Delphi Complete Works of William Dean Howells

by William Dean Howells

  VIII

  THE sentimentalist is very abundant in Italy, and most commonly he is of our race and religion, though he is rather English than American. The Englishman, so chary of his sensibilities at home, abandons himself to them abroad. At Rome he already regrets the good old days of the temporal power, when the streets were unsafe after nightfall and unclean the whole twenty-four hours, and there was no new quarter. At Venice he is bowed down under the restorations of the Ducal Palace and the church of St Mark; and he has no language in which to speak of the little steamers on the Grand Canal, which the Venetians find so convenient. In Florence, from time to time, he has a panic prescience that they are going to tear down the Ponte Vecchio. I do not know how he gets this, but he has it, and all the rest of us sentimentalists eagerly share it with him when he comes in to the table d’hôte luncheon, puts his Baedeker down by his plate, and before he has had a bite of anything calls out: “Well, they are going to tear down the Ponte Vecchio!”

  The first time that this happened in our hotel, I was still under the influence of the climate; but I resolved to visit the Ponte Vecchio with no more delay, lest they should be going to tear it down that afternoon. It was not that I cared a great deal for the bridge itself, but my accumulating impressions of Florentine history had centred about it as the point where that history really began to be historic. I had formed the idea of a little dramatic opening for my sketches there, with Buondelmonte riding in from his villa to meet his bride, and all that spectral train of Ghibelline and Guelphic tragedies behind them on the bridge; and it appeared to me that this could not be managed if the bridge were going to be torn down. I trembled for my calvalcade, ignominiously halted on the other side of the Arno, or obliged to go round and come in on some other bridge without regard to the fact; and at some personal inconvenience I hurried off to the Ponte Vecchio. I could not see that the preparations for its destruction had begun, and I believe they are still threatened only in the imagination of sentimental Anglo-Saxons. The omnibuses were following each other over the bridge in the peaceful succession of so many horse-cars to Cambridge, and the ugly little jewellers’ booths glittered in their wonted security on either hand all the way across. The carriages, the carts, the foot-passengers were swarming up and down from the thick turmoil of Por San Maria; and the bridge did not respond with the slightest tremor to the heel clandestinely stamped upon it for a final test of its stability.

  But the alarm I had suffered was no doubt useful, for it was after this that I really began to be serious with my material, as I found it everywhere in the streets and the books, and located it from one to the other. Even if one has no literary designs upon the facts, that is incomparably the best way of dealing with the past. At home, in the closet, one may read history, but one can realize it, as if it were something personally experienced, only on the spot where it was lived. This seems to me the prime use of travel; and to create the reader a partner in the enterprise and a sharer in its realization seems the sole excuse for books of travel, now when modern facilities have abolished hardship and danger and adventure, and nothing is more likely to happen to one in Florence than in Fitchburg.

  In this pursuit of the past, the inquirer will often surprise himself in the possession of a genuine emotion; at moments the illustrious or pathetic figures of other days will seem to walk before him unmocked by the grotesque and burlesquing shadows we all cast while in the flesh. I will not swear it, but it would take little to persuade me that I had vanishing glimpses of many of these figures in Florence. One of the advantages of this method is that you have your historical personages in a sort of picturesque contemporaneity with one another and with yourself, and you imbue them all with the sensibilities of our own time. Perhaps this is not an advantage, but it shows what may be done by the imaginative faculty; and if we do not judge men by ourselves, how are we to judge them at all?

