*
 
 
 

 
 
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 CITIES OF ITALY
 
 CITIES OF ITALY 
 
 *' v 
 
 BY 
 
 ARTHUR SYMONS 
 
 MCMVII: J. M. DENT & CO. 
 
 29 & 30 BEDFORD STREET, W.C.
 
 Printed at The Knickerbocker Press, New Rochelle, N. Y., U.S.A.
 
 TO MADAME LA COMTESSE DE LA TOUR 
 
 As you know, and, I sometimes think, regret, 
 I am one of those for whom the visible world exists, 
 very actively; and, for me, cities are like people, 
 with souls and temperaments of their own, and it 
 has always been one of my chief pleasures to asso- 
 ciate with the souls and temperaments congenial 
 to me among cities. And as love, or it may be 
 hate, can alone reveal soul to soul, among human 
 beings, so, it seems to me, the soul of a city will 
 reveal itself only to those who love, or, perhaps, 
 hate it, with a far-sighted emotion. I have come 
 upon many cities which have left me indifferent, 
 perhaps through some accident in my way of 
 approach; at any rate, they had nothing to say to 
 me: Madrid, for instance, and Vienna, and St. 
 Petersburg, and Berlin. It would be impossible for 
 me to write about these cities: I should have 
 nothing to say. But certain other cities, Rome, 
 Venice, Seville, how I have loved them, what a 
 delight it was to me merely to be alive, and living 
 in them; and what a delight it is to me to think of 
 them, to imagine myself in their streets and on their 
 waters! Moscow, Naples, how I have hated them, 
 
 2081398
 
 iv DEDICATION 
 
 how I have suffered in them, merely because I was 
 there; and how clearly I see them still, with that 
 sharp memory of discomfort! It seems to me that 
 all these cities have given up to me at least some- 
 thing of their souls, like the people I have loved 
 and hated on my way through the world. At least 
 they have given me what they had to give me, like 
 the people: my part of their souls. For we can see 
 or receive, in people or things, only our own part of 
 them: the vision rising in our own eyes, the passion 
 rising in our own hearts. 
 
 This is not saying that I have not tried to do 
 more than write a kind of subjective diary, in which 
 the city should be an excuse for my own sensations. 
 I have put myself as little as possible into these 
 pages; I have tried to draw confidences out of the 
 stones that I have trodden but a few weeks or a 
 few months, out of the faces that I have seen in 
 passing, out of the days of sunshine that have after 
 all warmed a stranger. I have respected the sight 
 of my eyes and the judgment of my senses, and I 
 have tried to evoke my cities in these pages exactly 
 as they appeared to me to be in themselves. It is 
 part of my constant challenge to myself, in every- 
 thing I write, to be content with nothing short of 
 that vraie vrit which one imagines to exist some- 
 where on this side of ultimate attainment. It is 
 so much easier to put oneself into things than to 
 persuade things to give up their own secrets; and I 
 like to aim at this difficult kind of truth.
 
 DEDICATION v 
 
 What is truth? you will say: yes, the old question, 
 which no one has ever answered. I am only ex- 
 plaining my intentions. 
 
 ARTHUR SYMONS. 
 
 CHATEAU DE CHAMEANE, 
 
 PUY DE D6ME, August, 1903.
 
 Part of this book was provisionally published in 
 1903 as the Italian section of a book of "Cities," 
 which I do not intend to reissue, in its original form. 
 Here I have brought together, into something more 
 like unity, all that I have to say about Italy, and I 
 hope later to do the same with my scattered writings, 
 in "Cities" and elsewhere, on Spain. I have re- 
 peated the dedication of the book in which I made 
 my first attempts at the interpretation of places, 
 because, though I am here limiting myself to Italy, 
 my intention remains the same. 
 
 WlTTERSHAM, July, 1907.
 
 CONTENTS 
 
 ROME ..... 
 VENICE ..... 
 NAPLES ..... 
 FLORENCE: AN INTERPRETATION 
 RAVENNA .... 
 
 PISA 
 
 SIENA ..... 
 VERONA . . 
 
 BOLOGNA .... 
 
 BERGANO AND LORENZO LOTTO . 
 BRESCIA'AND ROMANINO . 
 ON A REMBRANDT IN MILAN 
 
 "5 
 
 209 
 227 
 
 239 
 
 247 
 
 255 
 263 
 
 IX
 
 ROME
 
 ROME 
 
 I 
 
 THE last sunset of the year had been stormy; the 
 whole sky, as I saw it from the Pincio, blazed like 
 a conflagration; fire caught the farthest roofs of 
 Rome, and seemed to sear the edges and outskirts 
 of the city, like a great flame coming down from 
 heaven. This flame burnt with an unslackening 
 ardency long after the sun had gone down below 
 the horizon; then the darkness began to creep 
 about it, and it grew sombre, drooping into purple, 
 withering into brown, dwindling into a dull violet, 
 and from that wandering into a fainter and fainter 
 greyness, until the roofs, jutting like abrupt shadows 
 into the night, seemed to go up like smoke all round 
 the city, as if the great fire were smouldering out. 
 Darkness came on rapidly, there was no moon, and 
 as I stood, just before midnight, by the side of the 
 Forum, under the shadow of the Arch of Septimius 
 Severus, I seemed at first to be standing at the edge 
 of a great black abyss. Gradually, as I looked down, 
 I became aware of a sort of rocky sea, a dark sea of 
 white and slender rocks, which, as I watched them,
 
 4 ROME 
 
 seemed to heighten into the night. Near the tri- 
 umphal arch I could distinguish the eight smooth 
 columns of the Temple of Saturn; there, on the 
 other side of this gulf, was the Palatine; and but 
 a little to my left, though unseen, the Arch of 
 Titus, and the Colosseum. In those imperishable 
 ruins, which are still, after more than twenty 
 centuries, the true Rome, the Rome which really 
 exists, I saw the only human immortality which 
 I had ever visibly seen. The twelve strokes of 
 midnight, coming from the Christian churches on 
 all sides, sounded faintly, as if they did but reckon 
 the time of years, not of centuries. It was Pagan 
 Rome that lasted, and Pagan Rome means humanity, 
 working regardless of itself, and with the world at 
 its feet, as a quarry to build from. This Rome, 
 even in ruins, bows the mind before its strength, 
 its purpose, its inflexible success. I had come to 
 Rome thinking that it was as the city of the 
 Popes that I should see the Eternal City. I was 
 filled only with a sense of the power of things earthly, 
 the eternity of an art wholly the work of men's 
 hands, as I turned away from the Forum, in those 
 first moments of the new year. I looked back: the 
 Arch of Septimius Severus stood up white and 
 gigantic, blotting out the sky. 
 
 The soul of Rome, as one gradually realises it, 
 first, I think, and not least intimately, from the 
 Aurelian Wall, then from the Colosseum, the Pan- 
 theon, the Forum, the Stadium, and then piece by
 
 ROME 5 
 
 piece, from the Vatican, the Diocletian, the Capi- 
 toline galleries of sculpture, is a very positive soul, 
 all of one piece, so to speak, in which it is useless 
 to search for delicate shades, the mystery of sugges- 
 tion, a meaning other than the meaning which, in a 
 profound enough sense, is on the surface. All these 
 walls, columns, triumphal arches, the fagade of the 
 Pantheon, have nothing to tell us beyond what they 
 were meant to tell; and they were meant to answer 
 certain very definite purposes, and to do their work 
 splendidly indeed, but without caprice. This sim- 
 plicity of purpose is what makes Roman architecture 
 so much more satisfying than even fine Renaissance 
 architecture; and there is little fine Renaissance 
 work in Rome: the Cancellaria, a palace or two. 
 In architecture, more perhaps than in any other 
 art, nothing is so easily comprehended, so immediate 
 in its appeal to the instinct, as that greatest art, 
 which is classic. Think for a moment of St. Peter's, 
 while you stand before the outer wall of the Colos- 
 seum. That shell of rough stone-work, from which 
 every trace of ornamentation is gone, gives, even 
 at first sight, a sense of satisfaction, because of the 
 easy way in which those perfectly natural pro- 
 portions answer to the unconscious logic of the 
 eye, notwithstanding the immensity of the scale on 
 which they are carried out; while St. Peter's leaves 
 you bedazed, wondering, inquiring, as before a prob- 
 lem of which you have not the key. For beauty 
 of detail, for the charm which is not the mathematical
 
 6 ROME 
 
 charm of proportion, the moral charm of strength, 
 the material charm of grandeur, do not come to 
 Rome. You will find no detail neglected, for all 
 detail is part of a whole; but you will find no detail 
 over which the workman has grown amorous, into 
 which he has put something of his soul, over and 
 above the work of his hands. 
 
 To the Roman mind, as I have come to realise it 
 for myself, after a winter in Rome spent in trying 
 to make my general notion of these things particular, 
 the world about one was always a very real, very 
 desirable thing, quite enough for one's whole needs 
 in a life which was at once a brief flutter of that 
 winged thing, "animula, vagula, blandula," and also 
 a moment which it was possible to perpetuate, by 
 the work of one's hands, or the hands of slaves, 
 working to order. In a world which seemed to lie 
 at their feet, conquered, the sense of power, which 
 the Romans had in so actual a degree, sharpened 
 their desire to appropriate all the resources of what 
 lay there before them, to enjoy its whole beauty, 
 and to leave behind them, by their own effort, the 
 assurance of what they had so vividly enjoyed. 
 That monument of the baker, outside the Porta 
 Maggiore, made to imitate the homely utensils of 
 his trade, and still telling us that Marcus Vergilius 
 Erysaces, who lies under those stones, sold his bread 
 in the city, seems to me a significant indication of 
 this resolute hold on the earth, on the day's work, 
 and this resolution to perpetuate it. It is the
 
 ROME 7 
 
 more significant because for the most part a mere 
 citizen in Rome must have counted for very little. 
 As the world was for Rome, so Rome was for 
 the State, and the State, after all, was for the 
 Caesars. 
 
 And so it is that we find the one really satisfying 
 work in sculpture left by the Romans to be the 
 Antinous, repeated over and over again, in an almost 
 mechanical carrying out of the will of Hadrian, but 
 coming, at its best, to a kind of perfection. Antinous 
 is the smile of the eternity of youth, and the smile is 
 a little sad, for all its gracious acceptance of the 
 sunlight. It is sad with youth's sensitive conscious- 
 ness of the first cold breath of wind which comes to 
 trouble that sunlight; a wistfulness which is the 
 wistfulness of animals, and in which the soul and 
 its regrets have no part. Perfect bodily sensitive- 
 ness; the joy and sadness which are implicit in 
 mere human breathing; a simplicity of sensation 
 which comes at once into the delightful kingdom of 
 things, which we are so painful in our search for, 
 and thus attains a sort of complexity, or its equi- 
 valent, without knowing it; life taken on its own 
 terms, and without preference of moment to mo- 
 ment: it is all this that I find in the grave, and 
 smiling, and unthinking, and pensive head of An- 
 tinous, in that day-dream of youth, just con- 
 scious enough of its own felicity for so much the 
 more heightened an enjoyment of that passing 
 moment.
 
 8 ROME 
 
 II 
 
 Looking at Antinous, or at a young Roman model 
 who lies on those spectacular steps of the Trinitk de' 
 Monti to-day, you realise that the Romans were born 
 without a soul, and that in all these centuries of 
 Christendom they have never acquired one. It has 
 been the genius of the Catholic religion, whose 
 temporal seat, so appropriately, has always been at 
 Rome, to divine and to respond to this tempera- 
 mental tendency of the people who have given it 
 power. At Rome it is natural to found empires; 
 the seven hills await them. Religion never could 
 be mystical at Rome; it must have its part in the 
 world, with all the power of the world, and all the 
 world's hold on temporal felicity, and it is by an 
 appeal to after all largely the Pagan sentiment in 
 life and thought that the Popes have been able to 
 succeed the Caesars. Never was any "mystical city 
 of God" so solidly based on the stable powers of the 
 earth. Church has succeeded temple, and you find 
 the church superincumbent, quite literally, as in 
 San Clemente, stratum above stratum, the chapel of 
 Mithra under the apse of the Christian basilica; or, 
 as in San Lorenzo fuori le Mura, where church after 
 church, built over and into one another, is supported 
 by columns, crowded with friezes, set together with- 
 out design or order, out of ancient temples or palaces. 
 Just as the theatre, dancing, music, were a part or 
 appendage of the State religion, so the Church has
 
 ROME 9 
 
 taken to itself all that is finest in spectacle, all that 
 is rarest in singing. Those perfumed and golden 
 gifts of the three old Magi to the young Christ, 
 the gift of the world and its delicacies, were not 
 given in vain. All the churches in Rome are full of 
 incense and gold. 
 
 To see St. Peter's is to realise all that is strongest, 
 most Roman, nothing that is subtle or spiritual, in the 
 power of the Church. This vast building, the largest 
 church in the world, imposes itself upon you, where- 
 ever you are in Rome; you see the dome from the 
 Alban or the Sabine hills, from which the whole city 
 seems dwindled to a white shadow upon a green 
 plain. Before it lies all Rome, behind it the vague 
 desolation of fruitless fields, ruinous houses, a 
 mouldering wall, a few ragged trees. I climbed one 
 evening, about sunset, on a day when the sky 
 itself had the desolation of brooding storms, to the 
 strip of narrow, untrodden ground behind it, which 
 rises from the Via Scaccia, going down on the other 
 side to the Via della Zecca. It stood there hiding 
 the whole city and half the sky, a vast grey bulk; 
 now and again the moon, looking through a rift in 
 the clouds, touched the leaden roof with a finger of 
 light; the cypresses, seeming to lean against the 
 white walls at the base, turned blacker; a few gas 
 lamps shone about it like gold candles about the 
 high altar; and gradually, as I watched, light after 
 light sprang up out of the deep streets and pre- 
 cipitous houses, the hills grew darker, and more
 
 io ROME 
 
 vague, and the solid mass itself, now a looming 
 greyness, seemed to float like a great shadow into 
 the depths of the night. And always, by day, looked 
 at from within or without, it is by its immensity, 
 its spectacular qualities, that it is impressive. To 
 walk across the floor is like taking a journey ; voices 
 chanting in a side chapel can only just be heard 
 from the opposite aisle; and, looking at the four 
 piers which support the dome, one remembers that 
 the church of San Carlino alle Quattro Fontane, 
 by no means a small church, is exactly the size of 
 one of those four piers. Everything, the whole 
 decoration, in order that it may be in proportion 
 to the scale of the building, is exaggerated, and 
 almost no detail bears an intimate examination, or 
 can give one a separate sensation of pleasure; for 
 the few lovely things, like Michelangelo's Pieta, 
 are lost in little chapels, where they exist quietly, 
 in their corners, like a fine, silent criticism of all this 
 display, these florid Popes and angels, this noisy 
 architectural rhetoric. And St. Peter's, impressing 
 you, as it certainly does, with its tremendous size, 
 strength, wealth, and the tireless, enduring power 
 which has called it into being, holds you at a distance, 
 with the true ecclesiastical frigidity. You learn here 
 how to distinguish between what i^ emotional and 
 what is properly ecclesiastical in the Catholic Church. 
 St. Peter's is entirely positive, dogmatic, the asser- 
 tion of the supremacy of the Church over the world ; 
 never mystic, as in one of those dim Spanish cathe-
 
 ROME ii 
 
 drals, that of Barcelona, for instance; nor yet fan- 
 tastic, full of strange, precious wonders of the world, 
 brought from far off, as in St. Mark's. It is florid, 
 spectacular, but never profane; suggesting, as it 
 does, what is the strength, and what are also the 
 metaphysical limitations of the Church, it never 
 suggests, as St. Mark's does, the human curiosities 
 which may become a strange vice, as easily as a 
 singular virtue. Nor is it, like St. Mark's, in the 
 midst of the city, where the heart of the city beats, 
 where one sees a homely crowd wandering in and 
 out all day long, looking in on the way home from 
 market, as one might look in for a moment at a 
 friend's house. 
 
 High Mass at St. Peter's, as I saw it on Christmas 
 Day, said by Cardinal Rampolla, was an impressive 
 ceremony, indeed, but it was said mainly to a crowd 
 of curious strangers. The large, rigid figure in the 
 red robes and the gold mitre, who sat there under 
 his golden vestments, lifting a white-gloved hand on 
 whose third finger shone the emerald ring set with 
 diamonds, performed the sacred functions with a 
 dignity which was a little weary, and in the priest's 
 expressionless way, with that air of fixed meditation 
 (as of a continual commerce with heaven) which is 
 the Church's manner of expressing disapproval of 
 the world. Where I seemed to see a real devotion 
 was in the peasants from the Campagna, who passed 
 with their rough cloaks rolled round them, and 
 kissed St. Peter's foot devoutly, leaning their fore-
 
 12 ROME 
 
 heads against it; the women carefully rubbing the 
 toe with their handkerchiefs before kissing it. I 
 saw the same deep feeling in a fifteenth-century 
 church into which I went that afternoon, S. Agostino, 
 a church famed for its devotion. A whole wall was 
 covered with little gilt-framed votive offerings, silver 
 hearts, and pious vows, and in front of them many 
 poor old women sat and knelt, praying with closed 
 eyes; others lifted their children to kiss the foot 
 of Sansovino's patrician Virgin, the compassionate 
 Madonna del Parto. I found a different, but per- 
 haps not less sincere, company of worshippers in 
 San Luigi dei Francesi, before that screen of candles, 
 like burning gold, gold light rising flamelike out of 
 gilt candlesticks, which enshrined for their devotion 
 the unseen presence of the Sacrament. But at the 
 midnight Mass in the same church, which was 
 attended by a special permission, I was once more 
 in that atmosphere of positive, unspiritual things 
 which I had breathed in St. Peter's, and which 
 seemed to me so typical of Rome. The church 
 was filled to its farthest corner by a brilliant crowd ; 
 the music, played by organ, harp, and strings, 
 and sung by somewhat uncertain voices, was florid 
 and brilliant; and far off, at the golden end of the 
 church, white against the gold light, seven rows of 
 candles rising like an arch of pure gold, the priests 
 moved through the sacred ritual. Near me were 
 some Italians, two of them women of the finest 
 aristocratic type, with faces carved like cameos, a
 
 ROME 13 
 
 touch of cruelty in their dark, vivid, reticent dignity; 
 and these faces, looking on as at a show, and pre- 
 pared to look away the moment it was no longer 
 amusing, seemed to bring all the strength of the 
 world's hold on one into the perfumed atmosphere 
 of the place. Looking, as I could not but look, at 
 these beautiful Pagan faces, perfect as Roman 
 medals, I felt that they were Rome, and that Rome 
 was at least sure of this world, whatever her ad- 
 miration, her curiosity, her possible dreams, of 
 another. 
 
 Ill 
 
 "The grandeur that was Rome": that phrase of 
 Poe's sums up perfectly the impression which Rome, 
 even now, makes upon the observer. The secret 
 of what is most impressive there is the choice 
 (miraculous, we are led to suppose, and can well 
 believe) of its site. A city built upon seven hills, 
 hills which have arranged themselves, naturally, with 
 such an art of impressive composition, can have no 
 rival among the cities of the world in its appeal to 
 the sense of material grandeur. That the Senate 
 should throne itself upon the Capitol, that the 
 palaces of the Caesars should have been on the Pala- 
 tine or the Esquiline, was an almost incalculable 
 aid to the pomp of State. St. Peter's, seen in the 
 sky from all Rome, thrones Catholicism on a similar 
 eminence. Everything in Rome impresses by its
 
 H ROME 
 
 height, by an amplitude of adjusted proportions, 
 which is far more than the mere equivalent of vast 
 spaces covered, as in London, invisible for its very 
 size. The pride of looking down, the pride of 
 having something to look up to, are alike satisfied 
 for the Romans, by what nature and art have done 
 for Rome. 
 
 This Roman grandeur began by being colossally 
 simple. I find all the grandeur of Rome in even 
 so late a work as the Aurelian Wall, and that is 
 nothing but a bare, brown, precipitous line of 
 masonry, patched with the mendings of all the 
 ages. The Colosseum, the Pantheon, for all their 
 original splendour of decoration, still exist with such 
 potency, now that they are reduced to the bare 
 elements of their construction, because the simplicity 
 of that construction was the primary concern of 
 Vespasian and Titus, of Agrippa and Hadrian, in 
 building them. Effect is aimed at, and the effect 
 is always that of impressing by size; but the effect 
 is sought legitimately, with the finest materials, 
 their most natural, however sumptuous, arrange- 
 ment, and that Roman way of going straight to an 
 end, like their roads, though at the cost of an army of 
 men, a treasury of gold. In the work of the Middle 
 Ages, of the Renaissance, of the seventeenth century, 
 we find the same effect aimed at, but with a sumptu- 
 ousness not duly subordinated, and turning fre- 
 quently (as in the extravagances of the typical 
 Bernini) into colossal bad taste. Yet still, to this
 
 ROME 15 
 
 moment, Rome is the most pompous, the most mag- 
 nificent, of Western cities. Was there ever a more 
 imposing public square than that vast, florid Piazza 
 del Popolo, by which, before the days of the railway, 
 strangers entered Rome? almost nowhere entirely 
 commendable in detail, but with what an art of 
 effect in its remote corners, into which no crowd 
 can stretch, its three long, straight, narrow vistas 
 into the city, its terraced and columned heights, its 
 great gateway. The square in which St. Peter's 
 stands, with that colonnade which Bernini set up 
 in his one moment of genius; the dark irregular, 
 half -concealed palace of the Vatican holding on to 
 a corner of the great church; the square itself, with 
 its obelisk, the two fountains, the stones worn by 
 all the pilgrims of the world ; no other square makes 
 quite the same appeal to one, or suggests so much 
 of the world's history. And how impressive, cer- 
 tainly how sumptuous, are all these immense, never 
 quite architecturally satisfying churches, heaped 
 against the sky at the corner of every square, dig- 
 nifying the poverty of even the humblest streets, 
 leaving, like San Paolo fuori le Mura, infinite riches 
 run to waste in the unpopulated Campagna! You 
 can scarcely walk for five minutes in any direction 
 without coming on something, perhaps incongruous 
 where it is, like the eleven Corinthian columns of 
 Hadrian's Temple of Neptune, forty feet high, now 
 rilled up with modern brick-work, and made into 
 the Exchange ; something absolutely startling, some-
 
 16 ROME 
 
 thing vast and sudden, it may be only the Trevi 
 Fountain, it may be the Theatre of Marcellus, the 
 Capitol itself. And the appropriate dtcor of life 
 awaits every occasion, ready set; for what occasion 
 is there in life which was not anticipated and pre- 
 pared for, with learned, foreseeing taste, centuries 
 ago, in those times when Rome had perfected the 
 arts of life as now only the Eastern races ever dream 
 of perfecting them? Think, in the baths of Cara- 
 calla or of Diocletian, among the trees and ruins of 
 the Palatine; or, with less of the historic effort, in 
 the gardens of the Villa Albani, with their alleys of 
 shaven box, carved into niches for statues; of the 
 Villa Borghese, with their avenues of ilex, their 
 grassy amphitheatre; of the Villa Doria-Pamphili, 
 which is like an English park, laid out by a French 
 gardener; in the Bosco of the Villa Medici, wild 
 and delicate, with its staircase going up between 
 the trees to the sky; think what a decor lies before 
 one, gone to waste, or at least wasted, for a life of 
 the most triumphant pleasure! To live in Rome 
 is to understand all the coloured and spectacular 
 vices of the Caesars, all the elaborate sins of the 
 Renaissance. Occasions so great as these have 
 gone, but the possibilities remain, awaiting only 
 their opportunity. 
 
 IV 
 
 Rome is a sea in which many worlds have gone
 
 ROME 17 
 
 down, and its very pavement is all in waves; so that 
 to drive through these narrow streets, and across 
 these broad squares, in which there is no footway 
 over which a wheel may not drive, is like rocking in 
 a boat on slightly uneasy water. The soil every- 
 where heaves over still buried ruins, which may 
 hold (who knows?) another Apoxyomenos. And, 
 as no other great city in the world is, the whole of 
 Rome is one vast museum, in which the very 
 galleries, palaces, churches, which contain the finest 
 of its treasures, are themselves but single items in 
 that museum which is Rome. And what gives to 
 all this precisely its special charm, and also its special 
 value to the student, is that Rome is still a living city, 
 the capital of a nation, and with an actual life of its 
 own, which, often enough, can be seen in its direct 
 descent from antiquity. The Roman people have 
 always had a sense of the continuity of their national 
 life, of their literal part in the inheritance of their 
 ancestors. One sees it, sometimes with a quaint 
 grotesqueness, in the simple-minded way in which, 
 just as they Christianised Pagan temples, so they 
 have always taken to themselves and turned to their 
 own uses the monuments of all the ages: Pasquino, 
 Marforio, Madama Lucrezia, the Bocca della Verita; 
 the religion of one age becoming the mouthpiece for 
 the satire or criticism of the next, as the Pagan gods 
 in exile, in the Christian Middle Ages, became 
 demons, haunting the souls of men with their perilous 
 beauty. One sees it, at the present day, in that
 
 i8 ROME 
 
 singular deification of Vittorio Emanuele, which is 
 really an apotheosis, after the manner of the apo- 
 theoses of the Roman emperors; and quite after 
 their ruthless manner is that waste of thousands of 
 pounds in the destruction of certain old streets, 
 which were beautiful, for the proper view of an 
 equestrian statue, which will be hideous. And 
 then, in the actual museums, the palace of the 
 Vatican, the palace of the Conservatori, the baths of 
 Diocletian, what a prepared atmosphere one finds 
 and how much more at home in these courts, fres- 
 coed halls, papal summer-houses, Carthusian clois- 
 ters, is all this white, chosen humanity of statues, 
 which, if they "remember their august abodes," 
 must certainly pine less for Greece, which they left 
 so early, than any other marble beings in the world. 
 Since 1 have been in Rome I have realised, for my- 
 self, many things about Greek art, which not all 
 the study of sculpture in London, Paris, and Berlin 
 has taught me; and I have been able to see it, not 
 only as the greatest, the most "classic" art of the 
 world, but as the most living, responsive, intimately 
 delightful. And this is certainly because I have 
 seen it where it could be seen more like something 
 in its natural place, less like something on show, than 
 anywhere out of Greece. 
 
 And in painting, too, one has the opportunity of 
 making certain not unsimilar discoveries. Rome is 
 not rich in easel-pictures, nor yet in altar-pieces, 
 but it is only in Rome that it is possible to realise, to
 
 ROME 19 
 
 the full extent of their gifts and limitations, the 
 pictorial genius of Michelangelo, of Raphael, and 
 of Pinturicchio. Michelangelo in the decoration of 
 the Sistine Chapel, Raphael in the decoration of the 
 Stanze and Logge, Pinturicchio in the decoration of 
 the Appartamento Borgia, of the Vatican, is seen 
 working as the painter loves to work, in the one 
 really satisfying way in which he can work, archi- 
 tecturally, for the adornment of a given space, which 
 is part of the essential life of a building. And so 
 these frescoes, as no picture in a museum could ever 
 be, are an actual part of Rome, precisely as much a 
 part of it as the Vatican itself. 
 
 In the Sistine Chapel there are admirable paint- 
 ings by Botticelli, by Signorelli, by Perugino, but 
 one can see nothing there but Michelangelo. And 
 the emotion of first seeing this immense world created 
 by Michelangelo seized me with a delighted awe, 
 such as I could imagine to have stirred in the soul 
 of Adam when he awoke and beheld the world. 
 Other things are beautiful, exquisite, subtle, but 
 these seem to contain all beautiful and exquisite 
 and subtle things, and to disregard them. In the 
 passion of this overwhelming life which burns 
 through every line, there is for once the creating 
 joy of the artist, flawless, unimpaired, unchecked, 
 fulfilling its desire as not even the Greeks have 
 done; for desire, in them, was restrained by a sense 
 of delicate harmony, to which it was the triumphant 
 self-sacrifice of their art to conform. Here we have
 
 20 ROME 
 
 no sense of even so much of mortal concession to 
 the demands of immortality; but the unbounded 
 spirit seems to revel in the absoluteness of its free- 
 dom. Here, at last, here indeed for the first time 
 is all that can be meant by sublimity; a sublimity 
 which attains its pre-eminence through no sacrifice 
 of other qualities; a sublimity which (let us say it 
 frankly) is amusing. I find the magnificent and 
 extreme life of these figures as touching, intimate, 
 and direct in its appeal as the most vivid and 
 gracious realism of any easel-picture: God, the 
 Father and the Son, the Virgin, the men and women 
 of the Old Testament, the Sibyls, the risen dead of 
 the Last Judgment, all these tremendous symbols 
 of whatever has been divined by the spirit or sought 
 out by the wisdom of the ages crowd upon one with 
 the palpable, irresistible nearness of the people who 
 throng one in one's passage through the actual 
 world. It seemed to me then, it still seems to me, 
 strange that I should have felt it, but never before 
 had I felt so much at home among paintings, so 
 little of a mere spectator. One seems to be of the 
 same vivid and eternal world as these joyous and 
 meditative beings, joyous and meditative even in 
 hell, where the rapture of their torment broods in 
 eyes and limbs with the same energy as the rapture 
 of God in creation, of the woman in disobedience, or 
 of Isaiah in vision. They are close to one, I think, 
 partly because they are so far away; because no 
 subtlety in the eyes or lips, no delicacy in the fold
 
 ROME 21 
 
 of garments, none of the curious and discoverable 
 ways by which art imitates and beautifies nature, 
 can distract one from the immediate impress of such 
 passionate and obsessing life. Art ceases to approach 
 one directly, through this sense or that, through 
 colour, or suggested motion, or some fancied outlook 
 of the soul ; it comes straight to one, boldly, seizing 
 one at once by that instinct of immediate recognition, 
 by which, except here, only perhaps the direct works 
 of God have ever approached and revealed them- 
 selves to the soul of man. 
 
 Now turn to Raphael. Here, on the contrary, 
 we have art so obvious in its concealment of art 
 that it becomes the idol of the crowd, and ceases 
 to interest the more curious dreamer before pictures. 
 Raphael is the instinctively triumphant perfection of 
 the ideal of the average man; he is what scarcely 
 the greatest of painters can be, and what only 
 mediocre painters have desired to be. Here is the 
 simplicity of what is called inspiration: the ease of 
 doing, better than any one else, what the greater 
 number would like, better than anything else, to do. 
 And he is miraculous; yet a miracle which just fails 
 to interest one; because, I think, he is essentially 
 exterior, and his pictures a dream of the hand 
 rather than a dream of the soul. Even that peace 
 which he can convey with so delicate a power 
 seems to me rather the slumber than the ecstasy 
 of peace. His Madonnas have no foresight in 
 their eyes of the seven swords with which the
 
 22 ROME 
 
 divine child is to pierce their breasts. His gracious 
 saints have never, before they attained sanctity, 
 suffered all the enlightening ardours of sin. His 
 martyrs have no memory, either of death, by which 
 they have passed, or of heaven, to which they have 
 come. All the pe/sons of his pictures live, some- 
 what unthinkingly, in the moment which their 
 gesture perpetuates; they have but that gesture. 
 We see eternity in the moment of fierce meditation 
 which Michelangelo calls up before us, as if thought 
 in the brows and hands were about to relax or 
 resolve itself into some other of the unaccountable 
 moods of so elemental a being. In the painful, 
 intense face of a Velasquez we see the passionate 
 frailties, the morbid, minute hatreds of a long race 
 of just such suffering and reticent beings. And 
 in the smile which wanders, lurking in the im- 
 perceptible corner of lip or eyelid, across the faces 
 of Leonardo, we see the enigma of whatever is 
 most secret, alluring, inexplicable, in the mysterious 
 charm of human beauty; that look which seems to 
 remember, and is perhaps only a forget fulness. But 
 the people of Raphael live in the content of that 
 one gracious moment in which they lift their hands 
 in prayer or benediction, or open their untroubled 
 eyes to that moment's sunlight. 
 
 The art of Pinturicchio, which can now, since the 
 opening of the Appartamento Borgia in the Vatican, 
 be studied more completely at Rome than even at 
 Siena, is another, a more primitive, but not less
 
 ROME 23 
 
 individual art. Those frescoes, simply as decora- 
 tions, are as beautiful as any decorations that were 
 ever done ; and they ' are at once an arabesque, in 
 which everything seems to exist simply in order 
 that it may be a moment's beautiful colour on a 
 wall, and a piece of homely realism, in which every 
 figure seems to be a portrait, and every animal, tree, 
 and jewel to be painted for its own sake. There 
 is not a little naivete 1 in the design, a technique 
 in which there is none of the confident sureness 
 of hand of either Raphael or Michelangelo, but a 
 certain hesitation, an almost timid recourse to such 
 expedients as the use of stucco in relief, and even 
 of painted wood, glued upon the flat surface to 
 represent a tower or a gateway. But you feel 
 that the man has something to say, that, to be 
 more accurate, he sees pictures; and that this 
 simple and sumptuous and real and imaginary 
 world, which he has called into being in order that 
 it may remind us of the world about us, and be 
 more beautiful, and so be a delight to the eyes 
 and a repose to the soul, is not only an unsurpassed 
 piece of decoration, but the revelation of a tempera- 
 ment to which beauty was perhaps more beautiful 
 for its own sake than to any other painter. Pin- 
 turicchio loves the world, animals, trees, human 
 faces, the elegance of men and women in courtly, 
 coloured dresses, youth with its simple pride of 
 existence, kings for their gold and purple robes, 
 saints for the divine calm of their eyelids and the
 
 24 ROME 
 
 plaintive grace of their slim hands, all the world's 
 beauty as it comes up like the flower of the grass, 
 and especially that beauty which takes no thought 
 of itself; and he loves it with so simple and humble 
 and absorbing a love that he paints it just as he 
 sees it, almost without thinking of his own share in 
 the work. That is why this select and coloured 
 world of his, in which there is no passionate or 
 visionary life, as in Michelangelo, nor that com- 
 posed and conscious presence in time and space of 
 the people of Raphael, lives with such simplicity, as 
 if filled with a calm and joyous sense of its own 
 beauty. To live under the decorations of Michel- 
 angelo would be as exhausting as to live in a world 
 in which every person was a person of genius. 
 To live amongst the decorations of Raphael would 
 be to live amongst people of too placid, too amiable 
 disposition, and too limited intelligence; it would 
 become a weariness, But one need never cease to 
 live happily amongst the men and women whom 
 Pinturicchio saw walking in beautiful robes, that 
 were never woven so finely by hands in meadows of 
 gold flowers, that never grew out of the brown earth, 
 always finding heaven, a heaven of chrysoprase and 
 chalcedony, at a turn of the way, and without sur- 
 prise; for these and their abode have the beauty 
 that we desire to find in the world, in what is most 
 homely, obvious, and frequent in it, the beauty that 
 is there, if we could see it, and the beauty that for 
 the most part we do not see, because we are too
 
 ROME 25 
 
 sophisticated, too conscious of ourselves, and be- 
 cause we discover too thoughtful a consciousness 
 of themselves in natural things. 
 
 To realise the greatness of Rome, it is not enough 
 to have seen the Colosseum, St. Peter's, the churches, 
 palaces, ruins, squares, fountains, and gardens; you 
 may have seen all these, and yet not have seen the 
 most beautiful possession of Rome: the Campagna. 
 Seen from the Alban hills, Rome is a mere cluster 
 of white houses in a desert, a desert as variable in 
 colour as the sky. Lost in that wilderness, a speck 
 between that wilderness and the sky, it seems a 
 mere accident in a visible infinity. And now re- 
 member that this vast Campagna is simply the 
 pleasure park of Rome : that it is left there, feverous 
 and unproductive, the loveliest of ruins, in order 
 that Rome may have the pride of possessing it; 
 and think if any city in the world possesses so 
 costly and magnificent a luxury. 
 
 It is one of the many delicate surprises of Rome 
 to come suddenly, at the end of a street which had 
 seemed lost in the entanglements of the city, upon 
 a glimpse of the Campagna or the hills. And those 
 hills, rising up from the plain to the sky, their soft 
 lines, under certain weather, indistinguishable from 
 either, opalescent, changing colour as the wind 
 scatters or heaps the clouds, as sunlight or scirocco
 
 26 ROME 
 
 passes over them, have something of the untiring 
 charm, the infinite variety, of the sea. Drive a 
 little way into the Campagna, and you might be on 
 the Pampas, or in the desert which is about the ruins 
 of Thebes. An almost audible silence descends 
 upon you, in which the world seems asleep. A shep- 
 herd leans motionless upon his staff; the sheep 
 move drowsily about him ; and you hear the tinkle ot 
 the bell. 
 
 To see Tivoli, loud and white with waterfalls, a 
 little grey town set upon grey and cloven rocks, 
 fringed with the silvery green of olive trees; to see 
 any one of the castelli, one would willingly cross a 
 whole country; and they lie, Frascati, Albano, 
 Genzano, Marino, Ariccia, Rocca di Papa, at the 
 very gates of Rome, within the compass of one 
 day's drive. These castelli are all fantastic and 
 improbable; white, huddled, perched like flights of 
 white birds that have settled there; hanging over 
 volcanic chasms that have burst into lakes, fertilised 
 into vines and olives; wild trees, their grey trunks 
 leaning this way and that, seeming to face up and 
 down the hillside, like armies meeting in battle; 
 each castello with its own rococo villas, like incrusta- 
 tions upon the rock; each castello set on its own hill, 
 as if it had drawn up the ladder after having climbed 
 there: a little city of refuge from the perils of the 
 plain. They hold the Alban Lake between them, and 
 Lake Nemi, which sleeps with the deepest sleep of 
 any lake I have ever seen, in the most restful arms of
 
 ROME 27 
 
 land. And each has its own aspect. Frascati, as 
 one turns in and out of its streets, opening suddenly 
 on vague glimpses, as if cut by the sides of a frame, 
 is like a seaside village ; and one cannot help imagin- 
 ing the wash of waves, instead of the grassy plain of 
 the Campagna, at the end of those coiling streets. 
 Rocca di Papa is like an eagle's nest, perched high 
 on the mountain, with its shady square in front of 
 the little church where you hear old women praying 
 aloud. Marino has an air of the country, with its 
 fierce men, its somewhat bold, handsome women, its 
 thronging children. Ariccia hangs picturesquely 
 against the very side of the hill, jutting out into 
 space. Each has its variety of primitive life, of 
 rococo architecture, of running water, of trees, of 
 volcanic rock, of lake scenery. And for those who 
 care greatly for the delicate shading of colours as 
 they change over a sensitive landscape, to look from 
 these heights is to look down, from dawn till sun- 
 set, upon a paradise of the daintiest colours in the 
 world, in that jewelled desert which lies about Rome. 
 But the Campagna is most wonderful, most itself, 
 at sunset ; and sunset in Rome should be seen from 
 the Via Appia, as I saw it during a memorable drive 
 in mid-winter. Looking back from the mound 
 beyond the Casal Rotondo, Rome seemed far off, 
 dwindled by distance, all its towers and domes and 
 roofs white, set in the hollow of the hills. Nearer 
 to me, Frascati, a white sparkle upon the dark 
 Alban hills : between, along the sky, the Apennines,
 
 28 ROME 
 
 their snow lying caressingly against the clouds; and 
 below, all around me, the desert of the Campagna, 
 the long grey line of the aqueducts seeming to 
 impress itself, with a certain insistency, upon the 
 otherwise timeless waste of the great plain. A 
 church bell sounded faintly, like the sound of a 
 cow-bell, from a little white church on the Via Appia 
 Nuova; the air was still, clear, cold, with a marvel- 
 lous serenity in its soft brightness; and as I looked 
 across the Campagna, going out desolately towards 
 the sea, I could just distinguish a light shining 
 along the line of dark trees at the edge of the horizon. 
 Hearing a slow creaking of wheels, I looked down, 
 and saw in a road two lounging oxen drawing a 
 load of silvery ilex boughs. Two peasants went 
 by, lounging like the oxen, in their long-haired 
 garments of undressed skins; shepherds who had 
 come down from the Apennines for the winter, with 
 their flocks and herds, and had encamped upon the 
 plain, in the little conical huts which rise out of it 
 so strangely. Sunset was beginning, and, as we 
 drove back along the Via Appia, the clouds which 
 had obscured the sun cleared away, and the sky 
 seemed to be washed with colours which were at 
 once fiery and watery: greens of an inexpressibly 
 luminous delicacy, paler and softer than any grass 
 or leaf that ever grew, but with the ardour in them 
 of growing things; pinks that were like the inner 
 petals of rose-leaves, flushing on the horizon to a 
 fierce golden red, which burned in the tops of the
 
 ROME 29 
 
 trees like a conflagration, and at the edges floating 
 away into paler and paler gold, and from that into 
 the green of moonlit water, and from that into a blue 
 which was the colour of shallow water under very 
 faint sunlight, a blue which deepened overhead into 
 the vast outstretched dome of the sky. The air 
 grew chill, with that intense cold which seems to 
 come down out of the sky upon Rome for an hour 
 after sunset. We drove back, along the straight 
 road, between the ruined tombs which had once 
 stood at the gates of the villas of Romans, and 
 which stand now, in their ruins, seeming to look 
 as the Romans loved to look, on the road which was 
 the world's highway; that long road leading into the 
 Eternal City (upon which, indeed, the ends of the 
 earth are still visibly come) out of the vague world. 
 In so beautiful a desolation, at which the soul shivers 
 away into that loneliness which is the soul's ecstasy 
 before eternal things, I said to myself that here, if 
 anywhere upon earth, God and man had worked 
 together to show at one glimpse all the glory of the 
 world. 
 
 VI 
 
 Perhaps my most agreeable recollection of a 
 winter spent in Rome is the recollection of in- 
 numerable drives with a friend in the Roman Cam- 
 pagna and about the Castelli Romani. The Comte 
 de B., after a lifetime of disinterested travelling,
 
 30 ROME 
 
 in which he trained his eyes to a perfect suscep- 
 tibility, and his judgment to a perfect impartial- 
 ity in the noting and comparison of so much of 
 the world's scenery, came finally to a deliberate 
 preference of this scenery about Rome as the most 
 beautiful in the world, a deliberate choice of it as 
 the scenery most appropriate, at all events, to the 
 demands of his own temperament, the requirements 
 of his own meditations. And it is through his 
 eyes, certainly, that I first learned to see the Cam- 
 pagna, which, like all profound beauty, does not 
 reveal itself to all, with the insolent challenge of 
 Alps, the feminine seductiveness of meadow-lands; 
 and I cannot evoke for myself the spectacle of the 
 Roman landscape without seeing in its midst so 
 difficult, so constant, so learned a lover of it; for 
 this strange, attractive figure, the traveller, the 
 student of race, the student of history, with his 
 courtly violence, his resolute pieties, his humorous 
 prejudices softening the rigour of a singular spiritual 
 equanimity, his reticent, self-absorbed, and yet 
 gracious and affectionate temperament, seemed to 
 me, in his lifetime, himself an inevitable figure in 
 that landscape. 
 
 The beauty of the Campagna is a soft, gradual, 
 changing beauty, whose extreme delicacy is made 
 out of the action upon one another of savage and 
 poisonous forces. The line of the Alban mountains, 
 against the clear sky, is the most harmonious line 
 of mountains that I have ever seen ; but its pathetic
 
 ROME 31 
 
 grace, in which there is almost the appeal of music, 
 comes to it from the tumultuous caprice of volcanic 
 fires. The great plain, which, seen from the hills, 
 is like a gently undulating sea, covered with soft 
 and variable tints as the sunlight wanders across it, 
 is a desert of lava, barren soil, and lank herbage, 
 discoloured grass and the far from "tufted" as- 
 phodel. The malaria which always lurks there 
 has thinned and withered and bent the few shep- 
 herds and herdsmen who are its only inhabitants. 
 Its silence is the silence of desolation. It is ridged 
 with broken aqueducts, strewn with the fragments 
 of the tombs and villas of Romans. Before Rome 
 was, it was Latium, the birthplace of the Latin 
 people. It hides under it the Catacombs of the 
 Christians. All the changes of the earth and of the 
 world have passed over it, ruining it with elaborate 
 cruelty; and they have only added subtlety to its 
 natural beauty, and memories to that beauty of 
 association which is a part of the spirit of places. 
 
 But the charm of the Campagna depends also, 
 more than most landscapes, on weather, on the hour 
 at which one sees it; and it has different aspects, 
 seems to reveal to one a different secret, as one 
 approaches it from this gate or that. Our drive 
 was usually timed to end with sunset, and sunset 
 is the most surprising and illusive hour at which to 
 see the Campagna. I remember the first sunset 
 I ever saw there. We had driven around the 
 deserted outer side of the Aurelian Wall, between
 
 32 ROME 
 
 the canne, rustling loudly, rattling against one an- 
 other, in the rising tramontana, and the tall brown 
 wall, in which the stones are of every age and 
 recall every ruler of Rome. The air was cold and 
 bright, and as we came near the Porta San Paolo 
 sunset was beginning to streak a pale sky with faint 
 bands of rose and green, against which I saw the 
 cypresses of Shelley's graveyard and the Pyramid 
 of Cestius. The sky flushed, moment by moment, 
 with brighter and brighter, yet always delicate, 
 colour, a faint rose which reddened to fire, splashing 
 with sidelong jets of flame the pallid green which 
 brightened miraculously to a watery colour as green 
 as grass, yet as luminous as moonlight. Green 
 melted into gold, red into the faintest of rose, as 
 if an inner heat burned them, and every colour was 
 reflected in diminishing shades, above and below, 
 upon the sky itself. And this light in the sky 
 seemed to reflect itself, as in a mirror, all over the 
 Campagna, which changed sensitively as every 
 colour changed in the sky. In a time of scirocco, 
 when I have seen the vapour rolling in from the 
 hills, the whole plain has seemed to wither into an 
 ashen greyness; at noon, under steady sunlight, it 
 has shimmered with gold; at night, when I have 
 climbed a high wooded bank which lies outside 
 the Porta del Popolo, I have seen it lying under its 
 network of silver mist, the Tiber hurrying through 
 it, curved like a crescent. And always, closing 
 in the plain as with a magic circle, there has been
 
 ROME 33 
 
 the soft line of the Alban hills, the sharper indenta- 
 tions of the Sabine hills, and beyond, the snow upon 
 the Apennines. 
 
 The beauty of the little hill-towns which rise out 
 of the Campagna, like rocks rising out of the sea, 
 has really the character of a kind of inland sea-coast, 
 in which the houses themselves take a precipitous 
 and rocky air, clinging, as they do at Ariccia, to a 
 scant foothold over a gulf, or, at Rocca di Papa, to 
 the bare side of the mountain ; and they have, along 
 with this shy and withdrawn savagery of aspect, to 
 which the quite recent legends of brigandage add 
 a certain confirmation, something almost artificial in 
 their exquisite poise, their spectacular appropriate- 
 ness of detail, the happy accidents of their grouping 
 and the rococo adornment of their villas, built for 
 Popes and princes. It is by their artificiality that 
 they seem to attach themselves to Rome, by that 
 side of them which is delicate and ornate; their 
 ruggedness, the freshness of their mountain air, the 
 colour in the rough cheeks of their peasants, the 
 flavour of their wine and flowers, are all their own, 
 and have nothing in common with anything Roman. 
 Only Tivoli seems to me in a sense Roman, one of 
 the great things of Rome, on the same natural scale 
 as the great buildings there; what is artificial in 
 its waterfalls and gorges and the terraced Villa 
 d'Este being done consummately, and with a com- 
 plete harmony of adaptation. 
 
 And, like the Campagna, these castelli have their
 
 34 ROME 
 
 secrets, which are not quite ready to reveal them- 
 selves to every comer. At Frascati, for instance, 
 even the Villa Aldobrandini is, in a sense, one of 
 the show-villas; that villa which, if you read closely 
 enough in Pater's "Marius," you will find described 
 as the house of a certain "aristocratic poet who 
 loved every sort of superiorities," where Marius 
 meets Apuleius. "Whereupon," we are told, "the 
 numerous cascades of the precipitous garden of the 
 villa, framed in the doorway of the hall, fell into a 
 harmless picture, in its place among the pictures 
 within, and hardly more real than they." Yet, even 
 there I do not find the intimacy, the penetrating 
 strangeness, of the neglected gardens of the Villa 
 Falconieri, higher up on the other side of the climb- 
 ing roadway, entered by a gate flowered through by 
 the whole body of an immense, twisted, very ancient 
 tree, which has been allowed so fantastic a whim 
 of growth. There is a little lake on a plateau at 
 the highest point of those gardens, which I shall 
 remember even if I forget Lake Nemi itself, and 
 that "mirror of Diana" is the most purely beautiful 
 lake I have ever seen. This space of dark water 
 is closed in on three sides by tall, motionless cy- 
 presses, their solemn green, menacing enough in 
 itself, reflected like great cubes of blackness, point- 
 ing downwards at the sky. The waters are always 
 dark, even in full sunlight; they have always that 
 weight upon them of the funereal trees which stand 
 between them and the sun; and through the cy-
 
 ROME 35 
 
 presses you can see Rome, far away, beyond the 
 gardens, the stacked vines, the olive-trees, and the 
 indefinite wilderness, set there like a heap of white 
 stones. I scarcely know what it is that this un- 
 accountable scene awaits; but it seems to wait. 
 Disillusioned lovers might walk there, chill even on 
 a day of sun, seeing their past perhaps in that 
 distant glimpse of Rome, their future in those 
 cypress-shadowed depths, and their present in the 
 narrow strip of brown earth between those two 
 infinitudes. 
 
 Scenery so liberal as this scenery of the Roman 
 Campagna lends itself, on their own terms, to many 
 minds. By whatever side human things and the 
 history of the world interest you, on that side chiefly 
 will you feel the attraction of the Campagna. To 
 the friend in whose company I frequented it it 
 was a mirror of very definite thoughts, memories, 
 speculations, with which the history and religion of 
 Rome had to do. Here, he would remind me, at 
 that bend of the Tiber, Cleopatra's barge passed, 
 rowing hard for Egypt; there, at the cross-roads on 
 the Via Appia, Christ appeared to St. Peter, where 
 the little church still asks the question, "Domine, 
 quo vadis?" Here, on the Via Ostense, a small 
 chapel marks the spot where St. Peter and St. Paul 
 took leave of one another before each went to his 
 martyrdom; farther on, at the Tre Fontane, where 
 the Trappists* friends, the birds, sing among ave- 
 nues of eucalyptus, St. Paul was beheaded. To my
 
 36 ROME 
 
 friend every stone had its precise memory, its legend 
 or record. And that, certainly, is the most fruitful 
 way of seeing the Campagna, though, indeed, one 
 ignorant or heedless of these things might still come 
 to prefer this to all other scenery for its own sake, 
 for its mere natural sensitiveness to one's moods and 
 the sunlight. 
 
 VII 
 
 We love cities for their gracious weather, as we 
 love persons for their amiable dispositions; and 
 Rome, even in winter, shows frequently a marvellous 
 equanimity of temper. I have had, in December 
 and January, weeks of uninterrupted sunshine, in 
 which every day's promenade ended naturally, as it 
 should, with sunset. And that perilous shiver of 
 cold which comes over city and Campagna in the 
 hour after sunset gives just that astringent touch 
 which is needed for the completion of all merely 
 pleasant beauty. But happiness in Rome, certainly, 
 comes and goes with the wind and the sunshine. 
 Withdraw the sun, and Rome is like a face from 
 which the smile has faded; change the wind, and 
 one's own disposition changes with it. Driving one 
 day in the Campagna, outside the Porta Furba, I 
 saw the scirocco. The hills above Frascati were a 
 little dimmed with clouds; gradually a vast, white, 
 rolling mist came violently up out of the sky beyond 
 the hills; soft, stealthy, pendulous, undulating, irre-
 
 ROME 37 
 
 sistible, it came coiling rapidly onward, as if a poison- 
 ous life had taken shape and came serpentlike upon 
 Rome. Under a chill rain these narrow streets, 
 with their wrinkled stones in which the rain gathers, 
 become desolate in an instant ; and indoors, in these 
 houses without fires, without chimneys, life becomes 
 intolerable. Living, as one is apt to do here, on 
 one's sensations, how can any happiness be possible 
 in the absence of just what makes the happiness of 
 the sensations: gracious weather, the mere liberty 
 to feel without discomfort? By one's fireside in 
 London a storm of winter rain matters little enough. 
 But what does everything else in the world matter 
 here in a downpour of rain in winter? 
 
 And these people, one feels, are made for happi- 
 ness, for the easy acceptance of things as they come. 
 There is a terrible poverty in Rome, of which the 
 beggars who await you at every street corner are 
 but too genuine a sign. The first gesture learnt by 
 the children of poor people in Rome is to hold 
 out their hands for alms ; they begin when they are 
 so young that they can only totter, and they are 
 still holding out their hands for alms when they can 
 only totter because they are so old. Yet another 
 sign of it I find in the 3000 cabmen of Rome, sitting 
 hungrily on their boxes, in their worm-eaten fur 
 coats, too lazy to do anything but sit there holding 
 out their whips to solicit every passer, and unable 
 to make a decent living even in a place so frequented 
 by strangers and a place where every one drives.
 
 38 ROME 
 
 But even here, in these beggars and cabmen, is there 
 not a certain participation, at all events, in that open- 
 air life which is the felicity of Rome? "Abbiamo 
 pazienza," say the poor people, and sit in the sun. 
 
 To poor and rich alike, the whole of every part 
 of the open air of Rome is a personal property. 
 People stand in the streets as if in their own drawing- 
 rooms; and in the Corso, especially at that hour 
 of the afternoon when the thickest flow of carriages 
 has passed, they stretch from side to side, forming 
 into groups outside the Caff Aragno and on both 
 sides of the Piazza Colonna. But, if they can, they 
 drive: Italians hate walking. This gives them a 
 respect for anything on wheels, so that Rome is 
 represented by its carriages, as Venice is repre- 
 sented by its gondolas. They have even saintly 
 warrant for it; for San Filippo Neri, one of their 
 patron saints, and himself a typical Roman, set it 
 down among his instructions to the faithful that, as 
 a concession to the weakness of the flesh, it was 
 permitted to keep a carriage. And the Romans have 
 taken him so precisely at his word that they will live 
 on macaroni and five soldi's worth of wine in order 
 to keep a carrozza. Cardinals, again, are not 
 allowed to walk in the streets; they must drive in 
 a closed carriage. So it is that Rome, more than 
 any other city in which driving is a luxury rather 
 than a necessity, is the city where one drives. The 
 constant passing of carriages, in streets where two 
 can scarcely pass abreast and where there is no foot-
 
 ROME 39 
 
 path, procures one, indeed, one of the few disagree- 
 able sensations of Rome: the sensation, whenever 
 one walks, of a wheel about to descend on one's 
 heel. 
 
 In the long, narrow, thronged Corso the press of 
 carriages, as they go to and return from the Pincio, 
 is so great that walking becomes difficult. But, 
 all the same, I find that conventional drive along 
 the Corso, through the Piazza, del Popolo, up the 
 winding terraces of the Pincio, the equivalent (and 
 how much more than the equivalent !) of Hyde Park 
 or the Bois de Boulogne, one of the most tolerable 
 of all conventional drives. What I find specially 
 charming is its universality, its equality. You will 
 see the queen in her carriage with the red livery; 
 the nobility, the rich bourgeois, the shopkeepers, all 
 with their families; nurse-maids, women without 
 hats, young clerks and young princes, passing and 
 repassing, side by side, all seeming to be entirely 
 contented with themselves, the fine air, the music, 
 the marvellous view over Rome, in which the colours 
 begin to group towards sunset. On those picturesque 
 heights, high over the city; under those evergreen 
 oaks by which the Romans delude themselves into 
 thinking it is never winter; in sight of St. Peter's in 
 the sky, and all Rome, its roofs and domes, below; 
 without thought, but idly satisfied with the sunlight, 
 with the band that plays to them their positive, un- 
 shaded, soulless Italian music, Verdi or Mascagni, 
 they pass and repass, proud of being Romans, even
 
 40 ROME 
 
 if they do not take the trouble to so much as glance 
 at the daily miracle of Rome. 
 
 VIII 
 
 The carnival, which this year, for perhaps the first 
 time in ten years, was really a carnival, is simply the 
 personification of Roman idleness, and a gaiety which 
 is a sort of tradition. I begin to see now the mean- 
 ing of those idle people, dinnerless, and with shin- 
 ing boots and many rings, who stand in the Corso 
 in front of the Caffe Aragno. To wear coloured 
 dresses, to put on masks, to run in the streets all 
 day and to dance all night, to chatter irresponsibly, 
 to throw jokes and confetti about the air, and to 
 forget that one is poor, that life has its to-morrow 
 and has had its yesterday: this is happiness to the 
 Romans, and their abandonment to it is contagious. 
 It is very long since anything has given me so 
 inspiriting and reckless a sense of the joy of life as 
 the sight of these ardent smiling faces, in which 
 mirth is never vulgar, but as natural as speech ; and 
 I find the mask, making all men humorously akin, 
 the only form in which the idea of democracy is not 
 intolerable. What a coloured whirl, in which all 
 Rome seemed to become a kaleidoscope! Every- 
 where a flight of white frilled things, Pierrots, 
 Pulcinellas, darting, alighting, along a flowery way, 
 like white birds ; flowers by day and lights by night ; 
 the cars, the moccoletti; with, at night, the pathos of
 
 ROME 41 
 
 streets strewn with flowers and confetti, the smell 
 of trodden flowers, the feast ended. On the after- 
 noon of Mercoledi Grasso I began to make my way 
 along the Corso at three, and I did not reach the 
 Piazza del Popolo until half-past four. And that 
 difficult way along the street, its windows all aflower 
 with faces, a soft rain of coloured paper raindrops, 
 the sharp hail of confetti falling all the way, flowers 
 flying above one's head, settling on one's hat, tapping 
 against one's cheek, was a lesson in the Italian 
 temperament, its Southern capacity for simple en- 
 joyment, for the true folly, that abandonment to the 
 moment's whim, in which there is none of the North- 
 ern brutality. Civilisation has sunk deeper into 
 these people, in whom civility is a tradition; it 
 has penetrated to the roots; and in this character 
 so positive, so unshaded, from which the energy has 
 dwindled away, but not the simplicity, the charming 
 and graceful naturalness, there is the same super- 
 ficial, yet in its way sufficient, quality as in the fine 
 finish of these faces, equally finished in the peasant 
 and in the noble. 
 
 IX 
 
 Northern beauty, however fine may be the line of 
 its contour, is never, for good or evil, a mere beauty 
 of the body, a thing beginning with itself and ending 
 in itself: it contains always a suggestion; it is 
 haunted by a soul ; it leaves for its completion some-
 
 42 ROME 
 
 thing to the imagination. But in the beauty of 
 Roman women there is no trace of spiritual beauty, 
 none of the softness of charm; it is the calm, assured, 
 unquestioning beauty of the flesh. These are 
 faces which should be seen always in pure out- 
 line, for they are without melting curves, delicate 
 and variable shades, or any of that suggestion which 
 comes from anything but their own definite qualities 
 as they are in themselves. The faces of Roman 
 women of the upper classes are cold, hard, finished, 
 and impenetrable as cameos. In a face which is at 
 all beautiful you will not find a line which is not 
 perfect, and this elegance and sureness of line goes 
 with that complexion which is the finest of all com- 
 plexions, pure ivory, and which carries with it the 
 promise of a temperament in which there is all 
 the subtlety of fire. The distinction between the 
 properly aristocratic and the strictly plebeian face is, 
 I think, less marked in Rome than in any city. 
 Almost all Roman women have regular faces, the 
 profile clearly cut and in a straight line; black hair, 
 often with deep tones of blue in it, and sometimes 
 curling crisply; dark eyes, often of a fine uniform 
 brown, large, steady, profound, with that unmeaning 
 profundity which means race, and which one sees in 
 the Jewess, the gipsy. They have a truly Roman 
 dignity, and beneath that the true fire, without 
 which dignity is but the comely shroud of a corpse ; 
 and though there is not a trace in them of the soft, 
 smiling, catlike air of the women of Venice, and not
 
 ROME 43 
 
 much of the vivid, hardy, uncaring provocativeness 
 of the women of Naples, they are content to let you 
 see in them that reasonable nearness to the animal 
 which no Italian woman is ashamed to acknowledge. 
 They have often a certain massiveness of build 
 which makes a child look like a young woman, and 
 a young woman like a matron; but, for Italians, 
 they are tall, and, though one sees none of the trim 
 Neapolitan waists, it is but rarely that one sees, even 
 among the market women bringing in their baskets 
 on their heads, those square and lumpish figures 
 which roll so comfortably through Venice. 
 
 The day on which to see the Roman populace 
 most easily, most significantly, is the day of San 
 Stefano, at the popular saint's church on the Cae- 
 lian. The circular walls are covered with fif- 
 teenth century paintings of martyrdoms, naive 
 saints, bold in colour and distressing in attitude, 
 suffering all the tortures of Pagan ingenuity. From 
 early morning till late in the afternoon an incessant 
 stream of people, mostly young people, out of all 
 the alleys of Rome and from all the hills of the 
 Campagna, surges in and out of the narrow doorway, 
 where one is almost carried off one's feet in the 
 difficult passage. Outside, where there are lines of 
 booths covered with sweets and toys, fruits and 
 cakes, the lane has the aspect of a fair. Inside, 
 there is a service going on in the choir, but few pay 
 much heed to it; they have come to see the show, 
 and they make the round of all the martyrdoms.
 
 44 ROME 
 
 The women, almost all bareheaded, stop at the door, 
 in the very press of the crowd, to pull out the folded 
 handkerchief and throw it over their heads, catching 
 the ends between their teeth. And face after face, 
 as I watched them pass me, w r as absolutely beautiful ; 
 now a Raphael Madonna, now a Roman goddess; 
 adorable young people in whom beauty was a tradi- 
 tion. Some of them had complexions like wax, 
 others were as brown as mahogany; all alike had 
 that finished regularity of feature to which the 
 ardency or mildness of the eyes was but one detail 
 the more in a perfectly harmonious picture. And 
 these beautiful creatures, at once placid and vivid, 
 were unconscious of their beauty, with the uncon- 
 sciousness of animals; and they swarmed there like 
 animals, with a heartless and innocent delight in the 
 brutal details of those painted scenes of torture, in 
 which they saw their ancestors torturing their an- 
 cestors. As they nudged one another, their eyes 
 glistening, and pointed to the saint who was being 
 boiled in a cauldron, the saint whose flesh was being 
 flayed off in long rolls, the female saint whose breasts 
 were being cut off with a long knife, I seemed to see 
 the true Roman mob as it had been of old, as it will 
 always be. It was just such people as these, with 
 their strong nerves, their indifference in the matter 
 of human life, who used to fill the Colosseum, as 
 simply as they filled the martyrs' church of San 
 Stefano Rotondo, when the martyrs themselves were 
 being thrown to the lions.
 
 ROME 45 
 
 X 
 
 In a city laid out for the delight of the eyes it is 
 natural that much of the most intimate charm of the 
 city should linger in its villas and gardens, and there 
 is nothing which gives so much the sensation of that 
 mournful, yet not too mournful, atmosphere of partly 
 faded splendour which is the atmosphere of Rome as 
 the gardens of the Villa Mattei. Around are broken 
 walls rising brown and jagged against the sky, the 
 walls of the baths of Caracalla; a desolate strip of 
 country on the edge of the city; and beyond, seen 
 from the terraces lined with the dead bluish-green 
 of cactus, the Alban hills. All the garden walks, 
 where not even the cypresses are funereal nor the 
 sunlight itself gay, breathe an exquisite melan- 
 choly, the most delicate and seductive breath of 
 decay. There are wandering terraces, slim vistas, an 
 entanglement of green and wayward life, winding in 
 and out of brown defaced walls fringed with ivy, 
 and about white and broken statues shining from 
 under this green cloak of leaves; everywhere sur- 
 prising turns of ways among the trees curving out 
 here and there, as if instinctively, into a circle about 
 a fountain, where broad leaves shadow the heads of 
 gods or emperors in stone. And everywhere there 
 is the cool sound of water, which rises in the fountains 
 and drips under water-plants in a grotto ; and every- 
 where, as one follows the winding paths, a white 
 hand stretches out from among the darkness of ivy,
 
 46 ROME 
 
 at some turn of the way, and one seems to catch the 
 escaping flutter of white drapery among the leaves. 
 You will sometimes see the shy figure of an old car- 
 dinal taking his walk there; and if you follow him, 
 you will come upon a broad alley of ilexes, lined with 
 broken statues, broken friezes, and arched over by 
 fantastically twisted branches, brown and interlaced, 
 on which the blue-grey leaves hang delicately like 
 lace; an alley leading to what must once have been 
 a sarcophagus, covered, on the side by which you 
 approach it, with white carved figures. On the 
 other side you find yourself in a little trellised circle, 
 from which, as through a window suddenly opened, 
 you see the Alban hills; there is a rustic wooden 
 seat against the stone of the sarcophagus, on which, 
 roughly carved, two lions meet and seem to shake 
 hands, and above is written: "Qui San Filippo Neri 
 discorreva coi suoi discepoli delle cose di Dio." 
 
 Just as I love the gardens of the Villa Mattei, so, 
 for much the same reason, I love certain old churches 
 and cloisters, which, hidden away in quiet corners, 
 exhale, like a faint perfume, a sense of peace and of 
 desolation in so singular a union. I am never tired 
 of the Pace, the Church of Peace, which nestles 
 against the Anima, the Church of the Soul, in a poor 
 central part of the city. And it is not for the Sibyls 
 of Raphael, admirable in grace of invention as they 
 are, that I go to it, but partly for the frescoes of 
 Baldassare Peruzzi, on the opposite wall, their 
 strength, their gracious severity, their profound
 
 ROME 47 
 
 purity, and partly for something in the narrow com- 
 pass, the dim colours, of the church itself, which seem 
 to make it, not in name only, the Church of Peace. 
 And in the midst of the Trastevere, with its high 
 mouldering walls, its desolate open spaces, its yel- 
 low tortuous alleys, and half-fallen houses laid open 
 against the road, one comes upon certain churches 
 each of which has its own appeal. There is San 
 Crisogono, Madame Gervaisais' church, big, rect- 
 angular, railed off from the world, with its vast dim 
 emptiness, very restful as I have seen it at Vespers, 
 mostly in shadow, a broad band of light showing, at 
 one end, the white-robed priests, the dark shawls of 
 old women, the children running to and fro over the 
 floor, while one hears the pathetic little organ now 
 before and now behind the voices which sing quaver- 
 ing responses. There is the basilica of Santa Maria 
 in Trastevere, with its precious mosaics, standing 
 aside from the yellow emptiness of the square. There 
 is the church which had been the house of St. Cecilia, 
 in which you see the white plaintive marble figure 
 of the martyr lying under the altar, in a delicate 
 attitude, as if in sleep, with that ineffectual gash 
 along the slim neck; the monastery with its little 
 upper room in which St. Francis of Assisi had lived, 
 and where the old, half-blind, simple-minded monk 
 shows you the famous portrait and the fragments of 
 the saint's clothing. There is the monastery of San 
 Cosimato, now an almshouse for old people, with its 
 adorable unknown Pinturicchio, its august carved
 
 48 ROME 
 
 tombs underfoot, its mouldering cloister, in which 
 precious marbles lie about like refuse; its ragged 
 garden, which has grown green over one knows not 
 what wealth of buried treasures; linen hanging to 
 dry, old men and women moving slowly with bent 
 backs: all this pathetic casual mingling of ruined 
 magnificence and the decrepit old age of people 
 living on charity, how expressive of Rome it is, 
 and how curiously it completes one's sense of that 
 desolation which is, as Shelley found it, "a delicate 
 thing"! 
 
 And in all these rich churches in the midst of 
 very poor people, all with at least their bit of precious 
 marble, their fresco, their one fine picture, there is 
 something which appeals to yet another sentiment ; 
 for, opening as they desire the gates of heaven to 
 the poor, do they not certainly open the gates of that 
 heaven on earth which is art? When I go into one 
 of these churches and see how poor or humble or 
 distressed people have come into them for the relief 
 of rest, and when, as I sit there, certainly with no 
 devout thoughts, I feel the gradual descent all 
 around me of an atmosphere of repose, which seems 
 to shut one off, as with invisible wings, from the 
 agitations of the world, the busy trivialities of one's 
 own mind, all the little, active hindrances to one's 
 own possession of one's self, I realise how well the 
 Catholic Church has understood the needs of that 
 humanity to which she has set herself to minister, 
 and how medicinal a place she must always have in
 
 ROME 49 
 
 the world's course, if no longer as a tonic, still as 
 the most soothing, the most necessary, of narcotics. 
 
 XI 
 
 There are certain hours, there is something in 
 the aspect of certain places, churches, or gardens, in 
 which it seems to me that Bernini has interpreted 
 more of the soul of Rome than we are apt or anxious 
 to suppose. All that is florid, not quite sincere, un- 
 fairly spectacular, in the aspect of the city is summed 
 up for me in the four Doctors of the Church, in 
 black and white marble, who lean around the chair 
 of Peter in St. Peter's, and in the ten loose-limbed 
 angels (done after Bernini's designs) who balance 
 themselves against an unfelt wind on the balustrades 
 of the Ponte Sant' Angelo. What is more subtle in 
 this same not quite sincere aiming after effect comes 
 out in the languid St. Sebastian, in the church of 
 that name on the way to the Catacombs, his white 
 marble flesh pierced by gilt arrows, lying elegantly 
 in his violent death; about which, indeed, the 
 modern custodians of the church have set a whole 
 array of painted card-board dolls, a very rag-fair. 
 But subtler still, more intimately expressive of that 
 part of the religious sentiment which must inevitably, 
 in so ecclesiastical a city, come to complete, on the 
 world's side, whatever is profane, sensuous, artificial, 
 in the idea of devotion to the immaculate Virgin, is 
 the Santa Teresa in the Church of S. Maria della
 
 50 ROME 
 
 Vittoria. The saint, who has the fine hands of a 
 patrician lady, lies in an attitude of sharp, luxurious, 
 almost active abandonment, the most sensual atti- 
 tude I have ever seen in stone ; her eyes are upturned, 
 under their heavy lids, to where a stream of golden 
 rays falls upon her, a new Danae, while a young and 
 smiling angel stands above her, about to pierce her 
 heart with the arrow of divine love. 
 
 But if there are certain moods in which Bernini 
 and his Rome seem to one the true Rome, there are 
 others in which a deeper simplicity seems to indicate 
 what is, after all, deeper in the heart of the city, as 
 in some charming piece of unconscious poetry (super- 
 stition, if you like to call it so) ,such as the benediction 
 of horses on the day of San Antonio Thaumaturgo. 
 I love all superstitions, for I have never yet found 
 one which did not come out of something which was 
 once pure poetry. They are the people's heritage 
 of poetry, and to believe them is to have, at all 
 events, something of the mood, the mental attitude 
 to which alone poetry can appeal. I spent some 
 time on the steps of the Church of San Eusebio on 
 that day of the benediction of horses, and I re- 
 member one very rough and wild-looking country- 
 man and his son, who drove up in a little homely cart, 
 a foal trotting by the side of the mare. The man got 
 down and waited, looking up anxiously, his cap in 
 his hand, until the priest came out with his card of 
 printed Latin and his gilt sprinkler, and blessed the 
 horses in the name of the Father and the Son and
 
 ROME 51 
 
 the Holy Ghost; then the countryman put on his 
 cap with satisfaction, got into his cart, and drove off, 
 not knowing that he had been unconsciously living 
 a piece of poetry. 
 
 On another day, about Christmas, I saw the 
 Presepe in that church of the Aracceli (its altar 
 indeed near heaven) which has throned itself higher 
 even than the Capitol, upon which it looks down 
 from above its ladder-like steps, on which, if you see 
 them from below, people seem to be gliding down a 
 celestial staircase without moving their feet as they 
 pass from stair to stair. The lighted manger, as I 
 entered the dim church, was shown suddenly as the 
 sliding-doors were drawn back; and a priest, going 
 up into the midst of the painted dolls, took the 
 Bambino, a chubby red infant made of coarsely 
 daubed wood, his robes all golden and bejewelled, 
 out of his mother's arms, and carried him through 
 the church to the vestry, where he was held in front 
 of the altar to have his foot kissed. Women and 
 children crowded about him, smiling and pleased, 
 seeing what was droll, and at the same time the 
 poetry of the symbol. There I saw another side of 
 the religious element in Rome, the Christ of simple 
 women, of little children, as that sprinkling of the 
 horses had been the religion, centred in his beasts, 
 of the peasant, and the Bernini saint, in her ecstasy 
 of abandonment to the divine love, the patroness of 
 Roman boudoirs.
 
 52 ROME 
 
 XII 
 
 In a toy-shop in the Via Nazionale there is on 
 one side a life-sized waxen clown dressed in red, who 
 winks his eyes, and taps with his hand on the win- 
 dow; on the other side is a little waxen clown, 
 seated, dressed in green, who holds on his lap a pig 
 with a napkin round his neck. He holds a piece 
 of meat in his hand, and the pig looks at it and puts 
 out his tongue. Then the clown shrugs his shoulders, 
 taps on the ground with one foot, and again holds 
 out the piece of meat to the pig, who licks it with 
 his tongue, when the clown again draws back the 
 piece of meat, shrugs his shoulders, and taps his foot 
 again. There never was anything more ingenious of 
 its kind, and every one who passes the window stops 
 in front of the two clowns and the pig. It seems to 
 me that in this puerile mechanical ingenuity I see 
 modern Rome as the Romans would like to make it, 
 as they have made it whenever they have had the 
 chance. That Rome should be a living city rather 
 than a museum of antiquities is one of its special 
 charms; and thus it is that Rome, in which all the 
 ages are at home and jostle one another, is, more 
 than any other city, a world in miniature. But 
 Rome adapts itself less than most cities to all the 
 unsightly economies and hurried facilities of modern 
 progress. The Italian of to-day, the Italian in whose 
 hands is the civic power, has resolved that his capital, 
 which he knows to be the most historically interest-
 
 ROME 53 
 
 ing capital in the world, shall compete with all the 
 young, pushing commercial capitals on their own 
 lines, which fortunately it can never do. He has 
 set electric trams running past Trajan's Forum, and 
 through narrow and crowded streets where they are 
 an absolute danger. A little while ago he planned 
 to surround the Forum with a gilt railing, but he 
 had not the money to do it. He has put a hideous 
 iron bridge across the Tiber close to the Ponte Sant' 
 Angelo. He has built a gas-manufactory in the very 
 midst of ancient Rome, and poisoned the air all 
 round. He has cut down the secular cypresses of 
 the Villa Ludovisi, and, indeed, all the trees he could 
 lay his axe upon. But he has propped up every 
 falling stone, and every stone is falling, of the house 
 of the Anguillaras in the Trastevere, because Count 
 Anguillara was the enemy of a Pope. 
 
 Modern Roman feeling, which, since the events of 
 1870, has been somewhat assertively patriotic, has 
 certainly little sympathy for the Church. Has it, or 
 has it not, left the hearts of the people, remaining 
 but as a tradition, a bowing of the head before the 
 passing of God, a lifting of the hat before the passing 
 of death? Are the priests, after all, making the 
 laws of a city which is in the hands of the enemy? 
 At all events, the Church is still able very impres- 
 sively to disregard what may be only a temporary 
 alienation. Walking one day from the Via Sistina 
 towards the Villa Medici, along that gracious height 
 which overlooks all Rome, and thinking of the very
 
 54 ROME 
 
 temporal grandeur of what lay there before me, I 
 saw a young priest walking rapidly to and fro on the 
 flat roof of a house, his eyes fixed on his breviary, 
 never raising them to consider the splendour of the 
 city. He seemed to me to typify the serene, un- 
 thinking, and, because immaterial, invincible power 
 of the Church, throned there over what she does 
 not always even trouble to understand, so certain is 
 she that a power founded on faith is the master 
 of material things, and must always remain, even 
 in secret, even unacknowledged, even against men's 
 will, their master. 
 
 XIII 
 
 Nothing in Rome is so great, nothing so admirable, 
 as the continuity and persistence of its life; which 
 renews itself incessantly, through change, destruc- 
 tion, and the "improvements" of all the ages. To- 
 day Rome is alive, and it contains, without confusion, 
 the still living ruins of every age known to history. 
 No other city harmonises so easily things elsewhere 
 incongruous, and I find to-day nothing necessarily 
 incongruous in any part of its existence. It is still 
 the capital of Italy, the King and the Pope live in it 
 side by side, there are soldiers and priests, colleges 
 and shops, and the strangers who come to it on pil- 
 grimage find something very different from the mu- 
 seum of archaeology and of the fine arts which they 
 may have looked to find.
 
 ROME 55 
 
 Yet, in this persistence of the national life, it is 
 curious how much more evident are the vices than the 
 virtues of their ancestors in, at all events, the public 
 performances of the modern Romans. The ancient 
 Romans were among the great builders of the world, 
 and much of what they built still remains hardly the 
 worse for wear after nearly two thousand years. The 
 modern Romans still build, and would still build, if 
 they could, in the grand manner, and with the old 
 stability. The bridge which crosses the Tiber to the 
 island, the Pons Fabricius or Ponte Quattro Capi, 
 the most solid and the most elegant bridge in Rome, 
 has its builder's name and the date of its building, 
 B. C. 62, still legibly engraved on both sides of each 
 arch. The Ponte Margherita, which leads from the 
 Piazza del Popolo to the other side of the river, has 
 already, in its fifteen years of existence, had to be 
 repaired. Less than thirty years ago an embank- 
 ment was made along both sides of the Tiber ; it has 
 turned a living river into a canal suffocated between 
 prison walls, and the first serious flood has broken 
 a gap in it. A vast building, which is to be the Law 
 Courts, is rising, "a ghost in marble," to use a phrase 
 of Coleridge, an ominous, hideous, unescapable ghost, 
 which will blast a whole region of Rome. A monu- 
 ment to Vittorio Emanuele is being built with a 
 steady waste of years and money, as yet hardly to 
 be calculated; and this monument will buffet and 
 overhang the sight in the very midst of the city, as 
 the man and horse of the Garibaldi statue stamp
 
 56 ROME 
 
 their pattern on the sky, like a placard hung high 
 enough at last. 
 
 And the Romans follow their ancestors, with a like 
 difference, in another and even worse fashion. The 
 whole history of Rome has been a series of transposi- 
 tions, from the brick which Augustus left marble, 
 and the Haussmannisation of Nero, to the cutting 
 of the Corso Vittorio Emanuele. In all these changes, 
 for better or for worse, the old has been destroyed 
 to make way for the new. During the Middle Ages, 
 and right into the Renaissance, Pagan buildings 
 were merely quarries for Christian churches and the 
 palaces of nobles. Now and then the plunder was 
 used to some purpose, and the travertine of the Colos- 
 seum helped to build the Cancellaria and the Farnese 
 Palace. But now, when respect for ancient monu- 
 ments is accepted in principle, and when the principle 
 is put into practice by the tidying of the Forum and 
 by the barrier of the lira which keeps the casual 
 vagabond out of its enclosure, whatever is destroyed 
 is destroyed deliberately, inexcusably. No excuse, 
 but that of money-making or of the most trivial 
 material convenience, has ever been offered for the 
 destruction of the Villa Ludovisi, for the encroach- 
 ment on the Campagna by the building of factories 
 and of tenements, for the gas-works of the Circus 
 Maximus, for the contemplated destruction of part 
 of the Castel S. Angelo in order to widen a road 
 which is already as wide as most of the streets of 
 Rome. This is not the first time that the conven-
 
 ROME 57 
 
 ience of the people has been set before the preserva- 
 tion of so eminently national a monument. Part 
 of the fortifications were removed some twenty 
 years ago; unnecessarily even then. In all these 
 petty larcenies upon the property of the world, 
 nothing has been gained, everything lost; for of 
 what consequence is it to any one that two cardinals 
 may drive abreast from the Ponte Margherita to the 
 Vatican, or that the latest bevy of Cook's tourists 
 may sit down to dinner on the exact spot where the 
 gardens of Sallust had delighted the Romans for 
 nearly the whole of the Christian Era? 
 
 The modern Roman has two passions, which we 
 can express in English by a single word : edification. 
 He has the mania of building vast edifices, and he has 
 the mania of turning his building to some edifying 
 purpose. In the monument to Vittorio Emanuele 
 and in the Garibaldi statue both are combined; 
 in the Law Courts, in the Gallery of Modern Art, in 
 the Banca d' Italia, we find the passion for what is 
 big; in the "busts of distinguished Italians" which 
 "embellish," as Baedeker says " the various walks " 
 of the Pincio, we find the passion for what is edifying. 
 
 Image-worship has always had its seat in Rome, 
 and the statues to Vittorio Emanuele and to Gari- 
 baldi are the legitimate lineage of the statues which 
 were first set up to the gods of Paganism and then to 
 the saints of Christianity. The Roman must have 
 something visible to worship, and it is the sculptor's 
 art, with its noble pomp, its publicity, that has always
 
 58 ROME 
 
 most pleased him. First he worshipped images of 
 force, then images of mercy, and now he again 
 worships images of force. He has drawn his deities 
 nearer to him, he has chosen them out of his own 
 streets, he has exalted them that he may exalt him- 
 self in them. The instinct is the same, only the form 
 changes. 
 
