Delphi Complete Works of William Dean Howells

by William Dean Howells

  Almost from the beginning of their rivalry, some three or four hundred years before, the triumph of Florence was a foregone conclusion. The serious historians are rather ashamed of the incident that kindled the first hostilities between the two cities, but the chroniclers, who are still more serious, treat it with perfect gravity; and I, who am always with the chroniclers, cannot offer it less respect. The fact is, that one day, at the time of the coronation of the Emperor Frederick II. of Rome, the Florentine ambassador, who was dining with a certain cardinal, either politely or sincerely admired the cardinal’s lapdog so much that the cardinal could not help making him a present of the dog, out of hand. The Florentine thought this extremely handsome of the cardinal, and the cardinal forgot all about it; so that when the Pisan ambassador came to dine with him the next day, and professed also to be charmed with this engaging lapdog, the cardinal promptly bestowed it upon him in his turn; nothing could equal the openhandedness of that cardinal in the matter of lapdogs. He seems to have forgotten his gift to the Pisan as readily as he had forgotten his present to the Florentine; or possibly he thought that neither of them would have the ill manners to take him in earnest; very likely it was the custom to say to a guest who admired your dog, “He is yours,” and then think no more about it. However, the Florentine sent for the dog and got it, and then the Pisan sent, and got the poor cardinal’s best excuses; one imagines the desolated smiles and deprecating shrugs with which he must have made them. The affair might have ended there, if it had not happened that a party of Florentines and a party of Pisans met shortly afterwards in Rome, and exchanging some natural jeers and taunts concerning the good cardinal’s gift, came to blows about it. The Pisans were the first to begin this quarrel, and all the Florentines in Rome were furious. Oddo di Arrigo Fifanti, whom the diligent reader of these pages will remember as one of the Florentine gentlemen who helped cut the throat of Buondelmonte on his wedding day, chanced to be in Rome, and put himself at the head of the Florentines. He was not the kind of man to let any sort of quarrel suffer in his hands, and he led the Florentines on to attack the Pisan legation in the street.

  When the news of this outrage came to Pisa, it set the hot little state in a flame. She was glad of a chance to break with Florence, for the Pisans had long been jealous of the growing power of the upstart city, and they hastened to make reprisal by seizing all the Florentine merchandise within their borders. Florence still remained in such awe of the old-established respectability of Pisa, and of her supremacy by land and sea, lately illustrated in her victorious wars with the Genoese and Saracens, that she was willing to offer any reasonable reparation; and her consuls even sent -to pay secretly the price of the confiscated goods, if only they could have them back, and so make an appearance of honourable reconciliation before their people. The Pisan authorities refused these humble overtures, and the Florentines desperately prepared for war. The campaign ended in a single battle at Castel del Bosco, where the Florentines, supported by the Lucchese, defeated the Pisans with great slaughter, and conquered a peace that left them masters of the future. After that Pisa was in league with Florence, as she had been in league with her before that, against the encroachments of the emperors upon the liberties of the Tuscan cities, and she was often at war with her, siding with the Sienese in one of their famous defeats at the hands of the Florentines, and generally doing what she could to disable and destroy her rival. She seems to have grown more and more incapable of governing herself; she gave herself to this master and that; and at last, in 1406, after a siege of eight months, she was reduced by the Florentines. Her women had fought together with her men in her defence; the people were starving, and the victors wept at the misery they saw within the fallen city.

  The Florentines had hoped to inherit the maritime greatness of Pisa, but this perished with her; thereafter the ships that left her famous arsenal were small and few. The Florentines treated their captive as well as a mediaeval people knew how, and addressed themselves to the restoration of her prosperity; but she languished in their hold for nearly a hundred years, when Pietro de’ Medici, hoping to make interest for himself with Charles VIII. of France (who seems to have invaded Italy rather for the verification of one of Savonarola’s prophecies than for any other specific purpose), handed over Pisa with the other Florentine fortresses to the French troops. When their commandant evacuated the place, he restored it not to the Florentines but to the Pisans. The Florentines set instantly and actively about the reconquest, and after a siege and a blockade that lasted for years, they accomplished it. In this siege, as in the other great defence, the Pisan women fought side by side with the men; it is told of two sisters working upon the fortifications, that when one was killed by a cannon-shot the other threw her body into a gabion, covered it with earth, and went on with her work above it. Before Pisa fell people had begun to drop dead of famine in her streets, and the Florentines, afraid that they would destroy the city in their despair, offered them terms far beyond their hopes, after a war of fifteen years.

