_2_
THE LEMON GARDENS
The padrone came just as we were drinking coffee after dinner. It was
two o'clock, because the steamer going down the lake to Desenzano had
bustled through the sunshine, and the rocking of the water still made
lights that danced up and down upon the wall among the shadows by
the piano.
The signore was very apologetic. I found him bowing in the hall, cap in
one hand, a slip of paper in the other, protesting eagerly, in broken
French, against disturbing me.
He is a little, shrivelled man, with close-cropped grey hair on his
skull, and a protruding jaw, which, with his gesticulations, always
makes me think of an ancient, aristocratic monkey. The signore is a
gentleman, and the last, shrivelled representative of his race. His only
outstanding quality, according to the villagers, is his avarice.
_'Mais--mais, monsieur--je crains que--que--que je vous dérange--'_
He spreads wide his hands and bows, looking up at me with implicit brown
eyes, so ageless in his wrinkled, monkey's face, like onyx. He loves to
speak French, because then he feels grand. He has a queer, naïve,
ancient passion to be grand. As the remains of an impoverished family,
he is not much better than a well-to-do peasant. But the old spirit is
eager and pathetic in him.
He loves to speak French to me. He holds his chin and waits, in his
anxiety for the phrase to come. Then it stammers forth, a little rush,
ending in Italian. But his pride is all on edge: we must continue
in French.
The hall is cold, yet he will not come into the large room. This is not
a courtesy visit. He is not here in his quality of gentleman. He is only
an anxious villager.
'_Voyez, monsieur--cet--cet--qu'est-ce que--qu'est-ce que veut dire
cet--cela?_'
He shows me the paper. It is an old scrap of print, the picture of an
American patent door-spring, with directions: 'Fasten the spring either
end up. Wind it up. Never unwind.'
It is laconic and American. The signore watches me anxiously, waiting,
holding his chin. He is afraid he ought to understand my English. I
stutter off into French, confounded by the laconic phrases of the
directions. Nevertheless, I make it clear what the paper says.
He cannot believe me. It must say something else as well. He has not
done anything contrary to these directions. He is most distressed.
'_Mais, monsieur, la porte--la porte--elle ferme_ pas--_elle s'ouvre_--'
He skipped to the door and showed me the whole tragic mystery. The door,
it is shut--_ecco_! He releases the catch, and pouf!--she flies open.
She flies _open_. It is quite final.
The brown, expressionless, ageless eyes, that remind me of a monkey's,
or of onyx, wait for me. I feel the responsibility devolve upon me. I
am anxious.
'Allow me,' I said, 'to come and look at the door.'
I feel uncomfortably like Sherlock Holmes. The padrone protests--_non,
monsieur, non, cela vous dérange_--that he only wanted me to translate
the words, he does not want to disturb me. Nevertheless, we go. I feel I
have the honour of mechanical England in my hands.
The Casa di Paoli is quite a splendid place. It is large, pink and
cream, rising up to a square tower in the centre, throwing off a painted
loggia at either extreme of the façade. It stands a little way back from
the road, just above the lake, and grass grows on the bay of cobbled
pavement in front. When at night the moon shines full on this pale
façade, the theatre is far outdone in staginess.
The hall is spacious and beautiful, with great glass doors at either
end, through which shine the courtyards where bamboos fray the sunlight
and geraniums glare red. The floor is of soft red tiles, oiled and
polished like glass, the walls are washed grey-white, the ceiling is
painted with pink roses and birds. This is half-way between the outer
world and the interior world, it partakes of both.
The other rooms are dark and ugly. There is no mistake about their being
interior. They are like furnished vaults. The red-tiled, polished floor
in the drawing-room seems cold and clammy, the carved, cold furniture
stands in its tomb, the air has been darkened and starved to death, it
is perished.
Outside, the sunshine runs like birds singing. Up above, the grey rocks
build the sun-substance in heaven, San Tommaso guards the terrace. But
inside here is the immemorial shadow.
Again I had to think of the Italian soul, how it is dark, cleaving to
the eternal night. It seems to have become so, at the Renaissance, after
the Renaissance.
In the Middle Ages Christian Europe seems to have been striving, out of
a strong, primitive, animal nature, towards the self-abnegation and the
abstraction of Christ. This brought about by itself a great sense of
completeness. The two halves were joined by the effort towards the one
as yet unrealized. There was a triumphant joy in the Whole.
But the movement all the time was in one direction, towards the
elimination of the flesh. Man wanted more and more to become purely free
and abstract. Pure freedom was in pure abstraction. The Word was
absolute. When man became as the Word, a pure law, then he was free.
But when this conclusion was reached, the movement broke. Already
Botticelli painted Aphrodite, queen of the senses, supreme along with
Mary, Queen of Heaven. And Michelangelo suddenly turned back on the
whole Christian movement, back to the flesh. The flesh was supreme and
god-like, in the oneness of the flesh, in the oneness of our physical
being, we are one with God, with the Father. God the Father created man
in the flesh, in His own image. Michelangelo swung right back to the old
Mosaic position. Christ did not exist. To Michelangelo there was no
salvation in the spirit. There was God the Father, the Begetter, the
Author of all flesh. And there was the inexorable law of the flesh, the
Last Judgement, the fall of the immortal flesh into Hell.
This has been the Italian position ever since. The mind, that is the
Light; the senses, they are the Darkness. Aphrodite, the queen of the
senses, she, born of the sea-foam, is the luminousness of the gleaming
senses, the phosphorescence of the sea, the senses become a conscious
aim unto themselves; she is the gleaming darkness, she is the luminous
night, she is goddess of destruction, her white, cold fire consumes and
does not create.
This is the soul of the Italian since the Renaissance. In the sunshine
he basks asleep, gathering up a vintage into his veins which in the
night-time he will distil into ecstatic sensual delight, the intense,
white-cold ecstasy of darkness and moonlight, the raucous, cat-like,
destructive enjoyment, the senses conscious and crying out in their
consciousness in the pangs of the enjoyment, which has consumed the
southern nation, perhaps all the Latin races, since the Renaissance.
It is a lapse back, back to the original position, the Mosaic position,
of the divinity of the flesh, and the absoluteness of its laws. But also
there is the Aphrodite-worship. The flesh, the senses, are now
self-conscious. They know their aim. Their aim is in supreme sensation.
They seek the maximum of sensation. They seek the reduction of the
flesh, the flesh reacting upon itself, to a crisis, an ecstasy, a
phosphorescent transfiguration in ecstasy.
The mind, all the time, subserves the senses. As in a cat, there is
subtlety and beauty and the dignity of the darkness. But the fire is
cold, as in the eyes of a cat, it is a green fire. It is fluid,
electric. At its maximum it is the white ecstasy of phosphorescence, in
the darkness, always amid the darkness, as under the black fur of a cat.
Like the feline fire, it is destructive, always consuming and reducing
to the ecstasy of sensation, which is the end in itself.
There is the I, always the I. And the mind is submerged, overcome. But
the senses are superbly arrogant. The senses are the absolute, the
god-like. For I can never have another man's senses. These are me, my
senses absolutely me. And all that is can only come to me through my
senses. So that all is me, and is administered unto me. The rest, that
is not me, is nothing, it is something which is nothing. So the Italian,
through centuries, has avoided our Northern purposive industry, because
it has seemed to him a form of nothingness.
It is the spirit of the tiger. The tiger is the supreme manifestation of
the senses made absolute. This is the
Tiger, tiger burning bright,
In the forests of the night
of Blake. It does indeed burn within the darkness. But the
_essential_ fate, of the tiger is cold and white, a white ecstasy.
It is seen in the white eyes of the blazing cat. This is the supremacy
of the flesh, which devours all, and becomes transfigured into a
magnificent brindled flame, a burning bush indeed.
This is one way of transfiguration into the eternal flame, the
transfiguration through ecstasy in the flesh. Like the tiger in the
night, I devour all flesh, I drink all blood, until this fuel blazes up
in me to the consummate fire of the Infinite. In the ecstacy I am
Infinite, I become again the great Whole, I am a flame of the One White
Flame which is the Infinite, the Eternal, the Originator, the Creator,
the Everlasting God. In the sensual ecstasy, having drunk all blood and
devoured all flesh, I am become again the eternal Fire, I am infinite.
This is the way of the tiger; the tiger is supreme. His head is
flattened as if there were some great weight on the hard skull,
pressing, pressing, pressing the mind into a stone, pressing it down
under the blood, to serve the blood. It is the subjugate instrument of
the blood. The will lies above the loins, as it were at the base of the
spinal column, there is the living will, the living mind of the tiger,
there in the slender loins. That is the node, there in the spinal cord.
So the Italian, so the soldier. This is the spirit of the soldier. He,
too, walks with his consciousness concentrated at the base of the spine,
his mind subjugated, submerged. The will of the soldier is the will of
the great cats, the will to ecstasy in destruction, in absorbing life
into his own life, always his own life supreme, till the ecstasy burst
into the white, eternal flame, the Infinite, the Flame of the Infinite.
Then he is satisfied, he has been consummated in the Infinite.
This is the true soldier, this is the immortal climax of the senses.
This is the acme of the flesh, the one superb tiger who has devoured all
living flesh, and now paces backwards and forwards in the cage of its
own infinite, glaring with blind, fierce, absorbed eyes at that which is
nothingness to it.
The eyes of the tiger cannot see, except with the light from within
itself, by the light of its own desire. Its own white, cold light is so
fierce that the other warm light of day is outshone, it is not, it does
not exist. So the white eyes of the tiger gleam to a point of
concentrated vision, upon that which does not exist. Hence its
terrifying sightlessness. The something which I know I am is hollow
space to its vision, offers no resistance to the tiger's looking. It can
only see of me that which it knows I am, a scent, a resistance, a
voluptuous solid, a struggling warm violence that it holds overcome, a
running of hot blood between its Jaws, a delicious pang of live flesh in
the mouth. This it sees. The rest is not.
And what is the rest, that which is-not the tiger, that which the tiger
is-not? What is this?
What is that which parted ways with the terrific eagle-like angel of the
senses at the Renaissance? The Italians said, 'We are one in the Father:
we will go back.' The Northern races said, 'We are one in Christ: we
will go on.'
What _is_ the consummation in Christ? Man knows satisfaction when he
surpasses all conditions and becomes, to himself, consummate in the
Infinite, when he reaches a state of infinity. In the supreme ecstasy
of the flesh, the Dionysic ecstasy, he reaches this state. But how does
it come to pass in Christ?
It is not the mystic ecstasy. The mystic ecstasy is a special sensual
ecstasy, it is the senses satisfying themselves with a self-created
object. It is self-projection into the self, the sensuous self satisfied
in a projected self.
Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.
Blessed are they which are persecuted for righteousness' sake, for
theirs is the kingdom of heaven.
The kingdom of heaven is this Infinite into which we may be consummated,
then, if we are poor in spirit or persecuted for righteousness' sake.
Whosoever shall smite thee on the right cheek, turn to him the other
also.
Love your enemies, bless them that curse you, do good to them that
hate you, and pray for them which despitefully use you, and
persecute you.
Be ye therefore perfect, even as your Father which is in heaven is
perfect.
To be perfect, to be one with God, to be infinite and eternal, what
shall we do? We must turn the other cheek, and love our enemies.
Christ is the lamb which the eagle swoops down upon, the dove taken by
the hawk, the deer which the tiger devours.
What then, if a man come to me with a sword, to kill me, and I do not
resist him, but suffer his sword and the death from his sword, what am
I? Am I greater than he, am I stronger than he? Do I know a consummation
in the Infinite, I, the prey, beyond the tiger who devours me? By my
non-resistance I have robbed him of his consummation. For a tiger knows
no consummation unless he kill a violated and struggling prey. There is
no consummation merely for the butcher, nor for a hyena. I can rob the
tiger of his ecstasy, his consummation, his very __my non-resistance. In
my non-resistance the tiger is infinitely destroyed.
But I, what am I? 'Be ye therefore perfect.' Wherein am I perfect in
this submission? Is there an affirmation, behind my negation, other than
the tiger's affirmation of his own glorious infinity?
What is the Oneness to which I subscribe, I who offer no resistance in
the flesh?
Have I only the negative ecstasy of being devoured, of becoming thus
part of the Lord, the Great Moloch, the superb and terrible God? I have
this also, this subject ecstasy of consummation. But is there
nothing else?
The Word of the tiger is: my senses are supremely Me, and my senses are
God in me. But Christ said: God is in the others, who are not-me. In all
the multitude of the others is God, and this is the great God, greater
than the God which is Me. God is that which is Not-Me.
And this is the Christian truth, a truth complementary to the pagan
affirmation: 'God is that which is Me.'
God is that which is Not-Me. In realizing the Not-Me I am consummated, I
become infinite. In turning the other cheek I submit to God who is
greater than I am, other than I am, who is in that which is not me. This
is the supreme consummation. To achieve this consummation I love my
neighbour as myself. My neighbour is all that is not me. And if I love
all this, have I not become one with the Whole, is not my consummation
complete, am I not one with God, have I not achieved the Infinite?
After the Renaissance the Northern races continued forward to put into
practice this religious belief in the God which is Not-Me. Even the idea
of the saving of the soul was really negative: it was a question of
escaping damnation. The Puritans made the last great attack on the God
who is Me. When they beheaded Charles the First, the king by Divine
Right, they destroyed, symbolically, for ever, the supremacy of the Me
who am the image of God, the Me of the flesh, of the senses, Me, the
tiger burning bright, me the king, the Lord, the aristocrat, me who am
divine because I am the body of God.
After the Puritans, we have been gathering data for the God who is
not-me. When Pope said 'Know then thyself, presume not God to scan, The
proper study of mankind is Man,' he was stating the proposition: A man
is right, he is consummated, when he is seeking to know Man, the great
abstract; and the method of knowledge is by the analysis, which is the
destruction, of the Self. The proposition up to that time was, a man is
the epitome of the universe. He has only to express himself, to fulfil
his desires, to satisfy his supreme senses.
Now the change has come to pass. The individual man is a limited being,
finite in himself. Yet he is capable of apprehending that which is not
himself. 'The proper study of mankind is Man.' This is another way of
saying, 'Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself.' Which means, a man
is consummated in his knowledge of that which is not himself, the
abstract Man. Therefore the consummation lies in seeking that other, in
knowing that other. Whereas the Stuart proposition was: 'A man is
consummated in expressing his own Self.'
The new spirit developed into the empirical and ideal systems of
philosophy. Everything that is, is consciousness. And in every man's
consciousness, Man is great and illimitable, whilst the individual is
small and fragmentary. Therefore the individual must sink himself in the
great whole of Mankind.
This is the spirituality of Shelley, the perfectibility of man. This is
the way in which we fulfil the commandment, 'Be ye therefore perfect,
even as your Father which is in heaven is perfect.' This is Saint
Paul's, 'Now I know in part; but then shall I know even as I am known.'
When a man knows everything and understands everything, then he will be
perfect, and life will be blessed. He is capable of knowing everything
and understanding everything. Hence he is justified in his hope of
infinite freedom and blessedness.
The great inspiration of the new religion was the inspiration of
freedom. When I have submerged or distilled away my concrete body and my
limited desires, when I am like the skylark dissolved in the sky yet
filling heaven and earth with song, then I am perfect, consummated in
the Infinite. When I am all that is not-me, then I have perfect liberty,
I know no limitation. Only I must eliminate the Self.
It was this religious belief which expressed itself in science. Science
was the analysis of the outer self, the elementary substance of the
self, the outer world. And the machine is the great reconstructed
selfless power. Hence the active worship to which we were given at the
end of the last century, the worship of mechanized force.
Still we continue to worship that which is not-me, the Selfless world,
though we would fain bring in the Self to help us. We are shouting the
Shakespearean advice to warriors: 'Then simulate the action of the
tiger.' We are trying to become again the tiger, the supreme, imperial,
warlike Self. At the same time our ideal is the selfless world
of equity.
We continue to give service to the Selfless God, we worship the great
selfless oneness in the spirit, oneness in service of the great
humanity, that which is Not-Me. This selfless God is He who works for
all alike, without consideration. And His image is the machine which
dominates and cows us, we cower before it, we run to serve it. For it
works for all humanity alike.
At the same time, we want to be warlike tigers. That is the horror: the
confusing of the two ends. We warlike tigers fit ourselves out with
machinery, and our blazing tiger wrath is emitted through a machine. It
is a horrible thing to see machines hauled about by tigers, at the mercy
of tigers, forced to express the tiger. It is a still more horrible
thing to see tigers caught up and entangled and torn in machinery. It is
horrible, a chaos beyond chaos, an unthinkable hell.
The tiger is not wrong, the machine is not wrong, but we, liars,
lip-servers, duplicate fools, we are unforgivably wrong. We say: 'I will
be a tiger because I love mankind; out of love for other people, out of
selfless service to that which is not me, I will even become a tiger.'
Which is absurd. A tiger devours because it is consummated in devouring,
it achieves its absolute self in devouring. It does not devour because
its unselfish conscience bids it do so, for the sake of the other deer
and doves, or the other tigers.
Having arrived at the one extreme of mechanical selflessness, we
immediately embrace the other extreme of the transcendent Self. But we
try to be both at once. We do not cease to be the one before we become
the other. We do not even play the roles in turn. We want to be the
tiger and the deer both in one. Which is just ghastly nothingness. We
try to say, 'The tiger is the lamb and the lamb is the tiger.' Which is
nil, nihil, nought.
The padrone took me into a small room almost contained in the thickness
of the wall. There the Signora's dark eyes glared with surprise and
agitation, seeing me intrude. She is younger than the Signore, a mere
village tradesman's daughter, and, alas, childless.
It was quite true, the door stood open. Madame put down the screw-driver
and drew herself erect. Her eyes were a flame of excitement. This
question of a door-spring that made the door fly open when it should
make it close roused a vivid spark in her soul. It was she who was
wrestling with the angel of mechanism.
She was about forty years old, and flame-like and fierily sad. I think
she did not know she was sad. But her heart was eaten by some impotence
in her life.
She subdued her flame of life to the little padrone. He was strange and
static, scarcely human, ageless, like a monkey. She supported him with
her flame, supported his static, ancient, beautiful form, kept it
intact. But she did not believe in him.
Now, the Signora Gemma held her husband together whilst he undid the
screw that fixed the spring. If they had been alone, she would have done
it, pretending to be under his direction. But since I was there, he did
it himself; a grey, shaky, highly-bred little gentleman, standing on a
chair with a long screw-driver, whilst his wife stood behind him, her
hands half-raised to catch him if he should fall. Yet he was strangely
absolute, with a strange, intact force in his breeding.
They had merely adjusted the strong spring to the shut door, and
stretched it slightly in fastening it to the door-jamb, so that it drew
together the moment the latch was released, and the door flew open.
We soon made it right. There was a moment of anxiety, the screw was
fixed. And the door swung to. They were delighted. The Signora Gemma,
who roused in me an electric kind of melancholy, clasped her hands
together in ecstasy as the door swiftly shut itself.
'_Ecco!_' she cried, in her vibrating, almost warlike woman's voice:
'_Ecco!_'
Her eyes were aflame as they looked at the door. She ran forward to try
it herself. She opened the door expectantly, eagerly. Pouf!--it shut
with a bang.
'_Ecco!_' she cried, her voice quivering like bronze, overwrought but
triumphant.
I must try also. I opened the door. Pouf! It shut with a bang. We all
exclaimed with joy.
Then the Signor di Paoli turned to me, with a gracious, bland, formal
grin. He turned his back slightly on the woman, and stood holding his
chin, his strange horse-mouth grinning almost pompously at me. It was an
affair of gentlemen. His wife disappeared as if dismissed. Then the
padrone broke into cordial motion. We must drink.
He would show me the estate. I had already seen the house. We went out
by the glass doors on the left, into the domestic courtyard.
It was lower than the gardens round it, and the sunshine came through
the trellised arches on to the flagstones, where the grass grew fine and
green in the cracks, and all was deserted and spacious and still. There
were one or two orange-tubs in the light.
Then I heard a noise, and there in the corner, among all the pink
geraniums and the sunshine, the Signora Gemma sat laughing with a baby.
It was a fair, bonny thing of eighteen months. The Signora was
concentrated upon the child as he sat, stolid and handsome, in his
little white cap, perched on a bench picking at the pink geraniums.
She laughed, bent forward her dark face out of the shadow, swift into a
glitter of sunshine near the sunny baby, laughing again excitedly,
making mother-noises. The child took no notice of her. She caught him
swiftly into the shadow, and they were obscured; her dark head was
against the baby's wool jacket, she was kissing his neck, avidly, under
the creeper leaves. The pink geraniums still frilled joyously in
the sunshine.
I had forgotten the padrone. Suddenly I turned to him inquiringly.
'The Signora's nephew,' he explained, briefly, curtly, in a small voice.
It was as if he were ashamed, or too deeply chagrined.
The woman had seen us watching, so she came across the sunshine with the
child, laughing, talking to the baby, not coming out of her own world to
us, not acknowledging us, except formally.
The Signor Pietro, queer old horse, began to laugh and neigh at the
child, with strange, rancorous envy. The child twisted its face to cry.
The Signora caught it away, dancing back a few yards from her
old husband.
'I am a stranger,' I said to her across the distance. 'He is afraid of a
stranger.'
'No, no,' she cried back, her eyes flaring up. 'It is the man. He always
cries at the men.'
She advanced again, laughing and roused, with the child in her arms. Her
husband stood as if overcast, obliterated. She and I and the baby, in
the sunshine, laughed a moment. Then I heard the neighing, forced laugh
of the old man. He would not be left out. He seemed to force himself
forward. He was bitter, acrid with chagrin and obliteration, struggling
as if to assert his own existence. He was nullified.
The woman also was uncomfortable. I could see she wanted to go away with
the child, to enjoy him alone, with palpitating, pained enjoyment. It
was her brother's boy. And the old padrone was as if nullified by her
ecstasy over the baby. He held his chin, gloomy, fretful, unimportant.
He was annulled. I was startled when I realized it. It was as though his
reality were not attested till he had a child. It was as if his _raison
d'être_ had been to have a son. And he had no children. Therefore he had
no _raison d'être_. He was nothing, a shadow that vanishes into nothing.
And he was ashamed, consumed by his own nothingness.
I was startled. This, then, is the secret of Italy's attraction for us,
this phallic worship. To the Italian the phallus is the symbol of
individual creative immortality, to each man his own Godhead. The child
is but the evidence of the Godhead.
And this is why the Italian is attractive, supple, and beautiful,
because he worships the Godhead in the flesh. We envy him, we feel pale
and insignificant beside him. Yet at the same time we feel superior to
him, as if he were a child and we adult.
Wherein are we superior? Only because we went beyond the phallus in the
search of the Godhead, the creative origin. And we found the physical
forces and the secrets of science.
We have exalted Man far above the man who is in each one of us. Our aim
is a perfect humanity, a perfect and equable human consciousness,
selfless. And we obtain it in the subjection, reduction, analysis, and
destruction of the Self. So on we go, active in science and mechanics,
and social reform.
But we have exhausted ourselves in the process. We have found great
treasures, and we are now impotent to use them. So we have said: 'What
good are these treasures, they are vulgar nothings.' We have said: 'Let
us go back from this adventuring, let us enjoy our own flesh, like the
Italian.' But our habit of life, our very constitution, prevents our
being quite like the Italian. The phallus will never serve us as a
Godhead, because we do not believe in it: no Northern race does.
Therefore, either we set ourselves to serve our children, calling them
'the future', or else we turn perverse and destructive, give ourselves
joy in the destruction of the flesh.
The children are not the future. The living truth is the future. Time
and people do not make the future. Retrogression is not the future.
Fifty million children growing up purposeless, with no purpose save the
attainment of their own individual desires, these are not the future,
they are only a disintegration of the past. The future is in living,
growing truth, in advancing fulfilment.
But it is no good. Whatever we do, it is within the greater will towards
self-reduction and a perfect society, analysis on the one hand, and
mechanical construction on the other. This will dominates us as a whole,
and until the whole breaks down, the will must persist. So that now,
continuing in the old, splendid will for a perfect selfless humanity, we
have become inhuman and unable to help ourselves, we are but attributes
of the great mechanized society we have created on our way to
perfection. And this great mechanized society, being selfless, is
pitiless. It works on mechanically and destroys us, it is our master
and our God.
It is past the time to leave off, to cease entirely from what we are
doing, and from what we have been doing for hundreds of years. It is
past the time to cease seeking one Infinite, ignoring, striving to
eliminate the other. The Infinite is twofold, the Father and the Son,
the Dark and the Light, the Senses and the Mind, the Soul and the
Spirit, the self and the not-self, the Eagle and the Dove, the Tiger and
the Lamb. The consummation of man is twofold, in the Self and in
Selflessness. By great retrogression back to the source of darkness in
me, the Self, deep in the senses, I arrive at the Original, Creative
Infinite. By projection forth from myself, by the elimination of my
absolute sensual self, I arrive at the Ultimate Infinite, Oneness in the
Spirit. They are two Infinites, twofold approach to God. And man must
know both.
But he must never confuse them. They are eternally separate. The lion
shall never lie down with the lamb. The lion eternally shall devour the
lamb, the lamb eternally shall be devoured. Man knows the great
consummation in the flesh, the sensual ecstasy, and that is eternal.
Also the spiritual ecstasy of unanimity, that is eternal. But the two
are separate and never to be confused. To neutralize the one with the
other is unthinkable, an abomination. Confusion is horror and
nothingness.
The two Infinites, negative and positive, they are always related, but
they are never identical. They are always opposite, but there exists a
relation between them. This is the Holy Ghost of the Christian Trinity.
And it is this, the relation which is established between the two
Infinites, the two natures of God, which we have transgressed,
forgotten, sinned against. The Father is the Father, and the Son is the
Son. I may know the Son and deny the Father, or know the Father and deny
the Son. But that which I may never deny, and which I have denied, is
the Holy Ghost which relates the dual Infinites into One Whole, which
relates and keeps distinct the dual natures of God. To say that the two
are one, this is the inadmissible lie. The two are related, by the
intervention of the Third, into a Oneness.
There are two ways, there is not only One. There are two opposite ways
to consummation. But that which relates them, like the base of the
triangle, this is the constant, the Absolute, this makes the Ultimate
Whole. And in the Holy Spirit I know the Two Ways, the Two Infinites,
the Two Consummations. And knowing the Two, I admit the Whole. But
excluding One, I exclude the Whole. And confusing the two, I make
nullity nihil.
'_Mais_,' said the Signore, starting from his scene of ignominy, where
his wife played with another man's child, '_mais--voulez-vous vous
promener dans mes petites terres?_'
It came out fluently, he was so much roused in self-defence and
self-assertion.
We walked under the pergola of bony vine-stocks, secure in the sunshine
within the walls, only the long mountain, parallel with us, looking in.
I said how I liked the big vine-garden, I asked when it ended. The pride
of the padrone came back with a click. He pointed me to the terrace, to
the great shut lemon-houses above. They were all his. But--he shrugged
his Italian shoulders--it was nothing, just a little garden, _vous
savez, monsieur_. I protested it was beautiful, that I loved it, and
that it seemed to me _very_ large indeed. He admitted that today,
perhaps, it was beautiful.
'_Perchè--parce que--il fait un tempo--così--très bell'--très beau,
ecco!_'
He alighted on the word _beau_ hurriedly, like a bird coming to ground
with a little bounce.
The terraces of the garden are held up to the sun, the sun falls full
upon them, they are like a vessel slanted up, to catch the superb, heavy
light. Within the walls we are remote, perfect, moving in heavy spring
sunshine, under the bony avenue of vines. The padrone makes little
exclamatory noises that mean nothing, and teaches me the names of
vegetables. The land is rich and black.
Opposite us, looking down on our security, is the long, arched mountain
of snow. We climbed one flight of steps, and we could see the little
villages on the opposite side of the lake. We climbed again, and could
see the water rippling.
We came to a great stone building that I had thought was a storehouse,
for open-air storage, because the walls are open halfway up, showing the
darkness inside and the corner pillar very white and square and distinct
in front of it.
Entering carelessly into the dimness, I started, for at my feet was a
great floor of water, clear and green in its obscurity, going down
between the walls, a reservoir in the gloom. The Signore laughed at my
surprise. It was for irrigating the land, he said. It stank, slightly,
with a raw smell; otherwise, I said, what a wonderful bath it would
make. The old Signore gave his little neighing laugh at the idea.
Then we climbed into a great loft of leaves, ruddy brown, stored in a
great bank under the roof, seeming to give off a little red heat, as
they gave off the lovely perfume of the hills. We passed through, and
stood at the foot of the lemon-house. The big, blind building rose high
in the sunshine before us.
All summer long, upon the mountain slopes steep by the lake, stands the
rows of naked pillars rising out of the green foliage like ruins of
temples: white, square pillars of masonry, standing forlorn in their
colonnades and squares, rising up the mountain-sides here and there, as
if they remained from some great race that had once worshipped here. And
still, in the winter, some are seen, standing away in lonely places
where the sun streams full, grey rows of pillars rising out of a broken
wall, tier above tier, naked to the sky, forsaken.
They are the lemon plantations, and the pillars are to support the heavy
branches of the trees, but finally to act as scaffolding of the great
wooden houses that stand blind and ugly, covering the lemon trees in
the winter.
