Part 4

Yet, though one feels that this new spirit has tamed the desert, and transplanted to it enough of the leaven of human intercourse to exorcise its evil spirits, the imagination remains chiefly struck by the strangeness of the conditions in which these voluntary exiles must have found themselves. The hermits brought little with them from the world of cities and men compared to what they found in the wilderness. Their relation to the earth--their ancient mysterious mother--must have been the most intimate as well as the most interesting part of their lives; as a “return to nature” the experience had a freshness and intensity which the modern seeker after primeval sensations can never hope to recover. For in those days, when distances were measured by the pilgrim’s sandal or the ass’s hoof, a few miles meant exile, and the mountain visible from the walls of his native town offered the solitary as complete an isolation as the slopes of Lebanon. News travelled at the same pace, when it did not drop by the way. There was little security outside the city walls, and small incentive for the traveller, except from devotional motives, to seek out the anchorite on his inaccessible height.

The hermit, therefore, was thrown back on the companionship of the wild; and what he won from it we read in the gentler legends of the desert, and in the records of the early Italian artists. Much, for instance, is told of the delightful nature of the intercourse between the solitaries and wild animals. The lion having been the typical “denizen” of the Libyan sands, the Italian painter has transplanted him to the Umbrian hill-sides, where, jointly with the wolf and the stag, he lives in gentle community with the anchorites. For instead of fleeing from or fighting these lords of the wilderness, the wise hermits at once entered into negotiations with them--negotiations sometimes resulting in life-long friendships, and sealed by the self-sacrificing death of the adoring animal. It was of course the power of the cross which subjugated these savage beasts; and many instances are recorded of the control exercised over wild animals, and the contrition awakened in them, by the conquering sign. But the hermits, not content with asserting their spiritual predominance over these poor soulless creatures (_non sono Cristiani_), seemed to feel that such a victory was too easy, and were themselves won over by the devotion of their dumb friends, and drawn into a brotherly commerce which no law of the Church prescribed.

The mystical natural history of the first Christian centuries facilitated the belief in this intercourse between man and beast. When even familiar domestic animals were credited with strange symbolic attributes, it was natural to people the wild with the dragon, the hydra and the cocatrix; to believe that the young of the elephant were engendered by their mothers’ eating of the mandragora which grows on a mount near Paradise; that those of the lion were born dead and resuscitated by their parents’ breath; and that the old eagle renewed his youth by plunging three times in a magic fountain. It is not strange that creatures so marvellously endowed should have entered into friendly relations with the human intruders upon their solitude, and subdued their savage natures to the teachings of their new masters. And as the lion and the wolf were gradually transformed into humble but wise companions, so the other influences of the wilderness came to acquire a power over the solitaries. Even after the early Thebaids had been gathered in under one or another of the great monastic rules, seekers after holiness continued to flee the communal life, and in Italy every lonely height came to have its recluse. It was impossible that these little restricted human lives, going forth singly into the desert, should not be gradually absorbed into it and saturated with its spirit. Think what a soul-shattering or soul-making experience it must have been to the dweller in the narrow walled town or the narrower monastery, to go forth alone, beyond the ploughed fields and the road to the next village, beyond the haunts of men and hail of friendly voices, forth into the unmapped region of hills and forests, where wild beasts and robbers, and other presences less definable but more baleful, lay in wait for the lonely traveller! From robbers there was not much to fear: the solitaries were poor, and it was a great sin to lay hands on them. The wild beasts, too, might be won over to Christian amity; but what of those other presences of which the returning traveller whispered over the evening fire?

At first, no doubt, the feeling of awe was uppermost, and only the heart inflated with divine love could sustain the assaults of fear and loneliness; but gradually, as the noise of cities died out, as the ear became inured to the vast hush of nature, and the mind to the delicious recurrence of untroubled hours--then, wonderfully, imperceptibly, the spirit of the hermit must have put forth tendrils of sympathy and intelligence toward the mysterious world about him. Think of the joy of escaping from the ceaseless brawls, the dirt, disease and misery of the mediæval town, or from the bickering, the tale-bearing, the mechanical devotions of the crowded monastery! Think of the wonder of entering, alone and undisturbed, into communion with this vast still world of cliff and cataract, of bird and beast and flower!

There were, of course, different kinds of hermits: the dull kind whose only object was to escape from the turmoil and rivalry of the city, or the toil and floggings of the farm, and to live drowsily in a warm cleft of the rocks (not too far from the other solitaries), high above the populous plain alternately harried by war and pestilence; and there was the ecstatic, so filled with the immanent light that he saw neither cliff nor cataract, that the various face of nature was no more to him than a window of clear glass opening on the brightness of the beatific vision. But there must have been a third kind also--the kind in whom the divine love, instead of burning like a cold inward flame, overflowed on the whole world about him; to whom, in this new immediate contact with nature, the swallow became a sister, the wolf a brother, the very clods “lovers and lamps”: mute Saint Francises, born out of their due time, to whom the life of nature revealed, inarticulately but profoundly, the bond of brotherhood between man and the soil.

