Delphi Complete Works of William Dean Howells

by William Dean Howells

  She said she had no trouble with her girls, and she was experiencing now, at the end of the first year, the satisfaction of success in her experiment: hers I call it, because, though there is a similar school in Naples, she was the foundress of this in Florence.

  There is now in Italy much inquiry as to what the Italians can best do to resume their place in the business of the world; and in giving me a letter to the director of the Popular Schools in Florence, Signora G — told me something of what certain good heads and hearts there had been thinking and doing. It appeared to these that Italy, with her lack of natural resources, could never compete with the great industrial nations in manufacturing, but they believed that she might still excel in the mechanical arts which are nearest allied to the fine arts, if an intelligent interest in them could be reawakened in her people, and they could be enlightened and educated to the appreciation of skill and beauty in these. To this end a number of Florentine gentlemen united to establish the Popular Schools, where instruction is given free every Sunday to any man or boy of any age who chooses to wash his hands and face and come. Each of these gentlemen pledges himself to teach personally in the schools, or to pay for a teacher in his place; there is no aid from the state; all is the work of private beneficence, and no one receives pay for service in the schools except the porter.

  I found them in a vast old palace in the Via Parione, and the director kindly showed me through every department. Instruction is given in reading, writing, and arithmetic, and the other simpler branches; but the final purpose of the schools is to train the faculties for the practice of the decorative arts, and any art in which disciplined and nimble wits are useful. When a pupil enters, his name is registered, and his history in the school is carefully recorded up to the time he leaves it. It was most interesting to pass from one room to another, and witness the operation of the admirable ideas which animated the whole. Of course, the younger pupils were the quicker; but the director called them up without regard to age or standing, and let me hear them answer their teachers’ questions, merely saying, “This one has been with us six weeks; this one, two; this one, three years,” etc. They were mostly poor fellows out of the streets, but often they were peasants who walked five or six miles to and fro to profit by the chance offered them for a little life and light Sometimes they were not too clean, and the smell in the rooms must have been trying to the teachers; but they were decently clad, attentive, and well behaved. One of the teachers had come up through the schools, with no other training, and was very efficient. There was a gymnasium, and the pupils were taught the principles of hygiene; there was abundant scientific apparatus, and a free circulating library. There is no religious instruction, but in one of the rooms a professor from the Studii Superiori was lecturing on the Duties of a Citizen; I heard him talk to the boys about theft; he was very explicit with them, but just and kindly; from time to time he put a question to test their intelligence and attention. An admirable spirit of democracy — that is to say, of humanity and good sense — seemed to prevail throughout. The director made one little fellow read to me. Then, “What is your business?” he asked. “Cleaning out eave-troughs.” Some of the rest tittered. “Why laugh?” demanded the director sternly. “It is an occupation, like another.”

  There are no punishments; for gross misbehaviour the offender is expelled. On the other hand, the pupils are given premiums for excellence, and are encouraged to put them into the savings-bank. The whole course is for four years; but in the last year’s room few remained. Of these was a certain rosso (red-head), whom the director called up. Afterwards he told me that this rosso had a wild romantic passion for America, whither he supremely desired to go, and that it would be an inexpressible pleasure for him to have seen me. I came away regretting that he could form so little idea from my looks of what America was really like.

  In an old Medici palace, which was also once a convent, at the Oltrarno end of the Trinità bridge, is the National Female Normal School, one of two in the kingdom, the other being at Naples. On the day of my visit, the older girls had just returned from the funeral of one of their professors — a priest of the neighbouring parish of S. Spirito. It was at noon, and, in the natural reaction, they were chatting gaily; and as they ranged up and down stairs and through the long sunny corridors, pairing off, and whispering and laughing over their luncheon, they were very much like school-girls at home. The porter sent me upstairs through their formidable ranks to the room of the professor to whom I was accredited, and he kindly showed me through his department. It was scientific, and to my ignorance, at least, was thoroughly equipped for its work with the usual apparatus; but at that moment the light, clean, airy rooms were empty of students; and he presently gave me in charge of the directress, Signora Billi, who kindly led the way through the whole establishment. Some Boston lady, whom she had met in our educational exhibit at the Exposition in Paris, had made interest with her for all future Americans by giving her a complete set of our public-school text-books, and she showed me with great satisfaction, in one of the rooms, a set of American school furniture, desks, and seats. But there the Americanism of the Normal School ended. The instruction was oral, the text-books few or none; but every student had her note-book in which she set down the facts and principles imparted. I do not know what the comparative advantages of the different systems are; but it seemed to me that there must be more life and sympathy in the Italian.

