From sketch-book and diary

My great regret is that I had so little time to ply my paints and try at least to make studies which would now be very precious to me. How little I knew the shortness of my sojourn! The two little Cape ponies (with much of the Arab in them) were in almost daily requisition along those great pine-bordered, red-earthed roads, to take me for my return calls, or a portion of them. I fear I left many unreturned towards the end. There were the Dutch as well as the English, a large circle. I had sketching expeditions projected which never came off, with a clever Dutch lady, who did charming water-colours of beautiful Constantia and the striking country above Simon’s Bay, and the true “Cape of Good Hope” beyond. She had battled with snakes in the pursuit of her art, and in the woods had sustained the stone-throwing of the baboons, who made a target of her as she sat at work. I was willing for the baboon bombardment, and even would chance the snakes, as one chances everything, to wrest but a poor little water-colour from nature.

Two events which, in that tremendous year ‘99, were of more than usual importance loom large in my memory of the Cape – that is, the Queen’s Birthday Review in May, and the opening of Parliament on the 14th July. The Birthday Review on the Plain at Green Point was the ditto of others I had seen on the sands of Egypt, on the green sward of Laffan’s Plain at Aldershot, on the Dover Esplanade, and wherever W. had been in command; but this time, as he rode up on his big grey to give the Governor the Royal Salute before leading the “Three Cheers for Her Majesty the Queen!” a prophet might have seen the War Spectre moving through the ranks of red-coats behind the General.

At the opening of Parliament we ladies almost filled the centre of the “House,” and I was able to study the scene from very close. The Dutch Members, on being presented to the Speaker, took the oath by raising the right hand, whereas the English, of course, kissed the Book. The proceedings were all on the lines followed at Westminster, the Governor keeping his hat on as representing the Sovereign. The opening words of “the Speech from the Throne” sounded hollow. They proclaimed amongst other things urbi et orbi, that we were at peace with the South African Republics.

“And now,” says the diary, “Good-bye, South Africa, for ever! I am glad that in you I have had experience of one of the most enchanting portions of this earth!”

As you know that experience only lasted five months after all. We left on the 23rd August ‘99 on a day of blinding rain, which, as the ship moved off, drew like a curtain across that country which I felt we were leaving to a fast-approaching trouble. The war cloud was descending. It burst in blood and fire a few weeks later and deepened the sense of melancholy with which I shall ever think of that far-away land.

IV

ITALY

CHAPTER I

VINTAGE-TIME IN TUSCANY

A DESCENT from the Apennine on a September evening into Tuscany, with the moon nearly full – that moon which in a few days will be shining in all its power upon the delights of the vintage week – this I want to recall to you who have shared the pleasure of such an experience with me.

A descent into the Garden of Italy, spread out wide in a haze of warm air – can custom stale the feeling which that brings to heart and mind?

Railway travel has its poetry, its sudden and emotional contrasts and surprises. But a few hours ago we were in the foggy drizzle of an autumn morning at Charing Cross, and, ere we have time to be fagged by a too-long journey, our eyes and brain receive the image of the Tuscan plain!

The train slows down for a moment on emerging from the last tunnel at the top of the mountain barrier; the grinding brakes are still, and for a precious instant we listen at the window for the old summer night sounds we remember and love. Yes! there they are; there he is, the dear old chirping, drumming, droning night-beetle in myriads at his old penetrating song, persistent as the sicala’s through the dog days, local in its suggestiveness as the corncrake’s endless saw among the meadow-sweet all through the Irish summer night.

But, avanti! Down the winding track with flying sparks from the locked wheels, every metre to the good; down to the red domes of Pistoja; forward, then, on the level, to Florence and all it holds.

How we English do love Italy! Somewhere in our colder nature flows a warm Gulf Stream of love for what is sunny and clear-skied and genial, and I think I may say, though my compatriots little realize it, that the evidences of a living faith which are inseparable from Italian landscape greatly add to the charm that attracts us to this land. What would her hills be if decapitated of the convents on their summits, with each its cypress-lined Via Crucis winding up the hillside? The time of the after-glow would be voiceless if deprived of the ringing of the Angelus. Dimly we perceive these things, or hardly recognise them as facts – nay, many of us still protest, but they draw us to Italy.

