x 
 
 • 
 
 
 UNIVERSITY OF ( 
 RIVERSIDE
 
 EARTHWORK OUT OF TUSCJNT
 
 Limited to Five Hundred Copies for sale in England. 
 
 All Rights Reserved.
 
 EARTHWORK OUT OF 
 
 TUSCANV+ BEING IMPRES- 
 SIONS AND TRANSLATIONS OF 
 MAURICE HEWLETT + + + * + 
 
 " For as it is hurtful to drink -wine or 
 •water alone • and as -wine mingled -with 
 •water is pleasant and delighteth the taste : 
 even so speech, finely framed, delighteth 
 the ears of them that read the story." — 
 2 Maccabees xv. 39 
 
 LONDON: Published by 
 
 J. M. DENT 6- CO, at dldine House 
 in Great Eastern Street, E.C. MDCCCXCV
 
 MY FATHER 
 
 THIS LITTLE BOOK, 
 
 NOT AS BEING WORTHY, BUT AS ALL I HAVE, 
 
 IS DEDICATED 
 
 I cannot add one tendril to your bays, 
 
 Worn quietly where who love you sing your praise. 
 
 But I may stand 
 
 A mong the household throng with lifted hand, 
 
 Upholding for sweet honour of the land 
 
 Your crown of days.
 
 CONTENTS 
 
 Proem: Apologia pro libello 
 
 I 
 
 I. Eye of Italy 
 
 9 
 
 II. Little Flowers 
 
 21 
 
 III. Of Sheep-Shearers 
 
 30 
 
 IV. A Sacrifice at Prato 
 
 35 
 
 V. Of Poets and Needlework 
 
 50 
 
 VI. The Soul of a Fact 
 
 62 
 
 VII. Quattrocentisteria 
 
 74 
 
 VIII. The Burden of New Tyre 
 
 99 
 
 IX. Ilaria, Mariota, Bettina . 
 
 106 
 
 X. Servus Servorum 
 
 • "5 
 
 XI. Cats 
 
 121 
 
 XII. The Soul of a City 
 
 130 
 
 XIII. With the Brown Bear 
 
 • 143 
 
 XIV. Friends in Council 
 
 • J 53 
 
 XV. Dead Churches in Foligno 
 
 . 161 
 
 Envoy : To all you Ladies 
 
 • 173
 
 ADVERTISEMENT 
 
 Polite reader, you who have travelled 
 Italy, it will not be unknown to you that 
 the humbler sort in that country have ever 
 believed certain spots and recesses of their 
 land — as wells, mountain-paths, farmsteads , 
 groves of ilex or olive, quiet pinewoods, 
 creeks or bays of the sea, and such like 
 hidden ways — to be the chosen resort of 
 familiar spirits, baleful or beneficent, fate- 
 ridden or amenable to prayer, half divine, 
 wholly out of rule or ordering ; which rustic 
 deities and genii locorum, if it was not 
 needful to propitiate, it was fascination 
 to observe. It is believed of them in 
 the hill-country round about Perugia and 
 in the quieter parts of Tuscany, that they 
 
 b ix
 
 x Advertisement 
 
 are still present, tolerated of God by 
 reason of their origin {which is, indeed, 
 that of the very soil whose effluence 
 they are), chastened, circumscribed, and, 
 as it were, combed or pared of evil 
 desire and import. To them or their 
 avatars (it matters little which) the rude 
 people still bow down; they still humour 
 them with gifts of flowers, songs, or artless 
 customs (as May-day, or the Giorno de' 
 Grilli) ; you may still see wayside shrines, 
 votive tablets, humble offerings, set in a 
 farm-wall or country hedge, starry and 
 fresh as a patch of yellow flowers in a rye- 
 field. If you say that they have made gods 
 in their own image, you do not convince 
 them of Sin, for they do as their betters. 
 If you say their gods are earthy, they reply 
 by asking, " What then are we ? " For 
 they will admit, and you cannot deny, 
 earthiness to have at least a part in all of
 
 Advertisement • xi 
 
 us. And you are forbidden to call this 
 unhappy, since God made all. Out of the 
 drenched earth whence these worshippers 
 arose, they made their rough-cast gods ; out 
 of the same earth they still mould images to 
 speak the presentment of them which they 
 have. Out of that earth, I, a northern 
 image-maker, have set up my conceits of 
 their informing spirits, of the spirits of them- 
 selves, their soil, and the fair works they 
 have accomplished. So I have called this 
 book Earthwork out of Tuscany. Qui 
 habet aures ad audiendum audiat. 
 
 London, 1895.
 
 PROEM 
 
 Apologia pro lihello suo : in a letter to a 
 friend 
 
 Although you know your Italy well, you ask me, 
 who see her now for the first time, to tell you how 
 I find her ; how she sinks into me ; wherein she ful- 
 fils, and wherein fails to fulfil, certain dreams and 
 fancies of mine (old amusements of yours) about 
 her. Here, truly, you show yourself the diligent 
 collector of human documents your friends have 
 always believed you; for I think it can only be 
 appetite for acquisition, to see how a man recogniz- 
 ant of the claims of modernity in Art bears the first 
 brunt of the Old Masters' assault, that tempts you 
 to risk a rechauffee of Paul Bourget and Walter 
 Pater, with ana lightly culled from Symonds, and, 
 perchance, the questionable support of ponderous 
 references out of Burckhardt. In spite of my 
 waiver of the title, you relish the notion of a Modern 
 face to face with Botticelli and Mantegna and Perugino 
 (to say nothing of that Giotto who had so much to 
 say !), artists in whom, you think and I agree, certain 
 impressions strangely positive of many vanished aspects 
 of life remain to be accounted for, and (it may be) 
 reconciled with modern visions of Art and Beauty. 
 Well ! I am flattered and touched by such confidence 
 in my powers of expression and your own of endur-
 
 2 Earthwork out of 'Tuscany 
 
 ance. I look upon you as a late-in-time Maecenas, 
 generously resolved to defray the uttermost charge 
 of weariness that a young writer may be encouraged 
 to unfold himself and splash in the pellucid Tuscan 
 air. I cannot assert that you are performing an act 
 of charity to mankind, but I can at least assure you 
 that you are doing more for me than if you had 
 settled my accounts with Messrs Cook & Sons, or 
 Signora Vedova Paolini, my esteemed landlady. A 
 writer who is worth anything accumulates more than 
 he gives off, and never lives up to his income. His 
 difficulty is the old one of digestion, Italian Art 
 being as crucial for the modern as Italian cookery. 
 Crucial indeed ! for diverse are the ways of the 
 Hyperboreans cheek by jowl with asciutta and 
 Tuscan table-wine, as any osteria will convince 
 you. To one man the oil is a delight : he will 
 soak himself in it till his thought swims viscid in 
 his pate. To another it is abhorrent : straightway 
 he calls for his German vinegar and drowns the 
 native flavour in floods as bitter as polemics. Your 
 wine too ! Overweak for water, says one, who 
 consumes a stout Jiaschone and spends a stertorous 
 afternoon in headache and cursing at the generous 
 home-grown. Frizzante ! cries your next to all 
 his gods ; and flushes the poison with infected 
 water. Crucial enough. So with Art. Goethe 
 went to Assisi. " I left on my left," says he, 
 " the vast mass of churches, piled Babel-wise one 
 over another, in one of which rest the remains of 
 the Holy Saint Francis of Assisi — with aversion,
 
 Apologia Pro Libello 3 
 
 for I thought to myself that the people who as- 
 sembled in them were mostly of the same stamp with 
 my captain and travelling companion." 
 
 Truly an odd ground of aversion to a painted 
 church that there might be a confessional-box 
 in the nave! But he had no eyes for Gothic, 
 being set on the Temple of Minerva. The Right 
 Honourable Joseph Addison's views of Siena will be 
 familiar to you ; but an earlier still was our excellent 
 Mr John Evelyn doing the grand tour ; going to 
 Pisa, but seeing no frescos in the Campo Santo ; 
 going to Florence, but seeing neither Santa Croce 
 nor Santa Maria Novella ; in his whole journey he 
 would seem to have found no earlier name than 
 Perugino's affixed to a picture. Goethe was urbane 
 to Francia, " a very respectable artist ; " he was 
 astonished at Mantegna, " one of the older painters," 
 
 but accepted him as leading up to Titian : and so 
 
 "thus was art developed after the barbarous period." 
 But Goethe had the sweeping sublimity of youth 
 with him. " I have now seen but two Italian cities, 
 and for the first time ; and I have spoken with but few 
 persons ; and yet I know my Italians pretty well ! " 
 Seriously, where in criticism do you learn of an earlier 
 painter than Perugino, until you come to our day ? 
 And where now do you get the raptures over the 
 Carracci and Domenichino and Guercino and the rest 
 of them which the last century expended upon their 
 unthrifty soil ? Ruskin found Botticelli ; yes, and 
 Giotto. Roscoe never so much as mentions either. 
 Why should he, honest man ? They couldn't
 
 4 Earthwork out of Tuscany 
 
 draw ! Cookery is very like Art, as Socrates told 
 Gorgias. Unfortunately, it is far easier to verify 
 your impressions in the former case than in the 
 latter. Yet that is the first and obvious duty Oi 
 the critic — that is, the writer whomsoever. In my 
 degree it has been mine. Wherefore, if I unfold 
 anything at all, it shall not be the Cicerone nor 
 the veiled " Anonymous," nor the Wiederbelebung, 
 nor (I hope) the Mornings in Florence, but that 
 thing in which you place such touching reliance — 
 myself and my poor sensations. Ecco ! I have 
 nothing else. You take a boy out of school ; you 
 set him to book- reading, give him Shakespere and 
 a Bible, set him sailing in the air with the poets ; 
 drench him with painter's dreams, via, Titian's 
 carmine and orange, Veronese's rippling brocades, 
 Umbrian morning skies, and Tuscan hues wrought 
 of moon-beams and flowing water — anon you turn 
 him adrift in Italy, a country where all poets' souls 
 seem to be caged in crystal and set in the sun, and 
 say — " Here, dreamer of dreams, what of the day ? " 
 Madonna ! You ask and you shall obtain. I proceed 
 to expand under your benevolent eye. 
 
 To me, Italy is not so much a place where pictures 
 have been painted (some of which remain to testify), 
 as a place where pictures have been lived and built. 
 I fail to see how Perugia is not a picture by, say, 
 Astorre Baglione. Perhaps I should be nearer the 
 mark if I said it was a frozen epic. What I mean 
 is, that in Italy it is still impossible to separate the 
 soul and body of the soil, to say, as you may say in
 
 Apologia Pro Libello 5 
 
 London or Paris, — here behind this sordid grey 
 mask of warehouses and suburban villas lurks the 
 soul that once was Shakespere or once was Villon. 
 You will not say that of Florence ; you will hardly 
 say it (though the time is at hand) of Milan and 
 Rome. Do the gondoliers still sing snatches of 
 Ariosto ? I don't know Venice. M. Bourget 
 assures me his vetturino quoted Dante to him 
 between Monte Pulciano and Siena ; and I believe 
 him. At any rate, in Italy as I have found it, the 
 inner secret of Italian life can be read, not in painting 
 alone, nor poem alone, but in the swift sun, in the 
 streets and shrouded lanes, in the golden pastures, in 
 the plains and blue mountains; in flowery cloisters and 
 carved church porches — out of doors as well as in. 
 The story of Troy is immortal — why not because 
 the Trojans themselves live immortal in their fabled 
 sons ? That being so, I by no means promise you 
 my sensations to be of the ear-measuring, nose- 
 nabbing sort now so popular. I am bad at dates 
 and soon tire of symbols. My theology may be to 
 seek ; you may catch me as much for the world 
 as for Athanase. With world and doctor I shall, 
 indeed, have little enough to do, for wherever I 
 go I shall be only on the look-out for the soul 
 of this bright-eyed people, whom, being no Goethe, 
 I do not profess to understand or approve. Must 
 the lover do more than love his mistress, and 
 weave his sonnets about her white brows ? I may 
 see my mistress Italy embowered in a belfry, a 
 fresco, the scope of a Piazza, the lilt of a Stornello,
 
 6 Earthwork out of 'Tuscany : 
 
 the fragrance of a legend. If I don't find a legend 
 to hand I may, as lief as not, invent one. It shall 
 be a legend fitted close to the soul of a fact, if 1 
 succeed : and if I fail, put me behind you and take 
 down your four volumes of Rio, or your four-and- 
 twenty of Rosini. Go to Crowe and Cavalcaselle 
 and be wise. Parables ! — I like the word — to go 
 round about the thing, whose heart I cannot hit with 
 my small-arm, marking the goodly masses and un- 
 obtrusive meek beauties of it, and longing for them in 
 vain. No amount of dissecting shall reveal the core 
 of Sandro's Venus. For after you have pared off the 
 husk of the restorer, or bled in your alembic the 
 very juices the craftsman conjured withal, you come 
 down to the seamy wood, and Art is gone. Nay, 
 but your Morelli, your Crowe, ciphering as they went 
 for want of thought, what did they do but screw Art 
 into test-tubes, and serve you up the fruit of their 
 litmus-paper assay with vivacity, may be, — but with 
 what kinship to the picture ? I maintain that the 
 peeling and gutting of fact must be done in the 
 kitchen: the king's guests are not to know how 
 many times the cook's finger went from cate to 
 mouth before the seasoning was proper to the table. 
 The king is the artist, you are the guest, I am the 
 abstractor of quintessences, the cook. Remember, 
 the cook had not the ordering of the feast : that was 
 the king's business — mine is to mingle the flavours 
 to the liking of the guest that the dish be worthy the 
 conception and the king's honour. 
 
 Nor will I promise you that I shall not break into
 
 Apologia Pro Libello 7 
 
 a more tripping stave than our prose can afford, here 
 and there. The pilgrim, if he is young and his 
 shoes or his belly pinch him not, sings as he goes, 
 the very stones at his heels (so music-steeped is this 
 land), setting him the key. Jog the foot-path way 
 through Tuscany in my company, it's Lombard Street 
 tc my hat I charm you out of your lassitude by my 
 open humour. Things I say will have been said 
 be r ore, and better ; my tunes may be stale and my 
 phrasing rough : I may be irrelevant, irreverent, what 
 yoi please. Eh, well ! I am in Italy, — the land of 
 shiugsand laughing. Shrug me (or my book) away; 
 bul, pray Heaven, laugh ! And, as the young are 
 always very wise when they find their voice and 
 have their confidence well put out to usury, laugh 
 (but in your cloak) when I am sententious or apt to 
 t;ars. I have found lacrima rerum in Italy as else- 
 vhere ; and sometimes Life has seemed to me to sail 
 es near to tragedy as Art can do. I suppose I must 
 te a very bad Christian, for I remain sturdily an 
 optimist, still convinced that it is good for us to be 
 here, while the sun is up. Men and pictures, poems, 
 rities, churches, comely deeds, grow like cabbages : 
 they are of the soil, spring from it to the sun, glow 
 open-hearted while he is there ; and when he goes, 
 they go. So grew Florence, and Shakespere, and 
 Greek myth — the three most lovely flowers of 
 Nature's seeding I know of. And with the flowers 
 *row the weeds. My first weed shall sprout by 
 Arno, in a cranny of the Ponte Vecchio, or cling 
 like a Dryad of the wood to some gnarly old
 
 8 Earthwork out of 'Tuscany 
 
 olive on the hill-side of Arcetri. If it bear no little 
 gold-seeded flower, or if its pert leaves don't blush 
 under the sun's caress, it shan't be my fault or the 
 sun's. 
 
 Take, then, my watered wine in the name of the 
 Second Maccabgean, for here, as he says, " will 1 
 make an end. And if I have done well, and as :'s 
 fitting the story, it is that which I desired : but if 
 slenderly and meanly, it is that which I could attain 
 unto." 
 
 I have killed you at the first cast. I feel it. Has 
 any city, save, perhaps, Cairo, been so written out 
 as Florence ? I hear you querulous ; you raise your 
 eyebrows ; you sigh as you watch the tottering ash of 
 your second cigar. Mrs Brown comes to tell yoi 
 it is late. I agree with you quickly. Florence ha. 
 often been sketched before — putting Browning aside 
 with his astounding fresco-music — by Ruskin anc 
 George Eliot and Mr Henry James, to name only 
 masters. But that is no reason why I should not try 
 my prentice hand. Florence alters not at all. Mer. 
 do. My picture, poor as you like, shall be my own, 
 It is not their Florence or yours — and, remember, ] 
 would strike at Tuscany through Florence, and through- 
 out Tuscany keep my eye in her beam, — but my owr. 
 mellow king-cup of a town, the glowing heart of 
 the whole Arno basin, whose suave and weather- 
 warmed grace I shall try to catch and distil. But 
 Mrs Brown is right ; it is late : the huntsmen are up 
 in America, as your good kinsman has it, and I would 
 never have you act your own Antipodes. Addio.
 
 Eye of Italy * 
 
 I have been here a few days only — perhaps a week : 
 if it's impressionism you're after, the time is now or 
 a year hence. For, in these things of three stages, 
 two may be tolerable, the first clouding of the water 
 with the wine's red fire, or the final resolution of 
 the two into one humane consistence : the inter- 
 mediate course is, like all times of process, brumous 
 and hesitant. After a dinner in the white piazza, 
 shrinking slowly to blue under the keen young moon's 
 eye, watched over jealously by the frowning bulk of 
 Brunelleschi's globe — after a dinner of pasta con 
 brodo, veal cutlets, olives, and a bottle of right Barbera, 
 let me give you a pastel (this is the medium for such 
 evanescences) of Florence herself. At present I 
 only feel. No one should think — few people can — 
 after dinner. Be patient therefore ; suffer me thus far. 
 I would spare you, if I might, the horrors of my 
 night-long journey from Milan. There is little 
 romance in a railway : the novelists have worked it 
 dry. That is, however, a part of my sum of per- 
 ceptions which began, you may put it, at the dawn 
 
 * My thanks are due to the Editor of Black and White for 
 permission to reprint the substance of this essay. 
 
 9
 
 io Earthwork out of Tuscany 
 
 which saw Florence and me face to face. So I 
 must in no wise omit it. 
 
 I find, then, that Italian railway-carriages are 
 constructed for the convenience of luggage, and that 
 passengers are an afterthought, as dogs or grooms 
 are with us, to be suffered only if there be room and 
 on condition they look after the luggage. In my 
 case we had our full complement of the staple ; never- 
 theless L every passenger assumed the god, keeping 
 watch on his traps, and thinking to shake the spheres 
 at every fresh arrival. Thoughtless behaviour ! for 
 there were thus twelve people packed into a rocky 
 landscape of cardboard portmanteaus and umbrella- 
 peaks ; twenty-four legs, and urgent need of stretching- 
 room as the night wore on. There was, jostling, 
 there was asperity from those who could sleep and 
 those who would ; there was more when two shock- 
 head drovers — like First and Second Murderers in a 
 tragedy — insisted on taking off their boots. It was 
 not that there was little room for boots ; indeed I 
 think they nursed them on their thin knees. It was 
 at any rate too much even for an Italian passenger ; 
 for — well, well ! their way had been a hot and a dusty 
 one, poor fellows. So the guard was summoned, 
 and came with all the implicit powers of an uniform 
 and, I believe, a sword. The boots were strained 
 on sufficiently to preserve the amenities of the way : 
 they could not, of course, be what they had been ; 
 the carriage was by this a forcing-house. And 
 through the long night we ached away an intolerable 
 span of time with, for under-current, for sinister
 
 Eye of Italy 1 1 
 
 accompaniment to the pitiful strain, the muffled 
 interminable plodding of the engine, and the rack of 
 the wheels pulsing through space to the rhythm of 
 some music-hall jingle heard in snatches at home. 
 At intervals came shocks of contrast when we were 
 brought suddenly face to face with a gaunt and 
 bleached world. Then we stirred from our stupor, 
 and set to looking into each other's stale faces. We 
 had shrieked and clanked our way into some great 
 naked station, shivering raw and cold under the 
 electric lights, streaked with black shadows on its 
 whitewash and patched with coarse advertisements. 
 The porters' voices echoed in the void, shouting 
 " Piacenza," " Parma," « Reggio," " Modena," 
 " Bologna" with infinite relish for the varied hues of 
 a final a. One or two cowed travellers slippered up 
 responsive to the call, and we, the veterans who 
 endured, set our teeth, shuddered, and smoked feverish 
 cigarettes on the platform among the carriage-wheels 
 and points ; or, if we were new hands, watched 
 awfully the advent of another sleeping train, as dingy 
 as our own — yet a hero of romance ! For it bore 
 the hieratic and tremendous words " Roma, Firenze, 
 Milano" It was privileged then ; it ministered 
 in the sanctuary. We glowed in our sordid skins, 
 and could have kissed the foot-boards that bore the 
 dust of Rome. I will swear I shall never see 
 those three words printed on a carriage without a 
 thrill. Roma, Firenze, Milano, — Lord ! what a 
 traverse. 
 
 Or we held long purposeless rests at small wayside
 
 t 2 Earthwork out of Tuscany : 
 
 places where no station could be known, and the 
 shrouded land stretched away on either side, not to 
 be seen, but rather felt, in the cool airs that blew in, 
 and the rustling of secret trees near by. No further 
 sound was, save the muttered talking of the guards 
 without and the simmering of the engine, on some- 
 where in front. And then " Partenza ! " rang 
 out in the night ; and " Pronti ! " came as a faint 
 echo on before. We laboured on, and the dreams 
 began where they had broken off. For we dreamed 
 in these times, fitful and lurid, coloured dreams ; 
 flashes of horrible crises in one's life ; interminable 
 precipices ; a river skiff engulfed in a swirl of green 
 sea-water ; agonies of repentance ; shameful failure, 
 defeat, memories — and then the steady pulsing of 
 the engine, and thick, impermeable darkness choking 
 up the windows again. How I ached for the 
 dawn ! 
 
 I awoke from what I believe to have been a 
 panic of snoring to hear the train clattering over the 
 sleepers and points, and to see — oh, human, brotherly 
 sight ! — the broad level light of morning stream out 
 of the east. We were stealing into a city asleep. 
 Tall flat houses rose in the chill mist to our left and 
 stared blankly down upon us with close-barred green 
 eyelids. Gas-lamps in swept streets flickered dirty 
 yellow in the garish light. A great purple dome 
 lay ahead, flanked by the ruddy roofs and gables of 
 a long church. My heart leapt for Florence. 
 Pistoja ! 
 
 And then, at Prato, a nut-brown old woman
 
 Eye of Italy 13 
 
 with a placid face got into our carriage with a 
 basket of green figs and some bottles of milk for 
 the Florentine market. So we were nearing. And 
 soon we ran in between lines of white and pink 
 villas edged with rows of planes, drenched still with 
 dews and the night mists, among bullock-carts and 
 queer shabby little vetture, everything looking light 
 and elfin in the brisk sunshine and autumn bite — into 
 the barrel-like station, and I into the arms, say 
 rather the arm-chair, of Signora Vedova Paolini, 
 chattiest and most motherly of landladies. 
 
 Earth, Air, Fire, Water, Florence, form the 
 five elements of our planet according to the testi- 
 mony of Boniface VIII. of clamant and not very 
 Catholic memory. That is true if you take it this 
 way. You cannot resolve an element ; but you 
 cannot resolve Florence ; therefore Florence is an 
 element. Ecco ! She is like nothing else in Nature, 
 or (which is much the same thing) Art. You can 
 have olives elsewhere, and Gothic elsewhere ; you 
 can have both at Aries, for instance. You can have 
 Campanili printed white (but not rose-and-white, 
 not rose-and-gold-and- white) on blue anywhere 
 along the Mediterranean from Tripoli to Tangier : 
 you will find Giotto at Padua, and statues growing 
 in the open air at Naples. But for the silvery magic 
 of olives and blue ; for a Gothic which has the 
 supernatural and always restless eagerness of the 
 North, held in check, reduced to our level by the 
 blessedly human sanity of Romanesque ; for sculpture 
 which sprouts from the crumbling church-sides like
 
 14 Earthwork out of Tuscany : 
 
 some frankly happy stone-crop, or wall-flower, just 
 as wholesomely coloured and tenderly shaped, you 
 must come to Florence. Come for choice in this 
 golden afternoon of the year. Green figs are twelve- 
 a-penny ; you can get peaches for the asking, and 
 grapes and melons without ; brown men are treading 
 the wine-fat in every little white hill-town, and in 
 Florence itself you may stumble upon them, as I once 
 did, plying their mystery in a battered old church — 
 sight only to be seen in Italy, where religions have been 
 many, but religionists substantially the same. That 
 is the Italian way ; there was the practical evidence. 
 Imagine the sight. A gaunt and empty old basilica, 
 the beams of the Rood still left, the dye of fresco 
 still round the walls and tribune — here the dim 
 figure of Sebastian roped to his tree, there the 
 cloudy forms of Apostles or the Heavenly Host 
 shadowed in masses of crimson or green — and, down 
 below, a slippery purple sea, frothed sanguine at the 
 edges, and wild, half-naked creatures treading out 
 the juice, dancing in the oozy stuff rhythmically, 
 to the music of some wailing air of their own. 
 Saturnia regna indeed, and in the haunt of Sant' 
 Ambrogio, or under the hungry eye of San Ber- 
 nardino, or other lean ascetic of the Middle Age. 
 But that, after all, is Italian, not necessarily Floren- 
 tine or Tuscan. I must needs abstract the unique 
 quintessential humours of this my eye of Italy. 
 Stendhal, do you remember ? didn't like one of 
 these. He said that in Florence people talked about 
 " huesta hasa " when they would say " questa casa,"
 
 Eye of Italy 15 
 
 and thus turned Italian into a mad Arabic. So they 
 do, especially the women : why not ? The poor 
 Stendhal loved Milan, wrote himself down " Arrigo 
 Milanese" — and what can you expect from a 
 Milanese ? 
 
 They tell me, who know Florence well, that 
 she is growing unwieldy. Like a bulky old 
 concierge, they say, she sits in the passage of her 
 Arno, swollen, fat, and featureless, a kind of 
 Chicago, a city of tame conveniences ungraced by 
 arts. That means that there are suburbs and tram- 
 ways ; it means that the gates will not hold her 
 in ; it has a furtive stab at the Railway Station 
 and the omnibus in the Piazza del Duomo : it is 
 Mornings in Florence. The suggestion is that Art 
 is some pale remote virgin who must needs shiver 
 and withdraw at the touch of actual life : the art- 
 lover must maunder over his mistress's wrongs 
 instead of manfully insisting upon her rights, her 
 everlasting triumphant justifications. Why this 
 watery talk of an Art that was and may not be 
 again, because we go to bed by electricity and 
 have our hair brushed by machinery ? Pray has 
 Nature ceased ? or Life ? Art will endure with 
 these fine things, which in Florence, let me say, 
 are very fine indeed. But there's a practical answer 
 to the indictment. As a city she is a mere cupful. 
 You can walk from Cantagalli's, at the Roman 
 Gate, to the Porta San Gallo, at the end of the 
 Via Cavour, in about the time it would take you 
 to go from Newgate to Kensington Gardens. Yet
 
 1 6 Earthwork out of Tuscany : 
 
 whereas in London such a walk would lead you 
 through a slice of a section, in Florence you would 
 cut through the whole city from hill to hill. You 
 are never away from the velvet flanks of the Tuscan 
 hills. Every street-end smiles an enchanting vista 
 upon you. Houses frowning, machicolated and 
 sombre, or gay and golden-white with cool green 
 jalousies and spreading eaves, stretch before you 
 through mellow air to a distance where they melt 
 into hills, and hills into sky ; into sky so clear and 
 rarely blue, so virgin pale at the horizon, that the 
 hills sleep brown upon it under the sun, and the 
 cypresses, nodding a-row, seem funeral weeds beside 
 that radiant purity. Some such adorable stretch 
 of tilth and pasture, sky and cloud, hangs like 
 a god's crown beyond the city and her towers. 
 In the long autumn twilight Fiesole and the hills 
 lie soft and purple below a pale green sky. There 
 is a pause at this time when the air seems washed 
 for sleep — every shrub, every feature of the land- 
 scape is cut clean as with a blade. The light 
 dies, the air deepens to wet violet, and the 
 glimpses of the hill-town gleam like snow. At 
 such times Samminiato looms ghostly upon you 
 and fades slowly out. The flush in the East faints 
 and fails and the evening star shines like a gem. 
 It is hot and still in the broad Piazza Santa 
 Maria ; they are lighting the lamps ; the swarm 
 grows of the eager, shabby, spendthrift crowd of 
 young Italians, so light-hearted and fluent, and so 
 prodigal of this old Italy of theirs — and ours.
 
 Eye of Italy 1 7 
 
 All this I have been watching as I might. Nature 
 clings to the city, playing her rhythmic dance at the 
 end of every street. 
 
 Nature clings. Yes ; but she is within as well 
 as without. What is that sentimental platitude of 
 somebody's (the worst kind of platitude, is it not?) 
 about the sun being to flowers what Art is to Life ? 
 It has the further distinction of being untrue. In 
 Florence you learn that what he is to flowers, that 
 he is to Art. For I soberly believe that under his 
 rays Florence has grown open like some rare white 
 water-lily ; that sun and sky have set the conditions, 
 struck, as it were, the chord. I have wandered 
 through and through her recessed ways the length 
 of this bright and breezy October week ; and have 
 marked where I walked the sun's great hand laid 
 upon palace and cloister and bell-tower. He has 
 summoned up these flat-topped houses, these pre- 
 cipitous walls beneath which winds the darkened 
 causeway. One seems to be travelling in a mountain 
 gorge with, above, a thin ribbon of sky, fluid blue, 
 flawless of cloud, like the sea. He, that so master- 
 ful sun, has given Florence the apathetic, beaten 
 aspect of a southern town ; he and the temperate 
 sky have fixed the tone for ever ; and the nimble air 
 — " nimbly and sweetly " recommending itself — has 
 given the quaintness and the freaksomeness of the 
 North. This bursts out, young and irresponsible, in 
 pinnacle, crocket, and gable, in towers like spears, and 
 in the eager lancet windows which peer upwards out 
 of Orsammichele and the Dominican Church. This
 
 1 8 Earthwork out of Tuscany 
 
 mixture is Florence and has made her art. The 
 blue of the sky gives the key to her palette, the 
 breath of the west wind, the salt wind from our own 
 Atlantic, tingles in her campanili ; and the Italian 
 sun washes over all with his lazy gold. Habit and 
 inclination both speak. She rejects no wise thing 
 and accepts every lovely thing. Nature and Art have 
 worked hand in hand, as they will when we let 
 them. For what is an art so inimitable, so innocent, 
 so intimate as this of Tuscany, after all, but a high 
 effort of creative Nature — Natura naturans, as Spinosa 
 calls her ? Here, on the weather-fretted walls, a 
 Delia Robbia blossoms out in natural colours 
 — blue and white and green. They are Spring's 
 colours. You need not go into the Bargello to 
 understand Luca and Andrea at their happy task ; 
 as well go to a botanical museum to read the secret 
 of April. See them on the dusty wall of Orsam- 
 michele. They have wrought the blossom of the 
 stone — clusters of bright-eyed flowers with the 
 throats and eyes of angels, singing, you might say, 
 a children's hymn to Our Lady, throned and pure 
 in the midst of the bevy. See the Spedale degli 
 Innocenti, where a score of little flowery white 
 children grow, open-armed, out of their sky-blue 
 medallions. Really, are they lilies, or children, 
 or the embodied strophes of a psalter ? you ask. 
 I mix my metaphors like an Irishman, but you will 
 see my meaning. All the arts blend in art : " rien 
 ne fait mieux entendre combien un faux sonnet est 
 ridicule que de s'imaginer une femme ou une maison 
 faite sur ce modele-la." Pascal knew ; and so
 
 Eye of Italy 19 
 
 did Philip Sidney. " Nature never set forth the 
 earth in so rich tapestry as divers poets have done ; " 
 and the nearer truth seems to be that Art is Nature 
 made articulate, Nature's soul inflamed with love 
 and voicing her secrets through one man to many. 
 So there may be no difference between me and a 
 cabbage-rose but this, that I can consider my own 
 flower, how it grows, or rather, when it is grown. 
 
 It is very pleasant sometimes to think that wistful 
 guess of Plato's true in spite of everything — that the 
 state is the man grown great, as the universe is the 
 state grown infinite. It explains that Florence has 
 a soul, the broader image of her sons', and that this 
 soul speaks in Art, utters itself in flower of stone 
 and starry stretches of fresco (like that serene blue 
 and grey band in the Sistine chapel which redeems 
 so many of Rome's waste places), sings colour-songs 
 (there are such affairs) on church and cloister walls. 
 Seeing these good things, we should rather hear the 
 town's voice crying out her fancy to friendly hearts. 
 Thus — let me run the figure to death — if Luca's 
 blue-eyed medallions are the crop of the wall, they 
 are also the soul of Florence, singing a blithe secular 
 song about gods whose abiding charm is the art that 
 made them live. And if the towers and domes are 
 the statelier flowers of the garden, lily, hollyhock, 
 tulip of the red globe, so they are Florence again as 
 she strains forward and up, sternly defiant in the 
 Palazzo Vecchio, bright and curious at Santa Croce, 
 pure, chaste as a seraph, when, thrilling with the 
 touch of Giotto, she gazes in the clarity of her 
 golden and rosy marbles, tinted like a pearl and
 
 20 Earthwork out of 'Tuscany 
 
 shaped like an archangel, towards the blue vault 
 whose eye she is. 
 
 Wandering, therefore, through this high city ; 
 loitering on the bridge whereunder turbid Arno 
 glitters like brass; standing by the yellow Baptistery; 
 or seeing in Santa Croce cloister — where I write 
 these lines — seven centuries of enthusiasm mellowed 
 down by sun and wind into a comely dotage of grey 
 and green, one is disposed to wonder whether we are 
 only just beginning to understand Art, or to misunder- 
 stand it ? Has the world slept for two thousand 
 years ? Is Degas the first artist ? Was Aristotle 
 the first critic, and is Mr George Moore the second ? 
 As a white pigeon cuts the blue, and every pinion of 
 him shines as burnished agate in the live air, things 
 shape themselves somewhat. I begin to see that Art 
 is, and that men have been, and shall be, but never are. 
 Facts are an integral part of life, but they are not life. 
 I heard a metaphysician say once that matter was the 
 adjective of life, and thought it a mighty pretty saying. 
 In a true sense, it would seem, Art is that adjective. 
 For so surely as there are honest men to insist how 
 true things are or how proper to moralising, there 
 will be Art to sing how lovely they are, and what 
 amiable dwellings for us. Thus fortified, I think I 
 can understand Magister Joctus Fiorentise. He lies 
 behind these crumbling walls. Traces of his 
 crimson and blue still stain the cloister-walk. What 
 was he telling us in crimson and blue ? How dumb 
 Zacharias spelt out the name of his son John in the 
 roll of a book ? Hardly that, I think.
 
 // 
 
 Little Flowers 
 
 The Via del Monte alle Croce is a leafy way cut 
 between hedgerows, in the morning time heavy with 
 dew and the smell of wet flowers. Where it strays 
 out of the Gira al Monte there is a crumbly brick 
 wall, a well, and a little earthen shrine to Madonna 
 — a daub, it is true, of glaring chromes and blues, 
 thick in glaze and tawdry devices of stout cupids 
 and roses, but somehow, on this suggestive Autumn 
 morning, innocent and blue of eye as the carolling 
 throngs of Luca which it travesties. And a pious 
 inscription cut below testifieth how Saint Francis, 
 " in friendly talk with the Blessed Mariano di Lugo," 
 paused here before it, and then vanished. It is not 
 necessary to believe in ghosts ; but I'll go bail that 
 story is true. We are but two stones' throw from 
 the gaunt hulk of a Franciscan Church ; a file of 
 dusty cypresses marks the ruins of a painful Calvary 
 cut in the waste and shale of the hill-side. Below, 
 as in a green pasture, Florence shines like a dove's 
 egg in her nest of hills ; I can pick out among the 
 sheaf of spears which hedge her about the daintiest 
 of them all, the crocketted pinnacle of Santa Croce,
 
 Earthwork out of Tuscany : 
 
 grey on blue ; and then the lean ridge of a shrine 
 the barest, simplest and most honest in all Tuscany. 
 Certainly Saint Francis, "familiarmentediscorrendo," 
 appeared in this place. I need no reference to the 
 Annals of the Seraphic Order — part, book and page 
 — to convince me. My stone gives them. " Ann. 
 Ord. Min. Tom. cclii. fasc. 3.," and so on. That 
 is but a sorry concession to our short-sightedness. 
 For if we believe not the shrine which we have 
 seen, how shall we believe Giotto ? What of 
 Giotto ? That is my point. 
 
 Something too much, it may be, of modern art- 
 criticism, which is ashamed of thinking, snuffeth at 
 pictures which tell you things, at literature in books 
 or music or church ornament. Is literature not 
 good anywhere ? Have we exhausted the Arabian 
 Nights or the Acta Sanctorum ? At any rate, if 
 we must choose between Giotto and the prophet 
 of the Yellow Book, my heart is fixed. I am 
 for the teller of tales. Story-telling it is, glorifi- 
 cation of one whom Mr George Moore would call 
 (has, indeed, called) a "squint-eyed Italian Saint" 
 — and whether he objected to malformity, nation- 
 ality or calling, I never could learn — this too it 
 may be ; it may tend to edification and I know not 
 what beside. I will grant all that. And though it 
 Is hard to prophesy what might have happened five 
 hundred years ago ; though there might have been a 
 Giotto without a Francis of whom to speak ; yet I 
 never knew a case where a painter (call him poet if 
 you will ; he will be none the worse for that) fell so
 
 Little Flowers 23 
 
 directly into the gap awaiting him. The Gospel 
 living and tangible again ! Spirits, apparitions, as of 
 three mysterious sisters, met you in the open country, 
 and crying " Hail ! Lady Poverty," straightly van- 
 ished. A legend was a-making round about the 
 strange life not fifty years closed, a life which seems, 
 extravagance apart, to have been a lyrical outburst, a 
 strophe in the hymn of praise which certain happy 
 people were singing just then. It was a Gloria in 
 Excelsis for a second time in Christian Annals 
 which did not end in a wail of " Agnus Dei qui 
 tollis peccata, miserere." Why should it? Should 
 the children of the bride-chamber fast when the 
 bridegroom was with them ? And of all the 
 " wreath'd singers at the marriage-door," blithest 
 and sanest was Master Joctus of Florence. This 
 being so, I hope I shall not be accused of any 
 mischief if I say that in Giotto I see one of the 
 select company of immortals whose work can never 
 be surpassed because it is entirely adequate to the 
 facts and atmosphere he selected. The standard of 
 a work of art must always be — Is it well done ? 
 rather than — Is it well intentioned ? Wherefore, if 
 Giotto or anybody else choose to spend himself upon 
 a sermon or an essay or an article of the Creed, and 
 do well thereby, I may not blame him, nor call him 
 back to study the play of light across a marsh or the 
 flight of pigeons in the westering sun. Ma basta, 
 basta cosi, you may say with the Cavaliere of 
 Goldoni. 
 
 Santa Croce church is of the barrack-room
 
 24 Earthwork out of Tuscany : 
 
 stamp, dim and enormous, grey with years and 
 seamed with work. Its impressiveness (for with 
 Orvieto and a fleet of churches at Ravenna it 
 stands above all Italy in that) consists mainly, I 
 believe, in its being built of exactly the moral 
 bones of the religion it was intended to embody. 
 An Italian religion, namely ; perfectly sane, at 
 bottom practical, with a base of plain, every-day, 
 ten-commandment morality. That was the base 
 of Saint Francis' good brown life : therefore Santa 
 Croce is admirably built, squared, mortised and 
 compacted by skilled workmen to whom brick- 
 laying was a fine art. But, withal, this religion 
 had its lyric raptures, its " In fuoco Amor mi 
 mise," or its sobbing at the feet of the Crucified, 
 its Corotto and Seven Sorrowful Mysteries : accord- 
 ingly Santa Croce, like a pollarded lime, reserves 
 its buds, harbours and garners them, throws out no 
 suckers or lateral adornments the length of its trunk, 
 but bursts into a flowery crown of them at the top 
 — a whole row of chapels along the cross-beam of the 
 tau ; and in the place of honour a shallow apse pierced 
 with red lancets and aglow like an opal. Never a 
 chapel of them but is worth study and a stiff neck. 
 After the Rule came the Fioretti ; after Francis 
 and Bonaventure came Celano and Jacopone da 
 Todi : after Arnolfo del Lapo and his attention 
 to business came the hours of ease when he planned 
 the airy plume on which the campanile leaps sky- 
 ward ; and came also Giotto to weave the crown 
 of Santa Croce.
 
 Little Flowers 25 
 
 I take the Tuscan nature to be so constituted 
 that it will play with any given subject of specula- 
 tion in much the same way. With one or two 
 mighty exceptions to be sure — Dante, of course, 
 Buonarroti of course, and, for all his secularities, 
 Boccace — it is not imagination you find in Tuscany. 
 Rather, a sweet and delicate, a wholesome, a home- 
 grown fancy wantoning with thought which may 
 be unpleasant, unhealthy, grave, frivolous — what you 
 will ; yet playing in such a way, and with such 
 intuitive taste and breeding that no harm ensues 
 nor any nausea. They realise for me a fairy 
 country ; I can think no evil of a Tuscan. So 
 I can read Boccace the infidel, Boccace the gross, 
 where Voltaire makes me a bigot and Catulle 
 Mendes ashamed. The fresh breeze blowing 
 through the Decameron keeps the air sweet. Even 
 Lorenzo is a child for me, and Macchiavel, " the 
 man without a soul," I decline to take seriously. 
 Consider, then, all Tuscan art from this point of 
 view, the weaving of innocent fancies round some 
 chance-caught theme. Christianity may have been 
 the point d'appui. No dcubt it generally was. 
 What then ? Have you never heard two children 
 dreaming aloud of the ways of God, or the troubles 
 of Christ ? How they humanise, how they realise 
 the Mystery ! Just such a pretty babble I find in 
 the Spanish Chapel, which to take in any other 
 spirit would work a madness in the brain. You 
 remember the North wall, apotheosis of Saint 
 Thomas and what-not, for all the world like a
 
 26 Earthwork out of 'Tuscany 
 
 paradigm of the irregular verb " Aquinizo." What 
 are we to suppose Lippo Memmi (or whoever else 
 it was) to have been about when he hung in mid- 
 air on his swinging bridge and stained the wet 
 square red and green ? To read Ruskin you would 
 think he was fulminating urbl et orh'i with the 
 Summa or Cur Deus homo at his ringers' ends. 
 Depend upon it he was doing quite other, or 
 the artistic temper (phrase rendered loathsome by 
 the halfpenny newspapers) suffered a relapse be- 
 tween the days of King David and the days of 
 his brother Lippo Lippi. Are we to suppose 
 that a man who could live in intimate commerce 
 with fourteen such gracious ladies as he has set 
 there, ranged on their carved Sedilia — his Brito- 
 mart trim and debonnair ; his willowy Carita ; his 
 wimpled matron in clean white who masquerades 
 as I know not what branch of theology ; his pretty 
 girlish Geometry of coiled and braided hair and 
 the yet unloosed girdle of demure virginity ; his 
 maid Musica crowned with roses, and Logica, the 
 bold-eyed and open-throated wench, hand to hip 
 — is this the man for sententiousness ? Out, out ! 
 Could anyone save a humourist of high order have 
 given Moses such a pair of horns, or set, under 
 Music, such a shagged Tubal to belabour an 
 anvil ? The wall sings like an anthology, — a 
 Gothic anthology where " Bele Aliz matin leva " 
 is versicle, and " In un boschetto trovai pastorella " 
 antiphon. You might as well talk of Christian 
 Mathematics as of Christian Art, or bind the sweet
 
 Little Flowers 27 
 
 influences of Pleiades as the volant sallies of a 
 poet's wit. 
 
 Once we get it into our heads that the Tuscans 
 were fanciful children, always, and the discrepancy of 
 critics, of Ruskin, and Mr George Moore, or Rio 
 and Mr Addington Symonds, may vanish. For 
 another thing, we shall understand and allow for the 
 standard of Santa Croce and the Fiorettu From the 
 latter nosegay I take this : 
 
 " It happened one day as Brother Peter was 
 standing to his prayer, thinking earnestly about the 
 Passion of Christ, how the blessed Mother of him, 
 and John Evangelist his best-beloved, and Saint 
 Francis too, were painted at the foot of the Cross, 
 crucified indeed with him through anguish of the 
 mind, that there came upon him the longing to know 
 which of these three had endured the bitterest pains 
 of that anguish, the Mother who bore our Lord, or 
 the Disciple familiar to his bosom, or Saint Francis 
 crucified also even as he was. And as he stood 
 thinking on these things, lo ! there appeared before 
 him the Virgin Mary with Saint John Evangelist 
 and Saint Francis, robed in splendid apparel and of 
 glory wonderful ; but Saint Francis' robe was more 
 cunningly wrought than Saint John's. Now Peter 
 stood quite scared at the sight ; but Saint John bade 
 him take comfort, saying, ' Be not afraid, dearest 
 brother, for we are come hither to dispel thy doubt. 
 You are to know, then, that above all creatures the 
 Mother of Christ and I grieved over the Passion of 
 our Lord. But since that day Saint Francis has felt
 
 28 Earthwork out of Tuscany : 
 
 more anguish than any other. Therefore, as you see, 
 he is in glory now.' Then Brother Peter asked 
 him, and said, 'Most holy Apostle of Christ, 
 wherefore cometh it that the vesture of Saint Francis 
 is more glorious than thine ? ' Answered him Saint 
 John, ' The reason is this, for that when he was in 
 the world he wore a viler than ever I did.' So then 
 Saint John gave him a vestment which he carried on 
 his arm, and the holy company vanished." 
 
 This, be sure, is true ; and I have its English parallel 
 ready to hand. For I once heard a father and his 
 child talking of the goodness of God. " God," says 
 the father, " gives thee the milk to thy porridge ; " 
 and the child thought it a good saying, yet puzzled 
 over it, doubting, as it afterwards appeared, the part 
 to be assigned to a friend of his, the daily milkman. 
 And so he solved it. " God makes the milk and 
 the milkman brings it," he said. The Fioretti, if 
 you must needs break a butterfly on your dissecting- 
 board, was written, as I judge, by a bare-foot Minorite 
 of forty ; compiled, that is, from the wonderings, the 
 pretty adjustments and naive disquisitions of any such 
 weather-worn brown men as you may see to-day 
 toiling up the Calvary to their Convent. And in 
 this same story-telling Giotto is an adept. He loves 
 to gather his fellows round him and speak of Saints 
 and Archangels, where our youngsters talk of fairy 
 godmothers and white rabbits. To say this is not 
 Art, as the critics profanely teach, is monstrous. Is 
 not the Fioretti literature, or the Gospel according to 
 Saint Luke literature ? And is not Religion the
 
 Little Flowers 29 
 
 highest art of all, the large elementary poetry at the 
 core of the heart of man ? Just so was the craft 
 which disposed the rings of that wonderful ornament 
 round about the Bardi chapel, rings of clean 
 arabesque wrought in line upon pale blue and pink 
 and brown, and which in so doing fitted the 
 Franciscan thaumaturgy with an exact garment 
 tenderly adjusted to every wave of its abandonment 
 — even so was this a great art indeed. For you 
 ask of an art no more than this, that it shall be 
 adequately representative : there are no comparative 
 degrees. 
 
 So when I learn from the works of Ruskin that 
 he can " read a picture to you as, if Mr Spurgeon 
 knew anything about art, Mr Spurgeon would read 
 it, — that is to say, from the plain, common-sense 
 Protestant side ; " or when I learn from the works 
 of Mr George Moore that Sir Frederick Burton 
 made of the National Gallery a Museum ; or when 
 one complains of a picture that it is not didactic, 
 and another that it holds a thought, I make haste to 
 laugh lest I should do wrong to Tuscany, that looked 
 upon the world to love it : for she saw that it was 
 very good.
 
 Ill 
 
 Of Sheep-Shearers 
 
 Scene — Florence : the nave of the Duomo. 
 Smeralda, Bernardo. 
 
 Smer. High doctrine, Lord Bernardo. See you 
 that country girl yonder ? 
 
 Ber. Surely. The little wistful mother spying for 
 God in her first-born. Well ? 
 
 Smer. Has there been any trifling there, think you ? 
 
 Ber. Truth, Madam, I cannot tell. 'Tis very like, 
 God knows. Woman gives and man's a knave, 
 often as not. Yet we in Genoa have Mother- 
 hood in high esteem. We hold it covereth 
 sin, — or, indeed, lifteth out of the fumes of it. 
 The theme is sorry — sorry. I beseech you 
 pass it by. 
 
 Smer. In Florence we indite sonnets to such themes, 
 wherein sorrow doth breed a curious hankering 
 after secrets. O, the plague-spot ! Save you, 
 gentlemen. 
 
 Enter Agnolo Po/iziano and Luca Signorelli. 
 
 Carry your cross thither, Bernardo. They 
 will at least set it square on your shoulders. 
 3°
 
 Of Sbeep-Shearers 3 1 
 
 Agn. I kiss your hands, Madonna. Signor Bernardo, 
 I stand as one who would serve you where he 
 might. Master Luca, you must know this 
 gentleman, the Count Bernardo, potent in 
 Genoa. 
 
 Luca. Does Genoa, then, hatch arrows ? 
 
 Ber. Oh, expound, sir, expound ! Genoa does not 
 hatch answers to riddles. 
 
 Luca. Are you brother to that shaft of beauty that 
 late transfixed us ? You are marvellous alike 
 in bearing. 
 
 Smer. Such homage should move you, my lord. 
 Here is another devotee. 
 
 Ber. Ah ! I thank you, worthy sir, for that excel- 
 lent lady. I dare not claim her kindred. 
 
 Luca. You might claim to a better purpose than a 
 blood-tie, young lord, with your look of ask- 
 and-have, your breadth of thorax. Best catch 
 the hour, best catch the hour : we've gallants- 
 in Florence apt to the trick of it. My Agnolo, 
 you have seen this shapely maid ? I tell you a 
 flush'd goddess. Fire from heaven ! Would 
 I had the painting of her. You should not 
 miss the goddess, I engage. 
 
 Smer. Would you set her up a goddess to the life ? 
 To the tumbling of her shift ? 
 
 Luca. Madam Smeralda, I would paint the god in 
 the life of her, in the youth and ardour of her. 
 "Ye shall be as gods," quoth the book. I 
 tell you, gods are ye already, you clean-limbed 
 striplings. And as such I could depict you
 
 J2 Earthwork out of Tuscany : 
 
 and no other man breathing. There's a man 
 now in our city — I think Pieve had the hatch- 
 ing of him, and Perugia 'twas taught him to 
 fly — who will limn your gods as men, a trick 
 proper enough for a chapter of nuns. For 
 me, I take no such journeyman work. An 
 explorer am I, anatomist, leech as my patron 
 was, good Luke of Galilee. For, look you, 
 I will apply my simples to your frame, smear 
 you from crown to base, and draw you thence 
 a clean god from what was most vile man. 
 Witchery ? No ; but a knack of judgment ; a 
 kind of bargaining between my hand and pair 
 of eyes. Call me exorcist, diviner, as you will, 
 I say I am a sheep-shearer. For the painter's 
 craft is not to add but to shred away. Do 
 you take me there, Master Genoese ? 
 
 Ber. In part, sir, in part. You are, as I conceive, 
 a delver like good Master Adam, our honest 
 parent. I could wish you delve to as true 
 purpose. You have a fellow god-finder, I hear, 
 in one Sandro, a painter of a good conceit. 
 
 Litca. 'Tis a dreamer, sir, believe me, a dreamer of 
 virgin nights, who knows not the oracle of a 
 tense muscle nor the right equivalent of a hairy 
 chest. His gods are of the cloister, and his 
 goddesses have the vapours of a long-legged 
 girl belated in the nursery : they are all for your 
 tremors and swoonings, your lingering fingering 
 embracements of bosom friends. Aphroditissa ! 
 Bones of me, shall Aphrodite languish in a
 
 Of Sheep-Shearers t>3 
 
 skimpy skirt ! Yet, if you'll believe me, I can 
 tell you this for sure. Giuliano Medici met 
 with me yesterday a-mid-bridge, and " Know 
 you ought against our Sandro ? " says he. I 
 tell him what I tell you now, he's a great 
 painter of conceits, one that will read you a 
 whole pandect of philosophy into a Pan and 
 Syrinx. The last thing that was there, I 
 might think — 
 
 Agn. Nay, friend Luca, you are out there. For 
 what saith Metrodorus Olympiades in his 
 Syntagma, the thirty-fifth book ? I hold you 
 convicted of sin. 
 
 Luca. Alas, that the chaff of the schools should 
 dusty the lips kissed by Apollo and the Nine ! 
 Your lore shall choke your lyre. Well, well ! 
 Where was I ? Oh, Sandro ! " 'Tis the man 
 for me ! " he cries, kindling. " He shall 
 frame me a Venus that shall speak. For look 
 you, Luca," ran he on, being as it were easy 
 in my company, " I do intend it a tribute to a 
 noble lady from the Sea, and would have it speak 
 the mind of Florence to her." " Sir," say I — 
 
 Smer. Now, my lord, now ! 
 
 Luca. But may I never speak ! " Sir," I say, 
 " you will perchance honour your lady friend 
 where you may cheapen my art. For believe 
 me, sir" — and I spoke him stout and plain! — 
 " Your piece that is contrived for pander had 
 been better scratched on a posy-ring or hid in 
 a nosegay ! "
 
 34 Earthwork out of Tuscany 
 
 Ber. You cut him deep, sir. 
 
 Luca. Did I not so ? Oh, I go far, I go far ! 
 Yet is that Sandro a draftsman of great parts 
 and most exuberant spirit. If he would dream 
 less and live more, he would be king of a brush 
 that would serve him, when he was minded, to 
 flights in the air. As it is, he finds mind the 
 choicer part of his matter, and will feed eagerly 
 thereon. But 'tis a food will give him the 
 cholick and his pieces the blotch. Do I speak 
 plain enough ? 
 
 Ber. Truly, sir, you have spoken like an old ac- 
 quaintance. To meet again, sir, as I must 
 hope. 
 
 Smer. Fare you heartily well, Master Luca. We 
 must leave you to ponder muscles * and the 
 significance of brawn i' the back. [They pass. 
 
 Luca. Lovely lady, I will ponder honesty and the 
 right intention of a speaking eye. A Circe 
 prowls the strand ! Proper for it. 
 
 Agn. And the straight young Genoese ? 
 
 Luca. Lo you ! Odysseus or a pig ? Come, my 
 Agnolo ; no stuff for our anvil. 
 Exeunt.
 
 w 
 
 A Sacrifice at Prato 
 
 (From a recovered narrative) 
 
 The rim of the sun was burning the hill tops, and 
 already the vanguard of his strength stemming the 
 morning mists, when I and my companion first trod 
 the dust of a small town which stood in our path. 
 It still lay very hard and white, however, and 
 sharply edged to its girdle of olives and mul- 
 berry trees drenched in dews, a compactly folded 
 town well fortified by strong walls and many towers, 
 with the mist upon it and softly over it like a veil. 
 For it lay well under the shade of the hills awaiting 
 the sun's coming. In the streets, though they were 
 by no means asleep, but, contrariwise, busy with the 
 traffic of men and pack-mules, there was a shrewd 
 bite as of night air ; looking up we could perceive 
 how faint the blue of the sky was, and the cloud- 
 flaw how rosy yet with the flush of Aurora's beauty- 
 sleep. Therefore we were glad to get into the 
 market-place, filled with people and set round with 
 goodly brick buildings, and to feel the light and 
 warmth steal about our limbs. 
 
 "It would seem fitting," said I, "seeing that 
 day is at hand and already we enjoy the first-fruits 
 
 35
 
 36 Earthwork out of Tuscany : 
 
 of his largess, that we should seek, some neighbouring 
 shrine where we might praise the gods. For never 
 yet was land that had not, as its fairest work, gods : 
 and in a land so fair as this there must needs be gods 
 yet fairer, and shrines to case them in." This I 
 said, having observed pious offerings laid upon the 
 shrines of divers gods by the road. At the* which, 
 looking curiously, it seemed to me that the inhabit- 
 ants of this country were favoured above the common 
 with devout thoughts and the objects of them — gods 
 and goddesses. You might not pass a farm without 
 its tutelary altar to the genius of the place, some 
 holy shade, or — as she was figured as a matron — 
 some great land-goddess, perhaps Cybele, or the 
 Bona Dea ; and pleasant it was to me to see that 
 the tufts of common flowers set before her were for 
 the most part smiling and fresh with the dew that 
 assured an early gathering. In the streets of the 
 city, moreover, I had seen many more such, slight 
 affairs (it is true) of painted earthenware, some 
 gaudily adorned with green and yellow colour and of 
 workmanship as raw, some painted flat on the wall 
 of a recess (in which was more skill, though the 
 device was often gross enough — to dwell upon death 
 and despair), and some again of choice beauty both 
 of form and colour and a most rare blitheness, as it 
 might be the spirit of the contrivers breaking through 
 the hard stone. And all of these I knew to be 
 gods, but the devices upon them were hard to be 
 read, or approved. There was a naked youth pierced 
 with arrows, wherein the texture of smooth flesh
 
 A Sacrifice at Prato 37 
 
 accorded not well with the bitterness of his hurt ; a 
 young man also, bearded, of spare and mournful 
 habit and girt with a rope round his middle ; in his 
 hands were wounds, as again of arrows, and there 
 was a rent in his garment where a javelin had torn 
 1 a way into his side. Such suffering of wounds and 
 
 broken flesh stared sharply up against the young 
 flowers and grasses which spoke of healthy wind 
 and rain and a sun-kissed earth. Goddesses also 
 I saw — a virgin of comely red and white visage ; 
 yellow-haired she was, crowned like a king's daughter; 
 at her side a wheel, cruelly spiked on the outer edge 
 and not easily to be related to so heartsome a maid. 
 But before them all (with one grim exception, to 
 be sure) I saw the Earth-Mother who had been 
 upon the farm and homestead-walls, of the same 
 high perfection of form, and in raiment stately and 
 adorned, yet (it would seem) something sorrowful 
 as she might mourn the loss of lover or young child. 
 Now the darkest sight I saw was that exception 
 before rehearsed ; and it was this. A black cross 
 stood in the most joyful places of the city, and one 
 suffered upon it to very death. Whereat I mar- 
 velled greatly, saying, " Who is the man thus 
 tormented whom the people worship as a god ? " 
 And my companion answered, 
 
 " A great god he is, if the country report lie not, 
 and has many names which amount to this, that he 
 has freed this nation from bondage and died that he 
 may live again, and they too. And of the truth of 
 what they say 1 cannot speak ; but I think he is
 
 38 Earthwork out of Tuscany 
 
 Bacchus the Redeemer, who, as you, Balbus, know, 
 was no wanton reveller in lasciviousness, but a very 
 god of great benevolence and of wisdom truly dark 
 and awful. Who also took our mortal nature upon 
 him and suffered in the shades : rising whence (for 
 he was god and man) like the dawn from the night's 
 bosom, or the flooding of spring weather from the 
 iron gates of winter, he sped over land and sea, 
 touching earth and the dwellers upon it. And to 
 those he touched tongues were given and sooth- 
 saying, and to many the transports of inspiration 
 and divine madness, as of poets and rhapsodists. 
 And tragedy and choral odes are his, and the 
 furious splendour of dances. But of the worship 
 of Dionysus you know something, having been at 
 Eleusis and beheld the holy mysteries. 
 
 " Now the god of this people has the same gift 
 of tongues and madness of possession. To him are 
 also sacred priests of the oracle, and high tragedies, 
 and the wailing of music, and streaming processions of 
 virgins and young boys. He too agonised and arose 
 stronger and more shining than before, dying, in- 
 deed, and rising at the very vernal equinox we 
 have mentioned. He too is worshipped in certain 
 Mysteries whereat the confession of iniquity and the 
 cleansing of hearts come first : and the sacrifice is 
 just that wheaten cake and fruit of the vine whereof, 
 at Eleusis, you have praised to me the simplicity and 
 ethic beauty. And he can inspire his devotees 
 with frenzy. For I have heard that certain men of 
 the country, on a day, and urged by his dsemon, run
 
 A Sacrifice at Prato 39 
 
 naked from place to place in honour of him, lashing 
 their bare backs with ox-goads ; and will fast by 
 the week together, they and the women alike ; and 
 that pious virgins, under stress of these things, swoon 
 and are floated betwixt earth and heaven, and after- 
 wards relate their blissful encounters and prophesy 
 strange matters ; receiving also dolorous wounds 
 (which nevertheless are very sweet to them) like to 
 the wounds which he himself received unto death ; 
 and all these things they endure because they are 
 mystically fraught with the wisdom and efficacy of 
 the god. Nay, I have been told that in the parts 
 over sea, towards the North and West, he is wor- 
 shipped, just as at Eleusis, with pipes and timbrels and 
 brazen cymbals and all excess of music ; and there 
 they dance in his service and surfer • the ecstasies 
 of the Masnads and Corybants in the Dionysiac 
 revel. But this I find quaint to be believed." 
 
 Now when I had heard so much, I was the 
 more desirous to find some temple where I 
 could observe the cult of this wounded god, and 
 so sought counsel of my friend versed in the 
 people's learning. To my questioning he replied 
 that it would be easy. We were (said he) in the 
 market - place among the buyers and chafferers 
 of fruit, vegetables, earthenware, milk, eggs, and 
 such country produce ; which honest folk, it being 
 the hour of the morning sacrifice and the temple 
 facing us, would soon abandon their brisk toil for 
 religion's sake ; whereupon we too would go. So 
 I looked across the square and saw a very fair
 
 4° Earthwork out of 'Tuscany 
 
 building, lofty and many windowed, all of clean 
 white marble, banded over with bars of a smooth 
 black stone, curiously carved, moreover, in sculp- 
 tured work of gods and men and of flowers and 
 fruits — all cut in the pure marble. At one side 
 was a noble rostrum, of the like fine stone, where- 
 on young boys and girls, as it were fauns and dryads 
 and other woodland creatures, capered as they list : 
 and above the midmost door a semi-circle of pale 
 blue enamel, whereon was the image of the Great 
 Goddess in gleaming white. She was of smiling 
 debonnair countenance and in the full pride of her 
 blossom-time — being as a young woman whose 
 girdle is new loosed to the will of her lord — and 
 in her arms was a naked child, finely wrought to 
 the size of life. On either side of her a beautiful 
 youth (in whom I must needs admire the smooth- 
 ness of their chins and the bravery of their vesture 
 shining in the clear light), did reverence to the 
 Goddess and the child : and there were beings, 
 winged like birds, with the faces of strong boys, 
 but no bodies at all that I could see, who flew 
 above them all. This was brave work, very 
 wonderful to me in a people who, thus excellently 
 inspired and having such comely smiling divinities 
 and so clear a vision of them before their eyes, 
 could yet be curious after suffering heroes and 
 stabbed virgins and gods with mangled limbs. But 
 we went into the temple with the good people of 
 the country-side to the sound of bells from a high 
 tower hard by. And I was something surprised
 
 A Sacrifice at Prato 41 
 
 that they brought no beasts with them for the 
 sacrifice, nor any of the fruits which were so 
 abundant in the land ; but my companion reminded 
 me again that the sacrifice was ready prepared 
 within, and was, as it were, emblematical of all 
 fruits and every sort of meat, being that wine and 
 bread into which you may comprehend all bodily 
 and (by a figure) ghostly sustenance. By this we 
 were within the temple, which I now perceived was 
 a pantheon, having altars to all the gods, some only 
 of whose shrines I had remarked on the way thither. 
 Dark and lofty it was, with piered arches that 
 soared into the mist, and jewelled windows pain- 
 fully worked in histories and fables of old time : — 
 all as far apart as conceivably might be from the 
 holy places of my own country ; for whereas, with 
 us, the level gaze of the sun is never absent, and 
 through the colonnades you would see stretches of 
 the far blue country, or, perchance, the shimmer of 
 the restless sea, here no light of day could pene- 
 trate, and all the senses might apprehend must be 
 of solemn darkness, longing thoughts to cleave it, 
 and, afar off and dim, some flutter of even light as 
 of blest abodes. A strange people ! to despise the 
 sure and fair, for the taunting shadows of desire. 
 But, growing more familiar in the middle of new- 
 ness and the awe that comes of it, I was again 
 amazed at the number of the gods, their nature and 
 sort. I saw again the arrow-stricken youth, whom 
 we call Asclepius (but never knew thus tormented 
 — as with his father's arrows ! ) and again the
 
 42 Earthwork out of Tuscany 
 
 Maid of the Wheel, Fortune as I suppose : but 
 with us the wheel is not so manifestly bitter. Then 
 also the wounded hero, cowled and corded, ragged 
 exceedingly, the like of whom we have not, unless 
 it be some stripling loved by an immortal and 
 wounded to death by grudging Fate, as Atys or 
 Adonis. And if, indeed, this were one of them, 
 the image-maker did surely err in making him of so 
 vile a presence — a thing against all likelihood tha.t 
 the gods, being themselves of super-excellent shapeli- 
 ness, should stoop to anything of less favour. Yet 
 he was of singular sweetness in his pains, and high 
 fortitude : and he was much loved of the people, as 
 I afterwards learned. And one was a young knight, 
 winged and with a sword in his hand ; at his feet 
 a grievous worm of many folds. This I must take 
 for Perseus but that his radiancy did rather point 
 him for Phoebus, the lord of days and the red sun. 
 But in the centre of the whole temple was an altar, 
 high and broad, fenced about with steps and a rail, 
 which I took to be made unto the god of gods or 
 perhaps the king of that country, until I saw the 
 black cross and the Agonist hanging from it as one 
 dead. Then I knew that the chief god of this 
 people was Dionysus the Redeemer, if it were 
 really he. But I had reason to alter my opinion 
 on that matter as you shall hear. 
 
