“We visited my well-loved church of San Pietro, that treasure-house left undespoiled by the Italian Government—safeguarded, not as a place of worship—let that be well understood—but as ‘an Art Monument.’ So its pictures and carvings are left in the places their authors intended them for and not nailed up stark and shivering in a cold, staring museum, like the poor altar pieces and modest bits of delicate carving that have been wrenched from their life-long homes in so many churches throughout this country. True, in the museum the light is good, far better for showing the artist’s work than the ‘dim religious light’ of a church. But the painter knew all about the bad light, and still painted his picture for such and such an altar, not to his own glory, but to the glory of God.
“As we were passing once more the rich-toned Duomo and Nicola Pisano’s lovely fountain that stands before it, we saw the fountain suddenly surrounded by an eruption of Bersaglieri, who woke the echoes of that erst-while silent Piazza with their songs and chaff. They were on manœuvres and were halting here for the day. Shedding heavy hats and knapsacks, they had run down to fill their canteens and water-barrels. Toujours gais are the Bersaglieri, and a very pretty sight it was to see those good-looking healthy lads in their red fatigue fezes unbending in this picturesque manner. In the evening they were off again with the fanfaronade of their massed trumpets spurring their pas gymnastique to the farthest point of swagger, and Perugia returned to its repose.
“We strolled about the streets by the light of the moon and felt the silence of those narrow ways. Now a cat would run into the light and disappear into blackness; a man in a cloak would emerge from a dark alley, as it were at the back of a stage, and, coming forward into the moonlight of an open space, look ready to begin a tenor love-song to an overhanging balcony (the lady not yet to the fore)—the opening scene in an opera after the overture of the Bersaglieri trumpets. Assuredly this was old Italy. The one modern touch is a very lovely one. In place of the old and rank olive-oil lamps of my first visit, burning at street corners under the little holy images and in the recesses of the wine-shops, there are drops of exquisite electric light. Thank goodness, the hideous interval of gas is nearing its extinction in Italy and the blessed ‘white coal’ which this country can generate so cheaply by her abundant water-power, will e’er very long become the agent of her machine-driven industries and illuminate with soft radiance her gracious cities. I think the Via Nuova at Genoa, that street of palaces, glowing in the light of those great electric globes, swung across from side to side, is a quite splendid bit of modernity, for which I tender the Genoese my hearty thanks. ‘Grazie, Signori!’”
VESUVIUS
COMMEND me to a darkening winter afternoon amidst the fires of Vesuvius for bringing the mind down to first principles! This is what we poetise, and paint, and dance on—this Thing that we are come to gaze at here in silence, as it shows through certain cracks in this shell we call the solid earth! “You are here on sufferance,” the Thing says to us, “and you do well to come and see where I show a little bit of myself. May it do you good. Remember, I am under your feet wherever you go!”
Jan. ‘96—“To-day the fumes from the nether fires came in gusts through the snorting crater, sending sulphurous smoke rolling down on the keen north wind straight into our labouring lungs as we pounded through the ashes on our way up the ‘cone.’ There is no getting at all near the hideous mouth; in attempting any such thing one would very soon be over head and ears in the yellow sulphur and lost beyond recall. I thought of the fate of a ‘mad Englishman,’ who, in spite of the warning cries of the native guides, made a dart for some outlying lesser crater, declaring he saw a shoe floating in it. Trying to hook out this precious ‘shoe’ with his walking-stick, he fell in and withered away like a moth in a candle-flame.
“I was cheered on to fresh exertions by W.’s encouraging words, otherwise I think I would have reposed by the wayside at an early stage of the ascent, yet too proud for a litter. Many of the party went up in litters ignominiously carried on men’s shoulders, but I went through the whole routine on foot, as I began; only I was inclined to halt at retardingly frequent intervals. The growls of the mountain every now and then warned us that a volley of rocks and stones was coming, and, behold! the bunch of them shot up in a wide arc over our heads. The crater is a spectacle that gives the mind such occupation as it has not had before. Talk of the Pyramids and the Sphinx that so overpowered me at Gizeh! That crater would think it a good joke to chuck them up in the air.
“But nothing impressed me into silence so heavily as the sight, later on, of a lava stream, lower down the mountain-side, issuing in thick ooze, and crawling slowly from out a gaping cavern. Liquid, deep scarlet fire was this, of the density, apparently, of oil, advancing like a fiery death to scorch and consume with slow and even flow—inexorable. No possibility of approaching its borders; even where we stood the rocks began to burn our feet. A guide flung a log of wood on the river, and it spontaneously burst into vivid flame, shrivelled up, and was gone in a puff of smoke. Turning for rest and solace from the lurid spectacle, the factitious horrors of the congealed lava all around one only deepened the sense of gloom. Curling and curdling as they cooled, the lava streams of bygone times have hardened into the most weird shapes the imagination could conceive. We seemed to be on a battlefield where Titan warriors lay distorted in their death agony; enormous mothers clasped their babies in the embrace of death, and the war-horses were monsters of pre-historic stature, petrified in the last throes.
“We could see far, far down on the plain the skeleton of poor little Pompeii like a minute raised plan delicately modelled in plaster.
“The thunders of the Bible will reverberate in my mind with more vitality since our excursion to Vesuvius.”