The enchanted woods

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THE ENCHANTED WOODS

UNIFORM JVITH THIS FOLUME

HORTUS VITAE. Essays on

the Gardening of Life. By

Vernon Lee.

THE ENCHANTED
WOODS 3t jt jt

AND OTHER ESSAYS ON THE
GENIUS OF PLACES ^ ^

BY

VERNON LEE

JOHN LANE: THE BODLEY HEAD
LONDON i5f NEW YORK. MDCCCCV

WILLIAM CLOWES AND SONS, LIMITED, LONDON AND BECCLES.

LIBFIAKY

i.MVERsrrv ov c aijforma

SA.NTA liAUliAKA

DEDICATION

To MISS 1. O. FORD,

AoKi. Granck,

Lkkds.

M"^' DEAR Isabella,

You made mc very happy by
saying that you had taken another volume of
my essays on one of your lecturing and can-
vassing expeditions in the bleak and black
North^

Take this new ragbag of impressions with
you next time, my dear. And when the
landscape of chimneys and desecrated rivers
and inhuman suburbs is making even your
spirits flag a little, pull out some of the con-
tents at random. For the only justification
of my idle wanderings is if their sunshine and
romance may amuse, for a minute, people more
useful, though not more willing, than myself.

Your affectionate friend,

Vernon Lee.

MaIANO, near Fl-ORtNCR,

Noi'tmher, 1904.

vii

CONTENTS

I>AGB

Dedication v

Introduction : The Enchanted Woods . . . i

Pisa and the Campo Santo 13

Switzerland again ....... 23

Tuscan Churches in Summer 33

Arles 41

NvMPHs AND A River God 53

Brive-la-Gaillarde 63

Of Paris and the Exhibition 73

Trent 83

The Motor-Car and the Genius of Places —

1 93

II 103

The Ilex Woods and the Anchorites . . . 109

German Fir Trees 121

COMPIEGNE and FonTAINEBLEAU 131

The Forest of the Antonines 139

Most St. Michel 151

A Walk in the Maremma 163

ix

Contents

PAGE

Les Charmettes

173

In the Euganean Hills

183

The Hospitality of the Black Madonna

193

The Holy Year at Ravenna ....

203

The Generalife .

215

Couci-le-Chateau .

22s

The Tapestry at Angers

23s

Germany once more .

2+S

The Carillon

2SS

The Cardinal's Villa .

26s

In Gascony .

27s

Era Gia L'Ora ...

. 291

All Souls' Day at Venice

301

Et in Arcadia ...

•

3"

THE ENCHANTED WOODS

THE ENCHANTED WOODS

T MAY not tell you — it were indiscreet and to
no purpose — on what part of the earth's
surface the Enchanted Woods are situate.
When one is in them they seem to march
nowhere with reality ; and after issuing one
is tempted to deny their existence. For they
are full of spells and of adventure without end,
drawing one, up that dark, gliding river, into
their hidden heart. The soil into which the
thousand-year-old oaks strike their gnarled
roots, is the soil of romance itself. Rinaldo or
Sir Guyon was steered along those translucent
brown waters in the twilight of the boughs, and
enchantresses plied the oars. The heron who has
rattled up from among the reeds is the cousin
of the wonderful Blue Bird ; the fountain of
Merlin is hidden among the twisted whitethorns;
perhaps Merlin himself. One wanders along
muttering scraps of verse, or, as happened to

3 I' -

The Enchanted Woods

me, pursued by a phrase of recitative, a bar of
purling accompaniment, telling the loves of
Amadis ; one follows now one path, now
another, through marshland or underwood, up
and down, endlessly, aimlessly, much as one
reads, listlessly turning pages,the suddenly broken
off, suddenly resumed narrative of Ariosto or
Tasso or Spenser ; the fancy roving, galloping,
changing loves and identities like the willing
victims of great wizards and fairies. Who was
it, and where, who sailed upstream inland,
inland into such woods as these, on a river like
this one ? The river glides swiftly, flush with
the grass, clear reddish brown close by, clear
golden green in the distance, but always wonder-
fully deep and dark ; dimpling and eddying
with the pebbles it rolls, murmuring and
rustling where it sweeps the branches of the
overhanging oaks. The sunshine is in small
spots, in broken stars, through the foliage.
Scarcely a rustle of leaves, a distant twitter and
cooing of birds ; every sound dominated by the
murmur of that stream in the deep woodland
silence.

I am faced by the sunset in a wide chace,
green and browned over with rushes ; the sun-

4

The Enchanted Woods

set among branches of immense trees and in
the gaps between them, vivid crimson and bars
of pale fresh blue. Back in the thickets it is
dusk, and I lose my way, and am happy to lose
it ; and the creaking of the branches, the sudden
hurtle of wings — wild duck rising in the marsh
hard by — makes my heart stop with delightful
fright, and I sing, but under my breath, to keep
myself company. And, of a sudden, stop.
For I have struck once more that strange river,
gliding exceeding swiftly, smooth, silent, dark
between the trees. And the oaks and beeches
loom in the dusk, colossal, the pale branches
take threatening appearances, as of elephants or
writhing snakes. Shapes still exist, but all colour
is gone, and with it all life, in that brown light
made of darkness. Such, surely, might be the
rivers, the trees and thickets of Elysium, where
Orpheus, seeking Eurydice, need scarcely avert
his eyes, seeing her already as a shadow among
shadows.

Here is a bridge, which I cross ; and issuing
from the magic gloom, and striding through
the rough grass under the open starlit sky,
behold 1 close in front is the long terraced
house, with ground-floor windows standing

5

The Enchanted Woods

open, lit up orange in the serene blue evening.
And my heart rejoices at the nearness of
gracious and hospitable inmates, not wizards or
enchantresses, but ten thousand times more
delightful.

Enchanted woods are rare. But I suspect
that where they exist, and seem — so deep is
their magic — to march nowhere on reality,
they are most often within a stone's-throw
of the dear homes of every day ; nor is it
needful to travel very far afield in order to
find them.

This belief is beginning to be borne in on
me, and to cure me of hankerings after new
and distant places. For although the pleasures
of travel, the quest of the kindly genius of
localities, have been perhaps the greatest
blessing of my life, I find, on thinking things
over, that on the whole I have travelled less
than my neighbours, and far less for travelling's
own sake. There are moments, of course,
when I feel just a little saddened at seeing
them start without me for wonderful places —
Egypt and Spain and Greece, which I shall
never go to ; and when certain names, mere
casual references to this thing or that, drive

6

The Enchanted Woods

into my heart a funny little wedge, gentle and
yet quite sharp, of longing — the nostalgia of
the hills and streets one will never see with
bodily eye.

But is not this tiny pang the preparation for
all happiness and its accompaniment ? And is
there not, in our finest pleasures, something
analao;ous to that sense of delicrhtful breathless-
ness with which we climb a hillside or make
head against the waves of a sea-wind ? In other
words, does not the thorough having of any-
thing require a wide margin of — I will not say
of lacking^ but of forgoing, of not having, other
things ; and is not sparingness and comparative
emptiness — the sparingness and comparative
emptiness of the monk's table and cell — the
rule of true votaries of enjoyment ? Stay at
home, explore the surrounding ten miles (and
no pleasure of travel is keener than that of the
first hundred yards of the eleventh mile from
home), promenade round one's garden or
bedroom like Dc Maistre, and thus get up a
fine hunger for distant wanderings, for China
or Peru ? Heaven forbid ! There is no folly
more vain or fruitless than to manipulate one's
own happiness I

7

The Enchanted Woods

My growing belief is that the journeys
richest in pleasant memories are those under-
taken accidentally, or under the stress of
necessity ; moreover, that the most interesting
places are those which we stray into, or just
deflect towards, as we wander for the sake of
friends or work, or even in humbler quest of
cheapness of living or economy of health.
This belief that the best travel is not for
travelling's sake goes hand in hand with a
certain philosophy of life, very vague, difficult
to define, but perhaps the deeper down and
more inevitable, forcing itself upon one with
every added year of experience. As we con-
tinue to live, and see more of our own and
other folks' lives behind, or alongside of us,
there arises a dim comprehension of some
mysterious law by which the good things of
life, all the happiness — nay, the very power of
being happy — are not life's aims but life's
furtherance, and their true possession depends
on willing and uncalculating response to life's
multifold and changing beckonings and behests.
Life itself is a journey from an unknown
starting point to an unknown goal. We who
move along its tracks cannot overlook the

8

The Enchanted Woods

roads which cross and recross one another in
endless intricacy ; and the maps we make for
ourselves are the mere scrawlings of fanciful
children. All we can do, while thus travelling
we know neither whence nor whither, is to
keep our eyes clear, our feet undefiled, to drop
as much useless baggage as possible, and fill our
hands with the fruits and herbs, sweet or
salutary, of the roadside. But if we imagine
that we can bend our course to the hidden
Temples of Sais, or the Gardens of Armida, or
the Heavenly Jerusalem, why ! there is no
mischief in hoping ; only, methinks we shall
be disappointed. For wisdom, beauty — nay,
holiness itself — are not regions of the soul,
attainable and separate kingdoms ; but
rather, methinks, modes in which the soul
carries itself, or not, along the mysterious
journey to which it is elected or condemned.
And as to the gods, we need not pilgrimage
towards them : they walk, majestic, through
the universe ; and if our spirit is reve-
rent and cheerful, they take us now and then
by the hand, and lead us a few yards —
yes, lead even our poor selves, with the fish
in our hand and the dog at our heels as the

9

The Enchanted Woods

two archangels lead the little Tobit in the
pictures.

If this be the case, as I think, with the angels
and the great gods, how much more with so
humble a divinity as the friendly one of
localities ! We need undertake no voyages of
discovery to meet the Genius Loci. There is a
presiding spirit, an oread, in every venerable
and well-grown tree, overtopping the forest or
lonely upon the ploughed ridges ; a naiad in
every well-head, among the trickling cress and
the mossy stones ; nay, even in every cistern of
fair masonry and pure beryl water open to the
sky, where watering-cans are filled of evenings.
And as to enchanted woods, why, they lie in
many parks and girdle many cities ; only you
must know them when you see them, and
submit willingly to their beneficent magic.
Thus we enrich our life, not by the making of
far-fetched plans, nor by the seeking of change
and gain ; but by the faithful putting to profit
of what is within our grasp.

Wherefore, O benign divinity of places,
bestow upon us eyes and hearts such as will
recognize thy hidden shrines all over the world
and within every lane's turning ; and grant us,

10

The Enchanted Woods

as thy highest boon, to wander every now and
then in the Enchanted Woods, between the
hour of rising from our solitary work and the
hour of sitting down to meat with our dear
friends 1

IX

PISA AND THE CAMPO SANTO

PISA AND THE CAMPO SANTO

/^NE has a confused impression about Pisa
^^ that, historically as well as topographically,
it has suffered a sea change ; its Past washed
away or silted up by flooding river and receding
Mediterranean ; only the cathedral and its pre-
cincts remaining stranded all alone ; and life
of all kinds ebbing away with every passing
century, until the town becomes a place for
consumptives gently to die in, and travellers,
bound for less dreamy cities, to linger an hour
or so, between two trains, in its churchyard.

Besides the wonderful cathedral (itself the
latest monument of Hellenic and Roman art, a
wonderful reconstruction, material and aesthetic,
out of Antiquity's wreckage) and its kindred
tower and baptistery, there remains nothing of
early mediaeval Pisa save a few little church
frdnts set in alien houses. And there are very
few traces of the later Pisa of the Campo Santo's

15

The Enchanted Woods

time. The town, taken as a whole, is vaguely
seventeenth century, Medicean grand-ducal
coats-of-arms everywhere ; nay, even early
nineteenth century, the abode of Byron and
Shelley, and, to me at least, full of their
memories.

But from a distance, as in one's recollection,
Pisa exists only in those few monuments,
isolated in time as in space ; and this is its
great charm. Rowing^down the river, as I did
on a day of flood and violent sea-wind, Pisa
soon lost all her city, became reduced to the
cupolas of cathedral and baptistery, and finally
to the belfry, rising out from the marshland,
under the conical hills and the storm clouds.
And bicycling, as I have often done, outside
the various gates, the delight of the pinewoods
by the sea, of the olive yards towards Lucca, of
the great Carrara mountains and their foothills,
rising in various shades of green and blue and
smoke colour, various degrees of unreality —
the delight, meseems, of this wide flat country
of open cornfield and of hay — is brought to a
head by the delight of the return ; of seeing
the wonderful cathedral group overtopping the
walls. And then, having passed under the gate,

i6

Pisa and the Campo Santo

of finding those buildings at once, just within
the walls ; nothing visible beyond, and all alone
in their field of crass and sweet white clover.

Seen from a distance, particularly from out-
side the city, and with no trees (thank Heaven !)
round about to measure things by, the cupola
of the cathedral appears unimportant, becomes,
what cupolas rarely are, quite sunk in the
building's general shape. And that general
shape, so strictly cruciform and gabled at each
end, is, oddly enough, as I saw it across the
meadows and marsh, the shape of some very
primitive church, recalling to my mind (a
strange freak of resemblance) the one, of all
others, at Tintagel. A church, at all events, of
infinite remoteness of age and infinite isolation,
no town anywhere ; a stranded thing from
other times. This merely adds to the extra-
ordinary imaginative fascination of finding it to
be, on near approach, that marvellous casket of
ivory, that perfection of exquisite line and
colour and carving, from the lowest pillared
bays of its three apses and the flat arches and
pilasters of its sides to the triumphal crosses
and garlands of its high lateral gables.

Those temple-like side gables, surely the
17 c

The Enchanted Woods

loveliest part of its loveliness, bring home to
one the fact that, as I said before, this Pisan
cathedral, built by Greeks or pupils of Greeks,
is one of the last works of antique art. The
columns of giallo antico and of peach-blossom
marble, and the slabs of porphyry and serpentine,
which mottle and perfect the tea-rose colouring
of the apse, are not more surely the remains of
ancient temples in Greece and Asia Minor,
brought home on the galleys of Pisa, than the
architectural forms, the capitals and mouldings
and exquisite fretwork, are the remains of the
art of Hellas and of Rome, certain patterns
seeming almost copied from the tomb of
Mausolos, with a kind of waywardness of
accent, an added flame of line and curve,
belonging to the Middle Ages, and telling of
Gothic art to come. What a subduing charm
about these buildings, all of the same time,
closely grouped — the cathedral, the baptistery,
and the tower — in that field of scented white
clover just underneath the city walls.

The sentiment about the Campo Santo is,
of course, quite different ; and within its walls
it encloses a world of quite another character.
And not the less so because, under the half-

i8

Pisa and the Campo Santo

effiiced frescoes of medieval moralities and
legends, and alongside of the mutilated antique
sarcophagi, there rest, in the place of the
original Pisans — (" I want to see the tombs of
the Crusaders," as a burly clergyman reiterated
stubbornly in English) — all sorts of modern
creatures. There are all the local celebrities
with eighteenth-century pigtails or heads of hair
a la Brutus, frilled nightgowns and togas ;
writers on jurisprudence, on fair ladies' canary
birds, or, like the illustrious forgotten Marulli,
" On Mendicity," a work which a life-sized
Canova genius is crowning with the greatest care,
*' On Mendicity ! " The Middle Ages also, at
the other end of the churchyard cloister, have
left their views on the subject expressed in the
group of maimed and blind and halt who arc
calling on Death in the great fresco of his
triumph ; and perhaps, on the whole, the in-
sinuation therein implied, that some of these
unfortunate persons will be taken to heaven by
the angels of judgment, is more consolatory for
mendicants than the book of the illustrious
Marulli under the wreath deposited by the
Canova genius. There also, near the chains of
the port of Pisa, hung on the walls, is that

19

The Enchanted Woods

friend of Voltaire's and of Frederick the Great's,
AlgarottuSy sed non omniSy as he is careful to
inform us. One is glad to think that some
portion of him escaped to more suitable spheres,
for an eighteenth-century exquisite would have
suffered from the Gothick bad taste and super-
stition of the frescoes all round. There lie
all these worthies, Mme. Catalani also, mixed
up with the Counts of Donoratico, forbears of
Ugolino, and with the mother of the Countess
Matilda. And, not least odd, the poor Northern
people, Poles, for instance, who had evidently
come to Pisa to die of consumption, as might
so easily have happened to Keats, and would
very likely have happened to Shelley if the
Pisan sea had not taken him instead.

For my own part I confess I am glad of this
jumble ; it humanizes the place, takes it a little
out of the Past, which has so long ceased to
be alive that, like the painted people on the
walls and the sculptured people on the sarco-
phagi, it seems scarcely to have gone through
the bitterness and solemnity of dying.

Such as it is, the Campo Santo is an enchant-
ing place to linger in, particularly on fine May
mornings. Nothing could be more charming

20

Pisa and the Campo Santo

than to run one's eyes along the frescoes,
which, in their patchiness of colour, sometimes
very vivid, sometimes utterly faded, are really
like variegated flower-beds. One steps across
the grass and sunshine of the enclosed space to
have the pleasure of the contrast, and to see the
frescoes also from the opposite side, framed in
by the white carved mullions, vivid blue or
mauve pink, with a figure here and there
standing out.

One lets one's self speculate, but in no critical
mood, whether Dante would have been pleased
or furious with those frescoed illustrations to
his " Inferno ; " would he have countenanced
that cute, cheerful, gigantic devil munching
traitors, green and yellow, and picking up
others to munch like the Ogre Fee Faw Fum ?
Had he such visions as these of sinners being
spitted and potted and larded and emptied (like
poultry) by furry devil-cooks ; visions of snakes
being made use of like pack-thread ? Who
knows 1 Who knows 1 And does not every
generation of readers re-write the immortal
poets ?

Or else one may spell out, or make up for
one's self, the legends of some of these saints — •

21

The Enchanted Woods

San Ranieri, for instance — the adventures by
land and sea, hunting-parties, storms with devils
in the rigging, temptations of hermits in the
wilderness, and tremendous battles with Gog
and Magog or Prester John ; stories perhaps
out of the Legenda Aurea of James of Voragine,
but just a little influenced, methinks, by Anatole
France. . . . And while thus lazily at work,
our eye suddenly falling on the bas-relief — say,
that of the chariot-horses dragging poor young
Hippolytus — of some pagan sarcophagus, or
caught by the blond helmeted serenity of a fine
head of Ares, . , . The cloister mullions frame
in, above the ivory-tinted marbles of the oppo-
site wall, the cathedral cupola shaped like a
dry poppy-head, and the pomegranate-shaped
dome of the baptistery — reddish and purple and
frosted with white ; and beyond them the pale-
blue sky, recently washed by rain, with just one
feathery cirrus. The sunshine falls blond and
mild on the marble tombstones ; the swallows
flash in and out ; and a fresh breeze brings the
scent of the white clover outside into the
cloisters of the churchyard.

22

SWITZERLAND AGAIN

SWITZERLAND AGAIN

TN my previous dealings with the genius of
localities, I have had occasion to speak of
the tarrying at unknown gates in alien places,
and of the wistful conjuring up of vague
inhabitants who might be one's friends. . . .

On the present occasion the houses which
opened their doors to the wayfarer were the
very same I had peered at and wondered about
five years before. Or, at least, houses just like
them, and in the self-same locality ; country
houses with overhanging chfdct roofs and tubs
of blue hydrangeas against the doorsteps, which
I had seen during those misty walks among
the green lawns, the fragrant lime-trees beyond
the climbing walls and towers of that dear Swiss
town.

The whole adventure (I mean my recent
stay at F ) has the delightful vague-
ness, the disdain of how and why, the bold

25

The Enchanted Woods

foreshortening of a dream, and a dream's air of
superior significance : no asking and answering
of questions, no chain of dull reasons, no
bothering about names or relationships, but a
fine directness and taking for granted of every-
thing that's pleasant and unusual. It seemed
to radiate from the improbable circumstance
that my business at F was purely senti-
mental— to meet, in fact, a friend of many
years' standing whom I had never beheld with
mortal eyes, albeit perhaps with the other eyes
of the immortal spirit. We had missed one
another Heaven knows how often ; or perhaps
— who knows ? — we had never really tried to
meet. This time the intention was undoubted.

F is off the line that leads to anywhere,

and I had come on purpose, with much exchange
of letters. I arrived, and found her . . . No.
Not really gone, though called away to Paris
the previous evening. But not gone. Ex-
tremely present, on the contrary, with a pervading
presence passing that vulgarly so called. In-
deed, throughout her house her own portrait
seemed the least personal thing ; though I
would note, as a symbol of that dream-like
taking for granted^ that I recognized the portrait

26

Switzerland again

as if I had been familiar with her every unseen
feature. It was not like the fairy-story, though
there were books and flowers arranged, and
meals daintily spread by unseen hands — for the
fiiry hostess, though invisible, was there.

Nor did the hospitality stop here, since we
have needs more delicate, curiosity, desire for
cordiality, apparently unknown to the too-too
solid heroes of fairy-tales. Friends came and
fetched me for walks and drives ; delightful
persons with familiar speech and look and quite
uncertain names, who showed me the curiosities
of the town, and carried me to other friendly,
delightful persons about whom I knew nothing
at all and yet everything.

The houses, as I have said, are outside the
town, set down in meadows of that lush Swiss
grass whitened with hemlock, and you got to
them along avenues of blossoming lime. Great
chalets in shape — farm buildings, woodstacks,
barns, all leaning against them ; and themselves
farm-like, pastoral, with scent of hay and dairy
coming from the yards. But once inside,
following the neat bonne along the deep, cool
passage, one found one's self in the midst of
old-world refinement — nay, even old-world

27

The Enchanted Woods

romance. There was the delicate Louis XV.
furniture, the pale hunting-scene tapestries, the
grace of branch-shaped moulding and tendril-
like ironwork, the charm of pistachio-green
doors and panels, of a dining-room fitted with
dainty coral-coloured chairs and cupboards ; all
the grace of eighteenth-century France brought
back from Versailles by Swiss captains of ad-
venture, but subdued, made modest, and in a
way made moral by adaptation to a wholesome
rural life, by being fitted into these domestic
farms, open-doored, where master and mistress
walked out into the kitchen garden and among
the cattle. . . .

The captain of adventure, full-wigged and
corsleted, by Rigault or Rigault's pupil, looked
down upon our gouter in that coral-red room :
the table spread with home-baked cakes, with
cream, butter, fruit, and honey off the farm,
and set with the old-fashioned flowers which

the hospitable demoiselles de B tied up

for my journey. There were some charming
young girls, relations of each other and every
one, my new little friend particularly, like a
rose in her rose-coloured frock ; and we all sat
round the big table. Then a young nephew

28

Switzerland again

strolled in, hooted, from riding. Then there
entered another lady, connected in some way
with some famous eighteenth-century letters,
and having, herself, a certain cosmopolitan and
literary grace which the eighteenth-century was
noted for. I had been taken that morning to
see her house, another farm-like chalet with
Louis XV. interior, over a deep ravine, a rush-
ing Alpine river, made for the delectation, one
mii^ht think, of Zimmerman or Senancour, or
other lovers of " solitude." There was also
the house of a '* grand'mere," a lady of the
Diesbachs (pronounced in Versailles fashion
Di-es-bacque). The overhanging chalet eaves
as usual, and farm-like look ; but inside rooms
almost castle-like, mediaeval German, and hung
with the tournament armour, the swords and
pikes and saddle-cloths, of some sixteenth-
century ancestor.

I felt I had penetrated not merely among
delightful living inhabitants, old and young,
full of courtesy and kindness, but, thanks to
them, into a recondite tittle past world — the
world of a handful of Swiss nobles, originally
feudal, excluded for that reason from all home
concerns by the patricians of the cities, and,

29

The Enchanted Woods

therefore, from father to son, seeking military-
service abroad ; but always returning, from
Versailles or Vienna, to take a wife of their
own stock, to look after their dairy meadows
and their apple orchards, and to plant more
avenues of limes on the green ridges above the
river. A world of subdued romanticalness, no
longer French, but not yet German, of the
quality of the healthy parts of Rousseau, the
rustic bits of "Julie," and the adventure with
the two young ladies in the periwinkle woods.
. . . An imaginary world, made up of scraps of
letters and memoirs, impressions of furniture,
phrases of songs " c'est mon berger rendez le
moi," for the spinet ? Perhaps ; and none the
worse for that. But a world certainly not more
charming, and apart, and altogether unlikely,
than that of these friendly and gracious-living
people, who welcomed me into their fragrant
flower-gardens and dear old wide-eaved houses,
that serene, long summer afternoon, while the
sunlight lay low on the green lush grass, all
whitened with hemlock. i

May I never be guilty of a word or a thought
lacking the least little bit in veneration for the
Genius Loci! But, impiety of this kind being
30

Switzerland again

out of the question, I should like to confess
that it would not do to be always left in
tete-a-tete with the divinity immanent in bricks
and mortar and rock and stream. Every now
and then, at least, localities ought to take a
human voice and human eyes, and their friendly
charm become personified in kindly living
creatures. This amiable miracle has often
happened in my fortunate and, I trust, grate-
ful, wanderings. Whole districts have meant
friends — some, alas ! existing no longer save in
the memory of those places never to be revisited,
like that ample and beautiful lady of the Venetian
mainland, on to whom the great doges and
admirals could look approvingly from the walls.
Nor can the foot-alps of Piedmont, their pastures
and forests, ever become dissociated in my heart
from the gracious and pathetic personality of the
friend I found — to keep for so short a time ! —
among them. One lives quicker while travelling,
each hour counting for many of one's stay-at-
home days. And the rapid, sudden acquaintance
with localities, the brief sojourns divested of
responsibility, innocent of yesterday and to-
morrow, bring with them a heightened possibility
of human intercourse. There is a more rapid

The Enchanted Woods

intuition of one another, and a freedom from
doubt and shyness. And the stress of time,
the feeling of now or never, begets a quick,
sufficient stretching out of hands and clasping
of personalities.

The Genius Loci, most impersonal of all
worshipful divinities, sometimes bestows on his
pious ones, quite unexpectedly, very human
favours. I made these reflections, but not for
the first time ; and I regarded in the light of
sacrificial and holy tributes to my divinity the
flowers and the home-baked cakes which had
been given me by the ladies in the coral-red
Louis XV. room in the chalet near F .

32

TUSCAN CHURCHES IN SUMMER

TUSCAN CHURCHES IN SUMMER

'T~^HE other day, instead of driving through
Pistoia on my way up to the villa, I
thought I should like to see again some ot
those little romanesque churches, and began
with San Giovanni /«(?r Civilas. I like the name,
bearing the thought, the image, both of the smaller
town of the past and of the poplars and grass
at the foot of the walls and of the open country
beyond. The church, as usual, was locked,
and 1 wasted a good deal of time in getting it
opened. But I liked it all the better. For
despite the sudden magic of entering an Italian
church by an open main portal, where the
picketed-down curtain lets in glints of sun and
lets out whiffs of incense ; the magic of plung-
ing from the open glare into the dark and cool
enclosure, a transition as complete as from land
to water, a different mode for the whole being —
despite all this, I almost prefer the shut church,

35 '^ 2

The Enchanted Woods

for there is a charm (in summer, of course, as
with everything in the South) quite peculiar
attendant on the difficult and tortuous entry
into such disused buildings. There is the
waiting in the side street at the Campanello della
Cura, or in the vaulted passage where you have
vistas of whitewashed stairs with crucifixes
behind gratings, or of little closed gardens,
perhaps an orange tree against a wall. Then
the passing through various sheltered places,
sacristies with their old-world threadbare de-
corum ; and into the church, unexpectedly by
some side or hidden door. The church —
particularly one of these basilical barns of
Pistoia — thus shut up, thus stealthily ap-
proached, seems in its emptiness so much more
a thing of dreams and of ages.

The pictures on gilt grounds, the solemn
carved lions of the pulpit, and birds in the
capitals ; the allegorical women, with features
worn away by many hands, of the holy-water
stoup ; all these things seem in this fashion to
belong more to themselves, and give one, as no
open church can do, the rest and the comfort
of remoteness from the practical, the present,
the passing.

36

Tuscan Churches in Summer

And since 1 am on this subject, let me say a
word also in praise of sacristies. A sacristy
has a more intimate air of the past, of the
consecrated, than, most often, a church. It is
safer from irreverence, and from what is but a
form of irreverence, that indiscreet faith which
knows exactly everything about divine matters,
as it conceives them ! Whereas in a sacristy
the very gossip and snuff-taking of the canons
assumes a certain symbolical air, and becomes,
as they robe and disrobe themselves and cover
and uncover their chalices, a part of a larger
and more solemn ritual. Sacristies also possess,
much more than churches (and more properly,
for a church should be for every man and
woman and child, and for their poor human
rags and failings), that delicate swept and gar-
nished quality which is the external equivalent
of holiness, and the principal reason for the
setting aside of places and of souls for such
necessary medicinal onesidedness.

Sacristies have, moreover, the impersonal
quality (a quality of sacrifice, not of vanity) of
sacerdotal magnificence and — may 1 say so ? —
sacerdotal coquet terie. It is not for the individual's
benefit or ostentation (the individual, in Italy,

37

The Enchanted Woods

being often a quite dreadfully shabby old person)
this fine folding and careful putting by, this
dainty air which hangs like faint incense about
the white and purple clothes, the copes hung out
on old-fashioned horses, the napkins and laced
surplices spread out on the oak tables. In
Lent particularly the sacristies get this full
meaning, partly because of the prevalence of all
that beautiful puce and mulberry colour every-
where, the mourning magnificence of the church.
Partly also because the church itself becomes
more modest and mysterious, veiled in a manner
like the crucifixes with their figures barely seen
through the dark silk. And then there is a
charm, not wholly Christian, but with under-
tones of classic, Olympic associations, in the
formal trophies of palm branches which are
being prepared in these sacristies.

