OF MEDIAEVAL LANDSCAPE:--SECONDLY, THE ROCKS.
Sec. 1. I closed the last chapter, not because our subject was
exhausted, but to give the reader breathing time, and because I
supposed he would hardly care to turn back suddenly from the
subjects of thought last suggested, to the less pregnant matters of
inquiry connected with mediaeval landscape. Nor was the pause
mistimed even as respects the order of our subjects; for hitherto we
have been arrested chiefly by the beauty of the pastures and fields,
and have followed the mediaeval mind in its fond regard of leaf and
flower. But now we have some hard hill-climbing to do; and the
remainder of our investigation must be carried on, for the most
part, on hands and knees, so that it is not ill done of us first to
take breath.
Sec. 2. It will be remembered that in the last chapter, Sec. 14., we
supposed it probable that there would be considerable inaccuracies
in the mediaeval mode of regarding nature. Hitherto, however, we have
found none; but, on the contrary, intense accuracy, precision, and
affection. The reason of this is, that all floral and foliaged
beauty might be perfectly represented, as far as its form went, in
the sculpture and ornamental painting of the period; hence the
attention of men was thoroughly awakened to that beauty. But as
mountains and clouds and large features of natural scenery could not
be accurately represented, we must be prepared to find them not so
carefully contemplated,--more carefully, indeed, than by the Greeks,
but still in no wise as the things themselves deserve.
Sec. 3. It was besides noticed that mountains, though regarded with
reverence by the mediaeval, were also the subjects of a certain
dislike and dread. And we have seen already that in fact the place
of the soul's purification, though a mountain, is yet by Dante
subdued, whenever there is any pleasantness to be found upon it,
from all mountainous character into grassy recesses, or slopes to
rushy shore; and, in his general conception of it, resembles much
more a castle mound, surrounded by terraced walks,--in the manner,
for instance, of one of Turner's favorite scenes, the bank under
Richmond Castle (Yorkshire); or, still more, one of the hill slopes
divided by terraces, above the Rhine, in which the picturesqueness
of the ground has been reduced to the form best calculated for the
growing of costly wine, than any scene to which we moderns should
naturally attach the term "Mountainous." On the other hand, although
the Inferno is just as accurately measured and divided as the
Purgatory, it is nevertheless cleft into rocky chasms which possess
something of true mountain nature--nature which we moderns of the
north should most of us seek with delight, but which, to the great
Florentine, appeared adapted only for the punishment of lost
spirits, and which, on the mind of nearly all his countrymen, would
to this day produce a very closely correspondent effect; so that
their graceful language, dying away on the north side of the Alps,
gives its departing accents to proclaim its detestation of hardness
and ruggedness; and is heard for the last time, as it bestows on the
noblest defile in all the Grisons, if not in all the Alpine chain,
the name of the "_evil_ way"--"la Via Mala."
Sec. 4. This "evil way," though much deeper and more sublime,
corresponds closely in general character to Dante's "Evil-pits,"
just as the banks of Richmond do to his mountain of Purgatory; and
it is notable that Turner has been led to illustrate, with his whole
strength, the character of both; having founded, as it seems to me,
his early dreams of mountain form altogether on the sweet banks of
the Yorkshire streams, and rooted his hardier thoughts of it in the
rugged clefts of the Via Mala.
Sec. 5. Nor of the Via Mala only: a correspondent defile on the St.
Gothard,--so terrible in one part of it, that it can, indeed,
suggest no ideas but those of horror to minds either of northern or
southern temper, and whose wild bridge, cast from rock to rock over
a chasm as utterly hopeless and escapeless as any into which Dante
gazed from the arches of Malebolge, has been, therefore, ascribed
both by northern and southern lips to the master-building of the
great spirit of evil--supplied to Turner the element of his most
terrible thoughts in mountain vision, even to the close of his life.
The noblest plate in the series of the Liber Studiorum,[79] one
engraved by his own hand, is of that bridge; the last mountain
journey he ever took was up the defile; and a rocky bank and arch,
in the last mountain drawing which he ever executed with his perfect
power, are remembrances of the path by which he had traversed in his
youth this Malebolge of the St. Gothard.
Sec. 6. It is therefore with peculiar interest, as bearing on our own
proper subject, that we must examine Dante's conception of the rocks
of the eighth circle. And first, as to general tone of color: from
what we have seen of the love of the mediaeval for bright and
variegated color, we might guess that his chief cause of dislike to
rocks would be, in Italy, their comparative colorlessness. With
hardly an exception, the range of the Apennines is composed of a
stone of which some special account is given hereafter in the
chapters on Materials of Mountains, and of which one peculiarity,
there noticed, is its monotony of hue. Our slates and granites are
often of very lovely colors; but the Apennine limestone is so grey
and toneless, that I know not any mountain district so utterly
melancholy as those which are composed of this rock, when unwooded.
Now, as far as I can discover from the internal evidence in his
poem, nearly all Dante's mountain wanderings had been upon this
ground. He had journeyed once or twice among the Alps, indeed, but
seems to have been impressed chiefly by the road from Garda to
Trent, and that along the Corniche, both of which are either upon
those limestones, or a dark serpentine, which shows hardly any color
till it is polished. It is not ascertainable that he had ever seen
rocky scenery of the finely colored kind, aided by the Alpine
mosses: I do not know the fall at Forli (Inferno, xvi. 99.), but
every other scene to which he alludes is among these Apennine
limestones; and when he wishes to give the idea of enormous mountain
size, he names Tabernicch and Pietra-pana,--the one clearly chosen
only for the sake of the last syllable of its name, in order to make
a sound as of cracking ice, with the two sequent rhymes of the
stanza,--and the other is an Apennine near Lucca.
Sec. 7. His idea, therefore, of rock color, founded on these
experiences, is that of a dull or ashen grey, more or less stained
by the brown of iron ochre, precisely as the Apennine limestones
nearly always are; the grey being peculiarly cold and disagreeable.
As we go down the very hill which stretches out from Pietra-pana
towards Lucca, the stones laid by the road-side to mend it are of
this ashen grey, with efflorescences of manganese and iron in the
fissures. The whole of Malebolge is made of this rock, "All wrought
in stone of iron-colored grain."[80]
Perhaps the iron color may be meant to predominate in Evil-pits; but
the definite grey limestone color is stated higher up, the river
Styx flowing at the base of "malignant _grey_ cliffs"[81] (the word
malignant being given to the iron-colored Malebolge also); and the
same whitish-grey idea is given again definitely in describing the
robe of the purgatorial or penance angel, which is "of the color of
ashes, or earth dug dry." Ashes necessarily mean _wood_-ashes in an
Italian mind, so that we get the tone very pale; and there can be no
doubt whatever about the hue meant, because it is constantly seen on
the sunny sides of the Italian hills, produced by the scorching of
the ground, a dusty and lifeless whitish grey, utterly painful and
oppressive; and I have no doubt that this color, assumed eminently
also by limestone crags in the sun, is the quality which Homer means
to express by a term he applies often to bare rocks, and which is
usually translated "craggy," or "rocky." Now Homer is indeed quite
capable of talking of "rocky rocks," just as he talks sometimes of
"wet water;" but I think he means more by this word: it sounds as if
it were derived from another, meaning "meal," or "flour," and I have
little doubt it means "mealy white;" the Greek limestones being for
the most part brighter in effect than the Apennine ones.
Sec. 8. And the fact is, that the great and pre-eminent fault of
southern, as compared with northern scenery, is this rock-whiteness,
which gives to distant mountain ranges, lighted by the sun, sometimes
a faint and monotonous glow, hardly detaching itself from the whiter
parts of the sky, and sometimes a speckled confusion of white light
with blue shadow, breaking up the whole mass of the hills, and making
them look near and small; the whiteness being still distinct at the
distance of twenty or twenty-five miles. The inferiority and
meagreness of such effects of hill, compared with the massive purple
and blue of our own heaps of crags and morass, or the solemn
grass-green and pine-purples of the Alps, have always struck me most
painfully; and they have rendered it impossible for any poet or
painter studying in the south, to enter with joy into hill scenery.
Imagine the difference to Walter Scott, if instead of the single
lovely color which, named by itself alone, was enough to describe his
hills,--
"Their southern rapine to renew,
Far in the distant Cheviot's _blue_,"--
a dusty whiteness had been the image that first associated itself
with a hill range, and he had been obliged, instead of "blue"
Cheviots, to say, "barley-meal-colored" Cheviots.
Sec. 9. But although this would cause a somewhat painful shock even to
a modern mind, it would be as nothing when compared with the pain
occasioned by absence of color to a mediaeval one. We have been
trained, by our ingenious principles of Renaissance architecture, to
think that meal-color and ash-color are the properest colors of all;
and that the most aristocratic harmonies are to be deduced out of
grey mortar and creamy stucco. Any of our modern classical
architects would delightedly "face" a heathery hill with Roman
cement; and any Italian sacristan would, but for the cost of it, at
once whitewash the Cheviots. But the mediaevals had not arrived at
these abstract principles of taste. They liked fresco better than
whitewash; and, on the whole, thought that Nature was in the right
in painting her flowers yellow, pink, and blue;--not grey.
Accordingly, this absence of color from rocks, as compared with
meadows and trees, was in their eyes an unredeemable defect; nor did
it matter to them whether its place was supplied by the grey neutral
tint, or the iron-colored stain; for both colors, grey and brown,
were, to them, hues of distress, despair, and mortification, hence
adopted always for the dresses of monks; only the word "brown" bore,
in their color vocabulary, a still gloomier sense than with us. I
was for some time embarrassed by Dante's use of it with respect to
dark skies and water. Thus, in describing a simple twilight--not a
Hades twilight, but an ordinarily fair evening--(Inf. ii. 1.) he
says, the "brown" air took the animals of earth away from their
fatigues;--the waves under Charon's boat are "brown" (Inf. iii.
117.); and Lethe, which is perfectly clear and yet dark, as with
oblivion, is "bruna-bruna," "brown, _exceeding_ brown." Now, clearly
in all these cases no _warmth_ is meant to be mingled in the color.
Dante had never seen one of our bog-streams, with its porter-colored
foam; and there can be no doubt that, in calling Lethe brown, he
means that it was dark slate grey, inclining to black; as, for
instance, our clear Cumberland lakes, which, looked straight down
upon where they are deep, seem to be lakes of ink. I am sure this is
the color he means; because no clear stream or lake on the Continent
ever looks brown, but blue or green; and Dante, by merely taking
away the pleasant color, would get at once to this idea of grave
clear grey. So, when he was talking of twilight, his eye for color
was far too good to let him call it _brown_ in our sense. Twilight
is not brown, but purple, golden, or dark grey; and this last was
what Dante meant. Farther, I find that this negation of color is
always the means by which Dante subdues his tones. Thus the fatal
inscription on the Hades gate is written in "obscure color," and the
air which torments the passionate spirits is "aer nero" _black_ air
(Inf. v. 51.), called presently afterwards (line 81.) malignant air,
just as the grey cliffs are called malignant cliffs.
Sec. 10. I was not, therefore, at a loss to find out what Dante meant
by the word; but I was at a loss to account for his not, as it
seemed, acknowledging the existence of the color of _brown_ at all;
for if he called dark neutral tint "brown," it remained a question
what term he would use for things of the color of burnt umber. But,
one day, just when I was puzzling myself about this, I happened to
be sitting by one of our best living modern colorists, watching him
at his work, when he said, suddenly, and by mere accident, after we
had been talking of other things, "Do you know I have found that
there is no _brown_ in Nature? What we call brown is always a
variety either of orange or purple. It never can be represented by
umber, unless altered by contrast."
Sec. 11. It is curious how far the significance of this remark extends,
how exquisitely it illustrates and confirms the mediaeval sense of
hue;--how far, on the other hand, it cuts into the heart of the old
umber idolatries of Sir George Beaumont and his colleagues, the "where
do you put your _brown_ tree" system; the code of Cremona-violin-
colored foregrounds, of brown varnish and asphaltum; and all the old
night-owl science, which, like Young's pencil of sorrow,
"In melancholy dipped, _embrowns_ the whole."
Nay, I do Young an injustice by associating his words with the
asphalt schools; for his eye for color was true, and like Dante's;
and I doubt not that he means dark grey, as Byron purple-grey in
that night piece in the Siege of Corinth, beginning
"'Tis midnight; on the mountains _brown_
The cold, round moon looks deeply down;"
and, by the way, Byron's best piece of evening color farther
certifies the hues of Dante's twilight,--it
"Dies like the dolphin, when it gasps away--
The last still loveliest; till 'tis gone, and all is _grey_."
