Part 8 (1/2)
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 a.s.sisi on the slopes of the ”Umbrian Hills”!
[Ill.u.s.tration: 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
”23_rd April_ 1900.--All day 'on the wander' through ripe old Perugia. A silent city, full of memories, br.i.m.m.i.n.g over with history, lapped in Art! Everywhere the flowering fruit-trees showed over the brown walls, the suns.h.i.+ne fell pleasantly on the ma.s.ses 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 s.p.a.ces 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 wors.h.i.+p--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 s.h.i.+vering 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 G.o.d.
”As we were pa.s.sing 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 manuvres 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 ma.s.sed 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 s.p.a.ce, 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. a.s.suredly 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 sh.e.l.l 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 r.e.t.a.r.dingly 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 fact.i.tious 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 t.i.tan 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 rea.s.sured by its blessings, which seemed embodied in those scenes of Eden.
[Ill.u.s.tration]
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 plat.i.tudes on the subject? Every one has tried his or her hand upon this theme, and many dreadful ba.n.a.lities have come of it; many pert a.s.sertions, 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.
[Ill.u.s.tration: 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-sc.r.a.pers” 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 pa.s.s; 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 s.p.a.ce I saw below me.