It is very pleasant sometimes to think that wistful guess of Plato's true in spite of everything—that the state is the man grown great, as the universe is the state grown Infinite. It explains that Florence has a soul, the broader image of her sons', and that this soul speaks in Art, utters itself in flower of stone and starry stretches of fresco (like that serene blue and grey band in the Sistine chapel which redeems so many of Rome's waste places), sings colour-songs (there are such affairs) on church and cloister walls. Seeing these good things, we should rather hear the town's voice crying out her fancy to friendly hearts. Thus—let me run the figure to death—if Luca's blue-eyed medallions are the crop of the wall, they are also the soul of Florence, singing a blithe secular song about gods whose abiding charm is the art that made them live. And if the towers and domes are the statelier flowers of the garden, lily, hollyhock, tulip of the red globe, so they are Florence again as she strains forward and up, sternly defiant in the Palazzo Vecchio, bright and curious at Santa Croce, pure, chaste as a seraph, when, thrilling with the touch of Giotto, she gazes in the clarity of her golden and rosy marbles, tinted like a pearl and shaped like an archangel, towards the blue vault whose eye she is.
Wandering, therefore, through this high city; loitering on the bridge whereunder turbid Arno glitters like brass; standing by the yellow Baptistery; or seeing in Santa Croce cloister—where I write these lines— seven centuries of enthusiasm mellowed down by sun and wind into a comely dotage of grey and green, one is disposed to wonder whether we are only just beginning to understand Art, or to misunderstand it? Has the world slept for two thousand years? Is Degas the first artist? Was Aristotle the first critic, and is Mr. George Moore the second? As a white pigeon cuts the blue, and every opinion of him shines as burnished agate in the live air, things shape themselves somewhat. I begin to see that Art is, and that men have been, and shall be, but never are. Facts are an integral part of life, but they are not life. I heard a metaphysician say once that matter was the adjective of life, and thought it a mighty pretty saying. In a true sense, it would seem, Art is that adjective. For so surely as there are honest men to insist how true things are or how proper to moralising, there will be Art to sing how lovely they are, and what amiable dwellings for us. Thus fortified, I think I can understand Magister Joctus Florentiæ. He lies behind these crumbling walls. Traces of his crimson and blue still stain the cloister-walk. What was he telling us in crimson and blue? How dumb Zacharias spelt out the name of his son John in the roll of a book? Hardly that, I think.
II
LITTLE FLOWERS
The Via del Monte alle Croce is a leafy way cut between hedgerows, in the morning time heavy with dew and the smell of wet flowers. Where it strays out of the Giro al Monte there is a crumbly brick wall, a well, and a little earthen shrine to Madonna—a daub, it is true, of glaring chromes and blues, thick in glaze and tawdry devices of stout cupids and roses, but somehow, on this suggestive Autumn morning, innocent and blue of eye as the carolling throngs of Luca which it travesties. And a pious inscription cut below testifieth how Saint Francis, "in friendly talk with the Blessed Mariano di Lugo," paused here before it, and then vanished. It is not necessary to believe in ghosts; but I'll go bail that story is true. We are but two stones' throw from the gaunt hulk of a Franciscan Church; a file of dusty cypresses marks the ruins of a painful Calvary cut in the waste and shale of the hill-side. Below, as in a green pasture, Florence shines like a dove's egg in her nest of hills; I can pick out among the sheaf of spears which hedge her about the daintiest of them all, the crocketed pinnacle of Santa Croce, grey on blue; and then the lean ridge of a shrine the barest, simplest and most honest in all Tuscany. Certainly Saint Francis, "familiarmente discorrendo," appeared in this place. I need no reference to the Annals of the Seraphic Order—part, book and page—to convince me. My stone gives them. "Ann. Ord. Min. Tom. cclii. fasc. 3.," and so on. That is but a sorry concession to our short- sightedness. For if we believe not the shrine which we have seen, how shall we believe Giotto? What of Giotto? That is my point.
Something too much, it may be, of modern art-criticism, which is ashamed of thinking, snuffeth at pictures which tell you things, at literature in books or music or church ornament. Is literature not good anywhere? Have we exhausted the Arabian Nights or the Acta Sanctorum? At any rate, if we must choose between Giotto and the prophet of the Yellow Book, my heart is fixed. I am for the teller of tales. Story-telling it is, glorification of one whom Mr. George Moore would call (has, indeed, called) a "squint-eyed Italian Saint"—and whether he objected to malformity, nationality or calling, I never could learn—this too it may be; it may tend to edification and I know not what beside. I will grant all that. And though it is hard to prophesy what might have happened five hundred years ago; though there might have been a Giotto without a Francis of whom to speak; yet I never knew a case where a painter (call him poet if you will; he will be none the worse for that) fell so directly into the gap awaiting him. The Gospel living and tangible again! Spirits, apparitions, as of three mysterious sisters, met you in the open country, and crying "Hail! Lady Poverty," straightly vanished. A legend was a-making round about the strange life not fifty years closed, a life which seems, extravagance apart, to have been a lyrical outburst, a strophe in the hymn of praise which certain happy people were singing just then. It was a Gloria in Excelsis for a second time in Christian Annals which did not end in a wail of "Agnus Dei qui tollis peccata, miserere." Why should it? Should the children of the bride-chamber fast when the bridegroom was with them? And of all the "wreath'd singers at the marriage-door," blithest and sanest was Master Joctus of Florence. This being so, I hope I shall not be accused of any mischief if I say that in Giotto I see one of the select company of immortals whose work can never be surpassed because it is entirely adequate to the facts and atmosphere he selected. The standard of a work of art must always be—Is it well done? rather than—Is it well intentioned? Wherefore, if Giotto or anybody else choose to spend himself upon a sermon or an essay or an article of the Creed, and do well thereby, I may not blame him, nor call him back to study the play of light across a marsh or the flight of pigeons in the westering sun. Ma, basta, basta cosi, you may say with the Cavaliere of Goldoni.
Santa Croce church is of the barrack-room stamp, dim and enormous, grey with years and seamed with work. Its impressiveness (for with Orvieto and a fleet of churches at Ravenna it stands above all Italy in that) consists mainly, I believe, in its being built of exactly the moral bones of the religion it was intended to embody. An Italian religion, namely; perfectly sane, at bottom practical, with a base of plain, everyday, ten-commandment morality. That was the base of Saint Francis' good brown life: therefore Santa Croce is admirably built, squared, mortised and compacted by skilled workmen to whom brick-laying was a fine art. But, withal, this religion had its lyric raptures, its "In fuoco Amor mi mise," or its sobbing at the feet of the Crucified, its Corotto and Seven Sorrowful Mysteries: accordingly Santa Croce, like a pollarded lime, reserves its buds, harbours and garners them, throws out no suckers or lateral adornments the length of its trunk, but bursts into a flowery crown of them at the top—a whole row of chapels along the cross-beam of the tau; and in the place of honour a shallow apse pierced with red lancets and aglow like an opal. Never a chapel of them but is worth study and a stiff neck. After the Rule came the Fioretti; after Francis and Bonaventure came Celano and Jacopone da Todi; after Arnolfo del Lapo and his attention to business came the hours of ease when he planned the airy plume on which the Church leaps skyward; and came also Giotto to weave the crown of Santa Croce.
I take the Tuscan nature to be so constituted that it will play with any given subject of speculation in much the same way. With one or two mighty exceptions to be sure—Dante, of course, Buonarroti, of course, and, for all his secularities. Boccace—it is not imagination you find in Tuscany. Rather, it is a sweet and delicate, a wholesome, home-grown fancy, wantoning with thought which may be unpleasant, unhealthy, grave, frivolous—what you will; yet playing in such a way, and with such intuitive taste and breeding that no harm ensues nor any nausea. They realise for me a fairy country; I can think no evil of a Tuscan. So I can read Boccace the infidel, Poggio the gross, where Voltaire makes me a bigot and Catulle Mendes ashamed. The fresh breeze blowing through the Decameron keeps the air sweet. Even Lorenzo is a child for me, and Macchiavel, "the man without a soul," I decline to take seriously. Consider, then, all Tuscan art from this point of view, the weaving of innocent fancies round some chance-caught theme, Christianity may have been the point d'appui. No doubt it generally was. What then? Have you never heard two children dreaming aloud of the ways of God, or the troubles of Christ? How they humanise, how they realise the Mystery! Just such a pretty babble I find in the Spanish Chapel, which to take in any other spirit would work a madness in the brain. You remember the North wall, apotheosis of Saint Thomas and what-not, for all the world like a paradigm of the irregular verb "Aquinizo." What are we to suppose Lippo Memmi (or whoever else it was) to have been about when he hung in mid-air on his swinging bridge and stained the wet square red and green? To read Ruskin you would think he was fulminating urbi et orbi with the Summa or Cur Deus homo at his fingers' ends. Depend upon it he was doing quite other, or the artistic temper (phrase rendered loathsome by the halfpenny newspapers) suffered a relapse between the days of King David and the days of his brother Lippo Lippi. Are we to suppose that a man who could live in intimate commerce with fourteen such gracious ladies as he has set there, ranged on their carved sedilia—his Britomart trim and debonnair; his willowy Carità; his wimpled matron in clean white who masquerades as I know not what branch of theology; his pretty girlish Geometry of coiled and braided hair and the yet unloosed girdle of demure virginity; his maid Musica crowned with roses, and Logica, the bold-eyed and open-throated wench, hand to hip—is this the man for sententiousness? Out, out! Could any one save a humourist of high order have given Moses such a pair of horns, or set, under Music, such a shagged Tubal to belabour an anvil? The wall sings like an anthology,—a Gothic anthology where "Bele Aliz matin leva" is versicle, and "In un boschetto trovai pastorella" antiphon. You might as well talk of Christian Mathematics as of Christian Art, or bind the sweet influences of Pleiades as the volant sallies of a poet's wit.
Once we get it into our heads that the Tuscans were fanciful children, always, and the discrepancy of critics, of Ruskin and Mr. George Moore, of Rio and Mr. Addington Symonds, may vanish. For another thing, we shall understand and allow for the standard of Santa Croce and the Fioretti. From the latter nosegay! take this:
"It happened one day as Brother Peter was standing to his prayer, thinking earnestly about the Passion of Christ, how the blessed Mother of him, and John Evangelist his best-beloved, and Saint Francis too, were painted at the foot of the Cross, crucified indeed with him through anguish of the mind, that there came upon him the longing to know which of these three had endured the bitterest pains of that anguish, the Mother who bore our Lord, or the Disciple familiar to his bosom, or Saint Francis crucified also even as he was. And as he stood thinking on these things, lo! there appeared before him the Virgin Mary with Saint John Evangelist and Saint Francis, robed in splendid apparel and of glory wonderful; but Saint Francis' robe was more cunningly wrought than Saint John's. Now Peter stood quite scared at the sight; but Saint John bade him take comfort, saying, 'Be not afraid, dearest brother, for we are come hither to dispel thy doubt. You are to knows then, that above all creatures the Mother of Christ and I grieved over the Passion of our Lord. But since that day Saint Francis has felt more anguish than any other. Therefore, as you see, he is in glory now.' Then Brother Peter asked him, and said, 'Most holy Apostle of Christ, wherefore cometh it that the vesture of Saint Francis is more glorious than thine?' Answered him Saint John, 'The reason is this, for that when he was in the world he wore a viler than ever I did.' So then Saint John gave him a vestment which he carried on his arm, and the holy company vanished."