ACT I

LIMBO AND OTHER ESSAYS

TO WHICH IS NOW ADDED ARIADNE IN MANTUA

BY

VERNON LEE

LONDON--JOHN LANE--THE BODLEY HEAD

NEW YORK--JOHN LANE COMPANY

MCMVIII

CONTENTS

LIMBO

IN PRAISE OF OLD HOUSES

THE LIE OF THE LAND

TUSCAN MIDSUMMER MAGIC

ON MODERN TRAVELLING

OLD ITALIAN GARDENS

ABOUT LEISURE

RAVENNA AND HER GHOSTS

THE COOK-SHOP AND THE FOWLING-PLACE

ACQUAINTANCE WITH BIRDS

ARIADNE IN MANTUA

LIMBO

Perocchè gente di molto valore

Conobbi che in quel _Limbo_ eran sospesi.

I

It may seem curious to begin with Dante and pass on to the Children's

Rabbits' House; but I require both to explain what it is I mean by

Limbo; no such easy matter on trying. For this discourse is not about

the Pious Pagans whom the poet found in honourable confinement at the

Gate of Hell, nor of their neighbours the Unchristened Babies; but I am

glad of Dante's authority for the existence of a place holding such

creatures as have just missed a necessary rite, or come too soon for

thorough salvation. And I am glad, moreover, that the poet has insisted

on the importance--"gente di molto valore"--of the beings thus enclosed;

because it is just with the superior quality of the things in what I

mean by Limbo that we are peculiarly concerned.

And now for the other half of my preliminary illustration of the

subject, to wit, the Children's Rabbits' House. The little gardens which

the children played at cultivating have long since disappeared, taken

insensibly back into that corner of the formal but slackly kept garden

which looks towards the steep hill dotted with cows and sheep. But in

that corner, behind the shapeless Portugal laurels and the patches of

seeding grass, there still remains, beneath big trees, what the children

used to call the "Rabbits' Villa." 'Tis merely a wooden toy house, with

green moss-eaten roof, standing, like the lake dwellings of prehistoric

times, on wooden posts, with the tall foxgloves, crimson and white,

growing all round it. There is something ludicrous in this superannuated

toy, this Noah's ark on stilts among the grass and bushes; but when you

look into the thing, finding the empty plates and cups "for having tea

with the rabbits," and when you look into it spiritually also, it grows

oddly pathetic. We walked up and down between the high hornbeam

hedges, the sunlight lying low on the armies of tall daisies and

seeding grasses, and falling in narrow glints among the white boles and

hanging boughs of the beeches, where the wooden benches stand unused in

the deep grass, and the old swing hangs crazily crooked. Yes, the

Rabbits' Villa and the surrounding overgrown beds are quite pathetic. Is

it because they are, in a way, the graves of children long dead, as

dead--despite the grown-up folk who may come and say "It was I"--as the

rabbits and guinea-pigs with whom they once had tea? That is it; and

that explains my meaning: the Rabbits' Villa is, to the eye of the

initiate, one of many little branch establishments of Limbo surrounding

us on all sides. Another poet, more versed in similar matters than Dante

(one feels sure that Dante knew his own mind, and always had his own

way, even when exiled), Rossetti, in a sonnet, has given us the terrible

little speech which would issue from the small Limbos of this kind:

Look in my face: My name is _Might-have-been_.

II

Of all the things that Limbo might contain, there is one about which

some persons, very notably Churchyard Gray, have led us into error. I do

not believe there is much genius to be found in Limbo. The world,

although it takes a lot of dunning, offers a fair price for this

article, which it requires as much as water-power and coal, nay even as

much as food and clothes (bread for its soul and raiment for its

thought); so that what genius there is will surely be brought into

market. But even were it wholly otherwise, genius, like murder, _would

out_; for genius is one of the liveliest forces of nature; not to be

quelled or quenched, adaptable, protean, expansive, nay explosive; of

all things in the world the most able to take care of itself; which

accounts for so much public expenditure to foster and encourage it:

foster the sun's chemistry, the force of gravitation, encourage atomic

affinity and natural selection, magnificent Mæcenas and judicious

Parliamentary Board, they are sure to do you credit!

Hence, to my mind, there are _no mute inglorious Miltons_, or none

worth taking into account. Our sentimental surmises about them grow from

the notion that human power is something like the wheels or cylinder of

a watch, a neat numbered scrap of mechanism, stamped at a blow by a

creative _fiat_, or hand-hammered by evolution, and fitting just exactly

into one little plan, serving exactly one little purpose, indispensable

for that particular machine, and otherwise fit for the dust-heap.

Happily for us, it is certainly not so. The very greatest men have

always been the most versatile: Lionardo, Goethe, Napoleon; the next

greatest can still be imagined under different circumstances as turning

their energy to very different tasks; and I am tempted to think that the

hobbies by which many of them have laid much store, while the world

merely laughed at the statesman's trashy verses or the musician's

third-rate sketches, may have been of the nature of rudimentary organs,

which, given a different environment, might have developed, become the

creature's chief _raison d'être_, leaving that which has actually

chanced to be his talent to become atrophied, perhaps invisible.

Be this last as it may--and I commend it to those who believe in genius

as a form of monomania--it is quite certain that genius has nothing in

common with machinery. It is the most organic and alive of living

organisms; the most adaptable therefore, and least easily killed; and

for this reason, and despite Gray's _Elegy_, there is no chance of much

of it in Limbo.

This is no excuse for the optimistic extermination of distinguished men.

It is indeed most difficult to kill genius, but there are a hundred ways

of killing its possessors; and with them as much of their work as they

have left undone. What pictures might Giorgione not have painted but for

the lady, the rival, or the plague, whichever it was that killed him!

Mozart could assuredly have given us a half-dozen more _Don Giovannis_

if he had had fewer lessons, fewer worries, better food; nay, by his

miserable death the world has lost, methinks, more even than that--a

commanding influence which would have kept music, for a score of years,

earnest and masterly but joyful: Rossini would not have run to seed, and

Beethoven's ninth symphony might have been a genuine "Hymn to Joy" if

only Mozart, the Apollo of musicians, had, for a few years more,

flooded men's souls with radiance. A similar thing is said of Rafael;

but his followers were mediocre, and he himself lacked personality, so

that many a better example might be brought.

These are not useless speculations; it is as well we realise that,

although genius be immortal, poor men of genius are not. Quite an

extraordinary small amount of draughts and microbes, of starvation

bodily and spiritual, of pin-pricks of various kinds, will do for them;

we can all have a hand in their killing; the killing also of their

peace, kindliness, and justice, sending these qualities to Limbo, which

is full of such. And now, dear reader, I perceive that we have at last

got Limbo well in sight and, in another minute, we may begin to discern

some of its real contents.

III

The Paladin Astolfo, as Ariosto relates, was sent on a winged horse up

to the moon; where, under the ciceroneship of John the Evangelist, he

saw most of the things which had been lost on earth, among others the

wits of many persons in bottles, his cousin Orlando's which he had come

on purpose to fetch, and, curiously enough, his own, which he had never

missed.

The moon does well as storehouse for such brilliant, romantic things.

The Limbo whose contents and branches I would speak of is far less

glorious, a trifle humdrum; sometimes such as makes one smile, like that

Villa of the Rabbits in the neglected garden. 'Twas for this reason,

indeed, that I preferred to clear away at once the question of the Mute

Inglorious Miltons, and of such solemn public loss as comes of the

untimely death of illustrious men. Do you remember, by the way, reader,

a certain hasty sketch by Cazin, which hangs in a corner of the

Luxembourg? The bedroom of Gambetta after his death: the white bed

neatly made, empty, with laurel garlands replacing him; the tricolor

flag, half-furled, leaned against the chair, and on the table vague

heaped-up papers; a thing quite modest and heroic, suitable to all

similar occasions--Mirabeau say, and Stevenson on his far-off

island--and with whose image we can fitly close our talk of genius

wasted by early death.

I have alluded to _happiness_ as filling up much space in Limbo; and I

think that the amount of it lying in that kingdom of Might-have-been is

probably out of all proportion with that which must do that duty in this

actual life. Browning's _Last Ride Together_--one has to be perpetually

referring to poets on this matter, for philosophers and moralists

consider happiness in its _causal connection_ or as a fine snare to

virtue--Browning's _Last Ride Together_ expresses, indeed, a view of the

subject commending itself to active and cheerful persons, which comes to

many just after their salad days; to wit, what a mercy that we don't

often get what we want most. The objects of our recent ardent longings

reveal themselves, most luridly sometimes, as dangers, deadlocks,

fetters, hopeless labyrinths, from which we have barely escaped. This is

the house I wanted to buy, the employment I fretted to obtain, the lady

I pined to marry, the friend with whom I projected to share lodgings.

With such sudden chill recognitions comes belief in a special

providence, some fine Greek-sounding goddess, thwarting one's dearest

wishes from tender solicitude that we shouldn't get what we want. In

such a crisis the nobler of us feel like the Riding Lover, and learn

ideal philosophy and manly acquiescence; the meaner snigger ungenerously

about those youthful escapes; and know not that they have gained safety

at the price, very often, of the little good--ideality, faith and

dash--there ever was about them: safe, smug individuals, whose safety is

mere loss to the cosmos. But later on, when our characters have settled,

when repeated changes have taught us which is our unchangeable ego, we

begin to let go that optimist creed, and to suspect (suspicion turning

to certainty) that, as all things which _have_ happened to us have not

been always advantageous, so likewise things longed for in vain need not

necessarily have been curses. As we grow less attached to theories, and

more to our neighbours, we recognise every day that loss, refusal of the

desired, has not by any means always braced or chastened the lives we

look into; we admit that the Powers That Be showed considerable judgment

in disregarding the teachings of asceticism, and inspiring mankind with

innate repugnance to having a bad time. And, to return to the question

of Limbo, as we watch the best powers, the whole usefulness and

sweetness starved out of certain lives for lack of the love, the

liberty, or the special activities they prayed for; as regards the

question of Limbo, I repeat, we grow (or try to grow) a little more

cautious about sending so much more happiness--ours and other folk's--to

the place of Might-have-been.

Some of it certainly does seem beyond our control, a fatal matter of

constitution. I am not speaking of the results of vice or stupidity;

this talk of Limbo is exclusively addressed to the very nicest people.

A deal of the world's sound happiness is lost through Shyness. We have

all of us seen instances. They often occur between members of the same

family, the very similarity of nature, which might make mothers and

daughters, brothers and sisters, into closest companions, merely

doubling the dose of that terrible reserve, timidity, horror of human

contact, paralysis of speech, which keeps the most loving hearts

asunder. It is useless to console ourselves by saying that each has its

own love of the other. And thus they walk, sometimes side by side,

never looking in one another's eyes, never saying the word, till death

steps in, death sometimes unable to loosen the tongue of the mourner.

Such things are common among our reserved northern races, making us so

much less happy and less helpful in everyday life than our Latin and

Teuton neighbours; and, I imagine, are commonest among persons of the

same blood. But the same will happen between lovers, or those who should

have been such; doubt of one's own feeling, fear of the other's charity,

apprehension of its all being a mistake, has silently prevented many a

marriage. The two, then, could not have been much in love? Not _in

love_, since neither ever allowed that to happen, more's the pity; but

loving one another with the whole affinity of their natures, and, after

all, _being in love_ is but the crisis, or the beginning of that, if

it's worth anything.

Thus shyness sends much happiness to Limbo. But actual shyness is not

the worst. Some persons, sometimes of the very finest kind, endowed for

loving-kindness, passion, highest devotion, nay requiring it as much as

air or warmth, have received, from some baleful fairy, a sterilising

gift of fear. Fear of what they could not tell; something which makes

all community of soul a terror, and every friend a threat. Something

terrible, in whose presence we must bow our heads and pray impunity

therefrom for ourselves and ours.

But the bulk of happiness stacked up in Limbo appears, on careful

looking, to be an agglomeration of other lost things; justice, charm,

appreciation, and faith in one another, all recklessly packed off as so

much lumber, sometimes to make room for fine new qualities instead!

Justice, I am inclined to think, is usually sent to Limbo through the

agency of others. A work in many folios might be written by condensing

what famous men have had said against them in their days of struggle,

and what they have answered about others in their days of prosperity.

The loss of _charm_ is due to many more circumstances; the stress of

life indeed seems calculated to send it to Limbo. Certain it is that few

women, and fewer men, of forty, preserve a particle of it. I am not

speaking of youth or beauty, though it does seem a pity that mature

human beings should mostly be too fat or too thin, and lacking either

sympathy or intellectual keenness. _Charm_ must comprise all that, but

much besides. It is the undefinable quality of nearly every child, and

of all nice lads and girls; the quality which (though it _can_ reach

perfection in exceptional old people) usually vanishes, no one knows

when exactly, into the Limbo marked by the Rabbits' Villa, with its

plates and tea-cups, mouldering on its wooden posts in the unweeded

garden.

More useful qualities replace all these: hardness, readiness to snatch

opportunity, mistrust of all ideals, inflexible self-righteousness;

useful, nay necessary; but, let us admit it, in a life which, judged by

the amount of dignity and sweetness it contains, is perhaps scarce

necessary itself, and certainly not useful. The case might be summed up,

for our guidance, by saying that the loss of many of our finer qualities

is due to the complacent, and sometimes dutiful, cultivation of our

worse ones!

For, even in the list of virtues, there are finer and less fine, nay

virtues one might almost call atrocious, and virtues with a taint of

ignominy. I have said that we lose some of our finer qualities this way;

what's worse is, that we often fail to appreciate the finest qualities

of others.

IV

And here, coming to the vague rubric _appreciation of others_, I feel we

have got to a district of Limbo about which few of us should have the

audacity to speak, and few, as a fact, have the courage honestly to

think. _What do we make of our idea of others_ in our constant attempt

to justify ourselves? No Japanese bogie-monger ever produced the equal

of certain wooden monster-puppets which we carve, paint, rig out, and

christen by the names of real folk--alas, alas, dear names sometimes of

friends!--and stick up to gibber in our memory; while the real image,

the creature we have really known, is carted off to Limbo! But this is

too bad to speak of.

Let us rather think gently of things, sad, but sad without ignominy, of

friendships still-born or untimely cut off, hurried by death into a

place like that which holds the souls of the unchristened babies;

often, like them, let us hope, removed to a sphere where such things

grow finer and more fruitful, the sphere of the love of those we have

not loved enough in life.

But that at best is but a place of ghosts; so let us never forget, dear

friends, how close all round lies Limbo, the Kingdom of

Might-have-been.

IN PRAISE OF OLD HOUSES

I

My Yorkshire friend was saying that she hated being in an old house.

_There seemed to be other_ people in it besides the living....

These words, expressing the very reverse of what I feel, have set me

musing on my foolish passion for the Past. The Past, but the real one;

not the Past considered as a possible Present. For though I should like

to have seen ancient Athens, or Carthage according to Salambô, and

though I have pined to hear the singers of last century, I know that any

other period than this of the world's history would be detestable to

live in. For one thing--one among other instances of brutish

dulness--our ancestors knew nothing of the emotion of the past, the

rapture of old towns and houses.

This emotion, at times this rapture, depends upon a number of mingled

causes; its origin is complex and subtle, like that of all things

exquisite; the flavour of certain dishes, the feel of sea or mountain

air, in which chemical peculiarities and circumstances of temperature

join with a hundred trifles, seaweed, herbs, tar, heather and so forth;

and like, more particularly, music and poetry, whose essence is so

difficult of ascertaining. And in this case, the causes that first occur

to our mind merely suggest a number more. Of these there is a principal

one, only just less important than that suggested by my Yorkshire

friend, which might be summed up thus: _That the action of time makes

man's works into natural objects._

Now, with no disrespect to man, 'tis certain Nature can do more than he.

Not that she is the more intelligent of the two; on the contrary, she

often makes the grossest artistic blunders, and has, for instance, a

woeful lack of design in England, and a perfect mania for obvious

composition and deliberate picturesqueness in Italy and Argyllshire. But

Nature is greater than man because she is bigger, and can do more things

at a time. Man seems unable to attend to one point without neglecting

some other; where he has a fine fancy in melody, his harmony is apt to

be threadbare; if he succeeds with colour, he cannot manage line, and if

light and shade, then neither; and it is a circumstance worthy of remark

that whenever and wherever man has built beautiful temples, churches,

and palaces, he has been impelled to bedizen them with primary colours,

of which, in Venice and the Alhambra, time at last made something

agreeable, and time also, in Greece, has judged best to obliterate every

odious trace. Hence, in the works of man there is always a tendency to

simplify, to suppress detail, to make things clear and explain patterns

and points of view; to save trouble, thought, and material; to be

symmetrical, which means, after all, to repeat the same thing twice

over; he knows it is wrong to carve one frieze on the top of the other,

and to paint in more than one layer of paint. Of all such restrictions

Nature is superbly unconscious. She smears weather-stain on

weather-stain and lichen on lichen, never stopping to match them. She

jags off corners and edges, and of one meagre line makes fifty curves

and facets. She weaves pattern over pattern, regardless of confusion,

so that the mangiest hedgerow is richer, more subtle than all the

carpets and papers ever designed by Mr. Morris. Her one notion is _More,

always more_; whereas that of man, less likely to exceed, is a timid

_Enough_. No wonder, for has she not the chemistry of soil and sun and

moisture and wind and frost, all at her beck and call?

Be it as it may, Nature does more for us than man, in the way of

pleasure and interest. And to say, therefore, that time turns the works

of man into natural objects is, therefore, saying that time gives them

infinitely more variety and charm. In making them natural objects also

time gives to man's lifeless productions the chief quality of everything

belonging to Nature--life. Compare a freshly plastered wall with one

that has been exposed to sun and rain, or a newly slated roof to one all

covered with crumbling, grey, feathery stuff, like those of the Genoese

villages, which look as if they had been thatched with olive-leaves from

off their hills. 'Tis the comparison between life and death; or, rather,

since death includes change, between something and nothing. Imagine a

tree as regular as a column, or an apple as round as a door-knob!

II

So much for the material improvements which time effects in our

surroundings. We now come to the spiritual advantages of dealing with

the past instead of the present.

These begin in our earliest boy- or girl-hood. What right-minded child

of ten or twelve cares, beyond its tribute of apples, and jam, and

cricket, and guinea-pigs, for so dull a thing as the present? Why, the

present is like this schoolroom or playground, compared with Polar Seas,

Rocky Mountains, or Pacific Islands; a place for the body, not for the

soul. It all came back to me, a little while ago, when doing up for my

young friend, L.V., sundry Roman coins long mislaid in a trunk, and

which had formed my happiness at his age. Delightful things!--smooth and

bright green like certain cabbage-leaves, or of a sorry brown, rough

with rust and verdigris; but all leaving alike a perceptible portion of

themselves in the paper bag, a delectable smell of copper on one's

hands. How often had I turned you round and round betwixt finger and

thumb, trying to catch the slant of an inscription, or to get, in some

special light, the film of effaced effigy--the chin of Nero, or the

undulating, benevolent nose of Marcus Aurelius? How often have my hands

not anointed you with every conceivable mixture of oil, varnish, and

gum, rubbing you gently with silk and wool, and kid gloves, in hopes

that something ineffable might rise up on your surface! I quite

sympathised with my young friend when, having waggled and chortled over

each of them several times, he thought it necessary to overcome the

natural manly horror for kissing, and shook my hand twice, thrice, and

then once more, returning from the door.... For had they not

concentrated in their interesting verdigrised, brass-smelling smallness

something, to me, of the glory and wonder of Rome? Cæcilia Metella, the

Grotto of Egeria--a vague vision, through some twenty years' fog, of a

drive between budding hedges and dry reeds; a walk across short

anemone-starred turf; but turning into distinct remembrance of the

buying of two old pennies, one of Augustus, the other even more

interesting, owing to entire obliteration of both reverse and obverse; a

valuable coin, undoubtedly. And the Baths of Caracalla, which I can

recollect with the thick brushwood, oak scrub, ivy and lentisk, and even

baby ilexes, covering the masonry and overhanging the arches, and with

rose hedges just cut away to dig out some huge porphyry pillar--were not

their charms all concentrated in dim, delicious hopes of finding, just

where the green turf ended and the undulating expanse of purple, green

and white tessellated pavement began, some other brazen penny? And then,

in Switzerland, soon after, did I not suffer acutely, as I cleaned my

coins, from the knowledge that in this barbarous Northern place, which

the Romans had, perhaps, never come near, it was quite useless to keep

one's eyes on the ruts of roads and the gravel of paths, and

consequently almost useless to go out, or to exist; until one day I

learnt that a certain old lawyer, in a certain field, had actually dug

up Roman antiquities.... I don't know whether I ever saw them with

corporeal eyes, but certainly with those of the spirit; and I was lent

a drawing of one of them, a gold armlet, of which I insisted on having

a copy made, and sticking it up in my room....

It does but little honour to our greatest living philosopher that he,

whom children will bless for free permission to bruise, burn, and cut

their bodies, and empty the sugar-bowl and jam-pot, should wish to

deprive the coming generation of all historical knowledge, of so much

joy therefore, and, let me add, of so much education. For do not tell me

that it is not education, and of the best, to enable a child to feel the

passion and poetry of life; to live, while it trudges along the dull

familiar streets, in company with dull, familiar, and often stolidly

incurious grown-up folk, in that terrible, magnificent past, in dungeons

and palaces, loving and worshipping Joan of Arc, execrating Bloody Mary,

dreaming strange impossible possibilities of what we would have said and

done for Marie Antoinette--said to her, _her_ actually coming towards

us, by some stroke of magic, in that advancing carriage! There is enough

in afterlife, God knows, to teach us _not to be heroic_; 'tis just as

well that, as children, we learn a lingering liking for the quality;

'tis as important, perhaps, as learning that our tissues consume

carbon, if they do so. I can speak very fervently of the enormous value

for happiness of such an historical habit of mind.

Such a habit transcends altogether, in its power of filling one's life,

the merely artistic and literary habit. For, after all, painting,

architecture, music, poetry, are things which touch us in a very

intermittent way. I would compare this historic habit rather to the

capacity of deriving pleasure from nature, not merely through the eye,

but through all the senses; and largely, doubtless, through those

obscure perceptions which make certain kinds of weather, air, &c., an

actual tonic, nay food, for the body. To this alone would I place my

_historical habit_ in the second rank. For, as the sensitiveness to

nature means supplementing our physical life by the life of the air and

the sun, the clouds and waters, so does this historic habit mean

supplementing our present life by a life in the past; a life larger,

richer than our own, multiplying our emotions by those of the dead....

I am no longer speaking of our passions for Joan of Arc and Marie

Antoinette, which disappear with our childhood; I am speaking of a

peculiar sense, ineffable, indescribable, but which every one knows

again who has once had it, and which to many of us has grown into a

cherished habit--the sense of being companioned by the past, of being in

a place warmed for our living by the lives of others. To me, as I

started with saying, the reverse of this is almost painful; and I know

few things more odious than the chilly, draughty emptiness of a place

without a history. For this reason America, save what may remain of

Hawthorne's New England and Irving's New York, never tempts my vagabond

fancy. Nature can scarcely afford beauty wherewith to compensate for

living in block-tin shanties or brand new palaces. How different if we

find ourselves in some city, nay village, rendered habitable for our

soul by the previous dwelling therein of others, of souls! Here the

streets are never empty; and, surrounded by that faceless crowd of

ghosts, one feels a right to walk about, being invited by them, instead

of rushing along on one's errands among a throng of other wretched

living creatures who are blocked by us and block us in their turn.

