THE MARBLE MOUNTAINS OF CARRARA AND THE VALLEY OF THE SERCHIO FROM THE LUCCA HILLS
I never saw him more moved. In a storm of anger he left the room, crying out, "Send him away." Fortunately we had with us Henry R. Newman, the American artist, then working for Ruskin at Florence. He could do the talking to the disappointed, enraged Italian, and got rid of him—and a Napoleon of mine—after awhile. I was thankful to Newman for getting rid of the cast as well; and when the coast was clear Ruskin looked in, rather apologetic after his outburst. "I hope you didn't give the fellow anything," he said, and, of course, I was much too weak-minded to fight the case.
But I still think the object-lesson was well worth a Napoleon. That ghastly thing was not our Ilaria; any cast is a hard, dead caricature if once you have really known the living, ancient marble. And the wrath of Ruskin laid his secret bare. Do you think he could have stirred the world with mere flourishes from the pen? Falling in love was not too strong a word for the feeling that dictated, over Ilaria's marble portrait, his plea for sincerity in art: "If any of us, after staying for a time beside this tomb, could see, through his tears, one of the vain and unkind encumbrances of the grave, which, in these hollow and heartless days, feigned sorrow builds to foolish pride, he would, I believe, receive such a lesson of love as no coldness could refuse, no fatuity forget, and no insolence disobey."
To gather up the threads it may be worth while noting briefly the chief incidents in this Italian tour, with a few comments from Ruskin's unpublished diary, showing how rapidly pleasure and pain alternated in his moods.
On arrival, walking round the town, first to Ilaria and last to San Romano, he notes: "Found all. D. G." The next day he heard of the death of J. W. Bunney, who had done so much work for him at Venice, notably the large picture of St. Mark's now in the Sheffield museum. We often thought Ruskin did not feel these losses, and was a little hard when news came that old friends were gone. But under the apparent stoicism there was much real emotion; indeed, some of his later attacks of mental illness followed such events. I do not say they were the only causes, but they contributed. In April 1887, the sudden death of Laurence Hilliard, on board ship in the Ægean, undoubtedly turned the balance, and intensified weakness and worry into illness of many months' duration. In this case he wrote: "A heavy warning to me, were warning needed. But I fear death too constantly, and feel it too fatally, as it is." I think his fear of death was purely the dread of leaving his work undone, with some shrinking of the possible pain; his sense of death was in the growing limitation of his powers, which he could only forget in the presence of beautiful landscape. Thus next day, on the Lucca mountains, he "sat long watching the soft sunlighted classic hills, plumed and downy with wood, the burning russet of fallen chestnuts for foreground, thinking how lovely the world was in its light, when given."
At Florence on Oct. 4: "Hotel Gran Bretagna once more; good dinner and flask of Aleatico. Nothing hurt of Ponte Vecchio or the rest." Next morning the pendulum swung the other way, partly, I am afraid, because he could not get me to be ecstatic about the Duomo, and I almost argued him into a good word for Bronzino's "Judith." Then, again, a drive to Bellosguardo and a beautiful walk made it all right again, and a visit to Fiesole in sunshine redeemed the character of the neighbourhood. But the great event was his introduction to Mrs. and Miss Francesca Alexander, brought about through Mr. Newman, and followed by a friendship which had a great and happy influence on his later life. Miss Alexander's beautiful handwriting, and the pathos of her manuscript "Story of Ida," and her pen-drawings to the "Roadside Songs of Tuscany," which he then and there bought for "St. George" and the world, were a great discovery, to him as if he had found "the famous stone which turneth all to gold."
Returning to Lucca on the 11th he worked with zeal and power on his drawings of the Duomo, and wrote his diary with animation. Here is a vignette from it: "Sat. 14th. Wet afternoon; bought cheese and hunted for honey. Found the only view from ramparts in the evening. Tanneries and cotton-mills spoil the north-west side. Girls singing in a milly, cicadesque, incomprehensible manner. An old priest standing to hear them—thinking—I would give much to know what!"