But to go back to the subject of our
Tuscan churches in summer-time. Returning
from the villa last Sunday, full of the sense
of its delicate sweetness, I felt I could not
return directly home, to unpacking and to
opening of letters ; and as it was still early in
these long June evenings, I stopped on my
way at Santa Maria Novella. The church was

38

Tuscan Churches in Summer

crowded, preparing for the procession (I had
forgotten it was Corpus Domini)^ but very airy
(all the doors and the Spanish chapel cloister
wide open) ; and only a delicate scent of in-
cense and of fresh flowers came from the
darkness, where the great altar, covered with
lights, loomed like a silver peacock out of the
vagueness of curtains and deep-coloured glass.
There were lots of people preparing for the
procession ; smart young women and boys and
crowds of small children ; little girls in great
white feathers ; one tiny mite in pale flesh-
colour and gilt wings, as Cupid, with a
cornucopia of flowers — a most Renaissance
fancy ! All these children were being bustled
about by fine Dominicans with lace surplices
over their white robes, and by brothers of some
white confraternity with cowls turned back.
It was a feast of children, really lovely and
charming, like a feast of flowers, making one
understand the wholesome Pagan side of the
old faith, which calls the little children to it,
not for benediction and exhortation only, but
for delightful dressing up in the sanctuary.

From this it was funny, and in a way
instructive, to go into the empty Spanish chapel.

39

The Enchanted Woods

An arrangement had been made there, near the
altar, of a few straw chairs and one solitary-
gold and crimson chair of state ; and seated
on them were five or six pious women^ as one
of my Italian friends calls them, with their hair
in nets, frumpish black garments and rosaries,
all hanging on the words, the rather fatuous
jocularity of their spiritual director. A little
feast of clerical wit and flow of pious soul
which must have seemed droll enough to the
lovely Giottesque Virtues and Arts, in dainty
embroideries, and the courtly King Davids and
Ptolomies painted on the walls. But the feast
of children continued, though less sacerdotal,
in the big cloister. The less favoured of
fortune, whom the Church, for lack of ostrich
feathers and white shoes, had not called to the
great pageant upstairs, were having just as good
a time here below — rolling in the grass and
making mud pies in the sand, within the shelter
of the pillars and in the shadow of the pointed
belfry, while sounds of bells and of organs came
from above.

40

ARLES

ARLES

" T7 VEN as at Aries, where the Rhone stag-
"^ nates, the ground is chequered over
with sepulchres." Those lines of the ninth
canto of the "Inferno" were in my mind the
whole time, and now sum up the impressions
of that autumn day at Aries.

The place Dante alluded to — the extraordi-
nary melancholy avenue, called the Aliscamps,
or Elysian Fields — remains unchanged from
when he saw it, and when it suggested to him
the street of tombs in the city of Dis. It
opens suddenly out of one of the rough boule-
vards which surround the Roman walls of
Aries. The rows of big plane trees and the
yellowing poplars stretch into the marsh, which
is revealed, despite its vines and reddening
peach trees, by sedgy ditches, and, even at
midday, by swarms of huge mosquitoes. The
sarcophagi, mostly lidless, lie close together in

43

The Enchanted Woods

the rank grass on either side of the dusty,
deserted road ; their long, double line inter-
rupted here and there by a little mediaeval
chapel, desecrated. And the sepulchral walk
is closed by what itself looks like a great tomb :
a half-ruined church, with Byzantine atrium
and belfry, dilapidated, stained by time, and
grown with weeds. One guesses that it was
intended to exorcise the ghostly multitudes of
this mortuary avenue among the marshes ;
and one might think that the people of Aries
would have consecrated and reconsecrated it
many times over. But instead of such pathetic
hallowing of the old pagan cemetery, the Revo-
lution has left only dismantled chapels, with
the coats of arms of the great Provencal nobles
crumbling on the vaultings : desecrated, rifled
tombs presiding over that mile of empty
sarcophagi.

After my morning in those Aliscamps, and
in the little black cloisters of St. Trophime, I
spent a couple of hours on the raised seats
of the arena, watching the butchers' boys and
drovers of the neighbourhood playing a harm-
less game of brag with half a dozen unwilling
little bulls, while the whole population of Aries

44

Arl

es

looked on. After a sad scirocco morning, the
Sunday afternoon was splendid — magnificent
Southern October sunshine and a brilliant sky
behind the jagged whitish masonry and mediaeval
towers of the amphitheatre. And the former
seats of the arena, now rough and weed-grown,
were turned into a sort of promenade for a
crowd of holiday-makers, with no end of quite
wonderfully pretty women in the dignified and
dainty Arlesian dress and headgear. There
was a band playing noisily, and a great shouting
and clapping whenever a bull showed signs of
charging one of the lads, who kept running up
and down trying to provoke the creatures.

The whole thing was extraordinarily Southern,
sunny, and gay ; the bells of the churches
seeming to ring the people to the arena. Yet,
for all that, my impression of Aries remains on
the whole sepulchral : a humble little squalid
mediaeval place, bull-ring and bands and beautiful
women and dust-heaps and filth and all, squat-
ting in an over-great tomb like poor melancholy
Cavalcanti (not rising disdainful, waist and
shoulders, like Farinata) as Dante described
him after seeing the rows of sarcophagi of the
Aliscamps. I^'or even as an old print shows

45

The Enchanted Woods

the amphitheatre used as a citadel, and choked
with battlemented houses and towers, so the
whole town seems to have sat itself down in
that Rhone marshland because of those walls,
those forums and basilicas of the dead Roman
city, half filling their greatness with its tortuous
provincial streets, defiling their magnificence,
as its population still defiles their monuments,
with its mean hand-to-mouth life through the
dark centuries. And in this lies the chief
characteristic of Aries, in this squalor of its
past life. It would be easy, in description,
to turn Aries inadvertently into a kind of
Ravenna ; and I take note of the fact, as of
one of the odd tricks of the genius loci^ that my
recollections of the place are already becoming
modified, made just a little poignant and
majestic by contact with the thought of that
other dead city by the Adriatic. But there is
nothing at Aries either of ancient empire or ot
mediaeval romance (the romance of Ravenna's
pine forests and Venetian houses). And if it
is undoubtedly a tomb, it is not of the kind of
those great horned sarcophagi carved with pea-
cocks and palm trees and once shingled with
beaten gold, such as stand in the sunken

46

Aries

churches and around the grave of Dante at
Ravenna ; but rather like those innumerable
stone boxes, shapeless, defaced, become little
more than troughs, on to which flutter down
the yellow poplar leaves along the dusty,
mosquito-haunted Aliscamps.

With all this hangs together a very personal
impression of having got, somehow or other,
far, far away from home, having lost my way
by accident, into the depths of the provinces
and of an unknown past. Good fortune, often
repeated, has given me the habit of feeling
companioned even when quite solitary on my
journeys, of imagining possible future friends in
remote and unfamiliar places ; so that the room
of an inn, the street of a new place, does not
make me feel lonely.

But it was diflrerent at Aries. It seemed
inconceivable, somehow, that in this huddled
town of time-stained little houses, with their
corner shrines and black gutter, there should
be any life into which mine might ever pene-
trate ; indeed, any life very different (for all
the Socialist posters and politicians yelling all
night at the Cafe du Forum) from that which
during those crumbling, oozing centuries since

47

The Enchanted Woods

the fall of Rome, have left this place a dust-
heap and a sewer-puddle. But the kind and
frequently humorous Fates which preside over
my wanderings have willed that even Aries
should become, sooner or later, connected in
my mind with impressions of friendship.

The way of it has been most curiously round-
about, though efficacious. For what could seem
less likely than that the recollections of my
lonely day at Aries, of its avenue of tombs and
general sepulchral character, should be corrected
hundreds of miles away at Padua, and, of all
places, in a butler's pantry ? Yet it happened
like that, and not eight days ago, and at the
very moment 1 was beginning to put together
these notes and was despairing at their gloomi-
ness. Moreover, it all hinges on those lines of
Dante with which I have prefaced my remarks.
For the friend I went to look for in that pantry,
Luigi, most scholarly of courtly white-haired
butlers, has the best reason for knowing lines
of Dante, since he has translated [nionumentum
aere perennius /) the whole " Divine Comedy "
into his native dialect. ... So that, coming
into his sacrarium, stuck round with various
discarded photographs of places, I had no need

48

Arl

es

to keep my tcelings to myselt on recognizing,
above the glasses and decanters and coffee-cups,
the dismantled church and ruined belfry of the
Aliscamps, the horned sarcophagi and the
burying-troughs of the Pagan lying higgledy-
piggledy under the trees. My mind flew back
a year, out of the friendly pantry to that
scirocco morning, to the yellowing leaves falling
on to the dusty Provenc^al road, the belated
sawing cicalas and the gigantic poisonous gnats,
ghosts, no doubt, of evil-minded ancients buzz-
ing round their sepulchres in that uncanny
promenade.

"It is a photograph " — he answered my
inquiries — " which Count Alberto had spoilt
and thrown away. It seems a curious place,
and I have often wondered where it is."

"Why, it is Aries. . . ."

" Aries .'' " cried he, laying down his duster
and approaching — " you don't mean, signora,
Aries ijvhere the Rhone stagnates ? "

"Of course — don't you see.'' — *and the whole
place is chequered over with tombs ' — fanno i
sepolcri tut to '/ loco varo.''

We were bending together over the photo-
graph. " I will write that verse upon it, and

49 K

The Enchanted Woods

am infinitely indebted to you, signora," he said,
" for telling me. Then Dante saw it ! "

" Of course Dante saw it, hundreds of old
stone coffins lying about in the fields. Dante
saw it and wrote about it. And / saw it last
October, Luigi. ..."

But I desisted from adding, what, however,
interested me very much, that I also was writing
about it. . . .

The line of Dante now stands in neat pencil
at the foot of that photograph in the pantry at
Padua ; and the friendly face and courteous
gesture of the old butler fill up the empty
space in my lonely recollection of the Alis-
camps. Aries, henceforth, belongs no longer
exclusively to a dreary, remote Middle Ages !

Little guessing this kind though tardy
thoughtfulness of the Genius of Place on my
behalf, I ended my stay at Aries with an
accidental but most impressive last sight of
the city. A mistake in the time had set me
down at the station half an hour too soon.
So, retracing my steps towards the town, I
got on to a narrow quay of the Rhone, a
semicircular stone embankment, flush almost
with the water, and protecting the old houses,

50

Arl

es

corbelled and battlemented, from the river ;
old, old backs of houses, stained with centuries
of dirt and with the fogs of this place " where
the Rhone stagnates."

It swirls past, thick, in long twists and
dimples of pale water, a boat or two stranded
against the embankment ; and, at a bend, the
battered gargoyle monsters of a kind of little
palace peering down into its melancholy flood.
The sun had set unperceived, and the water
took in its pallor faint rose and lilac tints.
The old town looked tomb-like. Very fitly
this river walk began with a thick hedge of
green cypress ; and as I travelled away in
the deepening night, I noticed a group of
cypresses, funereal in the flat, surrounding
every little station along the line.

NYMPHS AND A RIVER GOD

NYMPHS AND A RIVER GOD

pURBLlND people complain that there is
-*■ not water enough in the Italian land-
scape ; estimating streams, apparently, according
to the boats you can float on, or the pounds
of fish you can pull out of, them, rather than
by the grace and waywardness of the in-dwell-
ing nymphs, or the sacred and miraculous
character of the river god. For Italy has
nymphs and river gods ; which, to me at least,
seem quite as much to be desired as trout or
punts ; and there is water enough everywhere
in its hilly regions to refresh the spirit, though
perhaps not always, I admit it, to bathe the
body. And such as are dissatisfied thereat had
better not come to Italy, and may as well skip
these pages.

I don't quite know what meaning the ancients
attached to the wood Nympha:um^ and 1 rather
fear it meant some portion of their public baths.
But to me the word has come into connection

55

The Enchanted Woods

with certain little places very peculiar, and
which one meets often enough on these hill-
sides. I have just found one, quite perfect, while
riding up the steep paths from the Mugnone
Valley to the Amphitheatre of Fiesole. There
is a sharp turn of the lanes, and in a little
widening between the olive-yards a brake of
reeds, a circle of bushes, a matting of wet
grass ; and a little stream, winding down the
hill, falls over a weir, a smooth sheet of limpid
white water, losing itself in the grass, and
going babbling and singing away through the
tiny gorge, with the cypresses and tall bay trees
marking its course, and the flaming leafless
willows its resting-places.

This is a NymphcBum^ a home of the nymphs,
and I recognize it immediately as such. But
what do I mean thereby ? Do I imagine forms
of maidens, brides or bridesmaids of rustic gods
haunting the spot } Assuredly not ; nor any
human forms save an occasional peasant tilling
the olive-yard. Yet I know it is the place of
the nymphs, I feel their presence, though the
nymphs are merely the white singing water,
the whispering brake of reeds ; not immanent
in it all, but f/, itself. Certainly it is not merely

56

Nymphs and a River God

so much stone, water, grass, or trees. And
when, as otten happens, my pony stops in such
places to drink of" the shallow brook which
crosses the path, 1 have a very special feeling
as of being in an open-air chapel, a consecrated
place ; and it is all summed up in that mis-
applied word, the Nymphmim.

I have mentioned this kind of feeling, because
it explains that it was something stronger even
than the three immortal hexameters of Virgil,
with Carducci's four or five beautiful strophes
added to them, which drove me to brave the
snow-wind along those miles of Umbrian
valley in accomplishment of that long-desired
pilgrimage to the sacred springs of the
Clitumnus. It was a very i\\\Q^ very cold
March morning, a few round clouds rising
and being chased along the snowy mountains.
An austere country, and naturally wintry, this
great high-lying oval valley or ancient lake-
bottom of Umbria : mountains all round,
rounded and without much grace, but very
solemn in their deep blue powdered with
snow ; towns appearing and disappearing with
every fitful light upon their flanks and spurs ;
their crops backward, hedges leafless, and bare

57

The Enchanted Woods

their sparse trees ; oaks, always and only oaks,
except the olives here and there quite thin on
the grey parched rubble of the hillsides. Very
solemn ; not tragic, but almost more than
austere. A country, moreover, very scanty of
people ; few farms, and only one real village
to pass through in all those miles ; decent but
poor, with a great turreted castle in its midst,
turned into barns ; and a church with a fresco
on the door, surrounded by last year's faded
garlands. The people also, without Tuscan
ease or Roman swagger, silent and serious ;
men on pack-horses or driving strings of
mules ; women spinning with the distaff while
herding the sheep and black pigs in the thin
frost-bitten grass. And at intervals, from every
hillside, great runs of torrent rubble, avalanches
of stone ; and in them, untouched or unheed-
ing, the great bare oaks in scattered companies,
with only tufts of black hellebore at their feet.
It was sunny by fits, and very cold. What a
solemn, solemn country, this vast, flat, oval
valley of green crops, swept by the wind and
snow from the mountains, and burnt by the
sun, and devastated by the torrents ; and yet
fertile, and human, and serene !

58

Nymphs and a River God

1 had seen that little temple of the Clitumnus,
under the rocky, towered hill, and above the
full, lush stream, very often, from the train,
which passes it without stopping ; it is an
accidental arrangement of suggestions and lines
so perfect as to have haunted one for years,
even had one not known the name and the
verses. And now at last I got to it. The
little temple stands on a rock above a mill
turned by the Clitumnus. Looked at from
near, it is evidently made up out of remains
of a much larger building, and in Byzantine
times, with carved cross and vines ; it is, in
fact, a Christian church. But, built of Roman
fragments, with its gable and entablature, its
two fluted columns and little vestibule between
them, 'tis the most classic and pagan place I
have ever seen. One is quite surprised, inside
the tiny temple cella^ to find upon the altar
the usual framed printed forms, " Sacerdos
quum lavat manus," etc., and one somehow
translates this Christian rite into an antique
lustration. Pigeons live untidily all over the
temple, and between its two columns I found
the body of a finch, with that decent look
which dead birds have. Under the temple, as

59

The Enchanted Woods

I have said, and passing through a mill, flows
the Clitumnus : unsullied by the women who
wash in it, a shallow stream of pellucid water,
the great weeds waving in its whiteness like
naiads' hair ; the banks green, with here and
there a weeping willow, faintly green, and
a rosy peach-tree doing it honour in this
blossomless country. An inscription tells
that the place was sacred to the Clitumnian
Jove, or to Jove as the Clitumnus — Jovi
Clitumno. The Latin leaves it impressively
ambiguous.

One must do like Turner, and transfer in
the picture painted and cherished by one's fancy
the little temple from above this mill-reach to
about a mile off along the same road, to the
springs of the river ; and one must think of it
as guarding the very height and perfection of
this lovely water, its miraculous well-head.
Under the road, under an arid rock, sparsely
grown with bare oaks, lies a pond half sur-
rounded by the buildings and little garden
of a farm, encroached on by the green and
watery grass, and guarded towards the plain
by tall hedges and a screen of budding poplars.
A little island, green also with fresh weeping

60

Nymphs and a River God

willows, is in the midst. And this pond is the
well-head of the Clitumnus. Out of the rock,
invisibly, heaven knows how, issue swift streams
of purest white water, winding among the cress,
the wild mint, and the grasses. And out of
deep holes (as if a tree had been uprooted)
bubble more waters, pellucid, pale beryl-
coloured ; and more well up, pure blue among
the waving tresses of weeds, effervescing on the
surface. Never was such water elsewhere !
Straight from the hidden naiads' urns, gushing
upwards among the unexpected grass and reeds
and trees under that stony hill. A woman
who was filling her pitcher, and who gave me
to drink, told me it never lessens, but rather
the contrary, in the greatest summer droughts.
Some peasants were shoeing a handsome mule
at the forge by the brink ; and two lovely
bullocks, purest white Val di Chiana breed,
worthy of Virgil and of the Roman triumphs
on the Capitol, were waiting to be yoked. 1
had felt, while sitting in the sunshine by the
temple, that it, and the stream, and the bleak
blue valley, were consecrated for me by those
lines of the Georgics. But now, seeing the
springs, I understood that there were things

6 1

The Enchanted Woods

more wonderful and venerable than all Virgil's
poetry, the places which had inspired it ; and
that I was in the home of a God, in a real
God's presence.

62

BRIVE-LA-GAILLARDE

BRIVE-LA-GAILLARDE

T AM very glad that friend of mine induced
me to go out ot my way to Brive, although
nothing could have been more different from
what, Heaven only knows why, I had made
up out ot her few words about the place.

And here I would note the way in which
a friend, by the mere fact of having recently
been there, can keep company with us, despite
all difficulties of time and space, in what would
otherwise be quite new and solitary places.
Thus with this particular friend of mine, the
arch-traveller : how often have I trodden in
her footsteps 1 Last spring it was at Viterbo,
amidst the magic of fruit blossom and of
trickling fountains, the melancholy fascination of
those ivory basilicas among the dismantled walls,
the forsaken fields, of Toscanclla : a word left
on a scrap of paper on the inn table bringing
the bare knowledge th;it the other had been

65 F

The Enchanted Woods

there, that her eyes, her feet, had been on those
stones ; that her thoughts had gone out, like
mine, to meet these things. This time it is in
autumn showers, in the hilly heart of France
that I have been thus companioned ; com-
panioned, who knows, perhaps more fully and
truly almost than many a time that we have
travelled side by side in the body. For our
truer friendships give into our power an
essence, as it were, of the personality — a real
presence distilled from all we care for really —
glance, gesture, tone of voice, turn of the head,
curl of the hair, and individual, inexpressible
ways of feeling and seeing things ; all of which
remains ours (if we know how to use it
reverently), inalienably ours, happen what may,
and companions us, as I said, on occasion. I
felt this thing, and was befriended yesterday
evening on coming to the nice balconied Hotel
de Bordeaux (where Kings of Spain and Pope
Pius VII. had halted, as inscriptions told me),
and while as yet Brive-la-Gaillarde meant
nothing to me except a starry night, big trees
all round, some roses at my window, and a
vague sense of approaching the South.

Meant, let me hasten to correct, nothing
66

Brive-la-Gaillarde

connected with the reality. For I saw Brivc
quite well before getting there, and see it quite
distinctly, as its exists in my fancy, alongside
of the other Brive painted in my memory.
The Brive I had come to see rises in a broken-
off amphitheatre above a deep ravine, which is
spanned, with its torrent, by a great viaduct ;
a long mail of elms looks down into the gulf,
and the town is piled behind, rows of Louis
XIV. hotels and of more modest " vieille
France " houses whitewashed and silvery-
roofed. And, in a dainty way, with the smart
swagger of an old impregnable fortress turned
to the prosperous uses of peace, it lives up to
its name of La Gaillarde. And the autumn
sun makes it whiter, the first autumn cloudiness
turns its slate into pure silver.

That is my Brive ; and a very good place it
is, and one I shall keep in my dreams till the
day I find it, perchance, in the Kingdom of
Heaven. The unexpected in the business is
not so much that the real Brive should have
turned out wholly different ; first of all just as
flat as a town can well settle down to be in the
midst of a hilly country, and neither fortified-
looking, nor white, nor — Heaven save the

67

The Enchanted Woods

mark ! — dainty nor prosperous, nor in the least
" vieille France " as I understand those words.
This utter difference from the place of my
imagining is not the unexpected ; but rather
that, given this utter difference, I should not
have been disappointed, but quite, quite the
reverse.

It was raining on and off, and more on than
off; and I wandered under my umbrella past
the great plane trees which have replaced, as is
usual in France, the city walls and moat ; and
on along the muddy cobbles of the tortuous
streets. And as I walked into Brive-la-Gaillarde
1 understood at once, I scarce knew why, that
the bit of journey in the dark yesterday — the
hillsides covered with chestnuts, the rushing
torrents, the long tunnels after Limoges — had
brought me not only into the mountains (I
could see their green sloping pastures between
the roofs of Brive) but also in great measure
into the South. For here was that almost
inevitable mark of the South : not the squalor
only — and there was a more than Southern dose
of that — but the South's — at least the historic
Southern town's — tragic look, its air of having
lost its children and refusing to be consoled.

68

Brive-la-Gaillarde

In Northern countries — England, Germany,
Switzerland, and what I have hitherto thought
of as France — the Past may remain as a thing
of peace and prosperity. But in the South,
with few exceptions, there is always the trace of
a wrench, a catastrophe, a sudden lamentable
breaking-off (monuments and institutions hanor.
ing rag-like) ; or else the crumbling of long
periods of slow depression ; a mournful no to
life. I understood the Southernncss of Brive as
much in this characteristic as in the carts dragged
no longer by horses but by thin red cows (straw
wreathing the creatures' horns in a Bedlam
fashion), and in the hard peaches and figs and
mushrooms on to which the rain was descending
in the market-place. The South is in those
tortuous streets, where, ever and anon, a bit of
tracer)', a row of Romanesque heads, as off
some church front, or even a lovely double-
arched window of Siennese pattern, is built up
into a sordid house. The South is in the
big yellow Romanesque church, all corners and
porches outside and all dark chapels and apses
inside — of Romanesque which never, never can
flower into Gothic, however much its round
arches squeeze into horseshoe, and its piers stilt

69

The Enchanted Woods

themselves against the ceiling. A Southern,
mournful church, believed in and neglected,
damp, dark, and stained, into which (a circum-
stance always impressive) you go down steps
instead of up — a descent into long ago. The
market, the booths and umbrellas and carts in
the rain, spread all round it ; men in blouses
and sabots, and women in caps ; for Brive,
though already the South, is still France. And
in this mixture, perhaps because it is the first
time I meet it, lies the charm of La Gaillarde.
It is not at all an Italian city (or even village !)
of past magnificence, civic or tyrannical. It is
French, very French, and thoroughly provincial.
Its houses, although (in the smaller streets, at
least, and the black alleys and courts) festooned
with vines in trellis-fashion, are high, slate-
roofed ; many of them are wooden, projecting
bulgy sides into the street ; and every here and
there you meet a pepper-pot tower, a corkscrew
turret-stair, and pointed cock-eyed attics.

Nothing remains at Brive of the early Middle
Ages, save that one melancholy twelfth-century
church ; a town probably nipped in the bud,
blasted in the great catastrophe of Southern
France ; and then ruined once more during

70

Brive-Ia-Gaillarde

the wars of Religion. At least this inner town,
which was once inside the walls, walls the
seventeenth century — Richelieu, as usual —
evidently pulled down, planting the avenues of
planes in the filled-up moat. Then the better-
to-do folk, during that brief prosperity of early
Louis XIV. which rebuilt so much of France,
set those boulevards with handsome little
hotels, mansarded and ivU de hccufd^ but now
very sad in their turn among the little gardens.
And meanwhile inside the town the little
fifteenth-century castellated houses in yards
and lanes became, no doubt, little chateaux de la
m'lshe ; and thus on, absenteeism and taxes
helping, the town dwindling, dying, on till the
Revolution. . . .

The historical emotion had me in its grip ;
1 thought that I wanted a history of Brivc.
But once inside the bookshop I desisted from
asking for one, feeling I knew the melancholy
tale quite poignantly enough. The Brive
booksellers (for there are two) are guildess of
the usual display of aphrodisiac yellow backs.
They are decorous warehouses of ready-
reckoners, m^nageres modeleSj manuals ot eti-
quette, and gilt-edged aids to devotion, and do

The Enchanted Woods

business mainly in copybooks and faire-parts.
But in one of them I found a shelf full of
cheap classics, and I felt I positively must
possess one as a souvenir of Brive. I hankered
after a Montaigne or some sixteenth-century
tattered satirist ; I would have liked a " Capitaine
Fracasse," or even a "Trois Mousquetaires,"
for those hungry swashbucklers might have
hailed from this place. ... At last I found
a " Manon Lescaut," uncut, but stained with
damp. I bought it. Of course, it is not of
the same date as Brive. But it has the God-
forsakenness, the misere, the penetrating sad-
ness, its essentially French charm. For the
charm of poor Brive-la-Gaillarde, its melancholy
grace, is very great.

72

OF PARIS AND THE EXHIBITION

OF PARIS AND THE EXHIBITION

np^HE third day I simply struck, refused point-
■*■ blank to enter the Exhibition, and taking
a cab where the colossal Parisienne presides
over its gates (Parisienne quotha ! Why, she
is only one part tryer-on at the Printemps, and
two parts spurious Indian idol or archaeological
sham Astarte) I had myself set down in regions
still unshaken by the motor-car, and where no
cry of " tiquettes " breaks upon the song of salad
vendor and of intrier. Far along the quays,
near the Wine Market, where I plunged into
an unexpected little black Gothic church, and
willingly lost myself in a maze ot narrow
streets, with washball and cabbage water stream-
ing down their sides. Behind the windows,
the meagre geraniums, young women were
ironing print frocks ; students in barbaric hats
and workmen in peg-top trousers were dining
on the pavement ; and white house-painters,

75

The Enchanted Woods

and whiter cook-boys like Watteau Pierrots,
and bonnes and widow ladies in black, and even
(in the Rue de la Parcheminerie, for instance)
cocks and hens, were all a leisurely bustle in the
greyish-blue atmosphere, against that greyish-
white background, touched with the vivid
orange and cobalt of posters, which all of it
means Paris. Means it at least to me, and, I
should think, to every one who cares for real
places and hates shams, and — well, and exhi-
bitions.

It is not the utilitarian side of the Exhibition
which offends me, far from it ; there is an
element of life, and therefore of possible future
grace or dignity, in everything useful, if it is
really so, and not mere lumber and complication.
I respect all machines, for instance, hoping they
may some day perfect themselves into their own
minimum, or, so to speak, their own negation.
And I wish some capable person had explained
them to me, or rather that I had been a person
capable of grasping their explanation. I do not
mind even the gross and animal side of the
Exhibition, the endless eating and drinking,
which is its sole serious feature, if only people
would be less grimly anxious and fiercely active

76

Of Paris and the Exhibition

about securing tables, or a little better pleased
with their food once they have got it. I do
not really hate all the various vulgar divertisse-
ments so long as any one is diverted ; and 1
can even hope that it is not merely horrid
covetousness, but in some simple breasts a
vague fairy-story wonder which gathers the
sordid multitudes round the cases of diamonds
and rubies and emeralds. People distil the
poetry needful for healthy life out of many and
very different things, and most appeals to the
imagination are, after all, better than nothing.

What vexes me in the Exhibition is precisely
that by which it appeals in vain, so to speak,
to mc. There is a certain impressiveness in the
thought that the Past, as well as the Distant,
have sent their wares to be exhibited. But
there is not much real pleasure to be squeezed
out of time and space as such ; and then it turns
out to be mere rhetoric, and just on a par with
the sham Kremlins, and cardboard St. Marks,
and block-tin Meccas, and all the other dreary
frauds. One catches one's self wandering in fancy
from the pale Morte d'Arthur tapestries and
Byzantine enamels of the Retrospective show
to remote provincial cathedrals, and forlorn

71

The Enchanted Woods

little churches on mountain-side or brink of
salt marsh, their real, fitting abode ; and when
it comes to the glass case in the Spanish depart-
ment, containing the relics of poor Boabdil el
Chico, one could cry at this last outrage reserved
for the King of Granada, and feels one's own
heart and fancy stripped and sent into exile like
the poor nice Moors. For those things, torn
banners, and damascened sword, and pathetic
frayed coat with its crimson pomegranates, have
come by rail alongside of dry goods and iron-
mongery.

This, however, is not the worst. It is the
disregard to all sense of geography implied in
the gazebos of the Rue des Nations (let alone
disregard to all other decent feeling in bringing
over savages to stare at) ; the disregard for all
those circumstances of climate, soil, vegetation,
lie of the land and history which constitute the
organic habit of countries and the organic reason
of places and monuments, making them into
living creatures, charming friends, or venerable
divinities. It is, to me, of course, this stupid
wicked carnival sacrilege towards the Genius
Loci. . . . And yet, as some writers tell us
about Torquemada and similar personages of

78

Of Paris and the Exhibition

tender religious sensibility, I am aware that at
the bottom of the wrath that burns in me, and
would like to burn in and all through that
Rue des Nations, there is nothing but infinite
sadness and pity. Yes ; in good earnest, and
without irony or rhetoric or nonsense of any
kind, a sense of great sadness for what all this
points to : the incapacity, in ninety- nine out
of every hundred quite human contemporaries,
of extracting any interest save selt-interest from
their everyday surroundings, of distilling any
imaginative charm out of their own life ; the
absence of all that is spectacular or lovely or
significant in their own thoughts and feelings ;
and the consequent necessity to pile up, mostly
in vain, tremendous artificial and far-fetched
follies in the dull landscape of their existence.

