answer. An echo, only, fluttered and grew faint down the stone steps. He
hoisted his cloak from the shoulder and swung his right arm free. Then he
knocked again. Nothing. No sign. Heavy silence; only a distant murmur of
voices, muffled and infinitely far, from the Campo on the hill.
"The game has flown! Or the old dog sleeps." Maso sighed, for he wanted to
see him drop gurgling to his knees. Still, it made his affair easier. He
gave one fierce hoist to his cloak, twitched his right arm once or twice,
and gently turned the handle. Then he stepped lightly and daintily into
the room.
A candle guttered on a little table in the corner, and the Crucified
showed white upon the black cross above. Marco Zoppa lay on his bed with
his throat cut from ear to ear. The cut was so resolute that his head
stuck out at an angle from his body--almost a right angle; and in some
struggle he had got his nostril sliced. That gave him an odd,
_mesquin_ expression, lying there with his mouth open and his yawning
nostril, as if he wanted to sneeze. The room smelt stale and sour; the
thick air gathered in a misty halo round the candle, and a fat shroud of
tallow drooped over the edges of the candlestick.
Maso dropped his long, clean knife; dropped on to his knees and wailed
like a chained dog. He could not take his eyes from the horrible black pit
between the dead man's chin and trunk. Out of that pit a thin scarlet
stream was still slipping lazily, and crawling down the white coverlet to
the floor. Maso's wailing attracted a dog near by. He too set off howling
from behind his door: and then another, and another. There was a chorus of
howls, long-drawn, pitiful, desolate; and Maso, the only man in that
woeful company, howled like any dog of the pack.
Gradually his moaning sank and then stopped with a dry sob. He crawled on
his knees a little nearer to the bed and eyed fearfully a patch of blood
on the counterpane. Just God! what was that patch? A faint circle smeared
with the finger, and through the midst of it a ragged dart. Carlo
Formaggia had been there! He knew that mark! And then the whole truth
blazed before him like a sheet of fire. He fell forward on his face. The
thin thread of scarlet from Marco Zoppa's gaping throat crawled drop by
drop on to his shoulder.
Carlo Formaggia had limed his bird.
XII
WITH THE BROWN BEAR
The secret of happy travelling is contrast. Suffer, that you may drowse
thereafter: grill, that you may have a heat on you worth assuagement.
Wherefore, to the Italian wanderer, it will be worth while to endure the
fierceness of the Lombard plain, even the gilded modernisms of Milan
(blistering though they may be under the stroke of the naked sun) and the
dusty, painful traverse of the Apennines, to drop down at last into the
broad green peace of the Val D'Arno. Take, however, the first halting-
place you can. You will find yourself in a hollow of the hills, helping
the brown bear of Pistoja keep the Northern gates of Tuscany. It is not
unlikely that the Apennine may "walk abroad with the storm," or hide his
moss-brown slopes in great sheets of mist. This, while it means a fine
sight, means also rain for Pistoja. A quiet rain will accordingly fall
upon the little city, gently but persistently. Only in the gleams may you
guess that you have the Tuscan sky over you and the smiling Tuscan Art
round about. But the ways of the Pistolesi will confirm the feeble knees;
such at least was my case.
For the Pistolesi were there beside foul weather, and splashed about under
green umbrellas with prodigious jokes to cut at each other's expense, of a
sort we reserve for Spring or early June. For them, with a vintage none
too good to be garnered, it might have been the finest weather in the
world: but I am bound to add my belief that they would have laughed were
it the worst. With no money, no weather, and taxes intolerable, Pistoja
laughed and looked handsome. Was not Boccaccio a Pistolese? I was reminded
of his book at every turn of the road: life is a wanton story there, or,
say, a Masque of Green Things, enacted by a splendid fairy rout. They were
still the well-favoured race Dino Compagni described them far back in the
fourteenth century--"formati di bella statura oltre a' Toscani," he says.
The words hold good of their grandsons--the men leaner and longer, hardier
and keener than you find them in Lucca or Siena; and the women carry their
heads high, and when they smile at you (as they will) you think the sun
must be shining. They are mountaineers, a strong race. At _pallone_
one day, I saw muscles "all a-ripple down the back," arms and shoulders,
which would have intoxicated the great old "amatore del persona" himself.
