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BRINGING IN THE GRAPES
BRINGING IN THE GRAPES

CHAPTER I
VINTAGE-TIME IN TUSCANY

A DESCENT from the Apennine on a September evening into Tuscany, with the moon nearly full—that moon which in a few days will be shining in all its power upon the delights of the vintage week—this I want to recall to you who have shared the pleasure of such an experience with me.

A descent into the Garden of Italy, spread out wide in a haze of warm air—can custom stale the feeling which that brings to heart and mind?

Railway travel has its poetry, its sudden and emotional contrasts and surprises. But a few hours ago we were in the foggy drizzle of an autumn morning at Charing Cross, and, ere we have time to be fagged by a too-long journey, our eyes and brain receive the image of the Tuscan plain!

The train slows down for a moment on emerging from the last tunnel at the top of the mountain barrier; the grinding brakes are still, and for a precious instant we listen at the window for the old summer night sounds we remember and love. Yes! there they are; there he is, the dear old chirping, drumming, droning night-beetle in myriads at his old penetrating song, persistent as the sicala’s through the dog days, local in its suggestiveness as the corncrake’s endless saw among the meadow-sweet all through the Irish summer night.

But, avanti! Down the winding track with flying sparks from the locked wheels, every metre to the good; down to the red domes of Pistoja; forward, then, on the level, to Florence and all it holds.

How we English do love Italy! Somewhere in our colder nature flows a warm Gulf Stream of love for what is sunny and clear-skied and genial, and I think I may say, though my compatriots little realize it, that the evidences of a living faith which are inseparable from Italian landscape greatly add to the charm that attracts us to this land. What would her hills be if decapitated of the convents on their summits, with each its cypress-lined Via Crucis winding up the hillside? The time of the after-glow would be voiceless if deprived of the ringing of the Angelus. Dimly we perceive these things, or hardly recognise them as facts—nay, many of us still protest, but they draw us to Italy.

And now the arrival at Florence. The pleasure of dwelling on that arrival, when on the platform our friends await us with the sun of Italy in their looks! Then away we go with them in carriages drawn by those fast-trotting Tuscan ponies that are my wonder and admiration, with crack of whip and jingle of bells along the white moon-lit road to the great villa at Signa, where the vintage is about to begin.

To recall the happy labour of those precious three days of grape-picking in the mellow heat on the hillside, and then the all-pervading fumes of fermenting wine of the succeeding period in the courtyard of the Fattoria; the dull red hue of the crushed grapes that dyes all things, animate and inanimate, within the sphere of work, is one of the most grateful efforts of my memory. I see again the handsome laughing peasants, the white oxen, the flights of pigeons across the blue of the sky. The mental relaxation amidst all this activity of wholesome and natural labour, the complete change of scene, afford a blessed rest to one who has worked hard through a London winter and got very tired of a London season. It is a patriarchal life here, and the atmosphere of good humour between landlord and tenant seems to show the land laws and customs of Tuscany to be in need of no reformer, the master and the man appearing to be nearer contentment than is the case anywhere else that I know of. You and I saw a very cheery specimen of the land system at grand old Caravaggio.

A SON OF THE SOIL, RIVIERA DI LEVANTE
A SON OF THE SOIL, RIVIERA DI LEVANTE

Then the evenings! I know it is trite to talk of guitars and tenor voices under the moonlight, but Italy woos you back to many things we call “used up” elsewhere, and there is positive refreshment in hearing those light tenor voices, expressive of the light heart, singing the ever-charming stornellos of the country as we sit under the pergola after dinner each evening. The neighbours drop in and the guitar goes round with the coffee. Everybody sings who can, and, truth to say, some who can’t. Many warm thanks to our kind friends, English and Italian (some are gone!), who gave you and me such unforgettable hospitality in ‘75, ‘76.

But lest all these guitarings and airy nothings of the gentle social life here should become oversweet, we can slip away from the rose-garden and climb up into the vineyards of the rustic podere that speak of wholesome peasant labour, of tillage—the first principle of man’s existence on earth—and, among the practical pole-vines that bear the true wine-making grapes (not the dessert fruit of the garden pergola), have a quiet talk.

