When it came to the point of quitting
the reposeful life of Monte Beni, the sculptor was
not without regrets, and would willingly have dreamed
a little longer of the sweet paradise on earth that
Hilda’s presence there might make. Nevertheless,
amid all its repose, he had begun to be sensible of
a restless melancholy, to which the cultivators of
the ideal arts are more liable than sturdier men.
On his own part, therefore, and leaving Donatello
out of the case, he would have judged it well to go.
He made parting visits to the legendary dell, and to
other delightful spots with which he had grown familiar;
he climbed the tower again, and saw a sunset and a
moonrise over the great valley; he drank, on the eve
of his departure, one flask, and then another, of the
Monte Beni Sunshine, and stored up its flavor in his
memory as the standard of what is exquisite in wine.
These things accomplished, Kenyon was ready for the
journey.
Donatello had not very easily been
stirred out of the peculiar sluggishness, which enthralls
and bewitches melancholy people. He had offered
merely a passive resistance, however, not an active
one, to his friend’s schemes; and when the appointed
hour came, he yielded to the impulse which Kenyon
failed not to apply; and was started upon the journey
before he had made up his mind to undertake it.
They wandered forth at large, like two knights-errant,
among the valleys, and the mountains, and the old
mountain towns of that picturesque and lovely region.
Save to keep the appointment with Miriam, a fortnight
thereafter, in the great square of Perugia, there was
nothing more definite in the sculptor’s plan
than that they should let themselves be blown hither
and thither like Winged seeds, that mount upon each
wandering breeze. Yet there was an idea of fatality
implied in the simile of the winged seeds which did
not altogether suit Kenyon’s fancy; for, if
you look closely into the matter, it will be seen that
whatever appears most vagrant, and utterly purposeless,
turns out, in the end, to have been impelled the most
surely on a preordained and unswerving track.
Chance and change love to deal with men’s settled
plans, not with their idle vagaries. If we desire
unexpected and unimaginable events, we should contrive
an iron framework, such as we fancy may compel the
future to take one inevitable shape; then comes in
the unexpected, and shatters our design in fragments.
The travellers set forth on horseback,
and purposed to perform much of their aimless journeyings
under the moon, and in the cool of the morning or
evening twilight; the midday sun, while summer had
hardly begun to trail its departing skirts over Tuscany,
being still too fervid to allow of noontide exposure.
For a while, they wandered in that
same broad valley which Kenyon had viewed with such
delight from the Monte Beni tower. The sculptor
soon began to enjoy the idle activity of their new
life, which the lapse of a day or two sufficed to
establish as a kind of system; it is so natural for
mankind to be nomadic, that a very little taste of
that primitive mode of existence subverts the settled
habits of many preceding years. Kenyon’s
cares, and whatever gloomy ideas before possessed him,
seemed to be left at Monte Beni, and were scarcely
remembered by the time that its gray tower grew undistinguishable
on the brown hillside. His perceptive faculties,
which had found little exercise of late, amid so thoughtful
a way of life, became keen, and kept his eyes busy
with a hundred agreeable scenes.
He delighted in the picturesque bits
of rustic character and manners, so little of which
ever comes upon the surface of our life at home.
There, for example, were the old women, tending pigs
or sheep by the wayside. As they followed the
vagrant steps of their charge, these venerable ladies
kept spinning yarn with that elsewhere forgotten contrivance,
the distaff; and so wrinkled and stern looking were
they, that you might have taken them for the Parcae,
spinning the threads of human destiny. In contrast
with their great-grandmothers were the children, leading
goats of shaggy beard, tied by the horns, and letting
them browse on branch and shrub. It is the fashion
of Italy to add the petty industry of age and childhood
to the hum of human toil. To the eyes of an observer
from the Western world, it was a strange spectacle
to see sturdy, sunburnt creatures, in petticoats,
but otherwise manlike, toiling side by side with male
laborers, in the rudest work of the fields. These
sturdy women (if as such we must recognize them) wore
the high-crowned, broad brimmed hat of Tuscan straw,
the customary female head-apparel; and, as every breeze
blew back its breadth of brim, the sunshine constantly
added depth to the brown glow of their cheeks.
The elder sisterhood, however, set off their witch-like
ugliness to the worst advantage with black felt hats,
bequeathed them, one would fancy, by their long-buried
husbands.
Another ordinary sight, as sylvan
as the above and more agreeable, was a girl, bearing
on her back a huge bundle of green twigs and shrubs,
or grass, intermixed with scarlet poppies and blue
flowers; the verdant burden being sometimes of such
size as to hide the bearer’s figure, and seem
a self-moving mass of fragrant bloom and verdure.
Oftener, however, the bundle reached only halfway
down the back of the rustic nymph, leaving in sight
her well-developed lower limbs, and the crooked knife,
hanging behind her, with which she had been reaping
this strange harvest sheaf. A pre-Raphaelite
artist (he, for instance, who painted so marvellously
a wind-swept heap of autumnal leaves) might find an
admirable subject in one of these Tuscan girls, stepping
with a free, erect, and graceful carriage. The
miscellaneous herbage and tangled twigs and blossoms
of her bundle, crowning her head (while her ruddy,
comely face looks out between the hanging side festoons
like a larger flower), would give the painter boundless
scope for the minute delineation which he loves.
Though mixed up with what was rude
and earthlike, there was still a remote, dreamlike,
Arcadian charm, which is scarcely to be found in the
daily toil of other lands. Among the pleasant
features of the wayside were always the vines, clambering
on fig-trees, or other sturdy trunks; they wreathed
themselves in huge and rich festoons from one tree
to another, suspending clusters of ripening grapes
in the interval between. Under such careless
mode of culture, the luxuriant vine is a lovelier
spectacle than where it produces a more precious liquor,
and is therefore more artificially restrained and
trimmed. Nothing can be more picturesque than
an old grapevine, with almost a trunk of its own,
clinging fast around its supporting tree. Nor
does the picture lack its moral. You might twist
it to more than one grave purpose, as you saw how
the knotted, serpentine growth imprisoned within its
strong embrace the friend that had supported its tender
infancy; and how (as seemingly flexible natures are
prone to do) it converted the sturdier tree entirely
to its own selfish ends, extending its innumerable
arms on every bough, and permitting hardly a leaf
to sprout except its own. It occurred to Kenyon,
that the enemies of the vine, in his native land,
might here have seen an emblem of the remorseless gripe,
which the habit of vinous enjoyment lays upon its
victim, possessing him wholly, and letting him live
no life but such as it bestows.
The scene was not less characteristic
when their path led the two wanderers through some
small, ancient town. There, besides the peculiarities
of present life, they saw tokens of the life that had
long ago been lived and flung aside. The little
town, such as we see in our mind’s eye, would
have its gate and its surrounding walls, so ancient
and massive that ages had not sufficed to crumble them
away; but in the lofty upper portion of the gateway,
still standing over the empty arch, where there was
no longer a gate to shut, there would be a dove-cote,
and peaceful doves for the only warders. Pumpkins
lay ripening in the open chambers of the structure.
Then, as for the town wall, on the outside an orchard
extends peacefully along its base, full, not of apple-trees,
but of those old humorists with gnarled trunks and
twisted boughs, the olives. Houses have been
built upon the ramparts, or burrowed out of their
ponderous foundation. Even the gray, martial
towers, crowned with ruined turrets, have been converted
into rustic habitations, from the windows of which
hang ears of Indian corn. At a door, that has
been broken through the massive stonework where it
was meant to be strongest, some contadini are winnowing
grain. Small windows, too, are pierced through
the whole line of ancient wall, so that it seems a
row of dwellings with one continuous front, built in
a strange style of needless strength; but remnants
of the old battlements and machicolations are interspersed
with the homely chambers and earthen-tiled housetops;
and all along its extent both grapevines and running
flower-shrubs are encouraged to clamber and sport over
the roughness of its decay.
Finally the long grass, intermixed
with weeds and wild flowers, waves on the uppermost
height of the shattered rampart; and it is exceedingly
pleasant in the golden sunshine of the afternoon to
behold the warlike precinct so friendly in its old
days, and so overgrown with rural peace. In its
guard rooms, its prison chambers, and scooped out of
its ponderous breadth, there are dwellings nowadays
where happy human lives are spent. Human parents
and broods of children nestle in them, even as the
swallows nestle in the little crevices along the broken
summit of the wall.
Passing through the gateway of this
same little town, challenged only by those watchful
sentinels, the pigeons, we find ourselves in a long,
narrow street, paved from side to side with flagstones,
in the old Roman fashion. Nothing can exceed
the grim ugliness of the houses, most of which are
three or four stories high, stone built, gray, dilapidated,
or half-covered with plaster in patches, and contiguous
all along from end to end of the town. Nature,
in the shape of tree, shrub, or grassy sidewalk, is
as much shut out from the one street of the rustic
village as from the heart of any swarming city.
The dark and half ruinous habitations, with their
small windows, many of which are drearily closed with
wooden shutters, are but magnified hovels, piled story
upon story, and squalid with the grime that successive
ages have left behind them. It would be a hideous
scene to contemplate in a rainy day, or when no human
life pervaded it. In the summer noon, however,
it possesses vivacity enough to keep itself cheerful;
for all the within-doors of the village then bubbles
over upon the flagstones, or looks out from the small
windows, and from here and there a balcony. Some
of the populace are at the butcher’s shop; others
are at the fountain, which gushes into a marble basin
that resembles an antique sarcophagus. A tailor
is sewing before his door with a young priest seated
sociably beside him; a burly friar goes by with an
empty wine-barrel on his head; children are at play;
women, at their own doorsteps, mend clothes, embroider,
weave hats of Tuscan straw, or twirl the distaff.
