There will be tufts of iris everywhere, rising up proud and tender. When the rose-coloured wild gladiolus is mingled in the corn, and the love-in-the-mist opens blue: in May and June, before the corn is cut.
But as yet it is neither May nor June, but end of April, the pause between spring and summer, the nightingale singing interruptedly, the bean-flowers dying in the bean-fields, the bean-perfume passing with spring, the little birds hatching in the nests, the olives pruned, and the vines, the last bit of late ploughing finished, and not much work to hand, now, not until the peas are ready to pick, in another two weeks or so. Then all the peasants will be crouching between the pea-rows, endlessly, endlessly gathering peas, in the long pea- harvest which lasts two months.
So the change, the endless and rapid change. In the sunny countries, the change seems more vivid, and more complete than in the grey countries. In the grey countries, there is a grey or dark permanency, over whose surface passes change ephemeral, leaving no real mark. In England, winters and summers shadowily give place to one another. But underneath lies the grey substratum, the permanency of cold, dark reality where bulbs live, and reality is bulbous, a thing of endurance and stored-up, starchy energy.
But in the sunny countries, change is the reality and permanence is artificial and a condition of imprisonment. In the North, man tends instinctively to imagine, to conceive that the sun is lighted like a candle, in an everlasting darkness, and that one day the candle will go out, the sun will be exhausted, and the everlasting dark will resume uninterrupted sway. Hence, to the northerner, the phenomenal world is essentially tragical, because it is temporal and must cease to exist. Its very existence implies ceasing to exist, and this is the root of the feeling of tragedy.
But to the southerner, the sun is so dominant that, if every phenomenal body disappeared out of the universe, nothing would remain but bright luminousness, sunniness. The absolute is sunni- ness; and shadow, or dark, is only merely relative: merely the result of something getting between one and the sun.
This is the instinctive feeling of the ordinary southerner. Of course, if you start to reason, you may argue that the sun is a phenomenal body. Therefore it came into existence, therefore it will pass out of existence, therefore the very sun is tragic in its nature.
But this is just argument. We think, because we have to light a candle in the dark, therefore some First Cause had to kindle the sun in the infinite darkness of the beginning.
The argument is entirely shortsighted and specious. We do not know in the least whether the sun ever came into existence, and we have not the slightest possible ground for conjecturing that the sun will ever pass out of existence. All that we do know, by actual experience, is that shadow comes into being when some material object intervenes between us and the sun, and that shadow ceases to exist when the intervening object is removed. So that, of all temporal or transitory or bound-to-cease things that haunt our existence, shadow or darkness, is the one which is purely and simply temporal. We can think of death, if we like, as of something permanently intervening between us and the sun: and this is at the root of the southern, under-world idea of death. But this doesn’t alter the sun at all. As far as experience goes, in the human race, the one thing that is always there is the shining sun, and dark shadow is an accident of intervention.
Hence, strictly, there is no tragedy. The universe contains no tragedy, and man is only tragical because he is afraid of death. For my part, if the sun always shines, and always will shine, in spite of millions of clouds of words, then death, somehow, does not have many terrors. In the sunshine, even death is sunny. And there is no end to the sunshine.
That is why the rapid change of the Tuscan spring is utterly free, for me, of any sense of tragedy. “Where are the snows of yesteryear?” Why, precisely where they ought to be. Where are the little yellow aconites of eight weeks ago? I neither know nor care. They were sunny and the sun shines, and sunniness means change, and petals passing and coming. The winter aconites sunnily came, and sunnily went. What more? The sun always shines. It is our fault if we don’t think so.
THE ELEPHANTS OF DIONYSUS
Dionysus, returning from India a victor with his hosts, met the Amazons once more towards the Ephesian coasts. O small-breasted, brilliant Amazons, will you never leave off attacking the Bull-foot, for whom the Charites weave ivy-garlands? Garlands and flutes. Oh, listen to the flutes! Oh, draw near, there is going to be sacrifice to the god of delight!
But the Amazons swept out of cover with bare limbs flashing and bronze spears lifted. O Dionysus! Iacchus! Iacchus! how fierce they are against you, fiercer than your own panthers. Ah, the shock of the enraged Amazons! Ah, elephants of the East, trumpeting round Dionysus!
