Complete Works of Wilkie Collins (2286 page)

It was of ill-omen to me, one of its earliest incidents being my only brother’s death; but Dickens had a friend’s true helpfulness in sorrow, and a portion of what he then wrote to me I permit myself to preserve in a note
for what it relates of his own sad experiences and solemn beliefs and hopes. The journey southward began on the 20th January, and five days later I had a letter written from La Scala, at a little inn, “supported on low brick arches like a British haystack,” the bed in their room “like a mangle,” the ceiling without lath or plaster, nothing to speak of available for comfort or decency, and nothing particular to eat or drink. “But for all this I have become attached to the country and I don’t care who knows it.” They had left Pisa that morning and Carrara the day before: at the latter place an ovation awaiting him, the result of the zeal of our eccentric friend Fletcher, who happened to be staying there with an English marble-merchant.
“There is a beautiful little theatre there, built of marble; and they had it illuminated that night, in my honour. There was really a very fair opera: but it is curious that the chorus has been always, time out of mind, made up of labourers in the quarries, who don’t know a note of music, and sing entirely by ear. It was crammed to excess, and I had a great reception; a deputation waiting upon us in the box, and the orchestra turning out in a body afterwards and serenading us at Mr. Walton’s.” Between this and Rome they had a somewhat wild journey;
and before Radicofani was reached, there were disturbing rumours of bandits and even uncomfortable whispers as to their night’s lodging-place. “I really began to think we might have an adventure; and as I had brought (like an ass) a bag of Napoleons with me from Genoa, I called up all the theatrical ways of letting off pistols that I could call to mind, and was the more disposed to fire them from not having any.” It ended in no worse adventure, however, than a somewhat exciting dialogue with an old professional beggar at Radicofani itself, in which he was obliged to confess that he came off second-best. It transpired at a little town hanging on a hill side, of which the inhabitants, being all of them beggars, had the habit of swooping down, like so many birds of prey, upon any carriage that approached it.

“Can you imagine” (he named a first-rate bore, for whose name I shall substitute) “M. F. G. in a very frowsy brown cloak concealing his whole figure, and with very white hair and a very white beard, darting out of this place with a long staff in his hand, and begging? There he was, whether you can or not; out of breath with the rapidity of his dive, and staying with his staff all the Radicofani boys, that he might fight it out with me alone. It was very wet, and so was I: for I had kept, according to custom, my box-seat. It was blowing so hard that I could scarcely stand; and there was a custom-house on the spot, besides. Over and above all this, I had no small money; and the brave C never has, when I want it for a beggar. When I had excused myself several times, he suddenly drew himself up and said, with a wizard look (fancy the aggravation of M. F. G. as a wizard!) ‘Do you know what you are doing, my lord? Do you mean to go on, to-day?’ ‘Yes,’ I said, ‘I do.’ ‘My lord,’ he said, ‘do you know that your vetturino is unacquainted with this part of the country; that there is a wind raging on the mountain, which will sweep you away; that the courier, the coach, and all the passengers, were blown from the road last year; and that the danger is great and almost certain?’ ‘No,’ I said, ‘I don’t.’ ‘My lord, you don’t understand me, I think?’ ‘Yes I do, d —
 
— you!’ nettled by this (you feel it? I confess it). ‘Speak to my servant. It’s his business. Not mine’ — for he really was too like M. F. G. to be borne. If you could have seen him! — ’Santa Maria, these English lords! It’s not their business, if they’re killed! They leave it to their servants!’ He drew off the boys; whispered them to keep away from the heretic; and ran up the hill again, almost as fast as he had come down. He stopped at a little distance as we moved on; and pointing to Roche with his long staff cried loudly after me, ‘It’s
his
business if you’re killed, is it, my lord? Ha! ha! ha! whose business is it, when the English lords are born! Ha! ha! ha!’ The boys taking it up in a shrill yell, I left the joke and them at this point. But I must confess that I thought he had the best of it. And he had so far reason for what he urged, that when we got on the mountain pass the wind became terrific, so that we were obliged to take Kate out of the carriage lest she should be blown over, carriage and all, and had ourselves to hang on to it, on the windy side, to prevent its going Heaven knows where!”