 The Romans have still the choice of unparalleled 
 sites, and they have lost none of their old skill in 
 choice. From the Janiculum one sees all Rome; 
 one sees the Janiculum from almost every quarter 
 of Rome. Tasso's oak is there, and the garden of the 
 eighteenth century Academy of the Arcadians, and 
 the Villa Lante ; and there, on the highest point of the 
 hill, once wooded with old and lovely oaks, the eques- 
 trian statue of Garibaldi has been set up. The base 
 stands a little woodenly, all four legs set square, the 
 rider at least sits steady; but around the base are 
 fretful groups in bronze : on two sides peaceful sym- 
 bolism, and on two sides fighting men with plumes 
 and guns and sabres and revolvers and bugles and 
 knapsacks. By the roadside on the way down to 
 Acqua Paola there are busts in top-hats and military 
 caps ; and these, which no one can mistake for orna- 
 ment, are put there, I suppose, for purposes of edifi- 
 cation, like the busts of distinguished Italians which 
 embellish the various walks of the Pincio. 
 
 The great men of the Pincio range from Julius 
 Caesar to Daniele Manin ; they are put there, I sup- 
 pose, in order that the Roman youth of to-day, as
 
 ROME 59 
 
 he takes the air on the most delightful promenade in 
 Europe, may think of the great men to whom his 
 country has given birth, and that he may be stirred to 
 emulation. Great men or mediocrities, they are re- 
 presented in these shameless busts with an unvary- 
 ing and irritating inanity. They cannot be ignored : 
 the bald head and frizzled locks pose and flutter for 
 attention; the names cry from the pedestals; one 
 is continually distracted from what is peaceful and 
 renewing in this high garden which looks over Rome. 
 Is it possible, I ask myself, that the Roman youth 
 of to-day can be so greedy of edification, so destitute 
 of artistic sensibility, as to derive the proper improv- 
 ing thrill from what should do no more than shock 
 his artistic sense? 
 
 The artistic sense: it is there that the modern 
 Roman is lacking. What the ancient Roman did he 
 desires to do ; only the essential thing is not there, the 
 sense of proportion, of beauty, of taste, the artistic 
 sense. 
 
 Between the Capitol and the Piazza Venezia, 
 partly hidden by walls and hoardings, there can be 
 seen vast irregular substructures of stone-work al- 
 ready in parts lined with white marble, in the form 
 of what seems to be a large modern house, with doors 
 and windows ; everywhere big doors leading nowhere, 
 and narrow windows through which no one will ever 
 look. The hinder part of the structure is as yet left 
 plain, but the front and sides are clamped and em- 
 bossed with irrelevant and mediocre decoration. At
 
 60 ROME 
 
 each corner there is stuck a composite blob of orna- 
 ment in which a garland of palm-leaves seems to 
 support a cluster of Roman breastplates, shields, 
 and helmets. Other blobs, with discs containing 
 winged heads, are slung to the flat part of the w r all 
 by marble ribbons; here and there are brocades of 
 scroll-work and foliage, and the cornices of the win- 
 dows are teased into flowery patterns. Fluted 
 columns with ornamentations of palm-leaves spring- 
 ing from the bases support I know not what, and a 
 few trivial nude figures are carved on flat pillars 
 dividing the windows. 
 
 This house, as it seems, this immense and mean 
 house, is no more than the base for the gigantic mon- 
 ument to Vittorio Emanuele, which has got no fur- 
 ther after twenty years' labour upon it. There is to 
 be an equestrian statue on the summit, when all 
 is done, and some two millions of pounds have been 
 spent; but no one knows much about the statue, for 
 the sculptor who was to have done it is dead, and the 
 statue is still to make. In preparing the ground for 
 the monument some mischief has already been done, 
 but the most serious part of the mischief is only as 
 yet decided on. One corner of the Piazza. Venezia 
 is made by the angle of the Palazzo Venezia and of 
 what is known as the Palazzetto, a smaller and lower 
 but not less beautiful wing of this palace, and this 
 palace is the only example of the finer early Renais- 
 sance which exists in Rome. The Palazzetto is to 
 be pulled down, and it is to be pulled down not even
 
 ROME 61 
 
 because the space of ground occupied is wanted 
 for part of the structure of this monument, but in 
 order that the monument may be properly seen 
 from the other end of the Corso. Protests have 
 been raised in Rome, even by the Romans, against 
 this wanton and ridiculous act of vandalism; but it 
 appears that the protests are to be disregarded, 
 and that a beautiful building of the fifteenth century 
 is to be pulled down to make a peep-hole for one of 
 the earliest abortions of the twentieth century. 
 
 For this monument which comes shouldering 
 into Rome like a hulking parvenu, there can be no 
 excuse of need, or even of utility, nor indeed any 
 excuse for intruding upon the society of his betters. 
 Here is a poor country, with still untold treasures 
 buried where every spade may reach them, and 
 there is not money enough to keep the spades digging. 
 And here are millions being poured out and heaped 
 up for the building of a monument which is neither 
 a palace nor a church nor a museum nor a thea- 
 tre, nor anything capable of human or divine uses; 
 not even, as the Pyramids were, a tomb. The Law 
 Courts, which are being built on the other side of the 
 river, can scarcely bear the reproach of being useless. 
 What building in a city can be more important than 
 a building in which the law is administered ? Thirty 
 millions of francs is a large price to pay for utility 
 and impressiveness, but let us see if the second result, 
 as well as the first, is answered. 
 
 Imagine a long and low building with a flat roof,
 
 62 ROME 
 
 and on the flat roof a village of small houses. The 
 doorway and the centre of the front are still covered 
 with scaffolding, and not wholly to be made out, 
 though it seems that the main part of the ornamen- 
 tation is to be reserved for them. But, looking over 
 the rest of the building, one observes ornamentation 
 everywhere and nowhere good ornamentation. There 
 are pillars bandaged and bolstered, supporting 
 cornices of many styles, culminating in a drove of 
 tightly-packed bulls' heads, linked by garlands; 
 everywhere garlands, fat garlands tied by ribbons, 
 and above them, hanging by ribbons from imitation 
 nails, medallions with foolish historic heads. Every- 
 where there are angles, knobs, twiddles of stone ; not 
 an arch is allowed to curve freely, not a pillar to 
 spring straight from its base, not a window ledge to 
 remain plain. And, in front of this tortured and 
 trivial and formidable edifice, as if in silent and unre- 
 garded criticism of what is pretentious and ineffectual 
 in it, a slender framework of black and ribbed scaf- 
 folding makes a stately and dignified pattern. 
 
 I wish to guard myself from even a momentary 
 injustice, and it would be unjust to say that the 
 Romans have not done skilfully what they have 
 chosen, and perhaps, in a sense, been obliged to do, 
 in the engineering of the Corso Vittorio Emanuele 
 and of the tunnel of the Via Milano, and that they 
 have not built at least one considerable building with 
 an unusual sense of symmetry and even of restraint. 
 Every piece of ornamentation on the Banca d' Italia
 
 ROME 63 
 
 is bad, but, in proportion to its size, how remarkably 
 little ornamentation there is! The Art Gallery 
 in the same street, with its vaults and pillars, its 
 friezes, its gentlemen posed against the sky in all 
 the discomfort of stone, is there, not far off, rhetori- 
 cal and complacent; and is but one more instance 
 of that lack in Rome of the artistic sense, of the mere 
 element of taste, which we see more fundamentally 
 in the setting of the boxers of Canova among the 
 antique sculpture of the Vatican, and in the careful 
 preservation in the Palace of the Conservatori of the 
 sixteenth-century infants, who bring so sharp a dis- 
 cord into the severe and admirable harmony of the 
 Capitoline wolf of the fifth century before Christ. 
 
 It is, I have already said, the great charm of Rome 
 that it should be still alive and still at the head of a 
 nation. I am prepared to admit the necessity of 
 main thoroughfares, the perhaps pardonable conven- 
 ience of electric trams, and it is clear that as the 
 population increases some sort of housing must be 
 devised for this increase ; cheap flats must, no doubt, 
 be built for poor people ; but why need these hideous 
 buildings be put up precisely where there is most to 
 spoil in the natural aspect of things? Only a little 
 while ago the country around the Piazza of S. Gio- 
 vanni in Laterano and the country around the Porta 
 S. Lorenzo were masterpieces of nature and of that 
 art which comes with age and ruin. To-day both 
 are disfigured by mean and cheap buildings, already 
 squalid, and the incomparable Campagna is driven
 
 64 ROME 
 
 yet further from the gates. The beauty of Rome, let 
 it never be forgotten, dwindles by every step that 
 the Campagna withdraws from it; and, for Rome, 
 beauty is force, existence itself. So far, during so 
 many centuries Rome has always, by a natural 
 magic in its hills, its air, its sky, triumphed over 
 every outrage of its enemies or of its citizens. Will 
 it always continue to do so? is the question which one 
 asks oneself, not too hopefully. It has had to fight 
 against many barbarians, but never against so for- 
 midable a barbarism as the great modern barbarism, 
 part vulgarity, part pretentiousness, part incompe- 
 tence, which calls itself progress. 
 
 XIV 
 
 What is subtlest in Rome must always reveal 
 itself to strangers, and not to the Romans; for the 
 modern Roman is given over to the desire and 
 admiration of material things, and what is subtlest 
 in Rome appeals to the soul, perhaps I should say, 
 rather, to the mind. Since I lived in Rome I 
 have come to find both London and Paris, in them- 
 selves, a little provincial: for I find them occupied 
 with less eternal things, or with less of the immediate 
 message of eternal things speaking in them, than 
 this liberating Rome. Rome, properly apprehended 
 (and to apprehend it properly it needs only that you 
 are not without a certain intelligence, and that you 
 remain passive to your impressions), seems to shut
 
 ROME 65 
 
 one in, as with its own walls, upon the greatest 
 moments that have been in the world; upon the 
 greatest moments of art, of history, of religion, of 
 humanity. It is not merely that they are there; 
 you cannot escape them. Every road does not lead 
 to Rome, but every road in Rome leads to eternity. 
 It is quietly prodigal of itself, like the air about one 
 which is part of one's breath. In this large Rome 
 one has room for one's self; within these walls one 
 is shut in from others, and from what in oneself is 
 the reflection of their image; one's energies are not 
 torn into little ineffectual pieces, as they are in the 
 rapid drawing this way and that of the daily life of 
 all other great cities. One has time to discover 
 that, while there are many interesting and even 
 intoxicating things in the world, there are very few 
 things of primary importance. It is like the opening 
 of a great door. This opening of a door, in front 
 of which one has passed constantly without even 
 seeing that it was shut, is the moment for which 
 every other moment in life was but an unconscious 
 waiting; every moment which follows will re- 
 member it. For the most part this door is but 
 opened and then shut suddenly, before our eyes 
 have become well accustomed to the unfamiliar 
 light in which we discern, it may be, familiar objects. 
 It is not often that the door is held steadily open as 
 long as we choose to look through it. But that is 
 what happens in Rome. 
 
 In London I am too close to a multitude of in- 
 s
 
 66 ROME 
 
 teresting trifles, of attractive people, of opportunities 
 for the satisfaction of every desire. To will and to 
 receive are, in London, simultaneous. Daily life is 
 too importunate in thrusting upon me whatever for 
 an idle or perverse or estimable moment I have 
 hankered after. There are too many people, too 
 many books, too many museums, too many theatres ; 
 the spectacle of this feverish, unslackening life is 
 too absorbing. I cannot escape the newspapers; 
 for even if I do not read them, there is always some 
 one to tell me what they have been saying of my 
 own or my friend's last book. I cannot help 
 sometimes asking myself what will be the immediate, 
 urban effect of something which I have written; 
 and it is a little humiliating to find oneself in so 
 trivial a mental attitude, which it would be difficult 
 to preserve in front of the Pantheon or of the Colos- 
 seum. And, above all, I have not time to live. 
 Life scatters into waves all over the rocks, falling 
 back broken and dispersed into the seething trouble 
 of the ocean. Yesterday is to-day, and to-day to- 
 morrow, before I have been alone with myself for an 
 hour. That canopy of smoke which London has 
 set up between itself and the sky imprisons me, day 
 by day, with the debris of each day. I forget that 
 anything else exists. 
 
 In Paris, frankly, I am too much at home, too 
 happy; I require too little; life is too easy, and 
 answers too readily to the demands of the senses. 
 And Paris, which frees me from one conventionality,
 
 ROME 67 
 
 imposes upon me another. Because the flesh is an 
 honourable part of the human constitution, and 
 liberty an honourable prerogative of the citizen, it 
 does not follow that a permissible exemption should 
 become a precept, a very prejudice. And that is 
 just the provinciality of that bright, youthful, in- 
 spiriting, and seductive Paris which I love so much 
 and in which I find it, after all, more nearly possible 
 to be myself than in London ; for Paris is not merely 
 the city of the senses, but the city of ideas, the ideas 
 of pure reason. 
 
 But Rome has freed me from both these tyran- 
 nies, the tyranny of the senses and of the ideas 
 of pure reason. It neither absorbs me too much in 
 material things nor forces me into too rapid mental 
 conclusions. So much of the world's history lies 
 about here, in these stones, like a part of nature, 
 and with so far more significant a meaning than in 
 the mere picturesque heaping of natural forces. 
 Empires have lived and died here; the great spir- 
 itual empire of the Western world still has its 
 seat upon the seven hills; here are all the kingdoms 
 of art; and is it possible to find anywhere a more 
 intimate message than in these voices, in this 
 eloquent Roman silence? 
 
 WINTER, 1896, 1904.
 
 VENICE
 
 VENICE 
 
 I 
 
 COMING in the train from Milan, we seemed, for 
 the last ten minutes, to be rushing straight into 
 the sea. On each side was water, nothing but 
 water, stretching out vaguely under the pale evening 
 light; and at first there was not a sign of land 
 ahead. Then a wavering line, with dark ships, 
 and thin shafts of rigging, came out against the 
 horizon, like the first glimpse of an island; the 
 line broadened, lights began to leap, one after 
 another, out of the darkness, and a great ware- 
 house, glowing like a furnace, grew up solidly out 
 of the water. We were in Venice. 
 
 I had never been in Venice before, and in the 
 excitement of the moment I resolved that I would 
 find my way to St. Mark's on foot, through the 
 labyrinth of streets and bridges, in which I did not 
 even know whether to turn to the right or to the 
 left, for I had lost my guide-book in changing 
 trains at Bale. It seemed to me amusing to trust 
 myself to the attraction of the centre, and I set 
 out confidently, following as far as I could the main 
 
 71
 
 72 VENICE 
 
 stream of people. I walked fast, plunging deeper 
 and deeper into unknown ways, which were like 
 nothing I had ever seen, turning now to right, now 
 to left, crossing the bridges, with their long, low 
 comfortable steps, seeing the black flash of a gon- 
 dola round a sudden corner, under me, and down 
 the vanishing waterway between tall houses with 
 carved balconies and stone steps rising out of the 
 water; turning down narrow alleys, where two 
 people could only just walk abreast, alleys which 
 broadened all at once into great empty squares, 
 a rococo church in one corner, a fifteenth-century 
 palace in another; then a wider alley, in which 
 bright crowds were buying and selling out of bril- 
 liantly coloured shops, women in vivid shawls, 
 walking superbly, men in beautiful rags lounging 
 against the wall and lying in doorways ; then another 
 grey square, a glimpse, in the opening between 
 two houses, of gondolas lying in the water, between 
 the tall stakes of a ferry ; and then again the, narrow 
 and dim alleys. I went on and on, turning back, 
 trying another alley, and still the endless alleys 
 seemed to reach out before me, and the bright 
 crowds grew thinner and thinner: endless! and 
 was I really going farther and farther away? I 
 began to wonder, and I turned back, half way up 
 a narrow street, and asked the way to the Piazza. 
 Straight on, they told me, up that very street, a few 
 steps ; and all at once, going a few steps beyond 
 the point at which I had turned back, I found
 
 VENICE 73 
 
 myself suddenly free of all that coil of entang- 
 ling alleys, which had seemed to be tightening 
 about me like a snake; I came out into a great 
 space, seeing for the first time a clear breadth of 
 sky, and there, against the sky, was St Mark's. 
 
 I was glad to see Venice for the first time by 
 night, and to come into it in just this casual fashion. 
 A place has almost the shyness of a person, with 
 strangers; and its secret is not to be surprised by 
 a too direct interrogation. A guide-book is a 
 necessary evil; but it is not when I have had a 
 guide-book in my hand that I have received my 
 lasting impressions. I have spent weeks in the 
 churches of Venice, climbing upon ladders and 
 propping myself against altars, and lying on my 
 back on benches, to look at pictures; and I have 
 learnt many things about Tintoretto, and Bellini, 
 and Carpaccio, and Tiepolo, which I could have 
 learnt in no other way. But what I have learnt 
 about Venice, Venice as a person, has come to me 
 more or less unconsciously, from living on the 
 Zattere, where I could see the masts of ships and 
 the black hulls of barges, whenever I looked out 
 of my windows on the canal of the Giudecca; from 
 sitting night after night outside a cafe" in the Piazza, 
 listening to the military band, watching people 
 pass, thinking of nothing, only singularly content 
 to be there; from strolling night after night down 
 to the promontory of the Dogana, and looking 
 into the darkness of the water, watching a man
 
 74 VENICE 
 
 catching fish in a net like a shrimping net, while the 
 sound of the mandolins and of the voices of singers 
 who sat in lantern-lighted gondolas outside the 
 windows of the hotels on the Grand Canal came to 
 me in a double chorus, crossing one another in a 
 strange, not inharmonious confusion of tunes; and 
 especially from the Lido, that long, narrow bank 
 between the lagoon and the Adriatic, to whose sea- 
 ward side I went so often, merely to be there, on the 
 sand beyond the bathing-huts, watching the quiet- 
 ude of the sea. On the horizon there would be a 
 long, tall line of fishing-boats, their red sails flash- 
 ing against the pearl grey of the sky like the painted 
 wings of great moths, spread for flight ; as you gazed 
 at them, they seemed to stand there motionless ; then, 
 as you looked away for a moment and looked back 
 again, one of them would have vanished suddenly, 
 as if it had gone down into the sea. And the water, 
 which rippled so gently against the sand at my feet, 
 had something of the gentleness of colour of that 
 water which wanders about the shores of Ireland. 
 It shone, and seemed to grow whiter and whiter, 
 as it stretched out towards the horizon, where the 
 fishing-boats stood up in their long, tall line against 
 the sky; it had the delicacy, the quietude of the 
 lagoon, with, in those bright sails, the beckoning of 
 a possible escape from the monotony of too ex- 
 quisite things.
 
 VENICE 75 
 
 II 
 
 Venice has been sentimentalised by the German 
 and by the young lady of all nations. Lovers have 
 found its moonlight and its water more expressive 
 than the moonlight and the water of any other shore. 
 Byron, Musset, Wagner, Browning, have lived and 
 died there. It has been painted by every painter. 
 It has become a phrase, almost as meaningless as 
 Arcadia. And indeed it is difficult to think of 
 Venice as being quite a real place, its streets of 
 water as being exactly real streets, its gondolas as 
 being no more than the equivalent of hansoms, its 
 union of those elsewhere opposed sentiments of the 
 sea, the canal, the island, walled and towered land, 
 as being quite in the natural order of things. I had 
 had my dreams of Venice, but nothing I had dreamed 
 was quite as impossible as what I found. That first 
 night, as I looked at the miraculous, many-coloured 
 fagade of St. Mark's, the pale, faintly-tinged marble 
 of the Doge's Palace, I seemed, after all, not to have 
 left London, but to be still at the Alhambra, watch- 
 ing a marvellous ballet, and, as it pleases me to 
 be, in the very midst of it, among the glittering 
 "properties," knocking at every step against some 
 fragment of delicately unreal scenery, losing none of 
 the illusion by being so close to its framework. The 
 Doge's Palace looked exactly like beautifully painted 
 canvas, as if it were stretched on frames, and ready 
 to be shunted into the wings for a fresh "set" to
 
 76 VENICE 
 
 come forward. Yes, it is difficult to believe in Venice 
 most of all when one is in Venice. 
 
 I do not understand why any one paints Venice, 
 and yet every one who paints, paints Venice. But to 
 do so is to forget that it is itself a picture, a finished, 
 conscious work of art. You cannot improve the 
 picture as it is, you can add nothing, you need 
 arrange nothing. Everything has been done, awaits 
 you, enchants you, paralyses you; the artistic effect 
 of things as they are is already complete: it leaves, 
 or should leave you, if you have artistic intentions 
 upon it, helpless. Mere existence, at Venice, be- 
 comes at once romantic and spectacular: it is like 
 living in a room without a blind, in the full sunlight. 
 A realist, in Venice, would become a romantic, by 
 mere faithfulness to what he saw before him. People 
 are always saying in Venice, "What a picture that 
 would make!" but the things of which people say 
 that are just the things in which nature, time, art, 
 and chance have already made pictures, have already 
 done all that the artist should be left to do for him- 
 self: they remain for the photographer. The only 
 chance, it seems to me, for the artist in Venice is to 
 realise frankly that, in this water which seems to 
 exist in order that it may set off the delicacy 
 and slimness and fine decoration of architecture 
 which on land would appear to have lost the 
 key of its harmony, in this architecture which 
 seems to have grown up out of the water in order 
 that it may be a flower on the surface of the
 
 VENICE 77 
 
 water, he is painting the scenery of a masque or 
 ballet. 
 
 And yet, after all, but perhaps it will only deepen 
 your impression of that unreality which is Venice, 
 the masque or ballet, you will soon find, is over. 
 The scenery is still there, the lights have been left 
 on; only the actors, the dancers, are gone. That is 
 one element of the melancholy which is an element 
 in the charm of Venice; but a certain sadness is 
 inherent in the very sound and colour of still water, 
 and a little of the melancholy which w r e now feel 
 must always have been a background of shadow, 
 even at the most splendid moment of the masque. 
 Now, when art and commerce, the Doges and the 
 galleys, have alike drifted into the past; when the 
 great squares are too large for the largest crowds 
 that are ever to be found in them, and the great 
 palaces, too large for their owners, are passing into 
 the hands of Jews and Americans ; when the tracery 
 of Renaissance windows looks out between broken 
 glass and roughly fixed boards, and the balustrades 
 of balconies moulder and wear away under the 
 dripping of clothes hung over them to dry; when 
 this city of carnivals and masked balls, Goldoni's, 
 Longhi's, is asleep by midnight, it may well seem 
 as if silence and desolation have descended on it like 
 a cloud. Why is it then that the melancholy of 
 Venice is the most exquisite melancholy in the 
 world? It is because that melancholy is no nearer 
 to one's heart than the melancholy in the face of a
 
 7 8 VENICE 
 
 portrait. It is the tender and gracious sadness of 
 that beautiful woman who leans her face upon her 
 hands in a famous picture in the Accademia. The 
 feast is over, the wine still flushes the glass on the 
 table, the little negro strikes his lute, she listens to 
 the song, her husband sits beside her, proudly: 
 something not in the world, a vague thought, a 
 memory, a forgetfulness, has possessed her for the 
 moment, setting those pensive lines about her lips, 
 which have just smiled, and which will smile again 
 when she has lifted her eyelids. 
 
 Ill 
 
 All Venice is a piece of superb, barbaric patch- 
 work in which the East and the West have an 
 equal share. The lion of St. Mark's, his head and 
 shoulders in one piece, his hind-quarters in another, 
 is a symbol of the construction of Venice, just as 
 the bronze horses, which have seen the downfall of 
 Nero, the splendours of Constantinople, and, at 
 Paris, the First Empire, are a symbol of its history. 
 Venice is as near to the East as it is to Italy; you 
 are reminded of the East at every step; yet, after 
 all, its interest is precisely that it is not Eastern, 
 that it is really of the West, and that it has given a 
 new touch of the fantastic to the fantasy which we 
 call Oriental, an arrangement of lines and colours 
 which, in its own country, has a certain air of being 
 at home, but which, out of its country, frankly 
 admits itself barbaric, a bastard.
 
 VENICE 79 
 
 In the thirteenth century there was a law which 
 obliged every Venetian merchant, coming back from 
 a voyage, to bring with him something for the 
 adornment of the basilica. Thus it is that St. Mark's 
 has come to be one vast mosaic, in which every 
 piece of marble is itself a precious thing, perhaps 
 brought from the other end of the world, and a kind 
 of votive offering. The church is like an immense 
 jewel, a piece of goldsmith's work, in which the 
 exquisite and the fantastic are carried to so rare a 
 beauty, in their elaborate mingling, as to attain 
 almost to a perfection in spite of themselves. Unlike 
 other great churches, the beauty of St. Mark's is not 
 so much structural as in ornament, ornament which 
 seems, indeed, to become a part of its very substance. 
 It is not for its proportions, for the actual science 
 in stone of a Palladio or a Sansovino, that it comes 
 to be, in a sense, the most beautiful church in the 
 world, but because it has the changing colours of 
 an opal, and the soft outlines of a living thing. It 
 takes the reflection of every cloud, and, in certain 
 lights, flushes into a rose, whitens to a lily. You 
 enter, and your feet are upon a pavement which 
 stretches away in coloured waves like a sea; over 
 your head is a sky of pure gold, a jewelled sky, in 
 which the colours and the patterns are the history 
 of the whole world. The gold, when the light 
 strikes it, glitters in one part like rock-crystal, in 
 another like gilt chain armour. Rosy lights play 
 upon it, and the very vault dies away in soft fire.
 
 8o VENICE 
 
 Yet St. Mark's has nothing of the spiritual mysti- 
 cism of a Gothic cathedral, any more than it has 
 the purely ecclesiastical atmosphere of St. Peter's. 
 It is half temple, half mosque ; it has the severity of 
 an early Christian church, overlaid by the barbaric 
 splendours of the East; and its splendours, too, are 
 hieratic, in a strange and fantastic hierarchy which 
 seems to partake of all the religions, the beginnings 
 of Christianity seem visibly building themselves up 
 out of the ruins of Paganism; and the rites of the 
 Greek Church or of the Catholic would be equally 
 in place. It is a church which is also the world, a 
 little world into which everything enters; where 
 everything that has human beauty, or curiosity, or 
 value, is not too beautiful or valuable, and could in 
 no way be unsuited, for the divine use. And St. 
 Mark's has room, still, for all the world and all the 
 churches. Tourists walk about carrying red guide- 
 books, and listening to the chatter of guides; old 
 people, with handkerchiefs over their heads, twisted 
 like turbans, kneel with clasped hands and uncon- 
 scious eyes ; the High Mass goes on in the choir, 
 invisibly, behind the great barrier, through which 
 there comes the sound of voices chanting; and, in a 
 side chapel, an old priest says his Mass to a few 
 devout persons. And nothing seems out of place , the 
 devout persons, the priests, the tourists, the largest 
 onyx in the world, over the pulpit, the profane 
 sumptuousness of African marble, the "majestical 
 roof fretted with golden fire"; for here, as every-
 
 VENICE 81 
 
 where in Venice, all contradictions seem able to 
 exist side by side, in some fantastic, not quite ex- 
 plicable, unity of their own. 
 
 IV 
 
 High Mass at St Mark's, as I have seen it at 
 Easter and at the feast of St Mark, is somewhat less 
 magnificent a ceremony than in most churches; for 
 the elevation and seclusion of the choir permit the 
 sight of the holy mysteries only to the few who can 
 find room inside the screen, or in one of the side 
 chapels, or in the galleries. The galleries, indeed, 
 give much the best point of view. Looking down 
 from that height, you see the priests move through 
 their appointed courses, the vestments, the incense 
 mounting on the wings of the music, among the 
 voices; and the great crowd crawling over the 
 pavement, with a continual motion, from the church 
 to the Piazza, from the Piazza to the church, set- 
 tling down, now and again, into solid groups, like 
 the pigeons outside. And indeed the aspect of the 
 church is very similar to the aspect of the Piazza. 
 It has the same air of space and leisure; it can be 
 thronged, yet never appears to be full, and it has the 
 same air of belonging to the people. On a festa 
 everybody comes in, as naturally as everybody walks 
 up and down the Piazza', there is the same bright 
 crowd, face for face, shawl for shawl. It is not an 
 instinct of devotion; it is habit, and the attraction 
 
 6
 
 82 VENICE 
 
 of the centre. In Venice all roads lead to the Piazza, 
 and the Piazza is but the courtyard of St. Mark's. 
 The Piazza di San Marco always gives one an 
 impression of space; yet, put into Trafalgar Square, 
 how much room it would leave over! The buildings 
 on three sides of it, though of different dates, and 
 of very different interest as architecture (part of the 
 south side being the Library of Sansovino, the finest 
 public building in Italy), are all perfectly regular, 
 and, at a general view, uniform; yet there is no 
 sense of monotony, but rather of a distinguished 
 precision, which, in its rich severity, is somehow more 
 various than variety itself. And the Piazza, with 
 its arcade of shops and cafe's, though it is in one 
 sense the Rue de Rivoli of Venice, the resort of 
 every foreigner, is still, as it always has been, the 
 resort of the people, and of all the people. The 
 Englishman or the German, though he takes his ice 
 at Florian's, or his coffee at the Quadri, like a native, 
 is, after all, only an outside spectator of the really 
 Venetian way of taking one's leisure. The first 
 time I came into the Piazza, on an afternoon when 
 the band was playing, I saw what seemed to me 
 either a wedding or a funeral. A procession was 
 slowly making its way along, a procession which 
 seemed interminable ; and, on coming nearer, I found 
 that in effect it never ended, for the line returned 
 upon itself like the winding line of a farandole, and 
 while those nearer to the Procuratie Vecchie were 
 always coming from the direction of St. Mark's, those
 
 VENICE 83 
 
 farther out were always going towards it. The 
 order was rarely broken, and the incredible slowness 
 of the step was never quickened. It was the public 
 promenade, in which only the costumes have changed 
 century after century; not the faces, nor the step, 
 nor the drawling line returning upon itself, in which 
 all Venice, shawled, bare-headed, bourgeois, aristo- 
 cratic, and the carabinieri, imposing, ornamental 
 creatures who seem for once in their place, in such a 
 procession, take the air together. Another leisur- 
 able crowd darkens the terrasse of the cafes, spread- 
 ing far out into the Piazza from under the arcades; 
 and around the bandstand in the middle there is yet 
 another crowd, standing attentively, while the band 
 plays the eternal Verdi, the eternal Ponchielli ; and 
 about them, wings wide in the sunlight, the pigeons 
 come swooping down, each with his little pink feet 
 poised delicately close together, separating just as 
 they touch the ground. At night the same prom- 
 enade goes on: but the pigeons are sleeping, among 
 the carved angels and beside the bronze horses 
 of the basilica. Under the gaslight and the clear, 
 dark blue of a sky which seems stretched like the 
 silk of a velarium, the winding line is denser than 
 ever. Little groups are clustered in every corner, 
 on every step, on the pedestals of the flagstaves, on 
 the marble slabs of St. Mark's, between the porphyry 
 columns, on the marble bench in front of the Log- 
 getta. At ten the crowd begins to melt away; 
 by eleven, only Florian's and the Quadri have still
 
 84 VENICE 
 
 their gay, chattering disputants, little set by little 
 set, each in its own room, or on the chairs outside 
 it. But there are still lingerers about the flagstaves, 
 before the Loggetta, and in the doorways and arches 
 of St. Mark's; bare-headed women and children, half 
 asleep, their bright shawls drawn around them, loung- 
 ing so beautifully, in such coloured outline, and with 
 such a visible sense of repose. 
 
 V 
 
 The main thoroughfare of Venice, the street of 
 shops, which leads from the Piazza, everywhere, is 
 the Merceria, which you enter under the clock- 
 tower, on which the two bronze gentlemen strike 
 the hour with their hammers. After many windings 
 it broadens out, just before reaching the Rialto, 
 into the Campo San Salvatore, and from that on- 
 wards to the Campo San Bartolommeo. From Good 
 Friday to Easter Monday there is a sort of little 
 fair here, and stalls are set up under the church 
 of San Salvatore, and all around the little railing 
 within which stands Goldoni's statue. He stands 
 there, looking down on the people as if he saw in 
 them one of his comedies; firmly planted, wearing 
 his court dress with an air, and with an intensely 
 self-satisfied smile of amused interest on his face. 
 If he could only turn his head, he would look right 
 up the steep, broad stairs of the Rialto, which 
 lie there to the right, bright with moving crowds
 
 VENICE 85 
 
 of colour, winding up and down on each side of the 
 central line of stalls, between the shops, hung with 
 long coloured stripes. He stands there, looking 
 down on the people. All around are tall grey houses, 
 with shutters of green and pale blue ; one house , in a 
 corner, has shutters of an intense blue, which seems 
 to soak up and cast back all the sunlight. The stalls 
 are but a few boards, hastily set up on trestles ; they 
 are hung with bright rows of stockings, necklaces, 
 toys, heaped with sweets, and shirts, and shawls; 
 some of them are old book-stalls, piled with worthless 
 books in all languages, mostly in calf, together with 
 numerous little works of gallantry and devotion, all in 
 paper ; there is a Fonografico Excelsior, and there are 
 glittering copper things, pots and pans, lying all 
 over the ground ; and there is a pentagonal kiosque 
 of unpainted wood, with little flags flying and paper 
 placards stuck across it, at which two women in 
 striped blouses, aided by a man, are serving out 
 endless tiny cups of coffee, at a halfpenny a cup. 
 The cry of "Acqua!" is heard at every moment, 
 and the water-carriers pass, with their framework 
 of glasses and their covered copper pans of water. 
 The men, who stand or sit by the stalls, are all 
 smoking. Sometimes they take the cigar from 
 their mouths to shout their wares, but for the 
 most part they seem indifferent to purchasers; 
 especially one old and dirty Jew, with long hair 
 and a long beard, who puffs placidly at his pipe 
 as he watches the stall of cheap kerchiefs to which
 
 86 VENICE 
 
 no customer ever comes. I noticed particularly a 
 group of five old women, with turbaned heads and 
 a century of wrinkles, and another group of eleven 
 facchini and beggars, some of whom were very 
 old men, with tattered, yet still dignified cloaks, 
 huge brigandish hats, their bright red stockings 
 showing like an ornament through the gaps in their 
 boots. They were terribly dirty; but in Venice, 
 where everything has its own way of becoming 
 beautiful, dirt, at the right distance, gives a fine 
 tone to an old face, like those faces that we see in 
 the sketches of Michelangelo, wrinkled like a withered 
 apple, tanned to a sombre red, and set in the shadow 
 of long grey hair and beard. Dirt, on such a face, 
 a kind of weather-stain, has that dignity which 
 dirt in England gives to an old ruin. Here the 
 old ruin is the beggar-man, and he is not less pic- 
 turesque, not less dignified, than any castle in 
 England. 
 
 VI 
 
 A part of Venice that I like, not because it is 
 attractive in itself, but because it is so unlike the 
 show Venice and so like a fishing village, with its 
 smell of the sea and ships, is the Via Garibaldi, 
 which runs from Veneta Marina past the Public 
 Gardens. It is a broad thoroughfare, which I can 
 look up and down for some distance, a rare thing 
 in Venice; and I have often sat here, intently idle,
 
 VENICE 87 
 
 watching every one who passes me. All that is 
 humbler, more truly indigenous, in Venice, seems 
 to pass, at one time or another, along that highway 
 between the two main branches of the lagoon, the 
 shore which looks towards San Giorgio, the Riva, 
 and the shore which looks towards Murano, the 
 Fondamenta Nuove. Sailors are always passing, 
 and fishermen, with their heavy heelless shoes, and 
 fine ruddy-brown knitted stockings, ribbed in cir- 
 cular coils, which they wear like top boots; the 
 faces here are bronzed to a deeper tone of red 
 than in any other quarter except the Giudecca. 
 Sometimes a company of soldiers comes marching 
 past, in their dark blue great-coats and helmets, 
 their drab trousers and gaiters; they walk briskly, 
 with the swinging gait of the Italian soldier. 
 
 The houses are old, and mostly white, with green 
 and brown shutters which have faded from the 
 crudeness of their original colours, to become a soft 
 lilac, a delicate chocolate. There are a few booths 
 in the middle of the road, under the little starved 
 trees, laid out for the most part with clothes, skirts 
 and handkerchiefs, and fruit; the two necessities of 
 existence here, bright-coloured things to wear, and 
 fruit to eat. A facchino is lying flat on his face, 
 asleep, on one of the polished marble benches, his 
 vivid blue trousers glittering in the heat of the sun ; 
 another facchino leans against a tree, smoking ; men, 
 women, and children are lying along the walk, 
 basking in the sunlight; some of the children are
 
 88 VENICE 
 
 bare-footed, for the people about here are a little 
 more sordid in their poverty than in most parts of 
 Venice, though without that air of depression which 
 I have noticed in the Canareggio quarter. Two 
 little red-shawled children are sitting on a seat 
 opposite to me, counting their treasures; groups of 
 small people, carrying just slightly smaller babies, 
 are resting against the entrance to the gardens. I 
 hear at every moment the slip-slop of heelless shoes 
 dragging their way along the pavement, and catch a 
 glimpse of the heels of brilliant stockings, red, striped, 
 white, occasionally a fine, ecclesiastical purple; now 
 a whole flock of greenish yellow shawls passes, then, 
 by itself, a bright green shawl, a grey, a blue, an 
 amber; and scarcely two of all these coloured things 
 are alike : the street flickers with colour, in the hot 
 sunshine. Italian women are never at rest in their 
 shawls; they are always unwinding them, resettling 
 their folds, shifting them from head to shoulders, and 
 back again, slipping out a ringed hand to sketch a 
 whole series of gestures. And they are never in a 
 hurry. They come and go, stop, form into groups, 
 talk leisurely, and then go on their way, almost, I like 
 to think, with the mechanical movement of a herd of 
 cows, with the same deep sense of repose, of animal 
 contentment, which comes of living in the sun. 
 
 VII 
 
 Venetian women are rarely pretty, often charm-
 
 VENICE 89 
 
 ing, generally handsome. And all of them, without 
 exception, walk splendidly, not taking little mincing 
 feminine steps, but with a fine, grave stride, due 
 partly to the fact that they are accustomed to wear 
 heelless slippers, which oblige them to plant the feet 
 firmly, and the whole foot at once, without a chance 
 of tripping upon the toes or pounding upon the 
 heels, as women who wear tight boots are able, and 
 only too apt, to do ; they walk with almost the same 
 action as if they were bare-footed, and almost as 
 well. And they use the whole body in walking, 
 not with the undulatory motion of Spanish women, 
 but with a movement of the whole back and shoul- 
 ders, in the exact swing of the stride. Venetian 
 women do, however, remind one in many ways 
 of Spanish women, in their way of doing the hair, 
 of wearing the mantilla, for instance ; the Moorish 
 element, which is their bond of union, coming out 
 so naturally in Venice, where one finds, quite as a 
 matter of course, an Antico Caffk dei Mori, where a 
 cigarette is still known as a spagnoletto, where the 
 dialect touches Spanish at all points. The types of 
 Venetian women vary in every quarter rthe women 
 of the Castello have quite a different look from the 
 women of the Dorsoduro. In a seaport town there 
 is always a certain intermixture of races, and Venice, 
 with the different layers of its different occupations 
 and conquests, is variable to a greater degree than 
 most seaports. Remembering that nearness which 
 Venice has always had to the East, it is not alto-
 
 9 o VENICE 
 
 gether surprising to find among the Venetian types, 
 and not least frequently, one which is almost Jap- 
 anese. They are singularly charming, these small, 
 dark, cat-like creatures, with their small black eyes, 
 vivid as the eyes of a wild animal, their little noses, 
 prettily curved in at the tip, their mouths with 
 thick, finely curved lips, their hair, too, sometimes 
 drawn back in the Japanese manner. And they 
 have that look of catlike comfort and good-humour 
 which is also a Japanese habit. Then there are 
 many Jews here, and in the Jewish women you find 
 often the finest type of Jewish beauty, in which 
 the racial characteristics stop short just at the 
 perfect moment. You find, too, but only now and 
 again, the vivid swarthiness of the gipsy, with the 
 gipsy's shining black hair, as black and polished as 
 ebony, plaited and coiled tightly round the back 
 of the head. 
 
