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YALE UNIVERSITY
LIBRARY

From the Library of
PROFESSOR HENRY R. LANG

EARTHWORK OUT OF TUSCANY

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EARTHWORK OUT
OF TUSCANY >« being
IMPRESSIONS AND TRANSLA
TIONS OF MAURICE HEWLETT
WITH ILLUSTRATIONS BY
JAMES KERR LAWSON »« »«

"For as it is hurtful to drink -wine or
water alone: and as -wine mingled -with
water is pleasant and deligkteth the taste:
even so speech, finely framed, delighteth
the ears of them that read the story" —
2 Maccabees xv. 39

New edition
With additional
Illustrations in
Photogravure

THE MACMILLAN COMPANY
LONDON : MACMILLAN & CO., Ltd.
1902
AU rights reeer-veit

Copyright, 1899,
By G. P. PUTNAM'S SONS.

First printed elsewhere.
Reprinted December, 1902.

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Norfoooti J-t.03 :
Berwick & Smith, Norwood, Mass., U.S.A.

To
MY FATHER
THIS LITTLE BOOK,
NOT AS BEING WORTHY, BUT AS ALL I HA VE,
IS DEDICATED

I cannot add one tendril to your bays,
Worn quietly where who love you sing your praise,
But I -may stand
A mong the household throng with lifted hand,
Upholding for sweet honour of the land
Your crown of days.

PREFACE TO THE SECOND
EDITION
My Critics — to whom, kind or unkind, I
confess obligations — and the Public between
them have produced, it appears, some sort
of demand for this Second Edition. While
I do not think it either polite or politic to
enquire too deeply into reasons, I am not
the man to disoblige them. It is sufficient
for me that in a world indifferent well-
peopled five hundred souls have bought or
acquired my book, and that other hundreds
have signified their desire to do likewise.
Nevertheless — the vanity of authors being
notoriously hard-rooted — / must own to my
mortification in the discovery that not more
than two in every hundred who have read
me have known what I was at. I have been
told it is a good average, but, with defer
ence, I don't think so. No man has any
right to take beautiful and simple things

PREFACE TO THE SECOND EDITION
out of their places, wrap them up in a tissue
of his own conceits, and hand them about
the universe for gods and men to wonder
upon. If he must convey simple things let
him convey them simply. If I, for instance,
must steal a loaf of bread, would it not be
better to walk out of the shop with it under
my coat than to call for it in a hansom
and hoodwink the baker with a forged
cheque on Coutts's bank ? Surely. If, then,
I go to Italy, and convey the hawthorn-
scent of Della Robbia, the straining of
Botticelli to express the ineffable, the mellow
autumn tones of the life of Florence ; if I
do this, and make a parade of my magnani
mity in permitting the household to divide
the spoil, how on earth should I mar all my
bravery by giving people what they don't
want, or turn double knave by fobbing them
off with an empty box ?
I had hoped to have done better than this.
I tried to express in the title of my book
what I thought I had done; more, I was
bold enough to assume that, having weath-

PREFACE TO THE SECOND EDITION
ered the title, my readers would find a
smooth channel with leading-lights enough
to bring them sound to port. Mea culpa !
/ believe I was wrong. The booh has been
read as a collection of essays and stories
and dialogues only pulled together by the
binder's tapes; as otherwise disjointed, frag
mentary, decousue, a "piebald monstrous
book," a sort of kous-kous, made out
of the odds and ends of a scribbler's
note-book. Some have liked some morsels,
others other morsels : it has been a matter
of the luck of the fork. Very few, one only
to my knowledge, can have seen the thing as
it presented itself to my flattering eye — not
as a pudding, not as a case of confectionery
even, but as a little sanctuary of images such
as a pious heathen might make of his earth
enware gods. Let us be serious: listen.
The thing is Criticism; but some of it is
criticism by trope and figure. I hope that
is plain enough.
When thefirst man heard his first thun
derstorm he said (or Human Nature has

PREFACE TO THE SECOND EDITION
bettered itself), " Certainly a God is an
gry. ' ' When after a night of doubt and
heaviness the sun rose out of the sea, the
sea kindled, and all its waves laughed in
numerably, again he said, " God is stir
ring. Joy cometh in the morning. ' ' Even
in saying so much he was making images,
poor man, for one's soul is as dumb as a
fish and can only talk by signs. But by
degrees, as his hand grew obedient to his
heart, he set to work to make more lasting
images of these gods — Thunder Gods, Gods
of the Sun and the Morning. And as these
gods were the sum of the best feelings he
had, so the images of them were the best
things he made. And that goes on now
whenever a young man sees something new
or strange or beautiful. He wonders, he
falls on his face, he would say his prayers ;
he rises up, he would sing a pcean. But he
is dumb, the wretch ! He must make im
ages. This he does because Necessity drives
him : this I have done. And part of the
world calls the result Criticism, and another

PREFACE TO THE SECOND EDITION
part says, It may be Art. But I know that
it is the struggling of a dumb man to find
an outlet, and I call it Religion.
"God first made man, and straightway man made
Cod:
No wonder if a tang of that same sod,
IVhereout we issued at a breath, should cling
To all we fashion. We can only plod
Lit by a starveling candle ; and we sing
Of what we can remember of the road."
The vague informed, the lovely indefinite
defined: that is Art. As a sort of pate
sur pate comes Criticism, to do for Art
what Art does for life. I have tried in this
book to be the artist at second-hand, to
make pictures of pictures, images of images,
poems of poems. You may call it Criticism,
you may call it Art : I call it Religion. It
is making the best thing I can out of the best
things I feel.
One thing is very plain ; whatever may
be said of my pictures, Mr. Kerr Lawson in
Ms has brought the very breath of the places

PREFACE TO THE SECOND EDITION
he, you, and I love. I come jigging with my
commentary at his heels, and am well con
tent ; for I know I shall have a chance of a
hearing while he holds your eyes.
London, 1808.

ADVERTISEMENT
Polite reader, you who have travelled
Italy, it will not be unknown to you that
the humbler sort in that country have ever
believed certain spots and recesses of their
land — as wells, mountain -paths, farm
steads, groves of ilex or olive, quiet pine-
woods, creeks or bays of the sea, and such
like hidden ways — to be the chosen resort of
familiar spirits, baleful or beneficent, fate-
ridden or amenable to prayer, half divine,
wholly out of rule or ordering; which rustic
deities and genii locorum, if ii was not
needful to propitiate, it was fascination to
observe. It is believed of them in the hill-
country round about Perugia and in the
quieter parts of Tuscany, that they are still
present, tolerated of God by reason of their
origin i^ohich is, indeed, that of the very
soil whose effluence they are), chastened,
circumscribed, and, as it were, combed or

ADVERTISEMENT
pared of evil desire and import. To them
or their avatars (it matters little which) the
rude people still bow down ; they still
humour them with gifts of flowers, songs,
or artless customs (as of May-day or the
Giorno de' Grilli) / you may still see wayside
shrines, votive tablets, humble offerings, set
in a farm-wall or country hedge, starry and
fresh as a patch of yellow flowers in a rye-
field. If you say that they have made gods
in their own image, you do not convince
them of Sin, for they do as their betters.
If you say their gods are earthy, they reply
by asking, "What then are we?" For
they will admit, and you cannot deny,
earthiness to have at least a part in all of
us. And you are forbidden to call this
unhappy, since God made all. Out of the
drenched earth whence these worshippers
arose, they made their rough-cast gods ; out
of the same earth they still mould images to
speak the presentment of them which they
have. Out of that earth, I, a northern
image-maker, have set up my conceits of

ADVERTISEMENT their informing spirits, of the spirits of
themselves, their soil, and the fair works
they have accomplished. So I have called
this booh Earthwork out of Tuscany. Qui
habet aures ad audiendum audiat.
London, 1895.

CONTENTS

Page

Proem : apologia pro libello .

i

1. Eye of Italy

12

II. Little Flowers

29

HI. A Sacrifice at Prato .

4>

IV. Of Poets and Needlework

60

V. Of Boils and the Ideal

75

VI. The Soul of a Fact .

98

VII. Quattrocentisteria

114

VIII. The Burden of New Tyre

'47

IX. Ilaria, Mariota, Bettina

'57

X. Cats ....

169

XI. The Soul of a City .

180

XII. With the Brown Bear

'97

XIII. Dead Churches in Foligno

210

Envoy : To all you Ladies

227

XV

ILLUSTRATIONS IN
PHOTOGRAVURE
Page
Tietro Terugino . , Frontispiece
Florence ...... 6
From San Miniato on the Mount.
Madonna and Child . . . .52
From the group by Andrea Della Robbia in the
Cathedral, Prato.
The Assumption of the Virgin . 94
Group from the fainting by Pietro Vannucci,
called Perugino, in tke gallery of the A cademy
of Fine Arts, Florence.
Judith and Holofernes . . .100
From the group by Donatello in the Loggia of the
Lanzi, Florence.
Judith . . . . . .106
From tke painting by Botticelli in ike Uffizi Gal
lery, Florence.
Alessandro Botticelli . . . .112
Church of San Giovanni Fuorcivitas, Tistoia. 200
Founded in the 8th Century. Ornamentation is of
the 14th Century.
The Visitation ..... 206
Group by one of the Della Robbia in the Church of
San Giovanni Fuorcivitas, Pistoia.

ILLUSTRATIONS OTHER THAN
PHOTOGRAVURE

Page

Toscanella

10

Earthwork

12
" Queer, shabby little vetture "
'7
The Dominican Church.
24
The Plume of Santa Croce
33
The Eternal Child
34
Prato
48
Peaches and Wine
56
The "Perseus" of the Loggia
102
Anadyomene
'44
La Mangia
'53
"Madonna col Bambino "
.65
San Lorenzo
170
' ' Carlo Formaggia had limed
his bird"
196
Gothic and Latin
202
"Faith"
204
"Works"
223
XIX
PROEM
APOLOGIA PRO LIBELLO SUO: IN A LETTER TO
A FRIEND
ALTHOUGH you know your Italy well,
you ask me, who see her now for
the first time, to tell you how I find her;
how she sinks into me; wherein she fulfils,
and wherein fails to fulfil, certain dreams
and fancies of mine (old amusements of
yours) about her. Here, truly, you show
yourself the diligent collector of human
documents your friends have always be
lieved you; for I think it can only be ap
petite for acquisition, to see how a man
recognisant of the claims of modernity in
Art bears the first brunt of the Old Masters'
assault, that tempts you to risk a rechauffie
of Paul Bourget and Walter Pater, with
ana lightly culled from Symonds, and, per
chance, the questionable support of ponder
ous references out of Burckhardt. In spite
of my waiver of the title, you relish the
notion of a Modern face to face with Botti
celli and Mantegna and Perugino (to say

EARTHWORK OUT OF TUSCANY :
nothing of that Giotto who had so much to
say 1), artists in whom, you think and I
agree, certain impressions strangely positive
of many vanished aspects of life remain to
be accounted for, and (it may be) reconciled
with modern visions of Art and Beauty.
Well ! I am flattered and touched by such
confidence in my powers of expression and
your own of endurance. I look upon you
as a late-in-time Maecenas, generously re
solved to defray the uttermost charge of
weariness, that a young writer may be en
couraged to unfold himself and splash in
the pellucid Tuscan air. I cannot assert
that you are performing an act of charity
to mankind, but I can at least assure you
that you are doing more for me than if you
had settled my accounts with Messrs. Cook
& Sons, or Signora Vedova Paolini, my
esteemed landlady. A writer who is worth
anything accumulates more than he gives
off, and never lives up to his income. His
difficulty is the old one of digestion, Italian
Art being as crucial for the Modern as Ital
ian cookery. Crucial indeed 1 for diverse
are the ways of the Hyperboreans cheek by
jowl with asciutta and Tuscan table-wine,
as any osteria will convince you. To one

APOLOGIA PRO LIBELLO
man the oil is a delight : he will soak him
self in it till his thought swims viscid in his
pate. To another it is abhorrent : straight
way he calls for his German vinegar and
drowns the native flavour in floods as bitter
as polemics. Your wine too 1 Overweak
for water, says one, who consumes a stout
fiaschone and spends a stertorous afternoon
in headache and cursing at the generous
home-grown. Frpgantel cries your next
to all his gods ; and flushes poison with
infected water. Crucial enough. So with
Art. Goethe went to Assisi.
" I left on my left,'7 says he, " the vast mass of churches,
piled Babel-wise one over another — in one of which rest
the remains of the Holy Saint Francis of Assisi — with
aversion, for I thought to myself that the people who
assembled in them were mostly of the same stamp with
my captain and travelling companion."
Truly an odd ground of aversion to a
painted church that there might be a con
fessional-box in the nave! But he had no
eyes for Gothic, being set on the Temple
of Minerva. The Right Honourable Joseph
Addison's views of Siena will be familiar
to you; but an earlier still was our excel
lent Mr. John Evelyn doing the grand tour;
going to Pisa, but seeing no frescos in the

EARTHWORK OUT OF TUSCANY:
Campo Santo ; going to Florence, but see
ing neither Santa Croce nor Santa Maria
Novella; in his whole journey he would
seem to have found no earlier name than
Perugino's affixed to a picture. Goethe
was urbane to Francia, "a very respect
able artist"; he was astonished at Man
tegna, "one of the older painters," but
accepted him as leading up to Titian : and
so — "thus was art developed after the
barbarous period." But Goethe had the
sweeping sublimity of youth with him.
" I have now seen but two Italian cities,
and for the first time; and I have spoken
with but few persons ; and yet I know my
Italians pretty well ! " Seriously, where in
criticism do you learn of an earlier painter
than Perugino, until you come to our day ?
And where now do you get the raptures
over the Carracci and Domenichino and
Guercino and the rest of them which the
last century expended upon their unthrifty
soil? Ruskin found Botticelli; yes, and
Giotto. Roscoe never so much as men
tions either. Why should he, honest man ?
They could n't draw! Cookery is very
like Art, as Socrates told Gorgias. Un
fortunately, it is far easier to verify your

APOLOGIA PRO LIBELLO
impressions in the former case than in the
latter. Yet that is the first and obvious
duty of the critic — that is, the writer whom
soever. In my degree it has been mine.
Wherefore, if I unfold anything at all, it
shall not be the Cicerone nor the veiled
' ' Anonymous, " nor the Wiederbelebung,
nor (I hope) the Mornings in Florence, but
that thing in which you place such touch
ing reliance — myself and my poor sensa
tions. Ecco ! I have nothing else. You
take a boy out of school; you set him to
book-reading, give him Shakespeare and a
Bible, set him sailing in the air with the
poets; drench him with painter's dreams,
via Titian's carmine and orange, Vero
nese's rippling brocades, Umbrian morning
skies, and Tuscan hues wrought of moon
beams and flowing water — anon you turn
him adrift in Italy, a country where all
poets' souls seem to be caged in crystal
and set in the sun, and say — "Here,
dreamer of dreams, what of the day ? "
Madonna ! You ask and you shall obtain.
I proceed to expand under your benevo
lent eye.
To me, Italy is not so much a place
where pictures have been painted (some

EARTHWORK OUT OF TUSCANY:
of which remain to testify), as a place
where pictures have been lived and built;
I fail to see how Perugia is not a picture by,
say, Astorre Baglione. Perhaps I should
be nearer the mark if I said it was a frozen
epic. What I mean is, that in Italy it is
still impossible to separate the soul and
body of the soil, to say, as you may say in
London or Paris, — here behind this sordid
grey mask of warehouses and suburban
villas lurks the soul that once was Shakes
peare or once was Villon. You will not say
that of Florence ; you will hardly say it
(though the time is at hand) of Milan and
Rome. Do the gondoliers still sing snatches
of Ariosto ? I don't know Venice. M.
Bourget assures me his vetlurino quoted
Dante to him between Monte Pulciano and
Siena; and I believe him. At any rate, in
Italy as I have found it, the inner secret of
Italian life can be read, not in painting
alone, nor poem alone, but in the swift
sun, in the streets and shrouded lanes, in
the golden pastures, in the plains and blue
mountains; in flowery cloisters and carved
church porches — out of doors as well as in.
The story of Troy is immortal — why not
because the Trojans themselves live immor-
6

Florence .
From San Miniato on the Mount

APOLOGIA PRO LIBELLO
tal in their fabled sons ? That being so, I
by no means promise you my sensations
to be of the ear-measuring, nose-rubbing
sort now so popular. I am bad at dates
and soon tire of symbols. My theology
may be to seek; you may catch me as
much for the world as for Athanase. With
world and doctor I shall, indeed, have lit
tle enough to do, for wherever I go I shall
be only on the lookout for the soul of
this bright-eyed people, whom, being no
Goethe, I do not profess to understand
or approve. Must the lover do more than
love his mistress, and weave his sonnets
about her white brows ? I may see my
mistress Italy embowered in a belfry, a
fresco, the scope of a piazza, the lilt of a
stornello, the fragrance of a legend. If I
don't find a legend to hand I may, as lief
as not, invent one. It shall be a legend
fitted close to the soul of a fact, if I suc
ceed: and if I fail, put me behind you and
take down your four volumes of Rio, or
your four-and-twenty of Rosini. Go to
Crowe and Cavalcaselle and be wise !
Parables ! — I like the word — to go round
about the thing, whose heart I cannot hit
with my small arm, marking the goodly

EARTHWORK OUT OF TUSCANY :
masses and unobtrusive meek beauties of
it, and longing for them in vain. No
amount of dissecting shall reveal the core
of Sandro's Venus. For after you have
pared off the husk of the restorer, or bled
in your alembic the very juices the crafts
man conjured withal, you come down to
the seamy wood, and Art is gone. Nay,
but your Morelli, your Crowe, ciphering as
they went for want of thought, what did
they do but screw Art into test-tubes, and
serve you up the fruit of their litmus-paper
assay with vivacity, may be, — but with
what kinship to the picture ? I maintain
that the peeling and gutting of fact must
be done in the kitchen: the king's guests
are not to know how many times the
cook's finger went from cate to mouth
before the seasoning was proper to the
table. The king is the artist, you are the
guest, I am the abstractor of quintessences,
the cook. Remember, the cook had not the
ordering of the feast : that was the king's
business— mine is to mingle the flavours
to the liking of the guest that the dish be
worthy the conception and the king's
honour. Nor will I promise you that I shall not

APOLOGIA PRO LIBELLO
break into a more tripping stave than our
prose can afford, here and there. The pil
grim, if he is young and his shoes or his
belly pinch him not, sings as he goes, the
very stones at his heels (so music-steeped
is this land) setting him the key. Jog the
foot-path way through Tuscany in my
company, it 's Lombard Street to my hat I
charm you out of your lassitude by my open
humour. Things I say will have been said
before, and better; my tunes may be stale
and my phrasing rough : I may be irrelevant,
irreverent, what you please. Eh, well ! I
am in Italy, — the land of shrugs and laugh
ing. Shrug me (or my book) away; but,
pray Heaven, laugh ! And, as the young
are always very wise when they find their
voice and have their confidence well put
out to usury, laugh (but in your cloak)
when I am sententious or apt to tears. I
have found lacrimal rerum in Italy as else
where; and sometimes Life has seemed to
me to sail as near to tragedy as Art can do.
I suppose I must be a very bad Christian,
for I remain sturdily an optimist, still con
vinced that it is good for us to be here,
while the sun is up. Men and pictures,
poems, cities, churches, comely deeds,

EARTHWORK OUT OF TUSCANY:
grow like cabbages; they are of the soil,
spring from it to the sun, glow open-
hearted while he is there; and when he
goes, they go. So grew Florence, and
Shakespeare, and Greek myth — the three
most lovely flowers of Nature's seeding I
know of. And with the flowers grow the
weeds. My first weed shall sprout by
Arno, in a cranny of the Ponte Vecchio, or
cling like a Dryad of the wood to some
gnarly old olive on the hillside of Arcetri.
If it bear no little gold-seeded flower, or if
its pert leaves don't blush under the sun's
caress, it sha n't be my fault or the sun's.
Take, then, my watered wine in the
name of the Second Maccabsean, for here,
as he says, "will I make an end. And if 1
have done well, and as is fitting the story,
it is that which I desired : but if slenderly
and meanly, it is that which I could attain
unto." I have killed you at the first cast. I feel
it. Has any city, save, perhaps, Cairo,
been so written out as Florence ? I hear
you querulous; you raise your eyebrows;
you sigh as you watch the tottering ash of
your second cigar. Mrs. Brown comes to
tell you it is late. I agree with you quickly.

TOSCANELLA

APOLOGIA PRO LIBELLO
Florence has often been sketched before —
putting Browning aside with his astounding
fresco-music — by Ruskin and George Eliot
and Mr. Henry James, to name only mas
ters. But that is no reason why I should
not try my prentice hand. Florence alters
not at all. Men do. My picture, poor as
you like, shall be my own. It is not their
Florence or yours, — and, remember, I would
strike at Tuscany through Florence, and
throughout Tuscany keep my eye in her
beam, — but my own mellow kingcup of a
town, the glowing heart of the whole Arno
basin, whose suave and weather-warmed
grace I shall try to catch and distil. But
Mrs. Brown is right; it is late : the huntsmen
are up in America, as your good kinsman
has it, and I would never have you act your
own Antipodes. Addio.

ii

EYE OF ITALY"
I HAVE been here a few days only — per
haps a week; if it 's impressionism
you 're after, the time is now or a year
hence. For, in these things of three stages,
two may be tolerable : the first clouding of
the water with the wine's red fire, or the
final resolution of the two into one humane
consistence; the intermediate course is, like
all times of process, brumous and hesitant.
After a dinner in the white piazza, shrink
ing slowly to blue under the keen young
moon's eye, watched over jealously by the
frowning bulk of Brunelleschi's globe —
after a dinner of pasta con brodo, veal cut
lets, olives, and a bottle of right *Barbera,
let me give you a pastel (this is the medium
for such evanescences) of Florence herself.
At present I only feel. No one should think
— few people can — after dinner. Be patient
therefore ; suffer me thus far.
1 My thanks are due to the editor of Black and White
for permission to reprint the substance of this essay.

EARTHWORK

EYE OF ITALY
I would spare you, if I might, the horrors
of my night-long journey from Milan.
There is little romance in a railway: the
novelists have worked it dry. That is,
however, a part of my sum of perceptions
which began, you may put it, at the dawn
which saw Florence and me face to face.
So I must in no wise omit it.
I find, then, that Italian railway-carriages
are constructed for the convenience of lug
gage, and that passengers are an after
thought, as dogs or grooms are with us,
to be suffered only if there be room, and on
condition they look after the luggage. In
my case we had our full complement of
the staple; nevertheless, every passenger
assumed the god, keeping watch on his
traps, and thinking to shake the spheres at
every fresh arrival. Thoughtless behaviour !
for there were thus twelve people packed
into a rocky landscape of cardboard port
manteaus and umbrella-peaks; twenty-four
legs, and urgent need of stretching-room as
the night wore on. There was jostling,
there was asperity from those who could
sleep and from those who would; there
was more when two shock-head drovers —
like First and Second Murderers in a tragedy
13

EARTHWORK OUT OF TUSCANY:
— insisted on taking off their boots. It was
not that there was little room for boots;
indeed I think they nursed them on their
thin knees. It was at any rate too much
even for an Italian passenger; for — well,
well! their way had been a hot and a dusty
one, poor fellows. So the guard was sum
moned, and came with all the implicit
powers of a uniform and, I believe, a
sword. The boots were strained on suffi
ciently to preserve the amenities of the
way; they could not, of course, be what
they had been ; the carriage was by this a
forcing-house. And through the long night
we ached away an intolerable span of time
with, for under-current, for sinister accom
paniment to the pitiful strain, the muffled
interminable plodding of the engine, and
the rack of the wheels pulsing through
space to the rhythm of some music-hall
jingle heard in snatches at home. At in
tervals came shocks of contrast when we
were brought suddenly face to face with a
gaunt and bleached world. Then we stirred
from our stupor, and sat looking at each
other's stale faces. We had shrieked and
clanked our way into some great naked
station, shivering raw and cold under the
14

EYE OF ITALY
electric lights, streaked with black shad
ows on its whitewash and patched with
coarse advertisements. The porters' voices
echoed in the void, shouting "Placenta,"
"Parma," "Reggio," "Modena," "Bo
logna," with infinite relish for the varied
hues of the final a. One or two cowed
travellers slippered up responsive to the
call, and we, the veterans who endured,
set our teeth, shuddered, and smoked fever
ish cigarettes on the platform among the
carriage-wheels and points; or, if we were
new hands, watched awfully the advent
of another sleeping train, as dingy as our
own — yet a hero of romance ! For it bore
the hieratic and tremendous words, "Roma,
Firenze, Milano." It was privileged then;
it ministered in the sanctuary. We glowed
in our sordid skins, and could have kissed
the foot-boards that bore the dust of Rome.
I will swear I shall never see those three
words printed on a carriage without a
thrill. Roma, Firenze, Milano, — Lord !
what a traverse.
Or we held long, purposeless rests at
small wayside places where no station
could be known, and the shrouded land
stretched away on either side, not to
15

EARTHWORK OUT OF TUSCANY:
be seen, but rather felt, in the cool airs
that blew in, and the rustling of secret
trees near by. No further sound was, save
the muttered talking of the guards without
and the simmering of the engine, on some
where in front. And then " Parten^a ! "
rang out in the night, and " Pronti ! "
came as a faint echo on before. We la
boured on, and the dreams began where
they had broken off. For we dreamed in
these times, fitful and lurid, coloured
dreams; flashes of horrible crises in one's
life; interminable precipices; a river skiff
engulfed in a swirl of green sea- water;
agonies of repentance; shameful failure,
defeat, memories — and then the steady
pulsing of the engine, and thick, imperme
able darkness choking up the windows
again. How I ached for the dawn !
I awoke from what I believe to have
been a panic of snoring, to hear the train
clattering over the sleepers and points,
and to see — oh, human, brotherly sight ! —
the broad level light of morning stream out
of the east. We were stealing into a city
asleep. Tall flat houses rose in the chill
mist to our left and stared blankly down
upon us with close-barred green eyelids.
16

EYE OF ITALY
Gas-lamps in swept streets flickered dirty
yellow in the garish light. A great purple
dome lay ahead, flanked by the ruddy roofs
and gables of a long church. My heart
leapt for Florence. Pistoja !
And then, at Prato, a nut-brown old
woman with a placid face got into our car
riage with a basket of green figs and some

bottles of milk for the Florentine markets.
So we were nearing. And soon we ran in
between lines of white and pink villas
edged with rows of planes drenched still
with dews and the night mists, among bul
lock-carts and queer shabby little vetture,
everything looking light and elfin in the
brisk sunshine and autumn bite — into the
barrel-like station, and I into the arms, say
rather the arm-chair, of Signora Vedova
i7

EARTHWORK OUT OF TUSCANY :
Paolini, chattiest and most motherly of
landladies. Earth, Air, Fire, Water, Florence, form
the five elements of our planet according to
the testimony of Boniface VIII. of clamant
and not very Catholic memory. That is
true if you take it this way. You cannot
resolve an element; but you cannot resolve
Florence ; therefore Florence is an element.
Ecco ! She is like nothing else in Nature,
or (which is much the same thing) Art.
You can have olives elsewhere, and Gothic
elsewhere ; you can have both at Aries, for
instance. You can have campanili printed
white (but not rose-and-white, not rose-
and- gold -and -white) on blue anywhere
along the Mediterranean from Tripoli to
Tangier: you will find Giotto at Padua, and
statues growing in the open air at Naples.
But for the silvery magic of olives and
blue ; for a Gothic which has the supernat
ural and always restless eagerness of the
North, held in check, reduced to our level
by the blessedly human sanity of Roman
esque ; for sculpture which sprouts from the
crumbling church-sides like some frankly
happy stonecrop, or wallflower, just as
wholesomely coloured and tenderly shaped,
j8

EYE OF ITALY
you must come to Florence. Come for
choice in this golden afternoon of the year.
Green figs are twelve-a-penny; you can
get peaches for the asking, and grapes and
melons without it; brown men are treading
the wine-fat in every little white hill-town,
and in Florence itself you may stumble
upon them, as I once did, plying their mys
tery in a battered old church — sight only to
be seen in Italy, where religions have been
many, but religionists substantially the
same. That is the Italian way ; there was
the practical evidence. Imagine the sight.
A gaunt and empty old basilica, the beams
of the rood still left, the dye of fresco still
round the walls and tribune — here the dim
figure of Sebastian roped to his tree, there
the cloudy forms of Apostles or the Heav
enly Host shadowed in masses of crimson
or green — and, down below, a slippery
purple sea, frothed sanguine at the edges,
and wild, half-naked creatures treading out
the juice, dancing in the oozy stuff rhythm
ically, to the music of some wailing air of
their own. Saturnia regna indeed, and in
the haunt of Sant' Ambrogio, or under the
hungry eye of San Bernardino, or other lean
ascetic of the Middle Age. But that, after
19

EARTHWORK OUT OF TUSCANY •
all, is Italian, not necessarily Florentine or
Tuscan. I must needs abstract the unique
quintessential humours of this my eye of
Italy. Stendhal, do you remember ? did n't
like one of these. He said that in Florence
people talked about "huestahasa" when
they would say "questa casa," and thus
turned Italian into a mad Arabic. So they
do, especially the women: why not ? The
poor Stendhal loved Milan, wrote himself
down "Arrigo Milanese" — and what can
you expect from a Milanese ?
They tell me, who know Florence well,
that she is growing unwieldy. Like a
bulky old concierge, they say, she sits in
the passage of her Arno, swollen, fat, and
featureless, a kind of Chicago, a city of
tame conveniences ungraced by arts. That
means that there are suburbs and tramways ;
it means that the gates will not hold her in;
it has a furtive stab at the railway station
and the omnibus in the Piazza del Duomo:
it is Mornings in Florence. The sugges
tion is that Art is some pale remote virgin
who must needs shiver and withdraw at
the touch of actual life : the art-lover must
maunder over his mistress's wrongs instead
of manfully insisting upon her rights, her

EYE OF ITALY
everlasting triumphant justifications. Why
this watery talk of an Art that was and may
not be again, because we go to bed by
electricity and have our hair brushed by
machinery ? Pray has Nature ceased ? or
Life ? Art will endure with these fine things,
which in Florence, let me say, are very fine
indeed. But there 's a practical answer to
the indictment. As a city she is a mere
cupful. You can walk from Cantagalli's,
at the Roman Gate, to the Porta San Gallo,
at the end of the Via Cavour, in half the
time it would take you to go from New
gate to Kensington Gardens. Yet whereas
in London such a walk would lead you
through a slice of a section, in Florence
you would cut through the whole city
from hill to hill. You are never away from
the velvet flanks of the Tuscan hills. Every
street-end smiles an enchanting vista upon
you. Houses frowning, machicolated and
sombre, or gay and golden-white with cool
green jalousies and spreading eaves, stretch
before you through mellow air to a distance
where they melt into hills, and hills into
sky ; into sky so clear and rarely blue, so
virgin pale at the horizon, that the hills
sleep brown upon it under the sun, and the

EARTHWORK OUT OF TUSCANY:
cypresses, nodding a-row, seem funeral
weeds beside that radiant purity. Some
such adorable stretch of tilth and pasture,
sky and cloud, hangs like a god's crown
beyond the city and her towers. In the
long autumn twilight Fiesole and the hills
lie soft and purple below a pale green sky.
There is a pause at this time when the air
seems washed for sleep — every shrub, every
feature of the landscape is cut clean as with
a blade. The light dies, the air deepens to
wet violet, and the glimpses of the hill-
town gleam like snow. At such times
Samminiato looms ghostly upon you and
fades slowly out. The flush in the East
faints and fails and the evening star shines
like a gem. It is hot and still in the broad
Piazza Santa Maria ; they are lighting the
lamps; the swarm grows of the eager,
shabby, spendthrift crowd of young Ital
ians, so light-hearted and fluent, and so
prodigal of this old Italy of theirs — and ours.
All this I have been watching as I might.
Nature clings to the city, playing her
rhythmic dance at the end of every street.
Nature clings. Yes; but she is within as
well as without. What is that sentimental
platitude of somebody's (the worst kind of

EYE OF ITALY
platitude, is it not?) about the sun being
to flowers what Art is to Life ? It has the
further distinction of being untrue. In
Florence you learn that what he is to flow
ers, that he is to Art. For I soberly believe
that under his rays Florence has grown
open like some rare white water-lily ; that
sun and sky have set the conditions, struck,
as it were, the chord. I have wandered
through and through her recessed ways the
length ot this bright and breezy October
week; and have marked where I walked
the sun's great hand laid upon palace and
cloister and bell-tower. He has summoned
up these flat-topped houses, these pre
cipitous walls beneath which winds the
darkened causeway. One seems to be
travelling in a mountain gorge with, above,
a thin ribbon of sky, fluid blue, flawless of
cloud, like the sea. He, that so masterful
sun, has given Florence the apathetic, beaten
aspect of a southern town ; he and the
temperate sky have fixed the tone for ever;
and the nimble air — " nimbly and sweetly "
recommending itself — has given the quaint-
ness and the freaksomeness of the North.
This bursts out, young and irresponsible,
in pinnacle, crocket, and gable, in towers
23

EARTHWORK OUT OF TUSCANY:
like spears, and in the eager lancet win
dows which peer upwards out of Orsam
michele and the Dominican church. This
mixture is Florence and has made her art.
The blue of the sky gives the key to her
palette, the breath of the west wind, the
salt wind from our own Atlantic, tingles in
her campanili; and the Italian sun washes
over all with his lazy gold. Habit and in
clination both speak. She rejects no wise
thing and accepts every lovely thing. Na
ture and Art have worked hand in hand, as
they will when we let them. For what is
an art so inimitable, so innocent, so intim
ate as this of Tuscany, after all, but a high
effort of creative Nature — Natura naturans,
as Spinosa calls her ? Here, on the weather-
fretted walls, a Delia Robbia blossoms out
in natural colours — blue and white and
green. They are Spring's colours. You
need not go into the Bargello to understand
Luca and Andrea at their happy task; as
well go to a botanical museum to read the
secret of April. See them on the dusty
wall of Orsammichele. They have wrought
the blossom of the stone— -clusters of bright-
eyed flowers with the throats and eyes of
angels, singing, you might say, a children's
24

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o """'¦:""' :

_

THE DOMINICAN CHURCH

EYE OF ITALY
hymn to Our Lady, throned and pure in the
midst of the bevy. See the Spedale degli
Innocenti, where a score of little flowery
white children grow, open-armed, out of
their sky-blue medallions. Really, are they
lilies, or children, or the embodied strophes
of a psalter ? you ask. I mix my metaphors
like an Irishman, but you will see my
meaning. All the arts blend in art: " Rien
ne fait mieux entendre combien un faux
sonnet est ridicule que de s'imaginer une
femme ou une maison faite sur ce
modele-la." Pascal knew; and so did
Philip Sidney. "Nature never set forth
the earth in so rich tapestry as divers poets
have done " ; and the nearer truth seems to
be that Art is Nature made articulate, Na
ture's soul inflamed with love and voicing
her secrets through one man to many. So
there may be no difference between me
and a cabbage-rose but this, that I can con
sider my own flower, how it grows, or
rather, when it is grown.
It is very pleasant sometimes to think
that wistful guess of Plato's true in spite of
everything — that the state is the man grown
great, as the universe is the state grown
infinite. It explains that Florence has a
25

EARTHWORK OUT OF TUSCANY:
soul, the broader image of her sons', and
that this soul speaks in Art, utters itself in
flower of stone and starry stretches of
fresco (like that serene blue and grey band
in the Sistine chapel which redeems so
many of Rome's waste places), sings
colour-songs (there are such affairs) on
church and cloister walls. Seeing these
good things, we should rather hear the
town's voice crying out her fancy to friendly
hearts. Thus— let me run the figure to
death — if Luca's blue- eyed medallions are
the crop of the wall, they are also the soul
of Florence, singing a blithe secular song
about gods whose abiding charm is the art
that made them live. And if the towers
and domes are the statelier flowers of the
garden, lily, hollyhock, tulip of the red
globe, so they are Florence again as she
strains forward and up, sternly defiant in
the Palazzo Vecchio, bright and curious at
Santa Croce, pure, chaste as a seraph, when,
thrilling with the touch of Giotto, she gazes
in the clarity of her golden and rosy marbles,
tinted like a pearl and shaped like an arch
angel, towards the blue vault whose eye
she is.
Wandering, therefore, through this high
26

EYE OF ITALY
city; loitering on the bridge whereunder
turbid Arno glitters like brass ; standing by
the yellow Baptistery; or seeing in Santa
Croce cloister — where I write these lines —
seven centuries of enthusiasm mellowed
down by sun and wind into a comely
dotage of grey and green, one is disposed
to wonder whether we are only just begin
ning to understand Art, or to misunder
stand it? Has the world slept for two
thousand years ? Is Degas the first artist ?
Was Aristotle the first critic, and is Mr.
George Moore the second ? As a white
pigeon cuts the blue, and every pinion of
him shines as burnished agate in the live
air, things shape themselves somewhat. I
begin to see that Art is, and that men have
been, and shall be, but never are. Facts
are an integral part of life, but they are not
life. I heard a metaphysician say once that
matter was the adjective of life, and thought
it a mighty pretty saying. In a true sense,
it would seem, Art is that adjective. For
so surely as there are honest men to insist
how true things are or how proper to
moralising, there will be Art to sing how
lovely they are, and what amiable dwell
ings for us. Thus fortified, I think I can
27

EARTHWORK OUT OF TUSCANY:
understand Magister Joctus Fiorentiae. He
lies behind these crumbling walls. Traces
of his crimson and blue still stain the clois
ter-walk. What was he telling us in crim
son and blue ? How dumb Zacharias spelt
out the name of his son John in the roll of
a book ? Hardly that, I think.

28

LITTLE FLOWERS
THE Via del Monte alle Croce is a leafy
way cut between hedgerows, in the
morning time heavy with dew and the
smell of wet flowers. Where it strays out
of the Gira al Monte there is a crumbly
brick wall, a well, and a little earthen
shrine to Madonna — a daub, it is true, of
glaring chromes and blues, thick in glaze
and tawdry devices of stout Cupids and
roses, but somehow, on this suggestive
Autumn morning, innocent and blue of eye
as the carolling throngs of Luca which it
travesties. And a pious inscription cut be
low testifieth how Saint Francis, "in
friendly talk with the Blessed Mariano di
Lugo," paused here before it, and then
vanished. It is not necessary to believe in
ghosts; but I'll go bail that story is true.
We are but two stones' throw from the
gaunt hulk of a Franciscan church; a file
of dusty cypresses marks the ruins of a
painful Calvary cut in the waste and shale
29

EARTHWORK OUT OF TUSCANY:
of the hill-side. Below, as in a green pas
ture, Florence shines like a dove's egg in
her nest of hills ; I can pick out among the
sheaf of spears which hedge her about the
daintiest of them all, the crocketed pinna
cle of Santa Croce, grey on blue; and then
the lean ridge of a shrine the barest, sim
plest, and most honest in all Tuscany.
Certainly Saint Francis, " familiarmente
discorrendo," appeared in this place. I need
no reference to the Annals of the Seraphic
Order— part, book, and page — to convince
me. My stone gives them. "Ann. Ord.
Min. Tom. cclii. fasc. 3," and so on. That
is but a sorry concession to our short-sight
edness. For if we believe not the shrine
which we have seen, how shall we believe
Giotto ? What of Giotto ? That is my
point. Something too much, it may be, of
modern art-criticism, which is ashamed of
thinking, snuffeth at pictures which tell
you things, at literature in books or music
or church ornament. Is literature not good
anywhere ? Have we exhausted the Ara
bian Nights or the Acta Sanctorum ? At
any rate, if we must choose between Giotto
and the prophet of the Yellow Book, my
30

LITTLE FLOWERS
heart is fixed. I am for the teller of tales.
Story-telling it is, glorification of one whom
Mr. George Moore would call (has, indeed,
called) a "squint-eyed Italian Saint" — and
whether he objected to malformity, nation
ality or calling, I never could learn —
this too it may be; it may tend to edifica
tion and I know not what beside. I will
grant all that. And though it is hard to
prophesy what might have happened five
hundred years ago ; though there might
have been a Giotto without a Francis of
whom to speak; yet I never knew a case
where a painter (call him poet if you will;
he will be none the worse for that) fell so
directly into the gap awaiting him. The
Gospel living and tangible again! Spirits,
apparitions, as of three mysterious sisters,
met you in the open country, and crying
"Hail! Lady Poverty," straightly vanished.
A legend was a-making round about the
strange life not fifty years closed, a life which
seems, extravagance apart, to have been a
lyrical outburst, a strophe in the hymn of
praise which certain happy people were
singing just then. It was a Gloria in Excel-
sis for a second time in Christian Annals
which did not end in a wail of " Agnus Dei,
31

EARTHWORK OUT OF TUSCANY:
qui tollis peccata, miserere." Why should
it ? Should the children of the bride-cham
ber fast when the bridegroom was with
them ? And of all the " wreath'd singers at
the marriage-door," blithest and sanest was
Master Joctus of Florence. This being so, I
hope I shall not be accused of any mischief
if I say that in Giotto I see one of the select
company of immortals whose work can
never be surpassed because it is entirely
adequate to the facts and atmosphere he
selected. The standard of a work of art
must always be — Is it well done ? rather
than — Is it well intentioned? Wherefore,
if Giotto or anybody else choose to spend
himself upon a sermon or an essay or an
article of the Creed, and do well thereby, I
may not blame him, nor call him back to
study the play of light across a marsh or
the flight of pigeons in the westering sun.
" Ma, basta, basta cosi," you may say with
the Cavaliere of Goldoni.
Santa Croce church is of the barrack-
room stamp, dim and enormous, grey with
years and seamed with work. Its impress-
iveness (for with Orvieto and a fleet of
churches at Ravenna it stands above all
Italy in that) consists mainly, I believe, in
32

LITTLE FLOWERS

its being built of exactly the moral
bones of the religion it was intended to
embody. An Italian religion, namely ;
perfectly sane, at bottom practical,
with a base of plain, every-day, ten-
commandment morality. That was
the base of Saint Francis' good brown
life : therefore Santa Croce is admir
ably built, squared, mortised, and
compacted by skilled workmen to
whom bricklaying was a fine art.
But, withal, this religion had its lyric
raptures, its "In fuoco Amor
mi mise," or its sobbing at
the feet of the Cruci
fied, its Corotto and
Seven Sorrowful Mys
teries : accordingly
Santa Croce, like a
pollarded lime, reserves
its buds, harbours and
garners them, throws
out no suckers or lateral
adornments the length
of its trunk, but bursts
into a flowery crown
of them at the top — a
whole row of chapels 33

EARTHWORK OUT OF TUSCANY:
along the cross-beam of the tau; and in
the place of honour a shallow apse pierced
with red lancets and aglow like an opal.
Never a chapel of them but is worth study
and a stiff neck. After the Rule came
the Fiorettt; after Francis and Bonaventure
came Celano and Jacopone da Todi ; after
Arnolfo del Lapo and his attention to busi
ness came the hours of ease when he planned
the airy plume on which the church leaps
skyward; and came also Giotto to weave
the crown of Santa Croce.
I take the Tuscan nature to be so con
stituted that it will play with any given
subject of speculation in much the same
way. With one or two mighty exceptions
to be sure — Dante, of course, Buonarroti,
of course, and, for all his secularities,
Boccace — it is not imagination you find in
Tuscany. Rather, it is a sweet and deli
cate, a wholesome, a home-grown fancy,
wantoning with thought which may be
unpleasant, unhealthy, grave, frivolous —
what you will ; yet playing in such a way,
and with such intuitive taste and breeding
that no harm ensues nor any nausea. They
realise for me a fairy country ; I can think
no evil of a Tuscan. So I can read Boccace
34

¦ ¦»

THE ETERNAL CHILD

LITTLE FLOWERS
the infidel, Poggio the gross, where Vol
taire makes me a bigot and Catulle Men-
des ashamed. The fresh breeze blowing
through the Decameron keeps the air sweet.
Even Lorenzo is a child for me, and Mac-
chiavel, " the man without a soul," I de
cline to take seriously. Consider, then,
all Tuscan art from this point of view, the
weaving of innocent fancies round some
chance-caught theme. Christianity may
have been the point d 'appui. No doubt it
generally was. What then ? Have you
never heard two children dreaming aloud
of the ways of God, or the troubles of
Christ? How they humanise, how they
realise the Mystery ! Just such a pretty
babble I find in the Spanish chapel, which
to take in any other spirit would work a
madness in the brain. You remember the
North wall, apotheosis of Saint Thomas
and what-not, for all the world like a par
adigm of the irregular verb "Aquinizo."
What are we to suppose Lippo Memmi (or
whoever else it was) to have been about
when he hung in mid-air on his swinging
bridge and stained the wet square red and
green ? To read Ruskin you would think
he was fulminating urbi et orbi with the
35

EARTHWORK OUT OF TUSCANY:
Summa or Cur Deus homo at his fingers'
ends. Depend upon it he was doing quite
other, or the artistic temper (phrase rend
ered loathsome by the halfpenny news
papers) suffered a relapse between the days
of King David and the days of his brother
Lippo Lippi. Are we to suppose that a
man who could live in intimate commerce
with fourteen such gracious ladies as he
has set there, ranged on their carved sedilia
— his Britomart trim and debonnaire; his
willowy Carita ; his wimpled matron in
clean white who masquerades as I know
not what branch of theology ; his pretty
girlish Geometry of coiled and braided hair
and the yet unloosed girdle of demure vir
ginity ; his maid Musica crowned with
roses, and Logica, the bold-eyed and
open-throated wench, hand to hip — is this
the man for sententiousness ? Out, out !
Could anyone save a humourist of high
order have given Moses such a pair of
horns, or set, under Music, such a shagged
Tubal to belabour an anvil ? The wall
sings like an anthology, — a Gothic antho
logy where " Bele Aliz matin leva" is
versicle, and "In un boschetto trovai pas-
torella " antiphon. You might as well talk
36

LITTLE FLOWERS
of Christian Mathematics as of Christian
Art, or bind the sweet influences of Pleiades
as the volant sallies of a poet's wit.
Once we get it into our heads that the
Tuscans were fanciful children, always, and
the discrepancy of critics, of Ruskin and Mr.
George Moore, of Rio and Mr. Addington
Symonds, may vanish. For another thing,
we shall understand and allow for the
standard of Santa Croce and the Fiorettt.
From the latter nosegay I take this :
" It happened one day as Brother Peter was standing
to his prayer, thinking earnestly about the Passion of
Christ, how the blessed Mother of him, and John
Evangelist his best-beloved, and Saint Francis too, were
painted at the foot of the Cross, crucified indeed with
him through anguish of the mind, that there came upon
him the longing to know which of these three had en
dured the bitterest pains of that anguish, the Mother who
bore our Lord, or the Disciple familiar to his bosom, or
Saint Francis crucified also even as he was. And as he
stood thinking on these things, lo ! there appeared before
him the Virgin Mary with Saint John Evangelist and Saint
Francis, robed in splendid apparel and of glory wonderful ;
but Saint Francis' robe was more cunningly wrought
than Saint John's. Now Peter stood quite scared at the
sight ; but Saint John bade him take comfort, saying,
' Be not afraid, dearest brother, for we are come hither
to dispel thy doubt. You are to know, then, that
above all creatures the Mother of Christ and I grieved
over the Passion of our Lord. But since that day Saint
37

EARTHWORK OUT OF TUSCANY:
Francis has felt more anguish than any other. There
fore, as you see, he is in glory now.' Then Brother
Peter asked him, and said, ' Most holy Apostle of Christ,
wherefore cometh it that the vesture of Saint Francis is
more glorious than thine ? ' Answered him Saint John,
' The reason is this, for that when he was in the world
he wore a viler than ever I did.' So then Saint John
gave him a vestment which he carried on his arm, and
the holy company vanished."
This, be sure, is true ; and I have its Eng
lish parallel ready to hand. For I once
heard a father and his child talking of the
goodness of God. " God," says the father,
"gives thee the milk to thy porridge " ; and
the child thought it a good saying, yet
puzzled over it, doubting, as it afterwards
appeared, the part to be assigned to a friend
of his, the daily milkman. And so he
solved it. "God makes the milk and the
milkman brings it," he said. The Fiorettt,
if you must needs break a butterfly on your
dissecting-board, was written, as I judge,
by a bare-foot Minorite of forty ; compiled,
that is, from the wonderings, the pretty
adjustments and naive disquisitions of any
such weather-worn brown men as you may
see to-day toiling up the Calvary to their
Convent. And in this same story-telling
Giotto is an adept. He loves to gather his
38

LITTLE FLOWERS
fellows round him and speak of Saints and
Archangels, where our youngsters talk of
fairy godmothers and white rabbits. To
say this is not Art, as the critics profanely
teach, is monstrous. Is not the Fiorettt
literature, or the Gospel according to Saint
Luke literature? And is not Religion the
highest art of all, the large elementary
poetry at the core of the heart of man ?
Just so was the craft which disposed the
rings of that wonderful ornament round
about the Bardi chapel, rings of clean ara
besque wrought in line upon pale blue and
pink and brown, and which in so doing
fitted the Franciscan thaumaturgy with an
exact garment tenderly adjusted to every
wave of its abandonment — even so was
this a great art indeed. For you ask of an
art no more than this, that it shall be ade
quately representative : there are no com
parative degrees.
So when I learn from the works of Rus
kin that he can "read a picture to you as,
if Mr. Spurgeon knew anything about art,
Mr. Spurgeon would read it, — that is to say,
from the plain, common-sense Protestant
side " ; or when I learn from the works of
Mr. George Moore that Sir Frederick Burton
39

EARTHWORK OUT OF TUSCANY:
made of the National Gallery a Museum ;
or when one complains of a picture that it
is not didactic, and another that it holds a
thought, I make haste to laugh lest I should
do wrong to Tuscany, that looked upon the
world to love it : for she saw that it was
very good.

40

Ill
A SACRIFICE AT PRATO
(An old-fashioned narrative)*
THE rim of the sun was burning the hill
tops, and already the vanguard of his
strength stemming the morning mists,
when I and my companion first trod the
dust of a small town which stood in our
path. It still lay very hard and white,
however, and sharply edged to its girdle of
olives and mulberry trees drenched in dews,
a compactly folded town well fortified by
strong walls and many towers, with the
mist upon it and softly over it like a veil.
For it lay well under the shade of the hills
awaiting the sun's coming. In the streets,
though they were by no means asleep, but,
contrariwise, busy with the traffic of men
and pack-mules, there was a shrewd bite
* Perhaps I may be allowed to explain that this article
was written from the stand-point of a cultivated Pagan
of the Empire, who should have journeyed in Time as
well as Space. 4i

EARTHWORK OUT OF TUSCANY:
as of night air ; looking up we could per
ceive how faint the blue of the sky was,
and the cloud-flaw how rosy yet with the
flush of Aurora's beauty-sleep. Therefore
we were glad to get into the market-place,
filled with people and set round with goodly
brick buildings, and to feel the light and
warmth steal about our limbs.
"It would seem fitting," said I, "seeing
that day is at hand and already we enjoy
the first-fruits of his largess, that we should
seek some neighbouring shrine where we
might praise the gods. For never yet was
land that had not, as its fairest work, gods :
and in a land so fair as this there must
needs be gods yet fairer, and shrines to case
them in." This I said, having observed
pious offerings laid upon the shrines of
divers gods by the road. At the which,
looking curiously, it seemed to me that the
inhabitants of this country were favoured
above the common with devout thoughts
and the objects of them — gods and god
desses. You might not pass a farm with
out its tutelary altar to the genius of the
place, some holy shade, or — as she was
figured as a matron — some great land-god
dess, perhaps Cybele, or the Bona Dea ;
42

A SACRIFICE AT PRATO
and pleasant it was to me to see that the
tufts of common flowers set before her
were for the most part smiling and fresh
with the dew that assured an early gather
ing. In the streets of the city, moreover, I
had seen many more such, slight affairs (it
is true) of painted earthenware, some gaud
ily adorned with green and yellow colour
and of workmanship as raw, some painted
flat on the wall of a recess (in which was
more skill, though the device was often
gross enough — to dwell upon death and
despair), and some again of choice beauty,
both of form and colour, and a most rare
blitheness, as it might be the spirit of the
contrivers breaking through the hard stone.
And all of these I knew to be gods, but the
devices upon them were hard to be read,
or approved. There was a naked youth
pierced with arrows, wherein the texture
of smooth flesh accorded not well with the
bitterness of his hurt ; a young man also,
bearded, of spare and mournful habit and
girt with a rope round his middle ; in his
hands were wounds, as again of arrows,
and there was a rent in his garment where
a javelin had torn a way into his side. Such
suffering of wounds and broken flesh stared
43

EARTHWORK OUT OF TUSCANY :
sharply up against the young flowers and
grasses which spoke of healthy wind and
rain and a sun-kissed earth. Goddesses
also I saw — a virgin of comely red and
white visage ; yellow-haired she was,
crowned like a king's daughter ; at her side
a wheel, cruelly spiked on the outer edge
and not easily to be related to so heartsome
a maid. But before them all (with one
grim exception, to be sure) I saw the
Earth-Mother who had been upon the farm
and homestead-walls, of the same high
perfection of form, and in raiment stately
and adorned, yet (it would seem) some
thing sorrowful as she might mourn the
loss of lover or young child. Now the
darkest sight I saw was that exception be
fore rehearsed ; and it was this. A black
cross stood in the most joyful places of the
city, and one suffered upon it to very death.
Whereat I marvelled greatly, saying, "Who
is the man thus tormented whom the
people worship as a god ?" And my com
panion answered,
"A great god he is, if the country report
lie not, and has many names which amount
to this, that he has freed this nation from
bondage and died that he may live again,
44

A SACRIFICE AT PRATO
and they too. And of the truth of what
they say I cannot speak ; but I think he is
Bacchus the Redeemer, who, as you, Bal-
bus, know, was no wanton reveller in
lasciviousness, but a very god of great be
nevolence and of wisdom truly dark and
awful. Who also took our mortal nature
upon him and suffered in the shades : rising
whence (for he was god and man) like the
dawn from the night's bosom, or the flood
ing of spring weather from the iron gates
of winter, he sped over land and sea,
touching earth and the dwellers upon it.
And to those he touched tongues were
given and soothsaying, and to many the
transports of inspiration and divine mad
ness, as of poets and rhapsodists. And
tragedy and choral odes are his, and the
furious splendour of dances. But of the
worship of Dionysus you know something,
having been at Eleusis and beheld the holy
mysteries. " Now the god of this people has the
same gift of tongues and madness of pos
session. To him are also sacred priests
of the oracle, and high tragedies, and the
wailing of music, and streaming processions
of virgins and young boys. He too agonised
45

EARTHWORK OUT OF TUSCANY:
and arose stronger and more shining than
befcre, dying, indeed, and rising at the very
vernal equinox we have mentioned. He too
is worshipped in certain Mysteries whereat
the confession of inquity and the cleansing
of hearts come first: and the sacrifice is
just that wheaten cake and fruit of the vine
whereof, at Eleusis, you have praised to
me the simplicity and ethic beauty. And
he can inspire his devotees with frenzy.
For I have heard that certain men of the
country, on a day, and urged by his dae
mon, run naked from place to place in
honour of him, lashing their bare backs
with ox-goads ; and will fast by the week
together, they and the women alike ; and
that pious virgins, under stress of these
things, swoon and are floated betwixt earth
and heaven, and afterwards relate their
blissful encounters and prophesy strange
matters; receiving also dolorous wounds
(which nevertheless are very sweet to
them) like to the wounds which he him
self received unto death; and all these
things they endure because they are mystic
ally fraught with the wisdom and efficacy
of the god. Nay, I have been told that in
the parts over sea, towards the North and
46

A SACRIFICE AT PRATO
West, he is worshipped, just as at Eleusis,
with pipes and timbrels and brazen cymbals
and all excess of music ; and there they
dance in his service and suffer the ecstasies
of the Maenads and Corybants in the Diony-
siac revel. But this I find quaint to be
believed." Now when I had heard so much, I was
the more desirous to find some temple
where I could observe the cult of this
wounded god, and so sought counsel of my
friend versed in the people's learning. To
my questioning he replied that it would be
easy. We were (said he) in the market
place among the buyers and chafferers of
fruit, vegetables, earthenware, milk, eggs,
and such country produce; which honest
folk, it being the hour of the morning
sacrifice and the temple facing us, would
soon abandon their brisk toil for religion's
sake; whereupon we too would go. Sol
looked across the square and saw a very
fair building, lofty and many windowed, all
of clean white marble, banded over with
bars of a smooth black stone, curiously
carved, moreover, in sculptured work of
gods and men and of flowers and fruits —
all cut in the pure marble. At one side was
47

EARTHWORK OUT OF TUSCANY:
a "noble rostrum, of the like fine stone,
whereon young boys and girls, as it were
fauns and dryads and other woodland
creatures, capered as they list: and above
the midmost door a semi-circle of pale blue
enamel, whereon was the image of the
Great Goddess in gleaming white. She
was of smiling debonnair countenance and
in the full pride of her blossom-time — being
as a young woman whose girdle is new
loosed to the will of her lord — and in her
arms was a naked child, finely wrought to
the size of life. On either side of her a
beautiful youth (in whom I must needs
admire the smoothness of their chins and
the bravery of their vesture shining in the
clear light), did reverence to the Goddess
and the child: and there were beings,
winged like birds, with the faces of strong
boys, but no bodies at all that I could see,
who flew above them all. This was brave
work, very wonderful to me in a people
who, thus excellently inspired and having
such comely smiling divinities and so clear
a vision of them before their eyes, could
yet be curious after suffering heroes and
stabbed virgins and gods with mangled
limbs. But we went into the temple with
48

Eft' ::H

!

J :¦ . r',/

PRATO

A SACRIFICE AT PRATO
the good people of the country-side to the
sound of hells from a high tower hard by.
And I was something surprised that they
brought no beasts with them for the sacri
fice, nor any of the fruits which were so
abundant in the land ; but my companion
reminded me again that the sacrifice was
ready prepared within, and was, as it were,
emblematical of all fruits and every sort of
meat, being that wine and bread into which
you may comprehend all bodily and (by a
figure) ghostly sustenance. By this we
were within the temple, which I now
perceived was a pantheon, having altars to
all the gods, some only of whose shrines I
had remarked on the way thither. Dark
and lofty it was, with piered arches that
soared into the mist, and jewelled windows
painfully worked in histories and fables of
old time — all as far apart as conceivably
might be from the holy places of my own
country ; for whereas, with us, the level
gaze of the sun is never absent, and
through the colonnades you would see
stretches of the far blue country, or, per
chance, the shimmer of the restless sea,
here no light of day could penetrate, and
all the senses might apprehend must be of
49

EARTHWORK OUT OF TUSCANY:
solemn darkness, longing thoughts to cleave
it, and, afar off and dim, some flutter of
even light as of blest abodes. A strange
people ! to despise the sure and fair, for the
taunting shadows of desire. But, growing
more familiar in the middle of newness and
the awe that comes of it, I was again
amazed at the number of the gods, their
nature and sort. I saw again the arrow-
stricken youth, whom we call Asclepius
(but never knew thus tormented— as with
his father's arrows !) and again the Maid of
the Wheel, Fortune as I suppose: but with
us the wheel is not so manifestly bitter.
Then also the wounded hero, cowled and
corded, ragged exceedingly, the like of
whom we have not, unless it be some
stripling loved by an immortal and wounded
to death by grudging Fate, as Atys or
Adonis. And if, indeed, this were one of
them, the image-maker did surely err in
making him of so vile a presence — a thing
against all likelihood that the gods, being
themselves of super-excellent shapeliness,
should stoop to anything of less favour.
Yet he was of singular sweetness in his
pains, and high fortitude : and he was
much loved of the people, as I afterwards
50

A SACRIFICE AT PRATO
learned. And one was a young knight,
winged and with a sword in his hand ; at
his feet a grievous worm of many folds.
This I must take for Perseus but that his
radiancy did rather point him for Phoebus,
the lord of days and the red sun. But in
the centre of the whole temple was an
altar, high and broad, fenced about with
steps and a rail, which I took to be made
unto the god of gods or perhaps the king
of that country, until I saw the black cross
and the Agonist hanging from it as one
dead. Then I knew that the chief god of
this people was Dionysus the Redeemer, if
it were really he. But I had reason to alter
my opinion on that matter as you shall
hear. By this the temple was filled with the
country folk who flocked in with the very
reek of their toil upon them and hardly so
much as their implements and marketable
wares left behind. They were of all ages
and conditions, both youths and maids,
arrowy, tall, and open-eyed; and aged
ones there were, bowed by labour and
seamed with the stress of weather or the
assaults of unstaying Fate : whereof, for
the most part, the women sat down against
51

EARTHWORK OUT OF TUSCANY =
the wall and plied dextrously their fans ;
but the men stood leaning against the
pillars which held the timbers of the roof.
And they conversed easily together, and
some were merry, and others, as I could
perceive, beset with affairs of government
or business — for they talked more vehe
mently ©f these matters than of others, as
men will, even beneath the very eyelids of
the god. And so I could understand that
this sacrifice was not the yearly celebrating
of high mysteries, but the common piety
of every day with which it is rather seemly
than essential we should begin our labour
ing. There were, indeed, signs in the
apparelling of the temple that more solemn
festivals were sometimes held, as the de
livery of oracles, the calculation of auspices
and such like : that, at least, I took to be
the intention of small recesses along the
walls, that, through a grating of fine brass,
a priest of the sanctuary uttered the wisdom
of the god in sentences which the meaner
sort should fit with what ease they might
to their circumstances. For, I suppose, it is
still found good that the dark saying of the
Oracle should be illumined by the subtlety
of the initiate and not by the necessities
52

Madonna and Child
From the group by Andrea della Robbia in the Cathedral,
Prato

A SACRIFICE AT PRATO
of the simple. And while I was thus
musing I found the ministrants in shining
white about the great altar, busied with the
preparation for the rite, lighting the torches
(very inconsiderable for so large a building,
but, mayhap, proportionate to the con
dition of the people) : and they placed a
great book upon the altar, and bowed
themselves ere they left. And soon after
wards, to the ringing of a bell, came the
priest's boy carrying the offering of the
altar, and the priest himself in stiff garments
of white and yellow.
Now, for the sacrifice, I could not well
understand it, save that it was very shortly
done and with a light heart accepted by the
people, who (I thought) held it as of the
number of those services whose bare per
formance is efficacious and wholesome — on
account, partly of reverent antiquity and
long usage, and partly as having some
hidden virtue best known to the god in
whose honour it is done. For in my own
country, I know well, there were many
such rites, whose commission edified the
people more than their omission would
have dishonoured the god: wise men, there
fore (as priests and philosophers), who
53

EARTHWORK OUT OF TUSCANY:
would live in peace, bow their bodies by
rule, knowing surely that their souls may
be bolt upright notwithstanding. So here
were many solemn acts which, doubtless,
once had some now unfathomable design
and purport, diligently rehearsed, while the
worshippers gazed about with dull uncon
cern, or, being young, cast eyes of longing
upon the country wenches set laughing and
rosy by the wall, or, old, nursed their in
firmities. And, on a sudden, a bell rang;
and again rang; and the packed body of
men and women fell upon their faces, and
so remained in a horrific silence for a space
where a man might count a score. There
after another bell, as of release. So the as
sembly rose to their feet and, as I saw,
swept from their foreheads and breasts the
dust of the temple floor. But as soon as it
was over, a very old priest came through
the press and offered the same sacrifice in a
little guarded shrine at the lower end, amid
many lamps and wax torches and glittering
ornaments. Here was more devotion
among the people, indeed a great struggling
and elbowing just so as to touch the altar,
or the steps of it, or the priest's hem, or
even the rails which fenced the shrine.
54

A SACRIFICE AT PRATO
And with some show of good reason was
this hubbub, as I learned. For here was in
deed treasured the Girdle of Venus (this
being her very sanctuary) and as much de
sired as ever it was by women great with
child or wanting to conceive. And I looked
very curiously upon it, but the Girdle I
could never see; only there was a painted
image over the altar of the great queen-
mother, Venus Genetrix herself, depicted as
a broad-browed, placid matron giving of
the fruits of her bounteous breasts to a male
child. Then I knew that this was that same
Goddess who stood over the outer door of
the place, and was well pleased to find that
the people, howsoever ignorantly, adored
the power that enwombs the world, —
Venus, the life-bringer and quickener of
things that breathe, — and could, in this
matter, touch hearts with the wise. So with
this thought, that truly God was one and
men divers, I came out of the temple well
pleased, into the level light of the day's beam.
In the tavern doorway, under a bush of
green ilex, we sat down in company to eat
bread and peaches sopped in the wine of
the country, and talked very briskly of all
the things we had seen and heard. And
55

EARTHWORK OUT OF TUSCANY:
soon into the current of our discourse was
drawn a dark-faced youth, who had been
observing us earnestly for some time from
under his hanging brows, and who, grow
ing mighty curious (as I find the way of
them is), must know who and whence we
were and of what belief and condition in
the world. So when I had satisfied him,
"Turn for turn," said I, "my honest friend:
being strangers, as you have learned, we
have seen many things which touch us
nearly, and some which are hard of read
ing. But this very reading is to us of high
concernment, for these matters relate to re
ligion, and religion, of what sort soever it
may be, no man can venture to despise. For
certain I am, that, as a man hath never seen
the gods, so he may never be sure that he
hath ever conceived them, even darkly, as
in a mirror. For we are dwellers in a cave,
my friend, with our backs to the light, and
may not tell of a truth whether the shadows
that flit and fade be indeed gods or no.
Tell me, therefore (for I am puzzled by it),
is the goddess whose presentment I yet see
over your temple-porch, that Mother of
gods and men, yea, even Mother of life it
self, to whom we also bend the neck ? "
56

- -

'- . '

.- ...

PEACHES AND WINE

A SACRIFICE AT PRATO
"She is, sir, as we believe, Mother of
God; and therefore, God being author of
life, Mother of life and all things living."
" It is as I had believed," said I, "and
you, young sir, and I, may bow together in
that temple of hers without offence. For
the temple is to her honour as I conceive ? "
"Why, yes," he answered, "it is raised to
her most holy name and to that of our Lord. "
" And your Lord, who is this ? and
which altar is his ? For there are many."
" The great altar is his, and indeed he is to
be worshipped in all," said the young man.
"He is then the tortured god, whose
semblance hangs upon the black cross ? "
"He is."
Then I begged him to tell me why these
mournful images were scattered over his
goodly earth, these maimed gods, this
blood and weeping; but I may not set down
all that he told me, seeing that much of it
was dark, and much, as I thought, not per
tinent to the issue. Much again was said
with his hands, which I cannot interpret
here. Suffice it that I learned this concern
ing the Agonist, that he was the son of the
goddess and greater than she, though in a
sense less. Mortal he was, and immortal,
57

EARTHWORK OUT OF TUSCANY:
abject to look upon, being indeed accounted
a malefactor and crucified like a thief; and
yet a king of men, speaking wisdom
whereof the like hath hardly been heard.
For of two things he taught there would
seem to be no bottom to them, so profound
and unsearchable they are. And one of
them was this, — "The kingdom is within
you '* (or some such words) ; and the other
was, " Who will lose his life shall save it."
Whereof, methinks, the first comprehends
all the teaching of the Academy and the
second that of the Porch. So this man
must needs have been a god, and whether
the son or no of the Soul of the World,
greater than she. For what she did, as it
were by necessity and her blind inhering
power, he knew. Therefore he must have
been Wisdom itself. And thus I knew
that he could not be Dionysus the Saviour,
though he might have many of his attri
butes; nor simply that son of Venus whom
Ausonius alone of our poets saw fastened
to a cross. So at last, "I will tell you,"
said I, "who this god really is, as it seems
to me. Being of vile estate and yet greatest
of all; being mortal and yet immortal, god
and man; being at once most wise and
58

A SACRIFICE AT PRATO
most simple, and (as such his condition
imports) intermediate between Earth and
Heaven, he must needs be the Divine Eros,
concerning whom Plato's words are yet
with us. So I can understand why he is
so wise, why he suffers always, and yet
cannot be driven by torment nor persuaded
by sophisms to cease loving. For the ne
cessity of love is to crave ever; and he is
Love himself. Wherefore I am very sure
he can lead men, if they will, from the fair
things of the world to those infinitely fairer
things in themselves whereby what we now
have are so very fair to see. And he may
well be son of this goddess and nourished
by her milk; for it behoves us that a god
should stand between Earth and Heaven
and be compact of the elements of either,
so that he should condescend the wisdom
of his head to instruct the clemency of his
heart. And we know, you and I, that the
gods are but attributes of God, whose in
tellect (as I say) may well be in Heaven, but
his heart is in the Earth, and is the core of
it. For so we say of the poet that his
heart is ever in his fair work."
Thus we took our wine and were well
content to sit in the sunshine. 59

IV
OF POETS AND NEEDLEWORK
THE man of our time to class poetry as a
thing very pleasant and useful shall
hardly be found. At most the saying will
suffer reprint as a quaintness, a freak, or a
paradox ; and so it has proved. From
Prato, dusty little city of mid-Tuscany, and
with the impress of its Reale Orfanotrofio
(nourisher, it would thus appear, of more
Humanities than one), comes an " Opera
Nova.nella quale si contengono bellissime his-
torie, contrasti, lamenti e frottole, con al-
cune canqoni a ballo, strambotti, geloghe,
farse, capitoli e ba^ellette di piii eccellenti
an fori. Aggiuntevi assai tramutationi, vil-
lanelle alia napolitana, sonetti alia berga-
masca e maria^i alia povana, indovinelli,
ritoboli e passer otti ' ' ; cosa, this legend goes
on to say, molto piacevole ed utile. This is, no
doubt, rococo, and at best a pitiful, catch-
farthing bit of ancientry : yet it looks back
to a time when it was indeed the fact that
no choice work could be but useful, and
60

OF POETS AND NEEDLEWORK
when eyes and ears, as conduits to the
soul, had that full of consideration we re
serve for mouth and nose, purveyors to the
belly. Vasari, Giorgio, he too, bourgeois though
he were, and in so far the best of testi
mony, knew it when he found Luca's blue
and white to be "molto utile per la state."
We should say that of a white umbrella or
suit of flannels ; why of earthenware or an
adroit strambotto .? That marks the cleft,
the incurable gulf of difference, between a
people like the Tuscans with art in their
marrow, and our present selves with our
touching reliance upon a most unseemly
hunger after facts. I suppose I should be
stretching a point if I said that Samson
Agonistes was cosa molto piacevole ed utile.
And yet I name there a great poem and a
weighty, whence the general public suck,
or claim to suck, no small advantage. Is it
more useful to them than Bradshaw ? I
doubt. But here, in this Opera Nova so
furthered, are sixty-three little snatches of
Luigi Pulci's, eight lines to the stave, about
the idlest of make-believe love affairs, full
of such Petrarchisms as "Gl' occhi tuoi
belli son li crudel dardi," or
61

EARTHWORK OUT OF TUSCANY:
"Tu m'ai trafitto il cor ! donde io moro,
Se tu, iddea, non mi dai aiutoro," —
the merest commonplaces of gallantry :
called on what account by their contrivers
molto utile ?
I have urged in my Second Essay that the
Tuscans were inveterate weavers of fancy,
choosing what came easiest to hand to
weave withal. I dared to see such airy
spinning in that Spanish Chapel from which
Mr. Ruskin has nearly frightened the lovers
of Art ; I said that the Summa was to the
painters there as good vantage-ground as
any novel of Sacchetti's. I now say that
Luigi Pulci and his kindred so treated the
love-lore which was solemn mystery to
Guinicelli and Lapo and Fazio, or the young
Dante shuddering before his lord of terrible
aspect. I would add Petrarch's name to
this honourable roll if I believed it fitting
such a niche ; but I find him the greatest
equivocator of them all, and owe him a
grudge for making a fifteenth-century Dante
impossible. It is true, had there been such
a poet we should never have had our Mil
ton ; but that may not serve the Swan of
Vaucluse as justification for being miserable
before a looking-glass, that he starved his
62

OF POETS AND NEEDLEWORK
grandsons to serve ours. Take him then
as a poser : give him, for the argument's
sake, Boccace to his company, Cino ; give
him our Pulci, give him Ariosto, give him
Lorenzo, Politian ; give him Tasso for aught
I care ; you have no one left but the sugar-
cured Guarino. Dante stands alone upon
the skyey peaks of his great argument,
steadied there and holding his breath, as
for the hush that precedes weighty endeav
our ; and Bojardo (no Tuscan by birth)
stands squarely to the plains, holding out
one hand to Rabelais over-Alps and another
to Boccace grinning in his grave. The fel
low is such a sturdy pagan we must e'en
forgive him some of his quirks. Italian
poesy, poor lady, stript to the smock, can
still look honestly out if she have but two
such vestments whole and unclouted as the
Commedia and the Orlando. Let us look
at some of her spoiled bravery. Take up
my Opera Nova and pick over Pulci in his
lightest mood. I am minded to try my
hand for your amusement.
" Let him rejoice who can ; for me, I 'd grieve.
Peace be with all ; for me yet shall be war.
Let him that hugs delight, hug on, and leave
To me sweet pain, lest day my night shall mar.
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EARTHWORK OUT OF TUSCANY-.
I am struck hard ; the world, you may believe,
Laughs out ; — rejoice, my world ! I '11 pet my scar.
Rogue love, that puttest me to such a pass,
They cry thee, ' It is well ! ' 1 sing, ' Alas ! '

i ' »

Vers de socUU ? No ; too rhetorical :
your antithesis gives headaches to fine la
dies. Euphuist ? Not in the applied sense :
read Shakespere's sonnets in that manner ;
or, if you object that Shakespere is too
high for such comparisons, read Drum-
mond of Hawthornden. Poetry, which has
a soul, we cannot call it. Verse it assur
edly is, and of the most excellent. Just re
ceive a quatrain of the pure spring and
judge for yourself :
" Chi gode goda, che pur io stento ;
Chi e in pace si sia, ch'io son in guerra ;
Chi ha diletto l'habbi, ch'io ho tormento ;
Chi vivelieto, in me dolor affena."
Balance is there. Vocalisation, adjust
ment of sound, discriminate use of long
syllables and short, of subjunctive and in
dicative moods.* Unpremeditated art it is
not : indeed it is craft rather than art ; for
* More than that : the piece is an excellent example
of the skilful use of redundant syllables. It is certain
that a study of Italian poetry would help our, too often,
tame blank verse to be (however bad otherwise) at least
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OF POETS AND NEEDLEWORK
Art demands a larger share of soul-expend
iture than Pulci could afford. And of such
is the delicate ware which Tuscany, no
thing doubting, took for lavoro molto utile.
For, believe it or not, of that kind were
Delia Robbia's enrichments, Ghirlandajo's
frescos, Raphael's Madonnas, and Alberti's
broad marble churches : of that kind and
of no other ; on a level with the painted
lady smiling out of a painted window at
Airolo, whose frozen lips assure the trav
erser of the Saint Gothard that he has passed
the ridge and may soon smell the olives.
Wherein, then, is the use ? Why, it is
in the art of it. I will convict you out of
Alberti's own mouth, or his biographer's,
for he spake it truly. " For he was wont
to say," thus runs the passage, "that what
ever might be accomplished by the wit of
man with a certain choiceness, that indeed
was next to the divine." To image the
divine, you see, you must accomplish some
what, scrupulously weigh, select, and re
fuse ; in short adapt exquisitely your means
not dull. It might bring it nearer to Milton, as Dante
brought Keats. Witness his revision of Hyperion. If
the Tuscans over-rated the craft in Poetry, we assuredly
under-rate it. 65

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until they are adequate to your ends. And,
keeping the eye steadily on that, you might
grow to discard solemn ends, or moment
ous, altogether, until poetry and painting
ceased to be arts at all, and must be classed,
at best, with needlework. So indeed it
proved in the case of poetry. After Politian
(who really did catch some echo of other
times, and of manners more primal than his
own, and did instil something of it in his
Orfeo) no poet of Italy had anything seri
ous to say. I doubt it even of Tasso,
though Tasso, I know, has a vogue. I ex
cept, of course, Michael Angelo, as I have
already said ; and I except Boccace and
Bojardo. Painting was drawn out of the
pit laid privily for her by the sheer neces
sity of an outlet ; and painting, having
much to say, became the representative
Italian art. Poetry, the most ancient of
them all, as she is the most majestic; the
art which refuses to be taught, and alone
of her sisters must be acquired by self-
spenditure (so that before you can learn to
string your words in music you must be
shaken with a thought which, to your tor
turing, you must spoil) ; poetry, at once
music and soothsay, knitted to us as
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OF POETS AND NEEDLEWORK
touching her common speech, and to the
spheres as touching on the same immortal
harmonies ; poetry such as Dante's was,
was gone from Tuscany, and painting, to
her own ruining, reigned instead, drawing
in sculpture and architecture to share her
kingdom and attributes. Which indeed
they did, to their equal detriment and our
discouragement that read.
When I want to see Death in small
clothes bowing in the drawing-room I turn
to my Petrarch and open at Sonnet cclxxxii.
where it is written how :
*"*" // lies with Death to take the beauty of
Laura but not the gracious memory of her ' ' ;
As thus :
" Now hast thou touch'd thy stretch of power, O Death ;
Thy brigandage hath beggar'd Love's demesne
And quench'd the lamp that lit it, and the queen
Of all the flowers snapped with thy ragged teeth.
Hollow and meagre stares our life beneath
The querulous moon, robb'd of its sovereign :
Yet the report of her, her deathless mien —
Not thine, O churl ! Not thine, thou greedy Death !
They are with her in Heaven, the which her grace,
Like some brave light, gladdens exceedingly
And shoots chance beams to this our dwelling-place :
So art thou swallowed in her victory.
Yet on me, beauty-whelmed in very sooth,
On me that last-born angel shall have ruth."
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Look in vain for' the deep heart-cry that
voiced Dante's passion in the tremendous
statements of this :
" Beatrice is gone up into high Heaven,
The kingdom where the angels are at peace ;
And lives with them : and to her friends is dead.
Not by the frost of winter was she driven
Away, like others ; nor by summer heats ;
But through a perfect gentleness, instead.
For from the lamp of her meek lowlihead
Such an exceeding glory went up hence
That it woke wonder in the Eternal Sire,
Until a sweet desire
Entered Him for that lovely excellence,
So that He bade her to Himself aspire ;
Counting this weary and most evil place
Unworthy of a thing so full of grace.'' (D. G. Rossetti.)
Now and again it may happen that a
poet, ridden by the images of his thought,
can " state the facts " and leave the rhyme
to chance. The Greeks, to whom facts
were rarer and of more significance, one
supposes, than they are to us, did it habitu
ally. That is what gives such irresistible
import to Homer and to Sophocles. They
knew that the adjective is the natural
enemy of the verb. The naked act, the
bare thought, a sequence of stately-balanced
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OF POETS AND NEEDLEWORK
rhythm and that ensuring harmony of sen
tences, gave their poetry its distinction.
They did not wilfully colour their verse, if
they did, as I suppose we must admit,
their statues. " Now," says Sir Thomas,
"there is a musick wherever there is a har
mony, order or proportion ; and thus far
we may maintain the musick of the spheres;
for those well-ordered motions, and regular
paces, though they give no sound unto the
ear, yet to the understanding they strike a
note most full of harmony." After the
Greeks, Dante, who may have drawn lo
bello stile from Virgil, but hardly his great
notes, as of a bell, carried on the tradition
of directness and naked strength. But
Petrarch, and after him all Tuscany, dallied
with light thinking, and beat all the images
of Love's treasury into thin conventions.
Pero, what gentlemen they were, these
" ingegni fiorentini," these Tuscan wits !
What innate breeding and reticence ! What
punctilious loyalty to the little observances
of literature, of wall-decoration, call it, in
the most licentiously -minded of them !
Lorenzo Magnifico was a rake and could
write lewdly enough, as we all know.
Yet, when he chose, that is, when Art bade
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EARTHWORK OUT OF TUSCANY:
him, how unerringly he chose the right
momentum. His too was "la mente che
non erra." I found this of his the other
day, and must needs close up my notes
with it. The very notion of it was, in his
time, a convention ; a series of sonnets
bound together by an argument ; a Vita
nova without its overmastering occasion.
Simonetta was dead; whereupon " tutti i
fiorentini ingegni, come si conviene in si
pubblica jattura, diversamente ed avversa-
mente si dolsono, chi in versi, chi in prosa."
The poor dead lady was, in fact, a butt for
these sharpshooters. Yet hear Lorenzo.
" Died, as we have declared, in our city a certain
lady, whereby all people alike in Florence were moved
to compassion. And this is no marvel, seeing that with
all earthly beauty and courtesy she was adorned as,
before her day, no other under heaven could have been.
Among her other excellent parts, she had a carriage so
sweet and winsome that whosoever should have any
commerce or friendly dealing with her, straightway fell
to believe himself enamoured of her. Ladies also, and
all youth of her degree, not only suffered no harbourage
to unkindly thought upon this her eminence over all the
rest, nor grudged it her at all, but stoutly upheld and
took pleasure in her loveliness and gracious bearing ; and
this so honestly that you would have found it hard to be
believed so many men without jealousy could have
loved her, or so many ladies without envy give her
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OF POETS AND NEEDLEWORK
place. So, the more her life by its comely ordering had
endeared her to mankind, pity also for her death, for the
flower of her youth, and for a beauteousness which in
death, it may be, showed the more resplendently than in
life, did breed in the heart the smarting of great desire.
Therefore she was carried uncovered on the bier from her
dwelling to the place of burial, and moved all men,
thronging there to see her, to abundant shedding of
tears. And in some, who before had not been aware of
her, after pity grew great marvel for that she, in death,
had overcome that loveliness which had seemed insu
perable while she yet lived. Among which people,
who before had not known her, there grew a bitterness
and, as it were, ground of reproach, that they had not
been acquainted with so fair a thing before that hour
when they must be shut off from it for ever ; to know
her thus and have perpetual grief of her. But truly in
her was made manifest that which our Petrarch had
spoken when he said,
' Death showed him lovely in her lovely face.' "
This is to write like a gentleman and an
artist, with ear attuned to the subtlest fall
and cadence, with scrupulous weighing of
words that their true outline shall hold
clear and sharp. It is intarsiatura, skilful
and clean at the edges. He goes on to play
with his hammered thought, always as de
licately and precisely as before.
" Falling, therefore, such an one to death, all the
wits of Florence, as is seemly in so public a calamity,
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EARTHWORK OUT OF TUSCANY:
lamented severally and mutually, some in rhyme, some
in prose, the ruefulness of it ; and bound themselves
to exalt her excellence each after the contriving of his
mind : in which company 1, too, must needs be ; I,
too, mingle rhymes with tears. So I did in the sonnets
below rehearsed ; whereof the first began thus :
' O limpid shining star, that to thy beam.'
" Night had fallen : together we walked, a dear
friend and I, together talking of our common sorrow :
and so speaking, the night being wondrous clear, I
lifted my eyes to a star of exceeding brilliancy, which
appeared in the West, of such assured splendour as not
alone to excel other stars, but so eagerly to shine that it
threw in shadow all the lights of heaven about it.
Whereof having great marvel, I turned to my friend,
saying : ' We ought not to wonder at this sight, seeing
that the soul of that most gentle lady is of a truth either
re-informed in this, a new star, or conjoined to shine
with it. Wherefore there is no marvel in such exceeding
brightness ; and we who took comfort in her living
delights, may even now be appeased by her appearance
in a limpid star. And if our vision for such a light
is tender and fragile, we should beseech her shade, that
is the god in her, to make us bolder by withholding
some part of her beam that we may sometimes look
upon her, nor sear our eyes. But, to say sooth, this is
no overboldness in her, endowed as she was with all the
power of her beauty, that she should strive to shine
more excellently than all the other stars, or even yet more
proudly with Phoebus himself, asking of him his very
chariot, that she, rather, may rule our day. Which
thing, if you allow it without presumption in our star,
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OF POETS AND NEEDLEWORK
how vilely shows the impertinence of Death to have laid
hands upon such loveliness and authority as hers.' And
since these my reasonings seemed of the stuff proper for
a sonnet, I took leave of my friend and composed that
one which follows ; speaking in it of the above men
tioned star."
The sonnet is in the right Petrarchian
vein, adroit and shallow as you please.
With such a preface it could hardly be
otherwise — the invocation of the lady's
shade, the twitting of Death (making his
Mastership jig to suit their occasions who
had of late been in his presence) and the
naive acceptance of all gifts as "buona
materia a un sonetto." In the end he spins
four to her memory; then finds another
lady and doubles all his superlatives for her.
For the star, he remembers, may have been
Lucifer ; and Lucifer is but herald of the
day. To it then ! with all the buona ma
teria a un sonetto the dawn can give you.
Thus flourished poetry in the Tuscan quat-
trocentro ; for Politian was but little more
poet than Lorenzo, while he was no less
dextrous as a rhymer and fashioner of con
ceits. Not serious, but piacevole, with an
elegantia qucrdam prope divinum ; there
fore molto utile. Pen-work in fact, and
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EARTHWORK OUT OF TUSCANY:
kin to needlework. Because Tuscany saw
choicely - wrought things pleasing, and
pleasant things useful, we of to-day can
see Florence as an open-air Museum. But
we wrap our own Poets in heavy bindings
and let them lie on drawing-room tables in
company of Whitaker's Almanac and an
album of photographs. Well, well ! We
must teach them to say, Philistia, be thou
glad of me, I suppose.

74

V
OF BOILS AND THE IDEAL*
(A Colloquy with Perugino)
" 'T'HERE," said my Roman escort, as we
1 forded the Tiber near Torgiano,
"the haze is lifting : behold august
Perugia." I looked out over the misty
plain, and saw the spiked ridge of a hill,
serried with towers and belfries as a port
with ships' masts; then the grey stone
walls and escarpments warm in the sun ;
finally a mouth to the city, which seemed
to engulph both the white road and the
citizens walking to and fro upon it like
flies. But it was some time yet before I
could decipher the image on the gonfalon
streaming in the breeze above the Signiory.
It was actually, on a field vert, a griffin
rampant sable, langued gules. " So ho ! "
said the guide when I had described it,
* This appeared in the New Review for December, 1 896,
and is reproduced by leave of the Publisher.
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EARTHWORK OUT OF TUSCANY:
"So ho ! the Mountain Cat is at home
again. . . . And here comes scouring one
of the whelps," he added in alarm. A
young man, black-avised, bare-headed,
pressing a lathered horse, bore down upon
us. He seemed to gain exultation with
every new pulse of his strength: the
Genius of Brute Force, handsome as he
was evil. And yet not evil, unless a wild
beast is evil; which it probably is not. He
soon reached us, pulled up short with a
clatter of hoofs, and hailed me in a raw
dialect, asking what I did, whence and who
I was, whither I went, what I would ? As
he spake — looking at me with fierce eyes
in which pride, suspicion, and the shyness
of youth struggled and rent each other — he
fooled with a straight sword, and seemed
to put his demands rather to provoke a
quarrel than to get an answer. I wished
no quarrel with a boy, so, as my custom is,
I answered deliberately that I travelled, and
from Rome; that my name was Hewlett,
at his service; that I was going to Perugia;
that I would be rid of him. I saw him
grow loutish before my adroit impassivity ;
his fencing was not with such tools. He
sulked, and must know next what I wanted
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OF BOILS AND THE IDEAL
at Perugia. I told him I had business with
Pietro Vannucci, called II Perugino by those
who admired him from a distance ; and he
seemed relieved, withal a something of con
tempt for my person fluttered on his pretty
lip. At any rate, he left fingering his steel
toy. "Peter the Pious!" he scoffed.
"Are you of his litter? Pots and Pans?
Off with you; you'll find him hoarding his
money or his wife. To the wife you may
send these from Semonetto. Whereat my
young gentleman fell to kissing his hand in
the air. I rose in my stirrups and bowed
elaborately, and, taking off my hat in the
act, put him to some shame, for he was
without that equipment. He pulled a wry
face at me, like any schoolboy, and can
tered off on his spent horse, arms akimbo,
and his irons rattling about him. My guide
marked a furtive cross on his breast and
vowed, I am pretty sure, a score candles to
Santa Maria in Cosmedin if ever he reached
home. "God is good," he said, "God is
very good. That was Simon Baglione."
"He seemed a very unlicked cub," was
all my reply. So we climbed the dusty
steep, winding twice or thrice round about
the hill in a brown plain set with stubbed
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EARTHWORK OUT OF TUSCANY:
trees, and entered the armed city by the
Porta Eburnea. Inside the walls, thread
ing our way up a spiral lane among bullock-
carts, cloaked cavaliers, monks, fair-haired
girls carrying pitchers and baskets, bullies,
bravoes, and well-to-do burgesses, we
passed from one ambush to another, by
dark gullies, stinking traps, and twisted
stairways, to the Via Deliziosa, without
ever a hint of the broad sunshine or whiff
of the balmy air which we had left outside
on the plain.
In a little mildewed court, where one
patch of light did indeed slope upon a
lemon-tree loaded with fruit and flowers,
I found my man in a droll pass with his
young wife. He was, in fact, tiring her
hair in the open : nothing more ; never
theless, there was that air of mystery in
the performance which made me at once
squeamish of going farther, and afraid to
withdraw. I stood, therefore, in confusion
while the sport went on. It was of his
seeking I could see, for the poor girl looked
shamefaced and weary enough. She was
a winsome child (no more), broad in the
brows, full in the eye, yellow-haired, like
most of the women in this place, with a
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OF BOILS AND THE IDEAL
fine-shaped mouth, rather voluptuously
underlipped ; and, as I then saw her, sitting
in a carven chair with her hands at a listless
droop over the arms of it. Her hair, which
was loose about her and of great length
and softness, lay at the mercy of her
master. He, a short, pursy man, well over
middle age — " past the Grand Climacteric,"
as Bulwer Lytton used to say — red and
anxiously lined, stood behind her, barber
fashion, and ran her hair through his fingers,
all the while talking to himself very fast.
His eyes were half- shut : he seemed
ravished by the sight of so much gold
(if common reports belie him not) or the
feel of so much silk (the likelier opinion), I
know not which. Assuredly so odd a
beginning to my adventure, a hardier man
would have stumbled !
The sport went on. The girl, as I con
sidered her, was of slight, almost mean
figure ; her good looks, which as yet lay
rather in promise, resolved themselves into
a small compass, for they ended at her
shoulders. Below them she was slender
to stooping, and with no shape to speak
of. Allow her a fine little head, the timid
freshness natural to her age, a blush-rose
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EARTHWORK OUT OF TUSCANY:
skin, slim neck, and that glorious weight
of hair : there is Perugino's wife ! Add
that she was vested in a milky green robe
which was cut square and low at the neck
and fitted her close, and I have no more to
say on her score than she had on any. As for
the Maestro himself, I got to know him
better. On mere sight I could guess some
thing of him. A master evidently, unhappy
when not ordering something ; fidgety by
the same token ; yet a fellow of humours,
and fertile of inventions whereon to feed
them. The more I considered him the
more subtle ministry to his pleasures did
I find this morning's work to be. A man,
finally, happiest in dreams. I looked at
him now in that vein. In and out, elbow-
deep sometimes, went his hands and arms,
plunging, swimming in that luxurious
mesh of hair. He sprayed it out in a
shower for Danae ; he clutched it hard and
drew it into thick burnished ropes of fine
gold. Anon, as the whim caught him,
he would pile it up and hedge it with
great silver pins, fanshape, such as coun
try girls use, till it took the semblance,
now of a tower, now of a wheel, now of
some winged beast — sphinx or basilisk —
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OF BOILS AND THE IDEAL
couching on the girl's head. Then, stepping
back a little, he would clasp his hands over
his eyes, and with head in air sing some
snatch of triumph, or laugh aloud for the
very wildness of his power ; and so the
game went on, that seemed a feast of
delight to the man — a feast ? an orgie of
sense. But the woman might have been
cut in stone. Had she not breathed, or
had not her fingers faintly stirred now and
again, you would have sworn her a wax
doll. I know not how long the two might have
stayed at their affairs, for here I grew
wearied and, coughing discreetly, slid my
foot on the flags. The man looked up,
stopped his play at once ; the spell was
broken. The girl, I noticed, stirred not at
all, but sat on as she was, with her hair about
her clasping her shoulders and flooding her
with gold. But Master Peter was a little
disconcerted, I am pretty sure ; certainly he
was redder than usual about the gills and
gullet. He cleared his throat once or twice
with an attempt at pomposity which he
vainly tried to sustain as he came out to
meet me. When I handed him the Pro-
thonotary's letter, and he saw the broad

EARTHWORK OUT OF TUSCANY:
seal, he bowed quite low ; the letter read,
he took me by the hand and led me to the
loggia of his house. We had to pass Madam
on the way thither; but by this Master
Peter carried off the affair as coolly as you
choose. " Imola, child," he said as we
passed, "I have company. Put up thy
hair and fetch me out a fiaschone of Orvieto
— that of the year before last. Be sure
thou makest no mistake; and break no bot
tles, girl, for the wine is good. And hard
enough to come by," he added with a sigh.
The girl obeyed. Without raising her eyes
she rose ; without raising them she put her
hands to her head and deftly braided and
coiled her hair into a single twist; still look
ing down to earth she passed into the house.
Pietro began to talk briskly enough so
soon as we were set. The air was mild
for mid-March ; between the ridged tiles of
the cortile, which ran up to a great height,
I could see a square of pale blue sky;
gnats were busy in the beam of dusty light
which slanted across the shade; I heard
the bees about the lemon-bush droning of
a quiet and opulent summer hovering near
by. It was a very peaceful and well-dis
posed world just then. Pietro, much at
S2

OF BOILS AND THE IDEAL
his ease, was apt to take life as he found
it — nor do I wonder.
"Yes," he said, "the work goes; the
work goes. I have much to do ; you may
call me just now quite a man of affairs.
This very morning, now, I received a little
deputation from Citta di Castello — quite a
company ! The Prior, the Sub-Prior, two
Vicars-Choral, two Wardens of Guilds, and
other gentlemen, craving a piece by my
own hand for the altar of Saint Roch. I
thank our Lord I can pick and choose in
these days. I told them I would think of
it, whereat they seemed to know relief, but
I added, How did they wish the boil treated,
on the Saint's left thigh ? For I told them,
and I was very firm, that though Holy
Church might aver the boil to have been a
grievous boil, a boil indeed, yet my art
could have little to say to boils, as boils.
The boil must be a great boil, and a red,
said they; for the populace love best what
they know best, and cannot worship, as
you might say, with maimed rites. More
over, Poggibonsi had a Saint Roch done by
that luxurious Sienese Bazzi (a man of scan
dalous living, as I daresay you know),
where the boil was fiery to behold and as
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EARTHWORK OUT OF TUSCANY:
big as a man's ankle-bone. This was a
cause of new great devotion among the
impious by reason of its plain relationship
to our frail flesh. Citta was a poor city; in
fine, there must be a handsome boil. I
said, Let me refine upon the boil, and Saint
Roch is yours, with Madonna, in addition,
caught up in clouds of pure light, and two
fiddling angels, one at either hand. Finally,
with the petition that Madonna should be
rarely adorned with pearls Flemish-fashion,
they let me have my way upon the boil.
So the work goes on ! "
"But, good Master Peter," I exclaimed
here, "I could find some discrepancy in this.
On the one hand you boggle at boils, on the
other you suffer pearls to be thrust upon
you. Why, if you cleave to the one, should
you despise the other ? For, for aught I
see, your thesis should exclude either."
"And so it does," he said, smiling.
"But for one man in Citta that knows a
pearl there will be a hundred who can judge
of a boil. My Madonna will be a pearl-
faced Umbrian maid, and her other pearls
just as Flemish as I choose. But I hear
our glasses clinking."
I, too, heard Imola's footfall on the flags,
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OF BOILS AND THE IDEAL
and ventured to say, " And I know where
your Madonna is, Master Peter." But he
affected not to hear.
She served us our amber cup with the
same persistent, almost sullen, self-contin
ence. But, I thought, I must see your
eyes, Mistress, for once; so called to mind
my encounter with the wild young Baglione
of the morning. Smiling as easily as I
could, I accosted her with " Madonna, I
am the bearer of compliments to you, if
you choose to hear them." Then she
looked me full for a second of time. I saw
by her dilating eyes, wide as a hare's
(though of a sea-grey colour), that she was
not always queen of herself, and pitied her.
For it is ill to think of broken-in hearts, or
souls set in bars, and I could fancy Master
Peter's hand not so light upon her as upon
church- walls. But I went on, "Yes, Ma
donna, even as I rode up hither, I met a
young knight-at-arms who wished you as
well as you were fair, and kissed your
hands as best he might, considering the
distance, before he rode off." Imola blushed,
but said nothing.
"Who was this youth, sir?" asked
Master Peter, in a hurry. 85

EARTHWORK OUT OF TUSCANY:
" It was plainly some young noble of your
State," said I, "but for his name I know
nothing, for he told me nothing." I added
this quickly, because I could see our friend
was keen enough for all his coat of uncon
cern, and I feared the whip by and by for
Imola's thin shoulders. But I knew quite
well who the boy was. Imola went lightly
away without any sign of twitter. I turned
to Master Peter again.
" In this matter of boils and pearls," I
began, "I would not deny but you are in
the right, and yet there is this to be said.
The Greeks of whose painting, truly, we
have next to nothing, in all the work of
theirs known to us did what lay before
them as well as ever they could. They
stayed not to theorise over this axiom and
that, that formula and this. They said
rather, You wish for the presentment of a
man with a boil on his leg? Well. And
they produced both man and boil."
"Why yes, yes," broke in my friend,
"that is plain enough. But apart from
this, that you are talking of sculpture to me
who do but paint, you should know very
well that your Greek copied no single boil,
no, nor no probable boil, but, as it were,
86

OF BOILS AND THE IDEAL
the summary and perfect conclusion of all
possible boils."
" To Tithanon ? Yes ; I admit it. For
Aristotle says as much."
" Right so do I, in my degree and by my
art," said Perugino; "and without know
ing anything of Aristotle save that he was
wise." "Your pardon, my brave Vannucci," I
said, "but you have admitted the opposite
of this. Did you not hint to the deputa
tion that you would give Saint Roch no
boils ? And have you ever let creep into
your pieces the semblance of so much as a
pimple ? Remember, I know your Sebas
tian; and know, also, II Sodoma's, which
he made as a banner for the Confraternity
of that famous Saint in Camollia."
" I seek the essence of fact," he replied,
" which, believe me, never lay in the dis
placement of an arrow-point: no, nor in
the head of a boil. Bazzi is a sensualist :
as his palate grows stale he whets it by
stronger meat; thinks to provoke appetite
by disgust; would draw you on by a nasty'
inference, as a dog by his hankering after
faecal odours. What nearness to Art in
his plumpy boy stuck with arrows like a
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EARTHWORK OUT OF TUSCANY:
skewered capon ? Causes nuns to weep,
hey ? and to dream dreams, hey ? Nature
would do that cleanlier; and waxwork more
powerfully ! Form, my good sir, Form is
your safeguard. Lay hold on Form ; you are
as near to Essence as may be here below.
Art works for the rational enlargement of
the fancy, not the titillation of sense. And
Invention is the more sacred the closer it
apes the scope of the divine plan. And
this much, at least, of the Grecian work I
have learned, that it will never lick vulgar
shoes, nor fawn to beastly eyes. It is a
stately order, a high pageant, a solemn
gradual, wherein the beholder will behold
just so much as he is prepared, by litany
and fasting and long vigil, to receive. No
more and no less."
"Aristotle again," said I, "with his
'continual slight novelty.' No fits and
starts." "I have told you before I know nothing
of the man," said Perugino, vexed, it ap
peared, at such wounding of his vanity to
be new ; "let me tell you this. There are
fellows abroad who dub me dunce and
dull -head. The young Buonarroti, for
sooth, who mistakes the large for the

OF BOILS AND THE IDEAL
great, quantity for quality ; who in the
indetermined pretends to see the mysteri
ous. Mystery, quotha ! Mystery may be
in an astrologer's horoscope, in a diagram.
Mystery needs no puckered virago, nor
bully in the sulks. There is mystery in the
morning calms, mystery in a girl's melting
mood; mystery in the irresolution of a
growing boy full of dreams. But behold ! it
is there, not here. If you see it not, the
fault is your own. It may be broad as
day, cut clean as with a knife, displayed at
large before a brawling world too busy
lapping or grudging to heed it. The many
shall pass it by as they run huddling to the
dark. Yet the few shall adore therein the
excellency of the mystery, even as the few
(the very few) may discern in the flake of
wafer-bread the shining wholeness of the
Divine Nature  "
" ' The few remain, the many change and
pass,'" I interpolated in a murmur. But
Perugino never heeded me. He went on :
"The Greek, young sir, took the fact
and let it alone to breed. His act lay in the
taking and setting. Just so much import
as it had borne it bore still; just so much
weight as separation from its fellows lent
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EARTHWORK OUT OF TUSCANY :
it was to his credit who first cut it free.
But nowadays glamour suits only with
serried muscles, frowns, and writhen lips ;
where darkness is we shudder, saying,
Behold a great mystery ! Let a painter de
clare his incompetence to utter, it shall be
enough to assure you he has walked with
God; for if he stammers, look you, that
testifies he is overwhelmed. Amen, I
would answer. Let his head swim and be
welcome; but let him not set to painting
till he can stand straight again. For in one
thing I am no Greek, in that I cannot hold
drunkenness divine." Here the good man
stopped for want of breath and I whipped in.
" Your great Crucifixion in Santa Maria
Maddalena," I began.
" Look you, sir,'- he took me up, " I
know what you would be at. Take that
piece (which is of my very best) or another
equally good, I mean the Charge to Peter
in Pope Sixtus his new Chapel, and listen
to me. The first thing your painter must
seek to do is to fill his wall. Let there be
no mistake about this. He is at first no
prophet nor man of God ; he is no jug
gler nor mountebank who shall be re
warded according to the enormity of his
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OF BOILS AND THE IDEAL
grins ; his calling, maybe, is humbler, for
all he stands for is to wash a wall so that
no eye be set smarting because of it. Now
that seems a very simple matter ; it is just
as simple as the eye itself — so you may
judge the validity of the arguments against
me, that a wholesome green or goodly red
wash would suffice. It would suffice in
different well for a kennel of dogs. But
mark this. Although your painter may
drop hints for the soul, let him not strain
above his pitch lest he crack his larynx.
To his colour he may add form in the
flat ; but he cannot escape the flat, how
ever he may wriggle, any more than the
sculptor can escape the round, scrape he
never so wisely. Buonarroti will scrape
and shift ; the Fleming has scraped and
shifted all his days to as little purpose. His
seed-pearls invite your touch. Touch them,
my friend, you will smear your fingers.
Ne sutor ultra crepidam. Leave miracles,
O painter, to the Saint, and stick to your
brush-work. Colour and form in the flat ;
there is his armour to win the citadel of a
man's soul."
"They call you mawkish," I dared to
say. 9""

EARTHWORK OUT OF TUSCANY:
" I am in good company," said the little
man, with much pomposity.
" You say boldly, then, if I catch the
chain of your argument " — thus I pursued
him — "that you present (as by some for
mula which you have elaborated) the facts
of religion in colour and design ? For I
suppose you will allow that your Art is
concerned at least as much with religion
as with the washing of walls ? "
"Religion ! Religion ! " cried he. "What
are you at ? Concerned with religion !
Man alive, it is concerned with itself ; it
is religion. I see you are very far indeed
from the truth, and as you have spoken
of my Crucifixion in Florence, now you
shall suffer me to speak of it. I testify
what I know, not that which I have not
seen. And as mine eyes have never filled
with blood from Golgotha, so I do not
conjure with tools I have not learned to
handle. But I will tell you what I have
seen. The Mass : whereof my piece is, as
it were, the transfiguration or a parable.
For it grew out of a Mass I once heard,
stately-ordered, solemnly and punctiliously
served in a great church. Mayhap, I
dreamed of it ; we shall not quarrel over
92

OF BOILS AND THE IDEAL
terms. It was a strange Mass, shorn of much
ornament and circumstance, I thought,
as I knelt and wondered : Here are no
lamentations, no bruised breasts, no out
poured hearts, nor souls on flames. The
day for tears is past, the fires are red, not
flaming ; this is a day for steadfast regard,
for service, patience, and good hope ; this
is a day for Art to chant what the soul
hath endured. For Art is a fruit sown in
action and watered to utterance by tears.
Two priests only, clothed in fine linen,
served the Mass : ornaments of candles,
incense, prostration, genuflection, there
were none. Yet, step by step, and with
every stop pondered reverently ere another
was laid to its fellow's foundation ; with
full knowledge of the end ere yet was the
beginning accomplished ; in every gesture,
every pause, intonation, invocation, stave
of song, phrase of prayer ; by painful de
grees wrought in the soul's sweat and
tears, unadorned, cold as fine stone, yet
glittering none the less like fair marble set
in the sun — was that solemn Mass sung
through in the bare Church to the glory of
God and His angels, who must ever rejoice
in a work done so that the master-mind is
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EARTHWORK OUT OF TUSCANY:
straining and on watch over heart and
voice. And I said, Calvary is done and the
woe of it turned to triumph. Love is the
fulfilling of the Law. Henceforth, for me
Law shall be the fulfilment of my Love.
"Therefore I paint no terrors of death,
no flesh torn by iron, no passion of an
anguish greater than we can ever conceive,
no bitter-sweet ecstasy of Self abandoned
or Love inflaming ; but instead, serenity,
a morning sky, a meek victim, Love fulfill
ing Law. Shorn of accidents, for the
essence is enough ; not passionate, for that
were as gross an affront in face of such aw
ful death as to be trivial. Nothing too much ;
Law fulfilling Love ; reasonable service.
"And because we are of the earth earthy,
and because what I work you must behold
with bodily eyes, I limn you angels and
gods in your own image ; not of greater
stature nor of more excellent beauty than
many among you ; not of finer essence,
maybe, than yourselves. But as the priests
about that naked altar, so stand they, that
the love which transfigures them be ab
sorbed in the fulfilling of law ; and the law
they exquisitely follow be at once the
pattern and glass of their love."
94

The Assumption of the Virgin
Croup from the painting- by Pietro Vannucci, called
Perugino, in the gallery of the Academy of
fine Arts, Florence

OF BOILS AND THE IDEAL
Master Peter drained a beaker of his
Orvieto. I admired ; for indeed the little
man spoke well.
"Now the Lord be good to you, Master
Peter," I said ; " men do you a great
wrong. For there are some who aver that
you doubt."
"Who does not doubt?" replied my
host. "We doubt whenever we cannot
see." "I believe you are right," said I. " Your
great Saint is, after all, your great Seer.
For you, then, to question the soul's im
mortality is but to admit that you do not
yet see your own life to come."
" Leave it so," said Perugino. " Let us
talk reasonably."
"Did all men love the law as you do,"
I resumed after a painful pause — for I felt
the force of the Master's rebuke to my im
pertinence (and could hope others will feel
it also) — " did all love the law as you do,
the world would be a cooler place and
passion at a discount. But I cannot con
ceive Art without passion."
"Nor I," said the painter, " and for the ex
cellent reason that there is no such thing. But
remember this: passion is like the Alpheus.
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EARTHWORK OUT OF TUSCANY:
Hedge it about with dams, you drive it
deeper. Out of sight is not out of being.
And the issue must needs be the fairer."
"Happy the passion," I said, "which
hath an issue. There is passion of the
vexed sort, where the tears are frozen to
ice as they start. Of the tortured thus,
remember —
' Lo pianto stesso li pianger non lascia,
E il duol, che trova in su gli occhi rintoppo,
Si volve in entro a far crescer l'ambascia.' "
"You know our Dante?" said Master
Peter blandly (though I swear he knew
what I was at). "There may be such
people ; doubtless there are such people.
For me, I find a perpetual outlet in my
art." I could not forbear :
" Master Peter, Master Peter," I cried out,
"how can I believe you when I know that
your Madonna's eyes are brimming ; when
I know why she turns them to a misty
heaven or an earth seen blotted by reason
of tears ? Do these tears ever fall, Master
Peter ? or who freezes them as they start ? "
For I wondered where his patient Imola
found her outlet, and whether young Si
mone has shown her a way. Master Peter
drummed on the table and nursed one fat leg.
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OF BOILS AND THE IDEAL
Before I took leave of the urbane little
painter, in fact while I stood in the act of
handshaking, I saw her white face at an
upper window, looming behind rigid bars.
On a sudden impulse I concluded my fare
wells rapidly and made to go. Vannucci
turned back into the house and closed the
door ; but I stayed in the cortile pretending
a trouble with my spurs. Sure enough,
in a short time I heard a light footfall.
Imola stood beside me.
"Wish me a safe journey," I said smil
ing, "and no "jmore bare-headed cavaliers
on the road." Her lips hardly moved, so
still her voice was. "Was he bare
headed ? " she asked, as if in awe.
"Love-locks floating free," I answered
her gaily enough. " Shall I thank him for
his courtesies to you, Madonna, if we
meet ? "
"You will not meet: he is gone to
Spello," she began, and then stopped,
blushing painfully.
" But I may stay in Spello this night and
could seek him out."
She was mistress of her lips, and could
now look steadily at me. " I wish him
very well," said Imola. 97

VI
THE SOUL OF A FACT
IN the days when it was verging on a
question whether a man could be at
the same time a good Christian and an
artist, the chosen subjects of painting were
significant of the approaching crisis — those
glaring moral contrasts in history which,
for want of a happier term, we call dram-
atir. Why this was so, whether Art took
a hint from Politics, or had withdrawn her
more intimate manifestations to await like
lier times, is a question it were long to
answer. The subjects, at any rate, were
such as the Greeks, with their surer in
stincts and saving grace of sanity in matters
of this kind, either forbore to meddle with
or treated as decoratively as they treated
acanthus-wreaths. To-day we call them
"effective" subjects; we find they pro
duce shocks and tremors ; we think it
braces us to shudder, and we think that
Art is a kind of emotional pill ; we meas
ure it quantitatively, and say that we
98

THE SOUL OF A FACT
"know what we like." And doubtless
there is something piquant in the quivering
produced, for example, by the sight of
white innocence fluttering helpless in a
grey shadow of lust. So long as the Bible
remained a god, that piquancy was found
in a Massacre of the Innocents ; in our own
time we find it in a Faust and Gretchen, in
the Dore Gallery, or in the Royal Academy.
It was a like appreciation of the certain
effect of vivid contrasts as powerful didactic
agents (coupled with, or drowning, a some
thing purer and more devout) which had
inspired those most beautiful and distinctive
of all the symbols of Catholicism, the Ad
oration of the Kings, the Christ-child cycle,
and which raised the Holy Child and Maid-
Mother to their place above the mystic
tapers and the Cross. Naturally the Old
Testament, that garner of grim tales, proved a
rich mine : David and Golias, Susanna and
the Elders, the Sacrifice of Isaac, Jeph
thah 's daughter. But the story of Judith
did not come to be painted in Tuscan sanc
tuaries until Donatello of Florence had first
cast her in bronze at the prayer of Cosimo
pater patrice.. Her entry was dramatic
enough at least : Dame Fortune may well
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EARTHWORK OUT OF TUSCANY:
have sniggered as she spun round the city
on her ball. Cosimo the patriot and his
splendid grandson were no sooner dead
and their brood sent flying, than Dona-
tello's fudith was set up in the Piazza as a
fit emblem of rescue from tyranny, with
the vigorous motto, to make assurance
double, " EXEMPLVM SALVTIS PVBLIC/E CIVES
posvere." Savonarola, who knew his
Bible, saw here a keener application of
Judith's pious sin. A few years later that
same fudith saw him burn. Thus, as an in
carnate cynicism, she will pass ; as a work
of art she is admittedly one of her great
creator's failures. Her neighbour Perseus
of the Loggia makes this only too plain !
For Cellini has seized the right moment in
a deed of horror, and Donatello, with all
his downrightness and grip of the fact, has
hit upon the wrong. It is fatal to freeze a
moment of time into an eternity of waiting.
His fudith will never strike : her arm is
palsied where it swings. The Damoclean
sword is a fine incident for poetry ; but
Holofernes was no Damocles, and, if he had
been, it were intolerable to cast his experi
ence in bronze. Donatello has essayed that
thing impossible for sculpture, to arrest a

Judith and Holofernes
From the group by Donatello in the Loggia of the Lanzi,
."" Florence

THE SOUL OF A FACT
moment instead of denote a permanent at
tribute. Art is adjectival, is it not, O Dona
tello ? Her business is to qualify facts, to
say what things are, not to state them, to
affirm that they are. A sculptured fudith
was done not long afterwards, carved, as
we shall see, with a burin on a plate ;
and the man who so carved her was a
painter. Meantime, pari passu, almost, a painter
who was a poet was trying his hand ; a
man who knew his Bible and his mythology
and was equally at home with either. Per
haps it is not extravagant to say that you
cannot be an artist unless you are at home
with mythology, unless mythology is the
swiftest and most direct expression of your
being, so that you can be measured by it
as a man is known by his books, or a
woman by her clothes, her way of bowing,
her amusements, or her charities. For
mythopoeia is just this, the incarnating the
spirit of natural fact ; and the generic name
of that power is Art. A kind of creation,
a clothing of essence in matter, an hypos-
tatising (if you will have it) of an object of
intuition within the folds of an object of
sense. Lessing did not dig so deep as his

EARTHWORK OUT OF TUSCANY:
Greek Voltaire (whose "dazzling antithe
sis, " after all, touches the root of the matter),
for he did not see that rhythmic extension
in time or space, as the case may be, with
all that that implies — colour, value, propor
tion, all the convincing incidents of form —
is simply the mode of all arts, the thing
with which Art's substance must be inter
penetrated, until the two form a whole,
lovely, golden, irresistible, and inevitable as
Nature's pieces are. This substance, I have
said, is the spirit of natural fact. And so
mythology is Art at its simplest and barest
(where the bodily medium is neither word,
nor texture of stone, nor dye), the parent
art from which all the others were, so to
speak, begotten by man's need. Thus
much of explanation, I am sorry to say, is
necessary, before we turn to our mytho-
poet of Florence, to see what he made out
of the story of Judith.
First of all, though, what has the story
of Judith to do with mythology ? It is a
legend, one of the finest of Semitic legends;
and between legend and myth there is as
great a gulf as between Jew and Greek. I
believe there are no myths proper to Israel
— I do not see how such magnificent

THE PERSEUS OF THE LOGGIA

THE SOUL OF A FACT
egoists could contract to the necessary state
of awe — and I do not know that there are any
legends proper to Greece which are divorced
from real myths. For where a myth is the
incarnation of the spirit of natural fact, a
legend is the embellishment of an historical
event : a very different thing. A natural
fact is permanent and elemental, an histor
ical event is transient and superficial. Take
one instance out of a score. The rainbow
links heaven and earth. Iris then, to the
myth-making Greek, was Jove's messenger,
intermediary between God and Man. That
is to incarnate a constant, natural fact.
Plato afterwards, making her daughter of
Thaumas, incarnated a fact, psychological,
but none the less constant, none the less
natural. But to say, as the legend-loving
Jew said, that Noah floated his ark over a
drowning world and secured for his poster
ity a standing covenant with God, who
then and once for all set his bow in the
heavens ; that is to indicate, somewhere,
in the dim backward and abysm of time,
an historical event. The rainbow is
suffered as the skirt of the robe of Noah,
who was an ancestor of Israel. So the
Judith poem may be a decorated event, or
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EARTHWORK OUT OF TUSCANY :
it may be the barest history in a splendid
epical setting : the point to remember is
that it cannot be, as a legend, a subject for
creative art. The artist, in the language
of Neo-Platonism, is a demiurge ; he only
of men can convert dead things into life.
And now we will go into the Uffizi.
Mr. Ruskin, in his petulant-playful way,
has touched upon the feeling of amaze
most people have who look for the first
time at Botticelli's fudith tripping smoothly
and lightly over the hill-country, her stead
fast maid dogging with intent, patient eyes
every step she takes. You say it is flippant,
affected, pedantic. For answer, I refer you
to the sage himself, who, from his point of
view — that painting may fairly deal with a
chapter of history — is perfectly right. The
prevailing strain of the story is the strength
of weakness — ex dulci fortitudo, to invert
the old enigma. " O God, O my God, hear
me also, a widow. Break down their
stateliness by the hand of a woman ! " It
is the refrain that runs through the whole
history of Israel, that reasonable compla
cency of a little people in their God-fraught
destiny. And, withal, a streak of savage
spite: that the audacious oppressor shall be
104

THE SOUL OF A FACT
done scornfully to death. There is the
motive of Jael and Sisera too. So "she
smote twice upon his neck with all her
might, and she took away his head from
him, and tumbled his body down from the
bed." Ho ! what a fate for the emissary
of the Great King. Wherefore, once more,
the jubilant paradox, " The Lord hath smit
ten him by the hand of a woman ! " That
is it: the amazing, thrilling antithesis in
sisted on over and over again by the old
Hebrew bard. " Her sandals ravished his
eyes, her beauty took his mind prisoner,
and the fauchion passed through his neck."
That is the leit-motif: Sandro the poet
knew it perfectly well and taught it, to the
no small comfort of Mr. Ruskin and his
men. Giuditta, dainty, blue-eyed, a girl
still and three years a widow, flits home
ward through a spring landscape of grey
and green and the smile of a milky sky,
being herself the dominant of the chord,
with her bough of slipt olive and her jagged
scimitar, with her pretty blue fal-lals
smocked and puffed, and her yellow curls
floating over her shoulders. On her slim
feet are the sandals that ravished his eyes ;
all her maiden bravery is dancing and
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EARTHWORK OUT OF TUSCANY:
fluttering like harebells in the wind. Be
hind her plods the slave-girl folded in an
orange scarf, bearing that shapeless, name
less burden of hers, the head of the grim Lord
Holofernes. Oh, for that, it is the legend
itself ! For look at the girl's eyes. What
does their dreamy solemnity mean if not,
" the Lord hath smitten him by the hand
of a woman " ? One other delicate bit of
symbolising he has allowed himself, which
I may not omit. You are to see by whom
this deed was done : by a woman who has
unsexed herself. Judith is absorbed in her
awful service ; her robe trails on the ground
and clings about her knees ; she is uncon
scious of the hindrance. The gates of
Bethulia are in sight, the Chaldean horse
men are abroad, but she has no anxiety to
escape. She is swift because her life just
now courses swiftly ; but there is no haste.
The maid, you shall mark, picks up her
skirts with careful hand, and steps out the
more lustily for it.
So far Botticelli the poet, and so far also
Mr. Ruskin, reader of pictures. What says
Botticelli the painter ? Had he no instincts
to tell him that his art could have little to
say to a legend ? Or that a legend might
1 06

Judith
From the painting by Botticelli in the Uffizi Gallery, Florence

THE SOUL OF A FACT
be the subject of an epic (here, indeed,
was an epic ready made), might, under
conditions, be the subject of a drama ; but
could not, under any conditions, be alone
the subject of a picture ? I don't for a
moment suggest that he had, or that any
artist ever goes to work in this double-
entry, methodical way, but are we entitled
to say that he was not influenced by
his predilections, his determinations as a
draughtsman, when he squared himself to
illustrate the Bible ? We say that the
subject of a picture is the spirit of natural
fact. If Botticelli was a painter, that is
what he must have looked for, and must
have found, in every picture he painted.
Where, then, was he to get his natural
facts in the story of Judith ? What is, in
that story, the natural, essential (as opposed
to the historical, fleeting) fact ? It is
murder. Judith's deed was what the old
Scots law incisively calls slauchter. It
may be glossed over as assassination or
even execution — in fact, in Florence, where
Giuliano was soon to be taken off, it did
not fail to be so called : it remains, how
ever, just murder. Botticelli, not shirking
the position at all, judged murder to be
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EARTHWORK OUT OF TUSCANY:
a natural fact, and its spirit or essence
swiftness and stealth. Chaucer, let us
note, had been of the same mind :
" The smyler with the knyf under his cloke,"
and so on, in lines not to be matched for
hasty and dreadful suggestion. Swiftness
and stealth, the ambush, the averted face
and the sudden stab, are the standing ele
ments of murder : pare off all the rest, you
come down to that. Your staring looks,
your blood, your "chirking," are accident
als. They may be there (for each of us
carries a carcase), but the horror of sudden
death is above them : a man may strangle
with his thoughts clearer than with his
pair of hands. And as "matter" is but
the stuff wherewith Nature works, and
she is only insulted, not defied, when we
flout or mangle it, so it is against the high
dignity of Art to insist upon the carrion
she must use. She will press, here the
terror, there the radiance, of essential fact ;
she will leave to us, seeing it in her face,
to add mentally the poor stage properties
we have grown to trust. No blood, if you
please. Therefore, in Botticelli's fudith,
nothing but the essentials is insisted on ;
108

THE SOUL OF A FACT
the rest we instantly imagine, but it is not
there to be sensed. The panel is in a
tremor. So swift and secret is Judith, so
furtive the maid, we need no hurrying
horsemen to remind us of her oath, —
"Hear me, and I will do a thing which
shall go throughout all generations to the
children of our nation." Sudden death is
in the air ; nature has been outraged. But
there is no drop of blood — the thin scarlet
line along the sword-edge is a symbol if
you will — the pale head in the cloth is a
mere "thing" : yet we all know what has
been done. Mr. Ruskin is wrong to dwell
here upon the heroism of the heroine, the
beneficence of the crime, the exhilaration
of the patriot ; he is traducing the painter
by so praising the poet. All those things
may be there ; and why should they not ?
But it is a pity to insist upon them until
you have no space for the pictorial some
thing which is there too, and makes the
picture. Other Judiths there are ; two here, one
next door in the Pitti, any number scattered
over the galleries of Europe. There are
Jacopo Palma of Venice and Allori of
Florence who used the old story, the one
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to perpetuate a fat blonde, the other a hand
some actress in a " strong " situation ; there
is Sodoma ; there are Horace Vernet and
the moderns, the Wests and Haydons of
our grandfathers. It is a pet subject of the
Salon. These men have vulgarised an epic,
and smirched poetry and painting alike
for the sake of a tawdry sensation. But
enough : let us look at one more. Man-
tegna's is worth looking at. It is a pen
drawing, often repeated, best known by
the fine engraving he finally made of it.
I think it is the best murder picture in the
world. To begin with, the literary interest
of the story is practically gone. This wild,
terrible, beautiful woman may be Judith if
you choose : she might be Medea or Agave,
or Salome, or the Lucrezia Borgia of popu
lar fancy and Donizetti. The fact is she
is part of a scheme whose object is the
aesthetic aspect of murder — murder con
sidered as one of the fine arts. Andrea was
able, and 1 know not that anybody else
of his day could have been able, to con
template murder purely objectively, with
no thought of its ethical relations. Botti
celli had been fired by the heroism and the
moral grandeur of the special circumstances

THE SOUL OF A FACT
of a given case : down they went into his
picture with what rightly belonged to it.
There is none of that here. And Mantegna
makes other distinctions in the field com
mon to both of them. Murder, for him,
did not essentially subsist in its shock
ing suddenness ; it held something more
specific, a witchery of its own, a macabre
fascination, a mystery. Leonardo felt it
when he drew his Medusa ; Shelley wrote
it down "the tempestuous loveliness of
terror." Thus it had, for Mantegna, an
unique emotional habit which set it off
from other vice and gave it a positive,
appreciable, aesthetic value of its own.
With even more unerrancy than Botticelli,
he gripped the adjectival and qualifying
function of his art. He saw that crime,
too, had its pictorial side. When Keats,
writing of the Lamia sloughing her snake-
folds, tells us how —
" She writhed about, convulsed with scarlet pain; "
or when, of organ music, he says —
" Up aloft
The silver, snarling trumpets 'gan to chide,"
he is simply, in his own art and with his
proper methods, getting precisely the same

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kind of effect : he is incarnating the soul
of a fact. And so Mantegna, with his
Roman kindness for whatever had breadth
and vigour and boldness of design, carved
his Judith on the lines of a Vestal Virgin,
and gave her the rapt, daemonic features
of the Tragic Muse. And, with his full
share of that unhealthy craving for the
mere nastiness of crime, that Amina-trait
which distinguished the later Empire and
its correlate the Renaissance, he drew
together the elements of his picture to
express an eminently characteristic concep
tion of curious murder. What amplitude
of outline ; what severe grace of drapery !
And what mad affectation of attention to
the ghastly baggage she is preparing for
her flight ! I can only instance for a paral
lel the pitiful case of the young Ophelia,
decked with flowers and weeds, and falter
ing in her pretty treble songs about lechery
and dead bodies. It needs strong men to
do these things ; men who have lived out
all that the world can offer them of heaven
and hell, and, with the tolerance of ma
turity, are in the mind to see something
worth a thought in either. There is in
murder something more horrible than

Alessandro Botticelli

THE SOUL OF A FACT
blood, — the spirit that breeds blood and
plays with it. M. Jan van Beers and his
kindred of the dissecting-room and acci-
dents'-ward are passed by Mantegna, who
gives no vulgar illusion of gaping wounds
and jetting blood ; but, instead, holds up
to us a beautiful woman daintily fingering
a corpse.

113

VII
QUATTROCENTISTERIA
(HOW SANDRO BOTTICELLI SAW SIMONETTA IN THE SPRING)
I
UP at Fiesole, among the olives and
chestnuts which cloud the steeps,
the magnificent Lorenzo was entertaining
his guests on a morning in April. The
olives were just whitening to silver ; they
stretched in a trembling sea down the slope.
Beyond lay Florence, misty and golden;
and round about were the mossy hills, cut
sharp and definite against a grey-blue sky,
printed with starry buildings and sober
ranks of cypress. The sun, catching the
mosaics of San Miniato and the brazen
cross on the facade, made them shine like
sword-blades in the quiver of the heat be
tween. For the valley was just a lake of
hot air, hot and murky — "fever weather,"
said the people in the streets — with a glar
ing summer sun let in between two long
spells of fog. 'T was unnatural at that
season, via ; but the blessed Saints sent the
114

QUATTROCENTISTERIAweather, and one could only be careful what
one was about at sun-down.
Up at the villa, with brisk morning airs
rustling overhead, in the cool shades of
trees and lawns, it was pleasant to lie still,
watching these things, while a silky young
exquisite sang to his lute a not too auda
cious ballad about Selvaggia, or Becchina
and the saucy Prior of Sant' Onofrio. He
sang well, too, that dark-eyed boy ; the girl
at whose feet he was crouched was laugh
ing and blushing at once; and, being very
fair, she blushed hotly. She dared not raise
her eyes to look into his, and he knew it
and was quietly measuring his strength — it
was quite a comedy ! At each wanton
refrain he lowered his voice to a whisper
and bent a little forward. And the girl's
laughter became hysterical ; she was shak
ing with the effort to control herself. At
last she looked up with a sort of sob in her
breath and saw his mocking smile and the
gleam of the wild beast in his eyes. She
grew white, rose hastily and turned away
to join a group of ladies sitting apart. A
man with a heavy, rather sullen face and a
bush of yellow hair falling over his fore
head in a wave was standing aside watching
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all this. He folded his arms and scowled
under his big brows ; and when the girl
moved away his eyes followed her.
The lad ended his song in a broad sar
casm amid bursts of laughter and applause.
The Magnificent, sitting in his carved chair,
nursed his sallow face and smiled approval.
" My brother boasts his invulnerability," he
said, turning to his neighbour; "let him
look to it, Messer Cupido will have him
yet. Already, we can see, he has been let
into some of the secrets of the bower."
The man bowed and smiled deferentially.
"Signor Giuliano has all the qualities to
win the love of ladies, and to retain it.
Doubtless he awaits his destiny. The
Wise Man has said that ' Beauty . .
The young poet enlarged on his text with
some fire in his thin cheeks, while the
company kept very silent. It was much to
their liking; even Giuliano was absorbed;
he sat on the ground clasping one knee be
tween his hands, smiling upwards into
vacancy, as a man does whose imagination
is touched. Lorenzo nursed his sallow
face and beat time to the orator's cadences
with his foot ; he, too, was abstracted and
smiling. At the end he spoke: "Our
116

QUATTROCENTISTERIAMarsilio himself has never said nobler
words, my Agnolo. The mantle of the
Attic prophet has descended indeed upon
this Florence. And Beauty, as thou sayest,
is from heaven. But where shall it be
found here below, and how discerned ? "
The man of the heavy jowl was standing
with folded arms, looking from under his
brows at the group of girls. Lorenzo saw
everything; he noticed him. "Our San
dro will tell us it is yonder. The Star of
Genoa shines over Florence and our poor
little constellations are gone out. Ecco, my
Sandro, gravest and hardiest of painters, go
summon Madonna Simonetta and her hand
maidens to our Symposium. Agnolo will
speak further to us of this sovereignty of
Beauty." The painter bowed his head and moved
away. A green alley vaulted with thick ilex and
myrtle formed a tapering vista where the
shadows lay misty blue and pale shafts of
light pierced through fitfully. At the far end
it ran out into an open space and a splash
of sunshine. A marble Ganymede with
lifted arms rose in the middle like a white
flame. The girls were there, intent upon
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some commerce of their own, flashing
hither and thither over the grass in a
flutter of saffron and green and crimson.
Simonetta — Sandro could see — was a little
apart, a very tall, isolated figure, clear
and cold in a recess of shade, standing
easily, resting on one hip with her hands
behind her. A soft, straight robe of white
clipped her close from shoulder to heel; the
lines of her figure were thrust forward by
her poise. His eye followed the swell of
her bosom, very gentle and girlish, and the
long folds of her dress falling thence to her
knee. While she stood there, proud and
remote, a chance beam of the sun shone on
her head so that it seemed to burn. ' ' Heaven
salutes the Queen of Heaven, — Venus
Urania ! " With an odd impulse he stopped,
crossed himself, and then hurried on.
He told his errand to her, having no
eyes for the others.
" Signorina — I am to acquaint her Serenity
that the divine poet Messer Agnolo is to
speak of the sovereign power of beauty;
of the Heavenly Beauty whereof Plato
taught, as it is believed."
Simonetta arched a slim neck and looked
down at the obsequious speaker, or at least
nS

QUATTROCENTISTERIA he thought so. And he saw how fair she
was, a creature how delicate and gracious,
with grey eyes frank and wide, and full
red lips where a smile (nervous and a little
wistful, he judged, rather than defiant)
seemed always to hover. Such clear-cut,
high beauty made him ashamed; but her
colouring (for he was a painter) made his
heart beat. She was no ice-bound shadow
of deity then ! but flesh and blood ; a girl
— a child, of timid, soft contours, of warm
roses and blue veins laced in a pearly skin.
And she was crowned with a heavy wealth
of red-gold hair, twisted in great coils,
bound about with pearls, and smouldering
like molten metal where it fell rippling
along her neck. She dazzled him, so that
he could not face her or look further. His
eyes dropped. He stood before her moody,
disconcerted. The girls, who had dissolved their com
pany at his approach, listened to what he
had to say linked in knots of twos and
threes. They needed no excuses to return ;
some were philosophers in their way,
philosophers and poetesses ; some had
left their lovers in the ring round Lorenzo.
So they went down the green alley still
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locked by the arms, by the waist or
shoulders. They did not wait for Simon
etta. She was a Genoese, and proud as the
snow. Why did Giuliano love her ? Did
he love her, indeed ? He was bewitched
then, for she was cold, and a brazen crea
ture in spite of it. How dare she bare her
neck so ! Oh ! 't was Genoese. " Uomini
senza fede e donne senza vergogna, " they
quoted as they ran.
And Simonetta walked alone down the
way with her head high ; but Sandro
stepped behind, at the edge of her trailing
white robe. . . .
. . . The poet was leaning against an
ancient alabaster vase, soil-stained, yellow
with age and its long sojourn in the loam,
but with traces of its carved garlands
clinging to it still. He fingered it lovingly
as he talked. His oration was concluding,
and his voice rose high and tremulous ;
there were sparks in his hollow eyes. . . .
"And as this sovereign Beauty is queen
of herself, so she is subject to none other,
owns to no constraining custom, fears no
reproach of man. What she wills, that
has the force of a law. Being Beauty, her
deeds are lovely and worshipful. Therefore

QUATTROCENTISTERIAPhryne, whom men, groping in dark
ness and the dull ways of earth, dubbed
courtesan, shone in a Court of Law before
the assembled nobles of Athens, naked and
undismayed in the blaze of her fairness.
And Athens discerned the goddess and
trembled. Yes, and more; even as Aph
rodite, whose darling she was, arose pure
from the foam, so she too came up out of
the sea in the presence of a host, and the
Athenians, seeing no shame, thought
none, but, rather, reverenced her the more.
For what shame is it that the body of one
so radiant in clear perfections should be
revealed ? Is then the garment of the soul,
her very mould and image, so shameful ?
Shall we seek to know her essence by the
garment of a garment, or hope to behold
that which really is in the shadows we cast
upon shadows? Shame is of the brute
dullard who thinks shame. The evil ever
sees Evil glaring at him. Plato, the golden-
mouthed, with the soul of pure fire, has
said the truth of this matter in his De Re
publics, the fifth book, where he speaks of
young maids sharing the exercise of the
Palaestra, yea, and the Olympic contests
even ! For he says, ' Let the wives of our

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wardens bare themselves, for their virtue
will be a robe ; and let them share the
toils of war and defend their country.
And for the man who laughs at naked
women exercising their bodies for high
reasons, his laughter is a fruit of unripe
wisdom, and he himself knows not what
he is about ; for that is ever the best of
sayings that ' the useful is the noble and the
hurtful the base.' . . ."
There was a pause. The name of Plato
had had a strange effect upon the company.
You would have said they had suddenly
entered a church and had felt all lighter in
terests sink under the weight of the dim,
echoing nave. After a few moments the
poet spoke again in a quieter tone, but his
voice had lost none of the unction which
had enriched it. . . . " Beauty is
queen: by the virtue of Deity, whose
image she is, she reigns, lifts up, fires.
Let us beware how we tempt Deity lest
we perish ourselves. Actaeon died when
he gazed unbidden upon the pure body of
Artemis ; but Artemis herself rayed her
splendour upon Endymion, and Endymion
is among the immortals. We fall when we
rashly confront Beauty, but that Beauty

QUATTROCENTISTERIA who comes unawares may nerve our souls
to wing to heaven." He ended on a re
sonant note, and then, still looking out
over the valley, sank into his seat. Lorenzo,
with a fine humility, got up and kissed his
thin hand. Giuliano looked at Simonetta,
trying to recall her gaze, but she remained
standing in her place, seeing nothing of her
companions. She was thinking of some
thing, frowning a little and biting her lip ;
her hands were before her; her slim fingers
twisted and locked themselves nervously,
like a tangle of snakes. Then she tossed
her head, as a young horse might, and
looked at Giuliano suddenly, full in the
eyes. He rose to meet her with a deprecat
ing smile, cap in hand — but she walked
past him, almost brushing him with her
gown, but never flinching her full gaze,
threaded her way through the group to the
back, behind the poet, where Sandro was.
He had seen her coming, indeed he had
watched her furtively throughout the ora
tion, but her near presence disconcerted
him again — and he looked down. She
was strongly excited with her quick re
solution ; her colour had risen and her
voice faltered when she began to speak.
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She spoke eagerly, running her words
together. " Ecco, Messer Sandro," she whispered,
blushing. " You have heard these sayings.
. . . Who is there in Florence like
me?" "There is no one," said Sandro, simply.
"I will be your Lady Venus," she went
on, breathlessly. "You shall paint me,
rising from the sea-foam. . . . The
Genoese love the sea." She was still eager
and defiant ; her bosom rose and fell
unchecked. "The Signorina is mocking me; it is
impossible; the Signorina knows it."
" Eh, Madonna/ is it so shameful to be
fair — Star of the Sea, as your poets sing at
evening ? Do you mean that I dare not do
it ? Listen then, Signor Pittore ; to-morrow
morning at mass-time you will come to the
Villa Vespucci with your brushes and pans
and you will ask for Monna Simonetta.
Then you will see. Leave it now ; it is
settled." And she walked away with her
head high and the same superb smile on
her red lips. Mockery ! She was in dead
earnest; all her child's feelings were in hot
revolt. These women who had whispered
124

QUATTROCENTISTERIA
to each other, sniggered at her dress, her
white neck and her free carriage ; Giuliano,
who had presumed so upon her candour —
these prying, censorious Florentines — she
would strike them dumb with her amazing
loveliness. They sang her a goddess that
she might be flattered and suffer their
company: she would show herself a god
dess indeed — the star of her shining Genoa,
where men were brave and silent and
maidens frank like the sea. Yes, and then
she would withdraw herself suddenly and
leave them forlorn and dismayed.
As for Sandro, he stood where she had
left him, peering after her with a mist in
his eyes. He seemed to be looking over
the hill-side, over the city glowing afar off
gold and purple in the hot air, to Mont'
Oliveto and the heights, where a line of
black cypresses stood about a low white
building. At one angle of the building was
a little turret with a belvedere of round
arches. The tallest cypresses just topped
the windows. There his eyes seemed to
rest. II
At mass-time Sandro, folded in his shabby
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EARTHWORK OUT OF TUSCANY:
green cloak, stepped into the sun on the
Ponte Vecchio. The morning mists were
rolling back under the heat; you began to
see the yellow line of houses stretching
along the turbid river on the far side, and
frowning down upon it with blank, mud-
stained faces. Above, through streaming
air, the sky showed faintly blue, and a
campanile to the right loomed pale and un
certain like a ghost. The sound of innu
merable bells floated over the still city.
Hardly a soul was abroad; here and there a
couple of dusty peasants were trudging
in with baskets of eggs and jars of milk
and oil; a boat passed down to the fishing,
and the oar knocked sleepily in the rowlock
as she cleared the bridge. And above, on
the heights of Mont' Oliveto, the tapering
forms of cypresses were faintly outlined —
straight bars of shadow — and the level
ridge of a roof ran lightly back into the soft
shroud. Sandro could mark these things as he
stepped resolutely on to the bridge, crossed
it, and went up a narrow street among the
sleeping houses. The day held golden
promise; it was the day of his life ! Mean
while the mist clung to him and nipped
126

QUATTROCENTISTERIA him ; what had fate in store ? What was
to be the issue? In the Piazza Santo
Spirito, grey and hollow-sounding in the
chilly silences, his own footsteps echoed
solemnly as he passed by the door of the
great ragged church. Through the heavy
darkness within lights flickered faintly and
went; service was not begun. A drab
crew of cripples lounged on the steps
yawning and shivering, and two country
girls were strolling to mass with brown
arms round each other's waists. When
Sandro's footfall clattered on the stones
they stopped by the door, looking after him,
and laughed to see his dull face and muffled
figure. In the street beyond he heard a
bell jingling, hasty, incessant; soon a
white-robed procession swept by him,
fluttering vestments, tapers, and the Host
under a canopy, silk and gold. Sandro
snatched at his cap and dropped on his
knees in the road, crouching low and mut
tering under his breath as the vision went
past. He remained kneeling for a moment
after it had gone, then crossed himself —
forehead, breast, lip — and hurried forward.
. . . He stepped under the archway
into the court. There was a youth with a
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EARTHWORK OUT OF TUSCANY =
cropped head and swarthy neck lounging
there teazing a spaniel. As the steps
sounded on the flags he looked up; the old
green cloak and clumsy shoes of the visitor
did not interest him ; he turned his back and
went on with his game. Sandro accosted
him — Was the Signorina at the house ? The
boy went on with his game. "Eh, Dia-
volo ! I know nothing at all," he said.
Sandro raised his voice till it rang round
the courtyard. "You will go at once and
inquire. You will say to the Signorina that
Sandro di Mariano Filipepi the Florentine
painter is here by her orders ; that he waits
her pleasure below."
The boy had got up ; he and Sandro
eyed each other for a little space. Sandro
was the taller and had the glance of a
hawk. So the porter went.
Presently, with throbbing brows, he stood
on the threshold of Simonetta's cham
ber. It was the turret room of the
villa and its four arched windows looked
through a leafy tracery over towards
Florence. Sandro could see down below
him in the haze the glitter of the Arno and
the dusky dome of Brunelleschi cleave the
sward of the hills like a great burnished
128

QUATTROCENTISTERIAbowl. In the room itself there was tapes
try, the Clemency of Scipio, with courtiers
in golden cuirasses and tall plumes, and
peacocks and huge Flemish horses — a rich
profusion of crimson and blue drapery and
stout-limbed soldiery. On a bracket, above
a green silk curtain, was a silver statuette
of Madonna and the Bambino Gesii, with
a red lamp flickering feebly before ; by
the windows a low divan heaped with
velvet cushions and skins. But for a coffer
and a prayer desk and a curtained recess
which enshrined Simonetta's bed, the room
looked wind-swept and bare.
When he entered Simonetta was stand
ing by the window leaning her hand against
the ledge for support. She was draped
from top to toe in a rose-coloured mantle
which shrouded her head like a nun's
wimple and then fell in heavy folds to the
ground. She flushed as he came in, but
saluted him with a grave inclination.
Neither spoke. The silent greeting, the full
consciousness in each of their parts, gave
a curious religious solemnity to the scene
— like some familiar but stately Church mys
tery. Sandro busied himself mechanically
with his preparations — he was a lover
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EARTHWORK OUT OF TUSCANY:
and his pulse chaotic, but he had come to
paint — and when these were done, on tip
toe, as it were, he looked timidly about him
round the room, seeking where to pose
her. Then he motioned her with the same
reverential, preoccupied air, silent still, to
a place under the silver Madonna. . . .
. . . There was a momentary quiver
of withdrawal. Simonetta blushed vividly
and drooped her eyes down to her little
bare feet peeping out below the lines of
the rosy cloak. The cloak's warmth shone
on her smooth skin and rayed over her
cheeks. In her flowery loveliness she
looked diaphanous, ethereal ; and yet you
could see what a child she was, with her
bright audacity, her ardour and her wilful
ness flushing and paling about her like the
dawn. There she stood trembling on the
brink. . . .
Suddenly all her waywardness shot into
her eyes ; she lifted her arms and the cloak
fell back like the shard of a young flower ;
then, delicate and palpitating as a silver reed,
she stood up in the soft light of the morn
ing, and the sun, slanting in between the
golden leaves and tendrils, kissed her neck
and shrinking shoulder. 130

QUATTROCENTISTERIA Sandro stood facing her, moody and
troubled, fingering his brushes and bits of
charcoal; his shaggy brows were knit, he
seemed to be breathing hard. He collected
himself with an effort and looked up at her
as she stood before him shrinking, awe
struck, panting at the thing she had done.
Their eyes met, and the girl's distress in
creased ; she raised her hand to cover her
bosom; her breath came in short gasps
from parted lips, but her wide eyes still
looked fixedly into his, with such blank
panic that a sudden movement might really
have killed her. He saw it all; she, there
at his mercy! Tears swam and he trem
bled. Ah ! the gracious lady ! what
divine condescension! what ineffable cour
tesy ! But the artist in him was awak
ened almost at the same moment; his
looks wandered in spite of her piteous
candour and his own nothingness. Sandro
the poet would have fallen on his face with
an "Exi a me, nam peccator sum." San
dro the painter was different — no mercy
there. He made a snatch at a carbon and
raised his other hand with a kind of com
mand — " Holy Virgin ! what a line ! Stay
as you are, I implore you: swerve not one
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EARTHWORK OUT OF TUSCANY:
hair's breadth and I have you for ever ! "
There was conquest in his voice.
So Simonetta stood very still, hiding her
bosom with her hand, but never took her
watch off the enemy. As he ran blindly
about doing a hundred urgent indispensa
ble things, — noting the lights, the line she
made, how her arm cut across the folds of
the curtain — she dogged him with staring,
fascinated eyes, just as a hare, crouching in
her form, watches a terrier hunting round
her and waits for the end.
But the enemy was disarmed. Sandro
the passionate, the lover, the brooding de
votee, was gone; so was la bella Simonetta
the beloved, the be-hymned. Instead,
here was a fretful painter, dashing lines
and broad smudges of shade on his paper,
while before him rose an exquisite, slender,
swaying form, glistening carnation and sil
ver, and, over all, the maddening glow of
red-gold hair. Could he but catch those
velvet shadows, those delicate, glossy, re
flected lights ! Body of Bacchus ! How
could he put them in ! What a picture
she was ! Look at the sun on her shoulder !
and her hair — Christ! how it burned! It
was a curious moment. The girl, who had
132

QUATTROCENTISTERIAnever understood or cared to understand
this humble lover, guessed now that he
was lost in the artist. She felt that she
was simply an effect, and she resented it as
a crowning insult. Her colour rose again,
her red lips gathered into a pout. If San
dro had but known, she was his at that in
stant. He had but to drop the painter,
throw down his brushes, set his heart and
hot eyes bare — to open his arms and she
would have fled into them and nestled
there; so fierce was her instinct just then
to be loved, she, who had always been
loved! But Sandro knew nothing and cared
nothing. He was absorbed in the gracious
lines of her body, the lithe long neck, the
drooping shoulder, the tenderness of her
youth ; and then the grand open curve of
the hip and thigh on which she was poised.
He drew them in with a free hand in great
sweeping lines, eagerly, almost angrily;
once or twice he broke his carbon and—
body of a dog ! — he snatched at another.
This lasted a few minutes only : even
Simonetta, with all her maiden tremors still
feverishly acute, hardly noticed the flight
of time ; she was so hot with the feeling of
her wrongs, the slight upon her victorious
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EARTHWORK OUT OF TUSCANY:
fairness. Did she not know how fair
she was ? She was getting very angry ;
she had been made a fool of. All Florence
would come and gape at the picture and
mock her in the streets with bad names
and coarse gestures as she rode by. She
looked at Sandro. Santa Maria ! how hot
he was ! His hair was drooping over his
eyes ! He tossed it back every second !
And his mouth was open, one could see
his tongue working ! Why had she not
noticed that great mouth before ? 'T was
the biggest in all Florence. Oh ! why had
he come ? She was frightened, remorseful,
a child again, with a trembling, pathetic
mouth and shrinking limbs. And then her
heart began to beat under her slim fingers.
She pressed them down into her flesh to
stay those great, masterful throbs. A tear
gathered in her eye ; larger and larger it
grew, and then fell. A shining drop rested
on the round of her cheek and rolled slowly
down her chin to her protecting hand, and
lay there half-hidden, shining like a rain
drop between two curving petals of a rose.
It was just at that moment the painter
looked up from his work and shook his
bush of hair back. Something in his sketch
134

QUATTROCENTISTERIA had displeased him ; he looked up frown
ing, with a brush between his teeth. When
he saw the tear-stained, distressful, beauti
ful face it had a strange effect upon him.
He dropped nerveless, like a wounded man,
to his knees, and covered his eyes with his
hands. "Ah Madonna! for the pity of
heaven forgive me ! forgive me ! I have
sinned, I have done thee fearful wrong ; I,
who still dare to love thee." He uncovered
his face and looked up radiant ; his own
words had inspired him. "Yes," he went
on, with a steadfast smile, "I, Sandro, the
painter, the poor devil of a painter, have
seen thee and I dare to love ! " His tri
umph was short-lived. Simonetta had
grown deadly white, her eyes burned, she
had forgotten herself. She was tall and
slender as a lily, and she rose, shaking, to
her height.
"Thou presumest strangely," she said,
in a slow, still voice, " Go ! Go in peace ! "
She was conqueror. In her calm scorn,
she was like a young immortal, some cold,
victorious Cynthia whose chastity had been
flouted. Sandro was pale too ; he said
nothing and did not look at her again. She
stood quivering with excitement, watching
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EARTHWORK OUT OF TUSCANY:
him with the same intent alertness as he
rolled up his paper and crammed his
brushes and pencils into the breast of his
jacket. She watched him still as he backed
out of the room and disappeared through
the curtains of the archway. She listened
to his footsteps along the corridor, down
the stair. She was alone in the silence of
the sunny room. Her first thought was for
her cloak ; she snatched it up and veiled
herself, shivering as she looked fearfully
round the walls. And then she flung her
self on the piled cushions before the window
and sobbed piteously, like an abandoned
child. The sun slanted in between the golden
leaves and tendrils and played in the tangle
of her hair. . . . Ill
At ten o'clock on the morning of April
the twenty-sixth, a great bell began to toll :
two beats heavy and slow, and then silence,
while the air echoed the reverberation,
moaning. Sandro, in shirt and breeches,
with bare feet spread broad, was at work
in his garret on the old bridge. He stayed
his hand as the strong tone struck, bent his
136

QUATTROCENTISTERIA head and said a prayer : "Miserere ei, Do-
mine ; requiem eternam dona, Domine " ;
the words came out of due order, as if he
was very conscious of their import. Then
he went on. And the great bell went on ;
two beats together, and then silence. It
seemed to gather solemnity and a heavier
message as he painted. Through the open
window a keen draught of air blew in with
dust and a scrap of shaving from the Lung'
Arno down below ; it circled round his
workshop, fluttering the sketches and rags
pinned to the walls. He looked out on a
bleak landscape — San Miniato in heavy
shade, and the white houses by the river
staring like dead faces. A strong breeze
was abroad ; it whipped the brown water
and raised little curling billows, ragged and
white at the edges, and tossed about snaps
of surf. It was cold. Sandro shivered as
he shut to his casement ; and the stiffening
gale rattled at it fitfully. Once again it
thrust it open, bringing wild work among
the litter in the room. He made it fast with
the rain driving in his face. And above
the howling of the squall he heard the
sound of the great bell, steady and un
moved, as if too full of its message to be
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EARTHWORK OUT OF TUSCANY :
put aside. Yet it was coming to him
athwart the wind.
Sandro stood at his casement and looked
at the weather — beating rain and yeasty
water. He counted, rather nervously, the
pulses between each pair of the bell's deep
tones. He was impressionable to circum
stances, and the coincidence of storm and
passing-bell awed him. . . . "Either
the God of Nature suffers or the fabric of
the world is breaking" ;• — he remembered
a scrap of talk wafted towards him (as he
stood in attendance) from some humanist
at Lorenzo's table only yesterday, above the
light laughter and snatches of song. That
breakfast party at the Camaldoli yesterday !
What a contrast — the even spring weather
with the sun in a cloudless sky, and now
this icy dead morning with its battle of
wind and bell, fighting, he thought, — over
the failing breath of some strong man.
Man ! God, more like. "The God of
Nature suffers," he murmured, as he turned
to his work. . . .
Simonetta had not been there yesterday.
He had not seen her, indeed, since that
nameless day when she had first trans
ported him with the radiance of her bare
138

QUATTROCENTISTERIA
beauty and then struck him down with a
level gaze from steel-cold eyes. And he
had deserved it, he had — she had said —
" presumed strangely." Three more words
only had she uttered and he had slunk out
from her presence like a dog. What a
Goddess ! Venus Urania ! So she, too,
might have ravished a worshipper as he
prayed, and, after, slain him for a careless
word. Cruel ? No, but a Goddess. Beauty
had no laws ; she was above them. Ag
nolo himself had said it, from Plato. . . .
Holy Michael ! What a blast ! Black and
desperate weather. . . . "Either the
God of Nature suffers." . . . God
shield all Christian souls on such a
day ! . . .
One came and told him Simonetta Ves
pucci was dead. Some fever had torn at
her and raced through all her limbs, licking
up her life as it passed. No one had
known of it — it was so swift ! But there
had just been time to fetch a priest ; Fra
Matteo, they said, from the Carmine, had
shrived her (it was a bootless task, God
knew, for the child had babbled so, her
wits wandered, look you), and then he had
performed the last office. One had fled to
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EARTHWORK OUT OF TUSCANY:
tell the Medici. Giuliano was wild with
grief ; 't was as if he had killed her instead
of the Spring-ague — but then, people said
he loved her well ! And our Lorenzo had
bid them swing the great bell of the Duomo
— Sandro had heard it perhaps ? — and there
was to be a public procession, and a Re
quiem sung at Santa Croce before they took
her back to Genoa to lie with her fathers.
Eh ! Bacchus ! She was fair and Giuliano
had loved her well. It was natural enough
then. So the gossip ran out to tell his
news to more attentive ears, and Sandro
stood in his place intoning softly "Te
Deum Laudamus."
He understood it all. There had been a
dark and awful strife — earth shuddering as
the black shadow of death swept by.
Through tears now the sun beamed broad
over the gentle city where she lay lapped in
her mossy hills. " Lux eterna lucet ei," he
said, with a steady smile; "atque lucebit,"
he added after a pause. He had been paint
ing that day an agonizing Christ, red and
languid, crowned with thorns. Some of his
own torment seems to have entered it, for,
looking at it now, we see, first of all, wild
eyeballs staring with the mad earnestness,
140

QUATTROCENTISTERIA
the purposeless intensity of one seized
or "possessed." He put the panel away
and looked about for something else, the
sketch he had made of Simonetta on that
last day. When he had found it, he rolled
it straight and set it on his easel. It was
not the first charcoal study he had made
from life, but a brush drawing on dark
paper, done in sepia-wash and the lights in
white lead. He stood looking into it
with his hands clasped. About half a
braccia high, faint and shadowy in the
pale tint he had used, he saw her there
victim rather than Goddess. Standing
timidly and wistfully, shrinking rather,
veiling herself, maiden-like, with her hands
and hair, with lips trembling and dewy
eyes, she seemed to him now an immortal
who must needs suffer for some great
end; live and suffer and die; live again,
and suffer and die. It was a doom per
petual like Demeter's, to bear, to nur
ture, to lose and to find her Perse
phone. She had stood there immaculate
and apprehensive, a wistful victim. Three
days before he had seen her thus ; and
now she was dead. He would see her no
more. 141

EARTHWORK OUT OF TUSCANY:
Ah, yes ! Once more he would see
her. . . .
They carried dead Simonetta through the
streets of Florence with her pale face un
covered and a crown of myrtle in her hair.
People thronging there held their breath
or wept to see such still loveliness; and
her poor parted lips wore a patient little
smile, and her eyelids were pale violet and
lay heavy to her cheek. White, like a
bride, with a nosegay of orange-blossom
and syringa at her throat, she lay there on
her bed with lightly folded hands and the
strange aloofness and preoccupation all
the dead have. Only her hair burned about
her like a molten copper ; and the wreath
of myrtle leaves ran forward to her brows
and leapt beyond them into a tongue.
The great procession swept forward;
black brothers of Misericordia, shrouded
and awful, bore the bed or stalked before it
with torches that guttered and flared sootily
in the dancing light of day. They held
the pick of Florence, those scowling shrouds
— Giuliano and Lorenzo, Pazzi, Tornabuoni,
Soderini or Pulci ; and behind, old Cat-
taneo, battered with storms, walked
142

QUATTROCENTISTERIA
heavily, swinging his long arms and look
ing into the day's face as if he would try
another fall with Death yet. Priests and
acolytes, tapers, banners, vestments and a
great silver Crucifix, they drifted by,
chanting the dirge for Simonetta; and she,
as if for a sacrifice, lifted up on her silken
bed, lay couched like a white flower edged
colour of flame. . . .
. . . Santa Croce, the great church,
stretched forward beyond her into the dis
tances of grey mist and cold spaces of light.
Its bare vastness was damp like a vault.
And she lay in the midst listless, heavy-lid
ded, apart, with the half-smile, as it
seemed, of some secret mirth. Round her
the great candles smoked and flickered,
and mass was sung at the High Altar for
her soul's repose. Sandro stood alone
facing the shining altar, but looking fixedly
at Simonetta on her couch. He was white
and dry — parched lips and eyes that ached
and smarted. Was this the end ? Was it
possible, my God ! that the transparent,
unearthly thing lying there so prone and
pale was dead ? Had such loveliness aught
to do with life or death ? Ah ! sweet lady,
dear heart, how tired she was, how deadly
143

EARTHWORK OUT OF TUSCANY:
tired! From where he stood he could see
with intolerable anguish the sombre rings
round her eyes and the violet shadows on
the lids, her folded hands and the straight,
meek line to her feet. And her poor wan
face with its wistful, pitiful little smile was
turned half aside on the delicate throat, as
if in a last appeal: — "Leave me now, O
Florentines, to my rest. I have given you
all I had: ask no more. I was a young
girl, a child; too young for your eager
strivings. You have killed me with your
play ; let me be now, let me sleep ! " Poor
child! Poor child! Sandro was on his
knees, with his face pressed against the pul
pit and tears running through his fingers as
he prayed. . . .
As he had seen her, so he painted. As
at the beginning of life in a cold world,
passively meeting the long trouble of it, he
painted her a rapt Presence floating evenly
to our earth. A grey, translucent sea laps
silently upon a little creek, and in the hush
of a still dawn the myrtles and sedges on
the water's brim are quiet. It is a dream
in half tones that he gives us, grey and
green and steely blue ; and just that, and
some homely magic of his own, hint the
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QUATTROCENTISTERIAcommerce of another world with man's
discarded domain. Men and women are
asleep, and as in an early walk you may
startle the hares at their play, or see the
creatures of the darkness — owls and night
hawks and heavy moths — flit with fantas
tic purpose over the familiar scene, so here
it comes upon you suddenly that you have
surprised Nature's self at her mysteries ;
you are let into the secret; you have caught
the spirit of the April woodland as she
glides over the pasture to the copse. And
that, indeed, was Sandro's fortune. He
caught her in just such a propitious hour.
He saw the sweet wild thing, pure and un-
defiled by touch of earth; caught her in
that pregnant pause of time ere she had
lighted. Another moment and a buxom
nymph of the grove would fold her in a
rosy mantle, coloured as the earliest wood-
anemones are. She would vanish, we
know, into the daffodils or a bank of vio
lets. And you might tell her presence
there, or in the rustle of the myrtles, or
coo of doves mating in the pines; you
might feel her genius in the scent of the
earth or the kiss of the West wind; but
you could only see her in mid-April, and
zo 145

EARTHWORK OUT OF TUSCANY:
you should look for her over the sea. She
always comes with the first warmth of the
year. But daily, before he painted, Sandro knelt
in a dark chapel in Santa Croce, while a
blue-chinned priest said mass for the repose
of Simonetta's soul.

