by Ouida
“When she called a shepherd from his flocks in the green valley to build for her a bell-tower so that she might hear, night and morning, the call to the altar, the shepherd built for her in such fashion that the belfry has been the Pharos of Art for five centuries.
“Here is the secret of Florence — supreme aspiration.
“The aspiration which gave her citizens force to live in poverty, and clothe themselves in simplicity, so as to be able to give up their millions of florins to bequeath miracles in stone and metal and colour to the Future. The aspiration which so purified her soil, red with carnage, black with smoke of war, trodden continuously by hurrying feet of labourers, rioters, mercenaries, and murderers, that from that soil there could spring, in all its purity and perfection, the paradise-blossom of the Vita Nuova.
“Venice perished for her pride and carnal lust; Rome perished for her tyrannies and her blood-thirst; but Florence, — though many a time nearly strangled under the heel of the Empire and the hand of the Church — Florence was never slain utterly either in body or soul; Florence still crowned herself with flowers even in her throes of agony, because she kept always within her that love — impersonal, consecrate, void of greed — which is the purification of the individual life and the regeneration of the body politic. ‘We labour for the ideal,’ said the Florentines of old, lifting to heaven their red flower de luce — and to this day Europe bows before what they did, and cannot equal it.”
“But she had so many great men, so many mighty masters!” I would urge, whereon Pascarèl would glance on me with his lightest and yet uttermost scorn.
“Oh wise female thing, who always traces the root to the branch and deduces the cause from the effect! Did her great men spring up full-armed like Athene, or was it the pure, elastic atmosphere of her that made her mere mortals strong as immortals) The supreme success of modern government is to flatten down all men into one uniform likeness, so that it is only by most frightful, and often destructive, effort that any originality can contrive to get loose in its own shape for a moment’s breathing space; but in the Commonwealth of Florence a man, being born with any genius in him, drew in strength to do and dare greatly with the very air he breathed.
“Moreover, it was not only the great men that made her what she was.
“It was, above all, the men who knew they were not great, but yet had the patience and unselfishness to do their appointed work for her zealously, and with every possible perfection in the doing of it “It was not only Orcagna planning the Loggia, but every workman who chiselled out a piece of its stone, that put all his head and heart into the doing thereof. It was not only Michaelangelo in his studio, but every poor painter who taught the mere a, b, c, d of the craft to a crowd of pupils out of the streets,’ who did whatsoever came before them to do mightily and with reverence.
“In those days all the servants as well as the sovereigns of Art were penetrated with the sense of her holiness.
“It was the mass of patient, intelligent, poetic, and sincere servitors of art, who, instead of wildly consuming their souls in envy and desire, cultured their one talent to the uttermost, so that the mediocrity of that age would have been the excellence of any other.
“Not alone from the great workshops of the great masters did the light shine on the people. From every scaffold where a palace ceiling was being decorated with its fresco, from every bottega where the children of the poor learned to grind and to mingle the colours, from every cell where some solitary monk studied to produce an offering to the glory of his God, from every nook and corner where the youths gathered in the streets to see some Nunziata or Ecce Homo lifted to its niche in the city wall, from every smallest and most hidden home of art — from the nest under the eaves as well as from the cloud-reaching temples, — there went out amidst the multitudes an ever-flowing, ever-pellucid stream of light, from that Aspiration which is in itself Inspiration.
“So that even to this day the people of Italy have not forgotten the supreme excellence of all beauty, but are, by the sheer instinct of inherited faith, incapable of infidelity to those traditions; so that the commonest craftsman of them all will sweep his curves and shade his hues upon a plaster cornice with a perfection that is the despair of the maestri of other nations.”
So he would talk on at divers times, as we paced the twisting lines of the streets, or paused on some white olive slope to look backward on the tumult of the roofs, with the battlements of the Vecchio tower rising out like some old sea-galley from the waves of the rippling sunshine. And I grew quickly to share this tender, fantastic, filial affection of his for the City of the Lilies.
Nay, who could do otherwise who has once dwelt within the magic circles of her storied walls!
Say some day at noontide you feel a little weary of it all.
Say it is midsummer, and the strong Leone sun is white on every stone; and the very cicale have hushed their chatter, and have gone to sleep.
Amo is nearly dry; grass grows between its pebbles, and straw is laid to bleach on its deserted bed. The buildings are scorched and colourless; the olives are pallid in the heat; the cypresses strain thirstily upward against the sky, as though seeking a rain-cloud and finding none in all the shadowless wide blue.
Say for once you are almost a renegade to her. The zinzari have been troublesome, and the sun beats against the blinds, and will not be denied. Your eyes ache with the radiance as they do when you throw off your mask after the opera ball.
You, for once in a way, are tired of the city, and think you will arise and go to that old, cool marble court in the villa amongst the hills, where the vine shadows play all the day long, and the waters drip in the deep acanthus shadows. Or else you dream a little in remembrance of clear green alpine rivers, shining in greenest meadows; of Tirol pine-slopes, rising to the snow with deep blue shadows asleep on bluer lakes; of Swabian woods or of Thuringian forests, wet, still, and full of song of birds, into whose leafy darkness no daylight ever comes.
