Twilight in Italy
D.H. Lawrence




CONTENTS


THE CRUCIFIX ACROSS THE MOUNTAINS

ON THE LAGO DI GARDA
  1 _The Spinner and the Monks_
  2 _The Lemon Gardens_
  3 _The Theatre_
  4 _San Gaudenzio_
  5 _The Dance_
  6 _Il Duro_
  7 _John_

ITALIANS IN EXILE

THE RETURN JOURNEY




_The Crucifix Across the Mountains_


The imperial road to Italy goes from Munich across the Tyrol, through
Innsbruck and Bozen to Verona, over the mountains. Here the great
processions passed as the emperors went South, or came home again from
rosy Italy to their own Germany.

And how much has that old imperial vanity clung to the German soul? Did
not the German kings inherit the empire of bygone Rome? It was not a
very real empire, perhaps, but the sound was high and splendid.

Maybe a certain Grössenwahn is inherent in the German nature. If only
nations would realize that they have certain natural characteristics, if
only they could understand and agree to each other's particular nature,
how much simpler it would all be.

The imperial procession no longer crosses the mountains, going South.
That is almost forgotten, the road has almost passed out of mind. But
still it is there, and its signs are standing.

The crucifixes are there, not mere attributes of the road, yet still
having something to do with it. The imperial processions, blessed by the
Pope and accompanied by the great bishops, must have planted the holy
idol like a new plant among the mountains, there where it multiplied and
grew according to the soil, and the race that received it.

As one goes among the Bavarian uplands and foothills, soon one realizes
here is another land, a strange religion. It is a strange country,
remote, out of contact. Perhaps it belongs to the forgotten, imperial
processions.

Coming along the clear, open roads that lead to the mountains, one
scarcely notices the crucifixes and the shrines. Perhaps one's interest
is dead. The crucifix itself is nothing, a factory-made piece of
sentimentalism. The soul ignores it.

But gradually, one after another looming shadowily under their hoods,
the crucifixes seem to create a new atmosphere over the whole of the
countryside, a darkness, a weight in the air that is so unnaturally
bright and rare with the reflection from the snows above, a darkness
hovering just over the earth. So rare and unearthly the light is, from
the mountains, full of strange radiance. Then every now and again recurs
the crucifix, at the turning of an open, grassy road, holding a shadow
and a mystery under its pointed hood.

I was startled into consciousness one evening, going alone over a marshy
place at the foot of the mountains, when the sky was pale and unearthly,
invisible, and the hills were nearly black. At a meeting of the tracks
was a crucifix, and between the feet of the Christ a handful of withered
poppies. It was the poppies I saw, then the Christ.

It was an old shrine, the wood-sculpture of a Bavarian peasant. The
Christ was a peasant of the foot of the Alps. He had broad cheekbones
and sturdy limbs. His plain, rudimentary face stared fixedly at the
hills, his neck was stiffened, as if in resistance to the fact of the
nails and the cross, which he could not escape. It was a man nailed down
in spirit, but set stubbornly against the bondage and the disgrace. He
was a man of middle age, plain, crude, with some of the meanness of the
peasant, but also with a kind of dogged nobility that does not yield its
soul to the circumstance. Plain, almost blank in his soul, the
middle-aged peasant of the crucifix resisted unmoving the misery of his
position. He did not yield. His soul was set, his will was fixed. He was
himself, let his circumstances be what they would, his life fixed down.

Across the marsh was a tiny square of orange-coloured light, from the
farm-house with the low, spreading roof. I remembered how the man and
his wife and the children worked on till dark, silent and intent,
carrying the hay in their arms out of the streaming thunder-rain into
the shed, working silent in the soaking rain.

The body bent forward towards the earth, closing round on itself; the
arms clasped full of hay, clasped round the hay that presses soft and
close to the breast and the body, that pricks heat into the arms and the
skin of the breast, and fills the lungs with the sleepy scent of dried
herbs: the rain that falls heavily and wets the shoulders, so that the
shirt clings to the hot, firm skin and the rain comes with heavy,
pleasant coldness on the active flesh, running in a trickle down towards
the loins, secretly; this is the peasant, this hot welter of physical
sensation. And it is all intoxicating. It is intoxicating almost like a
soporific, like a sensuous drug, to gather the burden to one's body in
the rain, to stumble across the living grass to the shed, to relieve
one's arms of the weight, to throw down the hay on to the heap, to feel
light and free in the dry shed, then to return again into the chill,
hard rain, to stoop again under the rain, and rise to return again with
the burden.

It is this, this endless heat and rousedness of physical sensation which
keeps the body full and potent, and flushes the mind with a blood heat,
a blood sleep. And this sleep, this heat of physical experience, becomes
at length a bondage, at last a crucifixion. It is the life and the
fulfilment of the peasant, this flow of sensuous experience. But at last
it drives him almost mad, because he cannot escape.

For overhead there is always the strange radiance of the mountains,
there is the mystery of the icy river rushing through its pink shoals
into the darkness of the pine-woods, there is always the faint tang of
ice on the air, and the rush of hoarse-sounding water.

And the ice and the upper radiance of snow are brilliant with timeless
immunity from the flux and the warmth of life. Overhead they transcend
all life, all the soft, moist fire of the blood. So that a man must
needs live under the radiance of his own negation.

There is a strange, clear beauty of form about the men of the Bavarian
highlands, about both men and women. They are large and clear and
handsome in form, with blue eyes very keen, the pupil small, tightened,
the iris keen, like sharp light shining on blue ice. Their large,
full-moulded limbs and erect bodies are distinct, separate, as if they
were perfectly chiselled out of the stuff of life, static, cut off.
Where they are everything is set back, as in a clear frosty air.

Their beauty is almost this, this strange, clean-cut isolation, as if
each one of them would isolate himself still further and for ever from
the rest of his fellows.

Yet they are convivial, they are almost the only race with the souls of
artists. Still they act the mystery plays with instinctive fullness of
interpretation, they sing strangely in the mountain fields, they love
make-belief and mummery, their processions and religious festivals are
profoundly impressive, solemn, and rapt.

It is a race that moves on the poles of mystic sensual delight. Every
gesture is a gesture from the blood, every expression is a symbolic
utterance.

For learning there is sensuous experience, for thought there is myth and
drama and dancing and singing. Everything is of the blood, of the
senses. There is no mind. The mind is a suffusion of physical heat, it
is not separated, it is kept submerged.

At the same time, always, overhead, there is the eternal, negative
radiance of the snows. Beneath is life, the hot jet of the blood playing
elaborately. But above is the radiance of changeless not-being. And life
passes away into this changeless radiance. Summer and the prolific
blue-and-white flowering of the earth goes by, with the labour and the
ecstasy of man, disappears, and is gone into brilliance that hovers
overhead, the radiant cold which waits to receive back again all that
which has passed for the moment into being.

The issue is too much revealed. It leaves the peasant no choice. The
fate gleams transcendent above him, the brightness of eternal,
unthinkable not-being. And this our life, this admixture of labour and
of warm experience in the flesh, all the time it is steaming up to the
changeless brilliance above, the light of the everlasting snows. This is
the eternal issue.

Whether it is singing or dancing or play-acting or physical transport of
love, or vengeance or cruelty, or whether it is work or sorrow or
religion, the issue is always the same at last, into the radiant
negation of eternity. Hence the beauty and completeness, the finality of
the highland peasant. His figure, his limbs, his face, his motion, it is
all formed in beauty, and it is all completed. There is no flux nor hope
nor becoming, all is, once and for all. The issue is eternal, timeless,
and changeless. All being and all passing away is part of the issue,
which is eternal and changeless. Therefore there is no becoming and no
passing away. Everything is, now and for ever. Hence the strange beauty
and finality and isolation of the Bavarian peasant.

It is plain in the crucifixes. Here is the essence rendered in sculpture
of wood. The face is blank and stiff, almost expressionless. One
realizes with a start how unchanging and conventionalized is the face of
the living man and woman of these parts, handsome, but motionless as
pure form. There is also an underlying meanness, secretive, cruel. It is
all part of the beauty, the pure, plastic beauty. The body also of the
Christus is stiff and conventionalized, yet curiously beautiful in
proportion, and in the static tension which makes it unified into one
clear thing. There is no movement, no possible movement. The being is
fixed, finally. The whole body is locked in one knowledge, beautiful,
complete. It is one with the nails. Not that it is languishing or dead.
It is stubborn, knowing its own undeniable being, sure of the absolute
reality of the sensuous experience. Though he is nailed down upon an
irrevocable fate, yet, within that fate he has the power and the delight
of all sensuous experience. So he accepts the fate and the mystic
delight of the senses with one will, he is complete and final. His
sensuous experience is supreme, a consummation of life and death
at once.

It is the same at all times, whether it is moving with the scythe on the
hill-slopes, or hewing the timber, or steering the raft down the river
which is all effervescent with ice; whether it is drinking in the
Gasthaus, or making love, or playing some mummer's part, or hating
steadily and cruelly, or whether it is kneeling in spellbound subjection
in the incense-filled church, or walking in the strange, dark,
subject-procession to bless the fields, or cutting the young birch-trees
for the feast of Frohenleichnam, it is always the same, the dark,
powerful mystic, sensuous experience is the whole of him, he is mindless
and bound within the absoluteness of the issue, the unchangeability of
the great icy not-being which holds good for ever, and is supreme.

Passing further away, towards Austria, travelling up the Isar, till the
stream becomes smaller and whiter and the air is colder, the full
glamour of the northern hills, which are so marvellously luminous and
gleaming with flowers, wanes and gives way to a darkness, a sense of
ominousness. Up there I saw another little Christ, who seemed the very
soul of the place. The road went beside the river, that was seething
with snowy ice-bubbles, under the rocks and the high, wolf-like
pine-trees, between the pinkish shoals. The air was cold and hard and
high, everything was cold and separate. And in a little glass case
beside the road sat a small, hewn Christ, the head resting on the hand;
and he meditates, half-wearily, doggedly, the eyebrows lifted in strange
abstraction, the elbow resting on the knee. Detached, he sits and dreams
and broods, wearing his little golden crown of thorns, and his little
cloak of red flannel that some peasant woman has stitched for him.

No doubt he still sits there, the small, blank-faced Christ in the cloak
of red flannel, dreaming, brooding, enduring, persisting. There is a
wistfulness about him, as if he knew that the whole of things was too
much for him. There was no solution, either, in death. Death did not
give the answer to the soul's anxiety. That which is, is. It does not
cease to be when it is cut. Death cannot create nor destroy. What
is, is.

The little brooding Christ knows this. What is he brooding, then? His
static patience and endurance is wistful. What is it that he secretly
yearns for, amid all the placidity of fate? 'To be, or not to be,' this
may be the question, but is it not a question for death to answer. It is
not a question of living or not-living. It is a question of being--to be
or not to be. To persist or not to persist, that is not the question;
neither is it to endure or not to endure. The issue, is it eternal
not-being? If not, what, then, is being? For overhead the eternal
radiance of the snow gleams unfailing, it receives the efflorescence of
all life and is unchanged, the issue is bright and immortal, the snowy
not-being. What, then, is being?

As one draws nearer to the turning-point of the Alps, towards the
culmination and the southern slope, the influence of the educated world
is felt once more. Bavaria is remote in spirit, as yet unattached. Its
crucifixes are old and grey and abstract, small like the kernel of the
truth. Further into Austria they become new, they are painted white,
they are larger, more obtrusive. They are the expressions of a later,
newer phase, more introspective and self-conscious. But still they are
genuine expressions of the people's soul.

Often one can distinguish the work of a particular artist here and there
in a district. In the Zemm valley, in the heart of the Tyrol, behind
Innsbruck, there are five or six crucifixes by one sculptor. He is no
longer a peasant working out an idea, conveying a dogma. He is an
artist, trained and conscious, probably working in Vienna. He is
consciously trying to convey a _feeling_, he is no longer striving
awkwardly to render a truth, a religious fact.

The chief of his crucifixes stands deep in the Klamm, in the dank gorge
where it is always half-night. The road runs under the rock and the
trees, half-way up the one side of the pass. Below, the stream rushes
ceaselessly, embroiled among great stones, making an endless loud noise.
The rock face opposite rises high overhead, with the sky far up. So that
one is walking in a half-night, an underworld. And just below the path,
where the pack-horses go climbing to the remote, infolded villages, in
the cold gloom of the pass hangs the large, pale Christ. He is larger
than life-size. He has fallen forward, just dead, and the weight of the
full-grown, mature body hangs on the nails of the hands. So the dead,
heavy body drops forward, sags, as if it would tear away and fall under
its own weight.

It is the end. The face is barren with a dead expression of weariness,
and brutalized with pain and bitterness. The rather ugly, passionate
mouth is set for ever in the disillusionment of death. Death is the
complete disillusionment, set like a seal over the whole body and being,
over the suffering and weariness and the bodily passion.

The pass is gloomy and damp, the water roars unceasingly, till it is
almost like a constant pain. The driver of the pack-horses, as he comes
up the narrow path in the side of the gorge, cringes his sturdy
cheerfulness as if to obliterate himself, drawing near to the large,
pale Christ, and he takes his hat off as he passes, though he does not
look up, but keeps his face averted from the crucifix. He hurries by in
the gloom, climbing the steep path after his horses, and the large white
Christ hangs extended above.

The driver of the pack-horses is afraid. The fear is always there in
him, in spite of his sturdy, healthy robustness. His soul is not sturdy.
It is blenched and whitened with fear. The mountains are dark overhead,
the water roars in the gloom below. His heart is ground between the
mill-stones of dread. When he passes the extended body of the dead
Christ he takes off his hat to the Lord of Death. Christ is the Deathly
One, He is Death incarnate.