And now the arrival at Florence. The pleasure of dwelling on that arrival, when on the platform our friends await us with the sun of Italy in their looks! Then away we go with them in carriages drawn by those fast-trotting Tuscan ponies that are my wonder and admiration, with crack of whip and jingle of bells along the white moon-lit road to the great villa at Signa, where the vintage is about to begin.

To recall the happy labour of those precious three days of grape-picking in the mellow heat on the hillside, and then the all-pervading fumes of fermenting wine of the succeeding period in the courtyard of the Fattoria; the dull red hue of the crushed grapes that dyes all things, animate and inanimate, within the sphere of work, is one of the most grateful efforts of my memory. I see again the handsome laughing peasants, the white oxen, the flights of pigeons across the blue of the sky. The mental relaxation amidst all this activity of wholesome and natural labour, the complete change of scene, afford a blessed rest to one who has worked hard through a London winter and got very tired of a London season. It is a patriarchal life here, and the atmosphere of good humour between landlord and tenant seems to show the land laws and customs of Tuscany to be in need of no reformer, the master and the man appearing to be nearer contentment than is the case anywhere else that I know of. You and I saw a very cheery specimen of the land system at grand old Caravaggio.

Then the evenings! I know it is trite to talk of guitars and tenor voices under the moonlight, but Italy woos you back to many things we call “used up” elsewhere, and there is positive refreshment in hearing those light tenor voices, expressive of the light heart, singing the ever-charming stornellos of the country as we sit under the pergola after dinner each evening. The neighbours drop in and the guitar goes round with the coffee. Everybody sings who can, and, truth to say, some who can’t. Many warm thanks to our kind friends, English and Italian (some are gone!), who gave you and me such unforgettable hospitality in ‘75, ‘76.

But lest all these guitarings and airy nothings of the gentle social life here should become oversweet, we can slip away from the rose-garden and climb up into the vineyards of the rustic podere that speak of wholesome peasant labour, of tillage – the first principle of man’s existence on earth – and, among the practical pole-vines that bear the true wine-making grapes (not the dessert fruit of the garden pergola), have a quiet talk.

The starry sky is disclosed almost round the entire circle of the horizon, with “Firenze la gentile” in the distance on our right, the Apennine in front, and the sleeping plain trending away to the left to be lost in mystery. I want to talk to you of our experience of Italy the Beloved, from our earliest childhood until to-day.

What a happy chance it was that our parents should have been so taken with the Riviera di Levante as to return there winter after winter, alternately with the summers spent in gentle Kent or Surrey, during our childhood; not the French Riviera which has since become so sophisticated, but that purely Italian stretch of coast to the east of Genoa, ending in Porto Fino, that promontory which you and I will always hold as a sacred bit of the world. Why? There are as lovely promontories jutting out into the Mediterranean elsewhere? The child’s love for the scenes of its early friendships with nature is a jealous love.

Our relations by marriage with the B. family admitted us into the centre of a very typical Italian home of the old order. I suppose that life was very like the life of eighteenth-century England – the domestic habits were curiously alike, and I cannot say I regret that their vogue is passing. We are thought to be so ridiculously fastidious, noi altri inglesi, and our parents were certainly not exceptional in this respect, and suffered accordingly.

The master of the house, the autocratic padrone, had been in the Italian Legion in Napoleon’s Russian campaign, as you may remember, and the retreat from Moscow had apparently left certain indelible cicatrices on the old gentleman’s temper. I can hear his stentorian voice even now calling to the servant (I think there was only one “living in,” though there were about a dozen hangers-on) in the rambling old Palazzo without bells. “O – O – O, Mariuccia!” “Padrone!” you heard in a feminine treble from the remote regions of the kitchen upstairs, somewhere. Mariuccia would generally get a bit of the Italian legionary’s mind when she came tumbling down the marble stairs. Madame la Generale appeared in the morning with a red handkerchief on her head and remained in corsetless déshabillé till the afternoon. Genoese was the home language, French was for society. No one spoke real Italian. They had not yet begun to “Toscaneggiare,” as it grew to be the fashion to do when Italy became united. Don’t you dislike to hear them?