How convey this sense? I do not mean that if I walk through old Paris or

through Rome my thoughts revolve on Louis XI. or Julius Cæsar. Nothing

could be further from the fact. Indeed the charm of the thing is that

one feels oneself accompanied not by this or that magnifico of the past

(whom of course one would never have been introduced to), but by a crowd

of nameless creatures; the daily life, common joy, suffering, heroism of

the past. Nay, there is something more subtle than this: the whole place

(how shall I explain it?) becomes a sort of living something. Thus, when

I hurry (for one must needs hurry through Venetian narrowness) between

the pink and lilac houses, with faded shutters and here and there a

shred of tracery; now turning a sharp corner before the locksmith's or

the chestnut-roaster's; now hearing my steps lonely between high walls

broken by a Gothic doorway; now crossing some smooth-paved little square

with its sculptured well and balconied palaces, I feel, I say, walking

day after day through these streets, that I am in contact with a whole

living, breathing thing, full of habits of life, of suppressed words; a

sort of odd, mysterious, mythical, but very real creature; as if, in

the dark, I stretched out my hand and met something (but without any

fear), something absolutely indefinable in shape and kind, but warm,

alive. This changes solitude in unknown places into the reverse of

solitude and strangeness. I remember walking thus along the bastions

under the bishop's palace at Laon, the great stone cows peering down

from the belfry above, with a sense of inexpressible familiarity and

peace. And, strange to say, this historic habit makes us familiar also

with places where we have never been. How well, for instance, do I not

know Dinant and Bouvines, rival cities on the Meuse (topography and

detail equally fantastic); and how I sometimes long, as with

homesickness, for a scramble among the stones and grass and

chandelier-like asphodels of Agrigentum, Veii, Collatium! Why, to one

minded like myself, a map, and even the names of stations in a

time-table, are full of possible delight.

And sometimes it rises to rapture. This time, eight years ago, I was

fretting my soul away, ill, exiled away from home, forbidden all work,

in the south of Spain. At Granada for three dreary weeks it rained

without ceasing, till the hill of the Alhambra became filled with the

babbling of streams, and the town was almost cut off by a sea of mud.

Between the showers one rushed up into the damp gardens of the

Generalife, or into the Alhambra, to be imprisoned for hours in its

desolate halls, while the rain splashed down into the courts. My

sitting-room had five doors, four of glass; and the snow lay thick on

the mountains. My few books had been read long ago; there remained to

spell through a Spanish tome on the rebellion of the Alpujarras, whose

Moorish leader, having committed every crime, finally went to heaven for

spitting on the Koran on his death-bed. Letters from home were

perpetually lost, or took a week to come. It seemed as if the world had

quite unlearned every single trick that had ever given me pleasure. Yet,

in these dreary weeks, there was one happy morning.

It was the anniversary, worse luck to it, of the Conquest of Granada

from the Moors. We got seats in the chapel of the Catholic kings, and

watched a gentleman in a high hat (which he kept on in church) and

swallow tails, carry the banner of Castile and Aragon, in the presence

of the archbishop and chapter, some mediæval pages, two trumpeters with

pigtails, and an array of soldiers. A paltry ceremony enough. But before

it began, and while mass was still going on, there came to me for a few

brief moments that happiness unknown for so many, many months, that

beloved historic emotion.

My eyes were wandering round the chapel, up the sheaves of the pilasters

to the gilded spandrils, round the altars covered with gibbering

sculpture, and down again among the crowd kneeling on the matted

floor--women in veils, men with scarlet cloak-lining over the shoulder,

here and there the shaven head and pigtail of the bull-ring. In the

middle of it all, on their marble beds, lay the effigies of Ferdinand

and Isabella, with folded hands and rigid feet, four crimson banners of

the Moors overhead. The crowd was pouring in from the cathedral, and

bevies of priests, and scarlet choir-boys led by their fiddler. The

organ, above the chants, was running through vague mazes. I felt it

approaching and stealing over me, that curious emotion felt before in

such different places: walking up and down, one day, in the church of

Lamballe in Brittany; seated, another time, in the porch at Ely. And

then it possessed me completely, raising one into a sort of beatitude.

This kind of rapture is not easy to describe. No rare feeling is. But I

would warn you from thinking that in such solemn moments there sweeps

across the brain a paltry pageant, a Lord Mayor's Show of bygone things,

like the cavalcades of future heroes who descend from frescoed or

sculptured wall at the bidding of Ariosto's wizards and Spenser's

fairies. This is something infinitely more potent and subtle; and like

all strong intellectual emotions, it is compounded of many and various

elements, and has its origin far down in mysterious depths of our

nature; and it arises overwhelmingly from many springs, filling us with

the throb of vague passions welling from our most vital parts. There is

in it no possession of any definite portion of bygone times; but a

yearning expectancy, a sense of the near presence, as it were, of the

past; or, rather, of a sudden capacity in ourselves of apprehending the

past which looms all round.

For a few moments thus, in that chapel before the tombs of the Catholic

kings; in the churches of Bruges and Innsbruck at the same time (for

such emotion gives strange possibilities of simultaneous presence in

various places); with the gold pomegranate flower of the badges, and the

crimson tassels of the Moorish standards before my eyes; also the iron

knights who watch round Maximilian's grave--for a moment while the

priests were chanting and the organs quavering, the life of to-day

seemed to reel and vanish, and my mind to be swept along the dark and

gleaming whirlpools of the past....

III

Catholic kings, Moorish banners, wrought-iron statues of paladins; these

are great things, and not at all what I had intended to speak of when I

set out to explain why old houses, which give my Yorkshire friend the

creeps, seem to my feelings so far more peaceful and familiar.

Yes, it is just because the past is somehow more companionable, warmer,

more full of flavour, than the present, that I love all old houses; but

best of all such as are solitary in the country, isolated both from new

surroundings, and from such alterations as contact with the world's

hurry almost always brings. It certainly is no question of beauty. The

houses along Chelsea embankment are more beautiful, and some of them a

great deal more picturesque than that Worcestershire rectory to which I

always long to return: the long brick house on its terraced river-bank,

the overladen plum-trees on one side, and the funereally prosperous

churchyard yews on the other; and with corridors and staircases hung

with stained, frameless Bolognese nakedness, Judgments of Paris,

Venuses, Carità Romanas, shipped over cheap by some bear-leading

parson-tutor of the eighteenth century. Nor are they architectural,

those brick and timber cottages all round, sinking (one might think)

into the rich, damp soil. But they have a mellowness corresponding to

that of the warm, wet, fruitful land, and due to the untroubled, warm

brooding over by the past. And what is architecture to that? As to these

Italian ones, which my soul loveth most, they have even less of what you

would call beauty; at most such grace of projecting window-grating or

buttressed side as the South gives its buildings; and such colour, or

rather discolouring, as a comparatively small number of years will

bring.

It kept revolving in my mind, this question of old houses and their

charm, as I was sitting waiting for a tram one afternoon, in the

church-porch of Pieve a Ripoli, a hamlet about two miles outside the

south-east gate of Florence. That church porch is like the baldacchino

over certain Roman high altars, or, more humbly, like a very large

fourpost bedstead. On the one hand was a hillside of purple and brown

scrub and dark cypresses fringed against the moist, moving grey sky; on

the other, some old, bare, mulberry-trees, a hedge of russet sloe,

closing in wintry fields; and, more particularly, next the porch, an

insignificant house, with blistered green shutters at irregular

intervals in the stained whitewash, a big green door, and a little

coat-of-arms--the three Strozzi half-moons--clapped on to the sharp

corner. I sat there, among the tombstones of the porch, and wondered why

I loved this house: and why it would remain, as I knew it must, a

landmark in my memory. Yes, the charm must lie in the knowledge of the

many creatures who have lived in this house, the many things that have

been done and felt.

The creatures who have lived here, the things which have been felt and

done.... But those things felt and done, were they not mainly trivial,

base; at best nowise uncommon, and such as must be going on in every new

house all around? People worked and shirked their work, endured,

fretted, suffered somewhat, and amused themselves a little; were loving,

unkind, neglected and neglectful, and died, some too soon, some too

late. That is human life, and as such doubtless important. But all that

goes on to-day just the same; and there is no reason why that former

life should have been more interesting than that these people, Argenta

Cavallesi and Vincenzio Grazzini, buried at my feet, should have had

bigger or better made souls and bodies than I or my friends. Indeed, in

sundry ways, and owing to the narrowness of life and thought, the calmer

acceptance of coarse or cruel things, I incline to think that they were

less interesting, those men and women of the past, whose rustling

dresses fill old houses with fantastic sounds. They had, some few of

them, their great art, great aims, feelings, struggles; but the majority

were of the earth, and intolerably earthy. 'Tis their clothes' ghosts

that haunt us, not their own.

So why should the past be charming? Perhaps merely because of its being

the one free place for our imagination. For, as to the future, it is

either empty or filled only with the cast shadows of ourselves and our

various machineries. The past is the unreal and the yet visible; it has

the fascination of the distant hills, the valleys seen from above; the

unreal, but the unreal whose unreality, unlike that of the unreal things

with which we cram the present, can never be forced on us. _There is

more behind; there may be anything._ This sense which makes us in love

with all intricacies of things and feelings, roads which turn, views

behind views, trees behind trees, makes the past so rich in

possibilities.... An ordinary looking priest passes by, rings at the

door of the presbytery, and enters. Those who lived there, in that old

stained house with the Strozzi escutcheon, opposite the five bare

mulberry-trees, were doubtless as like as may be to this man who lives

there in the present. Quite true; and yet there creeps up the sense that

_they_ lived in the past.

For there is no end to the deceits of the past; we protest that we know

it is cozening us, and it continues to cozen us just as much. Reading

over Browning's _Galuppi_ lately, it struck me that this dead world of

vanity was no more charming or poetical than the one we live in, when it

also was alive; and that those ladies, Mrs. X., Countess Y., and Lady

Z., of whose _toilettes_ at last night's ball that old gossip P---- had

been giving us details throughout dinner, will in their turn, if any one

care, be just as charming, as dainty, and elegiac as those other women

who sat by while Galuppi "played toccatas stately at the clavichord."

Their dresses, should they hang for a century or so, will emit a perfume

as frail, and sad, and heady; their wardrobe filled with such dust as

makes tears come into one's eyes, from no mechanical reason.

"Was a lady _such_ a lady?" They will say that of ours also. And, in

recognising this, we recognise how trumpery, flat, stale and

unprofitable were those ladies of the past. It is not they who make the

past charming, but the past that makes them. Time has wonderful

cosmetics for its favoured ones; and if it brings white hairs and

wrinkles to the realities, how much does it not heighten the bloom,

brighten the eyes and hair of those who survive in our imagination!

And thus, somewhat irrelevantly, concludes my chapter in praise of old

houses.

THE LIE OF THE LAND

NOTES ABOUT LANDSCAPES

I

I want to talk about the something which makes the real, individual

landscape--the landscape one actually sees with the eyes of the body and

the eyes of the spirit--the _landscape you cannot describe_.

That is the drawback of my subject--that it just happens to elude all

literary treatment, and yet it must be treated. There is not even a

single word or phrase to label it, and I have had to call it, in sheer

despair, _the lie of the land_: it is an unnamed mystery into which

various things enter, and I feel as if I ought to explain myself by dumb

show. It will serve at any rate as an object-lesson in the extreme

one-sidedness of language and a protest against human silence about the

things it likes best.

Of outdoor things words can of course tell us some important points:

colour, for instance, and light, and somewhat of their gradations and

relations. And an adjective, a metaphor, may evoke an entire atmospheric

effect, paint us a sunset or a star-lit night. But the far subtler and

more individual relations of visible line defy expression: no poet or

prose writer can give you the tilt of a roof, the undulation of a field,

the bend of a road. Yet these are the things in landscape which

constitute its individuality and which reach home to our feelings.

For colour and light are variable--nay, more, they are relative. The

same tract will be green in connection with one sort of sky, blue with

another, and yellow with a third. We may be disappointed when the woods,

which we had seen as vague, moss-like blue before the sun had overtopped

the hills, become at midday a mere vast lettuce-bed. We should be much

more than disappointed, we should doubt of our senses if we found on

going to our window that it looked down upon outlines of hills, upon

precipices, ledges, knolls, or flat expanses, different from those we

had seen the previous day or the previous year. Thus the unvarying items

of a landscape happen to be those for which precise words cannot be

found. Briefly, we praise colour, but we actually _live_ in the

indescribable thing which I must call the _lie of the land_. The lie of

the land means walking or climbing, shelter or bleakness; it means the

corner where we dread a boring neighbour, the bend round which we have

watched some one depart, the stretch of road which seemed to lead us

away out of captivity. Yes, _lie of the land_ is what has mattered to us

since we were children, to our fathers and remotest ancestors; and its

perception, the instinctive preference for one kind rather than another,

is among the obscure things inherited with our blood, and making up the

stuff of our souls. For how else explain the strange powers which

different shapes of the earth's surface have over different individuals;

the sudden pleasure, as of the sight of an old friend, the pang of

pathos which we may all receive in a scene which is new, without

memories, and so unlike everything familiar as to be almost without

associations?

The _lie of the land_ has therefore an importance in art, or if it have

not, ought to have, quite independent of pleasantness of line or of

anything merely visual. An immense charm consists in the fact that the

mind can walk about in a landscape. The delight at the beauty which is

seen is heightened by the anticipation of further unseen beauty; by the

sense of exploring the unknown; and to our present pleasure before a

painted landscape is added the pleasure we have been storing up during

years of intercourse, if I may use this word, with so many real ones.

II

For there is such a thing as intercourse with fields and trees and

skies, with the windings of road and water and hedge, in our everyday,

ordinary life. And a terrible thing for us all if there were not; if our

lives were not full of such various commerce, of pleasure, curiosity,

and gratitude, of kindly introduction of friend by friend, quite apart

from the commerce with other human beings. Indeed, one reason why the

modern rectangular town (built at one go for the convenience of running

omnibuses and suppressing riots) fills our soul with bitterness and

dryness, is surely that this ill-conditioned convenient thing can give

us only its own poor, paltry presence, introducing our eye and fancy

neither to further details of itself, nor to other places and people,

past or distant.

Words can just barely indicate the charm of this _other place other

time_ enriching of the present impression. Words cannot in the least, I

think, render that other suggestion contained in _The Lie of the Land_,

the suggestion of the possibility of a delightful walk. What walks have

we not taken, leaving sacred personages and profane, not to speak of

allegoric ones, far behind in the backgrounds of the old Tuscans,

Umbrians, and Venetians! Up Benozzo's hillside woods of cypress and

pine, smelling of myrrh and sweet-briar, over Perugino's green rising

grounds, towards those slender, scant-leaved trees, straight-stemmed

acacias and elms, by the water in the cool, blue evening valley. Best of

all, have not Giorgione and Titian, Palma and Bonifazio, and the dear

imitative people labelled _Venetian school_, led us between the hedges

russet already with the ripening of the season and hour into those

fields where the sheep are nibbling, under the twilight of the big

brown trees, to where some pale blue alp closes in the slopes and the

valleys?

III

It is a pity that the landscape painters of our day--I mean those French

or French taught, whose methods are really new--tend to neglect _The Lie

of the Land_. Some of them, I fear, deliberately avoid it as

old-fashioned--what they call obvious--as interfering with their aim of

interesting by the mere power of vision and skill in laying on the

paint. Be this as it may, their innovations inevitably lead them away

from all research of what we may call _topographical_ charm, for what

they have added to art is the perfection of very changeable conditions

of light and atmosphere, of extremely fleeting accidents of colour. One

would indeed be glad to open one's window on the fairyland of iridescent

misty capes, of vibrating skies and sparkling seas of Monsieur Claude

Monet; still more to stand at the close of an autumn day watching the

light fogs rise along the fields, mingling with delicate pinkish mist of

the bare poplar rows against the green of the first sprouts of corn.

But I am not sure that the straight line of sea and shore would be

interesting at any other moment of the day; and the poplar rows and

cornfields would very likely be drearily dull until sunset. The moment,

like Faust's second of perfect bliss, is such as should be made

immortal, but the place one would rather not see again. Yet Monsieur

Monet is the one of his school who shows most care for the scene he is

painting. The others, even the great ones--men like Pissarro and Sisley,

who have shown us so many delightful things in the details of even the

dull French foliage, even the dull midday sky--the other _modern ones_

make one long to pull up their umbrella and easel and carry them on--not

very far surely--to some spot where the road made a bend, the embankment

had a gap, the water a swirl; for we would not be so old-fashioned as to

request that the country might have a few undulations.... Of course it

was very dull of our ancestors--particularly of Clive Newcome's

day--always to paint a panorama with whole ranges of hills, miles of

river, and as many cities as possible; and even our pleasure in Turner's

large landscapes is spoilt by their being the sort of thing people

would drive for miles or climb for hours to enjoy, what our grandfathers

in post-chaises called a _noble fine prospect_. All that had to be got

rid of, like the contemporaneous literary descriptions: "A smiling

valley proceeded from south-east to north-west; an amphitheatre of

cliffs bounding it on the right hand; while to the left a magnificent

waterfall leapt from a rock three hundred feet in height and expanded

into a noble natural basin of granite some fifty yards in diameter," &c.

&c. The British classics, thus busy with compass, measuring-rod and

level, thus anxious to enable the reader to reconstruct their landscape

on paste-board, had no time of course to notice trifling matters: how,

for instance,

The woods are round us, heaped and dim;

From slab to slab how it slips and springs

The thread of water, single and slim,

Through the ravage some torrent brings.

Nor could the panoramic painter of the earlier nineteenth century pay

much attention to mere alternations of light while absorbed in his great

"Distant View of Jerusalem and Madagascar"; indeed, he could afford to

move off only when it began to rain very hard.

IV

The impressionist painters represent the reaction against this dignified

and also more stolid school of landscape; they have seen, or are still

seeing, all the things which other men did not see. And here I may

remark that one of the most important items of this seeing is exactly

the fact that in many cases we can _see_ only very little. The

impressionists have been scoffed at for painting rocks which might be

chimney-stacks, and flowering hedges which might be foaming brooks;

plains also which might be hills, and _vice versâ_, and described as

wretches, disrespectful to natural objects, which, we are told, reveal

new beauties at every glance. But is it more respectful to natural

objects to put a drawing-screen behind a willow-bush and copy its

minutest detail of branch and trunk, than to paint that same willow, a

mere mist of glorious orange, as we see it flame against the hillside

confusion of mauve, and russet and pinkish sereness? I am glad to have

brought in that word _confusion_: the modern school of landscape has

done a great and pious thing in reinstating the complexity, the mystery,

the confusion of Nature's effects; Nature, which differs from the paltry

work of man just in this, that she does not thin out, make clear and

symmetrical for the easier appreciation of foolish persons, but packs

effect upon effect, in space even as in time, one close upon the other,

leaf upon leaf, branch upon branch, tree upon tree, colour upon colour,

a mystery of beauty wrapped in beauty, without the faintest concern

whether it would not be better to say "this is really a river," or,

"that is really a tree." "But," answer the critics with much

superiority, "art should not be the mere copying of Nature; surely there

is already enough of Nature herself; art should be the expression of

man's delight in Nature's shows." Well, Nature shows a great many things

which are not unchanging and not by any means unperplexing; she shows

them at least to those who will see, see what is really there to be

seen; and she will show them, thanks to our brave impressionists, to all

men henceforth who have eyes and a heart. And here comes our debt to

these great painters: what a number of effects, modest and exquisite, or

bizarre and magnificent, they will have taught us to look out for; what

beauty and poetry in humdrum scenery, what perfect loveliness even among

sordidness and squalor: tints as of dove's breasts in city mud, enamel

splendours in heaps of furnace refuse, mysterious magnificence, visions

of Venice at night, of Eblis palace, of I know not what, in wet gaslit

nights, in looming lit-up factories. Nay, leaving that alone, since 'tis

better, perhaps, that we should not enjoy anything connected with grime

and misery and ugliness--how much have not these men added to the

delight of our walks and rides; revealing to us, among other things, the

supreme beauty of winter colouring, the harmony of purple, blue, slate,

brown, pink, and russet, of tints and compounds of tints without a name,

of bare hedgerows and leafless trees, sere grass and mist-veiled waters;

compared with which spring is but raw, summer dull, and autumn

positively ostentatious in her gala suit of tawny and yellow.

Perhaps, indeed, these modern painters have done more for us by the

beauty they have taught us to see in Nature than by the beauty they have

actually put before us in their pictures; if I except some winter

landscapes of Monet's and the wonderful water-colours of Mr. Brabazon,

whose exquisite sense of form and knowledge of drawing have enabled him,

in rapidest sketches of rapidly passing effects, to indicate the

structure of hills and valleys, the shape of clouds, in the mere wash of

colour, even as Nature indicates them herself. With such exceptions as

these, and the beautiful mysteries of Mr. Whistler, there is

undoubtedly, in recent landscape, a preoccupation of technical methods

and an indifference to choice of subject, above all, a degree of

insistence on what is _actually seen_ which leads one to suspect that

the impressionists represent rather a necessary phase in the art, than a

definite achievement, in the same manner as the Renaissance painters who

gave themselves up to the study of perspective and anatomy. This

terrible over-importance of the act of vision is doubtless the

preparation for a new kind of landscape, which will employ these

arduously acquired facts of colour and light, this restlessly renovated

technique, in the service of a new kind of sentiment and imagination,

differing from that of previous ages even as the sentiment and

imagination of Browning differs from that of his great predecessors. But

it is probably necessary that the world at large, as well as the

artists, should be familiarised with the new facts, the new methods of

impressionism, before such facts and methods can find their significance

and achievement; even as in the Renaissance people had to recognise the

realities of perspective and anatomy before they could enjoy an art

which attained beauty through this means; it would have been no use

showing Sixtine chapels to the contemporaries of Giotto. There is at

present a certain lack of enjoyable quality, a lack of soul appealing to

soul, in the new school of landscape. But where there is a faithful,

reverent eye, a subtle hand, a soul cannot be far round the corner. And

we may hope that, if we be as sincere and willing as themselves, our

Pollaiolos and Mantegnas of the impressionist school, discoverers of new

subtleties of colour and light, will be duly succeeded by modern

Michelangelos and Titians, who will receive all the science ready for

use, and bid it fetch and carry and build new wonderful things for the

pleasure of their soul and of ours.

V

And mentioning Titian, brings to my memory a remark once made to me on

one of those washed away, rubbly hills, cypresses and pines holding the

earth together, which the old Tuscans drew so very often. The remark,

namely, that some of the charm of the old masters' landscapes is due to

the very reverse of what sometimes worries one in modern work, to the

notion which these backgrounds give at first--bits of valley, outlines

of hills, distant views of towered villages, of having been done without

trouble, almost from memory, till you discover that your Titian has

modelled his blue valley into delicate blue ridges; and your Piero della

Francesca indicated the precise structure of his pale, bony mountains.

Add to this, to the old men's credit, that, as I said, they knew _the

lie of the land_, they gave us landscapes in which our fancy, our

memories, could walk.

How large a share such fancy and such memories have in the life of art,

people can scarcely realise. Nay, such is the habit of thinking of the

picture, statue, or poem, as a complete and vital thing apart from the

mind which perceives it, that the expression _life of art_ is sure to be

interpreted as life of various schools of art: thus, the life of art

developed from the type of Phidias to that of Praxiteles, and so forth.

