intrigue with a pretty woman, and sometimes women far above me had cast
their eyes down on the arena as in Spain ladies do in the bull-ring to
pick a lover out thence for his strength: but I had never cared. I had
loved, laughed, and wandered away with the stroller's happy liberty; but
I had never cared. Now all at once the whole world seemed dead; dead,
heaven and earth; and only one woman's two eyes left living in the
universe; living, and looking into my soul and burning it to ashes. Do
you know what I mean? No?--ay, then you know not love.
* * *
Sometimes I think love is the darkest mystery of life: mere desire will
not explain it, nor will the passions or the affections. You pass years
amidst crowds, and know naught of it; then all at once you meet a
stranger's eyes, and never are you free. That is love. Who shall say
whence it comes? It is a bolt from the gods that descends from heaven
and strikes us down into hell. We can do nothing.
* * *
In Italy one wants so little; the air and the light, and a little red
wine, and the warmth of the wind, and a handful of maize or of grapes,
and an old guitar, and a niche to sleep in near a fountain that murmurs
and sings to the mosses and marbles--these are enough in Italy.
* * *
Petty laws breed great crimes. Few rulers, little or big, remember that.
* * *
_L'esprit du clocher_ is derided nowadays. But it may well be doubted
whether the age which derides it will give the world anything one-half
as tender and true in its stead. It is peace because it is content; and
it is a peace which has in it the germ of heroism: menaced, it produces
patriotism--the patriotism whose symbol is Tell.
* * *
The tyrannies of petty law hurt the authority of the State more with the
populace than all the severity of a Draconian code against great
offences. Petty laws may annoy but can never harm the rich, for they can
always evade them or purchase immunity; but petty laws for the poor are
as the horse-fly on the neck and on the eyelids of the horse.
* * *
It was in the month of April; outside the walls and on the banks of
Tiber, still swollen by the floods of winter, one could see the gold of
a million daffodils and the bright crimson and yellow of tulips in the
green corn. The scent of flowers and herbs came into the town and filled
its dusky and narrow ways; the boatmen had green branches fastened to
their masts; in the stillness of evening one heard the song of crickets,
and even a mosquito would come and blow his shrill little trumpet, and
one was willing to say to him "Welcome!" because on his little horn he
blew the glad news, "Summer is here!"
_HELD IN BONDAGE._
"A young man married is a man that's marred." That's a golden rule,
Arthur; take it to heart. Anne Hathaway, I have not a doubt, suggested
it; experience is the sole asbestos, only unluckily one seldom gets it
before one's hands are burnt irrevocably. Shakespeare took to wife the
ignorant, rosy-cheeked Warwickshire peasant girl at _eighteen_! Poor
fellow! I picture him, with all his untried powers, struggling like
new-born Hercules for strength and utterance, and the great germ of
poetry within him, tingeing all the common realities of life with its
rose hue; genius giving him power to see with god-like vision the
"fairies nestling in the cowslip chalices," and the golden gleam of
Cleopatra's sails; to feel the "spiced Indian air" by night, and the
wild working of kings' ambitious lust; to know by intuition, alike the
voices of nature unheard by common ears, and the fierce schemes and
passions of a world from which social position shut him out! I picture
him in his hot, imaginative youth, finding his first love in the
yeoman's daughter at Shottery, strolling with her by the Avon, making
her an "odorous chaplet of sweet summer buds," and dressing her up in
the fond array of a boy's poetic imaginings! Then--when he had married
her, he, with the passionate ideals of Juliets and Violas, Ophelias and
Hermiones in his brain and heart, must have awakened to find that the
voices so sweet to him were dumb to her. The "cinque spotted cowslip
bells" brought only thoughts of wine to her. When he was watching
"certain stars shoot madly from their spheres," she most likely was
grumbling at him for mooning there after curfew bell. When he was
learning Nature's lore in "the fresh cup of the crimson rose," she was
dinning in his ear that Hammet and Judith wanted worsted socks. When he
was listening in fancy to the "sea-maid's song," and weaving thoughts to
which a world still stands reverentially to listen, she was buzzing
behind him, and bidding him go card the wool, and weeping that, in her
girlhood, she had not chosen some rich glover or ale-taster, instead of
idle, useless, wayward Willie Shakespeare. Poor fellow! He did not
write, I would swear, without fellow-feeling, and yearning over souls
similarly shipwrecked, that wise saw, "A young man married is a man
that's marred."
_PASCARÈL._
When a man's eyes meet yours, and his faith trusts you, and his heart
upon a vague impulse is laid bare to you, it always has seemed to me the
basest treachery the world can hold to pass the gold of confidence which
he pours out to you from hand to hand as common coin for common
circulation.
* * *
Circumstance is so odd and so cruel a thing. It is wholly apart from
talent.
Genius will do so little for a man if he do not know how to seize or
seduce opportunity. No doubt, in his youth, Ambrogiò had been shy,
silent, out of his art timid, and in his person ungraceful, and
unlovely. So the world had passed by him turning a deaf ear to his
melodies, and he had let it pass, because he had not that splendid
audacity to grasp it perforce, and hold it until it blessed him, without
which no genius will ever gain the benediction of the Angel of Fame.
Which is a fallen Angel, no doubt; but still, perhaps, the spirit most
worth wrestling with after all; since wrestle we must in this world, if
we do not care to lie down and form a pavement for other men's cars of
triumph, as the Assyrians of old stretched themselves on their faces
before the coming of the chariot of their kings.
* * *
One of the saddest things perhaps in all the sadness of this world is
the frightful loss at which so much of the best and strongest work of a
man's life has to be thrown away at the onset. If you desire a name
amongst men, you must buy the crown of it at such a costly price!
True, the price will in the end be paid back to you, no doubt, when you
are worn out, and what you do is as worthless as the rustling canes that
blow together in autumn by dull river sides: then you scrawl your
signature across your soulless work, and it fetches thrice its weight in
gold.
But though you thus have your turn, and can laugh at your will at the
world that you fool, what can that compensate you for all those dear
dead darlings?--those bright first-fruits, those precious earliest
nestlings of your genius, which had to be sold into bondage for a broken
crust, which drifted away from you never to be found again, which you
know well were a million fold better, fresher, stronger, higher, better
than anything you have begotten since then; and yet in which none could
be found to believe, only because you had not won that magic spell which
lies in--being known?
* * *
When I think of the sweet sigh of the violin melodies through the white
winter silence of Raffaelino's eager, dreamy eyes, misty with the
student's unutterable sadness and delight; of old Ambrogiò, with his
semicircle of children round him, lifting their fresh voices at his
word; of the little robin that came every day upon the waterpipe, and
listened, and thrilled in harmony, and ate joyfully the crumbs which the
old maestro daily spared to it from his scanty meal--when I think of
those hours, it seems to me that they must have been happiness too.
"Could we but know when we are happy!" sighs some poet. As well might
he write, "Could we but set the dewdrop with our diamonds! could we but
stay the rainbow in our skies!"
* * *
Every old Italian city has this awe about it--holds close the past and
moves the living to a curious sense that they are dead and in their
graves are dreaming; for the old cities themselves have beheld so much
perish around them, and yet have kept so firm a hold upon tradition and
upon the supreme beauty of great arts, that those who wander there grow,
as it were, bewildered, and know not which is life and which is death
amongst them.
* * *
The sun was setting.
Over the whole Valdarno there was everywhere a faint ethereal golden
mist that rose from the water and the woods.
The town floated on it as upon a lake; her spires, and domes, and
towers, and palaces bathed at their base in its amber waves, and rising
upward into the rose-hued radiance of the upper air. The mountains that
encircled her took all the varying hues of the sunset on their pale
heights until they flushed to scarlet, glowered to violet, wavered with
flame, and paled to whiteness, as the opal burns and fades. Warmth,
fragrance, silence, loveliness encompassed her; and in the great
stillness the bell of the basilica tolled slowly the evening call to
prayer.
Thus Florence rose before me.
A strange tremor of exceeding joy thrilled through me as I beheld the
reddened shadows of those close-lying roofs, and those marble heights of
towers and of temples. At last my eyes gazed on her! the daughter of
flowers, the mistress of art, the nursing mother of liberty and of
aspiration.
I fell on my knees and thanked God. I pity those who, in such a moment,
have not done likewise.
* * *
There is nothing upon earth, I think, like the smile of Italy as she
awakes when the winter has dozed itself away in the odours of its
oakwood fires.
The whole land seems to laugh.
The springtide of the north is green and beautiful, but it has nothing
of the radiance, the dreamfulness, the ecstasy of spring in the southern
countries. The springtide of the north is pale with the gentle
colourless sweetness of its world of primroses; the springtide of Italy
is rainbow-hued, like the profusion of anemones that laugh with it in
every hue of glory under every ancient wall and beside every hill-fed
stream.
Spring in the north is a child that wakes from dreams of death; spring
in the south is a child that wakes from dreams of love. One is rescued
and welcomed from the grave; but the other comes smiling on a sunbeam
from heaven.
* * *
The landscape that has the olive is spiritual as no landscape can ever
be from which the olive is absent; for where is there spirituality
without some hue of sadness?
But this spiritual loveliness is one for which the human creature that
is set amidst it needs a certain education as for the power of
Euripides, for the dreams of Phædrus, for the strength of Michaelangelo,
for the symphonies of Mozart or Beethoven.
The mind must itself be in a measure spiritualised ere aright it can
receive it.
It is too pure, too impalpable, too nearly divine, to be grasped by
those for whom all beauty centres in strong heats of colour and great
breadths of effect; it floats over the senses like a string of perfect
cadences in music; it has a breath of heaven in it; though on the earth
it is not of the earth; when the world was young, ere men had sinned on
it, and gods forsaken it, it must have had the smile of this light that
lingers here.
* * *
Bad? Good? Pshaw! Those are phrases. No one uses them but fools. You
have seen the monkeys' cage in the beast-garden here. That is the world.
It is not strength, or merit, or talent, or reason that is of any use
there; it is just which monkey has the skill to squeeze to the front and
jabber through the bars, and make his teeth meet in his neighbours'
tails till they shriek and leave him free passage--it is that monkey
which gets all the cakes and the nuts of the folk on a feast-day. The
monkey is not bad; it is only a little quicker and more cunning than the
rest; that is all.
* * *
It is a kind of blindness--poverty. We can only grope through life when
we are poor, hitting and maiming ourselves against every angle.
* * *
Count art by gold, and it fetters the feet it once winged.
* * *
"Is that all you know?" he cried, while his voice rang like a
trumpet-call. "Listen here, then, little lady, and learn better. What is
it to be a player? It is this. A thing despised and rejected on all
sides; a thing that was a century since denied what they call Christian
burial; a thing that is still deemed for a woman disgraceful, and for a
man degrading and emasculate; a thing that is mute as a dunce save when,
parrot-like, it repeats by rote with a mirthless grin or a tearless sob;
a wooden doll, as you say, applauded as a brave puppet in its prime,
hissed at in its first hour of failure or decay; a thing made up of
tinsel and paint, and patchwork, of the tailor's shreds and the barber's
curls of tow--a ridiculous thing to be sure. That is a player. And yet
again--a thing without which laughter and jest were dead in the sad
lives of the populace; a thing that breathes the poet's words of fire so
that the humblest heart is set aflame; a thing that has a magic on its
lips to waken smiles or weeping at its will; a thing which holds a
people silent, breathless, intoxicated with mirth or with awe, as it
chooses; a thing whose grace kings envy, and whose wit great men will
steal; a thing by whose utterance alone the poor can know the fair
follies of a thoughtless hour, and escape for a little space from the
dull prisons of their colourless lives into the sunlit paradise where
genius dwells--_that_ is a player, too!"
* * *
The instrument on which we histrions play is that strange thing, the
human heart. It looks a little matter to strike its chords of laughter
or of sorrow; but, indeed, to do that aright and rouse a melody which
shall leave all who hear it the better and the braver for the hearing,
that may well take a man's lifetime, and, perhaps, may well repay it.
* * *
Oh, cara mia, when one has run about in one's time with a tinker's
tools, and seen the lives of the poor, and the woe of them, and the
wretchedness of it all, and the utter uselessness of everything, and
the horrible, intolerable, unending pain of all the things that breathe,
one comes to think that in this meaningless mystery which men call life
a little laughter and a little love are the only things which save us
all from madness--the madness that would curse God and die.
