Washington Irving

by Brian Jay Jones

  As he listened to the Italian drawing-room chatter, Irving came to appreciate the liberties his own country afforded, where political dissent was openly discussed rather than violently oppressed. Yet, when he learned of the politically motivated duel between Alexander Hamilton and Aaron Burr that ended with Hamilton dead of a gunshot wound, he was disgusted: “My fellow countrymen do not know the blessings they enjoy; they are trifling with their felicity and are in fact themselves their worst enemies. I sicken when I think of our political broils, slanders & enmities.”20

  There was plenty in Genoa that would have appealed to any American abroad for the first time, but Irving paid only obligatory visits to the local sites; it was far more entertaining to fraternize with Hall and his Genoese circle. But all this socializing, he explained to William, was for a good reason: “I shall have a series of acquaintance through Europe that is exceeding difficult for an American to make, as our letters are generally to Merchants in the sea ports who are most commonly a tasteless interested set of beings. Perhaps no American has ever traveled in this country with similar advantages, and surely if traveling is necessary to polish the manners, this is the society most conducive to that end.”21

  He promised William he would leave Genoa as quickly as he could, but provided excuses for why he might be delayed. “At Leghorn and Pisa,” he warned, “the quarantines are very long and all Tuscany is surrounded by Cordones, which it is impossible to pass without performing quarantines of two or three weeks.” Further, “I should be exposed to innumerable difficulties & embarassments was I to attempt to pass thro Tuscany particularly as I am almost entirely ignorant of the Italian language.”22

  Lastly, he informed William he was in danger of exceeding his budget, and asked his brother to make more credit available. “I would rather forego the pleasure of seeing any part of Europe than run my family to expenses they cannot afford,” he told William. All that he had been given so far, he said, he had only accepted because he knew it gave his brothers pleasure. “I well know the delight my brothers experience in contributing to the happiness of each other,” he wrote ingratiatingly. To Washington's relief, William extended his credit without protest.23

  With his pockets filled, a relieved Irving booked passage on the Matilda, an American ship bound for Messina on the northeastern coast of Sicily. As the Matilda sailed into the Mediterranean on Christmas Eve, Irving was nearly moved to tears by the sight of the sun winking off the snow-covered mountains on the Corsican coastline. The Roman gods were no longer there, he sighed to William: “In these dull matter of fact times, our only consolation is to wander about the haunts they once frequented and endeavor to make up by imagination the want of the reality…. Our imagination becomes tinctured with romance and we look around us with an enthusiastic eye that heightens every scene.”24

  Such pensive reflection, however, was short-lived; on December 29, as the unarmed Matilda neared the Isle of Planosa, it was fired upon by French pirates! The Matilda struck its American colors, and Captain Matthew Strong allowed the pirates to pull up alongside. Irving was disappointed the pirate ship was so small—“about the size of one of our Staten Island ferry boats,” he grumbled—but he admitted he was terrified. “My heart almost failed me,” he wrote, “a more villainous looking crew I never beheld.”25

  Captain Strong was taken aboard the pirate ship for a conversation, along with Irving as an unwilling interpreter. In what Irving called “some confused story,” the pirate captain explained that his crew was merely patrolling the area to ensure no ships escaped quarantine at Leghorn. Unconvinced, Irving and Strong returned to the Matilda, where the pirate captain rummaged through the contents of Irving's trunks, pausing only to cock an eyebrow at a letter of introduction he was carrying to the governor of Malta. “They treated me with much more respect than before,” Irving noted with some satisfaction.26

  After several agonizing hours, the privateers departed, taking only two cases of quicksilver, some rum, and “about half of the provisions we had on board,” Irving reported. To his lasting disappointment, nothing had been stolen from him, and the entire affair had been carried out more like a business transaction than a sacking. The pirates even had the gall to provide a receipt for the pilfered provisions, informing Strong the English consul at Malta would reimburse them for their losses. Still, the encounter was enough to give Irving nightmares. That night, he said, “I started out of bed with the horrid idea that their stillettos were raised against my bosom.”27

