Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 12, August, 1863, No. 70 by Various

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I know no painter who has so well succeeded in putting a wet sky into
his pictures as Turner; and in this I judge him by the literal
_chiaroscuro_ of engraving. In proof of it, I take down from my shelf
his "Rivers of France": a book over which I have spent a great many
pleasant hours, and idle ones too,--if it be idle to travel leagues at
the turning of a page, and to see hill-sides spotty with vineyards, and
great bridges wallowing through the Loire, and to watch the fishermen of
Honfleur putting to sea. There are skies, as I said, in some of these
pictures which make a man instinctively think of his umbrella, or of his
distance from home: no actual rain-drift stretching from them, but such
unmistakable promise of a rainy afternoon, in their little parallel
wisps of dark-bottomed clouds, as would make a provident farmer order
every scythe out of the field.

In the "Chair of Gargantua," on which my eye falls, as I turn over the
pages, an actual thunder-storm is breaking. The scene is somewhere upon
the Lower Seine. From the middle of the left of the picture the lofty
river-bank stretches far across, forming all the background;--its
extreme distance hidden by a bold thrust of the right bank, which juts
into the picture just far enough to shelter a white village, which lies
gleaming upon the edge of the water. On all the foreground lies the
river, broad as a bay. The storm is coming down the stream. Over the
left spur of the bank, and over the meeting of the banks, it broods
black as night. Through a little rift there is a glimpse of serene sky,
from which a mellow light streams down upon the edges and angles of a
few cliffs upon the farther shore. All the rest is heavily shadowed. The
edges of the coming tempest are tortuous and convulsed, and you know
that a fierce wind is driving the black billows on; yet all the water
under the lee of the shores is as tranquil as a dream; a white sail,
near to the white village, hangs slouchingly to the mast: but in the
foreground the tempest has already caught the water; a tall lugger is
scudding and careening under it as if mad; the crews of three
fishermen's boats, that toss on the vexed water, are making a confused
rush to shorten sail, and you may almost fancy that you hear their
outcries sweeping down the wind. In the middle scene, a little steamer
is floating tranquilly on water which is yet calm; and a column of smoke
piling up from its tall chimney rises for a space placidly enough, until
the wind catches and whisks it before the storm. I would wager ten to
one, upon the mere proof in the picture, that the fishermen and the
washerwomen in the foreground will be drenched within an hour.

When I have once opened the covers of Turner,--especially upon such a
wet day as this,--it is hard for me to leave him until I have wandered
all up and down the Loire, revisited Tours and its quiet cathedral, and
Blois with its stately chateau, and Amboise with its statelier, and
coquetted again with memories of the Maid of Orleans.

From the Upper Loire it is easy to slip into the branching valleys
which sidle away from it far down into the country of the Auvergne.
Turner does not go there, indeed; the more's the pity; but I do, since
it is the most attractive region rurally (Brittany perhaps excepted) in
all France. The valleys are green, the brooks are frequent, the rivers
are tortuous, the mountains are high, and luxuriant walnut-trees embower
the roads. It was near to Moulins, on the way hither, through the
pleasant Bourbonnois, that Tristram Shandy met with the poor,
half-crazed Maria, piping her evening service to the Virgin.

And at that thought I must do no less than pull down my "Tristram
Shandy," (on which the dust of years has accumulated,) and read again
that tender story of the lorn maiden, with her attendant goat, and her
hair caught up in a silken fillet, and her shepherd's pipe, from which
she pours out a low, plaintive wail upon the evening air.

It is not a little singular that a British author should have supplied
the only Arcadian resident of all this Arcadian region. The Abbe Delille
was, indeed, born hereabout, within sight of the bold Puy de Dome, and
within marketing-distance of the beautiful Clermont. But there is very
little that is Arcadian, in freshness or simplicity, in either the
"Gardens" or the other verse of Delille.

Out of his own mouth (the little green-backed book, my boy) I will
condemn him:--

"Ce n'est plus cette simple et rustique deesse
Qui suit ses vieilles lois; c'est une enchanteresse
Qui, la baguette en main, par des hardis travaux
Fait naitre des aspects et des tresors nouveaux,
Compose un sol plus riche et des races plus belles,
Fertilise les monts, dompte les rocs rebelles."

The _baguette_ of Delille is no shepherd's crook; it has more the
fashion of a drumstick,--_baguette de tambour_.

