Earthwork out of Tuscany Part 2

Unpremeditated art it is not: indeed it is craft rather than art; for Art demands a larger share of soul-expenditure than Pulci could afford. And of such is the delicate ware which Tuscany, nothing 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 a.s.sure the traverser of the Saint Gothard that he has pa.s.sed the ridge and may soon smell the olives.

[Footnote 1: 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 not dull. It might bring it nearer to Milton, as Dante brought Keats. Witness his revision of _Hyperion_. If the Tuscans overrated the craft in Poetry, we a.s.suredly underrate it.]

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 pa.s.sage, "that whatever 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 somewhat, scrupulously weigh, select and refuse; in short adapt exquisitely your means until they are adequate to your ends. And, keeping the eye steadily on that, you might grow to discard solemn ends, or momentous, altogether, until poetry and painting ceased to be arts at all, and must be cla.s.sed, 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 serious to say. I doubt it even of Ta.s.so, though Ta.s.so, I know, has a vogue. I except, 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 necessity 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 torturing, you must spoil); poetry, at once music and soothsay, knitted to us as 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 cclx.x.xii., where it is written how:--

_"It lies with Death to take the beauty of Laura but not the gracious memory of her";_

As thus:

"Now hast them 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."

Look in vain for the deep heart-cry that voiced Dante's pa.s.sion 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."

[Footnote: This translation is Rossetti's.]

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 habitually. 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 rhythm and that ensuing harmony of sentences, 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 harmony, 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.

_Per_, 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 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 avversamente si dolsono, chi in versi, chi in prosa." The poor dead lady was, in fact, a b.u.t.t 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 compa.s.sion. 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 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 insuperable 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 delicately and precisely as before.

"Falling, therefore, such an one to death, all the wits of Florence, as is seemly in so public a calamity, 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 I, too, must needs be; I, too, mingle rhymes with tears. So I did in the sonnets below rehea.r.s.ed; whereof the first began thus:

'O limpid s.h.i.+ning 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 a.s.sured splendour as not alone to excel other stars, but so eagerly to s.h.i.+ne 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 s.h.i.+ne 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 G.o.d 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 over-boldness in her, endowed as she was with all the power of her beauty, that she should strive to s.h.i.+ne 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, 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-mentioned 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 Masters.h.i.+p jig to suit their occasions who had of late been in his presence) and the naive acceptance of all gifts as "buona materia a an 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 materia a un sonetto_ the dawn can give you. Thus flourished poetry in the Tuscan _quattrocento_; for Politian was but little more poet than Lorenzo, while he was no less dextrous as a rhymer and fas.h.i.+oner of conceits. Not serious, but _piacevole_, with an _elegantia quaedam prope divinum_; therefore _molto utile_. Pen-work in fact, and 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 Almanack and an alb.u.m of photographs. Well, well! We must teach them to say, _Philistia, be thou glad of me_, I suppose.

V

OF BOILS AND THE IDEAL

[Footnote: This appeared in the _New Review_ for December 1896, and is reproduced by leave of the Publisher.]

_(A Colloquy with Perugino)_

"There," said my Roman escort, as we forded the Tiber near Torglano, "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 s.h.i.+ps' 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! had described it, "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 impa.s.sivity; his fencing was not with such tools. He sulked, and must know next what I wanted at Perugia. I told him I had business with Pietro Vannucci, called Il Perugino by those who admired him from a distance; and he seemed relieved, withal a something of contempt 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 h.o.a.rding 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 cantered 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. "G.o.d is good," he said, "G.o.d 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 trees, and entered the armed city by the Porta Eburnea.

Inside the walls, threading 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 pa.s.sed from one ambush to another, by dark gullies, stinking traps, and twisted stairways, to the Via Deliziosa, without ever a hint of the broad suns.h.i.+ne 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 pa.s.s with his young wife. He was, in fact, tiring her hair in the open: nothing more; nevertheless there was that air of mystery in the performance which made me at once squeamish of going further, 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 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 fas.h.i.+on, 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. a.s.suredly so odd a beginning to my adventure, a hardier man would have stumbled!

The sport went on. The girl, as I considered her, was of slight, almost mean figure; her good looks, which as yet lay rather in promise, resolved themselves into a small compa.s.s, 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 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 something 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, fan-shape, such as country girls use, till it took the semblance, now of a tower, now of a wheel, now of some winged beast--sphinx or basilisk--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 s.n.a.t.c.h 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 orgy 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 Prothonotary's letter, and he saw the broad 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 pa.s.s 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 pa.s.sed, "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 bottles, 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 looking down to earth she pa.s.sed 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-disposed world just then. Pietro, much at 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 wors.h.i.+p, as you might say, with maimed rites. Moreover, Poggibonsi had a Saint Roch done by that luxurious Sienese Bazzi (a man of scandalous living, as I daresay you know), where the boil was fiery to behold and as big as a man's ankle- bone. This was a cause of new great devotion among the impious by reason of its plain relations.h.i.+p 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 pet.i.tion that Madonna should be rarely adorned with pearls Flemish- fas.h.i.+on, 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 gla.s.ses clinking."

I, too, heard Imola's footfall on the flags, 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- continence. 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, Madonna, 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.

"It was plainly some young n.o.ble 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 unconcern, and I feared the whip by-and-bye 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, the summary and perfect conclusion of ail possible boils."

"_To Pithanon?_ Yes; I admit it. For Aristotle says as much."

"Right so do I, in my degree and by my art," said Perugino; "and without knowing 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 deputation 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 _Sebastian_; and know also Il 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 displacement 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 appet.i.te 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 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 t.i.tillation 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."