Part 22

But stranger than these mutations of mortality is the fact that Italy holds the ashes of our Shelley and Keats, as it held so much of the life of Byron and Browning. As if Rome had not riches and memories to super-satiety! A Protestant cemetery seems indeed out of key as much with these poets as with Rome, but that overshadowing Pyramid of Cestius restores the exotic touch, and violets and daisies blot out all but the religion of beauty, so that Shelley could write: “It might make me in love with death to think that one should be buried in so sweet a place.” It is pleasant to think that only a year later Shelley, however exiguous his ashes, found in that sweet place the rest and re-union for which his _cor cordium_ yearned.

“’Tis Adonais calls! oh hasten thither, No more let life divide what Death can join together.”

With what a wonderful coast Shelley has mingled his memory—fig-trees, olives, palms, cactus, hawthorn, pines bent seaward, all running down the steep cliff. What enchanting harmonies they make with the glimpses of sea deep below, the white villages and campaniles, seen through their magic tangle. As you pass through the sunny dusty village roads, the girls seem to ripen out of the earth like grapes, both white and black, for there are golden-haired blondes as well as sun-kissed brunettes. They walk bare-footed, with water-jars poised on their heads, sometimes balancing great russet bundles of hay. And the old peasant women with Dantesque features sit spinning or lace-making at the doors of their cottages, as they have sat these three thousand years, without growing a wrinkle the more, if indeed there was ever room for another wrinkle on their dear corrugated faces. What earth lore as of aged oaks they must have sucked in during all these centuries!

It is here that one understands the Paganism of d’Annunzio, whose soul lies suffused in these sparkling infinities of sun and sea and sky, whose marmoreal language is woven from the rhythmic movement and balance of these sculptural bodies.

Viareggio, which holds Shelley’s monument, is a place of strange twisted plane-trees. The Piazza Shelley is a simple quiet square of low houses fronting a leafy garden and the sea. It leads out, curiously enough, from the Via Machiavelli. There is a bronze bust, which admirers cover with laurel, and an inscription which represents him as meditating here a final page to “Prometheus Unbound.” (Baedeker, comically mis-translating “una pagina postrema,” represents him as meditating “a posthumous page”!)

Not here, however, but in La Pineta is the place to muse upon Shelley. It is a thick, sandy pinewood with an avenue of planes. The pines are staggering about in all directions, drunk with wind and sun. Very silent was it as I sat here on a spring evening, watching the rosy clouds over the low hills and the mottled sunset over the sea. The birds ventured scarcely a twitter; they knew they could not vie with Shelley’s skylark.

Shelley’s epitaph in the Roman cemetery is like a soft music at the end of a Shakespeare tragedy.

“Nothing of me that doth fade But doth suffer a sea-change Into something rich and strange.”

What a curious and pacifying fusion of poetry and wit! It reconciles us to the passing back of this cosmic spirit into the elements by way of water. But what a jarring perpetuation of the world’s noises on the tombstone of Keats!

“This grave contains all that was mortal of a young English poet, who on his death-bed, in the bitterness of his heart at the malicious powers of his enemies, desired these words to be engraven on his tombstone: ‘Here lies one whose name was written in water.’”

Water again! But water as chaos and devourer. How ill all this turbulence accords with the marble serenity of his fame, a fame that so far as pure poetry is concerned stands side by side with Shakespeare’s! We are a good way now from the twenty-fourth of February, eighteen hundred and twenty-one. A few years more and Keats will have been silent a hundred years, and we know that his nightingale will sing for ever. What profits it, then, to prolong this mortuary bitterness, to hang this dirty British linen on the Roman grave? The museum is the place for this tombstone—I could whisk it thither like the Doge Pesaro’s wall. Will it save the next great poet from the malice of his enemies? Will they speak a dagger less? Not a bodkin! The next great poet, being great and a poet, will appeal in novel and unforeseeable ways, and be as little read and as harshly reviewed as the marvellous boy of Hampstead whose death at twenty-five is the greatest loss English literature has ever sustained. Were it not fittest, therefore, to celebrate the centenary of this death by changing his epitaph for a line of “Adonais”?—

“He lives, he wakes; ’tis Death is dead, not he.”

The tragedy of Keats is sufficiently commemorated in Shelley’s preface and in the pages of literary history and in the doggerel of Byron.

“‘Who killed John Keats?’ ‘I,’ says the _Quarterly_, So savage and Tartarly ’Twas one of my feats.”

And Byron lamented and marvelled

“That the soul, that very fiery particle, Should let itself be snuffed out by an article.”

I do not share this discontent. To be snuffed out by an article is precisely the only dignified ending for a soul. This dualism of body and spirit which has been foisted upon us has degradations enough even in health. No union was ever worse assorted than this marriage of inconvenience by which a body with boorish tastes and disgusting habits is chained to an intelligent and fastidious soul. No wonder their relations are strained. Such cohabitation is scarcely legitimate. Were they only to keep their places, a reasonable _modus vivendi_ might be patched up. The things of the spirit could exercise causation in the sphere of the spirit, and the things of the body would be restricted to their corporeal circle. But alas! the partners, like most married couples, interfere with each other and intrude on each other’s domain. Body and soul transfuse and percolate each other. Too much philosophising makes the liver sluggish, and a toothache tampers with philosophy. Despair slackens the blood and wine runs to eloquence. Body or soul cannot even die of its own infirmity; the twain must arrange a _modus moriendi_, each consenting to collapse of the other’s disease. Thus a body in going order may be stilled by a stroke of bad news, and a spiritual essence may pass away through a pox.

Think of the most powerful of the Popes, the head of Christendom, the excommunicator of the Kings of France and Spain, having to succumb to a fever; think of the great French writer, in whose brain the whole modern world mirrored itself, having to die of a gas from which even his dog recovered; think of the giant German philosopher, who had announced the starry infinitude of the moral law, degenerating into the imbecile who must tie and untie his necktie many times a minute. Surely it were worthier of man’s estate had Innocent III perished of an argument in favour of lay investiture, had Zola been snuffed out by an anti-Dreyfusard pamphlet or a romantic poem, had Kant succumbed to the scornful epigram of Herder, or even to the barkings of the priests’ dogs who had been given his name. And far worthier were it of a poet to die of a review than of a jaundice, of a criticism than a consumption. Infinitely more dignified was the death of Keats under the _Quarterly_ than the death of Byron himself under a fever, which some trace to a microbe, itself possibly injected by a mosquito. That were an unpardonable oversight of Dame Nature, who in her democratic enthusiasm forgets that mosquitos are not men’s equals, and that these admirable insects should be blooded more economically. Assuredly the author of “The Vision of Judgment” would have preferred to die of a stanza or a sting-tailed epigram.

Dame Nature had the last word; but was Byron, foreseeing her crushing repartee, so absolutely unjustified in his criticisms and questionings of a Power that held him as lightly as the parasite on the hind leg of any of the fifty thousand species of beetles? For if Fate treads with equal foot on a Byron and a beetle, the bard may be forgiven if he takes it less christianly than the coleopteron.

Byron is “cheap” to-day in England, and while Greece celebrates the centenary of his arrival and Crete calls on his name, while Italy is full of his glory, his hotels and his piazzas, while Genoa is proud that he lived in _Il Paradiso_ and the Armenian Monastery at Venice still cherishes the memory of his sojourn there to learn Armenian, and every spot he trod is similarly sacred, the Puritan critic reminds us that

“The gods approve The depth and not the tumult of the soul.”

Yes, we know, but when a poet is disapproving of the gods their standards matter less. And we are men, not gods, that their standards should be ours. _Humani sumus_, and nothing of Byron’s passion and pain can be alien from us. This tumult of the soul, who has escaped it? Not Wordsworth, assuredly, who wrote those lines. Only the fool hath _not_ said in his heart, “There is no God.” Even Cardinal Manning said it on his death-bed. Not that death-bed conversions are worth anything. Matthew Arnold was apt to give us Wordsworth as the reposeful contrast to the bold, bad Byron. But the calmness of Wordsworth is only in his style, and if his questionings are cast in bronze, they were often forged in the same furnace as Byron’s, and fused through and through with the pain

“Of all this unintelligible world.”

Poets, even the austere, have to learn in suffering what they teach in song. Only the suffering is always so much clearer than what it teaches them. And then, as Heine says, comes Death, and with a clod of earth gags the mouth that sings and cries and questions.

“Aber ist Das eine Antwort?”

VARIATIONS ON A THEME

Among these multitudinous _Madonnas_, and countless _Crucifixions_, and _Entombments_ innumerable, who shall dare award the palm for nobility of conception? But there is a minor theme of Renaissance Art as to which I do not hesitate. It is the _Pietà_ theme, but with angels replacing or supplementing the Madonna who cherishes the dead Christ, and it is significant that the finest treatment of it I have seen comes from the greatest craftsman who treated it—to wit, Giovanni Bellini. His _Cristo Sorretto da Angioli_ you will find painted on wood—a _tavola_—in the Palazzo Communale of Rimini. The Christ lies limp but tranquil, in the peace, not the rigidity, of death, and four little angels stand by, one of them half hidden by the dead figure. The exquisite appeal of this picture, the uniqueness of the conception, lies in the sweet sorrow of the little angels—a sorrow as of a dog or a child that cannot fathom the greatness of the tragedy, only knows dumbly that here is matter for sadness. The little angels regard the wounds with grave infantile concern. Sacred tragedy is here fused with idyllic poetry in a manner to which I know no parallel in any other painter. The sweet perfection of Giovanni Bellini, too suave for the grim central theme of Christianity, here finds triumphant and enchanting justification.

It is perhaps worth while tracing how every other painter’s handling of the theme that I have chanced on fails to reach this lyric pathos.

Bellini himself did not perhaps quite reach it again, though he reaches very noble heights in two pictures (one now in London and the other in Berlin), in which the reduction in the number of angels to two makes even for enhancement of the restful simplicity, while in the Berlin picture there is a touching intimacy of uncomprehending consolation in the pressing of the little angelic cheeks against the dead face. But the fact that in both pictures one angel seems to understand more or to be more exercised than the other contributes a disturbing complicacy. The serene unity is, indeed, preserved by Bellini in his _Pietà_ in the Museo Correr of Venice. But here the three young angels supporting the body are merely at peace—there is nothing of that sweet wistfulness.

For a contrary reason the woodland flavour is equally absent from its neighbour, a picture by an unknown painter of the Paduan school. Here the peace is exchanged, not for poetry but tragedy. The Christ is erect in his tomb, and the two haloed baby angels who uphold his arms are the one weeping, the other horror-struck. The horror is accentuated and the poetry still further lessened in an anonymous painting in a chapel of S. Anastasia in Verona, where boy angels are positively roaring with grief. Nor is the poetry augmented in that other anonymous painting in the Palazzo Ducale of Venice, where one angel kisses the dead hand and the other the blood-stained linen at the foot. In Girolamo da Treviso’s picture in the Brera one child angel examines the bloody palm and the other lifts up the drooping left arm with its little frock. Great round tears run down their faces, which are swollen and ugly with grief. Still more tragic, even to grotesquerie, is an old fresco fragment in an underground church in Brescia, where the little angels are catching the sacred blood in cups—those cups invented by Perugino and borrowed even by Raphael. Francesco Bissolo, in the Academy of Venice, preserves the tranquillity of Bellini, but by making the angels older loses not only the seductive _naïveté_ but the whole naturalness, for these angels are old enough to know better, one feels. They have no right to such callousness. Raphael’s father in his picture in the cathedral of Urbino escapes this pitfall, for his adult angels bend solicitously over the Christ and support his arms from above. But Lorenzo Lotto, though he gives us innocent child-angels, tumbles into an analogous trap, for he forgets that by adding a Madonna and a Magdalen in bitter tears he transforms these untroubled little angels into little devils, who have not even the curiosity to wonder what in heaven’s name their mortal elders are weeping over. In Cariani’s so-called _Deposizione_ at Ravenna one little angel does weep in imitation of the mortals, leaning his wet cheek on the Christ’s dead hand—“tears such as angels weep”—but he only repeats the human tragedy, and might as well be a little boy. Two older angels howl and grimace in Marco Zoppo’s picture in the Palazzo Almerici of Pesaro, while the haloed, long-ringleted head of the Christ droops with slightly open mouth and a strange smile as provoking as Mona Lisa’s. Francia in the National Gallery gives us a red-eyed Madonna with one calm and one compassionate angel, and Zaganelli in the Brera vies with Bellini in the vague, tender wonderment of the child angels who lift up the arms, but the picture is second-rate and the angels are little girls with bare arms and puffed sleeves. Nor is it a happy innovation to show us the legs of the Christ sprawling across the tomb.

Marco Palmezzano, with inferior beauty, also trenches on Bellini’s ground; but not only is the Christ sitting up, not quite dead, but one of the two child angels is calling out as for aid, so that the restful finality of Bellini is vanished. Still nearer to the Bellini idea approaches a picture in the Academy of Venice attributed to Marco Basaiti and an unknown Lombardian. But if this avoids tragedy, the turn is too much in the direction of comedy. The child angels are made still more infantine, so that there is neither horror nor even perturbation, merely a shade of surprise at so passive a figure. One plays with the Christ’s hair, the other with his feet—the Blake-like tenderness is not absent, but the poetry of this utter unconsciousness is not so penetrating as the wistful yearning of the Bellini angels before some dim, unsounded ocean of tragedy. This precise note I did, indeed, once catch in a corner of Domenichino’s _Madonna del Rosario_, where a baby surveys the crown of thorns; but this is just a side-show in a joyous, thickly populated picture, and the Christ is not dead, but a live _bambino_, who showers down roses on the lower world of martyrdom and sorrow.

He is almost too dead in the fading fresco of the little low-vaulted, whitewashed, ancient church of S. Maria Infra Portas in Foligno. A great gash mutilates his side, his head, horribly fallen back, lies on the Madonna’s lap, his legs and arms droop. The mother’s long hair hangs down from her halo, she clasps her hands in agony, and a child angel on either side looks on commiseratingly. Strange to say, this conserves the poetry, despite the horror, though the horror removes it out of comparison with Bellini’s handling.

In Genoa I found three more variations on the theme, two in the cathedral, the first with four angels, all gravely concerned, and the second with quite a crowd of little boys and angels, nearly all weeping. One of the little angels has taken off the crown of thorns—a good touch in a bad picture. The third variant is by Luca Cambiaso, and in the Palazzo Rosso, with a single agitated boy angel. A _Pietà_ in Pistoja takes its main pathos from its lonely position on the staircase of the fusty town hall: a last rose of summer, all its companions are faded and gone, all save one pretty lady saint blooming in a vast ocean of plaster. Even its own Madonna and Apostles are half obliterated; but the boy angel remains in a curious posture: he has got his head betwixt the legs of the Christ, and with his arms helps to sustain the drooping figure. Still more original touches appear in Andrea Utili’s picture in Faenza. Here the Christ has his arms crossed, and his halo, tilted back over his crown of thorns, gleams weirdly in red and gold, and on his tomb rest pincers and a hammer. The two youthful angels are deeply moved; one holds a cross and the other three nails.

If any painter could vie in enchantment with Giovanni Bellini it is Crivelli, and, indeed, there are fascinating things in his _Pietà_ in the Brera, idyllic sweetness in the angels, original decorative touches in the book and burning taper, and masterly imagination in the ghastly lack of vitality with which each dead hand of the Christ droops on the tender living hand of an angel. Had only the angels been a little younger, this would have been as sweetly lyrical as Bellini. From Michelangelo we have only a sketch of the subject, with his wingless child angels, over whom stands the Mater Dolorosa with useless outspread arms, that should have been helping the poor little things to support their burden. In Guido Reni’s _Pietà_ at Bologna her hands droop in folded resignation, while one angel weeps and one adores and pities. I fear the presence of the Madonna and other mortals destroys the peculiar celestial poetry, though of course the conjunction of mortals and angels brings a poetry of its own.

Tura’s treatment of the theme in Vienna I have not seen. But Vivarini breaks out in a new direction. His two angels fly from right and left towards the tomb, under full canvas, so to speak. But it is a pattern _et præterea nihil_. More poetic in its originality is a picture of the Veronese school in the Brera, showing us two baby angels, half curious, half apprehensive, unfolding the Christ’s winding-sheet. But it is a dark, poorly painted picture. Another new invention is Garofalo’s in the same gallery. He gives us a crowd of commonplace weeping figures in a picturesque landscape, and his angel is a sweet little cherub aloft on a pillar over the heads of the mourning mob. But the angel might be a mere architectural decoration, for all his effect upon the picture.

Thus have we seen almost every possible variation tried—adult angels and young angels and baby angels, calm angels and callous angels, lachrymose angels and vociferous angels, helpless angels and hospital angels, boy angels and girl angels, and only one artist has seen the sole permutation which extracts the quintessential poetry of the theme—the high celestial tragedy unadulterated by human grief, and sweetened yet deepened by angels too young to understand and too old to be unperturbed, too troubled for play and too tranquil for tears.

And it is to that incarnation of evil, Sigismondo Malatesta, that we owe this masterpiece of lyric simplicity, for ’twas the Magnificent Monster himself that commissioned it—His rolling and reverberating Magnificence, Sigismondo Pandolfo Malatesta di Pandolfo—whose polyphonous, orotund name and the black and white elephants of whose crest pervade the splendid temple which he remodelled at Rimini for the glory of God. And lest the world should forget ’twas he to whom heaven owed the delicious Pagan reliefs by the pillars, or the now-faded ultramarine and starry gold of the chapels, each first pilaster bears in Greek the due inscription:

TO THE IMMORTAL GOD SIGISMONDO PANDOLFO MALATESTA DI PANDOLFO

(Pray do not pause here—epigraphs, like telegrams, are not punctuated)

PRESERVED FROM MANY OF THE GREATEST PERILS OF THE ITALIAN WAR ERECTED AND BEQUEATHED MAGNIFICENTLY LAVISH AS HE HAD VOWED IN THE VERY MIDST OF THE STRUGGLE AN ILLUSTRIOUS AND HOLY MEMORIAL

No less reflexive was his apotheosis of the frail Isotta, of whom he first made an honest woman and then a goddess. What wonder if his critics carped at the “Disottæ,” the “divine Isotta,” he wrote over her tomb, in lieu of the conventional “Dominæ Isottæ Bonæ Memoriæ”! But one must do the bold, bad condottiere the justice to say that while two angels bear this inscription over her in gold, his own tomb is comparatively modest. It is Isotta whose tomb is supported by shield-bearing elephants and culminates in flourishes as of elephants’ trunks, Isotta who stands over her altar in the guise of a gold-winged angel. Malatesta’s patronage of Giovanni Bellini was not his only contribution to the arts, for a cluster of poets found hospitality at his court and burial at his temple—with a careful inscription that it was Sigismondo Pandolfo Malatesta di Pandolfo who buried them—though these seem to have plied the trade of Laureate, if I may judge from the volume published at Paris, “L’Isotteo.” I cannot pretend to be read in Porcellio de’ Pandone or Tommaso Seneca or Basinio of Parma. But Bellini’s _tavola_ suffices to make me say with riddling Samson, “Out of the strong cometh forth sweetness.”

For this is perhaps the teleological purpose of the Magnificent Ones, to play the Mæcenas to some starveling artist or penurious poet. There is in the santuario of the Malatesta temple a fresco of this Sigismondo. He is seen in the flush of youth, gay in a brocaded mantle and red hose, but somewhat disconcertingly on his knees before a crowned figure—his patron saint according to some, the Emperor Sigismondo more probably. Let us call it that sovereign fate to which even megaphonious Magnificence must bow. Almost divine in his lifetime, within a few years the Magnificent One’s character commences to decay, as if that too could not resist the corruption of death. Happy the prince of whom some not malodorous shred of reputation remains a century after his death. The evil that men do lives after them, the good they have _not_ done is oft interred with their bones.