The starry sky is disclosed almost round the entire circle of the horizon, with “Firenze la gentile” in the distance on our right, the Apennine in front, and the sleeping plain trending away to the left to be lost in mystery. I want to talk to you of our experience of Italy the Beloved, from our earliest childhood until to-day.

What a happy chance it was that our parents should have been so taken with the Riviera di Levante as to return there winter after winter, alternately with the summers spent in gentle Kent or Surrey, during our childhood; not the French Riviera which has since become so sophisticated, but that purely Italian stretch of coast to the east of Genoa, ending in Porto Fino, that promontory which you and I will always hold as a sacred bit of the world. Why? There are as lovely promontories jutting out into the Mediterranean elsewhere? The child’s love for the scenes of its early friendships with nature is a jealous love.

Our relations by marriage with the B. family admitted us into the centre of a very typical Italian home of the old order. I suppose that life was very like the life of eighteenth-century England—the domestic habits were curiously alike, and I cannot say I regret that their vogue is passing. We are thought to be so ridiculously fastidious, noi altri inglesi, and our parents were certainly not exceptional in this respect, and suffered accordingly.

The master of the house, the autocratic padrone, had been in the Italian Legion in Napoleon’s Russian campaign, as you may remember, and the retreat from Moscow had apparently left certain indelible cicatrices on the old gentleman’s temper. I can hear his stentorian voice even now calling to the servant (I think there was only one “living in,” though there were about a dozen hangers-on) in the rambling old Palazzo without bells. “O—O—O, Mariuccia!” “Padrone!” you heard in a feminine treble from the remote regions of the kitchen upstairs, somewhere. Mariuccia would generally get a bit of the Italian legionary’s mind when she came tumbling down the marble stairs. Madame la Generale appeared in the morning with a red handkerchief on her head and remained in corsetless dÉshabillÉ till the afternoon. Genoese was the home language, French was for society. No one spoke real Italian. They had not yet begun to “Toscaneggiare,” as it grew to be the fashion to do when Italy became united. Don’t you dislike to hear them?

What recollections our parents carried away from those visits to the Nervi household! How we used to love to hear mamma’s accounts, for instance, of the night Lord Minto came to tea. Madame Gioconda had put the whole pound of choice green tea which she had bought at the English shop in Genoa into a large tea-pot requisitioned for this rare English occasion. Poor mamma had the pouring of it out, and no deluges of hot water, brought by the astonished Mariuccia, could tame that ferocious beverage. I am sure the brave General never got more completely “bothered” by the Russian cannon than he did by the “gun-powder” that evening. Nowadays such a mistake could not happen when il thÈ is quite the fashion.

Italians still think it the right thing to visit England in November and go to Liverpool, Manchester, and Birmingham for their informing little tour. In those remote days it was the only way in which the few that ever ventured so far saw our lovely land. Mamma was constantly sent into a state of suppressed indignation by the stereotyped question, “Are there any flowers in England?” But I have not done with the old General. I remember we were so frightened of that Tartar that Papa used to have to propel us into the Presence, when, in the evenings, every one, big and little, sat down to dominoes or “tombola.” Syrup and water and little cakes made of chestnut flour refreshed the company. The General’s snuff was in the syrup, I firmly believed. We looked like two little martyrs as we went up to salute those shaking yellow cheeks on being sent to bed. Why are children put to these ordeals?

The living was frugal, the real “simple life” which some of us in England are pretending to lead to-day. But on certain occasions, such as Shrove Tuesday, for instance, ah! no effects of oriental feasting could surpass the repletion with which each guest left the festive board. Mariuccia had help for three days previous to such regalings, during which one heard the tapping of the chopper in the kitchen, preparing the force-meat for the national dish, the succulent ravioli, as one passed within earshot of that remote vaulted hall.

And do you remember (you are a year my junior, and a year makes a great difference in the child’s mind) a certain night when there was a ball at our villa on the Albaro shore, and the shutters of the great “sala” were thrown open to let in the moonlight at midnight? A small barque lay in the offing, surrounded by little boats, and a cheer came over the sea in answer to what the people over there, seeing the sudden illumination from the chandeliers, took for our flashing signal of “God-speed!” They were a detachment of Garibaldi’s Redshirts on their way to liberate Southern Italy. The grown-ups on our side went down to supper, and our little cropped heads remained looking at the barque in the moon’s broad reflection long after we were supposed to be asleep. I had seen the Liberator himself talking to the gardener at the ——’s villa, where he was staying, at Quarto, the day before he sailed for Messina.

