Delphi Complete Works of William Dean Howells

by William Dean Howells

  I said how very simple it was when one knew, and he said, yes, very simple; and I came away sighing for the day when our foundries shall be enclosed in myrtle hedges, and reached through garden-paths. I suppose I shall hardly see it, however, for it had taken almost a thousand years for that foundry in Pisa to attain its idyllic setting. Patience!

  II

  ON my way home from Lucca, I stopped at Prato, whither I had been tempted to go all winter by the steam-tramway trains snuffing in and out of our Piazza Santa Maria Novella at Florence. I found it a flat, dull, commonplace-looking town at first blush, with one wild huge, gaunt piazza, planted with straggling sycamores and banged all round by copper-smiths, whose shops seemed to alternate with the stables occupying its arcades. Multitudinous hanks of new-dyed yarn blew in the wind under the trees, and through all the windows and open doors I saw girls and women plaiting straw. This forms the chief industry of Prato, where, as a kind little priest with a fine Roman profile, in the railway carriage, assured me between the prayers he kept saying to himself, there was work for all and all were at work.

  Secular report was not so flattering to Prato. I was told that business was but dull there since the death of the English gentleman, one Mr Askew, who has done so much for it, and who lies buried in the odour of sanctity in the old, Carmelite convent I saw his grave there when I went to look at the frescoes, under the tutelage of an old, sleek, fat monk, roundest of the round dozen of brothers remaining since the suppression. I cannot say now why I went to see these frescoes, but I must have been told by some local guide they were worthy to be seen, for I find no mention of them in the books. My old monk admired them without stint, and had a particular delight in the murder of St Martin, who was stabbed in the back at the altar.

  He rubbed his hands gleefully and pointed out the flying acolyte: “Sempre scappa, ma è sempre là!” (Always running, but always there!) And then he burst into a childish, simple laugh that was rather grewsome, considering its inspiration and the place.

  Upon the whole, it might have been as well to suppress that brother along with the convent; though I was glad to hear his praises or the Englishman who had befriended the little town so wisely; and I was not troubled to learn that this good man was a convert to the religion of his beneficiaries.

  All that I ever knew of him I heard from the monk and read from his gravestone; but until he came nothing so definite had been done, probably, to mend the prosperity of Prato, broken by the sack in 1512, when the Spaniards, retiring from their defeat at Ravenna by Gaston de Foix, sat down before the town and pounded a hole in its undefended walls with their cannon. They were the soldiers of that Holy League which Pope Julius II. invented, and they were marching upon Florence to restore the Medici. They were very hungry, and as fearless as they were pitiless; and when they had made a breach in the wall, they poured into the town and began to burn and to kill, to rob and to ravish.

  “Five thousand persons,” says a careful and temperate history, “without resisting, without defending themselves, without provocation, were inhumanly slaughtered in cold blood; neither age nor sex was spared, nor sanctity respected; every house, every church, every convent was pillaged, devastated, and brutally defiled. Only the cathedral, thanks to the safeguard posted there by the Cardinal Legate Giovanni de Medici, was spared, and this was filled with women, gathered there to weep, to pray, to prepare for death. For days the barbarous soldiery rioted in the sack of the hapless city, which, with its people decimated, and its territory ravaged, never fully rose again from its calamity; more than three centuries passed before its population reached the number it had attained before the siege.”

  At that time Prato had long been subject to Florence, but in its day Prato had also been a free and independent republic, with its factions and its family feuds, like another. The greatest of its families were the Guazziolitri, of Guelph politics, who aspired to its sovereignty, but were driven out and all their property confiscated. They had built for their palace and fortress the beautiful old pile which now serves the town for municipal uses, and where there is an interesting little gallery, though one ought rather to visit it for its own sake, and the stately image it keeps in singular perfection of a grandeur of which we can now but dimly conceive.

  I said that Prato was dull and commonplace, but that only shows how pampered and spoiled one becomes by sojourn in Italy. Let me explain now that it was only dull and commonplace in comparison with other towns I had been seeing. If we had Prato in America, we might well visit it for inspiration from its wealth of picturesqueness, and history, and of art. We have, of course, nothing to compare with it; and one ought always to remember, in reading the notes of the supercilious American tourist in Italy, that he is sneering with a mental reservation to this effect. More memory, more art, more beauty clusters about the Duomo at Prato than about — I do not wish to be extravagant — the New Old South in Boston or Grace Church in New York.

  I am afraid, indeed, we should not find in the interior even of these edifices such frescoes as those of Lippo Lippi and Ghirlandajo in the cathedral at Prato; and as for the Della Robbia over the door and the pulpit of Donatello on the corner without, where they show the Virgin’s girdle on her holiday, what shall one say? We have not even a girdle of the virgin! These are the facts that must still keep us modest and make us beg not to be taken too positively, when we say Prato is not interesting. In that pulpit, with its “marble brede” of dancing children, one sees almost at his best a sculptor whose work, after that of Mino da Fiesole, goes most to the heart of the beholder.

  I hung about the piazza, delighting in it, till it was time to take the steam-tramway to Florence, and then I got the local postman to carry my bag to the cars for me. He was the gentlest of postmen, and the most grateful for my franc, and he explained as we walked how he was allowed by the Government to make what sums he could in this way between his distributions of the mail. His salary was fifty francs a month, and he had a family.

  I dare say he is removed by this time, for a man with an income like that must seem an Offensive Partisan to many people of opposite politics in Prato.

  The steam-tramway train consisted of two or three horse-cars coupled together, and drawn by the pony-engine I was familiar with in our Piazza. This is a common means of travel between all large Italian cities and outlying small towns, and I wonder why we have not adopted it in America. We rattled pleasantly along the level of the highway at the rate of ten or twelve miles an hour, and none of the horses seemed to be troubled by us. They had probably been educated up to the steam-tram, and I will never believe that American horses are less capable of intellectual development than the Italian.

  III

  WE postponed our visit to Fiesole, which we had been meaning to make all winter, until the last days of our Florentine sojourn, and it was quite the middle of April when we drove up to the Etruscan city.

  “Go by the new road and come back by the old,” said a friend who heard we were really going at last. “Then you will get the whole thing.”

  We did so; but I am not going to make the reader a partner of all of our advantages; I am not sure that he would be grateful for them; and to tell the truth, I have forgotten which road Boccaccio’s villa was on and which the villa of the Medici. Wherever they are they are charming. The villa of Boccaccio is now the Villa Palmieri; I still see it fenced with cypresses, and its broad terrace peopled with weather-beaten statues, which at a distance I could not have sworn were not the gay ladies and gentlemen who met there and told their merry tales while the plague raged in Florence. It is not only famous as the supposed scene of the Decamerone, but it takes its name from a learned gentleman who wrote a poem there, in which he maintained that at the time of Satan’s rebellion the angels who remained neutral became the souls now inhabiting our bodies. For this uncomfortable doctrine his poem, though never printed, was condemned by the Inquisition — and justly. The Villa Medici, once Villa Mozzi, and now called Villa Spence, after the Engli
sh gentleman who inhabits it, was the favourite seat of Lorenzo before he placed himself at Villa Carreggi; hither he resorted with his wits, his philosophers, his concubines, buffoons, and scholars; and here it was that the Pazzi hoped to have killed him and Giuliano at the time of their ill-starred conspiracy. You come suddenly upon it, deeply dropped amidst its gardens, at a turn of the winding slopes which make the ascent to Fiesole a constantly changing delight and wonder.

