It is all a question of sensitiveness. Brute force and overbearing may make a terrific effect. But in the end, that which lives lives by delicate sensitiveness… Brute force crushes many plants. Yet the plants rise again. The pyramids will not last a moment compared with the daisy.
(Etruscan Places chapter 2)
Evil, what is evil?
There is only one evil, to deny life.
‘Etruscan Places’ was published posthumously (D.H. Lawrence died in 1930). In his biography of Lawrence, Anthony Burgess tells us it was meant to be much longer. Lawrence had been interested in the Etruscans since at least 1920. At the time they were known as the mysterious race that occupied northern Italy before the Romans obliterated them in a series of wars, wiping out their civilisation, leaving no written records, or traces of their language, or buildings. All we know is from their tombs which contain marvellous paintings and frescoes. For Lawrence they epitomised a primitive culture based on natural instinct, in touch with their pagan sensual selves, which had been wiped out by the force of abstract law and reason (the Romans).
This is obviously a grotesque distortion of the facts since, at the very least:
- if crushed they were, it was by the Roman Republic, centuries before there was a Roman Empire (see Roman–Etruscan Wars)
- the Romans were indeed an obsessively militaristic culture but at the same time they practiced a florid variety of blood-thirsty cults, traditions and ceremonies which you’d have thought Lawrence would have liked
But really what Lawrence does is reshape the Etruscans in his own image, as embattled outsiders fighting several types of ‘establishment’.
This is why the book opens with an attack on all the current historians of the ancient world, who Lawrence accuses of being in thrall to the glamour of Greece and Rome and downplaying all other cultures (one thinks of the Carthaginians in the same ‘victim’ category, but there were lots of others). And, as Burgess points out, when he writes of an empire which crushes scores of native peoples in the name of ‘freedom’ Lawrence is obviously at the same time referring to the British Empire, whose subjugation of native peoples around the world Lawrence deplored.
As history, then, the book is bordering on worthless. So wherein lies its value? Three things: 1) Lawrence’s as-usual thrillingly direct and vivid response to the Etruscan art he sees, 2) and spinning from that, the fantasias he builds up about Etruscan belief and religion, which all confirm Lawrence’s own worship of life and vitality which he projects onto ‘a vivid, life-accepting people, who must have lived with real fullness’.
And then 3) a surprisingly large part of the book has social history value as a nuts and bolts account of contemporary tourism in Italy. It takes the form of several trips or journeys he undertook with a friend, Earl Brewster (1878 to 1957) an American painter, writer and scholar, to key Etruscan sites which he describes in great detail. As such there’s a surprising amount about trains and hotels and taxis and walking through the landscape etc. So, for example, within a few pages, here he is having made it to the local train station for Cerveteri and having discovered there’s no taxi to the site so they’re just going to have to walk there.
A road not far from the sea, a bare, flattish, hot white road with nothing but a tilted oxen-wagon in the distance like a huge snail with four horns. Beside the road the tall asphodel is letting off its spasmodic pink sparks, rather at random, and smelling of cats. Away to the left is the sea, beyond the flat green wheat, the Mediterranean glistening flat and deadish, as it does on the low shores. Ahead are hills, and a ragged bit of a grey village with an ugly big grey building: that is Cerveteri. (p.99)
You have the feeling that although, in his books, essays and stories of the 1920s, Lawrence is liable to go off into the wildest fantasies about the male principle and the cosmos and the dark gods, about what he actually sees and hears and smells he is always obsessively, compulsively honest. And if this means being pretty unflattering about contemporary people and places, so be it.
1. Cerveteri
After a brief introduction satirising the Great Roman Empire, Lawrence sets off with his unnamed companion (Brewster), they arrive at Palo station, five miles from Cerveteri, which was the ancient Etruscan city of Caere, or Cere: ‘It was a gay and gaudy Etruscan city when Rome put up her first few hovels: probably.’ They have come to see the tombs.
First they have to trudge five miles along a hot dusty road to get there. Then there’s only one taverna and the food is disgusting. Eventually two boys are found to guide them to the necropolis. Apparently the Etruscans built in wood which is why their architecture has completely disappeared and been built over many times. They liked to build on the tops of hills or ridges, with a steep scarp slope and a hill opposite. The central place of the settlement was called the arx. On the hill opposite they built their necropolis, so the living could look across and see their dead.
There were loads of them. Every large tumulus covered several tombs and in the necropolis of Cerveteri there are hundreds of tombs and the same number in another hill on the other side of the town, and all filled with treasure to accompany the wealthy dead to the afterlife. And, in Lawrence’s hugely skewed opinion, for the Etruscans that afterlife was joyous:
And death, to the Etruscan, was a pleasant continuance of life, with jewels and wine and flutes playing for the dance. It was neither an ecstasy of bliss, a heaven, nor a purgatory of torment. It was just a natural continuance of the fullness of life. Everything was in terms of life, of living. (p.109)
They trudge down into the ravine and up the slope opposite to emerge on a small plain. Being Lawrence, the best bit is a page-long hymn in praise of the pink and stinky asphodel. He is in a frisky combative mood, and so takes issue with an unnamed English scholar who can’t believe the ancient Greeks made so much of this stinky plant and thinks they must have really meant our own lovely daffodil. Which Lawrence mocks.
Trust an Englishman and a modern for wanting to turn the tall, proud, sparky, dare-devil asphodel into the modest daffodil! I believe we don’t like the asphodel because we don’t like anything proud and sparky. (p.104)
And you can hear Lawrence-the-embattled speaking. Just as, in the opening pages, he scorned English puritanism and then added, rather unnecessarily:
Who isn’t vicious to his enemy? To my detractors I am a very effigy of vice.
Finally they arrive at the avenue of mushroom-shaped burial mounds and Lawrence reminds us that he is quite the globetrotter:
There is a queer stillness and a curious peaceful repose about the Etruscan places I have been to, quite different from the weirdness of Celtic places, the slightly repellent feeling of Rome and the old Campagna, and the rather horrible feeling of the great pyramid places in Mexico, Teotihuacan and Cholula, and Mitla in the south; or the amiably idolatrous Buddha places in Ceylon.
They pick up a formal guide who takes them through the fence protecting the sites and into the tombs. He describes the layout and then, for the first time, intrudes his own hobby horse about the phallus.
Here all is plain, simple, usually with no decoration, and with those easy natural proportions whose beauty one hardly notices, they come so naturally, physically. It is the natural beauty of proportion of the phallic consciousness, contrasted with the more studied or ecstatic proportion of the mental and spiritual Consciousness we are accustomed to.
On to the tomb of the Tarquins, the family that gave Etruscan kings to early Rome. Writing carved into the walls but:
We cannot read one single sentence. The Etruscan language is a mystery. Yet in Caesar’s day it was the everyday language of the bulk of the people in central Italy–at least, east-central. And many Romans spoke Etruscan as we speak French. Yet now the language is entirely lost. Destiny is a queer thing.
The feel of the tombs encourages Lawrence in his enthusiasm for his version of the Etruscans:
There is a simplicity, combined with a most peculiar, free-breasted naturalness and spontaneity, in the shapes and movements of the underworld walls and spaces, that at once reassures the spirit. The Greeks sought to make an impression, and Gothic still more seeks to impress the mind. The Etruscans, no. The things they did, in their easy centuries, are as natural and as easy as breathing. They leave the breast breathing freely and pleasantly, with a certain fullness of life. Even the tombs. And that is the true Etruscan quality: ease, naturalness, and an abundance of life, no need to force the mind or the soul in any direction. (p.109)
But the really striking feature is the numerous phallic symbols, large and small, found in every tomb.
One can live one’s life, and read all the books about India or Etruria, and never read a single word about the thing that impresses one in the very first five minutes, in Benares or in an Etruscan necropolis: that is, the phallic symbol. Here it is, in stone, unmistakable, and everywhere, around these tombs. Here it is, big and little, standing by the doors, or inserted, quite small, into the rock: the phallic stone! Perhaps some tumuli had a great phallic column on the summit: some perhaps by the door. There are still small phallic stones, only seven or eight inches long, inserted in the rock outside the doors: they always seem to have been outside.
Whereas above the entrance to every female tomb was a stone chest or box. Lawrence immediately misreads and elides the technical arx with Noah’s Ark and with the female principle.
The guide-boy, who works on the railway and is no profound scholar, mutters that every woman’s tomb had one of these stone houses or chests over it – over the doorway, he says – and every man’s tomb had one of the phallic stones, or lingams… The stone house, as the boy calls it, suggests the Noah’s Ark without the boat part: the Noah’s Ark box we had as children, full of animals. And that is what it is, the Ark, the arx, the womb. The womb of all the world, that brought forth all the creatures. The womb, the arx, where life retreats in the last refuge. The womb the ark of the covenant, in which lies the mystery of eternal life, the manna and the mysteries.
