I find, then, that Italian railway-carriages are constructed

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EARTHWORK OUT OF TUSCANY

Being Impressions and Translations of Maurice Hewlett

"For as it is hurtful to drink wine or water alone; and as wine mingled

with water is pleasant and delighteth the taste: even so speech, finely

framed, delighteth the ears of them that read the story."--3 MACCABEES xv.

39.

TO

MY FATHER

THIS LITTLE BOOK

NOT AS BEING WORTHY BUT AS ALL I HAVE

IS DEDICATED

I cannot add one tendril to your bays,

Worn quietly where who love you sing your praise;

But I may stand

Among the household throng with lifted hand,

Upholding for sweet honour of the land

Your crown of days.

PREFACE TO THE THIRD EDITION

I cannot be for ever explaining what I intended when I wrote this book.

Upon this, its third appearance, even though it is to rank in that good

company which wears the crimson of Eversley, it must take its chance,

undefended by its conscious parent. He feels, indeed, with all the

anxieties, something of the pride of the hen, who conducts her brood of

ducklings to the water, sees them embark upon the flood, and must leave

them to their buoyant performances, dreadful, but aware also that they are

doing a finer thing than her own merits could have hoped to win them. So

it is here. I did not at the outset expect a third edition in any livery;

I may still fear a wreck for this cockboat of my early invention; but I

hope I am too respectful of myself to try throwing oil upon the waters.

I leave the former prefaces as they stand. I felt them when I made them,

and feel them still; but I shall make no more. If _Earthwork_ has the

confidence, at this time of day, to carry a red coat, it shall carry it

alone.

LONDON, 1901.

PREFACE TO THE SECOND EDITION

Mr. Critics--to whom, kind or unkind, I confess obligations--and the

Public between them have produced, it appears, some sort of demand for

this Second Edition. While I do not think it either polite or politic to

enquire too deeply into reasons, I am not the man to disoblige them. It is

sufficient for me that in a world indifferent well peopled five hundred

souls have bought or acquired my book, and that other hundreds have

signified their desire to do likewise. Nevertheless--the vanity of authors

being notoriously hard-rooted--I must own to my mortification in the

discovery that not more than two in every hundred who have read me have

known what I was at. I have been told it is a good average, but, with

deference, I don't think so. No man has any right to take beautiful and

simple things out of their places, wrap them up in a tissue of his own

conceits, and hand them about the universe for gods and men to wonder

upon. If he must convey simple things let him convey them simply. If I,

for instance, must steal a loaf of bread, would it not be better to walk

out of the shop with it under my coat than to call for it in a hansom and

hoodwink the baker with a forged cheque on Coutts's bank? Surely. If,

then, I go to Italy, and convey the hawthor-scent of Della Robbia, the

straining of Botticelli to express the ineffable, the mellow autumn tones

of the life of Florence; if I do this, and make a parade of my magnanimity

in permitting the household to divide the spoil, how on earth should I mar

all my bravery by giving people what they don't want, or turn double knave

by fobbing them off with an empty box?

I had hoped to have done better than this. I tried to express in the title

of my book what I thought I had done; more, I was bold enough to assume

that, having weathered the title, my readers would find a smooth channel

with leading-lights enough to bring them sound to port. _Mea culpa!_

I believe that I was wrong. The book has been read as a collection of

essays and stories and dialogues only pulled together by the binder's

tapes; as otherwise disjointed, fragmentary, _décousue_, a "piebald

monstrous book," a sort of _kous-kous_, made out of the odds and ends

of a scribbler's note-book. Some have liked some morsels, others other

morsels: it has been a matter of the luck of the fork. Very few, one only

to my knowledge, can have seen the thing as it presented itself to my

flattering eye--not as a pudding, not as a case of confectionery even, but

as a little sanctuary of images such as a pious heathen might make of his

earthenware gods. Let us be serious: listen. The thing is Criticism; but

some of it is criticism by trope and figure. I hope that is plain enough.

When the first man heard his first thunderstorm he said (or Human Nature

has bettered itself), "Certainly a God is angry." When after a night of

doubt and heaviness the sun rose out of the sea, the sea kindled, and all

its waves laughed innumerably, again he said, "God is stirring. Joy cometh

in the morning." Even in saying so much he was making images, poor man,

for one's soul is as dumb as a fish and can only talk by signs. But by

degrees, as his hand grew obedient to his heart, he set to work to make

more lasting images of these gods--Thunder Gods, Gods of the Sun and the

Morning. And as these gods were the sum of the best feelings he had, so

the images of them were the best things he made. And that goes on now

whenever a young man sees something new or strange or beautiful. He

wonders, he falls on his face, he would say his prayers; he rises up, he

would sing a pæan. But he is dumb, the wretch! He must make images. This

he does because Necessity drives him: this I have done. And part of the

world calls the result Criticism, and another part says, It may be Art.

But I know that it is the struggling of a dumb man to find an outlet, and

I call it Religion.

"God first made man, and straightway man made God;

No wonder if a tang of that same sod,

Whereout we issued at a breath, should cling

To all we fashion. We can only plod

Lit by a starveling candle; and we sing

Of what we can remember of the road."

The vague informed, the lovely indefinite defined: that is Art. As a sort

of _pâte sur pâte_ comes Criticism, to do for Art what Art does for

life. I have tried in this book to be the artist at second-hand, to make

pictures of pictures, images of images, poems of poems. You may call it

Criticism, you may call it Art: I call it Religion. It is making the best

thing I can out of the best things I feel.