We were certainly an unconventional family, and we were so happy in our rovings through the land of sun. But if you and I are inclined to bemoan too much modernism in that Italy we so jealously love, oh! do not let us forget the gloom of some of those old palaces which we had a mind to inhabit a l’Italienne, on bad winter nights—the old three-beaked oil lamps in the bedrooms serving, as our dear father used to say, only to “make darkness visible”—the wind during the great storms setting some loose shutter flapping in uninhabited upper regions of the house; the dark places which Charles Dickens in his Pictures from Italy says he noticed in all the Italian houses he slept in on his tour, which were not wholly innocent of scorpions. The marble floors and the paucity of fireplaces did not give comfort for the short winters; but how glorious those old houses became as soon as the cold was gone; shabby, ramshackle, and splendid, we loved them “for all in all.”

In certain things modern Italy affords us an easier life. We are given to nagging at the Italians for their dreadful want of taste in spoiling the beauty of their cities, but in the old days we were nagging at them for their dirt. Now Rome is the cleanest capital in the world. Some one said it is more than clean, it is dusted. And is not the Society for the Protection of Animals in existence, at least? With what derision such an institution would have been heard of in our childhood’s days—a suggestion of those “mad English.”

Do you call to mind what scenes used to occur whenever mamma came out with us, between her and the muleteers? I can see her now, in the fulness of her English beauty, flying out one day at a carter for flogging and kicking his mules that were hardly able to drag a load up the Albaro Hill. This was the dialogue. Mamma—“Voi siete un cattivo!” Muleteer—“E voi siete bella!” Mamma—“Voi siete un birbante!” Muleteer—“E voi siete bella!” Mamma—“Voi siete uno scelerato!” Muleteer—“E voi siete bella!” And so on, till we had reached the bottom of the cruel hill, mamma at the end of her crescendo of fulminations and the man’s voice, still calling “E voi siete bella” in imitation of her un-Genoese phraseology, lost in distance at the top. “I shall get a fit some day,” were her first English words. Poor dear mother, the shooting of the singing-birds in spring, the dirt, the noise, the flies, the mosquitoes—so many thorns in her Italian rose! Yet how she loved that rose, but not more than the sweet violet of our England that had no such thorns. The music in the churches, too, was trying in those days, and to none more so than to that music-loving soul. We have seen her doing her best to fix her mind on her devotions, with her fingers in her ears, and her face puckered up into an excruciated bunch. I hope Pius X. has enforced the plain-chant everywhere, and stopped those raspings of secular waltzes on sour fiddles that were supposed to aid our fervour. But I am nagging. As a Northerner, I have no right to lecture the Italians as to what sort of music is best for devotion, nor to tell them that the dressing of their sacred images in gaudy finery on festival days is not the way to deepen reverence. The Italians do what suits them best in these matters, and if our English taste is offended let us stay at home.

Well, well, here below there is nothing bright without its shadow. When we had the delicious national costumes we had the dirt and the cruelty. But why, I ask, cannot we keep the national dress, the local customs, the picturesqueness while we gain the cleanly and the kind? Every time I revisit Italy I miss another bit of colour and pleasing form amongst the populations. In Rome not a cloak is to be seen on the citizens, that black cloak lined with red or green they used to throw over the left shoulder, toga-wise—only old left-off ulsters or overcoats from Paris or Berlin. Not a red cap on the men of Genoa; the pezzotto and mezzero, most feminine headgear for the women, are extinct there. Ladies in Rome are even shy of wearing the black mantilla to go to the Vatican, and put it on in the cloak-room of the palace, removing it again to put on the barbarous Parisian hat for the streets. When we foreign ladies drive in our mantillas to the Audiences we are stared at! Even my old friends the red, blue, and green umbrellas of portly dimensions, formerly dear to the clergy, no longer light up the sombre clerical garb. Did I not see a flight of bare-footed Capuchins, last time in Rome, put up, every monk of them, a black Gingham when a shower came on, and I was expecting an efflorescence of my fondly-remembered Gamps? Next time I go the other bit of clerical colour will have vanished, and I shall find them using white pocket-handkerchiefs instead of the effective red bandana.