The first impression of Rome was disappointing. It was the evening of the 30th of January, and the cloudy sky, dull cold rain, and muddy footways, he was prepared for; but he was not prepared for the long streets of commonplace shops and houses like Paris or any other capital, the busy people, the equipages, the ordinary walkers up and down. “It was no more my Rome, degraded and fallen and lying asleep in the sun among a heap of ruins, than Lincoln’s-inn-fields is. So I really went to bed in a very indifferent humour.” That all this yielded to later and worthier impressions I need hardly say; and he had never in his life, he told me afterwards, been so moved or overcome by any sight as by that of the Coliseum, “except perhaps by the first contemplation of the Falls of Niagara.” He went to Naples for the interval before the holy week; and his first letter from it was to say that he had found the wonderful aspects of Rome before he left, and that for loneliness and grandeur of ruin nothing could transcend the southern side of the Campagna. But farther and farther south the weather had become worse; and for a week before his letter (the 11th of February), the only bright sky he had seen was just as the sun was coming up across the sea at Terracina. “Of which place, a beautiful one, you can get a very good idea by imagining something as totally unlike the scenery in
Fra Diavolo
as possible.” He thought the bay less striking at Naples than at Genoa, the shape of the latter being more perfect in its beauty, and the smaller size enabling you to see it all at once, and feel it more like an exquisite picture. The city he conceived the greatest dislike to.
“The condition of the common people here is abject and shocking. I am afraid the conventional idea of the picturesque is associated with such misery and degradation that a new picturesque will have to be established as the world goes onward. Except Fondi, there is nothing on earth that I have seen so dirty as Naples. I don’t know what to liken the streets to where the mass of the lazzaroni live. You recollect that favourite pigstye of mine near Broadstairs? They are more like streets of such apartments heaped up story on story, and tumbled house on house, than anything else I can think of, at this moment.” In a later letter he was even less tolerant. “What would I give that you should see the lazzaroni as they really are — mere squalid, abject, miserable animals for vermin to batten on; slouching, slinking, ugly, shabby, scavenging scarecrows! And oh the raffish counts and more than doubtful countesses, the noodles and the blacklegs, the good society! And oh the miles of miserable streets and wretched occupants,
to which Saffron-hill or the Borough-mint is a kind of small gentility, which are found to be so picturesque by English lords and ladies; to whom the wretchedness left behind at home is lowest of the low, and vilest of the vile, and commonest of all common things. Well! well! I have often thought that one of the best chances of immortality for a writer is in the Death of his language, when he immediately becomes good company; and I often think here, — What
would
you say to these people, milady and milord, if they spoke out of the homely dictionary of your own ‘lower orders.’“ He was again at Rome on Sunday the second of March.

Sad news from me as to a common and very dear friend awaited him there; but it is a subject on which I may not dwell farther than to say that there arose from it much to redeem even such a sorrow, and that this I could not indicate better than by these wise and tender words from Dickens. “No philosophy will bear these dreadful things, or make a moment’s head against them, but the practical one of doing all the good we can, in thought and deed. While we can, God help us! ourselves stray from ourselves so easily; and there are all around us such frightful calamities besetting the world in which we live; nothing else will carry us through it. . . . What a comfort to reflect on what you tell me. Bulwer Lytton’s conduct is that of a generous and noble-minded man, as I have ever thought him. Our dear good Procter too! And Thackeray — how earnest they have all been! I am very glad to find you making special mention of Charles Lever. I am glad over every name you write. It says something for our pursuit, in the midst of all its miserable disputes and jealousies, that the common impulse of its followers, in such an instance as this, is surely and certainly of the noblest.”

After the ceremonies of the holy week, of which the descriptions sent to me were reproduced in his book, he went to Florence,
which lived always afterwards in his memory with Venice, and with Genoa. He thought these the three great Italian cities. “There are some places here,
— oh Heaven how fine! I wish you could see the tower of the palazzo Vecchio as it lies before me at this moment, on the opposite bank of the Arno! But I will tell you more about it, and about all Florence, from my shady arm-chair up among the Peschiere oranges. I shall not be sorry to sit down in it again. . . . Poor Hood, poor Hood! I still look for his death, and he still lingers on. And Sydney Smith’s brother gone after poor dear Sydney himself! Maltby will wither when he reads it; and poor old Rogers will contradict some young man at dinner, every day for three weeks.”

Before he left Florence (on the 4th of April) I heard of a “very pleasant and very merry day” at Lord Holland’s; and I ought to have mentioned how much he was gratified, at Naples, by the attentions of the English Minister there, Mr. Temple, Lord Palmerston’s brother, whom he described as a man supremely agreeable, with everything about him in perfect taste, and with that truest gentleman-manner which has its root in kindness and generosity of nature. He was back at home in the Peschiere on Wednesday the ninth of April. Here he continued to write to me every week, for as long as he remained, of whatever he had seen: with no definite purpose as yet, but the pleasure of interchanging with myself the impressions and emotions undergone by him. “Seriously,” he wrote to me on the 13th of April, “it is a great pleasure to me to find that you are really pleased with these shadows in the water, and think them worth the looking at. Writing at such odd places, and in such odd seasons, I have been half savage with myself, very often, for not doing better. But d’Orsay, from whom I had a charming letter three days since, seems to think as you do of what he has read in those shown to him, and says they remind him vividly of the real aspect of these scenes. . . . Well, if we should determine, after we have sat in council, that the experiences they relate are to be used, we will call B. and E. to their share and voice in the matter.” Shortly before he left, the subject was again referred to (7th of June). “I am in as great doubt as you about the letters I have written you with these Italian experiences. I cannot for the life of me devise any plan of using them to my own satisfaction, and yet think entirely with you that in some form I ought to use them.” Circumstances not in his contemplation at this time settled the form they ultimately took.

Two more months were to finish his Italian holiday, and I do not think he enjoyed any part of it so much as its close. He had formed a real friendship for Genoa, was greatly attached to the social circle he had drawn round him there, and liked rest after his travel all the more for the little excitement of living its activities over again, week by week, in these letters to me. And so, from his “shady arm-chair up among the Peschiere oranges,” I had at regular intervals what he called his rambling talk; went over with him again all the roads he had taken; and of the more important scenes and cities, such as Venice, Rome, and Naples, received such rich filling-in to the first outlines sent, as fairly justified the title of
Pictures
finally chosen for them. The weather all the time too had been without a flaw. “Since our return,” he wrote on the 27th April, “we have had charming spring days. The garden is one grove of roses; we have left off fires; and we breakfast and dine again in the great hall, with the windows open. To-day we have rain, but rain was rather wanted I believe, so it gives offence to nobody. As far as I have had an opportunity of judging yet, the spring is the most delightful time in this country. But for all that I am looking with eagerness to the tenth of June, impatient to renew our happy old walks and old talks in dear old home.”

Of incidents during these remaining weeks there were few, but such as he mentioned had in them points of humour or character still worth remembering.
Two men were hanged in the city; and two ladies of quality, he told me, agreed to keep up for a time a prayer for the souls of these two miserable creatures so incessant that Heaven should never for a moment be left alone; to which end “they relieved each other” after such wise, that, for the whole of the stated time, one of them was always on her knees in the cathedral church of San Lorenzo. From which he inferred that “a morbid sympathy for criminals is not wholly peculiar to England, though it affects more people in that country perhaps than in any other.”

Of Italian usages to the dead some notices from his letters have been given, and he had an example before he left of the way in which they affected English residents. A gentleman of his friend Fletcher’s acquaintance living four miles from Genoa had the misfortune to lose his wife; and no attendance on the dead beyond the city gate, nor even any decent conveyance, being practicable, the mourner, to whom Fletcher had promised nevertheless the sad satisfaction of an English funeral, which he had meanwhile taken enormous secret pains to arrange with a small Genoese upholsterer, was waited upon, on the appointed morning, by a very bright yellow hackney-coach-and-pair driven by a coachman in yet brighter scarlet knee-breeches and waistcoat, who wanted to put the husband and the body inside together. “They were obliged to leave one of the coach-doors open for the accommodation even of the coffin; the widower walked beside the carriage to the Protestant cemetery; and Fletcher followed on a big grey horse.”