IJ/C
 
 THE ENCHANTED WOODS
 
 
 
 UNIFORM WITH THIS VOLUME 
 
 
 HORTUS VITAE. Essays on 
 
 
 the Gardening of Life. By 
 
 
 Vernon Lee. 
 
 

 
 THE ENCHANTED 
 WOODS s s s? 
 
 AND OTHER ESSAYS ON THE 
 GENIUS OF PLACES J4 <t 
 
 BY 
 
 VERNON LEE 
 
 JOHN LANE: THE BODLEY HEAD 
 LONDON iff NEW YORK. MDCCCCV
 
 WILLIAM CLOWES AND SONS, LIMITED, LONDON AND BECCLES.
 
 LIBRARY 
 
 UNN n OF (ALIFORM A 
 
 .VIA 1UK1UKA 
 
 DEDICATION
 
 To MISS I. O. FORD, 
 
 Ann. Grange, 
 
 Leeds. 
 
 My dear Isabella, 
 
 You made me very happy by 
 saying that you had taken another volume of 
 my essays on one of your lecturing and can- 
 vassing expeditions in the bleak and black 
 North. 
 
 Take this new ragbag of impressions with 
 you next time, my dear. And when the 
 landscape of chimneys and desecrated rivers 
 ami inhuman suburbs is making even your 
 spirits flag a little, pull out some of the con- 
 tents at random. For the only justification 
 of my idle wanderings is if their sunshine and 
 romance may amuse, for a minute, people more 
 useful, though not more willing, than myself. 
 
 Your affectionate friend, 
 
 Vernon Lee. 
 
 Maiano, nbab Flounce, 
 November, 1904. 
 
 vii
 
 CONTENTS 
 
 I'AGE 
 
 Dedication v 
 
 Introduction : The Enchanted Woods i 
 
 Pisa and the Campo Santo 13 
 
 Switzerland acain 23 
 
 Tuscan Churches in Summer 33 
 
 Arles 41 
 
 Nymphs and a River God 53 
 
 Brive-la-Gaillarde 63 
 
 Of Paris and the Exhibition 73 
 
 Trent 83 
 
 The Motor-Car and the Genius of Places — 
 
 1 93 
 
 II 103 
 
 The Ilex Woods and the Anchorites . . 109 
 
 German Fir Trees 1:1 
 
 Compiegne and Fontainebleau 1 ] 1 
 
 The Forest of the Antonines 139 
 
 Mont St. Michel 151 
 
 A Walk in the Maremma 163 
 
 ix
 
 Contents 
 
 
 PAGE 
 
 Les Charmettes 
 
 173 
 
 In the Euganean Hills 
 
 183 
 
 The Hospitality of the Black Madonna 
 
 193 
 
 The Holy Year at Ravenna .... 
 
 203 
 
 The Generalife . 
 
 . 
 
 215 
 
 Couci-le-Chateau . 
 
 . 
 
 225 
 
 The Tapestry at Angers 
 
 . 
 
 23S 
 
 Germany once more 
 
 . 
 
 245 
 
 The Carillon 
 
 . 
 
 • 25S 
 
 The Cardinal's Villa . 
 
 . 
 
 265 
 
 In Gascony . 
 
 . 
 
 275 
 
 Era Gia L'Ora ... 
 
 . 
 
 291 
 
 All Souls 1 Day at Venice 
 
 . 
 
 301 
 
 Et in Arcadia ... 
 
 * • • • 
 
 3"
 
 THE ENCHANTED WOODS
 
 THE ENCHANTED WOODS 
 
 MAY not tell you — it were indiscreet and to 
 no purpose — on what part of the earth's 
 surface the Enchanted Woods are situate. 
 When one is in them they seem to march 
 nowhere with reality ; and after issuing one 
 is tempted to deny their existence. For they 
 are full of spells and of adventure without end, 
 drawing one, up that dark, gliding river, into 
 their hidden heart. The soil into which the 
 thousand-year-old oaks strike their gnarled 
 roots, is the soil of romance itself. Rinaldo or 
 Sir Guyon was steered along those translucent 
 brown waters in the twilight of the boughs, and 
 enchantresses plied the oars. The heron who has 
 rattled up from among the reeds is the cousin 
 of the wonderful Blue Bird ; the fountain of 
 Merlin is hidden among the twisted whitethorns; 
 perhaps Merlin himself. One wanders along 
 muttering scraps of verse, or, as happened to 
 
 3 1! 2
 
 The Enchanted Woods 
 
 me, pursued by a phrase of recitative, a bar of 
 purling accompaniment, telling the loves of 
 Amadis ; one follows now one path, now 
 another, through marshland or underwood, up 
 and down, endlessly, aimlessly, much as one 
 reads, listlessly turning pages,the suddenly broken 
 off, suddenly resumed narrative of Ariosto or 
 Tasso or Spenser ; the fancy roving, galloping, 
 changing loves and identities like the willing 
 victims of great wizards and fairies. Who was 
 it, and where, who sailed upstream inland, 
 inland into such woods as these, on a river like 
 this one ? The river glides swiftly, flush with 
 the grass, clear reddish brown close by, clear 
 golden green in the distance, but always wonder- 
 fully deep and dark ; dimpling and eddying 
 with the pebbles it rolls, murmuring and 
 rustling where it sweeps the branches of the 
 overhanging oaks. The sunshine is in small 
 spots, in broken stars, through the foliage. 
 Scarcely a rustle of leaves, a distant twitter and 
 cooing of birds ; every sound dominated by the 
 murmur of that stream in the deep woodland 
 silence. 
 
 I am faced by the sunset in a wide chace, 
 green and browned over with rushes ; the sun- 
 
 4
 
 The Enchanted Woods 
 
 set among branches of immense trees and in 
 the gaps between them, vivid crimson and bars 
 of pale fresh blue. Back in the thickets it is 
 dusk, and I lose my way, and am happy to lose 
 it ; and the creaking of the branches, the sudden 
 hurtle of wings — wild duck rising in the marsh 
 hard by — makes my heart stop with delightful 
 fright, and I sing, but under my breath, to keep 
 myself company. And, of a sudden, stop. 
 For I have struck once more that strange river, 
 gliding exceeding swiftly, smooth, silent, dark 
 between the trees. And the oaks and beeches 
 loom in the dusk, colossal, the pale branches 
 take threatening appearances, as of elephants or 
 writhing snakes. Shapes still exist, but all colour 
 is gone, and with it all life, in that brown light 
 made of darkness. Such, surely, might be the 
 rivers, the trees and thickets of Elysium, where 
 Orpheus, seeking Eurydice, need scarcely avert 
 his eyes, seeing her already as a shadow among 
 shadows. 
 
 Here is a bridge, which I cross ; and issuing 
 from the magic gloom, and striding through 
 the rough grass under the open starlit sky, 
 behold ! close in front is the long terraced 
 house, with ground-floor windows standing 
 
 5
 
 The Enchanted Woods 
 
 open, lit up orange in the serene blue evening. 
 And my heart rejoices at the nearness of 
 gracious and hospitable inmates, not wizards or 
 enchantresses, but ten thousand times more 
 delightful. 
 
 Enchanted woods are rare. But I suspect 
 that where they exist, and seem — so deep is 
 their magic — to march nowhere on reality, 
 they are most often within a stone's-throw 
 of the dear homes of every day ; nor is it 
 needful to travel very far afield in order to 
 find them. 
 
 This belief is beginning to be borne in on 
 me, and to cure me of hankerings after new 
 and distant places. For although the pleasures 
 of travel, the quest of the kindly genius of 
 localities, have been perhaps the greatest 
 blessing of my life, I find, on thinking things 
 over, that on the whole I have travelled less 
 than my neighbours, and far less for travelling's 
 own sake. There are moments, of course, 
 when I feel just a little saddened at seeing 
 them start without me for wonderful places — 
 Egypt and Spain and Greece, which I shall 
 never go to ; and when certain names, mere 
 casual references to this thing or that, drive 
 
 6
 
 The Enchanted Woods 
 
 into my heart a funny little wedge, gentle and 
 yet quite sharp, of longing — the nostalgia of 
 the hills and streets one will never see with 
 bodily eye. 
 
 But is not this tiny pang the preparation for 
 all happiness and its accompaniment ? And is 
 there not, in our finest pleasures, something 
 analacrous to that sense of delightful breathless- 
 ness with which we climb a hillside or make 
 head against the waves of a sea-wind ? In other 
 words, does not the thorough having of any- 
 thing require a wide margin of — I will not say 
 of lacking, but of forgoing, of not having, other 
 things ; and is not sparingness and comparative 
 emptiness — the sparingness and comparative 
 emptiness of the monk's table and cell — the 
 rule of true votaries of enjoyment ? Stay at 
 home, explore the surrounding ten miles (and 
 no pleasure of travel is keener than that of the 
 first hundred yards of the eleventh mile from 
 home), promenade round one's garden or 
 bedroom like De Maistre, and thus get up a 
 fine hunger for distant wanderings, for China 
 or Peru ? Heaven forbid ! There is no folly 
 more vain or fruitless than to manipulate one's 
 own happiness I 
 
 7
 
 The Enchanted Woods 
 
 My growing belief is that the journeys 
 richest in pleasant memories are those under- 
 taken accidentally, or under the stress of 
 necessity ; moreover, that the most interesting 
 places are those which we stray into, or just 
 deflect towards, as we wander for the sake of 
 friends or work, or even in humbler quest of 
 cheapness of living or economy of health. 
 This belief that the best travel is not for 
 travelling's sake goes hand in hand with a 
 certain philosophy of life, very vague, difficult 
 to define, but perhaps the deeper down and 
 more inevitable, forcing itself upon one with 
 every added year of experience. As we con- 
 tinue to live, and see more of our own and 
 other folks' lives behind, or alongside of us, 
 there arises a dim comprehension of some 
 mysterious law by which the good things of 
 life, all the happiness — nay, the very power of 
 being happy — are not life's aims but life's 
 furtherance, and their true possession depends 
 on willing and uncalculating response to life's 
 multifold and changing beckonings and behests. 
 Life itself is a journey from an unknown 
 starting point to an unknown goal. We who 
 move along its tracks cannot overlook the 
 
 8
 
 The Enchanted Woods 
 
 roads which cross and recross one another in 
 endless intricacy ; and the maps we make for 
 ourselves are the mere scrawlings of fanciful 
 children. All we can do, while thus travelling 
 we know neither whence nor whither, is to 
 keep our eyes clear, our feet undefiled, to drop 
 as much useless baggage as possible, and fill our 
 hands with the fruits and herbs, sweet or 
 salutary, of the roadside. But if we imagine 
 that we can bend our course to the hidden 
 Temples of Sais, or the Gardens of Armida, or 
 the Heavenly Jerusalem, why ! there is no 
 mischief in hoping ; only, methinks we shall 
 be disappointed. For wisdom, beauty — nay, 
 holiness itself — are not regions of the soul, 
 attainable and separate kingdoms ; but 
 rather, methinks, modes in which the soul 
 carries itself, or not, along the mysterious 
 journey to which it is elected or condemned. 
 And as to the gods, we need not pilgrimage 
 towards them : they walk, majestic, through 
 the universe ; and if our spirit is reve- 
 rent and cheerful, they take us now and then 
 by the hand, and lead us a few yards — 
 yes, lead even our poor selves, with the fish 
 in our hand and the dog at our heels as the 
 
 9
 
 The Enchanted Woods 
 
 two archangels lead the little Tobit in the 
 pictures. 
 
 If this be the case, as I think, with the angels 
 and the great gods, how much more with so 
 humble a divinity as the friendly one of 
 localities ! We need undertake no voyages of 
 discovery to meet the Genius Loci. There is a 
 presiding spirit, an oread, in every venerable 
 and well-grown tree, overtopping the forest or 
 lonely upon the ploughed ridges ; a naiad in 
 every well-head, among the trickling cress and 
 the mossy stones ; nay, even in every cistern of 
 fair masonry and pure beryl water open to the 
 sky, where watering-cans are filled of evenings. 
 And as to enchanted woods, why, they lie in 
 many parks and girdle many cities ; only you 
 must know them when you see them, and 
 submit willingly to their beneficent magic. 
 Thus we enrich our life, not by the making of 
 far-fetched plans, nor by the seeking of change 
 and gain ; but by the faithful putting to profit 
 of what is within our grasp. 
 
 Wherefore, O benign divinity of places, 
 bestow upon us eyes and hearts such as will 
 recognize thy hidden shrines all over the world 
 and within every lane's turning ; and grant us, 
 
 10
 
 The Enchanted Woods 
 
 as thy highest boon, to wander every now and 
 then in the Enchanted Woods, between the 
 hour of rising from our solitary work and the 
 hour of sitting down to meat with our dear 
 friends i 
 
 i r
 
 PISA AND THE CAMPO SANTO
 
 PISA AND THE CAMPO SANTO 
 
 ANE has a confused impression about Pisa 
 ^-^ that, historically as well as topographically, 
 it has suffered a sea change ; its Past washed 
 away or silted up by flooding river and receding 
 Mediterranean ; only the cathedral and its pre- 
 cincts remaining stranded all alone ; and life 
 of all kinds ebbing away with every passing 
 century, until the town becomes a place for 
 consumptives gently to die in, and travellers, 
 bound for less dreamy cities, to linger an hour 
 or so, between two trains, in its churchyard. 
 
 Besides the wonderful cathedral (itself the 
 latest monument of Hellenic and Roman art, a 
 wonderful reconstruction, material and aesthetic, 
 out of Antiquity's wreckage) and its kindred 
 tower and baptistery, there remains nothing of 
 early medixval Pisa save a tew little church 
 trdnts set in alien houses. And there are very 
 few traces of the later Pisa of the Campo Santo's 
 
 '5
 
 The Enchanted Woods 
 
 time. The town, taken as a whole, is vaguely 
 seventeenth century, Medicean grand-ducal 
 coats-of-arms everywhere ; nay, even early 
 nineteenth century, the abode of Byron and 
 Shelley, and, to me at least, full of their 
 memories. 
 
 But from a distance, as in one's recollection, 
 Pisa exists only in those few monuments, 
 isolated in time as in space ; and this is its 
 great charm. Rowing^down the river, as I did 
 on a day of flood and violent sea-wind, Pisa 
 soon lost all her city, became reduced to the 
 cupolas of cathedral and baptistery, and finally 
 to the belfry, rising out from the marshland, 
 under the conical hills and the storm clouds. 
 And bicycling, as I have often done, outside 
 the various gates, the delight of the pinewoods 
 by the sea, of the olive yards towards Lucca, of 
 the great Carrara mountains and their foothills, 
 rising in various shades of green and blue and 
 smoke colour, various degrees of unreality — 
 the delight, meseems, of this wide flat country 
 of open cornfield and of hay — is brought to a 
 head by the delight of the return ; of seeing 
 the wonderful cathedral group overtopping the 
 walls. And then, having passed under the gate, 
 
 16
 
 Pisa and the Campo Santo 
 
 of finding those buildings at once, just within 
 the walls ; nothing visible beyond, and all alone 
 in their field of crass and sweet white clover. 
 
 Seen from a distance, particularly from out- 
 side the city, and with no trees (thank Heaven !) 
 round about to measure things by, the cupola 
 of the cathedral appears unimportant, becomes, 
 what cupolas rarely are, quite sunk in the 
 building's general shape. And that general 
 shape, so strictly cruciform and gabled at each 
 end, is, oddly enough, as I saw it across the 
 meadows and marsh, the shape of some very 
 primitive church, recalling to my mind (a 
 strange freak of resemblance) the one, of all 
 others, at Tintagel. A church, at all events, of 
 infinite remoteness of age and infinite isolation, 
 no town anywhere ; a stranded thing from 
 other times. This merely adds to the extra- 
 ordinary imaginative fascination of finding it to 
 be, on near approach, that marvellous casket of 
 ivory, that perfection of exquisite line and 
 colour and carving, from the lowest pillared 
 bays of its three apses and the flat arches and 
 pilasters of its sides to the triumphal crosses 
 an I garlands of its high lateral gables. 
 
 Those temple-like side gables, surely the 
 
 1 7 c
 
 The Enchanted Woods 
 
 loveliest part of its loveliness, bring home to 
 one the fact that, as I said before, this Pisan 
 cathedral, built by Greeks or pupils of Greeks, 
 is one of the last works of antique art. The 
 columns of giallo antico and of peach-blossom 
 marble, and the slabs of porphyry and serpentine, 
 which mottle and perfect the tea-rose colouring 
 of the apse, are not more surely the remains of 
 ancient temples in Greece and Asia Minor, 
 brought home on the galleys of Pisa, than the 
 architectural forms, the capitals and mouldings 
 and exquisite fretwork, are the remains of the 
 art of Hellas and of Rome, certain patterns 
 seeming almost copied from the tomb of 
 Mausolos, with a kind of waywardness of 
 accent, an added flame of line and curve, 
 belonging to the Middle Ages, and telling of 
 Gothic art to come. What a subduing charm 
 about these buildings, all of the same time, 
 closely grouped — the cathedral, the baptistery, 
 and the tower — in that field of scented white 
 clover just underneath the city walls. 
 
 The sentiment about the Campo Santo is, 
 of course, quite different ; and within its walls 
 it encloses a world of quite another character. 
 And not the less so because, under the half- 
 
 i3
 
 Pisa and the Campo Santo 
 
 effaced frescoes of mediaeval moralities and 
 legends, and alongside of the mutilated antique 
 sarcophagi, there rest, in the place of the 
 original Pisans — (" I want to see the tombs of 
 the Crusaders," as a burly clergyman reiterated 
 stubbornly in English) — all sorts of modern 
 creatures. There are all the local celebrities 
 with eighteenth-century pigtails or heads of hair 
 a la Brutus, frilled nightgowns and togas ; 
 writers on jurisprudence, on fair ladies' canary 
 birds, or, like the illustrious forgotten Marulli, 
 " On Mendicity," a work which a life-sized 
 Canova genius is crowning with the greatest care. 
 «' On Mendicity ! " The Middle Ages also, at 
 the other end of the churchyard cloister, have 
 left their views on the subject expressed in the 
 group of maimed and blind and halt who arc 
 calling on Death in the great fresco of his 
 triumph ; and perhaps, on the whole, the in- 
 sinuation therein implied, that some of these 
 unfortunate persons will be taken to heaven by 
 the angels of judgment, is more consolatory for 
 mendicants than the book of the illustrious 
 Marulli under the wreath deposited by the 
 Canova genius. There also, near the chains of 
 the port of Pisa, hung on the walls, is that 
 
 19
 
 The Enchanted Woods 
 
 friend of Voltaire's and of Frederick the Great's, 
 AlgarottuSy sed non omnis, as he is careful to 
 inform us. One is glad to think that some 
 portion of him escaped to more suitable spheres, 
 for an eighteenth-century exquisite would have 
 suffered from the Gothick bad taste and super- 
 stition of the frescoes all round. There lie 
 all these worthies, Mme. Catalani also, mixed 
 up with the Counts of Donoratico, forbears of 
 Ugolino, and with the mother of the Countess 
 Matilda. And, not least odd, the poor Northern 
 people, Poles, for instance, who had evidently 
 come to Pisa to die of consumption, as might 
 so easily have happened to Keats, and would 
 very likely have happened to Shelley if the 
 Pisan sea had not taken him instead. 
 
 For my own part I confess I am glad of this 
 jumble ; it humanizes the place, takes it a little 
 out of the Past, which has so long ceased to 
 be alive that, like the painted people on the 
 walls and the sculptured people on the sarco- 
 phagi, it seems scarcely to have gone through 
 the bitterness and solemnity of dying. 
 
 Such as it is, the Campo Santo is an enchant- 
 ing place to linger in, particularly on fine May 
 mornings. Nothing could be more charming 
 
 20
 
 Pisa and the Campo Santo 
 
 than to run one's eyes along the frescoes, 
 which, in their patchiness of colour, sometimes 
 very vivid, sometimes utterly faded, are really 
 like variegated flower-beds. One steps across 
 the grass and sunshine of the enclosed space to 
 have the pleasure of the contrast, and to see the 
 frescoes also from the opposite side, framed in 
 by the white carved mullions, vivid blue or 
 mauve pink, with a figure here and there 
 standing out. 
 
 One lets one's self speculate, but in no critical 
 mood, whether Dante would have been pleased 
 or furious with those frescoed illustrations to 
 his "Inferno ;" would he have countenanced 
 that cute, cheerful, gigantic devil munching 
 traitors, green and yellow, and picking up 
 others to munch like the Ogre Fee Faw Fum ? 
 Had lie such visions as these of sinners being 
 spitted and potted and larded and emptied (like 
 poultry) by furry devil-cooks ; visions of snakes 
 being made use of like pack-thread ? Who 
 knows ! Who knows ! And does not every 
 generation of readers re-write the immortal 
 poets ? 
 
 Or else one may spell out, or make up for 
 one's self, the legends of some of these saints — 
 
 21
 
 The Enchanted Woods 
 
 San Ranieri, for instance — the adventures by- 
 land and sea, hunting-parties, storms with devils 
 in the rigging, temptations of hermits in the 
 wilderness, and tremendous battles with Gog 
 and Magog or Prester John ; stories perhaps 
 out of the Legenda Aurea of James of Voragine, 
 but just a little influenced, methinks, by Anatole 
 France. . . . And while thus lazily at work, 
 our eye suddenly falling on the bas-relief — say, 
 that of the chariot-horses dragging poor young 
 Hippolytus — of some pagan sarcophagus, or 
 caught by the blond helmeted serenity of a fine 
 head of Ares. . . . The cloister mullions frame 
 in, above the ivory-tinted marbles of the oppo- 
 site wall, the cathedral cupola shaped like a 
 dry poppy-head, and the pomegranate-shaped 
 dome of the baptistery — reddish and purple and 
 frosted with white ; and beyond them the pale- 
 blue sky, recently washed by rain, with just one 
 feathery cirrus. The sunshine falls blond and 
 mild on the marble tombstones ; the swallows 
 flash in and out ; and a fresh breeze brings the 
 scent of the white clover outside into the 
 cloisters of the churchyard. 
 
 22
 
 SWITZERLAND AGAIN
 
 SWITZERLAND AGAIN 
 
 TX my previous dealings with the genius of 
 
 localities, I have had occasion to speak of 
 
 the tarrying at unknown gates in alien places, 
 
 and of the wistful conjuring up of vague 
 
 inhabitants who might be one's friends. . . . 
 
 On the present occasion the houses which 
 opened their doors to the wayfarer were the 
 very same I had peered at and wondered about 
 five years before. Or, at least, houses just like 
 them, and In the self-same locality ; country 
 houses with overhanging chalet roofs and tubs 
 of blue hydrangeas against the doorsteps, which 
 I had seen during those misty walks among 
 the green lawns, the fragrant lime-trees beyond 
 the climbing walls and towers of that dear Swiss 
 town. 
 
 The whole adventure (I mean my recent 
 stay at F ) has the delightful vague- 
 ness, the disdain of how and why, the bold 
 
 25
 
 The Enchanted Woods 
 
 foreshortening of a dream, and a dream's air of 
 superior significance : no asking and answering 
 of questions, no chain of dull reasons, no 
 bothering about names or relationships, but a 
 fine directness and taking for granted of every- 
 thing that's pleasant and unusual. It seemed 
 to radiate from the improbable circumstance 
 that my business at F was purely senti- 
 mental — to meet, in fact, a friend of many 
 years' standing whom I had never beheld with 
 mortal eyes, albeit perhaps with the other eyes 
 of the immortal spirit. We had missed one 
 another Heaven knows how often ; or perhaps 
 — who knows ? — we had never really tried to 
 meet. This time the intention was undoubted. 
 
 F is off the line that leads to anywhere, 
 
 and I had come on purpose, with much exchange 
 of letters. I arrived, and found her . . . No. 
 Not really gone, though called away to Paris 
 the previous evening. But not gone. Ex- 
 tremely present, on the contrary, with a pervading 
 presence passing that vulgarly so called. In- 
 deed, throughout her house her own portrait 
 seemed the least personal thing ; though I 
 would note, as a symbol of that dream-like 
 taking for granted \ that I recognized the portrait 
 
 26
 
 Switzerland again 
 
 as if I had been familiar with her every unseen 
 feature. It was not like the fairy-story, though 
 there were books and flowers arranged, and 
 meals daintily spread by unseen hands — for the 
 fairy hostess, though invisible, was there. 
 
 Nor did the hospitality stop here, since we 
 have needs more delicate, curiosity, desire for 
 cordiality, apparently unknown to the too-too 
 solid heroes of fairy-tales. Friends came and 
 fetched me for walks and drives ; delightful 
 persons with familiar speech and look and quite 
 uncertain names, who showed me the curiosities 
 of the town, and carried me to other friendly, 
 delightful persons about whom I knew nothing 
 at all and yet everything. 
 
 The houses, as I have said, are outside the 
 town, set down in meadows of that lush Swiss 
 grass whitened with hemlock, and you got to 
 them along avenues of blossoming lime. Great 
 chalets in shape — farm buildings, woodstacks, 
 barns, all leaning against them ; and themselves 
 farm-like, pastoral, with scent of hay and dairy 
 coming from the yards. But once inside, 
 following the neat bonne along the deep, cool 
 passage, one found one's self in the midst of 
 old-world refinement — nay, even old-world 
 
 27
 
 The Enchanted Woods 
 
 romance. There was the delicate Louis XV. 
 furniture, the pale hunting-scene tapestries, the 
 grace of branch-shaped moulding and tendril- 
 like ironwork, the charm of pistachio-green 
 doors and panels, of a dining-room fitted with 
 dainty coral-coloured chairs and cupboards ; all 
 the grace of eighteenth-century France brought 
 back from Versailles by Swiss captains of ad- 
 venture, but subdued, made modest, and in a 
 way made moral by adaptation to a wholesome 
 rural life, by being fitted into these domestic 
 farms, open-doored, where master and mistress 
 walked out into the kitchen garden and among 
 the cattle. . . . 
 
 The captain of adventure, full-wigged and 
 corsleted, by Rigault or Rigault's pupil, looked 
 down upon our gouter in that coral-red room : 
 the table spread with home-baked cakes, with 
 cream, butter, fruit, and honey off the farm, 
 and set with the old-fashioned flowers which 
 
 the hospitable demoiselles de B tied up 
 
 for my journey. There were some charming 
 young girls, relations of each other and every 
 one, my new little friend particularly, like a 
 rose in her rose-coloured frock ; and we all sat 
 round the big table. Then a young nephew 
 
 28
 
 Switzerland again- 
 
 strolled in, hooted, from riding. Then there 
 entered another lady, connected in some way 
 with some famous eighteenth-century letters, 
 and having, herself, a certain cosmopolitan and 
 literary grace which the eighteenth-century was 
 noted for. I had been taken that morning to 
 see her house, another farm-like chfilet with 
 Louis XV. interior, over a deep ravine, a rush- 
 ing Alpine river, made for the delectation, one 
 mi^ht think, of Zimmerman or Senancour, or 
 other lovers of " solitude." There was also 
 the house of a " grand'mere," a lady of the 
 Diesbachs (pronounced in Versailles fashion 
 Di-es-bacque). The overhanging chalet eaves 
 as usual, and farm-like look ; but inside rooms 
 almost castle-like, mediaeval German, and hung 
 with the tournament armour, the swords and 
 pikes and saddle-cloths, of some sixteenth- 
 century ancestor. 
 
 I felt I had penetrated not merely among 
 delightful living inhabitants, old and young, 
 full of courtesy and kindness, but, thanks to 
 them, into a recondite Tittle past world — the 
 world of a handful of Swiss nobles, originally 
 feudal, excluded for that reason from all home 
 concerns by the patricians of the cities, and, 
 
 29
 
 The Enchanted Woods 
 
 therefore, from father to son, seeking military 
 service abroad ; but always returning, from 
 Versailles or Vienna, to take a wife of their 
 own stock, to look after their dairy meadows 
 and their apple orchards, and to plant more 
 avenues of limes on the green ridges above the 
 river. A world of subdued romanticalness, no 
 longer French, but not yet German, of the 
 quality of the healthy parts of Rousseau, the 
 rustic bits of "Julie," and the adventure with 
 the two young ladies in the periwinkle woods. 
 . . . An imaginary world, made up of scraps of 
 letters and memoirs, impressions of furniture, 
 phrases of songs " c'est mon berger rendez Ie 
 moi," for the spinet ? Perhaps ; and none the 
 worse for that. But a world certainly not more 
 charming, and apart, and altogether unlikely, 
 than that of these friendly and gracious-living 
 people, who welcomed me into their fragrant 
 flower-gardens and dear old wide-eaved houses, 
 that serene, long summer afternoon, while the 
 sunlight lay low on the green lush grass, all 
 whitened with hemlock. 
 
 May I never be guilty of a word or a thought 
 lacking the least little bit in veneration for the 
 Genius Loci! But, impiety of this kind being 
 
 30
 
 Switzerland again 
 
 o 
 
 out of the question, I should like to confess 
 that it would not do to be always left in 
 ictc-a-tcte with the divinity immanent in bricks 
 and mortar and rock and stream. Every now 
 and then, at least, localities ought to take a 
 human voice and human eyes, and their friendly 
 charm become personified in kindly living 
 creatures. This amiable miracle has often 
 happened in my fortunate and, I trust, grate- 
 ful, wanderings. Whole districts have meant 
 friends — some, alas ! existing no longer save in 
 the memory of those places never to be revisited, 
 like that ample and beautiful lady of the Venetian 
 mainland, on to whom the great doges and 
 admirals could look approvingly from the walls. 
 Nor can the foot-alps of Piedmont, their pastures 
 and forests, ever become dissociated in my heart 
 from the gracious and pathetic personality of the 
 friend I found — to keep for so short a time ! — 
 among them. One lives quicker while travelling, 
 each hour counting for many of one's stay-at- 
 home days. And the rapid, sudden acquaintance 
 with localities, the brief sojourns divested of 
 responsibility, innocent of yesterday and to- 
 morrow, bring with them a heightened possibility 
 of human intercourse. There is a more rapid 
 
 31
 
 The Enchanted Woods 
 
 intuition of one another, and a freedom from 
 doubt and shyness. And the stress of time, 
 the feeling of now or never, begets a quick, 
 sufficient stretching out of hands and clasping 
 of personalities. 
 
 The Genius Loci, most impersonal of all 
 worshipful divinities, sometimes bestows on his 
 pious ones, quite unexpectedly, very human 
 favours. I made these reflections, but not for 
 the first time ; and I regarded in the light of 
 sacrificial and holy tributes to my divinity the 
 flowers and the home-baked cakes which had 
 been given me by the ladies in the coral-red 
 Louis XV. room in the chalet near F . 
 
 32
 
 TUSCAN CHURCHES IN SUMMER
 
 TUSCAN CHURCHES IN SUMMER 
 
 np^HE other day, instead of driving through 
 Pistoia on my way up to the villa, I 
 thought I should like to see again some of 
 those little romanesque churches, and began 
 with San Giovanni fuor Civitas. I like the name, 
 bearing the thought, the image, both of the smaller 
 town of the past and of the poplars and grass 
 at the foot of the walls and of the open country 
 beyond. The church, as usual, was locked, 
 and 1 wasted a good deal of time in getting it 
 opened. But I liked it all the better. For 
 despite the sudden magic of entering an Italian 
 church by an open main portal, where the 
 picketed-down curtain lets in glints of sun and 
 lets out whiffs of incense ; the magic of plung- 
 ing from the open glare into the dark and cool 
 enclosure, a transition as complete as from land 
 to water, a different mode for the whole being — 
 despite all this, I almost prefer the shut church, 
 
 35 D 2
 
 The Enchanted Woods 
 
 for there is a charm (in summer, of course, as 
 with everything in the South) quite peculiar 
 attendant on the difficult and tortuous entry 
 into such disused buildings. There is the 
 waiting in the side street at the Campanello della 
 Cura y or in the vaulted passage where you have 
 vistas of whitewashed stairs with crucifixes 
 behind gratings, or of little closed gardens, 
 perhaps an orange tree against a wall. Then 
 the passing through various sheltered places, 
 sacristies with their old-world threadbare de- 
 corum ; and into the church, unexpectedly by 
 some side or hidden door. The church — 
 particularly one of these basilical barns of 
 Pistoia — thus shut up, thus stealthily ap- 
 proached, seems in its emptiness so much more 
 a thing of dreams and of ages. 
 
 The pictures on gilt grounds, the solemn 
 carved lions of the pulpit, and birds in the 
 capitals ; the allegorical women, with features 
 worn away by many hands, of the holy-water 
 stoup ; all these things seem in this fashion to 
 belong more to themselves, and give one, as no 
 open church can do, the rest and the comfort 
 of remoteness from the practical, the present, 
 the passing. 
 
 36
 
 Tuscan Churches in Summer 
 
 And since I am on this subject, let me say a 
 word also in praise of sacristies. A sacristy- 
 has a more intimate air of the past, of the 
 consecrated, than, most often, a church. It is 
 safer from irreverence, and from what is but a 
 form of irreverence, that indiscreet faith which 
 knows exactly everything about divine matters, 
 as it conceives them ! Whereas in a sacristy 
 the very gossip and snuff-taking of the canons 
 assumes a certain symbolical air, and becomes, 
 as they robe and disrobe themselves and cover 
 and uncover their chalices, a part of a larger 
 and more solemn ritual. Sacristies also possess, 
 much more than churches (and more properly, 
 for a church should be for every man and 
 woman and child, and for their poor human 
 rags and failings), that delicate swept and gar- 
 nished quality which is the external equivalent 
 of holiness, and the principal reason for the 
 setting aside of places and of souls for such 
 necessary medicinal onesidedness. 
 
 Sacristies have, moreover, the impersonal 
 quality (a quality of sacrifice, not of vanity) of 
 sacerdotal magnificence and — may 1 say so ? — 
 sacerdotal coquetterie. It is not for the individual's 
 benefit or ostentation (the individual, in Italy, 
 
 37
 
 The Enchanted Woods 
 
 being often a quite dreadfully shabby old person) 
 this fine folding and careful putting by, this 
 dainty air which hangs like faint incense about 
 the white and purple clothes, the copes hung out 
 on old-fashioned horses, the napkins and laced 
 surplices spread out on the oak tables. In 
 Lent particularly the sacristies get this full 
 meaning, partly because of the prevalence of all 
 that beautiful puce and mulberry colour every- 
 where, the mourning magnificence of the church. 
 Partly also because the church itself becomes 
 more modest and mysterious, veiled in a manner 
 like the crucifixes with their figures barely seen 
 through the dark silk. And then there is a 
 charm, not wholly Christian, but with under- 
 tones of classic, Olympic associations, in the 
 formal trophies of palm branches which are 
 being prepared in these sacristies. 
 
