The aristocrats tried to fortify themselves inside these palaces and these splendours. Regal Paris built up the external evidences of her regality. But the two-limbed man inside these vast shells died, poor worm, of over-encumbrance.
The natural aristocrat has got to fortify himself inside his own will, according to his own strength. The moment he builds himself external evidences, like palaces, he builds himself in, and commits his own doom. The moment he depends on his jewels, he has lost his virtue.
It always seems to me that the next civilization won’t want to raise these ponderous, massive, deadly buildings that refuse to crumble away with their epoch and weigh men helplessly down. Neither palaces nor cathedrals nor any other hugenesses. Material simplicity is after all the highest sign of civilization. Here in Paris one knows it finally. The ponderous and depressing museum that is regal Paris. And living humanity like poor worms struggling inside the shell of history, all of them inside the museum. The dead life and the living life, all one museum.
Monuments, museums, permanencies, and ponderosities are all anathema. But brave men are for ever born, and nothing else is worth having.
FIREWORKS IN FLORENCE
Yesterday being St. John’s Day, the 24th June, and St. John being the patron saint of Florence, his day being also the day of midsummer festival, when, in the north, you jump through the flames: for all these reasons Florence was lit up, and there was a show of fireworks from the Piazzale. There must be fire of some sort on Midsummer Day: so let it be fireworks.
The illuminations were rather scanty. The Palazzo Vecchio had frames of little electric bulbs round the windows. But above that, all along the battlements of the square roof, and in the arches of the thin-necked tower, and between the battlements at the top of the tower, the flames were orange-ruddy, and they danced about in one midsummer witch-night dance, a hundred or two little ruddy dancements among the black, hard battlements, and round the lofty, unrelenting square crown of the old building. It was at once medieval and fascinating, in the soft, hot, moonlit night. The Palazzo Vecchio has come down to our day, but it hasn’t yet quite come down to us. It lifts its long slim neck like a hawk rearing up to look around, and in the darkness its battlements in silhouette look like black feathers. Like an alert fierce bird from the Middle Ages it lifts its head over the level town, eagle with serrated plumes. And one feels it is a wonder that the modern spirit hasn’t given it a knock over the head, it is so silently fierce and haughty and severe with splendour.
On Midsummer Night the modern spirit had only fixed itself, like so many obstinate insects, in the squares of paltry electric bulb lights on the hard facade. Stupid, staring, unwinking, unalive, unchanging beads of electric lights! As if there could be anything festive or midsummerish about them, in their idiotic fixity like bright colourless brass nail-heads nailed on the night.
Thus far had the modern spirit nailed itself on the old Palazzo. But above, where the battlements ruffled like pinion-tips upon the blond sky, and the dark-necked tower suddenly shot up, the modern spirit unexplainedly ceased, and the Middle Ages flourished. There the illuminations must have been oil flare-lamps, old oil torch lamps, because the flames were like living bodies, so warm and alive, and they danced about perpetually in the warm bland air of night, like Shiva dancing her myriad-movement dance. And all this alive dancement the severe old building carried calmly, with pride and dignity, its neck in the sky. As for the rows of electric bulbs below, like buttons on the breast of a page-boy, they didn’t exist.
If anything is detestable, it is hard, stupid fixity, that doesn’t know how to flicker and waver and be alive, but must keep on going on being the same, like the buttons on a coat; the coat wears out, but the idiotic buttons are the same as ever.
The people were streaming out of the piazza, all in one direction, and all quiet, and all seeming small and alive under the tall buildings. Of course the Palazzo Vecchio and the Uffizi aren’t really tall: in terms of the Woolworth Tower, that is, or the Flatiron Building. But underneath their walls people move diminished, in small, alert, lively throngs, just as in the street-scenes of the old pictures: throngs and groups of striding and standing and streaming people who are quick and alive, and still have a certain alert human dignity, in spite of their being so diminished. And that again is different from the effect of looking down from the top of the Flat- iron Building, let us say. There you see people little and scurrying and insect-like, rather repulsive, like the thick mechanical hurrying of ants.
