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(frontis)
By
(dedication)
TO MY FRIEND, MABEL PRICE, IN MEMORY OF MANY RAMBLES AND HOPES OF MANY
MORE AMONGST HILLS, BOOKS, AND UNREALITIES
MAIANO NEAR FLORENCE FEBRUARY
1897
(contents)
the superior quality of the things in what I mean by Limbo that we are peculiarly concerned.
And now for the other half of my preliminary illustration of the
subject, to wit, the Children's Rabbits' House. The little
gardens which the children played at cultivating have long since
disappeared, taken insensibly back into that corner of the formal but
slackly kept garden which looks towards the steep hill dotted with cows and
sheep. But in that corner, behind the shapeless Portugal laurels and the
patches of seeding grass, there still remains, beneath big trees, what the
children used to call the "Rabbits' Villa." 'Tis
merely a wooden toy house, with green moss-eaten roof, standing, like the
lake dwellings of prehistoric times, on wooden posts, with the tall
foxgloves, crimson and white, growing all round it. There is something
ludicrous in this superannuated toy, this Noah's ark on stilts among
the grass and bushes; but when you look into the thing, finding the empty
plates and cups "for having tea with the rabbits," and when you
look into it spiritually also, it grows oddly pathetic. We walked up and
down between the high hornbeam hedges,
the sunlight lying low on the armies of tall daisies and seeding grasses, and falling in narrow glints among the white boles and hanging boughs of the beeches, where the wooden benches stand unused in the deep grass, and the old swing hangs crazily crooked. Yes, the Rabbits' Villa and the surrounding overgrown beds are quite pathetic. Is it because they are, in a way, the graves of children long dead, as dead--despite the grown-up folk who may come and say "It was I"--as the rabbits and guinea-pigs with whom they once had tea? That is it; and that explains my meaning: the Rabbits' Villa is, to the eye of the initiate, one of many little branch establishments of Limbo surrounding us on all sides. Another poet, more versed in similar matters than Dante (one feels sure that Dante knew his own mind, and always had his own way, even when exiled), Rossetti, in a sonnet, has given us the terrible little speech, which would issue from the small Limbos of this kind: Look in my face: My name is Might-have-been.
glorious Miltons
Hence, to my mind, there are no mute
in-
Page 7
Be this last as it may--and I commend it to
those who believe in genius as a form of monomania--it is quite certain that genius has nothing in common with machinery. It is the most organic and alive of living organisms; the most adaptable therefore, and least easily killed; and for this reason, and despite Gray's Elegy, there is no chance of much of it in Limbo.
This is no excuse for the optimistic extermination of distinguished men.
It is indeed most difficult to kill genius, but there are a hundred ways of
killing its possessors; and with them as much of their work as they have
left undone. What pictures might Giorgione not have painted but for the
lady, the rival, or the plague, whichever it was that killed him! Mozart
could assuredly have given us a half-dozen more Don Giovannis
if he had had fewer lessons, fewer worries, better food; nay, by his
miserable death the world has lost, methinks, more even than that--a
commanding influence which would have kept music, for a score of years,
earnest and masterly but joyful: Rossini would not have run to seed, and
Beethoven's ninth symphony might have been a genuine a "Hymn to
Joy" if only Mozart, the Apollo of musicians, had, for a few years
more,
flooded men's souls with radiance. A similar thing is said of Rafael; but his followers were mediocre, and he himself lacked personality, so that many a better example might be brought.
These are not useless speculations; it is as well we realise that,
although genius be immortal, poor men of genius are not. Quite an
extraordinarily small amount of draughts and microbes, of starvation bodily
and spiritual, of pin-pricks of various kinds, will do for them; we can all
have a hand in their killing; the killing also of their peace, kindliness
and justice, sending these qualities to Limbo, which is full of such. And
now, dear reader, I perceive that we have at last got Limbo well in sight
and, in another minute, we may begin to discern some of its real
contents.
persons in bottles, his cousin Orlando's, which he had come on purpose to fetch, and, curiously enough, his own, which he had never missed.
The moon does well as storehouse for such brilliant, romantic things.
The Limbo whose contents and branches I would speak of is far less
glorious, a trifle humdrum; sometimes such as makes one smile, like that
Villa of the Rabbits in the neglected garden. 'Twas for this reason,
indeed, that I preferred to clear away at once the question of the Mute
Inglorious Miltons, and of such solemn public loss as comes of the untimely
death of illustrious men. Do you remember, by the way, reader, a certain
hasty sketch by Cazin, which hangs in a corner of the Luxembourg? The
bedroom of Gambetta after his death: the white bed neatly made, empty, with
laurel garlands replacing him; the tricolor flag, half-furled, leaned
against the chair, and on the table vague heaped-up papers; a thing quite
modest and heroic, suitable to all similar occasions--Mirabeau say,
and Stevenson on his far-off island--and with whose image we can fitly
close our talk of genius wasted by early death.
I have alluded to happiness as filling up
much space in Limbo; and I think that the amount of it lying in that kingdom of Might-have-been is probably out of all proportion with that which must do duty in this actual life. Browning's Last Ride Together--one has to be perpetually referring to poets on this matter, for philosophers and moralists consider happiness in its causal connection or as a fine snare to virtue--Browning's Last Ride Together expresses, indeed, a view of the subject commending itself to active and cheerful persons, which comes to many just after their salad days; to wit, what a mercy that we don't often get what we want most. The objects of our recent ardent longings reveal themselves, most luridly sometimes, as dangers, deadlocks, fetters, hopeless labyrinths, from which we have barely escaped. This is the house I wanted to buy, the employment I fretted to obtain, the lady I pined to marry, the friend with whom I projected to share lodgings. With such sudden chill recognitions comes belief in a special providence, some fine Greek-sounding goddess, thwarting one's dearest wishes from tender solicitude that we shouldn't get what we want. In such a crisis the nobler of us feel
like the Riding Lover, and learn ideal philosophy and manly acquiescence; the meaner snigger ungenerously about those youthful escapes; and know not that they have gained safety at the price, very often, of the little good--ideality, faith and dash--there ever was about them: safe smug individuals, whose safety is mere loss to the cosmos. But later on, when our characters have settled, when repeated changes have taught us which is our unchangeable ego, we begin to let go that optimist creed, and to suspect (suspicion turning to certainty) that, as all things which have happened to us have not been always advantageous, so likewise things longed for in vain need not necessarily have been curses. As we grow less attached to theories, and more to our neighbours, we recognise every day that loss, refusal of the desired, has not by any means always braced or chastened the lives we look into; we admit that the Powers That Be showed considerable judgment in disregarding the teachings of asceticism, and inspiring mankind with iinmate repugnance to having a bad time. And, to return to the question of Limbo, as we watch the best powers, the whole usefulness and
sweetness starved out of certain lives for lack of the love, the liberty or the special activities they prayed for; as regards the question of Limbo, I repeat, we grow (or try to grow) a little more cautious about sending so much more happiness--ours and other folk's--to the place of Might-have-been.
Some of it certainly does seem beyond our control, a fatal matter of
constitution. I am not speaking of the results of vice or stupidity; this
talk of Limbo is exclusively addressed to the very nicest people.
A deal of the world's sound happiness is lost through Shyness. We
have all of us seen instances. They often occur between members of the same
family, the very similarity of nature, which might make mothers and
daughters, brothers and sisters, into closest companions, merely doubling
the dose of that terrible reserve, timidity, horror of human contact,
paralysis of speech, which keeps the most loving hearts asunder. It is
useless to console ourselves by saying that each has its own love of the
other. And thus they walk, sometimes side by side, never looking in one
another's eyes, never saying the word, till death steps in, death
sometimes
unable to loosen the tongue of the mourner. Such things are common among our reserved northern races, making us so much less happy and less helpful in everyday life than our Latin and Teuton neighbours; and, I imagine, are commonest among persons of the same blood. But the same will happen between lovers, or those who should have been such; doubt of one's own feeling, fear of the other's charity, apprehension of its all being a mistake, has silently prevented many a marriage. The two, then, could not have been much in love? Not in love, since neither ever allowed that to happen, more's the pity; but loving one another with the whole affinity of their natures, and, after all, being in love is but the crisis, or the beginning of that, if it's worth anything.
Thus shyness sends much happiness to Limbo. But actual shyness is not
the worst. Some persons, sometimes of the very finest kind, endowed for
loving-kindness, passion, highest devotion, nay requiring it as much as air
or warmth, have received, from some baleful fairy, a sterilising gift of
fear. Fear of what they could not tell; something which makes all community
of soul a terror, and
every friend a threat. Something terrible, in whose presence we must bow our heads and pray impunity therefrom for ourselves and ours.
But the bulk of happiness stacked up in Limbo appears, on careful
looking, to be an agglomeration of other lost things; justice, charm,
appreciation, and faith in one another, all recklessly packed off as so
much lumber, sometimes to make room for fine new qualities instead!
Justice, I am inclined to think, is usually sent to Limbo through the
agency of others. A work in many folios might be written by condensing what
famous men have had said against them in their days of struggle, and what
they have answered about others in their days of prosperity.
The loss of charm is due to many more circumstances; the
stress of life indeed seems calculated to send it to Limbo. Certain it is
that few women, and fewer men, of forty, preserve a particle of it. I am
not speaking of youth or beauty, though it does seem a pity that mature
human beings should mostly be too fat or too thin, and lacking either
sympathy or intellectual keenness. Charm must comprise all
that, but much besides. It
is the undefinable quality of nearly every child, and of all nice lads and girls; the quality which (though it can reach perfection in exceptional old people) usually vanishes, no one knows when exactly, into the Limbo marked by the Rabbits' Villa, with its plates and tea-cups, mouldering on its wooden posts in the unweeded garden.
More useful qualities replace all these: hardness, readiness to snatch
opportunity, mistrust of all ideals, inflexible self-righteousness; useful,
nay necessary; but, let us admit it, in a life which, judged by the amount
of dignity and sweetness it contains, is perhaps scarce necessary itself,
and certainly not useful. The case might be summed up, for our guidance, by
saying that the loss of many of our finer qualities is due to the
complacent, and sometimes dutiful, cultivation of our worse ones!