And here we can see him Lawrentising the Etruscans, aligning them with his own cult of sex in its broadest sense, to mean the great archetypes of male and female. Lawrence freely speculates that it was this overt, blatant attachment to phallic religion which prompted the Romans to wipe them out, because the Romans were interested in only two things, power and wealth.
They hated the phallus and the ark, because they wanted empire and dominion and, above all, riches: social gain. You cannot dance gaily to the double flute and at the same time conquer nations or rake in large sums of money.
2. Tarquinia
At the end of their sightseeing they catch the bus back to Poli where they could catch an evening train back to Rome but they are aiming to travel on to the next site, at Tarquinia. With two hours to kill they walk the two miles to check out Ladispoli, a seaside place, some two miles away.
And speculates about when the Etruscans arrived from over the sea, and why, and who they found inhabiting the west Italian landscape, and where their language came from. it isn’t related to either Greek or primitive Latin. We don’t know and Lawrence is no expert. Instead:
That which half emerges from the dim background of time is strangely stirring; and after having read all the learned suggestions, most of them contradicting one another; and then having looked sensitively at the tombs and the Etruscan things that are left, one must accept one’s own resultant feeling.
Back at Poli station the master gives them a decent meal of cold meats, oranges and wine and they catch the train for an hours journey south to Cività Vecchia, which is a port of not much importance, except that from here the regular steamer sails to Sardinia.
Lawrence is made very cross by a sneaking spy-official who comes up to them in the street and asks to see their passports which Lawrence angrily refuses to do. When he says ‘there wasn’t even a war on’ you remember the very long chapter in his novel ‘Kangaroo’ which describes his repeated humiliation by the wartime authorities in England and realise how extremely touchy he is about the pathetic powers of petty officialdom.
They find a hotel. Next morning they catch the 8am train one stop to Tarquinia. Lawrence notes how the Fascist regime insists on the Italian roots of all names. He mocks the Fascist claim to be reviving the old Roman Empire.
The hotel they’re guided to is owned by a husband and wife but run by their hyper-active 14-year-old son, Albertino. They visit the local museum in the Palazzo Vitelleschi when it opens at 10 (given the Fascist salute by its two officials). Lawrence has strong opinions about museums i.e. they should be local, and local artefacts should not be hauled off to museums hundreds of miles away.
If one must have museums, let them be small, and above all, let them be local. Splendid as the Etruscan museum is in Florence, how much happier one is in the museum at Tarquinia, where all the things are Tarquinian, and at least have some association with one another, and form some sort of organic whole. (p.124)
And so to the tombs. The plus words, his value words, repeated in endless variations, are:
- free-breasted naturalness and spontaneity
- ease, naturalness, and an abundance of life
- a certain naturalness and feeling
- vital life
- Etruscan vitality
- the real Etruscan liveliness and naturalness.
- life-significance
- vigorous, strong-bodied liveliness is characteristic of the Etruscans
- fresh and cleanly vivid
- naive wonder
- archaic innocence
Information about:
- the arx, the high place, the inner citadel and holy place of the city
- the early black ware decorated in scratches, or undecorated, called bucchero
- the Etruscan lucumones, or prince-magistrates, were in the first place religious seers, governors in religion, then magistrates, then princes
- the sacred patera, or mundum, the round saucer with the raised knob in the centre, which represents the round germ of heaven and earth.
3. The Painted Tombs of Tarquinia 1
So they ‘did’ the museum in the morning and in the afternoon go with a guide outside the town to the famous tombs. These have a very different feel from the splendid spacious tombs at Cerveteri.
Here there is no stately tumulus city, with its highroad between the tombs, and inside, rather noble, many-roomed houses of the dead. Here the little one-room tombs seem scattered at random on the hilltop, here and there:
The guide takes them down into:
- the Tomb of Hunting and Fishing
- the Tomb of the Feast
- the Tomb of the Dead Man
- the Tomb of the Lionesses
- the Tomb of the Maiden
- the Tomb of the Painted Vases
- the Tomb of the Old Man
- the Tomb of the Inscriptions
- the Tomb of the Leopards
Detail of the Tomb of the Leopards at Tarquinia, showing musicians ‘swiftly going with their limbs full of life, full of life to the tips’. Plate 9 of ‘Etruscan Places’
He gives detailed and sensitive assessments of the wall paintings in all these tombs, for example praising the delicacy of the way the figures touch each other.
He reflects on the local quality of Italian culture:
The Etruscans carried out perfectly what seems to be the Italian instinct: to have single, independent cities, with a certain surrounding territory, each district speaking its own dialect and feeling at home in its own little capital, yet the whole confederacy of city-states loosely linked together by a common religion and a more-or-less common interest. Even today Lucca is very different from Ferrara, and the language is hardly the same.
And:
To get any idea of the pre-Roman past we must break up the conception of oneness and uniformity, and see an endless confusion of differences.
Lawrence gives detailed verbal descriptions of ten tombs and persuasively describes how, each time they stumble back into the bright outside, stepping up from the entrances (all the tombs are carved in rock below ground level), each time the underworld of figures dancing or at feast become more and more real and the bright daylight world of indifferent grassy mounds and a dim view towards the sea, comes to seem unreal.
They finish for the day and trudge back to the hotel. Lawrence reflects on what he’s seen. As far as I know he is inventing when he writes:
Behind all the Etruscan liveliness was a religion of life, which the chief men were seriously responsible for. Behind all the dancing was a vision, and even a science of life, a conception of the universe and man’s place in the universe which made men live to the depth of their capacity. To the Etruscan all was alive; the whole universe lived; and the business of man was himself to live amid it all. (p.147)
This is very like the total animism he attributes to the native Americans the Hopi chapter of ‘Mornings in Mexico’ and Lawrence describes it for page after page.
He goes on about the Etruscan kings being ‘the life-bringers and the death-guides’, the role of the lucumo or religious prince, before waxing lyrical about the symbolism of the fish, different birds, the leopard, deer etc, the role of astrology, and so on. Within all life forms there needs to be a balance, apparently, between the fiery and the watery and much more in the same vein, which all ends with a thump when, out of nowhere, he suddenly has a pop at the great portrait painter of his day, John Singer Sergeant (1856 to 1925). Maybe there had been lots of coverage of his death as Lawrence was writing??
So the symbolism goes all through the Etruscan tombs. It is very much the symbolism of all the ancient world. But here it is not exact and scientific, as in Egypt. It is simple and rudimentary, and the artist plays with it as a child with fairy stories. Nevertheless, it is the symbolic element which rouses the deeper emotion, and gives the peculiarly satisfying quality to the dancing figures and the creatures. A painter like Sargent, for example, is so clever. But in the end he is utterly uninteresting, a bore. He never has an inkling of his own triviality and silliness. One Etruscan leopard, even one little quail, is worth all the miles of him. (p.156)
4. The Painted Tombs of Tarquinia 2
Sitting in a café overlooking the town gates, Lawrence gives way to disappointingly tired, grumpy old man tropes, comparing a completely invented fantasy of the gaily dressed Etruscan workers dancing and singing their way back from the fields, with the modern-day scene of raggedy old peasants trudging besides carts and being questioned by surly customs officials, the Dazio men (anyone bringing any goods into any Italian town had to pay a tariff).
We have lost the art of living; and in the most important science of all, the science of daily life, the science of behaviour, we are complete ignoramuses. We have psychology instead.
There are three Japanese staying at their hotel. A bit of comedy concerning the boy Albertino who is immensely amused by their difficulties using a dictionary, and who insists they’re Chinese.
Breakfast then Lawrence and Brewster collect their guide and set off to see some more of the tombs. There are about 27 in total, they’ve seen 12 so far. They fall in with a young German who’s just finished an archaeology degree, has come from seeing sites in Tunis, and is resolutely unimpressed by everything. Forty-year-old Lawrence categorises him under ‘young people today’ who, we’ve seen, he cordially laments.
Nicht viel wert! – not much worth – doesn’t amount to anything – seems to be his favourite phrase, as it is the favourite phrase of almost all young people today. Nothing amounts to anything, for the young. Well, I feel it’s not my fault, and try to bear up. But though it is bad enough to have been of the war generation, it must be worse to have grown up just after the war. One can’t blame the young, that they don’t find that anything amounts to anything. The war cancelled most meanings for them. (p.162)
Compare the post-war laments littered through Lawrence’s novel ‘Aaron’s Rod’ and the empty-headed young people in his novella, ‘The Virgin and The Gypsy’. And so they go on to visit:
- the Tomb of the Bulls
- the Tomb of the Augurs
- the Tomb of the Baron
Again, Lawrence gives detailed descriptions of the paintings in each tomb along with his attempts at interpretation of the human poses and the heraldic beasts, tying everything into his conception of the Etruscan’s freshness and vividness, seeing things with the wonder of a child.
At one point Lawrence makes the typically sweeping claim that:
Greek myths are only gross representations of certain very clear and very ancient esoteric conceptions, that are much older than the myths: or the Greeks. Myths, and personal gods, are only the decadence of a previous cosmic religion.
And suddenly I thought of Robert Graves. Graves wrote numerous books imposing his eccentric views on the ancient world, and held increasingly dotty opinions about the ancient forces of the Mediterranean, famously settling to live in Majorca. What is the link between Lawrence and Graces, Mediterranean exiles, eccentrics, worshippers of the Life Force?
Lawrence waxes lyrical about how wonderful the world of the Etruscans must have been, when people or animals weren’t just individuals but symbols of cosmic powers. He sees this demonstrated in the paintings by the way the edges of the figures are soft, indicating the way they blur into the cosmos around them – in comparison with Greek or Roman figures who are much more precisely modelled, who have edges, who have lost their connection with the cosmos.
In the final, later tombs (the Tomb of the Typhon, the Tomb of the Shields), when Etrurian towns were falling to Republican Rome (Veii, the first great Etruscan city to be captured by Rome, was taken about 388 B.C., and completely destroyed) he sees a sudden falling off of the art. It becomes mannered and external, stylised and losing all the Etruscan freshness (p.172). The conquering Romans converted the king-rulers to local administrators and overnight the magic vanished.
For Lawrence, the culture of the ancient Greeks and Romans was about power and crushed the Etruscan joy of life.
The old religion of the profound attempt of man to harmonize himself with nature, and hold his own and come to flower in the great seething of life, changed with the Greeks and Romans into a desire to resist nature, to produce a mental cunning and a mechanical force that would outwit Nature and chain her down completely, completely, till at last there should be nothing free in nature at all, all should be controlled, domesticated, put to man’s meaner uses.
And he goes on to propose an interesting idea: that it was precisely when this freshness was being crushed, that the idea of hell arose.
Curiously enough, with the idea of the triumph over nature arose the idea of a gloomy Hades, a hell and purgatory. To the peoples of the great natural religions the after-life was a continuing of the wonder-journey of life. To the peoples of the Idea the afterlife is hell, or purgatory, or nothingness, and paradise is an inadequate fiction.
No point visiting any more of the tombs. The decadent, corrupt Roman vision has taken over. And yet in an act of historical injustice, it is these last, decadent tomb paintings, the ones of hell, that the historians who want to damn the Etruscans refer to as evidence of their morbidity. Lawrence damns the historians for being so hidebound by conventional praise of Rome as to be incapable of seeing the laughing, dancing freshness he has just described in such detail in the earlier, truly Etruscan tombs.
Having finished with the tombs Lawrence comments on the view. He imagines the Etruscans farmed the land in families, completely unlike the Romans who created luxury villas supported by the forced labour of hordes of slaves, locked up at night in barracks. But in the last century of the Republic the Romans realised more wealth came from trade and slowly abandoned the land (as all the poets of the Golden Age lament), paving the way – Lawrence says, with sweeping historical generalisation – for the Dark Ages.
5. Vulci
Apparently, ancient Etruria consisted of a league or loose religious confederacy of twelve cities, each city embracing some miles of country all around. Of these twelve city-states, Tarquinii was supposed to be the oldest, the chief city, Caere, was not far off, to the north, and Vulci was a dozen miles north of Tarquinia. So hither Lawrence and Brewster make their way.
They take another train, just one stop north to Montalto di Castro. Here there is a lot of faff with the malarial locals organising a lift in a cart the five miles to Vulci. It is a two-wheeled gig driven by a local youth and costs 50 lire to lumber them across the Maremma. What is the Maremma? I’m glad you asked.
