Earthwork Out Of Tuscany

M >> Maurice Hewlett >> Earthwork Out Of Tuscany

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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
"_Pronti!_" 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 sunshine
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 masses 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 passage 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 shiver 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 god'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
shines 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 platitude of somebody's (the worst kind of platitude, 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--clusters
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 gods 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 brass; 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 shines 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 shines 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.
Certainly Saint Francis, "familiarmente discorrendo," appeared in this
place. I need no reference to the Annals of the Seraphic Order--part, book
and page--to convince me. My stone gives them. "Ann. Ord. Min. Tom. cclii.
fasc. 3.," and so on. That is but a sorry concession to our short-
sightedness. For if we believe not the shrine which we have seen, how
shall we believe Giotto? What of Giotto? That is my point.

Something too much, it may be, of modern art-criticism, which is ashamed
of thinking, snuffeth at pictures which tell you things, at literature in
books or music or church ornament. Is literature not good anywhere? Have
we exhausted the _Arabian Nights_ or the _Acta Sanctorum_? At
any rate, if we must choose between Giotto and the prophet of the
_Yellow Book_, my heart is fixed. I am for the teller of tales.
Story-telling it is, glorification of one whom Mr. George Moore would call
(has, indeed, called) a "squint-eyed Italian Saint"--and whether he
objected to malformity, nationality or calling, I never could learn--this
too it may be; it may tend to edification and I know not what beside. I
will grant all that. And though it is hard to prophesy what might have
happened five hundred years ago; though there might have been a Giotto
without a Francis of whom to speak; yet I never knew a case where a
painter (call him poet if you will; he will be none the worse for that)
fell so directly into the gap awaiting him. The Gospel living and tangible
again! Spirits, apparitions, as of three mysterious sisters, met you in
the open country, and crying "Hail! Lady Poverty," straightly vanished. A
legend was a-making round about the strange life not fifty years closed, a
life which seems, extravagance apart, to have been a lyrical outburst, a
strophe in the hymn of praise which certain happy people were singing just
then. It was a _Gloria in Excelsis_ for a second time in Christian
Annals which did not end in a wail of "Agnus Dei qui tollis peccata,
miserere." Why should it? Should the children of the bride-chamber fast
when the bridegroom was with them? And of all the "wreath'd singers at the
marriage-door," blithest and sanest was Master Joctus of Florence. This
being so, I hope I shall not be accused of any mischief if I say that in
Giotto I see one of the select company of immortals whose work can never
be surpassed because it is entirely adequate to the facts and atmosphere
he selected. The standard of a work of art must always be--Is it well
done? rather than--Is it well intentioned? Wherefore, if Giotto or anybody
else choose to spend himself upon a sermon or an essay or an article of
the Creed, and do well thereby, I may not blame him, nor call him back to
study the play of light across a marsh or the flight of pigeons in the
westering sun. Ma, basta, basta cosi, you may say with the Cavaliere of
Goldoni.

Santa Croce church is of the barrack-room stamp, dim and enormous, grey
with years and seamed with work. Its impressiveness (for with Orvieto and
a fleet of churches at Ravenna it stands above all Italy in that) consists
mainly, I believe, in its being built of exactly the moral bones of the
religion it was intended to embody. An Italian religion, namely; perfectly
sane, at bottom practical, with a base of plain, everyday, ten-commandment
morality. That was the base of Saint Francis' good brown life: therefore
Santa Croce is admirably built, squared, mortised and compacted by skilled
workmen to whom brick-laying was a fine art. But, withal, this religion
had its lyric raptures, its "In fuoco Amor mi mise," or its sobbing at the
feet of the Crucified, its _Corotto_ and Seven Sorrowful Mysteries:
accordingly Santa Croce, like a pollarded lime, reserves its buds,
harbours and garners them, throws out no suckers or lateral adornments the
length of its trunk, but bursts into a flowery crown of them at the top--a
whole row of chapels along the cross-beam of the _tau_; and in the
place of honour a shallow apse pierced with red lancets and aglow like an
opal. Never a chapel of them but is worth study and a stiff neck. After
the Rule came the _Fioretti_; after Francis and Bonaventure came
Celano and Jacopone da Todi; after Arnolfo del Lapo and his attention to
business came the hours of ease when he planned the airy plume on which
the Church leaps skyward; and came also Giotto to weave the crown of Santa
Croce.

