The Innocents Abroad
music at eventide; and yet others of the populace sit in the open air in
front of the refreshment houses and eat ices and drink mild beverages
that could not harm a child. They go to bed moderately early, and sleep
well. They are always quiet, always orderly, always cheerful,
comfortable, and appreciative of life and its manifold blessings. One
never sees a drunken man among them. The change that has come over our
little party is surprising. Day by day we lose some of our restlessness
and absorb some of the spirit of quietude and ease that is in the
tranquil atmosphere about us and in the demeanor of the people. We grow
wise apace. We begin to comprehend what life is for.
We have had a bath in Milan, in a public bath-house. They were going to
put all three of us in one bath-tub, but we objected. Each of us had an
Italian farm on his back. We could have felt affluent if we had been
officially surveyed and fenced in. We chose to have three bathtubs, and
large ones--tubs suited to the dignity of aristocrats who had real
estate, and brought it with them. After we were stripped and had taken
the first chilly dash, we discovered that haunting atrocity that has
embittered our lives in so many cities and villages of Italy and France
--there was no soap. I called. A woman answered, and I barely had time to
throw myself against the door--she would have been in, in another second.
I said:
“Beware, woman! Go away from here--go away, now, or it will be the worse
for you. I am an unprotected male, but I will preserve my honor at the
peril of my life!”
These words must have frightened her, for she skurried away very fast.
Dan's voice rose on the air:
“Oh, bring some soap, why don't you!”
The reply was Italian. Dan resumed:
“Soap, you know--soap. That is what I want--soap. S-o-a-p, soap;
s-o-p-e, soap; s-o-u-p, soap. Hurry up! I don't know how you Irish
spell it, but I want it. Spell it to suit yourself, but fetch it.
I'm freezing.”
I heard the doctor say impressively:
“Dan, how often have we told you that these foreigners cannot understand
English? Why will you not depend upon us? Why will you not tell us what
you want, and let us ask for it in the language of the country? It would
save us a great deal of the humiliation your reprehensible ignorance
causes us. I will address this person in his mother tongue: 'Here,
cospetto! corpo di Bacco! Sacramento! Solferino!--Soap, you son of a
gun!' Dan, if you would let us talk for you, you would never expose your
ignorant vulgarity.”
Even this fluent discharge of Italian did not bring the soap at once, but
there was a good reason for it. There was not such an article about the
establishment. It is my belief that there never had been. They had to
send far up town, and to several different places before they finally got
it, so they said. We had to wait twenty or thirty minutes. The same
thing had occurred the evening before, at the hotel. I think I have
divined the reason for this state of things at last. The English know
how to travel comfortably, and they carry soap with them; other
foreigners do not use the article.
At every hotel we stop at we always have to send out for soap, at the
last moment, when we are grooming ourselves for dinner, and they put it
in the bill along with the candles and other nonsense. In Marseilles
they make half the fancy toilet soap we consume in America, but the
Marseillaise only have a vague theoretical idea of its use, which they
have obtained from books of travel, just as they have acquired an
uncertain notion of clean shirts, and the peculiarities of the gorilla,
and other curious matters. This reminds me of poor Blucher's note to the
landlord in Paris:
PARIS, le 7 Juillet. Monsieur le Landlord--Sir: Pourquoi don't you
mettez some savon in your bed-chambers? Est-ce que vous pensez I
will steal it? La nuit passee you charged me pour deux chandelles
when I only had one; hier vous avez charged me avec glace when I had
none at all; tout les jours you are coming some fresh game or other
on me, mais vous ne pouvez pas play this savon dodge on me twice.
Savon is a necessary de la vie to any body but a Frenchman, et je
l'aurai hors de cet hotel or make trouble. You hear me. Allons.
BLUCHER.
I remonstrated against the sending of this note, because it was so mixed
up that the landlord would never be able to make head or tail of it; but
Blucher said he guessed the old man could read the French of it and
average the rest.
Blucher's French is bad enough, but it is not much worse than the English
one finds in advertisements all over Italy every day. For instance,
observe the printed card of the hotel we shall probably stop at on the
shores of Lake Como:
“NOTISH.”
“This hotel which the best it is in Italy and most superb, is
handsome locate on the best situation of the lake, with the most
splendid view near the Villas Melzy, to the King of Belgian, and
Serbelloni. This hotel have recently enlarge, do offer all
commodities on moderate price, at the strangers gentlemen who whish
spend the seasons on the Lake Come.”
How is that, for a specimen? In the hotel is a handsome little chapel
where an English clergyman is employed to preach to such of the guests of
the house as hail from England and America, and this fact is also set
forth in barbarous English in the same advertisement. Wouldn't you have
supposed that the adventurous linguist who framed the card would have
known enough to submit it to that clergyman before he sent it to the
printer?
