Earthwork out of Tuscany | Page 2

better than this. I tried to express in the title of my book what I thought I had done; more, I was bold enough to assume that, having weathered the title, my readers would find a smooth channel with leading-lights enough to bring them sound to port. _Mea culpa!_ I believe that I was wrong. The book has been read as a collection of essays and stories and dialogues only pulled together by the binder's tapes; as otherwise disjointed, fragmentary, _d��cousue_, a "piebald monstrous book," a sort of _kous-kous_, made out of the odds and ends of a scribbler's note-book. Some have liked some morsels, others other morsels: it has been a matter of the luck of the fork. Very few, one only to my knowledge, can have seen the thing as it presented itself to my flattering eye--not as a pudding, not as a case of confectionery even, but as a little sanctuary of images such as a pious heathen might make of his earthenware gods. Let us be serious: listen. The thing is Criticism; but some of it is criticism by trope and figure. I hope that is plain enough.
When the first man heard his first thunderstorm he said (or Human Nature has bettered itself), "Certainly a God is angry." When after a night of doubt and heaviness the sun rose out of the sea, the sea kindled, and all its waves laughed innumerably, again he said, "God is stirring. Joy cometh in the morning." Even in saying so much he was making images, poor man, for one's soul is as dumb as a fish and can only talk by signs. But by degrees, as his hand grew obedient to his heart, he set to work to make more lasting images of these gods--Thunder Gods, Gods of the Sun and the Morning. And as these gods were the sum of the best feelings he had, so the images of them were the best things he made. And that goes on now whenever a young man sees something new or strange or beautiful. He wonders, he falls on his face, he would say his prayers; he rises up, he would sing a p?an. But he is dumb, the wretch! He must make images. This he does because Necessity drives him: this I have done. And part of the world calls the result Criticism, and another part says, It may be Art. But I know that it is the struggling of a dumb man to find an outlet, and I call it Religion.
"God first made man, and straightway man made God; No wonder if a tang of that same sod, Whereout we issued at a breath, should cling To all we fashion. We can only plod Lit by a starveling candle; and we sing Of what we can remember of the road."
The vague informed, the lovely indefinite defined: that is Art. As a sort of _pate sur pate_ comes Criticism, to do for Art what Art does for life. I have tried in this book to be the artist at second-hand, to make pictures of pictures, images of images, poems of poems. You may call it Criticism, you may call it Art: I call it Religion. It is making the best thing I can out of the best things I feel.
LONDON, 1898.
ADVERTISEMENT TO THE FIRST EDITION
Polite reader, you who have travelled Italy, it will not be unknown to you that the humbler sort in that country have ever believed certain spots and recesses of their land--as wells, mountain-paths, farmsteads, groves of ilex or olive, quiet pine-woods, creeks or bays of the sea, and such like hidden ways--to be the chosen resort of familiar spirits, baleful or beneficent, fate-ridden or amenable to prayer, half divine, wholly out of rule or ordering; which rustic deities and genii locorum, if it was not needful to propitiate, it was fascination to observe. It is believed of them in the hill-country round about Perugia and in the quieter parts of Tuscany, that they are still present, tolerated of God by reason of their origin (which is, indeed, that of the very soil whose effluence they are), chastened, circumscribed and, as it were, combed or pared of evil desire and import. To them or their avatars (it matters little which) the rude people still bow down; they still humour them with gifts of flowers, songs, or artless customs (as of Mayday, or the _Giorno de' Grilli_); you may still see wayside shrines, votive tablets, humble offerings, set in a farm-wall or country hedge, starry and fresh as a patch of yellow flowers in a rye-field. If you say that they have made gods in their own image, you do not convince them of Sin, for they do as their betters. If you say their gods are