Siberia and Java ! the Tombs of Mycenae
and furniture of Potsdam ! What good can
they get from it all if they cannot see the
difference between the lie of the land at Fon-
tainebleau and at Compiegne ; if it is nothing
to them where the sand and the vineyards of
the He de France end and the chalk and the
apple trees of Normandy begin ? Why, even
in this centralized France, every district, I feel

79

The Enchanted Woods

convinced, has some variation of shape of cart
or harness, of fold and sit of starched cap ; and
as to Paris, why, everything, or almost every-
thing, which has been made by man and time
and not by machinery, possesses a grace, an
amusing turn, a something telling of the centuries
and the weather, and telling above all of its
own particular private means and ways, from
the flying buttresses of Notre Dame to the
long carts, with cranks and levers, on which
the great blue-fleeced horses draw the barrels
along from the Halle aux Vins.

That brings me back to my expedition of,
so to speak, purification after too much ex-
hibition. I had an even better one, a pilgrimage
to the spirit in-dwelling in the Left Bank, quite
accidentally a few days later. We went first
to an old house, Louis XIV., with great yard
for coaches and garlanded portal, in the Rue
Garanciere, and then on. But I ought to explain
that one of the charms of the Left Bank, one of
the things which make it so particularly Paris,
is its being a great alluvium and accretion of
the in-streaming provinces, containing samples
of every provincial town, of every sort of pro-
vincial life, even of the seclusion and silence

80

of Paris and the Exhibition

thereof alongside of its own noisy thorough-
fares. The particular house we went to see,
with a view to hiring for a nurse's school, that
afternoon was a little old hotel in the Rue
Vanneau, uninhabited for months, and seemingly
years, full of dust and cobwebs, and yet quite
dainty and decorously cheerful ; behind it the
big trees and half-wild bushes of a neglected
garden. An old lady and gentleman (who ?
whence .?) were taking the air on the steps of
this utterly dismantled abode. The last in-
habitants had been some Peres Benedictins ;
and on the mantelpiece of the empty lodge lay
an old newspaper address of Sa Grandeur the
Bishop of Hebron, or Antioch, or Tyre.

O Paris of the Left Bank, the only real Paris
for me, with thy stately hotels and long convent
walls overtopped with discreet green ; thy frowzy
little Balzac pensions, tenanted once by the
nymphs of Farmers-General, and now by en-
thusiastic art students and warlike doctoresses,
and widows from the provinces leading bowing
sons in check cravats ; Paris of Faisan d'Ors
where we hoped in the plat c/ujourand hesitated
between gratuitous blue wine and another, not
gratuitous, demic-CtDineite ; Paris of crcmeries,

8 1 c.

The Enchanted Woods

wherein we cheated the desire for afternoon
tea, and many, doubtless, thought to cheat
desire for dinner or lunch ; Paris of history,
of romance, Dumas and Balzac, of hope and
effort and day-dreams also, Socialists, and
scientific struggling girls of Rosny's novels,
and ardent expatriated creatures fit for Henry
James ! I felt it was the only real Paris, as
I stood (having left behind the civilized cosmo-
politan boulevards), at the window of a certain
fourth floor near the Invalides, overlooking
clipped trees and Louis XIV. attics, with, in the
smoky sunset distance, a faint babel of Exhibition
towers and domes. And to think that I, even
/, could have thought, even for a second, that
I had come to Paris to see the Rue des
Nations !

82

TRENT

TRENT

T TOW strange it seemed, and yet how delight-
fully right, early that morning, to be
once more in the South ; to be going no longer
in a omnibus to an inn, but rattling and jingling
behind postillion harnesses up to this hospitable
house ! How very lovely and delicate Trent
looked as we drove through ; not picturesque,
like those old German towns behind me, but
much better, beautiful^ with its fine Venetian
windows of fifteenth and sixteenth century
work, its remains of fresco, its Lombard Cathe-
dral all pillareted ; its porticoes and squares
where the baskets of grapes and mushrooms
were being unloaded, and the walls and towers
with Ghibelline swallow-tails, with the Adigc
rushing past them to Verona. And how
pleasant it was, once outside the city, along the
dusty roads of the valley and the steep mountain
track up to this castle, to meet white oxen

85

The Enchanted Woods

drawing up carts of new wine, not on ladder
waggons as in South Germany and Switzerland,
but on those carts like old-fashioned artillery
trains, waspwaists studded with nails, and
almost spokeless wheels, which belong to all
Lombardy, and which tell one that the Alps
are behind and nothing in front but wide
descending valleys and the great plain of the
Po, until you get to the Apennines.

How much pleasure Germany has just
given me, I thought ; as we jingled along
through that border country, where officials
speak German and Nature speaks Italian ; and
how much pleasure Italy is going to give me
once more !

One should be grateful for, and cherish, the
very differences in the kind of pleasure, the
way of giving it, which different countries have.
Thus, in Germany (save in some large cosmo-
politan towns of no account for local sentiment)
I am a stranger, knowing no inhabitants, and
moving from inn to inn ; not in the least
solitary (far from it), but companioned only by
effigied Gotz von Berlichingen knights out of
Franconian churches, and candid adventurers,
and sensitive eccentric fine ladies, and ballad-

86

Trent

singers, and " advocates of the poor," and
mysterious abbes and beautiful souls out ot
Goethe's and Jean Paul's novels and Stilling's
autobiography ; by nurses and teachers almost
— alas ! as past and imaginary — and my father's
shooting companions out of my own childhood ;
companioned also, In the way in which they
only companion, by Immortal tunes. And
without any disrespect to whatever dear living
German friends Fortune may hold in reserve
tor me (their vague images, guessed at behind
turret casements in rough-paved towns, or
behind gates, shadowed by lime trees, of steep-
roofed country houses, are perhaps the most
unreal members of my whole Imaginary escort !)
without, assuredly, any disrespect to future
German realities, I think that this kind of
solitude or sociability (for it Is both) Is perhaps
what fits in best with Germany and German
sentiment. But it is quite different with Italy.
That Is the land of friends, real, living, and
incomparable ; and their simplicity and gravity
and fantastic humour, their impetuous gracious-
ness and grace, their Indefinable quality of
ancient race and local breeding, are required for
the full appreciation of the greatness of their

87

The Enchanted Woods

history, the genius and charm of their art, as
much as the unbroken family tradition, the love
of district and town, which is revealed in their
everyday talk.

So that sojourn in an inn, so proper in
Germany, affects me as rather against nature in
Italy, as a loss and a grievance ; and it seemed
so very right that this really Italian town of
Trent should make me happy in real Italian
fashion. Up here in the castle, high among
woods of mixed northern beech and southern
pine among the rocks, with its great rooms
frescoed by the Fuggers for Charles V.'s stay,
and now more worthily inhabited by babies and
dolls and rocking-horses ; up here, as last year
down in the palace at Trent, I felt at once in
touch, through this friendly present, with the
past. In half an hour, during a meal among
the family portraits — a Titian and a Moroni
among them — one seemed to know not merely
everything about the modern Trent, with its
Italian inhabitants and Austrian garrison and
officials, but also about the feudal Trent of the
Council and before. The family of the Mad-
ruzzos, who held the Prince Bishopric for nearly
a century, and owned so many castles, had

88

Trent

become quite real and familiar to me. And,
turn about with possibility of mountain excur-
sions (including reference to time-tables ot
railways and lake steamers), we found ourselves,
quite naturally, calculating how many changes
of horses must have been needed to carry the
news from the Council to Rome, supposing, of
course, that the messengers of Charles V. and
Pope Farnese had galloped day and night.

Last year I stayed to see my friends in Trent
itself. It was midsummer, during an interlude
of stormy weather, which brought out the
Alpine character of the place. In fine weather,
towns situated like this one, like Bcllinzona also,
and Innsbruck, in the flat surrounded by high
mountain walls, have something to me intoler-
ably suggestive of a prison. But when the
clouds hide these barriers with the rest of the
world (the endless baffling of a great Alpine
valley), these places have a grandeur, and even
a special pleasantness in their apparent com-
panionship with the elements. The rocks and
forests and high pastures look down into them,
the storms and snows play familiarly in these
close quarters ; and here at Trent there is a little
waterfall on an Alp, performing as unconcernedly

89

The Enchanted Woods

before the whole town as the spurts of water
among the statues and traceries of the great
fountain by the cathedral. It is pleasant to see
this Alpine character recorded in a fresco on
the outside of one of the fine fifteenth-century
Venetian houses : the family are seated in a
room with Oriental rugs, before a wide window
letting in the sunset and the mountains, drawing
them into intimacy.

The first evening I passed at Trent itself (as
distinguished from this castle above it) the Alps
seemed to close down on it with their storms ;
and one wondered whether the Adige, big with
melted snow, was not going, as it has so often
done, to join in this over-familiar game of the
elements with the city.

We made our way through dark streets
rushing with water, and under waterfalls from
the roofs, to the church containing the famous
seventeenth-century organ, of which the chapel-
master of the Lateran used to talk to me years
and years ago. Some service connected with
the Sacred Heart was going on, the church all
hung with red damask, and a splendid altar
blazing out of the darkness like a Christmas-
tree. There were a good many people, despite

90

Trent

the frightful weather, all huddled in cloaks and
shawls, and scarcely visible in the dark nave.
A little hymn was played over and over again
by the organ, and sung alternately by the con-
gregation without accompaniment. The voices,
mainly women and boys, had that deep, guttural
quality one gets to know and love in Italian
fields, solemn and with a pathos which strikes
one as primaeval. The little organ, on the other
hand, was infinitely mellow, like a small band
of old stringed instruments, a sort of Cremona
among organs itself. We stayed till the last
repetition of the beautiful old hymn-tune, and
went away, when the sermon began, out into
that mountain storm raging through the streets.
It was curious to remember that this was the
church where the great Council had sat to re-
make or to mar Catholicism, the rows and rows
of silver mitres which Titian has painted, or one
of his pupils.

91

THE MOTOR-CAR AND THE
GENIUS OF PLACES

THE MOTOR-CAR AND THE
GENIUS OF PLACES

I

'T^HEY took me yesterday a long drive in
-*- their motor-car along the Hog's Back,
through Guildford, Dorking, and a score of
other places, all of which 1 do not much believe
in. Still, there is in the scenery of Southern
England something which greatly harmonizes
this improbable mode of locomotion, and
tempers into mere comfortable dreaminess that
sense of unreality, of " not having been there,"
which it is apt to leave in the old-fashioned
votary of the Genius of Places. No rapidity
of movement can disconcert the slow, poetic
prose of this dear country ; and you seem to
turn over its village gardens and willowed
streams, and litde churches among elms, and
old-world inns with swinging signs, and lovers
in the lane, or children on the green, like so

95

The Enchanted Woods

many pictures in a Caldecott or Greenaway
book, with an amused and pleasant feeling of
leisure. And the lie of the land is similarly
reassuring.

The furthest distances are gathered neatly
together, blue fold on blue fold, against the
green hemlock fringe of the high-lying roads,
with no mountain or sea suggestion of other
lands beyond ; no distant steeples or towers
suggestive of distant past, of life less peaceful
than that of the toy country towns, with plum
and apricot roofs among the tree-tops. Nay,
the very sky, with which the motor's unimpeded
rushing brings you into curious new relation,
broods over it all with a sheltering intimacy
shutting out the very thought of foreign lands.

A drive like this one through a very familiar
and prosperous country makes one understand,
if not the imaginative value, at all events the
moral mission, of the motor-car in the future ;
in the future, of course, when it will be a thing of
honourable utility, not swagger, and within the
reach of many. For instead of travelling, like
irresponsible outlaws, imprisoned between fences
and embankments, it takes us into the streets
and on to the roads where people are moving

96

Motor-car and the Genius of Places

about naturally ; it makes us slacken and
deflect for waggons and go-carts, nay, stop short,
decently, for children and dogs, feeling the
claims of other life than ours, and suggesting
that remote districts and foreign lands are not
our tea-gardens and racecourses ; for I fear
that railways have merely diminished the sense
of enlarged brotherhood which should come
from reasonable travel. Moreover, the motor-
car will remove the degradation of being con-
veyed like cattle or luggage, irresponsible and
unresponsive ; and will reinstate the decorous
sense of mystery connected with change of place.
The place I was in recedes, vanishes ; the one I
am in slips away as I speak ; and the hospitable
distance approaches and unfurls to receive me ;
and I am full of wonder and regret and gladness.
These are the moral advantages which the
motor-car will bring. It has, also, its very
special appeals to the fancy and the feelings.
Apart from the rapture of mere swift move-
ment, which I neither feel nor regret not
feeling (there are so many possible exhilarations
in life without verging on drunkenness), is the
sense of triumph over steepness, flying uphill
with the ease we are accustomed to only in

97 "

The Enchanted Woods

rushing down : the effort against weight,
abolished not merely in ourselves, but in the
thing which carries us. Then, particularly in
flat or widespread counties, the unaccustomed
speed enables one to see as wholes tracts of land
too large to be taken in at any ordinary pace ;
and even more, tracts of sky. A certain great
elliptical pattern of clouds, shaped like the
rounds of feathers of the sawed marble slabs
of St. Mark's would, for instance, have been
invisible had we been traversing the Roman
Campagna at a foot's pace or the trot of a
horse. And there is, in the swishing over
tiresome details, in the abolition of the — " Oh,
here's another piece of boring straight road ! "
something most strangely like thought or desire.
If beggars could ride (reversing the old saw)
wishes would be nowadays not horses, but
motors.

As regards the feeling for localities, the
motor heightens not the sense of topography
(which is, if anything, sacrificed), but the great
o-eographical one. The ins and outs of a group
of hills, their various slopes and levels and wide
shelving valleys, and the reaching inwards of
the plain among the mountain roots ; the whole

98

Motor-car and the Genius of Places

real shape ot the earth's surflxce, and the com-
plexities ot its ways, all this is revealed as
you swish past. Revealed rather than realized.
To such as me, at least. Probably because I
cannot grasp things so quickly, cannot give
them the warmth, the fulness of a reality which
has picked up and knotted afresh the fibres of
one's heart. In motoring things remain ocular,
mere visions, unaccompanied by the sympa-
thizing measuring of our muscles and will.
They lack the tangible joy, working deep into
our nerves, of the massive real. On cominsf
back to Rome after that couple of hours in the
mountains I could remember, could see, those
hillsides delicately fringed with palest still rosy
leaf against the background of lilac distance, of
high Apennine snow above the far-off blue.
And those high-lying shallow valleys, deep
meadows twisting and feathering off into spirals
of fresh-leaved trees ; those steep green banks
fringed at the top with pine, where stands the
so-called tomb of Cicero, a round, contempla-
ting watch-tower ; or, I would rather it were,
the tomb of Lucretius, meditating eternities.
... I saw it all — see it all even now — clearly
enough in my mind's eye. But lacking the

99

The Enchanted Woods

corroborating evidence of my limbs, or of any
movement I have learned to time against my
limbs' movements, these things remain seen^
without the ineffable sense of having been
there, or of its having been in me. Had I
been there indeed ? I remember the sort of
doubt with which I returned on that occasion.
There was, moreover, a vague dissatisfaction :
this couple of hours in the far-off places had
made too little difference in me. I missed the
sense of strangeness which brings with it so
much refreshment and renovation. The dream-
land had whirled past, leaving me, unlike the
awakened dreamer in the fairy tale, without a
pebble or a flower to attest its reality.

It seems, in a way, right that such should be
the case ; and one seems to guess at one of
the underlying concordances of things, in the
fact that such effortless seeing and knowing
should lack the mark of complete possession
working deep into the soul, which belongs to
desires that struggle for their accomplishment.
How poignantly, pathetically almost, we feel
the lines and colours of the hills remaining
for ever on the horizon ! What a nostalgic
fondness, as for the unattainable past, we often

lOO

Motor-car and the Genius of Places

have for the twist of the valley, the reach of
the river — nay, the very tuft of trees or point-
ing steeple just beyond the limits of our daily
walk or ride !

But we want both kinds of locomotion — the
limited and the limitless and effordess, by which
I mean the motor-car, in answer to different
kinds and phases of our feeling, and to the
different quality of place and hour. The fleet-
ing and intangible memories left by motoring
suit certain alien localities and places of a dead
and done-for past. They are fitting, moreover,
for occasions of rapid meeting and parting,
blotting out the how and why into insignifi-
cance, leaving the improbable, central moment
to vacillate in the memory : was it, or not ?

Short of such sentimental facts (which one
can't help imagining) I can conceive no greater
contrast, nor one more illustrative of the special
quality of motoring, than yesterday's drive in
and out of South-Country villages (I have
remarked how the intimate character of that
scenery diminishes the dream-like nature of this
form of locomotion) and a similar motor drive,
quite recent, back from Versailles at the close
of a long, hot day.

roi

The Enchanted Woods

Eveninp- had come on in the absolute solitude

o

and stillness of the Trianon park ; extraordinarily-
silent, breathless, between the hornbeam hedges
and round the ponds dark and shining like
bronzed water-lily leaves ; the water, like the
air, like the dim trees, reduced to the condition
of a ghost. No sound save an occasional wood-
pigeon. While we sat at dinner by the window,
a street-singer had set to lamenting below, and
a tall house become suddenly preternaturally
white in the waning day and the electric light
among the trees ; bringing, as such emblems of
passingness always do in places of brief sojourn,
a little pang to the heart. It is always, some-
how, that hour in this world, coming suddenly :
the end of the day, the moment to part.

It was quite dark when we set out back to
Paris. We rushed through the park of St.
Cloud, which started into existence, though not
reality, in the broad flare of the motor-car's
lamps ; the road appearing under our wheels*
the trees coming into being as the light flashed
up into their branches. No other mode of
travel has ever given me so fantastic a sense
of the real unreality of things, of their becoming
only because we happen to see them. . . .

I02

Motor-car and the Genius of Places

Avenues and wide places opening out ot the
darkness, and great ponds shining under the
crescent moon ; and, starting out of thickets,
statues — tall, white, close at hand, gone as soon
again. A minute later, issuing out of that
uncertain place, the lights of Paris below
us, the great illuminated wheel, the lit-up
restaurants and bands amon": the lanterns and
the trees, and the crowd of carriages. All gone
equally. And what remains } The absurd,
mournful quaver of the street-singer at
\'ersailles ; the noiseless sand of the park
under foot ; and that corner house suddenly
grown white ; and the sense of parting.

II

There sometimes comes the need for a pali-
node^ so to speak, of blame ; and this, after my
previous praise, is my chapter of grievances
against the motor-car, and, symbolically speak-
ing, many other desirable and far-fetched things.

Perhaps my ill-humour came of the expedi-
tion savouring too much of the magician's flying
carpet ; for one docs not expect to go a-motor-
ing from Venice. Still, that crossing of the
103

The Enchanted Woods

lagoon, preliminary to the rest, was the most
satisfactory part of it. Although not very early
(and it is still almost summer) we found, imme-
diately outside of Venice and its canals, a misty
sea, in whose chilly whiteness the telegraph and
semaphore posts tapered, as it were, into some
uncertain north, bridging the way to England,
Russia, America. ... It made me understand,
what 1 had never realized before, that the settling
on the sand-banks of the lagoon was not some
kind of embankment for Cythera, or gorgeous
Turneresque picnic (" the sun of Venice going
out to sea," and so forth), but a very sad and
solemn matter, the poor refugees seeking not
safety merely, but to become invisible almost on
the surface of the foggy, unkind waters. The
difference of seasons is perhaps greater in Italy
than elsewhere ; even in Tuscany I know hill-
side farms and villas which, commonplace and
smiling in May or June, become in winter the
very symbol of forlorn bleakness. And, simi-
larly, knowing the lagoon only in summer, I
did not realize, until this misty morning, what
that lacustrine life of earliest Venice must have
meant, what toil and hardship. I was grateful
for that knowledge, as one should be, methinks,

104

Motor-car and the Genius of Places

for any moment of chastened teeling In the
hours of pleasure-seeking, since in this matter
of motor-cars . . .

But let me first tell my gratitude to the
mountains, after these weeks of Venice, and to
the river Piave which issues out of them into
the Plain of Treviso. I had caught sight of
it years ago, driving under Asolo, with the
kind, graciously whimsical lady whose name
Mr. Brownino; has for ever connected with that
place. And I had never forgotten that immense
river-bed of palest lilac or rosy-white shingle,
with the pellucid blue Alpine streams dividing
it ; white villages, steepled as in Giorgione's
backgrounds, on its wooded banks ; and the
portals of the great mountains, a storm of dark
blue blocking them, from which it all issues :
river and landscape and fresh romantic life.

You go into those foothill valleys of Asolo
with singular suddenness, and leave them in a
manner more complete and astonishing still ;
leave them as one goes out of a house or
house's room, returning to the weary plain of
scorched vineyards and grey canals and endless
avenues of plane-trees. Green valleys in-
credibly romantic ; grass, just touched with

105

The Enchanted Woods

crocus, of vivid, unlikely emerald green ; and
sweeping chestnuts ; and brooks among the red
stones. And, above the hedges of hornbeam,
sugarloaf hills, each with its towered villa or
steepled church, white on the greenness. I
recognized them all ; remembering those drives,
long ago, when the talk was of Mr. Browning,
while our hostess's restless little dogs ran up
and down and across us, as she said, " as if
we were landscapes "

I was tired and depressed when the motor
stopped snorting and whirring in the little
town of Asolo. And going into that house,
waiting in that glazed-in loggia, with Mr.
Browning's clavichord and everything else un-
changed, and the vines yellowing once more
against the distant blue landscape ; the feeling
of the dead and done-for past rose up with
every bit of furniture, every line of hills which
leapt back into my consciousness. So much
seemed dead besides that poor charming, kindly
lady and her tiresome, restless dogs.

And when I joined my new friends in the
piazza, and we loitered about looking for
picturesque or funny details, there was some-
thing almost shocking in the irresponsible way

1 06

Motor-car and the Genius of Places

ill which the best of us will turn over with idle
fingers, poke with boot tip or umbrella, sights
which, to some one, surely, must mean lost
years and heartache. I felt the full profanity
of such making of the worship of the Genius
Loci into watching quaint processions, christen-
ings, or funerals, on to which we snap, at least
in spirit, our Kodak. ... I felt ungrateful to
the motor. Nay, it seemed to me, this time, but
another device for wasting the kernel of things
and filling ourselves with their voluminous
husks, and one of the practical ironies which
wait on privilege of all kinds.

Certain it is that what remains clearest in
this day's recollections, rather than the land-
scapes we whirled into and out of, were the
faces, enviously gaping or angry, of the people
we scattered along the road. It is not good, I
am afraid, dear friends, to scatter people along
roads and cover them with the dust of our
wheels ; there is a corresponding scattering ot
our soul, and a covering of // with dust. The
spirit of places, scared on this occasion, had
taken us by the hand, invisible but so present,
that other time, when we lingered near the
rope-walk at Chioggia, trying not to disturb

107

The Enchanted Woods

the children's attention, or picking our way
upon the sea-wall, so as not to interrupt the
maize-winnowing.

Those endless roads between the sedgy canals
and the plane-trees, of the level land of Treviso,
took gravity and beauty as we rushed back
along them in the dusk. And at this hour, the
hurtle of the motor, which had oiFended me in
the earlier part of the day, turned into a solemn
swiftness, evocative of serious thoughts, of
ghosts almost, as the lantern light ran along the
leaves overhead, and the long, white Venetian
houses arose and disappeared in the blue night.

At Mestre there was a fair going on ; a
merry-go-round by the water's edge, yellow
and red lights among the trees and in the long,
shivering ripples of the canal. And when we
had left the motor, and were once more in the
launch, slowly gliding between the dark banks
into the pale moon mist of the lagoon, 1 think
we all of us, fortunate and privileged creatures,
felt as if sky and water, and lights and shadowy'
barges, and half-lit houses and the miles of
scenery we had rushed through, had done
nothing but fill our empty souls with unspeak-
able, unreasonable sadness, brimful, overflowing.

108

THE ILEX WOODS AND THE
ANCHORITES

THE ILEX WOODS AND THE
ANCHORITES

T UNDERSTOOD at last, in those Umbrian
ilex woods, why, all through the winter, I
had never been able to see the snowstorms
break over Vallombrosa, the blue mountain
depths, the white distant snows, the solemn
beetling clouds, without thinking about hermits,
about anchorites. The words used to rise up
in my mind regularly every time. I remarked
them to myself, and returned home, to forget
them till the next wintry ride above my
house.

The ilex woods of Umbria, so black, com-
pact, mysterious, used always to attract me on
the old journey (by Perugia and the Valley of
the Nera) from Florence to Rome ; and I can
remember the kind of pleasant terror which
filled me when, on one such journey in my
I 1 1

The Enchanted Woods

childhood, the train stopped without apparent
reason in one of their precipitous defiles. But
I never got in among the ilexes till some years
ago, while staying at Foligno, and they came
upon me almost as a surprise this early spring
at Spoleto.

The ilex woods above Foligno were those
surrounding the ancient abbey of Sassovivo.
You scramble up into hills of that lovely red
roan limestone, brightening here and there into
pure carnation colour, of which these Umbrian
towns, Assisi, Spello, Foligno, Trevi, are all
built ; bleak hills thinly furred over with sere
oak scrub and dry heather, of which the wood-
men were making faggots that rolled and
bounded down into the torrent beds. You
continue up and into the mountain ; the ilex
woods begin ; and in them, suddenly, you
come upon the half-ruined Cistercian monastery,
with its fortified walls and towers and pillareted
cloister, and its creviced belfry with a juniper
bush growing alongside of the weather vane.
Some charcoal-burners' mules were grazing with
the sheep under the thinned ilexes ; grazing the
thyme and the myrrh scented grey herbs among
the loose, rosy stones. The wind was blowing

I 12

The Ilex Woods and the Anchorites

keen, and white cloud balls moving over the
valley and the distant blue hills ; it was an
austere, wild place, oddly primeval, which made
one feel, even under the monastery towers, that
this was the old Umbria of before Roman days,
its forests cut indeed to scrub, but sprouting
still from the ancient roots. I broke a twig of
ilex to take home, and kept it many months in
my study ; the leaves turned into brittle black
silver. That was my first close acquaintance
with the Umbrian ilex woods.

I don't know whether there have ever been
any hermits in these woods of Sassovivo,
though 1 like to think of them there before
the monks came ; but I know, for St. Jerome
mentions it, that the " Mountain " of Spolcto
was full of them. A place full of hermits
sounds, literally taken, a contradiction in terms.
But it is not the case. The pleasant thing
about my anchorites is that they were quite
alone — really alone, as children would put it —
and at the same time not at all solitary. You
have the proof of it in a great many early
frescoes, and in a most instructive picture of
the Hermits of the Thcbais, by, I think, one
of the Lorenzetti. There they all arc, within
11^ I

The Enchanted Woods

a stone's-throw of each other, each in a little
pink house of his own, with his own belfry,
his own well, garden, rocks, and his own, his
'very own demons coming to tempt him. It is
the ideal of very ownness, for there is always
somebody to whom you can show how alone
you are.

The same impression is left by Fra Domenico
Cavalca's "Lives of the Fathers of the Desert."
I call it Cavalca's, because I cannot but think
that this charming fourteenth-century monk
must have allowed himself great liberties in
translating from St. Jerome, St. Athanasius,
and from their Latin translator, Evagrius, a
clerk of Antioch, all of whom sound grim
enough. Certain it is that Cavalca's hermits
are quite delightfully sociable. It is true that
one of them lived on the top of an inaccessible
rock for the space of fifty years, never admitting
any person to his dwelling. But even he had
appointed days on which he conversed from his
window with all such strangers as were desirous
of Instruction or comfort. And even another
one, about whom there is a controversy whether
the place he inhabited was a dry cistern or a
hollowed-out gourd, and should be parsed
114

The Ilex Woods and the Anchorites

" Syricumbam vocatit " or " Syri gumbam
vocant," even this adaptable person seems to
have seen a good deal of company. For that
is the peculiarity of your anchorite, that even
when he settles at a good three days' journey in
the wilderness, and in a Syricumba or gumba
so-called by Syrians, the whole population of
large towns streams out to call on him. 1 pass
over in silence those bands of ladies with lutes
and timbrels whom the later frescoes show us
as gracefully intruding on the leisure of the
hermits ; and even over the tame lions and she-
wolves and the centaurs and fauns with whom
these holy men picked up acquaintance along
the way. The fact is that these lives of
anchorites of Cavalca are simply steeped in the
most charming sentimental sociability. Half
the legends are stories of romantic friendships,
journeys to meet " unknown friends," but with
a tenderness far more graceful on the part of
these greybeards than anything we read of
eighteenth-century " beautiful souls." Take,
for instance, the case of St. Paul, the proto —
or, we might say, premier — hermit, to whom a
chapel and a tiny house are dedicated in the
Spoleto ilex woods. He was a sort of religious
115

The Enchanted Woods

Robinson Crusoe ; for, flying from persecution,
he found ready made a beautiful cave at the
foot of a most beautiful hill, with a palm and a
spring at hand ; and close by the anvils and
hammers and other useful properties of a band
of coiners, who had hidden in that desert " in
the days of Antony and Cleopatra." Now, it
so happened that St. Anthony (he of the
Temptation) had attained the age of ninety, and
had imagined himself for the greater part of
this time to have been the first hermit that ever
was, when it was revealed to him in a vision
that this invention was really due to the St.
Paul in question, now a hundred and thirteen
years old, who was living in the place described
above. St. Anthony, just a tiny bit vexed at
finding himself forestalled, but quite dear and
good about it all, instantly felt an irresistible
impulse to go and see St. Paul. It was in the
course of his search that he asked his way of
the centaur, and was guided by the she-wolf, a
little episode of charming sentiment. But
nothing can come up to the tenderness of the
arrival of the dear old saint at the other dear
old saint's cave ; his lying all night at the door,
watching the light through the rock ; and their
ii6

The Ilex Woods and the Anchorites

meeting, their embrace when each, without
having been told, called the other by name ; and
the elder hermit, having had the joy of seeing
the younger, died and was buried by him in the
wilderness. . . . Besides, they often went out in
large numbers, companies of friends, dispersing
in a district, each building his little hermitage
within call ot the other ; charming people,
about whom I refuse to hear a single one of
the horrid things which historians, and ascetic
writers, and professional stylists like Flaubert,
have had the bad taste to write.

