Earthwork out of Tuscany Part 1

Earthwork Out Of Tuscany.

by Maurice Hewlett.

PREFACE

Mr. Critics--to whom, kind or unkind, I confess obligations--and the Public between them have produced, it appears, some sort of demand for this Second Edition. While I do not think it either polite or politic to enquire too deeply into reasons, I am not the man to disoblige them. It is sufficient for me that in a world indifferent well peopled five hundred souls have bought or acquired my book, and that other hundreds have signified their desire to do likewise. Nevertheless--the vanity of authors being notoriously hard-rooted--I must own to my mortification in the discovery that not more than two in every hundred who have read me have known what I was at. I have been told it is a good average, but, with deference, I don't think so. No man has any right to take beautiful and simple things out of their places, wrap them up in a tissue of his own conceits, and hand them about the universe for G.o.ds and men to wonder upon. If he must convey simple things let him convey them simply. If I, for instance, must steal a loaf of bread, would it not be better to walk out of the shop with it under my coat than to call for it in a hansom and hoodwink the baker with a forged cheque on Coutts's bank? Surely. If, then, I go to Italy, and convey the hawthor-scent of Della Robbia, the straining of Botticelli to express the ineffable, the mellow autumn tones of the life of Florence; if I do this, and make a parade of my magnanimity in permitting the household to divide the spoil, how on earth should I mar all my bravery by giving people what they don't want, or turn double knave by fobbing them off with an empty box?

I had hoped to have done better than this. I tried to express in the t.i.tle of my book what I thought I had done; more, I was bold enough to a.s.sume that, having weathered the t.i.tle, my readers would find a smooth channel with leading-lights enough to bring them sound to port. _Mea culpa!_ I believe that I was wrong. The book has been read as a collection of essays and stories and dialogues only pulled together by the binder's tapes; as otherwise disjointed, fragmentary, _decousue_, a "piebald monstrous book," a sort of _kous-kous_, made out of the odds and ends of a scribbler's note-book. Some have liked some morsels, others other morsels: it has been a matter of the luck of the fork. Very few, one only to my knowledge, can have seen the thing as it presented itself to my flattering eye--not as a pudding, not as a case of confectionery even, but as a little sanctuary of images such as a pious heathen might make of his earthenware G.o.ds. Let us be serious: listen. The thing is Criticism; but some of it is criticism by trope and figure. I hope that is plain enough.

When the first man heard his first thunderstorm he said (or Human Nature has bettered itself), "Certainly a G.o.d is angry." When after a night of doubt and heaviness the sun rose out of the sea, the sea kindled, and all its waves laughed innumerably, again he said, "G.o.d is stirring. Joy cometh in the morning." Even in saying so much he was making images, poor man, for one's soul is as dumb as a fish and can only talk by signs. But by degrees, as his hand grew obedient to his heart, he set to work to make more lasting images of these G.o.ds--Thunder G.o.ds, G.o.ds of the Sun and the Morning. And as these G.o.ds were the sum of the best feelings he had, so the images of them were the best things he made. And that goes on now whenever a young man sees something new or strange or beautiful. He wonders, he falls on his face, he would say his prayers; he rises up, he would sing a paean. But he is dumb, the wretch! He must make images. This he does because Necessity drives him: this I have done. And part of the world calls the result Criticism, and another part says, It may be Art.

But I know that it is the struggling of a dumb man to find an outlet, and I call it Religion.

"G.o.d first made man, and straightway man made G.o.d; No wonder if a tang of that same sod, Whereout we issued at a breath, should cling To all we fas.h.i.+on. We can only plod Lit by a starveling candle; and we sing Of what we can remember of the road."

The vague informed, the lovely indefinite defined: that is Art. As a sort of _pate sur pate_ comes Criticism, to do for Art what Art does for life. I have tried in this book to be the artist at second-hand, to make pictures of pictures, images of images, poems of poems. You may call it Criticism, you may call it Art: I call it Religion. It is making the best thing I can out of the best things I feel.

LONDON, 1898.

