Travelling Companions: I
I.
THE most strictly impressive picture in Italy is incontestably the Last Supper of Leonardo at Milan. A part of its immense solemnity is doubtless due to its being one of the first of the great Italian masterworks that you encounter in coming down from the North. Another secondary source of interest resides in the very completeness of its decay. The mind finds a rare delight in filling each of its vacant spaces, effacing its rank defilement, and repairing, as far as possible, its sad disorder. Of the essential power and beauty of the work there can be no better evidence than this fact that, having lost so much, it has yet retained so much. An unquenchable elegance lingers in those vague outlines and incurable scars ; enough remains to place you in sympathy with the unfathomable wisdom of the painter. The fresco covers a wall, the reader will remember, at the end of the former refectory of a monastery now suppressed, the precinct of which is occupied by a regiment of cavalry. Horses stamp, soldiers rattle their oaths, in the cloisters which once echoed to the sober tread of monastic sandals and the pious greetings of meek-voiced friars.
It was the middle of August, and summer sat brooding fiercely over the streets of Milan. The great brickwrought dome of the church of St. Mary of the Graces rose black with the heat against the brazen sky. As my fiacre drew up in front of the church, I found another vehicle in possession of the little square of shade which carpeted the glaring pavement before the adjoining convent. I left the two drivers to share this advantage as they could, and made haste to enter the cooler presence of the Cenacolo. Here I found the occupants of the fiacre without, a young lady and an elderly man. Here also, besides the official who takes your tributary franc, sat a longhaired copyist, wooing back the silent secrets of the great fresco into the cheerfullest commonplaces of yellow and blue. The gentleman was earnestly watching this ingenious operation ; the young lady sat with her eyes fixed on the picture, from which she failed to move them when I took my place on a line with her. I too, however, speedily became as unconscious of her presence as she of mine, and lost myself in the study of the work before us. A single glance had assured me that she was an American.
Since that day, I have seen all the great art treasures of Italy : I have seen Tintoretto at Venice, Michael Angelo at Florence and Rome, Correggio at Parma ; but I have looked at no other picture with an emotion equal to that which rose within me as this great creation of Leonardo slowly began to dawn upon my intelligence from the tragical twilight of its ruin. A work so nobly conceived can never utterly die, so long as the half-dozen main lines of its design remain. Neglect and malice are less cunning than the genius of the great painter. It has stored away with masterly skill such a wealth of beauty as only perfect love and sympathy can fully detect. So, under my eyes, the restless ghost of the dead fresco returned to its mortal abode. From the beautiful central image of Christ I perceived its radiation right and left along the sadly broken line of the disciples. One by one, out of the depths of their grim dismemberment, the figures trembled into meaning and life, and the vast, serious beauty of the work stood revealed. What is the ruling force of this magnificent design ? Is it art? is it science ? is it sentiment ? is it knowledge ? I am sure I can’t say ; but in moments of doubt and depression I find it of excellent use to recall the great picture with all possible distinctness. Of all the works of man’s hands it is the least superficial.
The young lady’s companion finished his survey of the copyist’s work and came and stood behind his chair. The reader will remember that a door has been rudely cut in the wall, a part of it entering the fresco.
“ He has n’t got in that door,” said the old gentleman, speaking apparently of the copyist.
The young lady was silent. “Well, my dear,” he continued. “ What do you think of it ? ”
The young girl gave a sigh. “ I see it,” she said.
“You see it, eh? Well, I suppose there is nothing more to be done.”
The young lady rose slowly, drawing on her glove. As her eyes were still on the fresco, I was able to observe her. Beyond doubt she was American. Her age I fancied to be twenty-two. She was of middle stature, with a charming slender figure. Her hair was brown, her complexion fresh and clear. She wore a white piqué dress and a black lace shawl, and on her thick dark braids a hat with a purple feather. She was largely characterized by that physical delicacy and that personal elegance (each of them sometimes excessive) which seldom fail to betray my young countrywomen in Europe. The gentleman, who was obviously her father, bore the national stamp as plainly as she. A shrewd, firm, generous face, which told of many dealings with many men, of stocks and shares and current prices,—a face, moreover, in which there lingered the mellow afterglow of a sense of excellent claret. He was bald and grizzled, this perfect American, and he wore a short-bristled white moustache between the two hard wrinkles forming the sides of a triangle of which his mouth was the base and the ridge of his nose, where his eyeglass sat, the apex. In deference perhaps to this exotic growth, he was
better dressed than is common with the typical American citizen, in a blue necktie, a white waistcoat, and a pair of gray trousers. As his daughter still lingered, he looked at me with an eye of sagacious conjecture.
“ Ah, that beautiful, beautiful, beautiful Christ,” said the young lady, in a tone which betrayed her words in spite of its softness. “ O father, what a picture ! ”
“ Hum ! ” said her father, “ I don’t see it.”
“ I must get a photograph,” the young girl rejoined. She turned away and walked to the farther end of the hall, where the custodian presides at a table of photographs and prints. Meanwhile her father had perceived my Murray.
“English, sir?” he demanded.
“ No, I’m an American, like yourself, I fancy.”
“ Glad to make your acquaintance, sir. From New York ? ”
“ From New York. I have been absent from home, however, for a number of years.”
“ Residing in this part of the world ? ”
“No. I have been living in Germany. I have only just come into Italy.”
“Ah, so have we. The young lady is my daughter. She is crazy about Italy. We were very nicely fixed at Interlaken, when suddenly she read in some confounded book or other that Italy should be seen in summer. So she dragged me over the mountains into this fiery furnace. I’m actually melting away. I have lost five pounds in three days.”
I replied that the heat was indeed intense, but that I agreed with his daughter that Italy should be seen in summer. What could be pleasanter than the temperature of that vast cool hall ?