146

VIII
THE BURDEN OF NEW TYRE
FOR a short time in her motley history,
an old-clothesman, one Domenico —
he and his "Compagnia del Bruco," his
Company of the Worm * — reigned over
Siena and gave to her people a taste for
blood. It was a bloodshed on easy terms
they had ; for surely no small nation (ex
cept that tiger-cat Perugia) has achieved
so much massacre with so little fighting.
Massacre considered as one of the Fine
Arts ? No indeed ; but massacre as a via
ticum, as "title clear to mansions in the
skies " ; for, with more complacency than
discrimination, these sated citizens chose
to dedicate their most fantastic blood-orgies
by a Missa de Spiritu Sancto in the Cathe
dral Church. The old-clothesman, who by
some strange oversight died in his bed,
was floated up on the incense of this de
vout service to show his hands, and —
* This was one of the Contrade into which the City
was divided, and of which each had its totem-sign.
147

EARTHWORK OUT OF TUSCANY:
marvel ! — Saint Catherine, the "amorosa
sposa " of Heaven, reigned in his stead.
Certainly, for unction spiced with ferocity,
for a madness which alternately kissed the
Crucifix and trampled on it, for mandra-
gora and fleurs de lys, saints and succubi,
churches and lupanars — commend me to
Siena the red.
You are not to suppose that she has not
paid for all this, the red Siena. None of
it is absolved ; it is there floating vaguely
in the atmosphere. It chokes the gully-
trap streets in August when the air is like
a hot bath ; it wails round the corners on
stormy nights and you hear it battling
among the towers overhead, buffeting the
stained walls of criminal old palaces and
churches grown hoary in iniquity — so many
half-embodied centuries of deadly sin
gnawing their spleens or shrieking their
infamous carouse over again. So, at least,
I found it. Without baring myself to the
charge of any sneaking kindness for blood-
shedding, I may own to the fascination of
the precipitous fortress-town huddled red
and grey on its three red crags, and of its
suggestion of all the old crimes of Italy
from Ezzelino's to Borgia's, of all unhappy
148

THE BURDEN OF NEW TYRE
deaths from Pia de' Tolomei's to Vittoria's,
the White Devil of Italy. Its air seemed
" blood-boltered " (like the shade of the
hunted Banquo), its stones, curiously
slippery for such dry weather, cried
" Haro ! " or " Out ! Havoc ! " And above
it all shone a marble church, white as a
bride ; while now and again on a favour
able waft of wind came the fragrant mem
ory of Saint Catherine. It is the peak of
earth most charged with wayward emo
tions — pity and terror blent together into a
poignant beauty, a sorcery. Imagine your
self one of those old Popes — Linus or
Anaclete or Damasius — whose heads spike
the clerestory of the Duomo, you would
look down upon a sea of pictures (by the
best pavement-artists in the world) — the
Massacre of the Innocents like a patch of dry
blood by the altar-steps, a winking Ma
donna in the Capella del Voto thronged
with worshippers, Hermes Trismegistus,
a freaksome wizard, by the West door,
and a gilded array of the great world smil
ing and debonnairin the sacristy. Not far
off is Sodoma's lovely Catherine fainting
under the sweet dolour of her spousals.
Are you for the White or the Black Mass ?
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EARTHWORK OUT OF TUSCANY:
Cybele or the Holy Ghost ? Catherine or
Hermes Trismegistus ? Siena will give you
any and yet more cunning confections. It
is very strange.
The approach to her three hills, if you
are not flattened by the intolerable pilgrim
age from Florence, is fine. Hints of what
is to come greet you in the frittered shale
of the grey country-side broken abruptly
by little threatening hill-towns. The scar
juts out of the earth's crust, rising sheer, and
there on a fretted peak hovers a fortress-
village, steep red roofs, an ancient bell-
tower or two with a lean barrel of a church
beyond ; all the lines cut sharp to the clean
sky ; a bullock cart creaking up home
wards ; the shiver and dust of olives round
the walls. You could swear you caught
the glint of a long gun over the machicola
tions ; but it is only a casement fired by
the westering sun. Such are San Miniato,
Castel Fiorentino, Poggibonsi (where stayed
Lorenzo's Nencia — his Nancy, we should
call her), San Gimignano and its Fina, a
little girl-saint of fifteen springs ; such, too,
is Siena when you get there, but redder,
her grey stones blushing for her sins. And
the country blushes for her as you draw
150

THE BURDEN OF NEW TYRE
near, for all the vineyards are dotted with
burning willows in the autumn — osier-
bushes flaming at the heart. Let it be
night when you arrive — the dead vast and
middle of a still night. Then suffer your
self to be whirled through the inky streets,
over the flags, from one hill to another.
It is deathly quiet ; no soul stirs. The
palaces rise on either hand like the ghosts
of old reproaches ; a flickering lamp reveals
a gully as black as a grave, and shines on
the edge of a lane which falls you know
not whither. You turn corners which
should complicate a maze, you scrape and
clatter down steeps, you groan up mountain
sides. All in the dark, mind. And the
great white houses slide down upon you
to the very flags you are beating ; you
could nearly touch either wall with a hand.
So you swerve round a column, under a
votive lamp, and have left the stars and
their violet bed. You are in a cortile : men
say there is an inn here with reasonable
entertainment. If it is the Aquila Nera
it will serve. There is no sound beyond
the labouring of our horses' wind and of
some outland dog in the far distance baying
for a moon. This is Siena at her black magic.
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EARTHWORK OUT OF TUSCANY:
I maintain that the impression you thus
receive holds you. Next morning there is
a blare of sun. It will blind you at first,
blister you. Rayed out from plaster-walls
which have been soaking in it for five cent
uries, driven up in palpable waves of heat
from the flags, lying like a lake of white
metal in the Piazza, however recklessly
this truly royal sun may beam, in Siena
you will feel furtive and astare for sudden
death. There is nothing frank and open about
Siena ; none of your robust, red-lunged,
open-air Paganism. Theophile Gautier,
Baudelaire, Poe — such super-sensitive
plants should have known it, instead of
the ingenuous M. Bourget and the delib
erate Mr. Henry James. M. Bourget
looked at the Sodomas and Mr. James ad
mired the view: what a romance we should
have had from Gautier of illicit joys and
their requital by a knife, what a strophe
from Baudelaire half-obscene, half-mourn
ful, wholly melodious. But Theophile
Gautier tarried in Venice, and as for M.
Charles, the man of pronounced tastes and
keen nose stuck in the main to Paris.
Failing them as guides, go you first to the
152

THE BURDEN OF NEW TYRE

Piazza del Campo where horses
race in August — all roads lead
thither. Contraries again ! A
square ? It is a cup. A field ?
It is a Gabbatha : a place of burn
ing pavements. Were red brick
and Gothic ever so superbly com
pounded before, to be so strong
and yet so lithe? That is the
Palazzo Publico, the shrine of
Aristotle's Politics and the Mira
cles of the Virgin. What is that
long spear which seems to shake
as it glances skywards ? It is n't
a spear ; it 's the Torre del Mangia
— the loveliest tower in Tuscany,
the filia pulchrior of a beautiful
mother, the Torre della Vacca of
Florence. That tower rises from
the bottom of the cup
and shoots straight up
wards, nor stays till it has
out-topped the proudest
belfry on the hills about
it. But what a square
this is ! The backs of
the houses (whose front
doors are high above on

fp*j

153

EARTHWORK OUT OF TUSCANY:
the hill-top) stand like bald cliffs on every
side. You cannot see any outlets : most of
them are winding stairways cut between the
houses. The lounging, shabby men and
girls seem handsomer and lazier than you
found them in Florence. They seem to
have room to stretch their fine limbs against
these naked walls. Their maturity is almost
tropical. The girls wear flopping straw
hats : wide, sorrowful eyes stare at you
from the shady recesses, and the round
ing of their chins and beautiful proud necks
are marked by glossy lights. "Morbida
e bianca," sang Lorenzo. I suppose they
think of little more than the market price
of spring onions : but then, why do their
eyes speak like that ? And what do they
speak of ? Dio mio, I am an honest man !
So was not Lorenzo ; listen to him :
" Two eyes hath she, so roguish and demure
That, lit they on a rock, they 'd make it feel ;
How shall poor melting men meet such a lure ? "
How indeed ? Ah, Nenciozza mia !
" My little Nancy shows nor fleck nor pimple ;
Pliant and firm is she, a reed for grace :
In her smooth chin there 's just one pretty dimple
That rounds the perfect measure of her face. "
154

THE BURDEN OF NEW TYRE
That dimple has been the destruction of
many a heart: —
"So wise, withal, above us other simple
Plain folk — sure, Nature set her in this place
To bloom her tender whiteness all about us,
And break our hearts — and then bloom on without
us."
Yes indeed, my Lorenzo. But enough !
Let us take shelter in the Duomo.
Barred like a tiger, glistening snow and
rose and gold, topped by a flaunting angel,
her door flanked by the lean Roman wolf ;
paved with pictures, hemmed with the
Popes from Peter to Pius, encrusted with
marbles and gemmy frescoes, it is a casket
of delights, this church, and the quintessence
of Siena — molles Senat as Beccadelli, him
self of this Tyre, dubbed his native town.
Voluptuous as she was, tigerish Siena was
more consistent than you would think.
True, Saints Catherine and Bernardine con
sort oddly with the old-clothesman saying
mass with wet hands, and Beccadelli
the soft singer of abominations, just as
the "Madones aux longs regards" of the
Primitives — pious creatures of slim idle
fingers and desirous eyes, pining in brocade
and jewels — seem in a different sphere (as
155

EARTHWORK OUT OF TUSCANY :
indeed they are) from Pinturricchio's well-
found Popes and Princesses, and Sodoma's
languishing boys or half-ripe Catherines
dying of love. Have I not said this was
once a city of pleasure ? And whether the
pleasure was a blood-feast or an Agape, or a
Platonic banquet where the flute-players and
wine-cups and crowns crushed out the high
disquisition and philosophic undercurrent
— it was all one to soft Siena drowsing the
days out on her hills. Her pleasures were
fierce, and beautiful as fierce. But the bur
den of Tyre is always the same. And so
the memories of a thousand ancient wrongs
unpurged howl over the red city, as once
howled the ships of Tarshish.

156

IX
ILARIA, MARI0TA, BETTINA
(STUDIES IN TRANSLATION FROM STONE)
GREATEST of great ladies is Ilaria,
potens Lucca, sleeping easily, with
chin firmly rounded to the vault, where
she has slept for five hundred years, and
still a power in Lucca of the silver planes.
It was a white-hot September day I went
to pay my devotions to her shrine. Lucca
drowsed in a haze, her bleached arcades of
trees lifeless in the glare of high noon ; all
the valley was winking, the very bells had
no strength to chime: and then I saw
Ilaria lie in the deep shade waiting for the
judgment. Ilaria was a tall Tuscan — the
girls of Lucca are out of the common tall,
and straight as larches — of fine birth and a
life of minstrels and gardens. Pompous
processions, trapped horses, emblazonings,
were hers, and all refinements of High
Masses and Cardinals. So she lived once a
life as stately-ordered as old dance-music,
in the airy corridors of a great marble
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EARTHWORK OUT OF TUSCANY :
palace, swept hourly by the thin, clear air
of the Lucchesan plain; and her lord went
out to war with Pisa or Pescia, or even
farther afield, following Emperor or Pope
to that Monteaperti which made Arbia run
colour of wine, or shrill Benevento, or
Altopascio which cost the Florentines so
dear.* But Ilaria stayed at home to trifle
with lap-dogs and jongleurs under the
orange trees ; heard boys make stammer
ing love, and laughed lightly at their
Decameron travesty, being too proud to be
ashamed or angered ; and sometimes (for
she was not too proud but that love should
be of the party), she pulled a ring from
one lithe finger, and looked down while
the lad kissed it for a holy relic and put it
in his bosom reverently, — pretending not
to see. But, Ilaria, you knew well what
gave colour to the faint and worn old words
about Fior di spin giallo, or O Dea fatale,
or " O Dio de' Dei !
La piii bellina mi parete voi ;
O quanto sete cara agli occhi miei ! "
And so the days passed in your square
* Historically he could have done none of these
things, except, perhaps, fight at Altopascio.
158

ILARIA, MARIOTA, BETTINA
corner palace, until the plague came down
with the North wind, and you bowed your
proud neck before it like a mountain pine.
Young to die, young to die and leave the
pleasant ways of Lucca, the green ram
parts, the grassy walks in the pastures
where the hawks fly and the shadows fleet
over the green and gold of early May.
Young enough, Ilaria. Scorner of love,
now Death is at hand, with the bats' wings
and wet scythe they give him in the Piazza,
when your lord comes triumphing or God's
Body takes the air: what of him, Ma
donna ? Let him come, says Ilaria, with
raised eyebrows and a wintry smile. Yet
she fought: her thin hands held off the
scythe at arms' length ; she set her teeth and
battled with the winged beast. Whenas she
knew it must be, suddenly she relaxed her
hold, and Death had his way with her.
Then her women came about her and
robed her in a long robe, colour of olive
leaves, and soft to the touch. And they
covered soberly her feet and placed them
on a crouching dog, which was Lucca.
But her fine hands they folded peace-wise
below her bosom, to rest quietly there like
the clasps of a girdle. Her gentle hair
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EARTHWORK OUT OF TUSCANY:
(bright brown it was, like a yearling chest
nut) they crowned also, and closed down
her ringed eyes. So they let her lie till
judgment come. And when I saw her the
close robe still folded her about and ran
up her throat lovingly to her chin, till her
head seemed to thrust from it as a flower
from its calyx. It would seem, too, as
if her bosom rose and fell, that her nos
trils quivered when the wind blew in and
touched them; and the hem of her gar
ment being near me, I was fain to kiss
it and say a prayer to the divinity haunting
that place. So I left the presence well dis
posed in my heart to glorify God for so fair
a sight. Whereafter I took the way to Florence
among the vineyards and tangled hill-sides;
and, anon, in the broad plain I stayed at
Prato to honour the lady of the town.
Madonna della Cintola she is called now,
and one Luca, a worker in clay, knew her
mind most intimately and did all her will.
Quiet days she had lived at Prato, being
wife to a decent metal-worker there and
keeper of his house and stuff. Mariota she
was then called for all her name, but as
to her parentage none knew it, save that
160

ILARIA, MARIOTA, BETTINA
Marco's Vanna had been both frail and fair,
and when she had been in flower the great
Lord Ottoboni had flowered likewise — and
often in her company. Giovanna I had
never known ; she died before her lord
married the Lady Adhelidis of Verona and
the seven days' tilting were held in her
honour in a field below the city wall. But
when Luca first knew Mariota and saw
how her mother's pride beaconed from her
smooth brow, the girl was standing in the
Piazza in a tattered green kirtle and bodice
that gaped at the hooks, played upon by
sun, and fallow wind, and longing looks
driven at her eyes in vain. The wench
carried her head and light fardel of years
like a Princess; would laugh to show her
fine teeth if your jest pleased her; and then
she would look straightly upon you and be
glad of you. If you pleased her not, she
would look through you to the mountains
or the church-tower. She had as squarely
a modelled chin as ever I saw, and her lips
firmly set and redder than strawberries in a
wet May. None taught her anything;
none, that Luca coald learn, gave her sup
or bed. He was a boy then and would
have given her both. I think she knew he
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EARTHWORK OUT OF TUSCANY:
favoured her — what girl does not ? Every
body favoured Mariota, — stayed as she
passed, and followed her stealthily with
troubled eyes. But he was a moody boy
then, at the mercy of dreams, and stam
mered when he was near her, blushing.
When he came back she was seventeen
years old, and the metal-worker's wife.
It was then Luca saw her, in the street
called of the Eye, where climbing plants
top the convent wall and from the garden
comes the scent of wall-flowers and sweet
marjoram. At her man's door she was standing,
barefooted, fray-kirtled as of old ; but
riper, of more assured and triumphant
beauty. In her arms a boy-child, lusty and
half-naked, struggled to be fed, seeking
with both fat hands to forage for himself.
Turning her grey eyes, where pride slum
bered and shame had never been, she knew
Luca again, made him welcome at the door,
with superb assurance set wine and olives
and bread before him; and so stood at the
table while he ate, gravely recovering one
by one the features of his face, smiling,
preoccupied with her pleasure and uncon
scious of the cooing child. For with
162

ILARIA, MARIOTA, BETTINA
matronly composure she had eased my
gentleman as soon as she had provided for
her guest.
In comes the metal-worker, Sor Matteo,
burly but watchful in a greasy apron, eyes
the lad up and down with much burden
some pondering of hand to scrubby chin,
as to say to Mariota " I 'm no fool." With
never a blush, nor a quailing of the eyes'
level beam, Mariota begs cousin Luca to
become conscious of her master.
There were the makings of a piece of
right Boccacesque in all this, and the pa
drone showed manifest disinclination for
his accustomed part: but Luca's candid
face disclaimed all dark-entry work. Mari
ota hurried to her task. A modeller in
clay, a statuary, via, an admirer of the
choicer contrivings of Mother Nature! What
and if he should find his cousin, his scarce-
remembered gossip Mariota, worth an ar
tist's half -closed eye ! And the bambin-
accio (with a side-look and face averted
as she spoke) — ecco! — many a Gesulino
showed a leaner thigh and cheeks less
peachy than he. Had Papa seen the new
dimple in Beppino's chin ? And more soft
piping to the same tune. Master Matteo
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EARTHWORK OUT OF TUSCANY:
was appeased ; but Luca was far adrift with
other matters. Love, for him, lay not in
flesh and blood alone; rather, in what flesh
and blood signified in another clay, not
Messer Domeneddio's, but his own chosen
task-stuff. He had come hither to Prato
on the commission of the Opera, to work
a Madonna col 'Bambino for the great door
of the Duomo. Well ! he had his Madonna
to hand, it would seem: — Mariota at the
door of the smith's house, confident, lis
som and fresh, and the lusty child groping
for his breakfast. The light had been upon
her, gleamed upon her skin, her brimming
eyes, her glossy brown hair. What a
bravery was hers ! What a glorified pre
sentment of young life, new-budded, was
here ! The town gaped, the husband ad
mired ; but Mariota, with her square chin
and high carriage, looked as straightly be
fore her, when in pale blue and silver-
white, Madonna with the Babe and the
holy deacons Stephen and Laurence stood,
four months afterwards, within the shadow
of the great church, and shone out to the
day. I pay silent respect to strapping Mariota
and her baby-boy in the country of Boccace.
164

ILARIA, MARIOTA, BETTINA

Then, when I am in Florence again, under
the spell of the city life, I lounge in the
Borg' Ognissanti, or across Arno in the
quarttere San Niccolo, or out by San Fre-
diano where Botticelli in his green old age
pruned his vines, or in the pent streets be
tween the Via della Per
gola and Santa Croce, j-*^.
and watch the townsfolk §^%\
lead their lives of patch- ,(,> § )
work and ea.sy /-<^^Cyi^k,
laughter. I fear I
have a taste for such
company. I am fond
of verdure; I like
trees as well as men :

l"$,*J

every oak
for me has
its hamad
ryad inform
ing it. I like
flowers bet-
ter than
men ; and
the most
beautifulflower I
know is a

(fft$"t

V; -_..,', ;¦-! u'l.,.- .' , f \\ --ij-._ :,/v; p
W>? -'-5 fc*S« •- •-• ~T* i>-i - -'* - *{¦'„ ¦•

165

EARTHWORK OUT OF TUSCANY:
girl. I have a sweetheart in the Bargello, as
you shall hear. I believe she is one of Dona-
tello's sowing ; but the critics are divided.
I cannot trace Verocchio's bluntened linea
ments in her, nor Mino's peaksomeness,
nor anything of Desiderio. She 's not very
pretty, but she's like a summer flower,
say, a campanula ; and that is why I love
to watch her and talk to her in this grand-
fatherly fashion. Bettina, I say to her, are
you, I wonder, twelve years old yet ? You
cannot be much more I think, for you have
let your bodice-strap slip off one of your
shoulders and betray you to the sun. You
are but a round rosebud now and no one
thinks any harm ; but some day the sun
will look at you in an odd way, and then,
suddenly, you will be ashamed, and draw
your frock right up to your neck.
And your hair strays where it likes at
present. I know you have a golden fillet
of box-leaves round your brow: that is
because you are only a little girl still, not
more than twelve. And you have tied the
ends up in a sort of knot. But you romp
so much and laugh so — I know you have
two bright rows of little teeth — that you
can never expect to keep tidy. Why,
166

ILARIA, MARIOTA, BETTINA
even now, while I am scolding you, you
are itching to laugh and run away. I see
a wavy lock trailing down your neck,
raga^a, and those heavy tresses on your
temples, instead of being drawn meekly
back, droop down over your temples, and
cover up your little ears. Don't you know
that Florentine ladies are proud of their
foreheads, and when they have pretty ears
always show them ? Some day, my dear,
you will go out into the world ; and your
hair will be twisted up into coils with gold
braid; perhaps you will have on it a
flowery garland of Messer Domenico's
making, and a string of Venice beads round
your throat. And when the time comes,
you won't let the sun play with your neck
any more ; he won't know his romp when
he sees her in stiff velvet of Genoa and a
high collar edged with seed-pearls.
And you won't look me in the eyes as
you are doing now, saucy girl, with your
chin pushed forward and your mouth all in
a pucker — who 's to know whether you are
going to pout or giggle? — and your pert
green eyes wide open, as if to say " Who 's
this old thickhead staring at me so hard ? "
No, Bettina, you will drop them instead ;
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EARTHWORK OUT OF TUSCANY:
you will blush all over your neck and
cheeks, and hang your round head. You
have chestnuts in your two fists now I
know; there's some of the flour sticking
to the corners of your mouth, little slut. But
then you will have a fan perhaps, or a spy
glass, or at least a mass-book in the morn
ings; and when I am looking at you, your
fingers will tie themselves in knots and be
very interesting. In two years' time, Bettina !
But though I sha'n't love you half as
much as I do now, I shall always come to
see you I think; and, as I shall be a very
old man by that time, perhaps you will still
sit on a stool at my knee and give me a
kiss now and then — oh, a mere bird's
peck, just for kindness. . . . The Via
de' Bardi is grey, and you are there in
yellow. You are like a young daffodil
dancing in the winter grass. But soon
you will have strained to your full flower-
time, and I see you in your summering,
lithe and rather languid, with heavy-lidded
eyes, and a slow smile. Then you will
not dance; but, instead, you will stoop
gravely like a tall garden lily, and give your
white hand to the lover kneeling below.
And all in two years, my little Bettina !
168

X
CATS
THERE was once a man in Italy — so the
story runs — who said that animals
were sacred because God had made them.
People did n't believe him for a long time ;
they came, you see, of a race which had
found it amusing to kill such things, and
killed a great many of them too, until it
struck them one fine day that killing men
was better sport still, and watching men
kill each other the best sport of all because
it was the least trouble. Animals ! said
they, why, how can they be sacred ; things
that you call beef and mutton when they
have left off being oxen and sheep, and
sell for so much a pound ? They scoffed at
this mad neighbour, looked at each other
waggishly and shrugged their shoulders as
he passed along the street. Well ! then,
all of a sudden, as you may say, one morn
ing he walked into the town — Gubbio it
was — with a wolf pacing at his heels — a
certain wolf which had been the terror of
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EARTHWORK OUT OF TUSCANY =
the country-side and eaten I don't know
how many children and goats. He walked
up the main street till he got to the open
Piazza in front of the great church. And
the long grey wolf padded beside him with
a limp tongue lolling out between the
ragged palings which stood him for teeth.
In the middle of the Piazza was a fountain,
and above the fountain a tall stone crucifix.
Our friend mounted the steps of the cross
in the alert way he had (like a little bird,
the story says), and the wolf, after lapping
apologetically in the basin, followed him
up three steps at a time. Then with one
arm round the shaft to steady himself, he
made a fine sermon to the neighbours
crowding in the Square, and the wolf
stood with his fore-paws on the edge of
the fountain and helped him. The sermon
was all about wolves (naturally) and the
best way of treating them. I fancy the
people came to agree with it in time; any
how when the man died they made a saint
of him and built three churches, one over
another, to contain his body. And I believe
it is entirely his fault that there are a hun-
dred-and-three cats in the convent-garden
of San Lorenzo in Florence. For what are
170

CATSyou to do ? Animals are sacred, says Saint
Francis. Animals are sacred, but cats have
kittens ; and so it comes about that the
people who agree with Saint Francis have
to suffer for the people who don't.
The Canons of San Lorenzo agree with
Saint Francis, and it seems to me that they
must suffer a good deal. The convent is
large ; it has a great mildewed cloister
with a covered-in walk all round it built
on arches. In the middle is a green garth
with cypresses and yews dotted about ;
and when you look up you see the blue
sky cut square, and the hot tiles of a huge
dome staring up into it. Round the cloister
walk are discreet brown doors, and by the
side of each door a brass plate tells you
the name and titles of the Canon who lives
behind it. It is on the principle of Dean's
Yard at Westminster ; only here there are
more Canons — and more cats.
The Canons live under the cloister; the
cats live on the green garth, and sometimes
die there. I did not see much of the Can
ons; but the cats seemed to me very sad —
depressed, nostalgic even, might describe
them, if there had not been something
more languid, something faded and spiritless
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EARTHWORK OUT OF TUSCANY :
about their habit. It was not that they
quarrelled. I heard none of those long-
drawn wails, gloomy yet mellow soli
loquies, with which our cats usher in the
crescent moon or hymn her when she
swims at the full: there lacked even that
comely resignation we may see on any
sunny window-ledge at home; — the
rounded back and neatly ordered tail, the
immaculate fore-paws peering sedately be
low the snowy chest, the squeezed-up
eyes which so resolutely shut off a bleak
and (so to say) unenlightened world.
That is pensiveness, sedate, chastened mel
ancholy; but it is soothing, it speaks a
philosophy, and a certain balancing of
pleasures and pains. In San Lorenzo clois
ter, when I looked in one hot noon seeking
a refuge from the glare and white dust of
the city, I was conscious of a something
sinister that forbade such an even existence
for the smoothest -tempered cat. There
were too many of them for companionship
and perhaps too few for the humour of the
thing to strike them: in and out the chilly
shades they stalked gloomily, hither and
thither, like lank and unquiet ghosts of
starved cats. They were of all colours —
172

CATS
gay orange-tawny, tortoiseshell with the
becoming white patch over one eye, deli
cate tints of grey and fawn and lavender,
brindle, glossy sable; and yet the gloom
and dampness of the place seemed to mil
dew them all so that their brightness was
glaring and their softest gradations took on
a shade as of rusty mourning. No cat
could be expected to do herself justice.
To and fro they paced, balancing some
times with hysterical precision on the ledge
of the parapet, passing each other at whis
ker's length, but cutting each other dead!
Not a cat had a look or a sniff for his
fellow; not a cat so much as guessed at an
other's existence. Among those hundred-
and-three restless spirits there was not a
cat but did not affect to believe that a
hundred-and-two were away ! It was
horrible, the inhumanity of it. Here were
these shreds and waifs, these " unnecessary
litters " of Florentine households, herded to
gether in the only asylum (short of the Arno)
open to them, driven in like dead leaves
in November, flitting dismally round and
round for a span, and watching each other
die without a mew or a lick ! Saint Francis
was not the wise man I had thought him.
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EARTHWORK OUT OF TUSCANY:
It was about two o'clock in the after
noon. I had watched these beasts at their
feverish exercises for nearly an hour before
I perceived that they were gradually hem
ming me in. They seemed to be forming
up, in ranks, on the garth. Only a ditch
separated us — I was in the cloister-walk, a
hundred-and-three gaunt, expectant, des
perate cats facing me. Their famished pale
eyes pierced me through and through ; and
two-hundred-and-two hungry eyes (four
cats supported life in one apiece) is more
than I can stand, though I am a married
man with a family. These brutes thought
I was going to feed them ! I was preparing
weakly for flight when I heard steps in the
gateway; a woman came in with a black
bag. She must be going to deposit a cat
on Jean-Jacques' ingenious plan of avoiding
domestic trouble; it was surely impossible
she wanted to borrow one ! Neither: she
came confidently in, beaming on our mad
fellowship with a pleasant smile of prepara
tion. The cats knew her better than I did.
Their suspense was really shocking to wit
ness. While she was rolling her sleeves
up and tying on her apron — she was poor,
evidently, but very neat and wholesome in
174

CATSher black dress and the decent cap which
crowned her grey hair — while she unpacked
the contents of the bag — two newspaper
parcels full of rather distressing viands,
scissors, and a pair of gloves which had
done duty more than once — while all these
preparations were soberly fulfilling, the
agitation of the hundred-and-three was
desperate indeed. The air grew thick, it
quivered with the lashing of tails; hoarse
mews echoed along the stone walls, paws
were raised and let fall with the rhythmical
patter of raindrops. A furtive beast played
the thief: he was one of the one-eyed fra
ternity, red with mange. Somehow he
slipped in between us; we discovered him
crouched by the newspaper raking over
the contents. This was no time for cere
mony; he got a prompt cuff over the head
and slunk away shivering and shaking his
ears. And then the distribution began.
Now, your cat, at the best of times, is
squeamish about his food; he stands no
tricks. He is a slow eater, though he can
secure his dinner with the best of us. A
vicious snatch, like a snake, and he has it.
Then he spreads himself out to dispose of
the prey — feet tucked well in, head low,
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EARTHWORK OUT OF TUSCANY:
tail laid close along, eyes shut fast. That
is how a cat of breeding loves to dine.
Alas ! many a day of intolerable prowling,
many a black vigil, had taken the polish
off the hundred-and-three. As a matter of
fact they behaved abominably : they leaped
at the scraps, they clawed at them in the
air, they bolted them whole with starting
eyes and portentous gulpings, they growled
all the while with the smothered ferocity
of thunder in the hills. No waiting of
turns, no licking of lips and moustaches to
get the lingering flavours, no dalliance.
They were as restless and suspicious here
as everywhere; their feast was the horrid
hasty orgy of ghouls in a churchyard.
But an even distribution was made: I
don't think any one got more than his
share. Of course there were underhand
attempts in plenty and, at least once, open
violence — a sudden rush from opposite
sides, a growling and spitting like sparks
from a smithy; and then, with ears laid
flat, two ill-favoured beasts clawed blindly
at each other, and a sly and tigerish brindle
made away with the morsel. My woman
took the thing very coolly I thought, served
them all alike, and did n't resent (as I
176

CATS should have done) the unfortunate want of
delicacy there was about these vagrants.
A cat that takes your food and growls at
you for the favour, a cat that would eat
you if he dared, is a pretty revelation. Ca
donne furieusement a penser. It gives you
a suspicion of just how far the polish we
most of us smirk over will go. My cats at
San Lorenzo knew some few moments of
peace between two and three in the after
noon. That would have been the time
to get up a testimonial to the kind soul
who fed them. Try them at five and
they would ignore you. But try them next
morning !
My knowledge of the Italian tongue, in
those days, was severely limited to the
necessaries of existence ; to try me on a
fancy subject, like cats, was to strike me
dumb. But at this stage of our intercourse
(hitherto confined to smiles and eye-
service) it became so evident my com
panion had something to say that I must
perforce take my hat off and stand attent
ive. She pointed to the middle of the garth,
and there, under the boughs of a shrub, I
saw the hundred-and-fourth cat, sorriest
of them all. It was a new-comer, she told
12 177

EARTHWORK OUT OF TUSCANY:
me, and shy. Shy it certainly was, poor
wretch ; it glowered upon me from under
the branches like a bad conscience. Shy
ness could not hide hunger — I never saw
hungrier eyes than hers — but it could hold
it in check: the silkiest speech could not
tempt her out, and when we threw pieces
she only winced ! What was to be done
next was my work. Plain duty called me
to scale the ditch with some of those drip
ping, slippery, nameless cates in my fin
gers and to approach the stranger where
she lurked bodeful under her tree. My
passage towards her lay over the rank
vegetation of the garth, in whose coarse
herbage here and there I stumbled upon a
limp white form stretched out — a waif the
less in the world ! I don't say it was a
happy passage for me : it was made to
the visible consternation of her I wished
to befriend. Her piteous yellow eyes
searched mine for sympathy ; she wanted
to tell me something and I would n't under
stand 1 As I neared her she shivered and
mewed twice. Then she limped painfully
off — poor soul, she had but three feet ! —
to another tree, leaving behind her, un
willingly enough, a much-licked dead
178

CATSkitten. That was what she wanted to tell
me then. As I was there, I deposited the
garbage by the side of the little corpse,
knowing she would resume her watch,
and retired. My friend who had put up
her parcels was prepared to go. She
thanked me with a smile as she went out,
looking carefully round lest she had missed
out some other night-birds.
One of the Canons had come out of his
door and was leaning against the lintel,
thoughtfully rubbing his chin. He was a
spare dry man who seemed to have meas
ured life and found it a childish business.
He jerked his head towards the gateway
as he glanced at me. "That is a good
woman," he said in French, "shelendeth
unto the Lord. . . . Yes," he went
on, nodding his head slowly backwards
and forwards, "lends Him something every
day." The cats were sitting in the shady
cloister-garth licking their whiskers : one
was actually cleaning his paw. I went out
into the sun thinking of Saint Francis and
his wolf.

179

XI
THE SOUL OF A CITY
HE hated Marco first of all because one
day he undersold him in the Campo,
put him to shame in open market. Figs
were going cheap that October in spite of
the waning year ; but there was no earthly
reason why he should give the English
ladies more than four for two soldi. What
were soldi to English people ? The scratch
of a flea 1 He would have given them a
handful, taken as they came, for their piece
of cinquanta, and reaped a tidy little profit
for himself. Who would have been the
worse ? God knew he needed it. Mariola
crumpled with the ague like a dried leaf,
and that long girl of his growing up so fast,
and still running wild with goat-herds and
marble quarrymen. How could he send
her to the nuns for a place unless he bought
her some shoes and a rosary ? And then
that pig Marco — thieving old miser — peered
forward with his mock candour and silver-
rimmed goggles and offered ten for two
1 80

THE SOUL OF A CITY
soldi — ten ! with the market price, Dio
mio, at twelve ! And fichi Matt too ! Do
you wonder that the ladies in striped
blankets gave the cheek to Maso Cecci and
turned to Marco Zoppa ?
That was n't all, but it was an accentua
tion of a long series of spiteful injuries
wrought him by the wrinkled old villain.
Maso endured, hating the old man daily
more and more ; tried little tricks, little
revenges, upon him, upset his baskets, hid
his pipe ; but they generally failed or re
coiled with a nasty swiftness upon himself.
He only got deeper and deeper into the
bad odour of the neighbours who traded
in the Piazza with fruit and indifferent
photographs. Nothing went very well-
thanks to that unspeakable old Marco! His
girl grew longer and lazier and handsomer,
with a shapelier bust and a pair of arms
like that snaky Bacchante in the Opera.
Maso had to quail more than he liked to
admit before the proud stare of her eyes;
and when she dropped the heavy lids upon
them and sauntered away, arms akimbo
under her shawl, he could only swear.
And he always cursed Marco Zoppa, who
gave her chestnuts and sage counsel for
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EARTHWORK OUT OF TUSCANY:
nothing. God only knew what devilry he
might be whispering to her in the shady
corner where the sun never came and the
grass sprouted between the flags — she
leaning against the wall, looking down at
her toes, and he peering keen-eyed into her
face and muttering in his beard, sometimes
laying an old brown hand on her shoulder
— Lord! he did hate the man.
Then came the August races.
Maso had brought his Isotta into the city
to see the fun and she had disappeared in
the press just before the procession stayed
by the Palazzo and the trumpets sounded
for the first race. Maso shrugged his
shoulders and cursed his luck, but did n't
budge. The girl must look after herself.
He was on the upper rim of the great
fountain craning his neck over the pack of
people: then he got a dig under the ribs
enough to take the breath of an ox. It was
the spout of old Marco's green umbrella.
" Hey! silly fool," spluttered the old liar,
" dost want that loose-legged slut of thine
in trouble ? I tell thee she 's playing in a
corner with Carlo Formaggia. Already he 's
pinched her cheek twice, and who knows
what the end may be? Mud-coloured
182

THE SOUL OF A CITY
ass, wilt thou let they child slip to the
devil while thou standest gaping at a horse
race ? " And this before all the neigh
bours ! What to say to such a man ?
Maso babbled with rage ; but he had to go,
for Carlo Formaggia was well known. He
had ruined more girls than enough ; he
was in league with vile houses, gambling
dens, thieves' hells ; Captain of an infamous
secret society ; the police were only wait
ing for a pretext to get him shipped off to
the hulks. He must go of course. No
thanks to Marco though : in fact he hated
him worse than ever, partly because he had
drawn all eyes and a fair share of snigger
ing and tongues thrust in the cheek upon
his account ; but most because he knew he
had been trapped into losing a good place.
For, as he mounted the narrow stair cut
between old houses steep as rocks, he
turned and saw Zoppa placidly smoking his
pipe in the very spot he had held, squatted
on the fountain-rim with his green umbrella
between his knees. He was beaming
through his spectacles, in a fatherly, in
dulgent sort of way, upon the shouting
people ; following the race too, like one
who had paid for his box. Maso, when
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EARTHWORK OUT OF TUSCANY :
he heard the shatter of hoofs and the wild
roar from thousands of throats down below
him in the Campo, cursed old Zoppa with a
grey face, and went muttering round the
blinding sides of the Duomo to find his
daughter. And when he did find her she
was eating chestnuts at the open door of her
aunt's shop in the Via Ghibellina ! Bacchus!
she was sick of all those folk in their festa
clothes, was all the explanation she would
give him from between fine white teeth all
clogged with chestnut-meal. If he chose
to dress his daughter like a beggar's brat
he had better not take her to the races.
Maso's feeling of relief at finding her alone
and looking her usual sulky impassive self
gave way very rapidly to a sort of right
eous wrath against his triumphant enemy.
So, by foul slanders of honest, God-fearing
people that old Jew had not scrupled to
rob him of his place ! His place and his
day's fun. By Heaven, he was tricked,
duped by a scaly-eyed Jew pedlar, a vile
old dog tottering down to Hell with lies in
his beard. Well ! he would put this
morning's work down to his score ; some
day there would be a choice little reckoning
for Ser Marco. 184

THE SOUL OF A CITY
Maso, green with impotent fury, poured
out his flood of gutturals upon his insouci-
ante child. General reproaches were always
a failure in cases of this sort. Some were
sure to be wild guess-work and to drown
the real ones : you could never tell when
you had hit the mark. Had she not — she
fourteen, too ! — slid astride down the rail
ing into the Campo and been caught up in
the arms of Carlo Formaggia waiting and
laughing at the bottom ? Had she not lain
a whole minute in his arms, panting?
And then, T)io mio, with the sweat still on
her forehead, she had slipped off to San
Domenico and confessed to coughing at
mass the Sunday before ! Pest ! he would
give her the strap over her shoulders when
he got her home. The long, brown girl
leaned against the lintel kicking one heel
idly against the other. She was smiling at
him, smiling with her lazy, languid eyes
and with her glistening teeth. Every now
and then she inspected a chestnut critically
— like an amateur ! — and slipped it between
her jaws. They split it like a banana.
And then she squeezed the half skins and
dropped the flour down her throat. She
had a long sinewy throat, glossy as velvet,
185

EARTHWORK OUT OF TUSCANY:
with its silvery lights and dusky brown
shadows. Maso stood helpless before her
as she drank down her flour ; he chattered
like a little passionate ape. At last he lifted
up both hands in a sudden frenzy of despair
and went away.
Of course the races were over. The
sober streets swarmed with people in their
holiday clothes. They all seemed laughing
and smoking, and talking fluently of some
thing ridiculous. Maso, egoist, knew it
must be about him — or his daughter.
Arms and heads went like mill-sails or tall
trees in a gale of wind. Then, with a
rattle and the sudden sliding of four hoofs
on the flags, a cart would be in the thick
of them, and the people scoured to the
curb, still laughing, or spitting between the
spasms of the interrupted jest. The boys
tried to peep under the sagging hats of the
girls, and the girls turned pettish shoulders
to them and, as they turned, you caught
the glint of fun in their great roes' eyes
and saw the lips part before the quick
breath. The streets were mere gullies,
clefts hewn in zig-zag between grey houses
that tottered up and up, and lay over them
like cliffs. An ancient church with bleached
1S6

THE SOUL OF A CITY
stone saints under flowery canopies, a
guttering candle before a tinsel shrine, and
the hoarse babel of the streets — whips that
cracked and spluttered like squibs, a swarm
ing coloured stream of men and maids, once
the twang of a chance mandoline. Siena
was feasting, and the waiters furtively
swept their foreheads with their coatsleeves
as they ran in and out of the trattorie.
In the trattoria of the Aquila Rossa old
Marco Zoppa smoked his pipe and talked,
between the spurts of smoke, to his neigh
bours. Fate brought him face to face with
two enemies at once. Maso was battling
his way up the street, white and strained
as a grave-cloth ; and Carlo Formaggia,
the approved bravo — oiled and jaunty, with
his brown felt fantastically rolled and stuck
over one ear, with a long cigar which he
alternately gnawed and sucked, Carlo the
broad-chested, of the seared, evil face,
came down with the stream on the arms
of two other gilded youths. They met
before the cafe, the man of intolerable
wrongs and the Pilia-Borsa of Siena. Maso
scowled till his thick eyebrows cut his face
horizontally In two. He stood ostenta
tiously still, muttering with his lips as the
187

EARTHWORK OUT OF TUSCANY:
trio went lightly by. Then he made to go
on. But old Marco Zoppa stood up and
made a speech. He had the wooden stem
of his pipe 'twixt finger and thumb, and
used it like a conductor's bdton to empha
sise his points. As his voice shrilled and
quavered, Carlo Formaggia caught his own
name and turned back to listen, prick-
eared. He stood out of sight resting one
foot on a doorstep, and leaned forward
on to his leg. He might have been dream
ing of some night of love, but he held
every word as it dropped.
" Maso," Marco went on, "thou art but
a thin fool. I know what I know ; but
thou must needs stick dirt in thine ears
and pass me by. Well, let be, let be ; the
end will come soon enough — this night even.
And I have warned thee."
"Spawn of a pig, wilt never have done
irking me ? See, I scratch thee off me ! "
Maso drove home his gibe with a dramatic
performance. The trattoria was agape.
Every table held its three craning necks
and six piercing, twinkling eyes atop.
" I grow old, my Maso, I grow very old,
and thy monkey's tricks are nought. 'T is
thy slip of a girl and thy poor twisted
iSS

THE SOUL OF A CITY
Mariola I would save in spite of thee.
Listen then once more, and for the last
time. Ser Carlo intends to snare thy
pigeon. He has limed his twigs ; the bird
flutters free for this noon, but by to
night she will be caged. For me, I have
done my possible — but I am old. Life
tingles fiercer in the blood of a young
man. Therefore beware. Wilt thou see
that brawny assassin toying with thy girl ;
leaning over her where she crouches, poi
soning her with fat words ? That 's how
the snake licks the turtle before he gulps
her — 'tis to make her sleek, look you !
Well, go thy way, dolt and blunderhead.
For me — old as I am — I will shoot a last
bolt for Mariola. This very night after
supper I go to the Sbirro : and thy thanks
will be a rounder oath and some more
knave's tricks with my baskets."
"No thanks are owing, Marco Zoppa";
Maso was ashy with shame and rage at the
old man's placid benevolence. "Marco
Zoppa, thou hast been my enemy ever, and
I have borne it " — the Cafe roared with
laughter; a fat old Capuchin nearly had a
fit. Maso looked round with fright in his
eyes. He went on, "Now thou hast

EARTHWORK OUT OF TUSCANY:
gone too far — insulting me grossly before
these citizens. Thou hast brought thine
end upon thyself." He ran away fighting
through the delighted crowd. Everybody
who could get at him slapped him on the
back. A big carter stove his hat in.
Old Marco shrugged his patient shoul
ders and sat down to read the Secolo. He
balanced his silver-rimmed spectacles on
his nose and held the journal at arm's
length with hand a thought more shaky,
perhaps, than usual. Presently he looked
up: " Mother of God ! what a white-faced
rogue it is ! Eh, Giuseppe ? " "By Mars,
if looks could stab, thou hadst been riddled
by the knife before this," said his friend.
Marco shrugged and went on reading — he
was an old man.
But when Carlo Formaggia had heard
the debate, he turned a shade shinier, and
his eyes harder and brighter. As he mo
tioned his friends off with a look, he swal
lowed something hard in his throat. Then
he turned down the first side street,
doubled round to the right, turned to the
left down a kind of black sewer-trap and
let himself into a wine-shop where he sat
down, breathing short. He drank brandy
iqo

THE SOUL OF A CITY
— but he drank like a machine. The mus
cles of his jaw were working spasmodically
as he sat rigid on a tub, leaning against the
counter. And he fingered something at
his belt. His eyes were in a cold stare: he
saw nothing and did n't move. But he
went on drinking brandy till late in the af
ternoon, till the Hail Mary bells began to
sound a tinkling chorus through the still air.
And Maso Cecci, he too, rushed away
white and chattering. Rage had past
definition with him, he saw things red, and
they choked him. The air felt thick to
him, full of flies. He brushed his hands
before his face, struck out vaguely, and
swore as the dazzling black things settled
round him again in a swarm. Irritated,
maddened as he was, he still heard the de
risive yells of the crowd at the birreria and
saw Marco's calm wise old face smiling
urbanely behind silver spectacles. Cristo
amore! how he loathed that old man.
Siena could never hold the pair of them :
there must be an end — there should be an
end. His heart gave a jerk under his vest
as he thought of it. An end ! — an end of
his eternal fretting jealousy in the Campo,
his continued sense of being worsted, of
191

EARTHWORK OUT OF TUSCANY:
galling inferiority to that methodical old
villain. An end of his worries about
Isotta; an end — ah! but there would be
something rarer than that ? To a man like
Maso, a small man, of immoderate self-
esteem, and that self-esteem always on
the smart, there is another satisfaction—
that of seeing the better man totter and
slip forward to his knees. This insuffer
able old Marco who was always so right,
with his slow methods and accursed ac
curacy — to see him stumble and drop !
That was what made Maso's heart flutter
and thud against his skin. And then,
as he thought of it, it seemed inevita
ble. It could be done in a minute, via !
The old man was alone — it would be dusk
— he would peer forward through the
gloom to open the door and — Madre di
Dio! — and then ! Maso was sweating;
the back of his palate itched intolerably;
something hot and sticky clogged his
mouth and glued his tongue against the
roof of it. His knees shook so that he
could scarcely walk. Some little boys
stood to stare at him as he lurched by, and
laughed stealthily to see the hated Maso
tipsy. But Maso was unconscious of all
192

THE SOUL OF A CITY
this: he staggered on homewards with
scorching eyes. . . .
Old Marco lived down beyond the Rail
way Station — a room in a crazy block of
buildings that had been run up for the
needs of the factory hands. It was like a
great smooth cliff, this block, and was
washed over a raw pink, but it glowed in
the setting sun that evening, like the city
herself and all the hills, the colour of bright
blood. As Maso neared its blind face,
stepping warily with outstretched neck like
some obscene bird, and with one hand un
der his coat — the sun was going down into
a purple bank of cloud. He gilded the
edges as he sank and shot broad rays of
crimson light up into the green sky. Here
and there a star twinkled faint ; the city
lay over him like a cloudy, silent company
of rocks ; the tower of the Palazzo ran up
into the pallor of the sky, a shaking spear.
There was but one glimmer of light in
the whole ghostly wall of tenements and
that, Maso knew, was Marco Zoppa's.
Every soul else was crowded in the Campo
waiting for the fireworks. And, as he
thought, he heard a dull thud behind him,
and turned ; and there, far up, a single
13 193

EARTHWORK OUT OF TUSCANY:
shaft of flame shot aloft, and stayed, and
burst into a fan of lights ; and a puff told
him it was the first rocket. "Ecco ! Madre
di Dio, a sign ! a sign ! So will / go up ;
and so shall my enemy come down." And
Maso crept up the stairway breathing thick
and short. . . .
With a hand still under his cloak he
rapped his knuckles on the door. No
answer. An echo, only, fluttered and grew
faint down the stone steps. He hoisted
his cloak from the shoulder and swung his
right arm free. Then he knocked again.
Nothing. No sign. Heavy silence ; only
a distant murmur of voices, muffled and
infinitely far, from the Campo on the hill.
"The game has flown ! Or the old dog
sleeps." Maso sighed, for he wanted to
see him drop gurgling to his knees. Still,
it made his affair easier. He gave one
fierce hoist to his cloak, twitched his right
arm once or twice, and gently turned the
handle. Then he stepped lightly and dain
tily into the room.
A candle guttered on a little table in the
corner, and the Crucified showed white
upon the black cross above. Marco Zoppa
lay on his bed with his throat cut from ear
194

THE SOUL OF A CITY
to ear. The cut was so resolute that his
head stuck out at an angle from his body —
almost a right angle ; and in some struggle
he had got his nostril sliced. That gave
him an odd, mesquin expression, lying
there with his mouth open and his yawn
ing nostril, as if he wanted to sneeze. The
room smelt stale and sour ; the thick air
gathered in a misty halo round the candle,
and a fat shroud of tallow drooped over the
edges of the candlestick.
Maso dropped his long, clean knife ;
dropped on to his knees and wailed like a
chained dog. He could not take his eyes
from the horrible black pit between the
dead man's chin and trunk. Out of that
pit a thin scarlet stream was still slipping
lazily, and crawling down the white cover
let to the floor. Maso's wailing attracted
a dog near by. He too set off howling
from behind his door : and then another,
and another. There was a chorus of howls,
long-drawn, pitiful, desolate ; and Maso,
the only man in that woeful company,
howled like any dog of the pack.
Gradually his moaning sank and then
stopped with a dry sob. He crawled on
his knees a little nearer to the bed and
195

EARTHWORK OUT OF TUSCANY:
eyed fearfully a patch of blood on the
counterpane. Just God ! what was that
patch ? A faint circle smeared with the
finger, and through the midst of it a ragged
dart. Carlo Formaggia had been there !
He knew that mark ! And then the whole
truth blazed before him like a sheet of fire.
He fell forward on his face. The thin
thread of scarlet from Marco Zoppa's gap
ing throat crawled drop by drop on to his
shoulder. Carlo Formaggia had limed his bird.

196

XII
WITH THE BROWN BEAR
THE secret of happy travelling is con
trast. Suffer, that you may drowse
thereafter : grill, that you may have a heat
on you worth assuagement. Wherefore,
to the Italian wanderer, it will be worth
while to endure the fierceness of the Lom
bard plain, even the gilded modernisms of
Milan (blistering though they may be under
the stroke of the naked sun) and the dusty,
painful traverse of the Apennines, to drop
down at last into the broad green peace of
the Val d'Arno. Take, however, the first
halting-place you can. You will find your
self in a hollow of the hills, helping the
brown bear of Pistoja keep the Northern
gates of Tuscany. It is not unlikely that
the Apennine may " walk abroad with the
storm," or hide his moss-brown slopes in
great sheets of mist. This, while it means
a fine sight, means also rain for Pistoja.
A quiet rain will accordingly fall upon the
little city, gently but persistently. Only
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EARTHWORK OUT OF TUSCANY:
in the gleams may you guess that you have
the Tuscan sky over you and the smiling
Tuscan Art round about. But the ways of
the Pistolesi will confirm the feeble knees :
such at least was my case.
For the Pistolesi were there besides foul
weather, and splashed about under green
umbrellas with prodigious jokes to cut at
each other's expense, of a sort we reserve
for Spring or early June. For them, with
a vintage none too good to be garnered, it
might have been the finest weather in the
world ; but I am bound to add my belief
that they would have laughed were it the
worst. With no money, no weather, and
taxes intolerable, Pistoja laughed and looked
handsome. Was not Boccaccio a Pistol-
ese ? I was reminded of his book at every
turn of the road : life is a wanton story
there, or, say, a Masque of Green Things,
enacted by a splendid fairy rout. They
were still the well-favoured race Dino Com-
pagni described them far back in the four
teenth century — " formati di bella statura
oltre a' Toscani," he says. The words
hold good of their grandsons — the men
leaner and longer, hardier and keener than
you find them in Lucca or Siena ; and the

WITH THE BROWN BEAR
women carry their heads high, and when
they smile at you (as they will) you think
the sun must be shining. They are mount
aineers, a strong race. At pallone one
day, I saw muscles "all a-ripple down the
back," arms, and shoulders, which would
have intoxicated the great old "amatore
del persona" himself. For their vivacity,
it is racial ; I think all Tuscans, more or
less, retain the buoyant spirits, the alertness
as of birds, which crowned Italy with
Florence instead of Rome or Milan. Tus
can Art is a proof of that, and Tuscan Art
can be studied at its roots in Pistoja : you
see there the naked thing itself with none
of the wealth of Florence to make the
head swim. If Florence had stopped
short at the death of Giuliano de' Medici,
you might say Pistoja was Florence seen
through the diminishing-glass. Is not that
ribbed dome, with its purple mass domi
neering over the huddled roofs, Brunel-
Ieschi's ? It is a faithful copy of Vasari's
hatching ; but no matter. So with the
Baptistry, the towers, the grim old cor
niced palaces, the sdruccioli and gloomy
clefts which serve for streets. But you
would be wrong. Pisa is the real parent
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EARTHWORK OUT OF TUSCANY:
of Pistoja, as indeed she is of Florence —
Dante's Florence. Pisa's magnificent build
ing repeats too itself here : Gothic with
a touch of Latin sanity, a touch of the
genuine Paganism which loves the daedal
earth and cannot bring itself to be out of
touch with it. San Giovanni fuori-civitas,
what a rock-hewn church it is ! A rigid
oblong, dark as the twilight, running with
the street without belfry or window or
facade. Three tiers of shallow arcades on
spiral columns, never a window to be seen,
and the whole of solemn black marble
narrowly striped with white. Is there
such a beast as a black tiger — a tiger where
the tawny and black change places ? San
Giovanni is modelled after that fashion.
It is very old — twelfth century at latest —
very shabby and weather-beaten, dusty
and deserted. But it will outlive Pistoja ;
and that is probably what Pistoja desired.
This black and white, which is so re
miniscent of early Florence, is carried out
with more fidelity to the model in the
Piazza. The octagonal Baptistry is, no
doubt, a copy of Dante's beloved church ;
but it is much better placed, does not
"shun to be admired" like its beautiful
200

Church of San Giovanni Fuorcivitas,
Pistoia
Founded in the ,8th Century; Ornamentation is
of the 14th Century

WITH THE BROWN BEAR
yellowed sister. The Duomo is of Pisa
again, and has a tower, half belfry, half
fortress, which once the Podesta seized
and held while the plucky little town en
dured a siege. The Brown Bear stood out
long against the Lily. But Lorenzo showed
his teeth: and the Wolf prevailed at last.
Sculpture apart, the resemblance to Florence
stops here. None of her Cinque-cento
bravery and little of her earlier and finer
Renaissance came this way. But one thing
came; one clean breath from "that solemn
fifteenth century " did blow to this verge
of Tuscan soil, a breath from Luca della
Robbia and his men. They may flower
more exuberantly in Florence, those broad,
blue-eyed platters of theirs ; nowhere is
their purpose more explicit, their charm
more exquisitely appreciable than here.
There is a chance of considering the art on
its own merits ; better, you can see it
more truly as it was at home, since Florence
has caught some little of Haussmannism
and is not as Luca left it. So here, per
haps best of all, you may try to plumb the
depths of the Della Robbia soul, — through
its purity and limpid candour, through its
shining, sweetly wholesome homeliness,

EARTHWORK OUT OF TUSCANY:
down to the crystal sincerity burning re
cessed in the shrine. It is the fashion to
say of Angelico da Fiesole that his was a
naivete which amounted to genius : a thin
phrase, which may nevertheless pass to
qualify the inspired miniaturist. The re
ligiosity of the Della Robbia, while no less
naive, is really far other. It is not Gothic
at all, nor ascetic, nor mystic. It would
be Latin, were it not blithe enough to be
Greek. It speaks of what is and must be,
and is well content ; not of what should,
or might be, if one could but tear off this
crust. It seems probable that it speaks as
pure a Paganism- — just that very Paganism
which Pisan building represents — as has
been seen since the workmen of Tanagra
fashioned their little clay familiars for the
tombs, slim Greek girls in their reedy habit as
they lived, or chattering matrons like those
you read of in Theocritus. Much fine phras
ing has been spent upon the effort to analyse
the aesthetics of Della Robbia ware. Its
inexhaustible charm is unquestionable; but
just where does it catch one's breath ? Not
altogether in the clean colouring, like no
thing so much as that of a cool, glazed dairy
at home, — "milky-blue," "cream- white,"

GOTHIC AND LATIN

WITH THE BROWN BEAR
"butter-yellow," "parsley-green," all the
dairy names come pat to pen ; — not ne
cessarily in the sheer, April loveliness of
form and expression, though that would
count for much ; nor, I believe, as Mr.
Pater would have us acknowledge, in the
evanescent delicacy of each motive and
sentiment, — the arresting of a single sigh,
a single wave of desire, a single stave of
the Magnificat. All this is true, and true
only of Luca, and yet the whole charm is
not there. Rather, I think, you will find it
in the fusing of humble material — the age-
old clay of the potter (of the Master-Potter,
for that matter) — and fine art, whereby the
wayside shrine is linked to the high altar,
and contadino and Vicar-Apostolic can hail
a common ideal. Every lane, every cot
tage, has its Madonna-shrine here ; lumped
in clay or daubed in raw colour, nothing
can obliterate the sweet sentiment of these
poor weeds of art, these tawdry little ap
peals to the better part of us. Madonna
cries with a bared red heart ; she supports
a white Christ ; she stoops suave to enfold
a legion of children in her mantle. She is
as Tuscan as the brownest of them ; but a
Tuscan of the rarest mould, they would
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EARTHWORK OUT OF TUSCANY:
have you to see, of a cleanliness quite un
approachable, of a benignity wholly divine.
One learns the secret of devotional art best
of all in such ephemeral sanctuaries. And
since Fine Art is the flower of these shabby
roots, Italy only, where Cincinnatus worked
in his garden, can furnish so wonderful a
harmony of opposites. Surely it is the
most democratic country in Europe. I saw

a Colonel the other day, in Bologna, carry
ing a newspaper parcel. He was in full
uniform. It was the secret of Saint Francis
that he knew how to bridge the gulf on
either side of which we, prisoners in feu
dal holds, have cried to each other in vain.
It was the secret of the Delia Robbia too.
The god shall sink that we may rise to
meet him in the way. Why not? Here
204

WITH THE BROWN BEAR
in Pistoja are some precious pieces — a Vis
itation in San Giovanni, a pearly Madonna
Incoronata on the big door of San Giacopo,
concerning which it would be difficult to
account to one's self for the added zest
given by the mantle of fine dust which has
settled down on the pale folds of the
drapery and outlined the square blue panels
of the background. After all, is it not one
more touch of the hedgerow, a symbol of
the hedgerow-faith not quite dead in the
byways of Italy ?
But I know I shall never convey the spon
taneity with which Fra Paolino's Visitation
strikes quick for the heart. The thing is so
momentary, a mere quiver of emotion pass
ing from one woman to another. The pair
of them have looked in to the deeps. Then
the older stumbles forward to her knees,
and the girl stoops down to raise her. One
guesses the rest. They will be sobbing to
gether in a minute, the girl's face buried in
the other's shoulder. All you are to see
is just the wistfulness, — " My dear ! my
dear ! " And then the Virgin, full of Grace,
but a shy girl in her teens for all that,
hides her hot cheeks and cries her little
wild heart to quietness. Some of it is in
205

EARTHWORK OUT OF TUSCANY:
Albertinelli's fine picture, but not all. All of
it — and here 's the point — is to be seen in the
street among these clear-eyed Tuscan wo
men, just as Fra Paolino (himself of Pistoja)
saw it before our time, and then fixed it for
ever in blue and white.
And now cross the Piazza and come down
the steep incline by the Palazzo Commune,
turn to the left, and behold the crown of
Pistoja, the Spedale del Ceppo. Everybody
knows Luca's masterpiece at Florence, the
Foundling Hospital on whose front are some
twenty bambini in pure white on blue:
babies or flowers, one does not know
which. In 15 14 the Pistolesi remodelled
their own hospital, and called in the suc
cessors to Luca's mystery to make it joyful.
Andrea, Giovanni, Luca II., and Girolamo
came and conjured in turn, and their wall
flowers sprouted from the limewashed sides.
I fancy myself out in the patched Piazza del
Ceppo as I write, looking again on the
pleasant quietness of it all. It is a grey day
with thunder smouldering somewhere in
the hills, close and heavy. The blind walls
about me stare hard in the raw light, but
the wards of the hospital are open back and
front to the air; it is a rest for the eye to
206

The visitation
Gfoupby one of the Delia. Robbia in the Church of San
Giovanni Funvcivitas, Pistoia

WITH THE BROWN BEAR
look into their cool depths within the loggia.
It is a square, very plain, yellow building,
this hospital, unrelieved save for its log
gia, its painted frieze of earthenware, and
a rickety cross to denote its pious uses.
Through the wards I can see to the wet
sky again and a gable-end of vivid red and
yellow. A thin black Christ on his cross
stands up against this bright square of dis
tance, pathetic silhouette enough for me;
reminder something sinister, you might
think, for the sick folk inside. But not so;
this is a crucifix, not a Crucifixion. This poor
wooden Rood, bowing in the shade, speaks
not of high tragedy, but of the simple annals
of the poor again ; not of St. John, but of St.
Luke. I shall be called sentimental; but
with the band of garden colours before me I
can't get away from the streets and alleys. I
am not sure the craftsmen intended I should.
The hospital itself is low and square ; it
is limewashed all over, and has the blind
and beaten aspect of all Italian houses : —
red-purplish tiles running into deep eaves,
jalousied windows, and the loggia. It is
on the face of this that the workers in
baked clay — "lavoro molto utile per la
state," so cool and fresh is it, so redolent
207

EARTHWORK OUT OF TUSCANY:
of green pastures and the winds of April —
have moulded the Seven Acts of Pure
Mercy in colours as pure ; blue of morning
sky, grass-green, daffodil-yellow. Once
more, no heroics : here is what the work
men knew and we see. Black and white
frati, not idealised at all, but sleek and
round in the jaw as a monk will get on oil
and asciutta, minister to sun-burnt peas
ants, and ruddy girls as massive in the
waist and stout in the ankle as their sisters
of to-day. Then, of course, there is Alle
gory, — Allegory of your well-ordered, grav
itated sort, which takes us no whit farther
from wholesome earth and the men and
women so plainly and happily made of it.
No soaring, no transcendentalism. Carita
is a deep-breasted market-girl nursing two
brown babies, whom I have just seen
sprawling over a gourd in the Campo
Marzio ; Fortezza, Speranza, Fede, I know
them all, bless their sober, good eyes ! in
the fruit-market, or selling newspapers, or
plaiting straws in the Piazza. After this
we slide into religion pure and direct, the
beautiful ridiculous Paganism which has
never left the plain heathen-folk. Wreathed
medallions in the spandrils give us Mary
208

WITH THE BROWN BEAR
warned, Mary visited, Mary homing to her
Son, Mary crowned ; what would they do
without their Bona Dea in Tuscany ? She
is of them, and yet always a little beyond
their grasp. Not too far, however. That
means Gothicism. The advantage of the
Italian religious ideal is obvious. Art may
never leave for long together the good brown
earth ; and it can serve religion well when it
plucks up a type to set, clean as God made it,
just a little above our reach, to show whose
is " the earth and the fulness thereof."
An example. I leave the white and
crumbling Piazza, its old marble well, its
beggars, its sick, and its meadow-fresh bor
der of Delia Robbia planting, and stray up
the Via del Ceppo towards the ramparts.
High at a barred window a brown mother
with a brown dependent baby smiles down
upon my wayfaring. She has fine broad
brows and a patient face ; when she smiles,
out of mere kindness for my solitary goings,
it is pleasant to note the gleam of light on
her teeth and lips. I take off my hat, as
Luca or Lippo would have done, to "ma
cousine la Reine des cieux."
Thus goes life in Pistoja and the rest of
the world. 209