For, even in the list of virtues, there are finer and less fine, nay
virtues one might almost call atrocious, and virtues with a taint of
ignominy. I have said that we lose some of our finer qualities this way;
what's worse is, that we often fail to appreciate the finest qualities
of others.
Let us rather think gently of things, sad, but sad without ignominy, of
friendships stillborn or untimely cut off, hurried by death into a place
like that which holds the souls of the unchristened babies; often, like
them, let us hope, removed to a sphere where such things grow finer and
more fruitful, the sphere of
the love of those we have not loved enough in life.
But that at best is but a place of ghosts; so let us never forget, dear
friends, how close all round lies Limbo, the Kingdom of
Might-have-been.
These words, expressing the very reverse of what I feel, have set me
musing on my foolish passion for the Past. The Past, but the real one; not
the Past considered as a possible Present. For though I should like to have
seen ancient Athens, or Carthage according to Salambô, and though I
have pined to hear the singers of last century, I know that any other
period than this of the world's history would be detestable to live
in. For one thing--one among other instances of brutish
dulness--our ancestors knew nothing of the emotion of the past, the
rapture of old towns and houses.
This emotion, at times this rapture, depends upon a number of mingled
causes; its origin is complex and subtle, like that of all things
exquisite; the flavour of certain dishes, the feel of sea or mountain air,
in which chemical peculiarities and circumstances of temperature join with
a hundred trifles, seaweed, herbs, tar, heather and so forth; and like,
more particularly, music and poetry, whose essence is so difficult of
ascertaining. And in this case, the causes that first occur to our mind
merely suggest a number more. Of these there is a principal one, only just
less important than that suggested by my Yorkshire friend, which might be
summed up thus: That the action of time makes man's works into
natural objects.
Now, with no disrespect to man, 'tis certain Nature can do more
than he. Not that she is the more intelligent of the two; on the contrary,
she often makes the grossest artistic blunders, and has, for instance, a
woeful lack of design in England, and a perfect mania for obvious
composition and deliberate picturesqueness in Italy and Argyllshire. But
Nature is greater than man because she is bigger, and can do more things at
a time. Man seems
unable to attend to one point without neglecting some other; where he has a fine fancy in melody, his harmony is apt to be threadbare; if he succeeds with colour, he cannot manage line, and if light and shade, then neither; and it is a circumstance worthy of remark that whenever and wherever man has built beautiful temples, churches, and palaces, he has been impelled to bedizen them with primary colours, of which, in Venice and the Alhambra, time at last made something agreeable, and time also, in Greece, has judged best to obliterate every odious trace. Hence, in the works of man there is always a tendency to simplify, to suppress detail, to make things clear and explain patterns and points of view; to save trouble, thought, and material; to be symmetrical, which means, after all, to repeat the same thing twice over; he knows it is wrong to carve one frieze on the top of the other, and to paint in more than one layer of paint. Of all such restrictions Nature is superbly unconscious. She smears weather-stain on weather-stain and lichen on lichen, never stopping to match them. She jags off corners and edges, and of one meagre line makes fifty curves and facets. She weaves pattern over pattern,
regardless of confusion, so that the mangiest hedgerow is richer, more subtle than all the carpets and papers ever designed by Mr. Morris. Her one notion is More, always more; whereas that of man, less likely to exceed, is a timid Enough. No wonder, for has she not the chemistry of soil and sun and moisture and wind and frost, all at her beck and call?
Be it as it may, Nature does more for us than man, in the way of
pleasure and interest. And to say, therefore, that time turns the works of
man into natural objects is, therefore, saying that time gives them
infinitely more variety and charm. In making them natural objects also time
gives to man's lifeless productions the chief quality of everything
belonging to Nature--life. Compare a freshly plastered wall with one
that has been exposed to sun and rain, or a newly slated roof to one all
covered with crumbling, grey, feathery stuff, like those of the Genoese
villages, which look as if they had been thatched with olive-leaves from
off their hills. 'Tis the comparison between life and death; or,
rather, since death includes change, between something and nothing. Imagine
a tree as regular as a column, or an apple as round as a door-knob!
These begin in our earliest boy- or girl-hood. What right-minded child
of ten or twelve cares, beyond its tribute of apples, and jam, and cricket,
and guinea-pigs, for so dull a thing as the present? Why, the present is
like this schoolroom or playground, compared with Polar Seas, Rocky
Mountains, or Pacific Islands; a place for the body, not for the soul. It
all came back to me, a little while ago, when doing up for my young friend,
L.V., sundry Roman coins long mislaid in a trunk, and which had formed my
happiness at his age. Delightful things!--smooth and bright green like
certain cabbage-leaves, or of a sorry brown, rough with rust and verdigris;
but all leaving alike a perceptible portion of themselves in the paper bag,
a delectable smell of copper on one's hands. How often had I turned
you round and round betwixt finger and thumb, trying to catch the slant
of an inscription, or to get, in some special light, the film ot effaced effigy--the chin of Nero, or the undulating, benevolent nose of Marcus Aurelius? How often have my hands not anointed you with every conceivable mixture of oil, varnish, and gum, rubbing you gently with silk and wool, and kid gloves, in hopes that something ineffable might rise up on your surface! I quite sympathised with my young friend when, having waggled and chortled over each of them several times, he thought it necessary to overcome the natural manly horror for kissing, and shook my hand twice, thrice, and then once more, returning from the door... For had they not concentrated in their interesting verdigrised, brass-smelling smallness something, to me, of the glory and wonder of Rome? Cæcilia Metella, the Grotto of Egeria--a vague vision, through some twenty years' fog, of a drive between budding hedges and dry reeds; a walk across short anemone-starred turf; but turning into distinct remembrance of the buying of two old pennies, one of Augustus, the other even more interesting, owing to entire obliteration of both reverse and obverse; a valuable coin, undoubtedly. And the Baths of Caracalla,
which I can recollect with the thick brushwood, oak scrub, ivy and lentisk, and even baby ilexes, covering the masonry and overhanging the arches, and with rose hedges just cut away to dig out some huge porphyry pillar--were not their charms all concentrated in dim, delicious hopes of finding, just where the green turf ended and the undulating expanse of purple, green and white tesselated pavement began, some other brazen penny? And then, in Switzerland, soon after, did I not suffer acutely, as I cleaned my coins, from the knowledge that in this barbarous Northern place, which the Romans had, perhaps, never come near, it was quite useless to keep one's eyes on the ruts of roads and the gravel of paths, and consequently almost useless to go out, or to exist; until one day I learnt that a certain old lawyer, in a certain field, had actually dug up Roman antiquities... I don't know whether I ever saw them with corporeal eyes, but certainly with those of the spirit; and I was lent a drawing of one of them, a gold armlet, of which I insisted on having a copy made, and sticking it up in my room...
It does but little honour to our greatest living philosopher that he,
whom children will
bless for free permission to bruise, burn, and cut their bodies, and empty the sugar-bowl and jam-pot, should wish to deprive the coming generation of all historical knowledge, of so much joy therefore, and, let me add, of so much education. For do not tell me that it is not education, and of the best, to enable a child to feel the passion and poetry of life; to live, while it trudges along the dull familiar streets, in company with dull, familiar, and often stolidly incurious grown-up folk, in that terrible, magnificent past, in dungeons and palaces, loving and worshipping Joan of Arc, execrating Bloody Mary, dreaming strange impossible possibilities of what we would have said and done for Marie Antoinette--said to her, her actually coming towards us, by some stroke of magic, in that advancing carriage! There is enough in afterlife, God knows, to teach us not to be heroic; 'tis just as well that, as children, we learn a lingering liking for the quality; 'tis as important, perhaps, as learning that our tissues consume carbon, if they do so. I can speak very fervently of the enormous value for happiness of such an historical habit of mind.
Such a habit transcends altogether, in its power of filling one's
life, the merely artistic
and literary habit. For, after all, painting, architecture, music, poetry, are things which touch us in a very intermittent way. I would compare this historic habit rather to the capacity of deriving pleasure from nature, not merely through the eye, but through all the senses; and largely, doubtless, through those obscure perceptions which make certain kinds of weather, air, &c., an actual tonic, nay food, for the body. To this alone would I place my historical habit in the second rank. For, as the sensitiveness to nature means supplementing our physical life by the life of the air and the sun, the clouds and waters, so does this historic habit mean supplementing our present life by a life in the past; a life larger, richer than our own, multiplying our emotions by those of the dead....
I am no longer speaking of our passions for Joan of Arc and Marie
Antoinette, which disappear with our childhood; I am speaking of a peculiar
sense, ineffable, indescribable, but which every one knows again who has
once had it, and which to many of us has grown into a cherished
habit--the sense of being companioned by the past, of being in a place
warmed for our living by the lives of others.
To me, as I started with saying, the reverse of this is almost painful; and I know few things more odious than the chilly, draughty, emptiness of a place without a history. For this reason America, save what may remain of Hawthorne's New England and Irving's New York, never tempts my vagabond fancy. Nature can scarcely afford beauty wherewith to compensate for living in block-tin shanties or brand new palaces. How different if we find ourselves in some city, nay village, rendered habitable for our soul by the previous dwelling therein of others, of souls! Here the streets are never empty; and, surrounded by that faceless crowd of ghosts, one feels a right to walk about, being invited by them, instead of rushing along on one's errands among a throng of other wretched living creatures who are blocked by us and block us in their turn.
How convey this sense? I do not mean that if I walk through old Paris or
through Rome my thoughts revolve on Louis XI. or Julius Cæsar.
Nothing could be further from the fact. Indeed the charm of the thing is
that one feels oneself accompanied not by this or that magnifico of the
past (whom of course one would never have been introduced to), but
by a crowd of nameless creatures; the daily life, common joy, suffering, heroism of the past. Nay, there is something more subtle than this: the whole place (how shall I explain it?) becomes a sort of living something. Thus, when I hurry (for one must needs hurry through Venetian narrowness) between the pink and lilac houses, with faded shutters and here and there a shred of tracery; now turning a sharp corner before the locksmith's or the chestnut-roaster's; now hearing my steps lonely between high walls broken by a Gothic doorway; now crossing some smooth-paved little square with its sculptured well and balconied palaces, I feel, I say, walking day after day through these streets, that I am in contact with a whole living, breathing thing, full of habits of life, of suppressed words; a sort of odd, mysterious, mythical, but very real creature; as if, in the dark, I stretched out my hand and met something (but without any fear), something absolutely indefinable in shape and kind, but warm, alive. This changes solitude in unknown places into the reverse of solitude and strangeness. I remember walking thus along the bastions under the bishop's palace at Laon, the great stone cows peering
down from the belfry above, with a sense of inexpressible familiarity and peace. And, strange to say, this historic habit makes us familiar also with places where we have never been. How well, for instance, do I not know Dinant and Bouvines, rival cities on the Meuse (topography and detail equally fantastic); and how I sometimes long, as with homesickness, for a scramble among the stones and grass and chandelier-like asphodels of Agrigentum, Veii, Collatium! Why, to one minded like myself, a map, and even the names of stations in a time-table, are full of possible delight.
And sometimes it rises to rapture. This time, eight years ago, I was
fretting my soul away, ill, exiled away from home, forbidden all work, in
the south of Spain. At Grenada for three dreary weeks it rained without
ceasing, till the hill of the Alhambra became filled with the babbling of
streams, and the town was almost cut off by a sea of mud. Between the
showers one rushed up into the damp gardens of the Generalife, or into the
Alhambra, to be imprisoned for hours in its desolate halls, while the rain
splashed down into the courts. My sitting-room had five doors, four of
glass; and the snow lay thick on the mountains. My few
books had been read long ago; there remained to spell through a Spanish tome on the rebellion of the Alpujarras, whose Moorish leader, having committed every crime, finally went to heaven for spitting on the Koran on his death-bed. Letters from home were perpetually lost, or took a week to come. It seemed as if the world had quite unlearned every single trick that had ever given me pleasure. Yet, in these dreary weeks, there was one happy morning.
It was the anniversary, worse luck to it, of the Conquest of Grenada
from the Moors. We got seats in the chapel of the Catholic kings, and
watched a gentleman in a high hat (which he kept on in church) and swallow
tails, carry the banner of Castille and Aragon, in the presence of the
archbishop and chapter, some mediæval pages, two trumpeters with
pigtails, and an array of soldiers. A paltry ceremony enough. But before it
began, and while mass was still going on, there came to me for a few brief
moments that happiness unknown for so many, many months, that beloved
historic emotion.
My eyes were wandering round the chapel, up the sheaves of the pilasters
to the gilded spandrils, round the altars covered with
gibbering sculpture, and down again among the crowd kneeling on the matted floor--women in veils, men with scarlet cloak-lining over the shoulder, here and there the shaven head and pigtail of the bull-ring. In the middle of it all, on their marble beds, lay the effigies of Ferdinand and Isabella, with folded hands and rigid feet, four crimson banners of the Moors overhead. The crowd was pouring in from the cathedral, and bevies of priests, and scarlet choir-boys led by their fiddler. The organ, above the chants, was running through vague mazes. I felt it approaching and stealing over me, that curious emotion felt before in such different places: walking up and down, one day, in the church of Lamballe in Brittany; seated, another time, in the porch at Ely. And then it possessed me completely, raising me into a sort of beatitude. This kind of rapture is not easy to describe. No rare feeling is. But I would warn you from thinking that in such solemn moments there sweeps across the brain a paltry pageant, a Lord Mayor's Show of bygone things, like the cavalcades of future heroes who descend from frescoed or sculptured wall at the bidding of Ariosto's wizards and Spenser's fairies. This is some-
thing infinitely more potent and subtle; and like all strong intellectual emotions, it is compounded of many and various elements, and has its origin far down in mysterious depths of our nature; and it arises overwhelmingly from many springs, filling us with the throb of vague passions welling from our most vital parts. There is in it no possession of any definite portion of bygone times; but a yearning expectancy, a sense of the near presence, as it were, of the past; or, rather, of a sudden capacity in ourselves of apprehending the past which looms all round.
For a few moments thus, in that chapel before the tombs of the Catholic
kings; in the churches of Bruges and Innsbruck at the same time (for such
emotion gives strange possibilities of simultaneous presence in various
places); with the gold pomegranate flower of the badges, and the crimson
tassels of the Moorish standards before my eyes; also the iron knights who
watch round Maximilian's grave--for a moment while the priests
were chanting and the organs quavering, the life of to-day seemed to reel
and vanish, and my mind to be swept along the dark and gleaming whirlpools
of the past....
Yes, it is just because the past is somehow more companionable, warmer,
more full of flavour, than the present, that I love all old houses; but
best of all such as are solitary in the country, isolated both from new
surroundings, and from such alterations as contact with the world's
hurry almost always brings. It certainly is no question of beauty. The
houses along Chelsea embankment are more beautiful, and some of them a
great deal more picturesque than that Worcestershire rectory, to which I
always long to return: the long brick house on its terraced river-bank, the
overladen plum-trees on one side, and the funereally prosperous churchyard
yews on the other; and with corridors and staircases hung with stained,
frameless Bolognese nakedness,
Judgments of Paris, Venuses, Carità Romanas, shipped over cheap by some bear-leading parson-tutor of the eighteenth century. Nor are they architectural, those brick and timber cottages all round, sinking (one might think) into the rich, damp soil. But they have a mellowness corresponding to that of the warm, wet, fruitful land, and due to the untroubled, warm brooding over by the past. And what is architecture to that? As to these Italian ones, which my soul loveth most, they have even less of what you would call beauty; at most such grace of projecting window-grating or buttressed side as the South gives its buildings; and such colour, or rather discolouring, as a comparatively small number of years will bring.
It kept revolving in my mind, this question of old houses and their
charm, as I was sitting waiting for a tram one afternoon, in the
church-porch of Pieve a Ripoli, a hamlet about two miles outside the
south-east gate of Florence. That church porch is like the baldacchino over
certain Roman high altars, or, more humbly, like a very large fourpost
bedstead. On the one hand was a hillside of purple and brown scrub and dark
cypresses fringed against the
moist, moving grey sky; on the other, some old, bare, mulberry-trees, a hedge of russet sloe, closing in wintry fields; and, more particularly, next the porch, an insignificant house, with blistered green shutters at irregular intervals in the stained whitewash, a big green door, and a little coat-of-arms--the three Strozzi halfmoons--clapped on to the sharp corner. I sat there, among the tombstones of the porch, and wondered why I loved this house: and why it would remain, as I knew it must, a landmark in my memory. Yes, the charm must lie in the knowledge of the many creatures who have lived in this house, the many things that have been done and felt.
The creatures who have lived here, the things which have been felt and
done.... But those things felt and done, were they not mainly trivial,
base; at best nowise uncommon, and such as must be going on in every new
house all around? People worked and shirked their work, endured, fretted,
suffered somewhat, and amused themselves a little; were loving, unkind,
neglected and neglectful, and died, some too soon, some too late. That is
human life, and as such doubtless important. But all that goes on to-day
just the same; and
there is no reason why that former life should have been more interesting than that these people, Argenta Cavallesi and Vincenzio Grazzini, buried at my feet, should have had bigger or better made souls and bodies than I or my friends. Indeed, in sundry ways, and owing to the narrowness of life and thought, the calmer acceptance of coarse or cruel things, I incline to think that they were less interesting, those men and women of the past, whose rustling dresses fill old houses with fantastic sounds. They had, some few of them, their great art, great aims, feelings, struggles; but the majority were of the earth, and intolerably earthy. 'Tis their clothes' ghosts that haunt us, not their own.
more behind; there may be anything
So why should the past be charming? Perhaps merely because of its being
the one free place for our imagination. For, as to the future, it is either
empty or filled only with the cast shadows of ourselves and our various
machineries. The past is the unreal and the yet visible; it has the
fascination of the distant hills, the valleys seen from above; the unreal,
but the unreal whose unreality, unlike that of the unreal things with which
we cram the present, can never be forced on us. There is
Page 40
For there is no end to the deceits of the past; we protest that we know
it is cozening us, and it continues to cozen us just as much. Reading over
Browning's Galuppi lately, it struck me that this dead
world of vanity was no more charming or poetical than the one we live in,
when it also was alive; and that those ladies, Mrs. X., Countess Y., and
Lady Z., of whose toilettes at last
night's ball that old gossip P-- had been giving us details
throughout dinner, will in their turn, if any one care, be just as
charming, as dainty, and elegiac as those other women who sat by while
Galuppi "played toccatas stately at the
clavichord." Their dresses, should they hang for a century or so, will emit a perfume as frail, and sad, and heady; their wardrobe filled with such dust as makes tears come into one's eyes, from no mechanical reason.
"Was a ladysuch a lady?" They will say that of
ours also. And, in recognising this, we recognise how trumpery, flat, stale
and unprofitable were those ladies of the past. It is not they who make the
past charming, but the past that makes them. Time has wonderful cosmetics
for its favoured ones; and if it brings white hairs and wrinkles to the
realities, how much does it not heighten the bloom, brighten the eyes and
hair of those who survive in our imagination!
And thus, somewhat irrelevantly, concludes my chapters in praise of old
houses.
That is the drawback of my subject--that it just happens to elude
all literary treatment, and yet it must be treated. There is not even a
single word or phrase to label it, and I have had to call it, in sheer
despair, the lie of the land: it is an unnamed mystery into
which various things enter, and I feel as if I ought to explain myself by
dumb show. It will serve at any rate as an object-lesson in the extreme
one-sidedness of language and a protest against human silence about the
things it likes best.
Of outdoor things words can of course tell us some important points:
colour, for instance,
and light, and somewhat of their gradations and relations. And an adjective, a metaphor may evoke an entire atmospheric effect, paint us a sunset or a star-lit night. But the far subtler and more individual relations of visible line defy expression: no poet or prose writer can give you the tilt of a roof, the undulation of a field, the bend of a road. Yet these are the things in landscape which constitute its individuality and which reach home to our feelings.
For colour and light are variable--nay, more, they are relative.
The same tract will be green in connection with one sort of sky, blue with
another, and yellow with a third. We may be disappointed when the woods,
which we had seen as vague, moss-like blue before the sun had overtopped
the hills, become at midday a mere vast lettuce-bed. We should be much more
than disappointed, we should doubt of our senses we found on going to our
window that looked down upon outlines of hills, upon precipices, ledges,
knolls, or flat expanses, different from those we had seen the previous day
or the previous year. Thus the unvarying items of a landscape happen to be
those for which precise words cannot be found. Briefly
we praise colour, but we actually live in the indescribable thing which I must call the lie of the land. The lie of the land means walking or climbing, shelter or bleakness; it means the corner where we dread a boring neighbour, the bend round which we have watched some one depart, the stretch of road which seemed to lead us away out of captivity. Yes, lie of the land is what has mattered to us since we were children, to our fathers and remotest ancestors; ay, and its perception, the instinctive preference for one kind rather than another, is among the obscure things inherited with our blood, and making up the stuff of our souls. For how else explain the strange powers which different shapes of the earth's surface have over different individuals; the sudden pleasure, as of the sight of an old friend, the pang of pathos which we may all receive in a scene which is new, without memories, and so unlike everything familiar as to be almost without associations?
The lie of the land has therefore an importance in art, or
if it have not, ought to have, quite independent of pleasantness of line or
of anything merely visual. An immense charm consists in the fact that the
mind can walk about in a landscape. The delight at
the beauty which is seen is heightened the anticipation of further unseen beauty; the sense of exploring the unknown; and our present pleasure before a painted landscape is added the pleasure we have been storing up during years of intercourse, if I may use this word, with so many real ones.
neither to further details of itself, nor to other places and people, past or distant.
Words can just barely indicate the charm of this other place other time
enriching of the present impression. Words cannot in the least, I think,
render that other suggestion contained in The Lie of the Land,
the suggestion of the possibility of a delightful walk. What walks have we
not taken, leaving sacred personages and profane, not to speak of allegoric
ones, far behind in the backgrounds of the old Tuscans, Umbrians, and
Venetians! Up Benozzo's hillside woods of cypress and pine, smelling
of myrrh and sweet-briar, over Perugino's green rising grounds,
towards those slender, scant-leaved trees, straight-stemmed acacias and
elms, by the water in the cool, blue evening valley. Best of all, have not
Giorgione and Titian, Palma and Bonifazio, and the dear imitative people
labelled Venetian school, led us between the hedges russet
already with the ripening of the season and hour into those fields where
the sheep are nibbling, under the twilight of the big brown trees, to where
some pale blue alp closes in the slopes and the valleys?
moment of the day; and the poplar rows and cornfields would very likely be drearily dull until sunset. The moment, like Faust's second of perfect bliss, is such as should be made immortal, but the place one would rather not see again. Yet Monsieur Monet is the one of his school who shows most care for the scene he is painting. The others, even the great ones--men like Pissarro and Sisley, who have shown us so many delightful things in the details of even the dull French foliage, even the dull midday sky--the other modern ones make one long to pull up their umbrella and easel and carry them on--not very far surely--to some spot where the road made a bend, the embankment had a gap, the water a swirl; for we would not be so old-fashioned as to request that the country might have a few undulations.... Of course it was very dull of our ancestors--particularly of Clive Newcome's day--always to paint a panorama with whole ranges of hills, miles of river, and as many cities as possible; and even our pleasure in Turner's large landscapes is spoilt by their being the sort of thing people would drive for miles or climb for hours to enjoy, what our grandfathers in post-chaises called a
noble fine prospect. All that had to be got rid of, like the
contemporaneous literary descriptions: "A smiling valley proceeded
from south-east to north-west; an amphitheatre cliffs bounding it on the
right hand; while the left a magnificent waterfall leapt from a rock three
hundred feet in height and expanded into a noble natural basin of granite
some fifty yards in diameter," &c. &c. The British classics,
thus busy with compass, measuring-rod and level, thus anxious to enable the
reader to reconstruct their landscape on pasteboard, had no time of course
to notice trifling matters: how, for instance,
"The woods are
round us, heaped and dim;
From slab to slab how it
slips and springs
The thread of water, single and
slim,
Through the ravage some torrent
brings."
Nor could the panoramic painter of the earlier nineteenth century pay much
attention to mere alternations of light while absorbed in his great
"Distant View of Jerusalem and Madagascar;" indeed, he could
afford to move off only when it began to rain very hard.
confusion of Nature's effects; Nature, which differs from the paltry work of man just in this, that she does not thin out, make clear and symmetrical for the easier appreciation of foolish persons, but packs effect upon effect, in space even as in time, one close upon the other, leaf upon leaf, branch upon branch, tree upon tree, colour upon colour, a mystery of beauty wrapped in beauty, without the faintest concern whether it would not be better to say "this is really a river," or, "that is really a tree." "But," answer the critics with much superiority, "art should not be the mere copying of Nature; surely there is already enough of Nature herself; art should be the expression of man's delight in Nature's shows." Well, Nature shows a great many things which are not unchanging and not by any means unperplexing; she shows them at least to those who will see, see what is really there to be seen; and she will show them, thanks to our brave impressionists, to all men henceforth who have eyes and a heart. And here comes our debt to these great painters: what a number of effects, modest and exquisite, or bizarre and magnificent, they will have taught us to look out for; what beauty and poetry in
humdrum scenery, what perfect loveliness even among sordidness and squalor: tints as of dove's breasts in city mud, enamel splendours in heaps of furnace refuse, mysterious magnificence, visions of Venice at night, of Eblis palace, of I know not what, in wet gaslit nights, in looming lit-up factories. Nay, leaving that alone, since 'tis better, perhaps, that we should not enjoy anything connected with grime and misery and ugliness--how much have not these men added to the delight of our walks and rides; revealing to us, among other things, the supreme beauty of winter colouring, the harmony of purple, blue, slate, brown, pink, and russet, of tints and compounds of tints without a name, of bare hedgerows and leafless trees, sere grass and mist-veiled waters; compared with which spring is but raw, summer dull, and autumn positively ostentatious in her gala suit of tawny and yellow.
Perhaps, indeed, these modern painters have done more for us by the
beauty they have taught us to see in Nature than by the beauty they have
actually put before us in their pictures; if I except some winter
landscapes of Monet's and the wonderful
water colours
of Mr. Brabazon, whose exquisite sense of form and knowledge of drawing have enabled him, in rapidest sketches of rapidly passing effects, to indicate the structure of hills and valleys, the shape of clouds, in the mere wash of colour, even as Nature indicates them herself. With such exceptions as these, and the beautiful mysteries of Mr. Whistler, there is undoubtedly in recent landscape a preoccupation of technical methods and an indifference to choice of subject, above all, a degree of insistance on what is actually seen which leads one to suspect that the impressionists represent rather a necessary phase in the art, than a definite achievement, in the same manner as the Renaissance painters who gave themselves up to the study of perspective and anatomy. This terrible over-importance of the act of vision is doubtless the preparation for a new kind of landscape, which will employ these arduously acquired facts of colour and light, this restlessly renovated technique, in the service of a new kind of sentiment and imagination, differing from that of previous ages even as the sentiment and imagination of Browning differs from that of his great predecessors. But it is probably necessary that the world at large, as
well as the artists, should be familiarised with the new facts, the new methods of impressionism, before such facts and methods can find their significance and achievement; even as in the Renaissance people had to recognise the realities of perspective and anatomy before they could enjoy an art which attained beauty through this means; it would have been no use showing Sixtine chapels to the contemporaries of Giotto. There is at present a certain lack of enjoyable quality, a lack of soul appealing to soul, in the new school of landscape. But where there is a faithful, reverent eye, a subtle hand, a soul cannot be far round the corner. And we may hope that, if we be as sincere and willing as themselves, our Pollaiolos and Mantegnas of the impressionist school, discoverers of new subtleties of colour and light, will be duly succeeded by modern Michelangelos and Titians, who will receive all the science ready for use, and bid it fetch and carry and build new wonderful things for the pleasure of their soul and of ours.
How large a share such fancy and such memories have in the life of art,
people can scarcely realise. Nay, such is the habit of thinking of the
picture, statue, or poem, as
a complete and vital thing apart from the mind which perceives it, that the expression life of art is sure to be interpreted as life of various schools of art: thus, the life of art developed from the type of Phidias to that of Praxiteles, and so forth. But in the broader, truer sense, the life of all art goes on in the mind and heart, not merely of those who make the work, but of those who see and read it. Nay, is not the work, the real one, a certain particular state of feeling, a pattern woven of new perceptions and impressions and of old memories and feelings, which the picture, the statue or poem, awakens, different in each different individual? 'Tis a thought perhaps annoying to those who have slaved seven years over a particular outline of muscles, a particular colour of grass, or the cadence of a particular sentence. What! all this to be refused finality, to be disintegrated by the feelings and fancies of the man who looks at the picture, or reads the book, heaven knows how carelessly besides? Well, if not disintegrated, would you prefer it to be unassimilated? Do you wish your picture, statue or poem to remain whole as you made it? Place it permanently in front of a
mirror; consign it to the memory of a parrot; or, if you are musician, sing your song, expression and all, down a phonograph. You cannot get from the poor human soul, that living microcosm of changing impressions, the thorough, wholesale appreciation which you want.
It is extraordinary how much of my soul seems to cling to certain
peculiarities of what I have called lie of the land,
undulations, bends
of rivers, straightenings and snakings of road; how much of one's past life, sensations, hopes, wishes, words, has got entangled in the little familiar sprigs, grasses and moss. The order of time and space is sometimes utterly subverted; thus, last autumn, in a corner of Argyllshire, I seemed suddenly cut off from everything in the British Isles, and reunited to the life I used to lead hundreds of miles away, years ago in the high Apennines, merely because of the minute starry moss under foot and the bubble of brooks in my ears.
Nay, the power of outdoor things, their mysterious affinities, can
change the values even of what has been and what has not been, can make one
live for a moment in places which have never existed save in the fancy.
Have I not found myself suddenly taken back to certain woods which I loved
in my childhood simply because I had halted before a great isolated fir
with hanging branches, a single fir shading a circle of soft-green turf,
and watched the rabbits sitting, like round grey stones suddenly flashing
into white tails and movement? Woods where? I have not the faintest notion.
Perhaps only woods I imagined my father must be shooting in when I was a
baby, woods which I made up out of Christmas trees, moss and dead rabbits, woods I had heard of in fairy tales...
Such are some of the relations of landscape and sentiments, a correct
notion of which is necessary before it is possible to consider the best
manner of representing landscape with words; a subject to
which none of my readers, I think, nor myself, have at present the smallest
desire to pass on.
I knew that by her dress, but I did not like to allude to its being
old-fashioned. It was the sort of thing, muslin all embroidered with little
nosegays of myrtle and yellow broom, and tied into odd bunches at the elbow
and waist, which they wore in the days of Botticelli's
Spring; and on her head she had a garland of eglantine and
palm-shaped hellebore leaves which was quite unmistakable.
The nymph Terzollina (for of course she was the tutelary divinity of the
narrow valley behind the great Medicean Villa) merely shook her head and
shifted one of her bare feet, on which she was seated under a cypress tree,
and went on threading the yellow broom flowers.
"At all events, you might tell me some thing about the Magnificent
Lorenzo," I went on, impatient at her obstinacy. "You know
quite well that he used to come and court you here, and make verses most
likely."
The exasperating goddess raised her thin brown face, with the sharp
squirrel's teeth and the glittering goat's eyes. Very pretty I
thought her, though undoubtedly a little passée, like all the symbolical ladies of her
set. She plucked at a clump of dry peppermint,
perfuming the hot air as she crushed it, and then looked up, with a sly, shy little peasant-girl's look, which was absurd in a lady so mature and so elaborately adorned. Then, in a crooning voice, she began to recite some stanzas in ottava rima, as follows:
"The house where the good old Knight Gualando hid away the little
Princess, was itself hidden in this hidden valley. It was small and quite
white, with great iron bars to the windows. In front was a long piece of
greensward, starred with white clover, and behind and in front, to where
the pines and cypresses began, ran strips of corn-field. It was remote from
all the pomps of life; and when the cuckoo had become silent and the
nightingales had cracked their voices, the only sound was the coo of the
wood-pigeons, the babble of the stream, and the twitter of the young
larks.
"The old Knight Gualando had hidden his bright armour in an oaken
chest; and went to the distant town every day dressed in the blue smock of
a peasant, and driving a donkey before him. Thence he returned with
delicates for the little Princess and with news of the wicked usurper; nor
did any one
suspect who he was, or dream of his hiding-place.
"During his absence the little Princess whose name was
Fiordispina, used to string beads through the hot hours when the sun smote
through the trees, and the green corn ridges began to take a faint gilding
in their silveriness, as the Princess remembered it in a picture in the
Castle Chapel, where the sun was represented by a big embossed ball of
gold, projecting from the picture, which she was allowed to stroke on
holidays.
"In the evening, when the sky turned pearl white, and a breeze
rustled through the pines and cypresses which made a little black fringe on
the hill-top and a little patch of feathery velvet pile on the slopes, the
little Princess would come forth, and ramble about in her peasant's
frock, her fair face stained browner by the sun than by any walnut juice.
She would climb the hill, and sniff the scent of the sun-warmed resin, and
the sweetness of the yellow broom. It spread all over the hill, and the
King, her father, had not possessed so many ells of cloth of gold.
"But one evening she wandered further than usual, and saw on a
bank, at the edge of a
cornfield, five big white lilies blowing. She went back home and fetched the golden scissors from her work-bag, and cut off one of the lilies. On the next day she came again and cut another until she had cut them all.
"But it happened that an old witch was staying in that
neighbourhood, gathering herbs among the hills. She had taken note of the
five lilies, because she disliked them on account of their being white; and
she remarked that one of them had been cut off; then another, then another.
She hated people who like lilies. When she found the fifth lily gone, she
wondered greatly, and climbed on the ridge, and looked at their stalks
where they were cut. She was a wise woman, who knew many things. So she
laid her finger upon the cut stalk, and said, 'This has not been cut
with iron shears'; and she laid her lip against the cut stalk, and
felt that it had been cut with gold shears, for gold cuts like nothing
else.
"'Oho!' said the old witch--'where there
are gold scissors, there must be gold work-bags; and where there are gold
work-bags, there must be little Princesses.'"
"Well, and then?" I asked.
"Oh then, nothing at all," answered Nymph Terzollina beloved
by the Magnificent Lorenzo, who had seen the procession of the Three Kings.
"Good evening to you."
And where her white muslin dress, broidered with nosegays of broom and
myrtle had been spread on the dry grass and crushed mint, there was only,
beneath the cypresses, a bush of white-starred myrtle a tuft of belated
yellow broom.
On the other hand, during those weeks of cloudless summer, natural
objects vie with each other in giving one amateur representations. Things
look their most unexpected, masquerade as other things, get queer
unintelligible allegoric meanings, leaving you to guess what it all means,
a constant dumb-crambo of trees, flowers, animals, houses, and
moonlight.
The moon, particularly, is continually en
scène, as if to take the place of the fireflies, which
last only so long as the corn is in the ear, gradually getting extinguished
and trailing about, humble helpless moths with a pale phosphorescence in
their tail, in the grass and in the curtains. The moon takes their place;
the moon which, in an Italian summer, seems to be full for three weeks out
of the four.
One evening the performance was given by the moon and the corn-sheaves,
assisted by minor actors such as crickets, downy owls, and vine-garlands.
The oats, which had been of such exquisite delicacy of green, had just been
reaped in the field beyond our garden and were now stacked up. Suspecting
one of the usual performances, I went after dinner to the upper
garden-gate, and looked through the bars. There it was, the familiar,
elemental witchery. The moon was nearly full, blurring the stars, steeping
the sky and earth in pale blue mist, which seemed somehow to be the visible
falling dew. It left a certain greenness to the broad grass path, a vague
yellow to the unsickled wheat; and threw upon the sheaves of oats the
shallows of festooned vine garlands. Those sheaves, or stooks--who can
describe
their metamorphose? Palest yellow on the pale stubbly ground, they were frosted by the moonbeams in their crisp fringe of ears, and in the shining straws projecting here and there. Straws, ears? You would never have guessed that they were made of anything so mundane. They sat there, propped against the trees, between the pools of light and the shadows, while the crickets trilled their cool, shrill song; sat solemnly with an air of expectation, calling to me, frightening me. And one in particular, with a great additional bunch on his head, cut by a shadow, was oddly unaccountable and terrible. After a minute I had to slink away, back into the garden, like an intruder.
The beasts were being sold on a piece of rough, freshly reaped ground,
lying between the high road and the river bed, empty of waters, but full
among its shingle of myrrh-scented yellow herbage. The oxen were mostly
of the white Tuscan breeds (those of Romagna are smaller but more spirited, and of a delicate grey) only their thighs slightly browned; the scarlet cloth neck-fringes set off, like a garland of geranium, against the perfect milkiness of backs and necks. They looked, indeed, these gigantic creatures, as if moulded out of whipped cream or cream cheese; suggesting no strength, and even no resistance to the touch, with their smooth surface here and there packed into minute wrinkles, exactly like the little stracchini cheeses. This impalpable whiteness of the beasts suited their perfect tameness, passiveness, letting themselves be led about with great noiseless strides over the stubbly ridges and up the steep banks; and hustled together, flank against flank, horns interlaced with horns, without even a sound or movement of astonishment or disobedience. Never a low or a moo; never a glance round of their big, long-lashed, blue-brown eyes. Their big jaws move like millstones, their long tufted tails switch monotonously like pendulums.
Around them circle peasants, measuring them with the eye, prodding them
with the finger, pulling them by the horns. And every now and then one of
the red-faced
men, butchers mainly, who act as go-betweens, dramatically throws his arms round the neck of some recalcitrant dealer or buyer, leads him aside, whispering with a gesture like Judas's kiss; or he clasps together the red hands and arms of contracting parties, silencing their objections, forcing them to do business. The contrast is curious between these hot, excited yelling, jostling human beings, above whose screaming Dio Canes! and Dio Ladros! the cry of the iced-water seller recurs monotonously, and the silent, impassive bullocks, white, unreal, inaudible; so still and huge, indeed, that, seen from above, they look like an encampment, their white flanks like so much spread canvas in the sunshine. And from a little distance, against the hillside beyond the river, the already bought yokes of bullocks look, tethered in a grove of cypresses, like some old mediæval allegory--an allegory, as usual, nobody knows of what.
district of Siena; but I doubt very much whether you will find them on the surface of the real globe, for I suspect them to be a piece of midsummer magic and nothing more. They had been for years to me among the number (we all have such) of things familiar but inaccessible; or rather things whose inaccessibility--due to no conceivable cause--is an essential quality of their existence. Every now and then from one of the hills you get a glimpse of the square red tower, massive and battlemented, rising among the grey of its ilexes, beckoning one across a ridge or two and a valley; then disappearing again, engulfed in the oak woods, green in summer, copper-coloured in winter: to reappear, but on the side you least expected it, plume of ilexes, battlements of tower, as you twisted along the high-lying vineyards and the clusters of umbrella pines fringing the hill-tops; and then, another minute and they were gone.
