From sketch-book and diary

Arise (depart), north wind; and come, O south wind; blow through my garden, and let the aromatical spices thereof flow (Canticles iv. 16).

“My Shakespeare is upside down.

At Christmas I no more desire a rose
Than wish a snow in May’s new-fangled mirth. —

    Love’s Labour’s Lost.
“Here roses load the Christmas air with sweetness, and May ushers in the snow upon the mountains.

When proud-pied April, dress’d in all his trim,
Hath put a spirit of youth in everything. —

    Sonnet.
“Here April is in the ‘sear and yellow.’

“Yesterday a furnace-blast swooped down upon us from the great deserts to the north, and I feel I shall never be myself while I continue to see my shadow at noonday projected southward. But enough of grumbling for the present.

“Nowhere have I seen such starlight as streams upon the earth from the Milky Way, which belts the whole heavens here with silver. I don’t know why I have never seen the Milky Way so distinct and splendid in the Northern Hemisphere. It is the glory of the South African nights, and I have the pleasure, too, of seeing the entire sweep of the ‘Scorpion’s’ tail, superb scroll of blazing stars. I knew the Southern Cross would be disappointing, and so was not disappointed.

“It gyrates over the Pole in a way to greatly astonish the uninitiated. The other evening, dressing for an evening function, I saw it before my window upright, and on coming home in the small hours, behold it on its head!

“I cannot hope ever to convey to the mind of those who have not experienced Cape Colony the extraordinarily powerful local feeling of these days and nights. Melancholy they are – at least to me – but most, most beautiful and pungently poetical. The aromatic quality of the odours that permeate the air suggests that word. Yet all is too strange to win the heart of a newcomer, however much his eyes and mind may be captivated.

“If an artist wanted to accomplish that apparently impossible feat of painting Fairyland direct from Nature, without one touch supplied out of his own fancy, he would only have to come here. There are effects of light and colour on these landscapes that I never saw elsewhere. The ordinary laws seem set aside. For instance, you expect a palm-tree to tell dark against the sunset. Oh, dear me no, not necessarily here. I saw one a tender green, and the sand about it was in a haze of softest rose-colour, through which shone the vivid orange light of the sunset behind it. Incredible altogether are the colours at sunset, but all so fleeting. And there is no after-glow here as in Egypt and Italy; the instant the glory of the setting sun is gone all is over and all is grey.

“Even the melancholy-quaint sound of the frogs through the night suggests fairy tales. It is appealing in its own way. I thought the Italian maremma frog noisy, but no one can imagine what an orgy of shrill croaking fills the nights here. They are everywhere, these irrepressibles, though invisible; near your head, far away, under your feet, at your side, in the tree-tops, in the streams, for ever springing their rattles with renewed zest. I shall never hear nocturnal frogs again without being transported to these regions of strange and melancholy nights.

“Table Mountain rises square and precipitous above our garden, far above the simmer of the frogs, and looks like an altar in the pure white light that falls upon it from the Milky Way. How still, how holy in its repose of the long ages it looks, and the thought comes to one’s mind, ‘Would that all the evil brought to South Africa by the finding of the gold could be gathered together and burnt on that altar as a peace offering!’

“On this Rosebank side there is nothing that jars with the majestic feeling of Table Mountain, but to see what we English have done at its base on the other side, at Cape Town, is to see what man can do in his little way to outrage Nature’s dignity. The Dutch never jarred; their old farm-houses with white walls, thatched roofs, green shutters, and rounded Flemish gables look most harmonious in this landscape. Wherever we have colonized there you will see the corrugated iron dwelling, the barbed-wire fence, the loathsome advertisement. We talk so much of the love of the beautiful, and yet no people do so much to spoil beauty as we do wherever we settle down, all the world over. I respect the Dutch saying; ‘The eye must have something’ – beauty is a necessity to moral health. A clear sky and a far horizon have more value to the national mind than we care to recognize, and though the smoking factory that falsifies England’s skies and blurs her horizons may fill our pockets with gold, it makes us poorer by dulling our natures. I am sure that a clear physical horizon induces a clear mental one.