In November, when cold winds came down and snow had fallen on the
mountains, from out of the storehouses the men were carrying timber, and
we heard the clang of falling planks. Then, as we walked along the
military road on the mountain-side, we saw below, on the top of the
lemon gardens, long, thin poles laid from pillar to pillar, and we heard
the two men talking and singing as they walked across perilously,
placing the poles. In their clumsy zoccoli they strode easily across,
though they had twenty or thirty feet to fall if they slipped. But the
mountain-side, rising steeply, seemed near, and above their heads the
rocks glowed high into the sky, so that the sense of elevation must have
been taken away. At any rate, they went easily from pillar-summit to
pillar-summit, with a great cave of space below. Then again was the
rattle and clang of planks being laid in order, ringing from the
mountain-side over the blue lake, till a platform of timber, old and
brown, projected from the mountain-side, a floor when seen from above, a
hanging roof when seen from below. And we, on the road above, saw the
men sitting easily on this flimsy hanging platform, hammering the
planks. And all day long the sound of hammering echoed among the rocks
and olive woods, and came, a faint, quick concussion, to the men on the
boats far out. When the roofs were on they put in the fronts, blocked in
between the white pillars withhold, dark wood, in roughly made panels.
And here and there, at irregular intervals, was a panel of glass, pane
overlapping pane in the long strip of narrow window. So that now these
enormous, unsightly buildings bulge out on the mountain-sides, rising in
two or three receding tiers, blind, dark, sordid-looking places.
In the morning I often lie in bed and watch the sunrise. The lake lies
dim and milky, the mountains are dark blue at the back, while over them
the sky gushes and glistens with light. At a certain place on the
mountain ridge the light burns gold, seems to fuse a little groove on
the hill's rim. It fuses and fuses at this point, till of a sudden it
comes, the intense, molten, living light. The mountains melt suddenly,
the light steps down, there is a glitter, a spangle, a clutch of
spangles, a great unbearable sun-track flashing across the milky lake,
and the light falls on my face. Then, looking aside, I hear the little
slotting noise which tells me they are opening the lemon gardens, a long
panel here and there, a long slot of darkness at irregular intervals
between the brown wood and the glass stripes.
'_Voulez-vous_'--the Signore bows me in with outstretched
hand--'_voulez-vous entrer, monsieur?_'
I went into the lemon-house, where the poor threes seem to mope in the
darkness. It is an immense, dark, cold place. Tall lemon trees, heavy
with half-visible fruit, crowd together, and rise in the gloom. They
look like ghosts in the darkness of the underworld, stately, and as if
in life, but only grand shadows of themselves. And lurking here and
there, I see one of the pillars, But he, too, seems a shadow, not one of
the dazzling white fellows I knew. Here we are trees, men, pillars, the
dark earth, the sad black paths, shut in in this enormous box. It is
true, there are long strips of window and slots of space, so that the
front is striped, and an occasional beam of light fingers the leaves of
an enclosed tree and the sickly round lemons. But it is nevertheless
very gloomy.
'But it is much colder in here than outside,' I said.
'Yes,' replied the Signore, 'now. But at night--I _think_--'
I almost wished it were night to try. I wanted to imagine the trees
cosy. They seemed now in the underworld. Between the lemon trees, beside
the path, were little orange trees, and dozens of oranges hanging like
hot coals in the twilight. When I warm my hands at them the Signore
breaks me off one twig after another, till I have a bunch of burning
oranges among dark leaves, a heavy bouquet. Looking down the Hades of
the lemon-house, the many ruddy-clustered oranges beside the path remind
me of the lights of a village along the lake at night, while the pale
lemons above are the stars. There is a subtle, exquisite scent of lemon
flowers. Then I notice a citron. He hangs heavy and bloated upon so
small a tree, that he seems a dark green enormity. There is a great host
of lemons overhead, half-visible, a swarm of ruddy oranges by the paths,
and here and there a fat citron. It is almost like being under the sea.
At the corners of the path were round little patches of ash and stumps
of charred wood, where fires had been kindled inside the house on cold
nights. For during the second and third weeks in January the snow came
down so low on the mountains that, after climbing for an hour, I found
myself in a snow lane, and saw olive orchards on lawns of snow.
The padrone says that all lemons and sweet oranges are grafted on a
bitter-orange stock. The plants raised from seed, lemon and sweet
orange, fell prey to disease, so the cultivators found it safe only to
raise the native bitter orange, and then graft upon it.
And the maestra--she is the schoolmistress, who wears black gloves while
she teaches us Italian--says that the lemon was brought by St Francis of
Assisi, who came to the Garda here and founded a church and a monastery.
Certainly the church of San Francesco is very old and dilapidated, and
its cloisters have some beautiful and original carvings of leaves and
fruit upon the pillars, which seem to connect San Francesco with the
lemon. I imagine him wandering here with a lemon in his pocket. Perhaps
he made lemonade in the hot summer. But Bacchus had been before him in
the drink trade.
Looking at his lemons, the Signore sighed. I think he hates them. They
are leaving him in the lurch. They are sold retail at a halfpenny each
all the year round. 'But that is as dear, or dearer, than in England,' I
say. 'Ah, but,' says the maestra, 'that is because your lemons are
outdoor fruit from Sicily. _Però_--one of our lemons is as good as _two_
from elsewhere.'
