Travels With Henry James Page 15

  AUTUMN IN FLORENCE

  November 15, 1874

  Florence from the Arno.

  FLORENCE, TOO, HAS ITS “SEASON” AS WELL AS ROME, AND I have been taking some satisfaction, for the past six weeks, in the thought that it has not yet begun. Coming here in the first days of October, I found the summer lingering on in almost untempered force, and ever since, until within a day or two, it has been dying a very gradual death. Properly enough, as the city of flowers, Florence is delightful in the spring—during those blossoming weeks of March and April, when a six months’ steady shivering has not shaken New York and Boston free of the grip of winter. But something in the mood of autumn seems to suit peculiarly the mood in which an appreciative tourist strolls through these many-memoried streets and galleries and churches. Old things, old places, old people (or, at least, old races) have always seemed to me to tell their secrets more freely in such moist, gray, melancholy days as have formed the complexion of the past October. With Christmas comes the winter, the opera (the good opera), the gaieties, American and other. Meanwhile, it is pleasant enough, for persons fond of the Florentine flavor, that the opera is indifferent, that the Americans have not all arrived, and that the weather has a monotonous, overcast softness, extremely favorable to contemplative habits. There is no crush on the Cascine, as on the sunny days of winter, and the Arno, wandering away toward the mountains in the haze, seems as shy of being looked at as a good picture in a bad light. No light could be better to my eyes; it seems the faded light of that varied past on which an observer here spends so many glances. There are people, I know, who freely intimate that the “Florentine flavor” I speak of is dead and buried, and that it is an immense misfortune not to have tasted the real thing, in the Grand Duke’s time. Some of these friends of mine have been living here ever since, and have seen the little historic city expanding in the hands of its “enterprising” syndic into its shining girdle of boulevards and beaux quartiers, such as M. Haussmann set the fashion of—like some precious little page of antique text swallowed up in a marginal commentary. I am not sure of the real wisdom of regretting the change—apart from its being always good sense to prefer a larger city to a smaller one. For Florence, in its palmy days, was peculiarly a city of change—of shifting régimes, and policies, and humors; and the Florentine character, as we have it to-day, is a character which takes all things easily for having seen so many come and go. It saw the national capital arrive, and took no further thought than sufficed for the day; it saw it depart, and whistled it cheerfully on its way to Rome. The new boulevards of the Sindaco Peruzzi come, it may be said, but they don’t go; but after all, from the aesthetic point of view, it is not strictly necessary they should. It seems to me part of the essential amiability of Florence—of her genius for making you take to your favor on easy terms everything that in any way belongs to her—that she has already flung a sort of reflet of her charm over all their undried mortar and plaster.

  Nothing could be prettier, in a modern way, than the Piazza d’Azeglio, or the Avenue of the Princess Margaret; nothing pleasanter than to stroll across them, and enjoy the afternoon lights through their liberal vistas. They carry you close to the charming hills which look down into Florence on all sides, and if, in the foreground, your sense is a trifle perplexed by the white pavements, dotted here and there with a policeman or a nursemaid, you have only to look just beyond to see Fiesole on its mountainside glowing purple from the opposite sunset.

  Turning back into Florence proper, you have local color enough and to spare—which you enjoy the more, doubtless, from standing off in this fashion to get your light and your point of view. The elder streets, abutting on all this newness, go boring away into the heart of the city in narrow, dusky vistas of a fascinating picturesqueness. Pausing to look down them, sometimes, and to penetrate the deepening shadows through which they recede, they seem to me little corridors leading out from the past, as mystical as the ladder in Jacob’s dream; and when I see a single figure coming up toward me I am half afraid to wait till it arrives; it seems too much like a ghost—a messenger from an under-world. Florence, paved with its great mosaics of slabs, and lined with its massive Tuscan palaces, which, in their large dependence on pure symmetry for beauty of effect, reproduce more than other modern styles the simple nobleness of Greek architecture, must have always been a stately city, and not especially rich in that ragged picturesqueness—the picturesqueness of poverty—on which we feast our idle eyes at Rome and Naples. Except in the unfinished fronts of the churches, which, however, unfortunately, are mere prosaic ugliness, one finds here less romantic stateliness than in most Italian cities. But at two or three points it exists in perfection—in just such perfection as proves that often what is literally hideous may be constructively delightful. On the north side of the Arno, between the Ponte Vecchio and the Ponte Santa Trinità, is an ancient row of houses, backing on the river, in whose yellow flood they bathe their aching old feet. Anything more battered and befouled, more cracked and disjointed, dirtier, drearier, shabbier, it would be impossible to conceive. They look as if, fifty years ago, the muddy river had risen over their chimneys, and then subsided again and left them coated for ever with its unsightly slime. And yet, forsooth, because the river is yellow, and the light is yellow, and here and there, elsewhere, some mellow, mouldering surface, some hint of color, some accident of atmosphere, takes up the foolish tale and repeats the note—because, in short, it is Florence, it is Italy, and you are an American, bred amid the micaceous sparkle of brownstone fronts and lavish of enthusiasms, these miserable dwellings, instead of simply suggesting mental invocations to an enterprising board of health, bloom and glow all along the line in the perfect felicity of picturesqueness. Lately, during the misty autumn nights, the moon has been shining on them faintly, and refining away their shabbiness into something ineffably strange and spectral. The yellow river sweeps along without a sound, and the pale tenements hang above it like a vague miasmatic exhalation. The dimmest back-scene at the opera, when the tenor is singing his sweetest, seems hardly to belong to a more dreamily fictitious world.

  What it is that infuses so rich an interest into the charm of Florence is difficult to say in a few words; yet as one wanders hither and thither in quest of a picture or a bas-relief, it seems no marvel that the place should be interesting. Two industrious English ladies have lately published a couple of volumes of “Walks” through the Florentine streets, and their work is a long enumeration of great artistic deeds. These things remain for the most part in sound preservation, and, as the weeks go by and you spend a constant portion of your days among them, you seem really to be living in the magical time. It was not long; it lasted, in its splendor, for less than a century; but it has stored away in the palaces and churches of Florence a heritage of beauty which these three enjoying centuries since have not yet come to the end of. This forms a distinct intellectual atmosphere, into which you may turn aside from the modern world and fill your lungs with the breath of a forgotten creed. The memorials of the past in Florence have the advantage of being somehow more cheerful and exhilarating than in other cities which have had a great aesthetic period. Venice, with her old palaces cracking with the weight of their treasures, is, in its influence, insupportably sad; Athens, with her maimed marbles and dishonored memories, transmutes the consciousness of sensitive observers, I am told, into a chronic heartache. But in one’s impression of old Florence there is something very sound and sweet and wholesome—something which would make it a growing pleasure to live here long. In Athens and Venice, surely, a long residence would be a pain. The reason of this is partly the peculiarly lovable, gentle character of Florentine art in general—partly the tenderness of time, in its lapse, which, save in a few cases, has been as sparing of injury as if it knew that when it had dimmed and corroded these charming things, it would have nothing so sweet again for its tooth to feed on. If the beautiful Ghirlandaios and Lippis are fading, we shall never know it. The large Fra Angelico in the Ac
ademy is as clear and keen as if the good old monk were standing there wiping his brushes; the colors seem to sing, as it were, like new-fledged birds in June. Nothing is more characteristic of early Tuscan art than the bas-reliefs of Luca della Robbia; yet, save for their innocence, there is not one of them that might not have been modelled yesterday. The color is mild but not faded, the forms are simple but not archaic. But perhaps the best image of the absence of stale melancholy in Florentine antiquity is the bell-tower of Giotto beside the Cathedral. No traveller has forgotten how it stands there, straight and slender, plated with colored marbles, seemingly so strangely rich, in the common streets. It is not even simple in design, and I never cease to wonder that the painter of so many grimly archaic little frescoes should have fashioned a building which, in the way of elaborate elegance, leaves the finest modern culture nothing to suggest. Nothing can be imagined at once more lightly and more richly fanciful; it might have been a present, ready-made, to the city by some Oriental genie. Yet, with its Eastern look, it seems of no particular time; it is not gray and hoary like a Gothic spire, nor cracked and despoiled like a Greek temple; its marbles shine so little less freshly than when they were laid together, and the sunset lights up its embroidered cornice with such a friendly radiance, that you come to regard it at last as simply the graceful, indestructible soul of the city made visible. The Cathedral, externally, in spite of its solemn hugeness, strikes the same light, cheerful note; it has grandeur, of course, but such a pleasant, agreeable, ingenuous grandeur. It has seen so much, and outlived so much, and served so many sad purposes, and yet remains in aspect so true to the gentle epicureanism that conceived it. Its vast, many-colored marble walls are one of the sweetest entertainments of Florence; there is an endless fascination in walking past them, and feeling them lift their great acres of mosaic higher in the air than you care to look. You greet them as you do the side of a mountain when you are walking in the valley; you don’t twist back your head to look at the top, but content yourself with some little nestling hollow—some especial combination of the little marble dominoes.