“Ah, yes,” said my friend ; “ I suppose we shall have plenty of this kind of thing. It makes no odds to me, so long as my poor girl has a good time.”
“ She seems,” I remarked, “ to be having a pretty good time with the photographs.” In fact, she was comparing photographs with a great deal of apparent energy, while the salesman lauded his wares in the Italian manner. We strolled over to the table. The young girl was seemingly in treaty for a large photograph of the head of Christ, in which the blurred and fragmentary character of the original was largely intensified, though much of its exquisite pathetic beauty was also preserved. “They ’ll not think much of that at home,” said the old gentleman.
“ So much the worse for them,” said his daughter, with an accent of delicate pity. With the photograph in her hand, she walked back to the fresco. Her father engaged in an English dialogue with the custodian. In the course of five minutes, wishing likewise to compare the copy and the original, I returned to the great picture. As I drew near it the young lady turned away. Her eyes then for the first time met my own. They were deep and dark and luminous, — I fancied streaming with tears. I watched her as she returned to the table. Her walk seemed to me peculiarly graceful ; light, and rapid, and yet full of decision and dignity. A thrill of delight passed through my heart as I guessed at her moistened lids.
“ Sweet fellow - countrywoman,” I cried in silence, “ you have the divine gift of feeling.” And I returned to the fresco with a deepened sense of its virtue. When I turned around, my companions had left the room.
In spite of the great heat, I was prepared thoroughly to “do” Milan. In fact, I rather enjoyed the heat; it seemed to my Northern senses to deepen the Italian, the Southern, the local character of things. On that blazing afternoon, I have not forgotten, I went to the church of St. Ambrose, to the Ambrosian Library, to a dozen minor churches. Every step distilled a richer drop into the wholesome cup of pleasure. From my earliest manhood, beneath a German sky, I had dreamed of this Italian pilgrimage, and, after much waiting and working and planning, I had at last undertaken it in a spirit of fervent devotion. There had been moments in Germany when I fancied myself a clever man; but it now seemed to me that for the first time I really felt my intellect. Imagination, panting and exhausted, withdrew from the game ; and Observation stepped into her place, trembling and glowing with open-eyed desire.
I had already been twice to the Cathedral, and had wandered through the clustering inner darkness of the high arcades which support those lightdefying pinnacles and spires. Towards the close of the afternoon I found myself strolling once more over the great column - planted, altar - studded pavement, with the view of ascending to the roof. On presenting myself at the little door in the right transept, through which you gain admission to the upper regions, I perceived my late fellow-visitors of the fresco preparing apparently for an upward movement, but not without some reluctance on the paternal side. The poor gentleman had been accommodated with a chair, on which he sat fanning himself with his hat and looking painfully apoplectic. The sacristan meanwhile held open the door with an air of invitation. But my corpulent friend, with his thumb in his Murray, balked at the ascent. Recognizing me, his face expressed a sudden sense of vague relief.
“ Have you been up, sir ? ” he inquired, groaningly.
I answered that I was about to ascend ; and recalling then the fact, which I possessed rather as information than experience, that young American ladies may not improperly detach themselves on occasion from the parental side, I ventured to declare that, if my friend was unwilling to encounter the fatigue of mounting to the roof in person, I should be most happy, as a fellow-countryman, qualified already perhaps to claim a traveller’s acquaintance, to accompany and assist his daughter.
“ You ’re very good, sir,” said the poor man; “ I confess that I ’m about played out. I’d far rather sit here and watch these pretty Italian ladies saying their prayers. Charlotte, what do you say ? ”
“Of course if you’re tired I should be sorry to have you make the effort,” said Charlotte. “ But I believe the great thing is to see the view from the roof. I ’m much obliged to the gentleman.”
It was arranged accordingly that we should ascend together. “ Good luck to you,” cried my friend, “and mind you take good care of her.”
Those who have rambled among the marble immensities of the summit of Milan Cathedral will hardly expect me to describe them. It is only when they have been seen as a complete concentric whole that they can be properly appreciated. It was not as a whole that I saw them ; a week in Italy had assured me that I have not the architectural coup d'&$339;il. In looking back on the scene into which we emerged from the stifling spiral of the ascent, I have chiefly a confused sense of an immense skyward elevation and a fierce blinding efflorescence of fantastic forms of marble. There, reared for the action of the sun, you find a vast marble world. The solid whiteness lies in mighty slabs along the iridescent slopes of nave and transept, like the lonely snow-fields of the higher Alps. It leaps and climbs and shoots and attacks the unsheltered blue with a keen and joyous incision. It meets the pitiless sun with a more than equal glow ; the day falters, declines, expires, but the marble shines forever, unmelted and unintermittent. You will know what I mean if you have looked upward from the Piazza at midnight. With confounding frequency too, on some uttermost point of a pinnacle, its plastic force explodes into satisfied rest in some perfect flower of a figure. A myriad carven statues, known only to the circling air, are poised and niched beyond reach of human vision, the loss of which to mortal eyes is, I suppose, the gain of the Church and the Lord. Among all the jewelled shrines and overwrought tabernacles of Italy, I have seen no such magnificent waste of labor, no such glorious synthesis of cunning secrets. As you wander, sweating and blinking, over the changing levels of the edifice, your eye catches at a hundred points the little profile of a little saint, looking out into the dizzy air, a pair of folded hands praying to the bright immediate heavens, a sandalled monkish foot planted on the edge of the white abyss. And then, besides this mighty world of the great Cathedral itself, you possess the view of all green Lombardy, — vast, lazy Lombardy, resting from its Alpine upheavals.
My companion carried a little white umbrella, with a violet lining. Thus protected from the sun, she climbed and gazed with abundant courage and spirit. Her movements, her glance, her voice, were full of intelligent pleasure. Now that I could observe her closely, I saw that, though perhaps without regular beauty, she was yet, for youth, summer, and Italy, more than pretty enough. Owing to my residence in Germany, among Germans, in a small university town, Americans had come to have for me, in a large degree, the interest of novelty and remoteness. Of the charm of American women, in especial, I had formed a very high estimate, and I was more than ready to be led captive by the farfamed graces of their frankness and freedom. I already felt that in the young girl beside me there was a different quality of womanhood from any that I had recently known ; a keenness, a maturity, a conscience, which deeply stirred my curiosity. It was positive, not negative maidenhood.
“You’re an American,” I said, as we stepped to look at the distance.
“Yes; and you?” In her voice alone the charm faltered. It was high, thin, and nervous.
“ O, happily, I ’m also one.”
“ I should n’t have thought so. I should have taken you for a German.”
“ By education I am a German. I knew you were an American the moment I looked at you.”
“ I suppose so. It seems that American women are easily recognized. But don’t talk about America.” She paused and swept her dark eye over the whole immensity of prospect. “This is Italy,” she cried, “ Italy, Italy ! ”
“ Italy indeed. What do you think of the Leonardo.”
“ I fancy there can be only one feeling about it. It must be the saddest and finest of all pictures. But I know nothing of art. I have seen nothing yet but that lovely Raphael in the Brera.”
“You have a vast deal before you. You ’re going southward, I suppose.”
“Yes, we are going directly to Venice. There I shall see Titian.”
“Titian and Paul Veronese.”
“Yes, I can hardly believe it. Have you ever been in a gondola ? ”
“ No ; this is my first visit to Italy.”
“Ah, this is all new, then, to you as well.”
“ Divinely new,” said I, with fervor.
She glanced at me, with a smile, —a ray of friendly pleasure in my pleasure. “And you are not disappointed ! ”
“ Not a jot. I ’m too good a German.”
“ I’m too good an American. I live at Araminta, New Jersey ! ”
We thoroughly “did” the high places of the church, concluding with an ascent into the little gallery of the central spire. The view from this spot is beyond all words, especially the view toward the long mountain line which shuts out the North. The sun was sinking: clear and serene upon their blue foundations, the snow-peaks sat clustered and scattered, and shrouded in silence and light. To the south the long shadows fused and multiplied, and the bosky Lombard flats melted away into perfect Italy. This prospect offers a great emotion to the Northern traveller. A vague, delicious impulse of conquest stirs in his heart. From his dizzy vantage-point, as he looks down at her, beautiful, historic, exposed, he embraces the whole land in the far-reaching range of his desire. “ That is Monte Rosa,” I said; “ that is the Simplon pass ; there is the triple glitter of those lovely lakes.”
“Poor Monte Rosa,” said my companion.
“ I ’m sure I never thought of Monte Rosa as an object of pity.”
“You don’t know what she represents. She represents the genius of the North. There she stands, frozen and fixed, resting her head upon that mountain wall, looking over at this lovely southern world and yearning towards it forever in vain.”
“ It is very well she can’t come over. She would melt.”
“ Very true. She is beautiful, too, in her own way. I mean to fancy that I am her chosen envoy, and that I have come up here to receive her blessing.”
I made an attempt to point out a few localities. “Yonder lies Venice, out of sight. In the interval are a dozen divine little towns. I hope to visit them all. I shall ramble all day in their streets and churches, their little museums, and their great palaces. In the evening I shall sit at the door of a café in the little piazza, scanning some lovely civic edifice in the moonlight, and saying, ‘ Ah ! this is Italy ! ’ ”
“ You gentlemen are certainly very happy. I’m afraid we must go straight to Venice.”
“ Your father insists upon it ? ”
“ He wishes it. Poor father ! in early life he formed the habit of being in a hurry, and he can’t break it even now, when, being out of business, he has nothing on earth to do.”
“ But in America I thought daughters insisted as well as fathers.”
The young girl looked at me, half serious, half smiling. “ Have you a mother?” she asked ; and then, blushing the least bit at her directness and without waiting for an answer, “This is not America,” she said. “ I should like to think I might become for a while a creature of Italy.”
Somehow I felt a certain contagion in her momentary flash of frankness. “I strongly suspect,” I said, “ that you are American to the depths of your soul, and that you ’ll never be anything else ; I hope not.”
In this hope of mine there was perhaps a little impertinence ; but my companion looked at me with a gentle smile, which seemed to hint that she forgave it. “You, on the other hand,” she said, “are a perfect German, I fancy; and you ’ll never be anything else.”
“ I am sure I wish with all my heart,” I answered, “ to be a good American. I’m open to conversion. Try me.”
“ Thank you ; I have n’t the ardor ; I ’ll make you over to my father. We must n’t forget, by the way, that he is waiting for us.”
We did forget it, however, awhile longer. We came down from the tower and made our way to the balustrade which edges the front of the edifice, and looked down on the city and the piazza below. Milan had, to my sense, a peculiar charm of temperate gayety, — the softness of the South without its laxity ; and I felt as if I could gladly spend a month there. The common life of the streets was beginning to stir and murmur again, with the subsiding heat and the approaching night. There came up into our faces a delicious emanation as from the sweetness of Transalpine life. At the little balconies of the windows, beneath the sloping awnings, with their feet among the crowded flower-pots and their plump bare arms on the iron rails, lazy, dowdy Italian beauties would appear, still drowsy with the broken siesta. Beautiful, slim young officers had begun to dot the pavement, glorious with their clanking swords, their brown moustaches, and their legs of azure. In gentle harmony with these, various ladies of Milan were issuing forth to enjoy the cool; elegant, romantic, provoking, in short black dresses and lace mantillas depending from their chignons, with a little cloud of powder artfully enhancing the darkness of their hair and eyes. How it all was n’t Germany! how it couldn’t have been Araminta, New Jersey ! “ It’s the South, the South,” I kept repeating, — “the South in nature, in man, in manners.” It was a brighter world. “ It’s the South,” I said to my companion. “Don’t you feel it in all your nerves ? ”
“ O, it’s very pleasant,” she said.
