OF BOILS AND THE IDEAL
[Footnote: This appeared in the New Review for December 1896, and is reproduced by leave of the Publisher.]
(A Colloquy with Perugino)
"There," said my Roman escort, as we forded the Tiber near Torglano, "the haze is lifting: behold august Perugia," I looked out over the misty plain, and saw the spiked ridge of a hill, serried with towers and belfries as a port with ships' masts; then the grey stone walls and escarpments warm in the sun; finally a mouth to the city, which seemed to engulph both the white road and the citizens walking to and fro upon it like flies. But it was some time yet before I could decipher the image on the gonfalon streaming in the breeze above the Signiory. It was actually, on a field vert, a griffin rampant sable, langued gules. "So ho!" said the guide when! had described it, "So ho! the Mountain Cat is at home again…. And here comes scouring one of the whelps," he added in alarm. A young man, black-avised, bare-headed, pressing a lathered horse, bore down upon us. He seemed to gain exultation with every new pulse of his strength: the Genius of Brute Force, handsome as he was evil. And yet not evil, unless a wild beast is evil; which it probably is not. He soon reached us, pulled up short with a clatter of hoofs, and hailed me in a raw dialect, asking what I did, whence and who I was, whither I went, what I would? As he spake—looking at me with fierce eyes in which pride, suspicion, and the shyness of youth struggled and rent each other—he fooled with a straight sword, and seemed to put his demands rather to provoke a quarrel than to get an answer. I wished no quarrel with a boy, so, as my custom is, I answered deliberately that I travelled, and from Rome; that my name was Hewlett, at his service; that I was going to Perugia; that I would be rid of him. I saw him grow loutish before my adroit impassivity; his fencing was not with such tools. He sulked, and must know next what I wanted at Perugia. I told him I had business with Pietro Vannucci, called Il Perugino by those who admired him from a distance; and he seemed relieved, withal a something of contempt for my person fluttered on his pretty lip. At any rate, he left fingering his steel toy. "Peter the Pious!" he scoffed, "Are you of his litter? Pots and Pans? Off with you; you'll find him hoarding his money or his wife. To the wife you may send these from Semonetto." Whereat my young gentleman fell to kissing his hand in the air. I rose in my stirrups and bowed elaborately, and, taking off my hat in the act, put him to some shame, for he was without that equipment. He pulled a wry face at me, like any schoolboy, and cantered off on his spent horse, arms akimbo, and his irons rattling about him. My guide marked a furtive cross on his breast and vowed, I am pretty sure, a score candles to Santa Maria in Cosmedin if ever he reached home. "God is good," he said, "God is very good. That was Simon Baglione."
"He seemed a very unlicked cub," was all my reply. So we climbed the dusty steep, winding twice or thrice round about the hill in a brown plain set with stubbed trees, and entered the armed city by the Porta Eburnea. Inside the walls, threading our way up a spiral lane among bullock-carts, cloaked cavaliers, monks, fair-haired girls carrying pitchers and baskets, bullies, bravoes, and well-to-do burgesses, we passed from one ambush to another, by dark gullies, stinking traps, and twisted stairways, to the Via Deliziosa, without ever a hint of the broad sunshine or whiff of the balmy air which we had left outside on the plain. In a little mildewed court, where one patch of light did indeed slope upon a lemon-tree loaded with fruit and flowers, I found my man in a droll pass with his young wife. He was, in fact, tiring her hair in the open: nothing more; nevertheless there was that air of mystery in the performance which made me at once squeamish of going further, and afraid to withdraw. I stood, therefore, in confusion while the sport went on. It was of his seeking I could see, for the poor girl looked shamefaced and weary enough. She was a winsome child (no more), broad in the brows, full in the eye, yellow- haired, like most of the women in this place, with a fine-shaped mouth, rather voluptuously underlipped, and, as I then saw her, sitting in a carven chair with her hands at a listless droop over the arms of it. Her hair, which was loose about her and of great length and softness, lay at the mercy of her master. He, a short, pursy man, well over middle age— "past the Grand Climacteric," as Bulwer Lytton used to say—red and anxiously lined, stood behind her, barber fashion, and ran her hair through his fingers, all the while talking to himself very fast. His eyes were half-shut: he seemed ravished by the sight of so much gold (if common reports belie him not) or the feel of so much silk (the likelier opinion), I know not which. Assuredly so odd a beginning to my adventure, a hardier man would have stumbled!
The sport went on. The girl, as I considered her, was of slight, almost mean figure; her good looks, which as yet lay rather in promise, resolved themselves into a small compass, for they ended at her shoulders. Below them she was slender to stooping, and with no shape to speak of. Allow her a fine little head, the timid freshness natural to her age, a blush-rose skin, slim neck, and that glorious weight of hair: there is Perugino's wife! Add that she was vested in a milky green robe which was cut square and low at the neck and fitted her close, and I have no more to say on her score than she had on any. As for the Maestro himself, I got to know him better. On mere sight I could guess something of him. A master evidently, unhappy when not ordering something; fidgety by the same token; yet a fellow of humours, and fertile of inventions whereon to feed them. The more I considered him the more subtle ministry to his pleasures did I find this morning's work to be. A man, finally, happiest in dreams. I looked at him now in that vein. In and out, elbow-deep sometimes, went his hands and arms, plunging, swimming in that luxurious mesh of hair. He sprayed it out in a shower for Danaë; he clutched it hard and drew it into thick burnished ropes of fine gold. Anon, as the whim caught him, he would pile it up and hedge it with great silver pins, fan-shape, such as country girls use, till it took the semblance, now of a tower, now of a wheel, now of some winged beast—sphinx or basilisk—couching on the girl's head. Then, stepping back a little, he would clasp his hands over his eyes, and with head in air sing some snatch of triumph, or laugh aloud for the very wildness of his power; and so the game went on, that seemed a feast of delight to the man—a feast? an orgy of sense. But the woman might have been cut in stone. Had she not breathed, or had not her fingers faintly stirred now and again, you would have sworn her a wax doll.
I know not how long the two might have stayed at their affairs, for here I grew wearied and, coughing discreetly, slid my foot on the flags. The man looked up, stopped his play at once; the spell was broken. The girl, I noticed, stirred not at all, but sat on as she was with her hair about her clasping her shoulders and flooding her with gold. But Master Peter was a little disconcerted, I am pretty sure; certainly he was redder than usual about the gills and gullet. He cleared his throat once or twice with an attempt at pomposity which he vainly tried to sustain as he came out to meet me. When I handed him the Prothonotary's letter, and he saw the broad seal, he bowed quite low; the letter read, he took me by the hand and led me to the loggia of his house. We had to pass Madam on the way thither; but by this Master Peter carried off the affair as coolly as you choose. "Imola, child," he said as we passed, "I have company. Put up thy hair and fetch me out a fiaschone of Orvieto—that of the year before last. Be sure thou makest no mistake; and break no bottles, girl, for the wine is good. And hard enough to come by," he added with a sigh. The girl obeyed. Without raising her eyes she rose; without raising them she put her hands to her head and deftly braided and coiled her hair into a single twist; still looking down to earth she passed into the house.
Pietro began to talk briskly enough so soon as we were set. The air was mild for mid-March; between the ridged tiles of the cortile, which ran up to a great height, I could see a square of pale blue sky; gnats were busy in the beam of dusty light which slanted across the shade; I heard the bees about the lemon-bush droning of a quiet and opulent summer hovering near-by. It was a very peaceful and well-disposed world just then. Pietro, much at his ease, was apt to take life as he found it—nor do I wonder. "Yes," he said, "the work goes; the work goes. I have much to do; you may call me just now quite a man of affairs. This very morning, now, I received a little deputation from Città di Castello—quite a company! The Prior, the Sub-Prior, two Vicars-Choral, two Wardens of Guilds, and other gentlemen, craving a piece by my own hand for the altar of Saint Roch. I thank our Lord I can pick and choose in these days. I told them I would think of it, whereat they seemed to know relief, but I added, How did they wish the boil treated, on the Saint's left thigh? For I told them, and I was very firm, that though Holy Church might aver the boil to have been a grievous boil, a boil indeed, yet my art could have little to say to boils, as boils. The boil must be a great boil, and a red, said they; for the populace love best what they know best, and cannot worship, as you might say, with maimed rites. Moreover, Poggibonsi had a Saint Roch done by that luxurious Sienese Bazzi (a man of scandalous living, as I daresay you know), where the boil was fiery to behold and as big as a man's ankle- bone. This was a cause of new great devotion among the impious by reason of its plain relationship to our frail flesh. Città was a poor city; in fine, there must be a handsome boil, I said. Let me refine upon the boil, and Saint Roch is yours, with Madonna, in addition, caught up in clouds of pure light, and two fiddling angels, one at either hand. Finally, with the petition that Madonna should be rarely adorned with pearls Flemish- fashion, they let me have my way upon the boil. So the work goes on!"
"But, good Master Peter," I exclaimed here, "I could find some discrepancy in this. On the one hand you boggle at boils, on the other you suffer pearls to be thrust upon you. Why, if you cleave to the one, should you despise the other? For, for aught I see, your thesis should exclude either."
"And so it does," he said, smiling, "But for one man in Città that knows a pearl there will be a hundred who can judge of a boil. My Madonna will be a pearl-faced Umbrian maid, and her other pearls just as Flemish as I choose. But I hear our glasses clinking."
I, too, heard Imola's footfall on the flags, and ventured to say, "And I know where your Madonna is, Master Peter," But he affected not to hear.
She served us our amber cup with the same persistent, almost sullen, self- continence. But, I thought, I must see your eyes, Mistress, for once; so called to mind my encounter with the wild young Baglione of the morning. Smiling as easily as I could, I accosted her with "Madonna, I am the bearer of compliments to you, if you choose to hear them." Then she looked me full for a second of time. I saw by her dilating eyes, wide as a hare's (though of a sea-grey colour), that she was not always queen of herself, and pitied her. For it is ill to think of broken-in hearts, or souls set in bars, and I could fancy Master Peter's hand not so light upon her as upon church-walls. But I went on, "Yes, Madonna, even as I rode up hither, I met a young knight-at-arms who wished you as well as you were fair, and kissed your hands as best he might, considering the distance, before he rode off." Imola blushed, but said nothing.
"Who was this youth, sir?" asked Master Peter, in a hurry.
"It was plainly some young noble of your State," said I, "but for his name I know nothing, for he told me nothing." I added this quickly, because I could see our friend was keen enough for all his coat of unconcern, and I feared the whip by-and-bye for Imola's thin shoulders. But I knew quite well who the boy was. Imola went lightly away without any sign of twitter. I turned to Master Peter again.
"In this matter of boils and pearls," I began, "I would not deny but you are in the right, and yet there is this to be said. The Greeks of whose painting, truly, we have next to nothing. In all the work of theirs known to us did what lay before them as well as ever they could. They stayed not to theorise over this axiom and that, that formula and this. They said rather, 'You wish for the presentment of a man with a boil on his leg? Well.' And they produced both man and boil."
"Why yes, yes," broke in my friend, "that is plain enough. But apart from this, that you are talking of sculpture to me who do but paint, you should know very well that your Greek copied no single boil, no, nor no probable boil, but, as it were, the summary and perfect conclusion of ail possible boils."
"To Pithanon? Yes; I admit it. For Aristotle says as much."
"Right so do I, in my degree and by my art," said Perugino; "and without knowing anything of Aristotle save that he was wise."
"Your pardon, my brave Vannucci," I said, "but you have admitted the opposite of this. Did you not hint to the deputation that you would give Saint Roch no boils? And have you ever let creep into your pieces the semblance of so much as a pimple? Remember, I know your Sebastian; and know also Il Sodoma's, which he made as a banner for the Confraternity of that famous Saint In Camollia."
"I seek the essence of fact," he replied; "which, believe me, never lay in the displacement of an arrow-point; no, nor in the head of a boil. Bazzi is a sensualist: as his palate grows stale he whets it by stronger meat; thinks to provoke appetite by disgust; would draw you on by a nasty inference, as a dog by his hankering after fæcal odours. What nearness to Art in his plumpy boy stuck with arrows like a skewered capon? Causes nuns to weep, hey? and to dream dreams, hey? Nature would do that cleanlier; and waxwork more powerfully! Form, my good sir, Form is your safeguard. Lay hold on Form; you are as near to Essence as may be here below. Art works for the rational enlargement of the fancy, not the titillation of sense. And Invention is the more sacred the closer it apes the scope of the divine plan. And this much, at least, of the Grecian work I have learned, that it will never lick vulgar shoes, nor fawn to beastly eyes. It is a stately order, a high pageant, a solemn gradual, wherein the beholder will behold just so much as he is prepared, by litany and fasting and long vigil, to receive. No more and no less."
"Aristotle again," said I, "with his 'continual slight novelty.' No fits and starts."
"I have told you before I know nothing of the man," said Perugino, vexed, it appeared, at such wounding of his vanity to be new; "let me tell you this. There are fellows abroad who dub me dunce and dull-head. The young Buonarroti, forsooth, who mistakes the large for the great, quantity for quality; who in the indetermined pretends to see the mysterious. Mystery, quotha! Mystery may be in an astrologer's horoscope, in a diagram. Mystery needs no puckered virago, nor bully in the sulks. There is mystery in the morning calms, mystery in a girl's melting mood, mystery in the irresolution of a growing boy full of dreams. But behold! it is there, not here. If you see it not, the fault is your own. It may be broad as day, cut clean as with a knife, displayed at large before a brawling world too busy lapping or grudging to heed it. The many shall pass it by as they run huddling to the dark. Yet the few shall adore therein the excellency of the mystery, even as the few (the very few) may discern in the flake of wafer-bread the shining wholeness of the Divine Nature——"
"'The few remain, the many change and pass,'" I interpolated in a murmur.
But Perugino never heeded me. He went on.
"The Greek, young sir, took the fact and let it alone to breed. His act lay in the taking and setting. Just so much import as it had borne it bore still; just so much weight as separation from its fellows lent it was to his credit who first cut it free. But nowadays glamour suits only with serried muscles, frowns, and writhen lips; where darkness is we shudder, saying, Behold a great mystery! Let a painter declare his incompetence to utter, it shall be enough to assure you he has walked with God; for if he stammers, look you, that testifies he is overwhelmed. Amen, I would answer. Let his head swim and be welcome; but let him not set to painting till he can stand straight again. For in one thing I am no Greek, in that I cannot hold drunkenness divine." Here the good man stopped for want of breath and I whipped in.
"Your great Crucifixion in Santa Maria Maddalena," I began.
"Look you, sir," he took me up, "I know what you would be at. Take that piece (which is of my very best) or another equally good, I mean the Charge to Peter in Pope Sixtus his new Chapel, and listen to me. The first thing your painter must seek to do is to fill his wall. Let there be no mistake about this. He is at first no prophet or man of God; he is no juggler nor mountebank who shall be rewarded according to the enormity of his grins; his calling, maybe, is humbler, for all he stands for is to wash a wall so that no eye be set smarting because of it. Now that seems a very simple matter; it is just as simple as the eye itself— so you may judge the validity of the arguments against me, that a wholesome green or goodly red wash would suffice. It would suffice indifferent well for a kennel of dogs. But mark this. Although your painter may drop hints for the soul, let him not strain above his pitch lest he crack his larynx. To his colour he may add form in the flat; but he cannot escape the flat, however he may wriggle, any more than the sculptor can escape the round, scrape he never so wisely. Buonarroti will scrape and shift; the Fleming has scraped and shifted all his days to as little purpose. His seed-pearls invite your touch. Touch them, my friend, you will smear your fingers. Ne sutor ultra crepidam. Leave miracles, O painter, to the Saint, and stick to your brush-work. Colour and form in the flat; there is his armour to win the citadel of a man's soul."
"They call you mawkish," I dared to say.
"I am in good company," said the little man with much pomposity.
"You say boldly, then, if I catch the chain of your argument"—thus I pursued him—"that you present (as by some formula which you have elaborated) the facts of religion in colour and design? For I suppose you will allow that your Art is concerned at least as much with religion as with the washing of walls?"
"Religion! Religion!" cried he. "What are you at? Concerned with religion! Man alive, it is concerned with itself; it is religion. I see you are very far indeed from the truth, and as you have spoken of my Crucifixion in Florence, now you shall suffer me to speak of it. I testify what I know, not that which I have not seen. And as mine eyes have never filled with blood from Golgotha, so I do not conjure with tools I have not learned to handle. But I will tell you what I have seen. The Mass: whereof my piece is, as it were, the transfiguration or a parable. For it grew out of a Mass I once heard, stately-ordered, solemnly and punctiliously served in a great church. Mayhap, I dreamed of it; we shall not quarrel over terms. It was a strange Mass, shorn of much ornament and circumstance; I thought, as I knelt and wondered: Here are no lamentations, no bruised breasts, no outpoured hearts, nor souls on flames. The day for tears is past, the fires are red, not flaming; this is a day for steadfast regard, for service, patience, and good hope; this is a day for Art to chant what the soul hath endured. For Art is a fruit sown in action and watered to utterance by tears. Two priests only, clothed in fine linen, served the Mass: ornaments of candles, incense, prostration, genuflection, there were none. Yet, step by step, and with every step pondered reverently ere another was laid to Its fellow's foundation; with full knowledge of the end ere yet was the beginning accomplished; In every gesture, every pause, intonation, invocation, stave of song, phrase of prayer; by painful degrees wrought in the soul's sweat and tears, unadorned, cold as fine stone, yet glittering none the less like fair marble set in the sun—was that solemn Mass sung through in the bare Church to the glory of God and His angels, who must ever rejoice in a work done so that the master-mind is straining and on watch over heart and voice. And I said, Calvary is done and the woe of it turned to triumph. Love is the fulfilling of the Law. Henceforth, for me Law shall be the fulfilment of my Love.
"Therefore I paint no terrors of death, no flesh torn by iron, no passion of an anguish greater than we can ever conceive, no bittersweet ecstasy of Self abandoned or Love inflaming; but instead, serenity, a morning sky, a meek victim, Love fulfilling Law. Shorn of accidents, for the essence is enough; not passionate, for that were as gross an affront in face of such awful death as to be trivial. Nothing too much; Law fulfilling Love; reasonable service.
"And because we are of the earth earthy, and because what I work you must behold with bodily eyes, I limn you angels and gods in your own image; not of greater stature nor of more excellent beauty than many among you; not of finer essence, maybe, than yourselves. But as the priests about that naked altar, so stand they, that the love which transfigures them be absorbed in the fulfilling of law; and the law they exquisitely follow be at once the pattern and glass of their love."
Master Peter drained a beaker of his Orvieto. I admired; for indeed the little man spoke well.
"Now the Lord be good to you, Master Peter," I said; "men do you a great wrong. For there are some who aver that you doubt."
"Who does not doubt?" replied my host. "We doubt whenever we cannot see."
"I believe you are right," said I. "Your great Saint is, after all, your great Seer. For you, then, to question the soul's immortality is but to admit that you do not yet see your own life to come."
"Leave it so," said Perugino. "Let us talk reasonably."
"Did all men love the law as you do," I resumed after a painful pause—for I felt the force of the Master's rebuke to my impertinence (and could hope others will feel it also)—"did all love the law as you do, the world would be a cooler place and passion at a discount. But I cannot conceive Art without passion."
"Nor I," said the painter, "and for the excellent reason that there is no such thing. But remember this: passion is like the Alpheus. Hedge it about with dams, you drive it deeper. Out of sight is not out of being. And the issue must needs be the fairer."
"Happy the passion," I said, "which hath an issue. There is passion of the vexed sort, where the tears are frozen to ice as they start. Of the tortured thus, remember—
"Lo pianto stesso li planger non lascia,
E il duol, che trova in su gli occhi rintoppo,
Si volve in entro a far crescer l' ambascia."
"You know our Dante?" said Master Peter blandly (though I swear he knew what I was at). "There may be such people; doubtless there are such people. For me, I find a perpetual outlet in my art." I could not forbear——
"Master Peter, Master Peter," I cried out, "how can I believe you when I know that your Madonna's eyes are brimming; when I know why she turns them to a misty heaven or an earth seen blotted by reason of tears? Do these tears ever fall, Master Peter? or who freezes them as they start?"
For I wondered where his patient Imola found her outlet, and whether young Simone has shown her a way. Master Peter drummed on the table and nursed one fat leg.
Before I took leave of the urbane little painter, in fact while I stood in the act of handshaking, I saw her white face at an upper window, looming behind rigid bars. On a sudden impulse I concluded my farewells rapidly and made to go. Vannucci turned back into the house and closed the door; but I stayed in the cortile pretending a trouble with my spurs. Sure enough, in a short time I heard a light footfall. Imola stood beside me.
"Wish me a safe journey," I said smiling, "and no more bare-headed cavaliers on the road." Her lips hardly moved, so still her voice was. "Was he bare-headed?" she asked, as if in awe.
"Love-locks floating free," I answered her gaily enough. "Shall I thank him for his courtesies to you, Madonna, if we meet?"
"You will not meet: he is gone to Spello," she began, and then stopped, blushing painfully.
"But I may stay in Spello this night and could seek him out."
She was mistress of her lips, and could now look steadily at me. "I wish him very well," said Imola.