The Project Gutenberg EBook of Stray Studies from England and Italy, by 
John Richard Greene

This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.net


Title: Stray Studies from England and Italy

Author: John Richard Greene

Release Date: June 20, 2008 [EBook #25855]

Language: English

Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1

*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK STRAY STUDIES - ENGLAND AND ITALY ***




Produced by Barbara Tozier, Barbara Kosker, Bill Tozier
and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at
http://www.pgdp.net











  STRAY STUDIES

  FROM

  ENGLAND AND ITALY.

  BY

  JOHN RICHARD GREEN.


  LONDON:
  MACMILLAN AND CO.
  1876.

  LONDON:
  PRINTED BY WILLIAM CLOWES AND SONS,
  STAMFORD STREET AND CHARING CROSS.




PREFACE.


I have to thank the Editors of _Macmillan's Magazine_ and the _Saturday
Review_ for allowing me to reprint most of the papers in this series. In
many cases however I have greatly changed their original form. A few
pages will be found to repeat what I have already said in my 'Short
History.'




CONTENTS

                                                   PAGE

  A BROTHER OF THE POOR                               1

  SKETCHES IN SUNSHINE:--

      I. CANNES AND ST. HONORAT                      31
     II. CARNIVAL ON THE CORNICE                     44
    III. TWO PIRATE TOWNS OF THE RIVIERA             59
     IV. THE WINTER RETREAT                          71
      V. SAN REMO                                    79

  THE POETRY OF WEALTH                               93

  LAMBETH AND THE ARCHBISHOPS                       107

  CHILDREN BY THE SEA                               167

  THE FLORENCE OF DANTE                             181

  BUTTERCUPS                                        198

  ABBOT AND TOWN                                    211

  HOTELS IN THE CLOUDS                              241

  ÆNEAS: A VERGILIAN STUDY                          257

  TWO VENETIAN STUDIES:--

      I. VENICE AND ROME                            289
     II. VENICE AND TINTORETTO                      300

  THE DISTRICT VISITOR                              313

  THE EARLY HISTORY OF OXFORD                       329

  THE HOME OF OUR ANGEVIN KINGS                     359

  CAPRI                                             383

  CAPRI AND ITS ROMAN REMAINS                       395

  THE FEAST OF THE CORAL-FISHERS                    414




A BROTHER OF THE POOR.


There are few stiller things than the stillness of a summer's noon such
as this, a summer's noon in a broken woodland, with the deer asleep in
the bracken, and the twitter of birds silent in the coppice, and hardly
a leaf astir in the huge beeches that fling their cool shade over the
grass. Afar off a gilded vane flares out above the grey Jacobean gables
of Knoll, the chime of a village clock falls faintly on the ear, but
there is no voice or footfall of living thing to break the silence as I
turn over leaf after leaf of the little book I have brought with me from
the bustle of town to this still retreat, a book that is the record of a
broken life, of a life "broken off," as he who lived it says of another,
"with a ragged edge."

It is a book that carries one far from the woodland stillness around
into the din and turmoil of cities and men, into the misery and
degradation of "the East-end,"--that "London without London," as some
one called it the other day. Few regions are more unknown than the Tower
Hamlets. Not even Mrs. Riddell has ventured as yet to cross the border
which parts the City from their weltering mass of busy life, their
million of hard workers packed together in endless rows of monotonous
streets, broken only by shipyard or factory or huge breweries, streets
that stretch away eastward from Aldgate to the Essex marshes. And yet,
setting aside the poetry of life which is everywhere, there is poetry
enough in East London; poetry in the great river which washes it on the
south, in the fretted tangle of cordage and mast that peeps over the
roofs of Shadwell or in the great hulls moored along the wharves of
Wapping; poetry in the "Forest" that fringes it to the east, in the few
glades that remain of Epping and Hainault,--glades ringing with the
shouts of school-children out for their holiday and half mad with
delight at the sight of a flower or a butterfly; poetry of the present
in the work and toil of these acres of dull bricks and mortar where
everybody, man woman and child, is a worker, this England without a
"leisure class"; poetry in the thud of the steam-engine and the white
trail of steam from the tall sugar refinery, in the blear eyes of the
Spitalfields weaver, or the hungering faces of the group of labourers
clustered from morning till night round the gates of the docks and
watching for the wind that brings the ships up the river: poetry in its
past, in strange old-fashioned squares, in quaint gabled houses, in grey
village churches, that have been caught and overlapped and lost, as it
were, in the great human advance that has carried London forward from
Whitechapel, its limit in the age of the Georges, to Stratford, its
bound in that of Victoria.

Stepney is a belated village of this sort; its grey old church of St.
Dunstan, buried as it is now in the very heart of East London, stood
hardly a century ago among the fields. All round it lie tracts of human
life without a past; but memories cluster thickly round "Old Stepney,"
as the people call it with a certain fond reverence, memories of men
like Erasmus and Colet and the group of scholars in whom the Reformation
began. It was to the country house of the Dean of St. Paul's, hard by
the old church of St. Dunstan, that Erasmus betook him when tired of the
smoke and din of town. "I come to drink your fresh air, my Colet," he
writes, "to drink yet deeper of your rural peace." The fields and hedges
through which Erasmus loved to ride remained fields and hedges within
living memory; only forty years ago a Londoner took his Sunday outing
along the field path which led past the London Hospital to what was
still the suburban village church of Stepney. But the fields through
which the path led have their own church now, with its parish of dull
straight streets of monotonous houses already marked with premature
decay, and here and there alleys haunted by poverty and disease and
crime.

There is nothing marked about either church or district; their character
and that of their people are of the commonest East-end type. If I ask my
readers to follow me to this parish of St. Philip, it is simply because
these dull streets and alleys were chosen by a brave and earnest man as
the scene of his work among the poor. It was here that Edward Denison
settled in the autumn of 1867, in the second year of the great "East
London Distress." In the October of 1869 he left England on a fatal
voyage from which he was never to return. The collection of his letters
which has been recently printed by Sir Baldwyn Leighton has drawn so
much attention to the work which lay within the narrow bounds of those
two years that I may perhaps be pardoned for recalling my own memories
of one whom it is hard to forget.

A few words are enough to tell the tale of his earlier days. Born in
1840, the son of a bishop, and nephew of the late Speaker of the House
of Commons, Edward Denison passed from Eton to Christchurch, and was
forced after quitting the University to spend some time in foreign
travel by the delicacy of his health. His letters give an interesting
picture of his mind during this pause in an active life, a pause which
must have been especially distasteful to one whose whole bent lay from
the first in the direction of practical energy. "I believe," he says in
his later days, "that abstract political speculation is my _métier_;"
but few minds were in reality less inclined to abstract speculation.
From the very first one sees in him what one may venture to call the
best kind of "Whig" mind, that peculiar temper of fairness and
moderation which declines to push conclusions to extremes, and recoils
instinctively when opinion is extended beyond its proper bound. His
comment on Newman's 'Apologia' paints his real intellectual temper with
remarkable precision. "I left off reading Newman's 'Apologia' before I
got to the end, tired of the ceaseless changes of the writer's mind, and
vexed with his morbid scruples--perhaps, too, having got a little out of
harmony myself with the feelings of the author, whereas I began by being
in harmony with them. I don't quite know whether to esteem it a blessing
or a curse; but whenever an opinion to which I am a recent convert, or
which I do not hold with the entire force of my intellect, is forced too
strongly upon me, or driven home to its logical conclusion, or
over-praised, or extended beyond its proper limits, I recoil
instinctively and begin to gravitate towards the other extreme, sure to
be in turn repelled by it also."

I dwell on this temper of his mind because it is this practical and
moderate character of the man which gives such weight to the very
sweeping conclusions on social subjects to which he was driven in his
later days. A judgment which condemns the whole system of Poor Laws, for
instance, falls with very different weight from a mere speculative
theorist and from a practical observer whose mind is constitutionally
averse from extreme conclusions. Throughout however we see this
intellectual moderation jostling with a moral fervour which feels
restlessly about for a fitting sphere of action. "Real life," he writes
from Madeira, "is not dinner-parties and small talk, nor even croquet
and dancing." There is a touch of exaggeration in phrases like these
which need not blind us to the depth and reality of the feeling which
they imperfectly express, a feeling which prompted the question which
embodies the spirit of all these earlier letters,--the question, "What
is my work?"

The answer to this question was found both within and without the
questioner. Those who were young in the weary days of Palmerstonian rule
will remember the disgust at purely political life which was produced by
the bureaucratic inaction of the time, and we can hardly wonder that,
like many of the finer minds among his contemporaries, Edward Denison
turned from the political field which was naturally open to him to the
field of social effort. His tendency in this direction was aided, no
doubt, partly by the intensity of this religious feeling and of his
consciousness of the duty he owed to the poor, and partly by that closer
sympathy with the physical suffering around us which is one of the most
encouraging characteristics of the day. Even in the midst of his
outburst of delight at a hard frost ("I like," he says, "the bright
sunshine that generally accompanies it, the silver landscape, and the
ringing distinctness of sounds in the frozen air"), we see him haunted
by a sense of the way in which his pleasure contrasts with the winter
misery of the poor. "I would rather give up all the pleasures of the
frost than indulge them, poisoned as they are by the misery of so many
of our brothers. What a monstrous thing it is that in the richest
country in the world large masses of the population should be condemned
annually to starvation and death!" It is easy to utter protests like
these in the spirit of a mere sentimentalist; it is less easy to carry
them out into practical effort, as Edward Denison resolved to do. After
an unsatisfactory attempt to act as Almoner for the Society for the
Relief of Distress, he resolved to fix himself personally in the
East-end of London, and study the great problem of pauperism face to
face.

His resolve sprang from no fit of transient enthusiasm, but from a sober
conviction of the need of such a step. "There are hardly any residents
in the East rich enough to give much money, or with enough leisure to
give much time," he says. "This is the evil. Even the best disposed in
the West don't like coming so far off, and, indeed, few have the time to
spare, and when they do there is great waste of time and energy on the
journey. My plan is the only really practicable one, and as I have both
means, time, and inclination, I should be a thief and a murderer if I
withheld what I so evidently owe." In the autumn of 1867 he carried out
his resolve, and took lodgings in the heart of the parish which I
sketched in the opening of this paper. If any romantic dreams had mixed
with his resolution they at once faded away before the dull, commonplace
reality. "I saw nothing very striking at Stepney," is his first comment
on the sphere he had chosen. But he was soon satisfied with his choice.
He took up in a quiet, practical way the work he found closest at hand.
"All is yet in embryo, but it will grow. Just now I only teach in a
night school, and do what in me lies in looking after the sick, keeping
an eye upon nuisances and the like, seeing that the local authorities
keep up to their work. I go to-morrow before the Board at the workhouse
to compel the removal to the infirmary of a man who ought to have been
there already. I shall drive the sanitary inspector to put the Act
against overcrowding in force." Homely work of this sort grows on him;
we see him in these letters getting boys out to sea, keeping school with
little urchins,--"demons of misrule" who tried his temper,--gathering
round him a class of working men, organizing an evening club for boys.
All this, too, quietly and unostentatiously and with as little resort as
possible to "cheap charity," as he used to call it, to the "doles of
bread and meat which only do the work of poor-rates."

So quiet and simple indeed was his work that though it went on in the
parish of which I then had the charge it was some little time before I
came to know personally the doer of it. It is amusing even now to
recollect my first interview with Edward Denison. A vicar's Monday
morning is never the pleasantest of awakenings, but the Monday morning
of an East-end vicar brings worries that far eclipse the mere headache
and dyspepsia of his rural brother. It is the "parish morning." All the
complicated machinery of a great ecclesiastical, charitable, and
educational organization has got to be wound up afresh, and set going
again for another week. The superintendent of the Women's Mission is
waiting with a bundle of accounts, complicated as only ladies' accounts
can be. The churchwarden has come with a face full of gloom to consult
on the falling off in the offertory. The Scripture-reader has brought
his "visiting book" to be inspected, and a special report on the
character of a doubtful family in the parish. The organist drops in to
report something wrong in the pedals. There is a letter to be written to
the inspector of nuisances, directing his attention to certain
odoriferous drains in Pig-and-Whistle Alley. The nurse brings her
sick-list and her little bill for the sick-kitchen. The schoolmaster
wants a fresh pupil-teacher, and discusses nervously the prospects of
his scholars in the coming inspection. There is the interest on the
penny bank to be calculated, a squabble in the choir to be adjusted, a
district visitor to be replaced, reports to be drawn up for the Bishop's
Fund and a great charitable society, the curate's sick-list to be
inspected, and a preacher to be found for the next church festival.