“ We must forget all our cares and duties and sorrows. We must go in for the beautiful. Think of this great trap for the sunbeams, in this city of yellows and russets and crimsons, of liquid vowels and glancing smiles being, like one of our Northern cathedrals, a temple to Morality and Conscience. It does n’t belong to heaven, but to earth, — to love and light and pleasure.”
My friend was silent a moment. “ I’m glad I’m not a Catholic,” she said at last. “ Come, we must go down.”
We found the interior of the Cathedral delightfully cool and shadowy. The young lady’s father was not at our place of ingress, and we began to walk through the church in search of him. We met a number of Milanese ladies, who charmed us with their sombre elegance and the Spanish romance of their veils. With these pale penitents and postulants my companion had a lingering sisterly sympathy.
“ Don’t you wish you were a Catholic now ? ” I asked. “ It would be so pleasant to wear one of those lovely mantillas.”
“ The mantillas are certainly becoming,” she said. “But who knows what horrible old-world sorrows and fears and remorses they cover ? Look at this person.” We were standing near the great altar. As she spoke, a woman rose from her knees, and as she drew the folds of her lace mantle across her bosom, fixed her large dark eyes on us with a peculiar significant intensity. She was of less than middle age, with a pale, haggard face, a certain tarnished elegance of dress, and a remarkable nobleness of gesture and carriage. She came towards us, with an odd mixture, in her whole expression, of decency and defiance. “ Are you English ? ” she said in Italian. “You are very pretty. Is he a brother or a lover ? ” “ He is neither,” said I, affecting a tone of rebuke.
“Neither? only a friend ! You are very happy to have a friend, Signorina. Ah, you are pretty! You were watching me at my prayers just now; you thought me very curious, apparently.
I don't care. You may see me here any day. But I devoutly hope you may never have to pray such bitter, bitter prayers as mine. A thousand excuses.” And she went her way.
“ What in the world does she mean ? ” said my companion.
“ Monte Rosa,” said I, " was the genius of the North. This poor woman is the genius of the Picturesque. She shows us the essential misery that lies behind it. It ’s not an unwholesome lesson to receive at the outset. Look at her sweeping down the aisle. What a poise of the head ! The picturesque is handsome, all the same.”
“ I do wonder what is her trouble,” murmured the young girl. “ She has swept away an illusion in the folds of those black garments.”
“ Well,” said I, “ here is a solid fact to replace it.” My eyes had just lighted upon the object of our search. He sat in a chair, half tilted back against a pillar. His chin rested on his shirtbosom, and his hands were folded together over his waistcoat, where it most protruded. Shirt and waistcoat rose and fell with visible, audible regularity. I wandered apart and left his daughter to deal with him. When she had fairly aroused him, he thanked me heartily for my care of the young lady, and expressed the wish that we might meet again. “We start to-morrow for Venice,” he said. “I want awfully to get a whiff of the sea-breeze and to see if there is anything to be got out of a gondola.”
As I expected also to be in Venice before many days, I had little doubt of our meeting. In consideration of this circumstance, my friend proposed hat we should exchange cards ; which we accordingly did, then and there, before the high altar, above the gorgeous chapel which enshrines the relics of St. Charles Borromeus. It was thus that I learned his name to be Mr. Mark Evans.
“ Take a few notes for us ! ” said Miss Evans, as I shook her hand in farewell.
I spent the evening, after dinner, strolling among the crowded streets of the city, tasting of Milanese humanity. At the door of a café I perceived Mr. Evans seated at a little round table. He seemed to have discovered the merits of absinthe. I wondered where he had left his daughter. She was in her room, I fancied, writing her journal.
The fortnight which followed my departure from Milan was in all respects memorable and delightful. With an interest that hourly deepened as I read, I turned the early pages of the enchanting romance of Italy. I carried out in detail the programme which I had sketched for Miss Evans. Those few brief days, as I look back on them, seem to me the sweetest, fullest, calmest of my life. All personal passions, all restless egotism, all worldly hopes, regrets, and fears were stilled and absorbed in the steady perception of the material present. It exhaled the pure essence of romance. What words can reproduce the picture which these Northern Italian towns project upon a sympathetic retina ? They are shabby, deserted, dreary, decayed, unclean. In those August days the southern sun poured into them with a fierceness which might have seemed fatal to any lurking shadow of picturesque mystery. But taking them as cruel time had made them and left them, I found in them an immeasurable instruction and charm. My perception seemed for the first time to live a sturdy creative life of its own. How it fed upon the mouldy crumbs of the festal past! I have always thought the observant faculty a windy impostor, so long as it refuses to pocket pride and doff its bravery and crawl on all-fours, if need be, into the unillumined corners and crannies of life. In these dead cities of Verona, Mantua, Padua, how life had revelled and postured in its strength ! How sentiment and passion had blossomed and flowered ! How much of history had been performed ! What a wealth of mortality had ripened and decayed ! I have never elsewhere got so deep an impression of the social secrets of mankind. In England, even, in those verdure-stifled haunts of domestic peace which muffle the sounding chords of British civilization, one has a fainter sense of the possible movement and fruition of individual character. Beyond a certain point you fancy it merged in the general medium of duty, business, and politics. In Italy, in spite of your knowledge of the strenuous public conscience which once inflamed these compact little states, the unapplied, spontaneous moral life of society seems to have been more active and more subtle. I walked about with a volume of Stendahl in my pocket; at every step I gathered some lingering testimony to the exquisite vanity of ambition.
