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EARTHWORK OUT OF TUSCANY

Being Impressions and Translations of Maurice Hewlett

"For as it is hurtful to drink wine or water alone; and as wine mingled with water is pleasant and delighteth the taste: even so speech, finely framed, delighteth the ears of them that read the story."--3 MACCABEES xv. 39.

TO

MY FATHER

THIS LITTLE BOOK

NOT AS BEING WORTHY BUT AS ALL I HAVE

IS DEDICATED

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

PREFACE TO THE THIRD EDITION

I cannot be for ever explaining what I intended when I wrote this book. Upon this, its third appearance, even though it is to rank in that good company which wears the crimson of Eversley, it must take its chance, undefended by its conscious parent. He feels, indeed, with all the anxieties, something of the pride of the hen, who conducts her brood of ducklings to the water, sees them embark upon the flood, and must leave them to their buoyant performances, dreadful, but aware also that they are doing a finer thing than her own merits could have hoped to win them. So it is here. I did not at the outset expect a third edition in any livery; I may still fear a wreck for this cockboat of my early invention; but I hope I am too respectful of myself to try throwing oil upon the waters.

I leave the former prefaces as they stand. I felt them when I made them, and feel them still; but I shall make no more. If _Earthwork_ has the confidence, at this time of day, to carry a red coat, it shall carry it alone.

LONDON, 1901.

PREFACE TO THE SECOND EDITION

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

I had hoped to have done better than this. I tried to express in the title of my book what I thought I had done; more, I was bold enough to assume that, having weathered the title, my readers would find a smooth channel with leading-lights enough to bring them sound to port. _Mea culpa!_ I believe that I was wrong. The book has been read as a collection of essays and stories and dialogues only pulled together by the binder's tapes; as otherwise disjointed, fragmentary, _décousue_, a "piebald monstrous book," a sort of _kous-kous_, made out of the odds and ends of a scribbler's note-book. Some have liked some morsels, others other morsels: it has been a matter of the luck of the fork. Very few, one only to my knowledge, can have seen the thing as it presented itself to my flattering eye--not as a pudding, not as a case of confectionery even, but as a little sanctuary of images such as a pious heathen might make of his earthenware 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 the first man heard his first thunderstorm he said (or Human Nature has bettered itself), "Certainly a God is angry." When after a night of doubt and heaviness the sun rose out of the sea, the sea kindled, and all its waves laughed innumerably, again he said, "God is stirring. Joy cometh in the morning." Even in saying so much he was making images, poor man, for one's soul is as dumb as a fish and can only talk by signs. But by degrees, as his hand grew obedient to his heart, he set to work to make more lasting images of these 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 pæan. But he is dumb, the wretch! He must make images. This he does because Necessity drives him: this I have done. And part of the world calls the result Criticism, and another part says, It may be Art. But I know that it is the struggling of a dumb man to find an outlet, and I call it Religion.

"God first made man, and straightway man made God; No wonder if a tang of that same sod, Whereout 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 _pâte sur pâte_ comes Criticism, to do for Art what Art does for life. I have tried in this book to be the artist at second-hand, to make pictures of pictures, images of images, poems of poems. You may call it Criticism, you may call it Art: I call it Religion. It is making the best thing I can out of the best things I feel.

LONDON, 1898.

ADVERTISEMENT TO THE FIRST EDITION

Polite reader, you who have travelled _Italy_, it will not be unknown to you that the humbler sort in that country have ever believed certain spots and recesses of their land--as wells, mountain-paths, farmsteads, groves of ilex or olive, quiet pine-woods, creeks or bays of the sea, and such like hidden ways--to be the chosen resort of familiar spirits, baleful or beneficent, fate-ridden or amenable to prayer, half divine, wholly out of rule or ordering; which rustic deities and _genii locorum_, if it was not needful to propitiate, it was fascination to observe. It is believed of them in the hill-country round about _Perugia_ and in the quieter parts of _Tuscany_, that they are still present, tolerated of God by reason of their origin (which is, indeed, that of the very soil whose effluence they are), chastened, circumscribed and, as it were, combed or pared of evil desire and import. To them or their _avatars_ (it matters little which) the rude people still bow down; they still humour them with gifts of flowers, songs, or artless customs (as of Mayday, or the _Giorno de' Grilli_); you may still see wayside shrines, votive tablets, humble offerings, set in a farm-wall or country hedge, starry and fresh as a patch of yellow flowers in a rye-field. If you say that they have made 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 their informing spirits, of the spirits of themselves, their soil, and the fair works they have accomplished. So I have called this book _Earthwork out of Tuscany. Qui habet aures ad audiendum audiat._

LONDON, 1895.