Sec. 12. Let not, however, the reader confuse the use of brown, as an
expression of a natural tint, with its use as a means of _getting
other tints_. Brown is often an admirable ground, just because it is
the only tint which is _not_ to be in the finished picture, and
because it is the best basis of many silver greys and purples, utterly
opposite to it in their nature. But there is infinite difference
between laying a brown ground as a representation of shadow,--and as a
base for light; and also an infinite difference between using brown
shadows, associated with colored lights--always the characteristic of
false schools of color--and using brown as a warm neutral tint for
general study. I shall have to pursue this subject farther hereafter,
in noticing how brown is used by great colorists in their studies,
not as color, but as the pleasantest negation of color, possessing
more transparency than black, and having more pleasant and sunlike
warmth. Hence Turner, in his early studies, used blue for distant
neutral tint, and brown for foreground neutral tint; while, as he
advanced in color science, he gradually introduced, in the place of
brown, strange purples, altogether peculiar to himself, founded,
apparently, on Indian red and vermilion, and passing into various
tones of russet and orange.[82] But, in the meantime, we must go back
to Dante and his mountains.
Sec. 13. We find, then, that his general type of rock color was meant,
whether pale or dark, to be a colorless grey--the most melancholy
hue which he supposed to exist in Nature (hence the synonym for it,
subsisting even till late times, in mediaeval appellatives of dress,
"_sad_-colored")--with some rusty stain from iron; or perhaps the
"color ferrigno" of the Inferno does not involve even so much of
orange, but ought to be translated "iron grey."
This being his idea of the color of rocks, we have next to observe
his conception of their substance. And I believe it will be found that
the character on which he fixes first in them is _frangibility_
--breakableness to bits, as opposed to wood, which can be sawn or
rent, but not shattered with a hammer, and to metal, which is tough
and malleable.
Thus, at the top of the abyss of the seventh circle, appointed for
the "violent," or souls who had done evil by force, we are told,
first, that the edge of it was composed of "great broken stones in a
circle;" then, that the place was "Alpine;" and, becoming hereupon
attentive, in order to hear what an Alpine place is like, we find
that it was "like the place beyond Trent, where the rock, either by
earthquake, or failure of support, has broken down to the plain, so
that it gives any one at the top some means of getting down to the
bottom." This is not a very elevated or enthusiastic description of
an Alpine scene; and it is far from mended by the following verses,
in which we are told that Dante "began to go down by this great
_unloading_ of stones," and that they moved often under his feet by
reason of the new weight. The fact is that Dante, by many
expressions throughout the poem, shows himself to have been a
notably bad climber; and being fond of sitting in the sun, looking
at his fair Baptistery, or walking in a dignified manner on flat
pavement in a long robe, it puts him seriously out of his way when
he has to take to his hands and knees, or look to his feet; so that
the first strong impression made upon him by any Alpine scene
whatever, is, clearly, that it is bad walking. When he is in a
fright and hurry, and has a very steep place to go down, Virgil has
to carry him altogether, and is obliged to encourage him, again and
again, when they have a steep slope to go up,--the first ascent of
the purgatorial mountain. The similes by which he illustrates the
steepness of that ascent are all taken from the Riviera of Genoa,
now traversed by a good carriage road under the name of the
Corniche; but as this road did not exist in Dante's time, and the
steep precipices and promontories were then probably traversed by
footpaths, which, as they necessarily passed in many places over
crumbling and slippery limestone, were doubtless not a little
dangerous, and as in the manner they commanded the bays of sea
below, and lay exposed to the full blaze of the south-eastern sun,
they corresponded precisely to the situation of the path by which he
ascends above the purgatorial sea, the image could not possibly have
been taken from a better source for the fully conveying his idea to
the reader: nor, by the way, is there reason to discredit, in _this_
place, his powers of climbing; for, with his usual accuracy, he has
taken the angle of the path for us, saying it was considerably more
than forty-five. Now a continuous mountain slope of forty-five
degrees is already quite unsafe either for ascent or descent, except
by zigzag paths; and a greater slope than this could not be climbed,
straightforward, but by help of crevices or jags in the rock, and
great physical exertion besides.
Sec. 14. Throughout these passages, however, Dante's thoughts are
clearly fixed altogether on the question of mere accessibility or
inaccessibility. He does not show the smallest interest in the
rocks, except as things to be conquered; and his description of
their appearance is utterly meagre, involving no other epithets than
"erto" (steep or upright), Inf. xix. 131., Purg. iii. 48. &c.;
"sconcio" (monstrous), Inf. xix. 131.; "stagliata" (cut), Inf. xvii.
