Delphi complete works of.., p.1235
Delphi Complete Works of William Dean Howells, page 1235
English which has once been Italian acquires an emotionality which it does not perhaps wholly lose in returning to itself; and I am not sure that the language of the illustrious stranger, whom I quote at second hand, has not kept some terms which are native to Signor Bacciotti rather than himself. But it must be remembered that he was an eighteenth-century Englishman, and perhaps expressed himself much in this way. The picture he draws, if a little too idyllic, too pastoral, too operatic, for our realization, must still have been founded on fact, and I hope it is at least as true as those which commemorate the atrocities of the Medici. At any rate it is delightful, and one may as probably derive the softness of the modern Florentine morals and manners from the benevolence of Leopold as from the ferocity of Cosimo. Considering what princes mostly were in the days when they could take themselves seriously, and still are now when I should think they would give themselves the wink on seeing their faces in the glass, I am willing to allow that kindly despot of a Leopold all the glory that any history may claim for him. He had the genius of humanity, and that is about the only kind of genius which is entitled to reverence in this world. If he perhaps conceived of men as his children rather than his brothers, still he wished them well, and did them all the good he knew how. After a hundred years it must be allowed that we have made a considerable advance beyond him — in theory.
XXIX
WHAT society in Florence may now be like underneath its superficial effect of gentleness and placidity, the stranger, who reflects how little any one really knows of his native civilisation, will carefully guard himself from saying upon his own authority. From the report of others, of people who had lived long in Florence and were qualified in that degree to speak, one might say a great deal — a great deal that would be more and less than true. A brilliant and accomplished writer, a stranger naturalized by many years’ sojourn, and of an imaginable intimacy with his subject, sometimes spoke to me of a decay of manners which he had noticed in his time: the peasants no longer saluted persons of civil condition in meeting them; the young nobles, if asked to a ball, ascertained that there was going to be supper before accepting. I could not find these instances very shocking, upon reflection; and I was not astonished to hear that the sort of rich American girls who form the chase of young Florentine noblemen show themselves indifferent to untitled persons. There was something more of instruction in the fact that these fortune-hunters care absolutely nothing for youth or beauty, wit or character, in their prey, and ask nothing but money. This implies certain other facts — certain compensations and consolations, which the American girl with her heart set upon an historical name would be the last to consider. What interested me more was the witness which this gentleman bore, with others, to the excellent stuff of the peasants, whom he declared good and honest, and full of simple, kindly force and uprightness. The citizen class, on the other hand, was unenlightened and narrow-minded, and very selfish towards those beneath them; he believed that a peasant, for example, who cast his lot in the city, would encounter great unfriendliness in them if he showed the desire and the ability to rise above his original station. Both from this observer, and from other foreigners resident in Florence, I heard that the Italian nobility are quite apart from the national life; they have no political influence, and are scarcely a social power; there are, indeed, but three of the old noble families founded by the German emperors remaining — the Ricasoli, the Gherardeschi, and the Stufe; and a title counts absolutely for nothing with the Italians. At the same time, a Corsini was syndic of Florence; all the dead wall invited me to “vote for Peruzzi” in the approaching election for deputy, and at the last election a Ginori had been chosen. It is very hard to know about these things, and I am not saying my informants were wrong; but it is right to oppose to theirs the declaration of the intelligent and sympathetic scholar with whom I took my walks about Florence, and who said that there was great goodwill between the people and the historical families, who were in thorough accord with the national aspirations and endeavours. Again, I say, it is difficult to know the truth; but happily the truth in this case is not important.
One of the few acquaintances I made with Italians outside of the English-speaking circles was that of a tradesman who, in the intervals of business, was reading Shakspeare in English, and — if I may say it— “Venetian Life.” I think some Americans had lent him the latter classic. I did not learn from him that many other Florentine tradesmen gave their leisure to the same literature; in fact, I inferred that, generally speaking, there was not much interest in any sort of literature among the Florentines; and I only mention him in the hope of throwing some light upon the problem with which we are playing. He took me one night to the Literary Club, of which he was a member, and of which the Marchese Ricci is president; and I could not see that any presentation could have availed me more than his with that nobleman or the other nobleman who was secretary. The president shook my hand in a friendly despair, perfectly evident, of getting upon any common ground with me; and the secretary, after asking me if I knew Doctor Holmes, had an amiable effect of being cast away upon the sea of American literature. These gentlemen, as I understood, came every week to the club, and assisted at its entertainments, which were sometimes concerts, sometimes lectures and recitations, and sometimes conversation merely, for which I found the empty chairs, on my entrance, arranged in groups of threes and fives about the floor, with an air perhaps of too great social premeditation. Presently there was playing on the piano, and at the end the president shook hands with the performer. If there was anything of the snobbishness which poisons such intercourse for our race, I could not see it. May be snobbishness, like gentlemanliness, is not appreciable from one race to another.