They lived like that, St. Jerome already tells
us, in the ilex woods above Spoleto. The
woods get thicker and thicker as you ascend
the " Mountain " above the steep stony town,
so that you gradually get less and less view ;
instead of the look-down on the great Umbrian
valley, pale with young crops, and across it to
the Apennines, smoking with melted snows,
you have only black gnarled trunks and black
branches above banks of deep moss. But here
and there, in the most unexpected way, at the
path's turning, appears a pink or white little
house, a grated, domed chapel, " Hemitage of
St. Jerome the Doctor," " Hermitage called
117

The Enchanted Woods

after St. Paul the proto-hermit," and so forth,
with a bit of terrace and a view. And never,
never a single soul ! During my ascent, of
nearly an hour and a half, and my descent
again, not one creature did I meet, save a man
with a dog, and a priest, gaunt in a rusty cape,
and riding on a pack mule.

I had come to Spoleto out of obstinacy,
in frightful belated spring cold, and had
regretted my folly. Bnt how right I had
been ! I knew it as soon as I had climbed
to the top of the town, among the great
rocks under the castle, and had felt the cold
wet wind rush up the ravine, mountain air,
coming from over rock, from among woods
off the snow which is melting on the great,
blue Apennines ! I understood what had ailed
me in Rome : the houses, the streets, the
talking. The anchorites had felt like that in
their day, no doubt, when they also fled from
the kindness of kindest and most amusing
friends, up into this mountain. . . . Meanwhile
the woods closed again, with violets in the wet
grass and few birds singing in the gloom. And
as the path grew steeper, the woods darker, I
began to notice scraps of melting snow, and
ii8

The Ilex Woods and the Anchorites

then more and more ; till, at what seemed the
top (but one could not see), it lay quite thick
under the ilexes. I went on. The ilexes,
bigger and bigger, suddenly opened ; and there
was a flattish dell, open, a field of purest snow,
with only a black cross in the midst, the woods
all round, and alongside a tiny house, with a
chapel, a belfry, and a little yard, through whose
deep snow a path had been freshly swept. I
sat down under the porch. A Franciscan
suddenly appeared out of the wood, crossed the
snow and pulled at a rope ; a bell rang, and a
minute after a chant arose, vespers. I lifted
the latch of the chapel ; at the altar three
monks and two acolytes and two kneeling
peasants ; darkness only broken by the lights
on the altar and before the coloured Calvary
pictures. As I came out the birds were singing
in the blackness of the ilexes ; the bell of the
little chapel continued to toll ; and snow began
to fall very gently. Thin flakes, mixed with
rain, were still falling when I issued into the
rocky gorge full of the roar and the draught
of the torrent, as I left the ilex woods be-
hind me.

I continued dreaming of the little snowfield
119

The Enchanted Woods

up there alongside of the chapel ; and I under-
stood that it was in some prevision of it that I
had never been able all winter to see the snow-
storms break above Vallombrosa without think-
ing of hermits, of anchorites.

1 20

GERxMAN FIR TREES

GERMAN FIR TREES

" Und ist so lustig haussen in dem Wald." — The Wolt
in "Rothk'appchen."

^TT^HE first sight, almost, which welcomed me
"*■ to Germany was a fine timber skeleton
house, just finished by the carpenters and
waiting for its brick and mortar ; and on its
gable a gallantly beribboned little fir tree. A
carpenter's tree like this had been the object
of my longing when a child : fancy if one could
have one (off a roof, of course) for one's very
own ! Something of this longing after the un-
attainable, heightened, perhaps, by the recol-
lections of radiant German Christmases and
their mysterious, resin-scented preparations,
seems to awaken in me at the thought or
distant view of German fir woods.

There was, for instance, a certain hill covered

with fir woods which tantalized me lately all the

time I stayed at that old castle of the Habs-

burgs. Below, and within easy reach, were

123

The Enchanted Woods

wonderful forests of beech, just touched with
yellow, and sweeping with their silky skirts the
dewy emerald grass ; orchards moreover, gar-
landed and festooned with rosy apples. But what
I wanted was the fir-clad hill. It lay back behind
lower grassy slopes, very far and very high up :
a dark, soft mass ; and in its midst, making the
tall trees stand out like a ragged mane, a great
clearing, wide and vivid green. Day after day
I walked up and down the lime-tree terrace by
the Rittersaal^ looking down from the rocky
castle hill ; and every time, day after day, my
eyes were drawn by that unattainable forest.
Such are the fir woods which beckon and murmur
and draw one along all through German poetry,
good, bad, and indifferent, from Walther von
der Vogelweide to Heine.

For the woods (we have no word which
really renders the meaning of that great singular
Der Wald) are more intimately connected with
the life of Germany than with that of other
countries. Even apart from the enormous
proportion of forest-land which strikes one if,
for instance, one happens to cross Germany
from north-west to south-east, from Holland
to Venetia, the woods are much nearer than in
124

German Fir Trees

other countries (I count Switzerland and Tyrol
as being German) to the haunts of men. In
the centre and the south at least the forests
actually surround the towns, holding their bit
ot valley, their fields and meadows, enclosed
in their unchanging, evergreen mystery. So
that the natural, almost the only, walk is into
the forest, which thus becomes associated with
all holiday-making, with rest from work and
small amusinfj adventure. It is from the Wald
that the bands of citizens and apprentices are
returning, with Faust and Wagner behind,
escorted by the eerie, circling poodle, through
the spring twilight. That scene came vividly
home to me, and seemed almost present, one
Sunday that I had descended from the old
castle : people from the little town were going
to and fro the woods, whole families ; and deep
in the green depths a lot of well-dressed
children were playing shrilly. The woods are
the playground, real or imaginary, of the Teuton
child — much as the sand and shingle are of
the children of other countries ; and, alas ! as
gravelled gardens with Punch and Judy are of
other children still. They are the scene of
escapade of bigger boys, instead of the river

1^5

The Enchanted Woods

to fish in as in England or France, or the
hill-side with atrocious fowling-huts in Italy.
And have we not all seen the portly, spectacled
German burgher, adorned with forest-green
braid and little falcon's feather, bringing a
woodland quality, an echo of Frehchutz horns,
even on to tramcars and into museums ? Let
us not laugh — far from it. It merely means
that the woods have rooted in the German
heart and that they sprout and sough in every
line of German poetry and every bar of German
music.

But it is the essential quality of the German
woods not to show traces of this commerce
with man. No other places exist so wholly for
themselves, so lonely, so different from human
things. I am not thinking of great forests,
really remote — say, of the Tyrol, fragrant
wildernesses of fir and larch, where every clear-
ing lets in the view of the great blue, jagged
mountains veined with snow or veiled with
vapours. The fir woods I am thinking of are,
as I said, those surrounding towns, and from
whose depths the wild men, petticoated and
crowned with leaves and carrying leafy clubs,
had but a very little walk to go when sitting

12,6

German Fir Trees

for their portrait on coat-of-arms or sign ot
hostelry. For instance, the woods round about
Eisenach, under the Wartburg. 1 saw them
first, a hurried glimpse, before going to my inn
on a clear autumn day, the frost just melted
on the grass and on the yellow bushes ; but 1
brought back an impression of infinite silence
and remoteness of a valley, far, far away, bright
green meadows tipped with crocus, and steep
slopes of dense black fir.

The next day I had more time, but did not
need to go much further. For sitting on the
dry, brown, needle-covered ground I had my
fill of woodland stillness. The high masts of
the firs, with their banner-like boughs, are so
close together as to make a concentrated light —
a light quite special, meaning enclosure, almost
sanctuary, in which all colour — the rose of the
beechmast, the green of the moss in patches
and ridges — takes a solemn vividness. Further
along there was a little plantation of beech
saplings, growing in high shafts with bunches
of pale, yellowing leaves against the gaps of
white, watery sky, and round them the firs once
more, motionless, unruffled, though there ran
through them a sough as of the distant sea,
127

The Enchanted Woods

gathering at times to a deep, deep sound — a
sound ubiquitous, mysterious, and baffling, like
those paths which one's eye makes everywhere
between the tree trunks. By the side of that
Eisenach forest what a poor piece of cardboard
operatic romance was not the Wartburg ! The
poetry of Germany was not in it and its Minne-
singers, genuine or spurious, but in the fir-
trees below.

But there are fir woods more lyric still, and
in a neighbourhood so profaned by mankind
that I dare not whisper its name for fear of
making you incredulous. Suffice it that, not a
mile off, people sit by the hundred, on blue
and red wicker chairs, chattering, while a band
brays and clashes in front and electric trams
clatter and shriek all round. But the woods
know nothing of it. They have precipitous,
downhill places, very dark, where one sees only
the great grey boles ; and hillocks, where the
pennons, the masts, and rigging of the firs
stand black against the sky ; and little valleys
with old, isolated trees grown immense, and
stumps and tiny sprouting things deep in the
moss and bilberry ; clearings with stacked-up
wood, filling the warm air with delicious
128

German Fir Trees

aromatic scent. Aiul, most delightful of all,
hollows packed with bright green saplings,
making one understand the adjective spruce,
with each shooting up to its little green cross,
extending its stiff little branches halfway up,
and letting the lowest boughs barely touch the
grass, like the brocade farthingale of some baby
princess. These plantations of saplings bring
the delightful thought of what these vivid
green, symmetrical, erect, and cheerful little
trees have each and all a chance of becoming —
Christmas trees like those I can see with my

mind's eye in the market-place at W ,

things one intrigued as a child to go near when
taken a walk, and about which, while dragged
along by the impatient nurse, one wondered
what size, indeed which^ among those green,
stiff, varnished-looking trees, would he onis
own.

It is good to think of such Christmas trees
of the past and the future. It is good also to
think that if the little sapling do not end in such
radiant premature death, it may grow into one
of the solemn pcnnoned troopers of that c^reat
forest army ; or into the mast of a big ship,
helping to mimic a forest in the docks ;
129 K

The Enchanted Woods

or be cut into children's toys, horses with
arched necks or dolls with apple cheeks ; or,
again, form part of the carpenter's scaffolding
for a house, maybe covered with paper bouquets
and streamers, and planted triumphantly on the
gable of the half-finished building.

And here I must pause. For singing the
praises of fir trees (as of friends, lovers, and
native place) is a pleasure by no means always
communicated to the listener, and therefore to
be gratified only at intervals and by insidious
methods. Let me but note that the last of these
Teutonic beribboned carpenters' trees which
greeted my sight six weeks ago v/hile crossing
Switzerland, was near the station of Olten, and
on the top, alas ! of the iron boiler of a new
factory of Sunlight Soap ! But close behind
was a bend of the Aar, glass-green, brimful,
majestic, with its fringe of russet scrub and
sedge ; and the Christmas tree, from the top
of its boiler, can talk with the great river about
the great woods.

130

COMPIEGNE
AND FONTAINEBLEAU

COMPIEGNE
AND FONTAINEBLEAU

'' I "'HOUGH greener, fresher, deeper — Indeed
of inexpressible deep, fresh leafiness, these
endless woods of Compiegne, broken off, inter-
rupted, but for ever resumed on all sides, leave
much the same impression as do those of Fon-
tainebleau. They are not real forest in the sense
of Germany, Ravenna, or even Ireland, in my sense^
so to speak ; but great parks mapped out and
planted for Royal amusement ; radiations of
smooth white roads from the big quincunxed
palace, and then more radiations along them,
wide grassy avenues, green cuttings where the
trees are close, deep tracks in russet leaves
where they are thinned, all marked with sign-
posts bearing courtly names. At every cross-
road— and they are endless — one sees in fancy
the great Royal coaches rolling as on the green
and blue ground of Louis XV. tapestries. One

The Enchanted Woods

feels the pomp, but none of the romance, of
historical hunting. What one is told of the
still remaining sport, the traditional or revived
hunts, with brilliant, varied livrees^ jack-boots,
hahit a la fran^aise, faced and galooned, horns
and barking hounds, all confirms the impression.
So that the stag one thinks of, and almost expects
to meet breaking the green covert or crossing
the glade, is not a very real one, but rather a
monumental creature sculptured by Goujon or
Pilon, ready to kneel down and prop some
long-limbed Diane de Poitiers of the rounded
forehead and the moon-shaped brows.

But this artificial and courtly quality, common
to both those two great French Royal hunting
grounds, while at Fontainebleau it breaks off
suddenly with the outlying villages, at Com-
pi^gne merely expands into the enchanting
and improbable Watteau festiveness of the
skirts of the forest. Two slow, full rivers, the
Aisne and the Oise, crowned like proper
garden nymphs with sedge, arrange their cool
bosquets of poplars into fanciful islands and
unreal harbours, while the grass and unripe
crops make themselves Into seeming lawns em-
bosomed by the soft round darkness of the tufty
134

Compicgnc and Fontaiucbleau

torest. 'Tis an ample, majestic, voluptuous,
and, as I said, artificial-looking country, in which
the little villages of fine old grey stone and
their flowery gardens (stately rose hollyhocks
everywhere) have an air of park lodges, and the
big stone barns play at being old manor houses,
as if the French peasant did not exist, and the
Ancien Regime still continued, with its mar-
quises and gallant abbes dressed as shepherds
and shepherdesses, and preparing, under the
gorgeous summer sky, for a fresh departure
pour Cy there.

Here and there also there are indications,
which fancy multiplies and enlarges, of all that
great hunting life which has dwindled into the
amusement of a few smart persons, more fit for
Gyp and Anatole France than for the novels
and memoires of Boucher and Lancret days.
There are some big white chateaux, their
modernness veiled in trees, inns a la IIurt\
with ample stabling, and kennels surmounted
by stone stags' heads ; glimpses also, ever and
anon, from the high roads into the thickets of
tall regular beeches, dainty on their carpet of
green lily leaves.

I drove one warm evening through this

The Enchanted Woods

flounced and furbelowed country by the side
of the greatest of living decorative painters ;
and seemed to see it, thanks to a gesture now
and then of his whip, or a movement of his
head, silently, in one direction or another, half
transformed into triumphant ceilings and panels
in public palaces ; feeling through his genius
the fulness of the luxurious and courtly land-
scape— -feerique in the French sense, magnificent,
spectacular, entirely for pomp and pleasure. It
gave me a little shock of surprise, and a certain
sense of relief, when suddenly, at a bend of a
road, we came upon a great ripe cornfield, and
on its edge a tall black crucifix surrounded by
a little square of trimmed lime-trees, hard and
serious against the greenish sky.

For quite another reason, because it is the
Royal park's negation instead of its crowning
poetry, is the outlying country at Fontaine-
bleau far more attractive to me than the forest
itself. At Barbizon, for instance, there is a
positive delight, on issuing from the village
street, in finding one's self no longer in that vast
green prison, but in the open country ; Millet's
country, too, of serene and fruitful human
labour. I remember how I felt it, one August
136

Compiegnc and Fontaiiiebleau

afternoon : the big gently sloping cornlields,
stooks and sheaves lying shining, spread out ;
great stacks here and there, and, close behind
us, a big grey stone farmyard. Pale stubble ;
very pale, smoky-blue distance of poplars, with
the church tower of Chailly-en-Bure ; a few
figures — a boy leading a horse, for instance, a
scarlet reaping machine, with a faded bouquet
tied to it — taking importance in this simplicity.
A pale lilac sunset was taking place among
clouds ; a great silvery beam descending,
descending in benediction on this sweet, deli-
cate, human, solemn country. And there were
larks and swallows singing and whirring over-
head, after those silent miles of waterless,
birdless forest.

Every now and then, walking in the glades
and paths, particularly where the beeches have
been cut, and have shot up in slender white
stems, out of the red autumn leaves, filtering
the light to vivid green ; and again, in those
solemn places where one suddenly intrudes
upon some solitary giant oak, Pharamond or
Jupiter, 1 felt that if one could wander in it
for weeks, Fontainebleau forest would become
a great real, in a way organic, personality for

The Enchanted Woods

one, Nay, one guessed It, merely poring over
the map, and taking in the vastness of its
extent and its many incidents. But, as a
whole, and superficially there is about it some-
thing wearying in the sense that it is all made
by human hands but for no human purpose.
One wants, for spiritual comfort, methinks,
both fields and vineyards and dairy meadows
telling of mankind's loving and well-rewarded
labour ; and moors and woods and marshes
for birds and beasts, for trees and heather and
mosses and stones and their manifold modes of
life. But Fontainebleau is neither ; its meaning
is of the jejune historical kind, and one grasps
it thoroughly only after a dreary morning of
going over the acres of yards, of corridors, of
halls and rooms and galleries and pavilions
of the palace, and realizing the colossal idol
worship of the Ancien Regime. All this much
stone and mortar, all these forest roads and
glades for one little life-size King !

138

THE FOREST OF THE

ANTONINES

THE FOREST OF THE
ANTONINES

'' T WANT to see the Forest of the Anto-
nines," said my friend ; so off" we started.
It was a forest, this Forest of the Antonincs
(which or what Antonines ? People in the
town below, or perhaps Roman Emperors with
laurel crowns ?) of marvellous fir trees. Not,
perhaps, very extensive, but incalculably old
and quite infinitely mysterious. I gathered
that she had heard of it (though never since)
during her childhood in the lower Apennine
valleys ; but, so far as I ascertained, not from
any one who had ever been there. She did not
explain why she imagined it to exist more par-
ticularly in the neighbourhood where I was
staying ; nor did it ever occur to me to ask.
All I knew was that the Forest of the Antonines
must lie somewhere in those higher mountain
regions, and that I also wanted to see it. We
141

The Enchanted Woods

beat the country for two days, and in various
directions ; moreover, asking information of
every one along the roads.

The narrow valleys were filled, as usual in
the Apennines, with monotonous bright-green
chestnut trees, grown for their fruit, at proper
distances as in an orchard ; and along the crests,
under the bare peaks, there were, also as usual,
beeches clipped down to scrub for charcoal. At
the end of a long, flat road snaking between two
precipices, there was a sort of region of nothing
at all, with a few bleak farms and a forlorn
chapel belfry, and a tuft of wind-warped trees
around them. I think we both of us had a
vague feeling that this place had somehow
something to do with our quest. But as to a
forest, there was none ; and there certainly was
not a fir-tree far and wide (those about the
forlorn buildings were quite irrefutably syca-
mores).

" It must be somewhere up here," said my
friend pensively ; " the Forest of the Anto-
nines, I mean." And with these words we went
home. Did a Forest of the Antonines ever
exist anywhere .'' Was it one of those phan-
tom places arisen in a child's fancy from some
142

The Forest of the Antonines

misunderstood but long-brooded-over word,
and which continue sometimes to haunt and
beckon, mirage-like, through years and years ?

This much is certain, that my friend's belief
evidently passed into me ; and that although
(after that unsuccessful journey of discovery) I
cannot remember our ever mentioning the
name together, I often caught myself think-
ing about the Forest of the Antonines, and
always as something unquestionably delectable
and strange.

So that I had a peculiar little feeling of
surprise and yet of familiarity, two or three
months ago, when I found myself for the first
time in those only remaining firwoods of the
Apennine crest. The place was quite a different
one and bore a totally different name. But I
knew it was the Forest of the Antonines, and
the knowledge was delightful. 1 knew it the
first evening I spent in that high valley. In a
few minutes I found myself in the forest, drawn
to its heart and its mysteries. The poignant
sylvan smell of distant charcoal ovens mingled
in the sweetness of wet leaves and moss and
warm fir-resin. And from the bottom of the
ravine rose the sound of the forest's secret, of
^43

The Enchanted Woods

the invisible stream. The sense of mysterious
immanent presence was so great in that place
that after a few minutes I turned round where
I sat on the rocks to make sure that no one was
behind me. The gorge gradually filled with
vapours, hiding the rocky peaks, and steaming
up as from a distant cauldron from the far-off
plains : they sending their heat, and the moun-
tains thrusting it back, with the rushing water
and its draughts, and its virgin freshness. This
is the most mysterious part of the whole of that
Apennine forest. One has the illusion of a
great semicircle filled with woods. And to-
wards dusk the bare peaks, becoming bodiless
— mere pale-blue wraiths against the white sky
— recede indefinitely, letting the woods extend
as far as fancy would have them, ridding one
of the knowledge that this seeming Northern
forest is but a little tract of mountain flank and
summit ; letting one imagine that this is some
land east of the sun and west of the moon, out of
whose mysterious depth one would never walk,
walked one ever so long.

For this is the peculiarity of that Apennine
forest (making one identify it with that forest
of the Antonines which existed only in my
144

The Forest of the Antonines

friend's childish imagination) that it is only a
sample of what might be, should have been, of
what once was, and which one's heart's desires
must make the most of and enclose itself within.
The thin chestnut woods — orchards where
every tree is grafted and pruned — begin a
hundred yards below, and are the reality of the
country, sloping down the great spurs, filling
the valleys, changing gradually into oak thicket,
scrub of myrtle and lentisk, olive and vineyard,
pine and cypress grove, all the things of that
South we had thought to escape from, as they
approach the plains, the cities, or the sea.
And, more sadly, dwindling rapidly away, in
the highest regions even, into melancholy dot-
ting of stumps of fir and beech upon the sere
grass, the ever-increasing barren rock, whence
the waters rush down to ravage instead of
blessing.

The longing for forests, for the reality of
which this half-imaginary forest of the Anto-
nines is but the sample, does meet with satis-
faction in the past. Italy has had her gods
Sylvanus and Picus. There remain, in Southern-
most Tuscany and Umbria, whole hillsides of
scrub which was once a marvellous forest of

145 L

The Enchanted Woods

ilex ; oak woods have been as common all over
the peninsula as in England ; the tall trees of
the inextricable Maremma jungle have been
cut down within the memory of man ; and
there yet remains along the Adriatic, and even
the Mediterranean, the marvellous fairyland of
the great pinetas. But everywhere the wooded
parts of Italy have dwindled. Heaven knows
when the mischief began. It is a story of
greed and wastefulness, for the clearings need-
ful to make a country inhabitable and fertile
must have been accomplished thousands of
years ago, and all since then been mere destruc-
tion. A history of it, could it be written,
would be instructive. It would, I imagine, be
found that the destruction of the forests of Italy
kept pace with the decline of Italy's commerce
and industry, idle and impoverished nobles
turning everything they could to ready money ;
and the crushing taxation which has been the
price of national independence sweeping away
the last vestiges of woodland. The division
of property following the French Revolution,
and the sudden demand for cash resulting
from the wars of Napoleon, is one of the
chief incidents of the tragedy. The big trees
146

The Forest of the Antonines

of the Maremma were cut down and burnt
tor potash just at that period ; and, so far
as I can make out, the fir woods of the
high Apennines, wherever they were private
property, disappeared about the same time.
Things have happened under our very eyes :
the haunted forest of the Montello, in the
province of Treviso, whence the Venetian
arsenal had got the oakwood for its galleys,
was cut down to the last tree about twenty
years ago. The process of destruction follows
a fatal course : the big trees are felled ; the
charcoal burner periodically cuts the oak, ilex,
or beech woods ; cattle are allowed to browse
before a new wood has arisen for him ; then
follows the peasant scraping brushwood tor the
bakehouse ; then come the sheep ; after the
sheep the goats ; and after the goats it is time
for the sun, the frosts, and the rains to wither
and ravage.

By an irony of things, it is, of course, the
element most wanted in these climates, water,
which turns against man and brings desolation.
Close to that Apennine crest, but on the
northern slope where the forests have been
destroyed, is a little town, Fiumalbo, once the
147

The Enchanted Woods

hunting seat of the Dukes of Modena and the
metropolis, so to speak, of those valleys. It is
at the deep bottom of a great steep valley ;
clapped down, grey stone roofs, shabby houses
once handsome, between two torrents which
encircle it like a moat, and looking like a piece
of torrent bed itself ; the slopes of dry yellow
grass and thin chestnuts rise from it, with
melancholy crevasses and landslips of pale soil ;
and above, veiled and unveiled by wet black
clouds, stands Monte Cimone, the highest
Northern Apennine peak, its base thinly dotted
with stunted little trees. There is a bridge over
either torrent bed, and in the middle, far below
the road, is huddled the sad little town, with
the remains of a castle, a gaunt seminary, and a
kind of palace, with a scrub of neglected garden,
once the summer residence of the Estensi.
Then the church — oh ! such a battered, stained,
God-forgotten old church, filled with votive
pictures of people falling off trees and wounding
themselves with axes, telling that this poor,
scant population is one of woodcutters and
charcoal burners (carrying their skill to distant
parts, the Maremma, Corsica, and even France) ;
:inJ outside the church a few rude sculptures of
148

The Forest ot the Antonines

little Crusaders on horseback, like chessmen :
Fiumalbo once had sovereign lords, and its
inhabitants fought for the Holy Sepulchre.
One feels that it was once a kind of capital :
many of the houses have a look of palaces, with
outer stair and loggia, and stone escutcheons.
Its only history nowadays is that of floods. It
is periodically overwhelmed by the two torrents,
which wreck and desolate everything. Some
fifteen years ago the population was barely
saved, and the coffins — horrible to think of! —
were torn by the waters and by the stones of
the torrent out of the churchyard and dashed
along the rocks and the houses. I asked the
local doctor how in the world he explained that
this town should ever have been built in that
hole, in the very bed of those adjoining torrents.
His answer shed a great light upon the history
and condition of that region, and, for the matter
of that, of all Italy. '' At the time of the
building of Fiumalbo," he said, " the position
was a good and sheltered one. The torrents
were not dangerous — not torrents at all, but
streams with a regular flow. The mountains
were covered with forests.

*' Our fathers," added the doctor, sadly,
149

The Enchanted Woods

" could still remember them at the foot of the
Cimone and the Rondinaio."

This, then, was the Apennines' revenge !
And it was the coffins, very likely, of the self-
same men who had cut down the forests which
were dragged out of the ground and hurled
along by those torrents of their own making.

150

MONT ST. MICHEL

w

MONT ST. MICHEL

HEN the omnibus was due to take me
from Mont St. Michel to the main
land, I ran back to tip the maid of the little
private house where the inn had billeted me,
and asked for a glass of water. The old lady
of the house, Mdlle. de Blangine, who was
writing near her dining-room window, heard
my request, and, calling to the maid, insisted
on my having something in the water : a little
fleio' d'oranger. . . . This was the pleasantest
and (such is human perverseness !) the most
suggestive impression 1 derived from this historic
place I had read so much about, and wanted so
long to see.

The litde house, just underneath the abbey,
is on the southern side of the rock, covered
with wild white clematis, big fig-trees growing
in its scrambling garden ; and as 1 went to and
fro my tidy little room, 1 had had glimpses of
153

The Enchanted Woods

quaint eighteenth-century furniture, and antique
warming-pans, like ornamental glowing suns,
hanging up in the pantry. This charming old
maiden lady with her aristocratic name, letting
out rooms to Mme. Poulard Aine's superfluous
tourists ; never showing herself except to make
that gracious hospitable offer at my departure ;
I have often thought of her since. She has
put a little human romance, in Balzac's gentler
vein, into my recollections of the Mont St.
Michel.

The first impression had been dreary : the
brakes from the mainland crowded with jostling
tourists ; the main street arched and turreted
suspiciously like some cardboard " Old Lon-
don ; " every alternate house a restaurant or
shop for Souvenirs du Mont St. Michel ; then,
once beyond the tourists' shouts, the endless
evil-smelling steps and dust-heap corners, and
ramparts with unvarying view of leagues of
sad, wet sands. A hidden sunset was going on
when I reached the top of the rock. I walked
up and down, in and out of the desecrated
abbey church, choked with dusty scaffoldings
inside, and barricaded outside with unused
cranes and trolleys ; and, for all this desecration
154

Mont St. Michel

of supposed repair, mouldy and green with
damp. In front, below, stretched miles of grey
sands to an invisible sea ; and over them hung
a pall of leaden clouds with ladders of pale-grey
beams. The tourists were at dinner in the
various Poulard inns ; and the only living
sound was the screech of greedy seagulls round
the rock. Rarely in all my life has any place
filled me with such overwhelming sadness and
desire to rush away.

But descending from the Abbey, and skirting
the little churchyard in the dusk, I stumbled
upon a little half-hidden church, and entered.
It was dark, irregularly spotted with candlelight
for service, and unseen women were chanting a
litany. A church, I imagine, quite modern and
trivial ; but in that darkness, only the altar
blazing, with vague sheen of gold from the
procession banners hanging all round, and the
scanty, scarce visible, congregation bending over
the prie-dieux^ it might have been of any time ;
and made me realize, with reverence and
tenderness, the reality of this place of mediaeval
pilgrimage, this sanctuary, girt with quicksands,
of " St. Michael in the Peril of the Sea," to whom
Roland commended his soul when he perished.

^55

The Enchanted Woods

This put me in conceit with Mont St. Michel,
and made me a little indignant with myself.
What ! I had wanted a place of pilgrimage
for my own private sentimental delectation,
strictly without pilgrims, or at best only ghostly
pilgrims made for myself ! Fie upon such
superfineness ! Mankind is always vulgar, for
vulgarity is mere misapplication of its energies,
or perhaps misapplication of our squeamishness ;
and without mankind, vulgarity and all, no
Mont St. Michel and no me to cavil about it.
The Canterbury pilgrims, judging by some of
the stories they related, were vulgar ; the
pilgrims to Eleusis, from words dropped by
Aristophanes, were even vulgarer ; and there
is considerable lack of dignity and sweetness
in the crowd of ladies celebrating the entomb-
ment of Adonis, in the account left by Theo-
critus. And are not tourists the modern and
lay representatives of pilgrims, starting on their
journey, however much they yell on the brakes
and squabble for Mme. Poulard Ainu's omelette,
with desires of spiritual improvement and vague,
unwonted feelings of romance ?

This altered, and more humane, attitude of
mind allowed me to take a certain pleasure,
156

Mont St. Michel

later in the evening, in watching trom the little
garden gate the bands of tourists going from
the eating-houses to their various resting-places
for the night : moving blobs of Japanese lanterns,
red and orange and green, and yellow lights
and grotesque shadows moving along the old
wooden house fronts, and across the turrets
and battlements, with snatches of comic songs
and goblin laughter. Thus, no doubt, the
rollicking pilgrims of old, for whom the abbey
was built, and the great vaulted and pillared
refectories and foresteries.

The most painful circumstance, I mused next
morning, as I watched the bands of shopkeepers
from Paris, and peasants in blouses, and peasant
women in delicate starched caps — the most
painful circumstance about pilgrims, antique or
mediaeval or modern (and then called tourists),
is that the thing which attracts them most,
more than crowding on the brake, and shouting
in the street, and fighting for the omelettes,
happens to be the gruesome element — the
horrid gaping wounds of young Adonis and
his various divine brothers or successors ; the
place where Becket was murdered, the stone
whence St. Paul's decollated head made the

^57

The Enchanted Woods

three jumps, the cupboard where Catherine
de Medicis kept her poisons, the planks still
stained with Rizzio's blood ; and here, at Mont
St. Michel, the dungeons.

It had cost me half-an-hour's parley in an
office, much misrepresentation of myself as a
student of architecture, and a good silver piece
of a hundred sous, to be exempted from the
sight and full-length description of those
dungeons. "The dungeons form an integral
portion of the celebrated Abbey of Mont St.
Michel and of its history ; the official guides
are under strictest orders to conduct all visitors
to them between the church and the refectories ;
if Madame therefore desires to see the cloisters,
Madame cannot logically be exempted from the
visit of the dungeons." Madame, however,
as stated above, being possessed of an illogical
mind, circumvented the logical French nation
on this occasion, and sat for a couple of hours
in the cloisters while party after party streamed
through, at regular intervals, to and fro the
dungeons.

The official guide turned the key on me
every time, feigning not to notice my presence ;
and the solitude and silence between each

158

Mont St. Michel

clattering and vociferating incursion was only
the more absolute. The charm of that cloister
(to my mind, far greater than that of its elaborate
granite carvings) is due to its being overlooked
on one side by the pinnacles and flying but-
tresses, the whole blackened rockery, with
haunting gargoyles, of the apse of the abbey
church ; while, by a very wide window, it
overlooks the sands, the pale pinky-brown in-
coming tide, and the band of blue offing under
the rainy, mottled sky. And, sheer under-
neath, are the roots, so to speak, of the fortified
abbey, broken black walls and turrets striking
into the rock and the grass like the big ash
trees which grow among them. There are the
remains of a kitchen garden and what was
perhaps a bowling-green, and great thickets of
grass and cow parsley, haunted by rabbits and
magpies ; and plumb below the pale curdled
sands. No monk of old, I said to myself, ever
enjoyed or conceived such solitude in these
cloisters as I am enjoying, thanks to those
tourists. . . .

I thought, however, that, as I have already
said, the most notable impression I should carry
away that day would be of old Mile, de

159

The Enchanted Woods

Blangine, in her neat Louis XV. parlour, send-
ing out the maid to offer me the orange flower-
water. But it was not so. After leaving the
cloister, and watching Mme. Poulard Aine,
deftly reverse, between the two plates, omelette
after omelette (the main live interest of Mont
St. Michel consists in the feuds of innumerable
Poulards, elder, younger, sons, nephews, grand-
sons, each setting forth on posters and by word
of mouth that he alone is possessed of the
genuine recipe for the classic omelette soufflee)
— and after waiting on the ramparts above the
inn, above the slate roofs and turrets and fig-
trees, for my own turn, my own little share of
omelette to come, I had to wait again for the
train at Pontorson, and elected to do so not
among the raging tourists and porters and
omnibus drivers, but in the churchyard. And
in a corner, among a heap of rubbish and
watched over by the great wolf gargoyles of
the granite tower, I found an English inscrip-
tion : " Sacred to the memory of Sarah Web-
ster, of Biddeford, North Devon, England,
who fell asleep in Jesu, August 24, 1869, aged
29 years, leaving an affectionate husband and
child." This grave seemed sadder even than
160

Mont St. Michel

that of the Neapolitan sailor-boy in the church-
yard at Tintagel ; the moral distance between
some flowery English village, and this dirty,
black Norman graveyard even greater. She
must have died on a journey, a pleasure trip
to this very Mont St. Michel with her husband
and baby ; she must have been, poor young
creature, thus left behind in alien land, a pilgrim,
a tourist.

l6l M

A WALK IN THE MAREMMA

A WALK IN THE MAREMMA

TT is only in a country like this Marcmma,
'■' where one lives all day in the saddle,
that can be learned the full meaning, the especial
virtues, of a solitary walk. As one rides along,
the loveliest landscapes unfurl and furl, in front
and behind ; they are tantalizing, unclutchablc.
And in the longing for closer acquaintance, it
is borne in on one that it is only with the feet
that complete possession is taken of a country.
It is only while walking, and walking by
one's self, that — to paraphrase Swinburne — one
touches and tastes it, and breathes it, and lives
of its life.

It was raining gently — indeed, it was the
rain which had prevented our riding as usual —
during that walk yesterday, my only walk
among all these days on horseback. And I
did not go any distance ; in fact, kept almost
within call of the Castle, high on its rock above

•65 ^

The Enchanted Woods

the confluence of the two streams. I scrambled
along — and scrambling is the most intimate
form of walking, the one bringing the most
affectionate knowledge — along the banks where
spates have filled the lower branches of the
leafless elms and rosy-budding aspens with
armfuls of dry bramble, clematis-tendril, and
reeds ; foolish Ophelia-wreaths under the real
garlands of ivy, which crown the top ; immense
dry nests ready for fantastic birds, bigger than
the heron who sailed over us at the ford, indeed
for birds altogether of Fairyland. What joy to
feel the soft flood sand under one's feet, to wet
one's hands picking the snowdrops in the green
moss and sere leaves, to stay listening to the
song of the stream, one's ear close to it, on
the big stones its white waters encircle !

During a drive, even during a sauntering
ride at foot's pace, one does not think ; or
thinks of other matters ; but when one walks
alone in a not quite familiar country, one thinks
about it — it only, and finds out every little
reason for loving it.

In this manner it was not before yesterday's
scramble along those river banks under the Castle
that I understood what is at the bottom of a

i66

A Walk in the Mare m ma

great deal of the Maremma's fascination tor me,
and the charm, more particularly, of its river
landscape and its rolling pastures. This country-
realizes something I have, so to speak, guessed
at for years and years, and longed for, not
merely whenever the Roman express rushed
me through the shallow Sabine valleys, but
long, long ago, during those monotonous
rounds of the Roman villas. I remember so
well that, as a child the sense almost of
being imprisoned, in that desolation-girdled
Rome, used to weigh on my spirits ; and how
I used to feel rather than think that certain
bends of road of Villa Borghese — grass dells
traversed by winding rows of oaks, thickets
in holes, and wide swelling meadows in the
sunshine, must be samples (even to their wooden
fences and weather-stained flirm-buildings) of
something — how shall I say it ? — well, some-
thing real^ which existed, I knew not where,
beyond the walls of Rome and the stretch of
its empty Campagna.

This sense of being shown a tiny sample
(the reality, the enough utterly denied one) is
frequent in that great stage scene run up by
the centuries and called Rome, where vistas are

167

The Enchanted Woods

rarely otherwise than baffling, and things are
not what they looked when you try to walk
into them. But the feeling can come equally
in other places and is one of the incidents, the
peripezicy of the religion of the Genius Loci;
one of the small cruelties with which, like every
other divinity, he troubles and chastens and
makes ready the souls of his worshippers. It
is by the repetition of such moments of baffled
longing that the topographical imagination
acquires its passionate power, the power of
sweeping along folds of hills and woods (like
these I have before me as I sit sunning myselt
behind the Castle bakehouse, where the mules
are unloading the fragrant faggots of ever-
greens), and of penetrating along the hidden
bends of river valleys ; nay, even of poising
and circling over mere points and lines on a
map, and lingering among names of places one
shall never see.

And with the realization of such long-dreamed-
of possibilities comes a different but closely
related joy to the idle lover of localities. One
recognizes vaguely, but with deep and per-
meating satisfaction, that since this is a reality,
there must be more, much more of it ; and that

1 68

A Walk in the Maremma

this especial character and loveliness is, in all
probability, one of the many great modes ot the
world's existence. I felt it poignantly along
this little Maremma stream, while looking at
the great lentisk and myrde bushes, grown to
trees because unattainable where they hang to
the red soil under the Castle terrace. Of
lentisks and myrtles like those there must be
forests somewhere or other. Such jade-green
and crystalline streams under ivied elms must
flow innumerable. Such wide sweeps of
flattened valley, rounded with lilac leaflessness
and soft plume of evergreen, must stretch for
miles and miles. This is a whole great country,
this seaboard between Arno and Tiber, this
ancient Etruria ; it is a reality, and must have
sister-regions throughout the dominions of the
gods of Greece and of Italy.

As I scrambled along the stream, where the
autumn leaves were sprinkled white with snow-
drops, the water took rosy and purple stains ;
and the rainy sky opened blue and moist,
surrounded by colossal mounds of white and
crimson and inky cumulus. And when I had
climbed up the Casde hill and got to Its
shoulder, behold ! a great dark storm was

169

The Enchanted Woods

coming up from the sea, filling the shallow
valley with smoke. It thundered ; and short
white lightnings danced above the woods, only
one blood-red stain marking the place of the
setting sun.

o

" Snow in the Apennine," said the head
huntsman. And indeed to-day it is cloudless,
and the Maremma lies pale buff and pale lilac
and russet, its rivers bright and azure, under a
radiant winter sky.

I am sitting, as I said, writing in my note-
book, by the Castle bakehouse ; the smell of
fresh bread, of sweet charred olive-wood issuing
from it ; and the first twitter of birds mingling
with the rustle of the river far below. The
thoughts of yesterday return to my mind, the
pleasure I felt in finding myself, at last, in
the kind of country I had so long guessed at
and wished for. But thinking it all over, and
trying to understand this phase of our senti-
mental intercourse with places, I begin to
believe there is something more. Is there not
at the bottom of it all, like reversed harmonics
which give the whole state of mind its special
quality, its timbre^ the hidden suspicion that the
reality in question, the similar beyond which we

170

A Walk in the Maremma

delight in, has no existence ? That it is we
who have made it out of our soul's stuff, out of
our own dreams and wishes, as we secretly
make all the things we care for most ?

171

LES CHARMETTES

LES CHARMETTES

T HAD forgotten, one might have said, the
very existence of the Charmettes ; and was
not even clear about their whereabouts when
my hosts alluded to them : were they near
Chambery or on this Lake of Annecy ? Yet,
now that I have been there, it has become quite
plain that I must have been, if not thinking, at
least feeling about them for a long time ; and
that those ten autumn days in Savoy were
nothing but a preparation, secretly compassed
by the Genius Lociy to whom I minister, for
that bit of romance.

I almost fancy the thing began as soon as I
had crossed the Channel. Not merely with the
unaccustomed brightness and heat ; but rather
with the faint sweet smell of the clematis, dusty
along the roads, and the smell, sweeter and more
evocative still, of the ivy bloom, telling of old
farmhouses in Touraine, of the courtyards of

1/5

The Enchanted Woods

Italian hillside villas. And once in Savoy, in
my first stroll among the vineyards by the lake,
I seemed to smell, to taste the South as I
picked the tiny lilac blooms of the dry pepper-
mint off the rough walls. But the whole
impression was, of course, very far from being
merely Southern ; just as it is the unexpected
mixture which makes the special charm of
Rousseau. Even on the first radiant day, with
the western mountains made blue and unsub-
stantial— Italian, so to speak — by the sun
behind them ; and the light permeating the
vines and walnut leaves, making them liquid
gold and green, there was the sense that this
was the North, Swiss, almost German, with
the homely romanticalness of barns and chalets,
and little pepperpot castles, and many-windowed,
steep-roofed houses in the vineyards. And
across the creek of marvellous, enamel-blue
water came the sound of whetting scythes, with
its suggestion of the freshness and purity of
high places and of short summers.

The weather soon broke up. It poured for

days ; and when the great black clouds rolled

back, there was a powdering of snow on rocks

and grass, and Savoy had lost all its look of Italy.

176

Les Charmettes

When I pot to Chambcry it was bitter cold ;
the black clouds lay along the mountains,
making, with the grey roofs and grey stone
houses, a depressing symphony in chill and
dreariness. I don't know when I have spent a
morning of such dull bad temper as the one in
which I tried to extract — and failed — some sort
of interest out of that dreadful town, rejected
alike, it seemed to me, by Italy and France. It
was with a stupid sense of traveller's duty, and
a degrading wish to kill a few hours of this
over-short life, that I set out for the Charmettes.
Since the Charmettes — that much I had gained
— are near Chambcry.

There is no kind of house more delightful
to me than what I must call the Louis XV.
pavilion, with its long wide windows of small
panes, its faded shutters flap to flap above
the great garland of wistaria, and Its high roof
of silvery slate among the trees. One has seen
such a house a score of times, in every old-
world French provincial tow::. The eye and
fancy are drawn to it, wishing to pene-
trate into its closed rooms and its forgotten
Story ; and one goes out of one's way, very
likely, to get a better view ; or returns to those
1 -j^ N

The Enchanted Woods

town outskirts, to that corner of leafy lane, in
order to get one glimpse again over the orchard
walls. It seems a kind of magic to pass through
the twisted iron gate, on to the little terrace
with the oleanders and pomegranates in dis-
coloured tubs ; and altogether unreal to be
pulling, with some hope of admission, at the
rusty bell. . . .

After a minute, which I spent looking at the
big mountains (for the Louis XV, pavilion was
the Charmettes), a peasant woman came out of
the adjacent farm and unlocked the door. And
now comes the second strand of improbability
in this web of unlikely dreams. The house you
enter stands empty, but with the air of having
been inhabited till yesterday, though perhaps
inhabited a little by ghosts : chairs and tables
are in their places on the broken brick floor or
dusty parquet ; a big Louis XV. sideboard also
with a few coarse Strasburg plates and a set of
pewter ; and beds, in their alcoves, with moth-
eaten silk quilts ; while on the walls, among
mirrors cracked and dimmed, hang the por-
traits of the late owners. In the dining-room
a faded poster sets forth that this Proprieti
is for sale, with its gardens and vineyards ;

178

Les Charmettes

eighty thousand francs they ask for it, furniture
and all.

In the course of one's wanderings — and in
Italy especially — one has stumbled occasionally
into places like this, standing untouched, save
by decay, as they stood a century and a half
ago ; and ready to be inhabited by any purchaser
who should have the nerve to share a house
with inmates not of this world. But never
have I seen a similar place so utterly according
to the heart's desire. The small size of the
house, the exquisite proportions of the rooms
and stairs, the grace of mouldings, bevellings,
and trumeaux ; the elegance of the sparse,
scant furniture, even to the charming green-
branched wall-papers — I have seen things of
the same kind, even lived among them (my
mansarde room, with Louis XV. silhouette aunts
and green lilac pattern on the walls, at my
friend's near Fribourg) ; but never have I seen
anything so complete or so perfect. So com-
pletely and perfectly, also, of the Past !

One would loiter in these rooms ; pick out
old rondo tunes or minuets, perhaps, on the
spinet ; wonder what faces had mirrored them-
selves in these spotted glasses, what manner of
179

The Enchanted Woods

people had taken the air among the box borders
in the sight of those great mountains. And
one would turn away unwillingly (perhaps
returning for a last glance) after plucking a
sprig of the myrtle against the door ; and
depart, not without looking back and wonder-
ing, among scrappy reminiscences of the
" Nouvelle Heloise " and of " Werther," what
the romance of this house might have
been.

And then ! That there should really be a
romance in that romantic place ; the romance,
pathetic, enchanting, wofully human, cynically
sad, and surpassing even " Manon Lescaut " in
eighteenth-century essence : the romance of the
first volume of the " Confessions " !

I walked quite a long time up and down the
little terraced garden, and round the farm and
barns and manure-heaps and walnut trees, up
into the vineyard above the grey, pointed roof.
And — having promised the peasant woman not
to touch anything In the garden — I did not take
a sprig of that myrtle against the house door.
But I felt at liberty, in the rough grass among
the vines, to pick a mignonette flower ; stunted,
and certainly no mere wild scentless one, but
i8o

Les Charmettes

some degenerate straggler out of the garden ;
and, who knows ? of the seed planted by Jean
Jacques and Maman.

These Charmettes, so French, yet with their
Swiss, and in a manner South German, sur-
roundings (this country might be Bavaria or
the Southern Palatinate) are typical of what
Rousseau's genius stands for. Typical, like
his real story with Madame de Warens, which
is so wholly unlike the light or brutal scandals
(from Marivaux to the Liaisons Dangereuses)
of eighteenth-century France. A story, in its
sensual crudeness, yet full of poetry and sad-
ness, and purified at every step by those
escapades into solitude and nature, mad wan-
derings over hill and dale, which might be in
Wilhehn Mcister, nay, even in Stevenson.

These thoughts went on in my head for the
rest of that cold, dull day in the dismal town of
Chamb^ry ; and although I ended at a book-
seller's and bought a stout yellow-backed
" CEuvres de J. J. Rousseau : Les Confes-
sions ; " nay, spent the evening turning over
its pages, my inner eye was full of the little
house among the walnut trees and the vine-
yards ; and I seemed to know whatever was

The Enchanted Woods

worth knowing of the poor wretched boy of
genius and his dear, exquisite, and unprincipled
protectress, far better than any book could set
it forth.

182

IN THE EUGANEAN HILLS

IN THE EUGANEAN HILLS

T T was pitch dark as wc drove from Padua ;
the long, damp halos of the carriage-lamps
revealing nothing but endless avenues of plane
and thinly fringed canals along the way. So it
was but next day that I took in the flict, when
the mists thinned away under the windows, that
the house I had come to was in the Euganean
Hills. The autumn morning became exquisitely
sweet, dim, yet luminous ; the sky visible, but
thinly veiled with white. In the great stillness
of things the slow descent of a yellow leaf, the
tall of an acorn, took a sort of gentle importance ;
voices, the noise of cocks and hens, the click of
a smithy, came clear but as out of a hidden
distance. Autumn and Italy mysteriously
wrought together one of their loveliest deeds
of magic : melting away everything in the
world except a delicate outline, changing the
hills into atmosphere luminous, buoyant, silvery

•85

The Enchanted Woods

and azure ; effacing all save the nearest detail,
and that made uncertain and baffling — a plain
or a lake, houses or cypresses ? It seemed the
fit interior of that Euganean group, fantastic
always in their curious shape and complete
isolation, and in their forming a bubble-shaped
cluster in that extinct, long silted-up piece of
sea. The Euganeans, moreover, which one
gets to think of as a kind of mirage at Venice,
mostly invisible, even In clearest weather, and,
rising up, hyacinth-blue cones against the amber
or the suffused crimson of the sunset, fitful,
unreal islands of Circe or Armida.

There is, to my mind, a very peculiar pleasure
— akin to that of following a river from its
source to the sea — in getting to know the
different physiognomy, the different mode of
being, of various mountainous or hilly regions.
Walking on the terrace of the villa with the
African traveller (who disdained to take a part
in any of our excursions), I was able to guess
how immensely, and in a way super-humanly,
personal, the genealogy, biography, and way of
being of localities and districts must become in
the light of science ; just by a word here and
there, accompanied by a nod in the direction of
1 86

Ill the Eiiganean Hills

the hills around, or the plain below, or the
misty gap where the Alps should be, he was
able to make me realize that the geologist and
geographer have secrets and have emotions like
those of the historical student. These hills had
for him an additional and (however unconscious)
imaginative interest, not unlike that with which
I sometimes caught myself, seated at table with
my friends, suddenly conscious that these dear
modern people — my kind old host and charm-
ing young hostess, the very unmediceval Knight
of Malta, the traveller himself, and, oddest
perhaps, my excellent friend Francesco, the
radical economist, are the representatives of
alpine feudatories, of a famous Umbrian con-
dotticrc, and of the most tragic victims of
Venetian statecraft.

But, quite apart from any such scientific,
so to speak, genealogical knowledge of hills
and mountains, one can take in them the
interest awakened by well-defined human
types, families, or individuals. One notes the
difference, not only of outline, rounded or
broken into facets, but of the steepness
or flatness, telling of mosses and bogs,
or of streams washing the earth from the

187

The Enchanted Woods

ridges ; the difference, naturally, in the depth
and darkness of valleys, shelving or abrupt,
and in their intricacy ; these Euganeans,
for instance, making one understand where
Mantegna, living as he did in their city or
Padua, came by his fantastic perspectives ot
streams and roads twisting like dragon's tails
round some great scaly rock.

We turned and twisted along just such roads
— enclosed, secluded, the whole hill-range so
extraordinarily cut off from all the world, so
self-containing — every time we took a drive.
The first time it was to see the ruins of a castle,
become almost indistinguishable from the rocks,
which had belonged to those tyrants of Padua,
of whom my hosts are the direct descendants.
At the end of the twisting valleys there was
something white in the blue plain, Padua ; and
beyond, a long light line, the Adriatic ; and
immediately below us, in the deep russet
precipice, two great hawks were circling. The
Serene Republic, which proscribed the very
name, had taken care that nothing should
remain of the doomed family's castle.

Another day I was taken to see a former
Benedictine monastery at Praglia. It was odd
i88

In the Eugaiieaii Hills

suddenly to find in one of these rural valley
corners a great cruciform Renaissance church,
with colossal flights of steps, like those in
Titian's Presentation at the Temple. In the
immense nave only a few peasants were singing
the evcninc; responses — women mostly — in that
guttural middle voice, sexless but so natural,
which has the pleasant bitterness of hillside
herbs. From the little pillared loggia of the
deserted monastery there was a view of exquisite
solemn sweetness : russet and yellow, very pale,
of hillside scrub ; lines of vineyard, trailing
perfect festoons of coppery rose ; grass after-
math beneath, with young grey calves and
flocks of turkeys feeding. And, above the
great barn-roofs, the loveliest of hillsides 1 a
thin growth of olives, with here and there a
cypress above the rose and orange brushwood
among the rocks. These steep Euganean
valleys are set with villas of characteristic
Venetian, eighteenth-century shape, like those
of the Giudecca and the Lido, and here
and there a delicate white steeple sprouts out
of the rock. It was Sunday, and in one of
the litde villages a band was playing under a
vine-trellis, men and girls dancing to it very
189

The Enchanted Woods

gracefully : this poor Italian peasantry, taxed to
the bone, has wonderful sunshine and oxygen
in its soul, which keep it serene even when
starving.

We always talked a great deal about the

peasants, about the corn laws and militarism,

my dear Francesco and I ; and I had quite

forgotten, the other afternoon, where he was

taking me in the jingling cart. We got out at

some farms, and slowly climbed the grass path up

the smallest, most isolated of those Euganeans

— barely a bubble in the plain. But at a turning

of the path my interest in politics and economy

suddenly went out : we were in romance, in

the fairyland of Italian poetry. Imagine (and

I seemed imagining rather than walking in

reality) a mediaeval castle of the Scaligers,

perfect with battlemented walls, circular like its

rock, but a castle turning magically into a villa

such as d'Annunzio has made immortal ; great

cypresses marking the moat, and the steep paths

from the plain ; a formal garden reached by the

drawbridge ; steps and balustrades filling up

everywhere the angles of the fortress ; lemon

and gaggia houses nestling under the walls ;

and a whole people of statues standing sentry

190

In the Euganean Hills

on high, profiled against the castle. And all
these things at such angles as to make perfect
pictures : towers, battlements, cypresses, statues
all perspcctived not merely for the eye but for
the imagination, compelling each back into that
charmed circle, so that the impressions of Ezzc-
lino's Castle (for it was Ezzelino's also) and of
Armida's garden interchange, interlace like
theme with theme in a subtle piece of music,
enclosing the soul and subduing it in a maze of
romance and beauty.

The evening was misty ; the Euganean cones
and the little hills of Vicenza were barely out-
lined ; long curls of smoke lying in the vague
autumn yellow of the plain ; pale red filaments
veining the sky ; everything was undefined,
with an air of nowhere^ out of which the castle,
the gardens, towers, Ghibelline batdements,
statues, lemon-trees, and great cypresses alone
emerged, filling the eye and the fancy.

A few bats began to hover ; the drawbridge,
over which we had crossed, rose again behind
us with a gentle movement like a bird's wing.
It was twilight, and a minute or two later the
castle had vanished.

" You arc very late for tea," said my charming
191

The Enchanted Woods

young hostess, "and I suppose they did not
give you any."

** They ? " I asked vaguely.

" The people at the castle, of course. You
don't mean to say you didn't call on them }
Didn't Francesco tell you it belonged to the
inlaws of your friend Theodora M ? "

I went to the fire with my cup in my hand.
A little shiver, not merely of cold went through
me.

" The castle, my dear Maria, does not really
exist," I answered, '* and therefore it cannot
belong to anybody's inlaws — the castle I have
just come from."

192

THE HOSPITALITY OF THE
BLACK MADONNA

THE HOSPITALITY OF THE
BLACK MADONNA

/^N the top of Monte Mucrone, the highest
of the mountains separating the plain of
Piedmont from the valley of Monte Rosa, the
Black Madonna entertains her devotees with
magnificent hospitality. After climbing up and
up and up between great chestnut woods and
tender Alpine lawns, with a pure white stream
rushing incalculable miles an hour downhill
under the box hedges and the arcaded cottages
and past the white steeples and painted churches
along the road, you come quite suddenly to
more solemn groves of beech dotted with
circular chapels, and, emerging from them, find
yourself in the bare and crater-like hollow of the
mountain, and in front of a triple row of great
porticocd palaces, a sort of Italian Versailles.

This is the Sanctuary of Oropa, the residence
of the great Black Madonna, whose portrait is
painted on all the houses of that district. She
195 o 2

The Enchanted Woods

can give hospitality, I am told, and can easily
believe, to more than a thousand pilgrims. To
Dukes of Savoy and Kings of Sardinia, and all
manner of Lombard Archdukes and similar
high personages in the magnificent seventeenth-
century buildings and wings over the court of
honour and the majestic flights of stairs, where
her effigy ) in a golden-metal sun, surmounts
the gates like a weather-vane. And hospitality
to endless smaller folk in the cells opening on
to the double cloisters of the immense inner
yard or square. I did not see the state-rooms
at Oropa, for (one of the strangest circumstances
about this strange place) there was no one
anywhere to show one anything. But, for that
very reason, I roamed freely about the endless
cloistered corridors on to which open the in-
numerable rooms, each with two or three
colossal beds, intended for the humbler pilgrims,
corridors and rooms all numbered and inscribed
with names of patron saints. Huge mattresses
were airing in the yard (which is the size of a
large city square), and im.mense frowsy-looking
coverlets, enough to cover six, hanging on the
parapets in the sun, uninviting objects at the
first glance, but which discovered themselves to

196

Hospitality of the Black Madonna

be of fine-patterned seventeenth-century cotton
or hemp brocade of faded russet or green.

The Black Madonna, like all the French and
Italian great folk of the past — Rousseau's
friends of whom he so bitterly complains and
the Duchesse du Maine, Louis XIV.'s bastard's
wife, at Sceaux — the Black Madonna lodges,
but does not board her "[uests. But on either
side of the great triumphal staircase are spread
out vast eating-houses — Croce Biancas and
Croce Rossas, with swinging signs and white-
covered tables, among oleanders in tubs, and
cciffes and Birrerias and Rigliardos ; and humbler
ones are nested even in the central portico,
under the great metal sun and the huge metal
monogram of the Black Madonna ; and with
them shops of all kinds — perfumers, tobacco-
nists, stationers, newspaper vendors, and barbers
— everything which the pious of various classes
can want for use or pleasure. And, indeed,
the approach to the hospice, even before you
see it, is marked not merely by white and
pillared chapels (like things in frescoes by Pin-
turicchio or Signorelli), but by wooden booths,
chockful of rosaries, medals, painted votive
candles, scapulars, and ricordoSy of all kinds, of

197

The Enchanted Woods

Oropa and its Madonna ; booths where, I am
happy to say, there is also a splendid show of
indiarubber-balls, tin railways and tramways,
dolls, and toys of every sort, so that the
children at home may get a good impression of
the great Black Virgin whom the parents have
left home and them to visit.

The priests and sacristans were busy preparing
for a coming pilgrimage and festivity ; so I
could not be shown the Black Madonna. And,
on the whole, I was better pleased. No visible
presence could have come up to the sense of
her invisible immanence. Everything for her
and through her ; the whole church, the
sacristies, the lumber-rooms, even the damp,
dark passages, panelled with votive pictures
from floor to ceiling — nay, the very ceilings
themselves hung round. The oldest were

CD

dark, stained canvases showing bedrooms with
Louis XIV. worthies in bed under canopies and
storied periwigs ; nay, there were some in
Elizabethan rufFs. Then came every conceiv-
able thing susceptible of being framed and
glazed : oils, water-colours, prints, pictures
made of locks of hair, and touching bead-
samplers, down to the modernest form of

198

Hospitality of the Black Madonna

ex-voto : photographic flimily groups, with a
little Black Madonna let into the corner of the
negative, heaven opening in the photographer's
studio. The Black Madonna indeed presides
over only very earthly things : people in bed,
people under runaway horses, people upsetting
in boats, flilling out of third-floor windows, or
escaping from fires ; at best, funny little smug
parents, kneeling and pointing to the cradle
which the Black Madonna has filled. The
Black Madonna, not unlike a swaddled infant,
of a Byzantine cast, herself, always in the sky
in the corner, but apparently fetching and
carrying only for material advantages and
escapes. Spiritual wants seem altogether out-
side her capacities ; indeed, it is strange how
completely the inhabitants of Heaven are
regarded as adjuncts to mere temporal con-
venience in all places of pilgrimage. Yet,
when one has been in this votive church a little
time, one recoo-nizes that this is all more heart-
stirring than any mere disinterested piety.
One is overwhelmed by the sense, not of so
much faith, but rather of so many passionate
human demands producing it : fear of death,
fright of danger, and man and woman's love,
199

The Enchanted Woods

and clinging to kindred and desire for offspring
— all this vast chorus of common human
egoistic passions which has risen up for genera-
tions and generations from this strange place of
prayer so solitary in the lap of the Alps.

Rising up whither ? Going out of that
church, black with smoked votive pictures, I
was dazzled by the brilliance of the sky and
the sparkle— stony, inexorable — of the great
peaks of that amphitheatre of rock which the
vast yard of the hospice encloses with its build-
ings, even as the side scenes of the stage
enclose the painted background, sky, and
rocks, and sailing clouds. All seems so pure,
so spiritual, compared with this pullulation of
human prayers ; so coldly, brightly uncon-
taminated by all these miseries.

I could not go into that church again. But
passing out of the porticoed yards, I climbed
a few minutes up, in the wake of a school
of grey orphan girls and of some nuns
and black-dressed women with conspicuous
rosaries, apparently carrying their luncheon up
into the mountains. And then, emerging, I
discovered what that wonderful stage effect of
the hospice roofs and porticos had hidden :
200

Hospitality of the Black Madonna

under the great bare peaks of shining granite,
a wide amphitheatre of meadow and short
beechwoods, with a torrent and little white
foaming brooks rushing across, and chiilets
here and there with cows, and everywhere on
the open pasture green or in the dark green
groves, innumerable little lanterned chapels
with circular porticos, like things from fifteenth-
century frescoes ; a country of keenest air and
freshest, tenderest grass still uncut, and mossy
boulders embedded in flowers, and a perpetual
bubble of waters.

