Travels With Henry James

by Henry James

  Ravenna, on the other hand, began with the church, and all its monuments and relics are harmoniously rigid. By the middle of the first century it possessed an exemplary saint—Apollinaris, a disciple of Peter—to whom its two finest churches are dedicated. It was to one of these, jocosely entitled the “new” one, that I first directed my steps. I lingered outside a while and looked at the great red, barrel-shaped bell-towers, so rusty, so crumbling, so archaic, and yet so resolute to ring in another century or two, and then went in to the coolness, the shining marble columns, the queer old sculptured slabs and sarcophagi, and the long mosaics, scintillating under the roof, along the wall of the nave. San Apollinare Nuovo, like most of its companions, is a magazine of early Christian odds and ends; of fragments of yellow marble encrusted with quaint sculptured emblems of primitive dogma; great rough troughs, containing the bones of old bishops; episcopal chairs with the marble worn narrow with centuries of pressure from the solid episcopal person; slabs from the fronts of old pulpits, covered with carven hieroglyphics of an almost Egyptian abstruseness—lambs, and stags, and fishes, and beasts of theological affinities even less apparent. Upon all these strange things the strange figures in the great mosaic panorama look down, with colored cheeks and staring eyes, lifelike enough to speak to you and answer your wonderment, and tell you in bad Latin of the decadence that it was in such and such a fashion they believed and worshipped. First, on each side, near the door, are houses and ships and various old landmarks of Ravenna; then begins a long procession, on one side, of twenty-two white-robed virgins and three obsequious magi, terminating in a throne bearing the Madonna and Child, surrounded by four angels; on the other side, of an equal number of male saints (twenty-five, that is) holding crowns in their hands and leading to the Saviour, enthroned between angels of singular expressiveness. What it is these long, slim seraphs express I cannot quite say, but they have an odd, knowing, sidelong look out of the narrow ovals of their eyes which, though not without sweetness, would certainly make me feel like murmuring a defensive prayer or so if I were to find myself alone in the church toward dusk. All this work is of the latter part of the sixth century and brilliantly preserved. The gold backgrounds twinkle as if they had been inserted yesterday, and here and there a figure is executed almost too much in the modern manner to be interesting; for the charm of mosaic work is, to my sense, confined altogether to the infancy of the art. The great Christ, in the series of which I speak, is quite an elaborate picture, and yet he retains enough of the orthodox stiffness to make him impressive in the simpler, elder sense. He is clad in a purple robe, like an emperor, his hair and beard are artfully curled, his eyebrows arched, his complexion brilliant, his whole aspect such a one as the popular mind may have attributed to Honorius or Valentinian. It is all very Byzantine, and yet I found in it much of that interest which is inseparable, to a facile imagination, from all early representations of the Saviour. Practically, they are no more authentic than the more or less plausible inventions of Ary Scheffer and Holman Hunt; but they borrow a certain value, factitious perhaps but irresistible, from the mere fact that they are twelve or thirteen centuries less distant from the original. It is something that this is the way people in the sixth century imagined Jesus to have looked; the image is by so much the less complex. The great purple-robed monarch on the wall at Ravenna is at least a very potent and positive Christ, and the only objection I have to make to him is that, though in this character he must have had a full apportionment of divine foreknowledge, he betrays no apprehension of Dr. Channing and M. Renan. If one’s preference lies, for distinctness’ sake, between the old narrowness and the modern complexity, one must admit that the narrowness here has a very grand outline.

  I spent the rest of the morning in picturesque transition between the hot, yellow streets and the cool, grey interiors of the churches. The greyness everywhere was lighted up by the scintillation, on vault and entablature, of mosaics more or less archaic, but always brilliant and elaborate, and everywhere, too, by the same keen wonderment that, while centuries had worn themselves away and empires risen and fallen, these little cubes of colored glass had stuck in their allotted places and kept their freshness. I have no space to enumerate the Ravennese churches one by one, and, to tell the truth, my memory of them has already become a sort of hazy confusion and formless meditation. The total aspect of Ravenna, its sepulchral stillness, its absorbing perfume of evanescence and decay and mortality, confounds the distinctions and blurs the details. The cathedral, which is very vast and high, has been excessively modernized, and was being still more so by a lavish application of tinsel and cotton-velvet in preparation for the centenary feast of St. Apollinaris, which befalls next month. Things on this occasion are to be done handsomely, and a fair Ravennese informed me that a single family had contributed three thousand francs towards a month’s vesper-music. It seemed to me hereupon that I should like in the August twilight to wander into the quiet nave of San Apollinare, and look up at the great mosaics through the resonance of some fine chanting. I remember distinctly enough, however, the tall basilica of San Vitale, of octagonal shape, like an exchange or a custom-house—modelled, I believe, upon St. Sophia at Constantinople. It is very lofty, very solemn, and, as to the choir, densely pictured over on arch and apse with mosaics of the time of Justinian. These are regular pictures, full of movement, gesture, and perspective, and just enough sobered in hue by time to look historic and venerable. In the middle of the church, under the great dome, sat an artist whom I envied, making at an effective angle a picture of the choir and its broken lights, its decorated altar, and its encrusted, twinkling walls. The picture, when it is finished, will hang, I suppose, on the library wall of some person of taste; but even if it is much better than is probable (I didn’t look at it), all his taste will not tell the owner, unless he has been there, in just what a soundless, mouldering, out-of-the-way corner of old Italy it was painted. An even better place for an artist fond of dusky architectural works, except that here the dusk is excessive and he would hardly be able to tell his green from his red, is the extraordinary little church of the Santi Nazaro e Celso, otherwise known as the mausoleum of Galla Placidia. This, perhaps, on the whole, is the most impressive and picturesque spot in Ravenna. It consists of a sort of narrow, low-browed cave, shaped like a Latin cross, every inch of which, except the floor, is covered with dense symbolic mosaics. Before you and on each side, through the thick, brown light, loom three enormous barbaric sarcophagi, containing the remains of potentates of the Lower Empire. It is as if history had burrowed underground to escape from research, and you had fairly run it to earth. On the right lie the ashes of the Emperor Honorius, and in the middle those of his sister, Galla Placidia, a lady who I believe had great adventures. On the other side rest the bones of Constantius III. The place is like a little natural grotto lined with glimmering mineral substances, and there is something quite tremendous in being shut up so closely with these three imperial ghosts. The shadow of the great Roman name seems to tread upon the huge sepulchres and abide for ever within the narrow walls.

  But there are other memories attached to Ravenna beside those of primitive bishops and degenerate emperors. Byron lived here and Dante died here, and the tomb of the one poet and the dwelling of the other are among the regular objects of interest. The grave of Dante, it must be said, is anything but Dantesque, and the whole precinct is disposed with that curious vulgarity of taste which distinguishes most modern Italian tributes to greatness. Dante memorialized in stucco, even in a slumbering corner of Ravenna, is not a satisfactory spectacle. Fortunately, of all poets he least needs a monument, as he was pre-eminently an architect in diction, and built himself his memorial in verses more solid than Cyclopean blocks. If Dante’s tomb is not Dantesque, neither is Byron’s house Byronic, being a homely, shabby, two-storied dwelling, directly on the street, with as little as possible of isolation and mystery. In Byron’s time it was an inn, and it is rather a curious reflection that “Cain” and the �
��Vision of Judgment” should have been written at a hotel. Here is a commanding precedent as to self-abstraction for tourists who are at once sentimental and literary. I must declare, indeed, that my acquaintance with Ravenna considerably increased my esteem for Byron and helped to renew my faith in the sincerity of his inspiration. A man so much de son temps as Byron was, can have spent two long years in this profoundly stagnant city only by the help of taking a great deal of disinterested pleasure in his own genius. He had indeed a notable pastime (the various churches, by the way, are adorned with monuments of ancestral Guicciolis); but it is none the less obvious that Ravenna, fifty years ago, would have been an intolerably dull residence to a foreigner of distinction unprovided with a real intellectual passion. The hour one spends with Byron’s memory, then, is a charitable one. After all, one says to one’s self, as one turns away from the grandiloquent little slab in the front of his house and looks down the deadly provincial vista of the empty, sunny street, the author of so many superb stanzas asked less from the world than he gave to it. One of his diversions was to ride in the Pineta, which, beginning a couple of miles from the city, extends for some twenty-five miles along the sands of the Adriatic. I drove out to it for Byron’s sake, and Dante’s, and Boccaccio’s, all of whom have interwoven it with their fictions, and for that of a possible whiff of coolness from the sea. Between the city and the forest, in the midst of malarious rice-swamps, stands the finest of the Ravenna churches, the stately temple of San Apollinare in Classe. The Emperor Augustus constructed hereabouts a harbor for fleets, which the ages have choked up, and which survives only in the title of this ancient church. Its extreme loneliness makes it doubly impressive. They opened the great doors for me, and let a shaft of heated air go wander up the beautiful nave, between the twenty-four lustrous, pearly columns of cipollino marble, and mount the wide staircase of the choir, and spend itself beneath the mosaics of the vault. I passed a delicious half-hour sitting there in this wave of tempered light, looking down the cool, grey avenue of the nave, out of the open door at the vivid green swamps, listening to the melancholy stillness. I rambled for an hour in the Pineta, between the tall, smooth, silvery stems of the pines, beside a creek which led me to the outer edge of the wood and a view of white sails, gleaming and gliding behind the sandhills. It was infinitely picturesque; but, as the trees stand at wide intervals, and bear far aloft in the blue air but a little parasol of foliage, I suppose that, of a glaring summer day, the forest was only the more Italian for being perfectly shadeless.