  IX

  I TOOK some pains with my Florentines, first and last, I will confess it. I went quite back with them to the lilies that tilted all over the plain where they founded their city in the dawn of history, and that gave her that flowery name of hers. I came down with them from Fiesole to the first marts they held by the Arno for the convenience of the merchants who did not want to climb that long hill to the Etruscan citadel; and I built my wooden hut with the rest hard by the Ponte Vecchio, which was an old bridge a thousand years before Gaddi’s structure. I was with them all through that dim turmoil of wars, martyrdoms, pestilences, heroisms, and treasons for a thousand years, feeling their increasing purpose of municipal freedom and hatred of the one-man power (il governo d’un solo) alike under Romans, Huns, Longobards, Franks, and Germans, till in the eleventh century they marched up against their mother city, and destroyed Fiesole, leaving nothing standing but the fortress, the cathedral, and the Caffé Aurora, where the visitor lunches at this day, and has an incomparable view of Florence in the distance. When, in due time, the proud citizens began to go out from their gates and tumble their castles about the ears of the Germanic counts and barons in the surrounding country, they had my sympathy almost to the point of active co-operation; though I doubt now if we did well to let those hornets come into the town and build other nests within the walls, where they continued nearly as pestilent as ever. Still, so long as no one of them came to the top permanently, there was no danger of the one-man power we dreaded, and we could adjust our arts, our industries, our finances to the state of street warfare, even if it lasted, as at one time, for forty years. I was as much opposed as Dante himself to the extension of the national limits, though I am not sure now that our troubles came from acquiring territory three miles away, beyond the Ema, and I could not trace the bitterness of partisan feeling even to the annexation of Prato, whither it took me a whole hour to go by the stream-tram. But when the factions were divided under the names of Guelph and Ghibelline, and subdivided again into Bianchi and Neri, I was always of the Guelph and the Bianchi party, for it seemed to me that these wished the best to the commonwealth, and preserved most actively the traditional fear and hate of the one-man power. I believed heartily in the wars against Pisa and Siena, though afterward, when I visited those cities, I took their part against the Florentines, perhaps because they were finally reduced by the Medici, — a family I opposed from the very first, uniting with any faction or house that contested its rise. They never deceived me when they seemed to take the popular side, nor again when they voluptuously favoured the letters and arts, inviting the city full of Greeks to teach them. I mourned all through the reign of Lorenzo the Magnificent over the subjection of the people, never before brought under the one-man power, and flattered to their undoing by the splendours of the city and the state he created for him. When our dissolute youth went singing his obscene songs through the moonlit streets, I shuddered with a good Piagnone’s abhorrence; and I heard one morning with a stem and solemn joy that the great Frate had refused absolution to the dying despot who had refused freedom to Florence. Those were great days for one of my thinking, when Savonarola realized the old Florentine ideal of a free commonwealth, with the Medici banished, the Pope defied, and Christ king; days incredibly dark and terrible, when the Frate paid for his goodwill to us with his life, and suffered by the Republic which he had restored. Then the famous siege came, the siege of fifteen months, when Papist and Lutheran united under one banner against us, and treason did what all the forces of the Empire had failed to effect Yet Florence, the genius of the great democracy, never showed more glorious than in that supreme hour, just before she vanished for ever, and the Medici bastard entered the city out of which Florence had died, to be its liege lord where no master had ever been openly confessed before. I could follow the Florentines intelligently through all till that; but then, what suddenly became of that burning desire of equality, that deadly jealousy of a tyrant’s domination, that love of country surpassing the love of life? It is hard to reconcile ourselves to the belief that the right can be beaten, that the spirit of a generous and
valiant people can be broken; but this is what seems again and again to happen in history, though never so signally, so spectacularly, as in Florence when the Medici were restored. After that there were conspiracies and attempts of individuals to throw off the yoke; but in the great people, the prostrate body of the old democracy, not a throe of revolt. Had they outlived the passion of their youth for liberty, or were they sunk in despair before the odds arrayed against them? I did not know what to do with the Florentines from this point; they mystified me, silently suffering under the Medici for two hundred years, and then sleeping under the Lorrainese for another century, to awake in our own time the most polite, the most agreeable of the Italians perhaps, but the most languid. They say of themselves, “We lack initiative;” and the foreigner most disposed to confess his ignorance cannot help having heard it said of them by other Italians that while the Turinese, Genoese, and Milanese, and even the Venetians, excel them in industrial enterprise, they are less even than the Neapolitans in intellectual activity; and that when the capital was removed to Rome they accepted adversity almost with indifference, and resigned themselves to a second place in everything. I do not know whether this is true; there are some things against it, as that the Florentine schools are confessedly the best in Italy, and that it would be hard anywhere in that country or another to match the group of scholars and writers who form the University of Florence. These are not all Florentines, but they live in Florence, where almost any one would choose to live if he did not live in London, or Boston, or New York, or Helena, Montana T. There is no more comfortable city in the world, I fancy. But you cannot paint comfort so as to interest the reader of a book of travel. Even the lack of initiative in a people who conceal their adversity under very good clothes, and have abolished beggary, cannot be made the subject of a graphic sketch; one must go to their past for that.