 By this the temple was filled with the country 
 folk who flocked in with the very reek of their toil 
 upon them and hardly so much as their implements 
 and marketable wares left behind. They were of all
 
 A Sacrifice at Prato 43 
 
 ages and conditions, both youths and maids, arrowy, 
 tall and open-eyed ; and aged ones there were, 
 bowed by labour and seamed with the stress of 
 weather or the assaults of unstaying Fate : whereof, 
 for the most part, the women sat down against the 
 wall and plied dextrously their fans ; but the men 
 stood leaning against the pillars which held the 
 timbers of the roof. And they conversed easily 
 together, and some were merry, and others, as I 
 could perceive, beset with affairs of government or 
 business — for they talked more vehemently of these 
 matters than of others, as men will, even beneath the 
 very eyelids of the god. And so I could under- 
 stand that this sacrifice was not the yearly celebrating 
 of high mysteries, but the common piety of every 
 day with which it is rather seemly than essential we 
 should begin our labouring. There were, indeed, 
 signs in the apparelling of the temple that more 
 solemn festivals were sometimes held, as the delivery 
 of oracles, the calculation of auspices and such like : 
 that, at least, I took to be the intention of small 
 recesses along the walls, that, through a grating of 
 fine brass, a priest of the sanctuary uttered the wisdom 
 of the god in sentences which the meaner sort should 
 fit with what ease they might to their circumstances. 
 For, I suppose, it is still found good that the dark 
 saying of the Oracle should be illumined by the 
 subtlety of the initiate and not by the necessities of 
 the simple. And while I was thus musing I found 
 the ministrants in shining white about the great altar, 
 busied with the preparation for the rite, lighting
 
 44 Earthwork out of Tuscany : 
 
 the torches (very inconsiderable for so large a 
 building, but, mayhap, proportionate to the condition 
 of the people) : and they placed a great book upon 
 the altar, and bowed themselves ere they left. And 
 soon afterwards, to the ringing of a bell, came the 
 priest's boy carrying the offering of the altar, and the 
 priest himself in stiff garments of white and yellow. 
 
 Now, for the sacrifice, I could not well under- 
 stand it, save that it was very shortly done and 
 with a light heart accepted by the people, who (I 
 thought) held it as of the number of those services 
 whose bare performance is efficacious and wholesome 
 — on account, partly of reverent antiquity and long 
 usage, and partly as having some hidden virtue 
 best known to the god in whose honour it is done. 
 For in my own country, I know well, there were 
 many such rites, whose commission edified the people 
 more than their omission would have dishonoured the 
 god: wise men, therefore, (as priests and philosophers) 
 who would live in peace, bow their bodies by rule, 
 knowing surely that their souls may be bolt upright 
 notwithstanding. So here were many solemn acts 
 which, doubtless, once had some now unfathomable 
 design and purport, diligently rehearsed, while the 
 worshippers gazed about with dull unconcern, or, 
 being young, cast eyes of longing upon the country 
 wenches set laughing and rosy by the wall, or, old, 
 nursed their infirmities. And, on a sudden, a bell 
 rang ; and again rang ; and the packed body of 
 men and women fell upon their faces, and so 
 remained in a horrific silence for a space where a
 
 A Sacrifice at Prato 45 
 
 man might count a score. Thereafter another bell, 
 as of release. So the assembly rose to their feet and, 
 as I saw, swept from their foreheads and breasts the 
 dust of the temple floor. But as soon as it was over, 
 a very old priest came through the press and offered 
 the same sacrifice in a little guarded shrine at the 
 lower end, amid many lamps and wax torches and 
 glittering ornaments. Here was more devotion 
 among the people, indeed a great struggling and 
 elbowing just so as to touch the altar, or the steps 
 of it, or the priest's hem, or even the rails which 
 fenced the shrine. And with some show of good 
 reason was this hubbub, as I learned. For here was 
 indeed treasured the Girdle of Venus (this being her 
 very sanctuary) and as much desired as ever it was 
 by women great with child or wanting to conceive. 
 And I looked very curiously upon it, but the Girdle 
 I could never see ; only there was a painted image 
 over the altar of the great queen-mother, Venus 
 Genetrix herself, depicted as a broad-browed, placid 
 matron giving of the fruits of her bounteous breasts 
 to a male child. Then 1 knew that this was that 
 same Goddess who stood over the outer door of the 
 place, and was well pleased to find that the people, 
 howsoever ignorantly, adored the power that en- 
 wombs the world — Venus, the life-bringer and 
 quickener of things that breathe, — and could, in this 
 matter, touch hearts with the wise. So with this 
 thought, that truly God was one and men divers, I 
 came out of the temple well pleased, into the level 
 light of the day's beam.
 
 46 Earthwork out of 'Tuscany 
 
 In the tavern doorway, under a bush of green 
 ilex, we sat down in company to eat bread and 
 peaches sopped in the wine of the country, and 
 talked very briskly of all the things we had seen and 
 heard. And soon into the current of our discourse 
 was drawn a dark-faced youth, who had been 
 observing us earnestly for some time from under his 
 hanging brows, and who, growing mighty curious 
 (as I find the way of them is), must know who and 
 whence we were and of what belief and condition in 
 the world. So when I had satisfied him, " Turn for 
 turn," said I, " my honest friend : being strangers, 
 as you have learned, we have seen many things 
 which touch us nearly, and some which are hard of 
 reading. But this very reading is to us of high 
 concernment, for these matters relate to religion, and 
 religion, of what sort soever it may be, no man can 
 venture to despise. For certain I am, that, as a 
 man hath never seen the gods, so he may never be 
 sure that he hath ever conceived them, even darkly, 
 as in a mirror. For we are dwellers in a cave, my 
 friend, with our backs to the light, and may not tell 
 of a truth whether the shadows that flit and fade be 
 indeed gods or no. Tell me, therefore, (for I am 
 puzzled by it) is the goddess whose presentment I 
 yet see over your temple-porch, that Mother of gods 
 and men, yea, even Mother of life itself, to whom 
 we also bend the neck ? " 
 
 " She is, sir, as we believe, Mother of God ; 
 and therefore, God being author of life, Mother of 
 life and all things living."
 
 A Sacrifice at Prato 47 
 
 << 
 
 It is as I had believed," said I, "and you, 
 young sir, and I, may bow together in that temple of 
 hers without offence. For the temple is to her 
 honour as I conceive ? " 
 
 "Why, yes," he answered, "it is raised to her 
 most holy name and to that of our Lord." 
 
 "And your Lord, who is this? and which altar 
 is his ? For there were many." 
 
 " The great altar is his, and indeed he is to be 
 worshipped in all," said the young man. 
 
 " He is then the tortured god, whose semblance 
 hangs upon the black cross ? " 
 "He is." 
 
 Then I begged him to tell me why these mournful 
 images were scattered over his goodly earth, these 
 maimed gods, this blood and weeping ; but I may 
 not set down all that he told me seeing that much 
 of it was dark, and much, as I thought, not pertinent 
 to the issue. Much again was said with his hands, 
 which I cannot interpret here. Suffice it that I 
 learned this concerning the Agonist, that he was the 
 son of the goddess and greater than she, though in a 
 sense less. Mortal he was, and immortal, abject to 
 look upon, being indeed accounted a malefactor and 
 crucified like a thief; and yet a king of men, speak- 
 ing wisdom whereof the like hath hardly been heard. 
 For of two things he taught there would seem to 
 be no bottom to them, so profound and unsearch- 
 able they are. And one of them was this, — " The 
 kingdom is within you " (or some such words) ; 
 and the other was, " Who will lose his life shall
 
 4.8 Earthwork out of Tuscany 
 
 save it." Whereof, methinks, the first comprehends 
 all the teaching of the Academy and the second that 
 of the Porch. So this man must needs have been 
 a god, and whether the son or no of the Soul of the 
 World, greater than she. For what she did, as it 
 were by necessity and her blind inhering power, he 
 knew. Therefore he must have been Wisdom itself. 
 And thus I knew that he could not be Dionysus the 
 Saviour, though he might have many of his attributes ; 
 nor simply that son of Venus whom Ausonius alone 
 of our poets saw fastened to a cross. So at last, " I 
 will tell you," said I, " who this god really is, as it 
 seems to me. Being of vile estate and yet greatest 
 of all; being mortal and yet immortal, god and man; 
 being at once most wise and most simple, and (as 
 such his condition imports) intermediate between 
 Earth and Heaven, he must needs be the Divine 
 Eros, concerning whom Plato's words are yet with 
 us. So I can understand why he is so wise, why he 
 suffers always, and yet cannot be driven by torment 
 nor persuaded by sophisms to cease loving. For the 
 necessity of love is to crave ever ; and he is Love 
 himself. Wherefore I am very sure he can lead 
 men, if they will, from the fair things of the world 
 to those infinitely fairer things in themselves whereby 
 what we now have are so very fair to see. And he 
 may well be son of this goddess and nourished by 
 her milk ; for it behoves us that a god should stand 
 between Earth and Heaven and be compact of the 
 elements of either, so that he should condescend the 
 wisdom of his head to instruct the clemency of his
 
 A Sacrifice at Prato 40 
 
 heart. And we know, you and I, that the gods are 
 but attributes of God, whose intellect (as I say) 
 may well be in Heaven, but his heart is in the Earth, 
 and is the core of it. For so we say of the poet 
 that his heart is ever in his fair work." 
 
 Thus we took our wine and were well content to 
 sit in the sunshine.
 
 V 
 
 Of Poets and Needlework 
 
 The man of our time to class poetry as a thing very 
 pleasant and useful shall hardly be found. At most 
 the saying will suffer reprint as a quaintness, a freak, 
 or a paradox ; and so it has proved. From Prato, 
 dusty little city of mid-Tuscany, and with the im- 
 press of its Reale Orfanotrofio (nourisher, it would 
 thus appear, of more Humanities than one) comes 
 an " Opera Nova, nella quale si contengono bellissime 
 historie, contrasti, lamenti et Jrottole, con alcune can." 
 %oni a ballo, strambotti, geloghe, farse, capitoli e 
 bazellette di piu eccellenti autorl. Aggiuntevi as sal 
 tramutationi, villanelle alia napolitana, sonetti alia 
 bergamasca et mariazi alia povana, indovinelli, ritoboli 
 e passerotti ; " cosa, this legend goes on to say, molto 
 piacevole et utile. This is, no doubt, rococo, and at 
 best a pitiful, catchfarthing bit of ancientry : yet it 
 looks back to a time when it was indeed the fact that 
 no choice work could be but useful, and when eyes 
 and ears, as conduits to the soul, had that full of 
 consideration we reserve for mouth and nose, pur- 
 veyors to the belly. 
 
 Vasari, Giorgio, he too, bourgeois though he were, 
 and in so far the best of testimony, knew it when he 
 50
 
 Of Poets and Needlework 5 1 
 
 found Luca's blue and white to be " molto utile per 
 la state." We should say that of an umbrella or of 
 white flannels ; why of milky earthenware or an 
 adroit strambotto ? That marks the cleft, the incur- 
 able gulf of difference between a people like the 
 Tuscans with art in their marrow, and our present 
 selves with our touching reliance upon a most unseemly 
 hunger after facts. I suppose I should be stretching 
 a point if I said that Samson Agonistes was cosa molto 
 piacevole ed utile. And yet I name there a great 
 poem and a weighty, whence the general public suck, 
 or claim to suck, no small advantage. Is it more 
 useful to them than Bradshaw ? I doubt. But here, 
 in this Opera Nova so furthered, are sixty-three 
 little snatches of Luigi Pulci's, eight lines to the 
 stave, about the idlest of make-believe love affairs, 
 full of such Petrarchisms as " Gl' occhi tuoi belli son 
 li crudel dardi," or 
 
 " Tu m'ai trafitto il cor ! donde io moro, 
 Se tu, iddea, non mi dai aiutoro." — 
 
 the merest commonplaces of gallantry : called on 
 what account by their contrivers molto utile ? 
 
 I have urged somewhere else that the Tuscans 
 were inveterate weavers of fancy, choosing what came 
 easiest to hand to weave withal. I dared to see such 
 airy spinning in that Spanish Chapel from which 
 Mr Ruskin has nearly frightened the lovers of Art ; I 
 said that the Summa was to the painters there as good 
 vantage ground as a novel of Sacchetti's. I now say 
 that Luigi Pulci and his kindred so treated the love- 
 lore which was solemn mystery to Guinicelli and
 
 52 Earthwork out of Tuscany 
 
 Lapo and Fazio, or the young Dante shuddering 
 before his lord of terrible aspect. I would add 
 Petrarch's name to this honourable roll if I believed 
 it fitting such a niche ; but I find him the greatest 
 equivocator of them all, and owe him a grudge for 
 making a fifteenth-century Dante impossible. It is 
 true, had there been such a poet we should never 
 have had our Milton ; but that may not serve the 
 Swan of Vauclus as justification for being miserable 
 before a looking-glass, that he starved his grandsons 
 to serve ours. Take him then as a poser : give him, 
 for the argument's sake, Boccace to his company, 
 Cino; give him our Pulci, give him Ariosto, give him 
 Lorenzo, Politian ; give him Tasso for aught I care ; 
 you have no one left. Dante stands alone upon the 
 skyey peaks of his great argument, steadied there 
 and holding his breath, as for the hush that precedes 
 weighty endeavour ; and Bojardo (no Tuscan by 
 birth) stands squarely to the plains, holding out 
 one hand to Rabelais over-Alps and ^another to 
 Boccace grinning in his grave. The fellow is 
 such a sturdy pagan we must e'en forgive him some 
 of his quirks. Italian poesy, poor lady," stript to 
 the smock, can still look honestly out if she have 
 but two such vestments whole and unclouted as 
 the Commedia and the Orlando. Let us look at 
 some of her spoiled bravery. Take up my Opera 
 Nova and pick over Pulci in his lightest mood. I 
 am minded to try my hand for your amusement. 
 
 "Let him rejoice who can; for me, I'd grieve ; 
 Peace be with all ; for me yet shall be war ;
 
 Of Poets and Needlework 53 
 
 Let him that hugs delight, hug on, and leave 
 To me sweet pain, lest day my night shall mar ; 
 I am struck hard; the world, you may believe, 
 Laughs out ; — rejoice, my world ! I'll pet my scar. 
 Rogue love that puttest me to such a pass, 
 They cry thee ' It is well ! ' I sing, ' Alas ! ' " 
 
 Vers de soclete ? No ; too rhetorical : your 
 antithesis gives headaches to fine ladies. Euphuist ? 
 Not in the applied sense : read Shakespere's sonnets 
 in that manner ; or, if you object that Shakespere 
 is too high for such comparisons, read Drummond 
 of Hawthornden. Poetry, which has a soul, we 
 cannot call it. Verse it assuredly is, and of the 
 most excellent. Just receive a quatrain of the pure 
 spring and judge for yourself: 
 
 " Chi gode goda, che pur io stento ; 
 Chi e in pace si sia, ch'io son in guerra ; 
 Chi ha diletto l'habbi, ch'io ho tormento ; 
 Chi vive lieto, in me dolor afferra." 
 
 Balance is there. Vocalization, adjustment of 
 sound, discriminate use of long syllables and short, of 
 subjunctive and indicative moods.* Unpremeditated 
 art it is not : indeed it is craft rather than art ; for 
 Art demands a larger share of soul-expenditure than 
 Pulci could afford. And of such is the delicate 
 ware which Tuscany, nothing doubting, took for 
 
 * More than that : the piece is an excellent example of 
 the skilful use of redundant syllables. It is certain that a 
 study of Italian poetry would help our, too often, tame 
 blank verse to be (however bad otherwise) at least not dull. 
 It might bring it nearer to Milton, as Dante brought Keats. 
 Witness his revision of Hyperion. If the Tuscans over-rated 
 the craft in Poetry ; we assuredly under-rate it.
 
 54 Earthwork out of Tuscany : 
 
 lavoro molto utile. For, believe it or not, of that 
 kind were Delia Robbia's enrichments, Ghirlandajo's 
 frescos, Raphael's Madonnas, and Alberti's broad 
 marble churches : of that kind and of no other ; 
 on a level with the painted lady smiling out of a 
 painted window at Airolo, whose frozen lips assure 
 the traverser of the Saint Gothard that he has 
 passed the ridge and may soon smell the olives. 
 
 Wherein, then, is the use ? Why, it is in the art 
 of it. I will convict you out of Alberti's own 
 mouth, or his biographer's, for he spake it truly. 
 " For he was wont to say," thus runs the passage, 
 " that whatever might be accomplished by the wit 
 of man with a certain choiceness, that indeed was 
 next to the divine." To image the divine, you see, 
 you must accomplish somewhat, scrupulously weigh, 
 select and refuse ; in short adapt exquisitely your 
 means until they are adequate to your ends. And, 
 keeping the eye steadily on that, you might grow to 
 discard solemn ends, or momentous, altogether, until 
 poetry and painting ceased to be arts at all, and 
 must be classed, at best, with needlework. So 
 indeed it proved in the case of poetry. After 
 Politian (who really did catch some echo of other 
 times, and of manners more primal than his own, and 
 did instil something of it in his Orfeo) no poet of 
 Italy had anything serious to say. I doubt it even 
 of Tasso, though Tasso, I know, has a vogue. I 
 except, of course, Michael Angelo, as I have already 
 said ; and I except Boccace and Bojardo. Painting 
 was drawn out of the pit laid privily for her by the
 
 Of Poets and Needlework 55 
 
 sheer necessity of an outlet ; and painting, having 
 much to say, became the representative Italian art. 
 Poetry, the most ancient of them all, as she is the 
 most majestic ; the art which refuses to be taught, and 
 alone of her sisters must be acquired by self-spendi- 
 ture (so that before you can learn to string your 
 words in music you must be shaken with a thought 
 which, to your torturing, you must spoil) ; poetry, 
 at once music and soothsay, knitted to us as touching 
 her common speech, and to the spheres as touching 
 on the same immortal harmonies ; poetry such as 
 Dante's was, was gone from Tuscany, and painting, 
 to her own ruining, reigned instead, drawing in 
 sculpture and architecture to share her kingdom and 
 attributes. Which indeed they did, to their equal 
 detriment and our discouragement that read. 
 
 When I want to see Death in small-clothes 
 bowing in the drawing-room I turn to my Petrarch 
 and open at Sonnet cclxxxii. where it is written 
 how : — 
 
 " It lies with Death to take the beauty of Laura but 
 not the gracious memory of her ; " 
 
 As thus : 
 
 " Now hast thou touch'd thy stretch of power, O Death ; 
 Thy brigandage hath beggar'd Love's demesne 
 And quench'd the lamp that lit it, and the queen 
 Of ail the flowers snapped with thy ragged teeth. 
 Hollow and meagre stares our life beneath 
 The querulous moon, robb'd of its sovereign : 
 Yet the report of her, her deathless mien — 
 Not thine, O churl ! Not thine, thou greedy Death 1 
 They are with her in Heaven, the which her grace. 
 Light some brave light, gladdens exceedingly
 
 56 Earthwork out of Tuscany : 
 
 And shoots chance beams to this our dwelling-place : 
 So art thou swallowed in her victory. 
 And me her beauty whelmed in very sooth, 
 On me that last-born angel shall have ruth." 
 
 Look in vain for the deep heart-cry that voiced 
 Dante's passion in the tremendous statements of 
 this : 
 
 " Beatrice is gone up into high Heaven, 
 The kingdom where the angels are at peace ; 
 And lives with them : and to her friends is dead. 
 Not by the frost of winter was she driven 
 Away, like others ; nor by summer heats ; 
 But through a perfect gentleness, instead. 
 For from the lamp of her meek lowlihead 
 Such an exceeding glory went up hence 
 That it woke wonder in the Eternal Sire, 
 Until a sweet desire 
 Entered Him for that lovely excellence, 
 So that He bade her to Himself aspire ; 
 Counting this weary and most evil place 
 Unworthy of a thing so full of grace." 
 
 (D. G. Rossetti.) 
 
 Now and again it may happen that a poet, ridden 
 by the images of his thought, can " state the facts " 
 and leave the rhyme to chance. The Greeks, to 
 whom facts were rarer and of more significance, one 
 supposes, than they are to us, did it habitually. 
 That is what gives such irresistible import to Homer 
 and to Sophocles. They knew that the adjective 
 is the natural enemy of the verb. The naked act, 
 the bare thought, a sequence of stately-balanced 
 rhythm and that ensuing harmony of sentences, gave 
 their poetry its distinction. They did not wilfully
 
 Of Poets and Needlework ?j 
 
 colour their verse, if they did, as I suppose we must 
 admit, their statues. " Now," says Sir Thomas, 
 "there is a musick wherever there is a harmony, 
 order or proportion ; and thus far we may maintain 
 the musick of the spheres ; for those well-ordered 
 motions, and regular paces, though they give no 
 sound unto the ear, yet to the understanding they strike 
 a note most full of harmony." After the Greeks, 
 Dante, who may have drawn lo bello stile from 
 Virgil, but hardly his great notes, as of a bell, carried 
 on the tradition of directness and naked strength. 
 But Petrarch and after him all Tuscany dallied with 
 light thinking, and beat all the images of Love's 
 treasury into thin conventions. 
 
 Pero, what gentlemen they were, these " ingegni 
 fiorentini," these Tuscan wits! What innate 
 breeding and reticence! What punctilious loyalty 
 to the little observances of literature, of wall-decora- 
 tion, call it, in the most licentiously minded of them! 
 Lorenzo Magnifico was a rake and could write 
 lewdly enough, as we all know. Yet, when he 
 chose, that is when Art bade him, how unerringly 
 he chose the right momentum. His too was " la 
 mente che non erra." I found this of his the other 
 day, and must needs close up my notes with it. 
 The very notion of it was, in his time, a convention : 
 a series of sonnets bound together by an argument : 
 a Vita nuova without its overmastering occasion. 
 Simonetta was dead ; whereupon " tutti i fiorentini 
 ingegni, come si conviene in si pubblica jattura, di- 
 versamente ed avversamente si dolsono, chi in versi,
 
 5 8 Earthwork out of 'Tuscany 
 
 chi in prosa." The poor dead lady was, in fact, 
 a butt for these sharpshooters. But hear Lorenzo. 
 
 " Died, as we have declared, in our city a certain 
 lady, whereby all people alike in Florence were 
 moved to compassion. And this is no marvel, 
 seeing that with all earthly beauty and courtesy she 
 was adorned as, before her day, no other under 
 heaven could have been. Among her other ex- 
 cellent parts, she had a carriage so sweet and 
 winsome that whosoever should have any commerce 
 or friendly dealing with her, straightway fell to 
 believe himself enamoured of her. Ladies also, and 
 all youth of her degree, not only suffered no harbour- 
 age to unkindly thought upon this her eminence over 
 all the rest, nor grudged it her at all, but stoutly 
 upheld and took pleasure in her loveliness and 
 gracious bearing ; and this so honestly that you 
 would have found it hard to be believed so many 
 men without jealousy could have loved her, or so 
 many ladies without envy give her place. So, the 
 more her life by its comely ordering had endeared 
 her to mankind, pity also for her death, for the 
 flower of her youth, and for a beauteousness which 
 in death, it may be, showed the more resplendently 
 than in life, did breed in the heart the smarting of 
 great desire. Therefore she was carried uncovered 
 on the bier from her dwelling to the place of burial, 
 and moved all men, thronging there to see her, to 
 abundant shedding of tears. And in some, who 
 before had not been aware of her, after pity grew 
 great marvel for that she, in death, had overcome
 
 Of Poets and Needlework 59 
 
 that loveliness which had seemed insuperable while 
 she yet lived. Among which people, who before had 
 not known her, there grew a bitterness and, as it 
 were, ground of reproach, that they had not been 
 acquainted with so fair a thing before that hour 
 when they must be shut off from it for ever ; to 
 know her thus and have perpetual grief of her. But 
 truly in her was made manifest that which our 
 Petrarch had spoken when he said, 
 
 'Death showed him lovely in her lovely face.'" 
 
 This is to write like a gentleman and an artist, 
 with ear attuned to the subtlest fall and cadence, 
 with scrupulous weighing of words that their true 
 outline shall hold clear and sharp. It is intarsiatura, 
 skilful and clean at the edges. He goes on to play 
 with his hammered thought, always as delicately and 
 precisely as before. 
 
 " Falling, therefore, such an one to death, all the 
 wits of Florence, as is seemly in so public a calamity, 
 lamented severally and mutually, some in rhyme, 
 some in prose, the ruefulness of it ; and bound them- 
 selves to exalt her excellence each after the contriv- 
 ing of his mind : in which company I, too, must 
 needs be ; I, too, mingle rhymes with tears. So I 
 did in the sonnets below rehearsed; whereof the first 
 began thus : 
 
 'O limpid shining star that to thy beam.' 
 
 " Night had fallen ; together we walked, a dear 
 friend and 1, together talking of our common 
 sorrow : and so speaking, the night being wondrous
 
 60 Earthwork out of 'Tuscany : 
 
 clear, I lifted my eyes to a star of exceeding brilli- 
 ancy, which appeared in the West, of such assured 
 splendour as not alone to excel other stars, but so 
 eagerly to shine that it threw in shadow all the 
 lights of heaven about it. Whereof having great 
 marvel, I turned to my friend, saying — ' We ought 
 not to wonder at this sight, seeing that the soul of 
 that most gentle lady is of a truth either re-informed 
 in this, a new star, or conjoined to shine with it. 
 Wherefore there is no marvel in such exceeding 
 brightness ; and we who took comfort in her living 
 delights, may even now be appeased by her appear- 
 ance in this limpid star. And if our vision for such 
 a light is tender and fragile, we should beseech her 
 shade, that is the god in her, to make us bolder by 
 withholding some part of her beam that we may 
 sometimes look upon her, nor sear our eyes. But, 
 to say sooth, this is no overboldness in her, endowed 
 as she was with all the power of her beauty, that 
 she should strive to shine more excellently that all 
 the other stars, or even yet more proudly with 
 Phcebus himself, asking of him his very chariot, that 
 she, rather, may rule our day. Which thing, if you 
 allow it without presumption in our star, how vilely 
 shows the impertinence of Death to have laid hands 
 upon such loveliness and authority as hers.' And 
 since these my reasonings seemed of the stuff proper 
 for a sonnet, I took leave of my friend and com- 
 posed that one which follows ; speaking in it of the 
 above mentioned star." 
 
 The sonnet is in the right Petrarchian vein, adroit
 
 Of Poets and Needlework 61 
 
 and shallow as you please. With such a preface it 
 could hardly be otherwise ; the invocation of the 
 lady's shade, the twitting of Death (making his 
 Mastership jig to suit their occasions who had of 
 late been in his presence) and the naive acceptance 
 of all gifts as " buona materia a un sonetto." In 
 the end he spins four to her memory ; then finds 
 another lady and doubles all his superlatives for 
 her. For the star, he remembers, may have 
 been Lucifer ; and Lucifer is but herald of the 
 day. To it then ! with all the buona materia 
 a un sonetto the dawn can give you. Thus 
 flourished poetry in the Tuscan quattrocentro ; for 
 Politian was no more poet than Lorenzo, while 
 he was no less dextrous as a rhymer and fashioner 
 of conceits. Not serious ; but piacevole, with an 
 elegantia quadam prope divinum ; therefore molto 
 utile. Pen-work in fact, and kin to needlework. 
 Because Tuscany saw choicely-wrought things 
 pleasing, and pleasant things useful, we of to-day 
 can see Florence as an open-air Museum. But we 
 wrap our own Poets in heavy bindings and let them 
 lie on drawing-room tables in company of Whitaker's 
 Almanac and an album of photographs. Well, 
 well ! We must teach them to say, Pbilistia,'be thou 
 glad of me, I suppose.
 
 VI 
 
 The Soul of a Fact 
 
 In the days when it was verging on a question 
 whether a man could be at the same time a good 
 Christian and an artist, the chosen subjects of 
 painting were significant of the approaching crisis 
 — those glaring moral contrasts in history which, 
 for want of a happier term, we call dramatic. 
 Why this was so, whether Art took a hint from 
 Politics, or had withdrawn her more intimate 
 manifestations to await likelier times, is a question 
 it were long to answer. The subjects, at any rate, 
 were such as the Greeks, with their surer instincts 
 and saving grace of sanity in matters of this kind, 
 either forbore to meddle with or treated as decora- 
 tively as they treated acanthus-wreaths. To-day 
 we call them " effective " subjects ; we find they 
 produce shocks and tremors ; we think it braces 
 us to shudder, and we think that Art is a kind of 
 emotional pill ; we measure Art quantitatively, and 
 we say that we " know what we like." And 
 doubtless there is something piquant in the quivering 
 produced, for example, by the sight of white 
 innocence fluttering helpless in a grey shadow of 
 62 

 
 The Soul of a Fact 63 
 
 lust. In the days when the Bible was still a god 
 that piquancy was found in a Massacre of the 
 Innocents : in our own time we find it in a Faust 
 and Gretchen, in the Dore Gallery, or in the Royal 
 Academy. It was a like appreciation of the 
 certain effect of vivid contrasts as powerful didactic 
 agents (coupled with, or drowning, a something 
 purer and more devout) which had inspired those 
 most beautiful and distinctive of all the symbols 
 of Catholicism, the Adoration of the Kings, the 
 Christ-child cycle, and which raised the Holy 
 Child and Maid-Mother to their place above the 
 mystic tapers and the Cross. Naturally the Old 
 Testament, that garner of grim tales, proved a rich 
 mine : David and Golias, Susanna and the Elders, 
 the Sacrifice of Isaac, Jethro's daughter. But the 
 story of Judith did not come to be painted in 
 Tuscan sanctuaries until Donatello of Florence had 
 first cast her in bronze at the prayer of Cosimo pater 
 patriae. Her entry was dramatic enough at least : 
 Dame Fortune may well have sniggered as she spun 
 round the city on her ball. Cosimo the patriot 
 and his splendid grandson were no sooner dead and 
 their brood sent flying, than Donatello's Judith 
 was set up in the ¥'\?ltl?l as a fit emblem of rescue 
 from tyranny, with the vigorous motto, to make 
 assurance double, " EXEMPLVM SALVTIS 
 PVBLICiE CIVES POSVERE." Savonarola, 
 who knew his Bible, saw here a keener application 
 of Judith's pious sin. A few years later that 
 same Judith saw him burn. Thus, as an incarnate
 
 64 Earthwork out of Tuscany : 
 
 cynicism, she will pass : as a work of art she is 
 admittedly one of her great creator's failures. Her 
 neighbour Perseus of the Loggia makes this only 
 too plain ! For Cellini has seized the right moment 
 in a deed of horror, and Donatello, with all his 
 downrightness and grip of the fact, has hit upon 
 the wrong. It is fatal to freeze a moment of time 
 into an eternity of waiting. His Judith will never 
 strike : her arm is palsied where it swings. The 
 Damoclean sword is a fine incident for poetry ; but 
 Holofernes was no Damocles, and, if he had been, 
 it were intolerable to cast his experience in bronze. 
 Donatello has essayed that thing impossible for 
 sculpture, to arrest a moment instead of denote 
 a permanent attribute. Art is adjectival, is it not, 
 O Donatello ? Her business is to qualify facts, 
 to say what things are, not to state them, to affirm 
 that they are. A sculptured Judith was done not 
 long afterwards, carved, as we shall see, with a 
 burin on a plate : and the man who so carved her 
 was a painter. 
 
 Meantime, pari passu, almost, a painter who was 
 a poet was trying his hand ; a man who knew his 
 Bible and his mythology and was equally at home 
 with either. Perhaps it is not extravagant to say 
 that you cannot be an artist unless you are at home 
 with mythology, unless mythology is the swiftest 
 and most direct expression of your being, so that 
 you can be measured by it as a man is known by 
 his books, or a woman by her clothes, her way of 
 bowing, her amusements, or her charities. For
 
 The Soul of a Fact 6$ 
 
 mythopoeia is just this, the incarnating the spirit 
 of natural fact ; and the generic name of that 
 power is Art. A kind of creation, a clothing 
 of essence in matter, an hypostatising (if you 
 will have it) of an object of intuition within 
 the folds of an object of sense. Lessing did not 
 dig so deep as his Greek Voltaire (whose "dazz- 
 ling antithesis," after all, touches the root of the 
 matter) for he did not see that rhythmic extension 
 in time or space, as the case may be, with all that 
 that implies — colour, value, proportion, all the con- 
 vincing incidents of form — is simply the mode of 
 all arts, the thing with which Art's substance must 
 be interpenetrated, until the two form a whole, 
 lovely, golden, irresistible, and inevitable as Nature's 
 pieces are. This substance, I have said, is the 
 spirit of natural fact. And so mythology is Art 
 at its simplest and barest (where the bodily medium 
 is neither word, nor texture of stone, nor dye), 
 the parent art from which all the others were, so 
 to speak, begotten by man's need. Thus much of 
 explanation, I am sorry to say, is necessary, before 
 we turn to our mytho-poet of Florence, to see 
 what he made out of the story of Judith. 
 
