The Essential Maurice Hewlett Collection. Maurice Hewlett
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LITTLE FLOWERS
3. A SACRIFICE AT PRATO
4. OF POETS AND NEEDLEWORK
5. OF BOILS AND THE IDEAL
6. THE SOUL OF A FACT
7. QUATTROCENTISTERIA
8. THE BURDEN OF NEW TYRE
9. ILARIA, MARIOTA, BETTINA
10. CATS
11. THE SOUL OF A CITY
12. WITH THE BROWN BEAR
13. DEAD CHURCHES AT FOLIGNO
ENVOY: TO ALL YOU LADIES
PROEM
APOLOGIA PRO LIBELLO: 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 fulfils, 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 recognisant of the claims of modernity in Art bears the first brunt of the Old Masters' assault, that tempts you to risk a _rechauffe_ 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 endurance. 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 Messr. Cook and 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 tablewine, 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 _fiaschone_ 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, for I thought to myself that the people who assembled 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 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 of 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 moonbeams and flowing water--anon you turn him adrift in Italy, a country where all poets' souls seem to be caged in crystal and set in the sun, and say--"Here, dreamer of dreams, what of the day?" _Madonna!_ 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 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-rubbing 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_, 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 I 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 unobtrusive 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