For their vivacity, it is racial; I think all Tuscans, more or less,
retain the buoyant spirits, the alertness as of birds, which crowned Italy
with Florence instead of Rome or Milan. Tuscan Art is a proof of that, and
Tuscan Art can be studied at its roots in Pistoja: you see there the naked
thing itself with none of the wealth of Florence to make the head swim. If
Florence had stopped short at the death of Giuliano de' Medici, you might
say Pistoja was Florence seen through the diminishing-glass. Is not that
ribbed dome, with its purple mass domineering over the huddled roofs,
Brunelleschi's? It is a faithful copy of Vasari's hatching; but no matter.
So with the Baptistery, the towers, the grim old corniced palaces, the
_sdruccioli_ and gloomy clefts which serve for streets. But you would
be wrong. Pisa is the real parent of Pistoja, as indeed she is of
Florence-Dante's Florence. Pisa's magnificent building repeats to itself
here: Gothic with a touch of Latin sanity, a touch of the genuine Paganism
which loves the dædal earth and cannot bring itself to be out of touch
with it. San Giovanni _fuoricivitas_, what a rock-hewn church it is!
A rigid oblong, dark as the twilight, running with the street without
belfry or window or façade. Three tiers of shallow arcades on spiral
columns, never a window to be seen, and the whole of solemn black marble
narrowly striped with white. Is there such a beast as a black tiger--a
tiger where the tawny and black change places? San Giovanni is modelled
after that fashion. It is very old--twelfth century at latest--very shabby
and weather-beaten, dusty and deserted. But it will outlive Pistoja; and
that is probably what Pistoja desired.
This black and white, which is so reminiscent of early Florence, is
carried out with more fidelity to the model in the Piazza. The octagonal
Baptistery is, no doubt, a copy of Dante's beloved church; but it is much
better placed, does not "shun to be admired" like its beautiful yellowed
sister. The Duomo is of Pisa again, and has a tower, half belfry, half
fortress, which once the Podestà seized and held while the plucky little
town endured a siege. The Brown Bear stood out long against the Lily. But
Lorenzo showed his teeth: and the Wolf prevailed at last. Sculpture apart,
the resemblance to Florence stops here. None of her Cinque-cento bravery
and little of her earlier and finer Renaissance came this way. But one
thing came; one clean breath from "that solemn fifteenth century" did blow
to this verge of Tuscan soil, a breath from Luca della Robbia and his men.
They may flower more exuberantly in Florence, those broad, blue-eyed
platters of theirs; nowhere is their purpose more explicit, their charm
more exquisitely appreciable than here. There is a chance of considering
the art on its own merits; better, you can see it more truly as it was at
home, since Florence has caught some little of Haussmannism and is not as
Luca left it. So here, perhaps best of all, you may try to plumb the
depths of the Della Robbia soul,--through its purity and limpid candour,
through its shining, sweetly wholesome homeliness, down to the crystal
sincerity burning recessed in the shrine. It is the fashion to say of
Angelico da Fiesole that his was a naïveté which amounted to genius: a
thin phrase, which may nevertheless pass to qualify the inspired
miniaturist. The religiosity of the Della Robbia, while no less naïve, is
really far other. It is not Gothic at all, nor ascetic, nor mystic. It
would be Latin, were it not blithe enough to be Greek. It speaks of what
is and must be, and is well content; not of what should, or might be, if
one could but tear off this crust. It seems probable that it speaks as
pure a Paganism--just that very Paganism which Pisan building represents--
as has been seen since the workmen of Tanagra fashioned their little clay
familiars for the tombs, slim Greek girls in their reedy habit as they
lived, or chattering matrons like those you read of in Theocritus. Much
fine phrasing has been spent upon the effort to analyse the æsthetics of
Delia Robbia ware. Its inexhaustible charm is unquestionable; but just
where does it catch one's breath? Not altogether in the clean colouring,
like nothing so much as that of a cool, glazed dairy at home,--"milky-
blue," "cream-white," "butter-yellow," "parsley-green," all the dairy