 First of all, though, what has the story of Judith 
 to do with mythology ? It is a legend, one of the 
 finest of Semitic legends ; and between legend and 
 myth there is as great a gulf as between Jew and 
 Greek. I believe there are no myths proper to 
 Israel — I do not see how such magnificent egoists 
 could contract to the necessary state of awe — and 
 
 E
 
 66 Earthwork out of Tuscany : 
 
 do not know that there are any legends proper to 
 Greece which are divorced from real myths. For 
 where a myth is the incarnation of the spirit of 
 natural fact, a legend is the embellishment of an 
 historical event : a very different thing. A natural 
 fact is permanent and elemental, an historical event 
 is transient and superficial. Take one instance out 
 of a score. The rainbow links heaven and earth. 
 Iris then, to the myth-making Greek, was Jove's 
 messenger, intermediary between God and Man. 
 That is to incarnate a constant, natural fact. Plato 
 afterwards, making her daughter of Thaumas, in- 
 carnated a fact, psychological, but none the less 
 constant, none the less natural. But to say, as the 
 legend-loving Jew said, that Noah floated his ark 
 over a drowning world and secured for his posterity 
 a standing covenant with God, who then and once 
 for all set his bow in the heavens ; that is to 
 indicate, somewhere, in the dim backward and 
 abysm of time, an historical event. The rainbow 
 is suffered as the skirt of the robe of Noah, who 
 was an ancestor of Israel. So the Judith poem may 
 be a decorated event, or it may be the barest history 
 in a splendid epical setting : the point to remember 
 is that it cannot be, as legend, a subject for creative 
 art. The artist, in the language of Neo-Platonism, 
 is a demiurge ; he only of men can convert dead 
 things into life. And now we will go into the 
 UfKzi. 
 
 Mr Ruskin, in his petulant-playful way, has 
 touched upon the feeling of amaze most people have
 
 The Soul of a Fact 67 
 
 who look for the first time at Botticelli's Judith 
 tripping smoothly and lightly over the hill-country, 
 her steadfast maid dogging with intent patient eyes 
 every step she takes. You say it is flippant, affected, 
 pedantic. For answer, I refer you to the sage him- 
 self, who, from his point of view — that painting may 
 fairly deal with a chapter of history — is perfectly 
 right. The prevailing strain of the story is the 
 strength of weakness — ex dulci fortitudo, to invert the 
 old enigma. " O God, O my God, hear me also, 
 a widow. Break down their stateliness by the hand 
 of a woman ! " It is the refrain that runs through 
 the whole history of Israel, that reasonable com- 
 placency of a little people in their God-fraught 
 destiny. And, withal, a streak of savage spite : that 
 the audacious oppressor shall be done scornfully to 
 death. There is the motive of Jael and Sisera too. 
 So " she smote twice upon his neck with all her 
 might, and she took away his head from him, and 
 tumbled his body down from the bed." Ho ! what 
 a fate for the emissary of the Great King. Where- 
 fore, once more, the jubilant paradox, "The Lord 
 hath smitten him by the hand of a woman ! " That 
 is it : the amazing, thrilling antithesis insisted on 
 over and over again by the old Hebrew bard. 
 " Her sandals ravished his eyes, her beauty took his 
 mind prisoner, and the fauchion passed through his 
 neck." That is the leit-motif: Sandro the poet 
 knew it perfectly well and taught it to the no small 
 comfort of Mr Ruskin and his men. Giuditta, 
 dainty, blue-eyed, a girl still and three years a widow,
 
 68 Earthwork out of 'Tuscany 
 
 flits homeward through a spring landscape of grey 
 and green and the smile of a milky sky, being her- 
 self the dominant of the chord, with her bough 
 of slipt olive and her jagged scimitar, with her 
 pretty blue fal-lals smocked and puffed, and her 
 yellow curls floating over her shoulders. On her 
 slim feet are the sandals that ravished his eyes ; 
 all her maiden bravery is dancing and fluttering 
 like harebells in the wind. Behind her plods the 
 slave-girl folded in an orange scarf, bearing that 
 shapeless, nameless burden of hers, the head of the 
 grim Lord Holofernes. Oh, for that, it is the 
 legend itself! For look at the girl's eyes. What 
 does their dreamy solemnity mean if not " the Lord 
 hath smitten him by the hand of a woman " ? One 
 other delicate bit of symbolising he has allowed him- 
 self, which I may not omit. You are to see by 
 whom this deed was done : by a woman who has 
 unsexed herself. Judith is absorbed in her awful 
 service : her robe trails on the ground and clings 
 about her knees ; she is unconscious of the hindrance. 
 The gates of Bethulia are in sight ; the Chaldean 
 horsemen are abroad, but she has no anxiety to 
 escape. She is swift because her life just now 
 courses swiftly ; but there is no haste. The maid, 
 you shall mark, picks up her skirts with careful hand, 
 and steps out the more lustily for it. 
 
 So far Botticelli the poet, and so far also Mr 
 Ruskin, reader of pictures. What says Botticelli 
 the painter ? Had he no instincts to tell him that 
 his art could have little to say to a legend ? Or
 
 The Soul of a Fact 69 
 
 that a legend might be the subject of an epic (here, 
 indeed, was an epic ready made), might, under 
 conditions, be the subject of a drama ; but could 
 not, under any conditions, be alone the subject of a 
 picture ? I don't for a moment suggest that he had, 
 or that any artist ever goes to work in this double- 
 entry, methodical way, but are we entitled to say 
 that he was not influenced by his predilections, his 
 determinations as a draughtsman, when he squared 
 himself to illustrate the Bible ? We say that the 
 subject of a picture is the spirit of natural fact. If 
 Botticelli was a painter, that is what he must have 
 looked for, and must have found, in every picture he 
 painted. Where, then, was he to get his natural 
 facts in the story of Judith ? What is, in that story, 
 the natural, essential (as opposed to the historical, 
 fleeting) fact? It is murder. Judith's deed was 
 what the old Scots law incisively calls slauchter. 
 It may be glossed over as assassination or even 
 execution — in fact, in Florence, where Giuliano 
 was soon to be taken off, it did not fail to be so 
 called : it remains, however, just murder. Botti- 
 celli, not shirking the position at all, judged murder 
 to be a natural fact, and its spirit or essence swiftness 
 and stealth. Chaucer, let us note, had been of the 
 same mind : 
 
 " The smyler with the knyf under his cloke," 
 
 and so on, in lines not to be matched for hasty and 
 dreadful suggestion. Swiftness and stealth, the 
 ambush, the averted face and the sudden stab, are
 
 jo Earthwork out of Tuscany 
 
 the standing elements of murder : pare off all the 
 rest, you come down to that. Your staring looks, 
 your blood, your " chirking," are accidentals. 
 They may be there (for each of us carries a carcase), 
 but the horror of sudden death is above them : a 
 man may strangle with his thoughts cleaner than 
 with his pair of hands. And as " matter " is but 
 the stuff wherewith Nature works, and she is only 
 insulted, not defied, when we flout or mangle it, so 
 it is against the high dignity of Art to insist upon 
 the carrion she must use. She will press, here the 
 terror, there the radiance, of essential fact ; she will 
 leave to us, seeing it in her face, to add mentally the 
 poor stage properties we have grown to trust. No 
 blood, if you please. Therefore, in Botticelli's 
 Judith, nothing but the essentials are insisted on : 
 the rest we instantly imagine, but it is not there to 
 be sensed. The panel is in a tremor. So swift 
 and secret is Judith, so furtive the maid, we need 
 no hurrying horsemen to remind us of her oath, — 
 " Hear me, and I will do a thing which shall go 
 throughout all generations to the children of our 
 nation." Sudden death in the air ; nature has been 
 outraged. But there is no drop of blood — the thin 
 scarlet line along the sword-edge is a symbol if 
 you will — the pale head in the cloth is a mere 
 " thing " : yet we all know what has been done. 
 Mr Ruskin is wrong to dwell here upon the heroism 
 of the heroine, the beneficence of the crime, the 
 exhilaration of the patriot; he is traducing the 
 painter by so praising the poet. All those things
 
 The Soul of a Fact n\ 
 
 may be there : and why should they not ? But it is 
 a pity to insist upon them until you have no space 
 for the pictorial something which is there too, and 
 makes the picture. 
 
 Other Judiths there are ; two here, one next door 
 in the Pitti, any number scattered over the galleries 
 of Europe. There are Jacopo Palma of Venice 
 and Allori of Florence who used the old story, 
 the one to perpetuate a fat blonde, the other a 
 handsome actress in a "strong" situation; there is 
 Sodoma ; there are Horace Vernet and the moderns, 
 the Wests and Hay dons of our grandfathers. It 
 is a pet subject of the Salon. These men have 
 vulgarised an epic, and smirched poetry and paint- 
 ing alike for the sake of a tawdry sensation. But 
 enough : let us look at one more. Mantegna's is 
 worth looking at. It is a pen drawing, often re- 
 peated, best known by the fine engraving he finally 
 made of it. I think it is the best murder picture in 
 the world. To begin with the literary interest of 
 the story is practically gone. This wild, terrible, 
 beautiful woman may be Judith if you choose : she 
 might be Medea or Agave, or Salome, or the 
 Lucrezia Borgia of popular fancy and Donizetti. 
 The fact is she is part of a scheme whose object 
 is the aesthetic aspect of murder — murder considered 
 as one of the fine arts. Andrea was able, and I 
 know not that anybody else of his day could have 
 been able, to contemplate murder purely objectively 
 with no thought of its ethical relations. Botticelli 
 had been fired by the heroism and the moral
 
 
 72 Earthwork out of 'Tuscany 
 
 grandeur of the special circumstances of a given 
 case : down they went into his picture with what 
 rightly belonged to it. There is none of that 
 here. And Mantegna makes other distinctions in 
 the field common to both of them. Murder, for 
 him, did not essentially subsist in its shocking 
 suddenness ; it held something more specific, a 
 witchery of its own, a macabre fascination, a 
 mystery. Lionardo felt it when he drew his 
 Medusa : Shelley wrote it down " the tempestuous 
 loveliness of terror." Thus it had, for Mantegna, 
 an unique emotional habit which set it ofF from 
 other vice and gave it a positive, appreciable, aesthetic 
 value of its own. With even more unerrancy than 
 Botticelli, he gripped the adjectival and qualifying 
 function of his art. He saw that crime, too, had its 
 pictorial side. When Keats, writing of the Lamia 
 sloughing her snake-folds, tells us how — 
 
 " She writhed about, convulsed -with scarlet pain ; " 
 
 or when, of organ music, he says — 
 
 " Up aloft 
 The silver, snarling trumpets 'gan to chide," 
 
 he is simply, in his own art and with his proper 
 methods, getting precisely the same kind of effect : 
 he is incarnating the soul of a fact. And so 
 Mantegna, with his Roman kindness for whatever 
 had breath and vigour and boldness of design, 
 carved his Judith on the lines of a Vestal Virgin, 
 and gave her the rapt, daemonic features of the 
 Tragic Muse. And, with his full share of that
 
 'The Soul of a Fact 73 
 
 unhealthy craving for the mere nastiness of crime, 
 that Amina-trait which distinguished the later 
 Empire and its correlate the Renaissance, he drew 
 together the elements of his picture to express an 
 eminently characteristic conception of curious 
 murder. What amplitude of outline ; what severe 
 grace of drapery ! And what mad affectation of 
 attention to the ghastly baggage she is preparing 
 for her flight ! I can only instance for a parallel 
 the pitiful case of the young Ophelia, decked with 
 flowers and weeds, and faltering in her pretty treble 
 songs about lechery and dead bodies. It needs 
 strong men to do these things ; men who have 
 lived out all that the world can offer them of 
 heaven and hell, and, with the tolerance of maturity, 
 are in the mind to see something worth a thought 
 in either. There is in murder something more 
 horrible than blood, — the spirit that breeds blood 
 and plays with it. Wierckz and his kindred of 
 the dissecting-room and accidents'-ward are passed 
 by Mantegna, who gives no vulgar illusion of 
 gaping wounds and jetting blood ; but, instead, holds 
 up to us a beautiful woman daintily fingering a 
 corpse.
 
 VII 
 
 Quattrocentisteria 
 
 [Noiv Sandro Botticelli saw Simonetta in the Spring) 
 
 Up at Fiesole, among the olives and chesnuts which 
 cloud the steeps, the magnificent Lorenzo was enter- 
 taining his guests on a morning in April. The 
 olives were just whitening to silver ; they stretched 
 in a trembling sea down the slope. Beyond lay 
 Florence, misty and golden ; and round about were 
 the mossy hills, cut sharp and definite against a grey- 
 blue sky, printed with starry buildings and sober 
 ranks of cypress. The sun catching the mosaics 
 of San Miniato and the brazen cross on the facade, 
 made them shine like sword-blades in the quiver of 
 the heat between. For the valley was just a lake 
 of hot air, hot and murky — " fever weather," said 
 the people in the streets — with a glaring summer 
 sun let in between two long spells of fog. 'Twas 
 unnatural at that season, via ; but the blessed Saints 
 sent the weather and one could only be careful what 
 one was about at sun-down. 
 
 Up at the Villa, with brisk morning airs rustling 
 overhead, in the cool shades of trees and lawns, 
 it was pleasant to lie still, watching these things, 
 while a silky young exquisite sang to his lute a 
 
 74
 
 Quattrocentisteria nc 
 
 not too audacious ballad about Selvaggia, or Becchina 
 and the saucy Prior of Sant' Onofrio. He sang 
 well too, that dark-eyed boy ; the girl at whose 
 feet he was crouched was laughing and blushing 
 at once; and, being very fair, she blushed hotly. 
 She dared not raise her eyes to look into his, and 
 he knew it and was quietly measuring his strength — 
 it was quite a comedy ! At each wanton refrain 
 he lowered his voice to a whisper and bent a little 
 forward. And the girl's laughter became hysterical ; 
 she was shaking with the effort to control herself. 
 At last she looked up with a sort of sob in her 
 breath and saw his mocking smile and the gleam 
 of the wild beast in his eyes. She grew white, 
 rose hastily and turned away to join a group of 
 ladies sitting apart. A man with a heavy, rather 
 sullen face and a bush of yellow hair falling over 
 his forehead in a wave, was standing aside watching 
 all this. He folded his arms and scowled under 
 his big brows ; and when the girl moved away his 
 eyes followed her. 
 
 The lad ended his song in a broad sarcasm amid 
 bursts of laughter and applause. The Magnificent, 
 sitting in his carved chair, nursed his sallow face 
 and smiled approval. " My brother boasts his in- 
 vulnerability," he said, turning to his neighbour, 
 " let him look to it, Messer Cupido will have him 
 yet. Already, we can see, he has been let into 
 some of the secrets of the bower." The man 
 bowed and smiled deferentially. " Signor Giuliano 
 has all the qualities to win the love of ladies, and
 
 j6 Earthwork out of 'Tuscany 
 
 to retain it. Doubtless he awaits his destiny. The 
 Wise Man has said that " Beauty. . . ." The 
 young poet enlarged on his text with some fire in 
 his thin cheeks, while the company kept very silent. 
 It was much to their liking ; even Giuliano was 
 absorbed ; he sat on the ground clasping one knee 
 between his hands, smiling upwards into vacancy, 
 as a man does whose imagination is touched. 
 Lorenzo nursed his sallow face and beat time to 
 the orator's cadences with his foot ; he, too, was 
 abstracted and smiling. At the end he spoke ; 
 " Our Marsilio himself has never said nobler words, 
 my Agnolo. The mantle of the Attic prophet 
 has descended indeed upon this Florence. And 
 Beauty, as thou sayest, is from heaven. But where 
 shall it be found here below, and how discerned ? " 
 The man of the heavy jowl was standing with 
 folded arms, looking from under his brows at the 
 group of girls. Lorenzo saw everything ; he noticed 
 him. " Our Sandro will tell us it is yonder. The 
 Star of Genoa shines over Florence and our poor 
 little constellations are gone out. Ecco, my Sandro, 
 gravest and hardiest of painters, go summon Madonna 
 Simonetta and her handmaidens to our Symposium. 
 Agnolo will speak further to us of this sovereignty 
 of Beauty." 
 
 The painter bowed his head and moved away. 
 
 A green alley vaulted with thick ilex and myrtle 
 formed a tapering vista where the shadows lay misty 
 blue and pale shafts of light pierced through fitfully. 
 At the far end it ran out into an open space and a
 
 Quattrocentisteria 77 
 
 splash of sunshine. A marble Ganymede with 
 lifted arms rose in the middle like a white flame. 
 The girls were there, intent upon some commerce of 
 their own, flashing hither and thither over the grass 
 in a flutter of saffron and green and crimson. 
 Simonetta — Sandro could see — was a little apart, a 
 very tall, isolated figure, clear and cold in a recess 
 of shade, standing easily, resting on one hip with her 
 hands behind her. A soft, straight robe of white 
 clipped her close from shoulder to heel ; the lines of 
 her figure were thrust forward by her poise. His 
 eye followed the swell of her bosom, very gentle and 
 girlish, and the long folds of her dress falling thence 
 to her knee. While she stood there, proud and 
 remote, a chance beam of the sun shone on her head 
 so that it seemed to burn. " Heaven salutes the 
 Queen of Heaven, — Venus Urania ! " With an 
 odd impulse he stopped, crossed himself, and then 
 hurried on. 
 
 He told his errand to her ; having no eyes for the 
 others. 
 
 " Signorina — I am to acquaint her Serenity that 
 the divine poet Messer Agnolo is to speak of the 
 sovereign power of beauty ; of the Heavenly Beauty 
 whereof Plato taught, as it is believed." 
 
 Simonetta arched a slim neck and looked down at 
 the obsequious speaker, or at least he thought so. 
 And he saw how fair she was, a creature how delicate 
 and gracious, with grey eyes frank and wide, and 
 full red lips where a smile (nervous and a little wist- 
 ful, he judged, rather than defiant) seemed always to
 
 J 8 Earthwork out of Tuscany : 
 
 hover. Such clear-cut, high beauty made him 
 ashamed ; but her colouring (for he was a painter) 
 made his heart beat. She was no ice-bound shadow 
 of deity then ! but flesh and blood ; a girl — a child, 
 of timid, soft contours, of warm roses and blue veins 
 laced in a pearly skin. And she was crowned with 
 a heavy wealth of red-gold hair, twisted in great coils, 
 bound about with pearls, and smouldering like molten 
 metal where it fell rippling along her neck. She 
 dazzled him, so that he could not face her or look 
 further. His eyes dropped. He stood before her 
 moody, disconcerted. 
 
 The girls, who had dissolved their company at his 
 approach, listened to what he had to say linked in 
 knots of twos and threes. They needed no excuses 
 to return ; some were philosophers in their way, 
 philosophers and poetesses ; some had left their lovers 
 in the ring round Lorenzo. So they went down the 
 green alley still locked by the arms, by the waist or 
 shoulders. They did not wait for Simonetta. She 
 was a Genoese, and proud as the snow. Why did 
 Giuliano love her ? Did he love her, indeed ? He 
 was bewitched then, for she was cold, and a brazen 
 creature in spite of it. How dare she bare her neck 
 so ! Oh ! 'twas Genoese. " Uomini senza fede e 
 donne senza vergogna," they quoted as they ran. 
 
 And Simonetta walked alone down the way with 
 her head high ; but Sandro stepped behind, at the 
 edge of her trailing white robe. . . . 
 
 . . . The poet was leaning against an ancient 
 alabaster vase, soil-stained, yellow with age and its
 
 uattrocentisteria to 
 
 long sojourn in the loam, but with traces of its 
 carved garlands clinging to it still. He fingered it 
 lovingly as he talked. His oration was concluding, 
 and his voice rose high and tremulous ; there were 
 sparks in his hollow eyes. . . . "And as this 
 sovereign Beauty is queen of herself, so she is 
 subject to none other, owns to no constraining 
 custom, fears no reproach of man. What she wills, 
 that has the force of a law. Being Beauty, her 
 deeds are lovely and worshipful. Therefore Phryne, 
 whom men, groping in darkness and the dull ways 
 of earth, dubbed courtesan, shone in a Court of Law 
 before the assembled nobles of Athens, naked and 
 undismayed in the blaze of her fairness. And 
 Athens discerned the goddess and trembled. Yes, 
 and more; even as Aphrodite, whose darling she 
 was, arose pure from the foam, so she too came up 
 out of the sea in the presence of a host, and the 
 Athenians, seeing no shame, thought none, but, 
 rather, reverenced her the more. For what shame 
 is it that the body of one so radiant in clear perfec- 
 tions should be revealed ? Is then the garment of 
 the soul, her very mould and image, so shameful ? 
 Shall we seek to know her essence by the garment 
 of a garment, or hope to behold that which really is 
 in the shadows we cast upon shadows ? Shame is 
 of the brute dullard who thinks shame. The evil 
 ever sees Evil glaring at him. Plato, the golden- 
 mouthed, with the soul of pure fire, has said the truth 
 of this matter in his De Republicd, the fifth book, 
 where he speaks of young maids sharing the exercise
 
 8o Earthwork out of Tuscany 
 
 of the Palaestra, yea, and the Olympic contests 
 even ! For he says, ' Let the wives of our wardens 
 bare themselves, for their virtue will be a robe ; and 
 let them share the toils of war and defend their 
 country. And for the man who laughs at naked 
 women exercising their bodies for high reasons, his 
 laughter is a fruit of unripe wisdom, and he himself 
 knows not what he is about ; for that is ever the 
 best of sayings that the useful is the noble and the 
 hurtful the base.' . . ." 
 
 There was a pause. The name of Plato had had 
 a strange effect upon the company. You would 
 have said they had suddenly entered a church and 
 had felt all lighter interests sink under the weight of 
 the dim, echoing nave. After a few moments the 
 poet spoke again in a quieter tone, but his voice had 
 lost none of the unction which had enriched it. . . . 
 " Beauty is queen : by the virtue of Deity, whose 
 image she is, she reigns, lifts up, fires. Let us 
 beware how we tempt Deity lest we perish ourselves. 
 Actseon died when he gazed unbidden upon the 
 pure body of Artemis ; but Artemis herself rayed 
 her splendour upon Endymion, and Endymion is 
 among the immortals. We fall when we rashly 
 confront Beauty, but that Beauty who comes un- 
 awares may nerve our souls to wing to heaven." He 
 ended on a resonant note, and then, still looking out 
 over the valley, sank into his seat. Lorenzo, with 
 a fine humility, got up and kissed his thin hand. 
 Giuliano looked at Simonetta, trying to recall her 
 gaze, but she remained standing in her place, seeing
 
 Qjiattrocentlsteria 8 1 
 
 nothing of her companions. She was thinking of 
 something, frowning a little and biting her lip, her 
 hands were before her ; her slim fingers twisted and 
 locked themselves nervously, like a tangle of snakes. 
 Then she tossed her head, as a young horse might, 
 and looked at Giuliano suddenly, full in the eyes. 
 He rose to meet her with a deprecating smile, cap 
 in hand — but she walked past him, almost brushing 
 him with her gown, but never flinching her full 
 gaze, threaded her way through the group to the 
 back, behind the poet, where Sandro was. He had 
 seen her coming, indeed he had watched her furtively 
 throughout the oration, but her near presence dis- 
 concerted him again — and he looked down. She 
 was strongly excited with her quick resolution ; her 
 colour had risen and her voice faltered when she 
 began to speak. She spoke eagerly, running her 
 words together. 
 
 " Ecco, Messer Sandro," she whispered blushing. 
 " You have heard these sayings. . . . Who is 
 there in Florence like me?" 
 
 " There is no one," said Sandro simply. 
 
 " I will be your Lady Venus," she went on 
 breathlessly. " You shall paint me, rising from 
 the sea-foam. . . . The Genoese love the sea." 
 She was still eager and defiant ; her bosom rose 
 and fell unchecked. 
 
 " The Signorina is mocking me ; it is impossible ; 
 the Signorina knows it." 
 
 " Eh, Madonna ! is it so shameful to be fair — 
 Star of the Sea as your poets sing at evening ? 
 
 F
 
 82 Earthwork out of Tuscany ; 
 
 Do you mean that I dare not do it ? Listen then, 
 Signor Pittore ; to-morrow morning at mass-time 
 you will come to the Villa Vespucci with your 
 brushes and pans and you will ask for Monna 
 Simonetta. Then you will see. Leave it now ; 
 it is settled." And she walked away with her 
 head high and the same superb smile on her red 
 lips. Mockery ! She was in dead earnest ; all her 
 child's feelings were in hot revolt. These women 
 who had whispered to each other, sniggered 
 at her dress, her white neck and her free carriage ; 
 Giuliano who had presumed so upon her candour — 
 these prying, censorious Florentines — she would 
 strike them dumb with her amazing loveliness. 
 They sang her a goddess that she might be flattered 
 and suffer their company : she would show herself 
 a goddess indeed — the star of her shining Genoa, 
 where men were brave and silent and maidens 
 frank like the sea. Yes, and then she would 
 withdraw herself suddenly and leave them forlorn 
 and dismayed. 
 
 As for Sandro, he stood where she had left 
 him, peering after her with a mist in his eyes. 
 He seemed to be looking over the hill-side, over 
 the city glowing afar off gold and purple in the 
 hot air, to Mont' Oliveto and the heights, where 
 a line of black cypresses stood about a low white 
 building. At one angle of the building was a little 
 turret with a belvedere of round arches. The 
 tallest cypress just topped the windows. There 
 his eyes seemed to rest.
 
 Qjiattrocentisteria 83 
 
 // 
 
 At mass-time Sandro, folded in his shabby green 
 cloak, stepped into the sun on the Ponte Vecchio. 
 The morning mists were rolling back under the 
 heat ; you began to see the yellow line of houses 
 stretching along the turbid river on the far side, and 
 frowning down upon it with blank, mud-stained 
 faces. Above, through steaming air, the sky showed 
 faintly blue and a campanile to the right loomed 
 pale and uncertain like a ghost. The sound of 
 innumerable bells floated over the still city. Hardly 
 a soul was abroad ; here and there a couple of dusty 
 peasants were trudging in with baskets of eggs and 
 jars of milk and oil ; a boat passed down to the 
 fishing, and the oar knocked sleepily in the rowlock 
 as she cleared the bridge. And above, on the 
 heights of Mont' Oliveto, the tapering forms of 
 cypresses were faintly outlined — straight bars of 
 shadow — and the level ridge of a roof ran lightly 
 back into the soft shroud. 
 
 Sandro could mark these things as he stepped 
 resolutely on to the bridge, crossed it, and went up 
 a narrow street among the sleeping houses. The 
 day held golden promise ; it was the day of his life ! 
 Meantime the mist clung to him and nipped him ; 
 what had fate in store ? What was to be the issue ? 
 In the Piazza Santo Spirito, grey and hollow- 
 sounding in the chilly silences, his own footsteps 
 echoed solemnly as he passed by the door of the 
 great ragged church. Through the heavy darkness
 
 84 Earthwork out of Tuscany : 
 
 within lights flickered faintly and went ; service was 
 not begun. A drab crew of cripples lounged on the 
 steps yawning and shivering, and two country girls 
 were strolling to the mass with brown arms round 
 each other's waists. When Sandro's footfall 
 clattered on the stones they stopped by the door 
 looking after him and laughed to see his dull face 
 and muffled figure. In the street beyond he heard 
 a bell jingling, hasty, incessant ; and soon a white- 
 robed procession swept by him, fluttering vestments, 
 tapers, and the Host under a canopy, silk and gold. 
 Sandro snatched at his cap and dropped on his 
 knees in the road, crouching low and muttering 
 under his breath as the vision went past. He 
 remained kneeling for a moment after it had gone, 
 then crossed himself — forehead, breast, lip — and 
 hurried forward. . . . He stepped under the 
 archway into the Court. There was a youth with 
 a cropped head and swarthy neck lounging there 
 teazing a spaniel. As the steps sounded on the 
 flags he looked up ; the old green cloak and 
 clumsy shoes of the visitor did not interest him ; he 
 turned his back and went on with his game. Sandro 
 accosted him — Was the Signorina at the house ? 
 The boy went on with his game. " Eh, Diavolo ! 
 I know nothing at all," he said. 
 
 Sandro raised his voice till it rang round the 
 courtyard. " You will go at once and inquire. You 
 will say to the Signorina that Sandro di Mariano 
 Filipepi the Florentine painter is here by her orders; 
 that he waits her pleasure below."
 
 Quattrocentisteria 85 
 
 The boy had got up ; he and Sandro eyed each 
 other for a little space. Sandro was the taller and 
 had the glance of a hawk. So the porter went. . . . 
 
 . . . Presently with throbbing brows he stood on 
 the threshold of Simonetta's chamber. It was the 
 turret room of the villa and its four arched windows 
 looked through a leafy tracery over towards Florence. 
 Sandro could see down below him in the haze the 
 glitter of the Arno and the dusky dome of Brunel- 
 leschi cleave the sward of the hills like a great 
 burnished bowl. In the room itself there was 
 tapestry, the Clemency of Scipio, with courtiers in 
 golden cuirasses and tall plumes, and peacocks and 
 huge Flemish horses — a rich profusion of crimson 
 and blue drapery and stout limbed soldiery. On a 
 bracket, above a green silk curtain, was a silver 
 statuette of Madonna and the Bambino Gesu, with 
 a red lamp flickering feebly before. By the windows 
 a low divan heaped with velvet cushions and skins. 
 But for a coffer and a prayer desk and a curtained 
 recess which enshrined Simonetta's bed, the room 
 looked wind-swept and bare. 
 
 When he entered Simonetta was standing by the 
 window leaning her hand against the ledge for 
 support. She was draped from top to toe in a 
 rose-coloured mantle which shrouded her head like 
 a nun's wimple and then fell in heavy folds to the 
 ground. She flushed as he came in, but saluted him 
 with a grave inclination. Neither spoke. The 
 silent greeting, the full consciousness in each of 
 their parts, gave a curious religious solemnity to the
 
 86 Earthwork out of 'Tuscany 
 
 scene — like some familiar but stately Church mys- 
 tery. Sandro busied himself mechanically with his 
 preparations — he was a lover and his pulse chaotic, 
 but he had come to paint — and when these were 
 done, on tip-toe, as it were, he looked timidly about 
 him round the room, seeking where to pose her. 
 Then he motioned her with the same reverential, 
 preoccupied air, silent still, to a place under the 
 silver Madonna. . . . 
 
 . . . There was a momentary quiver of with- 
 drawal. Simonetta blushed vividly and drooped her 
 eyes down to her little bare foot peeping out below 
 the lines of the rosy cloak. The cloak's warmth 
 shone on her smooth skin and rayed over her cheeks. 
 In her flowery loveliness she looked diaphanous, 
 ethereal ; and yet you could see what a child she 
 was, with her bright audacity, her ardour and her 
 wilfulness flushing and paling about her like the 
 dawn. There she stood trembling on the brink. . . . 
 
 Suddenly all her waywardness shot into her eyes ; 
 she lifted her arms and the cloak fell back like 
 the shard of a young flower ; then, delicate and 
 palpitating as a silver reed, she stood up in the soft 
 light of the morning, and the sun, slanting in be- 
 tween the golden leaves and tendrils, kissed her neck 
 and shrinking shoulder. 
 
 Sandro stood facing her, moody and troubled, 
 fingering his brushes and bits of charcoal ; his shaggy 
 brows were knit, he seemed to be breathing hard. 
 He collected himself with an effort and looked up 
 at her as she stood before him shrinking, awe-struck, 
 panting at the thing she had done. Their eyes met,
 
 Quattrocentisteria 8 7 
 
 and the girl's distress increased ; she raised her hand 
 to cover her bosom ; her breath came in short gasps 
 from parted lips, but her wide eyes still looked 
 fixedly into his, with such blank panic that a sudden 
 movement might really have killed her. He saw 
 it all ; she ! there at his mercy. Tears swam and 
 he trembled. Ah ! the gracious lady ! what divine 
 condescension ! what ineffable courtesy ! But the 
 artist in him was awakened almost at the same 
 moment ; his looks wandered in spite of her piteous 
 candour and his own nothingness. Sandro the poet 
 would have fallen on his face with an " Exi a me, 
 nam peccator sum." Sandro the painter was differ- 
 ent — no mercy there. He made a snatch at a carbon 
 and raised his other hand with a kind of command 
 — " Holy Virgin ! what a line ! Stay as you are, 
 I implore you : swerve not one hair's breadth and 
 I have you for ever ! " There was conquest in his 
 voice. 
 
 So Simonetta stood very still, hiding her bosom 
 with her hand, but never took her watch off the 
 enemy. As he ran blindly about doing a hundred 
 urgent indispensable things, — noting the lights, the line 
 she made, how her arm cut across the folds of the 
 curtain — she dogged him with staring, fascinated eyes, 
 just as a hare, crouching in her form, watches a 
 terrier hunting round her and waits for the end. 
 
