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
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