If I follow on southward to Provence, whither I am borne upon the scuds
of rain over Turner's pictures, and the pretty Bourbonnois, and the
green mountains of Auvergne, I find all the characteristic literature of
that land of olives is only of love or war: the vines, the
olive-orchards, and the yellow hill-sides pass for nothing. And if I
read an old _Sirvente_ of the Troubadours, beginning with a certain
redolence of the fields, all this yields presently to knights, and
steeds caparisoned,--

"Cavalliers ab cavals armatz."

It is smooth reading, and is attributed to Bertrand de Born,[3] who
lived in the time when even the lion-hearted King Richard turned his
brawny fingers to the luting of a song. Let us listen:--

"The beautiful spring delights me well,
When flowers and leaves are growing;
And it pleases my heart to hear the swell
Of the birds' sweet chorus flowing
In the echoing wood;
And I love to see, all scattered around,
Pavilions and tents on the martial ground;
And my spirit finds it good
To see, on the level plains beyond,
Gay knights and steeds caparisoned."

[Footnote 3: M. Raynouard, _Poesies de Troubadours_, II. 209.]

But as the Troubadour nestles more warmly into the rhythm of his verse,
the birds are all forgotten, and the beautiful spring, and there is a
sturdy clang of battle, that would not discredit our own times:--

"I tell you that nothing my soul can cheer,
Or banqueting or reposing,
Like the onset cry of 'Charge them!' rung
From each side, as in battle closing;
Where the horses neigh,
And the call to 'aid' is echoing loud,
And there, on the earth, the lowly and proud
In the foss together lie,
And yonder is piled the mingled heap
Of the brave that scaled the trenches steep.

"Barons! your castles in safety place,
Your cities and villages, too,
Before ye haste to the battle-scene:
And Papiol! quickly go,
And tell the lord of 'Yes and No'
That peace already too long hath been!"[4]

[Footnote 4: I cannot forbear taking a bit of margin to print the
closing stanzas of the original, which carry the clash of sabres in
their very sound.

"Ie us dic que tan no m' a sabor
Manjars ni beure ni dormir
Cum a quant aug cridar: A lor!
D'ambas las partz; et aug agnir
Cavals voitz per l'ombratge,
Et aug cridar: Aidatz! Aidatz!
E vei cazer per los fossatz
Paucs e grans per l'erbatge,
E vei los mortz que pels costatz
An los tronsons outre passatz.

"Baros, metetz et gatge
Castels e vilas e ciutatz,
Enans q' usquecs no us guerreiatz.

"Papiol, d'agradatge
Ad _Oc e No_ t' en vai viatz,
Dic li que trop estan en patz."

It would seem that the men of that time, like men of most times, bore a
considerable contempt for people who said "Yes" one day, and "No" the
next.]

I am on my way to Italy, (it may as well be confessed,) where I had
fully intended to open my rainy day's work; but Turner has kept me, and
then Auvergne, and then the brisk battle-song of a Troubadour.

When I was upon the Cajano farm of Lorenzo the Magnificent, during my
last "spell of wet," it was uncourteous not to refer to the pleasant
commemorative poem of "Ambra," which Lorenzo himself wrote, and which,
whatever may be said against the conception and conduct of it, shows in
its opening stanzas that the great Medici was as appreciative of rural
images--fir-boughs with loaded snows, thick cypresses in which late
birds lurked, sharp-leaved junipers, and sturdy pines fighting the
wind--as ever he had been of antique jewels, or of the rhythm of such as
Politiano. And if I have spoken slightingly of this latter poet, it was
only in contrast with Virgil, and in view of his strained Latinity. When
he is himself, and wraps his fancies only in his own sparkling Tuscan,
we forget his classic frigidities, and his quarrels with Madonna
Clarice, and are willing to confess that no pen of his time was dipped
with such a relishing _gusto_ into the colors of the hyacinths and
trembling pansies, and into all the blandishments of a gushing and
wanton spring.[5]

[Footnote 5: See Wm. Parr Greswell's _Memoirs of Politiano_, with
translations.]

But classical affectation was the fashion of that day. A certain
Bolognese noble, Bero by name, wrote ten Latin books on rural affairs:
Tiraboschi says he never saw them; neither have I. Another scholar,
Pietro da Barga, who astonished his teachers by his wonderful
proficiency at the age of twelve, and who was afterward guest of the
French ambassador in Venice, wrote a poem on rural matters, to which,
with an exaggerated classicism, he gave the Greek name of
"_Cynegeticon_"; and about the same time Giuseppe Voltolina composed
three books on kitchen-gardening. I name these writers only out of
sympathy with their topics: I would not advise the reading of them: it
would involve a long journey and scrupulous search to find them, through
I know not what out-of-the-way libraries; and if found, no essentially
new facts or theories could be counted on which are not covered by the
treatise of Crescenzi. The Pisans or Venetians may possibly have
introduced a few new plants from the East; the example of the Medici may
have suggested some improvements in the arrangement of forcing-houses,
or the outlay of villas; but in all that regarded general husbandry,
Crescenzi was still the man.