LONDON, 1898.

ADVERTISEMENT TO THE FIRST EDITION

Polite reader, you who have travelled _Italy_, it will not be unknown

to you that the humbler sort in that country have ever believed certain

spots and recesses of their land--as wells, mountain-paths, farmsteads,

groves of ilex or olive, quiet pine-woods, creeks or bays of the sea, and

such like hidden ways--to be the chosen resort of familiar spirits,

baleful or beneficent, fate-ridden or amenable to prayer, half divine,

wholly out of rule or ordering; which rustic deities and _genii

locorum_, if it was not needful to propitiate, it was fascination to

observe. It is believed of them in the hill-country round about

_Perugia_ and in the quieter parts of _Tuscany_, that they are

still present, tolerated of God by reason of their origin (which is,

indeed, that of the very soil whose effluence they are), chastened,

circumscribed and, as it were, combed or pared of evil desire and import.

To them or their _avatars_ (it matters little which) the rude people

still bow down; they still humour them with gifts of flowers, songs, or

artless customs (as of Mayday, or the _Giorno de' Grilli_); you may

still see wayside shrines, votive tablets, humble offerings, set in a

farm-wall or country hedge, starry and fresh as a patch of yellow flowers

in a rye-field. If you say that they have made gods in their own image,

you do not convince them of Sin, for they do as their betters. If you say

their gods are earthy, they reply by asking, "What then are we?" For they

will admit, and you cannot deny, earthiness to have at least a part in all

of us. And you are forbidden to call this unhappy, since God made all. Out

of the drenched earth whence these worshippers arose, they made their

rough-cast gods; out of the same earth they still mould images to speak

the presentment of them which they have. Out of that earth, I, a northern

image-maker, have set up my conceits of their informing spirits, of the

spirits of themselves, their soil, and the fair works they have

accomplished. So I have called this book _Earthwork out of Tuscany. Qui

habet aures ad audiendum audiat._

LONDON, 1895.

CONTENTS

PROEM: APOLOGIA PRO LIBELLO

1. EYE OF ITALY

2. LITTLE FLOWERS

3. A SACRIFICE AT PRATO

4. OF POETS AND NEEDLEWORK

5. OF BOILS AND THE IDEAL

6. THE SOUL OF A FACT

7. QUATTROCENTISTERIA

8. THE BURDEN OF NEW TYRE

9. ILARIA, MARIOTA, BETTINA

10. CATS

11. THE SOUL OF A CITY

12. WITH THE BROWN BEAR

13. DEAD CHURCHES AT FOLIGNO

ENVOY: TO ALL YOU LADIES

PROEM

APOLOGIA PRO LIBELLO: IN A LETTER TO A FRIEND

Although you know your Italy well, you ask me, who see her now for the

first time, to tell you how I find her; how she sinks into me; wherein she

fulfils, and wherein fails to fulfil, certain dreams and fancies of mine

(old amusements of yours) about her. Here, truly, you show yourself the

diligent collector of human documents your friends have always believed

you; for I think it can only be appetite for acquisition, to see how a man

recognisant of the claims of modernity in Art bears the first brunt of the

Old Masters' assault, that tempts you to risk a _rechauffée_ of Paul

Bourget and Walter Pater, with _ana_ lightly culled from Symonds,

and, perchance, the questionable support of ponderous references out of

Burckhardt. In spite of my waiver of the title, you relish the notion of a

Modern face to face with Botticelli and Mantegna and Perugino (to say

nothing of that Giotto who had so much to say!), artists in whom, you

think and I agree, certain impressions strangely positive of many vanished

aspects of life remain to be accounted for, and (it may be) reconciled

with modern visions of Art and Beauty. Well! I am flattered and touched by

such confidence in my powers of expression and your own of endurance. I

look upon you as a late-in-time Maecenas, generously resolved to defray

the uttermost charge of weariness that a young writer may be encouraged to

unfold himself and splash in the pellucid Tuscan air. I cannot assert that

you are performing an act of charity to mankind, but I can at least assure

you that you are doing more for me than if you had settled my accounts

with Messr. Cook and Sons, or Signora Vedova Paolini, my esteemed

landlady. A writer who is worth anything accumulates more than he gives

off, and never lives up to his income. His difficulty is the old one of

digestion, Italian Art being as crucial for the modern as Italian cookery.

Crucial indeed! for diverse are the ways of the Hyperboreans cheek by jowl

with _asciutta_ and Tuscan tablewine, as any _osteria_ will

convince you. To one man the oil is a delight: he will soak himself in it

till his thought swims viscid in his pate. To another it is abhorrent:

straightway he calls for his German vinegar and drowns the native flavour

in floods as bitter as polemics. Your wine too! Overweak for water, says

one, who consumes a stout _fiaschone_ and spends a stertorous

afternoon in headache and cursing at the generous home-grown.

_Frizzante!_ cries your next to all his gods; and flushes the poison

with infected water. Crucial enough. So with art. Goethe went to Assisi.

"I left on my left," says he, "the vast mass of churches, piled Babel-wise

one over another, in one of which rest the remains of the Holy Saint

Francis of Assisi--with aversion, for I thought to myself that the people

who assembled in them were mostly of the same stamp with my captain and

travelling companion."

