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ANOTHER WAY

If all the year were playing holidays,
To sport would be as tedious as to work.

I

Henry IV., Part I., I. ii. 197.

F you take a dog out for a walk you will see him hastening from one selected point to another with an air of extreme eagerness. To each he addresses his nostrils seriously. Then he speeds on to the next as if every moment were his last-before life fails he must put forth the strength and the refinement of his nose upon the enthralling fragrance of all the choicer ingredients of life. Whole campaigns of seemingly impassioned sniffing are thus prosecuted. For, surely, the business must, like a campaign, have some sort of cohesion; a dog of parts cannot be always accumulating mere odoriferous data, mere isolated and disparate facts; some elements of a philosophy must emerge; some rude culture, some infant critical system.

In such a dog the memory must presently resemble a room hung, in some order or other, with etchings of persons, places and leading events-every print a smell, every line a contributive whiff. Novels say that a drowning man, at the moment of his departure, lives through all his past days again. If so, what chords, fugues and canons of perfume may have thronged for one supreme instant the gifted nostrils of the unfortunates sometimes observable in our canals and ponds. Think, too, of what may pass

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when two aged dogs, aromatists of the old school, meet and communicate. Vieille école, bonne école, begad! -of course they share that tender sentiment with Major Pendennis and all God's other veteran creatures; Cæsar must signify somehow to Luath that Ponto's extinction last week has severed one of the few links that remained with the dear dead days when a smell was a smell; and Luath no doubt would call up, with some reminiscent flick of the muzzle, the fine collectorship of the dead, the fund of choice aromas hoarded in his memory, and his exquisite sense of relative values in various scents. 'He was a dog, take him for all in all, we shall not ever smell his like again."

II

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This pitch of assiduity in the employment of any one sense is not easily attained by man. Still, an approach has been made by some American and English persons of an advanced culture. Released from the cares of this world they have given themselves, as whole-time devotees, to the snuffing up of the immemorial odours of charmful places, their distinctive essence and characteristic appeal. The war may have thinned them out. No doubt it somewhat changed the personnel of the corps; for it redistributed wealth, and aromatists have to be more or less wealthy. It must at any rate have discommoded them. The fifty years before it were their great time for maturing, that being Europe's season of greatest wealth and easiest transport and least discourtesy all round. France, from Paris southwards, knew the

breed; specimens were to be seen in the older German and Austrian towns; the Prado drew some to Madrid; the Hermitage took others to St. Petersburg. But Italy was the place; to various degrees of density the whole peninsula was speckled with highly civilised aliens who had contrived to convert our intractable life into one elegant and exquisite holiday. We others, plain workingfolk taking a month's rest from our labours, would find them in permanent occupation of Florence, Bologna, Perugia, Assisi, a little faint at times with sheer excess of masterpieces, but still pursuing. Or in the Alps we would meet them in summer, when they had fallen away for the moment, fully charged and slightly lethargic, like the mosquito after his meals, from the year-long fruition of beauty and ancientry; there they would give their o'er-laboured noses a total rest, amidst the salubrious vacuity and nullity—for all the higher purposes of peak and glacier, before these delicate corporal agents were bent up once more to the strenuous enjoyment of the perfumed past.

Do not confuse these devotees with people who go to live on the Lung Arno or over the Grand Canal in order to write learned or sensitive books, or to bottle atmosphere for a novel, or else to screw themselves up to the needful point for emitting authentic poetry. A Browning may live in a large Renaissance palace at Venice by way of his trade; he sucks up local colour industrially, much as a hound inhales the scent of a fox, or a specialist pig absorbs the faint, fine odour of truffles. To each the congenial redolence is so much raw material

for his professional toils. Doubtless all the three animals like it. But that only shows that each has found his vocation and not that they are mere animals of pleasure. The whole-hog aromatist is. From him nothing of household use, such as a poem, the brush of a fox, or a good truffle, proceeds. He just, in the highest and purest and most intelligent sense, but still quite unproductively, sniffs and sniffs and sniffs again, like our friends Beppo and Rover on their walks. Rich enough not to bother, cultivated up to the nines, undistracted by family duties, or abdicating them freely, good aromatists turn from the relatively infragrant lands of their birth to live in the pink jails that pass for villas in Piedmont or in mouldering masterpieces of Lombard Gothic. They cast from them, for ever, even those lighter pursuits of the chase or the board-room which almost convince the British squire. or guinea-pig that he does some sort of work in return for his rather expensive keep. They leave all, just to exist intensely as so many perfected systems of perceptions, persistently stringing like beads their countless smooth round days of receptivity in galleries, churches and squares, in Boboli and Pincian Gardens and along the Appian Way, always quickening and re-quickening their discriminant sense of some distinctive quality in this or in that—in the bespangled and twinkling Ravenna mosaics, in Botticelli's piquant betrayals of sceptical lassitude or in the startling wild grace of Donatello, in John Bellini's great love or Luini's capital sugar. There they are, a standing public for the quattrocento, a “gate for the Renaissance; while they subsist, the last enchant

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ments of the Middle Age, whispering from Giotto's tower and Brunelleschi's dome, are sure of an audience that has its receivers properly tuned.

III

Some of them were baffling company for us plain souls. They would practise astute refinements of pleasure that we had not thought of. Only in certain moods of one's own, they would say, should certain places be seen. It was mere bungling and waste to address oneself to the whispering Umbrian peace of Perugia in the key of urbane animation congenial to Florence— poor old Florence, now so overrun. Only a clown would bring to Sorrento the trailing mood of melancholy that gave Venice-the Venice of twenty years sinceits fullest value for sensitive souls, or accost the lingering sunshine and the crumbling walls of that lost Venice in the spirit of delicate epicurean positivism propitious to a proper absorption of the essential Neapolitan savours.

These leaders of the march of taste seemed always to have just discovered some quintessential new essence of charm, some real right thing which we ought to have heard of already, but hadn't. They used to leave us standing, just when we thought that we had all but caught up. Venice, it seemed, was all very well, but did we not know that the last distillation of the basic spirit of her early life was to be caught at―O no; not at Torcello; poor old Ruskin might have fancied thatbut in some squat rural slum on the mainland; or else among those drear, bald quays of northern Venice where

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