Well, but, you are told, the beggars are cleared out, those persistent unfortunates who used to thrust their deformities and diseases before you wherever you turned, with the wailing refrain, “Misericordia, signore!” “Un povero zoppo!” “Un cieco!” “Ho fame!” etc. etc. But they sunned themselves and ate their bread and onions where they liked (not where we liked) in perfect liberty. Where are they now? In dreary poorhouses, I suppose, out of sight, regularly fed and truly miserable. I am afraid that much of our modern comfort is owing simply to the covering up of unpleasantnesses. In the East, especially, life is seen with the cover taken off, and many painful sights and many startling bits of the reality of life spoil the sunshine for us there for a while. But worse things are in the London streets, only “respectably” covered up, and I am sure that more cruelty is committed by the ever-increasing secret work of the vivisector than ever wrung the heart of the compassionate in the old days in the open street.

And there, as we sit on the hillside above Signa, lies Florence, just discernible in the far-off plain, where I learnt so much of my art. Those frescoes of Masaccio, Andrea del Sarto, and all those masters of the human face who revelled in painting every variety of human type, how they augmented my taste that way! Nothing annoyed me so much as the palpable use of one model in a crowded composition. Take a dinner-party at table—will you ever see two noses alike as you run your eye along the guests? Even in a regiment of evenly matched troops, all of one nationality, I ask you to show me two men in the ranks sharing the same nose!

Ah! those days I spent in the cloisters of the SS. Annuziata, making pencil copies of Andrea’s figures in the series of frescoes illustrating the life of St Philip. It was summer-time, and the tourists only came bothering me towards the end. That hot summer, when I used to march into Florence, accompanied by little Majolina, in the still-early mornings, when the sicala was not yet in full chirp for the day! Four days a week to my master’s studio under the shadow of the Medici Chapel, and two to my dear cloisters; the Sunday at our villa under Fiesole. Happy girl!

I see in my diary this brilliant adaptation of Coleridge’s lines—

I have much to thank my master Guiseppe Bellucci for, who drilled me so severely, carrying on the instruction I had the advantage to receive from thorough-going Richard Burchett the head-master at South Kensington—never-to-be-forgotten South Kensington.

It seems a shame to be saying so much about Florence and not to pause a few minutes to give the other a little hand-shake in passing. There I began my art-student life, than which no part of an artist’s career can be more free from care or more buoyed up with aspirations for the future. Dear early days spent with those bright and generous comrades, my fellow-students, so full of enthusiasm over what they called my “promise”—I have all those days chronicled in the old diaries. There I recall the day I was promoted to the “Life Class” from the “Antique”—a joyful epoch; and the Sketching Club where “old D——,” the second master, used to give “Best” nearly every time to Kate Greenaway and “Second Best” to me. What joy when I got a “Best” one fine day. She and I raced neck and neck with those sketches after that. The “Life Class” was absorbingly interesting. But how nervous and excited I felt at grappling with my first living model. He was a fine old man (but with a bibulous eye) costumed to represent “Cranmer walking to the Tower.” I see in the diary, “Cranmer walked rather unsteadily to the Tower to-day, and we all did badly in consequence.” Then came one of Cromwell’s Ironsides whose morion gave him a perpetual headache, followed by my first full-length, a costume model in tights and slashed doublet whom we spitefully called “Spindle-Shanks” and greatly disliked. What was my surprise, long years afterwards, to stumble upon my “Spindle-Shanks” as “‘Christopher Columbus,’ by the celebrated painter of etc. etc.” I then remembered I had made a present of him, when finished, to our “char,” much to her embarrassment, I should think. However, she seems to have got rid of the “white elephant” with profit to herself in course of time. But I must not let myself loose on those glorious student days, so full of work and of play, otherwise I would wander too far away from my subject. It was tempting to linger over that hand-shake.

