I too have crossed the Alps, and Hannibal himself had no such baggage of
dreams and memories, such fife-and-drum of lyrics, such horns of ivory,
such emblazoned standards and streamered gonfalons, flying and
fluttering, such phalanxes of heroes, such visions of cities to spoil
and riches to rifle—palace and temple, bust and picture, tapestry and
mosaic. My elephants too matched his; my herds of mediæval histories,
grotesque as his gargoyled beasts. Nor without fire and vinegar have I
pierced my passage to these green pastures. “_Ave Italia, regina
terrarum!_” I cried, as I kissed the hem of thy blue robe, starred with
white cities.
There are who approach Italy by other portals, but these be the true
gates of heaven, these purple peaks snow-flashing as they touch the
stainless sky; scarred and riven with ancient fires, and young with jets
of living water. Nature’s greatness prepares the heart for man’s glory.
I too have crossed the Rubicon, and Cæsar gathered no such booty. Gold
and marble and sardonyx, lapis-lazuli, agate and alabaster, porphyry,
jasper and bronze, these were the least of my spoils. I plucked at the
mystery of the storied land and fulfilled my eyes of its loveliness and
colour. I have seen the radiant raggedness of Naples as I squeezed in
the squirming, wriggling ant-heap; at Paestum I have companied the
lizard in the forsaken Temple of Poseidon. (O the soaring Pagan pillars,
divinely Doric!) I have stood by the Leaning Tower in Bologna that gave
a simile to Dante; and by the long low wall of Padua’s university,
whence Portia borrowed her learned plumes, I have stayed to scan a
placarded sonnet to a Doctor of Philology; I have walked along that
delectable Riviera di Levante and left a footprint on those wind-swept
sands where Shelley’s mortal elements found their fit resolution in
flame. I have lain under Boccaccio’s olives, and caressed with my eye
the curve of the distant Duomo and the winding silver of the Arno.
Florence has shown me supreme earth-beauty, Venice supreme water-beauty,
and I have worshipped Capri and Amalfi, offspring of the love-marriage
of earth and water.
O sacredness of sky and sun! Receive me, ye priests of Apollo. I am for
lustrations and white robes, that I may kneel in the dawn to the
Sun-God. Let me wind in the procession through the olive groves. For
what choking Christian cities have we exchanged the lucid Pagan
hill-towns? Behold the idolatrous smoke rising to Mammon from the
factory altars of Christendom. We have sacrificed our glad sense of the
world-miracle to worldly miracles of loaves and fishes. Grasping after
the unseen, we have lost the divinity of the seen. Ah me! shall we ever
recapture that first lyric rapture?
O consecration of the purifying dawn, O flame on the eastern altar, what
cathedral rose-window can replace thee? O trill of the lark, soaring
sunward, O swaying of May boughs and opening of flower chalices, what
tinkling of bells and swinging of censers can bring us nearer the divine
mystery? What are our liturgies but borrowed emotions, grown cold in the
passing and staled by use—an anthology for apes!
But I wrong the ape. Did not an Afric explorer—with more insight than
most, albeit a woman—tell me how even an ape in the great virgin
forests will express by solemn capers some sense of the glory and
freshness of the morning, his glimmering reason struggling towards
spiritual consciousness, and moving him to dance his wonder and
adoration? Even so the Greek danced his way to religion and the drama.
Alas for the ape’s degenerate cousin, the townsman shot to business
through a tube!
I grant him that the shortest distance between two points is a straight
line, yet ’tis with the curve that beauty commences. Your crow is the
scientific flier, and a dismal bird it is. Who would demand an austere,
unbending route ’twixt Sorrento and Amalfi instead of the white road
that winds and winds round that great amphitheatre of hills, doubling on
itself as in a mountain duet, and circumvoluting again and yet again,
till the intertangled melody of peaks becomes a great choral burst, and
all the hills sing as in the Psalmist, crag answering crag! Do you grow
impatient when chines yawn at your feet and to skirt them the road turns
inland half a mile, bringing you back on the other side of the chasm, as
to your mere starting-point? Do you crave for an iron-trestled American
bridge to span the gap? Nay; science is the shortest distance between
two points, but beauty, like art, is long.
What is this haste to arrive? Give me to walk and walk those high paths
hung ’twixt mountain and sea: the green wild grass, with its dots of
daisy and dandelion; cactus and asphodel overhanging from the
mountain-side, figs, olives, vines, sloping in terraced patches to the
sea, which through bronze leafy tunnels shows blue and sparkling at the
base of contorted cliffs. A woman’s singing comes up from the green and
grey tangle of gnarled trunks, and mingles with the sweet piping of the
birds. A brown man moves amid the furrows. A sybil issues from a pass,
leaning on her staff, driving a pair of goats, her head swathed in a
great white handkerchief. I see that the Italian painters have copied
their native landscape as well as their fellow men and women, though
they pictured Palestine or Hellas or the land of faery. Not from inner
fancy did Dosso Dossi create that glamorous background for his Circe.