But the great emotion, after all, was to feel myself among scenes in which art had ranged so freely. It had often enough been bad, but it had never ceased to be art. An invincible instinct of beauty had presided at life, —an instinct often ludicrously crude and primitive. Wherever I turned I found a vital principle of grace, — from the smile of a chambermaid to the curve of an arch. My memory reverts with an especial tenderness to certain hours in the dusky, faded saloons of those vacant, ruinous palaces which boast of “ collections.” The pictures are frequently poor, but the visitor’s impression is generally rich. The brick-tiled floors are bare ; the doors lack paint ; the great windows, curtains ; the chairs and tables have lost their gilding and their damask drapery ; but the ghost of a graceful aristocracy treads at your side and does the melancholy honors of the abode with a dignity that brooks no sarcasm. You feel that art and piety here have been blind, generous instincts. You are reminded in persuasive accents of the old personal regimen in human affairs. Certain pictures are veiled and curtained virginibus puerisqne. Through these tarnished halls lean and patient abbés led their youthful virginal pupils. Have you read Stendahl’s Chartreuse de Parme ? There was such a gallery in the palace of the Duchess of San Severino. After a long day of strolling, lounging, and staring, I found a singularly perfect pleasure in sitting at the door of a café in the warm starlight, eating an ice and making an occasional experiment in the way of talk with my neighbors. I recall with peculiar fondness and delight three sweet sessions in the delicious Piazza die Signori at Verona. The Piazza is small, compact, private almost, accessible only to pedestrians, paved with great slabs which have known none but a gentle human tread. On one side of it rises in elaborate elegance and grace, above its light arched loggia, the image-bordered mass of the ancient palace of the Council; facing this stand two sterner, heavier buildings, dedicated to municipal offices and to the lodgement of soldiers. Step through the archway which leads out of the Piazza and you will find a vast quadrangle with a staircase climbing sunward, along the wall, a row of gendarmes sitting in the shade, a group of soldiers cleaning their muskets, a dozen persons of either sex leaning downward from the open windows. At one end of the little square rose into the pale darkness the high slender shaft of a brick campanile ; in the centre glittered steadily a colossal white statue of Dante. Behind this statue was the Caffé Dante, where on three successive days I sat till midnight, feeling the scene, learning its sovereign “ distinction.” But of Verona I shall not pretend to speak. As I drew near Venice I began to feel a soft impatience, an expectant tremor of the heart. The day before reaching it I spent at Vicenza. I wandered all day through the streets, of course, looking at Palladio’s palaces and enjoying them in defiance of reason and Ruskin. They seemed to me essentially rich and palatial. In the evening I resorted, as usual, to the city’s generous heart, the decayed exglorious Piazza. This spot at Vicenza affords you a really soul-stirring premonition of Venice. There is no Byzantine Basilica and no Ducal Palace; but there is an immense impressive hall of council, and a soaring campanile, and there are two discrowned columns telling of defeated Venetian dominion. Here I seated myself before a café door, in a group of gossiping votaries of the Southern night. The tables being mostly occupied, I had some difficulty in finding one. In a short time I perceived a young man walking through the crowd, seeking where he might bestow himself. Passing near me, he stopped and asked me with irresistible grace if he might share my table. I cordially assented: he sat down and ordered a glass of sugar and water. He was of about my own age, apparently, and full of the opulent beauty of the greater number of young Italians. His dress was simple even to shabbiness : he might have been a young prince in disguise, a Haroun-al-Raschid. With small delay we engaged in conversation. My companion was boyish, modest, and gracious ; he nevertheless discoursed freely on the things of Vicenza. He was so good as to regret that we had not met earlier in the day ; it would have given him such pleasure to accompany me on my tour of the city. He was passionately fond of art: he was in fact an artist. Was I fond of pictures ? Was I inclined to purchase ? I answered that I had no desire to purchase modern pictures, that in fact I had small means to purchase any. He informed me that he had a beautiful ancient work which, to his great regret, he found himself compelled to sell; a most divine little Correggio. Would I do him the favor to look at it ? I had small belief in the value of this unrenowned masterpiece ; but I felt a kindness for the young painter. I consented to have him call for me the next morning and take me to his house, where for two hundred years, he assured me, the work had been jealously preserved.
He came punctually, beautiful, smiling, shabby, as before. After a ten minutes’ walk we stopped before a gaudy half-palazzo which rejoiced in a vague Palladian air. In the basement, looking on the court, lived my friend ; with his mother, he informed me, and his sister. He ushered me in, through a dark antechamber, into which, through a gaping kitchen door, there gushed a sudden aroma of onions. I found myself in a high, halfdarkened saloon. One of the windows was open into the court, from which the light entered verdantly through a row of flowering plants. In an armchair near the window sat a young girl in a dressing-gown, empty-handed, pale, with wonderful eyes, apparently an invalid. At her side stood a large elderly woman in a rusty black silk gown, with an agreeable face, flushed a little, apparently with the expectation of seeing me. The young man introduced them as his mother and his sister. On a table near the window, propped upright in such a way as to catch the light, was a small picture in a heavy frame. I proceeded to examine it. It represented in simple composition a Madonna and Child ; the mother facing you, pressing the infant to her bosom, faintly smiling, and looking out of the picture with a solemn sweetness. It was pretty, it was good ; but it was not Correggio. There was indeed a certain suggestion of his exquisite touch ; but it was a likeness merely, and not the precious reality. One fact, however, struck swiftly home to my consciousness : the face of the Madonna bore a singular resemblance to that of Miss Evans. The lines, the character, the expression, were the same ; the faint halfthoughtful smile was hers, the feminine frankness and gentle confidence of the brow, from which the dark hair waved back with the same even abundance. All this, in the Madonna’s face, was meant for heaven ; and on Miss Evans’s in a fair degree, probably, for earth. But the mutual likeness was, nevertheless, perfect, and it quickened my interest in the picture to a point which the intrinsic merit of the work would doubtless have failed to justify ; although I confess that I was now not slow to discover a great deal of agreeable painting in it.
