Earth, Air, Fire, Water, Florence, form the five elements of our planet according to the testimony of Boniface VIII. of clamant and not very Catholic memory. That is true if you take it this way. You cannot resolve an element; but you cannot resolve Florence; therefore Florence is an element. _Ecco!_ She is like nothing else In Nature, or (which is much the same thing) Art. You can have olives elsewhere, and Gothic elsewhere; you can have both at Aries, for instance. You can have _Campanili_ printed white (but not rose-and white, not rose-and-gold- and-white) on blue anywhere along the Mediterranean from Tripoli to Tangier: you will find Giotto at Padua, and statues growing in the open air at Naples. But for the silvery magic of olives and blue; for a Gothic which has the supernatural and always restless eagerness of the North, held in check, reduced to our level by the blessedly human sanity of Romanesque; for sculpture which sprouts from the crumbling church-sides like some frankly happy stone-crop, or wall-flower, just as wholesomely coloured and tenderly shaped, you must come to Florence. Come for choice in this golden afternoon of the year. Green figs are twelve-a-penny; you can get peaches for the asking, and grapes and melons without it; brown men are treading the wine-fat in every little white hill-town, and in Florence itself you may stumble upon them, as I once did, plying their mystery in a battered old church--sight only to be seen in Italy, where religions have been many, but religionists substantially the same. That is the Italian way; there was the practical evidence. Imagine the sight. A gaunt and empty old basilica, the beams of the Rood still left, the dye of fresco still round the walls and tribune--here the dim figure of Sebastian roped to his tree, there the cloudy forms of Apostles or the Heavenly Host shadowed in masses of crimson or green--and, down below, a slippery purple sea, frothed sanguine at the edges, and wild, half-naked creatures treading out the juice, dancing in the oozy stuff rhythmically, to the music of some wailing air of their own. _Saturnia regna_ indeed, and in the haunt of Sant' Ambrogio, or under the hungry eye of San Bernardino, or other lean ascetic of the Middle Age. But that, after all, is Italian, not necessarily Florentine or Tuscan. I must needs abstract the unique quintessential humours of this my Eye of Italy. Stendhal, do you remember? didn't like one of these. He said that in Florence people talked about "huesta hasa" when they would say "questa casa," and thus turned Italian into a mad Arabic. So they do, especially the women: why not? The poor Stendhal loved Milan, wrote himself down "Arrigo Milanese"--and what can you expect from a Milanese?
They tell me, who know Florence well, that she is growing unwieldy. Like a bulky old _concierge_ they say, she sits in the passage of her Arno, swollen, fat, and featureless, a kind of Chicago, a city of tame conveniences ungraced by arts. That means that there are suburbs and tramways; it means that the gates will not hold her in; it has a furtive stab at the Railway Station and the omnibus in the Piazza del Duorno: it is _Mornings in Florence_. The suggestion is that Art is some pale remote virgin who must needs shiver and withdraw at the touch of actual life: the art-lover must maunder over his mistress's wrongs instead of manfully insisting upon her rights, her everlasting triumphant justifications. Why this watery talk of an Art that was and may not be again, because we go to bed by electricity and have our hair brushed by machinery? Pray, has Nature ceased? or Life? Art will endure with these fine things, which in Florence, let me say, are very fine indeed. But there's a practical answer to the indictment. As a city she is a mere cupful. You can walk from Cantagalli's, at the Roman Gate, to the Porta San Gallo, at the end of the Via Cavour, in half the time it would take you to go from Newgate to Kensington Gardens. Yet whereas in London such a walk would lead you through a slice of a section, in Florence you would cut through the whole city from hill to hill. You are never away from the velvet flanks of the Tuscan hills. Every street-end smiles an enchanting vista upon you. Houses frowning, machicolated and sombre, or gay and golden-white with cool green jalousies and spreading eaves, stretch before you through mellow air to a distance where they melt into hills, and hills into sky; into sky so clear and rarely blue, so virgin pale at the horizon, that the hills sleep brown upon it under the sun, and the cypresses, nodding a-row, seem funeral weeds beside that radiant purity. Some such adorable stretch of tilth and pasture, sky and cloud, hangs like a god's crown beyond the city and her towers. In the long autumn twilight Fiesole and the hills lie soft and purple below a pale green sky. There is a pause at this time when the air seems washed for sleep-every shrub, every feature of the landscape is cut clean as with a blade. The light dies, the air deepens to wet violet, and the glimpses of the hill-town gleam like snow. At such times Samminiato looms ghostly upon you and fades slowly out. The flush in the East faints and fails and the evening star shines like a gem. It is hot and still in the broad Piazza Santa Maria; they are lighting the lamps; the swarm grows of the eager, shabby, spendthrift crowd of young Italians, so light-hearted and fluent, and so prodigal of this old Italy of theirs--and ours. All this I have been watching as I might. Nature clings to the city, playing her rhythmic dance at the end of every street.