 But to go back to the subject of our 
 Tuscan churches in summer-time. Returning 
 from the villa last Sunday, full of the sense 
 of its delicate sweetness, I felt I could not 
 return directly home, to unpacking and to 
 opening of letters ; and as it was still early in 
 these long June evenings, I stopped on my 
 way at Santa Maria Novella. The church was 
 
 38
 
 Tuscan Churches in Summer 
 
 crowded, preparing for the procession (I had 
 forgotten it was Corpus Domini), but very airy 
 (all the doors and the Spanish chapel cloister 
 wide open) ; and only a delicate scent of in- 
 cense and of fresh flowers came from the 
 darkness, where the great altar, covered with 
 lights, loomed like a silver peacock out of the 
 vagueness of curtains and deep-coloured glass. 
 There were lots of people preparing for the 
 procession ; smart young women and boys and 
 crowds of small children ; little girls in great 
 white feathers ; one tiny mite in pale flesh- 
 colour and gilt wings, as Cupid, with a 
 cornucopia of flowers — a most Renaissance 
 fancy ! All these children were being bustled 
 about by fine Dominicans with lace surplices 
 over their white robes, and by brothers of some 
 white confraternity with cowls turned back. 
 It was a feast of children, really lovely and 
 charming, like a feast of flowers, making one 
 understand the wholesome Pagan side of the 
 old faith, which calls the little children to it, 
 not for benediction and exhortation only, but 
 for delightful dressing up in the sanctuary. 
 
 From this it was funny, and in a way 
 instructive, to go into the empty Spanish chapel. 
 
 39
 
 The Enchanted Woods 
 
 An arrangement had been made there, near the 
 altar, of a few straw chairs and one solitary 
 gold and crimson chair of state ; and seated 
 on them were five or six pious isoomen^ as one 
 of my Italian friends calls them, with their hair 
 in nets, frumpish black garments and rosaries, 
 all hanging on the words, the rather fatuous 
 jocularity of their spiritual director. A little 
 feast of clerical wit and flow of pious soul 
 which must have seemed droll enough to the 
 lovely Giottesque Virtues and Arts, in dainty 
 embroideries, and the courtly King Davids and 
 Ptolomies painted on the walls. But the feast 
 of children continued, though less sacerdotal, 
 in the big cloister. The less favoured of 
 fortune, whom the Church, for lack of ostrich 
 feathers and white shoes, had not called to the 
 great pageant upstairs, were having just as good 
 a time here below — rolling in the grass and 
 making mud pies in the sand, within the shelter 
 of the pillars and in the shadow of the pointed 
 belfry, while sounds of bells and of organs came 
 from above. 
 
 40
 
 ARLES
 
 ARLES 
 
 " T? VEN as at Aries, where the Rhone stag- 
 nates, the ground is chequered over 
 with sepulchres." Those lines of the ninth 
 canto of the "Inferno" were in my mind the 
 whole time, and now sum up the impressions 
 of that autumn day at Aries. 
 
 The place Dante alluded to — the extraordi- 
 nary melancholy avenue, called the Aliscamps, 
 or Elysian Fields — remains unchanged from 
 when he saw it, and when it suggested to him 
 the street of tombs in the city of Dis. It 
 opens suddenly out of one of the rough boule- 
 vards which surround the Roman walls of 
 Aries. The rows of big plane trees and the 
 yellowing poplars stretch into the marsh, which 
 is revealed, despite its vines and reddening 
 peach trees, by sedgy ditches, and, even at 
 midday, by swarms of huge mosquitoes. The 
 sarcophagi, mostly lidless, lie close together in 
 
 43
 
 The Enchanted Woods 
 
 the rank grass on either side of the dusty, 
 deserted road ; their long, double line inter- 
 rupted here and there by a little mediaeval 
 chapel, desecrated. And the sepulchral walk 
 is closed by what itself looks like a great tomb : 
 a half-ruined church, with Byzantine atrium 
 and belfry, dilapidated, stained by time, and 
 grown with weeds. One guesses that it was 
 intended to exorcise the ghostly multitudes of 
 this mortuary avenue among the marshes ; 
 and one might think that the people of Aries 
 would have consecrated and reconsecrated it 
 many times over. But instead of such pathetic 
 hallowing of the old pagan cemetery, the Revo- 
 lution has left only dismantled chapels, with 
 the coats of arms of the great Provencal nobles 
 crumbling on the vaultings : desecrated, rifled 
 tombs presiding over that mile of empty 
 sarcophagi. 
 
 After my morning in those Aliscamps, and 
 in the little black cloisters of St. Trophime, I 
 spent a couple of hours on the raised seats 
 of the arena, watching the butchers' boys and 
 drovers of the neighbourhood playing a harm- 
 less game of brag with half a dozen unwilling 
 little bulls, while the whole population of Aries 
 
 44
 
 Aries 
 
 looked on. After a sad scirocco morning, the 
 Sunday afternoon was splendid — magnificent 
 Southern October sunshine and a brilliant sky 
 behind the jagged whitish masonry and mediaeval 
 towers of the amphitheatre. And the former 
 seats of the arena, now rough and weed-grown, 
 were turned into a sort of promenade for a 
 crowd of holiday-makers, with no end of quite 
 wonderfully pretty women in the dignified and 
 dainty Arlesian dress and headgear. There 
 was a band playing noisily, and a great shouting 
 and clapping whenever a bull showed signs of 
 charging one of the lads, who kept running up 
 and down trying to provoke the creatures. 
 
 The whole thing was extraordinarily Southern, 
 sunny, and gay ; the bells of the churches 
 seeming to ring the people to the arena. Yet, 
 for all that, my impression of Aries remains on 
 the whole sepulchral : a humble little squalid 
 mediaeval place, bull-ring and bands and beautiful 
 women and dust-heaps and filth and all, squat- 
 ting in an over-great tomb like poor melancholy 
 Cavalcanti (not rising disdainful, waist and 
 shoulders, like Farinata) as Dante described 
 him after seeing the rows of sarcophagi of the 
 Aliscamps. Kor even as an old print shows 
 
 45
 
 The Enchanted Woods 
 
 the amphitheatre used as a citadel, and choked 
 with battlemented houses and towers, so the 
 whole town seems to have sat itself down in 
 that Rhone marshland because of those walls, 
 those forums and basilicas of the dead Roman 
 city, half filling their greatness with its tortuous 
 provincial streets, defiling their magnificence, 
 as its population still defiles their monuments, 
 with its mean hand-to-mouth life through the 
 dark centuries. And in this lies the chief 
 characteristic of Aries, in this squalor of its 
 past life. It would be easy, in description, 
 to turn Aries inadvertently into a kind of 
 Ravenna ; and I take note of the fact, as of 
 one of the odd tricks of the genius loci, that my 
 recollections of the place are already becoming 
 modified, made just a little poignant and 
 majestic by contact with the thought of that 
 other dead city by the Adriatic. But there is 
 nothing at Aries either of ancient empire or of 
 mediaeval romance (the romance of Ravenna's 
 pine forests and Venetian houses). And if it 
 is undoubtedly a tomb, it is not of the kind of 
 those great horned sarcophagi carved with pea- 
 cocks and palm trees and once shingled with 
 beaten gold, such as stand in the sunken 
 
 46
 
 Aries 
 
 churches and around the grave of Dante at 
 Ravenna ; but rather like those innumerable 
 stone boxes, shapeless, defaced, become little 
 more than troughs, on to which flutter down 
 the yellow poplar leaves along the dusty, 
 mosquito-haunted Aliscamps. 
 
 With all this hangs together a very personal 
 impression of having got, somehow or other, 
 far, far away from home, having lost my way 
 by accident, into the depths of the provinces 
 and of an unknown past. Good fortune, often 
 repeated, has given me the habit of feeling 
 companioned even when quite solitary on my 
 journeys, of imagining possible future friends in 
 remote and unfamiliar places ; so that the room 
 of an inn, the street of a new place, does not 
 make me feel lonely. 
 
 But it was different at Aries. It seemed 
 inconceivable, somehow, that in this huddled 
 town of time-stained little houses, with their 
 corner shrines and black gutter, there should 
 be any life into which mine might ever pene- 
 trate ; indeed, any life very different (for all 
 the Socialist posters and politicians yelling all 
 night at the Cafe du Forum) from that which 
 during those crumbling, oozing centuries since 
 
 47
 
 The Enchanted Woods 
 
 the fall of Rome, have left this place a dust- 
 heap and a sewer-puddle. But the kind and 
 frequently humorous Fates which preside over 
 my wanderings have willed that even Aries 
 should become, sooner or later, connected in 
 my mind with impressions of friendship. 
 
 The way of it has been most curiously round- 
 about, though efficacious. For what could seem 
 less likely than that the recollections of my 
 lonely day at Aries, of its avenue of tombs and 
 general sepulchral character, should be corrected 
 hundreds of miles away at Padua, and, of all 
 places, in a butler's pantry ? Yet it happened 
 like that, and not eight days ago, and at the 
 very moment 1 was beginning to put together 
 these notes and was despairing at their gloomi- 
 ness. Moreover, it all hinges on those lines of 
 Dante with which I have prefaced my remarks. 
 For the friend I went to look for in that pantry, 
 Luigi, most scholarly of courtly white-haired 
 butlers, has the best reason for knowing lines 
 of Dante, since he has translated {monumentum 
 aere perennius /) the whole "Divine Comedy" 
 into his native dialect. ... So that, coming 
 into his sacrarium, stuck round with various 
 discarded photographs of places, I had no need 
 
 48
 
 Aries 
 
 to keep my feelings to myself on recognizing, 
 above the glasses and decanters and coffee-cups, 
 the dismantled church and ruined belfry of the 
 Aliscamps, the horned sarcophagi and the 
 burying-troughs of the Pagan lying higgledy- 
 piggledy under the trees. My mind flew back 
 a year, out of the friendly pantry to that 
 scirocco morning, to the yellowing leaves falling 
 on to the dusty Provencal road, the belated 
 sawing cicalas and the gigantic poisonous gnats, 
 ghosts, no doubt, of evil-minded ancients buzz- 
 ing round their sepulchres in that uncanny 
 promenade. 
 
 "It is a photograph " — he answered my 
 inquiries — " which Count Alberto had spoilt 
 and thrown away. It seems a curious place, 
 and I have often wondered where it is." 
 
 "Why, it is Aries. . . ." 
 
 "Aries?' cried he, laying down his duster 
 and approaching — " you don't mean, signora, 
 Aries where the Rhone stagnates ? ' 
 
 "Of course — don't you see? — 'and the whole 
 place is chequered over with tombs ' — fanno i 
 sepokri tut to 7 loco varo." 
 
 We were bending together over the photo- 
 graph. " I will write that verse upon it, and 
 
 49 E
 
 The Enchanted Woods 
 
 am infinitely indebted to you, signora," he said, 
 " for telling me. Then Dante saw it ! " 
 
 " Of course Dante saw it, hundreds of old 
 stone coffins lying about in the fields. Dante 
 saw it and wrote about it. And / saw it last 
 October, Luigi. ..." 
 
 But I desisted from adding, what, however, 
 interested me very much, that I also was writing 
 about it. . . . 
 
 The line of Dante now stands in neat pencil 
 at the foot of that photograph in the pantry at 
 Padua ; and the friendly face and courteous 
 gesture of the old butler fill up the empty 
 space in my lonely recollection of the Alis- 
 camps. Aries, henceforth, belongs no longer 
 exclusively to a dreary, remote Middle Ages ! 
 
 Little guessing this kind though tardy 
 thoughtfulness of the Genius of Place on my 
 behalf, I ended my stay at Aries with an 
 accidental but most impressive last sight of 
 the city. A mistake in the time had set me 
 down at the station half an hour too soon. 
 So, retracing my steps towards the town, I 
 got on to a narrow quay of the Rhone, a 
 semicircular stone embankment, flush almost 
 with the water, and protecting the old houses, 
 
 50
 
 Arl 
 
 es 
 
 corbelled and battlemented, from the river ; 
 old, old backs of houses, stained with centuries 
 of dirt and with the fogs of this place " where 
 the Rhone stagnates." 
 
 It swirls past, thick, in long twists and 
 dimples of pale water, a boat or two stranded 
 against the embankment ; and, at a bend, the 
 battered gargoyle monsters of a kind of little 
 palace peering down into its melancholy flood. 
 The sun had set unperceived, and the water 
 took in its pallor faint rose and lilac tints. 
 The old town looked tomb-like. Very fitly 
 this river walk began with a thick hedge of 
 green cypress ; and as I travelled away in 
 the deepening night, I noticed a group of 
 cypresses, funereal in the flat, surrounding 
 every little station along the line.
 
 NYMPHS AND A RIVER GOD
 
 NYMPHS AND A RIVER GOD 
 
 OURBLIND people complain that there is 
 ■*■ not water enough in the Italian land- 
 scape ; estimating streams, apparently, according 
 to the boats you can float on, or the pounds 
 of fish you can pull out of, them, rather than 
 by the grace and waywardness of the in-dwell- 
 ing nymphs, or the sacred and miraculous 
 character of the river god. For Italy has 
 nymphs and river gods ; which, to me at least, 
 seem quite as much to be desired as trout or 
 punts ; and there is water enough everywhere 
 in its hilly regions to refresh the spirit, though 
 perhaps not always, I admit it, to bathe the 
 body. And such as are dissatisfied thereat had 
 better not come to Italy, and may as well skip 
 these pages. 
 
 I don't quite know what meaning the ancients 
 attached to the wood Nymphccum, and 1 rather 
 fear it meant some portion of their public baths. 
 But to me the word has come into connection 
 
 55
 
 The Enchanted Woods 
 
 with certain little places very peculiar, and 
 which one meets often enough on these hill- 
 sides. I have just found one, quite perfect, while 
 riding up the steep paths from the Mugnone 
 Valley to the Amphitheatre of Fiesole. There 
 is a sharp turn of the lanes, and in a little 
 widening between the olive-yards a brake of 
 reeds, a circle of bushes, a matting of wet 
 grass ; and a little stream, winding down the 
 hill, falls over a weir, a smooth sheet of limpid 
 white water, losing itself in the grass, and 
 going babbling and singing away through the 
 tiny gorge, with the cypresses and tall bay trees 
 marking its course, and the flaming leafless 
 willows its resting-places. 
 
 This is a NymphcEum^ a home of the nymphs, 
 and I recognize it immediately as such. But 
 what do I mean thereby ? Do I imagine forms 
 of maidens, brides or bridesmaids of rustic gods 
 haunting the spot ? Assuredly not ; nor any 
 human forms save an occasional peasant tilling 
 the olive-yard. Yet I know it is the place of 
 the nymphs, I feel their presence, though the 
 nymphs are merely the white singing water, 
 the whispering brake of reeds ; not immanent 
 in it all, but it 9 itself. Certainly it is not merely 
 
 56
 
 Nymphs and a River God 
 
 so much stone, water, grass, or trees. And 
 when, as orten happens, my pony stops in such 
 places to drink of the shallow brook which 
 crosses the path, I have a very special feeling 
 as of being in an open-air chapel, a consecrated 
 place ; and it is all summed up in that mis- 
 applied word, the Nymphaum. 
 
 I have mentioned this kind of feeling, because 
 it explains that it was something stronger even 
 than the three immortal hexameters of Virgil, 
 with Carducci's four or five beautiful strophes 
 added to them, which drove me to brave the 
 snow-wind along those miles of Umbrian 
 valley in accomplishment of that long-desired 
 pilgrimage to the sacred springs of the 
 Clitumnus. It was a very fine, very cold 
 March morning, a few round clouds rising 
 and being chased along the snowy mountains. 
 An austere country, and naturally wintry, this 
 great high-lying oval valley or ancient lake- 
 bottom of Umbria : mountains all round, 
 rounded and without much grace, but very 
 solemn in their deep blue powdered with 
 snow ; towns appearing and disappearing with 
 every fitful light upon their flanks and spurs ; 
 their crops backward, hedges leafless, and bare 
 
 57
 
 The Enchanted Woods 
 
 their sparse trees ; oaks, always and only oaks, 
 except the olives here and there quite thin on 
 the grey parched rubble of the hillsides. Very 
 solemn ; not tragic, but almost more than 
 austere. A country, moreover, very scanty of 
 people ; few farms, and only one real village 
 to pass through in all those miles ; decent but 
 poor, with a great turreted castle in its midst, 
 turned into barns ; and a church with a fresco 
 on the door, surrounded by last year's faded 
 garlands. The people also, without Tuscan 
 ease or Roman swagger, silent and serious ; 
 men on pack-horses or driving strings of 
 mules ; women spinning with the distaff while 
 herding the sheep and black pigs in the thin 
 frost-bitten grass. And at intervals, from every 
 hillside, great runs of torrent rubble, avalanches 
 of stone ; and in them, untouched or unheed- 
 ing, the great bare oaks in scattered companies, 
 with only tufts of black hellebore at their feet. 
 It was sunny by fits, and very cold. What a 
 solemn, solemn country, this vast, flat, oval 
 valley of green crops, swept by the wind and 
 snow from the mountains, and burnt by the 
 sun, and devastated by the torrents ; and yet 
 fertile, and human, and serene ! 
 
 58
 
 Nymphs and a River God 
 
 I had seen that little temple of the Clitumnus, 
 under the rocky, towered hill, and above the 
 full, lush stream, very often, from the train, 
 which passes it without stopping ; it is an 
 accidental arrangement of suggestions and lines 
 so perfect as to have haunted one for years, 
 even had one not known the name and the 
 verses. And now at last I got to it. The 
 little temple stands on a rock above a mill 
 turned by the Clitumnus. Looked at from 
 near, it is evidently made up out of remains 
 of a much larger building, and in Byzantine 
 times, with carved cross and vines ; it is, in 
 fact, a Christian church. But, built of Roman 
 fragments, with its gable and entablature, its 
 two fluted columns and little vestibule between 
 them, 'tis the most classic and pagan place I 
 have ever seen. One is quite surprised, inside 
 the tiny temple cella, to find upon the altar 
 the usual framed printed forms, " Sacerdos 
 quum lavat manus," etc., and one somehow 
 translates this Christian rite into an antique 
 lustration. Pigeons live untidily all over the 
 temple, and between its two columns I found 
 the body of a finch, with that decent look 
 which dead birds have. Under the temple, as 
 
 59
 
 The Enchanted Woods 
 
 I have said, and passing through a mill, flows 
 the Clitumnus : unsullied by the women who 
 wash in it, a shallow stream of pellucid water, 
 the great weeds waving in its whiteness like 
 naiads' hair ; the banks green, with here and 
 there a weeping willow, faintly green, and 
 a rosy peach-tree doing it honour in this 
 blossomless country. An inscription tells 
 that the place was sacred to the Clitumnian 
 Jove, or to Jove as the Clitumnus — Jovi 
 Clitumno. The Latin leaves it impressively 
 ambiguous. 
 
 One must do like Turner, and transfer in 
 the picture painted and cherished by one's fancy 
 the little temple from above this mill-reach to 
 about a mile off along the same road, to the 
 springs of the river ; and one must think of it 
 as guarding the very height and perfection of 
 this lovely water, its miraculous well-head. 
 Under the road, under an arid rock, sparsely 
 grown with bare oaks, lies a pond half sur- 
 rounded by the buildings and little garden 
 of a farm, encroached on by the green and 
 watery grass, and guarded towards the plain 
 by tall hedges and a screen of budding poplars. 
 A little island, green also with fresh weeping 
 
 60
 
 Nymphs and a River God 
 
 willows, is in the midst. And this pond is the 
 well-head of the Clitumnus. Out of the rock, 
 invisibly, heaven knows how, issue swift streams 
 of purest white water, winding among the cress, 
 the wild mint, and the grasses. And out of 
 deep holes (as if a tree had been uprooted) 
 bubble more waters, pellucid, pale beryl- 
 coloured ; and more well up, pure blue among 
 the waving tresses of weeds, effervescing on the 
 surface. Never was such water elsewhere ! 
 Straight from the hidden naiads' urns, gushing 
 upwards among the unexpected grass and reeds 
 and trees under that stony hill. A woman 
 who was filling her pitcher, and who gave me 
 to drink, told me it never lessens, but rather 
 the contrary, in the greatest summer droughts. 
 Some peasants were shoeing a handsome mule 
 at the forge by the brink ; and two lovely 
 bullocks, purest white Val di Chiana breed, 
 worthy of Virgil and of the Roman triumphs 
 on the Capitol, were waiting to be yoked. I 
 had felt, while sitting in the sunshine by the 
 temple, that it, and the stream, and the bleak 
 blue valley, were consecrated for me by those 
 lines of the Georgics. But now, seeing the 
 springs, I understood that there were things 
 
 61
 
 The Enchanted Woods 
 
 more wonderful and venerable than all Virgil's 
 poetry, the places which had inspired it ; and 
 that I was in the home of a God, in a real 
 God's presence. 
 
 62
 
 BRIVE-LA-GAILLARDE
 
 BRIVE-LA-GAILLARDE 
 
 AM very glad that friend of mine induced 
 
 me to go out of my way to Brive, although 
 
 nothing could have been more different from 
 
 what, Heaven only knows why, I had made 
 
 up out of her tew words about the place. 
 
 And here I would note the way in which 
 a friend, by the mere fact of having recently 
 been there, can keep company with us, despite 
 all difficulties of time and space, in what would 
 otherwise be quite new and solitary places. 
 Thus with this particular friend of mine, the 
 arch-traveller : how often have I trodden in 
 her footsteps ! Last spring it was at Viterbo, 
 amidst the magic of fruit blossom and of 
 trickling fountains, the melancholy fascination of 
 those ivory basilicas among the dismantled walls, 
 the forsaken fields, of Toscanella : a word left 
 on a scrap of paper on the inn table bringing 
 the bare knowledge that the other had been 
 
 65
 
 The Enchanted Woods 
 
 there, that her eyes, her feet, had been on those 
 stones ; that her thoughts had gone out, like 
 mine, to meet these things. This time it is in 
 autumn showers, in the hilly heart of France 
 that I have been thus companioned ; com- 
 panioned, who knows, perhaps more fully and 
 truly almost than many a time that we have 
 travelled side by side in the body. For our 
 truer friendships give into our power an 
 essence, as it were, of the personality — a real 
 presence distilled from all we care for really — 
 glance, gesture, tone of voice, turn of the head, 
 curl of the hair, and individual, inexpressible 
 ways of feeling and seeing things ; all of which 
 remains ours (if we know how to use it 
 reverently), inalienably ours, happen what may, 
 and companions us, as I said, on occasion. I 
 felt this thing, and was befriended yesterday 
 evening on coming to the nice balconied Hotel 
 de Bordeaux (where Kings of Spain and Pope 
 Pius VII. had halted, as inscriptions told me), 
 and while as yet Brive-la-Gaillarde meant 
 nothing to me except a starry night, big trees 
 all round, some roses at my window, and a 
 vague sense of approaching the South. 
 
 Meant, let me hasten to correct, nothing 
 
 66
 
 Brive-la-Gaillarde 
 
 connected with the reality. For I saw Brive 
 quite well before getting there, and see it quite 
 distinctly, as its exists in my fancy, alongside 
 of the other Brive painted in my memory. 
 The Brive I had come to see rises in a broken- 
 orT amphitheatre above a deep ravine, which is 
 spanned, with its torrent, by a great viaduct ; 
 a long mail of elms looks down into the gulf, 
 and the town is piled behind, rows of Louis 
 XIV. hotels and of more modest " vieille 
 France ' houses whitewashed and silvery- 
 roofed. And, in a dainty way, with the smart 
 swagger of an old impregnable fortress turned 
 to the prosperous uses of peace, it lives up to 
 its name of La Gaillarde. And the autumn 
 sun makes it whiter, the first autumn cloudiness 
 turns its slate into pure silver. 
 
 That is my Brive ; and a very good place it 
 is, and one 1 shall keep in my dreams till the 
 day I find it, perchance, in the Kingdom of 
 Heaven. The unexpected in the business is 
 not so much that the real Brive should have 
 turned out wholly different ; first of all just as 
 flat as a town can well settle down to be in the 
 midst of a hilly country, and neither fortified- 
 looking, nor white, nor — Heaven save the 
 
 67
 
 The Enchanted Woods 
 
 mark ! — dainty nor prosperous, nor in the least 
 " vieille France " as I understand those words. 
 This utter difference from the place of my 
 imagining is not the unexpected ; but rather 
 that, given this utter difference, I should not 
 have been disappointed, but quite, quite the 
 reverse. 
 
 It was raining on and off, and more on than 
 off; and I wandered under my umbrella past 
 the great plane trees which have replaced, as is 
 usual in France, the city walls and moat ; and 
 on along the muddy cobbles of the tortuous 
 streets. And as I walked into Brive-la-Gaillarde 
 1 understood at once, I scarce knew why, that 
 the bit of journey in the dark yesterday — the 
 hillsides covered with chestnuts, the rushing 
 torrents, the long tunnels after Limoges — had 
 brought me not only into the mountains (I 
 could see their green sloping pastures between 
 the roofs of Brive) but also in great measure 
 into the South. For here was that almost 
 inevitable mark of the South : not the squalor 
 only — and there was a more than Southern dose 
 of that — but the South's — at least the historic 
 Southern town's — tragic look, its air of having 
 lost its children and refusing to be consoled. 
 
 68
 
 Brive-la-Gaillarde 
 
 In Northern countries — England, Germany, 
 Switzerland, and what 1 have hitherto thought 
 of as France — the Past may remain as a thing 
 of peace and prosperity. But in the South, 
 with few exceptions, there is always the trace of 
 a wrench, a catastrophe, a sudden lamentable 
 breaking-off (monuments and institutions hang- 
 ing rag-like) ; or else the crumbling of long 
 periods of slow depression ; a mournful no to 
 life. I understood the Southernness of Brive as 
 much in this characteristic as in the carts dragged 
 no longer by horses but by thin red cows (straw 
 wreathing the creatures' horns in a Bedlam 
 fashion), and in the hard peaches and figs and 
 mushrooms on to which the rain was descending 
 in the market-place. The South is in those 
 tortuous streets, where, ever and anon, a bit of 
 tracery, a row of Romanesque heads, as off 
 some church front, or even a lovely double- 
 arched window of Siennese pattern, is built up 
 into a sordid house. The South is in the 
 big yellow Romanesque church, all corners and 
 porches outside and all dark chapels and apses 
 inside — of Romanesque which never, never can 
 flower into Gothic, however much its round 
 arches squeeze into horseshoe, and its piers stilt 
 
 69
 
 The Enchanted Woods 
 
 themselves against the ceiling. A Southern, 
 mournful church, believed in and neglected, 
 damp, dark, and stained, into which (a circum- 
 stance always impressive) you go down steps 
 instead of up — a descent into long ago. The 
 market, the booths and umbrellas and carts in 
 the rain, spread all round it ; men in blouses 
 and sabots, and women in caps ; for Brive, 
 though already the South, is still France. And 
 in this mixture, perhaps because it is the first 
 time I meet it, lies the charm of La Gaillarde. 
 It is not at all an Italian city (or even village !) 
 of past magnificence, civic or tyrannical. It is 
 French, very French, and thoroughly provincial. 
 Its houses, although (in the smaller streets, at 
 least, and the black alleys and courts) festooned 
 with vines in trellis-fashion, are high, slate- 
 roofed ; many of them are wooden, projecting 
 bulgy sides into the street ; and every here and 
 there you meet a pepper-pot tower, a corkscrew 
 turret-stair, and pointed cock-eyed attics. 
 
 Nothing remains at Brive of the early Middle 
 Ages, save that one melancholy twelfth-century 
 church ; a town probably nipped in the bud, 
 blasted in the great catastrophe of Southern 
 France ; and then ruined once more during 
 
 70
 
 Brive-la-Gaillarde 
 
 the wars of Religion. At least this inner town, 
 which was once inside the walls, walls the 
 seventeenth century — Richelieu, as usual — 
 evidently pulled down, planting the avenues of 
 planes in the filled-up moat. Then the better- 
 to-do folk, during that brief prosperity of early 
 Louis XIV. which rebuilt so much of France, 
 set those boulevards with handsome little 
 hotels, mansarded and ail de bceuf\I, but now 
 very sad in their turn among the little gardens. 
 And meanwhile inside the town the little 
 fifteenth-century castellated houses in yards 
 and lanes became, no doubt, little chateaux de la 
 m'ucre ; and thus on, absenteeism and taxes 
 helping, the town dwindling, dying, on till the 
 Revolution. . . . 
 
 The historical emotion had me in its grip ; 
 1 thought that I wanted a history of Brive. 
 But once inside the bookshop I desisted from 
 asking for one, feeling I knew the melancholy 
 tale quite poignantly enough. The Brive 
 booksellers (for there are two) are guiltless of 
 the usual display of aphrodisiac yellow backs. 
 They are decorous warehouses of ready- 
 reckoners, mhageres modeks^ manuals o\ eti- 
 quette, and gilt-edged aids to devotion, and do 
 
 7'
 
 The Enchanted Woods 
 
 business mainly in copybooks and faire-parts. 
 But in one of them I found a shelf full of 
 cheap classics, and I felt I positively must 
 possess one as a souvenir of Brive. I hankered 
 after a Montaigne or some sixteenth-century 
 tattered satirist ; I would have liked a " Capitaine 
 Fracasse," or even a "Trois Mousquetaires," 
 for those hungry swashbucklers might have 
 hailed from this place. ... At last I found 
 a " Manon Lescaut," uncut, but stained with 
 damp. I bought it. Of course, it is not of 
 the same date as Brive. But it has the God- 
 forsakenness, the misere, the penetrating sad- 
 ness, its essentially French charm. For the 
 charm of poor Brive-la-Gaillarde, its melancholy 
 grace, is very great. 
 
 72
 
 OF PARIS AND THE EXHIBITION
 
 OF PARIS AND THE EXHIBITION 
 
 HT^HE third day I simply struck, refused point* 
 A blank to enter the Exhibition, and taking 
 a cab where the colossal Parisienne presides 
 over its gates (Parisienne quotha ! Why, she 
 is only one part tryer-on at the Printemps, and 
 two parts spurious Indian idol or archaeological 
 sham Astarte) I had myself set down in regions 
 still unshaken by the motor-car, and where no 
 cry of u liquet tes " breaks upon the song of salad 
 vendor and of vitrier. Far along the quays, 
 near the Wine Market, where I plunged into 
 an unexpected little black Gothic church, and 
 willingly lost myself in a maze of narrow 
 streets, with washball and cabbage water stream- 
 ing down their sides. Behind the windows, 
 the meagre geraniums, young women were 
 ironing print frocks ; students in barbaric hats 
 and workmen in peg-top trousers were dining 
 on the pavement ; and white house-painters, 
 
 75
 
 The Enchanted Woods 
 
 and whiter cook-boys like Watteau Pierrots, 
 and bonnes and widow ladies in black, and even 
 (in the Rue de la Parcheminerie, for instance) 
 cocks and hens, were all a leisurely bustle in the 
 greyish-blue atmosphere, against that greyish- 
 white background, touched with the vivid 
 orange and cobalt of posters, which all of it 
 means Paris. Means it at least to me, and, I 
 should think, to every one who cares for real 
 places and hates shams, and — well, and exhi- 
 bitions. 
 
 It is not the utilitarian side of the Exhibition 
 which offends me, far from it ; there is an 
 element of life, and therefore of possible future 
 grace or dignity, in everything useful, if it is 
 really so, and not mere lumber and complication. 
 I respect all machines, for instance, hoping they 
 may some day perfect themselves into their own 
 minimum, or, so to speak, their own negation. 
 And I wish some capable person had explained 
 them to me, or rather that I had been a person 
 capable of grasping their explanation. I do not 
 mind even the gross and animal side of the 
 Exhibition, the endless eating and drinking, 
 which is its sole serious feature, if only people 
 would be less grimly anxious and fiercely active 
 
 76
 
 Of Paris and the Exhibition 
 
 about securing tables, or a little better pleased 
 with their food once they have got it. I do 
 not really hate all the various vulgar divertisse- 
 ments so long as any one is diverted ; and 1 
 can even hope that it is not merely horrid 
 covetousness, but in some simple breasts a 
 vague fairy-story wonder which gathers the 
 sordid multitudes round the cases of diamonds 
 and rubies and emeralds. People distil the 
 poetry needful for healthy life out of many and 
 very different things, and most appeals to the 
 imagination are, after all, better than nothing. 
 
 What vexes me in the Exhibition is precisely 
 that by which it appeals in vain, so to speak, 
 to mc. There is a certain impressiveness in the 
 thought that the Past, as well as the Distant, 
 have sent their wares to be exhibited. But 
 there is not much real pleasure to be squeezed 
 out of time and space as such ; and then it turns 
 out to be mere rhetoric, and just on a par with 
 the sham Kremlins, and cardboard St. Marks, 
 and block-tin Meccas, and all the other dreary 
 frauds. One catches one's self wandering in fancy 
 from the pale Morte d'Arthur tapestries and 
 Byzantine enamels of the Retrospective show 
 to remote provincial cathedrals, and forlorn 
 
 //
 
 The Enchanted Woods 
 
 little churches on mountain-side or brink of 
 salt marsh, their real, fitting abode ; and when 
 it comes to the glass case in the Spanish depart- 
 ment, containing the relics of poor Boabdil el 
 Chico, one could cry at this last outrage reserved 
 for the King of Granada, and feels one's own 
 heart and fancy stripped and sent into exile like 
 the poor nice Moors. For those things, torn 
 banners, and damascened sword, and pathetic 
 frayed coat with its crimson pomegranates, have 
 come by rail alongside of dry goods and iron- 
 mongery. 
 
 This, however, is not the worst. It is the 
 disregard to all sense of geography implied in 
 the gazebos of the Rue des Nations (let alone 
 disregard to all other decent feeling in bringing 
 over savages to stare at) ; the disregard for all 
 those circumstances of climate, soil, vegetation, 
 lie of the land and history which constitute the 
 organic habit of countries and the organic reason 
 of places and monuments, making them into 
 living creatures, charming friends, or venerable 
 divinities. It is, to me, of course, this stupid 
 wicked carnival sacrilege towards the Genius 
 Loci. . . . And yet, as some writers tell us 
 about Torquemada and similar personages of 
 
 73
 
 Of Paris and the Exhibition 
 
 tender religious sensibility, I am aware that at 
 the bottom of the wrath that burns in me, and 
 would like to burn in and all through that 
 Rue des Nations, there is nothing but infinite 
 sadness and pity. Yes ; in good earnest, and 
 without irony or rhetoric or nonsense of any 
 kind, a sense of great sadness for what all this 
 points to : the incapacity, in ninety-nine out 
 of every hundred quite human contemporaries, 
 of extracting any interest save selr-interest from 
 their everyday surroundings, of distilling any 
 imaginative charm out of their own life ; the 
 absence of all that is spectacular or lovely or 
 significant in their own thoughts and feelings ; 
 and the consequent necessity to pile up, mostly 
 in vain, tremendous artificial and far-fetched 
 follies in the dull landscape of their existence. 
 
 Siberia and Java ! the Tombs of Mycenae 
 and furniture of Potsdam ! What good can 
 they get from it all if they cannot see the 
 difference between the lie of the land at Fon- 
 tainebleau and at Compiegne ; if it is nothing 
 to them where the sand and the vineyards or 
 the He de France end and the chalk and the 
 apple trees of Normandy begin ? Why, even 
 in this centralized France, every district, I feel 
 
 79
 
 The Enchanted Woods 
 
 convinced, has some variation of shape of cart 
 or harness, of fold and sit of starched cap ; and 
 as to Paris, why, everything, or almost every- 
 thing, which has been made by man and time 
 and not by machinery, possesses a grace, an 
 amusing turn, a something telling of the centuries 
 and the weather, and telling above all of its 
 own particular private means and ways, from 
 the flying buttresses of Notre Dame to the 
 long carts, with cranks and levers, on which 
 the great blue-fleeced horses draw the barrels 
 along from the Halle aux Vins. 
 
 That brings me back to my expedition or, 
 so to speak, purification after too much ex- 
 hibition. I had an even better one, a pilgrimage 
 to the spirit in-dwelling in the Left Bank, quite 
 accidentally a few days later. We went first 
 to an old house, Louis XIV., with great yard 
 for coaches and garlanded portal, in the Rue 
 Garanciere, and then on. But I ought to explain 
 that one of the charms of the Left Bank, one of 
 the things which make it so particularly Paris, 
 is its being a great alluvium and accretion of 
 the in-streaming provinces, containing samples 
 of every provincial town, of every sort of pro- 
 vincial life, even of the seclusion and silence 
 
 80
 
 Of Paris and the Exhibition 
 
 thereof alongside of its own noisy thorough- 
 fares. The particular house we went to see, 
 with a view to hiring for a nurse's school, that 
 afternoon was a little old hotel in the Rue 
 Vanneau, uninhabited for months, and seemingly 
 years, full of dust and cobwebs, and yet quite 
 dainty and decorously cheerful ; behind it the 
 big trees and half-wild bushes of a neglected 
 garden. An old lady and gentleman (who ? 
 whence ?) were taking the air on the steps of 
 this utterly dismantled abode. The last in- 
 habitants had been some Peres Benedictins ; 
 and on the mantelpiece of the empty lodge lay 
 an old newspaper address of Sa Grandeur the 
 Bishop of Hebron, or Antioch, or Tyre. 
 
 O Paris of the Left Bank, the only real Paris 
 for me, with thy stately hotels and long convent 
 walls overtopped with discreet green ; thy frowzy 
 little Balzac pensions, tenanted once by the 
 nymphs of Farmers-General, and now by en- 
 thusiastic art students and warlike doctoresses, 
 and widows from the provinces leading bowing 
 sons in check cravats ; Paris of Faisan d'Ors 
 where we hoped in the plat du jour and hesitated 
 between gratuitous blue wine and another, not 
 gratuitous, Jemic-canneite ; Paris of cremeries, 
 
 Si
 
 The Enchanted Woods 
 
 wherein we cheated the desire for afternoon 
 tea, and many, doubtless, thought to cheat 
 desire for dinner or lunch ; Paris of history, 
 of romance, Dumas and Balzac, of hope and 
 effort and day-dreams also, Socialists, and 
 scientific struggling girls of Rosny's novels, 
 and ardent expatriated creatures fit for Henry 
 James ! I felt it was the only real Paris, as 
 I stood (having left behind the civilized cosmo- 
 politan boulevards), at the window of a certain 
 fourth floor near the Invalides, overlooking 
 clipped trees and Louis XIV. attics, with, in the 
 smoky sunset distance, a faint babel of Exhibition 
 towers and domes. And to think that I, even 
 /, could have thought, even for a second, that 
 I had come to Paris to see the Rue des 
 Nations ! 
 
 82
 
 TRENT
 
 TRENT 
 
 T T OW strange it seemed, and yet how delight- 
 fully right, early that morning, to be 
 once more in the South ; to be going no longer 
 in a omnibus to an inn, but rattling and jingling 
 behind postillion harnesses up to this hospitable 
 house ! How very lovely and delicate Trent 
 looked as we drove through ; not picturesque, 
 like those old German towns behind me, but 
 much better, beautiful, with its fine Venetian 
 windows of fifteenth and sixteenth century 
 work, its remains of fresco, its Lombard Cathe- 
 dral all pillareted ; its porticoes and squares 
 where the baskets of grapes and mushrooms 
 were being unloaded, and the walls and towers 
 with Ghibelline swallow-tails, with the Adige 
 rushing past them to Verona. And how 
 pleasant it was, once outside the city, along the 
 dusty roads of the valley and the steep mountain 
 track up to this castle, to meet white oxen 
 
 85
 
 The Enchanted Woods 
 
 drawing up carts of new wine, not on ladder 
 waggons as in South Germany and Switzerland, 
 but on those carts like old-fashioned artillery- 
 trains, waspwaists studded with nails, and 
 almost spokeless wheels, which belong to all 
 Lombardy, and which tell one that the Alps 
 are behind and nothing in front but wide 
 descending valleys and the great plain of the 
 Po, until you get to the Apennines. 
 
 How much pleasure Germany has just 
 given me, I thought ; as we jingled along 
 through that border country, where officials 
 speak German and Nature speaks Italian ; and 
 how much pleasure Italy is going to give me 
 once more ! 
 
 One should be grateful for, and cherish, the 
 very differences in the kind of pleasure, the 
 way of giving it, which different countries have. 
 Thus, in Germany (save in some large cosmo- 
 politan towns of no account for local sentiment) 
 I am a stranger, knowing no inhabitants, and 
 moving from inn to inn ; not in the least 
 solitary (far from it), but companioned only by 
 effigied Gotz von Berlichingen knights out of 
 Franconian churches, and candid adventurers, 
 and sensitive eccentric fine ladies, and ballad- 
 
 86
 
 Trent 
 
 singers, and " advocates of the poor," and 
 mysterious abbes and beautiful souls out of 
 Goethe's and Jean Paul's novels and Stilling's 
 autobiography ; by nurses and teachers almost 
 — alas ! as past and imaginary — and my father's 
 shooting companions out of my own childhood ; 
 companioned also, in the way in which they 
 only companion, by immortal tunes. And 
 without any disrespect to whatever dear living 
 German friends Fortune may hold in reserve 
 for me (their vague images, guessed at behind 
 turret casements in rough-paved towns, or 
 behind gates, shadowed by lime trees, of steep- 
 roofed country houses, are perhaps the most 
 unreal members of my whole imaginary escort !) 
 without, assuredly, any disrespect to future 
 German realities, 1 think that this kind of 
 solitude or sociability (for it is both) is perhaps 
 what fits in best with Germany and German 
 sentiment. But it is quite different with Italy. 
 That is the land of friends, real, living, and 
 incomparable ; and their simplicity and gravity 
 and fantastic humour, their impetuous gracious- 
 ness and grace, their indefinable quality of 
 ancient race and local breeding, are required for 
 the full appreciation of the greatness of their 
 
 87
 
 The Enchanted Woods 
 
 history, the genius and charm of their art, as 
 much as the unbroken family tradition, the love 
 of district and town, which is revealed in their 
 everyday talk. 
 
 So that sojourn in an inn, so proper in 
 Germany, affects me as rather against nature in 
 Italy, as a loss and a grievance ; and it seemed 
 so very right that this really Italian town of 
 Trent should make me happy in real Italian 
 fashion. Up here in the castle, high among 
 woods of mixed northern beech and southern 
 pine among the rocks, with its great rooms 
 frescoed by the Fuggers for Charles V.'s stay, 
 and now more worthily inhabited by babies and 
 dolls and rocking-horses ; up here, as last year 
 down in the palace at Trent, I felt at once in 
 touch, through this friendly present, with the 
 past. In half an hour, during a meal among 
 the family portraits — a Titian and a Moroni 
 among them — one seemed to know not merely 
 everything about the modern Trent, with its 
 Italian inhabitants and Austrian garrison and 
 officials, but also about the feudal Trent of the 
 Council and before. The family of the Mad- 
 ruzzos, who held the Prince Bishopric for nearly 
 a century, and owned so many castles, had 
 
 88
 
 Trent 
 
 become quite real and familiar to me. And, 
 turn about with possibility of mountain excur- 
 sions (including reference to time-tables ot 
 railways and lake steamers), we found ourselves, 
 quite naturally, calculating how many changes 
 of horses must have been needed to carry the 
 news from the Council to Rome, supposing, ot 
 course, that the messengers of Charles V. and 
 Pope Farnese had galloped day and night. 
 
 Last year I stayed to see my friends in Trent 
 itself. It was midsummer, during an interlude 
 of stormy weather, which brought out the 
 Alpine character of the place. In fine weather, 
 towns situated like this one, like Bellinzona also, 
 and Innsbruck, in the flat surrounded by high 
 mountain walls, have something to me intoler- 
 ably suggestive of a prison. But when the 
 clouds hide these barriers with the rest of the 
 world (the endless baffling of a great Alpine 
 valley), these places have a grandeur, and even 
 a special pleasantness in their apparent com- 
 panionship with the elements. The rocks and 
 forests and high pastures look down into them, 
 the storms and snows play familiarly in these 
 close quarters ; and here at Trent there is a little 
 waterfall on an Alp, performing as unconcernedly 
 
 89
 
 The Enchanted Woods 
 
 before the whole town as the spurts of water 
 among the statues and traceries of the great 
 fountain by the cathedral. It is pleasant to see 
 this Alpine character recorded in a fresco on 
 the outside of one of the fine fifteenth-century 
 Venetian houses : the family are seated in a 
 room with Oriental rugs, before a wide window 
 letting in the sunset and the mountains, drawing 
 them into intimacy. 
 
 The first evening I passed at Trent itself (as 
 distinguished from this castle above it) the Alps 
 seemed to close down on it with their storms ; 
 and one wondered whether the Adige, big with 
 melted snow, was not going, as it has so often 
 done, to join in this over-familiar game of the 
 elements with the city. 
 
 We made our way through dark streets 
 rushing with water, and under waterfalls from 
 the roofs, to the church containing the famous 
 seventeenth-century organ, of which the chapel- 
 master of the Lateran used to talk to me years 
 and years ago. Some service connected with 
 the Sacred Heart was going on, the church all 
 hung with red damask, and a splendid altar 
 blazing out of the darkness like a Christmas- 
 tree. There were a good many people, despite 
 
 90
 
 Trent 
 
 the frightful weather, all huddled in cloaks and 
 shawls, and scarcely visible in the dark nave. 
 A little hymn was played over and over again 
 by the organ, and sung alternately by the con- 
 gregation without accompaniment. The voices, 
 mainly women and boys, had that deep, guttural 
 quality one gets to know and love in Italian 
 fields, solemn and with a pathos which strikes 
 one as primaeval. The little organ, on the other 
 hand, was infinitely mellow, like a small band 
 of old stringed instruments, a sort of Cremona 
 among organs itself. We stayed till the last 
 repetition of the beautiful old hymn-tune, and 
 went away, when the sermon began, out into 
 that mountain storm raging through the streets. 
 It was curious to remember that this was the 
 church where the great Council had sat to re- 
 make or to mar Catholicism, the rows and rows 
 of silver mitres which Titian has painted, or one 
 of his pupils. 
 
 91
 
 THE MOTOR-CAR AND THE 
 GENIUS OF PLACES
 
 THE MOTOR-CAR AND THE 
 GENIUS OF PLACES 
 
 I 
 
 nr^HEY took me yesterday a long drive in 
 ■*■ their motor-car along the Hog's Back, 
 through Guildford, Dorking, and a score of 
 other places, all of which I do not much believe 
 in. Still, there is in the scenery of Southern 
 England something which greatly harmonizes 
 this improbable mode of locomotion, and 
 tempers into mere comfortable dreaminess that 
 sense of unreality, of " not having been there," 
 which it is apt to leave in the old-fashioned 
 votary of the Genius of Places. No rapidity 
 of movement can disconcert the slow, poetic 
 prose of this dear country ; and you seem to 
 turn over its village gardens and willowed 
 streams, and little churches among elms, and 
 old-world inns with swinging signs, and lovers 
 in the lane, or children on the green, like so 
 
 95
 
 The Enchanted Woods 
 
 many pictures in a Caldecott or Greenaway 
 book, with an amused and pleasant feeling of 
 leisure. And the lie of the land is similarly 
 reassuring. 
 
 The furthest distances are gathered neatly 
 together, blue fold on blue fold, against the 
 green hemlock fringe of the high-lying roads, 
 with no mountain or sea suggestion of other 
 lands beyond ; no distant steeples or towers 
 suggestive of distant past, of life less peaceful 
 than that of the toy country towns, with plum 
 and apricot roofs among the tree-tops. Nay, 
 the very sky, with which the motor's unimpeded 
 rushing brings you into curious new relation, 
 broods over it all with a sheltering intimacy 
 shutting out the very thought of foreign lands. 
 
 A drive like this one through a very familiar 
 and prosperous country makes one understand, 
 if not the imaginative value, at all events the 
 moral mission, of the motor-car in the future ; 
 in the future, of course, when it will be a thing of 
 honourable utility, not swagger, and within the 
 reach of many. For instead of travelling, like 
 irresponsible outlaws, imprisoned between fences 
 and embankments, it takes us into the streets 
 and on to the roads where people are moving 
 
 96
 
 Motor-car and the Genius of Places 
 
 about naturally ; it makes us slacken and 
 deflect for waggons and go-carts, nay, stop short, 
 decently, for children and dogs, feeling the 
 claims of other life than ours, and suggesting 
 that remote districts and foreign lands are not 
 our tea-gardens and racecourses ; for I fear 
 that railways have merely diminished the sense 
 of enlarged brotherhood which should come 
 from reasonable travel. Moreover, the motor- 
 car will remove the degradation of being con- 
 veyed like cattle or luggage, irresponsible and 
 unresponsive ; and will reinstate the decorous 
 sense of mystery connected with change of place. 
 The place I was in recedes, vanishes ; the one I 
 am in slips away as I speak ; and the hospitable 
 distance approaches and unfurls to receive me ; 
 and I am full of wonder and regret and gladness. 
 These are the moral advantages which the 
 motor-car will bring. It has, also, its very 
 special appeals to the fancy and the feelings. 
 Apart from the rapture of mere swift move- 
 ment, which I neither feel nor regret not 
 feeling (there are so many possible exhilarations 
 111 life without verging on drunkenness), is the 
 sense of triumph over steepness, flying uphill 
 with the ease we are accustomed to only in 
 
 n
 
 The Enchanted Woods 
 
 rushing down : the effort against weight, 
 abolished not merely in ourselves, but in the 
 thing which carries us. Then, particularly in 
 flat or widespread counties, the unaccustomed 
 speed enables one to see as wholes tracts of land 
 too large to be taken in at any ordinary pace ; 
 and even more, tracts of sky. A certain great 
 elliptical pattern of clouds, shaped like the 
 rounds of feathers of the sawed marble slabs 
 of St. Mark's would, for instance, have been 
 invisible had we been traversing the Roman 
 Campagna at a foot's pace or the trot of a 
 horse. And there is, in the swishing over 
 tiresome details, in the abolition of the — " Oh, 
 here's another piece of boring straight road ! ' 
 something most strangely like thought or desire. 
 If beggars could ride (reversing the old saw) 
 wishes would be nowadays not horses, but 
 
 motors. 
 
 As regards the feeling for localities, the 
 motor heightens not the sense of topography 
 (which is, if anything, sacrificed), but the great 
 o-eographical one. The ins and outs of a group 
 of hills, their various slopes and levels and wide 
 shelving valleys, and the reaching inwards of 
 the plain among the mountain roots ; the whole 
 
 98
 
 Motor-car and the Genius of Places 
 
 real shape of the earth's surface, and the com- 
 plexities of its ways, all this is revealed as 
 you swish past. Revealed rather than realized. 
 To such as me, at least. Probably because I 
 cannot grasp things so quickly, cannot give 
 them the warmth, the fulness of a reality which 
 has picked up and knotted afresh the fibres of 
 one's heart. In motoring things remain ocular, 
 mere visions, unaccompanied by the sympa- 
 thizing measuring of our muscles and will. 
 They lack the tangible joy, working deep into 
 our nerves, of the massive real. On coming 
 back to Rome after that couple of hours in the 
 mountains I could remember, could see, those 
 hillsides delicately fringed with palest still rosy 
 leaf against the background of lilac distance, of 
 high Apennine snow above the far-off blue. 
 And those high-lying shallow valleys, deep 
 meadows twisting and feathering off into spirals 
 of fresh-leaved trees ; those steep green banks 
 fringed at the top with pine, where stands the 
 so-called tomb of Cicero, a round, contempla- 
 ting watch-tower ; or, 1 would rather it were, 
 the tomb of Lucretius, meditating eternities. 
 ... I saw it all — see it all even now — clearly 
 enough in my mind's eye. But lacking the 
 
 99
 
 The Enchanted Woods 
 
 corroborating evidence of my limbs, or of any 
 movement I have learned to time against my 
 limbs' movements, these things remain seen, 
 without the ineffable sense of having been 
 there, or of its having been in me. Had I 
 been there indeed ? I remember the sort of 
 doubt with which I returned on that occasion. 
 There was, moreover, a vague dissatisfaction : 
 this couple of hours in the far-off places had 
 made too little difference in me. I missed the 
 sense of strangeness which brings with it so 
 much refreshment and renovation. The dream- 
 land had whirled past, leaving me, unlike the 
 awakened dreamer in the fairy tale, without a 
 pebble or a flower to attest its reality. 
 
 It seems, in a way, right that such should be 
 the case ; and one seems to guess at one of 
 the underlying concordances of things, in the 
 fact that such effortless seeing and knowing 
 should lack the mark of complete possession 
 working deep into the soul, which belongs to 
 desires that struggle for their accomplishment. 
 How poignantly, pathetically almost, we feel 
 the lines and colours of the hills remaining 
 for ever on the horizon ! What a nostalgic 
 fondness, as for the unattainable past, we often 
 
 ioo
 
 Motor-car and the Genius of Places 
 
 have for the twist of the valley, the reach of 
 the river — nay, the very tuft of trees or point- 
 ing steeple just beyond the limits of our daily 
 v, .ilk or ride ! 
 
 But we want both kinds of locomotion — the 
 limited and the limitless and effortless, by which 
 I mean the motor-car, in answer to different 
 kinds and phases of our feeling, and to the 
 different quality of place and hour. The fleet- 
 ing and intangible memories left by motoring 
 suit certain alien localities and places of a dead 
 and done-for past. They are fitting, moreover, 
 tor occasions of rapid meeting and parting, 
 blotting out the how and why into insignifi- 
 cance, leaving the improbable, central moment 
 to vacillate in the memory : was it, or not ? 
 
 Short of such sentimental facts (which one 
 can't help imagining) I can conceive no greater 
 contrast, nor one more illustrative of the special 
 quality of motoring, than yesterday's drive in 
 and out of South-Country villages (I have 
 remarked how the intimate character of that 
 scenery diminishes the dream-like nature of this 
 form of locomotion) and a similar motor drive, 
 quite recent, back from Versailles at the close 
 of a long, hot day. 
 
 roi
 
 The Enchanted Woods 
 
 Evening- had come on in the absolute solitude 
 
 D 
 
 and stillness of the Trianon park ; extraordinarily- 
 silent, breathless, between the hornbeam hedges 
 and round the ponds dark and shining like 
 bronzed water-lily leaves ; the water, like the 
 air, like the dim trees, reduced to the condition 
 of a ghost. No sound save an occasional wood- 
 pigeon. While we sat at dinner by the window, 
 a street-singer had set to lamenting below, and 
 a tall house become suddenly preternaturally 
 white in the waning day and the electric light 
 among the trees ; bringing, as such emblems of 
 passingness always do in places of brief sojourn, 
 a little pang to the heart. It is always, some- 
 how, that hour in this world, coming suddenly : 
 the end of the day, the moment to part. 
 
 It was quite dark when we set out back to 
 Paris. We rushed through the park of St. 
 Cloud, which started into existence, though not 
 reality, in the broad flare of the motor-car's 
 lamps ; the road appearing under our wheels> 
 the trees coming into being as the light flashed 
 up into their branches. No other mode of 
 travel has ever given me so fantastic a sense 
 of the real unreality of things, of their becoming 
 only because we happen to see them. . . . 
 
 102
 
 Motor-car and the Genius of Places 
 
 Avenues and wide places opening out ot the 
 darkness, and great ponds shining under the 
 crescent moon ; and, starting out of thickets, 
 statues — tall, white, close at hand, gone as soon 
 again. A minute later, issuing out ot that 
 uncertain place, the lights of Paris below 
 us, the great illuminated wheel, the lit-up 
 restaurants and bands among the lanterns and 
 the trees, and the crowd of carriages. All gone 
 equally. And what remains ? The absurd, 
 mournful quaver of the street-singer at 
 Versailles ; the noiseless sand of the park 
 under foot ; and that corner house suddenly 
 grown white ; and the sense of parting. 
 
 II 
 
 There sometimes comes the need for a pali- 
 node^ so to speak, of blame ; and this, after my 
 previous praise, is my chapter of grievances 
 against the motor-car, and, symbolically speak- 
 ing, many other desirable and far-fetched things. 
 
 Perhaps my ill-humour came of the expedi- 
 tion savouring too much of the magician's flying 
 carpet ; for one does not expect to go a-motor- 
 ing from Venice. Still, that crossing of the 
 
 103
 
 The Enchanted Woods 
 
 lagoon, preliminary to the rest, was the most 
 satisfactory part of it. Although not very early 
 (and it is still almost summer) we found, imme- 
 diately outside of Venice and its canals, a misty 
 sea, in whose chilly whiteness the telegraph and 
 semaphore posts tapered, as it were, into some 
 uncertain north, bridging the way to England, 
 Russia, America. ... It made me understand, 
 what 1 had never realized before, that the settling 
 on the sand-banks of the lagoon was not some 
 kind of embankment for Cythera, or gorgeous 
 Turneresque picnic (" the sun of Venice going 
 out to sea," and so forth), but a very sad and 
 solemn matter, the poor refugees seeking not 
 safety merely, but to become invisible almost on 
 the surface of the foggy, unkind waters. The 
 difference of seasons is perhaps greater in Italy 
 than elsewhere ; even in Tuscany I know hill- 
 side farms and villas which, commonplace and 
 smiling in May or June, become in winter the 
 very symbol of forlorn bleakness. And, simi- 
 larly, knowing the lagoon only in summer, I 
 did not realize, until this misty morning, what 
 that lacustrine life of earliest Venice must have 
 meant, what toil and hardship. I was grateful 
 for that knowledge, as one should be, methinks, 
 
 104
 
 Motor-car and the Genius of Places 
 
 for any moment of chastened reeling in the 
 hours of pleasure-seeking, since in this matter 
 of motor-cars . . . 
 
 But let me first tell my gratitude to the 
 mountains, after these weeks of Venice, and to 
 the river Piave which issues out of them into 
 the Plain of Treviso. I had caught sight of 
 it years ago, driving under Asolo, with the 
 kind, graciously whimsical lady whose name 
 Mr. Browning has for ever connected with that 
 place. And I had never forgotten that immense 
 river-bed of palest lilac or rosy-white shingle, 
 with the pellucid blue Alpine streams dividing 
 it ; white villages, steepled as in Giorgione's 
 backgrounds, on its wooded banks ; and the 
 portals of the great mountains, a storm of dark 
 blue blocking them, from which it all issues : 
 river and landscape and fresh romantic life. 
 
 You go into those foothill valleys of Asolo 
 with singular suddenness, and leave them in a 
 manner more complete and astonishing still ; 
 leave them as one goes out of a house or 
 house's room, returning to the weary plain of 
 scorched vineyards and grey canals and endless 
 avenues of plane-trees. Green valleys in- 
 credibly romantic ; grass, just touched with 
 
 105
 
 The Enchanted Woods 
 
 crocus, of vivid, unlikely emerald green ; and 
 sweeping chestnuts ; and brooks among the red 
 stones. And, above the hedges of hornbeam, 
 sugarloaf hills, each with its towered villa or 
 steepled church, white on the greenness. I 
 recognized them all ; remembering those drives, 
 long ago, when the talk was of Mr. Browning, 
 while our hostess's restless little dogs ran up 
 and down and across us, as she said, " as if 
 we were landscapes " 
 
 I was tired and depressed when the motor 
 stopped snorting and whirring in the little 
 town of Asolo. And going into that house, 
 waiting in that glazed-in loggia, with Mr. 
 Browning's clavichord and everything else un- 
 changed, and the vines yellowing once more 
 against the distant blue landscape ; the feeling 
 of the dead and done-for past rose up with 
 every bit of furniture, every line of hills which 
 leapt back into my consciousness. So much 
 seemed dead besides that poor charming, kindly 
 lady and her tiresome, restless dogs. 
 
 And when I joined my new friends in the 
 piazza, and we loitered about looking for 
 picturesque or funny details, there was some- 
 thing almost shocking in the irresponsible way 
 
 1 06
 
 Motor-car and the Genius of Places 
 
 
 
 in which the best of us will turn over with idle 
 fingers, poke with boot tip or umbrella, sights 
 which, to some one, surely, must mean lost 
 years and heartache. I felt the full profanity 
 of such making of the worship of the Genius 
 Loci into watching quaint processions, christen- 
 ings, or funerals, on to which we snap, at least 
 in spirit, our Kodak. ... I felt ungrateful to 
 the motor. Nay, it seemed to me, this time, but 
 another device for wasting the kernel of things 
 and filling ourselves with their voluminous 
 husks, and one of the practical ironies which 
 wait on privilege of all kinds. 
 
 Certain it is that what remains clearest in 
 this day's recollections, rather than the land- 
 scapes we whirled into and out of, were the 
 faces, enviously gaping or angry, of the people 
 we scattered along the road. It is not good, I 
 am afraid, dear friends, to scatter people along 
 roads and cover them with the dust of our 
 wheels ; there is a corresponding scattering of 
 our soul, and a covering of it with dust. The 
 spirit of places, scared on this occasion, had 
 taken us by the hand, invisible but so present, 
 that other time, when we lingered near the 
 rope-walk at Chioggia, trying not to disturb 
 
 107
 
 The Enchanted Woods 
 
 the children's attention, or picking our way 
 upon the sea-wall, so as not to interrupt the 
 maize-winnowing. 
 
 Those endless roads between the sedgy canals 
 and the plane-trees, of the level land of Treviso, 
 took gravity and beauty as we rushed back 
 along them in the dusk. And at this hour, the 
 hurtle of the motor, which had offended me in 
 the earlier part of the day, turned into a solemn 
 swiftness, evocative of serious thoughts, of 
 ghosts almost, as the lantern light ran along the 
 leaves overhead, and the long, white Venetian 
 houses arose and disappeared in the blue night. 
 
 At Mestre there was a fair going on ; a 
 merry-go-round by the water's edge, yellow 
 and red lights among the trees and in the long, 
 shivering ripples of the canal. And when we 
 had left the motor, and were once more in the 
 launch, slowly gliding between the dark banks 
 into the pale moon mist of the lagoon, 1 think 
 we all of us, fortunate and privileged creatures, 
 felt as if sky and water, and lights and shadowy 
 barges, and half-lit houses and the miles of 
 scenery we had rushed through, had done 
 nothing but fill our empty souls with unspeak- 
 able, unreasonable sadness, brimful, overflowing. 
 
 108
 
 THE ILEX WOODS AND THE 
 ANCHORITES
 
 THE ILEX WOODS AND THE 
 ANCHORITES 
 
 T UNDERSTOOD at last, in those Umbrian 
 ilex woods, why, all through the winter, I 
 had never been able to see the snowstorms 
 break over Vallombrosa, the blue mountain 
 depths, the white distant snows, the solemn 
 beetling clouds, without thinking about hermits, 
 about anchorites. The words used to rise up 
 in my mind regularly every time. I remarked 
 them to myself, and returned home, to forget 
 them till the next wintry ride above my 
 house. 
 
 The ilex woods of Umbria, so black, com- 
 pact, mysterious, used always to attract me on 
 the old journey (by Perugia and the Valley of 
 the Nera) from Florence to Rome ; and I can 
 remember the kind of pleasant terror which 
 filled me when, on one such journey in my 
 
 I 1 1
 
 The Enchanted Woods 
 
 childhood, the train stopped without apparent 
 reason in one of their precipitous defiles. But 
 I never got in among the ilexes till some years 
 ago, while staying at Foligno, and they came 
 upon me almost as a surprise this early spring 
 at Spoleto. 
 
 The ilex woods above Foligno were those 
 surrounding the ancient abbey of Sassovivo. 
 You scramble up into hills of that lovely red 
 roan limestone, brightening here and there into 
 pure carnation colour, of which these Umbrian 
 towns, Assisi, Spello, Foligno, Trevi, are all 
 built ; bleak hills thinly furred over with sere 
 oak scrub and dry heather, of which the wood- 
 men were making faggots that rolled and 
 bounded down into the torrent beds. You 
 continue up and into the mountain ; the ilex 
 woods begin ; and in them, suddenly, you 
 come upon the half-ruined Cistercian monastery, 
 with its fortified walls and towers and pillareted 
 cloister, and its creviced belfry with a juniper 
 bush growing alongside of the weather vane. 
 Some charcoal-burners' mules were grazing with 
 the sheep under the thinned ilexes ; grazing the 
 thyme and the myrrh scented grey herbs among 
 the loose, rosy stones. The wind was blowing 
 
 112
 
 The Ilex Woods and the Anchorites 
 
 keen, and white cloud balls moving over the 
 valley and the distant blue hills ; it was an 
 austere, wild place, oddly primeval, which made 
 one feel, even under the monastery towers, that 
 this was the old Umbria of before Roman days, 
 its forests cut indeed to scrub, but sprouting 
 still from the ancient roots. I broke a twig of 
 ilex to take home, and kept it many months in 
 my study ; the leaves turned into brittle black 
 silver. That was my first close acquaintance 
 with the Umbrian ilex woods. 
 
 I don't know whether there have ever been 
 any hermits in these woods of Sassovivo, 
 though I like to think of them there before 
 the monks came ; but I know, for St. Jerome 
 mentions it, that the " Mountain " of Spoleto 
 was full of them. A place full of hermits 
 sounds, literally taken, a contradiction in terms. 
 But it is not the case. The pleasant thing 
 about my anchorites is that they were quite 
 alone — really alone, as children would put it — 
 and at the same time not at all solitary. You 
 have the proof of it in a great many early 
 frescoes, and in a most instructive picture ot 
 the Hermits of the Thebais, by, I think, one 
 of the Lorcnzetti. There they all arc, within 
 
 i 13 1
 
 The Enchanted Woods 
 
 a stone' s-throw of each other, each in a little 
 pink house of his own, with his own belfry, 
 his own well, garden, rocks, and his own, his 
 very own demons coming to tempt him. It is 
 the ideal of very ownness, for there is always 
 somebody to whom you can show how alone 
 you are. 
 
 The same impression is left by Fra Domenico 
 Cavalca's "Lives of the Fathers of the Desert." 
 I call it Cavalca's, because I cannot but think 
 that this charming fourteenth-century monk 
 must have allowed himself great liberties in 
 translating from St. Jerome, St. Athanasius, 
 and from their Latin translator, Evagrius, a 
 clerk of Antioch, all of whom sound grim 
 enough. Certain it is that Cavalca's hermits 
 are quite delightfully sociable. It is true that 
 one of them lived on the top of an inaccessible 
 rock for the space of fifty years, never admitting 
 any person to his dwelling. But even he had 
 appointed days on which he conversed from his 
 window with all such strangers as were desirous 
 of instruction or comfort. And even another 
 one, about whom there is a controversy whether 
 the place he inhabited was a dry cistern or a 
 hollowed-out gourd, and should be parsed 
 
 114
 
 The Ilex Woods and the Anchorites 
 
 11 Syricumbam vocant " or " Syri gumbam 
 vocant," even this adaptable person seems to 
 have seen a good deal of company. For that 
 is the peculiarity of your anchorite, that even 
 when he settles at a good three days' journey in 
 the wilderness, and in a Syricumba or gumba 
 so-called by Syrians, the whole population of 
 large towns streams out to call on him. I pass 
 over in silence those bands of ladies with lutes 
 and timbrels whom the later frescoes show us 
 as gracefully intruding on the leisure of the 
 hermits ; and even over the tame lions and she- 
 wolves and the centaurs and fauns with whom 
 these holy men picked up acquaintance along 
 the way. The fact is that these lives of 
 anchorites of Cavalca are simply steeped in the 
 most charming sentimental sociability. Half 
 the legends are stories of romantic friendships, 
 journeys to meet " unknown friends," but with 
 a tenderness far more graceful on the part of 
 these greybeards than anything we read of 
 eighteenth-century " beautiful souls." Take, 
 for instance, the case of St. Paul, the proto — 
 or, we might say, premier — hermit, to whom a 
 chapel and a tiny house are dedicated in the 
 Spoleto ilex woods. He was a sort of religious 
 
 1 '5
 
 The Enchanted Woods 
 
 Robinson Crusoe ; for, flying from persecution, 
 he found ready made a beautiful cave at the 
 foot of a most beautiful hill, with a palm and a 
 spring at hand ; and close by the anvils and 
 hammers and other useful properties of a band 
 of coiners, who had hidden in that desert " in 
 the days of Antony and Cleopatra." Now, it 
 so happened that St. Anthony (he of the 
 Temptation) had attained the age of ninety, and 
 had imagined himself for the greater part of 
 this time to have been the first hermit that ever 
 was, when it was revealed to him in a vision 
 that this invention was really due to the St. 
 Paul in question, now a hundred and thirteen 
 years old, who was living in the place described 
 above. St. Anthony, just a tiny bit vexed at 
 finding himself forestalled, but quite dear and 
 good about it all, instantly felt an irresistible 
 impulse to go and see St. Paul. It was in the 
 course of his search that he asked his way of 
 the centaur, and was guided by the she-wolf, a 
 little episode of charming sentiment. But 
 nothing can come up to the tenderness of the 
 arrival of the dear old saint at the other dear 
 old saint's cave ; his lying all night at the door, 
 watching the light through the rock ; and their 
 
 116
 
 The Ilex Woods and the Anchorites 
 
 meeting, their embrace when each, without 
 having been told, called the other by name ; and 
 the elder hermit, having had the joy of seeing 
 the younger, died and was buried by him in the 
 wilderness. . . . Besides, they often went out in 
 large numbers, companies of friends, dispersing 
 in a district, each building his little hermitage 
 within call of the other ; charming people, 
 about whom I refuse to hear a single one of 
 the horrid things which historians, and ascetic 
 writers, and professional stylists like Flaubert, 
 have had the bad taste to write. 
 
 They lived like that, St. Jerome already tells 
 us, in the ilex woods above Spoleto. The 
 woods get thicker and thicker as you ascend 
 the " Mountain '" above the steep stony town, 
 so that you gradually get less and less view ; 
 instead of the look-down on the great Umbrian 
 valley, pale with young crops, and across it to 
 the Apennines, smoking with melted snows, 
 you have only black gnarled trunks and black 
 branches above banks of deep moss. But here 
 and there, in the most unexpected way, at the 
 path's turning, appears a pink or white little 
 house, a grated, domed chapel, " Hemitage of 
 St. Jerome the Doctor," "Hermitage called 
 
 117
 
 The Enchanted Woods 
 
 after St. Paul the proto-hermit," and so forth, 
 with a bit of terrace and a view. And never, 
 never a single soul ! During my ascent, of 
 nearly an hour and a half, and my descent 
 again, not one creature did I meet, save a man 
 with a dog, and a priest, gaunt in a rusty cape, 
 and riding on a pack mule. 
 
 I had come to Spoleto out of obstinacy, 
 in frightful belated spring cold, and had 
 regretted my folly. Bnt how right I had 
 been ! I knew it as soon as I had climbed 
 to the top of the town, among the great 
 rocks under the castle, and had felt the cold 
 wet wind rush up the ravine, mountain air, 
 coming from over rock, from among woods 
 off the snow which is melting on the great, 
 blue Apennines ! I understood what had ailed 
 me in Rome : the houses, the streets, the 
 talking. The anchorites had felt like that in 
 their day, no doubt, when they also fled from 
 the kindness of kindest and most amusing 
 friends, up into this mountain. . . . Meanwhile 
 the woods closed again, with violets in the wet 
 grass and few birds singing in the gloom. And 
 as the path grew steeper, the woods darker, I 
 began to notice scraps of melting snow, and 
 
 118
 
 The Ilex Woods and the Anchorites 
 
 then more and more ; till, at what seemed the 
 top (but one could not see), it lay quite thick 
 under the ilexes. I went on. The ilexes, 
 bigger and bigger, suddenly opened ; and there 
 was a flattish dell, open, a field of purest snow, 
 with only a black cross in the midst, the woods 
 all round, and alongside a tiny house, with a 
 chapel, a belfry, and a little yard, through whose 
 deep snow a path had been freshly swept. I 
 sat down under the porch. A Franciscan 
 suddenly appeared out of the wood, crossed the 
 snow and pulled at a rope ; a bell rang, and a 
 minute after a chant arose, vespers. I lifted 
 the latch of the chapel ; at the altar three 
 monks and two acolytes and two kneeling 
 peasants ; darkness only broken by the lights 
 on the altar and before the coloured Calvary 
 pictures. As I came out the birds were singing 
 in the blackness of the ilexes ; the bell of the 
 little chapel continued to toll ; and snow began 
 to fall very gently. Thin flakes, mixed with 
 rain, were still falling when I issued into the 
 rocky gorge full of the roar and the draught 
 of the torrent, as I left the ilex woods be- 
 hind me. 
 
 I continued dreaming of the little snowrield 
 
 119
 
 The Enchanted Woods 
 
 up there alongside of the chapel ; and I under- 
 stood that it was in some prevision of it that I 
 had never been able all winter to see the snow- 
 storms break above Vallombrosa without think- 
 ing of hermits, of anchorites. 
 
 1 20
 
 GERMAN FIR TREES
 
 GERMAN FIR TREES 
 
 " Und ist so lustig haussen in dem Wald," — The Wolt 
 in "Rothkiippchen." 
 
 '"T^HE first sight, almost, which welcomed me 
 A to Germany was a fine timber skeleton 
 house, just finished by the carpenters and 
 waiting for its brick and mortar ; and on its 
 gable a gallantly beribboned little fir tree. A 
 carpenter's tree like this had been the object 
 of my longing when a child : fancy if one could 
 have one (off a roof, of course) for one's very 
 own ! Something of this longing after the un- 
 attainable, heightened, perhaps, by the recol- 
 lections of radiant German Christmases and 
 their mysterious, resin-scented preparations, 
 seems to awaken in me at the thought or 
 distant view of German fir woods. 
 
 There was, for instance, a certain hill covered 
 with fir woods which tantalized me lately all the 
 time I stayed at that old castle of the Habs- 
 burgs. Below, and within easy reach, were 
 
 123
 
 The Enchanted Woods 
 
 wonderful forests ot beech, just touched with 
 yellow, and sweeping with their silky skirts the 
 dewy emerald grass ; orchards moreover, gar- 
 landed and festooned with rosy apples. But what 
 I wanted was the fir-clad hill. It lay back behind 
 lower grassy slopes, very far and very high up : 
 a dark, soft mass ; and in its midst, making the 
 tall trees stand out like a ragged mane, a great 
 clearing, wide and vivid green. Day after day 
 I walked up and down the lime-tree terrace by 
 the Rittersaal y looking down from the rocky 
 castle hill ; and every time, day after day, my 
 eyes were drawn by that unattainable forest. 
 Such are the fir woods which beckon and murmur 
 and draw one along all through German poetry, 
 good, bad, and indifferent, from Walther von 
 der Vogelweide to Heine. 
 
 For the woods (we have no word which 
 really renders the meaning of that great singular 
 Der Wald) are more intimately connected with 
 the life of Germany than with that of other 
 countries. Even apart from the enormous 
 proportion of forest-land which strikes one if, 
 for instance, one happens to cross Germany 
 from north-west to south-east, from Holland 
 to Venetia, the woods are much nearer than in 
 
 124
 
 German Fir Trees 
 
 other countries (I count Switzerland and Tyrol 
 as being German) to the haunts of men. In 
 the centre and the south at least the forests 
 actually surround the towns, holding their bit 
 ot valley, their fields and meadows, enclosed 
 in their unchanging, evergreen mystery. So 
 that the natural, almost the only, walk is into 
 the forest, which thus becomes associated with 
 all holiday-making, with rest from work and 
 small amusing adventure. It is from the JVald 
 that the bands of citizens and apprentices are 
 returning, with Faust and Wagner behind, 
 escorted by the eerie, circling poodle, through 
 the spring twilight. That scene came vividly 
 home to me, and seemed almost present, one 
 Sunday that I had descended from the old 
 casde : people from the little town were going 
 to and fro the woods, whole families ; and deep 
 in the green depths a lot of well-dressed 
 children were playing shrilly. The woods arc 
 the playground, real or imaginary, of the Teuton 
 child — much as the sand and shingle are of 
 the children of other countries ; and, alas ! as 
 gravelled gardens with Punch and Judy are of 
 other children still. They are the scene of 
 escapade of bigger boys, instead of the river 
 
 »25
 
 The Enchanted Woods 
 
 to fish in as in England or France, or the 
 hill-side with atrocious fowling-huts in Italy. 
 And have we not all seen the portly, spectacled 
 German burgher, adorned with forest-green 
 braid and little falcon's feather, bringing a 
 woodland quality, an echo of Freischiitz horns, 
 even on to tramcars and into museums ? Let 
 us not laugh — far from it. It merely means 
 that the woods have rooted in the German 
 heart and that they sprout and sough in every 
 line of German poetry and every bar of German 
 music. 
 
 But it is the essential quality of the German 
 woods not to show traces of this commerce 
 with man. No other places exist so wholly for 
 themselves, so lonely, so different from human 
 things. I am not thinking of great forests, 
 really remote — say, of the Tyrol, fragrant 
 wildernesses of fir and larch, where every clear- 
 ing lets in the view of the great blue, jagged 
 mountains veined with snow or veiled with 
 vapours. The fir woods I am thinking of are, 
 as I said, those surrounding towns, and from 
 whose depths the wild men, petticoated and 
 crowned with leaves and carrying leafy clubs, 
 had but a very little walk to go when sitting 
 
 126
 
 German Fir Trees 
 
 for their portrait on coat-of-arms or sign ot 
 hostelry. For instance, the woods round about 
 Eisenach, under the Wartburg. 1 saw them 
 first, a hurried glimpse, before going to my inn 
 on a clear autumn day, the frost just melted 
 on the grass and on the yellow bushes ; but I 
 brought back an impression of infinite silence 
 and remoteness of a valley, far, fir away, bright 
 green meadows tipped with crocus, and steep 
 slopes of dense black fir. 
 
 The next day I had more time, but did not 
 need to go much further. For sitting on the 
 dry, brown, needle-covered ground I had my 
 fill of woodland stillness. The high masts of 
 the firs, with their banner-like boughs, are so 
 close together as to make a concentrated light — 
 a light quite special, meaning enclosure, almost 
 sanctuary, in which all colour — the rose of the 
 beechmast, the green of the moss in patches 
 and ridges — takes a solemn vividness. Further 
 along there was a little plantation of beech 
 saplings, growing in high shafts with bunches 
 of pale, yellowing leaves against the gaps of 
 white, watery sky, and round them the firs once 
 more, motionless, unruffled, though there ran 
 through them a sough as of the distant sea, 
 
 1 27
 
 The Enchanted Woods 
 
 gathering at times to a deep, deep sound — a 
 sound ubiquitous, mysterious, and baffling, like 
 those paths which one's eye makes everywhere 
 between the tree trunks. By the side of that 
 Eisenach forest what a poor piece of cardboard 
 operatic romance was not the Wartburg ! The 
 poetry of Germany was not in it and its Minne- 
 singers, genuine or spurious, but in the fir- 
 trees below. 
 
 But there are fir woods more lyric still, and 
 in a neighbourhood so profaned by mankind 
 that I dare not whisper its name for fear of 
 making you incredulous. Suffice it that, not a 
 mile off, people sit by the hundred, on blue 
 and red wicker chairs, chattering, while a band 
 brays and clashes in front and electric trams 
 clatter and shriek all round. But the woods 
 know nothing of it. They have precipitous, 
 downhill places, very dark, where one sees only 
 the great grey boles ; and hillocks, where the 
 pennons, the masts, and rigging of the firs 
 stand black against the sky ; and little valleys 
 with old, isolated trees grown immense, and 
 stumps and tiny sprouting things deep in the 
 moss and bilberry ; clearings with stacked-up 
 wood, filling the warm air with delicious 
 
 128
 
 German Fir Trees 
 
 aromatic scent. And, most delightful of all, 
 hollows packed with bright green saplings, 
 making one understand the adjective spruce, 
 with each shooting up to its little green cross, 
 extending its stiff little branches halfway up, 
 and letting the lowest boughs barely touch the 
 grass, like the brocade farthingale of some baby 
 princess. These plantations of saplings bring 
 the delightful thought of what these vivid 
 green, symmetrical, erect, and cheerful little 
 trees have each and all a chance of becoming — 
 Christmas trees like those I can see with my 
 
 mind's eye in the market-place at W , 
 
 things one intrigued as a child to go near when 
 taken a walk, and about which, while dragged 
 along by the impatient nurse, one wondered 
 what size, indeed which, among those green, 
 stiff, varnished-looking trees, would be ones 
 own. 
 
 It is good to think of such Christmas trees 
 of the past and the future. It is good also to 
 think that if the little sapling do not end in such 
 radiant premature death, it may grow into one 
 of the solemn pennoned troopers of that Great 
 forest army ; or into the mast of a big ship, 
 helping to mimic a forest in the docks ; 
 
 129 K
 
 The Enchanted Woods 
 
 or be cut into children's toys, horses with 
 arched necks or dolls with apple cheeks ; or, 
 again, form part of the carpenter's scaffolding 
 for a house, maybe covered with paper bouquets 
 and streamers, and planted triumphantly on the 
 gable of the half-finished building. 
 
 And here I must pause. For singing the 
 praises of fir trees (as of friends, lovers, and 
 native place) is a pleasure by no means always 
 communicated to the listener, and therefore to 
 be gratified only at intervals and by insidious 
 methods. Let me but note that the last of these 
 Teutonic beribboned carpenters' trees which 
 greeted my sight six weeks ago v/hile crossing 
 Switzerland, was near the station of Olten, and 
 on the top, alas ! of the iron boiler of a new 
 factory of Sunlight Soap ! But close behind 
 was a bend of the Aar, glass-green, brimful, 
 majestic, with its fringe of russet scrub and 
 sedge ; and the Christmas tree, from the top 
 of its boiler, can talk with the great river about 
 the great woods. 
 
 130
 
 COMPIEGNE 
 AND FONTAINEBLEAU
 
 COMPIEGNE 
 
 AND FONTAINEBLEAU 
 
 ' I k HOUGH greener, fresher, deeper — indeed 
 of inexpressible deep, fresh leafiness, these 
 endless woods of Compiegne, broken off, inter- 
 rupted, but for ever resumed on all sides, leave 
 much the same impression as do those of Fon- 
 taineblcau. They are not real forest In the sense 
 of Germany, Ravenna, or even Ireland, in my sense, 
 so to speak ; but great parks mapped out and 
 planted for Royal amusement ; radiations of 
 smooth white roads from the big quincunxed 
 palace, and then more radiations along them, 
 wide grassy avenues, green cuttings where the 
 trees are close, deep tracks in russet leaves 
 where they are thinned, all marked with sign- 
 posts bearing courtly names. At every cross- 
 road — and they are endless — one sees in fancy 
 the great Royal coaches rolling as on the green 
 and blue ground of Louis XV. tapestries. One 
 
 133
 
 The Enchanted Woods 
 
 feels the pomp, but none of the romance, of 
 historical hunting. What one is told of the 
 still remaining sport, the traditional or revived 
 hunts, with brilliant, varied livrees y jack-boots, 
 habit a la fratifaise, faced and galooned, horns 
 and barking hounds, all confirms the impression. 
 So that the stag one thinks of, and almost expects 
 to meet breaking the green covert or crossing 
 the glade, is not a very real one, but rather a 
 monumental creature sculptured by Goujon or 
 Pilon, ready to kneel down and prop some 
 long-limbed Diane de Poitiers of the rounded 
 forehead and the moon-shaped brows. 
 
 But this artificial and courtly quality, common 
 to both those two great French Royal hunting 
 grounds, while at Fontainebleau it breaks off 
 suddenly with the outlying villages, at Com- 
 piegne merely expands into the enchanting 
 and improbable Watteau festiveness of the 
 skirts of the forest. Two slow, full rivers, the 
 Aisne and the Oise, crowned like proper 
 garden nymphs with sedge, arrange their cool 
 bosquets of poplars into fanciful islands and 
 unreal harbours, while the grass and unripe 
 crops make themselves into seeming lawns em- 
 bosomed by the soft round darkness of the tufty 
 
 134
 
 Compiegne and Fontainebleau 
 
 torest. 'Tis an ample, majestic, voluptuous, 
 and, as I said, artificial-looking country, in which 
 the little villages of fine old grey stone and 
 their flowery gardens (stately rose hollyhocks 
 everywhere) have an air of park lodges, and the 
 big stone barns play at being old manor houses, 
 as if the French peasant did not exist, and the 
 Ancien Regime still continued, with its mar- 
 quises and gallant abbes dressed as shepherds 
 and shepherdesses, and preparing, under the 
 gorgeous summer sky, for a fresh departure 
 pour Cy there. 
 
 Here and there also there are indications, 
 which fancy multiplies and enlarges, of all that 
 great hunting life which has dwindled into the 
 amusement of a few smart persons, more fit for 
 Gyp and Anatole France than for the novels 
 and memo ires of Boucher and Lancret days. 
 There are some big white chateaux, their 
 modernness veiled in trees, inns h la /lure, 
 with ample stabling, and kennels surmounted 
 by stone stags' heads ; glimpses also, ever and 
 anon, from the high roads into the thickets of 
 tall regular beeches, dainty on their carpet of 
 green lily leaves. 
 
 I drove one warm evening through this 
 
 '35
 
 The Enchanted Woods 
 
 flounced and furbelowed country by the side 
 of the greatest of living decorative painters ; 
 and seemed to see it, thanks to a gesture now 
 and then of his whip, or a movement of his 
 head, silently, in one direction or another, half 
 transformed into triumphant ceilings and panels 
 in public palaces ; feeling through his genius 
 the fulness of the luxurious and courtly land- 
 scape — -feerique in the French sense, magnificent, 
 spectacular, entirely for pomp and pleasure. It 
 gave me a little shock of surprise, and a certain 
 sense of relief, when suddenly, at a bend of a 
 road, we came upon a great ripe cornfield, and 
 on its edge a tall black crucifix surrounded by 
 a little square of trimmed lime-trees, hard and 
 serious against the greenish sky. 
 
 For quite another reason, because it is the 
 Royal park's negation instead of its crowning 
 poetry, is the outlying country at Fontaine- 
 bleau far more attractive to me than the forest 
 itself. At Barbizon, for instance, there is a 
 positive delight, on issuing from the village 
 street, in finding one's self no longer in that vast 
 green prison, but in the open country ; Millet's 
 country, too, of serene and fruitful human 
 labour. I remember how I felt it, one August 
 
 136
 
 Compiegne and Fontainebleau 
 
 afternoon : the big gently sloping cornfields, 
 stooks and sheaves lying shining, spread out ; 
 great stacks here and there, and, close behind 
 us, a big grey stone farmyard. Pale stubble ; 
 very pale, smoky-blue distance of poplars, with 
 the church tower of Chailly-en-Bure ; a few 
 figures — a boy leading a horse, for instance, a 
 scarlet reaping machine, with a fiided bouquet 
 tied to it — taking importance in this simplicity. 
 A pale lilac sunset was taking place among 
 clouds ; a great silvery beam descending, 
 descending in benediction on this sweet, deli- 
 cate, human, solemn country. And there were 
 larks and swallows singing and whirring over- 
 head, after those silent miles of waterless, 
 birdless forest. 
 
 Every now and then, walking in the glades 
 and paths, particularly where the beeches have 
 been cut, and have shot up in slender white 
 stems, out of the red autumn leaves, filtering 
 the light to vivid green ; and again, in those 
 solemn places where one suddenly intrudes 
 upon some solitary giant oak, Pharamond or 
 Jupiter, 1 felt that if one could wander in it 
 for weeks, Fontainebleau forest would become 
 a great real, in a way organic, personality for 
 
 •37
 
 The Enchanted Woods 
 
 one. Nay, one guessed it, merely poring over 
 the map, and taking in the vastness of its 
 extent and its many incidents. But, as a 
 whole, and superficially there is about it some- 
 thing wearying in the sense that it is all made 
 by human hands but for no human purpose. 
 One wants, for spiritual comfort, methinks, 
 both fields and vineyards and dairy meadows 
 telling of mankind's loving and well-rewarded 
 labour ; and moors and woods and marshes 
 for birds and beasts, for trees and heather and 
 mosses and stones and their manifold modes of 
 life. But Fontainebleau is neither ; its meaning 
 is of the jejune historical kind, and one grasps 
 it thoroughly only after a dreary morning of 
 going over the acres of yards, of corridors, of 
 halls and rooms and galleries and pavilions 
 of the palace, and realizing the colossal idol 
 worship of the Ancien Regime. All this much 
 stone and mortar, all these forest roads and 
 glades for one little life-size King ! 
 
 138
 
 THE FOREST OF THE 
 
 ANTONINES
 
 THE FOREST OF THE 
 
 ANTONINES 
 
 14 T WANT to see the Forest of the Anto- 
 nines," said my friend ; so off we started. 
 It was a forest, this Forest of the Antonines 
 (which or what Antonines ? People in the 
 town below, or perhaps Roman Emperors with 
 laurel crowns ?) of marvellous fir trees. Not, 
 perhaps, very extensive, but incalculably old 
 and quite infinitely mysterious. I gathered 
 that she had heard of it (though never since) 
 during her childhood in the lower Apennine 
 valleys ; but, so far as I ascertained, not from 
 any one who had ever been there. She did not 
 explain why she imagined it to exist more par- 
 ticularly in the neighbourhood where I was 
 staying ; nor did it ever occur to me to ask. 
 All 1 knew was that the Forest of the Antonines 
 must lie somewhere in those higher mountain 
 regions, and that I also wanted to see it. We 
 
 141
 
 The Enchanted Woods 
 
 beat the country for two days, and in various 
 directions ; moreover, asking information of 
 every one along the roads. 
 
 The narrow valleys were filled, as usual in 
 the Apennines, with monotonous bright-green 
 chestnut trees, grown for their fruit, at proper 
 distances as in an orchard ; and along the crests, 
 under the bare peaks, there were, also as usual, 
 beeches clipped down to scrub for charcoal. At 
 the end of a long, flat road snaking between two 
 precipices, there was a sort of region of nothing 
 at all, with a few bleak farms and a forlorn 
 chapel belfry, and a tuft of wind-warped trees 
 around them. I think we both of us had a 
 vague feeling that this place had somehow 
 something to do with our quest. But as to a 
 forest, there was none ; and there certainly was 
 not a fir-tree far and wide (those about the 
 forlorn buildings were quite irrefutably syca- 
 mores). 
 
 " It must be somewhere up here," said my 
 friend pensively ; " the Forest of the Anto- 
 nines, I mean." And with these words we went 
 home. Did a Forest of the Antonines ever 
 exist anywhere ? Was it one of those phan- 
 tom places arisen in a child's fancy from some 
 
 142
 
 The Forest of the Antonines 
 
 misunderstood but long-brooded-over word, 
 and which continue sometimes to haunt and 
 beckon, mirage-like, through years and years ? 
 
 This much is certain, that my friend's belief 
 evidently passed into me ; and that although 
 (after that unsuccessful journey of discovery) I 
 cannot remember our ever mentioning the 
 name together, I often caught myself think- 
 ing about the Forest of the Antonines, and 
 always as something unquestionably delectable 
 and strange. 
 
 So that I had a peculiar little feeling of 
 surprise and yet of familiarity, two or three 
 months ago, when I found myself for the first 
 time in those only remaining firwoods of the 
 Apennine crest. The place was quite a different 
 one and bore a totally different name. But I 
 knew it was the Forest of the Antonines, and 
 the knowledge was delightful. I knew it the 
 first evening I spent in that high valley. In a 
 few minutes I found myself in the forest, drawn 
 to its heart and its mysteries. The poignant 
 sylvan smell of distant charcoal ovens mingled 
 in the sweetness of wet leaves and moss and 
 warm fir-resin. And from the bottom of the 
 ravine rose the sound of the forest's secret, of 
 
 143
 
 The Enchanted Woods 
 
 the invisible stream. The sense of mysterious 
 immanent presence was so great in that place 
 that after a few minutes I turned round where 
 I sat on the rocks to make sure that no one was 
 behind me. The gorge gradually filled with 
 vapours, hiding the rocky peaks, and steaming 
 up as from a distant cauldron from the far-off 
 plains : they sending their heat, and the moun- 
 tains thrusting it back, with the rushing water 
 and its draughts, and its virgin freshness. This 
 is the most mysterious part of the whole of that 
 Apennine forest. One has the illusion of a 
 great semicircle filled with woods. And to- 
 wards dusk the bare peaks, becoming bodiless 
 — mere pale-blue wraiths against the white sky 
 — recede indefinitely, letting the woods extend 
 as far as fancy would have them, ridding one 
 of the knowledge that this seeming Northern 
 forest is but a little tract of mountain flank and 
 summit ; letting one imagine that this is some 
 land east of the sun and west of the moon, out of 
 whose mysterious depth one would never walk, 
 walked one ever so long. 
 
 For this is the peculiarity of that Apennine 
 forest (making one identify it with that forest 
 of the Antonines which existed only in my 
 
 144
 
 The Forest of the Antonines 
 
 friend's childish imagination) that it is only a 
 sample of what might be, should have been, of 
 what once was, and which one's heart's desires 
 must make the most of and enclose itself within. 
 The thin chestnut woods — orchards where 
 every tree is grafted and pruned — begin a 
 hundred yards below, and are the reality of the 
 country, sloping down the great spurs, filling 
 the valleys, changing gradually into oak thicket, 
 scrub of myrtle and lentisk, olive and vineyard, 
 pine and cypress grove, all the things of that 
 South we had thought to escape from, as they 
 approach the plains, the cities, or the sea. 
 And, more sadly, dwindling rapidly away, in 
 the highest regions even, into melancholy dot- 
 ting of stumps of fir and beech upon the sere 
 grass, the ever-increasing barren rock, whence 
 the waters rush down to ravage instead of 
 blessing. 
 
 The longing for forests, for the reality of 
 which this half-imaginary forest of the Anto- 
 nines is but the sample, does meet with satis- 
 faction in the past. Italy has had her gods 
 Sylvanus and Picus. There remain, in Southern- 
 most Tuscany and Umbria, whole hillsides of 
 scrub which was once a marvellous forest of 
 
 '45 l
 
 The Enchanted Woods 
 
 ilex ; oak woods have been as common all over 
 the peninsula as in England ; the tall trees of 
 the inextricable Maremma jungle have been 
 cut down within the memory of man ; and 
 there yet remains along the Adriatic, and even 
 the Mediterranean, the marvellous fairyland of 
 the great pinetas. But everywhere the wooded 
 parts of Italy have dwindled. Heaven knows 
 when the mischief began. It is a story of 
 greed and wastefulness, for the clearings need- 
 ful to make a country inhabitable and fertile 
 must have been accomplished thousands of 
 years ago, and all since then been mere destruc- 
 tion. A history of it, could it be written, 
 would be instructive. It would, I imagine, be 
 found that the destruction of the forests of Italy 
 kept pace with the decline of Italy's commerce 
 and industry, idle and impoverished nobles 
 turning everything they could to ready money ; 
 and the crushing taxation which has been the 
 price of national independence sweeping away 
 the last vestiges of woodland. The division 
 of property following the French Revolution, 
 and the sudden demand for cash resulting 
 from the wars of Napoleon, is one of the 
 chief incidents of the tragedy. The big trees 
 
 146
 
 The Forest of the Antonines 
 
 of the Maremma were cut down and burnt 
 for potash just at that period ; and, so far 
 as I can make out, the fir woods of the 
 high Apennines, wherever they were private 
 property, disappeared about the same time. 
 Things have happened under our very eyes : 
 the haunted forest of the Montello, in the 
 province of Treviso, whence the Venetian 
 arsenal had got the oakwood for its galleys, 
 was cut down to the last tree about twenty 
 years ago. The process of destruction follows 
 a fatal course : the big trees are felled ; the 
 charcoal burner periodically cuts the oak, ilex, 
 or beech woods ; cattle are allowed to browse 
 before a new wood has arisen for him ; then 
 follows the peasant scraping brushwood for the 
 bakehouse ; then come the sheep ; after the 
 sheep the goats ; and after the goats it is time 
 for the sun, the frosts, and the rains to wither 
 and ravage. 
 
 By an irony of things, it is, of course, the 
 clement most wanted in these climates, water, 
 which turns against man and brings desolation. 
 Close to that Apennine crest, but on the 
 northern slope where the forests have been 
 destroyed, is a little town, Fiumalbo, once the 
 
 147
 
 The Enchanted Woods 
 
 hunting seat of the Dukes of Modena and the 
 metropolis, so to speak, of those valleys. It is 
 at the deep bottom of a great steep valley ; 
 clapped down, grey stone roofs, shabby houses 
 once handsome, between two torrents which 
 encircle it like a moat, and looking like a piece 
 of torrent bed itself ; the slopes of dry yellow 
 grass and thin chestnuts rise from it, with 
 melancholy crevasses and landslips of pale soil ; 
 and above, veiled and unveiled by wet black 
 clouds, stands Monte Cimone, the highest 
 Northern Apennine peak, its base thinly dotted 
 with stunted little trees. There is a bridge over 
 either torrent bed, and in the middle, far below 
 the road, is huddled the sad little town, with 
 the remains of a castle, a gaunt seminary, and a 
 kind of palace, with a scrub of neglected garden, 
 once the summer residence of the Estensi. 
 Then the church — oh ! such a battered, stained, 
 God-forgotten old church, filled with votive 
 pictures of people falling off trees and wounding 
 themselves with axes, telling that this poor, 
 scant population is one of woodcutters and 
 charcoal burners (carrying their skill to distant 
 parts, the Maremma, Corsica, and even France) ; 
 and outside the church a few rude sculptures of 
 
 148
 
 The Forest of the Antonines 
 
 little Crusaders on horseback, like chessmen : 
 Fiumalbo once had sovereign lords, and its 
 inhabitants fought for the Holy Sepulchre. 
 One feels that it was once a kind of capital : 
 many of the houses have a look of palaces, with 
 outer stair and loggia, and stone escutcheons. 
 Its only history nowadays is that of floods. It 
 is periodically overwhelmed by the two torrents, 
 which wreck and desolate everything. Some 
 fifteen years ago the population was barely 
 saved, and the coffins — horrible to think of! — 
 were torn by the waters and by the stones of 
 the torrent out of the churchyard and dashed 
 alons the rocks and the houses. I asked the 
 local doctor how in the world he explained that 
 this town should ever have been built in that 
 hole, in the very bed of those adjoining torrents. 
 His answer shed a great light upon the history 
 and condition of that region, and, for the matter 
 of that, of all Italy. " At the time of the 
 building of Fiumalbo," he said, " the position 
 was a good and sheltered one. The torrents 
 were not dangerous — not torrents at all, but 
 streams with a regular flow. The mountains 
 were covered with forests. 
 
 " Our fathers," added the doctor, sadly, 
 
 149
 
 The Enchanted Woods 
 
 " could still remember them at the foot of the 
 Cimone and the Rondinaio." 
 
 This, then, was the Apennines' revenge ! 
 And it was the coffins, very likely, of the self- 
 same men who had cut down the forests which 
 were dragged out of the ground and hurled 
 along by those torrents of their own making. 
 
 150
 
 MONT ST. MICHEL
 
 MONT ST. MICHEL 
 
 V\^HEN the omnibus was due to take me 
 from Mont St. Michel to the main 
 land, 1 ran back to tip the maid of the little 
 private house where the inn had billeted me, 
 and asked for a glass of water. The old lady 
 of the house, Mdlle. de Blangine, who was 
 writing near her dining-room window, heard 
 my request, and, calling to the maid, insisted 
 on my having something in the water : a little 
 fleur d'oranger. . . . This was the pleasantest 
 and (such is human perverseness !) the most 
 suggestive impression 1 derived from this historic 
 place I had read so much about, and wanted so 
 long to see. 
 
 The little house, just underneath the abbey, 
 is on the southern side of the rock, covered 
 with wild white clematis, big fig-trees growing 
 in its scrambling garden ; and as 1 went to and 
 fro my tidy little room, 1 had had glimpses of 
 
 153
 
 The Enchanted Woods 
 
 quaint eighteenth-century furniture, and antique 
 warming-pans, like ornamental glowing suns, 
 hanging up in the pantry. This charming old 
 maiden lady with her aristocratic name, letting 
 out rooms to Mme. Poulard Aine's superfluous 
 tourists ; never showing herself except to make 
 that gracious hospitable offer at my departure ; 
 I have often thought of her since. She has 
 put a little human romance, in Balzac's gentler 
 vein, into my recollections of the Mont St. 
 Michel. 
 
 The first impression had been dreary : the 
 brakes from the mainland crowded with jostling 
 tourists ; the main street arched and turreted 
 suspiciously like some cardboard " Old Lon- 
 don ; " every alternate house a restaurant or 
 shop for Souvenirs du Mont St. Michel ; then, 
 once beyond the tourists' shouts, the endless 
 evil-smelling steps and dust-heap corners, and 
 ramparts with unvarying view of leagues of 
 sad, wet sands. A hidden sunset was going on 
 when I reached the top of the rock. I walked 
 up and down, in and out of the desecrated 
 abbey church, choked with dusty scaffoldings 
 inside, and barricaded outside with unused 
 cranes and trolleys ; and, for all this desecration 
 
 154
 
 Mont St. Michel 
 
 of supposed repair, mouldy and green with 
 damp. In front, below, stretched miles of grey 
 sands to an invisible sea ; and over them hung 
 a pall of leaden clouds with ladders of pale-grey 
 beams. The tourists were at dinner in the 
 various Poulard inns ; and the only living 
 sound was the screech of greedy seagulls round 
 the rock. Rarely in all my life has any place 
 filled me with such overwhelming sadness and 
 desire to rush away. 
 
 But descending from the Abbey, and skirting 
 the little churchyard in the dusk, I stumbled 
 upon a little half-hidden church, and entered. 
 It was dark, irregularly spotted with candlelight 
 for service, and unseen women were chanting a 
 litany. A church, I imagine, quite modern and 
 trivial ; but in that darkness, only the altar 
 blazing, with vague sheen of gold from the 
 procession banners hanging all round, and the 
 scanty, scarce visible, congregation bending over 
 the prie-dieux, it might have been of any time ; 
 and made me realize, with reverence and 
 tenderness, the reality of this place of mediaeval 
 pilgrimage, this sanctuary, girt with quicksands, 
 of rt St. Michael in the Peril of the Sea," to whom 
 Roland commended his soul when he perished. 
 
 155
 
 The Enchanted Woods 
 
 This put me in conceit with Mont St. Michel, 
 and made me a little indignant with myself. 
 What ! I had wanted a place of pilgrimage 
 for my own private sentimental delectation, 
 strictly without pilgrims, or at best only ghostly 
 pilgrims made for myself ! Fie upon such 
 superfineness ! Mankind is always vulgar, for 
 vulgarity is mere misapplication of its energies, 
 or perhaps misapplication of our squeamishness ; 
 and without mankind, vulgarity and all, no 
 Mont St. Michel and no me to cavil about it. 
 The Canterbury pilgrims, judging by some of 
 the stories they related, were vulgar ; the 
 pilgrims to Eleusis, from words dropped by 
 Aristophanes, were even vulgarer ; and there 
 is considerable lack of dignity and sweetness 
 in the crowd of ladies celebrating the entomb- 
 ment of Adonis, in the account left by Theo- 
 critus. And are not tourists the modern and 
 lay representatives of pilgrims, starting on their 
 journey, however much they yell on the brakes 
 and squabble for Mme. Poulard Aine's omelette, 
 with desires of spiritual improvement and vague, 
 unwonted feelings of romance ? 
 
 This altered, and more humane, attitude of 
 mind allowed me to take a certain pleasure, 
 
 156
 
 Mont St. Michel 
 
 later in the evening, in watching trom the little 
 garden gate the bands of tourists going from 
 the eating-houses to their various resting-places 
 for the night : moving blobs of Japanese lanterns, 
 red and orange and green, and yellow lights 
 and grotesque shadows moving along the old 
 wooden house fronts, and across the turrets 
 and battlements, with snatches of comic songs 
 and goblin laughter. Thus, no doubt, the 
 rollicking pilgrims of old, for whom the abbey 
 was built, and the great vaulted and pillared 
 refectories and foresteries. 
 