“ But I doubt of its being a Correggio,” said I.
“ A Correggio, I give you my word of honor, sir ! ” cried my young man.
“ Ecco ! my son’s word of honor,” cried his mother.
“ I don’t deny,” I said, " that it is a very pretty work. It is perhaps Parmigianino.”
“O no, sir,” the elder insisted, “a true Correggio ! We have had it two hundred years ! Try another light; you will see. A true Correggio ! Is n’t it so, my daughter ? ”
The young man put his arm in mine, played his fingers airily over the picture, and whispered of a dozen beauties.
“ O, I grant you,” said I, “ it’s a very pretty picture.” As I looked at it I felt the dark eyes of the young girl in the arm-chair fixed upon me with almost unpleasant intensity. I met her gaze for a moment: I found in it a strange union of defiant pride and sad despondent urgency.
“ What do you ask for the picture ? ” I said.
There was a silence.
“ Speak, madre mia,” said the young man.
“ La senta ! ” and the lady played with her broken fan. “ We should like you to name a price.”
“O, if I named a price, it would not be as for a Correggio. I can’t afford to buy Correggios. If this were a real Correggio, you would be rich. You should go to a duke, a prince, not to me.”
“ We would be rich ! Do you hear, my children ? We are very poor, sir. You have only to look at us. Look at my poor daughter. She was once beautiful, fresh, gay. A year ago she fell ill : a long story, sir, and a sad one. We have had doctors ; they have ordered five thousand things. My daughter gets no better. There it is, sir. We are very poor.”
The young girl’s look confirmed her mother’s story. That she had been beautiful I could easily believe ; that she was ill was equally apparent. She was still remarkable indeed for a touching, hungry, unsatisfied grace. She remained silent and motionless, with her eyes fastened upon my face. I again examined the pretended Correggio. It was wonderfully like Miss Evans. The young American rose up in my mind with irresistible vividness and grace. How she seemed to glow with strength, freedom, and joy, beside this sombre, fading, Southern sister ! It was a happy thought that, under the benediction of her image, I might cause a ray of healing sunshine to fall at this poor girl’s feet.
“ Have you ever tried to sell the picture before ? ”
“ Never ! ” said the old lady, proudly. “ My husband had it from his father. If we have made up our minds to part with it now, —most blessed little Madonna ! —it is because we have had an intimation from heaven.”
“ From heaven ? ”
“ From heaven, Signore. My daughter had a dream. She dreamed that a young stranger came to Vicenza, and that he wandered about the streets saying, ‘ Where, ah where, is my blessed Lady ? ’ Some told him in one church, and some told him in another. He went into all the churches and lifted all the curtains, giving great fees to the sacristans ! But he always came out shaking his head and repeating his question, ‘ Where is my blessed Lady ? I have come from over the sea, I have come to Italy to find her ! ’ ” The woman delivered herself of this recital with a noble florid unction and a vast redundancy, to my Northern ear, of delightful liquid sounds. As she paused momentarily, her daughter spoke for the first time.
“ And then I fancied,” said the young girl, “that I heard his voice pausing under my window at night. ‘ His blessed Lady is here,’ I said, ' we must not let him lose her.’ So I called my brother and bade him go forth in search of you. I dreamed that he brought you back. We made an altar with candles and lace and flowers, and on it we placed the little picture. The stranger had light hair, light eyes, a flowing beard like you. He kneeled down before the little Madonna and worshipped her. We left him at his devotions and went away. When we came back the candles on the altar were out: the Madonna was gone, too ; but in its place there burned a bright pure light. It was a purse of gold ! ”
“ What a very pretty story ! ” said I. " How many pieces were there in the purse ? ”
The young man burst into a laugh. “ Twenty thousand ! ” he said.
I made my offer for the picture. It was esteemed generous apparently; I was cordially thanked. As it was inconvenient, however, to take possession of the work at that moment, I agreed to pay down but half the sum, reserving the other half to the time of delivery. When I prepared to take my departure the young girl rose from her chair and enabled me to measure at once her weakness and her beauty. “ Will you come back for the picture yourself?” she asked.
“ Possibly. I should like to see you again. You must get better.”
“ O, I shall never get better.”
“ I can't believe that. I shall perhaps have a dream to tell you ! ”
“ I shall soon be in heaven. I shall send you one.”
“ Listen to her ! ” cried the mother. “ But she is already an angel.”