That sunny enchantment, that redolence of mediæval romaunt, exhales from
many a haunting spot in these castled crags. Not from mere technical
ingenuity did the artists of the Annunciation and other sacred indoor
subjects introduce in their composition the spaces of the outer world
shining through doors or windows or marble porticoes, vistas of earthly
loveliness fusing with the holy beauty. Geology is here the handmaiden
of Art and Theology. The painters found these effects to hand, springing
from the structure of cities set upon ridges, as in a humble smithy of
Siena whose entrance is in a street, but whose back, giving upon a sheer
precipice, admits the wide purpureal landscape; or in that church in
Perugia, dominating the Umbrian valley, where the gloom of the Old
Masters in the dim chapel is suddenly broken by the sunlit spaciousness
of an older Master, framed in a little window. Do you wonder that the
Perugian Pintoricchio would not let his St. Jerome preach to a mere
crowded interior, or that the Umbrian school is from the first alive to
the spirit of space? Such pictures Italy makes for us not only from
interiors, but from wayside peep-holes, from clefts in the rock or gaps
in the greenery. The country, dark with cypresses or gleaming with domes
and campaniles, everywhere composes itself into a beautiful harmony; one
needs not eye-points of vantage. The peep-hole simply fixes one’s point
of view, frames the scene in one’s horizon of vision, and suggests by
its enhancement of Nature the true task of Art in unifying a sprawling
chaos of phenomena. And if to disengage the charm of space, Raphael and
Perugino and Francia and even Mariotto Albertinelli make such noble use
of the arch, was it not that its lovely limitation and definition of the
landscape had from early Roman antiquity been revealed by Architecture?
Arches and perspectives of arches, cloisters and colonnades, were
weaving a rhythm of space round the artists in their daily walks. Where
Nature was beautiful and Art was second Nature, the poets in paint were
made as well as born.
Paradox-mongers have exalted Art above Nature, yet what pen or brush
could reproduce Amalfi—that vibrant atmosphere, that shimmer and
flicker of clouds, sunshine, and water; the ruined tower on the spit,
the low white town, the crescent hills beyond, the blue sky bending over
all as over a great glimmering cup? Beethoven, who wrote always with
visual images in his mind, might have rendered it in another art,
transposing it into the key of music; for is not beauty as mutable as
energy, and what were the music of the spheres but the translation of
their shining infinitude?
Truer indeed such translation into singing sound than into the
cacophonies of speech, particularly of scientific speech.
I saw a great angel’s wing floating over Rimini, its swan-like feathers
spread with airy grace across the blue—but I must call it cirrus
clouds, forsooth—ruffling themselves on a firmament of illusion. We
name a thing and lo! its wonder flies, as in those profound myths where
all goes well till scientific curiosity comes to mar happiness. Psyche
turns the light on Cupid, Elsa must know Lohengrin’s name. With what
subtle instinct the Hebrew refused to pronounce the name of his deity! A
name persuades that the unseizable is seized, that leviathan is drawn
out with a hook. “Who is this that darkeneth counsel by words without
knowledge?” Primitive man projected his soul into trees and
stones—animism the wise it call—but we would project into man the
soullessness of stones and trees. Finding no soul in Nature, we would
rob even man of his, desperately disintegrating it back to mechanic
atoms. The savage lifted Nature up to himself; we would degrade
ourselves to Nature. For scientific examination read unscientific
ex-animation. And now ’tis the rare poet and artist for whom river and
tree incarnate themselves in nymphs and dryads. Your Böcklin painfully
designs the figures once created by the painless mythopoiesis of the
race; your Kipling strives to breathe back life into ships and engines.
As philosophy is but common sense by a more circuitous route, so may Art
be self-conscious savagery. And herein lies perhaps the true inwardness
of the Psyche legend. The soul exchanges the joys of _naïveté_ for the
travails of self-consciousness, but in the end wins back its simple
happiness, more stably founded. Yet, so read, the myth needs the
supplement of an even earlier phase—it might well have occupied a
spandrel at least in those delicious decorations for the ceiling of the
Villa Farnesina that Raphael drew from the fable of Apuleius—in which
Psyche, innocent of the corporeal Cupid, should dream of Amor. For me at
least the ecstasy of vision has never equalled the enchantment of the
visionary. O palm and citron, piously waved and rustled by my father at
the Feast of Tabernacles, you brought to my grey garret the whisper and
aroma of the sun-land. (Prate not of your Europes and Asias; these be no
true geographic cuts; there is but a sun-life and an ice-life, and the
grey life of the neutral zones.) But the solidities cannot vie with the
airy fantasies. Where is the magic morning-freshness that lay upon the
dream-city? Dawn cannot bring it, though it lay its consecrating gold
upon the still lagoons of a sea-city, or upon the flower-stones of a
Doge’s palace. Poets who have sung best of soils and women have not
always known them: the pine has dreamed of the palm, and the palm of the
pine.
“Heard melodies are sweet, but those unheard . . .” Ah, those unheard!
