Delphi Complete Works of William Dean Howells

by William Dean Howells

  At Pisa there is nothing of this wildness or strife in the Arno, not so much as at Florence, where it rushes and brawls down its channel and over its dams and ripples. Its waters are turbid, almost black, but smooth, and they slip oilily away with many a wreathing eddy, round the curve of the magnificent quay, to which my mind recurs still as the noblest thing in Pisa; as the noblest thing, indeed, that any city has done with its river. But what quick and sensitive allies of Nature the Italians have always shown themselves! No suggestion of hers has been thrown away on them; they have made the most of her lavish kindness, and transmuted it into the glory and the charm of art. Our last moments of sight-seeing in Pisa were spent in strolling beside the river, in hanging on the parapet and delighting in the lines of that curve.

  At one end of the city, before this begins, near a spick-and-span new iron bridge, is the mediaeval tower of the galley prison, which we found exquisitely picturesque in the light of our last morning; and then stretching up towards the heart of the town from this tower, were the ship-yards, with the sheds in which the old republic built the galleys she launched on every sea then known. They are used now for military stables; they are not unlike the ordinary horse-car stables of our civilization; and the grooms, swabbing the legs of the horses and combing their manes, were naturalized to our homesick sympathies by the homely community of their functions with those I had so often stopped to admire in my own land. There is no doubt but the toilet of a horse is something that interests every human being.

  INDUSTRIOUS LUCCA

  I

  WITH rather less than the ordinary stupidity of tourists, wretched slaves of routine as they are, we had imagined the possibility of going to Lucca overland; that is, of driving fifteen miles across the country instead of taking the train. It would be as three hours against twenty minutes, and as fifteen francs against two; but my friend was young and I was imprudent, and we boldly ventured upon the expedition. I have never regretted it, which is what can be said of, alas, how few pleasures! On the contrary, it is rapture to think of it still.

  Already, at eight o’clock of the April morning, the sun had filled the city with a sickening heat, which intimated pretty clearly what it might do for Pisa in August; but when we had mounted superbly to our carriage seats, after pensioning all the bystanders, and had driven out of the city into the green plain beyond the walls, we found it a delicious spring day, warm, indeed, but full of a fervent life.

  We had issued from the gate nearest the Four Fabrics, and I advise the reader to get that view of them if he can. To the backward glance of the journeyer toward Lucca, they have the unity, the ensemble, the want of which weakens their effect to proximity. Beside us swept the great level to the blue-misted hills on our right; before us it stretched indefinitely. From the grass, the larks were quivering up to the perfect heaven, and the sympathy of Man with the tender and lovely mood of Nature was expressed in the presence of the hunters with their dogs, who were exploring the herbage in quest of something to kill.

  Perhaps I do man injustice. Perhaps the rapture of the blameless litterateur and artist, who drove along crying out over the exquisite beauty of the scene, was more justly representative of our poor race. I am vexed now, when I think how brief this rapture was, and how much it might have been prolonged if we had bargained with our driver to go slow. We had bargained for everything else; but who could have imagined that one Italian could ever have been fast enough for two Americans? He was even too fast. He had a just pride in his beast, — as tough as the iron it was the colour of, — and when implored, in the interest of natural beauty, not to urge it on, he misunderstood; he boasted that it could keep up that pace all day, and he incited it in the good Tuscan of Pisa to go faster yet. Ah me! What enchanting villas he whirled us by! What gray chateaux! What old wayside towers, hoary out of all remembrance! What delightfully stupid-looking little stony picturesque villages, in every one of which that poor artist and I would have been glad to spend the whole day! But the driver could not snatch the broad and constant features of the landscape from us so quickly; these we had time to peruse and imprint for ever on our memories: the green expanses, the peach trees pink in their bloom; the plums and cherries putting on their bridal white; the gray road, followed its whole length by the vines trained from trees to tall stakes across a space which they thus embowered continuously from field to field. Everywhere the peasants were working the soil; spading, not ploughing their acres, and dressing it to the smoothness of a garden. It looked rich and fertile, and the whole land wore an air of smiling prosperity which I cannot think it put on expressly for us.

  Pisa seemed hardly to have died out of the horizon before her ancient enemy began to rise from the other verge, beyond the little space in which they used to play bloodily at national hostilities. The plain narrowed as we approached, and hills hemmed us in on three sides, with snow-capped heights in the background, from which the air blew cooler and cooler. It was only eleven o’clock, and we would gladly have been all day on the road. But we pretended to be pleased with the mistaken zeal that had hurried us; it was so amiable, we could not help it; and we entered Lucca with the smiling resolution to make the most of it

  II

  LUCCA lies as fiat as Pisa, but in shape it is as regularly oblong as that is square, and instead of the brick wall, which we had grown fond of there and in Siena, it has a girdle of gray stone, deeply moated with out, and broadly levelled on top, where a lovely driveway winds round the ancient town. The wall juts in a score of angles, and the projecting spaces thus formed are planted with groups of forest trees, lofty and old, and giving a charm to the promenade exquisitely wild and rare.

  To our approach, the clustering city towers and roofs promised a picturesqueness which she kept in her own fashion when we drove in through her gates, and were set down, after a dramatic rattling and banging through her streets, at the door of the Universo, or the Croce di Malta, — I do not really remember which hotel it was. But I remember very well the whole domestic force of the inn seemed to be concentrated in the distracted servant who gave us our rooms, and was landlord, porter, accountant, waiter, and chambermaid all in one. It was an inn apparently very little tainted by tourist custom, and Lucca is certainly one of the less discovered of the Tuscan cities. At the table d’hôte in the evening our commensals were all Italians except an ancient English couple, who had lived so long in that region that they had rubbed off everything English but their speech. I wondered a good deal who they could be; they spoke conservatively — the foreigners are always conservative in Italy — of the good old ducal days of Lucca, when she had her own mild little despot, and they were now going to the Baths of Lucca to place themselves for the summer. They were types of a class which is numerous all over the Continent, and which seems thoroughly content with expatriation. The Europeanised American is always apologetic; he says that America is best, and he pretends that he is going back there; but the continentalised Englishman has apparently no intention of repatriating himself. He has said to me frankly in one instance that England was beastly. But I own I should not like to have said it to him.

  In their talk of the ducal past of Lucca these English people struck again the note which my first impression of Lucca had sounded. Lucca was a sort of republic for nearly a thousand years» with less interruption from lords, bishops, and foreign dominions than most of her sister commonwealths, and she kept her ancient liberties down to the time of the French Revolution — four hundred years longer than Pisa, and two hundred and fifty years longer than Florence and Siena; as long, in fact, as Venice, which she resembled in an arbitrary change effected from a democratic to an aristocratic constitution at the moment when the change was necessary to her existence as an independent state. The duchy of Lucca created by the Congress of Vienna, 1817, and assigned to the Bourbons of Parma, lasted only thirty years, when it was merged by previous agreement in the grand duchy of Tuscany, the Bourbons going back to Parma, in which Napoleon’s Austrian widow had meantime
enjoyed a life interest. In this brief period, however, the old republican city assumed so completely the character of a little principality, that in spite of the usual Via Garibaldi and Corso Vittorio Emanuele, I could not banish the image of the ducal state from my mind. Yet I should be at a loss how to impart this feeling to every one, or to say why a vast dusty square, planted with pollarded sycamores, and a huge, Ugly palace with but a fairish gallery of pictures, fronting upon the dust and sycamores, should have been so expressive of a ducal residence. There was a statue of Maria Louisa, the first ruler of the temporary duchy, in the midst of these sycamores, and I had a persistent whimsey of her reviewing her little ducal army there, as I sat and looked out from the open door of the restaurant where my friend and I were making the acquaintance of a number of strange dishes and trying our best to be friends with the Lucchese conception of a beefsteak.

  It was not because I had no other periods to choose from; in Lucca you can be overwhelmed with them. Her chronicles do not indeed go back into the mists of fable for her origin, but they boast an Etruscan, a Roman antiquity which is hardly less formidable. Here in Α.U. 515 there was fixed a colony of two thousand citizens; here in 698 the great Cæsar met with Pompey and Crassus, and settled who should rule in Rome. After the Romans, she knew the Goths, the Lombards, and the Franks; then she had her own tyrants, and in the twelfth century she began to have her own consuls, the magistrates of her people’s choice, and to have her wars within and without, to be torn with faction and menaced with conquest in the right Italian fashion. Once she was sacked by the Pisans under the terrible Uguccione della Fagginola, in 1314; and more than once she was sold. She was sold for thirty-five thousand florins to two ambitious and enterprising, gentlemen, the Rossi brothers, of Parma, who, however, were obliged to relinquish her to the Scaligeri of Verona. This was the sorrow and shame that fell upon her after a brief fever of conquest and glory, brought her by the greatest of her captains, the famous Castruccio Castracani, the condottiere, whose fierce, death-white face, bordered by its pale yellow hair, looks more vividly out of the history of his time than any other. For Castruccio had been in prison, appointed to die, and when the rising of the Lucchese delivered him, and made him Lord of Lucca, Uguccione’s fetters were still upon him. He was of the ancient Ghibelline family of the Antelminelli, who had prospered to great wealth in England, where they spent a long exile and where Castruccio learned the art of war. After his death one of his sons sold his dominion to another for twenty-two thousand florins, from whom his German garrison took it and sold it for sixty thousand to Gherardo Spinola; he, in turn, disposed of it to the Rossi, at a clear loss of thirty-eight thousand florins. The Lucchese suffered six years under the Scaligeri, who sold them again — the market price this time is not quoted — to the Florentines, whom the Pisans drove out. These held her in a servitude so cruel that the Lucchese called it their Babylonian captivity, and when it was ended after twenty years, through the intervention of the Emperor Charles IV., in 1369, they were obliged to pay the German a hundred thousand florins for their liberty, which had been sold so many times for far less money.

  An ancient Lucchese family, the Guanigi, whose Gothic palaces are still the most beautiful in the city, now rose to power, and held it till 1430; and then the city finally established the republican government, which in its democratic and oligarchic form continued till 1799.

  The noblest event of this long period was the magnanimous attempt of the gonfaloniere, Francesco Burlamacchi, who in 1546 dreamed of driving the Medici from power and re-establishing the republic throughout Tuscany. Burlamacchi was of an old patrician family, but the love of freedom had been instilled in him by his uncle, Filippo Burlamacchi, that Fra Pacifico who wrote the first life of Savonarola and was one of his most fervent disciples. The gonfaloniere’s plot was discovered; and he was arrested by the timid Lucchese Senate, which hastened to assure the ferocious Cosimo I. that they were guiltless of complicity. The imperial commissioner came from Milan to preside at his trial, and he was sentenced to suffer death for treason to the empire. He was taken to Milan and beheaded; but now he is the greatest name in Lucca, and his statue in the piazza, fronting her ancient communal palace, appeals to all who love freedom with the memory of his high intent. He died in the same cause which Savonarola laid down his life for, and not less generously.

  Poor little Lucca had not even the courage to attempt to save him; but doubtless she would have tried if she had dared. She was under the special protection of the emperors, having paid Maximilian and then Charles V. good round sums for the confirmation of her early liberties; and she was so anxious to be well with the latter, that when she was accused to him of favouring the new Lutheran heresy she hastened to persecute the Protestants with the same cowardice that she had shown in abandoning Burlamacchi.

  It cost, indeed, no great effort to suppress the Protestant congregation at Lucca. Peter Martyr, its founder, had fled before, and was now a professor at Strasburg, whence he wrote a letter of severe upbraiding to the timorous flock who suffered themselves to be frightened back to Rome. Some of them would not renounce their faith, preferring exile, and of these, who emigrated by families, were the Burlamacchi, from whom the hero came. He had counted somewhat upon the spirit of the Reformation to help him in his design against the Medici, knowing it to be the spirit of freedom, but there is no one evidence that he was himself more a Protestant than Savonarola was.