It was to these solitaries that the wilderness truly confessed itself, yielding up once more all the terror and the poetry of its ancient life. For the cliffs and forests shunned of men had not always been thus deserted, and always there had throbbed in them the pulse of that strange intermediate life, between the man and the clod, of which the tradition lingers in all lonely places. The hermits of course knew this: the life of ancient days was still close to them. They knew also that the power of the cross had banished from temple and market-place, from garden, house and vineyard, a throng of tutelary beings on whom the welfare of men had once been thought to depend, but who had now been declared false to their trust, and driven forth to join their brothers of the hills and woods. This knowledge rested on no vague rumours, but on authenticated fact. Were not many of the old temples still standing, some built into the walls of Christian churches, others falling into desecrated ruin on lonely cliff and promontory? And was it not known that in these latter the wraiths of the old gods still reassembled? Many pilgrims and travellers bore witness to the fact. Who had not heard of the Jewish wayfarer, overtaken by night in a lonely country, who sought shelter in a ruined temple of Apollo, and would have been blasted by the god and his attendant demons, had he not (converted by fear) dispelled the unholy rout with the sign of the cross?

A tangle of classic and mediæval traditions, Greek, Etruscan and Germanic, in which the gods of the Thessalian glades and the werewolves of northern forests rode the midnight blast in the _chevauchée_ of a wild Walpurgisnacht, haunted the background of life in that confused age when “ignorant armies clashed by night” on the battleground of the awakening human intelligence. To the citizen hugging the city walls, this supernatural world was dark with images of sin and fear; but to the dweller in the forest, bold enough to affront the greater terrors of self-communion, it must have offered a mitigating sense of fellowship. That it did so is proved even by some of the earliest legends. It was not always in forms of peril and perdition that the banished gods manifested themselves to the votaries of the usurper. To the dweller in the city they may have come in vengeful shape, like the Venus, _tout entière à sa proie attachée_, who held fast to the Christian bridegroom’s ring (though surely here one catches a note of the old longing); but in their native solitude they seem to have appeared propitiatingly, with timid proffers of service, as when Saint Anthony, travelling in search of a fellow-hermit, was guided on his way, first by a centaur and then by “a little man with hoofs like a goat.”

For generations indeed, for centuries even in that slow-moving time, the divinities of the old dispensation must have remained more familiar to the simple people than the strange new God of Israel. Often they must have stolen back in the twilight, to surprise and comfort the unlettered toilers who still believed in them, still secretly offered them the dripping honeycomb and bowl of ewe’s milk, or hung garlands in the cleft tree which they haunted. To some of these humble hearts, grieving for their old fireside gods, and a little bewildered by the demands of the great forbidding Christ who frowned from the golden heights of the Byzantine apse, the “return to nature” must have been like a coming home to the instinctive endearing ways of childhood. How could they be alarmed by the sight of these old exiled gods, familiars of the hearth and garden; they who had been born to the sense of such presences, to half-human intercourse with beings who linked man to the soil that nurtured him, and the roof beneath which he slept?

Even the most holy and learned men of the first Christian centuries did not question the actual existence of the heathen gods, and the Fathers of the Church expended volumes of controversy in discussing their origin and their influence on a Christianized world. A strange conflict of opinion waged around this burning question. By the greater number of authorities the old gods were believed to be demons, emanations of the mysterious spirit of evil, himself the Ahriman of the ancient Eastern dualism, who had cleverly smuggled himself into the new Christian creed. Yet the oracles, though usually regarded as the voices of these demons, were always believed in and quoted by the Christian Church, and the history of the dark ages abounds in allusion to the authority of the Sibylline books. While Christian scholarship thus struggled under the spell of the old beliefs, how could the artisan and serf have freed themselves from it? Gradually, indeed, the Church, foreseeing the perils of a divided allegiance, and fearing the baleful loveliness of the old gods, was to transform their myths into Christian legend, and so supply a new throng of anthropomorphic conceptions for minds unable to keep their faith alive on the thin abstractions of the schoolmen. The iconography of the early Church bears witness to the skill with which these adaptations were effected, and the slender young Olympians and their symbols pressed into the service of the new faith; but it was long before the results of this process reached the popular mind, and meanwhile the old gods lived on in simple fellowship with the strange saints and angels.

Through all the middle ages the marvellous did not fail from the earth: it simply receded farther from the centres of life, drawing after it the hearts of the adventurous. The Polo brothers were no doubt clear-sighted practical men while they drove their trade in Venice; but wonders pressed upon them when they set foot in the Great Khan’s domains. If an astute Italian prince, who lived till the middle of the fifteenth century with the light of the new humanism flooding his court, could yet, on his travels to the Holy Land and Greece, discover castles inhabited by enchanted snakes, as well as wonder-working shrines of his own creed, how could the simple hearts of the anchorite and solitary remain closed to the old wonders?

Shapes which have once inhabited the imagination of man pass reluctantly out of existence. Centuries of poetic belief had peopled the old world with a race of superhuman beings, and as many centuries would be needed to lay their ghosts. It must be remembered, moreover, that no sudden cataclysm, political or intellectual, marked the introduction of the Christian faith. For three centuries after the sacrifice on Calvary, hardly an allusion to the new god is to be found in the pages of the pagan historians and philosophers. Even after he had led the legions of Constantine to victory, and so won official allegiance throughout the Roman world, no violent change marked the beginning of the new era. For centuries still, men ploughed the same fields with ploughs fashioned on the same lines, kept the same holidays with the same rites, and lived on the same store of accumulated beliefs. And in the hearts of the solitaries these beliefs must have lingered longest. For in fleeing the world they were returning to the native habitations of the old gods. They were nature-spirits every one, sprung from the wave, the cloud, the tree. To the cities they had been borne triumphant by the will of men, and from the cities they might be banished at its behest; but who should drive them from their old stronghold in the breast of nature? Their temples might be re-dedicated to the new god, but none could banish them from the temples not made with hands. Daylight might deny them, but twilight confessed them still. They made no effort to recover the supremacy which had been wrested from them: the gods know when their hour has come. But they lived on, shrinking back more and more into their primitive forms, into the vapour, the tree-trunk, the moon-track on the lonely sea; or revealing themselves, in wistful fugitive glimpses, to the mortals who had come to share their forest exile.

In what gentle guise they showed themselves, one may see in many pictures of the Italian _quattro cento_, some of whose lesser painters seem to have been in actual communion with this pale woodland Olympus. The gods they depict are not the shining lords of the Greek heaven, but half-human, half-sylvan creatures, shy suppliants for mortal recognition, hovering gently on the verge of evanescence. Robetta, the Florentine engraver, transferred them to some of his plates, Luini caught their tender grace in his Sacrifice to Pan and Metamorphosis of Daphne, and Lorenzo Costa gives a glimpse of their sylvan revels in the Mythological Scene of the Louvre; but it was Piero di Cosimo who had the clearest intuition of them. The gentle furred creature of the Death of Procris might have been the very faun who showed Saint Anthony the way; and in all Cosimo’s mythological pictures one has the same impression of that intermediate world, the twilight world of the conquered, Christianized, yet still lingering gods, so different from the clear upper air of classic art.

Was it, as the scholars would have us believe, mere lack of book-learning and technical skill that kept the painters of the _quattro_ cento spell-bound in this mediæval Olympus? Were these vanishing gods and half-gods merely a clumsy attempt to formulate the classic conception of divinity? But the Pisani had discovered Greek plastic art two centuries earlier; but the uncovered wonders of Rome were being daily drawn and measured by skilful hands; but the silhouettes of the antique temples were still outlined against the skies of Greater Greece! No--these lesser artists were not struggling to embody a half-understood ideal. Kept nearer the soil and closer to the past by the very limitations of their genius, they left to the great masters the task of reconstituting classical antiquity, content to go on painting the gods who still lived in their blood, the gods their own forbears had known in the familiar streets and fields, the fading gods whom the hermits were last to see in the lost recesses of the mountain.

A TUSCAN SHRINE

One of the rarest and most delicate pleasures of the continental tourist is to circumvent the compiler of his guide-book. The red volumes which accompany the traveller through Italy have so completely anticipated the most whimsical impulses of their readers that it is now almost impossible to plan a tour of exploration without finding, on reference to them, that their author has already been over the ground, has tested the inns, measured the kilometres, and distilled from the massive tomes of Kugler, Burckhardt and Morelli a portable estimate of the local art and architecture. Even the discovery of incidental lapses scarcely consoles the traveller for the habitual accuracy of his statements; and the only refuge left from his omniscience lies in approaching the places he describes by a route which he has not taken.

Those to whom one of the greatest charms of travel in over-civilized countries consists in such momentary escapes from the expected, will still find here and there, even in Italy, a few miles unmeasured by the guide-book; and it was to enjoy the brief exhilaration of such a discovery that we stepped out of the train one morning at Certaldo, determined to find our way thence to San Vivaldo.