Many idlers, meanwhile, strolling from one group to
another, let the warm day slide by in the sweet, interminable
task of doing nothing.
From all these people there comes
a babblement that seems quite disproportioned to the
number of tongues that make it. So many words
are not uttered in a New England village throughout
the year except it be at a political canvass
or town-meeting as are spoken here, with
no especial purpose, in a single day. Neither
so many words, nor so much laughter; for people talk
about nothing as if they were terribly in earnest,
and make merry at nothing as if it were the best of
all possible jokes. In so long a time as they
have existed, and within such narrow precincts, these
little walled towns are brought into a closeness of
society that makes them but a larger household.
All the inhabitants are akin to each, and each to
all; they assemble in the street as their common saloon,
and thus live and die in a familiarity of intercourse,
such as never can be known where a village is open
at either end, and all roundabout, and has ample room
within itself.
Stuck up beside the door of one house,
in this village street, is a withered bough; and on
a stone seat, just under the shadow of the bough,
sits a party of jolly drinkers, making proof of the
new wine, or quaffing the old, as their often-tried
and comfortable friend. Kenyon draws bridle here
(for the bough, or bush, is a symbol of the wine-shop
at this day in Italy, as it was three hundred years
ago in England), and calls for a goblet of the deep,
mild, purple juice, well diluted with water from the
fountain. The Sunshine of Monte Beni would be
welcome now. Meanwhile, Donatello has ridden
onward, but alights where a shrine, with a burning
lamp before it, is built into the wall of an inn stable.
He kneels and crosses himself, and mutters a brief
prayer, without attracting notice from the passers-by,
many of whom are parenthetically devout in a similar
fashion. By this time the sculptor has drunk off
his wine-and-water, and our two travellers resume
their way, emerging from the opposite gate of the
village.
Before them, again, lies the broad
valley, with a mist so thinly scattered over it as
to be perceptible only in the distance, and most so
in the nooks of the hills. Now that we have called
it mist, it seems a mistake not rather to have called
it sunshine; the glory of so much light being mingled
with so little gloom, in the airy material of that
vapor. Be it mist or sunshine, it adds a touch
of ideal beauty to the scene, almost persuading the
spectator that this valley and those hills are visionary,
because their visible atmosphere is so like the substance
of a dream.
Immediately about them, however, there
were abundant tokens that the country was not really
the paradise it looked to be, at a casual glance.
Neither the wretched cottages nor the dreary farmhouses
seemed to partake of the prosperity, with which so
kindly a climate, and so fertile a portion of Mother
Earth’s bosom, should have filled them, one
and all. But possibly the peasant inhabitants
do not exist in so grimy a poverty, and in homes so
comfortless, as a stranger, with his native ideas
of those matters, would be likely to imagine.
The Italians appear to possess none of that emulative
pride which we see in our New England villages, where
every householder, according to his taste and means,
endeavors to make his homestead an ornament to the
grassy and elm-shadowed wayside. In Italy there
are no neat doorsteps and thresholds; no pleasant,
vine-sheltered porches; none of those grass-plots
or smoothly shorn lawns, which hospitably invite the
imagination into the sweet domestic interiors of English
life. Everything, however sunny and luxuriant
may be the scene around, is especially disheartening
in the immediate neighborhood of an Italian home.
An artist, it is true, might often
thank his stars for those old houses, so picturesquely
time-stained, and with the plaster falling in blotches
from the ancient brick-work. The prison-like,
iron-barred windows, and the wide arched, dismal entrance,
admitting on one hand to the stable, on the other
to the kitchen, might impress him as far better worth
his pencil than the newly painted pine boxes, in which if
he be an American his countrymen live and
thrive. But there is reason to suspect that a
people are waning to decay and ruin the moment that
their life becomes fascinating either in the poet’s
imagination or the painter’s eye.
As usual on Italian waysides, the
wanderers passed great, black crosses, hung with all
the instruments of the sacred agony and passion:
there were the crown of thorns, the hammer and nails,
the pincers, the spear, the sponge; and perched over
the whole, the cock that crowed to St. Peter’s
remorseful conscience. Thus, while the fertile
scene showed the never-failing beneficence of the
Creator towards man in his transitory state, these
symbols reminded each wayfarer of the Saviour’s
infinitely greater love for him as an immortal spirit.