What recollections our parents carried away from those visits to the Nervi household! How we used to love to hear mamma’s accounts, for instance, of the night Lord Minto came to tea. Madame Gioconda had put the whole pound of choice green tea which she had bought at the English shop in Genoa into a large tea-pot requisitioned for this rare English occasion. Poor mamma had the pouring of it out, and no deluges of hot water, brought by the astonished Mariuccia, could tame that ferocious beverage. I am sure the brave General never got more completely “bothered” by the Russian cannon than he did by the “gun-powder” that evening. Nowadays such a mistake could not happen when il thè is quite the fashion.

Italians still think it the right thing to visit England in November and go to Liverpool, Manchester, and Birmingham for their informing little tour. In those remote days it was the only way in which the few that ever ventured so far saw our lovely land. Mamma was constantly sent into a state of suppressed indignation by the stereotyped question, “Are there any flowers in England?” But I have not done with the old General. I remember we were so frightened of that Tartar that Papa used to have to propel us into the Presence, when, in the evenings, every one, big and little, sat down to dominoes or “tombola.” Syrup and water and little cakes made of chestnut flour refreshed the company. The General’s snuff was in the syrup, I firmly believed. We looked like two little martyrs as we went up to salute those shaking yellow cheeks on being sent to bed. Why are children put to these ordeals?

The living was frugal, the real “simple life” which some of us in England are pretending to lead to-day. But on certain occasions, such as Shrove Tuesday, for instance, ah! no effects of oriental feasting could surpass the repletion with which each guest left the festive board. Mariuccia had help for three days previous to such regalings, during which one heard the tapping of the chopper in the kitchen, preparing the force-meat for the national dish, the succulent ravioli, as one passed within earshot of that remote vaulted hall.

And do you remember (you are a year my junior, and a year makes a great difference in the child’s mind) a certain night when there was a ball at our villa on the Albaro shore, and the shutters of the great “sala” were thrown open to let in the moonlight at midnight? A small barque lay in the offing, surrounded by little boats, and a cheer came over the sea in answer to what the people over there, seeing the sudden illumination from the chandeliers, took for our flashing signal of “God-speed!” They were a detachment of Garibaldi’s Redshirts on their way to liberate Southern Italy. The grown-ups on our side went down to supper, and our little cropped heads remained looking at the barque in the moon’s broad reflection long after we were supposed to be asleep. I had seen the Liberator himself talking to the gardener at the – ’s villa, where he was staying, at Quarto, the day before he sailed for Messina.

We were certainly an unconventional family, and we were so happy in our rovings through the land of sun. But if you and I are inclined to bemoan too much modernism in that Italy we so jealously love, oh! do not let us forget the gloom of some of those old palaces which we had a mind to inhabit a l’Italienne, on bad winter nights – the old three-beaked oil lamps in the bedrooms serving, as our dear father used to say, only to “make darkness visible” – the wind during the great storms setting some loose shutter flapping in uninhabited upper regions of the house; the dark places which Charles Dickens in his Pictures from Italy says he noticed in all the Italian houses he slept in on his tour, which were not wholly innocent of scorpions. The marble floors and the paucity of fireplaces did not give comfort for the short winters; but how glorious those old houses became as soon as the cold was gone; shabby, ramshackle, and splendid, we loved them “for all in all.”

In certain things modern Italy affords us an easier life. We are given to nagging at the Italians for their dreadful want of taste in spoiling the beauty of their cities, but in the old days we were nagging at them for their dirt. Now Rome is the cleanest capital in the world. Some one said it is more than clean, it is dusted. And is not the Society for the Protection of Animals in existence, at least? With what derision such an institution would have been heard of in our childhood’s days – a suggestion of those “mad English.”

