greatness is absolutely uncertain. Look at Machiavelli.
After having laid down infallible rules for social and public success
with such unapproachable astuteness that his name has become a synonym
for unerring policy, Machiavelli passed his existence in obedience and
submission to Rome, to Florence, to Charles, to Cosmo, to Leo, to
Clement.
He was born into a time favourable beyond every other to sudden changes
of fortune; a time in which any fearless audacity might easily become
the stepping-stone to a supreme authority; and yet Machiavelli, whom the
world still holds as its ablest statesman--in principle--never in
practice rose above the level of a servant of civil and papal tyrannies,
and, when his end came, died in obscurity and almost in penury.
Theoretically, Machiavelli could rule the universe; but practically he
never attained to anything finer than a more or less advantageous change
of masters. To reign doctrinally may be all very well, but when it only
results in serving actually, it seems very much better to be obscure and
content without any trouble.
"Fumo di gloria non vale fumo di pipa."
I, for one, at any rate, am thoroughly convinced of that truth of
truths.
I hearkened to him sorrowful; for to my ignorant eyes the witch candle
of fame seemed a pure and perfect planet; and I felt that the planet
might have ruled his horoscope had he chosen.
Is there no glory at all worth having, then? I murmured.
He stretched himself where he rested amongst the arum-whitened grass,
and took his cigaretto from his mouth:
Well, there is one, perhaps. But it is to be had about once in five
centuries.
You know Or San Michele? It would have been a world's wonder had it
stood alone, and not been companioned with such wondrous rivals that its
own exceeding beauty scarce ever receives full justice.
Where the jasper of Giotto and the marble of Brunelleschi, where the
bronze of Ghiberti and the granite of Arnolfo rise everywhere in the
sunlit air to challenge vision and adoration, or San Michele fails of
its full meed from men. Yet, perchance, in all the width of Florence
there is not a nobler thing.
It is like some massive casket of silver oxydised by time; such a casket
as might have been made to hold the Tables of the Law by men to whose
faith Sinai was the holy and imperishable truth.
I know nothing of the rule or phrase of Architecture, but it seems to
me surely that that square-set strength, as of a fortress, towering
against the clouds, and catching the last light always on its fretted
parapet, and everywhere embossed and enriched with foliage, and tracery,
and the figures of saints, and the shadows of vast arches, and the light
of niches gold-starred and filled with divine forms, is a gift so
perfect to the whole world, that, passing it, one should need say a
prayer for great Taddeo's soul.
Surely, nowhere is the rugged, changeless, mountain force of hewn stone
piled against the sky, and the luxuriant, dreamlike, poetic delicacy of
stone carven and shaped into leafage and loveliness more perfectly
blended and made one than where Or San Michele rises out of the dim,
many-coloured, twisting streets, in its mass of ebon darkness and of
silvery light.
Well, the other day, under the walls of it I stood, and looked at its
Saint George where he leans upon his shield, so calm, so young, with his
bared head and his quiet eyes.
"That is our Donatello's," said a Florentine beside me--a man of the
people, who drove a horse for hire in the public ways, and who paused,
cracking his whip, to tell this tale to me. "Donatello did that, and it
killed him. Do you not know? When he had done that Saint George, he
showed it to his master. And the master said, 'It wants one thing only.'
Now this saying our Donatello took gravely to heart, chiefly of all
because his master would never explain where the fault lay; and so much
did it hurt him, that he fell ill of it, and came nigh to death. Then he
called his master to him. 'Dear and great one, do tell me before I die,'
he said, 'what is the one thing my statue lacks.' The master smiled, and
said, 'Only--speech.' 'Then I die happy,' said our Donatello. And he
died--indeed, that hour."
"Now, I cannot say that the pretty story is true; it is not in the least
true; Donato died when he was eighty-three, in the Street of the Melon;
and it was he himself who cried, 'Speak then--speak!' to his statue, as
it was carried through the city. But whether true or false the tale,
this fact is surely true, that it is well--nobly and purely well--with a
people when the men amongst it who ply for hire on its public ways think
caressingly of a sculptor dead five hundred years ago, and tell such a
tale standing idly in the noonday sun, feeling the beauty and the pathos
of it all.
