The padrone came just as we were drinking coffee after dinner. It was
two o'clock, because the steamer going down the lake to Desenzano had
bustled through the sunshine, and the rocking of the water still made
lights that danced up and down upon the wall among the shadows by
the piano.
The signore was very apologetic. I found him bowing in the hall, cap in
one hand, a slip of paper in the other, protesting eagerly, in broken
French, against disturbing me.
He is a little, shrivelled man, with close-cropped grey hair on his
skull, and a protruding jaw, which, with his gesticulations, always
makes me think of an ancient, aristocratic monkey. The signore is a
gentleman, and the last, shrivelled representative of his race. His only
outstanding quality, according to the villagers, is his avarice.
_'Mais--mais, monsieur--je crains que--que--que je vous dérange--'_
He spreads wide his hands and bows, looking up at me with implicit brown
eyes, so ageless in his wrinkled, monkey's face, like onyx. He loves to
speak French, because then he feels grand. He has a queer, naïve,
ancient passion to be grand. As the remains of an impoverished family,
he is not much better than a well-to-do peasant. But the old spirit is
eager and pathetic in him.
He loves to speak French to me. He holds his chin and waits, in his
anxiety for the phrase to come. Then it stammers forth, a little rush,
ending in Italian. But his pride is all on edge: we must continue
in French.
The hall is cold, yet he will not come into the large room. This is not
a courtesy visit. He is not here in his quality of gentleman. He is only
an anxious villager.
'_Voyez, monsieur--cet--cet--qu'est-ce que--qu'est-ce que veut dire
cet--cela?_'
He shows me the paper. It is an old scrap of print, the picture of an
American patent door-spring, with directions: 'Fasten the spring either
end up. Wind it up. Never unwind.'
It is laconic and American. The signore watches me anxiously, waiting,
holding his chin. He is afraid he ought to understand my English. I
stutter off into French, confounded by the laconic phrases of the
directions. Nevertheless, I make it clear what the paper says.
He cannot believe me. It must say something else as well. He has not
done anything contrary to these directions. He is most distressed.
'_Mais, monsieur, la porte--la porte--elle ferme_ pas--_elle s'ouvre_--'
He skipped to the door and showed me the whole tragic mystery. The door,
it is shut--_ecco_! He releases the catch, and pouf!--she flies open.
She flies _open_. It is quite final.
The brown, expressionless, ageless eyes, that remind me of a monkey's,
or of onyx, wait for me. I feel the responsibility devolve upon me. I
am anxious.
'Allow me,' I said, 'to come and look at the door.'
I feel uncomfortably like Sherlock Holmes. The padrone protests--_non,
monsieur, non, cela vous dérange_--that he only wanted me to translate
the words, he does not want to disturb me. Nevertheless, we go. I feel I
have the honour of mechanical England in my hands.
The Casa di Paoli is quite a splendid place. It is large, pink and
cream, rising up to a square tower in the centre, throwing off a painted
loggia at either extreme of the façade. It stands a little way back from
the road, just above the lake, and grass grows on the bay of cobbled
pavement in front. When at night the moon shines full on this pale
façade, the theatre is far outdone in staginess.
The hall is spacious and beautiful, with great glass doors at either
end, through which shine the courtyards where bamboos fray the sunlight
and geraniums glare red. The floor is of soft red tiles, oiled and
polished like glass, the walls are washed grey-white, the ceiling is
painted with pink roses and birds. This is half-way between the outer
world and the interior world, it partakes of both.
The other rooms are dark and ugly. There is no mistake about their being
interior. They are like furnished vaults. The red-tiled, polished floor
in the drawing-room seems cold and clammy, the carved, cold furniture
stands in its tomb, the air has been darkened and starved to death, it
is perished.
Outside, the sunshine runs like birds singing. Up above, the grey rocks
build the sun-substance in heaven, San Tommaso guards the terrace. But
inside here is the immemorial shadow.
Again I had to think of the Italian soul, how it is dark, cleaving to
the eternal night. It seems to have become so, at the Renaissance, after
the Renaissance.
In the Middle Ages Christian Europe seems to have been striving, out of
a strong, primitive, animal nature, towards the self-abnegation and the
abstraction of Christ. This brought about by itself a great sense of
completeness. The two halves were joined by the effort towards the one
as yet unrealized. There was a triumphant joy in the Whole.