I don’t think I ever felt such heat as in Florence. As the July sun was sending every one out of the baking city, shutting up the House of Deputies, and generally taking the pith out of things, I remember Bellucci coming into the studio one day with his hair in wisps, and hinting that it would be as well for me to give myself un mesetto di riposo. I did take that “little month of rest” at our villa, and sketched the people and the oxen, and mixed a great deal in peasant society, benefitting thereby in the loss of my Genoese twang under the influence of their most grammatical Tuscan. The peasant is the most honourable, religious, and philosophical of mankind. I feel always safe with peasants and like their conversation and ways. They lead the natural life. Before daylight, in midsummer, one heard them directing their oxen at the plough, and after the mid-day siesta they were back at their work till the Ave Maria. It was a large family that inhabited the peasant quarters of our villa and worked the landlord’s vineyards. How they delighted in my sketches, in giving me sittings in the intervals of work, in seeing me doing amateur harvesting with a sickle and helping (?) them to bind the wheat sheaves and sift the grain. I must often have been in the way, now I think of it, but never a hint did these ladies and gentlemen of the horny hand allow to escape to my confusion. Carlotta, the eldest girl, read me some of the “Jerusalem Delivered” one full-moon night, to show me how easily one could read small print by the Italian moonlight. Her mother invited me to dine with the family one day as they were having a rare repast. Cencio had found two hedgehogs in a hollow olive-tree, and the ragout that ensued must be tasted by the signorina. Through the door of the kitchen where we dined on that occasion the two white oxen were seen reposing in the next apartment after their morning’s work. After tasting the spinoso stew, I begged to be allowed to take a stool in the corner and sketch the whole family at table, and with the perfect grace of those people I was welcomed to do so, and I got them all in as they sucked their hedgehog bones in concert. You were reading Keats in one of the arbours, meanwhile, I remember.

I loved those days at Florence where I felt I was making the most of my time and getting on towards the day when I should paint my first “real” picture. When next I visited Florence with you for those memorable vintages at Caravaggio in ‘75, ‘76, which I recalled just now to your remembrance, I had painted my first “real” picture and received in London more welcome than I deserved or hoped for.

Twice I have revisited the outside of my Florentine studio in recent years, not daring to go in. Bellucci is long dead and I don’t know who is there now. Standing under that tall window I have reviewed my career since the days I worked there. I rejoice to know that my best works are nearly all in public galleries or in the keeping of my Sovereign. To the artist, the idea of his works changing hands is never a restful one.

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CHAPTER II
SIENNA, PERUGIA, AND VESUVIUS

A TWO days’ excursion to Sienna at the close of our second vintage at Caravaggio was a fit finale to the last visit you and I ever paid to Italy en garÇon.

From Tuscany to Etruria—deeper still into the luxury of associating with the past. Honey-coloured Sienna! It dwells in my memory bathed in sunshine; the little city like a golden cup overflowing with the riches it can scarcely hold; the home of St. Catherine and the scene of her ecstasies and superhuman endeavours: the battlefield of St. Bernardine’s manful struggle against vice and luxury and gambling, so rampant and unabashed in his time. Everywhere in this city you see, sculptured on circular plaques of old white marble, let into the walls in street and square, that monogram which all denominations of Christians know so well, the I.H.S. with the Cross—Jesus Hominum Salvator. Whether the engraved characters seen on the tombs in the Roman Catacombs were or were not identical with those three initials and their significance, they were so regarded by all the Churches for centuries, and the monogram which St. Bernardine caused to be set up in this way throughout Sienna was moulded on them in that belief. It was he who caused this emblem to be so placed that the reluctant public eye could not wholly avoid it, and who had it illuminated on tablets which he held up to his congregations at the end of his rousing sermons, thus making that appeal to the mind through the eye which he relied upon as one of his most effectual levers. One may say he morally forced the people to recognise and venerate that Name once more.

Upon the carved coats-of-arms of Guelph and Ghibelline, which seemed to gird at each other from the walls, he imposed this sign of peace, and hence the multiplicity of these lovely symbols I am trying to recall. They are seals which his strong hand stamped upon his native place.

PLOUGHING IN TUSCANY
PLOUGHING IN TUSCANY

Like all the great saints, Bernardine was practical. The manufacturers of playing-cards and dice, finding their customers leaving them in ever-increasing numbers to follow the Franciscan with a fervour which reached to extraordinary heights, brought their complaints to him. Bankruptcy was upon them. “Turn your talent to painting this Name on cards and sell them to the people.” This was done, and these little tablets with the “I.H.S.” became endowed with a peculiar sanctity to the purchasers and sold well, so that little fortunes flowed in to fill the void left by the fall in playing-cards. All these we spoke of on the spot, I remember, and I write these words to you who know it all better than I do, to show you I have not forgotten.

Sometimes the monogram is inserted in the marble discs in gold on a blue ground. Do you see again those circles of warm white marble, those shining letters surrounded with golden rays on the blue centre, the reflected light in the hollows of the carving, the Italian sky above? These Siennese blank walls are better employed than those of modern Rome, where we may see somebody’s soap or blacking belauded in our mother tongue ad nauseam.

“A city set on a hill cannot be hid.” How high Sienna is set! A lovelier bit of man’s workmanship was never held aloft for man to see.

“To appreciate the outside aspect of Sienna we drove out” (I see in my diary) “to the fortress-villa of Belcaro, with an introduction to the owner, a recluse, who, though he has been to London once, somewhere in the ‘forties, has never been to Sienna.

“The drive to this historic villa was through a perfect Pre-Raphaelite landscape, full of highly-cultivated hillocks, above which the grander distant country unfolded itself. I apologized to the old Masters for what I had said of their landscape backgrounds before I had seen the Siennese middle distances whose type seems to have inspired so many of them.

“Each turn in the road gave us a new aspect of the golden-brown city behind us, on its steep hill. Perhaps the most effective view of it is from near Belcaro, where you get the dark stone-pines in the immediate foreground.

“And the interior of the city! Those narrow streets they call here rughe and costarelle are fascinating, dipping down to some archway through which you see, far below, the sudden misty distance of the rolling campagna, or a peep of a piazza in dazzling sunlight contrasting with the semi-darkness of the narrow stone lane. So narrow are these lanes that a pair of oxen drawing a cart all but scrape the side walls with the points of their enormous horns, and you must manage to avoid a collision by obliterating yourself in the nearest doorway. We found the people beautiful. There are no modern abominations in the way of buildings here, so that one enjoys Sienna with unalloyed pleasure.” ... At last!

I suppose nothing could be more satisfying to the lover of beauty and of that dignity which belongs to the great works of architecture of the past than the aspect of Sienna Cathedral in the light of a September moon, the planets and stars watching with her over that sanctuary in the cloudless heavens.

The silence of a little Italian city like this at night, when the full moon dispenses with the artificial lighting, is always taking. To-night the urban silence is broken perhaps by a burst of singing and the thrumming of a guitar; young fellows with apparently plenty of leisure are coming jauntily along the pavement singing, “Oi! Oi! Oi! Tirami la gamba se tu puoi,” and suddenly dive down a pitch-dark alley; then a burst of laughter from a cavernous wine-shop; then stillness again. A dog barks in a garden over whose walls you see where the “blessed moon tips with silver all these fruit-tree tops.” A fountain bubbles and gushes softly as you come upon its hiding-place in the deep shadow from a bit of loopholed wall that you scarcely recognize as the one you were sketching this morning. Hither a few fire-flies, remnants of the summer host, have strayed from beyond the city ramparts. Footsteps echo in the silence more than in the day-time; not a wheel is heard, but the campagna below is heard. It is murmuring with its invisible life of insects all awake and full of shrill energy—goodness knows about what. Your own energy is ebbing after the day’s enchantment and you feel that to stroll and sit and look is all the bliss you need.

I had a revelation at Sienna about frescoes. In this extraordinarily dry atmosphere you can see, as nowhere else, the fresco as it was originally intended to appear. I do not know that I liked the effect as I came into the sacristy of the cathedral and saw Pinturicchio’s apparently freshly painted scenes. These were so true, not only in their linear, but (strange to say) in their aËrial, perspective that the effect was as if the walls had opened to show us these crowds of figures in gorgeous halls or airy landscapes outside the building, and the eye was deceived by a positive illusion. One wants to feel the walls of an apartment, and when its frescoes are flat and faded, and appearing more as lovely bits of decorative colour, as we see elsewhere, the eye is better satisfied. But, looked at as pictures, these richly coloured works are truly masterly, full of character and natural, realistic action.

