Passages From the French and Italian Notebooks, Complete

N >> Nathaniel Hawthorne >> Passages From the French and Italian Notebooks, Complete

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September 28th.--I went to the Pitti Palace yesterday, and to the Uffizi
to-day, paying them probably my last visit, yet cherishing an
unreasonable doubt whether I may not see them again. At all events, I
have seen them enough for the present, even what is best of them; and, at
the same time, with a sad reluctance to bid them farewell forever, I
experience an utter weariness of Raphael's old canvas, and of the
time-yellowed marble of the Venus de' Medici. When the material
embodiment presents itself outermost, and we perceive them only by the
grosser sense, missing their ethereal spirit, there is nothing so heavily
burdensome as masterpieces of painting and sculpture. I threw my
farewell glance at the Venus de' Medici to-day with strange
insensibility.

The nights are wonderfully beautiful now. When the moon was at the full,
a few nights ago, its light was an absolute glory, such as I seem only to
have dreamed of heretofore, and that only in my younger days. At its
rising I have fancied that the orb of the moon has a kind of purple
brightness, and that this tinge is communicated to its radiance until it
has climbed high aloft and sheds a flood of white over hill and valley.
Now that the moon is on the wane, there is a gentler lustre, but still
bright; and it makes the Val d' Arno with its surrounding hills, and its
soft mist in the distance, as beautiful a scene as exists anywhere out of
heaven. And the morning is quite as beautiful in its own way. This
mist, of which I have so often spoken, sets it beyond the limits of
actual sense and makes it ideal; it is as if you were dreaming about the
valley,--as if the valley itself were dreaming, and met you half-way in
your own dream. If the mist were to be withdrawn, I believe the whole
beauty of the valley would go with it.

Until pretty late in the morning, we have the comet streaming through the
sky, and dragging its interminable tail among the stars. It keeps
brightening from night to night, and I should think must blaze fiercely
enough to cast a shadow by and by. I know not whether it be in the
vicinity of Galileo's tower, and in the influence of his spirit, but I
have hardly ever watched the stars with such interest as now.

September 29th.--Last evening I met Mr. Powers at Miss Blagden's, and he
talked about his treatment, by our government in reference, to an
appropriation of twenty-five thousand dollars made by Congress for a
statue by him. Its payment and the purchase of the statue were left at
the option of the President, and he conceived himself wronged because the
affair was never concluded. . . . . As for the President, he knows
nothing of art, and probably acted in the matter by the advice of the
director of public works. No doubt a sculptor gets commissions as
everybody gets public employment and emolument of whatever kind from our
government, not by merit or fitness, but by political influence skilfully
applied. As Powers himself observed, the ruins of our Capitol are not
likely to afford sculptures equal to those which Lord Elgin took from the
Parthenon, if this be the system under which they are produced. . . . . I
wish our great Republic had the spirit to do as much, according to its
vast means, as Florence did for sculpture and architecture when it was a
republic; but we have the meanest government and the shabbiest, and--if
truly represented by it--we are the meanest and shabbiest people known in
history. And yet the less we attempt to do for art the better, if our
future attempts are to have no better result than such brazen troopers as
the equestrian statue of General Jackson, or even such naked
respectabilities as Greenough's Washington. There is something false and
affected in our highest taste for art; and I suppose, furthermore, we are
the only people who seek to decorate their public institutions, not by
the highest taste among them, but by the average at best.

There was also at Miss Blagden's, among other company, Mr. ------, an
artist in Florence, and a sensible man. I talked with him about Home,
the medium, whom he had many opportunities of observing when the latter
was in these parts. Mr. ------ says that Home is unquestionably a knave,
but that he himself is as much perplexed at his own preternatural
performances as any other person; he is startled and affrighted at the
phenomena which he produces. Nevertheless, when his spiritual powers
fall short, he does his best to eke them out with imposture. This moral
infirmity is a part of his nature, and I suggested that perhaps if he
were of a firmer and healthier moral make, if his character were
sufficiently sound and dense to be capable of steadfast principle, he
would not have possessed the impressibility that fits him for the
so-called spiritual influences. Mr. ------ says that Louis Napoleon is
literally one of the most skilful jugglers in the world, and that
probably the interest he has taken in Mr. Home was caused partly by a
wish to acquire his art.

This morning Mr. Powers invited me to go with him to the Grand Duke's new
foundry, to see the bronze statue of Webster which has just been cast
from his model. It is the second cast of the statue, the first having
been shipped some months ago on board of a vessel which was lost; and, as
Powers observed, the statue now lies at the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean
somewhere in the vicinity of the telegraphic cable.

We were received with much courtesy and emphasis by the director of the
foundry, and conducted into a large room walled with bare, new brick,
where the statue was standing in front of the extinct furnace: a majestic
Webster indeed, eight feet high, and looking even more colossal than
that. The likeness seemed to me perfect, and, like a sensible man,
Powers' has dressed him in his natural costume, such as I have seen
Webster have on while making a speech in the open air at a mass meeting
in Concord,--dress-coat buttoned pretty closely across the breast,
pantaloons and boots,--everything finished even to a seam and a stitch.
Not an inch of the statue but is Webster; even his coat-tails are imbued
with the man, and this true artist has succeeded in showing him through
the broadcloth as nature showed him. He has felt that a man's actual
clothes are as much a part of him as his flesh, and I respect him for
disdaining to shirk the difficulty by throwing the meanness of a cloak
over it, and for recognizing the folly of masquerading our Yankee
statesman in a Roman toga, and the indecorousness of presenting him as a
brassy nudity. It would have been quite as unjustifiable to strip him to
his skeleton as to his flesh. Webster is represented as holding in his
right hand the written roll of the Constitution, with which he points to
a bundle of fasces, which he keeps from falling by the grasp of his left,
thus symbolizing him as the preserver of the Union. There is an
expression of quiet, solid, massive strength in the whole figure; a deep,
pervading energy, in which any exaggeration of gesture would lessen and
lower the effect. He looks really like a pillar of the state. The face
is very grand, very Webster stern and awful, because he is in the act of
meeting a great crisis, and yet with the warmth of a great heart glowing
through it. Happy is Webster to have been so truly and adequately
sculptured; happy the sculptor in such a subject, which no idealization
of a demigod could have supplied him with. Perhaps the statue at the
bottom of the sea will be cast up in some future age, when the present
race of man is forgotten, and if so, that far posterity will look up to
us as a grander race than we find ourselves to be. Neither was Webster
altogether the man he looked. His physique helped him out, even when he
fell somewhat short of its promise; and if his eyes had not been in such
deep caverns their fire would not have looked so bright.

Powers made me observe how the surface of the statue was wrought to a
sort of roughness instead of being smoothed, as is the practice of other
artists. He said that this had cost him great pains, and certainly it
has an excellent effect. The statue is to go to Boston, and I hope will
be placed in the open air, for it is too mighty to be kept under any roof
that now exists in America. . . . .

After seeing this, the director showed us some very curious and exquisite
specimens of castings, such as baskets of flowers, in which the most
delicate and fragile blossoms, the curl of a petal, the finest veins in a
leaf, the lightest flower-spray that ever quivered in a breeze, were
perfectly preserved; and the basket contained an abundant heap of such
sprays. There were likewise a pair of hands, taken actually from life,
clasped together as they were, and they looked like parts of a man who
had been changed suddenly from flesh to brass. They were worn and rough
and unhandsome hands, and so very real, with all their veins and the
pores of the skin, that it was shocking to look at them. A bronze leaf,
cast also from the life, was as curious and more beautiful.

Taking leave of Powers, I went hither and thither about Florence, seeing
for the last time things that I have seen many times before: the market,
for instance, blocking up a line of narrow streets with fruit-stalls, and
obstreperous dealers crying their peaches, their green lemons, their
figs, their delicious grapes, their mushrooms, their pomegranates, their
radishes, their lettuces. They use one vegetable here which I have not
known so used elsewhere; that is, very young pumpkins or squashes, of the
size of apples, and to be cooked by boiling. They are not to my taste,
but the people here like unripe things,--unripe fruit, unripe chickens,
unripe lamb. This market is the noisiest and swarmiest centre of noisy
and swarming Florence, and I always like to pass through it on that
account.

