LETTER XXIV. MARY ANNE DODD TO MISS DOOLAN, OF BALLYDOOLAN.
Lucca, Pagnini's Hotel.
Dearest Kitty,—This must be the very shortest of letters, for we are on the wing, and shall be for some days to come. Very few words, however, will suffice to tell you that we have at length persuaded papa to come on to Florence,—for the winter, of course. Rome will follow,—then Naples,—e poi?—who knows! I think he must have received some very agreeable tidings from your uncle Purcell, for he has been in better spirits than I have seen him latterly, and shows something like a return to his old vein of pleasantry. Not but I must own that it is what the French would call, very often, a mauvaise plaisanterie in its exercise, his great amusement being to decry and disparage the people of the Continent. He seems quite to forget that in every country the traveller is, and must be, a mark for knavery and cheating. His newness to the land, his ignorance, in almost all cases, of the language, his occasional mistakes, all point him out as a proper subject for imposition; and if the English come to compare notes with any Continental country, I'm not so sure we should have much to plume ourselves upon, as regards our treatment of strangers.
For our social misadventures abroad, it must be confessed that we are mainly most to blame ourselves. All the counterfeits of rank, station, and position are so much better done by foreigners than by our people, that we naturally are more easily imposed on. Now in England, for instance, it would be easier to be a duchess than to imitate one successfully. All the attributes that go to make up such a station abroad, might be assumed by any adventurer of little means and less capacity. We forget—or, more properly speaking, we do not know—this, when we come first on the Continent; hence the mistakes we fall into, and the disasters that assail us.
It would be very disagreeable for me to explain at length how what I mentioned to you about James's marriage has come to an untimely conclusion. Enough when I say that the lady was not, in any respect, what she had represented herself, and my dear brother may be said to have had a most fortunate escape. Of course the poor fellow has suffered considerably from the disappointment, nor are his better feelings alleviated by the—I will say—very indelicate raillery papa is pleased to indulge in on the subject. It is, however, a theme I do not care to linger on, and I only thus passively allude to it that it may be buried in oblivion between us.
We came along here from Genoa by the seaboard, a very beautiful and picturesque road, traversing a wild range of the Apennines, and almost always within view of the blue Mediterranean. At Spezia we loitered for a day or two, to bathe, and I must say nothing can be more innocently primitive than the practice as followed there.
Ladies and gentlemen—men and women, if you like it better—all meet in the water as they do on land, or rather not as they do on land, but in a very first-parentage state of no-dressedness. There they splash, swim, dive, and converse,—float, flirt, talk gossip, and laugh with a most laudable forgetfulness of externals. Introductions and presentations go forward as they would in society, and a gentleman asks you to duck instead of to dance with him. It would be affectation in me were I not to say that I thought all this very shocking at first, and that I really could scarcely bring myself to adopt it; but Lord George, who really swims to perfection, laughed me out of some, and reasoned me out of others of my prejudices, and I will own, dearest Kitty, his arguments were unanswerable.
"Were you not very much ashamed," said he, "the first time you saw a ballet, or 'poses plastiques'?—did not the whole strike you as exceedingly indelicate?—and now, would not that very same sense of shame occur to you as real indelicacy, since in these exhibitions it is Art alone you admire,—Art in its graceful development? The 'Ballarina' is not a woman; she is an ideal,—she is a Hebe, a Psyche, an Ariadne, or an Aphrodite. Symmetry, grace, beauty of outline,—these are the charms that fascinate you. Can you not, therefore, extend this spirit to the sea, and, instead of the Marquis of this and the Countess of that, only behold Tritono and sea-nymphs disporting in the flood?"
I saw at once the force of this reasoning, Kitty, and perceived that to take any lower view of the subject would be really a gross indelicacy. I tried to make Cary agree with me, but utterly in vain,—she is so devoid of imagination! There is, too, an utter want of refinement in her mind positively hopeless. She even confessed to me that Lord George without his clothes still seemed Lord George to her, and that no effort she could make was able to persuade her that the old Danish Minister in the black leather skullcap had any resemblance to a river god. Mamma behaved much better; seeing that the custom was one followed by all the "best people," she adopted it at once, and though she would scream out whenever a gentleman came to talk to her, I 'm sure, with a few weeks' practice, she 'd have perfectly reconciled herself to "etiquette in the water." Should you, with your very Irish notions, raise hands and eyes at all this, and mutter, "How very dreadful!—how shocking!" and so on, I have only to remind you of what the Princess Pauline said to an English lady, who expressed her prudish horrors at the Princess having "sat for Canova in wet drapery": "Oh, it was not so disagreeable as you think; there was always a fire in the room." Now, Kitty, I make the same reply to your shocked scruples, by saying the sea was deliciously warm. Bathing is here, indeed, a glorious luxury. There is no shivering or shuddering, no lips chattering, blue-nosed, goose-skinned misery, like the home process! It is not a rush in, in desperation, a duck in agony, and a dressing in ague, but a delicious lounge, associated with all the enjoyments of scenery and society. The temperature of the sea is just sufficiently below that of the air to invigorate without chilling, like the tone of a company that stimulates without exhausting you. It is, besides, indescribably pleasant to meet with a pastime so suggestive of new themes of talk. Instead of the tiresome and trite topics of ballet and balls, and dress and diamonds, your conversation smacks of salt water, and every allusion "hath suffered a sea change." Instead of a compliment to your dancing, the flattery is now on your diving; and he who once offered his arm to conduct you to the "buffet," now proposes his company to swim out to a lifebuoy!
And now let me get back to land once more, and you will begin to fancy that your correspondent is Undine herself in disguise. I was very sorry to leave Spezia, since I was just becoming an excellent swimmer. Indeed, the surgeon of an American frigate assured me that he thought "I had been raised in the Sandwich Islands,"—a compliment which, of course, I felt bound to accept in the sense that most flattered me.