CHAPTER IX. Florence
What did Shelley, what does any one, mean by their raptures about Florence? Never, surely, was the epithet of La Bella more misapplied. I can well understand the enthusiasm with which men call Genoa Il Superbo. Its mountain background, its deep blue sea, its groves of orange and acacia, the prickly aloe growing wild upon the very shore in all the luxuriance of tropical vegetation, indicative of an almost wasteful extravagance of production; while its amphitheatre of palaces, proudly rising in terraced rows, are gorgeous remembrances of the haughty Republic. But Florence! dark, dirty, and discordant! Palaces, gaol-like and gloomy, stand in streets where wretchedness and misery seem to have chosen their dwelling-place—the types of feudal tyranny side by side with modern destitution. The boasted Arno, too, a shrunk-up, trickling stream, not wide enough to be a river, not clear enough to be a rivulet, winds along between hills hot and sun-scorched, where the brown foliage has no touch of freshness, but stands parched and shrivelled by the hot glare of eternal noon. The white-walled villas glisten in the dazzling heat, not tempered by the slightest shade, but reflecting back the scorching glow from rocks cracked and fissured by the sun!
How disappointing is all this! and how wearisome is the endeavour, from the scattered objects here and there, to make any approach to that Florence one has imagined to himself! To me the abstraction is impossible. I carry about with me, even into the galleries, before the triumphs of Raf-faelle and the wonders of Michael Angelo, the sad discordant scenes through which I have passed. The jarred senses are rendered incapable of properly appreciating and feeling those influences that should diffuse their effect upon the mind; and even the sight of the “Guardia Civica,” strutting in solemn mockery beneath the archways where the proud Medici have trod, are contrasts to suggest rather a sense of sarcasm than of pleasure.
Here and there you do come upon some grand and imposing pile of building, the very stones of which seem laid by giant hands; but even these have the fortress character, the air of strongholds, rather than of princely dwellings, as at Genoa. You see at once how much more defence and safety were the guiding principles, than elegance of design and beauty of proportion. No vestibule, peopled with its marble groups, opens here to the passer-by a glimpse of a noble stair rising in spacious amplitude between walls of marble. No gate of gilded fretwork shews the terraced garden, with the plashing fountains, and the orange-trees bending with their fruit.
Like all continental cities where the English congregate, the inhabitants have a mongrel look, grafting English notions of dress and equipage upon their own, and, like most imitators, only successful in following the worst models. The Cascini, too, exhibits a very motley assemblage of gaudy liveries and, dusky carriages, riding-grooms dressed like footmen, their masters no bad resemblance to the “Jeunes Premiers” of a vaudeville. The men are very inferior in appearance to the Milanese; they are neither as well-built nor well-grown, and rarely have any pretensions to a fashionable exterior. The women are mostly ill-dressed, and, in no instance that I have seen, even well-looking. They have the wearied look, without the seductive languor, of the South; they are pale, but not fair; and their gestures are neither plastic nor graceful. In fact, in all that I have seen here, I am sadly disappointed-all, save the Raffaelle’s! they are above my conception of them.
How much of this lies in myself I dare not stop to inquire; a large share, perhaps, but assuredly not all. This climate should be avoided by those of weak chest. Symptoms of further “breaking-up” crowd upon me each day; and this burning sun and piercing wind make a sad conflict in the debilitated frame. But where to go, where to seek out a quiet spot to linger a few days and die! Rome is in all the agonies of its mock liberty—Naples in open revolt: here, where I am, all rule and government have ceased to exist; the mob have every thing at their mercy: that they have not abused their power, is more owing to their ignorance than their honour. When the Irish rebels carried the town of Ross by storm, they broke into the grocers’ shops to eat sugar! The Florentines having bullied the Duke, are only busied about the new uniforms of their Civic Guard!
Hitherto the reforms have gone no further than in organising this same National Guard, and in thrashing the police authorities wherever found. Now, bad as this police was, it was still the only protection to the public peace. It exists no longer; and Tuscany has made her first step in liberty “en Américaine” by adopting “Lynch Law.”
I was about to note down a singular instance of this indignant justice of the people, when the arrival of a letter, in a hand unknown to me, suddenly-routed all my intentions. If I am able to record the circumstance here, calmly and without emotion, it is neither from that philosophy the world teaches, nor from any higher motive—it is merely on the same principle that one would bear with tolerable equanimity the break-down of a carriage when within a few miles of the journey’s end! The fact, then, is simply this, that I, Horace Templeton, whose draughts a few days back might have gone far into the “tens of thousands,” without fear of “dishonour,” am now ruined! When we read this solemn word in the newspapers, we at once look back to the rank and station of him whose ruin is predicated. A Duke is “ruined” when he must sell three packs of hounds, three studs of horses, four of his five or six mansions, part with his yacht at Cowes, and his racers at Newmarket, and retire to the Continent with a beggarly pittance of some fifteen thousand per annum. A Merchant is ruined when, by the sudden convulsions of mercantile affairs, he is removed from the unlimited command of millions to pass his days, at Leamington or Cheltenham, on his wife’s jointure of two thousand a-year.
His clerk is ruined when he drops his pocket-book on his way from the Bank, and loses six hundred pounds belonging to the firm. His is more real ruin, for it implies stoppages, suspicion—mayhap loss of place, and its consequences.