Truly an odd ground of aversion to a painted church that there might be a

confessional-box in the nave! But he had no eyes for Gothic, being set on

the Temple of Minerva. The Right Honourable Joseph Addison's views of

Siena will be familiar to you; but an earlier still was our excellent Mr.

John Evelyn doing the grand tour; going to Pisa, but seeing no frescos in

the Campo Santo; going to Florence, but seeing neither Santa Croce nor

Santa Maria Novella; in his whole journey he would seem to have found no

earlier name than Perugino's affixed to a picture. Goethe was urbane to

Francia, "a very respectable artist"; he was astonished at Mantegna, "one

of the older painters," but accepted him as leading up to Titian: and so--

"thus was art developed after the barbarous period." But Goethe had the

sweeping sublimity of youth with him. "I have now seen but two Italian

cities, and for the first time; and I have spoken with but few persons;

and yet I know my Italians pretty well!" Seriously, where in criticism do

you learn of an earlier painter than Perugino, until you come to our day?

And where now do you get the raptures over the Carracci and Domenichino

and Guercino and the rest of them which the last century expended upon

their unthrifty soil? Ruskin found Botticelli; yes, and Giotto. Roscoe

never so much as mentions either. Why should he, honest man? They couldn't

draw! Cookery is very like Art, as Socrates told Gorgias. Unfortunately,

it is far easier to verify your impressions in the former case than in the

latter. Yet that is the first and obvious duty of the critic--that is, the

writer whomsoever. In my degree it has been mine. Wherefore, if I unfold

anything at all, it shall not be the _Cicerone_ nor the veiled

"Anonymous," nor the _Wiederbelebung_, nor (I hope) the _Mornings

in Florence_, but that thing in which you place such touching reliance

--myself and my poor sensations, _Ecco_! I have nothing else. You take

a boy out of school; you set him to book-reading, give him Shakespere and

a Bible, set him sailing in the air with the poets; drench him with

painter's dreams, _via_, Titian's carmine and orange, Veronese's

rippling brocades, Umbrian morning skies, and Tuscan hues wrought of

moonbeams and flowing water--anon you turn him adrift in Italy, a country

where all poets' souls seem to be caged in crystal and set in the sun, and

say--"Here, dreamer of dreams, what of the day?" _Madonna!_ You ask

and you shall obtain. I proceed to expand under your benevolent eye.

To me, Italy is not so much a place where pictures have been painted (some

of which remain to testify), as a place where pictures have been lived and

built; I fail to see how Perugia is not a picture by, say, Astorre

Baglione. Perhaps I should be nearer the mark if I said it was a frozen

epic. What I mean is, that in Italy it is still impossible to separate the

soul and body of the soil, to say, as you may say in London or Paris,--

here behind this sordid grey mask of warehouses and suburban villas lurks

the soul that once was Shakespere or once was Villon. You will not say

that of Florence; you will hardly say it (though the time is at hand) of

Milan and Rome. Do the gondoliers still sing snatches of Ariosto? I don't

know Venice. M. Bourget assures me his _vetturino_ quoted Dante to

him between Monte Pulciano and Siena; and I believe him. At any rate, in

Italy as I have found it, the inner secret of Italian life can be read,

not in painting alone, nor poem alone, but in the swift sun, in the

streets and shrouded lanes, in the golden pastures, in the plains and blue

mountains; in flowery cloisters and carved church porches--out of doors as

well as in. The story of Troy is immortal--why not because the Trojans

themselves live immortal in their fabled sons? That being so, I by no

means promise you my sensations to be of the ear-measuring, nose-rubbing

sort now so popular. I am bad at dates and soon tire of symbols. My

theology may be to seek; you may catch me as much for the world as for

Athanase. With world and doctor I shall, indeed, have little enough to do,

for wherever I go I shall be only on the look-out for the soul of this

bright-eyed people, whom, being no Goethe, I do not profess to understand

or approve. Must the lover do more than love his mistress, and weave his

sonnets about her white brows? I may see my mistress Italy embowered in a

belfry, a fresco, the scope of a Piazza, the lilt of a _Stornello_,

the fragrance of a legend. If I don't find a legend to hand I may, as lief

as not, invent one. It shall be a legend fitted close to the soul of a

fact, if I succeed: and if I fail, put me behind you and take down your

four volumes of Rio, or your four-and-twenty of Rosini. Go to Crowe and

Cavalcaselle and be wise. Parables!--I like the word--to go round about

the thing, whose heart I cannot hit with my small-arm, marking the goodly

masses and unobtrusive meek beauties of it, and longing for them in vain.

No amount of dissecting shall reveal the core of Sandro's Venus. For after

you have pared off the husk of the restorer, or bled in your alembic the

very juices the craftsman conjured withal, you come down to the seamy

wood, and Art is gone. Nay, but your Morelli, your Crowe, ciphering as

they went for want of thought, what did they do but screw Art into test-

tubes, and serve you up the fruit of their litmus-paper assay with

vivacity, may be,--but with what kinship to the picture? I maintain that

the peeling and gutting of fact must be done in the kitchen: the king's

guests are not to know how many times the cook's finger went from cate to

mouth before the seasoning was proper to the table. The king is the

artist, you are the guest, I am the abstractor of quintessences, the cook.

Remember, the cook had not the ordering of the feast: that was the king's

business--mine is to mingle the flavours to the liking of the guest that

the dish be worthy the conception and the king's honour.

