‘I’ve known Florence long, sir, but I’ve never known her so lovely as to-night. It’s as if the ghosts of her past were abroad in the empty streets. The present is sleeping; the past hovers about us like a dream made visible. Fancy the old Florentines strolling up in couples to pass judgement on the last performance of Michael, of Benvenuto! We should come in for a precious lesson if we might overhear what they say. The plainest burgher of them, in his cap and gown, had a taste in the matter! That was the prime of art, sir. The sun stood high in heaven, and his broad and equal blaze made the darkest places bright and the dullest eyes clear. We live in the evening of time! We grope in the grey dusk, carrying each our poor little taper of selfish and painful wisdom, holding it up to the great models and to the dim idea, and seeing nothing but overwhelming greatness and dimness. The days of illumination are gone! But do you know I fancy – I fancy,’ – and he grew suddenly almost familiar in this visionary fervour, – ‘I fancy the light of that time rests upon us here for an hour! I have never seen the David so grand, the Perseus so fair! Even the inferior productions of John of Bologna and of Baccio Bandinelli seem to realise the artist’s dream. I feel as if the moonlit air were charged with the secrets of the masters, and as if, standing here in religious contemplation, we might – we might witness a revelation!’ Perceiving at this moment, I suppose, my halting comprehension reflected in my puzzled face, this interesting rhapsodist paused and blushed. Then with a melancholy smile, ‘You think me a moonstruck charlatan, I suppose. It’s not my habit to hang about the piazza and pounce upon innocent tourists. But to-night, I confess, I’m under the charm. And then, somehow, I fancied you, too, were an artist!’
‘I’m not an artist, I’m sorry to say, as you must understand the term. But pray make no apologies. I am also under the charm; your eloquent reflections have only deepened it.’
‘If you’re not an artist, you’re worthy to be one!’ he rejoined, with a bow. ‘A young man who arrives at Florence late in the evening, and, instead of going prosaically to bed, or hanging over the travellers’ book at his hotel, walks forth without loss of time to pay his devoirs to the beautiful, is a young man after my own heart!’
The mystery was suddenly solved; my friend was an American! He must have been, to take the picturesque so prodigiously to heart. ‘None the less so, I trust,’ I answered, ‘if the young man is a sordid New-Yorker.’
‘New-Yorkers,’ he solemnly proclaimed, ‘have been munificent patrons of art!’
For a moment I was alarmed. Was this midnight reverie mere Yankee enterprise, and was he simply a desperate brother of the brush who had posted himself here to extort an ‘order’ from a sauntering tourist? But I was not called to defend myself. A great brazen note broke suddenly from the far-off summit of the bell-tower above us and sounded the first stroke of midnight. My companion started, apologised for detaining me, and prepared to retire. But he seemed to offer so lively a promise of further entertainment, that I was indisposed to part with him, and suggested that we should stroll homeward together. He cordially assented, so we turned out of the Piazza, passed down before the statued arcade of the Uffizi, and came out upon the Arno. What course we took I hardly remember, but we roamed slowly about for an hour, my companion delivering by snatches a sort of moon-touched aesthetic lecture. I listened in puzzled fascination, and wondered who the deuce he was. He confessed with a melancholy but all-respectful head-shake to his American origin. ‘We are the disinherited of Art!’ he cried. ‘We are condemned to be superficial! We are excluded from the magic circle. The soil of American perception is a poor little barren, artificial deposit. Yes! we are wedded to imperfection. An American, to excel, has just ten times as much to learn as a European. We lack the deeper sense. We have neither taste, nor tact, nor force. How should we have them? Our crude and garish climate, our silent past, our deafening present, the constant pressure about us of unlovely circumstance, are as void of all that nourishes and prompts and inspires the artist, as my sad heart is void of bitterness in saying so! We poor aspirants must live in perpetual exile.’
