Perpetual sound of water. The Arno, having risen with rain, is swirling brown: cafe-au-lait. It was a green river, suggesting olive trees and the hills. It is a rushing mass of cafe-au-lait, and it has already eaten one great slice from the flight of black steps. Cafe-au- lait is not respectful. But a world of women has brought us to it.
Morning in Florence. Dark, grey, and raining, with a perpetual sound of water. Over the bridge, carriages trotting under great ragged umbrellas. Two white bullocks urged from beneath a bright green umbrella, shambling into a trot as the whip-thong flickers between their soft shanks. Two men arm-in-arm under one umbrella, going nimbly. Mid-day from San Ministo — and cannon-shots. Why cannon-shots? Innumerable umbrellas over the bridge, “like flowers of infernal moly.”
David in the Piazza livid with rain. Unforgettable, now I am safe in my upper room again. Livid — unnatural. He is made so natural that he is against nature, there in his corpse-whiteness in the rain. The Florentines say that a hot excitement, an anticipatory orgasm, possesses him at midnight of the New Year. Once told, impossible to forget. A year’s waiting. It will happen to him, this orgasm, this further exposure of his nakedness. Uncomfortable. The Neptune, the Bandinelli statues, great stone creatures, do not matter. Water trickles over their flanks and down between their thighs, without effect. But David — always so sensitive. Corpse-white and sensitive. The water sinks into him, cold, diluting his stagnant springs. And yet he waits with that tense anticipation. As if to clutch the moment. Lividl The Florentine.
Perpetual sound of water. When the sun shines, it shines with grand brilliance, and then the Arno creeps underneath like a cat, like a green-eyed cat in a strange garden. We scarcely observe. We seem to hear the sun clapping in the air, noiseless and brilliant. The aerial and inaudible music of all the sun-shaken ether, inaudible, yet surely like chimes of glass. What is a river, then, but a green thread fluttering? And now! And particularly last night. Last night the river churned and challenged with strange noises. Not a Florentine walked by the parapet. Last night enormous cat- swirls breathed hoarse beyond the bank, the weir was a fighting flurry of waters. Like enormous cats interlocked in fight, uttering strange noises. Weight of dark, recoiling water. How is this Italy?
Florence — she puts up no fight. Who hears the river in Turin? Turin camps flat in defiance. Great snowy Alps, like inquisitive gods from the North, encircle her. She sticks a brandished statue at the end of the street, full in the vista of glistening, peering snow. She pokes her finger in the eye of the gods. But Florence, the Lily-town among her hills! Her hills, her hovering waters. She can be hot, brilliant, burnt dry. But look at David! What’s the matter with him? Not sun but cold rain. Children of the South, exposing themselves to the rain. Savonarola, like a hot coal quenched. The South, the North: the fire, the wet downfall. Once there was a pure equilibrium, and the Lily blossomed. But the Lily now — livid! David, livid, almost quenched, yet still strained and waiting, tense for that orgasm. Crowds will gather at New Year’s midnight.
The Lily, the flower of adolescence. Water-born. You cannot dry a lily-bulb. Take away its watery preponderance, surcharge an excess of water, and it is finished. Its flesh is dead. Ask a gardener. A water-blossom dripped from the North. How it blossomed here in the flowery town. Obviously northerners must love Florence. Here is their last point, their most southerly. The extreme south of the Lily’s flowering. It is said the fruits are best at their extremity of climate. The southern apple is sweetest at his most northerly limit. The Lily, the Water-born, most dazzling nearest the sun. Florence, the flower-town. David!
Michelangelo’s David is the presiding genius of Florence. Not a shadow of a doubt about it. Once and for all, Florence. So young: sixteen, they say. So big: and stark-naked. Revealed. Too big, too naked, too exposed. Livid, under today’s sky. The Florentine! The Tuscan pose — half self-conscious all the time. Adolescent. Waiting. The tense look. No escape. The Lily. Lily or iris, what does it matter? Whitman’s Calamus, too.
Does he listen? Does he, with his young troubled brow, listen? What does he hear? Weep of waters? Even on bluest, hottest day, the same tension. Listen! The weep of waters. The wintry North. The naked exposure. Stripped so bare, the very kernel of youth. Stripped even to the adolescent orgasm of New Year’s night — at midwinter. Unbearable.