Nor will I promise you that I shall not break into a more tripping stave

than our prose can afford, here and there. The pilgrim, if he is young and

his shoes or his belly pinch him not, sings as he goes, the very stones at

his heels (so music-steeped is this land) setting him the key. Jog the

foot-path way through Tuscany in my company, it's Lombard Street to my hat

I charm you out of your lassitude by my open humour. Things I say will

have been said before, and better; my tunes may be stale and my phrasing

rough: I may be irrelevant, irreverent, what you please. Eh, well! I am in

Italy,--the land of shrugs and laughing. Shrug me (or my book) away; but,

pray Heaven, laugh! And, as the young are always very wise when they find

their voice and have their confidence well put out to usury, laugh (but in

your cloak) when I am sententious or apt to tears. I have found _lacrimæ

rerum_ in Italy as elsewhere; and sometimes Life has seemed to me to

sail as near to tragedy as Art can do. I suppose I must be a very bad

Christian, for I remain sturdily an optimist, still convinced that it is

good for us to be here, while the sun is up. Men and pictures, poems,

cities, churches, comely deeds, grow like cabbages: they are of the soil,

spring from it to the sun, glow open-hearted while he is there; and when

he goes, they go. So grew Florence, and Shakespere, and Greek myth--the

three most lovely flowers of Nature's seeding I know of. And with the

flowers grow the weeds. My first weed shall sprout by Arno, in a cranny of

the Ponte Vecchio, or cling like a Dryad of the wood to some gnarly old

olive on the hill-side of Arcetri. If it bear no little gold-seeded

flower, or if its pert leaves don't blush under the sun's caress, it

shan't be my fault or the sun's.

Take, then, my watered wine in the name of the Second Maccabæan, for here,

as he says, "will I make an end. And if I have done well, and as is

fitting the story, it is that which I desired: but if slenderly and

meanly, it is that which I could attain unto."

I have killed you at the first cast. I feel it. Has any city, save,

perhaps, Cairo, been so written out as Florence? I hear you querulous; you

raise your eyebrows; you sigh as you watch the tottering ash of your

second cigar. Mrs. Brown comes to tell you it is late. I agree with you

quickly. Florence has often been sketched before--putting Browning aside

with his astounding fresco-music--by Ruskin and George Eliot and Mr. Henry

James, to name only masters. But that is no reason why I should not try my

prentice hand. Florence alters not at all. Men do. My picture, poor as you

like, shall be my own. It is not their Florence or yours--and, remember, I

would strike at Tuscany through Florence, and throughout Tuscany keep my

eye in her beam,--but my own mellow kingcup of a town, the glowing heart

of the whole Arno basin, whose suave and weather-warmed grace I shall try

to catch and distil. But Mrs. Brown is right; it Is late: the huntsmen are

up in America, as your good kinsman has it, and I would never have you act

your own Antipodes. Addio.

I

EYE OF ITALY

[Footnote: My thanks are due to the Editor of _Black and White_ for

permission to reprint the substance of this essay.]

I have been here a few days only--perhaps a week: if it's impressionism

you're after, the time is now or a year hence. For, in these things of

three stages, two may be tolerable, the first clouding of the water with

the wine's red fire, or the final resolution of the two into one humane

consistence: the intermediate course is, like all times of process,

brumous and hesitant. After a dinner in the white piazza, shrinking slowly

to blue under the keen young moon's eye, watched over jealously by the

frowning bulk of Brunelleschi's globe--after a dinner of _pasta con

brodo_, veal cutlets, olives, and a bottle of right _Barbèra_, let

me give you a pastel (this is the medium for such evanescences) of

Florence herself. At present I only feel. No one should think--few people

can--after dinner. Be patient therefore; suffer me thus far.

I would spare you, if I might, the horrors of my night-long journey from

Milan. There is little romance in a railway: the novelists have worked it

dry. That is, however, a part of my sum of perceptions which began, you

may put it, at the dawn which saw Florence and me face to face. So I must

in no wise omit it.

I find, then, that Italian railway-carriages are constructed for the

convenience of luggage, and that passengers are an afterthought, as dogs

or grooms are with us, to be suffered only if there be room and on

condition they look after the luggage. In my case we had our full

complement of the staple; nevertheless every passenger assumed the god,

keeping watch on his traps, and thinking to shake the spheres at every

fresh arrival. Thoughtless behaviour! for there were thus twelve people

packed into a rocky landscape of cardboard portmanteaus and umbrella-

peaks; twenty-four legs, and urgent need of stretching-room as the night

wore on. There was jostling, there was asperity from those who could sleep

and from those who would; there was more when two shock-head drovers--like

First and Second Murderers in a tragedy--insisted on taking off their

boots. It was not that there was little room for boots; indeed I think

they nursed them on their thin knees. It was at any rate too much even for

an Italian passenger; for--well, well! their way had been a hot and a

dusty one, poor fellows. So the guard was summoned, and came with all the

implicit powers of an uniform and, I believe, a sword. The boots were

strained on sufficiently to preserve the amenities of the way: they could

not, of course, be what they had been; the carriage was by this a forcing-

house. And through the long night we ached away an intolerable span of

time with, for under-current, for sinister accompaniment to the pitiful

strain, the muffled interminable plodding of the engine, and the rack of

the wheels pulsing through space to the rhythm of some music-hall jingle

heard in snatches at home. At intervals came shocks of contrast when we

were brought suddenly face to face with a gaunt and bleached world. Then

we stirred from our stupor, and sat looking at each other's stale faces.

We had shrieked and clanked our way into some great naked station,

shivering raw and cold under the electric lights, streaked with black

shadows on its whitewash and patched with coarse advertisements. The

porters' voices echoed in the void, shouting _"Piacensa," "Parma,"

"Reggio," "Modena," "Bologna,"_ with infinite relish for the varied

hues of a final _a_. One or two cowed travellers slippered up

responsive to the call, and we, the veterans who endured, set our teeth,

shuddered, and smoked feverish cigarettes on the platform among the

carriage-wheels and points; or, if we were new hands, watched awfully the

advent of another sleeping train, as dingy as our own--yet a hero of

romance! For it bore the hieratic and tremendous words "_Roma, Firenze,

Milano_" It was privileged then; it ministered in the sanctuary. We

glowed in our sordid skins, and could have kissed the foot-boards that

bore the dust of Rome. I will swear I shall never see those three words

printed on a carriage without a thrill, _Roma, Firenze, Milano_,--

Lord! what a traverse.

Or we held long purposeless rests at small wayside places where no station

could be known, and the shrouded land stretched away on either side, not

to be seen, but rather felt, in the cool airs that blew in, and the

rustling of secret trees near by. No further sound was, save the muttered

talking of the guards without and the simmering of the engine, on

somewhere in front. And then "_Partenza!_" rang out in the night, and

"_Pronti!_" came as a faint echo on before. We laboured on, and the

dreams began where they had broken off. For we dreamed in these times,

fitful and lurid, coloured dreams; flashes of horrible crises in one's

life; Interminable precipices; a river skiff engulfed in a swirl of green

sea-water; agonies of repentance; shameful failure, defeat, memories--and

then the steady pulsing of the engine, and thick, impermeable darkness

choking up the windows again. How I ached for the dawn!

I awoke from what I believe to have been a panic of snoring to hear the

train clattering over the sleepers and points, and to see--oh, human,

brotherly sight!--the broad level light of morning stream out of the east.

We were stealing into a city asleep. Tall flat houses rose in the chill

mist to our left and stared blankly down upon us with close-barred green

eyelids. Gas-lamps in swept streets flickered dirty yellow in the garish

light. A great purple dome lay ahead, flanked by the ruddy roofs and

gables of a long church. My heart leapt for Florence. Pistoja!

And then, at Prato, a nut-brown old woman with a placid face got into our

carriage with a basket of green figs and some bottles of milk for the

Florentine market. So we were nearing. And soon we ran in between lines of

white and pink villas edged with rows of planes drenched still with dews

and the night mists, among bullock-carts and queer shabby little

_vetture_, everything looking light and elfin in the brisk sunshine

and autumn bite--into the barrel-like station, and I into the arms, say

rather the arm-chair, of Signora Vedova Paolini, chattiest and most

motherly of landladies.

Earth, Air, Fire, Water, Florence, form the five elements of our planet

according to the testimony of Boniface VIII. of clamant and not very

Catholic memory. That is true if you take it this way. You cannot resolve

an element; but you cannot resolve Florence; therefore Florence is an

element. _Ecco!_ She is like nothing else In Nature, or (which is

much the same thing) Art. You can have olives elsewhere, and Gothic

elsewhere; you can have both at Aries, for instance. You can have

_Campanili_ printed white (but not rose-and white, not rose-and-gold-

and-white) on blue anywhere along the Mediterranean from Tripoli to

Tangier: you will find Giotto at Padua, and statues growing in the open

air at Naples. But for the silvery magic of olives and blue; for a Gothic

which has the supernatural and always restless eagerness of the North,

held in check, reduced to our level by the blessedly human sanity of

Romanesque; for sculpture which sprouts from the crumbling church-sides

like some frankly happy stone-crop, or wall-flower, just as wholesomely

coloured and tenderly shaped, you must come to Florence. Come for choice

in this golden afternoon of the year. Green figs are twelve-a-penny; you

can get peaches for the asking, and grapes and melons without it; brown

men are treading the wine-fat in every little white hill-town, and in

Florence itself you may stumble upon them, as I once did, plying their

mystery in a battered old church--sight only to be seen in Italy, where

religions have been many, but religionists substantially the same. That is

the Italian way; there was the practical evidence. Imagine the sight. A

gaunt and empty old basilica, the beams of the Rood still left, the dye of

fresco still round the walls and tribune--here the dim figure of Sebastian

roped to his tree, there the cloudy forms of Apostles or the Heavenly Host

shadowed in masses of crimson or green--and, down below, a slippery purple

sea, frothed sanguine at the edges, and wild, half-naked creatures

treading out the juice, dancing in the oozy stuff rhythmically, to the

music of some wailing air of their own. _Saturnia regna_ indeed, and

in the haunt of Sant' Ambrogio, or under the hungry eye of San Bernardino,

or other lean ascetic of the Middle Age. But that, after all, is Italian,

not necessarily Florentine or Tuscan. I must needs abstract the unique

quintessential humours of this my Eye of Italy. Stendhal, do you remember?

didn't like one of these. He said that in Florence people talked about

"huesta hasa" when they would say "questa casa," and thus turned Italian

into a mad Arabic. So they do, especially the women: why not? The poor

Stendhal loved Milan, wrote himself down "Arrigo Milanese"--and what can

you expect from a Milanese?

