Earthwork out of Tuscany | Page 4

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