Beholding these consecrated stations, the idea seemed
to strike Donatello of converting the otherwise aimless
journey into a penitential pilgrimage. At each
of them he alighted to kneel and kiss the cross, and
humbly press his forehead against its foot; and this
so invariably, that the sculptor soon learned to draw
bridle of his own accord. It may be, too, heretic
as he was, that Kenyon likewise put up a prayer, rendered
more fervent by the symbols before his eyes, for the
peace of his friend’s conscience and the pardon
of the sin that so oppressed him.
Not only at the crosses did Donatello
kneel, but at each of the many shrines, where the
Blessed Virgin in fresco faded with sunshine
and half washed out with showers looked
benignly at her worshipper; or where she was represented
in a wooden image, or a bas-relief of plaster or marble,
as accorded with the means of the devout person who
built, or restored from a mediaeval antiquity, these
places of wayside worship. They were everywhere:
under arched niches, or in little penthouses with
a brick tiled roof just large enough to shelter them;
or perhaps in some bit of old Roman masonry, the founders
of which had died before the Advent; or in the wall
of a country inn or farmhouse; or at the midway point
of a bridge; or in the shallow cavity of a natural
rock; or high upward in the deep cuts of the road.
It appeared to the sculptor that Donatello prayed
the more earnestly and the more hopefully at these
shrines, because the mild face of the Madonna promised
him to intercede as a tender mother betwixt the poor
culprit and the awfulness of judgment.
It was beautiful to observe, indeed,
how tender was the soul of man and woman towards the
Virgin mother, in recognition of the tenderness which,
as their faith taught them, she immortally cherishes
towards all human souls. In the wire-work screen
’before each shrine hung offerings of roses,
or whatever flower was sweetest and most seasonable;
some already wilted and withered, some fresh with
that very morning’s dewdrops. Flowers there
were, too, that, being artificial, never bloomed on
earth, nor would ever fade. The thought occurred
to Kenyon, that flower-pots with living plants might
be set within the niches, or even that rose-trees,
and all kinds of flowering shrubs, might be reared
under the shrines, and taught to twine and wreathe
themselves around; so that the Virgin should dwell
within a bower of verdure, bloom, and fragrant freshness,
symbolizing a homage perpetually new. There are
many things in the religious customs of these people
that seem good; many things, at least, that might
be both good and beautiful, if the soul of goodness
and the sense of beauty were as much alive in the Italians
now as they must have been when those customs were
first imagined and adopted. But, instead of blossoms
on the shrub, or freshly gathered, with the dewdrops
on their leaves, their worship, nowadays, is best symbolized
by the artificial flower.
The sculptor fancied, moreover (but
perhaps it was his heresy that suggested the idea),
that it would be of happy influence to place a comfortable
and shady seat beneath every wayside shrine. Then
the weary and sun-scorched traveller, while resting
himself under her protecting shadow, might thank the
Virgin for her hospitality. Nor, perchance, were
he to regale himself, even in such a consecrated spot,
with the fragrance of a pipe, would it rise to heaven
more offensively than the smoke of priestly incense.
We do ourselves wrong, and too meanly estimate the
Holiness above us, when we deem that any act or enjoyment,
good in itself, is not good to do religiously.
Whatever may be the iniquities of
the papal system, it was a wise and lovely sentiment
that set up the frequent shrine and cross along the
roadside. No wayfarer, bent on whatever worldly
errand, can fail to be reminded, at every mile or
two, that this is not the business which most concerns
him. The pleasure-seeker is silently admonished
to look heavenward for a joy infinitely greater than
he now possesses. The wretch in temptation beholds
the cross, and is warned that, if he yield, the Saviour’s
agony for his sake will have been endured in vain.
The stubborn criminal, whose heart has long been like
a stone, feels it throb anew with dread and hope;
and our poor Donatello, as he went kneeling from shrine
to cross, and from cross to shrine, doubtless found
an efficacy in these symbols that helped him towards
a higher penitence.
Whether the young Count of Monte Beni
noticed the fact, or no, there was more than one incident
of their journey that led Kenyon to believe that they
were attended, or closely followed, or preceded, near
at hand, by some one who took an interest in their
motions. As it were, the step, the sweeping garment,
the faintly heard breath, of an invisible companion,
was beside them, as they went on their way. It
was like a dream that had strayed out of their slumber,
and was haunting them in the daytime, when its shadowy
substance could have neither density nor outline,
in the too obtrusive light. After sunset, it grew
a little more distinct.
“On the left of that last shrine,”
asked the sculptor, as they rode, under the moon,
“did you observe the figure of a woman kneeling,
with her, face hidden in her hands?”
“I never looked that way,”
replied Donatello. “I was saying my own
prayer. It was some penitent, perchance.
May the Blessed Virgin be the more gracious to the
poor soul, because she is a woman.”