We determined to attain them, to be mocked no longer by Lecceto; and
went forth on one endless July afternoon. After much twisting from hillside
to hillside and valley to valley, we at last got into a country which was
strange enough to secrete even Lecceto. In a
narrow valley we were met by a scent, warm, delicious, familiar, which seemed to lead us (as perfumes we cannot identify will usually do) to ideas very hazy, but clear enough to be utterly inappropriate: English cottage-gardens, linen presses of old houses, old-fashioned sitting-rooms full of pots of potpourri; and then, behold, in front of us a hill covered every inch of it with flowering lavender, growing as heather does on the hills outside fairyland. And behind this lilac, sun-baked, scented hill, open the woods of ilexes. The trees were mostly young and with their summer uppergarment of green, fresh leaves over the crackling old ones; trees packed close like a hedge, their every gap filled with other verdure, arbutus and hornbeam, fern and heather; the close-set greenery crammed, as it were, with freshness and solitude.
These must be the woods of Lecceto, and in their depths the red
battlemented tower of the Hermitage. For I had forgotten to say that for a
thousand years that tower had been the abode of a succession of holy
personages, so holy and so like each other as to have almost grown into
one, an immortal hermit whom Popes and Emperors would come to consult
and be blessed by. Deeper and deeper therefore we made our way into the green coolness and dampness, the ineffable deliciousness of young leaf and uncurling fern; till it seemed as if the plantation were getting impenetrable, and we began to think that, as usual, Lecceto had mocked us, and would probably appear, if we retraced our steps, in the diametrically opposite direction. When suddenly, over the tree-tops, rose the square battlemented tower of red brick. Then, at a turn of the rough narrow lane, there was the whole place, the tower, a church and steeple, and some half fortified buildings, in a wide clearing planted with olive trees. We tied our pony to an ilex and went to explore the Hermitage. But the building was enclosed round by walls and hedges, and the only entrance was by a stout gate armed with a knocker, behind which was apparently an outer yard and a high wall pierced only by a twisted iron balcony. So we knocked.
But that knocker was made only for Popes and Emperors walking about with
their tiaras and crowns and sceptres, like the genuine Popes and Emperors
of Italian folk-tales and of Pinturicchio's frescoes; for no knocking
of ours, accompanied by loud yells, could elicit an
answer. It seemed simple enough to get in some other way; there must be peasants about at work, even supposing the holy hermit to have ceased to exist. But climbing wall and hurdles and squeezing between the close tight ilexes, brought us only to more walls, above which, as above the oakwoods from a distance, rose the inaccessible battlemented tower. And a small shepherdess, in a flapping Leghorn hat, herding black and white baby pigs in a neighbouring stubble-field under the olives, was no more able than we to break the spell of the Hermitage. And all round, for miles apparently, undulated the dense grey plumage of the ilex woods.
The low sun was turning the stubble orange, where the pigs were feeding;
and the distant hills of the Maremma were growing very blue behind the
olive trees. So, lest night should overtake us, we turned our pony's
head towards the city, and traversed the oakwoods and skirted the lavender
hill, rather disbelieving in the reality of the place we had just been at,
save when we saw its tower mock us, emerging again; an inaccessible,
improbable place. The air was scented by the warm lavender of the
hillsides; and by the
pines forming a Japanese pattern, black upon the golden lacquer of the sky. Soon the moon rose, big and yellow, lighting very gradually the road in whose gloom you could vaguely see the yokes of white cattle returning from work. By the time we reached the city hill everything was steeped in a pale yellowish light, with queer yellowish shadows; and the tall tanneries glared out with their buttressed balconied top, exaggerated and alarming. Scrambling up the moonlit steep of Fonte Branda, and passing under a black arch, we found ourselves in the heart of the gaslit and crowded city, much as if we had been shot out of a cannon into another planet, and feeling that the Hermitage of Lecceto was absolutely apocryphal.
of gifts, lighting of candles, gilding of apples, manifestation of marvels, realisation of the desirable and improbable--to wit, a Christmas Tree. And Italy, which knows no Christmas trees, makes its Bescheerung in midsummer gets rid of its tourist vulgarities, hides away the characteristics of its trivial nineteenth century, decks itself with magnolia blossoms and water-melons, with awnings and street booths, with mandolins and guitars; spangles itself with church festivals and local pageants and instead of wax-tapers and Chinese lanterns lights up the biggest golden sun by day, the biggest silver moon by night, all for the benefit of a few childish descendants of Goths and Vandals.
Nonsense apart, I am inclined to think that the specific charm of Italy
exists only during the hot months; the charm which gives one a little stab
now and then and makes one say--"This is Italy."
I felt that little stab, to which my heart had long become unused, at
the beginning of this very summer in Tuscany, to which belong the above
instances of Italian Midsummer Magic I was spending the day at a small, but
very ancient, Benedictine Monastery (it was a
century old when St. Peter Igneus, according to the chronicle, went through his celebrated Ordeal by Fire), now turned into a farm, and hidden, battlemented walls and great gate towers, among the cornfields near the Arno. It came to me as the revival of an impression long forgotten, that overpowering sense that "This was Italy," it recurred and recurred in those same three words, as I sat under the rose-hedge opposite the water-wheel shed, garlanded with drying pea-straw; and as I rambled through the chill vaults, redolent of old wine-vats, into the sudden sunshine and broad shadows of the cloistered yards.
That smell was mysteriously connected with it; the smell of wine-vats
mingled, I fancy (though I could not say why), with the sweet faint smell
of decaying plaster and wood-work. One night, as we were driving through
Bologna to wile away the hours between two trains, in the blue moon-mist
and deep shadows of the black porticoed city, that same smell came to my
nostrils as in a dream, and with it a whiff of bygone years, the years when
first I had had this impression of Italian Magic. Oddly enough, Rome, where
I spent much of my childhood and which was the object of my childish and
tragic adoration, was always something apart, never Italy for my feelings. The Apennines of Lucca and Pistoia, with their sudden revelation of Italian fields and lanes, of flowers on wall and along roadside, of bells ringing in the summer sky, of peasants working in the fields and with the loom and distaff, meant Italy.
But how much more Italy--and hence longed for how much!--was
Lucca, the town in the plain, with cathedral and palaces. Nay, any of the
mountain hamlets where there was nothing modern, and where against the
scarred brick masonry and blackened stonework the cypresses rose black and
tapering, the trelisses crawled bright green up hill! One never feels, once
out of childhood, such joy as on the rare occasions when I was taken to
such places. A certain farmhouse, with cypresses at the terrace corner and
a great oleander over the wall, was also Italy before it became my home for
several years. Most of all, however, Italy was represented by certain
towns: Bologna, Padua and Vicenza, and Siena, which I saw mainly in the
summer.
It is curious how one's associations change: nowadays Italy means
mainly certain familiar effects of light and cloud, certain
exquisite-
nesses of sunset amber against ultramarine hills, of winter mists among misty olives, of folds and folds of pale blue mountains; it is a country which belongs to no time, which will always exist, superior to picturesqueness and romance. But that is but a vague, half-indifferent habit of enjoyment. And every now and then, when the Midsummer Magic is rife, there comes to me that very different, old, childish meaning of the word; as on that day among the roses of those Benedictine cloisters, the cool shadow of the fig-trees in the yards, with the whiff of that queer smell, heavy with romance, of wine-saturated oak and crumbling plaster; and I know with a little stab of joy that this is Italy.
white fruit trees in the dark fields; the pine tops round, separate, yet intangible, against the sky of unearthly blue; the darkness not descending, as foolish people say it does, from the skies to the earth, but rising slowly from the earth where it has gathered fold upon fold, an emanation thereof, into the sky still pale and luminous, turning its colour to white, its whiteness to gray, till the stars, mere little white specks before, kindle one by one.
Dante, who had travelled so much, and so much against his will,
described this hour as turning backwards the longing of the traveller, and
making the heart grow soft of them who had that day said farewell to their
friends. It is an hour of bitterness, the crueller for mingled sweetness,
to the exile; and in those days when distances were difficult to overcome,
every traveller must in a sense have been somewhat of an exile. But to us,
who have not necessarily left our friends, who may be returning to them; to
us accustomed to coming and going, to us hurried along in dreary swiftness,
it is the hour also when the earth seems full of peace and goodwill; and
our pensiveness is only just sad enough to be sweet, not sad enough to be
bitter. For every hamlet we pass seems somehow the
place where we ought to tarry for all our days; every room or kitchen, a red square of light in the dimness with dark figures moving before the window, seems full of people who might be friends; and the hills we have never beheld before, the bends of rivers, the screen of trees, seem familiar as if we had lived among them in distant days which we think of with longing.
meant for the less fortunate freight of railways and steamers; though do I really envy those who see the wonderful places of the earth before they have dreamed of them, the dreamland of other men revealed to them for the first time in the solid reality of Cook and Gaze?
I would not for the world be misunderstood; I have not the faintest
prejudice against Gaze or Cook. I fervently desire that these gentlemen may
ever quicken trains and cheapen hotels; I am ready to be jostled in Alpine
valleys and Venetian canals by any number of vociferous tourists, for the
sake of the one, schoolmistress, or clerk, or artisan, or curate, who may
by this means have reached at last the land east of the sun and west of the
moon, the St. Brandan's Isle of his or her longings. What I object to
are the well-mannered, well-dressed, often well-informed persons who,
having turned Scotland into a sort of Hurlingham, are apparently making
Egypt, the Holy Land, Japan, into succursales
and
dépendances (I like the good Swiss names
evoking couriers and waiters) of their own particularly dull portion of
London and Paris and New York.
Less externally presentable certainly, but how much more really
venerable is the
mysterious class of dwellers in obscure pensions: curious beings who migrate without perceiving any change of landscape and people, but only change of fare, from the cheap boarding-house in Dresden to the cheap boarding-house in Florence, Prague, Seville, Rouen, or Bruges. It is a class whom one of nature's ingenious provisions, intended doubtless to maintain a balance of inhabited and uninhabited, directs unconsciously, automatically to the great cities of the past rather than to those of the present; so that they sit in what were once palaces, castles, princely pleasure-houses, discussing over the stony pears and apples the pleasures and drawbacks, the prices and fares, the dark staircase against the Sunday ices, of other boarding-houses in other parts of Europe. A quaint race it is, neither marrying nor giving in marriage, and renewed by natural selection among the poor in purse and poor in spirit; but among whom the sentimental traveller, did he still exist, might pick up many droll and melancholy and perhaps chivalrous stories.
My main contention then is merely that, before visiting countries and
towns in the body, we ought to have visited them in the spirit;
otherwise I fear we might as well sit still at home. I do not mean that we should read about them; some persons I know affect to extract a kind of pleasure from it; but to me it seems dull work. One wants to visit unknown lands in company, not with other men's descriptions, but with one's own wishes and fancies. And very curious such wishes and fancies are, or rather the countries and cities they conjure up, having no existence on any part of the earth's surface, but a very vivid one in one's own mind. Surely most of us, arriving in any interesting place, are already furnished with a tolerable picture or plan thereof; the cathedral on a slant or a rising ground, the streets running uphill or somewhat in a circle, the river here or there, the lie of the land, colour of the houses, nay, the whole complexion of the town, so and so. The reality, so far as my own experience goes, never once tallies with the fancy; but the town of our building is so compact and clear that it often remains in our memory alongside of the town of stone and brick, only gradually dissolving, and then leaving sometimes airy splendours of itself hanging to the solid structures of its prosaic rival.
Another curious thing to note is how certain
real scenes will sometimes get associated in our minds with places we have never beheld, to such a point that the charm of the known is actually enhanced by that of the unknown. I remember a little dell in the High Alps, which, with its huge larches and mountain pines, its tufts of bee-haunted heather and thyme among the mossy boulders, its overlooking peak and glimpses of far down lakes, became dear to me much less for its own sake than because it always brought to my mind the word Thrace, and with it a vague fleeting image of satyrs and moenads, a bar of the music of Orpheus. And less explicable than this, a certain rolling tableland, not more remote than the high road to Rome, used at one time to impress me with a mysterious consciousness of the plains of Central Asia; a ruined byre, a heap of white-washed stones, among the thistles and stubbles of a Fife hillside, had for me once a fascination due to the sense that it must be like Algeria.
Has any painter ever fixed on canvas such visions, distinct and
haunting, of lands he had never seen, Claude or Turner, or the Flemish
people who painted the little towered and domed celestial Jerusalem? I know
not. The nearest thing of the kind was a wonderful
erection of brown paper and (apparently) ingeniously arranged shavings, built up in rock-like fashion, covered with little green toy-box trees, and dotted here and there with bits of mirror glass and cardboard houses, which one puzzled me considerably in the parlour of a cottage. "Do tell me what that is?" at last rose to my lips. "That," answered my hostess very slowly, "that is a work of my late 'usband; a representation of the Halps as close as 'e could imagine them, for 'e never was abroad." I often think of that man "who never was abroad," and of his representation of the Alps; of the hours of poetic vision, of actual creation perhaps from sheer strength of longing, which resulted in that quaint work of art.
As close as he could imagine them! He had read, then, about the Alps,
read perhaps in Byron or some Radcliffian novel on a stall; and he had
wondered till the vision had come ready for pasteboard and toy-trees and
glue and broken mirror to embody it! And meanwhile I, who am obliged to
cross those very Alps twice every year, I try to do so at night, to rumble
and rattle up and down their gorges in a sleeping-car! There seems
something wrong in this; something wrong in the world's
adjustments, not really in me, for I swear it is respect for the Alps which makes me thus avoid their sight.
ones. But to decent, active, leisured folk it is, I maintain, humiliating; humiliating to become so much by comparison in one's own consciousness; and I suspect that the vague sense of self-disgust attendant on days thus spent is a sample of the self-disgust we feel very slightly (and ought to feel very strongly) whenever our wretched little self is allowed to occupy the whole stage of our perceptions.
There is in M. Zola's Bête Humaine a
curious picture of a train, one train after another, full of eager modern
life, being whirled from Paris to Havre through the empty fields, before
cottages and old-world houses miles remote from any town. But in reality is
not the train the empty thing, and are not those solitary houses and
pastures that which is filled with life? The Roman express thus rushes to
Naples, Egypt, India, the far East, the great Austral islands, cutting in
two the cypress avenue of a country house of the Val d'Arno, Neptune
with his conch, a huge figure of the seventeenth century, looking on from
an artificial grotto. What to him is this miserable little swish past of
to-day?
There is only one circumstance when this vacuity, this suspension of all
real life, is in its
place; when one is hurrying to some dreadful goal, a death-bed or perhaps a fresh-made grave. The soul is precipitated forward to one object, one moment, and cannot exist meanwhile; ruit not hora, but anima; emptiness suits passion and suffering, for they empty out the world.
introduced you gradually to its neighbours. We feel this in the talk of old people, those who can remember buying their team at Calais, of elderly ones who chartered their vetturino at Marseilles or Nice; in certain scraps in the novels even of Thackeray, giving the sense of this gradual occupation of the continent by relays. One of Mr. Ruskin's drawings at Oxford evokes it strongly in me. On what railway journey would he have come across that little town of Rheinfelden (where is Rheinfelden?), would he have wandered round those quaint towered walls, over that bridge, along that grassy walk?
I can remember, in my childhood, the Alps before they had railways; the
enormous remoteness of Italy, the sense of its lying down there, far, far
away in its southern sea; the immense length of the straight road from
Bellinzona to the lake, the endlessness of the winding valleys. Now, as I
said in relation to that effigy of the Alps by the man who had never been
abroad, I get into my bunk at Milan, and waking up, see, in the early
morning crispness, the glass green Reuss tear past, and the petticoated
turrets of Lucerne.
Once also (and I hope not once and never
again) I made an immense journey through Italy in a pony cart. We seemed to traverse all countries and climates; lush, stifling valleys with ripening maize and grapes; oak-woods where rows of cypress showed roads long gone, and crosses told of murders; desolate heaths high on hill-tops, and stony gorges full of myrtle; green irrigated meadows with plashing water-wheels, and grey olive groves; so that in the evening we felt homesick for that distant, distant morning: yet we had only covered as much ground as from London to Dover! And how immensely far off from Florence did we not feel when, four hours after leaving its walls, we arrived in utter darkness at the friendly mountain farm, and sat down to supper in the big bare room, where high-backed chairs and the plates above the immense chimney-piece loomed and glimmered in the half-light; feeling, as if in a dream, the cool night air still in our throats, the jingle of cart-bells and chirp of wayside crickets still in our ears! Where was Florence then? As a fact it was just sixteen miles off.
To travel in this way one should, however, as old John Evelyn advises,
"diet with the natives." Our ancestors (for one takes for
granted, of course, that one's ancestors were milords) were always plentifully furnished, I observe, with letters of introduction. They were necessary when persons of distinction carried their bedding on mules and rode in coaches escorted by blunderbuses, like John Evelyn himself.
It is this dieting with the natives which brings one fully in contact
with a country's reality. At the tables of one's friends, while
being strolled through the gardens or driven across country, one learns all
about the life, thoughts, feelings of the people; the very gossip of the
neighbourhood becomes instructive, and you touch the past through
traditions of the family. Here the French put up the maypole in 1796; there
the beautiful abbess met her lover; that old bowed man was the one who
struck the Austrian colonel at Milan before 1859. 'Tis the mode of
travelling that constituted the delight and matured the genius of Stendhal,
king of cosmopolitans and grand master of the psychologic novel. To my kind
friends, wherever I have any, but most perhaps in Northern Italy, is due
among other kinds of gratitude, gratitude for having travelled in this
way.
Mr. Browning, I was told last year by his dear friends at Asolo, first
came upon the kingdom of Kate the Queen by accident, perhaps not having
heard its name or not remembering it, in the course of a long walking tour
from Venice to the Alps. It was the first time he was in Italy, nay,
abroad, and he had come from London to Venice by sea. That village of
palaces on the hill-top, with the Lombard plain at its feet and the great
Alps at its back; with its legends of the Queen of Cyprus was, therefore,
one of the first impressions of mainland Italy which the poet could have
received. And one can understand Pippa Passes resulting
therefrom, better than from his years of familiarity with Florence. Pippa,
Sebald, Ottima, Jules, his bride, the Bishop, the Spy, nay, even Queen Kate
and her Page, are all born of that
sort of misinterpretation of places, times, and stories which is so fruitful in poetry, because it means the begetting of things in the image of the poet's own soul, rather than the fashioning them to match something outside it.
Even without being a poet you may profit in an especial manner by
travelling in a country where you know no one, provided you have in you
that scrap of poetic fibre without which poets and poetry are caviare to
you. There is no doubt that wandering about in the haunts of the past
undisturbed by the knowledge of the present is marvellously favourable to
the historic, the poetical emotion. The American fresh from the States
thinks of Johnson and Dickens in Fleet Street; at Oxford or Cambridge he
has raptures (are any raptures like these?) into which, like notes in a
chord and overtones in a note, there enters the deliciousness, the
poignancy of Chaucer, Shakespeare, Milton, Turner.
The Oxford or Cambridge man, on the other hand, will have similar
raptures in some boarding-house at Venice or Florence; raptures rapturous
in proportion almost to his ignorance of the language and the people. Do
not let us smile, dear friends, who have lived in Rome
till you are Romans, dear friends, who are Romans yourselves, at the foreigner with his Baedeker, turning his back to the Colosseum in his anxiety to reach it, and ashamed as well as unable to ask his way. That Goth or Vandal, very likely, is in the act of possessing Rome, of making its wonder and glory his own, consubstantial to his soul; Rome is his for the moment. Is it ours? Alas!
