The Columbian City

GENOA has succeeded well with a trick practiced by the race that built her — mankind. For men, too, seal up within themselves characters unapparent in their aspect, but cherished, undestroyed. Youth is locked up in the man of middle age, youth and middle age together are locked up in the aged man, well out of the sight of other men, and particularly deep out of the sight of his children: not merely a memory, but something as it were contemporary, an actual survival. In other words, the grown man knows in his own heart that he is a youngling, a youngling with additions. Perhaps he is, in his private thoughts, somewhat astonished to see that his friend is aware of him old, and is not aware of him young-and-old. Perhaps he fails to remind himself that his friend nourishes in his turn a like conviction, and carries about a like astonishment. To his junior every adult man addresses in silence the remonstrance, ‘Oh, young man, I too am a young man, with age added to my youth, and you are nothing that I am not.’ Other latent and lurking things are equally simple, and some accidental and some perpetual: the golden voice in the silent throat, and moonlight still streaming, albeit to us invisibly and insensibly, from the daylight moon.

It is no wonder that I should be set thinking of such concealments, since to me was shown, only yesterday, — to me who had been a Genoese child, with a full mastery of the local language, its Arabic, its French, its Portuguese, and even its Italian words, and of its perfectly organized and orderly, though unwritten grammar, — since, I say, to me had been shown for the first time the secret of my Genoa, my city of the fullness of the Renaissance; and the secret, which has always been there, is that she is at heart Gothic.

He who takes a motor-journey down the great high road of France to the South, and then through the last seaward foot-hills of the Maritime Alps eastward into Italy, leaps from ancient Rome at Nîmes and Orange and the Pont du Gard, to the Middle Ages at Avignon, and to the Renaissance at Genoa: three great stations of the genius of building in its zig-zag flight through Europe. That flight, mainly northwesterly, has here, by some chance, left us its monuments in an inverted order, and that inverted order is exactly suitable to the journey of the traveler journeying southeasterly. He flies toward Rome as one breasts a stream, swimming toward its source; but he leaves the Roman amphitheatre behind him in France, and there also the mediæval city, and overtakes the magnificent Renaissance — the centre of it, the fullness, the success, the domination—at Genoa. Not Venice, in the Grimani palace, not Vicenza, holds a more beautiful representative of the triumphant art of civic building of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries than Genoa shows in her Via Nuova (your true Genoese has not learned in twenty years and more to call that memorable street the Via Garibaldi), and in the score of scattered palaces within and without the place where stood her walls.

You have to recognize those palaces now, in the western suburb, through the smoke of factories and the dust and ashes of industrial refuse. They stand darkling in the injured sunshine, but you know their majestic, clean proportions, their four-square shape, and their cornices, their high roofs, the vaulted ground-floor, and the ‘ noble’ storey. Some of them are now standing with nothing but their own immediate architecture left— their ‘ house left unto them desolate’; and the mediate architecture so much their own, the terrace, the garden, the winging halfcircle of masonry to right and left, the upper fountain, and the lower, and the lowest, cut away and shoveled into ashheaps. Gone the gardens whereof the odors went out to sea to John Evelyn sailing by. But other palazzi, and all those of the Via Nuova, are untouched, unsullied, altogether unchanged. And these most Genoese buildings, and this incomparable street, were, we are now to learn, a kind of afterthought, a repudiation, a change, a novelty. The inner fact that our resplendent Genoa had locked and double-locked in the heart of her other streets — the close throng of her lofty and serried ways — is that she is, within and within, a Gothic city.

The secret has been well kept now for centuries. But at last Commendatore d’Andrade, who has saved numbers of the best buildings in the Columbian city from destruction when the straight lines of new streets have menaced them, began to wonder what might mean the faint indications of pointed arches, discernible where the characteristic soft colors of the Genoese plastered wall — dim yellow and rose — imperfectly disguised them. D’Andrade was restoring the Gothic St. George’s Hall, and was well aware of other relics of the great times when Genoa financed the dark distant islands of England, and gave them her patron saint, and left perdurable Italian words among the terms of her accountants. Those indications he traced and tracked, and following them discerned the Gothic town as strong as ever, upright, unruined, no dead city, no buried city, no city demolished nor one rebuilt, but a living city, hiding a lost art, a forgotten heart, an ancient spirit, inner chambers of history disguised; an erect city with a finger on her lip.

There is nothing more obscure in the history of the builder man than the manifest fact that he has grown, under all skies, to be ashamed of any gable he once put up. A recognition of this general passion was forced upon me, most unexpectedly, in California. There I saw the thing that has modernized Bruges, London, and Genoa, among other cities, prompting the new, remote, and most western American to hide his gable too: to put up before it a shamefaced screen. It was done indeed on a small scale and by simple means. The pointed roof had a plain square clapped on in the little frontage. And there was your Renaissance, here too, here again, putting your Gothic out of sight. Here too moved that historic impulse. The humiliation of a gable must be veiled from the public eye, albeit it was the eye of no more than a scattered village, and the house, at once bashful and ambitious, was a wooden cottage; and the old tradition of European building and its inheritance were cut off by many thousand miles. Man is like man; and by the Pacific he put on his little apron of thin wood as by the Thames he covered up his gable by square brick. A decent square, a square of some kind, something vertical and quadrangular, to face the world with. Thus the tiny Gothic and the tiny Renaissance were acted out on this strange unhistoric soil and in this new day; and the Gothic was disguised.