  Eight years after his death the constitution of Lucca was changed, and she fell under the rule of an aristocracy nicknamed the Lords of the Little Ring, from the narrow circle in which her senators succeeded one another. She had always been called Lucca the Industrious; in her safe subordination, she now worked and throve for two hundred and fifty years, till the French republicans came and toppled her oligarchy over at a touch. James Howell, writing one of his delightful letters from Florence in 1621, gives us some notion of Luccha as she appeared to the polite traveller of that day.

  “There is a notable active litttle Republic towards the midst of Tuscany,” he says, “called Lucca, which, in regard she is under the Emperour’s protection, he dares not meddle with, though she lie as a Partridg under a Faulcon’s wings, in relation to the grand Duke; besides there is another reason of the State why he meddles not with her, because she is more beneficial unto him now that she is free, and more industrious to support this freedom, than if she were become his vassal; for then it is probable she would grow more careless and idle, and so would not vent his comodities so soon, which she buys for ready mony, wherein most of her wealth consists. There is no State that winds the peny more nimbly and makes a quicker return.”

  Lasells, who visited Lucca a little earlier, tells us that it “ hath thirty thousand Muskets or half Muskets in its Arsenal, eight thousand Pikes, two thousand Brest Pieces of Musket proof, and store of great Artillery. The whole State, for a need, can arm eighteen thousand men of service;” but Lucca appears to have become the joke and by-word of her neighbours more and more as time went on. At Florence they told of a prima-donna who, when she gesticulated in opera at Lucca, flung her arms beyond the borders of the republic. An ignominious peace, timid, selfish, prudent, was her condition from the time the aristocratic change took place. For two centuries she was preparing for that Bourbon despotism which characterized her even physically to my fancy. “An absolute government,” says my Lucchese guide-book, “but of mild temper, which might have been more beneficent if it had been inspired by views less narrow. Yet it was a notable period of our history for municipal activity and for public works, which in proportion to the smallness of the country may also be called great; the city secured by vast and well-planned defences against the inundations of the Serchio; the country traversed in every direction by carriage-roads; abundance of the best water for use and beauty brought to the city by a monumental work of art; an ample highway across the Apennines, to communicate with Modena and Lombardy; bridges, ornamental and convenient, of stone and iron.”
r />   III

  OF mediaeval Lucca I have kept freshest the sense of her Gothic church architecture, with its delicate difference from that of Pisa, which it resembles and excels. It is touched with the Lombardic and Byzantine character, while keeping its own; here are the pillars resting on the backs of lions and leopards; here are the quaint mosaics in the façades. You see the former in the cathedral, which is not signally remarkable, like that of Florence, or Siena, or Pisa, and the latter in the beautiful old church of San Frediano, an Irish saint who for some reason figured in Lucca; he was bishop there in the fifth century, and the foundation of his church dates only a century or two later. San Michele is an admirable example of Lucchese gothic, and is more importantly placed than any other church, in the very heart of the town opposite the Palazzo Pretorio. This structure was dedicated to the occupation of the Podestà of Lucca, in pursuance of the republic’s high-languaged decree, recognising the fact that “among the ornaments with which cities embellish themselves, the greatest expenditure should always be devoted to those where the deities are worshipped, the magistracy administers justice, and the people convenes.” The Palazzo Pretorio is now the repository of a public archaeological collection, and the memory of its original use has so utterly perished that the combined intellects of two policemen, whom we appealed to for information, could not assign to it any other function than that of lottery office, appointed by the late grand duke. The popular intellect at Lucca is not very vivid, so far as we tested it, and though willing, it is not quick. The caffetiera in whose restaurant we took breakfast, under the shadow of the Pretorian Palace walls, was as ignorant of its history as the policemen; but she was very amiable, and she had three pretty daughters in the bon-bon department, who looked the friendliest disposition to know about it if they could.