61. I laid before you, in my last lecture, first lines of the chart of
Italian history in the thirteenth century, which I hope gradually to
fill with colour, and enrich, to such degree as may be sufficient for
all comfortable use. But I indicated, as the more special subject of our
immediate study, the nascent power of liberal thought, and liberal art,
over dead tradition and rude workmanship.
To-day I must ask you to examine in greater detail the exact relation of
this liberal art to the illiberal elements which surrounded it.
62. You do not often hear me use that word "Liberal" in any favourable
sense. I do so now, because I use it also in a very narrow and exact
sense. I mean that the thirteenth century is, in Italy's year of life,
her 17th of March. In the light of it, she assumes her toga virilis; and
it is sacred to her god Liber.
63. To her god _Liber_,--observe: not Dionusos, still less Bacchus, but
her own ancient and simple deity. And if you have read with some care
the statement I gave you, with Carlyle's help, of the moment and
manner of her change from savageness to dexterity, and from rudeness to
refinement of life, you will hear, familiar as the lines are to you, the
invocation in the first Georgic with a new sense of its meaning:--
"Vos, O clarissima mundi
Lumina, labentem coelo quae ducitis annum,
Liber, et alma Ceres; vestro si munere tellus
Chaoniam pingui glandem mutavit arista,
Poculaqu' inventis Acheloia miscuit uvis,
Munera vestra cano."
These gifts, innocent, rich, full of life, exquisitely beautiful in
order and grace of growth, I have thought best to symbolize to you,
in the series of types of the power of the Greek gods, placed in your
educational series, by the blossom of the wild strawberry; which in
rising from its trine cluster of trine leaves,--itself as beautiful as
a white rose, and always single on its stalk, like an ear of corn, yet
with a succeeding blossom at its side, and bearing a fruit which is as
distinctly a group of seeds as an ear of corn itself, and yet is the
pleasantest to taste of all the pleasant things prepared by nature
for the food of men, [1]--may accurately symbolize, and help you to
remember, the conditions of this liberal and delightful, yet entirely
modest and orderly, art, and thought.
[Footnote 1: I am sorry to pack my sentences together in this confused
way. But I have much to say; and cannot always stop to polish or adjust
it as I used to do.]
64. You will find in the fourth of my inaugural lectures, at the 98th
paragraph, this statement,--much denied by modern artists and authors,
but nevertheless quite unexceptionally true,--that the entire vitality
of art depends upon its having for object either to _state a true
thing_, or _adorn a serviceable one_. The two functions of art in Italy,
in this entirely liberal and virescent phase of it,--virgin art, we
may call it, retaining the most literal sense of the words virga and
virgo,--are to manifest the doctrines of a religion which now, for the
first time, men had soul enough to understand; and to adorn edifices
or dress, with which the completed politeness of daily life might be
invested, its convenience completed, and its decorous and honourable
pride satisfied.
65. That pride was, among the men who gave its character to the century,
in honourableness of private conduct, and useful magnificence of public
art. Not of private or domestic art: observe this very particularly.
"Such was the simplicity of private manners,"--(I am now quoting
Sismondi, but with the fullest ratification that my knowledge enables
me to give,)--"and the economy of the richest citizens, that if a city
enjoyed repose only for a few years, it doubled its revenues, and found
itself, in a sort, encumbered with its riches. The Pisans knew neither
of the luxury of the table, nor that of furniture, nor that of a number
of servants; yet they were sovereigns of the whole of Sardinia, Corsica,
and Elba, had colonies at St. Jean d'Acre and Constantinople, and their
merchants in those cities carried on the most extended commerce with the
Saracens and Greeks." [1]
[Footnote 1: Sismondi; French translation, Brussels, 1838; vol. ii., p.
275.]
66. "And in that time," (I now give you my own translation of Giovanni
Villani,) "the citizens of Florence lived sober, and on coarse meats,
and at little cost; and had many customs and playfulnesses which were
blunt and rude; and they dressed themselves and their wives with coarse
cloth; many wore merely skins, with no lining, and _all_ had only
leathern buskins; [1] and the Florentine ladies, plain shoes and
stockings with no ornaments; and the best of them were content with
a close gown of coarse scarlet of Cyprus, or camlet girded with an
old-fashioned clasp-girdle; and a mantle over all, lined with vaire,
with a hood above; and that, they threw over their heads. The women of
lower rank were dressed in the same manner, with coarse green Cambray
cloth; fifty pounds was the ordinary bride's dowry, and a hundred or
a hundred and fifty would in those times have been held brilliant,
('isfolgorata,' dazzling, with sense of dissipation or extravagance;)
and most maidens were twenty or more before they married. Of such gross
customs were then the Florentines; but of good faith, and loyal among
themselves and in their state; and in their coarse life, and poverty,
did more and braver things than are done in our days with more
refinement and riches."
[Footnote 1: I find this note for expansion on the margin of my lecture,
but had no time to work it out:--'This lower class should be either
barefoot, or have strong shoes--wooden clogs good. Pretty Boulogne
sabot with purple stockings. Waterloo Road--little girl with her hair
in curlpapers,--a coral necklace round her neck--the neck bare--and her
boots of thin stuff, worn out, with her toes coming through, and rags
hanging from her heels,--a profoundly accurate type of English national
and political life. Your hair in curlpapers--borrowing tongs from every
foreign nation, to pinch you into manners. The rich ostentatiously
wearing coral about the bare neck; and the poor--cold as the stones and
indecent.']