Dionysus and Christ of Florence. A clouded Dionysus, a refractory Christ. Dionysus, brightness of sky and moistness of earth: so they tell us is the meaning. Giver of riches. Riches of transport, the vine. Nymphs and Hamadryads, Silenus, Pan and the Fauns and Satyrs: clue to all these, Dionysus, Iacchus, Dithyrambus. David? — Dionysus, source of reed-music, water-born melody. “The Crocus and the Hyacinth in deep grass” — lily-flowers. Then wine. Dew and fire, as Pater says. Eleutherios, the Deliverer. What did he deliver? Michelangelo asked himself that; and left us the answer. Dreams, transports. Dreams, brilliant consciousness, vivid self-revelation. Michelangelo’s Dionysus, and Michelangelo’s David — what is the difference? The cloud on David. The four months of winter were sacred to Dionysus: months of wine and dreams and transport of self-realization. Months of the inner fire. The vine. Fire which even now, at New Year’s night, comes up in David. To have no issue. A cloud is on him.
Semele, scarred with lightning, gave birth prematurely to her child. The Cinque-Cento. Too fierce a mating, too fiery and potent a sire. The child was sewn again into the thigh of Zeus, re-entered into the loins of the lightning. So the brief fire-brand. It was fire overwhelming, over-weening, briefly married to the dew, that begot this child. The South to the North. Married! The child, the fire- dew, Iacchus, David.
Fire-dew, yet still too fiery. Plunge him further into the dew. Dithyrambus, the twice-born, born first of fire, then of dew. Dionysus leaping into the mists of the North, to escape his foes. David, by the Arno.
So Florence, this Lily. Here David trembled to his first perfection, on the brink of the dews. Here his soul found its perfect embodiment, in the trembling union of southern flame and northern waters. David, Dithyrambus; the adolescent. The shimmer, the instant of unstable combination, the soul for one moment perfectly embodied. Fire and dew, they call it. David, the Lily-flame, the Florentine.
The soul that held the fire and the dew clipped together in one lily-flame, where is it? David. Where is he? Cinque-Cento, a fleeting moment of adolescence. In that one moment the two eternal elements were held in consummation, forming the perfect embodiment of the human soul. And then gone. David, the Lily, the Florentine- Venus of the Scallop-Shell — Leonardo’s John the Baptist. The moment of adolescence — gone. The subtle, evanescent lily-soul. They are wistful, all of them: Botticelli’s women; Leonardo’s, Michelangelo’s men: wistful, knowing the loss even in the very moment of perfection. A day-lily, the Florentine. David frowning, Mona Lisa sadly, subtly smiling, beyond bitterness, Botticelli getting rapture out of sadness, his Venus wistfully Victrix. Fire and dew for one moment proportionate, immediately falling into disproportion.
They all knew. They knew the quenching of the flame, the breaking of the lily-balance, the passing of perfection and the pure pride of life, the inestimable loss. It had to be. They knew the mists of the North damping down. Born of the fire, they had still to be born of the mist. Christ, with his submission, universal humility, finding one level, like mist settling, like water. A new flood. Savonarola smokily quenched. The fire put out, or at least overwhelmed. Then Luther and the North.
Michelangelo, Leonardo, Botticelli, how well they knew, artistically, what was coming. The magnificent pride of life and perfection granted only to bud. The transient lily. Adam, David, Venus on her shell, the Madonna of the Rocks: they listen, all of them. What do they hear? Perpetual sound of waters. The level sweep of waters, waters overwhelming. Morality, chastity — another world drowned: equality, democracy, the masses, like drops of water in one sea, overwhelming all outstanding loveliness of the individual soul. Quenching of all flame in the great watery passivity which bears down at last so ponderous. Christ-like submissiveness which, once it bursts its bounds, floods the face of the earth with such devastation.
Pride of life! The perfect soul erect, holding the eternal elements consummate in itself. Thus for one moment the young lily David. For one moment Dionysus touched the hand of the Crucified: for one moment, and then was dragged down. Meekness flooded the soul of Dithyrambus, mist overwhelmed him. The elements supervene in the human soul, men become nature-worshippers; light, landscape and mists — these take the place of human individuality. Dionysus pale and corpse-like, there in the Piazza della Signoria. David, Venus, Saint John, all overcome with mist and surrender of the soul.
Yet no final surrender. Leonardo laughs last, even at the Crucified. David, with his knitted brow and full limbs, is unvanquished. Livid, maybe, corpse-coloured, quenched with innumerable rains of morality and democracy. Yet deep fountains of fire lurk within him. Must do. Witness the Florentines gathered at New Year’s night to watch that fiery fruitless orgasm. They laugh, but it is Leonardo’s laugh. The fire is not ridiculous. It surges recurrent. Never to be quenched. Stubborn. The Florentine.
One day David finishes his adolescence. One day he reaps his mates. It is a throbbing through the centuries of unquenchable fire, that will still leap out to consummation. The pride of life. The pride of the fulfilled self. The bud is not nipped; it awaits its maturity. Not the frail lily. Not even the clinging purple vine. But the full tree of life in blossom.