ADVERTIs.e.m.e.nT TO THE FIRST EDITION

Polite reader, you who have travelled _Italy_, it will not be unknown to you that the humbler sort in that country have ever believed certain spots and recesses of their land--as wells, mountain-paths, farmsteads, groves of ilex or olive, quiet pine-woods, creeks or bays of the sea, and such like hidden ways--to be the chosen resort of familiar spirits, baleful or beneficent, fate-ridden or amenable to prayer, half divine, wholly out of rule or ordering; which rustic deities and _genii locorum_, if it was not needful to propitiate, it was fascination to observe. It is believed of them in the hill-country round about _Perugia_ and in the quieter parts of _Tuscany_, that they are still present, tolerated of G.o.d by reason of their origin (which is, indeed, that of the very soil whose effluence they are), chastened, circ.u.mscribed and, as it were, combed or pared of evil desire and import.

To them or their _avatars_ (it matters little which) the rude people still bow down; they still humour them with gifts of flowers, songs, or artless customs (as of Mayday, or the _Giorno de' Grilli_); you may still see wayside shrines, votive tablets, humble offerings, set in a farm-wall or country hedge, starry and fresh as a patch of yellow flowers in a rye-field. If you say that they have made G.o.ds in their own image, you do not convince them of Sin, for they do as their betters. If you say their G.o.ds are earthy, they reply by asking, "What then are we?" For they will admit, and you cannot deny, earthiness to have at least a part in all of us. And you are forbidden to call this unhappy, since G.o.d made all. Out of the drenched earth whence these wors.h.i.+ppers arose, they made their rough-cast G.o.ds; out of the same earth they still mould images to speak the presentment of them which they have. Out of that earth, I, a northern image-maker, have set up my conceits of their informing spirits, of the spirits of themselves, their soil, and the fair works they have accomplished. So I have called this book _Earthwork out of Tuscany. Qui habet aures ad audiendum audiat._

LONDON, 1895.

PROEM

APOLOGIA PRO LIBELLO: IN A LETTER TO A FRIEND

Although you know your Italy well, you ask me, who see her now for the first time, to tell you how I find her; how she sinks into me; wherein she fulfils, and wherein fails to fulfil, certain dreams and fancies of mine (old amus.e.m.e.nts of yours) about her. Here, truly, you show yourself the diligent collector of human doc.u.ments your friends have always believed you; for I think it can only be appet.i.te for acquisition, to see how a man recognisant of the claims of modernity in Art bears the first brunt of the Old Masters' a.s.sault, that tempts you to risk a _rechauffee_ of Paul Bourget and Walter Pater, with _ana_ lightly culled from Symonds, and, perchance, the questionable support of ponderous references out of Burckhardt. In spite of my waiver of the t.i.tle, you relish the notion of a Modern face to face with Botticelli and Mantegna and Perugino (to say nothing of that Giotto who had so much to say!), artists in whom, you think and I agree, certain impressions strangely positive of many vanished aspects of life remain to be accounted for, and (it may be) reconciled with modern visions of Art and Beauty. Well! I am flattered and touched by such confidence in my powers of expression and your own of endurance. I look upon you as a late-in-time Maecenas, generously resolved to defray the uttermost charge of weariness that a young writer may be encouraged to unfold himself and splash in the pellucid Tuscan air. I cannot a.s.sert that you are performing an act of charity to mankind, but I can at least a.s.sure you that you are doing more for me than if you had settled my accounts with Messr. Cook and Sons, or Signora Vedova Paolini, my esteemed landlady. A writer who is worth anything acc.u.mulates more than he gives off, and never lives up to his income. His difficulty is the old one of digestion, Italian Art being as crucial for the modern as Italian cookery.

Crucial indeed! for diverse are the ways of the Hyperboreans cheek by jowl with _asciutta_ and Tuscan tablewine, as any _osteria_ will convince you. To one man the oil is a delight: he will soak himself in it till his thought swims viscid in his pate. To another it is abhorrent: straightway he calls for his German vinegar and drowns the native flavour in floods as bitter as polemics. Your wine too! Overweak for water, says one, who consumes a stout _fiaschone_ and spends a stertorous afternoon in headache and cursing at the generous home-grown.

_Frizzante!_ cries your next to all his G.o.ds; and flushes the poison with infected water. Crucial enough. So with art. Goethe went to a.s.sisi.

"I left on my left," says he, "the vast ma.s.s of churches, piled Babel-wise one over another, in one of which rest the remains of the Holy Saint Francis of a.s.sisi--with aversion, for I thought to myself that the people who a.s.sembled in them were mostly of the same stamp with my captain and travelling companion."

Truly an odd ground of aversion to a painted church that there might be a confessional-box in the nave! But he had no eyes for Gothic, being set on the Temple of Minerva. The Right Honourable Joseph Addison's views of Siena will be familiar to you; but an earlier still was our excellent Mr.

John Evelyn doing the grand tour; going to Pisa, but seeing no frescos in the Campo Santo; going to Florence, but seeing neither Santa Croce nor Santa Maria Novella; in his whole journey he would seem to have found no earlier name than Perugino's affixed to a picture. Goethe was urbane to Francia, "a very respectable artist"; he was astonished at Mantegna, "one of the older painters," but accepted him as leading up to t.i.tian: and so-- "thus was art developed after the barbarous period." But Goethe had the sweeping sublimity of youth with him. "I have now seen but two Italian cities, and for the first time; and I have spoken with but few persons; and yet I know my Italians pretty well!" Seriously, where in criticism do you learn of an earlier painter than Perugino, until you come to our day?

And where now do you get the raptures over the Carracci and Domenichino and Guercino and the rest of them which the last century expended upon their unthrifty soil? Ruskin found Botticelli; yes, and Giotto. Roscoe never so much as mentions either. Why should he, honest man? They couldn't draw! Cookery is very like Art, as Socrates told Gorgias. Unfortunately, it is far easier to verify your impressions in the former case than in the latter. Yet that is the first and obvious duty of the critic--that is, the writer whomsoever. In my degree it has been mine. Wherefore, if I unfold anything at all, it shall not be the _Cicerone_ nor the veiled "Anonymous," nor the _Wiederbelebung_, nor (I hope) the _Mornings in Florence_, but that thing in which you place such touching reliance --myself and my poor sensations, _Ecco_! I have nothing else. You take a boy out of school; you set him to book-reading, give him Shakespere and a Bible, set him sailing in the air with the poets; drench him with painter's dreams, _via_, t.i.tian's carmine and orange, Veronese's rippling brocades, Umbrian morning skies, and Tuscan hues wrought of moonbeams and flowing water--anon you turn him adrift in Italy, a country where all poets' souls seem to be caged in crystal and set in the sun, and say--"Here, dreamer of dreams, what of the day?" _Madonna!_ You ask and you shall obtain. I proceed to expand under your benevolent eye.

To me, Italy is not so much a place where pictures have been painted (some of which remain to testify), as a place where pictures have been lived and built; I fail to see how Perugia is not a picture by, say, Astorre Baglione. Perhaps I should be nearer the mark if I said it was a frozen epic. What I mean is, that in Italy it is still impossible to separate the soul and body of the soil, to say, as you may say in London or Paris,-- here behind this sordid grey mask of warehouses and suburban villas lurks the soul that once was Shakespere or once was Villon. You will not say that of Florence; you will hardly say it (though the time is at hand) of Milan and Rome. Do the gondoliers still sing s.n.a.t.c.hes of Ariosto? I don't know Venice. M. Bourget a.s.sures me his _vetturino_ quoted Dante to him between Monte Pulciano and Siena; and I believe him. At any rate, in Italy as I have found it, the inner secret of Italian life can be read, not in painting alone, nor poem alone, but in the swift sun, in the streets and shrouded lanes, in the golden pastures, in the plains and blue mountains; in flowery cloisters and carved church porches--out of doors as well as in. The story of Troy is immortal--why not because the Trojans themselves live immortal in their fabled sons? That being so, I by no means promise you my sensations to be of the ear-measuring, nose-rubbing sort now so popular. I am bad at dates and soon tire of symbols. My theology may be to seek; you may catch me as much for the world as for Athanase. With world and doctor I shall, indeed, have little enough to do, for wherever I go I shall be only on the look-out for the soul of this bright-eyed people, whom, being no Goethe, I do not profess to understand or approve. Must the lover do more than love his mistress, and weave his sonnets about her white brows? I may see my mistress Italy embowered in a belfry, a fresco, the scope of a Piazza, the lilt of a _Stornello_, the fragrance of a legend. If I don't find a legend to hand I may, as lief as not, invent one. It shall be a legend fitted close to the soul of a fact, if I succeed: and if I fail, put me behind you and take down your four volumes of Rio, or your four-and-twenty of Rosini. Go to Crowe and Cavalcaselle and be wise. Parables!--I like the word--to go round about the thing, whose heart I cannot hit with my small-arm, marking the goodly ma.s.ses and un.o.btrusive meek beauties of it, and longing for them in vain.