But the movement all the time was in one direction, towards the
elimination of the flesh. Man wanted more and more to become purely free
and abstract. Pure freedom was in pure abstraction. The Word was
absolute. When man became as the Word, a pure law, then he was free.
But when this conclusion was reached, the movement broke. Already
Botticelli painted Aphrodite, queen of the senses, supreme along with
Mary, Queen of Heaven. And Michelangelo suddenly turned back on the
whole Christian movement, back to the flesh. The flesh was supreme and
god-like, in the oneness of the flesh, in the oneness of our physical
being, we are one with God, with the Father. God the Father created man
in the flesh, in His own image. Michelangelo swung right back to the old
Mosaic position. Christ did not exist. To Michelangelo there was no
salvation in the spirit. There was God the Father, the Begetter, the
Author of all flesh. And there was the inexorable law of the flesh, the
Last Judgement, the fall of the immortal flesh into Hell.
This has been the Italian position ever since. The mind, that is the
Light; the senses, they are the Darkness. Aphrodite, the queen of the
senses, she, born of the sea-foam, is the luminousness of the gleaming
senses, the phosphorescence of the sea, the senses become a conscious
aim unto themselves; she is the gleaming darkness, she is the luminous
night, she is goddess of destruction, her white, cold fire consumes and
does not create.
This is the soul of the Italian since the Renaissance. In the sunshine
he basks asleep, gathering up a vintage into his veins which in the
night-time he will distil into ecstatic sensual delight, the intense,
white-cold ecstasy of darkness and moonlight, the raucous, cat-like,
destructive enjoyment, the senses conscious and crying out in their
consciousness in the pangs of the enjoyment, which has consumed the
southern nation, perhaps all the Latin races, since the Renaissance.
It is a lapse back, back to the original position, the Mosaic position,
of the divinity of the flesh, and the absoluteness of its laws. But also
there is the Aphrodite-worship. The flesh, the senses, are now
self-conscious. They know their aim. Their aim is in supreme sensation.
They seek the maximum of sensation. They seek the reduction of the
flesh, the flesh reacting upon itself, to a crisis, an ecstasy, a
phosphorescent transfiguration in ecstasy.
The mind, all the time, subserves the senses. As in a cat, there is
subtlety and beauty and the dignity of the darkness. But the fire is
cold, as in the eyes of a cat, it is a green fire. It is fluid,
electric. At its maximum it is the white ecstasy of phosphorescence, in
the darkness, always amid the darkness, as under the black fur of a cat.
Like the feline fire, it is destructive, always consuming and reducing
to the ecstasy of sensation, which is the end in itself.
There is the I, always the I. And the mind is submerged, overcome. But
the senses are superbly arrogant. The senses are the absolute, the
god-like. For I can never have another man's senses. These are me, my
senses absolutely me. And all that is can only come to me through my
senses. So that all is me, and is administered unto me. The rest, that
is not me, is nothing, it is something which is nothing. So the Italian,
through centuries, has avoided our Northern purposive industry, because
it has seemed to him a form of nothingness.
It is the spirit of the tiger. The tiger is the supreme manifestation of
the senses made absolute. This is the
Tiger, tiger burning bright,
In the forests of the night
of Blake. It does indeed burn within the darkness. But the
_essential_ fate, of the tiger is cold and white, a white ecstasy.
It is seen in the white eyes of the blazing cat. This is the supremacy
of the flesh, which devours all, and becomes transfigured into a
magnificent brindled flame, a burning bush indeed.
This is one way of transfiguration into the eternal flame, the
transfiguration through ecstasy in the flesh. Like the tiger in the
night, I devour all flesh, I drink all blood, until this fuel blazes up
in me to the consummate fire of the Infinite. In the ecstacy I am
Infinite, I become again the great Whole, I am a flame of the One White
Flame which is the Infinite, the Eternal, the Originator, the Creator,
the Everlasting God. In the sensual ecstasy, having drunk all blood and
devoured all flesh, I am become again the eternal Fire, I am infinite.
This is the way of the tiger; the tiger is supreme. His head is
flattened as if there were some great weight on the hard skull,
pressing, pressing, pressing the mind into a stone, pressing it down
under the blood, to serve the blood. It is the subjugate instrument of
the blood. The will lies above the loins, as it were at the base of the
spinal column, there is the living will, the living mind of the tiger,
there in the slender loins. That is the node, there in the spinal cord.
So the Italian, so the soldier. This is the spirit of the soldier. He,
too, walks with his consciousness concentrated at the base of the spine,
his mind subjugated, submerged. The will of the soldier is the will of
the great cats, the will to ecstasy in destruction, in absorbing life
into his own life, always his own life supreme, till the ecstasy burst
into the white, eternal flame, the Infinite, the Flame of the Infinite.
Then he is satisfied, he has been consummated in the Infinite.
This is the true soldier, this is the immortal climax of the senses.
This is the acme of the flesh, the one superb tiger who has devoured all
living flesh, and now paces backwards and forwards in the cage of its
own infinite, glaring with blind, fierce, absorbed eyes at that which is
nothingness to it.
The eyes of the tiger cannot see, except with the light from within
itself, by the light of its own desire. Its own white, cold light is so
fierce that the other warm light of day is outshone, it is not, it does
not exist. So the white eyes of the tiger gleam to a point of
concentrated vision, upon that which does not exist. Hence its
terrifying sightlessness. The something which I know I am is hollow
space to its vision, offers no resistance to the tiger's looking. It can
only see of me that which it knows I am, a scent, a resistance, a
voluptuous solid, a struggling warm violence that it holds overcome, a
running of hot blood between its Jaws, a delicious pang of live flesh in
the mouth. This it sees. The rest is not.
And what is the rest, that which is-not the tiger, that which the tiger
is-not? What is this?
What is that which parted ways with the terrific eagle-like angel of the
senses at the Renaissance? The Italians said, 'We are one in the Father:
we will go back.' The Northern races said, 'We are one in Christ: we
will go on.'
What _is_ the consummation in Christ? Man knows satisfaction when he
surpasses all conditions and becomes, to himself, consummate in the
Infinite, when he reaches a state of infinity. In the supreme ecstasy
of the flesh, the Dionysic ecstasy, he reaches this state. But how does
it come to pass in Christ?
It is not the mystic ecstasy. The mystic ecstasy is a special sensual
ecstasy, it is the senses satisfying themselves with a self-created
object. It is self-projection into the self, the sensuous self satisfied
in a projected self.
Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.
Blessed are they which are persecuted for righteousness' sake, for
theirs is the kingdom of heaven.
The kingdom of heaven is this Infinite into which we may be consummated,
then, if we are poor in spirit or persecuted for righteousness' sake.
Whosoever shall smite thee on the right cheek, turn to him the other
also.
Love your enemies, bless them that curse you, do good to them that
hate you, and pray for them which despitefully use you, and
persecute you.
Be ye therefore perfect, even as your Father which is in heaven is
perfect.
To be perfect, to be one with God, to be infinite and eternal, what
shall we do? We must turn the other cheek, and love our enemies.
Christ is the lamb which the eagle swoops down upon, the dove taken by
the hawk, the deer which the tiger devours.
What then, if a man come to me with a sword, to kill me, and I do not
resist him, but suffer his sword and the death from his sword, what am
I? Am I greater than he, am I stronger than he? Do I know a consummation
in the Infinite, I, the prey, beyond the tiger who devours me? By my
non-resistance I have robbed him of his consummation. For a tiger knows
no consummation unless he kill a violated and struggling prey. There is
no consummation merely for the butcher, nor for a hyena. I can rob the
tiger of his ecstasy, his consummation, his very __my non-resistance. In
my non-resistance the tiger is infinitely destroyed.
But I, what am I? 'Be ye therefore perfect.' Wherein am I perfect in
this submission? Is there an affirmation, behind my negation, other than
the tiger's affirmation of his own glorious infinity?
What is the Oneness to which I subscribe, I who offer no resistance in
the flesh?
Have I only the negative ecstasy of being devoured, of becoming thus
part of the Lord, the Great Moloch, the superb and terrible God? I have
this also, this subject ecstasy of consummation. But is there
nothing else?
The Word of the tiger is: my senses are supremely Me, and my senses are
God in me. But Christ said: God is in the others, who are not-me. In all
the multitude of the others is God, and this is the great God, greater
than the God which is Me. God is that which is Not-Me.