  Fiesole was farther than she seemed in the fine high air she breathes, and we had some long hours of sun and breeze in the exquisite spring morning before the first Etruscan emissaries met us with the straw fans and parasols whose fabrication still employs their remote antiquity. They were pretty children and young girls, and they were preferable to the mediaeval beggars who had swarmed upon us at the first town outside the Florentine limits, whither the Pia Casa di Recovero could not reach them. From every point the world-old town, fast seated on its rock, looked like a fortress, inexpugnable and picturesque; but it kept neither promise, for it yielded to us without a struggle, and then was rather tame and commonplace — commonplace and tame, of course, comparatively. It is not everywhere that you have an impressive Etruscan wall; a grass-grown Roman amphitheatre, lovely, silent; a museum stocked with classic relics and a custodian with a private store of them for sale, not to speak of a cathedral begun by the Florentines just after they destroyed Fiesole in 1000. Fiesole certainly does not, however, invite one by its modern aspect to think of the Etruscan capital which Cicero attacked in the Roman Senate for the luxury of its banquets and the lavish display of its inhabitants. It was but a plain and simple repast that the Café Aurora afforded us, and the Fiesolans seemed a plain and simple folk; perhaps in one of them who was tipsy an image of their classic corruptions survived.

  The only excitement of the place we seemed to have brought with us; there had, indeed, been an election some time before, and the dead walls — it seems odd that all the walls in Fiesole should not be dead by this time — were still placarded with appeals to the enlightened voters to cast their ballots for Peruzzi, candidate for the House of Deputies and a name almost as immemorial as their town’s.

  However luxurious, the Fiesolans were not proud; a throng of them followed us into the cathedral, where we went to see the beautiful monument of Bishop Salutali by Mino da Fiesole, and allowed me to pay the sacristan for them all. There may have been a sort of justice in this; they must have seen the monument so very often before!

  They were sociable, but not obtrusive, not even at the point called the Belvedere, where, having seen that we were already superabundantly supplied with straw fans and parasols, they stood sweetly aside and enjoyed our pleasure in the views of Florence. This ineffable prospect —

  But let me rather stand aside with the Fiesolans, and leave it to the reader!

  THE END

  A LITTLE SWISS SOJOURN

  CONTENTS

  First Paper

  Sign of the White Cross Inn

  Entrance to Villeneuve

  Post-office, Villeneuve

  The Castle of Chillon

  A Railroad Servant

  A Bit of Villeneuve

  The Prisoner of Chillon

  One of the Fountains

  “They helped to make the hay in the marshes”

  Cattle at the Fountains

  Washing Clothes in the Lake

  Flirtation at the Fountains

  Second Paper

  The Wine-press

  Castle of Aigle

  The Market at Vevey

  The Market, Vevay — A Bargain before the Notary

  Germans at Montreux

  Church Terrace, Montreux

  Tour up the Lake

  First Paper

  Sign of the White Cross Inn

  I

  Out of eighty or ninety days that we passed in Switzerland there must have been at least ten that were fair, not counting the forenoons before it began to rain, and the afternoons when it cleared up. They said that it was an unusually rainy autumn, and we could well believe it; yet I suspect that it rains a good deal in that little corner of the Canton Vaud even when the autumn is only usually rainy. We arrived late in September and came away early in December, and during that time we had neither the fevers that raged in France nor the floods that raged in Italy. We Vaudois were rather proud of that, but whether we had much else to be proud of I am not so certain. Of course we had our Alpine scenery, and when the day was fair the sun came loafing up over the eastern mountains about ten o’clock in the morning, and lounged down behind the western tops about half-past three, after dinner. But then he left the eternal snows of the Dent-du-Midi all flushed with his light, and in the mean time he had glittered for five hours on the “bleu impossible” of the Lake of Geneva, and had shown in a hundred changing lights and shadows the storied and sentimentalized towers of the Castle of Chillon. Solemn groups and ranks of Swiss and Savoyard Alps hemmed the lake in as far as the eye could reach, and the lateen-sailed craft lent it their picturesqueness, while the steamboats constantly making its circuit and stopping at all the little towns on the shores imparted a pleasant modern interest to the whole effect, which the trains of the railroad running under the lee of the castle agreeably heightened.

