Lamia's Winter-Quarters

by Alfred Austin

But did you go all that way, it will perhaps be asked, and introduce Lamia to the acknowledged fascinations of Tuscany, only to wander in search of wild-flowers, to climb rural hill-sides, to rave about scenery and sunshine, to listen reverentially to the Poet’s rhymes, and to discuss things in general, and Lamia’s favourite themes in particular? Surely, you may be disposed to add, all those things could have been done just as well at home. Had Florence itself, its churches, its palaces, its galleries, its storied thoroughfares, no attraction for you all?

FLORENCE

Indeed they had. But these have been written about with such minuteness by the learned, and with such fervour by the enthusiastic, that you would hardly thank so homely a pen as mine for describing them afresh. Moreover, let it be confessed that we had a way of our own, which is hardly the common way, of impressing Lamia’s sensitive mind with the artistic marvels of the City of Flowers. To the rest of us, Florence was already as familiar even as the Garden that we love, and the Poet had a theory, in which I entirely concurred, as to how Lamia’s familiarity should grow to be like ours, with a reserved freshness of its own. ‘There are two ways,’ he said, ‘of approaching a place like Florence. You can try to take possession of it, or you can allow it to take possession of you. The first is the more usual, but the second is, I would suggest, the more excellent way. Once when I was travelling hitherward, I remember an American tourist who was the only other occupant of the railway compartment, asking me if I knew Pisa; and, on my replying that I did, he said he should be much obliged if I would point it out to him. Shortly we approached it, and the train slackened pace in order to make the customary halt of some seven or eight minutes. “This is Pisa,” I said, and he at once leaned out of the window, and there he remained intently gazing till its Duomo, Leaning Tower, and Baptistery, could be seen no more. Then he turned to me, and said, “I thank you, sir, for showing me Pisa. I should not have liked to return to the States without having seen Pisa.” I beg of you not to take my fellow-traveller as a national type, for Americans are as various, and differ from each other as much, as the people of other countries. But I cannot think he had seen Pisa. Yet numbers of people resemble him in their tacit assumption that a hasty visual impression or snapshot, so to speak, deserves to be described as seeing, though, assuredly, where great works of art are concerned, it is not to see with the mind’s eye, to say nothing of the spirit’s.‘

‘I am easily taken possession of, as you know,’ said Lamia, for a moment pointedly turning to me, who certainly know nothing of the kind, and indeed know very much the reverse, and then redirecting her attention to the Poet. ‘But, if one is to be taken possession of by all the lovely places and things in this world, would not one have to live to a rather venerable age?’

‘There is an alternative,’ I said, ‘is there not? which is to be taken possession of by only some of them, but to be taken possession of by these thoroughly.’

‘How conjugal and domestic that sounds. But it makes no allowance for feminine curiosity. I should be sorry, when we leave Florence, to think there was anything in it worth seeing I had not seen.‘ ‘Neither shall there be, I hope,’ said the Poet, ‘but, if one is really to see what is worth seeing, I think one must bridle one’s curiosity a little about much that is not worth seeing. The specialist, no doubt, must be boundlessly curious concerning his particular pursuit, and the professional student of Art is a specialist. We are, at best, only dilettanti, and seek solely to expand our minds through sympathetic and discriminating enjoyment.‘

‘In fact,’ said Lamia, ‘it is with Art as with Life. If one is to enjoy it, one must not know too much about it. In that case, I can promise myself, during the next few weeks, no end of pleasure.’

We none of us, unless it be Veronica sometimes, resent Lamia’s seemingly irrelevant way of diverting a discussion, and the Poet has less reason than any of us to do so, since she not only accepts his utterances as words of absolute wisdom, but invariably strives to shape herself according to his canons of life and conduct. Accordingly, when we descended into Florence, which was pretty often, she manifested neither impatience nor curiosity, but suffered herself to fall into the fortuitous fashion of wandering about it that he recommended. We had neither guide nor guide-book; and, if any of us showed a disposition to enter here or to linger there, we entered or lingered as a matter of course. Lamia was left to her own impulses in giving much or little attention to tomb, fresco, statue, altar-piece, pulpit, or doorway; nor was she distracted by any information concerning them till she asked for it. Then, indeed, it was given most willingly, and it was rarely that one or other of us could not answer her inquiries. The Poet and I were sometimes at fault, but Veronica never. If you think that by such a method as this much must have been overlooked that is well deserving of notice, you must remember there was nothing to prevent us from returning to the same chapel or sacristy, the same monument or bas-relief, again and again; and, so varying is the human mood in general, and Lamia’s mood in particular, that what she would pass by on one occasion would wholly engross her attention in another. Thus there was a certain method underlying our apparent purposelessness, and I fancy she ended by knowing fully as much about Florence as those who order their visits to its innumerable treasures, while I am sure she enjoyed herself infinitely more. Moreover, this unsystematic system of artistic vagrancy issued sometimes in welcome surprises that extended the experience of all of us. One evening, for instance, just as we were on the point of quitting the city and driving homeward, Lamia said: