With mimicry, with praises, with echoes,
or with answers, the poets have all but outsung the
bells. The inarticulate bell has found too much
interpretation, too many rhymes professing to close
with her inaccessible utterance, and to agree with
her remote tongue. The bell, like the bird,
is a musician pestered with literature.
To the bell, moreover, men do actual
violence. You cannot shake together a nightingale’s
notes, or strike or drive them into haste, nor can
you make a lark toll for you with intervals to suit
your turn, whereas wedding-bells are compelled to
seem gay by mere movement and hustling. I have
known some grim bells, with not a single joyous note
in the whole peal, so forced to hurry for a human
festival, with their harshness made light of, as though
the Bishop of Hereford had again been forced to dance
in his boots by a merry highwayman.
The clock is an inexorable but less
arbitrary player than the bellringer, and the chimes
await their appointed time to fly — wild prisoners — by
twos or threes, or in greater companies. Fugitives — one
or twelve taking wing — they are sudden,
they are brief, they are gone; they are delivered
from the close hands of this actual present.
Not in vain is the sudden upper door opened against
the sky; they are away, hours of the past.
Of all unfamiliar bells, those which
seem to hold the memory most surely after but one
hearing are bells of an unseen cathedral of France
when one has arrived by night; they are no more to
be forgotten than the bells in “Parsifal.”
They mingle with the sound of feet in unknown streets,
they are the voices of an unknown tower; they are
loud in their own language. The spirit of place,
which is to be seen in the shapes of the fields and
the manner of the crops, to be felt in a prevalent
wind, breathed in the breath of the earth, overheard
in a far street-cry or in the tinkle of some black-smith,
calls out and peals in the cathedral bells. It
speaks its local tongue remotely, steadfastly, largely,
clamorously, loudly, and greatly by these voices;
you hear the sound in its dignity, and you know how
familiar, how childlike, how life-long it is in the
ears of the people. The bells are strange, and
you know how homely they must be. Their utterances
are, as it were, the classics of a dialect.
Spirit of place! It is for this
we travel, to surprise its subtlety; and where it
is a strong and dominant angel, that place, seen once,
abides entire in the memory with all its own accidents,
its habits, its breath, its name. It is recalled
all a lifetime, having been perceived a week, and
is not scattered but abides, one living body of remembrance.
The untravelled spirit of place — not to
be pursued, for it never flies, but always to be discovered,
never absent, without variation — lurks in
the by-ways and rules over the towers, indestructible,
an indescribable unity. It awaits us always in
its ancient and eager freshness. It is sweet
and nimble within its immemorial boundaries, but it
never crosses them. Long white roads outside
have mere suggestions of it and prophecies; they give
promise not of its coming, for it abides, but of a
new and singular and unforeseen goal for our present
pilgrimage, and of an intimacy to be made. Was
ever journey too hard or too long that had to pay such
a visit? And if by good fortune it is a child
who is the pilgrim, the spirit of place gives him
a peculiar welcome, for antiquity and the conceiver
of antiquity (who is only a child) know one another;
nor is there a more delicate perceiver of locality
than a child. He is well used to words and voices
that he does not understand, and this is a condition
of his simplicity; and when those unknown words are
bells, loud in the night, they are to him as homely
and as old as lullabies.
If, especially in England, we make
rough and reluctant bells go in gay measures, when
we whip them to run down the scale to ring in a wedding — bells
that would step to quite another and a less agile march
with a better grace — there are belfries that
hold far sweeter companies. If there is no music
within Italian churches, there is a most curious local
immemorial music in many a campanile on the heights.
Their way is for the ringers to play a tune on the
festivals, and the tunes are not hymn tunes or popular
melodies, but proper bell-tunes, made for bells.
Doubtless they were made in times better versed than
ours in the sub-divisions of the arts, and better
able to understand the strength that lies ready in
the mere little submission to the means of a little
art, and to the limits — nay, the very embarrassments — of
those means. If it were but possible to give
here a real bell-tune — which cannot be, for
those melodies are rather long — the reader
would understand how some village musician of the
past used his narrow means as a composer for the bells,
with what freshness, completeness, significance, fancy,
and what effect of liberty.
These hamlet-bells are the sweetest,
as to their own voices, in the world. Then I
speak of their antiquity I use the word relatively.
The belfries are no older than the sixteenth or seventeenth
century, the time when Italy seems to have been generally
rebuilt. But, needless to say, this is antiquity
for music, especially in Italy. At that time
they must have had foundries for bells of tender voices,
and pure, warm, light, and golden throats, precisely
tuned. The hounds of Theseus had not a more
just scale, tuned in a peal, than a North Italian belfry
holds in leash. But it does not send them out
in a mere scale, it touches them in the order of the
game of a charming melody. Of all cheerful sounds
made by man this is by far the most light-hearted.
You do not hear it from the great churches.
Giotto’s coloured tower in Florence, that carries
the bells for Santa Maria del Fiore and
Brunelleschi’s silent dome, does not ring more
than four contralto notes, tuned with sweetness, depth,
and dignity, and swinging one musical phrase which
softly fills the country.
The village belfry it is that grows
so fantastic and has such nimble bells. Obviously
it stands alone with its own village, and can therefore
hear its own tune from beginning to end. There
are no other bells in earshot. Other such dovecote-doors
are suddenly set open to the cloud, on a festa
morning, to let fly those soft-voiced flocks, but the
nearest is behind one of many mountains, and our local
tune is uninterrupted. Doubtless this is why
the little, secluded, sequestered art of composing
melodies for bells — charming division of
an art, having its own ends and means, and keeping
its own wings for unfolding by law — dwells
in these solitary places. No tunes in a town
would get this hearing, or would be made clear to
the end of their frolic amid such a wide and lofty
silence.
Nor does every inner village of Italy
hold a bell-tune of its own; the custom is Ligurian.
Nowhere so much as in Genoa does the nervous tourist
complain of church bells in the morning, and in fact
he is made to hear an honest rout of them betimes.
But the nervous tourist has not, perhaps, the sense
of place, and the genius of place does not signal to
him to go and find it among innumerable hills, where
one by one, one by one, the belfries stand and play
their tunes. Variable are those lonely melodies,
having a differing gaiety for the festivals; and a
pitiful air is played for the burial of a villager.
As for the poets, there is but one
among so many of their bells that seems to toll with
a spiritual music so loud as to be unforgotten when
the mind goes up a little higher than the earth, to
listen in thought to earth’s untethered sounds.
This is Milton’s curfew, that sways across
one of the greatest of all the seashores of poetry — “the
wide-watered.”