It was in the midst of a host of worries such as these that a card was
laid on my table with a name which I recognized as that of a young
layman from the West-end, who had for two or three months past been
working in the mission district attached to the parish. Now, whatever
shame is implied in the confession, I had a certain horror of "laymen
from the West-end." Lay co-operation is an excellent thing in itself,
and one of my best assistants was a letter-sorter in the post-office
close by; but the "layman from the West-end," with a bishop's letter of
recommendation in his pocket and a head full of theories about "heathen
masses," was an unmitigated nuisance. I had a pretty large experience of
these gentlemen, and my one wish in life was to have no more. Some had a
firm belief in their own eloquence, and were zealous for a big room and
a big congregation. I got them the big room, but I was obliged to leave
the big congregation to their own exertions, and in a month or two their
voices faded away. Then there was the charitable layman, who pounced
down on the parish from time to time and threw about meat and blankets
till half of the poor were demoralized. Or there was the statistical
layman, who went about with a note-book and did spiritual and economical
sums in the way of dividing the number of "people in the free seats" by
the number of bread tickets annually distributed. There was the layman
with a passion for homoeopathy, the ritualistic layman, the layman with
a mania for preaching down trades' unions, the layman with an
educational mania. All however agreed in one point, much as they
differed in others, and the one point was that of a perfect belief in
their individual nostrums and perfect contempt for all that was already
doing in the neighbourhood.

It was with no peculiar pleasure therefore that I rose to receive this
fresh "layman from the West"; but a single glance was enough to show me
that my visitor was a man of very different stamp from his predecessors.
There was something in the tall, manly figure, the bright smile, the
frank winning address of Edward Denison that inspired confidence in a
moment. "I come to learn, and not to teach," he laughed, as I hinted at
"theories" and their danger; and our talk soon fell on a certain "John's
Place," where he thought there was a great deal to be learned. In five
minutes more we stood in the spot which interested him, an alley running
between two mean streets, and narrowing at one end till we crept out of
it as if through the neck of a bottle. It was by no means the choicest
part of the parish: the drainage was imperfect, the houses miserable;
but wretched as it was it was a favourite haunt of the poor, and it
swarmed with inhabitants of very various degrees of respectability.
Costermongers abounded, strings of barrows were drawn up on the
pavement, and the refuse of their stock lay rotting in the gutter.
Drunken sailors and Lascars from the docks rolled along shouting to its
houses of ill-fame. There was little crime, though one of the "ladies"
of the alley was a well-known receiver of stolen goods, but there was a
good deal of drunkenness and vice. Now and then a wife came plumping on
to the pavement from a window overhead; sometimes a couple of viragoes
fought out their quarrel "on the stones"; boys idled about in the
sunshine in training to be pickpockets; miserable girls flaunted in
dirty ribbons at nightfall at half-a-dozen doors.

But with all this the place was popular with even respectable working
people in consequence of the small size and cheapness of the houses--for
there is nothing the poor like so much as a house to themselves; and the
bulk of its population consisted of casual labourers, who gathered every
morning round the great gates of the docks, waiting to be "called in" as
the ships came up to unload. The place was naturally unhealthy,
constantly haunted by fever, and had furnished some hundred cases in the
last visitation of cholera. The work done among them in the "cholera
time" had never been forgotten by the people, and, ill-famed as the
place was, I visited it at all times of the day and night with perfect
security. The apostle however of John's Place was my friend the
letter-sorter. He had fixed on it as his special domain, and with a
little aid from others had opened a Sunday-school and simple Sunday
services in the heart of it. A branch of the Women's Mission was
established in the same spot, and soon women were "putting by" their
pence and sewing quietly round the lady superintendent as she read to
them the stories of the Gospels.

It was this John's Place which Edward Denison chose as the centre of his
operations. There was very little in his manner to show his sense of
the sacrifice he was making, though the sacrifice was in reality a great
one. No one enjoyed more keenly the pleasures of life and society: he
was a good oarsman, he delighted in outdoor exercise, and skating was to
him "a pleasure only rivalled in my affection by a ride across country
on a good horse." But month after month these pleasures were quietly put
aside for his work in the East-end. "I have come to this," he says,
laughingly, "that a walk along Piccadilly is a most exhilarating and
delightful treat. I don't enjoy it above once in ten days, but therefore
with double zest." What told on him most was the physical depression
induced by the very look of these vast, monotonous masses of sheer
poverty. "My wits are getting blunted," he says, "by the monotony and
_ugliness_ of this place. I can almost imagine, difficult as it is, the
awful effect upon a human mind of never seeing anything but the meanest
and vilest of men and men's works, and of complete exclusion from the
sight of God and His works,--a position in which the villager never is."
But there was worse than physical degradation. "This summer there is not
so very much actual suffering for want of food, nor from sickness. What
is so bad is the habitual condition of this mass of humanity--its
uniform mean level, the absence of anything more civilizing than a
grinding organ to raise the ideas beyond the daily bread and beer, the
utter want of education, the complete indifference to religion, with the
fruits of all this--improvidence, dirt, and their secondaries, crime and
disease."

Terrible however as these evils were, he believed they could be met; and
the quiet good sense of his character was shown in the way in which he
met them. His own residence in the East-end was the most effective of
protests against that severance of class from class in which so many of
its evils take their rise. When speaking of the overcrowding and the
official ill-treatment of the poor, he says truly: "These are the sort
of evils which, where there are no resident gentry, grow to a height
almost incredible, and on which the remedial influence of the mere
presence of a gentleman known to be on the alert is inestimable." But
nothing, as I often had occasion to remark, could be more judicious than
his interference on behalf of the poor, or more unlike the fussy
impertinence of the philanthropists who think themselves born "to
expose" Boards of Guardians. His aim throughout was to co-operate with
the Guardians in giving, not less, but greater effect to the Poor Laws,
and in resisting the sensational writing and reckless abuse which aim at
undoing their work. "The gigantic subscription lists which are regarded
as signs of our benevolence," he says truly, "are monuments of our
indifference."

The one hope for the poor, he believed, lay not in charity, but in
themselves. "Build school-houses, pay teachers, give prizes, frame
workmen's clubs, help them to help themselves, lend them your brains;
but give them no money, except what you sink in such undertakings as
above." This is not the place to describe or discuss the more detailed
suggestions with which he faced the great question of poverty and
pauperism in the East-end; they are briefly summarized in a remarkable
letter which he addressed in 1869 to an East-end newspaper:--"First we
must so discipline and regulate our charities as to cut off the
resources of the habitual mendicant. Secondly, all who by begging
proclaim themselves destitute, must be taken at their word. They must be
taken up and kept at penal work--not for one morning, as now, but for a
month or two; a proportion of their earnings being handed over to them
on dismissal, as capital on which to begin a life of honest industry.
Thirdly, we must promote the circulation of labour, and obviate morbid
congestions of the great industrial centres. Fourthly, we must improve
the condition of the agricultural poor." Stern as such suggestions may
seem, there are few who have really thought as well as worked for the
poor without feeling that sternness of this sort is, in the highest
sense, mercy. Ten years in the East of London had brought me to the same
conclusions; and my Utopia, like Edward Denison's, lay wholly in a
future to be worked out by the growing intelligence and thrift of the
labouring classes themselves.

But stern as were his theories, there is hardly a home within his
district that has not some memory left of the love and tenderness of his
personal charity. I hardly like to tell how often I have seen the face
of the sick and dying brighten as he drew near, or how the little
children, as they flocked out of school, would run to him, shouting his
name for very glee. For the Sunday-school was soon transformed by his
efforts into a day-school for children, whose parents were really
unable to pay school-fees; and a large schoolroom, erected near John's
Place, was filled with dirty little scholars. Here too he gathered round
him a class of working men, to whom he lectured on the Bible every
Wednesday evening; and here he delivered addresses to the dock-labourers
whom he had induced to attend, of a nature somewhat startling to those
who talk of "preaching down to the intelligence of the poor." I give the
sketch of one of these sermons (on "Not forsaking the assembling of
yourselves together") in his own words:--"I presented Christianity as a
society; investigated the origin of societies, the family, the tribe,
the nation, with the attendant expanded ideas of rights and duties; the
common weal, the bond of union; rising from the family dinner-table to
the sacrificial rites of the national gods; drew parallels with trades'
unions and benefit clubs, and told them flatly they would not be
Christians till they were communicants." No doubt this will seem to most
sensible people extravagant enough, even without the quotations from
"Wordsworth, Tennyson, and even Pope" with which his addresses were
enlivened; but I must confess that my own experience among the poor
agrees pretty much with Edward Denison's, and that I believe "high
thinking" put into plain English to be more likely to tell on a
dock-yard labourer than all the "simple Gospel sermons" in the world.

His real power however for good among the poor lay not so much in what
he did as in what he was. It is in no spirit of class self-sufficiency
that he dwells again and again throughout these letters on the
advantages to such a neighbourhood of the presence of a "gentleman" in
the midst of it. He lost little, in the end he gained much, by the
resolute stand he made against the indiscriminate almsgiving which has
done so much to create and encourage pauperism in the East of London.
The poor soon came to understand the man who was as liberal with his
sympathy as he was chary of meat and coal tickets, who only aimed at
being their friend, at listening to their troubles, and aiding them with
counsel, as if he were one of themselves, at putting them in the way of
honest work, at teaching their children, at protecting them with a
perfect courage and chivalry against oppression and wrong. He
instinctively appealed in fact to their higher nature, and such an
appeal seldom remains unanswered. In the roughest costermonger there is
a vein of real nobleness, often even of poetry, in which lies the whole
chance of his rising to a better life. I remember, as an instance of the
way in which such a vein can be touched, the visit of a lady, well known
for her work in the poorer districts of London, to a low alley in this
very parish. She entered the little mission-room with a huge basket,
filled not with groceries or petticoats, but with roses. There was
hardly one pale face among the women bending over their sewing that did
not flush with delight as she distributed her gifts. Soon, as the news
spread down the alley, rougher faces peered in at window and door, and
great "navvies" and dock-labourers put out their hard fists for a
rosebud with the shyness and delight of schoolboys. "She was a _real_
lady," was the unanimous verdict of the alley; like Edward Denison she
had somehow discovered that man does not live by bread alone, and that
the communion of rich and poor is not to be found in appeals to the
material but to the spiritual side of man.

"What do you look on as the greatest boon that has been conferred on the
poorer classes in later years?" said a friend to me one day, after
expatiating on the rival claims of schools, missions, shoe-black
brigades, and a host of other philanthropic efforts for their
assistance. I am afraid I sank in his estimation when I answered,
"Sixpenny photographs." But any one who knows what the worth of family
affection is among the lower classes, and who has seen the array of
little portraits stuck over a labourer's fireplace, still gathering
together into one the "home" that life is always parting--the boy that
has "gone to Canada," the girl "out at service," the little one with the
golden hair that sleeps under the daisies, the old grandfather in the
country--will perhaps feel with me that in counteracting the tendencies,
social and industrial, which every day are sapping the healthier family
affections, the sixpenny photograph is doing more for the poor than all
the philanthropists in the world.

It is easy indeed to resolve on "helping" the poor; but it is far less
easy to see clearly how we can help them, what is real aid, and what is
mere degradation. I know few books where any one who is soberly facing
questions like these can find more help than in the "Letters" of Edward
Denison. Broken and scattered as his hints necessarily appear, the main
lines along which his thought moves are plain enough. He would
discriminate between temporary, and chronic distress, between the
poverty caused by a sudden revolution of trade and permanent destitution
such as that of Bethnal Green. The first requires exceptional treatment;
the second a rigid and universal administration of the Poor Laws. "Bring
back the Poor Law," he repeats again and again, "to the spirit of its
institution; organize a sufficiently elastic labour test, without which
no outdoor relief to be given; make the few alterations which altered
times demand, and impose every possible discouragement on private
benevolence." The true cure for pauperism lies in the growth of thrift
among the poor. "I am not drawing the least upon my imagination when I
say that a young man of twenty could in five years, even as a
dock-labourer, which is much the lowest employment and least well paid
there is, save about £20. This is not exactly Utopia; it is within the
reach of nearly every man, if quite at the bottom of the tree; but if it
were of anything like common occurrence the destitution and disease of
this life would be within manageable limits."

I know that words like these are in striking contrast with the usual
public opinion on the subject, as well as with the mere screeching over
poverty in which sentimentalists are in the habit of indulging. But it
is fair to say that they entirely coincide with my own experience. The
sight which struck me most in Stepney was one which met my eyes when I
plunged by sheer accident into the back-yard of a jobbing carpenter, and
came suddenly upon a neat greenhouse with fine flowers inside it. The
man had built it with his own hands and his own savings; and the sight
of it had so told on his next-door neighbour--a cobbler, if I remember
rightly--as to induce him to leave off drinking, and build a rival
greenhouse with savings of his own. Both had become zealous florists,
and thrifty, respectable men; but the thing which surprised both of them
most was that they had been able to save at all.

It is in the letters themselves however rather than in these desultory
comments of mine that the story of these two years of earnest combat
with the great problem of our day must be studied. Short as the time
was, it was broken by visits to France, to Scotland, to Guernsey, and by
his election as Member of Parliament for the borough of Newark. But
even these visits and his new parliamentary position were meant to be
parts of an effort for the regeneration of our poorer classes. His
careful examination of the thrift of the peasantry of the Channel
Islands, his researches into the actual working of the "Assistance
Publique" in Paris, the one remarkable speech he delivered in Parliament
on the subject of vagrancy, were all contributions to this great end. In
the midst of these labours a sudden attack of his old disease forced him
to leave England on a long sea-voyage, and within a fortnight of his
landing in Australia he died at Melbourne. His portrait hangs in the
school which he built, and rough faces as they gaze at it still soften
even into tears as they think of Edward Denison.




