But the snow grew thinner as the train drew southward, and about Bologna the ground showed through it in patches. Then the night came on, and when we reached Florence at nine o’clock we emerged into an atmosphere which, in comparison with the severity of the transalpine air, could only be called mildly reproachful. For a few days we rejoiced in its concessive softness with some such sense of escape as must come to one who has left moral obligation behind; and then our penalty began. If we walked half a mile away from our hotel, we despaired of getting back, and commonly had ourselves brought home by one of the kindly cab-drivers who had observed our exhaustion. It came finally to our not going away from our hotel to such distances at all. We observed with a mild passivity the vigour of the other guests, who went and came from morning till night, and brought to the table d’hote minds full of the spoil of their day’s sight-seeing. We confessed that we had not, perhaps, been out that day, and we accounted for ourselves by saying that we had seen Florence before, a good many years ago, and that we were in no haste, for we were going to stay all winter. We tried to pass it off as well as we could, and a fortnight had gone by before we had darkened the doors of a church or a gallery.
I suppose that all this lassitude was the effect of our sudden transition from the tonic air of the Swiss mountains; and I should be surprised if our experience of the rigours of a Florentine December were not considered libellous by many whose experience was different Nevertheless, I report it; for the reader may like to trace to it the languid lack of absolute opinion concerning Florence and her phenomena, and the total absence of final wisdom on any point, which I hope he will be able to detect throughout these pages.
II
IT was quite three weeks before I began to keep any record of impressions, and I cannot therefore fix the date at which I pushed my search for them beyond the limits of the Piazza Santa Maria Novella, where we were lodged. It is better to own up at once to any sin which one is likely to be found out in, for then one gains at least the credit of candour and courage; and I will confess here that I had come to Florence with the intention of writing about it. But I rather wonder now why I should have thought of writing of the whole city, when one piazza in it was interesting enough to make a book about. It was in itself not one of the most interesting piazzas of Florence in the ordinary way. I do not know that anything very historical ever happened there; but that is by no means saying that there did not There used, under the early Medici and the late grand dukes, to be chariot-races in it, the goals of which are the two obelisks by John of Bologna, set upon the backs of the bronze turtles which the sympathetic observer will fancy gasping under their weight at either end of the irregular space; and its wide floor is still unpaved, so that it is a sop of mud in rainy weather, and a whirl of dust in dry. At the end opposite the church is the terminus of the steam tramway running to Prato, and the small engine that drew the trains of two or three horse-cars linked together was perpetually fretting and snuffing about the base of the obelisk there, as if that were a stump and the engine were a boy’s dog with intolerable conviction of a woodchuck under it. From time to time the conductor blew a small horn of a feeble, reedy note, like that of the horns which children find in their stockings on Christmas morning; and then the poor little engine hitched itself to the train, and with an air of hopeless affliction snuffled away toward Prato, and left the woodchuck under the obelisk to escape. The impression of a woodchuck was confirmed by the digging round the obelisk which a gang of workmen kept up all winter; they laid down water-pipes, and then dug them up again. But when the engine was gone we could give our minds to other sights in the piazza.
III
ONE of these was the passage of troops, infantry or cavalry, who were always going to or from the great railway station behind the church, and who entered it with a gay blare of bugles, extinguished midway of the square, letting the measured tramp of feet or the irregular clank of hoofs make itself heard. This was always thrilling, and we could not get enough of the brave spectacle. We rejoiced in the parade of Italian military force with even more than native ardour, for we were not taxed to pay for it, and personally the men were beautiful; not large or strong, but regular and refined of face, rank and file alike, in that democracy of good looks which one sees in no other land. They marched with a lounging, swinging step, under a heavy burden of equipment, and with the sort of quiet patience to which the whole nation has been schooled in its advance out of slavish subjection to the van of civilization.
They were not less charming when they came through off duty, the officers in their statuesque cloaks, with the gleam of their swords beneath the folds, striding across the piazza in twos or threes, the common soldiers straggling loosely over its space with the air of peasants let loose amid the wonders of a city, and smoking their long, straw-stemmed Italian cigars, with their eyes all abroad. I do not think they kept up so active a courtship with the nursemaids as the soldiers in the London squares and parks, but there was a friendliness in their relations with the population everywhere that spoke them still citizens of a common country, and not alien to its life in any way. They had leisure just before Epiphany to take a great interest in the preparations the boys were making for the celebration of that feast, with a noise of long, slender trumpets of glass; and I remember the fine behaviour of a corporal in a fatigue-cap, who happened along one day when an orange-vendor and a group of urchins were trying a trumpet, and extorting from it only a few stertorous crumbs of sound. The corporal put it lightly to his lips, and blew a blast upon it that almost shivered our window-panes, and then walked off with the effect of one who would escape gratitude; the boys looked after him till he was quite out of sight with mute wonder, such as pursues the doer of a noble action.
One evening an officer’s funeral passed through the piazza, with a pomp of military mourning; but that was no more effective than the merely civil funeral which we once saw just at twilight. The bearers were in white cowls and robes, and one went at the head of the bier with a large cross. The others carried torches, which sometimes they inverted, swinging forward with a slow processional movement, and chanting monotonously, with the clear dark of the evening light keen and beautiful around them.
At other times we heard the jangle of a small bell, and looking out we saw a priest of Santa Maria, with the Host in his hand and his taper-bearing retinue around him, going to administer the extreme unction to some passing soul in our neighbourhood. Some of the spectators uncovered, but for the most part they seemed not to notice it, and the solemnity had an effect of business which I should be at some loss to make the reader feel. But that is the effect which church ceremonial in Italy has always had to me. I do not say that the Italians are more indifferent to their religion than other people, but that, having kept up its shows, always much the same in the celebration of different faiths, — Etruscan, Hellenic, Hebraic, — so long, they were more tired of them, and were willing to let it transact itself without their personal connivance when they could.
IV
ALL the life of the piazza was alike novel to the young eyes which now saw it for the first time from our windows, and lovely in ours, to which youth seemed to come back in its revision. I should not know how to give a just sense of the value of a man who used to traverse the square with a wide wicker tray on his head, piled up with Chianti wine-flasks that looked like a heap of great bubbles. I must trust him to the reader’s sympathy, together with the pensive donkeys abounding there, who acquired no sort of spiritual pride from the sense of splendid array, though their fringed and tasselled harness blazed with burnished brass. They appeared to be stationed in our piazza while their peasant-owners went about the city on their errands, and it may have been in an access of homesickness too acute for repression that, with a preliminary quivering of the tail and final rise of that member, they lifted their woe-begone countenances and broke into a long disconsolate bray, expressive of a despair which has not yet found its way into poetry, and is only vaguely suggested by some
music of the minor key.
These donkeys, which usually stood under our hotel, were balanced in the picture by the line of cabs at the base of the tall buildings on the other side, whence their drivers watched our windows with hopes not unnaturally excited by our interest in them, which they might well have mistaken for a remote intention of choosing a cab. From time to time one of them left the rank, and took a turn in the square from pure effervescence of expectation, flashing his equipage upon our eyes, and snapping his whip in explosions that we heard even through the closed windows. They were of all degrees of splendour and squalor, both cabs and drivers, from the young fellow with false, floating blue eyes and fur-trimmed coat, who drove a shining cab fresh from the builder’s hands, to the little man whose high hat was worn down almost to its structural pasteboard, and whose vehicle limped over the stones with querulous complaints from its rheumatic joints. When we began to drive out, we resolved to have always the worldlier turnout; but we got it only two or three times, falling finally and permanently — as no doubt we deserved, in punishment of our heartless vanity — to the wreck at the other extreme of the scale. There is no describing the zeal and vigilance by which this driver obtained and secured us to himself. For a while we practised devices for avoiding him, and did not scruple to wound his feelings; but we might as well have been kind, for it came to the same thing in the end. Once we had almost escaped. Our little man’s horse had been feeding, and he had not fastened his bridle on when the portiere called a carriage for us. He made a snatch at his horse’s bridle; it came off in his hand and hung dangling. Another driver saw the situation, and began to whip his horse across the square; our little man seized his horse by the forelock, and dragging him along at the top of his speed, arrived at the hotel door a little the first What could we do but laugh? Everybody in the piazza applauded, and I think it must have been this fact which confirmed our subjection. After that we pretended once that our little man had cheated us; but with respectful courage he contested the fact, and convinced us that we were wrong; he restored a gold pencil which he had found in his cab; and, though he never got it, he voluntarily promised to get a new coat, to do us the more honour when he drove us out to pay visits.
