SYMONDS'S SKETCHES IN ITALY AND GREECE.* HE who has never

seen the places described by Mr. Symonds will get from these Sketches clearer and more vivid pictures of them than he had before. He who already knows them, and the enjoy- ment of them, will recognise the accuracy with which they represent both broad effects and very minute details, and will find with pleasure that they show him new beauties which he had not himself observed before. For Mr. Symonds is an artist, not a mere photographer. The photographer copies the forms of nature with mechanical exactness except for some defects of perspective, and so far as can be seen- with one eye ;—and by skilful adjustments those defects may be reduced in importance, while the stereoscope gives that round- ness and solidity which its scientific inventor explained to be the optical effect of having two eyes to see with. But the artist, be he poet or painter, does something more than this, and different from it in kind as well as degree; nature is the material with which he works, but "his art must give the fashion." And this art can, and actually does, depict not merely the forms of nature as they Sketches in Italy and Greece. By John Addington. Symonds. London : Smithf Elder, and Co. 1874.

are in themselves, but also the thoughts and feelings which those forms awaken in the human spirit, and which then unite with them to produce our sense of beauty, and to give us that "new heaven and new earth" which Coleridge calls the dower of man's spirit when so wedded to nature, and which he further explains by saying that,

"We receive but what we give,

And in our life alone does nature live."

And as Mr. Symonds likes (as the readers of his other works know) to seek for beauty of very various kinds through the world of man and nature, we find that in these Sketches what we have called his "art" is shown in various forms. In some—as in those on the Cornice and Monte Generoso —the human element perhaps rather intensifies than dominates the pictures of those wonderful scenes of natural beauty. Having described in a few words, very suggestive to those who know the scene, his arrival at Mentone on a February day of mist and rain, Mr. Symonds continues :— " It was a Sunday morning when we woke and found that the rain had gone, the sun was shining brightly on the sea, and a clear north wind was blowing cloud and mist away. Out upon the hills we went, not caring much what path we took, for everything was beautiful, and hill and vale were full of garden walks. Through lemon-groves—pale, golden, tender trees—and olives, stretching their grey boughs against the lonely cottage tiles, we climbed until we reached the pines and heath above. Then I knew the meaning- of Theocritus for the first time. We found a well, broad, deep, and clear,. with green herbs growing at the bottom, a runlet flowing from it down the rocky steps, maiden-hair, black adiantam, and blue violets hanging from the brink and mirrored in the water. This was just the well in Hylas. Theocti- tus has been badly treated. They call him a Court poet, dead to nature, artificial in his pictures. Yet I recognised this fountain by his verse, just as if he had showed me the very spot. Violets grow every- where, of every shade from black to lilac. Their stalks are long, and the flowers 'nod' upon them, so that I see how the Greeks could

make them into chaplets It is impossible to go wrong in these valleys. They are cultivated to the height of about five hundred feet above the sea, in terraces laboriously built up with walls, earthed and manured, and irrigated by means of tanks and aque- ducts. Above this level, where the virgin soil has not been yet reclaimed, or where the winds of winter bring down freezing currents from the mountains through a gap or gully of the lower hills, a tangled growth of heaths, and arbutus, and pines, and rosemaries, and myrtles continues the vegetation, till it finally ends in bare grey rocks, or peaks some thousand feet in height. Far above all signs of cultivation, on these arid peaks you still may see villages and ruined castles, built centuries ago for a protection from the Moorish pirates. To these mountain fastnesses the people of the coast retreated when they descried the sails of their foes on the horizon. In Mentone, at the present day, there are old men who in their youth are said to have been taken captive by the Moors, and many Arabic words have found their way into the patois of the people."

