To stand or sit at the windows beside the show was an experience full of pleasure; and if the window was on a level with the heads of the huddling passers, one could be in all the merriment yet not jostled; one could easily pick out a pretty woman or a handsome man to whom to throw a bouquet; and one could see energetic revelers, already well supplied with flowers, reaching high windows with bouquets by means of those wooden contrivances which can be extended or contracted at will, and look like impracticable ladders. The fair recipient at the lattice never failed to respond with an ecstatic smile if this Jacob's ladder had been sufficiently long to reach her welcoming hand. Meantime, many bunches of flowers, some large and elegant, some small and merely gay of color, were being thrown aloft or flung downward, making fountains and cataracts of flowers. Sometimes these bouquets fell into the street dejectedly, upon whose pavement little ragamuffins were always ready to pounce for them, and sell them again as fast as possible to passers who had exhausted their supply, had become mad with the Carnival, and caught sight, in that very moment, of some cherished comrade to whom they wished to throw a greeting. There was an intoxicating enjoyment in being singled out as the recipient of fragrant flowers, sent with a laugh of the eyes; or of a handful of sugared almonds, tossed with a gay shout of compliment. If the passer who thus honored us was a complete stranger, meeting us for this one moment in racial kindness, we felt the untrammeled bonhomie which, God knows, we were expected to feel as a matter of course not for a moment only, but for life.
Upon all these things I delighted to think and afterwards to ponder, because I realized that they were of vital interest to the intelligence which was to me greatest and dearest.
CHAPTER XIII
ITALIAN DAYS: II
Between our two winters in Rome we spent the summer in Florence, to which we journeyed by carriage over a road that was hung like a rare gallery with landscapes of the most picturesque description, and bordered close at hand by many a blue or crimson or yellow Italian anemone with its black centre. This experience was all sunshine, all pastime. On the way, stopping at Lake Thrasymene, my mother wrote: —
May 29, 1858.
MY DEAR ELIZABETH, — I have just been watching the moon rise over the lake, exactly opposite the window of our parlor. We thought to go out and see the moonlight this evening, when I saw on the horizon what seemed a mighty conflagration, which I immediately supposed must be the moon, though I had never seen it look so red. The clouds were of a fiery splendor, and then the flaming rim of the moon appeared above the mountains, like the shield of some warrior of the great battle between Flaminius and Hannibal on this spot, rising with its ghostly invisible hero to see how it was now on the former field of blood. The “peace supreme” that reigns here this evening distances all thought of war and terror. We left Perugia this afternoon at three o'clock, with the finest weather. Our drive was enchanting all the way, along rich valleys and up mountains. And when climbing mountains we have two milk-white steers which majestically draw us along. Their eyes are deep wells of dark, peaceful light, that seem to express broad levels of rich waving grain, pure lapsing streams, olives and vines, and every other sign of plenty and quiet husbandry, with no end of dawns, twilights, and cool thickets. The golden age of rural life slumbers in their great orbs. Byron calls them “the purest gods of gentle waters.”
June 7. Here we are, then, in enchanting Florence! I shall try to send you a journal by the Bryants, who are here now. The Brownings are close by, and we are going to see them soon. The language has yet to be made in which to describe beautiful, beautiful Florence, with its air of nectar and sherbet and soft odors, its palaces, Arno, and smooth streets, arched bridges, and all its other charms and splendors. . . .
We were hot in the city of Florence. My only consolation was to eat unnumbered cherries and apricots, for I did not as yet like the figs. My brother and I sometimes had a lurid delight in cracking the cherry and apricot stones and devouring the bitter contents, with the dreadful expectation of soon dying from the effects. Altogether I considered our sojourn in the town house, Casa del Bello, a morose experience; but it was, fortunately, short. My mother had a different feeling: she wrote home to America, “It is a delightful residence.” Without doubt it contained much engaging finery. Three parlors, giving upon a garden, were absorbed into the “study” for my father alone; and my mother was greatly pleased to find that fifteen easy-chairs were within reach of any whim for momentary rest between the campaigns of sight-seeing. To add to my own arbitrary shadow and regret of that time, the garden at the rear of the house was to me clamp; full of green things and gracefully drooping trees, doubtless, but never embracing a ray of sunshine. Yet it was hot; all was relaxing; summer prevailed in one of its ill-humored moods. To make matters worse, my brother had caught in this Dantesque garden a brown bird, whether because sick or lame I know not. But an imprisoned bird it certainly was; and its prison consisted of a small, cell-like room, bare of anything but the heart-broken glances of its occupant. My father objected to the capture and caging of birds, and looked with cold disapproval upon the hospitable endeavor of my brother to lengthen the existence of a little creature that was really safer in the hands of Dame Nature. Presently the bird from the sad garden died, and then indeed Florence became intolerable to me! I wandered through the long, darkish hall that penetrated our edifice from front to back, and I sometimes emerged into the garden's bosky sullenness in my unsmiling misery. Again my mother's testimony proves my mind to have been strangely influenced by what to her was a garden full of roses, jessamine, orange and lemon trees, and a large willow-tree drooping over a fountain in its midst, with a row of marble busts along a terrace: altogether a place that should have filled me with kittenish glee. The “Note-Books,” to be sure, suggest that it harbored malaria. I looked with painful disappointment upon the unceasing dishes of fresh purple figs, which everybody else seemed to enjoy. I saw pale golden wine poured from poetic bottles braided with strands of straw, like pretty girls' heads of flaxen hair; and I was surprised that my father had the joyousness to smile, though sipping what he was later to call “Monte Beni Sunshine.”
That nothing of misery might be excluded from my dismal round of woe, the only people whom I could go to see were the Powers family, living opposite to us. Mr. Powers petrified me by the sang-froid with which he turned out, and pointed out, his statues. Great artists are apt to be like reflections from a greater light, — they know more about that light, than about themselves; but Mr. Powers seemed to me to defy art to lord it over his splendid mechanical genius, the self he managed so well. To prove beyond a doubt that material could not resist him, he would step from the studio into an adjoining apartment, and strike off button-like bits of metal from an iron apparatus which he had invented. It was either buttons or Venuses with him, indifferently, as I supposed.
Gray to me, though “bright” to my mother, were the galleries and narrow halls of marble busts, where started back into this life old Medicean barbarians, of imperial power and worm-like ugliness; presided over, as I looked upon them in memory during my girlhood, by that knightly form of Michel Angelo's seated Lorenzo de' Medici, whose attitude and shadowed eyes seem to express a lofty disapproval of such a world.
A morning dawned when the interest in living again became vigorous. A delicate-looking, essentially dignified young gentleman, the Count da Montauto, seeming considerably starved, but fascinatingly blue-blooded, appeared in our tiresome house. I heard that we were to remove to a villa at Bellosguardo, a hill distant fifteen minutes' drive from the city, where the summer was reasonable; and as the count owned this haunt of refreshment, I became enthusiastically tender in my respect for him. For years afterwards my sensibilities were exercised over the question as to where the count was put while we enjoyed the space and loveliness of Montauto; I did not know that he had a palace in town. His sad, sweetly resentful glance had conveyed to me the idea, “Must I still live, if I live beneath my rank, and as a leaser of villas?”
One day, happy day, we toiled by carriage, between light-colored walls, sometimes too high for any view, — that once caused my mother a three hours' walk, because of a misturn, — over little hot, dusty roads, out and up to the villa. My father and brother had already walked thither; and my brother's spirits, as he stood beside the high iron gateway, in front of the gray tower which was the theme, or chief outline, of the old country-seat, were pleasant to witness, and illustrated my own pent-up feelings. He shouted and danced before the iron bars of the gate like a humanized note of music, uncertain where it belonged, and glad of it. Our very first knowledge of Montauto was rich and varied, with the relief from pretentiousness which all ancient things enjoy, and with the appealing sweetness of time-worn shabbiness. The walls of the hall and staircase were of gray stone, as were the steps which led echoingly up to the second story of the house. My sister exclaims in delight concerning the whole scene: “This villa, — you have no idea how delightful it is! I think there must be pretty nearly a hundred rooms in it, of all shapes, sizes, and heights. The walls are never less than five feet thick, and sometimes more, so that it is perfectly cool. I should feel very happy to live here always. I am sitting in the loggia, which is delightful in the morning freshness. Oh, how I love every inch of that beautiful landscape!” The tower and the adjacent loggia were the features that preeminently sated our thirst for suggestive charm, and they became our proud boast and the chief precincts of our daily life and social intercourse. The ragged gray giant looked over the road-walls at its foot, and beyond and below them over the Arno valley, rimmed atop with azure distance, and touched with the delicate dark of trees. Internally, the tower (crowned, like a rough old king of the days of the Round Table, with a machicolated summit) was dusty, broken, and somewhat dangerous of ascent. Owls that knew every wrinkle of despair and hoot-toot of pessimism clung to narrow crevices in the deserted rooms, where the skeleton-like prison frameworks at the unglazed windows were in keeping with the dreadful spirits of these unregenerate anchorites. The forlorn apartments were piled one above the other until the historic cylinder of stone opened to the sky. In contrast to the barrenness of the gray inclosures, through the squares of the windows throbbed the blue and gold, green and lilac, of Italian heavens and countryside.