I went also to Santa Croce, and it seemed to me to present a longer vista
and broader space than almost any other church, perhaps because the
pillars between the nave and aisles are not so massive as to obstruct the
view. I looked into the Duomo, too, and was pretty well content to leave
it. Then I came homeward, and lost my way, and wandered far off through
the white sunshine, and the scanty shade of the vineyard walls, and the
olive-trees that here and there branched over them. At last I saw our
own gray battlements at a distance, on one side, quite out of the
direction in which I was travelling, so was compelled to the grievous
mortification of retracing a great many of my weary footsteps. It was a
very hot day. This evening I have been on the towertop star-gazing, and
looking at the comet, which waves along the sky like an immense feather
of flame. Over Florence there was an illuminated atmosphere, caused by
the lights of the city gleaming upward into the mists which sleep and
dream above that portion of the valley, as well as the rest of it. I saw
dimly, or fancied I saw, the hill of Fiesole on the other side of
Florence, and remembered how ghostly lights were seen passing thence to
the Duomo on the night when Lorenzo the Magnificent died. From time to
time the sweet bells of Florence rang out, and I was loath to come down
into the lower world, knowing that I shall never again look heavenward
from an old tower-top in such a soft calm evening as this. Yet I am not
loath to go away; impatient rather; for, taking no root, I soon weary of
any soil in which I may be temporarily deposited. The same impatience I
sometimes feel or conceive of as regards this earthly life. . . . .

I forgot to mention that Powers showed me, in his studio, the model of
the statue of America, which he wished the government to buy. It has
great merit, and embodies the ideal of youth, freedom, progress, and
whatever we consider as distinctive of our country's character and
destiny. It is a female figure, vigorous, beautiful, planting its foot
lightly on a broken chain, and pointing upward. The face has a high look
of intelligence and lofty feeling; the form, nude to the middle, has all
the charms of womanhood, and is thus warmed and redeemed out of the cold
allegoric sisterhood who have generally no merit in chastity, being
really without sex. I somewhat question whether it is quite the thing,
however, to make a genuine woman out of an allegory we ask, Who is to wed
this lovely virgin? and we are not satisfied to banish her into the realm
of chilly thought. But I liked the statue, and all the better for what I
criticise, and was sorry to see the huge package in which the finished
marble lies bundled up, ready to be sent to our country,--which does not
call for it.

Mr. Powers and his two daughters called to take leave of us, and at
parting I expressed a hope of seeing him in America. He said that it
would make him very unhappy to believe that he should never return
thither; but it seems to me that he has no such definite purpose of
return as would be certain to bring itself to pass. It makes a very
unsatisfactory life, thus to spend the greater part of it in exile. In
such a case we are always deferring the reality of life till a future
moment, and, by and by, we have deferred it till there are no future
moments; or, if we do go back, we find that life has shifted whatever of
reality it had to the country where we deemed ourselves only living
temporarily; and so between two stools we come to the ground, and make
ourselves a part of one or the other country only by laying our bones in
its soil. It is particularly a pity in Powers's case, because he is so
very American in character, and the only convenience for him of his
Italian residence is, that here he can supply himself with marble, and
with workmen to chisel it according to his designs.

SIENA.

October 2d.--Yesterday morning, at six o'clock, we left our ancient
tower, and threw a parting glance--and a rather sad one--over the misty
Val d' Arno. This summer will look like a happy one in our children's
retrospect, and also, no doubt, in the years that remain to ourselves;
and, in truth, I have found it a peaceful and not uncheerful one.

It was not a pleasant morning, and Monte Morello, looking down on
Florence, had on its cap, betokening foul weather, according to the
proverb. Crossing the suspension-bridge, we reached the Leopoldo railway
without entering the city. By some mistake,--or perhaps because nobody
ever travels by first-class carriages in Tuscany,--we found we had
received second-class tickets, and were put into a long, crowded
carriage, full of priests, military men, commercial travellers, and other
respectable people, facing one another lengthwise along the carriage, and
many of them smoking cigars. They were all perfectly civil, and I think
I must own that the manners of this second-class would compare favorably
with those of an American first-class one.

At Empoli, about an hour after we started, we had to change carriages,
the main train proceeding to Leghorn. . . . . My observations along the
road were very scanty: a hilly country, with several old towns seated on
the most elevated hill-tops, as is common throughout Tuscany, or
sometimes a fortress with a town on the plain at its base; or, once or
twice, the towers and battlements of a mediaeval castle, commanding the
pass below it. Near Florence the country was fertile in the vine and
olive, and looked as unpicturesque as that sort of fertility usually
makes it; not but what I have come to think better of the tint of the
olive-leaf than when I first saw it. In the latter part of our journey I
remember a wild stream, of a greenish hue, but transparent, rushing along
over a rough bed, and before reaching Siena we rumbled into a long
tunnel, and emerged from it near the city. . . . .

We drove up hill and down (for the surface of Siena seems to be nothing
but an irregularity) through narrow old streets, and were set down at
the Aquila Nera, a grim-looking albergo near the centre of the town.
Mrs. S------ had already taken rooms for us there, and to these we were
now ushered up the highway of a dingy stone staircase, and into a small,
brick-paved parlor. The house seemed endlessly old, and all the glimpses
that we caught of Siena out of window seemed more ancient still. Almost
within arm's reach, across a narrow street, a tall palace of gray,
time-worn stone clambered skyward, with arched windows, and square
windows, and large windows and small, scattered up and down its side. It
is the Palazzo Tolomei, and looks immensely venerable. From the windows
of our bedrooms we looked into a broader street, though still not very
wide, and into a small piazza, the most conspicuous object in which was a
column, hearing on its top a bronze wolf suckling Romulus and Remus.
This symbol is repeated in other parts of the city, and scours to
indicate that the Sienese people pride themselves in a Roman origin. In
another direction, over the tops of the houses, we saw a very high tower,
with battlements projecting around its summit, so that it was a fortress
in the air; and this I have since found to be the Palazzo Publico. It
was pleasant, looking downward into the little old piazza and narrow
streets, to see the swarm of life on the pavement, the life of to-day
just as new as if it had never been lived before; the citizens, the
priests, the soldiers, the mules and asses with their panniers, the
diligence lumbering along, with a postilion in a faded crimson coat
bobbing up and down on the off-horse. Such a bustling scene, vociferous,
too, with various street-cries, is wonderfully set off by the gray
antiquity of the town, and makes the town look older than if it were a
solitude.

Soon Mr. and Mrs. Story came, and accompanied us to look for lodgings.
They also drove us about the city in their carriage, and showed us the
outside of the Palazzo Publico, and of the cathedral and other remarkable
edifices. The aspect of Siena is far more picturesque than that of any
other town in Italy, so far as I know Italian towns; and yet, now that I
have written it, I remember Perugia, and feel that the observation is a
mistake. But at any rate Siena is remarkably picturesque, standing on
such a site, on the verge and within the crater of an extinct volcano,
and therefore being as uneven as the sea in a tempest; the streets so
narrow, ascending between tall, ancient palaces, while the side streets
rush headlong down, only to be threaded by sure-footed mules, such as
climb Alpine heights; old stone balconies on the palace fronts; old
arched doorways, and windows set in frames of Gothic architecture;
arcades, resembling canopies of stone, with quaintly sculptured statues
in the richly wrought Gothic niches of each pillar;--everything massive
and lofty, yet minutely interesting when you look at it stone by stone.
The Florentines, and the Romans too, have obliterated, as far as they
could, all the interest of their mediaeval structures by covering them
with stucco, so that they have quite lost their character, and affect the
spectator with no reverential idea of age. Here the city is all
overwritten with black-letter, and the glad Italian sun makes the effect
so much the stronger.

We took a lodging, and afterwards J----- and I rambled about, and went
into the cathedral for a moment, and strayed also into the Piazza del
Campo, the great public square of Siena. I am not in the mood for
further description of public places now, so shall say a word or two
about the old palace in which we have established ourselves. We have the
second piano, and dwell amid faded grandeur, having for our saloon what
seems to have been a ball-room. It is ornamented with a great fresco in
the centre of the vaulted ceiling, and others covering the sides of the
apartment, and surrounded with arabesque frameworks, where Cupids gambol
and chase one another. The subjects of the frescos I cannot make out,
not that they are faded like Giotto's, for they are as fresh as roses,
and are done in an exceedingly workmanlike style; but they are allegories
of Fame and Plenty and other matters, such as I could never understand.
Our whole accommodation is in similar style,--spacious, magnificent, and
mouldy.

In the evening Miss S------ and I drove to the railway, and on the
arrival of the train from Florence we watched with much eagerness the
unlading of the luggage-van. At last the whole of our ten trunks and tin
bandbox were produced, and finally my leather bag, in which was my
journal and a manuscript book containing my sketch of a romance. It
gladdened my very heart to see it, and I shall think the better of Tuscan
promptitude and accuracy for so quickly bringing it back to me. (It was
left behind, under one of the rail-carriage seats.) We find all the
public officials, whether of railway, police, or custom-house, extremely
courteous and pleasant to encounter; they seem willing to take trouble
and reluctant to give it, and it is really a gratification to find that
such civil people will sometimes oblige you by taking a paul or two
aside.

October 3d.--I took several strolls about the city yesterday, and find it
scarcely extensive enough to get lost in; and if we go far from the
centre we soon come to silent streets, with only here and there an
individual; and the inhabitants stare from their doors and windows at the
stranger, and turn round to look at him after he has passed. The
interest of the old town would soon be exhausted for the traveller, but I
can conceive that a thoughtful and shy man might settle down here with
the view of making the place a home, and spend many years in a sombre
kind of happiness. I should prefer it to Florence as a residence, but it
would be terrible without an independent life in one's own mind.

U---- and I walked out in the afternoon, and went into the Piazza del
Campo, the principal place of the city, and a very noble and peculiar
one. It is much in the form of an amphitheatre, and the surface of the
ground seems to be slightly scooped out, so that it resembles the shallow
basin of a shell. It is thus a much better site for an assemblage of the
populace than if it were a perfect level. A semicircle or truncated
ellipse of stately and ancient edifices surround the piazza, with arches
opening beneath them, through which streets converge hitherward. One
side of the piazza is a straight line, and is occupied by the Palazzo
Publico, which is a most noble and impressive Gothic structure. It has
not the mass of the Palazzo Vecchio at Florence, but is more striking.
It has a long battlemented front, the central part of which rises eminent
above the rest, in a great square bulk, which is likewise crowned with
battlements. This is much more picturesque than the one great block of
stone into which the Palazzo Vecchio is consolidated. At one extremity
of this long front of the Palazzo Publico rises a tower, shooting up its
shaft high, high into the air, and bulging out there into a battlemented
fortress, within which the tower, slenderer than before, climbs to a
still higher region. I do not know whether the summit of the tower is
higher or so high as that of the Palazzo Vecchio; but the length of the
shaft, free of the edifice, is much greater, and so produces the more
elevating effect. The whole front of the Palazzo Publico is exceedingly
venerable, with arched windows, Gothic carvings, and all the old-time
ornaments that betoken it to have stood a great while, and the gray
strength that will hold it up at least as much longer. At one end of the
facade, beneath the shadow of the tower, is a grand and beautiful porch,
supported on square pillars, within each of which is a niche containing a
statue of mediaeval sculpture.

The great Piazza del Campo is the market-place of Siena. In the morning
it was thronged with booths and stalls, especially of fruit and vegetable
dealers; but as in Florence, they melted away in the sunshine, gradually
withdrawing themselves into the shadow thrown from the Palazzo Publico.

On the side opposite the palace is an antique fountain of marble,
ornamented with two statues and a series of bas-reliefs; and it was so
much admired in its day that its sculptor received the name "Del Fonte."
I am loath to leave the piazza and palace without finding some word or
two to suggest their antique majesty, in the sunshine and the shadow; and
how fit it seemed, notwithstanding their venerableness, that there should
be a busy crowd filling up the great, hollow amphitheatre, and crying
their fruit and little merchandises, so that all the curved line of
stately old edifices helped to reverberate the noise. The life of
to-day, within the shell of a time past, is wonderfully fascinating.

Another point to which a stranger's footsteps are drawn by a kind of
magnetism, so that he will be apt to find himself there as often as he
strolls out of his hotel, is the cathedral. It stands in the highest
part of the city, and almost every street runs into some other street
which meanders hitherward. On our way thither, U---- and I came to a
beautiful front of black and white marble, in somewhat the same style as
the cathedral; in fact, it was the baptistery, and should have made a
part of it, according to the original design, which contemplated a
structure of vastly greater extent than this actual one. We entered the
baptistery, and found the interior small, but very rich in its clustered
columns and intersecting arches, and its frescos, pictures, statues, and
ornaments. Moreover, a father and mother had brought their baby to be
baptized, and the poor little thing, in its gay swaddling-clothes, looked
just like what I have seen in old pictures, and a good deal like an
Indian pappoose. It gave one little slender squeak when the priest put
the water on its forehead, and then was quiet again.

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