Then follow other "reproductions of Greek pastoral life," with its goats eating cytisus and myrtle, the cicadas singing in the olives, and the frogs croaking by the tanks, among the cypresses, the pines, and the flowers, till we are ready to say the Great Pan is not dead. But then Mr. Symonda goes on :— " So I dream till I come upon the Calvary, set on a solitary hillock, with its prayer-steps lending a wide prospect across the olives on the orange trees, and the broad valleys, to immeasurable skies and purple

seas We crossed a brook and entered a lemon-field, rich with blossoms, and carpeted with red anemones. Everything basked in sunlight, and glittered with exceeding brilliancy of hue. A tiny white chapel stood in the corner Inside, above the altar [was] a square picture brown with age As my sight became accus-

tomed to the gloom, I could see from the darkness of the picture a pale Christ nailed to the cross, with agonising, upward eyes, and an ashy auriole above the bleeding thorns. Thus I stepped suddenly away from the outward pomp and bravery of nature to the inward as- pirations, agonies, and martyrdoms of man—from Greek legends of the past to the real Christian present—and I remembered that an illimit- able prospect has been opened to the world, that in spite of ourselves we must turn our eyes heavenward, inward, to the infinite unseen beyond us, and within our souls. Nothing can take us back to Phcebus or to Pan. Nothing can again identify us with the simple, natural earth.

Une immense esperanee a traverse la term' Even the olives here tell more to us of Olivet and the Garden than of the oil-press and the wrestling-ground. The lilies carry us to the Sermon on the Mount, and teach humility, instead of summoning up some legend of a god's love for a mortal. The hill-side tanks, and running streams, and water- brooks swollen by sudden rain, speak of Palestine. We call the white flowers stars of Bethlehem. The large sceptre-reed, the fig-tree lingering in barrenness when other trees are full of fruit, the locust- Beans of the caruba,—for one suggestion of Greek idylls there is yet another of far deeper, dearer power.'

Long as this extract is, we have with difficulty and reluctance torn it away from the complete and highly-finished picture to which it belongs. It will justify what we have said of Mr. Symonda's "art," and we may add that in his transition from nature to man, from past to present, and from Greek to Christian life and thought, he farther illustrates that which is the highest exercise of the artist's power,—the power of portraying one characteristic expression of his subject just at the moment when it passes into another.

In "Corsica," a description of the "peculiar grandeur and desolation" of the " Salvator Rosa landscape" forms the back- ground of stories illustrative of the Corsican character, " with its stern love of justice, its furious revengefulness, and wild pas- sion for freedom." At Palermo, than which "perhaps there are few spots on the globe more beautiful," a detailed and charming picture of this beauty is interwoven with a sketch of Sicilian history, Greek, Arabian, Norman, German, French, and Spanish, full of life and spirit ; and into this is so fused that it becomes an integral part of the whole, an account of the "triumphs of eccle- siastical architecture" there to be found, and which are "none the less splendid because they cannot be reduced to rule or assigned to any single style," and "were the work of Saracen builders, assisted by Byzantine, Italian, and Norman craftsmen.'