But in the broader, truer sense, the life of all art goes on in the mind

and heart, not merely of those who make the work, but of those who see

and read it. Nay, is not _the_ work, the real one, a certain particular

state of feeling, a pattern woven of new perceptions and impressions and

of old memories and feelings, which the picture, the statue or poem,

awakens, different in each different individual? 'Tis a thought perhaps

annoying to those who have slaved seven years over a particular outline

of muscles, a particular colour of grass, or the cadence of a particular

sentence. What! all this to be refused finality, to be disintegrated by

the feelings and fancies of the man who looks at the picture, or reads

the book, heaven knows how carelessly besides? Well, if not

disintegrated, would you prefer it to be unassimilated? Do you wish your

picture, statue or poem to remain whole as you made it? Place it

permanently in front of a mirror; consign it to the memory of a parrot;

or, if you are musician, sing your song, expression and all, down a

phonograph. You cannot get from the poor human soul, that living

microcosm of changing impressions, the thorough, wholesale appreciation

which you want.

VI

This same power of sentiment and fancy, that is to say, of association,

enables us to carry about, like a verse or a tune, whole mountain

ranges, valleys, rivers and lakes, things in appearance the least easy

to remove from their place. As some persons are never unattended by a

melody; so others, and among them your humble servant, have always for

their thoughts and feelings, an additional background besides the one

which happens to be visible behind their head and shoulders. By this

means I am usually in two places at a time, sometimes in several very

distant ones within a few seconds.

It is extraordinary how much of my soul seems to cling to certain

peculiarities of what I have called _lie of the land_, undulations,

bends of rivers, straightenings and snakings of road; how much of one's

past life, sensations, hopes, wishes, words, has got entangled in the

little familiar sprigs, grasses and moss. The order of time and space is

sometimes utterly subverted; thus, last autumn, in a corner of

Argyllshire, I seemed suddenly cut off from everything in the British

Isles, and reunited to the life I used to lead hundreds of miles away,

years ago in the high Apennines, merely because of the minute starry

moss under foot and the bubble of brooks in my ears.

Nay, the power of outdoor things, their mysterious affinities, can

change the values even of what has been and what has not been, can make

one live for a moment in places which have never existed save in the

fancy. Have I not found myself suddenly taken back to certain woods

which I loved in my childhood simply because I had halted before a great

isolated fir with hanging branches, a single fir shading a circle of

soft green turf, and watched the rabbits sitting, like round grey

stones suddenly flashing into white tails and movement? Woods where? I

have not the faintest notion. Perhaps only woods I imagined my father

must be shooting in when I was a baby, woods which I made up out of

Christmas trees, moss and dead rabbits, woods I had heard of in fairy

tales....

Such are some of the relations of landscape and sentiments, a correct

notion of which is necessary before it is possible to consider the best

manner of _representing landscape with words_; a subject to which none

of my readers, I think, nor myself, have at present the smallest desire

to pass on.

TUSCAN MIDSUMMER MAGIC

I

"Then," I said, "you decline to tell me about the Three Kings, when

their procession wound round and round these hillocks: all the little

wooden horses with golden bridles and velvet holsters, out of the toy

boxes; and the camelopard, and the monkeys and the lynx, and the little

doll pages blowing toy trumpets. And still, I know it happened here,

because I recognise the place from the pictures: the hillocks all washed

away into breasts like those of Diana of the Ephesians, and the rows of

cypresses and spruce pines--also out of the toy box. I know it happened

in this very place, because Benozzo Gozzoli painted it all at the time;

and you were already about the place, I presume?"

I knew that by her dress, but I did not like to allude to its being

old-fashioned. It was the sort of thing, muslin all embroidered with

little nosegays of myrtle and yellow broom, and tied into odd bunches at

the elbows and waist, which they wore in the days of Botticelli's

_Spring_; and on her head she had a garland of eglantine and palm-shaped

hellebore leaves which was quite unmistakable.

The nymph Terzollina (for of course she was the tutelary divinity of the

narrow valley behind the great Medicean Villa) merely shook her head and

shifted one of her bare feet, on which she was seated under a cypress

tree, and went on threading the yellow broom flowers.

"At all events, you might tell me something about the Magnificent

Lorenzo," I went on, impatient at her obstinacy. "You know quite well

that he used to come and court you here, and make verses most likely."

The exasperating goddess raised her thin, brown face, with the sharp

squirrel's teeth and the glittering goat's eyes. Very pretty I thought

her, though undoubtedly a little _passée_, like all the symbolical

ladies of her set. She plucked at a clump of dry peppermint, perfuming

the hot air as she crushed it, and then looked up, with a sly, shy

little peasant-girl's look, which was absurd in a lady so mature and so

elaborately adorned. Then, in a crooning voice, she began to recite some

stanzas in _ottava rima_, as follows:

"The house where the good old Knight Gualando hid away the little

Princess, was itself hidden in this hidden valley. It was small and

quite white, with great iron bars to the windows. In front was a long

piece of greensward, starred with white clover, and behind and in front,

to where the pines and cypresses began ran strips of cornfield. It was

remote from all the pomps of life; and when the cuckoo had become silent

and the nightingales had cracked their voices, the only sound was the

coo of the wood-pigeons, the babble of the stream, and the twitter of

the young larks.

"The old Knight Gualando had hidden his bright armour in an oaken chest;

and went to the distant town every day dressed in the blue smock of a

peasant, and driving a donkey before him. Thence he returned with

delicates for the little Princess and with news of the wicked usurper;

nor did any one suspect who he was, or dream of his hiding-place.

"During his absence the little Princess, whose name was Fiordispina,

used to string beads through the hot hours when the sun smote through

the trees, and the green corn ridges began to take a faint gilding in

their silveriness, as the Princess remembered it in a picture in the

Castle Chapel, where the sun was represented by a big embossed ball of

gold, projecting from the picture, which she was allowed to stroke on

holidays.

"In the evening, when the sky turned pearl white, and a breeze rustled

through the pines and cypresses which made a little black fringe on the

hill-top and a little patch of feathery velvet pile on the slopes, the

little Princess would come forth, and ramble about in her peasant's

frock, her fair face stained browner by the sun than by any walnut

juice. She would climb the hill, and sniff the scent of the sun-warmed

resin, and the sweetness of the yellow broom. It spread all over the

hills, and the king, her father, had not possessed so many ells of cloth

of gold.

"But one evening she wandered further than usual, and saw on a bank, at

the edge of a cornfield, five big white lilies blowing. She went back

home and fetched the golden scissors from her work-bag, and cut off one

of the lilies. On the next day she came again and cut another until she

had cut them all.

"But it happened that an old witch was staying in that neighbourhood,

gathering herbs among the hills. She had taken note of the five lilies,

because she disliked them on account of their being white; and she

remarked that one of them had been cut off; then another, then another.

She hated people who like lilies. When she found the fifth lily gone,

she wondered greatly, and climbed on the ridge, and looked at their

stalks where they were cut. She was a wise woman, who knew many things.

So she laid her finger upon the cut stalk, and said, 'This has not been

cut with iron shears'; and she laid her lip against the cut stalk, and

felt that it had been cut with gold shears, for gold cuts like nothing

else.

"'Oho!' said the old witch--'where there are gold scissors, there must

be gold work-bags; and where there are gold work-bags, there must be

little Princesses.'"

"Well, and then?" I asked.

"Oh then, nothing at all," answered the Nymph Terzollina beloved by the

Magnificent Lorenzo, who had seen the procession of the Three Kings.

"Good evening to you."

And where her white muslin dress, embroidered with nosegays of broom and

myrtle, had been spread on the dry grass and crushed mint, there was

only, beneath the toy cypresses, a bush of white-starred myrtle and a

tuft of belated yellow broom.

II

One must have leisure to converse with goddesses; and certainly, during

a summer in Tuscany, when folk are scattered in their country houses,

and are disinclined to move out of hammock or off shaded bench, there

are not many other persons to talk with.

On the other hand, during those weeks of cloudless summer, natural

objects vie with each other in giving one amateur representations.

Things look their most unexpected, masquerade as other things, get queer

unintelligible allegoric meanings, leaving you to guess what it all

means, a constant dumb crambo of trees, flowers, animals, houses, and

moonlight.

The moon, particularly, is continually _en scène_, as if to take the

place of the fireflies, which last only so long as the corn is in the

ear, gradually getting extinguished and trailing about, humble helpless

moths with a pale phosphorescence in their tail, in the grass and in the

curtains. The moon takes their place; the moon which, in an Italian

summer, seems to be full for three weeks out of the four.

One evening the performance was given by the moon and the corn-sheaves,

assisted by minor actors such as crickets, downy owls, and

vine-garlands. The oats, which had been of such exquisite delicacy of

green, had just been reaped in the field beyond our garden and were now

stacked up. Suspecting one of the usual performances, I went after

dinner to the upper garden-gate, and looked through the bars. There it

was, the familiar, elemental witchery. The moon was nearly full,

blurring the stars, steeping the sky and earth in pale blue mist, which

seemed somehow to be the visible falling dew. It left a certain

greenness to the broad grass path, a vague yellow to the unsickled

wheat; and threw upon the sheaves of oats the shadows of festooned vine

garlands. Those sheaves, or stooks--who can describe their metamorphose?

Palest yellow on the pale stubbly ground, they were frosted by the

moonbeams in their crisp fringe of ears, and in the shining straws

projecting here and there. Straws, ears? You would never have guessed

that they were made of anything so mundane. They sat there, propped

against the trees, between the pools of light and the shadows, while the

crickets trilled their cool, shrill song; sat solemnly with an air of

expectation, calling to me, frightening me. And one in particular, with

a great additional bunch on his head, cut by a shadow, was oddly

unaccountable and terrible. After a minute I had to slink away, back

into the garden, like an intruder.

III

There are performances also in broad daylight, and then human beings are

admitted as supernumeraries. Such was a certain cattle fair, up the

valley of the Mugnone.

The beasts were being sold on a piece of rough, freshly reaped ground,

lying between the high road and the river bed, empty of waters, but full

among its shingle of myrrh-scented yellow herbage. The oxen were mostly

of the white Tuscan breeds (those of Romagna are smaller but more

spirited, and of a delicate grey) only their thighs slightly browned;

the scarlet cloth neck-fringes set off, like a garland of geranium,

against the perfect milkiness of backs and necks. They looked, indeed,

these gigantic creatures, as if moulded out of whipped cream or cream

cheese; suggesting no strength, and even no resistance to the touch,

with their smooth surface here and there packed into minute wrinkles,

exactly like the little _stracchini_ cheeses. This impalpable whiteness

of the beasts suited their perfect tameness, passiveness, letting

themselves be led about with great noiseless strides over the stubbly

ridges and up the steep banks; and hustled together, flank against

flank, horns interlaced with horns, without even a sound or movement of

astonishment or disobedience. Never a low or a moo; never a glance round

of their big, long-lashed, blue-brown eyes. Their big jaws move like

millstones, their long tufted tails switch monotonously like pendulums.

Around them circle peasants, measuring them with the eye, prodding them

with the finger, pulling them by the horns. And every now and then one

of the red-faced men, butchers mainly, who act as go-betweens,

dramatically throws his arms round the neck of some recalcitrant dealer

or buyer, leads him aside, whispering with a gesture like Judas's kiss;

or he clasps together the red hands and arms of contracting parties,

silencing their objections, forcing them to do business. The contrast is

curious between these hot, excited, yelling, jostling human beings,

above whose screaming _Dio Canes!_ and _Dio Ladros!_ the cry of the

iced-water seller recurs monotonously and the silent, impassive

bullocks, white, unreal, inaudible; so still and huge, indeed, that,

seen from above, they look like an encampment, their white flanks like

so much spread canvas in the sunshine. And from a little distance,

against the hillside beyond the river, the already bought yokes of

bullocks look, tethered in a grove of cypresses, like some old mediæval

allegory--an allegory, as usual, nobody knows of what.

IV

Another performance was that of the woods of Lecceto, and the hermitage

of the same name. You will find them on the map of the district of

Siena; but I doubt very much whether you will find them on the surface

of the real globe, for I suspect them to be a piece of midsummer magic

and nothing more. They had been for years to me among the number (we all

have such) of things familiar but inaccessible; or rather things whose

inaccessibility--due to no conceivable cause--is an essential quality of

their existence. Every now and then from one of the hills you get a

glimpse of the square red tower, massive and battlemented, rising among

the grey of its ilexes, beckoning one across a ridge or two and a

valley; then disappearing again, engulfed in the oak woods, green in

summer, copper-coloured in winter; to reappear, but on the side you

least expected it, plume of ilexes, battlements of tower, as you

twisted along the high-lying vineyards and the clusters of umbrella

pines fringing the hill-tops; and then, another minute and they were

gone.

We determined to attain them, to be mocked no longer by Lecceto; and

went forth on one endless July afternoon. After much twisting from

hillside to hillside and valley to valley, we at last got into a country

which was strange enough to secrete even Lecceto. In a narrow valley we

were met by a scent, warm, delicious, familiar, which seemed to lead us

(as perfumes we cannot identify will usually do) to ideas very hazy, but

clear enough to be utterly inappropriate: English cottage-gardens, linen

presses of old houses, old-fashioned sitting-rooms full of pots of

_pot-pourri_; and then, behold, in front of us a hill covered every inch

of it with flowering lavender, growing as heather does on the hills

outside fairyland. And behind this lilac, sun-baked, scented hill, open

the woods of ilexes. The trees were mostly young and with their summer

upper garment of green, fresh leaves over the crackling old ones; trees

packed close like a hedge, their every gap filled with other verdure,

arbutus and hornbeam, fern and heather; the close-set greenery crammed,

as it were, with freshness and solitude.

These must be the woods of Lecceto, and in their depths the red

battlemented tower of the Hermitage. For I had forgotten to say that for

a thousand years that tower had been the abode of a succession of holy

personages, so holy and so like each other as to have almost grown into

one, an immortal hermit whom Popes and Emperors would come to consult

and be blessed by. Deeper and deeper therefore we made our way into the

green coolness and dampness, the ineffable deliciousness of young leaf

and uncurling fern; till it seemed as if the plantation were getting

impenetrable, and we began to think that, as usual, Lecceto had mocked

us, and would probably appear, if we retraced our steps, in the

diametrically opposite direction. When suddenly, over the tree-tops,

rose the square battlemented tower of red brick. Then, at a turn of the

rough narrow lane, there was the whole place, the tower, a church and

steeple, and some half-fortified buildings, in a wide clearing planted

with olive trees. We tied our pony to an ilex and went to explore the

Hermitage. But the building was enclosed round by walls and hedges, and

the only entrance was by a stout gate armed with a knocker, behind which

was apparently an outer yard and a high wall pierced only by a twisted

iron balcony. So we knocked.

But that knocker was made only for Popes and Emperors walking about with

their tiaras and crowns and sceptres, like the genuine Popes and

Emperors of Italian folk-tales and of Pinturicchio's frescoes; for no

knocking of ours, accompanied by loud yells, could elicit an answer. It

seemed simple enough to get in some other way; there must be peasants

about at work, even supposing the holy hermit to have ceased to exist.

But climbing walls and hurdles and squeezing between the close tight

ilexes, brought us only to more walls, above which, as above the

oak-woods from a distance, rose the inaccessible battlemented tower. And

a small shepherdess, in a flapping Leghorn hat, herding black and white

baby pigs in a neighbouring stubble-field under the olives, was no more

able than we to break the spell of the Hermitage. And all round, for

miles apparently, undulated the dense grey plumage of the ilex woods.

The low sun was turning the stubble orange, where the pigs were feeding;

and the distant hills of the Maremma were growing very blue behind the

olive trees. So, lest night should overtake us, we turned our pony's

head towards the city, and traversed the oak-woods and skirted the

lavender hill, rather disbelieving in the reality of the place we had

just been at, save when we saw its tower mock us, emerging again; an

inaccessible, improbable place. The air was scented by the warm lavender

of the hillsides; and by the pines forming a Japanese pattern, black

upon the golden lacquer of the sky. Soon the moon rose, big and yellow,

lighting very gradually the road in whose gloom you could vaguely see

the yokes of white cattle returning from work. By the time we reached

the city hill everything was steeped in a pale yellowish light, with

queer yellowish shadows; and the tall tanneries glared out with their

buttressed balconied top, exaggerated and alarming. Scrambling up the

moonlit steep of Fonte Branda, and passing under a black arch, we found

ourselves in the heart of the gaslit and crowded city, much as if we had

been shot out of a cannon into another planet, and feeling that the

Hermitage of Lecceto was absolutely apocryphal.

V

The reason of this midsummer magic--whose existence no legitimate

descendant of Goths and Vandals and other early lovers of Italy can

possibly deny--the reason is altogether beyond my philosophy. The only

word which expresses the phenomenon is the German word, untranslatable,

_Bescheerung_, a universal giving of gifts, lighting of candles, gilding

of apples, manifestation of marvels, realisation of the desirable and

improbable--to wit, a Christmas Tree. And Italy, which knows no

Christmas trees, makes its _Bescheerung_ in midsummer, gets rid of its

tourist vulgarities, hides away the characteristics of its trivial

nineteenth century, decks itself with magnolia blossoms and water-melons

with awnings and street booths, with mandolins and guitars; spangles

itself with church festivals and local pageants; and instead of

wax-tapers and Chinese lanterns, lights up the biggest golden sun by

day, the biggest silver moon by night, all for the benefit of a few

childish descendants of Goths and Vandals.

Nonsense apart, I am inclined to think that the specific charm of Italy

exists only during the hot months; the charm which gives one a little

stab now and then and makes one say--"This is Italy."

I felt that little stab, to which my heart had long become unused, at

the beginning of this very summer in Tuscany, to which belong the above

instances of Italian Midsummer Magic. I was spending the day at a small,

but very ancient, Benedictine Monastery (it was a century old when St.

Peter Igneus, according to the chronicle, went through his celebrated

Ordeal by Fire), now turned into a farm, and hidden, battlemented walls

and great gate towers, among the cornfields near the Arno. It came to me

as the revival of an impression long forgotten, that overpowering sense

that "This was Italy," it recurred and recurred in those same three

words, as I sat under the rose-hedge opposite the water-wheel shed,

garlanded with drying pea-straw; and as I rambled through the chill

vaults, redolent of old wine-vats, into the sudden sunshine and broad

shadows of the cloistered yards.

That smell was mysteriously connected with it; the smell of wine-vats

mingled, I fancy (though I could not say why), with the sweet faint

smell of decaying plaster and wood-work. One night, as we were driving

through Bologna to wile away the hours between two trains, in the blue

moon-mist and deep shadows of the black porticoed city, that same smell

came to my nostrils as in a dream, and with it a whiff of bygone years,

the years when first I had had this impression of Italian Magic. Oddly

enough, Rome, where I spent much of my childhood and which was the

object of my childish and tragic adoration, was always something apart,

never Italy for my feelings. The Apennines of Lucca and Pistoia, with

their sudden revelation of Italian fields and lanes, of flowers on wall

and along roadside, of bells ringing in the summer sky, of peasants

working in the fields and with the loom and distaff, meant Italy.

But how much more Italy--and hence longed for how much!--was Lucca, the

town in the plain, with cathedral and palaces. Nay, any of the mountain

hamlets where there was nothing modern, and where against the scarred

brick masonry and blackened stonework the cypresses rose black and

tapering, the trelisses crawled bright green up hill! One never feels,

once out of childhood, such joy as on the rare occasions when I was

taken to such places. A certain farmhouse, with cypresses at the terrace

corner and a great oleander over the wall, was also Italy before it

became my home for several years. Most of all, however, Italy was

represented by certain towns: Bologna, Padua and Vicenza, and Siena,

which I saw mainly in the summer.

It is curious how one's associations change: nowadays Italy means mainly

certain familiar effects of light and cloud, certain exquisitenesses of

sunset amber against ultramarine hills, of winter mists among misty

olives, of folds and folds of pale blue mountains; it is a country which

belongs to no time, which will always exist, superior to picturesqueness

and romance. But that is but a vague, half-indifferent habit of

enjoyment. And every now and then, when the Midsummer Magic is rife,

there comes to me that very different, old, childish meaning of the

word; as on that day among the roses of those Benedictine cloisters, the

cool shadow of the fig-trees in the yards, with the whiff of that queer

smell, heavy with romance, of wine-saturated oak and crumbling plaster;

and I know with a little stab of joy that this is Italy.

ON MODERN TRAVELLING

I

There is one charming impression peculiar to railway travelling, that of

the twilight hour in the train; but the charm is greater on a short

journey, when one is not tired and has not the sense of being uprooted,

than on a long one. The movement of the train seems, after sunset,

particularly in the South where night fall is rapid, to take a quality

of mystery. It glides through a landscape of which the smaller details

are effaced, as are likewise effaced the details of the railway itself.

And that rapid gliding brings home to one the instability of the hour,

of the changing light, the obliterating form. It makes one feel that

everything is, as it were, a mere vision; bends of poplared river with

sunset redness in their grey swirls; big towered houses of other days;

the spectral white fruit trees in the dark fields; the pine tops round,

separate, yet intangible, against the sky of unearthy blue; the darkness

not descending, as foolish people say it does, from the skies to the

earth, but rising slowly from the earth where it has gathered fold upon

fold, an emanation thereof, into the sky still pale and luminous,

turning its colour to white, its whiteness to grey, till the stars, mere

little white specks before, kindle one by one.

Dante, who had travelled so much, and so much against his will,

described this hour as turning backwards the longing of the traveller,

and making the heart grow soft of them who had that day said farewell to

their friends. It is an hour of bitterness, the crueller for mingled

sweetness, to the exile; and in those days when distances were difficult

to overcome, every traveller must in a sense have been somewhat of an

exile. But to us, who have not necessarily left our friends, who may be

returning to them; to us accustomed to coming and going, to us hurried

along in dreary swiftness, it is the hour also when the earth seems full

of peace and goodwill; and our pensiveness is only just sad enough to be

sweet, not sad enough to be bitter. For every hamlet we pass seems

somehow the place where we ought to tarry for all our days; every room

or kitchen, a red square of light in the dimness with dark figures

moving before the window, seems full of people who might be friends; and

the hills we have never beheld before, the bends of rivers, the screen

of trees, seem familiar as if we had lived among them in distant days

which we think of with longing.

II

This is the best that can be said, I think, for modern modes of travel.

But then, although I have been jolted about a good deal from country to

country, and slept in the train on my nurse's knees, and watched all my

possessions, from my cardboard donkey and my wax dolls to my manuscripts

and proof-sheets, overhauled on custom-house counters--but then, despite

all this, I have never made a great journey. I have never been to the

United States, nor to Egypt, nor to Russia; and it may well be that I

shall see the Eleusinian gods, Persephone and whoever else imparts

knowledge in ghostland, without ever having set foot in Greece. My

remarks are therefore meant for the less fortunate freight of railways

and steamers; though do I really envy those who see the wonderful places

of the earth before they have dreamed of them, the dream-land of other

men revealed to them for the first time in the solid reality of Cook and

Gaze?

I would not for the world be misunderstood; I have not the faintest

prejudice against Gaze or Cook. I fervently desire that these gentlemen

may ever quicken trains and cheapen hotels; I am ready to be jostled in

Alpine valleys and Venetian canals by any number of vociferous tourists,

for the sake of the one, schoolmistress, or clerk, or artisan, or

curate, who may by this means have reached at last the land east of the

sun and west of the moon, the St. Brandan's Isle of his or her longings.