Perhaps in the blazing Tuscan noon you think of these or sudi as these that you have known, and that are all lying there across the dreamy flush of the rosy Apennines.
Say in the daytime you are thus, for once perhaps, faithless, — yet with the nightfall she will take up afresh her supremacy.
The long bright day draws to a close. The west is in a blaze of gold, against which the ilex and the acacia are black as funeral plumes. The innumerable scents of fruits and flowers and spices, and tropical seeds, and sweet essences, that fill the streets at every step from shops and stalls, and monks’ pharmacies, she fanned out in a thousand delicious odours on the cooling air. The wind has risen, blowing softly from mountain and from sea across the plains through the pines of Pisa, across to the oak-forests of green Casentino.
Whilst the sun still glows in the intense amber of his own dying glory, away in the tender violet hues of the east the young moon rises.
Rosy clouds drift against the azure of the zenith, and are reflected as in a mirror in the shallow river waters.
A little white cloud of doves flies homeward against the sky.
All the bells chime for the Ave Maria.
The evening falls.
Wonderful hues, creamy, and golden, and purple, and soft as the colours of a dove’s throat, spread themselves slowly over the sky; the bell tower rises like a shaft of porcelain clear against the intense azure; amongst the tall canes by the river the fire-flies sparkle; the shores are mirrored in the stream with every line and curve, and roof and cupola, drawn in sharp deep shadow; every lamp glows again thrice its size in the glass of the current, and the arches of the bridges meet their own image there; the boats glide down the water that is now white under the moon, now amber under the lights, now black under the walls, forever changing; night draws on, then closes quite.
But it is night as radiant as day, and ethereal as day can never be; on the hills the cypresses still stand out against the faint gold that lingers in the west; there is the odour of carnatio
ns and of acacias everywhere.
Noiseless footsteps come and go.
People pass softly in shadow, like a dream.
You lean down and bask in this sweet air that is like a breath of paradise.
Against your hand there are great clusters of the red oleander, that burn against the gleaming snowy globes of the half-opened magnolia flowers. The voice that is dearest to you on earth is low upon your ear.
From some other casement open like yours there comes the distant cadence of a mandoline. A sheaf of lilies is flung from a balcony with a laugh. A woman goes by with a knot of pomegranate in her dark hair. A break of song floats down the silence.
“Addio, gioja mia, addio!” drops tenderly down the wind like leaves shaken from a rose.
On the parapet of the river two lovers lean and watch the stream as it glides to its grave in the grey sea-sand, as their own passion glides to its grave of dead desire.
You smile, and know there is no grave for yours; he says so at the least, and you believe.
It is night in Italy.
It is night in Florence.
In all the width of the world is there aught so perfect elsewhere! With a glad heart you will answer, nothing so perfect anywhere.
In such a night why cannot the lips we love kiss us forever — forever — forever — into the dreams of death!
BOOK IV. THE WANDERING ARTE.
CHAPTER I.
Il bianco Aspetto.
Do you know the delicate delights of a summer morning in Italy? — morning I mean between four and five of the clock, and not the full hot mid-day that means morning to the languid associations of this weary century.
The nights, perfect as they are, have scarcely more loveliness than the birth of light, the first rippling laughter of the early day.
The air is cool, almost cold, and clear as glass. There is an endless murmur from birds’ throats and wings, and from far away there will ring from village or city the chimes of the first mass. The deep broad shadows lie so fresh, so grave, so calm, that by them the very dust is stilled and spiritualized.
Softly the sun comes, striking first the loftier trees and then the blossoming magnolias, and lastly the green lowliness of the gentle vines; until all above is in a glow of new-born radiance, whilst all beneath the leaves still is dreamily dusk and cool. The sky is of a soft sea-blue; great vapours will float here and there, iris coloured and snow-white. The stone parapets of bridge and tower shine against the purple of the mountains, which are low in tone, and look like hovering storm-clouds. Across the fields dun oxen pass to their labour; through the shadows peasants go their way to mass; down the river a raft drifts slowly with the pearly water swaying against the canes; all is clear, tranquil, fresh as roses washed with rain.
In such a daybreak in the soft spring weather we left Florence by the gate that was once in the old days broken down for the mule of the Vicar of Christ to pass through into the city.
Pascarèl was too inveterate a wanderer by instinct and habit to remain long in one place, even when that place was circled by the hills so dear to him; and he was looked for eagerly with the spring and summer in all the towns and villages through Tuscany and Umbria, and the flowering Romagna and the drear sea-washed Maremma.
The Arte, which was light and cleverly constructed, was at such times sent onwards on the back of mules, on the flat cart of a contadino, on the top of a hay-waggon, on the shoulders of sturdy hill peasants, or any manner of conveyance which best served the moment, and the sight of the red and white flag fluttering from the pile of canvas and wood was a signal for a headlong rush and a shout of joy from the whole population over the face of all the country.
As for ourselves we walked always where there was any beauty, whether along the river-shores, or through the fields and vineyards, or along the brown sides of the hills, or beside the play of the tideless sea, on the hot yellow sands, or across the plain from one little old walled town to another.
