Earthwork out of Tuscany | Page 5

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 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 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 to my hat I charm you out of your lassitude by my open humour.
Things I say will have been said before, and better; my tunes may be
stale and my phrasing rough: I may be irrelevant, irreverent, what you
please. Eh, well! I am in Italy,--the land of shrugs and laughing. Shrug
me (or my book) away; but, 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 tears. I have found _lacrimæ rerum_ in Italy as elsewhere; and
sometimes Life has seemed to me to sail as near to tragedy as Art can
do. I suppose I must be 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, cities, 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 grow 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 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 Maccabæan,
for here, as he says, "will I make an end. And if I have done well, and
as is 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 you it is late. I agree with you quickly.
Florence has often been sketched before--putting Browning aside with

his astounding fresco-music--by Ruskin and 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. Men do. My picture,
poor as you like, shall be my own. It is not their Florence or yours--and,
remember, I would strike at Tuscany through Florence, and throughout
Tuscany keep my eye in her beam,--but my own mellow kingcup 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: