University of Virginia Library

7. CHAPTER VII.
SCENES BY THE WAY.

When it came to the point of quitting the reposeful
life of Monte Beni, the sculptor was not without regrets,
and would willingly have dreamed a little longer of the
sweet paradise on earth that Hilda's presence there might
make. Nevertheless, amid all its repose, he had begun
to be sensible of a restless melancholy, to which the cultivators
of the ideal arts are more liable than sturdier men.
On his own part, therefore, and leaving Donatello out of
the case, he would have judged it well to go. He made
parting visits to the legendary dell, and to other delightful
spots with which he had grown familiar; he
climbed the tower again, and saw a sunset and a moonrise
over the great valley; he drank, on the eve of his departure,
one flask, and then another, of the Monte Beni
Sunshine, and stored up its flavor in his memory, as the
standard of what is exquisite in wine. These things accomplished,
Kenyon was ready for the journey.

Donatello had not very easily been stirred out of the
peculiar sluggishness, which inthralls and bewitches melancholy
people. He had offered merely a passive resistance,
however, not an active one, to his friend's schemes;

and when the appointed hour came, he yielded to the impulse
which Kenyon failed not to apply; and was started
upon the journey before he had made up his mind to
undertake it. They wandered forth at large, like two
knights-errant among the valleys, and the mountains, and
the old mountain-towns of that picturesque and lovely
region. Save to keep the appointment with Miriam, a
fortnight thereafter, in the great square of Perugia, there
was nothing more definite in the sculptor's plan, than that
they should let themselves be blown hither and thither
like winged seeds, that mount upon each wandering
breeze. Yet there was an idea of fatality implied in the
simile of the winged seeds which did not altogether suit
Kenyon's fancy; for, if you look closely into the matter it
will be seen that whatever appears most vagrant, and
utterly purposeless, turns out, in the end, to have been
impelled the most surely on a preordained and unswerving
track. Chance and change love to deal with men's
settled plans, not with their idle vagaries. If we desire
unexpected and unimaginable events, we should contrive
an iron framework, such as we fancy may compel the
future to take one inevitable shape; then comes in the
unexpected, and shatters our design in fragments.

The travellers set forth on horseback, and purposed to
perform much of their aimless journeyings, under the
moon, and in the cool of the morning or evening twilight;
the mid-day sun, while summer had hardly begun to trail
its departing skirts over Tuscany, being still too fervid to
allow of noontide exposure.

For a while, they wandered in that same broad valley

which Kenyon had viewed with such delight from the
Monte Beni tower. The sculptor soon began to enjoy
the idle activity of their new life, which the lapse of a
day or two sufficed to establish as a kind of system; it is
so natural for mankind to be nomadic, that a very little
taste of that primitive mode of existence subverts the
settled habits of many preceding years. Kenyon's cares,
and whatever gloomy ideas before possessed him, seemed
to be left at Monte Beni, and were scarcely remembered
by the time that its gray tower grew undistinguishable on
the brown hill-side. His perceptive faculties, which had
found little exercise of late, amid so thoughtful a way of
life, became keen, and kept his eyes busy with a hundred
agreeable scenes.

He delighted in the picturesque bits of rustic character
and manners, so little of which ever comes upon the surface
of our life at home. There for example, were the
old women, tending pigs or sheep by the wayside. As
they followed the vagrant steps of their charge, these
venerable ladies kept spinning yarn with that elsewhere
forgotten contrivance, the distaff; and so wrinkled and
stain-looking were they, that you might have taken them
for the Parcæ, spinning the threads of human destiny.
In contrast with their great grandmothers were the children,
leading goats of shaggy beard, tied by the horns,
and letting them browse on branch and shrub. It is the
fashion of Italy to add the petty industry of age and
childhood to the hum of human toil. To the eyes of an
observer from the western world, it was a strange spectacle
to see sturdy, sunburnt creatures, in petticoats, but

otherwise manlike, toiling side by side with male laborers,
in the rudest work of the fields. These sturdy women
(if as such we must recognize them) wore the high-crowned,
broad-brimmed hat of Tuscan straw, the customary
female head-apparel; and, as every breeze blew
back its breadth of brim, the sunshine constantly added
depth to the brown glow of their cheeks. The elder
sisterhood, however, set off their witch-like ugliness to the
worst advantage with black felt hats, bequeathed them,
one would fancy, by their long-buried husbands.

Another ordinary sight, as sylvan as the above, and
more agreeable, was a girl, bearing on her back a huge
bundle of green twigs and shrubs, or grass, intermixed
with scarlet poppies and blue flowers; the verdant burden
being sometimes of such size as to hide the bearer's
figure, and seem a self-moving mass of fragrant bloom
and verdure. Oftener, however, the bundle reached only
half-way down the back of the rustic nymph, leaving in
sight her well-developed lower limbs, and the crooked
knife, hanging behind her, with which she had been reaping
this strange harvest sheaf. A pre-Raphaelite artist
(he, for instance, who painted so marvellously a windswept
heap of autumnal leaves) might find an admirable
subject in one of these Tuscan girls stepping with a free,
erect, and graceful carriage. The miscellaneous herbage
and tangled twigs and blossoms of her bundle, crowning
her head (while her ruddy, comely face looks out between
the hanging side festoons like a larger flower), would give
the painter boundless scope for the minute delineation
which he loves.

Though mixed up with what was rude and earthlike,
there was still a remote, dreamlike, Arcadian charm,
which is scarcely to be found in the daily toil of other
lands. Among the pleasant features of the wayside were
always the vines, clambering on fig-trees, or other sturdy
trunks; they wreathed themselves, in huge and rich
festoons, from one tree to another, suspending clusters of
ripening grapes in the interval between. Under such
careless mode of culture, the luxuriant vine is a lovelier
spectacle than where it produces a more precious liquor,
and is therefore more artificially restrained and trimmed.
Nothing can be more picturesque than an old grape-vine,
with almost a trunk of its own, clinging fast around its
supporting tree. Nor does the picture lack its moral. You
might twist it to more than one grave purpose, as you
saw how the knotted, serpentine growth imprisoned within
its strong embrace the friend that had supported its tender
infancy; and how (as seemingly flexible natures are
prone to do) it converted the sturdier tree entirely to its
own selfish ends, extending its innumerable arms on every
bough, and permitting hardly a leaf to sprout except its
own. It occurred to Kenyon, that the enemies of the
vine, in his native land, might here have seen an emblem
of the remorseless gripe, which the habit of vinous enjoyment
lays upon its victim, possessing him wholly, and
letting him live no life but such as it bestows.

The scene was not less characteristic when their path
led the two wanderers through some small, ancient town.
There, besides the peculiarities of present life, they saw
tokens of the life that had long ago been lived and flung

aside. The little town, such as we see in our mind's eye,
would have its gate and its surrounding walls, so ancient
and massive that ages had not sufficed to crumble them
away; but in the lofty upper portion of the gateway, still
standing over the empty arch, where there was no longer
a gate to shut, there would be a dove-cote, and peaceful
doves for the only warders. Pumpkins lay ripening in
the open chambers of the structure. Then, as for the
town-wall, on the outside an orchard extends peacefully
along its base, full, not of apple-trees, but of those old
humorists with gnarled trunks and twisted boughs, the
olives. Houses have been built upon the ramparts, or
burrowed out of their ponderous foundation. Even the
gray, martial towers crowned with ruined turrets, have
been converted into rustic habitations, from the windows
of which hang ears of Indian corn. At a door, that has
been broken through the massive stonework, where it
was meant to be strongest, some contadini are winnowing
grain. Small windows, too, are pierced through the
whole line of ancient wall, so that it seems a row of dwellings
with one continuous front, built in a strange style
of needless strength; but remnants of the old battlements
and machicolations are interspersed with the homely
chambers and earthen-tiled house-tops; and all along its
extent both grape-vines and running flower-shrubs are
encouraged to clamber and sport over the roughnesses of
its decay.

Finally the long grass intermixed with weeds and wild
flowers, waves on the uppermost height of the shattered
rampart; and it is exceedingly pleasant in the golden

sunshine of the afternoon to behold the warlike precinct
so friendly in its old days, and so overgrown with rural
peace. In its guard-rooms, its prison-chambers, and
scooped out of its ponderous breadth, there are dwellings
now-a-days where happy human lives are spent. Human
parents and broods of children nestle in them, even as
the swallows nestle in the little crevices along the broken
summit of the wall.

Passing through the gateway of this same little town,
challenged only by those watchful sentinels, the pigeons,
we find ourselves in a long, narrow street, paved from side
to side with flagstones, in the old Roman fashion. Nothing
can exceed the grim ugliness of the houses, most of
which are three or four stories high, stone built, gray, dilapidated,
or half-covered with plaster in patches, and
contiguous all along from end to end of the town. Nature,
in the shape of tree, shrub, or grassy side-walk, is as
much shut out from the one street of the rustic village as
from the heart of any swarming city. The dark and half-ruinous
habitations, with their small windows, many of
which are drearily closed with wooden shutters, are but
magnified hovels, piled story upon story, and squalid with
the grime that successive ages have left behind them. It
would be a hideous scene to contemplate in a rainy day,
or when no human life pervaded it. In the summer-noon,
however, it possesses vivacity enough to keep itself cheerful;
for all the within-doors of the village then bubbles
over upon the flagstones, or looks out from the small windows,
and from here and there a balcony. Some of the
populace are at the butcher's shop; others are at the fountain,

which gushes into a marble basin that resembles an
antique sarcophagus. A tailor is sewing before his door,
with a young priest seated sociably beside him; a burly
friar goes by with an empty wine-barrel on his head;
children are at play; women at their own doorsteps mend
clothes, embroider, weave hats of Tuscan straw, or twirl
the distaff. Many idlers, meanwhile, strolling from one
group to another, let the warm day slide by in the sweet,
interminable task of doing nothing,

