“You have a poetical vein in you, evidently,” said M. Goefle; “but are not the people of that beautiful country dirty, idle, and voluntarily wretched?”
“Poverty is always half the fault of the government and half of the governed; the blame is never all on one side. I suppose that may be what prevents improvement. But in such a pleasant climate, the poverty produced by indolence finds an excuse in the sensuous pleasure of contemplative existence. In my youth I felt keenly this intoxicating charm of the south, and I appreciated it all the more because I felt also, from time to time, an excess of feverish energy, as if I had really been born five hundred leagues away, in those cold regions where mind exerts more authority over matter.”
“Then you were not altogether indolent yourself?”
“I believe I was not indolent at all, for my parents desired me to become a learned man, and, out of affection for them, I made great efforts to acquire knowledge. But I felt much more inclined towards the natural sciences, arts, and philosophy, than to the difficult and minute researches of the learned M. Goffredi. I thought his line of study rather useless, and was quite unable to experience such a delirium of joy as he felt when we had succeeded in determining the purpose of some ancient landmark or deciphering some Etruscan inscription. In other matters he left me perfectly free to follow my own preferences, and I lived with him in the pleasantest relations that it is possible to imagine. Indulge me in a few details about this period of my life, from infancy to youth—the time when the faculties of my soul were awakening within me.
“Perugia is a university city, a poetical place—one of the old Italian centres of beauty and learning. It is rich in antiquities and monuments of all periods; it has some fine libraries, an academy of fine arts, collections, and so forth. The city itself is beautiful and picturesque; it includes more than a hundred churches and fifty monasteries, all rich in pictures, manuscripts, etc. The Piazza del Duomo is a remarkable place, having on one side a rich Gothic cathedral, a fountain by Giovanni de Pisa, a chef-d’œuvre, and other monuments of different ages, and on the other a great palace in the Venetian style. This is a proud and strange relic of the thirteenth or fourteenth century, of a sombre red, finished with black ornaments in iron, and with its doors and windows pierced with that fantastic irregularity of design which has gone so entirely out of vogue since the introduction of the correct lines and pure taste introduced by the renaissance.
“I felt a passionate admiration for what I may call the dramatic physiognomy of this old palace, though M. Goffredi despised it as belonging to a period of barbarism. He admired only the antique, and such modern periods as are inspired by the antique. For my part, I plainly confess that all these masterpieces of exactly the same school, ancient and modern, sometimes tried very severely my power of admiring. This predetermined preference of the Italians for always going over that same old ground again, and their obstinate neglect of exactly the period when the national character was most freely expressing itself, between the absolutism of the emperors and that of the popes, had become so consecrated by public opinion, that you will pass there for a Vandal if you allow yourself to use any other than the recognized standards of excellence.[5]
“I was natural and spontaneous in my character, and accordingly I was often reproved in consequence of my love for what was indiscriminately called ‘The Gothic’—that is, everything not pertaining to the ages of Pericles, Augustus, or Raphael. It was with some effort, indeed, that my adoptive father could bring himself to admire the last of these three. His only enthusiasm was for the ruins of Rome; and when he took me thither he was surprised and scandalized to hear me say that I saw nothing there to make me forget the royal imaginativeness and effective grouping of our own Piazza del Duomo, with its great red and black palace, its assemblage of varied splendors, and its narrow, crooked streets, that suddenly plunge under gloomy arcades, with a sort of air of tragic mystery.
“I was by this time fifteen or sixteen years old, and began to be able to explain my tastes and ideas. I managed to make my father understand that it was a matter of necessity for me to be absolutely independent in all that related to taste and feeling. I could not help admiring and enjoying all efforts of genius and of invention. I found it impossible to imprison my views within a system, an epoch, or a school. In a word, I must have liberty to adore the universe, God, and that divine spark which He has given to man, wherever visible in the works of nature or of art.
“‘Thus,’ I said to him, ‘I love the beautiful sunshine and the gloomy night; our own austere Perugino and the impetuous Michael Angelo; the mighty substructures of the Romans, and the delicate pierced work of the Saracens. I love our own quiet lake Thrasymene, and the furious cataract of Terni. I love your beloved Etruscans and all your sublime ancients, but I also love the Greco-arabic cathedrals; I love equally the monumental fountain of Trevi, and the little brook that runs between two rocks in the depths of some rural solitude. Everything that is new seems to me worthy of interest and of attention; everything is dear to me that at any time seizes hold of my heart or of my thoughts. Feeling these impulses to admire whatever is beautiful or sublime, and even whatever is merely charming or agreeable, I have a great repugnance for a devotion confined to certain forms of the beautiful exclusively.
“‘But,’ I continued, ‘if you are convinced that in this I am in a wrong road, that the impulse which I feel—the desire for development in all directions—is dangerous, a symptom of an ill-regulated mental action, I will do my best to repress it, and throw myself entirely into whatever course of study you may mark out for me. I desire, above all things, to be what you wish me to be; but, my dear father, before you cut my wings, please to make yourself certain that there is nothing worth preserving in all this vain plumage.’