 Then there are many quite blonde women. The 
 Venetian red does not, indeed, exist, if it ever did, 
 in nature; the recipes for its production may still 
 be read: a painful process, in which you sat in the 
 full heat of the sun, with your face covered, and your 
 hair laid out around you to get soaked and coloured 
 with sunlight. The women nowadays feel that the 
 colour is not worth the headache. But they add to 
 nature in one matter with extraordinary persistence : 
 they powder their faces, slightly on week-days, and 
 thickly on festas, rarely with much art ; with, rather, 
 an ingenuous obviousness which, so far as my ob-
 
 VENICE 91 
 
 servation goes, is unique. Even quite young girls 
 use poudre de riz, without the slightest necessity 
 for its use; possibly, for one reason, because they 
 think it bad for the complexion to wash the face 
 much, and powder saves a good deal of washing. 
 It gives a charming air of sophistication to people 
 who are not too civilised to be frankly human, w r ho 
 are in most things so natural and who are so happily 
 wanting in those "little ways" which we call, by 
 way of reproach, feminine. But they are full of 
 fantastic contradictions, powdering their faces, which 
 are nice, and leaving their figures, which are some- 
 times inclined to broaden unreasonably, to take care 
 of themselves, without the aid or the direction of 
 stays. And there is something elaborately artificial 
 in the way many of them have of doing their hair, 
 in little kiss-curls, composed in all manner of different 
 ways; in little rows of cork-screws, or harebells 
 tinkling along the forehead; or in trails down 
 the side of the cheeks, as in Carpaccio's great 
 picture of the "Courtesans". There is something, 
 in their whole aspect, slightly self-conscious, charm- 
 ingly so, indeed; a smorfia which gives a curious, 
 ambiguous, at once asking and denying complaisance 
 to their lips and eyes, as if they refused nothing 
 without a full knowledge of what they were refusing. 
 Women and girls, even children, dress exactly alike ; 
 and there is nothing more comical, more charming 
 than the little people of twelve who look like twenty ; 
 brilliant, fascinating little people, at once very
 
 92 VENICE 
 
 childish and very mature, with their hair coiled at the 
 back like their elders, their skirts down to their 
 heels, their shawls too long for them, dangling to the 
 ground, but worn with an air of infinite importance 
 and self-sufficiency. And the colours of all these 
 women, the elegant olives, the delicate blondes, the 
 sombre browns, are thrown out so admirably, so 
 finely adorned, by the vivid colours of shawls, and 
 dresses, and stockings, which would be gaudy else- 
 where, but which here, in the heat and glitter of 
 such an atmosphere, are always in place, never im- 
 moderate; they are all part of the picture, the 
 great genre picture which is Venice. 
 
 VIII 
 
 They have been giving Goldoni at the Teatro 
 Rossini, with a company of excellent Italian come- 
 dians, and as the chatter in the gallery ends, and 
 the chatter begins on the stage, I have found for 
 once the perfect illusion: there is no difference 
 between the one and the other. Voluble, living 
 Venice, with its unchanging attitude towards things, 
 the prompt gaiety and gravity of its temperament, 
 finds equal expression in that gallery and, in this 
 interpretation of Goldoni, on that stage. 
 
 Going to the theatre in Venice is like a fantastic 
 overture to the play, and sets one's mood properly 
 in tune. You step into the gondola, which darts 
 at once across a space of half-lighted water, and
 
 VENICE 93 
 
 turns down a narrow canal between walls which 
 seem to reach more than half-way to the stars. The 
 tiny lantern in the prow sheds no light, is indeed no 
 more than a signal of approach, and you seem to be 
 sliding straight into the darkness. Here and there 
 a lamp shines from a bridge or at the water gate of 
 a house, but with no more than enough light to 
 make the darkness seen. The gondola sways, 
 swerves, and is round a sharp corner, and the water 
 rushes against the oar as it swings the keel straight 
 for another plunge forward. You see in flashes: 
 an alley with people moving against the light, the 
 shape of a door or balcony, seen dimly and in a 
 wholly new aspect, a broad, well-lighted square, a 
 dark church-front, a bridge overhead, the water 
 lapping against the green stone of a wall which 
 your elbow all but touches, a head thrust from a 
 window, the gondola which passes you, sliding 
 gently and suddenly alongside, and disappearing 
 into an unseen quiet. And, whenever you turn 
 your head, you will see, bending against the oar 
 and swaying with every movement of this horse of 
 the waters, his rider, the gondolier. 
 
 The realisation of Venice comes slowly, piece by 
 piece, and it is long before one has a perfectly definite 
 sense of the traffic, and of what that traffic means, 
 in these streets of water, which seem at first to be 
 made for no more than ornament and the promenade 
 of strangers. The dust-carts, when one grazes them 
 in t&e side canals, begin to suggest other uses in this
 
 94 VENICE 
 
 decorative water, and one day, meeting the gondola 
 of the post-office, rowing hard from the station, one 
 sees another, as it seems, transposition of things. 
 Going under the Bridge of Sighs, one sees the rough, 
 iron-bolted prison gondolas, with their square felzi 
 of solid wood, pierced by air holes on each side. 
 Crossing the Rialto one looks down on a procession 
 of gondolas, that approach slowly, and under the 
 tufted black hoods one sees the white flowers 
 and favours of a wedding. Funerals cross be- 
 tween the Fondamenta Nuove and the cemetery 
 island of San Michele, and the dead people still 
 go in their gondolas, under the last, narrower, 
 felzi. 
 
 Spectacular as all Venice is, there is nothing in 
 all Venice more spectacular than the gondola. It 
 is always difficult for me to realise that a gondola is 
 not a living thing. It responds so delicately to a 
 touch, the turn of a muscle; is so exquisitely sym- 
 pathetic, so vivid in its pride of motion, so gentle 
 and courteous with an adversary. And just as a 
 perfect rider becomes one body with his horse, 
 realising actually the fable of the centaur, so the 
 gondolier and the gondola seem to flow into a sin- 
 gle human rhythm. Nor is the gondola an easy 
 creature to master. To poise yourself on the edge 
 of the stern, and row forward, using only half a 
 rowlock, and to shoot round corner after corner, 
 from a narrow canal into a narrower, without so 
 much as grazing the prow of the gondola which
 
 VENICE 95 
 
 meets you: that requires, at every moment, the 
 swift and certain address of the polo-player guiding 
 his pony through a crashing melee. I never quite 
 knew whether it was more delightful to lie in a 
 gondola and watch the land from the water, or to 
 watch the gondola from land. From land, perhaps, 
 at night, when something slim and dark glides by, 
 the two rowers moving in silhouette, with the 
 fantastic bowing motion of the little figures at the 
 Chat Noir; or, again at night, when you hear a 
 strong voice singing, and a coloured line floats down 
 the canal, the singing boat in the midst, paper 
 lanterns tossing a variable light over the man who 
 stands at the prow and the women with hooded 
 heads, smiling, who play an accompaniment on 
 mandolins. But from the water, certainly, if it is 
 your good luck to see the great serenata, such as the 
 one I saw when the King of Italy and the Emperor 
 of Germany played that little masque of Kings at 
 Venice. The galleggiante, with its five thousand 
 lights, a great floating dome of crystals, started from 
 the Rialto ; from the midst of the lights came music, 
 Wagner and Rossini, Berlioz and the vivid, rattling, 
 never quite sincere, Mar da Reale; and the luminous 
 house of sound floated slowly, almost imperceptibly, 
 down the Grand Canal, a black cluster of gondolas 
 before it and beside it and behind it, packed so 
 tightly together that you could have walked across 
 them, from shore to shore. From my gondola, in the 
 midst of all these black hulls and bristling steel
 
 96 VENICE 
 
 prows, through the forest of oars, upright in the 
 water, between the towering figures of the gon- 
 doliers bending against their oars, over the heads of 
 the mass of people heaped together on this solid, 
 moving, changing floor of boats, I could see a yet 
 greater crowd on every point of the shore, on the 
 steps of the Salute, along the line of the Dogana, 
 on every landing-stage, at every window, high up on 
 the roofs. Bengal lights burned steadily; flash- 
 lights darted across the sky, with their crude, 
 sudden illumination ; rockets went up, paper lanterns 
 swayed and smoked ; and as we floated slowly, imper- 
 ceptibly down, it seemed as if the palaces on each side 
 of us were afloat too, drifting past us, to the sound of 
 music, through a night brilliant with strange fires. 
 
 What struck me then, as I found myself in the 
 midst of this jostling, tightly packed crowd, every 
 gondolier in violent action, shouting in that hoarse, 
 abrupt, stomachic voice which goes so well with the 
 unconsonanted Venetian dialect, was that not a single 
 one of them lost his temper, though each was doing 
 his best to outwit the other, and get his gondola a 
 little nearer to the music ; and I reflected how much 
 the situation would have tried the temper of a Lon- 
 don cabman. Their language, like their gestures, 
 was but decorative. The gondolier in Venice is as 
 fine to look at as his gondola; he has colour, too, in 
 the ruddy dye of his face, the infinite variety of his 
 amber shirts and blue trousers and scarlet sashes; 
 and if you really know him, he is one of the most
 
 VENICE 97 
 
 charming of people. It is by no means knowing the 
 gondoliers to have known them only as a master 
 who hires a man, and gets him at the lowest bidding. 
 Living on the Zattere, near which so many of them 
 live, I have had the chance of seeing them as they 
 are among themselves; I have played boccie with 
 them in the bowling-alley under the trellised vines, 
 from which the first drops of sap were beginning to 
 drip; I have sat with them in the tavern parlour, 
 beside the great chimney-corner, under the burnished 
 pots and pans, watching them play a mysterious 
 game with fantastic cards. And I have always felt 
 myself to be in the company of gentlemen. 
 
 IX 
 
 From the Casa on the Giudecca I look across the 
 water and see Venice. Is there another window 
 from which one can see so much of the beauty of land 
 and water? Opposite, along the Zattere, they are 
 unloading the boats: I see the black hulls and a 
 forest of masts and rigging. A steamer has come 
 in from Trieste, and lies between San Giorgio and 
 the Dogana, with its little black flock of gondolas 
 about it. An orange sail creeps steadily past the 
 window, and I hear the sail creak against the mast. 
 High above the houses, almost with the dominance 
 of the Suleimanie" at Constantinople, the great domes 
 of the Salute rise above the green trees and brown 
 roofs of the Patriarch's Palace. That long line
 
 98 VENICE 
 
 above the water, curving slightly until San Giorgio 
 intercepts it, is the Riva, and at all hours I can 
 watch it change colour, and sink into shadow, and 
 emerge with the lamps at night, a dark outline, 
 out of which the Doge's Palace rises, always white, 
 always mysterious, always at once solid and ex- 
 quisite. Every day one sees it, beside and above 
 the greyish green of the bulbous domes of St. Mark's, 
 the two columns of Syrian granite on the Piazzetta, 
 and the winged lion of St. Mark, with his fierce 
 laughter and alert springing body, who, from that 
 height, challenges the ships. 
 
 This long narrow island of the Giudecca, with its 
 houses now mere shells, granaries, storehouses, or 
 cottages for fisher people, had its palaces once, and 
 the Casa in which I am living was built by Palladio, 
 who planned the Redentore on the left, and San 
 Giorgio Maggiore on the little neighbouring island 
 to the right. Everything in the house is beautiful 
 and ample : the long courtyard opening, through two 
 stone pillars wreathed with vines, upon the garden ; 
 the stone staircase and the immense room shaped like 
 a cross without a top, its long wall almost filled with 
 tall and slender windows opening upon stone balco- 
 nies over the water; windows at the narrow end 
 looking over the garden, and, beyond the iron gate- 
 way with its carved stone figures on the gate-posts, 
 over the vast green and brown orchard and vineyard, 
 stretching to the still waters of the lagoon on the 
 other side of the island. There are timbered roofs,
 
 VENICE 99 
 
 vast garrets, and a chapel with its lamp still burning 
 before an image of the Virgin. The guests sit down 
 to their meals in the great hall, and are so far away 
 from each other that their presence has almost a 
 touch of unreality; one hears and sees them vaguely, 
 as if in a dream, and the Venetian woman who waits 
 upon us all, passing to and fro with a sleepy dignity, 
 has little curls of hair hanging about her eyes like 
 a woman in one of Carpaccio's pictures. Outside, 
 there is always sun on the garden, once a very formal 
 garden, and now just dilapidated enough for its 
 quaint conventionality to borrow a new refinement, 
 a touch of ruined dignity. One may wander 
 through low alleys of trellised vines to the water, 
 and beyond the water, on the other side of a narrow 
 bank of land, the sea lies. 
 
 There is, to those living on the Giudecca, a con- 
 stant sense of the sea, and not only because there 
 are always fishermen lounging on the quay, and 
 fishing-boats moored on the side canals, and nets 
 drying on the land, and crab-pots hanging half out 
 of the water. There is a quality in the air one 
 breathes, in the whole sensation of existence, which 
 is like a purification from the soft and entangling 
 enchantments of Venice. On the other side of the 
 water, which can look so much like the sea, and 
 form so rapid a barrier, yet across which every move- 
 ment on the quay can be distinguished, Venice 
 begins; and in Venice one is as if caught in an im- 
 mense network, or spider's web, which, as one walks
 
 ioo VENICE 
 
 in its midst, seems to tighten the closer about one. 
 The streets narrow overhead, push outwards with 
 beams and stone balconies and many turning angles ; 
 seem to loosen their hold for a moment where a 
 bridge crosses a narrow canal between high walls 
 and over dark water, and then tighten again in 
 close lanes where the smells of the shops meet and 
 fume about one's face. The lanes are busy with 
 men in rough clothes and with women in shawls, 
 bare-beaded, and with great soft bushes of hair, who 
 come and go quietly, slipping past one another in 
 these narrow spaces, where there is hardly room to 
 pass, as the gondolas slip past one another in the 
 narrow canals. The road is difficult to find, for a 
 single wrong turning may lead one to the other 
 end of Venice. This movement, the tangles of the 
 way, the continual arresting of one's attention by 
 some window, doorway, or balcony, put a strain 
 upon one's eyes, and begin after a time to tire and 
 stupefy the brain. There is no more bewildering 
 city, and as night comes on the bewilderment 
 grows almost disquieting. One seems to be turning 
 in a circle, to which there is no outlet, and from 
 which all one's desire is to escape. 
 
 Coming out at last upon the Zattere, and seeing 
 the breadth of water before one, it is as if one had 
 gone back to the sea. The ships lie close together 
 along the quay, ten deep, their masts etched against 
 the sky, the water, or that faint shadow with its 
 hard outline (almost level, but for the larger and
 
 VENICE 101 
 
 lesser domes of the Redentore and the Zitelle) 
 which is the island of the Giudecca. A few voices 
 rise from the boats ; the hulls creak gently, as if they 
 were talking together; there is a faint plashing of 
 water, and beyond, silent, hardly visible, unlighted 
 by the few lamps along the quay, the island waits, a 
 little desolate and unfriendly, but half way to the 
 sea. 
 
 At night the moon swings in the sky, like the lamp 
 of an illumination. There are curtains of dark, half 
 drawn, and, higher in the sky, pale gold stars, like 
 faint candles, in a dark which is luminous. Or, on 
 an autumn night which is like summer, a moon like 
 a thin silver medallion hangs low over San Giorgio, 
 and turns slowly to gold, while the water, between 
 moonrise and sunset, pales and glows, and the dark 
 begins to creep around the masts and rigging. 
 
 Rain in autumn brings a new, fierce beauty into 
 Venice, as it falls hammering on the water and rattles 
 on the wood of the boats and settles in pools in all 
 the hollows of the stones. Seen under that stormy 
 light, just before sunset, with a hot yellow moon 
 struggling to come through the rain-clouds, Venice 
 is as if veiled, and all its colours take on a fine, deep 
 richness, seen through water, like polished stones 
 in sea-pools. The slender masts, the thin black net- 
 work of the rigging stand out delicately, and with 
 an almost livid distinctness. The gondolas move 
 like black streaks on the water. For a moment the 
 west brightens, as the sun goes down behind a space
 
 102 VENICE 
 
 of sky that burns white, and shivers dully, streaked 
 with dim yellow flakes and fleeces. 
 
 There was a roaring of the sea all night, and in 
 the morning the water splashed under the windows, 
 almost level with the pavement. The whole Giu- 
 decca was swollen, and rose everywhere into grey 
 waves, tipped with white as they fell over. Sea- 
 gulls had come in from the sea, and flew in circles 
 over the water, dipping to the crest of the waves, 
 and curving around the boats laden with timber, 
 that crowded close together against the Zattere. 
 The wind still blew with violence, and a little rain 
 fell. The sky and the water were of the same leaden 
 grey, and the sea-gulls flying between water and 
 sky shone like white flakes of snow, blown by the 
 wind. 
 
 There is no city in Europe which contains so 
 much silence as Venice, and the silence of the 
 Giudecca is more lonely than any silence in Venice. 
 Yet, by day and night, there are certain noises, 
 which one learns to expect, becomes familiar with, 
 and finds no distraction in : the roar of the sea, when 
 there is wind on the sea-walls, a dull, continuous, 
 enveloping sound, which seems unintelligible as 
 one looks across at solid land on the other side of 
 water; the loud and shaking violence of wind; the 
 hoarse, echoing hoot and trumpeting of great black 
 or red steamers, which pass slowly or anchor almost 
 under the windows, to take in stores from the gran- 
 aries that stand locked and barred and as if empty,
 
 VENICE 103 
 
 along the fondamenta; the deep splash of the oars 
 of barges, as the men who push with long oars in the 
 water set the oars against their rowlocks and begin 
 the heavy rowing; the thin plash of the one oar of 
 gondolas; the guttural cries, from water and the 
 narrow strip of land, all in thick vowels, clotted 
 together without a consonant between; and the 
 ceaseless busy flapping of water upon the steps 
 and around hulls, with little noises never twice 
 quite the same. 
 
 Beyond Murano the water shines level, but with 
 surfaces of many textures, to where the horizon 
 ends on a thin line of low green trees. On the left, 
 rising into the sky, are hills, dim to their summits, 
 which sparkle with snow. In one place the tide 
 moves visibly under you, and then the movement is 
 over, but you are on water which just breathes, 
 and the breath waves it into faint patterns, like 
 moire" silk; and then it is breathless, and with a 
 surface like satin. Here and there the water has 
 ebbed from a mud-flat, coloured a deep green, with 
 white sea-birds sitting on the edge of the water. 
 Groups of stakes, set for landmarks, outline the 
 shapes of the sand-banks; and you see the white 
 birds sitting on the tops of the stakes. Black masses, 
 which seem at a distance like great iron cannons, are 
 seen, as one comes nearer, to be forts or powder-
 
 104 VENICE 
 
 magazines, each filling a tiny island, but for a patch 
 of grass or a cluster of starved trees. We pass few 
 gondolas, but oftener large boats, or barges, loaded 
 deep and sometimes with rafts around them, and 
 men walking barefoot, with their feet half in the 
 water, pushing with long poles. Dark women with 
 handkerchiefs of dark red or orange over their heads 
 sit on chairs in the buranelli, narrow boats rowed 
 by a man who stands and rows forward with two 
 oars which cross before him. 
 
 The gondola with its two rowers moves swiftly 
 and steadily. In front of us is Burano, with its 
 leaning campanile and the long line of white and 
 brown houses. To the right there is a small, formal, 
 and mysterious island, like the Island of Death 
 which Bocklin saw in picture after picture, but 
 never, unless in San Francesco del Deserto, on any 
 water of the earth. Dark green cypresses stand 
 around the brown-roofed monastery, with its low 
 tower and one leaning stone pine. Here, they tell 
 you, St. Francis once came, on his way from Egypt, 
 and the place where he preached is marked by a 
 stone let into the wall of an inner chapel, with 
 the inscription: Hie est locus ubi oravit seraphicus 
 Franciscus. In the garden, a garden full of weeds, 
 there is a glass shrine built over a grey and ancient 
 log; it is the staff of St. Francis, the monk told me, 
 and it blossomed there, and remains, a testimony, 
 after five centuries. On a stone over the door of the 
 cloister I read :
 
 VENICE 105 
 
 "0 Bcata Solitudo ! 
 Sola Beatitude! 
 Elongavi fugiens, et mansi in solitudine." 
 
 The monastery is now a place of penitence, and 
 misbehaving monks are sent here, to meditate, and 
 return, if they can, to peace, in this lonely foothold 
 of land among still waters. 
 
 As we row slowly around the sand-bank which 
 lies between San Francesco and Burano, there is a 
 luminous and breathless stillness on the water and 
 in the air, and the reflection of the campanile and of 
 the houses, every line and every colour repeated 
 flawlessly, like another self rather than an image of 
 itself, is seen reversed in the water. The real thing 
 and the image meet, passing into one another with so 
 little division that the eye can scarcely distinguish 
 where the one ends and the other begins. I never 
 saw so beautiful and so deceptive an illusion evoked 
 out of water by the sun. Looking back at San 
 Francesco, the cypresses and the one stone pine are 
 scarcely less black as they plunge downwards; sea- 
 gulls fly in the air over other sea-gulls, just a little 
 dimmer, that seem to fly far down in the water, 
 as in a crystal. 
 
 The island of Burano, the real island and not that 
 magical other island in the water, is dreary and sor- 
 did; dirt lies thick in every street; the campanile is 
 slowly settling over, there are cracks in the walls 
 of the churches; many of the houses are already
 
 io6 VENICE 
 
 ruinous. But if you look through the open doors 
 you will see that every house has its piece of old oak, 
 a chest or sideboard, with brass plates and copper 
 pans, sometimes with china on shelves, arranged over 
 it on the wall; and the brass and china are for the 
 most part old, and have come down in the family, from 
 generation to generation. The men in Burano are all 
 fishers, the women all lace-makers. Fishing-boats lie 
 with their nets and crab-pots in the canals; men 
 lounge on the quays in top boots and ribbed woollen 
 stockings; there is all the smell, dirt, and apparent 
 idleness of a fishing village, where work waits on the 
 tides and the weather. Women sit in every door- 
 way, bending over the lace which they are stitching 
 into the famous Burano point and into other deli- 
 cate patterns. The oldest women are still at work 
 with their needles ; they lift weary eyes for an instant, 
 as you bend over their work, and then the eyes turn 
 back to the stitching. The smallest girls are at 
 work with their needles already, and you see 
 them, with their little pale faces, bright eyes 
 like beads, and artists' fingers, crowded together, 
 row after row, in the narrow rooms of the 
 factory. 
 
 In the long central square there is a continual 
 clatter of wooden shoes, and a passing of women 
 and children, w r ith coloured handkerchiefs over their 
 heads. An old beggar with spectacles, a pointed 
 red cap, and a long patched yellow overcoat, stops 
 outside the window of the "Lion Crowned," and
 
 VENICE 107 
 
 begs for bread or soldi, and small boys thrust their 
 heads in, and beg laughing. 
 
 It is but a short row from Burano to Torcello, 
 and the oars of the gondola catch in the weeds of 
 narrow shores. One sees little but weeds and broken 
 walls and scant herbage; a few red cottages, a boat, 
 a few ducks afloat by the bank. You land at what 
 is hardly a village, but there is a village green, with 
 clothes hung out to dry, and a few children playing 
 on the green, and in the midst of the grass a very 
 ancient stone chair, rudely hewn out, and standing 
 against a pillar: they call it the chair of Attila, 
 and they say that it was Attila's throne, when Ven- 
 ice had not yet been built upon the water. Beyond, 
 in two red brick buildings, open in front, there 
 are innumerable fragments, a few inches square, 
 of Byzantine marble, carved with patterns lovely 
 enough to survive dismembering. 
 
 On the right hand is the strange octagon of 
 Santa Fosca, with its arcades and pillars, and the 
 seventh-century basilica of Santa Maria, with its 
 campanile, all somewhat ruinous and among so 
 many ruins. Inside the doors of the Cathedral 
 one sees a floor like St. Mark's, all in patterns of 
 coloured marble, and walls whitewashed, and yellow 
 with damp, where they are not lined with grey 
 marble, or covered with Byzantine or twelfth century 
 mosaics. The whole western wall is covered with 
 mosaics in six tiers; there are other mosaics in the 
 tribuna and the apse, and under the dome of the
 
 io8 VENICE 
 
 tribuna is the episcopal throne, with the seats of 
 the priests arranged in a semicircle like the steps 
 of an arena: the throne is of ancient marble, but 
 the seats are no more than a shell of restored brick- 
 work. On the panels of the screen and pulpit there 
 are scrolls of flowers and long-necked birds, with 
 conventional borders, carved in the marble; but 
 the white marble has gone green. Above are half- 
 ruined paintings against gold backgrounds, and 
 below, in the many-coloured marble floor, a bishop 
 lies carved in stone, and the stone is roughened like 
 a rock on which the tide has broken. In the mosaics 
 of the apse there are strange designs of birds and 
 beasts and fishes, woven into delicate patterns, pea- 
 cock-coloured with an unusual subtlety of colour. 
 At the other end of the church the whole wall, to 
 the brown rafters, is alive with the hard bright shapes 
 of twelfth-century mosaic. There are heavens and 
 hells, rows on rows of haloed saints in glory, angels 
 blowing into conchs, strange demons, men and gods, 
 all, row above row, on the dead gold with car- 
 pets of green grass and coloured flowers and white 
 clouds; naked figures among flames; skulls, with 
 separate hands and feet, and with snakes twined 
 through their eyeholes; heads with curled hair and 
 earrings among red flames, cherubim with wings 
 crossed beneath their chins, Mary with outstretched 
 arms, and Christ sitting in judgment. These 
 mosaics have been lately restored, and their fresh 
 aspect, among so much and such ancient ruin, does
 
 VENICE 109 
 
 but bring a touch of irrelevant new colour into this 
 temple of ruined splendour, which stands here, on 
 the malarious island, with an almost mysterious 
 magnificence in decay. 
 
 XI 
 
 GOLDONI, in his memoirs, tells us that the Venetians 
 sang all day long, " the shopkeepers laying out their 
 wares, the workmen coming home from work, the 
 gondoliers waiting for their masters"; and he adds: 
 " Gaiety is at the root of the national character, and 
 jesting is at the root of the Venetian language." 
 The day is past when the gondoliers sang Tasso, and 
 the shopkeepers do not sing now; but they stand at 
 the doors of their shops and smoke, and, like every 
 one else in Venice, take things comfortably. // 
 dolce far niente is a sensation which can scarcely 
 be realised more completely than in Venice ; and with 
 such a sky, such water, and such streets, who would 
 look for a bustling race of business people, like the 
 Milanese? In Venice no one will work very hard 
 for the sake of "getting on": why should he? I 
 never saw poor people who seemed so happy, and 
 who were really so comfortable in their poverty, as 
 the very poorest people here. The softness of the 
 climate, the little on which the comforts of life 
 depend, permit poverty, even beggary, to remain 
 dignified. Simply to lie in the sun, to have just
 
 no VENICE 
 
 enough to eat, and plenty of cheap cigars to smoke : 
 a poor man demands little more than that, and it 
 is rare indeed that he does not get so much. Time 
 scarcely exists in Venice; it certainly does not 
 exist for the idle poor. They hanker after no 
 luxuries; for, in Venice, merely to live is a luxury. 
 Think of a city where bread and wine, fruit and 
 flowers, are the chief things hawked about the 
 streets! Wherever you go you hear the cry of 
 " Acqua!" you see a basket heaped up with brilliant 
 flowers, and not far off some one is lying asleep, 
 a facchino in vivid blue, one wooden shoe under 
 his head for a pillow, stretched at full length in 
 any nook of shade. More even than in Rome, 
 scarcely less, and far more agreeably, than in Naples, 
 the whole place belongs to the people. The beggar 
 who curls up asleep on your doorstep has an equal 
 right with your own, and, so far as the doorstep is 
 concerned, a greater, for you do not require it 
 to sleep on, and he does. And there is scarcely an 
 inch of Venice where he cannot lie down and go 
 to sleep whenever he likes. Streets where a horse 
 or cart is unknown are so surprisingly clean, com- 
 fortable, and leisurely; they are made to be loitered 
 in, lain upon, and for every man to have his way 
 with. The moral of "The Sick King in Bokhara," 
 
 "That, though we take what we desire, 
 We must not snatch it eagerly," 
 
 needs no enforcement in Venice. Every one takes
 
 VENICE 
 
 in 
 
 what he wants; but he takes it gently, gracefully, 
 as a matter of course. Your cigars belong to your 
 gondolier as much as to yourself; and if he has 
 two oranges, one of them is yours. 
 
 The Venetians have but few amusements. There 
 are four theatres, and these are only open for 
 a few months out of the year, and supported only 
 by strolling companies; there is a theatre of mario- 
 nettes open still more rarely; and that is all. Once 
 upon a time there was a cafe-chantant, with a little 
 company from Vienna: Annie Vivanti has sung 
 there; but it has dwindled almost out of existence, 
 and there is not a music-hall or a public dancing- 
 hall in the whole city. No doubt this is partly 
 because the people are so poor that they cannot 
 pay for even the cheapest amusements; but is it 
 not also because they do not require them, rinding 
 sufficient pleasure in things as they are, in the mere 
 quiet gaiety of daily life, the fact of living always 
 in the midst of a dtcor de thedtre, of which they are 
 themselves acting the drama? That animal content 
 which comes over one in Venice, taking away the 
 desire of action and the need of excitement which 
 waylay the mind and the senses under less perfect 
 skies, makes it just as possible to be happy without 
 running after amusement as the simplicity of the 
 conditions of life makes it possible for the poor man 
 to live on polenta and a little fruit. There is some- 
 thing drowsy in the air of Venice, as there is some-
 
 ii2 VENICE 
 
 thing a little sleepy in the eyes of the Venetians. 
 Is not life, to those who live there always, as it is 
 to those who come and go in it for pleasure, a 
 kind of day-dream? 
 
 SPRING, 1894, and 1897, and AUTUMN, 1903.
 
 NAPLES
 
 NAPLES 
 
 I 
 
 I HAVE rarely entered a strange city without a 
 certain apprehension ; but no city ever filled me with 
 such terror as Naples. These long streets of tall, 
 mean houses, from which narrow alleys climbed the 
 hill, and descended to the harbour, in row after row 
 of meaner and not less tall houses, all with their little 
 iron balconies, over which clothes and linen draggled, 
 all with their crowded, squalid, patched, and coloured 
 throngs of restless life; the cracking of whips, the 
 clatter of wheels and of horses' hoofs on the uneven 
 stones; the thud of the cow-bell, the sharper tinkle 
 of the goat-bell, as the creatures wander about the 
 streets or wait at the doors of houses; the rattling 
 of bootblacks' brushes, the petulant whine of beggars, 
 the whole buzz of that humming, half-obliterated 
 Neapolitan, with its punctuation of gestures; the 
 rush and hustling of those sidewalks, after the 
 ample and courteous leisure of Rome; something 
 sordid in the very trees on the sea-front, second- 
 rate in the aspect of the carriages that passed, and 
 of the people who sat in them; the bare feet, rags, 
 
 "5
 
 n6 NAPLES 
 
 rainbow-coloured dirt, sprawling and spawning 
 poverty of Santa Lucia, and not of Santa Lucia 
 alone ; the odour of the city ; and then the indiscover- 
 able length and extent of it, the ways that seemed 
 to lead in whatever direction I wanted to go, and 
 then ended suddenly, or turned aside in another 
 direction; the darkness up the hill, and the un- 
 certainty of all those new, as yet unknown, roads: 
 that, as I turned away from the sea, when night 
 began to come down upon it, mounted to my head 
 like some horrible fume, enveloping me with disgust, 
 possessing me with terror. I have got a little ac- 
 customed to it now; I know my way through those 
 streets, which are, after all, simple enough in their 
 arrangement; I have come to see certain advantages, 
 even, in the turning of all this dirt and poverty out 
 into the sun; I find it a touching tribute to cleanli- 
 ness that every other poor person whom you see is 
 hunting for his own or his neighbour's vermin; but, 
 all the same, I think my first impression is likely 
 to last. 
 
 I do not think that the Neapolitans are more 
 vicious or intend to be more objectionable than 
 other people, but they are poor, naturally untidy; 
 they live in the street because there is sun and air 
 in the street, and it does not occur to them that 
 there is anything in human nature to hide. They 
 have an absolute, an almost ingenuous, lack of 
 civilisation, and after seeing the Neapolitans I have 
 more respect for civilisation. I am not convinced
 
 NAPLES 117 
 
 that the whole of the pavement belongs to the 
 dirtiest part of the people who walk on it, and that 
 these have exactly the right to encamp with their 
 wives and families in the way of one's feet, and 
 to perform quite the whole of their toilet before 
 one's eyes. For these people, whom you see in 
 Santa Lucia and the Strada del Porto and along the 
 whole of the quays, are as shameless as animals: 
 look into their faces, and you will see in their great, 
 dark eyes the unintelligent regard of animals. Old 
 age and infancy are here more horrible than any- 
 where else; that beginning and ending of human 
 life in helplessness and physical dishonour are here 
 emphasised with all the cruelty of which nature, 
 left to herself, is capable. A Christian ascetic, 
 wishing to meditate on the disgust of the flesh, 
 might well visit these quays. There he will see 
 the flaccid yellowness of old women, like the skin 
 of a rotten apple ; wrinkles eaten in with grime, until 
 they broaden into ruts; feet and ankles that have 
 been caked and roasted and soaked into iridescent 
 reds, smoky violets, shot purples; the horror of 
 decayed eyes, deformed limbs, hair crawling with 
 lice; and about these dishonoured bodies flutters a 
 medley of blackened and yellowing linen, tattered 
 trousers without buttons, tattered dresses without 
 strings, torn shawls, still loud in colour, but purple 
 where they had been red, and lavender where they 
 had been blue. And all this malodorous medley is 
 a-swarm, hoarse voices crying, hands in continual
 
 ii8 NAPLES 
 
 movement, the clatter of heelless shoes on the pave- 
 ment, the splash of emptied vessels, laughter, the 
 harsh notes of a song, rising out of their midst like 
 the bubble of steam escaping out of a boiling pot. 
 
 II 
 
 Naples varies in aspect according as you see it 
 from above or below, from the side which looks 
 towards Vesuvius, the side which looks towards 
 Capri, the side which merges into Posillipo ; and 
 no generalisation can express the effect of this pre- 
 cipitous and straggling town, under the shadow of 
 the burning mountain, and itself crawling up and 
 down the sides of volcanic hills, set in a half -circle 
 against the curve of the bay. Looking from Capodi- 
 monte you would say that it nestled among green 
 trees ; looking from the sea-front you would say that 
 it was built out of the sheer rock. And its colour 
 varies like its contour. Rain warmed by sunshine 
 brings out the finest colours, and shows you the roofs 
 and railed and windowed walls in their most effective 
 groupings, house piled above house, like rock piled 
 above rock, green foliage seeming to grow out of 
 their crevices. There never was a town which 
 seemed to have been so little made, to have grown 
 so entirely according to its own whim, and with so 
 little regard to any consideration but the crowding 
 of houses into every available inch of ground, street 
 intersecting street, and salite, scale, rampe rising out
 
 NAPLES 119 
 
 of these intersections wherever an unfilled corner 
 could be found. Looking down on the side streets 
 of Chiaia and Toledo is like looking down the clefts 
 in a rock, the crevices of a mountain side ; looking up 
 them, to the glimpses of the hill above, is like looking 
 up from the bottom of a gorge. And whenever you 
 climb, by stairways or winding terraces, to a certain 
 height, you see on the east the double ridge of 
 Vesuvius, smoke coiling into clouds above the crater, 
 its sides, in clear weather, spotted white with houses, 
 in dull weather an indistinguishable mass of violet or 
 purple, like the colour of thunder-clouds; on the 
 south, the bay, in which Capri and the ridged coast 
 of Sorrento appear and disappear with every change 
 of weather, like the stains in stone, or a picture 
 which the magic-lantern flashes upon and away from 
 the sheet. 
 
 Ill 
 
 Naples has ceased to be merely horrible to me, a 
 boiling pot; it has become a witches' cauldron. I 
 begin to be fascinated by those streets which are 
 corridors, with their violent shadows, their obscure 
 exuberance of life; those strange glimpses, as I 
 climb at night through terrace after terrace of sordid 
 streets, the houses open to view, the one large room 
 lit with the smoking oil-lamp, the figures bending 
 over it, the white beds set side by side, from one of 
 which you see already the nightcapped head of the
 
 120 NAPLES 
 
 grandmother, or a child's tumbled black hair; vague 
 figures still leaning into the darkness from their 
 balconies, now and then the sudden descent of a 
 basket at the end of a string, the sound of a man- 
 dolin or piano-organ, a song, or the rattle of feet on 
 the floor; for the most part silence, or a low chatter 
 which does not reach me. Lights shine out suddenly 
 from curtained windows, doors open and shut, you 
 hear the bolts drawn. And all kinds of strange 
 archways, passages, steps leading up or down, in- 
 definite turnings, perplex one at every step. There 
 is a crucifix which I pass every night; it is only a 
 crucifix painted upon wood, but it is set up in a 
 shrine like the gable of a house; there are five oil- 
 lamps about it, which cast singular lights on the 
 suffering figure, hanging there, as if on a Calvary, at 
 the side of the pavement, with fresh flowers at its 
 feet. That, too, seems to me like something not 
 quite natural, a part of the same sorcery which has 
 piled all these rocky ways and set up these cavernous 
 houses. No, there never was a town so troubling, 
 so disquieting, so incalculable as Naples, with its 
 heavenly bay lying out in front for strangers to gaze 
 at, and all this gross, contentedly animal life huddled 
 away in its midst, like some shameful secret. 
 
 IV 
 
 Wherever I go in Naples, in the streets, the 
 theatres, the churches, the cafe's, I see the same
 
 NAPLES 121 
 
 uncouth violence of life, the same ferment of un- 
 civilisation. Occasionally, when two Neapolitans 
 meet in the street, they kiss one another with a 
 loud kiss; for the most part they do not shake 
 hands, they do not nod, they do not lift their hats; 
 they stare fixedly, with an expression which I took 
 to mean violent aversion until I came to find it indi- 
 cated extreme friendship. Watching from a little 
 distance a group of men at a cafe table, you cannot 
 tell whether they are or are not having a serious 
 altercation. When a Neapolitan gesticulates he 
 does it with all his fingers and the whole of his 
 face; when he does not gesticulate, he is rigid. All 
 that is best, certainly, but all that is most typical in 
 the Neapolitan seems to me to be summed up in the 
 writer who more than any other has given in litera- 
 ture the whole savour of Naples. Matilde Serao 
 makes on one the impression of a good-humoured 
 gnome. Full of strength, sincerity, emotion, full of 
 an irresistible charm of humanity, she is so short and 
 stout as to be almost square; her head, too, with its 
 low forehead, is square; and she sits humped up, 
 with her head between her shoulders, all compressed 
 vivacity, which is ready to burst forth at any moment 
 in a flood of energetic, humorously emphatic words, 
 to which her leaping gestures with her short fat 
 fingers, in front of her nose, of her grimacing eyes, 
 of her cheeks wrinkled with laughter, add a further 
 and a yet more grotesque emphasis. 
 
 I heard the "Cavalleria Rusticana" one night at
 
 122 NAPLES 
 
 the San Carlo theatre, and, though the character of 
 the music is properly Sicilian, it seemed to me to 
 have a good deal in it of the people among whom it 
 is so popular. This crackling music, a fire which 
 crackles out, has an acute, feverish, quite Southern 
 sentimentality, the sentimentality of the mandolin 
 and the knife. Kindling, certainly, while you listen 
 to it, it is wiped out, as a sponge wipes out figures 
 on a slate, with the first breath of air you draw out- 
 side. And the true, canaille, Neapolitan music, the 
 Piedigrotta songs and the rest, which you hear all 
 day long, shouted, whistled, played on piano-organs, 
 on mandolins, in the streets, in the restaurants, in 
 the cafe's-chantants, have they not the very odour of 
 the streets in them? The songs are often enough 
 obscene, as popular songs often enough are, and to 
 hear Emilia Persico or Maldacea sing them, with a 
 knowing vivacity, an abominable languor, is to realise 
 all that they are capable of in the way of significant 
 expression. But in the tunes themselves, with their 
 heady notes, their pauses and rushes, their careful 
 uncertainties of rhythm, their almost Spanish effects 
 of monotony, there is something at once greasy and 
 fiery, an acrid vulgarity which stings the senses, 
 revolting and depraving, with a kind of intoxication 
 like the intoxication of cheap wine. 
 
