TO ITALY WITH EVELYN

Is any one so courageous as to wish for a glimpse of the city and the landscape of the future, two centuries and a half hence? Even if so, he can hardly desire it so warmly as the fainter-hearted desires the sight of the past. At any rate, if there be any scene that we would willingly be admitted to see as it is to be, that scene is not in Italy.

Thither would we willingly journey not later than in the day of John Evelyn, when he travelled in his youthful dignity, provided with letters, and spent some seasons in Rome, and studied for a year at the University of Padua. Every one knows his journal of the English Church under the Commonwealth, of the Plague, of the Fire, of the Court of Charles II. But not the least charming part of one of the most readable of books—a book written in an English prose that had not yet undergone much manipulation, but was still a little rigid, but rigid with vitality—is somewhat neglected; it is the part that records this progress through France to the Coast, and thence into Italy as far as Naples, and home by Venice, the Lakes, the Simplon Pass, and Switzerland. The happy man! When he drew near, after peril of shipwreck, to the port of Genoa, he ‘perfectly smelt the joyes of Italy’. This was off the noble village of Sanpierdarena, where now 26you may smell the odour of factories—soap-boiling and other things—for it has lately come to be stifled with thick smoke, and the mountain gardens are dying with their blackened arbours. Only of late have those ancient, coloured terraces, coloured as a few masterly landscapes are painted, so that a little of the canvas, or a little of the view, might be set in a ring and worn as a jewel—only of late have the gardens, once in rich and fortunate neglect, ceased to breathe their ancient breath.

‘We recovered the shore, which we now kept in view within half a league, in sight of those pleasant villas, and within scent of those fragrant orchards which are on this coast, full of princely retirements for the sumptuousnesse of their buildings and noblesse of the plantations, from whence, the wind blowing as it did, might perfectly be smelt the joyes of Italy, in the perfumes of orange, citron, and jasmine flowers for divers leagues seaward.’ And Evelyn was so much struck by the aura of this coast as to record it again in the dedication of his ‘Fumifugium’ to Charles II. What has befallen Sanpierdarena—that one place precisely, of all others—in the years just past makes the whole incident of this welcoming message from the cultivated lands, and of the ensuing treatise and its title, sound somewhat cruel in irony.

John Evelyn tried in vain to stay the approaching smoke, as he tried also—by an application to the same monarch—to avert the course of fashion 27in the then important dress of men. The East he thought better worth following than France, and he proposed a whole revision of the Western mode, and presented the King with a plan whereby the trivial fashions of ‘the monsieurs’ were to be exchanged for an Oriental ‘noblesse’. Charles accepted the pamphlet, and was soon after seen to wear a Persian robe; but he rather shabbily left Evelyn to conjecture, in silence, that it was his advice that had been taken. In the end, the King slid back, and ‘the monsieurs’ had it. If John Evelyn had had that glimpse into the future which few of us desire to-day, how could he have endured those French inventions to which the East has now been partly converted, and the fumes of that ash-strewn piece of coast? ‘But a soap-factory!’ cries the English reader, seeing all kinds of happy national sarcasm in the industry that, among others, has brought about this special local change. It happens, however, pat to this matter of soap, that Evelyn makes a note to the effect that he bought, in one of the towns of North Italy, certain ‘wash-balls’ which seemed to be new to him; he speaks of them as a useful invention. Before the factory had taken the place of the fragrant orchards the people of that coast had the constant custom of washing all their clothes. It is much to be feared that the smoke of the soap-factory has already put an end to that habit by making it too difficult, or impossible.

28Some consolation is to be found in this—that if a mile of that incomparable coast is spoilt, there remain scores of miles all untouched, differing only in the lesser majesty of the houses and gardens with their great sea-walls. The ‘sumptuousnesse’ admired by Evelyn will never be restored; but of the mere walls of those rougher houses too, in their place in the landscape, pieces might be set as jewels. It was always in praise of gardens that Evelyn wrote. Otherwise the general modern complaint as to the insensibility of the older writers to the daily splendours of nature is hardly unjust in his case. He, without noting, saw the change of skies that sets alight the world when you have crossed the Alps; and of the further illumination of a southern spring he says nothing; but he makes mention of the ‘extraordinary long’ tail of a horse, which he saw in a collection of curiosities, nor do two horns of as many unicorns go unrecorded, for he had a grave and simple admiration of such things as petrifactions, flies in amber, and all minor marvels. Nor does he cease to be a learned and most responsible man, in whose adult but innocent style we are to see nothing contrary to the dignities of State and office. The false air of childishness which this kind of English gives to the style of Pepys always makes his public functions and honours seem to us incongruous. In Evelyn’s Diary, by the way, we meet Mr. Pepys, about some Admiralty business, with so much solemnity that we hardly know him again.

29It is Italy that seems (by her people) to have an air of childishness in our eyes to-day. I have to confess that when I hear an Italian say something to the purpose I always cry inwardly ‘How intelligent!’ But in those days England took frankly a lower place. It could not be otherwise, seeing that the late Renaissance as it was then in Rome had imposed law and taste upon the whole of Europe. Evelyn had nothing whatever to be proud of at home, inasmuch as he was ashamed of York Minster, Lincoln, Durham, and the rest; inasmuch, too, as Shakespeare’s name occurs not once in his book. He never doubts that modern art had reached its culmination in St. Peter’s and the Lateran, in Guido Reni and Domenichino.

He found all those splendours new, and it is no wonder if he was convinced that all this art in course of progress, as it was visibly, must be better integrally than what had gone before. He took no notice of the earlier masters of any of the schools, but admired precisely as Horace Walpole admired, and on the same scale and according to the same order. He was diligent in the galleries, but the student of to-day is dismayed to see no Botticelli up or down the page, and to find the polite English traveller in rapture before the blatant Bernini.

Englishmen, in a word, paid Italy the great compliment of taking her at the highest estimation as she was at the moment. There was no painful comparison with any period of the past, for we have 30evidence in his works that Bernini was not afraid of antiquity itself. In arts, in letters, in arms, in science especially, Italy was foremost in present action—there was her splendour, as we may find it hard to realize. Evelyn sent home preparations from her schools of anatomy to the Royal Society, to which such things were new.

And as to the gardens, happy was this traveller, who was soon after to plan the hedges and alleys of Wotton and of Sayes Court, in such a school of gardens. He had, in England, to contend with the perpetual inequalities which have hardly been sufficiently recognized as distinctive of our plains. In Italy he found the plains to be flat with that peculiar sub-alpine flatness, and the roads straight. Most beautiful with the mountains for a distance—but he hardly had eyes for the mountains. It is rather difficult to forgive him for calling the rocks and bays of the coast ‘horrid gaps’ and ‘dreadful mountains’; but ‘Oh, the sweet Paradise!’ he cries among the fountains and the vines.

His was a clear spirit. Wherever he journeyed he went upright; and if we desire to travel with him into Italy, it is not only for the sake of his Italy but for the sake of himself. Something we would have from him in exchange for our better information on the ‘Gotiq ordonance’.

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