No amount of dissecting shall reveal the core of Sandro's Venus. For after you have pared off the husk of the restorer, or bled in your alembic the very juices the craftsman conjured withal, you come down to the seamy wood, and Art is gone. Nay, but your Morelli, your Crowe, ciphering as they went for want of thought, what did they do but screw Art into test- tubes, and serve you up the fruit of their litmus-paper a.s.say with vivacity, may be,--but with what kins.h.i.+p to the picture? I maintain that the peeling and gutting of fact must be done in the kitchen: the king's guests are not to know how many times the cook's finger went from cate to mouth before the seasoning was proper to the table. The king is the artist, you are the guest, I am the abstractor of quintessences, the cook.

Remember, the cook had not the ordering of the feast: that was the king's business--mine is to mingle the flavours to the liking of the guest that the dish be worthy the conception and the king's honour.

Nor will I promise you that I shall not break into a more tripping stave than our prose can afford, here and there. The pilgrim, if he is young and his shoes or his belly pinch him not, sings as he goes, the very stones at his heels (so music-steeped is this land) setting him the key. Jog the foot-path way through Tuscany in my company, it's Lombard Street to my hat I charm you out of your la.s.situde by my open humour. Things I say will have been said before, and better; my tunes may be stale and my phrasing rough: I may be irrelevant, irreverent, what you please. Eh, well! I am in Italy,--the land of shrugs and laughing. Shrug me (or my book) away; but, pray Heaven, laugh! And, as the young are always very wise when they find their voice and have their confidence well put out to usury, laugh (but in your cloak) when I am sententious or apt to tears. I have found _lacrimae rerum_ in Italy as elsewhere; and sometimes Life has seemed to me to sail as near to tragedy as Art can do. I suppose I must be a very bad Christian, for I remain st.u.r.dily an optimist, still convinced that it is good for us to be here, while the sun is up. Men and pictures, poems, cities, churches, comely deeds, grow like cabbages: they are of the soil, spring from it to the sun, glow open-hearted while he is there; and when he goes, they go. So grew Florence, and Shakespere, and Greek myth--the three most lovely flowers of Nature's seeding I know of. And with the flowers grow the weeds. My first weed shall sprout by Arno, in a cranny of the Ponte Vecchio, or cling like a Dryad of the wood to some gnarly old olive on the hill-side of Arcetri. If it bear no little gold-seeded flower, or if its pert leaves don't blush under the sun's caress, it shan't be my fault or the sun's.

Take, then, my watered wine in the name of the Second Maccabaean, for here, as he says, "will I make an end. And if I have done well, and as is fitting the story, it is that which I desired: but if slenderly and meanly, it is that which I could attain unto."

I have killed you at the first cast. I feel it. Has any city, save, perhaps, Cairo, been so written out as Florence? I hear you querulous; you raise your eyebrows; you sigh as you watch the tottering ash of your second cigar. Mrs. Brown comes to tell you it is late. I agree with you quickly. Florence has often been sketched before--putting Browning aside with his astounding fresco-music--by Ruskin and George Eliot and Mr. Henry James, to name only masters. But that is no reason why I should not try my prentice hand. Florence alters not at all. Men do. My picture, poor as you like, shall be my own. It is not their Florence or yours--and, remember, I would strike at Tuscany through Florence, and throughout Tuscany keep my eye in her beam,--but my own mellow kingcup of a town, the glowing heart of the whole Arno basin, whose suave and weather-warmed grace I shall try to catch and distil. But Mrs. Brown is right; it Is late: the huntsmen are up in America, as your good kinsman has it, and I would never have you act your own Antipodes. Addio.

I

EYE OF ITALY

[Footnote: My thanks are due to the Editor of _Black and White_ for permission to reprint the substance of this essay.]

