by Thomas Hardy
They stayed here a day or two, ‘the mountains showing again coquettish signs of uncovering themselves, and again coquettishly pulling down their veil’.
Leaving for Turin they stayed there awhile, then duly reached Genoa, concerning the first aspect of which from the train Hardy wrote a long time after the lines entitled ‘Genoa and the Mediterranean’, though that city — so pre-eminently the city of marble — ‘everything marble’, he writes, ‘even little doorways in slums’ — nobly redeemed its character when they visited its palaces during their stay.
At Pisa after visiting the Cathedral and Baptistery they stood at 187
the top of the leaning tower during a peal of the bells, which shook it under their feet, and saw the sun set from one of the bridges over the Arno, as Shelley had probably seen it from the same bridge many a time. Thence by ‘melancholy olives and cheerful lemons’ they proceeded to Florence, where they were met by an inhabitant of that city, Lucy Baxter, the daughter of the poet Barnes, married and settled there since Hardy had known her in girlhood, and who wrote under the name of ‘Leader Scott’. She had obtained lodgings for them at the Villa Trollope, in the Piazza dell’ Indipendenza; and there they remained all the time they were in Florence. Their Florentine experiences onward were much like those of other people visiting for the first time the buildings, pictures, and historic sites of that city. They were fortunately able to see the old Market just before its destruction. Having gone through the galleries and churches of Florence, they drove out and visited another English resident in the country near, and also went over the Certosa di Val d’Ema. Then they travelled on to Rome, their first glimpse of it being of the Dome of St. Peter’s across the stagnant flats of the Campagna.
They put up at the Hotel d’Allemagne, in the Via Condotti, a street opposite the Piazza di Spagna and the steps descending from the church of SS. Trinita dei Monti, on the south side of which stands the house where Keats died. Hardy liked to watch of an evening, when the streets below were immersed in shade, the figures ascending and descending these steps in the sunset glow, the front of the church orange in the same light; and also the house hard by, in which no mind could conjecture what had been lost to English literature in the early part of the same century that saw him there.
After some days spent in the Holy City Hardy began to feel, he frequently said, its measureless layers of history to lie upon him like a physical weight. The time of their visit was not so long after the peeling of the Colosseum and other ruins of their vast accumulations of parasitic growths, which, though Hardy as an architect defended the much-deplored process on the score of its absolute necessity if the walls were to be preserved, he yet wished had not been taken in hand till after his inspection of them. This made the ruins of the ancient city, the ‘altae moenia Romae’ as he called them from the Aeneid, more gaunt to the vision and more depressing to the mind than they had been to visitors when covered with greenery, and accounts for his allusions to the city in the poems on Rome written after his return, as exhibiting ‘ochreous gauntness’, ‘umbered walls’, and so forth.
He mentions in a note the dustiness of the Pincio: ‘ Dust rising in clouds from the windy drive to the top, whitening the leaves of the evergreen oaks, and making the pale splotches on the trunks of the plane trees yet paler. The busts of illustrious Romans seem to require hats and goggles as a protection. But in the sheltered gardens beneath palms spread, and oranges still hang on the trees.’
There was a great spurt of building going on at this time, on which he remarks, ‘ I wonder how anybody can have any zest to erect a new building in Rome, in the overpowering presence of decay on the mangy and rotting walls of old erections, originally of fifty times the strength of the new.’ This sentiment was embodied in the sonnet called ‘ Building a New Street in the Ancient Quarter.’
A visit to the graves of Shelley and Keats was also the inspiration of more verses — probably not written till later; his nearly falling asleep in the Sala delle Muse of the Vatican was the source of another poem, the weariness being the effect of the deadly fatiguing size of St. Peter’s; and the musical incident, which as he once said, took him by surprise when investigating the remains of Caligula’s palace, that of another.
‘The quality of the faces in the streets of Rome: Satyrs: Emperors: Faustinas.’