We were on the Maremma, that flat, wide plain of the coast that has been water-logged for centuries, and one of the most abandoned, wildest parts of Italy. Under the Etruscans; apparently, it was an intensely fertile plain. But the Etruscans seem to have been very clever drainage-engineers; they drained the land so that it was a waving bed of wheat, with their methods of intensive peasant culture. Under the Romans, however, the elaborate system of canals and levels of water fell into decay, and gradually the streams threw their mud along the coast and choked themselves, then soaked into the land and made marshes and vast stagnant shallow pools where the mosquitoes bred like fiends, millions hatching on a warm May day; and with the mosquitoes came the malaria, called the marsh fever in the old days. Already in late Roman times this evil had fallen on the Etruscan plains and on the Campagna of Rome. Then, apparently, the land rose in level, the sea-strip was wider but even more hollow than before, the marshes became deadly, and human life departed or was destroyed, or lingered on here and there.
Now the Italian government was draining this huge area and bringing it back into cultivation. Lawrence questions the boy-driver, Luigi, about it, as they jog along in the very jolty cart over the rutted track. It’s a fascinating drive, with much comment on the wildlife and then on the history. A ruined castle guards the border between the Papal States and Tuscany. Lawrence tells us that it was occupied by Lucien Bonaparte, Prince of Canino, brother of Napoleon who lived here after the death of his brother, as an Italian prince.
When, in 1828, ploughing oxen fell through the surface of the earth into a tomb, Lucien ordered them all excavated. He instructed the excavators to preserve every bit of painted ware but ordered the coarse black Etruscan ware to be smashed, to prevent the cheapening of the market. So for months the work of digging up and smashing all Etruscan pots went ahead under the auspices of a watchman overseeing the work with a gun. It’s a wonder any old remains survive humanity’s short-sighted stupidity, isn’t it?
So the tombs were thoroughly looted and despoiled and this explains why there’s not much to see at Vulci. Instead this chapter is most about the nervousness of their ‘guide’ who turns out not to be sure where the tombs are, of the strange atmosphere at the castle, when half a dozen man arrive on bicycles. Turns out they’re labourers come to collect their pay. There’s a shop there but it’s closed so Lawrence has to shout up to a woman in a window and ask for a candle which she throws down. All strange and unnerving.
First they are taken to the river tombs which are empty apart from rubbish and damaged sarcophagi scattered randomly, some still containing bones. They are extensive, clammy and depressing. Emerging from these they ask the guide they picked up at the castle, 40-year-old Mario, to show them some tumuli like small hills, away over the heather. They have to scramble down underneath brambles and enter what turns out to be an endless labyrinth of passages which never arrive at any definitive tomb or central chamber. No paintings at all. Nothing.
6. Volterra
Volterra is the most northerly of the great Etruscan cities of the west. It lies back some thirty miles from the sea, on a towering great bluff of rock that gets all the winds and sees all the world, looking out down the valley of the Cecina to the sea, south over vale and high land to the tips of Elba, north to the imminent mountains of Carrara, inward over the wide hills of the Pre-Apennines, to the heart of Tuscany.
Lawrence and Brewster get there by train, then change to a cog-and-ratchet line where one carriage is pushed by a small engine behind to arrive at the little town with its one hotel. They discover there’s going to be a banquet that evening for a new governor who’s arriving for Florence, which prompts a little digression on Italian politics and what is (maybe) a shrewd insight into the Italian character.
It was a cold, grey afternoon, with winds round the hard dark corners of the hard, narrow medieval town, and crowds of black-dressed, rather squat little men and pseudo-elegant young women pushing and loitering in the streets, and altogether that sense of furtive grinning and jeering and threatening which always accompanies a public occasion–a political one especially–in Italy, in the more out-of-the-way centres. It is as if the people, alabaster-workers and a few peasants, were not sure which side they wanted to be on, and therefore were all the more ready to exterminate anyone who was on the other side. This fundamental uneasiness, indecision, is most curious in the Italian soul. It is as if the people could never be wholeheartedly anything: because they can’t trust anything. And this inability to trust is at the root of the political extravagance and frenzy. They don’t trust themselves, so how can they trust their ‘leaders’ or their party’?