I have been here a few days only--perhaps a week: if it's impressionism you're after, the time is now or a year hence. For, in these things of three stages, two may be tolerable, the first clouding of the water with the wine's red fire, or the final resolution of the two into one humane consistence: the intermediate course is, like all times of process, brumous and hesitant. After a dinner in the white piazza, shrinking slowly to blue under the keen young moon's eye, watched over jealously by the frowning bulk of Brunelleschi's globe--after a dinner of _pasta con brodo_, veal cutlets, olives, and a bottle of right _Barbera_, let me give you a pastel (this is the medium for such evanescences) of Florence herself. At present I only feel. No one should think--few people can--after dinner. Be patient therefore; suffer me thus far.

I would spare you, if I might, the horrors of my night-long journey from Milan. There is little romance in a railway: the novelists have worked it dry. That is, however, a part of my sum of perceptions which began, you may put it, at the dawn which saw Florence and me face to face. So I must in no wise omit it.

I find, then, that Italian railway-carriages are constructed for the convenience of luggage, and that pa.s.sengers are an afterthought, as dogs or grooms are with us, to be suffered only if there be room and on condition they look after the luggage. In my case we had our full complement of the staple; nevertheless every pa.s.senger a.s.sumed the G.o.d, keeping watch on his traps, and thinking to shake the spheres at every fresh arrival. Thoughtless behaviour! for there were thus twelve people packed into a rocky landscape of cardboard portmanteaus and umbrella- peaks; twenty-four legs, and urgent need of stretching-room as the night wore on. There was jostling, there was asperity from those who could sleep and from those who would; there was more when two shock-head drovers--like First and Second Murderers in a tragedy--insisted on taking off their boots. It was not that there was little room for boots; indeed I think they nursed them on their thin knees. It was at any rate too much even for an Italian pa.s.senger; for--well, well! their way had been a hot and a dusty one, poor fellows. So the guard was summoned, and came with all the implicit powers of an uniform and, I believe, a sword. The boots were strained on sufficiently to preserve the amenities of the way: they could not, of course, be what they had been; the carriage was by this a forcing- house. And through the long night we ached away an intolerable span of time with, for under-current, for sinister accompaniment to the pitiful strain, the m.u.f.fled interminable plodding of the engine, and the rack of the wheels pulsing through s.p.a.ce to the rhythm of some music-hall jingle heard in s.n.a.t.c.hes at home. At intervals came shocks of contrast when we were brought suddenly face to face with a gaunt and bleached world. Then we stirred from our stupor, and sat looking at each other's stale faces.

We had shrieked and clanked our way into some great naked station, s.h.i.+vering raw and cold under the electric lights, streaked with black shadows on its whitewash and patched with coa.r.s.e advertis.e.m.e.nts. The porters' voices echoed in the void, shouting _"Piacensa," "Parma,"

"Reggio," "Modena," "Bologna,"_ with infinite relish for the varied hues of a final _a_. One or two cowed travellers slippered up responsive to the call, and we, the veterans who endured, set our teeth, shuddered, and smoked feverish cigarettes on the platform among the carriage-wheels and points; or, if we were new hands, watched awfully the advent of another sleeping train, as dingy as our own--yet a hero of romance! For it bore the hieratic and tremendous words "_Roma, Firenze, Milano_" It was privileged then; it ministered in the sanctuary. We glowed in our sordid skins, and could have kissed the foot-boards that bore the dust of Rome. I will swear I shall never see those three words printed on a carriage without a thrill, _Roma, Firenze, Milano_,-- Lord! what a traverse.

Or we held long purposeless rests at small wayside places where no station could be known, and the shrouded land stretched away on either side, not to be seen, but rather felt, in the cool airs that blew in, and the rustling of secret trees near by. No further sound was, save the muttered talking of the guards without and the simmering of the engine, on somewhere in front. And then "_Partenza!_" rang out in the night, and "_p.r.o.nti!_" came as a faint echo on before. We laboured on, and the dreams began where they had broken off. For we dreamed in these times, fitful and lurid, coloured dreams; flashes of horrible crises in one's life; Interminable precipices; a river skiff engulfed in a swirl of green sea-water; agonies of repentance; shameful failure, defeat, memories--and then the steady pulsing of the engine, and thick, impermeable darkness choking up the windows again. How I ached for the dawn!