What I object to are the well-mannered, well-dressed, often

well-informed persons who, having turned Scotland into a sort of

Hurlingham, are apparently making Egypt, the Holy Land, Japan, into

_succursales_ and _dépendances_ (I like the good Swiss names evoking

couriers and waiters) of their own particularly dull portion of London

and Paris and New York.

Less externally presentable certainly, but how much more really

venerable is the mysterious class of dwellers in obscure pensions:

curious beings who migrate without perceiving any change of landscape

and people, but only change of fare, from the cheap boarding-house in

Dresden to the cheap boarding-house in Florence, Prague, Seville, Rouen,

or Bruges. It is a class whom one of nature's ingenious provisions,

intended doubtless to maintain a balance of inhabited and uninhabited,

directs unconsciously, automatically to the great cities of the past

rather than to those of the present; so that they sit in what were once

palaces, castles, princely pleasure-houses, discussing over the stony

pears and apples the pleasures and drawbacks, the prices and fares, the

dark staircase against the Sunday ices, of other boarding-houses in

other parts of Europe. A quaint race it is, neither marrying nor giving

in marriage, and renewed by natural selection among the poor in purse

and poor in spirit; but among whom the sentimental traveller, did he

still exist, might pick up many droll and melancholy and perhaps

chivalrous stories.

My main contention then is merely that, before visiting countries and

towns in the body, we ought to have visited them in the spirit;

otherwise I fear we might as well sit still at home. I do not mean that

we should read about them; some persons I know affect to extract a kind

of pleasure from it; but to me it seems dull work. One wants to visit

unknown lands in company, not with other men's descriptions, but with

one's own wishes and fancies. And very curious such wishes and fancies

are, or rather the countries and cities they conjure up, having no

existence on any part of the earth's surface, but a very vivid one in

one's own mind. Surely most of us, arriving in any interesting place,

are already furnished with a tolerable picture or plan thereof; the

cathedral on a slant or a rising ground, the streets running uphill or

somewhat in a circle, the river here or there, the lie of the land,

colour of the houses, nay, the whole complexion of the town, so and so.

The reality, so far as my own experience goes, never once tallies with

the fancy; but the town of our building is so compact and clear that it

often remains in our memory alongside of the town of stone and brick,

only gradually dissolving, and then leaving sometimes airy splendours

of itself hanging to the solid structures of its prosaic rival.

Another curious thing to note is how certain real scenes will sometimes

get associated in our minds with places we have never beheld, to such a

point that the charm of the known is actually enhanced by that of the

unknown. I remember a little dell in the High Alps, which, with its huge

larches and mountain pines, its tufts of bee-haunted heather and thyme

among the mossy boulders, its overlooking peak and glimpses of far-down

lakes, became dear to me much less for its own sake than because it

always brought to my mind the word _Thrace_, and with it a vague

fleeting image of satyrs and mænads, a bar of the music of Orpheus. And

less explicable than this, a certain rolling table-land, not more remote

than the high road to Rome, used at one time to impress me with a

mysterious consciousness of the plains of Central Asia; a ruined byre, a

heap of whitewashed stones, among the thistles and stubbles of a Fife

hillside, had for me once a fascination due to the sense that it must be

like Algeria.

Has any painter ever fixed on canvas such visions, distinct and

haunting, of lands he had never seen, Claude or Turner, or the Flemish

people who painted the little towered and domed celestial Jerusalem? I

know not. The nearest thing of the kind was a wonderful erection of

brown paper and (apparently) ingeniously arranged shavings, built up in

rocklike fashion, covered with little green toy-box trees, and dotted

here and there with bits of mirror glass and cardboard houses, which

once puzzled me considerably in the parlour of a cottage. "Do tell me

what that is?" at last rose to my lips. "That," answered my hostess very

slowly, "that is a work of my late 'usband; a representation of the

Halps as close as 'e could imagine them, for 'e never was abroad." I

often think of that man "who never was abroad," and of his

representation of the Alps; of the hours of poetic vision, of actual

creation perhaps from sheer strength of longing, which resulted in that

quaint work of art.

As close as he could imagine them! He had read, then, about the Alps,

read perhaps in Byron or some Radcliffian novel on a stall; and he had

wondered till the vision had come, ready for pasteboard and toy trees

and glue and broken mirror to embody it! And meanwhile I, who am

obliged to cross those very Alps twice every year, I try to do so at

night, to rumble and rattle up and down their gorges in a sleeping-car!

There seems something wrong in this; something wrong in the world's

adjustments, not really in me, for I swear it is respect for the Alps

which makes me thus avoid their sight.

III

And here is the moment for stating my plea against our modern, rapid,

hurried travelling: there is to decent minds a certain element of

humiliation therein, as I suspect there is in every _royal road_. There

is something almost superhumanly selfish in this rushing across

countries without giving them a thought, indeed with no thoughts in us

save of our convenience, inconvenience, food, sleep, weariness. The

whole of Central Europe is thus reduced, for our feelings, to an

arrangement of buffets and custom-houses, its acres checked off on our

sensorium as so many jolts. For it is not often that respectable people

spend a couple of days, or even three, so utterly engrossed in

themselves, so without intellectual relation or responsibility to their

surroundings, living in a moral stratum not above ordinary life, but

below it. Perhaps it is this suspending of connection with all interests

which makes such travelling restful to very busy persons, and agreeable

to very foolish ones. But to decent, active, leisured folk it is, I

maintain, humiliating; humiliating to become so much by comparison in

one's own consciousness; and I suspect that the vague sense of

self-disgust attendant on days thus spent is a sample of the

self-disgust we feel very slightly (and ought to feel very strongly)

whenever our wretched little self is allowed to occupy the whole stage

of our perceptions.

There is in M. Zola's _Bête Humaine_ a curious picture of a train, one

train after another, full of eager modern life, being whirled from Paris

to Havre through the empty fields, before cottages and old-world houses

miles remote from any town. But in reality is not the train the empty

thing, and are not those solitary houses and pastures that which is

filled with life? The Roman express thus rushes to Naples, Egypt, India,

the far East, the great Austral islands, cutting in two the cypress

avenue of a country house of the Val d'Arno, Neptune with his conch, a

huge figure of the seventeenth century, looking on from an artificial

grotto. What to him is this miserable little swish past of to-day?

There is only one circumstance when this vacuity, this suspension of all

real life, is in its place; when one is hurrying to some dreadful goal,

a death-bed or perhaps a fresh-made grave. The soul is precipitated

forward to one object, one moment, and cannot exist meanwhile; _ruit_

not _hora_, but _anima_; emptiness suits passion and suffering, for they

empty out the world.

IV

Be this as it may, it will be a great pity if we lose a certain sense of

wonder at distance overcome, a certain emotion of change of place. This

emotion--paid for no doubt by much impatience and weariness where the

plains were wide, the mountains high, or the roads persistently

straight--must have been one of the great charms of the old mode of

travelling. You savoured the fact of each change in the lie of the

land, of each variation in climate and province, the difference between

the chestnut and the beech zones, for instance, in the south, of the fir

and the larch in the Alps; the various types of window, roof, chimney,

or well, nay, the different fold of the cap or kerchief of the market

women. One inn, one square, one town-hall or church, introduced you

gradually to its neighbours. We feel this in the talk of old people,

those who can remember buying their team at Calais, of elderly ones who

chartered their _vetturino_ at Marseilles or Nice; in certain scraps in

the novels even of Thackeray, giving the sense of this gradual

occupation of the continent by relays. One of Mr. Ruskin's drawings at

Oxford evokes it strongly in me. On what railway journey would he have

come across that little town of Rheinfelden (where is Rheinfelden?),

would he have wandered round those quaint towered walls, over that

bridge, along that grassy walk?

I can remember, in my childhood, the Alps before they had railways; the

enormous remoteness of Italy, the sense of its lying down there, far,

far away in its southern sea; the immense length of the straight road

from Bellinzona to the lake, the endlessness of the winding valleys.

Now, as I said in relation to that effigy of the Alps by the man who had

never been abroad, I get into my bunk at Milan, and waking up, see in

the early morning crispness, the glass-green Reuss tear past, and the

petticoated turrets of Lucerne.

Once also (and I hope not once and never again) I made an immense

journey through Italy in a pony-cart. We seemed to traverse all

countries and climates; lush, stifling valleys with ripening maize and

grapes; oak-woods where rows of cypress showed roads long gone, and

crosses told of murders; desolate heaths high on hill-tops, and stony

gorges full of myrtle; green irrigated meadows with plashing

water-wheels, and grey olive groves; so that in the evening we felt

homesick for that distant, distant morning: yet we had only covered as

much ground as from London to Dover! And how immensely far off from

Florence did we not feel when, four hours after leaving its walls, we

arrived in utter darkness at the friendly mountain farm, and sat down to

supper in the big bare room, where high-backed chairs and the plates

above the immense chimney-piece loomed and glimmered in the half-light;

feeling, as if in a dream, the cool night air still in our throats, the

jingle of cart-bells and chirp of wayside crickets still in our ears!

Where was Florence then? As a fact it was just sixteen miles off.

To travel in this way one should, however, as old John Evelyn advises,

"diet with the natives." Our ancestors (for one takes for granted, of

course, that one's ancestors were _milords_) were always plentifully

furnished, I observe, with letters of introduction. They were necessary

when persons of distinction carried their bedding on mules and rode in

coaches escorted by blunderbuses, like John Evelyn himself.

It is this dieting with the natives which brings one fully in contact

with a country's reality. At the tables of one's friends, while being

strolled through the gardens or driven across country, one learns all

about the life, thoughts, feelings of the people; the very gossip of the

neighbourhood becomes instructive, and you touch the past through

traditions of the family. Here the French put up the maypole in 1796;

there the beautiful abbess met her lover; that old bowed man was the one

who struck the Austrian colonel at Milan before 1859. 'Tis the mode of

travelling that constituted the delight and matured the genius of

Stendhal, king of cosmopolitans and grand master of the psychologic

novel. To my kind friends, wherever I have any, but most perhaps in

Northern Italy, is due among other kinds of gratitude, gratitude for

having travelled in this way.

V

But there is another way of travelling, more suitable methinks to the

poet. For what does the poet want with details of reality when he

possesses its universal essence, or with local manners and historic

tradition, seeing that his work is for all times and all men?

Mr. Browning, I was told last year by his dear friends at Asolo, first

came upon the kingdom of Kate the Queen by accident, perhaps not having

heard its name or not remembering it, in the course of a long walking

tour from Venice to the Alps. It was the first time he was in Italy,

nay, abroad, and he had come from London to Venice by sea. That village

of palaces on the hill-top, with the Lombard plain at its feet and the

great Alps at its back; with its legends of the Queen of Cyprus was,

therefore, one of the first impressions of mainland Italy which the poet

could have received. And one can understand _Pippa Passes_ resulting

therefrom, better than from his years of familiarity with Florence.

Pippa, Sebald, Ottima, Jules, his bride, the Bishop, the Spy, nay, even

Queen Kate and her Page, are all born of that sort of misinterpretation

of places, times, and stories which is so fruitful in poetry, because it

means the begetting of things in the image of the poet's own soul,

rather than the fashioning them to match something outside it.

Even without being a poet you may profit in an especial manner by

travelling in a country where you know no one, provided you have in you

that scrap of poetic fibre without which poets and poetry are caviare to

you. There is no doubt that wandering about in the haunts of the past

undisturbed by the knowledge of the present is marvellously favourable

to the historic, the poetical emotion. The American fresh from the

States thinks of Johnson and Dickens in Fleet Street; at Oxford or

Cambridge he has raptures (are any raptures like these?) into which,

like notes in a chord and overtones in a note, there enters the

deliciousness, the poignancy of Chaucer, Shakespeare, Milton, Turner.

The Oxford or Cambridge man, on the other hand, will have similar

raptures in some boarding-house at Venice or Florence; raptures

rapturous in proportion almost to his ignorance of the language and the

people. Do not let us smile, dear friends, who have lived in Rome till

you are Romans, dear friends, who are Romans yourselves, at the

foreigner with his Baedeker, turning his back to the Colosseum in his

anxiety to reach it, and ashamed as well as unable to ask his way. That

Goth or Vandal, very likely, is in the act of possessing Rome, of making

its wonder and glory his own, consubstantial to his soul; Rome is his

for the moment. It is ours? Alas!

Nature, Fate, I know not whether the mother or the daughter, they are so

like each other, looks with benignity upon these poor ignorant, solitary

tourists, and gives them what she denies to those who have more leisure

and opportunity. I cannot explain by any other reason a fact which is

beyond all possibility of doubt, and patent to the meanest observer,

namely, that it is always during our first sojourn in a place, during

its earlier part, and more particularly when we are living prosaically

at inns and boarding-houses, that something happens--a procession, a

serenade, a street-fight, a fair, or a pilgrimage--which shows the place

in a particularly characteristic light, and which never occurs again.

The very elements are desired to perform for the benefit of the

stranger. I remember a thunderstorm, the second night I was ever at

Venice, lighting up St. George's, the Salute, the whole lagoon as I have

never seen it since.

I can testify, also, to having seen the Alhambra under snow, a sparkling

whiteness lying soft on the myrtle hedges, and the reflection of arches

and domes waving, with the drip of melted snow from the roofs, in the

long-stagnant tanks. If I lived in Granada, or went back there, should I

ever see this wonder again? It was so ordered merely because I had just

come, and was lodging at an inn.

Yes, Fate is friendly to those who travel rarely, who go abroad to see

abroad, not to be warm or cold, or to meet the people they may meet

anywhere else. Honour the tourist; he walks in a halo of romance, The

cosmopolitan abroad desists from flannel shirts because he is always at

home; and he knows to a nicety hours and places which demand a high hat.

But does that compensate?

VI

There is yet another mystery connected with travelling, but 'tis too

subtle almost for words. All I can ask is, do you know what it is to

meet, say, in some college room, or on the staircase of an English

country house, or even close behind the front door in Bloomsbury, the

photograph of some Florentine relief or French cathedral, the black,

gaunt Piranesi print of some Roman ruin; and to feel suddenly Florence,

Rouen, Reims, or Rome, the whole of their presence distilled, as it

were, into one essence of emotion?

What does it mean? That in this solid world only delusion is worth

having? Nay; but that nothing can come into the presence of that

capricious despot, our fancy, which has not dwelt six months and six in

the purlieus of its palace, steeped, like the candidates for Ahasuerus's

favour, in sweet odours and myrrh.

OLD ITALIAN GARDENS

I

There are also modern gardens in Italy, and in such I have spent many

pleasant hours. But that has been part of my life of reality, which

concerns only my friends and myself. The gardens I would speak about are

those in which I have lived the life of the fancy, and into which I may

lead the idle thoughts of my readers.

It is pleasant to have flowers growing in a garden. I make this remark

because there have been very fine gardens without any flowers at all; in

fact, when the art of gardening reached its height, it took to despising

its original material, as, at one time, people came to sing so well that

it was considered vulgar to have any voice. There is a magnificent

garden near Pescia, in Tuscany, built in terraces against a hillside,

with wonderful waterworks, which give you shower-baths when you expect

them least; and in this garden, surrounded by the trimmest box hedges,

there bloom only imperishable blossoms of variegated pebbles and chalk.

That I have seen with my own eyes. A similar garden, near Genoa,

consisting of marble mosaics and coloured bits of glass, with a peach

tree on a wall, and an old harpsichord on the doorstep to serve instead

of bell or knocker, I am told of by a friend, who pretends to have spent

her youth in it. But I suspect her to be of supernatural origin, and

this garden to exist only in the world of Ariosto's enchantresses,

whence she originally hails. To return to my first remark, it is

pleasant, therefore, to have flowers in a garden, though not necessary.

We moderns have flowers, and no gardens. I must protest against such a

state of things. Still worse is it to suppose that you can get a garden

by running up a wall or planting a fence round a field, a wood or any

portion of what is vaguely called Nature. Gardens have nothing to do

with Nature, or not much. Save the garden of Eden, which was perhaps no

more a garden than certain London streets so called, gardens are always

primarily the work of man. I say primarily, for these outdoor

habitations, where man weaves himself carpets of grass and gravel, cuts

himself walls out of ilex or hornbeam, and fits on as roof so much of

blue day or of starspecked, moonsilvered night, are never perfect until

Time has furnished it all with his weather stains and mosses, and Fancy,

having given notice to the original occupants, has handed it into the

charge of gentle little owls and furgloved bats, and of other tenants,

human in shape, but as shy and solitary as they.

That is a thing of our days, or little short of them. I should be

curious to know something of early Italian gardens, long ago; long

before the magnificence of Roman Cæsars had reappeared, with their

rapacity and pride, in the cardinals and princes of the sixteenth and

seventeenth centuries. I imagine those beginnings to have been humble;

the garden of the early middle ages to have been a thing more for

utility than pleasure, and not at all for ostentation. For the garden of

the castle is necessarily small; and the plot of ground between the

inner and outer rows of walls, where corn and hay might be grown for the

horses, is not likely to be given up exclusively to her ladyship's

lilies and gillyflowers; salads and roots must grow there, and onions

and leeks, for it is not always convenient to get vegetables from the

villages below, particularly when there are enemies or disbanded

pillaging mercenaries about; hence, also, there will be fewer roses than

vines, pears, or apples, spaliered against the castle wall. On the other

hand the burgher of the towns begins by being a very small artisan or

shopkeeper, and even when he lends money to kings of England and

Emperors, and is part owner of Constantinople, he keeps his house with

business-like frugality. Whatever they lavished on churches, frescoes,

libraries, and pageants, the citizens, even of the fifteenth century,

whose wives and daughters still mended the linen and waited at table,

are not likely to have seen in their villa more than a kind of rural

place of business, whence to check factors and peasants, where to store

wine and oil; and from whose garden, barely enclosed from the fields, to

obtain the fruit and flowers for their table. I think that mediæval

poetry and tales have led me to this notion. There is little mention in

them of a garden as such: the Provençal lovers meet in orchards--"en un

vergier sor folha d'albespi"--where the May bushes grow among the almond

trees. Boccaccio and the Italians more usually employ the word _orto_,

which has lost its Latin signification, and is a place, as we learn from

the context, planted with fruit trees and with pot-herbs, the sage which

brought misfortune on poor Simona, and the sweet basil which Lisabetta

watered, as it grew out of Lorenzo's head, "only with rosewater, or that

of orange flowers, or with her own tears." A friend of mine has painted

a picture of another of Boccaccio's ladies, Madonna Dianora, visiting

the garden, which (to the confusion of her virtuous stratagem) the

enamoured Ansaldo has made to bloom in January by magic arts; a little

picture full of the quaint lovely details of Dello's wedding chests, the

charm of the roses and lilies, the plashing fountains and birds singing

against a background of wintry trees and snow-shrouded fields, the

dainty youths and damsels treading their way among the flowers, looking

like tulips and ranunculus themselves in their fur and brocade. But

although in this story Boccaccio employs the word _giardino_ instead of

_orto_, I think we must imagine that magic flower garden rather as a

corner--they still exist on every hillside--of orchard connected with

the fields of wheat and olives below by the long tunnels of vine

trellis, and dying away into them with the great tufts of lavender and

rosemary and fennel on the grassy bank under the cherry trees. This

piece of terraced ground along which the water--spurted from the

dolphin's mouth or the siren's breasts--runs through walled channels,

refreshing impartially violets and salads, lilies and tall flowering

onions, under the branches of the peach tree and the pomegranate, to

where, in the shade of the great pink oleander tufts, it pours out below

into the big tank, for the maids to rinse their linen in the evening,

and the peasants to fill their cans to water the bedded-out tomatoes,

and the potted clove-pinks in the shadow of the house.

The Blessed Virgin's garden is like that, where, as she prays in the

cool of the evening, the gracious Gabriel flutters on to one knee

(hushing the sound of his wings lest he startle her) through the pale

green sky, the deep blue-green valley; and you may still see in the

Tuscan fields clumps of cypresses clipped wheel-shape, which might mark

the very spot.

The transition from this orchard-garden, this _orto_, of the old Italian

novelists and painters to the architectural garden of the sixteenth and

seventeenth centuries, is indicated in some of the descriptions and

illustrations of the Hypnerotomachia Poliphili, a sort of handbook of

antiquities in the shape of a novel, written by Fra Francesco Colonna,

and printed at Venice about 1480. Here we find trees and hedges treated

as brick and stone work; walls, niches, colonnades, cut out of ilex and

laurel; statues, vases, peacocks, clipped in box and yew; moreover

antiquities, busts, inscriptions, broken altars and triumphal arches,

temples to the graces and Venus, stuck about the place very much as we

find them in the Roman Villas of the late sixteenth and seventeenth

centuries. But I doubt whether the Hypnerotomachia can be taken as

evidence of the gardens of Colonna's own days. I think his descriptions

are rather of what his archæological lore made him long for, and what

came in time, when antiques were more plentiful than in the early

Renaissance, and the monuments of the ancients could be incorporated

freely into the gardens. For the classic Italian garden is essentially

Roman in origin; it could have arisen only on the top of ancient walls

and baths, its shape suggested by the ruins below, its ornaments dug up

in the planting of the trees; and until the time of Julius II. and Leo

X., Rome was still a mediæval city, feudal and turbulent, in whose

outskirts, for ever overrun by baronial squabbles, no sane man would

have built himself a garden; and in whose ancient monuments castles were

more to be expected than belvederes and orangeries. Indeed, by the side

of quaint arches and temples, and labyrinths which look like designs for

a box of toys, we find among the illustrations of Polifilo various

charming woodcuts showing bits of vine trellis, of tank and of fountain,

on the small scale, and in the domestic, quite unclassic style of the

Italian burgher's garden. I do not mean to say that the gardens of

Lorenzo dei Medici, of Catherine Cornaro near Asolo, of the Gonzagas

near Mantua, of the Estensi at Scandiano and Sassuolo, were kitchen

gardens like those of Isabella's basil pot. They had waterworks already,

and aviaries full of costly birds, and enclosures where camels and

giraffes were kept at vast expense, and parks with deer and fishponds;

they were the gardens of the castle, of the farm, magnified and made

magnificent, spread over a large extent of ground. But they were not,

any more than are the gardens of Boiardo's and Ariosto's enchantresses

(copied by Spenser) the typical Italian gardens of later days.

And here, having spoken of that rare and learned Hypnerotomachia

Poliphili (which, by the way, any one who wishes to be instructed,

sickened, and bored for many days together, may now read in Monsieur

Claudius Popelin's French translation), it is well I should state that

for the rest of this dissertation I have availed myself of neither the

_British Museum_, nor the _National Library of Paris_, nor the _Library

of South Kensington_ (the italics seem necessary to show my appreciation

of those haunts of learning), but merely of the light of my own poor

intellect. For I do not think I care to read about gardens among

foolscap and inkstains and printed forms; in fact I doubt whether I

care to read about them at all, save in Boccaccio and Ariosto, Spenser

and Tasso; though I hope that my readers will be more literary

characters than myself.

