The Essential Maurice Hewlett Collection. Maurice Hewlett
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had not the ordering of the feast: that was the king's business--mine is to mingle the flavours to the liking of the guest that the dish be worthy the conception and the king's honour.
Nor will I promise you that I shall not break into a more tripping stave than our prose can afford, here and there. The pilgrim, if he is young and his shoes or his belly pinch him not, sings as he goes, the very stones at his heels (so music-steeped is this land) setting him the key. Jog the foot-path way through Tuscany in my company, it's Lombard Street to my hat I charm you out of your lassitude by my open humour. Things I say will have been said before, and better; my tunes may be stale and my phrasing rough: I may be irrelevant, irreverent, what you please. Eh, well! I am in Italy,--the land of shrugs and laughing. Shrug me (or my book) away; but, pray Heaven, laugh! And, as the young are always very wise when they find their voice and have their confidence well put out to usury, laugh (but in your cloak) when I am sententious or apt to tears. I have found _lacrim rerum_ in Italy as elsewhere; and sometimes Life has seemed to me to sail as near to tragedy as Art can do. I suppose I must be a very bad Christian, for I remain sturdily an optimist, still convinced that it is good for us to be here, while the sun is up. Men and pictures, poems, cities, churches, comely deeds, grow like cabbages: they are of the soil, spring from it to the sun, glow open-hearted while he is there; and when he goes, they go. So grew Florence, and Shakespere, and Greek myth--the three most lovely flowers of Nature's seeding I know of. And with the flowers grow the weeds. My first weed shall sprout by Arno, in a cranny of the Ponte Vecchio, or cling like a Dryad of the wood to some gnarly old olive on the hill-side of Arcetri. If it bear no little gold-seeded flower, or if its pert leaves don't blush under the sun's caress, it shan't be my fault or the sun's.
Take, then, my watered wine in the name of the Second Maccaban, for here, as he says, "will I make an end. And if I have done well, and as is fitting the story, it is that which I desired: but if slenderly and meanly, it is that which I could attain unto."
I have killed you at the first cast. I feel it. Has any city, save, perhaps, Cairo, been so written out as Florence? I hear you querulous; you raise your eyebrows; you sigh as you watch the tottering ash of your second cigar. Mrs. Brown comes to tell you it is late. I agree with you quickly. Florence has often been sketched before--putting Browning aside with his astounding fresco-music--by Ruskin and George Eliot and Mr. Henry James, to name only masters. But that is no reason why I should not try my prentice hand. Florence alters not at all. Men do. My picture, poor as you like, shall be my own. It is not their Florence or yours--and, remember, I would strike at Tuscany through Florence, and throughout Tuscany keep my eye in her beam,--but my own mellow kingcup of a town, the glowing heart of the whole Arno basin, whose suave and weather-warmed grace I shall try to catch and distil. But Mrs. Brown is right; it Is late: the huntsmen are up in America, as your good kinsman has it, and I would never have you act your own Antipodes. Addio.
I
EYE OF ITALY
[Footnote: My thanks are due to the Editor of _Black and White_ for permission to reprint the substance of this essay.]
I have been here a few days only--perhaps a week: if it's impressionism you're after, the time is now or a year hence. For, in these things of three stages, two may be tolerable, the first clouding of the water with the wine's red fire, or the final resolution of the two into one humane consistence: the intermediate course is, like all times of process, brumous and hesitant. After a dinner in the white piazza, shrinking slowly to blue under the keen young moon's eye, watched over jealously by the frowning bulk of Brunelleschi's globe--after a dinner of _pasta con brodo_, veal cutlets, olives, and a bottle of right _Barbra_, let me give you a pastel (this is the medium for such evanescences) of Florence herself. At present I only feel. No one should think--few people can--after dinner. Be patient therefore; suffer me thus far.
I would spare you, if I might, the horrors of my night-long journey from Milan. There is little romance in a railway: the novelists have worked it dry. That is, however, a part of my sum of perceptions which began, you may put it, at the dawn which saw Florence and me face to face. So I must in no wise omit it.