 The most painful circumstance, I mused next 
 morning, as I watched the bands of shopkeepers 
 from Paris, and peasants in blouses, and peasant 
 women in delicate starched caps — the most 
 painful circumstance about pilgrims, antique or 
 mediaeval or modern (and then called tourists), 
 is that the thing which attracts them most, 
 more than crowding on the brake, and shouting 
 in the street, and fighting for the omelettes, 
 happens to be the gruesome element — the 
 horrid gaping wounds of young Adonis and 
 his various divine brothers or successors ; the 
 place where Becket was murdered, the stone 
 whence St. Paul's decollated head made the 
 
 i57
 
 The Enchanted Woods 
 
 three jumps, the cupboard where Catherine 
 de Medicis kept her poisons, the planks still 
 stained with Rizzio's blood ; and here, at Mont 
 St. Michel, the dungeons. 
 
 It had cost me half-an-hour's parley in an 
 office, much misrepresentation of myself as a 
 student of architecture, and a good silver piece 
 of a hundred sous, to be exempted from the 
 sight and full-length description of those 
 dungeons. "The dungeons form an integral 
 portion of the celebrated Abbey of Mont St. 
 Michel and of its history ; the official guides 
 are under strictest orders to conduct all visitors 
 to them between the church and the refectories ; 
 if Madame therefore desires to see the cloisters, 
 Madame cannot logically be exempted from the 
 visit of the dungeons." Madame, however, 
 as stated above, being possessed of an illogical 
 mind, circumvented the logical French nation 
 on this occasion, and sat for a couple of hours 
 in the cloisters while party after party streamed 
 through, at regular intervals, to and fro the 
 dungeons. 
 
 The official guide turned the key on me 
 every time, feigning not to notice my presence ; 
 and the solitude and silence between each 
 
 158
 
 Mont St. Michel 
 
 clattering and vociferating incursion was only 
 the more absolute. The charm of that cloister 
 (to my mind, far greater than that of its elaborate 
 granite carvings) is due to its being overlooked 
 on one side by the pinnacles and flying but- 
 tresses, the whole blackened rockery, with 
 haunting gargoyles, of the apse of the abbey 
 church ; while, by a very wide window, it 
 overlooks the sands, the pale pinky-brown in- 
 coming tide, and the band of blue offing under 
 the rainy, motded sky. And, sheer under- 
 neath, are the roots, so to speak, of the fortified 
 abbey, broken black walls and turrets striking 
 into the rock and the grass like the big ash 
 trees which grow among them. There are the 
 remains of a kitchen garden and what was 
 perhaps a bowling-green, and great thickets of 
 grass and cow parsley, haunted by rabbits and 
 magpies ; and plumb below the pale curdled 
 sands. No monk of old, I said to myself, ever 
 enjoyed or conceived such solitude in these 
 cloisters as I am enjoying, thanks to those 
 tourists. . . . 
 
 I thought, however, that, as I have already 
 said, the most notable impression I should carry 
 away that day would be of old Mile, de 
 
 '59
 
 The Enchanted Woods 
 
 Blangine, in her neat Louis XV. parlour, send- 
 ing out the maid to offer me the orange flower- 
 water. But it was not so. After leaving the 
 cloister, and watching Mme. Poulard Aine, 
 deftly reverse, between the two plates, omelette 
 after omelette (the main live interest of Mont 
 St. Michel consists in the feuds of innumerable 
 Poulards, elder, younger, sons, nephews, grand- 
 sons, each setting forth on posters and by word 
 of mouth that he alone is possessed of the 
 genuine recipe for the classic omelette soufflee) 
 — and after waiting on the ramparts above the 
 inn, above the slate roofs and turrets and fig- 
 trees, for my own turn, my own little share of 
 omelette to come, I had to wait again for the 
 train at Pontorson, and elected to do so not 
 among the raging tourists and porters and 
 omnibus drivers, but in the churchyard. And 
 in a corner, among a heap of rubbish and 
 watched over by the great wolf gargoyles of 
 the granite tower, I found an English inscrip- 
 tion : " Sacred to the memory of Sarah Web- 
 ster, of Biddeford, North Devon, England, 
 who fell asleep in Jesu, August 24, 1869, aged 
 29 years, leaving an affectionate husband and 
 child." This grave seemed sadder even than 
 
 160
 
 Mont St. Michel 
 
 that of the Neapolitan sailor-boy in the church- 
 yard at Tintagel ; the moral distance between 
 some flowery English village, and this dirty, 
 black Norman graveyard even greater. She 
 must have died on a journey, a pleasure trip 
 to this very Mont St. Michel with her husband 
 and baby ; she must have been, poor young 
 creature, thus left behind in alien land, a pilgrim, 
 a tourist. 
 
 1 6 1 m
 
 A WALK IN THE MAREMMA
 
 A WALK IN THE MAREMMA 
 
 TT is only in a country like this Maremma, 
 A where one lives all day in the saddle, 
 that can be learned the full meaning, the especial 
 virtues, of a solitary walk. As one rides along, 
 the loveliest landscapes unfurl and furl, in front 
 and behind ; they are tantalizing, unclutchablc. 
 And in the longing for closer acquaintance, it 
 is borne in on one that it is only with the feet 
 that complete possession is taken of a country. 
 It is only while walking, and walking by 
 one's self, that — to paraphrase Swinburne — one 
 touches and tastes it, and breathes it, and lives 
 of its life. 
 
 It was raining gently — indeed, it was the 
 rain which had prevented our riding as usual — 
 during that walk yesterday, my only walk 
 among all these days on horseback. And I 
 did not go any distance ; in fact, kept almost 
 within call of the Castle, high on its rock above 
 
 •65
 
 The Enchanted Woods 
 
 the confluence of the two streams. I scrambled 
 along — and scrambling is the most intimate 
 form of walking, the one bringing the most 
 affectionate knowledge — along the banks where 
 spates have filled the lower branches of the 
 leafless elms and rosy-budding aspens with 
 armfuls of dry bramble, clematis-tendril, and 
 reeds ; foolish Ophelia-wreaths under the real 
 garlands of ivy, which crown the top ; immense 
 dry nests ready for fantastic birds, bigger than 
 the heron who sailed over us at the ford, indeed 
 for birds altogether of Fairyland. What joy to 
 feel the soft flood sand under one's feet, to wet 
 one's hands picking the snowdrops in the green 
 moss and sere leaves, to stay listening to the 
 song of the stream, one's ear close to it, on 
 the big stones its white waters encircle ! 
 
 During a drive, even during a sauntering 
 ride at foot's pace, one does not think ; or 
 thinks of other matters ; but when one walks 
 alone in a not quite familiar country, one thinks 
 about it — it only, and finds out every little 
 reason for loving it. 
 
 In this manner it was not before yesterday's 
 scramble along those river banks under the Castle 
 that I understood what is at the bottom of a 
 
 166
 
 A Walk in the Maremma 
 
 great deal of the Maremma's fascination tor me, 
 and the charm, more particularly, of its river 
 landscape and its rolling pastures. This country 
 realizes something I have, so to speak, guessed 
 at for years and years, and longed for, not 
 merely whenever the Roman express rushed 
 me through the shallow Sabine valleys, but 
 long, long ago, during those monotonous 
 rounds of the Roman villas. I remember so 
 well that, as a child the sense almost of 
 being imprisoned, in that desolation-girdled 
 Rome, used to weigh on my spirits ; and how 
 1 used to feel rather than think that certain 
 bends of road of Villa Borghese — grass dells 
 traversed by winding rows of oaks, thickets 
 in holes, and wide swelling meadows in the 
 sunshine, must be samples (even to their wooden 
 fences and weather-stained farm-buildings) of 
 something — how shall 1 say it ? — well, some- 
 thing real, which existed, I knew not where, 
 beyond the walls of Rome and the stretch of 
 its empty Campagna. 
 
 This sense of being shown a tiny sample 
 (the reality, the enough utterly denied one) is 
 frequent in that great stage scene run up by 
 the centuries and called Rome, where vistas are 
 
 167
 
 The Enchanted Woods 
 
 rarely otherwise than baffling, and things are 
 not what they looked when you try to walk 
 into them. But the feeling can come equally 
 in other places and is one of the incidents, the 
 peripezie, of the religion of the Genius Loci; 
 one of the small cruelties with which, like every 
 other divinity, he troubles and chastens and 
 makes ready the souls of his worshippers. It 
 is by the repetition of such moments of baffled 
 longing that the topographical imagination 
 acquires its passionate power, the power of 
 sweeping along folds of hills and woods (like 
 these I have before me as I sit sunning myself 
 behind the Castle bakehouse, where the mules 
 are unloading the fragrant faggots of ever- 
 greens), and of penetrating along the hidden 
 bends of river valleys ; nay, even of poising 
 and circling over mere points and lines on a 
 map, and lingering among names of places one 
 shall never see. 
 
 And with the realization of such long-dreamed- 
 of possibilities comes a different but closely 
 related joy to the idle lover of localities. One 
 recognizes vaguely, but with deep and per- 
 meating satisfaction, that since this is a reality, 
 there must be more, much more of it ; and that 
 
 1 68
 
 A Walk in the Maremma 
 
 this especial character and loveliness is, In all 
 probability, one of the many great modes of the 
 world's existence. I felt it poignantly along 
 this little Maremma stream, while looking at 
 the great lentisk and myrtle bushes, grown to 
 trees because unattainable where they hang to 
 the red soil under the Castle terrace. Ot 
 lentisks and myrtles like those there must be 
 forests somewhere or other. Such jade-green 
 and crystalline streams under ivied elms must 
 flow innumerable. Such wide sweeps of 
 flattened valley, rounded with lilac leaflessness 
 and soft plume of evergreen, must stretch tor 
 miles and miles. This is a whole great country, 
 this seaboard between Arno and Tiber, this 
 ancient Etruria ; it is a reality, and must have 
 sister-regions throughout the dominions of the 
 gods of Greece and of Italy. 
 
 As I scrambled along the stream, where the 
 autumn leaves were sprinkled white with snow- 
 drops, the water took rosy and purple stains ; 
 and the rainy sky opened blue and moist, 
 surrounded by colossal mounds of white and 
 crimson and inky cumulus. And when 1 had 
 climbed up the Castle hill and got to its 
 shoulder, behold ! a great dark storm was 
 
 169
 
 The Enchanted Woods 
 
 coming up from the sea, filling the shallow 
 valley with smoke. It thundered ; and short 
 white lightnings danced above the woods, only 
 one blood-red stain marking the place of the 
 setting sun. 
 
 o 
 
 " Snow in the Apennine," said the head 
 huntsman. And indeed to-day it is cloudless, 
 and the Maremma lies pale buff and pale lilac 
 and russet, its rivers bright and azure, under a 
 radiant winter sky. 
 
 I am sitting, as I said, writing in my note- 
 book, by the Castle bakehouse ; the smell of 
 fresh bread, of sweet charred olive-wood issuing 
 from it ; and the first twitter of birds mingling 
 with the rustle of the river far below. The 
 thoughts of yesterday return to my mind, the 
 pleasure I felt in finding myself, at last, in 
 the kind of country I had so long guessed at 
 and wished for. But thinking it all over, and 
 trying to understand this phase of our senti- 
 mental intercourse with places, I begin to 
 believe there is something more. Is there not 
 at the bottom of it all, like reversed harmonics 
 which give the whole state of mind its special 
 quality, its timbre, the hidden suspicion that the 
 reality in question, the similar beyond which we 
 
 170
 
 A Walk in the Maremma 
 
 delight in, has no existence r That it is we 
 who have made it out of our soul's stuff, out of 
 our own dreams and wishes, as we secretly 
 make all the things we care for most ? 
 
 171
 
 LES CHARMETTES
 
 LES CHARMETTES 
 
 HAD forgotten, one might have said, the 
 very existence of the Charmettes ; and was 
 not even clear about their whereabouts when 
 my hosts alluded to them : were they near 
 Chambery or on this Lake of Annecy ? Yet, 
 now that I have been there, it has become quite 
 plain that I must have been, if not thinking, at 
 least feeling about them for a long time ; and 
 that those ten autumn days in Savoy were 
 nothing but a preparation, secretly compassed 
 by the Genius Loci, to whom 1 minister, for 
 that bit of romance. 
 
 I almost fancy the thing began as soon as I 
 had crossed the Channel. Not merely with the 
 unaccustomed brightness and heat ; but rather 
 with the faint sweet smell of the clematis, dusty 
 along the roads, and the smell, sweeter and more 
 evocative still, of the ivy bloom, telling of old 
 farmhouses in Touraine, of the courtyards of 
 
 175
 
 The Enchanted Woods 
 
 Italian hillside villas. And once in Savoy, in 
 my first stroll among the vineyards by the lake, 
 I seemed to smell, to taste the South as I 
 picked the tiny lilac blooms of the dry pepper- 
 mint off the rough walls. But the whole 
 impression was, of course, very far from being 
 merely Southern ; just as it is the unexpected 
 mixture which makes the special charm of 
 Rousseau. Even on the first radiant day, with 
 the western mountains made blue and unsub- 
 stantial — Italian, so to speak — by the sun 
 behind them ; and the light permeating the 
 vines and walnut leaves, making them liquid 
 gold and green, there was the sense that this 
 was the North, Swiss, almost German, with 
 the homely romanticalness of barns and chalets, 
 and little pepperpot castles, and many-windowed, 
 steep-roofed houses in the vineyards. And 
 across the creek of marvellous, enamel-blue 
 water came the sound of whetting scythes, with 
 its suggestion of the freshness and purity of 
 high places and of short summers. 
 
 The weather soon broke up. It poured for 
 days ; and when the great black clouds rolled 
 back, there was a powdering of snow on rocks 
 and grass, and Savoy had lost all its look of Italy. 
 
 176
 
 Lcs Charmettes 
 
 When I g^ot to Chambcry it was bitter cold ; 
 the black clouds lay along the mountains, 
 making, with the grey roofs and grey stone 
 houses, a depressing symphony in chill and 
 dreariness. 1 don't know when I have spent a 
 morning of such dull bad temper as the one in 
 which I tried to extract — and failed — some sort 
 of interest out of that dreadful town, rejected 
 alike, it seemed to me, by Italy and France. It 
 was with a stupid sense of traveller's duty, and 
 a degrading wish to kill a few hours of this 
 over-short life, that I set out for the Charmettes. 
 Since the Charmettes — that much I had gained 
 — arc near Chambery. 
 
 There is no kind of house more delightful 
 to me than what I must call the Louis XV. 
 pavilion, with its long wide windows of small 
 panes, its faded shutters flap to flap above 
 the great garland of wistaria, and its high roof 
 of silvery slate among the trees. One has seen 
 such a house a score of times, in every old- 
 world French provincial tow::. The eye and 
 fancy are drawn to it, wishing to pene- 
 trate into its closed rooms and its forgotten 
 story ; and one goes out of one's way, very 
 likely, to get a better view ; or returns to those 
 
 177 N
 
 The Enchanted Woods 
 
 town outskirts, to that corner of leafy lane, in 
 order to get one glimpse again over the orchard 
 walls. It seems a kind of magic to pass through 
 the twisted iron gate, on to the little terrace 
 with the oleanders and pomegranates in dis- 
 coloured tubs ; and altogether unreal to be 
 pulling, with some hope of admission, at the 
 rusty bell. . . . 
 
 After a minute, which I spent looking at the 
 big mountains (for the Louis XV. pavilion was 
 the Charmettes), a peasant woman came out of 
 the adjacent farm and unlocked the door. And 
 now comes the second strand of improbability 
 in this web of unlikely dreams. The house you 
 enter stands empty, but with the air of having 
 been inhabited till yesterday, though perhaps 
 inhabited a little by ghosts : chairs and tables 
 are in their places on the broken brick floor or 
 dusty parquet ; a big Louis XV. sideboard also 
 with a few coarse Strasburg plates and a set of 
 pewter ; and beds, in their alcoves, with moth- 
 eaten silk quilts ; while on the walls, among 
 mirrors cracked and dimmed, hang the por- 
 traits of the late owners. In the dining-room 
 a faded poster sets forth that this Propriety 
 is for sale, with its gardens and vineyards ; 
 
 178
 
 Les Charmettes 
 
 eighty thousand francs they ask for it, furniture 
 and all. 
 
 In the course of one's wanderings — and in 
 Italy especially — one has stumbled occasionally 
 into places like this, standing untouched, save 
 by decay, as they stood a century and a half 
 ago ; and ready to be inhabited by any purchaser 
 who should have the nerve to share a house 
 with inmates not of this world. But never 
 have I seen a similar place so utterly according 
 to the heart's desire. The small size of the 
 house, the exquisite proportions of the rooms 
 and stairs, the grace of mouldings, bevellings, 
 and trumcaus ; the elegance of the sparse, 
 scant furniture, even to the charming green- 
 branched wall-papers — I have seen things of 
 the same kind, even lived among them (my 
 mansarde room, with Louis XV. silhouette aunts 
 and green lilac pattern on the walls, at my 
 friend's near Fribourg) ; but never have I seen 
 anything so complete or so perfect. So com- 
 pletely and perfectly, also, of the Past ! 
 
 One would loiter in these rooms ; pick out 
 old rondo tunes or minuets, perhaps, on the 
 spinet ; wonder what faces had mirrored them- 
 selves in these spotted glasses, what manner of 
 
 179
 
 The Enchanted Woods 
 
 people had taken the air among the box borders 
 in the sight of those great mountains. And 
 one would turn away unwillingly (perhaps 
 returning for a last glance) after plucking a 
 sprig of the myrtle against the door ; and 
 depart, not without looking back and wonder- 
 ing, among scrappy reminiscences of the 
 " Nouvelle Heloise " and of " Werther," what 
 the romance of this house might have 
 been. 
 
 And then ! That there should really be a 
 romance in that romantic place ; the romance, 
 pathetic, enchanting, wofully human, cynically 
 sad, and surpassing even " Manon Lescaut " in 
 eighteenth-century essence : the romance of the 
 first volume of the " Confessions " ! 
 
 I walked quite a long time up and down the 
 little terraced garden, and round the farm and 
 barns and manure-heaps and walnut trees, up 
 into the vineyard above the grey, pointed roof. 
 And — having promised the peasant woman not 
 to touch anything in the garden — I did not take 
 a sprig of that myrtle against the house door. 
 But I felt at liberty, in the rough grass among 
 the vines, to pick a mignonette flower ; stunted, 
 and certainly no mere wild scentless one, but 
 
 1 80
 
 Les Charmettes 
 
 some degenerate straggler out of the garden ; 
 and, who knows ? of the seed planted by Jean 
 Jacques and Ma man. 
 
 These Charmettes, so French, yet with their 
 Swiss, and in a manner South German, sur- 
 roundings (this country might be Bavaria or 
 the Southern Palatinate) are typical of what 
 Rousseau's genius stands for. Typical, like 
 his real story with Madame de Warens, which 
 is so wholly unlike the light or brutal scandals 
 (from Marivaux to the Liaisons Dangereuscs) 
 of eighteenth-century France. A story, in its 
 sensual crudeness, yet full of poetry and sad- 
 ness, and purified at every step by those 
 escapades into solitude and nature, mad wan- 
 derings over hill and dale, which might be in 
 IVilhelm Mcister, nay, even in Stevenson. 
 
 These thoughts went on in my head for the 
 rest of that cold, dull day in the dismal town of 
 Chambery ; and although I ended at a book- 
 seller's and bought a stout yellow-backed 
 " CEuvres de J. J. Rousseau : Les Confes- 
 sions ; " nay, spent the evening turning over 
 its pages, my inner eye was full of the little 
 house among the walnut trees and the vine- 
 yards ; and I seemed to know whatever was 
 
 181
 
 The Enchanted Woods 
 
 worth knowing of the poor wretched boy of 
 genius and his dear, exquisite, and unprincipled 
 protectress, far better than any book could set 
 it forth. 
 
 182
 
 IN THE EUGANEAN HILLS
 
 IN THE EUGANEAN HILLS 
 
 'T was pitch dark as we drove from Padua ; 
 the long, damp halos of the carriage-lamps 
 revealing nothing but endless avenues of plane 
 and thinly fringed canals along the way. So it 
 was but next day that I took in the fact, when 
 the mists thinned away under the windows, that 
 the house I had come to was in the Euganean 
 Hills. The autumn morning became exquisitely 
 sweet, dim, yet luminous ; the sky visible, but 
 thinly veiled with white. In the great stillness 
 of things the slow descent of a yellow leaf, the 
 hill of an acorn, took a sort of gentle importance ; 
 voices, the noise of cocks and hens, the click of 
 a smithy, came clear but as out of a hidden 
 distance. Autumn and Italy mysteriously 
 wrought together one of their loveliest deeds 
 of magic : melting away everything in the 
 world except a delicate outline, changing the 
 hills into atmosphere luminous, buoyant, silvery 
 
 185
 
 The Enchanted Woods 
 
 and azure ; effacing all save the nearest detail, 
 and that made uncertain and baffling — a plain 
 or a lake, houses or cypresses ? It seemed the 
 fit interior of that Euganean group, fantastic 
 always in their curious shape and complete 
 isolation, and in their forming a bubble-shaped 
 cluster in that extinct, long silted-up piece of 
 sea. The Euganeans, moreover, which one 
 gets to think of as a kind of mirage at Venice, 
 mostly invisible, even in clearest weather, and, 
 rising up, hyacinth-blue cones against the amber 
 or the suffused crimson of the sunset, fitful, 
 unreal islands of Circe or Armida. 
 
 There is, to my mind, a very peculiar pleasure 
 — akin to that of following a river from its 
 source to the sea — in getting to know the 
 different physiognomy, the different mode of 
 being, of various mountainous or hilly regions. 
 Walking on the terrace of the villa with the 
 African traveller (who disdained to take a part 
 in any of our excursions), I was able to guess 
 how immensely, and in a way super-humanly, 
 personal, the genealogy, biography, and way of 
 being of localities and districts must become in 
 the light of science ; just by a word here and 
 there, accompanied by a nod in the direction of 
 
 1 86
 
 In the Euganean Hills 
 
 the hills around, or the plain below, or the 
 misty gap where the Alps should be, he was 
 able to make me realize that the geologist and 
 geographer have secrets and have emotions like 
 those of the historical student. These hills had 
 for him an additional and (however unconscious) 
 imaginative interest, not unlike that with which 
 I sometimes caught myself, seated at table with 
 my friends, suddenly conscious that these dear 
 modern people — my kind old host and charm- 
 ing youne; hostess, the very unmedircval Knight 
 of Malta, the traveller himself, and, oddest 
 perhaps, my excellent friend Francesco, the 
 radical economist, are the representatives of 
 alpine feudatories, of a famous Umbrian con- 
 dottiere, and of the most tragic victims of 
 Venetian statecraft. 
 
 But, quite apart from any such scientific, 
 so to speak, genealogical knowledge of hills 
 and mountains, one can take in them the 
 interest awakened by well-defined human 
 types, families, or individuals. One notes the 
 difference, not only of outline, rounded or 
 broken into facets, but of the steepness 
 or flatness, telling of mosses and bogs, 
 or of streams washing the earth from the 
 
 187
 
 The Enchanted Woods 
 
 ridges ; the difference, naturally, in the depth 
 and darkness of valleys, shelving or abrupt, 
 and in their intricacy ; these Euganeans, 
 for instance, making one understand where 
 Mantegna, living as he did in their city ot 
 Padua, came by his fantastic perspectives ot 
 streams and roads twisting like dragon's tails 
 round some great scaly rock. 
 
 We turned and twisted along just such roads 
 — enclosed, secluded, the whole hill-range so 
 extraordinarily cut off from all the world, so 
 self-containing — every time we took a drive. 
 The first time it was to see the ruins of a castle, 
 become almost indistinguishable from the rocks, 
 which had belonged to those tyrants of Padua, 
 of whom my hosts are the direct descendants. 
 At the end of the twisting valleys there was 
 something white in the blue plain, Padua ; and 
 beyond, a long light line, the Adriatic ; and 
 immediately below us, in the deep russet 
 precipice, two great hawks were circling. The 
 Serene Republic, which proscribed the very 
 name, had taken care that nothing should 
 remain of the doomed family's castle. 
 
 Another day I was taken to see a former 
 Benedictine monastery at Praglia. It was odd 
 
 188
 
 In the Eugancan Hills 
 
 suddenly to find in one of these rural valley 
 corners a great cruciform Renaissance church, 
 with colossal flights of steps, like those in 
 Titian's Presentation at the Temple. In the 
 immense nave only a few peasants were singing 
 the evening responses — women mostly — in that 
 guttural middle voice, sexless but so natural, 
 which has the pleasant bitterness of hillside 
 herbs. From the little pillared loggia of the 
 deserted monastery there was a view of exquisite 
 solemn sweetness : russet and yellow, very pale, 
 of hillside scrub ; lines of vineyard, trailing 
 perfect festoons of coppery rose ; grass after- 
 math beneath, with young grey calves and 
 flocks of turkeys feeding. And, above the 
 great barn-roofs, the loveliest of hillsides ! a 
 thin growth of olives, with here and there a 
 cypress above the rose and orange brushwood 
 among the rocks. These steep Eugancan 
 valleys are set with villas of characteristic 
 Venetian, eighteenth-century shape, like those 
 of the Giudecca and the Lido, and here 
 and there a delicate white steeple sprouts out 
 of the rock. It was Sunday, and in one of 
 the little villages a band was playing under a 
 vine-trellis, men and girls dancing to it very 
 
 189
 
 The Enchanted Woods 
 
 gracefully : this poor Italian peasantry, taxed to 
 the bone, has wonderful sunshine and oxygen 
 in its soul, which keep it serene even when 
 starving. 
 
 We always talked a great deal about the 
 
 peasants, about the corn laws and militarism, 
 
 my dear Francesco and I ; and I had quite 
 
 forgotten, the other afternoon, where he was 
 
 taking me in the jingling cart. We got out at 
 
 some farms, and slowly climbed the grass path up 
 
 the smallest, most isolated of those Euganeans 
 
 — barely a bubble in the plain. But at a turning 
 
 of the path my interest in politics and economy 
 
 suddenly went out : we were in romance, in 
 
 the fairyland of Italian poetry. Imagine (and 
 
 I seemed imagining rather than walking in 
 
 reality) a mediaeval castle of the Scaligers, 
 
 perfect with battlemented walls, circular like its 
 
 rock, but a castle turning magically into a villa 
 
 such as d'Annunzio has made immortal ; great 
 
 cypresses marking the moat, and the steep paths 
 
 from the plain ; a formal garden reached by the 
 
 drawbridge ; steps and balustrades filling up 
 
 everywhere the angles of the fortress ; lemon 
 
 and gaggia houses nestling under the walls ; 
 
 and a whole people of statues standing sentry 
 
 190
 
 In the Euganean Hills 
 
 on high, profiled against the castle. And all 
 these things at such angles as to make perfect 
 pictures : towers, battlements, cypresses, statues 
 all pcrspectived not merely for the eye but for 
 the imagination, compelling each back into that 
 charmed circle, so that the impressions of Ezze- 
 lino's Castle (for it was Ezzelino's also) and of 
 Armida's garden interchange, interlace like 
 theme with theme in a subtle piece of music, 
 enclosing the soul and subduing it in a maze of 
 romance and beauty. 
 
 The evening was misty ; the Euganean cones 
 and the little hills of Vicenza were barely out- 
 lined ; long curls of smoke lying in the vague 
 autumn yellow of the plain ; pale red filaments 
 veining the sky ; everything was undefined, 
 with an air of nowhere, out of which the castle, 
 the gardens, towers, Ghibelline battlements, 
 statues, lemon-trees, and great cypresses alone 
 emerged, filling the eye and the fancy. 
 
 A few bats began to hover ; the drawbridge, 
 over which we had crossed, rose again behind 
 us with a gentle movement like a bird's wing. 
 It was twilight, and a minute or two later the 
 castle had vanished. 
 
 " You are very late for tea," said my charming 
 
 iyi
 
 The Enchanted Woods 
 
 young hostess, "and I suppose they did not 
 give you any." 
 
 " They ? " I asked vaguely. 
 
 " The people at the castle, of course. You 
 don't mean to say you didn't call on them ? 
 Didn't Francesco tell you it belonged to the 
 inlaws of your friend Theodora M ? " 
 
 I went to the fire with my cup in my hand. 
 A little shiver, not merely of cold went through 
 me. 
 
 " The castle, my dear Maria, does not really 
 exist," I answered, " and therefore it cannot 
 belong to anybody's inlaws — the castle I have 
 just come from." 
 
 192
 
 THE HOSPITALITY OF THE 
 BLACK MADONNA
 
 THE HOSPITALITY OF THE 
 BLACK MADONNA 
 
 /^\N the top of Monte Mucronc, the highest 
 of the mountains separating the plain of 
 Piedmont from the valley of Monte Rosa, the 
 Black. Madonna entertains her devotees with 
 magnificent hospitality. After climbing up and 
 up and up between great chestnut woods and 
 tender Alpine lawns, with a pure white stream 
 rushing incalculable miles an hour downhill 
 under the box hedges and the arcadcd cottages 
 and past the white steeples and painted churches 
 along the road, you come quite suddenly to 
 more solemn groves of beech dotted with 
 circular chapels, and, emerging from them, find 
 yourself in the bare and crater-like hollow of the 
 mountain, and in front of a triple row of great 
 porticoed palaces, a sort of Italian Versailles. 
 
 This is the Sanctuary of Oropa, the residence 
 of the great Black Madonna, whose portrait is 
 painted on all the houses of that district. She 
 
 195 o 2
 
 The Enchanted Woods 
 
 can give hospitality, I am told, and can easily 
 believe, to more than a thousand pilgrims. To 
 Dukes of Savoy and Kings of Sardinia, and all 
 manner of Lombard Archdukes and similar 
 high personages in the magnificent seventeenth- 
 century buildings and wings over the court of 
 honour and the majestic flights of stairs, where 
 her c^igyy in a golden-metal sun, surmounts 
 the gates like a weather-vane. And hospitality 
 to endless smaller folk in the cells opening on 
 to the double cloisters of the immense inner 
 yard or square. I did not see the state-rooms 
 at Oropa, for (one of the strangest circumstances 
 about this strange place) there was no one 
 anywhere to show one anything. But, for that 
 very reason, I roamed freely about the endless 
 cloistered corridors on to which open the in- 
 numerable rooms, each with two or three 
 colossal beds, intended for the humbler pilgrims, 
 corridors and rooms all numbered and inscribed 
 with names of patron saints. Huge mattresses 
 were airing in the yard (which is the size of a 
 large city square), and immense frowsy-looking 
 coverlets, enough to cover six, hanging on the 
 parapets in the sun, uninviting objects at the 
 first glance, but which discovered themselves to 
 
 196
 
 Hospitality of the Black Madonna 
 
 be of fine-patterned seventeenth-century cotton 
 or hemp brocade of faded russet or green. 
 
 The Black Madonna, like all the French and 
 Italian great folk of the past — Rousseau's 
 friends of whom he so bitterly complains and 
 the Duchesse du Maine, Louis XIV.'s bastard's 
 wife, at Sceaux — the Black Madonna lodges, 
 but does not board her guests. But on either 
 side of the great triumphal staircase are spread 
 out vast eating-houses — Croce Biancas and 
 Croce Rossas, with swinging signs and white- 
 covered tables, among oleanders in tubs, and 
 cafes and Birrerias and Rigliardos ; and humbler 
 ones are nested even in the central portico, 
 under the great metal sun and the huge metal 
 monogram of the Black Madonna ; and with 
 them shops of all kinds — perfumers, tobacco- 
 nists, stationers, newspaper vendors, and barbers 
 — everything which the pious of various classes 
 can want for use or pleasure. And, indeed, 
 the approach to the hospice, even before you 
 see it, is marked not merely by white and 
 pillared chapels (like things in frescoes by Pin- 
 turicchio or Signorelli), but by wooden booths, 
 chockful of rosaries, medals, painted votive 
 candles, scapulars, and riconlos y of all kinds, of 
 
 197
 
 The Enchanted Woods 
 
 Oropa and its Madonna ; booths where, I am 
 happy to say, there is also a splendid show of 
 indiarubber-balls, tin railways and tramways, 
 dolls, and toys of every sort, so that the 
 children at home may get a good impression of 
 the great Black Virgin whom the parents have 
 left home and them to visit. 
 
 The priests and sacristans were busy preparing 
 for a coming pilgrimage and festivity ; so I 
 could not be shown the Black Madonna. And, 
 on the whole, I was better pleased. No visible 
 presence could have come up to the sense of 
 her invisible immanence. Everything for her 
 and through her ; the whole church, the 
 sacristies, the lumber-rooms, even the damp, 
 dark passages, panelled with votive pictures 
 from floor to ceiling — nay, the very ceilings 
 themselves hung round. The oldest were 
 dark, stained canvases showing bedrooms with 
 Louis XIV. worthies in bed under canopies and 
 storied periwigs ; nay, there were some in 
 Elizabethan ruffs. Then came every conceiv- 
 able thing susceptible of being framed and 
 glazed : oils, water-colours, prints, pictures 
 made of locks of hair, and touching bead- 
 samplers, down to the modernest form of
 
 Hospitality of the Black Madonna 
 
 ex-voto : photographic family groups, with a 
 little Black Madonna let into the corner of the 
 negative, heaven opening in the photographer's 
 studio. The Black Madonna indeed presides 
 over only very earthly things : people in bed, 
 people under runaway horses, people upsetting 
 in boats, falling out of third-floor windows, or 
 escaping from fires ; at best, funny little smug 
 parents, kneeling and pointing to the cradle 
 which the Black Madonna has filled. The 
 Black Madonna, not unlike a swaddled infant, 
 of a Byzantine cast, herself, always in the sky 
 in the corner, but apparently fetching and 
 carrying only for material advantages and 
 escapes. Spiritual wants seem altogether out- 
 side her capacities ; indeed, it is strange how 
 completely the inhabitants of Heaven are 
 regarded as adjuncts to mere temporal con- 
 venience in all places of pilgrimage. Yet, 
 when one has been in this votive church a little 
 time, one recognizes that this is all more heart- 
 stirring than any mere disinterested piety. 
 One is overwhelmed by the sense, not of so 
 much faith, but rather of so many passionate 
 human demands producing it : fear of death, 
 fright of danger, and man and woman's love, 
 
 199
 
 The Enchanted Woods 
 
 and clinging to kindred and desire for offspring 
 — all this vast chorus of common human 
 egoistic passions which has risen up for genera- 
 tions and generations from this strange place of 
 prayer so solitary in the lap of the Alps. 
 
 Rising up whither ? Going out of that 
 church, black with smoked votive pictures, I 
 was dazzled by the brilliance of the sky and 
 the sparkle — stony, inexorable — of the great 
 peaks of that amphitheatre of rock which the 
 vast yard of the hospice encloses with its build- 
 ings, even as the side scenes of the stage 
 enclose the painted background, sky, and 
 rocks, and sailing clouds. All seems so pure, 
 so spiritual, compared with this pullulation of 
 human prayers ; so coldly, brightly uncon- 
 taminated by all these miseries. 
 
