Chapter V (1)

It was on the last day of our journey that the most imperturbable member of the party, looking up from a prolonged study of the guide-books, announced that we had not seen the Bergamasque Alps after all.

In the excited argument that followed, proof seemed to preponderate first on one side and then on the other; but a closer scrutiny of the map confirmed the fear that we had not actually penetrated beyond the borders of the promised land. It must be owned that at first the discovery was somewhat humiliating; but on reflection it left us overjoyed to think that we had still the Bergamasque Alps to visit. Meanwhile our pleasure had certainly been enhanced by our delusion; and we remembered with fresh admiration Goethe’s profound saying--a saying which Italy inspired--

_O, wie beseliget uns Menschen ein falscher Begriff!_

THE SANCTUARIES OF THE PENNINE ALPS

When June is hot on the long yellow streets of Turin, it is pleasant to take train for the Biellese, that romantic hill-country where the last slopes of the Pennine Alps melt into the Piedmontese plain.

The line, crossing the lowland with its red-tiled farm-houses and mulberry orchards, rises gradually to a region of rustling verdure. Mountain streams flow down between alder-fringed banks, white oxen doze under the acacia-hedges, and in the almond and cherry orchards the vine hangs its Virgilian garlands from blossoming tree to tree. This pastoral land rolls westward to the Graiian Alps in an undulating sea of green, but to the north it breaks abruptly into the height against which rises the terraced outline of Biella.

The cliffs of the Biellese are the haunt of ancient legend, and on almost every ledge a church or monastery perpetuates the story of some wonder-working relic. Biella, the chief town of this devout district, covers a small conical hill and spreads its suburbs over the surrounding level. Its hot sociable streets are full of the shrill activity of an Italian watering-place; but the transalpine traveller will probably be inclined to push on at once to the village of Andorno, an hour’s drive deeper in the hills.

Biella overhangs the plain; but Andorno lies in a valley which soon contracts to a defile between the mountains. The drive thither from Biella skirts the Cervo, a fresh mountain stream, and passes through villages set on park-like slopes in the ample shade of chestnut-groves. The houses of these villages have little of the picturesqueness mistakenly associated with Italian rural architecture; but every window displays its pot of lavender or of carnations, and the arched doorways reveal gardens flecked with the blue shadows of the vine-pergola.

Andorno itself is folded in hills, rounded, umbrageous, cooled with the song of birds. A sylvan hush envelops the place, and the air one breathes seems to have travelled over miles of forest freshened by unseen streams. It is all as still and drowsy as the dream of a tired brain. There is nothing to see but the country itself--acacia-fringed banks sloping to the stream below the village; the arch of a ruined bridge; an old hexagonal chapel with red-tiled roof and an arcade of stunted columns; and, beyond the bridge and the chapel, rich upland meadows where all day long the peasant women stoop to the swing of the scythe.

In June in this high country (where patches of snow still lie in the shaded hollows), the wild flowers of spring and summer seem to meet: narcissus and forget-me-not lingering in the grass, while yellow broom--Leopardi’s _lover of sad solitudes_--sheets the dry banks with gold, and higher up, in the folds of the hills, patches of crimson azalea mix their shy scent with the heavy fragrance of the acacia. In the meadows the trees stand in well-spaced majestic groups, walnut, chestnut and beech, tenting the grass with shade. The ivy hangs its drapery over garden walls and terraces, and the streams rush down under a quivering canopy of laburnum. The scenery of these high Pennine valleys is everywhere marked by the same nobleness of colour and outline, the same atmosphere of spaciousness and poetry. It is the rich studied landscape of Bonifazio’s idyls: a scene of peace and plenitude, not the high-coloured southern opulence but the sober wealth poured from a glacial horn of plenty. There is none of the Swiss abruptness, of the Swiss accumulation of effects. The southern aspect softens and expands. There is no crowding of impressions, but a stealing sense of harmony and completeness.

From Andorno the obvious excursion is to the famous shrine of San Giovanni; a “sight” taking up eight pages in the excellent “Guida del Biellese,” but remaining in the traveller’s memory chiefly as the objective point of a charming walk or drive. The road thither winds up the Val d’Andorno, between heights set with villages hung aloft among the beech-groves, or thrusting their garden-parapets above the spray and tumult of the Cervo. The densely-wooded cliffs are scarred with quarries of sienite, and the stream, as the valley narrows, forces its way over masses of rock and between shelving stony banks; but the little gardens dashed by its foam overflow with irises, roses and peonies, surrounded with box-hedges and shaded by the long mauve panicles of the wistaria.

Presently the road leaves the valley, and ascends the beech-clothed flank of the mountain on which the church of San Giovanni is perched. The coolness and hush of this wooded hill-side are delicious after the noise and sunshine of the open road, and one is struck by the civic amenity which, in this remote solitude, has placed benches at intervals beneath the trees. At length the brow of the hill is reached. The beeches recede, leaving a grassy plateau flanked by a long façade of the monastery; and from the brink of this open space the eye drops unhindered down the long leafy reaches of the Val d’Andorno.