I linger about this period, and the writers of this time, because I
snuff here and there among them the perfume of a country bouquet, which
carries the odor of the fields with it, and transports me to the
"empurpled hill-sides" of Tuscany. Shall I name Sannazaro, with his
"Arcadia"?--a dead book now,--or "Amyntas," who, before he is tall
enough to steal apples from the lowest boughs, (so sings Tasso,) plunges
head and ears in love with Sylvia, the fine daughter of Montano, who has
a store of cattle, "_richissimo d'armenti_"?

Then there is Rucellai, who, under the pontificate of Leo X., came to
be Governor of the Castle of Sant' Angelo, and yet has left a poem of
fifteen hundred lines devoted to Bees. In his suggestions for the
allaying of a civil war among these winged people, he is quite beyond
either Virgil or Columella or Mr. Lincoln. "Pluck some leafy branch," he
says, "and with it sprinkle the contending factions with either honey or
sweet grape-juice, and you shall see them instantly forego their
strife":--

"The two warring bands joyful unite,
And foe embraces foe: each with its lips
Licking the others' wings, feet, arms, and breast,
Whereon the luscious mixture hath been shed,
And all inebriate with delight."

So the Swiss,[6] he continues, when they fall out among themselves, are
appeased by some grave old gentleman, who says a few pleasant words, and
orders up a good stoop of sweet wine, in which all parties presently dip
their beards, and laugh and embrace and make peace, and so forget
outrage. It may have been the sixteenth-century way of closing a battle.

[Footnote 6:
"Come quando nei Suizzeri si muove
Sedizione, e che si grida a l' arme;
Se qualche nom grave allor si leva in piede
E comincia a parlar con dolce lingua,
Mitiga i petti barbari e feroci;
E intanto fa portare ondanti vasi
Pieni di dolci ed odorati vini;
Ahora ognun le labbra e 'l mento immerge
Ne' le spumanti tazze," etc.
]

Guarini, with all his affectations, has little prettinesses which charm
like the chirping of a bird;--as where he paints (in the very first
scene of the "Pastor Fido") the little sparrow flitting from fir to
beech, and from beech to myrtle, and twittering, "How I love! how I
love!" And the bird-mate ("_il suo dolce desio_") twitters in reply,
"How I love, how I love, too!" "_Ardo d' amore anch' io._"

Messer Pietro Bembo was a different man from Guarini. I cannot imagine
him listening to the sparrows; I cannot imagine him plucking a
flower,--except he have some courtly gallantry in hand, perhaps toward
the Borgia. He was one of those pompous, stiff, scholastic prigs who
wrote by rules of syntax; and of syntax he is dead. He was clever and
learned; he wrote in Latin, Italian, Castlian: but nobody reads him; he
has only a little crypt in the "Autori Diversi." I think of him as I
think of fine women who must always rustle in brocade embossed with hard
jewels, and who never win the triumphs that belong to a charming morning
_deshabille_ with only the added improvisation of a rose.

In his "Asolani" Bembo gives a very full and minute description of the
gardens at Asolo, which relieved the royal retirement of Caterina, the
Queen of Cyprus. Nothing could be more admirable than the situation:
there were skirts of mountain which were covered, and are still covered,
with oaks; there were grottos in the sides of cliffs, and water so
disposed--in jets, in pools inclosed by marble, and among rocks--as to
counterfeit all the wildness of Nature; there was the same stately array
of cypresses, and of clipped hedges, which had belonged to the villas of
Pliny; temples were decorated with blazing frescoes, to which, I dare
say, Carpaccio may have lent a hand, if not that wild rake, Giorgione.
Here the pretty Queen, with eight thousand gold ducats a year, (whatever
that amount may have been,) and some seventy odd retainers, held her
court; and here Bembo, a dashing young fellow at that time of seven or
eight and twenty, became a party to those disquisitions on Love, and to
those recitations of song, part of which he has recorded in the
"Asolani." I am sorry to say, the beauty of the place, so far as regards
its artificial features, is now all gone. The hall, which may have
served as the presence-chamber of the Queen, was only a few years since
doing service as a farmer's barn; and the traces of a Diana and an
Apollo were still coloring the wall under which a few cows were
crunching their clover-hay.