They tell me, who know Florence well, that she is growing unwieldy. Like a

bulky old _concierge_ they say, she sits in the passage of her Arno,

swollen, fat, and featureless, a kind of Chicago, a city of tame

conveniences ungraced by arts. That means that there are suburbs and

tramways; it means that the gates will not hold her in; it has a furtive

stab at the Railway Station and the omnibus in the Piazza del Duorno: it

is _Mornings in Florence_. The suggestion is that Art is some pale

remote virgin who must needs shiver and withdraw at the touch of actual

life: the art-lover must maunder over his mistress's wrongs instead of

manfully insisting upon her rights, her everlasting triumphant

justifications. Why this watery talk of an Art that was and may not be

again, because we go to bed by electricity and have our hair brushed by

machinery? Pray, has Nature ceased? or Life? Art will endure with these

fine things, which in Florence, let me say, are very fine indeed. But

there's a practical answer to the indictment. As a city she is a mere

cupful. You can walk from Cantagalli's, at the Roman Gate, to the Porta

San Gallo, at the end of the Via Cavour, in half the time it would take

you to go from Newgate to Kensington Gardens. Yet whereas in London such a

walk would lead you through a slice of a section, in Florence you would

cut through the whole city from hill to hill. You are never away from the

velvet flanks of the Tuscan hills. Every street-end smiles an enchanting

vista upon you. Houses frowning, machicolated and sombre, or gay and

golden-white with cool green jalousies and spreading eaves, stretch before

you through mellow air to a distance where they melt into hills, and hills

into sky; into sky so clear and rarely blue, so virgin pale at the

horizon, that the hills sleep brown upon it under the sun, and the

cypresses, nodding a-row, seem funeral weeds beside that radiant purity.

Some such adorable stretch of tilth and pasture, sky and cloud, hangs like

a god's crown beyond the city and her towers. In the long autumn twilight

Fiesole and the hills lie soft and purple below a pale green sky. There is

a pause at this time when the air seems washed for sleep-every shrub,

every feature of the landscape is cut clean as with a blade. The light

dies, the air deepens to wet violet, and the glimpses of the hill-town

gleam like snow. At such times Samminiato looms ghostly upon you and fades

slowly out. The flush in the East faints and fails and the evening star

shines like a gem. It is hot and still in the broad Piazza Santa Maria;

they are lighting the lamps; the swarm grows of the eager, shabby,

spendthrift crowd of young Italians, so light-hearted and fluent, and so

prodigal of this old Italy of theirs--and ours. All this I have been

watching as I might. Nature clings to the city, playing her rhythmic dance

at the end of every street.

Nature clings. Yes; but she is within as well as without. What is that

sentimental platitude of somebody's (the worst kind of platitude, is it

not?) about the sun being to flowers what Art is to Life? It has the

further distinction of being untrue. In Florence you learn that what he is

to flowers, that he is to Art. For I soberly believe that under his rays

Florence has grown open like some rare white water-lily; that sun and sky

have set the conditions, struck, as it were, the chord. I have wandered

through and through her recessed ways the length of this bright and breezy

October week; and have marked where I walked the sun's great hand laid

upon palace and cloister and bell-tower. _He_ has summoned up these

flat-topped houses, these precipitous walls beneath which winds the

darkened causeway. One seems to be travelling in a mountain gorge with,

above, a thin ribbon of sky, fluid blue, flawless of cloud, like the sea.

_He_, that so masterful sun, has given Florence the apathetic, beaten

aspect of a southern town; he and the temperate sky have fixed the tone

for ever; and the nimble air--"nimbly and sweetly" recommending itself--

has given the quaintness and the freaksomeness of the North. This bursts

out, young and irresponsible, in pinnacle, crocket, and gable, in towers

like spears, and in the eager lancet windows which peer upwards out of

Orsammichele and the Dominican Church. This mixture is Florence and has

made her art. The blue of the sky gives the key to her palette, the breath

of the west wind, the salt wind from our own Atlantic, tingles in her

_campanili_; and the Italian sun washes over all with his lazy gold.

Habit and inclination both speak. She rejects no wise thing and accepts

every lovely thing. Nature and Art have worked hand in hand, as they will

when, we let them. For what is an art so inimitable, so innocent, so

intimate as this of Tuscany, after all, but a high effort of creative

Nature--_Natura naturans_, as Spinosa calls her? Here, on the

weather-fretted walls, a Delia Robbia blossoms out in natural colours--

blue and white and green. They are Spring's colours. You need not go into

the Bargello to understand Luca and Andrea at their happy task; as well go

to a botanical museum to read the secret of April. See them on the dusty

wall of Orsammichele. They have wrought the blossom of the stone--clusters

of bright-eyed flowers with the throats and eyes of angels, singing, you

might say, a children's hymn to Our Lady, throned and pure in the midst of

the bevy. See the Spedale degli Innocenti, where a score of little flowery

white children grow, open-armed, out of their sky-blue medallions. Really,

are they lilies, or children, or the embodied strophes of a psalter? you

ask. I mix my metaphors like an Irishman, but you will see my meaning. All

the arts blend in art: "rien ne fait mieux entendre combien un faux sonnet

est ridicule que de s'imaginer une femme ou une maison faite sur ce

modèle-là." Pascal knew; and so did Philip Sidney, "Nature never set forth

the earth in so rich tapestry as divers poets have done"; and the nearer

truth seems to be that Art is Nature made articulate, Nature's soul

inflamed with love and voicing her secrets through one man to many. So

there may be no difference between me and a cabbage-rose but this, that I

can consider my own flower, how it grows, or rather, when it is grown.