  The pupils, who are of all ages from six years to twenty, are five hundred in number, and are nearly all from the middle class, though some are from the classes above and below that. They come there to be fitted for teaching, and are glad to get the places which the state, which educates them for nothing, pays scantily enough — two hundred and fifty dollars a year at most They were all neatly dressed, and well-mannered, of course, from the oldest to the youngest; the discipline is perfect, and the relation of teachers and pupils, I understand, most affectionate. Perhaps after saying this I ought to add that the teachers are all ladies, and young ladies. One of these was vexed that I should see her girls with their hats and sacks on: but they were little ones and just going home; the little ones were allowed to go home at one o’clock, while the others remained from nine till two. In the room of the youngest were two small Scotchwomen who had quite forgotten their parents’ dialect; but in their blue eyes and auburn hair, in everything but their speech, they were utterly alien to the dusky bloom and gleaming black of the Italians about them. The girls were nearly all of the dark type, though there was here and there one of those opaque Southern blondes one finds in Italy. Fair or dark, however, they all had looks of bright intelligence, though I should say that in beauty they were below the American average. All their surroundings here were wholesome and good, and the place was thoroughly comfortable, as the Italians understand comfort. They have no fire in the coldest weather, though at Signora G— ‘s commercial school they’had stoves, to be used in extreme cases; but on the other hand they had plenty of light and sunny air, and all the brick floors and whitewashed walls were exquisitely clean. I should not have been much the wiser for seeing them at their lessons, and I shall always be glad of that impression of hopeful, cheerful young life which the sight of their leisure gave me, as they wandered happy and free through the corridors where the nuns used to pace with downcast eyes and folded palms; and I came away very well satisfied with my century.

  My content was in nowise impaired by the visit which I made to the girls’ public school in Via Montebello. It corresponded, I suppose, to one of our primary schools; and here, as elsewhere, the teaching was by dictation; the children had readers, but no other textbooks; these were in the hands of the teachers alone.

  Again everything was very clean, very orderly, very humane and kindly. The little ones in the various rooms, called up at random, were wonderfully proficient in reading, mathematics, grammar, and geography; one small person showed an intimacy with the map of Europe which was nothing less than dismaying.

  I
did not succeed in getting to the boys’ schools, but I was told that they were practically the same as this; and it seemed to me that if I must miss either, it was better to see the future mothers of Italy at their books. Here alone was there any hint of the church in the school: it was a Friday, and the priest was coming to teach the future mothers their catechism.

  XL

  FEW of my readers, I hope, have failed to feel the likeness of these broken and ineffectual sketches to the pictures in stone which glare at you from the windows of the mosaicists on the Lungarno and in the Via Borgognissanti; the wonder of them is greater than the pleasure. I have myself had the fancy, in my work, of a number of small views and figures of mosaic, set in a slab of black marble for a table-top, or — if the reader does not like me to be so ambitious — a paper-weight; and now I am tempted to form a border to this capo d’ opera, bizarre and irregular, such as I have sometimes seen composed of the bits of pietra viva left over from a larger work. They are mere fragments of colour, scraps and shreds of Florence, which I find still gleaming more or less dimly in my note-books, and I have no notion of making any ordered arrangement of them But I am sure that if I shall but speak of how the sunshine lies in the Piazza of the Annunziata at noonday, falling on the feebly dribbling grotesques of the fountain there, and on John of Bologna’s equestrian grand duke, and on that dear and ever lovely band of babes by Luca della Robbia in the façade of the Hospital of the Innocents, I shall do enough to bring it all back to him who has once seen it, and to justify myself at least in his eyes.

  The beautiful pulpit of Donatello in San Lorenzo I find associated in sensation with the effect, from the old cloistered court of that church, of Brunelleschi’s dome and Giotti’s tower showing in the pale evening air above all the picturesque roofs between San Lorenzo and the cathedral; and not remote from these is my pleasure in the rich vulgarity and affluent bad taste of the modem decoration of the Caffé del Parlamento, in which one takes one’s ice under the chins of all these pretty girls, popping their little sculptured heads oiit of the lunettes below the frieze, with the hats and bonnets of fifteen years ago on them.

  Do you remember, beloved brethren and sisters of Florentine sojourn, the little windows beside the grand portals of the palaces, the cantine, where you could buy a graceful wicker-covered flask of the prince’s or marquis’s wine? “Open from ten till four — till one on holidays,” they were lettered; and in the Borgo degli Albizzi I saw the Cantina Filicaja, though it had no longer the old sigh for Italy upon its lips: —

  “Deh, fossi tu men bella o almen piu forte!”

  I am far from disdaining the memory of my horse-car tour of the city, on the track which followed so nearly the line of the old city wall that it showed me most of the gates still left standing, and the last grand duke’s arch of triumph, very brave in the sunset light. The tramways make all the long distances in the Florentine outskirts and suburbs, and the cars never come when you want them, just as with us, and are always as crowded.

