I chanced to meet an old woman the other day in a country omnibus. We journeyed together from Prato to Florence and became very friendly. Your dry old woman, who hath had losses, who has become, in fact, world-worn and very wise, or like one of Shakespeare's veterans--the Grave-digger, or the Countryman in _Antony and Cleopatra_--has probed the ball and found it hollow; such a battered and fortified soul in petticoats is peculiar to Italy, and countries where the women work and the men, pocketing their hands, keep sleek looks. We had just passed a pleasant little procession. It was Sunday, the hour Benediction. A staid nun was convoying a party of school-girls to church; whereupon I remarked to my neighbour on their pretty bearing, a sort of artless piety and of attention for unknown but not impossible blessings which they had about them. But my old woman took small comfort from it. She knew those cattle, she said: Capuchins, Jacobins, Black, White and Grey,--knew them all. Well! Everybody had his way of making a living: hers was knitting stockings. A hard life, _via_, but an honest. Here it became me to urge that the religious life might have its compensations, without which it would perhaps be harder than knitting stockings; that one needed relaxation and would do well to be sure that it was at least innocent. Relaxation of a kind, said she, a man must have. Snuff now! She was inveterate at the sport. The view was very dry; but I think its reasoned limitations also very Tuscan, and by no means exclusive of a tolerable amount of piety and honest dealing. Foligno, by mere contrast reminds me of it--busy Foligno huddled between the mighty knees of a chalk down, city of fallen churches and handsome girls, just now parading the streets with their fans a-flutter and a pretty turn to each veiled head of them.
As I write the light dies down, the wind drops, huge inky clouds hang over the west; the sun, as he falls behind them, sets them kindling at the edge. The worn old bleached domes, the bell-towers and turrets looming in the blue dusk, seem to sigh that the century moves so slowly forward. How many more must they endure of these?
It is the hour of Ave Maria. But only two cracked bells ring it in.
ENVOY: TO ALL YOU LADIES
Lovely and honourable ladies, it is, as I hold, no mean favour you have accorded me, to sit still and smiling while I have sung to your very faces a stave verging here and there on the familiar. You have sat thus enduring me, because, being wrought for the most part out of stone or painter's stuff, your necessities have indeed forbidden retirement. Yet my obligations should not on that account be lighter. He would be a thin spirit who should gain a lady's friendly regard, and then vilipend because she knew no better, or could not choose. I hope indeed that I have done you no wrong, _gentildonne_, I protest that I have meant none; but have loved you all as a man may, who has, at most, but a bowing acquaintance with your ladyships. As I recall your starry names, no blush hinting unmannerliness suspect and unconfessed hits me on the cheek:-- Simonetta, Ilaria, Nenciozza, Bettina; you too, candid Mariota of Prato; you, flinching little Imola; and you, snuff-taking, wool-carding ancient lady of the omnibus--scorner of monks, I have kissed your hands, I have at least given our whole commerce frankly to the world; and I know not how any shall say we have been closer acquainted than we should. You, tall Ligurian Simonetta, loved of Sandro, mourned by Giuliano and, for a seasons by his twisted brother and lord, have done well to utter but one side of your wild humour? The side a man would take, struck, as your Sandro was, by a nympholepsy, or, as Lorenzo was, by the rhymer's appetite for wherewithal to sonnetteer? If I understand you, it was never pique or a young girl's petulance drove you to Phryne's one justifiable act of self-assertion. It was honesty. Madonna, or I have read your grey eyes in vain; it was enthusiasm--that flame of our fire so sacred that though it play the incendiary there shall be no crime--or where would be now the "Vas d'elezione"?--nor though it reveal a bystander's grin, any shame at all. I shall live to tell that story of thine, Lady Simonetta, to thy honour and my own respect; for, as a poet says,
"There is no holier flame Than flatters torchwise in a stripling heart, ... a fire from Heaven To ash the clay of us, and wing the God."