At the dangers of the stairway my father laughed, with flashing glances. He always laughed (it was a sound peculiarly passionate and low, full, yet unobtrusive) at dangers in which he could share himself, although so grave when, in the moral turmoil, he was obliged to stand and watch uneven battle; not the less sorry for human nature because weakness comes from our ignoring the weapons we might have used. But on those trembling stairs he approved of the risk we ran, while cautioning me not to drop through one of the holes, and then stumbled within an inch of breaking his own neck, and laughed again. “While gropingly descending these crazy steps one dusky evening, I gratified Julian exceedingly by hitting my nose against the wall,” he admits in the “Note-Books.” Who would not enjoy seeing a monarch come to so humble a contact with the bulwarks of his tower? Especially if he were royal enough not to take offense at one's mirth, as this one never did. Reaching the topmost heights of the stone pile, shaggy with yellow moss, we eagerly pressed to the battlements and drank in the view, finding all Florence spread out before us, far down from the breeze and light and prospect of our perch, — understanding the joy of falcons that are long hooded, and then finally look.
On one side of the tower was the lawn, hemmed round by a somewhat high semicircular stone wall. In front of it was Florence, pinnacled and roof-crowded, across the gentle valley. Not far away rose Galileo's rival tower, and the habitations of one or two friends. On another side of the keep the valley clipped more decidedly; and in the foreground clustered a collection of trees upon a grassy slope, divided from the villa lawn by a low wall, over which my father and mother sometimes bought grapes, figs, pomegranates, and peaches grown upon the place, which were smilingly offered by the count's contadini. These from their numbers were unrecognizable, while their prices for the exquisite fruit were so small that it was a pleasure to be cheated. Behind the tower stretched lengthily the house, its large arched doorway looking upon all comers with a frown of shadow. Still further behind basked a bevy of fruit gardens and olive-tree dotted hill-sides with their vines of the grape. We used to sit on the lawn in the evenings, and sometimes received guests there; looking at the sky, moon, comet, and stars (“flowers of light,” my mother called them) as if they were new. Any mortal might have been forgiven for so regarding them, in the sapphire glory of an Italian night. My mother's untiring voice of melodious enthusiasm echoed about the group in ejaculations of praise.
In connection with the comet my elders spoke of war and misery, of which it was accused of being the messenger. My child's heart already knew the iron truth, and was not astonished at the intrusion of such a thought, that beauty and peace must always entertain the herald of the other country — the dark one. There was a sadness about Italy, although it lay under “the smile of God,” as my father calls its sunshine. He and my mother often mention this shadow, as before remarked, in their records. At times the cause seems to them to come from the “incubus” of the Catholic religion, although they both believed it capable of being wholly perfect. Glorious scenes were constantly soothing this sense of human sorrow, scenes such as cannot be found in regions outside the Church. In the Basilica of San Spirito my mother came upon several visible lovelinesses of elaborate devotion, which with her limpid purity of justice she enthusiastically notes down. She entered the church one day for coolness and rest, and, recognizing its “noble” beauties, she described, in her journal already printed, “a function going on before one of the side-chapels — the burial service of a child. The coffin was covered with a white satin pall, embroidered with purple and gold. The officiating priests were in robes of white satin and gold, and the altar was alight with candles, besides those borne by young boys in white tunics. This scene in the aisle was a splendid picture in the soft gloom of the church; and when the organ burst forth in a kind of tender rapture, rolling pearly waves of harmony along the large spaces, and filling the dome with the foam and spray of interlacing measures, it seemed as if angels were welcoming the young child to heaven.” The pettiness of a brief burial service in a private parlor or in a meagre meeting-house would not have touched her heart so profoundly, because it would not have recalled heaven so impressively in all its grandeur and tenderness. She evidently perceived here the sweet and even cheering veracity of a devotion that is glad to remember all the possibilities of reverent observance, each motion and aspect of which have a reference to God and to religious history. Again San Spirito gave her an insight into the dignity of painstaking