Delphi Complete Works of William Dean Howells

by William Dean Howells

  “This,” I said to my bitter heart, “will help a man to sleep, standing upright.”

  But to my surprise I presently found myself interested in these predecessors of mine. They were, in most unexpected number, South Americans, and there were far more Spanish than English names from our hemisphere, though I do not know why the South Americans should not travel as well as we of the Northern continent. There were, of course, Europeans of all races and languages, conspicuous among whom for their effusion and expansiveness were the French. I should rather have thought the Germans would be foremost in this sort, but these French bridal couples — they all seemed to be on their wedding journeys — let their joy bubble frankly out in the public record. One Baron — declared that he saw Pisa for the second time, and “How much more beautiful it is,” he cries, “now when I see it on my bridal tour!” and his wife writes fondly above this — one fancies her with her left arm thrown round his neck while they bend over the book together—” Life is a journey which we should always make in pairs.” On another page, “Cecie and Louis — , on their wedding journey, are very content with this hotel, and still more with being together.”

  Who could they have been, I wonder; and are they still better satisfied with each other’s company than with the hotels they stop at?

  The Minerva was a good hotel; not perhaps all that these Gallic doves boasted it, but very fair indeed, and the landlord took off a charge for two pigeons when we represented that he had only given us one for dinner. The artist came in, after a while, with the appetite of a good conscience, and that dinner almost starved us. We tried to eke out the pigeon with vegetables, but the cook’s fire had gone down, and we could get nothing but salad. There is nothing I hate more, under such circumstances, than a giardinetto for dessert, and a gardenette was all we had; a little garden that grew us only two wizened pears, some dried prunes, and two slices of Gruyère cheese, fitter for a Parisian bridal pair than for us. If my memory serves me right, we had to go out to a café for our after dinner coffee.

  At any rate we went out, and walked up to look at the Arno under the pale moon. We found the river roughed by the chill wind that flared the line of lamps defining the curve of the quay before the shadowy palaces, and swept through the quiet streets, and while we lounged upon the parapet, a poor mountebank — of those that tumble for centesimi before the cafés — came by, shivering and shrinking in his shabby tights. His spangled breech-cloth emitted some forlorn gleams; he was smoking a cigarette, and trying to keep on by a succession of shrugs the jacket that hung from one of his shoulders. I give him to the reader for whatever he can do with him in an impression of Pisa.

  V

  ONE of our first cares in Pisa was, of course, to visit the Four Fabrics, as the Italians call, par excellence, the Duomo, the Leaning Tower, the Baptistery, and the Campo Santo. I say cares, for to me it was not a great pleasure. I perceive, by reference to my note-book, that I found that group far less impressive than at first, and that the Campo Santo especially appeared conscious and finicking. I had seen those Orgagna frescoes before, and I had said to myself twenty years ago, in obedience to whatever art-critic I had in my pocket, that here was the highest evidence of the perfect sincerity in which the early masters wrought — that no one could have painted those horrors of death and torments of hell who had not thoroughly believed in them. But this time I had my doubts, and I questioned if the painters of the Campo Santo might not have worked with almost as little faith and reverence as so many American humorists. Why should we suppose that the men who painted the Vergognosa peeping through her fingers at the debauch of Noah should not be capable of making ferocious fun of the scenes which they seemed to depict seriously? There is, as we all know, a modem quality in the great minds, the quickest wits, of all ages, and I do not feel sure these old painters are always to be taken at their word. Were they not sometimes making a mock of the devout clerics and laics who employed them? It is bitter fun, I allow. The Death and the Hell of Orgagna are atrocious — nothing less. A hideous fancy, if not a grotesque, insolent humour, riots through those scenes, where the damned are shown with their entrails dangling out (my pen cannot be half so plain as his brush), with their arms chopped off, and their tongues torn out by fiends, with their women’s breasts eaten by snakes. I for one will not pretend to have revered those works of art, or to have felt anything but loathing in their presence. If I am told that I ought at least to respect the faith with which the painter wrought, I say that faith was not respectable; and I can honour him more if I believe he was portraying those evil dreams in contempt of them — doing what he could to make faith in them impossible by realising them in all the details of their filthy cruelty. It was misery to look upon them, and it was bliss to turn my back and give my gaze to the innocent wilding flowers and weeds — the daisies that powdered the sacred earth brought from the Holy Land in the Pisan galleys of old, for the sweeter repose of those laid away here to wait the Judgment Day. How long they had been sleeping already? But they do not dream; that was one comfort I revisited the Baptistery for the sake of the famous echo which I had heard before, and which had sweetly lingered in my sense all these twenty years. But I was now a little disappointed in it, — perhaps because the custodian who had howled so skilfully to evoke it was no longer there, but a mere tyro intent upon his half franc, with no real feeling for ululation as an art. Guides and custodians of an unexampled rapacity swarmed in and all about the Four Fabrics, and beggars, whom we had almost forgotten in Florence, were there in such number that if the Leaning Tower were to fall, as it still looks capable of doing at any moment, it would half depopulate Pisa. I grieve to say that I encouraged mendicancy in the person of an old woman whom I gave a franc by mistake for a soldo. She had hot the public spirit to refuse it; without giving me time to correct the error, her hand closed upon it like a talon of a vulture, and I had to get what consolation I could out of pretending to have meant to give her a franc, and to take lightly the blessings under which I really staggered.

  It may have been this misadventure that cast a malign light upon the cathedral, which I found, after that of Siena, not at all estimable. I dare say it had its merits; but I could get no pleasure even out of the swinging lamp of Galileo; it was a franc, large as the full moon, and reproachfully pale, that waved to and fro before my eyes. This cathedral, however, is only the new Duomo of Pisa, being less than eight hundred years of age, and there is an old Duomo, in another part of the city, which went much more to my heart. I do not pretend that I entered it; but it had a lovely façade of Pisan gothic, mellowed through all its marble by the suns of a thousand summers, and weed-grown in every neglected niche and nook where dust and seeds could be lodged; so that I now wonder I did not sit down before it and spend the rest of my life there.

  VI

  THE reader, who has been requested to imagine the irregular form and the perpetually varying heights and depths of Siena, is now set the easier task of supposing Pisa shut within walls almost quadrangular, and reposing on a level which expands to the borders of the hills beyond Lucca, and drops softly with the Arno towards the sea. The river divides the southward third of the city from the rest, to which stately bridges bind it again. The group of the Four Fabrics, to which we have paid a devoir tempered by modern misgiving, rises in aristocratic seclusion in the north-western corner of the quadrangle, and the outer wall of the Campo Santo is the wall of the city. Nothing statelier than the position of these edifices could be conceived; and yet their isolation, so favourable to their reproduction in small alabaster copies, costs them something of the sympathy of the sensitive spectator. He cannot withhold his admiration of that grandeur, but his soul turns to the Duomo in the busy heart of Florence, or to the cathedral, pre-eminent but not solitary in the crest of Siena. The Pisans have put their famous group apart from their streets and shops, and have consecrated to it a region which no business can take them to. In this they have gained distinction and effect for it, but they have lost for it t
hat character of friendly domesticity which belongs to all other religious edifices that I know in Italy. Here, as in some other things not so easily definable, the people so mute in all the arts but architecture — of which they were the origin and school in Italy — seem to have expressed themselves mistakenly. The Four Fabrics are where they are to be seen, to be visited, to be wondered at; but they are remote from human society, and they fail of the last and finest effect of architecture — the perfect adaptation of houses to the use of men. Perhaps also one feels a want of unity in the group; perhaps they are too much like dishes set upon the table: the Duomo a vast and beautiful pudding; the Baptistery a gigantic charlotte russe; the Campo Santo an exquisite structure in sugar; the Leaning Tower, a column of ice-cream which has been weakened at the base by too zealous an application of hot water to the outside of the mould. But I do not insist upon this comparison; I only say that I like the ancient church of St Paul by the Arno. Some question whether it was really the first cathedral of Pisa, maintaining that it was merely used as such while the Duomo was in repair after the fire from which it suffered shortly after its completion.

  One must nowadays seem to have some preference in all aesthetic matters, but the time was when polite tourists took things more easily. In the seventeenth century, “Richard Lassels, Gent, who Travelled through Italy five times as Tutor to several of the English Nobility and Gentry,” says of the Pisan Duomo that it “is a neat Church for structure, and for its three Brazen Doors historied with a fine Basso rilievo. It’s built after La maniera Tedescha, a fashion of Building much used in Italy four or five hundred years ago, and brought in by Germans or Tedeschi, saith Vasari. Near to the Domo stands (if leaning may be called standing) the bending Tower, so artificially made, that it seems to be falling, and yet it stands firm.... On the other side of the Domo, is the Campo Santo, a great square cloistered about with a low cloister curiously painted.”

  Here is no trouble of mind about the old masters, either architects or painters, but a beautiful succinctness, a tranquil brevity, which no concern for the motives, or meanings, or aspirations of either penetrates. We have taken upon ourselves in these days a heavy burden of inquiry as to what the mediaeval masters thought and felt; but the tourist of the seventeenth century could say of the Pisan Duomo that it was “a neat church for structure,” and of the Campo Santo that it was “curiously painted,” and there an end. Perhaps there was a relief for the reader also in this method. Master Lassels vexed himself to spell his Italian correctly no more than he did his English.

  He visited, apparently with more interest, the Church of the Knights of St Stephen, which indeed I myself found full of unique attraction. Of these knights he says: “They wear a Red Cross of Satin upon their Cloaks, and profess to fight against the Turks. For this purpose they have here a good House and Maintenance. Their Church is beautified without with a handsome Faciata of White Marble, and within with Turkish Ensigns and divers Lanterns of Capitanesse Gallies. In this House the Knights live in common, and they are well maintained. In their Treasury they show a great Buckler of Diamonds, won in a Battle against the Turks.... They have their Cancellaria, a Catalogue of those Knights who have done notable service against the Turks, which serves for a powerful exhortation to their Successors, to do, and die bravely. In fine, these Knights may marry if they will, and live in their own particular houses, but many of them choose celibate, as more convenient for brave Soldiers; Wives and Children being the true impedimenta exercitus The knights were long gone from their House and Maintenance in 1883, and I suspect it is years since any of them even professed to fight the Turks. But their church is still there, with their trophies, which I went and admired; and I do not know that there is anything in Pisa which gives you a more vivid notion of her glory in the past than those flags taken from the infidels and those carvings that once enriched her galleys. These and the ship-yards by the Arno, from which her galleys were launched, do really recall the majesty and dominion of the sea which once was hers — and then Genoa’s, and then Venice’s, and then the Hanseatic Cities’, and then Holland’s, and then England’s; and shall be ours when the Moral Force of the American Navy is appreciated At present Pisa and the United States are equally formidable as maritime powers, unless indeed this conveys too strong an impression of the decay of Pisa.

  VII

  ISSUING from the Church of the Cavaliers I found myself in the most famous spot in the whole city: the wide dusty square where the Tower of Famine once stood, and where you may still see a palace with iron baskets swung from the corners of the façade, in which it is said the wicked Archbishop Ruggieri used to put the heads of traitors. It may not be his palace, and the baskets may not have been used for this purpose; but there is no doubt that this was the site of the tower, which was not demolished till 1655, and that here it was that Ugolino and his children and grandchildren cruelly perished.

  The writer of an excellent little local guide to Pisa, which I bought on my first visit, says that Dante has told the story of Count Ugolino della Gherardesca, and that “after Dante, God alone can repeat it.” Yet I fancy the tragedy will always have a fascination to the scribbler who visits Pisa, irresistibly tempting him to recall it to his reader. I for my part shall not do less than remind him that Ugolino was Captain of the People and Podestà of Pisa at the time of her great defeat by Genoa in 1284, when so many of her best and bravest were carried off prisoners that a saying arose, “If you want to see Pisa, go to Genoa.” In those days they had a short and easy way of accounting for disaster, which has been much practised since down even to the date of our own civil war; they attributed it to treason, and in this case they were pretty clear that Count Ugolino was the traitor. He sailed away with his squadron before his critics thought the day lost; and after the battle, in his negotiations with Florence and Genoa they declared that he behaved as only a man would who wished to ruin his country in order to rule her. He had already betrayed his purpose of founding an hereditary lordship in Pisa, as the Visconti had done in Milan and the Scaligeri in Verona, and to this end had turned Guelph from being ancestrally Ghibelline; for his name is one of the three still surviving in Tuscany of the old German nobility founded there by the emperors. He was a man of furious and ruthless temper; he had caused one of his nephews to be poisoned, he stabbed another, and when the young man’s friend, a nephew of the Archbishop, would have defended him, Ugolino killed him with his own hand. The Archbishop, as a Ghibelline, was already no friend of Ugolino’s, and here now was bloodshed between them. “And what happened to Count Ugolino a little after,” says the Florentine chronicler, Villani, “ was prophesied by a wise and worthy man of the court, Marco Lombardo; for when the count was chosen by all to be Lord of Pisa, and when he was in his highest estate and felicity, he made himself a splendid birthday feast, where he had his children and grandchildren and all his lineage, kinsmen and kinswomen, with great pomp of apparel, and ornament, and preparation for a rich banquet The count took this Marco, and went about showing him his possessions and splendour, and the preparation for the feast, and that done, he said, ‘What do you think of it, Marco? ‘ The sage answered at once, and said, ‘ You are fitter for evil chance than any baron of Italy.’ And the count, afraid of Marco’s meaning, asked, ‘Why?’ And Marco answered, ‘Because you lack nothing but the wrath of God.’ And surely the wrath of God quickly fell upon him, as it pleased God, for his sins and treasons; for as it had been intended by the Archbishop of Pisa and his party to drive out of Pisa Nino and his followers, and betray and entrammel Ugolino, and weaken the Guelphs, the Archbishop ordered Count Ugolino to be undone, and immediately set the people on in their fury to attack and take his palace, giving the people to understand that he had betrayed Pisa, and surrendered their castles to the Florentines and Lucchese; and finding the people upon him, without hope of escape, Ugolino gave himself up, and in this assault his bastard son and one of his grandchildren were killed; and Ugolino being taken, and two of his sons and two of his son
’s sons, they threw them in prison, and drove his family and his followers out of Pisa.... The Pisans, who had thrown in prison Ugolino and his two sons, and two sons of his son Count Guelfo, as we have before mentioned, in a tower on the Piazza degli Anziani, caused the door of the tower to be locked and the keys to be thrown into the Arno, and forbidding these captives all food, in a few days they perished of hunger. But first, the count imploring a confessor, they would not allow him a friar or priest that he might confess. And all five being taken out of the tower together, they were vilely buried; and from that time the prison was called the Tower of Famine, and will be so always. For this cruelty the Pisans were strongly blamed by the whole world, wherever it was known, not so much for the count, who for his crimes and treasons was perhaps worthy of such a death, but for his sons and grandsons, who were young, boys, and innocent; and this sin, committed by the Pisans, did not remain unpunished, as may be seen in after time.”

  A monograph on Ugolino by an English writer states that the victims were rolled in the matting of their prison floor and interred, with the irons still on their limbs, in the cloister of the church of San Francesco. The grave was opened in the fourteenth century, and the irons taken out; again, in 1822, the remains were found and carelessly thrown together in a spot marked by a stone bearing the name of Vannuchi. Of the prison where they suffered, no more remains now than of the municipal eagles which the Republic put to moult there, and from which it was called the Moulting Tower before it was called the Tower of Famine.

  VIII.

  THE memory of that curious literary conjunction which once took place at Pisa, when Byron, Shelley, and Leigh Hunt met there to establish an English review on Italian ground, imparts to the old city an odour, faint now and very vague, of the time when Romance was new enough to seem Immortal; but I could do little with this association, as an element of my impression. They will point you out, if you wish, the palace in which Byron lived on the Lung’ Arno, but as I would not have gone to look at a palace with Byron alive in it, I easily excused myself for not hunting up this one of the residences with which he left Italy swarming. The Shelleys lived first in a villa, four miles off under the hills, but were washed out of it in one of the sudden inundations of the country, and spent the rest of their sojourn in the city, where Shelley alarmed his Italian friends by launching on the Amo in a boat he had contrived of pitched canvas and lath. His companion in this perilous navigation was that Mr Williams with whom he was afterwards drowned in Spezzia Bay. “Once,” writes Mrs Shelley, “I went down with him to the mouth of the Arno, where the stream, then high and swift, met the tideless sea and disturbed its sluggish waters. It was a waste and dreary scene; the desert sand stretched into a point surrounded by waves that broke idly but perpetually around.”