It is very grand of the Black Madonna, 1
reflected, to have chosen just such a spot for
the country house where she magnificently
lodges rich and poor to the number of more
than a thousand. But one wishes, somehow,
it had not been she. One wishes the place
might have belonged to some calm, classic
.^sculapius or Hygeia, with no fusty church
stacked with votive pictures and blackened
with votive candles. I should have liked rites
of some outdoor kind : religiously processional,
but not in any way superstitious ; rites of
exercise and meditation, but serene and clear-
minded, healing the spirit as well as the body
20 1

The Enchanted Woods

by use of these pure waters, this cold and
crystal air and bright sun, by life with these
rocks and woods and pastures, and the un-
wearied clouds ; rites in which personal demands
should be forgotten, and impersonal contem-
plation should replace them. . . .

Thinking these things I turned away from
that Alpine amphitheatre, looked back to
whence I had come, and forgot all cavillings.
Before me were the spread-out roofs and
cupolas, grey slate, sparkling granite, of the
hospice ; and over them, over the Madonna's
monogram and the metal sun on the big gate-
way, were, not green hillsides and rocks and
clouds as one expected, but, merging into a
milky blue sky, lay a blue, delicate, incon-
ceivable sea. Yes, a sea ; but a sea without
sparkles, and with luminous white curdHngs
which were rivers : the great plain of Lombardy
barely separated from the heavens by the pale
line of Genoese Apennines ; all blue, blue, of
incomparable, unspeakable blue against the
silvery roofs and walls of the hospice.

After all, I said to myself, as I walked
slowly down the hill, they can afford to let the
Black Madonna think she is the only potentate.
202

THE HOLY YEAR AT RAVENNA

THE HOLY YEAR AT RAVENNA

pERSONS of literary genius, or thereabouts,
-*■ 1 reflected that rainy day at Ravenna, are
always doing us good turns ; and perhaps not
more in furnishing us delightful masterpieces
than in showing us how to make up little vague
works of our own, felt, not written, out of the
scrappy stuff of our own life and reading.
Geniuses are people who amuse themselves
enormously and incidentally teach us persons
without genius though we are, to play at the
orames of their invention. In the middle of the
game (of which the trump card was somehow
the year 1900) which was making that wet
day in a provincial town so very enchanting, I
felt a vague warmth of recognition, and there
ensued the knowledge that I owed it all to M.
Anatole France — the Anatole France, at least,
of the immortal trilogy of dear Bergerct ; and
the sense of it added further to my pleasure.
205

The Enchanted Woods

It may surprise some that I should describe
Ravenna as a provincial town. But to me it is
one. I do not think very often about Dante,
whose bones they stole and mislaid at some
distant period ; nor about Byron, except in so
far that I once met his left-hand brother-in-law,
one of those Gambas who took him to Greece
and glory, a very fascinating old man. Nor
even about Theodoric, though I confess that
his house, with pillared windows, may be for
something in my preference for that ill-paved
street leading to the port and marshes, excru-
ciating as it is to a bicycle ; at least, before they
wrenched the porphyry sarcophagus out of the
masonry and took it to the town museum,
worse luck to them ! To me, who have lived
there much, Ravenna is a very proper provincial
town, with a prefect and a professor of botany
who is an original ; and a market place, full in
this snowy weather of farmers in furred cloaks
and condottiere caps. Also a lending library,
instituted by my friend, and Socialists, and the
" Industry of Beetroot Sugar," so much talked
over ; and a dear familiar house, well warmed
and full of books, with family traditions, boys*
exams., ravishing toilettes often, and political
206

The Holy Year at Ravenna

gnashing of teeth occasionally ; the whole pre-
sided over for my fancy by a mysterious person
in the lower regions, never seen, but heard of
as " restufFer of wool mattresses and bringer-up
ot truffle-hunting dogs." And from this house
there radiates through the town great luminous
beams and dust of gossip, discussion, biography,
legend (Garibaldi and Pio Nono, and even the
Serene Republic of Venice, whose daughters,
married by proxy, came to Ravenna by the
lagoon barge) — a halo of present or quasi-
present, mingling gradually in the darkness of
Exarchs and Ostroo-oths and confused Middle
Ages. I always loved the mixture, but never
so much as this particular December Sunday,
when I caught myself playing the game of
Anatole France, in the looming shadow of the
new century.

The weather was really atrocious. Vague
black Pious Women (the cultivation of piety
their sole profession) were shaking wet um-
brellas in the church porches ; and when you
entered, your first impression was of damp
pavement and little constellations of taper-lights
in a steaming twilight tasting of incense. In
that particular church, whose name 1 always
207

The Enchanted Woods

forget, at a forlorn street-corner (it has a round
archaic belfry seeming to penetrate into the
mist of centuries and centuries) I found the
evening benediction just ending. The Byzan-
tine columns are all encased in florid plaster ;
the only object of interest there, is a small bas-
relief of the fifth century, with an Adoration of
the Magi almost identical in arrangement with
the Corybantes' Dance before Cybele. I had
made that archaeological remark mentally, for
the tenth or eleventh time, and found no sort
of satisfaction in it, when my eye was caught by
a large railway poster near the door, with time-
table and price list for the trains to Rome on
the occasion of His Holiness's solemn opening
of the Holy Year Nineteen Hundred. . . .
The church was getting dark, most of the print
was small, and, moreover, the Pious Women
with soaked umbrellas, each stopped to take a
long deep stare at me before pushing out through
the leathern door. I felt I did not look as if I
o-enuinely wanted to know the price of those
tickets, and that I couldn't have made the Pious
Women understand why I really did ; so I got
shy, and tore myself away, and out into the
rain, repeating rather wistfully within myself,
208

The Holy Year at Ravenna

" Opening of the Holy Year Nineteen Hun-
dred. . . . Pope Leo XIII. — first-class tickets
by Bologna and Florence, or by Forli and
Ancona " — and a vague feeling welled up, with
words on its surface, which proved to be Ger-
man, a verse, 1 believe, of Schiller, " und nun
an dies Jahrhundert's ernstem Ende."

Out in the streets it had befrun to snow.
Wild weather coming ; and the day before,
driving towards the pine forest with my hostess
(the pine forest of Boccaccio's and Dryden's
spectre hunt), and past the famous beet-root
sugar refinery they are building at Classis, we
had seen the ploughed fields snowed over with
seagulls, harbingers of real snow.

1 found there was to be a dinner-party
of notabilities somewhat difficult to manasfe.
While questions of precedence were being
discussed at tca-timc, my host, appealed to on
the matter, brought out a volume of Baronius's
"Annals," a very fine edition, quarto, in vellum,
with dedication to Paul V, ; and began to read
out loud the year 1300, like this coming 1900,
a Holy Year, indeed the first officially such.
Pilgrims were flocking to Rome spontaneously
(among them, it is surmised, Dante) in such
209 I'

The Enchanted Woods

numbers that the reigning Pontiff granted
wholesale indulgence to dead and living.
" Moreover, it was stated by the demons
vociferating from the mouths of possessed
persons . . . that through the merits of the
said Apostles Peter and Paul all souls in
purgatory would be liberated from torments,
and even enabled to attain immediately to
glory." Demons, it seems, were quoted as
experts in such matters, as we quote doctors
and graphologists nowadays.

Then followed, always in Baronius (Dominus
Caesar, S.E.R. Cardinalis ac Bibliothecarius), a
story of a certain clerk, at St. George of the
Golden Veil, to whom there appeared, all
crowned with stars and in resplendent robes,
Mary, Diva Deipara, with her Son on her
knees. " To all men," spoke the vision, " God
mercifully gives indulgence." " And to me,
then ? " hastily asked the clerk, prostrating
himself as fast as possible. The Diva Deipara
let a moment pass. " To all men, living and
dead," she solemnly repeated. " And to me,
then ? " insisted the clericus, by no means
satisfied with general statements. Again the
Virgin let a little time pass, and answered

2IO

The Holy Year at Rav^enna

slowly, evidently taking a certain pleasure in
the poor clerk's flustered condition. "To all
men . . . dead and livino- . . . and ... to

o

thee also."

*' Omnibus mortuis et vivis," repeated my
host in his sonorous Italian Latin, "but not
to the King of France or the Colonnas, Pope
Boniface was careful to mention ; which perhaps
accounts for Guillaume de Nogaret's mission,
and Sciarra Colonna's famous box on the car
at Anagni."

The political dinner went off, thank Heaven,
satisfactorily ; a good deal was said about beet-
root sugar ; the Sicilian deputy's trial for
murder was alluded to, and the notabilities
were pretty unanimous in foretelling some
capital days of wild-duck shooting and snaring
in the salt marsh, for the snow was falling
quite thick. Next day indeed came the extra-
ordinary experience of wading through a little
snowfield to sec the alabaster Byzantine altar
they have set up against the green and gold
mosaics, Justinian and Theodora, grapes and
peacocks, at San Vitale.

But there was no poster there. I mean no
railway time-table for the opening of the Holy

21 I

The Enchanted Woods

Year ; and that was what I really wanted. I
found one, though, in a certain church down a
dark corridor : a small basilica, most primitive
and empty, icy, as if no living thing, not even
a Pious Woman, had breathed into its chill-
ness for a thousand years. There it was,
nailed against a pillar, near the marble ambon.
" Pilgrimage to Rome on occasion of the
solemn ceremony of opening the Holy Year
to be held by the Holy Father Pope Leo
XIII., in the Vatican Basilica, the twenty-fourth
December, 1899. Price of return tickets to
Rome from the following stations : Ravenna,
16 f. 5 c, third-class ; 28 f. 10 c, second-class ;
49 f. 10 c, first-class. Forli, Rimini, Cesena,"
a little less. A cat, startling me very much,
ran across the nave. The bells, in the Byzantine
belfry, began to ring. I became aware that I
wanted some afternoon tea quite madly.

All along the snowy streets my thoughts
danced in tumultuous yet orderly pattern. I
thought of the dinner of notables, and how
cold they must all be shooting their wild-duck
in the marsh. Forty-nine francs — was it really
much reduction, seeing that " the maternal
kindness of the Church was opening the
212

The Holy Year at Ravenna

inexhaustible treasure of indulfjence " ? Could
that certain clerk at St. George of the Golden Veil
have afforded it ? Perhaps he would have gone
third-class, or made a financial effort. Centuries
do not come to an end every day. Speaking
of centuries ending, I realized that I had a little
dreaded the end of this one. Schiller's " und
nun an dies Jahrhundert's ernstem Ende," and
so forth ; and also that, now that it was close
at hand, I felt quite comfortable and singularly
at peace with the world and its contents. The
spirit of M. Anatole France was abroad ; and
I thanked the literary temperament for teaching
me to make pleasant patterns of contemplation
even out of centuries that are departing.

213

THE GENERALIFE

THE GENERALIFE

'T^HE very little I have seen of Spain is
Moorish ; but Moorish with the sadness
of the Moors' destruction ; Africa, one might
say, revenging herself on that cruel Spain and
rendering it so oddly sterile of all things good.
I was ill at the time, and saw it all through
my melancholy ; but there are realities which
answer to most of our moods, perceptible only
through them ; and this, also, was, I think, a
side of Spain's reality.

But a reality isolated from all others, and
different. Made unlikely, moreover, by rising
out of the chaos of a long sea journey ; five
nights and days like nights, when, opening un-
willing eyes, they closed again over a glimpse
of deck tipping down into the water, or deck
rising like a wall underneath it ; of foam
monsters swimming hand-in-hand, like com-
panies of Japanese bogeys, round the ship's
217

The Enchanted Woods

bulwarks — nay, above them. Black emptiness,
vague nightmare for those endless days and
nights, with reminiscences, for all reality, of
recent wintry Northern scenes. And then
emergence, land, the South, an unfamiliar South
which seemed like Africa.

We rode under a blazing sun, through the
dustheaps of some Spanish villages, along the
beach where the mules are driven in the sea for
better going, and then inland, along a dusty,
rugged track between high aloes and cactuses
and great scarlet flowers like red-hot pokers.
A dreary country of rolling purple earth,
ploughed by the savage-looking brown cattle,
with low dusky hills at the end, with the sullen
clouds resting upon them. There is some-
thing unspeakably arid in the violet, almost
lilac colour of that earth, as if it had been baked
into barrenness ; an expression taken up by the
steel blue of the aloes, the grey of the scant
eucalyptus, the trembling white of the few
stunted poplars ; by the sharp, jagged forms of
this vegetation which looks — aloes with thin
long lances of dead flower, and prickly pears
with their battered shield-like discs — as if it
were all for warfare and desolation.
218

The Generalife

The desolation, as 1 remarked before, seems
to belong to the Spaniards, rightful owners,
aborigines of this unkind-looking country ;
while the few spots of sweetness and grace are
made by the Moors — left by them in an alien
land when they were banished. One feels as
much about every little fruitful gap in those
endless miles of stony hill and plateau, oases of
orange trees and sugar canes, with the great
cranes of wells rising among them ; I felt it also
even of the market gardens round iVIalaga and
Seville, where we bought lemons and winter
roses : the Moors must have made them. An
impression, most likely, radiating from the real
gardens, which one knows to have been
Moorish, or laid out, like those of the Alcazar,
by Moorish architects and gardeners for almost
Moorish Spanish kings.

A wonderfully peaceful place, that Alcazar
garden watched over by the great Moorish
lattice-work tower of the cathedral, and by its
own high, slender palm trees ; a Iiortus inclusus
in the best sense, where the winter sun lies on
the myrtle hedges and on the blue-and-green
tiled paths strewn with fragrant, dry fig-leaves.
In it one naturally remembers that Rhodes and
219

The Enchanted Woods

Damascus — names to conjure with ! — are much
on the same line, and somehow seem near (with
the palm trees brought from them) ; and one
muses on serene mediaeval days, learned Saracen
leeches, and Jewish philosophers, verses of
Omar Khayyam coming into one's head.
Spanish Spain with bullfights and cigarettes,
Seville of Don Juan and Figaro, has nothing to
say to these Moorish gardens ; has closed them
in, or rather closed them out of herself into
peacefulness and gentle decay.

This is, of course, very much the feeling of
the Generalife above Grenada. I say its feeling,
not merely mine about it ; because places like
these have moods and emotions on their
account, seem to feel something which they
transmit to us. Only the Generalife has an
added quality of romance, its terraces and
hedged paths, and litde porticos and fountains
overhanging, in their charmed regularity, the
stony, savage gorge of the Darro ; overlooking
the red towers and creeping walls of the
Alhambra. And then, beyond, the solemn blue
plain, and the peaks and everlasting snows of
the Sierra.

Far more than the Alhambra itself, which
220

The Generalife

savours too much of the show-place, Palace
of the CcTsars or Hadrian's villa, this little
Generalife has kept the poetry of Moorish
Spain. Partly also because of its small size,
and mainly, of course, because it is, if not
inhabited, at least inhabitable, and belongs to a
private individual descended in direct line from
its original owners.

That is the fascination : this odd, unlikely
fact, this bridging of the chasm between past
and present, modern Christendom and that
vanished Islam ; realizing it, one feels rather
as in the presence of persons intermarried with
ghosts. In the little palace — the casino of the
villa, it would be styled in Italy — above solemn,
high-backed chairs, hang the portraits of the
ancestors of the present proprietor, the Marquis
of Campotejar. Also their genealogical tree.
They are all descended from Don Pedro de
Grenada, son of Cidi Yahya, son of King Juzef
of Almeria ; descended through the Kings of
Granada from the Kings of Saragossa and
Cordova, and also certain Gothic kings ; they
are connected by marriage with the wife of
Charlemagne, and with Marsilius of Saragossa,
the Marsilius of the "Chanson de Roland" and

221

The Enchanted Woods

of Ariosto ! And there is the first Don Pedro,
this son of Cidi Yahya, in armour, a red cross
on his breast, and a dead Moor — a thing like
the " Saracen's Head " — at his feet ; and the
device, with the pomegranate of Granada,
" Servire Deo regnare est." Then there are
Alonzos, Pedros, Estebans, warriors and knights
of Malta and of Calatrava ; and finally a little
boy, like a baby by Bronzino, in a go-cart, with
the words, " murio nifio ; " and with him died
the male line of the House of Granada. There
were also dignitaries of the Church, of course ;
and some nuns ; one particularly. And I
wondered, vaguely, whether in such a family
strange things might not have happened, in the
style of Goethe's " Bride of Corinth ; " some
ghostly Moorish betrothed, coming, perhaps,
to fetch away the daughter of the Renegades,
even from behind the convent gratings,
somewhere, perhaps, in the days chronicled by
Mme. d'Aulnoy, or when, later still, Spain
was governed by Signor Farinelli, with Don
Ferdinand of Bourbon under him. . . . These
Moorish renegade princes often had very
beautiful names in their Christian days, like
these Granada Vinegas of the Generalife, and

222

The Generalile

the Valor y Cordobas, of whom Don Francisco
threw Christianity and Spain to the winds, and
rebelled and perished in the Alpujarra under
the name of Aben Humeya. Strange things to
think about, phantasmagoric notions, elusive,
impossible to define, which haunted the little
palace looking down on to the precipice, the
gardens with their slender fountains and
horseshoe porticoes. The place was full ot
the scent, sweet but medicinal, of that winter
blossom which covers its bare twigs with pale
yellow, dried-up looking stars ; and from the
gardener's house there rose into the damp
warm air that subtler perfume still of burning
olive branches or vine stumps, I cannot tell
which.

1 bade farewell to that Spain of the Moors in
the same unreal and dreamlike mood. We had
gone on board at the wharf of the Golden
Tower at Seville before it was daylight. As
the boat moved down the stream, the blue
darkness of the night became paler by a sort
of infiltration of light ; antl then there began
to emerge misty lines of poplars, scarce more
substantial than the curdling grey water under
the boat ; and every now and then white buildings
223

The Enchanted Woods

glared supernaturally out of the greyness of
the banks and hills. Then suddenly, above
the misty marshland and feathery trees, day-
light ; and on it, at a bend of the river, the
steeples and cupolas of Seville for the last time,
the cap of the Golden Tower, and pinnacles of
the Giralda. And later, when the sun was
already high, there appeared, higher than the
sun, and isolated on the pale blue, a double-
crested cloud, baseless and resting in the sky :
the twin snow-peaks, Mulhacen and thePicacho,
of the mountains of Granada.

224

COUCI-LE-CHATEAU

COUCI-LE-CHATEAU

^TT^HE sadness of the French sous-prefecture —
at least of Laon ! There are few con-
trasts so dreary as stopping there immediately
after Switzerland, with its continuity of wcll-
to-do-ness, and the something elemental and
fresh, as of unshorn pasture and pellucid rushing
streams, about its spick-and-span old towns and
villages.

The evening of our arrival at Laon, the
hopelessness of provincial France descended
deep and heavy into my soul. We walked at
sunset through the dull hillside town, and along
the avenues which have replaced its walls, pass-
ing a desolate-looking Louis XIV. barracks,
dormered and escutcheoned, standing forlorn
in a great sandy square. Abutting on the
hillside boulevards there were lane-like streets
of aristocratic houses with lovely slate roofs,
hut all close-sh uttered, deserted, dead-looking,
227 Q 2

The Enchanted Woods

and the elms and horse-chestnuts of their
gardens were fitly reduced to skeletons by the
past heat ; an autumn in midsummer, trees
barely outlined in brown featheriness, with a
soft cinder of dry leaves underfoot.

A wonderful tragic sunset took place : crim-
son first, then livid among great piled-up Alps
of cloud, above the endless plain of reaped field
and flattened forest. Such great plains are sad,
where the incident, whatever gives interest, is
due to changing, almost unreal things ; where
the mountains are mere perishable clouds, and
all that fancy clings to is mere passing show.
It was dusk when we found our way, after that
great circuit of the hill town, under the cathedral.
Looking up over the low roofs of the beautiful
Gothic chapterhouse, at whose corner there is
a sundial held by what was once a great angel,
his robe and the tip of his wing ; looking up,
climbing up the looming, inconceivably high
side of the great towers, one's eyes and soul
seemed to travel far into the storm-washed
evening sky ; suddenly meeting, there at the
top, the downward-peering heads of the gigantic
stone cows leaning out from the openwork of
the belfries.

228

Couci-lc-Chateau

But the next day France was kind and dear
once more. For we spent it at Couci. There
was a long slow journey on the platform of a
little local train through the deep woods, among
the great poplar groves, with glimpses of glassy,
reedy canals and lovely marshland starred with
big white flowers ; a journey so slow, so silent
and peaceful, and in soft rain, which somehow
made it merely more intimate, making one
penetrate, as it seemed, into that country's
secret. Couci is on a hill above that woodland :
a little town of old houses of fine white stone,
great Louis XIV. roofs of violet slate, and
every here and there — inserted in the masonry
— a bit of Gothic tracery. A little town, a
village almost, among the orchards and flower-
gardens enclosed in the great yellow-towered
wall ; typical — like Loches, Chinon, Tonnerre,
Montreuil in Picardy, St. Florcntin on the
march of Burgundy and Champagne, and a
hundred other places I hope some day to know,
of what is characteristically good and charming
in Northern France. Bringing home to one
the modest happiness which prosperity can
bring in a temperate climate on fertile soil ;
the kindly human side, as opposed to the
229

The Enchanted Woods

stagnation and selfishness of broken-up property
and remote provincialism.

How Stevenson has understood this subdued
cheerfulness of the small French country town 1
— a charm made up in part of the negation of
the tragic or lyric, all greyish white and slate-
colour like the old houses and the poplars by
the streams ; visited only by kindly suns and
breezes and such light frosts as check over-
luxuriance and prune vegetation, so to speak,
into fine flower and fruit. I thought of
Stevenson, and felt as if there were some story
or essay of his perpetually escaping my memory,
during the time I spent at the inn of Couci —
Hotel des Ruines — with beautifully flowering
pomegranates and oleanders in tubs on the
rough cobbles outside. It was left in charge
of a delightful elderly cuisiniere with that serious,
smiling dignity which French provincial servants
often have. There was also, having his mid-
day meal at the opposite table, an old-world,
gentleman-like person, spare and white-
moustached, like an elderly cavalry ofiicer, but,
as it proved, employed in the " Contributions
Indirectes" — to wit, salt and tobacco and such-
like— who entered into conversation with us.
230

Couci-le-Chateau

It started from a raven or jackdaw hopping
familiarly about the inn dining-room ; con-
versation of the kind so pleasant on a journey :
a litde about the antiquities of the place, the
castle, mediaeval wars, and so forth, and a good
deal about harvests, vintages, chasse^ woods,
wildboar, birds ; making the pleasant, natural
business of life, ours and other creatures', even
trees and bushes (for he talked forestry), abide
a little while in one's leisurely imagination.

It rained hard, and for a while it was out of
the question going to see the castle. But I felt
peaceful and satisfied in the little inn parlour,
looking at the cocked-hat roofs and white
houses across the pomegranate and oleander
blossoms before the windows. But not without
occasional excursions among the family photo-
graphs belonging to Mme. Veuve Francois, as
the framed diplomas with crowning goddesses
and caduceuses and winged wheels, from
*' Societes des Voyageurs du Commerce,"
declared that deserving landlady to be called.

The castle, or what remains thereof, was
really far the least among the attractions of
Couci. Great gaunt ruins, bringing — when
one had been led up and down and over and

2.^F

The Enchanted Woods

under, and heard all the guide's archaeology
— an intolerable sense of the ferocity and
monotony of that life, all offence and defence,
all subordinated to the most hideous, because
destructive, form of utilitarianism. No, no ;
the Middle Ages, well and good, of walled
towns and turreted cathedrals ; of a life, how-
ever often jeopardised, which had something
in it worth fighting about. But all these
warrens and rat-holes, once crammed with
pseudo-chivalry, merely depress one with a
sense of dreariness akin to that of the iron
hives of modern industrialism ; and what
redeems them is the vegetation, the bushes,
grasses, the rowans sprouting from broken
walls, the harebells and wild peppermint
carpeting the yards ; in fact. Nature's efforts
to cover it all up and hide it in oblivion.

Far more poetic than the ruins, there was
a little flowery terrace behind the inn, over-
looking the lustrous green-rolling country —
a quiet little place with chairs and tables, and
built, I have no doubt, of stones quarried in
the great fortress ; a most peaceful, pleasant
spot.

And before leaving Couci altogether I found
232

Couci- le-Chateau

another delightful place outside the gates — a
path among the freshly reaped cornfields, which
lie straight against the horizon in this country
of old, old worn-down hills, the great white
cumulus clouds resting on the line of stubble.
One walked along a narrow path tufted with
flowering purple thyme and saxifrage, and the
song of larks descended from the washed

o

blue sky.

Such places are companionable, and if, in
them, the genius loci does not actually arise and
meet and overwhelm the poor tired, fretted,
wayfaring soul, yet one feels his vague hidden
presence, reminding one that in this world,
and apart from all human understanding or
misunderstanding, there is no need for loneli-
ness.

233

THE TAPESTRY AT ANGERS

THE TAPESTRY AT ANGERS

A MONG the many pleasant things of travel,
methinks we should include, as so much
to the good, that which our fancy adds to
places : impressions sometimes false, and ex-
pectations often disappointed. Our memory
should hoard, for instance, a certain briet
delightful moment when entering, say, some
unknown town, and catching sight of a single
picturesque feature or quaint detail, one feels,
and even sees the rest to match. Unwarned,
most likely, by sad experience, which teaches
that perfect realities happen only once in a blue
moon, in places you can count upon your
fingers — like Rothenburg, or Siena, or Tangier,
or, twenty years ago, alas ! also Warwick.

Such a moment was that of my arrival at
Angers, the capital, 1 hear, of the French
Catholic revival, and as dreary assuredly as a
novel of clerical life by M. Ferdinand Fabre.

237

The Enchanted Woods

For through the rattling windows of the hotel
omnibus I caught a glimpse of a great Norman
belfry, and, bringing my head on a level with
my knees, I managed to see its pillared top.
And a few minutes later appeared the castle :
acres of walls and towers, colossal buttressed
masonry based on rock, black and vaguely
elephantine. I thrilled with the impression of
Plantagenet and Shakspearean Angers, the very
place for King John and Faulconbridge and
poor little Arthur.

The disappointments which follow such ex-
periences should not trouble us ; unless insisted
upon by our ill-humour, they disappear from
memory, shrink, roll up into nothing, vanish
like sleepless nights or boring days in trains,
leaving no image behind them ; and of the
things that seemed to be, only the things which
should have been remain. That first impressions
of places, and sometimes first experience of
persons, should sometimes be the most de-
lightful, shows not that outer reality is poor,
but that our powers of adding to it are rich ;
and this, rightly considered, is surely a subject
for rejoicing. Neither should we let ourselves
be put off by a more honourable aversion to
238

The Tapestry at Angers

the unreal. In cases like these, where scientific
or practical purposes do not require crude fact
to deal with, what really exists is what we really
feel. And we may calm our scruples by
reflectino^ that mere chaos-moncerine, mere void
and shapeless dreams and mutterings, are in-
compatible with the sensitiveness to the world's
suggestions and the instinct of meaningful re-
construction necessary for the seeing of clear and
charming visions. Certain germs called facts have
entered into our mind ; and in our mind's own
proper soil and climate, have grown, fertilized,
and crossed and altered by natural necessities
of growth. What does it matter if, by fate's
accident, similar germs have grown to different
shapes in other minds than ours, or even, as
the mystics would have said, in the great
thinking mind we call the universe? There
are as many ways of singing a great song as
there are singers, but great ones ! and all the
painters that ever have been have not exhausted
the ways of painting rightly one single land-
scape ; perhaps also there are united under one
mortal's name as many different lovable persons
as there arc hearts to love them. And as to
poetry, why, the very immortality of some of it,
239

The Enchanted Woods

of a line of Virgil, or a terzina of Dante, or a
scene of Shakspeare, is due simply to each
successive generation giving it a new lease of
life in a new meaning.

These are metaphysic speculations, though by
no means empty ones. But it is rather awkward,
all the same, to descend from them, with direct-
ness yet grace, to the story of the Lion with
Many Heads and the Fascinating Hydra on the
Angers tapestry. The tapestry in question hangs
all round the transepts and the single nave of that
cathedral, built by Plantagenet kings ; and, with
the two delightful blue and white rose windows,
converts its dark gauntness into something sug-
gestive of enchanted chambers. The work is
fifteenth century, and its general effect as colour,
what with fading and a mist of taper smoke and
incense, is that of alternated carpets of greyish
pink and pale blue, varied and interwoven to
an occasional lovely lavender. The story it
sets forth is, as stated, that of the many-headed
lion and the fascinating she-dragon, belonging
to a cycle of myths peculiar to arras-makers ;
and nothing can exceed the fantastic charm of
its presentation, or the weird humorousness of
the expression : the she-dragon, also called a
240

The Tapestry at Angers

hydra (for she has many swanlikc necks), is
a creature of infinite seductiveness. And there
is a large composition, on a rose-coloured ground
fleur de lysed with blue, of the poor beguiled
lion, sitting on his tail, holding a ball and
sceptre, and receiving most fatuously a whole
posse of bigwigs introduced by the fascinating
she-dragon, which is quite worthy of Walter
Crane in the days of the " Yellow Dwarf."