V
HE was, like all of his calling with whom he had to do in Florence, amiable and faithful, and he showed that personal interest in us from the beginning which is instant with most of them, and which found pretty expression when I was sending home a child to the hotel from a distance at nightfall. I was persistent in getting the driver’s number, and he divined the cause of my anxiety.
“Oh, rest easy!” he said, leaning down toward me from his perch. “I, too, am a father!”
Possibly a Bostno hackman might have gone so far as to tell me that he had young ones of his own, but he would have snubbed in reassuring me; and it is this union of grace with sympathy which, I think, forms the true expression of Italian civilization. It is not yet valued aright in the world; but the time must come when it will not be shouldered aside by physical and intellectual brutality. I hope it may come so soon that the Italians will not have learned bad manners from the rest of us. As yet, they seem uncontaminated, and the orange-vendor who crushes a plump grandmother up against the wall in some narrow street is as gayly polite in his apologies, and she as graciously forgiving, as they could have been under any older régime.
But probably the Italians could not change if they would. They may fancy changes in themselves and in one another, but the barbarian who returns to them after a long absence cannot see that they are personally different from all their political transformations. Life, which has become to us like a book which we silently peruse in the closet, or at most read aloud with a few friends, is still a drama with them, to be more or less openly played. This is what strikes you at first, and strikes you at last. It is the most recognizable thing in Italy, and I was constantly pausing in my languid strolls, confronted by some dramatic episode so bewilderingly familiar that it seemed to me I must have already attempted to write about it. One day, on the narrow sidewalk beside the escutcheoned cloister-wall of the church, two young and handsome people stopped me while they put upon that public stage the pretty melodrama of their feelings. The bareheaded girl wore a dress of the red and black plaid of the Florentine laundresses, and the young fellow standing beside her had a cloak falling from his left shoulder. She was looking down and away from him, impatiently pulling with one hand at the fingers of another, and he was vividly gesticulating, while he explained or expostulated, with his eyes not upon her, but looking straight forward; and they both stood as if, in a moment of opera, they were confronting an audience over the footlights. But they were both quite unconscious, and were merely obeying the histrionic instinct of their race. So was the schoolboy in clerical robes, when, goaded by some taunt, pointless to the foreign bystander, he flung himself into an attitude of deadly scorn, and defied the tormenting gamins; so were the vendor of chestnut-paste and his customer, as they debated over the smoking viand the exact quantity and quality which a soldo ought to purchase, in view of the state of the chestnut market and the price demanded elsewhere; so was the little woman who deplored, in impassioned accents, the non-arrival of the fresh radishes we liked with our coffee, when I went a little too early for them to her stall; so was the fruiterer who called me back with an effect of heroic magnanimity to give me the change I had forgotten, after beating him down from a franc to seventy centimes on a dozen of mandarin oranges. The sweetness of his air, tempering the severity of his self-righteousness in doing this, lingers with me yet, and makes me ashamed of having got the oranges at a just price. I wish he had cheated me.
We, too, can be honest if we try, but the effort seems to sour most of us. We hurl our integrity in the teeth of the person whom we deal fairly with; but when the Italian makes up his mind to be just, it is in no ungracious spirit. It was their lovely ways, far more than their monuments of history and art, that made return to the Florentines delightful. I would rather have had a perpetuity of the cameriere’s smile when he came up with our coffee in the morning than Donatello’s San Giorgio, if either were purchasable; and the face of the old chamber-maid, Maria, full of motherly affection, was better than the façade of Santa Maria Novella.
