What I Remember Part 16

"W.S.L."

The last in this series of letters which has reached my hands is altogether undated, but appears by the post-mark to have been written from Bath, 19th July, 1838.

"MY DEAR SIR,--There is one sentence in your letter which shocked me not a little. You say 'The Whigs have not offered you a Deputy Lieutenantcy; so cheap a distinction could not have hurt them. But then you are too proud to ask,' &c. Do you really suppose that I would have accepted it even if it had been offered? No, by G.o.d! I would not accept any distinction even if it were offered by honest men. I will have nothing but what I can take. It is, however, both an injustice and an affront to confer this dignity on low people, who do not possess a fourth of my property, and whose family is as ign.o.ble as Lord Melbourne's own, and not to have offered the same to me. In the eleventh page of the _Letters_ I published after the quelling of Bonaparte are these words: 'I was the first to abjure the party of the Whigs, and shall be the last to abjure the principles. When the leaders had broken all their promises to the nation, had shown their utter incapacity to manage its affairs, and their inclination to crouch before the enemy, I permitted my heart after some struggles to subside and repose in the cool of this reflection--Let them escape.

It is only the French nation that ever dragged such feebleness to the scaffold,' Again, page 35--'Honest men, I confess, have generally in the present times an aversion to the Whig faction, not because it is suitable either to honesty or understanding to prefer the narrow principles of the opposite party, but because in every country lax morals wish to be and are identified with public feeling, and because in our own a few of the very best have been found in an a.s.sociation with the very worst.' Whenever the Tories have deviated from their tenets, they have enlarged their views and exceeded their promises.

The Whigs have always taken an inverse course. Whenever they have come into power, they have previously been obliged to slight those matters, and to temporise with those duties, which they had not the courage either to follow or to renounce.

"And now, my dear sir, to pleasanter matters. I have nothing in the press, and never shall have. I gave Forster all my works, written or to be written. Neither I nor my family shall have anything to do with booksellers. They say a new edition of my _Imaginary Conversations_ is called for. I have sent Forster a dozen or two of fresh ones, but I hope he will not hazard them before my death, and will get a hundred pounds or near it for the whole.

"If ever I attended a public dinner, I should like to have been present at that which the people gave to you. Never let them be quiet until the Church has gone to the devil, its lawful owner, and till something a little like Christianity takes its place. If parsons are to be Lords, it is but right and reasonable that the Queen should be Pope. Indeed, I have no objection to this, but I have to the other.

What a singularity it is that those who profess a belief in Christ do not obey Him, while those who profess it in Mahomet or Moses or Boodh are obedient to their precepts, if not in certain points of morality, in all things else. Carlyle is a vigorous thinker, but a vile writer, worse than Bulwer. I breakfasted in company with him at Milman's.

Macaulay was there, a clever clown, and Moore too, whom I had not seen till then. Between those two Scotchmen he appeared like a glow-worm between two thistles. There were several other folks, literary and half literary, Lord Northampton, &c., &c. I forgot Rogers. Milman has written the two best volumes of poetry we have seen lately; but when Miss Garrow publishes hers I am certain there will be a total eclipse of them. My friend Hare's brother, who married a sister of the impudent c.o.xcomb, Edward Stanley, has bought a house at Torquay, and Hare tells me that unless he goes to Sicily be shall be there in winter. If so, we may meet; but Bath is my dear delight in all seasons. I have been sitting for my picture, and have given it to Mrs.

Paynter. It is admirably executed by Fisher.

"Yours ever,

"W.S.L."

These letters are all written upon the old-fashioned square sheet of letter paper, some gilt-edged, entirely written over, even to the turned-down ends, and heavily sealed.

Mr. Forster says no word about the Deputy-Lieutenantcy, and Landor's anger and disgust in connection with it. He must necessarily have known all about it, but probably in the exuberance of his material did not think it worth mentioning. But it evidently left almost as painful an impression on Landor's mind as the famous refusal of the Duke of Beaufort to appoint him a justice of the peace.

During the later portion of my life at Florence, and subsequently at Rome, Mr. G.P. Marsh and his very charming wife were among our most valued friends for many years. Marsh was an exception to the prevailing American rule, which for the most part changes their diplomatists with the change of President. He had been United States minister at Constantinople and at Turin before he came to Florence with the Italian monarchy. At Rome he was "the Dean" of the diplomatic body, and on many occasions various representative duties fell upon him as such which were especially unwelcome to him. The determination of the Great Powers to send amba.s.sadors to the Court of the Quirinal instead of ministers plenipotentiary, as previously, came as a great boon to Mr. Marsh. For as the United States send no amba.s.sadors, his position as longest in office of all the diplomatic body no longer placed him at the head of it.

Mr. Marsh was a man of very large and varied culture. A thorough cla.s.sical scholar and excellent modern linguist, philology was perhaps his most favourite pursuit. He wrote various books, his best I think a very large octavo volume, ent.i.tled not very happily _Man in Nature_.

The subject of it is the modifications and alterations which this planet has undergone at the hands of man. His subject leads him to consider much at large the denudation of mountains, which has caused and is causing such calamitous mischief in Italy and the south of France. He shows very convincingly and interestingly that the destruction of forests causes not only floods in winter and spring, but drought in summer and autumn. And the efforts which have recently been made in Italy to take some steps towards the reclothing of the mountain sides, have in great measure been due to his work, which has been largely circulated in an Italian translation.

The following letter which I select from many received from him, is not without interest. It is dated 30th November, 1867.

"DEAR SIR,--I return you Layard's article, which displays his usual marked ability, and has given me much pleasure as well as instruction.

I should much like to know what are his grounds for believing that 'a satisfactory settlement of this Roman question would have been speedily brought about with the concurrence of the Italian Government and the Liberal party in Rome, and with the tacit consent of the Emperor of the French, had it not been for the untoward enterprise of Garibaldi,' p. 283. I certainly have not the slightest ground for believing any such thing; nor do I understand _to whom_ the settlement referred to would have been 'satisfactory.' Does Mr. Layard suppose that any conceivable arrangement would be satisfactory both to the Papacy and to Italian Liberals out of Rome? The _Government_ of Italy, which changes as often as the moon, might have accepted something which would have satisfied Louis Napoleon, Antonelli, and the three hundred _n.o.bili_ of Rome, who waited at dinner, napkin on arm, on the Antiboini, to whom they gave an entertainment,--but the people?

"I send you one of Ferretti's pamphlets, which please keep. And I enclose in the package two of Tuckerman's books. If you could turn over the leaves of these and say to me in a note that they impress you favourably, and that you are not displeased with his magazine article, I will make him a happy man by sending him the note.

"Very truly yours,

"GEO.P. MARSH."

I did more than "turn over the leaves" of the book sent, and did very truly say that they had interested me much. It is rather suggestive to reflect how utterly unintelligible to the present generation must be the term "Antiboini" in the above letter, without a word of explanation. The highly unpopular and objectionable "Papal Legion" had been in great part recruited from Antibes, and were hence nicknamed "Antiboini," and not, as readers of the present day might fairly imagine, from having been the opponents of any "boini."

The personal qualities of Mr. Marsh had obtained for him a great, and I may indeed say, exceptional degree of consideration and regard from his colleagues of the diplomatic body, and from the Italian ministers and political world generally. And I remember one notable instance of the manifestation of this, which I cannot refrain from citing. Mr.

Marsh had written home to his Government some rather trenchantly unfavourable remarks on some portion of the then recent measures of the Italian Ministry. And by some awkward accident or mistake these had found their way into the columns of an American newspaper.

The circ.u.mstances might have given rise to very disagreeable and mischievous complications and results. But the matter was suffered to pa.s.s without any official observation solely from the high personal consideration in which Mr. Marsh was held, not only at the Consulta (the Roman Foreign Office), but at the Quirinal, and in many a Roman salon.

Mr. Marsh died full of years and honours at a ripe old age. But the closing scene of his life was remarkable from the locality of it. He had gone to pa.s.s the hot season at Vallombrosa, where a comfortable hotel replaces the old _forestieria_ of the monastery, while a School of Forestry has been established by the Government within its walls.

Amid those secular shades the old diplomatist and scholar breathed his last, and could not have done so in a more peaceful spot. But the very inaccessible nature of the place made it a question of some difficulty how the body should be transported in properly decorous fashion to the railway station in the valley below--a difficulty which was solved by the young scholars of the School of Forestry, who turned out in a body to have the honour of bearing on their shoulders the remains of the man whose writings had done so much to awaken the Government to the necessity of establishing the inst.i.tution to which they belonged.

Mrs. Marsh, for so many years the brightest ornament of the Italo-American society, and equally admired and welcomed by the English colony, first at Florence and then at Rome, still lives for the equal delight of her friends on the other side of the Atlantic. I may not, therefore, venture to say more of "what I remember" of her, than that it abundantly accounts for the feeling of an unfilled void, which her absence occasioned and occasions in both the American and English world on the banks of the Tiber.

CHAPTER XV.

It was in the spring of the year 1860 that I first became acquainted with "George Eliot" and G H. Lewes in Florence. But it was during their second visit to Italy in 1861 that I saw a good deal more of them. It was in that year, towards the end of May, that I succeeded in persuading them to accompany me in a visit to the two celebrated Tuscan monasteries of Camaldoli and La Vernia. I had visited both on more than one occasion previously--once with a large and very merry party of both s.e.xes, of whom Colley Grattan was one--but the excursion made in company with G.H. Lewes and George Eliot was another-guess sort of treat, and the days devoted to it stand out in high relief in my memory as some of the most memorable in my life.