‘You seem fairly at home in exile,’ I answered, ‘and Florence seems to me a very pretty Siberia. But do you know my own thought? Nothing is so idle as to talk about our want of a nutritive soil, of opportunity, of inspiration, and all the rest of it. The worthy part is to do something fine! There’s no law in our glorious Constitution against that. Invent, create, achieve! No matter if you’ve to study fifty times as much as one of these! What else are you an artist for? Be you our Moses,’ I added, laughing, and laying my hand on his shoulder, ‘and lead us out of the house of bondage!’
‘Golden words, – golden words, young man!’ he cried, with a tender smile. ‘ “Invent, create, achieve!” Yes, that’s our business: I know it well. Don’t take me, in Heaven’s name, for one of your barren complainers, – querulous cynics, who have neither talent nor faith! I’m at work!’ – and he glanced about him and lowered his voice as if this were a quite peculiar secret, – ‘I’m at work night and day. I’ve undertaken a creation! I’m no Moses; I’m only a poor, patient artist; but it would be a fine thing if I were to cause some slender stream of beauty to flow in our thirsty land! Don’t think me a monster of conceit,’ he went on, as he saw me smile at the avidity with which he adopted my fantasy; ‘I confess that I’m in one of those moods when great things seem possible! This is one of my nervous nights, – I dream waking! When the south-wind blows over Florence at midnight, it seems to coax the soul from all the fair things locked away in her churches and galleries; it comes into my own little studio with the moonlight, and sets my heart beating too deeply for rest. You see I am always adding a thought to my conception! This evening I felt that I couldn’t sleep unless I had communed with the genius of Michael!’
He seemed deeply versed in local history and tradition, and he expatiated con amore on the charms of Florence. I gathered that he was an old resident, and that he had taken the lovely city into his heart. ‘I owe her everything,’ he declared. ‘It’s only since I came here that I have really lived, intellectually. One by one, all profane desires, all mere worldly aims, have dropped away from me, and left me nothing but my pencil, my little note-book’ (and he tapped his breast-pocket), ‘and the worship of the pure masters, – those who were pure because they were innocent, and those who were pure because they were strong!’
‘And have you been very productive all this time?’ I asked, with amenity.
He was silent awhile before replying. ‘Not in the vulgar sense!’ he said, at last. ‘I have chosen never to manifest myself by imperfection. The good in every performance I have reabsorbed into the generative force of new creations; the bad – there’s always plenty of that – I have religiously destroyed. I may say, with some satisfaction, that I have not added a mite to the rubbish of the world. As a proof of my conscientiousness,’ – and he stopped short, and eyed me with extraordinary candour, as if the proof were to be overwhelming, – ‘I’ve never sold a picture! “At least no merchant traffics in my heart!” Do you remember the line in Browning? My little studio has never been profaned by superficial, feverish, mercenary work. It’s a temple of labour, but of leisure! Art is long. If we work for ourselves, of course we must hurry. If we work for her, we must often pause. She can wait!’
This had brought us to my hotel door, somewhat to my relief, I confess, for I had begun to feel unequal to the society of a genius of this heroic strain. I left him, however, not without expressing a friendly hope that we should meet again. The next morning my curiosity had not abated; I was anxious to see him by common daylight. I counted upon meeting him in one of the many aesthetic haunts of Florence, and I was gratified without delay. I found him in the course of the morning in the Tribune of the Uffizi, – that little treasure-chamber of perfect works. He had turned his back on the Venus de’ Medici, and with his arms resting on the railing which protects the pictures, and his head buried in his hands, he was lost in the contemplation of that super
b triptych of Andrea Mantegna, – a work which has neither the material splendour nor the commanding force of some of its neighbours, but which, glowing there with the loveliness of patient labour, suits possibly a more constant need of the soul. I looked at the picture for some time over his shoulder; at last, with a heavy sigh, he turned away and our eyes met. As he recognised me a deep blush rose to his face; he fancied, perhaps, that he had made a fool of himself overnight. But I offered him my hand with a frankness which assured him I was not a scoffer. I knew him by his ardent chevelure; otherwise he was much altered. His midnight mood was over, and he looked as haggard as an actor by daylight. He was far older than I had supposed, and he had less bravery of costume and gesture. He seemed the quite poor, patient artist he had proclaimed himself, and the fact that he had never sold a picture was more obvious than glorious. His velvet coat was threadbare, and his short slouched hat, of an antique pattern, revealed a rustiness which marked it an ‘original’, and not one of the picturesque reproductions which brethren of his craft affect. His eye was mild and heavy, and his expression singularly gentle and acquiescent; the more so for a certain pallid leanness of visage which I hardly knew whether to refer to the consuming fire of genius or to a meagre diet. A very little talk, however, cleared his brow and brought back his eloquence.
