Margaret Fuller (Howe 1883)/Chapter 12

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In this first visit to Rome, Margaret could not avoid some touch of the disenchantment which usually comes with the experience of what has been long and fondly anticipated. She had soon seen all that is preserved of "the fragments of the great time," and says: "They are many and precious; yet is there not so much of high excellence as I looked for. They will not float the heart on a boundless sea of feeling, like the starry night on our Western prairies." She confesses herself more interested at this moment in the condition and ​ prospects of the Italian people than in works of art, ancient or modern. In spite of this, she seems to have been diligent in visiting the galleries and studios of Rome. Among the latter she meutions those of the sculptors Macdonald, Wolff, Tenerani, and Gott, whose groups of young people and animals were to her "very refreshing after the grander attenıpts of the present time." She found our own Crawford just completing a bust of his beautiful wife, which is to-day a household treasure among her relatives. Margaret preferred his designs to those of Gibson, who was then considered the first of English sculptors. Among American painters she found Terry, Cranch, and licks at work. She saw the German Overbeck surrounded by his pictures, looking "as if he had just stepped out of one of them,—a lay monk, with a pious eye, and habitual morality of thought which lunits every gesture."

Among the old masters, Domenichino and Titian were those whom she learned to appreciate only by the study of their works. Other artists, she thinks, may be well understood through copies and cngravings, but not these. She enjoyed the frescos of Caracci with "the purest pleasure," tired soon of Guercino, who had been one of her favourites, and could not like Leonardo da Vinci at all. His pictures, she confesses, "show a wonderful deal of study and thought. I hate to see the marks of them. I want a simple and direct expression of soul." For the explanation of these remarks we must refer the reader back to what Emerson has said of Margaret's Idiosyncratic mode of judgment. Raphael and. Michael Angelo were already so well known to her through engravings, that their paintings and frescos made no new impression upon her. Not so was it with Michael's sculptures. Of his ​ Moses she says: "it is the only thing in Europe so far which has entirely outgone my hopes."

But the time was not one in which an enthusiast like Margaret could be content to withdraw from living issues into the calm impersonality of art. The popular life around her was throbbing with hopes and excitements to which it had long been unaccustomed. Visions of a living Italy flashed through the crevices of a stony despair which had lasted for ages. The prospect of representative government was held out to the Roman people, and the promise was welcomed by a torchlight procession which streamed through the Corso like a river of fire, and surging up to the Quirinal, where Pius then dwelt, “made it a mound of light." The noble Greek figures were illuminated, and their calm aspect contrasted strongly with the animated faces of the Italians. “The Pope appeared on his balcony; the crowd shouted their vivas. He extended his arms; the crowd fell on their knees and received his benediction." Margaret says that she had never seen anything finer.

In this new enthusiasm the people agreed to celebrate the birthday of Rome.

"A great dinner was given at the Baths of Titus, in the open air. The company was on the grass in the area, the music at one end; boxes filled with the handsome Roman women occupied the other sides. It was a new thing here, this popular dinner, and the Romans greeted it in an intoxication of hope and pleasure." Many political exiles, amnestied by the Pope, were present. The Marquis d'Azeglio, painter, novelist, and diplomatist, was the most noted of the speakers. From this renewed, regenerated Rome Margaret went on to visit the northern cities of Italy, passing through ​ Perugia on her way to Florence. In this neighbourhood she explored churches of Assisi, and the Etruscan tombs, then newly discovered. She was enchanted with the beauty of Perugia, its noble situation, and its treasures of early art. Florence interested her less than " cities more purely Italian, The natural character is ironed out here, and done up in a French pattern ; yet there is no French vivacity, nor Italian either." The Grand Duke was at the time in an impossible position between his allegiance to the liberalizing Pope and his fealty to despotic Austria. Tuscany accordingly was "glum as death” on the outside, but glowing with dangerous fire within.

Margaret, before leaving Florence, wrote: "Florence is not like Rome. At first I could not bear the change; yet, for the study of the fine arts, it is a still richer place. Worlds of thought have risen in my mind; some time you will have light from all.”

Here she visited the studios of her countrymen, Horatio Greenough and Hiram Powers, and, after a month's stay, went on to Bologna, where she greatly appreciated the truly Italian physiognomy of the city, and rejoiced in the record of its women artists and professors, nobly recognized and upheld by their fellow- citizens.

Thence she went to Ravenna, prized for its curious remains, its Byronic memories, and its famous Pineta, dear to students of Dante.' After this came a fortnight in Venice, which, like Angelo's Moses, surpassed her utmost expectations: "There only I began to feel in its fulness Venetian art. It can only be seen in its own atmosphere. Never had I the least idea of what is to be seen at Venice."

The city was, in those days, a place of refuge for ​ throneless royalty. The Duchesse de Berri and her son had each a palace on the Grand Canal. A queen of another sort, Taglioni, here consoled herself for the quiet of her retirement from the stage. Margaret had the pleasure of an outside view of the fête given by the royal Duchess in commemoration of her son's birthday. The aged Duchessc d'Angeulème came from Vienna to be present on the occasion.

"Twas a scene of fairy-land, the palace full of light, so that from the canal could be seen cven the pictures on the walls. Landing from the gondolas, the elegantly-dressed ladies and gentlemen seemed to rise from the water. We also saw them glide up the great stair, rustling their plumes, and in the reception-room make and receive the customary grimaces." A fine band of music completed the attractions of the scene. Margaret, listening and looking hard by, “thought of the Stuarts, Bourbons, and Bonapartes in Italy, and offered up a prayer that other names might be added to the list, and other princes, more rich in blood than in brain, might come to enjoy a perpetual villeggiatura in Italy.'