I was unfortunately prevented from following
the story to its conclusion, owing to the nave
being occupied by a procession of little girls
in muslin and elderly devotees in black alpaca,
all carrying paper palms and apparently tied
together by yards and yards of lulle ruches,
starting from an image, which they carried, of
the Madonna. I saw the little girls' eyes
wandering towards the tapestry. But they had
been too carefully brought up, methinks, to
comprehend the full meaning of the story, and
really believed, as little demoiselles should, that
it was all about the triumph of the Church
and the Theological Virtues ; though some of
them, perhaps, guessed that the Hydra was a
lady not very commc il faut. When the pro-
cession— alpacca skirts, and muslin frocks and
241 K

The Enchanted Woods

tulle ruches, and purple canons, and scarlet
enfants de chceur — had shuffled out little by
little, I sat down on the carved flamboyant
stairs of an overhead chapel, and watched some
picturesque dark-blue nuns coming and going
about the high altar, and folding and removing
its linen and carpets. In the waning light and
the incense cloud left by the recent service,
the cathedral, with its bits of carving here and
there, its battered monuments and uneven
floor, its windows of beryl and sapphire, and
its yards of rose-coloured and pale-blue arras,
felt quite enchantingly furnished and inhabitable,
so to speak, for the fancy. " It is quite im-
possible," I said to myself, " that people should
have told the story of the Lion and the
fascinating Hydra while really intending to
convey the adventures of the Theological Vir-
tues. Or, at all events "

But at this point my eye rested on a curious
Renaissance tomb in a corner of the transept.
It was much battered and partially bricked up.
The frieze consisted in a delicate garland looped
up at intervals by a death's head, each with a
name on a tablet : Alexander, Romulus, Semi-
ramis, Hercules, Cleopatra, Rhea, none of them,
242

The Tapestry at Angers

1 should think, belonging to the family of the
deceased. And meanwhile, underneath, the
real inscription had been removed, and the name
of the poor owner of the tomb replaced by a
course of bricks ! It was oddy ironical ; and
I felt that, in some subtle way, it all hinged
on to my argument about imagination. Only
I could not find the connection, for it was
half-past seven, and the Suisse with his halberd
hastily expelled me from the building. And
not having returned to Angers since, 1 have
never been able to recover the thread of those
thoughts.

243

GERMANY ONCE MORE

GERMANY ONCE MORE

TT AVING bicycled through the Castle woods,
getting off many times to enjoy the warm
freshness of the afternoon, the sunlight filtered
through the beeches, the flickers on lust year's
pink leaves, and the murmur and twitter amidst
the pale tree stems, I found myself at the
Neckar's edge, and crossed over by the ferry
at Ziegelhausen. On the opposite bank, I
descried, of course, a Restauration^ as this very
un-French institution is called ; and sat down
to some beer and black bread in a terraced
garden overlooking the wide, sedgy river.
Somebody was playing the piano in a neighbour-
ing village house ; and the one-two-three-four
of an old-fashioned sonata mingled pleasantly
with the lap of the water and the creak of the
ferry chain.

One is apt to be a little irritated with
Rcstaurations and Kaffeewirthschafts — every
247

The Enchanted Woods

legendary hollow in a forest, every rock com-
manding a view, every riverside, every ruin
of the German-speaking world being furnished
with such, from this flat, hot Neckar valley to
the high places of the Engadine, where you
drink chocolate in the shadow of the hoary,
yellow-mossed larches and in the draught of
a glacier stream ; and it is difficult, sometimes,
to be quite fair to the Teutonic instinct for
eating in every romantic moment, which cul-
minates in the veal cutlets and preserved
cranberries of the Wagner concerts at the
Kaim-saal at Munich. And I, too, had been
unjust. But sitting on that garden terrace
over the Neckar, drinking my brown beer
and eating my black bread while listening to
the Clementi sonata and going over in memory
my ride through the Heidelberg Castle woods,
I was made (as is often the case) just and
intelligent by happiness, and began to fathom
the mystery of the German Gemuth.

Gemiith ! Untranslatable word, for whose
modest, kindly spirituality, its suffused souU
fulness, the other languages, with their logical
and idealistic and practical pretentiousness, can
never find any real equivalent.
248

Germany Once More

The Germans, among other forms ot genius,
possess, above all things, a genius for con-
templation of an cesthetic, sentimental, yet
homely kind. This constant marriage of
creature comfort and emotion, of beer and
romance is its expression ; and music — yes,
I fear not to say it — music is its offspring.
By the side of their porcelain stove, and amid
the fumes of savoury stewed sausage, they
have ever dreamed of forests and of streams.
The huntsman (not in our sense !), the
poacher, and the wandering miller, as they
speak in the music of Weber, and still more
in the music of Schubert, have been for ever
their heroes ; the sound of jilger's horn ming-
ling evermore with the clatter and plash of
the mill in the world of Teutonic fancy ; which
world, as those divine songs truly remark,
" is green." And similarly, they have always
yearned towards a romantic past, " it beckons
them out of old legends." And I wonder
in what other country children have had sheets
of coloured knights (not soldiers) to cut out,
and the tower out of Schiller's " Robbers,"
with the old father being taken out of it,
for their pasteboard theatres, as I can vouch
249

The Enchanted Woods

for German children — at all events, alas ! of
forty years ago.

It is this homely love of romance, this
mixing up of what we priggish Anglo-Saxons
and Latins call higher and lower forms of
enjoyment, into one vague, permeating wonne
(I must be allowed that German word, so
soft, warm, comfortable, as compared with
our meagre and ascetic delight or rapture) ;
it is this spirit of roast veal in ruined castles,
and coffee and cinnamon cake in haunted forest
glades, which accounts for the Alpine land-
scapes and charming household details of
Diirer and the Little Masters ; accounts also
for the lovable side of rough, dogmatic old
Martin Luther ; for the most fascinating though
least Olympian parts of Faust ; and nowadays
for whatever is sane in the genius of Wagner.
But perhaps there is no one completer illustra-
tion of it than the first volume of Jung
Stilling's memoirs, which I happened to have
in my pocket that day at Ziegelhausen, and
which I opened at the ballad of the ghost of
the ruined castle, and again at the love-story
of the poor little niece of the " Christian
Widow."

250

Germany Once More

But to return to the German genius
for music, and its relation to Restaurations
and Kaffee-wirthschafts in romantic localities.
Nations differ essentially, not merely in what
they enjoy, but in their mode of taking
enjoyment. Now the Germans, as I have
said, enjoy themselves through several senses
at once, in a confused, suffused, permeating
manner which does away with definite images
and thoughts (and hence with literature and
the plastic arts as an adequate expression), but
accumulates a vast bulk of indefinable emotion.
Their feeling for the Rhine is typical of this.
Passing along it from Mainz to Koln, the
other day, it was borne in on me that the
power of this great wizard among rivers lies,
not in its beauty, for it is specially beautiful
neither in line nor in colour, but in its
pleasantness for the fancy : the peace and
prosperity of the smooth, flowing water cause-
way from the Alps to the Northern Ocean,
and of the wooded and vine-growing hills, of
rich, old-world towns and villages ; the know-
ledge also of its nixes, sprites and dragons, and
robber castles safe in picturesque ruins. You
cannot paint the Rhine, you cannot even

251

The Enchanted Woods

describe it, for picture or poem would leave
out half the items and the whole delicious con-
fusion of them. But you can set the Rhine to
music. And as she has done by the Rhine, so
Germany has done by all her deep, inexplicit
emotion ; making those indefinable moods of
hers, sensual and spiritual at once, melancholy
yet pleasant, into music complex and yet
perfectly fused, indefinable and soul-subduing
as they.

That evening, after returning home from
Ziegelhausen, I joined my friends on the
terrace of the Castle. The great ruined walls
and towers, which are (to the un-Teutonic eye)
decidedly ugly by daylight, loomed very grand
and mysterious among the big, sweet-scented
lime trees, the woods advancing to enfold them
from behind ; and in front, in the big gap
where you feel that the Rhine is, the town
lights made a fanciful glowworm network
below. Soldiers and students, and townsfolk
with all their children, were seated eating and
drinking under the trees, while the band played
Isolde's "Love-Death." And as we went
home in the darkness, still warm and scented
with resinous fir tree, we heard a chorus of
252

Germany Once More

men's voices, and saw swaying yellow lights
issue from the forest. The procession passed
us down the steep wooded road : burly shadows
with lanterns and big garlands, priests of the
dear goddess of German enjoyment.

-'5.

THE CARILLON

THE CARILLON

'■ I ""HERE had been a perfectly pure sunrise :
a line of low houses, a white lighthouse,
a piece of Holland, appearing in the light, and
disappearing again into the mists and waters.
Later, the lilac sea began to narrow into an
estuary ; or, rather, lines of coast, marsh,
villages, with little churches out of Flemish
pictures and avenues of toy-box little trees,
emerged out of the pale violet vapours, and
were absorbed back by them. Occasionally,
also, ships loomed, and yachts with white sails ;
and, much more frequently, fine big barges
with flowers and bird-cages and Dutch or
Dutch-looking names. At a bend, suddenly,
marsh and trees closer, and a seventeenth-
century gabled house, much like an old line-of-
battle ship. And at last, out of the depths of
the lavender, luminous haze, a belfry ; and
more ships, and dim wharves and houses, and

257 ii

The Enchanted Woods

another spire, immensely high, of twisted lace
work. Antwerp !

An Antwerp, alas ! considerably imaginary,
or one, at least, which, once on dry ground,
and despite the museums and old streets I
wearily trudged over, my imagination failed to
make properly real. Indeed, that imaginary
bygone Antwerp was most satisfactorily realized
when 1 went back to my inn and looked out of its
window ; oddly enough, a window on to the yard.

For, sitting there and looking across, I saw
steep roofs of lilac-grey, here and there daintily
accentuated by a new vermilion tile ; step
gables and high chimney-stacks, and, over an
almost vertically steep expanse of violet tile,
the fanciful flamboyant spiral of the cathedral
tower, the one the little masons are building up
behind St. Barbara in Van Eyck's lovely drawing.
And alongside of it an even more fantastic zinc
bulb tower on two storeys of Noah's Ark
window ; the dearest and most preposterous
of onion-shaped and scaled Teutonic pagodas,
such as are the sign-manual of the race from
the Danube to the Scheldt, from the Alps to
the French frontier. Round these two belfries,
set among the roofs and step gables, rose the

258

The Carillon

distant pinnacles of the cathedral apse ; a little
domestic turret, brick with white courses, which
Ruskin would have loved to draw ; and, madly
improbable, the converging spiders' webs and
white rosetted racks of the central telephone
office. All in a perfectly fiir blue autumn sky.

And the fantastic roof panorama took voice ;
the sharp slopes of delicate grey, the sharp
ridges of attic, the silvery bulb and the great
pale open-work corkscrew, began to sing and
speak. Every quarter of an hour a tinkle like
the tuning of a giant mandoline, or the prac-
tising of a fabulous triangle ; and every hour
and every half-hour a tunc, an old-world jig or
gavotte, shaken out falteringly, note clanking
against note, as on some ancient spinet built by
Rucker and magnified through dreams. It was
the Carillon ; and it gave me back that imaginary,
genuine Antwerp which had appeared and dis-
appeared among the morning mists upon the
river.

The carillon at Mechlin was even kinder to
the Genius Loci's faithful votary. There is a
dreary moment, well known and dreaded by
all of us who worship that most coy of all
divinities. A moment, in fact an hour, and
259

The Enchanted Woods

sometimes, alas ! more (a silver cart-wheel
being the usual token of this profanation,
this arrant simony), which stress of time, or
footsoreness, or dread of dislocation on a pave-
ment scorning bicycles, or mere lack of moral
courage, induces us, every now and then, to
spend in the cab of alien lands. One is
harrowed and mocked, even if the driver
consents to silence, by an intuition that all
the wrong streets are being taken and all the
right points of view rumbled over ; one would
fain direct, stop, even get out, but one cannot ;
the condition of spiritual aridity, of conscious
guilty estrangement from the Spirit of the
Locality, reduces one to mere vacillating craven
passiveness. It was thus with me at Mechlin.
I drove and drove, and cursed myself for having
got out at the station. A temporary liberation
from the cab did me no good, and the cathedral
— thin, liny Flemish-Gothic, relieved by Spanish
black-and-white mortuary allegory — in no way
helped to raise my spirits. Yet I loitered in
its emptiness, simply because that cab was
waiting at the front portal. When, hark ! —
something — was it sounds ? or wind ? I could

o

not understand at first. It seemed to vibrate
260

The Carillon

through the vaultings and along the pillars ;
and it became vague music, mysteriously
distant ; organs or double basses everywhere,
nowhere — Heaven knows where ! And then
I understood. It was the carillon ! Up
there ; high, high above the church, the
church's lofty cross-vaultings, and steep-pitched
roof; the carillon in the sky.

As fast as I decently could I reached a side
porch, the sound getting clearer and clearer as
I emerged from behind one heavy leathern
door after another. And outside, there it was !
The big, beautiful square tower, ever so high,
with the clock numbers like spiders' web upon
its fine stone lace work (Mechlin, of the right
material), was pouring out in all directions,
like the rooks which flew from its crannies, a
stream of bell music. Real music this time :
some complicated catch, almost a fugue, of
bygone days of ruffed and doublcted Flemish
composers, Goudimel, Josquin des Pres,OrIando
Lassus. So at least I thought, and chose to
think. Perfectly pure tones and in perfect
tune, but executed drowsily by some long
extinct band of strings, or great magical harp-
sichord, jangling divinely.
261

The Enchanted Woods

Under the carillon's magic I had found
Mechlin, and found my own soul. I did
not return to the cab, leaving driver and
horse to slumber at that front cathedral
door. The one on whose steps I was stand-
ing overlooked a little side-square, with in it
a quincunx of thin elms, their yellowing leaves
floating down on to the gravel, surrounding
a great, old-fashioned, vase-shaped lamp.
Opposite, half hidden, some quiet, gabled
houses of red brick ; and, as I said, the
cathedral tower above me, with the rooks
swarming round it. The sky had grown
faint grey, a few rain-drops began to fall,
and with them the day to close in ; children
also began to return from school in little bands.
1 walked up and down in that little square, till
the carillon music had ended, and the deep
tones of the bells — the real bells — mingled in
its closes. And then I seemed to recognize the
houses, streets, even the cobble pavements, of
Flemish seventeenth-century pictures, with that
particular crape of rainy northern twilight they
always have about them.

And I walked into that old world : quiet,
tortuous streets with gables and long convent
262

The Carillon

walls, and canals at low water, with barges and
a sail or two ; outlines of castellated buildings,
with funny turrets, over trees ; Madonnas at
every corner, and churches tucked away in
stealthy seventeenth-century Germanic fashion
(to please sick souls), down passages and behind
walls ; yes, and down a narrow, black lane, at
such a church apse, a great, sad, German-looking
Gethsemane, its big white figures shining mys-
teriously behind a grating. Moreover, as I
retraced my steps, near the little quincunx of
yellow elms, I found a discreet white house
with a brass plate, " Kleermaker voor Priesters "
— the dressmaker of priests ! It seemed to sum
it all up.

It was getting late, and I hastened back to
the cab which was patiently waiting, passing
through the Cathedral as if I had been there
the whole time, instead of wandering on foot
all over bygone Mechlin. As we crossed the
big square on the way back to the station I
heard for the last time, with a silly grateful
emotion, the distant melodious jangle and crash
of the carillon.

>63

THE CARDINAL'S VILLA

THE CARDINAL'S VILLA

T RECOGNIZED on the road from Viterbo
''■ to Bagnaia, and long before getting in sight
of the \'illa, that all this belonged to Rome.
One cannot but be struck with the singular
care displayed by the eternal players with living
symbols in the mise-en-scene for the long miracle
play — heroic, tragic, idyllic at the beginning,
and not without its Beggar s Opera side — called
the Story of Rome. No weary abrasions of
primoeval mountains into faint hillocks ; no
slow glacier grindings of valleys or leisurely
silting of seas or depositing of river soil ; but a
brand new set of scenery, merely for that single
drama of a few centuries, mere minutes in the
Gods' eyes : volcanic cones suddenly upheaved,
their fires still smouldering in the Tale of
Cacus ; lava streams instantly hardening into
ridges, and craters filling with unexpected lakes ;
waters gushing everywhere into triumphal
267

The Enchanted Woods

fountains, and the very soil looking beforehand
as if made up of charred cities and mouldered
human bones.

It was the consistence of the earth which told
me, even before the shapes of hills and houses,
that I was back on Roman territory ; that odd
light soil, lilac and friable like chemical manures,
and so unlike all honest garden mould, which
had puzzled and displeased me even in my
childhood. I recognized its characteristic dust,
shining grits, volcanic lapilli almost, as the
spring wind whirled it in my eyes on that road
to Bagnaia. The trees also, save the blossom-
ing orchards, manifested already the Roman
reluctance to grow up on the flat ; only a huge
solitary cypress, or ilex, or umbrella pine at
distances ; the world left to gigantic weeds and
rosemary and fennel and wallflower and waving
wild oats, bursting out everywhere from walls
and rocks. Walls and rocks, moreover, difficult
to tell from one another, and with that look
already of excavated tombs or hermits' grottoes.
And the abundance of waters ! The in-
numerable fountains of Viterbo ; and in the
hills surrounding it, rills and springs and minia-
ture Acqua Paolas gushing out everywhere.
268

The Cardinal's Villa

But does not Rome begin already with the first
volcanic hillocks at the southern gates of Siena ?
How districts repeat the same or similar
phrases, even like the songs of one composer !
This road from Viterbo to Bagnaia is what the
Via Flaminia outside Porta del Popolo must
once have been, running straight between
vignas flowering with cherry and peach, through
deep, bushy cuttings in the yellow tufo, and
with no sign of habitation save, at intervals,
fine seventeenth-century cdsifii^ with steps and
chapels, inscriptions and coats-of-arms, and
gates all leading to nowhere. Roman also in
the men in boots and green-lined coats loitering
along, and riding straight in their stirrups on
pack-horses. Then, at the end of this long,
empty, empty road, a viaduct, like that of
Lariccia done in small ; and beyond it a fortified
place, towered, black, with a great loggia'd
palace, gaunt, timed-stained, damp-eaten ; and
then, triumphant on the flank of the chestnut-
clad Cimino, the Villa Lante, tier upon tier,
terrace above terrace, rising with groves and
flights of steps cut out of the mountain above
this squalid feudal village.

One wonders what those cardinals can have
269

The Enchanted Woods

felt like, rolling in their coach or carried in their
mule litter, up to their place of delight through
such black and stinking villages, gathered like
dust-heaps below the villa gates. Perhaps that
was the natural adjunct, the sine qua non, not
merely the expression of how great part of their
wealth had been got ; and, to these magnificent
persons of rather thick-set than delicate asstheti-
cism, almost a desirable contrast. For they
were men of colossal, solid selfishness and far-
fetched grossness and vanity, robust of all their
appetites, intellectual as well as fleshly ; wholly
unsqueamish and able to digest unlimited good
fortune and glory of their own, and quite in-
capable of feeling the peas or stones or vermin
in other folks' bed so long as the rose-leaves were
smooth in their own great plumed and valanced
four-poster. Men, like this lo : Franc : Card :
Gambara, who has left himself thus in colossal
letters all over the villa of Bagnaia, whose
ostentation was so self-satisfied and quiet, as
to lose, like their huge escutcheons repeated
everywhere in stone or greenery, all vestige of
vulgarity.

The realization of such a type has become
impossible in our day. Our millionaires have
270

The Cardinal's Villa

no more notion how to do this thinji than our
architects how to make volutes and triumphal
arches, or our sculptors to model fountain gods.
The aesthetic forms of the future tend to a
certain moral decency. And the grasping, self-
assertive human being, and all that pertains to
him, will become, gradually (and very properly)
mean instead of magnificent.

Magnificent ! The full sense of that word,
of the knowledge of what that great Purple One
— porporato is the fitting Italian word — must
have been, sinks into 0!ie while lingering in
this wonderful place. The very work of time,
the overgrownness of the trees, the moss on
the staircase parapets, the lichen on the
fountains, the very flowers bursting out
between the blackened stones, seems merely
so much additional pomp, all things obeying
the whim of the great prelate who piled up the
gardens and carried down the waters, and bade
the groves be dense and shady. And after a little,
one is invaded by the personality, the rustling
grandeur of that Cardinal — lo : Franc : Gam-
bara, or whoever he may have been — thought-
lessly, mercilessly, pouring out the wealth
extorted from whole provinces of feudal labour
271

The Enchanted Woods

and countries full of superstition, in order to
make a place like this.

Strange possibilities seem to arise in one.
Methinks I knew that Cardinal. Years and
years ago they dressed me up in crimson silk
and diamonds, and I had a lip and a wig, and
was the master of such a villa. ... I might
have been that Cardinal. Perhaps we might
all have been ; that down-at-heel, dusty
American student trudging along the road
from Viterbo might have been. Perhaps, after
all, it was easy ! But having walked through
the grove beyond the terraces, looked over the
broken wall and longed to get out on the stony
paths among the leafless chestnut trees, up to
the crest, feathery, rosy, of Mount Cimino, I
felt also that I had walked out of such possi-
bilities, left lo : Franc : Card : Gambara, far
behind in the Past.

Coming back through the gardens, I met a
baby in white cloak and bonnet toddling in the
sunshine among the clipped hedges and the
fountains. And from the windows of one of
the two pavilions came the sound of laborious
childish strumming — a piano-lesson. Something
very different from what the cardinal, with his
272

The Cardinal's Villa

V^croncsc and Bonitazio bands of singers and
fiddlers, must have listened to as he sat at meat
between the ladies, and the poets, and the
learned men, and parti-coloured bullies of his
court. Only the children are here, at present,
said the gardener, with their governess. Cer-
tainly only children seem all right, nowadays,
in that place of bygone pomp and splendour,
among the ooze-bearded river gods and the
mossy winged heraldic dragons. They can
turn it all into plain, simple fairyland ; and it
is purified, redeemed, by being played with.

273

IN GASCONY

IN GASCONY

I.

TT gives me the impression, this Gascony,
with its sonorous names like battle-cries — •
Taillac, Layrac, AstafFort, Moirax, Miradoux,
Lectourc, Bonencontre, and La Montjoic (of
which anon) — it gives me the impression, more
than any country I know, of having had all its
past burnt and trodden down in never-ending
wars — wars of Albigenses, English, Armagnacs,
and Foix, wars of the Ligue and Henri IV., of
Richelieu and the Fronde ; all monuments, all
traditions, all social differences effaced into
remote and solitary undulations like those of
its old, old, worn-down hills. When, in a
desultory kind of way, the Convention (my
friends speak of it, in this uneventful land, as
if it had been last week) sent its Commissaire
to Auch and Lectoure, there remained to
guillotine only those cheerful and bony little
Cadets de Gascogne (and in Gascony every one
277

The Enchanted Woods

was a younger son, or stepson, of Fortune),
who, with nothing but their sword and their
Rosinante, had gone to enlist in Musketeers or
Gardes du Corps like the Great-Grandfather de
C. . . . and the immortal d'Artagnan. Their
castles are scarce distinguishable, save by thicker
walls and oubliettes, from the farms which have
not been castles ; and the bearers of their
names now live year in, year out, in the little
white hastides behind the yellowing elms of the
hilltops, between the seigneurial dovecot and
the horsepond, leaving to parvenus almost
as antiquated as themselves, the notary, the
receveury the retired wine-merchants, those
pathetic little hotels hidden among the plane
trees and the fruit walls, which everywhere
replace the defences of these once warlike
Gascon places.

But this destruction of all more obvious
traces of any particular past seems merely to
make this country the property of a vague
" not to-day." Gascony has, more than any
part of France I know, a kind of threadbare
distinction, an ancien regime tattered grace. One
remembers that it was here, near the Garonne,
that Tristram Shandy dismounted his mule
278

In Gascony

and joined in the dance (with the coquettish
lady of the torn placket-hole), singing to the
tambourine, like the rustics in Jasmin's poems,
"Viva la joya, fidon la tristeza " — or whatever
is the correct Gascon therefor. One is sur-
prised on climbing into these warlike-looking
hill towns and villages (the pigeon-houses and
deserted windmills doing military service) to
find the iron cross at the entrance stacked
round with flowers in tubs and pipkins, the
black streets set at intervals with geraniums
and coral trees among the refuse heaps, and
their narrow squalor festooned with vines and
scarlet-runners, as if in chronic festivity. There
are coopers at work mending vats and barrels,
whose last year's dregs stain the black gutters
purple and fill the place with cheertul sour-
sweet smell. There are little cafes under the
plates which have replaced the walls and
towers ; and at La Montjoie, in the country
of the Armagnacs, there is even a renowned
patisserie. . . .

Its renown was so great that a treat there

was the chief inducement held out by my

Gascon friend to the little infantry captain

and myself ; though, to be sure, we were also

279

The Enchanted Woods

to see in the ancient church of the place a
genuine finger of St. Louis, preserved in wine.
The church was unluckily closed for repairs,
and the finger of St. Louis not on view ; but
that was a minor disappointment only to my
hospitable friend after the two hours' drive he
had brought us. How, as Sterne would have
said, he did " diable " and ** mais sapristi " over
that cake-shop ! It was there, indeed, with
white and rose oleanders at the door, and a
large inscription, ^^A la Source des Douceurs^
But on most diligent search it was found to
contain only a plateful of stale sugar biscuits,
defying the tooth of time and man, a bottle of
sticky brown syrup, and a large model of the
church — all made of sugar, but not intended to
be eaten. They only baked once a week, they
replied, and when certain distinguished clients
sent an order. And they nodded in the
direction of the little pavilions, pepper-pot-
roofed and veiled in creepers, on the former
ramparts. . . . My poor host went away
apologetic, furious, and crestfallen. But I,
despite the taste for cakes which France
awakens (with a tendency to politeness and
eloquence) in my soul — I would not have given
280

In Gascony

that little shop, with its sugar church, that
empty " Source des Douceurs^' for all the cakes in
Christendom. They bake cakes only once a
week at La Montjoie ; and what else have they
done there, 1 wonder (besides yearly processions
with the finger of St. Louis in wine), since
Richelieu dismantled it ? And that clarion
name, La Montjoie !

II

The only monuments of this empty country,
so hardly used by history, and where history
has left so little trace, arc the pigeon-houses
remaining over from feudal times, not merely
as convenience, but as a mark of privilege, the
modern peasant building them because the
seigneur built them in his grandfather's child-
hood ; they make the shabby farmhouses seem
the abode of nobles. As it is, they are the
accent, the romance, in this singularly accent-
less and unromantic country : square isolated
towers, with pointed slate caps, or veritable
columbaria, making one dream of tombs along
Roman ways. They rise up everywhere, and

28 I

The Enchanted Woods

add an odd suggestiveness to this sweet land-
scape, its long low lines against the cloudy,
sunny sky, its patchwork of pale, faded colours :
thin grass, lilac aftermath and cinnamon stubble,
all harmonized like the crumpled folds of some
piece of threadbare brocade worn by centuries
of poverty.

These two days past 1 have been watching
the pigeons, going in and out of a very beautiful
dovecot alongside an old farm near Parays.
Pigeons of all colours, lilac, cinnamon and grey,
like the autumnal country, puffing themselves
out, purfling and trying their wings on the
imbricated roof, broken by odd tiny attics.
They seemed the only living creatures about
the place ; the others no doubt in the fields
ploughing and sowing. And under the
hedge, during that first visit, I found a poor
violet pigeon, sick or disabled, motionless,
passive, letting me take him in my hand, and
barely ruffling his feathers with vexation.
Coming back the same way a little later, I
found the pigeon dying : his poor little eyes
veiled and his wings spread on the grass, faintly
beating it. And this morning, returning to see
that charming dovecot, I could see under the
282

In Gascony

hedge hard by it only one little fluff of tender
breast-feather.

The companions of the dead pigeon, mis-
chievous creatures, were meanwhile spending
their morning in a freshly ploughed and sowed
field, some hundreds of them together. Look-
ing at their greedy motions, one understands
what the droit de colomhicr meant in feudal days
to the peasant at whose expense the noble kept
these gluttonous beauties. A shout from afar
(or is it a hawk whom I fail to notice }\ and
they rise up, opening like a fan in the air.
But only to flutter down again on the same
ploughed field, a few yards ofi\,

There was something exasperating in the
thought of the sower's wasted trouble, more
than his wasted seed. And while I felt inclined
to shout, or throw stones at the pigeons, I have
been pleasantly amused at the turkeys which,
every now and then, have been having a grand
time in the big fig-tree in front of my window.
Flocks of turkeys innumerable, the real pos-
sessors of this depopulated country, of these
freshly ploughed hillsides, these yellowing vine-
yards already swept by the autumn winds. The
fig-tree stands in a bit of rough ground, fragrant
283

The Enchanted Woods

with dry peppermint. They leap up into its
great branches with rustle of their watered silk
skirts, much shrill talk, and the awkward dignity
of dowagers.

The smaller birds waited for the opportunity
of a rainy day ; and very quietly, almost in-
visible among the big dripping leaves, had, I
imagine, much more of a real meal ; though
they were as noiseless, save for a faint whistle
now and then, as the birds carved among the
stone leafage of a church porch.

Birds seem in their rights these days of
north wind and fitful sunshine on these bleak,
open slopes, where the yellow quinces and the
medlars stand out of the hedges against the
southern blue of the sky.

Ill

Ever since reading Loti's book about his
childhood, I had been haunted by fragrant,
fugitive visions of plums drying on mats in
the sunshine. And one of my first thoughts
on coming last year to Gascony was that I
should see all that ; for Agen prunes are among
the few things, like Dr. Johnson's wall-fruit,
284

In Gascony

of which, ill imagination at least, I had never
had my fill. At last, yesterday, at the house

of MM. deL , I had it.

The prunes were lying in a high rooni in a
wooden outhouse. Three great heaps of them
— nay, rather lakes (for there was a look of
depth in their smooth, dimpled, shining black-
ness)— on the cleanly swept wooden floor ;
rakes and baskets and spades and shovels, all
those rustic things whose disorder is orderly
and venerable, carefully banished into corners
away from the prunes' solemn neighbourhood.
The presence of the prunes had been borne in
on us already at the foot of the wooden stairs,
by an ineffable fragrance of ripeness, of incense,
with just a delicious reminiscence of varnish,
bringing beloved visions of Noah's arks and
fir-trees out of toy boxes. Indeed, once realized,
that presence seemed to permeate all things
and follow one all over the establishment. We
were shown the hurdles on which the plums
are first dried in the sun ; then the smaller
triangular trays, like sieves of wattle, on which
they are put into the ovens. Rows of ovens,
with pleasant litter of fuel, oak and vine-stump,
alongside ! Also, in the little, dried-up orchard,
285

The Enchanted Woods

among the skeletons of fennel and caraway, and
the parched vines laden with yellow grapes
already halfway to raisins, the little, stiff plum-
trees, pretty well bare and pathetically shabby.