  II

  WHAT is odd in the history of Pisa is that it has given but one name to common remembrance. Her prosperity was early and great, and her people employed it in the cultivation of all the arts; yet Andrea and Nicolo Pisano are almost the only artists whose fame is associated with that of their native city. She was perpetually at war by sea and by land, yet her admirals and generals are unknown to the world. Her university is one of the oldest and most learned in Italy, yet she produced no eminent scholars or poets, and one hardly realizes that the great Galileo, who came a century after the fall of his country, was not a Florentine but a Pisan by birth; he was actually of a Florentine family settled in Pisa. When one thinks of Florence, one thinks of Dante, of Giotto, of Cimabue, of Brunelleschi, of Michelangelo, of Savonarola, and of Lorenzo de’ Medici and Leo X., of Boccaccio and Pulci and Politian, of Machiavelli, of Giovanni delle Bande Nere and Gino Capponi, of Guido Cavalcanti, of Amerigo Vespucci, of Benvenuto Cellini, and Masaccio and Botticelli, and all the rest. When one thinks of Siena, one thinks of St Catharine, and Ochino, and Socinus, and the Piccolomini, and Bandini, and Sodoma; but when one thinks of Pisa, Ugolino is the sole name that comes into one’s mind. I am not at all sure, however, that one ought to despise Pisa for her lack of celebrities; I am rather of a contrary opinion. It is certain that such a force and splendour as she was for five hundred years could have been created only by a consensus of mighty wills, and it seems to me that a very pretty case might be made out in behalf of the democracy whose level was so high that no one head could be seen above it. Perhaps this is what we are coming to in our own civilization, and I am disposed to take heart from the heroless history of Pisa when I look round over the vast plain of our equality, where every one is as great as every other.

  I wish, if this is the case, we might come finally to anything as clean and restful and lovely as I found Pisa on the day of my arrival; but of course that would be much more difficult for a continent than for a city, and probably our last state will not be so pleasant. On our way down from Florence, through much the same landscape as that through which we had started to Siena, the peach-trees were having their turn in the unhurried Italian spring’s succession of blossoms, and the fields were lit with their pathetic pink, where earlier the paler bloom of the almond had prevailed. As I said, Pisa herself was in her spring dress, and it may be that the season had touched her with the languor which it makes the whole world feel, as she sat dreaming beside her Arno, in the midst of the gardens that compassed her about within her walls. I do not know what Pisa had to say to other tourists who arrived that day, but we were old friends, and she regarded me with a frank, sad wonder when she read in my eyes a determination to take notes of her.

  “Is it possible?” she expressed, with that mute, melancholy air of hers. “You, who have lived in Italy, and ought to know better? You, who have been here, before? Sit down with me beside the Arno!” and she indicated two or three empty bridges, which I was welcome to
, or if I preferred half a mile or so of that quay, which has the noblest sweep in the world, there it was, vacant for me. I shrugged my excuses, as well as I could, and indicated the artist at my side, who with his etching-plate under his arm, and his hat in his hand, was making his manners to Pisa, and I tried to explain that we were both there under contract to produce certain illustrated papers for THE CENTURY.

  “What papers? What Century?” she murmured, and tears came into the eyes of the beautiful ghost; and she added with an inexpressible pathos and bitterness, “I remember no century, since the fifteenth, when — I — died.”

  She would not say, when she fell under the power of her enemy, but we knew she was thinking of Florence; and as she bowed her face in her hands, we turned away with our hearts in our throat.

  We thought it well not to go about viewing the monuments of her fallen grandeur at once, — they are all kept in wonderful repair, — and we left the Amo, whose mighty curve is followed on either side by lines of magnificent palaces, and got our driver to carry us out to the streets that dwindled into lanes beside the gardens fenced in by red brick city walls. At one point a long stretch of the wall seemed trellised for yellow roses which covered acres of it with their golden multitude; but when we got down and walked nearer, with the permission of the peasant whose field we passed through, we found they were lemons. He said they grew very well in that shelter and exposure, and his kind old weather-beaten, friendly face was almost the colour of one. He bade us go anywhere we liked in his garden, and he invited us to drink of the water of his well, which he said never went dry in the hottest weather. Then he returned to his fat old wife, who had kept on weeding, and bent down beside her and did not follow us for drink-money, but returned a self-respectful adieu from a distance, when we called a good-by before getting into our carriage. We generalised from his behaviour a manly independence of character in the Pisan people, and I am sure we were not mistaken in the beauty of the Pisan women, who, as we met them in the street, were all extremely pretty, and young, many of them, even after five hundred years. One gets over expecting good looks in Tuscany; and perhaps this was the reason why we prized the loveliness of the Pisans. It may have been comparative, only, though I am inclined to think it was positive. At any rate, there can be no doubt about the landscape outside the walls, which we drove into a little way out of one of the gates, to return by another. It was a plain country, and at this point a line of aqueduct stretched across the smiling fields to the feet of the arid, purple hills, that propped the blue horizon. There was something richly simple in the elements of the picture, which was of as few tones as a landscape of Titian or Raphael, and as strictly subordinated in its natural features to the human interest, which we did our best to represent. I daresay our best was but poor. Every acre of that plain had been the theatre of a great tragedy; every rood of ground had borne its hero. Now, in the advancing spring, the grass and wheat were long enough to flow in the wind, and they flowed like the ripples of a wide green sea to the feet of those purple hills, away from our feet where we stood beside our carriage on its hither shore. The warmth of the season had liberated the fine haze that dances above the summer fields, and this quivered before us like the confluent phantoms of multitudes, indistinguishably vast, who had fallen there in immemorial strife. But we could not stand musing long upon this fact; we had taken that carriage by the hour. Yet we could not help loitering along by the clear stream that followed the road, till it brought us to a flour-whitened mill, near the city wall, slowly and thoughtfully turning its huge undershot wheel; and I could not resist entering and speaking to the miller, where, leaning upon a sack of wheat, he dimly loomed through the powdered air, in the exact attitude of a miller I used to know in a mill on the little Miami, in Ohio, when I was a boy.

