It was one of these misty October days when every landscape looks so magnificent, that, given pencil, brush, and the power of copying what one sees, it almost seems that any one, without going through the eclectic process of creation, could paint a great picture. The colours were blurred as if the intervening atmosphere were a sheet of bad glass; and the relationship between the old rose of ploughed fields, the yellow strips of mustard, and the brighter gold and pink of the sunflowers, chrysanthemums, and Michaelmas daisies in the border, made one think of an oriental vase painted with dim blossoms and butterflies in which is arranged a nosegay of bright and freshly plucked flowers—the paintings on the porcelain melting into the flowers, the flowers vivifying the colours on the porcelain.
That is what the relationship between life and art should be like, she thought, art the nosegay, life the porcelain vase.
Life could not be shot on the wing—it must first be frozen.... Myths that simplified and transposed so that things became as the chairs and sofa had been that day in her Chelsea lodgings ... heliacal periods ... Apollo and Dionysus ... it was all the same thing. If only she could find it, life at Plasencia had some design, some plot ... yes, that was it—a plot that enlarged and simplified things so that they could be seen.
What was life at Plasencia like? A motley hostile company sailing together in a ship as in Cervantes’s Persiles?
No; it still had roots; night and day it still stared at the same view; externally, it was immobile. It was more like a convent than a ship, an ill-matched company forced to live together under one roof, which one and all they long to leave.
A sense of discomfort came over her at the word “convent”: long bare corridors hung with hideous lithographs; hard cold beds; shrewish vulgar-tongued bells summoning one to smoked fish; an insipid calligraphy; “that by the intercession of Blessed Madeleine Sophie Barat, Virgin, through her devotion to thy Sacred Heart” ... it certainly had ambivalence—it was the great Catholic art she had tried to define to herself when confronted with doubting Anna; but it was not Plasencia.
“Nunnery” was a better word, a compact warm word, suggesting hives and the mysterious activities of bees ... it had an archaic ring too ... yes, art always exists in the past (if not why is the present tense never used?)—it is the present seen as the past.
A nunnery, then, long ago—Boccaccio’s Fiammetta, as a full-blown carnation splits its calyx, her beauty bursting through her novice’s habit, receiving in the nunnery parlour all the amorous youth of Naples. And yet it was not the same as if she had received them in a boudoir of the world. The nunnery’s rule might be lax but it remained a rule; and that, artistically, was of very great value—vivid earthly passion seen against the pale tracery of Laud, Nones, Vespers. And at Plasencia too—out there in the view life was enacted against a background of Hours: ver, aetas, autumnus, hiems—to call them by their Latin names made them at once liturgical.
A nunnery, long ago ... where? Not in Italy; for that would be out of harmony with the colour scheme of Plasencia—not so with Spain, from the stuff of which they were knit, so many of them. A Spanish play (because a play is the best vehicle for a plot) much more brightly coloured than Plasencia, “Cherubimic,” as manuscripts illuminated in very bright colours used to be called ... the action not merely in Spain, but in their own Seville ... Moorish Seville ... hence a play, written like the letters to Queen Elizabeth from eastern potentates, “on paper which doth smell most fragrantly of camphor and ambergris, and the ink of perfect musk.”