Hardy’s notes of Rome were of a very jumbled and confusing kind. But, probably from a surviving architectural instinct, he made a few measurements in the Via Appia Antica, where he was obsessed by a vision of a chained file of prisoners plodding wearily along towards Rome, one of the most haggard of whom was to be famous through the ages as the founder of Pauline Christianity. He also noticed that the pavement of the fashionable promenade, the Corso, was two feet six inches wide. Of a different kind was his note that ‘The monk who showed us the hole in which stood Saint Peter’s Cross in the Church of S. Pietro in Montorio, and fetched up a pinch of clean sand from it, implying it had been there ever since the apostle’s crucifixion, was a man of cynical humour, and gave me an indescribably funny glance from the tail of his eye as if to say: “ You see well enough what an imposture it all is!” I have noticed this sly humour in some more of these Roman monks, such as the one who sent me on alone into the vaults of the Cappuccini [among the thousands of skulls there], not knowing that I was aware of them, and therefore not startled at the ghastly scene. Perhaps there is something in my appearance which makes them think me a humorist also.’
On the Roman pictures and statuary the only remark he makes except in verse is: ‘ Paintings. In Roman art the kernel of truth has acquired a thick rind of affectation: e.g. I find that pictures by Giotto have been touched up so thoroughly that what you see is not Giotto at all, but the over-lying renovations. A disappointing sight. Alas for this “wronged great soul of an ancient master”!’ (The remark, though written at Rome, seems to refer more particularly to Florence.)
By curious chance Hardy was present at a wedding at the church of S. Lorenzo-in-Lucina, and was vexed with himself that he did not recollect till afterwards that it was the church of Pompilia’s marriage in The Ring and the Book. But he was on the whole more interested in Pagan than in Christian Rome, of the latter preferring churches in which he could detect columns from ancient temples. Christian Rome, he said, was so rambling and stratified that to comprehend it in a single visit was like trying to read Gibbon through at a sitting. So that, for instance, standing on the meagre remains of the Via Sacra then recently uncovered, he seemed to catch more echoes of the inquisitive -bore’s conversation there with the poet Horace than of worship from the huge basilicas hard by, which were in point of time many centuries nearer to him. But he was careful to remind one to whom he spoke about this that it was really a question of familiarity, time being nothing beside knowledge, and that he happened to remember the scene in the Satires which he, like so many schoolboys, had read, while his mind was a blank on the most august ceremonial of the Middle-Age Christian services in the Basilica Julia or the Basilica of Constantine.
‘April. Our spirits. As we get older they are less subject to steep gradients than in youth. We lower the elevations, and fill the hollows with sustained judgments.’
While here he received among other letters one from Mrs. Procter containing the following remarks:
‘It is very kind of you to think of me in Rome, and stretch out a friendly hand. Perhaps, as you are living amidst the Ancient, there is a propriety in thinking of the Oldish, and, I must say, the truest,
friend you have.
‘We are still in Winter: to-day a bitter East wind, and tiles and chimney pots flying about. Never have we had so long a season of cold weather — all our Money gone in Coals and Gas.
‘I have been displeased, so much as one ever is by a Man whom you care nothing about, by an Article written by a Dr. Wendell Holmes the American. He comes here, and then says, “the most wonderful thing I saw in England were the Old Ladies — they are so active, and tough like Old M
acaws” — Now am I like an Old Macaw? — He might have said Parrots.
‘Then Mr. Thackeray’s letters [to Mrs. Brookfield]: so common, so vulgar! You will see them in Scribners Magazine. — He was never in love with me, but the 200 letters he wrote me were very superior to these.’
It was with a sense of having grasped very little of its history that he left the city, though with some relief, which may have been partly physical and partly mental.
Returning to Florence on ‘a soft green misty evening following rain’, he found the scenery soothing after the gauntness of Rome. On a day of warm sun he sat down for a long time, he said, on the steps of the Lanzi, in the Piazza della Signoria, and thought of many things:
‘It is three in the afternoon, and the faces of the buildings are steeped in afternoon stagnation. The figure of Neptune is looking an intense white against the brown-grey houses behind, and the bronze forms round the basin [of the fountain] are starred with rays on their noses, elbows, knees, bosoms and shoulders. The shade from the Loggia dei Lanzi falls half across the Piazza. Turning my head there rise the three great arches with their sculptures, then those in the middle of the Loggia, then the row of six at the back with their uplifted fingers, as if’ [sentence unfinished].
‘In the caffe near there is a patter of speech, and on the pavement outside a noise of hoofs. The reflection from that statue of Neptune throws a secondary light into the caffe.
‘Everybody is thinking, even amid these art examples from various ages, that this present age is the ultimate climax and upshot of the previous ages, and not a link in a chain of them.
‘In a work of art it is the accident which charms, not the intention; that we only like and admire. Instance the amber tones that pervade the folds of drapery in ancient marbles, the deadened polish of the surfaces, and the cracks and the scratches.’
In visiting Fiesole they met with a mishap which might have ended in a serious accident. With Mrs. Baxter they had journeyed out from Florence to the foot of the hill on which the little town stands, and were about to walk up the height when on second thoughts they entered a gimcrack omnibus that plied to the top. The driver went to have a drink before starting, and left the omnibus untended, only one of the two horses being put to. The horse immediately started with the three inside at a furious pace towards Florence. The highway was dotted with heaps of large stones for repair, but he avoided them by a miracle, until the steam tram from Florence appeared a little way ahead, and a collision seemed inevitable. Two workmen, however, seeing the danger, descended from the roof of a house and stepping in front of the horse stopped it. They again attempted Fiesole, and climbed up — this time on foot despite all invitations from flymen.
In a sonnet on Fiesole called ‘In the Old Theatre’ Hardy makes use of an incident that occurred while he was sitting in the stone Amphitheatre on the summit of the hill.
A few more looks at Florence, including the Easter ceremony of the Scoppio del Carro, a visit to Mrs. Browning’s tomb, and to the supposed scene in the Piazza dell’ Annunziata of one of Browning’s finest poems, ‘The Statue and the Bust’, ended their visit to this half- English city, and after seeing Siena they left for Bologna, Ferrara, and Venice by the railway across the Apennines, not forgetting to gaze at the Euganean Hills so inseparable from thoughts of Shelley. It is rather noticeable that two such differing poets as Browning and Shelley, in their writings, their mentality, and their lives, should have so mingled in Hardy’s thoughts during this Italian tour, almost to the exclusion of other English poets equally, or nearly so, associated with Italy, with whose works he was just as well acquainted.
Hardy seems to have found more pleasure in Venice than in any Italian city previously visited, in spite of bad weather during a part of his stay there. Byron of course was introduced here among the other phantom poets marshalled through his brain in front of the sea-queen’s historic succession of scenes.
A wet windy morning accompanied their first curious examination of the Ducal Palace, ‘ the shining ferri of the gondolas curtseying down and up against the wharf wall, and the gondoliers standing looking on at us. The wet draught sweeps through the colonnade by Miinster’s shop, not a soul being within it but Munster, whose face brightens at sight of us like that of a man on a desert island. . . . The dumb boy who showed us the way to the Rialto has haunted us silently ever since.
‘The Hall of the Great Council is saturated with Doge-domry. The faces of the Doges pictured on the frieze float out into the air of the room in front of me. “We know nothing of you”, say these spectres. “Who may you be, pray?” The draught brushing past seems like inquiring touches by their cold hands, feeling, feeling like blind people what you are. Yes: here to this visionary place I solidly bring in my person Dorchester and Wessex life; and they may well ask why do I do it. . . . Yet there is a connection. The bell of the Campanile of S. Marco strikes the hour, and its sound has exactly that tin-tray timbre given out by the bells of Longpuddle and Weatherbury, showing that they are of precisely the same-proportioned alloy.’