  X

  Yet if the reader had time, I would like to linger a little on our way down to the Via Borgo Santi Apostoli, where it branches off into the Middle Ages out of Via Tornabuoni, not far from Vieusseux’s Circulating Library. For Via Tornabuoni is charming, and merits to be observed for the ensemble it offers of the contemporary Florentine expression, with its alluring shops, its confectioners and cafés, its florists and milliners, its dandies and tourists, and, ruggedly massing up out of their midst, the mighty bulk of its old Strozzi Palace, mediaeval, sombre, superb, tremendously impressive of the days when really a man’s house was his castle. Everywhere in Florence the same sort of contrast presents itself in some degree; but nowhere quite so dramatically as here, where it seems expressly contrived for the sensation of the traveller when he arrives at the American banker’s with his letter of credit the first morning, or comes to the British pharmacy for his box of quinine pills. It is eminently the street of the tourists, who are always haunting it on some errand. The best shops are here, and the most English is spoken; you hear our tongue spoken almost as commonly as Italian, and much more loudly, both from the chest and through the nose, whether the one is advanced with British firmness to divide the groups of civil and military loiterers on the narrow pavement before the confectioner Giacosa’s, or the other is flattened with American curiosity against the panes of the jewellers’ windows. There is not here the glitter of mosaics which fatigues the eye on the Lungarno or in Via Borgognissanti, nor the white glare of new statuary — or statuettary, rather — which renders other streets impassable; but there is a sobered richness in the display, and a local character in the prices which will sober the purchaser.

  Florence is not well provided with spaces for the outdoor lounging which Italian leisure loves, and you must go to the Cascine for much Florentine fashion if you want it; but something of it is always rolling down through Via Tornabuoni in its carriage at the proper hour of the day, and something more is always standing before Giacosa’s English-tailored, Italian-mannered, to bow, and smile, and comment. I was glad that the sort of swell whom I used to love in the Piazzi at Venice abounded in the narrower limits of Via Tornabuoni. I was afraid he was dead; but he graced the curbstone there with the same lily-like disoccupation and the same sweetness of aspect which made the Procuratie Nuove like a garden. He was not without his small dog or his cane held to his mouth; he was very, very patient and kind with the aged crone who plays the part of Florentine flower-girl in Via Tornabuoni, and whom I after saw aiming with uncertain eye a boutonniere of violets at his coat-lapel; there was the same sort of calm, heavy-eyed beauty looking out at him from her ice or coffee through the vast pane of the confectioner’s window, that stared sphinx-like in her mystery from a cushioned corner of Florian’s; and the officers went by with tinkling spurs and sabres, and clicking boot-heels, differing in nothing but their Italian uniforms and complexions from the blonde Austrian military of those far-off days. I often wondered who or what those beautiful swells might be, and now I rather wonder that I did not ask some one who could tell me. But perhaps it was not important; perhaps it might even have impaired their value in the picture of a conscientious artist who can now leave them, without a qualm, to be imagined as rich and noble as the reader likes. Not all the frequenters of Doney’s famous café were both, if one could trust hearsay. Besides those who could afford to drink the first sprightly runnings of his coffee-pot, it was said that there was a genteel class, who, for the sake of being seen to read their newspapers there, paid for the second décantation from its grounds, which comprised what was left in the cups from the former. This might be true of a race which loves a goodly outside perhaps a little better than we do; but Doney’s is not the Doney’s of old days, nor its coffee so very good at first hand. Yet if that sort of self-sacrifice goes on in there, I do not object; it continues the old Latin tradition of splendour and hunger which runs through so many pleasant books, and is as good in its way as a beggar at the gate of a palace. It is a contrast; it flatters the reader who would be incapable of it; and let us have it. It is one of the many contrasts in Florence which I spoke of, and not all of which there is time to point out. But if you would have the full effect of the grimness and rudeness of the Strozzi Palace (drolly parodied, by the way, in a structure of the same street which is like a Strozzi Palace on the stage), look at that bank of flowers at one corner of its base, — roses, carnations, jonquils, great Florentine anemones, — laying their delicate cheeks against the savage blocks of stone, rent and burst from their quarry, and set here with their native rudeness untamed by hammer or chisel.