 I could not go into that church again. But 
 passing out of the porticoed yards, I climbed 
 a few minutes up, in the wake of a school 
 of grey orphan girls and of some nuns 
 and black-dressed women with conspicuous 
 rosaries, apparently carrying their luncheon up 
 into the mountains. And then, emerging, I 
 discovered what that wonderful stage effect of 
 the hospice roofs and porticos had hidden : 
 
 200
 
 Hospitality of the Black Madonna 
 
 under the great bare peaks of shining granite, 
 a wide amphitheatre of meadow and short 
 beechwoods, with a torrent and little white 
 roaming brooks rushing across, and chalets 
 here and there with cows, and everywhere on 
 the open pasture green or in the dark green 
 groves, innumerable little lanterned chapels 
 with circular porticos, like things from fifteenth- 
 century frescoes ; a country of keenest air and 
 freshest, tenderest grass still uncut, and mossy 
 boulders embedded in flowers, and a perpetual 
 bubble of waters. 
 
 It is very grand of the Black Madonna, I 
 reflected, to have chosen just such a spot for 
 the country house where she magnificently 
 lodges rich and poor to the number of more 
 than a thousand. But one wishes, somehow, 
 it had not been she. One wishes the place 
 might have belonged to some calm, classic 
 i^isculapius or Hygeia, with no fusty church 
 stacked with votive pictures and blackened 
 with votive candles. I should have liked rites 
 of some outdoor kind : religiously processional, 
 but not in any way superstitious ; rites of 
 exercise and meditation, but serene and clear- 
 minded, healing the spirit as well as the body 
 
 20 1
 
 The Enchanted Woods 
 
 by use of these pure waters, this cold and 
 crystal air and bright sun, by life with these 
 rocks and woods and pastures, and the un- 
 wearied clouds ; rites in which personal demands 
 should be forgotten, and impersonal contem- 
 plation should replace them. . . . 
 
 Thinking these things I turned away from 
 that Alpine amphitheatre, looked back to 
 whence I had come, and forgot all cavillings. 
 Before me were the spread-out roofs and 
 cupolas, grey slate, sparkling granite, of the 
 hospice ; and over them, over the Madonna's 
 monogram and the metal sun on the big gate- 
 way, were, not green hillsides and rocks and 
 clouds as one expected, but, merging into a 
 milky blue sky, lay a blue, delicate, incon- 
 ceivable sea. Yes, a sea ; but a sea without 
 sparkles, and with luminous white curdlings 
 which were rivers : the great plain of Lombardy 
 barely separated from the heavens by the pale 
 line of Genoese Apennines ; all blue, blue, of 
 incomparable, unspeakable blue against the 
 silvery roofs and walls of the hospice. 
 
 After all, I said to myself, as I walked 
 slowly down the hill, they can afford to let the 
 Black Madonna think she is the only potentate. 
 
 202
 
 THE HOLY YEAR AT RAVENNA
 
 THE HOLY YEAR AT RAVENNA 
 
 T)ERSONS of literary genius, or thereabouts, 
 
 -*■ I reflected that rainy day at Ravenna, are 
 
 always doing us good turns ; and perhaps not 
 
 more in furnishing us delightful masterpieces 
 
 than in showing us how to make up little vague 
 
 works of our own, felt, not written, out of the 
 
 scrappy stuff of our own life and reading. 
 
 Geniuses are people who amuse themselves 
 
 enormously and incidentally teach us persons 
 
 without genius though we are, to play at the 
 
 o-ames of their invention. In the middle of the 
 
 game (of which the trump card was somehow 
 
 the year 1900) which was making that wet 
 
 day in a provincial town so very enchanting, I 
 
 felt a vague warmth of recognition, and there 
 
 ensued the knowledge that I owed it all to M. 
 
 Anatole France — the Anatole France, at least, 
 
 of the immortal trilogy of dear Bergeret ; and 
 
 the sense of it added further to my pleasure. 
 
 205
 
 The Enchanted Woods 
 
 It may surprise some that I should describe 
 Ravenna as a provincial town. But to me it is 
 one. I do not think very often about Dante, 
 whose bones they stole and mislaid at some 
 distant period ; nor about Byron, except in so 
 far that I once met his left-hand brother-in-law, 
 one of those Gambas who took him to Greece 
 and glory, a very fascinating old man. Nor 
 even about Theodoric, though I confess that 
 his house, with pillared windows, may be for 
 something in my preference for that ill-paved 
 street leading to the port and marshes, excru- 
 ciating as it is to a bicycle ; at least, before they 
 wrenched the porphyry sarcophagus out of the 
 masonry and took it to the town museum, 
 worse luck to them ! To me, who have lived 
 there much, Ravenna is a very proper provincial 
 town, with a prefect and a professor of botany 
 who is an original ; and a market place, full in 
 this snowy weather of farmers in furred cloaks 
 and condotliere caps. Also a lending library, 
 instituted by my friend, and Socialists, and the 
 " Industry of Beetroot Sugar," so much talked 
 over ; and a dear familiar house, well warmed 
 and full of books, with family traditions, boys' 
 exams., ravishing toilettes often, and political 
 
 206
 
 The Holy Year at Ravenna 
 
 gnashing of teeth occasionally ; the whole pre- 
 sided over for my fancy by a mysterious person 
 in the lower regions, never seen, but heard of 
 as " restuffer of wool mattresses and bringer-up 
 of truffle-hunting dogs." And from this house 
 there radiates through the town o-reat luminous 
 beams and dust of gossip, discussion, biography, 
 legend (Garibaldi and Pio Nono, and even the 
 Serene Republic of Venice, whose daughters, 
 married by proxy, came to Ravenna by the 
 lagoon barge) — a halo of present or quasi- 
 present, mingling gradually in the darkness of 
 Exarchs and Ostrogoths and confused Middle 
 Ages. I always loved the mixture, but never 
 so much as this particular December Sunday, 
 when I caught myself playing the game of 
 Anatole France, in the looming shadow of the 
 new century. 
 
 The weather was really atrocious. Vague 
 black Pious Women (the cultivation of piety 
 their sole profession) were shaking wet um- 
 brellas in the church porches ; and when you 
 entered, your first impression was of damp 
 pavement and little constellations of taper-lights 
 in a steaming twilight tasting of incense. In 
 that particular church, whose name 1 always 
 
 207
 
 The Enchanted Woods 
 
 forget, at a forlorn street-corner (it has a round 
 archaic belfry seeming to penetrate into the 
 mist of centuries and centuries) I found the 
 evening benediction just ending. The Byzan- 
 tine columns are all encased in florid plaster ; 
 the only object of interest there, is a small bas- 
 relief of the fifth century, with an Adoration of 
 the Magi almost identical in arrangement with 
 the Corybantes' Dance before Cybele. I had 
 made that archaeological remark mentally, for 
 the tenth or eleventh time, and found no sort 
 of satisfaction in it, when my eye was caught by 
 a large railway poster near the door, with time- 
 table and price list for the trains to Rome on 
 the occasion of His Holiness's solemn opening 
 of the Holy Year Nineteen Hundred. . . . 
 The church was getting dark, most of the print 
 was small, and, moreover, the Pious Women 
 with soaked umbrellas, each stopped to take a 
 long deep stare at me before pushing out through 
 the leathern door. I felt I did not look as if I 
 o-enuinely wanted to know the price of those 
 tickets, and that I couldn't have made the Pious 
 Women understand why I really did ; so I got 
 shy, and tore myself away, and out into the 
 rain, repeating rather wistfully within myself, 
 
 208
 
 The Holy Year at Ravenna 
 
 " Opening of the Holy Year Nineteen Hun- 
 dred. . . . Pope Leo XIII. — first-class tickets 
 by Bologna and Florence, or by Forli and 
 Ancona " — and a vague feeling welled up, with 
 words on its surface, which proved to be Ger- 
 man, a verse, I believe, of Schiller, " und nun 
 an dies Jahrhundert's ernstem Ende." 
 
 Out in the streets it had begun to snow. 
 Wild weather coming ; and the day before, 
 driving towards the pine forest with my hostess 
 (the pine forest of Boccaccio's and Dryden's 
 spectre hunt), and past the famous beet-root 
 sugar refinery they are building at Classis, we 
 had seen the ploughed fields snowed over with 
 seagulls, harbingers of real snow. 
 
 I found there was to be a dinner-party 
 of notabilities somewhat difficult to manage. 
 While questions of precedence were being 
 discussed at tea-time, my host, appealed to on 
 the matter, brought out a volume of Baronius's 
 " Annals," a very fine edition, quarto, in vellum, 
 with dedication to Paul V. ; and began to read 
 out loud the year 1300, like this coming 1900, 
 a Holy Year, indeed the first officially such. 
 Pilgrims were flocking to Rome spontaneously 
 (among them, it is surmised, Dante) in such 
 
 209 p
 
 The Enchanted Woods 
 
 numbers that the reigning Pontiff granted 
 wholesale indulgence to dead and living. 
 " Moreover, it was stated by the demons 
 vociferating from the mouths of possessed 
 persons . . . that through the merits of the 
 said Apostles Peter and Paul all souls in 
 purgatory would be liberated from torments, 
 and even enabled to attain immediately to 
 glory." Demons, it seems, were quoted as 
 experts in such matters, as we quote doctors 
 and graphologists nowadays. 
 
 Then followed, always in Baronius (Dominus 
 Caesar, S.E.R. Cardinalis ac Bibliothecarius), a 
 story of a certain clerk, at St. George of the 
 Golden Veil, to whom there appeared, all 
 crowned with stars and in resplendent robes, 
 Mary, Diva Deipara, with her Son on her 
 knees. " To all men," spoke the vision, " God 
 mercifully gives indulgence." " And to me, 
 then ? " hastily asked the clerk, prostrating 
 himself as fast as possible. The Diva Deipara 
 let a moment pass. " To all men, living and 
 dead," she solemnly repeated. " And to me, 
 then ? " insisted the clericus, by no means 
 satisfied with general statements. Again the 
 Virgin let a little time pass, and answered 
 
 2IO
 
 The Holy Year at Ravenna 
 
 slowly, evidently taking a certain pleasure in 
 the poor clerk's flustered condition. "To all 
 men . . . dead and living . . . and ... to 
 thee also." 
 
 u Omnibus mortuis et vivis," repeated my 
 host in his sonorous Italian Latin, "but not 
 to the King of France or the Colonnas, Pope 
 Boniface was careful to mention ; which perhaps 
 accounts for Guillaume de Nogaret's mission, 
 and Sciarra Colonna's famous box on the ear 
 at Anagni." 
 
 The political dinner went off, thank Heaven, 
 satisfactorily ; a good deal was said about beet- 
 root sugar ; the Sicilian deputy's trial for 
 murder was alluded to, and the notabilities 
 were pretty unanimous in foretelling some 
 capital days of wild-duck shooting and snaring 
 in the salt marsh, for the snow was falling 
 quite thick. Next day indeed came the extra- 
 ordinary experience of wading through a little 
 snowficld to see the alabaster Byzantine altar 
 they have set up against the green and gold 
 mosaics, Justinian and Theodora, grapes and 
 peacocks, at San Vitale. 
 
 But there was no poster there. I mean no 
 railway time-table for the opening of the Holy 
 
 2 i I
 
 The Enchanted Woods 
 
 Year ; and that was what I really wanted. I 
 found one, though, in a certain church down a 
 dark corridor : a small basilica, most primitive 
 and empty, icy, as if no living thing, not even 
 a Pious Woman, had breathed into its dull- 
 ness for a thousand years. There it was, 
 nailed against a pillar, near the marble ambon. 
 " Pilgrimage to Rome on occasion of the 
 solemn ceremony of opening the Holy Year 
 to be held by the Holy Father Pope Leo 
 XIII., in the Vatican Basilica, the twenty-fourth 
 December, 1899. Price of return tickets to 
 Rome from the following stations : Ravenna, 
 16 f. 5 c.j third-class ; 28 f. 10 c, second-class ; 
 49 f. 10 c, first-class. Forli, Rimini, Cesena," 
 a little less. A cat, startling me very much, 
 ran across the nave. The bells, in the Byzantine 
 belfry, began to ring. I became aware that I 
 wanted some afternoon tea quite madly. 
 
 All along the snowy streets my thoughts 
 danced in tumultuous yet orderly pattern. I 
 thought of the dinner of notables, and how 
 cold they must all be shooting their wild-duck 
 in the marsh. Forty-nine francs — was it really 
 much reduction, seeing that " the maternal 
 kindness of the Church was opening the 
 
 212
 
 The Holy Year at Ravenna 
 
 inexhaustible treasure of indulgence " ? Could 
 that certain clerk at St. George of the Golden Veil 
 have afforded it ? Perhaps he would have gone 
 third-class, or made a financial effort. Centuries 
 do not come to an end every day. Speaking 
 of centuries ending, I realized that I had a little 
 dreaded the end of this one. Schiller's " und 
 nun an dies Jahrhundert's ernstem Ende," and 
 so forth ; and also that, now that it was close 
 at hand, I felt quite comfortable and singularly 
 at peace with the world and its contents. The 
 spirit of M. Anatole France was abroad ; and 
 I thanked the literary temperament for teaching 
 me to make pleasant patterns of contemplation 
 even out of centuries that are departing. 
 
 213
 
 THE GENERALIFE
 
 THE GENERALIFE 
 
 ' I K HE very little I have seen of Spain is 
 A Moorish ; but Moorish with the sadness 
 of the Moors' destruction ; Africa, one might 
 say, revenging herself on that cruel Spain and 
 rendering it so oddly sterile of all things good. 
 I was ill at the time, and saw it all through 
 my melancholy ; but there are realities which 
 answer to most of our moods, perceptible only 
 through them ; and this, also, was, I think, a 
 side of Spain's reality. 
 
 But a reality isolated from all others, and 
 different. Made unlikely, moreover, by rising 
 out of the chaos of a long sea journey ; five 
 nights and days like nights, when, opening un- 
 willing eyes, they closed again over a glimpse 
 of deck tipping down into the water, or deck 
 rising like a wall underneath it ; of foam 
 monsters swimming hand-in-hand, like com- 
 panies of Japanese bogeys, round the ship's 
 
 217
 
 The Enchanted Woods 
 
 bulwarks — nay, above them. Black emptiness, 
 vague nightmare for those endless days and 
 nights, with reminiscences, for all reality, of 
 recent wintry Northern scenes. And then 
 emergence, land, the South, an unfamiliar South 
 which seemed like Africa. 
 
 We rode under a blazing sun, through the 
 dustheaps of some Spanish villages, along the 
 beach where the mules are driven in the sea for 
 better going, and then inland, along a dusty, 
 rugged track between high aloes and cactuses 
 and great scarlet flowers like red-hot pokers. 
 A dreary country of rolling purple earth, 
 ploughed by the savage-looking brown cattle, 
 with low dusky hills at the end, with the sullen 
 clouds resting upon them. There is some- 
 thing unspeakably arid in the violet, almost 
 lilac colour of that earth, as if it had been baked 
 into barrenness ; an expression taken up by the 
 steel blue of the aloes, the grey of the scant 
 eucalyptus, the trembling white of the few 
 stunted poplars ; by the sharp, jagged forms of 
 this vegetation which looks — aloes with thin 
 long lances of dead flower, and prickly pears 
 with their battered shield-like discs — as if it 
 were all for warfare and desolation. 
 
 218
 
 The Generalife 
 
 The desolation, as I remarked before, seems 
 to belong to the Spaniards, rightful owners, 
 aborigines of this unkind-looking country ; 
 while the few spots of sweetness and grace are 
 made by the Moors — left by them in an alien 
 land when they were banished. One feels as 
 much about every little fruitful gap in those 
 endless miles of stony hill and plateau, oases of 
 orange trees and sugar canes, with the great 
 cranes of wells rising among them ; I felt it also 
 even of the market gardens round Malaga and 
 Seville, where we bought lemons and winter 
 roses : the Moors must have made them. An 
 impression, most likely, radiating from the real 
 gardens, which one knows to have been 
 Moorish, or laid out, like those of the Alcazar, 
 by Moorish architects and gardeners for almost 
 Moorish Spanish kings. 
 
 A wonderfully peaceful place, that Alcazar 
 garden watched over by the great Moorish 
 lattice-work tower of the cathedral, and by its 
 own high, slender palm trees ; a hurt us inclusus 
 in the best sense, where the winter sun lies on 
 the myrtle hedges and on the blue-and-green 
 tiled paths strewn with fragrant, dry fig-leaves. 
 In it one naturally remembers that Rhodes and 
 
 219
 
 The Enchanted Woods 
 
 Damascus — names to conjure with 1 — are much 
 on the same line, and somehow seem near (with 
 the palm trees brought from them) ; and one 
 muses on serene mediaeval days, learned Saracen 
 leeches, and Jewish philosophers, verses of 
 Omar Khayyam coming into one's head. 
 Spanish Spain with bullfights and cigarettes, 
 Seville of Don Juan and Figaro, has nothing to 
 say to these Moorish gardens ; has closed them 
 in, or rather closed them out of herself, into 
 peacefulness and gentle decay. 
 
 This is, of course, very much the feeling of 
 the Generalife above Grenada. I say its feeling, 
 not merely mine about it ; because places like 
 these have moods and emotions on their 
 account, seem to feel something which they 
 transmit to us. Only the Generalife has an 
 added quality of romance, its terraces and 
 hedged paths, and little porticos and fountains 
 overhanging, in their charmed regularity, the 
 stony, savage gorge of the Darro ; overlooking 
 the red towers and creeping walls of the 
 Alhambra. And then, beyond, the solemn blue 
 plain, and the peaks and everlasting snows of 
 the Sierra. 
 
 Far more than the Alhambra itself, which 
 
 220
 
 The Generalife 
 
 savours too much of the show-place, Palace 
 of the Caesars or Hadrian's villa, this little 
 Generalife has kept the poetry of Moorish 
 Spain. Partly also because of its small size, 
 and mainly, of course, because it is, if not 
 inhabited, at least inhabitable, and belongs to a 
 private individual descended in direct line from 
 its original owners. 
 
 That is the fascination : this odd, unlikely 
 fact, this bridging of the chasm between past 
 and present, modern Christendom and that 
 vanished Islam ; realizing it, one feels rather 
 as in the presence of persons intermarried with 
 ghosts. In the little palace — the casino of the 
 villa, it would be styled in Italy — above solemn, 
 high-backed chairs, hang the portraits of the 
 ancestors of the present proprietor, the Marquis 
 of Campotejar. Also their genealogical tree. 
 They are all descended from Don Pedro de 
 Grenada, son of Cidi Yahya, son of King Juzef 
 of Almeria ; descended through the Kings ot 
 Granada from the Kings of Saragossa and 
 Cordova, and also certain Gothic kings ; they 
 are connected by marriage with the wife ot 
 Charlemagne, and with Marsilius of Saragossa, 
 the Marsilius of the "Chanson de Roland" and 
 
 2 2 1
 
 The Enchanted Woods 
 
 of Ariosto ! And there is the first Don Pedro, 
 this son of Cidi Yahya, in armour, a red cross 
 on his breast, and a dead Moor — a thing like 
 the " Saracen's Head " — at his feet ; and the 
 device, with the pomegranate of Granada, 
 " Servire Deo regnare est." Then there are 
 Alonzos, Pedros, Estebans, warriors and knights 
 of Malta and of Calatrava ; and finally a little 
 boy, like a baby by Bronzino, in a go-cart, with 
 the words, " murio niilo ; " and with him died 
 the male line of the House of Granada. There 
 were also dignitaries of the Church, of course ; 
 and some nuns ; one particularly. And I 
 wondered, vaguely, whether in such a family 
 strange things might not have happened, in the 
 style of Goethe's " Bride of Corinth ; " some 
 ghostly Moorish betrothed, coming, perhaps, 
 to fetch away the daughter of the Renegades, 
 even from behind the convent gratings, 
 somewhere, perhaps, in the days chronicled by 
 Mme. d'Aulnoy, or when, later still, Spain 
 was governed by Signor Farinelli, with Don 
 Ferdinand of Bourbon under him. . . . These 
 Moorish renegade princes often had very 
 beautiful names in their Christian days, like 
 these Granada Vinegas of the Generalife, and 
 
 222
 
 The Gcncraliie 
 
 the Valor y Cordobas, of whom Don Francisco 
 threw Christianity and Spain to the winds, and 
 rebelled and perished in the Alpujarra under 
 the name of Aben Humeya. Strange things to 
 think about, phantasmagoric notions, elusive, 
 impossible to define, which haunted the little 
 palace looking down on to the precipice, the 
 gardens with their slender fountains and 
 horseshoe porticoes. The place was full ot 
 the scent, sweet but medicinal, of that winter 
 blossom which covers its bare twigs with pale 
 yellow, dried-up looking stars ; and from the 
 gardener's house there rose into the damp 
 warm air that subtler perfume still of burning 
 olive branches or vine stumps, 1 cannot tell 
 which. 
 
 1 bade farewell to that Spain of the Moors in 
 the same unreal and dreamlike mood. We had 
 gone on board at the wharf of the Golden 
 Tower at Seville before it was daylight. As 
 the boat moved down the stream, the blue 
 darkness of the night became paler by a sort 
 of infiltration of light ; and then there began 
 to emerge misty lines of poplars, scarce more 
 substantial than the curdling grey water under 
 the boat ; and every now and then white buildings 
 
 223
 
 The Enchanted Woods 
 
 glared supernaturally out of the greyness of 
 the banks and hills. Then suddenly, above 
 the misty marshland and feathery trees, day- 
 light ; and on it, at a bend of the river, the 
 steeples and cupolas of Seville for the last time, 
 the cap of the Golden Tower, and pinnacles of 
 the Giralda. And later, when the sun was 
 already high, there appeared, higher than the 
 sun, and isolated on the pale blue, a double- 
 crested cloud, baseless and resting in the sky : 
 the twin snow-peaks, Mulhacen and the Picacho, 
 of the mountains of Granada. 
 
 224
 
 COUCI-LE-CHATEAU
 
 COUCI-LE-CHATEAU 
 
 / TT V HE sadness of the French sous-prefecture — 
 at least of Laon ! There are few con- 
 trasts so dreary as stopping there immediately 
 after Switzerland, with its continuity of well- 
 to-do-ness, and the something elemental and 
 fresh, as of unshorn pasture and pellucid rushing 
 streams, about its spick-and-span old towns and 
 villages. 
 
 The evening of our arrival at Laon, the 
 hopelessness or provincial France descended 
 deep and heavy into my soul. We walked at 
 sunset through the dull hillside town, and along 
 the avenues which have replaced its walls, pass- 
 ing a desolate-looking Louis XIV. barracks, 
 dormered and escutcheoned, standing forlorn 
 in a great sandy square. Abutting on the 
 hillside boulevards there were lane-like streets 
 of aristocratic houses with lovely slate roofs, 
 but all close-shuttered, deserted, dead-looking, 
 
 227 Q 2
 
 The Enchanted Woods 
 
 and the elms and horse-chestnuts of their 
 gardens were fitly reduced to skeletons by the 
 past heat ; an autumn in midsummer, trees 
 barely outlined in brown featheriness, with a 
 soft cinder of dry leaves underfoot. 
 
 A wonderful tragic sunset took place : crim- 
 son first, then livid among great piled-up Alps 
 of cloud, above the endless plain of reaped field 
 and flattened forest. Such great plains are sad, 
 where the incident, whatever gives interest, is 
 due to changing, almost unreal things ; where 
 the mountains are mere perishable clouds, and 
 all that fancy clings to is mere passing show. 
 It was dusk when we found our way, after that 
 great circuit of the hill town, under the cathedral. 
 Looking up over the low roofs of the beautiful 
 Gothic chapterhouse, at whose corner there is 
 a sundial held by what was once a great angel, 
 his robe and the tip of his wing ; looking up, 
 climbing up the looming, inconceivably high 
 side of the great towers, one's eyes and soul 
 seemed to travel far into the storm-washed 
 evening sky ; suddenly meeting, there at the 
 top, the downward-peering heads of the gigantic 
 stone cows leaning out from the openwork of 
 the belfries. 
 
 228
 
 Couci-le-Chateau 
 
 But the next day France was kind and dear 
 once more. For we spent it at Couci. There 
 was a long slow journey on the platform of a 
 little local train through the deep woods, among 
 the great poplar groves, with glimpses of glassy, 
 reedy canals and lovely marshland starred with 
 big white flowers ; a journey so slow, so silent 
 and peaceful, and in soft rain, which somehow 
 made it merely more intimate, making one 
 penetrate, as it seemed, into that country's 
 secret. Couci is on a hill above that woodland : 
 a little town of old houses of fine white stone, 
 great Louis XIV. roofs of violet slate, and 
 every here and there — inserted in the masonry 
 — a bit of Gothic tracery. A little town, a 
 village almost, among the orchards and flower- 
 gardens enclosed in the great yellow-towered 
 wall ; typical — like Loches, Chinon, Tonnerre, 
 Montreuil in Picardy, St. Florentin on the 
 march of Burgundy and Champagne, and a 
 hundred other places I hope some day to know, 
 of what is characteristically good and charming 
 in Northern France. Bringing home to one 
 the modest happiness which prosperity can 
 bring in a temperate climate on fertile soil ; 
 the kindly human side, as opposed to the 
 
 229
 
 The Enchanted Woods 
 
 stagnation and selfishness of broken-up property 
 and remote provincialism. 
 
 How Stevenson has understood this subdued 
 cheerfulness of the small French country town ! 
 — a charm made up in part of the negation of 
 the tragic or lyric, all greyish white and slate- 
 colour like the old houses and the poplars by 
 the streams ; visited only by kindly suns and 
 breezes and such light frosts as check over- 
 luxuriance and prune vegetation, so to speak, 
 into fine flower and fruit. I thought of 
 Stevenson, and felt as if there were some story 
 or essay of his perpetually escaping my memory, 
 during the time I spent at the inn of Couci — 
 Hotel des Ruines — with beautifully flowering 
 pomegranates and oleanders in tubs on the 
 rough cobbles outside. It was left in charge 
 of a delightful elderly cuisiniere with that serious, 
 smiling dignity which French provincial servants 
 often have. There was also, having his mid- 
 day meal at the opposite table, an old-world, 
 gentleman-like person, spare and white-, 
 moustached, like an elderly cavalry officer, but, 
 as it proved, employed in the " Contributions 
 Indirectes" — to wit, salt and tobacco and such- 
 like — who entered into conversation with us. 
 
 230
 
 Couci-le-Chateau 
 
 It started from a raven or jackdaw hopping 
 familiarly about the inn dining-room ; con- 
 versation of the kind so pleasant on a journey : 
 a little about the antiquities of the place, the 
 castle, mediaeval wars, and so forth, and a good 
 deal about harvests, vintages, c/iasse, woods, 
 wildboar, birds ; making the pleasant, natural 
 business of life, ours and other creatures', even 
 trees and bushes (for he talked forestry), abide 
 a little while in one's leisurely imagination. 
 
 It rained hard, and for a while it was out of 
 the question going to see the castle. But I felt 
 peaceful and satisfied in the little inn parlour, 
 looking at the cocked-hat roofs and white 
 houses across the pomegranate and oleander 
 blossoms before the windows. But not without 
 occasional excursions among the family photo- 
 graphs belonging to Mme. Veuve Francois, as 
 the framed diplomas with crowning goddesses 
 and caduceuses and winged wheels, from 
 " Societes des Voyageurs du Commerce," 
 declared that deserving landlady to be called. 
 
 The castle, or what remains thereof, was 
 really far the least among the attractions of 
 Couci. Great gaunt ruins, bringing — when 
 one had been led up and down and over and 
 
 23F
 
 The Enchanted Woods 
 
 under, and heard all the guide's archaeology 
 — an intolerable sense of the ferocity and 
 monotony of that life, all offence and defence, 
 all subordinated to the most hideous, because 
 destructive, form of utilitarianism. No, no ; 
 the Middle Ages, well and good, of walled 
 towns and turreted cathedrals ; of a life, how- 
 ever often jeopardised, which had something 
 in it worth fighting about. But all these 
 warrens and rat-holes, once crammed with 
 pseudo-chivalry, merely depress one with a 
 sense of dreariness akin to that of the iron 
 hives of modern industrialism ; and what 
 redeems them is the vegetation, the bushes, 
 grasses, the rowans sprouting from broken 
 walls, the harebells and wild peppermint 
 carpeting the yards ; in fact, Nature's efforts 
 to cover it all up and hide it in oblivion. 
 
 Far more poetic than the ruins, there was 
 a little flowery terrace behind the inn, over- 
 looking the lustrous green-rolling country — 
 a quiet little place with chairs and tables, and 
 built, I have no doubt, of stones quarried in 
 the great fortress ; a most peaceful, pleasant 
 spot. 
 
 And before leaving Couci altogether I found 
 
 232
 
 Couci- le-Chateau 
 
 another delightful place outside the gates — a 
 path among the freshly reaped cornfields, which 
 lie straight against the horizon in this country 
 of old, old worn-down hills, the great white 
 cumulus clouds resting on the line of stubble. 
 One walked along a narrow path tufted with 
 flowering purple thyme and saxifrage, and the 
 son£ of larks descended from the washed 
 
 blue sky. 
 
 Such places are companionable, and if, in 
 them, the genius loci does not actually arise and 
 meet and overwhelm the poor tired, fretted, 
 wayfaring soul, yet one feels his vague hidden 
 presence, reminding one that in this world, 
 and apart from all human understanding or 
 misunderstanding, there is no need for loneli- 
 ness. 
 
 233
 
 THE TAPESTRY AT ANGERS
 
 THE TAPESTRY AT ANGERS 
 
 A MONG the many pleasant things of travel, 
 methinks we should include, as so much 
 to the good, that which our fancy adds to 
 places : impressions sometimes false, and ex- 
 pectations often disappointed. Our memory 
 should hoard, for instance, a certain briet 
 delightful moment when entering, say, some 
 unknown town, and catching sight of a single 
 picturesque feature or quaint detail, one feels, 
 and even sees the rest to match. Unwarned, 
 most likely, by sad experience, which teaches 
 that perfect realities happen only once in a blue 
 moon, in places you can count upon your 
 fingers — like Rothenburg, or Siena, or Tangier, 
 or, twenty years ago, alas ! also Warwick. 
 
 Such a moment was that of my arrival at 
 Angers, the capital, I hear, of the French 
 Catholic revival, and as dreary assuredly as a 
 novel of clerical life by M. Ferdinand Fabre. 
 
 237
 
 The Enchanted Woods 
 
 For through the rattling windows of the hotel 
 omnibus I caught a glimpse of a great Norman 
 belfry, and, bringing my head on a level with 
 my knees, I managed to see its pillared top. 
 And a few minutes later appeared the castle : 
 acres of walls and towers, colossal buttressed 
 masonry based on rock, black and vaguely 
 elephantine. I thrilled with the impression of 
 Plantagenet and Shakspearean Angers, the very 
 place for King John and Faulconbridge and 
 poor little Arthur. 
 
 The disappointments which follow such ex- 
 periences should not trouble us ; unless insisted 
 upon by our ill-humour, they disappear from 
 memory, shrink, roll up into nothing, vanish 
 like sleepless nights or boring days in trains, 
 leaving no image behind them ; and of the 
 things that seemed to be, only the things which 
 should have been remain. That first impressions 
 of places, and sometimes first experience of 
 persons, should sometimes be the most de- 
 lightful, shows not that outer reality is poor, 
 but that our powers of adding to it are rich ; 
 and this, rightly considered, is surely a subject 
 for rejoicing. Neither should we let ourselves 
 be put off by a more honourable aversion to 
 
 238
 
 The Tapestry at Angers 
 
 the unreal. In cases like these, where scientific 
 or practical purposes do not require crude fact 
 to deal with, what really exists is what we really 
 feel. And we may calm our scruples by 
 reflecting that mere chaos-mongering, mere void 
 and shapeless dreams and mutterings, are in- 
 compatible with the sensitiveness to the world's 
 suggestions and the instinct of meaningful re- 
 construction necessary for the seeing of clear and 
 charming visions. Certain germs called facts have 
 entered into our mind ; and in our mind's own 
 proper soil and climate, have grown, fertilized, 
 and crossed and altered by natural necessities 
 of growth. What does it matter if, by fate's 
 accident, similar germs have grown to different 
 shapes in other minds than ours, or even, as 
 the mystics would have said, in the great 
 thinking mind we call the universe? There 
 are as many ways of singing a great song as 
 there are singers, but great ones ! and all the 
 painters that ever have been have not exhausted 
 the ways of painting rightly one single land- 
 scape ; perhaps also there are united under one 
 mortal's name as many different lovable persons 
 as there are hearts to love them. And as to 
 poetry, why, the very immortality of some of it, 
 
 2 39
 
 The Enchanted Woods 
 
 of a line of Virgil, or a terzina of Dante, or a 
 scene of Shakspeare, is due simply to each 
 successive generation giving it a new lease of 
 life in a new meaning. 
 
 These are metaphysic speculations, though by 
 no means empty ones. But it is rather awkward, 
 all the same, to descend from them, with direct- 
 ness yet grace, to the story of the Lion with 
 Many Heads and the Fascinating Hydra on the 
 Angers tapestry. The tapestry in question hangs 
 all round the transepts and the single nave of that 
 cathedral, built by Plantagenet kings ; and, with 
 the two delightful blue and white rose windows, 
 converts its dark gauntness into something sug- 
 gestive of enchanted chambers. The work is 
 fifteenth century, and its general effect as colour, 
 what with fading and a mist of taper smoke and 
 incense, is that of alternated carpets of greyish 
 pink and pale blue, varied and interwoven to 
 an occasional lovely lavender. The story it 
 sets forth is, as stated, that of the many-headed 
 lion and the fascinating she-dragon, belonging 
 to a cycle of myths peculiar to arras-makers ; 
 and nothing can exceed the fantastic charm of 
 its presentation, or the weird humorousness of 
 the expression : the she-dragon, also called a 
 
 240
 
 The Tapestry at Angers 
 
 hydra (for she has many swanlike necks), is 
 a creature of infinite seductiveness. And there 
 is a large composition, on a rose-coloured ground 
 fleur de lysed with blue, of the poor beguiled 
 lion, sitting on his tail, holding a ball and 
 sceptre, and receiving most fatuously a whole 
 posse of bigwigs introduced by the fascinating 
 she-dragon, which is quite worthy of Walter 
 Crane in the days of the " Yellow Dwarf." 
 
 I was unfortunately prevented from following 
 the story to its conclusion, owing to the nave 
 being occupied by a procession of little girls 
 in muslin and elderly devotees in black alpaca, 
 all carrying paper palms and apparently tied 
 together by yards and yards of tulle ruches, 
 starting from an image, which they carried, of 
 the Madonna. I saw the little girls' eyes 
 wandering towards the tapestry. But they had 
 been too carefully brought up, methinks, to 
 comprehend the full meaning of the story, and 
 really believed, as little demoiselles should, that 
 it was all about the triumph ot the Church 
 and the Theological Virtues ; though some of 
 them, perhaps, guessed that the Hydra was a 
 lady not very comme il fan!. When the pro- 
 cession — alpacca skirts, and muslin frocks and 
 
 2. | i R
 
 The Enchanted Woods 
 
 tulle ruches, and purple canons, and scarlet 
 enfants de chceur — had shuffled out little by- 
 little, I sat down on the carved flamboyant 
 stairs of an overhead chapel, and watched some 
 picturesque dark-blue nuns coming and going 
 about the high altar, and folding and removing 
 its linen and carpets. In the waning light and 
 the incense cloud left by the recent service, 
 the cathedral, with its bits of carving here and 
 there, its battered monuments and uneven 
 floor, its windows of beryl and sapphire, and 
 its yards of rose-coloured and pale-blue arras, 
 felt quite enchantingly furnished and inhabitable, 
 so to speak, for the fancy. " It is quite im- 
 possible," I said to myself, " that people should 
 have told the story of the Lion and the 
 fascinating Hydra while really intending to 
 convey the adventures of the Theological Vir- 
 tues. Or, at all events " 
 
 But at this point my eye rested on a curious 
 Renaissance tomb in a corner of the transept. 
 It was much battered and partially bricked up. 
 The frieze consisted in a delicate garland looped 
 up at intervals by a death's head, each with a 
 name on a tablet : Alexander, Romulus, Semi- 
 ramis, Hercules, Cleopatra, Rhea, none of them, 
 
 242
 
 The Tapestry at Angers 
 
 I should think, belonging to the family of the 
 deceased. And meanwhile, underneath, the 
 real inscription had been removed, and the name 
 of the poor owner of the tomb replaced by a 
 course of bricks ! It was oddy ironical ; and 
 I felt that, in some subtle way, it all hinged 
 on to my argument about imagination. Only 
 I could not find the connection, for it was 
 half-past seven, and the Suisse with his halberd 
 hastily expelled me from the building. And 
 not having returned to Angers since, 1 have 
 never been able to recover the thread of those 
 thoughts. 
 
 243
 
 GERMANY ONCE MORE
 
 GERMANY ONCE MORE 
 
 T_J AVING bicycled through the Castle woods, 
 getting off many times to enjoy the warm 
 freshness of the afternoon, the sunlight filtered 
 through the beeches, the flickers on last year's 
 pink leaves, and the murmur and twitter amidst 
 the pale tree stems, I found myself at the 
 Neckar's edge, and crossed over by the ferry 
 at Ziegelhausen. On the opposite bank, I 
 descried, of course, a Restauration 3 as this very 
 un-French institution is called ; and sat down 
 to some beer and black bread in a terraced 
 garden overlooking the wide, sedgy river. 
 Somebody was playing the piano in a neighbour- 
 ing village house ; and the one-two-three-four 
 of an old-fashioned sonata mingled pleasantly 
 with the lap of the water and the creak of the 
 ferry chain. 
 
 One is apt to be a little irritated with 
 Restaurations and Kaffeewirthschafts — every 
 
 247
 
 The Enchanted Woods 
 
 legendary hollow in a forest, every rock com- 
 manding a view, every riverside, every ruin 
 of the German-speaking world being furnished 
 with such, from this flat, hot Neckar valley to 
 the high places of the Engadine, where you 
 drink chocolate in the shadow of the hoary, 
 yellow-mossed larches and in the draught of 
 a glacier stream ; and it is difficult, sometimes, 
 to be quite fair to the Teutonic instinct for 
 eating in every romantic moment, which cul- 
 minates in the veal cutlets and preserved 
 cranberries of the Wagner concerts at the 
 Kaim-saal at Munich. And I, too, had been 
 unjust. But sitting on that garden terrace 
 over the Neckar, drinking my brown beer 
 and eating my black bread while listening to 
 the Clementi sonata and going over in memory 
 my ride through the Heidelberg Castle woods, 
 I was made (as is often the case) just and 
 intelligent by happiness, and began to fathom 
 the mystery of the German Gem'uth. 
 
 Gem'uth I Untranslatable word, for whose 
 modest, kindly spirituality, its suffused souU 
 fulness, the other languages, with their logical 
 and idealistic and practical pretentiousness, can 
 never find any real equivalent. 
 
 248
 
 Germany Once More 
 
 The Germans, among other forms of genius, 
 possess, above all things, a genius for con- 
 templation of an Esthetic, sentimental, yet 
 homely kind. This constant marriage of 
 creature comfort and emotion, of beer and 
 romance is its expression ; and music — yes, 
 I fear not to say it — music is its offspring. 
 By the side of their porcelain stove, and amid 
 the fumes of savoury stewed sausage, they 
 have ever dreamed of forests and of streams. 
 The huntsman (not in our sense !), the 
 poacher, and the wandering miller, as they 
 speak in the music of Weber, and still more 
 in the music of Schubert, have been for ever 
 their heroes ; the sound of jager's horn ming- 
 ling evermore with the clatter and plash of 
 the mill in the world of Teutonic fancy ; which 
 world, as those divine songs truly remark, 
 " is green." And similarly, they have always 
 yearned towards a romantic past, " it beckons 
 them out of old legends." And I wonder 
 in what other country children have had sheets 
 of coloured knights (not soldiers) to cut out, 
 and the tower out of Schiller's " Robbers," 
 with the old father being taken out of it, 
 for their pasteboard theatres, as I can vouch 
 
 249
 
 The Enchanted Woods 
 
 for German children — at all events, alas ! of 
 forty years ago. 
 
 It is this homely love of romance, this 
 mixing up of what we priggish Anglo-Saxons 
 and Latins call higher and lower forms of 
 enjoyment, into one vague, permeating wonne 
 (I must be allowed that German word, so 
 soft, warm, comfortable, as compared with 
 our meagre and ascetic delight or rapture) ; 
 it is this spirit of roast veal in ruined castles, 
 and coffee and cinnamon cake in haunted forest 
 glades, which accounts for the Alpine land- 
 scapes and charming household details of 
 Diirer and the Little Masters ; accounts also 
 for the lovable side of rough, dogmatic old 
 Martin Luther ; for the most fascinating though 
 least Olympian parts of Faust ; and nowadays 
 for whatever is sane in the genius of Wagner. 
 But perhaps there is no one completer illustra- 
 tion of it than the first volume of Jung 
 Stilling's memoirs, which I happened to have 
 in my pocket that day at Ziegelhausen, and 
 which I opened at the ballad of the ghost of 
 the ruined castle, and again at the love-story 
 of the poor little niece of the " Christian 
 Widow." 
 
 250
 
 Germany Once More 
 
 But to return to the German genius 
 for music, and its relation to Restaurations 
 and KafFee-wirthschafts in romantic localities. 
 Nations differ essentially, not merely in what 
 they enjoy, but in their mode of taking 
 enjoyment. Now the Germans, as I have 
 said, enjoy themselves through several senses 
 at once, in a confused, suffused, permeating 
 manner which does away with definite images 
 and thoughts (and hence with literature and 
 the plastic arts as an adequate expression), but 
 accumulates a vast bulk of indefinable emotion. 
 Their feeling for the Rhine is typical of this. 
 Passing along it from Mainz to Koln, the 
 other day, it was borne in on me that the 
 power of this great wizard among rivers lies, 
 not in its beauty, for it is specially beautiful 
 neither in line nor in colour, but in its 
 pleasantness for the fancy : the peace and 
 prosperity of the smooth, flowing water cause- 
 way from the Alps to the Northern Ocean, 
 and of the wooded and vine-growing hills, of 
 rich, old-world towns and villages ; the know- 
 ledge also of its nixes, sprites and dragons, and 
 robber castles safe in picturesque ruins. You 
 cannot paint the Rhine, you cannot even 
 
 251
 
 The Enchanted Woods 
 
 describe it, for picture or poem would leave 
 out half the items and the whole delicious con- 
 fusion of them. But you can set the Rhine to 
 music. And as she has done by the Rhine, so 
 Germany has done by all her deep, inexplicit 
 emotion ; making those indefinable moods of 
 hers, sensual and spiritual at once, melancholy 
 yet pleasant, into music complex and yet 
 perfectly fused, indefinable and soul-subduing 
 as they. 
 
 That evening, after returning home from 
 Ziegelhausen, I joined my friends on the 
 terrace of the Castle. The great ruined walls 
 and towers, which are (to the un-Teutonic eye) 
 decidedly ugly by daylight, loomed very grand 
 and mysterious among the big, sweet-scented 
 lime trees, the woods advancing to enfold them 
 from behind ; and in front, in the big gap 
 where you feel that the Rhine is, the town 
 lights made a fanciful glowworm network 
 below. Soldiers and students, and townsfolk 
 with all their children, were seated eating and 
 drinking under the trees, while the band played 
 Isolde's "Love-Death." And as we went 
 home in the darkness, still warm and scented 
 with resinous fir tree, we heard a chorus of 
 
 252
 
 Germany Once More 
 
 men's voices, and saw swaying yellow lights 
 issue from the forest. The procession passed 
 us down the steep wooded road : burly shadows 
 with lanterns and big garlands, priests of the 
 dear goddess of German enjoyment. 
 
 '53
 
 THE CARILLON
 
 THE CARILLON 
 
 r^HERE had been a perfectly pure sunrise : 
 a line of low houses, a white lighthouse, 
 a piece of Holland, appearing in the light, and 
 disappearing again into the mists and waters. 
 Later, the lilac sea began to narrow into an 
 estuary ; or, rather, lines of coast, marsh, 
 villages, with little churches out of Flemish 
 pictures and avenues of toy-box little trees, 
 emerged out of the pale violet vapours, and 
 were absorbed back by them. Occasionally, 
 also, ships loomed, and yachts with white sails ; 
 and, much more frequently, fine big barges 
 with flowers and bird-cages and Dutch or 
 Dutch-looking names. At a bend, suddenly, 
 marsh and trees closer, and a seventeenth- 
 century gabled house, much like an old line-of- 
 battle ship. And at last, out of the depths of 
 the lavender, luminous haze, a belfry ; and 
 more ships, and dim wharves and houses, and 
 
 2 57
 
 The Enchanted Woods 
 
 another spire, immensely high, of twisted lace 
 work. Antwerp ! 
 
 An Antwerp, alas ! considerably imaginary, 
 or one, at least, which, once on dry ground, 
 and despite the museums and old streets I 
 wearily trudged over, my imagination failed to 
 make properly real. Indeed, that imaginary 
 bygone Antwerp was most satisfactorily realized 
 when I went back to my inn and looked out of its 
 window ; oddly enough, a window on to the yard. 
 
 For, sitting there and looking across, I saw 
 steep roofs of lilac-grey, here and there daintily 
 accentuated by a new vermilion tile ; step 
 gables and high chimney-stacks, and, over an 
 almost vertically steep expanse of violet tile, 
 the fanciful flamboyant spiral of the cathedral 
 tower, the one the little masons are building up 
 behind St. Barbara in Van Eyck's lovely drawing. 
 And alongside of it an even more fantastic zinc 
 bulb tower on two storeys of Noah's Ark 
 window ; the dearest and most preposterous 
 of onion-shaped and scaled Teutonic pagodas, 
 such as are the sign-manual of the race from 
 the Danube to the Scheldt, from the Alps to 
 the French frontier. Round these two belfries, 
 set among the roofs and step gables, rose the 
 
 253
 
 The Carillon 
 
 distant pinnacles of the cathedral apse ; a little 
 domestic turret, brick with white courses, which 
 Ruskin would have loved to draw ; and, madly 
 improbable, the converging spiders' webs and 
 white rosetted racks of the central telephone 
 office. All in a perfectly fair blue autumn sky. 
 
 And the fantastic roof panorama took voice ; 
 the sharp slopes of delicate grey, the sharp 
 ridges of attic, the silvery bulb and the great 
 pale open-work corkscrew, began to sing and 
 speak. Every quarter of an hour a tinkle like 
 the tuning of a giant mandoline, or the prac- 
 tising of a fabulous triangle ; and every hour 
 and every half-hour a tune, an old-world jig or 
 gavotte, shaken out falteringly, note clanking 
 against note, as on some ancient spinet built by 
 Rucker and magnified through dreams. It was 
 the Carillon ; and it gave me back that imaginary, 
 genuine Antwerp which had appeared and dis- 
 appeared among the morning mists upon the 
 river. 
 
 The carillon at Mechlin was even kinder to 
 the Genius Loci's faithful votary. There is a 
 dreary moment, well known and dreaded by 
 all of us who worship that most coy of all 
 divinities. A moment, in fact an hour, and 
 
 *59
 
 The Enchanted Woods 
 
 sometimes, alas ! more (a silver cart-wheel 
 being the usual token of this profanation, 
 this arrant simony), which stress of time, or 
 footsoreness, or dread of dislocation on a pave- 
 ment scorning bicycles, or mere lack of moral 
 courage, induces us, every now and then, to 
 spend in the cab of alien lands. One is 
 harrowed and mocked, even if the driver 
 consents to silence, by an intuition that all 
 the wrong streets are being taken and all the 
 right points of view rumbled over ; one would 
 fain direct, stop, even get out, but one cannot ; 
 the condition of spiritual aridity, of conscious 
 guilty estrangement from the Spirit of the 
 Locality, reduces one to mere vacillating craven 
 passiveness. It was thus with me at Mechlin. 
 I drove and drove, and cursed myself for having 
 got out at the station. A temporary liberation 
 from the cab did me no good, and the cathedral 
 — thin, liny Flemish-Gothic, relieved by Spanish 
 black-and-white mortuary allegory — in no way 
 helped to raise my spirits. Yet I loitered in 
 its emptiness, simply because that cab was 
 waiting at the front portal. When, hark ! — 
 something — was it sounds ? or wind ? I could 
 not understand at first. It seemed to vibrate 
 
 260
 
 The Carillon 
 
 through the vaultings and along the pillars ; 
 and it became vague music, mysteriously 
 distant ; organs or double basses everywhere, 
 nowhere — Heaven knows where ! And then 
 I understood. It was the carillon ! Up 
 there ; high, high above the church, the 
 church's lofty cross-vaultings, and steep-pitched 
 roof; the carillon in the sky. 
 
 As fast as I decently could I reached a side 
 porch, the sound getting clearer and clearer as 
 I emerged from behind one heavy leathern 
 door after another. And outside, there it was ! 
 The big, beautiful square tower, ever so high, 
 with the clock numbers like spiders' web upon 
 its fine stone lace work (Mechlin, of the right 
 material), was pouring out in all directions, 
 like the rooks which flew from its crannies, a 
 stream of bell music. Real music this time : 
 some complicated catch, almost a fugue, of 
 bygone days of ruffed and doubletcd Flemish 
 composers, Goudimel, Josquin des Pres, Orlando 
 Lassus. So at least I thought, and chose to 
 think. Perfectly pure tones and in perfect 
 tune, but executed drowsily by some long 
 extinct band of strings, or great magical harp- 
 sichord, jangling divinely. 
 
 261
 
 The Enchanted Woods 
 
 Under the carillon's magic I had found 
 Mechlin, and found my own soul. I did 
 not return to the cab, leaving driver and 
 horse to slumber at that front cathedral 
 door. The one on whose steps I was stand- 
 ing overlooked a little side-square, with in it 
 a quincunx of thin elms, their yellowing leaves 
 floating down on to the gravel, surrounding 
 a great, old-fashioned, vase-shaped lamp. 
 Opposite, half hidden, some quiet, gabled 
 houses of red brick ; and, as I said, the 
 cathedral tower above me, with the rooks 
 swarming round it. The sky had grown 
 faint grey, a few rain-drops began to fall, 
 and with them the day to close in ; children 
 also began to return from school in little bands. 
 1 walked up and down in that little square, till 
 the carillon music had ended, and the deep 
 tones of the bells — the real bells — mingled in 
 its closes. And then I seemed to recognize the 
 houses, streets, even the cobble pavements, of 
 Flemish seventeenth-century pictures, with that 
 particular crape of rainy northern twilight they 
 always have about them. 
 
 And I walked into that old world : quiet, 
 tortuous streets with gables and long convent 
 
 262
 
 The Carillon 
 
 walls, and canals at low water, with barges and 
 a sail or two ; outlines of castellated buildings, 
 with funny turrets, over trees ; Madonnas at 
 every corner, and churches tucked away in 
 stealthy seventeenth-century Germanic fashion 
 (to please sick souls), down passages and behind 
 walls ; yes, and down a narrow, black lane, at 
 such a church apse, a great, sad, German-looking 
 Gethsemane, its big white figures shining mys- 
 teriously behind a grating. Moreover, as I 
 retraced my steps, near the little quincunx of 
 yellow elms, 1 found a discreet white house 
 with a brass plate, " Kleermaker voor Priesters " 
 — the dressmaker of priests ! It seemed to sum 
 it all up. 
 
 It was getting late, and I hastened back to 
 the cab which was patiently waiting, passing 
 through the Cathedral as if I had been there 
 the whole time, instead of wandering on foot 
 all over bygone Mechlin. As we crossed the 
 big square on the way back to the station I 
 heard for the last time, with a silly grateful 
 emotion, the distant melodious jangle and crash 
 of the carillon. 
 
 263
 
 THE CARDINAL'S VILLA
 
 THE CARDINAL'S VILLA 
 
 T RECOGNIZED on the road from Viterbo 
 A to Bagnaia, and long before getting in sight 
 of the Villa, that all this belonged to Rome. 
 One cannot but be struck with the singular 
 care displayed by the eternal players with living 
 symbols in the mise-en-schie for the long miracle 
 play — heroic, tragic, idyllic at the beginning, 
 and not without its Beggar s Opera side — called 
 the Story of Rome. No weary abrasions of 
 primeval mountains into faint hillocks ; no 
 slow glacier grindings of valleys or leisurely 
 silting of seas or depositing of river soil ; but a 
 brand new set of scenery, merely for that single 
 drama of a few centuries, mere minutes in the 
 Gods' eyes : volcanic cones suddenly upheaved, 
 their fires still smouldering in the Tale of 
 Cacus ; lava streams instantly hardening into 
 ridges, and craters filling with unexpected lakes ; 
 waters gushing everywhere into triumphal 
 
 267
 
 The Enchanted Woods 
 
 fountains, and the very soil looking beforehand 
 as if made up of charred cities and mouldered 
 human bones. 
 
 It was the consistence of the earth which told 
 me, even before the shapes of hills and houses, 
 that I was back on Roman territory ; that odd 
 light soil, lilac and friable like chemical manures, 
 and so unlike all honest garden mould, which 
 had puzzled and displeased me even in my 
 childhood. I recognized its characteristic dust, 
 shining grits, volcanic lapilli almost, as the 
 spring wind whirled it in my eyes on that road 
 to Bagnaia. The trees also, save the blossom- 
 ing orchards, manifested already the Roman 
 reluctance to grow up on the flat ; only a huge 
 solitary cypress, or ilex, or umbrella pine at 
 distances ; the world left to gigantic weeds and 
 rosemary and fennel and wallflower and waving 
 wild oats, bursting out everywhere from walls 
 and rocks. Walls and rocks, moreover, difficult 
 to tell from one another, and with that look 
 already of excavated tombs or hermits' grottoes. 
 And the abundance of waters ! The in- 
 numerable fountains of Viterbo ; and in the 
 hills surrounding it, rills and springs and minia- 
 ture Acqua Paolas gushing out everywhere. 
 
 268
 
 The Cardinal's Villa 
 
 But does not Rome begin already with the first 
 volcanic hillocks at the southern irates of Siena ? 
 How districts repeat the same or similar 
 phrases, even like the songs of one composer ! 
 This road from Viterbo to Bagnaia is what the 
 Via Flaminia outside Porta del Popolo must 
 once have been, running straight between 
 vignas flowering with cherry and peach, through 
 deep, bushy cuttings in the yellow tufo, and 
 with no sign of habitation save, at intervals, 
 fine seventeenth-century casing with steps and 
 chapels, inscriptions and coats-of-arms, and 
 gates all leading to nowhere. Roman also in 
 the men in boots and green-lined coats loitering 
 along, and riding straight in their stirrups on 
 pack-horses. Then, at the end of this long, 
 empty, empty road, a viaduct, like that of 
 Lariccia done in small ; and beyond it a fortified 
 place, towered, black, with a great loggia'd 
 palace, gaunt, timed-stained, damp-eaten ; and 
 then, triumphant on the flank of the chestnut- 
 clad Cimino, the Villa Lante, tier upon tier, 
 terrace above terrace, rising with groves and 
 flights of steps cut out of the mountain above 
 this squalid feudal village. 
 
 One wonders what those cardinals can have 
 
 269
 
 The Enchanted Woods 
 
 felt like, rolling in their coach or carried in their 
 mule litter, up to their place of delight through 
 such black and stinking villages, gathered like 
 dust-heaps below the villa gates. Perhaps that 
 was the natural adjunct, the sine qua non, not 
 merely the expression of how great part of their 
 wealth had been got ; and, to these magnificent 
 persons of rather thick-set than delicate aestheti- 
 cism, almost a desirable contrast. For they 
 were men of colossal, solid selfishness and far- 
 fetched grossness and vanity, robust of all their 
 appetites, intellectual as well as fleshly ; wholly 
 unsqueamish and able to digest unlimited good 
 fortune and glory of their own, and quite in- 
 capable of feeling the peas or stones or vermin 
 in other folks' bed so long as the rose-leaves were 
 smooth in their own great plumed and valanced 
 four-poster. Men, like this Io : Franc : Card : 
 Gambara, who has left himself thus in colossal 
 letters all over the villa of Bagnaia, whose 
 ostentation was so self-satisfied and quiet, as 
 to lose, like their huge escutcheons repeated 
 everywhere in stone or greenery, all vestige of 
 vulgarity. 
 
 The realization of such a type has become 
 impossible in our day. Our millionaires have 
 
 270
 
 The Cardinal's Villa 
 
 no more notion how to do this thin£ than our 
 architects how to make volutes and triumphal 
 arches, or our sculptors to model fountain gods. 
 The aesthetic forms of the future tend to a 
 certain moral decency. And the grasping, self- 
 assertive human being, and all that pertains to 
 him, will become, gradually (and very properly) 
 mean instead of magnificent. 
 
 Magnificent ! The full sense of that word, 
 of the knowledge of what that great Purple One 
 — porporato is the fitting Italian word — must 
 have been, sinks into one while lingerino- in 
 
 i too 
 
 this wonderful place. The very work of time, 
 the overgrownness of the trees, the moss on 
 the staircase parapets, the lichen on the 
 fountains, the very flowers bursting out 
 between the blackened stones, seems merely 
 so much additional pomp, all things obeying 
 the whim of the great prelate who piled up the 
 gardens and carried down the waters, and bade 
 the groves be dense and shady. And after a little, 
 one is invaded by the personality, the rustling 
 grandeur of that Cardinal — Io : Franc : Gam- 
 bara, or whoever he may have been — thought- 
 lessly, mercilessly, pouring out the wealth 
 extorted from whole provinces of feudal labour 
 
 271
 
 The Enchanted Woods 
 
 and countries full of superstition, in order to 
 make a place like this. 
 
 Strange possibilities seem to arise in one. 
 Methinks I knew that Cardinal. Years and 
 years ago they dressed me up in crimson silk 
 and diamonds, and I had a lip and a wig, and 
 was the master of such a villa. ... I might 
 have been that Cardinal. Perhaps we might 
 all have been ; that down-at-heel, dusty 
 American student trudging along the road 
 from Viterbo might have been. Perhaps, after 
 all, it was easy ! But having walked through 
 the grove beyond the terraces, looked over the 
 broken wall and longed to get out on the stony 
 paths among the leafless chestnut trees", up to 
 the crest, feathery, rosy, of Mount Cimino, I 
 felt also that I had walked out of such possi- 
 bilities, left Io : Franc : Card : Gambara, far 
 behind in the Past. 
 
 Coming back through the gardens, I met a 
 baby in white cloak and bonnet toddling in the 
 sunshine among the clipped hedges and the 
 fountains. And from the windows of one of 
 the two pavilions came the sound of laborious 
 childish strumming — a piano-lesson. Something 
 very different from what the cardinal, with his 
 
 272
 
 The Cardinal's Villa 
 
 Veronese and Bonifazio bands of singers and 
 fiddlers, must have listened to as he sat at meat 
 between the ladies, and the poets, and the 
 learned men, and parti-coloured bullies of his 
 court. Only the children are here, at present, 
 said the gardener, with their governess. Cer- 
 tainly only children seem all right, nowadays, 
 in that place of bygone pomp and splendour, 
 among the ooze-bearded river gods and the 
 mossy winged heraldic dragons. They can 
 turn it all into plain, simple fairyland ; and it 
 is purified, redeemed, by being played with. 
 
 ?73
 
 IN GASCON V
 
 IN GASCONY 
 
 I. 
 
 'T gives me the impression, this Gascony, 
 with its sonorous names like battle-cries — 
 Taillac, Layrac, Astaffort, Moirax, Miradoux, 
 Lectoure, Bonencontre, and La Montjoie (of 
 which anon) — it gives me the impression, more 
 than any country I know, of having had all its 
 past burnt and trodden down in never-ending 
 wars — wars of Albigenses, English, Armagnacs, 
 and Foix, wars of the Ligue and Henri IV., of 
 Richelieu and the Fronde ; all monuments, all 
 traditions, all social differences effaced into 
 remote and solitary undulations like those of 
 its old, old, worn-down hills. When, in a 
 desultory kind of way, the Convention (my 
 friends speak of it, in this uneventful land, as 
 if it had been last week) sent its Commissaire 
 to Auch and Lectoure, there remained to 
 guillotine only those cheerful and bony little 
 Cadets de Gascogne (and in Gascony every one 
 
 277
 
 The Enchanted Woods 
 
 was a younger son, or stepson, of Fortune), 
 who, with nothing but their sword and their 
 Rosinante, had gone to enlist in Musketeers or 
 Gardes du Corps like the Great-Grandfather de 
 C. . . . and the immortal d'Artagnan. Their 
 castles are scarce distinguishable, save by thicker 
 walls and oubliettes, from the farms which have 
 not been castles ; and the bearers of their 
 names now live year in, year out, in the little 
 white bastides behind the yellowing elms of the 
 hilltops, between the seigneurial dovecot and 
 the horsepond, leaving to parvenus almost 
 as antiquated as themselves, the notary, the 
 receveur> the retired wine-merchants, those 
 pathetic little hotels hidden among the plane 
 trees and the fruit walls, which everywhere 
 replace the defences of these once warlike 
 Gascon places. 
 
 But this destruction of all more obvious 
 traces of any particular past seems merely to 
 make this country the property of a vague 
 " not to-day." Gascony has, more than any 
 part of France I know, a kind of threadbare 
 distinction, an ancien regime tattered grace. One 
 remembers that it was here, near the Garonne, 
 that Tristram Shandy dismounted his mule 
 
 278
 
 In Gascon 
 
 y 
 
 and joined in the dance (with the coquettish 
 lady of the torn placket-hole), singing to the 
 tambourine, like the rustics in Jasmin's poems, 
 "Viva la joya, fidon la tristeza " — or whatever 
 is the correct Gascon therefor. One is sur- 
 prised on climbing into these warlike-looking 
 hill towns and villages (the pigeon-houses and 
 deserted windmills doing military service) to 
 find the iron cross at the entrance stacked 
 round with flowers in tubs and pipkins, the 
 black streets set at intervals with geraniums 
 
 O 
 
 and coral trees among the refuse heaps, and 
 their narrow squalor festooned with vines and 
 scarlet-runners, as if in chronic festivity. There 
 are coopers at work mending vats and barrels, 
 whose last year's dregs stain the black gutters 
 purple and fill the place with cheerful sour- 
 sweet smell. There are little cafes under the 
 plates which have replaced the walls and 
 towers ; and at La Montjoie, in the country 
 of the Armagnacs, there is even a renowned 
 patisserie. . . . 
 
 Its renown was so great that a treat there 
 was the chief inducement held out by my 
 Gascon friend to the little infantry captain 
 and myself; though, to be sure, we were also 
 
 279
 
 The Enchanted Woods 
 
 to see in the ancient church of the place a 
 genuine finger of St. Louis, preserved in wine. 
 The church was unluckily closed for repairs, 
 and the finger of St. Louis not on view ; but 
 that was a minor disappointment only to my 
 hospitable friend after the two hours' drive he 
 had brought us. How, as Sterne would have 
 said, he did " diable " and " mats sapristi " over 
 that cake-shop ! It was there, indeed, with 
 white and rose oleanders at the door, and a 
 large inscription, U A la Source des Douceur?" 
 But on most diligent search it was found to 
 contain only a plateful of stale sugar biscuits, 
 defying the tooth of time and man, a bottle of 
 sticky brown syrup, and a large model of the 
 church — all made of sugar, but not intended to 
 be eaten. They only baked once a week, they 
 replied, and when certain distinguished clients 
 sent an order. And they nodded in the 
 direction of the little pavilions, pepper-pot- 
 roofed and veiled in creepers, on the former 
 ramparts. . . . My poor host went away 
 apologetic, furious, and crestfallen. But I, 
 despite the taste for cakes which France 
 awakens (with a tendency to politeness and 
 eloquence) in my soul — I would not have given 
 
 280
 
 In Gascony 
 
 ~ I !■■■   Ml I I 
 
 that little shop, with its sugar church, that 
 empty " Source des Douceurs" for all the cakes in 
 Christendom. They bake cakes only once a 
 week at La Montjoie ; and what else have they 
 done there, I wonder (besides yearly processions 
 with the finger of St. Louis in wine), since 
 Richelieu dismantled it ? And that clarion 
 name, La Montjoie ! 
 
 II 
 
 The only monuments of this empty country, 
 so hardly used by history, and where history 
 has left so little trace, are the pigeon-houses 
 remaining over from feudal times, not merely 
 as convenience, but as a mark of privilege, the 
 modern peasant building them because the 
 seigneur built them in his grandfather's child- 
 hood ; they make the shabby farmhouses seem 
 the abode of nobles. As it is, they are the 
 accent, the romance, in this singularly accent- 
 less and unromantic country : square isolated 
 towers, with pointed slate caps, or veritable 
 columbaria, making one dream of tombs along 
 Roman ways. They rise up everywhere, and 
 
 28l
 
 The Enchanted Woods 
 
 add an odd suggestiveness to this sweet land- 
 scape, its long low lines against the cloudy, 
 sunny sky, its patchwork of pale, faded colours : 
 thin grass, lilac aftermath and cinnamon stubble, 
 all harmonized like the crumpled folds of some 
 piece of threadbare brocade worn by centuries 
 of poverty. 
 
 These two days past I have been watching 
 the pigeons, going in and out of a very beautiful 
 dovecot alongside an old farm near Parays. 
 Pigeons of all colours, lilac, cinnamon and grey, 
 like the autumnal country, puffing themselves 
 out, purfling and trying their wings on the 
 imbricated roof, broken by odd tiny attics. 
 They seemed the only living creatures about 
 the place ; the others no doubt in the fields 
 ploughing and sowing. And under the 
 hedge, during that first visit, I found a poor 
 violet pigeon, sick or disabled, motionless, 
 passive, letting me take him in my hand, and 
 barely ruffling his feathers with vexation. 
 Coming back the same way a little later, I 
 found the pigeon dying : his poor little eyes 
 veiled and his wings spread on the grass, faintly 
 beating it. And this morning, returning to see 
 that charming dovecot, I could see under the 
 
 282
 
 In Gascon v 
 
 hedge hard by it only one little fluff of tender 
 breast-feather. 
 
 The companions of the dead pigeon, mis- 
 chievous creatures, were meanwhile spending 
 their morning in a freshly ploughed and sowed 
 field, some hundreds of them together. Look- 
 ing at their greedy motions, one understands 
 what the droit de colombicr meant in feudal days 
 to the peasant at whose expense the noble kept 
 these gluttonous beauties. A shout from afar 
 (or is it a hawk whom 1 fail to notice ?), and 
 they rise up, opening like a fan in the air. 
 But only to flutter down again on the same 
 ploughed field, a few yards off. 
 
 There was something exasperating in the 
 thought of the sower's wasted trouble, more 
 than his wasted seed. And while I felt inclined 
 to shout, or throw stones at the pigeons, I have 
 been pleasantly amused at the turkeys which, 
 every now and then, have been having a grand 
 time in the big fig-tree in front of my window. 
 Flocks of turkeys innumerable, the real pos- 
 sessors of this depopulated country, of these 
 freshly ploughed hillsides, these yellowing vine- 
 yards already swept by the autumn winds. The 
 fig-tree stands in a bit of rough ground, fragrant 
 
 2^3
 
 The Enchanted Woods 
 
 with dry peppermint. They leap up into its 
 great branches with rustle of their watered silk 
 skirts, much shrill talk, and the awkward dignity 
 of dowagers. 
 
 The smaller birds waited for the opportunity 
 of a rainy day ; and very quietly, almost in- 
 visible among the big dripping leaves, had, I 
 imagine, much more of a real meal ; though 
 they were as noiseless, save for a faint whistle 
 now and then, as the birds carved among the 
 stone leafage of a church porch. 
 
 Birds seem in their rights these days of 
 north wind and fitful sunshine on these bleak, 
 open slopes, where the yellow quinces and the 
 medlars stand out of the hedges against the 
 southern blue of the sky. 
 
 Ill 
 
 Ever since reading Loti's book about his 
 childhood, I had been haunted by fragrant, 
 fugitive visions of plums drying on mats in 
 the sunshine. And one of my first thoughts 
 on coming last year to Gascony was that I 
 should see all that ; for Agen prunes are among 
 the few things, like Dr. Johnson's wall-fruit, 
 
 284
 
 In Gascony 
 
 of which, in imagination at least, I had never 
 had my fill. At last, yesterday, at the house 
 
 of MM. de L , 1 had it. 
 
 The prunes were lying in a high room in a 
 wooden outhouse. Three great heaps of them 
 — nay, rather lakes (for there was a look of 
 depth in their smooth, dimpled, shining black- 
 ness) — on the cleanly swept wooden floor ; 
 rakes and baskets and spades and shovels, all 
 those rustic things whose disorder is orderly 
 and venerable, carefully banished into corners 
 away from the prunes' solemn neighbourhood. 
 The presence of the prunes had been borne in 
 on us already at the foot of the wooden stairs, 
 by an ineffable fragrance of ripeness, of incense, 
 with just a delicious reminiscence of varnish, 
 bringing beloved visions of Noah's arks and 
 fir-trees out of toy boxes. Indeed, once realized, 
 that presence seemed to permeate all things 
 and follow one all over the establishment. We 
 were shown the hurdles on which the plums 
 are first dried in the sun ; then the smaller 
 triangular trays, like sieves of wattle, on which 
 they are put into the ovens. Rows of ovens, 
 with pleasant litter of fuel, oak and vine-stump, 
 alongside ! Also, in the little, dricd-up orchard, 
 
 285
 
 The Enchanted Woods 
 
 among the skeletons of fennel and caraway, and 
 the parched vines laden with yellow grapes 
 already halfway to raisins, the little, stiff plum- 
 trees, pretty well bare and pathetically shabby. 
 