  On January 5, 1805, after thirteen days at sea, the Matilda docked at Messina, where they faced an adversary more fearsome than pirates, “one of the greatest torments of the seas,” Irving wrote in mock horror, “the Health Office.” After a quick inspection for signs of yellow fever (“The sage geniuses,” Irving wrote haughtily, “imagined that it was possible to perceive whether people had the infection lurking in their veins by taking a hasty look at their neck & chests at ten or fifteen feet distance”), the Messina Health Office ordered the Matilda to sit in quarantine for twenty-one days.28

  To Irving's frustration, he wasn't permitted to board other ships quarantined in the harbor, or mingle with their crews. No matter; he climbed up the masts of the Matilda to have shouted conversations with the seamen on board the American schooner Nautilus. Defying local health authorities, Irving took great delight in sailing around the harbor in a small boat, flouting quarantine by rowing as close as he could to other vessels. When he was spotted one afternoon trying to sneak a letter on board the Nautilus, Sicilian guards jumped into a longboat and chased him in a mad pursuit around the harbor, shouting at him in Italian. Irving laughed, pretending not to understand, but was eventually hauled defiantly back to the Matilda.

  After the Matilda's release from quarantine in late January, Irving arranged to be on board the Nautilus when it departed for Syracuse. He spent a limited time exploring Messina; the town was still a shambles, not yet having recovered from a 1783 earthquake. Worse, a fistfight between an officer of the Nautilus and the mate on an English transport had ended with the Englishman dead and the Americans trying to avoid a sticky political inquiry. On January 31—after catching a glimpse of Admiral Nelson's British fleet coursing up the straits in pursuit of the French armada that had escaped his blockade at Toulon—Irving and the Nautilus slunk out of Messina.

  A nine-day stay in Syracuse failed to convince Irving of the city's charms; after a week preyed upon by beggars, he finally pronounced the place “a miserable hole,” though he was quick to point out the competence of the local opera singers. He eagerly played the tourist, visiting a cavern known as the Ear of Dionysus—where he risked his neck by being lowered over a precipice to test the cave's unique acoustics—and viewing the relics of nearby churches. “By the way,” Irving wrote in his journal, after looking at yet another saintly pelvis, “these disciples must have been an uncommon bony set of fellows. I have seen no less than five thigh bones of St. John the Baptist, three arms of St. Stephen, and four jaw bones of St. Peter.”29

  He arrived by mule in Catania on February 12, just in time to take part in a celebration for Saint Agatha, the town's patron saint. Ever the skeptic of all things religious, Irving asked a local priest to explain the value of a patron saint who had permitted half the city to be consumed by a volcanic eruption in 1693. The priest replied that Agatha had allowed lava to cover only part of the city so the rest would see what miseries she had saved them from. Irving left the church in head-shaking disbelief. “Such is the flimsy manner in which the priests impose upon the credulity of this superstitious people,” he wrote.30

  Irving left Catania a week later, making the 130-mile trip west across Sicily to Palermo in five long, rainy days, “a detail of misery, poverty, wretched accommodation, and almost every inconvenience a traveler could suffer.”31 Things were better in Palermo, where Irving visited the opera and the theater, and continued to capitalize on his uncanny talent for snagging invitations to the most fashionable parties. One eve
ning he spent drinking with the prince of Belmonte until two in the morning; the next in conversation with various nobles at the Palazzo Reale.

  On March 7 Irving arrived in Naples, with Mount Vesuvius smoking heavily across the gulf. Despite the “apparent misery” and “vile exhalations” of the place, he liked Naples. He immediately found American companionship, attaching himself to two Virginians, a twenty-six-year-old attorney and agrarian named Joseph Cabell and Colonel John Mercer, a member of the U.S. Board of Commissioners who had been sent to France to settle legal claims under the Louisiana Purchase. Irving was particularly fond of Cabell—“a gentleman of whose talents information & disposition I cannot speak too highly.” Cabell had considerable charm and merit as a traveling companion, but he also proved to be a bad influence on Irving, indulging and encouraging what Washington always referred to as his “gentlemanly habits.”32