Nature, Fate, I know not whether the mother or the daughter, they are so
like each other, looks with benignity upon these poor ignorant, solitary
tourists, and gives them what she denies to those who have more leisure and
opportunity. I cannot explain by any other reason a fact which is beyond
all possibility of doubt, and patent to the meanest observer; namely, that
it is always during our first sojourn in a place, during its earlier part,
and more particularly when we are living prosaically at inns and
boarding-houses, that something happens--a procession, a serenade, a
street-fight, a fair, or a pilgrimage--which shows the place in a
particularly characteristic light, and which never occurs again. The very
elements are desired to perform for the benefit of the stranger. I remember
a thunderstorm, the
second night I was ever at Venice, lighting up St. George's, the Salute, the whole lagoon as I have never seen it since.
I can testify, also, to having seen the Alhambra under snow, a sparkling
whiteness lying soft on the myrtle hedges, and the reflection of arches and
domes waving, with the drip of melted snow from the roofs, in the
long-stagnant tanks. If I lived in Grenada, or went back there, should I
ever see this wonder again? It was so ordered merely because I had just
come, and was lodging at an inn.
Yes, Fate is friendly to those who travel rarely, who go abroad to see
abroad, not to be warm or cold, or to meet the people they may meet
anywhere else. Honour the tourist; he walks in a halo of romance. The
cosmopolitan abroad desists from flannel shirts because he is always at
home; and he knows to a nicety hours and places which demand a high hat.
But does that compensate?
All I can ask is, do you know what it is to meet, say, in some college room, or on the staircase of an English country house, or even close behind the front door in Bloomsbury, the photograph of some Florentine relief or French cathedral, the black, gaunt Piranesi print of some Roman ruin; and to feel suddenly Florence, Rouen, Reims, or Rome, the whole of their presence distilled, as it were, into one essence of emotion?
What does it mean? That in this solid world only delusion is worth
having? Nay; but that nothing can come into the presence of that capricious
despot, our fancy, which has not dwelt six months and six in the purlieus
of its palace, steeped, like the candidates for Ahasuerus's favour, in
sweet odours and myrrh.
It is pleasant to have flowers growing in a garden. I make this remark
because there have been very fine gardens without any flowers at all; in
fact, when the art of gardening reached its height, it took to despising
its original material, as, at one time, people came to sing so well that it
was considered vulgar to have any voice. There is a magnificent garden near
Pescia, in Tuscany, built in terraces
against a hillside, with wonderful water-works, which give you shower baths when you expect them least; and in this garden, surrounded by the trimmest box hedges, there bloom only imperishable blossoms of variegated pebbles and chalk. That I have seen with my own eyes. A similar garden, near Genoa, consisting of marble mosaics and coloured bits of glass, with a peach tree on a wall, and an old harpsichord on the doorstep to serve instead of bell or knocker, I am told of by a friend, who pretends to have spent her youth in it. But I suspect her to be of supernatural origin, and this garden to exist only in the world of Ariosto's enchantresses, whence she originally hails. To return to my first remark, it is pleasant, therefore, to have flowers in a garden, though not necessary. We moderns have flowers, and no gardens. I must protest against such a state of things. Still worse is it to suppose that you can get a garden by running up a wall or planting a fence round a field, a wood or any portion of what is vaguely called Nature. Gardens have nothing to do with Nature, or not much. Save the garden of Eden, which was perhaps no more a garden than certain London streets so called, gardens
are always primarily the work of man. I say primarily, for these outdoor habitations, where man weaves himself carpets of grass and gravel, cuts himself walls out of ilex or hornbeam, and fits on as roof so much of blue day or of starspecked, moonsilvered night, are never perfect until Time has furnished it all with his weather stains and mosses, and Fancy, having given notice to the original occupants, has handed it into the charge of gentle little owls and furgloved bats, and of other tenants, human in shape, but as shy and solitary as they.
That is a thing of our days, or little short of them. I should be
curious to know something of early Italian gardens, long ago; long before
the magnificence of Roman Cæsars had reappeared, with their rapacity
and pride, in the cardinals and princes of the sixteenth and seventeenth
centuries. I imagine those beginnings to have been humble; the garden of
the early middle ages to have been a thing more for utility than pleasure,
and not at all for ostentation. For the garden of the castle is necessarily
small; and the plot of ground between the inner and outer rows of walls,
where corn and hay might be grown for the
horses, is not likely to be given up exclusively to her ladyship's lilies and gillyflowers; salads and roots must grow there, and onions and leeks, for it is not always convenient to get vegetables from the villages below, particularly when there are enemies or disbanded pillaging mercenaries about; hence, also, there will be fewer roses than vines, pears, or apples, spaliered against the castle wall. On the other hand the burgher of the towns begins by being a very small artisan or shopkeeper, and even when he lends money to kings of England and Emperors, and is part owner of Constantinople, he keeps his house with businesslike frugality. Whatever they lavished on churches, frescoes, libraries, and pageants, the citizens, even of the fifteenth century, whose wives and daughters still mended the linen and waited at table, are not likely to have seen in their villa more than a kind of rural place of business, whence to check factors and peasants, where to store wine and oil; and from whose garden, barely enclosed from the fields, to obtain the fruit and flowers for their table. I think that mediæval poetry and tales have led me to this notion. There is little mention in them of a
garden as such: the Provençal lovers meet in orchards--"en un vergier sor folha d'albespi"--where the May bushes grow among the almond trees. Boccaccio and the Italians more usually employ the word orto, which has lost its Latin signification, and is a place, as we learn from the context, planted with fruit trees and with pot-herbs, the sage which brought misfortune on poor Simona, and the sweet basil which Lisabetta watered, as it grew out of Lorenzo's head, "only with rosewater, or that of orange flowers, or with her own tears." A friend of mine has painted a picture of another of Boccaccio's ladies, Madonna Dianora, visiting the garden, which (to the confusion of her virtuous stratagem) the enamoured Ansaldo has made to bloom in January by magic arts; a little picture full of the quaint lovely details of Dello's wedding chests, the charm of the roses and lilies, the plashing fountains and birds singing against a background of wintry trees and snow-shrouded fields, the dainty youths and damsels treading their way among the flowers, looking like tulips and ranunculus themselves in their fur and brocade. But although in this story Boccaccio employs the word giardino instead of
orto, I think we must imagine that magic flower garden rather as a corner--they still exist on every hillside--of orchard connected with the fields of wheat and olives below by the long tunnels of vine trellis, and dying away into them with the great tufts of lavender and rosemary and fennel on the grassy bank under the cherry trees. This piece of terraced ground along which the water--spurted from the dolphin's mouth or the siren's breasts--runs through walled channels, refreshing impartially violets and salads, lilies and tall flowering onions, under the branches of the peach tree and the pomegranate, to where, in the shade of the great pink oleander tufts, it pours out below into the big tank, for the maids to rinse their linen in the evening, and the peasants to fill their cans to water the bedded out tomatoes, and the potted clove-pinks in the shadow of the house.
The Blessed Virgin's garden is like that, where, as she prays in
the cool of the evening, the gracious Gabriel flutters on to one knee
(hushing the sound of his wings lest he startle her) through the pale green
sky, the deep blue-green valley; and you may still see in the
Tuscan fields clumps of cypresses clipped wheel shape, which might mark the very spot.
The transition from this orchard-garden, this
orto, of the old Italian novelists and painters
to the architectural garden of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, is
indicated in some of the descriptions and illustrations of the
Hypnerotomachia Poliphili, a sort of handbook of antiquities in the shape
of a novel, written by Fra Francesco Colonna, and printed at Venice about
1480. Here we find trees and hedges treated as brick and stone work; walls,
niches, colonnades, cut out of ilex and laurel; statues, vases, peacocks,
clipped in box and yew; moreover antiquities, busts, inscriptions, broken
altars and triumphal arches, temples to the graces and Venus, stuck about
the place very much as we find them in the Roman Villas of the late
sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. But I doubt whether the
Hypnerotomachia can be taken as evidence of the gardens of Colonna's
own days. I think his descriptions are rather of what his
archæological lore made him long for, and what came in time, when
antiques were more plentiful than in the early Renaissance, and the
monuments of the ancients could be incorporated
freely into the gardens. For the classic Italian garden is essentially Roman in origin; it could have arisen only on the top of ancient walls and baths, its shape suggested by the ruins below, its ornaments dug up in the planting of the trees; and until the time of Julius II. and Leo X., Rome was still a mediæval city, feudal and turbulent, in whose outskirts, for ever overrun by baronial squabbles, no sane man would have built himself a garden; and in whose ancient monuments castles were more to be expected than belvederes and orangeries. Indeed, by the side of quaint arches and temples, and labyrinths which look like designs for a box of toys, we find among the illustrations of Polifilo various charming woodcuts showing bits of vine trellis, of tank and of fountain, on the small scale, and in the domestic, quite unclassic style of the Italian burgher's garden. I do not mean to say that the gardens of Lorenzo dei Medici, of Catherine Cornaro near Asolo, of the Gonzagas near Mantua, of the Estensi at Scandiano and Sassuolo, were kitchen gardens like those of Isabella's basil pot. They had waterworks already, and aviaries full of costly birds, and enclosures where camels and giraffes were kept
at vast expense, and parks with deer and fishponds; they were the gardens of the castle, of the farm, magnified and made magnificent, spread over a large extent of ground. But they were not, any more than are the gardens of Boiardo's and Ariosto's enchantresses (copied by Spencer) the typical Italian gardens of later days.
And here, having spoken of that rare and learned Hypnerotomachia
Poliphili (which, by the way, any one who wishes to be instructed,
sickened, and bored for many days together, may now read in Monsieur
Claudius Popelin's French translation), it is well I should state that
for the rest of this dissertation I have availed myself of neither the
British Museum, nor the National Library of
Paris, nor the Library of South Kensington (the italics
seem necessary to show my appreciation of those haunts of learning), but
merely of the light of my own poor intellect. For I do not think I care to
read about gardens among foolscap and inkstains and printed forms; in fact
I doubt whether I care to read about them at all, save in Boccaccio and
Ariosto, Spencer and Tasso; though I hope that my readers will be more
literary characters than myself.