Delphi Complete Works of William Dean Howells

by William Dean Howells

  I speak of them at once, because I did not think the Lucchese generally such handsome people as the Pisans, and I wish to be generous before I am just. Why, indeed, should I be severe with the poor Lucchese in any way, even for their ignorance, when the infallible Baedeker himself speaks of the statue in the Piazza S. Michele as that of “S. Burlamacchi”? The hero thus canonised stood frowning down upon a grain and seed market when we went to offer him our homage, and the peasants thought we had come to buy, and could not understand why we should have only a minor curiosity about their wares. They took the wheat up in their brown hands to show us, and boasted of its superior quality. We said we were strangers, and explained that we had no intention of putting in a crop of that sort; but they only laughed blankly. In spite of this prevailing ignorance, penetrating even to the Baedeker in our hands, Lucca was much tableted to the memory of her celebrities, especially her literary celebrities, who need tablets as greatly as any literary celebrities I know. There was one literary lady whose tablet I saw in a church, and whom the local Scientific and Literary Academy proclaimed “the marvel of her age” for her learning and her gifts in improvisation. The reader will readily identify her from this; or if he cannot, the greater shame to him; he might as well be a Lucchese.

  “All there are barrators, except Bontura;

  No into yes for money there is changed,”

  says Dante of this Lucca in which I found an aspect of busy commonplace, an air of thrift and traffic, and in which I only feign to have discovered an indifference to finer things. I dare say Lucca is full of intelligence and polite learning; but she does not imbue her policemen and caffetieras with it, as Boston does. Yet I would willingly be at this moment in a town where I could step out and see an old Roman amphitheatre, built bodily up into the modern city, and showing its mighty ribs through the houses surrounding the market-place — a market-place quaint beyond any other, with its tile-roofed stands and booths. There is much more silk in Lucca than in Boston, if we have the greater culture; and the oil of Lucca is sublime; and — yes, I will own it! — Lucca has the finer city wall. The town showed shabby and poor from the driveway along the top of this, for we saw the backyards and rears of the houses; but now and then we looked down into a stiff, formal, delicious palace garden, full of weather-beaten statues, old, bad, ridiculous, divinely dear and beautiful!

  I cannot say that I have been hardly used, when I remember that I have seen such gardens as those; and I humbly confess it a privilege to have walked in the shadow of the Guanigi palaces at Lucca, in which the gothic seems to have done its best for a stately and lovely effect. I even climbed to the top of one of their towers, which I had wondered at ever since my first sight of Lucca because of the little grove it bore upon its crest I asked the custodian of the palace what it was, and he said it was a little garden, which I suspected already. But I had a consuming desire to know what it looked like, and what Lucca looked like from it; and I asked him how high the tower was. He answered that it was four hundred feet high, which I doubted at first, but came to believe when I had made the ascent. I hated very much to go up that tower; but when the custodian said that an English lady eighty years old had gone up the week before, I said to myself that I would not be outdone by any old lady of eighty, and I went up. The trees were really rooted in little beds of earth up there, and had been growing for ten years; the people of the house sometimes took tea under them in the summer evenings.

  This tower was one of three hundred and seventy in which Lucca abounded before the Guanigi levelled them. They were for the convenience of private warfare; the custodian showed me a little chamber near the top, where he pretended the garrison used to stay. I enjoyed his statement as much as if it were a fact, and I enjoyed still more the magnificent prospect of the city and country from the towers; the fertile plain with the hills all round, and distant mountains snow-crowned except to the south where the valley widened toward Florence; the multitudinous roofs and bell-towers of the city, which filled its walls full of human habitations, with no breadths of orchard and field as at Fisa and Siena.

  The present Count Guanigi, so the custodian pretended, lives in another palace, and lets this in apartments; you may have the finest for seventy-five dollars a year, with privilege of sky-garden. I did not think it dear, and I said so, though I did not visit any of the interiors and do not know what state the finest of them may be in.

  We did, however, see one Lucchese palace throughout; the Palazzo Mansi, in which there is an admirable gallery of Dutch pictures inherited by the late marquis through a Dutch marriage made by one of his ancestors. The portrait of this lady, a gay, exuberant, eighteenth-century blonde, ornaments the wall of one of the gilded and tapestried rooms which form two sides of the palace court. From a third, standing in an arcaded passage, you look across this court, gray with the stone of which the edifice is built, to a rich brown mass of tiled roofs, and receive a perfect impression of the pride and state in which life was lived in the old days in Lucca. It is a palace in the classic taste; it is excellent in its way, and it expresses as no other sort of edifice can the splendours of an aristocracy, after it has ceased to be feudal and barbaric, and become elegant and municipal. What laced coats and bag-wigs, what hoops and feathers had not alighted from gilt coaches and sedan-chairs in that silent and empty court! I am glad to be plebeian and American, a citizen of this enormous democracy, but if I were strictly cross-examined, would I not like also to be a Lord of the Little Ring in Lucca, a marquis, and a Mansi?

