Part 16 (1/2)
The Brownings are the two English poets who first spring to mind in connexion with Florence; but they had had very ill.u.s.trious predecessors. In August and September, 1638, during the reign of Ferdinand II, John Milton was here, and again in the spring of 1639. He read Latin poems to fellow-scholars in the city and received complimentary sonnets in reply. Here he met Galileo, and from here he made the excursion to Vallombrosa which gave him some of his most famous lines. He also learned enough of the language to write love poetry to a lady in Bologna, although he is said to have offended Italians generally by his strict morality.
Skipping a hundred and eighty years we find Sh.e.l.ley in Florence, in 1819, and it was here that his son was born, receiving the names Percy Florence. Here he wrote, as I have said, his ”Ode to the West Wind” and that grimly comic work ”Peter Bell the Third”.
But next the Brownings it is Walter Savage Landor of whom I always think as the greatest English Florentine. Florence became his second home when he was middle-aged and strong; and then again, when he was a very old man, s.h.i.+pwrecked by his impulsive and impossible temper, it became his last haven. It was Browning who found him his final resting-place--a floor of rooms not far from where we now stand, in the Via Nunziatina.
Florence is so intimately a.s.sociated with Landor, and Landor was so happy in Florence, that a brief outline of his life seems to be imperative. Born in 1775, the heir to considerable estates, the boy soon developed that whirlwind headstrong impatience which was to make him as notorious as his exquisite genius has made him famous. He was sent to Rugby, but disapproving of the headmaster's judgment of his Latin verses, he produced such a lampoon upon him, also in Latin, as made removal or expulsion a necessity. At Oxford his Latin and Greek verses were still his delight, but he took also to politics, was called a mad Jacobin, and, in order to prove his sanity and show his disapproval of a person obnoxious to him, fired a gun at his shutters and was sent down for a year. He never returned. After a period of strained relations with his father and hot repudiations of all the plans for his future which were made for him--such as entering the militia, reading law, and so forth--he retired to Wales on a small allowance and wrote ”Gebir”
which came out in 1798, when its author was twenty-three. In 1808 Landor threw in his lot with the Spaniards against the French, saw some fighting and opened his purse for the victims of the war; but the usual personal quarrel intervened. Returning to England he bought Llanthony Abbey, stocked it with Spanish sheep, planted extensively, and was to be the squire of squires; and at the same time seeing a pretty penniless girl at a ball in Bath, he made a bet he would marry her, and won it. As a squire he became quickly involved with neighbours (an inevitable proceeding with him) and also with a Bishop concerning the restoration of the church. Lawsuits followed, and such expenses and vexations occurred that Landor decided to leave England--always a popular resource with his kind. His mother took over the estate and allowed him an income upon which he travelled from place to place for a few years, quarrelling with his wife and making it up, writing Latin verses everywhere and on everything, and coming into collision not only with individuals but with munic.i.p.alities.
He settled in Florence in 1821, finding rooms in the Palazzo Medici, or, rather, Riccardi. There he remained for five years, which no doubt would have been a longer period had he not accused his landlord, the Marquis, who was then the head of the family, of seducing away his coachman. Landor wrote stating the charge; the Marquis, calling in reply, entered the room with his hat on, and Landor first knocked it off and then gave notice. It was at the Palazzo Medici that Landor was visited by Hazlitt in 1825, and here also he began the ”Imaginary Conversations,” his best-known work, although it is of course such brief and faultless lyrics as ”Rose Aylmer” and ”To Ianthe” that have given him his widest public.
On leaving the Palazzo, Landor acquired the Villa Gherardesca, on the hill-side below Fiesole, and a very beautiful little estate in which the stream Affrico rises.
Crabb Robinson, the friend of so many men of genius, who was in Florence in 1880, in rooms at 1341 Via della Nuova Vigna, met Landor frequently at his villa and has left his impressions. Landor had made up his mind to live and die in Italy, but hated the Italians. He would rather, he said, follow his daughter to the grave than to her wedding with an Italian husband. Talking on art, he said he preferred John of Bologna to Michelangelo, a statement he repeated to Emerson, but afterwards, I believe, recanted. He said also to Robinson that he would not give 1000 Pounds for Raphael's ”Transfiguration,” but ten times that sum for Fra Bartolommeo's picture of S. Mark in the Pitti. Next to Raphael and Fra Bartolommeo he loved Perugino.
