The Note-Books of Samuel Butler Part 51

After dinner I ordered a coffee; the landlord, who also had had his dinner, asked me to be good enough to defer it for another year and I a.s.sented. I then asked him which was the best inn at Segni. He replied that it did not matter, that when a man had quattrini one albergo was as good as another. I said, No; that more depended on what kind of blood was running about inside the albergatore than on how many quattrini the guest had in his pocket. He smiled and offered me a pinch of the most delicious snuff. His wife came and cleared the table, having done which she shed the water bottle over the floor to keep the dust down. I am sure she did it all to all the blessed G.o.ds that live in heaven, though she did not say so.

The Imperfect Lady

There was one at a country house in Sicily where I was staying. She had been lent to my host for change of air by his friend the marchese. She dined at table with us and we all liked her very much.

She was extremely pretty and not less amiable than pretty. In order to reach the dining-room we had to go through her bedroom as also through my host's. When the monsignore came, she dined with us just the same, and the old priest evidently did not mind at all. In Sicily they do not bring the scent of the incense across the dining- room table. And one would hardly expect the attempt to be made by people who use the oath "Santo Diavolo."

Siena and S. Gimignano

At Siena last spring, prowling round outside the cathedral, we saw an English ecclesiastic in a stringed, sub-shovel hat. He had a young lady with him, presumably a daughter or niece. He eyed us with much the same incurious curiosity as that with which we eyed him. We pa.s.sed them and went inside the duomo. How far less impressive is the interior (indeed I had almost said also the exterior) than that of San Domenico! Nothing palls so soon as over-ornamentation.

A few minutes afterwards my Lord and the young lady came in too. It was Sunday and ma.s.s was being celebrated. The pair pa.s.sed us and, when they reached the fringe of the kneeling folk, the bishop knelt down too on the bare floor, kneeling bolt upright from the knees, a few feet in front of where we stood. We saw him and I am sure he knew we were looking at him. The lady seemed to hesitate but, after a minute or so, she knuckled down by his side and we left them kneeling bolt upright from the knees on the hard floor.

I always cross myself and genuflect when I go into a Roman Catholic church, as a mark of respect, but Jones and Gogin say that any one can see I am not an old hand at it. How rudimentary is the action of an old priest! I saw one once at Venice in the dining-room of the Hotel la Luna who crossed himself by a rapid motion of his fork just before he began to eat, and Miss Bertha Thomas told me she saw an Italian lady at Varallo at the table-d'hote cross herself with her fan. I do not cross myself before eating nor do I think it inc.u.mbent upon me to kneel down on the hard floor in church--perhaps because I am not an English bishop. We were sorry for this one and for his young lady, but it was their own doing.

We then went into the Libreria to see the frescoes by Pinturicchio-- which we did not like--and spent some little time in attending to them. On leaving we were told to sign our names in a book and did so. As we were going out we met the bishop and his lady coming in; whether they had been kneeling all the time, or whether they had got up as soon we were gone and had spent the time in looking round I cannot say, but, when they had seen the frescoes, they would be told to sign their names and, when they signed, they would see ours and, I flatter myself, know who we were.

On returning to our hotel we were able to collect enough information to settle in our own minds which particular bishop he was.

A day or two later we went to Poggibonsi, which must have been an important place once; nothing but the walls remain now, the city within them having been razed by Charles V. At the station we took a carriage, and our driver, Ulisse Pogni, was a delightful person, second baritone at the Poggibonsi Opera and princ.i.p.al fly-owner of the town. He drove us up to S. Gimignano and told us that the people still hold the figures in Benozzo Gozzoli's frescoes to be portraits of themselves and say: "That's me," and "That's so and so."

Of course we went to see the frescoes, and as we were coming down the main street, from the Piazza on which the Municipio stands, who should be mounting the incline but our bishop and his lady. The moment he saw us, he looked cross, stood still and began inspecting the tops of the houses on the other side of the street; so also did the lady. There was nothing of the smallest interest in these and we neither of us had the smallest doubt that he was embarra.s.sed at meeting us and was pretending not to notice us. I have seldom seen any like attempt more clumsily and fatuously done. Whether he was saying to himself, "Good Lord! that wretch will be putting my kneeling down into another Alps and Sanctuaries or Ex Voto"; or whether it was only that we were a couple of blackguard atheists who contaminated the air all round us, I cannot tell; but on venturing to look back a second or two after we had pa.s.sed them, the bishop and the lady had got a considerable distance away.