Out of the Piazza Signoria the people were all flowing in one direction, towards the dark mouth of the Uffizi, towards the river. The fountain was shooting up a long, leaning stem of water, and the rather stupid thick Bandinelli statue below glistened all over, in his thick nakedness, but not unpleasant, really. Michelangelo’s David, in the dry dimness, continued to smirk and trail his foot self-consciously, the incarnation of the modern self-conscious young man, and very objectionable.
But the crowd streamed on, towards the Lungarno, under the big- headed David, unheeding. It is a curious thing, that in spite of that extremely obtrusive male statue of David which stands and has stood for so long a time there in the Piazza, where every Friday the farmers from the country throng to discuss prices, still the name David is practically unknown among the ordinary people. They have never heard it. It is meaningless sound to them. It might as well be Popocatepetl. Tell them your name is David, and they remain utterly impervious and blank. You cannot bring them to utter it.
On the Lungarno the crowd is solid. There is no traffic. The whole length of the riverside has become one long theatre pit, where the whole populace of Florence waits to see the fireworks. In countless numbers they stand and wait, the whole city, yet quiet almost as mice.
The fireworks will go off from the Piazzale Michelangelo, which is like a platform, a little platform away above the left bank of the river. So the crowd solidly lines the right bank, the whole city.
In the sky a little to the south, the fair, warm moon, almost full, lingers in a fleece of iridescent cloud, as if also wanting to look on, but from an immeasurable distance. There is no drawing near, on the moon’s part.
The crowd is quiet, and perfectly well-behaved. No excitement, and absolutely no exuberance. In a sense, there is no holiday spirit at all. A man hawks half-a-dozen balloons, but nobody buys them. There is a little flare-lit stall, where they cook those little aniseed waffles. And nobody seems to buy them. Only the men who silently walk through the throng with little tubs of ice-cream do a trade. But almost without a sound.
It seems long to wait. Down on the grass by the still full river, under the embankment, are throngs of people. Even those boats in which during the day one sees men getting gravel are full of spectators. But you wouldn’t know, unless you looked over the rampart. They are so still. In the river’s underworld.
It is weary to wait. The young men, all wearing no hats, stroll, winding among the throng of immovable citizens and wives. There is nothing to see. Best sit in the motor-car by the kerb.
By the car stand two women with a police-dog on a chain. The dog, alert, nervous, uneasy, crouches and then rises restlessly. Bang! Up goes the first rocket, like a golden tadpole wiggling up in the sky, then a burst of red and green sparks. The dog winces, and crouches under the running-board of the car. Bang! Bang! Crackle! More rockets, more showers of stars and fizzes of aster-petal light in the sky. The dog whimpers, the mistresses divide their attention between the heavens and him. In the sky, the moon draws further and further off, while still watching palely. At an immense distance, the moon, pallid far. Nearer, in the high sky, a rolling and fuming of smoke, a whistling of rockets, a spangling and splashing of fragments of coloured lights, and, most impressive of all, the continuous explosions, crepitation within the air itself, the high air bursting outwards from within itself, in continual shocks. It is more like an air-raid than anything. And perhaps the deepest impression made on the psyche is that of a raid in the air.
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The dog suffers and suffers more. He tries to hide away, not to look at all. But there is an extra bang and a fusillade! He has to look! bish! the sky-asters burst one beyond the other! He cannot bear it. He shivers like a glass cup that is going to shatter. His mistresses try to comfort him. They want to look at the fireworks but their interest in the dog is more real. And he, he wants to cover his ears, and bury his head, but at every new bang! he starts afresh and rises, and turns round. Sometimes he sits like a statue of pure distress, still as bronze. Then he curls away upon himself again, curling to get away. While the high sky bursts and reverberates, wiggles with tadpoles of golden fire, and plunges with splashes of light, spangles of colour, as if someone had thrown a stone into the ether from above, and then pelted the ether with stones.
The crowd watches in silence. Young men wander by, and in the subdued tone of mocking irony common to the Italians, they say bello! bello! bellezza! But it is pure irony. As the light goes up, you see the dark trees and cypresses standing tall and black, like Dan- tesque spectators, on the sky-line. And down below, you see the townspeople standing motionless, with uplifted faces. Also, rather frequently, a young man with his arm round his white-dressed sweetheart, caressing her and making public love to her. Love-making, it seems, like everything else, must be public nowadays. The stag goes into the depths of the forest. But the young city buck likes the light to flare up and reveal his arm round the shoulders of his girl, his hand stroking her neck.
Up on the Piazzale, they are letting off the figure-pieces: wheels that turn round showerily in red and green and white fire, fuming dense smoke, that moves in curious slow volumes, all penetrated with colour. Now there is a red piece: and on top of the old water- tower a column of red fire and reddish smoke. It looks as if a city in the distance were being burnt by the enemy. And again the fusillade of a raid, while the smoke rolls ponderously, the colour dies out, only the iridescence of the far, unreachable naked moon tinges the low fume.
In heaven are more rockets. There are lovely ones that lean down in the sky like great spider lilies, with long outcurving petals of soft light, and at the end of each petal, a sudden drop of pure green, ready to fall like dew. But some strange hand of evanescence brushes it away, and it is gone, and the next rocket bursting shows all the smoke-threads still stretching, like the spectre of the great fire lily, up in the sky: like the greyness of wild clematis fronds in autumn, crumbling together, as the succeeding rocket bursts in brilliance.
Meanwhile, in another world, and a world more real, the explosion and percussions and fusillades keep up, and penetrate into the soul with a sense of fear. The dog, reduced and shattered, tries to get used to it, but can’t succeed.
There is a great spangling and sparkling and trailing of long lights in the sky and long sprays of whitish, successively-bursting fire-blossoms, and other big many-petalled flowers curving their petals downwards like a grasping hand. Ah, at last, it is all happening at once!
And as the eye is thrilled and dazzled, the ear almost ceases to hear. Yet the moment the sky empties, it is the percussion of explosions on the heart that one feels.
It is quickly all over. The chauffeur is gabbling sotto voce that it is shorter than last year. The crowd is dispersing so quickly and silently, as if they were running away. And you feel they are all mocking quietly at the spectacle. Panem et circenses is all very well, but when the great crowd quietly jeers at your circus, it leaves you at a loss.
The cathedral dome, the top of Giotti’s tower, like a lily-stem, and the straight lines of the top of the Baptistery are outlined with rather sparse electric bulbs. It looks very unfinished. Yet, with that light above illuminating the pale and coloured marbles ghostly, and the red tiles of the dome in the night-sky, and the abrupt end of the lily-stem without a flower, and the old hard lines of the Baptistery’s top, there is a lovely ethereal quality to the great cathedral group; and you think again of the Lily of Florence — ”The Lily of Florence shall become the cauliflower of Rovenzano,” somebody said.
But not yet, anyhow.
GERMANS AND LATINS
It is already summer in Tuscany, the sun is hot, the earth is baked hard, and the soul has changed her rhythm. The nightingales sing all day and all night — not at all sadly, but brightly, vividly, impudently, with a trilling power of assertion quite disproportionate to the size of the shy bird. Why the Greeks should have heard the nightingale weeping or sobbing is more than I can understand. Anyhow, perhaps the Greeks were looking for the tragic, rather than the rhapsodic consummation to life. They were predisposed.
Tomorrow, however, is the first of May, and already summer is here. Yesterday, in the flood of sunshine on the Arno at evening, I saw two German boys steering out of the Por Santa Maria onto the Ponte Vecchio in Florence. They were dark-haired, not blonds, but otherwise the true Wandervogel type, in shirts and short trousers and thick boots, hatless, coat slung in the rucksack, shirt-sleeves rolled back above the brown muscular arms, shirt-breast open from the brown, scorched breast, and the face and neck glowing sun- darkened as they strode into the flood of evening sunshine, out of the narrow street. They were talking loudly to one another in German, as .if oblivious of their surroundings, in that thronged crossing of the Ponte Vecchio. And they strode with strong strides, heedless, marching past the Italians as if the Italians were but shadows. Strong, heedless, travelling intently, bent a little forward from the rucksacks in the plunge of determination to travel onwards, looking neither to right nor left, conversing in strong voices only with one another, where were they going, in the last golden light of the sun-flooded evening, over the Arno? Were they leaving town, at this hour? Were they pressing on, to get out of the Porta Romana before nightfall, going southwards?
In spite of the fact that one is used to these German youths, in Florence especially, in summer, still the mind calls a halt each time they appear and pass by. If swans or wild geese flew honking, low over the Arno in the evening light, moving with that wedge-shaped, intent, unswerving progress that is so impressive, they would create the same impression on one. They would bring that sense of remote, far-off lands which these Germans bring, and that sense of mysterious, unfathomable purpose.
Now no one knows better than myself that Munich or Frankfort- am-Main are not far-off, remote, lonely lands: on the contrary: and that these boys are not mysteriously migrating from one unknown to another. They are just wandering for wandering’s sake, and moving instinctively, perhaps, towards the sun, and towards Rome, the old centre-point. There is really nothing more remarkable in it than in the English and Americans sauntering diffidently and, as it were, obscurely along the Lungarno. The English in particular seem to move under a sort of Tarnhelm, having a certain power of invisibility. They manage most of the time to efface themselves, deliberately, from the atmosphere. And the Americans, who don’t try to efface themselves, give the impression of not being really there. They have left their real selves way off in the United States, in Europe they are like rather void Doppelganger. I am speaking, of course, of the impression of the streets. Inside the hotels, the trains, the tea-rooms and the restaurants, it is another affair. There you may have a little England, very insular, or a little America, very money- rich democratic, or a little Germany, assertive, or a little Scandinavia. domestic. But I am not speaking of indoor impressions. Merely of the streets.
And in the streets of Florence or Rome, the Wandervogel make a startling impression, whereas the rest of the foreigners impress one rather negatively. When I am in Germany, then Germany seems to me very much like anywhere else, especially England or America.
And when I see the Wandervogel pushing at evening out of the Por Santa Maria, across the blaze of sun and into the Ponte Vecchio, then Germany becomes again to me what it was to the Romans: the mysterious, half-dark land of the north, bristling with gloomy forests, resounding to the cry of wild geese and of swans, the land of the stork and the bear and the Drachen and the Greifen.
I kn
ow it is not so. Yet the impression comes back over me, as I see the youths pressing heedlessly past. And I know it is the same with the Italians. They see, as their ancestors saw in the Goths and the Vandals, i barbari, the barbarians. That is what the little policeman with his staff and his peaked cap thinks, as the boys from the north go by: i barbari! Not with dislike or contempt: not at all: but with the old, weird wonder. So he might look up at wild swans flying over the Ponte Vecchio: wild strangers from the north.
So strong is the impression the Wandervogel make on the imagination! It is not that I am particularly impressionable. I know the Italians feel very much as I do.
And when one sees English people with rucksacks and shirtsleeves rolled back and hob-nailed boots, as one does sometimes, even in Tuscany, one notices them, but they make very little impression. They are rather odd than extraordinary. They are just gli escursion- isti, quite comprehensible: part of the fresh-air movement. The Italians will laugh at them, but they know just what to think about them.
Whereas about the Wandervogel they do not quite know what to think, nor even what to feel: since we even only feel the things we know how to feel. And we do not know what’to feel about these Wandervogel boys. They bring with them such a strong feeling of somewhere else, of an unknown country, an unknown race, a powerful, still unknown northland.
How wonderful it must have been, at the end of the old Roman Empire, for the Roman citizens to see the big, bare-limbed Goths, with their insolent-indifferent blue eyes, stand looking on at the market-places! They were there like a vision. Non angli sed angeli, as we were told the first great Pope said of the British slaves. Creatures from the beyond, presaging another world of men.
So it was then. So it is, to a certain extent, even now. Strange wanderers towards the sun, forerunners of another world of men. That is how one still feels, as one sees the Wandervogel cross the Ponte Vecchio. They carry with them another world, another air, another meaning of life. The meaning is not explicit, not as much as it is even in storks or wild geese. But there it lies, implicit.
Complete Works of D.H. Lawrence (Illustrated) Page 1007