Do you call to mind what scenes used to occur whenever mamma came out with us, between her and the muleteers? I can see her now, in the fulness of her English beauty, flying out one day at a carter for flogging and kicking his mules that were hardly able to drag a load up the Albaro Hill. This was the dialogue. Mamma – “Voi siete un cattivo!” Muleteer – “E voi siete bella!” Mamma – “Voi siete un birbante!” Muleteer – “E voi siete bella!” Mamma – “Voi siete uno scelerato!” Muleteer – “E voi siete bella!” And so on, till we had reached the bottom of the cruel hill, mamma at the end of her crescendo of fulminations and the man’s voice, still calling “E voi siete bella” in imitation of her un-Genoese phraseology, lost in distance at the top. “I shall get a fit some day,” were her first English words. Poor dear mother, the shooting of the singing-birds in spring, the dirt, the noise, the flies, the mosquitoes – so many thorns in her Italian rose! Yet how she loved that rose, but not more than the sweet violet of our England that had no such thorns. The music in the churches, too, was trying in those days, and to none more so than to that music-loving soul. We have seen her doing her best to fix her mind on her devotions, with her fingers in her ears, and her face puckered up into an excruciated bunch. I hope Pius X. has enforced the plain-chant everywhere, and stopped those raspings of secular waltzes on sour fiddles that were supposed to aid our fervour. But I am nagging. As a Northerner, I have no right to lecture the Italians as to what sort of music is best for devotion, nor to tell them that the dressing of their sacred images in gaudy finery on festival days is not the way to deepen reverence. The Italians do what suits them best in these matters, and if our English taste is offended let us stay at home.

Well, well, here below there is nothing bright without its shadow. When we had the delicious national costumes we had the dirt and the cruelty. But why, I ask, cannot we keep the national dress, the local customs, the picturesqueness while we gain the cleanly and the kind? Every time I revisit Italy I miss another bit of colour and pleasing form amongst the populations. In Rome not a cloak is to be seen on the citizens, that black cloak lined with red or green they used to throw over the left shoulder, toga-wise – only old left-off ulsters or overcoats from Paris or Berlin. Not a red cap on the men of Genoa; the pezzotto and mezzero, most feminine headgear for the women, are extinct there. Ladies in Rome are even shy of wearing the black mantilla to go to the Vatican, and put it on in the cloak-room of the palace, removing it again to put on the barbarous Parisian hat for the streets. When we foreign ladies drive in our mantillas to the Audiences we are stared at! Even my old friends the red, blue, and green umbrellas of portly dimensions, formerly dear to the clergy, no longer light up the sombre clerical garb. Did I not see a flight of bare-footed Capuchins, last time in Rome, put up, every monk of them, a black Gingham when a shower came on, and I was expecting an efflorescence of my fondly-remembered Gamps? Next time I go the other bit of clerical colour will have vanished, and I shall find them using white pocket-handkerchiefs instead of the effective red bandana.

Well, but, you are told, the beggars are cleared out, those persistent unfortunates who used to thrust their deformities and diseases before you wherever you turned, with the wailing refrain, “Misericordia, signore!” “Un povero zoppo!” “Un cieco!” “Ho fame!” etc. etc. But they sunned themselves and ate their bread and onions where they liked (not where we liked) in perfect liberty. Where are they now? In dreary poorhouses, I suppose, out of sight, regularly fed and truly miserable. I am afraid that much of our modern comfort is owing simply to the covering up of unpleasantnesses. In the East, especially, life is seen with the cover taken off, and many painful sights and many startling bits of the reality of life spoil the sunshine for us there for a while. But worse things are in the London streets, only “respectably” covered up, and I am sure that more cruelty is committed by the ever-increasing secret work of the vivisector than ever wrung the heart of the compassionate in the old days in the open street.

And there, as we sit on the hillside above Signa, lies Florence, just discernible in the far-off plain, where I learnt so much of my art. Those frescoes of Masaccio, Andrea del Sarto, and all those masters of the human face who revelled in painting every variety of human type, how they augmented my taste that way! Nothing annoyed me so much as the palpable use of one model in a crowded composition. Take a dinner-party at table – will you ever see two noses alike as you run your eye along the guests? Even in a regiment of evenly matched troops, all of one nationality, I ask you to show me two men in the ranks sharing the same nose!

Ah! those days I spent in the cloisters of the SS. Annuziata, making pencil copies of Andrea’s figures in the series of frescoes illustrating the life of St Philip. It was summer-time, and the tourists only came bothering me towards the end. That hot summer, when I used to march into Florence, accompanied by little Majolina, in the still-early mornings, when the sicala was not yet in full chirp for the day! Four days a week to my master’s studio under the shadow of the Medici Chapel, and two to my dear cloisters; the Sunday at our villa under Fiesole. Happy girl!

