After wide wanderings through the
valley, the two travellers directed their course towards
its boundary of hills. Here, the natural scenery
and men’s modifications of it immediately took
a different aspect from that of the fertile and smiling
plain. Not unfrequently there was a convent on
the hillside; or, on some insulated promontory, a mined
castle, once the den of a robber chieftain, who was
accustomed to dash down from his commanding height
upon the road that wound below. For ages back,
the old fortress had been flinging down its crumbling
ramparts, stone by stone, towards the grimy village
at its foot.
Their road wound onward among the
hills, which rose steep and lofty from the scanty
level space that lay between them. They continually
thrust their great bulks before the wayfarers, as
if grimly resolute to forbid their passage, or closed
abruptly behind them, when they still dared to proceed.
A gigantic hill would set its foot right down before
them, and only at the last moment would grudgingly
withdraw it, just far enough to let them creep towards
another obstacle. Adown these rough heights were
visible the dry tracks of many a mountain torrent that
had lived a life too fierce and passionate to be a
long one. Or, perhaps, a stream was yet hurrying
shyly along the edge of a far wider bed of pebbles
and shelving rock than it seemed to need, though not
too wide for the swollen rage of which this shy rivulet
was capable. A stone bridge bestrode it, the
ponderous arches of which were upheld and rendered
indestructible by the weight of the very stones that
threatened to crush them down. Old Roman toil
was perceptible in the foundations of that massive
bridge; the first weight that it ever bore was that
of an army of the Republic.
Threading these defiles, they would
arrive at some immemorial city, crowning the high
summit of a hill with its cathedral, its many churches,
and public edifices, all of Gothic architecture.
With no more level ground than a single piazza in
the midst, the ancient town tumbled its crooked and
narrow streets down the mountainside, through arched
passages and by steps of stone. The aspect of
everything was awfully old; older, indeed, in its
effect on the imagination than Rome itself, because
history does not lay its finger on these forgotten
edifices and tell us all about their origin.
Etruscan princes may have dwelt in them. A thousand
years, at all events, would seem but a middle age for
these structures. They are built of such huge,
square stones, that their appearance of ponderous
durability distresses the beholder with the idea that
they can never fall, never crumble away, never
be less fit than now for human habitation. Many
of them may once have been palaces, and still retain
a squalid grandeur. But, gazing at them, we recognize
how undesirable it is to build the tabernacle of our
brief lifetime out of permanent materials, and with
a view to their being occupied by future ’generations.
All towns should be made capable of
purification by fire, or of decay, within each half-century.
Otherwise, they become the hereditary haunts of vermin
and noisomeness, besides standing apart from the possibility
of such improvements as are constantly introduced into
the rest of man’s contrivances and accommodations.
It is beautiful, no doubt, and exceedingly satisfactory
to some of our natural instincts, to imagine our far
posterity dwelling under the same roof-tree as ourselves.
Still, when people insist on building indestructible
houses, they incur, or their children do, a misfortune
analogous to that of the Sibyl, when she obtained
the grievous boon of immortality. So we may build
almost immortal habitations, it is true; but we cannot
keep them from growing old, musty, unwholesome, dreary, full
of death scents, ghosts, and murder stains; in short,
such habitations as one sees everywhere in Italy,
be they hovels or palaces.
“You should go with me to my
native country,” observed the sculptor to Donatello.
“In that fortunate land, each generation has
only its own sins and sorrows to bear. Here,
it seems as if all the weary and dreary Past were
piled upon the back of the Present. If I were
to lose my spirits in this country, if
I were to suffer any heavy misfortune here, methinks
it would be impossible to stand up against it, under
such adverse influences.”
“The sky itself is an old roof,
now,” answered the Count; “and, no doubt,
the sins of mankind have made it gloomier than it used
to be.” “O, my poor Faun,”
thought Kenyon to himself, “how art thou changed!”
A city, like this of which we speak,
seems a sort of stony growth out of the hillside,
or a fossilized town; so ancient and strange it looks,
without enough of life and juiciness in it to be any
longer susceptible of decay. An earthquake would
afford it the only chance of being ruined, beyond
its present ruin.
Yet, though dead to all the purposes
for which we live to-day, the place has its glorious
recollections, and not merely rude and warlike ones,
but those of brighter and milder triumphs, the fruits
of which we still enjoy. Italy can count several
of these lifeless towns which, four or five hundred
years ago, were each the birthplace of its own school
of art; nor have they yet forgotten to be proud of
the dark old pictures, and the faded frescos, the
pristine beauty of which was a light and gladness
to the world. But now, unless one happens to be
a painter, these famous works make us miserably desperate.
