Earthwork out of Tuscany | Page 5

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 _lacrim? 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 Maccab?an, 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: the huntsmen are up in America, as your good kinsman has it, and I would never have you act your own Antipodes. Addio.

I
EYE OF ITALY
[Footnote: My thanks are due to the Editor of Black and White for permission to reprint the substance of this essay.]
I have been here a few days only--perhaps a week: if it's