CONTENTS

PROEM: APOLOGIA PRO LIBELLO

1. EYE OF ITALY

2. LITTLE FLOWERS

3. A SACRIFICE AT PRATO

4. OF POETS AND NEEDLEWORK

5. OF BOILS AND THE IDEAL

6. THE SOUL OF A FACT

7. QUATTROCENTISTERIA

8. THE BURDEN OF NEW TYRE

9. ILARIA, MARIOTA, BETTINA

10. CATS

11. THE SOUL OF A CITY

12. WITH THE BROWN BEAR

13. DEAD CHURCHES AT FOLIGNO

ENVOY: TO ALL YOU LADIES

PROEM

APOLOGIA PRO LIBELLO: IN A LETTER TO A FRIEND

Although you know your Italy well, you ask me, who see her now for the first time, to tell you how I find her; how she sinks into me; wherein she fulfils, and wherein fails to fulfil, certain dreams and fancies of mine (old amusements of yours) about her. Here, truly, you show yourself the diligent collector of human documents your friends have always believed you; for I think it can only be appetite 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 _rechauffée_ of Paul Bourget and Walter Pater, with _ana_ lightly culled from Symonds, and, perchance, the questionable support of ponderous references out of Burckhardt. In spite of my waiver of the title, you relish the notion of a Modern face to face with Botticelli and Mantegna and Perugino (to say nothing of that Giotto who had so much to say!), artists in whom, you think and I agree, certain impressions strangely positive of many vanished aspects of life remain to be accounted for, and (it may be) reconciled with modern visions of Art and Beauty. Well! I am flattered and touched by such confidence in my powers of expression and your own of endurance. I look upon you as a late-in-time Maecenas, generously resolved to defray the uttermost charge of weariness that a young writer may be encouraged to unfold himself and splash in the pellucid Tuscan air. I cannot 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 Messr. Cook and 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 Italian cookery. Crucial indeed! for diverse are the ways of the Hyperboreans cheek by jowl with _asciutta_ and Tuscan tablewine, as any _osteria_ will convince you. To one man the oil is a delight: he will soak himself in it till his thought swims viscid in his pate. To another it is abhorrent: straightway he calls for his German vinegar and drowns the native flavour in floods as bitter as polemics. Your wine too! Overweak for water, says one, who consumes a stout _fiaschone_ and spends a stertorous afternoon in headache and cursing at the generous home-grown. _Frizzante!_ cries your next to all his gods; and flushes the poison with infected water. Crucial enough. So with art. Goethe went to Assisi. "I left on my left," 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 confessional-box in the nave! But he had no eyes for Gothic, being set on the Temple of Minerva. The Right Honourable Joseph Addison's views of Siena will be familiar to you; but an earlier still was our excellent Mr. John Evelyn doing the grand tour; going to Pisa, but seeing no frescos in the Campo Santo; going to Florence, but seeing neither Santa Croce nor Santa Maria Novella; in his whole journey he would seem to have found no earlier name than Perugino's affixed to a picture. Goethe was urbane to Francia, "a very respectable artist"; he was astonished at Mantegna, "one of the older painters," but accepted him as leading up to 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 mentions either. Why should he, honest man? They couldn't draw! Cookery is very like Art, as Socrates told Gorgias. Unfortunately, it is far easier to verify your impressions in the former case than in the latter. Yet that is the first and obvious duty of the critic--that is, the writer whomsoever. In my degree it has been mine. Wherefore, if I unfold anything at all, it shall not be the _Cicerone_ nor the veiled "Anonymous," nor the _Wiederbelebung_, nor (I hope) the _Mornings in Florence_, but that thing in which you place such touching reliance --myself and my poor sensations, _Ecco_! I have nothing else. You take a boy out of school; you set him to book-reading, give him Shakespere and a Bible, set him sailing in the air with the poets; drench him with painter's dreams, _via_, Titian's carmine and orange, Veronese's rippling brocades, Umbrian morning skies, and Tuscan hues wrought of moonbeams and flowing water--anon you turn him adrift in Italy, a country where all poets' souls seem to be caged in crystal and set in the sun, and say--"Here, dreamer of dreams, what of the day?" _Madonna!_ You ask and you shall obtain. I proceed to expand under your benevolent eye.