It is very pleasant sometimes to think that wistful guess of Plato's true

in spite of everything--that the state is the man grown great, as the

universe is the state grown Infinite. It explains that Florence has a

soul, the broader image of her sons', and that this soul speaks in Art,

utters itself in flower of stone and starry stretches of fresco (like that

serene blue and grey band in the Sistine chapel which redeems so many of

Rome's waste places), sings colour-songs (there are such affairs) on

church and cloister walls. Seeing these good things, we should rather hear

the town's voice crying out her fancy to friendly hearts. Thus--let me run

the figure to death--if Luca's blue-eyed medallions are the crop of the

wall, they are also the soul of Florence, singing a blithe secular song

about gods whose abiding charm is the art that made them live. And if the

towers and domes are the statelier flowers of the garden, lily, hollyhock,

tulip of the red globe, so they are Florence again as she strains forward

and up, sternly defiant in the Palazzo Vecchio, bright and curious at

Santa Croce, pure, chaste as a seraph, when, thrilling with the touch of

Giotto, she gazes in the clarity of her golden and rosy marbles, tinted

like a pearl and shaped like an archangel, towards the blue vault whose

eye she is.

Wandering, therefore, through this high city; loitering on the bridge

whereunder turbid Arno glitters like brass; standing by the yellow

Baptistery; or seeing in Santa Croce cloister--where I write these lines--

seven centuries of enthusiasm mellowed down by sun and wind into a comely

dotage of grey and green, one is disposed to wonder whether we are only

just beginning to understand Art, or to misunderstand it? Has the world

slept for two thousand years? Is Degas the first artist? Was Aristotle the

first critic, and is Mr. George Moore the second? As a white pigeon cuts

the blue, and every opinion of him shines as burnished agate in the live

air, things shape themselves somewhat. I begin to see that Art _is_,

and that men have been, and shall be, but never _are_. Facts are an

integral part of life, but they are not life. I heard a metaphysician say

once that matter was the adjective of life, and thought it a mighty pretty

saying. In a true sense, it would seem, Art is that adjective. For so

surely as there are honest men to insist how true things are or how proper

to moralising, there will be Art to sing how lovely they are, and what

amiable dwellings for us. Thus fortified, I think I can understand

Magister Joctus Florentiæ. He lies behind these crumbling walls. Traces of

his crimson and blue still stain the cloister-walk. What was he telling us

in crimson and blue? How dumb Zacharias spelt out the name of his son John

in the roll of a book? Hardly that, I think.

II

LITTLE FLOWERS

The Via del Monte alle Croce is a leafy way cut between hedgerows, in the

morning time heavy with dew and the smell of wet flowers. Where it strays

out of the Giro al Monte there is a crumbly brick wall, a well, and a

little earthen shrine to Madonna--a daub, it is true, of glaring chromes

and blues, thick in glaze and tawdry devices of stout cupids and roses,

but somehow, on this suggestive Autumn morning, innocent and blue of eye

as the carolling throngs of Luca which it travesties. And a pious

inscription cut below testifieth how Saint Francis, "in friendly talk with

the Blessed Mariano di Lugo," paused here before it, and then vanished. It

is not necessary to believe in ghosts; but I'll go bail that story is

true. We are but two stones' throw from the gaunt hulk of a Franciscan

Church; a file of dusty cypresses marks the ruins of a painful Calvary cut

in the waste and shale of the hill-side. Below, as in a green pasture,

Florence shines like a dove's egg in her nest of hills; I can pick out

among the sheaf of spears which hedge her about the daintiest of them all,

the crocketed pinnacle of Santa Croce, grey on blue; and then the lean

ridge of a shrine the barest, simplest and most honest in all Tuscany.

Certainly Saint Francis, "familiarmente discorrendo," appeared in this

place. I need no reference to the Annals of the Seraphic Order--part, book

and page--to convince me. My stone gives them. "Ann. Ord. Min. Tom. cclii.

fasc. 3.," and so on. That is but a sorry concession to our short-

sightedness. For if we believe not the shrine which we have seen, how

shall we believe Giotto? What of Giotto? That is my point.

Something too much, it may be, of modern art-criticism, which is ashamed

of thinking, snuffeth at pictures which tell you things, at literature in

books or music or church ornament. Is literature not good anywhere? Have

we exhausted the _Arabian Nights_ or the _Acta Sanctorum_? At

any rate, if we must choose between Giotto and the prophet of the

_Yellow Book_, my heart is fixed. I am for the teller of tales.

Story-telling it is, glorification of one whom Mr. George Moore would call

(has, indeed, called) a "squint-eyed Italian Saint"--and whether he

objected to malformity, nationality or calling, I never could learn--this

too it may be; it may tend to edification and I know not what beside. I

will grant all that. And though it is hard to prophesy what might have

happened five hundred years ago; though there might have been a Giotto

without a Francis of whom to speak; yet I never knew a case where a

painter (call him poet if you will; he will be none the worse for that)

