These thoughts, and the ones I shall try to make clear as I go on,
began to take shape one early winter morning some ten years ago, while
I was staying among the vineyards in the little range of hills which
separate the valley of the Ombrone from the lower valley of the Arno.
Stony hills, stony paths between leafless lilac hedges, stony outlines
of crest, fringed with thin rosy bare trees; here and there a few
bright green pines; for the rest, olives and sulphur-yellow sere vines
among them; the wide valley all a pale blue wash, and Monte Morello
opposite wrapped in mists. It was visibly snowing on the great
Apennines, and suddenly, though very gently, it began to snow here
also, wrapping the blue distance, the yellow vineyards, in thin veils.
Brisk cold. At the house, when I returned from my walk, the children
were flattened against the window-panes, shouting for joy at the snow.
We grown-up folk, did we live wiser lives, might be equally delighted
by similar shows.
A very Tuscan, or rather (what I mean when I make use of that word,
for geographically Tuscany is very large and various) a very
Florentine day. Beauty, exquisiteness, serenity; but not without
austerity carried to a distinct bitingness. And this is the quality
which we find again in all very characteristic Tuscan art. Such a
country as this, scorched in summer, wind-swept in winter, and
constantly stony and uphill, a country of eminently dry, clear, moving
air, puts us into a braced, active, self-restrained mood; there is in
it, as in these frosty days which suit it best, something which gives
life and demands it: a quality of happy effort. The art produced by
people in whom such a condition of being is frequent, must necessarily
reproduce this same condition of being in others.
Therefore the connection between a country and its art must be sought
mainly in the fact that all art expresses a given state of being, of
emotion, not human necessarily, but vital; that is to say, expresses
not whether we love or hate, but rather _how_ we love or hate, how we
_are_. The mountain forms, colour, water, etc., of a country are
incorporated into its art less as that art's object of representation,
than as the determinant of a given mode of vitality in the artist.
Hence music and literature, although never actually reproducing any
part of them, may be strongly affected by their character. The _Vita
Nuova_, the really great (not merely historically interesting)
passages of the Divine Comedy, and the popular songs of Tigri's
collection, are as much the outcome of these Tuscan mountains and
hills, as is any picture in which we recognise their outlines and
colours. Indeed, it happens that of literal rendering (as
distinguished from ever-present reference to quality of air or light,
to climbing, to rock and stone as such) there is little in the
_Commedia_, none at all in either the old or the more modern lyrics,
and not so much even in painted landscape. The Tuscan backgrounds of
the fifteenth century are _not_ these stony places, sun-burnt or
wind-swept; they are the green lawns and pastures in vogue with the
whole international Middle Ages, but rendered with that braced,
selecting, finishing temper which _is_ the product of those stony
hills. Similarly the Tuscans must have been influenced by the grace,
the sparseness, the serenity of the olive, its inexhaustible vigour
and variety; yet how many of them ever painted it? That a people
should never paint or describe their landscape may mean that they have
not consciously inventoried the items; but it does not mean that they
have not æsthetically, so to speak _nervously_, felt them. Their
quality, their virtue, may be translated into that people's way of
talking of or painting quite different things: the Tuscan quality is a
quality of form, because it is a quality of mood.