  XI

  THE human passions were wrought almost as primitive into the civic structure of Florence, down in the thirteenth century, which you will find with me at the bottom of the Borgo Santi Apostoli, if you like to come. There and thereabouts dwell the Buondelmonti, the Amidei, the Uberti, the Lamberti, and other noble families, in fastnesses of stone and iron as formidable as the castles from which their ancestors were dislodged when the citizens went out into the country around Florence, and destroyed their strongholds and obliged them to come into the city; and thence from their casements and towers they carried on their private wars as conveniently as ever, descending into the streets, and battling about among the peaceful industries of the vicinity for generations. It must have been inconvenient for the industries, but so far as one can understand, they suffered it just as a Kentucky community now suffers the fighting out of a family feud in its streets, and philosophically gets under shelter when the shooting begins. It does not seem to have been objected to some of these palaces that they had vaulted passageways under their first stories, provided with trap doors to let the besieged pour hot water down on the passers below; these avenues were probably strictly private, and the citizens did not use them at times when family feeling ran high. In fact, there could have been but little coming and going about these houses for any who did not belong in them. A whole quarter, covering the space of several American city blocks, would be given up to the palaces of one family and its adherents, in a manner which one can hardly understand without seeing it. The Peruzzi,
for example, enclosed a Roman amphitheatre with their palaces, which still follow in structure the circle of the ancient edifice; and the Peruzzi were rather peaceable people, with less occasion for fighting-room than many other Florentine families, — far less than the Buondelmonti, Uberti, Amidei, Lamberti, Gherardini, and others, whose domestic fortifications seem to have occupied all that region lying near the end of the Ponte Vecchio. They used to fight from their towers on three corners of Por San Maria above the heads of the people passing to and from the bridge, and must have occasioned a great deal of annoyance to the tourists of that day. Nevertheless, they seem to have dwelt in very tolerable enmity together till one day when a Florentine gentleman invited all the noble youth of the city to a banquet at his villa, where, for their greater entertainment, there was a buffoon playing his antics. This poor soul seems not to have been a person of better taste than some other humorists, and he thought it droll to snatch away the plate of Uberto degl’ Infangati, who had come with Buondelmonte, at which Buondelmonte became furious, and resented the insult to his friend, probably in terms that disabled the politeness of those who laughed, for it is recorded that Oddo di Arrigo dei Fifanti, “a proud and resolute man,” became so incensed as to throw a plate and its contents into Uberto’s face. The tables were overturned, and Buondelmonte stabbed Oddo with a knife; at which point the party seems to have broken up, and Oddo returned to Florence from Campi, where the banquet was given, and called a family council to plot vengeance. But a temperate spirit prevailed in this senate, and it was decided that Buondelmonte, instead of dying, should marry Oddo’s niece, Reparata degli Amidei, differently described by history as a plain girl, and as one of the most beautiful and accomplished damsels of the city, of a noble and consular family. Buondelmonte, a handsome and gallant cavalier, but a weak will, as appears from all that happened, agreed to this, and everything was happily arranged, till one day when he was riding by the house of Forese Donati. Monna Gualdrada Donati was looking out of the window, and possibly expecting the young man. She called to him, and when he had alighted and come into the house she began to mock him.