Here in Milan, in an ancient tumble-down ruin of a church, is the
mournful wreck of the most celebrated painting in the world--“The Last
Supper,” by Leonardo da Vinci. We are not infallible judges of pictures,
but of course we went there to see this wonderful painting, once so
beautiful, always so worshipped by masters in art, and forever to be
famous in song and story. And the first thing that occurred was the
infliction on us of a placard fairly reeking with wretched English. Take
a morsel of it: “Bartholomew (that is the first figure on the left hand
side at the spectator,) uncertain and doubtful about what he thinks to
have heard, and upon which he wants to be assured by himself at Christ
and by no others.”
Good, isn't it? And then Peter is described as “argumenting in a
threatening and angrily condition at Judas Iscariot.”
This paragraph recalls the picture. “The Last Supper” is painted on the
dilapidated wall of what was a little chapel attached to the main church
in ancient times, I suppose. It is battered and scarred in every
direction, and stained and discolored by time, and Napoleon's horses
kicked the legs off most the disciples when they (the horses, not the
disciples,) were stabled there more than half a century ago.
I recognized the old picture in a moment--the Saviour with bowed head
seated at the centre of a long, rough table with scattering fruits and
dishes upon it, and six disciples on either side in their long robes,
talking to each other--the picture from which all engravings and all
copies have been made for three centuries. Perhaps no living man has
ever known an attempt to paint the Lord's Supper differently. The world
seems to have become settled in the belief, long ago, that it is not
possible for human genius to outdo this creation of da Vinci's. I
suppose painters will go on copying it as long as any of the original is
left visible to the eye. There were a dozen easels in the room, and as
many artists transferring the great picture to their canvases. Fifty
proofs of steel engravings and lithographs were scattered around, too.
And as usual, I could not help noticing how superior the copies were to
the original, that is, to my inexperienced eye. Wherever you find a
Raphael, a Rubens, a Michelangelo, a Carracci, or a da Vinci (and we see
them every day,) you find artists copying them, and the copies are always
the handsomest. Maybe the originals were handsome when they were new,
but they are not now.
This picture is about thirty feet long, and ten or twelve high, I should
think, and the figures are at least life size. It is one of the largest
paintings in Europe.
The colors are dimmed with age; the countenances are scaled and marred,
and nearly all expression is gone from them; the hair is a dead blur upon
the wall, and there is no life in the eyes. Only the attitudes are
certain.
People come here from all parts of the world, and glorify this
masterpiece. They stand entranced before it with bated breath and parted
lips, and when they speak, it is only in the catchy ejaculations of
rapture:
“Oh, wonderful!”
“Such expression!”
“Such grace of attitude!”
“Such dignity!”
“Such faultless drawing!”
“Such matchless coloring!”
“Such feeling!”
“What delicacy of touch!”
“What sublimity of conception!”
“A vision! A vision!”
I only envy these people; I envy them their honest admiration, if it be
honest--their delight, if they feel delight. I harbor no animosity
toward any of them. But at the same time the thought will intrude itself
upon me, How can they see what is not visible? What would you think of a
man who looked at some decayed, blind, toothless, pock-marked Cleopatra,
and said: “What matchless beauty! What soul! What expression!” What
would you think of a man who gazed upon a dingy, foggy sunset, and said:
“What sublimity! What feeling! What richness of coloring!” What would
you think of a man who stared in ecstasy upon a desert of stumps and
said: “Oh, my soul, my beating heart, what a noble forest is here!”
You would think that those men had an astonishing talent for seeing
things that had already passed away. It was what I thought when I stood
before “The Last Supper” and heard men apostrophizing wonders, and
beauties and perfections which had faded out of the picture and gone, a
hundred years before they were born. We can imagine the beauty that was
once in an aged face; we can imagine the forest if we see the stumps; but
we can not absolutely see these things when they are not there. I am
willing to believe that the eye of the practiced artist can rest upon the
Last Supper and renew a lustre where only a hint of it is left, supply a
tint that has faded away, restore an expression that is gone; patch, and
color, and add, to the dull canvas until at last its figures shall stand
before him aglow with the life, the feeling, the freshness, yea, with all
the noble beauty that was theirs when first they came from the hand of
the master. But I can not work this miracle. Can those other uninspired
visitors do it, or do they only happily imagine they do?
After reading so much about it, I am satisfied that the Last Supper was a
very miracle of art once. But it was three hundred years ago.
It vexes me to hear people talk so glibly of “feeling,” “expression,”
“tone,” and those other easily acquired and inexpensive technicalities of
art that make such a fine show in conversations concerning pictures.
There is not one man in seventy-five hundred that can tell what a
pictured face is intended to express. There is not one man in five
hundred that can go into a court-room and be sure that he will not
mistake some harmless innocent of a juryman for the black-hearted
assassin on trial. Yet such people talk of “character” and presume to
interpret “expression” in pictures. There is an old story that Matthews,
the actor, was once lauding the ability of the human face to express the
passions and emotions hidden in the breast. He said the countenance
could disclose what was passing in the heart plainer than the tongue
could.