With a farewell glance at my pictured Madonna I departed. My visit to this little Vicenza household had filled me with a painful, indefinable sadness. So beautiful they all were, so civil, so charming, and yet so mendacious and miserable ! As I hurried along in the train toward the briny cincture of Venice, my heart was heavy with the image of that sombre, dying Italian maiden. Her face haunted me. What fatal wrong had she suffered ? What hidden sorrow had blasted the freshness of her youth ? As I began to smell the nearing Adriatic, my fancy bounded forward to claim asylum in the calmer presence of my bright American friend. I have no space to tell the story of my arrival in Venice and my first impressions. Mr. Evans had not mentioned his hotel. He was not at the Hotel de l’Europe, whither I myself repaired. If he was still in Venice, however, I foresaw that we should not fail to meet. The day succeeding my arrival I spent in a restless fever of curiosity and delight, now lost in the sensuous ease of my gondola, now lingering in charmed devotion before a canvas of Tintoretto or Paul Veronese. I exhausted three gondoliers and saw all Venice in a passionate fury and haste. I wished to probe its fulness and learn at once the best — or the worst. Late in the afternoon I disembarked at the Piazzetta and took my way haltingly and gazingly to the manydomed Basilica, — that shell of silver with a lining of marble. It was that enchanting Venetian hour when the ocean - touching sun sits melting to death, and the whole still air seems to glow with the soft effusion of his golden substance. Within the church, the deep brown shadow-masses, the heavy thick-tinted air, the gorgeous composite darkness, reigned in richer, quainter, more fantastic gloom than my feeble pen can reproduce the likeness of. From those rude concavities of dome and semi-dome, where the multitudinous facets of pictorial mosaic shimmer and twinkle in their own dull brightness ; from the vast antiquity of innumerable marbles, incrusting the walls in roughly mated slabs, cracked and polished and triple-tinted with eternal service ; from the wavy carpet of compacted stone, where a thousand oncebright fragments glimmer through the long attrition of idle feet and devoted knees ; from sombre gold and mellow alabaster, from porphyry and malachite, from long dead crystal and the sparkle of undying lamps, — there proceeds a dense rich atmosphere of splendor and sanctity which transports the half-stupefied traveller to the age of a simpler and more awful faith. I wandered for half an hour beneath those reverted cups of scintillating darkness, stumbling on the great stony swells of the pavement as I gazed upward at the long mosaic saints who curve gigantically with the curves of dome and ceiling. I had left Europe ; I was in the East. An overwhelming sense of the sadness of man’s spiritual history took possession of my heart. The clustering picturesque shadows about me seemed to represent the darkness of a past from which he had slowly and painfully struggled. The great mosaic images, hideous, grotesque, inhuman, glimmered like the cruel spectres of early superstitions and terrors. There came over me, too, a poignant conviction of the ludicrous folly of the idle spirit of travel. How with Murray and an opera-glass it strolls and stares where omniscient angels stand diffident and sad ! How blunted and stupid are its senses! How trivial and superficial its imaginings ! To this builded sepulchre of trembling hope and dread, this monument of mighty passions, I had wandered in search of pictorial effects. O vulgarity ! Of course I remained, nevertheless, still curious of effects. Suddenly I perceived a very agreeable one. Kneeling on a low prie-dieu, with her hands clasped, a lady was gazing upward at the great mosaic Christ in the dome of the choir. She wore a black lace shawl and a purple hat. She was Miss Evans. Her attitude slightly puzzled me. Was she really at her devotions, or was she only playing at prayer ? I walked to a distance, so that she might have time to move before I addressed her. Five minutes afterwards, however, she was in the same position. I walked slowly towards her, and as I approached her attracted her attention. She immediately recognized me and smiled and bowed, without moving from her place.
“ I saw you five minutes ago,” I said, “ but I was afraid of interrupting your prayers.”
“O, they were only half-prayers,” she said.
“ Half-prayers are pretty well for one who only the other day was thanking Heaven that she was not a Catholic.”
“ Half-prayers are no prayers. I’m not a Catholic yet.”
Her father, she told me, had brought her to the church, but had returned on foot to the hotel for his pocket-book. They were to dine at one of the restaurants in the Piazza. Mr. Evans was vastly contented with Venice, and spent his days and nights in gondolas. Awaiting his return, we wandered over the church. Yes, incontestably, Miss Evans resembled my little Vicenza picture. She looked a little pale with the heat and the constant nervous tension of sight-seeing; but she pleased me now as effectually as she had pleased me before. There was an even deeper sweetness in the freedom and breadth of her utterance and carriage. I felt more even than before that she was an example of woman active, not of woman passive. We strolled through the great Basilica in serious, charmed silence. Miss Evans told me that she had been there much : she seemed to know it well. We went into the dark Baptistery and sat down on a bench against the wall, trying to discriminate in the vaulted dimness the harsh mediæval reliefs behind the altar and the mosaic Crucifixion above it.
“ Well,” said I, “ what has Venice done for you ? ”
“ Many things. Tired me a little, saddened me, charmed me.”
“ How have you spent your time ? ”
“As people spend it. After breakfast we get into our gondola and remain in it pretty well till bedtime. I believe I know every canal, every Canaletto, in Venice. You must have learned already how sweet it is to lean back under the awning, to feel beneath you that steady, liquid lapse, to look out at all this bright, sad elegance of ruin. I have been reading two or three of George Sand’s novels. Do you know La Dernière Aldini? I fancy a romance in every palace.”
“ The reality of Venice seems to me to exceed all romance. It’s romance enough simply to be here.”“ Yes ; but how brief and transient a romance ! ”
“Well,” said I, “we shall certainly cease to be here, but we shall never cease to have been here. You are not to leave directly, I hope.”
“ In the course of ten days or a fortnight we go to Florence.”
“ And then to Rome ? ”
“To Rome and Naples, and then by sea, probably, to Genoa, and thence to Nice and Paris. We must be at home by the new year. And you ? ”
“ I hope to spend the winter in Italy.”
“ Are you never coming home again ?”
“ By no means. I shall probably return in the spring. But I wish you, too, were going to remain.”
“ You are very good. My father pronounces it impossible. I have only to make the most of it while I’m here.”
“ Are you going back to Araminta ? ”
Miss Evans was silent a moment. “ O, don’t ask ! ” she said.
“What kind of a place is Araminta?” I asked, maliciously.
Again she was silent. “ That is John the Baptist on the cover of the basin,” she said, at last, rising to her feet, with a light laugh.