  The three men visited the ruins at Pompeii and hired mules to take them up Mount Vesuvius, which Irving reported was “vomiting” smoke. He was captivated by the view from the top of the mountain—“a prospect the most lovely I ever beheld”—but was nearly overcome by fumes. He staggered down the mountainside to a local tavern, where he, Cabell, and Mercer recovered their senses by downing several glasses of wine.33

  After more than two weeks in Naples, Irving was beginning to find the town too crowded and expensive. He was ready to leave, and on March 24 he and Cabell set out in a carriage for Rome. Three days later, under a driving rain, they entered the city's Lateran Gate. “To describe the emotions of the mind and the crowd of ideas that arise on entering this ‘Mistress of the World’ is impossible,” Irving wrote. “All is wonder, restlessness, unsatisfied curiosity, eagerness and impatience.”34 After unpacking at their hotel, they learned three American gentlemen of Cabell's acquaintance were also in town, one of whom was an aspiring painter from South Carolina named Washington Allston.

  Smart, good-looking, and hugely talented, twenty-five-year-old Allston had graduated from Harvard in 1800 and briefly studied art in Charleston, alongside miniaturist painters Charles Fraser and Edward Greene Malbone. In 1801 he and Malbone entered the Royal Academy in London, where they studied under the American neoclassical painter Benjamin West. Since 1804 Allston had been studying in Europe, mainly in Paris, but had recently come to Rome.

  While Allston later became known by students and admirers as “the American Titian,” in March 1805 he was simply an eager and gifted young man beginning his career as a painter and part-time writer. Irving adored him—indeed, was smitten by him. “There was something, to me, inexpressibly engaging in the appearance and manner of Allston,” he wrote years later, describing the young painter in remarkably intimate terms: “I do not think I have ever been more completely captivated on a first acquaintance. He was of a light and graceful form; with large blue eyes, and black silken hair, waving and curling round a pale expressive countenance. Every thing about him bespoke the man of intellect and refinement.”35

  Irving wasn't the only one who succumbed to the young man's charm and brilliance; Allston later counted Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Samuel F. B. Morse among his admirers. But this was something more. Beginning with John Anderson, Irving esteemed smart, talented, refined gentlemen in ways that transcended mere respect and admiration. He genuinely loved such men, craving, almost requiring, their constant companionship and approval. It is likely he had fallen in love with Washington Allston—and Allston may have reciprocated his feelings. “A young man's intimacy took place immediately between us,” Irving said delicately later in his life, “and we were much together during my brief sojourn at Rome.”36

  Still, Allston was in Rome to work, so being with him meant tagging along while he visited the Villa Borghese, Farnese Palace, or Barberini Palace to look at paintings and sculptures. Irving watched Allston with slightly jealous awe, doing his best to mimic Allston's interest in art. Statuary bored him—“I no longer feel interested in them unless they have something more than antiquity to recommend them,” Irving wrote impatiently—but painting stirred him. With the enthusiasm of a dilettante, Irving decided that painting, not literature, was his new passion. “Suddenly the thought presented itself,” he recalled years later. “Why might I not remain here and turn painter?”37

  According to Irving, Allston responded with enthusiasm, and the two planned their future as artists. “We would take an apartment together,” Irving wrote dreamily. “He would give me all the instruction and assistance in his power, and was sure I would succeed.”38

  It was a plan—at least for several days. The two young men continued visiting palaces and museums, staring at landscape paintings and marble torsos. Better still, at least in Irving's opinion, were the dinners with artists like L. Caracciolo, who engraved the works of Claude Lorrain, or the visits to sculptor Antonio Canova's studio, where the artist made casts for statues of the Bonaparte family.