II

The climate of Italy (moving on in my discourse) renders it difficult

and almost impossible to have flowers growing in the ground all through

the summer. After the magnificent efflorescence of May and June the soil

cakes into the consistence of terra-cotta, and the sun, which has

expanded and withered the roses and lilies with such marvellous

rapidity, toasts everything like so much corn or maize. Very few

herbaceous flowers--the faithful, friendly, cheerful zinnias, for

instance--can continue blooming, and the oleander, become more

brilliantly rose-colour with every additional week's drought, triumph

over empty beds. Flowers in Italy are a crop like corn, hemp, or beans;

you must be satisfied with fallow soil when they are over. I say these

things, learned by some bitter experience of flowerless summers, to

explain why Italian flower-gardening mainly takes refuge in pots--from

the great ornamented lemon-jars down to the pots of carnations, double

geraniums, tuberoses, and jasmines on every wall, on every ledge or

window-sill; so much so, in fact, that even the famous sweet basil, and

with it young Lorenzo's head, had to be planted in a pot. Now this

poverty of flower-beds and richness of pots made it easy and natural for

the Italian garden to become, like the Moorish one, a place of mere

greenery and water, a palace whose fountains plashed in sunny yards

walled in with myrtle and bay, in mysterious chambers roofed over with

ilex and box.

And this it became. Moderately at first; a few hedges of box and

cypress--exhaling its resinous breath in the sunshine--leading up to the

long, flat Tuscan house, with its tower or pillared loggia under the

roof to take the air and dry linen; a few quaintly cut trees set here

and there, along with the twisted mulberry tree where the family drank

its wine and ate its fruit of an evening; a little grove of ilexes to

the back, in whose shade you could sleep while the cicalas buzzed at

noon; some cypresses gathered together into a screen, just to separate

the garden from the olive yard above; gradually perhaps a balustrade set

at the end of the bowling-green, that you might see, even from a

distance, the shimmery blue valley below, the pale blue distant hills;

and if you had it, some antique statue not good enough for the courtyard

of the town house, set on the balustrade or against the tree; also,

where water was plentiful, a little grotto, scooped out under that

semicircular screen of cypresses. A very modest place, but differing

essentially from the orchard and kitchen garden of the mediæval burgher;

and out of which came something immense and unique--the classic Roman

villa.

For your new garden, your real Italian garden, brings in a new

element--that of perspective, architecture, decoration; the trees used

as building material, the lie of the land as theatre arrangements, the

water as the most docile and multiform stage property. Now think what

would happen when such gardens begin to be made in Rome. The Popes and

Popes' nephews can enclose vast tracts of land, expropriated by some

fine sweeping fiscal injustice, or by the great expropriator, fever, in

the outskirts of the town; and there place their casino, at first a mere

summer-house, whither to roll of spring evenings in stately coaches and

breathe the air with a few friends; then gradually a huge house, with

its suits of guests' chambers, stables, chapel, orangery, collection of

statues and pictures, its subsidiary smaller houses, belvederes,

circuses, and what not! And around the house His Eminence or His Serene

Excellency may lay out his garden. Now go where you may in the outskirts

of Rome you are sure to find ruins--great aqueduct arches, temples

half-standing, gigantic terrace-works belonging to some baths or palace

hidden beneath the earth and vegetation. Here you have naturally an

element of architectural ground-plan and decoration which is easily

followed: the terraces of quincunxes, the symmetrical groves, the long

flights of steps, the triumphal arches, the big ponds, come, as it were,

of themselves, obeying the order of what is below. And from underground,

everywhere, issues a legion of statues, headless, armless, in all stages

of mutilation, who are charitably mended, and take their place, mute

sentinels, white and earth-stained, at every intersecting box hedge,

under every ilex grove, beneath the cypresses of each sweeping hillside

avenue, wherever a tree can make a niche or a bough a canopy. Also

vases, sarcophagi, baths, little altars, columns, reliefs by the score

and hundred, to be stuck about everywhere, let into every wall, clapped

on the top of every gable, every fountain stacked up, in every empty

space.

Among these inhabitants of the gardens of Cæsar, Lucullus, or Sallust,

who, after a thousand years' sleep, pierce through the earth into new

gardens, of crimson cardinals and purple princes, each fattened on his

predecessors' spoils--Medici, Farnesi, Peretti, Aldobrandini, Ludovisi,

Rospigliosi, Borghese, Pamphili--among this humble people of stone I

would say a word of garden Hermes and their vicissitudes. There they

stand, squeezing from out their triangular sheath the stout pectorals

veined with rust, scarred with corrosions, under the ilexes, whose drip,

drip, through all the rainy days and nights of those ancient times and

these modern ones has gradually eaten away an eye here, a cheek there,

making up for the loss by gilding the hair with lichens, and matting the

beard with green ooze; while patched chin, and restored nose, give them

an odd look of fierce German duellists. Have they been busts of Cæsars,

hastily ordered on the accession of some Tiberius or Nero, hastily sent

to alter into Caligula or Galba, or chucked into the Tiber on to the top

of the monster Emperor's body after that had been properly hauled

through the streets? Or are they philosophers, at your choice, Plato or

Aristotle or Zeno or Epicurus, once presiding over the rolls of poetry

and science in some noble's or some rhetor's library? Or is it possible

that this featureless block, smiling foolishly with its orbless

eye-sockets and worn-out mouth, may have had, once upon a time, a nose

from Phidias's hand, a pair of Cupid lips carved by Praxiteles?

III

A book of seventeenth-century prints--"The Gardens of Rome, with their

plans raised and seen in perspective, drawn and engraved by Giov:

Battista Falda, at the printing-house of Gio: Giacomo de' Rossi, at the

sign of Paris, near the church of Peace in Rome"--brings home to one,

with the names of the architects who laid them out, that these Roman

villas are really a kind of architecture cut out of living instead of

dead timber. To this new kind of architecture belongs a new kind of

sculpture. The antiques do well in their niches of box and laurel under

their canopy of hanging ilex boughs; they are, in their weather-stained,

mutilated condition, another sort of natural material fit for the

artist's use; but the old sculpture being thus in a way assimilated

through the operation of earth, wind, and rain, into tree-trunks and

mossy boulders, a new sculpture arises undertaking to make of marble

something which will continue the impression of the trees and waters,

wave its jagged outlines like the branches, twist its supple limbs like

the fountains. It is high time that some one should stop the laughing

and sniffing at this great sculpture, of Bernini and his Italian and

French followers, the last spontaneous outcome of the art of the

Renaissance, of the decorative sculpture which worked in union with

place and light and surroundings. Mistaken as indoor decoration, as free

statuary in the sense of the antique, this sculpture has after all

given us the only works which are thoroughly right in the open air,

among the waving trees, the mad vegetation which sprouts under the

moist, warm Roman sky, from every inch of masonry and travertine. They

are comic of course looked at in all the details, those angels who smirk

and gesticulate with the emblems of the passion, those popes and saints

who stick out colossal toes and print on the sky gigantic hands, on the

parapets of bridges and the gables of churches; but imagine them

replaced by fine classic sculpture--stiff mannikins struggling with the

overwhelming height, the crushing hugeness of all things Roman; little

tin soldiers lost in the sky instead of those gallant theatrical

creatures swaggering among the clouds, pieces of wind-torn cloud,

petrified for the occasion, themselves! Think of Bernini's Apollo and

Daphne, a group unfortunately kept in a palace room, with whose right

angles its every outline swears, but which, if placed in a garden, would

be the very summing up of all garden and park impressions in the waving,

circling lines; yet not without a niminy piminy restraint of the

draperies, the limbs, the hair turning to clustered leaves, the body

turning to smooth bark, of the flying nymph and the pursuing god.

The great creation of this Bernini school, which shows it as the

sculpture born of gardens, is the fountain. No one till the seventeenth

century had guessed what might be the relations of stone and water, each

equally obedient to the artist's hand. The mediæval Italian fountain is

a tank, a huge wash-tub fed from lions' mouths, as if by taps, and

ornamented, more or less, with architectural and sculptured devices. In

the Renaissance we get complicated works of art--Neptunes with tridents

throne above sirens squeezing their breasts, and cupids riding on

dolphins, like the beautiful fountain of Bologna; or boys poised on one

foot, holding up tortoises, like Rafael's Tartarughe of Piazza Mattei;

more elaborate devices still, like the one of the villa at Bagnaia, near

Viterbo. But these fountains do equally well when dry, equally well

translated into bronze or silver: they are wonderful saltcellars or

fruit-dishes; everything is delightful except the water, which spurts in

meagre threads as from a garden-hose. They are the fitting ornament of

Florence, where there is pure drinking water only on Sundays and

holidays, of Bologna, where there is never any at all.

The seventeenth century made a very different thing of its

fountains--something as cool, as watery, as the jets which gurgle and

splash in Moorish gardens and halls, and full of form and fancy withal,

the water never alone, but accompanied by its watery suggestion of power

and will and whim. They are so absolutely right, these Roman fountains

of the Bernini school, that we are apt to take them as a matter of

course, as if the horses had reared between the spurts from below and

the gushes and trickles above; as if the Triton had been draped with the

overflowing of his horn; as if the Moor with his turban, the Asiatic

with his veiled fall, the solemn Egyptian river god, had basked and

started back with the lion and the seahorse among the small cataracts

breaking into foam in the pond, the sheets of water dropping,

prefiguring icicles, lazily over the rocks, all stained black by the

north winds and yellow by the lichen, all always, always, in those Roman

gardens and squares, from the beginning of time, natural objects,

perfect and not more to be wondered at than the water-encircled rocks of

the mountains and seashores. Such art as this cannot be done justice to

with the pen; diagrams would be necessary, showing how in every case the

lines of the sculpture harmonise subtly, or clash to be more subtly

harmonised, with the movement, the immensely varied, absolutely

spontaneous movement of the water; the sculptor, become infinitely

modest, willing to sacrifice his own work, to make it uninteresting in

itself, as a result of the hours and days he must have spent watching

the magnificent manners and exquisite tricks of natural waterfalls--nay,

the mere bursting alongside of breakwaters, the jutting up between

stones, of every trout-stream and milldam. It is not till we perceive

its absence (in the fountains, for instance, of modern Paris) that we

appreciate this Roman art of water sculpture. Meanwhile we accept the

fountains as we accept the whole magnificent harmony of nature and

art--nature tutored by art, art fostered by nature--of the Roman villas,

undulating, with their fringe of pines and oaks, over the hillocks and

dells of the Campagna, or stacked up proudly, vineyards and woods all

round, on the steep sides of Alban and Sabine hills.

IV

This book of engravings of the villas of the Serene Princes

Aldobrandini, Pamphili, Borghese, and so forth, brings home to us

another fact, to wit, that the original owners and layers-out thereof

must have had but little enjoyment of them. There they go in their big

coaches, among the immense bows and curtsies of the ladies and gentlemen

and dapper ecclesiastics whom they meet; princes in feathers and laces,

and cardinals in silk and ermine. But the delightful gardens on which

they are being complimented are meanwhile mere dreadful little

plantations, like a nurseryman's squares of cabbages, you would think,

rather than groves of ilexes and cypresses, for, alas, the greatest

princes, the most magnificent cardinals, cannot bribe Time, or hustle

him to hurry up.

And thus the gardens were planted and grew. For whom? Certainly not for

the men of those days, who would doubtless have been merely shocked

could they have seen or foreseen.... For their ghosts perhaps? Scarcely.

A friend of mine, in whose information on such matters I have implicit

belief, assures me that it is not the _whole_ ghosts of the ladies and

cavaliers of long ago who haunt the gardens; not the ghost of their

everyday, humdrum likeness to ourselves, but the ghost of certain

moments of their existence, certain rustlings, and shimmerings of their

personality, their waywardness, momentary, transcendent graces and

graciousnesses, unaccountable wistfulness and sorrow, certain looks of

the face and certain tones of the voice (perhaps none of the steadiest),

things that seemed to die away into nothing on earth, but which have

permeated their old haunts, clung to the statues with the ivy, risen and

fallen with the plash of the fountains, and which now exhale in the

breath of the honeysuckle and murmur in the voice of the birds, in the

rustle of the leaves and the high, invading grasses. There are some

verses of Verlaine's, which come to me always, on the melancholy minuet

tune to which Monsieur Fauré has set them, as I walk in those Italian

gardens, Roman and Florentine, walk in the spirit as well as in the

flesh:

Votre âme est un paysage choisi

Que vont charmant masques et bergamasques

Jouant du luth et quasi

Tristes sous leurs déguisements fantasques.

Tout en chantant sur le mode mineur

L'amour vainqueur et la vie opportune,

Ils n'ont pas l'air de croire à leur bonheur;

Et leur chanson se mêle au clair de lune,

Au calme clair de lune triste et beau

Qui fait rêver les oiseaux dans les arbres

Et sangloter d'extase les jets d'eau,

Les grands jets d'eau sveltes parmi les marbres.

V

And this leads me to wonder what these gardens must be when the key has

turned in their rusty gates, and the doorkeeper gone to sleep under the

gun hanging from its nail. What must such places be, Mondragone, for

instance, near Frascati, and the deserted Villa Pucci near Signa, during

the great May nights, when my own small scrap of garden, not beyond

kitchen sounds and servants' lamps, is made wonderful and magical by the

scents which rise up, by the song of the nightingales, the dances of

the fireflies, copying in the darkness below the figures which are

footed by the nimble stars overhead. Into such rites as these, which the

poetry of the past practises with the poetry of summer nights, one durst

not penetrate, save after leaving one's vulgar flesh, one's habits,

one's realities outside the gate.

And since I have mentioned gates, I must not forget one other sort of

old Italian garden, perhaps the most poetical and pathetic--the garden

that has ceased to exist. You meet it along every Italian highroad or

country lane; a piece of field, tender green with the short wheat in

winter, brown and orange with the dried maize husks and seeding sorghum

in summer, the wide grass path still telling of coaches that once rolled

in; a big stone bench, with sweeping shell-like back under the rosemary

bushes; and, facing the road, between solemnly grouped cypresses or

stately marshalled poplars, a gate of charming hammered iron standing

open between its scroll-work masonry and empty vases, under its covered

escutcheon. The gate that leads to nowhere.

ABOUT LEISURE

Sancte Hieronyme, ora pro nobis!

_Litany of the Saints._

I

Hung in my room, in such a manner as to catch my eye on waking, is an

excellent photograph of Bellini's _St. Jerome in his Study_. I am aware

that it is not at all by Bellini, but by an inferior painter called

Catena, and I am, therefore, careful not to like it very much. It

occupies that conspicuous place not as a work of art but as an _aid to

devotion_. For I have instituted in my mind, and quite apart from the

orthodox cultus, a special devotion to St. Jerome as the Patron of

Leisure.

And here let me forestall the cavillings of those who may object that

Hieronymus, whom we call Jerome (born in Dalmatia and died at Bethlehem

about 1500 years ago), was on the contrary a busy, even an overworked

Father of the Church; that he wrote three stout volumes of polemical

treatises, besides many others (including the dispute "concerning

seraphs"), translated the greater part of the Bible into Latin, edited

many obscure texts, and, on the top of it all, kept up an active

correspondence with seven or eight great ladies, a circumstance alone

sufficient to prove that he could not have had much time to spare. I

know. But all that either has nothing to do with it or serves to explain

why St. Jerome was afterwards rewarded by the gift of Leisure, and is,

therefore, to be invoked by all those who aspire at enjoying the same.

For the painters of all schools, faithful to the higher truth, have

agreed in telling us that: first, St. Jerome had a most delightful

study, looking out on the finest scenery; secondly, that he was never

writing, but always reading or looking over the edge of his book at the

charming tables and chairs and curiosities, or at the sea and mountains

through the window; and thirdly, _that he was never interrupted by

anybody_. I underline this item, because on it, above all the others, is

founded my certainty that St. Jerome is the only person who ever

enjoyed perfect leisure, and, therefore, the natural patron and

advocate of all the other persons to whom even imperfect leisure is

refused. In what manner this miracle was compassed is exactly what I

propose to discuss in this essay. An excellent _Roman Catholic_ friend

of mine, to whom I propounded the question, did indeed solve it by

reminding me that Heaven had made St. Jerome a present of a lion who

slept on his door-mat, after which, she thought, his leisure could take

care of itself. But although this answer seems decisive, it really only

begs the question; and we are obliged to inquire further into the _real

nature of St. Jerome's lion_. This formula has a fine theological ring,

calling to mind Hieronymus's own treatise, _Of the Nature of Seraphs_,

and I am pleased to have found anything so suitable to the arrangements

of a Father of the Church. Nevertheless, I propose to investigate into

the subject of Leisure with a method rather human and earthly than in

any way transcendental.

II

We must evidently begin by a little work of defining; and this will be

easiest done by considering first what Leisure is not. In the first

place, it is one of those things about which we erroneously suppose that

other people have plenty of it, and we ourselves have little or none,

owing to our thoroughly realising only that which lies nearest to our

eye--to wit, _ourself_. How often do we not go into another person's

room and say, "Ah! _this_ is a place where one can feel peaceful!" How

often do we not long to share the peacefulness of some old house, say in

a deserted suburb, with its red fruit wall and its cedar half hiding the

windows, or of some convent portico, with glimpses of spaliered orange

trees. Meanwhile, in that swept and garnished spacious room, in that

house or convent, is no peacefulness to share; barely, perhaps, enough

to make life's two ends meet. For we do not see what fills up, chokes

and frets the life of others, whereas we are uncomfortably aware of the

smallest encumbrance in our own; in these matters we feel quickly enough

the mote in our own eye, and do not perceive the beam in our

neighbour's.

And leisure, like its sister, peace, is among those things which are

internally felt rather than seen from the outside. (Having written this

part of my definition, it strikes me that I have very nearly given away

St. Jerome and St. Jerome's lion, since any one may say, that probably

that famous leisure of his was just one of the delusions in question.

But this is not the case. St. Jerome really had leisure, at least when

he was painted; I know it to be a fact; and, for the purposes of

literature, I require it to be one. So I close this parenthesis with the

understanding that so much is absolutely settled.)

Leisure requires the evidence of our own feelings, because it is not so

much a quality of time as a peculiar state of mind. We speak of _leisure

time_, but what we really mean thereby is _time in which we can feel at

leisure_. What being at leisure means is more easily felt than defined.

It has nothing to do with being idle, or having time on one's hands,

although it does involve a certain sense of free space about one, as we

shall see anon. There is time and to spare in a lawyer's waiting-room,

but there is no leisure, neither do we enjoy this blessing when we have

to wait two or three hours at a railway junction. On both these

occasions (for persons who can profit thereby to read the papers, to

learn a verb, or to refresh memories of foreign travel, are distinctly

abnormal) we do not feel in possession of ourselves. There is something

fuming and raging inside us, something which seems to be kicking at our

inner bulwarks as we kicked the cushions of a tardy four-wheeler in our

childhood. St. Jerome, patron of leisure, never behaved like that, and

his lion was always engrossed in pleasant contemplation of the

cardinal's hat on the peg. I have said that when we are bored we feel as

if possessed by something not quite ourselves (much as we feel possessed

by a stone in a shoe, or a cold in the head); and this brings me to a

main characteristic of leisure: it implies that we feel free to do what

we like, and that we have plenty of space to do it in. This is a very

important remark of mine, and if it seem trite, that is merely because

it is so wonderfully true. Besides, it is fraught with unexpected

consequences.

III

The worst enemy of leisure is boredom: it is one of the most active

pests existing, fruitful of vanity and vexation of spirit. I do not

speak merely of the wear and tear of so-called social amusements, though

that is bad enough. We kill time, and kill our better powers also, as

much in the work undertaken to keep off _ennui_ as in the play. Count

Tolstoi, with his terrible eye for shams, showed it all up in a famous

answer to M. Dumas _fils_. Many, many of us, work, he says, in order to

escape from ourselves. Now, we should not want to escape from ourselves;

we ought to carry ourselves, the more unconsciously the better, along

ever widening circles of interest and activity; we should bring

ourselves into ever closer contact with everything that is outside us;

we should be perpetually giving ourselves from sheer loving instinct;

but how can we give ourself if we have run away from it, or buried it at

home, or chained it up in a treadmill? Good work is born of the love of

the Power-to-do for the Job-to-be-done; nor can any sort of chemical

arrangements, like those by which Faust's pupil made _Homunculus_ in

his retort, produce genuinely living, and in its turn fruitful, work.

The fear of boredom, the fear of the moral going to bits which boredom

involves, encumbers the world with rubbish, and exhibitions of pictures,

publishers' announcements, lecture syllabuses, schemes of charitable

societies, are pattern-books of such litter. The world, for many people,

and unfortunately, for the finer and nobler (those most afraid of

_ennui_) is like a painter's garret, where some half-daubed canvas,

eleven feet by five, hides the Jaconda on the wall, the Venus in the

corner, and blocks the charming tree-tops, gables, and distant meadows

through the window.

Art, literature, and philanthropy are notoriously expressions no longer

of men's and women's thoughts and feelings, but of their dread of

finding themselves without thoughts to think or feelings to feel.

So-called practical persons know this, and despise such employments as

frivolous and effeminate. But are they not also, to a great extent,

frightened of themselves and running away from boredom? See your

well-to-do weighty man of forty-five or fifty, merchant, or soldier, or

civil servant; the same who thanks God _he_ is no idler. Does he really

require more money? Is he more really useful as a colonel than as a

major, in a wig or cocked hat than out of it? Is he not shuffling money

from one heap into another, making rules and regulations for others to

unmake, preparing for future restless idlers the only useful work which

restless idleness can do, the carting away of their predecessor's

litter?

Nor is this all the mischief. Work undertaken to kill time, at best to

safeguard one's dignity, is clearly not the work which one was born to,

since that would have required no such incentives. Now, trying to do

work one is not fit for, implies the more or less unfitting oneself to

do, or even to be, the something for which one had facilities. It means

competing with those who are utterly different, competing in things

which want a totally different kind of organism; it means, therefore,

offering one's arms and legs, and feelings and thoughts to those blind,

brutal forces of adaptation which, having to fit a human character into

a given place, lengthen and shorten it, mangling it unconcernedly in

the process.

Say one was naturally adventurous, a creature for open air and quick,

original resolves. Is he the better for a deliberative, sedentary

business, or it for him? There are people whose thought poises on

distant points, swirls and pounces, and gets the prey which can't be got

by stalking along the bushes; there are those who, like divers, require

to move head downwards, feet in the air, an absurd position for going up

hill. There are people who must not feel æsthetically, in order (so Dr.

Bain assures us) that they may be thorough-paced, scientific thinkers;

others who cannot get half a page or fifty dates by heart because they

assimilate and alter everything they take in.

And think of the persons born to contemplation or sympathy, who, in the

effort to be prompt and practical, in the struggle for a fortune or a

visiting-list lose, atrophy (alas, after so much cruel bruising!) their

inborn exquisite powers.

The world wants useful inhabitants. True. But the clouds building

bridges over the sea, the storms modelling the peaks and flanks of the

mountains, are a part of the world; and they want creatures to sit and

look at them and learn their life's secrets, and carry them away,

conveyed perhaps merely in altered tone of voice, or brightened colour

of eye, to revive the spiritual and physical hewers of wood and drawers

of water. For the poor sons and daughters of men require for sustenance,

as well as food and fuel, and intellect and morals, the special

mysterious commodity called _charm_....

IV

And here let me open a parenthesis of lamentation over the ruthless

manner in which our century and nation destroys this precious thing,

even in its root and seed. _Charm_ is, where it exists, an intrinsic and

ultimate quality; it makes our actions, persons, life, significant and

desirable, apart from anything they may lead to, or any use to which

they can be put. Now we are allowing ourselves to get into a state where

nothing is valued, otherwise than as a means; where to-day is

interesting only because it leads up to to-morrow; and the flower is

valued only on account of the fruit, and the fruit, in its turn, on

account of the seed.