Does this sweeping generalisation about ‘the Italian soul’ have any validity? Does it explain Italy’s notoriously fickle and unstable politics for more or less the last hundred years? Lawrence makes quite clear his political agnosticism. In the crowd of people awaiting the banquet:
The cheeky girls salute one with the ‘Roman’ salute, out of sheer effrontery: a salute which has nothing to do with me, so I don’t return it. Politics of all sorts are anathema. But in an Etruscan city which held out so long against Rome I consider the Roman salute unbecoming, and the Roman imperium unmentionable… But it is not for me to put even my little finger in any political pie. I am sure every post-war country has hard enough work to get itself governed, without outsiders interfering or commenting. Let those rule who can rule. (p.200)
They tour round the town, see the piazza and church and the old walls and, beyond them, the staggering views as the sun sets. Back to the hotel where all the waiters are so excited setting up the banquet for the new governor that they can barely get served.
Next morning to the local museum to see the unique ‘urns’, in fact sarcophagi, made from the local Volterran alabaster, easy to work and carve. So it’s the decorative statues atop the urns which appeal. Lawrence has a digression about the ‘perfection’ of Greek art which he finds too controlled, finished and soulless. Give him the more artless, vivid Etruscan carvings.
He has an interesting passage on the symbolic meaning of the beasts carved into many of the urns, ‘sea-monsters, the seaman with fish-tail, and with wings, the sea-woman the same: or the man with serpent-legs, and wings, or the woman the same’. These things are all coming up from the depths where ancient people thought lay the real powers of the world.
The portrait carvings of people on the lids of the sarcophagi are crude. The sarcophagi are small, often only two foot long, so the figures seem stunted or with unnaturally large heads and stunted bodies. Lawrence considers this a northern Etrurian style, lacking the energy and grace of the southern images, holding the seeds of the grotesque Gothic within them.
Only a couple of tombs are open but Lawrence didn’t see them. Most of the ones out in the fields have been flattened for agricultural land. One entire tomb has been transferred in its entirety to the garden of the Florence museum. Lawrence describes visiting it but this only triggers his usual lament about leaving antiquities where they are found.
Why, oh why, wasn’t the tomb left intact as it was found, where it was found? The garden of the Florence museum is vastly instructive, if you want object-lessons about the Etruscans. But who wants object-lessons about vanished races? What one wants is a contact. The Etruscans are not a theory or a thesis. If they are anything, they are an experience. (p.214)
Thoughts
The book is more genuinely about the Etruscans than Mornings in Mexico is about Mexico (seeing as nearly half the chapters in that book are set in the United States). It is more systematic and, as I’ve indicated, goes into great detail about what is to be seen. The original book contained 14 pretty good black and white photos of the wall paintings and urn carvings he describes. And yet…
I’ve been to many of the classic archaeological sites, to the pyramids, Luxor and the Valley of the Kings in Egypt, to Mycenae and Delphi in Greece, to Troy in Turkey, to our very own Stonehenge. At the time I overflowed with imagination, I knew all the stories and was entranced by their glamour. But now, reading this book, I found the entire archaeological content a bit tiring. I most enjoyed his descriptions of flowers and views and people: of the living, of life: the hyperactive 14-year-old hotel manager Albertino, the reluctant guide Luigi, the brash young women in the Volterra hotel giving Fascist salutes. Lawrence himself says something similar, all the way back in 1925.
Why has mankind had such a craving to be imposed upon? Why this lust after imposing creeds, imposing deeds, imposing buildings, imposing language, imposing works of art? The thing becomes an imposition and a weariness at last. Give us things that are alive and flexible, which won’t last too long and become an obstruction and a weariness.
I like to think of the little wooden temples of the early Greeks and of the Etruscans: small, dainty, fragile, and evanescent as flowers. We have reached the stage when we are weary of huge stone erections, and we begin to realize that it is better to keep life fluid and changing than to try to hold it fast down in heavy monuments.
Everything is in flux. Accept it. Rejoice in it. This is Lawrence’s creed.
Slavery
I am against slavery, in all its forms, throughout history. As I’ve written in many posts, slavery was almost universal in all human societies until relatively recently, just as empires have been the most frequent ways for humans to organise their societies. They aren’t the exceptions, they are the (horrifying) rule. Doesn’t justify either of them, my blog just tries to place them in proper historical perspective.
Anyway, Lawrence makes a big deal throughout the book of really sharply distinguishing between Greek (too intellectual and finished) and Roman (too brutal and imperial) cultures, and his beloved Etruscans, overflowing with ‘free-breasted naturalness’ and so on.