VI
IT is true that the church bore its age somewhat better; for though Maria must have been beautiful, too, in her youth, her complexion had not that luminous flush in which three hundred years have been painting the marble front of the church. It is this light, or this colour, — I hardly know which to call it, — that remains in my mind as the most characteristic quality of Santa Maria Novella; and I would like to have it go as far as possible with the reader, for I know that the edifice would not otherwise present itself in my pages, however flatteringly entreated or severely censured. I remember the bold mixture of the styles in its architecture, the lovely sculptures of its grand portals, the curious sundials high in its front; I remember the brand-new restoration of the screen of monuments on the right, with the arms of the noble patrons of the church carved below them, and the grass of the space enclosed showing green through the cloister-arches all winter long; I remember also the unemployed labourers crouching along its sunny base for the heat publicly dispensed in Italy on bright days — when it is not needed; and they all gave me the same pleasure, equal in degree, if not in kind. While the languor of these first days was still heavy upon me, I crept into the church for a look at the Ghirlandajo frescos behind the high altar, the Virgin of Cimabue, and the other objects which one is advised to see there, and had such modest satisfaction in them as may come to one who long ago, once for all, owned to himself that emotions to which others testified in the presence of such things were beyond him. The old masters and their humble acquaintance met shyly, after so many years; these were the only terms on which I, at least, could preserve my self-respect; and it was not till we had given ourselves time to overcome our mutual diffidence that the spirit in which their work was imagined sto
le into my heart and made me thoroughly glad of it again. Perhaps the most that ever came to me was a sense of tender reverence, of gracious quaintness in them; but this was enough. In the meanwhile I did my duty in Santa Maria Novella. I looked conscientiously at all the pictures, in spite of a great deal of trouble I had in putting on my glasses to read my “Walks in Florence” and taking them off to see the paintings; and I was careful to identify the portraits of Poliziano and the other Florentine gentlemen and ladies in the frescos. I cannot say that I was immediately sensible of advantage in this achievement; but I experienced a present delight in the Spanish chapel at finding not only Petrarch and Laura, but Boccaccio and Fiammetta, in the groups enjoying the triumphs of the church militant It will always remain a confusion in our thick Northern heads, this attribution of merit through mere belief to people whose lives cast so little lustre on their creeds; but the confusion is an agreeable one, and I enjoyed it as much as when it first overcame me in Italy.
VII
THE cicerone who helped me about these figures was a white-robed young monk, one of twelve who are still left at Santa Maria Novella to share the old cloisters now mainly occupied by the pupils of a military college and a children’s school. It was noon, and the corridors and the court were full of boys at their noisy games, on whom the young father smiled patiently, lifting his gentle voice above their clamour to speak of the suppression of the convents. This was my first personal knowledge of the effect of that measure, and I now perceived the hardship which it must have involved, as I did not when I read of it, with my Protestant satisfaction, in the newspapers. The uncomfortable thing about any institution which has survived its usefulness is that it still embodies so much harmless life that must suffer in its destruction. The monks and nuns had been a heavy burden no doubt, for many ages, and at the best they cumbered the ground; but when it came to a question of sweeping them away, it meant sorrow and exile and dismay to thousands of gentle and blameless spirits like the brother here, who recounted one of many such histories so meekly, so unresentfully. He and his few fellows were kept there by the piety of certain faithful who, throughout Italy, still maintain a dwindling number of monks and nuns in their old cloisters wherever the convent happened to be the private property of the order. I cannot say that they thus quite console the sentimentalist who would not have the convents re-established, even while suffering a poignant regret for their suppression; but I know from myself that this sort of sentimentalist is very difficult, and perhaps he ought not to be too seriously regarded.
Delphi Complete Works of William Dean Howells Page 1227