 At Easter the Neapolitans mourn for the death 
 of Jesus Christ as the Greeks mourned for the death 
 of Adonis. It is a sacred play to them, in which 
 they take the same turbulent, and, for the moment,
 
 NAPLES 123 
 
 absorbing interest, as in an opera at San Carlo, or a 
 melodrama at the Mercadante. On Good Friday, 
 during the "Tre Ore" of the Passion, I went into 
 the popular central church of Santa Trinitk Maggiore. 
 Between the high altar and the pulpit, where a 
 queer, black figure in his cornered hat preached 
 with a sounding voice and the gestures of a puppet, 
 there was a rough platform, draped with blue cloth, 
 on which was an orchestra of black-coated gentlemen 
 and some singers, who sang with high Mascagni 
 voices. The people, coming in continuously by 
 twos and threes, rushed about the church as if it 
 were the market-place, precipitately, greeting their 
 friends with little sharp hisses of recognition, turning 
 about in their chairs, chattering in whispers, waving 
 their hands to one another, standing and arranging 
 one another's hats. Never have I seen such bustling, 
 restless, disorderly churches, or people so un- 
 civilised in their devotions. During the "three 
 hours" the church was packed in all its corners, 
 people sitting on the altar-steps, and on the altars, 
 perched in and around all the confessionals ; the men 
 piled their hats into the empty holy-water basins, 
 the women who had come without hats did not cover 
 their heads with handkerchiefs; during the sermon 
 all listened attentively, as to a really absorbing play. 
 On the day before Holy Thursday, there had been 
 the celebration of the Santo Sepolcro. The doors 
 of the churches were draped in black, the high altar 
 was covered with black cloth, and on a black cloth
 
 i2 4 NAPLES 
 
 before the high altar the crucifix was laid out, as 
 if in a tomb. Some of the Christs were small, of 
 dark metal, almost indistinguishable from a little 
 distance; others were large, made of painted wood, 
 with smears of red paint for the five wounds ; and a 
 crowd came and went all day long, mostly women, 
 and these women knelt and kissed the five wounds, 
 almost prostrating themselves on the floor. There 
 was something grotesque, familiar, amorous, extra- 
 vagant, in this unending procession of women, rich 
 and poor, young and old, all, one after another, 
 dropping on their knees, leaning over the sacred 
 body, whose passion was shown to them with so 
 visible a significance ; something, I cannot tell what, 
 barbaric, infantile, sensuous, in the sight and sound 
 of all those devout and eager kisses, which they 
 gave with a passionate solemnity, as to a lover. 
 
 V 
 
 Outside Naples, between Vesuvius and the sea, 
 half buried and half recovered from the earth, the 
 ghastly suburb of Pompeii repeats, like a remote 
 echo, the very note of Naples. Pompeii, though 
 you will find it large enough when you follow all 
 the intersections of its abrupt, crossing ways, re- 
 mains in the memory like a toy city, or a cabinet in 
 a museum. And, as one walks in these streets, in 
 which noise or silence is alike oppressive, interrupt- 
 ing, it is possible to persuade oneself that one is
 
 NAPLES 125 
 
 merely visiting a museum, looking at curiosities. In 
 so frightful a step back of nearly twenty centuries, 
 the mind reels, clutching at that somewhat pacifying 
 thought, for at least its momentary relief. And 
 then, all at once, turning aside into an empty street 
 from the guide and the visitors, you are seized, and, 
 as it were, imprisoned within the terror of this 
 image of the immortality of death, before which all 
 the legends of hell become credible, seeing how 
 hard it is to escape, even by death, out of the bond- 
 age of even a material indestructibility. Here are 
 the bodies of men and women, moulded for ever in 
 the gesture of their last moment, and these rigid 
 earthly corpses are as vivid in their interrupted life 
 as the wet corpses lying on the slabs of the Morgue, 
 the suicides of yesterday. These hastily set up walls 
 might have been built last year, and the rut of the 
 waggon-wheels in the solid pavement of lava is like 
 a wheel-mark left overnight in the dry mud of a 
 country road. The brothel and the temple are here, 
 side by side, and here, only just cleansed from its 
 burial, is a villa, its walls still bright with paint, still 
 eloquent with frescoes, the little bronze and marble 
 images still smiling about the fountains and flower- 
 beds of the central garden; a pot, the yellow rust 
 of lava corroding it, set over the fire which went out 
 suddenly on that twenty-fourth of August, A.D. 79. 
 Feeling the stone and mortar of these jerry-built 
 walls, noting the conventional glibness of these 
 graceful decorative paintings, realising, by the very
 
 126 NAPLES 
 
 signs of its "pleasant sins," that here, after all, was 
 but the Brighton of its day, you seem, by the con- 
 sciousness of all that is trivial, temporary, accidental 
 in it, to be brought closer to that so strangely 
 capricious survival of ancient death. And then, 
 going out into the road, in the first step beyond the 
 hedge, in the first breath of relief at the sight of 
 the little station, the two hotels for visitors, the 
 quiet fields in which men are digging, fruitful fields 
 stretching out to the roots of the mountains all 
 around, Vesuvius smoking placidly above, this un- 
 bearable sense of the nearness of life suspended so 
 many years ago drops back suddenly, and again it is 
 as if it had never been, and again you have persuaded 
 yourself that this is after all only a show in a mu- 
 seum, a collection of curiosities, a toy city which 
 had never really had anything too intimate to do 
 with humanity. 
 
 VI 
 
 There is in Naples the image of a world, which 
 adds a new world to one's contemplation, not less 
 vivid and swarming than those streets; and that 
 world of the Aquarium seems as real, as natural, in 
 all its fantastic, extravagant, and enigmatical life, as 
 the life of human beings. It is, indeed, first by its 
 humanity that it strikes us, by the strange irony of 
 the likeness which one sees in these scaled, pulpy, 
 and many-tentacled creatures of the sea, in the very
 
 NAPLES 127 
 
 expression of their eyes and bodies, and also in the 
 whole manner of their occupations among the rocks 
 and their neighbours, with the faces and the doings 
 of men. There is not a human vice or absurdity 
 which I have not seemed to see in these drowsy, and 
 irritable, and rapacious, and surly, and preoccupied 
 creatures, their whole lives spent in catching flies 
 (with what an elaborate mechanism of means to that 
 end!) in coiling and uncoiling an army of suckers to 
 the very obliteration, almost, of the centre of their 
 being; in fanning themselves, with soft, unresting 
 wings, forwards and backwards, forwards and back- 
 wards, for ever, neither turning nor ceasing for a 
 moment. Some have the aspect of eternal age, as 
 others have the curse of eternal activity. In the 
 great, sullen, flat creatures with their purple bodies, 
 their bull-dog jaws, their heavy eyes, I see the gross 
 bourgeois, as he is everywhere in the world; it 
 seems that he inhabits the water as he inhabits the 
 earth, and with the same authority. Is there not a 
 heavy coquetry in the motions of a certain kind of 
 eel, the very effervescence of bumptious youth in 
 'the little fishes with fins which look like arms 
 a-kimbo, the very parody of -our aspirations in the 
 diaphanous, delicately coloured creatures, edged 
 with lavender, who have puffed all their life into 
 their heads, which for ever pant and strain upwards 
 like balloons, as if trying to free themselves of the 
 little tangle of body still left to them? Then, too, 
 there is a fantasy more terrible than any nightmare,
 
 128 NAPLES 
 
 a soft, seductively coloured, deceptive, strangling 
 life in these clinging, and absorbing, and stealthy 
 apparitions of the sea, which come and go in the 
 water with the sudden and soft violence of the 
 water itself. 
 
 Coming up out of the twilight, where I have 
 been gazing into the glass boxes filled with water, 
 wondering at these uneasy miracles of the sense of 
 touch, I find myself replunged into the bustle of 
 Naples; for the concert has begun in the Villa, and 
 people are walking to and fro under the trees, and 
 sitting on the chairs about the band-stand, listening 
 to the harsh din of those brass instruments playing 
 their noisy, military, Italian music. The garden of 
 the Villa Nazionale lies for a mile along the sea- 
 front, from the Largo della Vittoria almost to the 
 beginning of Posillipo, and you can stand under the 
 curdling blossoms of the Judas trees, and still see 
 the blue water shining under the afternoon sun or 
 the tossing of the little waves when the wind begins 
 to blow them grey. On the afternoon when I had 
 visited the Aquarium, clouds began to climb over 
 the top of the hill, catching stormy colours and then 
 turning leaden; and presently the concert came 
 abruptly to an end, as the rain poured with a straight, 
 steady violence, scattering the people hither and 
 thither into the little wooden cafe's, under the thin 
 branches of trees, under the drooping hoods of 
 cabs, and behind the flapping curtains of trams. I 
 sat in one of the cafes and watched the hurry of
 
 NAPLES 129 
 
 people unprepared for anything but sunshine; the 
 blind rush through the puddles, the shelterless 
 lingering under dripping trees, the half-desperate, 
 half-hoping glances upward at the grey sky, which 
 might be blue again at any moment or perhaps 
 not for an hour's time. All the brightness, the 
 unconsidering gaiety of Naples had gone out like 
 a candle in the wind ; life seemed to come angrily to 
 a pause, in this sudden hostility of nature. Pres- 
 ently I heard the twanging of a string: two men 
 with mandolin and fiddle were standing in the 
 doorway, and a woman began to sing one of the 
 Piedigrotta songs. A man carrying a cloth-covered 
 box came in, took off his cap, and went smilingly, 
 persistently, from table to table with his tortoise- 
 shell combs, his corals, and his brooches of lava. 
 Outside the window crouched a dark, handsome, 
 half-witted beggar-girl, with her red handkerchief 
 over her head, her white teeth shining in a smile; 
 she held out her little brown hand, beckoning for 
 alms; and standing there, bare-footed in the rain, 
 seemed to bring back the Neapolitan accent to 
 Naples. 
 SPRING, 1897. 
 
 9
 
 FLORENCE : AN INTERPRETATION
 
 FLORENCE: AN INTERPRETATION 
 
 I. DONATE LLO 
 
 FLORENCE is a corridor, through which the beauty 
 and finery of the world have passed. That new 
 Spring which Botticelli painted, and which was the 
 Renaissance, flowered into the Florentine lilies with 
 more of its ardour, and a more "hard and deter- 
 minate outline," than in any other Italian soil. 
 Giotto's Campanile, itself a lily, is the seal and sig- 
 nature of what in Florence is straight, slender, full 
 of formal grace. Florentine art has always been an 
 art of form, of delicate but precise outline, and the 
 shape of the city, of its bridges and palaces, is of a 
 severe elegance, and it lies, glittering like silver and 
 with all the daintiness of silver-work, in the hollow 
 of the Apennines. Looking down on it from San 
 Miniato, Brunelleschi's dome and the dragon-neck 
 of the Palazzo Vecchio and the flowerlike Campanile 
 stand out like great jewels from the casket, and 
 the Arno clasps it like a jewelled band. It is gar- 
 landed with gardens, encircled with hills, but it is 
 the river that completes its beauty. 
 
 There are more masterpieces in Florence than in 
 
 133
 
 i 3 4 FLORENCE 
 
 any city in the world. Masterpieces are at every 
 street corner, there are whole squares of master- 
 pieces, like that square which contains Brunel- 
 leschi's dome, Giotto's tower, and Ghiberti's gates. 
 Santa Maria Novella conceals wonders, but is there 
 anything inside more lovely than those outer walls 
 of marble? The visitor hastening to see the sculp- 
 ture which it contains forgets to realise how much 
 the Bargello is one of its own treasures. Picture- 
 galleries in palaces call one away from what is 
 lovely in the streets, the river-side, the bridges, 
 though indeed the art of the bridges, the aspect 
 which has come to that river-side, are akin to all 
 that Florence has created in paint and marble in 
 those galleries. If we could endure so continual a 
 pressure and solicitation of beauty, no city would 
 be so good to live in as Florence ; but the eyes cannot 
 take rest in it: they are preoccupied, indoors and 
 out of doors; this prevalence of rare things becomes 
 almost an oppression. That is why it is better to 
 live outside the gates, a little way up one of the 
 hillsides: to look down on Florence, "washed in the 
 morning water-gold," as Browning saw it, or at 
 night, like a flower that opens secretly with evening, 
 and to go down into it on daily errands, to see one 
 beautiful thing and come away. 
 
 Florence to-day is like a woman who has been 
 praised so long that she has become self-conscious, 
 and seems to have no longer an individual life of 
 her own, but to await homage. Her Venus typifies
 
 FLORENCE 135 
 
 her, the chilly conscious Venus of the Medici. She 
 has no sorcery, and there is no part of her charm 
 which you cannot define. Time scarcely changes 
 her, and she suffices to the American tourist as easily 
 as she sufficed to Cosimo. Hers are all tangible 
 beauties and all forms of life in which the rhythm 
 is never broken. Excess is alien to her; to her, ex- 
 uberance is not beauty. The mystery of Leonardo 
 is a foreign thing to her, which comes and goes in 
 her midst, a visitor welcomed but not understood. 
 She understands Verrocchio. Michelangelo leaves 
 in one of her courtly chapels a rock half hewn out 
 of the earth itself: that "Day" who lives with a 
 more intense, complete, and overpowering life than 
 the other more finished figures. But Florence is 
 never really at home with Michelangelo. She made 
 Donatello in her own image. 
 
 In Florence there is nothing of the majesty of 
 Rome nor of the sea-magic of Venice. Rome is 
 made out of the eternal hills, on which the ends of 
 the world have come, age by age; it is the city 
 made glorious by Michelangelo and Michelangelo 
 typifies its glories. Venice is born out of the 
 marriage of land and sea, and it was Titian who 
 took up the Doge's ring out of the water, and per- 
 petuated the new ecstasy of colour. But Florence, 
 marvellously built, every stone set decorously on 
 stone, a conscious work of craftsmen upon material 
 naturally adaptable, is represented rather by sculp- 
 ture than by painting, and, in painting, by precise
 
 i 3 6 FLORENCE 
 
 and sensitive design, an almost sculptured out- 
 line. Florence, the city of all the arts, the corridor 
 through which all the arts have passed and in which 
 they still linger, is the city made to be a shrine for 
 Donatello. 
 
 To Donatello there was no conflict between the 
 rhythm of beauty and the rhythm of life ; none even 
 between a sense of reality exasperated to a point of 
 fierce intensity and a suavity and grace of form 
 which has in it a quality of abstract joy ; none between 
 a decoration of great elaborateness and a culmi- 
 nating effect of entire simpleness, a sufficing unity. 
 He has no distinction to make between reality and 
 the ideal; he has no prejudice against ugliness, yet 
 never falls into the grotesque; he will work in any 
 medium; adopt, as it seems, any manner; yet an 
 individuality, curiously strange and certain, is seen 
 in all his work, through all his disguises ; there is as 
 sharp a savour in his laughing and dancing children 
 as in his Magdalen who has sinned and grown old. 
 He is part of the Renaissance, and, together with 
 Botticelli, expresses the secret and perpetuates the 
 delicate, severe essence of Florence, as it came in 
 that age to perfection. 
 
 Between the Greeks and Donatello there had 
 been great sculpture; but the art, as an individual 
 and organic thing, awoke only in Donatello. The 
 sculptors of the Gothic cathedrals, the carvers of 
 tombs, had inspirations of genius, and no art in 
 bronze or marble could do things finer of their kind
 
 FLORENCE 137 
 
 than those representations of death, in which the 
 faith of the Middle Ages seems to survive. There is 
 a bronze tombstone in the church of S. Trinita in 
 Florence which, with its wry mouth and puckered 
 eyelids, denoting a ghastly continuance of life, 
 suggests almost the huddled grandeur, here funereal, 
 of Rodin's Balzac. How much Donatello learnt 
 from these great craftsmen may be seen at Siena, 
 in the bronze tombstone of Bishop Pecci. The 
 folds are freer, easier, with less of that mighty 
 emphasis of the Middle Ages; and they are definite, 
 imagined as covering the limbs of an actual body. 
 The bronze becomes almost pictorial. And, as we 
 see Donatello going back to the Middle Ages, re- 
 viving a manner and yet experimenting upon it, 
 so we see him experimenting with the energy of life 
 itself, in all directions, not content without turning 
 bronze or marble or wood or stone to his own uses, 
 and leaving them with new possibilities for others; 
 for Rodin, certainly, who has learned many of his 
 secrets. With Donatello awakens and dies a whole 
 art of his own, but after him ancient sculpture is 
 over and modern sculpture has begun. 
 
 To see the likeness between Donatello and that 
 fresh, curious and eager, half childlike and wholly 
 experienced spirit and temper which blossomed 
 with the Renaissance, and with special rarity at 
 Florence, it is enough to see the bronze David in 
 the Bargello and the Judith and Holof ernes in the 
 Loggia. The David of Michelangelo, the copy made
 
 138 FLORENCE 
 
 of it, dominates Florence, a giant against its sky; 
 but it is not of the nature of Florence, a native 
 growth. It has an admirable strength, an easy 
 bigness; but how much more Florentine, how much 
 more interesting, the subtle, almost perverse dainti- 
 ness of Donatello! Again, in the Loggia, how sig- 
 nificant it is to contrast the Judith of Donatello, 
 with its exquisite quietude, in which horror becomes 
 beauty, quieted into eternal rest, with the Perseus of 
 Cellini, its neighbour there, and so out of place. The 
 Perseus is done with conscious heat and exterior 
 vivacity of life, with an air of bravado in the whole 
 pose : the generalised limbs and features, the decora- 
 tive body, showy and fine, the terrorless Medusa 
 head from which the blood drips like clotted pearls, 
 the trunk from which blood sprouts like a bunch of 
 grapes; the over-elaborated pedestal, with the 
 marble Isises, its niches with restless bronze figures 
 dancing, or meaninglessly arrested. Michelangelo 
 is great and Cellini is little, but both seem to be set 
 up in Florence for the better identification of the 
 Florentine spirit in Donatello. 
 
 In the David we have a delicate manly joy, too 
 simple to be heroic, too young to be conscious of 
 the greatness of an instinctive action; and in the 
 flower-like and girlish body, equipped so daintily 
 and so daringly for warfare, Donatello has created 
 the modern type of youthful male beauty, the keen- 
 witted younger brother of the Faun of Praxiteles, 
 in whom the soul has awakened, but only to a keener
 
 FLORENCE 139 
 
 consciousness of the delightfulness of life. The face 
 under the garlanded hat is full of that modern 
 beauty in which expression counts for so much; 
 but the boy is already unconscious of the terrible 
 head on which his mailed foot treads. Judith, as 
 she raises the sword to cut through the offered 
 neck of Holof ernes, has a more passionate meaning 
 in her eyes; her serene, slender, and elegant beauty 
 is the destructive beauty of woman, and the man 
 who sits at her feet, helpless, dazed by lust, with 
 closed eyes and open palms, awaits death sleepily, 
 like a lover. This man and this woman keep the 
 eternal attitude with a ghastly and lovely placidity ; 
 and it is with a faultless sense of beauty that Dona- 
 tello has woven them together into this mortal 
 rhythm. 
 
 In the Judith the two bodies, standing and sitting, 
 fit into one as if moulded out of a single substance, 
 yet with no loss of whatever is essential in the drama. 
 And in the David also there is a like flawless in- 
 genuity of composition: the head, with its helmet, 
 fitting into the space between the two legs, one wing 
 of the helmet broken sharp off on the side next to 
 the ground, the other rising up the leg along the 
 greaves, so decoratively ; the toes which curl over 
 in their bronze sandals on the lower part of the dead 
 cheek, between the beard and moustache ; the decora- 
 tive value, dainty, not terrifying, of the decapitated 
 head on which the flower-like creature tramples. 
 
 In the Judith and in the David, which are both
 
 140 FLORENCE 
 
 made out of terrible subjects, there is an equal share 
 of that singular joy which we find somewhere in 
 almost all the best work of Donatello. Does it 
 come to them from a capture of life or from a last 
 perfection of style? It is to be distinguished, giving 
 a thrilling, not easily explicable quality of attraction 
 to work not in itself at first attractive. In the Zuc- 
 cone of the Campanile we have a harmony, unlike 
 any other in sculpture, except perhaps in some of 
 those statues on Gothic cathedrals to which an almost 
 grotesque poignancy seems to come by some humble 
 accident; a harmony made out of elements of 
 frankly apprehended uncouthness, in head, figure, 
 and drapery, set to become mutually significant. 
 In the Poggio Bracciolini of the Cathedral there is 
 the same acceptance of fact, a kind of psychological 
 treatment giving its value to this elaborately simple 
 dignity. In the St. George we have a kind of com- 
 promise, not perhaps for once wholly satisfying, be- 
 tween the heroic Greek sculpture and the knightly 
 sculpture of the Middle Ages. In medallions of the 
 Madonna, and in busts of children (like the St. 
 Lawrence of the Sacristy) there is an equal inten- 
 sity, in the one of pathos, in the other of innocence, 
 in which the feeling and the form are precisely in 
 balance ; but in works like the wooden statue of the 
 Magdalen, the marble statue of John the Baptist, 
 and the painted terra-cotta bust of Niccol6 da Uz- 
 zano, there is a kind of lean and hungry realism 
 which brings a new fierce quality, almost but not
 
 FLORENCE 141 
 
 quite eager enough to break through the bounds of 
 form. The Magdalen is a representation of an 
 aged sinner, a kind of Vieille Heaulmi&re done very 
 literally after nature, and it rivals and excels all 
 that has been done in the typically Spanish art of 
 wood-carving. In the bust of Niccol6 da Uzzano 
 experiment is carried further, has recurred to the 
 forgotten art of painting sculpture: and the head, 
 with the blood in its cheeks, the eyeballs alive under 
 the brows, which seems to turn visibly on its wrinkled 
 neck and to be about to open its mouth and speak, 
 has a terrifying but not really grotesque beauty, 
 though indeed a bewildering and exciting thing, 
 perhaps too intimately and deceptively human. 
 
 And if, in these masterpieces of an art which has 
 seemed ready to give up everything for expression, 
 an art in which beauty begins to be as passionately 
 troubled as the later art of Botticelli, but for a 
 human not for a religious passion, the rhythm of 
 life may seem to be in danger of overflowing the 
 rhythm of formal beauty, there is at least one piece 
 of work, the relief in sandstone of the Annunciation 
 in Santa Croce, in which the decorative quality 
 comes to be almost everything. Under the frame 
 of grey and gold, with laughing and mocking child- 
 ren at the top, there is something sumptuous, fantas- 
 tically elegant in the elaborate patterns of gold and 
 scroll-work, discs, cones, tassels, and, everywhere, 
 wings; in the gold at the borders of the robes, and 
 at the wrists, and on the angels' shoulders, and in
 
 142 FLORENCE 
 
 the ribbons that flutter out a wing's length, and on 
 the binding of the book which the Virgin holds in her 
 hand. In the two exquisite and sensitive figures, 
 which stand inside the frame as if inside an open door, 
 there is something of the rhythm of Botticelli, with an 
 even more personal, alluring, not quite simple grace of 
 aspect. Drama and decoration go well together, nei- 
 ther losing for the other's sake, in such splendid work 
 in relief as the dance of the daughter of Herodias 
 in the Baptistery at Siena. Ghiberti's Baptism of 
 Christ faces it, on the brighter side of Jacopo della 
 Quercia's- font, for which it was done; yet even 
 Ghiberti seems emphatic and obvious after it. The 
 dance is over, Salome has brought in the head, and 
 shrinks back, struck suddenly aghast at what she has 
 done, while her mother covers her face with her 
 hands, and only Herod, unmoved, leans forward and 
 looks at the head which a servant hands to him on a 
 platter. There is detail, but all serves the illusion 
 while it helps the decoration: the table, the dishes, 
 the napkin, the windows beyond, and a player with 
 a mandolin, and, yet beyond, other idle heads at 
 other windows. Here the rhythm is added, like 
 a fine transparent garment, to the invention, the 
 reality. 
 
 But it is in the Cantoria that all Donatello's 
 qualities of abundant and rhythmical life fall and 
 flow together, like the sea in its unbroken harmony 
 of movement. Wave interlaces wave of laughing 
 and leaping children, who dance to a melody which
 
 FLORENCE 143 
 
 they render visible, and are the only carven things 
 in the world that justify Keats when he says in his 
 " Ode on a Grecian Urn" : 
 
 "Heard melodies are sweet, but those unheard 
 Are sweeter." 
 
 So much music has never been put literally into 
 marble. In the Cantoria of Luca della Robbia, over 
 against it on the walls of the Bargello, the music, 
 though it has been an inspiration, is tamed to an- 
 other medium, where it becomes quiescent, an in- 
 audible gesture. And there, with all its gracious 
 and simple beauty, the whole design remains a 
 little formal, does not live equally and with an inner 
 life throughout the whole squared and framed series 
 of groups. But in Donatello one impulse of exul- 
 tation flows and reflows, unchecked, wave-like, 
 coming and going with an irresistible joy. And 
 there is exquisite and appropriate beauty in the 
 whole design of the gallery, with its delicately formal 
 vases and shells, its subtle touches of green and 
 gold, its blue and orange discs in the under-panels, 
 where mosaic is added to marble with a new and 
 admirable sense of decoration. The faint mosaic 
 background throughout is itself an invention. 
 Here, for once, is amplitude of decoration, all that 
 the Renaissance ever used or misused, adjusted 
 with a perfect sense of the whole, whose outline it 
 fills, does not overflow, with all the vitality of 
 beauty.
 
 i 4 4 FLORENCE 
 
 II. LEONARDO DA VINCI 
 
 The wisdom and mystery of Leonardo have 
 nothing in them akin to Florence, yet it was at 
 Florence, as Pater tells us, that "Leonardo's history 
 is the history of his art; he himself is lost in the 
 bright cloud of it." It was in Florence, and from 
 Verrocchio, that Leonardo learned the desire of 
 perfection and the love of toil. But his desires were 
 never tangible or limited, he brought to this city of 
 clear outline and exquisite finality something which 
 could never be contained within the limits that sat- 
 isfied it. It was in Florence that what was subtlest 
 in his vision came to him, and his model and im- 
 age of the soul was found in a Florentine woman; 
 though indeed, if the Renaissance made Monna 
 Lisa, she is nearer sister to the Sphinx than to Simon- 
 etta. In the aspect of Monna Lisa there is more 
 than the revelation of life or the creation of form; 
 there is a suggestion of something more beautiful 
 than the beauty of visible things; she has a secret, 
 which she will not tell. To a city so satisfied with 
 the world, so content to be alive in a world decorated 
 after its pleasure, Leonardo comes as startlingly as 
 Savonarola, yet with no mission. Savonarola strips 
 off one lovely veil after another from the beauty of 
 mortal things, rending them angrily; but Leonardo 
 transfigures reality as with a new veil, adding mystery 
 to beauty, and awakening a new longing in the mind. 
 What he learned from Florence he gave back in a
 
 FLORENCE 145 
 
 rarer gift, and he remains there, an exception, as he 
 must remain always for the whole world, because 
 no personality so flawless and so unlimited has yet 
 been seen among men. 
 
 In Leonardo da Vinci the desire of perfection was 
 organic. He bewildered his contemporaries and 
 he has bewildered later students of his life and work 
 by a simple, undeviating devotion to the perfect 
 achievement of everything to which he set his hand. 
 Bandello sums up for us the world's naive astonish- 
 ment that any artist should be always "about his 
 father's business" in a narrative of how at one time 
 he would stand on his scaffolding, busy painting, 
 from morning to night, and then do nothing for 
 three or four days but "spend an hour or two in 
 contemplating his work, examining and criticising 
 his figures," and then, in the heat of the day, walk 
 from the other end of Florence, "mount the scaffold- 
 ing, seize a brush, add two or three touches to a 
 single figure, and return forthwith." In 1501 a 
 Carmelite priest in Florence answers the questionings 
 of Isabella d' Este: "Leonardo's life," he says, "is 
 changeful and uncertain; it is thought that he lives 
 only for the day. Since he has been in Florence he 
 has worked only on one cartoon. . . . The 
 study is not yet complete. . . . He is entirely 
 wrapped up in geometry and has no patience for 
 painting." For sixteen years he is at work on the 
 equestrian statue of Francesco Sforza, Duke of Milan, 
 of which all trace has now disappeared ; the portrait
 
 146 FLORENCE 
 
 of Monna Lisa, after four years' work upon it, seemed 
 to him unfinished. And, meanwhile, he has given 
 up years to the study of the flight of birds, and an- 
 nounces that he has discovered the secret of human 
 flight; he has inspected strongholds for Cesare 
 Borgia, turned the course of the Arno, invented 
 masques and tourneys for the marriage of the Sforzas, 
 written his great "Treatise on Painting," and is 
 famed for his skill in playing on a lyre of his own 
 invention, and for his bodily strength and princely 
 manners. At one moment we find an observer 
 writing of him: "His mathematical experiments 
 have withdrawn him from painting to such an extent 
 that he cannot endure the sight of a brush." And 
 it is after this, when he is already fifty years of age, 
 that his great period of painting begins. He worked 
 with infinite slowness, and a Quattrocentist poet 
 alludes to Leonardo as one who "perhaps excels all 
 others, yet cannot tear himself away from a picture, 
 and in many years scarce brings one to completion." 
 Leonardo aimed at nothing less than finality, and 
 when he left his own art for science, or for the at- 
 tainment of no matter what end, he was aiming 
 at the perfecting of a universal genius, the dream of 
 that age, and almost, in him, a literally accomplished 
 fact. In a famous letter recommending himself 
 to the Duke of Milan, he declares with assurance: 
 " I believe that I could equal any other, as regards 
 works in architecture, both public and private. I 
 can likewise conduct water from one place to an-
 
 FLORENCE 147 
 
 other. Furthermore, I can execute works in sculp- 
 ture, marble, bronze, or terra-cotta. In painting, 
 also, I can do what can be done as well as any other, 
 be he who he may." Already, at the age of thirty, 
 he can say all that with truth, and the passion of 
 curiosity, the rage of patient labour, the progress 
 along all roads to all ends, is to go on without slack- 
 ening to the time of his death, at only a few years 
 from seventy. But where Leonardo differs from all 
 other seekers after many secrets is in his resolve to 
 master each in turn completely, and not to aban- 
 don any one, even after it has been solved. He is 
 the Don Juan of knowledge, who has never for- 
 saken a mistress, and for whom no mistress has 
 been unfruitful. 
 
 And the reason of this is that he is moved not 
 by any abstract desire of culture, but by pure 
 curiosity, a quite simple desire of all experience and 
 all beauty. Leonardo's supreme aim was at the 
 perfecting of himself, himself as one of the fine 
 arts. It is for this that he seems to forsake the 
 chief task set before him, that he is content to seem 
 like one who has lost his way : the way is nothing to 
 him; the end and the way are always with him, for 
 he himself is both the end and the way. 
 
 "A good painter," said Leonardo, "has two chief 
 objects to paint : man and the intentions of his soul. 
 The former is easy, the latter hard, for it must be 
 expressed by gesture and movements of the limbs." 
 And he says elsewhere: "That figure is not good
 
 148 FLORENCE 
 
 which does not express through its gestures the 
 passions of its soul." Thus he becomes, more than 
 any other painter, the painter of the soul. The soul 
 of beautiful women or beautiful youths seemed to 
 become visible to him in a certain smile of the lips 
 and eyes, and in the subtle movement of the wrist 
 and fingers. He has created, not only in the Gio- 
 conda, a clairvoyant smile, which is the smile of 
 a mysterious wisdom hidden in things. He paints 
 lips which, if they spoke, could but say, by the 
 mere using of words, some less essential thing, some 
 less intimate secret of the soul. No other painter 
 has, like Leonardo, painted wisdom. What other 
 painters, if they attempt to render, attempt to 
 render by symbols, Leonardo draws, by some en- 
 chantment, out of reluctant lips and eyes and 
 hands, and, by the gesture of the body, speaks the 
 passions of the soul. 
 
 That "there can be no perfect beauty without 
 some strangeness in the proportion" would have 
 been conceded by Leonardo, who, indeed, advised 
 artists to look for something in nature which is 
 beyond nature, not only in faces and bodies, but in 
 veined marble, in the stains on walls, in the shapes 
 of clouds, and in water and fire. His pictures are 
 disquieting to those not immediately and wholly 
 responsive to them ; the eyes of Monna Lisa, as they 
 follow you about the Salon Carre 1 of the Louvre, 
 seem to be asking some seductive and impenetrable 
 question, on which all one's happiness may depend.
 
 FLORENCE 149 
 
 In the followers of Leonardo, this almost perverse 
 subtlety of innocence becomes mannered; "pious 
 and sweet, as is their style," to apply a phrase used 
 of Leonardo himself by Isabella d' Este. It is sig- 
 nificant that the word which comes first to one's 
 lips in speaking of Leonardo should be the word 
 grace, and not, as with Michelangelo, strength, or, 
 as with Raphael, skill. In Michelangelo, strength 
 frequently becomes grace; in Leonardo, grace itself 
 becomes intensified to something which is beyond 
 the utmost strength. Now the artist should never 
 consciously aim at strength; but, conscious of his 
 strength, he should aim at the utmost subtlety of 
 beauty. Leonardo, in his pictures, as in his precepts, 
 aims at nothing less than perfection; that is, the 
 balance of every quality. Now grace is perfect 
 balance, grace being all that need appear in strength 
 in action. 
 
 What I mean will be quite clear if I recall two 
 Greek marbles which I once saw in a private exhi- 
 bition in London. In one, the head of an old man, 
 strength went as far as strength could go without 
 being changed into some further and higher sub- 
 stance. The truth and energy of this head, gnarled 
 and wry, with its insistence on all the cavities and 
 disgraces of age, on the falling to pieces of the once 
 shapely house of life, are only to be compared, in 
 Greek work, with the drunken old woman in the Glyp- 
 tothek at Munich, or in modern work, with "La 
 vieille Heaulmiere" of Rodin. The drunken woman
 
 150 FLORENCE 
 
 is, indeed, a more "furrowing lesson in life," as she 
 sits hugging her wine-jar; you see the rocky shoul- 
 der blades, the pits sunk under the collar-bones, 
 the wrinkled hollows under the lifted chin, the nose 
 drawn upwards by the senile movement of the mouth 
 which still thirsts. In the old man, once thought 
 to be Seneca, you have still the restraining force of 
 a will which endures age and pain with gravity. 
 But consider, in this sculptor's work, the point to 
 which strength and the desire of truth have carried 
 it. There is truth and there is strength, and there 
 is the beauty which grows up inevitably out of a 
 sufficiently powerful truth. But let us look across 
 at another head, the head of a woman, which does 
 not seem clever at all; which seems, as one first 
 catches sight of it, curiously simple, as if the diffi- 
 culties of the art of sculpture had been evaded rather 
 than conquered, yet which ravishes the mind into a 
 certain quiet and fulness of delight. The modelling 
 is nowhere obvious: every outline is smoothed and 
 rounded, nothing leaps out upon one and seizes an 
 unwilling admiration. You do not notice it for 
 strength, for any ingenious mastery of any evident 
 difficulty. Venus rose so out of the waters, when 
 human beauty came consciously into the world, 
 not startling any one, but like a dream which has 
 come true. The forehead and cheeks are no subtler 
 than a flower; the neck, in its breadth from chin to 
 nape, has no refinements upon an actual neck in 
 which one has felt life rather than seen beauty.
 
 FLORENCE 151 
 
 The eyes and lips settle down into no fixed expression 
 by which one can remember them; but some 
 infinitely mysterious expression seems to flow 
 through them as through the eyes and lips of a 
 woman's head by Leonardo. And you will see what 
 is not in the other head, the lack of which leaves it 
 where it is : something incalculable, something which 
 begins where truth leaves off, something which 
 transfigures truth. 
 
 And I am not sure that you will not find this 
 something in the bronze of "La vieille Heaulmiere" 
 in the Luxembourg Gallery. Wasted, ruinous, 
 "lean, wizen, like a small dry tree," this piteous 
 body remembers the body it had when it was young, 
 and the beauty is still there, in the lovely skeleton 
 that shows right through the flesh, in the delicate 
 contours of the almost hairless head, in the indestruc- 
 tible grace of the profile. This "poor old light 
 woman" is more tragic than the old drunken woman 
 of the Munich Gallery; but, as one looks at the old 
 drunken woman, one sees only the sordid pity of 
 things as they are, while "La vieille Heaulmiere" is 
 saying "Thus endeth all the beauty of us," as it 
 can be said only by those who have fastened "the 
 sweet yoke" of beauty upon the necks of the world. 
 
 Our time is the time in which men seem to them- 
 selves to have first discovered the beauty of ugly and 
 of common things. There is a whole modern litera- 
 ture, and there is a whole modern art, and even 
 music, in which men have set themselves to be ugly
 
 i 5 2 FLORENCE 
 
 with intention, as they once set themselves to the 
 more difficult achievement of beauty. They forget 
 that there is nothing so twisted in nature or in men's 
 brains that has not been drawn by some Eastern 
 weaver of patterns, or carved by some Western ape 
 of life. What all but a few men of genius have for- 
 gotten in all ages is that beauty is in no literal ren- 
 dering of anything, Venus or the satyr ; but may wash 
 like a flood of air over either Venus or the satyr, 
 making either beautiful. It is enough to compare any 
 grotesque and evil head in the best of Beardsley's 
 drawings with Leonardo's head of Judas in the 
 Windsor Library, or with one of those bitter and 
 malevolent heads full of insane fury and the energy 
 of the beasts, which he scattered over the pages of 
 his sketch-book. These have a beauty not less 
 restrained, in its poised and perfected violence, 
 than the beauty of mysterious peace which broods 
 over the "Virgin of the Rocks." To Beardsley the 
 thing drawn must remain ugly through all the beauty 
 of the drawing, and must hurt. The sculptor of 
 the woman's head, if he had done the head of the 
 old man, would have lost nothing that is character- 
 istic in the grimace of eyes and mouth, but he would 
 have touched it with I know not what magic in his 
 fingers, and it would have ravished us, like the other, 
 into some quiet heaven of delight. 
 
 Then, in this transfiguring art of Leonardo, there 
 is, in every picture, not only a thing of perfectly 
 achieved beauty, but a new thing. We see him,
 
 FLORENCE 153 
 
 before every one else, inventing landscape, inventing 
 a whole new movement for an equestrian statue; 
 inventing the first wholly simple and natural treat- 
 ment of the Virgin and Child; inventing, in the 
 Gioconda, a new art of portrait-painting, in which a 
 woman's soul is, for the first time, seen smiling. He 
 was content to do nothing as it had been done 
 before, as he was content to do nothing without 
 perfection. 
 
 "It is thought," said the Carmelite, "that he 
 lives only for the day." Leonardo has the patience 
 of one who, instigated by continual inspiration, 
 knows that inspiration is an impulse, not an ac- 
 complishment. More than others, he waited on it, 
 yet without abandoning himself to a too confident 
 repose in its first promptings. It was part of his 
 genius to know how to leave off working and how to 
 return to work. He gives you in a picture nothing 
 but inspiration, because he fills up the inevitable 
 gaps and intervals by a calculated absence, and the 
 achievement of other tasks. He returns to his idea 
 again and again, as his sketches show us, supple- 
 menting inspiration by a finer inspiration; never 
 weary, yet never perhaps satisfied. As he achieved 
 more than others so he desired more ; and in the most 
 eloquent words which he wrote he has said an 
 epilogue over the passing of all earthly beauty " O 
 Time! consumer of all things; O envious age! thou 
 dost destroy all things and devour all things with the 
 relentless teeth of years, little by little, in a slow
 
 i 5 4 FLORENCE 
 
 death. Helen, when she looked in her mirror, seeing 
 the withered wrinkles made in her face by old age, 
 wept and wondered why she had twice been carried 
 away." 
 
 III. A TRIUMPH OF LORENZO DE* MEDICI 
 
 While Leonardo was thus pitying the fate of 
 men and women in the old age of Helen, and saying, 
 for his own comfort, that "lovely mortal things 
 pass, but not art," Florence was rejoicing, with only 
 momentary after- thoughts, in its newly awakened 
 consciousness of what could be done to colour and 
 inspirit life, day by day, in an existence lived after 
 what seemed to be the blithe Greek pattern. It 
 was Lorenzo de' Medici who gave the liveliest ut- 
 terance to this new Paganism and set down most 
 definitely, in a lovely form, for a " Triumph of Bac- 
 chus and Ariadne," no doubt charioted gallantly 
 through the streets, the conclusion of the age. His 
 verses, which I have translated very literally, mark 
 a stage, and are a necessary part, of my interpreta- 
 tion of Florence. 
 
 What a lovely thing this Youth is, 
 If but Youth would always stay so! 
 You'd be happy? be to-day so, 
 In to-morrow's tale no truth is.
 
 FLORENCE 155 
 
 Here is Bacchus, and beside him 
 Ariadne, lovely, loving; 
 Time flies, yet, although they chide him, 
 Their love moves not with his moving. 
 Nymphs and fauns and all folk roving 
 Are for ever blithe and gay so. 
 You'd be happy? be to-day so, 
 In to-morrow's tale no truth is. 
 
