University of Virginia Library

8. CHAPTER VIII.
PICTURED WINDOWS.

After wide wanderings through the valley, the two
travellers directed their course towards its boundary of
hills. Here, the natural scenery and men's modifications
of it immediately took a different aspect from that of the
fertile and smiling plain. Not unfrequently there was a
convent on the hill-side; or, on some insulated promontory,
a ruined castle, once the den of a robber chieftain,
who was accustomed to dash down from his commanding
height upon the road that wound below. For ages back,
the old fortress had been flinging down its crumbling ramparts,
stone by stone, towards the grimy village at its foot.

Their road wound onward among the hills, which rose
steep and lofty from the scanty level space that lay between
them. They continually thrust their great bulks
before the wayfarers, as if grimly resolute to forbid their
passage, or closed abruptly behind them, when they still
dared to proceed. A gigantic hill would set its foot right
down before them, and only at the last moment, would
grudgingly withdraw it, just far enough to let them creep
towards another obstacle. Adown these rough heights

were visible the dry tracks of many a mountain-torrent
that had lived a life too fierce and passionate to be a long
one. Or, perhaps a stream was yet hurrying shyly along
the edge of a far wider bed of pebbles and shelving rock
than it seemed to need, though not too wide for the
swollen rage of which this shy rivulet was capable. A
stone bridge bestrode it, the ponderous arches of which
were upheld and rendered indestructible by the weight
of the very stones that threatened to crush them down.
Old Roman toil was perceptible in the foundations of that
massive bridge; the first weight that it ever bore was
that of an army of the Republic.

Threading these defiles, they would arrive at some immemorial
city, crowning the high summit of a hill with
its cathedral, its many churches, and public edifices, all
of Gothic architecture. With no more level ground
than a single piazza, in the midst, the ancient town tumbled
its crooked and narrow streets down the mountainside,
through arched passages and by steps of stone. The
aspect of everything was awfully old; older, indeed, in
its effect on the imagination, than Rome itself, because
history does not lay its finger on these forgotten edifices
and tell us all about their origin. Etrucean princes may
have dwelt in them. A thousand years, at all events,
would seem but a middle age for these structures. They
are built of such huge, square stones, that their appearance
of ponderous durability distresses the beholder with
the idea that they can never fall — never crumble away
— never be less fit than now for human habitation.
Many of them may once have been palaces, and still

retain a squalid grandeur. But, gazing at them, we recognize
how undesirable it is to build the tabernacle of
our brief lifetime out of permanent materials, and with
a view to their being occupied by future generations.

All towns should be made capable of purification by
fire, or of decay within each half-century. Otherwise,
they become the hereditary haunts of vermin and noisomeness,
besides standing apart from the possibility of
such improvements as are constantly introduced into the
rest of man's contrivances and accommodations. It is
beautiful, no doubt, and exceedingly satisfactory to some
of our natural instincts, to imagine our far posterity
dwelling under the same roof-tree as ourselves. Still,
when people insist on building indestructible houses, they
incur, or their children do, a misfortune analogous to that
of the Sibyl, when she obtained the grievous boon of immortality.
So, we may build almost immortal habitations,
it is true; but we cannot keep them from growing old,
musty, unwholesome, dreary, full of death-scents, ghosts,
and murder-stains; in short, such habitations as one sees
everywhere in Italy, be they hovels or palaces.

“You should go with me to my native country,” observed
the sculptor, to Donatello. “In that fortunate
land, each generation has only its own sins and sorrows
to bear. Here, it seems as if all the weary and dreary
Past were piled upon the back of the Present. If I were
to lose my spirits in this country — if I were to suffer
any heavy misfortune here — methinks it would be impossible
to stand up against it, under such adverse
influences.”

“The sky itself is an old roof, now,” answered the
Count; “and, no doubt, the sins of mankind have made
it gloomier than it used to be.”

“Oh, my poor Faun,” thought Kenyon to himself,
“how art thou changed!”

A city, like this of which we speak, seems a sort of
stony growth out of the hill-side, or a fossilized town; so
ancient and strange it looks, without enough of life and
juiciness in it to be any longer susceptible of decay.
An earthquake would afford it the only chance of being
ruined, beyond its present ruin.

Yet, though dead to all the purposes for which we live
to-day, the place has its glorious recollections, and not
merely rude and warlike ones, but those of brighter and
milder triumphs, the fruits of which we still enjoy. Italy
can count several of these lifeless towns which, four or
five hundred years ago, were each the birthplace of its
own school of art; nor have they yet forgotten to be
proud of the dark, old pictures, and the faded frescoes,
the pristine beauty of which was a light and gladness to
the world. But now, unless one happens to be a painter,
these famous works make us miserably desperate. They
are poor, dim ghosts of what, when Giotto or Cimabue
first created them, threw a splendor along the stately
aisles; so far gone towards nothingness, in our day, that
scarcely a hint of design or expression can glimmer
through the dusk. Those early artists did well to paint
their frescoes. Glowing on the church walls, they might
be looked upon as symbols of the living spirit that made
Catholicism a true religion, and that glorified it as long as

it retained a genuine life; they filled the transepts with a
radiant throng of saints and angels, and threw around the
high altar a faint reflection — as much as mortals could
see, or bear — of a Diviner Presence. But now that the
colors are so wretchedly bedimmed — now that blotches
of plastered wall dot the frescoes all over, like a mean
reality thrusting itself through life's brightest illusions, —
the next best artist to Cimabue or Giotto or Ghirlandaio
or Pinturicchio, will be he that shall reverently cover
their ruined masterpieces with whitewash!

Kenyon, however, being an earnest student and critic
of Art, lingered long before these pathetic relics; and
Donatello, in his present phase of penitence, thought no
time spent amiss while he could be kneeling before an
altar. Whenever they found a cathedral, therefore, or a
Gothic church, the two travellers were of one mind to
enter it. In some of these holy edifices they saw pictures
that time had not dimmed nor injured in the least, though
they perhaps belonged to as old a school of Art as any
that were perishing around them. These were the painted
windows; and as often as he gazed at them the sculptor
blessed the mediæval time, and its gorgeous contrivances
of splendor; for surely the skill of man has never accomplished,
nor his mind imagined, any other beauty or glory
worthy to be compared with these.

It is the special excellence of pictured glass, that the
light, which falls merely on the outside of other pictures,
is here interfused throughout the work; it illuminates the
design, and invests it with a living radiance; and in requital
the unfading colors transmute the common daylight

into a miracle of richness and glory in its passage through
the heavenly substance of the blessed and angelic shapes
which throng the high-arched window.

“It is a woful thing,” cried Kenyon, while one of
these frail, yet enduring and fadeless pictures threw its
hues on his face, and on the pavement of the church
around him, — “a sad necessity that any Christian soul
should pass from earth without once seeing an antique
painted window, with the bright Italian sunshine glowing
through it! There is no other such true symbol of the
glories of the better world, where a celestial radiance will
be inherent in all things and persons, and render each
continually transparent to the sight of all.”

“But what a horror it would be,” said Donatello, sadly,
“if there were a soul among them through which the light
could not be transfused.”

“Yes; and perhaps this is to be the punishment of sin,”
replied the sculptor; “not that it shall be made evident
to the universe, which can profit nothing by such knowledge,
but that it shall insulate the sinner from all sweet
society by rendering him impermeable to light, and, therefore,
unrecognizable in the abode of heavenly simplicity
and truth. Then, what remains for him, but the dreariness
of infinite and eternal solitude.”

“That would be a horrible destiny, indeed!” said Donatello.

His voice as he spoke the words had a hollow and
dreary cadence, as if he anticipated some such frozen
solitude for himself. A figure in a dark robe was lurking
in the obscurity of a side-chapel close by, and made an

impulsive movement forward, but hesitated as Donatello
spoke again.

“But there might be a more miserable torture than to
be solitary forever,” said he. “Think of having a single
companion in eternity, and instead of finding any
consolation, or at all events variety of torture, to see
your own weary, weary sin repeated in that inseparable
soul.”

“I think, my dear Count, you have never read Dante,”
observed Kenyon. “That idea is somewhat in his style,
but I cannot help regretting that it came into your mind
just then.”

The dark-robed figure had shrunk back, and was quite
lost to sight among the shadows of the chapel.

“There was an English poet,” resumed Kenyon, turning
again towards the window; “who speaks of the
`dim, religious light,' transmitted through painted glass.
I always admired this richly descriptive phrase; but,
though he was once in Italy, I question whether Milton
ever saw any but the dingy pictures in the dusty windows
of English cathedrals, imperfectly shown by the gray
English daylight. He would else have illuminated that
word, `dim,' with some epithet that should not chase
away the dimness, yet should make it glow like a million
of rubies, sapphires, emeralds, and topazes. Is it not so
with yonder window? The pictures are most brilliant in
themselves, yet dim with tenderness and reverence, because
God himself is shining through them.”

“The pictures fill me with emotion, but not such as
you seem to experience,” said Donatello. “I tremble at

those awful saints; and, most of all, at the figure above
them. He glows with Divine wrath!”

