every school-boy knows it: but what every school-boy does not know, and
but few of the masters, is this charming, jingling rendering of it into
the Venetian dialect:--
"La neve xè andàda,
Su i prài torna i fieri
De cento colori,
E a dosso de i àlbori
La fogia è tornada
A farli vestir.
"Che gusto e dilèto
Che dà quèla tèra
Cambiàda de cièra,
E i fiumi die placidi
Sbassài nel so' lèto
Va zòzo in te 'l mar!"[17]
On my last wet-day, I spoke of the elder Pliny, and now the younger
Pliny shall tell us something of one or two of his country-places. Pliny
was a government-official, and was rich: whether these facts had any
bearing on each other I know no more than I should know if he had lived
in our times.
I know that he had a charming place down by the sea, near to Ostium. Two
roads led thither; "both of them," he says, "in some parts sandy, which
makes it heavy and tedious, if you travel in a coach; but easy enough
for those who ride. My villa" (he is writing to his friend Gallus,
Epist. XX. Lib. 2) "is large enough for all convenience, and not
expensive." He describes the portico as affording a capital retreat in
bad weather, not only for the reason that it is protected by windows,
but because there is an extraordinary projection of the roof. "From the
middle of this portico you pass into a charming inner court, and thence
into a large hall which extends towards the sea,--so near, indeed, that
under a west wind the waves ripple on the steps. On the left of this
hall is a large lounging-room (_cubiculum_), and a lesser one beyond,
with windows to the east and west. The angle which this lounging-room
forms with the hall makes a pleasant lee, and a loitering-place for my
family in the winter. Near this again is a crescent-shaped apartment,
with windows which receive the sun all day, where I keep my favorite
authors. From this, one passes to a bed-chamber by a raised passage,
under which is a stove that communicates an agreeable warmth to the
whole apartment. The other rooms in this portion of the villa are for
the freedmen and slaves; but still are sufficiently well ordered (_tam
mundis_) for my guests."
And he goes on to describe the bath-rooms, the cooling-rooms, the
sweating-rooms, the tennis-court, "which lies open to the warmth of the
afternoon sun." Adjoining this is a tower, with two apartments below and
two above,--besides a supper-room, which commands a wide look-out along
the sea, and over the villas that stud the shores. At the opposite end
of the tennis-court is another tower, with its apartments opening upon a
museum,--and below this the great dining-hall, whose windows look upon
gardens, where are box-tree hedges, and rosemary, and bowers of vines.
Figs and mulberries grow profusely in the garden; and walking under
them, one approaches still another banqueting-hall, remote from the sea,
and adjoining the kitchen-garden. Thence a grand portico
(_crypto-porticus_) extends with a range of windows on either side, and
before the portico is a terrace perfumed with violets. His favorite
apartment, however, is a detached building, which he has himself erected
in a retired part of the grounds. It has a warm winter-room, looking one
way on the terrace, and another on the ocean; through its folding-doors
may be seen an inner chamber, and within this again a sanctum, whose
windows command three views totally separate and distinct,--the sea, the
woods, or the villas along the shore.
"Tell me," he says, "if all this is not very charming, and if I shall
not have the honor of your company, to enjoy it with me?"
If Pliny regarded the seat at Ostium as only a convenient and
inexpensive place, we may form some notion of his Tuscan property,
which, as he says in his letter to his friend Apollinaris, (Lib. V.
Epist. 6,) he prefers to all his others, whether of Tivoli, Tusculum, or
Palestrina. There, at a distance of a hundred and fifty miles from Rome,
in the midst of the richest corn-bearing and olive-bearing regions of
Tuscany, he can enjoy country quietude. There is no need to be slipping
on his toga; ceremony is left behind. The air is healthful; the scene is
quiet. "_Studiis animum, venatu corpus exerceo._" I will not follow him
through the particularity of the description which he gives to his
friend Apollinaris. There are the wide-reaching views of fruitful
valleys and of empurpled hill-sides; there are the fresh winds sweeping
from the distant Apennines; there is the _gestatio_ with its clipped
boxes, the embowered walks, the colonnades, the marble banquet-rooms,
the baths, the Carystian columns, the soft, embracing air, and the
violet sky. I leave Pliny seated upon a bench in a marble alcove of his
Tuscan garden. From this bench, the water, gushing through several
little pipes, as if it were pressed out by the weight of the persons
reposing upon it, falls into a stone cistern underneath, whence it is
received into a polished marble basin, so artfully contrived that it is
always full, without ever overflowing. "When I sup here," he writes,
"this basin serves for a table,--the larger dishes being placed round
the margin, while the smaller ones swim about in the form of little
vessels and waterfowl."
Such _al fresco_ suppers the country-gentlemen of Italy ate in the first
century of our era!
* * * * *
Palladius wrote somewhere about the middle of the fourth century. His
work is arranged in the form of a calendar for the months, and closes
with a poem which is as inferior to the poems of the time of Augustus
as the later emperors were inferior to the Cæsars. There is in his
treatise no notable advance upon the teachings of Columella, whom he
frequently quotes,--as well as certain Greek authorities of the Lower
Empire. I find in his treatise a somewhat fuller list of vegetables,
fruits, and field-crops than belongs to the earlier writers. I find more
variety of treatment. I see a waning faith in the superstitions of the
past; Bacchus and the Lares are less jubilant than they were; but the
Christian civilization has not yet vivified the art of culture. The
magnificent gardens of Nero and the horticultural experiences of the
great Adrian at Tivoli have left no traces in the method or inspiration
of Palladius.
* * * * *
I will not pass wholly from the classic period, without allusion to the
recent book of Professor Daubeny on Roman husbandry. It is charming, and
yet disappointing,--not for failure, on his part, to trace the
traditions to their sources, not for lack of learning or skill, but for
lack of that _afflatus_ which should pour over and fill both subject and
talker, where the talker is lover as well as master.
Daubeny's husbandry lacks the odor of fresh-turned ground,--lacks the
imprint of loving familiarity. He is clearly no farmer: every man who
has put his hand to the plough (_aratori crede_) sees it. Your blood
does not tingle at his story of Boreas, nor a dreamy languor creep over
you when he talks of sunny south-winds.
Had he written exclusively of bees, or trees, or flowers, there would
have been a charming murmur, like the _susurrus_ of the poets,--and a
fragrance as of crushed heaps of lilies and jonquils. But Daubeny
approaches fanning as a good surgeon approaches a _cadaver_. He
disarticulates the joints superbly; but there is no tremulous intensity.
The bystanders do not feel the thrill with which they see a man bare his
arm for a capital operation upon a live and palpitating body.
* * * * *
From the time of Palladius to the time of Pietro Crescenzi is a period
of a thousand years, a period as dreary and impenetrable as the
snow-cloud through which I see faintly a few spires staggering: so along
the pages of Muratori's interminable annals gaunt figures come and go;
but they are not the figures of farmers.
Goths, wars, famines, and plague succeed each other in ghastly
procession. Boëthius lifts, indeed, a little rural plaint from out of
the gloom,--
"Felix nimium prior ætas,
Contenta fidelibus arvis,"[18]--
but the dungeon closes over him; and there are outstanding orders of
Charlemagne which look as if he had an eye to the crops of Italy, and to
a good vegetable stew with his Transalpine dinners,--but for the most
part the land is waste. I see some such monster as Eccelino reaping a
harvest of blood. I see Lombards pouring down from the mountain-gates,
with falcons on their thumbs, ready to pounce upon the purple _columbæ_
that trace back their lineage to the doves Virgil may have fed in the
streets of Mantua. I see torrents of people, the third of them women,
driven mad by some fanatical outcry, sweeping over the whole breadth of
Italy, and consuming all green things as a fire consumes stubble. Think
of what the fine villa of Pliny would have been, with its boxwood bowers
and floating dishes, under the press of such crusaders! It was a
precarious time for agricultural investments: I know nothing that could
match it, unless it may have been last summer's harvests in the valley
of the Shenandoah.