It began, perhaps, with the loss of that sacramental view of life and

life's details which belonged to Judaism and the classic religions, and

of which even Catholicism has retained a share; making eating, drinking,

sleeping, cleaning house and person, let alone marriage, birth, and

death, into something grave and meaningful, not merely animal and

accidental; and mapping out the years into days, each with its symbolic

or commemorative meaning and emotion. All this went long ago, and

inevitably. But we are losing nowadays something analogous and more

important: the cultivation and sanctification not merely of acts and

occasions but of the individual character.

Life has been allowed to arrange itself, if such can be called

arrangement, into an unstable, jostling heap of interests, ours and

other folk's, serious and vacuous, trusted to settle themselves

according to the line of least resistance (that is, of most breakage!)

and the survival of the toughest, without our sympathy directing the

choice. As the days of the year have become confused, hurried, and

largely filled with worthless toil and unworthy trouble, so in a

measure, alas, our souls! We rarely envy people for being delightful; we

are always ashamed of mentioning that any of our friends are virtuous;

we state what they have done, or do, or are attempting; we state their

chances of success. Yet success may depend, and often does, on greater

hurrying and jostling, not on finer material and workmanship, in our

hurrying times. The quick method, the rapid worker, the cheap object

quickly replaced by a cheaper--these we honour; we want the last new

thing, and have no time to get to love our properties, bodily and

spiritual. 'Tis bad economy, we think, to weave such damask, linen, and

brocade as our fathers have left us; and perhaps this reason accounts

for our love of _bric-à-brac_; we wish to buy associations ready made,

like that wealthy man of taste who sought to buy a half-dozen old

statues, properly battered and lichened by the centuries, to put in his

brand new garden. With this is connected--I mean this indifference to

what folk _are_ as distinguished from what they _do_--the self-assertion

and aggressiveness of many worthy persons, men more than women, and

gifted, alas, more than giftless; the special powers proportionately

accompanied by special odiousness. Such persons cultivate themselves,

indeed, but as fruit and vegetables for the market, and, with good luck

and trouble, possibly _primeurs_: concentrate every means, chemical

manure and sunshine, and quick each still hard pear or greenish

cauliflower into the packing-case, the shavings and sawdust, for export.

It is with such well-endowed persons that originates the terrible mania

(caught by their neighbours) of tangible work, something which can be

put alongside of others' tangible work, if possible with some visible

social number attached to it. So long as this be placed on the stall

where it courts inspection, what matter how empty and exhausted the soul

which has grown it? For nobody looks at souls except those who use them

for this market-gardening.

Dropping metaphor; it is woeful to see so many fine qualities sacrificed

to _getting on_, independent of actual necessity; getting on, no matter

why, on to the road _to no matter what_. And on that road, what

bitterness and fury if another passes in front! Take up books of

science, of history and criticism, let alone newspapers; half the space

is taken up in explaining (or forestalling explanations), that the sage,

hero, poet, artist said, did, or made the particular thing before some

other sage, hero, poet, artist; and that what the other did, or said, or

made, was either a bungle, or a plagiarism, or worst of all--was

something _obvious_. Hence, like the bare-back riders at the Siena

races, illustrious persons, and would-be illustrious, may be watched

using their energies, not merely in pressing forward, but in hitting

competitors out of the way with inflated bladders--bladders filled with

the wind of conceit, not merely the breath of the lungs. People who

might have been modest and gentle, grow, merely from self-defence,

arrogant and aggressive; they become waspish, contradictory, unfair, who

were born to be wise and just, and well-mannered. And to return to the

question of _Charm_, they lose, soil, maim in this scuffle, much of this

most valuable possession; their intimate essential quality, their

natural manner of being towards nature and neighbours and ideas; their

individual shape, perfume, savour, and, in the sense of herbals, their

individual _virtue_. And when, sometimes, one comes across some of it

remaining, it is with the saddened feeling of finding a delicate plant

trampled by cattle or half eaten up by goats.

Alas, alas, for charm! People are busy painting pictures, writing poems,

and making music all the world over, and busy making money for the

buying or hiring thereof. But as to that charm of character which is

worth all the music and poetry and pictures put together, how the good

common-sense generations do waste it.

V

Now I suspect that _Charm_ is closely related to _Leisure_. Charm is a

living harmony in the individual soul. It is organised internally, the

expression of mere inborn needs, the offspring of free choice; and as it

is the great giver of pleasure to others, sprung probably from pleasure

within ourselves; making life seem easier, more flexible, even as life

feels in so far easier and more flexible to those who have it. Now even

the best work means struggle, if not with the world and oneself, at

least with difficulties inanimate and animate, pressure and resistance

which make the individual soul stronger, but also harder and less

flower-like, and often a trifle warped by inevitable routine. Hence

Charm is not the nursling of our hours of work, but the delicate and

capricious foster-child of Leisure. For, as observed, Leisure suspends

the pull and push, the rough-and-ready reciprocity of man and

circumstance. 'Tis in leisure that the soul is free to grow by its own

laws, grow inwardly organised and harmonious; its fine individual

hierarchism to form feelings and thoughts, each taking rank and motion

under a conscious headship. 'Tis, I would show, in leisure, while

talking with the persons who are dear, while musing on the themes that

are dearer even than they, that voices learn their harmonious modes,

intonation, accent, pronunciation of single words; all somehow falling

into characteristic pattern, and the features of the face learn to move

with that centred meaning which oftentimes makes homeliness itself more

radiant than beauty. Nay more, may it not be in Leisure, during life's

pauses, that we learn to live, what for and how?

VI

_Life's Pauses._ We think of Leisure in those terms, comparing it with

the scramble, at best the bustle, of work. But this might be a delusion,

like that of the moving shore and the motionless boat. St. Jerome, our

dear patron of Leisure, is looking dreamily over the top of his desk,

listening to the larks outside the wide window, watching the white

sailing clouds. Is he less alive than if his eyes were glued to the

page, his thoughts focussed on one topic, his pen going scratch-scratch,

his soul oblivious of itself? He might be writing fine words, thinking

fine thoughts; but would he have had fine thoughts to think, fine words

to write, if he had always been busy thinking and writing, and had kept

company not with the larks and the clouds and the dear lion on the mat,

but only with the scratching pen?

For, when all is said and done, 'tis during work we spend, during

leisure we amass those qualities which we barter for ever with other

folk, and the act of barter is _life_. Anyhow, metaphysics apart, and to

return to St. Jerome. This much is clear, that if Leisure were not a

very good thing, this dear old saint would never have been made its

heavenly patron.

But your discourse, declares the stern reader or he of sicklier

conscience, might be a masked apology for idleness; and pray how many

people would work in this world if every one insisted on having Leisure?

The question, moralising friend, contains its own answer: if every one

insisted on a share of Leisure, every one also would do a share of work.

For as things stand, 'tis the superfluity of one man which makes the

poverty of the other. And who knows? The realisation that Leisure is a

good thing, a thing which every one must have, may, before very long,

set many an idle man digging his garden and grooming his horses, many an

idle woman cooking her dinner and rubbing her furniture. Not merely

because one half of the world (the larger) will have recognised that

work from morning to night is not in any sense living; but also because

the other half may have learned (perhaps through grumbling experience)

that doing nothing all day long, incidentally consuming or spoiling the

work of others, is not _living_ either. The recognition of the necessity

of Leisure, believe me, will imply the recognition of the necessity of

work, as its moral--I might say its _hygienic_, as much as its economic,

co-relative.

For Leisure (and the ignorance of this truth is at the bottom of much

_ennui_)--Leisure implies a superabundance not only of time but of the

energy needed to spend time pleasantly. And it takes the finest activity

to be truly at Leisure. Since Being at Leisure is but a name for being

active from an inner impulse instead of a necessity; moving like a

dancer or skater for the sake of one's inner rhythm instead of moving,

like a ploughman or an errand-boy, for the sake of the wages you get for

it. Indeed, for this reason, the type of all Leisure is _art_.

But this is an intricate question, and time, alas! presses. We must

break off this leisurely talk, and betake ourselves each to his

business--let us hope not to his treadmill! And, as we do so, the more

to enjoy our work if luckily useful, the less to detest it if, alas! as

so often in our days, useless; let us invoke the good old greybeard,

painted enjoying himself between his lion and his quail in the

wide-windowed study; and, wishing for leisure, invoke its patron. Give

us spare time, Holy Jerome, and joyful energy to use it. Sancte

Hieronyme, ora pro nobis!

RAVENNA AND HER GHOSTS

My oldest impression of Ravenna, before it became in my eyes the abode

of living friends as well as of outlandish ghosts, is of a melancholy

spring sunset at Classe.

Classe, which Dante and Boccaccio call in less Latin fashion Chiassi, is

the place where of old the fleet _(classis)_ of the Romans and

Ostrogoths rode at anchor in the Adriatic. And Boccaccio says that it is

(but I think he over-calculates) at three miles distance from Ravenna.

It is represented in the mosaic of Sant' Apollinare Nuovo, dating from

the reign of Theodoric, by a fine city wall of gold _tesseræ_ (facing

the representation of Theodoric's town palace with the looped-up

embroidered curtains) and a strip of ultramarine sea, with two

rowing-boats and one white blown-out sail upon it. Ravenna, which is now

an inland town, was at that time built in a lagoon; and we must picture

Classe in much the same relation to it that Malamocco or the Port of

Lido is to Venice, the open sea-harbour, where big ships and flotillas

were stationed, while smaller craft wound through the channels and

sand-banks up to the city. But now the lagoon has dried up, the Adriatic

has receded, and there remains of Classis not a stone, save, in the

midst of stagnant canals, rice marsh and brown bogland, a gaunt and

desolate church, with a ruinous mildewed house and a crevassed round

tower by its side.

It seemed to me that first time, and has ever since seemed, no Christian

church, but the temple of the great Roman goddess Fever. The gates stood

open, as they do all day lest inner damp consume the building, and a

beam from the low sun slanted across the oozy brown nave and struck a

round spot of glittering green on the mosaic of the apse. There, in the

half dome, stood rows and rows of lambs, each with its little tree and

lilies, shining out white from the brilliant green grass of Paradise,

great streams of gold and blue circling around them, and widening

overhead into lakes of peacock splendour. The slanting sunbeam which

burnished that spot of green and gold and brown mosaic, fell also

across the altar steps, brown and green in their wet mildew like the

ceiling above. The floor of the church, sunk below the level of the

road, was as a piece of boggy ground leaving the feet damp, and

breathing a clammy horror on the air. Outside the sun was setting behind

a bank of solid grey clouds, faintly reddening their rifts and sending a

few rose-coloured streaks into the pure yellow evening sky. Against that

sky stood out the long russet line, the delicate cupolaed silhouette of

the sear pinewood recently blasted by frost. While, on the other side,

the marsh stretched out beyond sight, confused in the distance with grey

clouds its lines of bare spectral poplars picked out upon its green and

the greyness of the sky. All round the church lay brown grass, livid

pools, green rice-fields covered with clear water reflecting the red

sunset streaks; and overhead, driven by storm from the sea, the white

gulls, ghosts you might think, of the white-sailed galleys of Theodoric,

still haunting the harbour of Classis.

Since then, as I hinted, Ravenna has become the home of dear friends,

to which I periodically return, in autumn or winter or blazing summer,

without taking thought for any of the ghosts. And the impressions of

Ravenna are mainly those of life; the voices of children, the plans of

farmers, the squabbles of local politics. I am waked in the morning by

the noises of the market; and opening my shutters, look down upon green

umbrellas and awnings spread over baskets of fruit and vegetables, and

heaps of ironware and stalls of coloured stuffs and gaudy kerchiefs. The

streets are by no means empty. A steam tramcar puffs slowly along the

widest of them; and, in the narrower, you have perpetually to squeeze

against a house to make room for a clattering pony-cart, a jingling

carriole, or one of those splendid bullock-waggons, shaped like an

old-fashioned cannon-cart with spokeless wheels and metal studdings.

There are no mediæval churches in Ravenna, and very few mediæval houses.

The older palaces, though practically fortified, have a vague look of

Roman villas; and the whole town is painted a delicate rose and apricot

colour, which, particularly if you have come from the sad coloured

cities of Tuscany, gives it a Venetian, and (if I may say so)

chintz-petticoat flowered-kerchief cheerfulness. And the life of the

people, when you come in contact with it, also leaves an impression of

provincial, rustic bustle. The Romagnas are full of crude socialism. The

change from rice to wheat-growing has produced agricultural discontent;

and conspiracy has been in the blood of these people, ever since Dante

answered the Romagnolo Guido that his country would never have peace in

its heart. The ghosts of Byzantine emperors and exarchs, of Gothic kings

and mediæval tyrants must be laid, one would think, by socialist

meetings and electioneering squabbles; and perhaps by another movement,

as modern and as revolutionary, which also centres in this big

historical village, the reclaiming of marshland, which may bring about

changes in mode of living and thinking such as Socialism can never

effect; nay, for all one knows, changes in climate, in sea and wind and

clouds. _Bonification_, reclaiming, that is the great word in Ravenna;

and I had scarcely arrived last autumn, before I found myself whirled

off, among dog-carts and _chars-à-bancs_, to view reclaimed land in the

cloudless, pale blue, ice-cold weather. On we trotted, with a great

consulting of maps and discussing of expenses and production, through

the flat green fields and meadows marked with haystacks; and jolted

along a deep sandy track, all that remains of the Roméa, the pilgrims'

way from Venice to Rome, where marsh and pool begin to interrupt the

well-kept pastures, and the line of pine woods to come nearer and

nearer. Over the fields, the frequent canals, and hidden ponds, circled

gulls and wild fowl; and at every farm there was a little crowd of

pony-carts and of gaitered sportsmen returning from the marshes. A sense

of reality, of the present, of useful, bread-giving, fever-curing

activity came by sympathy, as I listened to the chatter of my friends,

and saw field after field, farm after farm, pointed out where, but a

while ago, only swamp grass and bushes grew, and cranes and wild duck

nested. In ten, twenty, fifty years, they went on calculating, Ravenna

will be able to diminish by so much the town-rates; the Romagnas will be

able to support so many more thousands of inhabitants; and that merely

by employing the rivers to deposit arable soil torn from the mountain

valleys; the rivers--Po and his followers, as Dante called them--which

have so long turned this country into marsh; the rivers which, in a

thousand years, cut off Ravenna from her sea.

We turned towards home, greedy for tea, and mightily in conceit with

progress. But before us, at a turn of the road, appeared Ravenna, its

towers and cupolas against a bank of clouds, a piled-up heap of sunset

fire; its canal, barred with flame, leading into its black vagueness, a

spectre city. And there, to the left, among the bare trees, loomed the

great round tomb of Theodoric. We jingled on, silent and overcome by the

deathly December chill.

That is the odd thing about Ravenna. It is, more than any of the Tuscan

towns, more than most of the Lombard ones, modern, and full of rough,

dull, modern life; and the past which haunts it comes from so far off,

from a world with which we have no contact. Those pillared basilicas,

which look like modern village churches from the street, affect one with

their almost Moorish arches, their enamelled splendour of ultramarine,

russet, sea-green and gold mosaics, their lily fields and peacock's

tails in mosque-like domes, as great stranded hulks, come floating

across Eastern seas and drifted ashore among the marsh and rice-field.

The grapes and ivy berries, the pouting pigeons, the palm-trees and

pecking peacocks, all this early symbolism with its association of

Bacchic, Eleusinian mysteries, seems, quite as much as the actual

fragments of Grecian capitals, the discs and gratings of porphyry and

alabaster, so much flotsam and jetsam cast up from the shipwreck of an

older Antiquity than Rome's; remnants of early Hellas, of Ionia, perhaps

of Tyre.

I used to feel this particularly in Sant' Apollinare Nuovo, or, as it is

usually called, _Classe dentro_, the long basilica built by Theodoric,

outrivalled later by Justinian's octagon church of Saint Vitalis. There

is something extremely Hellenic in feeling (however un-Grecian in form)

in the pearly fairness of the delicate silvery white columns and

capitals; in the gleam of white, on golden ground, and reticulated with

jewels and embroideries, of the long band of mosaic virgins and martyrs

running above them. The virgins, with their Byzantine names--Sancta

Anastasia, Sancta Anatolia, Sancta Eulalia, Sancta Euphemia--have big

kohled eyes and embroidered garments fantastically suggesting some

Eastern hieratic dancing-girl; but they follow each other, in single

file (each with her lily or rose-bush sprouting from the gauze, green

mosaic), with erect, slightly balanced gait like the maidens of the

Panathenaic procession, carrying, one would say, votive offerings to the

altar, rather than crowns of martyrdom; all stately, sedate, as if

drilled by some priestly ballet-master, all with the same wide eyes and

set smile as of early Greek sculpture. There is no attempt to

distinguish one from the other. There are no gaping wounds, tragic

attitudes, wheels, swords, pincers or other attributes of martyrdom. And

the male saints on the wall opposite are equally unlike mediæval

Sebastians and Laurences, going, one behind the other, in shining white

togas, to present their crowns to Christ on His throne. Christ also, in

this Byzantine art, is never the Saviour. He sits, an angel on each

side, on His golden seat, clad in purple and sandalled with gold,

serene, beardless, wide-eyed like some distant descendant of the

Olympic Jove with his mantle of purple and gold.

This church of Saint Apollinaris contains a chapel specially dedicated

to the saint, which sums up that curious impression of Hellenic

pre-Christian cheerfulness. It is encrusted with porphyry and _giallo

antico_, framed with delicate carved ivy wreaths along the sides, and

railed in with an exquisite piece of alabaster openwork of vines and

grapes, as on an antique altar. And in a corner of this little temple,

which seems to be waiting for some painter enamoured of Greece and

marble, stands the episcopal seat of the patron saint of the church, the

saint who took his name from Apollo; an alabaster seat, wide-curved and

delicate, in whose back you expect to find, so striking is the

resemblance, the relief of dancing satyrs of the chair of the Priest of

Dionysus.

As I was sitting one morning, as was my wont, in Sant' Apollinare Nuovo,

which (like all Ravenna churches) is always empty, a woman came in, with

a woollen shawl over her head, who, after hunting anxiously about, asked

me where she would find the parish priest. "It is," she said, "for the

Madonna's milk. My husband is a labourer out of work, he has been ill,

and the worry of it all has made me unable to nurse my little baby. I

want the priest, to ask him to get the Madonna to give me back my milk."

I thought, as I listened to the poor creature, that there was but little

hope of motherly sympathy from that Byzantine Madonna in purple and gold

mosaic magnificence, seated ceremoniously on her throne like an antique

Cybele.

Little by little one returns to one's first impression, and recognises

that this thriving little provincial town, with its socialism and its

_bonification_ is after all a nest of ghosts, and little better than the

churchyard of centuries.

Never, surely, did a town contain so many coffins, or at least thrust

coffins more upon one's notice. The coffins are stone, immense oblong

boxes, with massive sloping lids horned at each corner, or trough-like

things with delicate sea-wave patternings, figures of toga'd saints and

devices of palm-trees, peacocks, and doves, the carving made clearer by

a picking out of bright green damp. They stand about in all the

churches, not walled in, but quite free in the aisles, the chapels, and

even close to the door. Most of them are doubtless of the fifth or sixth

century, others perhaps barbarous or mediæval imitations; but they all

equally belong to the ages in general, including our own, not

curiosities or heirlooms, but serviceable furniture, into which

generations have been put, and out of which generations have been turned

to make room for later corners. It strikes one as curious at first to

see, for instance, the date 1826 on a sarcophagus probably made under

Theodoric or the Exarchs, but that merely means that a particular

gentleman of Ravenna began that year his lease of entombment. They have

passed from hand to hand (or, more properly speaking, from corpse to

corpse) not merely by being occasionally discovered in digging

foundations, but by inheritance, and frequently by sale. My friends

possess a stone coffin, and the receipt from its previous owner. The

transaction took place some fifty years ago; a name (they are cut very

lightly) changed, a slab or coat-of-arms placed with the sarcophagus in

a different church or chapel, a deed before the notary--that was all.

What became of the previous tenant? Once at least he surprised posterity

very much; perhaps it was in the case of that very purchase for which my

friends still keep the bill. I know not; but the stone-mason of the

house used to relate that, some forty years ago, he was called in to

open a stone coffin; when, the immense horned lid having been rolled

off, there was seen, lying in the sarcophagus, a man in complete armour,

his sword by his side and vizor up, who, as they cried out in

astonishment, instantly fell to dust. Was he an Ostrogothic knight, some

Gunther or Volker turned Roman senator, or perhaps a companion of Guido

da Polenta, a messmate of Dante, a playfellow of Francesca?

Coffins being thus plentiful, their occupants (like this unknown

warrior) have played considerable part in the gossip of Ravenna. It is

well known, for instance, that Galla Placidia, daughter of Theodosius,

sister of Arcadius and Honorius, and wife to a Visigothic king, sat for

centuries enthroned (after a few years of the strangest adventures)

erect, inside the alabaster coffin, formerly plated with gold, in the

wonderful little blue mosaic chapel which bears her name. You could see

her through a hole, quite plainly; until, three centuries ago, some

inquisitive boys thrust in a candle, and burned Theodosius's daughter to

ashes. Dante also is buried under a little cupola at the corner of a

certain street, and there was, for many years, a strange doubt about his

bones. Had they been mislaid, stolen, mixed up with those of ordinary

mortals? The whole thing was shrouded in mystery. That street corner

where Dante lies, a remote corner under the wing of a church, resembled,

until it was modernised and surrounded by gratings, and filled with

garlands and inscriptions to Mazzini, nothing so much as the corner of

Dis where Dante himself found Farinata and Cavalcante. It is crowded

with stone coffins; and, passing there in the twilight, one might expect

to see flames upheaving their lids, and the elbows and shoulders of

imprisoned followers of Epicurus.

Only once, so far as I know, have the inhabitants of Ravenna, Byzantine,

mediæval, or modern, wasted a coffin; but one is very glad of that once.

I am speaking of a Roman sarcophagus, on which you can still trace the

outlines of garlands, which stands turned into a cattle trough, behind

the solitary farm in the depth of the forest of St. Vitalis. Round it

the grass is covered in summer by the creeping tendrils of the white

clematis; and, in winter, the great thorn bushes and barberries and oaks

blaze out crimson and scarlet and golden. The big, long-horned, grey

cows pass to and fro to be milked; and the shaggy ponies who haunt the

pine wood come there to drink. It is better than housing no matter how

many generations, jurisconsults, knights, monks, tyrants and persons of

quality, among the damp and the stale incense of a church!

Enough of coffins! There are live things at Ravenna and near Ravenna;

amongst others, though few people realise its presence, there is the

sea.

It was on the day of the fish auction that I first went there. In the

tiny port by the pier (for Ravenna has now no harbour) they were making

an incredible din over the emptyings of the nets; pretty, mottled,

metallic fish, and slimy octopuses and sepias and flounders, looking

like pieces of sea-mud. The fishing-boats, mostly from the Venetian

lagoon, were moored along the pier, wide-bowed things, with eyes in the

prow like the ships of Ulysses; and bigger craft, with little castles

and weather-vanes and saints' images and penons on the masts like the

galleys of St. Ursula as painted by Carpaccio; but all with the splendid

orange sail, patched with suns, lions, and coloured stripes, of the

Northern Adriatic. The fishermen from Chioggia, their heads covered with

the high scarlet cap of the fifteenth century, were yelling at the

fishmongers from town; and all round lounged artillerymen in their white

undress and yellow straps, who are encamped for practice on the sands,

and whose carts and guns we had met rattling along the sandy road

through the marsh.