  III

  I TRY to give the reader a true impression of the sweet confusion of travel in those old lands. In the phrases that come out of the point of the pen, rather than out of the head or the heart, we talk about losing ourselves in the associations of the past; but we never do it. A prime condition of our sympathy with it, is that we always and every instant and vividly find our dreary, tiresome, unstoried, unstoriable selves in it; and if I had been less modem, less recent, less raw, I should have been by just so much indifferent to the antique charm of the place. In the midst of my reverie of the Pisan past, I dreamily asked the miller about the milling business in the Pisan present. I forget what he said.

  The artist outside had begun an etching, — if you let that artist out of your sight half a second he began an etching, — and we got back by a common effort into the town again, where we renewed our impression of a quiet that was only equalled by its cleanliness, of a cleanliness that was only surpassed by its quiet. I think of certain dim arcaded streets; of certain genial, lonely, irregular squares, more or less planted with pollarded sycamores, just then woolily tufted with their leaf-buds; and I will ask the reader to think of such white light over all as comes in our own first real spring days; for in some atmospheric qualities and effects the spring is nowhere so much alike as in America and Italy. In one of these squares the boys were playing ball, striking it with a small tambourine instead of a bat; in another, some young girls sat under a sycamore with their sewing; and in a narrow street running out of this was the house where Galileo was born. He is known to have said that the world moves; but I do not believe it has moved much in that neighbourhood since his time. His natal roof is overlooked by a lofty gallery leading into Prince Corsini’s garden; and I wish I could have got inside of that garden; it must have been pleasanter than the street in which Galileo was born, and which more nearly approached squalor in its condition than any other street that I remember in Pisa. It had fallen from no better state, and must always have witnessed to the poverty of the decayed Florentine family from which Galileo sprang.

  I left the artist there — beginning an etching as usual — and wandered back to our hotel; for it was then in the drowsy heart of the late afternoon, and I believed that Pisa had done all that she could for me in one day. But she had reserved a little surprise, quaint and unimaginable enough, in a small chapel of the Chiesa Evangelica Metodista Italiana, which she suddenly showed me in a retired street I wandered through. This Italian Evangelical Methodist Church was but a tiny structure, and it stood back from the street in a yard, with some hollies and myrtles before it — simple and plain, like a little Methodist church at home. It had not a frequented look, and I was told afterwards that the Methodists of Pisa were in that state of arrest which the whole Protestant movement in Italy has fallen into, after its first vigorous impulse. It has not lost ground, but it has not gained, which is also a kind of loss. Apparently the Protestant church which prospers best in Italy is the ancient Italian church of the Waldenses. This presents the Italians a Protestantism of their own invention, while perhaps the hundred religions which we offer them are too distracting, if unaccompanied by our one gravy. It is said that our missionaries have unexpected difficulties to encounter in preaching to the Italians, who are not amused, as we should be, by a foreigner’s blunder, in our language, but annoyed and revolted by incorrect Italian from the pulpit. They have, moreover, their intellectual pride in the matter: they believe that if Protestantism had been the wiser and better thing we think it, the Italians would have found it out long ago for themselves. As it is, such proselytes as we make are among the poor and ignorant; though that is the way all religions begin.

  After the Methodist Church it was not at all astonishing to come upon an agricultural implement warehouse — alongside of a shop glaring with alabaster statuary — where the polite attendant offered me an American pump as the very best thing of its kind that I could use on my podere. When I explained that I and his pump were fellow-countrymen, I could see that we both rose in his respect A French pump, he said, was not worth anything in comparison, and I made my own inferences as to the relative inferiority of a Frenchman.

  IV

  WHEN I got to t
he hotel I asked for the key to my room, which opened by an inner door into the artist’s room, and was told that the artist had it. He had come out by that door, it appeared, and carried off the key in his pocket.

  “Very well,” I said, “then let us get in with the porter’s key.”

  They answered that the porter had no key, and they confessed that there was no other key than that which my friend had in his pocket. They maintained that for one door one key was enough, and they would not hear to the superiority of the American hotel system of several keys, which I, flown with pride by the lately acknowledged pre-eminence of American pumps, boasted for their mortification. I leave the sympathetic reader of forty-six to conceive the feelings of a man whose whole being had set nap-wards in a lethal tide, and who now found himself arrested and as it were dammed up in inevitable vigils. In the reading-room there were plenty of old newspapers that one could sleep over; but there was not a lounge, not an arm-chair. I pulled up one of the pitiless, straight-backed seats to the table, and meditated upon the lost condition of an artist who, without even meaning it, could be so wicked; and then I opened the hotel register, in which the different guests had inscribed their names, their residences, their feelings, their opinions of Pisa and the Hotel Minerva.