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Italy, the Magic Land. Lilian Whiting
Читать онлайн.Название Italy, the Magic Land
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isbn 4064066145361
Автор произведения Lilian Whiting
Жанр Документальная литература
Издательство Bookwire
Were all the muses present at the christening of William Wetmore Story—sculptor, musician, poet and painter, jurist and man of letters, and the friend whose social relationships made life a thing of beauty—
“To winds and waterfalls,
And autumn’s sunlit festivals,
To music and to music’s thoughts
Inextricably bound”?
Mr. Story made his first visit to Italy in 1847; not at that time with any fixed purpose of exchanging his profession of the law for art. He loved literature, and his grace and ease in expression had already manifested his literary talent; he had an inclination toward modelling—it could hardly, at this time, have been called by a stronger name—and curiously enough with him the usual conditions were reversed and he received a commission for a statue of his father, Judge Story, before he had made any definite turning toward the art of sculpture. A young man of versatile gifts and accomplished scholarship, sculpture was to him one among the many attractive forms of art rather than the supreme attraction; and it was the stimulus of the given work that determined him as a sculptor, rather than his determination to be a sculptor that determined the work. Among the goddesses of life Destiny must, perhaps, be allowed a place. At all events, after Mr. Story’s initial glance at Italy, he sought Rome again a year later, and this time it was his choice for life, however unrevealed to his eye were the resplendent years that lay before him. He had fallen under the spell of the Magic Land. In a letter to Lowell, Mr. Story had questioned how he should ever endure again “the restraint and bondage of Boston.” It was the picturesque Rome of the Popes that he first knew. The years of 1848–49 were those of revolutionary activities in Italy. Pio Nono, one of the most saintly and beloved of the Popes—whose mortal form now rests in that richly decorated chapel in old San Lorenzo, fuori le mura, on the site of the church that Constantine founded on the burial place of St. Lawrence—made his flight to Gaeta and the Roman republic was established. It was a dramatic scene when Pio Nono returned (April 12, 1850), entering Rome by the Porta San Giovanni. The scene from this gate was then, as now, one of the most impressive in the Eternal City.
It was in this vast Basilica of San Giovanni Laterano that Pio Nono entered that April day, leaving his carriage and walking alone to the altar, where he knelt in devotion. A splendid procession awaited without to accompany the Holy Father to the Papal Palace. The superb state carriages conveyed princes and foreign ambassadors and great nobles. From the Piazza San Giovanni to St. Peter’s every house was illuminated, and the populace cheered and waved until the very air vibrated with sound and color. These were the days when the methods of government were a visible spectacle, a drama, making the life in Rome a daily illuminated missal.
The Storys, on their return to Italy, located themselves for a time in Florence, where they met the Brownings, and that lifelong friendship between the poet and the sculptor was initiated. In these happy Florentine days Mr. Story worked in his studio while his wife read to him the life of Keats, then just issued, written by Monckton Milnes, later Lord Houghton. But the “flowing conditions” soon bore them onward to Rome, where they settled themselves in the Via Porta Pinciana, and met the Crawfords, who were domiciled in the Villa Negroni. In these Roman days, too, appeared Mr. Cropsey, of poetic landscape fame, and here, too, was Margaret Fuller. Mazzini was then a leading figure in the Chamber of Deputies—“the prophet not only of modern Italy, but of the modern world.” He found Italy “utilitarian and materialistic, permeated by French ideas, and weakened by her reliance on French initiative. He was filled with hope that Italy might not only achieve her own unity, but might once more accomplish, as she had in the Rome of the Cæsars and the Rome of the Church, the unity of the Western world. ‘On my side I believe,’ he says, ‘that the great problem of the day was a religious problem, to which all other questions were but secondary.’ ” He was asserting that “we cannot relate ourselves to the Divine, but through collective humanity. It is not by isolated duty (which indeed the conditions of modern life render more and more impossible), nor by contemplation of mere Power as displayed in the material world, that we can develop our nature. It is rather by mingling with the universal life, and by carrying on the evolution of the never-ending work.”