 But the enemy was disarmed. Sandro the 
 passionate, the lover, the brooding devotee, was 
 gone ; so was la bella Simonetta the beloved, the 
 be-hymned. Instead, here was a fretful painter, 
 dashing lines and broad smudges of shade on his
 
 88 Earthwork out of Tuscany : 
 
 paper, while before him rose an exquisite, slender, 
 swaying form, glistening carnation and silver, and, 
 over all, the maddening glow of red-gold hair. 
 Could he but catch those velvet shadows, those 
 delicate, glossy, reflected-lights ! Body of Bacchus ! 
 How could he put them in ! What a picture 
 she was! Look at the sun on her shoulder! 
 and her hair — Christ! how it burned! It was 
 a curious moment. The girl who had never 
 understood or cared to understand this humble 
 lover, guessed now that he was lost in the 
 artist. She felt that she was simply an effect 
 and she resented it as a crowning insult. Her 
 colour rose again, her red lips gathered into a 
 pout. If Sandro had but known, she was his 
 at that instant. He had but to drop the painter, 
 throw down his brushes, set his heart and hot 
 eyes bare — to open his arms and she would have 
 fled into them and nestled there ; so fierce was 
 her instinct just then to be loved, she, who had 
 always been loved ! But Sandro knew nothing and 
 cared nothing. He was absorbed in the gracious 
 lines of her body, the lithe long neck, the drooping 
 shoulder, the tenderness of her youth ; and then 
 the grand open curve of the hip and thigh on 
 which she was poised. He drew them in with a 
 free hand in great sweeping lines, eagerly, almost 
 angrily ; once or twice he broke his carbon and — 
 body of a dog ! — he snatched at another. 
 
 This lasted a few minutes only : even Simonetta, 
 with all her maiden tremors still feverishly acute,
 
 Qjiattroce?itisteria 89 
 
 hardly noticed the flight of time ; she was so hot 
 with the feeling of her wrongs, the slight upon her 
 victorious fairness. Did she not knoiv how fair 
 she was ? She was getting very angry ; she had 
 been made a fool of. All Florence would come 
 and gape at the picture and mock her in the 
 streets with bad names and coarse gestures as she 
 rode by. She looked at Sandro. Santa Maria ! 
 how hot he was ! His hair was drooping over 
 his eyes ! He tossed it back every second ! And 
 his mouth was open, one could see his tongue 
 working ! Why had she not noticed that great 
 mouth before ? 'Twas the biggest in all Florence. 
 O ! why had he come ? She was frightened, re- 
 morseful, a child again, with a trembling pathetic 
 mouth and shrinking limbs. And then her heart 
 began to beat under her slim fingers. She pressed 
 them down into her flesh to stay those great master- 
 ful throbs. A tear gathered in her eye ; larger 
 and larger it grew, and then fell. A shining drop 
 rested on the round of her cheek and rolled slowly 
 down her chin to her protecting hand, and lay 
 there half hidden, shining like a rain-drop between 
 two curving petals of a rose. 
 
 It was just at that moment the painter looked 
 up from his work and shook his bush of hair 
 back. Something in his sketch had displeased 
 him ; he looked up frowning, with a brush between 
 his teeth. When he saw the tear-stained, distress- 
 ful, beautiful face it had a strange effect upon him. 
 He dropped nerveless, like a wounded man, to his
 
 go Earthwork out of Tuscany : ( 
 
 knees, and covered his eyes with his hands. " Ah 
 Madonna ! for the pity of heaven forgive me ! 
 forgive me ! I have sinned, I have done thee 
 fearful wrong ; I, who still dare to love thee." 
 He uncovered his face and looked up radiant : 
 his own words had inspired him. " Yes," he 
 went on, with a steadfast smile, " I, Sandro, the 
 painter, the poor devil of a painter, have seen 
 thee and I dare to love ! ' ; His triumph was 
 short-lived. Simonetta had grown deadly white, 
 her eyes burned, she had forgotten herself. She 
 was tall and slender as a lily, and she rose, shaking, 
 to her height. 
 
 " Thou presumest strangely," she said, in a 
 slow still voice, " Go ! Go in peace ! " 
 
 She was conqueror. In her calm scorn, she 
 was like a young immortal, some cold victorious 
 Cynthia whose chastity had been flouted. Sandro 
 was pale too : he said nothing and did not look 
 at her again. She stood quivering with excite- 
 ment, watching him with the same intent alertness 
 as he rolled up his paper and crammed his brushes 
 and pencils into the breast of his jacket. She 
 watched him still as he backed out of the room 
 and disappeared through the curtains of the arch- 
 way. She listened to his footsteps along the 
 corridor, down the stair. She was alone in the 
 silence of the sunny room. Her first thought 
 was for her cloak ; she snatched it up and veiled 
 herself shivering as she looked fearfully round the 
 walls. And then she flung herself on the piled
 
 )uattrocentisteria 91 
 
 cushions before the window and sobbed piteously, 
 like an abandoned child. 
 
 The sun slanted in between the golden leaves 
 and tendrils and played in the tangle of her 
 hair. . . . 
 
 Ill 
 
 At ten o'clock on the morning of April the twenty- 
 sixth, a great bell began to toll : two beats heavy 
 and slow, and then silence, while the air echoed 
 the reverberation, moaning. Sandro, in shirt and 
 breeches, with bare feet spread broad, was at work 
 in his garret on the old bridge. He stayed his 
 hand as the strong tone struck, bent his head and 
 said a prayer : " Miserere ei, Domine ; requiem 
 eternam dona, Domine ; " the words came out of 
 due order as if he was very conscious of their import. 
 Then he went on. And the great bell went on ; 
 two beats together, and then silence. It seemed 
 to gather solemnity and a heavier message as he 
 painted. Through the open window a keen draught 
 of air blew in with dust and a scrap of shaving from 
 the Lung' Arno down below ; it circled round his 
 workshop, fluttering the sketches and rags pinned to 
 the walls. He looked out on a bleak landscape — 
 San Miniato in heavy shade, and the white houses 
 by the river staring like dead faces. A strong 
 breeze was abroad ; it whipped the brown water 
 and raised little curling billows, ragged and white at 
 the edges, and tossed about snaps of surf. It was
 
 92 Earthwork out of Tuscany : 
 
 cold. Sandro shivered as he shut to his casement ; 
 and the stiffening gale rattled at it fitfully. Once 
 again it thrust it open, bringing wild work among 
 the litter in the room. He made fast with the rain 
 driving in his face. And above the howling of the 
 squall he heard the sound of the great bell, steady 
 and unmoved as if too full of its message to be put 
 aside. Yet it was coming to him athwart the wind. 
 
 Sandro stood at his casement and looked at 
 the weather — beating rain and yeasty water. He 
 counted, rather nervously, the pulses between each 
 pair of the bell's deep tones. He was impressionable 
 to circumstances, and the coincidence of storm and 
 passing-bell awed him. ..." Either the God 
 of Nature suffers or the fabric of the world is 
 breaking ; " — he remembered a scrap of talk wafted 
 towards him (as he stood in attendance) from some 
 humanist at Lorenzo's table only yesterday, above 
 the light laughter and snatches of song. That break- 
 fast party at the Camaldoli yesterday ! What a 
 contrast — the even spring weather with the sun in 
 a cloudless sky, and now this icy dead morning 
 with its battle of wind and bell, fighting, he thought, 
 — over the failing breath of some strong man. Man! 
 God, more like. " The God of Nature suffers," 
 he murmured as he turned to his work. . . . 
 
 Simonetta had not been there yesterday. He had 
 not seen her, indeed, since that nameless day when 
 she had first transported him with the radiance of 
 her bare beauty and then struck him down with 
 a level gaze from steel-cold eyes. And he had
 
 ^jiattrocenthteria 93 
 
 deserved it, he had — she had said — " presumed 
 strangely." Three more words only had she 
 uttered and he had slunk out from her presence 
 like a dog. What a Goddess ! Venus Urania ! 
 So she, too, might have ravished a worshipper as 
 , he prayed, and, after, slain him for a careless word. 
 Cruel ? No, but a Goddess. Beauty had no laws ; 
 she was above them. Agnolo himself had said it, 
 from Plato. . . . Holy Michael ! What a blast ! 
 Black and desperate weather. ..." Either the 
 God of Nature suffers." . . . God shield all 
 Christian souls on such a day ! . . . 
 
 One came and told him Simonetta Vespucci 
 was dead. Some fever had torn at her and raced 
 through all her limbs, licking up her life as it passed. 
 No one had known of it — it was so swift ! But 
 there had just been time to fetch a priest ; Fra 
 Matteo, they said, from the Carmine, had shrived 
 her ('twas a bootless task, God knew, for the child 
 had babbled so, her wits wandered, look you), and 
 then he had performed the last office. One had 
 fled to tell the Medici. Giuliano was wild with 
 grief; 'twas as if he had killed her instead of the 
 Spring-ague — but then, people said he loved her 
 well ! And our Lorenzo had bid them swing the 
 great bell of the Duomo — Sandro had heard it 
 perhaps ? — and there was to be a public procession, 
 and a Requiem sung at Santa Croce before they 
 took her back to Genoa to lie with her fathers. 
 Eh ! Bacchus ! She was fair and Giuliano had 
 loved her well. 'Twas natural enough then. So 
 
 -6"
 
 94 Earthwork out of 'Tuscany : ! 
 
 the gossip ran out to tell his news to more attentive 
 ears, and Sandro stood in his place, intoning softly 
 " Te Deum Laudamus." 
 
 He understood it all. There had been a dark 
 and awful strife — earth shuddering as the black 
 shadow of death swept by. Through tears now the 
 sun beamed broad over the gentle city where she 
 lay lapped in her mossy hills. " Lux eterna lucet 
 ei," he said with a steady smile ; " atque lucebit," 
 he added after a pause. He had been painting 
 that day an agonizing Christ, red and languid, 
 crowned with thorns. Some of his own torment 
 seems to have entered it, for, looking at it now, 
 we see, first of all, wild eyeballs staring with the 
 mad earnestness, the purposeless intensity of one 
 seized or "possessed." He put the panel away 
 and looked about for something else, the sketch he 
 had made of Simonetta on that last day. When 
 he had found it, he rolled it straight and set it on 
 his easel. It was not the first charcoal study he 
 had made from life, but a brush drawing on dark 
 paper, done in sepia-wash and the lights in white 
 lead. He stood looking into it with his hands 
 clasped. About half a braccia high, faint and 
 shadowy in the pale tint he had used, he saw her 
 there victim rather than Goddess. Standing 
 timidly and wistfully, shrinking rather, veiling her- 
 self, maiden-like, with her hands and hair, with lips 
 trembling and dewy eyes, she seemed to him now 
 an immortal who must needs suffer for some great 
 end ; live and suffer and die ; live again, and suffer
 
 ^jiattrocentisteria 95 
 
 and die. It was a doom perpetual like Demeter's, to 
 bear, to nurture, to lose and to find her Persephone. 
 She had stood there immaculate and apprehensive, 
 a wistful victim. Three days before he had seen 
 her thus ; and now she was dead. He would see 
 , her no more. 
 
 Ah ! Yes, once more he would see her. . . . 
 
 • ••••• 
 
 They carried dead Simonetta through the streets 
 of Florence with her pale face uncovered and a 
 crown of myrtle in her hair. People thronging 
 there held their breath, or wept to see such still 
 loveliness ; and her poor parted lips wore a patient 
 little smile, and her eyelids were pale violet and lay 
 heavy to her cheek. White, like a bride, with a 
 nosegay of orange-blossom and syringa at her 
 throat, she lay there on her bed with lightly 
 folded hands and the strange aloofness and pre- 
 occupation all the dead have. Only her hair 
 burned about her like a molten copper ; and the 
 wreath of myrtle leaves ran forward to her brows 
 and leapt beyond them into a tongue. 
 
 The great procession swept forward ; black 
 brothers of Misericordia, shrouded and awful, bore 
 the bed or stalked before it with torches that 
 guttered and flared sootily in the dancing light 
 of day. They held the pick of Florence, those 
 scowling shrouds — Giuliano and Lorenzo, Pazzi, 
 Tornabuoni, Soderini or Pulci ; and behind, old 
 Cattaneo, battered with storms, walked heavily, 
 swinging his long arms and looking into the day's
 
 g6 Earthwork out of Tuscany ; 
 
 face as if he would try another fall with Death yet. 
 Priests and acolytes, tapers, banners, vestments and 
 a great silver Crucifix, they drifted by, chanting the 
 dirge for Simonetta ; and she, as if for a sacrifice, 
 lifted up on her silken bed, lay couched like a white 
 flower edged colour of flame. . . . 
 
 . . . Santa Croce, the great church, stretched for- 
 ward beyond her into distances of grey mist and 
 cold spaces of light. Its bare vastness was damp 
 like a vault. And she lay in the midst listless, 
 heavy-lidded, apart, with the half-smile, as it 
 seemed, of some secret mirth. Round her the 
 great candles smoked and flickered, and mass was 
 sung at the High Altar for her soul's repose. 
 Sandro stood alone facing the shining altar but 
 looking fixedly at Simonetta on her couch. He 
 was white and dry — parched lips and eyes that ached 
 and smarted. Was this the end ? Was it possible, 
 my God ! that the transparent, unearthly thing lying 
 there so prone and pale was dead ? Had such loveli- 
 ness aught to do with life or death ? Ah ! sweet 
 lady, dear heart, how tired she was, how deadly 
 tired ! From where he stood he could see with 
 intolerable anguish the sombre rings round her 
 eyes and the violet shadows on the lids, her folded 
 hands and the straight, meek line to her feet. And 
 her poor wan face with its wistful, pitiful little smile 
 was turned half aside on the delicate throat, as if 
 in a last appeal : — "Leave me now, O Florentines, 
 to my rest. I have given you all I had : ask no 
 more. I was a young girl, a child ; too young for
 
 uattrocentisteria 97 
 
 your eager strivings. You have killed me with 
 your play ; let me be now, let me sleep ! " Poor 
 child ! Poor child ! Sandro was on his knees with 
 his face pressed against the pulpit and tears running 
 through his fingers as he prayed. . . . 
 
 As he had seen her, so he painted. As at the 
 beginning of life in a cold world, passively meet- 
 ing the long trouble of it, he painted her a rapt 
 Presence floating evenly to our earth. A grey, 
 translucent sea laps silently upon a little creek and, 
 in the hush of a still dawn, the myrtles and sedges 
 on the water's brim are quiet. It is a dream in half 
 tones that he gives us, grey and green and steely 
 blue ; and just that, and some homely magic of his 
 own, hint the commerce of another world with man's 
 discarded domain. Men and women are asleep, and 
 as in an early walk you may startle the hares at 
 their play, or see the creatures of the darkness — owls 
 and night hawks and heavy moths — flit with fantastic 
 purpose over the familiar scene, so here it comes 
 upon you suddenly that you have surprised Nature's 
 self at her mysteries ; you are let into the secret ; 
 you have caught the spirit of the April woodland as 
 she glides over the pasture to the copse. And that, 
 indeed, was Sandro's fortune. He caught her in 
 just such a propitious hour. He saw the sweet wild 
 thing, pure and undefiled by touch of earth ; caught 
 her in that pregnant pause of time ere she had lighted. 
 Another moment and a buxom nymph of the grove 
 would fold her in a rosy mantle, coloured as the 
 earliest wood-anemones are. She would vanish, we 
 
 G
 
 98 
 
 Earthwork out of Tuscany 
 
 know, into the daffodils or a bank of violets. And 
 you might tell her presence there, or in the rustle of 
 the myrtles, or coo of doves mating in the pines ; you 
 might feel her genius in the scent of the earth or the 
 kiss of the West wind ; but you could only see her 
 in mid-April, and you should look for her over the 
 sea. She always comes with the first warmth of 
 the year. 
 
 But daily, before he painted, Sandro knelt in a 
 dark chapel in Santa Croce, while a blue-chinned 
 priest said mass for the repose of Simonetta's soul.
 
 VIII 
 
 The Burden of New Tyre 
 
 For a short time in her motley history, an old- 
 clothesman, one Domenico — he and his "Com- 
 pagnia del Bruco," his Company of the Grub — 
 reigned over Siena and gave to her people a taste 
 for blood. It was bloodshed on easy terms they 
 had ; for surely no small nation (except that tiger- 
 cat Perugia) has achieved so much massacre and 
 so little fighting. Massacre considered as one of 
 the Fine Arts ? No indeed ; but massacre as a via- 
 ticum, as " title clear to mansions in the skies " ; for, 
 with more complacency than discrimination, these 
 sated citizens chose to dedicate their most fantastic 
 blood-orgies by a Missa de Spiritu Sancto in the 
 Cathedral Church. The old-clothesman, who by 
 some strange oversight died in his bed, was floated 
 up on the incense of this devout service to show 
 his hands, and — marvel ! — Saint Catherine, the 
 " amorosa sposa " of Heaven, reigned in his stead. 
 Certainly, for unction spiced with ferocity, for a 
 madness which alternately kissed the Crucifix and 
 trampled on it, for mandragora and feurs de lys, 
 saints and succubi, churches and lazar-dens — 
 commend me to Siena the red. 
 
 99
 
 ioo Earthwork out of Tuscany : 
 
 You are not to suppose that she has not paid 
 for all this, the red Siena. None of it is absolved ; 
 it is there floating vaguely in the atmosphere. It 
 chokes the gully-trap streets in August when the 
 air is like a hot bath ; it wails round the corners 
 on stormy nights and you hear it battling among 
 the towers overhead, bufFetting the stained walls 
 of criminal old palaces and churches grown hoary 
 in iniquity — so many half-embodied centuries of 
 deadly sin gnawing their spleens or shrieking their 
 infamous carouse over again. So at least I found 
 it. Without baring myself to the charge of any 
 sneaking kindness for bloodshedding, I may own to 
 the fascination of the precipitous fortress-town 
 huddled red and grey on its three red crags, and 
 of its suggestion of all the old crimes of Italy from 
 Ezzelino's to Borgia's. Its air seemed "blood- 
 boltered" (like the shade of the hunted Banquho), 
 its stones, curiously slippery for such dry weather, 
 cried " Haro ! " or " Out ! Havoc ! " And 
 above it all shone a marble church, white as a 
 bride, while now and again on a favourable waft 
 of wind came the fragrant memory of Saint 
 Catherine. It is the peak of earth most charged 
 with wayward emotions — pity and terror blent to- 
 gether into a poignant beauty, a sorcery. Imagine 
 yourself one of those old Popes — Linus or 
 Anaclete or Damasius — whose heads spike the 
 clerestory of the Duomo, you would look down 
 upon a sea of pictures (by the best pavement-artists 
 in the world) — the Massacre of the Innocents
 
 The Burden of New Tyre I o i 
 
 like a patch of dry blood by the altar-steps, a 
 winking Madonna in the Capella del Voto thronged 
 with worshippers, Hermes Trismegistus, a freaksome 
 wizard, by the West door, and a gilded array of 
 the grand monde smiling and debonnair in the 
 sacristy. Not far off is Sodoma's lovely Catherine 
 fainting under the sweet dolour of her spousals. 
 Are you for the White or the Black Mass ? 
 Cybele or the Holy Ghost ? Catherine or Hermes 
 Trismegistus } . Siena will give you any and yet 
 more cunning confections. It is very strange. 
 
 The approach to her three hills, if you are not 
 flattened by the intolerable pilgrimage from Florence, 
 is fine. Hints of what is to come greet you in the 
 frittered shale of the grey country-side broken 
 abruptly by little threatening hill-towns. The scat- 
 juts out of the earth's crust, rising sheer, and there 
 on a fretted peak hovers a fortress-village, steep red 
 roofs, an ancient bell-tower or two with a lean barrel 
 of a church beyond ; all the lines cut sharp to the 
 clean sky ; a bullock cart creaking up homewards ; 
 the shiver and dust of olives round the walls. You 
 could swear you caught the glint of a long gun over 
 the machicolations ; but it is only a casement fired 
 by the westering sun. Such are San Miniato, Castel 
 Fiorentino, Poggibonsi (where stayed Lorenzo's 
 Nencia — his Nancy, we should call her), San 
 Gimignano and its Fina, a little girl-saint of fifteen 
 springs ; such, too, is Siena when you get there, but 
 redder, her grey stones blushing for her sins. And 
 the country blushes for her as you draw near, for all
 
 102 Earthwork out of Tuscany : 
 
 the vineyards are dotted with burning willows in the 
 autumn — osier-bushes flaming at the heart. Let it 
 be night when you arrive — the dead vast and middle 
 of a still night. Then suffer yourself to be whirled 
 through the inky streets, over the flags, from one 
 hill to another. It is deathly quiet ; no soul stirs. 
 The palaces rise on either hand like the ghosts of old 
 reproaches ; a flickering lamp reveals a gully as black 
 as a grave, and shines on the edge of a lane which 
 falls you know not whither. You turn corners 
 which should complicate a maze, you scrape and 
 clatter down steeps, you groan up mountain-sides. 
 All in the dark, mind. And the great white houses 
 slide down upon you to the very flags you are beat- 
 ing ; you could near touch either wall with a hand. 
 So you swerve round a column, under a votive lamp, 
 and have left the stars and their violet bed. You 
 are in a cort'de : men say there is an inn here with 
 reasonable entertainment. If it is the Aquila Nera 
 it will serve. There is no sound beyond the labour- 
 ing of our horses' wind and of some outland dog in 
 the far distance baying for a moon. This is Siena 
 at her black magic. 
 
 I maintain that the impression you thus receive 
 holds you. Next morning there is a blare of sun. 
 It will blind you at first, blister you. Rayed out 
 from plaster-walls which have been soaking in it for 
 five centuries, driven up in palpable waves of heat 
 from the flags, lying like a lake of white metal in the 
 Piazza, however recklessly this truly royal sun may 
 beam, in Siena you will feel furtive and astare for 
 sudden death.
 
 The Burden of New Tyre 103 
 
 There is nothing frank and open about Siena ; 
 none of your robust, red-lunged, open-air Paganism. 
 Theophile Gautier, Baudelaire, Poe — such super- 
 sensitive plants should have known it, instead of the 
 ingenuous M. Bourget and the ingenious Mr Henry 
 James. M. Bourget looked at the Sodomas and Mr 
 James admired the view : what a romance we should 
 have had from Gautier of illicit joys and their 
 requital by a knife, what a strophe from Baudelaire 
 half obscene, half-mournful, wholly melodious. But 
 Theophile Gautier tarried in Venice, and, as for M. 
 Charles, the man of pronounced tastes and keen 
 nose, stuck in the main to Paris. Failing them as 
 guides, go you first to the Piazza del Campo where 
 horses race in August — all roads lead thither. Con- 
 traries again ! A square ? It is a cup. A field ? 
 It is a Gabbatha : a place of burning pavements. 
 Were red brick and Gothic ever so superbly com- 
 pounded before, to be so strong and yet so lithe ? 
 That is the Palazzo Publico, the shrine of Aris- 
 totle's Politics and the Miracles of the Virgin. 
 What is that long spear which seems to shake as 
 *t glances skywards ? It isn't a spear ; it's the 
 Torre del Mangia — the loveliest tower in Tuscany, 
 the jilia pulchrior of a beautiful mother, the Torre 
 della Vacca of Florence. That tower rises from 
 the bottom of the cup and shoots straight upwards, 
 nor stays till it has out-topped the proudest belfry 
 on the hills about it. But what a square this is ! 
 The backs of the houses (whose front doors are 
 high above on the hill-top) stand like bald cliffs on
 
 104 Earthwork out of Tuscany 
 
 every side. You cannot see any outlets : most of 
 them are winding stairways cut between the houses. 
 The lounging, shabby men and girls seem handsomer 
 and lazier than you found them in Florence. They 
 seem to have room to stretch their fine limbs 
 against these naked walls. Their maturity is almost 
 tropical. The girls wear flopping straw hats : wide, 
 sorrowful eyes stare at you from the shady recesses, 
 and the rounding of their chins and beautiful proud 
 necks are marked by glossy lights. " Morbida 
 e bianca," sang Lorenzo. I suppose they think 
 of little more than the market price of spring 
 onions : but then, why do their eyes speak like that ? 
 And what do they speak of? Dlo mio, I am 
 an honest man! But so was Lorenzo; listen to 
 him : — 
 
 " Two eyes hath she so roguish and demure 
 That, lit they on a rock, they'd make it feel ; 
 How shall poor melting man meet such a lure ? " 
 
 How indeed ? Ah, Nenciozza mia ! 
 
 " My little Nancy shows nor fleck nor pimple ; 
 Pliant and firm is she, a reed for grace : 
 In her smooth chin there's just one pretty dimple 
 That rounds the perfect measure of her face : " 
 
 That dimple has been the destruction of many a 
 British heart : — 
 
 " So wise, withal, above us other simple 
 Plain folk — sure, Nature set her in this place 
 To bloom her tender whiteness all about us, 
 And break our hearts — and then bloom on without us."
 
 The Burden of Neiv Tyre 105 
 
 Yes indeed, my Lorenzo. But enough ! Let 
 us take shelter in the Duomo. 
 
 Barred like a tiger, glistening snow and rose and 
 gold, topped by a flaunting angel, her door flanked by 
 the lean Roman wolf, paved with pictures, hemmed 
 with the Popes from Peter to Pius, encrusted with 
 marbles and gemmy frescoes, it is a casket of 
 delights this church, and the quintessence of Siena 
 — molles Sena as Beccadelli, himself a Tyrian, 
 dubbed his native town. Voluptuous as she was, 
 tigerish Siena was more consistent than you would 
 think. True, Saints Catherine and Bernardine 
 consort oddly with the old-clothesman saying mass 
 with wet hands, and Beccadelli the soft singer of 
 abominations, just as the " Madones aux longs 
 regards" of the Primitives — pious creatures of slim 
 idle fingers and desirous eyes, pining in brocade 
 and jewels — seem in a different sphere from Pin- 
 turricchio's well-found Popes and Princesses, and 
 Sodoma's languishing boys or half-ripe Catherines 
 dying of love. Have I not said this was once a city 
 of pleasure ? And whether the pleasure was a blood- 
 feast or an Agape, or a Platonic banquet where the 
 flute-players and wine-cups and crowns crushed out 
 the high disquisition and philosophic undercurrent — 
 it was one to soft Siena drowsing on her hills. Her 
 pleasures were fierce, and beautiful as fierce. But 
 the burden of Tyre is always the same. And so 
 the memories of a thousand ancient wrongs unpurged 
 howl over the red city, as once howled the ships of 
 Tarshish.
 
 IX 
 
 Ilaria, Mar iota, Bettina 
 (Studies in translation from stone') 
 
 Greatest of great ladies is Ilaria, potens Lucca, 
 sleeping easily, with chin firmly rounded to the vault, 
 where she has slept for five hundred years : and still 
 a power in Lucca of the silver planes. It was a 
 white-hot September day I went to pay my devo- 
 tions to her shrine. Lucca drowsed in a haze, her 
 bleached arcades of trees lifeless in the glare of high 
 noon : all the valley was winking, the very bells had 
 no strength to chime : and then I saw Ilaria lie in 
 the deep shade waiting for the judgment. Ilaria was 
 a tall Tuscan — the girls of Lucca are out of the 
 common tall, and straight as larches — of fine birth 
 and a life of minstrels and gardens. Pompous pro- 
 cessions, trapped horses, emblazonings, were hers, and 
 all refinements of High Masses and Cardinals. So 
 she lived once a life as stately-ordered as old dance- 
 music, in the airy corridors of a great marble palace 
 swept hourly by the thin, clean air of the Lucchesan 
 plain ; and her lord went out to war with Pisa or 
 Pescia, or even further afield, following Emperor or 
 Pope to that Monteaperti which made Arbia run 
 1 06
 
 Ilaria, Mar iota, Bettina 107 
 
 colour of wine, or shrill Benevento, or Altopascio 
 which cost the Florentines so dear.* But Ilaria 
 stayed at home to trifle with lap-dogs and jongleurs 
 under the orange trees ; heard boys make stammering 
 love, and laughed lightly at their Decameron travesty, 
 being too proud to be ashamed or angered ; and 
 sometimes (for she was not too proud but that love 
 should be of the party), she pulled a ring from one 
 lithe finger, and looked down while the lad kissed it 
 for a holy relic and put it in his bosom reverently, — 
 pretending not to see. But, Ilaria, you knew well 
 what gave colour to the faint and worn old words 
 about Fior dl spin giallo, or Deafatale, or 
 
 " O Dio de' Dei ! 
 
 La piu bellina mi parete voi ; 
 
 O quanto sete cara agli occhi miei ! " 
 
 And so the days passed in your square corner 
 palace, until the plague came down with the North 
 wind, and you bowed your proud neck before it like 
 a mountain pine. Young to die, young to die and 
 leave the pleasant ways of Lucca, the green ramparts, 
 the grassy walks in the pastures where the hawks 
 fly and the shadows fleet over the green and gold 
 of early May. Young enough, Ilaria. Scorner of 
 love, now Death is at hand, with the bats' wings and 
 wet scythe they give him in the Piazza, when your 
 lord comes triumphing or God's Body takes the air : 
 what of him, Madonna ? Let him come, says Ilaria, 
 with raised eyebrows and a wintry smile. Yet she 
 
 * Historically he could have done none of these things, 
 except, perhaps, fight at Altopascio.
 
 108 Earthwork out of Tuscany : 
 
 fought : her thin hands held off the scythe at arms' 
 length ; she set her teeth and battled with the 
 winged beast. Whenas she knew it must be, 
 suddenly she relaxed her hold, and Death had his 
 way with her. 
 
 Then her women came about her and robed her 
 in a long robe, colour of olive leaves, and soft to the 
 touch. And they covered soberly her feet and 
 placed them on a crouching dog, which was Lucca. 
 But her fine hands they folded peace-wise below her 
 bosom, to rest quietly there like the clasps of a girdle. 
 Her gentle hair (bright brown it was, like a yearling 
 chestnut) they crowned also, and closed down her 
 ringed eyes. So they let her lie till judgment come. 
 And when I saw her the close robe still folded her 
 about and ran up her throat lovingly to her chin, till 
 her head seemed to thrust from it as a flower from its 
 calyx. It would seem, too, as if her bosom rose and 
 fell, that her nostrils quivered when the wind blew 
 in and touched them ; and the hem of her garment 
 being near me, I was fain to kiss it and say a prayer 
 to the divinity haunting that place. So I left the 
 presence well disposed in my heart to glorify God 
 for so fair a sight. 
 
 Whereafter I took the way to Florence among 
 the vineyards and tangled hill-sides ; and, anon, in 
 the broad plain I stayed at Prato to honour the lady 
 of the town. Madonna della Cintola she is called 
 now, and one Luca, a worker in clay, knew her 
 mind most intimately and did all her will. Quiet 
 days she had lived at Prato, being wife to a decent
 
 Ilaria, Mariota, Bettina 109 
 
 metal-worker there and keeper of his house and stuff. 
 Mariota she was then called for all her name, but 
 as to her parentage none knew it, save that Marco's 
 Joanna had been both frail and fair, and when she had 
 been in flower the great Lord Ottoboni had flowered 
 likewise — and often in her company. Joanna I had 
 never known ; she died before her lord married the 
 lady Adelidis of Verona and the seven days' tilting 
 were held in her honour in a field below the city 
 wall. But when Luca first knew Mariota and saw 
 how her mother's pride beaconed from her smooth 
 brow, the girl was standing in the Piazza in a 
 tattered green kirtle and bodice that gaped at the 
 hooks, played upon by sun, and fallow wind, and 
 longing looks driven at her eyes in vain. The 
 wench carried her head and light fardel of years 
 like a Princess ; would laugh to show her fine 
 teeth if your jest pleased her ; and then she 
 would look straightly upon you and be glad of 
 you. If you pleased her not, she would look through 
 you to the mountains or the church-tower. She 
 had as squarely a modelled chin as ever I saw, and 
 her lips firmly set and redder than strawberries in a 
 wet May. None taught her anything ; none, that 
 Luca could learn, gave her sup or bed. He was a 
 boy then and would have given her both. I think 
 she knew he favoured her — what girl does not ? 
 Everybody favoured Mariota, stayed as she passed, 
 and followed her stealthily with troubled eyes. 
 But he was a moody boy then, at the mercy of 
 dreams, and stammered when he was near her,
 
 iio Earthwork out of Tuscany : 
 
 blushing. When he came back she was seventeen 
 years old, and the metal-worker's wife. It was then 
 Luca saw her, in the street called of the Eye, where 
 climbing plants top the convent wall and from the 
 garden comes the scent of wall-flowers and sweet 
 marjoram. 
 
 At her man's door she was standing, bare- 
 footed, fray-kirtled as of old ; but riper, of more 
 assured and triumphant beauty. In her arms a 
 boy-child, lusty and half-naked, struggled to be fed, 
 seeking with both fat hands to forage for himself. 
 Turning her grey eyes, where pride slumbered and 
 shame had never been, she knew Luca again, made 
 him welcome at the door, with superb assurance 
 set wine and olives and bread before him ; and so 
 stood at the table while he ate, gravely recovering 
 one by one the features of his face, smiling, pre- 
 occupied with her pleasure and unconscious of the 
 cooing child. For with matronly composure she 
 had eased my gentleman as soon as she had pro- 
 vided for her guest. 
 
 In comes the metal-worker, Sor Matteo, burly but 
 benevolent in a greasy apron, eyes the lad up and 
 down with much burdensome pondering of hand to 
 scrubby chin, as to say to Mariota " I'm no fool." 
 With never a blush, nor a quailing of the eyes' level 
 beam, Mariota begs cousin Luca to become con- 
 scious of her master. 
 
 There were the makings of a piece of right Boc- 
 cacesque in all this, and the padrone showed manifest 
 disinclination for his accustomed part : but Luca's
 
 I/aria, Mariota, Bettina 1 1 1 
 
 candid face disclaimed all dark-entry work. Mariota 
 hurried to her task. A modeller in clay, a statuary, 
 via, an admirer of the choicer contrivings of Mother 
 Nature ! What and if he should find his cousin, 
 his scarce-remembered gossip Mariota, worth an 
 artist's half-closed eye ! And the lambinaccio (with 
 a side-look and face averted as she spoke) — ecco ! — 
 many a Gesulino showed a leaner thigh and cheeks 
 less peachy than he. Had Papa seen the new 
 dimple in Beppino's chin ? And more soft piping 
 to the same tune. Master Matteo was appeased ; 
 but Luca was far adrift with other matters. Love, 
 for him, lay not in flesh and blood alone ; rather, in 
 what flesh and blood signified in another clay, not 
 Messer Domeneddio's, but his own chosen task-stuff. 
 He had come hither to Prato on the commission of 
 the Opera, to work a Madonna col Bambino for the 
 great door of the Duomo. Well ! he had his 
 Madonna to hand, it would seem : — Mariota at the 
 door of the smith's house, confident, lissom and fresh, 
 and the lusty child groping for his breakfast. The 
 light had been upon her, gleamed upon her skin, her 
 brimming eyes, her glossy brown hair. What a 
 bravery was hers ! What a glorified presentment of 
 young life, new-budded, was here ! The town gaped, 
 the husband admired; but Mariota, with her square 
 chin and high carriage, looked as straightly before 
 her, when in pale blue and silver-white, Madonna with 
 the Babe and the holy deacons Stephen and Laurence 
 stood, four months afterwards, within the shadow of 
 the great church, and shone out to the day.
 
 112 Earthwork oat of Tuscany : 
 
 I pay silent respect to strapping Mariota and her 
 baby-boy in the country of Boccace. Then, when I 
 am in Florence again, under the spell of the city life, 
 I lounge in the Borg' Ognissanti, or across Arno in 
 the quartiere San Niccolo, or out by San Frediano 
 where Botticelli in his green old age pruned his 
 vines, or in the pent streets between the Via della 
 Pergola and Santa Croce, and watch the townsfolk 
 lead their lives of patchwork and easy laughter. I 
 fear I have a taste for such company. I am fond of 
 verdure ; I like trees as well as men : every oak for 
 me has its hamadryad informing it. I like flowers 
 better than men ; and the most beautiful flower I 
 know is a girl. I have a sweetheart in the Bargello, 
 as you shall hear. I believe she is one of Donatello's 
 sowing ; but the critics are divided. I cannot trace 
 Verocchio's bluntened lineaments in her, nor Mino's 
 peaksomeness, nor anything of Desiderio. She's not 
 very pretty, but she's like a summer flower, say, a 
 campanula ; and that is why I love to watch her and 
 talk to her in this grandfatherly fashion. Bettina, T 
 say to her, are you, I wonder, twelve years old yet ? 
 You cannot be much more I think, for you have let 
 your bodice-strap slip ofF one of your shoulders and 
 betray you to the sun. You are but a round rose-bud 
 now and no one thinks any harm; but some day the sun 
 will look at you in an odd way, and then, suddenly, 
 you will be ashamed, and draw your frock right up to 
 your neck. 
 
 And your hair strays where it likes at present. 
 I know you have a golden fillet of box-leaves round
 
 Ilarla, Mar iota, Bettina 113 
 
 your brow : that is because you are only a little girl 
 still, not more than twelve. And you have tied 
 the ends up in a sort of knot. But you romp so 
 much and laugh so — I know you have two bright 
 rows of little teeth — that you can never expect to 
 keep tidy. Why, even now, while I am scolding 
 you, you are itching to laugh and run away. I see 
 a wavy lock trailing down your neck, ragazza, and 
 those heavy tresses on your temples, instead of being 
 drawn meekly back, droop down over your temples, 
 and cover up your little ears. Don't you know 
 that Florentine ladies are proud of their foreheads, 
 and when they have pretty ears, always show them ? 
 Some day, my dear, you will go out into the world ; 
 and your hair will be twisted up into coils with gold 
 braid ; perhaps you will have on it a flowery garland 
 of Messer Domenico's making, and a string of 
 Venice beads round your throat. And when that 
 time comes, you won't let the sun play with your 
 neck any more ; he won't know his romp when he 
 sees her in stiff velvet of Genoa and a high collar 
 edged with seed-pearls. 
 
 And you won't look me in the eyes as you are 
 doing now, saucy girl, with your chin pushed forward 
 and your mouth all in a pucker — who's to know 
 whether you are going to pout or giggle ? — and your 
 pert grey eyes wide open, as if to say " Who's this 
 old thickhead staring at me so hard ? " No, Bettina, 
 you will drop them instead ; you will blush all over 
 your neck and cheeks, and hang your round head. 
 You have chestnuts in your two fists now I know ; 
 
 H
 
 
 ii 4 
 
 Earthwork out of 'Tuscany 
 
 there's some of the flour sticking to the corners of 
 your mouth, little slut. But then you will have a 
 fan perhaps, or a spyglass, or at least a mass-book 
 in the mornings ; and when I am looking at you, 
 your fingers will tie themselves in knots and be very 
 interesting. In two years' time, Bettina ! 
 
 But though I shan't love you half as much as I 
 do now, I shall always come to see you I think ; 
 and, as I shall be a very old man by that time, 
 perhaps you will still sit on a stool at my knee and 
 give me a kiss now and then — oh, a mere bird's peck, 
 just for kindness. . . . The Via de' Bardi is grey, 
 and you are there in yellow. You are like a young 
 daffodil dancing in the winter grass. But soon 
 you will have strained to your full flower-time, 
 and I see you in your summering, lithe and rather 
 languid, with heavy-lidded eyes, and a slow smile. 
 Then you will not dance ; but, instead, you will 
 stoop gravely like a tall garden lily, and give your 
 white hand to the lover kneeling below. 
 
 And all in two years, my little Bettina !
 
 X 
 Servus Servorum 
 Scene — A room in a Florentine Palace 
 Lorenzo de' Medici, Bernardo, a Genoese 
 
 Lor. Sforza down ; Genoa free, the field open. 
 Well, well ! Are you very sure of this ? 
 
 Ber. I am so sure that my life is staked upon the 
 fact of it. Will you stead Freedom, my lord ? 
 
 Lor. Freedom ? Well, Genoa's a broad city. 
 
 Ber. The sea is broad enough. Genoa is knit up 
 with sea and the smell of ships. In such 
 amplitude there should be room found to swing 
 a sceptre. 
 
 Lor. What is it you ask ? 
 
 Ber. Simonetta. 
 
 Lor. How now ? Simonetta ? The girl is free as 
 Genoa. 
 
 Ber. Both are beset with ambushes : Venice 
 hankers after one ; Giuliano, your brother, 
 waits till the maid falls to him. I ask you 
 clear the pass. This is not a great thing ; for 
 me it may be much. The Lombard is off, 
 and I care not greatly who may be next yoke- 
 master — \_aside~\ for a season. In touching 
 
 us
 
 1 1 6 Earthwork out of Tuscany : 
 
 my country you touch not me, for you cannot 
 efface her glory any more than you can sub- 
 limate her shaggy rocks. But you lay hands 
 on holiness where you set up to serve my lady : 
 there you wound ; there you may be wounded. 
 I do not wait that you should go along with 
 me in this. I reason not, nor claim. But 
 I have my price like any market-stuff. Leave 
 it so. Are you toward ? \_Aside~\ The 
 usurous thief haggles within himself. Proper 
 work for a free man ! But I drop him yet. 
 
 Lor. \_Aside~\ Simonetta for thee, Genoa for me ; 
 the hat for Giuliano ; tiara, Rome, Italy ! 
 Florence the heart and Medici the blood of 
 a sumptuous body-politic. — O rare ! Sforza 
 down — ah, there now ! What a tumble ! 
 Necks are soon broke that climb ... see now, 
 see now, can I fix it ? . . . thus — and thus — 
 Can I not adjust, smooth, strike ? Well ! \_Aloud~\ 
 We must speak further, sir, I must see my 
 way. Meantime no word. 
 
 Ber. I am close, my lord. But, look you, I am 
 well friended in Genoa. Genoa is mine when 
 I have strength to it. Strength, and the 
 comfortable assurance of a friend of peace. 
 There's Naples now. 
 
 Lor. How ? Naples ? Ferrante is my foe : guard 
 yourself with Naples. Go, sir ; I must needs 
 think. Guard yourself with Naples. 'Tis a 
 rank stock, and wormed. 
 
 Ber. I leave you, my lord. \_Exit. 

 
 Servus Nervorum 117 
 
 Lor. Your Genoese is a dull dog ; and a proud 
 dog, for pride is the panoply of a thick wit. 
 Give him a snuffed apple, and he'll waste the 
 world to wipe the affront from his platter. 
 Thus your heavy-armoured spirit looks at 
 honour, that it lies in what you would be 
 thought rather than in that which you are. 
 Giuliano should leave snuffing the peachy 
 maid. Does Florence, do all Tuscany and 
 the marches thereof, grow no ripe fruit ? 
 What is she, won, but a snack o' the feast 
 and edge to the tarnished blade of his palate ? 
 Take her away, give her unsnuffed to my 
 grudging Genoese — nay, nay, Giuliano Proud- 
 Flesh would be fretted to a fever. You 
 poison the plum — and then what good is it ? 
 But a poisoned plum ! Quick and dextrous 
 trader — the great leveller of ranks and estates. 
 Quick as the plague we endure in our midst, 
 and as amenable to your handling withal. 
 Kiss a dead man's hand, kiss his Cordetto, the 
 flower that may have lain on his breast and 
 watch'd the dying of him — Dlo buono! there's 
 your political instrument. Sudden as the fire 
 . . . Genoa and Naples ! Saints forbid. 
 Florence and Genoa — lo you ! Pisa humbled 
 further ; Lucca laid lower ; Florence spearing 
 cloud-high. And Medici her kingly line — 
 her dynasty ! . . . A line of kings. A sceptred 
 line of kings. I must think of this. 1 must 
 think of this. . . . Yes. It shall be that one
 
 1 1 8 Earthwork out of Tuscany : 
 
 falleth and another climbeth ... to a throne. 
 O Dante, that was a dream of thine ! Ho ! 
 without there ! 
 
 Enter a Servant. 
 
 Send me Brigida. \_Exit Servant. 
 
 What a thing is a ruler, that must play- 
 Providence in two keys ! There must be no 
 hitch in this. Your Providence works in the 
 rough ; yet, mainly, for kings and the longer 
 arm. Though my shoulder be withered by my 
 dam's mischance, my arm sways free to the 
 motions of a green head. 
 
 Enter Brigida. 
 Ha, Brigida. What's o'clock ? 
 Brig. The great candles are half spent, my lord. 
 
 There's meat in them till the masses be sung 
 
 and the grave fed. 
 Lor. Hast kept the watch, Brigida ? 
 Brig. My lady and I have held it with the Brothers 
 
 of Saint Mark. The sweet lamb lies still 
 
 enough, woe's the hour. 
 Lor. And thy lady, Brigida, thy lady ? No rest ? 
 Brig. Even now she is gone to snatch an hour. 
 
 She's fagged, my lord ; fagged and white ; and 
 
 as dry as ash. 'Tis hard grief that may not be 
 
 wetted. 
 Lor. Rest is well, Brigida ; it is wisely done. See 
 
 now, Brigida, I pine for my little child. I 
 
 could weep, look you, but that I must work. 
 
 Go you now, Brigida, fetch me the Christ
 
 Servus Servorum 1 1 o 
 
 she yet wears. Unclasp the chain and bring 
 it me. Go you. 
 
 Brig. Your dead maid bore it when life was green, 
 my lord. She had it when the pest got her 
 down : even now she has it in her sleep ! 'Tis 
 a tainted toy, my lord. What would you with 
 such a thing ? 
 
 Lor. Brigida, Brigida, thy tongue was ever thine 
 enemy ! Must I remind thee, Brigida, of this ? 
 Fetch this toy, fetch it me. I must needs 
 see it here. 
 
 Brig. It is enough. {Goes. 
 
 Lor. What shall a nurse-girl know of Providence 
 and kingly counsels ? Alas, a king must work 
 in the rough for the good of his people — the 
 good of his people ! And, perchance, soil his 
 fingers. What else do our cousin of Naples, 
 our cousin of France, and all the dogs of the 
 kingly pack, but trip the hart that their master 
 may dine ? And this master of theirs — what 
 saith Plato? — is — is the State. The State must 
 feed, and kings scorch their bowels with lime, 
 lest the State go hungry. The maid should die 
 therefore — that the State want not for white 
 meat. 
 
 Re-enters Brigida, with a Crucifix on a chain. 
 
 Gingerly held, my Brigida ; 'tis well done. 
 Let me weep at the sight of it. Alack, 'twas 
 hers indeed, my little one's ! Let it lie on the 
 table, Brigida. So, so. Resume thy watch.
 
 120 Earthwork out of Tuscany 
 
 Pray ; lest the Evil One come feast on thy tired 
 lamb. Thou art a faithful soul, Brigida, an 
 honest soul ! I must reward thee for many 
 things. Take this my ring. 'Tis most choice 
 work of Rhodes, wherein you may see the passion 
 of Hercules in the shirt, down to the very licking 
 of the luxurious flame. 'Tis nothing to thee ; to 
 me it may be much, hereafter. Scala will give 
 thee a hundred florins for the ring. Thou 
 shalt purchase thereout a mass for me ; for me 
 and all Christian souls — the souls of all kings 
 and all servants of States. Get thee gone, good 
 Brigida ; go pray. 
 Brig. \_Going.~\ My lord is distracted. High 
 policy doth drive him mad. A good master, 
 free and open-handed. Yet I never saw him 
 so before. \_Goes. 
 
 Lor. From one child to another. Where's the 
 harm o' that ? She is almost a child, still in 
 the bud and tendril time. Poor little chick ! 
 frosted ere thy wings could feather. She is 
 winged by this, mayhap — and eyed. How now ! 
 If she could see me at the work ? Foh ! a 
 jest, a leap i' the dark of the schools, a sop to 
 stay our green-sickness. Lie thou there, taint. 
 I touch thee not. 'Tis most admirable work ! 
 I had it of a Bolognese. A royal gift ! The 
 Pope, they say, gives a dish of figs. But 
 Providence, who sends a pestilence and famine, 
 works for kings. Plague's abroad ; strikes 
 secretly and swift. Kiss the Cross ! 

 
 XI 
 
 Cats 
 
 There was once a man in Italy — so the story runs 
 — who said that animals were sacred because God 
 had made them. People didn't believe him for a 
 long time ; they came, you see, of a race which had 
 found it amusing to kill such things, and killed a 
 great many of them too, until it struck them one 
 fine day that killing men was better sport still, and 
 watching men kill each other the best sport of all 
 because it was the least trouble. Animals ! said 
 they, why, how can they be sacred ; things that you 
 call beef and mutton when they have left off being 
 oxen and sheep, and sell for so much a pound ? 
 They scoffed at this mad neighbour, looked at each 
 other waggishly and shrugged their shoulders as he 
 passed along the street. Well ! then, all of a 
 sudden, as you may say, one morning he walked 
 into the town — Gubbio it was — with a wolf pacing 
 at his heels — a certain wolf which had been the 
 terror of the country-side and eaten I don't know 
 how many children and goats. He walked up the 
 main street till he got to the open Piazza in front 
 of the great church. And the long grey wolf
 
 122 Earthwork out of Tuscany : 
 
 padded beside him with 'a limp tongue lolling out 
 between the ragged palings which stood him for 
 teeth. In the middle of the Piazza was a fountain, 
 and above the fountain a tall stone crucifix. Our 
 friend mounted the steps of the cross in the alert 
 way he had (like a little bird, the story says) and 
 the wolf, after lapping apologetically in the basin, 
 followed him up three steps at a time. Then 
 with one arm round the shaft to steady himself he 
 made a fine sermon to the neighbours crowding in 
 the Square, and the wolf stood with his fore-paws 
 on the edge of the fountain and helped him. The 
 sermon was all about wolves (naturally) and the 
 best way of treating them. I fancy the people 
 came to agree with it in time ; anyhow when the 
 man died they made a saint of him and built three 
 churches, one over another, to contain his body. 
 And I believe it is entirely his fault that there are 
 a hundred-and-three cats in the convent-garden 
 of San Lorenzo in Florence. For what are you 
 to do? Animals are sacred, says Saint Francis. 
 Animals are sacred, but cats have kittens; and so 
 it comes about that the people who agree with 
 Saint Francis have to suffer for the people who 
 don't. 
 
 The Canons of San Lorenzo agree with Saint 
 Francis, and it seems to me that they must suffer a 
 good deal. The convent is large; it has a great 
 mildewed cloister with a covered-in walk all round 
 it built on arches. In the middle is a green garth 
 with cypresses and yews dotted about; when you
 
 Cats 
 
 123 
 
 look up you see the blue sky cut square, and the hot 
 tiles of a huge dome staring up into it. Round the 
 cloister walk are discreet brown doors, and by the 
 side of each door a brass plate tells you the name 
 and titles of the Canon who lives behind it. It is 
 on the principle of Dean's Yard at Westminster ; 
 only here there are more Canons — and more cats. 
 
 The Canons live under the cloister ; the cats 
 live on the green garth, and sometimes die there. 
 I did not see much of the Canons ; but the 
 cats seemed to me very sad — depressed, nostalgic 
 even, might describe them, if there had not been 
 something more languid, something faded and 
 spiritless about their habit. It was not that they 
 quarrelled. I heard none of those long-drawn 
 wails, gloomy yet mellow soliloquies, with which 
 our cats usher in the crescent moon or hymn her 
 when she swims at the full : there lacked even 
 that comely resignation we may see on any sunny 
 window-ledge at home ; — the rounded back and 
 neatly ordered tail, the immaculate fore-paws peering 
 sedately below the snowy chest, the squeezed-up 
 eyes which so resolutely shut off a bleak and (so 
 to say) unenlightened world. That is pensiveness, 
 sedate chastened melancholy ; but it is soothing ; 
 it speaks a philosophy, and a certain balancing 
 of pleasures and pains. In San Lorenzo cloister, 
 when I looked in one hot noon seeking a refuge 
 from the glare and white dust of the city, I 
 was conscious of a something sinister that forbade 
 such an even existence for the smoothest tempered
 
 i 24 Earthwork out of Tuscany : 
 
 cat. There were too many of them for companion- 
 ship and perhaps too few for the humour of the 
 thing to strike them : in and out the chilly shades 
 they stalked gloomily, hither and thither like lank 
 and unquiet ghosts of starved cats. They were of 
 all colours — gay orange-tawny, tortoiseshell with 
 the becoming white patch over one eye, delicate 
 tints of grey and fawn and lavender, brindle, glossy 
 sable ; and yet the gloom and dampness of the place 
 seemed to mildew them all so that their brightness 
 was glaring and their softest gradations took on a 
 shade as of rusty mourning. No cat could be ex- 
 pected to do herself justice. 
 
 To and fro they paced, balancing sometimes with 
 hysterical precision on the ledge of the parapet, 
 passing each other at whisker's length, but cutting 
 each other dead ! Not a cat had a look or a sniff 
 for his fellow ; not a cat so much as guessed at 
 another's existence. Among those hundred-and- 
 three restless spirits there was not a cat but 
 did not affect to believe that a hundred-and- 
 two were away ! It was horrible, the inhumanity 
 of it. Here were these shreds and waifs, these 
 "unnecessary litters" of Florentine households, 
 herded together in the only asylum (short of the 
 Arno) open to them, driven in like dead leaves in 
 November, flitting dismally round and round for a 
 span, and watching each other die without a mew or 
 a lick ! Saint Francis was not the wise man I had 
 thought him. 
 
 It was about two o'clock in the afternoon. I
 
 Cats 125 
 
 had watched these beasts at their feverish exercises 
 for nearly an hour before I perceived that they were 
 gradually hemming me in. They seemed to be 
 forming up, in ranks, on the garth. Only a ditch 
 separated us — I was in the cloister-walk, a hundred- 
 and-three gaunt, expectant, desperate cats facing me. 
 Their famished pale eyes pierced me through and 
 through ; and two-hundred-and-two hungry eyes 
 (four cats supported life on one apiece) is more than 
 I can stand, though I am a married man with a 
 family. These brutes thought I was going to feed 
 them ! I was preparing weakly for flight when I 
 heard steps in the gateway ; a woman came in with 
 a black bag. She must be going to deposit a cat on 
 Jean-Jacques' ingenious plan of avoiding domestic 
 trouble ; it was surely impossible she wanted to 
 borrow one ! Neither : she came confidently in, 
 beaming on our mad fellowship with a pleasant smile 
 of preparation. The cats knew her better than I 
 did. Their suspense was really shocking to witness. 
 While she was rolling her sleeves up and tying on 
 her apron — she was poor, evidently, but very neat 
 and wholesome in her black dress and the decent 
 cap which crowned her grey hair — while she un- 
 packed the contents of the bag — two newspaper parcels 
 full of rather distressing viands, scissors, and a pair 
 of gloves which had done duty more than once — 
 while all these preparations were soberly fulfilling, 
 the agitation of the hundred-and-three was desperate 
 indeed. The air grew thick, it quivered with the 
 lashing of tails ; hoarse mews echoed along the
 
 126 Earthwork out of Tuscany : 
 
 stone walls, paws were raised and let fall with the 
 rhythmical patter of raindrops. A furtive beast 
 played the thief: he was one of the one-eyed 
 fraternity, red with mange. Somehow he slipped in 
 between us ; we discovered him crouched by the 
 newspaper raking over the contents. This was no 
 time for ceremony ; he got a prompt cuff over the 
 head and slunk away shivering and shaking his ears. 
 And then the distribution began. Now, your cat, 
 at the best of times, is squeamish about his food ; 
 he stands no tricks. He is a slow eater, though he 
 can secure his dinner with the best of us. A vicious 
 snatch, like a snake, and he has it. Then he spreads 
 himself out to dispose of the prey — feet tucked well 
 in, head low, tail laid close along, eyes shut fast. 
 That is how a cat of breeding loves to dine. Alas ! 
 many a day of intolerable prowling, many a black 
 vigil, had taken the polish off the hundred-and-three. 
 As a matter of fact they behaved abominably : they 
 leaped at the scraps, they clawed at them in the air, 
 they bolted them whole with starting eyes and por- 
 tentous gulpings, they growled all the while with the 
 smothered ferocity of thunder in the hills. No 
 waiting of turns, no licking of lips and moustaches to 
 get the lingering flavours, no dalliance. They were 
 as restless and suspicious here as everywhere ; their 
 feast was the horrid hasty orgy of ghouls in a church- 
 yard. 
 
 But an even distribution was made : 1 don't think 
 any one got more than his share. Of course there 
 were underhand attempts in plenty and, at least once,
 
 Cats 127 
 
 open violence — a sudden rush from opposite sides, 
 a growling and spitting like sparks from a smithy ; 
 and then, with ears laid flat, two ill-favoured beasts 
 clawed blindly at each other, and a sly and tigerish 
 brindle made away with the morsel. My woman 
 took the thing very coolly I thought, served them 
 all alike, and didn't resent (as I should have done) 
 the unfortunate want of delicacy there was about 
 these vagrants. A cat that takes your food and 
 growls at you for the favour, a cat that would eat 
 you if he dared, is a pretty revelation. Ca donne 
 fur'ieusement a penser. It gives you a suspicion of 
 just how far the polish we most of us smirk over 
 will go. My cats at San Lorenzo knew some few 
 moments of peace between two and three in the 
 afternoon. That would have been the time to get 
 up a testimonial to the kind soul who fed them. 
 Try them at five and they would ignore you. But 
 try them next morning ! 
 
 My knowledge of the Italian tongue, in those 
 days, was severely limited to the necessaries of 
 existence ; to try me on a fancy subject, like 
 cats, was to strike me dumb. But at this stage 
 of our intercourse (hitherto confined to smiles and 
 eye-service) it became so evident my companion 
 had something to say that I must perforce 
 take my hat off and stand attentive. She pointed 
 to the middle of the garth, and there, under the 
 boughs of a shrub, I saw the hundred-and-fourth 
 cat, sorriest of them all. It was a new-comer, 
 she told me, and shy. Shy it certainly was, poor
 
 128 Earthwork out of Tuscany : 
 
 wretch ; it glowered upon me from under the 
 branches like a bad conscience. Shyness could not 
 hide hunger — I never saw hungrier eyes than hers 
 — but it could hold it in check : the silkiest speech 
 could not tempt her out, and when we threw pieces 
 she only winced ! What was to be done next was 
 my work. Plain duty called me to scale the ditch 
 with some of those dripping, slippery, nameless cates 
 in my fingers and to approach the stranger where she 
 lurked bodeful under her tree. My passage towards 
 her lay over the rank vegetation of the garth, in 
 whose coarse herbage here and there I stumbled upon 
 a limp white form stretched out — a waif the less 
 in the world ! I don't say it was a happy passage 
 for me : it was made to the visible consternation of 
 her I wished to befriend. Her piteous yellow eyes 
 searched mine for sympathy ; she wanted to tell 
 me something and I wouldn't understand ! As 
 I neared her she shivered and mewed twice. Then 
 she limped painfully off — poor soul, she had but 
 three feet! — to another tree, leaving behind her, 
 unwillingly enough, a much-licked dead kitten. 
 That was what she wanted to tell me then. As 
 I was there, I deposited the garbage by the side 
 of the little corpse, knowing she would resume her 
 watch, and retired. My friend who had put up 
 her parcels was prepared to go. She thanked me 
 with a smile as she went out, looking carefully 
 round lest she had missed out some other night-birds. 
 One of the Canons had come out of his door and 
 was leaning against the lintel, thoughtfully rubbing his
 
 Cats 129 
 
 chin. He was a spare dry man who seemed to have 
 measured life and found it a childish business. He 
 jerked his head towards the gateway as he glanced 
 at me. " That is a good woman," he said in 
 French, " she lendeth unto the Lord. . . . Yes," he 
 went on, nodding his head slowly backwards and 
 forwards, " lends Him something every day." The 
 cats were sitting in the shady cloister-garth licking 
 their whiskers : one was actually cleaning his paw. 
 I went out into the sun thinking of Saint Francis 
 and his wolf.
 
 
 XII 
 
 The Soul of a City 
 
 He hated Marco first of all because one day he 
 undersold him in the Campo, put him to shame in 
 open market. Figs were going cheap that October 
 in spite of the waning year ; but there was no earthly 
 reason why he should give the English ladies more 
 than four for two soldi. What were soldi to English 
 people ? The scratch of a flea ! He would have 
 given them a handful, taken as they came, for their 
 piece of cinquanta, and reaped a tidy little profit for 
 himself. Who would have been the worse ? God 
 knew he needed it. Mariola crumpled with the ague 
 like a dried leaf, and that long girl of his growing up 
 so fast, and still running wild with goat-herds and 
 marble quarrymen. How could he send her to the 
 nuns for a place unless he bought her some shoes 
 and a rosary ? And then that pig Marco — thieving 
 old miser — peered forward with his mock candour 
 and silver-rimmed goggles and offered ten for 
 two soldi — ten! with the market price, Dio mio, 
 at twelve ! And Jichi totati too ! Do you 
 wonder that the ladies in striped blankets gave the 
 cheek to Maso Cecci and turned to Marco Zoppa ? 
 130
 
 'The Soul of a City \ o i 
 
 That wasn't all, but it was an accentuation of a 
 long series of spiteful injuries wrought him by the 
 wrinkled old villain. Maso endured, hating the old 
 man daily more and more ; tried little tricks, little 
 revenges, upon him, upset his baskets, hid his pipe ; 
 but they generally failed or recoiled with a nasty 
 swiftness upon himself. He only got deeper and 
 deeper into the bad odour of the neighbours who 
 traded in the Piazza with fruit and indifferent photo- 
 graphs. Nothing went very well — thanks to that 
 unspeakable old Marco ! His girl grew longer and 
 lazier and handsomer, with a shapelier bust and a pair 
 of arms like that snaky Bacchante in the Opera. 
 Maso had to quail more than he liked to admit 
 before the proud stare of her eyes ; and when she 
 dropped the heavy lids upon them and sauntered 
 away, arms akimbo under her shawl, he could only 
 swear. And he always cursed Marco Zoppa who 
 gave her chestnuts and sage counsel for nothing. 
 God only knew what devilry he might be whispering 
 to her in the shady corner where the sun never came 
 and the grass sprouted between the flags — she leaning 
 against the wall, looking down at her toes, and he 
 peering keen-eyed into her face and muttering in his 
 beard, sometimes laying an old brown hand on her 
 shoulder — Lord ! he did hate the man. 
 
 Then came the August races. 
 
 Maso had brought his Isotta into the city to see 
 the fun and she had disappeared in the press just 
 before the procession stayed by the Palazzo and the 
 trumpets sounded for the first race. Maso shrugged
 
 132 Earthwork out of Tusccmy : 
 
 his shoulders and cursed his luck, but didn't budge. 
 The girl must look after herself. He was on the 
 upper rim of the great fountain craning his neck over 
 the pack of people : then he got a dig under the ribs 
 enough to take the breath of an ox. It was the 
 spout of old Marco's green umbrella. " Hey ! silly 
 fool," spluttered the old liar, "dost want that loose- 
 legged slut of thine in trouble ? I tell thee she's 
 playing in a corner with Carlo Formaggia. Already 
 he's pinched her cheek twice, and who knows what 
 the end may be ? Mud-coloured ass, wilt thou let 
 thy child slip to the devil while thou standest gaping 
 at a horse-race ? " And this before all the neigh- 
 bours ! What to say to such a man ? Maso babbled 
 with rage ; but he had to go, for Carlo Formaggia 
 was well known. He had ruined more girls than 
 enough ; he was in league with vile houses, gambling 
 dens, thieves' hells ; Captain of an infamous secret 
 society ; the police were only waiting for a pretext 
 to get him shipped off to the hulks. He must go of 
 course. No thanks to Marco though : in fact he 
 hated him worse than ever, partly because he had 
 drawn all eyes and a fair share of sniggering and 
 tongues thrust in the cheek upon his account ; but 
 most because he knew he had been trapped into 
 losing a good place. For, as he mounted the narrow 
 stair cut between old houses steep as rocks, he turned 
 and saw Zoppa placidly smoking his pipe in the very 
 spot he had held, squatted on the fountain-rim with 
 his green umbrella between his knees. He was 
 beaming through his spectacles, in a fatherly, indulgent
 
 The Soul of a City 133 
 
 sort of way, upon the shouting people ; following the 
 race too, like one who had paid for his box. Maso, 
 when he heard the shatter of hoofs and the wild roar 
 from thousands of throats down below him in the 
 Campo, cursed old Zoppa with a grey face, and went 
 muttering round the blinding sides of the Duomo to 
 find his daughter. And when he did find her she 
 was eating chestnuts at the open door of her aunt's 
 shop in the Via Ghibellina ! Bacchus ! she was 
 sick of all those folk in their festa clothes, was all 
 the explanation she would give him from between 
 fine white teeth all clogged with chestnut-meal. If 
 he chose to dress his daughter like a beggar's brat 
 he had better not take her to the races. Maso's 
 feeling of relief at finding her alone and looking her 
 usual sulky impassive self, gave way very rapidly to 
 a sort of righteous wrath against his triumphant 
 enemy. So, by foul slanders of honest God-fearing 
 people that old Jew had not scrupled to rob him 
 of his place ! His place and his day's fun. By 
 Heaven, he was tricked, duped by a scaly-eyed Jew 
 pedlar, a vile old dog tottering down to Hell with 
 lies in his beard. Well ! he would put this 
 morning's work down to his score ; some day there 
 would be a choice little reckoning for Ser Marco. 
 
 Maso, green with impotent fury, poured out 
 his flood of gutturals upon his insouciante child. 
 General reproaches were always a failure in cases 
 of this sort. Some were sure to be wild guess- 
 work and to drown the real ones : you could 
 never tell when you had hit the mark. Had she
 
 1 34 Earthwork out of Tuscany : 
 
 not — she fourteen, too ! — slid astride down the 
 railing into the Campo and been caught up in the 
 arms of Carlo Formaggia waiting and laughing at 
 the bottom? Had she not lain a whole minute 
 in his arms, panting ? And then, Dio mio, with 
 the sweat still on her forehead, she had slipped off 
 to San Domenico and confessed to coughing at 
 mass the Sunday before ! Pest ! he would give 
 her the strap over her shoulders when he got her 
 home. The long, brown girl leaned against the 
 lintel kicking one heel idly against the other. She 
 was smiling at him, smiling with her lazy, languid 
 eyes and with her glistening teeth. Every now 
 and then she inspected a chestnut critically — like 
 an amateur ! — and slipped it between her jaws. 
 They split it like a banana. And then she squeezed 
 the half skins and dropped the flour down her 
 throat. She had a long sinewy throat, glossy as 
 velvet, with its silvery lights and dusky brown 
 shadows. Maso stood helpless before her as she 
 drank down her flour ; he chattered like a little 
 passionate ape. At last he lifted up both hands in 
 a sudden frenzy of despair and went away. 
 