134.; "maligno" (malignant), Inf. vii. 108; "duro" (hard), xx. 25.;
with "large" and "broken" (rotto) in various places. No idea of
roundness, massiveness, or pleasant form of any kind appears for a
moment to enter his mind; and the different names which are given to
the rocks in various places seem merely to refer to variations in
size: thus a "rocco" is a part of a "scoglio," Inf. xx. 25. and
xxvi. 27.; a "scheggio" (xxi. 69. and xxvi. 17.) is a less fragment
yet; a "petrone," or "sasso," is a large stone or boulder (Purg. iv.
101. 104.), and "pietra," a less stone,--both of these last terms,
especially "sasso," being used for any large mountainous mass, as in
Purg. xxi. 106.; and the vagueness of the word "monte" itself, like
that of the French "montagne," applicable either to a hill on a
post-road requiring the drag to be put on,--or to the Mont Blanc,
marks a peculiar carelessness in both nations, at the time of the
formation of their languages, as to the sublimity of the higher
hills; so that the effect produced on an English ear by the word
"mountain," signifying always a mass of a certain large size, cannot
be conveyed either in French or Italian.
Sec. 15. In all these modes of regarding rocks we find (rocks being in
themselves, as we shall see presently, by no means monstrous or
frightful things) exactly that inaccuracy in the mediaeval mind which
we had been led to expect, in its bearings on things contrary to the
spirit of that symmetrical and perfect humanity which had formed its
ideal; and it is very curious to observe how closely in the terms he
uses, and the feelings they indicate, Dante here agrees with Homer.
For the word stagliata (cut) corresponds very nearly to a favorite
term of Homer's respecting rocks "sculptured," used by him also of
ships' sides; and the frescoes and illuminations of the Middle Ages
enable us to ascertain exactly what this idea of "cut" rock was.
Sec. 16. In Plate 10. I have assembled some examples, which will give
the reader a sufficient knowledge of mediaeval rock-drawing, by men
whose names are known. They are chiefly taken from engravings, with
which the reader has it in his power to compare them,[83] and if,
therefore, any injustice is done to the original paintings the fault
is not mine; but the general impression conveyed is quite accurate,
and it would not have been worth while, where work is so deficient
in first conception, to lose time in insuring accuracy of facsimile.
Some of the crags may be taller here, or broader there, than in the
original paintings; but the character of the work is perfectly
preserved, and that is all with which we are at present concerned.
[Illustration: 10. Geology of the Middle Ages.]
Figs. 1. and 5. are by Ghirlandajo; 2. by Filippo Pesellino; 4. by
Leonardo da Vinci; and 6. by Andrea del Castagno. All these are
indeed workmen of a much later period than Dante, but the system of
rock-drawing remains entirely unchanged from Giotto's time to
Ghirlandajo's;--is then altered only by an introduction of
stratification indicative of a little closer observance of nature,
and so remains until Titian's time. Fig 1. is exactly representative
of one of Giotto's rocks, though actually by Ghirlandajo; and Fig.
2. is rather less skilful than Giotto's ordinary work. Both these
figures indicate precisely what Homer and Dante meant by "cut"
rocks. They had observed the concave smoothness of certain rock
fractures as eminently distinctive of rock from earth, and use the
term "cut" or "sculptured" to distinguish the smooth surface from
the knotty or sandy one, having observed nothing more respecting its
real contours than is represented in Figs. 1. and 2., which look as
if they had been hewn out with an adze. Lorenzo Ghiberti preserves
the same type, even in his finest work.
Fig. 3., from an interesting sixteenth century MS. in the British
Museum (Cotton, Augustus, A. 5.), is characteristic of the best
later illuminators' work; and Fig. 5., from Ghirlandajo, is pretty
illustrative of Dante's idea of terraces on the purgatorial
mountain. It is the road by which the Magi descend in his picture of
their Adoration, in the Academy of Florence. Of the other examples I
shall have more to say in the chapter on Precipices; meanwhile we
have to return to the landscape of the poem.
Sec. 17. Inaccurate as this conception of rock was, it seems to have been
the only one which, in mediaeval art had place as representative of
mountain scenery. To Dante, mountains are inconceivable except as
great broken stones or crags; all their broad contours and undulations
seem to have escaped his eye. It is, indeed, with his usual undertone
of symbolic meaning that he describes the great broken stones, and the
fall of the shattered mountain, as the entrance to the circle
appointed for the punishment of the violent; meaning that the violent
and cruel, notwithstanding all their iron hardness of heart, have no
true strength, but, either by earthquake, or want of support, fall at
last into desolate ruin, naked, loose, and shaking under the tread.