They were anxious to be moving northwards from Florence, and I had some difficulty in persuading them to undertake the expedition. A certain weight of responsibility, therefore, lay on me--that folks whose days were so sure of being turned to good profit, should not by my fault be led to waste any of them. But I had already seen enough of both of them to feel sure that the specialties of the very exceptional little experience I proposed to them would be appreciated and acceptable. Neither he nor she were fitted by their habits, or indeed by the conditions of their health, to encounter much "roughing," and a certain amount of that was a.s.suredly inevitable--a good deal more five-and-twenty years ago than would be the case now. But if the flesh was weak, truly the spirit was willing! I have heard grumbling and discontent from the young of either s.e.x in the heyday of health and strength in going over the same ground. But for my companions on the present occasion, let the difficulties and discomforts be what they might, the continually varied and continually suggestive interest they found in everything around them, overrode and overbore all material considerations.

Never, I think, have I met with so impressionable and so delicately sensitive a mind as that of George Eliot! I use "sensitive" in the sense in which a photographer uses the word in speaking of his plates.

Everything that pa.s.sed within the ken of that wonderful organism, whether a thing or combination of things seen, or an incident, or a trait revealing or suggesting character, was instantly reproduced, fixed, registered by it, the operating light being the wonderful native force of her intellect. And the photographs so produced were by no means evanescent. If ever the admirably epigrammatic phrase, "wax to receive and marble to retain," was applicable to any human mind, it was so to that of George Eliot. And not only were the enormous acc.u.mulations of stored-up impressions safe beyond reach of oblivion or confusion, but they were all and always miraculously ready for co-ordination with those newly coming in at each pa.s.sing moment! Think of the delight of pa.s.sing, in companionship with such a mind, through scenes and circ.u.mstances entirely new to it!

Lewes, too, was a most delightful companion, the cheeriest of philosophers! The old saying of "_Comes jucundus in via pro vehiculo est_," was especially applicable to him. Though very exhaustible in bodily force, he was inexhaustible in cheerfulness, and above all in unwearied, incessant, and minute care for "Polly." In truth, if any man could ever be said to have lived in another person, Lewes in those days, and to the end of his life, lived in and for George Eliot. The talk of worshipping the ground she trod on, and the like, are pretty lovers phrases, sometimes signifying much, and sometimes very little.

But it is true accurately and literally of Lewes. That care for her, at once comprehensive and minute, unsleeping watchfulness, lest she should dash her foot against a stone, was _never_ absent from his mind. She had become his real self, his genuine _ego_ to all intents and purposes. And his talk and thoughts were egoistic accordingly. Of his own person, his ailments, his works, his ideas, his impressions, you might hear not a word from him in the intercourse of many days.

But there was in his inmost heart a _naf_ and never-doubting faith that talk on all these subjects as regarded _her_ must be profoundly interesting to those he talked with. To me, at all events, it was so.

Perhaps had it been otherwise, there would have been less of it.

We were to reach Camaldoli the first night, and had therefore to leave Florence very early in the morning. At Pelago, a little _paese_--village we should call it--on the Arno some fourteen or fifteen miles above Florence, we were to find saddle-horses, the journey we were about to make being in those days practicable in no other way, unless on foot. There was at that time a certain Antonio da Pelago, whose calling it was to act as guide, and to furnish horses.

I had known him for many years, as did all those whose ramblings took them into those hills. He was in many respects what people call "a character," and seemed to fancy himself to have in some degree proprietary rights over the three celebrated Tuscan monasteries, Vallombrosa, Camaldoli, and La Vernia. He was well known to the friars at each of these establishments, and indeed to all the spa.r.s.e population of that country-side. He was a very good and competent guide and courier, possessed with a very amusingly exaggerated notion of his own importance, and rather bad to turn aside from his own preconceived and predetermined methods of doing everything that had to be done. George Eliot at once made a study of him.

I am reminded, too, as I write, of the great amus.e.m.e.nt with which my old and highly-valued friend of many years, Alfred Austin, who long subsequently was making the same excursion with me and both our wives, listened to an oration of the indispensable Antonio. One of his baggage horses had strayed and become temporarily lost among the hills. He was exceedingly wroth, and poured forth his vexation in a torrent of very unparliamentary language. "_Corpo di Guida!_"

he exclaimed, among a curious a.s.sortment of heterogeneous adjurations--"Body of Judas!" stooping to the ground as he spoke, and striking the back of his hand against it, with an action that very graphically represented a singular survival of the cla.s.sical _testor inferos!_ Then suddenly changing his mood, he apostrophised the missing beast with the almost tearful reproach, "There! there now!

