wild; and what he won from it we read in the gentler legends of the
desert, and in the records of the early Italian artists. Much, for
instance, is told of the delightful nature of the intercourse between
the solitaries and wild animals. The lion having been the typical
“denizen” of the Libyan sands, the Italian painter has transplanted
him to the Umbrian hill-sides, where, jointly with the wolf and the
stag, he lives in gentle community with the anchorites. For instead
of fleeing from or fighting these lords of the wilderness, the wise
hermits at once entered into negotiations with them--negotiations
sometimes resulting in life-long friendships, and sealed by the
self-sacrificing death of the adoring animal. It was of course the
power of the cross which subjugated these savage beasts; and many
instances are recorded of the control exercised over wild animals,
and the contrition awakened in them, by the conquering sign. But the
hermits, not content with asserting their spiritual predominance over
these poor soulless creatures (_non sono Cristiani_), seemed to feel
that such a victory was too easy, and were themselves won over by the
devotion of their dumb friends, and drawn into a brotherly commerce
which no law of the Church prescribed.
The mystical natural history of the first Christian centuries
facilitated the belief in this intercourse between man and beast. When
even familiar domestic animals were credited with strange symbolic
attributes, it was natural to people the wild with the dragon, the
hydra and the cocatrix; to believe that the young of the elephant were
engendered by their mothers’ eating of the mandragora which grows on
a mount near Paradise; that those of the lion were born dead and
resuscitated by their parents’ breath; and that the old eagle renewed
his youth by plunging three times in a magic fountain. It is not
strange that creatures so marvellously endowed should have entered into
friendly relations with the human intruders upon their solitude, and
subdued their savage natures to the teachings of their new masters.
And as the lion and the wolf were gradually transformed into humble
but wise companions, so the other influences of the wilderness came
to acquire a power over the solitaries. Even after the early Thebaids
had been gathered in under one or another of the great monastic rules,
seekers after holiness continued to flee the communal life, and in
Italy every lonely height came to have its recluse. It was impossible
that these little restricted human lives, going forth singly into the
desert, should not be gradually absorbed into it and saturated with
its spirit. Think what a soul-shattering or soul-making experience it
must have been to the dweller in the narrow walled town or the narrower
monastery, to go forth alone, beyond the ploughed fields and the road
to the next village, beyond the haunts of men and hail of friendly
voices, forth into the unmapped region of hills and forests, where
wild beasts and robbers, and other presences less definable but more
baleful, lay in wait for the lonely traveller! From robbers there was
not much to fear: the solitaries were poor, and it was a great sin to
lay hands on them. The wild beasts, too, might be won over to Christian
amity; but what of those other presences of which the returning
traveller whispered over the evening fire?
At first, no doubt, the feeling of awe was uppermost, and only the
heart inflated with divine love could sustain the assaults of fear and
loneliness; but gradually, as the noise of cities died out, as the ear
became inured to the vast hush of nature, and the mind to the delicious
recurrence of untroubled hours--then, wonderfully, imperceptibly, the
spirit of the hermit must have put forth tendrils of sympathy and
intelligence toward the mysterious world about him. Think of the joy of
escaping from the ceaseless brawls, the dirt, disease and misery of the
mediæval town, or from the bickering, the tale-bearing, the mechanical
devotions of the crowded monastery! Think of the wonder of entering,
alone and undisturbed, into communion with this vast still world of
cliff and cataract, of bird and beast and flower!
There were, of course, different kinds of hermits: the dull kind whose
only object was to escape from the turmoil and rivalry of the city,
or the toil and floggings of the farm, and to live drowsily in a warm
cleft of the rocks (not too far from the other solitaries), high above
the populous plain alternately harried by war and pestilence; and
there was the ecstatic, so filled with the immanent light that he saw
neither cliff nor cataract, that the various face of nature was no more
to him than a window of clear glass opening on the brightness of the
beatific vision. But there must have been a third kind also--the kind
in whom the divine love, instead of burning like a cold inward flame,
overflowed on the whole world about him; to whom, in this new immediate
contact with nature, the swallow became a sister, the wolf a brother,
the very clods “lovers and lamps”: mute Saint Francises, born out of
their due time, to whom the life of nature revealed, inarticulately but
profoundly, the bond of brotherhood between man and the soil.