From all these people there comes a babblement that
seems quite disproportioned to the number of tongues that
make it. So many words are not uttered in a New England
village throughout the year — except it be at a
political canvass or town-meeting — as are spoken here,
with no especial purpose, in a single day. Neither so
many words, nor so much laughter; for people talk about
nothing as if they were terribly in earnest, and make
merry at nothing, as if it were the best of all possible
jokes. In so long a time as they have existed, and within
such narrow precincts, these little walled towns are brought
into a closeness of society that makes them but a larger
household. All the inhabitants are akin to each, and
each to all; they assemble in the street as their common
saloon, and thus live and die in a familiarity of intercourse,
such as never can be known where a village is open at
either end, and all roundabout, and has ample room within
itself.

Stuck up beside the door of one house, in this village
street, is a withered bough; and on a stone seat, just under
the shadow of the bough, sits a party of jolly drinkers,

making proof of the new wine, or quaffing the old, as their
often-tried and comfortable friend. Kenyon draws bridle
here (for the bough, or bush, is a symbol of the wine-shop
at this day in Italy, as it was three hundred years ago in
England), and calls for a goblet of the deep, mild purple
juice, well diluted with water from the fountain. The
Sunshine of Monte Beni would be welcome now. Meanwhile,
Donatello has ridden onward, but alights where a
shrine, with a burning lamp before it, is built into the
wall of an inn-stable. He kneels, and crosses himself,
and mutters a brief prayer, without attracting notice from
the passers-by, many of whom are parenthetically devout,
in a similar fashion. By this time the sculptor has drunk
off his wine-and-water, and our two travellers resume
their way, emerging from the opposite gate of the village.

Before them, again, lies the broad valley, with a mist
so thinly scattered over it as to be perceptible only in the
distance, and most so in the nooks of the hills. Now that
we have called it mist, it seems a mistake not rather to
have called it sunshine; the glory of so much light being
mingled with so little gloom, in the airy material of that
vapor. Be it mist or sunshine, it adds a touch of ideal
beauty to the scene, almost persuading the spectator that
this valley and those hills are visionary, because their visible
atmosphere is so like the substance of a dream.

Immediately about them, however, there were abundant
tokens that the country was not really the paradise
it looked to be, at a casual glance. Neither the wretched
cottages nor the dreary farm-houses seemed to partake of
the prosperity, with which so kindly a climate, and so fertile

a portion of Mother Earth's bosom, should have filled
them, one and all. But, possibly, the peasant inhabitants
do not exist in so grimy a poverty; and in homes so comfortless,
as a stranger, with his native ideas of those matters,
would be likely to imagine. The Italians appear to
possess none of that emulative pride which we see in our
New England villages, where every householder, according
to his taste and means, endeavors to make his homestead
an ornament to the grassy and elm-shadowed
wayside. In Italy there are no neat doorsteps and
thresholds; no pleasant, vine-sheltered porches; none
of those grass-plots or smoothly-shorn lawns, which hospitably
invite the imagination into the sweet domestic
interiors of English life. Everything, however sunny
and luxuriant may be the scene around, is especially
disheartening in the immediate neighborhood of an Italian
home.

An artist, it is true, might often thank his stars for
those old houses, so picturesquely time-stained, and with
the plaster falling in blotches from the ancient brickwork.
The prison-like, iron-barred windows, and the wide-arched,
dismal entrance, admitting on one hand to the
stable, on the other to the kitchen, might impress him
as far better worth his pencil than the newly-painted
pine boxes, in which — if he be an American — his
countrymen live and thrive. But there is reason to
suspect that a people are waning to decay and ruin the
moment that their life becomes fascinating either in the
poet's imagination or the painter's eye.

As usual, on Italian waysides, the wanderers passed

great, black crosses, hung with all the instruments of the
sacred agony and passion; there were the crown of
thorns, the hammer and nails, the pinchers, the spear,
the sponge; and perched over the whole, the cock that
crowed to Saint Peter's remorseful conscience. Thus,
while the fertile scene showed the never-failing beneficence
of the Creator towards man in his transitory state,
these symbols reminded each wayfarer of the Saviour's
infinitely greater love for him as an immortal spirit. Beholding
these consecrated stations, the idea seemed to
strike Donatello of converting the otherwise aimless
journey into a penitential pilgrimage. At each of them
he alighted to kneel and kiss the cross, and humbly
press his forehead against its foot; and this so invariably,
that the sculptor soon learned to draw bridle of his
own accord. It may be, too, heretic as he was, that
Kenyon likewise put up a prayer, rendered more fervent
by the symbols before his eyes, for the peace of his
friend's conscience, and the pardon of the sin that so
oppressed him.

Not only at the crosses did Donatello kneel, but at each
of the many shrines, where the blessed Virgin in fresco
— faded with sunshine and half washed out with showers
— looked benignly at her worshipper; or where she
was represented in a wooden image, or a bas-relief of plaster
or marble, as accorded with the means of the devout
person who built, or restored from a mediæval antiquity,
these places of wayside worship. They were everywhere;
under arched niches, or in little penthouses with
a brick tiled roof, just large enough to shelter them; or

perhaps in some bit of old Roman masonry, the founders
of which had died before the Advent; or in the wall of
a country inn or farm-house, or at the midway point of a
bridge, or in the shallow cavity of a natural rock, or high
upward in the deep cuts of the road. It appeared to the
sculptor that Donatello prayed the more earnestly and the
more hopefully at these shrines, because the mild face of
the Madonna promised him to intercede as a tender
mother betwixt the poor culprit and the awfulness of
judgment.

It was beautiful to observe, indeed, how tender was the
soul of man and woman towards the Virgin mother, in
recognition of the tenderness which, as their faith taught
them, she immortally cherishes towards all human souls.
In the wire-work screen, before each shrine, hung offerings
of roses, or whatever flower was sweetest and
most seasonable; some already wilted and withered, some
fresh with that very morning's dew-drops. Flowers there
were, too, that, being artificial, never bloomed on earth,
nor would ever fade. The thought occurred to Kenyon,
that flower-pots with living plants, might be set within the
niches, or even that rose-trees, and all kinds of flowering
shrubs, might be reared under the shrines and taught to
twine and wreath themselves around; so that the Virgin
should dwell within a bower of verdure, bloom, and fragrant
freshness, symbolizing a homage perpetually new.
There are many things in the religious customs of these
people that seem good; many things, at least, that might
be both good and beautiful, if the soul of goodness and
the sense of beauty were as much alive in the Italians

now as they must have been when those customs were
first imagined and adopted. But, instead of blossoms on
the shrub, or freshly gathered, with the dew-drops on
their leaves, their worship, now-a-days, is best symbolized
by the artificial flower.

The sculptor fancied, moreover, (but perhaps it was his
heresy that suggested the idea,) that it would be of happy
influence to place a comfortable and shady seat beneath
every wayside shrine. Then, the weary and sun-scorched
traveller, while resting himself under her protecting shadow,
might thank the Virgin for her hospitality. Nor
perchance, were he to regale himself, even in such a consecrated
spot, with the fragrance of a pipe, would it rise
to heaven more offensively than the smoke of priestly incense.
We do ourselves wrong, and too meanly estimate
the Holiness above us, when we deem that any act or
enjoyment, good in itself, is not good to do religiously.

Whatever may be the iniquities of the papal system, it
was a wise and lovely sentiment, that set up the frequent
shrine and cross along the roadside. No wayfarer, bent
on whatever worldly errand, can fail to be reminded, at
every mile or two, that this is not the business which
most concerns him. The pleasure-seeker is silently admonished
to look heavenward for a joy infinitely greater
than he now possesses. The wretch in temptation beholds
the cross, and is warned, that if he yield, the Saviour's
agony for his sake will have been endured in vain. The
stubborn criminal, whose heart has long been like a stone,
feels it throb anew with dread and hope, and our poor
Donatello, as he went kneeling from shrine to cross, and

from cross to shrine, doubtless found an efficacy in these
symbols that helped him towards a higher penitence.

Whether the young Count of Monte Beni noticed the
fact, or no, there was more than one incident of their
journey that led Kenyon to believe, that they were attended,
or closely followed, or preceded, near at hand, by
some one who took an interest in their motions. As it
were, the step, the sweeping garment, the faintly-heard
breath, of an invisible companion, was beside them, as
they went on their way. It was like a dream that had
strayed out of their slumber and was haunting them in
the daytime, when its shadowy substance could have
neither density nor outline, in the too obtrusive light.
After sunset, it grew a little more distinct.

“On the left of that last shrine,” asked the sculptor,
as they rode, under the moon, “did you observe the
figure of a woman kneeling, with her face hidden in her
hands?”

“I never looked that way,” replied Donatello. “I was
saying my own prayer. It was some penitent, perchance.
May the Blessed Virgin be the more gracious to the poor
soul, because she is a woman.”