Essays | Page 2

green over their city _piazza_--the wide
light-grey pavements so vast that to keep them weeded would need an
army of workers. That army has not been employed; and grass grows in
a small way, but still beautifully, in the wide space around which the
tramway circles. Perhaps a hatred of its delightful presence is what
chiefly prompts the civic government in Rome to the effort to turn the
piazza into a square. The shrub is to take the place not so much of the
pavement as of the importunate grass. For it is hard to be beaten--and
the weed does so prevail, is so small, and so dominant! The sun takes
its part, and one might almost imagine a sensitive Municipality in tears,
to see grass running, overhead and underfoot, through the "third"
(which is in truth the fourth) Rome.
When I say grass I use the word widely. Italian grass is not turf; it is
full of things, and they are chiefly aromatic. No richer scents throng

each other, close and warm, than these from a little hand-space of the
grass one rests on, within the walls or on the plain, or in the Sabine or
the Alban hills. Moreover, under the name I will take leave to include
lettuce as it grows with a most welcome surprise on certain ledges of
the Vatican. That great and beautiful palace is piled, at various angles,
as it were house upon house, here magnificent, here careless, but with
nothing pretentious and nothing furtive. And outside one lateral
window on a ledge to the sun, prospers this little garden of random
salad. Buckingham Palace has nothing whatever of the Vatican dignity,
but one cannot well think of little cheerful cabbages sunning
themselves on any parapet it may have round a corner.
Moreover, in Italy the vegetables--the table ones--have a wildness, a
suggestion of the grass, from lands at liberty for all the tilling. Wildish
peas, wilder asparagus--the field asparagus which seems to have
disappeared from England, but of which Herrick boasts in his
manifestations of frugality--and strawberries much less than half-way
from the small and darkling ones of the woods to the pale and corpulent
of the gardens, and with nothing of the wild fragrance lost--these are all
Italian things of savage savour and simplicity. The most cultivated of
all countries, the Italy of tillage, is yet not a garden, but something
better, as her city is yet not a town but something better, and her
wilderness something better than a desert. In all the three there is a
trace of the little flying heels of the runaway.

WELLS
The world at present is inclined to make sorry mysteries or unattractive
secrets of the methods and supplies of the fresh and perennial means of
life. A very dull secret is made of water, for example, and the plumber
sets his seal upon the floods whereby we live. They are covered, they
are carried, they are hushed, from the spring to the tap; and when their
voices are released at last in the London scullery, why, it can hardly be
said that the song is eloquent of the natural source of waters, whether
earthly or heavenly. There is not one of the circumstances of this
capture of streams--the company, the water-rate, and the rest--that is
not a sign of the ill-luck of modern devices in regard to style. For style
implies a candour and simplicity of means, an action, a gesture, as it
were, in the doing of small things; it is the ignorance of secret ways;

whereas the finish of modern life and its neatness seem to be secured
by a system of little shufflings and surprises.
Dress, among other things, is furnished throughout with such fittings;
they form its very construction. Style does not exist in modern
arrayings, for all their prettiness and precision, and for all the
successes--which are not to be denied--of their outer part; the happy
little swagger that simulates style is but another sign of its absence,
being prepared by mere dodges and dexterities beneath, and the
triumph and success of the present art of raiment--"fit" itself--is but the
result of a masked and lurking labour and device.
The masters of fine manners, moreover, seem to be always aware of the
beauty that comes of pausing slightly upon the smaller and slighter
actions, such as meaner men are apt to hurry out of the way. In a word,
the workman, with his finish and accomplishment, is the dexterous
provider of contemporary things; and the ready, well-appointed, and
decorated life of all towns is now altogether in his hands; whereas the
artist craftsman of other times made a manifestation of his means. The
first hides the streams, under stress and pressure, in paltry pipes which
we all must make