I awoke from what I believe to have been a panic of snoring to hear the train clattering over the sleepers and points, and to see--oh, human, brotherly sight!--the broad level light of morning stream out of the east.

We were stealing into a city asleep. Tall flat houses rose in the chill mist to our left and stared blankly down upon us with close-barred green eyelids. Gas-lamps in swept streets flickered dirty yellow in the garish light. A great purple dome lay ahead, flanked by the ruddy roofs and gables of a long church. My heart leapt for Florence. Pistoja!

And then, at Prato, a nut-brown old woman with a placid face got into our carriage with a basket of green figs and some bottles of milk for the Florentine market. So we were nearing. And soon we ran in between lines of white and pink villas edged with rows of planes drenched still with dews and the night mists, among bullock-carts and queer shabby little _vetture_, everything looking light and elfin in the brisk suns.h.i.+ne and autumn bite--into the barrel-like station, and I into the arms, say rather the arm-chair, of Signora Vedova Paolini, chattiest and most motherly of landladies.

Earth, Air, Fire, Water, Florence, form the five elements of our planet according to the testimony of Boniface VIII. of clamant and not very Catholic memory. That is true if you take it this way. You cannot resolve an element; but you cannot resolve Florence; therefore Florence is an element. _Ecco!_ She is like nothing else In Nature, or (which is much the same thing) Art. You can have olives elsewhere, and Gothic elsewhere; you can have both at Aries, for instance. You can have _Campanili_ printed white (but not rose-and white, not rose-and-gold- and-white) on blue anywhere along the Mediterranean from Tripoli to Tangier: you will find Giotto at Padua, and statues growing in the open air at Naples. But for the silvery magic of olives and blue; for a Gothic which has the supernatural and always restless eagerness of the North, held in check, reduced to our level by the blessedly human sanity of Romanesque; for sculpture which sprouts from the crumbling church-sides like some frankly happy stone-crop, or wall-flower, just as wholesomely coloured and tenderly shaped, you must come to Florence. Come for choice in this golden afternoon of the year. Green figs are twelve-a-penny; you can get peaches for the asking, and grapes and melons without it; brown men are treading the wine-fat in every little white hill-town, and in Florence itself you may stumble upon them, as I once did, plying their mystery in a battered old church--sight only to be seen in Italy, where religions have been many, but religionists substantially the same. That is the Italian way; there was the practical evidence. Imagine the sight. A gaunt and empty old basilica, the beams of the Rood still left, the dye of fresco still round the walls and tribune--here the dim figure of Sebastian roped to his tree, there the cloudy forms of Apostles or the Heavenly Host shadowed in ma.s.ses of crimson or green--and, down below, a slippery purple sea, frothed sanguine at the edges, and wild, half-naked creatures treading out the juice, dancing in the oozy stuff rhythmically, to the music of some wailing air of their own. _Saturnia regna_ indeed, and in the haunt of Sant' Ambrogio, or under the hungry eye of San Bernardino, or other lean ascetic of the Middle Age. But that, after all, is Italian, not necessarily Florentine or Tuscan. I must needs abstract the unique quintessential humours of this my Eye of Italy. Stendhal, do you remember?

didn't like one of these. He said that in Florence people talked about "huesta hasa" when they would say "questa casa," and thus turned Italian into a mad Arabic. So they do, especially the women: why not? The poor Stendhal loved Milan, wrote himself down "Arrigo Milanese"--and what can you expect from a Milanese?