It was to these solitaries that the wilderness truly confessed itself,
yielding up once more all the terror and the poetry of its ancient
life. For the cliffs and forests shunned of men had not always been
thus deserted, and always there had throbbed in them the pulse of
that strange intermediate life, between the man and the clod, of which
the tradition lingers in all lonely places. The hermits of course knew
this: the life of ancient days was still close to them. They knew also
that the power of the cross had banished from temple and market-place,
from garden, house and vineyard, a throng of tutelary beings on whom
the welfare of men had once been thought to depend, but who had now
been declared false to their trust, and driven forth to join their
brothers of the hills and woods. This knowledge rested on no vague
rumours, but on authenticated fact. Were not many of the old temples
still standing, some built into the walls of Christian churches, others
falling into desecrated ruin on lonely cliff and promontory? And was
it not known that in these latter the wraiths of the old gods still
reassembled? Many pilgrims and travellers bore witness to the fact.
Who had not heard of the Jewish wayfarer, overtaken by night in a
lonely country, who sought shelter in a ruined temple of Apollo, and
would have been blasted by the god and his attendant demons, had he
not (converted by fear) dispelled the unholy rout with the sign of the
cross?
A tangle of classic and mediæval traditions, Greek, Etruscan and
Germanic, in which the gods of the Thessalian glades and the werewolves
of northern forests rode the midnight blast in the _chevauchée_ of a
wild Walpurgisnacht, haunted the background of life in that confused
age when “ignorant armies clashed by night” on the battleground of
the awakening human intelligence. To the citizen hugging the city
walls, this supernatural world was dark with images of sin and fear;
but to the dweller in the forest, bold enough to affront the greater
terrors of self-communion, it must have offered a mitigating sense
of fellowship. That it did so is proved even by some of the earliest
legends. It was not always in forms of peril and perdition that the
banished gods manifested themselves to the votaries of the usurper.
To the dweller in the city they may have come in vengeful shape, like
the Venus, _tout entière à sa proie attachée_, who held fast to the
Christian bridegroom’s ring (though surely here one catches a note
of the old longing); but in their native solitude they seem to have
appeared propitiatingly, with timid proffers of service, as when Saint
Anthony, travelling in search of a fellow-hermit, was guided on his
way, first by a centaur and then by “a little man with hoofs like a
goat.”
For generations indeed, for centuries even in that slow-moving time,
the divinities of the old dispensation must have remained more familiar
to the simple people than the strange new God of Israel. Often they
must have stolen back in the twilight, to surprise and comfort the
unlettered toilers who still believed in them, still secretly offered
them the dripping honeycomb and bowl of ewe’s milk, or hung garlands
in the cleft tree which they haunted. To some of these humble hearts,
grieving for their old fireside gods, and a little bewildered by the
demands of the great forbidding Christ who frowned from the golden
heights of the Byzantine apse, the “return to nature” must have been
like a coming home to the instinctive endearing ways of childhood. How
could they be alarmed by the sight of these old exiled gods, familiars
of the hearth and garden; they who had been born to the sense of such
presences, to half-human intercourse with beings who linked man to the
soil that nurtured him, and the roof beneath which he slept?