 Of course the races were over. The sober 
 streets swarmed with people in their holiday clothes. 
 They all seemed laughing and smoking, and talking 
 fluently of something ridiculous. Maso, egoist, knew 
 it must be about him — or his daughter. Arms and 
 heads went like mill-sails or tall trees in a gale of 
 wind. Then, with a rattle and the sudden sliding 
 of four hoofs on the flags, a cart would be in the 

 
 The Soul of a City 135 
 
 thick of them, and the people scoured to the curb, 
 still laughing, or spitting between the spasms of 
 the interrupted jest. The boys tried to peep under 
 the sagging hats of the girls, and the girls turned 
 pettish shoulders to them and, as they turned, you 
 caught the glint of fun in their great roes' eyes 
 and saw the lips part before the quick breath. The 
 streets were mere gullies, clefts hewn in zig-zag 
 between grey houses that tottered up and up, and 
 lay over them like cliffs. An ancient church with 
 bleached stone saints under flowery canopies, a 
 guttering candle before a tinsel shrine, and the 
 hoarse babel of the street — whips that cracked and 
 spluttered like squibs, a swarming coloured stream 
 of men and maids, once the twang of a chance 
 mandoline. Siena was feasting, and the waiters 
 furtively swept their foreheads with their coatsleeves 
 as they ran in and out of the trattorie. 
 
 In the trattoria of the Aqu'tla Rossa old Marco 
 Zoppa smoked his pipe and talked, between the 
 spurts of smoke, to his neighbours. Fate brought 
 him face to face with two enemies at once. 
 Maso was battling his way up the street, white 
 and strained as a grave-cloth ; and Carlo For- 
 maggia, the approved bravo — oiled and jaunty, 
 with his brown felt fantastically rolled and stuck 
 over one ear, with a long cigar which he alternately 
 gnawed and sucked, Carlo the broad-chested, of 
 the seared, evil face, came down with the stream 
 on the arms of two other gilded youths. They 
 met before the cafe, the man of intolerable wrongs
 
 136 Earthwork out of Tuscany 
 
 and the Pilia-Borsa of Siena. Maso scowled till 
 his thick eyebrows cut his face horizontally in 
 two. He stood ostentatiously still, muttering with 
 his lips as the trio went lightly by. Then he 
 made to go on. But old Marco Zoppa stood 
 up and made a speech. He had the wooden 
 stem of his pipe 'twixt finger and thumb, and 
 used it like a conductor's baton to emphasise his 
 points. As his voice shrilled and quavered, Carlo 
 Formaggia caught his own name and turned back 
 to listen, prick-eared. He stood out of sight rest- 
 ing one foot on a doorstep, and leaned forward 
 on to his leg. He might have been dreaming of 
 some night of love, but he held every word as it 
 dropped. 
 
 " Maso," Marco went on, " thou art but a 
 thin fool. I know what I know ; but thou must 
 needs stick dirt in thine ears and pass me by. 
 Well, let be, let be ; the end will come soon 
 enough — this night even. And I have warned 
 thee." 
 
 " Spawn of a pig, wilt never have done irking 
 me ? See, I scratch thee off me ! " Maso drove 
 home his gibe with a dramatic performance. The 
 trattoria was agape. Every table held its three 
 craning necks and six piercing, twinkling eyes 
 atop. 
 
 " I grow old, my Maso, I grow very old, and 
 thy monkey's tricks are nought. 'Tis thy slip 
 of a girl and thy poor twisted Mariola I would 
 save in spite of thee. Listen then once more,
 
 I'he Soul of a City 137 
 
 and for the last time. Ser Carlo intends to snare 
 thy pigeon. He has limed his twigs ; the bird 
 flutters free for this noon, but by to-night she 
 will be caged. For me, I have done my possible 
 — but I am old. Life tingles fiercer in the blood 
 of a young man. Therefore beware. Wilt thou 
 see that brawny assassin toying with thy girl ; 
 leaning over her where she crouches, poisoning 
 her with fat words ? That's how the snake 
 licks the turtle before he gulfs her — 'tis to 
 make her sleek, look you ! Well, go thy way, 
 dolt and blunderhead. For me — old as I am 
 — I will shoot a last bolt for Mariola. This 
 very night after supper I go to the Sbirro : and 
 thy thanks will be a rounder oath and some more 
 knave's tricks with my baskets." 
 
 " No thanks are owing, Marco Zoppa " ; Maso 
 was ashy with shame and rage at the old man's 
 placid benevolence. " Marco Zoppa, thou hast been 
 my enemy ever, and I have borne it" — the Cafe 
 roared with laughter ; a fat old Capuchin nearly had 
 a fit. Maso looked round with fright in his eyes. 
 He went on, " Now thou hast gone too far — insult- 
 ing me grossly before these citizens. Thou hast 
 brought thine end upon thyself." He ran away 
 fighting through the delighted crowd. Everybody 
 who could get at him slapped him on the back. A 
 big carter stove his hat in. 
 
 Old Marco shrugged his patient shoulders and 
 sat down to read the Secolo. He balanced his silver- 
 rimmed spectacles on his nose and held the journal at
 
 138 Earthwork out of Tusca?ty : 
 
 arm's length with hand a thought more shaky, per- 
 haps, than usual. Presently he looked up : " Mother 
 of God ! what a white-faced rogue it is ! Eh, 
 Giuseppe ? " " By Mars, if looks could stab, thou 
 hadst been riddled by the knife before this," said his 
 friend. Marco shrugged and went on reading — he 
 was an old man. 
 
 But when Carlo Formaggia had heard the debate, 
 he turned a shade shinier, and his eyes harder and 
 brighter. As he motioned his friends off with a 
 look, he swallowed something hard in his throat. 
 Then he turned down the first side street, doubled 
 round to the right, turned to the left down a kind of 
 black sewer-trap and let himself into a wine-shop 
 where he sat down, breathing short. He drank 
 brandy — but he drank like a machine. The muscles 
 of his jaw were working spasmodically as he sat 
 rigid on a tub, leaning against the counter. And he 
 fingered something at his belt. His eyes were in 
 a cold stare : he saw nothing and didn't move. But 
 he went on drinking brandy till late in the afternoon, 
 till the Hail Mary bells began to sound a tinkling 
 chorus through the still air. 
 
 And Maso Cecci, he too, rushed away white 
 and chattering. Rage had past definition with him, 
 he saw things red, and they choked him. The 
 air felt thick to him, full of flies. He brushed his 
 hands before his face, struck out vaguely, and swore 
 as the dazzling black things settled round him again 
 in a swarm. Irritated, maddened as he was, he 
 still heard the derisive yells of the crowd at the
 
 The Soul of a City 139 
 
 birreria and saw Marco's calm wise old face smiling 
 urbanely behind silver spectacles. Crista amore ! 
 how he loathed that old man. Siena could never 
 hold the pair of them : there must be an end — 
 there should be an end. His heart gave a jerk 
 under his vest as he thought of it. An end! — an 
 end of his eternal fretting jealousy in the Campo, 
 his continued sense of being worsted, of galling 
 inferiority to that methodical old villain. An end 
 of his worries about Isotta ; an end — ah ! but 
 there would be something rarer than that ? To 
 a man like Maso, a small man, of immoderate 
 self-esteem, and that self-esteem always on the 
 smart, there is another satisfaction — that of seeing 
 the better man totter and slip forward to his knees. 
 This insufferable old Marco who was always so 
 right, with his slow methods and accursed accuracy 
 — to see him stumble and drop! That was what 
 made Maso's heart flutter and thud against his 
 skin. And then, as he thought of it, it seemed 
 inevitable. It could be done in a minute, via ! 
 The old man was alone — it would be dusk — he 
 would peer forward through the gloom to open 
 the door and — Madre di Dio ! — and then ! Maso 
 was sweating ; the back of his palate itched in- 
 tolerably ; something hot and sticky clogged his 
 mouth and glued his tongue against the roof of it. 
 His knees shook so that he could scarcely walk. 
 Some little boys stood to stare at him as he lurched 
 by, and laughed stealthily to see the hated Maso tipsy. 
 But Maso was unconscious of all this : he staggered 
 on homewards with scorching eyes. . . .
 
 14° Earthwork out of 'Tuscany : 
 
 Old Marco lived down beyond the Railway 
 Station — a room in a crazy block of buildings 
 that had been run up for the needs of the factory 
 hands. It was like a great smooth cliff, this block, 
 and was washed over a raw pink, but it glowed 
 in the setting sun that evening, like the city herself 
 and all the hills, the colour of bright blood. As 
 Maso neared its blind face, stepping warily with 
 outstretched neck like some obscene bird, and with 
 one hand under his coat — the sun was going down 
 into a purple bank of cloud. He gilded the 
 edges as he sank and shot broad rays of crimson 
 light up into the green sky. Here and there a star 
 twinkled faint ; the city lay over him like a cloudy, 
 silent company of rocks ; the tower of the Palazzo 
 ran up into the pallor of the sky, a shaking spear. 
 
 There was but one glimmer of light in the 
 whole ghostly wall of tenements and that, Maso 
 knew, was Marco Zoppa's. Every soul else was 
 crowded in the Campo waiting for the fireworks. 
 And, as he thought, he heard a dull thud behind 
 him, and turned ; and there, far up, a single shaft 
 of flame shot aloft, and stayed, and burst into a 
 fan of lights ; and a puff told him it was the first 
 rocket. " Ecco ! Madre di Dio, a sign ! a sign ! 
 So will / go up ; and so shall my enemy come 
 down." And Maso crept up the stairway breath- 
 ing thick and short. . . . 
 
 With a hand still under his cloak he rapped 
 his knuckles on the door. No answer. An 
 echo, only, fluttered and grew faint down the
 
 The Soul of a City 141 
 
 stone steps. He hoisted his cloak from the 
 shoulder and swung his right arm free. Then 
 he knocked again. Nothing. No sign. Heavy- 
 silence ; only a distant murmur of voices, muffled 
 and infinitely far, from the Campo on the hill. 
 
 " The game has flown ! Or the old dog sleeps." 
 Maso sighed, for he wanted to see him drop 
 gurgling to his knees. Still, it made his affair 
 easier. He gave one fierce hoist to his cloak, 
 twitched his right arm once or twice, and gently 
 turned the handle. Then he stepped lightly and 
 daintily into the room. 
 
 A candle guttered on a little table in the corner, 
 and the Crucified showed white upon the black 
 cross above. Marco Zoppa lay on his bed with 
 his throat cut from ear to ear. The cut was so 
 resolute that his head stuck out at an angle from 
 his body — almost a right angle ; and in some 
 struggle he had got his nostril sliced. That gave 
 him an odd, mesquin expression, lying there with 
 his mouth open and his yawning nostril, as if he 
 wanted to sneeze. The room smelt stale and 
 sour ; the thick air gathered in a misty halo round 
 the candle, and a fat shroud of tallow drooped 
 over the edges of the candlestick. 
 
 Maso dropped his long, clean knife ; dropped 
 on to his knees and wailed like a chained dog. 
 He could not take his eyes from the horrible 
 black pit between the dead man's chin and trunk. 
 Out of that pit a thin scarlet stream was still 
 slipping lazily, slowly, and trailing down the white
 
 142 Earthwork out of Tuscany 
 
 coverlid to the floor. Maso's wailing attracted a 
 dog near by. He too set ofF howling from 
 behind his door : and then another, and another. 
 There was a chorus of howls, long-drawn, pitiful, 
 desolate ; and Maso, the only man in that woeful 
 company, howled like any dog of the pack. 
 
 Gradually his moaning sank and then stopped 
 with a dry sob. He crawled on his knees a little 
 nearer to the bed and eyed fearfully a patch of blood 
 on the counterpane. Just God ! what was that 
 patch ? A faint circle smeared with the finger, 
 and through the midst of it a ragged dart. Carlo 
 Formaggia had been there ! He knew that mark ! 
 And then the whole truth blazed before him like 
 a sheet of fire. He fell forward on his face. 
 The thin thread of scarlet from Marco Zoppa's 
 gaping throat crawled drop by drop on to his 
 shoulder. 
 
 Carlo Formaggia had limed his bird.
 
 XIII 
 
 With the Brown Bear 
 
 The secret of happy travelling (and of Turkish 
 baths) is contrast. Suffer, that you may drowse 
 thereafter : grill, that you may have a heat on you 
 worth assuagement. Wherefore, to the Italian 
 wanderer, it will be worth while to endure the 
 fierceness of the Lombard plain, even the gilded 
 modernisms of Milan (blistering though they may 
 be under the stroke of the naked sun) and the 
 dusty, painful traverse of the Apennines, to drop 
 down at last into the broad green peace of the Val 
 D'Arno. Take, however, the first halting-place 
 you can. You will find yourself in a hollow of 
 the hills, helping the brown bear of Pistoja keep 
 the Northern gates of Tuscany. It is not unlikely 
 that the Apennine may " walk abroad with the 
 storm," or hide his moss-brown slopes in great 
 sheets of mist. This, while it means a fine 
 sight, means also rain for Pistoja. A quiet rain 
 will accordingly fall upon the little city, gently 
 but persistently. Only in the gleams may you 
 guess that you have the Tuscan sky over you and 
 the smiling Tuscan Art round about. But the 
 
 143
 
 144 Earthwork out of Tuscany : 
 
 ways of the Pistolesi will confirm the feeble knees : 
 such at least was my case. 
 
 For the Pistolesi were there beside foul weather, 
 and splashed about under green umbrellas with pro- 
 digious jokes to cut at each other's expense, of a 
 sort we reserve for Spring or early June. For them, 
 with a vintage none too good to be garnered, it 
 might have been the finest weather in the world ; 
 but I am bound to add my belief that they would 
 have laughed were it the worst. With no money, no 
 weather, and taxes intolerable, Pistoja laughed and 
 looked handsome. Was not Boccaccio a Pistolese ? 
 I was reminded of his book at every turn of the road : 
 life is a wanton story there, or, say, a Masque of 
 Green Things, enacted by a splendid fairy rout. 
 They were still the well-favoured race Dino Com- 
 pagni described them far back in the fourteenth 
 century — " formati di bella statura oltre a' Toscani," 
 he says. The words hold good of their grandsons — 
 the men leaner and longer, hardier and keener than 
 you find them in Lucca or Siena ; and the women 
 carry their heads high, and when they smile at you 
 (as they will) you think the sun must be shining. 
 They are a strong race. At pal/one one day, I saw 
 muscles " all a-ripple down the back," arms and 
 shoulders, which would have intoxicated the great 
 old "amatore del persona" himself. For their 
 vivacity, it is racial ; I think all Tuscans, more or 
 less, retain the buoyant spirits, the alertness as of 
 birds, which crowned Italy with Florence instead of 
 Rome or Milan. Tuscan Art is a proof of that,
 
 With the Brown Bear 145 
 
 and Tuscan Art can be studied at its roots in 
 Pistoja : you see there the naked thing itself with 
 none of the wealth of Florence to make the head 
 swim. If Florence had stopped short at the death 
 of Giuliano de' Medici, you might say Pistoja was 
 Florence seen through the diminishing-glass. Is 
 not that ribbed dome, with its purple mass domineer- 
 ing over the huddled roofs, Brunelleschi's ? It is a 
 faithful copy of Vasari's hatching ; but no matter. 
 So with the Baptistry, the towers, the grim old 
 corniced palaces, the sdrucc'ioli and gloomy clefts 
 which serve for streets. But you would be wropg. 
 Pisa is the real parent of Pistoja, as indeed she is of 
 Florence — Dante's Florence. Pisa's magnificent 
 building repeats to itself here : Gothic with a touch 
 of Latin sanity, a touch of the genuine Paganism 
 which loves the dasdal earth and cannot bring itself 
 to be out of touch with it. San Giovanni fuori- 
 civitas, what a rock-hewn church it is ! A rigid 
 oblong, dark as the twilight, running with the street 
 without belfry or window or facade. Three tiers of 
 shallow arcades on spiral columns, never a window 
 to be seen, and the whole of solemn black marble 
 narrowly striped with white. Is there such a beast 
 as a black tiger — a tiger where the tawny and 
 black change places ? San Giovanni is modelled after 
 that fashion. It is very old — twelfth century at 
 latest — very shabby and weather-beaten, dusty and 
 deserted. But it will outlive Pistoja ; and that is 
 probably what Pistoja desired. 
 
 This black and white, which is so reminiscent of
 
 146 Earthwork out of 'Tuscany : 
 
 early Florence, is carried out with more fidelity to 
 the model in the Piazza. The octagonal Baptistry 
 is, no doubt, a copy of Dante's beloved church ; 
 but it is much better placed, does not " shun to be 
 admired " like its beautiful yellowed sister. The 
 Duomo is of Pisa again, and has a tower, half 
 belfry, half fortress, which once the Podesta seized 
 and held while the plucky little town endured a 
 siege. The Brown Bear stood out long against the 
 Lily. But Lorenzo showed his teeth : and the Wolf 
 prevailed at last. Sculpture apart, the resemblance 
 to Florence stops here. None of her Cinque-cento 
 bravery and little of her earlier and finer Renaissance 
 came this way. But one thing came ; one clean 
 breath from " that solemn fifteenth century " did 
 blow to this verge of Tuscan soil, a breath from 
 Luca della Robbia and his men. They may flower 
 more exuberantly in Florence, those broad, blue- 
 eyed platters of theirs ; nowhere is their purpose 
 more explicit, their charm more exquisitely appreci- 
 able than here. There is a chance of considering 
 the art on its own merits ; better, you can see it 
 more truly as it was at home, since Florence has 
 caught some little of Haussmannism and is not as 
 Luca left it. So here, perhaps best of all, you may 
 try to plumb the depths of the Delia Robbia soul, — 
 through its purity and limpid candour, through its 
 shining, sweetly wholesome homeliness, down to the 
 crystal sincerity burning recessed in the shrine. It is 
 the fashion to say of Angelico da Fiesole that his was 
 a naivete which amounted to genius : a thin phrase,
 
 With the Brown Bear \/\rj 
 
 which may nevertheless pass to qualify the inspired 
 miniaturist. The religiosity of the Delia Robbia, 
 while no less na'i've, is really far other. It is not Gothic 
 at all, nor ascetic, nor mystic. It would be Latin, were 
 it not blithe enough to be Greek. It speaks of what 
 is and must be, and is well content ; not of what should, 
 or might be, if one could but tear off this crust. It 
 seems probable that it speaks as pure a Paganism 
 — just that very Paganism which Pisan building re- 
 presents — as has been seen since the workmen 
 of Tanagra fashioned their little clay familiars for 
 the tombs, slim Greek girls in their reedy habit 
 as they lived, or chattering matrons like those you 
 read of in Theocritus. Much fine phrasing has 
 been spent upon the effort to analyse the aesthetics 
 of Delia Robbia ware. Its inexhaustible charm is 
 unquestionable ; but just where does it catch one's 
 breath ? Not altogether in the clean colouring, 
 like nothing so much as that of a cool, glazed dairy 
 at home, — " milky-blue," " cream-white," " butter- 
 yellow," "parsley-green," all the dairy names come 
 pat to pen — ; not necessarily in the sheer, April 
 loveliness of form and expression, though that would 
 count for much ; nor, I believe, as Mr Pater would 
 have us acknowledge, in the evanescent delicacy of 
 each motive and sentiment, — the arresting of a single 
 sigh, a single wave of desire, a single stave of the 
 Magnificat. All this is true, and true only of 
 Luca, and yet the whole charm is not there. 
 Rather, I think, you will find it in the fusing of 
 humble material — the age-old clay of the potter
 
 148 Earthwork out of Tuscany: 
 
 (of the Master-Potter, for that matter) — and fine 
 art, whereby the wayside shrine is linked to the 
 high altar, and contadino and Vicar-Apostolic can 
 hail a common ideal. Every lane, every cottage, 
 has its Madonna-shrine here ; lumped in clay or 
 daubed in raw colour, nothing can obliterate the 
 sweet sentiment of these poor weeds of art, these 
 tawdry little appeals to the better part of us. 
 Madonna cries with a bared red heart ; she sup- 
 ports a white Christ ; she stoops suave to enfold 
 a legion of children in her mantle. She is as 
 Tuscan as the brownest of them ; only a Tuscan 
 of the rarest mould, they would have you to see, 
 of a cleanliness quite unapproachable, of a benignity 
 wholly divine. One learns the secret of devotional 
 art best of all in such ephemeral sanctuaries. And 
 since Fine Art is the flower of these shabby roots, 
 Italy only, where Cincinnatus worked in his garden, 
 can furnish so wonderful a harmony of opposites. 
 Surely it is the most democratic country in Europe. 
 I saw a Colonel the other day, in Bologna, carrying 
 a newspaper parcel. He was in full uniform. It 
 was the secret of Saint Francis that he knew how 
 to bridge the gulf on either side of which we, 
 prisoners in feudal holds, have cried to each other 
 in vain. It was the secret of the Delia Robbia 
 too. The god shall sink that we may rise to meet 
 him in the way. Why not ? Here in Pistoja 
 are some precious pieces — a Visitation in San 
 Giovanni, a pearly Madonna Incoronata on the big 
 door of San Giacopo, concerning which it would
 
 With the Brown Bear iaq 
 
 be difficult to account to one's self for the added 
 zest given by the mantle of fine dust which has 
 settled down on the pale folds of the drapery and 
 outlined the square blue panels of the background. 
 After all, is it not one more touch of the hedgerow, 
 a symbol of the hedgerow-faith not quite dead in 
 the byeways of Italy ? 
 
 But I know I shall never convey the spontaneity 
 with which Fra Paolino's Visitation strikes quick for 
 the heart. The thing is so momentary, a mere 
 quiver of emotion passing from one woman to 
 another. The pair of them have looked in to 
 the deeps. Then the older stumbles forward to 
 her knees, and the girl stoops down to raise her. 
 One guesses the rest. They will be sobbing 
 together in a minute, the girl's face buried in 
 the other's shoulder. All you are to see is just 
 the wistfulness, — " My dear ! my dear ! " And 
 then the Virgin, full of Grace, but a shy girl in 
 her teens for all that, hides her hot cheeks and 
 cries her little wild heart to quietness. Some of 
 it is in Albertinelli's fine picture, but not all. All 
 of it — and here's the point — is to be seen in the 
 street among these clear-eyed Tuscan women, just 
 as Fra Paolino (himself of Pistoja) saw it before 
 our time, and then fixed it for ever in blue and 
 white. 
 
 And now cross the Piazza and come down the 
 steep incline by the Palazzo Commune, turn to the 
 left, and behold the crown of Pistoja, the Spedale 
 del Ceppo. Everybody knows Luca's masterpiece
 
 15° Earthwork out of Tuscany : 
 
 at Florence, the Foundling Hospital on whose front 
 are some twenty bambini in pure white on blue : 
 babies or flowers, one does not know which. In 
 1 514 the Pistolesi remodelled their own hospital, 
 and called in the successors to Luca's mystery to 
 make it joyful. Andrea, Giovanni, Luca II. and 
 Girolamo came and conjured in turn, and their wall- 
 flowers sprouted from the limewashed sides. I fancy 
 myself out in the patched Piazza del Ceppo as I 
 write, looking again on the pleasant quietness of it 
 all. It is a grey day with thunder smouldering 
 somewhere in the hills, close and heavy. The blind 
 walls about me stare hard in the raw light, but the 
 wards of the hospital are open back and front to 
 the air ; it is a rest for the eye to look into their 
 cool depths within the loggia. It is a square, very 
 plain, yellow building, this hospital, unrelieved save 
 for its loggia, its painted frieze of earthenware, and 
 a rickety cross to denote its pious uses. Through 
 the wards I can see to the wet sky again and a 
 gable-end of vivid red and yellow. A thin black 
 Christ on his cross stands up against this bright 
 square of distance, pathetic silhouette enough for 
 me : reminder something sinister, you might think, 
 for the sick folk inside. But not so ; this is a 
 crucifix, not a Crucifixion. This poor wooden 
 Rood, bowing in the shade, speaks not of high 
 tragedy, but of the simple annals of the poor again ; 
 not of St. John, but of St. Luke. I shall be called 
 sentimental ; but with the band of garden colours 
 before me I can't get away from the streets and
 
 With the Brown Bear 151 
 
 alleys. I am not sure the craftsmen intended I 
 should. 
 
 The hospital itself is low and square ; it is lime- 
 washed all over, and has the blind and beaten aspect 
 of all Italian houses : — red-purplish tiles running into 
 deep eaves, jalousied windows, and the loggia. It 
 is on the face of this that the workers in baked clay 
 — "lavoro molto utile per la state," so cool and 
 fresh is it, so redolent of green pastures and the 
 winds of April — have moulded the Seven Acts of 
 Pure Mercy in colours as pure ; blue of morning 
 sky, grass-green, daffodil-yellow. Once more, no 
 heroics : here is what the workmen knew and we 
 see. Black and white /rati, not idealised at all, but 
 sleek and round in the jaw as a monk will get on oil 
 and asciutta, minister to sun-burnt peasants and ruddy 
 girls, as massive in the waist and stout in the ankle 
 as their sisters of to-day. Then, of course, there is 
 Allegory. Allegory of your well-ordered, gravi- 
 tated sort, which takes us no whit farther from 
 wholesome earth and the men and women so plainly 
 and happily made of it. No soaring, no transcen- 
 dentalism. Carita is a deep-breasted market-girl 
 nursing two brown babies, whom I have just seen 
 sprawling over a gourd in the Campo Marzio ; 
 Fortezza, Speranza, Fede, I know them all, bless 
 their sober, good eyes ! in the fruit-market, or selling 
 newspapers, or plaiting straws in the Piazza. After 
 this we slide into religion pure and direct, the 
 beautiful ridiculous Paganism which has never left 
 the plain heathen-folk. Wreathed medallions in the
 
 1 5 2 Earthwork out of Tuscany 
 
 spandrils give us Mary warned, Mary visited, Mary 
 homing to her Son, Mary crowned ; what would they 
 do without their Bona Dea in Tuscany ? She is of 
 them, and yet always a little beyond their grasp. Not 
 too far, however. That means Gothicism. The ad- 
 vantage of the Italian religious ideal is obvious. Art 
 may never leave for long together the good brown 
 earth ; and it can serve religion well when it plucks 
 up a type to set, clean as God made it, just a little 
 above our reach, to show whose is " the earth and 
 the fulness thereof." 
 
 An example. I leave the white and crumbling 
 Piazza, its old marble well, its beggars, its sick, and 
 its meadow-fresh border of Delia Robbia planting, 
 and stray up the Via del Ceppo towards the ramparts. 
 High at a barred window a brown mother with a 
 brown dependent baby smiles down upon my way- 
 faring. She has fine broad brows and a patient 
 face ; when she smiles, out of mere kindness for my 
 solitary goings, it is pleasant to note the gleams of 
 light on her teeth and lips. I take off my hat, as 
 Luca or Lippo would have done, to " ma cousine 
 la Reine des cieux." 
 
 Thus goes life in Pistoja and the rest of the 
 world.
 
 XIV 
 
 Friends in Council 
 
 Scene — Florence : a room in the Cardinal's Lodging 
 
 The Cardinal St. George ; the Archbishop of 
 Pisa ; Fra Antonio, a Dominican. 
 
 Card. So Cesare won the hawks and the woman 
 too ! A good joke, you will confess, Mon- 
 signore ? 
 
 Arch. Your Eminence will kill me with laughing. 
 The wit of you Romans ! 
 
 Card. Oh, we can be merry enough when we've 
 a mind. But the point of the gibe is keener 
 than you think. Emilia had loved her husband 
 after all ! " Excellent ! " cries Cesare, when 
 he finds this out : " I win the best spar- 
 hawk in Rome, a mistress, and a salve for my 
 jealousy at a blow." What do you say to 
 that ? 
 
 Arch. Merry indeed, Eminence. . . . But Jacopo's 
 late. 
 
 Fra Ant. A sluggish liver, but a sure worker. 
 He'll not fail. 
 
 153
 
 154 Earthwork out of 'Tuscany : 
 
 Card. Have you won the Genoese ? How is he 
 called ? Bernardo ! Have you won him 
 yet? 
 
 Fra Ant. I have set my snares. Have patience. 
 
 Card. Why, does he still hold out ? 
 
 Fra Ant. For a last effort. Oh, you have nothing 
 to fear. I am with him. 'Twill be fruitless. 
 
 Arch. You are fierce, Antonio. 
 
 Fra Ant. I am upon the King's business ; and the 
 King is mocked — shall my knees falter, and 
 the King bleed ? Let the sword fall ; let there 
 be scorpions, yea, scourges thonged with steel, 
 whips of fire, that the Sanctuary of the Holy 
 Place be cleansed. Iniquity spits blasphemies 
 at Heaven, the like of which have not been 
 since old Rome lay twisting, bitten by the mad 
 dog Nero. I tell you it must be wiped away, 
 seared and scorched away. Kill, saith the 
 Lord of Hosts — being, as of old, a jealous 
 God, swift in judgment, and a famine wind. 
 Whereof, I, as it hath been revealed, am the 
 fang and dog-tooth. See you to it, therefore, 
 that there be no hitch nor draw-back. 
 
 Arch. The Pope looks not thus upon our affair. 
 
 Card. No, indeed ; for the Holy Father's last word 
 to me was " Mind you, no blood." He is an 
 easy man, Sixtus, for all the world says. 
 
 Fra Ant. See you, sir, the Pope's an instrument. 
 So our blade break not till the work be done, 
 we ask not where it was forged, or why. 
 
 Card. Well, thou'rt a crooked thorn, Antonio ! I'd
 
 Friends in Council 155 
 
 rather see thee at thy striking than feel thy 
 stab. Ah, Jacopo ! 
 
 Enter Jacopo De Pazzi and Stefano, a priest. 
 
 So ; what have you garnered, Master James, 
 — tares ? 
 
 Jac. Hot grain, Eminence ; mustard-seed. 
 
 Arch. H'm. A priest. Holy Church gathereth 
 her forces. Not of my diocese I think. 
 
 Fra Ant. Can you bite, priest ? 
 
 Stef. Yes, monk, so the meat be seasoned to my 
 tooth. 
 
 Jac. This man's sister was a tender blossom which 
 Giuliano, smelling, coveted, and, plucking, hath 
 deflowered. The maid, in short, is no maid. 
 Giuliano thereby is overfed. We must bleed 
 him in the company lest he die of a surfeit. 
 
 Arch. Bad, bad. Incontinence is a deadly sin, and 
 most abhorrent to a true man. 
 
 Card. Shall we swear him in ? 
 
 Jac. Oh, the man is earnest — eh, Stefano ? 
 
 Stef. Try me. Being a priest, I believe in God. 
 Yet in this matter, were God himself to advise 
 me stay, I'd stay not, but drive deeper inwards, 
 lest haply God should blame himself anon that 
 he had made for man that which was, after all, 
 but a sapling radish. 
 
 Arch. Not of my diocese, I am very sure. 
 
 Fra Ant. Oh, peace ! To work. We are agreed 
 on all but the when and where. 'Tis now
 
 156 Earthwork out of Tuscafiy : 
 
 Tuesday. Allow I gain Bernardo Friday, as 
 I think I may. 
 
 Jac. How do you know that ? 
 
 Fra Ant. Trust me : there is a breeze agetting will 
 drive him. Then Saturday is clear. Now, on 
 Saturday — 
 
 Arch. The eve of Pentecost and the cloven tongues ! 
 
 Fra Ant. On Saturday Eminence here will feast his 
 hosts. We will be there to make the company 
 sport. 
 
 Card. This may not be. It cannot be. lnhospi- 
 tality! Nay, nay. The Pope would be 
 angered ; my person affronted ; Holy Church 
 wounded to the heart. You must never dream 
 of Saturday. 
 
 Fra Ant. Pish ! 
 
 Card. Nay, but indeed, I beseech you think of it. 
 Gentlemen, on my honour I may not. Think 
 of the grievous sin, the scandal. Guests of 
 their guest ! And a so feasted guest ! Fie, 
 ingratitude ! Black : we are excellent friends. 
 Why, Sunday we hear a mass together in the 
 Duomo. Inhospitality ! Never. How shall 
 I serve a mass with my guests when I have 
 killed 'em ? 
 Fra Ant. Ha ! There is a mass toward ? 
 Card. Indeed, indeed, yes. High Mass on Sunday 
 to clinch our Saturday loving. A rich and 
 fruitful time now ! And no guests of mine 
 then. Hosts rather. There's your time now! 
 Jac. What ! In the Duomo ? No, no, that may 
 never be.
 
 Friends in Coiuicil 157 
 
 Arch. The measure doubtless would be severe. 
 \_Aside~\ Not my diocese, remember. 
 