names come pat to pen--; not necessarily in the sheer, April loveliness of
form and expression, though that would count for much; nor, I believe, as
Mr. Pater would have us acknowledge, in the evanescent delicacy of each
motive and sentiment,--the arresting of a single sigh, a single wave of
desire, a single stave of the Magnificat. All this is true, and true only
of Luca, and yet the whole charm is not there. Rather, I think, you will
find it in the fusing of humble material--the age-old clay of the potter
(of the Master-Potter, for that matter)--and fine art, whereby the wayside
shrine is linked to the high altar, and _contadino_ and Vicar-
Apostolic can hail a common ideal. Every lane, every cottage, has its
Madonna-shrine here; lumped in clay or daubed in raw colour, nothing can
obliterate the sweet sentiment of these poor weeds of art, these tawdry
little appeals to the better part of us. Madonna cries with a bared red
heart; she supports a white Christ; suave she stoops to enfold a legion of
children in her mantle. She is as Tuscan as the brownest of them; but a
Tuscan of the rarest mould, they would have you to see, of a cleanliness
quite unapproachable, of a benignity wholly divine. One learns the secret
of devotional art best of all in such ephemeral sanctuaries. And since
Fine Art is the flower of these shabby roots, Italy only, where
Cincinnatus worked in his garden, can furnish so wonderful a harmony of
opposites. Surely it is the most democratic country in Europe. I saw a
Colonel the other day, in Bologna, carrying a newspaper parcel. He was in
full uniform. It was the secret of Saint Francis that he knew how to
bridge the gulf on either side of which we, prisoners in feudal holds,
have cried to each other in vain. It was the secret of the Delia Robbia
too. The god shall sink that we may rise to meet him in the way. Why not?
Here in Pistoja are some precious pieces--a _Visitation_ in San
Giovanni, a pearly _Madonna Incoronata_ on the big door of San
Giacopo, concerning which it would be difficult to account to one's self
for the added zest given by the mantle of fine dust which has settled down
on the pale folds of the drapery and outlined the square blue panels of
the background. After all, is it not one more touch of the hedgerow, a
symbol of the hedgerow-faith not quite dead in the byeways of Italy?
But I know I shall never convey the spontaneity with which Fra Paolino's
_Visitation_ strikes quick for the heart. The thing is so momentary,
a mere quiver of emotion passing from one woman to another. The pair of
them have looked in to the deeps. Then the older stumbles forward to her
knees, and the girl stoops down to raise her. One guesses the rest. They
will be sobbing together in a minute, the girl's face buried in the
other's shoulder. All you are to see is just the wistfulness,--"My dear!
my dear!" And then the Virgin, full of Grace, but a shy girl in her teens
for all that, hides her hot cheeks and cries her little wild heart to
quietness. Some of it is in Albertinelli's fine picture, but not all. All
of it--and here's the point--is to be seen in the street among these
clear-eyed Tuscan women, just as Fra Paolino (himself of Pistoja) saw it
before our time, and then fixed it for ever in blue and white.
And now cross the Piazza and come down the steep incline by the Palazzo
Commune, turn to the left, and behold the crown of Pistoja, the Spedale
del Ceppo. Everybody knows Luca's masterpiece at Florence, the Foundling
Hospital on whose front are some twenty _bambini_ in pure white on
blue: babies or flowers, one does not know which. In 1514 the Pistolesi
remodelled their own hospital, and called in the successors to Luca's
mystery to make it joyful. Andrea, Giovanni, Luca II. and Girolamo came
and conjured in turn, and their wallflowers sprouted from the limewashed
sides. I fancy myself out in the patched Piazzo del Ceppo as I write,
looking again on the pleasant quietness of it all. It is a grey day with
thunder smouldering somewhere in the hills, close and heavy. The blind
walls about me stare hard in the raw light, but the wards of the hospital
are open back and front to the air; it is a rest for the eye to look into
their cool depths within the loggia. It is a square, very plain, yellow
building, this hospital, unrelieved save for its loggia, its painted
frieze of earthenware, and a rickety cross to denote its pious uses.
