PERHAPS, in the English mind, any real liking for the
work of Mr. Maurice Hewlett may not unfairly be called an acquired taste. His peculiarities of idea and expression are striking, and by no means always agreeable : his beauties are often "purple patches" of a more or less exotic kind. Also, and in a book of this sort more than in his romances, we find ourselves in a world of echoes of past styles and mannerisms. Who is this, for instance, on Dante and the Sienese? "He gave them a kind of contemptuous pity: a gallant, feather-headed, high-flying, high-sniffing race, and altogether unlucky." And this : " Tuscan still, at the heart, you see, this large, cocksure, genial man ; but also a rare creature—a Tuscan who knew himself to be so, having been taught the stern discipline of Harrisburgh, and much whisky."
It is all very well to talk of soaring " with long-pinioned Mr. Ruskin in warm, ethical waves of air "; and to remark that "the late Professor Ruskin seldom left the pulpit"; but who might have written this note,—at least in its style and tone ? " You may think it worth notice—as I do—that the only Gothic art which the Tuscans took, faithfully observed, and bettered, was sculpture " ; and so on, besides other in- stances. So much for the venerable masters, Carlyle and Ruskin. We are also reminded more naturally of Walter Pater and John Addington Symonds.
Mr. Hewlett takes credit to himself that in this journey through Tuscany, this "leisurely, sententious commentary," "dictated by the logic of the roads, diverted only from its course by the accidents of travel, the humours of the moment, the freaks of memory," and so forth, he has "always pre- ferred a road to a church, always a man to a masterpiece, a singer to his song." This kind of ideal, which suggests Sterne as a literary ancestor—a remark which may also be justified by passages and episodes in the book, and by characteristic touches of style—has not been completely and logically carried out, a fact not greatly to be regretted. Study of the bodies and souls of the Tuscans, and of the purely physical features of their country, mountains, plains, marshes, rivers, and roads, does not after all take up more space in the book than that of the wonderful, little-known cities and walled villages that crown the hilltops, the wild old churches and cathedrals full of mediaeval mystery, where, now and then, the Madonnas remain to be loved and entreated over their original altars, masterpieces not yet "herded into" those museums of which Mr. Hewlett expresses the growing horror felt by thinking people and real travellers. He is amusing on the Uffizi and the Pitti. Florence, which he once loved so well, is now dead to him; " as more and more foreigners come to picnic upon the remains." Does it ever strike him that on his long drives, comfortable or other- wise, during his sojourns in ancient towns, in primitive inns, in his admiration of tall brown shepherds and workers among the vines and olive-yards, his flirtation with young women of Siena and Arezzo, whom he protests modest and virtuous with a fervour slightly overdone—does it occur to him, amid all this keen enjoyment, that he, too, is a foreigner, picnicking in Tuscany ; with a sincere love for Italy, indeed, and a real sentimental fancy for the Italians, as far as their beauty and their natural innocence are concerned ; but with neither the will nor the power, any more than Stendhal, Gautier, and other such dilettante travellers before him, to give Italy anything worth having in return for the pleasure of these picnics? If Florence is dead at heart, as he says, then certainly Siena and the rest of the cities will die, and from the very same cause: the self-con- sciousness and all the other unhappy things that grow under the eyes, however admiring, of idle strangers.
In many ways Mr. Hewlett's book is attractive and delightful, and travellers in Tuscany, especially those who are able to avoid the railroad, will find it a great help. His artistic suggestiveness never fails ; his ideas and conclusions, especially with regard to such unfamiliar places as Volterra, Cortona, Arezzo, and many more, seem almost invariably right. His advice about guide-books will touch the heart and mind of any traveller not quite an ordinary slave of Murray and Baedeker; and he is especially to be thanked for one or two stinging remarks on the guide-books of the late Mr.
• The Roaal in Tuscany a Commentary. By Maurice Hewlett. 2 Yale. London : Macmillan and Co. Via net.] Grant Allen : "primers for the schoolroom." It was, indeed, Mr. Grant Allen's book on Florence which first showed the present writer, a sad revelation, what Italian travel in these latter days had come to be. Mr. Hewlett is, of course, entirely right in offering his ideal adventurer, his model tourist in Tuscany, The Divine Comedy as his chief com- panion. He has a great deal to say about Dante, and says it well, though dwelling after his manner—a little absurdly, to our taste—on "the green-eyed girl whom he loved so wildly." He tells us no less than five times in a few pages that Beatrice had green eyes. This one fact ought to teach something to those yet unacquainted with Mr. Hewlett's turn of mind and characteristics as a writer : it will not surprise any one who
knows him already.