It is true these lemons have an exquisite fragrance and perfume, but
whether their force as lemons is double that of an ordinary fruit is a
question. Oranges are sold at fourpence halfpenny the kilo--it comes
about five for twopence, small ones. The citrons are sold also by weight
in Salò for the making of that liqueur known as 'Cedro'. One citron
fetches sometimes a shilling or more, but then the demand is necessarily
small. So that it is evident, from these figures, the Lago di Garda
cannot afford to grow its lemons much longer. The gardens are already
many of them in ruins, and still more 'Da Vendere'.
We went out of the shadow of the lemon-house on to the roof of the
section below us. When we came to the brink of the roof I sat down. The
padrone stood behind me, a shabby, shaky little figure on his roof in
the sky, a little figure of dilapidation, dilapidated as the
lemon-houses themselves.
We were always level with the mountain-snow opposite. A film of pure
blue was on the hills to the right and the left. There had been a wind,
but it was still now. The water breathed an iridescent dust on the far
shore, where the villages were groups of specks.
On the low level of the world, on the lake, an orange-sailed boat leaned
slim to the dark-blue water, which had flecks of foam. A woman went
down-hill quickly, with two goats and a sheep. Among the olives a man
was whistling.
'_Voyez_,' said the padrone, with distant, perfect melancholy. 'There
was once a lemon garden also there--you see the short pillars, cut off
to make a pergola for the vine. Once there were twice as many lemons as
now. Now we must have vine instead. From that piece of land I had two
hundred lire a year, in lemons. From the vine I have only eighty.'
'But wine is a valuable crop,' I said.
'Ah--_così-così_! For a man who grows much. For me--_poco, poco--peu_.'
Suddenly his face broke into a smile of profound melancholy, almost a
grin, like a gargoyle. It was the real Italian melancholy, very
deep, static.
'_Vous voyez, monsieur_--the lemon, it is all the year, all the year.
But the vine--one crop--?'
He lifts his shoulders and spreads his hands with that gesture of
finality and fatality, while his face takes the blank, ageless look of
misery, like a monkey's. There is no hope. There is the present. Either
that is enough, the present, or there is nothing.
I sat and looked at the lake. It was beautiful as paradise, as the first
creation. On the shores were the ruined lemon-pillars standing out in
melancholy, the clumsy, enclosed lemon-houses seemed ramshackle, bulging
among vine stocks and olive trees. The villages, too, clustered upon
their churches, seemed to belong to the past. They seemed to be
lingering in bygone centuries.
'But it is very beautiful,' I protested. 'In England--'
'Ah, in England,' exclaimed the padrone, the same ageless, monkey-like
grin of fatality, tempered by cunning, coming on his face, 'in England
you have the wealth--_les richesses_--you have the mineral coal and the
machines, _vous savez_. Here we have the sun--'
He lifted his withered hand to the sky, to the wonderful source of that
blue day, and he smiled, in histrionic triumph. But his triumph was only
histrionic. The machines were more to his soul than the sun. He did not
know these mechanisms, their great, human-contrived, inhuman power, and
he wanted to know them. As for the sun, that is common property, and no
man is distinguished by it. He wanted machines, machine production,
money, and human power. He wanted to know the joy of man who has got the
earth in his grip, bound it up with railways, burrowed it with iron
fingers, subdued it. He wanted this last triumph of the ego, this last
reduction. He wanted to go where the English have gone, beyond the Self,
into the great inhuman Not Self, to create the great unliving creators,
the machines, out of the active forces of nature that existed
before flesh.
But he is too old. It remains for the young Italian to embrace his
mistress, the machine.
I sat on the roof of the lemon-house, with the lake below and the snowy
mountain opposite, and looked at the ruins on the old, olive-fuming
shores, at all the peace of the ancient world still covered in sunshine,
and the past seemed to me so lovely that one must look towards it,
backwards, only backwards, where there is peace and beauty and no more
dissonance.
I thought of England, the great mass of London, and the black, fuming,
laborious Midlands and north-country. It seemed horrible. And yet, it
was better than the padrone, this old, monkey-like cunning of fatality.
It is better to go forward into error than to stay fixed inextricably
in the past.
Yet what should become of the world? There was London and the industrial
counties spreading like a blackness over all the world, horrible, in the
end destructive. And the Garda was so lovely under the sky of sunshine,
it was intolerable. For away, beyond, beyond all the snowy Alps, with
the iridescence of eternal ice above them, was this England, black and
foul and dry, with her soul worn down, almost worn away. And England was
conquering the world with her machines and her horrible destruction of
natural life. She was conquering the whole world.
And yet, was she not herself finished in this work? She had had enough.
She had conquered the natural life to the end: she was replete with the
conquest of the outer world, satisfied with the destruction of the Self.
She would cease, she would turn round; or else expire.
If she still lived, she would begin to build her knowledge into a great
structure of truth. There it lay, vast masses of rough-hewn knowledge,
vast masses of machines and appliances, vast masses of ideas and
methods, and nothing done with it, only teeming swarms of disintegrated
human beings seething and perishing rapidly away amongst it, till it
seems as if a world will be left covered with huge ruins, and scored by
strange devices of industry, and quite dead, the people disappeared,
swallowed up in the last efforts towards a perfect, selfless society.