 All these little jolly satyrs, 
 Following on the nymphs to find them, 
 Have in forests and in caverns 
 Laid a hundred snares to bind them; 
 Heats of Bacchus urge and blind them 
 Till they dance and leap astray so. 
 You'd be happy? be to-day so, 
 In to-morrow's tale no truth is. 
 
 And the little nymphs are grateful 
 By their satyrs to be singled; 
 Who, that is not foul and hateful, 
 Would put out a fire Love kindled? 
 All together, mixed and mingled, 
 Feast their youth and years away so. 
 You'd be happy? be to-day so, 
 In to-morrow's tale no truth is. 
 
 Next Silenus follows, sunken 
 On the ass's back, a burthen; 
 He is gay and old and drunken, 
 Years of fatness bind his girth in,
 
 156 FLORENCE 
 
 Heaping loads of wine and mirth in, 
 Till he can but laugh and sway so. 
 You'd be happy? be to-day so, 
 In to-morrow's tale no truth is. 
 
 Midas follows, and his seizure 
 Turns to gold all things created. 
 But what pleasure to have treasure 
 When desire is unabated? 
 With what water shall be sated 
 Thirst no sweetness can allay so? 
 You'd be happy? be to-day so, 
 In to-morrow's tale no truth is. 
 
 Open ears wide, every creature: 
 None can count upon to-morrow, 
 But to-day we all and each are 
 Ready, old and young, to borrow 
 Present joy from coming sorrow. 
 Feast our youth and years away so! 
 You'd be happy? be to-day so, 
 In to-morrow's tale no truth is. 
 
 Youths and maidens, every lover, 
 Long live love and long live Bacchus ! 
 When the song and dance are over, 
 Though love's burning sweetness rack us, 
 Toil and care shall never track us. 
 That which must be shall be aye so. 
 You'd be happy? be to-day so, 
 In to-morrow's tale no truth is. 
 What a lovely thing this Youth is, 
 If but Youth would always stay so !
 
 FLORENCE 157 
 
 IV. DANTE AND BOTTICELLI 
 
 The earlier work of Botticelli is like an illustration 
 of that characteristically Renaissance ideal of the 
 painter which we find developed throughout the 
 whole of Leon Battista Alberti's book on painting; 
 and it is in this book that the story of the " Calumny 
 of Apelles" is related, as a subject for painters, 
 precisely as Botticelli was to paint it. To Alberti's 
 theories we must add that new poetry, with its 
 ancient symbolism and its fresh Spring graces, which 
 was being written by Poliziano and by Lorenzo de' 
 Medici. There is little doubt that in the so-called 
 "Mars and Venus" of the National Gallery we have a 
 composition suggested by the " Stanze per la Giostra" 
 of Poliziano, in which Giuliano de' Medici and la 
 bella Simonetta are commemorated ; and the " Prima- 
 vera" has sometimes been taken to be an illustra- 
 tion of another of his poems, though indeed it sums 
 up in a visible image the whole Spring poetry of the 
 Renaissance. All this poetry, like all Botticelli's 
 earlier work, is a literal new birth of Paganism; and 
 Botticelli captures the Greek spirit, not, as Raphael 
 did, by an ardent scholarship, seizing upon the 
 actual forms and the supposed "classic" feeling of 
 Greek sculpture, of the "Three Graces" for instance, 
 in the Cathedral Library at Siena, but by creating a 
 new antiquity of his own over again in Florence, 
 putting his town folk in holiday attire into it, and 
 seeing Simonetta as a Tangara, unconsciously. The
 
 158 FLORENCE 
 
 youth of Greece came back to him by an accidental 
 relationship of the eyes and hand, and by a genius 
 for interpreting slight hints, and re-creating them 
 in a new, fantastic, or fanciful way of his own. He 
 has the secret of the Greek rhythm, and nothing in 
 his feeling comes to break or disturb that rhythm. 
 Whether he paints the birth of Venus or of Christ, 
 he has the same indifference and curiosity: each is 
 a picture to him. The pensive unconcern, what 
 looks like weariness or vague trouble, in the face of 
 the Virgin, is not so conscious a thinking into it of 
 such speculations as Pater finds there (and finds, for 
 us if not for Botticelli, rightly), but an expression 
 chosen for its charm, its melancholy grace, by one 
 who gave it equally to Venus rising sadly out of the 
 waves, and to the Virgin enthroned and indifferent 
 among angels, or holding her child like an idle or 
 heavy toy. Judith going home through the midst 
 of her enemies, with the sword and olive-branch in 
 her hand, Truth in the "Calumny," Simonetta in 
 the picture in London, have all the same look of 
 exquisite weariness, as of those who do or endure 
 great things in a dream, and are all hypnotised by 
 the same meditation, which is really the soul of 
 their visible beauty. And Botticelli sets gravity 
 and sadness in their eyes and lips as he sets jewels 
 of gold on the dress, and curls the hair into curves 
 lovelier than the curves of shells. 
 
 Vasari tells us that under the influence of Savon- 
 arola Botticelli for a time "totally abandoned
 
 FLORENCE 159 
 
 painting." In the "Nativity" in the National Gal- 
 lery we see the effect of that influence upon his art 
 when he went back to it. The Christian convention, 
 which he had accepted as a part of his design just 
 as he accepted the convention of the Venus de 
 Medici for his own Venus, is wholly abandoned ; for 
 he has now a new, personal, fantastical interest in the 
 thing itself, and in his own apocalyptic interpre- 
 tation of it; he invents a new form, in which the 
 suavity is replaced by an ecstasy, and men and 
 angels meet and embrace with uncontrollable emo- 
 tion, and little devils from Hell hide like snakes 
 among the clefts of the rocks. A new quality has 
 come into his work, troubling it, and giving it a 
 new, restless beauty, certainly Christian at last. 
 His design hardens, losing something of its decora- 
 tive beauty; the rhythm contracts, the pensive 
 expression in the faces becomes a personal trouble ; 
 and in the "Pi eta" at Munich (if it is really his) 
 there is almost the grimace of over-strung emotion, 
 as in the S. Zenobio panels there is a hurry of move- 
 ment which is almost feverish. 
 
 It is in this later, mystical period that most 
 writers have preferred to place the greater part of 
 Botticelli's drawings to the "Divine Comedy," and 
 some have even imagined him to have been occupied 
 on them to the very end of his life, during those last 
 years which may not have been so dejected, as we 
 know now that they were not so long drawn out, as 
 Vasari has said. Savonarola did not come to
 
 160 FLORENCE 
 
 Florence till 1482, and there can be little doubt 
 that Botticelli had begun his drawings before 1481, 
 though in that year he must, for a time, have laid 
 them aside, to paint the frescoes in the Sistine 
 Chapel. In 1481 an edition of Dante was published 
 at Florence by Christoforo Landino, containing, in 
 addition to his commentary, a number of engravings, 
 varying in different copies from two to twenty. 
 These engravings, clumsily and badly done as they 
 are, we now know to have been done by some inferior 
 craftsman who had seen, and who tried to imitate, 
 Botticelli's earlier designs to the " Inferno." They 
 end with the nineteenth canto; and, as the book 
 appeared in August, 1481, and we know that Botti- 
 celli went to Rome early in that year, it would 
 appear that he had got so far, and no further, with 
 his drawings, and that the printer could not wait 
 for his return. Their chief 'value for us is that 
 they give us, in their prints to the eight cantos of 
 the "Inferno" for which Botticelli's drawings are 
 missing, some faint, fragmentary, and distorted 
 idea of what those designs may have been. 
 
 The first edition of Dante's "Divine Comedy" 
 was printed in 1472, but manuscript copies still 
 continued to be made for rich collectors, who would 
 have been ashamed to possess so renowned a book 
 in any less costly and beautiful a shape. We know 
 from an anonymous manuscript of the tenth century, 
 in the National Library at Florence, that Botticelli
 
 FLORENCE 161 
 
 "painted and pictured a Dante on parchment for 
 Lorenzo di Pier Francesco de' Medici, which was 
 accounted a marvellous thing." Of this Lorenzo, 
 who died in 1 503, we know also that he commissioned 
 a youthful statue of John the Baptist from Michel- 
 angelo. It was not until the beginning of the nine- 
 teenth century that the drawings of Botticelli were 
 known to exist in the collection of the Duke of 
 Hamilton. At the Hamilton sale in 1882 they were 
 bought by the Berlin Museum. There are eighty- 
 eight sheets of parchment, one of which is double, 
 and contains a single design; three sheets contain 
 no design. The text is written on one side of the 
 parchment, in six columns, each sheet containing a 
 whole canto; and on the other side the designs are 
 sketched with silver-point, and finished in black 
 or brown ink: each design faces the canto which it 
 illustrates. A single page ("Inferno," xviii.) is 
 painted in body-colour. Seven more sheets, con- 
 taining eight more drawings belonging to the same 
 series, were afterwards discovered in the Vatican 
 Library: the chart of Hell, the illustration to canto 
 i., drawn on either side of the same sheet, and the 
 illustrations to cantos ix., x., xii., xiii., xv., and 
 xvi. of the "Inferno." Two of these sheets are 
 wholly, and one partly, coloured, as if in imitation 
 of the illuminated manuscripts of the time. No 
 texts or designs have been found to cantos ii. to 
 vii., or xi. and xiv., of the " Inferno" ; of canto xxxi.
 
 162 FLORENCE 
 
 of the " Paradise" there is only the text; the drawing 
 for canto xxxii. is scarcely begun, and there is neither 
 text nor drawing for the last canto. 1 
 
 The earlier designs, most indeed of those to the 
 "Inferno," are more crowded, more literal and ex- 
 act in their following of every detail, more casually 
 composed, in their setting of a series of episodes 
 layer above layer, than the later ones; and it is 
 only as he moves upward from Hell through Purga- 
 tory to Heaven that Botticelli becomes wholly master 
 of his material, wholly himself. Vasari tells us that, 
 after painting the frescoes at Rome, he squandered 
 "the considerable sum of money" which he had had 
 from the Pope, and "returned at once to Florence, 
 where, being whimsical and eccentric, he occu- 
 pied himself with commenting on a certain part of 
 Dante, illustrating the "Inferno," and executing 
 prints, over which he wasted much time, and, neglect- 
 ing his proper occupation, he did no work, and 
 thereby caused infinite disorder in his affairs." 
 We may thus reasonably suppose that the drawings 
 begun before 1481 were continued within the course 
 of the next year or two; and nothing is more likely 
 than that the work was continued, at intervals, 
 during many years. Yet I see no reason for sup- 
 posing that any part of it was done after the fatal 
 
 1 A facsimile reproduction of all the drawings has been pub- 
 lished in folio, under the care of Dr. F. Lippmann, by G. Grote, 
 Berlin (1887), and, reduced to half the size of the originals, by 
 Lawrence and Bullen (1896), with an introduction and com- 
 mentary by the same editor, and slightly reduced facsimiles of 
 the twenty engravings of 1481.
 
 FLORENCE 163 
 
 influence of Savonarola had drawn the painter out 
 of his sufficing artificial paradise into the regions 
 of "the Second Woe of the Apocalypse." Is there, 
 in any part of the drawings, a suggestion of that 
 harder later technique which we find in the "Nativity" 
 of 1500, or of the harsh energy which we find in the 
 S. Zenobio panels? Is there, in the faithful and 
 literal record of Dante's poem, with its simple ac- 
 ceptance of fact and its more and more gracious 
 economy of line, any of the later Christian feeling, 
 grown sad, painful, and acute, the sort of fanatic- 
 ism which he seems to have caught from Savona- 
 rola, and implanted in his latest pictures? I think 
 not: though I think I can see, in this ardent study 
 of Dante, one of the ways leading Botticelli to 
 Savonarola. 
 
 To an artist of the Renaissance the Hell and 
 Purgatory of Dante would be infinitely more diffi- 
 cult to illustrate than those subjects of ancient 
 mythology which had their own classic conventions. 
 The Hell of the Campo Santo and of the mediseval 
 illuminators would seem to him a convention not 
 yet consecrated by tradition, and without any 
 pictorial probability to his own mind. He could 
 but draw literally, following Dante's words without 
 seeing his pictures through the same fierce and 
 minute ecstasy of imagination. Has any Italian 
 painter really had a fine sense of the grotesque? 
 Probably Michelangelo, in those priceless drawings 
 which went down in the ship off Civitavecchia, put
 
 1 64 FLORENCE 
 
 sublimity into Dante, as Blake has done in our own 
 age, and by a method of interpretation perhaps not 
 wholly different. But is Dante really sublime in 
 the Miltonic sense, or in the sense in which some 
 of Blake's drawings are sublime? I do not feel that 
 he is. His imagination is severe, precise, definite; 
 he sees in hard outline, by flashes, certainly, but 
 without any of the heightening of atmosphere. The 
 vision of Milton is a kind of second sight, perhaps a 
 blind man's pageant of "men as trees walking"; 
 Shakespeare too sees in metaphors, through the 
 suggestion of words, in their subtle colouring of out- 
 line; but to Dante everything is in profile, and his 
 words are always as if graven in the white marble 
 which he saw in Purgatory, 
 
 " Come figura in cera si sugella." 
 Thus I think that when Botticelli is at his best, 
 and when he allows himself room to be quite clear, 
 and does not try to put a whole canto into a single 
 design, the form in which he renders Dante is really 
 the form in which Dante should be rendered. The 
 " Inferno" he is not always able to turn into beautiful 
 shapes, because of what Pater has noticed, "that 
 the words of a poet, which only feebly present an 
 image to the mind, must be lowered in key when 
 translated into form"; but in much of the "Pur- 
 gatorio" and most of the "Paradiso" there is little 
 but his piety or fidelity to hinder him. The almost 
 monkish piety with which he follows his sacred text, 
 not daring to put his own private interpretation in
 
 FLORENCE 165 
 
 the place of a strictly literal, an orthodox one, is 
 like that of a missal-painter, decorating verse after 
 verse of the Scriptures, as if actually in the margins 
 of his text; with a monk's patience also, but with a 
 quite Pagan sense of beauty, a lyrical quality of 
 design, which was wholly typical of the Renaissance. 
 It is perhaps in his character of the pious monk, 
 working for the glory of God on his missal, that he 
 writes in minute letters on the banner of one of his 
 young angels, in his drawing of the nine heavenly 
 orders, each with its name written in the margin, 
 his own name, " Sandro di Mariano," as if numbering 
 his place among them before the time. 
 
 Botticelli's Hell, like Dante's, is a place of gross 
 physical torture, in which the Devil is exactly as 
 Dante saw him, a child's ideal of horror, with his 
 three Gargantuan heads each "champing a sin- 
 ner" between its separate fangs. The beauty which 
 comes into even this design comes by a skill of hand 
 which draws lovely lines for the articulations of the 
 fingers and of the bats' wings. There is rarely a 
 beauty wholly appropriate to the subject, and 
 directly conditioned by it, but rather a struggle 
 between the nature of the task and the means used 
 to turn it into a picture. Sometimes, as in the 
 illustration to canto xxii., decoration comes into 
 the design with the barbed spears and bats' wings 
 of devils, and the grouping of the tormented figures 
 and their tormentors, and the lonely line of sooth- 
 sayers pacing at the edge of the chasm above the
 
 1 66 FLORENCE 
 
 lake. Coiled snakes twist and voyage across certain 
 designs in intricate arabesques, and Geryon has a 
 kind of morbid elegance in his curved scales, and 
 there are two very decorative pages ornamented 
 with nothing but spiring flames. But there are 
 others which struggle confusedly with horror, or are a 
 kind of map, or algebraical signs; and there is no 
 intimacy or subtlety in their rendering of the evil 
 powers of nature, nothing that does not lose rather 
 than gain from its subject, and no accidental beauty 
 that would not be more in keeping with either Purga- 
 tory or Paradise. 
 
 With the "Purgatorio" Dante leaves more room 
 to his illustrator, and Botticelli gradually ceases to 
 be the slave of his text. Occasionally he takes a 
 casual word very literally, as in the eighteenth 
 canto, where he sets all the slothful biting at their 
 own flesh. But in the next canto he shrinks from 
 rendering the horrible details of the Siren, "quella 
 antica strega," as he would certainly have done, 
 with careful fidelity, in the "Inferno." In at least 
 one design, the fifteenth, he has frankly continued 
 his own rendering of a scene, without going on with 
 Dante's continuation of it; and the design which 
 he repeats, with changes, is, in its first form, as an 
 illustration to the fourteenth canto, one of the 
 subtlest and most emotional of them all, with some- 
 thing, in the row of blind beggars huddled against 
 the rocks, of the emotional quality of Blake. He is 
 not always careful to take the opportunities that
 
 FLORENCE 167 
 
 Dante gives him; and thus, in the second canto, 
 Casella is only the most robust of a number of naked 
 shapes; in the fifth, la Pia is uncommemorated, 
 though the design has many figures, and we remem- 
 ber that canto only for her few lines; and Rachel 
 and Leah are not to be seen in the twenty-seventh, 
 though the twenty-eighth is wholly given up to 
 Matilda gathering flowers in Eden, and is one of the 
 most beautiful of all the designs, in its almost Japan- 
 ese arrangement, between the straight tree-trunks. 
 There is spiritual meaning, as well as gracious 
 arabesque, in the beautiful bodies of those who have 
 sinned through love, and now strive to re-embrace 
 among the flames; and a loveliness of line which is 
 itself its own sufficient meaning in the two nudes of 
 canto iv., one seated, with his arms about his knees, 
 and the other turning slowly in the foreground, and 
 in the nude figure in the seventh canto seated with his 
 back to the hollow of the valley where the spirits of 
 kings rest on the grass. In all these there is that 
 delight in the beauty of bodies which is so Greek in 
 Botticelli, and in the elaborate design in many 
 compartments which illustrates canto x. there is 
 more of his delight in moving draperies, and people 
 dancing, and straight lances, and the crowd and 
 trampling of horsemen, and a spirit like the Pagan 
 or Renaissance spirit of the "Birth of Venus" or the 
 "Spring." Itis in the seriesof "triumphs "in which 
 he realises, exactly as Dante had planned it, but with 
 what pictorial ecstasy, the pageant of the Car of
 
 1 68 FLORENCE 
 
 Beatrice, that we see his design most triumphant 
 most characteristically his own. Is not the first 
 perhaps the finest in its simplicity, its sweep of 
 design: the lower curve of the river Lethe like a 
 floating pennant, and the upper curves of the seven 
 pennants of smoke blown back and carried round 
 from the seven candlesticks borne by angels? And 
 yet is not the second more splendid, more sumptuous, 
 in its immensely rich and intricate network of dec- 
 oration, woven with precise and delicate detail into 
 a texture and pattern seen as clearly and as raptur- 
 ously as Dante's? 
 
 In his vision of the Car of Beatrice Dante's imagery 
 is, as Botticelli's design proves to us, marvellously 
 pictorial. For the most part what may be called his 
 larger imagery is mediaeval, and, though distinctly 
 visualised, has much of the mediaeval uncouthness; 
 as, for instance, in the eagle of canto xx. of the 
 "Paradise," made up of so many saints, five to the 
 arch of the eyebrow. His smaller imagery, all 
 those similes by which he shows us the reflection 
 before we see the thing, have on the contrary a 
 homely naturalness which sets us wondering after- 
 wards how so simple a statement of fact can have 
 turned into such great poetry. Think of all that 
 poets have said about night, and then hear Dante: 
 
 " La notte che le cose ci nasconde" 
 
 "Night that hides things from us." While both 
 Milton and Shakespeare are constantly saying things
 
 FLORENCE 169 
 
 for effect, and letting them dazzle us, Dante's style 
 requires no heightening, no matter what he has to 
 say, and it is on the same level of speech that he 
 writes, of the church bells, 
 
 "Tin tin sonando con si dolce nota" 
 
 and, of the ineffable vision of the Virgin ensapphir- 
 ing brightest heaven with lovely sapphire, 
 
 " Onde si coronova il bel zaffiro 
 Del quale il del piu chiaro s'inzaffira " 
 
 It is always by their little details, the details that 
 make things clear to the sight, that he names them; 
 as, when Matilda looks up from the flowers she is 
 gathering, he says of her that she turned "like a 
 lady dancing, who turns with the soles of her feet 
 close to the ground, and scarcely sets foot before 
 foot." How beautiful that is in drawing, how like 
 Botticelli, who, though he does not illustrate exactly 
 that attitude, might seem to remember the words 
 when, in the fifth canto of the " Paradiso, " he draws 
 the naked feet of Beatrice, set delicately together, 
 like a pigeon's preparing to alight. And it is in the 
 " Paradiso" chiefly that Botticelli seems to melt into 
 the very spirit of Dante, purifying it, sometimes, of 
 those "corollaries" and "deductions" which are apt 
 to turn heaven into a wrangling hell of the schoolmen. 
 Throughout the main part of the "Paradiso" 
 Botticelli gives us, in his designs, only two figures, 
 Dante and Beatrice, whether because he did not 
 finish his drawings, or whether, as I would rather
 
 i;o FLORENCE 
 
 think, he saw that the main significance of the book 
 is concentrated upon the celestial relations of Dante 
 and Beatrice, now at once actual and lyrical. And 
 so he gives us circle after circle with only these two 
 figures, sometimes set into a sky of starry flames, 
 sometimes detached against mere emptiness of light ; 
 disregarding incidents or persons who, in the poem, 
 break a little upon its divine monotony. Even 
 Cunizza in the amorous sphere is only seen in the 
 half-closed eyes of Dante under the light of her 
 presence, and in his hand uplifted in joyous surprise. 
 And in the circle of the sun he does but shield 
 his eyes against overpowering light, not seeing S. 
 ThomasAquinas and the other doctors of the Church. 
 Even the birds who make D and I and L with their 
 flight, and the M of wings twined with lilies, do not 
 tempt Botticelli out of his reticence. But every 
 motion of the soul and speech of Dante and Beatrice 
 is rendered with subtle fidelity in some gesture, some 
 turn of the head or hands, some lifting of the eyelids 
 or parting of the lips, with a restraint like Dante's, 
 and like no other gesture in Italian poetry or painting. 
 Think of Italian gesture, even of Leonardo's in the 
 "Last Supper." In every canto Botticelli makes a 
 new marvel of the folds of Beatrice's robe; every 
 movement is studied so as to set the lines into some 
 new arrangement, in which, as in " Venus " and the 
 "Spring," hands and feet and hair have their part 
 in the rhythm. 
 
 Like a pearl on a white forehead, or the reflection
 
 FLORENCE 171 
 
 of faces seen in clear water: it is Dante's image for 
 the aspect of certain spiritual realities as they come 
 to him in one of the circles of Heaven, and Botticelli 
 has drawn many of these designs to the " Paradiso," 
 and some among the more elaborate ones which 
 begin with the twenty-first canto, with just such 
 faintness and precision. There are delicious nai- 
 vetes, as in the second head which grows on Dante's 
 shoulders, looking backwards, because in the poem 
 he turns ; and in the face of Beatrice, which is changed 
 into a tragic mask, where, in the poem, she refrains 
 from smiling, lest the radiance of the seventh 
 heaven, drawn into her eyes, should shrivel Dante 
 into ashes. In this design, that of Jacob's ladder, 
 there is a whirl of baby angels like flowers or birds 
 (the daws of Dante's simile), in which little bodies 
 drunk with light fly exquisitely, as birds do, turning 
 upon themselves in the air in their vehemence of 
 delight. And Botticelli has repeated this note of 
 rapture in his last almost completed design, where 
 we see the river of light, its banks "painted with 
 marvellous Spring," and the "living sparks," like 
 winged infants, plunging head foremost into the 
 blossoms, and then whirling, drunk with odours, 
 into the river out of the "smiling of the grasses." 
 In Botticelli's fidelity to Dante I find something 
 of Dante's fidelity to nature, and with the same 
 exquisitely personal art. Only Wordsworth, occa- 
 sionally, among poets, gets the inevitable magic 
 of a statement which is at once completely truthful
 
 i?2 FLORENCE 
 
 and completely beautiful: Dante gets it in almost 
 every statement. Wordsworth's line, spoken of 
 Milton : 
 
 " Thy soul was like a star, and dwelt apart." 
 might render the essence and secret of Dante, as a 
 writer of verse, better than most translations of his 
 whole poem. And in Botticelli we find a minutely 
 beautiful truth like that of Dante, and in his choice 
 of pure outline to convey Dante's vision a choice 
 wholly appropriate. Reading Dante over again, 
 canto by canto, and turning from the poem to the 
 drawings, I find Dante more beautiful, seeing him 
 through Botticelli's eyes, and I find in Botticelli 
 a beauty wholly his own, a creation comparable 
 with Dante's, in an art which Dante envied.
 
 RAVENNA 
 
 '73
 
 RAVENNA 
 
 I 
 
 ENTERING Ravenna, I seemed to be pentrating 
 into emptiness. Here not a house seems alive; 
 there is an odour in the air which is like the smell 
 of earth or of graves ; the people shiver in the streets, 
 or walk muffled to the mouth in ample cloth cloaks 
 with collars of fur; there is a feverish red in the 
 hollow cheeks, and a brightness of fever in the eyes. 
 After Venice, where I had seen strong and com- 
 fortable men, naked to the waist, carrying heavy 
 burdens between the wharves and the ships, one 
 seemed to have come into a city of sick people. 
 And the city, too, is as if worn out, languid with 
 fever; it has not aged gracefully. Its miraculous 
 mosaics, so nearly unaging, are housed inside rough 
 walls, through which the damp creeps, staining 
 the marble columns with strange, lovely colours of 
 decay. The streets are chill, narrow corridors for 
 the wind; earth-coloured, left to accumulate the 
 natural dinginess of things. Here and there a 
 great basilica, a tower, the fragment of an ancient 
 palace, stands up in the corner of an empty piazza. 
 or rises out of a cluster of dull-brown roofs. The 
 Cathedral square is half overgrown with grass ; grass 
 
 175
 
 1 76 RAVENNA 
 
 grows up the six steps in front of the one old and 
 solid house there ; all around the red plaster is peeling 
 off the walls; through two of the five roads which 
 lead out of the square you see the green and brown 
 of trees and the dingy beginnings of the city wall. 
 On market-day Ravenna awakens for a whole 
 morning. The people come in great numbers 
 through all the gates of the city, on foot, and in 
 their tiny carts slung together with netted string. 
 The Piazza Vittorio Emanuele is thronged with 
 rough, red, wrinkled peasants, muffled in their 
 great cloaks, and in the Piazza Dante Alighieri, which 
 opens out of it, there is a sort of small fair. Stalls 
 are set up all over the rocky ground ; cloths of bright 
 colour, especially certain fiery yellows and reds, are 
 heaped upon them ; they hang in strips, blazing in the 
 midst of dull hanks of hemp, of wooden utensils, of 
 earthenware, of beaten copper. Women with bright 
 handkerchiefs over their heads, with something red 
 always in kerchief or bodice, stand at the stalls ; there 
 is a slow heaving of people to and fro in the square. 
 The women who pass have serious yet slightly ironical 
 faces, sometimes with that steady, ambiguous look 
 which one sees in the Jewess and in the gipsy. They 
 hold themselves proudly, like conscious animals, 
 differing (how strangely!) from the Venetians, their 
 neighbours, who are unconscious animals. It is all 
 a little sombre and feverish; there is no gaiety, no 
 lightness, but rather something serious, almost un- 
 easy, in the watchful aspect of the people.
 
 RAVENNA 177 
 
 II 
 
 All life forsakes Ravenna, which lives on with 
 an unholy charm, like one really dead, kept in a 
 semblance of life by witchcraft. The sea has ebbed 
 from it, life has ebbed out of it, splendour and power 
 have forsaken it ; it remains the lovely and unhappy 
 ghost of itself. The streets themselves are as if 
 cut out of the ground : they have the colour and chill 
 feeling of the earth ; the sun rarely soaks into them : 
 one seems to be walking in a city dug up out of ruins. 
 There is a strange, shivering silence everywhere; 
 in these roughly paved streets on which there is so 
 rarely a sound of wheels or of footsteps; in these 
 vast and solid houses, from behind whose bars and 
 shutters so few faces look out ; in these empty squares, 
 these sumptuous churches with closed doors, opened 
 for curious strangers ; these great gateways shutting 
 in the city upon itself. And light, when it comes 
 into the city, is itself disquieting. Sometimes, after 
 a day's resignation or dull waiting, Ravenna begins 
 to awaken, like a convalescent, as the afternoon 
 brightens towards sunset. Seen from the walls 
 the colours of the sky seem to soak down upon the 
 city ; it flushes, seems to respond to the light. Stand- 
 ing in the Piazza. Byron at sunset, one sees the red 
 walls of the Church of S. Francesco, as if flaming 
 against a sky from which the fires of sunset are 
 reflected; every leaf of the little tree that stands 
 in the corner of the square burns with a separate
 
 i;8 RAVENNA 
 
 flame, and the red glow extends to the tomb of 
 Braccioforte, where Dante lies buried among the 
 sarcophagi. 
 
 Ravenna is full of ancient monuments which 
 seem to last on, after so unthinkably many centuries, 
 like very old people, blind and deaf and feeble in 
 hands and feet, who still sit by the hearth of their 
 old homes, dressed in ancient finery, and tolerating 
 the youth of the world with an impeccable courtesy. 
 They frighten the younger people a little, who feel 
 their own flimsy modernness, and a youth which is 
 not likely to grow distinguished, as they consider 
 the ghastly beauty of their ancestors. 
 
 In Ravenna there are the tombs of all the ages: 
 sarcophagi of the early martyrs of the Church, the 
 sepulchre of Theodoric, King of the Goths, the tomb 
 of Dante. Has any structure in which people were 
 to live ever lasted so long as those in which for so 
 much longer (as, in their wisdom, they realised) they 
 were to lie dead? There are only a few arches and 
 a few broken walls left of the palace of Theodoric, 
 but the tomb of Theodoric still stands, with its 
 impregnable walls, its roof of a single slab of Istrian 
 granite, solid as a prison, like a work of Titans. 
 And, everywhere, with a strange and lovely placidity, 
 which seems natural and at home only in Ravenna, 
 there are the sarcophagi of stone and marble, in 
 churches and museums, around the tomb of Dante, 
 and, once only, though empty, in the mausoleum 
 which was built to cover it; the vast and rocky
 
 RAVENNA 179 
 
 sarcophagus of Galla Placidia. They are a part of 
 the place, beautiful and formidable and peaceful 
 remembrances of death. Death here becomes as 
 beautiful and durable a thing as any other form of 
 what is elsewhere fleeting in human things. There 
 is something terrifying in the eternity of form, colour, 
 substance; in Ravenna nothing is lost, everything 
 lasts on, and may sometimes be thought to wish, and 
 be unable, to fade out, or even to grow old visibly. 
 
 Ill 
 
 Lean and ascetic Ravenna has a certain ex- 
 quisite rigidity in its charm, like that of a crucifix, 
 like that of the strange, severe, and sumptuous 
 crucifix of engraved silver discs in the Cathedral. 
 The streets are long and straight, with sharp angles, 
 rarely a curve: you can look half way across the 
 city, and see the light through any one of its great 
 gateways. And the houses are almost all flat ; they 
 are large, severe, with iron bars over the lower 
 windows ; they have rarely a balcony or any exterior 
 decoration. The houses of the Polentas or of the 
 Traversari are only distinguished from the later 
 buildings by a finer severity, by a few rigid cornices 
 or lintels, and by a more heavily resistant way of 
 leaning back from a base solidly planted in the earth. 
 The very ruins, the ruins of the palace of Theodoric, 
 for instance, form level lines with the street, and 
 bring no disturbing picturesqueness into the pattern.
 
 i8o RAVENNA 
 
 And, in all this, there is a form of charm as inherent 
 as in the severe art of mosaic. In Ravenna mosaic 
 obtains a quality hardly known elsewhere, a quality 
 of softness, almost a diaphanous quality. The 
 colours of mosaic in Venice are the colours of Venetian 
 water, as it is stained by clouds and by the hard 
 bright reflections of things : Venetian mosaic is water 
 turned to stone. But in Ravenna its colours are 
 those of the sky above them. I have seen, at sunset, 
 a sky in which I could distinguish the exact shades 
 of colour, certain purples and reds and bluish yellows, 
 which I had seen in the mosaics of S. Vitale, in the 
 birds and beasts and fruits in the central roof of the 
 choir there. I have seen, at sunset, the subtlest 
 green of S. Apollinare in Classe, the malachite and 
 lapis lazuli of the Baptistery of the Orthodox, alive 
 and momentary in the sky above Ravenna. 
 
 Ravenna is a city clothed in hard substances: 
 marble, and the metallic brightness of mosaic. 
 And these hard substances have become ductile and 
 luminous, a garment of Oriental stuffs and jewels, 
 coloured in infinite gradations. Its splendour is se- 
 pulchral, and to walk in it is to walk in a buried 
 city, where the earth has been heaped for centuries 
 over rich treasures, never quite lost, nor ever wholly 
 recovered. To enter S. Vitale is like entering an 
 excavation, and one has almost the sensation that 
 these columns of white marble, with their exquisite 
 and severe capitals, so precise and delicate, these 
 veined marbles which paint the walls, these domes
 
 RAVENNA 181 
 
 and arches over which fields and skies of mosaic 
 flame and blossom, are now being dug up out of the 
 earth. Everywhere there is a covering of rough 
 red brick, a mere shell, over these temples, which 
 are still, after the devastations of fourteen hundred 
 years, the most royal palaces built for God and the 
 saints. 
 
 Sigismondo Malatesta stripped the marble from 
 the walls of S. Apollinare in Classe, but the twenty- 
 four columns of greyish-white marble, resting on 
 their square, carved, white marble bases, still stand 
 in their place, twelve on either side, and lead up to 
 the broad circular steps of the tribuna, where, in 
 the dome, colour begins. If the mosaics of the nave 
 of S. Apollinare Nuovo could but be transferred to 
 the walls of the nave of S. Apollinare in Classe, we 
 should have, under one roof, an all but perfect sixth- 
 century basilica, clothed in colours as flaming and 
 imperishable as jewels. In the choir of S. Vitale 
 there is a column of green marble veined with more 
 colours than I have ever seen in marble: agate, 
 porphyry, malachite, and I know not how many other 
 precious substances. Looked at against the light it 
 is like a great mottled green snake, dully alive, and 
 standing rigid. Overhead, in the dome, there is a 
 sky which is like the neck of a peacock, flowered 
 over with patterns of leaves and beasts and birds, 
 in the fixed, fiery, and gentle illumination of mosaic. 
 
 It is always the green of grass and the blue of the 
 sky that are burnt into these coloured spaces like
 
 182 RAVENNA 
 
 flames. And, as one might remember certain flowers 
 among the flowers of a great garden, or certain jewels 
 from a cabinet of jewels, I remember chiefly, and 
 with most of separate pleasure, the gold stars on the 
 blue nocturnal sky of the dome of the mausoleum of 
 Galla Placidia ; the birds of all species and all colours, 
 the ducks and hens, among red disks, trefoliated 
 outwards in white, which make the inner ceiling of 
 the Cappella di S. Pier Crisologo; the lapis lazuli 
 which makes a sky in the dome of the Baptistery, 
 against which the twelve Apostles walk in gold and 
 white robes, with jewelled crowns in their hands, and 
 the green grass, on which a shadow turns and darkens 
 with their feet, as the circle goes round with the sun ; 
 the smooth green carpet of grass in the heavenly 
 meadow which curtains the whole dome of S. Apol- 
 linare in Classe like a sky; the peacocks at the four 
 corners of the roof of the tribuna of S. Vitale, and 
 the globes of burning blue under the feet of the four 
 angels who point to the central Lamb; and, in S. 
 Apollinare Nuovo, the Eastern shawls and jewels 
 and the points of the red slippers of the women who 
 carry crowns to the Virgin, and the white and gold 
 curtains looped back from the windows of the royal 
 palace of Ravenna. 
 
 IV 
 
 But, in Ravenna, there is another charm besides 
 this visible one. It is to be loved for its sternness,
 
 RAVENNA 183 
 
 the barriers to its beauty, what is tragic and un- 
 yielding in it, its still and silent attitude of fixed 
 meditation and remembrance, its stoniness, its mists 
 and winter colour, its reticent, unwilling, and mysteri- 
 ous response to a mood of the sky or of the hour. 
 It broods among memories, forgetting nothing. The 
 heroic and unhappy Queen Galla Placidia has still 
 her place there, outside her mausoleum, empty now 
 of all but the beauty which she created about her, 
 fifteen centuries ago. The peasants, as they pass 
 the rocky tomb standing in the midst of fields, with 
 its two bushes of pampas-grass, like two lamps 
 burning with white flame, before it, speak of Theo- 
 doric the Goth, as of a king against whom Garibaldi 
 might have led them. One still sees, in the mosaic 
 of the choir of S. Vitale, the insatiable eyes of the 
 Empress Theodora, as she stands, tall and royally 
 draped and crowned with pearls, offering a cup of 
 gold to the throned Christ. In the church of S. 
 Maria in Porto Fuori, which rises with its great 
 square tower out of a farmyard in a field, one still 
 sees, among the half -ruined frescoes with their colours 
 of pale rose, the calm and eager face of Francesca da 
 Rimini: the bright gold hair wreathed with green 
 leaves, the long neck, the long sensitive hands, the 
 long straight line of nose and forehead, and the 
 wide-open eye, looking down from an open window, 
 as if for the first sight of Paolo. The cottage 
 woman who opened the church door for me spoke 
 with an easy, smiling, and respectful familiarity of
 
 1 84 RAVENNA 
 
 Francesca and of Peter the Sinner, the Blessed 
 Pietro degli Onesti who built the church in 1096. 
 A peasant whom I met in the Pineta said to me: 
 "Have you seen Dante's Walk, under the trees 
 by the canal? He used to walk there in the even- 
 ings, studying." He said it as if his grandfather 
 had met Dante walking there. 
 
 Ravenna is full of Dante. His tomb, inscribed 
 
 " Dantis Poetae Sepulchrum," 
 
 is railed in with the eleven early Christian sar- 
 cophagi of the "Sepolcreto di Braccioforte," and 
 with certain tablets to Mazzini hung with wreaths 
 of dry leaves. It is in the earliest of these sar- 
 cophagi that d'Annunzio has planted a rose-tree in 
 the first act of " Francesca da Rimini," where Fran- 
 cesca walks round it in the court of her father's 
 house, and touches the carvings on the four sides, 
 and says, as she touches each in order: 
 
 " The Redeemer treads 
 
 Under his feet the lion and the snake ; 
 
 Mary saluted Elizabeth ; 
 
 Our Lady, and the angel bids ' All hail ! ' 
 
 The stags are drinking at the running brook." 
 
 By the side of the tomb is the house, its windows 
 bricked up, but the tall brown wall still solid, where, 
 as the tablet tells you, Dante was the guest of Guido 
 da Polenta: "Questa casa fu un tempo dei 
 Polentani, che ebbero la gloria di accogliere ospital- 
 mente Dante Alighieri." On an old red wall over- 
 looking the public gardens near the station there
 
 RAVENNA 185 
 
 is another tablet: "Beatrice, figliuola di Dante Al- 
 ighieri, in questo cenobio di Santo Stefano degli 
 Olivi si vot6 a Dio, indegnata delle nequizie del 
 mondo, visto da una rea fazione di cittadini dan- 
 nato il padre a perpetuo esilio e mendico ire in 
 cerca deH'altrui pane" (Beatrice, daughter of 
 Dante Alighieri, in this convent of Santo Stefano 
 degli Olivi, devoted herself to God, wroth with the 
 world's wickedness, having seen her father, through 
 the evil dissension of citizens, condemned to per- 
 petual exile, and to become a beggar for the bread 
 of strangers). 
 
 After Dante, Byron is still the great presence in 
 Ravenna. The hotel which bears his name was 
 the palace of the Guiccioli, and Byron lived there, 
 as cavalier servente of the Countess, from June, 1819, 
 to October, 1821. Across the square, now the 
 Piazza Byron, is the Cafe Byron, and an inscription 
 over the door tells us that Byron, when he first came 
 to Ravenna, chose to live in this house because it 
 was near the tomb of Dante. The tablet calls him 
 "splendore del secolo decimonono." In the street 
 opposite there is a little curiosity-shop, and one 
 afternoon, as I was looking vainly around the 
 shelves, the shopkeeper put on an air of mystery, 
 and called me into a corner, while he unlocked a 
 drawer and took out a piece of yellowing paper. It 
 was a draft of 500 made out to Byron's credit in 
 1821, and signed by him, in his unmistakable hand- 
 writing, on the stamped paper of the period. The
 
 iS6 RAVENNA 
 
 old man told me with pride that his mother had 
 been educated in the same convent with Byron's 
 daughter, the Convent of S. Francesco, across the 
 way; they had been great friends, he said. 
 