Even the most holy and learned men of the first Christian centuries did
not question the actual existence of the heathen gods, and the Fathers
of the Church expended volumes of controversy in discussing their
origin and their influence on a Christianized world. A strange conflict
of opinion waged around this burning question. By the greater number of
authorities the old gods were believed to be demons, emanations of the
mysterious spirit of evil, himself the Ahriman of the ancient Eastern
dualism, who had cleverly smuggled himself into the new Christian
creed. Yet the oracles, though usually regarded as the voices of these
demons, were always believed in and quoted by the Christian Church,
and the history of the dark ages abounds in allusion to the authority
of the Sibylline books. While Christian scholarship thus struggled
under the spell of the old beliefs, how could the artisan and serf have
freed themselves from it? Gradually, indeed, the Church, foreseeing the
perils of a divided allegiance, and fearing the baleful loveliness of
the old gods, was to transform their myths into Christian legend, and
so supply a new throng of anthropomorphic conceptions for minds unable
to keep their faith alive on the thin abstractions of the schoolmen.
The iconography of the early Church bears witness to the skill with
which these adaptations were effected, and the slender young Olympians
and their symbols pressed into the service of the new faith; but it was
long before the results of this process reached the popular mind, and
meanwhile the old gods lived on in simple fellowship with the strange
saints and angels.
Through all the middle ages the marvellous did not fail from the earth:
it simply receded farther from the centres of life, drawing after
it the hearts of the adventurous. The Polo brothers were no doubt
clear-sighted practical men while they drove their trade in Venice;
but wonders pressed upon them when they set foot in the Great Khan’s
domains. If an astute Italian prince, who lived till the middle of
the fifteenth century with the light of the new humanism flooding his
court, could yet, on his travels to the Holy Land and Greece, discover
castles inhabited by enchanted snakes, as well as wonder-working
shrines of his own creed, how could the simple hearts of the anchorite
and solitary remain closed to the old wonders?
Shapes which have once inhabited the imagination of man pass
reluctantly out of existence. Centuries of poetic belief had peopled
the old world with a race of superhuman beings, and as many centuries
would be needed to lay their ghosts. It must be remembered, moreover,
that no sudden cataclysm, political or intellectual, marked the
introduction of the Christian faith. For three centuries after the
sacrifice on Calvary, hardly an allusion to the new god is to be found
in the pages of the pagan historians and philosophers. Even after he
had led the legions of Constantine to victory, and so won official
allegiance throughout the Roman world, no violent change marked the
beginning of the new era. For centuries still, men ploughed the same
fields with ploughs fashioned on the same lines, kept the same holidays
with the same rites, and lived on the same store of accumulated
beliefs. And in the hearts of the solitaries these beliefs must have
lingered longest. For in fleeing the world they were returning to the
native habitations of the old gods. They were nature-spirits every one,
sprung from the wave, the cloud, the tree. To the cities they had been
borne triumphant by the will of men, and from the cities they might
be banished at its behest; but who should drive them from their old
stronghold in the breast of nature? Their temples might be re-dedicated
to the new god, but none could banish them from the temples not made
with hands. Daylight might deny them, but twilight confessed them
still. They made no effort to recover the supremacy which had been
wrested from them: the gods know when their hour has come. But they
lived on, shrinking back more and more into their primitive forms,
into the vapour, the tree-trunk, the moon-track on the lonely sea; or
revealing themselves, in wistful fugitive glimpses, to the mortals who
had come to share their forest exile.
In what gentle guise they showed themselves, one may see in many
pictures of the Italian _quattro cento_, some of whose lesser painters
seem to have been in actual communion with this pale woodland Olympus.
The gods they depict are not the shining lords of the Greek heaven,
but half-human, half-sylvan creatures, shy suppliants for mortal
recognition, hovering gently on the verge of evanescence. Robetta, the
Florentine engraver, transferred them to some of his plates, Luini
caught their tender grace in his Sacrifice to Pan and Metamorphosis
of Daphne, and Lorenzo Costa gives a glimpse of their sylvan revels
in the Mythological Scene of the Louvre; but it was Piero di Cosimo
who had the clearest intuition of them. The gentle furred creature of
the Death of Procris might have been the very faun who showed Saint
Anthony the way; and in all Cosimo’s mythological pictures one has the
same impression of that intermediate world, the twilight world of the
conquered, Christianized, yet still lingering gods, so different from
the clear upper air of classic art.