"'Our Donatello' still to the people of Florence. 'Our own little
Donato' still, our pet and pride, even as though he were living and
working in their midst to-day, here in the shadows of the
Stocking-maker's Street, where his Saint George keeps watch and ward.
"'Our little Donato' still, though dead so many hundred years ago.
"That is glory, if you will. And something more beautiful than any
glory--Love."
He was silent a long while, gathering lazily with his left hand the arum
lilies to bind them together for me.
Perhaps the wish for the moment passed over him that he had chosen to
set his life up in stone, like to Donato's, in the face of Florence,
rather than to weave its light and tangled skein out from the breaths of
the wandering winds and the sands of the shifting shore.
* * *
Come out here in the young months of summer, and leave, as we left, the
highways that grim walls fence in, and stray, as we strayed, through the
field-paths and the bridle-roads in the steps of the contadini, and you
will find this green world about your feet touched with the May-day
suns to tenderest and most lavish wealth of nature.
The green corn uncurling underneath the blossoming vines. The vine
foliage that tosses and climbs and coils in league on league of verdure.
The breast-high grasses full of gold and red and purple from the
countless flowers growing with it.
The millet filled with crimson gladioli and great scarlet poppies. The
hill-sides that look a sheet of rose-colour where the lupinelli are in
bloom. The tall plumes of the canes, new-born, by the side of every
stream and rivulet.
The sheaves of arum leaves that thrust themselves out from every joint
of masonry or spout of broken fountain. The flame of roses that burns on
every handbreadth of untilled ground and springs like a rainbow above
the cloud of every darkling roof or wall. The ocean spray of arbutus and
acacia shedding its snow against the cypress darkness. The sea-green of
the young ilex leaves scattered like light over the bronze and purple of
the older growth. The dreamy blue of the iris lilies rising underneath
the olives and along the edges of the fields.
* * *
All greatest gifts that have enriched the modern world have come from
Italy. Take those gifts from the world, and it would lie in darkness, a
dumb, barbaric, joyless thing.
Leave Rome alone, or question as you will whether she were the mightiest
mother, or the blackest curse that ever came on earth. I do not speak of
Rome, imperial or republican, I speak of Italy.
Of Italy, after the greatness of Rome dropped as the Labarum was raised
on high, and the Fisher of Galilee came to fill the desolate place of
the Cæsars.
Of Italy, when she was no more a vast dominion, ruling over half the
races of the globe, from the Persian to the Pict, but a narrow slip
bounded by Adriatic and Mediterranean, divided into hostile sections,
racked by foreign foes, and torn by internecine feud.
Of Italy, ravaged by the Longobardo, plundered by the French, scourged
by the Popes, tortured by the Kaisers; of Italy, with her cities at war
with each other, her dukedoms against her free towns, her tyrants in
conflict with her municipalities; of Italy, in a word, as she has been
from the days of Theodoric and Theodolinda to the days of Napoleon and
Francis Joseph. It is this Italy--our Italy--which through all the
centuries of bloodshed and of suffering never ceased to bear aloft and
unharmed its divining-rod of inspiration as S. Christopher bore the
young Christ above the swell of the torrent and the rage of the tempest.
All over Italy from north to south men arose in the darkness of those
ages who became the guides and the torchbearers of a humanity that had
gone astray in the carnage and gloom.
The faith of Columbus of Genoa gave to mankind a new world. The insight
of Galileo of Pisa revealed to it the truth of its laws of being. Guido
Monacco of Arezzo bestowed on it the most spiritual of all earthly joys
by finding a visible record for the fugitive creations of harmony ere
then impalpable and evanescent as the passing glories of the clouds.
Dante Alighieri taught to it the might of that vulgar tongue in which
the child babbles at its mother's knee, and the orator leads a
breathless multitude at his will to death or triumph. Teofilo of Empoli
discovered for it the mysteries of colour that lie in the mere earths of
the rocks and the shores, and the mere oils of the roots and the
poppies. Arnoldo of Breccia lit for it the first flame of free opinion,
and Amatus of Breccia perfected for it the most delicate and exquisite
of all instruments of sound, which men of Cremona, or of Bologna, had
first created. Maestro Giorgio, and scores of earnest workers whose
names are lost in Pesaro and in Gubbio, bestowed on it those homelier
treasures of the graver's and the potter's labours which have carried
the alphabet of art into the lowliest home. Brunelleschi of Florence
left it in legacy the secret of lifting a mound of marble to the upper
air as easily as a child can blow a bubble; and Giordano Bruno of Nola
found for it those elements of philosophic thought, which have been
perfected into the clear and prismatic crystals of the metaphysics of
the Teuton and the Scot.
From south and north, from east and west, they rose, the ministers and
teachers of mankind.
From mountain and from valley, from fortress smoking under battle, and
from hamlet laughing under vines; from her great wasted cities, from her
small fierce walled towns, from her lone sea-shores ravaged by the
galleys of the Turks, from her villages on hill and plain that struggled
into life through the invaders' fires, and pushed their vineshoots over
the tombs of kings, everywhere all over her peaceful soil, such men
arose.
Not men alone who were great in a known art, thought or science, of
these the name was legion; but men in whose brains, art, thought, or
science took new forms, was born into new life, spoke with new voice,
and sprang full armed a new Athene.
Leave Rome aside, I say, and think of Italy; measure her gifts, which
with the lavish waste of genius she has flung broadcast in grand and
heedless sacrifice, and tell me if the face of earth would not be dark
and drear as any Scythian desert without these?
She was the rose of the world, aye--so they bruised and trampled her,
and yet the breath of heaven was ever in her.
She was the world's nightingale, aye--so they burned her eyes out and
sheared her wings, and yet she sang.
But she was yet more than these: she was the light of the world: a light
set on a hill, a light unquenchable. A light which through the darkness
of the darkest night has been a Pharos to the drowning faiths and dying
hopes of man.
* * *
"It must have been such a good life--a painter's--in those days; those
early days of art. Fancy the gladness of it then--modern painters can
know nothing of it.
"When all the delicate delights of distance were only half perceived;
when the treatment of light and shadow was barely dreamed of; when
aerial perspective was just breaking on the mind in all its wonder and
power; when it was still regarded as a marvellous boldness to draw from
the natural form in a natural fashion;--in those early days only fancy
the delights of a painter!
"Something fresh to be won at each step; something new to be penetrated
at each moment; something beautiful and rash to be ventured on with each
touch of colour,--the painter in those days had all the breathless
pleasure of an explorer; without leaving his birthplace he knew the joys
of Columbus.
"And then the reverence that waited on him.
"He was a man who glorified God amongst a people that believed in God.
"What he did was a reality to himself and those around him. Spinello
fainted before the Satanas he portrayed, and Angelico deemed it
blasphemy to alter a feature of the angels who visited him that they
might live visibly for men in his colours in the cloister.
"Of all men the artist was nearest to heaven, therefore of all men was
he held most blessed.
"When Francis Valois stooped for the brush he only represented the
spirit of the age he lived in. It is what all wise kings do. It is their
only form of genius.
"Now-a-days what can men do in the Arts! Nothing.
"All has been painted--all sung--all said.
"All is twice told--in verse, in stone, in colour. There is no
untraversed ocean to tempt the Columbus of any Art.
"It is dreary--very dreary--that. All had been said and done so much
better than we can ever say or do it again. One envies those men who
gathered all the paradise flowers half opened, and could watch them
bloom.
"Art can only live by Faith: and what faith have we?
"Instead of Art we have indeed Science; but Science is very sad, for she
doubts all things and would prove all things, and doubt is endless, and
proof is a quagmire that looks like solid earth, and is but shifting
waters."
His voice was sad as it fell on the stillness of Arezzo--Arezzo who had
seen the dead gods come and go, and the old faiths rise and fall, there
where the mule trod its patient way and the cicala sang its summer song
above the place where the temple of the Bona Dea and the Church of
Christ had alike passed away, so that no man could tell their place.
It was all quiet around.
"I would rather have been Spinello than Petrarca," he pursued, after a
while. "Yes; though the sonnets will live as long as men love: and the
old man's work has almost every line of it crumbled away.
"But one can fancy nothing better than a life such as Spinello led for
nigh a century up on the hill here, painting, because he loved it, till
death took him. Of all lives, perhaps, that this world has ever seen,
the lives of painters, I say, in those days were the most perfect.
"Not only the magnificent pageants of Leonardo's, of Raffaelle's, of
Giorgone's: but the lowlier lives--the lives of men such as Santi, and
Ridolfi, and Benozzo, and Francia, and Timoteo, and many lesser men than
they, painters in fresco and grisaille, painters of miniatures, painters
of majolica and montelupo, painters who were never great, but who
attained infinite peacefulness and beauty in their native towns and
cities all over the face of Italy.
"In quiet places, such as Arezzo and Volterra, and Modena and Urbino,
and Cortona and Perugia, there would grow up a gentle lad who from
infancy most loved to stand and gaze at the missal paintings in his
mother's house, and the coena in the monk's refectory, and when he had
fulfilled some twelve or fifteen years, his people would give in to his
wish and send him to some bottega to learn the management of colours.
"Then he would grow to be a man; and his town would be proud of him, and
find him the choicest of all work in its churches and its convents, so
that all his days were filled without his ever wandering out of reach of
his native vesper bells.
"He would make his dwelling in the heart of his birthplace, close under
its cathedral, with the tender sadness of the olive hills stretching
above and around; in the basiliche or the monasteries his labour would
daily lie; he would have a docile band of hopeful boyish pupils with
innocent eyes of wonder for all he did or said; he would paint his
wife's face for the Madonna's, and his little son's for the child
Angel's; he would go out into the fields and gather the olive bough, and
the feathery corn, and the golden fruits, and paint them tenderly on
ground of gold or blue, in symbol of those heavenly things of which the
bells were for ever telling all those who chose to hear; he would sit in
the lustrous nights in the shade of his own vines and pity those who
were not as he was; now and then horsemen would come spurring in across
the hills and bring news with them of battles fought, of cities lost and
won; and he would listen with the rest in the market-place, and go home
through the moonlight thinking that it was well to create the holy
things before which the fiercest reiter and the rudest free-lance would
drop the point of the sword and make the sign of the cross.
"It must have been a good life--good to its close in the cathedral
crypt--and so common too; there were scores such lived out in these
little towns of Italy, half monastery and half fortress, that were
scattered over hill and plain, by sea and river, on marsh and mountain,
from the day-dawn of Cimabue to the afterglow of the Carracci.
"And their work lives after them; the little towns are all grey and
still and half peopled now; the iris grows on the ramparts, the canes
wave in the moats, the shadows sleep in the silent market-place, the
great convents shelter half-a-dozen monks, the dim majestic churches are
damp and desolate, and have the scent of the sepulchre.
"But there, above the altars, the wife lives in the Madonna and the
child smiles in the Angel, and the olive and the wheat are fadeless on
their ground of gold and blue; and by the tomb in the crypt the
sacristan will shade his lantern and murmur with a sacred tenderness:--
"'Here he sleeps.'
"'He,' even now, so long, long after, to the people of his birthplace.
Who can want more of life--or death?"
So he talked on in that dreamy, wistful manner that was as natural with
him in some moments as his buoyant and ironical gaiety at others.
Then he rose as the shadows grew longer and pulled down a knot of
pomegranate blossom for me, and we went together under the old walls,
across the maize fields, down the slope of the hills to the olive
orchard, where a peasant, digging deep his trenches against the autumn
rains, had struck his mattock on the sepulchre of the Etruscan king.
There was only a little heap of fine dust when we reach the spot.
* * *
"There was so much more colour in those days," he had said, rolling a
big green papone before him with his foot. "If, indeed, it were laid on
sometimes too roughly. And then there was so much more play for
character. Now-a-days, if a man dare go out of the common ways to seek a
manner of life suited to him, and unlike others, he is voted a vagabond,
or, at least, a lunatic, supposing he is rich enough to get the sentence
so softened. In those days the impossible was possible--a paradox? oh,
of course. The perfection of those days was, that they were full of
paradoxes. No democracy will ever compass the immensity of Hope, the
vastness of Possibility, with which the Church of those ages filled the
lives of the poorest poor. Not hope spiritual only, but hope
terrestrial, hope material and substantial. A swineherd, glad to gnaw
the husks that his pigs left, might become the Viceregent of Christ, and
spurn emperors prostrate before his throne. The most famished student
who girt his lean loins to pass the gates of Pavia or Ravenna, knew that
if he bowed his head for the tonsure he might live to lift it in a
pontiff's arrogance in the mighty reality and the yet mightier metaphor
of a Canosa. The abuses of the mediæval Church have been gibbeted in
every language; but I doubt if the wonderful absolute _equality_ which
that Church actually contained and caused has ever been sufficiently
remembered. Then only think how great it was to _be_ great in those
years, when men were fresh enough of heart to feel emotion and not
ashamed to show it. Think of Petrarca's entry into Rome; think of the
superb life of Raffael; think of the crowds that hung on the lips of
the Improvisatori: think of the influence of S. Bruno, of S. Bernard, of
S. Francis; think of the enormous power on his generation of Fra
Girolamo! And if one were not great at all, but only a sort of brute
with stronger sinews than most men, what a fearless and happy brute one
might be, riding with Hawkwood's Lances, or fighting with the Black
Bands! Whilst, if one were a peaceable, gentle soul, with a turn for art
and grace, what a calm, tender life one might lead in little, old, quiet
cities, painting praying saints on their tiptoes, or moulding
marriage-plates in majolica! It must have been such a great thing to
live when the world was still all open-eyed with wonder at itself, like
a child on its sixth birthday. Now-a-days, science makes a great
discovery; the tired world yawns, feels its pockets, and only asks,
"Will it pay?" Galileo ran the risk of the stake, and Giordano Bruno
suffered at it; but I think that chance of the faggots must have been
better to bear than the languid apathy and the absorbed avarice of the
present age, which is chiefly tolerant because it has no interest except
in new invented ways for getting money and for spending it."
_IN MAREMMA._
He remembered two years before, when he had passed through Italy on his
way eastward, pausing in Ferrara, and Brescia, and Mantua, and staying
longer in the latter city on account of a trial then in course of
hearing in the court of justice, which had interested him by its
passionate and romantic history; it had been the trial of the young
Count d'Este, accused of the assassination of his mistress. Sanctis had
gone with the rest of the town to the hearing of the long and tedious
examination of the witnesses and of accused. It had been a warm day in
early autumn, three months after the night of the murder; Mantua had
looked beautiful in her golden mantle of sunshine and silver veil of
mist; there was a white, light fog on the water meadows and the lakes,
and under it the willows waved and the tall reeds rustled; whilst the
dark towers, the forked battlements, the vast Lombard walls, seemed to
float on it like sombre vessels on a foamy sea.
He remembered the country people flocking in over the bridge, the bells
ringing, the red sails drifting by, the townsfolk gathering together in
the covered arcades and talking with angry rancour against the dead
woman's lord. He remembered sitting in the hush and gloom of the
judgment-hall and furtively sketching the head of the prisoner because
of its extreme and typical beauty. He remembered how at the time he had
thought this accused lover guiltless, and wondered that the tribunal did
not sooner suspect the miserly, malicious, and subtle meaning of the
husband's face. He remembered listening to the tragic tale that seemed
so well to suit those sombre, feudal streets, those melancholy waters,
seeing the three-edged dagger passed from hand to hand, hearing how the
woman had been found dead in her beauty on her old golden and crimson
bed with the lilies on her breast, and looking at the attitude of the
prisoner--in which the judges saw remorse and guilt, and he could only
see the unutterable horror of a bereaved lover to whom the world was
stripped and naked.
He had stayed but two days in Mantua, but those two days had left an
impression on him like that left by the reading at the fall of night of
some ghastly poem of the middle ages. He had thought that they had
condemned an innocent man, as the judge gave his sentence of the galleys
for life: and the scene had often come back to his thoughts.