Were it not better done—as poets use—never to sport with Beatrice in
the shade, nor with the tangles of loved Laura’s hair? Shall Don Quixote
learn that Dulcinea del Toboso is but a good, likely country lass? I
would not marry the sea with a ring, no, not for all the gold and purple
of the Bucentaur. What should a Doge of dreams be doing in that galley?
To wed the sea—and know its mystery but petulance, its unfathomed caves
only the haunt of crude polypi; no mermaids, no wild witchery, and
pearls but a disease of the oyster!
Mayhap I had been wiser to keep my Italian castles in Spain than to
render myself obnoxious to the penalties of the actual. Rapacity,
beggary, superstition, hover over the loveliness of the land like the
harpies and evil embodiments in Ambrogio Lorenzetti’s homely _Allegory
of Bad Government_ in the Sala della Pace of Siena. To-day that
fourteenth-century cartoonist would have found many a new episode for
his frescoed morality-play, whereof the ground-plot would run: how, to
be a Great Power with martial pride of place, Italy sacrifices the
substance. Incalculably rich in art, her every village church bursting
with masterpieces beyond the means of millionaires, she hugs her
treasures to her ragged bosom with one skinny hand, the other extended
for alms. Adorable Brother Francis of Assisi, with thy preachment of
“holy poverty,” didst thou never suspect there could be an unholy
poverty? ’Tis parlous, this beatitude of beggary. More bandits bask at
thy shrine than at almost any other spot in Christendom. Where the
pilgrims are, there the paupers are gathered together; there must be
rich prey in those frenzied devotees who crawl up thy chapel, licking
its rough stones smooth. Thou hadst no need of food: if two small loaves
were provided for thy forty days’ Lent in that island in the Lake of
Perugia, one and a half remained uneaten; and even if half a loaf seemed
better to thee than no bread, ’twas merely because the few mouthfuls
chased far from thee the venom of a vainglorious copy of thy Master.
Perchance ’tis from some such humility the beggars of Assisi abstain
from a too emulous copy of thee. Thou didst convert thy brother, the
fierce wolf of Agobio, and give the countryside peace, but what of this
pack of wolves thou hast loosed—in sheep’s clothing! With what joy did
I see in a church at Verona an old barefoot, naked-kneed beggar, who was
crouching against a pillar, turn into marble!
Or shall we figure Italia’s beggars as her mosquitos, inevitable
accompaniment of her beauties? The mosquito-mendicant, come he as
cripple or cicerone, buzzes ever in one’s ears, foe to meditation and
enkindlement. Figure me seeking refuge in a Palazzo of once imperial
Genoa; treading pensively the chambers of Youth and Life, the Arts, and
the Four Seasons, through which duchesses and marchese had trailed
silken skirts. With gaze uplifted at the painted ceilings, I ponder on
that magnificence of the world and the flesh which the Church could not
wither—nay, which found consummate expression in the Pope’s own church
in St. Peter’s, where the baldachino of twinkling lights supplies the
one touch of religious poetry. I pass into the quiet library and am
received by the venerable custodian, a Dr. Faustus in black skull-cap
and white beard. He does the honours of his learned office, brings me
precious Aldines. Behold this tome of antique poetry, silver-typed—a
“limited edition,” twenty-four copies made for the great families. He
gloats with me over Ovid’s “Metamorphoses”; over the fantasy of the
title-page, the vignettes of nymphs and flowers, the spacious folio
pages. Here is Homer in eight languages. My heart goes out to the
scholarly figure as we bend over the parallel columns, bookworms both. I
envy the gentle Friar of Letters his seclusion and his treasures. He
lugs out a mediæval French manuscript, a poem on summer—“Saison aussi
utile que belle,” he adds unexpectedly. We discourse on manuscripts: of
the third-century Virgil at Florence and its one missing leaf in the
Vatican; how French manuscripts may be found as early as the tenth
century, while the Italian scarcely precede Dante, and demonstrate his
creation of the language. We laud the Benedictines for their loving
labour in multiplying texts—he is wrought up to produce the apple of
his eye, an illuminated manuscript that had belonged to a princess. It
is bound in parchment, with golden clasps. “Figures de la Bible” I seem
to remember on its ornate title-page. I bend lovingly over the quaint
letters, I see the princess’s white hand turning the polychrome pages,
her lace sleeve ruffled exquisitely as in a Bronzino portrait. Suddenly
Dr. Faustus ejaculates in English: “Give me a drink!”
My princess fled almost with a shriek, and I came back to the sordid
Italy of to-day. Of to-day? Is not yesterday’s glamour equally
illusionary? But perhaps Genoa with her commercial genius is no typical
daughter of Italia. Did not Dante and the Tuscan proverb alike denounce
her? Does not to-day’s proverb say that it takes ten Jews to make one
Genoese? And yet it was Genoa that produced Mazzini and sped Garibaldi.
Would you wipe out this bookish memory by a better? Then picture the
library of a monastery, that looks out on the cypressed hills, whose
cloisters Sodoma and Signorelli frescoed with naïve legends of St.