  Then, just as quickly as the scheme had been hatched, it evaporated. Even Irving admitted his folly. “I believe it owed its main force to the lovely evening ramble in which I first conceived it, and to the romantic friendship I had formed with Allston,” he wrote later. “I promised myself a world of enjoyment in his society, and in the society of several artists with whom he had made me acquainted, and pictured forth a scheme of life all tinted with the rainbow hues of youthful promise. My lot in life, however, was differently cast.”39

  Irving had flirted so briefly with the idea of an artistic life that he does not mention it in his letters to William. But he did tell William that after only eight days in Rome, he was bored. The Italian art of conversazione he found dull—“an Italian conversazione is a place where people meet to do anything else but converse,” he complained—and he thought the city a shadow of its former glory. He believed he had exhausted all that Rome had to offer, though he was careful to couch his explanation in terms he thought William would understand: “To a man of fortune traveling for amusement or who has plenty of time to spare, it may be well enough to spend a couple of months in Rome; but to one whose object is improvement and who has to be economic of his time, a much shorter term will suffice.”40

  The truth was Cabell had talked him into accompanying him to Paris, ostensibly to attend a series of botany lectures, though the two likely had ulterior motives. Irving again justified his decision to quit Rome for Paris in the name of improvement, which he felt certain would resonate with William: “There will commence in May a course of lectures at the Garden of Plants in Paris, on botany, chemistry and different other branches of science by the most experienced and learned men…. The doors of knowledge are there thrown open and the different pursuits both useful and ornamental may be prosecuted with more facility and less expense than at any other city in the world.” The route he and Cabell would be taking, he explained to William, would wind north through Loreto, then slingshot over to Bologna, thus avoiding all of Tuscany and bypassing Venice. “So much for my route,” wrote Washington, “which I hope will meet with your approbation.”41

  It didn't. William immediately fired back, his irritation obvious: “This day your letter, dated Rome, 4th April, was received, and afforded us both pleasure and mortification—pleasure to hear that your health is so completely re-established, and mortification to learn that you have determined to gallop through Italy.… And, as you propose to be at Paris to attend the lectures which are to commence in May, all Italy, I presume, is to be scoured through, (leaving Florence on your left and Venice on your right) in the short period of eight or nine weeks!”42

  William wasn't fooled by Washington's explanation for leaving Rome so quickly; he knew his brother's predilections too well to be taken in by stories about botany and chemistry. He knew too well his brother's real motivation: “Good company, I find, is the grand desideratum with you; good company made you stay eleven weeks at Genoa, where you needed not to have stayed more than two, and good company drives you through all Italy in less time than was necessary for your stay in Genoa
. I find no fault, however, with your stay in Genoa; your skipping through Italy, omitting to visit Florence and Venice, I cannot forget. But it is painful to find fault—especially when the evil is now without a remedy.” Fortunately for Washington, William's response didn't reach him for months. For now, he had only a few days remaining in Rome, and he was determined to make the most of them. He saw the Sistine Chapel and the ruins of Tusculum, attended concerts, visited galleries, and participated in more conversaziones. And he continued to meet interesting people. Baron de Humboldt, the Prussian minister to the Court of Rome, introduced him to Madame de Stael, the strong-willed author of Delphine, who was in Italy researching her next book. “She is a woman of great strength of mind & understanding by all accounts,” Irving wrote appreciatively.43

  As Holy Week wound to a close in mid-April, Irving and Cabell departed Rome for the northeastern coast of Italy. Their journey from Rome to Paris—which took them across Italy, through the Alps into Switzerland, and across the French countryside to Paris—was indeed the gallop that William feared. Washington was in constant motion—on horseback, in a carriage, in a boat, or on foot—for the next forty days.

  Their first destination of interest was 175 miles away at Loreto, a small hillside town just off the Adriatic Sea, whose main tourist attraction was, and still is, the Santa Casa di Loreto. According to legend, the Santa Casa was the house in which the Virgin Mary was born, which was miraculously transported by angels from Nazareth to Loreto. Irving dismissed both the site and story as “the greatest triumphs over human credulity that ever priestcraft achieved.”44

  Turning northwest along the coast, Irving and Cabell arrived in Bologna on April 22, just in time to attend the evening opera. Bolognese audiences, Irving noted in his journal, had no problem attending the same opera night after night, and cheered every song as if they'd never heard it before. The crowds were equally receptive to the ballet, though Irving was quick to point out that the loudest bravos came when a ballerina's skirts fluttered over her head.45