Here is the secret of Florence--supreme aspiration.

The aspiration which gave her citizens force to live in poverty, and clothe themselves in simplicity, so as to be able to give up their millions of florins to bequeath miracles in stone and metal and colour to the Future. The aspiration which so purified her soil, red with carnage, black with smoke of war, trodden continuously by hurrying feet of labourers, rioters, mercenaries, and murderers, that from that soil there could spring, in all its purity and perfection, the paradise-blossom of the Vita Nuova.

Venice perished for her pride and carnal l.u.s.t; Rome perished for her tyrannies and her blood-thirst; but Florence--though many a time nearly strangled under the heel of the Empire and the hand of the Church--Florence was never slain utterly either in body or soul; Florence still crowned herself with flowers even in her throes of agony, because she kept always within her that love--impersonal, consecrate, void of greed--which is the purification of the individual life and the regeneration of the body politic. "We labour for the ideal," said the Florentines of old, lifting to heaven their red flower de luce--and to this day Europe bows before what they did and cannot equal it.

"But she had so many great men, so many mighty masters!" I would urge, whereon Pascarel would glance on me with his lightest and yet utmost scorn.

"O wise female thing, who always traces the root to the branch and deduces the cause from the effect! Did her great men spring up full-armed like Athene, or was it the pure, elastic atmosphere of her that made her mere mortals strong as immortals? The supreme success of modern government is to flatten down all men into one uniform likeness, so that it is only by most frightful, and often destructive, effort that any originality can contrive to get loose in its own shape for a moment's breathing s.p.a.ce; but in the Commonwealth of Florence a man, being born with any genius in him, drew in strength to do and dare greatly with the very air he breathed."

Moreover, it was not only the great men that made her what she was.

It was, above all, the men who knew they were not great, but yet had the patience and unselfishness to do their appointed work for her zealously, and with every possible perfection in the doing of it.

It was not only Orcagna planning the Loggia, but every workman who chiselled out a piece of its stone, that put all his head and heart into the doing thereof. It was not only Michaelangelo in his studio, but every poor painter who taught the mere a, b, c, d of the craft to a crowd of pupils out of the streets, who did whatsoever came before them to do mightily and with reverence.

In those days all the servants as well as the sovereigns of art were penetrated with the sense of her holiness.

It was the ma.s.s of patient, intelligent, poetic, and sincere servitors of art, who, instead of wildly consuming their souls in envy and desire, cultured their one talent to the uttermost, so that the mediocrity of that age would have been the excellence of any other.

Not alone from the great workshops of the great masters did the light shine on the people. From every scaffold where a palace ceiling was being decorated with its fresco, from every bottega where the children of the poor learned to grind and to mingle the colours, from every cell where some solitary monk studied to produce an offering to the glory of his G.o.d, from every nook and corner where the youths gathered in the streets to see some Nunziata or Ecce h.o.m.o lifted to its niche in the city wall, from every smallest and most hidden home of art--from the nest under the eaves as well as from the cloud-reaching temples,--there went out amidst the mult.i.tudes an ever-flowing, ever-pellucid stream of light, from that Aspiration which is in itself Inspiration.

So that even to this day the people of Italy have not forgotten the supreme excellence of all beauty, but are, by the sheer instinct of inherited faith, incapable of infidelity to those traditions; so that the commonest craftsman of them all will sweep his curves and shade his hues upon a plaster cornice with a perfection that is the despair of the maestri of other nations.

The broad plains that have been the battle-ground of so many races and so many ages were green and peaceful under the primitive husbandry of the contadini.

Everywhere under the long lines of the yet unbudded vines the seed was springing, and the trenches of the earth were brimful with brown bubbling water left from the floods of winter, when Reno and Adda had broken loose from their beds.

Here and there was some old fortress grey amongst the silver of the olive orchards; some village with white bleak house-walls and flat roofs pale and bare against the level fields; or some little long-forgotten city once a stronghold of war and a palace for princes, now a little hushed and lonely place, with weed-grown ramparts and gates rusted on their hinges, and tapestry weavers throwing the shuttle in its deserted and dismantled ways.

But chiefly it was always the green, fruitful, weary, endless plain trodden by the bullocks and the goats, and silent, strangely silent, as though fearful still of its tremendous past.

The long bright day draws to a close. The west is in a blaze of gold, against which the ilex and the acacia are black as funeral plumes. The innumerable scents of fruits and flowers and spices, and tropical seeds, and sweet essences, that fill the streets at every step from shops and stalls, and monks' pharmacies, are fanned out in a thousand delicious odours on the cooling air. The wind has risen, blowing softly from mountain and from sea across the plains through the pines of Pisa, across to the oak-forests of green Casentno.

Whilst the sun still glows in the intense amber of his own dying glory, away in the tender violet hues of the east the young moon rises.

Rosy clouds drift against the azure of the zenith, and are reflected as in a mirror in the shallow river waters.

A little white cloud of doves flies homeward against the sky.

All the bells chime for the Ave Maria.

The evening falls.

Wonderful hues, creamy, and golden, and purple, and soft as the colours of a dove's throat, spread themselves slowly over the sky; the bell tower rises like a shaft of porcelain clear against the intense azure; amongst the tall canes by the river the fire-flies sparkle; the sh.o.r.es are mirrored in the stream with every line and curve, and roof and cupola, drawn in sharp deep shadow; every lamp glows again thrice its size in the gla.s.s of the current, and the arches of the bridges meet their own image there; the boats glide down the water that is now white under the moon, now amber under the lights, now black under the walls, for ever changing; night draws on, then closes quite.

But it is night as radiant as day, and ethereal as day can never be; on the hills the cypresses still stand out against the faint gold that lingers in the west; there is the odour of carnations and of acacias everywhere.

Noiseless footsteps come and go.

People pa.s.s softly in shadow, like a dream.

You know how St. Michael made the Italian? he is saying to them, and the clear crystal ring of the sonorous Tuscan reaches to the farthest corner of the square. Nay?--oh, for shame! Well, then, it was in this fashion; long, long ago, when the world was but just called from chaos, the Dominiddio was tired, as you all know, and took his rest on the seventh day; and four of the saints, George and Denis and Jago and Michael, stood round him with their wings folded and their swords idle.

So to them the good Lord said: "Look at those odds and ends, that are all lying about after the earth is set rolling. Gather them up, and make them into four living nations to people the globe." The saints obeyed and set to the work.

St. George got a piece of pure gold and a huge lump of lead, and buried the gold in the lead, so that none ever would guess it was there, and so sent it rolling and b.u.mping to earth, and called it the English people.

St. Jago got a bladder filled with wind, and put in it the heart of a fox, and the fang of a wolf, and whilst it puffed and swelled like the frog that called itself a bull, it was despatched to the world as the Spaniard.

St. Denis did better than that; he caught a sunbeam flying, and he tied it with a bright knot of ribbons, and he flashed it on earth as the people of France; only, alas! he made two mistakes, he gave it no ballast, and he dyed the ribbons blood-red.

Now St. Michael, marking their errors, caught a sunbeam likewise, and many other things too; a mask of velvet, a poniard of steel, the chords of a lute, the heart of a child, the sigh of a poet, the kiss of a lover, a rose out of paradise, and a silver string from an angel's lyre.

Then with these in his hand he went and knelt down at the throne of the Father. "Dear and great Lord," he prayed, "to make my work perfect, give me one thing; give me a smile of G.o.d." And G.o.d smiled.

Then St. Michael sent his creation to earth, and called it the Italian.

But--most unhappily, as chance would have it--Satanas watching at the gates of h.e.l.l, thought to himself, "If I spoil not his work, earth will be Eden in Italy." So he drew his bow in envy, and sped a poisoned arrow; and the arrow cleft the rose of paradise, and broke the silver string of the angel.

And to this day the Italian keeps the smile that G.o.d gave in his eyes; but in his heart the devil's arrow rankles still.

Some call this barbed shaft Cruelty; some Superst.i.tion; some Ignorance; some Priestcraft; maybe its poison is drawn from all four; be it how it may, it is the duty of all Italians to pluck hard at the arrow of h.e.l.l, so that the smile of G.o.d alone shall remain with their children's children.

Yonder in the plains we have done much; the rest will lie with you, the Freed Nation.

There is an old legend, he made answer to me, an old monkish tale, which tells how, in the days of King Clovis, a woman, old and miserable, forsaken of all, and at the point of death, strayed into the Merovingian woods, and lingering there, and hearkening to the birds, and loving them, and so learning from them of G.o.d, regained, by no effort of her own, her youth; and lived, always young and always beautiful, a hundred years; through all which time she never failed to seek the forests when the sun rose, and hear the first song of the creatures to whom she owed her joy. Whoever to the human soul can be, in ever so faint a sense, that which the birds were to the woman in the Merovingian woods, he, I think, has a true greatness. But I am but an outcast, you know; and my wisdom is not of the world.

Yet it seemed the true wisdom, there, at least, with the rose light shining across half the heavens, and the bells ringing far away in the plains below over the white waves of the sea of olives.

Only for the people! Altro! did not Sperone and all the critics at his heels p.r.o.nounce Ariosto only fit for the vulgar mult.i.tude? and was not Dante himself called the laureate of the cobblers and the bakers?

And does not Sacchetti record that the great man took the trouble to quarrel with an a.s.s-driver and a blacksmith because they recited his verses badly?

If he had not written "only for the people," we might never have got beyond the purisms of Virgilio, and the Ciceronian imitations of Bembo.

Dante now-a-days may have become the poet of the scholars and the sages, but in his own times he seemed to the sciolists a most terribly low fellow for using his mother tongue; and he was most essentially the poet of the vulgar--of the _vulgare eloquio_, of the _vulgare ill.u.s.tre_; and pray what does the "Commedia" mean if not a _canto villereccio_, a song for the rustics? Will you tell me that?

Only for the people! Ah, that is the error. Only! how like a woman that is! Any trash will do for the people; that is the modern notion; vile roulades in music, tawdry crudities in painting, cheap balderdash in print--all that will do for the people. So they say now-a-days.