Hardy had been, for many reasons, keen to see St. Mark’s; and he formed his own opinion on it:
‘Well. There is surely some conventional ecstasy, exaggeration,
— shall I say humbug? — in what Ruskin writes about this, if I remember (though I have not read him lately), when the church is looked at as a whole. One architectural defect nothing can get over — its squatness as seen from the natural point of view — the glassy marble pavement of the Grand Piazza. Second, its weak, flexuous, constructional lines. Then, the fantastic Oriental character of its Lr&ails makes it barbaric in its general impression, in spite of their eat beauty.
air ‘ Mosaics, mosaics, mosaics, gilding, gilding, everywhere inside and out. The domes like inverted china-bowls within — much gilt also.
‘This being said, see what good things are left to say — of its art, of its history! That floor, of every colour and rich device, is worn into undulations by the infinite multitudes of feet that have trodden it, and what feet there have been among the rest!
‘A commonplace man stoops in a dark corner where he strikes a common match, and shows us — what — a lost article? — a purse, pipe, or tobacco-pouch? no; shows us — drags from the depths of time as by a miracle — wonderful diaphanous alabaster pillars that were once in Solomon’s temple.’
On Venice generally he makes the following desultory remarks: ‘When it rains in Italy it makes one shrink and shiver; it is so far more serious a matter than in England. We have our stern gray Stone and brick walls, and weathered copings, and buttress-slopes, to fend such. But here there are exposed to the decaying rain marbles, and frescoes, and tesserae, and gildings, and endless things — driving one to implore mentally that all these treasures may be put under a glass case!’
When the weather was finer:
‘Venice is composed of blue and sunlight. Hence I incline, after all, to “sun-girt” rather than “sea-girt”, which I once upheld.’ [In Shelley’s poem,’ Many a Green Isle needs must be.’]
‘Venice requires heat to complete the picture of her. Heat is an artistic part of the portrait of all southern towns.’
They were most kindly received and entertained during their brief stay by friends to whom they had introductions. Browning’s friend Mrs. Bronson showed them many things; and in respect of an evening party given for them by Mrs. Daniel Curtis at the Palazzo Barbarigo, it could not be said that ‘silent rows the songless gondolier’, several boats lit,by lanterns pausing in front of the open windows on the Grand Cinal while their rowers and the singers they brought serenaded the guests within. But alas, it was true that ‘Tasso’s echoes were no more’, the music being that of the latest popular song of the date:
‘Fu-ni-cu-li, fu-ni-cu-la, Fu-ni-cu-li-cu-la!’
However, the scene was picturesque, Hardy used to say — the dark shapes of the gondoliers creeping near to them silently, like c~to or other nocturnal animals, the gleam of a ferro
here and there: thy. the lanterns suddenly lighting up over the heads of the singend throwing diffused light on their faces and forms; a sky as of black velvet stretching above with its star points, as the notes flapped back from the dilapidated palaces behind with a hollow and almost sepulchral echo, as if from a vault.
Quoting Byron brings to the mind a regret which Hardy sometimes expressed, that though he possibly encountered some old native man or woman of fourscore or over who could remember Byron’s residence at the Spinelli and Mocenigo palaces, he never questioned any likely one among them on the point, though once in especial he stood on the Riva degli Schiavoni beside such an aged personage whose appearance made him feel her to be an instance of such recollection.
He was curious to know if any descendants of the powerful Doges were left in decayed modern Venice. Mr. Curtis told him that there were some in Venetian society still — poor, but proud, though not offensively so. The majority were extinct, their palaces being ruinous. Going on to Mrs. Bronson’s immediately afterwards,
the Contessa Mcalled. She was a great beauty, having the well-
defined hues and contours of foreigners in the south; and she turned out to be one of the very descendants Hardy had inquired about. When asked afterwards how she was dressed, he said in a green velvet jacket with fluffy tags, a grey hat and feathers, a white veil with seed pearls, and a light figured skirt of a yellowish colour. She had a charming manner, her mind flying from one subject to another like a child’s as she spoke her pretty attempts at English. ‘But I li — eek moch to do it!’ . . . ‘Si, si!’ ... ‘Oh noh, noh!’