Benedict and Satan. See under the long low ceiling, propped on the cool
white pillars, those niched rows of vellum bindings guarding the
leisurely Latin lore of the Fathers. Behold me meditating the missals
and pontificals, pageants in manuscript, broidered and illuminated, all
glorious with gold initials and ultramarine and vermilion miniatures; or
those folio processions of sacred music, each note pranked in its
bravery and stepping statelily amid garlands of blue and gold and the
hovering faces of angels; dreaming myself into that mystic peace of the
Church, till the vesper bell calls to paternosters and genuflexions, and
the great organ rolls out to drown this restless, anchorless century.
Now am I for nones and primes, for vigils and sackcloth, for breviaries
and holy obedience. In shady cloisters, mid faded frescoes, round sleepy
rose-gardens, I will pace to papal measures, while the serene sun-dial
registers the movement of the sun round the earth. Who speaks of a
religion as though it were dependent upon its theology? Dogmas are but
its outward show; inwardly and subtly it lives by its beauty, its
atmosphere, its inracination in life, and its creed is but a poor
attempt to put into words a thought too large for syllables, too elusive
for phrases. Language is a net that catches the fish and lets the ocean
stream through. Again that fallacy of the Name.
Beautiful I will call that service I saw at Bologna on Whitsun Sunday,
though you must dive deep to find the beauty. Not in S. Petronio itself
will you find it, in those bulbous pillars swathed in crimson damask,
though there is a touch of it in the vastness, the far altar, the remote
choir and surpliced priests on high, the great wax candle under the big
baldachino, the congregation lost in space. Nor will you easily
recognise it in the universal disorder, in that sense of a church parade
_within_ the church, in the _brouhaha_ that drowns the precentor’s
voice, in the penny chairs planted or stacked as the worshippers ebb or
flow, in the working men and their families sprawling over the
altar-steps, in the old women coifed in coloured handkerchiefs, with
baskets that hold bottles as well as prayer-books; not even in the
pretty women in Parisian hats, or the olive-skinned girls in snoods,
least of all in the child’s red balloon, soaring to the roof at the very
moment of the elevation of the Host, and followed with heavenward eyes
by half the congregation. And yet there is no blasphemy even in the
balloon; the child’s innocent pleasure in its toy is mixed with its
sense of holy festivity. There is no sharp contrast of sacred and
secular. The church does not end with its portals; it extends into the
great piazza. Nor do the crowds squatting on its steps in the sun, and
seething in the square it dominates, feel themselves outside the
service. The very pigeons seem to flutter with a sense of sacred
holiday, as though they had just listened to the sermon of their big
brother, St. Francis. The Church, like the radiant blue sky, is over
all. And this is the genius of Catholicism.
Not without significance are those thirteenth-century legends in which
even the birds and the fishes were brought into the fold universal, as
into a spiritual Noah’s Ark, all equally in need of salvation. Some of
the Apostles themselves were mere fishers, spreading no metaphoric net.
What an evolution to St. Antony, who wins the finny tribes to reverence
and dismisses them with the divine blessing! Even the horses are blessed
in Rome on St. Antony’s Day, or in his name at Siena before the great
race for the Palio, each runner sprinkled in the church of its ward.
To think that missionaries go forth to preach verbal propositions
violently torn from the life and the historic enchainment and the art
and the atmosphere! If they would but stay at home and reform the words,
which must ever change, so as to preserve the beauty, which must never
die! For words must change, if only to counterbalance their own
mutations and colourings, their declines and falls. They are no secure
envelope for immortal truths: I would as lief embody my fortunes in a
paper currency. Let the religion of the future be writ only in
music—Palestrina’s or Allegri’s, Bach’s or Wagner’s, as you will—so
that no heresies can spring from verbal juggles, distorted texts, or
legal quibbles. And yet—would the harmony be unbroken? What quarrels
over misprinted sharps and naturals! How the doctors of music would
disagree on the _tempo_ and the phrasing and burn and excommunicate for
a dotted semibreve! What Church Councils—the pianissimo party versus
the fortissimo, legato legions and staccato squadrons, the Holy Wars of
Harmony—all Christian history _da capo_!
I like that gracious tolerance of humanism you find in some Renaissance
pictures, those composite portraits of ideas, in which Pagan and
Christian types and periods mingle in the higher synthesis of
conception—or perhaps even in a happy inconsistence of dual belief.
Raphael could not represent the conflagration in the Borgo that was
extinguished by papal miracle without consecrating a corner of his work
to the piety of Æneas, carrying Anchises on his back in a parallel
moment of peril. Raphael’s work is, in fact, almost a series of
illustrations of the Sposalizio of Hebraism and Hellenism. That library
of Julius II in the Vatican may stand as the scene of their union.
Beyond the true Catholicism of its immortal frescoes humanism cannot go.