But in no part of the poem do we find allusion to mountains in any
other than a stern light; nor the slightest evidence that Dante cared
to look at them. From that hill of San Miniato, whose steps he knew so
well, the eye commands, at the farther extremity of the Val d'Arno,
the whole purple range of the mountains of Carrara, peaked and mighty,
seen always against the sunset light in silent outline, the chief
forms that rule the scene as twilight fades away. By this vision Dante
seems to have been wholly unmoved, and, but for Lucan's mention of
Aruns at Luna, would seemingly not have spoken of the Carrara hills in
the whole course of his poem: when he does allude to them, he speaks
of their white marble, and their command of stars and sea, but has
evidently no regard for the hills themselves. There is not a single
phrase or syllable throughout the poem which indicates such a regard.
Ugolino, in his dream, seemed to himself to be in the mountains, "by
cause of which the Pisan cannot see Lucca;" and it is impossible to
look up from Pisa to that hoary slope without remembering the awe that
there is in the passage; nevertheless, it was as a hunting-ground only
that he remembered those hills. Adam of Brescia, tormented with
eternal thirst, remembers the hills of Romena, but only for the sake
of their sweet waters:
"The rills that glitter down the grassy slopes
Of Casentino, making fresh and soft
The banks whereby they glide to Arno's stream,
Stand ever in my view."
And, whenever hills are spoken of as having any influence on
character, the repugnance to them is still manifest; they are always
causes of rudeness or cruelty:
"But that ungrateful and malignant race,
Who in old times came down from Fesole,
_Ay, and still smack of their rough mountain flint_,
Will, for thy good deeds, show thee enmity.
Take heed thou cleanse thee of their ways."
So again--
"As one _mountain-bred_,
Rugged, and clownish, if some city's walls
He chance to enter, round him stares agape."
Sec. 18. Finally, although the Carrara mountains are named as having
command of the stars and sea, the _Alps_ are never specially
mentioned but in bad weather, or snow. On the sand of the circle of
the blasphemers--
"Fell slowly wafting down
Dilated flakes of fire, as flakes of snow
On Alpine summit, when the wind is hushed."
So the Paduans have to defend their town and castles against
inundation,
"Ere the genial warmth be felt,
On Chiarentana's top."
The clouds of anger, in Purgatory, can only be figured to the reader
who has
"On an Alpine height been ta'en by cloud,
Through which thou sawest no better than the mole
Doth through opacous membrane."
And in approaching the second branch of Lethe, the seven ladies
pause,--
"Arriving at the verge
Of a dim umbrage hoar, such as is seen
Beneath green leaves and gloomy branches oft
To overbrow a bleak and Alpine cliff."
Sec. 19. Truly, it is unfair of Dante, that when he is going to use
snow for a lovely image, and speak of it as melting away under
heavenly sunshine, he must needs put it on the Apennines, not on the
Alps:
"As snow that lies
Amidst the living rafters, on the back
Of Italy, congealed, when drifted high
And closely piled by rough Sclavonian blasts,
Breathe but the land whereon no shadow falls,
And straightway melting, it distils away,
Like a fire-washed taper; thus was I,
Without a sigh, or tear, consumed in heart."
The reader will thank me for reminding him, though out of its proper
order, of the exquisite passage of Scott which we have to compare
with this:
"As snow upon the mountain's breast
Slides from the rock that gave it rest,
Sweet Ellen glided from her stay,
And at the monarch's feet she lay."
Examine the context of this last passage, and its beauty is quite
beyond praise; but note the northern love of rocks in the very first
words I have to quote from Scott, "The rocks that gave it rest." Dante
could not have thought of his "cut rocks" as giving rest even to snow.
He must put it on the pine branches, if it is to be at peace.
Sec. 20. There is only one more point to be noticed in the Dantesque
landscape; namely, the feeling entertained by the poet towards the
sky. And the love of mountains is so closely connected with the love
of clouds, the sublimity of both depending much on their
association, that having found Dante regardless of the Carrara
mountains as seen from San Miniato, we may well expect to find him
equally regardless of the clouds in which the sun sank behind them.
