Twilight in Italy | Page 2

was a man
of middle age, plain, crude, with some of the meanness of the peasant,
but also with a kind of dogged nobility that does not yield its soul to the
circumstance. Plain, almost blank in his soul, the middle-aged peasant
of the crucifix resisted unmoving the misery of his position. He did not
yield. His soul was set, his will was fixed. He was himself, let his
circumstances be what they would, his life fixed down.
Across the marsh was a tiny square of orange-coloured light, from the
farm-house with the low, spreading roof. I remembered how the man
and his wife and the children worked on till dark, silent and intent,
carrying the hay in their arms out of the streaming thunder-rain into the
shed, working silent in the soaking rain.
The body bent forward towards the earth, closing round on itself; the
arms clasped full of hay, clasped round the hay that presses soft and
close to the breast and the body, that pricks heat into the arms and the
skin of the breast, and fills the lungs with the sleepy scent of dried
herbs: the rain that falls heavily and wets the shoulders, so that the shirt
clings to the hot, firm skin and the rain comes with heavy, pleasant
coldness on the active flesh, running in a trickle down towards the loins,
secretly; this is the peasant, this hot welter of physical sensation. And it

is all intoxicating. It is intoxicating almost like a soporific, like a
sensuous drug, to gather the burden to one's body in the rain, to stumble
across the living grass to the shed, to relieve one's arms of the weight,
to throw down the hay on to the heap, to feel light and free in the dry
shed, then to return again into the chill, hard rain, to stoop again under
the rain, and rise to return again with the burden.
It is this, this endless heat and rousedness of physical sensation which
keeps the body full and potent, and flushes the mind with a blood heat,
a blood sleep. And this sleep, this heat of physical experience, becomes
at length a bondage, at last a crucifixion. It is the life and the fulfilment
of the peasant, this flow of sensuous experience. But at last it drives
him almost mad, because he cannot escape.
For overhead there is always the strange radiance of the mountains,
there is the mystery of the icy river rushing through its pink shoals into
the darkness of the pine-woods, there is always the faint tang of ice on
the air, and the rush of hoarse-sounding water.
And the ice and the upper radiance of snow are brilliant with timeless
immunity from the flux and the warmth of life. Overhead they
transcend all life, all the soft, moist fire of the blood. So that a man
must needs live under the radiance of his own negation.
There is a strange, clear beauty of form about the men of the Bavarian
highlands, about both men and women. They are large and clear and
handsome in form, with blue eyes very keen, the pupil small, tightened,
the iris keen, like sharp light shining on blue ice. Their large,
full-moulded limbs and erect bodies are distinct, separate, as if they
were perfectly chiselled out of the stuff of life, static, cut off. Where
they are everything is set back, as in a clear frosty air.
Their beauty is almost this, this strange, clean-cut isolation, as if each
one of them would isolate himself still further and for ever from the
rest of his fellows.
Yet they are convivial, they are almost the only race with the souls of
artists. Still they act the mystery plays with instinctive fullness of

interpretation, they sing strangely in the mountain fields, they love
make-belief and mummery, their processions and religious festivals are
profoundly impressive, solemn, and rapt.
It is a race that moves on the poles of mystic sensual delight. Every
gesture is a gesture from the blood, every expression is a symbolic
utterance.
For learning there is sensuous experience, for thought there is myth and
drama and dancing and singing. Everything is of the blood, of the
senses. There is no mind. The mind is a suffusion of physical heat, it is
not separated, it is kept submerged.
At the same time, always, overhead, there is the eternal, negative
radiance of the snows. Beneath is life, the hot jet of the blood playing
elaborately. But above is the radiance of changeless not-being. And life
passes away into this changeless radiance. Summer and the prolific
blue-and-white flowering of the earth goes by, with the labour and the
ecstasy of man, disappears, and is gone into brilliance that hovers
overhead, the radiant cold which waits