 In the country about Ravenna there is a luxurious 
 harshness. The bank of wall on which you may 
 walk round the city looks outwards over wide, flat, 
 marshy plains, and, as far as you can see, the plains 
 broaden, set with thin trees, which I saw desolately 
 shedding their last leaves, on a day late in Novem- 
 ber. There was a faint mist ; the air was damp and 
 cold. Straight roads, going between narrow alleys 
 of these thin and almost leafless trees, stretched 
 across the plain with a dusty monotony. Dry 
 stalks rattled in the fields, beyond hedges of faded 
 green and yellow bushes ; field after field lay in long 
 narrow strips, side by side, colour by colour, dull 
 greens and browns, spotted by sudden gleams of 
 autumn colouring; with here and there a garden of 
 white chrysanthemums, a garden of vegetables 
 surrounded by trellised vines, or a plot of weedy 
 grass, with fruit trees around it. White bullocks 
 passed on the roads, dragging primitive carts of 
 singular shape, painted all over with pictures in 
 bright colours. Here and there women worked with 
 bare feet in the fields ; old men scraped together the 
 fallen leaves out of the ditches ; small black donkeys
 
 RAVENNA 187 
 
 waited for their little carts to be filled. In the air, the 
 feeling of the earth ; in all these gestures, in the colour 
 of the day, in the attitude of Ravenna, heaped 
 there so like a funeral monument, I felt the winter. 
 Between Ravenna and the sea the land is almost 
 half water. Marshes lie on each side of the narrow 
 path by the canal, and the canal turns aside into 
 many creeks and channels, with rushy mud banks 
 around them, and, beyond, pools of water with 
 brown reedy grass growing up out of it. The land 
 is flat to the horizon, dull brown or green where 
 there is not the glitter of water, bright white, or 
 blue like lapis lazuli. In the distance thin lines 
 of stone-pines stand up against the sky; here and 
 there, not far from the road, the pines cluster; on 
 the left, beyond the canal and the moorland, there 
 is the dense wall of the Pineta, green-black above, 
 with shadowy tints of lavender about the stems. 
 Along the canal men are fishing with strange nets 
 hoisted on cranes, like vast insects with endless 
 tentacles, two reaching forwards and two backwards, 
 webbed with one immense net of delicate meshes : it 
 dips with a slow and stealthy motion into the water, 
 and, as it is hoisted again, you see the fish leaping 
 in its midst. Some of these fantastic, almost living 
 creatures hang over the sea itself, from the planks 
 and heaped stones which go out in a long double 
 line into the water, to form a narrow harbour ; fishing- 
 boats with orange and ochre sails lie along both 
 sides of it; and beyond, the coast is flat, dreary,
 
 i88 RAVENNA 
 
 unvaried, a line of dark sand and short brown weedy 
 grass along the edge of the grey sea. 
 
 Outside Ravenna, by whatever gate one leaves 
 it, there is, for a certain space around the walls, a 
 monotonous dreariness, out of which one gradually 
 distinguishes, first, the thin line of white trees, then 
 the vines festooned from tree to tree around the 
 fields, the white oxen ploughing the black earth, 
 yoked two by two in eights; then, ruddy or orange 
 sails seen across the fields from the direction of the 
 harbour; and, in the midst of the plain, the tower, 
 like a lighthouse tower, of the church of S. Maria in 
 Porto Fuori, and the bare bulk and tall round cam- 
 panile of S. Apollinare in Classe, as if forgotten by 
 the side of a road that no longer leads anywhere. 
 Soon after S. Apollinare in Classe, woods begin. 
 There are long and white trails of bright and painted 
 bushes, with young pine-trees in their midst, and 
 tangles of grass, and taller trees with grey stems and 
 delicate branches. One treads upon brown leaves 
 between hedges of yellowing green, which open, now 
 and again, upon a pool or marsh, in which the wa- 
 ter glitters between leaves and stems. It is long 
 before the stone-pines begin, and they begin one by 
 one, each spreading its sunshade of green lace over 
 its own circle of grass. They stand in lines and 
 thin clusters beside the canal, rising almost out of 
 the bright water; and their mass thickens and 
 darkens towards the sea, making that " reedy trem- 
 bling" under a gentle wind which Dante speaks of.
 
 RAVENNA 189 
 
 As I came to the edge of the wood, and saw sails 
 at the end of a space of brown and marshy ground, 
 and heard the sea, a woman inside the one cottage 
 that stood there began to sing to herself. It was 
 a wild and melancholy dirge, and seemed to put the 
 feeling of the place and the hour into music. 
 
 WINTER, 1903.
 
 PISA 
 
 191
 
 PISA 
 
 I 
 
 AT the extreme edge of Pisa, in a corner of its 
 battlemented walls, there is a meadow, with daisies 
 among the bright green grass; a dusty road goes 
 along its whole length, leading from the town into 
 the flat country outside the gate; and on the other 
 side of the meadow is the white low wall of the Campo 
 Santo. Between, in the midst of the grass, there 
 are two miraculous buildings in white marble, which 
 the weather and the ages have turned to the yellow 
 of old ivory, faintly banded with black: the Bap- 
 tistery and the Cathedral. Beyond the Cathedral, 
 leaning fourteen feet out of the perpendicular, away 
 from it, a white miraculous toy, the Campanile; 
 and beyond, over the house-tops, the placid outlines 
 of the hills. From the top of the Campanile you 
 can see the whole brown city, ruddy with roofs, en- 
 closed by its battlemented walls, nested in the smooth 
 green hollow between the mountains and the sea; 
 the white roads on the plain, the shining curve of 
 the Arno, and then, beyond a line of brown woods, 
 
 193
 
 194 PISA 
 
 the faint blue streak of the sea, and what seems like 
 a great hill coming up sheer out of it, the island of 
 La Gorgona. Landwards, all round, there is a circle 
 of hills, which on one side close in almost upon the 
 town, and you catch the sparkle of the hills of 
 Carrara. 
 
 And between this unparalleled corner and the 
 eager modern life of the busy town there seems, at 
 first, no kinship. The people of Pisa are wild and 
 untamed, with something gipsy and a little savage 
 in their aspect. Children run barefoot, or in wooden 
 clogs without heels, and at night there are cries 
 and clatterings in the streets, asleep so early, which 
 lie aside from the busy main thoroughfares. The 
 faces of girls and women, with their straight eye- 
 brows and eyes set high under them, are often very 
 handsome, at times lovely; and they have a wild 
 charm, a kind of engaging impudence. The men are 
 rough, hot-tempered, loud-tongued ; the quality of 
 the peasant as if sharpened, set on edge, soured 
 perhaps, by town life. On the other side of a pine- 
 wood there is Leghorn, where there are sailors, Jews, 
 the sea, one of the ways into the world. 
 
 And Pisa itself, as one roams in it, under the ar- 
 cades of the Borgo, or coming out of narrow streets 
 into broad vacant squares, or following the delicate 
 windings of the river, has something fragile in its 
 aspect, a quiet enveloping subtlety, which is not in 
 keeping either with that modern life or with what 
 is solid and unworn in the age of its vast white monu- 
 ments of marble. What is it that seems to be con-
 
 PISA 195 
 
 cealed here, an alluring and quite innocent mystery 
 in things, unconscious of itself, and made out of 
 many contraries? After Ravenna, where the whole 
 place is subdued into a kind of sepulchral melan- 
 choly, and seems to brood feverishly over its tombs, 
 Pisa, which is also the guardian of so much ancient 
 death, seems to be irrelevantly awake and alive. 
 It keeps this holy earth and these white glories as 
 a possession, not subdued to their mood, with a life 
 wholly apart from them. 
 
 And so it is always with the same sensation of 
 surprise that one turns aside from the river, passes 
 through vague streets in which the sense of life 
 and movement dies gradually away, and comes out 
 suddenly upon that green meadow folded into the 
 angle of the town wall, with its three white marvels, 
 the Baptistery, the Cathedral, and the Campanile, 
 rising into the sky at different heights, but with the 
 same dainty massiveness, and behind them the 
 long white outer wall of the Campo Santo, as if it 
 hid something formidable and mysterious. I do 
 not know any corner of the actual world which seems 
 so improbable, when one is actually there. A 
 street's length away peasants shout angrily on their 
 way from the railway-station to the market-place; 
 the river is flowing on continually from the hills 
 beyond Florence to the sea; and that trivial, eager 
 life and that soft continual passing away are equally 
 remote, as one lingers, among these relics that seem 
 the work of magic, and to have been kept white and 
 untouched by some magical intervention.
 
 196 PISA 
 
 II 
 
 Nothing, in this group of marvels on the grass, 
 has a separate beauty quite equal to its surprising 
 beauty as a whole. It is composed on a vast scale, 
 and to give the effect of daintiness; and impresses 
 one first as some kind of giant's play-work in ivory. 
 The aspect of the Campanile, an immense, inexplica- 
 ble tube, with its pillars and rounded arches as if 
 carved in a pattern round and round something that 
 one could take up in one's hand, is fantastic by day, 
 for its strangeness, its whiteness, its mocking bias; 
 but by night it becomes ominous, overpowering, 
 and seems to lift itself into the darkness like a solid 
 column of grey smoke, which bends over to precipi- 
 tate some vague ruin. On the other side of the 
 meadow the Baptistery has been laid down on the 
 grass like a jewelled casket, the largest and most 
 splendid casket in the world. It shelters jewels, 
 the carved pulpit of Niccola Pisano, and, far lovelier, 
 the baptismal font, with its lace-work in black, 
 white, and yellow marble, circle within circle and 
 square within square, on each of its eight sides. The 
 most part of the Baptistery dates from the beginning 
 of the twelfth century, and, in spite of some later 
 additions, adding needless decoration, it has a sober 
 grandeur, a large and elaborate simplicity, which 
 gives one the complete satisfaction of a thing wholly 
 organic, a natural growth. The Cathedral is fault- 
 lessly constructed, and has been a pattern to most
 
 PISA 197 
 
 other work in the Tuscan Romanesque manner, yet, 
 seen from the ground, and from in front, it is diffi- 
 cult to feel the same sense of satisfaction. Inside, 
 "no place of equal splendour," says one who knows 
 more of churches and their qualities than most men, 
 "is quite so devout." The structure, of white 
 marble alternating with black marble, is itself a de- 
 coration of an exquisitely severe richness. Outside, 
 especially about the choir and transepts, the same 
 structure (so plain, undecorated, as it seems after 
 the stone forests of French Gothic) is no less delicate 
 in its pale colours. But in the fagade, so famous and 
 in truth so original, with its ascending and diminish- 
 ing rows of slender columns, there is, in the design 
 an admirable symmetry, yet a symmetry whose 
 elegance is hardly thrilling. The lower part, in the 
 patterns around the doorways, and in the frieze of 
 beasts which runs across above the first rows of 
 pillars, is carved finely, and the colours inlaid in the 
 stone are used carefully, in subordination to the 
 structural work in carving; but, higher up, inlaid 
 patterns are substituted, with a somewhat crowded, 
 merely prettifying effect, for the firmer and finer 
 outlines of carved stone. I like best to look down 
 on the Cathedral from the top of the Campanile, for 
 from that point it is wholly beautiful, and one sees 
 its characteristically Pisan design, like the painted 
 crucifixes in the Museum, the choir and transepts 
 making the curved top and side-pieces, and the 
 dome the raised head-piece or halo. Seen from that
 
 198 PISA 
 
 height it seems to be laid out on the grass carpet 
 like an immense crucifix of tarnished silver or old 
 ivory. 
 
 By the side of the Cathedral, inside a low white 
 wall, the painted cloisters of the Campo Santo, with 
 their precious marbles, surround a long and narrow 
 space of green grass, open to the sky. The Campo 
 Santo is the "Memento Mori" of the Middle Ages 
 to Italy. The paintings on the walls of these cloisters 
 can be compared only with the German " Dances 
 of Death," and the like, and there is in the contrast 
 all the difference of the two races. The imagina- 
 tion of Orgagna, or of the Pisans who painted the 
 " Triumph of Death," the " Last Judgment," and the 
 "Hell" is less naturally fantastic than the German 
 imagination; it is logical, faithful to a conception, 
 and desires only to be very real in turning into visible 
 shape what it has come to believe of invisible things 
 and of things to come. The remembrances of 
 death are brought in with crude physical horror, as 
 the tortures of the mediaeval hell are also, with a 
 pitiless straightforwardness: the knight who stops 
 his nose over an open grave, the horse that neighs 
 and snuffs at the worms there. The saved folk in 
 heaven are folk out of the painter's own city, making 
 music and caressing their lapdogs under the trees 
 in a Pisan meadow in summer. It is very real old 
 men and beggars and halt and maimed folk who 
 hold out their hands in vain supplication, as the 
 scythed angel passes over them, on other business,
 
 PISA 199 
 
 in the air. And to the painter there is a tragedy 
 not less literal and actual in the flight of angels and 
 devils over the little male and female souls that 
 fly upwards out of the open mouths of sleepers. 
 "Hell is murky," and he sees it in just such circles 
 of bodily agony, with these prongs and snakes and 
 flames, and devils no less scaled, and clawed, and 
 elaborated for all the parodies of hate. These pic- 
 tures on the walls are pictures secondly, and first of 
 all teaching, a warning to those about to die. It is 
 their intention, not their pattern, that makes them 
 pictures ; it is by their literal rendering of the beliefs 
 of their time, it is by their sheer force as a homily in 
 paint, that they appeal to us now, in these cloisters 
 of this chapel of death, with a poignancy which is 
 still contemporary. 
 
 Ill 
 
 Pisan art, as one sees it in the Museum, begins 
 with miniatures, strange bright stains on parch- 
 ment, of the eleventh century. Two centuries later 
 come the paintings on wood and those singular 
 crucifixes with their gilt halos raised from the 
 wood of the cross, throwing the head forward. The 
 Christs are all Jews, and Mary is a Jewess, with a 
 simplicity untroubled by the irrationalities of tradi- 
 tion. The finest crucifix is one attributed to Giunta 
 Pisano, splendid in design and colour, with its 
 sombre richness, its elaborate decoration, its rim of
 
 200 PISA 
 
 heavy gold nails; the whole horror made passionate 
 and austere, with a tragic beauty in the lean, con- 
 torted figure, the agonised attendant faces. 
 
 And these crucifixes are seen in room after room, 
 together with panels with gold backgrounds, set in 
 decorative frames; all minutely painted in crude 
 bright colours, with an earnest attempt to render 
 the reality of earthly things and to invent some 
 ideal beauty for spiritual things. There are works 
 by artists of Pisa, Siena, and Florence; and one 
 passes from picture to picture a little dazed and dis- 
 concerted by their conventions which no longer 
 mean anything, forgotten formulas, discovering a 
 beauty of colour here, a naivete of design there, but 
 seeing them for the most part as one reads verse in 
 a language only partially known. There are frag- 
 ments of marble among the pictures, an exquisite 
 rose-window from the church of the Spina, a broken 
 but still lovely and terrible monster crouched and 
 leaning over a wall, wooden statues out of churches, 
 with jointed hands and arms, and with a quaint 
 conscious charm in their suggestion of slim bodies. 
 Nothing among the pictures touched me so closely 
 as a series of small panels from the high altar of 
 Santa Caterina, by Simone Martini. In their dainty 
 architectural gilt frames, against their backgrounds 
 of gold, they have a calm, severely rich beauty of 
 design and colour. A lovely Magdalen holds a chased 
 casket, and there is subtlety in the long oval of the 
 sleepy, faint, and morbid face with its ruddy hair
 
 PISA 201 
 
 and jewelled band across the forehead. All these 
 saints have plaintive, formal, expressive faces, there 
 is a delicacy in their eyelids and long fingers, and 
 they make sensitive gestures. 
 
 IV 
 
 Poets have loved Pisa, and are remembered there. 
 It was its peace, says Mrs. Shelley, that suited 
 Shelley; " our roots," he says himself, " never struck 
 so deep as at Pisa." Byron, Shelley, and Leopardi 
 all lived and wrote in Pisa, and there are marble 
 tablets recording them on the houses in which they 
 lived. Leopardi's house was in the Via Fagiuoli; 
 Byron's and Shelley's almost opposite one another, 
 on each side of the river. The Palazzo Lanfranchi, 
 now Palazzo Torcanelli, is a simple, massive house 
 of plain brown stone, the doors and windows out- 
 lined in white stone; it stands on the sunny side of 
 the river, not far from the Ponte di Mezzo. The 
 inscription says: "Giorgio Gordon Noel Byron qui 
 dimor6 dall' autunno del 1821 all' estate del 1822 
 e scrisse sei canti del' ' Don Giovanni. ' ' Shelley's 
 house is on the Lung' Arno Galileo, opposite a little 
 eastward, part of a big building with yellow plastered 
 walls and windows; and the inscription says: " Percy 
 Bysshe Shelley trascorse in queste mura gli ultimi 
 mesi del 1821, I'inverno del 1822, qui tradusse in 
 versi immortali gli affetti e le imagine che Pisa gli 
 inspir6, e compose 1'elegia in morte di John Keats,
 
 202 PISA 
 
 'Adonais. " Shelley has captured much of the 
 soul of Pisa in two lovely poems, "Evening: Ponte 
 a Mare," where the "slow soft toads out of damp 
 corners creep," and the lines on "The Tower of 
 Famine," which render the whole aspect and atmos- 
 phere of the fourteenth-century Arsenal tower, heavy 
 and ominous, which he took to be Ugolino's. Ugo- 
 lino's tower was pulled down long ago, and an in- 
 scription on the house which replaced it, at the 
 corner of the Piazza dei Cavalieri, tells you where 
 it stood. 
 
 In Pisa the Middle Ages are felt everywhere, but 
 for the most part as an echo, an odour, rather than 
 in any actual stone, literally surviving. Many of 
 the streets keep their old quaint names unspoilt; 
 as the Via delle Belle Torri, with its two side-streets, 
 the Via 1' Amore, and the Via del Cuore. The arcades 
 of the Borgo remind one of Padua, and as one walks 
 under them there are glimpses, here and there, of 
 pillared church-fronts, or of the carving on old houses. 
 There is the eleventh-century church of S. Pierino, 
 with its steps leading up from the street, its heavy 
 pillars, and fine floor of mosaic; S. Michele in Borgo, 
 with its facade in three tiers, of pillars and tre- 
 foliated arches, severer in design than the fagade 
 of the Cathedral; there is the admirable S. Paolo a 
 Ripa d'Arno; and there is the thirteenth-century 
 Santa Maria della Spina, the sailor's church, set 
 down like a white and black trinket, on the banks of 
 the Arno. Begging brothers of the Misericordia pass
 
 PISA 203 
 
 you in the streets, with their black livery, black 
 hoods, and vast black hats slung upon their backs. 
 Girls and women stand chattering about the many 
 fountains, drawing water, and carrying it in small 
 copper cans, all of one pattern, shaped delicately 
 like ancient vases. But, for the most part, that 
 sense of peace, that placid melancholy, which comes 
 to seem the natural atmosphere of Pisa, harmonising 
 whatever is new, active, and stirring in it with all 
 that remains, not only in its one enchanting corner, 
 of past ages, is a kind of intangible charm, made up 
 of many elements and softly transfiguring them: 
 the languid evenings when the lights begin to come 
 out along the river, the lovely curve of its course 
 between red-roofed and green-shuttered houses, the 
 boats that float down helped by oars and sail, the 
 sight of misty hills beyond the water; sunsets that 
 burn the sky to soft fire above the roofs; and the 
 wind that conies up the river every night from the 
 sea, tempered to softness as it drifts through Pisa. 
 
 A large part of the beauty of Pisa comes to it 
 from the Arno, which winds through it from end to 
 end, and can be followed into the leafy country, by a 
 grassy path which goes beside it, always within 
 sight of the hills, which, on a misty evening in 
 March, are like banks of solid smoke. Under a 
 grey sky, in the faint mist which veils the outlines
 
 204 PISA 
 
 of the hills, Spring budding overhead in the trees 
 and starring their brown branches with green, among 
 which tiny bats fly restlessly, the night comes on 
 gently, with a peaceful and slightly mournful charm. 
 Coming back, I saw the long curved line of the Lung' 
 Arno, the brown and yellow and green of the houses 
 under a low-hanging thunder-cloud about to burst; 
 a rich, deep, complex effect of colour, sombre and 
 with a dull sort of intensity, as if some fierce heat 
 smouldered there. After a rain-storm in the hills 
 the river awakens violently, and rushes downwards, 
 swollen, yellow, and curdled, creased and wried into 
 wrinkles and cross-eddies. At night, looking down 
 on it from a high window, the water is oily black, 
 streaked with white, and the reflections of the gas 
 lamps along the quays plunge downwards like long 
 stakes of gold, planted in the river. Where the 
 light strikes it one can see the tide flowing swiftly; 
 but for the most part it is a black pit of water, divid- 
 ing the town. 
 
 If you follow the river to the sea you will come to 
 one of the loveliest places in Italy, Bocca d'Arno, 
 where the Arno freshens into little waves as it meets 
 the sea-waves and mingles with them. On one side 
 of the river the sand begins, and beyond the grass 
 there are pine-trees, green to blackness as they 
 thicken and cut off the sky. On the other side of 
 the river there is a flat green marsh, ending upon a 
 dark line of trees. Above, there are jagged peaks 
 against the sky, hills white with snow where they
 
 PISA 205 
 
 rise into the white rain-clouds. Towards Pisa the 
 hills darken, softening into gentler curves. And it 
 seems as if nothing that is supremely beautiful in 
 nature is not here. Here, at this lovely meeting- 
 place, are hills, woods, valleys, a river, and the sea. 
 SPRING, 1904.
 
 SIENA 
 
 207
 
 SIENA 
 
 INFLEXIBLE Siena, St. Catherine's, is a fierce 
 eyrie for visions, yet, planted so firmly on its rock, 
 almost every house still at need a fortress, is as if 
 fortified permanently against enemies. The coun- 
 try comes right up to its gates, and is beaten back 
 there; the ancient walls are like a rampart, and in- 
 side them all the houses climb upward, crowding 
 and tightening about the cathedral, until their 
 roofs and walls almost merge into its structure. 
 They climb to it and cling like peasants about a 
 queen, dressed in their homely brown and soiled 
 white and with all the patches of poverty; and the 
 queen stands royally attired, in the supreme dis- 
 tinction of black and white. This concentration of 
 the city upon itself, these close streets which twist 
 around one another, cross and recross, and rise so 
 high in order that they may not need to extend 
 widely, this complete detachment from everything 
 outside the walls which mark the city's limit, must 
 certainly have helped the growth of that instinct 
 from which it sprang, the instinct of proud aloofness. 
 Siena is like a little China, and its city-walls mark 
 
 209 
 14
 
 210 SIENA 
 
 the bounds of what it chooses to keep from strangers. 
 The image of the Middle Ages still persists in its 
 streets, and the character of its people remains un- 
 changed. Customs never die in Siena, and change 
 has no temptation for the Sienese. White oxen 
 still walk in the streets, drowsing in couples, their 
 wide horns almost touching the walls on either side ; 
 and they drag wicker carts shaped like Roman 
 chariots. 
 
 The modern spirit has spoiled Rome, and is daily 
 destroying there. It is more slowly, but not less 
 certainly, destroying Venice, with a literal, calcu- 
 lated destruction. Florence has let in the English, 
 who board there, and a new spirit, not destructive, 
 reverent of past things but superficial with new 
 civilisation, has mingled the Renaissance with the 
 commonplace of the modern world. But Siena is 
 content to remain itself, neither ambitious nor de- 
 jected, busying itself with its old industries (the 
 smell of the tanneries, as in the days of St. Catherine, 
 never out of its streets), keeping its beautiful old 
 things quietly, not trying to make new things like 
 them; content with the old limits, and with all old 
 things as they were. 
 
 And the splendour and dignity of its past still 
 live nobly in all the walls of Siena. Its history is 
 written there in stone, and with a lasting beauty, 
 in the walls of all its palaces. Palaces line the 
 streets, Gothic and Renaissance, all flat, severe, 
 built with grey stone cut into square blocks, with
 
 SIENA 211 
 
 here and there a reminiscence of the less simple and 
 admirable Florentine manner of building with partly 
 unhewn blocks. The palaces join walls with private 
 houses, and ask for no more space in these equalising 
 streets, to which they add force and beauty. They 
 accommodate themselves to the street, and turn 
 with it, in a kind of democracy of pride. Towers, 
 structures like prisons, gloomy remnants, which 
 stand at street-corners or between shop and shop, 
 come into the pattern naturally, without incongruity. 
 All Siena is of one piece, and at night sleeps together 
 with the same tranquil sleep. 
 
 There is in the streets at night a curious sense of 
 quiet, not the quiet of suspense or desolation, but 
 rather of people who prefer to stay indoors, in their 
 own homes, with walls and windows between them 
 and other people, in a quite friendly aloofness. 
 The streets do not call to them, as they call to people 
 in the South; they are corridors to walk through, not 
 alleys to linger in ; and the Sienese are not lingerers. 
 Even by day few people stand idle in the streets; 
 the church-square, on its height, is no meeting-place. 
 Siena works quietly by day, and at night sleeps 
 quietly. And, in the deserted streets, dimly lighted 
 by gas lamps at rare intervals, you seem to walk 
 through some mysterious excavation, with precipi- 
 tous descents on every side of you, going down, you 
 know not whither, into some lower part of the 
 earth or of the night.
 
 212 SIENA 
 
 II 
 
 The streets in Siena are high and narrow, and 
 they plunge upwards and downwards, under dark 
 arches, as if tunnelled out of solid rock, with walls 
 built straight, from pavement to roof, every window 
 flat to the wall, without ledge or cornice or balcony. 
 The streets are built to let in the wind and to keep 
 out the sun, and around all the squares, vast and 
 empty, walls are built against the sky, and square 
 thin towers climb straight to the stars, each to a 
 separate star in the stretched and many-lighted 
 canopy. The streets are set at all angles; the walls 
 seem to meet overhead, they plunge into invisible 
 depths. There are streets which go down hill so 
 rapidly that one is obliged to lean back on every 
 step, and then straight up hill again at almost an 
 acute angle; rarely a street which goes far on one 
 level, and never a street which goes far in one direc- 
 tion without turning. One looks down from the 
 street where one is walking, upon another which 
 passes under it or strikes out at right angles at the 
 bottom of a long flight of steps. One peers through 
 an archway on a piazza of which one sees no more 
 than the pavement and the foundation of the houses, 
 or looks upward through an archway above a flight 
 of steps, and sees only the tops of the houses. 
 
 In the heart of Siena there is a square, the Piazza 
 Vittorio Emanuele, which is shaped like the inside 
 of a shell, and curves upwards from the Palazzo
 
 SIENA 213 
 
 Communale, with its high tower, la Mangia, which 
 rises into the sky, red and white, with only less than 
 the supreme elegance of the dragon's neck of Flor- 
 ence, the tower of the Palazzo Vecchio. The square 
 is surrounded by tall irregular houses, built of red 
 brick, with green wooden shutters; narrow lanes 
 lead out of it upward and downward, and as you 
 look through an archway you see feet walking above 
 your head, and heads moving below your feet. The 
 middle of the square is paved with red brick, and 
 one walks on it as on Alps ; all around are short white 
 stone pillars, set at intervals, and beyond there is a 
 strip of grey stone pavement, round which the horses 
 race every year in the sport of the Palio, which 
 has survived in Siena since the Middle Ages. 
 
 Religion too, in Siena, is a part of tradition, like 
 the Palio, and the whole population can be seen going 
 all one way, like a Spanish city on the day of a bull- 
 fight, when the sermon is to end the "forty hours" 
 at S. Domenico. In that church of St. Catherine, 
 where Sodoma has painted her famous agony, one 
 sees a great crowd, of townsfolk and peasants, as- 
 sembling gravely, and standing patiently to listen 
 to the sermon, which is spoken monotonously from 
 the pulpit, all on one note, with pauses for rest 
 between each division. It is an old usage, and the 
 people follow it with a natural obedience. And in 
 the same way, with simplicity, not with fervour they 
 observe their feast-days. I was in Siena on the day 
 of Saint Joseph, and as I went towards the little
 
 2i 4 SIENA 
 
 mean church of S. Giuseppe, in its high corner, a 
 kind of fair seemed to be going on. On both sides 
 of the two steep streets, S. Giovanni Dupre and S. 
 Agata, little wooden toys, that ran on wheels made 
 of fir-cones, were being sold, and the people went 
 up and down the two streets, dressed in their best 
 clothes, the flapping Leghorn hats garlanded with 
 flowers nodding grotesquely, as with an affectation 
 of youth, on aged heads. Very soon one distin- 
 guished that these people were on their way to the 
 church where mass was being said, and they poured 
 in through the middle door and out through the 
 two side-doors, and every one dropped a coin into 
 the money-box on the table inside the door, and 
 received in exchange a leaflet with an image of St. 
 Joseph, and kissed it with pious gravity. It is only 
 on festa days that Siena seems completely to waken, 
 and it is only a few streets that are alive at any one 
 time. 
 
 What is still most living in Siena is the memory 
 of St. Catherine. Every child in the street offers 
 to take you to see her house, which stands half way 
 down the hill leading to the valley of the tanners 
 and dyers, and to Fontebranda, the fountain which 
 Dante remembered in hell. St. Catherine's head, 
 a ghastly relic (of which I saw only the copy in her 
 house, beautiful in the mortal pallor of the wax) , is 
 still kept in a shrine in S. Domenico under the altar 
 of the chapel which Sodoma painted in her honour. 
 It is for the sake of this relic, and because St. Gather-
 
 SIENA 215 
 
 ine used to come to this church to pray tnat S. 
 Domenico is still the favourite church in Siena, 
 though the main part of the building has been turned 
 into barracks. The vast Gothic structure, built of 
 red brick, massive and imposing in its simplicity, 
 is one of the landmarks of Siena. It is on the edge 
 of a gulf, over against the Cathedral; and on the 
 other side of the gulf, brown and white houses climb, 
 roof above roof, like a cluster of rocks, grouped there 
 naturally ; with, high over them, long, slender, striped 
 in long and slender lines of black and white marble, 
 the Cathedral, like a flower which has raised itself 
 out of the gross red earth and its rocks. 
 
 Ill 
 
 The Cathedral is a house of light, and all its 
 form and ornament are meant for the sun. Only the 
 fagade is in part disappointing, where, in the upper 
 half, the modern mosaics bring a distracting tangle 
 into what would have been the splendid design of 
 the lower half. Seen from S. Domenico, on its hill, 
 it has a clear, almost transparent beauty, a slim 
 and supple and striped elegance in line, with its 
 tower, so delicately symmetrical, its small grey dome 
 supported on small and dainty pillars. Inside, what 
 discretion, how undisfigured, how simply and har- 
 moniously decorated for divine uses! Severity 
 unites with sumptuousness in this distinguished 
 inner covering of black and white marble, on walls
 
 216 SIENA 
 
 and pillars. Under the dome there are tall black 
 and white pillars, bearing gilt statues; gold and 
 blue (with the rarest traces of red) are the two 
 colours which for the most part supplement and 
 enrich this severe colouring. Around the roof, 
 under the cornice of the windows, there is a fan- 
 tastic series of busts of the Popes, each a mitred 
 head, with its faint smile or closed eyes, in its sep- 
 arate niche, with the name, Formosus, Sivicius, or 
 Zosimus, painted in black below. The gold on the 
 mitres and on the lappets of the copes add faint 
 touches of colour, and the walls below and the roof 
 above are covered with fanciful patterns, and on 
 the roof gold stars are set on a background of blue 
 sky. In the choir, with its lovely carved wood and 
 intarsia, stands the pulpit of the Pisanos, with its 
 little carved world of men and the homely life of its 
 beasts. Donatello's St. John stands in one of the 
 side chapels named after the saint, and the five 
 small frescoes of Pinturicchio have faded to a discreet 
 dimness, in which one sees, not too distinctly, lovely 
 landscapes of grass and trees and hills; and there 
 is a fresco of Pinturicchio over an altar. 
 
 The Library of the Cathedral, where the sculptured 
 three Graces used to stand, when Raphael saw them, 
 is at first sight too dazzling, and the ten frescoes 
 seem to have been painted by Pinturicchio yester- 
 day. The splendour strikes harshly, and it is some 
 time before we can accustom our eyes to the new 
 aspect of this room, which is like a missal turned
 
 SIENA 217 
 
 fresco. It is to avoid the sinking of the paint into the 
 plaster, and that dulness which is in itself so attrac- 
 tive in fresco-painting, that Pinturicchio uses so 
 much gold, whenever it can be used, on vestments, 
 ceilings, canopies, altar-frames, on the bridles of 
 horses, on belts, chains, and brooches, using stucco 
 to give salience to the gold. He paints in clear crude 
 colours, with little shading, and he uses some aston- 
 ishing reds and greens and blues, which cry out like 
 trumpets from the midst of these pomps and cere- 
 monies. The Raphaelesque air of these gracious 
 young men and of these elegant old men would 
 bring a new quality into painting at Siena, with all 
 that Pinturicchio chose out of the actual world : 
 these decorative yet actual crowds, these knights on 
 horseback, these Popes in benediction, these white- 
 cowled monks, and grave Easterns in turbans. But 
 in his gold and brightness and love of beautiful 
 ornament he was but following in the tradition of 
 the Sienese painters; he was but realising some of 
 their dreams, not without even a little of the hard- 
 ness which with them went with their brightness, 
 though with a purely human quality, a delighted 
 sense of the earth, to which the growths and orna- 
 ments of the earth could give entire satisfaction. 
 
 Nothing so bright was ever put on a wall as the 
 picture of that room in which JEneas Sylvius is 
 made cardinal: that ceiling of gold embossed in gold, 
 that red and green of canopy and curtain, that gold 
 altar-front and the gold frame of the altar-piece,
 
 218 SIENA 
 
 with the glowing white marble of the altar-slab and 
 of the floor and of the steps to the throne. It is as 
 if the wall opened, and the room, not the picture 
 of it, the actual room and crowd, were there. 
 
 But what is most individual in the beauty of the 
 Cathedral decoration lies underfoot. The whole 
 centre of the floor is carefully covered with wood, 
 and it is only in the aisles that one can see the pic- 
 tures cut out in thin outline as if engraved in the 
 stones, which is the art peculiar to Siena. Battles 
 are fought out with lances; there are figures of the 
 Sibyls, with elaborate robes; friezes of winged lions; 
 with scenes and stories of a great energy of move- 
 ment, as in the many-coloured "Massacre of the Inno- 
 cents " by Matteo di Giovanni (his favourite subject) 
 with its border of laughing children looking down 
 from windows and balconies, the helpless women 
 with their babies, the merciless swordsmen, woven 
 into a lovely decoration of tossing arms and swords 
 and babies brandished in the air. Nowhere else 
 has stone so flowered into daintiness, into so delicate 
 an image of life; not, as elsewhere, detached, in the 
 great art of sculpture, but like pictures, like draw- 
 ings (as indeed they are called : Graffiti), like scratch- 
 ings on slate. The Sienese love of minute finish in 
 decoration is seen not only in their early paintings, 
 but in tiny patterns cut in stone over doorways, like 
 engraved work, in the painting of the under part of 
 their jutting roofs, and, above all, in this manner of 
 engraving stones as others carved wood, choosing
 
 SIENA 219 
 
 the hardest material, for its difficulty, and making 
 it, by the patience of their skill, a sumptuous thing. 
 It is a way of turning the hard pavement under 
 one's feet into a painted carpet. 
 
 IV 
 
 In early Sienese art, so Byzantine in manner, one is 
 struck by its elaborate finish, and by a love of rich 
 ornament, of bright pure colour, which is, however, 
 grave and gentle, and at first used only to paint the 
 beauty of Heaven and of the angels, and then the 
 earthly splendour of the Popes, and lastly the divine 
 humanity of St. Catherine and S. Bernardino, the 
 two people of genius whom Siena gave to the angels. 
 Duccio paints the faces of his Madonnas green, in 
 order to suggest a superhuman countenance in 
 which there is none of the human ruddiness of flesh. 
 With St. Catherine another, human pallor, comes 
 into painting, and Sodoma, with his new, more ac- 
 complished means, strives to paint ecstasy, and 
 once, in the " Swoon of St. Catherine" in S. Domenico, 
 renders marvellously that death in life. In Sodoma, 
 Sienese painting begins to become self-conscious, 
 and he leads the way to the worst and feeblest ex- 
 travagances of Beccafumi and Pacchiarotto. He is 
 never quite sincere, or wholly given up to the thing 
 he is doing, and he lets his feelings or his rhetoric 
 or his skill carry him in many directions. But, 
 before he destroyed Sienese art, he left at least
 
 220 SIENA 
 
 one example of how what the early painters had 
 been trying to do by pious formulas, the rendering 
 of superhuman ecstasies, could be done, quite lit- 
 erally, by sheer painting. 
 
 What is really most profound, personal, and ex- 
 quisite in Sienese painting is to be found in Duccio, 
 who in his earliest work is purely Byzantine, and in 
 all his work purely mediaeval. His vast altar-piece in 
 the Opera del Duomo, the " Majestas," is hieratic, for- 
 mal, conventionally bright, but what warm personal 
 feeling there is in even what is least individualised in 
 the figures of the Madonna and Child, with their gold 
 halos and the pattern of gold on their scarcely faded 
 robes, the burnished blue robe of the Virgin, and the 
 bright robes of the attendant saints, each with gold 
 halo distinct against a background of ruddier gold. 
 And what sense of drama, how many kinds of beauty, 
 what delicate feeling, in the numberless little scenes 
 out of the Gospel, broken up into arbitrary squares 
 and sections in what was once the back of the picture. 
 It is all much more realised than in many Sienese 
 paintings in compartments, painted with no more 
 than a child's notion of what reality ought to be. 
 Yet it is still to some extent image-making. But 
 between this image-making and the modern rhetoric 
 of Sodoma there is an art more vital than Sodoma's, 
 and not wholly aloof from the decorative reality of 
 the earlier work. Matteo di Giovanni and Sodoma 
 are to be seen in a single chapel in S. Agostinq. The 
 " Massacre of the Innocents " has a violent loveliness
 
 SIENA 221 
 
 which is rarer and more penetrating than anything 
 which Sodoma ever attained. The packed angry 
 crowd is as it were squeezed together, every face 
 individually alive; the grim swordsmen, the mocking 
 Jew Herod, who sits enthroned in the very midst 
 of the slaughter, the agonised women, the father 
 who kneels beside his wife and stretches out his arms 
 tenderly over the dead child in her lap. And the 
 gestures are terrible : the sword thrust into the mouth 
 of the babe, as the mother all but escapes with it, 
 the gold-hilted daggers gripped hard, high in the 
 air, the clutching hands, and feet trampling on the 
 dead, the strange decorative rim of dead babies set 
 symmetrically along the floor in the front of the 
 picture, the older children who look in through pil- 
 lared windows, laughing idly. And this painter 
 has a like care for the beauty of dresses, worked with 
 gold, and falling in lovely folds, and for the scrupu- 
 lous coils of hair and falling curls, and for the gold 
 ornaments over Herod's throne, and for the squares 
 and circles of cosimato work in the floor stained with 
 little, sufficient stains of blood. Over the altar 
 Sodoma has painted an "Adoration of the Magi," and 
 it is full of all the obviousness of beauty, of lyrical 
 cries of colour, from here, from there: this crowned 
 youth with a face in which the Leonardo smile has 
 deepened to consciousness, this kneeling king with 
 his effective manly grace, the effective violence of 
 the negro king standing by his side, the doll-like 
 Virgin and Child, St. Joseph posed for the display
 
 222 SIENA 
 
 of a muscular bare arm; and beyond, a cavalcade, 
 trees, rocks, a shadowy castle on a hill, glimpses of a 
 faint valley ; all made of conscious charm, of a beauty 
 not organic, an applied beauty. 
 
 Elsewhere, as in S. Bernardino, where the really 
 fine Sodoma is the " Coronation of the Virgin," there 
 is more of this wildly luxurious colour and languid 
 form, nudes of romantic softness, strange spots of 
 feverish colour, as in the leopard-skin and purple 
 girdle of St. John, and in the melting white drapery 
 of the Virgin, and in the ruddy hair and beard of 
 Christ. But what all this leads to is to be seen 
 tragically on another wall, in Beccafumi's "[Death of 
 the Virgin," where the fever of Sodoma passes into 
 delirium, and splashes in coloured waves all over 
 the picture. 
 