All the gardening of Italy at that period, as, indeed, at almost all
times, depended very much upon architectural accessories: colonnades and
wall-veil with frescoes make a large part of Italian gardening to this
day. The Isola Bella in the Lago Maggiore, and the Borghese Garden at
Rome, are fair types. And as I recall the sunny vistas of this last, and
the noontide loungings upon the marble seats, counting white flecks of
statues amid the green of cypresses, and watching the shadow which some
dense-topped pine flings upon a marble flight of steps or a marble
balustrade, I cannot sneer at the Italian gardening, or wish it were
other than it is. The art-life of Italy is the crowning and the
overlapping life. The Campagna seems only a bit of foreground to carry
the leaping arches of the aqueducts, and to throw the hills of Tivoli
and Albano to a purple distance. The farmers (_fattori_) who gallop
across the fields, in rough sheepskin wrappers, and upon scurvy-looking
ponies, are more picturesque than thrifty; and if I gallop in company
with one of them to his home upon the farther edge of the Campagna,
(which is an allowable wet-day fancy,) I shall find a tall stone house
smeared over roughly with plaster, and its ground-floor devoted to a
crazy cart, a pony, a brace of cows, and a few goats; a rude court is
walled in adjoining the house, where a few pigs are grunting. Ascending
an oaken stair-way within the door, I come upon the living-room of the
_fattore_; the beams overhead are begrimed with smoke, and garnished
here and there with flitches of bacon; a scant fire of fagots is
struggling into blaze upon an open hearth; and on a low table bare of
either cloth or cleanliness, there waits him his supper of _polenta_,
which is nothing more or less than our plain boiled Indian-pudding. Add
to this a red-eyed dog, that seems to be a savage representative of a
Scotch colley,--a lean, wrinkled, dark-faced woman, who is unwinding the
bandages from a squalling _Bambino_,--a mixed odor of garlic and of
goats, that is quickened with an ammoniacal pungency,--and you may form
some idea of the home of a small Roman farmer in our day. It falls away
from the standard of Cato; and so does the man.

He takes his twenty or thirty acres, upon shares, from some wealthy
proprietor of Rome, whose estate may possibly cover a square mile or two
of territory. He sells vegetables, poultry, a little grain, a few curds,
and possibly a butt or two of sour wine. He is a type of a great many
who lived within the limits of the old Papal territory; whether he and
they have dropped their musty sheepskins and shaken off their unthrift
under the new government, I cannot say.

Around Bologna, indeed, there was a better race of farmers: the
intervening thrift of Tuscany had always its influence. The meadows of
Terni, too, which are watered by the Velino, bear three full crops of
grass in the season; the valley of the Clitumnus is like a miniature of
the Genesee; and around Perugia the crimson-tasselled clovers, in the
season of their bloom, give to the fields the beauty of a garden.

The old Duke of Tuscany, before he became soured by his political
mishaps, was a great patron of agricultural improvements. He had
princely farms in the neighborhood both of his capital and of Pisa. Of
the latter I cannot speak from personal observation; but the dairy-farm,
_Cascina_, near to Florence, can hardly have been much inferior to the
Cajano property of the great Lorenzo. The stables were admirably
arranged, and of permanent character; the neatness was equal to that of
the dairies of Holland. The Swiss cows, of a pretty dun-color, were kept
stalled, and luxuriously fed upon freshly cut ray-grass, clover, or
vetches, with an occasional sprinkling of meal; the calves were
invariably reared by hand; and the average _per diem_ of milk,
throughout the season, was stated at fourteen quarts; and I think
Madonna Clarice never strained more than this into the cheese-tubs of
Ambra. I trust the burghers of Florence, and the new _Gonfaloniere_,
whoever he may be, will not forget the dun cows of the Cascina, or their
baitings with the tender vetches.

The redemption of the waste marshlands in the Val di Chiana by the
engineering skill of Fossombroni, and the consequent restoration of many
thousands of acres which seemed hopelessly lost to fertility, is a
result of which the Medici would hardly have dreamed, and which would do
credit to any age or country.

About the better-cultivated portions of Lombardy there is an almost
regal look. The roads are straight, and of most admirable construction.
Lines of trees lift their stateliness on either side, and carry trailing
festoons of vines. On both sides streams of water are flowing in
artificial canals, interrupted here and there by cross sluices and
gates, by means of which any or all of the fields can be laid under
water at pleasure, so that old meadows return three and four cuttings of
grass in the year. There are patches of Indian-corn which are equal to
any that can be seen on the Miami; hemp and flax appear at intervals,
and upon the lower lands rice. The barns are huge in size, and are
raised from the ground upon columns of masonry.

