weaver of silk, indeed; but he was also always a lover, and always a
soldier; that is, always half a poet. He had his Caròccio and his
Ginevra as well as his tools and his sacks of florins. He had his sword
as well as his shuttle. His scarlet giglio was the flower of love no
less than the blazonry of battle on his standard, and the mint stamp of
the commonwealth on his coinage.
Herein lay the secret of the influence of Florence: the secret which
rendered the little city, stretched by her river's side, amongst her
quiet meadows white with arums, a sacred name to all generations of men
for all she dared and all she did.
"She amassed wealth," they say: no doubt she did--and why?
To pour it with both hands to melt in the foundries of Ghiberti--to
bring it in floods to cement the mortar that joined the marbles of
Brunelleschi! She always spent to great ends, and to mighty uses.
When she called a shepherd from his flocks in the green valley to build
for her a bell-tower so that she might hear, night and morning, the call
to the altar, the shepherd built for her in such fashion that the belfry
has been the Pharos of Art for five centuries.
Here is the secret of Florence--supreme aspiration.
The aspiration which gave her citizens force to live in poverty, and
clothe themselves in simplicity, so as to be able to give up their
millions of florins to bequeath miracles in stone and metal and colour
to the Future. The aspiration which so purified her soil, red with
carnage, black with smoke of war, trodden continuously by hurrying feet
of labourers, rioters, mercenaries, and murderers, that from that soil
there could spring, in all its purity and perfection, the
paradise-blossom of the Vita Nuova.
Venice perished for her pride and carnal lust; Rome perished for her
tyrannies and her blood-thirst; but Florence--though many a time nearly
strangled under the heel of the Empire and the hand of the
Church--Florence was never slain utterly either in body or soul;
Florence still crowned herself with flowers even in her throes of agony,
because she kept always within her that love--impersonal, consecrate,
void of greed--which is the purification of the individual life and the
regeneration of the body politic. "We labour for the ideal," said the
Florentines of old, lifting to heaven their red flower de luce--and to
this day Europe bows before what they did and cannot equal it.
"But she had so many great men, so many mighty masters!" I would urge,
whereon Pascarèl would glance on me with his lightest and yet utmost
scorn.
"O wise female thing, who always traces the root to the branch and
deduces the cause from the effect! Did her great men spring up
full-armed like Athene, or was it the pure, elastic atmosphere of her
that made her mere mortals strong as immortals? The supreme success of
modern government is to flatten down all men into one uniform likeness,
so that it is only by most frightful, and often destructive, effort that
any originality can contrive to get loose in its own shape for a
moment's breathing space; but in the Commonwealth of Florence a man,
being born with any genius in him, drew in strength to do and dare
greatly with the very air he breathed."
Moreover, it was not only the great men that made her what she was.
It was, above all, the men who knew they were not great, but yet had the
patience and unselfishness to do their appointed work for her zealously,
and with every possible perfection in the doing of it.
It was not only Orcagna planning the Loggia, but every workman who
chiselled out a piece of its stone, that put all his head and heart into
the doing thereof. It was not only Michaelangelo in his studio, but
every poor painter who taught the mere a, b, c, d of the craft to a
crowd of pupils out of the streets, who did whatsoever came before them
to do mightily and with reverence.
In those days all the servants as well as the sovereigns of art were
penetrated with the sense of her holiness.
It was the mass of patient, intelligent, poetic, and sincere servitors
of art, who, instead of wildly consuming their souls in envy and desire,
cultured their one talent to the uttermost, so that the mediocrity of
that age would have been the excellence of any other.
Not alone from the great workshops of the great masters did the light
shine on the people. From every scaffold where a palace ceiling was
being decorated with its fresco, from every bottega where the children
of the poor learned to grind and to mingle the colours, from every cell
where some solitary monk studied to produce an offering to the glory of
his God, from every nook and corner where the youths gathered in the
streets to see some Nunziata or Ecce Homo lifted to its niche in the
city wall, from every smallest and most hidden home of art--from the
nest under the eaves as well as from the cloud-reaching temples,--there
went out amidst the multitudes an ever-flowing, ever-pellucid stream of
light, from that Aspiration which is in itself Inspiration.