And the driver of the pack-horses acknowledges this deathly Christ as
supreme Lord. The mountain peasant seems grounded upon fear, the fear of
death, of physical death. Beyond this he knows nothing. His supreme
sensation is in physical pain, and in its culmination. His great climax,
his consummation, is death. Therefore he worships it, bows down before
it, and is fascinated by it all the while. It is his fulfilment, death,
and his approach to fulfilment is through physical pain.

And so these monuments to physical death are found everywhere in the
valleys. By the same hand that carved the big Christ, a little further
on, at the end of a bridge, was another crucifix, a small one. This
Christ had a fair beard, and was thin, and his body was hanging almost
lightly, whereas the other Christ was large and dark and handsome. But
in this, as well as in the other, was the same neutral triumph of death,
complete, negative death, so complete as to be abstract, beyond cynicism
in its completeness of leaving off.

Everywhere is the same obsession with the fact of physical pain,
accident, and sudden death. Wherever a misfortune has befallen a man,
there is nailed up a little memorial of the event, in propitiation of
the God of hurt and death. A man is standing up to his waist in water,
drowning in full stream, his arms in the air. The little painting in its
wooden frame is nailed to the tree, the spot is sacred to the accident.
Again, another little crude picture fastened to a rock: a tree, falling
on a man's leg, smashes it like a stalk, while the blood flies up.
Always there is the strange ejaculation of anguish and fear, perpetuated
in the little paintings nailed up in the place of the disaster.

This is the worship, then, the worship of death and the approaches to
death, physical violence, and pain. There is something crude and
sinister about it, almost like depravity, a form of reverting, turning
back along the course of blood by which we have come.

Turning the ridge on the great road to the south, the imperial road to
Rome, a decisive change takes place. The Christs have been taking on
various different characters, all of them more or less realistically
conveyed. One Christus is very elegant, combed and brushed and foppish
on his cross, as Gabriele D'Annunzio's son posing as a martyred saint.
The martyrdom of this Christ is according to the most polite convention.
The elegance is very important, and very Austrian. One might almost
imagine the young man had taken up this striking and original position
to create a delightful sensation among the ladies. It is quite in the
Viennese spirit. There is something brave and keen in it, too. The
individual pride of body triumphs over every difficulty in the
situation. The pride and satisfaction in the clean, elegant form, the
perfectly trimmed hair, the exquisite bearing, are more important than
the fact of death or pain. This may be foolish, it is at the same time
admirable.

But the tendency of the crucifix, as it nears the ridge to the south, is
to become weak and sentimental. The carved Christs turn up their faces
and roll back their eyes very piteously, in the approved Guido Reni
fashion. They are overdoing the pathetic turn. They are looking to
heaven and thinking about themselves, in self-commiseration. Others
again are beautiful as elegies. It is dead Hyacinth lifted and extended
to view, in all his beautiful, dead youth. The young, male body droops
forward on the cross, like a dead flower. It looks as if its only true
nature were to be dead. How lovely is death, how poignant, real,
satisfying! It is the true elegiac spirit.

Then there are the ordinary, factory-made Christs, which are not very
significant. They are as null as the Christs we see represented in
England, just vulgar nothingness. But these figures have gashes of red,
a red paint of blood, which is sensational.

Beyond the Brenner, I have only seen vulgar or sensational crucifixes.
There are great gashes on the breast and the knees of the Christ-figure,
and the scarlet flows out and trickles down, till the crucified body has
become a ghastly striped thing of red and white, just a sickly thing of
striped red.

They paint the rocks at the corners of the tracks, among the mountains;
a blue and white ring for the road to Ginzling, a red smear for the way
to St Jakob. So one follows the blue and white ring, or the three
stripes of blue and white, or the red smear, as the case may be. And the
red on the rocks, the dabs of red paint, are of just the same colour as
the red upon the crucifixes; so that the red upon the crucifixes is
paint, and the signs on the rocks are sensational, like blood.

I remember the little brooding Christ of the Isar, in his little cloak
of red flannel and his crown of gilded thorns, and he remains real and
dear to me, among all this violence of representation.

'_Couvre-toi de gloire, Tartarin--couvre-toi de flanelle._' Why should
it please me so that his cloak is of red flannel?

In a valley near St Jakob, just over the ridge, a long way from the
railway, there is a very big, important shrine by the roadside. It is a
chapel built in the baroque manner, florid pink and cream outside, with
opulent small arches. And inside is the most startling sensational
Christus I have ever seen. He is a big, powerful man, seated after the
crucifixion, perhaps after the resurrection, sitting by the grave. He
sits sideways, as if the extremity were over, finished, the agitation
done with, only the result of the experience remaining. There is some
blood on his powerful, naked, defeated body, that sits rather hulked.
But it is the face which is so terrifying. It is slightly turned over
the hulked, crucified shoulder, to look. And the look of this face, of
which the body has been killed, is beyond all expectation horrible. The
eyes look at one, yet have no seeing in them, they seem to see only
their own blood. For they are bloodshot till the whites are scarlet, the
iris is purpled. These red, bloody eyes with their stained pupils,
glancing awfully at all who enter the shrine, looking as if to see
through the blood of the late brutal death, are terrible. The naked,
strong body has known death, and sits in utter dejection, finished,
hulked, a weight of shame. And what remains of life is in the face,
whose expression is sinister and gruesome, like that of an unrelenting
criminal violated by torture. The criminal look of misery and hatred on
the fixed, violated face and in the bloodshot eyes is almost impossible.
He is conquered, beaten, broken, his body is a mass of torture, an
unthinkable shame. Yet his will remains obstinate and ugly, integral
with utter hatred.

It is a great shock to find this figure sitting in a handsome, baroque,
pink-washed shrine in one of those Alpine valleys which to our thinking
are all flowers and romance, like the picture in the Tate Gallery.
'Spring in the Austrian Tyrol' is to our minds a vision of pristine
loveliness. It contains also this Christ of the heavy body defiled by
torture and death, the strong, virile life overcome by physical
violence, the eyes still looking back bloodshot in consummate hate
and misery.

The shrine was well kept and evidently much used. It was hung with
ex-voto limbs and with many gifts. It was a centre of worship, of a sort
of almost obscene worship. Afterwards the black pine-trees and the river
of that valley seemed unclean, as if an unclean spirit lived there. The
very flowers seemed unnatural, and the white gleam on the mountain-tops
was a glisten of supreme, cynical horror.

After this, in the populous valleys, all the crucifixes were more or
less tainted and vulgar. Only high up, where the crucifix becomes
smaller and smaller, is there left any of the old beauty and religion.
Higher and higher, the monument becomes smaller and smaller, till in the
snows it stands out like a post, or a thick arrow stuck barb upwards.
The crucifix itself is a small thing under the pointed hood, the barb of
the arrow. The snow blows under the tiny shed, upon the little, exposed
Christ. All round is the solid whiteness of snow, the awful curves and
concaves of pure whiteness of the mountain top, the hollow whiteness
between the peaks, where the path crosses the high, extreme ridge of the
pass. And here stands the last crucifix, half buried, small and tufted
with snow. The guides tramp slowly, heavily past, not observing the
presence of the symbol, making no salute. Further down, every mountain
peasant lifted his hat. But the guide tramps by without concern. His is
a professional importance now.

On a small mountain track on the Jaufen, not far from Meran, was a
fallen Christus. I was hurrying downhill to escape from an icy wind
which almost took away my consciousness, and I was looking up at the
gleaming, unchanging snow-peaks all round. They seemed like blades
immortal in the sky. So I almost ran into a very old Martertafel. It
leaned on the cold, stony hillside surrounded by the white peaks in the
upper air.

The wooden hood was silver-grey with age, and covered, on the top, with
a thicket of lichen, which stuck up in hoary tufts. But on the rock at
the foot of the post was the fallen Christ, armless, who had tumbled
down and lay in an unnatural posture, the naked, ancient wooden
sculpture of the body on the naked, living rock. It was one of the old
uncouth Christs hewn out of bare wood, having the long, wedge-shaped
limbs and thin flat legs that are significant of the true spirit, the
desire to convey a religious truth, not a sensational experience.

The arms of the fallen Christ had broken off at the shoulders, and they
hung on their nails, as ex-voto limbs hang in the shrines. But these
arms dangled from the palms, one at each end of the cross, the muscles,
carved sparely in the old wood, looking all wrong, upside down. And the
icy wind blew them backwards and forwards, so that they gave a painful
impression, there in the stark, sterile place of rock and cold. Yet I
dared not touch the fallen body of the Christ, that lay on its back in
so grotesque a posture at the foot of the post. I wondered who would
come and take the broken thing away, and for what purpose.




_On the Lago di Garda_



_1_

THE SPINNER AND THE MONKS


The Holy Spirit is a Dove, or an Eagle. In the Old Testament it was an
Eagle; in the New Testament it is a Dove.

And there are, standing over the Christian world, the Churches of the
Dove and the Churches of the Eagle. There are, moreover, the Churches
which do not belong to the Holy Spirit at all, but which are built to
pure fancy and logic; such as the Wren Churches in London.

The Churches of the Dove are shy and hidden: they nestle among trees,
and their bells sound in the mellowness of Sunday; or they are gathered
into a silence of their own in the very midst of the town, so that one
passes them by without observing them; they are as if invisible,
offering no resistance to the storming of the traffic.

But the Churches of the Eagle stand high, with their heads to the skies,
as if they challenged the world below. They are the Churches of the
Spirit of David, and their bells ring passionately, imperiously, falling
on the subservient world below.

The Church of San Francesco was a Church of the Dove. I passed it
several times in the dark, silent little square, without knowing it was
a church. Its pink walls were blind, windowless, unnoticeable, it gave
no sign, unless one caught sight of the tan curtain hanging in the door,
and the slit of darkness beneath. Yet it was the chief church of
the village.

But the Church of San Tommaso perched over the village. Coming down the
cobbled, submerged street, many a time I looked up between the houses
and saw the thin old church standing above in the light, as if it
perched on the house-roofs. Its thin grey neck was held up stiffly,
beyond was a vision of dark foliage, and the high hillside.

I saw it often, and yet for a long time it never occurred to me that it
actually existed. It was like a vision, a thing one does not expect to
come close to. It was there standing away upon the house-tops, against a
glamour of foliaged hillside. I was submerged in the village, on the
uneven, cobbled street, between old high walls and cavernous shops and
the houses with flights of steps.

For a long time I knew how the day went, by the imperious clangour of
midday and evening bells striking down upon the houses and the edge of
the lake. Yet it did not occur to me to ask where these bells rang. Till
at last my everyday trance was broken in upon, and I knew the ringing of
the Church of San Tommaso. The church became a living connexion with me.

So I set out to find it, I wanted to go to it. It was very near. I could
see it from the piazza by the lake. And the village itself had only a
few hundreds of inhabitants. The church must be within a stone's throw.

Yet I could not find it. I went out of the back door of the house, into
the narrow gully of the back street. Women glanced down at me from the
top of the flights of steps, old men stood, half-turning, half-crouching
under the dark shadow of the walls, to stare. It was as if the strange
creatures of the under-shadow were looking at me. I was of
another element.

The Italian people are called 'Children of the Sun'. They might better
be called 'Children of the Shadow'. Their souls are dark and nocturnal.
If they are to be easy, they must be able to hide, to be hidden in lairs
and caves of darkness. Going through these tiny chaotic backways of the
village was like venturing through the labyrinth made by furtive
creatures, who watched from out of another element. And I was pale, and
clear, and evanescent, like the light, and they were dark, and close,
and constant, like the shadow.

So I was quite baffled by the tortuous, tiny, deep passages of the
village. I could not find my way. I hurried towards the broken end of a
street, where the sunshine and the olive trees looked like a mirage
before me. And there above me I saw the thin, stiff neck of old San
Tommaso, grey and pale in the sun. Yet I could not get up to the church,
I found myself again on the piazza.

Another day, however, I found a broken staircase, where weeds grew in
the gaps the steps had made in falling, and maidenhair hung on the
darker side of the wall. I went up unwillingly, because the Italians
used this old staircase as a privy, as they will any deep side-passage.

But I ran up the broken stairway, and came out suddenly, as by a
miracle, clean on the platform of my San Tommaso, in the
tremendous sunshine.

It was another world, the world of the eagle, the world of fierce
abstraction. It was all clear, overwhelming sunshine, a platform hung in
the light. Just below were the confused, tiled roofs of the village, and
beyond them the pale blue water, down below; and opposite, opposite my
face and breast, the clear, luminous snow of the mountain across the
lake, level with me apparently, though really much above.

I was in the skies now, looking down from my square terrace of cobbled
pavement, that was worn like the threshold of the ancient church. Round
the terrace ran a low, broad wall, the coping of the upper heaven where
I had climbed.

There was a blood-red sail like a butterfly breathing down on the blue
water, whilst the earth on the near side gave off a green-silver smoke
of olive trees, coming up and around the earth-coloured roofs.

It always remains to me that San Tommaso and its terrace hang suspended
above the village, like the lowest step of heaven, of Jacob's ladder.
Behind, the land rises in a high sweep. But the terrace of San Tommaso
is let down from heaven, and does not touch the earth.

I went into the church. It was very dark, and impregnated with centuries
of incense. It affected me like the lair of some enormous creature. My
senses were roused, they sprang awake in the hot, spiced darkness. My
skin was expectant, as if it expected some contact, some embrace, as if
it were aware of the contiguity of the physical world, the physical
contact with the darkness and the heavy, suggestive substance of the
enclosure. It was a thick, fierce darkness of the senses. But my
soul shrank.

I went out again. The pavemented threshold was clear as a jewel, the
marvellous clarity of sunshine that becomes blue in the height seemed to
distil me into itself.

Across, the heavy mountain crouched along the side of the lake, the
upper half brilliantly white, belonging to the sky, the lower half dark
and grim. So, then, that is where heaven and earth are divided. From
behind me, on the left, the headland swept down out of a great,
pale-grey, arid height, through a rush of russet and crimson, to the
olive smoke and the water of the level earth. And between, like a blade
of the sky cleaving the earth asunder, went the pale-blue lake, cleaving
mountain from mountain with the triumph of the sky.

Then I noticed that a big, blue-checked cloth was spread on the parapet
before me, over the parapet of heaven. I wondered why it hung there.

Turning round, on the other side of the terrace, under a caper-bush that
hung like a blood-stain from the grey wall above her, stood a little
grey woman whose fingers were busy. Like the grey church, she made me
feel as if I were not in existence. I was wandering by the parapet of
heaven, looking down. But she stood back against the solid wall, under
the caper-bush, unobserved and unobserving. She was like a fragment of
earth, she was a living stone of the terrace, sun-bleached. She took no
notice of me, who was hesitating looking down at the earth beneath. She
stood back under the sun-bleached solid wall, like a stone rolled down
and stayed in a crevice.

Her head was tied in a dark-red kerchief, but pieces of hair, like dirty
snow, quite short, stuck out over her ears. And she was spinning. I
wondered so much, that I could not cross towards her. She was grey, and
her apron, and her dress, and her kerchief, and her hands and her face
were all sun-bleached and sun-stained, greyey, bluey, browny, like
stones and half-coloured leaves, sunny in their colourlessness. In my
black coat, I felt myself wrong, false, an outsider.

She was spinning, spontaneously, like a little wind. Under her arm she
held a distaff of dark, ripe wood, just a straight stick with a clutch
at the end, like a grasp of brown fingers full of a fluff of blackish,
rusty fleece, held up near her shoulder. And her fingers were plucking
spontaneously at the strands of wool drawn down from it. And hanging
near her feet, spinning round upon a black thread, spinning busily, like
a thing in a gay wind, was her shuttle, her bobbin wound fat with the
coarse, blackish worsted she was making.

All the time, like motion without thought, her fingers teased out the
fleece, drawing it down to a fairly uniform thickness: brown, old,
natural fingers that worked as in a sleep, the thumb having a long grey
nail; and from moment to moment there was a quick, downward rub, between
thumb and forefinger, of the thread that hung in front of her apron, the
heavy bobbin spun more briskly, and she felt again at the fleece as she
drew it down, and she gave a twist to the thread that issued, and the
bobbin spun swiftly.

Her eyes were clear as the sky, blue, empyrean, transcendent. They were
dear, but they had no looking in them. Her face was like a
sun-worn stone.

'You are spinning,' I said to her.

Her eyes glanced over me, making no effort of attention.

'Yes,' she said.

She saw merely a man's figure, a stranger standing near. I was a bit of
the outside, negligible. She remained as she was, clear and sustained
like an old stone upon the hillside. She stood short and sturdy, looking
for the most part straight in front, unseeing, but glancing from time to
time, with a little, unconscious attention, at the thread. She was
slightly more animated than the sunshine and the stone and the
motionless caper-bush above her. Still her fingers went along the strand
of fleece near her breast.

'That is an old way of spinning,' I said.

'What?'

She looked up at me with eyes clear and transcendent as the heavens. But
she was slightly roused. There was the slight motion of the eagle in her
turning to look at me, a faint gleam of rapt light in her eyes. It was
my unaccustomed Italian.

'That is an old way of spinning,' I repeated.

'Yes--an old way,' she repeated, as if to say the words so that they
should be natural to her. And I became to her merely a transient
circumstance, a man, part of the surroundings. We divided the gift of
speech, that was all.

She glanced at me again, with her wonderful, unchanging eyes, that were
like the visible heavens, unthinking, or like two flowers that are open
in pure clear unconsciousness. To her I was a piece of the environment.
That was all. Her world was clear and absolute, without consciousness of
self. She was not self-conscious, because she was not aware that there
was anything in the universe except _her_ universe. In her universe I
was a stranger, a foreign _signore_. That I had a world of my own, other
than her own, was not conceived by her. She did not care.

So we conceive the stars. We are told that they are other worlds. But
the stars are the clustered and single gleaming lights in the night-sky
of our world. When I come home at night, there are the stars. When I
cease to exist as the microcosm, when I begin to think of the cosmos,
then the stars are other worlds. Then the macrocosm absorbs me. But the
macrocosm is not me. It is something which I, the microcosm, am not.

So that there is something which is unknown to me and which nevertheless
exists. I am finite, and my understanding has limits. The universe is
bigger than I shall ever see, in mind or spirit. There is that which
is not me.

If I say 'The planet Mars is inhabited,' I do not know what I mean by
'inhabited', with reference to the planet Mars. I can only mean that
that world is not my world. I can only know there is that which is not
me. I am the microcosm, but the macrocosm is that also which I am not.

The old woman on the terrace in the sun did not know this. She was
herself the core and centre to the world, the sun, and the single
firmament. She knew that I was an inhabitant of lands which she had
never seen. But what of that! There were parts of her own body which she
had never seen, which physiologically she could never see. They were
none the less her own because she had never seen them. The lands she had
not seen were corporate parts of her own living body, the knowledge she
had not attained was only the hidden knowledge of her own self. She
_was_ the substance of the knowledge, whether she had the knowledge in
her mind or not. There was nothing which was not herself, ultimately.
Even the man, the male, was part of herself. He was the mobile, separate
part, but he was none the less herself because he was sometimes severed
from her. If every apple in the world were cut in two, the apple would
not be changed. The reality is the apple, which is just the same in the
half-apple as in the whole.

And she, the old spinning-woman, was the apple, eternal, unchangeable,
whole even in her partiality. It was this which gave the wonderful clear
unconsciousness to her eyes. How could she be conscious of herself when
all was herself?

She was talking to me of a sheep that had died, but I could not
understand because of her dialect. It never occurred to her that I could
not understand. She only thought me different, stupid. And she talked
on. The ewes had lived under the house, and a part was divided off for
the he-goat, because the other people brought their she-goats to be
covered by the he-goat. But how the ewe came to die I could not
make out.

Her fingers worked away all the time in a little, half-fretful movement,
yet spontaneous as butterflies leaping here and there. She chattered
rapidly on in her Italian that I could not understand, looking meanwhile
into my face, because the story roused her somewhat. Yet not a feature
moved. Her eyes remained candid and open and unconscious as the skies.
Only a sharp will in them now and then seemed to gleam at me, as if to
dominate me.

Her shuttle had caught in a dead chicory plant, and spun no more. She
did not notice. I stooped and broke off the twigs. There was a glint of
blue on them yet. Seeing what I was doing, she merely withdrew a few
inches from the plant. Her bobbin hung free.

She went on with her tale, looking at me wonderfully. She seemed like
the Creation, like the beginning of the world, the first morning. Her
eyes were like the first morning of the world, so ageless.

Her thread broke. She seemed to take no notice, but mechanically picked
up the shuttle, wound up a length of worsted, connected the ends from
her wool strand, set the bobbin spinning again, and went on talking, in
her half-intimate, half-unconscious fashion, as if she were talking to
her own world in me.

So she stood in the sunshine on the little platform, old and yet like
the morning, erect and solitary, sun-coloured, sun-discoloured, whilst I
at her elbow, like a piece of night and moonshine, stood smiling into
her eyes, afraid lest she should deny me existence.

Which she did. She had stopped talking, did not look at me any more, but
went on with her spinning, the brown shuttle twisting gaily. So she
stood, belonging to the sunshine and the weather, taking no more notice
of me than of the dark-stained caper-bush which hung from the wall above
her head, whilst I, waiting at her side, was like the moon in the
daytime sky, overshone, obliterated, in spite of my black clothes.

'How long has it taken you to do that much?' I asked.

She waited a minute, glanced at her bobbin.

'This much? I don't know. A day or two.'

'But you do it quickly.'

She looked at me, as if suspiciously and derisively. Then, quite
suddenly, she started forward and went across the terrace to the great
blue-and-white checked cloth that was drying on the wall. I hesitated.
She had cut off her consciousness from me. So I turned and ran away,
taking the steps two at a time, to get away from her. In a moment I was
between the walls, climbing upwards, hidden.

The schoolmistress had told me I should find snowdrops behind San
Tommaso. If she had not asserted such confident knowledge I should have
doubted her translation of _perce-neige_. She meant Christmas roses all
the while.

However, I went looking for snowdrops. The walls broke down suddenly,
and I was out in a grassy olive orchard, following a track beside pieces
of fallen overgrown masonry. So I came to skirt the brink of a steep
little gorge, at the bottom of which a stream was rushing down its steep
slant to the lake. Here I stood to look for my snowdrops. The grassy,
rocky bank went down steep from my feet. I heard water tittle-tattling
away in deep shadow below. There were pale flecks in the dimness, but
these, I knew, were primroses. So I scrambled down.

Looking up, out of the heavy shadow that lay in the cleft, I could see,
right in the sky, grey rocks shining transcendent in the pure empyrean.
'Are they so far up?' I thought. I did not dare to say, 'Am I so far
down?' But I was uneasy. Nevertheless it was a lovely place, in the cold
shadow, complete; when one forgot the shining rocks far above, it was a
complete, shadowless world of shadow. Primroses were everywhere in nests
of pale bloom upon the dark, steep face of the cleft, and tongues of
fern hanging out, and here and there under the rods and twigs of bushes
were tufts of wrecked Christmas roses, nearly over, but still, in the
coldest corners, the lovely buds like handfuls of snow. There had been
such crowded sumptuous tufts of Christmas roses everywhere in the
stream-gullies, during the shadow of winter, that these few remaining
flowers were hardly noticeable.

I gathered instead the primroses, that smelled of earth and of the
weather. There were no snowdrops. I had found the day before a bank of
crocuses, pale, fragile, lilac-coloured flowers with dark veins,
pricking up keenly like myriad little lilac-coloured flames among the
grass, under the olive trees. And I wanted very much to find the
snowdrops hanging in the gloom. But there were not any.

I gathered a handful of primroses, then I climbed suddenly, quickly out
of the deep watercourse, anxious to get back to the sunshine before the
evening fell. Up above I saw the olive trees in the sunny golden grass,
and sunlit grey rocks immensely high up. I was afraid lest the evening
would fall whilst I was groping about like an otter in the damp and the
darkness, that the day of sunshine would be over.

Soon I was up in the sunshine again, on the turf under the olive trees,
reassured. It was the upper world of glowing light, and I was
safe again.

All the olives were gathered, and the mills were going night and day,
making a great, acrid scent of olive oil in preparation, by the lake.
The little stream rattled down. A mule driver 'Hued!' to his mules on
the Strada Vecchia. High up, on the Strada Nuova, the beautiful, new,
military high-road, which winds with beautiful curves up the
mountain-side, crossing the same stream several times in clear-leaping
bridges, travelling cut out of sheer slope high above the lake, winding
beautifully and gracefully forward to the Austrian frontier, where it
ends: high up on the lovely swinging road, in the strong evening
sunshine, I saw a bullock wagon moving like a vision, though the
clanking of the wagon and the crack of the bullock whip responded close
in my ears.

Everything was clear and sun-coloured up there, clear-grey rocks
partaking of the sky, tawny grass and scrub, browny-green spires of
cypresses, and then the mist of grey-green olives fuming down to the
lake-side. There was no shadow, only clear sun-substance built up to the
sky, a bullock wagon moving slowly in the high sunlight, along the
uppermost terrace of the military road. It sat in the warm stillness of
the transcendent afternoon.

The four o'clock steamer was creeping down the lake from the Austrian
end, creeping under the cliffs. Far away, the Verona side, beyond the
Island, lay fused in dim gold. The mountain opposite was so still, that
my heart seemed to fade in its beating as if it too would be still. All
was perfectly still, pure substance. The little steamer on the floor of
the world below, the mules down the road cast no shadow. They too were
pure sun-substance travelling on the surface of the sun-made world.

A cricket hopped near me. Then I remembered that it was Saturday
afternoon, when a strange suspension comes over the world. And then,
just below me, I saw two monks walking in their garden between the
naked, bony vines, walking in their wintry garden of bony vines and
olive trees, their brown cassocks passing between the brown vine-stocks,
their heads bare to the sunshine, sometimes a glint of light as their
feet strode from under their skirts.

It was so still, everything so perfectly suspended, that I felt them
talking. They marched with the peculiar march of monks, a long, loping
stride, their heads together, their skirts swaying slowly, two brown
monks with hidden hands, sliding under the bony vines and beside the
cabbages, their heads always together in hidden converse. It was as if I
were attending with my dark soul to their inaudible undertone. All the
time I sat still in silence, I was one with them, a partaker, though I
could hear no sound of their voices. I went with the long stride of
their skirted feet, that slid springless and noiseless from end to end
of the garden, and back again. Their hands were kept down at their
sides, hidden in the long sleeves, and the skirts of their robes. They
did not touch each other, nor gesticulate as they walked. There was no
motion save the long, furtive stride and the heads leaning together. Yet
there was an eagerness in their conversation. Almost like
shadow-creatures ventured out of their cold, obscure element, they went
backwards and forwards in their wintry garden, thinking nobody could
see them.

Across, above them, was the faint, rousing dazzle of snow. They never
looked up. But the dazzle of snow began to glow as they walked, the
wonderful, faint, ethereal flush of the long range of snow in the
heavens, at evening, began to kindle. Another world was coming to pass,
the cold, rare night. It was dawning in exquisite, icy rose upon the
long mountain-summit opposite. The monks walked backwards and forwards,
talking, in the first undershadow.

And I noticed that up above the snow, frail in the bluish sky, a frail
moon had put forth, like a thin, scalloped film of ice floated out on
the slow current of the coming night. And a bell sounded.

And still the monks were pacing backwards and forwards, backwards and
forwards, with a strange, neutral regularity.

The shadows were coming across everything, because of the mountains in
the west. Already the olive wood where I sat was extinguished. This was
the world of the monks, the rim of pallor between night and day. Here
they paced, backwards and forwards, backwards and forwards, in the
neutral, shadowless light of shadow.

Neither the flare of day nor the completeness of night reached them,
they paced the narrow path of the twilight, treading in the neutrality
of the law. Neither the blood nor the spirit spoke in them, only the
law, the abstraction of the average. The infinite is positive and
negative. But the average is only neutral. And the monks trod backward
and forward down the line of neutrality.

Meanwhile, on the length of mountain-ridge, the snow grew
rosy-incandescent, like heaven breaking into blossom. After all, eternal
not-being and eternal being are the same. In the rosy snow that shone in
heaven over a darkened earth was the ecstasy of consummation. Night and
day are one, light and dark are one, both the same in the origin and in
the issue, both the same in the moment, of ecstasy, light fused in
darkness and darkness fused in light, as in the rosy snow above
the twilight.

But in the monks it was not ecstasy, in them it was neutrality, the
under earth. Transcendent, above the shadowed, twilit earth was the rosy
snow of ecstasy. But spreading far over us, down below, was the
neutrality of the twilight, of the monks. The flesh neutralizing the
spirit, the spirit neutralizing the flesh, the law of the average
asserted, this was the monks as they paced backward and forward.

The moon climbed higher, away from the snowy, fading ridge, she became
gradually herself. Between the roots of the olive tree was a rosy-tipped
daisy just going to sleep. I gathered it and put it among the frail,
moony little bunch of primroses, so that its sleep should warm the rest.
Also I put in some little periwinkles, that were very blue, reminding me
of the eyes of the old woman.

The day was gone, the twilight was gone, and the snow was invisible as I
came down to the side of the lake. Only the moon, white and shining, was
in the sky, like a woman glorying in her own loveliness as she loiters
superbly to the gaze of all the world, looking sometimes through the
fringe of dark olive leaves, sometimes looking at her own superb,
quivering body, wholly naked in the water of the lake.

My little old woman was gone. She, all day-sunshine, would have none of
the moon. Always she must live like a bird, looking down on all the
world at once, so that it lay all subsidiary to herself, herself the
wakeful consciousness hovering over the world like a hawk, like a sleep
of wakefulness. And, like a bird, she went to sleep as the shadows came.

She did not know the yielding up of the senses and the possession of the
unknown, through the senses, which happens under a superb moon. The
all-glorious sun knows none of these yieldings up. He takes his way. And
the daisies at once go to sleep. And the soul of the old spinning-woman
also closed up at sunset, the rest was a sleep, a cessation.

It is all so strange and varied: the dark-skinned Italians ecstatic in
the night and the moon, the blue-eyed old woman ecstatic in the busy
sunshine, the monks in the garden below, who are supposed to unite both,
passing only in the neutrality of the average. Where, then, is the
meeting-point: where in mankind is the ecstasy of light and dark
together, the supreme transcendence of the afterglow, day hovering in
the embrace of the coming night like two angels embracing in the
heavens, like Eurydice in the arms of Orpheus, or Persephone embraced
by Pluto?

Where is the supreme ecstasy in mankind, which makes day a delight and
night a delight, purpose an ecstasy and a concourse in ecstasy, and
single abandon of the single body and soul also an ecstasy under the
moon? Where is the transcendent knowledge in our hearts, uniting sun and
darkness, day and night, spirit and senses? Why do we not know that the
two in consummation are one; that each is only part; partial and alone
for ever; but that the two in consummation are perfect, beyond the range
of loneliness or solitude?



_2_

THE LEMON GARDENS


The padrone came just as we were drinking coffee after dinner. It was
two o'clock, because the steamer going down the lake to Desenzano had
bustled through the sunshine, and the rocking of the water still made
lights that danced up and down upon the wall among the shadows by
the piano.

The signore was very apologetic. I found him bowing in the hall, cap in
one hand, a slip of paper in the other, protesting eagerly, in broken
French, against disturbing me.

He is a little, shrivelled man, with close-cropped grey hair on his
skull, and a protruding jaw, which, with his gesticulations, always
makes me think of an ancient, aristocratic monkey. The signore is a
gentleman, and the last, shrivelled representative of his race. His only
outstanding quality, according to the villagers, is his avarice.

_'Mais--mais, monsieur--je crains que--que--que je vous dérange--'_

He spreads wide his hands and bows, looking up at me with implicit brown
eyes, so ageless in his wrinkled, monkey's face, like onyx. He loves to
speak French, because then he feels grand. He has a queer, naïve,
ancient passion to be grand. As the remains of an impoverished family,
he is not much better than a well-to-do peasant. But the old spirit is
eager and pathetic in him.

He loves to speak French to me. He holds his chin and waits, in his
anxiety for the phrase to come. Then it stammers forth, a little rush,
ending in Italian. But his pride is all on edge: we must continue
in French.

The hall is cold, yet he will not come into the large room. This is not
a courtesy visit. He is not here in his quality of gentleman. He is only
an anxious villager.

'_Voyez, monsieur--cet--cet--qu'est-ce que--qu'est-ce que veut dire
cet--cela?_'

He shows me the paper. It is an old scrap of print, the picture of an
American patent door-spring, with directions: 'Fasten the spring either
end up. Wind it up. Never unwind.'

It is laconic and American. The signore watches me anxiously, waiting,
holding his chin. He is afraid he ought to understand my English. I
stutter off into French, confounded by the laconic phrases of the
directions. Nevertheless, I make it clear what the paper says.

He cannot believe me. It must say something else as well. He has not
done anything contrary to these directions. He is most distressed.

'_Mais, monsieur, la porte--la porte--elle ferme_ pas--_elle s'ouvre_--'

He skipped to the door and showed me the whole tragic mystery. The door,
it is shut--_ecco_! He releases the catch, and pouf!--she flies open.
She flies _open_. It is quite final.

The brown, expressionless, ageless eyes, that remind me of a monkey's,
or of onyx, wait for me. I feel the responsibility devolve upon me. I
am anxious.

'Allow me,' I said, 'to come and look at the door.'

I feel uncomfortably like Sherlock Holmes. The padrone protests--_non,
monsieur, non, cela vous dérange_--that he only wanted me to translate
the words, he does not want to disturb me. Nevertheless, we go. I feel I
have the honour of mechanical England in my hands.

The Casa di Paoli is quite a splendid place. It is large, pink and
cream, rising up to a square tower in the centre, throwing off a painted
loggia at either extreme of the façade. It stands a little way back from
the road, just above the lake, and grass grows on the bay of cobbled
pavement in front. When at night the moon shines full on this pale
façade, the theatre is far outdone in staginess.

The hall is spacious and beautiful, with great glass doors at either
end, through which shine the courtyards where bamboos fray the sunlight
and geraniums glare red. The floor is of soft red tiles, oiled and
polished like glass, the walls are washed grey-white, the ceiling is
painted with pink roses and birds. This is half-way between the outer
world and the interior world, it partakes of both.

The other rooms are dark and ugly. There is no mistake about their being
interior. They are like furnished vaults. The red-tiled, polished floor
in the drawing-room seems cold and clammy, the carved, cold furniture
stands in its tomb, the air has been darkened and starved to death, it
is perished.

Outside, the sunshine runs like birds singing. Up above, the grey rocks
build the sun-substance in heaven, San Tommaso guards the terrace. But
inside here is the immemorial shadow.

Again I had to think of the Italian soul, how it is dark, cleaving to
the eternal night. It seems to have become so, at the Renaissance, after
the Renaissance.

In the Middle Ages Christian Europe seems to have been striving, out of
a strong, primitive, animal nature, towards the self-abnegation and the
abstraction of Christ. This brought about by itself a great sense of
completeness. The two halves were joined by the effort towards the one
as yet unrealized. There was a triumphant joy in the Whole.

But the movement all the time was in one direction, towards the
elimination of the flesh. Man wanted more and more to become purely free
and abstract. Pure freedom was in pure abstraction. The Word was
absolute. When man became as the Word, a pure law, then he was free.

But when this conclusion was reached, the movement broke. Already
Botticelli painted Aphrodite, queen of the senses, supreme along with
Mary, Queen of Heaven. And Michelangelo suddenly turned back on the
whole Christian movement, back to the flesh. The flesh was supreme and
god-like, in the oneness of the flesh, in the oneness of our physical
being, we are one with God, with the Father. God the Father created man
in the flesh, in His own image. Michelangelo swung right back to the old
Mosaic position. Christ did not exist. To Michelangelo there was no
salvation in the spirit. There was God the Father, the Begetter, the
Author of all flesh. And there was the inexorable law of the flesh, the
Last Judgement, the fall of the immortal flesh into Hell.

This has been the Italian position ever since. The mind, that is the
Light; the senses, they are the Darkness. Aphrodite, the queen of the
senses, she, born of the sea-foam, is the luminousness of the gleaming
senses, the phosphorescence of the sea, the senses become a conscious
aim unto themselves; she is the gleaming darkness, she is the luminous
night, she is goddess of destruction, her white, cold fire consumes and
does not create.

This is the soul of the Italian since the Renaissance. In the sunshine
he basks asleep, gathering up a vintage into his veins which in the
night-time he will distil into ecstatic sensual delight, the intense,
white-cold ecstasy of darkness and moonlight, the raucous, cat-like,
destructive enjoyment, the senses conscious and crying out in their
consciousness in the pangs of the enjoyment, which has consumed the
southern nation, perhaps all the Latin races, since the Renaissance.

It is a lapse back, back to the original position, the Mosaic position,
of the divinity of the flesh, and the absoluteness of its laws. But also
there is the Aphrodite-worship. The flesh, the senses, are now
self-conscious. They know their aim. Their aim is in supreme sensation.
They seek the maximum of sensation. They seek the reduction of the
flesh, the flesh reacting upon itself, to a crisis, an ecstasy, a
phosphorescent transfiguration in ecstasy.

The mind, all the time, subserves the senses. As in a cat, there is
subtlety and beauty and the dignity of the darkness. But the fire is
cold, as in the eyes of a cat, it is a green fire. It is fluid,
electric. At its maximum it is the white ecstasy of phosphorescence, in
the darkness, always amid the darkness, as under the black fur of a cat.
Like the feline fire, it is destructive, always consuming and reducing
to the ecstasy of sensation, which is the end in itself.

There is the I, always the I. And the mind is submerged, overcome. But
the senses are superbly arrogant. The senses are the absolute, the
god-like. For I can never have another man's senses. These are me, my
senses absolutely me. And all that is can only come to me through my
senses. So that all is me, and is administered unto me. The rest, that
is not me, is nothing, it is something which is nothing. So the Italian,
through centuries, has avoided our Northern purposive industry, because
it has seemed to him a form of nothingness.

It is the spirit of the tiger. The tiger is the supreme manifestation of
the senses made absolute. This is the

    Tiger, tiger burning bright,
    In the forests of the night

of Blake. It does indeed burn within the darkness. But the
_essential_ fate, of the tiger is cold and white, a white ecstasy.
It is seen in the white eyes of the blazing cat. This is the supremacy
of the flesh, which devours all, and becomes transfigured into a
magnificent brindled flame, a burning bush indeed.

This is one way of transfiguration into the eternal flame, the
transfiguration through ecstasy in the flesh. Like the tiger in the
night, I devour all flesh, I drink all blood, until this fuel blazes up
in me to the consummate fire of the Infinite. In the ecstacy I am
Infinite, I become again the great Whole, I am a flame of the One White
Flame which is the Infinite, the Eternal, the Originator, the Creator,
the Everlasting God. In the sensual ecstasy, having drunk all blood and
devoured all flesh, I am become again the eternal Fire, I am infinite.

This is the way of the tiger; the tiger is supreme. His head is
flattened as if there were some great weight on the hard skull,
pressing, pressing, pressing the mind into a stone, pressing it down
under the blood, to serve the blood. It is the subjugate instrument of
the blood. The will lies above the loins, as it were at the base of the
spinal column, there is the living will, the living mind of the tiger,
there in the slender loins. That is the node, there in the spinal cord.

So the Italian, so the soldier. This is the spirit of the soldier. He,
too, walks with his consciousness concentrated at the base of the spine,
his mind subjugated, submerged. The will of the soldier is the will of
the great cats, the will to ecstasy in destruction, in absorbing life
into his own life, always his own life supreme, till the ecstasy burst
into the white, eternal flame, the Infinite, the Flame of the Infinite.
Then he is satisfied, he has been consummated in the Infinite.

This is the true soldier, this is the immortal climax of the senses.
This is the acme of the flesh, the one superb tiger who has devoured all
living flesh, and now paces backwards and forwards in the cage of its
own infinite, glaring with blind, fierce, absorbed eyes at that which is
nothingness to it.

The eyes of the tiger cannot see, except with the light from within
itself, by the light of its own desire. Its own white, cold light is so
fierce that the other warm light of day is outshone, it is not, it does
not exist. So the white eyes of the tiger gleam to a point of
concentrated vision, upon that which does not exist. Hence its
terrifying sightlessness. The something which I know I am is hollow
space to its vision, offers no resistance to the tiger's looking. It can
only see of me that which it knows I am, a scent, a resistance, a
voluptuous solid, a struggling warm violence that it holds overcome, a
running of hot blood between its Jaws, a delicious pang of live flesh in
the mouth. This it sees. The rest is not.

And what is the rest, that which is-not the tiger, that which the tiger
is-not? What is this?

What is that which parted ways with the terrific eagle-like angel of the
senses at the Renaissance? The Italians said, 'We are one in the Father:
we will go back.' The Northern races said, 'We are one in Christ: we
will go on.'

What _is_ the consummation in Christ? Man knows satisfaction when he
surpasses all conditions and becomes, to himself, consummate in the
Infinite, when he reaches a state of infinity. In the supreme ecstasy
of the flesh, the Dionysic ecstasy, he reaches this state. But how does
it come to pass in Christ?

It is not the mystic ecstasy. The mystic ecstasy is a special sensual
ecstasy, it is the senses satisfying themselves with a self-created
object. It is self-projection into the self, the sensuous self satisfied
in a projected self.

    Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.

    Blessed are they which are persecuted for righteousness' sake, for
    theirs is the kingdom of heaven.

The kingdom of heaven is this Infinite into which we may be consummated,
then, if we are poor in spirit or persecuted for righteousness' sake.

    Whosoever shall smite thee on the right cheek, turn to him the other
    also.

    Love your enemies, bless them that curse you, do good to them that
    hate you, and pray for them which despitefully use you, and
    persecute you.

    Be ye therefore perfect, even as your Father which is in heaven is
    perfect.

To be perfect, to be one with God, to be infinite and eternal, what
shall we do? We must turn the other cheek, and love our enemies.

Christ is the lamb which the eagle swoops down upon, the dove taken by
the hawk, the deer which the tiger devours.

What then, if a man come to me with a sword, to kill me, and I do not
resist him, but suffer his sword and the death from his sword, what am
I? Am I greater than he, am I stronger than he? Do I know a consummation
in the Infinite, I, the prey, beyond the tiger who devours me? By my
non-resistance I have robbed him of his consummation. For a tiger knows
no consummation unless he kill a violated and struggling prey. There is
no consummation merely for the butcher, nor for a hyena. I can rob the
tiger of his ecstasy, his consummation, his very __my non-resistance. In
my non-resistance the tiger is infinitely destroyed.

But I, what am I? 'Be ye therefore perfect.' Wherein am I perfect in
this submission? Is there an affirmation, behind my negation, other than
the tiger's affirmation of his own glorious infinity?

What is the Oneness to which I subscribe, I who offer no resistance in
the flesh?

Have I only the negative ecstasy of being devoured, of becoming thus
part of the Lord, the Great Moloch, the superb and terrible God? I have
this also, this subject ecstasy of consummation. But is there
nothing else?

The Word of the tiger is: my senses are supremely Me, and my senses are
God in me. But Christ said: God is in the others, who are not-me. In all
the multitude of the others is God, and this is the great God, greater
than the God which is Me. God is that which is Not-Me.

And this is the Christian truth, a truth complementary to the pagan
affirmation: 'God is that which is Me.'

God is that which is Not-Me. In realizing the Not-Me I am consummated, I
become infinite. In turning the other cheek I submit to God who is
greater than I am, other than I am, who is in that which is not me. This
is the supreme consummation. To achieve this consummation I love my
neighbour as myself. My neighbour is all that is not me. And if I love
all this, have I not become one with the Whole, is not my consummation
complete, am I not one with God, have I not achieved the Infinite?

After the Renaissance the Northern races continued forward to put into
practice this religious belief in the God which is Not-Me. Even the idea
of the saving of the soul was really negative: it was a question of
escaping damnation. The Puritans made the last great attack on the God
who is Me. When they beheaded Charles the First, the king by Divine
Right, they destroyed, symbolically, for ever, the supremacy of the Me
who am the image of God, the Me of the flesh, of the senses, Me, the
tiger burning bright, me the king, the Lord, the aristocrat, me who am
divine because I am the body of God.

After the Puritans, we have been gathering data for the God who is
not-me. When Pope said 'Know then thyself, presume not God to scan, The
proper study of mankind is Man,' he was stating the proposition: A man
is right, he is consummated, when he is seeking to know Man, the great
abstract; and the method of knowledge is by the analysis, which is the
destruction, of the Self. The proposition up to that time was, a man is
the epitome of the universe. He has only to express himself, to fulfil
his desires, to satisfy his supreme senses.

Now the change has come to pass. The individual man is a limited being,
finite in himself. Yet he is capable of apprehending that which is not
himself. 'The proper study of mankind is Man.' This is another way of
saying, 'Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself.' Which means, a man
is consummated in his knowledge of that which is not himself, the
abstract Man. Therefore the consummation lies in seeking that other, in
knowing that other. Whereas the Stuart proposition was: 'A man is
consummated in expressing his own Self.'

The new spirit developed into the empirical and ideal systems of
philosophy. Everything that is, is consciousness. And in every man's
consciousness, Man is great and illimitable, whilst the individual is
small and fragmentary. Therefore the individual must sink himself in the
great whole of Mankind.

This is the spirituality of Shelley, the perfectibility of man. This is
the way in which we fulfil the commandment, 'Be ye therefore perfect,
even as your Father which is in heaven is perfect.' This is Saint
Paul's, 'Now I know in part; but then shall I know even as I am known.'

When a man knows everything and understands everything, then he will be
perfect, and life will be blessed. He is capable of knowing everything
and understanding everything. Hence he is justified in his hope of
infinite freedom and blessedness.

The great inspiration of the new religion was the inspiration of
freedom. When I have submerged or distilled away my concrete body and my
limited desires, when I am like the skylark dissolved in the sky yet
filling heaven and earth with song, then I am perfect, consummated in
the Infinite. When I am all that is not-me, then I have perfect liberty,
I know no limitation. Only I must eliminate the Self.

It was this religious belief which expressed itself in science. Science
was the analysis of the outer self, the elementary substance of the
self, the outer world. And the machine is the great reconstructed
selfless power. Hence the active worship to which we were given at the
end of the last century, the worship of mechanized force.

Still we continue to worship that which is not-me, the Selfless world,
though we would fain bring in the Self to help us. We are shouting the
Shakespearean advice to warriors: 'Then simulate the action of the
tiger.' We are trying to become again the tiger, the supreme, imperial,
warlike Self. At the same time our ideal is the selfless world
of equity.

We continue to give service to the Selfless God, we worship the great
selfless oneness in the spirit, oneness in service of the great
humanity, that which is Not-Me. This selfless God is He who works for
all alike, without consideration. And His image is the machine which
dominates and cows us, we cower before it, we run to serve it. For it
works for all humanity alike.

At the same time, we want to be warlike tigers. That is the horror: the
confusing of the two ends. We warlike tigers fit ourselves out with
machinery, and our blazing tiger wrath is emitted through a machine. It
is a horrible thing to see machines hauled about by tigers, at the mercy
of tigers, forced to express the tiger. It is a still more horrible
thing to see tigers caught up and entangled and torn in machinery. It is
horrible, a chaos beyond chaos, an unthinkable hell.

The tiger is not wrong, the machine is not wrong, but we, liars,
lip-servers, duplicate fools, we are unforgivably wrong. We say: 'I will
be a tiger because I love mankind; out of love for other people, out of
selfless service to that which is not me, I will even become a tiger.'
Which is absurd. A tiger devours because it is consummated in devouring,
it achieves its absolute self in devouring. It does not devour because
its unselfish conscience bids it do so, for the sake of the other deer
and doves, or the other tigers.

Having arrived at the one extreme of mechanical selflessness, we
immediately embrace the other extreme of the transcendent Self. But we
try to be both at once. We do not cease to be the one before we become
the other. We do not even play the roles in turn. We want to be the
tiger and the deer both in one. Which is just ghastly nothingness. We
try to say, 'The tiger is the lamb and the lamb is the tiger.' Which is
nil, nihil, nought.

The padrone took me into a small room almost contained in the thickness
of the wall. There the Signora's dark eyes glared with surprise and
agitation, seeing me intrude. She is younger than the Signore, a mere
village tradesman's daughter, and, alas, childless.

It was quite true, the door stood open. Madame put down the screw-driver
and drew herself erect. Her eyes were a flame of excitement. This
question of a door-spring that made the door fly open when it should
make it close roused a vivid spark in her soul. It was she who was
wrestling with the angel of mechanism.

She was about forty years old, and flame-like and fierily sad. I think
she did not know she was sad. But her heart was eaten by some impotence
in her life.

She subdued her flame of life to the little padrone. He was strange and
static, scarcely human, ageless, like a monkey. She supported him with
her flame, supported his static, ancient, beautiful form, kept it
intact. But she did not believe in him.

Now, the Signora Gemma held her husband together whilst he undid the
screw that fixed the spring. If they had been alone, she would have done
it, pretending to be under his direction. But since I was there, he did
it himself; a grey, shaky, highly-bred little gentleman, standing on a
chair with a long screw-driver, whilst his wife stood behind him, her
hands half-raised to catch him if he should fall. Yet he was strangely
absolute, with a strange, intact force in his breeding.

They had merely adjusted the strong spring to the shut door, and
stretched it slightly in fastening it to the door-jamb, so that it drew
together the moment the latch was released, and the door flew open.

We soon made it right. There was a moment of anxiety, the screw was
fixed. And the door swung to. They were delighted. The Signora Gemma,
who roused in me an electric kind of melancholy, clasped her hands
together in ecstasy as the door swiftly shut itself.

'_Ecco!_' she cried, in her vibrating, almost warlike woman's voice:
'_Ecco!_'

Her eyes were aflame as they looked at the door. She ran forward to try
it herself. She opened the door expectantly, eagerly. Pouf!--it shut
with a bang.

'_Ecco!_' she cried, her voice quivering like bronze, overwrought but
triumphant.

I must try also. I opened the door. Pouf! It shut with a bang. We all
exclaimed with joy.

Then the Signor di Paoli turned to me, with a gracious, bland, formal
grin. He turned his back slightly on the woman, and stood holding his
chin, his strange horse-mouth grinning almost pompously at me. It was an
affair of gentlemen. His wife disappeared as if dismissed. Then the
padrone broke into cordial motion. We must drink.

He would show me the estate. I had already seen the house. We went out
by the glass doors on the left, into the domestic courtyard.

It was lower than the gardens round it, and the sunshine came through
the trellised arches on to the flagstones, where the grass grew fine and
green in the cracks, and all was deserted and spacious and still. There
were one or two orange-tubs in the light.

Then I heard a noise, and there in the corner, among all the pink
geraniums and the sunshine, the Signora Gemma sat laughing with a baby.
It was a fair, bonny thing of eighteen months. The Signora was
concentrated upon the child as he sat, stolid and handsome, in his
little white cap, perched on a bench picking at the pink geraniums.

She laughed, bent forward her dark face out of the shadow, swift into a
glitter of sunshine near the sunny baby, laughing again excitedly,
making mother-noises. The child took no notice of her. She caught him
swiftly into the shadow, and they were obscured; her dark head was
against the baby's wool jacket, she was kissing his neck, avidly, under
the creeper leaves. The pink geraniums still frilled joyously in
the sunshine.

I had forgotten the padrone. Suddenly I turned to him inquiringly.

'The Signora's nephew,' he explained, briefly, curtly, in a small voice.
It was as if he were ashamed, or too deeply chagrined.

The woman had seen us watching, so she came across the sunshine with the
child, laughing, talking to the baby, not coming out of her own world to
us, not acknowledging us, except formally.

The Signor Pietro, queer old horse, began to laugh and neigh at the
child, with strange, rancorous envy. The child twisted its face to cry.
The Signora caught it away, dancing back a few yards from her
old husband.

'I am a stranger,' I said to her across the distance. 'He is afraid of a
stranger.'

'No, no,' she cried back, her eyes flaring up. 'It is the man. He always
cries at the men.'

She advanced again, laughing and roused, with the child in her arms. Her
husband stood as if overcast, obliterated. She and I and the baby, in
the sunshine, laughed a moment. Then I heard the neighing, forced laugh
of the old man. He would not be left out. He seemed to force himself
forward. He was bitter, acrid with chagrin and obliteration, struggling
as if to assert his own existence. He was nullified.

The woman also was uncomfortable. I could see she wanted to go away with
the child, to enjoy him alone, with palpitating, pained enjoyment. It
was her brother's boy. And the old padrone was as if nullified by her
ecstasy over the baby. He held his chin, gloomy, fretful, unimportant.

He was annulled. I was startled when I realized it. It was as though his
reality were not attested till he had a child. It was as if his _raison
d'être_ had been to have a son. And he had no children. Therefore he had
no _raison d'être_. He was nothing, a shadow that vanishes into nothing.
And he was ashamed, consumed by his own nothingness.

I was startled. This, then, is the secret of Italy's attraction for us,
this phallic worship. To the Italian the phallus is the symbol of
individual creative immortality, to each man his own Godhead. The child
is but the evidence of the Godhead.

And this is why the Italian is attractive, supple, and beautiful,
because he worships the Godhead in the flesh. We envy him, we feel pale
and insignificant beside him. Yet at the same time we feel superior to
him, as if he were a child and we adult.

Wherein are we superior? Only because we went beyond the phallus in the
search of the Godhead, the creative origin. And we found the physical
forces and the secrets of science.

We have exalted Man far above the man who is in each one of us. Our aim
is a perfect humanity, a perfect and equable human consciousness,
selfless. And we obtain it in the subjection, reduction, analysis, and
destruction of the Self. So on we go, active in science and mechanics,
and social reform.

But we have exhausted ourselves in the process. We have found great
treasures, and we are now impotent to use them. So we have said: 'What
good are these treasures, they are vulgar nothings.' We have said: 'Let
us go back from this adventuring, let us enjoy our own flesh, like the
Italian.' But our habit of life, our very constitution, prevents our
being quite like the Italian. The phallus will never serve us as a
Godhead, because we do not believe in it: no Northern race does.
Therefore, either we set ourselves to serve our children, calling them
'the future', or else we turn perverse and destructive, give ourselves
joy in the destruction of the flesh.

The children are not the future. The living truth is the future. Time
and people do not make the future. Retrogression is not the future.
Fifty million children growing up purposeless, with no purpose save the
attainment of their own individual desires, these are not the future,
they are only a disintegration of the past. The future is in living,
growing truth, in advancing fulfilment.

But it is no good. Whatever we do, it is within the greater will towards
self-reduction and a perfect society, analysis on the one hand, and
mechanical construction on the other. This will dominates us as a whole,
and until the whole breaks down, the will must persist. So that now,
continuing in the old, splendid will for a perfect selfless humanity, we
have become inhuman and unable to help ourselves, we are but attributes
of the great mechanized society we have created on our way to
perfection. And this great mechanized society, being selfless, is
pitiless. It works on mechanically and destroys us, it is our master
and our God.

It is past the time to leave off, to cease entirely from what we are
doing, and from what we have been doing for hundreds of years. It is
past the time to cease seeking one Infinite, ignoring, striving to
eliminate the other. The Infinite is twofold, the Father and the Son,
the Dark and the Light, the Senses and the Mind, the Soul and the
Spirit, the self and the not-self, the Eagle and the Dove, the Tiger and
the Lamb. The consummation of man is twofold, in the Self and in
Selflessness. By great retrogression back to the source of darkness in
me, the Self, deep in the senses, I arrive at the Original, Creative
Infinite. By projection forth from myself, by the elimination of my
absolute sensual self, I arrive at the Ultimate Infinite, Oneness in the
Spirit. They are two Infinites, twofold approach to God. And man must
know both.

But he must never confuse them. They are eternally separate. The lion
shall never lie down with the lamb. The lion eternally shall devour the
lamb, the lamb eternally shall be devoured. Man knows the great
consummation in the flesh, the sensual ecstasy, and that is eternal.
Also the spiritual ecstasy of unanimity, that is eternal. But the two
are separate and never to be confused. To neutralize the one with the
other is unthinkable, an abomination. Confusion is horror and
nothingness.

The two Infinites, negative and positive, they are always related, but
they are never identical. They are always opposite, but there exists a
relation between them. This is the Holy Ghost of the Christian Trinity.
And it is this, the relation which is established between the two
Infinites, the two natures of God, which we have transgressed,
forgotten, sinned against. The Father is the Father, and the Son is the
Son. I may know the Son and deny the Father, or know the Father and deny
the Son. But that which I may never deny, and which I have denied, is
the Holy Ghost which relates the dual Infinites into One Whole, which
relates and keeps distinct the dual natures of God. To say that the two
are one, this is the inadmissible lie. The two are related, by the
intervention of the Third, into a Oneness.

There are two ways, there is not only One. There are two opposite ways
to consummation. But that which relates them, like the base of the
triangle, this is the constant, the Absolute, this makes the Ultimate
Whole. And in the Holy Spirit I know the Two Ways, the Two Infinites,
the Two Consummations. And knowing the Two, I admit the Whole. But
excluding One, I exclude the Whole. And confusing the two, I make
nullity nihil.

'_Mais_,' said the Signore, starting from his scene of ignominy, where
his wife played with another man's child, '_mais--voulez-vous vous
promener dans mes petites terres?_'

It came out fluently, he was so much roused in self-defence and
self-assertion.

We walked under the pergola of bony vine-stocks, secure in the sunshine
within the walls, only the long mountain, parallel with us, looking in.

I said how I liked the big vine-garden, I asked when it ended. The pride
of the padrone came back with a click. He pointed me to the terrace, to
the great shut lemon-houses above. They were all his. But--he shrugged
his Italian shoulders--it was nothing, just a little garden, _vous
savez, monsieur_. I protested it was beautiful, that I loved it, and
that it seemed to me _very_ large indeed. He admitted that today,
perhaps, it was beautiful.

'_Perchè--parce que--il fait un tempo--così--très bell'--très beau,
ecco!_'

He alighted on the word _beau_ hurriedly, like a bird coming to ground
with a little bounce.

The terraces of the garden are held up to the sun, the sun falls full
upon them, they are like a vessel slanted up, to catch the superb, heavy
light. Within the walls we are remote, perfect, moving in heavy spring
sunshine, under the bony avenue of vines. The padrone makes little
exclamatory noises that mean nothing, and teaches me the names of
vegetables. The land is rich and black.

Opposite us, looking down on our security, is the long, arched mountain
of snow. We climbed one flight of steps, and we could see the little
villages on the opposite side of the lake. We climbed again, and could
see the water rippling.

We came to a great stone building that I had thought was a storehouse,
for open-air storage, because the walls are open halfway up, showing the
darkness inside and the corner pillar very white and square and distinct
in front of it.

Entering carelessly into the dimness, I started, for at my feet was a
great floor of water, clear and green in its obscurity, going down
between the walls, a reservoir in the gloom. The Signore laughed at my
surprise. It was for irrigating the land, he said. It stank, slightly,
with a raw smell; otherwise, I said, what a wonderful bath it would
make. The old Signore gave his little neighing laugh at the idea.

Then we climbed into a great loft of leaves, ruddy brown, stored in a
great bank under the roof, seeming to give off a little red heat, as
they gave off the lovely perfume of the hills. We passed through, and
stood at the foot of the lemon-house. The big, blind building rose high
in the sunshine before us.

All summer long, upon the mountain slopes steep by the lake, stands the
rows of naked pillars rising out of the green foliage like ruins of
temples: white, square pillars of masonry, standing forlorn in their
colonnades and squares, rising up the mountain-sides here and there, as
if they remained from some great race that had once worshipped here. And
still, in the winter, some are seen, standing away in lonely places
where the sun streams full, grey rows of pillars rising out of a broken
wall, tier above tier, naked to the sky, forsaken.

They are the lemon plantations, and the pillars are to support the heavy
branches of the trees, but finally to act as scaffolding of the great
wooden houses that stand blind and ugly, covering the lemon trees in
the winter.

In November, when cold winds came down and snow had fallen on the
mountains, from out of the storehouses the men were carrying timber, and
we heard the clang of falling planks. Then, as we walked along the
military road on the mountain-side, we saw below, on the top of the
lemon gardens, long, thin poles laid from pillar to pillar, and we heard
the two men talking and singing as they walked across perilously,
placing the poles. In their clumsy zoccoli they strode easily across,
though they had twenty or thirty feet to fall if they slipped. But the
mountain-side, rising steeply, seemed near, and above their heads the
rocks glowed high into the sky, so that the sense of elevation must have
been taken away. At any rate, they went easily from pillar-summit to
pillar-summit, with a great cave of space below. Then again was the
rattle and clang of planks being laid in order, ringing from the
mountain-side over the blue lake, till a platform of timber, old and
brown, projected from the mountain-side, a floor when seen from above, a
hanging roof when seen from below. And we, on the road above, saw the
men sitting easily on this flimsy hanging platform, hammering the
planks. And all day long the sound of hammering echoed among the rocks
and olive woods, and came, a faint, quick concussion, to the men on the
boats far out. When the roofs were on they put in the fronts, blocked in
between the white pillars withhold, dark wood, in roughly made panels.
And here and there, at irregular intervals, was a panel of glass, pane
overlapping pane in the long strip of narrow window. So that now these
enormous, unsightly buildings bulge out on the mountain-sides, rising in
two or three receding tiers, blind, dark, sordid-looking places.

In the morning I often lie in bed and watch the sunrise. The lake lies
dim and milky, the mountains are dark blue at the back, while over them
the sky gushes and glistens with light. At a certain place on the
mountain ridge the light burns gold, seems to fuse a little groove on
the hill's rim. It fuses and fuses at this point, till of a sudden it
comes, the intense, molten, living light. The mountains melt suddenly,
the light steps down, there is a glitter, a spangle, a clutch of
spangles, a great unbearable sun-track flashing across the milky lake,
and the light falls on my face. Then, looking aside, I hear the little
slotting noise which tells me they are opening the lemon gardens, a long
panel here and there, a long slot of darkness at irregular intervals
between the brown wood and the glass stripes.

'_Voulez-vous_'--the Signore bows me in with outstretched
hand--'_voulez-vous entrer, monsieur?_'

I went into the lemon-house, where the poor threes seem to mope in the
darkness. It is an immense, dark, cold place. Tall lemon trees, heavy
with half-visible fruit, crowd together, and rise in the gloom. They
look like ghosts in the darkness of the underworld, stately, and as if
in life, but only grand shadows of themselves. And lurking here and
there, I see one of the pillars, But he, too, seems a shadow, not one of
the dazzling white fellows I knew. Here we are trees, men, pillars, the
dark earth, the sad black paths, shut in in this enormous box. It is
true, there are long strips of window and slots of space, so that the
front is striped, and an occasional beam of light fingers the leaves of
an enclosed tree and the sickly round lemons. But it is nevertheless
very gloomy.

'But it is much colder in here than outside,' I said.

'Yes,' replied the Signore, 'now. But at night--I _think_--'

I almost wished it were night to try. I wanted to imagine the trees
cosy. They seemed now in the underworld. Between the lemon trees, beside
the path, were little orange trees, and dozens of oranges hanging like
hot coals in the twilight. When I warm my hands at them the Signore
breaks me off one twig after another, till I have a bunch of burning
oranges among dark leaves, a heavy bouquet. Looking down the Hades of
the lemon-house, the many ruddy-clustered oranges beside the path remind
me of the lights of a village along the lake at night, while the pale
lemons above are the stars. There is a subtle, exquisite scent of lemon
flowers. Then I notice a citron. He hangs heavy and bloated upon so
small a tree, that he seems a dark green enormity. There is a great host
of lemons overhead, half-visible, a swarm of ruddy oranges by the paths,
and here and there a fat citron. It is almost like being under the sea.

At the corners of the path were round little patches of ash and stumps
of charred wood, where fires had been kindled inside the house on cold
nights. For during the second and third weeks in January the snow came
down so low on the mountains that, after climbing for an hour, I found
myself in a snow lane, and saw olive orchards on lawns of snow.

The padrone says that all lemons and sweet oranges are grafted on a
bitter-orange stock. The plants raised from seed, lemon and sweet
orange, fell prey to disease, so the cultivators found it safe only to
raise the native bitter orange, and then graft upon it.

And the maestra--she is the schoolmistress, who wears black gloves while
she teaches us Italian--says that the lemon was brought by St Francis of
Assisi, who came to the Garda here and founded a church and a monastery.
Certainly the church of San Francesco is very old and dilapidated, and
its cloisters have some beautiful and original carvings of leaves and
fruit upon the pillars, which seem to connect San Francesco with the
lemon. I imagine him wandering here with a lemon in his pocket. Perhaps
he made lemonade in the hot summer. But Bacchus had been before him in
the drink trade.

Looking at his lemons, the Signore sighed. I think he hates them. They
are leaving him in the lurch. They are sold retail at a halfpenny each
all the year round. 'But that is as dear, or dearer, than in England,' I
say. 'Ah, but,' says the maestra, 'that is because your lemons are
outdoor fruit from Sicily. _Però_--one of our lemons is as good as _two_
from elsewhere.'

It is true these lemons have an exquisite fragrance and perfume, but
whether their force as lemons is double that of an ordinary fruit is a
question. Oranges are sold at fourpence halfpenny the kilo--it comes
about five for twopence, small ones. The citrons are sold also by weight
in Salò for the making of that liqueur known as 'Cedro'. One citron
fetches sometimes a shilling or more, but then the demand is necessarily
small. So that it is evident, from these figures, the Lago di Garda
cannot afford to grow its lemons much longer. The gardens are already
many of them in ruins, and still more 'Da Vendere'.

We went out of the shadow of the lemon-house on to the roof of the
section below us. When we came to the brink of the roof I sat down. The
padrone stood behind me, a shabby, shaky little figure on his roof in
the sky, a little figure of dilapidation, dilapidated as the
lemon-houses themselves.

We were always level with the mountain-snow opposite. A film of pure
blue was on the hills to the right and the left. There had been a wind,
but it was still now. The water breathed an iridescent dust on the far
shore, where the villages were groups of specks.

On the low level of the world, on the lake, an orange-sailed boat leaned
slim to the dark-blue water, which had flecks of foam. A woman went
down-hill quickly, with two goats and a sheep. Among the olives a man
was whistling.

'_Voyez_,' said the padrone, with distant, perfect melancholy. 'There
was once a lemon garden also there--you see the short pillars, cut off
to make a pergola for the vine. Once there were twice as many lemons as
now. Now we must have vine instead. From that piece of land I had two
hundred lire a year, in lemons. From the vine I have only eighty.'

'But wine is a valuable crop,' I said.

'Ah--_così-così_! For a man who grows much. For me--_poco, poco--peu_.'

Suddenly his face broke into a smile of profound melancholy, almost a
grin, like a gargoyle. It was the real Italian melancholy, very
deep, static.

'_Vous voyez, monsieur_--the lemon, it is all the year, all the year.
But the vine--one crop--?'

He lifts his shoulders and spreads his hands with that gesture of
finality and fatality, while his face takes the blank, ageless look of
misery, like a monkey's. There is no hope. There is the present. Either
that is enough, the present, or there is nothing.

I sat and looked at the lake. It was beautiful as paradise, as the first
creation. On the shores were the ruined lemon-pillars standing out in
melancholy, the clumsy, enclosed lemon-houses seemed ramshackle, bulging
among vine stocks and olive trees. The villages, too, clustered upon
their churches, seemed to belong to the past. They seemed to be
lingering in bygone centuries.

'But it is very beautiful,' I protested. 'In England--'

'Ah, in England,' exclaimed the padrone, the same ageless, monkey-like
grin of fatality, tempered by cunning, coming on his face, 'in England
you have the wealth--_les richesses_--you have the mineral coal and the
machines, _vous savez_. Here we have the sun--'

He lifted his withered hand to the sky, to the wonderful source of that
blue day, and he smiled, in histrionic triumph. But his triumph was only
histrionic. The machines were more to his soul than the sun. He did not
know these mechanisms, their great, human-contrived, inhuman power, and
he wanted to know them. As for the sun, that is common property, and no
man is distinguished by it. He wanted machines, machine production,
money, and human power. He wanted to know the joy of man who has got the
earth in his grip, bound it up with railways, burrowed it with iron
fingers, subdued it. He wanted this last triumph of the ego, this last
reduction. He wanted to go where the English have gone, beyond the Self,
into the great inhuman Not Self, to create the great unliving creators,
the machines, out of the active forces of nature that existed
before flesh.

But he is too old. It remains for the young Italian to embrace his
mistress, the machine.

I sat on the roof of the lemon-house, with the lake below and the snowy
mountain opposite, and looked at the ruins on the old, olive-fuming
shores, at all the peace of the ancient world still covered in sunshine,
and the past seemed to me so lovely that one must look towards it,
backwards, only backwards, where there is peace and beauty and no more
dissonance.

I thought of England, the great mass of London, and the black, fuming,
laborious Midlands and north-country. It seemed horrible. And yet, it
was better than the padrone, this old, monkey-like cunning of fatality.
It is better to go forward into error than to stay fixed inextricably
in the past.

Yet what should become of the world? There was London and the industrial
counties spreading like a blackness over all the world, horrible, in the
end destructive. And the Garda was so lovely under the sky of sunshine,
it was intolerable. For away, beyond, beyond all the snowy Alps, with
the iridescence of eternal ice above them, was this England, black and
foul and dry, with her soul worn down, almost worn away. And England was
conquering the world with her machines and her horrible destruction of
natural life. She was conquering the whole world.

And yet, was she not herself finished in this work? She had had enough.
She had conquered the natural life to the end: she was replete with the
conquest of the outer world, satisfied with the destruction of the Self.
She would cease, she would turn round; or else expire.

If she still lived, she would begin to build her knowledge into a great
structure of truth. There it lay, vast masses of rough-hewn knowledge,
vast masses of machines and appliances, vast masses of ideas and
methods, and nothing done with it, only teeming swarms of disintegrated
human beings seething and perishing rapidly away amongst it, till it
seems as if a world will be left covered with huge ruins, and scored by
strange devices of industry, and quite dead, the people disappeared,
swallowed up in the last efforts towards a perfect, selfless society.



_3_

THE THEATRE


During carnival a company is playing in the theatre. On Christmas Day
the padrone came in with the key of his box, and would we care to see
the drama? The theatre was small, a mere nothing, in fact; a mere affair
of peasants, you understand; and the Signor Di Paoli spread his hands
and put his head on one side, parrot-wise; but we might find a little
diversion--_un peu de divertiment_. With this he handed me the key.

I made suitable acknowledgements, and was really impressed. To be handed
the key of a box at the theatre, so simply and pleasantly, in the large
sitting-room looking over the grey lake of Christmas Day; it seemed to
me a very graceful event. The key had a chain and a little shield of
bronze, on which was beaten out a large figure 8.

So the next day we went to see _I Spettri_, expecting some good, crude
melodrama. The theatre is an old church. Since that triumph of the deaf
and dumb, the cinematograph, has come to give us the nervous excitement
of speed--grimace agitation, and speed, as of flying atoms, chaos--many
an old church in Italy has taken a new lease of life.

This cast-off church made a good theatre. I realized how cleverly it had
been constructed for the dramatic presentation of religious ceremonies.
The east end is round, the walls are windowless, sound is well
distributed. Now everything is theatrical, except the stone floor and
two pillars at the back of the auditorium, and the slightly
ecclesiastical seats below.

There are two tiers of little boxes in the theatre, some forty in all,
with fringe and red velvet, and lined with dark red paper, quite like
real boxes in a real theatre. And the padrone's is one of the best. It
just holds three people.

We paid our threepence entrance fee in the stone hall and went upstairs.
I opened the door of Number 8, and we were shut in our little cabin,
looking down on the world. Then I found the barber, Luigi, bowing
profusely in a box opposite. It was necessary to make bows all round:
ah, the chemist, on the upper tier, near the barber; how-do-you-do to
the padrona of the hotel, who is our good friend, and who sits, wearing
a little beaver shoulder-cape, a few boxes off; very cold salutation to
the stout village magistrate with the long brown beard, who leans
forward in the box facing the stage, while a grouping of faces look out
from behind him; a warm smile to the family of the Signora Gemma, across
next to the stage. Then we are settled.

I cannot tell why I hate the village magistrate. He looks like a family
portrait by a Flemish artist, he himself weighing down the front of the
picture with his portliness and his long brown beard, whilst the faces
of his family are arranged in two groups for the background. I think he
is angry at our intrusion. He is very republican and self-important. But
we eclipse him easily, with the aid of a large black velvet hat, and
black furs, and our Sunday clothes.

Downstairs the villagers are crowding, drifting like a heavy current.
The women are seated, by church instinct, all together on the left, with
perhaps an odd man at the end of a row, beside his wife. On the right,
sprawling in the benches, are several groups of bersaglieri, in grey
uniforms and slanting cock's-feather hats; then peasants, fishermen, and
an odd couple or so of brazen girls taking their places on the
men's side.

At the back, lounging against the pillars or standing very dark and
sombre, are the more reckless spirits of the village. Their black felt
hats are pulled down, their cloaks are thrown over their mouths, they
stand very dark and isolated in their moments of stillness, they shout
and wave to each other when anything occurs.

The men are clean, their clothes are all clean washed. The rags of the
poorest porter are always well washed. But it is Sunday tomorrow, and
they are shaved only on a Sunday. So that they have a week's black
growth on their chins. But they have dark, soft eyes, unconscious and
vulnerable. They move and balance with loose, heedless motion upon their
clattering zoccoli, they lounge with wonderful ease against the wall at
the back, or against the two pillars, unconscious of the patches on
their clothes or of their bare throats, that are knotted perhaps with a
scarlet rag. Loose and abandoned, they lounge and talk, or they watch
with wistful absorption the play that is going on.

They are strangely isolated in their own atmosphere, and as if revealed.
It is as if their vulnerable being was exposed and they have not the wit
to cover it. There is a pathos of physical sensibility and mental
inadequacy. Their mind is not sufficiently alert to run with their
quick, warm senses.

The men keep together, as if to support each other, the women also are
together; in a hard, strong herd. It is as if the power, the hardness,
the triumph, even in this Italian village, were with the women in their
relentless, vindictive unity.

That which drives men and women together, the indomitable necessity, is
like a bondage upon the people. They submit as under compulsion, under
constraint. They come together mostly in anger and in violence of
destructive passion. There is no comradeship between men and women, none
whatsoever, but rather a condition of battle, reserve, hostility.

On Sundays the uncomfortable, excited, unwilling youth walks for an hour
with his sweetheart, at a little distance from her, on the public
highway in the afternoon. This is a concession to the necessity for
marriage. There is no real courting, no happiness of being together,
only the roused excitement which is based on a fundamental hostility.
There is very little flirting, and what there is is of the subtle, cruel
kind, like a sex duel. On the whole, the men and women avoid each other,
almost shun each other. Husband and wife are brought together in a
child, which they both worship. But in each of them there is only the
great reverence for the infant, and the reverence for fatherhood or
motherhood, as the case may be; there is no spiritual love.

In marriage, husband and wife wage the subtle, satisfying war of sex
upon each other. It gives a profound satisfaction, a profound intimacy.
But it destroys all joy, all unanimity in action.

On Sunday afternoons the uncomfortable youth walks by the side of his
maiden for an hour in the public highway. Then he escapes; as from a
bondage he goes back to his men companions. On Sunday afternoons and
evenings the married woman, accompanied by a friend or by a child--she
dare not go alone, afraid of the strange, terrible sex-war between her
and the drunken man--is seen leading home the wine-drunken, liberated
husband. Sometimes she is beaten when she gets home. It is part of the
process. But there is no synthetic love between men and women, there is
only passion, and passion is fundamental hatred, the act of love is
a fight.

The child, the outcome, is divine. Here the union, the oneness, is
manifest. Though spirit strove with spirit, in mortal conflict, during
the sex-passion, yet the flesh united with flesh in oneness. The phallus
is still divine. But the spirit, the mind of man, this has
become nothing.

So the women triumph. They sit down below in the theatre, their
perfectly dressed hair gleaming, their backs very straight, their heads
carried tensely. They are not very noticeable. They seem held in
reserve. They are just as tense and stiff as the men are slack and
abandoned. Some strange will holds the women taut. They seem like
weapons, dangerous. There is nothing charming nor winning about them; at
the best a full, prolific maternity, at the worst a yellow poisonous
bitterness of the flesh that is like a narcotic. But they are too strong
for the men. The male spirit, which would subdue the immediate flesh to
some conscious or social purpose, is overthrown. The woman in her
maternity is the law-giver, the supreme authority. The authority of the
man, in work, in public affairs, is something trivial in comparison. The
pathetic ignominy of the village male is complete on Sunday afternoon,
on his great day of liberation, when he is accompanied home, drunk but
sinister, by the erect, unswerving, slightly cowed woman. His drunken
terrorizing is only pitiable, she is so obviously the more
constant power.

And this is why the men must go away to America. It is not the money. It
is the profound desire to rehabilitate themselves, to recover some
dignity as men, as producers, as workers, as creators from the spirit,
not only from the flesh. It is a profound desire to get away from women
altogether, the terrible subjugation to sex, the phallic worship.

The company of actors in the little theatre was from a small town away
on the plain, beyond Brescia. The curtain rose, everybody was still,
with that profound, naïve attention which children give. And after a few
minutes I realized that _I Spettri_ was Ibsen's _Ghosts_. The peasants
and fishermen of the Garda, even the rows of ungovernable children, sat
absorbed in watching as the Norwegian drama unfolded itself.

The actors are peasants. The leader is the son of a peasant proprietor.
He is qualified as a chemist, but is unsettled, vagrant, prefers
play-acting. The Signer Pietro di Paoli shrugs his shoulders and
apologizes for their vulgar accent. It is all the same to me. I am
trying to get myself to rights with the play, which I have just lately
seen in Munich, perfectly produced and detestable.

It was such a change from the hard, ethical, slightly mechanized
characters in the German play, which was as perfect an interpretation as
I can imagine, to the rather pathetic notion of the Italian peasants,
that I had to wait to adjust myself.

The mother was a pleasant, comfortable woman harassed by something, she
did not quite know what. The pastor was a ginger-haired caricature
imitated from the northern stage, quite a lay figure. The peasants never
laughed, they watched solemnly and absorbedly like children. The servant
was just a slim, pert, forward hussy, much too flagrant. And then the
son, the actor-manager: he was a dark, ruddy man, broad and thick-set,
evidently of peasant origin, but with some education now; he was the
important figure, the play was his.

And he was strangely disturbing. Dark, ruddy, and powerful, he could not
be the blighted son of 'Ghosts', the hectic, unsound, northern issue of
a diseased father. His flashy Italian passion for his half-sister was
real enough to make one uncomfortable: something he wanted and would
have in spite of his own soul, something which fundamentally he did
not want.

It was this contradiction within the man that made the play so
interesting. A robust, vigorous man of thirty-eight, flaunting and
florid as a rather successful Italian can be, there was yet a secret
sickness which oppressed him. But it was no taint in the blood, it was
rather a kind of debility in the soul. That which he wanted and would
have, the sensual excitement, in his soul he did not want it, no, not at
all. And yet he must act from his physical desires, his physical will.

His true being, his real self, was impotent. In his soul he was
dependent, forlorn. He was childish and dependent on the mother. To hear
him say, '_Grazia, mamma!_' would have tormented the mother-soul in any
woman living. Such a child crying in the night! And for what?

For he was hot-blooded, healthy, almost in his prime, and free as a man
can be in his circumstances. He had his own way, he admitted no
thwarting. He governed his circumstances pretty much, coming to our
village with his little company, playing the plays he chose himself. And
yet, that which he would have he did not vitally want, it was only a
sort of inflamed obstinacy that made him so insistent, in the masculine
way. He was not going to be governed by women, he was not going to be
dictated to in the least by any one. And this because he was beaten by
his own flesh.

His real man's soul, the soul that goes forth and builds up a new world
out of the void, was ineffectual. It could only revert to the senses.
His divinity was the phallic divinity. The other male divinity, which is
the spirit that fulfils in the world the new germ of an idea, this was
denied and obscured in him, unused. And it was this spirit which cried
out helplessly in him through the insistent, inflammable flesh. Even
this play-acting was a form of physical gratification for him, it had in
it neither real mind nor spirit.

It was so different from Ibsen, and so much more moving. Ibsen is
exciting, nervously sensational. But this was really moving, a real
crying in the night. One loved the Italian nation, and wanted to help it
with all one's soul. But when one sees the perfect Ibsen, how one hates
the Norwegian and Swedish nations! They are detestable.

They seem to be fingering with the mind the secret places and sources of
the blood, impertinent, irreverent, nasty. There is a certain
intolerable nastiness about the real Ibsen: the same thing is in
Strindberg and in most of the Norwegian and Swedish writings. It is with
them a sort of phallic worship also, but now the worship is mental and
perverted: the phallus is the real fetish, but it is the source of
uncleanliness and corruption and death, it is the Moloch, worshipped in
obscenity.

Which is unbearable. The phallus is a symbol of creative divinity. But
it represents only part of creative divinity. The Italian has made it
represent the whole. Which is now his misery, for he has to destroy his
symbol in himself.

Which is why the Italian men have the enthusiasm for war, unashamed.
Partly it is the true phallic worship, for the phallic principle is to
absorb and dominate all life. But also it is a desire to expose
themselves to death, to know death, that death may destroy in them this
too strong dominion of the blood, may once more liberate the spirit of
outgoing, of uniting, of making order out of chaos, in the outer world,
as the flesh makes a new order from chaos in begetting a new life, set
them free to know and serve a greater idea.

The peasants below sat and listened intently, like children who hear and
do not understand, yet who are spellbound. The children themselves sit
spellbound on the benches till the play is over. They do not fidget or
lose interest. They watch with wide, absorbed eyes at the mystery, held
in thrall by the sound of emotion.

But the villagers do not really care for Ibsen. They let it go. On the
feast of Epiphany, as a special treat, was given a poetic drama by
D'Annunzio, _La Fiaccola sotto il Moggio_--_The Light under the Bushel_.

It is a foolish romantic play of no real significance. There are several
murders and a good deal of artificial horror. But it is all a very nice
and romantic piece of make-believe, like a charade.

So the audience loved it. After the performance of _Ghosts_ I saw the
barber, and he had the curious grey clayey look of an Italian who is
cold and depressed. The sterile cold inertia, which the so-called
passionate nations know so well, had settled on him, and he went
obliterating himself in the street, as if he were cold, dead.

But after the D'Annunzio play he was like a man who has drunk sweet wine
and is warm.

'_Ah, bellissimo, bellissimo_!' he said, in tones of intoxicated
reverence, when he saw me.

'Better than _I Spettri_?' I said.

He half-raised his hands, as if to imply the fatuity of the question.

'Ah, but--' he said, 'it was D'Annunzio. The other....'

'That was Ibsen--a great Norwegian,' I said, 'famous all over the
world.'

'But you know--D'Annunzio is a poet--oh, beautiful, beautiful!' There
was no going beyond this '_bello--bellissimo_'.

It was the language which did it. It was the Italian passion for
rhetoric, for the speech which appeals to the senses and makes no demand
on the mind. When an Englishman listens to a speech he wants at least to
imagine that he understands thoroughly and impersonally what is meant.
But an Italian only cares about the emotion. It is the movement, the
physical effect of the language upon the blood which gives him supreme
satisfaction. His mind is scarcely engaged at all. He is like a child,
hearing and feeling without understanding. It is the sensuous
gratification he asks for. Which is why D'Annunzio is a god in Italy. He
can control the current of the blood with his words, and although much
of what he says is bosh, yet his hearer is satisfied, fulfilled.

Carnival ends on the 5th of February, so each Thursday there is a Serata
d' Onore of one of the actors. The first, and the only one for which
prices were raised--to a fourpence entrance fee instead of
threepence--was for the leading lady. The play was _The Wife of the
Doctor_, a modern piece, sufficiently uninteresting; the farce that
followed made me laugh.

Since it was her Evening of Honour, Adelaida was the person to see. She
is very popular, though she is no longer young. In fact, she is the
mother of the young pert person of _Ghosts_.

Nevertheless, Adelaida, stout and blonde and soft and pathetic, is the
real heroine of the theatre, the prima. She is very good at sobbing; and
afterwards the men exclaim involuntarily, out of their strong emotion,
'_bella, bella_!' The women say nothing. They sit stiffly and
dangerously as ever. But, no doubt, they quite agree this is the true
picture of ill-used, tear-stained woman, the bearer of many wrongs.
Therefore they take unto themselves the homage of the men's '_bella,
bella_!' that follows the sobs: it is due recognition of their hard
wrongs: 'the woman pays.' Nevertheless, they despise in their souls the
plump, soft Adelaida.

Dear Adelaida, she is irreproachable. In every age, in every clime, she
is dear, at any rate to the masculine soul, this soft, tear-blenched,
blonde, ill-used thing. She must be ill-used and unfortunate. Dear
Gretchen, dear Desdemona, dear Iphigenia, dear Dame aux Camélias, dear
Lucy of Lammermoor, dear Mary Magdalene, dear, pathetic, unfortunate
soul, in all ages and lands, how we love you. In the theatre she
blossoms forth, she is the lily of the stage. Young and inexperienced as
I am, I have broken my heart over her several times. I could write a
sonnet-sequence to her, yes, the fair, pale, tear-stained thing,
white-robed, with her hair down her back; I could call her by a hundred
names, in a hundred languages, Melisande, Elizabeth, Juliet, Butterfly,
Phèdre, Minnehaha, etc. Each new time I hear her voice, with its faint
clang of tears, my heart grows big and hot, and my bones melt. I detest
her, but it is no good. My heart begins to swell like a bud under the
plangent rain.

The last time I saw her was here, on the Garda, at Salò. She was the
chalked, thin-armed daughter of Rigoletto. I detested her, her voice had
a chalky squeak in it. And yet, by the end, my heart was overripe in my
breast, ready to burst with loving affection. I was ready to walk on to
the stage, to wipe out the odious, miscreant lover, and to offer her all
myself, saying, 'I can see it is real _love_ you want, and you shall
have it: _I_ will give it to you.'

Of course I know the secret of the Gretchen magic; it is all in the
'Save me, Mr Hercules!' phrase. Her shyness, her timidity, her
trustfulness, her tears foster my own strength and grandeur. I am the
positive half of the universe. But so I am, if it comes to that, just as
positive as the other half.

Adelaida is plump, and her voice has just that moist, plangent strength
which gives one a real voluptuous thrill. The moment she comes on the
stage and looks round--a bit scared--she is _she_, Electra, Isolde,
Sieglinde, Marguèrite. She wears a dress of black voile, like the lady
who weeps at the trial in the police-court. This is her modern uniform.
Her antique garment is of trailing white, with a blonde pigtail and a
flower. Realistically, it is black voile and a handkerchief.

Adelaida always has a handkerchief. And still I cannot resist it. I say,
'There's the hanky!' Nevertheless, in two minutes it has worked its way
with me. She squeezes it in her poor, plump hand as the tears begin to
rise; Fate, or man, is inexorable, so cruel. There is a sob, a cry; she
presses the fist and the hanky to her eyes, one eye, then the other. She
weeps real tears, tears shaken from the depths of her soft, vulnerable,
victimized female self. I cannot stand it. There I sit in the padrone's
little red box and stifle my emotion, whilst I repeat in my heart: 'What
a shame, child, what a shame!' She is twice my age, but what is age in
such circumstances? 'Your poor little hanky, it's sopping. There, then,
don't cry. It'll be all right. _I'll_ see you're all right. _All_ men
are not beasts, you know.' So I cover her protectively in my arms, and
soon I shall be kissing her, for comfort, in the heat and prowess of my
compassion, kissing her soft, plump cheek and neck closely, bringing my
comfort nearer and nearer.

It is a pleasant and exciting role for me to play. Robert Burns did the
part to perfection:

    O wert thou in the cauld blast
    On yonder lea, on yonder lea.

How many times does one recite that to all the Ophelias and Gretchens in
the world:

    Thy bield should be my bosom.

How one admires one's bosom in that capacity! Looking down at one's
shirt-front, one is filled with strength and pride.

Why are the women so bad at playing this part in real life, this
Ophelia-Gretchen role? Why are they so unwilling to go mad and die for
our sakes? They do it regularly on the stage.

But perhaps, after all, we write the plays. What a villain I am, what a
black-browed, passionate, ruthless, masculine villain I am to the
leading lady on the stage; and, on the other hand, dear heart, what a
hero, what a fount of chivalrous generosity and faith! I am _anything_
but a dull and law-abiding citizen. I am a Galahad, full of purity and
spirituality, I am the Lancelot of valour and lust; I fold my hands, or
I cock my hat in one side, as the case may be: I am _myself_. Only, I am
not a respectable citizen, not that, in this hour of my glory and
my escape.

Dear Heaven, how Adelaida wept, her voice plashing like violin music, at
my ruthless, masculine cruelty. Dear heart, how she sighed to rest on my
sheltering bosom! And how I enjoyed my dual nature! How I
admired myself!

Adelaida chose _La Moglie del Dottore_ for her Evening of Honour. During
the following week came a little storm of coloured bills: 'Great Evening
of Honour of Enrico Persevalli.'

This is the leader, the actor-manager. What should he choose for his
great occasion, this broad, thick-set, ruddy descendant of the peasant
proprietors of the plain? No one knew. The title of the play was
not revealed.

So we were staying at home, it was cold and wet. But the maestra came
inflammably on that Thursday evening, and were we not going to the
theatre, to see _Amleto_?

Poor maestra, she is yellow and bitter-skinned, near fifty, but her dark
eyes are still corrosively inflammable. She was engaged to a lieutenant
in the cavalry, who got drowned when she was twenty-one. Since then she
has hung on the tree unripe, growing yellow and bitter-skinned, never
developing.

'_Amleto!_' I say. '_Non lo conosco._'

A certain fear comes into her eyes. She is schoolmistress, and has a
mortal dread of being wrong.

'_Si_,' she cries, wavering, appealing, '_una dramma inglese_.'

'English!' I repeated.

'Yes, an English drama.'

'How do you write it?'

Anxiously, she gets a pencil from her reticule, and, with black-gloved
scrupulousness, writes _Amleto_.

'_Hamlet_!' I exclaim wonderingly.

'_Ecco, Amleto!_' cries the maestra, her eyes aflame with thankful
justification.

Then I knew that Signore Enrico Persevalli was looking to me for an
audience. His Evening of Honour would be a bitter occasion to him if the
English were not there to see his performance.

I hurried to get ready, I ran through the rain. I knew he would take it
badly that it rained on his Evening of Honour. He counted himself a man
who had fate against him.

'_Sono un disgraziato, io._'

I was late. The First Act was nearly over. The play was not yet alive,
neither in the bosoms of the actors nor in the audience. I closed the
door of the box softly, and came forward. The rolling Italian eyes of
Hamlet glanced up at me. There came a new impulse over the Court
of Denmark.

Enrico looked a sad fool in his melancholy black. The doublet sat close,
making him stout and vulgar, the knee-breeches seemed to exaggerate the
commonness of his thick, rather short, strutting legs. And he carried a
long black rag, as a cloak, for histrionic purposes. And he had on his
face a portentous grimace of melancholy and philosophic importance. His
was the caricature of Hamlet's melancholy self-absorption.

I stooped to arrange my footstool and compose my countenance. I was
trying not to grin. For the first time, attired in philosophic
melancholy of black silk, Enrico looked a boor and a fool. His
close-cropped, rather animal head was common above the effeminate
doublet, his sturdy, ordinary figure looked absurd in a
melancholic droop.

All the actors alike were out of their element. Their Majesties of
Denmark were touching. The Queen, burly little peasant woman, was ill at
ease in her pink satin. Enrico had had no mercy. He knew she loved to be
the scolding servant or housekeeper, with her head tied up in a
handkerchief, shrill and vulgar. Yet here she was pranked out in an
expanse of satin, la Regina. Regina, indeed!

She obediently did her best to be important. Indeed, she rather fancied
herself; she looked sideways at the audience, self-consciously, quite
ready to be accepted as an imposing and noble person, if they would
esteem her such. Her voice sounded hoarse and common, but whether it was
the pink satin in contrast, or a cold, I do not know. She was almost
childishly afraid to move. Before she began a speech she looked down and
kicked her skirt viciously, so that she was sure it was under control.
Then she let go. She was a burly, downright little body of sixty, one
rather expected her to box Hamlet on the ears.

Only she liked being a queen when she sat on the throne. There she
perched with great satisfaction, her train splendidly displayed down the
steps. She was as proud as a child, and she looked like Queen Victoria
of the Jubilee period.

The King, her noble consort, also had new honours thrust upon him, as
well as new garments. His body was real enough but it had nothing at all
to do with his clothes. They established a separate identity by
themselves. But wherever he went, they went with him, to the confusion
of everybody.

He was a thin, rather frail-looking peasant, pathetic, and very gentle.
There was something pure and fine about him, he was so exceedingly
gentle and by natural breeding courteous. But he did not feel kingly, he
acted the part with beautiful, simple resignation.

Enrico Persevalli had overshot himself in every direction, but worst of
all in his own. He had become a hulking fellow, crawling