To me, Italy is not so much a place where pictures have been painted (some of which remain to testify), as a place where pictures have been lived and built; I fail to see how Perugia is not a picture by, say, Astorre Baglione. Perhaps I should be nearer the mark if I said it was a frozen epic. What I mean is, that in Italy it is still impossible to separate the soul and body of the soil, to say, as you may say in London or Paris,-- here behind this sordid grey mask of warehouses and suburban villas lurks the soul that once was Shakespere or once was Villon. You will not say that of Florence; you will hardly say it (though the time is at hand) of Milan and Rome. Do the gondoliers still sing snatches of Ariosto? I don't know Venice. M. Bourget assures me his _vetturino_ quoted Dante to him between Monte Pulciano and Siena; and I believe him. At any rate, in Italy as I have found it, the inner secret of Italian life can be read, not in painting alone, nor poem alone, but in the swift sun, in the streets and shrouded lanes, in the golden pastures, in the plains and blue mountains; in flowery cloisters and carved church porches--out of doors as well as in. The story of Troy is immortal--why not because the Trojans themselves live immortal in their fabled sons? That being so, I by no means promise you my sensations to be of the ear-measuring, nose-rubbing sort now so popular. I am bad at dates and soon tire of symbols. My theology may be to seek; you may catch me as much for the world as for Athanase. With world and doctor I shall, indeed, have little enough to do, for wherever I go I shall be only on the look-out for the soul of this bright-eyed people, whom, being no Goethe, I do not profess to understand or approve. Must the lover do more than love his mistress, and weave his sonnets about her white brows? I may see my mistress Italy embowered in a belfry, a fresco, the scope of a Piazza, the lilt of a _Stornello_, the fragrance of a legend. If I don't find a legend to hand I may, as lief as not, invent one. It shall be a legend fitted close to the soul of a fact, if I succeed: and if I fail, put me behind you and take down your four volumes of Rio, or your four-and-twenty of Rosini. Go to Crowe and Cavalcaselle and be wise. Parables!--I like the word--to go round about the thing, whose heart I cannot hit with my small-arm, marking the goodly 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 craftsman conjured withal, you come down to the seamy wood, and Art is gone. Nay, but your Morelli, your Crowe, ciphering as they went for want of thought, what did they do but screw Art into test- tubes, and serve you up the fruit of their litmus-paper 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 break into a more tripping stave than our prose can afford, here and there. The pilgrim, if he is young and his shoes or his belly pinch him not, sings as he goes, the very stones at his heels (so music-steeped is this land) setting him the key. Jog the foot-path way through Tuscany in my company, it's Lombard Street to my hat I charm you out of your 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 laughing. Shrug me (or my book) away; but, pray Heaven, laugh! And, as the young are always very wise when they find their voice and have their confidence well put out to usury, laugh (but in your cloak) when I am sententious or apt to tears. I have found _lacrimæ rerum_ in Italy as elsewhere; and sometimes Life has seemed to me to sail as near to tragedy as Art can do. I suppose I must be a very bad Christian, for I remain sturdily an optimist, still convinced that it is good for us to be here, while the sun is up. Men and pictures, poems, cities, churches, comely deeds, grow like cabbages: they are of the soil, spring from it to the sun, glow open-hearted while he is there; and when he goes, they go. So grew Florence, and Shakespere, and Greek myth--the three most lovely flowers of Nature's seeding I know of. And with the flowers grow the weeds. My first weed shall sprout by Arno, in a cranny of the Ponte Vecchio, or cling like a Dryad of the wood to some gnarly old olive on the hill-side of Arcetri. If it bear no little gold-seeded flower, or if its pert leaves don't blush under the sun's caress, it shan't be my fault or the sun's.

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

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

I

EYE OF ITALY

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

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

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