Thou hast made me throw away all my devotions! All! And Easter only just gone!" That is to say, your fault has betrayed me into violence and bad language, which has begun a new record of offences just after I had made all clear by my Easter devotions.

The first stage of our rough ride was to the little hill town of Prato Vecchio on the infant Arno, and close under the lofty peaks of Falterona, in the flanks of which both the Arno and the Tiber rise.

The path, as it descends to the town, winds round the ruins of an ancient castle, beneath the walls of which is still existent that Fontebranda fountain, which Adam the forger in the _Inferno_ longed for a drop of, and which almost all Dantescan scholars and critics mistake for a larger and nowadays better known fountain of the same name at Siena. On pointing it out to George Eliot, I found, of course, that the name and the whole of Adam the forger's history was familiar to her; but she had little expected to find his local habitation among these wild hills; and she was unaware of the current mistake between the Siena Fontebranda, and the little rippling streamlet before us.

The little _osteria_, at which we were to get some breakfast, was a somewhat lurid dwelling in an uninviting back lane. But the ready and smiling good-humour with which the hostess prepared her coffee and bread, and eggs and bacon, availed much to make up for deficiencies, especially for guests far more interested in observing every minute specialty of the place, the persons, and the things, than they were extreme to mark what was amiss. I remember George Eliot was especially struck by the absence of either milk or b.u.t.ter, and by the fact that the inhabitants of these hills, and indeed the Tuscans of the remoter parts of the country generally, never use them at all--or did not in those days.

But it was beyond Prato Vecchio that the most characteristic part of our ride began. The hills, into the folds and gullies of which we plunged almost immediately after leaving the walls of the little town, are of the most arid, and it is hardly too much to say, repulsive description. It is impossible to imagine soil more evidently to the least experienced eye hopeless for any purpose useful to man, than these rolling and deeply water-scored hills. Nor has the region any of the characters of the picturesque. The soil is very friable, consisting of an easily disintegrated slaty limestone, of a pale whitey-brown in prevailing colour, varied here and there by stretches of similar material greenish in tint. For the most part the hill-sides are incapable of nourishing even a blade of gra.s.s; and they are evidently in the process of rapid removal into the Mediterranean, for the further extension of the plain that has been formed between Pisa and the sh.o.r.e since the time, only a few hundred years ago, when Pisa was a first-cla.s.s naval power. All this, with the varied historical corollaries and speculations which it suggested, was highly interesting to my fellow-travellers.

But the ride, nowhere dangerous, though demanding some strong faith in the sure-footedness of Antonio's steeds, is not an easy one. The sun was beating with unmitigated glare on those utterly shadeless hill-sides. It was out of the question to attempt anything beyond a walk. The sides of the gullies, which had to be ascended and descended, though never reaching to the picturesque proportions of precipices, were yet sufficiently steep and rough to make very fatiguing riding for a lady unaccustomed to such exercise. And George Eliot was in no very robust condition of health at the time. And despite his well dissembled anxiety I could see that Lewes was not easy respecting her capability of resisting the heat, the fatigue, and the unwonted exercise. But her cheerfulness and activity of interest never failed her for an instant. Her mind "made increment of everything." Nor even while I led her horse down some of the worst descents did the exigencies of the path avail to interrupt conversation, full of thought and far-reaching suggestiveness, as her talk ever was.

At last we reached the spot where the territory of the monastery commences; and it is one that impresses itself on the imagination and the memory in a measure not likely to be forgotten. The change is like a pantomime transformation scene! The traveller pa.s.ses without the slightest intermediate gradation from the dreary scene which has been described, into the shade and the beauty of a region of magnificent and well-managed forest! The bodily delight of pa.s.sing from the severe glare of the sun into this coolness, welcome alike to the skin and to the eye, was very great. And to both my companions, but especially to George Eliot, the great beauty of the scene we entered on gave the keenest pleasure.

a.s.suredly Saint Romuald in selecting a site for his Camaldolese did not derogate from the apparently instinctive wisdom which seems to have inspired the founders of monasteries of every order and in every country of Europe. Invariably the positions of the religious houses were admirably well chosen; and that of Camaldoli is no exception to the rule. The convent is not visible from the spot where the visitor enters the forest boundary which marks the limit of the monastic domain. Nearly an hour's ride through scenery increasing in beauty with each step, where richly green lawns well stocked with cattle are contrasted wonderfully with the arid desolation so recently left behind, has still to be done ere the convent's hospitable door is reached.

The convent door, however, in our case was not reached, for the building used for the reception of visitors, and called the _forestieria_, occupies its humble position by the road side a hundred yards or so before the entrance to the monastery is reached. There Antonio halted his cavalcade, and while showing us our quarters with all the air of a master, sent one of his attendant lads to summon the _padre forestieraio_--the monk deputed by the society to receive strangers.