SKETCHES IN SUNSHINE.



I.

CANNES AND ST. HONORAT.


In a colloquial sort of way we talk glibly enough of leaving England,
but England is by no means an easy country to leave. If it bids us
farewell from the cliffs of Dover, it greets us again on the quay of
Calais. It would be a curious morning's amusement to take a map of
Europe, and mark with a dot of red the settlements of our lesser English
colonies. A thousand Englands would crop up along the shores of the
Channel or in quiet nooks of Normandy, around mouldering Breton castles
or along the banks of the Loire, under the shadow of the Maritime Alps
or the Pyrenees, beneath the white walls of Tunis or the Pyramids of the
Nile. During the summer indeed England is everywhere--fishing in the
fiords of Norway, sketching on the Kremlin, shooting brigands in
Albania, yachting among the Cyclades, lion-hunting in the Atlas,
crowding every steamer on the Rhine, annexing Switzerland, lounging
through Italian galleries, idling in the gondolas of Venice. But even
winter is far from driving England home again; what it really does is to
concentrate it in a hundred little Britains along the sunny shores of
the South. Each winter resort brings home to us the power of the British
doctor. It is he who rears pleasant towns at the foot of the Pyrenees,
and lines the sunny coasts of the Riviera with villas that gleam white
among the olive groves. It is his finger that stirs the camels of
Algeria, the donkeys of Palestine, the Nile boats of Egypt. At the first
frosts of November the doctor marshals his wild geese for their winter
flitting, and the long train streams off, grumbling but obedient, to the
little Britains of the South.

Of these little Britains none is more lovely than Cannes. The place is a
pure creation of the health-seekers whose gay villas are thrown
fancifully about among its sombre fir-woods, though the "Old Town," as
it is called nowadays, remains clinging to its original height, street
above street leading up to a big bare church of the Renascence period,
to fragments of mediæval walls and a great tower which crowns the summit
of the hill. At the feet of this height lie the two isles of Lerins, set
in the blue waters of the bay; on the east the eye ranges over the
porphyry hills of Napoul to the huge masses of the Estrelles; landwards
a tumbled country with bright villas dotted over it rises gently to the
Alps. As a strictly winter resort Cannes is far too exposed for the more
delicate class of invalids; as a spring resort it is without a rival.
Nowhere is the air so bright and elastic, the light so wonderfully
brilliant and diffused. The very soil, full of micaceous fragments,
sparkles at our feet. Colour takes a depth as well as a refinement
strange even to the Riviera; nowhere is the sea so darkly purple,
nowhere are the tones of the distant hills so delicate and evanescent,
nowhere are the sunsets so sublime. The scenery around harmonizes in its
gaiety, its vivacity, its charm with this brightness of air and light.
There is little of grandeur about it, little to compare in magnificence
with the huge background of the cliffs behind Mentone or the mountain
wall which rises so steeply from its lemon groves. But everywhere there
is what Mentone lacks--variety, largeness, picturesqueness of contrast
and surprise. Above us is the same unchanging blue as there, but here it
overarches gardens fresh with verdure and bright with flowers, and
houses gleaming white among the dark fir-clumps; hidden little ravines
break the endless tossings of the ground; in the distance white roads
rush straight to grey towns hanging strangely against the hill-sides; a
thin snow-line glitters along the ridge of the Maritime Alps; dark
purple shadows veil the recesses of the Estrelles.

Nor is it only this air of cheerfulness and vivacity which makes Cannes
so pleasant a spring resort for invalids; it possesses in addition an
advantage of situation which its more sheltered rivals necessarily want.
The high mountain walls that give their complete security from cold
winds to Mentone or San Remo are simply prison walls to visitors who are
too weak to face a steep ascent on foot or even on donkey-back, for
drives are out of the question except along one or two monotonous roads.
But the country round Cannes is full of easy walks and drives, and it is
as varied and beautiful as it is accessible. You step out of your hotel
into the midst of wild scenery, rough hills of broken granite screened
with firs, or paths winding through a wilderness of white heath.
Everywhere in spring the ground is carpeted with a profusion of
wild-flowers, cistus and brown orchis, narcissus and the scarlet
anemone; sometimes the forest scenery sweeps away, and leaves us among
olive-grounds and orange-gardens arranged in formal, picturesque rows.
And from every little height there are the same distant views of far-off
mountains, or the old town flooded with yellow light, or islands lying
gem-like in the dark blue sea, or the fiery hue of sunset over the
Estrelles.

Nor are these land-trips the only charm of Cannes. No one has seen the
coast of Provence in its beauty who has not seen it from the sea. A sail
to the isles of Lerins reveals for the first time the full glory of
Cannes even to those who have enjoyed most keenly the large
picturesqueness of its landscapes, the delicate colouring of its distant
hills, the splendour of its sunsets. As one drifts away from the shore
the circle of the Maritime Alps rises like the framework of some perfect
picture, the broken outline of the mountains to the left contrasting
with the cloud-capt heights above Turbia, snow-peaks peeping over the
further slopes between them, delicate lights and shadows falling among
the broken country of the foreground, Cannes itself stretching its
bright line of white along the shore. In the midst of the bay, the
centre as it were of this exquisite landscape, lie the two isles of
Lerins. With the larger, that of St. Marguerite, romance has more to do
than history, and the story of the "Man in the Iron Mask," who was so
long a prisoner in its fortress, is fast losing the mystery which made
it dear even to romance. The lesser and more distant isle, that of St.
Honorat, is one of the great historic sites of the world. It is the
starting point of European monasticism, whether in its Latin, its
Teutonic, or its Celtic form, for it was by Lerins that the monasticism
of Egypt first penetrated into the West.

The devotees whom the fame of Antony and of the Coenobites of the Nile
had drawn in crowds to the East returned at the close of the fourth
century to found similar retreats in the isles which line the coasts of
the Mediterranean. The sea took the place of the desert, but the type of
monastic life which the solitaries had found in Egypt was faithfully
preserved. The Abbot of Lerins was simply the chief of some thousands of
religious devotees, scattered over the island in solitary cells, and
linked together by the common ties of obedience and prayer. By a curious
concurrence of events the coenobitic life of Lerins, so utterly unlike
the later monasticism of the Benedictines, was long preserved in a
remote corner of Christendom. Patrick, the most famous of its scholars,
transmitted its type of monasticism to the Celtic Church which he
founded in Ireland, and the vast numbers, the asceticism, the loose
organization of such abbeys as those of Bangor or Armagh preserved to
the twelfth century the essential characteristics of Lerins. Nor is this
all its historical importance. What Iona is to the ecclesiastical
history of Northern England, what Fulda and Monte Cassino are to the
ecclesiastical history of Germany and Southern Italy, that this Abbey of
St. Honorat became to the Church of Southern Gaul. For nearly two
centuries, and those centuries of momentous change, when the wreck of
the Roman Empire threatened civilization and Christianity with ruin like
its own, the civilization and Christianity of the great district between
the Loire, the Alps, and the Pyrenees rested mainly on the Abbey of
Lerins. Sheltered by its insular position from the ravages of the
barbaric invaders who poured down on the Rhône and the Garonne, it
exercised over Provence and Aquitaine a supremacy such as Iona till the
Synod of Whitby exercised over Northumbria. All the more illustrious
sees of Southern Gaul were filled by prelates who had been reared at
Lerins; to Arles, for instance, it gave in succession Hilary, Cæsarius,
and Virgilius. The voice of the Church was found in that of its doctors;
the famous rule of faith, "quod ubique, quod semper, quod ab omnibus,"
is the rule of Vincent of Lerins; its monk Salvian painted the agony of
the dying Empire in his book on the government of God; the long fight of
semi-Pelagianism against the sterner doctrines of Augustin was chiefly
waged within its bounds.

Little remains to illustrate this earlier and more famous period of the
monastic history of Lerins which extends to the massacre of its monks by
Saracen pirates at the opening of the eighth century. The very look of
the island has been changed by the revolutions of the last hundred
years. It is still a mere spit of sand, edged along the coast with
sombre pines; but the whole of the interior has been stripped of its
woods by the agricultural improvements which are being carried on by the
Franciscans who at present possess it, and all trace of solitude and
retirement has disappeared. A well in the centre of the island and a
palm-tree beside the church are linked to the traditional history of the
founders of the abbey. Worked into the later buildings we find marbles
and sculptures which may have been brought from the mainland, as at
Torcello, by fugitives who had escaped the barbaric storm. A bas-relief
of Christ and the Apostles, which is now inserted over the west gate of
the church, and a column of red marble which stands beside it, belong
probably to the earliest days of the settlement at Lerins. In the little
chapels scattered over the island fragments of early sarcophagi,
inscriptions, and sculpture have been industriously collected and
preserved. But the chapels themselves are far more interesting than
their contents. Of the seven which originally lined the shore, two or
three only now remain uninjured; in these the building itself is either
square or octagonal, pierced with a single rough Romanesque window, and
of diminutive size. The walls and vaulting are alike of rough
stonework. The chapels served till the Revolution as seven stations
which were visited by the pilgrims to the island, but we can hardly
doubt that in these, as in the Seven Chapels at Glendalough, we see
relics of the earlier coenobitic establishment.

The cloister of the abbey is certainly of a date later than the massacre
of the monks, which took place according to tradition in the little
square of wild greensward which lies within it; but the roughness of its
masonry, the plain barrel roof, and the rude manner in which the low,
gloomy vaulting is carried round its angles, are of the same character
as in the usual tenth-century buildings of Southern Gaul. With the
exception of the masonry of its side walls there is nothing in the
existing remains of the abbey church itself earlier than its
reconstruction at the close of the eleventh century. The building has
been so utterly wrecked that little architectural detail is left; but
the broad nave, with its narrow side aisles, the absence, as in the
Aquitanian churches, of triforium and clerestory, and the shortness of
the choir space, give their own individual mark to St. Honorat. Of the
monastic buildings directly connected with the church only a few rooms
remain, and these are destitute of any features of interest. They are
at present used as an orphanage by the Franciscans whom the Bishop of
Frejus, by whom the island was purchased some fifteen years ago, has
settled there as an agricultural colony, and whose reverence for the
relics around them is as notable as their courtesy to the strangers who
visit them. If it is true that the island narrowly escaped being turned
into a tea-garden and resort for picnics by some English speculators, we
can only feel a certain glow of gratitude to the Bishop of Frejus. The
brown train of the eleven brothers as we saw them pacing slowly beneath
the great caroub-tree close to the abbey, or the row of boys blinking in
the sunshine as they repeat their lesson to the lay-brother who acts as
schoolmaster, jar less roughly on the associations of Lerins than the
giggle of happy lovers or the pop of British champagne.

There is little interest in the later story of St. Honorat, from the
days of the Saracen massacre to its escape from conversion into a
tea-garden. The appearance of the Moslem pirates at once robbed it of
its old security, and the cessation of their attacks was followed by new
dangers from the Genoese and Catalans who infested the coast in the
fourteenth century. The isle was alternately occupied by French and
Spaniards in the war between Francis and Charles V.; it passed under the
rule of Commendatory abbots, and in 1789, when it was finally
secularized, the four thousand monks of its earlier history had shrunk
to four. Perhaps the most curious of all the buildings of Lerins is that
which took its rise in the insecurity of its mediæval existence. The
Castle of Lerins, which lies on the shore to the south of the church, is
at once a castle and an abbey. Like many of the great monasteries of the
East, its first object was to give security to its inmates against the
marauders who surrounded them. Externally its appearance is purely
military; the great tower rises from its trench cut deep in the rock, a
portcullis protects the gate, the walls are pierced with loopholes and
crowned with battlements. But within, the arrangements, so far as it is
possible to trace them in the present ruined state of the building, seem
to have been purely monastic. The interior of the tower is occupied by a
double-arched cloister, with arcades of exquisite first-pointed work,
through which one looks down into the little court below. The visitor
passes from this into the ruins of the abbot's chapel, to which the
relics were transferred for security from the church of St. Honorat,
and which was surrounded by the cells, the refectory, and the domestic
buildings of the monks. The erection of the castle is dated in the
twelfth century, and from this time we may consider the older abbey
buildings around the church to have been deserted and left to ruin; but
we can hardly grumble at a transfer which has given us so curious a
combination of military and monastic architecture in the castle itself.

Something of the feudal spirit which such a residence would be likely to
produce appears in the abbot's relations with the little town of Cannes,
which formed a part of his extensive lordship on the mainland. Its
fishers were harassed by heavy tolls on their fishery, and the rights of
first purchase in the market and forced labour were rigorously exacted
by the monastic officers. It is curious to compare, as one's boat floats
back across the waters of the bay, the fortunes of these serfs and of
their lords.




SKETCHES IN SUNSHINE.




II.

CARNIVAL ON THE CORNICE.