Was it, as the scholars would have us believe, mere lack of
book-learning and technical skill that kept the painters of the
_quattro_ cento spell-bound in this mediæval Olympus? Were these
vanishing gods and half-gods merely a clumsy attempt to formulate
the classic conception of divinity? But the Pisani had discovered
Greek plastic art two centuries earlier; but the uncovered wonders of
Rome were being daily drawn and measured by skilful hands; but the
silhouettes of the antique temples were still outlined against the
skies of Greater Greece! No--these lesser artists were not struggling
to embody a half-understood ideal. Kept nearer the soil and closer to
the past by the very limitations of their genius, they left to the
great masters the task of reconstituting classical antiquity, content
to go on painting the gods who still lived in their blood, the gods
their own forbears had known in the familiar streets and fields, the
fading gods whom the hermits were last to see in the lost recesses of
the mountain.
A TUSCAN SHRINE
One of the rarest and most delicate pleasures of the continental
tourist is to circumvent the compiler of his guide-book. The red
volumes which accompany the traveller through Italy have so completely
anticipated the most whimsical impulses of their readers that it is now
almost impossible to plan a tour of exploration without finding, on
reference to them, that their author has already been over the ground,
has tested the inns, measured the kilometres, and distilled from the
massive tomes of Kugler, Burckhardt and Morelli a portable estimate
of the local art and architecture. Even the discovery of incidental
lapses scarcely consoles the traveller for the habitual accuracy of
his statements; and the only refuge left from his omniscience lies in
approaching the places he describes by a route which he has not taken.
Those to whom one of the greatest charms of travel in over-civilized
countries consists in such momentary escapes from the expected, will
still find here and there, even in Italy, a few miles unmeasured by
the guide-book; and it was to enjoy the brief exhilaration of such a
discovery that we stepped out of the train one morning at Certaldo,
determined to find our way thence to San Vivaldo.
For some months we had been vaguely aware that, somewhere among the
hills between Volterra and the Arno, there lay an obscure monastery
containing a series of terra-cotta groups which were said to represent
the scenes of the Passion. No one in Florence seemed to know much about
them; and many of the people whom we questioned had never even heard
of San Vivaldo. Professor Enrico Ridolfi, at that time the director
of the Royal Museums at Florence, knew by hearsay of the existence
of the groups, and told me that there was every reason to accept the
local tradition which has always attributed them to Giovanni Gonnelli,
the blind modeller of Gambassi, an obscure artist of the seventeenth
century, much praised by contemporary authors, but since fallen into
merited oblivion. Professor Ridolfi, however, had never seen any
photographs of the groups, and was not unnaturally disposed to believe
that they were of small artistic merit, since Gonnelli worked much
later, and in a more debased period of taste, than the modeller of the
well-known groups at Varallo. Still, even when the more pretentious
kind of Italian sculpture was at its lowest, a spark of its old life
smouldered here and there in the improvisations of the _plasticatore_,
or stucco modeller; and I hoped to find, in the despised groups of
San Vivaldo, something of the coarse naïveté and brutal energy which
animate their more famous rivals of Varallo. In this hope we started
in search of San Vivaldo; and as the guide-books told us that it could
be reached only by way of Castel Fiorentino, we promptly determined to
attack it from San Gimignano.
At Certaldo, the birthplace of Boccaccio, where the train left us one
April morning, we found an archaic little carriage, with a coachman
who entered sympathetically into our plan for eluding our cicerone. He
told us that he knew a road which led in about four hours across the
mountains from San Gimignano to San Vivaldo; and in his charge we were
soon crossing the poplar-fringed Elsa and climbing the steep ascent to
San Gimignano, where we were to spend the night.