They are poor, dim ghosts of what, when Giotto or
Cimabue first created them, threw a splendor along
the stately aisles; so far gone towards nothingness,
in our day, that scarcely a hint of design or expression
can glimmer through the dusk. Those early artists
did well to paint their frescos. Glowing on the
church-walls, they might be looked upon as symbols
of the living spirit that made Catholicism a true
religion, and that glorified it as long as it retained
a genuine life; they filled the transepts with a radiant
throng of saints and angels, and threw around the high
altar a faint reflection as much as mortals
could see, or bear of a Diviner Presence.
But now that the colors are so wretchedly bedimmed, now
that blotches of plastered wall dot the frescos all
over, like a mean reality thrusting itself through
life’s brightest illusions, the next
best artist to Cimabue or Giotto or Ghirlandaio or
Pinturicchio will be he that shall reverently cover
their ruined masterpieces with whitewash!
Kenyon, however, being an earnest
student and critic of Art, lingered long before these
pathetic relics; and Donatello, in his present phase
of penitence, thought no time spent amiss while he
could be kneeling before an altar. Whenever they
found a cathedral, therefore, or a Gothic church,
the two travellers were of one mind to enter it.
In some of these holy edifices they saw pictures that
time had not dimmed nor injured in the least, though
they perhaps belonged to as old a school of Art as
any that were perishing around them. These were
the painted windows; and as often as he gazed at them
the sculptor blessed the medieval time, and its gorgeous
contrivances of splendor; for surely the skill of
man has never accomplished, nor his mind imagined,
any other beauty or glory worthy to be compared with
these.
It is the special excellence of pictured
glass, that the light, which falls merely on the outside
of other pictures, is here interfused throughout the
work; it illuminates the design, and invests it with
a living radiance; and in requital the unfading colors
transmute the common daylight into a miracle of richness
and glory in its passage through the heavenly substance
of the blessed and angelic shapes which throng the
high-arched window.
“It is a woeful thing,”
cried Kenyon, while one of these frail yet enduring
and fadeless pictures threw its hues on his face, and
on the pavement of the church around him, “a
sad necessity that any Christian soul should pass
from earth without once seeing an antique painted
window, with the bright Italian sunshine glowing through
it! There is no other such true symbol of the
glories of the better world, where a celestial radiance
will be inherent in all things and persons, and render
each continually transparent to the sight of all.”
“But what a horror it would
be,” said Donatello sadly, “if there were
a soul among them through which the light could not
be transfused!”
“Yes; and perhaps this is to
be the punishment of sin,” replied the sculptor;
“not that it shall be made evident to the universe,
which can profit nothing by such knowledge, but that
it shall insulate the sinner from all sweet society
by rendering him impermeable to light, and, therefore,
unrecognizable in the abode of heavenly simplicity
and truth. Then, what remains for him, but the
dreariness of infinite and eternal solitude?”
“That would be a horrible destiny,
indeed!” said Donatello.
His voice as he spoke the words had
a hollow and dreary cadence, as if he anticipated
some such frozen solitude for himself. A figure
in a dark robe was lurking in the obscurity of a side
chapel close by, and made an impulsive movement forward,
but hesitated as Donatello spoke again.
“But there might be a more miserable
torture than to be solitary forever,” said he.
“Think of having a single companion in eternity,
and instead of finding any consolation, or at all
events variety of torture, to see your own weary,
weary sin repeated in that inseparable soul.”
“I think, my dear Count, you
have never read Dante,” observed Kenyon.
“That idea is somewhat in his style, but I cannot
help regretting that it came into your mind just then.”
The dark-robed figure had shrunk back,
and was quite lost to sight among the shadows of the
chapel.
“There was an English poet,”
resumed Kenyon, turning again towards the window,
“who speaks of the ‘dim, religious light,’
transmitted through painted glass. I always admired
this richly descriptive phrase; but, though he was
once in Italy, I question whether Milton ever saw any
but the dingy pictures in the dusty windows of English
cathedrals, imperfectly shown by the gray English
daylight. He would else have illuminated that
word ‘dim’ with some epithet that should
not chase away the dimness, yet should make it glow
like a million of rubies, sapphires, emeralds, and
topazes. Is it not so with yonder window?
The pictures are most brilliant in themselves, yet
dim with tenderness and reverence, because God himself
is shining through them.”
“The pictures fill me with emotion,
but not such as you seem to experience,” said
Donatello. “I tremble at those awful saints;
and, most of all, at the figure above them. He
glows with Divine wrath!”
“My dear friend,” said
Kenyon, “how strangely your eyes have transmuted
the expression of the figure! It is divine love,
not wrath!”
“To my eyes,” said Donatello
stubbornly, “it is wrath, not love! Each
must interpret for himself.”
The friends left the church, and looking
up, from the exterior, at the window which they had
just been contemplating within, nothing; was visible
but the merest outline of dusky shapes, Neither the
individual likeness of saint, angel, nor Saviour,
and far less the combined scheme and purport of the
picture, could anywise be made out. That miracle
of radiant art, thus viewed, was nothing better than
an incomprehensible obscurity, without a gleam of
beauty to induce the beholder to attempt unravelling
it.
“All this,” thought the
sculptor, “is a most forcible emblem of the
different aspect of religious truth and sacred story,
as viewed from the warm interior of belief, or from
its cold and dreary outside. Christian faith
is a grand cathedral, with divinely pictured windows.
Standing without, you see no glory, nor can possibly
imagine any; standing within, every ray of light reveals
a harmony of unspeakable splendors.”
After Kenyon and Donatello emerged
from the church, however, they had better opportunity
for acts of charity and mercy than for religious contemplation;
being immediately surrounded by a swarm of beggars,
who are the present possessors of Italy, and share
the spoil of the stranger with the fleas and mosquitoes,
their formidable allies. These pests the
human ones had hunted the two travellers
at every stage of their journey. From village
to village, ragged boys and girls kept almost under
the horses’ feet; hoary grandsires and grandames
caught glimpses of their approach, and hobbled to
intercept them at some point of vantage; blind men
stared them out of countenance with their sightless
orbs; women held up their unwashed babies; cripples
displayed their wooden legs, their grievous scars,
their dangling, boneless arms, their broken backs,
their burden of a hump, or whatever infirmity or deformity
Providence had assigned them for an inheritance.
On the highest mountain summit in the most
shadowy ravine there was a beggar waiting
for them. In one small village, Kenyon had the
curiosity to count merely how many children were crying,
whining, and bellowing all at once for alms. They
proved to be more than forty of as ragged and dirty
little imps as any in the world; besides whom, all
the wrinkled matrons, and most of the village maids,
and not a few stalwart men, held out their hands grimly,
piteously, or smilingly in the forlorn hope of whatever
trifle of coin might remain in pockets already so
fearfully taxed. Had they been permitted, they
would gladly have knelt down and worshipped the travellers,
and have cursed them, without rising from their knees,
if the expected boon failed to be awarded.
Yet they were not so miserably poor
but that the grown people kept houses over their heads.
In the way of food, they had, at least,
vegetables in their little gardens, pigs and chickens
to kill, eggs to fry into omelets with oil, wine to
drink, and many other things to make life comfortable.
As for the children, when no more small coin appeared
to be forthcoming, they began to laugh and play, and
turn heels over head, showing themselves jolly and
vivacious brats, and evidently as well fed as needs
be. The truth is, the Italian peasantry look
upon strangers as the almoners of Providence, and
therefore feel no more shame in asking and receiving
alms, than in availing themselves of providential bounties
in whatever other form.
In accordance with his nature, Donatello
was always exceedingly charitable to these ragged
battalions, and appeared to derive a certain consolation
from the prayers which many of them put up in his behalf.
In Italy a copper coin of minute value will often
make all the difference between a vindictive curse death
by apoplexy being the favorite one-mumbled in an old
witch’s toothless jaws, and a prayer from the
same lips, so earnest that it would seem to reward
the charitable soul with at least a puff of grateful
breath to help him heavenward. Good wishes being
so cheap, though possibly not very efficacious, and
anathemas so exceedingly bitter, even if
the greater portion of their poison remain in the
mouth that utters them, it may be wise to
expend some reasonable amount in the purchase of the
former. Donatello invariably did so; and as he
distributed his alms under the pictured window, of
which we have been speaking, no less than seven ancient
women lifted their hands and besought blessings on
his head.
“Come,” said the sculptor,
rejoicing at the happier expression which he saw in
his friend’s face. “I think your steed
will not stumble with you to-day. Each of these
old dames looks as much like Horace’s
Atra Cura as can well be conceived; but,
though there are seven of them, they will make your
burden on horseback lighter instead of heavier.”
“Are we to ride far?” asked the Count.
“A tolerable journey betwixt
now and to-morrow noon,” Kenyon replied; “for,
at that hour, I purpose to be standing by the Pope’s
statue in the great square of Perugia.”