Here is Athens :—

"Athens, by virtue of scenery and situation, was predestined to be the mother-land of the free reason of mankind, long before the Athenians had won by their great deeds the right to name their city the orna- ment and the eye of Hellas. Nothing is more obvious to one who has seen many lands and tried to distinguish their essential characters, than the fact that no one country exactly resembles another, but that, how- ever similar in climate and locality, each presents a peculiar and well-marked property belonging to itself alone. The specific quality of Athenian landscape is light, not richness, or sublimity, or romantic loveliness, or grandeur of mountain outline, but luminous beauty, serene eiposure to the airs of heaven. The harmony and balance of the scenery, so varied in its details, and yet so comprehensible, are sympathetic to the temperance of Greek morality, the moderation of Greek art. The radiance with which it is illuminated has all the clearness and distinction of the Attie intellect. From whatever point the plain of Athens, with its' semicircle of greater and lesser hillatimay be surveyed, it always presents a picture of dignified and lustrous beauty. The Acropolis is the centre of this landscape, splendid as a work of art with its crown of temples; and the sea, sur- mounted by the long low hills of the Mores, is the boundary to which the eye is irresistibly led. Mountains and islands and plain alike are made of limestone, hardening here and there into marble, broken into delicate and varied forms, and sprinkled with a vegetation of low shrubs and brushwood, so sparse and slight that the naked rock in every direction meets the light. This rock is grey and colourless ; viewed in the twilight of a misty day, it shows the dull, tame uniformity of hone. Without the sun it is asleep and sorrowful. But by reason of this very deadness, the limestone of Athenian landscape is always ready to take the colours to the air and sun. In noonday it smiles with silvery lustre, fold upon fold of the indented hills and islands melting from the brightness of the sea into the untempered brilliance of the sky. At dawn and sunset the same rocks array themselves with a celestial robe of rainbow-woven hues ; islands, sea, and mountains, far and near, bum with saffron, violet, and rose, with the tints of beryl and topaz, sapphire, and almandine and amethyst, each in due order and at proper dis- tances. The fabled dolphin in it death could not have showed a more brilliant succession of splendours waning into splendours through the whole chord of prismatic colours. This sensitiveness of the Attic limestone to any modification of the sky's light gives a peculiar spirituality to the landscape. The hills remain in form and outline unchanged, but the beauty breathed upon them lives and dies with the emotions of the air from whence it emanates ; the spirit of light abides with them and quits them by alternations that seem to be the pulses of an ethereally communicated life. No country, therefore, could be better fitted for the home of a race gifted with exquisite sensibilities, in whom humanity should first attain the freedom of sell-consciousness-in art and thought."

And then follow quotations from Euripides, Plato, and Milton, showing that this relation of the people and the land they dwelt in was recognised of old, and is no new fancy of the writer.

Of Syracuse—though it "has nothing to show but the scene of world-important actions," and though (from causes which Mr. Symonds explains) of the five towns which were once contained within its walls scarcely a vestige remains, except in the little island of Ortygia—we have a picture full of reality, and blending the present and the past in one. In Ortygia, the-sacred fountain of Arethusa, which seemed to the home-loving hearts of the first settlers to have followed them from Hellas, Still bubbles there, "recently rescued from the washerwomen" by a wall ; but why did not Mr. Symonds verify the record of the pursuit of Alpheus, of whom we may still have sight—the present writer speaks not from authority, but from his own observation—as he still rises con- stantly through the sea just below, in that fresh-water spring which the boatmen call rocchio della Zillica ? Other records of more im- portance he does verify and illustrate, with his usual scholarship and historical feeling. With Thucydides in his hand, he guides us to the Great Harbour, in those days when the siege of Syracuse " decided the destinies of Greece," discusses, and suggests .an ex- planation of the difficulties which prevented the Athenians from retreating down the slope of Epipolle, which is so low and gentle ; shows how the successive stages of that great struggle may be connected with the several localities, which he. pictures with his usual vividness ; .takes us through the . miniature groves of yellow flags and papyrus, along the banks of the .Anapus, which those- who have seen them cannot forget, and so over "the ground traversed by the army first in their attempted flight, and then in

their return as captives to Syracuse "; and lastly, shows us "their prison-grave," now called the Latomia de' Cappuccini, of which, with Mr. Symonds's sketch before us, we cannot agree with him that "it is impossible to describe it in words," though it may well be that "no photographs give any notion of it."

The volume contains a chapter on the "Popular Songs of 'Tuscany," which "are almost exclusively devoted to love," as, with few exceptions, is the case with all the songs of Italy, which, says Mr. Symonds, has hardly any instances of a ballad literature resembling that of our Border or of Spain. The purity of these love-songs is remarkable, and the simple beauty of Mr. Symonds's translations must represent very charming originals. His skill and taste as a translator are known. The chapter on "Monte Generoso " concludes with a translation made there one morning of Goethe's lines on the Godhead, which the readers of the Spectator may remember two or three years ago, and the volume closes with some translations from Petrarch's Sonnets.