The next morning, before sunrise, the little carriage awaited us at
the inn door; and as we dashed out under the gateway of San Gimignano
we felt the thrill of explorers sighting a new continent. It seemed,
in fact, an unknown world which lay beneath us in the early light.
The hills, so definitely etched at midday, at sunset so softly
modelled, had melted into a silver sea of which the farthest waves were
indistinguishably merged in billows of luminous mist. Only the near
foreground retained its precision of outline, and that too had assumed
an air of unreality. Fields, hedges and cypresses were tipped with an
aureate brightness which recalled the golden ripples running over the
grass in the foreground of Botticelli’s “Birth of Venus.” The sunshine
had the density of gold-leaf: we seemed to be driving through the
landscape of a missal.
At first we had this magical world to ourselves, but as the light
broadened groups of labourers began to appear under the olives and
between the vines; shepherdesses, distaff in hand, drove their flocks
along the roadside, and yokes of white oxen with scarlet fringes above
their meditative eyes moved past us with such solemn deliberateness
of step that fancy transformed their brushwood-laden carts into the
sacred _carroccio_ of the past. Ahead of us the road wound through
a district of vineyards and orchards, but to the north and east the
panorama of the Tuscan hills unrolled range after range of treeless
undulations, outlined one upon the other, as the sun grew high, with
the delicately-pencilled minuteness of a mountain background of Sebald
Beham’s. Behind us the fantastic towers of San Gimignano dominated each
bend of the road like some persistent mirage of the desert; to the
north lay Castel Fiorentino, and far away other white villages gleamed
like fossil shells embedded in the hill-sides.
The elements composing the foreground of such Tuscan scenes are almost
always extremely simple--slopes trellised with vine and mulberry, under
which the young wheat runs like green flame; stretches of ash-coloured
olive orchard; and here and there a farm-house with projecting eaves
and open loggia, guarded by its inevitable group of cypresses. These
cypresses, with their velvety-textured spires of rusty black, acquire
an extraordinary value against the neutral-tinted breadth of the
landscape; distributed with the sparing hand with which a practised
writer uses his exclamation-points, they seem to emphasize the more
intimate meaning of the scene; calling the eye here to a shrine, there
to a homestead, or testifying by their mere presence to the lost
tradition of some barren knoll. But this significance of detail is one
of the chief charms of the mid-Italian landscape. It has none of the
purposeless prodigality, the extravagant climaxes, of what is called
“fine scenery”; nowhere is there any obvious largesse to the eye; but
the very reticence of its delicately-moulded lines, its seeming disdain
of facile effects, almost give it the quality of a work of art, make it
appear the crowning production of centuries of plastic expression.
For some distance the road from San Gimignano to San Vivaldo winds
continuously upward, and our ascent at length brought us to a region
where agriculture ceases and the way lies across heathery undulations,
with a scant growth of oaks and ilexes in the more sheltered hollows.
As we drove on, these copses gave way to stone-pines, and presently
we dipped over the yoke of the highest ridge and saw below us another
sea of hills, with a bare mountain-spur rising from it like a scaly
monster floating on the waves, its savage spine bristling with the
walls and towers of Volterra.
For nearly an hour we skirted the edge of this basin of hills, in sight
of the ancient city on its livid cliff; then we turned into a gentler
country, through woods starred with primroses, with a flash of streams
in the hollows; and presently a murmur of church-bells reached us
through the woodland silence. At the same moment we caught sight of a
brick campanile rising above the trees on a slope just ahead of us, and
our carriage turned from the high-road up a lane with scattered chapels
showing their white façades through the foliage. This lane, making a
sudden twist, descended abruptly between mossy banks and brought us out
on a grass-plot before a rectangular monastic building adjoining the
church of which the bells had welcomed us. Here was San Vivaldo, and
the chapels we had passed doubtless concealed beneath their cupolas
“more neat than solemn” the terra-cottas of which we were in search.