I find, then, that Italian railway-carriages are constructed for the convenience of luggage, and that passengers are an afterthought, as dogs or grooms are with us, to be suffered only if there be room and on condition they look after the luggage. In my case we had our full complement of the staple; nevertheless every passenger assumed the god, keeping watch on his traps, and thinking to shake the spheres at every fresh arrival. Thoughtless behaviour! for there were thus twelve people packed into a rocky landscape of cardboard portmanteaus and umbrella- peaks; twenty-four legs, and urgent need of stretching-room as the night wore on. There was jostling, there was asperity from those who could sleep and from those who would; there was more when two shock-head drovers--like First and Second Murderers in a tragedy--insisted on taking off their boots. It was not that there was little room for boots; indeed I think they nursed them on their thin knees. It was at any rate too much even for an Italian passenger; for--well, well! their way had been a hot and a dusty one, poor fellows. So the guard was summoned, and came with all the implicit powers of an uniform and, I believe, a sword. The boots were strained on sufficiently to preserve the amenities of the way: they could not, of course, be what they had been; the carriage was by this a forcing- house. And through the long night we ached away an intolerable span of time with, for under-current, for sinister accompaniment to the pitiful strain, the muffled interminable plodding of the engine, and the rack of the wheels pulsing through space to the rhythm of some music-hall jingle heard in snatches at home. At intervals came shocks of contrast when we were brought suddenly face to face with a gaunt and bleached world. Then we stirred from our stupor, and sat looking at each other's stale faces. We had shrieked and clanked our way into some great naked station, shivering raw and cold under the electric lights, streaked with black shadows on its whitewash and patched with coarse advertisements. The porters' voices echoed in the void, shouting _"Piacensa," "Parma," "Reggio," "Modena," "Bologna,"_ with infinite relish for the varied hues of a final _a_. One or two cowed travellers slippered up responsive to the call, and we, the veterans who endured, set our teeth, shuddered, and smoked feverish cigarettes on the platform among the carriage-wheels and points; or, if we were new hands, watched awfully the advent of another sleeping train, as dingy as our own--yet a hero of romance! For it bore the hieratic and tremendous words "_Roma, Firenze, Milano_" It was privileged then; it ministered in the sanctuary. We glowed in our sordid skins, and could have kissed the foot-boards that bore the dust of Rome. I will swear I shall never see those three words printed on a carriage without a thrill, _Roma, Firenze, Milano_,-- Lord! what a traverse.
Or we held long purposeless rests at small wayside places where no station could be known, and the shrouded land stretched away on either side, not to be seen, but rather felt, in the cool airs that blew in, and the rustling of secret trees near by. No further sound was, save the muttered talking of the guards without and the simmering of the engine, on somewhere in front. And then "_Partenza!_" rang out in the night, and "_Pronti!_" came as a faint echo on before. We laboured on, and the dreams began where they had broken off. For we dreamed in these times, fitful and lurid, coloured dreams; flashes of horrible crises in one's life; Interminable precipices; a river skiff engulfed in a swirl of green sea-water; agonies of repentance; shameful failure, defeat, memories--and then the steady pulsing of the engine, and thick, impermeable darkness choking up the windows again. How I ached for the dawn!
I awoke from what I believe to have been a panic of snoring to hear the train clattering over the sleepers and points, and to see--oh, human, brotherly sight!--the broad level light of morning stream out of the east. We were stealing into a city asleep. Tall flat houses rose in the chill mist to our left and stared blankly down upon us with close-barred green eyelids. Gas-lamps in swept streets flickered dirty yellow in the garish light. A great purple dome lay ahead, flanked by the ruddy roofs and gables of a long church. My heart leapt for Florence. Pistoja!
And then, at Prato, a nut-brown old woman with a placid face got into our carriage with a basket of green figs and some bottles of milk for the Florentine market. So we were nearing. And soon we ran in between lines of white and pink villas edged with rows of planes drenched still with dews and the night mists, among bullock-carts and queer shabby little _vetture_,