Fireworks and lanterns in the deepening dusk before true nightfall: coloured lights in trees, shining globes along white esplanades at the frontiers of the dark. There is an otherworldly quality to these things, these attempts to draw out and prolong the fading evenings beyond the frontiers of the summer. In Japan, a cloud of fireflies was released at the culmination of an evening party.1 Candle lanterns, paper lanterns hung in the trees: planets and glow-worms. There is an inevitable poignancy attending the fireworks and candles that attempt to draw out and prolong the long evenings of high summer when they are already shortening and fading. Even though it is described almost entirely in terms of the visual arts of the day, how sad this early twentieth-century evening party now seems:
Below, on the water, lanterns were coming alight, faint ghosts of warm flame floating in the pallor of the first twilight. The earth was spread with darkness, like lacquer, overhead was a pale sky, all primrose, and the lake was pale as milk in one part . . . All round, shadow was gathering from the trees.2
John Singer Sargent’s famous picture of children lighting lanterns in a garden, Carnation, Lily, Lily, Rose, had its origin in just such a moment observed in August 1885 on the upper reaches of the Thames, where Sargent was boating with an American friend: ‘I am trying to paint a charming thing I saw the other evening. Two little girls in a garden at twilight lighting paper lanterns from rose-tree to rose-tree. I shall be a long time about it if I don’t give up in despair.’3 Part of the purpose of the whole lies in the very belatedness that is crucial to the painting and its atmosphere (indeed in a letter to R. L. Stevenson, in which he also identifies the way in which the sight of the children and the lantern had become entwined in his imagination with the phrase that eventually gave the picture its title, Sargent remembers the month as September rather than August).4 Yet this is balanced by a sense of celebration – the lanterns amongst the flowers are able to prolong the gathering in the garden beyond the daylight and lucid twilight to the threshold of the night. Sargent lamented that he had seen his ‘most paradisic sight’ so late in the year, that it had come too late for him to capture the extraordinary effect of falling light that had first moved him, seeing the lanterns in the garden across the water.
The process by which the finished painting came into being is chronicled by Sargent’s letters, and by the survival of numerous sketches and discarded versions, as well as by the intensity of working and reworking on the finished canvas.5 Sargent painted on in the shortening autumn dusks of 1885, asserting that by November he was reduced to tying artificial flowers to withered rose-trees. Carnation, Lily, Lily, Rose was not finished until the October of the following year, after much careful advance planting of lilies and equally careful timing of the few minutes in any day when the light was right: diffused, slightly purpled twilight to make the flowers, clothes and lanterns stand forward from their green background. He would place his easel and paints beforehand, and pose his models in anticipation of the few moments when he could paint in the right light: ‘Paints are not bright enough and then the effects only last ten minutes.’6
This is an extreme attempt at the old task of painting the moment as though in a moment, but in this case it took years and endless stopwatch-timings of shifting twilights to achieve. Yet the finished painting is little haunted by the feeling of fugacity that usually attends such images captured from changing light; a sense pervades it rather of quiet illumination and of darkness and autumn held at bay.
The title cites a line from a song from the 1800s that seems to have remained popular through to the end of the nineteenth century.7 It appears, for example, in 1870 as one moment of illumination in the crepuscular second chapter of Dickens’s last novel, The Mystery of Edwin Drood, where the benign Mr Crisparkle claims the song for the light that is ciphered by his name, singing it as he moves innocently out of the shadowy lodgings of the dark choirmaster, through the oppressive autumn twilight that haunts and shapes the novel. The song is also mentioned as intensely and widely popular in an 1877 letter by Stevenson,8 and it was reprinted as late as 1892, six years after Sargent’s picture was finished. Yet in content and musical style, the song (or, more precisely, glee) looks backward to the eighteenth century. The flowers compose a wreath worn by Flora as she passes through a pastoral landscape and their beauties are seen as reflections of her own. So the verbal and musical phrase that Sargent expected to echo in the viewer’s mind as they contemplated his picture in the 1880s would have been one shaped by the decorum of the previous century, an echo from a world growing remote, a parallel effect of old-world distancing to the removed twilight garden glimpsed across the river.
H. D.’s poem ‘Evening’ also isolates and commemorates the moment when civil twilight gives way to nautical twilight in a summer garden. Pale flowers fade into shadow as though the petals were folding in upon themselves and thus vanishing from sight – until a wash of dimness consumes all in the astronomical twilight that ushers in the night:
Shadow seeks shadow
Then both leaf
And leaf-shadow are lost.9
The slow leaf-drift of the lines is itself expressive of the drawn-out, suspended movement of the summer evening.
Baudelaire’s twilight place in ‘Harmonie du soir’ evokes a pleasure garden with a dance floor, high summer and the overpowering scent of lilies, a melancholy waltz on the evening air. And yet, as the imagery of the poem insists in troubled counterpoint, this place of summer pleasure is paralleled with the desolate liturgy of Maundy Thursday, the removal of the Host from the tabernacle, enacted desecrations, the stripping of the altars. Fear of the dark opposes the desire to retain every glimmer of the past day. Melancholy and pleasure and twilight are haunted by sombre, sacred enactments.
Voici venir les temps où vibrant sur sa tige
Chaque fleur s’évapore ainsi qu’un encensoir;
Les sons et les parfums tournent dans l’air du soir;
Valse mélancolique et langoureux vertige!10
See the hours come when quivering on its stalk, each flower gives forth its scent like a censer; the sounds and the perfumes turn in the evening air, melancholy waltz and languorous vertigo.
Even amongst the sensual beauties of the moment, the slow turns of the waltz and the outpouring of scent from the twilight flowers, fear and loss and regret are present. The final lines recall lost love and the sun setting red on the horizon, memory glimmering like the Host in the monstrance.
Un coeur tendre, qui hait le néant vaste et noir,
Du passé lumineux recueille tout vestige!
Le soleil s’est noyé dans son sang qui se fige . . .
Ton souvenir en moi luit comme un ostensoir!11
A tender heart which hates the great dark emptiness, recalling every trace of the brightness now gone; the sun drowns in its clotting blood, your memory flames in me like a monstrance.
The dance hall is transfigured and solemnized, the sacred and the profane coexist in air thick with the incense of the flowers.
The summer twilights of the Europe before the Great War are an imaginative territory that returns continually to haunt contemporary poets in English, as in Sean O’Brien’s thoughtful cento of Rilke, ‘Abendmusik’. The poet is present at a musical gathering in the drawing-room of a great house by the water:
. . . You promise an angel
To meet us, here in this room – let it be now –
In the stars, in the dusk-heavy pier-glass
Containing the river . . . 12
But the angel never materializes, and an atmosphere of waiting, repetition, even entrapment, grows slowly as stars come out but the evening never moves into night. Very much the same feeling is evoked by John Ash’s ‘Without Being Evening’: the elegant society of an empire reaching its end is in a city with views out to seas and mountains, inhabiting a world of stasis and languor, with natural and supernatural dangers waiting just out of sight. The poem works within the tension between belle époque Europe, and the slow fall of the empires of the ancient world, city and shadow:
From café terraces it is pleasant to watch
the changing colours of the mountains
as evening approaches, to conjure
images of those near places it would be
too troubling actually to visit –
places where, at this hour, a deer steps down
to a blue pool like an eye . . .13
Both of these poets are, more or less directly, paying homage to Rainer Maria Rilke, himself a twilight figure inhabiting the end of an empire, of a European order, but poised in the shadows between multiple worlds, two of which might be identified as aristocratic and modernist.
THE MANY BOOKSHOPS of Trieste all display piles of bilingual editions of the Elegie duinesi. Rilke’s great Duino Elegies were begun a few miles to the west of the city, on a night of black wind blowing over the clifftop castle at Duino, and in the wind he thought he heard the celebrated first line of supplication to the unheeding orders of angels. The rich ambiguities of the Elegies fit them for local adoption, naturalization. (The city was Austrian when Rilke began them, Italian by the time they were finished.)
These Elegies are shot through with evening, as in the lovers in the First Elegy ‘speaking wondrously in the night air’14 (‘in der Nachtluft wunderlich reden’) and the overflowing calendar of affirmations of the Seventh Elegy:
nicht nur die Wege, nicht nur die Wiesen im Abend,
nicht nur, nach spätem Gewitter, das atmende Klarsein,
. . .
sondern die Nächte! Sondern die hohen, des Sommers,
Nächte, sondern die Sterne, die Sterne der Erde.15
Not only the paths, not only the meadows at twilight, not that breathing at dusk, not that brightness which follows the storm . . . but the nights, the nights too, those tall nights of Summer, but the stars too, the stars of our Earth.
And it is by such evening paths through abruptly remote country that Rilke’s last shape-shifting protagonist – the ‘jungen Toten’ – the young man who has just died in the Tenth Elegy – follows a mature woman who is the personification of Grief, who is Grief itself, guardian of a starlit mountain landscape of authentic sorrow, into which the dead boy makes his way under blazing summer heavens. Their place of departure has been from one of Rilke’s most disconcerting and elusive constructions, a raucous fairground on the outskirts of the City of Mourning (or, rather, the City of False Consolation). Beyond this fairground, beyond the hoardings that advertise an extra-bitter beer called ‘Deathless’, is a twilight place (time of day is not precisely defined, but the pursuit of Grief that begins here passes in seven lines to the night valleys and the starlit mountains) and the region lies in dusk as a place of transition, its reality (‘ists wirklich’) as a place lying between imaginary and expressive worlds:
. . . O aber gleich darüber hinaus,
Hinter den letzten Planke . . .
. . .
Kinder spielen, und Liebende halten einander, – abseits,
ernst, im ärmlichen Gras, und Hunde haben Natur.16
. . . Just opposite, only just after the last of the hoardings . . . Children are playing, and lovers, a little apart, Hold one another on thin, threadbare grass, and dogs will be dogs.
This whole imagined borderland of fairground and back-lot resonates with a letter of Sylvia Townsend Warner’s describing the work of an unidentified young poet of the 1940s, a letter which is itself almost a prose poem about urban high summer: ‘He has got the emotion of vulgarity, the overtone of fairs and bank holidays and crowded summer parks, and people coming back in the evening from their day out . . . this particular smell of bruised public grass.’17
LOOKING SEAWARD from the Piazza Grande and crowded esplanades of Trieste on an evening of high summer, into the myriad colours of the Adriatic clouds at nautical twilight (their roses and yellows beginning to fade into uniform tones of grey and blue) brings another line of Rilke’s to mind, from one of his matchless poems on autumn: ‘Als welkten in den Himmeln ferne Gärten’ (As farthest gardens dwindle in the skies). This image immediately recalls one of the forgotten translations that I edited as a student (an example of that crepuscular phenomenon, English baroque), a momentary interpolation in a masque, a three-line improvisation on the evening sky:
. . . Like Summer’s Clouds
When the Day feels a light’ning before Death,
Or Gardens in the Air.18
Evening draws the high-summer crowds to walk on the esplanade and out into the Adriatic on the great stone jetties, the Mole, which reach westward into the waters, out towards the Habsburg palace of Miramare and the distant castle at Duino. It is inevitable that this book should find its end at Trieste, if a place can be (in a positive sense) a twilight place, then this frontier city, which I prefer to think of as a ‘hinge city’, is that place. It is also a haven at the turn of the Adriatic that offers an unrivalled point of vantage for the observation of the progress of twilight over water. Its great contemporary topographer, Claudio Magris, defines the gulf that stretches between the last Venetian outpost of Grado and the former Habsburg territories on the mainland: ‘Those eleven kilometres mark the passage from the airy marine ethos of Venice to a continental and problematic Mitteleuropa, grand, morose laboratory of a civilisation’s discontents, expert in emptiness and death.’19
Trieste is a place of twilights in itself – between languages, between western and central Europe. Culturally, the city is beguilingly ‘transitional Europe’, with Catholic, Greek and Serbian Orthodox cathedrals (S Giusto, S Nicolò, S Spiridione), as well as a fine synagogue: a cosmopolitan, pragmatically tolerant city, with considerable future potential as a place of convergence and discovery. Architecturally and linguistically it is hybrid: Italian, Slav, German. Indeed, all those languages were used at one point or another one evening at our table in the Caffè Tommaseo (as well as the new, inescapable lingua franca, English). A place of exile, perhaps disproportionately so in the imaginations of scholars of Anglo-Irish literature. From one perspective it is a city at the end of a line, the eastern terminus of the railway from Venice and Rome, from the familiar cities. And beyond it are territories coming to focus in the western imagination. Indistinct kingdoms – Istria, Illyria – are lost to the south beyond the capes and the sea haze.
As evening comes on the city blazes with light, brighter than any liner seen across the waters: floodlight and lamplight, refracted and reflected. One of the most complete and elegant ensembles created between the 1870s and 1930s is the great sea-square, the Piazza Unità d’Italia, with its flanking white stucco esplanades – the Savoia Excelsior hotel, great palaces of commerce and marine insurance. Tall clusters of lights on magnificent standards in the Piazza. Globes of yellowish light all along the esplanades and some way along the Molo Audace, the chief pier and promenade thrown out into the waters. Glimpses up into the hills, to the floodlit citadel of ancient Cathedral and Roman forum; the lights of distant villas amongst trees. Pale stucco grandeurs along the esplanade: S Nicolò ‘dei Greci’ with its pediment and flanking towers; a great domed insurance building with statues flickering on the skyline. Cafés, hotels, restaurants. Music coming and going with the soft onshore wind.
The whole ensemble is a realization of all the nineteenth-century fantasies of the city radiant with electricity, of the city of light. On the Molo dei Bersaglieri the shallow arches of the art deco Stazione Marittima are lit with a greenish radiance, as though the lights shone through the aqueous etched glass of that epoch. This is the pier where great liners still dock. It can be seen at the end of the view down from high windows in the old town, with a liner the size of a cathedral at its end, under a late afternoon sky that turns (at this season) early to grey and rose with the airborne dust from the uplands behind the city.
Turning away from that brilliance, from the belle époque ensemble of white stucco and high, blazing streetlights, turning onto the Molo Audace, you see twilight prolonged to the west in all the rich subtleties of advancing evening – the depths of colour in the sea and sky, which are not yet night, not yet even astronomical twilight, but profoundest nautical twilight greatly prolonged. Lucent blues – aquamarine below, lapis lazuli above – still shine from the west, with subtler refractions of madder red and light-shot azure on the water below. The sun may seem far below the horizon, but there is still moving light in the sky. Time seems suspended, nightfall postponed.
There are piercing blue lights let into the paving of the great piazza; lights of the same intense blue are set into the bollards along the esplanade. These combine to form a poetic evocation of the frontier of the retreated sea, the old shoreline before the great engineering works of the nineteenth century. There is a vendor moving through the piazza selling balls that sparkle with blue light when they are moved or thrown – magically it is exactly the same intense blue as the lights in the paving. The effect of these blue lights thrown up into the dark is haunting, as they flash and shine against the darkening inland sky above the gleaming stucco buildings. It is as though the blue lights in the paving have become animated, soaring at random into the evening above the city. Slow in their descent, the effect is like a continuous, measured firework display, like the regular and irregular play of vast, glimmering fountains.
Walking out onto the Molo beyond the lamps, into the high-summer night and the sound and breath of the sea, is to move into the summer festivals painted in the belle époque, something more intricate than Sargent’s lanterns in a country garden, complex in feeling like Baudelaire’s pleasure garden, more of the urbane order of J. D. Fergusson’s evocation of fireworks over the esplanade at Dieppe.