As we returned our driver took us about 4 kilometres outside Poggibonsi to San Lucchese, a church of the 12th or 13th century, greatly decayed, but still very beautiful and containing a few naif frescoes. He told us he had sung the Sanctus here at the festa on the preceding Sunday. In a room adjoining the church, formerly, we were told, a refectory, there is a very good fresco representing the "Miraculous Draught of Fishes" by Gerino da Pistoja (I think, but one forgets these names at once unless one writes them down then and there). It is dated--I think (again!)--about 1509, betrays the influence of Perugino but is more lively and interesting than anything I know by that painter, for I cannot call him master. It is in good preservation and deserves to be better, though perhaps not very much better, known than it is. Our driver pointed out that the baskets in which the fishes are being collected are portraits of the baskets still in use in the neighbourhood.

After we had returned to London we found, in the Royal Academy Exhibition, a portrait of our bishop which, though not good, was quite good enough to a.s.sure us that we had not been mistaken as to his diocese.

The Etruscan Urns at Volterra

As regards the way in which the Etruscan artists kept to a few stock subjects, this has been so in all times and countries.

When Christianity convulsed the world and displaced the older mythology, she did but introduce new subjects of her own, to which her artists kept as closely as their pagan ancestors had kept to their heathen G.o.ds and G.o.ddesses. We now make believe to have freed ourselves from these trammels, but the departure is more apparent than real. Our works of art fall into a few well-marked groups and the pictures of each group, though differing in detail, present the same general characters. We have, however, broken much new ground, whereas until the last three or four hundred years it almost seems either as if artists had thought subject a detail beneath their notice, or publics had insisted on being told only what they knew already.

The principle of living only to see and to hear some new thing, and the other principle of avoiding everything with which we are not perfectly familiar are equally old, equally universal, equally useful. They are the principles of conservation and acc.u.mulation on the one hand, and of adventure, speculation and progress on the other, each equally indispensable. The money has been, and will probably always be more persistently in the hands of the first of these two groups. But, after all, is not money an art? Nay, is it not the most difficult on earth and the parent of all? And if life is short and art long, is not money still longer? And are not works of art, for the most part, more or less works of money also? In so far as a work of art is a work of money, it must not complain of being bound by the laws of money; in so far as it is a work of art, it has nothing to do with money and, again, cannot complain.

It is a great help to the spectator to know the subject of a picture and not to be bothered with having to find out all about the story.

Subjects should be such as either tell their own story instantly on the face of them, or things with which all spectators may be supposed familiar. It must not be forgotten that a work exposed to public view is addressed to a great many people and should accordingly consider many people rather than one. I saw an English family not long since looking at a fine collection of the coins of all nations.

They hardly pretended even to take a languid interest in the French, German, Dutch and Italian coins, but brightened up at once on being shown a s.h.i.+lling, a florin and a half-crown. So children do not want new stories; they look for old ones.

"Mamma dear, will you please tell us the story of 'The Three Bears'?"

"No, my love, not to-day, I have told it you very often lately and I am busy."

"Very well, Mamma dear, then we will tell you the story of 'The Three Bears.'"

The Iliad and the Odyssey are only "The Three Bears" upon a larger scale. Just as the life of a man is only the fission of two amoebas on a larger scale. Cui non dictus Hylas puer et Latonia Delos? That was no argument against telling it again, but rather for repeating it. So people look out in the newspapers for what they know rather than for what they do not know, and the better they know it the more interested they are to see it in print and, as a general rule, unless they get what they expect--or think they know already--they are angry. This tendency of our nature culminates in the well-known lines repeated for ever and ever:

The battle of the Nile I was there all the while; I was there all the while At the battle of the Nile.

The battle of . . .

And so on ad lib. Even this will please very young children. As they grow older they want to hear about nothing but "The Three Bears." As they mature still further they want the greater invention and freer play of fancy manifested by such people as Homer and our west-end upholsterers, beyond which there is no liberty, but only eccentricity and extravagance.

So it is with all fas.h.i.+on. Fas.h.i.+ons change, but not radically except after convulsion and, even then, the change is more apparent than real, the older fas.h.i.+ons continually coming back as new ones.

So it is not only as regards choice of subject but also as regards treatment of subject within the limits of the work itself, after the subject is chosen. No matter whether the utterance of a man's inner mind is attempted by way of words, painting, or music, the same principle underlies all these three arts and, of course, also those arts that are akin to them. In each case a man should have but one subject easily recognisable as the main motive, and in each case he must develop, treat and ill.u.s.trate this by means of episodes and details that are neither so alien to the subject as to appear lugged in by the heels, nor yet so germane to it as to be identical. The treatment grows out of the subject as the family from the parents and the race from the family--each new-born member being the same and yet not the same with those that have preceded him. So it is with all the arts and all the sciences--they flourish best by the addition of but little new at a time in comparison with the old.

And so, lastly, it is with the ars artium itself, that art of arts and science of sciences, that guild of arts and crafts which is comprised within each one of us, I mean our bodies. In the detail they are nourished from day to day by food which must not be too alien from past food or from the body itself, nor yet too germane to either; and in the gross, that is to say, in the history of the development of a race or species, the evolution is admittedly for the most part exceedingly gradual, by means of many generations, as it were, of episodes that are kindred to and yet not identical with the subject.

And when we come to think of it, we find in the evolution of bodily form (which along with modification involves persistence of type) the explanation why persistence of type in subjects chosen for treatment in works of art should be so universal. It is because we are so averse to great changes and at the same time so averse to no change at all, that we have a bodily form, in the main, persistent and yet, at the same time, capable of modifications. Without a strong aversion to change its habits and, with its habits, the pabulum of its mind, there would be no fixity of type in any species and, indeed, there would be no life at all, as we are accustomed to think of life, for organs would disappear before they could be developed, and to try to build life on such a s.h.i.+fting foundation would be as hopeless as it would be to try and build a material building on an actual quicksand. Hence the habits, cries, abodes, food, hopes and fears of each species (and what are these but the realities of which human arts are as the shadow?) tell the same old tales in the same old ways from generation to generation, and it is only because they do so that they appear to us as species at all.

Returning now to the Etruscan cinerary urns--I have no doubt that, perhaps three or four thousand years hence, a collection of the tombstones from some of our suburban cemeteries will be thought exceedingly interesting, but I confess to having found the urns in the Museum at Volterra a little monotonous and, after looking at about three urns, I hurried over the remaining 397 as fast as I could. [1889.]

The Quick and the Dead

The walls of the houses [in an Italian village] are built of brick and the roofs are covered with stone. They call the stone "vivo."

It is as though they thought bricks were like veal or mutton and stones like bits out of the living calf or sheep. {279}

The Grape-Filter

When the water of a place is bad, it is safest to drink none that has not been filtered through either the berry of a grape, or else a tub of malt. These are the most reliable filters yet invented.

Bertoli and his Bees

Giacomo Bertoli of Varallo-Sesia keeps a watch and clock shop in the street. He is a cheery little old gentleman, though I do not see why I should call him old for I doubt his being so old as I am. He and I have been very good friends for years and he is always among the first to welcome me when I go to Varallo.

He is one of the most famous bee-masters in Europe. He keeps some of his bees during the winter at Camasco not very far from Varallo, others in other places near and moves them up to Alagna, at the head of the Val Sesia, towards the end of May that they may make their honey from the spring flowers--and excellent honey they make.

About a fortnight ago I happened to meet him bringing down ten of his hives. He was walking in front and was immediately followed by two women each with crates on their backs, and each carrying five hives.

They seemed to me to be ordinary deal boxes, open at the top, but covered over with gauze which would keep the bees in but not exclude air. I asked him if the bees minded the journey, and he replied that they were very angry and had a great deal to say about it; he was sure to be stung when he let them out. He said it was "un lavoro improbo," and cost him a great deal of anxiety.

"The Lost Chord"

It should be "The Lost Progression," for the young lady was mistaken in supposing she had ever heard any single chord "like the sound of a great Amen." Unless we are to suppose that she had already found the chord of C Major for the final syllable of the word and was seeking the chord for the first syllable; and there she is on the walls of a Milanese restaurant arpeggioing experimental harmonies in a transport of delight to advertise Somebody and Someone's pianos and holding the loud pedal solidly down all the time. Her family had always been unsympathetic about her music. They said it was like a loose bundle of fire-wood which you never can get across the room without dropping sticks; they said she would have been so much better employed doing anything else.