For some months we had been vaguely aware that, somewhere among the hills between Volterra and the Arno, there lay an obscure monastery containing a series of terra-cotta groups which were said to represent the scenes of the Passion. No one in Florence seemed to know much about them; and many of the people whom we questioned had never even heard of San Vivaldo. Professor Enrico Ridolfi, at that time the director of the Royal Museums at Florence, knew by hearsay of the existence of the groups, and told me that there was every reason to accept the local tradition which has always attributed them to Giovanni Gonnelli, the blind modeller of Gambassi, an obscure artist of the seventeenth century, much praised by contemporary authors, but since fallen into merited oblivion. Professor Ridolfi, however, had never seen any photographs of the groups, and was not unnaturally disposed to believe that they were of small artistic merit, since Gonnelli worked much later, and in a more debased period of taste, than the modeller of the well-known groups at Varallo. Still, even when the more pretentious kind of Italian sculpture was at its lowest, a spark of its old life smouldered here and there in the improvisations of the _plasticatore_, or stucco modeller; and I hoped to find, in the despised groups of San Vivaldo, something of the coarse naïveté and brutal energy which animate their more famous rivals of Varallo. In this hope we started in search of San Vivaldo; and as the guide-books told us that it could be reached only by way of Castel Fiorentino, we promptly determined to attack it from San Gimignano.

At Certaldo, the birthplace of Boccaccio, where the train left us one April morning, we found an archaic little carriage, with a coachman who entered sympathetically into our plan for eluding our cicerone. He told us that he knew a road which led in about four hours across the mountains from San Gimignano to San Vivaldo; and in his charge we were soon crossing the poplar-fringed Elsa and climbing the steep ascent to San Gimignano, where we were to spend the night.

The next morning, before sunrise, the little carriage awaited us at the inn door; and as we dashed out under the gateway of San Gimignano we felt the thrill of explorers sighting a new continent. It seemed, in fact, an unknown world which lay beneath us in the early light. The hills, so definitely etched at midday, at sunset so softly modelled, had melted into a silver sea of which the farthest waves were indistinguishably merged in billows of luminous mist. Only the near foreground retained its precision of outline, and that too had assumed an air of unreality. Fields, hedges and cypresses were tipped with an aureate brightness which recalled the golden ripples running over the grass in the foreground of Botticelli’s “Birth of Venus.” The sunshine had the density of gold-leaf: we seemed to be driving through the landscape of a missal.

At first we had this magical world to ourselves, but as the light broadened groups of labourers began to appear under the olives and between the vines; shepherdesses, distaff in hand, drove their flocks along the roadside, and yokes of white oxen with scarlet fringes above their meditative eyes moved past us with such solemn deliberateness of step that fancy transformed their brushwood-laden carts into the sacred _carroccio_ of the past. Ahead of us the road wound through a district of vineyards and orchards, but to the north and east the panorama of the Tuscan hills unrolled range after range of treeless undulations, outlined one upon the other, as the sun grew high, with the delicately-pencilled minuteness of a mountain background of Sebald Beham’s. Behind us the fantastic towers of San Gimignano dominated each bend of the road like some persistent mirage of the desert; to the north lay Castel Fiorentino, and far away other white villages gleamed like fossil shells embedded in the hill-sides.

The elements composing the foreground of such Tuscan scenes are almost always extremely simple--slopes trellised with vine and mulberry, under which the young wheat runs like green flame; stretches of ash-coloured olive orchard; and here and there a farm-house with projecting eaves and open loggia, guarded by its inevitable group of cypresses. These cypresses, with their velvety-textured spires of rusty black, acquire an extraordinary value against the neutral-tinted breadth of the landscape; distributed with the sparing hand with which a practised writer uses his exclamation-points, they seem to emphasize the more intimate meaning of the scene; calling the eye here to a shrine, there to a homestead, or testifying by their mere presence to the lost tradition of some barren knoll. But this significance of detail is one of the chief charms of the mid-Italian landscape. It has none of the purposeless prodigality, the extravagant climaxes, of what is called “fine scenery”; nowhere is there any obvious largesse to the eye; but the very reticence of its delicately-moulded lines, its seeming disdain of facile effects, almost give it the quality of a work of art, make it appear the crowning production of centuries of plastic expression.

For some distance the road from San Gimignano to San Vivaldo winds continuously upward, and our ascent at length brought us to a region where agriculture ceases and the way lies across heathery undulations, with a scant growth of oaks and ilexes in the more sheltered hollows. As we drove on, these copses gave way to stone-pines, and presently we dipped over the yoke of the highest ridge and saw below us another sea of hills, with a bare mountain-spur rising from it like a scaly monster floating on the waves, its savage spine bristling with the walls and towers of Volterra.