LONDON, 1898.
ADVERTISEMENT TO THE FIRST EDITION
Polite reader, you who have travelled Italy, it will not be unknown to you that the humbler sort in that country have ever believed certain spots and recesses of their land—as wells, mountain-paths, farmsteads, groves of ilex or olive, quiet pine-woods, creeks or bays of the sea, and such like hidden ways—to be the chosen resort of familiar spirits, baleful or beneficent, fate-ridden or amenable to prayer, half divine, wholly out of rule or ordering; which rustic deities and genii locorum, if it was not needful to propitiate, it was fascination to observe. It is believed of them in the hill-country round about Perugia and in the quieter parts of Tuscany, that they are still present, tolerated of God by reason of their origin (which is, indeed, that of the very soil whose effluence they are), chastened, circumscribed and, as it were, combed or pared of evil desire and import. To them or their avatars (it matters little which) the rude people still bow down; they still humour them with gifts of flowers, songs, or artless customs (as of Mayday, or the Giorno de' Grilli); you may still see wayside shrines, votive tablets, humble offerings, set in a farm-wall or country hedge, starry and fresh as a patch of yellow flowers in a rye-field. If you say that they have made gods in their own image, you do not convince them of Sin, for they do as their betters. If you say their gods are earthy, they reply by asking, "What then are we?" For they will admit, and you cannot deny, earthiness to have at least a part in all of us. And you are forbidden to call this unhappy, since God made all. Out of the drenched earth whence these worshippers arose, they made their rough-cast gods; out of the same earth they still mould images to speak the presentment of them which they have. Out of that earth, I, a northern image-maker, have set up my conceits of their informing spirits, of the spirits of themselves, their soil, and the fair works they have accomplished. So I have called this book Earthwork out of Tuscany. Qui habet aures ad audiendum audiat.