Part 7 (1/2)
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 inst.i.tution 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 suns.h.i.+ne 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 compa.s.sionate 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 ill.u.s.trating 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--
”'Tis sweet to him who all the week Through city crowds must push his way, etc.”
'Tis sweet to her who all the week With brush and paint must work her way To stroll thro' florence vineyards cool And hallow thus the Sabbath Day.
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 pa.s.sing. 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 Cla.s.s” 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 Cla.s.s”
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 embarra.s.sment, 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 tw.a.n.g 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 h.o.r.n.y 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.