From Venice Margaret journcycdon to Milan, stopping on the way at Vicenza, Verona, Mantua, Lago di Garda, and Brescia. Theso ten days of travel opened to her long vistas of historic study, delightful to contemplate, cven if hopeless to explore fully. No ten days of her previous life, she is sure, ever brought her so far in this direction. In approaching Milan her thoughts reverted to the “Promessi Sposi.” 'Nearly asleep for a moment, she heard the sound of waters, and started up to ask, “Is that the Adda?” She had guessed rightly. The authorship of this classic work seemed to her to secure to its writer, Manzoni, the right ​ of eminent domain in and around Milan. Writing to Emerson from this city, she says:—

"To-day, for the first time, I have seen Manzoni. Manzoni has spiritual efficacy in his looks; his eyes still glow with delicate tenderness. His manners are very engaging, frank, expansive; every word betokens the habitual elevation of his thoughts, and (what you care for so much) he says distinct, good things. He lives in the house of his fathers, in the simplest manner.”

Manzoni had, at the time, somewhat displeased his neighbours by a second marriage, scarcely considered suitable for him. Margaret, however, liked the new very well, wife "and saw why he married her."

She found less to see in Milan than in other Italian cities, and was glad to have there some days of quiet after the fatigues of her journey, which had been augmented at Brescia by a brief attack of fever. She mentions with interest the bust of the celebrated mathematician, Maria Gaetana Agnesi, preserved in the Ambrosian Library. Among her new acquaintances here were some young Italian radicals," interested in ideas."

The Italian Lakes and Switzerland came next in the order of her travels. Her Swiss tour she calls "a little romance by itself," promising to give, at a later date, a description of it, which we fail to find anywhere. Returning from it, she passed a fortnight at Como, and saw something of the Italian nobility, who pass their summers on its shores. Here she enjoyed the society of the accomplished Marchesa Arconati Visconti, whom she had already met in Florence, and who became to her a constant and valued friend.

​ Margaret found no exaggeration in the enthusiasm expressed by poets and artists for the scenery of this lake region. The descriptions of it given by Goethe, Richter, and Taylor had not prepared her for what she saw. Even Turner's pictures had fallen short of the real beauty. At Lugano she met Lady Franklin, the widow of the Arctic explorer. She returned to Milan by the 8th of September, in time for the great feast of the Madonna, and finally left the city " with great regret, and hope to return." In, a letter to her brother Richard she speaks of her Radical friends there as "a circle of aspiring youth, such as I have not known in any other city.” Conspicuous among these was the young Marquis Guerrieri Conzaga, commended to her by “a noble soul, the quietest sensibility, and a brilliant and ardent, though not a great, mind." This gentleman has to-day a recognised position in Italy as a thoroughly enlightened and intelligent Liberal.

Margaret found among the Milaneac, as she must have anticipated, a great hatred of the Austrian rule, aggravated, at the time of her second visit, by acts of foolish and useless repression. On the occasion of the festivals attending the entry of a new archbishop, some youths (among them possibly Margaret's Radical friends) determined to sing the hymn composed at Rome in honour of Pius IX. The consequence of this was a charge of the armed Austrian police upon the defenceless crowd of people present, who, giving way, were stabbed by them in the back. Margaret's grief and indignation at this state of things made her feel keenly the general indifference of her own travelling country-people to the condition and fate of Italy.

"Persons who call themselves Americans—miser​ able, thoughtless Esaus, unworthy their high birthright.... absorbed at home by the lust of gain, the love of show, abroad, they see only the equipages, the fine clothes, the food. They have no heart for the idea, for the destiny of our own great nation: how can they feel the spirit that is struggling in this?”

The condition of Italy has been greatly altered for the better since Margaret wrote these words, thirty-six years ago; but the American traveller of this type is to-day, to all intents and purposes, what he was then.

Margaret left Milan before the end of this September, to return to Rome. She explored with delight the great Certosa of Pavia, and in Parnia saw the Coreggio pictures, of which she says: “A wonderful beauty it is that informs them,—not that which is the chosen food of my soul, yet a noble beauty, and which did its message to me also." Parnia and Modena appeared to her "obliged to hold their breath while their poor, ignorant sovereigns skulk in corners, hoping to hide from the coming storm."

Before reaching Rome, Margaret made a second visit to Florence. The liberty of the press had been recently established in Tuscany, under happy auspices. This freedom took effect in the establishment of two liberal papers, Alba (The Dawn) and Patria, needless to translate. The aim of these was to educate the youth and the working classes, by promoting fearlcssness in thought and temperance in action.

The creation of the National Guard bad given confidence to the people. Shortly before Margaret's arrival this event had been celebrated by a grand public festival, preceded by a general reconciliation of public and private differences, and culminating in a general embracing, and exchanging of banners. Margaret ​ speaks of this as a "new great covenant of brotherly love," in which "all was done in that beautiful poetic manner peculiar to this artist-people.” In this feast of reconciliation resident Americans bore their part, Horatio Greenough taking the lead among them. Margaret's ears were refreshed by continually hearing in the streets the singing of the Roman hymn composed in honour of Pope Pius. Wishing that her own country might send some substantial token of sympathy to the land of its great discoverers, she suggests that a cannon, named for one of these, would be the most fitting gift.^[1] The first letter from Rome after these days is dated October 18, 1847.