Through the wards I can see to the wet sky again and a gable-end of vivid
red and yellow. A thin black Christ on his cross stands up against this
bright square of distance, pathetic silhouette enough for me; reminder
something sinister, you might think, for the sick folk inside. But not so;
this is a crucifix, not a _Crucifixion_. This poor wooden Rood,
bowing in the shade, speaks not of high tragedy, but of the simple annals
of the poor again; not of St. John, but of St. Luke, I shall be called
sentimental; but with the band of garden colours before me I can't get
away from the streets and alleys, I am not sure the craftsmen intended I
should.
The hospital itself is low and square; it is limewashed all over, and has
the blind and beaten aspect of all Italian houses:--red-purplish tiles
running into deep eaves, jalousied windows, and the loggia. It is on the
face of this that the workers in baked clay--"lavoro molto utile per la
state," so cool and fresh is it, so redolent of green pastures and the
winds of April--have moulded the Seven Acts of Pure Mercy in colours as
pure; blue of morning sky, grass-green, daffodil-yellow. Once more, no
heroics: here is what the workmen knew and we see. Black and white
_frati_, not idealised at all, but sleek and round in the jaw as a
monk will get on oil and _asciutta_, minister to sunburnt peasants,
and ruddy girls as massive in the waist and stout in the ankle as their
sisters of to-day. Then, of course, there is Allegory. Allegory of your
well-ordered, gravitated sort, which takes us no whit further from
wholesome earth and the men and women so plainly and happily made of it.
No soaring, no transcendentalism. Carità is a deep-breasted market-girl
nursing two brown babies, whom I have just seen sprawling over a gourd in
the Campo Marzio; Fortezza, Speranza, Fede, I know them all, bless their
sober, good eyes! in the fruit-market, or selling newspapers, or plaiting
straws in the Piazza. After this we slide into religion pure and direct,
the beautiful ridiculous Paganism which has never left the plain heathen-
folk. Wreathed medallions in the spandrils give us Mary warned, Mary
visited, Mary homing to her Son, Mary crowned; what would they do without
their Bona Dea in Tuscany? She is of them, and yet always a little beyond
their grasp. Not too far, however. That means Gothicism. The advantage of
the Italian religious ideal is obvious. Art may never leave for long
together the good brown earth; and it can serve religion well when it
plucks up a type to set, clean as God made it, just a little above our
reach, to show Whose is "the earth and the fulness thereof."
An example. I leave the white and crumbling Piazza, its old marble well,
its beggars, its sick, and its meadow-fresh border of Delia Robbia
planting, and stray up the Via del Ceppo towards the ramparts. High at a
barred window a brown mother with a brown dependent baby smiles down upon
my wayfaring. She has fine broad brows and a patient face; when she
smiles, out of mere kindness for my solitary goings, it is pleasant to
note the gleam of light on her teeth and lips. I take off my hat, as Luca
or Lippo would have done, to "ma cousine la Reine des cieux."
Thus goes life In Pistoja and the rest of the world.