“My dear friend,” exclaimed Kenyon, “how strangely
your eyes have transmuted the expression of the figure!
It is divine love, not wrath.”

“To my eyes,” said Donatello, stubbornly, “it is wrath,
not love! Each must interpret for himself.”

The friends left the church, and, looking up from the
exterior, at the window which they had just been contemplating
within, nothing was visible but the merest outline
of dusky shapes. Neither the individual likeness of
saint, angel, nor Saviour, and far less the combined
scheme and purport of the picture, could anywise be
made out. That miracle of radiant art, thus viewed, was
nothing better than an incomprehensible obscurity, without
a gleam of beauty to induce the beholder to attempt
unravelling it.

“All this,” thought the sculptor, “is a most forcible
emblem of the different aspect of religious truth and
sacred story, as viewed from the warm interior of belief,
or from its cold and dreary outside. Christian faith is a
grand cathedral, with divinely pictured windows. Standing
without, you see no glory, nor can possibly imagine
any; standing within, every ray of light reveals a harmony
of unspeakable splendors.”

After Kenyon and Donatello emerged from the church,
however, they had better opportunity for acts of charity
and mercy than for religious contemplation; being immediately
surrounded by a swarm of beggars, who are the
present possessors of Italy, and share the spoil of the

stranger with the fleas and mosquitos, their formidable
allies. These pests — the human ones — had hunted the
two travellers at every stage of their journey. From
village to village, ragged boys and girls kept almost under
the horses' feet; hoary grandsires and grandames
caught glimpses of their approach, and hobbled to intercept
them at some point of vantage; blind men stared
them out of countenance with their sightless orbs; women
held up their unwashed babies; cripples displayed their
wooden legs, their grievous scars, their dangling, boneless,
arms, their broken backs, their burden of a hump, or
whatever infirmity or deformity Providence had assigned
them for an inheritance. On the highest mountain summit
— in the most shadowy ravine — there was a beggar
waiting for them. In one small village, Kenyon had the
curiosity to count merely how many children were crying,
whining, and bellowing all at once for alms. They proved
to be more than forty of as ragged and dirtly little imps
as any in the world; besides whom, all the wrinkled matrons,
and most of the village maids, and not a few stalwart
men, held out their hands grimly, piteously, or
smilingly, in the forlorn hope of whatever trifle of coin
might remain in pockets already so fearfully taxed. Had
they been permitted, they would gladly have knelt down
and worshipped the travellers, and have cursed them,
without rising from their knees, if the expected boon
failed to be awarded.

Yet they were not so miserably poor but that the
grown people kept houses over their heads. In the way
of food, they had, at least, vegetables in their little gardens,

pigs and chickens to kill, eggs to fry into omelets
with oil, wine to drink, and many other things to make
life comfortable. As for the children, when no more
small coin appeared to be forthcoming, they began to
laugh and play, and turn heels over head, showing themselves
jolly and vivacious brats, and evidently as well fed
as needs be. The truth is, the Italian peasantry look
upon strangers as the almoners of Providence, and therefore
feel no more shame in asking and receiving alms,
than in availing themselves of providential bounties in
whatever other form.

In accordance with his nature, Donatello was always
exceedingly charitable to these ragged battalions, and
appeared to derive a certain consolation from the prayers
which many of them put up in his behalf. In Italy a
copper coin of minute value will often make all the difference
between a vindictive curse — death by apoplexy being
the favorite one — mumbled in an old witch's toothless
jaws, and a prayer from the same lips, so earnest that
it would seem to reward the charitable soul with at least
a puff of grateful breath to help him heavenward. Good
wishes being so cheap, though possibly not very efficacious,
and anathemas so exceedingly bitter, — even if
the greater portion of their poison remain in the mouth
that utters them, — it may be wise to expend some reasonable
amount in the purchase of the former. Donatello
invariably did so; and as he distributed his
alms under the pictured window, of which we have been
speaking, no less than seven ancient women lifted their
hands and besought blessings on his head.

“Come,” said the sculptor, rejoicing at the happier
expression which he saw in his friend's face, “I think
your steed will not stumble with you to-day. Each of
these old dames looks as much like Horace's Atra Cura
as can well be conceived; but, though there are seven
of them, they will make your burden on horseback
lighter instead of heavier.”

“Are we to ride far?” asked the Count.

“A tolerable journey betwixt now and to-morrow noon,”
Kenyon replied; “for, at that hour, I purpose to be standing
by the Pope's statue in the great square of Perugia.”