‘And this is your first visit to these enchanted halls?’ he cried. ‘Happy, thrice happy youth!’ And taking me by the arm, he prepared to lead me to each of the pre-eminent works in turn and show me the cream of the gallery. But before we left the Mantegna, he pressed my arm and gave it a loving look. ‘He was not in a hurry,’ he murmured. ‘He knew nothing of “raw Haste, half-sister to Delay”!’ How sound a critic my friend was I am unable to say, but he was an extremely amusing one; overflowing with opinions, theories, and sympathies, with disquisition and gossip and anecdote. He was a shade too sentimental for my own sympathies, and I fancied he was rather too fond of superfine discriminations and of discovering subtle intentions in the shallow felicities of chance. At moments, too, he plunged into the sea of metaphysics and floundered awhile in waters too deep for intellectual security. But his abounding knowledge and happy judgement told a touching story of long attentive hours in this worshipful company; there was a reproach to my wasteful saunterings in so devoted a culture of opportunity. ‘There are two moods,’ I remember his saying, ‘in which we may walk through galleries, – the critical and the ideal. They seize us at their pleasure, and we can never tell which is to take its turn. The critical mood, oddly, is the genial one, the friendly, the condescending. It relishes the pretty trivialities of art, its vulgar clevernesses, its conscious graces. It has a kindly greeting for anything which looks as if, according to his light, the painter had enjoyed doing it, – for the little Dutch cabbages and kettles, for the taper fingers and breezy mantles of late-coming Madonnas, for the little blue-hilled pastoral, sceptical Italian landscapes. Then there are the days of fierce, fastidious longing, – solemn church-feasts of the intellect, – when all vulgar effort and all petty success is a weariness, and everything but the best – the best of the best – disgusts. In these hours we are relentless aristocrats of taste. We’ll not take Michael for granted, we’ll not swallow Raphael whole!’
The gallery of the Uffizi is not only rich in its possessions, but peculiarly fortunate in that fine architectural accident, as one may call it, which unites it – with the breadth of river and city between them – to those princely chambers of the Pitti Palace. The Louvre and the Vatican hardly give you such a sense of sustained enclosure as those long passages projected over street and stream to establish a sort of inviolate transition between the two palaces of art. We passed along the gallery in which those precious drawings by eminent hands hang chaste and grey above the swirl and murmur of the yellow Arno, and reached the ducal saloons of the Pitti. Ducal as they are, it must be confessed that they are imperfect as show-rooms, and that with their deep-set windows and their massive mouldings, it is rather a broken light that reaches the pictured walls. But here the masterpieces hang thick, and you seem to see them in a luminous atmosphere of their own. And the great saloons, with their superb dim ceilings, their outer wall in splendid shadow, and the sombre opposite glow of mellow canvas and dusky gilding, make, themselves, almost as fine a picture as the Titians and Raphaels they imperfectly reveal. We lingered briefly before many a Raphael and Titian; but I saw my friend was impatient, and I suffered him at last to lead me directly to the goal of our journey, – the most tenderly fair of Raphael’s Virgins, the Madonna in the Chair. Of all the fine pictures of the world, it seemed to me this is the one with which criticism has least to do. None betrays less effort, less of the mechanism of effect and of the irrepressible discord between conception and result, which shows dimly in so many consummate works. Graceful, human, near to our sympathies as it is, it has nothing of manner, of method, nothing, almost, of style; it blooms there in rounded softness, as instinct with harmony as if it were an immediate exhalation of genius. The figure melts away the spectator’s mind into a sort of passionate tenderness which he knows not whether he has given to heavenly purity or to earthly charm. He is intoxicated with the fragrance of the tenderest blossom of maternity that ever bloomed on earth.