Upon a parchment (_strumento_) of Ferrara, bearing date A. D. 1113,
(Annals of Muratori,) I find a memorandum or contract which looks like
reviving civilization. "_Terram autem illam quam roncabo, frui debeo per
annos tres; postea reddam serraticum._" The Latin is stiff, but the
sense is sound. "If I grub up wild land, I shall hold it three years for
pay."
* * * * *
I shall make no apology for introducing next to the reader the
"Geoponica Geoponicorum,"--a somewhat extraordinary collection of
agricultural opinions, usually attributed, in a loose way, to the
Emperor Constantine Porphyrogenitus, who held the Byzantine throne about
the middle of the tenth century. It was undoubtedly under the order of
Constantine that the collection took its present shape; but whether a
collection under the same name had not previously existed, and, if so,
to whom is to be credited the authorship, are questions which have been
discussed through a wilderness of Greek and Roman type, by the various
editors.
The edition before me (that of Niclas, Leipsic) gives no less than a
hundred pages of prolegomena, prefaces, introductory observations, with
notes to each and all, interlacing the pages into a motley of patchwork;
the whole preceded by two, and followed by five stately dedications. The
weight of authority points to Cassianus Bassus, a Bithynian, as the real
compiler,--notwithstanding his name is attached to particular chapters
of the book, and notwithstanding he lived as early as the fifth century.
Other critics attribute the collection to Dionysius Uticensis, who is
cited by both Varro and Columella. The question is unsettled, and is not
worth the settling.
My own opinion--in which, however, Niclas and Needham do not share--is,
that the Emperor Porphyrogenitus, in addition to his historical and
judicial labors,[19] wishing to mass together the best agricultural
opinions of the day, expressed that wish to some trusted Byzantine
official (we may say his Commissioner of Patents). Whereupon the
Byzantine official (commissioner) goes to some hungry agricultural
friend, of the Chersonesus, and lays before him the plan, with promise
of a round Byzantian stipend. The agricultural friend goes lovingly to
the work, and discovers some old compilation of Bassus or of Dionysius,
into which he whips a few modern phrases, attributes a few chapters to
the virtual compiler of the whole, makes one or two adroit allusions to
local scenes, and carries the result to the Byzantine official
(commissioner). The official (commissioner) has confidence in the
opinions and virtues of his agricultural friend, and indorses the book,
paying over the stipend, which it is found necessary to double, by
reason of the unexpected cost of execution. The official (commissioner)
presents the report to the Emperor, who receives it gratefully,--at the
same tune approving the bill of costs, which has grown into a quadruple
of the original estimates.
This hypothesis will explain the paragraphs which so puzzle Niclas and
Needham; it explains the evident interpolations, and the local
allusions. The only extravagance in the hypothesis is its assumption
that the officials of Byzantium were as rapacious as our own.
Thus far, I have imagined a certain analogy between the work in view and
the "Patent Office Agricultural Reports." The analogy stops here: the
"Geoponica" is a good book. It is in no sense to be regarded as a work
of the tenth century, or as one strictly Byzantine: nearly half the
authors named are of Western origin, and I find none dating later than
the fifth century,--while many, as Apuleius, Fiorentinus, Africanus, and
the poor brothers Quintilii, who died under the stab of Commodus, belong
to a period preceding that of Palladius. Aratus and Democritus (of
Abdera) again, who are cited, are veterans of the old Greek school, who
might have contributed as well to the agriculture of Thrace or Macedonia
in the days of Philip as in the days of the Porphyrogenitus.
The first book, of meteorologic phenomena, is nearly identical in its
teachings with those of Aratus, Varro, and Virgil.
The subject of field-culture is opened with the standard maxim,
repeated by all the old writers, that the master's eye is
invaluable.[20] The doctrine of rotation, or frequent change of crops,
is laid down with unmistakable precision. A steep for seed (hellebore)
is recommended, to guard against the depredations of birds or mice.
In the second book, in certain chapters credited to Fiorentinus, I find,
among other valuable manures mentioned, sea-weed and tide-drift,
([Greek: Ta ek tês thalassês de ekbrassomena bryodê],) which I do not
recall in any other of the old writers. He also recommends the refuse of
leather-dressers, and a mode of promoting putrefaction in the
compost-heap, which would almost seem to be stolen from "Bommer's
Method." He further urges the diversion of turbid rills, after rains,
over grass lands, and altogether makes a better compend of this branch
of the subject than can be found in the Roman writers proper.
Grain should be cut before it is fully ripe, as the meal is the sweeter.
What correspondent of our agricultural papers, suggesting this as a
novelty, could believe that it stood in Greek type as early as ever
Greek types were set?
A farm foreman should be apt to rise early, should win the respect of
his men, should fear to tell an untruth, regard religious observances,
and not drink too hard.
Three or four books are devoted to a very full discussion of the vine,
and of wines,--not differing materially, however, from the Columellan
advice. In discussing the moral aspects of the matter, this Geoponic
author enumerates other things which will intoxicate as well as
wine,--even some waters; also the wine made from barley and wheat, which
barbarians drink. Old men, he says, are easily made drunk; women not
easily, by reason of temperament; but by drinking enough they may come
to it.
Where the discourse turns upon pears, (Lib. X. Cap. xxiii.,) it is
urged, that, if you wish specially good fruit, you should bore a hole
through the trunk at the ground, and drive in a plug of either oak or
beech, and draw the earth over it. If it does not heal well, wash for a
fortnight with the lees of old wine: in any event, the wine-lees will
help the flavor of the fruit. Almost identical directions are to be
found in Palladius, (Tit. XXV.,) but the above is credited to Diophanes,
who lived in Asia Minor a full century before Christ.
Book XI. opens with flowers and evergreens, introduced (by a Latin
translation) in a mellifluous roll of genitives:--"_plantationem
rosarum, et liliorum, et violarum, et reliquorum florum odoralorum_."
Thereafter is given the pretty tradition, that red roses came of nectar
spilled from heaven. Love, who bore the celestial vintage, tripped a
wing, and overset the vase; and the nectar, spilling on the valleys of
the earth, bubbled up in roses. Next we have this kindred story of the
lilies. Jupiter wished to make his boy Hercules (born of a mortal) one
of the gods; so he snatches him from the bosom of his earthly mother,
Alemena, and bears him to the bosom of the godlike Juno. The milk is
spilled from the full-mouthed boy, as he traverses the sky, (making the
Milky Way,) and what drops below stars and clouds, and touches earth,
stains the ground with--lilies.
In the chapter upon pot-herbs are some of those allusions to the climate
of Constantinople which may have served to accredit the work in the
Byzantine court. I find no extraordinary methods of kitchen-garden
culture,--unless I except the treatment of musk-melon seeds to a steep
of milk and honey, in order to improve the flavor of the fruit. (Cap.
xx.) The remaining chapters relate to ordinary domestic animals, with
diversions to stags, camels, hare, poisons, scorpions, and serpents. I
can cheerfully commend the work to those who have a snowy day on their
hands, good eyesight, and a love for the subject.
* * * * *
And now, while the snow lasts, let us take one look at Messer Pietro
Crescenzi, a Bolognese of the fourteenth century. My copy of him is a
little, fat, unctuous, parchment-bound book of 1534, bought upon a
street stall under the walls of the University of Bologna.
Through whose hands may it not have passed since its printing! Sometimes
I seem to snuff in it the taint of a dirty-handed friar, who loved his
pot-herbs better than his breviary, and plotted his yearly garden on
some shelf of the hills that look down on Castagnolo: other times I
scent only the mould and the damp of some monastery shelf, that guarded
it quietly and cleanly, while red-handed war raged around the walls.
Crescenzi was a man of good family in Bologna, being nephew of Crescenzi
di Crescenzo, who died in 1268, an ambassador in Venice. Pietro was
educated to the law, and, wearying of the civil commotions in his native
town, accepted judicial positions in the independent cities of
Italy,--Pisa and Asti among others; and after thirty years of absence,
in which, as he says, he had read many authors,[21] and seen many sorts
of farming, he gives his book to the world.