XIII
DEAD CHURCHES AT FOLIGNO
FROM my roof-top, whither I am fled to
snatch what cooler airs may drift into
this cup of earth, I can see above the strag
gling tiles of gable and loggia the cupolas
and belfries of many churches. I know
they are all dead ; for I have wound a de
vious way through the close, inhospitable
streets and met them or their ghosts at
every corner. The ghost of a dead church
is the worst of all disembodied sighs: he
wails and chatters at you. Here I have
seen churches whose towers were fallen
and their tribunes laid bare to the insults
of the work-a-day world. There were
churches with ugly gashes in them, fresh
and smarting still ; some had sightless eyes,
as of skulls ; and there were churches
piecemeal and scattered like the splinters
of the True Cross. A great foliated arch
of travertine would frame a patch of
plaster and soiled casement just broad
enough for some lolling pair of shoulders

DEAD CHURCHES
and shock-head atop; a sacred emblem,
some Agnus indefinably venerable, some
proud old cognisance of the See, or frayed
Byzantine symbol (plaited with infinite art
by its former contrivers), such and other
consecrated fragments would stuff a hole to
keep the wind away from a donkey-stall
or Fabbrica di pasta in a muddy lane. I
met dismantled walls still blushing with
the stains of fresco — a saint's robe, the
limp burden of the Addolorata ; — I met
texts innumerable, shrines fly-ridden and,
often as not, mocked with dead flowers.
And now, as I see these grey towers and
the grand purple line of the hills hem
ming in the Tiber Valley, I know I am
come down to the sated South, to the
confines of Umbria, the country of dead
churches, and of Rome the metropolis of
such deplorable broken toys. This appears
to me the disagreeable truth concerning
the harbourage of Saint Francis and Saint
Bernardine, and of Roberto da Lecce, a
man who, if everybody had his rights,
would be known as great in his way as
either. You will remember that Luther
found it out before me. The religious
enthusiasm we bring in may serve our

EARTHWORK OUT OF TUSCANY:
turn while we are here: it will be odd if
any survive for the return ; impossible to
go away as fervid as we come. Other
enthusiasms will fatten ; but the wonder
ful Gothic adumbration of Christianity was
born in the North and has never been
healthy anywhere else. Gothicism, driven
southward runs speedily to seed ; an
amazing luxuriance, a riot, strange flowers
of heavy shapes and maddening savour ;
and then that worst corruption to follow a
perfection premature. So mediaeval Christ
ianity in Umbria is a ruin, but not for
Salvator Rosa ; it has not been suffered a
dignified death. That is the sharpest cut
of all, that the poor bleached skull must be
decked with paper roses.
All this is forced upon me by my last
days in Tuscany, where a lower mean has
secured a serener reign. I had hardly real
ised the comeliness of its intellectual vigour
without this abrupt contrast. Pistoja, with
its pleasant worship of the wholesome in
common life; Lucca, girdled with the grey
and green of her immemorial planes, and
adorned with the silvery gloss of old mar
ble and stone-cutter's work exquisitely curi
ous ; then Prato, dusty little handful of old

DEAD CHURCHES
brick palaces and black and white towers,
where I heard a mass before the high altar
but two Sundays ago. All Prato was in
church that showery morning, I think. The
air was close, even in the depths of the
great nave : the fans all about me kept up a
continual flicker, like bats' wings, and the
men had to use their hats, or handkerchiefs
where they had them. To hear the re
sponses rolling about the chapels and echo
ing round the timbers of the roof you would
have said the thunder had come. It was
too dark to see Lippi's light-hearted secul-
arities in the choir; one saw them, how
ever, best in the congregation — the same
appealing innocence in the grey-eyed wo
men, and the men with the same grave self-
possession and the same respectful but
deliberate concern with their own affairs
which gives you the idea that they are lend
ing themselves to divine service rather out
of politeness than from any more intimate
motive. Lippi saw this in Prato four cent
uries ago, and I, after him, saw it all again
in a rustic sacrifice which I should find it
hard to distinguish from earlier sacrifices in
the same spot. And indeed it is informed
with precisely the same spirit, an inarticulate
213

EARTHWORK OUT OF TUSCANY :
reverence for the Dynamic in Nature. How
many religions can be reduced to that! In
Florence- again, what a hardy slip of the old
stock still survives! You may see how the
worship of Venus Genetrix and Maria Dei-
para merged in the work of Botticelli and
Ghirlandajo, Michael Angelo and Andrea
del Sarto; you may see how, if asceticism
has never thriven there, there was (and still
is) an effort after selection of some sort and
a scrupulous respect for the elegantia quce-
dam which Alberti held to be almost divine;
you may see, at least, a religion which still
binds, and which, making no great profes
sions, has grown orderly and surely to re
spect. Thus from a Tuscany, pagan, kindly,
exuberant and desponding by turns, but
always ready with that long slow smile you
first meet in the Lorenzetti of Siena and
afterwards find so tenderly expressed in its
different manifestations in the Della Robbia
and Botticelli, — a smile where patience and
wistfulness struggle together and finally
kiss, — I came down to Umbria and a people
dying of what M. Huysmans grandiosely
calls "our immense fatigue." Here is a
people that has loved asceticism not wisely.
This asceticism, pushed to the limit where it
214

DEAD CHURCHES
becomes a kind of sensuality, has bitten
into Umbria's heart; and Umbria, with a
cloyed palate, sees her frescos peel and lets
her sanctuaries out to bats and green lizards.
Surely the worst form of moral jaundice is
where the sufferer watches his affections
palsy, but makes no stir.
From the ramp of the citadel at Perugia
you can guess what a hornet's nest that
grey stronghold of the Baglioni must have
been. It commands the great plain and
bars the way to Rome. Westward, on a
spur of rock, stands Magione and a lonely
tower : this was their outpost towards
Siena. Eastward there is a white patch on
the distant hills — Spello, "mountain built
with quiet citadel," quiet enough now.
There was always a Baglione at Spello
with his eyes set on chance comers from
Foligno and Rome. Seen from thence,
Augusta Perusia hangs like a storm cloud
over her cliffs, impregnable but by strategy,
as wicked and beautiful as ever her former
masters, the Seven Deadly Sins, grandsons
of Fortebraccio. The place is like its his
tory, of course, having, in fact, grown up
with it : you might say it was the incarn
ation of Perugia's spirit ; it would only be
215

EARTHWORK OUT OF TUSCANY:
to admit, what is so obvious over here,
that a town is the work of art of that
larger soul, the body politic. So to see
the crazy streets cut in steps and crevasses
across and through the rocks, spanning a
gorge with a stone ladder or boring a
twisted tunnel under the sheer of the
Etruscan walls, to note the churches
innumerable and the foundations of the
thirty fortress-towers she once had — all this
is to read the secret of Perugia's two love
affairs. Of her towers Julius II. left but
two standing, blind pillars of masonry ;
but there were thirty of them once, and
the Baglioni held them all, for a season.
Now it was these wild Baglioni — "filling
the town with all manner of evil living,"
says Matarazzo, but nevertheless intensely
beloved for their bold bearing and beauty,
as of young hawks ; — it was just these
blood-stained striplings, this Semonetto
who rode shouting into the Piazza after an
affray and swept his clogged hair clear of
his eyes that he might see to kill, this
black Astorre, "of the few words," who
was murdered in his shirt on his marriage-
eve by his cousin and best friend ; it was
this very cousin Grifone, so beautiful that
216

DEAD CHURCHES
"he seemed an angel of Paradise," who, in
his turn, was cut down and laid out with
his dead allies below San Lorenzo that his
widow might not fail of finding him and
his marred fairness — it was just this stormy
crew that fell weeping at Suor Brigida's
meek feet, confessed their sins, and received
the Communion (encompassers and encom
passed together, and all in a rapture) on
the very eve of the great slaughter of 1500;
it was they who adorned the Oratory of
San Bernardino and made it the miracle of
rose-colour and blue that it is ; who reared
the enormous San Domenico below the
Gate of Mars, and who, in this hot-bed
of enormity, nurtured Perugino's dreamy
Madonnas. What it meant I know not at
all. There are other riddles as hard in Um
bria. Renan saw the gentle cadence of
the landscape — violet hills, the silver gauze
of water, oliveyards all of a green mist ;
read the Fiorettt and the dolorous ecstasies
of Perugino's Sebastian, and straightway
adapted the high-flown parallel worked
out in detail by Giotto. Umbria for him
was the Galilee of Italy, and Francis son of
Bernard an avatar of Christ. But Renan
was apt to allow his emotions to ride him.
217

EARTHWORK OUT OF TUSCANY:
Another dazzling contrast, which has re
cently exercised another dextrous French
man, is Siena with her Saint Catherine
and her Sodoma who betrayed her — Saint
Catherine, as great a force politically as
she was spiritually, and Sodoma, who
painted her like a Danae with love-glazed
eyes fainting before the apparition of the
Crucified Seraph.
There is nothing like this in the history
of Tuscany, whose palaces not long were
fortresses nor her monks at any time suc
cessful politicians. Cosimo had pulled
down the Florentine towers or ever the
last Oddi had loosed hold of Ridolfo's
throat. I know that Siena is just within
that province geographically ; in tempera
ment, in art and manner, she has always
shown herself intensely Umbrian. Take,
then, the case of Savonarola. The Floren
tines received him gladly enough and heard
him with honest admiration, even enthusi
asm. Still there is reason to believe they
took him, in the main, spectacularly, as
they also took that portentous old mono
maniac Gemisthos Pletho, who made re
ligions as we might make pills. For,
observe, Savonarola lost his head — and his
218

DEAD CHURCHES
life, good soul ! — where the Florentines did
not. The cobbler went beyond his last
when the Frate essayed politics. He suf
fered accordingly. But in Perugia, in Siena,
in Gubbio and Orvieto, the great revival
ists Bernardine, Catherine, Fra Roberto,
held absolute rule over body and soul. For
the moment Baglione and Oddi kissed each
other ; all feuds were stayed ; a man
might climb the back alleys of a night with
out any fear of a knife to yerk him (the
Ancient's word) under the ribs or noose
round his neck to swing him up to the
archway withal. So Catherine brought
back Boniface (and much trouble) from
Avignon, and Da Lecce wrote out a new
constitution for some rock-bound hive of the
hills, whose crowd wailing in the market
place knew the ecstasy of repentance, and
ran riot in religious orgies very much after
the fashion of the Greater Dionysia or, say, the
Salvation Army. And how Niccolo Alunno
would have painted the Salvation Army !
So it does seem that the two great
passions of Umbria burnt themselves out
together. They were, indeed, the two
ends of the candle. When the Baglioni
fell in the black work of two August nights,
219

EARTHWORK OUT OF TUSCANY:
only one escaped. And with them died
the love of the old lawless life and the in
finite relish there was for some positive
foretaste of the life of the world to come.
Both lives had been lived too fast : from
that day Perugia fell into a torpor, as Peru
gino, the glass of his time and place, also
fell. Perugino, we know, had his doubts
concerning the immortality of the soul, but
painted on his beautiful cloister-dreams,
and knocked down his saints to the highest
bidder.* Vasari assures me that the chief
solace of the old prodigal in his end of days
was to dress his young wife's hair in fan
tastic coils and braids. A prodigal he was
— true Peruginese in that — prodigal of the
delicate meats his soul afforded. His end
may have been unedifying; it must at least
have been very pitiful. Nowadays his
name stands upon the Corso Vannucci of
the town he uttered, and in the court wall
of a little recessed and colonnaded house in
the Via Deliziosa. Meantime his frescos
drop mildewed from chapel walls or are
borne away to a pauper funeral in the
Palazzo Communale.
* See, however, what he has to say for himself in
Chapter V. ante. 220

DEAD CHURCHES
In his finely studied Sensations M. Paul
Bourget, it seems to me, flogs the air and
fails to climb it when he struggles to lay
open the causes of poor Vannucci's embit
tering. If ever painting took up the office
of literature it was in the fifteenth century.
The quattrocentisti stand to Italy for our
Elizabethan dramatists. This may have
produced bad painting : Mr. George Moore
will tell you that it did. I am not sure that
it very greatly matters, for, failing a litera
ture which was really dramatic, really poet
ical, really in any sense representative, it
was as well that there led an outlet some
where. At any rate Lippi and Botticelli, to
those who know them, are expressive of
the Florentine temper when Pulci and Pol-
itian are distorted echoes of another; Peru
gino leads us into the recesses of Perugia
while Graziani keeps up fumbling at the
lock. And Perugino's languorous boys and
maids are the figments of a riotous erotic,
of a sensuous fancy without imagination or
intelligence or humour. His Alcibiades, or
Michael Archangel, seems greensick with a
love mainly physical ; his Socrates has the
combed resignation of his Jeromes and
Romualds — smoothly ordered old men set

EARTHWORK OUT OF TUSCANY :
in the milky light of Umbrian mornings and
dreaming out placid lives by the side of a
moonfaced Umbrian beauty, who is now
Mary and now Luna as chance motions his
hand. How penetrating, how distinctive
by the side of them seems Sandro's slim
and tearful Anima Mundi shivering in the
chill dawn ! With what a strange magic
does Filippino usher in the pale apparition
of the Mater Dolorosa to his Bernard, or
flush her up again to a heaven of blue-green
and a glory of burning cherubim ? This he
does, you remember, with rocket-like effect
in a chapel of the Minerva in Rome. But
it is the unquenchable thirst of the Umbrians
for some spiritual nutriment, some outlet
for their passion to be found only in blood
shed or fainting below the Cross, some
fierce and untamable animal quality such
as you see to-day in the torn gables, the
towers and bastions of Perugia, it is the
spirit which informed and made these things
you get in Perugino's pictures — in the hot
sensualism of their colour-scheme, the ripe
ness and bloom of physical beauty encasing
the vague longing of a too-rapid ado
lescence. The desire could never be fed and
the bloom wore off. Look at Duccio's work

DEAD CHURCHES

on the facade of San Bernardino. Duccio
was a Florentine, but where in Florence
would you see his like ? What a revel of
disproportion in
these long-leg
ged nymphs,
full-lipped and
narrow-eyed as
any of Rossetti's
curious imagin
ings. Take the
Poverta, a weedy
girl with the
shrinking paps
of a child. Here ...
again (exquisite 1^
as she is in
modelling and
intensity of ex
pression) you
get the entice
ment of a mal
formation which
is absolutely un-
Greek — unless
you are to count Phrygia within the magic
ring-fence — and only to be equalled by the
luxury of Beccadelli. You get that in
223

EARTHWORK OUT OF TUSCANY:
Sodoma too, the handy Lombard; you have
it in Perugino and all the Umbrians (in some
form or other); but never, I think, in the
genuine Tuscan — not even in Botticelli —
and never, of course, in the Venetians.
Duccio modelled these things while the
Delia Robbia were at their Hellenics; and a
few years after he did them, came the end
of the Baglioni and all such gear. The end
of real Umbrian art was not long. Perugino
awoke to have his doubts of the soul's im
mortality. No great wonder there, per
haps, given he acknowledged a merciful
heaven. . . .
I chanced to meet an old woman the
other day in a country omnibus. We jour
neyed together from Prato to Florence and
became very friendly. Your dry old wo
man, who hath had losses, who has become,
in fact, world- worn and very wise, or like
one of Shakespeare's veterans — the Grave-
digger, or the Countryman in Antony and
Cleopatra — has probed the ball and found it
hollow ; such a battered and fortified soul
in petticoats is peculiar to Italy, and coun
tries where the women work and the men,
pocketing their hands, keep sleek looks. We
had just passed a pleasant little procession.
224

DEAD CHURCHES
It was Sunday, the hour Benediction. A
staid nun was convoying a party of school
girls to church ; whereupon I remarked to
my neighbour on their pretty bearing, a
sort of artless piety and of attention for un
known but not impossible blessings which
they had about them. But my old woman
took small comfort from it. She knew
those cattle, she said : Capuchins, Jacobins,
Black, White and Grey, — knew them all.
Well! Everybody had his way of making
a living: hers was knitting stockings. A
hard life, via, but an honest. Here it became
me to urge that the religious life might have
its compensations, without which it would
perhaps be harder than knitting stockings ;
that one needed relaxation and would do
well to be sure that it was at least innocent.
Relaxation of a kind, said she, a man must
have. Snuff now ! She was inveterate at
the sport. The view was very dry; but I
think it reasoned limitations also very Tus
can, and by no means exclusive of a tolera
ble amount of piety and honest dealing.
Foligno, by mere contrast, reminds me of
it — busy Foligno huddled between the
mighty knees of a chalk down, city of fall
ing churches and handsome girls, just now
%s 225

EARTHWORK OUT OF TUSCANY:
parading the streets with their fans a-flutter
and a pretty turn to each veiled head of
them. As I write the light dies down, the wind
drops, huge inky clouds hang over the
west; the sun, as he falls behind them, sets
them kindling at the edge. The worn old
bleached domes, the bell-towers and turrets
looming in the blue dusk, seem to sigh that
the century moves so slowly forward. How
many more must they endure of these ?
It is the hour of zAve Maria. But only
two cracked bells ring it in.

226

ENVOY : TO ALL YOU LADIES
LOVELY and honourable ladies, it is, as
I hold, no mean favour you have ac
corded me, to sit still and smiling while I
have sung to your very faces a stave verg
ing here and there on the familiar. You
have sat thus enduring me, because, being
wrought for the most part out of stone or
painter's stuff, your necessities have indeed
forbidden retirement. Yet my obligations
should not on that account be lighter. He
would be a thin spirit who should gain a
lady's friendly regard, and then vilipend
because she knew no better, or could not
choose. I hope indeed that I have done
you no wrong, gentildonne. I protest that
I have meant none ; but have loved you all
as a man may, who has, at most, but a
bowing acquaintance with your ladyships.
As I recall your starry names, no blush
hinting unmannerliness suspect and uncon-
fessed hits me on the cheek : — Simonetta,
Ilaria, Nenciozza, Bettina ; you too, candid
Mariota of Prato ; you, flinching little
227

EARTHWORK OUT OF TUSCANY:
Imola; and you, snuff-taking, wool-carding
ancient lady of the omnibus — scorner of
monks, I have kissed your hands. I have
at least given our whole commerce frankly
to the world ; and I know not how any
shall say we have been closer acquainted
than we should. You, tall Ligurian Simon
etta, loved of Sandro, mourned by Giuliano
and, for a season, by his twisted brother
and lord, have I done well to utter but one
side of your wild humour ? The side a
man would take, struck, as your Sandro
was, by a nympholepsy, or, as Lorenzo
was, by the rhymer's appetite for where
withal to sonnetteer ? If I understand you,
it was never pique or a young girl's petu
lance drove you to Phryne's one justifiable
act of self-assertion. It was honesty,
Madonna, or I have read your grey eyes in
vain ; it was enthusiasm — that flame of our
fire so sacred that though it play the incen
diary there shall be no crime — or where
would be now the " Vas d'elezione"? —
nor though it reveal a bystander's grin,
any shame at all. I shall live to tell that
story of thine, Lady Simonetta, to thy
honour and my own respect; for, as a poet
says, 22S

ENVOY: TO ALL YOU LADIES
" There is no holier flame
Than flutters torchwise in a stripling heart,
 a fire from Heaven
To ash the clay of us, and wing the God."
I have seen all memorials of you left
behind to be pondered by him who played
Dante to your Beatrice, Sandro the painting
poet, — the proud clearness of you as at the
marriage feast of Nastagio degli Onesti ; the
melting of the sorrow that wells from you
in a tide, where you hold the book of your
over-mastering honour and read Magnificat
Anima Mea with a sob in your throat ; your
acquaintance, too, with that grief which
was your own hardening ; your sojourn,
wan and woebegone as would become the
wife of Moses (maker of jealous gods) ;
all these guises of you, as well as the
presentments of your innocent youth, I
have seen and adored. But I have ever
loved you most where you stand a wistful
Venus Anadyomene — " Una donzella non
con uman volto," as Politian confessed ; for
I know your heart, Madonna, and see on
the sharp edge of your threatened life,
Ardour look back to maiden Reclusion, and
on (with a pang of foreboding) to mockery
and evil judgment. Never fear but I brave
229

EARTHWORK OUT OF TUSCANY:
your story out to the world ere many days.
And if any, with profane leer and tongue in
the cheek, take your sorrow for reproach
or your pitifulness for a shame, let them
receive the lash of the whip from one who
will trouble to wield it : non ragioniam di
lor. For your honourable women I give
you Ilaria, the slim Lucchesan, and my little
Bettincina, a child yet with none of the
vaguer surmises of adolescence when it
flushes and dawns, but likely enough, if
all prosper, to be no shame to your com
pany. As yet she is aptest to Donatello's
fancy: she will grow to be of a statelier
bevy. I see her in Ghirlandajo's garden,
pacing, still-eyed, calm and cold, with
Ginevra de' Benci and Giovanna of the
Albizzi, those quiet streets on a visit to the
mother of John Baptist.
Mariota. the hardy wife of the metal-
smith, is not for one of your quality,
though the wench is well enough now
with her baby on her arm and the best of
her seen by a poet and made enduring.
He, like our Bernardo, had motherhood in
such esteem that he held it would ransom
a sin. A sin ? I am no casuist to discuss
rewards and punishments ; but if Socrates
230

ENVOY: TO ALL YOU LADIES
were rightly informed and sin indeed
ignorance, I have no whips for Mariota's
square shoulders. Her baby, I warrant,
plucked her from the burning. I am not
so sure but you might find in that girl a re
sponsive spirit, and — is the saying too
hard? — a teacher. Contentment with a
few things was never one of your virtues,
madam. There is a lady whose name has been
whispered through my pages, a lady with
whom I must make peace if I can. Had I
known her, as Dante did, in the time of
her nine-year excellence and followed her
(with an interlude, to be sure, for Gentucca)
through the slippery ways of two lives
with much eating of salt bread, I might
have grown into her favour. But I never did
know Monna Beatrice Portinari; and when
I met her afterwards as my Lady Theologia
I thought her something imperious and
case-hardened. Now here and there some
words of mine (for she has a high stom
ach) may have given offence. I have hinted
that her court is a slender one in Italy, the
service paid her lip-service; the lowered
eyes and bated breath reserved for her ; but
for Fede her sister, tears and long kisses
231

EARTHWORK OUT OF TUSCANY:
and the clinging. Well! the Casa Catto-
lica is a broad foundation; I find Francis of
Umbria at the same board with Sicilian
Thomas. If I cleave to the one must I
despise the other? Lady Fede has my
heart and Lady Dottrina must put aside the
birch if she would share that little kingdom.
Religio habet, said Pico; theologia autem
invenit. Let her find. But she must be
speedy, for I promise her the mood grows
on me as I become italianato ; and I can
not predict when the other term of the
proposition may be accomplished. For
one thing, Lady Theologia, I praise you
not. Sympathy seems to me of the es
sence, the healing touch an excellent thing
in woman. But you told Virgil,
" lo son fatta da Dio, sua merce, tale,
Che la vostra miseria non mi tange."
Sympathy, Madonna ? And Virgil hope
less! On these terms I had rather gloom
with the good poet (whose fault in your
eyes was that he knew in what he had
believed) than freeze with you and Aquinas
on your peak of hyaline. And as I have
found you, Donna Beatrice, so in the main
have they of whom I pitch my pipe. Here
232

ENVOY: TO ALL YOU LADIES
and there a man of them got exercise for
his fingers in your web; here and there
one, as Pico the young Doctor of yellow
hair and nine hundred heresies, touched
upon the back of your ivory dais that he
might jump from thence to the poets out
beyond you in the Sun. Your great Dante,
too, loved you through all. But, Madonna,
he had loved you before when you were —
Donna pietosa e di novella etade,
and, as became his lordly soul, might never
depart from the faith he had in you. For
me, I protest I love Religion your warm-
bosomed mate too well to turn from her;
yet I would not on that account grieve her
(who treats you well out of the cup of her
abounding charity) by aspersing you. And
if I may not kiss your foot as you would
desire, I may bow when I am in the way
with you; not thanking God I am not as
you are, but, withal, wishing you that de
gree of interest in a really excellent world
with which He has blessed me and my
like, the humble fry.
Lastly, to the Spirits which are in the
shrines of the cities of Tuscany, I lift up
my hands with the offering of my thin
233

EARTHWORK OUT OF TUSCANY :
book. To Lucca dove-like and demure, to
Prato, the brown country-girl, to Pisa,
winsome maid-of-honour to the lady of
the land, to Pistoja, the ruddy-haired and
ample, and to Siena, the lovely wretch,
black-eyed and keen as a hawk; even to
Perugia, the termagant, with a scar on her
throat; but chief est to the Lady Firenze,
the pale Queen crowned with olive — to all
of you, adored and adorable sisters, I offer
homage as becomes a postulant, the re
pentance of him who has not earned his
reward, thanksgiving, and the praise I have
not been able to utter. And I send you,
Book, out to those ladies with the suppli
cation of good Master Cino, schoolman and
poet, saying, E se tu troverai donne gentile,
Ivi girai ; che la ti vo mandare ;
E dono a lor d' audienza chiedi.
Poi di a costor: Gittatevi a lor piedi,
E dite, chi vi manda e per che fare,
Udite donne, esti valletti umili.

234

THE LIFE AND DEATH OF
RICHARD YEA AND NAY
By MAURICE HEWLETT
Aztthor of " The Forest Lovers," " Little Novels of Italy;'' etc.
I2mo. Cloth. $1.50

"The hero of Mr. Hewlett's latest novel is Richard Cceur de Lion, whose
character is peculiarly suited to the author's style. It is on a much wider
plan than ' The Forest Lovers,' and while not historical in the sense of
attempting to follow events with utmost exactness, it will be found to give
an accurate portrayal of the life of the day, such as might well be expected
from the author's previous work. There is a varied and brilliant back
ground, the scene shifting from France to England, and also to Palestine.
In a picturesque way, and a way that compels the sympathies of his readers,
Mr. Hewlett reads into the heart of King Richard Cceur de Lion, showing
how he was torn by two natures and how the title ' Yea and Nay ' was
peculiarly significant of his character." — Boston Herald.
"The tale by itself is marvellously told; full of luminous poetry;
intensely human in its passion ; its style, forceful and picturesque ; its
background, a picture of beauty and mysterious loveliness; the whole,
radiant with the very spirit of romanticism as lofty in tone and as serious
in purpose as an epic poem. It is a book that stands head and shoulders
above the common herd of novels — the work of a master hand." —
Indianapolis News.
" Mr. Hewlett has done one of the most notable things in recent litera
ture, a thing to talk about with abated breath, as a bit of master-craftsman
ship touched by the splendid dignity of real creation." — The Interior.

THE MACMILLAN COMPANY
66 FIFTH AVENUE, NEW YORK

THE FOREST LOVERS
BY
MAURICE HEWLETT
12mo. Cloth. $1.50

"A series of adventures as original as they are romantic. . . .
' The Forest Lovers ' is a piece of ancient arras ; a thing mysteriously
beautiful, a book that is real, and, at the same time, radiant with
poetry and art. 'The Forest Lovers' will be read with admiration,
and preserved with something more than respect." — The Tribime,
New York.
" A story compounded of many kinds of beauty. It has, to begin
with, enchanting beauty of background ; or rather, it moves through
a beautiful world, the play of whose life upon it is subtle, beguiling,
and magical. . . . The story has a beautiful quality both of spirit
and of form." — The Outlook.
" The book is a joy to read and to remember, a source of clean
and pure delight to the spiritual sense, a triumph of romance reduced
to the essentials, and interpreted with a mastery of expression that
is well nigh beyond praise." — The Dial.
" There is a freshness, a vivacity about the narrative itself, as well
as about the style, that carries the reader more or less breathlessly
along from one thrilling scene to another, and leaves him at the end
with little disposition to lay down the book. We sincerely commis
erate the jaded reader who cannot find amusement in ' The Forest
Lovers.' " — The Critic.
James Lane Allen says :
" This work, for any one.of several solid reasons, must be regarded
as of very unusual interest. In the matter of style alone, it is an
achievement, an extraordinary achievement ... in the matter of
interpreting nature there are passages in this book that I have never
seen surpassed in prose fiction."
Hamilton W. Mabie says :
" The plot is boldly conceived and strongly sustained ; the char
acters are vigorously drawn and are thrown into striking con
trast. ... It leads the reader far from the dusty highway ; it is
touched with the penetrating power of the imagination ; it has
human interest and idyllic loveliness." — Book Reviews.

THE MACMILLAN COMPANY
66 FIFTH AVENUE, NEW YORK

LITTLE NOVELS OF ITALY

BY
MAURICE HEWLETT
12mo. Cloth. $1.50

"Among the younger writers of fiction there are two men whose
works are of inspiration all compact. They are Rudyard Kipling
and Maurice Hewlett. . . . Both these writers are faithful to human
nature, which is at the bottom of all great art and literature. In
Kipling the dominant ideal seems to be that of truth, in Hewlett it
is beauty ('truth seen from another side'). ... In the writings
of the former, truth emerges in naked force ; with the author of
' Little Novels of Italy," it comes forth adorned with the flowers of
art and poetry, clad in the shimmering cloth of gold of the Italian
Renaissance." — The Tribune, New York.
" There is imagination luminous with poetry and art in this singu
larly romantic collection of short stories. In the matter of style
alone, Mr. Hewlett accomplishes much that is wonderful in its deli
cacy and loveliness ; yet he deals with intensely human passions —
passions that with a less delicate perceptive touch or sensitiveness
to the divine in human suffering would be base and sordid." — ¦
Boston Herald.
" Mr. Hewlett is one of those rare and happy authors who can
make niches for themselves quite apart from the ordinary trend of
literature, where invidious comparisons cannot reach them. The
quaint, mediaeval quality of his ' Forest Lovers ' has cast its spell
over countless readers, even while they questioned wherein that
spell could lie; and so it is with his latest volume." — Commercial
Advertiser. " The style is forceful and picturesque, and the stories are so true
to their locality that they read almost like translations." — New York
Times.

NEW CANTERBURY TALES
By MAURICE HEWLETT
Cloth 12mo $1.50

Mr. Maurice Hewlett, whose conceptions have never lacked
for boldness, has, without challenging comparison, and in complete
individuality of style, taken up the great subject made famous by
Chaucer. He interweaves six interesting Tales into a single charm
ing romance. Following the Prologue are:
The Scrivener's Tale of the Countess Alys.
Dan Costard's Tale of Peridore and Paravail.
Captain Salomon Brazenhead's Tale of the Half-Brothers.
The Prioress of Ambresbury's Tale of St. Gervase of Plessy,
Master Richard Smith's Tale of the Cast of the Apple.
Percival Perceforest's Tale of Eugenio and Galeotto.
"The whole is an Intense and delightful surprise." — Chicago
Tribune. " Each strikes a different note, but each is faithful to the taste of
his time, which means a stout belief in the Saints, and perhaps as
genuine a fear of ' Old Legion,' a delight in chivalrous deeds, in
mundane pomp and might. And behind them is the author's genius
for the creation of character and drama, so that these Old World
fancies, full of the glamour of ancient legend, in some cases all com
pact of a curious, mediaeval quaintness, seem somehow extraordi
narily human and true." — New York Tribune.
" With each successive volume there is added proof, if such proof
were needed, that for real fineness of touch and true artistic instinct
Mr. Hewlett stands quite by himself in his country and generation."
— The Commercial Advertiser > New York.

THE MACMILLAN COMPANY
66 FIFTH AVENUE, NEW YORK

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