  LONDON SIGHTS

  November 10, 1875

  Albert Memorial, Kensington Gardens, ca. 1876.

  WHEN THE ALBERT MEMORIAL WAS COMPLETED AND uncovered in London more than a year since, and displayed through the smoky air its treasures of florid architecture, there was much almost ribald jesting at the way the local atmosphere was destined to blight its gilding and its precious stones. The thing seemed like a sort of magnificent satire upon the London climate. Some five years ago the beautiful new structure of the Royal Academy was brilliant with its carved white stone and its gleaming statues; to-day it is of a dusky, smutty gray, and to-morrow it will be as black and hoary as Westminster Abbey and St. Paul’s. Having seen the Albert Memorial just after its erection, I was lately curious to observe whether its splendor had as yet begun perceptibly to wane. It must be confessed that up to this moment it has made a very successful resistance. It will have the best wishes of all lovers of the picturesque for its continued success; for whatever may be thought of its artistic merit or of the moral necessity for having erected it, it at least may be valued by the London wayfarers as the sole specimen of vivid color in the metropolis. Its position of course helps to preserve its purity, with the vast open spaces of Kensington Gardens beside it and behind it in one quarter, and the mitigated contaminations of the far-spreading terraces and crescents of Prince’s Gate, Queen’s Gate, etc., facing it on the other. Readers interested in these matters may be reminded that the Memorial stands on the edge of Kensington Gardens, opposite the great red-and-yellow rotunda of Albert Hall—a sort of utilitarian Coliseum, which, I believe, has not been found very useful. The Memorial is a wonderful combination of British sculpture and architecture, gilding, mosaic, and the work of the lapidary. It consists of an immense gilt canopy of Gothic design, under which an image of the Prince-Consort is destined to repose. It rises colossally from a huge embankment, as it were, of steps, at each corner of which is a group in marble representing one of the four great continents. The “motive” of these groups is sufficiently picturesque, a great local beast, of heroic proportions—the bull, the bison, the camel, and the elephant—being in each case the central figure; but the sculpture, like all the sculpture, is second-rate and common. It is the work, of course, of the highest English skill—of Messrs. Macdowell, Bell, Foley, and Theed. At each angle of the upper platform where the shafts of the canopy rise is another group—“Manufactures,” by Mr. Weekes; “Commerce,” by Mr. Thorneycroft; “Agriculture,” by Mr. Marshall; and “Engineering,” by Mr. Lawlor. Round this outer base of the canopy runs an immense frieze in white marble, executed half by Mr. Philip and half by Mr. Armstead, representing, a trifle below life-size, the array of the world’s great artists—poets, painters, sculptors, musicians, and architects. They have been sagaciously chosen and cleverly combined, and the most expressive and original portion of the sculpture is here, we should say, especially on Mr. Armstead’s side. As for the canopy itself, with its flamboyant Gothic, its columns of porphyry, its statues and statuettes of bronze and gold (or seeming gold), its chased and chiselled jeweller’s-work, its radiant mosaics, its thick-strewn gems of malachite and lapis and jasper and onyx and more rare stones than we know the names of, its gables and spires and pinnacles and crockets, its general gleaming and flashing and climbing and soaring, its great jewelled cross at the summit—all this quite beggars description. We should say in general that the workmanship throughout has been of a finer sort than the original taste, and that if the Memorial preserves in the future the memory of our present knowingness in architecture, it will also perpetuate the modern weakness of that art which once unfolded the friezes along the Parthenon and suspended the tombs in the Italian cathedrals.