On the pier we were met by an old man, very shabby and unshaven, who had

been the priest for many years, with a salary of twelve pounds a year,

of Sta. Maria in Porto Fuori, a little Gothic church in the marsh, where

he had discovered and rubbed slowly into existence (it took him two

months and heaven knows how many pennyworths of bread!) some valuable

Giottesque frescoes. He was now chaplain of the harbour, and had turned

his mind to maritime inventions, designing lighthouses, and shooting

dolphins to make oil of their blubber. A kind old man, but with the odd

brightness of a creature who has lived for years amid solitude and

fever; a fit companion for the haggard saints whom he brought, one by

one, in robes of glory and golden halos, to life again in his forlorn

little church.

While we were looking out at the sea, where a little flotilla of yellow

and cinnamon sails sat on the blue of the view-line like parrots on a

rail, the sun had begun to set, a crimson ball, over the fringe of pine

woods. We turned to go. Over the town, the place whence presently will

emerge the slanting towers of Ravenna, the sky had become a brilliant,

melancholy slate-blue; and apparently out of its depths, in the early

twilight, flowed the wide canal between its dim banks fringed with

tamarisk. No tree, no rock, or house was reflected in the jade-coloured

water, only the uniform shadow of the bank made a dark, narrow band

alongside its glassiness. It flows on towards the invisible sea, whose

yellow sails overtop the grey marshland. In thick smooth strands of

curdled water it flows lilac, pale pink, opalescent according to the

sky above, reflecting nothing besides, save at long intervals the

spectral spars and spider-like tissue of some triangular fishing-net; a

wan and delicate Lethe, issuing, you would say, out of a far-gone past

into the sands and the almost tideless sea.

Other places become solemn, sad, or merely beautiful at sunset. But

Ravenna, it seems to me, grows actually ghostly; the Past takes it back

at that moment, and the ghosts return to the surface.

For it is, after all, a nest of ghosts. They hang about all those

silent, damp churches; invisible, or at most tantalising one with a

sudden gleam which may, after all, be only that of the mosaics, an

uncertain outline which, when you near it, is after all only a pale grey

column. But one feels their breathing all round. They are legion, but I

do not know who they are. I only know that they are white, luminous,

with gold embroideries to their robes, and wide, painted eyes, and that

they are silent. The good citizens of Ravenna, in the comfortable

eighteenth century, filled the churches with wooden pews, convenient,

genteel in line and colour, with their names and coats-of-arms in full

on the backs. But the ghosts took no notice of this measure; and there

they are, even among these pews themselves.

Bishops and Exarchs, and jewelled Empresses, and half Oriental

Autocrats, saints and bedizened court-ladies, and barbarian guards and

wicked chamberlains; I know not what they are. Only one of the ghosts

takes a shape I can distinguish, and a name I am certain of. It is not

Justinian or Theodora, who stare goggle-eyed from their mosaic in San

Vitale mere wretched historic realities; _they_ cannot haunt. The

spectre I speak of is Theodoric. His tomb is still standing, outside the

town in an orchard; a great round tower, with a circular roof made

(heaven knows how) of one huge slab of Istrian stone, horned at the

sides like the sarcophagi, or vaguely like a Viking's cap. The ashes of

the great king have long been dispersed, for he was an Arian heretic.

But the tomb remains, intact, a thing which neither time nor earthquake

can dismantle.

In the town they show a piece of masonry, the remains of a doorway, and

a delicate, pillared window, built on to a modern house, which is

identified (but wrongly I am told) as Theodoric's palace, by its

resemblance to the golden palace with the looped-up curtains on the

mosaic of the neighbouring church. Into the wall of this building is

built a great Roman porphyry bath, with rings carved on it, to which

time has adjusted a lid of brilliant green lichen. There is no more. But

Theodoric still haunts Ravenna. I have always, ever since I have known

the town, been anxious to know more about Theodoric, but the accounts

are jejune, prosaic, not at all answering to what that great king, who

took his place with Attila and Sigurd in the great Northern epic, must

have been. Historians represent him generally as a sort of superior

barbarian, trying to assimilate and save the civilisation he was bound

to destroy; an Ostrogothic king trying to be a Roman emperor; a military

organiser and bureaucrat, exchanging his birthright of Valhalla for

heaven knows what aulic red-tape miseries. But that is unsatisfactory.

The real man, the Berserker trying to tame himself into the Cæsar of a

fallen, shrunken Rome, seems to come out in the legend of his remorse

and visions, pursued by the ghosts of Boetius and Symmachus, the wise

men he had slain in his madness.

He haunts Ravenna, striding along the aisles of her basilicas, riding

under the high moon along the dykes of her marshes, surrounded by

white-stoled Romans, and Roman ensigns with eagles and crosses; but

clad, as the Gothic brass-worker of Innsbruck has shown him, in no Roman

lappets and breastplate, but in full mail, with beaked steel shoes and

steel gorget, his big sword drawn, his vizor down, mysterious, the

Dietrich of the Nibelungenlied, Theodoric King of the Goths.

These are the ghosts that haunt Ravenna, the true ghosts haunting only

for such as can know their presence. But Ravenna, almost alone among

Italian cities, possesses moreover a complete ghost-story of the most

perfect type and highest antiquity, which has gone round the world and

become known to all people. Boccaccio wrote it in prose; Dryden re-wrote

it in verse; Botticelli illustrated it; and Byron summed up its quality

in one of his most sympathetic passages. After this, to re-tell it were

useless, had I not chanced to obtain, in a manner I am not at liberty to

divulge, another version, arisen in Ravenna itself, and written, most

evidently, in fullest knowledge of the case. Its language is the

barbarous Romagnol dialect of the early fifteenth century, and it lacks

all the Tuscan graces of the Decameron. But it possesses a certain air

of truthfulness, suggesting that it was written by some one who had

heard the facts from those who believed in them, and who believed in

them himself; and I am therefore decided to give it, turned into

English.

THE LEGEND

About that time (when Messer Guido da Pollenta was lord of Ravenna) men

spoke not a little of what happened to Messer Nastasio de Honestis, son

of Messer Brunoro, in the forest of Classis. Now the forest of Classis

is exceeding vast, extending along the sea-shore between Ravenna and

Cervia for the space of some fifteen miles, and has its beginning near

the church of Saint Apollinaris, which is in the marsh; and you reach

it directly from the gate of the same name, but also, crossing the River

Ronco where it is easier to ford, by the gate called Sisa, beyond the

houses of the Rasponis. And this forest aforesaid is made of many kinds

of noble and useful trees, to wit, oaks, both free standing and in

bushes, ilexes, elms, poplars, bays, and many plants of smaller growth

but great dignity and pleasantness, as hawthorns, barberries,

blackthorn, blackberry, brier-rose, and the thorn called marrucca, which

bears pods resembling small hats or cymbals, and is excellent for

hedging. But principally does this noble forest consist of pine-trees,

exceeding lofty and perpetually green; whence indeed the arms of this

ancient city, formerly the seat of the Emperors of Rome, are none other

than a green pine-tree.

And the forest aforesaid is well stocked with animals, both such as run

and creep, and many birds. The animals are foxes, badgers, hares,

rabbits, ferrets, squirrels, and wild boars, the which issue forth and

eat the young crops and grub the fields with incredible damage to all

concerned. Of the birds it would be too long to speak, both of those

which are snared, shot with cross-bows, or hunted with the falcon; and

they feed off fish in the ponds and streams of the forest, and grasses

and berries, and the pods of the white vine (clematis) which covers the

grass on all sides. And the manner of Messer Nastasio being in the

forest was thus, he being at the time a youth of twenty years or

thereabouts, of illustrious birth, and comely person and learning and

prowess, and modest and discreet bearing. For it so happened that, being

enamoured of the daughter of Messer Hostasio de Traversariis, the

damsel, who was lovely, but exceeding coy and shrewish, would not

consent to marry him, despite the desire of her parents, who in

everything, as happens with only daughters of old men (for Messer

Hostasio was well stricken in years), sought only to please her.

Whereupon Messer Nastasio, fearing lest the damsel might despise his

fortunes, wasted his substance in presents and feastings, and joustings,

but all to no avail.

When it happened that having spent nearly all he possessed and ashamed

to show his poverty and his unlucky love before the eyes of his

townsmen, he betook him to the forest of Classis, it being autumn, on

the pretext of snaring birds, but intending to take privily the road to

Rimini and thence to Rome, and there seek his fortune. And Nastasio took

with him fowling-nets, and bird-lime, and tame owls, and two horses (one

of which was ridden by his servant), and food for some days; and they

alighted in the midst of the forest, and slept in one of the

fowling-huts of cut branches set up by the citizens of Ravenna for their

pleasure.

And it happened that on the afternoon of the second day (and it chanced

to be a Friday) of his stay in the forest, Messer Nastasio, being

exceeding sad in his heart, went forth towards the sea to muse upon the

unkindness of his beloved and the hardness of his fortune. Now you

should know that near the sea, where you can clearly hear its roaring

even on windless days there is in that forest a clear place, made as by

the hand of man, set round with tall pines even like a garden, but in

the shape of a horse-course, free from bushes and pools, and covered

with the finest greensward. Here, as Nastasio sate him on the trunk of a

pine--the hour was sunset, the weather being uncommon clear--he heard a

rushing sound in the distance, as of the sea; and there blew a

death-cold wind; and then came sounds of crashing branches, and neighing

of horses, and yelping of hounds, and halloes and horns. And Nastasio

wondered greatly, for that was not the hour for hunting; and he hid

behind a great pine trunk, fearing to be recognised. And the sounds came

nearer, even of horns, and hounds, and the shouts of huntsmen; and the

bushes rustled and crashed, and the hunt rushed into the clearing,

horsemen and foot, with many hounds. And behold, what they pursued was

not a wild boar, but something white that ran erect, and it seemed to

Messer Nastasio, as if it greatly resembled a naked woman; and it

screamed piteously.

Now when the hunt had swept past, Messer Nastasio rubbed his eyes and

wondered greatly. But even as he wondered, and stood in the middle of

the clearing, behold, part of the hunt swept back, and the thing which

they pursued ran in a circle on the greensward, shrieking piteously. And

behold, it was a young damsel, naked, her hair loose and full of

brambles, with only a tattered cloth round her middle. And as she came

near to where Messer Nastasio was standing (but no one of the hunt

seemed to heed him) the hounds were upon her, barking furiously, and a

hunter on a black horse, black even as night. And a cold wind blew and

caused Nastasio's hair to stand on end; and he tried to cry out, and to

rush forward, but his voice died in his throat and his limbs were heavy,

and covered with sweat, and refused to move.

Then the hounds fastening on the damsel threw her down, and he on the

black horse turned swiftly, and transfixed her, shrieking dismally, with

a boar-spear. And those of the hunt galloped up, and wound their horns;

and he of the black horse, which was a stately youth habited in a coat

of black and gold, and black boots and black feathers on his hat, threw

his reins to a groom, and alighted and approached the damsel where she

lay, while the huntsmen were holding back the hounds and winding their

horns. Then he drew a knife, such as are used by huntsmen, and driving

its blade into the damsel's side, cut out her heart, and threw it, all

smoking, into the midst of the hounds. And a cold wind rustled through

the bushes, and all had disappeared, horses, and huntsmen, and hounds.

And the grass was untrodden as if no man's foot or horse's hoof had

passed there for months.

And Messer Nastasio shuddered, and his limbs loosened, and he knew that

the hunter on the black horse was Messer Guido Degli Anastagi, and the

damsel Monna Filomena, daughter of the Lord of Gambellara. Messer Guido

had loved the damsel greatly, and been flouted by her, and leaving his

home in despair, had been killed on the way by robbers, and Madonna

Filomena had died shortly after. The tale was still fresh in men's

memory, for it had happened in the city of Ravenna barely five years

before. And those whom Nastasio had seen, both the hunter and the lady,

and the huntsmen and horses and hounds, were the spirits of the dead.

When he had recovered his courage, Messer Nastasio sighed and said unto

himself: "How like is my fate to that of Messer Guido! Yet would I

never, even when a spectre, without weight or substance, made of wind

and delusion, and arisen from hell, act with such cruelty towards her I

love." And then he thought: "Would that the daughter of Messer Pavolo de

Traversariis might hear of this! For surely it would cause her to

relent!" But he knew that his words would be vain, and that none of the

citizens of Ravenna, and least of all the damsel of the Traversari,

would believe them, but rather esteem him a madman.

Now it came about that when Friday came round once more, Nastasio, by

some chance, was again walking in the forest-clearing by the great

pines, and he had forgotten; when the sea began to roar, and a cold wind

blew; and there came through the forest the sound of horses and hounds,

causing Messer Nastasio's hair to stand up and his limbs to grow weak as

water. And he on the black horse again pursued the naked damsel, and

struck here with his boar-spear, and cut out her heart and threw it to

the hounds; the which hunter and damsel were the ghosts of Messer Guido,

and of Madonna Filomena, daughter of the Lord of Gambellara, arisen out

of Hell. And in this fashion did it happen for three Fridays following,

the sea beginning to moan, the cold wind to blow and the spirits to

hunt the deceased damsel at twilight in the clearing among the

pine-trees.

Now when Messer Nastasio noticed this, he thanked Cupid, which is the

Lord of all Lovers, and devised in his mind a cunning plan. And he

mounted his horse and returned to Ravenna, and gave out to his friends

that he had found a treasure in Rome; and that he was minded to forget

the damsel of the Traversari and seek another wife. But in reality he

went to certain money-lenders, and gave himself into bondage, even to be

sold as a slave to the Dalmatian pirates if he could not repay his loan.

And he published that he desired to take to him a wife, and for that

reason would feast all his friends and the chief citizens of Ravenna,

and regale them with a pageant in the pine forest, where certain foreign

slaves of his should show wonderful feats for their delight. And he sent

forth invitations, and among them to Messer Pavolo de Traversariis and

his wife and daughter. And he bid them for a Friday, which was also the

eve of the Feast of the Dead.

Meanwhile he took to the pine forest carpenters and masons, and such as

paint and gild cunningly, and waggons of timber, and cut stone for

foundations, and furniture of all kinds; and the waggons were drawn by

four and twenty yoke of oxen, grey oxen of the Romagnol breed. And he

caused the artisans to work day and night, making great fires of dry

myrtle and pine branches, which lit up the forest all around. And he

caused them to make foundations, and build a pavilion of timber in the

clearing which is the shape of a horse-course, surrounded by pines. The

pavilion was oblong, raised by ten steps above the grass, open all round

and reposing on arches and pillars; and there was a projecting _abacus_

under the arches over the capitals, after the Roman fashion; and the

pillars were painted red, and the capitals red also picked out with gold

and blue, and a shield with the arms of the Honestis on each. The roof

was raftered, each rafter painted with white lilies on a red ground, and

heads of youths and damsels; and the roof outside was made of wooden

tiles, shaped like shells and gilded. And on the top of the roof was a

weather-vane; and the vane was a figure of Cupid, god of love,

cunningly carved of wood and painted like life, as he flies, poised in

air, and shoots his darts on mortals. He was winged and blindfolded, to

show that love is inconstant and no respecter of persons; and when the

wind blew, he turned about, and the end of his scarf, which was beaten

metal, swung in the wind. Now when the pavilion was ready, within six

days of its beginning, carpets were spread on the floor, and seats

placed, and garlands of bay and myrtle slung from pillar to pillar

between the arches. And tables were set, and sideboards covered with

gold and silver dishes and trenchers; and a raised place, covered with

arras, was made for the players of fifes and drums and lutes; and tents

were set behind for the servants, and fires prepared for cooking meat.

Whole oxen and sheep were brought from Ravenna in wains, and casks of

wine, and fruit and white bread, and many cooks, and serving-men, and

musicians, all habited gallantly in the colours of the Honestis, which

are vermilion and white, parti-coloured, with black stripes; and they

wore doublets laced with gold, and on their breast the arms of the

house of Honestis, which are a dove holding a leaf.

Now on Friday the eve of the Feast of the Dead, all was ready, and the

chief citizens of Ravenna set out for the forest of Classis, with their

wives and children and servants, some on horseback, and others in wains

drawn by oxen, for the tracks in that forest are deep. And when they

arrived, Messer Nastasio welcomed them and thanked them all, and

conducted them to their places in the pavilion. Then all wondered

greatly at its beauty and magnificence, and chiefly Messer Pavolo de

Traversariis; and he sighed, and thought within himself, "Would that my

daughter were less shrewish, that I might have so noble a son-in-law to

prop up my old age!" They were seated at the tables, each according to

their dignity, and they ate and drank and praised the excellence of the

cheer; and flowers were scattered on the tables, and young maidens sang

songs in praise of love, most sweetly. Now when they had eaten their

fill, and the tables been removed, and the sun was setting between the

pine-trees, Messer Nastasio caused them all to be seated facing the

clearing, and a herald came forward, in the livery of the Honestis,

sounding his trumpet and declaring in a loud voice that they should now

witness a pageant, the which was called the Mystery of Love and Death.

Then the musicians struck up, and began a concert of fifes and lutes,

exceeding sweet and mournful. And at that moment the sea began to moan,

and a cold wind to blow: a sound of horsemen and hounds and horns and

crashing branches came through the wood; and the damsel, the daughter of

the Lord of Gambellara, rushed naked, her hair streaming and her veil

torn, across the grass, pursued by the hounds, and by the ghost of

Messer Guido on the black horse, the nostrils of which were filled with

fire. Now when the ghost of Messer Guido struck that damsel with the

boar-spear, and cut out her heart, and threw it, while the others wound

their horns, to the hounds, and all vanished, Messer Nastasio de

Honestis, seizing the herald's trumpet, blew in it, and cried in a loud

voice, "The Pageant of Death and Love! The Pageant of Death and Love!

Such is the fate of cruel damsels!" and the gilt Cupid on the roof swung

round creaking dreadfully, and the daughter of Messer Pavolo uttered a

great shriek and fell on the ground in a swoon.

* * * * *

Here the Romagnol manuscript comes to a sudden end, the outer sheet

being torn through the middle. But we know from the Decameron that the

damsel of the Traversari was so impressed by the spectre-hunt she had

witnessed that she forthwith relented towards Nastagio degli Onesti, and

married him, and that they lived happily ever after. But whether or not

that part of the pine forest of Classis still witnesses this ghostly

hunt, we have no means of knowing.

On the whole, I incline to think that, when the great frost blasted the

pines (if not earlier) the ghosts shifted quarters from the forest of

Classis to the church of the same name, on that forest's brink.

Certainly there seems nothing to prevent them. Standing in the midst of

those uninhabited rice-fields and marshes, the church of Classis is yet

always open, from morning till night; the great portals gaping, no

curtain interposed. Open and empty; mass not even on Sundays; empty of

human beings, open to the things of without. The sunbeams enter through

the open side windows, cutting a slice away from that pale, greenish

twilight; making a wedge of light on the dark, damp bricks; bringing

into brief prominence some of the great sarcophagi, their peacocks and

palm-trees picked out in vivid green lichen. Snakes also enter, the

Sacristan tells me, and I believe it, for within the same minute, I saw

a dead and a living one among the arum leaves at the gate. Is that

little altar, a pagan-looking marble table, isolated in the midst of the

church, the place where they meet, pagan creatures claiming those

Grecian marbles? Or do they hunt one another round the aisles and into

the crypt, slithering and hissing, the souls of Guido degli Anastagi,

perhaps, and of his cruel lady love?

Such are Ravenna and Classis, and the Ghosts that haunt them.

THE COOK-SHOP AND THE FOWLING-PLACE

In the street of the Almond and appropriately close to the covered-over

canal (Rio Terra) of the Assassins, there is a cook-shop which has

attracted my attention these two last months in Venice. For in its

window is a row of tiny corpses--birds, raw, red, with agonised plucked

little throats, the throats through which the sweet notes came. And the

sight brings home to me more than the suggestion of a dish at supper,

savoury things of the size of a large plum, on a cushion of polenta....

I had often noticed the fowling-places which stand out against the sky

like mural crowns on the low hills of Northern Italy; Bresciana is the

name given to the thing, from the province, doubtless, of its origin.

Last summer, driving at the foot of the Alps of Friuli, such a place was

pointed out to me on a green knoll; it marked the site of a village of

Collalto, once the fief of the great family of that name, which had

died, disappeared, church and all, after the Black Death of the

fourteenth century.

The strangeness of the matter attracted me; and I set out, the next

morning, to find the fowling-place. I thought I must have lost my way,

and was delighting in the radiance of a perfectly fresh, clear, already

autumnal morning, walking along through the flowery grass fields in

sight of the great mountains, when, suddenly, there I was before the

uncanny thing, the Bresciana. Uncanny in its odd shape of walled and

moated city of clipped bushes, tight-closed on its hill-top, with its

Guelph battlements of hornbeam against the pale blue sky. And uncannier

for its mysterious delightfulness. Imagine it set in the loveliest mossy

grass, full of delicate half-Alpine flowers; beautiful butterflies

everywhere about; and the sort of ditch surrounding it overgrown with

blackberries, haws, sloes, ivy, all manner of berries; a sort of false

garden of paradise for the poor birds.

But when I craned over the locked wicket and climbed on to the ladder

alongside, what I saw was more uncanny yet. I looked down on to rows of

clipped, regular, hornbeam hedges, with grass paths between them,

maze-like. A kind of Versailles for the birds, you might think. Only, in

the circular grass plot from which those green hedges and paths all

radiated, something alarming: an empty cage hung to a tree. And going

the round of the place I discovered that between the cut hornbeam

battlements of the circular enclosure there was a wreath of thin wire

nooses, almost invisible, in which the poor little birds hang

themselves. It seems oddly appropriate that this sinister little place,

with its vague resemblance to that clipped garden in which Mantegna's

allegorical Vices are nesting, should be, in fact, a cemetery; that tiny

City of Dis of the Birds, on its green hillock in front of the great

blue Alps, being planted on those villagers dead of the Plague.

The fowling-place began to haunt me, and I was filled with a perhaps

morbid desire to know more of its evil rites. After some inquiry, I

introduced myself accordingly to the most famous fowler of the

neighbourhood, the owner of a wineshop at Martignacco. He received me

with civility, and expounded his trade with much satisfaction; an

amiable, intelligent old man, with sufficient of Italian in that

province of strange dialect.

In the passage at the foot of his staircase and under sundry dark arches

he showed me a quantity of tiny wooden cages and of larger cages divided

into tiny compartments. There were numbers of goldfinches, a blackbird,

some small thrushes, an ortolan, and two or three other kinds I could

not identify; nay, even a brace of unhappy quail in a bottle-shaped

basket. These are the decoys; the cages are hung in the circular walks

of the fowling-place, and the wretched little prisoners, many of them

blinded of one or both eyes, sing their hearts out and attract their

companions into the nooses. Then he showed me the nets--like thin, thin

fishing nets--for quail; and the little wands which are covered with

lime and which catch the wings of the creatures; but that seemed a

merciful proceeding compared with the gruesome snares of the Bresciana.

