only masters. But that is no reason why I should
not try my prentice hand. Florence alters not
at all. Men do. My picture, poor as you
like, shall be my own. It is not their Florence
or yours—and, remember, I would strike
at Tuscany through Florence, and throughout Tuscany
keep my eye in her beam,—but my own mellow
kingcup of a town, the glowing heart of the whole
Arno basin, whose suave and weather-warmed grace I
shall try to catch and distil. But Mrs. Brown
is right; it Is late: the huntsmen are up in
America, as your good kinsman has it, and I would never
have you act your own Antipodes. Addio.
EYE OF ITALY
[Footnote: My thanks are due to the Editor of
Black and White for permission to reprint the
substance of this essay.]
I have been here a few days only—perhaps
a week: if it’s impressionism you’re
after, the time is now or a year hence. For, in
these things of three stages, two may be tolerable,
the first clouding of the water with the wine’s
red fire, or the final resolution of the two into one
humane consistence: the intermediate course is,
like all times of process, brumous and hesitant.
After a dinner in the white piazza, shrinking slowly
to blue under the keen young moon’s eye, watched
over jealously by the frowning bulk of Brunelleschi’s
globe—after a dinner of pasta con brodo,
veal cutlets, olives, and a bottle of right Barbera,
let me give you a pastel (this is the medium for such
evanescences) of Florence herself. At present
I only feel. No one should think—few
people can—after dinner. Be patient
therefore; suffer me thus far.
I would spare you, if I might, the horrors of my night-long
journey from Milan. There is little romance in
a railway: the novelists have worked it dry.
That is, however, a part of my sum of perceptions which
began, you may put it, at the dawn which saw Florence
and me face to face. So I must in no wise omit
it.
I find, then, that Italian railway-carriages are constructed
for the convenience of luggage, and that passengers
are an afterthought, as dogs or grooms are with us,
to be suffered only if there be room and on condition
they look after the luggage. In my case we had
our full complement of the staple; nevertheless every
passenger assumed the god, keeping watch on his traps,
and thinking to shake the spheres at every fresh arrival.
Thoughtless behaviour! for there were thus twelve people
packed into a rocky landscape of cardboard portmanteaus
and umbrella-peaks; twenty-four legs, and urgent
need of stretching-room as the night wore on.
There was jostling, there was asperity from those who
could sleep and from those who would; there was more
when two shock-head drovers—like First
and Second Murderers in a tragedy—insisted
on taking off their boots. It was not that there
was little room for boots; indeed I think they nursed
them on their thin knees. It was at any rate too