  PISTOJA, PRATO, and FIESOLE

  I

  IT was on the last day of March, after our return from Siena, that I ran out to Pistoja with my friend the artist There were now many signs of spring in the landscape, and the gray olives were a less prevalent tone, amid the tints of the peach and pear blossoms. Dandelions thickly strewed the railroad sides; the grass was powdered with the little daisies, white with crimson-tipped petals; the garden borders were full of yellow flowering seed-turnips. The peasants were spading their fields; as we ran along, it came noon, and they began to troop over the white roads to dinner, past villas frescoed with false balconies and casements, and comfortable brownish-gray farmsteads. On our right the waves of distant purple hills swept all the way to Pistoja.

  I made it part of my business there to look up a young married couple, Americans, journeying from Venice to Florence, who stopped at Pistoja twenty years before, and saw the gray town in the gray light of a spring morning between four and six o’clock. I remembered how strange and beautiful they thought it, and from time to time I started with recognition of different objects — as if I had been one of that pair; so young, so simple-heartedly, greedily glad of all that eld and story which Italy constantly lavished upon them. I could not find them, but I found phantom traces of their youth in the ancient town, and that endeared it to me, and made it lovely through every hour of the long rainy day I spent there. To other eyes it might have seemed merely a stony old town, dull and cold under the lowering sky, with a locked-up cathedral, a bare baptistery, and a mediaeval public palace, and a history early merged in that of Florence; but to me it must always have the tender interest of the pleasure, pathetically intense, which that young couple took in it. They were very hungry, and they could get no breakfast in the drowsy town, not even a cup of coffee, but they did not mind that; they wandered about, famished but blest, and by one of the happy accidents that usually befriended them, they found their way up to the Piazza del Duomo and saw the Communal Palace so thoroughly, in all its gothic fulness and mediæval richness of detail, that I seemed never to have risen from the stone benching around the interior of the court on which they sat to study the escutcheons carven and painted on the walls. I could swear that the bear on the arms of Pistoja was the same that they saw and noted with the amusement which a bear in a checkered tabard must inspire in ignorant minds; though I am now able to inform the reader that it was put there because Pistoja was anciently infested with bears, and this was the last be
ar left when they were exterminated.

  We need not otherwise go deeply into the history of Pistoja. We know already how one of her family feuds introduced the factions of the Bianchi and Neri in Florence, and finally caused the exile of Dante; and we may inoffensively remember that Cataline met his defeat and death on her hills A.U. 691. She was ruled more or less tumultuously by princes, popes, and people till the time of her great siege by the Lucchese and Florentines and her own Guelph exiles in 1305. Famine began to madden the besieged, and men and women stole out of the city through the enemy’s camp and scoured the country for food. When the Florentines found this out they lay in wait for them, and such as they caught they mutilated, cutting off their noses, or arms, or legs, and then exposing them to the sight of those they had gone out to save from starvation. After the city fell the Florentine and Lucchese leaders commanded such of the wounded Pistojese as they found on the field to be gathered in heaps upon the demolished walls, that their fathers, brothers, and children might see them slowly die, and forbade any one, under pain of a like fate, to succour one of these miserable creatures.

  Pistoja could not endure the yoke fastened upon her. A few years later her whole people rose literally in a frenzy of rebellion against the Lucchese governor, and men, women, children, priests, and monks joined in driving him out. After the heroic struggle they re-established their own republic, which presently fell a prey to the feud of two of her families, in whose private warfare she suffered almost as much as from her foreign enemies. Between them the Cancellieri and the Panciatichi burned a thousand houses within her walls, not counting those without, and the latter had plotted to deliver over their country to the Visconti of Milan, when the Florentines intervened and took final possession of Pistoja.

  We had, therefore, not even to say that we were of the Cancellieri party in order to enter Pistoja, but drove up to the Hotel di Londra without challenge, and had dinner there, after which we repaired to the Piazza del Duomo; and while the artist got out a plate and began to etch in the rain, the author bestirred himself to find the sacristan and get into the cathedral. It was easy enough to find the sacristan, but when he had been made to put his head out of the fifth-story window he answered, with a want of enterprise and hospitality which I had never before met in Italy, that the cathedral was always open at three o’clock, and he would not come down to open it sooner. At that hour I revenged myself upon him by not finding it very interesting, though I think now the fault must have been in me. There is enough estimable detail of art, especially the fourteenth-century monument to the great lawyer and lover, Cino da Pistoja, who is represented lecturing to Petrarch among eight other of his pupils. The lady in the group is the Selvaggia whom he immortalised in his subtle and metaphysical verses; she was the daughter of Filippo Vergiolesi, the leader of the Ghibellines in Pistoja, and she died of hopeless love for Cino, when the calamities of their country drove him into exile at the time of the siege. He remains the most tangible if not the greatest name of Pistoja; he was the first of those who polished the Tuscan speech; he was a wonder of jurisprudence in his time, restoring the Roman law and commenting nine books of the Code; and the wayfarer, whether grammarian, attorney, litterateur, or young lady, may well look on his monument with sympathy.