Accordingly, we find that his only pleasure in the sky depends on
its "white clearness,"--that turning into "bianca aspette di
celestro" which is so peculiarly characteristic of fine days in
Italy. His pieces of pure pale light are always exquisite. In the
dawn on the purgatorial mountain, first, in its pale white, he sees
the "tremola della marina"--trembling of the sea; then it becomes
vermilion; and at last, near sunrise, orange. These are precisely
the changes of a calm and perfect dawn. The scenery of Paradise
begins with "Day added to day," the light of the sun so flooding the
heavens, that "never rain nor river made lake so wide;" and
throughout the Paradise all the beauty depends on spheres of light,
or stars, never on clouds. But the pit of the Inferno is at first
sight obscure, deep, and so _cloudy_ that at its bottom nothing
could be seen. When Dante and Virgil reach the marsh in which the
souls of those who have been angry and sad in their lives are for
ever plunged, they find it covered with thick fog; and the condemned
souls say to them,--
"We once were sad,
In the _sweet air, made gladsome by the sun_.
Now in these murky settlings are we sad."
Even the angel crossing the marsh to help them is annoyed by this
bitter marsh smoke, "fummo acerbo," and continually sweeps it with
his hand from before his face.
Anger, on the purgatorial mountain, is in like manner imaged,
because of its blindness and wildness, by the Alpine clouds. As they
emerge from its mist they see the white light radiated through the
fading folds of it; and, except this appointed cloud, no other can
touch the mountain of purification.
"Tempest none, shower, hail, or snow,
Hoar-frost, or dewy moistness, higher falls,
Than that brief scale of threefold steps. Thick clouds,
Nor scudding rack, are ever seen, swift glance
Ne'er lightens, nor Thaumantian iris gleams."
Dwell for a little while on this intense love of Dante for
light,--taught, as he is at last by Beatrice, to gaze on the sun
itself like an eagle,--and endeavor to enter into his equally
intense detestation of all mist, rack of cloud, or dimness of rain;
and then consider with what kind of temper he would have regarded a
landscape of Copley Fielding's or passed a day in the Highlands. He
has, in fact, assigned to the souls of the gluttonous no other
punishment in the Inferno than perpetuity of Highland weather:
"Showers
Ceaseless, accursed, heavy and cold, unchanged
For ever, both in kind and in degree,--
Large hail, discolored water, sleety flaw,
Through the dim midnight air streamed down amain."
Sec. 21. However, in this immitigable dislike of clouds, Dante goes
somewhat beyond the general temper of his age. For although the calm
sky was alone loved, and storm and rain were dreaded by all men,
yet the white horizontal clouds of serene summer were regarded with
great affection by all early painters, and considered as one of the
accompaniments of the manifestation of spiritual power; sometimes,
for theological reasons which we shall soon have to examine, being
received, even without any other sign, as the types of blessing or
Divine acceptance: and in almost every representation of the
heavenly paradise, these level clouds are set by the early painters
for its floor, or for thrones of its angels; whereas Dante retains
steadily, through circle after circle, his cloudless thought, and
concludes his painting of heaven, as he began it upon the
purgatorial mountain, with the image of shadowless morning:
"I raised my eyes, and as at morn is seen
The horizon's eastern quarter to excel,
So likewise, that pacific Oriflamb
Glowed in the midmost, and toward every part,
With like gradation paled away its flame."
But the best way of regarding this feeling of Dante's is as the
ultimate and most intense expression of the love of light, color,
and clearness, which, as we saw above, distinguished the mediaeval
from the Greek on one side, and, as we shall presently see,
distinguished him from the modern on the other. For it is evident
that precisely in the degree in which the Greek was agriculturally
inclined, in that degree the sight of clouds would become to him
more acceptable than to the mediaeval knight, who only looked for the
fine afternoons in which he might gather the flowers in his garden,
and in no wise shared or imagined the previous anxieties of his
gardener. Thus, when we find Ulysses comforted about Ithaca, by
being told it had "plenty of rain," and the maids of Colonos
boasting of their country for the same reason, we may be sure that
they had some regard for clouds; and accordingly, except
Aristophanes, of whom more presently, all the Greek poets speak
fondly of the clouds, and consider them the fitting resting-places
of the gods; including in their idea of clouds not merely the thin
clear cirrus, but the rolling and changing volume of the
thundercloud; nor even these only, but also the dusty whirlwind
cloud of the earth, as in that noble chapter of Herodotus which
tells us of the cloud, full of mystic voices, that rose out of the
dust of Eleusis, and went down to Salamis. Clouds and rain were of
course regarded with a like gratitude by the eastern and southern
nations--Jews and Egyptians; and it is only among the northern
mediaevals, with whom fine weather was rarely so prolonged as to
occasion painful drought, or dangerous famine, and over whom the
clouds broke coldly and fiercely when they came, that the love of
serene light assumes its intense character, and the fear of tempest
is gloomiest; so that the powers of the clouds which to the Greek
foretold his conquest at Salamis, and with whom he fought in
alliance, side by side with their lightnings, under the crest of
Parnassus, seemed, in the heart of the Middle Ages, to be only under
the dominion of the spirit of evil. I have reserved, for our last
example of the landscape of Dante, the passage in which this
conviction is expressed; a passage not less notable for its close
description of what the writer feared and disliked, than for the
ineffable tenderness, in which Dante is always raised as much above
all other poets, as in softness the rose above all other flowers. It
is the spirit of Buonconte da Montefeltro who speaks:
"Then said another: 'Ah, so may thy wish,
That takes thee o'er the mountain, be fulfilled,
As thou shalt graciously give aid to mine!