“As you gaze, enraptured, at the rosy flush of evening on the mountains across “False Bay” from some vantage point on the road to Simon’s Town, your eye is caught by staring letters in blatant colours in the foreground. “Keller’s boots are the best”; “Guinea Gold Cigarettes”; “Go to the Little Dust Pan, Cape Town, for your Kitchen things.” I won’t go to the Little Dust Pan. Of all the horrors, a dust pan at Cape Town, where your eyes are probably full enough of dust already from the arid streets, and your face stinging with the pebbles blown into it by a bitter “sou’easter”? I once said in Egypt I knew nothing more trying than paying calls in a “hamseem,” but a Cape Town “sou’easter” disarraying you, under similar circumstances, is a great deal more exasperating.

“I am told the Old Cape Town, when Johannesburg was as yet dormant, was a simple and comely place – its white houses, so well adapted to this intensely sunny climate, were deep set in wooded gardens, a few of which have so far escaped the claws of the jerry builder. (O United States, what things you send us – “jerry,” “shoddy” – !) But now the glaring streets, much too wide, and left unfinished, are lined with American “Stores” with cast-iron porticoes, above which rise buildings of most pretentious yet nondescript architecture, and the ragged outskirts present stretches of corrugated iron shanties which positively rattle back the clatter of a passing train or tram-car. And all around lie the dust bins of the population, the battered tin can, the derelict boot. No authorities seem yet to have been established to prevent the populace, white, brown, and black, from throwing out all their old refuse where they like. Some day things may be taken in hand, but at present this half-baked civilization produces very dreadful results. There is promise of what, some day, may be done in the pleasing red Parliament House and the beautiful public gardens of the upper town. There is such a rush for gold, you see! No one cares for poor Cape Town as a town. The adventurer is essentially a bird of passage. Man and Nature contrast more unfavourably to the former here than elsewhere, and the lines, ring in my ears all day.

Where every prospect pleases
And only man is vile,

“Altogether our Eden here is sadly damaged, and I am sorry it should be my compatriots who are chiefly answerable for the ugly patches on so surpassingly beautiful a scene. Our sophisticated life, too, is out of place in this unfinished country, and we ought to live more simply, as the Dutch do, and not feel it necessary to carry on the same ménage as in London. Liveried servants in tall hats and cockades irritate me under such a sun, and the butler in his white choker makes me gasp. An extravagant London-trained cook is more than ever trying where all provisions are so absurdly dear. The native servant in his own suitable dress, as in India and Egypt, does not exist down here.

“One of the chief reasons, I find, as I settle down in my new surroundings, for the feeling of incompleteness which I experience, is the fact of this country’s having no history. We get forlorn glimpses of the Past, when the old Dutch settlers used to hear the roar of the lions outside Cape Town Fort of nights; and, further back, we get such peeps as the quaint narratives of the early explorers allow us, but beyond those there is the great dark void.

“This is all from my own point of view, and I know there is one, an Africander born,[1 - Olive Schreiner.] who, with strong and vivid pen, writes with sympathy of the charms of Italy, but only expands into heartfelt home-fervour when returning to the red soil and atmospheric glamour of her native veldt. This personal way of looking at things makes the value of all art, literary and pictorial, to my mind. Set two artists of equal merit to paint the same scene together; the two pictures will be quite unlike each other. I am of those who believe that picture will live longest which contains the most of the author’s own thought, provided the author’s thought is worthy, and the technical qualities are good, well understood.”

I will end my South African sketch by one more page of diary, which, in recording a day’s expedition to the Paarl, gives an impression of the Cape landscape which may stand as typical of all its inland scenery.