worship. “While we were walking about, the priests and monks of the Order of St. Augustine, who have a convent attached, came in a procession from the sacristy, and knelt down in their sweeping black robes upon the marble pavement, in two lines, one behind the other, and chanted aloud their Ave Maria. It was a wonderful picture.” She still clung to the Puritanical idea that in religion itself, “What looks so wondrous, wondrous fair, His providence has taught us to fear. . . . Angels only are fit to live as monks pretend to live.” But she contradicts this theory. No one was more adapted than she to perceive the godliness of the monastic sacrifice, when she realized the object of it. Among her dearest friends and verified ideals were Mr. George Bradford, who always reminded me of a priest of the true type; and Miss Hoar, whose vestal soul, celebrating constant rites over the memory of her dead betrothed, made her the image of a nun. This welcome delicacy and loftiness of self-consecration my mother also observed in the ranks of the sometimes harshly criticised friars. At Fiesole, “A young monk unveiled the picture for us. He was very courteous, and had an air of unusual goodness and sincerity. He is one of those who 'bear witness.' As a matter of course I offered him a fee for his trouble, but he made a sad and decided gesture of refusal, that was very surprising and r
emarkable; for it was impossible to gainsay him, and I felt embarrassed that I had thought of the gold that perishes in the presence of the heavenly picture and the holy youth. I wish I knew his history.” I also wish she had known it, for it would have unveiled for her the most beautiful facts about other holy youths of our own day, as well as similar facts of earlier days, — truths whose purity would have rapt her thought even more deeply than Fra Angelico's purity in art, uncurtained by brave and humble hands for her sight. It is to be observed that her views and tacit beliefs and my father's are identical. They did not really believe that Italy was under an “incubus;” they felt the physical weight of Catholicity, or the Cross, and half guessed its spiritual spring.
Some of the rooms at Montauto I studiously avoided. The forlorn cavern of a parlor, or ball-room, I remember to have seen only once. There was a painful vacuum where good spirits ought to have been. Along the walls were fixed seats, like those in the apse of some morally fallen cathedral, and they were covered with blue threadbare magnificence that told the secrets of vanity. Heavy tables crowded down the centre of the room. I came, saw, and fled. The oratory was the most thrilling place of all. It opened out of my sister's room, which was a large, sombre apartment. It was said to attract a frequently seen ghost by the force of its profound twilight and historic sorrows; and my sister, who was courageous enough to startle a ghost, highly approved of this corner of her domain. But she suddenly lost her buoyant taste for disembodied spirits, and a rumor floated mistily about that Una had seen the wretched woman who could not forget her woes in death. In “Monte Beni” this oratory is minutely pictured, where “beneath the crucifix . . . lay a human skull . . . carved in gray alabaster, most skillfully done . . . with accurate imitation of the teeth, the sutures, the empty eye-caverns.” Everywhere the intense picturesqueness gave material, at Montauto, for my father's romance. Stella, whom he invited into the story without changing her name, was a sympathetic object in my now somewhat alarmed and lonely days. I call her an “object,” because I could not understand a word she said, and she soon gave up opening her lips when we were together. She looked kind, in spite of her rocky hardness of Italian feature, and she fed me on dried melon-seeds when I was at the lowest tide of depression. Sometimes she was to be found at the well, close to the entrance-arch. There the faithful servant let down a bucket by its heavy chain with a doomsday clank. The sunlight revealed the smallness and brilliancy and number of her black braids and the infinite multitude of her wrinkles, as well as the yellowness of her dangling gold earrings and the texture of her parchment-like arms, which were the color of glossy brown leaves. Sometimes she would awaken me from soporific melancholy by allowing herself to be found upon her knees in her bedroom, a bare and colorless abode, her great black crucifix hanging in majestic solitude upon the wall above her handsome old head. I thought her temporarily insane to pray so much, and at all to an audience; but I recognized the gentleness of the attacks, and I somehow loved her for them. Even to the ignorance of error truth can be beautiful. An extremely attractive little Italian maid, of sixteen or less, used also to be found on her knees before the crucifix.
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