 Card. But what a time ! See. Your Medici shall 
 come unarmed to the mass ; they shall kneel, 
 they shall bow themselves down. And they've 
 broad backs, your Medici — no bungling there. 
 Oh, 'tis the time of times ! Saturday's no 
 time compared with it. For, look you, a 
 man might be fore-armed that came afeasting 
 with a Cardinal. Some holy influence, some 
 aura — miracles. Saturday ! A fatal black 
 day. Bad as Friday. 
 
 Jac. I'll do no murder in the church. 
 
 Arch. No, no : very proper. Cardinal, you will 
 allow the measure, as I have said, to be 
 severe. A Metropolitan Church. 
 
 Card. Murder, man ! God alive, who talks of 
 murder ? Assassinate a tyrant ! Rid a 
 people that groaneth ! Sweep vermin ! Pest 
 — who's toward herein ? 
 
 Jac. I strike no blow in the church. 
 
 Card. Foh ! you're craven. Chalky white. What 
 say you, you priest there ? 
 
 Arch. Yes, yes, let us hear the voice of the Curate. 
 
 Stef. I say the deed's a proper deed. 
 
 Jac. Would you gravel a man in the church ? 
 
 Stef. The church is well enough. 
 
 Jac. But at the Holy Mass, man ? 
 
 Stef. Is he sure to be there ? 
 
 Card. That's fixed ; he comes for sure. 
 
 Stef. Then I'll tickle him there.
 
 158 Eartb t wo?~k out of Tuscany J 
 
 Arch. A strange Florentine priest ! 
 
 Card. But a brave priest ! A sturdy priest ! And 
 you, my Antonio, my spur of Dominic, how 
 do you stand ? 
 
 Arch. Yes, yes. What says the man of God, 
 the man of vows ! Let us hear the cloister. 
 
 Fra Ant. The cloister tells you that sin of the 
 blackest is abroad ; must be rid, must be 
 offered smoking, as a sacrifice to the Lord 
 that executeth righteousness and hateth iniquity. 
 Wipe your altar steps ! saith the Lord. Leave 
 it so. 
 
 Card. There now. A true man speaks. Eh, 
 Monsignore. 
 
 Arch. Your Eminence must be right. Still — 
 
 Card. Oh, be sure it is right. Messer Jacopo, 
 you have heard the Church. As a loyal son 
 now, what do you say. 
 
 Jac. Eminence, I have nothing to say — being a 
 layman. A priest may do what we may 
 not do. A priest, you may say, is at home 
 in a church. 
 
 Card. \_Aside^\ Winds the images, eh ? Moves 
 the joints ! Mehercle ! he has us there, by 
 the faith of a Christian ! [_Aloud~\ Well, 
 well, De' Pazzi, that may be. Nevertheless 
 I must be sure you are with us in counten- 
 ance. You rise with the lieges, you raise, 
 indeed, the lieges for Church and liberty ? 
 You will be there ? 
 
 Jac. I will be there armed ; my men shall be
 
 Friends in Council 159 
 
 posted and armed. But, by the mass, I 
 
 strike no blow in a church. If the crows, 
 
 that know that nest, do but cleave thoroughly, 
 
 Master Magnificent, Lorenzo the Great, is a 
 
 dead man. 
 Stef. Lorenzo ? What of Lorenzo ? Our man's 
 
 Giuliano, a villain — ah, and dead villain if my 
 
 prong slithers home. Lorenzo ! Saints forbid. 
 Card. \_Aside~\ Death ! What a nice rogue ; to 
 
 kill on appetite ; so soon cloyed with killing ! 
 
 A pretty fuss to Roman ears. \_Alond~\ Nay, 
 
 honest friend, let be. Giuliano is your man, 
 
 look you. 
 Stef. One spake of Lorenzo. 
 Jac. A mere slip of a hasty tongue : done in the 
 
 heat. 
 Arch. In the heat ! In the heat ! God, how hot 
 
 is this work to a plainish man ! 
 Card. [To Fra Ant.~\ You will have trouble with 
 
 this dainty dog, if you go not warily. 
 Arch. Is it too late, Eminence, to be off with this ? 
 Card. 'Sdeath, fool, are you white ? 
 Stef. I do not touch Lorenzo. God forbid. 
 Fra Ant. \_Aside~\ I must humour this knave. 
 
 Hark 'ee, priest, Giuliano's the man. 
 Stef. Giuliano's a damned thief; he's robbed mine 
 
 own. 
 Fra Ant. Whom has he not robbed, priest ? We 
 
 must rid him. 
 Stef. We'll so, never fear. Who spake of Lorenzo ? 
 Card. Why none ! 'Twas idle. Lorenzo? The
 
 160 Earthwork out of ^Tuscany 
 
 world's friend, patron of Florence ; as good 
 as any saint among the black letters already. 
 Thou'rt a mad priest. 
 
 Arch. We must needs love Lorenzo ; and will show 
 it yet, friend. 
 
 Card. \Aside~\ Hide your rancour, fool, that would 
 stab crawling ! So, friends, till mass-time in 
 the Duomo, when so it fall we may all be 
 there, and at work. And — and — the Lord 
 be with you. 
 
 Onmes. Et aim splritu tuo.
 
 XV 
 
 Dead Churches at Foligno 
 
 From my roof-top, whither I am fled to snatch 
 what cooler airs may drift into this cup of earth, 
 I can see above the straggling tiles of gable and 
 loggia the cupolas and belfries of many churches. 
 I know they are all dead ; for I have wound a 
 devious way through the close inhospitable streets 
 and met them or their ghosts at every corner. The 
 ghost of a dead church is the worst of all disem- 
 bodied sighs : he wails and chatters at you. Here 
 I have seen churches whose towers were fallen and 
 their tribunes laid bare to the insults of the work-a- 
 day world. There were churches with ugly gashes 
 in them, fresh and smarting still ; some had sight- 
 less eyes, as of skulls ; and there were churches 
 piecemeal and scattered like the splinters of the True 
 Cross. A great foliated arch of travertine would 
 frame a patch of plaster and soiled casement just 
 broad enough for some lolling pair of shoulders and 
 shock-head atop ; a sacred emblem, some Agnus 
 indefinably venerable, some proud old cognizance of 
 the See, or frayed Byzantine symbol (plaited with 
 infinite art by its former contrivers) such and other
 
 1 62 Earthwork out of Tuscany 
 
 consecrated fragments would stuff a hole to keep the 
 wind away from a donkey-stall or Fabbrica di pasta 
 in a muddy lane. I met dismantled walls still 
 blushing with the stains of fresco — a saint's robe, 
 the limp burden of the Addolorata ; — I met texts 
 innumerable, shrines fly-ridden and, often as not, 
 mocked with dead flowers. And now, as I see 
 these grey towers and the grand purple line of the 
 hills hemming in the Tiber Valley, I know I am 
 come down to the sated South, to the confines of 
 Umbria, the country of dead churches, and of 
 Rome the metropolis of such deplorable broken toys. 
 This appears to me the disagreeable truth concerning 
 the harbourage of Saint Francis and Saint Bernardine, 
 and of Roberto da Lecce, a man who, if everybody 
 had his rights, would be known as great in his way 
 as either. You will remember that Luther found 
 it out before me. The religious enthusiasm we bring 
 in may serve our turn while we are here : it will be 
 odd if any survive for the return ; impossible to go 
 away as fervid as we come. Other enthusiasms will 
 fatten ; but the wonderful Gothic adumbration of 
 Christianity was born in the North and has never 
 been healthy anywhere else. Gothicism, driven 
 southward runs speedily to seed ; an amazing luxuri- 
 ance, a riot, strange flowers of heavy shapes and 
 maddening savour ; and then that worst corruption 
 to follow a perfection premature. So mediaeval 
 Christianity in Umbria is a ruin, but not for Salvator 
 Rosa ; it has not been suffered a dignified death. 
 That is the sharpest cut of all, that the poor
 
 Dead Churches 163 
 
 bleached skull must be decked with paper 
 roses. 
 
 All this is forced upon me by my last days in 
 Tuscany where a lower mean has secured a serener 
 reign. I had hardly realised the comeliness of its 
 intellectual vigour without this abrupt contrast. 
 Pistoja, with its pleasant worship of the wholesome 
 in common life ; Lucca, girdled with the grey and 
 green of her immemorial planes, and adorned with 
 the silvery gloss of old marble and stone-cutter's 
 work exquisitely curious ; then Prato, dusty little 
 handful of old brick palaces and black and white 
 towers, where I heard a mass before the high altar 
 but two Sundays ago. All Prato was in church 
 that showery morning, I think. The air was close, 
 even in the depths of the great nave : the fans all 
 about me kept up a continual flicker, like bats' wings, 
 and the men had to use their hats, or handkerchiefs 
 where they had them. To hear the responses rolling 
 about the chapels and echoing round the timbers of 
 the roof you would have said the thunder had come. 
 It was too dark to see Lippi's light-hearted secu- 
 larities in the choir ; one saw them, however, best in 
 the congregation — the same appealing innocence in the 
 grey-eyed women, and the men with the same grave 
 self-possession and the same respectful but deliberate 
 concern with their own affairs which gives you the 
 idea that they are lending themselves to divine service 
 rather out of politeness than from any more intimate 
 motive. Lippi saw this in Prato four centuries ago, 
 and I, after him, saw it all again in a rustic sacrifice
 
 1 64 Earthwork out of Tuscany : 
 
 which I should find it hard to distinguish from 
 earlier sacrifices in the same spot. And indeed it 
 is informed with precisely the same spirit, an in- 
 articulate reverence for the Dynamic in Nature. 
 How many religions can be reduced to that ! In 
 Florence again, what a hardy slip of the old stock 
 still survives. You may see how the worship of 
 Venus Genetrix and Maria Deipara merged in the 
 work of Botticelli and Ghirlandajo, Michael Angelo 
 and Andrea del Sarto ; you may see how, if 
 asceticism has never thriven there, there was (and 
 still is) an effort after selection of some sort and 
 a scrupulous respect for the elegantia quadam which 
 Alberti held to be almost divine ; you may see, at 
 least, a religion which still binds, and which, making 
 no great professions, has grown orderly and surely 
 to respect. Thus from a Tuscany, pagan, kindly, 
 exuberant and desponding by turns, but always 
 ready with that long slow smile you first meet in 
 the Lorenzetti of Siena and afterwards find so 
 tenderly expressed in its different manifestations in 
 the Delia Robbia and Botticelli — a smile where 
 patience and wistfulness struggle together and finally 
 kiss, — I came down to Umbria and a people dying 
 of what M. Huysmans grandiosely calls "our 
 immense fatigue." Here is a people that has loved 
 asceticism not wisely. This asceticism, pushed to 
 the limit where it becomes a kind of sensuality, 
 has bitten into Umbria's heart ; and Umbria, with 
 a cloyed palate, sees her frescos peel and lets her 
 sanctuaries out to bats and green lizards. Surely
 
 Dead Churches 165 
 
 the worst form of moral jaundice is where the 
 sufferer watches his affections palsy, but makes no 
 stir. 
 
 From the ramp of the citadel at Perugia you can 
 guess what a hornet's nest that grey stronghold of 
 the Baglioni must have been. It commands the 
 great plain and bars the way to Rome. Westward, 
 on a spur of rock, stands Magione and a lonely tower : 
 this was their outpost towards Siena. Eastward 
 there is a white patch on the distant hills — Spello, 
 " Mountain built with quiet citadel," quiet enough 
 now. There was always a Baglione at Spello with 
 his eyes set on chance comers from Foligno and 
 Rome. Seen from thence, Augusta Perusia hangs like 
 a storm cloud over her cliffs, impregnable but by 
 strategy, as wicked and beautiful as ever her former 
 masters, the Seven Deadly Sins, grandsons of Forte- 
 braccio. The place is like its history, of course, 
 having in fact, grown up with it : you might say 
 it was the incarnation of Perugia's spirit ; it would 
 only be to admit, what is so obvious over here, that a 
 town is the work of art of that larger soul, the body 
 politic. So to see the crazy streets cut in steps and 
 crevasses across and through the rocks, spanning a 
 gorge with a stone ladder or boring a twisted tunnel 
 under the sheer of the Etruscan walls, to note the 
 churches innumerable and the foundations of the 
 thirty fortress-towers she once had — all this is to read 
 the secret of Perugia's two love affairs. Of her 
 towers Julius II. left but two standing, blind pillars 
 of masonry ; but there were thirty of them once, and
 
 1 66 Earthwork out of 'Tuscany : 
 
 the Baglioni held them all, for a season. Now it 
 was these wild Baglioni — " filling the town with 
 all manner of evil living," says Matarazzo, but 
 nevertheless intensely beloved for their bold bearing 
 and beauty, as of young hawks ; — it was just these 
 blood-stained striplings, this Semonetto who rode 
 shouting into the Piazza after an affray and swept his 
 clogged hair clear of his eyes that he might see to 
 kill, this black Astorre, " of the few words," who was 
 murdered in his shirt on his marriage-eve by his 
 cousin and best friend ; it was this very cousin 
 Grifone, so beautiful that " he seemed an angel of 
 Paradise," who, in his turn, was cut down and laid 
 out with his dead allies below San Lorenzo that his 
 widow might not fail of finding him and his marred 
 fairness — it was just this stormy crew that fell 
 weeping at Suor Brigida's meek feet, confessed their 
 sins and received the Communion (encompassers and 
 encompassed together, and all in a rapture) on the 
 very eve of the great slaughter of i 500 ; it was they 
 who adorned the Oratory of San Bernardino and 
 made it the miracle of rose-colour and blue that it is, 
 who reared the enormous San Domenico below the 
 Gate of Mars, and who, in this hot-bed of enormity, 
 nurtured Perugino's dreamy Madonnas. What it 
 meant I know not at all. There are other riddles as 
 hard in Umbria. Renan saw the gentle cadence of 
 the landscape — violet hills, the silver gauze of water, 
 oliveyards all of a green mist ; read the Fiorettl and 
 the dolorous ecstasies of Perugino's Sebastian, and 
 straightway adapted the high-flown parallel worked 

 
 Dead Churches 167 
 
 out in detail by Giotto. Umbria for him was the 
 Galilee of Italy, and Francis son of Bernard an avatar 
 of Christ. But Renan was apt to allow his emotions 
 to ride him. Another dazzling contrast, which has 
 recently exercised another dextrous Frenchman, is 
 Siena with her Saint Catherine and her Sodoma who 
 betrayed her — Saint Catherine, as great a force 
 politically as she was spiritually, and Sodoma, who 
 painted her like a Danae with love-glazed eyes 
 fainting before the apparition of the Crucified Seraph. 
 There is nothing like this in the history of 
 Tuscany whose palaces not long were fortresses nor 
 her monks at any time successful politicians. Cosimo 
 had pulled down the Florentine towers or ever the 
 last Oddi had loosed hold of Ridolfo's throat. I 
 know that Siena is just within that province geo- 
 graphically ; in temperament, in art and manner, she 
 has always shown herself intensely Umbrian. Take, 
 then, the case of Savonarola. The Florentines re- 
 ceived'him gladly enough and heard him with honest 
 admiration, even enthusiasm. Still, there is reason to 
 believe they took him, in the main, spectacularly, 
 as they also took that portentous old mono-maniac 
 Gemisthos Pletho who made religions as we might 
 make pills. For, observe, Savonarola lost his head 
 — and his life, good soul ! — where the Florentines 
 did not. The cobbler went beyond his last when 
 the Frate essayed politics. He suffered accordingly. 
 But in Perugia, in Siena, in Gubbio and Orvieto, 
 the great revivalists Bernardine, Catherine, Fra 
 Roberto, held absolute rule over body and soul.
 
 1 68 Earthwork out of Tuscany : 
 
 For the moment Baglione and Oddi kissed each 
 other ; all feuds were stayed ; a man might climb 
 the black alleys of a night without any fear of a 
 knife to yerk him (the Ancient's word) under the 
 ribs or noose round his neck to swing him up to 
 the archway withal. So Catherine brought back 
 Boniface (and much trouble) from Avignon, and 
 Da Lecce wrote out a new constitution for some 
 rock-bound hive of the hills, whose crowd wailing 
 in the market-place knew the ecstacy of repentance, 
 and ran riot in religious orgies very much after the 
 fashion of the Greater Dionysia or, say, the Salvation 
 Army. And how Niccolo Alunno would have 
 painted the Salvation Army ! 
 
 So it does seem that the two great passions of 
 Umbria burnt themselves out together. They were, 
 indeed, the two ends of the candle. When the 
 Baglioni fell in the black work of two August nights, 
 only one escaped. And with them died the love of 
 the old lawless life and the infinite relish there was for 
 some positive foretaste of the life of the world to 
 come. Both lives had been lived too fast : from that 
 day Perugia fell into a torpor, as Perugino, the glass of 
 his time and place, also fell. Perugino, we know, 
 had his doubts concerning the immortality of the soul, 
 but painted on his beautiful cloister-dreams, and 
 knocked down his saints to the highest bidder. 
 Vasari assures me that the chief solace of the old 
 prodigal in his end of days was to dress his young 
 wife's hair in fantastic coils and braids. A prodigal 
 he was — true Peruginese in that — prodigal of the deli-
 
 Dead Churches 169 
 
 cate meats his soul afforded. His end may have 
 been unedifying ; it must at least have been very piti- 
 ful. Nowadays his name stands upon the Corso 
 Vannucci of the town he uttered, and in the court 
 wall of a little recessed and colonnaded house in the 
 Via Deliziosa. Meantime his frescos drop mildewed 
 from chapel walls or are borne away to a pauper 
 funeral in the Palazzo Communale. 
 
 In his finely studied Sensations M. Paul Bourget, 
 it seems to me, flogs the air and fails to climb it 
 when he struggles to lay open the causes of poor 
 Vannucci's embittering. If ever painting took, up 
 the office of literature it was in the fifteenth century. 
 The quattrocent'isti stand to Italy for our Elizabethan 
 dramatists. This may have produced bad painting : 
 Mr George Moore will tell you that it did. I am 
 not sure that it very greatly matters, for, failing a 
 literature which was really dramatic, really poetical, 
 really in any sense representative, it was as well that 
 there led an outlet somewhere. At any rate Lippi 
 and Botticelli, to those who know them, are ex- 
 pressive of the Florentine temper when Pulci and 
 Politian are distorted echoes of another ; Perugino 
 leads us into the recesses of Perugia while Graziani 
 keeps us fumbling at the lock. But Perugino's 
 languorous boys and maids are the figments of a 
 riotous erotic, of a sensuous fancy without imagina- 
 tion or intelligence or humour. His Alcibiades, or 
 Michael Archangel, seems greensick with a love 
 mainly physical ; his Socrates has the combed re- 
 signation of his Jeromes and Romualds — smoothly
 
 1 7° Earthwork out of Tuscany : l 
 
 ordered old men set in the milky light of Umbrian 
 mornings and dreaming out placid lives by the side 
 of a moonfaced Umbrian beauty, who is now Mary 
 and now Luna as chance motions his hand. How 
 penetrating, how distinctive by the side of them seems 
 Sandro's slim and tearful Anima Mundi shivering 
 in the chill dawn ! With what a strange magic does 
 Filippino usher in the pale apparition of the Mater 
 Dolorosa to his Bernard, or flush her up again to a 
 heaven of blue-green and a glory of burning cheru- 
 bim ? This he does, you remember, with rocket- 
 like effect in a chapel of the Minerva in Rome. 
 But it is the unquenchable thirst of the Umbrians 
 for some spiritual nutriment, some outlet for their 
 passion to be found only in bloodshed or fainting 
 below the Cross, some fierce and untameable animal 
 quality such as you see to-day in the torn gables, the 
 towers and bastions of Perugia, it is the spirit 
 which informed and made these things you get in 
 Perugino's pictures — in the hot sensualism of their 
 colour-scheme, the ripeness and bloom of physical 
 beauty encasing the vague longing of a too-rapid 
 adolesence. The desire could never be fed and the 
 bloom wore off. Look at Duccio's work on the 
 facade of San Bernardino. Duccio was a Florentine, 
 but where in Florence would you see his like ? 
 What a revel in disproportion in these long-legged 
 nymphs, full-lipped and narrow-eyed as any of 
 Rossetti's curious imaginings. Take the Poverta, a 
 weedy girl with the shrinking paps of a child. Here 
 again (exquisite as she is in modelling and nicety
 
 Dead Churches 
 
 171 
 
 of expression ) you get the enticement of a malforma- 
 tion which is absolutely un-Greek — unless you are to 
 count Phrygia within the magic ring-fence — and only 
 to be equalled by the luxury of Beccadelli. You get 
 that in Sodoma too, the handy Lombard ; you have 
 it in Perugino and all the Umbrians (in some form or 
 other) ; but never, I think, in the genuine Tuscan — 
 not even in Botticelli — and never, of course, in the 
 Venetians. Duccio modelled these things while the 
 Delia Robbia were at their Hellenics ; and a few 
 years after he did them, came the end of the Baglioni 
 and all such gear. The end of real Umbrian art was 
 not long. Perugino awoke to have his doubts of the 
 soul's immortality. No great wonder there, perhaps, 
 given he acknowledged a merciful heaven. . . . 
 
 I chanced to meet an old woman the other day 
 in a country omnibus. We journeyed together 
 from Prato to Florence and became very friendly. 
 Your dry old woman, who hath had losses, who 
 has become, in fact, world-worn and very wise, or 
 who, like one of Shakespeare's veterans — the Grave- 
 digger, or the Countryman in Antony and Cleopatra 
 — has probed the ball and found it hollow ; such a 
 battered and fortified soul in petticoats is peculiar to 
 Italy, and countries where the women work and the 
 men, pocketing their hands, keep sleek looks. We 
 had just passed a pleasant little procession. It was 
 Sunday, the hour Benediction. A staid nun was 
 convoying a party of school -girls to church ; 
 whereupon I remarked to my neighbour on 
 their pretty bearing, a sort of artless piety and of
 
 172 Earthwork out of c Tuscany\ 
 
 attention for unknown but not impossible blessings 
 which they had about them. But my old 
 woman took, small comfort from it. She knew 
 those cattle, she said : Capuchins, Black, White and 
 Grey, — knew them all. Well ! Everybody had his 
 way of making a living : hers was knitting stockings. 
 A hard life, via, but an honest. Here it became 
 me to urge that the religious life might have its 
 compensations, without which it would perhaps be 
 harder than knitting stockings ; that one needed 
 relaxation and would do well to be sure that it was 
 at least innocent. Relaxation of a kind, said she, 
 a man must have. Snuff now ! She was inveterate 
 at the sport. The view was very dry ; but I think 
 its reasoned limitations also very Tuscan, and by no 
 means exclusive of a tolerable amount of piety and 
 honest dealing. Foligno, by mere contrast, reminds 
 me of it — busy Foligno huddled between the mighty 
 knees of a chalk down, city of falling churches and 
 lazy handsome girls, just now parading the streets 
 with their fans a-flutter and a pretty turn to each 
 veiled head of them. 
 
 As I write the light dies down, the wind drops, 
 huge inky clouds hang over the west ; the sun, as he 
 falls behind them, sets them kindling at the edge. 
 The worn old bleached domes, the bell-towers and 
 turrets looming in the blue dusk, seem to sigh that the 
 century moves so slowly forward. How many more 
 must they endure of these ? 
 
 It is the hour of Ave Maria. But only two 
 cracked bells ring it in.
 
 T 
 
 Envoy : To all you Ladies 
 
 Lovely and honourable ladies, it is, as I hold, no 
 mean favour you have accorded me, to sit still 
 and smiling while I have sung to your very faces a 
 stave verging here and there on the familiar. You 
 have sat thus enduring me, because, being wrought 
 for the most part out of stone or painter's stuif, your 
 necessities have indeed forbidden retirement. Yet 
 my obligations should not on that account be lighter. 
 He would be a thin spirit who should gain a lady's 
 friendly regard, and then vilipend because she knew 
 no better, or could not choose. I hope indeed that 
 I have done you no wrong, gentildonne. I protest 
 that I have meant none ; but have loved you all as a 
 man may, who has, at most, but a bowing acquaint- 
 ance with your ladyships. As I recall your starry 
 names, no blush hinting unmannerliness suspect and 
 unconfessed hits me on the cheek: — Simonetta, Ilaria, 
 Nenciozza, Bettina ; you too, candid Mariota of 
 Prato ; you, snuff-taking, wool-carding ancient lady 
 of the omnibus — scorner of monks, I have kissed 
 your hands. I have at least given our whole 
 commerce frankly to the world ; and I know not 
 how any shall say 1 we have been closer acquainted 
 than we should. You, tall Ligurian Simonetta, 
 
 173
 
 174 Earthwork out of Tuscany :y 
 
 loved of Sandro, mourned by Giuliano and, for a 
 season, by his twisted brother and lord, have I done 
 well to utter but one side of your wild humour ? 
 The side a man would take, struck, as your Sandro 
 was, by a nympholepsy, or, as Lorenzo was, by the 
 rhymer's appetite for wherewithal to sonnetteer ? 
 If I read your story, it was never pique or a young 
 girl's petulance drove you to Phryne's one justifiable 
 act of self-assertion. It was honesty, Madonna, or 
 I have read your grey eyes in vain ; it was en- 
 thusiasm — that flame of our fire so sacred that 
 though it play the incendiary there shall be no crime 
 — or where would be now the " Vas d'elezione " ? 
 — nor though it reveal a bystander's grin, any shame 
 at all. I shall live to tell that story of thine, Lady 
 Simonetta, to thy honour and my own respect ; for, 
 as a poet says, 
 
 " There is no holier flame 
 Than flutters torchwise in a stripling heart, 
 Revealing mystery all about, and light 
 Blinding, white, rapturous — a fire from Heaven 
 To ash the clay of us, and wing the God 
 Armed for the freeing of a world in chains." 
 
 I have seen all memorials of you left behind to 
 be pondered by your Dante, Sandro the painting 
 poet, — the proud clearness of you as at the marriage 
 feast of Nastagio degli Onesti ; the melting of the 
 sorrow that wells from you in a tide, where you 
 hold the book of your over- mastering honour and 
 read Magnificat Anima Mea with a sob in your 
 throat ; your acquaintance, too, with that grief
 
 To all you Ladies 1 75 
 
 which was your own hardening ; your sojourn, 
 wan and woebegone as would become the wife of 
 Moses (maker of jealous gods) ; all these guises 
 of you, as well as the presentments of your innocent 
 youth, I have seen and adored. But I have ever 
 loved you most where you stand a wistful Venus 
 Anadyomene — " Una donzella non con uman 
 volto " ; for I know your heart, Madonna, and 
 see on the sharp edge of your threatened life, 
 Ardour look back to maiden Reclusion, and on 
 (with a pang of foreboding) to mockery and evil 
 judgment. Never fear but I brave your story out 
 to the world ere many days. And if any, with 
 profane leer and tongue in the cheek, take your 
 sorrow for reproach or your pitifulness for a shame, 
 let them receive the lash of the whip from one 
 who will trouble to wield it : non ragioniam di lor. 
 For your honourable women I give you Ilaria, the 
 slim Lucchesan, and my little Bettincina, a child yet 
 with none of the vaguer surmises of adolescence 
 when it flushes and dawns, but likely enough, if 
 all prosper, to be no shame to your company. As 
 yet she is aptest to Donatello's fancy : she will 
 grow to be of a statelier bevy. I see her in Ghir- 
 landajo's garden, pacing, still-eyed, calm and cold, 
 with Ginevra de' Benci and Giovanna of the 
 Albizzi, those quiet streets on a visit to the 
 mother of John Baptist. 
 
 Mariota, the hardy wife of the metal-smith is not 
 for one of your quality, though the wench is well 
 enough now with her baby on her arm and the best
 
 176 Earthwork out of Tuscany : 
 
 of her seen by a poet and made enduring. 
 He, like our Bernardo, had motherhood in such 
 esteem that he held it would ransom a sin. A 
 sin ? I am no casuist to discuss rewards and 
 punishments ; but if Socrates were rightly informed 
 and sin indeed ignorance, I have no whips for 
 Mariota's square shoulders. Her baby, I warrant, 
 plucked her from the burning. I am not so sure 
 but you might find in that girl a responsive spirit, 
 and — is the saying too hard ? — a teacher. Con- 
 tentment with a few things was never one of your 
 virtues, madam. 
 
 There is a lady whose name has been whispered 
 through my pages, a lady with whom I must make 
 peace if I can. Had I known her, as Dante 
 did, in the time of her nine-year excellence and 
 followed her (with an interlude, be sure, for the 
 lady of the window) through the slippery ways of 
 two lives with much eating of salt bread, I might 
 have grown into her favour. But I never did 
 know Monna Beatrice Portinari ; and when I met 
 her afterwards as my Lady Theologia I thought 
 her something imperious and case-hardened. Now 
 here and there some words of mine (for she has 
 a high stomach) may have given offence. I have 
 hinted that her court is a slender one in Italy, the 
 service paid her lip-service ; the lowered eyes and 
 bated breath reserved for her ; but for Fede her 
 sister, tears and long kisses and the clinging. Well ! 
 the Casa Cattolica is a broad foundation : I find 
 Francis of Umbria at the same board with Sicilian
 
 To all you Ladies \ nn 
 
 Thomas. If I cleave to the one must I despise 
 the other ? Lady Fede has my heart and Lady 
 Dottrina must put aside the birch if she would 
 share that little kingdom. Religio habet, said 
 Pico ; theologia autem invenit. Let her find. 
 But she must be speedy, for I promise her the 
 mood grows on me as I become italianato ; and 
 I cannot predict when the other term of the pro- 
 position may be accomplished. For one thing, 
 Lady Theologia, I praise you not. Sympathy seems 
 to me of the essence, the healing touch an excel- 
 lent thing in woman. But you told Virgil, 
 
 " Io son fatta da Dio, sua merce, tale, 
 Che la vostra miseria non mi tange." 
 
 Sympathy, Madonna ? And Virgil torturing in 
 a flame ! On these terms I had rather roast 
 with the good poet (whose fault in your eyes 
 was that he knew in what he had believed) 
 than freeze with you and Aquinas on your peak 
 of hyaline. And as I have found you, Donna 
 Beatrice, so in the main have they of whom I 
 pitch my pipe. Here and there a man of them 
 got exercise for his fingers in your web ; here 
 and there one, as Pico the young Doctor of 
 yellow hair and nine hundred heresies, touched 
 upon the back of your ivory dais that he might 
 jump from thence to the poets out beyond you 
 in the Sun. Your great Dante, too, loved you 
 through all. But, Madonna, he had loved you 
 before when you were —
 
 I y8 Earthwork out of Tuscany 
 
 Donna pietosa e di novella etade, 
 
 and, as became his lordly soul, might never depart 
 from the faith he had in you. For me, I protest 
 I love Religion your warm-bosomed mate too 
 well to turn from her ; yet I would not on that 
 account grieve her (who treats you well out of the 
 cup of her abounding charity) by aspersing you. 
 And if I may not kiss your foot as you would 
 desire, I may bow when I am in the way with 
 you ; not thanking God I am not as you are, but, 
 withal, wishing you that degree of interest in a 
 really excellent world with which He has blessed 
 me and my like, the humble fry. 
 
 Lastly, to the Spirits which are in the shrines 
 of the cities of Tuscany, I lift up my hands with 
 the offering of my thin book. To Lucca dove- 
 like and demure, to Prato, the brown country- 
 girl, to Pisa, winsome maid-of-honour to the lady 
 of the land, to Pistoja, the ruddy-haired and ample, 
 and to Siena, the lovely wretch, black-eyed and 
 keen as a hawk ; even to Perugia, the termagant, 
 with a scar on her throat ; but chiefest to the 
 Lady Firenze, the pale Queen crowned with olive 
 
 to all of you, adored and adorable sisters, I 
 
 offer homage as becomes a postulant, the repent- 
 ance of him who has not earned his reward, 
 thanksgiving, and the praise I have not been able 
 to utter. And I send you, Book, out to those 
 ladies with the supplication of good Master Cino, 
 schoolman and poet, saying,
 
 To all you Ladies 1 79 
 
 E se tu troverai donne gentile, 
 Ivi girai ; che la ti vo mandare ; 
 E dono a lor d' audienza chiedi. 
 
 Poi di a costor: Gittatevi a lor piedi, 
 E dite, chi vi manda e per che fare, 
 Udite donne, esti valletti umili. 

 
 PRINTED BY 
 
 TURNBULL AND SPEARS, 
 
 EDINBURGH.
 
 
 DATE DUE 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 CAYLORO 
 
 
 
 PRINTED IN USA.
 
 UC SOUTHERN REGIONAL LIBRARY FACILITY 
 
 AA 000 231660
 
 
 
 
 : : 
 
 
 fevV'i 
 
 >, 
 
 
 
 
 : 
 
 
 v--.y '■:.'■ ■■■■■■ ^r;:- : :■■■■:■• 
 
 
 ^H '• 
 
 
 
 ■'■■■■,■:■■.-'■■.■'•■■■ ■<■■ W' ■■'■■^■■'•iWU-;tyti 
 
 sv m ■■-■ ■ - f's ■ ftty i