 There is in the ardent and concentrated beauty 
 of Siena something almost artificial, as of a city 
 on a hill in an old picture. From the fortifications 
 one can see the whole city, the houses set tightly side 
 by side, flat, many- windowed, brown and white, 
 brown-roofed, tier above tier, without visible space 
 between; all clustered together, as if for safety or 
 friendliness, and all leading up to the long and narrow 
 Cathedral, with its dome and tower, which seems 
 to draw all this irregular mass into a single harmony. 
 All around it is the peace of a green world, falling into
 
 SIENA 223 
 
 valleys where there is red earth and dark and pointing 
 cypresses and the grey mist of olives, and rising into 
 little hills where bells swing on the roofs of brown 
 monasteries. As the valley dips and rises the col- 
 ours darken, and, beyond the valley, hills begin pale 
 green and grey, and then, against the sky lighted 
 at sunset, a luminous dark blue, like the colour of 
 storm-clouds. Far off the hills seem to break like 
 quiet waves, in long curved lines, against the white 
 shore of sky. Seen after sunset it is as if a great 
 missal, painted by Sienese artists, had been set up- 
 right between earth and sky; a sky rose-coloured 
 and blue and gold, the outlines of the hills drawn 
 sharply against a gold background, purple-black, 
 with depths of colour glowing through darkness, 
 and lighted at the edges with miraculous gold.
 
 VERONA 
 
 225
 
 VERONA 
 
 IN Verona the gutters are of marble. The ledge 
 you lean upon, the flight of steps going up outside a 
 house, the posts which block a street against wheels, 
 the fountain in the market-place, are all made of 
 white or red marble. Pillars of white or red mar- 
 ble hold up the overhanging roofs of shops, and 
 the shop-keepers paste their advertisements over 
 the marble. Every street has its marble doorway, 
 window, or balcony, shaped after a fine Renaissance 
 pattern or carved with beautiful ornament. The 
 Loggia in that Piazza dei Signori which holds so 
 much history in its stones shows only in its harmony 
 of delicate proportions and faint colors, white and 
 gold and pink, a subtler and more conscious use 
 of the materials which lie ready to the hand every- 
 where in Verona. 
 
 In an angle near the Ponte Navi, made by the 
 Via Leoni and the Lungadige Bartolomeo Rubele, 
 is an old fragment of white marble, on which two 
 old and sleepy lions, wounded and worn with age, 
 
 crouch on each side of a low pediment. To the 
 
 227
 
 228 VERONA 
 
 right and left is a short marble pillar, with a square 
 cross in a circle carved upon it. Over the tops of 
 the houses, opposite the river, one sees the red 
 and white tower, and the choir with its pointed 
 gables set between slender cone-topped pillars, of 
 the Gothic church of San Fermo Maggiore. In 
 this huddle of white stone which lies, uncared for, in 
 the road, before the doors of two shops, the forms 
 are still alive, though sunk into the uneasy sleep of 
 the wounded; for the back of one of the lions is 
 clean broken away, and the faces of both have gone 
 dim, as if rubbed and washed out by rains and 
 dust. Not far off, along the Via Leoni, is the Arch 
 of the Lions, a beautiful fragment of a double 
 Roman gateway, built into the wall of a house, 
 with a shop-window fitted into the arch, and oil- 
 lamps in the shop-window; it stands there, just 
 turned aside from the tram line, a beautiful and 
 indestructible thing, all its forms washed over and 
 half obliterated, but still keeping the pathetic grace 
 of a broken statue. 
 
 And there are monsters everywhere, in red and 
 white marble, crouching at the doors of churches 
 and leaning over from the lintels, and carved in 
 slabs let into the walls of houses. A very dreadful 
 beast, with a face like a wheel, squats over the side 
 doorway of the Cathedral, clutched, I think, from 
 behind by another beast whose home is in the stone ; 
 and over the pillar on the other side of the doorway 
 there is another fantastic wrestle. At the main
 
 VERONA 229 
 
 doorway there are two monsters of red marble, which 
 still look alive and hardly older after seven centuries ; 
 their fur ribbed elegantly in conventional patterns 
 along their smooth sides, and on one of them a strange 
 design of a wheel, as if stamped into its flesh. They 
 have not the solemn humour of the two red marble 
 lions outside St. Mark's at Venice, homely, com- 
 panionable beasts; but are fierce and watchful. 
 They have the heads of cats or tigers, and one of 
 them lays its heavy claws upon two rams' heads, 
 which it crushes under it, while the other clutches 
 the coils of a great snake which bites it with wide- 
 open jaws. Columns of twisted and fluted red 
 marble are set on their backs, and columns of 
 smooth white marble stand behind them; and they 
 help to hold up the under arch of the square door- 
 way, with its alternate layers of smooth red marble 
 and carved white marble. 
 
 And the two colours of Veronese marble, red and 
 white, are repeated in bricks, in pavements, in 
 castles, churches, palaces, and bridges; and at 
 sunset the whole city seems to flush with ruddy 
 light. After the lamps are lighted the colours are 
 still visible. Square towers rise white and red 
 above the houses, and everywhere there are tall 
 archways which open upon lines of ruddy walls, or 
 upon the gold blackness of a narrowing street. 
 
 II 
 In the Piazza Erbe there is a marble fountain of
 
 230 VERONA 
 
 the time of Berengarius I.; a later statue, a little 
 distracting, has been added to it, but its original 
 design is the most simple and ample of any fountain 
 I know. The basin is but slightly hollowed, and the 
 water falling into it overflows upon a pavement that 
 slopes outwards only just enough for the water to 
 pour off it into a narrow rim around its edge, from 
 which it is drained off on one side through an iron 
 grating. The Tribuna, the other marble columns, 
 the column with the lion of St. Mark, set there when 
 Verona became tributary to Venice, stand about it 
 in the Piazza ; and all over the ground white umbrel- 
 las rise like a wood of tall mushrooms, covering the 
 stalls of fruit and vegetables, each umbrella set 
 solidly into its wooden box, upon which it stands 
 furled at night like a great unlighted altar candle. 
 The Piazza Erbe is the most individual square that 
 I know ; hardly two houses are of the same century, 
 and each has its own personal quality. There is 
 one house eight stories high ; an ancient carved pillar 
 stands in front of it; but it is mean, discoloured, the 
 plaster blackened, the green shutters peeled and 
 stained ; it is but two windows in breadth, and under 
 almost every window there is a fragment of carved 
 stone under the rusty iron balcony. The frescoes 
 in the Casa Mazzanti, Can Grande's house, where 
 Dante was a guest, are not yet all gone from the 
 walls; poor people look out between them from 
 every window, and look on a square hardly changed 
 except for its tram line.
 
 VERONA 231 
 
 In the Via Mazzanti, at the back of the Piazza 
 Erbe, the house of the Scalas is covered with balconies 
 in long lines, with others set irregularly; and a tall 
 outer staircase goes up along the wall to the third 
 story. A few fine windows are still left, and below, 
 clamped by long trails of iron hanging from the walls 
 on each side of the narrow street, is a marble well, 
 its eight sides covered with florid effective carving 
 coloured to many shades by age and dust. On the 
 walls of the house, beside the Volto Barbaro, a pas- 
 sage which goes under fragments of old brick-work, 
 looking out from the midst of modern building, there 
 is an inscription, typical of many which may be 
 seen in Verona: "Mastino I della Scala, eletto 
 Podesta nel 1260, Capitano del Popolo nel 1261, 
 cadde ucciso a tradimento li 17 Ottobre 1277, presso 
 questo volto da ci6 detto Barbaro." ("Mastino I 
 della Scala, elected Podesta in 1260, Captain of the 
 People in 1261, fell, treacherously slain, the i7th 
 October, 1277, near this arch, thence called Bar- 
 barous.") 
 
 The Piazza, was once the Forum, when Verona 
 was Roman; now it is the fruit-market, and the 
 tram runs backwards and forwards through it all 
 day long, down the street of the lions, and past the 
 house where they tell you Juliet lived. I was walk- 
 ing through it after dark, and I heard a thin tinkle 
 of music coming out between half-closed shutters. 
 Looking through them, I saw the waiter of the 
 "Deposito di Birra," in his shirt-sleeves, whirled
 
 232 VERONA 
 
 round in the arms of a customer who wore a hat and 
 was smoking a Virginia. A moment later the land- 
 lady and a woman who had been sitting at one of 
 the tables waltzed past the window. The guitar 
 tinkled, the dancers laughed, stopped, and went 
 back to the tables at which they sat or waited. 
 
 Ill 
 
 When I try to call up Verona, it is always the 
 cypresses of the Giardino Giusti, and the tall terraces 
 which their tops almost reach, that come first to 
 mind. They are among the oldest cypresses in 
 Europe, and among the tallest. I remember a bronze 
 label on one incredibly wrinkled, dry, wizened, but 
 still living bark, attesting it to have stood there four 
 hundred years. The lean, ancient things stood as 
 straight as pillars ; the whole slender stem seemed 
 to sway down with every breath of wind, as I 
 looked down on them from the height from which 
 one sees across Verona to the Apennines. A 
 cypress never looks young, and these, when one 
 saw only the sombre green fur of their foliage, 
 looked no older than any cypresses in any Turkish 
 graveyard. To pass under them, and look close, was 
 to see how like is the work of time, working by cen- 
 turies upon the vegetable life of trees, to the work 
 of time on the little animal lifetime of men. 
 
 And then, as I think again of Verona, I see the 
 church porch at the end of the street to which I
 
 VERONA 233 
 
 came back every day, Sant' Anastasia, with its ribbed 
 brick- work and the marble arch of the doorway, and 
 the fresco of the lunette. The bronze gates of San 
 Zeno, each with its twenty-four reliefs, in the literal 
 twelfth-century manner; the plain arches of the 
 Roman bridge, and the wing-like Ghibelline battle- 
 ments of Can Grande's bridge of the fourteenth 
 century, with its inner galleries; a glimpse of old 
 tall houses going right down into the river, as one 
 sees them in Canaletto's pictures of Verona, done 
 before the embankment straightened and spoiled it ; 
 and then the lizard which I saw clinging to the wall 
 of the hotel as I looked out of the window, and the 
 inch-long snake which lay asleep by the side of the 
 pavement: these, by I know not what unconscious 
 choice of the memory, come back before my eyes, 
 and help to station Verona. And, as vividly as 
 anything there, I see the old water-seller who sat 
 just aside from the Via Nuova, her copper-topped 
 table of green wood with its pattern of brass nails, 
 made to fit between the two short pillars of red 
 marble with tops of white marble which stood at the 
 entrance of the alley ; the bottles with brass stoppers 
 which held some coloured liquid, the large copper can 
 which held the water, and the vast copper bowl with 
 water for washing the glasses. 
 
 IV 
 
 The Via Nuova is a narrow street which leads
 
 234 VERONA 
 
 from the Piazza Erbe to the Piazza Vittorio Eman- 
 uele ; it is a street of shops, closed at both ends to 
 traffic, like the Sierpes at Seville, and, like that, it is 
 the evening promenade, or the beginning of a prome- 
 nade which expands into that immense square which 
 contains the Arena in one corner, leaving enough 
 space over for the Municipio, the old Guard-house, 
 and the mediaeval gateway of the Viscontis, besides 
 a palace, cafe's, shops, around no more than its outer 
 edges. Beside the Arena the oldest things in Verona 
 are new, and look already passing into decay. When 
 Dante walked in it, it was a ruin, and since that 
 century it has suffered little except at the hands of 
 the restorers. It was built for cruel use, not for 
 beauty; and there is a sternness in its aspect which 
 would suit ill with any not serious or deadly sport. 
 But now, browned, defaced, the whole skeleton of 
 its walls left naked, one ruinous fragment of an 
 outer wall still standing, unsupported and in all the 
 disarray of age, it has that beauty of use, order, and 
 strength which we have learned to see in the un- 
 adorned and very simple building of the Romans, 
 almost wherever two stones are left on one another 
 and not yet cast down. Seen at night, with a purple 
 sunset facing it across the gate of the Viscontis, and 
 a tragic moon breaking through clouds, in a circle of 
 white light, behind and above the great curve of its 
 wall, it has another, romantic, almost Gothic, aspect, 
 like that of those ruins of the Middle Ages which we 
 begin to tire of, as being, like Swiss scenery, too
 
 VERONA 235 
 
 picturesque, too splendidly arranged for effect. 
 But a quieting of the clouds brings it back to its 
 austerity. 
 
 In the evenings the band plays in the Piazza, and 
 the chairs of the cafe's spread right across the broad 
 pavement, and the people walk slowly up and down, 
 coming from the Via Nuova, passing by the Arena, 
 and going nearly up to the old gateway. I sat 
 there with great content, thinking of other city 
 squares where I had sat watching the people from 
 a chair set on the pavement outside a cafe", and I 
 wondered whether in even the great square of St. 
 Mark's, where I should be in a few evenings from 
 then, I should find more to remember, in what my 
 eyes rested on, or a more adventurous point of 
 flight for dreams. 
 
 AUTUMN, 1903.
 
 BOLOGNA 
 
 237
 
 BOLOGNA 
 
 THIS sad and learned town, which I have seen 
 only under a thin, continuous rain which made its 
 streets of arcades seem a matter of course, revealed 
 itself to me with a certain severe charm, a little 
 fantastic also, fascinating rather the mind than 
 the senses. Coming from Naples, I suddenly felt 
 the North. In the bedroom of my hotel, where I 
 heard the rain fall, outside my door, on the little 
 open balcony over the central court, I remembered 
 that for a month I had been sleeping where I could 
 look from my bed and see nothing but sky and sea, 
 both seeming to be equally far below me, in the 
 hollow of a great plain. Walking in these covered 
 streets, I saw only Northern faces hurrying past me ; 
 students with their black-hooded mackintoshes, 
 like the hooded cloak of Faust on the stage ; women 
 with covered heads, their faces distressed because 
 of the rain; farmers, gross as their cattle, who might 
 have been coming to an English market. The sun 
 had gone out, and all the bright colour seemed to 
 have faded from the world. 
 
 But, perhaps a little from the force of that very 
 contrast, the browns and greys of Bologna seemed to 
 
 239
 
 2 4 o BOLOGNA 
 
 me to have a singular and a very personal beauty. 
 The crinkled brown of the unfinished front of S. 
 Petronio, the dull brown brick-work of the two 
 towers, the reddish-brown of S. Domenico, in its 
 desolate square; all the many-shaded grey of colon- 
 nades, of the University, of the courts seen through 
 open doorways, under their arches, seemed to com- 
 pose themselves to suit the whole picture of a town 
 shut in upon itself since the Middle Ages, and still 
 keeping so much of the Middle Ages within its walls. 
 I found something bewildering in these unending 
 churches, church within church, as in the sevenfold 
 Santo Stefano, with their irregular architecture, 
 their strange, primitive frescoes, their many carvings, 
 tombs of saints and kings, their crypts cumbered with 
 pious relics, eighth-century fonts, ninth-century sar- 
 cophagi, their cloisters, two-storied, and now over- 
 grown with grass. Wherever I went in Bologna I 
 came upon something mediaeval: a church, a pillar, 
 a public building, the Podesta dwindling away under 
 the portico of Vignola into cafe's and shops; and, 
 more typical, because more fantastic than anything 
 else, the two leaning towers, serving no purpose, not 
 in themselves beautiful, but, like most of the caprices 
 of the Middle Ages, lasting, a lasting wonder, a riddle 
 without an answer, a sort of gigantic joke, stupe- 
 fying as the jokes of Rabelais. 
 
 In the picture gallery, among many indifferent 
 pictures and some admirable ones, showing histori- 
 cally the whole course of Bolognese art, there is a
 
 BOLOGNA 241 
 
 roomful of Francias, from the formal, hard early 
 manner of the worker in niello to the gentle and 
 severe mastery of the later work. Francia shows 
 me something of Bologna, in these intent, instructed 
 faces, to whom life has always been a closed thing, 
 shut in upon by walls, whose meditation has never 
 been soft, or luxurious, or a flower of the sunlight, 
 whose dreams have never been of very distant hori- 
 zons. There is no mystery in his pictures, always 
 the serious joy or the grave sorrow of unimpassioned 
 people; and I have seen in the streets just those 
 oval, placid women's faces, conscious of the day 
 and the hour. His colour is clear, definite, but with- 
 out splendour, or that shade which is the shadow of 
 intense light. Like Bologna, he appeals rather to 
 the mind than to the senses, and chiefly to a mind 
 whose chief concerns are with those hundred and 
 thirty churches, those twenty monasteries, which 
 the city holds within its walls. 
 
 But the most profound impression which I received 
 in this old, sad, learned town, the slumber of whose 
 colonnades is disturbed, after all not unsympathet- 
 ically, by the boisterous youth, eternally renewed, 
 century after century, of students, was the impression 
 which I received from the Museo Civico. I was the 
 only visitor that inclement day, and I congratulated 
 myself on being safe from interruption. But gradu- 
 ally, as I moved from room to room in that silence, 
 amongst all those spoils of Etruscan and Italic 
 sepulchres, the weight of so much, so ancient, and 
 19
 
 242 BOLOGNA 
 
 so forgotten death began to weigh upon me. I 
 moved from room to room, and still I found myself 
 among earthly bones, in which all the violence of a 
 life which had come to an end so many centuries ago 
 seemed still a-gasp in those mouths without lips, 
 those sockets without eyes, those long, knotted, 
 fleshless fingers. And by their side, in case after 
 case, were all the little household things which those 
 very hands, perhaps, had carried thoughtlessly; the 
 hairpins of dead women, their earrings, their bronze 
 mirrors, delicately worked, which had shown, per- 
 haps, those very faces to themselves when they 
 were yet flesh. I went into other rooms, but beside 
 the instruments of music, their metal rusted, their 
 strings slack and broken, I was pursued by the 
 thought of the hands that had lifted them, the 
 fingers that had sounded their notes. I turned to 
 the coins, the medals; and there, in these delicately 
 incised heads, Cellini's or John of Bologna's, I could 
 see only that they were the portraits of dead men 
 and women, and that the pride of life which had per- 
 petuated them was after all only another glory 
 which had gone down into the dust, ridiculously de- 
 spoiled by death. Why was it, what unexpected, 
 too convincing logic in these silent things, in the 
 particular place where I saw them, the particular 
 mood which I brought to the seeing of them? I 
 cannot quite account for it, but never in any other 
 museum (those mortuaries of civilisation laid out 
 as a perpetual chapelle ardente for our amusement)
 
 BOLOGNA 243 
 
 had I felt so acutely the pathos of transitory things 
 not suffered to die; many separate houses, which 
 had each been a home, turned into a public show; 
 never had I felt such an odour of death, not even in 
 Pompeii. 
 
 Going a little hurriedly into the open air, I met a 
 band of students who passed me with a joyous un- 
 concern, untouched by the gathered trouble of the 
 past or by any sense of sadness in the covered streets 
 which echoed under their feet. Their audacious 
 modernness, their confident youth, came to me with 
 a singular relief, and, heedless of most things as 
 they seemed just then to be, I remembered the not 
 less confident motto of their university: "Bononia 
 docet." 
 
 SPRING, 1897.
 
 BERGAMO AND LORENZO LOTTO 
 
 245
 
 BERGAMO AND LORENZO LOTTO 
 
 ALL around Bergamo one sees the landscape back- 
 grounds of early Italian pictures: on one side the 
 mountains, and, stretching out to the mountains or 
 to the sky, wide flat plains, set with short trees like 
 bushes, and with square patches of cultivated ground, 
 a green level space ending on the sky in a mist. 
 Here and there a little hill, like an abrupt rock, 
 rises out of the plain. And the colours, as evening 
 comes on, are the colours of a Luini fresco, greens 
 and reddish browns, mingled just as they are on the 
 plaster. Looking upwards from the Citta Bassa, 
 the Citta Alta rises out of the plain, almost suddenly, 
 up a green hill; you see the long deep wall of the 
 ramparts, lined along the top with walnut trees; 
 above, tiers of white, flat, brown-roofed, many- 
 windowed houses, like a Spanish, or Eastern, city; 
 here and there a tower, a spire, a dome, or an arch. 
 Roads climb the hillsides in terraces, and you see 
 their straight lines turning abruptly, as they go 
 higher. The houses are large and solid, and as you 
 walk through the climbing streets you see, over 
 your head, the roofs almost meet across the little 
 gaps of sky. Now and again the streets broaden into 
 
 247
 
 248 BERGAMO AND LORENZO LOTTO 
 
 a square of many angles. The Piazza Garibaldi 
 has at one end Scamozzi's unfinished palace, its 
 three uncompanioned statues standing against the 
 sky ; and at the other end, where the square of simple 
 flat houses narrows, the Gothic Palazzo Vecchio, 
 with its arcades, through which one sees the twelfth- 
 century front of Santa Maria Maggiore, and a part 
 of the over- decorated Capella Colleoni, like a casket 
 of turned ivory, with one angle and the steps of the 
 Cathedral. At the side there is a pillared staircase, 
 roofed with rough red tiles, which goes up by abrupt 
 stories of house-tops to a square tower, with I know 
 not what "romantic charm in its aspect. There is a 
 florid monument to Garibaldi in the midst of the 
 square, but the beautiful arches of the Palazzo Vec- 
 chio end the space, opening to let the sight through 
 upon pillars, curved stone steps, and the gateway of 
 the lions. 
 
 In the lower town, people go briskly about their 
 business, and there is a continual coming and going 
 of diligences from the country, and of trams trotting 
 from the railway station to the funicular railway 
 which takes you to the higher town. There are 
 broad squares, with stalls of books and fruit in them, 
 and low buildings like dilapidated almshouses, 
 intersected by narrow streets, which form a kind of 
 ciU between the two squares. The tram trots under 
 a deep alley of chestnuts, and you seem at every 
 point to be at the edge of the country. The fu- 
 nicular railway goes up through trees and among
 
 BERGAMO AND LORENZO LOTTO 249 
 
 houses, and sets you down not far from the wooded 
 ramparts, which go all round the higher town, broad 
 and dusty promenades which at certain points re- 
 mind one of the Kalemegdan at Belgrade. 
 
 Coming downwards from the higher town, by a 
 road which goes under the Porta Sant' Agostino, 
 just below the ruined Gothic church, now a barrack, 
 which stands on one of the highest heights, you go 
 through an alley of acacias to the Accademia Car- 
 rara, in which three picture galleries are united, 
 one of them containing the pictures left to his birth- 
 place by Giovanni Morelli. Here and throughout 
 Bergamo, in seven different churches, you are con- 
 tinually meeting with Lorenzo Lottos. All through 
 the Citta Alta there are churches, some of them 
 locked, and most of them but poorly cared for, 
 with frescoes left to peel off the walls and altar- 
 pieces half concealed by the gilt frippery of religion. 
 In the Cathedral there is a splendid little Madonna, 
 which Morelli thought was a Bellini, but which Mr. 
 Berenson tells us is a Bissolo: it is hidden away in 
 a dark frame, like a wooden box, at the back of the 
 high altar. But above all there are Lottos. In 
 the Accademia there is the " Betrothal of St. Cather- 
 ine," in which conscious figures stand and lean as if 
 they were set there for some gracious or elegantly 
 sentimental effect, the dignity of fine peasant 
 models smoothed out into prettiness. In the por- 
 trait of a woman against a sky in which a gold moon 
 breaks through storm-clouds, there is a sumptuous
 
 250 BERGAMO AND LORENZO LOTTO 
 
 quality of real charm in this face, which has character 
 as well as prettiness, a face like an Ingres, with rich 
 detail of rings and chains and pearls in necklace and 
 fillet, and an elaborate red hat with cunningly ren- 
 dered gold bows. In Santo Spirito there is a 
 Madonna with saints, shoals of angels adrift on 
 tinted and tufted clouds, in which the prettiness has 
 no fineness; it is wholly done for effect, and the 
 quality of the paint has the quality of the feeling, 
 with a kind of actual acidity in its colour. In the 
 queer, shut-up church of San Michele al Pozzo 
 Bianco, there are some frescoes in which we see 
 much of what is best in this feminine and never 
 quite sincere painter. They are half hidden by 
 gilt altar-pieces, and parts of them have been 
 plastered over, but there is real charm, with an 
 unusual simplicity, in these quiet green landscapes, 
 in which Mary and the Child ride on a little 
 shaggy donkey, and Joseph toils uphill carrying a 
 pack on his back. There is the marriage of the 
 Virgin, and her birth, done with broad washes of 
 plain colour, and a charming figure of the Virgin, 
 at her marriage, in white, with green leaves in her 
 hair. But in San Bernardino in Pignolo there is a 
 Madonna (obscured behind great red hangings and 
 gilt gewgaws) painted in that smooth way, with that 
 forced, self-conscious elegance of attitude, which 
 gives its air of insincerity to so much of Lotto's 
 work. And again, in San Bartolomeo, there is a 
 throned Madonna, with sprawling angels above and
 
 BERGAMO AND LORENZO LOTTO 251 
 
 crowded saints below, which, full as it is of effec- 
 tive ability, of ready design, of undistinguished but 
 telling colour, has the rhetorical quality of the the- 
 atre, with the insincerity of every form of rhetoric. 
 To see the Lotto one goes into the choir, behind 
 the high altar; and, turning away dissatisfied from 
 what clamoured for one's attention in the altar-piece, 
 I looked, at first carelessly, and then as closely as 
 the dim light would let me, at the intarsia work of 
 the stalls, done by Fra Damiano in 1520, four years 
 after the picture. Here, in this supple and vigorous 
 work in wood, I saw what could be done by a fine 
 artist in the handling of somewhat intractable 
 material. The work was broad or minute at will; 
 with splendid masses and division of colour in some 
 designs which seemed to represent the Deluge, sharp, 
 clear, firmly outlined in the patterns of streets and 
 houses; full of rich colour in the setting of wood 
 against wood, and at times almost as delicate as a 
 Japanese design. There was the head of John the 
 Baptist laid on a stone slab, which was like a drawing 
 of Daumier. And, in the whole composition of the 
 design, with its two ovals set on each side like mir- 
 rors for the central horror, there was perfect bal- 
 ance. The work throughout was firm, fine, 
 delicately elaborated; every stall was a picture, 
 complete in itself, and with a quality of sincerity 
 which I had looked for in vain in the altar-piece of 
 Lotto. The contrast set me thinking. I am not 
 judging Lotto by all that is known of him, by his
 
 252 BERGAMO AND LORENZO LOTTO 
 
 best portraits, like that portrait of an old man in 
 the Brera, but Lotto as we see him at Bergamo, 
 a painter of religious pictures in which he aims 
 at rendering a certain kind of reality. And the 
 criticism of Fra Damiano upon his contemporary 
 the famous painter seemed to me the criticism of a 
 thing, comparatively humble in itself, but in itself 
 wholly satisfying, upon the failure of a more con- 
 spicuous endeavour, which has made its own place 
 in art, to satisfy certain primary demands which 
 one may logically make upon it. 
 
 1903.
 
 BRESCIA AND ROMANINO 
 
 253
 
 BRESCIA AND ROMANINO 
 
 BRESCIA is broad and leisurely, with arcades and 
 squares, churches and palaces ; and the Middle Ages 
 and the Renaissance and the Resorgimento live 
 there comfortably together. There was hard righting 
 here in 1849, and there are monuments to those who 
 fell in the streets. And these modem statues and 
 reliefs of men with muskets are seen side by side with 
 Roman columns of the first century, early Christian 
 basilicas, palaces of the twelfth century, elaborate 
 Renaissance facades, and the numberless white mar- 
 ble fountains, of different ages and of many admi- 
 rable designs, which bring the sound of water into 
 these clean and not crowded streets. Everywhere 
 fine doorways open into patios, with green grass, 
 trees, pillars, and a fountain ; it might be Spain, only 
 there are no rejas, none of the beautiful iron gates 
 which in Spain shut off the patio from the street. 
 And one comes constantly upon fine old buildings, 
 turned now to humble uses, but kept with a certain 
 care and cleanliness. Wine-presses stand in the 
 side streets, and one hears the grapes splashing and 
 cracking, as a dirty man with purple legs dances in 
 the barrel. And there are wine-screws out of which 
 
 255
 
 256 BRESCIA AND ROMANINO 
 
 one sees men taking bowls of crushed red skins, like 
 a kind of purple peat. 
 
 The people of Brecsia go quietly about their 
 streets, and on Sunday evenings sit down by the 
 pavement while the band plays outside the cafe's 
 under the arcades. One might be at Venice, at 
 Florian's or the Quadri, but there is no St. Mark's 
 and, indeed, no Piazza. The street, at that part 
 of the Corso, is very broad, and from half -past eight 
 to ten the trams stop, little toy trams which trot 
 in an antiquated way, each with its one lean horse. 
 A policeman in a tall hat and frock-coat, holding a 
 tasselled cane, sets up two heavily-weighted notice 
 boards at each end of a given length of the tram 
 line. On these boards the words " Passagio pei soli 
 pedoni" are painted in writing characters on three 
 music staves in the treble clef. At ten o'clock the 
 tram, which has been waiting, begins to trot again, 
 and the people go home. 
 
 The people (except for a strange breed of dwarfs, 
 chiefly women, who are not deformed, but no more 
 than half -size) remind me a little of Venice. There 
 are the same small creatures, women and girls, who 
 wear black shawls or black lace mantillas over their 
 heads, and pass by twos and threes, quietly, with 
 watchful eyes, always with beautiful hair, which in 
 the very old women turns to a kind of crisp white 
 wool. There is no model of Romanino or of Moretto 
 whom I did not see in the streets, and I saw also 
 some smaller and more piquant faces, delicately
 
 BRESCIA AND ROMANINO 257 
 
 featured, which I do not find in the work of the two 
 painters of Brescia. 
 
 People go to Brescia for the sake of Moretto and 
 of Romanino, who make up a little Brescian school 
 of their own and whose work is chiefly to be seen 
 there. Walter Pater, with something more than 
 sympathy, has interpreted all that is best in the 
 work of this "Rubens in Italy" and his companion 
 in the paper called "Art Notes in North Italy." 
 Going to Brescia and to Bergamo, it was with an 
 aroused curiosity that I went through the galleries 
 and had the doors of many churches unlocked for 
 me. I never tried so hard to like the work of any 
 painter as I have tried to like the work of Moretto, 
 nor failed so completely. Everything of Moretto 
 has vigour, yet the vigour rarely reaches fineness; 
 his skill in the use of colour ends before the touch of 
 illumination has come; his design is never, even at 
 its best, free from a certain conventional correctness. 
 He has been praised for his "subdued silvery tone" 
 and for a Venetian richness of colouring. Neither 
 in his richness nor in his severity does he show the 
 instinctive qualities of a great colourist ; he is always 
 capable, never subtle, never really distinguished. 
 What has been called ideality in him is a sentiment 
 which, however sincere it may be in itself, is unable 
 to express itself, except very rarely, in a sincere way. 
 He is the type of all that is skilful, telling, and ener- 
 getic ; his aim is serious, and his capacity considerable, 
 but he remains, a little out in the cold, between the 
 17
 
 258 BRESCIA AND ROMANINO 
 
 great painters and the painters who, without being 
 great, have carried some individual charm to per- 
 fection. He is no one's favourite painter. 
 
 In the work of Romanino (who was born thirteen 
 years before Moretto, in 1485, and who survived him 
 eleven years) I find it more possible to be interested, 
 and I am able to look on Romanino with a kind of 
 respect which Moretto rarely exacts from me. In 
 the Corpus Domini Chapel of San Giovanni there 
 are frescoes by both painters, side by side, the 
 younger man still obviously under the influence of 
 the elder. But as one compares the works of the 
 two men, how much more simple, downright, really 
 seen and felt, are the Romaninos! They remind me 
 at certain points of the work of Madox Brown; one 
 picture in particular, of Christ in the house of the 
 Pharisee, where the Magdalen kneels almost under 
 the table, as she bends over to kiss the feet of 
 Christ, with a natural movement of quaint awk- 
 wardness. Moretto has painted the scene in the 
 church of Santa Maria Calchera, less theatrically 
 than usual, and with an almost literal copy of the 
 queer attitude: the body arched over and the head 
 drooping. I do not find much more than skill and 
 a somewhat superficial simplicity in the well-known 
 Romanino in that church, the "St. Apollonius." But 
 in the church of San Francesco there is a "Madonna 
 and Saints " behind the high altar which shows us, 
 certainly, all that Romanino can do. Seen from 
 the doorway, it glows with a rich and sombre colour,
 
 BRESCIA AND ROMANINO 259 
 
 as if wrought out of darkness; and the colour has 
 sobriety, like the design, in which a form wholly 
 traditional seems to come alive, with a character of 
 its own. There is a Virgin with slightly sullen lips 
 and eyes; there are fine kneeling figures below, in 
 green and gold cloaks. Something of what is more 
 earnest and personal in Romanino is seen in the 
 " Supper at Emmaus " in the Palazzo Martinengo, 
 with its sombre quality of paint, its directness of rep- 
 resentation. And whenever he is seen in company 
 with Moretto, as in that gallery and in the old Cathe- 
 dral, where all the bravura of Moretto is heard 
 clamouring, he impresses one by what is simple and 
 sincere in his statement of things. Is it only by 
 comparison? At least I have never felt so forbid- 
 ding an aspect in any picture gallery as in that pic- 
 ture gallery at Brescia, where Moretto and Romanino 
 surround one with their hard, capable, and unlovely 
 work. I find myself turning by preference to the 
 Romaninos, but with little satisfaction. And for 
 once I find a Raphael, which brings a certain relief 
 and coolness to the eyes, as I turn to the small, 
 minute, and really beautiful head of Christ wearing 
 the crown of thorns, painted at Florence, but still 
 under the influence of Perugino. There I saw a 
 thing wholly achieved, not half way to accomplish- 
 ment ; and I became all the more conscious of the 
 very definite point at which Romanino had stopped. 
 
 1903.
 
 ON A REMBRANDT IN MILAN 
 
 261
 
 ON A REMBRANDT IN MILAN 
 
 I HAD spent an hour in the Brera, and I was a 
 little weary of the beauty of consciously beautiful 
 things. From the Lombard frescoes of the four- 
 teenth century, down to Procaccini and Crispi, 
 every Italian picture is an attempt to create 
 beauty; beauty first and everything else after- 
 wards. I remember that when I was in Spain it 
 seemed to me as if only the Italians had realised 
 how pictures should be painted. In Spain the 
 dramatic sense has obscured the sense of beauty; 
 there must be a story told spectacularly, with all 
 the gestures of the emotion, and if beauty comes 
 into it at all it comes as an ornament to a scene 
 otherwise conceived. But after an hour in the 
 Brera I begin to feet a certain monotony and a 
 certain lifelessness in these beautiful persons, who 
 seemed to have existed in the world only that 
 they might be painted; in these scenes that 
 had never happened except in a painter's studio; 
 in all that was artificial from the beginning 
 in these pictures painted for ornament. There is a 
 Raphael which has a room to itself, like the Raphael 
 at Dresden; the " Sposalizio," which the official 
 catalogue, like the guide-books, honours with three 
 
 263
 
 264 ON A REMBRANDT IN MILAN 
 
 stars in the margin. It is an early picture, painted 
 in the manner of Perugino; and it is painted with 
 an already perfectly assured skill, an easy and justi- 
 fied confidence which no difficulty, no sensitiveness 
 before an ideal of something more than perfection, 
 can abash. Looking into it closely, one sees there 
 all that Perugino tried to do, done with decision; 
 and all Perugino's quality, the quality which makes 
 him interesting, gone. It is all polished away, im- 
 proved clean out of existence. And there is the 
 bright, smooth, finished thing, not a speck or crease 
 upon it; almost as faultless and lifeless as if it had 
 been made by a machine. It stands there alert 
 as a champion, the typical Italian picture; and it 
 says : "A craftsman in the trade of beauty made me ; 
 it is enough that I exist; bow down before me and 
 own that I am worthy of three stars in the catalogue." 
 Raphael challenges loudly; the others are more 
 quiet, but all smile to themselves, as they await the 
 eyes of the tourist, with the confidence of a beautiful 
 woman awaiting the response of her mirror. And 
 is there anywhere a more delicate orgy of loveliness 
 than in this gallery of Italian pictures, which is like 
 a perfumed garden, full of all manner of flowers? 
 This spectacle, which begins, as you enter, with the 
 gallant kinght, St. Martin, dividing his cloak with 
 his sword for the beggar, is a gallant spectacle, full 
 of all the world's finery, and jewels, and brave deaths 
 and glorified Madonnas. It is all a very serious play, 
 as serious as the woman's tragic comedy of her
 
 ON A REMBRANDT IN MILAN- 265 
 
 toilette ; and nothing in it moves one very much, not 
 the languid grace with which St. Sebastian receives 
 the arrows, nor Tintoretto's flaring lights and grey 
 corpse in the long hall underground where St. Mark 
 appears to the Venetians. When Mantegna paints 
 the dead Christ with what Crowe and Calvalcaselle 
 call " disagreeable boldness," it is only, serious though 
 it is, a game of perspective. By the side of the grey, 
 startling thing there is the most placid of all Madon- 
 nas, Mantegna's Virgin haloed with the heads of 
 fat child-angels, and, beside Bellini's tragic and 
 lovely Pietk, with the woman crying, there is the 
 little comely brown peasant Virgin, who sits so 
 primly against the strip of green background. All 
 Luini's patrician saints are here, dressed as care- 
 fully as if a woman had dressed them, with the 
 white lines at their throats and wrists, their curled 
 hair parted and falling in a few easy ripples down 
 the neck. As flying angels carry the dead body of 
 St. Catherine through the air, the same tress falls 
 out from the gold tresses heaped together under her 
 chin. An exquisite drawing, which has been wor- 
 shipped as Leonardo's, and which may be his, in 
 spite of a certain over-softness in it, shows us a 
 Christ, full of mournfulness, and as beautiful as a 
 woman. 
 
 I had spent an hour among these colours and per- 
 fumes, and it seemed as if my senses had begun to 
 grow sleepy in their midst. All at once I came into 
 a little room full of dark pictures, and in the middle
 
 266 ON A REMBRANDT IN MILAN 
 
 of the room, on an easel, a living thing looked at 
 me. It was the head of a woman, plump, blonde, 
 with rich blood in her cheeks, and thin gold hair 
 crimped over her forehead. Her red lips were pursed 
 together, her quite round eyes wide open, and ex- 
 pressing very little, except the quietly accepted fact 
 of being alive. She was quite unconscious that I 
 was looking at her, and, if she had noticed me, would 
 have been indifferent to my opinion. An American 
 lady who came into the room, and who saw me 
 standing still and stupid in front of the picture, said 
 kindly: "I have been in Amsterdam and it seems 
 to me that I have seen her there. Is she not the 
 blonde Saskia, the wife of Rembrandt?" But I 
 looked at my catalogue, and told her that it was 
 Rembrandt's sister. 
 
 And here, suddenly, I seemed to have found a 
 thing which made all the rest of the pictures like 
 an enchanting box of toys. Here was nature ac- 
 cepted frankly; nothing asked of nature but to be 
 herself. In all the others, even when nature was the 
 foundation, there had been arrangement, transpo- 
 sition, an aim at doing something with nature, at 
 fitting it to a pattern or setting it to a tune. Life 
 must be a motive for decoration, and beauty must 
 be added, like a garment, to whatever natural charm 
 life may seem to suggest by its existence. Here, 
 it was life itself that grew up softly upon the canvas, 
 without any pattern but what seemed the accident 
 of nature (nature's truth that is) and without an
 
 ON A REMBRANDT IN MILAN 267 
 
 added ornament except the mere truth of paint. 
 The white linen about the neck, the collar embroid- 
 ered with jewels, shone with an actual glitter as if 
 the paint sparkled under the light. And this paint 
 seemed to delight in its own beauty, as the sunlight 
 does, when it makes and brightens the colours of 
 the world. A new art, it seemed, had been dis- 
 covered, by which things themselves, anything in 
 itself, could become eternally interesting; an art 
 which invented a whole new, infinitely various 
 beauty, by the mere illumination of things truth- 
 fully realised, in their precise accompaniment and 
 subordination to life. 
 
 1903.
 
 BY THE SAME WRITER 
 
 POEMS (Collected edition in two volumes). 1902. 
 
 AN INTRODUCTION TO THE STUDY OF BROWNING. 
 1886, 1906. 
 
 AUBREY BEARDSLEY. 1898, 1905. 
 
 THE SYMBOLIST MOVEMENT IN LITERATURE. 
 1899. 
 
 PLAYS, ACTING, AND Music. 1903. 
 
 CITIES. 1903. 
 
 STUDIES IN PROSE AND VERSE. 1904. 
 
 A BOOK OF TWENTY SONGS. 1905. 
 
 SPIRITUAL ADVENTURES. 1905. 
 
 THE FOOL OF THE WORLD, AND OTHER POEMS. 
 1906. 
 
 STUDIES IN SEVEN ARTS. 1906. 
 
 WILLIAM BLAKE. 1907. 
 
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