I see in my diary this brilliant adaptation of Coleridge’s lines —

“’Tis sweet to him who all the weekThrough city crowds must push his way, etc.”’Tis sweet to her who all the weekWith brush and paint must work her wayTo stroll thro’ florence vineyards coolAnd hallow thus the Sabbath Day.

I have much to thank my master Guiseppe Bellucci for, who drilled me so severely, carrying on the instruction I had the advantage to receive from thorough-going Richard Burchett the head-master at South Kensington – never-to-be-forgotten South Kensington.

It seems a shame to be saying so much about Florence and not to pause a few minutes to give the other a little hand-shake in passing. There I began my art-student life, than which no part of an artist’s career can be more free from care or more buoyed up with aspirations for the future. Dear early days spent with those bright and generous comrades, my fellow-students, so full of enthusiasm over what they called my “promise” – I have all those days chronicled in the old diaries. There I recall the day I was promoted to the “Life Class” from the “Antique” – a joyful epoch; and the Sketching Club where “old D – ,” the second master, used to give “Best” nearly every time to Kate Greenaway and “Second Best” to me. What joy when I got a “Best” one fine day. She and I raced neck and neck with those sketches after that. The “Life Class” was absorbingly interesting. But how nervous and excited I felt at grappling with my first living model. He was a fine old man (but with a bibulous eye) costumed to represent “Cranmer walking to the Tower.” I see in the diary, “Cranmer walked rather unsteadily to the Tower to-day, and we all did badly in consequence.” Then came one of Cromwell’s Ironsides whose morion gave him a perpetual headache, followed by my first full-length, a costume model in tights and slashed doublet whom we spitefully called “Spindle-Shanks” and greatly disliked. What was my surprise, long years afterwards, to stumble upon my “Spindle-Shanks” as “‘Christopher Columbus,’ by the celebrated painter of etc. etc.” I then remembered I had made a present of him, when finished, to our “char,” much to her embarrassment, I should think. However, she seems to have got rid of the “white elephant” with profit to herself in course of time. But I must not let myself loose on those glorious student days, so full of work and of play, otherwise I would wander too far away from my subject. It was tempting to linger over that hand-shake.

I don’t think I ever felt such heat as in Florence. As the July sun was sending every one out of the baking city, shutting up the House of Deputies, and generally taking the pith out of things, I remember Bellucci coming into the studio one day with his hair in wisps, and hinting that it would be as well for me to give myself un mesetto di riposo. I did take that “little month of rest” at our villa, and sketched the people and the oxen, and mixed a great deal in peasant society, benefitting thereby in the loss of my Genoese twang under the influence of their most grammatical Tuscan. The peasant is the most honourable, religious, and philosophical of mankind. I feel always safe with peasants and like their conversation and ways. They lead the natural life. Before daylight, in midsummer, one heard them directing their oxen at the plough, and after the mid-day siesta they were back at their work till the Ave Maria. It was a large family that inhabited the peasant quarters of our villa and worked the landlord’s vineyards. How they delighted in my sketches, in giving me sittings in the intervals of work, in seeing me doing amateur harvesting with a sickle and helping (?) them to bind the wheat sheaves and sift the grain. I must often have been in the way, now I think of it, but never a hint did these ladies and gentlemen of the horny hand allow to escape to my confusion. Carlotta, the eldest girl, read me some of the “Jerusalem Delivered” one full-moon night, to show me how easily one could read small print by the Italian moonlight. Her mother invited me to dine with the family one day as they were having a rare repast. Cencio had found two hedgehogs in a hollow olive-tree, and the ragout that ensued must be tasted by the signorina. Through the door of the kitchen where we dined on that occasion the two white oxen were seen reposing in the next apartment after their morning’s work. After tasting the spinoso stew, I begged to be allowed to take a stool in the corner and sketch the whole family at table, and with the perfect grace of those people I was welcomed to do so, and I got them all in as they sucked their hedgehog bones in concert. You were reading Keats in one of the arbours, meanwhile, I remember.