  But I brought away no impression of pleasure or surprise from the cathedral generally, and in fact the works of art for which one may chiefly, if not solely, desire to see Pistoja again, are the Della Robbias, which immortally beautify the Ospedale del Ceppo. They represent with the simplest reality, and in the proportions of life, the seven works of mercy of St. Andrea Franchi, bishop of Pistoja, in 1399. They form a frieze or band round the edifice, and are of the glazed terra cotta in which the Della Robbias commonly wrought. The saint is seen visiting “The Naked,”

  “The Pilgrims,”

  “The Sick,”

  “The Imprisoned,”

  “The Dead,”

  “The An Hungered,”

  “The Athirst;” and between the tableaux are the figures of “Faith,”

  “Charity,”

  “Hope,”

  “Prudence,” and “Justice.” There is also an “Annunciation,”

  “A Visitation,”

  “An Assumption;” and in three circular reliefs, adorned with fruits and flowers after the Della Robbia manner, the arms of the hospital, the city, and the Medici; but what takes the eye and the heart are the good bishop’s works of mercy. In these colour is used as it must be in that material, and in the broad, unmingled blues, reds, yellows, and greens, primary, sincere, you have satisfying actuality of effect I believe the critics are not decided that these are the best works of the masters, but they gave me more pleasure than any others, and I remember them with a vivid joy still. It is hardly less than startling to see them first, and then for every succeeding moment it is delightful. Giovanni della Robbia and his brother, the monk Frate Ambrogio, and Andrea and his two sons, Luca and Girolomo, are all supposed to have shared in this work, which has, therefore, a peculiar interest, though it is not even mentioned by Vasari, and seems to have suffered neglect by all the earlier connoisseurs. It was skilfully restored in 1826 by a Pistojese architect, who removed the layer of dust that had hardened upon the glaze and hid the colours; and in 1839 the French Government asked leave to reproduce it in plaster for the Beaux Arts; from which copy another was made for the Crystal Palace at Sydenham. It is, by all odds, the chiefest thing in Pistoja, where the reader, when he goes too look at it, may like to recall the pretty legend of the dry tree-stump (ceppo) breaking into bud and leaf, to indicate to the two good Pistojese of six hundred years ago where to found the hospital which this lovely frieze adorns.

  Apparently, however, Pistoja does not expect to be visited for this or any other reason. I have already held up to obloquy the want of public spirit in the sacristan of the cathedral, and I have now to report an equal indifference on the part of the owner of a beautiful show-villa which a cabman persuaded me drive some miles out of the town through the rain to see. When we reached its gate, we were told that the villa was closed; simply that — closed. But I was not wholly a loser, for in celebration of my supposed disappointment my driver dramatized a grief which was as fine a theatrical spectacle as I have seen.

  Besides, I was able to stop on the way back at the ancient church of Sant’ Andrea, where I found myself as little expected, indeed, as elsewhere, but very prettily welcomed by the daughter of the sacristan, whose father was absent, and who made me free of the church. I thought that I wished to see the famous pulpit of Giovanna da Pisa, son of Niccolo, and the little maid had to light me a candle to look at it with. She was not of much help otherwise; she did not at all understand the subjects, neither the Nativity, nor the Adoration of the Magi (“Who were the three Magi Kings?” she asked, and was so glad when I explained), nor the Slaughter of the Innocents, nor the Crucifixion, nor the Judgment. These facts were as strange to her as the marvellous richness and delicacy of the whole work, which, for opulence of invention and perfect expression of intention, is surely one of the most wonderful things in all that wonderland of Italy. She stood by and freshly admired, while I lectured her upon it as if I had been the sacristan and she a simple maid from America, and got the hot wax of the candle all over my fingers.

  She affected to refuse my fee. “Le pare!” she said, with the sweetest pretence of astonishment (which, being interpreted, is something like “the idea!”); and when I forced the coin into her unwilling hand, she asked me to come again, when her father was at home.

  Would I could! There is no such pulpit in America, that I know of; and even Pistoja, in the rain and mud, nonchalant, unenterprising, is no bad place.

  I had actually business there besides that of a scribbling dilletante, and it took me, on behalf of a sculptor who had some medallions casting, to the most ancient of the several bronze foundries in Pistoja. This foundry, an irregular group of low roofs, was enclosed in a hedge of myrtle, and I descended through flow
ery garden-paths to the office, where the master met me with the air of a host, instead of that terrifying no-admittance-except-on-business address, which I have encountered in my rare visits to foundries in my own country. Nothing could have been more fascinating than the interior of the workshop, in which the bronze figures, groups, reliefs, stood about in every variety of dimension and all stages of finish. When I confessed my ignorance, with a candour which I shall not expect from the reader, of how the sculpturesque forms to their last fragile and delicate detail were reproduced in metal, he explained that an exact copy was first made in wax, which was painted with successive coats of liquid mud, one dried upon another, till a sufficient thickness was secured, and then the wax was melted out, and the bronze was poured in.