Its arrangement is very similar to that of Palladius, to which he makes
frequent reference. There is long and quaint talk of situations,
breezes, cellar-digging, and wells; but in the matter of irrigation and
pipe-laying he is clearly in advance of the Roman writers. He discourses
upon tiles, and gives a cement for making water-tight their
junction,--"_Calcina viva intrisa con olio_." (Lib. I. Cap. ix.) He adds
good rules for mortar-making, and advises that the timber for
house-building be cut in November or December in the old of the moon.
In matters of physiology he shows a near approach to modern views: he
insists that food for plants must be in a liquid form.[22]
He quotes Columella's rule for twenty-four loads (_carrette_) of manure
to hill-lands per acre, and eighteen to level land; and adds,--"Our
people put the double of this,"--"_I nostri mettano più chel doppio._"
But the book of our friend Crescenzi is interesting, not so much for its
maxims of agronomic wisdom as for its association with one of the most
eventful periods o£ Italian history. The new language of the
Peninsula[23] was just now crystallizing into shape, and was presently
to receive the stamp of currency from the hands of Dante and Boccaccio.
A thriving commerce through the ports of Venice and Amalfi demanded all
the products of the hill-sides. Milan, then having a population of two
hundred thousand, had turned a great river into the fields,--which to
this day irrigates thousands of acres of rice-lands. Wheat was grown in
profusion, at that time, on fields which are now desolated by the
malaria, or by indolence. In the days of Crescenzi, gunpowder was burned
for the first time in battle; and for the first time crops of grain were
paid for in bills of exchange. All the Peninsula was vibrating with the
throbs of a new and more splendid life. The art that had cropped out of
the fashionable schools of Byzantium was fast putting them in eclipse;
and before Crescenzi died, if he loved art on canvas as he loved art in
gardens, he must have heard admiringly of Cimabue, and Giotto, and
Orcagna.
* * * * *
In 1360 a certain Paganino Bonafede composed a poem called "Il Tesoro
de' Rustici"; but I believe it was never published; and Tiraboschi calls
it "_poco felice_." If we could only bar publicity to all the _poco
felice_ verses!
In the middle of the fifteenth century the Florentine Poggio says some
good things in a rural way; and still later, that whimsical,
disagreeable Politiano, who was a pet cub of Lorenzo de' Medici,
published his "Rusticus." Roscoe says, with his usual strained
hyperbole, that it is inferior in kind only to the Georgics. The fact
is, it compares with the Georgics as the vilest of the Medici compare
with the grandest of the Cæsars.
The young Michele Verini, of the same period, has given, in one of his
few remaining letters, an eloquent description of the Cajano farm of
Lorenzo de' Medici. It lay between Florence and Pistoia. The river
Ombrone skirted its fields. It was so successfully irrigated, that three
crops of grain grew in a year. Its barns had stone floors, walls with
moat, and towers like a castle. The cows he kept there (for ewes were
now superseded) were equal to the supply of the entire city of Florence.
Hogs were fed upon the whey; and peacocks and pheasant innumerable
roamed through the woods.
Politiano also touches upon the same theme; but the prose of young
Verini is better, because more explicit, than the verse of Politiano.
* * * * *
While I write, wandering in fancy to that fair plain where Florence sits
a queen, with her girdle of shining rivers, and her garland of
olive-bearing hills,----the snow is passing. The spires have staggered
plainly and stiffly into sight. Again I can count them, one by one. I
have brought as many authors to the front as there are spires staring at
me from the snow.
Let me marshal them once more:--Verini, the young Florentine;
Politiano,[24] who cannot live in peace with the wife of his patron;
Poggio, the Tuscan; Crescenzi, the magistrate and farmer joined; the
half-score of dead men who lie between the covers of the "Geoponica";
the martyr Boëthius, who, under the consolations of a serene, perhaps
Christian philosophy, cannot forget the charm of the fields; Palladius,
who is more full than original; Pliny the Consul, and the friend of
Tacitus; Horace, whose very laugh is brimming with the buxom cheer of
the country; and last,--Virgil.