They tell me, who know Florence well, that she is growing unwieldy. Like a bulky old _concierge_ they say, she sits in the pa.s.sage of her Arno, swollen, fat, and featureless, a kind of Chicago, a city of tame conveniences ungraced by arts. That means that there are suburbs and tramways; it means that the gates will not hold her in; it has a furtive stab at the Railway Station and the omnibus in the Piazza del Duorno: it is _Mornings in Florence_. The suggestion is that Art is some pale remote virgin who must needs s.h.i.+ver and withdraw at the touch of actual life: the art-lover must maunder over his mistress's wrongs instead of manfully insisting upon her rights, her everlasting triumphant justifications. Why this watery talk of an Art that was and may not be again, because we go to bed by electricity and have our hair brushed by machinery? Pray, has Nature ceased? or Life? Art will endure with these fine things, which in Florence, let me say, are very fine indeed. But there's a practical answer to the indictment. As a city she is a mere cupful. You can walk from Cantagalli's, at the Roman Gate, to the Porta San Gallo, at the end of the Via Cavour, in half the time it would take you to go from Newgate to Kensington Gardens. Yet whereas in London such a walk would lead you through a slice of a section, in Florence you would cut through the whole city from hill to hill. You are never away from the velvet flanks of the Tuscan hills. Every street-end smiles an enchanting vista upon you. Houses frowning, machicolated and sombre, or gay and golden-white with cool green jalousies and spreading eaves, stretch before you through mellow air to a distance where they melt into hills, and hills into sky; into sky so clear and rarely blue, so virgin pale at the horizon, that the hills sleep brown upon it under the sun, and the cypresses, nodding a-row, seem funeral weeds beside that radiant purity.

Some such adorable stretch of tilth and pasture, sky and cloud, hangs like a G.o.d's crown beyond the city and her towers. In the long autumn twilight Fiesole and the hills lie soft and purple below a pale green sky. There is a pause at this time when the air seems washed for sleep-every shrub, every feature of the landscape is cut clean as with a blade. The light dies, the air deepens to wet violet, and the glimpses of the hill-town gleam like snow. At such times Samminiato looms ghostly upon you and fades slowly out. The flush in the East faints and fails and the evening star s.h.i.+nes like a gem. It is hot and still in the broad Piazza Santa Maria; they are lighting the lamps; the swarm grows of the eager, shabby, spendthrift crowd of young Italians, so light-hearted and fluent, and so prodigal of this old Italy of theirs--and ours. All this I have been watching as I might. Nature clings to the city, playing her rhythmic dance at the end of every street.

Nature clings. Yes; but she is within as well as without. What is that sentimental plat.i.tude of somebody's (the worst kind of plat.i.tude, is it not?) about the sun being to flowers what Art is to Life? It has the further distinction of being untrue. In Florence you learn that what he is to flowers, that he is to Art. For I soberly believe that under his rays Florence has grown open like some rare white water-lily; that sun and sky have set the conditions, struck, as it were, the chord. I have wandered through and through her recessed ways the length of this bright and breezy October week; and have marked where I walked the sun's great hand laid upon palace and cloister and bell-tower. _He_ has summoned up these flat-topped houses, these precipitous walls beneath which winds the darkened causeway. One seems to be travelling in a mountain gorge with, above, a thin ribbon of sky, fluid blue, flawless of cloud, like the sea.

_He_, that so masterful sun, has given Florence the apathetic, beaten aspect of a southern town; he and the temperate sky have fixed the tone for ever; and the nimble air--"nimbly and sweetly" recommending itself-- has given the quaintness and the freaksomeness of the North. This bursts out, young and irresponsible, in pinnacle, crocket, and gable, in towers like spears, and in the eager lancet windows which peer upwards out of Orsammichele and the Dominican Church. This mixture is Florence and has made her art. The blue of the sky gives the key to her palette, the breath of the west wind, the salt wind from our own Atlantic, tingles in her _campanili_; and the Italian sun washes over all with his lazy gold.

Habit and inclination both speak. She rejects no wise thing and accepts every lovely thing. Nature and Art have worked hand in hand, as they will when, we let them. For what is an art so inimitable, so innocent, so intimate as this of Tuscany, after all, but a high effort of creative Nature--_Natura naturans_, as Spinosa calls her? Here, on the weather-fretted walls, a Delia Robbia blossoms out in natural colours-- blue and white and green. They are Spring's colours. You need not go into the Bargello to understand Luca and Andrea at their happy task; as well go to a botanical museum to read the secret of April. See them on the dusty wall of Orsammichele. They have wrought the blossom of the stone--cl.u.s.ters of bright-eyed flowers with the throats and eyes of angels, singing, you might say, a children's hymn to Our Lady, throned and pure in the midst of the bevy. See the Spedale degli Innocenti, where a score of little flowery white children grow, open-armed, out of their sky-blue medallions. Really, are they lilies, or children, or the embodied strophes of a psalter? you ask. I mix my metaphors like an Irishman, but you will see my meaning. All the arts blend in art: "rien ne fait mieux entendre combien un faux sonnet est ridicule que de s'imaginer une femme ou une maison faite sur ce modele-la." Pascal knew; and so did Philip Sidney, "Nature never set forth the earth in so rich tapestry as divers poets have done"; and the nearer truth seems to be that Art is Nature made articulate, Nature's soul inflamed with love and voicing her secrets through one man to many. So there may be no difference between me and a cabbage-rose but this, that I can consider my own flower, how it grows, or rather, when it is grown.

