Maurice Hewlett

“ 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 of the hill-side. Below, as in a green pasture, 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 pinnacle of Santa Croce, grey on blue; and then the lean ridge of a shrine the barest, simplest and most honest in all Tuscany. ”

“ 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? ”

“ 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 inclination both speak. She rejects no wise thing and accepts every lovely thing. Nature and Art have worked hand in hand, as they will when, we let them. For what is an art so inimitable, so innocent, so intimate as this of Tuscany, after all, but a high effort of creative Nature—Natura naturans, as Spinosa calls her? ”

“ 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!" ”

“ What is that long spear which seems to shake as it glances skywards? It isn'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 upwards, 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 the hill-top) stand like bald cliffs on every side. ”

“ In every gesture, every pause, intonation, invocation, stave of song, phrase of prayer; by painful degrees 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 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. ”

“ Pisa is the real parent of Pistoja, as indeed she is of Florence-Dante's Florence. Pisa's magnificent building repeats to itself here: Gothic with a touch of Latin sanity, a touch of the genuine Paganism which loves the dædal earth and cannot bring itself to be out of touch with it. San Giovanni fuoricivitas, what a rock-hewn church it is! A rigid oblong, dark as the twilight, running with the street without belfry or window or façade. 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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? ”

“ The approach to her three hills, if you are not flattened by the intolerable pilgrimage 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 homewards; the shiver and dust of olives round the walls. ”

“ 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! ”

“ 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 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. ”

“ 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 Simone has shown her a way. Master Peter drummed on the table and nursed one fat leg. ”

“ Donatello has essayed that thing impossible for sculpture, to arrest a moment instead of denote a permanent attribute. Art is adjectival, is it not, O Donatello? Her business is to qualify facts, to say what things are, not to state them, to affirm that they are. A sculptured Judith 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. ”

“ 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 straggling tiles of gable and loggia the cupolas and belfries of many churches. I know they are all dead; for I have wound a devious 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. ”

“ In the room itself there was tapestry, 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 Gesu, 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. ”

“ 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 Italians, 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. ”

“ 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 ”

“ IX ILARIA, MARIOTA, BETTINA (Studies in Translation from Stone)
Greatest of great ladies is Ilaria, potens Luccæ, 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. ”

“ Tall flat houses rose in the chill mist to our left and stared blankly down upon us with close-barred green eyelids. 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 carriage with a basket of green figs and some bottles of milk for the Florentine market. ”

“ But it is the unquenchable thirst of the Umbrians for some spiritual nutriment, some outlet for their passion to be found only in bloodshed or fainting below the Cross, some fierce and untameable 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 ripeness and bloom of physical beauty encasing the vague longing of a too-rapid adolescence. ”

“ Savonarola, who knew his Bible, saw here a keener application of Judith's pious sin. A few years later that same Judith saw him burn. Thus, as an incarnate 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 Judith will never strike: her arm is palsied where it swings. ”