If the _Theology_ is mainly confined to Biblical concepts and figures,
it is supplemented by Perino del Vaga’s picture of the Cumæan Sybil
showing the Madonna to Augustus, which is at least a dovetailing of the
divided worlds and eras. And if to explain the parity of Sybils with
prophets in the designs of Michelangelo you call in those Fathers of the
Church who found Christology in the old Sybilline leaves and have
coupled David and the Sybil in the Catholic funeral service, you must
admit a less dubious largeness in Raphael’s cartoons for the dome
mosaics in the Cappella Chigi of Santa Maria del Popolo; for to group
the gods of Hellas round the Creator and His angels, even by an
astronomic device involving their names for the planets, shows a mood
very far removed from that of the Christians who went to the lions in
this very Rome. (The consistent Christian mood is seen in the Quaker’s
avoidance of the heathen names of our days and months, mere bald
numeration replacing the Norse and Roman divinities.) Moreover,
Raphael’s _Parnassus_ is almost wholly to the glory of ancient Greece
and Rome. It is Dante and Petrarch who are honoured by neighbouring
Homer and Virgil. It is the violin that is glorified by Apollo’s playing
upon it. Anachronism if you will. But Art may choose to see history _sub
specie æternitatis_, and surely in Plato’s heaven rests the archetypal
violin, to which your Stradivarius or Guarnerius is a banjo.
Nor has antiquity ever received a nobler tribute than in _The School of
Athens_, that congregation of Pagan philosophers to which the Dukes of
Urbino and Mantua repair, to which Raphael himself brings his teacher,
while Bramante, builder of St. Peter’s, is proud to adorn the train of
Aristotle. See, too, under the ceiling-painting of _Justice_, how Moses
bringing the tables of the Law to the Israelites is supplemented by
Justinian giving the Pandects to Tritonian. Thus is Justice more subtly
illustrated than perhaps the painter consciously designed. How
finely—if even more paradoxically—this temper repeats itself later in
the English Puritan and Italian sonneteer, Milton, whose “Lycidas”
vibrates ’twixt the Classic and the Christian, and whose very epic of
Hebraism is saturated with catholic allusiveness, and embraces that
stately panegyric of
“Athens, the eye of Greece, mother of arts
And eloquence.”
Why, indeed, quarrel over religions when all men agree; all men, that
is, at the same grade of intellect! The learned busy themselves
classifying religions—there are reviews at Paris and Tübingen—but in
the crude working world religion depends less on the belief than on the
believer. All the simplest minds believe alike, be they Confucians or
Christians, Jews or Fantees. The elemental human heart will have its
thaumaturgic saints, its mapped hells, its processional priests, its
prompt answers to prayer, and if deprived of them will be found subtly
to reintroduce them. Mohammed and the Koran forbade the worship of
saints, yet the miracles and mediations of the _walis_ and the
pilgrimages to their tombs—with Mohammed himself as arch-_wali_—are
inseparable from Islam. The Buddha who came to teach a holy atheism was
made a god, the proclaimer of natural law a miracle-monger, his
revolution turned into a revolution of prayer-wheels and his religion
into the High Church Romanism of Lamaism. The Hebrew Torah which cried
anathema on idols became itself an idol, swathed in purple, adorned with
golden bells, and borne round like a Madonna for reverent kisses. The
Madonna herself, overgrown with the roses of a wayside shrine,
perpetuates the worship of Flora. On the very gates of St. Peter’s,
Europa, Ganymede, and Leda show their brazen faces. Not Confucius nor
Christ can really expel devils. What grosser idolatry than the worship
of those dressed wax dolls which make many an Italian church like a
theological Madame Tussaud’s! The Church has its Chamber of Horrors too,
its blood and nails and saintly skulls; the worship of Moloch was not
more essentially morbid. At the base of the intellectual mountain
flourishes rank and gorgeous vegetation, a tropic luxuriance; higher up,
in the zone of mediocrity, there are cultivated temperate slopes and
pruned gardens, pleasant pastures and ordered bowers; at the snowy
summits, in the rarefied æther, flash white the glacial impersonal
truths, barely a tuft of moss or lichen. Hark! peak is crying unto peak:
“Thy will be done.”
But what is this new voice—comes it from the mole-hills?—“_Our_ will
be done.” See—in the mask of the highest Christianity and science—the
old thaumaturgy creeping in, though now every man is his own saint,
healing his own diseases, denying death with a Podsnappian wave o’ the
hand. O my friends, get ye to the Eternal City—that canvas for the
flying panorama of races and creeds—and peep into a coffin in the
Capitoline Museum, and see the skeleton of the Etruscan girl, with rings
glittering on her bony fingers, and bracelets on her fleshless wrists,
and her doll at her side, in ironic preservation, its blooming cheeks
and sparkling eyes mocking the eyeless occiput of its mistress. Even so
shall your hugged treatises and your glittering gospels show among your
bones. Do you not know that death is the very condition of life—bound
up with it as darkness with light? How trivial the thought that sees
death but in the cemetery! ’Tis not only the grave that parts us from
our comrades and lovers; we lose them on the way. Lose them not only by
quarrel and estrangement, but by evolution and retrogression. They
broaden or narrow away from us, and we from them; they are changed,
other, transformed, dead and risen again. Woe for the orphans of living
parents, the widowers of undeceased wives! Our early Ego dies by inches,
till, like the perpetually darned sock, it retains nothing but the
original mould and shaping. Let us read the verse more profoundly: “In
the midst of life we are in death.” Whoever dies in the full tilt of his
ambitions is buried alive, and whoever survives his hopes and fears is
dead, unburied. Death for us is all we have missed, all the periods and
planets we have not lived in, all the countries we have not visited, all
the books we have not read, all the emotions and experiences we have not
had, all the prayers we have not prayed, all the battles we have not
fought. Every restriction, every negation, is a piece of death. Not
wholly has popular idiom ignored this truth. “Dead to higher things,” it
says; but we may be dead too to the higher mathematics. Death for the
individual is the whole universe outside his consciousness, and life but
the tiny blinking light of consciousness. But between the light and the
dark is perpetual interplay, and we turn dark to light and let light
subside to dark as our thoughts and feelings veer this way or that.