  I had a great deal of comfort in two old fellows, unoccupied custodians, in the convent of San Marco, who, while we were all fidgeting about, doing our Fra Angelico or our Savonarola, sat motionless in a patch of sunshine and tranquilly gossipped together in senile falsetto. On the other hand, I never saw truer grief, or more of it, in a custodian than the polite soul displayed in the Bargello on whom we came so near the hour of closing one day that he could show us almost nothing. I could see that it wrung his heart that we should have paid our francs to come in then, when the Dante in the peaceful Giotto fresco was only a pensive blur to the eye, and the hideous realisations of the great Pest in wax were mere indistinguishable nightmares. We tried to console him by assuring him of our delight in Della Robbia’s singing boys in another room, and of the compensation we had in getting away from the Twelve (Useless) Labours of Hercules by Rossi, and two or three particularly unpleasant muscular Abstractions of Michael Angelo. It was, in fact, too dark to see much of the museum, and we had to come again for that; but no hour could have been better than that of the falling dusk for the old court, with its beautiful staircase, where so many hearts had broken in the anguish of death, and so many bloody heads rolled upon the insensible stones since the first Podestà of Florence had made the Bargello his home, till the last Medici made it his prison.

  Of statues and pictures I have spoken very little, because it seems to me that others have spoken more than enough. Yet I have hinted that I did my share both of suffering and enjoying in galleries and churches, and I have here and there still lurking in my consciousness a colour, a look, a light, a line from some masterpiece of Botticelli, of Donatello, of Mino da Fiesole, which I would fain hope will be a consolation for ever, but which I will not vainly attempt to impart to others. I will rather beg the reader when he goes to Florence, to go for my sake, as well as his own, to the Academy and look at the Spring of Botticelli as long and often as he can keep away from the tender and dignified and exquisitely refined Mino da Fiesole sculptures in the Badia, or wherever else he may find them. These works he may enjoy without technique, and simply upon condition of his being a tolerably genuine human creature. There is something also very sweet and winningly simple in the archaic reliefs in the base of Giotto’s tower; and the lessee of the Teatro Umberto in showing me behind the scenes of his theatre had a politeness that was delicious, and comparable to nothing less than the finest works of art.

  In quality of courtesy the Italians are still easily first of all men, as they are in most other things when they will, though I am not sure that the old gentleman who is known in Florence as The American, par excellence, is not perhaps pre-eminent in the art of driving a circus-chariot. This compatriot has been one of the most striking and characteristic features of the place for a quarter of a century, with his team of sixteen or twenty horses guided through the Florentine streets by the reins gathered into his hands. From time to time his horses have run away and smashed his carriage, or at least pulled him from his seat, so that now he has himself strapped to the box, and four grooms sit with folded arms on the seats behind him, ready to jump down and fly at the horses’ heads. As the strange figure, drawn at a slow trot, passes along, with stiffly waxed moustache and impassive face, it looks rather like a mechanical contrivance in the human form; and you are yielding to this fancy, when, approaching a comer, it breaks into a long cry, astonishingly harsh and fierce, to warn people in the next street of its approach. It is a curions sight, and seems to belong to the time when rich and privileged people used their pleasure to be eccentric, and the “madness” of Englishmen especially was the amazement and delight of the Continent. It is in character with this that the poor old gentleman should bear one of our own briefly historical names, and that he should illustrate in the indulgence of his caprice the fact that no great length of time is required to arrive at all that centuries can do for a noble family. I have been sorry to observe a growing impatience with him on the part of the Florentine journalists. Upon the occasion of his last accident they asked if it was not time his progresses should be forbidden. Next to tearing down the Ponte Vecchio, I can imagine nothing worse.

  Journalism is very active in Florence, and newspapers are sold and read everywhere; they are conspicuous in the hands of people who are not supposed to read; and more than once the cab-driver whom I called at a street corner had to fold up his cheap paper and put it away before he could respond. They are of a varying quality. The “Nazione,” which is serious and political, is as solidly, if not so heavily, written as an English journal; the “Fanfulla della Domenica,” which is literary, contains careful and brilliant reviews of new books. The cheap papers are apt to be inflammatory in politics; if humorous, they are local and somewhat unintelligible. The more pretentious satirical papers are upon the model of the French — a little more political, but abounding mostly in jokes at the expense of the seventh commandment, which the Latins find so droll. There are in all thirty periodicals, monthly, weekly, and daily, published in
Florence, which you are continually assured is no longer the literary centre of Italy. It is true none of the leaders of the new realistic movement in fiction are Florentines by birth or residence; the chief Italian poet, Carducci, lives in Bologna, the famous traveller De Amicis lives in Turin, and most new books are published at Milan or Naples. But I recur again to the group of accomplished scholars who form the intellectual body of the Studii Superiori, or University of Florence; and thinking of such an able and delightful historian as Villari, and such a thorough and indefatigable littérateur as Gubernatis, whom the congenial intellectual atmosphere of Florence has attracted from Naples and Piedmont, I should not, if I were a Florentine, yield the palm without a struggle.