XXX
MY acquaintance, whom I should grieve to make in any sort a victim by my personalities, did me the pleasure to take me over the little ancestral farm which he holds just beyond one of the gates; and thus I got at one of the homely aspects of life which the stranger is commonly kept aloof from. A narrow lane, in which some boys were pitching stones for quoits in the soft Sunday afternoon sunshine, led up from the street to the farmhouse, where one wandering roof covered house, stables, and offices with its mellow expanse of brown tiles, A door opening flush upon the lane admitted us to the picturesque interior, which was divided into the quarters of the farmer and his family, and the apartment which the owner occupied during the summer heats. This contained half a dozen pleasant rooms, chief of which was the library, overflowing with books representing all the rich past of Italian literature in poetry, history, and philosophy — the collections of my host’s father and grandfather. On the table he opened a bottle of the wine made on his farm; and then he took me up to the terrace at the house-top for the beautiful view of the city, and the mountains beyond it, streaked with snow. The floor of the terrace, which, like all the floors of the house, was of brick, was heaped with olives from the orchard on the hillside which bounded the little farm; but I could see from this point how it was otherwise almost wholly devoted to market-gardening. The grass keeps green all winter long at Florence, not growing, but never withering; and there were several sorts of vegetables in view, in the same sort of dreamy arrest Between the rows of cabbages I noticed the trenches for irrigation; and I lost my heart to the wide, deep well under the shed-roof below, with a wheel, picturesque as a mill-wheel, for pumping water into these trenches. The farm implements and heavier household utensils were kept in order here; and among the latter was a large wash-tub of fine earthenware, which had been in use there for a hundred and fifty years. My friend led the way up the slopes of his olive-orchard, where some olives still lingered among the willow-like leaves, and rewarded my curious palate with the insipidity of the olive which has not been salted. Then we returned to the house, and explored the cow-stables, where the well-kept Italian kine between their stone walls were much warmer than most Italian Christians in Florence. In a large room next the stable and behind the kitchen the farm-people were assembled, men, women, and children, in their Sunday best, who all stood up when we came in — all but two very old men, who sat in the chimney and held out their hands over the fire that sent its smoke up between them. Their eyes were bleared with age, and I doubt if they made out what it was all about; but they croaked back a pleasant answer to my host’s salutation, and then let their mouths fall open again and kept their hands stretched over the fire. It would be very hard to say just why these old men were such a pleasure to me.
XXXI
ONE January afternoon I idled into the Baptistery, to take my chance of seeing some little one made a Christian, where so many babes, afterwards memorable for good and evil, had been baptized; and, to be sure, there was the conventional Italian infant of civil condition tied up tight in the swathing of its civilisation, perfectly quiescent, except for its feebly wiggling arms, and undergoing the rite with national patience. It lay in the arms of a half-grown boy, probably its brother, and there were the father and the nurse; the mother of so young a child could not come, of course. The officiating priest, with spectacles dropped quite to the point of his nose, mumbled the rite from his book, and the assistant, with one hand in his pocket, held a negligently tilted taper in the other. Then the priest lifted the lid of the font in which many a renowned poet’s, artist’s, tyrant’s, philanthropist’s twisted little features were similarly reflected, and poured on the water, rapidly drying the poor little skull with a single wipe of a napkin; then the servant in attendance powdered the baby’s head, and the group, grotesquely inattentive throughout to the sacred rite, dispersed, and left me and a German family who had looked on with murmurs of sympathy for the child to overmaster as we might any interest we had felt in a matter that had apparently not concerned them.
One is always coming upon this sort of thing in the Italian churches, this droll nonchalance in the midst of religious solemnities, which I suppose is promoted somewhat by the invasions of sight-seeing everywhere. In the Church of the Badia at Florence, one day, the indifference of the tourists and the worshippers to one another’s presence was carried to such a point that the boy who was showing the strangers about, and was consequently in their interest, drew the curtain of a picture, and then, with his back to a group of kneeling devotees, balanced himself on the chapel-rail and sat swinging his legs there, as if it had been a store-box on a curbstone.
Perhaps we do not sufficiently account for the domestication of the people of Latin countries in their everyday-open church. They are quite at their ease there, whereas we are as unhappy in ours as if we were at an evening party; we wear all our good clothes, and they come into the houses of their Father in any rag they chance to have on, and are at home there. I have never seen a more careless and familiar group than that of which I was glad to form one, in the Church of Ognissanti, one day. I had gone, in my quality of American, to revere the tablet to Amerigo Vespucci which is there, and I found the great nave of the church occupied by workmen who were putting together the foundations of a catafalque, hammering away, and chatting cheerfully, with their mouths full of tacks and pins, and the funereal frippery of gold, black, and silver braid all about them. The church-beggars had left their posts to come and gossip with them, and the grandchildren of these old women were playing back and forth over the structure, unmolested by the workmen, and unawed either by the function going on in a distant chapel or by the theatrical magnificence of the sculptures around them and the fresco overhead, where a painted colonnade lifted another roof high above the real vault.