Thus the old world disguised it. You may travel the older suburbs of London, and see little but Georgian and seventeenth-century façades. But if the chance of a high railway line should give you a sight of the roofs, you will see the multitude of high gabled tiles put pridefully out of view. Out of view, the citizen seems to say; cover that discreditable fact, and let no one but the birds know that our roof has points.

Evelyn passes over with contempt a church in Italy that was only ‘of Gotiq ordonance.’ Fielding apologizes for admiring a house of domestic English Gothic, albeit in the deep places of the country, far from the dominion of taste. Obviously, both the earlier and the later author would have liked, the one the church and the other the house, if they but might, if taste would but permit.

It may be objected that England has in great measure been painted red of late, and made thorny with sharpgabled houses, and that in particular vast suburbs have been converted to domestic Tudor, and away from the cornice and the square front. But that is not a forthright choice — it is artificial and a revival. Wherever man moves on the free way of his development, whether through hundreds or half-scores of years, whether in old lands or new, in whatever compendium of his racial history, in whatever modern pettiness or haste, he is ashamed of last year’s or last century’s gable, and dresses it in a false front that is his pride, and that banters, little as he may know it, all that is classical in his ambitions.

Genoa wore her new face with all her old exaltation of manner, and kept her secret until the architectural and antiquary eye began to trace those signs of the pointed arch. The colored plaster had fallen somewhat away, the Gothic signal became more evident. And the antiquary finger dogged it, street by narrow street, lane by lane, as straight as the lanes of Venice, but much loftier. For Genoa is more stringently packed than a child’s box of toys, set closer than any other city of Europe, so that here and there the eaves of the great houses not only meet across the footpath way, but overlap each other from this side to that. It was then discovered that those close streets had been made for mules, and not for the walks of citizens and their wives. Genoa had been an arcaded city. The mediæval citizen walked within the houses. He went sheltered, threading his town, covered over from rain and sun, fenced from wind, about the Gothic streets. It was the Renaissance that sent him out into the little thoroughfares, first cowering in a chair, and later hurrying under an umbrella. Beauty, and the beautiful attire of the Middle Ages, paraded at ease, not between but within the giant houses.

Down by the port, who does not know the long line of arcades yet remaining — round vaulted archways, with the popular shops below: the little ironmonger with his tiny window on the outward side, the deep quiet wineshop darkling to the inner side? It is a round-arched colonnade, and nothing is more familiar, more purely Genoese, than its aspect, nothing less Gothic. Well, this too is secretly Gothic. The pointed arches were converted into round when Genoa became ashamed of the ogive. With this discovery I resign the Genoa of my childish past, finding that she has an altogether different past of her own, hitherto kept from me who have always loved her. It is a disconcerting discovery, and I turn back to the Via Nuova, the perfect Renaissance street, always Renaissance, which has no secrets.

Americans, as of course, honored Genoa for the sake of their Columbus; but there is no Genoese school of art, and the most beautiful coast in the world is hidden from the traveler by tunnels, most fortunately for its beauty, and few pass more than a night or two in the sea-and-mountain city. But they may have time to make a comparison with New York, equally serried between waters as Genoa between the Mediterranean and the mountains. The narrow space sends New York up skywards by means of the ladder and the hod, and higher yet again by the ladder and the hod. The much narrower space, not only narrow but also steep, made the Genoese houses thus tall, and ranged them thus serried with defiles between, and set the city climbing by the help of her mountains. She steps up a stair of little wild-flower vineyards, by ledges of olive trees and wheat. You climb to the top floor of your high house, and find yourself at the roots of your neighbor’s orange trees, at the foot of his blooming garden that looks over your head straight against the south. Climb his six storeys again, and you rest, on the lower terrace, among the flowers of a higher householder, who faces freely sunward over many a silver-colored roof. It is a bright light gray city, as Florence is a clear brown, Rome generally yellow, Venice somewhat prevalently ruddy.

Genoa is to be allowed to keep her old secret, though known now, unexposed. Her Gothic arcades are not to be carved out again; they are traced and tracked, but they must remain built up into the wall once gay with the soft colors of the Renaissance city, colors now so faded that they too belong to the past, a later than the Gothic past, but still a past. Only here and there, as an example, a Gothic arch has been made to show itself, wholly, under the pickaxe. The general seal is not to be shattered, the key is not to be turned, the lock is not to be picked; but Genoa has had to confess once for all that there is a seal, a key, a lock, that something once open is enclosed. Scratched, stabbed, has her secret been, and probed, conjectured, ascertained, published; and now returned to her altered keeping, like a child from the surgeon’s hands into the mother’s.