On emerging from the Baptistery we found Mr. Evans, who greeted me cordially and insisted on my coming to dine with them. I think most fondly of our little dinner. We went to the Caffé Quadri and occupied a table beside an open window, looking out into the Piazza, which was beginning to fill with evening loungers and listeners to the great band of music in the centre. Miss Evans took off her hat and sat facing me in friendly silence. Her father sustained the larger burden of conversation. He seemed to feel its weight, however, as the dinner proceeded and when he had attacked his second bottle of wine. Miss Evans then questioned me about my journey from Milan. I told her the whole story, and felt that I infused into it a great deal of color and heat. She sat charming me forward with her steady, listening smile. For the first time in my life I felt the magic of sympathy. After dinner we went down into the Piazza and established ourselves at one of Florian’s tables. Night had become perfect ; the music was magnificent. At a neighboring table was a group of young Venetian gentlemen, splendid in dress, after the manner of their kind, and glorious with the wondrous physical glory of the Italian race.
“ They only need velvet and satin and plumes,” I said, “ to be subjects for Titian and Paul Veronese.”
They sat rolling their dark eyes and kissing their white hands at passing friends, with smiles that were like the moon-flashes on the Adriatic.
“ They are beautiful exceedingly,” said Miss Evans ; “ the most beautiful creatures in the world, except— ”
“ Except, you mean, this other gentleman.”
She assented. The person of whom I had spoken was a young man who was just preparing to seat himself at a vacant table. A lady and gentleman, elderly persons, had passed near him and recognized him, and he had uncovered himself and now stood smiling and talking. They were all genuine Anglo-Saxons. The young man was rather short of stature, but firm and compact. His hair was light and crisp, his eye a clear blue, his face and neck violently tanned by exposure to the sun. He wore a pair of small blond whiskers.
“ Do you call him beautiful ? ” demanded Mr. Evans. “ He reminds me of myself when I was his age. Indeed, he looks like you, sir.”
“ He ’s not beautiful,” said Miss Evans, “but he is handsome.”
The young man’s face was full of decision and spirit ; his whole figure had been moulded by action, tempered by effort. He looked simple and keen, upright, downright.
“ Is he English ? ” asked Miss Evans, “ or American ? ”
“ He is both,” I said, “or either. He is made of that precious clay that is common to the whole English-speaking race.”
“ He’s American.”
“Very possibly,” said I; and indeed we never learned. I repeat the incident because I think it has a certain value in my recital. Before we separated I expressed the hope that we might meet again on the morrow.
“It’s very kind of you to propose it,” said Miss Evans ; “ but you ’ll thank us for refusing. Take my advice, as for an old Venetian, and spend the coming three days alone. How can you enjoy Tintoretto and Bellini, when you are racking your brains for small talk for me ? ”
“ With you, Miss Evans, I should n’t talk small. But you shape my programme with a liberal hand. At the end of three days, pray, where will you be ? ”
They would still be in Venice, Mr. Evans declared. It was a capital hotel, and then those jolly gondolas ! I was unable to impeach the wisdom of the young girl’s proposition. To be so wise, it seemed to me, was to be extremely charming.
For three days, accordingly, I wandered about alone. I often thought of Miss Evans and I often fancied I should enjoy certain great pictures none the less for that deep associated contemplation and those fine emanations of assent and dissent which I should have known in her society. I wandered far ; I penetrated deep, it seemed to me, into the heart of Venetian power. I shook myself free of the sad and sordid present, and embarked on that silent contemplative sea whose irresistible tides expire at the base of the mighty canvases in the Scuola di San Rocco. But on my return to the hither shore, I always found my sweet young countrywoman waiting to receive me. If Miss Evans had been an immense coquette, she could not have proceeded more cunningly than by this injunction of a three days’ absence. During this period, in my imagination, she increased tenfold in value. I don’t mean to say that there were not hours together when I quite forgot her, and when I had no heart but for Venice and the lessons of Venice, for the sea and sky and the great painters and builders. But when my mind had executed one of these great passages of appreciation, it turned with a sudden sense of solitude and lassitude to those gentle hopes, those fragrant hints of intimacy, which clustered about the person of my friend. She remained modestly uneclipsed by the women of Titian. She was as deeply a woman as they, and yet so much more of a person ; as fit as the broadest and blondest to be loved for herself, yet full of serene superiority as an active friend. To the old, old sentiment what an exquisite modern turn she might give ! I so far overruled her advice as that, with her father, we made a trio every evening, after the day’s labors, at one of Florian’s tables. Mr. Evans drank absinthe and discoursed upon the glories of our common country, of which he declared it was high time I should make the acquaintance. He was not the least of a bore : I relished him vastly. He was in many ways an excellent representative American. Without taste, without culture or polish, he nevertheless produced an impression of substance in character, keenness in perception, and intensity in will, which effectually redeemed him from vulgarity. It often seemed to me, in fact, that his good-humored tolerance and easy morality, his rank selfconfidence, his nervous decision and vivacity, his fearlessness of either gods or men, combined in proportions of which the union might have been very fairly termed aristocratic. His voice, I admit, was of the nose, nasal; but possibly, in the matter of utterance, one eccentricity is as good as another. At all events, with his clear, cold gray eye, with that just faintly impudent, more than level poise of his ample chin, with those two hard lines which flanked the bristling wings of his gray moustache, with his general expression of unchallenged security and practical aptitude and incurious scorn of tradition, he impressed the sensitive beholder as a man of incontestable force. He was entertaining, too, partly by wit and partly by position. He was weak only in his love of absinthe. After his first glass he left his chair and strolled about the piazza, looking for possible friends and superbly unconscious of possible enemies. His daughter sat back in her chair, her arms folded, her ungloved hands sustaining them, her prettiness half defined, her voice enhanced and subdued by the gas-tempered starlight. We had infinite talk. Without question, she had an admirable feminine taste : she was worthy to know Venice. I remember telling her so in a sudden explosion of homage. “You are really worthy to know Venice, Miss Evans. We must learn to know it together. Who knows what hidden treasures we may help each other to find ? ”
H. James, Jr.