When he had shown me these things he produced a little Jew's-harp, on

which he fell to imitating the calls of various birds. But I noticed

that none of the little blinded prisoners hanging aloft made any

response. Only, quite spontaneously and all of a sudden, the poor

goldfinches set up a loud and lovely song; and the solitary blackbird

gave a whistle. Never have I heard anything more lugubrious than these

hedgerow and woodland notes issuing from the cages in that damp, black

corridor. And the old fowler, for all his venerable appearance and

gentleness of voice and manner, struck me as a wicked warlock, and own

sib of the witch who turned Jorinde and Jorinel into nightingales in her

little house hung round with cages.

A few days after my visit to the fowler, and one of the last evenings I

had in Friuli, I was walking once more beneath the Castle. After

threading the narrow green lanes, blocked by great hay-carts, I came of

a sudden on an open, high-lying field of mossy grass, freshly scythed,

with the haycocks still upon it, and a thin plantation of larches on one

side. And in front, at the end of that grey-green sweetness, the Alps of

Cadore, portals and battlements of dark leaden blue, with the last

flame-colour of sunset behind them, and the sunset's last rosy feathers

rising into the pale sky. The mowers were coming slowly along,

shouldering their scythes and talking in undertones, as folk do at that

hour. I also walked home in the quickly gathering twilight; the delicate

hemlock flowers of an unmowed field against the pearly luminous sky; the

wonderful blue of the thistles singing out in the dusk of the grass.

There rose the scent of cut grass, of ripening maize, and every

freshness of acacia and poplar leaf; and the crickets began to shrill.

As the light faded away I passed within sight of the fowling-place, the

little sinister formal garden of Versailles on the mound marking the

village which had died of the Black Death.

This is what returned to my mind every time, lately in Venice, that I

passed that cook-shop near the closed-up Canal of the Assassins, and saw

the row of tiny corpses ready for roasting. The little throats which

sang so sweetly had got caught, had writhed, twisted in the tiny wire

nooses between the hornbeam battlements. What ruffling of feathers and

starting of eyeballs in agony there had been, while the poor blind

decoy, finch or blackbird, sang, sang on in his cage on the central

grass-plot!

And we scrunch them under our knife and tooth, and remark how excellent

are little birds on a cushion of polenta, between a sage-leaf and a bit

of bacon! But fowling-places have come down from the remotest and most

venerable antiquity; and they exist of all kinds; and some of them,

moreover, are allegories.

ACQUAINTANCE WITH BIRDS

One of the things I should have liked, I said to myself to-day, as I

rode past one of the dreadful little fowling-places on the ridge of our

hills, would have been to become acquainted with birds....

The wish is simple, but quite without hope for a dweller in Tuscany,

where, what with poverty and lawlessness, peasants' nets and city

'prentices' guns, there are no birds whose acquaintance you can make.

You hear them singing and twittering, indeed, wherever a clump of garden

ilexes or a cypress hedge offers them protection; but they never let

themselves be seen, for they know that being seen is being shot: or at

least being caged. They cage them for singing, nightingales, thrushes,

and every kind of finch; and you can see them, poor isolated captives,

in rows and rows of cages in the markets. That is the way that people

like them: a certain devout lady of my neighbourhood, for instance,

whose little seventeenth-century house was hung round with endless tiny

cages, like the witches in the tale of Jorinde and Jorinel; a wicked

witch herself, no doubt, despite her illuminations in honour of the

Madonna, who should have taught her better. Another way of liking

singing-birds is on toast between a scrap of bacon and a leaf of sage, a

dainty dish much prized by persons of weak stomach. Persons with bad

digestions are apt, I fancy, to lose, and make others forego, much

pleasant companionship of soul.

For animals, at least, when not turned into pets, are excellent

companions for our souls. I say expressly "when not pets," because the

essence of this spiritual (for it _is_ spiritual) relation between us

and creatures is that they should not become our property, nor we

theirs; that we should be able to refresh ourselves by the thought and

contemplation of a life apart from our own, different from it; in some

ways more really natural, and, at all events, capable of seeming more

natural to our fancy. And birds, for many reasons, meet this

requirement to perfection. I have read, indeed, in various works that

they are not without vices, not a bit kinder than the other unkind

members of creation; and that their treatment of the unfit among

themselves is positively inhuman--or shall I say human? Perhaps this is

calumny, or superficial judgment of their sterner morality; but, be this

as it may, it is evident that they are in many respects very charming

people. It is very nice of them to be so æsthetic, to be amused and kept

quiet, like the hen birds, by music; and the tone of their conversation

is quite exquisitely affable.

My own opportunities of watching their proceedings have, alas! been very

limited; but, judging by the pigeons at Venice, they are wonderfully

forbearing and courteous to each other. I have often watched these

pigeons having their morning bath at the corner of St. Mark's, in a

little shallow trough in the pavement. They collect round by scores, and

wait for room to go in quite patiently; while the crowd inside ruffle,

dip, throw up water into their wings and shake it off; a mass of moving

grey and purple feathers, with never an angry push or a cry of

ill-temper among them. So I can readily believe a certain friend of mine

who passes hours in English brakes and hedgerows, watching birds through

special ten-guinea opera-glasses, that time and money could not be

better spent.

One reason, moreover, why all animals (one feels that so much in

Kipling's stories) are excellent company for our spirit is surely

because they are animals, not men; because the thought of them relieves

us therefore from that sense of overcrowding and jostling and general

wordiness and fuss from which we all suffer; and birds, more than any

other creatures, give us that sense of relief, of breathing-space and

margin, so very necessary to our spiritual welfare. For there is

freedom, air, light, in the very element in which birds exist, and in

their movements, the delightful sense of poising, of buoyancy, of being

delivered from our own body and made independent of gravitation, which,

as a friend of mine wisely remarks, Sir Isaac Newton most injudiciously

put into Nature's head. Indeed, there is a very special quality in the

mere thought of birds. St. Francis, had he preached to fishes, like his

follower of Padua, might have had as attentive an audience, but we

should not have cared to hear about it. _Aves mei fratres_--why, it is

the soul's kinship with air, light, liberty, what the soul loves best.

And similarly I suspect that the serene and lovely quality of Dante's

Francesca episode is due in great part to those similes of birds: the

starlings in the winter weather, the cranes "singing their dirge," and

those immortal doves swirling nestwards, _dal disio chiamate_, which

lift the lid of that cavern of hell and winnow its fumes into breathable

quality.

Perhaps (I say to myself, being ever disposed to make the best of a bad

bargain), perhaps the scantiness of my acquaintance with birds, the

difficulty about seeing them (for there is none about hearing them in

Tuscany, and I shall be kept awake by vociferous nightingales in a

month's time), gives to my feeling about them a pleasant, half-painful

eagerness. Certainly it raises the sight of birds, when I get out of

this country, into something of the nature of a performance. Even in

Rome, the larks, going up tiny brown rockets, into the pale blue sky

above the pale green endless undulations of grass, and the rooks and

magpies flocking round the ruins. And how much in Germany? Indeed, one

of Germany's charms is the condition, or, rather, the position, the

civic status, of birds and small creatures. One is constantly reminded

of the Minnesinger Walther's legacy to the birds of Wurzburg, and of

Luther's hiding the hare in the sleeve of his tunic. One of my first

impressions after crossing the Alps last year was of just such a hare,

only perfectly at his ease, running in front of my bicycle for ever so

long during a great thunderstorm which overtook us in the cornfields

between Donaustauff and Ratisbon. And as to birds! They are not merely

left in liberty, but assiduously courted by these kindly, and, in their

prosaic way, poetical Teutons. Already in the village shop on the top of

the Tyrolese pass there was a nest of swallows deep down in a passage.

And in the Lorenz Kirche at Nuremberg, while the electric trams go

clanking outside, the swallows whirr cheerfully along the aisles, among

the coats-of-arms, the wonderfully crested helmets suspended on high.

There was a swallow's nest in the big entrance room (where the peasants

sit and drink among the little dry birch-trees and fir garlands from the

Whitsuntide festivities) of the inn at Rothenburg; a nest above the rows

of pewter and stoneware, with baby swallows looking unconcernedly out at

the guests. But the great joy at Rothenburg was the family of storks

which still inhabit one of the high, pointed gatehouses. I used to go

and see them every morning: the great cartwheel on the funnel-shaped

roof, wisps of comfortable hay hanging over it; one of the parent storks

standing sentinel on one leg, the little ones raising themselves

occasionally into sight, the other stork hovering around on outspread

wings like tattered banners. To think that there were once storks also

in Italy, storks' homes, the old Lombard name _Cicognara_ meaning that;

and cranes also, whom the people in Boccaccio, and even Lorenzo di

Medici, went out to hunt! The last of them were certainly netted and

eaten, as they used to eat porcupines in Rome in my childish days.

Speaking of cranes reminds me of the pleasure I have had also in

watching herons, particularly among the ponds of my mother's old home.

"Would you like to see one near? I'll go and shoot it you at once," said

my very kind cousin.

How odd it is, when one thinks of it, that mere contemplation seems so

insufficient for us poor restless human beings! We cannot see a flower

without an impulse to pick it, a character without an impulse to, let us

say, analyse; a bird without an impulse to shoot. And in this way we

certainly lose most of the good which any of these things could be to

us: just to be looked at, thought about, enjoyed, and let alone.

* * * * *

ARIADNE IN MANTUA

TO

ETHEL SMYTH

THANKING, AND BEGGING, HER FOR MUSIC

PREFACE

_"Alles Vergängliche ist nur ein Gleichniss"_

_It is in order to give others the pleasure of reading or

re-reading a small masterpiece, that I mention the likelihood

of the catastrophe of my_ Ariadne _having been suggested by

the late Mr. Shorthouse's_ Little Schoolmaster Mark; _but I

must ask forgiveness of my dear old friend, Madame Emile

Duclaux_ (Mary Robinson), _for unwarranted use of one of the

songs of her_ Italian Garden.

_Readers of my own little volume_ Genius Loci _may meanwhile

recognise that I have been guilty of plagiarism towards myself

also_.

_For a couple of years after writing those pages, the image of

the Palace of Mantua and the lakes it steeps in, haunted my

fancy with that peculiar insistency, as of the half-lapsed

recollection of a name or date, which tells us that we know

(if we could only remember!)_ what happened in a place. _I let

the matter rest. But, looking into my mind one day, I found

that a certain song of the early seventeenth century_--(not

_Monteverde's_ Lamento d'Arianna _but an air_, Amarilli, _by

Caccini, printed alongside in Parisotti's collection_)--_had

entered that Palace of Mantua, and was, in some manner not

easy to define, the musical shape of what must have happened

there. And that, translated back into human personages, was

the story I have set forth in the following little Drama_.

_So much for the origin of_ Ariadne in Mantua, _supposing any

friend to be curious about it. What seems more interesting is

my feeling, which grew upon me as I worked over and over the

piece and its French translation, that these personages had an

importance greater than that of their life and adventures, a

meaning, if I may say so, a little_ sub specie aeternitatis.

_For, besides the real figures, there appeared to me vague

shadows cast by them, as it were, on the vast spaces of life,

and magnified far beyond those little puppets that I twitched.

And I seem to feel here the struggle, eternal, necessary,

between mere impulse, unreasoning and violent, but absolutely

true to its aim; and all the moderating, the weighing and

restraining influences of civilisation, with their idealism,

their vacillation, but their final triumph over the mere

forces of nature. These well-born people of Mantua,

privileged beings wanting little because they have much, and

able therefore to spend themselves in quite harmonious effort,

must necessarily get the better of the poor gutter-born

creature without whom, after all, one of them would have been

dead and the others would have had no opening in life. Poor_

Diego _acts magnanimously, being cornered; but he (or she) has

not the delicacy, the dignity to melt into thin air with a

mere lyric Metastasian "Piangendo partè", and leave them to

their untroubled conscience. He must needs assert himself,

violently wrench at their heart-strings, give them a final

stab, hand them over to endless remorse; briefly, commit that

public and theatrical deed of suicide, splashing the murderous

waters into the eyes of well-behaved wedding guests_.

_Certainly neither the_ Duke, _nor the_ Duchess Dowager, _nor_

Hippolyta _would have done this. But, on the other hand, they

could calmly, coldly, kindly accept the self-sacrifice

culminating in that suicide: well-bred people, faithful to

their standards and forcing others, however unwilling, into

their own conformity. Of course without them the world would

be a den of thieves, a wilderness of wolves; for they are,--if

I may call them by their less personal names,--Tradition,

Discipline, Civilisation_.

_On the other hand, but for such as_ Diego _the world would

come to an end within twenty years: mere sense of duty and

fitness not being sufficient for the killing and cooking of

victuals, let alone the begetting and suckling of children.

The descendants of_ Ferdinand _and_ Hippolyta, _unless they

intermarried with some bastard of_ Diego's _family, would

dwindle, die out; who knows, perhaps supplement the impulses

they lacked by silly newfangled evil_.

_These are the contending forces of history and life: Impulse

and Discipline, creating and keeping; love such as_ Diego's,

_blind, selfish, magnanimous; and detachment, noble, a little

bloodless and cruel, like that of the_ Duke of Mantua.

_And it seems to me that the conflicts which I set forth on my

improbable little stage, are but the trifling realities

shadowing those great abstractions which we seek all through

the history of man, and everywhere in man's own heart_.

VERNON LEE.

Maiano, near Florence,

June, 1903.

ARIADNE IN MANTUA

VIOLA. _....I'll serve this Duke:

....for I can sing

And speak to him in many sorts of music._

TWELFTH NIGHT, 1, 2.

DRAMATIS PERSONAE

FERDINAND, Duke of Mantua.

THE CARDINAL, his Uncle.

THE DUCHESS DOWAGER.

HIPPOLYTA, Princess of Mirandola.

MAGDALEN, known as DIEGO.

THE MARCHIONESS OF GUASTALLA.

THE BISHOP OF CREMONA.

THE DOGE'S WIFE.

THE VENETIAN AMBASSADOR.

THE DUKE OF FERRARA'S POET.

THE VICEROY OF NAPLES' JESTER.

A TENOR as BACCHUS.

The CARDINAL'S CHAPLAIN.

THE DUCHESS'S GENTLEWOMAN.

THE PRINCESS'S TUTOR.

Singers as Maenads and Satyrs; Courtiers,

Pages, Wedding Guests and Musicians.

* * * * *

The action takes place in the Palace of Mantua through a

period of a year, during the reign of Prospero I, of Milan,

and shortly before the Venetian expedition to Cyprus under

Othello.

ARIADNE IN MANTUA

ACT I

_The_ CARDINAL'S _Study in the Palace at Mantua. The_ CARDINAL _is

seated at a table covered with Persian embroidery, rose-colour picked

out with blue, on which lies open a volume of Machiavelli's works, and

in it a manuscript of Catullus; alongside thereof are a bell and a

magnifying-glass. Under his feet a red cushion with long tassels, and an

oriental carpet of pale lavender and crimson_. _The_ CARDINAL _is

dressed in scarlet, a crimson fur-lined cape upon his shoulders. He is

old, but beautiful and majestic, his face furrowed like the marble bust

of Seneca among the books opposite_.

_Through the open Renaissance window, with candelabra and birds carved

on the copings, one sees the lake, pale blue, faintly rippled, with a

rose-coloured brick bridge and bridge-tower at its narrowest point_.

DIEGO (_in reality_ MAGDALEN) _has just been admitted into the_

CARDINAL'S _presence, and after kissing his ring, has remained standing,

awaiting his pleasure_.

DIEGO _is fantastically habited as a youth in russet and violet tunic

reaching below the knees in Moorish fashion, as we see it in the

frescoes of Pinturicchio; with silver buttons down the seams, and

plaited linen at the throat and in the unbuttoned purfles of the

sleeves. His hair, dark but red where it catches the light, is cut over

the forehead and touches his shoulders. He is not very tall in his boy's

clothes, and very sparely built. He is pale, almost sallow; the face,

dogged, sullen, rather expressive than beautiful, save for the

perfection of the brows and of the flower-like singer's mouth. He stands

ceremoniously before the_ CARDINAL, _one hand on his dagger, nervously,

while the other holds a large travelling hat, looped up, with a long

drooping plume_.

_The_ CARDINAL _raises his eyes, slightly bows his head, closes the

manuscript and the volume, and puts both aside deliberately. He is,

meanwhile, examining the appearance of_ DIEGO.

CARDINAL

We are glad to see you at Mantua, Signor Diego. And from what our worthy

Venetian friend informs us in the letter which he gave you for our

hands, we shall without a doubt be wholly satisfied with your singing,

which is said to be both sweet and learned. Prythee, Brother Matthias

(_turning to his_ Chaplain), bid them bring hither my virginal,--that

with the Judgment of Paris painted on the lid by Giulio Romano; its tone

is admirably suited to the human voice. And, Brother Matthias, hasten to

the Duke's own theorb player, and bid him come straightways. Nay, go

thyself, good Brother Matthias, and seek till thou hast found him. We

are impatient to judge of this good youth's skill.

_The_ Chaplain _bows and retires_. DIEGO (_in reality_ MAGDALEN)

_remains alone in the_ CARDINAL'S _presence. The_ CARDINAL _remains for

a second turning over a letter, and then reads through the

magnifying-glass out loud_.

CARDINAL

Ah, here is the sentence: "Diego, a Spaniard of Moorish descent, and a

most expert singer and player on the virginal, whom I commend to your

Eminence's favour as entirely fitted for such services as your revered

letter makes mention of----" Good, good.

_The_ CARDINAL _folds the letter and beckons_ Diego _to approach, then

speaks in a manner suddenly altered to abruptness, but with no enquiry

in his tone_.

Signor Diego, you are a woman----

DIEGO _starts, flushes and exclaims huskily_, "My Lord----." _But the_

CARDINAL _makes a deprecatory movement and continues his sentence_.

and, as my honoured Venetian correspondent assures me, a courtesan of

some experience and of more than usual tact. I trust this favourable

judgment may be justified. The situation is delicate; and the work for

which you have been selected is dangerous as well as difficult. Have you

been given any knowledge of this case?

DIEGO _has by this time recovered his composure, and answers with

respectful reserve_.

DIEGO

I asked no questions, your Eminence. But the Senator Gratiano vouchsafed

to tell me that my work at Mantua would be to soothe and cheer with

music your noble nephew Duke Ferdinand, who, as is rumoured, has been a

prey to a certain languor and moodiness ever since his return from many

years' captivity among the Infidels. Moreover (such were the Senator

Gratiano's words), that if the Fates proved favourable to my music, I

might gain access to His Highness's confidence, and thus enable your

Eminence to understand and compass his strange malady.

CARDINAL

Even so. You speak discreetly, Diego; and your manner gives hope of more

good sense than is usual in your sex and in your trade. But this matter

is of more difficulty than such as you can realise. Your being a woman

will be of use should our scheme prove practicable. In the outset it may

wreck us beyond recovery. For all his gloomy apathy, my nephew is quick

to suspicion, and extremely subtle. He will delight in flouting us,

should the thought cross his brain that we are practising some coarse

and foolish stratagem. And it so happens, that his strange moodiness is

marked by abhorrence of all womankind. For months he has refused the

visits of his virtuous mother. And the mere name of his young cousin and

affianced bride, Princess Hippolyta, has thrown him into paroxysms of

anger. Yet Duke Ferdinand possesses all his faculties. He is aware of

being the last of our house, and must know full well that, should he die

without an heir, this noble dukedom will become the battlefield of

rapacious alien claimants. He denies none of this, but nevertheless

looks on marriage with unseemly horror.

DIEGO

Is it so?----And----is there any reason His Highness's melancholy should

take this shape? I crave your Eminence's pardon if there is any

indiscretion in this question; but I feel it may be well that I should

know some more upon this point. Has Duke Ferdinand suffered some wrong

at the hands of women? Or is it the case of some passion, hopeless,

unfitting to his rank, perhaps?

CARDINAL

Your imagination, good Madam Magdalen, runs too easily along the tracks

familiar to your sex; and such inquisitiveness smacks too much of the

courtesan. And beware, my lad, of touching on such subjects with the

Duke: women and love, and so forth. For I fear, that while endeavouring

to elicit the Duke's secret, thy eyes, thy altered voice, might betray

thy own.

DIEGO

Betray me? My secret? What do you mean, my Lord? I fail to grasp your

meaning.

CARDINAL

Have you so soon forgotten that the Duke must not suspect your being a

woman? For if a woman may gradually melt his torpor, and bring him under

the control of reason and duty, this can only come about by her growing

familiar and necessary to him without alarming his moody virtue.

DIEGO

I crave your Eminence's indulgence for that one question, which I repeat

because, as a musician, it may affect my treatment of His Highness. Has

the Duke ever loved?

CARDINAL

Too little or too much,--which of the two it will be for you to find

out. My nephew was ever, since his boyhood, a pious and joyless youth;

and such are apt to love once, and, as the poets say, to die for love.

Be this as it may, keep to your part of singer; and even if you suspect

that he suspects you, let him not see your suspicion, and still less

justify his own. Be merely a singer: a sexless creature, having seen

passion but never felt it; yet capable, by the miracle of art, of

rousing and soothing it in others. Go warily, and mark my words: there

is, I notice, even in your speaking voice, a certain quality such as

folk say melts hearts; a trifle hoarseness, a something of a break,

which mars it as mere sound, but gives it more power than that of sound.

Employ that quality when the fit moment comes; but most times restrain

it. You have understood?

DIEGO

I think I have, my Lord.

CARDINAL

Then only one word more. Women, and women such as you, are often ill

advised and foolishly ambitious. Let not success, should you have any in

this enterprise, endanger it and you. Your safety lies in being my tool.

My spies are everywhere; but I require none; I seem to know the folly

which poor mortals think and feel. And see! this palace is surrounded on

three sides by lakes; a rare and beautiful circumstance, which has done

good service on occasion. Even close to this pavilion these blue waters

are less shallow than they seem.

DIEGO

I had noted it. Such an enterprise as mine requires courage, my Lord;

and your palace, built into the lake, as life,--saving all thought of

heresy,--is built out into death, your palace may give courage as well

as prudence.

CARDINAL

Your words, Diego, are irrelevant, but do not displease me.

DIEGO _bows. The_ Chaplain _enters with_ Pages _carrying a harpsichord,

which they place upon the table; also two_ Musicians _with theorb and

viol_.

Brother Matthias, thou hast been a skilful organist, and hast often

delighted me with thy fugues and canons.--Sit to the instrument, and

play a prelude, while this good youth collects his memory and his voice

preparatory to displaying his skill.

_The_ chaplain, _not unlike the monk in Titian's "Concert" begins to

play_, DIEGO _standing by him at the harpsichord. While the cunningly

interlaced themes, with wide, unclosed cadences, tinkle metallically

from the instrument, the_ CARDINAL _watches, very deliberately, the face

of_ DIEGO, _seeking to penetrate through its sullen sedateness. But_

DIEGO _remains with his eyes fixed on the view framed by the window: the

pale blue lake, of the colour of periwinkle, under a sky barely bluer

than itself, and the lines on the horizon--piled up clouds or perhaps

Alps. Only, as the_ Chaplain _is about to finish his prelude, the face

of_ DIEGO _undergoes a change: a sudden fervour and tenderness

transfigure the features; while the eyes, from very dark turn to the

colour of carnelian. This illumination dies out as quickly as it came,

and_ DIEGO _becomes very self-contained and very listless as before_.

DIEGO

Will it please your Eminence that I should sing the Lament of Ariadne on

Naxos?