fell so directly into the gap awaiting him. The Gospel living and tangible

again! Spirits, apparitions, as of three mysterious sisters, met you in

the open country, and crying "Hail! Lady Poverty," straightly vanished. A

legend was a-making round about the strange life not fifty years closed, a

life which seems, extravagance apart, to have been a lyrical outburst, a

strophe in the hymn of praise which certain happy people were singing just

then. It was a _Gloria in Excelsis_ for a second time in Christian

Annals which did not end in a wail of "Agnus Dei qui tollis peccata,

miserere." Why should it? Should the children of the bride-chamber fast

when the bridegroom was with them? And of all the "wreath'd singers at the

marriage-door," blithest and sanest was Master Joctus of Florence. This

being so, I hope I shall not be accused of any mischief if I say that in

Giotto I see one of the select company of immortals whose work can never

be surpassed because it is entirely adequate to the facts and atmosphere

he selected. The standard of a work of art must always be--Is it well

done? rather than--Is it well intentioned? Wherefore, if Giotto or anybody

else choose to spend himself upon a sermon or an essay or an article of

the Creed, and do well thereby, I may not blame him, nor call him back to

study the play of light across a marsh or the flight of pigeons in the

westering sun. Ma, basta, basta cosi, you may say with the Cavaliere of

Goldoni.

Santa Croce church is of the barrack-room stamp, dim and enormous, grey

with years and seamed with work. Its impressiveness (for with Orvieto and

a fleet of churches at Ravenna it stands above all Italy in that) consists

mainly, I believe, in its being built of exactly the moral bones of the

religion it was intended to embody. An Italian religion, namely; perfectly

sane, at bottom practical, with a base of plain, everyday, ten-commandment

morality. That was the base of Saint Francis' good brown life: therefore

Santa Croce is admirably built, squared, mortised and compacted by skilled

workmen to whom brick-laying was a fine art. But, withal, this religion

had its lyric raptures, its "In fuoco Amor mi mise," or its sobbing at the

feet of the Crucified, its _Corotto_ and Seven Sorrowful Mysteries:

accordingly Santa Croce, like a pollarded lime, reserves its buds,

harbours and garners them, throws out no suckers or lateral adornments the

length of its trunk, but bursts into a flowery crown of them at the top--a

whole row of chapels along the cross-beam of the _tau_; and in the

place of honour a shallow apse pierced with red lancets and aglow like an

opal. Never a chapel of them but is worth study and a stiff neck. After

the Rule came the _Fioretti_; after Francis and Bonaventure came

Celano and Jacopone da Todi; after Arnolfo del Lapo and his attention to

business came the hours of ease when he planned the airy plume on which

the Church leaps skyward; and came also Giotto to weave the crown of Santa

Croce.

I take the Tuscan nature to be so constituted that it will play with any

given subject of speculation in much the same way. With one or two mighty

exceptions to be sure--Dante, of course, Buonarroti, of course, and, for

all his secularities. Boccace--it is not imagination you find in Tuscany.

Rather, it is a sweet and delicate, a wholesome, home-grown fancy,

wantoning with thought which may be unpleasant, unhealthy, grave,

frivolous--what you will; yet playing in such a way, and with such

intuitive taste and breeding that no harm ensues nor any nausea. They

realise for me a fairy country; I can think no evil of a Tuscan. So I can

read Boccace the infidel, Poggio the gross, where Voltaire makes me a

bigot and Catulle Mendes ashamed. The fresh breeze blowing through the

_Decameron_ keeps the air sweet. Even Lorenzo is a child for me, and

Macchiavel, "the man without a soul," I decline to take seriously.

Consider, then, all Tuscan art from this point of view, the weaving of

innocent fancies round some chance-caught theme, Christianity may have

been the _point d'appui_. No doubt it generally was. What then? Have

you never heard two children dreaming aloud of the ways of God, or the

troubles of Christ? How they humanise, how they realise the Mystery! Just

such a pretty babble I find in the Spanish Chapel, which to take in any

other spirit would work a madness in the brain. You remember the North

wall, apotheosis of Saint Thomas and what-not, for all the world like a

paradigm of the irregular verb "Aquinizo." What are we to suppose Lippo

Memmi (or whoever else it was) to have been about when he hung in mid-air

on his swinging bridge and stained the wet square red and green? To read

Ruskin you would think he was fulminating _urbi et orbi_ with the

_Summa_ or _Cur Deus homo_ at his fingers' ends. Depend upon it

he was doing quite other, or the artistic temper (phrase rendered

loathsome by the halfpenny newspapers) suffered a relapse between the days

of King David and the days of his brother Lippo Lippi. Are we to suppose

that a man who could live in intimate commerce with fourteen such gracious

ladies as he has set there, ranged on their carved sedilia--his Britomart

trim and debonnair; his willowy Carità; his wimpled matron in clean white

who masquerades as I know not what branch of theology; his pretty girlish

Geometry of coiled and braided hair and the yet unloosed girdle of demure

virginity; his maid Musica crowned with roses, and Logica, the bold-eyed

and open-throated wench, hand to hip--is this the man for sententiousness?

Out, out! Could any one save a humourist of high order have given Moses

such a pair of horns, or set, under Music, such a shagged Tubal to

belabour an anvil? The wall sings like an anthology,--a Gothic anthology

where "Bele Aliz matin leva" is versicle, and "In un boschetto trovai

pastorella" antiphon. You might as well talk of Christian Mathematics as

of Christian Art, or bind the sweet influences of Pleiades as the volant

sallies of a poet's wit.

Once we get it into our heads that the Tuscans were fanciful children,

always, and the discrepancy of critics, of Ruskin and Mr. George Moore, of

Rio and Mr. Addington Symonds, may vanish. For another thing, we shall

understand and allow for the standard of Santa Croce and the

_Fioretti_. From the latter nosegay! take this: