Earthwork out of Tuscany | Page 7

sound was, save the muttered
talking of the guards without and the simmering of the engine, on
somewhere in front. And then "_Partenza!_" rang out in the night, and
"_Pronti!_" came as a faint echo on before. We laboured on, and the
dreams began where they had broken off. For we dreamed in these
times, fitful and lurid, coloured dreams; flashes of horrible crises in
one's life; Interminable precipices; a river skiff engulfed in a swirl of
green sea-water; agonies of repentance; shameful failure, defeat,
memories--and then the steady pulsing of the engine, and thick,
impermeable darkness choking up the windows again. How I ached for
the dawn!
I awoke from what I believe to have been a panic of snoring to hear the
train clattering over the sleepers and points, and to see--oh, human,
brotherly sight!--the broad level light of morning stream out of the east.
We were stealing into a city asleep. Tall flat houses rose in the chill
mist to our left and stared blankly down upon us with close-barred
green eyelids. Gas-lamps in swept streets flickered dirty yellow in the
garish light. A great purple dome lay ahead, flanked by the ruddy roofs
and gables of a long church. My heart leapt for Florence. Pistoja!
And then, at Prato, a nut-brown old woman with a placid face got into
our carriage with a basket of green figs and some bottles of milk for the
Florentine market. So we were nearing. And soon we ran in between
lines of white and pink villas edged with rows of planes drenched still
with dews and the night mists, among bullock-carts and queer shabby
little vetture, everything looking light and elfin in the brisk sunshine

and autumn bite--into the barrel-like station, and I into the arms, say
rather the arm-chair, of Signora Vedova Paolini, chattiest and most
motherly of landladies.
Earth, Air, Fire, Water, Florence, form the five elements of our planet
according to the testimony of Boniface VIII. of clamant and not very
Catholic memory. That is true if you take it this way. You cannot
resolve an element; but you cannot resolve Florence; therefore Florence
is an element. _Ecco!_ She is like nothing else In Nature, or (which is
much the same thing) Art. You can have olives elsewhere, and Gothic
elsewhere; you can have both at Aries, for instance. You can have
Campanili printed white (but not rose-and white, not rose-and-gold-
and-white) on blue anywhere along the Mediterranean from Tripoli to
Tangier: you will find Giotto at Padua, and statues growing in the open
air at Naples. But for the silvery magic of olives and blue; for a Gothic
which has the supernatural and always restless eagerness of the North,
held in check, reduced to our level by the blessedly human sanity of
Romanesque; for sculpture which sprouts from the crumbling
church-sides like some frankly happy stone-crop, or wall-flower, just as
wholesomely coloured and tenderly shaped, you must come to Florence.
Come for choice in this golden afternoon of the year. Green figs are
twelve-a-penny; you can get peaches for the asking, and grapes and
melons without it; brown men are treading the wine-fat in every little
white hill-town, and in Florence itself you may stumble upon them, as I
once did, plying their mystery in a battered old church--sight only to be
seen in Italy, where religions have been many, but religionists
substantially the same. That is the Italian way; there was the practical
evidence. Imagine the sight. A gaunt and empty old basilica, the beams
of the Rood still left, the dye of fresco still round the walls and
tribune--here the dim figure of Sebastian roped to his tree, there the
cloudy forms of Apostles or the Heavenly Host shadowed in masses of
crimson or green--and, down below, a slippery purple sea, frothed
sanguine at the edges, and wild, half-naked creatures treading out the
juice, dancing in the oozy stuff rhythmically, to the music of some
wailing air of their own. Saturnia regna indeed, and in the haunt of
Sant' Ambrogio, or under the hungry eye of San Bernardino, or other
lean ascetic of the Middle Age. But that, after all, is Italian, not

necessarily Florentine or Tuscan. I must needs abstract the unique
quintessential humours of this my Eye of Italy. Stendhal, do you
remember? didn't like one of these. He said that in Florence people
talked about "huesta hasa" when they would say "questa casa," and thus
turned Italian into a mad Arabic. So they do, especially the women:
why not? The poor Stendhal loved Milan, wrote himself down "Arrigo
Milanese"--and what can you expect from a Milanese?
They tell me, who know Florence well, that she is growing unwieldy.
Like a bulky old concierge they say, she sits in the passage of her Arno,