It seems rather a waste of time and a misuse of criticism to point out at some length the inferiority of Petrarch, not only to Dante, but to all the peasant-poets of Tuscany, that land of natural song. Petrarch had a beauty of his own ; the kind of beauty most valued by the educated in his own time and country. We must add that it appears to us not at all critical, but rather ludicrous, to compare a love-sonnet of Lorenzo's with one of the greatest of Shakespeare's. It is a fault in some modern writers to treat their readers as ignorant people. They should write for the rank of intelli- gence by which they hope to be read.
Though it is sometimes used with a certain affectation, we cannot but heartily admire Mr. Hewlett's descriptive power. He has, it is hardly necessary to say, a wonderfully true feeling for colour and character in a landscape, and his word- pictures are frequently beautiful, whether they be general impressions of Italian scenery, or more detailed studies of some special countryside or mountain crowned with towers• One or two quotations will show him at his best :—
"Italy is a grey country, flushed with green in the spring, dusty grey all the summer (under a pearl-grey sky), grey bleached to white after the winter floods ; grey earth, grey tree-stems, grey olives, grey grass, and a blue heaven over a grey-green river swirling through pale sands. This is the colour of Tuscany, and of much of the Lombard plain, which certain painters of old have caught and translated."
The hill-towns generally have seldom been more vividly pictured :—
"I shall never see Radicofani again ; but it remains for ever in my mind's eye as I saw it last; a pale cone of rock, wrapped deep in a thunder cloud. While we upon the plain walked in light dust, methought in Radicofani the rain was sluicing the streets. Impenetrable, afar off—another climate was theirs. They wore familiar with storms ; for storms were brewed before their thresholds. Town and rock were indistinguishable; the rain en- gulfed all. Town and rock are mostly indistinguishable ; it is characteristic of the site that the buildings should lengthen the vantages of the ground ; and yet, when you have seen many, you will not be able to say that you have seen two alike. Monte- pulciano, with one blunt tower, climbs grandly beyond her mountain, and culminates the pyramid with a truncheon of dark red ; San Miniato de' Tedeschi clusters about hers behind grey walls, and then shoots up into a single tall shaft, whose mitred crest can be seen from Pisa. And what of Siena, the queen of all the hill-towns? Lovely from every side, from far off she seems to float over her green down like a scarf of cloud ; from nearer in the colour of the place strikes you first: it seems pure rose and white, with a pearl-grey dome to give it value, and two towers like wings to lift it up. San Gimignano has a forest of square towers, all the world knows; Asciano has a beautiful cupola; Volterra gives a dull jut forward into the manly wastes, like a headland into a lumpy sea. Cortona is littered down her hill-side like a disused cemetery—just as the tombs at Arles, 'dove Rhodano stagna,' pied the place in Dante's eye ; Massa Maritima winds about hers like a spiral stair, and reaches at last a great square castle upon the crest. And so with all of them, alike in difference : Montalcino, a fringe of building upon a spur of Amiata ; Celle hemming a shoulder of the hills with palaces and gateways ; and then brown Barga, and then Poggibonsi, and then Certaldo, so ruddy and so blithe—who that has seen them can fail to store them in separate guest-chambers of the mind? A tinge of colour, a scar, a rent in the flank, a bragging tower, a tree like a torn flag, a loggia thrust up like a fault in the rocks, some infallible sign there will be, so that none can ever be mistook?'
Here, we think, is Mr. Hewlett at his best. This sort of thing is not disfigured, like some of his work, by flippancy and bad taste, by disagreeable descriptions and unpleasant hints and similes, the morbid, unwholesome leaven which too easily taints a whole book.
Mr. Pennell's illustrations are very interesting, and full of freshness and information as to little-known Tuscany. They are, however, as it strikes us, a good deal too dark and
heavy in effect, being reproduced from strong pencil draw- ings, to give a very true idea of the air, the distances, and the colouring of Italy.
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