They have fled again, lo! the Amazons have fled like a sudden ceasing of a hail-storm. They are gone, they are vanished. Ah no! here are some, suppliant in the temple. Pardon, Lord Dionysus! Oh, pardon!
But inveterate are the Amazons: over the sea, over the sea to Samos. In Samos shall be no cry of Iacchus! None shall cry: Come! Come in the spring-time! For Amazons range along the coast, inveterate; defy thee, Dionysus.
The god takes ship, and his dark-faced following, elephants stand in the boats. And the Amazons wail when they see again the long- nosed beasts bulk up. Ah, how will they devour us! Bitter, bitter the fight! Spare them not this time, Lord Dionysus! Bitter, bitter the fight! And bright-red Amazon blood spreads over the rocks and the earth, yet the last ones pierce the elephants. The rocks are torn with the piercing death-cries of elephants, the great and piercing cry of elephants, dying at the hands of the last of the Amazons, rips the island rocks.
Dionysus has conquered the Amazons. The elephants are dead. And the rocks of Samos, called Phloion, remain torn.
DAVID
Perpetual sound of water. The Arno, having risen with rain, is swirling brown: cafe-au-lait. It was a green river, suggesting olive trees and the hills. It is a rushing mass of cafe-au-lait, and it has already eaten one great slice from the flight of black steps. Cafe-au- lait is not respectful. But a world of women has brought us to it.
Morning in Florence. Dark, grey, and raining, with a perpetual sound of water. Over the bridge, carriages trotting under great ragged umbrellas. Two white bullocks urged from beneath a bright green umbrella, shambling into a trot as the whip-thong flickers between their soft shanks. Two men arm-in-arm under one umbrella, going nimbly. Mid-day from San Ministo — and cannon-shots. Why cannon-shots? Innumerable umbrellas over the bridge, “like flowers of infernal moly.”
David in the Piazza livid with rain. Unforgettable, now I am safe in my upper room again. Livid — unnatural. He is made so natural that he is against nature, there in his corpse-whiteness in the rain. The Florentines say that a hot excitement, an anticipatory orgasm, possesses him at midnight of the New Year. Once told, impossible to forget. A year’s waiting. It will happen to him, this orgasm, this further exposure of his nakedness. Uncomfortable. The Neptune, the Bandinelli statues, great stone creatures, do not matter. Water trickles over their flanks and down between their thighs, without effect. But David — always so sensitive. Corpse-white and sensitive. The water sinks into him, cold, diluting his stagnant springs. And yet he waits with that tense anticipation. As if to clutch the moment. Lividl The Florentine.
Perpetual sound of water. When the sun shines, it shines with grand brilliance, and then the Arno creeps underneath like a cat, like a green-eyed cat in a strange garden. We scarcely observe. We seem to hear the sun clapping in the air, noiseless and brilliant. The aerial and inaudible music of all the sun-shaken ether, inaudible, yet surely like chimes of glass. What is a river, then, but a green thread fluttering? And now! And particularly last night. Last night the river churned and challenged with strange noises. Not a Florentine walked by the parapet. Last night enormous cat- swirls breathed hoarse beyond the bank, the weir was a fighting flurry of waters. Like enormous cats interlocked in fight, uttering strange noises. Weight of dark, recoiling
water. How is this Italy?
Florence — she puts up no fight. Who hears the river in Turin? Turin camps flat in defiance. Great snowy Alps, like inquisitive gods from the North, encircle her. She sticks a brandished statue at the end of the street, full in the vista of glistening, peering snow. She pokes her finger in the eye of the gods. But Florence, the Lily-town among her hills! Her hills, her hovering waters. She can be hot, brilliant, burnt dry. But look at David! What’s the matter with him? Not sun but cold rain. Children of the South, exposing themselves to the rain. Savonarola, like a hot coal quenched. The South, the North: the fire, the wet downfall. Once there was a pure equilibrium, and the Lily blossomed. But the Lily now — livid! David, livid, almost quenched, yet still strained and waiting, tense for that orgasm. Crowds will gather at New Year’s midnight.