Carnival in an ordinary little Italian town seems, no doubt, commonplace
enough to those who have seen its glories in Rome--the crowded Corso,
the rush of the maddened horses, the firefly twinklings of the
Maccoletti. A single evening of simple fun, a few peasants laughing in
the sunshine, a few children scrambling for bonbons, form an almost
ridiculous contrast to the gorgeous outburst of revelry and colour that
ushers in Lent at the capital. But there are some people after all who
still find a charm in the simple and the commonplace, and to whom the
everyday life of Italy is infinitely pleasanter than the stately
ceremonial of Rome. At any rate the stranger who has fled from Northern
winters to the shelter of the Riviera is ready to greet in the
homeliest Carnival the incoming of spring. His first months of exile
have probably been months of a little disappointment. He is far from
having found the perpetual sunshine which poets and guide-books led him
to hope for. He has shivered at Christmas just as he shivered at home,
he has had his days of snowfall and his weeks of rain. If he is
thoroughly British, he has growled and grumbled, and written to expose
"the humbug of the sunny South" in the _Times_; if he is patient, he has
jotted down day after day in his diary, and found a cold sort of
statistical comfort in the discovery that the sunny days after all
outnumbered the gloomy ones. The worst winter of the Riviera, he is
willing to admit, would be a very mild winter at home, but still, after
each concession to one's diary and common sense, there remains a latent
feeling of disappointment and deception.

But Carnival sweeps all this feeling away with the coming of the spring.
From the opening of February week follows week in a monotony of warm
sunshine. Day after day there is the same cloudless cope of blue
overhead, the same marvellous colour in the sea, the same blaze of
roses in the gardens, the same scent of violets in every lazy breath of
air that wanders down from the hills. Every almond-tree is a mass of
white bloom. The narcissus has found a rival along the terraces in the
anemone, and already the wild tulip is preparing to dispute the palm of
supremacy with both. It is the time for picnics, for excursions, for
donkey-rides, for dreams beneath the clump of cypresses that shoot up
black into the sky, for siestas beneath the olives. It is wonderful what
a prodigious rush of peace and good temper follows on the first rush of
spring. The very doctors of the winter resort shake hands with one
another, the sermons of the chaplain lose their frost-bitten savour and
die down into something like charity, scandal and tittle-tattle go to
sleep in the sunshine. The stolid, impassive English nature blooms into
a life strangely unlike its own. Papas forget their _Times_. Mammas
forget their propriety. The stout British merchant finds himself astride
of a donkey, and exchanging good-humoured badinage with the labourers in
the olive-terraces. The Dorcas of Exeter Hall leaves her tracts at home,
and passes without a groan the pictured Madonna on every wall. Carnival
comes, and completes the wreck of the proprieties. The girls secure
their window and pelt their black-bearded Professor in the street below
without dread of a scolding on the "convenances." The impassive spinster
whose voice never rises at home above the most polite whisper screams
with delight at the first sugarplum that hits her, and furtively
supplies her nieces with ammunition to carry on the war. "It is such
fun, isn't it, papa?" shout the boys as they lean breathless over the
balcony, laughing and pelting at the crowd that laughs and pelts back
again. And papa, who "puts down" fairs in England, and wonders what
amusement people can find in peepshows and merry-go-rounds, finds
himself surprised into a "Very jolly, indeed!"

It is the same welcome to the spring that gives its charm to the
Carnival in the minds of the Italians themselves. To the priest of
course Carnival is simply a farewell to worldly junketings and a welcome
to Lent, but like every other Church festival it is flinging off its
ecclesiastical disguise and donning among the people themselves its old
mask as a sheer bit of nature-worship. The women still observe Lent, and
their power as housekeepers forces its observance to a certain extent
on their husbands and sons. The Italian shrugs his shoulders and submits
in a humorous way to what is simply a bit of domestic discipline,
revenges himself by a jest on the priesthood, and waits with his quiet
"pazienza" till the progress of education shall have secured him a wife
who won't grudge him his dinner. But Lent is no reality to him, and
spring is a very real thing indeed. The winter is so short that the
whole habit of his life and the very fabric of his home is framed on the
apparent supposition that there is no such thing as winter at all. His
notion of life is life in the open air, life in the sunshine. The
peasant of the Cornice looks on with amazement at an Englishman tramping
along in the rain. A little rainfall or a little snow keeps every
labourer at home with a murmur of "cattivo Dio" between his teeth. A
Scotchman or a Yorkshireman wraps his plaid around him and looks with
contempt on an idle race who are "afraid of a sprinkle." But the peasant
of North Italy is no more of an idler than the peasant of the Lowlands.
The truth is, that both he and his home are absolutely unprepared for
bad weather. His clothes are thin and scanty. His diet is low. The
wonder is how he gets through a hard day's work on food which an
English pauper would starve upon. He has no fireplace at home, and, if
he had, he has no fuel. Wood is very dear, and coal there is none. If he
gets wet through there is no hearth to dry himself or his clothes at.
Cold means fever, and fever with low diet means death. Besides, there is
little loss in staying at home on rainy days. In England or the Lowlands
the peasant farmer who couldn't "bide a shower" would lose half the
year, but a rainy day along the Cornice is so rare a thing that it makes
little difference in the year's account.

It is much the same with the townsman, the trader, the professional man.
When work in the shop or office is over his life circles round the café.
Society and home mean for him the chatty, gesticulating group of friends
camped out round their little tables on the pavement under the huge
awning that gives them shade. When winter breaks up the pleasant circle,
and the dark, chilly evenings drive him, as we say, "home," he has no
home to flee unto. He is not used to domestic life, or to conversation
with his wife or his children. Above all there is no fire, no "hearth
and home." Going home in fact means going to bed. An Italian doctor or
an Italian lawyer knows nothing of the cosy evenings of the North, of
the bright fire, the brighter chat round it, or the quiet book till
sleep comes. Somebody has said truly enough that if a man wanted to see
human life at its best he would spend his winters in England and his
summers in Italy. We have so much winter that we have faced it, made a
study of it, and beaten it. Our houses are a great nuisance in warm
weather, but their thick walls and close-fitting windows and broad
fireplaces are admirably adapted for cold. Italians, on the other hand,
have so little winter that when the cold does come it is completely
their master. The large, dark, cool rooms that are so grateful in July
are simply ice-houses in December. The large windows are full of
crevices and draughts. An ordinary Italian positively dreads a fire from
his knowledge of the perils it entails in rooms so draughty as Italian
rooms commonly are. He infinitely prefers to rub his blue little hands
and wait till this inscrutable mystery of bad weather be overpast. But
it is only the thought of what he suffers during the winter, short as it
is in comparison with our own, that enables us to understand the ecstasy
of his joy at the reappearance of the spring. Everybody meets everybody
with greetings on the warmth and the sunshine. The mother comes down
again to bask herself at every doorstep, and the little street is once
more alive with chat and laughter. The very beggars exchange their whine
for a more cheerful tone of insidious persuasion. The women sing as they
jog down the hill-paths with the big baskets of olives on their heads.
The old dispossessed friar slumbers happily by the roadside. The little
tables come out on to the pavement, and the society of the place forms
itself afresh into buzzing groups of energetic conversers. The
dormouse-life of winter is over, and the spring and the Carnival has
come.

Carnival in a little Italian town, as we have said, is no very grand
thing, and as a mere question of fun it is no doubt amusing only to
people who are ready to be amused. And yet there is a quaint fascination
in it as a whole, in the rows of old women with demure little children
in their laps ranged on the stone seats along the bridge, the girls on
the pavement, the grotesque figures dancing along the road, the
harlequins, the mimic Capuchins, the dominoes with big noses, the
carriages rolling along amidst a fire of sugarplums, the boys darting
in and out and smothering one with their handfuls of flour, the sham
cook with his pots and pans wreathed with vine-branches, the sham
cavalier in theatrical cloak and trunk hose who dashes about on a pony,
the solemn group tossing a doll to a church-like chant in a blanket, the
chaff and violet bunches flung from the windows, the fun and life and
buzz and colour of it all. It is something very different, one feels,
from the common country fair of home. In the first place it is eminently
picturesque. As one looks down from the balcony through a storm of
sugarplums the eye revels in a perfect feast of colour. Even the
russet-brown of every old woman's dress glows in the sunshine into a
strange beauty. Every little touch of red or blue in the girls'
head-dresses shines out in the intense light. As the oddly attired
maskers dart in and out or whirl past in the dance the little street
seems like a gay ribbon of shifting hues winding between its grey old
houses with touches of fresh tints at every window and balcony. The
crimson caps of the peasants stand out in bold relief against the dark
green of the lemon-garden behind them. Overhead the wind is just
stirring in the big pendant leaves of the two palm-trees in the centre
of the street, and the eye once caught by them ranges on to the white
mass of the town as it stands glowing on its hill-side and thence to the
brown hilltops, and the intense blue of the sky.

The whole setting of the scene is un-English, and the scene itself is as
un-English as its setting. The fun, the enjoyment, is universal. There
is nothing of the complicated apparatus which an English fair requires,
none of the contrivances to make people laugh--the clowns, the
cheap-jacks, the moveable theatres, the vans with fat women and
two-headed calves, the learned pigs, the peepshows, the peripatetic
photographers, the weighing-machines, the swings, the merry-go-rounds.
And so there are none of the groups of vacant faces, the joyless
chawbacons lounging gloomily from stall to stall, the settled inanity
and dreariness of the crowd that drifts through an English fair. An
English peasant goes to be amused, and the clown finds it wonderfully
hard work to amuse him. The peasant of Italy goes to Carnival to amuse
himself and to amuse everybody else. He is full of joyousness and fun,
and he wishes everybody to be as funny and as joyous as himself. He has
no notion of doing his merriment by deputy. He claps his mask on his
face or takes his bag of flour in his hand, and is himself the fun of
the fair. His neighbour does precisely the same. The two farmers who
were yesterday chaffering over the price of maize meet each other in
Carnival as Punch and Harlequin. Every boy has his false nose or his
squeaking whistle. The quiet little maiden whom you saw yesterday
washing her clothes in the torrent comes tripping up the street with a
mask on her face. The very mothers with their little ones in their laps
throw in their contribution of smart speeches and merry taunts to the
fun of the affair. It is wonderful how simple the elements of their
amusement are and how perfectly they are amused. A little masquerading,
a little dancing, a little pelting with flour and sugarplums, and
everybody is as happy as possible.

And it is a happiness that is free from any coarse intermixture. The
badinage is childish enough, but it has none of the foul slang in which
an English crowd delights to express its notions of humour. The girls
bandy "chaff" with their disguised lovers, but the "chaff" is what their
mothers might hear. There is none of the brutal horseplay of home.
Harlequin goes by with his little bladder suspended from a string, but
the dexterous little touch is a touch and no more. The tiny sugarplums
rain like hail on one's face, but there is the fun of catching them and
seeing the children hunt after them in the dust. The flour-pelting is
the hardest to bear, but the annoyance is redeemed by the burst of
laughter from the culprit and the bystanders. It is a rare thing to see
anybody lose his temper. It is a yet rarer thing to see anybody drunk.
The sulky altercations, the tipsy squabbles, of Northern amusements are
unknown. The characteristic "prudence" of the Italian is never better
displayed than in his merriment. He knows how far to carry his badinage.
He knows when to have done with his fun. The tedious length of an
English merry-making would be unintelligible to him; he doesn't care to
spoil the day's enjoyment by making a night of it. A few hours of
laughter satisfy him, and when evening falls and the sunshine goes, he
goes with the sunshine.

It is in the Carnival that one sees most conspicuously displayed that
habit of social equality which is one of the special features of Italian
life. Nothing is more unlike the social jealousy of the Frenchman, or
the surly incivility with which a Lancashire operative thinks proper to
show the world that he is as good a man as his master. In either case
one feels the taint of a mere spirit of envious levelling, and a latent
confession that the levelling process has still in reality to be
accomplished. But the ordinary Italian has nothing of the leveller about
him. The little town is proud of its Marchese and of the great palazzo
that has entertained a King. It is a matter of public concern when the
Count gambles away his patrimony. An Italian noble is no object of
jealousy to his fellow-citizens, but then no one gives himself less of
the airs of a privileged or exclusive caste. Cavour was a popular man
because, noble as he was, he would smoke a cigar or stop for a chat with
anybody. The Carnival brings out this characteristic of Italian manners
amusingly enough. The mask, the disguise, levels all distinctions. The
Count's whiskers are white with the flour just flung at him by the
town-crier. The young nephews of the Baron are the two harlequins who
are exchanging badinage with the group of country girls at the corner. A
general pelting of sugarplums salutes the appearance of the Marchese's
four-in-hand with the Marchese himself in an odd mufti on the box.