I take the Tuscan nature to be so constituted that it will play with any
given subject of speculation in much the same way. With one or two mighty
exceptions to be sure--Dante, of course, Buonarroti, of course, and, for
all his secularities. Boccace--it is not imagination you find in Tuscany.
Rather, it is a sweet and delicate, a wholesome, home-grown fancy,
wantoning with thought which may be unpleasant, unhealthy, grave,
frivolous--what you will; yet playing in such a way, and with such
intuitive taste and breeding that no harm ensues nor any nausea. They
realise for me a fairy country; I can think no evil of a Tuscan. So I can
read Boccace the infidel, Poggio the gross, where Voltaire makes me a
bigot and Catulle Mendes ashamed. The fresh breeze blowing through the
_Decameron_ keeps the air sweet. Even Lorenzo is a child for me, and
Macchiavel, "the man without a soul," I decline to take seriously.
Consider, then, all Tuscan art from this point of view, the weaving of
innocent fancies round some chance-caught theme, Christianity may have
been the _point d'appui_. No doubt it generally was. What then? Have
you never heard two children dreaming aloud of the ways of God, or the
troubles of Christ? How they humanise, how they realise the Mystery! Just
such a pretty babble I find in the Spanish Chapel, which to take in any
other spirit would work a madness in the brain. You remember the North
wall, apotheosis of Saint Thomas and what-not, for all the world like a
paradigm of the irregular verb "Aquinizo." What are we to suppose Lippo
Memmi (or whoever else it was) to have been about when he hung in mid-air
on his swinging bridge and stained the wet square red and green? To read
Ruskin you would think he was fulminating _urbi et orbi_ with the
_Summa_ or _Cur Deus homo_ at his fingers' ends. Depend upon it
he was doing quite other, or the artistic temper (phrase rendered
loathsome by the halfpenny newspapers) suffered a relapse between the days
of King David and the days of his brother Lippo Lippi. Are we to suppose
that a man who could live in intimate commerce with fourteen such gracious
ladies as he has set there, ranged on their carved sedilia--his Britomart
trim and debonnair; his willowy Carita; his wimpled matron in clean white
who masquerades as I know not what branch of theology; his pretty girlish
Geometry of coiled and braided hair and the yet unloosed girdle of demure
virginity; his maid Musica crowned with roses, and Logica, the bold-eyed
and open-throated wench, hand to hip--is this the man for sententiousness?
Out, out! Could any one save a humourist of high order have given Moses
such a pair of horns, or set, under Music, such a shagged Tubal to
belabour an anvil? The wall sings like an anthology,--a Gothic anthology
where "Bele Aliz matin leva" is versicle, and "In un boschetto trovai
pastorella" antiphon. You might as well talk of Christian Mathematics as
of Christian Art, or bind the sweet influences of Pleiades as the volant
sallies of a poet's wit.

Once we get it into our heads that the Tuscans were fanciful children,
always, and the discrepancy of critics, of Ruskin and Mr. George Moore, of
Rio and Mr. Addington Symonds, may vanish. For another thing, we shall
understand and allow for the standard of Santa Croce and the
_Fioretti_. From the latter nosegay! take this:

"It happened one day as Brother Peter was standing to his prayer, thinking
earnestly about the Passion of Christ, how the blessed Mother of him, and
John Evangelist his best-beloved, and Saint Francis too, were painted at
the foot of the Cross, crucified indeed with him through anguish of the
mind, that there came upon him the longing to know which of these three
had endured the bitterest pains of that anguish, the Mother who bore our
Lord, or the Disciple familiar to his bosom, or Saint Francis crucified
also even as he was. And as he stood thinking on these things, lo! there
appeared before him the Virgin Mary with Saint John Evangelist and Saint
Francis, robed in splendid apparel and of glory wonderful; but Saint
Francis' robe was more cunningly wrought than Saint John's. Now Peter
stood quite scared at the sight; but Saint John bade him take comfort,
saying, 'Be not afraid, dearest brother, for we are come hither to dispel
thy doubt. You are to knows then, that above all creatures the Mother of
Christ and I grieved over the Passion of our Lord. But since that day
Saint Francis has felt more anguish than any other. Therefore, as you see,
he is in glory now.' Then Brother Peter asked him, and said, 'Most holy
Apostle of Christ, wherefore cometh it that the vesture of Saint Francis
is more glorious than thine?' Answered him Saint John, 'The reason is
this, for that when he was in the world he wore a viler than ever I did.'
So then Saint John gave him a vestment which he carried on his arm, and
the holy company vanished."

This, be sure, is true; and I have its English parallel ready to hand. For
I once heard a father and his child talking of the goodness of God. "God,"
says the father, "gives thee the milk to thy porridge"; and the child
thought it a good saying, yet puzzled over it, doubting, as it afterwards
appeared, the part to be assigned to a friend of his, the daily milkman.
And so he solved it. "God makes the milk and the milkman brings it," he
said. The _Fioretti_, if you must needs break a butterfly on your
dissecting-board, was written, as I judge, by a bare-foot Minorite of
forty; compiled, that is, from the wonderings, the pretty adjustments and
naive disquisitions of any such weatherworn brown men as you may see to-
day toiling up the Calvary to their Convent. And in this same story-
telling Giotto is an adept. He loves to gather his fellows round him and
speak of Saints and Archangels, where our youngsters talk of fairy
godmothers and white rabbits. To say this is not Art, as the critics
profanely teach, is monstrous. Is not the _Fioretti_ literature, or
the Gospel according to Saint Luke literature? And is not Religion the
highest art of all, the large elementary poetry in the core of the heart
of man? Just so was the craft which disposed the rings of that wonderful
ornament round about the Bardi chapel, rings of clean arabesque wrought in
line upon pale blue and pink and brown, and which in so doing fitted the
Franciscan thaumaturgy with an exact garment tenderly adjusted to every
wave of its abandonment--even so was this a great art indeed. For you ask
of an art no more than this, that it shall be adequately representative:
there are no comparative degrees.

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