  Florence is richer in pictures than one really knows until one has begun to look for them in outlying corners. Then, here and there, one comes upon treasures which it almost seems as if one might pilfer for the New York Museum without their being missed. The Pitti Palace, of course, is a collection of masterpieces; they jostle each other in their splendor, and they rather weary your admiration. The Uffizi is almost as fine a show, and together with that long serpentine artery which crosses the Arno and connects them, they form the great central treasure-chamber of the city. But I have been neglecting them of late for the sake of the Academy, where there are fewer copyists and tourists, fewer of the brilliant things you don’t care for. I observed here, a day or two since, lurking obscurely in one of the smaller rooms, a most enchanting Sandro Botticelli. It had a mean black frame, and it was hung where no one would have looked for a master-piece; but a good glass brought out its merits. It represented the walk of Tobias with the Angel, and there are parts of it really that an angel might have painted. Placed as it is, I doubt whether it is noticed by half-a-dozen persons a year. What a pity that it should not become the property of an institution which would give it a brave gilded frame and a strong American light! Then it might shed its wonderful beauty with all the force of rare example. Botticelli is, in a certain way, the most interesting of the Florentine painters—the only one, save Leonardo and Michael Angelo, who had a really inventive fancy. His imagination has a complex turn, which gives him at first a strangely modern, familiar air, but we soon discover that what we know of him is what our contemporary Pre-Raphaelites have borrowed. When we read Mr. William Morris’s poetry, when we look at Mr. Rossetti’s pictures, we are enjoying, among other things, a certain amount of diluted Botticelli. He endeavored much more than the other early Florentines to make his faces express a mood, a consciousness, and it is the beautiful preoccupied type of face which we find in his pictures that our modern Pre-Raphaelites reproduce, with their own modifications. Fra Angelico, Filippo Lippi, Ghirlandaio, were not imaginative; but who was ever more devotedly observant, more richly, genially graphic? If there should ever be a great weeding out of the world’s possessions, I should pray that the best works of the early Florentine school be counted among the flowers. With the ripest performances of the Venetians, they seem to me the most valuable things in the history of art. Heaven forbid that we should be narrowed down to a cruel choice; but if it came to a question of keeping or losing between half-a-dozen Raphaels and half-a-dozen things I could select at the Academy, I am afraid that, for myself, the memory of the “Transfiguration” would not save the Raphaels. And yet this was not the opinion of a patient artist whom I saw the other day copying the finest of Ghirlandaios—a beautiful “Adoration of the Kings” at the Hospital of the Innocenti. This is another specimen of the buried art-wealth of Florence. It hangs in a dusky chapel, far aloft, behind an altar, and, though now and then a stray tourist wanders in and puzzles awhile over the vaguely glowing forms, the picture is never really seen and enjoyed. I found an aged Frenchman of modest mien perched on the little platform beneath it, behind a great hedge of altar candlesticks, with an admirable copy almost completed. The difficulties of his task had been almost insuperable, and his performance seemed to me a real feat of magic. He could scarcely see or move, and he could only find room for his canvas by rolling it together and painting a small piece at a time, so that he never enjoyed a view of his work as a whole. The original is gorgeous with color and bewildering with ornamental detail, but not a gleam of the painter’s crimson was wanting, not a curl in his gold arabesque. It seemed to me that, if I had copied a Ghirlandaio under such circumstances, I should at least maintain, for my credit, that he was the first painter in the world. “Very good of its kind,” said the weary old man, with a shrug, in reply to my raptures; “but oh! how far short of Raphael!” However that may be, if the reader ever observes this brilliant copy in the Museum of Copies in Paris, let him stop before it with a certain reverence; it is one of the patient things of art. Seeing it wrought there, in its dusky chapel, in such scanty convenience, seemed to remind me that the old art-life of Florence was not yet extinct. The old painters are dead, but their influence is living.

  TUSCAN CITIES

  April 18, 1874

  Cathedral Square, Pisa, Italy.