So that even to this day the people of Italy have not forgotten the
supreme excellence of all beauty, but are, by the sheer instinct of
inherited faith, incapable of infidelity to those traditions; so that
the commonest craftsman of them all will sweep his curves and shade his
hues upon a plaster cornice with a perfection that is the despair of the
maestri of other nations.
* * *
The broad plains that have been the battle-ground of so many races and
so many ages were green and peaceful under the primitive husbandry of
the contadini.
Everywhere under the long lines of the yet unbudded vines the seed was
springing, and the trenches of the earth were brimful with brown
bubbling water left from the floods of winter, when Reno and Adda had
broken loose from their beds.
Here and there was some old fortress grey amongst the silver of the
olive orchards; some village with white bleak house-walls and flat roofs
pale and bare against the level fields; or some little long-forgotten
city once a stronghold of war and a palace for princes, now a little
hushed and lonely place, with weed-grown ramparts and gates rusted on
their hinges, and tapestry weavers throwing the shuttle in its deserted
and dismantled ways.
But chiefly it was always the green, fruitful, weary, endless plain
trodden by the bullocks and the goats, and silent, strangely silent, as
though fearful still of its tremendous past.
* * *
The long bright day draws to a close. The west is in a blaze of gold,
against which the ilex and the acacia are black as funeral plumes. The
innumerable scents of fruits and flowers and spices, and tropical seeds,
and sweet essences, that fill the streets at every step from shops and
stalls, and monks' pharmacies, are fanned out in a thousand delicious
odours on the cooling air. The wind has risen, blowing softly from
mountain and from sea across the plains through the pines of Pisa,
across to the oak-forests of green Casentìno.
Whilst the sun still glows in the intense amber of his own dying glory,
away in the tender violet hues of the east the young moon rises.
Rosy clouds drift against the azure of the zenith, and are reflected as
in a mirror in the shallow river waters.
A little white cloud of doves flies homeward against the sky.
All the bells chime for the Ave Maria.
The evening falls.
Wonderful hues, creamy, and golden, and purple, and soft as the colours
of a dove's throat, spread themselves slowly over the sky; the bell
tower rises like a shaft of porcelain clear against the intense azure;
amongst the tall canes by the river the fire-flies sparkle; the shores
are mirrored in the stream with every line and curve, and roof and
cupola, drawn in sharp deep shadow; every lamp glows again thrice its
size in the glass of the current, and the arches of the bridges meet
their own image there; the boats glide down the water that is now white
under the moon, now amber under the lights, now black under the walls,
for ever changing; night draws on, then closes quite.
But it is night as radiant as day, and ethereal as day can never be; on
the hills the cypresses still stand out against the faint gold that
lingers in the west; there is the odour of carnations and of acacias
everywhere.
Noiseless footsteps come and go.
People pass softly in shadow, like a dream.
* * *
You know how St. Michael made the Italian? he is saying to them, and the
clear crystal ring of the sonorous Tuscan reaches to the farthest corner
of the square. Nay?--oh, for shame! Well, then, it was in this fashion;
long, long ago, when the world was but just called from chaos, the
Dominiddio was tired, as you all know, and took his rest on the seventh
day; and four of the saints, George and Denis and Jago and Michael,
stood round him with their wings folded and their swords idle.
So to them the good Lord said: "Look at those odds and ends, that are
all lying about after the earth is set rolling. Gather them up, and make
them into four living nations to people the globe." The saints obeyed
and set to the work.
St. George got a piece of pure gold and a huge lump of lead, and buried
the gold in the lead, so that none ever would guess it was there, and so
sent it rolling and bumping to earth, and called it the English people.
St. Jago got a bladder filled with wind, and put in it the heart of a
fox, and the fang of a wolf, and whilst it puffed and swelled like the
frog that called itself a bull, it was despatched to the world as the
Spaniard.
St. Denis did better than that; he caught a sunbeam flying, and he tied
it with a bright knot of ribbons, and he flashed it on earth as the
people of France; only, alas! he made two mistakes, he gave it no
ballast, and he dyed the ribbons blood-red.
Now St. Michael, marking their errors, caught a sunbeam likewise, and
many other things too; a mask of velvet, a poniard of steel, the chords
of a lute, the heart of a child, the sigh of a poet, the kiss of a
lover, a rose out of paradise, and a silver string from an angel's lyre.
Then with these in his hand he went and knelt down at the throne of the
Father. "Dear and great Lord," he prayed, "to make my work perfect, give
me one thing; give me a smile of God." And God smiled.
Then St. Michael sent his creation to earth, and called it the Italian.
But--most unhappily, as chance would have it--Satanas watching at the
gates of hell, thought to himself, "If I spoil not his work, earth will
be Eden in Italy." So he drew his bow in envy, and sped a poisoned
arrow; and the arrow cleft the rose of paradise, and broke the silver
string of the angel.
And to this day the Italian keeps the smile that God gave in his eyes;
but in his heart the devil's arrow rankles still.
Some call this barbed shaft Cruelty; some Superstition; some Ignorance;
some Priestcraft; maybe its poison is drawn from all four; be it how it
may, it is the duty of all Italians to pluck hard at the arrow of hell,
so that the smile of God alone shall remain with their children's
children.
Yonder in the plains we have done much; the rest will lie with you, the
Freed Nation.
* * *
There is an old legend, he made answer to me, an old monkish tale, which
tells how, in the days of King Clovis, a woman, old and miserable,
forsaken of all, and at the point of death, strayed into the Merovingian
woods, and lingering there, and hearkening to the birds, and loving
them, and so learning from them of God, regained, by no effort of her
own, her youth; and lived, always young and always beautiful, a hundred
years; through all which time she never failed to seek the forests when
the sun rose, and hear the first song of the creatures to whom she owed
her joy. Whoever to the human soul can be, in ever so faint a sense,
that which the birds were to the woman in the Merovingian woods, he, I
think, has a true greatness. But I am but an outcast, you know; and my
wisdom is not of the world.
Yet it seemed the true wisdom, there, at least, with the rose light
shining across half the heavens, and the bells ringing far away in the
plains below over the white waves of the sea of olives.
* * *
Only for the people! Altro! did not Sperone and all the critics at his
heels pronounce Ariosto only fit for the vulgar multitude? and was not
Dante himself called the laureate of the cobblers and the bakers?
And does not Sacchetti record that the great man took the trouble to
quarrel with an ass-driver and a blacksmith because they recited his
verses badly?
If he had not written "only for the people," we might never have got
beyond the purisms of Virgilio, and the Ciceronian imitations of Bembo.
Dante now-a-days may have become the poet of the scholars and the sages,
but in his own times he seemed to the sciolists a most terribly low
fellow for using his mother tongue; and he was most essentially the poet
of the vulgar--of the _vulgare eloquio_, of the _vulgare illustre_; and
pray what does the "Commedia" mean if not a _canto villereccio_, a song
for the rustics? Will you tell me that?
Only for the people! Ah, that is the error. Only! how like a woman that
is! Any trash will do for the people; that is the modern notion; vile
roulades in music, tawdry crudities in painting, cheap balderdash in
print--all that will do for the people. So they say now-a-days.
Was the bell tower yonder set in a ducal garden or in a public place?
Was Cimabue's masterpiece veiled in a palace or borne aloft through the
throngs of the streets?
* * *
A man, be he bramble or vine, likes to grow in the open air in his own
fashion; but a woman, be she flower or weed, always thinks she would be
better under glass. When she gets the glass she breaks it--generally;
but till she gets it she pines.
* * *
When they grew up in Italy, all that joyous band,--Arlecchino in
Bergamo, Stenterello in Florence, Pulcinello in Naples, Pantaleone in
Venice, Dulcamara in Bologna, Beltramo in Milan, Brighella in
Brescia--masked their mirthful visages and ran together and jumped on
that travelling stage before the world, what a force they were for the
world, those impudent mimes!
"Only Pantomimi?" When they joined hands with one another and rolled
their wandering house before St. Mark's they were only players indeed;
but their laughter blew out the fires of the Inquisition, their fools'
caps made the papal tiara look but paper toy, their wooden swords struck
to earth the steel of the nobles, their arrows of epigram, feathered
from goose and from falcon, slew, flying, the many-winged dragon of
Superstition.
They were old as the old Latin land, indeed.
They had mouldered for ages in Etruscan cities, with the dust of
uncounted centuries upon them, and been only led out in Carnival times,
pale, voiceless, frail ghosts of dead powers, whose very meaning the
people had long forgotten. But the trumpet-call of the Renaissance woke
them from their Rip Van Winkle sleep.
They got up, young again, and keen for every frolic--Barbarossas of sock
and buskin, whose helmets were caps and bells, breaking the magic spell
of their slumber to burst upon men afresh; buoyant incarnations of the
new-born scorn for tradition, of the nascent revolts of democracy, with
which the air was rife.
"Only Pantomimi?" Oh, altro!
The world when it reckons its saviours should rate high all it owed to
the Pantomimi,--the privileged Pantomimi--who first dared take license
to say in their quips and cranks, in their capers and jests, what had
sent all speakers before them to the rack and the faggots.
Who think of that when they hear the shrill squeak of Pulcinello in the
dark bye-streets of northern towns, or see lean Pantaleone slip and
tumble through the transformation-scene of some gorgeous theatre?
Not one in a million.
Yet it is true for all that. Free speech was first due to the Pantomimi.
A proud boast that. They hymn Tell and chant Savonarola and glorify the
Gracchi, but I doubt if any of the gods in the world's Pantheon or the
other world's Valhalla did so much for freedom as those merry mimes that
the children scamper after upon every holiday.
* * *
We are straws on the wind of the hour, too frail and too brittle to
float into the future. Our little day of greatness is a mere child's
puff-ball, inflated by men's laughter, floated by women's tears; what
breeze so changeful as the one, what waters so shallow as the
other?--the bladder dances a little while; then sinks, and who
remembers?
* * *
Do you know the delicate delights of a summer morning in Italy? morning
I mean between four and five of the clock, and not the full hot mid-day
that means morning to the languid associations of this weary century.
The nights, perfect as they are, have scarcely more loveliness than the
birth of light, the first rippling laughter of the early day.
The air is cool, almost cold, and clear as glass. There is an endless
murmur from birds' throats and wings, and from far away there will ring
from village or city the chimes of the first mass. The deep broad
shadows lie so fresh, so grave, so calm, that by them the very dust is
stilled and spiritualised.
Softly the sun comes, striking first the loftier trees and then the
blossoming magnolias, and lastly the green lowliness of the gentle
vines; until all above is in a glow of new-born radiance, whilst all
beneath the leaves still is dreamily dusk and cool.
The sky is of a soft sea-blue; great vapours will float here and there,
iris-coloured and snow-white. The stone parapets of bridge and tower
shine against the purple of the mountains, which are low in tone, and
look like hovering storm-clouds. Across the fields dun oxen pass to
their labour; through the shadows peasants go their way to mass; down
the river a raft drifts slowly, with the pearly water swaying against
the canes; all is clear, tranquil, fresh as roses washed with rain.
* * *
To the art of the stage, as to every other art, there are two sides: the
truth of it, which comes by inspiration--that is, by instincts subtler,
deeper, and stronger than those of most minds; and the artifice of it,
in which it must clothe itself to get understood by the people.
It is this latter which must be learnt; it is the leathern harness in
which the horses of the sun must run when they come down to race upon
earth.
* * *
For in Italy life is all contrast, and there is no laugh and love-song
without a sigh beside them; there is no velvet mask of mirth and passion
without the marble mask of art and death near to it. For everywhere the
wild tulip burns red upon a ruined altar, and everywhere the blue borage
rolls its azure waves through the silent temples of forgotten gods.
* * *
To enter Bologna at midnight is to plunge into the depths of the middle
ages.
Those desolate sombre streets, those immense dark arches, dark as
Tartarus, those endless arcades where scarce a footfall breaks the
stillness, that labyrinth of marble, of stone, of antiquity; the past
alone broods over them all.
As you go it seems to you that you see the gleam of a snowy plume and
the shine of a straight rapier striking home through cuirass and
doublet, whilst on the stones the dead body falls, and high above over
the lamp-iron, where the torch is flaring, a casement uncloses, and a
woman's voice murmurs, with a cruel little laugh, "Cosa fatta capo ha!"
There is nothing to break the spell of that old-world enchantment.
Nothing to recall to you that the ages of Bentivoglio and of Visconti
have fled for ever.
The mighty Academy of Luvena Juris is so old, so old, so old!--the folly
and frippery of modern life cannot dwell in it a moment; it is as that
enchanted throne which turned into stone like itself whosoever dared to
seat himself upon its majestic heights.
For fifteen centuries Bologna has grimly watched and seen the mad life
of the world go by; it sits amidst the plains as the Sphynx amidst her
deserts.
* * *
It is women's way. They always love colour better than form, rhetoric
better than logic, priestcraft better than philosophy, and flourishes
better than fugues. It has been said scores of times before I said it.
Nay, he pursued, thinking he had pained me, you have a bright wit
enough, and a beautiful voice, though you sing without knowing very well
what you do sing. But genius you have not, look you; say your
thanksgiving to the Madonna at the next shrine we come to; genius you
have not.
What is it?
Well, it is hard to tell; but this is certain, that it puts peas
unboiled into the shoes of every pilgrim who really gets up to its
Olivet.
Genius has all manner of dead dreams and sorrowful lost loves for its
scallop-shells; and the palm that it carries is the bundle of rods
wherewith fools have beaten it for calling them blind.
Genius has eyes so clear that it sees straight down into the hearts of
others through all their veils of sophistry and simulation; but its own
heart is pierced often to the quick for shame of what it reads there.
It has such long and faithful remembrance of other worlds and other
lives which most minds have forgotten, that beside the beauty of those
memories all things of earth seem poor and valueless.
Men call this imagination or idealism; the name does not matter much;
whether it be desire or remembrance, it comes to the same issue; so that
genius, going ever beyond the thing it sees in infinite longing for some
higher greatness which it has either lost or otherwise cannot reach,
finds the art, and the humanity, and the creations, and the affections
which seem to others so exquisite most imperfect and scarcely to be
endured.
The heaven of Phædrus is the world which haunts Genius--where there
shall not be women but Woman, not friends but Friendship, not poems but
Poetry; everything in its uttermost wholeness and perfection; so that
there shall be no possibility of regret nor any place for desire.
For in this present world there is only one thing which can content it,
and that thing is music; because music has nothing to do with earth, but
sighs always for the lands beyond the sun.
And yet all this while genius, though sick at heart, and alone, and
finding little in man or in woman, in human art or in human nature, that
can equal what it remembers--or, as men choose to say, it imagines--is
half a child too, always: for something of the eternal light which
streams from the throne of God is always shed about it, though sadly
dimmed and broken by the clouds and vapours that men call their
atmosphere.
Half a child always, taking a delight in the frolic of the kids, the
dancing of the daffodils, the playtime of the children, the romp of the
winds with the waters, the loves of the birds in the blossoms. Half a
child always, but always with tears lying close to its laughter, and
always with desires that are death in its dreams.
No; you have not genius, cara mia. Say your grazie at the next shrine we
pass.
* * *
Therefore, in those days men, giving themselves leave to be glad for a
little space, were glad with the same sinewy force and manful singleness
of purpose as made them in other times laborious, self-denying, patient,
and fruitful of high thoughts and deeds.
Because they laboured for their fellows, therefore they could laugh with
them; and because they served God, therefore they dared be glad.
In those grave, dauntless, austere lives the Carnival's jocund revelry
was as one golden bead in a pilgrim's rosary of thorn-berries.
They had aimed highly and highly achieved; therefore they could go forth
amidst their children and rejoice.
But we--in whom all art is the mere empty Shibboleth of a ruined
religion whose priests are all dead; we--whose whole year-long course is
one Dance of Death over the putridity of our pleasures; we--whose
solitary purpose it is to fly faster and faster from desire to satiety,
from satiety to desire, in an endless eddy of fruitless effort;
we--whose greatest genius can only raise for us some inarticulate
protest of despair against some unknown God;--we have strangled King
Carnival and killed him, and buried him in the ashes of our own
unutterable weariness and woe.
* * *
Oh, I believe it was all true enough.
There were mighty Pascarèlli in the olden days. But I am very glad that
I was not of them; except, indeed, that I should have liked to strike a
blow or two for Guido Calvacanti and have hindered the merrymaking of
those precious rascals who sent him out to die of the marsh fever.
Great?
No; certainly I would not be great. To be a great man is endlessly to
crave something that you have not; to kiss the hands of monarchs and
lick the feet of peoples. To be great? Who was ever more great than
Dante, and what was his experience?--the bitterness of begged bread, and
the steepness of palace stairs.