And since ’tis complexity of consciousness that counts, and the death of
the amœba or the unborn babe is less a decomposition than the death of a
man, so is the death of a philosopher vaster than the death of a
peasant. We have but one word for the drying up of an ocean and the
drying up of a pool. And the sediment, the clay that we bury, wherefore
do we still label it with the living name? As if Cæsar might truly stop
a bung-hole! Mark Antony might come to praise Cæsar; he could not bury
him.
Here lies Mazzini forsooth! As if that spirit of white fire could rest
even on the farthest verge of thee, O abominable Campo Santo of Genoa,
with thy central rotunda pillared with black marble, thy spires and
Grecian buildings, thy Oriental magnificence, redeemed only by the
natural hills in which thou nestlest. Are our ashes indeed so grandiose
and spectacular a thing? Or art thou a new terror added to death? From
thy haughty terrace—whereon Death himself in black marble fights with a
desperate woman—I have gazed down upon thy four parallelograms, bounded
by cypresses and starred with great daisies, that seen nearer are white
crosses, and a simple _contadina_ lighting the lamp for her beloved dead
alone softens the scene. O the endless statuary of the gallery, the
arcades of slabs and reliefs, the faded wreaths, or those drearier beads
that never fade!—I could pray to the Madonna whose blue and gold halo
shines over thy dead to send a baby earthquake to swallow thee up.
Away with these cemeteries of stone, this frigid pomp of death, that
clings on to life even while spouting texts of resignation! Who cares
for these parish chronicles, these parallelograms of good people that
lived and fell on sleep, these worthy citizens and fond spouses. Horrid
is that clasp of intertwined hands. I could chop at those fingers with
an axe. ’Tis indecent, this graveyard flirtation. Respect your privacy,
good skeletons! Ye too, couples of the Etruscan catacombs, who dash our
spirits from your urns, to what end your graven images outside your
incinerated relics? Not in marmoreal mausolea, nor in railed-off tombs,
with knights and dames couchant, not in Medici chapels nor in the florid
monuments of Venetian Doges, not in the columbaria of the Via Appia nor
in the Gothic street-tombs of the Scaliger princes, resides death’s true
dignity—they are the vain apery of life—but in some stoneless,
flowerless grave where only the humped earth tells that here lies the
husk of one gathered into the vastness of oblivion.
There are times when one grows impatient for death. There is a sweetness
in being gathered to one’s fathers. The very phrase is restful. Dying
sounds more active; it recalls doing, and one is so tired of doing. But
to be culled softly, to be sucked up—the very vapour of the
Apostle—how balmily passive: to be wafted into the quiet Past, which
robs even fame of its sting, and wherein lie marshalled and sorted and
ticketed and dated, in stately dictionaries and monumental
encyclopædias, all those noisy poets, painters, warriors, all neatly
classified and silent. And the sweet silence of the grave allures even
after the bitter silence of life; after the silent endurance that is our
one reply to the insolence of facts. And in these delicate, seductive
moments, half longing, half acquiescence, the air is tremulous with
tender, crooning phrases, with gentle, wistful melodies, the hush-a-bye
of the earth-mother drawing us softly to her breast.
But an you will not acquiesce in simple earth-to-earth, I commend you to
the Greek sarcophagi you may see in the Naples Museum. There you will
find no smirking sentiment, no skull and cross-bones—ensign of Pirate
Death—but the very joy of life, ay, even a Bacchanalian gladness. I
recall a radiant procession, Cupids riding centaurs and lions and
playing on lyres, mortals driving chariots and blowing trumpets, or
dancing along, arms round one another’s necks.
“What pipes and timbrels? What wild ecstasy?”
Bury me in an old Greek sarcophagus, or let me fade into the anonymous
grass.