The scene is characterized by the tenderest gradations of colour and line: beeches blending with walnuts, these with the tremulous laburnum-thickets along the stream, and the curves of the hills flowing into one another till they lose themselves in the aërial distances of the plain. The building which commands this outlook is hardly worthy of its station, unless, indeed, the traveller feels its sober lines to be an admission of art’s inferiority to nature in such aspects. To the confirmed apologist of Italy there is indeed a certain charm in finding so insignificant a piece of architecture in so rare a spot: as though in a land thus amply dowered no architectural emphasis were needed to call attention to any special point of view. Yet a tenderness for the view, one cannot but infer, must have guided the steps of those early cenobites who peopled the romantic landscape with wonder-working images. When did a miracle take place on a barren plain or in a circumscribed hollow? The manifestations of divine favour invariably sought the heights, and those who dedicated themselves to the commemoration of such holy incidents did so in surroundings poetic enough to justify their faith in the supernatural.

_The Inner Quadrangle at Oropa_

E. C. Peixotto
LOVEIRE. 1901.
]

The church, with its dignified front and sculptured portal, adjoins the hospice, and shows little of interest within but the stone grotto containing the venerated image of Saint John, discovered in the third century by Saint Eusebius, Bishop of Vercelli. This grotto is protected by an iron grating, and its dark recess twinkles with silver hearts and other votive offerings. The place is still a favourite pilgrimage, but there seems to be some doubt as to which Saint John has chosen it as the scene of his posthumous thaumaturgy; for, according to the local guide-book, it is equally frequented on the feasts of the Baptist and of the Evangelist. This uncertainty is not without its practical advantages; and one reads that the hospice is open the year round, and that an excellent meal may always be enjoyed in the _trattoria_ above the arcade; while on the feasts of the respective saints it is necessary for the devotee to bespeak his board and lodging in advance.

If San Giovanni appeals chiefly to the lover of landscape, the more famous sanctuary of Oropa is of special interest to the architect; for thither, in the eighteenth century, the piety of the house of Savoy sent Juvara, one of the greatest architects of his time, to add a grand façade and portico to the group of monastic buildings erected a hundred years earlier by Negro di Pralungo.

The ascent to the great mountain-shrine of the Black Virgin leads the traveller back to Biella, and up the hills behind the town. The drive is long, but so diversified, so abounding in beauty, that in nearing its end one feels the need of an impressive monument to close so nobly ordered an approach. As the road rises above the vineyards of Biella, as the house-roofs, the church-steeples and the last suburban villas drop below the line of vision, there breaks upon the eye the vast undulating reach of the Piedmontese plain. From the near massing of cultivated verdure--the orchards, gardens, groves of the minutely pencilled foreground--to the far limit where earth and sky converge in silver, the landscape glides through every gradation of sun-lit cloud-swept loveliness. First the Val d’Andorno unbosoms its wooded depths; then the distances press nearer, blue-green and dappled with forest, with the towns of Biella, Novara and Vercelli like white fleets anchored on a misty sea. This view, with its fold on fold of woodland, dusky-shimmering in the foreground, then dark blue, with dashes of tawny sunlight and purple streaks of rain, till it fades into the indeterminate light of the horizon, suggests some heroic landscape of Poussin’s, or the boundless russet distances of Rubens’s “Château of Stein.”

Meanwhile the foreground is perpetually changing. The air freshens, the villages with their flower-gardens and their guardian images of the Black Virgin are left behind, and between the thinly-leaved beeches rise bare gravelly slopes backed by treeless hills. The Loreto of Piedmont lies nearly four thousand feet above the sea, and even in June there is a touch of snow in the air. For a moment one fancies one’s self in Switzerland; but here, at the bend of the road, is a white chapel with a classic porch, within which a group of terra-cotta figures enact some episode of the Passion. Italy has reasserted herself and art has humanized the landscape. More chapels are scattered through the trees, but one forgets to note them as the carriage turns into a wide grassy forecourt, bordered by stone pyramids and dominated at its farther end by the great colonnade of the hospice. A _rampe douce_ with fine iron gates leads up to an outer court enclosed in the arcaded wings of the building. Under these arcades are to be found shops in which the pilgrim may satisfy his various wants, from groceries, wines and cotton umbrellas (much needed in these showery hills), to rosaries, images of the Black Virgin, and pious histories of her miracles. Above the arcades the pilgrims are lodged; and in the centre of the inner façade Juvara’s marble portico unfolds its double flight of steps.

Passing through this gateway, one stands in a spacious inner quadrangle. This again is enclosed in low buildings resting on arcades, their alignment broken only by the modest façade of the church. Outside there is the profane bustle of life, the clatter of glasses at the doors of rival _trattorie_, the cracking of whips, the stir of buying and selling; but a warm silence holds the inner court. Only a few old peasant women are hobbling, rosary in hand, over the sun-baked flags to the cool shelter of the church. The church is indeed cavernously cold, with that subterranean chill peculiar to religious buildings. The interior is smaller and plainer than one had expected; but presently it is seen to be covered with a decoration beside which the rarest tapestry or fresco might sink into insignificance. This covering is composed of innumerable votive offerings, crowding each other from floor to vaulting over every inch of wall, lighting the chapels with a shimmer of silver and tinsel, with the yellow of old wax legs and arms, and the gleam of tarnished picture-frames: each overlapping scale of this strange sheath symbolizing some impulse of longing, grief or gratitude, so that, as it were, the whole church is lined with heart-beats. Most of these offerings are the gift of the poor mountain-folk, and the paintings record with artless realism the miraculous escapes of carters, quarrymen and stone-cutters. In the choir, however, hang a few portraits of noble donators in ruffs and Spanish jerkins; and one picture, rudely painted on the wall itself, renders with touching fidelity the interior of a peasant’s house in the sixteenth or seventeenth century, with the mother kneeling by a cradle over which the Black Virgin sheds her reassuring light.

The ebony Virgin herself (another “find” of the indefatigable Saint Eusebius) is enthroned behind the high altar, in a tiny chapel built by her discoverer, where, in a blaze of altar-lights, the miraculous image, nimbused in jewels and gold, showers a dazzling brightness on the groups who succeed each other at her iron lattice. The incense-laden air and the sweating stone walls encrusted with votive offerings recall at once the chapel of Loreto; but here the smaller space, the deeper dusk, heighten the sense of holiness and solemnity; and if a few white-capped Sisters are grouped against the grating, while before the altar a sweet-voiced young priest intones the mystic

_Mater purissima,
Mater admirabile,
Mater prudentissima,_

punctuated by the wailing _Ora pro nobis!_ of the nuns, it would be hard to picture a scene richer in that mingling of suavity and awe with which the Church composes her incomparable effects.

After so complex an impression the pleasures of the eye may seem a trifle thin; yet there is a great charm in the shaded walks winding through the colony of chapels above the monastery. Nothing in nature is lovelier than a beech-wood rustling with streams; and to come, in such a setting, on one graceful _tempietto_ after another, to discover, in their semi-pagan porches, groups of peasants praying before some dim presentment of the Passion, gives a renewed sense of the way in which, in Italy, nature, art and religion combine to enrich the humblest lives. These Sacred Mounts, or Stations of the Cross, are scattered everywhere on the Italian slopes of the Alps. The most famous is at Varallo, and to find any artistic merit one must go there, or to San Vivaldo in Tuscany, or the unknown hill-village of Cerveno in the Val Camonica. At Oropa the groups are relatively crude and uninteresting; but the mysterious half-light in which they are seen, and the surrounding murmur of leaves and water, give them a value quite independent of their plastic qualities.

* * * * *

Varallo itself is but a day’s journey from Andorno, and in June weather the drive thither is beautiful. The narrow country road mounts through chestnut-groves as fine as those which cast their velvet shade for miles about Promontogno in the Val Bregaglia. At first the way dips continuously from one green ravine to another, but at Mosso Santa Maria, the highest point of the ascent, the glorious plain again bursts into view, with white roads winding toward distant cities, and the near flanks of the hills clothed in unbroken forest. The Val Sesia is broader than the Val d’Andorno, and proportionately less picturesque; but its expanse of wheat and vine, checkered with shade and overhung by piled-up mossy rocks, offers a restful contrast to the landscape of the higher valleys. As Varallo is neared the hills close in again and the scenery regains its sub-Alpine character. The first unforgettable glimpse of the old town is caught suddenly at a bend of the road, with the Sanctuary lifted high above the river, and tiled roofs and church-towers clustered at its base. The near approach is a disenchantment; for few towns have suffered more than Varallo under the knife of “modern improvement,” and those who did not know it in earlier days would hardly guess that it was once the most picturesque town in North Italy. A dusty wide-avenued suburb, thinly scattered with cheap villas, now leads from the station to the edge of the old town; and the beautiful slope facing the Sacred Mountain has been cleared of its natural growth and planted with moribund palms and camellias, to form the “pleasure” grounds of a huge stucco hotel with failure written over every inch of its pretentious façade.

One knows not whether to lament the impairment of such rare completeness, or to find consolation in the fact that Varallo is rich enough not to be ruined by its losses. Ten or fifteen years ago every aspect was enchanting; now one must choose one’s point of view, but one or two of the finest are still intact. Turning one’s back, for instance, on the offending hotel, one has still, on a summer morning, the rarest vision of wood and water and happily-blended architecture: the Sesia with its soft meadows and leafy banks, the old houses huddled above it, and the high cliff crowned by the chapels of the Sacred Way. At night all melts to a diviner loveliness. The clustered darkness of the town, twinkling with lights, lies folded in hills delicately traced against a sky mauve with moonlight. Here and there the moon burnishes a sombre mass of trees, or makes a campanile stand out pale and definite as ivory; while high above, the summit of the cliff projects against the sky, with an almost Greek purity of outline, the white domes and arches of the Sanctuary.

The centre of the town is also undisturbed. Here one may wander through cool narrow streets with shops full of devotional emblems, and of the tall votive candles gaily spangled with gold, and painted with flower-wreaths and _mandorle_ of the Virgin. These streets, on Sundays, are thronged with the peasant women of the neighbouring valleys in their various costumes: some with cloth leggings and short dark-blue cloth petticoats embroidered in colours; others in skirts of plaited black silk, with embroidered jackets, silver necklaces and spreading head-dresses; for nearly every town has its distinctive dress, and some happy accident seems to have preserved this slope of the Alps from the depressing uniformity of modern fashions. In architectural effects the town is little richer than its neighbours; but it has that indescribable “tone” in which the soft texture of old stucco and the bloom of weather-beaten marble combine with a hundred happy accidents of sun and shade to produce what might be called the _patine_ of Italy. There is, indeed, one remarkable church, with a high double flight of steps leading to its door; but this (though it contains a fine Gaudenzio) passes as a mere incident in the general picturesqueness, and the only church with which the sight-seer seriously reckons is that of Santa Maria delle Grazie, frescoed with the artist’s scenes from the Passion.

_The Main Court of the Sacro Monte at Varallo_

E. C. Peixotto
VARALLO. 1901.
]

There is much beauty of detail in these crowded compositions; but, to the inexpert, Gaudenzio lives perhaps chiefly as the painter of the choiring angels of Saronno: so great there that elsewhere he seems relatively unimportant. At Varallo, at least, one associates him first with the Sacred Mountain. To this great monument of his native valley he contributed some of his most memorable work, and it seems fitting that on turning from his frescoes in Santa Maria one should find one’s self at the foot of the path leading to the Sanctuary. The wide approach, paved with tiny round pebbles polished by the feet of thousands of pilgrims, leads round the flank of the cliff to the park-like enclosure on its summit. Here, on the ledge overlooking the town, stands the church built by Saint Charles Borromeo (now disfigured by a modern façade), and grouped about it are the forty-two chapels of the “New Jerusalem.” These little buildings, to which one mounts or descends by mossy winding paths beneath the trees, present every variety of pseudo-classical design. Some, placed at different levels, are connected by open colonnades and long flights of steps; some have airy loggias, overlooking gardens tufted with blush-roses and the lilac iris; while others stand withdrawn in the deep shade of the beeches. Each chapel contains a terra-cotta group representing some scene in the divine history, and the site and architecture of each building have been determined by a subtle sense of dramatic fitness. Thus, the chapels enclosing the earlier episodes--the Annunciation, the Nativity and the scenes previous to the Last Supper--are placed in relatively open sites, with patches of flowers about their doorsteps; while as the drama darkens the pilgrim descends into deep shady hollows, or winds along chill stone corridors and up and down interminable stairs; a dark subterranean passage leading at last to the image of the buried Christ.

Of the groups themselves it is difficult to speak dispassionately, for they are so much a part of their surroundings that one can hardly measure them by any conventional standard. To do so, indeed, would be to miss their meaning. They must be studied as a reflection of the Bible story in the hearts of simple and emotional peasants; for it was the piety of the mountain-folk that called them into being, and the modellers and painters who contributed to the work were mostly natives of Val Sesia or of the neighbouring valleys. The art of clay modelling is peculiarly adapted to the rendering of strong and direct emotions. So much vivacity of expression do its rapid evocations permit, that one might almost describe it as intermediate between pantomime and sculpture. The groups at Varallo have the defects inherent in such an improvisation: the crudeness, the violence, sometimes even the seeming absurdities of an instantaneous photograph. These faults are redeemed by a simplicity and realism which have not had time to harden into conventionality. The Virgin and Saint Elizabeth are low-browed full-statured peasant women; the round-cheeked romping children, the dwarfs and hunchbacks, the Roman soldiers and the Jewish priests, have all been transferred alive from the market-places of Borgo Sesia and Arona. These expressive figures, dressed in real clothes, with real hair flowing about their shoulders, seem like the actors in some miracle-play arrested at its crowning moment.

Closer inspection brings to light a marked difference in quality between the different groups. Those by Tabacchetti and Fermo Stella are the best, excepting only the remarkable scene of the Crucifixion, attributed to Gaudenzio, and probably executed from his design. Tabacchetti is the artist of the Adam and Eve surrounded by the supra-terrestrial flora and fauna of Eden: a curious composition, with a golden-haired Eve of mincing elegance and refinement. To Stella are due some of the simplest and most moving scenes of the series: the Adoration of the Magi, the message of the angel to Joseph, and Christ and the woman of Samaria. Especially charming is the Annunciation, where a yellow-wigged angel, in a kind of celestial dressing-gown of flowered brocade, advances, lily in hand, toward a gracefully-startled Virgin, dressed (as one is told) in a costume presented by a pious lady of Varallo. In another scene the Mother of God, habited like a peasant of Val Sesia, looks up smilingly from the lace-cushion on which she is at work; while the Last Supper, probably a survival of the older wooden groups existing before Gaudenzio and his school took up the work, shows a lace-trimmed linen table-cloth, with bread and fruit set out on real Faenza dishes.

After these homely details the scenes of the Passion, where Gaudenzio’s influence probably prevailed, seem a trifle academic; but even here there are local touches, such as the curly white dog at the foot of Herod’s throne, the rags of the beggars, the child in the Crucifixion holding a spotted hound in leash.

The Crucifixion is fitly the culminating point of the series. Here Gaudenzio lined the background with one of his noblest frescoes, and the figures placed before it are worthy, in expression and attitude, to carry out the master’s conception. The gold-bucklered Roman knight on his white charger, the eager gaping throng, where beggars and cripples jostle turbaned fine ladies and their dwarfs, where oval-faced Lombard women with children at the breast press forward to catch a glimpse of the dying Christ, while the hideous soldiers at the foot of the cross draw lots for the seamless garment--all these crowding careless figures bring out with strange intensity the agony uplifted in their midst. Never, perhaps, has the popular, the unimpressed, unrepentant side of the scene been set forth with more tragic directness. One can fancy the gold-armoured knight echoing in after years the musing words of Anatole France’s _Procurateur de Judée_:--“Jésus? Jésus de Nazareth? Je ne me rappelle pas.”

* * * * *

From Varallo the fortunate traveller may carry his impressions unimpaired through the chestnut-woods and across the hills to the lake of Orta--a small sheet of water enclosed in richest verdure, with the wooded island of San Giuliano on its bosom. Orta has a secret charm of its own: a quality of solitude, of remoteness, that makes it seem the special property of each traveller who chances to discover it. Here too is a Sacred Way, surmounting the usual knoll above the town. The groups have little artistic merit, but there is a solemn charm in the tranquil glades, with their little white-pillared shrines, connected by grass walks under a continuous vaulting of branches. The chief “feature” of Orta, however, is the incredibly complete little island, with its ancient church embosomed in gardens; yet even this counts only as a detail in the general composition, a last touch to the prodigal picturesqueness of the place. The lake itself is begirt by vine-clad slopes, and in every direction roads and bridle-paths lead across the wooded hills, through glades sheeted in spring-time with primroses and lilies-of-the-valley, to the deeper forest-recesses at the foot of the high Alps.

In any other country the departure from such perfect loveliness must lead to an anti-climax; but there is no limit to the prodigality of the Italian landscape, and the wanderer who turns eastward from Orta may pass through scenes of undiminished beauty till, toward sunset, the hills divide to show Lake Maggiore at his feet, with the Isola Bella moored like a fantastic pleasure-craft upon its waters.

WHAT THE HERMITS SAW

In almost every gallery of Italy there hangs, among the pictures of the earlier period, one which represents, with loving minuteness of topographical detail, a rocky mountain-side honeycombed with caves and inhabited by hermits.

As a rule, the landscape is comprehensive enough to include the whole Thebaid, with the river at the base of the cliff, the _selva oscura_ “fledging the wild-ridged mountain steep by steep,” and the various little edifices--huts, chapels and bridges--with which the colony of anchorites have humanized their wild domain. This presentment of the life of the solitaries always remained a favourite subject in Italian art, and even in the rococo period, when piety had become a drawing-room accomplishment, the traditional charm of the “life apart” was commemorated by the mock “hermitages” to be found in every nobleman’s park, or by such frescoes as adorn the entrance to the chapel of the Villa Chigi, near Rome: a tiny room painted to represent a rocky cleft in the mountains, with anchorites visiting each other in their caves, or engaged in the duties of their sylvan existence.

A vast body of literature--and of a literature peculiarly accessible to the people--has kept alive in Catholic countries the image of the early solitary. The Golden Legend, the great Bollandist compilations, and many other collections of pious anecdote, preserve, in simple and almost childish form, the names and deeds of the desert saints. In the traditions of the Latin race there still lingers, no doubt, a sub-conscious memory of the dark days when all that was gentle and merciful and humane turned to the desert to escape the desolation of the country and the foulness of the town. From war and slavery and famine, from the strife of the circus factions and the incredible vices and treacheries of civilized life, the disenchanted Christian, aghast at the more than pagan corruption of a converted world, fled into the waste places to wear out his life in penance. The horrors he left behind surpassed anything the desert could show--surpassed even the terrors that walked by night, the airy tongues that syllabled men’s names, the lemurs, succubi and painted demons of the tombs. Nevertheless the lives of the early anchorites, who took refuge in the burning solitudes of Egypt and Asia Minor, were full of fears and anguish. Their history echoes with the groans and lamentations of souls in pain, and had their lives been recorded by contemporary artists, the presentment must have recalled those horribly circumstantial studies of everlasting torment which admonished the mediæval worshipper from the walls of every church.

But when Italian art began to chronicle the history of the desert fathers, a change had passed over the spirit of Christianity. If the world was still a dark place, full of fears and evil, solitary communion with God had ceased to become a more dreadful alternative; and when men went forth into the desert they found Christ there rather than the devil. So at least one infers from the spirit in which the Italian painters rendered the life of the Thebaid--transposing its scenes from the parched African desert to their own fertile landscape, and infusing into the lives of the desert fathers that sense of human fellowship with which Saint Francis had penetrated the mediæval conception of Christianity. The first hermits shunned each other as they shunned the image of evil; every human relation was a snare, and they sought each other out only in moments of moral or physical extremity, when flesh or spirit quailed before the hallucinations of solitude. But in the Italian pictures the hermits move in an atmosphere of fraternal tenderness. Though they still lead the “life apart,” it is shorn of its grimness and mitigated by acts of friendly ministry and innocent childlike intercourse. The solitaries still dwell in remote inaccessible regions, and for the most part their lives are spent alone; but on the feasts of the Church they visit each other, and when they go on pilgrimage they pause at each other’s thresholds.

Yet, though one feels that this new spirit has tamed the desert, and transplanted to it enough of the leaven of human intercourse to exorcise its evil spirits, the imagination remains chiefly struck by the strangeness of the conditions in which these voluntary exiles must have found themselves. The hermits brought little with them from the world of cities and men compared to what they found in the wilderness. Their relation to the earth--their ancient mysterious mother--must have been the most intimate as well as the most interesting part of their lives; as a “return to nature” the experience had a freshness and intensity which the modern seeker after primeval sensations can never hope to recover. For in those days, when distances were measured by the pilgrim’s sandal or the ass’s hoof, a few miles meant exile, and the mountain visible from the walls of his native town offered the solitary as complete an isolation as the slopes of Lebanon. News travelled at the same pace, when it did not drop by the way. There was little security outside the city walls, and small incentive for the traveller, except from devotional motives, to seek out the anchorite on his inaccessible height.

The hermit, therefore, was thrown back on the companionship of the wild; and what he won from it we read in the gentler legends of the desert, and in the records of the early Italian artists. Much, for instance, is told of the delightful nature of the intercourse between the solitaries and wild animals. The lion having been the typical “denizen” of the Libyan sands, the Italian painter has transplanted him to the Umbrian hill-sides, where, jointly with the wolf and the stag, he lives in gentle community with the anchorites. For instead of fleeing from or fighting these lords of the wilderness, the wise hermits at once entered into negotiations with them--negotiations sometimes resulting in life-long friendships, and sealed by the self-sacrificing death of the adoring animal. It was of course the power of the cross which subjugated these savage beasts; and many instances are recorded of the control exercised over wild animals, and the contrition awakened in them, by the conquering sign. But the hermits, not content with asserting their spiritual predominance over these poor soulless creatures (_non sono Cristiani_), seemed to feel that such a victory was too easy, and were themselves won over by the devotion of their dumb friends, and drawn into a brotherly commerce which no law of the Church prescribed.

The mystical natural history of the first Christian centuries facilitated the belief in this intercourse between man and beast. When even familiar domestic animals were credited with strange symbolic attributes, it was natural to people the wild with the dragon, the hydra and the cocatrix; to believe that the young of the elephant were engendered by their mothers’ eating of the mandragora which grows on a mount near Paradise; that those of the lion were born dead and resuscitated by their parents’ breath; and that the old eagle renewed his youth by plunging three times in a magic fountain. It is not strange that creatures so marvellously endowed should have entered into friendly relations with the human intruders upon their solitude, and subdued their savage natures to the teachings of their new masters. And as the lion and the wolf were gradually transformed into humble but wise companions, so the other influences of the wilderness came to acquire a power over the solitaries. Even after the early Thebaids had been gathered in under one or another of the great monastic rules, seekers after holiness continued to flee the communal life, and in Italy every lonely height came to have its recluse. It was impossible that these little restricted human lives, going forth singly into the desert, should not be gradually absorbed into it and saturated with its spirit. Think what a soul-shattering or soul-making experience it must have been to the dweller in the narrow walled town or the narrower monastery, to go forth alone, beyond the ploughed fields and the road to the next village, beyond the haunts of men and hail of friendly voices, forth into the unmapped region of hills and forests, where wild beasts and robbers, and other presences less definable but more baleful, lay in wait for the lonely traveller! From robbers there was not much to fear: the solitaries were poor, and it was a great sin to lay hands on them. The wild beasts, too, might be won over to Christian amity; but what of those other presences of which the returning traveller whispered over the evening fire?

At first, no doubt, the feeling of awe was uppermost, and only the heart inflated with divine love could sustain the assaults of fear and loneliness; but gradually, as the noise of cities died out, as the ear became inured to the vast hush of nature, and the mind to the delicious recurrence of untroubled hours--then, wonderfully, imperceptibly, the spirit of the hermit must have put forth tendrils of sympathy and intelligence toward the mysterious world about him. Think of the joy of escaping from the ceaseless brawls, the dirt, disease and misery of the mediæval town, or from the bickering, the tale-bearing, the mechanical devotions of the crowded monastery! Think of the wonder of entering, alone and undisturbed, into communion with this vast still world of cliff and cataract, of bird and beast and flower!

There were, of course, different kinds of hermits: the dull kind whose only object was to escape from the turmoil and rivalry of the city, or the toil and floggings of the farm, and to live drowsily in a warm cleft of the rocks (not too far from the other solitaries), high above the populous plain alternately harried by war and pestilence; and there was the ecstatic, so filled with the immanent light that he saw neither cliff nor cataract, that the various face of nature was no more to him than a window of clear glass opening on the brightness of the beatific vision. But there must have been a third kind also--the kind in whom the divine love, instead of burning like a cold inward flame, overflowed on the whole world about him; to whom, in this new immediate contact with nature, the swallow became a sister, the wolf a brother, the very clods “lovers and lamps”: mute Saint Francises, born out of their due time, to whom the life of nature revealed, inarticulately but profoundly, the bond of brotherhood between man and the soil.

It was to these solitaries that the wilderness truly confessed itself, yielding up once more all the terror and the poetry of its ancient life. For the cliffs and forests shunned of men had not always been thus deserted, and always there had throbbed in them the pulse of that strange intermediate life, between the man and the clod, of which the tradition lingers in all lonely places. The hermits of course knew this: the life of ancient days was still close to them. They knew also that the power of the cross had banished from temple and market-place, from garden, house and vineyard, a throng of tutelary beings on whom the welfare of men had once been thought to depend, but who had now been declared false to their trust, and driven forth to join their brothers of the hills and woods. This knowledge rested on no vague rumours, but on authenticated fact. Were not many of the old temples still standing, some built into the walls of Christian churches, others falling into desecrated ruin on lonely cliff and promontory? And was it not known that in these latter the wraiths of the old gods still reassembled? Many pilgrims and travellers bore witness to the fact. Who had not heard of the Jewish wayfarer, overtaken by night in a lonely country, who sought shelter in a ruined temple of Apollo, and would have been blasted by the god and his attendant demons, had he not (converted by fear) dispelled the unholy rout with the sign of the cross?

A tangle of classic and mediæval traditions, Greek, Etruscan and Germanic, in which the gods of the Thessalian glades and the werewolves of northern forests rode the midnight blast in the _chevauchée_ of a wild Walpurgisnacht, haunted the background of life in that confused age when “ignorant armies clashed by night” on the battleground of the awakening human intelligence. To the citizen hugging the city walls, this supernatural world was dark with images of sin and fear; but to the dweller in the forest, bold enough to affront the greater terrors of self-communion, it must have offered a mitigating sense of fellowship. That it did so is proved even by some of the earliest legends. It was not always in forms of peril and perdition that the banished gods manifested themselves to the votaries of the usurper. To the dweller in the city they may have come in vengeful shape, like the Venus, _tout entière à sa proie attachée_, who held fast to the Christian bridegroom’s ring (though surely here one catches a note of the old longing); but in their native solitude they seem to have appeared propitiatingly, with timid proffers of service, as when Saint Anthony, travelling in search of a fellow-hermit, was guided on his way, first by a centaur and then by “a little man with hoofs like a goat.”

For generations indeed, for centuries even in that slow-moving time, the divinities of the old dispensation must have remained more familiar to the simple people than the strange new God of Israel. Often they must have stolen back in the twilight, to surprise and comfort the unlettered toilers who still believed in them, still secretly offered them the dripping honeycomb and bowl of ewe’s milk, or hung garlands in the cleft tree which they haunted. To some of these humble hearts, grieving for their old fireside gods, and a little bewildered by the demands of the great forbidding Christ who frowned from the golden heights of the Byzantine apse, the “return to nature” must have been like a coming home to the instinctive endearing ways of childhood. How could they be alarmed by the sight of these old exiled gods, familiars of the hearth and garden; they who had been born to the sense of such presences, to half-human intercourse with beings who linked man to the soil that nurtured him, and the roof beneath which he slept?

Even the most holy and learned men of the first Christian centuries did not question the actual existence of the heathen gods, and the Fathers of the Church expended volumes of controversy in discussing their origin and their influence on a Christianized world. A strange conflict of opinion waged around this burning question. By the greater number of authorities the old gods were believed to be demons, emanations of the mysterious spirit of evil, himself the Ahriman of the ancient Eastern dualism, who had cleverly smuggled himself into the new Christian creed. Yet the oracles, though usually regarded as the voices of these demons, were always believed in and quoted by the Christian Church, and the history of the dark ages abounds in allusion to the authority of the Sibylline books. While Christian scholarship thus struggled under the spell of the old beliefs, how could the artisan and serf have freed themselves from it? Gradually, indeed, the Church, foreseeing the perils of a divided allegiance, and fearing the baleful loveliness of the old gods, was to transform their myths into Christian legend, and so supply a new throng of anthropomorphic conceptions for minds unable to keep their faith alive on the thin abstractions of the schoolmen. The iconography of the early Church bears witness to the skill with which these adaptations were effected, and the slender young Olympians and their symbols pressed into the service of the new faith; but it was long before the results of this process reached the popular mind, and meanwhile the old gods lived on in simple fellowship with the strange saints and angels.

Through all the middle ages the marvellous did not fail from the earth: it simply receded farther from the centres of life, drawing after it the hearts of the adventurous. The Polo brothers were no doubt clear-sighted practical men while they drove their trade in Venice; but wonders pressed upon them when they set foot in the Great Khan’s domains. If an astute Italian prince, who lived till the middle of the fifteenth century with the light of the new humanism flooding his court, could yet, on his travels to the Holy Land and Greece, discover castles inhabited by enchanted snakes, as well as wonder-working shrines of his own creed, how could the simple hearts of the anchorite and solitary remain closed to the old wonders?

Shapes which have once inhabited the imagination of man pass reluctantly out of existence. Centuries of poetic belief had peopled the old world with a race of superhuman beings, and as many centuries would be needed to lay their ghosts. It must be remembered, moreover, that no sudden cataclysm, political or intellectual, marked the introduction of the Christian faith. For three centuries after the sacrifice on Calvary, hardly an allusion to the new god is to be found in the pages of the pagan historians and philosophers. Even after he had led the legions of Constantine to victory, and so won official allegiance throughout the Roman world, no violent change marked the beginning of the new era. For centuries still, men ploughed the same fields with ploughs fashioned on the same lines, kept the same holidays with the same rites, and lived on the same store of accumulated beliefs. And in the hearts of the solitaries these beliefs must have lingered longest. For in fleeing the world they were returning to the native habitations of the old gods. They were nature-spirits every one, sprung from the wave, the cloud, the tree. To the cities they had been borne triumphant by the will of men, and from the cities they might be banished at its behest; but who should drive them from their old stronghold in the breast of nature? Their temples might be re-dedicated to the new god, but none could banish them from the temples not made with hands. Daylight might deny them, but twilight confessed them still. They made no effort to recover the supremacy which had been wrested from them: the gods know when their hour has come. But they lived on, shrinking back more and more into their primitive forms, into the vapour, the tree-trunk, the moon-track on the lonely sea; or revealing themselves, in wistful fugitive glimpses, to the mortals who had come to share their forest exile.

In what gentle guise they showed themselves, one may see in many pictures of the Italian _quattro cento_, some of whose lesser painters seem to have been in actual communion with this pale woodland Olympus. The gods they depict are not the shining lords of the Greek heaven, but half-human, half-sylvan creatures, shy suppliants for mortal recognition, hovering gently on the verge of evanescence. Robetta, the Florentine engraver, transferred them to some of his plates, Luini caught their tender grace in his Sacrifice to Pan and Metamorphosis of Daphne, and Lorenzo Costa gives a glimpse of their sylvan revels in the Mythological Scene of the Louvre; but it was Piero di Cosimo who had the clearest intuition of them. The gentle furred creature of the Death of Procris might have been the very faun who showed Saint Anthony the way; and in all Cosimo’s mythological pictures one has the same impression of that intermediate world, the twilight world of the conquered, Christianized, yet still lingering gods, so different from the clear upper air of classic art.

Was it, as the scholars would have us believe, mere lack of book-learning and technical skill that kept the painters of the _quattro_ cento spell-bound in this mediæval Olympus? Were these vanishing gods and half-gods merely a clumsy attempt to formulate the classic conception of divinity? But the Pisani had discovered Greek plastic art two centuries earlier; but the uncovered wonders of Rome were being daily drawn and measured by skilful hands; but the silhouettes of the antique temples were still outlined against the skies of Greater Greece! No--these lesser artists were not struggling to embody a half-understood ideal. Kept nearer the soil and closer to the past by the very limitations of their genius, they left to the great masters the task of reconstituting classical antiquity, content to go on painting the gods who still lived in their blood, the gods their own forbears had known in the familiar streets and fields, the fading gods whom the hermits were last to see in the lost recesses of the mountain.

A TUSCAN SHRINE

One of the rarest and most delicate pleasures of the continental tourist is to circumvent the compiler of his guide-book. The red volumes which accompany the traveller through Italy have so completely anticipated the most whimsical impulses of their readers that it is now almost impossible to plan a tour of exploration without finding, on reference to them, that their author has already been over the ground, has tested the inns, measured the kilometres, and distilled from the massive tomes of Kugler, Burckhardt and Morelli a portable estimate of the local art and architecture. Even the discovery of incidental lapses scarcely consoles the traveller for the habitual accuracy of his statements; and the only refuge left from his omniscience lies in approaching the places he describes by a route which he has not taken.

Those to whom one of the greatest charms of travel in over-civilized countries consists in such momentary escapes from the expected, will still find here and there, even in Italy, a few miles unmeasured by the guide-book; and it was to enjoy the brief exhilaration of such a discovery that we stepped out of the train one morning at Certaldo, determined to find our way thence to San Vivaldo.

For some months we had been vaguely aware that, somewhere among the hills between Volterra and the Arno, there lay an obscure monastery containing a series of terra-cotta groups which were said to represent the scenes of the Passion. No one in Florence seemed to know much about them; and many of the people whom we questioned had never even heard of San Vivaldo. Professor Enrico Ridolfi, at that time the director of the Royal Museums at Florence, knew by hearsay of the existence of the groups, and told me that there was every reason to accept the local tradition which has always attributed them to Giovanni Gonnelli, the blind modeller of Gambassi, an obscure artist of the seventeenth century, much praised by contemporary authors, but since fallen into merited oblivion. Professor Ridolfi, however, had never seen any photographs of the groups, and was not unnaturally disposed to believe that they were of small artistic merit, since Gonnelli worked much later, and in a more debased period of taste, than the modeller of the well-known groups at Varallo. Still, even when the more pretentious kind of Italian sculpture was at its lowest, a spark of its old life smouldered here and there in the improvisations of the _plasticatore_, or stucco modeller; and I hoped to find, in the despised groups of San Vivaldo, something of the coarse naïveté and brutal energy which animate their more famous rivals of Varallo. In this hope we started in search of San Vivaldo; and as the guide-books told us that it could be reached only by way of Castel Fiorentino, we promptly determined to attack it from San Gimignano.

At Certaldo, the birthplace of Boccaccio, where the train left us one April morning, we found an archaic little carriage, with a coachman who entered sympathetically into our plan for eluding our cicerone. He told us that he knew a road which led in about four hours across the mountains from San Gimignano to San Vivaldo; and in his charge we were soon crossing the poplar-fringed Elsa and climbing the steep ascent to San Gimignano, where we were to spend the night.

The next morning, before sunrise, the little carriage awaited us at the inn door; and as we dashed out under the gateway of San Gimignano we felt the thrill of explorers sighting a new continent. It seemed, in fact, an unknown world which lay beneath us in the early light. The hills, so definitely etched at midday, at sunset so softly modelled, had melted into a silver sea of which the farthest waves were indistinguishably merged in billows of luminous mist. Only the near foreground retained its precision of outline, and that too had assumed an air of unreality. Fields, hedges and cypresses were tipped with an aureate brightness which recalled the golden ripples running over the grass in the foreground of Botticelli’s “Birth of Venus.” The sunshine had the density of gold-leaf: we seemed to be driving through the landscape of a missal.

At first we had this magical world to ourselves, but as the light broadened groups of labourers began to appear under the olives and between the vines; shepherdesses, distaff in hand, drove their flocks along the roadside, and yokes of white oxen with scarlet fringes above their meditative eyes moved past us with such solemn deliberateness of step that fancy transformed their brushwood-laden carts into the sacred _carroccio_ of the past. Ahead of us the road wound through a district of vineyards and orchards, but to the north and east the panorama of the Tuscan hills unrolled range after range of treeless undulations, outlined one upon the other, as the sun grew high, with the delicately-pencilled minuteness of a mountain background of Sebald Beham’s. Behind us the fantastic towers of San Gimignano dominated each bend of the road like some persistent mirage of the desert; to the north lay Castel Fiorentino, and far away other white villages gleamed like fossil shells embedded in the hill-sides.