The studios of Mr. Crawford in those days were in the Piazza delle Terme, near the Baths of Diocletian. William Page, the painter, was domiciled on the slope of the Quirinal where he painted a portrait of Charlotte Cushman which Mrs. Browning described as “a miracle”; one of Mrs. Crawford; the head of Mrs. Story, which he insisted upon presenting to her husband; and a magnificent portrait of Browning which the artist presented to Mrs. Browning. “Both of us,” wrote Robert Browning of this gift, “would have fain escaped being the subjects of such princely generosity; but there was no withstanding his delicacy and noble-mindedness.” Mrs. Jameson was much in Rome in the early years of the 1850–60 decade, living in the old port by the Tiber nearly opposite to the new and splendid building of the law courts. Near the Tarpeian Rock Frederika Bremer had perched, in a tiny room of which she took all the frugal care, even to washing the blue cups and plates when she invited the Hawthornes to a tea of a simplicity that suggested, indeed, the utmost degree of “light” housekeeping. Thomas Buchanan Read was one of the hosts and guests of this social group, and it was at a dinner he gave that Hawthorne met Gibson, whose conversational talents were evidently (upon that occasion) chiefly employed in contemning the pre-Raphaelite school of painters and emphasizing the need of sculptors to discover and to follow the principles of the Greeks—“a fair doctrine, but one which Mr. Gibson fails to practise,” observes Hawthorne. The Brownings were variously bestowed in Rome through succeeding winters—in the Bocca di Leone, in the Via del Tritone and elsewhere. Mrs. Browning, as her “Casa Guida Windows” and many other poems attest, took always the deepest interest in Italian politics. American and English friends come and go, but the little group of residents and the more permanent sojourners, as the Hawthornes and the Brownings, continue their daily variations on life in the social dinners and teas, the excursions and the sight-seeing of the wonderful city.
Only the magician could “call up the vanished past again” and summon into an undeniable materialization those charming figures to come forth out of the shadowy air of the rich, historic past, and stand before us in the full light of contemporary attention. Not alone this group of choice persons, but the environment of their time, the very atmosphere, are demanded of this necromancy. The figure of Adelaide Kemble (Mrs. Sartoris) is one of these, and the tradition still survives of a concert given in the splendid, spacious hall of the Palazzo Colonna where she was the prima donna of the occasion. There were also musicals at the house of Mrs. Sartoris, where the guests met her famous sister, Fanny Kemble. Mrs. Browning was fond of both the sisters, and said of them that their social brilliancy was their least distinction. She found them both “noble and sympathetic,” and her “dear Mr. Page” and “Hatty” (Miss Hosmer) “an immense favorite with us both,” she said of her husband and herself; these and the Storys made up the special circle for the Brownings in Rome. “The Sartoris house has the best society in Rome,” writes Mrs. Browning to Miss Mitford, “and exquisite music, of course. We met Lockhart there and my husband sees a good deal of him. … A little society,” she says, “is good for soul and body, and on the Continent it is easy to get a handful of society without paying too dear for it. This is an advantage of Continental life.”
Mrs. Browning greatly admired the work of Mr. Page, whose portraits she found “like Titian’s.” But the tinted statues of Gibson seemed to her inartistic. His famous painted Venus she called “pretty,” but only as a wax doll might be, not as a work of genuine art. Then Thackeray and his two daughters came; Miss Anne (now known to the world of literature as Anne Thackeray Ritchie) was a special favorite with Mrs. Browning.
Coming to Rome at one time from Florence in midwinter, the Brownings found that the Storys had taken an apartment for them (in the Via Bocca di Leone), and they arrived to find lighted fires and lamps. Their journey had included a week’s visit at Assisi, studying the rich art of Cimabue and Giotto in the church of the great Franciscan monastery. Mrs. Browning visited studios in Rome and