  THE CITIES I MEAN ARE LEGHORN, PISA, LUCCA, AND PISTOIA, among which I have been spending the last few days. The most striking fact as to Leghorn, it must be conceded at the outset, is that, being in Tuscany, it should be so scantily Tuscan. The traveller curious in local color must content himself with the deep blue expanse of the Mediterranean. The streets, away from the docks, are modern, genteel, and rectangular. Liverpool might acknowledge them if it were not for their fresh-colored stucco. They are the offspring of the new industry, which is death to the old idleness. Of picturesque architecture, fruit of the old idleness, or at least of the old leisure, Leghorn is singularly destitute. It has neither a church worth one’s attention, nor a municipal palace, nor a museum, and it may claim the distinction, unique in Italy, of being the city of no pictures. In a shabby corner, near the docks, stands a statue of one of the elder grand-dukes of Tuscany, appealing to posterity on grounds now vague—chiefly that of having placed certain Moors under tribute. Four colossal negroes, in very bad bronze, are chained to the base of the monument, which forms with their assistance a sufficiently fantastic group; but to patronize the arts is not the line of the Livornese, and, for want of the slender annuity which would keep its precinct sacred, this curious memorial is buried in docks and rubbish. I must add that, on the other hand, there is a very well-conditioned and, in attitude and gesture, extremely realistic statue of Cavour in one of the city squares, and a couple of togaed effigies of recent grand-dukes in another. Leghorn is a city of magnificent spaces, and it was so long a journey from the sidewalk to the pedestal of these images that I never took the time to
go and read the inscriptions. And in truth, vaguely, I bore the originals a grudge, and wished to know as little about them as possible; for it seemed to me that as patres patriae, in their degree, they might have decreed that the great blank, ochre-faced piazza should be a trifle less ugly. There is a distinct amenity, however, in any experience of Italy, and I shall probably in the future not be above sparing a light regret to several of the hours of which the one I speak of was composed. I shall remember a large, cool, bourgeois villa in a garden, in a noiseless suburb—a middle-aged villa, roomy and stony, as an Italian villa should be. I shall remember that, as I sat in the garden, and, looking up from my book, saw through a gap in the shrubbery the red house-tiles against the deep blue sky and the gray underside of the ilex leaves turned up by the Mediterranean breeze, I had a vague consciousness that I was not in the Western world.

  If you should happen to wish to do so, you must not go to Pisa, and indeed we are most of us forewarned as to Pisa from an early age. Few of us can have had a childhood so unblessed by contact with the arts as that one of its occasional diversions should not have been a puzzled scrutiny of some alabaster model of the Leaning Tower under a glass cover in a back-parlor. Pisa and its monuments have, in other words, been industriously vulgarized, but it is astonishing how well they have survived the process. The charm of Pisa is, in fact, a charm of a high order, and is but partially foreshadowed by the famous crookedness of its campanile. I felt it irresistibly and yet almost inexpressibly the other afternoon, as I made my way to the classic corner of the city through the warm, drowsy air which nervous people come to inhale as a sedative. I was with an invalid companion, who had had no sleep to speak of for a fortnight. “Ah! stop the carriage,” said my friend, gaping, as I could feel, deliciously, “in the shadow of this old slumbering palazzo, and let me sit here and close my eyes, and taste for an hour of oblivion.” Once strolling over the grass, however, out of which the four marble monuments rise, we awaked responsively enough to the present hour. Most people remember the happy remark of tasteful, old-fashioned Forsyth (who touched a hundred other points in his “Italy” hardly less happily) as to three beautiful buildings being “fortunate alike in their society and their solitude.” It must be admitted that they are more fortunate in their society than we felt ourselves to be in ours, for the scene presented the animated appearance for which, on any fine spring day, all the choicest haunts of ancient quietude in Italy are becoming yearly more remarkable. There were clamorous beggars at all the sculptured portals and bait for beggars, in abundance, trailing in and out of them under convoy of loquacious ciceroni. I forget just how I apportioned the responsibility of intrusion, for it was not long before fellow-tourists and fellow-countrymen became a vague, deadened, muffled presence, like the dentist’s last words when he is giving you ether. They suffered a sort of mystical disintegration in the dense, bright, tranquil atmosphere of the place. The cathedral and its companions are fortunate indeed in everything—fortunate in the spacious angle of the gray old city-wall, which folds about them in their sculptured elegance like a strong protecting arm; fortunate in the broad green sward which stretches from the marble base of cathedral and cemetery to the rugged foot of the rampart; fortunate in the little vagabonds who dot the grass, plucking daisies and exchanging Italian cries; fortunate in the pale-gold tone to which time and the soft sea-damp have mellowed and darkened their marble plates; fortunate, above all, in an indescribable gracefulness of grouping (half-hazard, half-design), which ensures them, in one’s memory of things admired, very much the same isolated corner which they occupy in the pleasant city.