I liked all this, and I could not pass a church door without the wish to go in, not only for the pictures or statues one might see, but for the delightfully natural human beings one could always be sure of. Italy is above all lands the home of human nature — simple, unabashed even in the presence of its Maker, who is probably not so much ashamed of His work as some would Kke to have us think. In the churches, the beggary which the civil government has disheartened almost out of existence in the streets is still fostered, and an aged crone with a scaldino in her lap, a tattered shawl over her head, and an outstretched, skinny palm, guards the portal of every sanctuary. She has her chair, and the church is literally her home; she does all but eat and sleep there. For the rest, these interiors had not so much novelty as the charm of old association for me. Either I had not enlarged my interests in the twenty years since I had known them, or else they had remained unchanged; there was the same old smell of incense, the same chill, the same warmth, the same mixture of glare and shadow. A function in progress at a remote altar, the tapers starring the distant dusk; the straggling tourists; the sacristan, eager, but not too persistent with his tale of some special attraction at one’s elbow; the worshippers, all women or old men; a priest hurrying to or from the sacristy; the pictures, famous or unknown, above the side altars; the monuments, serious Gothic or strutting rococo — all was there again, just as it used to be.
But the thing that was really novel to me, who found the churches of 1883 in Florence so like the churches of 1863 in Venice, was the loveliness of the deserted cloisters belonging to so many of the former. These enclose nearly always a grass-grown space, where daisies and dandelions began to abound with the earliest consent of spring. Most public places and edifices in Italy have been so much photographed that few have any surprise left in them: one is sure that one has seen them oefore; but the cloisters are not yet the prey of this sort of pre-acquaintance. Whether the vaults and walls of the colonnades are beautifully frescoed, like those of Sta. Maria Novella or Sta. Annunziata or San Marco, or the place has no attraction but its grass and sculptured stone, it is charming; and these cloisters linger in my mind as something not less Florentine in character than the Ponte Vecchio or the Palazzo Publico. I remember particularly an evening effect in the cloister of Santa Annunziata, when the belfry in the corner, lifted aloft on its tower, showed with its pendulous bells like a great, graceful flower against the dome of the church behind it. The quiet in the place was almost sensible; the pale light, suffused with rose, had a delicate clearness; there was a little agreeable thrill of cold in the air; there could not have been a more refined moment’s pleasure offered to a sympathetic tourist loitering slowly homeward to his hotel and its table d’hôte; and why we cannot have old cloisters in America, where we are getting everything that money can buy, is a question that must remain to vex us. A suppressed convent at the corner of, say, Clarendon Street and Commonwealth Avenue, where the Brattle Street church is, would be a great pleasure on one’s way home in the afternoon; but still I should lack the final satisfaction of dropping into the chapel of the Brothers of the Misericordia, a little farther on towards Santa Maria Novella.
The sentimentalist may despair as he pleases, and have his fill of panic about the threatened destruction of the Ponte Vecchio, but I say that while these brothers, “black-stoled, black-hooded, like a dream,” continue to light the way to dusty death with their flaring torches through the streets of Florence, the mediaeval tradition remains unbroken; Italy is still Italy. They knew better how to treat Death in the Middle Ages than we do now, with our vain profanation of flowers to his service, our loathsome dapperness of “burial caskets,” and dress-coat and white tie for the dead. Those simple old Florentines, with their street wars, their pestilences, their manifold destructive violences, felt instinctively that he, the inexorable, was not to be hidden or palliated, not to be softened or prettified, or anywise made the best of, but was to be confessed in all his terrible gloom; and in this they found, not comfort, not alleviation, which time alone can give, but the anæsthesis of a freezing horror. Those masked and trailing sable figures, sweeping through the wide and narrow ways by night to the wild, long rhythm of their chant, in the red light of their streaming torches, and bearing the heavily draped bier in their midst, supremely awe the spectator, whose heart falters within him in the presence of that which alone is certain to be. I cannot say they are so effective by daylight, when they are carrying some sick or wounded person to the hospital; they have not their torches then, and the sun seems to take a cynical satisfaction in showing their robes to be merely of black glazed cotton. An anteroom of their chapel was fitted with locked and numbered drawers, where the brothers kept their robes; half-a-dozen coffin-shaped biers and litters stood about, and the floor was strewn with laurel leaves — I suppose because it was the festa of St. Sebastian.