‘That’s what I call a fine picture,’ said my companion, after we had gazed awhile in silence. ‘I have a right to say so, for I’ve copied it so often and so carefully that I could repeat it now with my eyes shut. Other works are of Raphael: this is Raphael himself. Others you can praise, you can qualify, you can measure, explain, account for: this you can only love and admire. I don’t know in what seeming he walked among men, while this divine mood was upon him; but after it, surely, he could do nothing but die; this world had nothing more to teach him. Think of it awhile, my friend, and you’ll admit that I’m not raving. Think of his seeing that spotless image, not for a moment, for a day, in a happy dream, as a restless fever-fit, not as a poet in a five minutes’ frenzy, time to snatch his phrase and scribble his immortal stanza, but for days together, while the slow labour of the brush went on, while the foul vapours of life interposed, and the fancy ached with tension, fixed, radiant, distinct, as we see it now! What a master, certainly! But ah, what a seer!’
‘Don’t you imagine,’ I answered, ‘that he had a model, and that some pretty young woman –’
‘As pretty a young woman as you please! It doesn’t diminish the miracle! He took his hint, of course, and the young woman, possibly, sat smiling before his canvas. But, meanwhile, the painter’s idea had taken wings. No lovely human outline could charm it to vulgar fact. He saw the fair form made perfect; he rose to the vision without tremor, without effort of wing; he communed with it face to face, and resolved into finer and lovelier truth the purity which completes it as the perfume completes the rose. That’s what they call idealism; the word’s vastly abused, but the thing is good. It’s my own creed, at any rate. Lovely Madonna, model at once and muse, I call you to witness that I too am an idealist!’
‘An idealist, then,’ I said, half jocosely, wishing to provoke him to further utterance, ‘is a gentleman who says to Nature in the person of a beautiful girl, “Go to, you’re all wrong! Your fine is coarse, your bright is dim, your grace is gaucherie. This is the way you should have done it!” Isn’t the chance against him?’
He turned upon me almost angrily, but perceiving the genial flavour of my sarcasm, he smiled gravely. ‘Look at that picture,’ he said, ‘and cease your irreverent mockery! Idealism is that! There’s no explaining it; one must feel the flame! It says nothing to Nature, or to any beautiful girl, that they’ll not both forgive! It says to the fair woman, “Accept me as your artist-friend, lend me your beautiful face, trust me, help me, and your eyes shall be half my masterpiece!” No one so loves and respects the rich realities of nature as the artist whose imagination caresses and flatters them. He knows what a fact may hold (whether Raphael knew, you may judge by his portrait behind us there, of Tommaso Inghirami); but
his fancy hovers above it, as Ariel above the sleeping prince. There is only one Raphael, but an artist may still be an artist. As I said last night, the days of illumination are gone; visions are rare; we have to look long to see them. But in meditation we may still woo the ideal; round it, smooth it, perfect it. The result – the result’ (here his voice faltered suddenly, and he fixed his eyes for a moment on the picture; when they met my own again they were full of tears) – ‘the result may be less than this; but still it may be good, it may be great!’ he cried with vehemence. ‘It may hang somewhere, in after years, in goodly company, and keep the artist’s memory warm. Think of being known to mankind after some such fashion as this! of hanging here through the slow centuries in the gaze of an altered world, living on and on in the cunning of an eye and hand that are part of the dust of ages, a delight and a law to remote generations; making beauty a force and purity an example!’
‘Heaven forbid!’ I said, smiling, ‘that I should take the wind out of your sails; but doesn’t it occur to you that beside being strong in his genius, Raphael was happy in a certain good faith of which we have lost the trick? There are people, I know, who deny that his spotless Madonnas are anything more than pretty blondes of that period, enhanced by the Raphaelesque touch, which they declare is a profane touch. Be that as it may, people’s religious and aesthetic needs went hand in hand, and there was, as I may say, a demand for the Blessed Virgin, visible and adorable, which must have given firmness to the artist’s hand. I’m afraid there is no demand now.’