“On Whitsun-eve we had a most enchanting expedition to Stellenbosch and the Paarl, which I will describe here. W., I, the children, and the B.’s, formed the party. We left home just at sunrise, the heavy dew warning us of a very hot winter’s day, though it was then cold enough. We took the train to Stellenbosch, and I was in ecstasies over the perfect loveliness of the scenes we passed through as the train climbed the incline towards those deeply serrated mountains which we were to pierce by and by. Looking back as we rose I could more fully appreciate the majestic proportions of Table Mountain, at whose base we live, and, when a long way off it stood above the plain in solitude, disclosed in its entirety, pale amethyst in the white morning light, I was more than ever filled with a sense of the majesty of this land which this dominating mountain seemed to gather up into itself and typify.

“Quite different in outline are the fantastic mountains we passed athwart to-day, and nowhere have I seen such intense unmixed ultramarine shadows as those that palpitate in their deep kloofs in contrast with the rosy warmth of their sunlit buttresses and jagged peaks. And as to the foregrounds here, when you get into the primeval wilderness, what words can I find to give an idea of their colouring, and of the profusion of the wild shrubs, all so spiky and aromatic, and some so weird, so strange, that cover the sandy plains? Here are some notes. In distance, blue mountains; middle distance, pine woods, dark; in foreground, gold-coloured shrubs, islanded in masses of bronze foliage full of immense thistle-shaped pink and white flowers; bright green rushes standing eight feet high, with brown heads waving; black cattle knee-deep in the rich herbage and a silver-grey stork slowly floating across the blue of the still sky.

“But this most paintable and decorative vegetation is not friendly to the intruder. These exquisitely toned shrubs with wild strong forms are full of repellent spikes which, like bayonets, they seem to level at you if, lured by the gentle perfume of their blossoms, you approach eye and nose too near. Depend upon it, this country was intended for thick-skinned blacks.

“As you get farther from town influences there appear much better human forms in the landscape, and to-day I was greatly struck with the appearance of an ox-waggon drawn by twelve big-horned beasts, and upon its piled-up load stood picturesque male and female Malays in white and gay colours – quite a triumphal car. A negro with immense whip walked by the side, and behind rose a long avenue of old stone-pines, and at the end of the vista the blue sky. These stone-pine avenues that border the red-earthed highways are among the most delightful of the many local beauties of the Cape, and such stone-pines! Old giants bigger than any I have seen on the Riviera. There are dense forests of them here, lovely things to look down on, with their soft, velvety masses of round tops of a rich dark green, looking like one solid mass. The wise Dutch who planted them had a law whereby any one felling one of these pines was bound to plant two saplings in its stead. We are doing a great deal of the felling without the planting.

“At Stellenbosch we got out, and, to my pleasure, I saw a long sort of char-à-banc driven at a hand gallop into the station yard, drawn by three mules and three horses – the vehicle ordered by W. to convey us to the ‘Paarl.’ And why ‘Paarl’? Deep among the mountains rises a double peak, bearing imbedded in each summit an immense smooth rock rounded like a black titanic ‘Pearl’ that glistens in the sun as it beats on its polished surface. Thither we blithely sped, one driver holding the multitudinous reins of our mixed team, the other manœuvering with both hands his immensely long whip, the gyrations of the thong being an interesting thing to watch as he touched up now this beast and now that. They have a way in this country of keeping up a uniform trot uphill, downhill, and on the level, but stopping frequently to breathe the team.” (Ah! give me road travel with horses – it is more human than the motor!) “After an enchanting stage through wild mountain gorges we came to an oak fixed upon by W. beforehand as marking our halting place, and there the six beasts were ‘out-spanned.’ The simple harness was just slipped off and laid along on the road where the animals stood, and then they were allowed to stray into the wild, tumbling bush as they liked and have a roll, if so minded. Then we lit a fire and spread our repast under the shade of the oak at the edge of a wood that sloped down to a mountain stream. All round the solemn mountains, all about us fragrant aromatic flowers and the call of wild African birds! I can well understand the passionate love an Africander-born must feel for his country. I know none that has such strong, saturating local sentiment. The horses and mules, whose feet I had espied several times waving in spurts of rolling above the undergrowth, being collected and ‘in-spanned,’ we set off for the Paarl Station and descended back into the Plain by rail at sunset; and as we left the mountains behind us they were flushing in the glory from the West, their shadows remaining of the same astonishing ultramarine they had kept all day. In any other country the blue would have changed somewhat, but here I don’t expect anything to follow any known rules – I accept the phenomena of things around me as time goes on, and have ceased to wonder. Oh! vision of loveliness, strange and unique, which this day has given me, never to be forgotten.”