 There was a solitary big oak in that orchard, 
 and in its thin shade a tiny tank with a thin 
 runnel of water hard by the lavender-bushes. 
 And in this poor, kindly, scorched country, 
 that oak and that runnel took on a sort of oasis 
 and almost sacred character, making one believe 
 in the coolness and freshness they symbolized 
 rather than brought, and suggesting, as my 
 dear Gascon friend remarked, grateful statues 
 to gods. A country, this Gascony (one felt in 
 that orchard) kindly, sweet, infinitely humble ; 
 and so delectable, like its shrivelled prunes. 
 
 For other countries there is the luxuriance of 
 grapes, the splendour of garlanded apple trees, 
 the richness of grass and flowers distilling milk 
 and honey ; the classic solemnity of olives and 
 the fairy-story marvels (oh, the gardens crossed 
 by the railway near Malaga !) of oranges and 
 lemons. But Gascony has the modest, shrivelled, 
 sweet and delicately scented prune ; ripened 
 not even entirely in the sunshine, but helped 
 by those mild, friendly ovens. 
 
 286
 
 In Gascony 
 
 We were guided through all this faded 
 sweetness by two dear old men ; bachelors, 
 brothers, having lived, one felt, since time 
 immemorial, together all alone in that low, flat, 
 white house hidden among farm buildings and 
 big yellowing horse-chestnuts. Life seemed to 
 have shrivelled and shrunk away from them, 
 from their half-audible voices and little wizen 
 frees, leaving only very gentle, tender souls, 
 almost ghosts, gliding along. Ces messieurs 
 offered us biscuits and champagne, which 
 flooded the square-cut tumblers ; but they 
 themselves partook, ghost-like, of nothing ; 
 only clicking glasses over faint little toasts. 
 
 In their drawing-room, presiding over the 
 faded furniture and the piles and piles of cigar 
 and envelope boxes (emptied, one felt sure, 
 through half a century), my friend pointed out 
 to me, among the family portraits, a singular 
 and very fitting personality. An old woman, 
 quite old, old — of the eighteenth century, grey- 
 haired, in a grey flowered wrapper, and a thin 
 silvery scarf wound round her head, turban- 
 like ; with such a pair of living, burning eyes, 
 such thin, yearning, ironical lips in her wrinkled 
 little face, grey also. It seems absurd to harp 
 
 287
 
 The Enchanted Woods 
 
 upon her greyness. But the whole picture was 
 grey, misty ; and therein lay its harmony and 
 charm ; as if you should have put a handful of 
 faded old letters in the fire, and their ashes, 
 their little puff of smoke, have gathered them- 
 selves (last embers helping) into a vivid, pathetic, 
 ironical human face. 
 
 I could not take my eyes off her ; or, rather, 
 she did not let me go. Perhaps it was partly 
 due to the contrast with the ghostiness of these 
 faded, frail old men gliding and whispering 
 about in the old house and on the terrace, 
 where the horse-chestnuts were already shed- 
 ding their leaves, and great geraniums, run 
 to wood, made unexpected vermilion spots 
 against the mildewed whitewash ; their vivid- 
 ness making the musty, cobwebby peacefulness 
 of that secluded place and of those gentle living 
 ghosts only more poignant. 
 
 The sun was setting as we came away from 
 the home of the prunes ; very pale gold and 
 rosy washes lying along the low, blunt hill out- 
 lines, and reflected, among the willows, in the 
 slow, muddy river. Dusk rose from the con- 
 cave fields, with the first song of the crickets, 
 as we neared home. Dusk not cool and tasting 
 
 288
 
 In Gascon 
 
 ot greenness as in other southern countries, but 
 warm as of a drying-oven, and of deep, reddish 
 darkness, solemn yet kindly. Is it my mood 
 at present ? But this country of Gascony, 
 inconspicuous almost to homeliness, with its 
 poor little burnt detail, its blunted outlines and 
 humble refusal of all swelling or uprising lines, 
 has got a power, methinks, over the heart, 
 intimate and in its humility very solemn ; a 
 purely spiritual dignity and grace. The Genius 
 Loci of these parts must be, and is, a human 
 soul. 
 
 289 u
 
 ERA GIA L'ORA. . . .
 
 ERA GIA L'ORA. . . . 
 
 ~^\EFEND us from the sentimental ups and 
 downs of travel, the caprice and moodiness 
 of the uprooted heart of the wayfarer. He is, 
 take it all round, the least cheerful person in 
 the world, for he is no longer disciplined into 
 acquiescence with fate by those unchanged sur- 
 roundings which look down on him with the 
 familiar self-satisfaction of his grandparents' 
 portraits. In his vague, irresponsible, wholly 
 individual state, he becomes efFeminate of soul, 
 subject, like children, to gusts of melancholy. 
 And the exhilaration of the first morning hours 
 is compensated by those melting moods at 
 sunset, already noticed by Dante ; when, in a 
 strange place, a bell (or, in more modern times, 
 a barrel-organ or accordion) can become the 
 voice of all dying things and tell of ten thousand 
 partings. Nor is the homesickness of travel 
 merely for home ; far from our allotted corner 
 
 293
 
 The Enchanted Woods 
 
 we strike roots, or put out tendrils with 
 incredible rapidity, clinging, regretting, just in 
 proportion as acquaintance has been short. I 
 am not alluding to human friendships or loves, 
 though there seems some truth in the notion 
 of amours de voyage. As regard places, how- 
 ever, the traveller, although he may be a perfect 
 Don Juan, is apt to be so in the oddest way, 
 fickle to the one he has ardently sought, and 
 longing for what he leaves behind. Have we 
 not, all of us, cast homesick eyes on the 
 receding train which has just brought us from 
 that place (surely we were not serious in calling 
 it a hole !) which we chafed at not leaving 
 earlier this very morning ? How familiar and 
 kindly the thought thereof has already become, 
 it and its inn, its dear dull streets there some- 
 where behind that range of hills ! And as to 
 this other place, beckoning foolishly with towers 
 and steeples, what can it ever be to us, and 
 why have we ordered our letters to be sent to 
 its post-office? What a sweet half-hour that 
 was, last night, watching the sky redden behind 
 the lime-trees of the promenade while the 
 bugles rang the Rappel ; and how intimate, how 
 peaceful was that total absence of all view, 
 
 294
 
 Era Gia L'ora 
 
 which we pretended to (or did wc really r) 
 grumble at ! 
 
 " There where I am not, there is happiness," 
 sings the Wayfarer of Schubert. And never, 
 surely, did verse and voice unite in a more 
 correct account of the frail unreasonableness of 
 the traveller's heart. 
 
 During that hour outside the outermost wall 
 of Carcassonne, what had touched me infinitely 
 more than all its show of battlements and 
 towers was the recognition that here, close at 
 hand at last, was the real South. The little 
 town below, with its boulevards of great plane- 
 trees and its black-guttered streets and big 
 buttressed and turreted churches (bastards, it 
 seemed to me, of the strange church of Albi), 
 was still distinctly French. But on the rough 
 grass and the flowering thyme under the citadel 
 walls, with their heaps of rubbish and brickbats, 
 the South seemed somehow at hand. After 
 days of ceaseless rain in that French and still 
 so Northern corner of Gascony which 1 have 
 just left, here was the radiance of a Southern 
 autumn, a sky against which the pepper-pot 
 towers looked absurdly incongruous ; against 
 which, rightfully, rose in the distance a great 
 
 295
 
 The Enchanted Woods 
 
 chain of peaks gleaming with snow — the 
 Pyrenees. 
 
 Soon after Carcassonne the hills also changed 
 character. I had guessed it, seeing them 
 from those pepper-pot towers, their pure, pale 
 luminousness in the distance, and their white 
 scars. They were no longer the earthly coteaux 
 of France, but rock and rock-grown herb, grey, 
 sun-scorched. And suddenly, looking up from 
 my book as the train sped along between Car- 
 cassonne and Narbonne, I saw, among the red 
 and tawny vines, on a stony hillside, the first 
 olives. 
 
 My heart leaped at that sight ; it meant the 
 South. How I had longed for it during those 
 weeks in France, expecting to come upon it at 
 every additional day's end, noting with eager 
 eyes every little detail which seemed to tell 
 of its nearness : the first fig-trees, the thin 
 aftermath, burnt lilac and russet, the vines 
 hung loose upon the black house-fronts. At 
 Toulouse, on the first brilliant chilly autumn 
 morning, it had delighted me to come upon the 
 market, spread out before the long Louis XV. 
 building of the Capitole, grapes, capsicums, 
 melons, all manner of charming coloured beans 
 
 296
 
 Era Gia L'ora 
 
 in sieves, and big mushrooms smellino; of the 
 mountains ; and that delight had meant a 
 thought of similar markets at Verona and at 
 Siena — the thought of the South. It was 
 the South that 1 had seemed to clutch in those 
 fields outside Albi, with the handful of dry, 
 lilac-flowered peppermint. . . . Clutch only to 
 be disappointed. The further I went the more 
 France remained France. And never more, 
 almost, than in that western corner by the 
 Garonne; the Garonne flowing between French 
 earthy coteaux, and French pepper-pot turrets, 
 and vineyards clipped short upon sticks, French 
 fashion. " Where," 1 had always amused my 
 friends by asking, "where does the South — the 
 real South — really begin ?" And added, when 
 they protested " But this is the South," " What 
 I mean is, Where doesn't it look like the rest of 
 France any longer ? Where shall 1 see the first 
 olives ? " 
 
 And here, on those stony little hills beyond 
 Carcassonne, were the first olives. 
 
 That was in the morning ; the morning, when 
 the traveller's heart is flushed with the present 
 and the future, and thinks, confidingly, that it 
 loves, that it will love, its goal. 
 
 297
 
 The Enchanted Woods 
 
 In the evening I had to wait an hour at 
 Cette. The little seaport is beautifully situated 
 with its back on a great salt lake, which you 
 approach among vineyards encroached upon by 
 purple sea marsh and tamarisk-grown lanes. 
 You leave behind, inland, a series of little 
 towns with names to conjure with : Narbonne, 
 Beziers, Agde — Agde-la-Noire, as the history 
 books call it, a great black fortified church pro- 
 jecting above its trees into the evening sky. 
 Finding I had that hour at Cette, I took a cab, 
 drove along the wharves, and walked the length 
 of the pier. The sea was perfectly calm, a blue 
 lake ; the white mole, the white wharves and 
 lighthouses projecting into it, the harbour 
 lights just appearing orange in the twilight. 
 Nets were drying all along, and the place was 
 full of sea smell. A big boat was going out 
 between the lighthouses, going South, to Italy 
 perhaps, like me, for this sea was the Mediter- 
 ranean. France, and those days in that western 
 corner in Gascony, was behind me. . . . That 
 delicate and unobtrusive empty country, with 
 its endless coteaux and shallow green valleys, 
 how far it seemed, how far, far out of all my 
 tracks. . . . The sadness of distance and change 
 
 298
 
 Era Gia L'ora 
 
 ot place ! The sadness of this perpetual 
 breaking-off, this leaving of life's phrase un- 
 finished. These friends — how many, many 
 have I had such ! Seen, barely known, and 
 then left ; the secure steadiness, the right 
 maturity of feelings interrupted, denied. 
 Distance, difference of place and climate, things 
 which put such zest, such poetry into life ; but 
 also, at times, such sadness. . . . When I 
 turned at the end of the pier the sun had set 
 behind the town, its rocky hill ; and lights 
 were beginning to make orange dots in the 
 faint lilac of evening. Great torn feathers of 
 crimson and black were floating in the west, 
 whence I had come. And by the time I had 
 retraced the length of the long white pier that 
 brief Southern twilight was over. I got back 
 into the train, and was borne away farther 
 and farther from that westernmost corner of 
 France — into the South, the South which 1 had 
 longed for. 
 
 299
 
 ALL SOULS' DAY AT VENICE
 
 ALL SOULS' DAY AT VENICE 
 
 'T being All Souls' Day, we idle folk have 
 ■*• been to do the cemetery. . . . 
 
 They had put a bridge of boats from the 
 northermost quay of Venice to the cemetery 
 island. A dense crowd, coming and going 
 across it, black over the black anchored barges, 
 each two with their yard of pale water between 
 their tarred hulls. And, as we draw near, as 
 we go beneath, the seeming silence turns into a 
 murmur, a shuffle, and a rumble. 
 
 For this one day in all the year the cemetery 
 island is bridged on to the islands of the living. 
 This is no mere coincidence, but a real symbol. 
 
 The cloisters and the gardens are full as for 
 a fair, crowds coming and going, buying tapers, 
 lighting them at the glittering waxlights before 
 the chapel, bringing a few flowers ; and the 
 smell of trodden sods and drenched, bruised 
 chrysanthemums mingles, funereal, with the 
 
 303
 
 The Enchanted Woods 
 
 stifle of all these poor, down-at-heel, recently 
 drenched, unwashed live folk in the warm, 
 moist air. A woebegone population, as that of 
 Southern countries is apt to grow at the first 
 touch of winter ; the lack of food and comfort, 
 the fecklessness and boredom, the blearness of 
 scrofulous children, the terrible draggletailedness 
 of pregnant women, the appalling misery of 
 crones and old men, all becoming apparent even 
 as the hidden stains and stenches come out in 
 bad weather on these canals. Another thins: is 
 also more evident than it would be were the 
 weather fine — that the gondola company have 
 come some other time, and that only the poor, 
 those who have no black clothes for such 
 occasions, have trudged across that gratis-given 
 bridge of boats ; and are now tramping, un- 
 hindered by family piety, over the vaults of 
 Grimanis, Giustinianis, Valmaranas, and the 
 rich shopkeepers endowed with allegoric virtues 
 and mourned by long gilt lists of relations. 
 
 But all this squalor is oddly solemn. And 
 the presence of work-a-day clothes, of babies 
 carried, and children dragged along ; nay, the 
 very provisions unpacked and consumed among 
 the graves, brings home the importance and 
 
 304
 
 All Souls' Day at Venice 
 
 universality of this yearly meeting of the dead 
 and the living. Some of the great squares 
 enclosed by cloisters are so crowded, the 
 draggled black-bead garlands on high are so 
 surrounded by moving, stooping, sitting figures, 
 by people grubbing up weeds or arranging their 
 poor flowers, that the tangle of purple and 
 black things aloft, the trampled grass and the 
 jostling crowd, give the impression of some 
 queer vintage scene or hop-picking ; the black 
 lantern or garland-bearing poles, bent or even 
 wrenched out of the earth, completing the 
 ironical likeness. 
 
 Part of the crowd are people merely doing 
 vague honour to vague dead, whose little 
 numbered headstones have perhaps been long 
 pulled out ; their bones, years ago, thrown behind 
 the gate marked " Ossuario," and their brief 
 resting-place given to others ; or gaping, a long 
 trench of freshly turned earth, in readiness for 
 those still of this life. These multitudes of 
 vague mourners tramp round the burial squares, 
 looking about, stopping here and there, subdued 
 by mere general contact with the fact of death. 
 
 But the real mourners fill the squares them- 
 selves, and attend to their own business. 
 
 305 X
 
 The Enchanted Woods 
 
 Some are doing their year's gardening, weeding, 
 as I have said, or dividing and replanting iris 
 bulbs or arranging cut flowers in patterns. In 
 one place a youth, sallow, and with a torn 
 sleeve, was intently making a most elaborate 
 bed, beautifully composed, of various coloured 
 chrysanthemums, sticking the flowers in devices, 
 after driving in four pegs to separate his grave 
 from other ones, and carefully enclosing it with 
 four black tapes. When he had finished he 
 took the remaining flowers (flowers in Venice 
 are nearly always bought, grown on the main- 
 land or the outlying islands), made them into 
 four tidy bushes, colour by colour, and fastened 
 one carefully to each of the four little posts he 
 had rammed in. He had all but finished when 
 we arrived ; and must have spent most of his 
 afternoon in such elaborate business. And 
 when we and the other people were beginning 
 to go away he was still perfecting it. On the 
 headstone — that is to say, the little stone cube 
 bearing the number of that pauper's temporary 
 grave — was a woman's name and the date, 
 1890. Thirteen years ago ; and the lad could 
 by no means have been more than two- or 
 three-and-twenty ! Was it filial piety through 
 
 306
 
 All Souls' Dav at Venice 
 
 all those boyish years ; or largely a certain 
 artistic inspiration, a skilful artisan's or gardener's 
 wish for an elaborate and tidy job, some form 
 of pride almost unmixed with tenderer feeling ? 
 Whatever the explanation, this youth's little 
 funereal garden of cut flowers represents the 
 great unselfish impulses which, whatever their 
 pretext, produce the immortal things — thought, 
 art ; and which are honourably linked to the 
 passionate striving to baffle death which comes 
 with death's earnest recognition. 
 
 In other parts of the cemetery little gardens 
 were being made ; and, more touching even, the 
 little glazed lanterns, smelling of hot tin, were 
 being kept replenished by watchful mourners, 
 bottle or oil in hand. But there were less 
 active yet more impressive ways of honouring 
 the dead : people kneeling for an indefinite 
 time before those little numbered cubes of stone, 
 or sitting on the ground alongside. Several old 
 women thus — squatting, not praying, but just 
 staying there. Some had brought scraps of 
 food ; and one was taking snufF out of a bit 
 of paper ; all of them keeping the dead one 
 company, staring before them into space and 
 time. At one poor grave there was a group of 
 
 307
 
 The Enchanted Woods 
 
 four, one at each corner : an old woman, a 
 younger one, a man and a sickly child ; all silent, 
 blurred-looking. Surely for these poor folk 
 there is a reality, if only a negative one, in this 
 suspending of the labour, cares, the empty 
 grind of life ; and their hour of watching by 
 the dead may be, in some way deeper than 
 words can say, an hour of communing with the 
 eternities. 
 
 While thus the cemetery was given up to 
 the living and to the long dead ; the scarcely 
 dead, the real dead, were arriving here and there 
 with the real mourners. I noted a mound of 
 fresh earth, with the ritual trowel sticking in it, 
 a couple of surpliced and shaven Franciscans 
 reciting the prayers to a few blear, red-eyed 
 people (a nun among them) ; all these new- 
 comers and their ministering clergy seeming a 
 little scared by intruding their own dead man 
 or woman into this great public feast of those 
 who have long passed beyond. And the crowd, 
 on its side, looked surprised at this new and 
 definite reality of loss in the midst of its vaguer 
 mournings ; this man or woman, only just 
 dead, carried in among those shadowy memories. 
 
 Very touching also were the little framed 
 
 308
 
 All Souls' Day at Venice 
 
 photographs, clean and evidently taken off 
 some poor table or wall, and hung on the cross 
 for the afternoon ; the dead pauper having his 
 effigy also on his grave, like the rich man 
 among his marble, if only for those few hours. 
 As we got back into the gondola the crowd 
 was streaming only one way along the black 
 bridge ; away from the cemetery, back into 
 life. 
 
 309
 
 ET IN ARCADIA .
 
 ET IN ARCADIA . . . 
 
 / np v HE snow in the Apennines had brought 
 -*- cold, sunny weather, and there was an 
 austere alacrity about all things. I followed 
 my dogs up the stony hillside with that little 
 breathlessness which is uncomfortable and yet 
 so pleasant to feel. Suddenly, at a turning, 
 there came the smell, very sweet and peculiar, 
 of burning olive twigs; and with it, to my soul, 
 a pang and a vision of Sicily, Greece — the real 
 South which I shall never go to. 
 
 Such homesickness for places I have never 
 been to, is not uncommon with me at this time 
 of year, and on days like this one ; making me 
 aware, unexpectedly, of fancied resemblances, and 
 giving to details of the familiar Tuscan land- 
 scape a foreign significance and the poignancy 
 of the rarely seen. The South ! something 
 exclaims within me. And I have vague re- 
 collections of the Odyssey or of Theocritus. 
 
 i r ->
 
 The Enchanted Woods 
 
 The thing which sets this mood a-going may 
 be a wall, on which one sits, looking down 
 on to green under olives (and the first bird 
 of this year is probably singing among them), 
 with a gnarled creeping rose, or an orange-tree 
 against a house which seems whiter than usual. 
 The place has become the sample, the beginning, 
 so to speak, of another part of the world. The 
 sea must be at the end of that stony little gorge 
 through which the brook leaps from pool to 
 pool of beryl green ; the sea, and no longer 
 the misty plain, down there between the rocks, 
 beyond the leafless poplars and the sharp reeds : 
 the Mediterranean. And on it my thoughts 
 take ship for those places where I shall never 
 go — for the South, for Antiquity ! 
 
 It always happens at this season. Perhaps it 
 is the scant, delicate detail revealing finer lines, 
 which thus turns corners of Tuscany into an 
 imaginary Hellas. Or perhaps the mere sunny 
 austerity of these rocky sere places, the twitter 
 of birds telling of renewed life, suggesting what, 
 to us, seem the homes of the world's happy 
 youth. Be this as it may, the feeling, almost 
 the illusion, is there : as yesterday, for instance, 
 when the stony horn of the Fiesole hill, all 
 
 3H
 
 Et in Arcadia . . . 
 
 burrowed with quarries, became suddenly I 
 know not what Grecian site, and the sheep 
 among the thin olives were browsing on the 
 walls of some Homeric city. 
 
 Yet in the pang which came with that sudden 
 whiff of burning olive there was, undoubtedly, 
 also envy. I happened to know that certain 
 friends were setting out southwards, by Terra- 
 cina, the Promontory of Circe (which I have 
 only watched across the sea, veiling and un- 
 veiling), to Greater Greece and Sicily. And 
 other friends, doubtless, are setting their sails 
 for Syria, for archipelagoes where marble 
 goddesses, Melian Aphrodite and Demeter of 
 Gnidos, once lay buried under myrtles ; and 
 for the coasts (if it have any !) of the romantic 
 little country where life was once so sweet 
 that tombstones boasted — "and I, too, in 
 Arcadia. ..." 
 
 The older I grow, and the more philosophi- 
 cally contented with my lot, the greater my 
 aversion to such cheap forms of consolation as 
 make light of the good things which are beyond 
 our reach : philosophy for foxes, sly beasts, and 
 apt to pick up random cheeses, but of whom 
 JEsop has not very many chivalrous traits to 
 
 315
 
 The Enchanted Woods 
 
 tell ! Apart from this last consideration, it is 
 borne in upon me more and more, that we 
 should be respectful towards our own desires, 
 and handle our capacity for wanting very 
 gingerly. They are, believe me, treasures of 
 the soul, and multiply its riches. This is not 
 the view taken by moralists in high places — 
 Epictetus or Buddha, for instance, or Tolstoi. 
 But I incline to think that when these preach 
 the snuffing-out of our desires, they are led 
 astray by the thought of the kind of persons 
 who are for ever accumulating properties and 
 multiplying opportunities of enjoyment. Now, 
 my contention is that this happens, and so 
 universally, just because the people in question 
 — the covetous, the grossly grasping or far- 
 fetching pleasure-seekers — are rather lacking in 
 real desires than overstocked with them. They 
 really do not want anything very keenly, and 
 that is why, like those who lose their appetite 
 for food, they always want something new — 
 want, in fact, for the mere sake of wanting ; 
 their greed, like most moral evils, being a 
 monster of that chimaera tribe classified by 
 Rabelais as " bombinans in vacuo." "Whereas 
 your genuine desires, sprung from the very 
 
 316
 
 Et in Arcadia 
 
 marrow of the individual constitution, pounce 
 on their fitting objects with unerring aim, and 
 never let go of them till every scrap and vestige 
 is enjoyed. And then return and find un- 
 guessed crumbs ; and once more, and again 
 and again — an endless feast, you might almost 
 imagine, off nothing. It was the love of 
 Anthony, believe me, made Cleopatra, when 
 already a grandmother, such that age could not 
 wither her, nor custom stale her infinite variety. 
 Moreover, and this is even more important 
 and worthy of the consideration of moralists, 
 desire, or let us call it less pompously, the power 
 of wanting^ is also the power of creating. " If 
 you do not want a yellow robe, a mat to lie 
 upon, or a small box of inlaid work in which to 
 keep betel nuts," says an eminent Buddhist 
 divine (I am quoting from memory), "you 
 evidently do not set about making any of these 
 sources of delusion, nor making other ones 
 wherewithal to barter them ; but you recline 
 in the shade of the tree of superior wisdom, or 
 hang by its branches head downwards in abso- 
 lutely unified contemplation of nothing in 
 particular, and with a most genuine foretaste 
 of annihilation." 
 
 3*7
 
 The Enchanted Woods 
 
 And so, if I did not want — it is the humble 
 essayist and votary of the Genius Loci speaking 
 at present — if I did not want the South, Sicily, 
 Greece, Arcadia, it is probable I should not 
 have felt that little stab of envy and sadness 
 when the smell of burning olive-wood met me 
 on my hillside. But it is certain also that 
 I should not have made those places for myself, 
 extracted and built them up out of this Tuscany 
 lying at my hand. There would have been 
 only one South, one Sicily, Greece, or Arcadia. 
 Now there are two. . . . 
 
 Nor is it places only of which we thus make, 
 1 will not say duplicates, but rather, in many 
 instances, revised, perfected copies. Our 
 friends, our loves are similarly dealt with ; 
 and, in so far as we are of value to any one, 
 ourselves also. The Soul's keen-eyed desires 
 seek out whatever flakes of ivory and crumbs 
 of gold exist in living realities ; and, casting 
 forth the clay (the clay, alas ! of more than the 
 mere feet), furnish the precious stuff which lacks ; 
 and in this manner frame the images enshrined 
 in our hearts. And in our hearts those idols we 
 have made become, perhaps, patron saints, gods, 
 by dint of sheer reverent service done them. 
 
 3i8
 
 Et in Arcadia 
 
 Those simulacra — who knows ? — shape into 
 their own resemblance their poor living 
 originals, abashed, divinely strengthened by 
 their recognition. If we arc worth our salt, 
 we have all made some one, been made by 
 some one, a little less undeserving of such 
 gratuitously given faith and love. 
 
 Dreams, all this. . . . Perhaps. And we 
 dreamers of dreams have, now and then, rough 
 awakenings. But we set to dreaming again ; 
 and our dreams are more continuous, more 
 tender, nobler — and, let me say, more potent 
 and more fertile, than many folks' waking 
 experience. For life is but the interchange of 
 what we want and what we have, the ever 
 richer give-and-take of reality and dreams. 
 
 To return to the hillside behind my house, 
 going up which that whiff ot olive smoke met 
 me. Half-way up, and well inside it, there is 
 a hidden ravine, stony, wild, and strangely 
 remote, which bears for me a secret name. It 
 is squeezed to a mere brook's trough by the 
 great quarried rocks, with their thin scrub of 
 myrtle and wild lavender, and, on the other 
 side, by sloping olive-yards and oak-woods, at 
 this season sere and of palest rosy copper. The 
 
 319
 
 The Enchanted Woods 
 
 stream, translucent, winds in the shallows, 
 twists between bushes and brakes of reeds like 
 pennoned lances ; and, at short intervals, leaps 
 down a succession of little natural weirs, making 
 pools, each varying in shape of rocky basin 
 and depth of beryl green, and in the fancy of 
 the falling water, like hair of different nymphs, 
 combed into smooth masses or twisting in little 
 wisps or curls. Black ilex branches hang, long 
 and loose like wreaths, across ; while, at dis- 
 tances, and where the stream is shallow, there 
 rises a sheaf of sapling bays, slender and 
 straight and sharp-leaved against the luminous 
 rift of winter sky. Thanks to the stream's 
 draught and the stony wildness of the hillside, 
 the air has somewhat of the taste of real 
 mountains ; and the bleating of unseen sheep, 
 the faint click from the quarries above, put a 
 sense of remoteness, stiller than silence, about 
 the water's voice and the first twitter of birds. 
 
 The ravine has, I have just said, for me 
 a secret name. This is not quite true ; or at 
 least the truth is far less definite. I do not 
 call, I feel, the place, Arcadia. Here, not an 
 hour's walk from my home, it is, and at the 
 same time tantalizingly, enchantingly, is not — 
 
 320
 
 Et in Arcadia 
 
 Greece, Sicily, the South of the Odyssey and 
 Theocritus. The South I shall never go to. 
 
 For the humble Genius Loci, even like the 
 crreat divinities of Olympus, is but an intangible 
 idol fashioned out of what we have and of 
 what we want. 
 
 THE END
 
 Br THE SAME WRITER 
 
 HORTUS VITAE; 
 
 or, the Hanging Gardens: 
 moralizing essays. 
 
 BY 
 
 VERNON LEE. 
 
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 culture of the ivsthetic and other senses." 
 
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 BT THE SAME WRITER 
 
 HORTUS VITAE; 
 
 or, the Hanging Gardens: 
 moralizing essays. 
 
 BY 
 
 VERNON LEE. 
 
 Times. — "There are many charming flowers in it . . . the swift 
 to-and-fro of her vivid, capricious mind carries the reader hither 
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 sun shines in this garden of hers, the south wind stirs among 
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 BOOKS ABOUT 
 
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 THE LIFE OF 
 SAINT MARY MAGDALEN 
 
 Translated from the Italian of an unknown fourteenth 
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 WALKS AND 
 PEOPLE IN TUSCANY 
 
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 BOOKS BY VERNON LEE 
 HORTUS VITAE 
 
 ESSAYS ON THE GARDENING OF LIFE 
 Crown %vo. 3s. 6 J. net. 
 
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 swift to and tro of her vivid, capricious mind carries the render 
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 THE ENCHANTED WOODS 
 
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 THE SPIRIT OF ROME 
 
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 VINGENZO FOPPA of BRESCIA 
 
 FOUNDER OF THE LOMBARD SCHOOL: HIS 
 LIFE AND WORK. By Constance Jocelyn Ffoulkes 
 and Monsignor Rodolfo Maiocchi, D.D., Rector of 
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 MEMOIRS OF THE DUKES OF 
 URBINO 
 
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 New Edition edited by Edward Hutton, with upwards 
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 of illustrations which it now contains, thus adding a pictorial 
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 IN A TUSCAN GARDEN 
 
 With Numerous Illustrations. 
 Crown ivo. 5s. net. 
 
 Times.. — " The book is brightly written, and the author's know- 
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 i-^ remarkably full ; moreover she has a sharp eye for the follies of 
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 enough." 
 
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 use to them than any other single work we remember to have 
 come across. . . . We should not like to spare the volume from 
 our collection of works on the subject." 
 
 tutor. — " This is a delightful, because delightfully personal 
 vet not unpleasantly egotistic, book. . . . The writer indulges, 
 too, in many asides on contemporary history, British national 
 characteristics, and a host of other tilings which are invariably 
 shrewd, and never malicious." 
 
 Morning Post. — "The reader wtll scarcely fail to find something 
 charming on every page." 
 
 UNDER PETRAIA 
 
 By the Author of" " IN A TUSCAN GARDEN " 
 
 With Numerous Illustrations. 
 Crown 8:v. 5s. net. 
 
 Daily Telegraph. "The kindliness and geniality of the whole 
 thing is irresistible, for it recalls the spirit of Borrow, to whom sun, 
 :i and stars were all good things." 
 
 Westminster Gazette. — " How delightful it is on a bleak day in 
 spring to take up such a pleasant little book of Italian reminis- 
 cences ' L*nder K-traia,' by the author of ' In a Tuscan Garden.' 
 The charm of the book In 9 in the power of the author to recreate 
 the scenes one knows so well." 
 
 Gtobl 1 r, purely conversational in style as this bookis.it 
 
 pr eserve s that indefinable charm which holds fast tin.- reader who 
 
 that he cannot put it down till he has 
 ed the end. And even then it will be taken up again and 
 ...i, to be dipped into as the fancy seizes us."
 
 ITALIAN VILLAS AND THEIR 
 GARDENS 
 
 By EDITH WHARTON. With numerous Full- 
 page Illustrations by Maxfield Parrish, of which 
 1 2 are finely printed in Colour. Royal 8vo. 2 is.net. 
 
 Westminster Gazette. — " A genuine piece of artistic criticism 
 dealing with an ancient and beautiful form of art. . . . The book 
 is beautifully illustrated. . . . Mr. Parrish enters thoroughly into 
 the feeling of the Italian garden, and delights in its formal designs 
 and massive effects of light and shade." 
 
 Saturday Review. — " Mr. Maxfield Parrish's drawings are 
 deserving of a full measure of credit in the production of a beauti- 
 ful and valuable book." 
 
 A QUEEN OF INDISCRETIONS 
 
 The Tragedy of Caroline of Brunswick, Queen 
 of England. From the Italian of G. P. Clerici. 
 Translated by Frederic Chapman. With 
 numerous Illustrations reproduced from contem- 
 porary Portraits and Prints. Demy 8vo. 21/- net. 
 
 Daily Telegraph. — " It could scarcely be done more thoroughly 
 or, on the whole, in better taste than is here displayed by Professor 
 Clerici. Mr. Frederic Chapman himself contributes an uncom- 
 monly interesting and well-informed introduction." 
 
 Times. — " Signor Clerici has brought to his task immense pains, 
 lucidity and an impartiality of mind which does not prevent a 
 definite view from emerging. Mr. Chapman has done the tn. is- 
 lation admirably well, and his own introduction is a careful 
 assistance to thoroughness." 
 
 ITALIAN LYRISTS OF TO-DAY 
 
 By G. A. GREEN. Translations in the original 
 metres from about 35 living Italian Poets. With 
 Bibliographical and Biographical Notes. Crown 
 8vo. 5/- net. 
 
 ON THE TRACKS OF LIFE 
 
 THE IMMORALITY OF MORALITY 
 Translated from the Italian of Leo. G. Sera by 
 J.M.Kennedy. With an Introduction by Di'.Oscar 
 Levy. Demy 8vo. 9x5! inches. Price 7/6 net. 
 
 Daily Chronicle. — " A very frank expression of the side of 
 thought which regards the assertion of individuality as the first 
 duty of the individual." 
 
 8
 
 
 
 THE LIBRARY 
 
 UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA 
 
 Santa Barbara 
 
 STACK COLLECTION 
 
 THIS BOOK IS DUE ON THE LAST DATE 
 STAMPED BELOW. 
 
 30m-8,'65(F6447s4)9482
 
 AA 000 329 446