FANTASIA NAPOLITANA: BEING A REVERIE OF AQUARIUMS, MUSEUMS, AND DEAD
CHRISTS
I
Of all the excursions I made from Naples—renowned headquarters for
excursions—none led me through more elemental highways than that which
started from the Aquarium, at a fee of two lire. Doubtless the Aquarium
of Naples exists for men of science, but men of art may well imagine it
has been designed as a noble poem in colour. Such chromatic splendours,
such wondrous greens and browns and reds, subtly not the colour scale of
earth, for over all a mystic translucence, a cool suffusion, every hue
suffering “a sea change into something rich and strange”! And the form
of all these sea-creatures and sea-flowers so graceful, so grotesque, so
manifold! “Nature’s plastic hand,” as Dante hath it, works deftly in
water. It leaps to the eye that Art has invented scarcely anything, that
the art of design in particular is a vast plagiarism. Here be your
carpets and your wall-patterns, your frosted glass and your pottery.
What Persian rug excels yon lamprey’s skin? My mind goes back to a great
craftsman’s studio, stacked with brilliant beetles and
dragon-flies—Nature’s feats of bravura—to eke out his inventions. Even
the dressmaker, I remember, is the greatest client of the butterfly-net
in her quest for delicious colour-blendings. Yet with how few root-ideas
Nature has worked; the infinitude of her combinations is purely an
affair of arrangement, complicated with secondary qualities of size and
colour. Conscious life even at its most complex is a function of four
variables: a food apparatus, a breathing apparatus, a circulating
apparatus, and a nerve apparatus. With what inimitable ingenuity Nature
has rung the changes on these four factors! Her problem has affinities
with the task of the inventors of typewriters, who, having to produce
the same collision of inked type with blank paper, have found so many
ways of achieving it that their machines resemble highly organised
creatures of curious conformation, one having no resemblance to another.
Some are annular and some are cubical, some have wheels of letters, some
have letters that fly singly. ’Tis scarcely credible that they all do
the same work. Are not animals machines? said Descartes. But I ask, Are
not machines animals? A vision surges up of Venice at night—out of the
darkness of the Grand Canal comes throbbing a creature of the Naples
Aquarium—all scattered blobs of flame, cohering through a spidery
framework. Through the still, dark water it glides, under the still,
starry sky, with San Giorgio for solemn background, and only from the
voices of Venetians singing as they float past—an impassioned, sad
memory, a trilled and fluted song—could one divine behind the fiery
sea-dragon the mere steam-launch. Between the laws that fashioned
steamboats and those that fashioned the animate world there is no
essential difference. The steamboat is not even inanimate, for at the
back of it burrows man like a nautilus in its shell, and his living will
has had to fight with the same shaping forces as those which mould the
entities of the water. The saurian age of the steamboat was the uncouth
hollowed trunk, and by slow, patient evolutions and infinite tackings to
meet winds and tides, it has come to this graceful, gliding creature
that skims in the teeth of the tempest. Denied the mastery of water, man
adds a floating form to his own; forbidden the sky, he projects from
himself a monstrous aery sac or winged engine; condemned to crawl the
earth, he supplements his nerves with an electric motor apparatus. Thus
endlessly transformed, Man the Prometheus is also Man the Proteus. Dante
praised Nature for having ceased to frame monsters, save the whale and
the elephant; he did not remark that Man had continued her work on a
substratum of himself.
The forms of the typewriters are even more clearly conditioned by the
struggle for life. The early patents are the creatures in possession,
and to develop a new type without infringing on their pastures, and
risking their claws, a machine is driven into ever-odder contrivances,
like creatures that can only exist in an over-crowded _milieu_ by
wriggling into some curious shape and filling some forgotten niche. The
lust of life that runs through Nature transforms the very dust to a
creeping palpitation, fills every leaf and drop of water with
pullulating populations. ’Tis an eternal exuberance, a riotous
extravagance, an ecstasy of creation. Great is Diana of the Ephesians,
for this Diana, as you may see her figured in the Naples Museum, black
but comely, is a goddess of many breasts, a teeming mother of
generations, the swart, sun-kissed Natura Nutrix, who ranges recklessly
from man to the guinea-pig, from the earwig to the giraffe, from the
ostrich to the tortoise, from the butterfly to the lizard, from the
glued barnacle timidly extending its tentacles when the tide washes food
towards its rock, to the ravenous shark darting fiercely through the
waters and seizing even man in its iron jaws. Yet they are at best mere
variations on the primal theme of heart, brain, lungs, and stomach, now
with enchanting grace as in the gazelle, now with barbaric splendour as
in the peacock, now with a touch of grotesque genius as in the
porcupine. And directly or indirectly all of them pass into one
another—in the most literal of senses—as they range the mutual larder
of the globe.
’Tis well to remember sometimes that this globe is not obviously
constructed for man, since only one-fourth of it is even land, and that
in a census of the planet, which nobody has ever thought of taking,
man’s poor thousand millions would be out-numbered by the mere
ant-hills. And since the preponderating interests numerically of this
sphere of ours are piscine, and in a truly democratic world a Fish
President would reign, elected by the vast majority of voters, and we
should all be bowing down to Dagon, the Aquarium acquires an added
dignity, and I gaze with fresh eyes at the lustrous emerald tanks.
Ah, here is indeed a Fish President, the shell-fish that presided over
the world’s destinies; the little murex that was the source of the
greatness of Tyre, and the weaver of its purpureal robes of empire.