  The exhibition of paintings by Gustave Doré now on view in London ceased a good while since to demand notice as a novelty, but has become one of the regular sights of the great city, and it suggests some reflections that are always pertinent. The general air of the establishment is not so much that of a temple of the arts as of an enterprising place of business. The pictures seem to be placed on view chiefly with the design of securing subscribers to certain projected engravings. The agents for subscriptions are liberally diffused through the rooms, and as they mingle “quite promiscuous” (as the London vernacular has it) with the visitors, the latter are liable to be buttonholed in the midst of such attentive contemplation as Doré’s canvases may have provoked. The engravings are to be executed in England, in the finest and smoothest style of the old-fashioned “line.” It may very well be that the pictures will gain on being reduced to small dimensions and to simple black and white, for they look, as a general thing, like “illustrations” hugely magnified and rather crudely colored. The exhibition is of course an interesting one, and gives an extraordinary impression of imagination, vigor, and facility. On the whole, doubtless, one ought not to be afraid of enjoying it. We may be tolerably sure that, where his pictures are wanting, M. Doré knows it, that he has deliberately chosen to do only what he conveniently could, and that he has settled it in his mind that a magnificent effect, however obtained, is its own justification. The artist’s “convenience,” we are at liberty to infer, has been to cover an immense quantity of canvas and make a great deal of money. As for his effects, the best of them are certainly magnificent. The only valid criticism of Gustave Doré must rest, it seems to me, on the admission that in the degree to which he possesses the temperament of the designer—in energy, and force, and c
onsistency of talent—he ranks with the few greatest names. He has a touch of Michael Angelo about him; the fact that he is an enterprising Parisian of the nineteenth century ought not to make this inconceivable to us. In the power to compose an immense combination of figures at short notice he recalls two of his greatest predecessors—Rubens and Tintoretto. We may prefer Rubens and Tintoretto, and yet do justice to other members of the family. It is Doré’s own fault if so often we find it very easy to prefer them. He has chosen to work by wholesale, and so very often did they, who, however, had the advantage that wholesale painting in their times, owing to the essential tone of men’s thoughts, could not of necessity be so superficial as it may be to-day. Their merit is that, whatever they did, they always achieved something that may be called painting; and Doré’s fault is that half the time his work is not painting at all. It is a rapid, superficial application of turbid and meaningless color—an imitation of painting not always particularly skillful. The two great things in London—the “Christ coming down from Judgment” and the “Tapis Vert”—are full of examples of this. The latter of these—a very cleverly imaginative representation of the gaming-table at Baden-Baden—is well known by photography, and known very favorably. The photograph flatters it, and so probably will the engraving, in giving it a charm of detail which the original lacks. The other picture—one of the largest ever painted—is full of imagination, skill, and power, and looks, as we intimated, like one of Doré’s most successful drawings shown by a magic-lantern. It is a most extraordinary performance. The other pictures are full of cleverness and invention, especially certain “Christian Martyrs in the Coliseum,” a heap of corpses lying in the empty arena, with wild beasts prowling over them in the blue starlight, and cold, phantasmal angels hovering above. The landscapes are singularly bad, many of them looking for all the world like second-rate American work. The best things have a merit which the way Doré has cheapened himself has made at last to seem trivial, but which would seem quite incomparable if it had been more abruptly presented. Their great fault is that they have no agreeable passages of painting—nothing exquisite, nothing that looks not only as if the artist had lingered over it, but as if he had even paused at it.