Nature clings. Yes; but she is within as well as without. What is that sentimental platitude of somebody's (the worst kind of platitude, is it not?) about the sun being to flowers what Art is to Life? It has the further distinction of being untrue. In Florence you learn that what he is to flowers, that he is to Art. For I soberly believe that under his rays Florence has grown open like some rare white water-lily; that sun and sky have set the conditions, struck, as it were, the chord. I have wandered through and through her recessed ways the length of this bright and breezy October week; and have marked where I walked the sun's great hand laid upon palace and cloister and bell-tower. _He_ has summoned up these flat-topped houses, these precipitous walls beneath which winds the darkened causeway. One seems to be travelling in a mountain gorge with, above, a thin ribbon of sky, fluid blue, flawless of cloud, like the sea. _He_, that so masterful sun, has given Florence the apathetic, beaten aspect of a southern town; he and the temperate sky have fixed the tone for ever; and the nimble air--"nimbly and sweetly" recommending itself-- has given the quaintness and the freaksomeness of the North. This bursts out, young and irresponsible, in pinnacle, crocket, and gable, in towers like spears, and in the eager lancet windows which peer upwards out of Orsammichele and the Dominican Church. This mixture is Florence and has made her art. The blue of the sky gives the key to her palette, the breath of the west wind, the salt wind from our own Atlantic, tingles in her _campanili_; and the Italian sun washes over all with his lazy gold. Habit and inclination both speak. She rejects no wise thing and accepts every lovely thing. Nature and Art have worked hand in hand, as they will when, we let them. For what is an art so inimitable, so innocent, so intimate as this of Tuscany, after all, but a high effort of creative Nature--_Natura naturans_, as Spinosa calls her? Here, on the weather-fretted walls, a Delia Robbia blossoms out in natural colours-- blue and white and green. They are Spring's colours. You need not go into the Bargello to understand Luca and Andrea at their happy task; as well go to a botanical museum to read the secret of April. See them on the dusty wall of Orsammichele. They have wrought the blossom of the stone--clusters of bright-eyed flowers with the throats and eyes of angels, singing, you might say, a children's hymn to Our Lady, throned and pure in the midst of the bevy. See the Spedale degli Innocenti, where a score of little flowery white children grow, open-armed, out of their sky-blue medallions. Really, are they lilies, or children, or the embodied strophes of a psalter? you ask. I mix my metaphors like an Irishman, but you will see my meaning. All the arts blend in art: "rien ne fait mieux entendre combien un faux sonnet est ridicule que de s'imaginer une femme ou une maison faite sur ce modle-l." Pascal knew; and so did Philip Sidney, "Nature never set forth the earth in so rich tapestry as divers poets have done"; and the nearer truth seems to be that Art is Nature made articulate, Nature's soul inflamed with love and voicing her secrets through one man to many. So there may be no difference between me and a cabbage-rose but this, that I can consider my own flower, how it grows, or rather, when it is grown.
It is very pleasant sometimes to think that wistful guess of Plato's true in spite of everything--that the state is the man grown great, as the universe is the state grown Infinite. It explains that Florence has a soul, the broader image of her sons', and that this soul speaks in Art, utters itself in flower of stone and starry stretches of fresco (like that serene blue and grey band in the Sistine chapel which redeems so many of Rome's waste places), sings colour-songs (there are such affairs) on church and cloister walls. Seeing