But when he describes the wall paintings in the tombs of Tarquinia, he casually mentions the slave boys and slave men and slave women waiting attendance on The Rich in this free-breasted society and, grouch that I am, I have to point out that, like so many fans of the ancient world (Egypt, Greece, Rome) he sings the praises of an ancient culture and ignores the fact that it was built and maintained and fed by mass slavery every bit as evil as the slave systems created by the European nations and existing in the United States until 1865. Lawrence tries to make out that his Etruscan slaves were happier than the Roman type.
There is a certain dance and glamour in all the movements, even in those of the naked slave men. They are by no means downtrodden menials, let later Romans say what they will. The slaves in the tombs are surging with full life. (p.134)
And I sort of take the point, acknowledging the well-attested historical fact that there were thousands of different types of slavery, from being worked to death in silver mines, shackled to an oar in a galley, being whipped in a plantation field, through to being a scented secretary to a senator or maid to a fine lady. But still, still… I cleave to a simple principle: If you hate slavery in one incarnation, in one place – then you hate slavery everywhere, at all times. The Etruscans may have been the happy-go-lucky lovers of life of Lawrence’s dreams – but all these tombs celebrate filthy rich slave-owners. Yuk.
Cypresses
Off the back of these trips and his obsession with the Etruscans, Lawrence wrote a magnificent poem, cypresses. It was a stroke of genius to associate their entire lost culture with the dark and brooding trees, like tall dark flames, which you see in Italy, and then to interrogate them about their mystery. As you’ll see, towards the end he becomes more argumentative, reprising his defence of the life-loving Etruscans against the legalistic and militaristic Romans.
Tuscan cypresses,
What is it?
Folded in like a dark thought
For which the language is lost,
Tuscan cypresses,
Is there a great secret?
Are our words no good?
The undeliverable secret,
Dead with a dead race and a dead speech, and yet
Darkly monumental in you,
Etruscan cypresses.
Ah, how I admire your fidelity,
Dark cypresses!
Is it the secret of the long-nosed Etruscans?
The long-nosed, sensitive-footed, subtly-smiling Etruscans,
Who made so little noise outside the cypress groves?
Among the sinuous, flame-tall cypresses
That swayed their length of darkness all around
Etruscan-dusky, wavering men of old Etruria:
Naked except for fanciful long shoes,
Going with insidious, half-smiling quietness
And some of Africa’s imperturbable sang-froid
About a forgotten business.
What business, then?
Nay, tongues are dead, and words are hollow as seed-pods,
Having shed their sound and finished all their echoing
Etruscan syllables,
That had the telling.
Yet more I see you darkly concentrate,
Tuscan cypresses,
On one old thought:
On one old slim imperishable thought, while you remain
Etruscan cypresses;
Dusky, slim marrow-thought of slender, flickering men of Etruria,
Whom Rome called vicious.
Vicious, dark cypresses:
Vicious, you supple, brooding, softly-swaying pillars of dark flame.
Monumental to a dead, dead race
Embowered in you!
Were they then vicious, the slender, tender-footed
Long-nosed men of Etruria?
Or was their way only evasive and different, dark, like cypress-trees in a wind?
They are dead, with all their vices,
And all that is left
Is the shadowy monomania of some cypresses
And tombs.
The smile, the subtle Etruscan smile still lurking
Within the tombs,
Etruscan cypresses.
He laughs longest who laughs last;
Nay, Leonardo only bungled the pure Etruscan smile.
What would I not give
To bring back the rare and orchid-like
Evil-yclept Etruscan?
For as to the evil
We have only Roman word for it,
Which I, being a little weary of Roman virtue,
Don’t hang much weight on.
For oh, I know, in the dust where we have buried
The silenced races and all their abominations,
We have buried so much of the delicate magic of life.
There in the deeps
That churn the frankincense and ooze the myrrh,
Cypress shadowy,
Such an aroma of lost human life!
They say the fit survive,
But I invoke the spirits of the lost.
Those that have not survived, the darkly lost,
To bring their meaning back into life again,
Which they have taken away
And wrapt inviolable in soft cypress-trees,
Etruscan cypresses.
Evil, what is evil?
There is only one evil, to deny life
As Rome denied Etruria
And mechanical America Montezuma still.
Genius.
Credit
‘Etruscan Places’ by D.H. Lawrence was published by Martin Secker in 1932. References are to the 1975 Penguin paperback edition.
Related links
- Etruscan Places online
- Original photos from Etruscan Places
- Etruscan civilization (Wikipedia article)
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