This work, Dieppe, 14 July 1905: Night (National Galleries of Scotland; see p. 234) was painted relatively early in Fergusson’s long career, when he was in his early thirties. It is dominated by a profound blue sky, under which elegant figures in white summer clothes or evening dress stroll on a promenade by grey water. A great avenue of streetlights curves away towards lit buildings in the distance. The whole is dominated by a great incandescent blaze of fireworks on the far side of the water, from which great rockets have shot up on stems of fire to explode in white, yellow and pink light in the heights of the sky.
The influence of Whistler’s famous Nocturne in Black and Gold: The Falling Rocket (1875) is palpable, but compared to Whistler’s sombre colouration, only partially relieved by yellow light on the ground and in the sky, Fergusson’s painting is shaped and illuminated by the brilliance of the fireworks. The rendering of both the direct and reflected light of these is achieved with great economy of means, as it modifies the deep hue of the sky and throws a border of rose-coloured light onto the white shawl of a woman in the foreground, catches a gleam from the paving of the promenade.
The chief impression of the picture, apart from the sensuous profundity of the cobalt night, as offset against white clothes and resplendent fire, is of immediacy – like Sargent’s work it is an attempt at the old illusion of a moment caught in a moment – the fireworks fixed in their curving, branching descents; the choreography of the two crossing groups of elegant strollers; the fleeting stillness of the man in a white suit who has turned his back, his hands in his pockets, his whole attention absorbed by the coloured fires rising from the other side of the water. Warm season and slow moment are powerfully conveyed by airy and rapid brushwork, light figures varnished onto depths of sky.
That moment is described as ‘night’ in the title, but what the painting conveys is the cobalt of the very end of nautical twilight: the clear outlines of the distant buildings hint that there is still a little ambient light as well as artificial light, light subordinate to the fireworks that are the picture’s chief focus. From the pure brightness of the fireworks themselves come subtle flickerings of colour that draw the composition together: touches of red on the white clothes of the women in the foreground picking up the pure red blaze of the falling rockets. In the grey water, the reflections of their falls are perfectly rendered as a vestigial constellation of specks of yellow.
Fergusson’s picture remains in the mind walking further out to sea along the Molo Audace, with the blue lights that soar through the sky above the piazza glimmering against the inland evening. After the streetlamps give out in the warm dark, there are benches, groups in quiet conversation. A young man, sitting alone, is playing his guitar to himself, to the Adriatic – soft alternations of major and minor chords. Looking back, lights from the city and the Stazione Marittima mingle on the surface of the waters at his feet, like a glimmering carpet of jade green and Naples yellow.
Turning, moving away to seawards. I moved away from the light thus, decades ago, leaving the fair on Midsummer Common in Cambridge, walking with my oldest friend. Booths and lights and the noise of people growing distant. Fading shouts from the Sky Skimmer; a panache of Lucozade-coloured light bulbs rotating, flickering in the distance against a backdrop of chestnut leaves, and the two of us moving away into the darkness under the trees, both finding ourselves unaccountably moved by the long shadows of the crowds thrown outwards onto the grass, as though we were leaving behind something infinitely more wonderful than a transitory constellation of coloured lights and mechanical music.
THERE IS A SINGLE PILOT BOAT riding on the sombre cobalt of the Adriatic, its white lights casting long streamers of reflection across the waves. Exactly above it, the evening star – so late – is riding in clear sky above the stroke of purple-grey cloud lingering on the western horizon.
Walking on, facing out to the west, further out into the waters. Through crowds that move softly in the dark, dressed in their pale summer clothes. Then further out into the smell of salt and the steady, soft percussion of the little waves, and the colours come clearer to the west, the colours of the last of the light. And to walk thus, warm air stirring white linen, amidst the flow and counterflow of people strolling through this festal high summer, through this always lingering, endless end of twilight, is to move westward under glimmers fading rose and aquamarine, strolling on the still-warm flagstones, music coming and going on the water, as if there were no night, nor morning, nor death.