Mostly In This Last
Visit I Took Pisa As Lightly As At The First, When, As I Have Noted From
The Printed Witness, I Was Gayly Indifferent To The Claims Of Her
Objects Of Interest.
If they came in my way, I looked at them, but I did
not put myself much about for them.
I rested mostly in the twilight of
old associations, trusting to the guidance of our cicerone, whom, in
some form or under some name, the reader will find waiting for him at
the cathedral door as we did. But I have since recurred to the record of
my second visit in 1883, with amazement at the exact knowledge of events
shown there, which became, in 1908, all a blur of dim conjecture. It
appears that I was then acquainted with much more Pisan history than any
other author I have found own to. I had also surprising adventures of
different kinds, such as my poorer experience of the present cannot
parallel. I find, for instance, that in 1883 I gave a needy crone in the
cathedral a franc instead of the piece of five centimes which I meant
for her, and that the lamp of Galileo did nothing to light the gloom
into which this error plunged my spirit.
It appears to have jaundiced my view of the whole cathedral, which I did
not find at all comparable to that of Siena, whereas in 1908 I thought
it all beautiful. This may have been because I was so newly from the
ugliness of the Eoman churches; though I felt, as I had felt before,
that the whole group of sacred edifices at Pisa was too suggestive of
decorative pastry and confectionery. No more than at the second view of
it did I now attempt the ascent of the Leaning Tower; I had discharged
this duty for life when I first saw it; with my seventy-one years upon
me, I was not willing to climb its winding stairs, and I doubted if I
could keep it from falling, as I then did, by inclining myself the other
way. I resolved that I would leave this to the new-comer; but I gladly
followed our cicerone across the daisied green from the cathedral to the
baptistery, where I found the famous echo waiting to welcome me back,
and greet me with its angelic sweetness, when the custodian who has it
in charge appealed to it; though its voice seemed to have been weakened
and coarsened in its forced replies to some rude Americans there, who
shouted out to it and mocked at it. One wished to ask them if they did
not know that this echo was sacred, and that their challenges of it were
a species of sacrilege. But doubtless that would not have availed to
silence them. By-and-by they went away, and then we were aware of an
interesting group of people by the font near the lovely Lombardic pulpit
of Nicola Pisano. They were peasants, by their dress - a young father and
mother and a little girl or two, and then a gentle, elderly woman, with
a baby in her arms, at which she looked proudly down. They were in their
simple best, and they had good Tuscan faces, full of kindness. I
ventured some propitiatory coppers with the children, and, when the old
woman made them thank me, I thought I could not be mistaken and I
ventured further: "You are the grandmother?"
"Yes, signer," she answered; and then we had some talk about the age and
the beauty of the baby, which I declared wonderful for both, in praises
loud enough for the father and mother to hear. After that they seemed to
hold a family council, from which I thought it respectful to stand apart
until the grandmother spoke to me again.
I did not understand, and I appealed to our guide for help.
"She wishes you to be godfather to the child."
I had never yet been a godfather, but I had the belief that it brought
grave responsibilities, which in the very casual and impermanent
circumstances I did not see how I was to meet. Yet how to refuse without
wounding these kind people who had so honored me I did not know until a
sudden inspiration came to my rescue.
"Tell them," I said, "and be careful to make them understand, that I am
very grateful and very sorry, but that I am a Protestant, and that I
suppose I cannot, for that reason, be godfather to their child."
He explained, and they received my thanks and regrets with smiling
acquiescence; and just then a very stout little old priest (who has
baptized nearly all the babies in Pisa for fifty years) came in, and the
baptism proceeded without my intervention. But I remained, somehow,
disappointed; it would have been pleasant to leave a godchild behind me
there in the neighborhood of Pisa; to have sent him from time to time
some little remembrance of this remote America, and, perhaps, when he
grew up and came to Pisa, and learned the art of the statuary, to have
had from him a Leaning Tower which he had cut in alabaster for me. I was
taking it for granted he was a boy, but he may not have been; there is
always that chance.
If I had been alone, I suppose I should still have gone into the Campo
Santo, from mere force of habit; I always go, in Pisa, but I had now
with me clearer eyes for art than mine are, and I wished to have their
light on the great allegories and histories frescoed round the
cloisters, and test with them the objects of my tacit and explicit
reserves and misgivings. I needed such eyes, and even some such powerful
glasses as would have pierced through the faded and wasted pictures and
shown them at least as I had first seen them. They were then in such
reasonable disrepair as one might expect after three or four centuries,
but in the last thirty years a ruinous waste has set in before which not
only the colors have faded, but the surfaces have crumbled under the
colors; and as yet no man knows how to stop the ravage.
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