towers was built by the Visconti and the other by Julius Caesar, a hundred years earlier.

So, poor old Mrs. Barratt at Langar could conceive no longer time than a hundred years. The Trojan war did not last ten years, but ten years was as big a lie as Homer knew.

We went over the Albula Pa.s.s to St. Moritz in two diligences and could not settle which was tonic and which was dominant; but the carriage behind us was the relative minor.

There was a picture in the dining-room but we could not get near enough to see it; we thought it must be either Christ disputing with the Doctors or Louis XVI saying farewell to his family--or something of that sort.

The Sacro Monte at Varese

The Sacro Monte is a kind of ecclesiastical Rosherville Gardens, eminently the place to spend a happy day.

The processions were best at the last part of the ascent; there were pilgrims, all decked out with coloured feathers, and priests and banners and music and crimson and gold and white and glittering bra.s.s against the cloudless blue sky. The old priest sat at his open window to receive the offerings of the devout as they pa.s.sed, but he did not seem to get more than a few bambini modelled in wax. Perhaps he was used to it. And the band played the barocco music on the barocco little piazza and we were all barocco together. It was as though the clergymen at Ladywell had given out that, instead of having service as usual, the congregation would go in procession to the Crystal Palace with all their traps, and that the band had been practising "Wait till the clouds roll by" for some time, and on Sunday, as a great treat, they should have it.

The Pope has issued an order saying he will not have ma.s.ses written like operas. It is no use. The Pope can do much, but he will not be able to get contrapuntal music into Varese. He will not be able to get anything more solemn than La Fille de Madame Angot into Varese.

As for fugues--! I would as soon take an English bishop to the Surrey pantomime as to the Sacro Monte on a festa.

Then the pilgrims went into the shadow of a great rock behind the sanctuary, spread themselves out over the gra.s.s and dined.

The Albergo Grotta Crimea

The entrance to this hotel at Chiavenna is through a covered court- yard; steps lead up to the roof of the court-yard, which is a terrace where one dines in fine weather. A great tree grows in the court- yard below, its trunk pierces the floor of the terrace, and its branches shade the open-air dining-room. The walls of the house are painted in fresco, with a check pattern like the late Lord Brougham's trousers, and there are also pictures. One represents Mendelssohn.

He is not called Mendelssohn, but I knew him by his legs. He is in the costume of a dandy of some five-and-forty years ago, is smoking a cigar and appears to be making an offer of marriage to his cook.

{261} Down below is a fresco of a man sitting on a barrel with a gla.s.s in his hand. A more absolutely worldly minded, uncultured individual it would be impossible to conceive. When I saw these frescoes I knew I should get along all right and not be over-charged.

Public Opinion

The public buys its opinions as it buys its meat, or takes in its milk, on the principle that it is cheaper to do this than to keep a cow. So it is, but the milk is more likely to be watered.

These Notes

I make them under the impression that I may use them in my books, but I never do unless I happen to remember them at the right time. When I wrote "Ramblings in Cheapside" [in the Universal Review, reprinted in Essays on Life, Art and Science] the preceding note about Public Opinion would have come in admirably; it was in my pocket, in my little black note-book, but I forgot all about it till I came to post my pocket-book into my note-book.

The Wife of Bath

There are Canterbury Pilgrims every Sunday in summer who start from close to the old Tabard, only they go by the South-Eastern Railway and come back the same day for five shillings. And, what is more, they are just the same sort of people. If they do not go to Canterbury they go by the Clacton Belle to Clacton-on-Sea. There is not a Sunday the whole summer through but you may find all Chaucer's pilgrims, man and woman for man and woman, on board the Lord of the Isles or the Clacton Belle. Why, I have seen the Wife of Bath on the Lord of the Isles myself. She was eating her luncheon off an Ally Sloper's Half-Holiday, which was spread out upon her knees. Whether it was I who had had too much beer or she I cannot tell, G.o.d knoweth; and whether or no I was caught up into Paradise, again I cannot tell; but I certainly did hear unspeakable words which it is not lawful for a man to utter, and that not above fourteen years ago but the very last Sunday that ever was. The Wife of Bath heard them too, but she never turned a hair. Luckily I had my detective camera with me, so I snapped her there and then. She put her hand up to her mouth at that very moment and rather spoiled herself, but not much. [1891.]

Horace at the Post-Office in Rome

When I was in Rome last summer whom should I meet but Horace.

I did not know him at first, and told him enquiringly that the post- office was in the Piazza Venezia?

He smiled benignly, shrugged his shoulders, said "Prego" and pointed to the post-office itself, which was over the way and, of course, in the Piazza S. Silvestro.

Then I knew him. I believe he went straight home and wrote an epistle to Mecaenas, or whatever the man's name was, asking how it comes about that people who travel hundreds of miles to see things can never see what is all the time under their noses. In fact, I saw him take out his note-book and begin making notes at once. He need not talk. He was not a good man of business and I do not believe his books sold much better than my own. But this does not matter to him now, for he has not the faintest idea that he ever wrote any of them and, more likely than not, has never even refreshed his memory by reading them.

Beethoven at Faido and at Boulogne

I have twice seen people so unmistakably like Beethoven (just as Madame Patey is unmistakably like Handel and only wants dressing in costume to be the image of him not in features only but in figure and air and manner) that I always think of them as Beethoven.

Once, at Faido in the Val Leventina, in 1876 or 1877, when the engineers were there surveying for the tunnel, there was among them a rather fine-looking young German with wild, ginger hair that rang out to the wild sky like the bells in In Memoriam, and a strong Edmund Gurney cut, {263} who played Wagner and was great upon the overture to Lohengrin; as for Handel--he was not worth consideration, etc.

Well, this young man rather took a fancy to me and I did not dislike him, but one day, to tease him, I told him that a little insignificant-looking engineer, the most commonplace mortal imaginable, who was sitting at the head of the table, was like Beethoven. He was very like him indeed, and Muller saw it, smiled and flushed at the same time. He was short, getting on in years and was a little thick, though not fat. A few days afterwards he went away and Muller and I happened to meet his box--an enormous cube of a trunk--coming down the stairs.

"That's Beethoven's box," said Muller to me.

"Oh," I said, and, looking at it curiously for a moment, asked gravely, "And is he inside it?" It seemed to fit him and to correspond so perfectly with him in every way that one felt as though if he were not inside it he ought to be.

The second time was at Boulogne this spring. There were three Germans at the Hotel de Paris who sat together, went in and out together, smoked together and did everything as though they were a unity in trinity and a trinity in unity. We settled that they must be the Heckmann Quartet, minus Heckmann: we had not the smallest reason for thinking this but we settled it at once. The middle one of these was like Beethoven also. On Easter Sunday, after dinner, when he was a little--well, it was after dinner and his hair went rather mad--Jones said to me:

"Do you see that Beethoven has got into the posthumous quartet stage?" [1885.]

Silvio

In the autumn of 1884, Butler spent some time at Promontogno and Soglio in the Val Bregaglia, sketching and making notes. Among the children of the Italian families in the albergo was Silvio, a boy of ten or twelve. He knew a little English and was very fond of poetry.

He could repeat, "How doth the little buzzy bee." The poem which pleased him best, however, was:

Hey diddle diddle, The Cat and the Fiddle, The Cow jumped over the Moon.

They had nothing, he said, in Italian literature so good as this.

Silvio used to talk to Butler while he was sketching.

"And you shall read Longfellow much in England?"

"No," I replied, "I don't think we read him very much."

"But how is that? He is a very pretty poet."