I have seen all memorials of you left behind to be pondered by him who played Dante to your Beatrice, Sandro the painting poet,--the proud clearness of you as at the marriage feast of Nastagio degli Onesti; the melting of the sorrow that wells from you in a tide, where you hold the book of your overmastering honour and read _Magnificat Anima Mea_ with a sob in your throat; your acquaintance, too, with that grief which was your own hardening; your sojourn, wan and woebegone as would become the wife of Moses (maker of jealous gods); all these guises of you, as well as the presentments of your innocent youth, I have seen and adored. But I have ever loved you most where you stand a wistful Venus Anadyomen-- "Una donzella non con uman volto," as Politian confessed; for I know your heart, Madonna, and see on the sharp edge of your threatened life, Ardour look back to maiden Reclusion, and on (with a pang of foreboding) to mockery and evil judgment. Never fear but I brave your story out to the world ere many days. And if any, with profane leer and tongue in the cheek, take your sorrow for reproach or your pitifulness for a shame, let them receive the lash of the whip from one who will trouble to wield it: _non ragioniam di lor_. For your honourable women I give you Ilaria, the slim Lucchesan, and my little Bettincina, a child yet with none of the vaguer surmises of adolescence when it flushes and dawns, but likely enough, if all prosper, to be no shame to your company. As yet she is aptest to Donatello's fancy: she will grow to be of a statelier bevy. I see her in Ghirlandajo's garden, pacing, still-eyed, calm and cold, with Ginevra de' Benci and Giovanna of the Albizzi, those quiet streets on a visit to the mother of John Baptist.
Mariota, the hardy wife of the metal-smith, is not for one of your quality, though the wench is well enough now with her baby on her arm and the best of her seen by a poet and made enduring. He, like our Bernardo, had motherhood in such esteem that he held it would ransom a sin. A sin? I am no casust to discuss rewards and punishments; but if Socrates were rightly informed and sin indeed ignorance, I have no whips for Mariota's square shoulders. Her baby, I warrant, plucked her from the burning. I am not so sure but you might find in that girl a responsive spirit, and--is the saying too hard?--a teacher. Contentment with a few things was never one of your virtues, madam.
There is a lady whose name has been whispered through my pages, a lady with whom I must make peace if I can. Had I known her, as Dante did, in the time of her nine-year excellence and followed her (with an interlude, to be sure, for Gentucca) through the slippery ways of two lives with much eating of salt bread, I might have grown into her favour. But I never did know Monna Beatrice Portinari; and when I met her afterwards as my Lady Theologia I thought her something imperious and case-hardened. Now here and there some words of mine (for she has a high stomach) may have given offence. I have hinted that her court is a slender one in Italy, the service paid her lip-service; the lowered eyes and bated breath reserved for her; but for Fede her sister, tears and long kisses and the clinging. Well! the Casa Cattolica is a broad foundation: I find Francis of Umbria at the same board with Sicilian Thomas. If I cleave to the one must I despise the other? Lady Fede has my heart and Lady Dottrina must put aside the birch if she would share that little kingdom. _Religio habet_, said Pico; _theologia autem invenit_. Let her find. But she must be speedy, for I promise her the mood grows on me as I become _italianato_; and I cannot predict when the other term of the proposition may be accomplished. For one thing, Lady Theologia, I praise you not. Sympathy seems to me of the essence, the healing touch an excellent thing in woman. But you told Virgil,
"Io son fatta da Dio, sua merc, tale, Che la vostra miseria non mi tange."
Sympathy, Madonna? And Virgil hopeless! On these terms I had rather gloom with the good poet (whose fault in your eyes was that he knew in what he had believed) than freeze with you and Aquinas on your peak of hyaline. And as I have found you, Donna Beatrice, so in the main have they of whom I pitch my pipe. Here and there a man of them got exercise for his fingers in your web; here and there one, as Pico the