I have a dapper little note-book of travel, from which these facts are
mainly taken; and at the head of one of its pages I observe an old
ink-sketch of a few trees, with festoons of vines between. It is
yellowed now, and poor always; for I am but a dabbler at such things.
Yet it brings back, clearly and briskly, the broad stretch of Lombard
meadows, the smooth Macadam, the gleaming canals of water, the white
finials of Milan Cathedral shining somewhere in the distance, the
thrushes, as in the "Pastor Fido," filling all the morning air with
their sweet

"Ardo d' amore! ardo d' amore!"

the dewy clover-lots, looking like wavy silken plush, the green glitter
of mulberry-leaves, and the beggar in steeple-crowned hat, who says,
"_Grazia_," and "_A rivedervi!_" as I drop him a few kreutzers, and
rattle away to the North, and out of Italy.

* * * * *

About the year 1570, a certain Conrad Heresbach, who was Councillor to
the Duke of Cleves, (brother to that unfortunate Anne of Cleves who was
one of the wife-victims of Henry VIII.,) wrote four Latin books on
rustic affairs, which were translated by Barnaby Googe, a Lincolnshire
farmer and poet, who was in his day gentleman-pensioner to Queen
Elizabeth. Our friend Barnaby introduces his translation in this
style:--"I haue thought it meet (good Reader) for thy further profit &
pleasure, to put into English these foure Bookes of Husbandry, collected
& set forth by Master Conrade Heresbatch, a great & a learned Counceller
of the Duke of Cleues: not thinking it reason, though I haue altered &
increased his worke, _with mine owne readings & obseruations_, joined
with the experience of sundry my friends, to take from him (as diuers in
the like case haue done) the honour & glory of his owne trauaile:
Neither is it my minde, that this either his doings or mine, should
deface, or any waves darken the good enterprise, or painfull trauailes
of such our countrymen, of England, as haue plentifully written of this
matter: but always haue, & do giue them the reuerence & honour due to so
vertuous, & well disposed Gentlemen, namely, _Master Fitz herbert_, &
_Master Tusser_: whose workes may, in my fancie, without any
presumption, compare with any, either _Varro_, _Columella_, or
_Palladius_ of _Rome_."

The work is written in the form of a dialogue, the parties being Cono, a
country-gentleman, Metella, his wife, Rigo, a courtier, and Hermes, a
servant. The first book relates to tillage, and farm-practice in
general; the second, to orcharding, gardens, and woods; the third, to
cattle; and the fourth, to fowl, fish, and bees. He had evidently been
an attentive reader of the older authors I have discussed, and his
citations from them are abundant. He had also opportunity for every-day
observation in a region which, besides being one of the most fertile,
was probably at that time the most highly cultivated in Europe; and his
work may be regarded as the most important contribution to agricultural
literature since the days of Crescenzi. He reaffirms, indeed, many of
the old fables of the Latinists,--respects the force of proper
incantations, has abiding faith in "the moon being aloft" in time of
sowing, and insists that the medlar can be grafted on the pine, and the
cherry upon the fir. Rue, he tells us, "will prosper the better for
being stolen"; and "If you breake to powder the horne of a Ram & sowe it
watrying it well, it is thought it will come to be good Sperage"
(Asparagus). He assures us that he has grafted the pear successfully
when in full bloom; and furthermore, that he has seen apples which have
been kept sound for three years.

Upon the last page are some rules for purchasing land, which I suspect
are to be attributed to the poet of Lincolnshire, rather than to
Heresbach. They are as good as they were then; and the poetry none the
worse:--

"First see that the land be clear
In title of the seller;
And that it stand in danger
Of no woman's dowrie;
See whether the tenure be bond or free,
And release of every fee of fee;
See that the seller be of age,
And that it lie not in mortgage;
Whether ataile be thereof found,
And whether it stand in statute bound;
Consider what service longeth thereto,
And what quit rent thereout must goe;
And if it become of a wedded woman,
Think thou then on covert baron;
And if thou may in any wise,
Make thy charter in warrantise,
To thee, thine heyres, assignes also;
Thus should a wise purchaser doe."

The learned Lipsius was a contemporary of Councillor Heresbach, and
although his orthodoxy was somewhat questionable, and his Calvinism
somewhat stretchy, there can be no doubt of the honest rural love which
belongs to some of his letters, and especially to this smack of verse (I
dare not say poetry) with which he closes his _Eighth (Cent. I.)_

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