There was a solitary big oak in that orchard,
and in its thin shade a tiny tank with a thin
runnel of water hard by the lavender-bushes.
And in this poor, kindly, scorched country,
that oak and that runnel took on a sort of oasis
and almost sacred character, making one believe
in the coolness and freshness they symbolized
rather than brought, and suggesting, as my
dear Gascon friend remarked, grateful statues
to gods. A country, this Gascony (one felt in
that orchard) kindly, sweet, infinitely humble ;
and so delectable, like its shrivelled prunes.

For other countries there is the luxuriance of
grapes, the splendour of garlanded apple trees,
the richness of grass and flowers distilling milk
and honey ; the classic solemnity of olives and
the fairy-story marvels (oh, the gardens crossed
by the railway near Malaga !) of oranges and
lemons. But Gascony has the modest, shrivelled,
sweet and delicately scented prune ; ripened
not even entirely in the sunshine, but helped
by those mild, friendly ovens.
286

In Gascony

We were guided through all this faded
sweetness by two dear old men ; bachelors,
brothers, having lived, one felt, since time
immemorial, together all alone in that low, flat,
white house hidden among farm buildings and
big yellowing horse-chestnuts. Life seemed to
have shrivelled and shrunk away from them,
from their half-audible voices and little wizen
faces, leaving only very geiitle, tender souls,
almost ghosts, gliding along. Ccs messieurs
oflfered us biscuits and champagne, which
flooded the square-cut tumblers ; but they
themselves partook, ghost-like, of nothing ;
only clicking glasses over faint little toasts.

In their drawing-room, presiding over the
faded furniture and the piles and piles of cigar
and envelope boxes (emptied, one felt sure,
through half a century), my friend pointed out
to me, among the family portraits, a singular
and very fitting personality. An old woman,
quite old, old — of the eighteenth century, grey-
haired, in a grey flowered wrapper, and a thin
silvery scarf wound round her head, turban-
like ; with such a pair of living, burning eyes,
such thin, yearning, ironical lips in her wrinkled
little face, grey also. It seems absurd to harp
287

The Enchanted Woods

upon her greyness. But the whole picture was
grey, misty ; and therein lay its harmony and
charm ; as if you should have put a handful of
faded old letters in the fire, and their ashes,
their little puff of smoke, have gathered them-
selves (last embers helping) into a vivid, pathetic,
ironical human face.

I could not take my eyes off her ; or, rather,
she did not let me go. Perhaps it was partly
due to the contrast with the ghostiness of these
faded, frail old men gliding and whispering
about in the old house and on the terrace,
where the horse-chestnuts were already shed-
ding their leaves, and great geraniums, run
to wood, made unexpected vermilion spots
against the mildewed whitewash ; their vivid-
ness making the musty, cobwebby peacefulness
of that secluded place and of those gentle living
ghosts only more poignant.

The sun was setting as we came away from
the home of the prunes ; very pale gold and
rosy washes lying along the low, blunt hill out-
lines, and reflected, among the willows, in the
slow, muddy river. Dusk rose from the con-
cave fields, with the first song of the crickets,
as we neared home. Dusk not cool and tasting

In Gascony

of greenness as in other southern countries, but
warm as of a drying-oven, and of deep, reddish
darkness, solemn yet kindly. Is it my mood
at present ? But this country of Gascony,
inconspicuous almost to homeliness, with its
poor litde burnt detail, its blunted outlines and
humble refusal of all swelling or uprisint^ lines,
has got a power, methinks, over the heart,
intimate and in its humility very solemn ; a
purely spiritual dignity and grace. The Genius
Loci of these parts must be, and is, a human
soul.

289

ERA GIA L'ORA.

ERA GIA L'ORA.

T^EFEXD us from the sentimental ups and
downs of travel, the caprice and moodiness
ot the uprooted heart of the wayfarer. He Is,
take it all round, the least cheerful person in
the world, for he Is no longer disciplined into
acquiescence with fate by those unchanged sur-
roundings which look down on him with the
familiar self-satisfaction of his grandparents'
portraits. In his vague, irresponsible, wholly
individual state, he becomes effeminate of soul,
subject, like children, to gusts of melancholy.
And the exhilaration of the first morning hours
is compensated by those melting moods at
sunset, already noticed by Dante ; when, in a
strange place, a bell (or, in more modern times,
a barrel-organ or accordion) can become the
voice of all dying things and tell of ten thousand
partings. Nor is the homesickness of travel
merely for home ; far from our allotted corner

293

The Enchanted Woods

we strike roots, or put out tendrils with
incredible rapidity, clinging, regretting, just in
proportion as acquaintance has been short. I
am not alluding to human friendships or loves,
though there seems some truth in the notion
of amours de voyage. As regard places, how-
ever, the traveller, although he may be a perfect
Don Juan, is apt to be so in the oddest way,
fickle to the one he has ardently sought, and
longing for what he leaves behind. Have we
not, all of us, cast homesick eyes on the
receding train which has just brought us from
that place (surely we were not serious in calling
it a hole !) which we chafed at not leaving
earlier this very morning ? How familiar and
kindly the thought thereof has already become,
it and its inn, its dear dull streets there some-
where behind that range of hills ! And as to
this other place, beckoning foolishly with towers
and steeples, what can it ever be to us, and
why have we ordered our letters to be sent to
its post-office? What a sweet half-hour that
was, last night, watching the sky redden behind
the lime-trees of the promenade while the
bugles rang the Rappel ; and how intimate, how
peaceful was that total absence of all view,
294

Era Gia L'ora . . .

which we pretended to (or did we rcully r)
grumble at !

" There where I am not, there is happiness,"
sings the Wayfarer of Schubert. And never,
surely, did verse and voice unite in a more
correct account of the frail unreasonableness of
the traveller's heart.

During that hour outside the outermost wall
of Carcassonne, what had touched me infinitely
more than all its show of battlements and
towers was the recognition that here, close at
hand at last, was the real South. The little
town below, with its boulevards of great plane-
trees and its black-guttered streets and big
buttressed and turreted churches (bastards, it
seemed to me, of the strange church of Albi),
was still distinctly French. But on the rough
grass and the flowering thyme under the citadel
walls, with their heaps of rubbish and brickbats,
the South seemed somehow at hand. After
days of ceaseless rain in that French and still
so Northern corner of Gascony which I have
just left, here was the radiance of a Southern
autumn, a sky against which the pepper-pot
towers looked absurdly incongruous ; against
which, rightfully, rose in the distance a great
295

The Enchanted Woods

chain of peaks gleaming with snow — the
Pyrenees.

Soon after Carcassonne the hills also changed
character. I had guessed it, seeing them
from those pepper-pot towers, their pure, pale
luminousness in the distance, and their white
scars. They were no longer the earthly coteaux
of France, but rock and rock-grown herb, grey,
sun-scorched. And suddenly, looking up from
my book as the train sped along between Car-
cassonne and Narbonne, I saw, among the red
and tawny vines, on a stony hillside, the first
olives.

My heart leaped at that sight ; it meant the
South. How I had longed for it during those
weeks in France, expecting to come upon it at
every additional day's end, noting with eager
eyes every little detail which seemed to tell
of its nearness : the first fig-trees, the thin
aftermath, burnt lilac and russet, the vines
hung loose upon the black house-fronts. At
Toulouse, on the first brilliant chilly autumn
morning, it had delighted me to come upon the
market, spread out before the long Louis XV.
building of the Capitoky grapes, capsicums,
melons, all manner of charming coloured beans
296

Era Gia L'ora . . .

in sieves, and bi^ mushrooms smcllino- of the
mountains ; and that delight had meant a
thought of similar markets at Verona and at
Siena — the thought of the South. It was
the South that I had seemed to clutch in those
fields outside Albi, with the handful of dry,
lilac-flowered peppermint. . . . Clutch only to
be disappointed. The further I went the more
France remained France. And never more,
almost, than in that western corner by the
Garonne ; the Garonne flowing between French
earthy cbteaux, and French pepper-pot turrets,
and vineyards clipped short upon sticks, French
fashion. " Where," I had always amused my
friends by asking, " where does the South — the
real South — really begin } " And added, when
they protested " But this is the South," " What
I mean is. Where doesn't it look like the rest of
France any longer .'' Where shall I see the first
olives .'' "

And here, on those stony little hills beyond
Carcassonne, were the first olives.

That was in the morning ; the morning, when
the traveller's heart is flushed with the present
and the future, and thinks, confidingly, that it
loves, that it will love, its goal.

297

The Enchanted Woods

In the evening I had to wait an hour at
Cette. The little seaport is beautifully situated
with its back on a great salt lake, which you
approach among vineyards encroached upon by
purple sea marsh and tamarisk-grown lanes.
You leave behind, inland, a series of little
towns with names to conjure with : Narbonne,
Beziers, Agde — Agde-la-Noire, as the history
books call it, a great black fortified church pro-
jecting above its trees into the evening sky.
Finding I had that hour at Cette, I took a cab,
drove along the wharves, and walked the length
of the pier. The sea was perfectly calm, a blue
lake ; the white mole, the white wharves and
lighthouses projecting into it, the harbour
lights just appearing orange in the twilight.
Nets were drying all along, and the place was
full of sea smell. A big boat was going out
between the lighthouses, going South, to Italy
perhaps, like me, for this sea was the Mediter-
ranean. France, and those days in that western
corner in Gascony, was behind me. . . . That
delicate and unobtrusive empty country, with
its endless coteaux and shallow green valleys,
how far it seemed, how far, far out of all my
tracks. . . . The sadness of distance and change
298

Era Gia L'ora . . .

of place ! The sadness of this perpetual
breaklng-off, this leaving of life's phrase un-
finished. These friends — how many, many
have I had such ! Seen, barely known, and
then left ; the secure steadiness, the right
maturity of feelings interrupted, denied.
Distance, difference of place and climate, things
which put such zest, such poetry into life ; but
also, at times, such sadness. . . . When I
turned at the end of the pier the sun had set
behind the town, its rocky hill ; and lights
were beginning to make orange dots in the
faint lilac of evening. Great torn feathers of
crimson and black were floating in the west,
whence I had come. And by the time I had
retraced the length of the long white pier that
brief Southern twilight was over. I got back
into the train, and was borne away farther
and farther from that westernmost corner of
France — into the South, the South which 1 had
longed for.

299

ALL SOULS' DAY AT VENICE

ALL SOULS' DAY AT VENICE

TT being All Souls' Day, we idle folk have
-*■ been to do the cemetery. . . .

They had put a bridge of boats from the
northermost quay of Venice to the cemetery
island. A dense crowd, coming and going
across it, black over the black anchored barges,
each two with their yard of pale water between
their tarred hulls. And, as we draw near, as
we go beneath, the seeming silence turns into a
murmur, a shuffle, and a rumble.

For this one day in all the year the cemetery
island is bridged on to the islands of the living.
This is no mere coincidence, but a real symbol.

The cloisters and the gardens arc full as for
a fair, crowds coming and going, buying tapers,
lighting them at the glittering waxlights before
the chapel, bringing a few flowers ; and the
smell of trodden sods and drenched, bruised
chrysanthemums mingles, funereal, with the

303

The Enchanted Woods

stifle of all these poor, down-at-heel, recently
drenched, unwashed live folk in the warm,
moist air. A woebegone population, as that of
Southern countries is apt to grow at the first
touch of winter ; the lack of food and comfort,
the fecklessness and boredom, the blearness of
scrofulous children, the terrible draggletailedness
of pregnant women, the appalling misery of
crones and old men, all becoming apparent even
as the hidden stains and stenches come out in
bad weather on these canals. Another thinp: is
also more evident than it would be were the
weather fine — that the gondola company have
come some other time, and that only the poor,
those who have no black clothes for such
occasions, have trudged across that gratis-given
bridge of boats ; and are now tramping, un-
hindered by family piety, over the vaults of
Grimanis, Giustinianis, Valmaranas, and the
rich shopkeepers endowed with allegoric virtues
and mourned by long gilt lists of relations.

But all this squalor is oddly solemn. And
the presence of work-a-day clothes, of babies
carried, and children dragged along ; nay, the
very provisions unpacked and consumed among
the graves, brings home the importance and
304

All Souls' Day at Venice

universality of this yearly meeting of the dead
and the living. Some of the great squares
enclosed by cloisters are so crowded, the
draggled black-bead garlands on high are so
surrounded by moving, stooping, sitting figures,
by people grubbing up weeds or arranging their
poor flowers, that the tangle of purple and
black things aloft, the trampled grass and the
jostling crowd, give the impression of some
queer vintage scene or hop-picking ; the black
lantern or garland-bearing poles, bent or even
wrenched out of the earth, completing the
ironical likeness.

Part of the crowd are people merely doing
vague honour to vague dead, whose little
numbered headstones have perhaps been long
pulled out ; their bones, years ago, thrown behind
the gate marked " Ossuarlo," and their brief
resting-place given to others ; or gaping, a long
trench of freshly turned earth, in readiness for
those still of this life. These multitudes of
vague mourners tramp round the burial squares,
looking about, stopping here and there, subdued
by mere general contact with the fact of death.

But the real mourners fill the squares them-
selves, and attend to their own business.
305 X

The Enchanted Woods

Some are doing their year's gardening, weeding,
as I have said, or dividing and replanting iris
bulbs or arranging cut flowers in patterns. In
one place a youth, sallow, and with a torn
sleeve, was intently making a most elaborate
bed, beautifully composed, of various coloured
chrysanthemums, sticking the flowers in devices,
after driving in four pegs to separate his grave
from other ones, and carefully enclosing it with
four black tapes. When he had finished he
took the remaining flowers (flowers in Venice
are nearly always bought, grown on the main-
land or the outlying islands), made them into
four tidy bushes, colour by colour, and fastened
one carefully to each of the four little posts he
had rammed in. He had all but finished when
we arrived ; and must have spent most of his
afternoon in such elaborate business. And
when we and the other people were beginning
to go away he was still perfecting it. On the
headstone — that is to say, the little stone cube
bearing the number of that pauper's temporary
grave — was a woman's name and the date,
1890. Thirteen years ago ; and the lad could
by no means have been more than two- or
three-and-twenty ! Was it filial piety through
306

All Souls' Dav at Venice

all those boyish years ; or largely a certain
artistic inspiration, a skilful artisan's or gardener's
wish tor an elaborate and tidy job, some form
of pride almost unmixed with tenderer feeling ?
Whatever the explanation, this youth's little
funereal garden of cut flowers represents the
great unselfish impulses which, whatever their
pretext, produce the immortal things — thought,
art ; and which are honourably linked to the
passionate striving to baffle death which comes
with death's earnest recognition.

In other parts of the cemetery little gardens
were being made ; and, more touching even, the
little glazed lanterns, smelling of hot tin, were
being kept replenished by watchful mourners,
bottle ot oil in hand. But there were less
active yet more impressive ways of honouring
the dead : people kneeling for an indefinite
time before those little numbered cubes of stone,
or sitting on the ground alongside. Several old
women thus — squatting, not praying, but just
staying there. Some had brought scraps of
food ; and one was taking snuff out of a bit
of paper ; all of them keeping the dead one
company, staring before them into space and
time. At one poor grave there was a group of

307

The Enchanted Woods

four, one at each corner : an old woman, a
younger one, a man and a sickly child ; all silent,
blurred-looking. Surely for these poor folk
there is a reality, if only a negative one, in this
suspending of the labour, cares, the empty
grind of life ; and their hour of watching by
the dead may be, in some way deeper than
words can say, an hour of communing with the
eternities.

While thus the cemetery was given up to
the living and to the long dead ; the scarcely
dead, the real dead, were arriving here and there
with the real mourners. I noted a mound of
fresh earth, with the ritual trowel sticking in it,
a couple of surpliced and shaven Franciscans
reciting the prayers to a few blear, red-eyed
people (a nun among them) ; all these new-
comers and their ministering clergy seeming a
little scared by intruding their own dead man
or woman into this great public feast of those
who have long passed beyond. And the crowd,
on its side, looked surprised at this new and
definite reality of loss in the midst of its vaguer
mournings ; this man or woman, only just
dead, carried in among those shadowy memories.

Very touching also were the little framed
-.08

All Souls' Day at Venice

photographs, clean and evidently taken off
some poor table or wall, and hung on the cross
for the afternoon ; the dead pauper having his
effigy also on his grave, like the rich man
among his marble, if only for those few hours.
As we got back into the gondola the crowd
was streaming only one way along the black
bridge ; away from the cemetery, back into
life.

309

ET IN ARCADIA .

ET IN ARCADIA . . .

'np*'HE snow in the Apennines had brought
-*■ cold, sunny weather, and there was an
austere alacrity about all things. 1 followed
my dogs up the stony hillside with that little
breathlessness which is uncomfortable and yet
so pleasant to feel. Suddenly, at a turning,
there came the smell, very sweet and peculiar,
of burning olive twigs; and with it, to my soul,
a pang and a vision of Sicily, Greece— the real
South which I shall never go to.

Such homesickness for places I have never
been to, is not uncommon with me at this time
of year, and on days like this one ; making me
aware, unexpectedly, of fancied resemblances, and
giving to details of the familiar Tuscan land-
scape a foreign significance and the poignancy
of the rarely seen. The South ! something
exclaims within me. And I have vague re-
collections of the Odyssey or of Theocritus.

The Enchanted Woods

The thing which sets this mood a-going may
be a wall, on which one sits, looking down
on to green under olives (and the first bird
of this year is probably singing among them),
with a gnarled creeping rose, or an orange-tree
against a house which seems whiter than usual.
The place has become the sample, the beginning,
so to speak, of another part of the world. The
sea must be at the end of that stony little gorge
through which the brook leaps from pool to
pool of beryl green ; the sea, and no longer
the misty plain, down there between the rocks,
beyond the leafless poplars and the sharp reeds :
the Mediterranean. And on it my thoughts
take ship for those places where I shall never
go — for the South, for Antiquity !

It always happens at this season. Perhaps it
is the scant, delicate detail revealing finer lines,
which thus turns corners of Tuscany into an
imaginary Hellas. Or perhaps the mere sunny
austerity of these rocky sere places, the twitter
of birds telling of renewed life, suggesting what,
to us, seem the homes of the world's happy
youth. Be this as it may, the feeling, almost
the illusion, is there : as yesterday, for instance,
when the stony horn of the Fiesole hill, all
314

Et in Arcadia . . .

burrowed with quarries, became suddenly I
know not what Grecian site, and the sheep
among the thin olives were browsing on the
walls of some Homeric city.

Yet in the pang which came with that sudden
whiff" of burning olive there was, undoubtedly,
also envy. I happened to know that certain
friends were setting out southwards, by Terra-
cina, the Promontory of Circe (which I have
only watched across the sea, veiling and un-
veiling), to Greater Greece and Sicily. And
other friends, doubtless, are setting their sails
for Syria, for archipelagoes where marble
goddesses, Melian Aphrodite and Demeter of
Gnidos, once lay buried under myrtles ; and
for the coasts (if it have any !) of the romantic
little country where life was once so sweet
that tombstones boasted — "and I, too, in
Arcadia. ..."

The older I grow, and the more philosophi-
cally contented with my lot, the greater my
aversion to such cheap forms of consolation as
make light of the good things which are beyond
our reach : philosophy for foxes, sly beasts, and
apt to pick up random cheeses, but of whom
j^sop has not very many chivalrous traits to

The Enchanted Woods

tell ! Apart from this last consideration, it is
borne in upon me more and more, that we
should be respectful towards our own desires,
and handle our capacity for wanting very
gingerly. They are, believe me, treasures of
the soul, and multiply its riches. This is not
the view taken by moralists in high places —
Epictetus or Buddha, for instance, or Tolstoi.
But I incline to think that when these preach
the snuffing-out of our desires, they are led
astray by the thought of the kind of persons
who are for ever accumulating properties and
multiplying opportunities of enjoyment. Now,
my contention is that this happens, and so
universally, just because the people in question
— the covetous, the grossly grasping or far-
fetching pleasure-seekers — are rather lacking in
real desires than overstocked with them. They
really do not want anything very keenly, and
that is why, like those who lose their appetite
for food, they always want something new —
want, in fact, for the mere sake of wanting ;
their greed, like most moral evils, being a
monster of that chimsera tribe classified by
Rabelais as ^^ hombinans in vacuoy Whereas
your genuine desires, sprung from the very
316

Et in Arcadia . . .

marrow of" the individual constitution, pounce
on their fitting objects with unerring aim, and
never let go of them till every scrap and vestige
is enjoyed. And then return and find un-
guessed crumbs ; and once more, and again
and again — an endless feast, you might almost
imagine, off nothing. It was the love of
Anthony, believe mc, made Cleopatra, when
already a grandmother, such that age could not
wither her, nor custom stale her infinite variety.
Moreover, and this is even more important
and worthy of the consideration of moralists,
desire, or let us call it less pompously, the power
of wantingy is also the power of creating. " If
you do not want a yellow robe, a mat to lie
upon, or a small box of inlaid work in which to
keep betel nuts," says an eminent Buddhist
divine (I am quoting from memory), "you
evidently do not set about making any of these
sources of delusion, nor making other ones
wherewithal to barter them ; but you recline
in the shade of the tree of superior wisdom, or
hang by its branches head downwards in abso-
lutely unified contemplation of nothing in
particular, and with a most genuine foretaste
of annihilation."

317

The Enchanted Woods

And so, if I did not want — it is the humble
essayist and votary of the Genius Loci speaking
at present — if I did not want the South, Sicily,
Greece, Arcadia, it is probable I should not
have felt that little stab of envy and sadness
when the smell of burning olive-wood met me
on my hillside. But it is certain also that
I should not have made those places for myself,
extracted and built them up out of this Tuscany
lying at my hand. There would have been
only one South, one Sicily, Greece, or Arcadia.
Now there are two. . . .

Nor is it places only of which we thus make,
I will not say duplicates, but rather, in many
instances, revised, perfected copies. Our
friends, our loves are similarly dealt with ;
and, In so far as we are of value to any one,
ourselves also. The Soul's keen-eyed desires
seek out whatever flakes of ivory and crumbs
of gold exist in living realities ; and, casting
forth the clay (the clay, alas ! of more than the
mere feet), furnish the precious stuff which lacks ;
and in this manner frame the images enshrined
in our hearts. And in our hearts those idols we
have made become, perhaps, patron saints, gods,
by dint of sheer reverent service done them.

318

Et in Arcadia . . .

Those simulacra — who knows ? — shape into
their own resemblance their poor living
originals, abashed, divinely strengthened by
their recognition. If we are worth our salt,
we have all made some one, been made by
some one, a little less undeserving of such
gratuitously given faith and love.

Dreams, all this. . . . Perhaps. And we
dreamers of dreams have, now and then, rough
awakenings. But we set to dreaming again ;
and our dreams are more continuous, more
tender, nobler — and, let me say, more potent
and more fertile, than many folks' waking
experience. For life is but the interchange of
what we want and what we have, the ever
richer give-and-take of reality and dreams.

To return to the hillside behind my house,
going up which that whiff of olive smoke met
me. Half-way up, and well inside it, there is
a hidden ravine, stony, wild, and strangely
remote, which bears for me a secret name. It
is squeezed to a mere brook's trough by the
great quarried rocks, with their thin scrub of
myrtle and wild lavender, and, on the other
side, by sloping olive-yards and oak-woods, at
this season sere and of palest rosy copper. The

319

The Enchanted Woods

stream, translucent, winds in the shallows,
twists between bushes and brakes of reeds like
pennoned lances ; and, at short intervals, leaps
down a succession of little natural weirs, making
pools, each varying in shape of rocky basin
and depth of beryl green, and in the fancy of
the falling water, like hair of different nymphs,
combed into smooth masses or twisting in little
wisps or curls. Black ilex branches hang, long
and loose like wreaths, across ; while, at dis-
tances, and where the stream is shallow, there
rises a sheaf of sapling bays, slender and
straight and sharp-leaved against the luminous
rift of winter sky. Thanks to the stream's
draught and the stony wildness of the hillside,
the air has somewhat of the taste of real
mountains ; and the bleating of unseen sheep,
the faint click from the quarries above, put a
sense of remoteness, stiller than silence, about
the water's voice and the first twitter of birds.

The ravine has, I have just said, for me
a secret name. This is not quite true ; or at
least the truth is far less definite. I do not
call^ I feel^ the place, Arcadia. Here, not an
hour's walk from my home, it is, and at the
same time tantalizingly, enchantingly, is not —
320

Et in Arcadia . . .

Greece, Sicily, the South of the Odyssey and
Theocritus. The South I shall never go to.

For the humble Genius Lociy even like the
great divinities of Olympus, is but an intangible
idol fashioned out of what we have and of
what we want.

THE END

Br THE SAME URITER

HORTUS VITAE;

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THE LIFE OF
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VINGENZO FOPPA of BRESCIA

FOUNDER OF THE LOMBARD SCHOOL: HIS
LIFE AND WORK. By Constance Jocelyn Ffoulkes
and Monsigfnor RODOLFO Maiocchi, D.D., Rector of
The Collegio Borromeo, Pavia. Based on research in
the Archives of Milan, Pavia, Brescia, and Genoa, and
on the study of all his known works. With nearly loo
Illustrations, 15 in Photog'ravure, and about 100 Docu-
ments. Demy 4to. Five Guineas net. Limited to 300
copies for sale in England and America.

No complete life of Vincenzo Foppa, one of the greatest of the
North Italian Masters, has ever been written. He was regarded
by some of his contemporaries as unrivalled in his art, and his
right to be considered the head and founder of the Lombard
School is undoubted. His influence was powerful and far-
reaching ; in the Milanese district it was practically dominant for
over a quarter of a centurj-, until the coming of Leonardo da Vinci.
The authors have unearthed a large amount of new material
relating to Foppa, one of the most interesting facts brought to
light being that he lived for twenty-three years longer than was
formerly supposed. The illustrations include several pictures by
Foppa hitherto unknown in the history of art, and others which
have never before been published, as well as reproductions of
every existing work by the master at present known.

MEMOIRS OF THE DUKES OF
URBINO

Illustrating the Arms, Art and Literature of Italy from
1440 to 1630. By James Dennistoun of Dennistoun. A
New Edition edited by Edward Hutton, with upwards
of 100 Illustrations. Demy 8vo., 3 vols. Price 42s net ;
postage IS. extra.

For many years this great book has been out of print, although
it still remains the chief authority upon the Duchy of Urbino from
the beginning of the fifteenth century. The Court of Urbino was
perhaps the most splendid and cultured in Italy, and Duke
Federigo one of the greatest soldiers of his time. Mr. Hutton
has carefully edited the whole work, leaving the text substantially
the same, but adding a large number of notes, comments and
references. Every sort of work has been laid under contribution
to illustrate the text and biograpliies have been supplied on many
subjects. The book acquires a new value on account of the mass
of illustrations which it now contains, thus adding a pictorial
comment to an historical and critical one.

IN A TUSCAN GARDEN

With Numerous Illustrations.
Crown 8vo. $s. net.

Times. — *' The book is brightly written, and the author's know-
lecljje of Itahan life, or rather of the life of a foreigner in Italy,
is remarkably full ; moreover she has a sharp eye for the follies of
her countrymen, and expxjses them with tartness that is amusing
enough."

M'esiminsUr Gazette. — " Those who intend settling temporarily
or permanently in Italy will find the volume of more practical
use to them than any other single work we remember to have
come across. . . . We should not like to spare the volume from
our collection of works on the subject."

Spectator. — " This is a delightful, because delightfully personal
yet not unpleasantly egotistic, book. . . . The writer indulges,
too, in many asides on contemporary history, British national
characteristics, and a host of other things which are invariablj*
shrewd, and never malicious."

Morning Post. — " The reader wtll scarcely fail to find something
charming on every page."

UNDER PETRAIA

By the Author of " IN A TUSCAN GARDEN "

With Numerous Illustrations.

Crou'u Svo. 5s. net.

Daily Telegraph.— "The kindliness and geniality of the whole
thing is irresistible, for it recalls the spirit of Borrow, to whom sun,
moon and stars were all good things."

Westminster Gazette. — " How delightful it is on a bleak day in
spring to take up such a pleasant little book of Italian reminis-
cences ' Under Fetraia," by the author of ' In a Tuscan Garden.'
The chanii of the book lies in the fwwer of the author to recreate
the scenes one knows so well."

Globe. — " For, purely conversational in style as this book is, it
preserves that indefinable charm which holds fast the reader who
has opened its pages so that he cannot put it down till he has
reached the end. And even then it will be taken up again and
again, to l>e dipped into as the fancy seizes us."

ITALIAN VILLAS AND THEIR
GARDENS

By EDITH WHARTON. With numerous Full-
page Illustrations by Maxfield Parrish, of which
12 are finely printed in Colour. Royal 8vo. 21s.net.

Westniimier Gazette. — "A genuine piece of artistic criticism
dealing with an ancient and beautiful form of art. . . . The book
is beautifull}' illustrated. . . . Mr. Parrish enters thoroughl}' into
the feeling of the Italian garden, and delights in its formal designs
and massive effects of light and shade."

Saturday Review. — " Mr. Maxfield Parrish's drawings are
deserving of a full measure of credit in the production of a beauti-
ful and valuable book."

A QUEEN OF INDISCRETIONS

The Tragedy of Caroline of Brunswick, Queen
of England. From the Italian of G. P. Clerici.
Translated by Frederic Chapman. With
numerous Illustrations reproduced from contem-
porary Portraits and Prints. Demy 8vo. 21/- net.

Daily Telegraph. — " It could scarcely be done more thoroughly
or, on the whole, in better taste than is here displayed by Professor
Clerici. Mr. Frederic Chapman himself contributes an uncom-
monly interesting and well-informed introduction."

Times.—" Signor Clerici has brought to his task immense pains,
lucidit}' and an impartiality of mind which does not prevent a
definite view from emerging. Mr. Chapman has done the tn. is-
lation admirably well, and his own introduction is a careful
assistance to thoroughness."

ITALIAN LYRISTS OF TO-DAY

By G. A. GREEN. Translations in the original
metres from about 35 living Italian Poets. With
Bibliographical and Biographical Notes. Crown
8vo. 5/- net.

ON THE TRACKS OF LIFE

THE IMMORALITY OF MORALITY
Translated from the Italian of Leo. G. Sera by
J.M.Kennedy. With an Introduction by Dr.OscAR
Levy. Demy Svo. 9x5! inches. Price 7/6 net.

Daily Chronicle. — " A very frank expression of the side of
thought which regards the assertion of individuality as the first
duty of the individual."

8

P27

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