It is very pleasant sometimes to think that wistful guess of Plato's true in spite of everything--that the state is the man grown great, as the universe is the state grown Infinite. It explains that Florence has a soul, the broader image of her sons', and that this soul speaks in Art, utters itself in flower of stone and starry stretches of fresco (like that serene blue and grey band in the Sistine chapel which redeems so many of Rome's waste places), sings colour-songs (there are such affairs) on church and cloister walls. Seeing these good things, we should rather hear the town's voice crying out her fancy to friendly hearts. Thus--let me run the figure to death--if Luca's blue-eyed medallions are the crop of the wall, they are also the soul of Florence, singing a blithe secular song about G.o.ds whose abiding charm is the art that made them live. And if the towers and domes are the statelier flowers of the garden, lily, hollyhock, tulip of the red globe, so they are Florence again as she strains forward and up, sternly defiant in the Palazzo Vecchio, bright and curious at Santa Croce, pure, chaste as a seraph, when, thrilling with the touch of Giotto, she gazes in the clarity of her golden and rosy marbles, tinted like a pearl and shaped like an archangel, towards the blue vault whose eye she is.

Wandering, therefore, through this high city; loitering on the bridge whereunder turbid Arno glitters like bra.s.s; standing by the yellow Baptistery; or seeing in Santa Croce cloister--where I write these lines-- seven centuries of enthusiasm mellowed down by sun and wind into a comely dotage of grey and green, one is disposed to wonder whether we are only just beginning to understand Art, or to misunderstand it? Has the world slept for two thousand years? Is Degas the first artist? Was Aristotle the first critic, and is Mr. George Moore the second? As a white pigeon cuts the blue, and every opinion of him s.h.i.+nes as burnished agate in the live air, things shape themselves somewhat. I begin to see that Art _is_, and that men have been, and shall be, but never _are_. Facts are an integral part of life, but they are not life. I heard a metaphysician say once that matter was the adjective of life, and thought it a mighty pretty saying. In a true sense, it would seem, Art is that adjective. For so surely as there are honest men to insist how true things are or how proper to moralising, there will be Art to sing how lovely they are, and what amiable dwellings for us. Thus fortified, I think I can understand Magister Joctus Florentiae. He lies behind these crumbling walls. Traces of his crimson and blue still stain the cloister-walk. What was he telling us in crimson and blue? How dumb Zacharias spelt out the name of his son John in the roll of a book? Hardly that, I think.

II

LITTLE FLOWERS

The Via del Monte alle Croce is a leafy way cut between hedgerows, in the morning time heavy with dew and the smell of wet flowers. Where it strays out of the Giro al Monte there is a crumbly brick wall, a well, and a little earthen shrine to Madonna--a daub, it is true, of glaring chromes and blues, thick in glaze and tawdry devices of stout cupids and roses, but somehow, on this suggestive Autumn morning, innocent and blue of eye as the carolling throngs of Luca which it travesties. And a pious inscription cut below testifieth how Saint Francis, "in friendly talk with the Blessed Mariano di Lugo," paused here before it, and then vanished. It is not necessary to believe in ghosts; but I'll go bail that story is true. We are but two stones' throw from the gaunt hulk of a Franciscan Church; a file of dusty cypresses marks the ruins of a painful Calvary cut in the waste and shale of the hill-side. Below, as in a green pasture, Florence s.h.i.+nes like a dove's egg in her nest of hills; I can pick out among the sheaf of spears which hedge her about the daintiest of them all, the crocketed pinnacle of Santa Croce, grey on blue; and then the lean ridge of a shrine the barest, simplest and most honest in all Tuscany.