The Lily, the flower of adolescence. Water-born. You cannot dry a lily-bulb. Take away its watery preponderance, surcharge an excess of water, and it is finished. Its flesh is dead. Ask a gardener. A water-blossom dripped from the North. How it blossomed here in the flowery town. Obviously northerners must love Florence. Here is their last point, their most southerly. The extreme south of the Lily’s flowering. It is said the fruits are best at their extremity of climate. The southern apple is sweetest at his most northerly limit. The Lily, the Water-born, most dazzling nearest the sun. Florence, the flower-town. David!
Michelangelo’s David is the presiding genius of Florence. Not a shadow of a doubt about it. Once and for all, Florence. So young: sixteen, they say. So big: and stark-naked. Revealed. Too big, too naked, too exposed. Livid, under today’s sky. The Florentine! The Tuscan pose — half self-conscious all the time. Adolescent. Waiting. The tense look. No escape. The Lily. Lily or iris, what does it matter? Whitman’s Calamus, too.
Does he listen? Does he, with his young troubled brow, listen? What does he hear? Weep of waters? Even on bluest, hottest day, the same tension. Listen! The weep of waters. The wintry North. The naked exposure. Stripped so bare, the very kernel of youth. Stripped even to the adolescent orgasm of New Year’s night — at midwinter. Unbearable.
Dionysus and Christ of Florence. A clouded Dionysus, a refractory Christ. Dionysus, brightness of sky and moistness of earth: so they tell us is the meaning. Giver of riches. Riches of transport, the vine. Nymphs and Hamadryads, Silenus, Pan and the Fauns and Satyrs: clue to all these, Dionysus, Iacchus, Dithyrambus. David? — Dionysus, source of reed-music, water-born melody. “The Crocus and the Hyacinth in deep grass” — lily-flowers. Then wine. Dew and fire, as Pater says. Eleutherios, the Deliverer. What did he deliver? Michelangelo asked himself that; and left us the answer. Dreams, transports. Dreams, brilliant consciousness, vivid self-revelation. Michelangelo’s Dionysus, and Michelangelo’s David — what is the difference? The cloud on David. The four months of winter were sacred to Dionysus: months of wine and dreams and transport of self-realization. Months of the inner fire. The vine. Fire which even now, at New Year’s night, comes up in David. To have no issue. A cloud is on him.
Semele, scarred with lightning, gave birth prematurely to her child. The Cinque-Cento. Too fierce a mating, too fiery and potent a sire. The child was sewn again into the thigh of Zeus, re-entered into the loins of the lightning. So the brief fire-brand. It was fire overwhelming, over-weening, briefly married to the dew, that begot this child. The South to the North. Married! The child, the fire- dew, Iacchus, David.
Fire-dew, yet still too fiery. Plunge him further into the dew. Dithyrambus, the twice-born, born first of fire, then of dew. Dionysus leaping into the mists of the North, to escape his foes. David, by the Arno.
So Florence, this Lily. Here David trembled to his first perfection, on the brink of the dews. Here his soul found its perfect embodiment, in the trembling union of southern flame and northern waters. David, Dithyrambus; the adolescent. The shimmer, the instant of unstable combination, the soul for one moment perfectly embodied. Fire and dew, they call it. David, the Lily-flame, the Florentine.
The soul that held the fire and the dew clipped together in one lily-flame, where is it? David. Where is he? Cinque-Cento, a fleeting moment of adolescence. In that one moment the two eternal elements were held in consummation, forming the perfect embodiment of the human soul. And then gone. David, the Lily, the Florentine- Venus of the Scallop-Shell — Leonardo’s John the Baptist. The moment of adolescence — gone. The subtle, evanescent lily-soul. They are wistful, all of them: Botticelli’s women; Leonardo’s, Michelangelo’s men: wistful, knowing the loss even in the very moment of perfection. A day-lily, the Florentine. David frowning, Mona Lisa sadly, subtly smiling, beyond bitterness, Botticelli getting rapture out of sadness, his Venus wistfully Victrix. Fire and dew for one moment proportionate, immediately falling into disproportion.
They all knew. They knew the quenching of the flame, the breaking of the lily-balance, the passing of perfection and the pure pride of life, the inestimable loss. It had to be. They knew the mists of the North damping down. Born of the fire, they had still to be born of the mist. Christ, with his submission, universal humility, finding one level, like mist settling, like water. A new flood. Savonarola smokily quenched. The fire put out, or at least overwhelmed. Then Luther and the North.
Michelangelo, Leonardo, Botticelli, how well they knew, artistically, what was coming. The magnificent pride of life and perfection granted only to bud. The transient lily. Adam, David, Venus on her shell, the Madonna of the Rocks: they listen, all of them. What do they hear? Perpetual sound of waters. The level sweep of waters, waters overwhelming. Morality, chastity — another world drowned: equality, democracy, the masses, like drops of water in one sea, overwhelming all outstanding loveliness of the individual soul. Quenching of all flame in the great watery passivity which bears down at last so ponderous. Christ-like submissiveness which, once it bursts its bounds, floods the face of the earth with such devastation.
Pride of life! The perfect soul erect, holding the eternal elements consummate in itself. Thus for one moment the young lily David. For one moment Dionysus touched the hand of the Crucified: for one moment, and then was dragged down. Meekness flooded the soul of Dithyrambus, mist overwhelmed him. The elements supervene in the human soul, men become nature-worshippers; light, landscape and mists — these take the place of human individuality. Dionysus pale and corpse-like, there in the Piazza della Signoria. David, Venus, Saint John, all overcome with mist and surrender of the soul.
Yet no final surrender. Leonardo laughs last, even at the Crucified. David, with his knitted brow and full limbs, is unvanquished. Livid, maybe, corpse-coloured, quenched with innumerable rains of morality and democracy. Yet deep fountains of fire lurk within him. Must do. Witness the Florentines gathered at New Year’s night to watch that fiery fruitless orgasm. They laugh, but it is Leonardo’s laugh. The fire is not ridiculous. It surges recurrent. Never to be quenched. Stubborn. The Florentine.
One day David finishes his adolescence. One day he reaps his mates. It is a throbbing through the centuries of unquenchable fire, that will still leap out to consummation. The pride of life. The pride of the fulfilled self. The bud is not nipped; it awaits its maturity. Not the frail lily. Not even the clinging purple vine. But the full tree of life in blossom.
NOTES FOR BIRDS, BEASTS AND FLOWERS
FRUITS
“For fruits are all of them female, in them lies the seed. And so when they break and show the seed, then we look into the womb and see its secrets. So it is that the pomegranate is the apple of love to the Arab, and the fig has been a catch-word for the female fissure for ages. I don’t care a fig for it! men say. But why a fig? The apple of Eden, even, was Eve’s fruit. To her it belonged, and she offered it to the man. Even the apples of knowledge are Eve’s fruit, the woman’s. But the apples of life the dragon guards, and no woman gives them. . . .”
“No sin is it to drink as much as a man can take and get home without a servant’s help, so he be not stricken in years.”
T
REES
“It is said, a disease has attacked the cypress trees of Italy, and they are all dying. Now even the shadow of the lost secret is vanishing from earth.”
“Empedokles says trees were the first living creatures to grow up out of the earth, before the sun was spread out and before day and night were distinguished; from the symmetry of their mixture of fire and water, they contain the proportion of male and female; they grow, rising up owing to the heat which is in the earth, so that they are parts of the earth just as embryos are parts of the uterus. Fruits are excretions of the water and fire in plants.”
FLOWERS
“And long ago, the almond was the symbol of resurrection. — But tell me, tell me, why should the almond be the symbol of resurrection? —
Have you not seen, in the mild winter sun of the southern Mediterranean, in January and in February, the re-birth of the almond tree, all standing in clouds of glory? —
Ah yes! ah yes! would I might see it again!
Yet even this is not the secret of the secret. Do you know what was called the almond bone, the last bone of the spine? This was the seed of the body, and from the grave it could grow into a new body again, like almond blossom in January. — No, no, I know nothing of that. — ”
“Oh Persephone, Persephone, bring back to me from Hades the life of a dead man. — ”
“Wretches, utter wretches, keep your hands from beans! saith Empedokles. For according to some, the beans were the beans of votes, and votes were politics. But others say it was a food-taboo. Others also say the bean was one of the oldest symbols of the male organ, for the peas-cod is later than the beans-cod.”
Complete Works of D.H. Lawrence (Illustrated) Page 1000