* * *
It always seems as if that well-spring of poetry and art which arose in
Italy, to feed and fertilise the world when it was half dead and wholly
barren under the tyrannies of the Church and the lusts of Feudalism; it
would always seem, I say, as though that water of life had so saturated
the Italian soil, that the lowliest hut upon its hills and plains will
ever nourish and put forth some flower of fancy.
The people cannot read, but they can rhyme. They cannot reason, but they
can keep perfect rhythm. They cannot write their own names, but written
on their hearts are the names of those who made their country's
greatness. They believe in the virtues of a red rag tied to a stick
amidst their fields, but they treasure tenderly the heroes and the
prophets of an unforgotten time. They are ignorant of all laws of
science or of sound, but when they go home by moonlight through the
maize yonder alight with lùcciole, they will never falsify a note, or
overload a harmony, in their love-songs.
The poetry, the art, in them is sheer instinct; it is not the genius of
isolated accident, but the genius of inalienable heritage.
* * *
Do you ever think of those artist-monks who have strewed Italy with
altar-pieces and missal miniatures till there is not any little lonely
dusky town of hers that is not rich by art? Do you often think of them?
I do.
There must have been a beauty in their lives--a great beauty--though
they missed of much, of more than they ever knew or dreamed of, let us
hope. In visions of the Madonna they grew blind to the meaning of a
woman's smile, and illuminating the golden olive wreath above the heads
of saints they lost the laughter of the children under the homely
olive-trees without.
But they did a noble work in their day; and leisure for meditation is no
mean treasure, though the modern world does not number it amongst its
joys.
One can understand how men born with nervous frames and spiritual
fancies into the world when it was one vast battle-ground, where its
thrones were won by steel and poison, and its religion enforced by torch
and faggot, grew so weary of the never-ending turmoil, and of the
riotous life which was always either a pageant or a slaughter-house,
that it seemed beautiful to them to withdraw themselves into some
peaceful place like this Badià and spend their years in study and in
recommendation of their souls to God, with the green and fruitful fields
before their cloister windows, and no intruders on the summer stillness
as they painted their dreams of a worthier and fairer world except the
blue butterflies that strayed in on a sunbeam, or the gold porsellini
that hummed at the lilies in the Virgin's chalice.
* * *
Florence, where she sits throned amidst her meadows white with Lenten
lilies, Florence is never terrible, Florence is never old. In her
infancy they fed her on the manna of freedom, and that fairest food gave
her eternal youth. In her early years she worshipped ignorantly indeed,
but truly always the day-star of liberty; and it has been with her
always so that the light shed upon her is still as the light of
morning.
Does this sound a fanciful folly? Nay, there is a real truth in it.
The past is so close to you in Florence. You touch it at every step. It
is not the dead past that men bury and then forget. It is an
unquenchable thing; beautiful, and full of lustre, even in the tomb,
like the gold from the sepulchres of the Ætruscan kings that shines on
the breast of some fair living woman, undimmed by the dust and the
length of the ages.
The music of the old greatness thrills through all the commonest things
of life like the grilli's chant through the wooden cages on Ascension
Day; and, like the song of the grilli, its poetry stays in the warmth of
the common hearth for the ears of the little children, and loses nothing
of its melody.
The beauty of the past in Florence is like the beauty of the great
Duomo.
About the Duomo there is stir and strife at all times; crowds come and
go; men buy and sell; lads laugh and fight; piles of fruit blaze gold
and crimson; metal pails clash down on the stones with shrillest
clangour; on the steps boys play at dominoes, and women give their
children food, and merry maskers grin in carnival fooleries; but there
in their midst is the Duomo all unharmed and undegraded, a poem and a
prayer in one, its marbles shining in the upper air, a thing so majestic
in its strength, and yet so human in its tenderness, that nothing can
assail, and nothing equal it.
Other, though not many, cities have histories as noble, treasuries as
vast; but no other city has them living and ever present in her midst,
familiar as household words, and touched by every baby's hand and
peasant's step, as Florence has.
Every line, every rood, every gable, every tower, has some story of the
past present in it. Every tocsin that sounds is a chronicle; every
bridge that unites the two banks of the river unites also the crowds of
the living with the heroism of the dead.
In the winding dusky irregular streets, with the outlines of their logge
and arcades, and the glow of colour that fills their niches and
galleries, the men who "have gone before" walk with you; not as
elsewhere mere gliding shades clad in the pallor of a misty memory, but
present, as in their daily lives, shading their dreamful eyes against
the noonday sun or setting their brave brows against the mountain wind,
laughing and jesting in their manful mirth and speaking as brother to
brother of great gifts to give the world. All this while, though the
past is thus close about you the present is beautiful also, and does not
shock you by discord and unseemliness as it will ever do elsewhere. The
throngs that pass you are the same in likeness as those that brushed
against Dante or Calvacanti; the populace that you move amidst is the
same bold, vivid, fearless, eager people with eyes full of dreams, and
lips braced close for war, which welcomed Vinci and Cimabue and fought
from Montaperto to Solferino.
And as you go through the streets you will surely see at every step some
colour of a fresco on a wall, some quaint curve of a bas-relief on a
lintel, some vista of Romanesque arches in a palace court, some dusky
interior of a smith's forge or a wood-seller's shop, some Renaissance
seal-ring glimmering on a trader's stall, some lovely hues of fruits and
herbs tossed down together in a Tre Cento window, some gigantic mass of
blossoms being borne aloft on men's shoulders for a church festivity of
roses, something at every step that has some beauty or some charm in it,
some graciousness of the ancient time, or some poetry of the present
hour.
The beauty of the past goes with you at every step in Florence. Buy eggs
in the market, and you buy them where Donatello bought those which fell
down in a broken heap before the wonder of the crucifix. Pause in a
narrow bye-street in a crowd and it shall be that Borgo Allegri, which
the people so baptized for love of the old painter and the new-born art.
Stray into a great dark church at evening time, where peasants tell
their beads in the vast marble silence, and you are where the whole city
flocked, weeping, at midnight to look their last upon the face of their
Michael Angelo. Pace up the steps of the palace of the Signorìa and you
tread the stone that felt the feet of him to whom so bitterly was known
"_com' è duro calle, lo scendere è'l salir per l'altrúi scale_." Buy a
knot of March anemoni or April arum lilies, and you may bear them with
you through the same city ward in which the child Ghirlandajo once
played amidst the gold and silver garlands that his father fashioned for
the young heads of the Renaissance. Ask for a shoemaker and you shall
find the cobbler sitting with his board in the same old twisting,
shadowy street way, where the old man Toscanelli drew his charts that
served a fair-haired sailor of Genoa, called Columbus. Toil to fetch a
tinker through the squalor of San Niccolò, and there shall fall on you
the shadow of the bell-tower where the old sacristan saved to the world
the genius of the Night and Day. Glance up to see the hour of the
evening time, and there, sombre and tragical, will loom above you the
walls of the communal palace on which the traitors were painted by the
brush of Sarto, and the tower of Giotto, fair and fresh in its perfect
grace as though angels had builded it in the night just past, "_ond'
ella toglie ancora e terza e nona_," as in the noble and simple days
before she brake the "_cerchia antìca_."
Everywhere there are flowers, and breaks of songs, and rills of
laughter, and wonderful eyes that look as if they too, like their Poets,
had gazed into the heights of heaven and the depths of hell.
And then you will pass out at the gates beyond the city walls, and all
around you there will be a radiance and serenity of light that seems to
throb in its intensity and yet is divinely restful, like the passion and
the peace of love when it has all to adore and nothing to desire.
The water will be broad and gold, and darkened here and there into
shadows of porphyrine amber. Amidst the grey and green of the olive and
acacia foliage there will arise the low pale roofs and flat-topped
towers of innumerable villages.
Everywhere there will be a wonderful width of amethystine hills and
mystical depths of seven-chorded light. Above, masses of rosy cloud will
drift, like rose-leaves leaning on a summer wind. And, like a magic
girdle which has shut her out from all the curse of age and death and
man's oblivion, and given her a youth and loveliness which will endure
so long as the earth itself endures, there will be the circle of the
mountains, purple and white and golden, lying around Florence.
* * *
Amidst all her commerce, her wars, her hard work, her money-making,
Florence was always dominated and spiritualised, at her noisiest and
worst, by a poetic and picturesque imagination.
Florentine life had always an ideal side to it; and an idealism, pure
and lofty, runs through her darkest histories and busiest times like a
thread of gold through a coat of armour and a vest of frieze.