And this is the Christian truth, a truth complementary to the pagan
affirmation: 'God is that which is Me.'
God is that which is Not-Me. In realizing the Not-Me I am consummated, I
become infinite. In turning the other cheek I submit to God who is
greater than I am, other than I am, who is in that which is not me. This
is the supreme consummation. To achieve this consummation I love my
neighbour as myself. My neighbour is all that is not me. And if I love
all this, have I not become one with the Whole, is not my consummation
complete, am I not one with God, have I not achieved the Infinite?
After the Renaissance the Northern races continued forward to put into
practice this religious belief in the God which is Not-Me. Even the idea
of the saving of the soul was really negative: it was a question of
escaping damnation. The Puritans made the last great attack on the God
who is Me. When they beheaded Charles the First, the king by Divine
Right, they destroyed, symbolically, for ever, the supremacy of the Me
who am the image of God, the Me of the flesh, of the senses, Me, the
tiger burning bright, me the king, the Lord, the aristocrat, me who am
divine because I am the body of God.
After the Puritans, we have been gathering data for the God who is
not-me. When Pope said 'Know then thyself, presume not God to scan, The
proper study of mankind is Man,' he was stating the proposition: A man
is right, he is consummated, when he is seeking to know Man, the great
abstract; and the method of knowledge is by the analysis, which is the
destruction, of the Self. The proposition up to that time was, a man is
the epitome of the universe. He has only to express himself, to fulfil
his desires, to satisfy his supreme senses.
Now the change has come to pass. The individual man is a limited being,
finite in himself. Yet he is capable of apprehending that which is not
himself. 'The proper study of mankind is Man.' This is another way of
saying, 'Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself.' Which means, a man
is consummated in his knowledge of that which is not himself, the
abstract Man. Therefore the consummation lies in seeking that other, in
knowing that other. Whereas the Stuart proposition was: 'A man is
consummated in expressing his own Self.'
The new spirit developed into the empirical and ideal systems of
philosophy. Everything that is, is consciousness. And in every man's
consciousness, Man is great and illimitable, whilst the individual is
small and fragmentary. Therefore the individual must sink himself in the
great whole of Mankind.
This is the spirituality of Shelley, the perfectibility of man. This is
the way in which we fulfil the commandment, 'Be ye therefore perfect,
even as your Father which is in heaven is perfect.' This is Saint
Paul's, 'Now I know in part; but then shall I know even as I am known.'
When a man knows everything and understands everything, then he will be
perfect, and life will be blessed. He is capable of knowing everything
and understanding everything. Hence he is justified in his hope of
infinite freedom and blessedness.
The great inspiration of the new religion was the inspiration of
freedom. When I have submerged or distilled away my concrete body and my
limited desires, when I am like the skylark dissolved in the sky yet
filling heaven and earth with song, then I am perfect, consummated in
the Infinite. When I am all that is not-me, then I have perfect liberty,
I know no limitation. Only I must eliminate the Self.
It was this religious belief which expressed itself in science. Science
was the analysis of the outer self, the elementary substance of the
self, the outer world. And the machine is the great reconstructed
selfless power. Hence the active worship to which we were given at the
end of the last century, the worship of mechanized force.
Still we continue to worship that which is not-me, the Selfless world,
though we would fain bring in the Self to help us. We are shouting the
Shakespearean advice to warriors: 'Then simulate the action of the
tiger.' We are trying to become again the tiger, the supreme, imperial,
warlike Self. At the same time our ideal is the selfless world
of equity.
We continue to give service to the Selfless God, we worship the great
selfless oneness in the spirit, oneness in service of the great
humanity, that which is Not-Me. This selfless God is He who works for
all alike, without consideration. And His image is the machine which
dominates and cows us, we cower before it, we run to serve it. For it
works for all humanity alike.
At the same time, we want to be warlike tigers. That is the horror: the
confusing of the two ends. We warlike tigers fit ourselves out with
machinery, and our blazing tiger wrath is emitted through a machine. It
is a horrible thing to see machines hauled about by tigers, at the mercy
of tigers, forced to express the tiger. It is a still more horrible
thing to see tigers caught up and entangled and torn in machinery. It is
horrible, a chaos beyond chaos, an unthinkable hell.
The tiger is not wrong, the machine is not wrong, but we, liars,
lip-servers, duplicate fools, we are unforgivably wrong. We say: 'I will
be a tiger because I love mankind; out of love for other people, out of
selfless service to that which is not me, I will even become a tiger.'
Which is absurd. A tiger devours because it is consummated in devouring,
it achieves its absolute self in devouring. It does not devour because
its unselfish conscience bids it do so, for the sake of the other deer
and doves, or the other tigers.
Having arrived at the one extreme of mechanical selflessness, we
immediately embrace the other extreme of the transcendent Self. But we
try to be both at once. We do not cease to be the one before we become
the other. We do not even play the roles in turn. We want to be the
tiger and the deer both in one. Which is just ghastly nothingness. We
try to say, 'The tiger is the lamb and the lamb is the tiger.' Which is
nil, nihil, nought.
The padrone took me into a small room almost contained in the thickness
of the wall. There the Signora's dark eyes glared with surprise and
agitation, seeing me intrude. She is younger than the Signore, a mere
village tradesman's daughter, and, alas, childless.
It was quite true, the door stood open. Madame put down the screw-driver
and drew herself erect. Her eyes were a flame of excitement. This
question of a door-spring that made the door fly open when it should
make it close roused a vivid spark in her soul. It was she who was
wrestling with the angel of mechanism.
She was about forty years old, and flame-like and fierily sad. I think
she did not know she was sad. But her heart was eaten by some impotence
in her life.
She subdued her flame of life to the little padrone. He was strange and
static, scarcely human, ageless, like a monkey. She supported him with
her flame, supported his static, ancient, beautiful form, kept it
intact. But she did not believe in him.
Now, the Signora Gemma held her husband together whilst he undid the
screw that fixed the spring. If they had been alone, she would have done
it, pretending to be under his direction. But since I was there, he did
it himself; a grey, shaky, highly-bred little gentleman, standing on a
chair with a long screw-driver, whilst his wife stood behind him, her
hands half-raised to catch him if he should fall. Yet he was strangely
absolute, with a strange, intact force in his breeding.
They had merely adjusted the strong spring to the shut door, and
stretched it slightly in fastening it to the door-jamb, so that it drew
together the moment the latch was released, and the door flew open.
We soon made it right. There was a moment of anxiety, the screw was
fixed. And the door swung to. They were delighted. The Signora Gemma,
who roused in me an electric kind of melancholy, clasped her hands
together in ecstasy as the door swiftly shut itself.
'_Ecco!_' she cried, in her vibrating, almost warlike woman's voice:
'_Ecco!_'
Her eyes were aflame as they looked at the door. She ran forward to try
it herself. She opened the door expectantly, eagerly. Pouf!--it shut
with a bang.
'_Ecco!_' she cried, her voice quivering like bronze, overwrought but
triumphant.
I must try also. I opened the door. Pouf! It shut with a bang. We all
exclaimed with joy.
Then the Signor di Paoli turned to me, with a gracious, bland, formal
grin. He turned his back slightly on the woman, and stood holding his
chin, his strange horse-mouth grinning almost pompously at me. It was an
affair of gentlemen. His wife disappeared as if dismissed. Then the
padrone broke into cordial motion. We must drink.
He would show me the estate. I had already seen the house. We went out
by the glass doors on the left, into the domestic courtyard.
It was lower than the gardens round it, and the sunshine came through
the trellised arches on to the flagstones, where the grass grew fine and
green in the cracks, and all was deserted and spacious and still. There
were one or two orange-tubs in the light.
Then I heard a noise, and there in the corner, among all the pink
geraniums and the sunshine, the Signora Gemma sat laughing with a baby.
It was a fair, bonny thing of eighteen months. The Signora was
concentrated upon the child as he sat, stolid and handsome, in his
little white cap, perched on a bench picking at the pink geraniums.
She laughed, bent forward her dark face out of the shadow, swift into a
glitter of sunshine near the sunny baby, laughing again excitedly,
making mother-noises. The child took no notice of her. She caught him
swiftly into the shadow, and they were obscured; her dark head was
against the baby's wool jacket, she was kissing his neck, avidly, under
the creeper leaves. The pink geraniums still frilled joyously in
the sunshine.