Much of the beauty of the Middle Ages which we delight in is owing to the mellowing of Time. When first turned out by painter or mason this beauty would not so charm the artist. A brandnew feudal castle must have looked very hard and staring; a walled city like a Brobdingnagian toy town in a round box. No lichens on those walls; no ivy, no clumps of wallflowers, or any of those compassionate veils that Nature, if allowed a free hand, gently lays upon our crudities, and which the modern Italian Sindaco calls “indecenza” and commands to be scraped away. The mind recognises the rightness of the inevitable bare look of a new building, but a scraped ruin offends both mind and eye.

PERUGIA

ONE day in April ‘99 I was reading a fascinating little book by Miss Duff Gordon on Perugia as I sat on a fallen pine-tree trunk in our wood at Rosebank in remote Cape Colony. I read it with intenser longing than ever to be back in the world of art, of history, of culture, of well-known and well-loved things, and, thinking we were likely to be in our lovely exile for at least three years (with a short flight home to England in the interval, perhaps), I thought of several precious things I would give to be at Perugia in reality. That very day in that very month of the following year I was there!

Why do we fret about the future? Vain weakness! In my experience the future has brought more than I wished for and better things, and the sad things that have come have been those I had not feared.

It is a lovely journey from Florence to Perugia—all beautiful, and one wants to be at both ends of the railway carriage at once so as to miss nothing. The old brown cities along the route are as frequent as the Rhine castles; they still have their battlemented walls and gateways to delight the artist for a long while yet. Perugia did not frown upon us so mediÆvally this time, as we drove up the long zigzag to it, as when you and I first saw it. I think some of the frown has been demolished since those days, and indeed I do not regret this. They are raising some good public buildings where, I am told, the old castle stood, and in these you see lovely pillars of rosy marble or granite quarried from Assisi. That old castle had gloomy memories for the Italians and had no claim to stay.

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 Assisi on the slopes of the “Umbrian Hills”!

THE BERSAGLIERI AT THE FOUNTAIN, PERUGIA
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

“23rd April 1900.—All day ‘on the wander’ through ripe old Perugia. A silent city, full of memories, brimming over with history, lapped in Art! Everywhere the flowering fruit-trees showed over the brown walls, the sunshine fell pleasantly on the masses 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 spaces 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 God.

“As we were passing 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 manoeuvres 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 massed 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 space, 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. Assuredly 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 shell 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 retardingly 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 factitious 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 Titan 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 reassured by its blessings, which seemed embodied in those scenes of Eden.

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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 platitudes on the subject? Every one has tried his or her hand upon this theme, and many dreadful banalities have come of it; many pert assertions, 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.

A MEETING ON THE PINCIAN: FRENCH AND GERMAN SEMINARISTS
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-scrapers” 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 pass; 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 space 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 rÉgime, 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 masses along the streets as the Pope’s mounted Chasseur, in cocked 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 lusty trees and shrubs that have all been scraped 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 Œcumenical 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.

A LENTEN SERMON IN THE COLOSSEUM
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 “glass 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 surpassing 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 faÇade of St. Peter’s on that memorable Easter Sunday, 1870. The scene was made especially notable in its pictorial effect by the masses 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 balustrade 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 multitude 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 balls, now unfastened and dangling, are beginning to prick 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 passes 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 balls 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 passage, some to be recovered only after several days, wandering in the Campagna, having burst through the sheet spread to stop them at the finish.

THE START FOR THE HORSE RACE, ROME
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 TrinitÀ 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 pass 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 pass 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 sex 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 pass 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 ThermÆ.

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. There was a palette sculptured on it in place of the other one’s lyre, and one little box hedge held the two friends within its embrace. What made Oliver Wendell Holmes (if it was he) say the scent of box was the scent of Eternity? I do not know the context of the passage, but I think the idea might strike a sensitive perception in some Italian cemetery, where that most touching perfume is always on the air, and Eternity plays about our minds on the scent of the box.

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From the Diary

Feb. 1906.—“And now Good-bye, Rome! I hope not a final farewell. I have been up to the Villa Medici to see across the city, on this my last evening, that dome which no one can ever look at unmoved, just at the hour which at this time of year brings the setting sun behind it, so that the crimson central ray seems to spring from the cross on the summit. Shutting out with my hand all intervening objects I seemed to see that purple dome floating in mid-air, a link between earth and heaven; a living token of the intercourse between the two, poised far above the dead ruins of the Pagan Past that lay low, in shadow, to the eastward. Good-bye.”