Landor soon became quite the husbandman. Writing to his sisters in 1831, he says: ”I have planted 200 cypresses, 600 vines, 400 roses, 200 arbutuses, and 70 bays, besides laurustinas, etc., etc., and 60 fruit trees of the best qualities from France. I have not had a moment's illness since I resided here, nor have the children. My wife runs after colds; it would be strange if she did not take them; but she has taken none here; hers are all from Florence. I have the best water, the best air, and the best oil in the world. They speak highly of the wine too; but here I doubt. In fact, I hate wine, unless hock or claret....
”Italy is a fine climate, but Swansea better. That however is the only spot in Great Britain where we have warmth without wet. Still, Italy is the country I would live in.... In two [years] I hope to have a hundred good peaches every day at table during two months: at present I have had as many bad ones. My land is said to produce the best figs in Tuscany; I have usually six or seven bushels of them.”
I have walked through Lander's little paradise--now called the Villa Landor and reached by the narrow rugged road to the right just below the village of S. Domenico. Its cypresses, planted, as I imagine, by Lander's own hand, are stately as minarets and its lawn is as green and soft as that of an Oxford college. The orchard, in April, was a ma.s.s of blossom. Thrushes sang in the evergreens and the first swallow of the year darted through the cypresses just as we reached the gates. It is truly a poet's house and garden.
In 1833 a French neighbour accused Landor of robbing him of water by stopping an underground stream, and Landor naturally challenged him to a duel. The meeting was avoided through the tact of Lander's second, the English consul at Florence, and the two men became friends. At his villa Landor wrote much of his best prose--the ”Pentameron,” ”Pericles and Aspasia” and the ”Trial of Shakespeare for Deer-stealing ”--and he was in the main happy, having so much planting and harvesting to do, his children to play with, and now and then a visitor. In the main too he managed very well with the country people, but one day was amused to overhear a conversation over the hedge between two pa.s.sing contadini. ”All the English are mad,” said one, ”but as for this one...!” There was a story of Landor current in Florence in those days which depicted him, furious with a spoiled dish, throwing his cook out of the window, and then, realizing where he would fall, exclaiming in an agony, ”Good G.o.d, I forgot the violets!”
Such was Landor's impossible way on occasion that he succeeded in getting himself exiled from Tuscany; but the Grand Duke was called in as pacificator, and, though the order of expulsion was not rescinded, it was not carried out.
In 1835 Landor wrote some verses to his friend Ablett, who had lent him the money to buy the villa, professing himself wholly happy--
Thou knowest how, and why, are dear to me My citron groves of Fiesole, My chirping Affrico, my beechwood nook, My Naiads, with feet only in the brook, Which runs away and giggles in their faces; Yet there they sit, nor sigh for other places--
but later in the year came a serious break. Landor's relations with Mrs. Landor, never of such a nature as to give any sense of security, had grown steadily worse as he became more explosive, and they now reached such a point that he flung out of the house one day and did not return for many years, completing the action by a poem in which he took a final (as he thought) farewell of Italy:--
I leave thee, beauteous Italy! No more From the high terraces, at even-tide, To look supine into thy depths of sky, The golden moon between the cliff and me, Or thy dark spires of fretted cypresses Bordering the channel of the milky way.
Fiesole and Valdarno must be dreams, Hereafter, and my own lost Affrico Murmur to me but the poet's song.
Landor gave his son Arnold the villa, settling a sum on his wife for the other children's maintenance, and himself returned to Bath, where he added to his friends Sir William Napier (who first found a resemblance to a lion in Landor's features), John Forster, who afterwards wrote his life, and Charles d.i.c.kens, who named a child after him and touched off his merrier turbulent side most charmingly as Leonard Boythom in ”Bleak House”. But his most constant companion was a Pomeranian dog; in dogs indeed he found comfort all his life, right to the end.
Landor's love of his villa and estate finds expression again and again in his verse written at this time. The most charming of all these charming poems--the perfection of the light verse of a serious poet--is the letter from England to his youngest boy, speculating on his Italian pursuits. I begin at the pa.s.sage describing the villa's cat:--
Does Cincirillo follow thee about, Inverting one swart foot suspensively, And wagging his dread jaw at every chirp Of bird above him on the olive-branch?
Frighten him then away! 'twas he who slew Our pigeons, our white pigeons peac.o.c.k-tailed, That feared not you and me--alas, nor him!
I flattened his striped sides along my knee, And reasoned with him on his b.l.o.o.d.y mind, Till he looked blandly, and half-closed his eyes To ponder on my lecture in the shade.
I doubt his memory much, his heart a little, And in some minor matters (may I say it?) Could wish him rather sager. But from thee G.o.d hold back wisdom yet for many years!
Whether in early season or in late It always comes high-priced. For thy pure breast I have no lesson; it for me has many.