Earthwork out of Tuscany | Page 4

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.