XIII
DEAD CHURCHES AT FOLIGNO
From my roof-top, whither I am fled to snatch what cooler airs may drift
into this cup of earth, I can see above the straggling tiles of gable and
loggia the cupolas and belfries of many churches. I know they are all
dead; for I have wound a devious way through the close inhospitable
streets and met them or their ghosts at every corner. The ghost of a dead
church is the worst of all disembodied sighs: he wails and chatters at
you. Here I have seen churches whose towers were fallen and their tribunes
laid bare to the insults of the work-a-day world. There were churches with
ugly gashes in them, fresh and smarting still; some had sightless eyes, as
of skulls; and there were churches piecemeal and scattered like the
splinters of the True Cross. A great foliated arch of travertine would
frame a patch of plaster and soiled casement just broad enough for some
lolling pair of shoulders and shock-head atop; a sacred emblem, some
_Agnus_ indefinably venerable, some proud old cognisance of the See,
or frayed Byzantine symbol (plaited with infinite art by its former
contrivers), such and other consecrated fragments would stuff a hole to
keep the wind away from a donkey-stall or _Fabbrica di pasta_ in a
muddy lane. I met dismantled walls still blushing with the stains of
fresco--a saint's robe, the limp burden of the Addolorata;--I met texts
innumerable, shrines fly-ridden and, often as not, mocked with dead
flowers. And now, as I see these grey towers and the grand purple line of
the hills hemming in the Tiber Valley, I know I am come down to the sated
South, to the confines of Umbria, the country of dead churches, and of
Rome the metropolis of such deplorable broken toys. This appears to me the
disagreeable truth concerning the harbourage of Saint Francis and Saint
Bernardine, and of Roberto da Lecce, a man who, if everybody had his
rights, would be known as great in his way as either. You will remember
that Luther found it out before me. The religious enthusiasm we bring in
may serve our turn while we are here: it will be odd if any survive for
the return; impossible to go away as fervid as we come. Other enthusiasms
will fatten; but the wonderful Gothic adumbration of Christianity was born
in the North and has never been healthy anywhere else. Gothicism, driven
southward, runs speedily to seed; an amazing luxuriance, a riot, strange
flowers of heavy shapes and maddening savour; and then that worse
corruption to follow a perfection premature. So mediæval Christianity in
Umbria is a ruin, but not for Salvator Rosa; it has not been suffered a
dignified death. That is the sharpest cut of all, that the poor bleached
skull must be decked with paper roses.
All this is forced upon me by my last days in Tuscany where a lower mean
has secured a serener reign. I had hardly realised the comeliness of its
intellectual vigour without this abrupt contrast. Pistoja, with its
pleasant worship of the wholesome in common life; Lucca, girdled with the
grey and green of her immemorial planes, and adorned with the silvery
gloss of old marble and stone-cutter's work exquisitely curious; then
Prato, dusty little handful of old brick palaces and black and white
towers, where I heard a mass before the high altar but two Sundays ago.
All Prato was in church that showery morning, I think. The air was close,
even in the depths of the great nave: the fans all about me kept up a
continual flicker, like bats' wings, and the men had to use their hats, or
handkerchiefs where they had them. To hear the responses rolling about the
chapels and echoing round the timbers of the roof you would have said the
thunder had come. It was too dark to see Lippi's light-hearted
secularities in the choir; one saw them, however, best in the
congregation--the same appealing innocence in the grey-eyed women, and the
men with the same grave self-possession and the same respectful but
deliberate concern with their own affairs which gives you the idea that
they are lending themselves to divine service rather out of politeness
than from any more intimate motive. Lippi saw this in Prato four centuries
ago, and I, after him, saw it all again in a rustic sacrifice which I
should find it hard to distinguish from earlier sacrifices in the same
spot. And indeed it is informed with precisely the same spirit, an
inarticulate reverence for the Dynamic in Nature. How many religions can
be reduced to that! In Florence again, what a hardy slip of the old stock
still survives! You may see how the worship of Venus Genetrix and Maria
Deipara merged in the work of Botticelli and Ghirlandajo, Michael Angelo
and Andrea del Sarto; you may see how, if asceticism has never thriven
there, there was (and still is) an effort after selection of some sort and
a scrupulous respect for the _elegantia quædam_ which Alberti held to
be almost divine; you may see, at least, a religion which still binds, and
which, making no great professions, has grown orderly and surely to
respect. Thus from a Tuscany, pagan, kindly, exuberant and desponding by
turns, but always ready with that long slow smile you first meet in the
Lorenzetti of Siena and afterwards find so tenderly expressed in its
different manifestations in the Delia Robbia and Botticelli--a smile where
patience and wistfulness struggle together and finally kiss,--I came down
to Umbria and a people dying of what M. Huysmans grandiosely calls "our
immense fatigue." Here is a people that has loved asceticism not wisely.
This asceticism, pushed to the limit where it becomes a kind of
sensuality, has bitten into Umbria's heart; and Umbria, with a cloyed
palate, sees her frescos peel and lets her sanctuaries out to bats and
green lizards. Surely the worst form of moral jaundice is where the
sufferer watches his affections palsy, but makes no stir.