My great regret is that I had so little time to ply my paints and try at least to make studies which would now be very precious to me. How little I knew the shortness of my sojourn! The two little Cape ponies (with much of the Arab in them) were in almost daily requisition along those great pine-bordered, red-earthed roads, to take me for my return calls, or a portion of them. I fear I left many unreturned towards the end. There were the Dutch as well as the English, a large circle. I had sketching expeditions projected which never came off, with a clever Dutch lady, who did charming water-colours of beautiful Constantia and the striking country above Simon’s Bay, and the true “Cape of Good Hope” beyond. She had battled with snakes in the pursuit of her art, and in the woods had sustained the stone-throwing of the baboons, who made a target of her as she sat at work. I was willing for the baboon bombardment, and even would chance the snakes, as one chances everything, to wrest but a poor little water-colour from nature.

Two events which, in that tremendous year ‘99, were of more than usual importance loom large in my memory of the Cape – that is, the Queen’s Birthday Review in May, and the opening of Parliament on the 14th July. The Birthday Review on the Plain at Green Point was the ditto of others I had seen on the sands of Egypt, on the green sward of Laffan’s Plain at Aldershot, on the Dover Esplanade, and wherever W. had been in command; but this time, as he rode up on his big grey to give the Governor the Royal Salute before leading the “Three Cheers for Her Majesty the Queen!” a prophet might have seen the War Spectre moving through the ranks of red-coats behind the General.

At the opening of Parliament we ladies almost filled the centre of the “House,” and I was able to study the scene from very close. The Dutch Members, on being presented to the Speaker, took the oath by raising the right hand, whereas the English, of course, kissed the Book. The proceedings were all on the lines followed at Westminster, the Governor keeping his hat on as representing the Sovereign. The opening words of “the Speech from the Throne” sounded hollow. They proclaimed amongst other things urbi et orbi, that we were at peace with the South African Republics.

“And now,” says the diary, “Good-bye, South Africa, for ever! I am glad that in you I have had experience of one of the most enchanting portions of this earth!”

As you know that experience only lasted five months after all. We left on the 23rd August ‘99 on a day of blinding rain, which, as the ship moved off, drew like a curtain across that country which I felt we were leaving to a fast-approaching trouble. The war cloud was descending. It burst in blood and fire a few weeks later and deepened the sense of melancholy with which I shall ever think of that far-away land.

IV

ITALY

CHAPTER I

VINTAGE-TIME IN TUSCANY

A DESCENT from the Apennine on a September evening into Tuscany, with the moon nearly full – that moon which in a few days will be shining in all its power upon the delights of the vintage week – this I want to recall to you who have shared the pleasure of such an experience with me.

A descent into the Garden of Italy, spread out wide in a haze of warm air – can custom stale the feeling which that brings to heart and mind?

Railway travel has its poetry, its sudden and emotional contrasts and surprises. But a few hours ago we were in the foggy drizzle of an autumn morning at Charing Cross, and, ere we have time to be fagged by a too-long journey, our eyes and brain receive the image of the Tuscan plain!

The train slows down for a moment on emerging from the last tunnel at the top of the mountain barrier; the grinding brakes are still, and for a precious instant we listen at the window for the old summer night sounds we remember and love. Yes! there they are; there he is, the dear old chirping, drumming, droning night-beetle in myriads at his old penetrating song, persistent as the sicala’s through the dog days, local in its suggestiveness as the corncrake’s endless saw among the meadow-sweet all through the Irish summer night.

But, avanti! Down the winding track with flying sparks from the locked wheels, every metre to the good; down to the red domes of Pistoja; forward, then, on the level, to Florence and all it holds.

How we English do love Italy! Somewhere in our colder nature flows a warm Gulf Stream of love for what is sunny and clear-skied and genial, and I think I may say, though my compatriots little realize it, that the evidences of a living faith which are inseparable from Italian landscape greatly add to the charm that attracts us to this land. What would her hills be if decapitated of the convents on their summits, with each its cypress-lined Via Crucis winding up the hillside? The time of the after-glow would be voiceless if deprived of the ringing of the Angelus. Dimly we perceive these things, or hardly recognise them as facts – nay, many of us still protest, but they draw us to Italy.

And now the arrival at Florence. The pleasure of dwelling on that arrival, when on the platform our friends await us with the sun of Italy in their looks! Then away we go with them in carriages drawn by those fast-trotting Tuscan ponies that are my wonder and admiration, with crack of whip and jingle of bells along the white moon-lit road to the great villa at Signa, where the vintage is about to begin.

To recall the happy labour of those precious three days of grape-picking in the mellow heat on the hillside, and then the all-pervading fumes of fermenting wine of the succeeding period in the courtyard of the Fattoria; the dull red hue of the crushed grapes that dyes all things, animate and inanimate, within the sphere of work, is one of the most grateful efforts of my memory. I see again the handsome laughing peasants, the white oxen, the flights of pigeons across the blue of the sky. The mental relaxation amidst all this activity of wholesome and natural labour, the complete change of scene, afford a blessed rest to one who has worked hard through a London winter and got very tired of a London season. It is a patriarchal life here, and the atmosphere of good humour between landlord and tenant seems to show the land laws and customs of Tuscany to be in need of no reformer, the master and the man appearing to be nearer contentment than is the case anywhere else that I know of. You and I saw a very cheery specimen of the land system at grand old Caravaggio.

Then the evenings! I know it is trite to talk of guitars and tenor voices under the moonlight, but Italy woos you back to many things we call “used up” elsewhere, and there is positive refreshment in hearing those light tenor voices, expressive of the light heart, singing the ever-charming stornellos of the country as we sit under the pergola after dinner each evening. The neighbours drop in and the guitar goes round with the coffee. Everybody sings who can, and, truth to say, some who can’t. Many warm thanks to our kind friends, English and Italian (some are gone!), who gave you and me such unforgettable hospitality in ‘75, ‘76.

But lest all these guitarings and airy nothings of the gentle social life here should become oversweet, we can slip away from the rose-garden and climb up into the vineyards of the rustic podere that speak of wholesome peasant labour, of tillage – the first principle of man’s existence on earth – and, among the practical pole-vines that bear the true wine-making grapes (not the dessert fruit of the garden pergola), have a quiet talk.

The starry sky is disclosed almost round the entire circle of the horizon, with “Firenze la gentile” in the distance on our right, the Apennine in front, and the sleeping plain trending away to the left to be lost in mystery. I want to talk to you of our experience of Italy the Beloved, from our earliest childhood until to-day.

What a happy chance it was that our parents should have been so taken with the Riviera di Levante as to return there winter after winter, alternately with the summers spent in gentle Kent or Surrey, during our childhood; not the French Riviera which has since become so sophisticated, but that purely Italian stretch of coast to the east of Genoa, ending in Porto Fino, that promontory which you and I will always hold as a sacred bit of the world. Why? There are as lovely promontories jutting out into the Mediterranean elsewhere? The child’s love for the scenes of its early friendships with nature is a jealous love.

Our relations by marriage with the B. family admitted us into the centre of a very typical Italian home of the old order. I suppose that life was very like the life of eighteenth-century England – the domestic habits were curiously alike, and I cannot say I regret that their vogue is passing. We are thought to be so ridiculously fastidious, noi altri inglesi, and our parents were certainly not exceptional in this respect, and suffered accordingly.