Social equality is possible, because among rich and poor alike there is
the same social ease. Barber or donkey-driver chats to you with a
perfect frankness and unconsciousness of any need of reserve. In both
rich and poor, too, there is the same social taste and refinement. The
coarse dress of the peasant girl is worn with as native a dignity as the
robe of a queen. An unconscious elegance breathes through the very
disguises of the Carnival, grotesque as many of them are. The young
fellow who has wreathed himself with flowers and vine-leaves shows a
knowledge of colour and effect which an artist might envy him. But there
is not one among the roughest of the peasants or of the townsfolk who
has not that indescribable thing we call manner, or who would betray our
insular awkwardness when we speak to a lord. And, besides this social
equality, there is a family equality too. In England old people enjoy
fun, but it is held to be indecorous in them to afford amusement to
others. A Palmerston may be a jester at eighty, but the jest must never
go beyond words. But in an Italian Carnival the old claim just as much a
part in the fun as the young. Grandfathers and grandmothers think it the
most natural thing in the world to turn out in odd costumes to give a
good laugh to the grandchildren. Papa pops on the most comical mask he
can find, and walks down the street arm-in-arm with his boy. In no
country perhaps is the filial regard stronger than in Italy; nowhere do
mothers claim authority so long over their sons. But this seems to be
compatible with a domestic liberty and ease which would be impossible in
the graver nations of the North. If once we laughed at our mother's
absurdities a mother's influence would be gone. But an Italian will
laugh and go on reverencing and obeying in a way we should never dream
of. Altogether, it is wonderful how many sides of social life and
national character find their illustration in a country carnival.




SKETCHES IN SUNSHINE.




III.

TWO PIRATE TOWNS OF THE RIVIERA.


The view of Monaco, as one looks down on it from the mountain road which
leads to Turbia, is unquestionably the most picturesque among all the
views of the Riviera. The whole coast-line lies before us for a last
look as far as the hills above San Remo, headland after headland running
out into blue water, white little towns nestling in the depth of sunny
bays or clinging to the brown hill-side, villas peeping white from the
dark olive masses, sails gleaming white against the purple sea. The
brilliancy of light, the purity and intensity of colour, the clear
freshness of the mountain air, tempered as it is by the warm sun-glow,
make the long rise from Mentone hard to forget. Mentone itself steals
out again and again from under its huge red cliffs to look up at us; we
pass by Roccabruna, half rock, half village, hanging high on the
hill-side; we leave the orange groves beneath us studded with golden
fruit; even the silvery wayward olives fail us, even the pines grow thin
and stunted. At last the mountain rises bare above us with only a red
rock jutting here and there from its ashen-coloured front. We reach the
top, and right in our road rises a vast fragment of Roman masonry, the
tower of Turbia, while, thousands of feet beneath, Monaco glows "like a
gem" in its setting of dark blue sea. We are on the track of "The
Daisy," and the verse of Tennyson's gay little poem comes back to us:--

    What Roman strength Turbia showed
    In ruin, by the mountain road;
      How like a gem, beneath, the city
    Of little Monaco basking glowed.

Monaco stands on a promontory of rock which falls in bold cliffs into
the sea; as one climbs to it from the bay one sees the citadel with its
huge bastions frowning on the white buildings of the palace, the long
line of grey, ivy-crested walls topping the cliffs, and above them the
mass of the little town, broken by a single campanile and a few
cypresses. Its situation at once marks the character of the place. It
is the one town of the Riviera which, instead of lying screened in the
hollow of some bay, as though eager to escape from pirate or Saracen,
juts boldly out into the sea as if on the look-out for prey. Its grim
walls, the guns still mounted and shot piled on its battlements, mark
the pirate town of the past. At its feet, in trim square of hotel and
gambling-house, with a smart Parisian look about it as if the whole had
been just caught up out of the Boulevards and dropped on this Italian
coast, lies the new Monaco, the pirate town of the present.

Even the least among Italian cities yields so much of interest in its
past that we turn with disappointment from the history of Monaco. The
place has always been a mere pirate haunt, without a break of liberty or
civic life; and yet there is a certain fascination in the perfect
uniformity of its existence. The town from which Cæsar sailed to Genoa
and Rome vanished before the ravages of the Saracens, and the spot
remained desert till it passed by Imperial cession to Genoa, and the
Genoese Commune erected a fort which became a refuge alternately for its
Guelf or Ghibelline exiles, its Spinolas or its Grimaldis. A church of
fine twelfth-century work is the only monument which remains of this
earlier time; at the opening of the fourteenth century Monaco passed
finally to the Grimaldis, and became in their hands a haunt of
buccaneers. Only one of their line rises into historic fame, and he is
singularly connected with a great event in English history. Charles
Grimaldi was one of the foremost leaders in the Italian wars of his day;
he passed as a mercenary into the service of France in her combat with
Edward III., and his seventy-two galleys set sail from Monaco with the
fifteen thousand Genoese bowmen who appear so unexpectedly in the
forefront of the battle of Crécy. The massacre of these forces drove him
home again to engage in attacks on the Catalans and Venetians and
struggles with Genoa, till the wealth which his piracy had accumulated
enabled him to add Mentone and Roccabruna to his petty dominions. It is
needless to trace the history of his house any further; corsairs,
soldiers of fortune, trimming adroitly in the struggles of the sixteenth
century between France and Spain, sinking finally into mere vassals of
Louis XIV. and hangers-on at the French Court, the family history of the
Grimaldis is one of treason and blood--brother murdering brother, nephew
murdering uncle, assassination by subjects avenging the honour of
daughters outraged by their master's lust.

Of the town itself, as we have said, there is no history at all; it
consists indeed only of a few petty streets streaming down the hill from
the palace square. The palace, though spoilt by a gaudy modern
restoration, is externally a fine specimen of Italian Renascence work,
its court painted all over with arabesques of a rough Caravaggio order,
while the State-rooms within have a thoroughly French air, as if to
embody the double character of their occupants, at once Lords of Monaco
and Ducs de Valentinois. The palace is encircled with a charming little
garden, a bit of colour and greenery squeezed in, as it were, between
cliff and fortress, from which one looks down over precipices of red
rock with the prickly pear clinging to their clefts and ledges, or
across a rift of sea to the huge bare front of the Testa del Cane with
gigantic euphorbias, cactus, and orange-gardens fringing its base. A
bribe administered to Talleyrand is said to have saved the political
existence of Monaco at the Congress of Vienna: but it is far more
wonderful that, after all the annexations of late years, it should still
remain an independent, though the smallest, principality in the world.
But even the Grimaldis have not managed wholly to escape from the
general luck of their fellow-rulers; Mentone and Roccabruna were ceded
to France some few years back for a sum of four million francs, and the
present lord of Monaco is the ruler of but a few streets and some two
thousand subjects. His army reminds one of the famous war establishment
of the older German princelings; one year indeed to the amazement of
beholders it rose to the gigantic force of four-and-twenty men; but
then, as we were gravely told by an official, "it had been doubled in
consequence of the war." Idler and absentee as he is, the Prince is
faithful to the traditions of his house; the merchant indeed sails
without dread beneath the once dreaded rocks of the pirate haunt; but a
new pirate town has risen on the shores of its bay. It is the pillage of
a host of gamblers that maintains the heroic army of Monaco, that
cleanses its streets, and fills the exchequer of its lord.

There is something exquisitely piquant in the contrast between the
gloomy sternness of the older robber-hold and the gaiety and
attractiveness of the new. Nothing can be prettier than the gardens,
rich in fountains and statues and tropical plants, which surround the
neat Parisian square of buildings. The hotel is splendidly decorated and
its _cuisine_ claims to be the best in Europe; there is a pleasant café;
the doors of the Casino itself stand hospitably open, and strangers may
wander without a question from hall to reading-room, or listen in the
concert-room to an excellent band which plays twice a-day. The salon
itself, the terrible "Hell" which one has pictured with all sorts of
Dantesque accompaniments, is a pleasant room, gaily painted, with cosies
all round it and a huge mass of gorgeous flowers in the centre. Nothing
can be more unlike one's preconceived ideas than the gambling itself, or
the aspect of the gamblers around the tables. Of the wild excitement,
the frenzy of gain, the outbursts of despair which one has come prepared
to witness, there is not a sign. The games strike the bystander as
singularly dull and uninteresting; one wearies of the perpetual deal and
turn-up of the cards at rouge-et-noir, of the rattle of the ball as it
dances into its pigeonhole at roulette, of the monotonous chant of "Make
your game, gentlemen," or "The game is made." The croupiers rake in
their gains or poke out the winnings with the passive regularity of
machines; the gamblers sit round the table with the vacant solemnity of
undertakers. The general air of the company is that of a number of
well-to-do people bored out of their lives, and varying their boredom
with quiet nods to the croupier and assiduous prickings of little cards.

The boredom is apparently greatest at rouge-et-noir, where the circle is
more aristocratic and thousands can be lost and won in a night.
Everybody looks tired, absent, inattentive; nobody takes much notice of
his neighbour or of the spectators looking on; nobody cares to speak; a
finger suffices to direct the croupier to push the stake on to the
desired spot, a nod or a look to indicate the winner. The game goes on
in a dull uniformity; nobody varies his stake; a few napoleons are added
to or subtracted from the heaps before each as the minutes go on;
sometimes a little sum is done on a paper beside the player; but there
is the same impassive countenance, the same bored expression everywhere.
Now and then one player gets quietly up and another sits quietly down.
But there is nothing startling or dramatic, no frenzies of hope or
exclamations of despair, nothing of the gambler of fiction with "his
hands clasped to his burning forehead," and the like. To any one who is
not fascinated by the mere look of rolls of napoleons pushed from one
colour to another, or of gold raked about in little heaps, there is
something very difficult to understand in the spell which a gaming-table
exercises. Roulette is a little more amusing, as it is more intelligible
to the looker-on. The stakes are smaller, the company changes oftener,
and is socially more varied. There is not such a dead, heavy earnestness
about these riskers of five-franc pieces as about the more desperate
gamblers of rouge-et-noir; the outside fringe of lookers-on bend over
with their stakes to back "a run of luck," and there is a certain quiet
buzz of interest when the game seems going against the bank. There is
always someone going and coming, over-dressed girls lean over and drop
their stake and disappear, young clerks bring their quarter's salary,
the casual visitor "doesn't mind risking a few francs" at roulette.

But even the excitement of roulette is of the gravest and dullest order.
The only player who seems to throw any kind of vivacity into his
gambling is a gaudy little Jew with heavy watch-chain, who vibrates
between one table and another, sees nothing of the game save the
dropping his stake at roulette and then rushing off to drop another
stake at rouge-et-noir, and finds time in his marches to spare a merry
little word to a friend or two. But he is the only person who seems to
know anybody. Men who sit by one another year after year never exchange
a word. There is not even the air of reckless adventure to excite one.
The player who dashes down his all on any part of the table and trusts
to fortune is a mere creature of fiction; the gambler of fact is a
calculator, a man of business, with a contempt for speculation and a
firm belief in long-studied combination. Each has his little card, and
ticks off the succession of numbers with the accuracy of a ledger. It is
in the careful study of these statistics that each believes he discovers
the secret of the game, the arrangement which, however it may be
defeated for a time by inscrutable interference of ill-luck, must in the
end, if there is any truth in statistics, be successful. One looks in
vain for the "reckless gambler" one has read about and talked about, for
"reckless" is the very last word by which one would describe the ring of
business-like people who come day after day with the hope of making
money by an ingenious dodge.

Their talk, if one listens to it over the dinner-table, turns altogether
on this business-like aspect of the question. Nobody takes the least
interest in its romantic or poetic side, in the wonderful runs of luck
or the terrible stories of ruin and despair which form the
stock-in-trade of the novelist. The talk might be that of a conference
of commercial travellers. Everybody has his infallible nostrum for
breaking the bank; but everybody looks upon the prospect of such a
fortune in a purely commercial light. The general opinion of the wiser
sort goes against heavy stakes, and "wild play" is only talked about
with contempt. The qualities held in honour, so far as we can gather
from the conversation, are "judgment," which means a careful study of
the little cards and a certain knowledge of mathematics, and
"constancy"--the playing not from caprice but on a definite plan and
principle. Nobody has the least belief in "luck." A winner is
congratulated on his "science." The loser explains the causes of his
loss. A portly person who announces himself as one of a company of
gamblers who have invested an enormous capital on a theory of winning by
means of low stakes and a certain combination excites universal
interest. Most of the talkers describe themselves frankly as men of
business. No doubt at Monaco, as elsewhere, there is the usual
aristocratic fringe--the Russian prince who flings away an estate at a
sitting, the half-blind countess from the Faubourg St. Germain, the
Polish dancer with a score of titles, the English "milord." But the bulk
of the players have the look and air of people who have made their money
in trade. It is well to look on at such a scene, if only to strip off
the romance which has been so profusely showered over it. As a matter of
fact nothing is more prosaic, nothing meaner in tone, nothing more
utterly devoid of interest, than a gambling-table. But as a question of
profit the establishment of M. Blanc throws into the shade the older
piracy of Monaco. The Venetian galleons, the carracks of Genoa, the
galleys of Marseilles, brought infinitely less gold to its harbour than
these two little groups of the fools of half a continent.




SKETCHES IN SUNSHINE.




IV.

THE WINTER RETREAT.