Of Montefeltro I; Buonconte I:
Giovanna, nor none else, have care for me;
Sorrowing with these I therefore go.' I thus:
From Campaldino's field what force or chance
Drew thee, that ne'er thy sepulchre was known?'
'Oh!' answered he, 'at Casentino's foot
A stream there courseth, named Archiano, sprung
In Apennine, above the hermit's seat.
E'en where its name is cancelled, there came I,
Pierced in the throat, fleeing away on foot,
And bloodying the plain. Here sight and speech
failed me; and finishing with Mary's name,
I fell, and tenantless my flesh remained.
...
_That evil will, which in his intellect
Still follows evil, came;_
... the valley, soon
As day was spent, _he covered o'er with cloud_.
From Pratomagno to the mountain range,
And stretched the sky above; so that the air,
Impregnate, changed to water. Fell the rain;
And to the fosses came all that the land
Contained not; and as mightiest streams are wont.
To the great river, with such headlong sweep,
Rushed, that nought stayed its course. My stiffened frame,
Laid at his mouth, the fell Archiano found,
And dashed it into Arno; from my breast
Loosening the cross, that of myself I made
When overcome with pain. He hurled me on,
Along the banks and bottom of his course;
Then in his muddy spoils encircling wrapt.'"
Observe, Buonconte, as he dies, crosses his arms over his breast,
pressing them together, partly in his pain, partly in prayer. His
body thus lies by the river shore, as on a sepulchral monument, the
arms folded into a cross. The rage of the river, under the influence
of the evil demon, _unlooses this cross_, dashing the body supinely
away, and rolling it over and over by bank and bottom. Nothing can
be truer to the action of a stream in fury than these lines. And how
desolate is it all! The lonely flight,--the grisly wound, "pierced
in the throat,"--the death, without help or pity,--only the name of
Mary on the lips,-and the cross folded over the heart. Then the rage
of the demon and the river,--the noteless grave,--and, at last, even
she who had been most trusted forgetting him,--
"Giovanna, none else have care for me."
There is, I feel assured, nothing else like it in all the range of
poetry; a faint and harsh echo of it, only, exists in one Scottish
ballad, "The Twa Corbies."
Here, then, I think, we may close our inquiry into the nature of the
mediaeval landscape; not but that many details yet require to be worked
out; but these will be best observed by recurrence to them, for
comparison with similar details in modern landscape,--our principal
purpose, the getting at the governing tones and temper of conception,
being, I believe, now sufficiently accomplished. And I think that our
subject may be best pursued by immediately turning from the mediaeval
to the perfectly modern landscape; for although I have much to say
respecting the transitional state of mind exhibited in the sixteenth
and seventeenth centuries, I believe the transitions may be more
easily explained after we have got clear sight of the extremes; and
that by getting perfect and separate hold of the three great phases of
art,--Greek, mediaeval, and modern,--we shall be enabled to trace, with
least chance of error, those curious vacillations which brought us to
the modern temper while vainly endeavoring to resuscitate the Greek. I
propose, therefore, in the next chapter, to examine the spirit of
modern landscape, as seen generally in modern painting, and especially
in the poetry of Scott.
[79] It is an unpublished plate. I know only two impressions of it.
[80] (Cayley.) "Tutto di pietra, e di color ferrigno"--Inf. xviii. 2.
[81] "Maligne piagge grige."--Inf. vii. 108.
[82] It is in these subtle purples that even the more
elaborate passages of the earlier drawings are worked; as,
for instance, the Highland streams, spoken of in
Pre-Raphaelitism. Also, Turner could, by opposition, get what
color he liked out of a brown. I have seen cases in which he
had made it stand for the purest _rose_ light.
[83] The references are in Appendix I.