  II

  The Swiss railroad was always an object of friendly amusement with the children, who could not get used to having the trains started by a small Christmas-horn. They had not entirely respected the English engine, with the shrill falsetto of its whistle, after the burly roar of our locomotives; and the boatswain’s pipe of the French conductor had considerably diminished the dignity of a sister republic in their minds; but this Christmas-horn was too droll. That a grown man, much more imposingly uniformed than an American general, should blow it to start a real train of cars was the source of patriotic sarcasm whenever its plaintive, reedy note was heard. We had come straight through from London, taking the sleeping-car at Calais, and rolling and bounding over the road towards Basle in a fashion that provoked scornful comparisons with the Pullman that had carried us so smoothly from Boston to Buffalo. It is well to be honest, even to our own adulation, and one must confess that the sleeping-car of the European continent is but the nervous and hysterical daughter of the American mother of sleeping-cars. Many express trains are run without any sleeper, and the charges for berths are ludicrously extravagant — five dollars apiece for a single night. It is not strange that the native prefers to doze away the night bolt-upright, or crouched into the corners of his repellently padded carriage, rather than toss upon the expensive pallet of the sleeping-car, which seems hung rather with a view to affording involuntary exercise than promoting dear-bought slumber. One advantage of it is that if you have to leave the car at five o’clock in the morning, you are awake and eager to do so long before that time. At the first Swiss station we quitted it to go to Berne, which was one of the three points where I was told by the London railway people that my baggage would be examined. I forget the second, but the third was Berne, and now at Delemont I looked about for the customs officers with the anxiety which the thought of them always awakens in the human heart, whether one has meant to smuggle or not. Even the good conscience may suffer from the upturning of a well-packed trunk. But nobody wanted to examine our baggage at Delemont, or at the other now-forgotten station; and at Berne, though I labored hard in several dialects with all the railway officials, I could not get them to open one of our ten trunks or five valises. I was so resolute in the matter that I had some difficulty to keep from opening them myself and levying duty upon their contents.

  III

  It was the first but not the last disappointment we suffered in Switzerland. A friend in London had congratulated us upon going to the Vaud in the grape season. “For thruppence,” he said, “they will let you go into the vineyards and eat all the grapes you can hold.” Arrived upon the ground, we learned that it was six francs fine to touch a grape in the vineyards; that every field had a watch set in it, who
popped up between the vines from time to time, and interrogated the vicinity with an eye of sleepless vigilance; and that small boys of suspicious character, whose pleasure or business took them through a vineyard, were obliged to hold up their hands as they passed, like the victims of a Far Western road agency. As the laws and usages governing the grape culture run back to the time of the Romans, who brought the vine into the Vaud, I was obliged to refer my friend’s legend of cheapness and freedom to an earlier period, whose customs we could not profit by. In point of fact, I could buy more grapes for thruppence in London than in the Vaud; and the best grapes we had in Switzerland were some brought from Italy, and sold at a franc a pound in Montreux to the poor foreigners who had come to feast upon the wealth of the local vineyards.

  It was the rain that spoiled the grapes, they said at Montreux, and wherever we complained; and indeed the vines were a dismal show of sterility and blight, even to the spectator who did not venture near enough to subject himself to a fine of six francs. The foreigners had protected themselves in large numbers by not coming, and the natives who prosper upon them suffered. The stout lady who kept a small shop of ivory carvings at Montreux continually lamented their absence to me: “Die Fremden kommen nicht, dieses regenes Wetter! Man muss Geduldt haben! Die Fremden kommen nicht!” She was from Interlaken, and the accents of her native dialect were flavored with the strong waters which she seemed always to have been drinking, and she put her face close up to that of the good, all-sympathizing Amerikaner who alone patronized her shop, and talked her sorrows loudly into him, so that he should not misunderstand.