Earthwork out of Tuscany | Page 9

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 Orsammichele. 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 modèle-là." Pascal knew; and so 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 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 misunderstand 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 opinion 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 Florenti?. 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.

II
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 Giro 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