It is odd, when one is safely anchored in a winter refuge to look back
at the terrors and reluctance with which one first faced the sentence of
exile. Even if sunshine were the only gain of a winter flitting, it
would still be hard to estimate the gain. The cold winds, the icy
showers, the fogs we leave behind us, give perhaps a zest not wholly its
own to Italian sunshine. But the abrupt plunge into a land of warmth and
colour sends a strange shock of pleasure through every nerve. The
flinging off of wraps and furs, the discarding of greatcoats, is like
the beginning of a new life. It is not till we pass in this sharp,
abrupt fashion from the November of one side the Alps to the November of
the other that we get some notion of the way in which the actual range
and freedom of life is cramped by the "chill north-easters" in which
Mr. Kingsley revelled. The unchanged vegetation, the background of dark
olive woods, the masses of ilex, the golden globes of the orange hanging
over the garden wall, are all so many distinct gains to an eye which has
associated winter with leafless boughs and a bare landscape. One has
almost a boyish delight in plucking roses at Christmas or hunting for
violets along the hedges on New Year's Day. There are chill days of
course, and chiller nights, but cold is a relative term and loses its
English meaning in spots where snow falls once or twice in a year and
vanishes before midday. The mere break of habit is delightful; it is
like a laughing defiance of established facts to lounge by the seashore
in the hot sun-glare of a January morning. And with this new sense of
liberty comes little by little a freedom from the overpowering dread of
chills and colds and coughs which only invalids can appreciate. It is an
indescribable relief not to look for a cold round every corner. The
"lounging" which becomes one's life along the Riviera or the Bay of
Naples is only another name for the ease and absence of anxiety which
the mere presence of constant sunshine gives to life.

Few people, in fact, actually "lounge" less than the English exiles who
bask in the sun of Italy. Their real danger lies in the perpetual
temptation to over-exertion which arises from the sense of renewed
health. Every village on its hilltop, every white shrine glistening high
up among the olives, seems to woo one up the stony paths and the long
hot climb to the summit. But the relief from home itself, the break away
from all the routine of one's life, is hardly less than the relief from
greatcoats. It is not till our life is thoroughly disorganized, till the
grave mother of a family finds herself perched on a donkey, or the
_habitué_ of Pall Mall sees himself sauntering along through the olive
groves, that one realizes the iron bounds within which our English
existence moves. Every holiday of course brings this home to one more or
less, but the long holiday of a whole winter brings it home most of all.
England and English ways recede and become unreal. Old prepossessions
and prejudices lose half their force when sea and mountains part us from
their native soil. It is hard to keep up our vivid interest in the
politics of Little Pedlington, or to maintain our old excitement over
the matrimonial fortunes of Miss Hominy. It becomes possible to
breakfast without the last telegram and to go to bed without the news of
a fresh butchery. One's real interest lies in the sunshine, in the
pleasure of having sunshine to-day, in the hope of having sunshine
to-morrow.

But really to enjoy the winter retreat one must keep as much as possible
out of the winter retreat itself. Few places are more depressing in
their social aspects than these picturesque little Britains. The winter
resort is a colony of squires with the rheumatism, elderly maidens with
delicate throats, worn-out legislators, a German princess or two with a
due train of portly and short-sighted chamberlains, girls with a hectic
flush of consumption, bronchitic parsons, barristers hurried off circuit
by the warning cough. The life of these patients is little more than the
life of a machine. As the London physician says when he bids them
"good-bye," "The nearer you can approach to the condition of a vegetable
the better for your chances of recovery." All the delicious
uncertainties and irregularities that make up the freedom of existence
disappear. The day is broken up into a number of little times and
seasons. Dinner comes at midday, and is as exact to its moment as the
early breakfast or the "heavy tea." And between each meal there are
medicines to be taken, inhalations to be gone through, the due hour of
rest to be allotted to digestion, the other due hour to exercise.

The air of the sick-room lingers everywhere about the place; one
catches, as it were, the far-off hush of the Campo Santo. Life is
reduced to its lowest expression; people exist rather than live. Every
one remembers that every one else is an invalid. Voices are soft,
conversation is subdued, visits are short. There is a languid, sickly
sweetness in the very courtesy of society. Gaiety is simply regarded as
a danger. Every hill is a temptation to too long and fatiguing a climb.
No sunshine makes "the patient" forget his wraps. No coolness of
delicious shade moves him to repose. His whole energy and watchfulness
is directed to the avoidance of a chill. Life becomes simply
barometrical. An east wind is the subject of public lamentation; the
vast mountain range to the north is admired less for its wild grandeur
than for the shelter it affords against the terrible mistral. Excitement
is a word of dread. Distance itself takes something of the sharpness
and vividness off from the old cares and interests of home. The very
letters that reach the winter resort are doctored, and "incidents which
might excite" are excluded by the care of correspondents: Mamma only
hears of Johnny's measles when Johnny is running about again. The young
scapegrace at Oxford is far too considerate to trouble his father,
against the doctor's orders, with the mention of his failure in the
schools. News comes with all colour strained and filtered out of it
through the columns of 'Galignani.' The neologian heresy, the debate in
Convocation which would have stirred the heart of the parson at home,
fall flat in the shape of a brown and aged 'Times.' There are no
"evenings out." The first sign of eve is the signal for dispersion
homewards, and it is only from the safe shelter of his own room that the
winter patient ventures to gaze on the perilous glories of the sunset.
The evenings are in fact a dawdle indoors as the day has been a dawdle
out, a little music, a little reading of the quiet order, a little chat,
a little letter-writing, and an early to bed.

It is this calm monotony of day after day at which the world of the
winter resort deliberately aims, a life like that of the deities of
Epicurus, untouched by the cares or interests of the world without. The
very gaiety is of the same subdued and quiet order--drives,
donkey-rides, picnics of the small and early type. An air of slow
respectability pervades the place; the bulk of the colonists are people
well-to-do, who can afford the expense of a winter away from home and of
a villa at £150 the season. The bankrupt element of Boulogne, the
half-pay element of Dinan or Avranches, is as rare on the Riviera as the
loungers who rejoice in the many-changing toilets of Arcachon or
Biarritz. The quiet humdrum tone of the parson best harmonises with that
of the winter resort, and parsons of all sorts abound there.

But the chaplain is not here, as in other little Britains, the centre of
social life; he is superseded by the doctor. The winter resort in fact
owes its origin to the doctor. The little village or the country town
looks with awe upon the man who has discovered for it a future of
prosperity, at whose call hosts of rich strangers come flocking from the
ends of the earth, at whose bidding villas rise white among the olives,
and parades stretch along the shore. "I found it a fishing hamlet," the
doctor may say with Augustus, "and I leave it a city." It is amusing to
see the awful submission which the city-builder expects in return. The
most refractory of patients trembles at the threat of his case being
abandoned. The doctor has his theories about situation. You are
lymphatic, and are ordered down to the very edge of the sea; you are
excitable, and must hurry from your comfortable lodgings to the highest
nook among the hills. He has his theories about diet, and you sink
obediently to milk and water. His one object of hostility and contempt
is your London physician. He tears up his rival's prescriptions with
contempt, he reverses the treatment. He sighs as you bid him farewell to
return to advice which is so likely to prove fatal. The London
physician, it is true, hints that though the oracle of the winter resort
is a clever man he is also a quack. But a quack soars into a greatness
beyond criticism when he creates cities and rules hundreds of patients
with his nod.




SKETCHES IN SUNSHINE.




V.

SAN REMO.


San Remo, though youngest in date, bids fair to become the most popular
of all the health resorts of the Riviera. At no other point along the
coast is the climate so mild and equable. The rural quiet and repose of
the place form a refreshing contrast with the Brighton-like gaiety of
Nizza or Cannes; even Mentone looks down with an air of fashionable
superiority on a rival almost destitute of promenades, and whose
municipality sighs in vain for a theatre. To the charms of quiet and
sunshine the place adds that of a peculiar beauty. The Apennines rise
like a screen behind the amphitheatre of soft hills that enclose
it--hills soft with olive woods, and dipping down into gardens of lemon
and orange, and vineyards dotted with palms. An isolated spur juts out
from the centre of the semicircle, and from summit to base of it tumbles
the oddest of Italian towns, a strange mass of arches and churches and
steep lanes, rushing down like a stone cataract to the sea. On either
side of the town lie deep ravines, with lemon gardens along their
bottoms, and olives thick along their sides. The olive is the
characteristic tree of San Remo. As late as the sixteenth century the
place was renowned for its palms; a palm tree stands on the civic
escutcheon, and the privilege of supplying the papal chapel with palm
branches in the week before Easter is still possessed by a family of San
Remese. But the palm has wandered off to Bordighera, and the high price
of oil during the early part of this century has given unquestioned
supremacy to the olive. The loss is after all a very little one, for the
palm, picturesque as is its natural effect, assumes any but picturesque
forms when grown for commercial purposes, while the thick masses of the
olive woods form a soft and almost luxurious background to every view of
San Remo.

What strikes one most about the place in an artistic sense is its
singular completeness. It lies perfectly shut in by the circle of
mountains, the two headlands in which they jut into the sea, and the
blue curve of the bay. It is only by climbing to the summit of the Capo
Nero or the Capo Verde that one sees the broken outline of the coast
towards Genoa or the dim forms of the Estrelles beyond Cannes. Nowhere
does the outer world seem more strangely far-off and unreal. But between
headland and headland it is hardly possible to find a point from which
the scene does not group itself into an exquisite picture with the white
gleaming mass of San Remo for a centre. Small too as the space is, it is
varied and broken by the natural configuration of the ground; everywhere
the hills fall steeply to the very edge of the sea and valleys and
ravines go sharply up among the olive woods. Each of these has its own
peculiar beauty; in the valley of the Romolo for instance, to the west
of the town, the grey mass of San Remo perched on a cliff-like steep,
the rocky bed of the torrent below, the light and almost fantastic arch
that spans it, the hills in the background with the further snow range
just peeping over them, leave memories that are hard to forget. It is
easy too for a good walker to reach sterner scenes than those
immediately around; a walk of two hours brings one among the pines of
San Romolo, an hour's drive plunges one into the almost Alpine scenery
of Ceriana. But for the ordinary frequenters of a winter resort the
chief attractions of the place will naturally lie in the warmth and
shelter of San Remo itself. Protected as it is on every side but that of
the sea, it is free from the dreaded mistral of Cannes and from the
sharp frost winds that sweep down the torrent-bed of Nizza. In the
earlier part of the first winter I spent there the snow, which lay thick
in the streets of Genoa and beneath even the palms of Bordighera, only
whitened the distant hilltops at San Remo. Christmas brought at last a
real snowfall, but every trace of it vanished before the sun-glare of
midday. From sunset to sunrise indeed the air is sometimes bitterly
cold, but the days themselves are often pure summer days.

What gives a special charm to San Remo, as to the other health-stations
along the Cornice, is the fact that winter and spring are here the
season of flowers. Roses nod at one over the garden-walls, violets peep
shyly out along the terraces, a run uphill brings one across a bed of
narcissus. It is odd to open one's window on a January morning and count
four-and-twenty different kinds of plants in bloom in the garden below.
But even were flowers absent, the character of the vegetation excludes
from northern eyes the sense of winter. The bare branches of the
fig-tree alone remind one that "summer is over and gone." Every
homestead up the torrent-valleys is embosomed in the lustrous foliage of
its lemon gardens. Every rivulet is choked with maiden-hair and delicate
ferns. The golden globes of the orange are the ornament of every garden.
The dark green masses of the olive, ruined by strong winds into sheets
of frosted silver, are the background of the whole. And right in front
from headland to headland lie the bright waters of the Mediterranean,
rising and sinking with a summer's swell, and glancing with a thousand
colours even in the gloomiest weather.

The story of San Remo begins with Saracenic inroads from Corsica and
Sardinia in the ninth century, to which Nizza, Oneglia, and Genoa owed
their walls. But before this time the wild Ligurian coast had afforded
hermitages to the earlier bishops of Genoa; to Siro who became its
apostle, to Romolo who was destined to give his name to the territory of
the town. San Romolo is indeed its invariable designation till the
fifteenth century, and it has been conjectured that its present name is
owing to no fanciful punning on Romulus and Remus but to a popular
contraction of its full ecclesiastical title, "Sancti Romuli in eremo."
It was in this "waste," left without inhabitants by the Saracenic
inroads, that Theodulf, bishop of Genoa, settled a little agricultural
colony round the Carolingian fort and lands which, though within the
feudal jurisdiction of the Counts of Ventimiglia, were the property of
his see. Two centuries passed quietly over the little town ere the
sudden rise of the Consulate here, as at Genoa and Milan, gave it
municipal liberty. The civil authority of the bishops passed to the
communal Parliament, the free assembly of the citizens in the church of
San Stefano; all civil administration, even the right of peace and war,
or of alliance, was exercised with perfect freedom from episcopal
intervention. The rights of the bishop in fact were reduced to the
nomination of the judicial magistrates of the town and the reception of
certain fees; rights which were subsequently sold to the Dorias, and
transferred by the Dorias to the Republic of Genoa.

This great communal revolution, itself a result of the wave of feeling
produced by the Crusades, left its characteristic mark in the armorial
bearings of the town, the Crusaders' Palm upon its shield. While its
neighbours, Ventimiglia and Albenga, sank into haunts of a feudal
noblesse, San Remo became a town of busy merchants, linked by treaties
of commerce with the trading cities of the French and Italian coasts.
The erection of San Siro marked the wealth and devotion of its citizens.
Ruined as it is, like all the churches of the Riviera, by the ochre and
stucco of a tasteless restoration, San Siro still retains much of the
characteristic twelfth-century work of its first foundation. The
alliance of the city with Genoa was that of a perfectly free State. The
terms of the treaty which was concluded between the two Republics in
1361 in the Genoese basilica of San Lorenzo are curious as illustrating
the federal relations of Italian States. It was in effect little more
than a judicial and military convention. Internal legislation, taxation,
rights of independent warfare, peace, and alliance were left wholly in
the power of the free commune. San Remo was bound to contribute ships
and men for service in Genoese warfare, but in return its citizens
shared the valuable privileges of those of Genoa in all parts of the
world. Genoa, as purchaser of the feudal rights of its lords, nominated
the podesta and other judicial officers, but these officers were bound
to administer the laws passed or adopted by the commune. The red cross
of Genoa was placed above the palm tree of San Remo on the shield of the
Republic; and on these terms the federal relations of the two States
continued without quarrel or change for nearly four hundred years.

The town continued to prosper till the alliance of Francis I. with the
Turks brought the scourge of the Moslem again on the Riviera. The
"Saracen towers" with which the coast is studded tell to this day the
tale of the raids of Barbarossa and Dragut. The blow fell heavily on San
Remo. The ruined quarter beneath its wall still witnesses to the heathen
fury. San Siro, which lay without the walls, was more than once
desecrated and reduced to ruin. A special officer was appointed by the
town to receive contributions for the ransom of citizens carried off by
the corsairs of Algiers or Tunis. These terrible razzias, which went on
to the very close of the last century, have left their mark on the
popular traditions of the coast. But the ruin which they began was
consummated by the purposeless bombardment of San Remo by an English
fleet during the war of the Austrian Succession, and by the perfidy with
which Genoa crushed at a single blow the freedom she had respected for
so many centuries. The square Genoese fort near the harbour commemorates
the extinction of the liberty of San Remo in 1729. The French revolution
found the city ruined and enslaved, and the gratitude of the citizens
for their deliverance by Buonaparte was shown by a sacrifice which it is
hard to forgive them. A row of magnificent ilexes, which stretched along
the ridge from the town to San Romolo, is said to have been felled for
the construction of vessels for the French navy.

Some of the criticism which has been lavished on San Remo is fair and
natural enough. To any one who has been accustomed to the exquisite
scenery around Cannes its background of olives seems tame and
monotonous. People who are fond of the bustle and gaiety of Nizza or
Mentone in their better days can hardly find much to amuse them in San
Remo. It is certainly quiet, and its quiet verges upon dulness. A more
serious drawback lies in the scarcity of promenades or level walks for
weaker invalids. For people with good legs, or who are at home on a
donkey, there are plenty of charming walks and rides up into the hills.
But it is not everybody who is strong enough to walk uphill or who cares
to mount a donkey. Visitors with sensitive noses may perhaps find reason
for growls at the mode of cultivation which is characteristic of the
olive groves. The town itself and the country around is, like the bulk
of the Riviera, entirely without architectural or archæological
interest. There is a fine castle within a long drive at Dolceacqua, and
a picturesque church still untouched within a short one at Ceriana, but
this is all. Beneficial as the reforms of Carlo Borromeo may have been
to the religious life of the Cornice, they have been fatal to its
architecture. On the other hand, any one with an artistic eye and a
sketch-book may pass his time pleasantly enough at San Remo. The
botanist may revel day after day in new "finds" among its valleys and
hill-sides. The rural quiet of the place delivers one from the
fashionable bustle of livelier watering-places, from the throng of
gorgeous equipages that pour along the streets of Nice, or from picnics
with a host of flunkeys uncorking the champagne.

The sunshine, the colour, the beauty of the little town, secure its
future. The time must soon come when the whole coast of the Riviera will
be lined with winter resorts; but we can hardly hope that any will
surpass the happy blending of warmth and interest and repose which makes
the charm of San Remo.




THE POETRY OF WEALTH.


There is one marvellous tale which is hardly likely to be forgotten so
long as men can look down from Notre Dame de la Garde on the sunny
beauty of Marseilles. Even if the rest of Dumas' works sink into
oblivion, the sight of Château d'If as it rises glowing from the blue
waters of the Mediterranean will serve to recall the wonders of 'Monte
Christo.' But the true claim of the book to remembrance lies not in its
mere command over the wonderful but in the peculiar sense of wonder
which it excites. It was the first literary attempt to raise the mere
dead fact of money into the sphere of the imagination, and to reveal the
dormant poetry of wealth. There has as yet been only a single age in the
world's history when wealth has told with any force upon the imagination
of men. Unpoetic as the Roman mind essentially was, the sudden burst
upon it of the accumulated riches of the older world kindled in
senators and proconsuls a sense of romance which, wild and extravagant
as it seems, has in some of its qualities found no parallel since. The
feast of Lucullus, the gluttony of Heliogabalus, the sudden upgrowth of
vast amphitheatres, the waste of millions on the sport of a day, the
encounters of navies in the mimic warfare of the Coliseum, are the
freaks of gigantic children tossing about wildly the slowly-hoarded
treasures of past generations; but they are freaks which for the first
time revealed the strange possibilities which lay in the future of
wealth.

It is hard to say whether such a time will ever return. No doubt the
world is infinitely richer now than it was in the time of the Romans,
and no doubt too there are at least a dozen people in London alone whose
actual income far exceeds that of the wealthiest of proconsuls. But the
wealth of the modern capitalist is a wealth which has grown by slow
accumulations, a wealth which has risen almost insensibly into its
enormous mass, and the vastness of which its owner has never had brought
home to him with the same sort of shock as that which Lucullus must have
felt when he fronted the treasures of Mithridates, or Clive when he
threaded his way among the sacks of jewels in the royal vaults of
Moorshedabad. So far indeed is wealth from stimulating the imagination
nowadays that a banker is the very type of the unimaginative man, and
the faintest suspicion of genius is enough to render a financier an
object of suspicion to the money market. But it is conceivable in the
odd freaks of things that we may yet see the advent of the
Poet-Capitalist. It is almost impossible to say what new opportunities
the possession of fabulous resources might not add to the fancy of a
dreamer or to the speculations of a philanthropist. It is not till after
a little thought that we realize how materially the course of human
progress is obstructed by sheer want of money at critical moments, or
how easily the sum of human happiness might be increased by the sudden
descent of a golden shower on the right people at the right time.

There are dreams which men have been dreaming for generation after
generation which require nothing for their realization but the
appearance of such a capitalist as we have imagined. To take what may
seem perhaps an odd instance, just because it is an odd instance, let us
remember what a wonderful amount of hope and anticipation has been
thrown by a great religious party into the restoration of the Jews.
Rightly or wrongly, it is the one theme which sends a throb of
excitement through the life of quiet parsonages and kindles a new fire
even in the dreariest May meetings at Exeter Hall. But in point of
actual fact there is not the slightest necessity to await any great
spiritual revolution for the accomplishment of such a dream if its
accomplishment were really desirable. A league of Evangelical bankers
who fully believed in the prophecies they are so fond of quoting could
turn the wildest fancies of Dr. Cumming into sober earnest with very
little trouble indeed. Any emigration agent would undertake the
transport of Houndsditch bodily to Joppa; the bare limestone uplands of
Judæa could be covered again with terraces of olive and vine at
precisely the same cost of money and industry as is still required to
keep up the cultivation of the Riviera; and Mr. Fergusson would furnish
for a due consideration plans and estimates for a restoration of the
Temple on Zion. We are not suggesting such a scheme as an opportunity
for investing money to any great profit, but it is odd to live in a
world of wealthy people who believe firmly that its realization would
make this world into a little heaven below and yet never seem to feel
that they have the means of bringing it about in their cheque-books. Or
to take a hardly less odd instance, but one which has actually been
brought a little nearer to practical realization. Some time ago a body
of Welsh patriots determined to save the tongue and literature of the
Cymry from extinction by founding a new Welsh nation on the shores of
Patagonia. Nothing but Welsh was to be spoken, none but Welsh books were
to be read, and the laws of the colony were to be an amalgam of the
codes of Moses and of Howel the Good. The plan failed simply because its
originators were poor and unable to tide over the first difficulties of
the project. But conceive an ardent capitalist with a passion for
nationalities embracing such a cause, and at the cost of a few hundreds
of thousands creating perhaps a type of national life which might
directly or indirectly affect the future of the world. Such a man might
secure himself a niche in history at less cost and with less trouble
than he could obtain a large estate and a share in the commission of the
peace for a midland county.

But there is no need to restrict ourselves simply to oddities, although
oddities of this sort acquire a grandeur of their own at the touch of
wealth. The whole field of social experiment lies open to a great
capitalist. The one thing required, for instance, to render the squalor
and misery of our larger towns practically impossible would be the
actual sight of a large town without squalor or misery; and yet if
Liverpool were simply handed over to a great philanthropist with the
income of half-a-dozen Dukes of Westminster such a sight might easily be
seen. Schemes of this sort require nothing but what we may term the
poetic employment of capital for their realization. It is strange that
no financial hero makes his appearance to use his great money-club to
fell direr monsters than those which Hercules encountered, and by the
creation of a city at once great, beautiful, and healthy to realize the
conception of the Utopia and the dream of Sir Thomas More. Or take a
parallel instance from the country. Those who have watched the issues of
the co-operative system as applied to agriculture believe they see in it
the future solution of two of our greatest social difficulties--those,
we mean, which spring from the increasing hardships of the farmer's
position, and those which arise from the terrible serfage of the rural
labourer. But the experiments which have been as yet carried on are on
too small a scale either to produce any influence on the labour market
as a whole, or to make that impression on the public imagination which
could alone raise the matter into a "question of the day." What is
wanted is simply that two or three dukes should try the experiment of
peasant co-operation on a whole county, and try it with a command of
capital which would give the experiment fair play. Whether it succeeded
or not, such an attempt would have a poetic and heroic aspect of a
different order from the usual expenditure of a British peer.

Or we may turn to a wholly different field, the field of art. We are
always ready to cry out against "pot boilers" as we wander through the
galleries of the Academy, and to grumble at the butchers' bills and
bonnet bills which stand between great artists and the production of
great works. But the butchers' bills and bonnet bills of all the forty
Academicians might be paid by a great capitalist without any deep dip
into his money bags, and a whole future opened to English art by the
sheer poetry of wealth. There are hundreds of men with special faculties
for scientific inquiry who are at the present moment pinned down to the
daily drudgery of the lawyer's desk or the doctor's consulting-room by
the necessities of daily bread. A Rothschild who would take a score of
natural philosophers and enable them to apply their whole energies to
investigation would help forward science as really as Newton himself, if
less directly. But there are even direct ways in which wealth on a
gigantic scale might put out a poetic force which would affect the very
fortunes of the world. There are living people who are the masters of
twenty millions; and twenty millions would drive a tunnel under the
Straits of Dover. If increased intercourse means, as is constantly
contended, an increase of friendship and of mutual understanding among
nations, the man who devoted a vast wealth to linking two peoples
together would rise at once to the level of the great benefactors of
mankind. An opportunity for a yet more direct employment of the
influence of wealth will some day or other be found in the field of
international politics. Already those who come in contact with the
big-wigs of the financial world hear whispers of a future when the
destinies of peoples are to be decided in bank parlours, and questions
of peace and war settled, not by the diplomatist and statesman, but by
the capitalist. But as yet these are mere whispers, and no European
Gould has risen up to "finance" Downing Street into submission, or to
meet the boldest move of Prince Bismarck by a fall of the Stock
Exchange. Of all the schemes however which we have suggested, this is
probably the nearest to practical realization. If not we ourselves, our
children at any rate may see International Congresses made possible by a
few people quietly buttoning their breeches-pockets, and the march of
"armed nations" arrested by "a run for gold."

Taking however men as they are, it is far more wonderful that no one has
hit on the enormous field which wealth opens for the developement of
sheer downright mischief. The sense of mischief is a sense which goes
quietly to sleep as soon as childhood is over from mere want of
opportunity. The boy who wants to trip up his tutor can easily find a
string to tie across the garden walk; but when one has got beyond the
simpler joys of childhood strings are not so easy to find. To carry out
a practical joke of the Christopher Sly sort we require, as Shakespere
saw, the resources of a prince. But once grant possession of unlimited
wealth, and the possibilities of mischief rise to a grandeur such as
the world has never realized. The Erie Ring taught us a little of what
capital might do in this way, but in the Erie Ring capital was fettered
by considerations of profit and loss. Throw these considerations
overboard and treat a great question in the spirit of sheer mischief,
and the results may be simply amazing. Conceive, for instance, a
capitalist getting the railways round London into his power, and then in
sheer freak stopping the traffic for a single day. No doubt the day
would be a short one, but even twelve hours of such a practical joke
would bring about a "Black Monday" such as England has never seen. But
there would be no need of such an enormous operation to enable us to
realize the power of latent mischief which the owner of great wealth
really possesses. An adroit operator might secure every omnibus and
every cab in the metropolis and compel us to paddle about for a week in
the mud of November before the loss was replaced.

It is quite possible indeed that gigantic mischief of this sort may find
its sphere in practical politics. Already Continental Governments watch
with anxiety the power which employers possess of bringing about a
revolution by simply closing their doors and throwing thousands of
unemployed labourers on the street; but it is a power which in some
degree or other capital will always possess, and any one who remembers
the assistance which Reform derived from the Hyde Park rows will see at
once that mischief on the large scale might be made in this way an
important factor in political questions.

Ambition has yet a wider sphere of action than even mischief in this
poetic use of wealth. A London preacher recently drew pointed attention
to the merely selfish use of their riches by great English nobles, and
contrasted it with the days when Elizabeth's Lords of the Council
clubbed together to provide an English fleet against the Armada, or the
nobles of Venice placed their wealth on every great emergency at the
service of the State. But from any constitutional point of view there is
perhaps nothing on which we may more heartily congratulate ourselves
than on the blindness which hides from the great capitalists of England
the political power which such a national employment of their wealth
would give them--a blindness which is all the more wonderful in what is
at once the wealthiest and the most political aristocracy which the
world has ever seen. What fame the mere devotion of a quarter of a
million to public uses may give to a quiet merchant the recent example
of Mr. Peabody abundantly showed. But the case of the Baroness Burdett
Coutts is yet more strictly to the point. The mere fact that she has
been for years credited with a wide and unselfish benevolence has given
her a power over the imagination of vast masses of the London poor which
no one who is not really conversant with their daily life and modes of
thinking could for an instant imagine. Her bounty is enlarged in the
misty air of the slums of Wapping or Rotherhithe to colossal dimensions,
and the very quietness and unobtrusiveness of her work gives it an air
of mystery which tells like romance on the fancy of the poor.

It was characteristic of the power which such a use of wealth may give
that the mobs who smashed the Hyde Park railings stopped to cheer before
the house of Lady Burdett Coutts. Luckily none of our political nobles
has ever bethought himself of the means by which the great Roman leaders
rose habitually to influence or won over the labouring masses by "panem
et Circenses." But a nobler ambition might find its field in a large
employment of wealth for public ends of a higher sort. Something of the
old patrician pride might have spurred the five or six great Houses who
own half London to construct the Thames Embankment at their own cost,
and to hand it over free from the higglings of Mr. Gore to the people at
large. Even now we may hear of some earl whose rent-roll is growing with
fabulous rapidity as coming forward to relieve the Treasury by the offer
of a National Gallery of Art, or checkmating the jobbers of South
Kensington by the erection of a National Museum. It seems to be easy
enough for peer after peer to fling away a hundred thousand at Newmarket
or Tattersall's, and yet a hundred thousand would establish in the
crowded haunts of working London great "Conservatoires" where the finest
music might be brought to bear without cost on the coarseness and
vulgarity of the life of the poor. The higher drama may be perishing in
default of a State subvention, but it never seems to enter any one's
head that there are dozens of people among those who grumbled at the
artistic taste of Mr. Ayrton who could furnish such a subvention at the
present cost of their stable. As yet however we must be content, we
suppose, with such a use of wealth as 'Lothair' brings to the front--the
purely selfish use of it carried to the highest pitch which selfishness
has ever reached. Great parks and great houses, costly studs and costly
conservatories, existence relieved of every hitch and discomfort--these
are the outlets which wealth has as yet succeeded in finding. For nobler
outlets we must wait for the advent of the Poet-Capitalist.




LAMBETH AND THE ARCHBISHOPS.


A little higher up the river, but almost opposite to the huge mass of
the Houses of Parliament, lies a broken, irregular pile of buildings, at
whose angle, looking out over the Thames, is one grey weatherbeaten
tower. The broken pile is the archiepiscopal Palace of Lambeth; the grey
weatherbeaten building is its Lollards' Tower. From this tower the
mansion itself stretches in a varied line, chapel and guard-room and
gallery and the stately buildings of the new house looking out on the
terrace and garden; while the Great Hall, in which the library has now
found a home, is the low picturesque building which reaches southward
along the river to the gate.

The story of each of these spots will interweave itself with the thread
of our narrative as we proceed; but I would warn my readers at the
outset that I do not purpose to trace the history of Lambeth in itself,
or to attempt any architectural or picturesque description of the place.
What I attempt is simply to mark in incident after incident which has
occurred within its walls the relation of the House to the Primates whom
it has sheltered for seven hundred years, and through them to the
literary, the ecclesiastical, the political history of the realm.

Nothing illustrates the last of these relations better than the site of
the house itself. It is doubtful whether we can date the residence of
the Archbishops of Canterbury at Lambeth, which was then a manor house
of the see of Rochester, earlier than the reign of Eadward the
Confessor. But there was a significance in the choice of the spot as
there was a significance in the date at which the choice was made. So
long as the political head of the English people ruled, like Ælfred or
Æthelstan or Eadgar, from Winchester, the spiritual head of the English
people was content to rule from Canterbury. It was when the piety of the
Confessor and the political prescience of his successors brought the
Kings finally to Westminster that the Archbishops were permanently
drawn to their suffragan's manor house at Lambeth. The Norman rule gave
a fresh meaning to their position. In the new course of national history
which opened with the Conquest the Church was called to play a part
greater than she had ever known before. Hitherto the Archbishop had been
simply the head of the ecclesiastical order--a representative of the
moral and spiritual forces on which government was based. The Conquest,
the cessation of the great Witenagemots in which the nation, however
imperfectly, had till then found a voice, turned him into a Tribune of
the People.

Foreigner though he might be, it was the Primate's part to speak for the
conquered race the words it could no longer utter. He was in fact the
permanent leader (to borrow a modern phrase) of a Constitutional
Opposition; and in addition to the older religious forces which he
wielded he wielded a popular and democratic force which held the new
King and the new baronage in check. It was he who received from the
sovereign whom he crowned the solemn oath that he would rule not by his
own will, but according to the customs, or as we should say now, the
traditional constitution of the realm. It was his to call on the people
to declare whether they chose him for their king, to receive the
thundered "Ay, ay," of the crowd, to place the priestly unction on
shoulder and breast, the royal crown on brow. To watch over the
observance of the covenant of that solemn day, to raise obedience and
order into religious duties, to uphold the custom and law of the realm
against personal tyranny, to guard amid the darkness and brutality of
the age those interests of religion, of morality, of intellectual life
which as yet lay peacefully together beneath the wing of the
Church,--this was the political office of the Primate in the new order
which the Conquest created, and it was this office which expressed
itself in the site of the house that fronted the King's house over
Thames.

From the days of Archbishop Anselm therefore to the days of Stephen
Langton, Lambeth only fronted Westminster as the Archbishop fronted the
King. Synod met over against Council; the clerical court of the one
ruler rivalled in splendour, in actual influence, the baronial court of
the other. For more than a century of our history the great powers which
together were to make up the England of the future lay marshalled over
against each other on either side the water.

With the union of the English people and the sudden arising of English
freedom which followed the Great Charter this peculiar attitude of the
Archbishops passed necessarily away. When the people itself spoke again,
its voice was heard not in the hall of Lambeth but in the Chapter-house
which gave a home to the House of Commons in its earlier sessions at
Westminster. From the day of Stephen Langton the nation has towered
higher and higher above its mere ecclesiastical organization, till the
one stands dwarfed beside the other as Lambeth now stands dwarfed before
the mass of the Houses of Parliament. Nor was the religious change less
than the political. In the Church as in the State the Archbishops
suddenly fell into the rear. From the days of the first English
Parliament to the days of the Reformation they not only cease to be
representatives of the moral and religious forces of the nation but
stand actually opposed to them. Nowhere is this better brought out than
in their house beside the Thames. The political history of Lambeth lies
spread over the whole of its site, from the gateway of Morton to the
garden where we shall see Cranmer musing on the fate of Anne Boleyn. Its
ecclesiastical interest on the other hand is concentrated in a single
spot. We must ask our readers therefore to follow us beneath the
groining of the Gate-House into the quiet little court that lies on the
river-side of the hall. Passing over its trim grass-plot to a doorway at
the angle of Lollards' Tower, and mounting a few steps, they will find
themselves in a square antechamber, paved roughly with tiles, and with a
single small window looking out towards the Thames. The chamber is at
the base of Lollards' Tower; in the centre stands a huge oaken pillar,
to which the room owes its name of the "Post-room," and to which
somewhat mythical tradition asserts Lollards to have been tied when they
were "examined" by the whip. On its western side a doorway of the purest
Early English work leads us directly into the palace Chapel.

It is strange to stand at a single step in the very heart of the
ecclesiastical life of so many ages, within walls beneath which the men
in whose hands the fortunes of English religion have been placed from
the age of the Great Charter till to-day have come and gone; to see the
light falling through the tall windows with their marble shafts on the
spot where Wyclif fronted Sudbury, on the lowly tomb of Parker, on the
stately screen-work of Laud, on the altar where the last sad communion
of Sancroft originated the Nonjurors. It is strange to note the very
characteristics of the building itself, marred as it is by modern
restoration, and to feel how simply its stern, unadorned beauty, the
beauty of Salisbury and of Lincoln, expressed the very tone of the
Church that finds its centre there.

And hardly less strange is it to recall the odd, roystering figure of
the Primate to whom, if tradition be true, it owes this beauty. Boniface
of Savoy was the youngest of three brothers out of whom their niece
Eleanor, the queen of Henry the Third, was striving to build up a
foreign party in the realm. Her uncle Amadeus was richly enfeoffed with
English lands; the Savoy Palace in the Strand still recalls the
settlement and the magnificence of her uncle Peter. For this third and
younger uncle she grasped at the highest post in the State save the
Crown itself. "The handsome Archbishop," as his knights loved to call
him, was not merely a foreigner as Lanfranc and Anselm had been
foreigners--strange in manner or in speech to the flock whom they
ruled--he was foreign in the worst sense: strange to their freedom,
their sense of law, their reverence for piety. His first visit set
everything on fire. He retreated to Lyons to hold a commission in the
Pope's body-guard, but even Innocent was soon weary of his tyranny. When
the threat of sequestration recalled him after four years of absence to
his see, his hatred of England, his purpose soon to withdraw again to
his own sunny South, were seen in his refusal to furnish Lambeth.
Certainly he went the wrong way to stay here. The young Primate brought
with him Savoyard fashions, strange enough to English folk. His armed
retainers, foreigners to a man, plundered the City markets. His own
archiepiscopal fist felled to the ground a prior who opposed his
visitation. It was the Prior of St. Bartholomew's by Smithfield; and
London, on the King's refusal to grant redress, took the matter into her
own hands. The City bells swung out, and a noisy crowd of citizens were
soon swarming beneath the walls of the palace, shouting threats of
vengeance.

For shouts Boniface cared little. In the midst of the tumult he caused
the sentences of excommunication which he had fulminated to be legally
executed in the chapel of his house. But bravado like this soon died
before the universal resentment, and "the handsome Archbishop" fled
again to Lyons. How helpless the successor of Augustine really was was
shown by a daring outrage perpetrated in his absence. Master Eustace,
his official, had thrown into prison the Prior of St. Thomas's Hospital
for some contempt of court; and the Prior's diocesan, the Bishop of
Winchester, a prelate as foreign and lawless as Boniface himself, took
up the injury as his own. A party of his knights appeared before the
house at Lambeth, tore the gates from their hinges, set Master Eustace
on horseback, and carried him off to the episcopal prison at Farnham. At
last Boniface bowed to submission, surrendered the points at issue,
recalled his excommunications, and was suffered to return. He had learnt
his lesson well enough to remain from that time a quiet, inactive man,
with a dash of continental frugality and wit about him. Whether he built
the chapel or no, he would probably have said of it as he said of the
Great Hall at Canterbury, "My predecessors built, and I discharge the
debt for their building. It seems to me that the true builder is the man
that pays the bill."

But Boniface never learnt to be an Englishman. When under the guidance
of Earl Simon of Montfort the barons wrested the observance of their
Charter from the King the Primate of England found shelter in a fresh
exile. The Church had in fact ceased to be national. The figure of the
first Reformer, as he stands on the chapel floor, is in itself the
fittest comment on the age in which the chapel was built, an age when
the interests of popular liberty and of intellectual freedom had sheered
off from the church which had so long been their protector. With them
the moral and spiritual life of the people sheered off too. The vast
ecclesiastical fabric rested in the days of Archbishop Sudbury solely on
its wealth and its tradition. Suddenly a single man summed up in himself
the national, the mental, the moral power it had lost, and struck at the
double base on which it rested. Wyclif, the keenest intellect of his
day, national and English to the very core, declared its tradition
corrupt and its wealth antichrist. The two forces that above all had
built up the system of mediæval Christianity, the subtlety of the
schoolman, the enthu