Pascarèl and his little troop had never been extravagant enough to take any other mode of travel than that which their own limbs afforded, except when they needed to get quickly from one province to another.
They always sauntered on from town to town, from village to village, staying on the road as fancy moved them. They had gone on in this way all across Italy, and half across Europe; and as for me I liked nothing better than to do as they had done.
As soon as the sun showed his red disc where he rose above the southern seas and the eastern deserts far away, we used to rise ourselves and set out upon our pilgrimage for the day, so that each portion of it was accomplished before the heats of noon. Or at other times, if they had not played anywhere that night, we set forth when the moon showed herself, and went on our way through the wonderful lustre of her, which seemed to throb everywhere like so much conscious life.
In these wanderings I learned for the first time how beautiful is the beauty of Italy.
In the old town of Verona, I had been nothing but a passionate little rebel, hating my poor, pale prison-house for its poverty and monotony, whilst the people with whom I had dwelt had seen no wonder in that which had been about them from their birth, and had found their vital interests lie in the scantiness of the oil for their lucernate, and the uncertainty of the measure of the soup for their morrow.
With Pascarèl, and wandering thus through the length and breadth of the Romagna and of Tuscany, a surer and higher perception awakened in me, and my heart and my mind alike stirred into sympathy with that ethereal loveliness of air, of distance, and of light, which is, as it were, the very soul of all Italian scenery.
Green plains have a certain likeness, whether in Belgium, or Bavaria, or Britain. A row of poplars quivering in the light looks much alike in Flandèrs or in Normandy. A rich wood all aglow with red and gold in autumn sunsets is the same thing after all in Rhineland as in Devon.
But Italy has a physiognomy that is all her own; that is like nothing else, which to some minds is sad, and strange, and desolate, and painful, and which to others is beautiful, and full of consolation and delicious as a dream; but which, be it what else it may, is always wholly and solely Italian, can never be met with elsewhere, and has a smile on it, and a sigh in it, that make other lands beside it seem as though they were soulless and were dumb.
It is not the intensity but the ethereality of its colour which is its charm; for it reflects every colour this wonderful “bianco aspetto” of Dante.
Colourless itself it takes by turn every hue, and returns every gift of the sun’s rays so exquisitely, that there is no single tone which is not by it purified and spiritualised.
At sunrise and at sunset most especially, but more or less throughout the entire day, this wondrous whiteness beams and blushes into the million hues of the flame opal.
Watch it from one year to another and you shall never find it twice the same.
When the blue mists of daybreak drift across it; when the clouds duskily cast their violet shadows on it; when the tremulous wood smoke curls up in the rosy air; when the whole mountain side is flushed like apple-blossoms, darkening here and there where the pines grow into softest amethyst; here and there lightened where the sun strikes into such glow, that like love it becomes “tanta rossa che appena fora dentro al fuoco nata,” in all these changes and in a thousand others that sweep each other away again and again in endless succession throughout each hour of the twenty-four, this “bianco aspetto” is the loveliest thing that the world holds.
It is the loveliness of a dream world; it is the loveliness which all other poets as well as Dante have beheld in their imparadised vision of a life eternal; and compared with it the denser colours and the stronger contrasts of more northern lands are almost coarse, and seem to have no soul in them, and speak no message from the gods to man.
Indeed all lands are soulless where the olive does not lift its consecrated boughs to heaven.
Noble and fruitful though the face of them may be, a certain pathos and poetic
meaning will be lacking in them, if on their hills and in their valleys the olive do not hover like a soft rain-cloud shimmering to silver with the light.
For the olive is always mournful; it is amidst trees as the opal amidst jewels; its foliage, and its flowers, and its fruits, are all colourless; it shivers softly as though it were cold even on those sunbathed hills; it seems for ever to say “peace, peace,” when there is no peace; and to be weary because that whereof it is the emblem has been banished from earth because men’s souls delight in war.
The landscape that has the olive is spiritual as no landscape can ever be from which the olive is absent; for where is there spirituality without some hue of sadness?
But this spiritual loveliness is one for which the human creature that is set amidst it needs a certain education as for the power of Euripides, for the dreams of Phædrus, for the strength of Michelangelo, for the symphonies of Mozart or Beethoven.
The mind must itself be in a measure spiritualised ere aright it can receive it.
It is too pure, too impalpable, too nearly divine, to be grasped by those for whom all beauty centres in strong heats of colour and great breadths of effect; it floats over the senses like a string of perfect cadences in music; it has a breath of heaven in it; though on the earth it is not of the earth; when the world was young, ere men had sinned on it, and gods forsaken it, it must have had the smile of this light that lingers here.
This beauty, the beauty of perfect outline, of faint transparent hues, of immeasurable horizons, of wondrous silvery effulgence in which the eyes seem to range and reach until the mere sense of sight grows into a voluptuous rapture, all this became known to me as I wandered through those old old lands by the side of Pascarèl.
Some instinct towards it had been with me always; but through him I learned to know what it was that I felt; and lesser things than this became through him also eloquent to me and beautiful.