Turning a corner of the track we saw them coming down to meet us, by two and two in a long file; angels in black cassocks with round black hats on their heads—a seminary taking its afternoon airing. They were young boys, the eldest sixteen or seventeen, the youngest not more than ten. Flapping along in their black skirts they walked with an unnatural decorum. It was difficult to believe, when one saw the little fellows at the head of the crocodile, with the tall Father in charge striding along at their side, it was difficult to believe that they were not masquerading. It seemed a piece of irreverent fun; a caricature by Goya come to life. But their faces were serious; chubby or adolescently thin, they wore already an unctuously clerical expression. It was no joke. Looking at those black-robed children, one wished that it had been.
We climbed on, the little priestlings descended out of sight. And now at last we were at the gates of the heavenly city. A little paved and parapeted platform served as landing to the flight of steps that led up into the heart of the convent. In the middle of the platform stood a more than life-sized statue of some unheard-of saint. It was a comically admirable piece of eighteenth-century baroque. Carved with coarse brilliance, the creature gesticulated ecstatically, rolling its eyes to heaven; its garments flapped around it in broad folds. It was not, somehow, the sort of saint one expected to see standing sentinel over the bleakest hermitage in Tuscany.
And the convent itself—that too seemed incongruous on the top of this icy mountain. For the heavenly city was a handsome early baroque affair with settecento trimmings and additions. The church was full of twiddly gilt carvings and dreadfully competent pictures; the remains of the seven pious Florentines who, in the thirteenth century, fled from the city of destruction in the plain below, and founded this hermitage on the mountain, were coffered in a large gold and crystal box, illuminated, like a show-case in the drawing-room of a collector of porcelain, by concealed electric lights.
No, the buildings were ludicrous. But after all, what do buildings matter? A man can paint beautiful pictures in a slum, can write poetry in Wigan; and conversely he can live in an exquisite house, surrounded by masterpieces of ancient art and yet (as one sees almost invariably when collectors of the antique, relying for once on their own judgment, and not on tradition, ‘go in for’ modern art) be crassly insensitive and utterly without taste. Within certain limits, environment counts for very little. It is only when environment is extremely unfavourable that it can blast or distort the powers of the mind.
And however favourable, it can do nothing to extend the limits set by nature to a man’s ability. So here the architecture seemed impossibly incongruous with the bleak place, with the very notion of a hermitage; but the hermits who live in the midst of it are probably not even aware of its existence. In the shade of the absurd statue of San Filippo Benizi a Buddha would be able to think as Buddhistically as beneath the bo-tree.
In the grounds of the monastery we saw half a dozen black-frocked Servites sawing wood—sawing with vigour and humility, in spite of the twiddly gilding in the church and the settecento bell tower. They looked the genuine article. And the view from the mountain’s second peak was in the grandest eremitic tradition. The hills stretched away as far as the eye could reach into the wintry haze, like a vast heaving sea frozen to stillness. The valleys were filled with blue shadow, and all the sunward slopes were the colour of rusty gold. At our feet the ground fell away into an immense blue gulf. The gauzy air softened every outline, smoothed away every detail, leaving only golden lights and violet shadows floating like the disembodied essence of a landscape, under the pale sky.
We stood for a long time looking out over that kingdom of silence and solemn beauty. The solitude was as profound as the shadowy gulf beneath us; it stretched to the misty horizons and up into the topless sky. Here at the heart of it, I thought, a man might begin to understand something about that part of his being which does not reveal itself in the quotidian commerce of life; which the social contacts do not draw forth, spark-like, from the sleeping flint that is an untried spirit; that part of him, of whose very existence he is only made aware in solitude and silence. And if there happens to be no silence in his life, if he is never solitary, then he may go down to his grave without a knowledge of its existence, much less an understanding of its nature or realization of its potentialities.
We retraced our steps to the monastery and thence walked down the steep path to the motor. A mile further down the road towards Pratolino, we met the priestlings returning from their walk. Poor children! But was their lot worse, I wondered, than that of the inhabitants of the city in the valley? On their mountain top they lived under a tyrannous rule, they were taught to believe in a number of things manifestly silly. But was the rule any more tyrannous than that of the imbecile conventions which control the lives of social beings in the plain? Was snobbery about duchesses and distinguished novelists more reasonable than snobbery about Jesus Christ and the Saints? Was hard work to the greater glory of God more detestable than eight hours a day in an office for the greater enrichment of the Jews?
Temperance was a bore, no doubt; but was it so nauseatingly wearisome as excess? And the expense of spirit in prayer and meditation—was that so much less amusing than the expense of spirit in a waste of shame? Driving down towards the city in the plain, I wondered. And when, in the Via Tornabuoni, we passed Mrs. Thingummy, in the act of laboriously squeezing herself out on to the pavement through the door of her gigantic limousine, I suddenly and perfectly understood what it was that had made those seven rich Florentine merchants, seven hundred years ago, abandon their position in the world, and had sent them up into the high wilderness, to live in holes at the top of Montesenario. I looked back; Mrs. Thingummy was waddling across the pavement into the jeweller’s shop. Yes, I perfectly understood.
PATINIR’S RIVER
The river flows in a narrow valley between hills. A broad, a brimming and a shining river. The hills are steep and all of a height. Where the river bends, the hills on one side jut forward in a bastion, the hills on the other retreat. There are cliffs, there are hanging woods, dark with foliage. The sky is pale above this strip of fantastically carved and scalloped earth. A pale sky from which it must sometimes rain Chinese white. For there is an ashen pallor over the rocks; and the green of the grass and the trees is tinged with white till it has taken on the colour of the ‘Emerald Green’ of children’s paint-boxes.
Brimming and shining river, pale crags, and trees richly dark, slopes where the turf is the colour of whitened verdigris—I took these things for fancies. Peering into the little pictures, each painted with a million tiny strokes of a four-haired sable brush, I laughed with pleasure at the beauty of the charming invention. This Joachim Patinir, I thought, imagines delicately. For years I was accustomed to float along that crag-reflecting river as down a river of the mind, out of the world.
And then one day—one wet day in autumn—driving out of Namur towards Dinant through the rain, suddenly I found myself rolling, as fast as ten horses ventured to take me through the slippery mud, along the bank of this imaginary stream. The rain, it is true, a little blurred the scene. Greyly it hung, like a dirty glass, between the picture and the beholder’s eye. But through it, unmistakably, I distinguished the fabulous landscape of the Fleming’s little paintings. Crags, river, emerald green slopes, dark woods were there, indubitably real. I had given to Joachim Patinir the credit that was due to God. What I had taken for his exquisite invention was the real and actual Meuse.
Mile after mile we drove, from Namur to Dinant; from Dinant, mile after mile, to Givet. And it was Patinir all the way; winding river, the double line of jutting and re-entrant hill, verdigris grass, cliffs and pensile trees all the way. At Givet we left the river; for our destination was Reims and our road led us through Rethel. We left the river, but left it with the impression that it wound back, Patinir landscape after Patinir landscape, all the way to its distant source at Poissy. I should like to think, indeed, that it did. For Patinir was a charming painter and his surviving works are few. Two hundred miles of him would not be at all too much.
PORTOFERRAIO
The sky was Tiepolo’s palette. A cloud of smoke mounted into the blue, white where it looked towards the sun and darkening, through the colour of the shadowed folds in a wedding gown, to grey. In the foreground on the right a