Hence the Phœnician commerce, Carthage, the Punic Wars, and the alphabet
in which I write.
Not only is colour softened by a sea change, but in this cool, glooming,
and glittering world the earth-creatures seem to have been sucked down
and transformed into water-creatures. There are flowers and twigs and
green waving grass that seem earth-flowers and twigs and grass
transposed into the key of water.
Only, these flowers and grasses are animal, these coralline twigs are
conscious; as if water, emulous of the creations of earth and air,
strove after their loveliness of curve and line, or as if the mermaidens
coveted them for their gardens. And there are gemmed fishes, as though
the mines of Ind had their counterpart in the forces producing these
living jewels. And there are bird-like fishes with feathery forms, that
one might expect to sing as they cleave the firmament of water: some
song less troubling than the Lorelei’s, with liquid gurgles and notes of
bubbling joy. And the sea, not content to be imitative, has added—over
and above its invention of the fish—to the great palpitation of life;
priestly forms, robed and cowled, silver-dusty pillars, half-shut
parasols. Even the common crab is an original; a homely grotesque with
no terraceous or aerial analogue, particularly as it floats in a happy
colour-harmony with a brown or red sponge on its back, a parasite
literally sponging upon it. But though you may look in vain for mermaid
or Lorelei, naiad or nymph, there is no reason in Nature why all that
poets feigned should not come into being. The water-babe might have been
as easily evolved as the earth-man, the hegemony of creation might have
been won by an aquatic creature with an accidental spurt of grey matter,
and the history of civilisation might have been writ in water. The
merman is a mere amphibian, not arrived. The gryphon and the centaur are
hybrids unborn. ’Tis just a fluke that these particular patterns of the
kaleidoscope have not been thrown. We may safely await evolutions. The
winged genius of the Romans, frequent enough on Pompeian frescoes, may
even be developed on this side of the skies, and we may fly with
sprouted wings and not merely with detachable. Puck and Ariel perchance
already frisk in some Patagonian forest, Caliban may be basking in
forgotten mud. Therefore, poets, trust yourself to life and the fulness
thereof. Whether you follow Nature’s combinations or precede them, you
may create fearlessly. From the _imitatio Naturæ_ you cannot escape,
whether you steal her combinations or her elements.
Shelley sings of “Death and his brother Sleep,” but gazing at this
mystic marine underworld of the Naples Aquarium, I would sing of Life
and his brother Sleep. For here are shown the strange beginnings of
things, half sleep, half waking: organisms rooted at one point like
flowers, yet groping out with tendrils towards life and
consciousness—the _not_ missing link between animal and vegetable life.
What feeling comes to trouble this mystic doze, stir this comatose
consciousness? The jelly-fish that seems a mere embodied pulse—a single
note replacing the quadruple chord of life—is yet a complex organism
compared with some that flit and flitter half invisibly in this green
universe of theirs: threads, insubstantialities, smoke spirals, shadowy
filaments on the threshold of existence, ghostly fibres, flashing films,
visible only by the beating of their white corpuscles. ’Tis reading the
Book of Genesis, verse by verse. And then suddenly a hitherto unseen
entity, the octopus, looses its sinuous suckers from the rock to which
its hue protectively assimilates—a Darwinian observation Lucian
anticipated in his “Dialogue of Proteus”—and unfolding itself in all
its manifold horror, steals upon its prey with swift, melodramatic
strides.
From the phantasmal polyzoa to these creatures of violent volition how
great the jump! _Natura non facit saltum_, forsooth! She is a veritable
kangaroo. From the unconscious to the conscious, from the conscious to
the self-conscious, from the self-conscious to the over-conscious,
there’s a jump at every stage, as between ice and water, water and
steam. Continuous as are her phases, a mysteriously new set of
conditions emerges with every crossed Rubicon. Dante, in making the
human embryo pass through the earlier genetic stages (“Purgatory,” Canto
XXV), seems curiously in harmony with modern thought, though he was but
reproducing Averroes.
But mankind has never forgotten its long siesta as a vegetable. Still
linked with the world of sleep through the mechanic processes of
nutrition, respiration, circulation, consciously alive only in his
higher centres, man tends ever to drowse back to the primal somnolence.
Moving along the lines of least resistance and largest comfort, he
steeps himself in the poppies of custom, drinks the mandragora of
ready-made morals, and sips the drowsy syrups of domesticity, till he
has nigh lapsed back to the automaton. But ever and anon through the
sluggish doze stirs the elemental dream, leaps the primeval fire, and
man is awake and astir and athrill for crusades, wars, martyrdoms,
revolutions, reformations, and back in his true biological genus.
Not only in man appears this contest of life and sleep: it runs through
the cosmos. There is a drag-back: the ebb of the flowing tide. How soon
the forsaken town returns to forest! Near the Roman Ghetto you may note
how the brickwork of the wall of the ancient Theatre of Marcellus has
relapsed to rock; man’s touch swallowed up in the mouldering ruggedness,
the houses at the base merely burrowed, the abodes of cave-dwellers.