The hour which preceded my arrival in the ancestral garden, where they
awaited me, seems to me--as I see it in imagination--illuminated with a
light of unaccustomed poetry.
To him who knows what slow or sudden fertilisations, what unexpected
transfigurations, are possible to an intense soul communicating with
other souls in the vicissitudes of this most uncertain life--to him
for whom the whole dignity of existence lies in exerting or submitting
to a moral force, and who approaches his kind with a secret anxiety to
dominate or be dominated--to every man who is curious about the inner
mystery, who is ambitious of spiritual power, or feels the need of
slavery, no hour has such a charm as that in which he moves forward,
with a vague anticipation, to meet the living Unknown and Infinite, a
dim world which he will either conquer, or by which he will be absorbed.
I was about to enter an enclosed garden. There the three virgin
princesses were awaiting the friend who had been absent so long, him to
whom, as their contemporary in age, they were bound by recollections
of childhood and adolescence, him who was sole heir to a name no less
ancient and distinguished than their own. And thus they were awaiting
the return of an equal, of a sojourner in great cities, one who should
bring them a breath of that larger life which they had renounced.
And each one of them perhaps in her secret heart was awaiting the
Bridegroom.
* * * * *
This time of waiting appears to me vehement in its anxiety when I think
of the bare and gloomy solitude of the house in which, until that
day, they had languished, their beautiful hands overflowing with the
treasures of youth, surrounded by a phantom pomp of existence called up
by their mother’s delirium to people the emptiness of the vast mirrors.
There, as if in twilight pools, the raving soul of the mother was wont
to be immersed. On the infinite distance of those colourless expanses,
had not each one of the maidens beheld the apparition of the youthful,
ardent figure of the Bridegroom who was to tear her from this obscure
decay, and carry her away in a whirlwind of delight?
Thus each one waited anxiously within her enclosed garden for the
coming of him who was only after all to delude her, to watch her perish
without possessing her.
“Ah! which of us will be the elect?”
Never perhaps--so I think--were their beautiful dim eyes so
earnestly strained as at that hour; those eyes dimmed by melancholy
and weariness, the light of inquiry quenched in them by too long
familiarity with never-changing objects: eyes dimmed by mutual pity,
reflecting the forms of familiar things without mystery or variety, in
hard outlines and lifeless colouring.
And suddenly each of them perceived in the other a new creature, armed
for combat.
* * * * *
I know not if there be anything sadder than these lightning-like
revelations made to tender hearts by the desire for happiness. The
virtuous sisters breathed in the same circle of sorrow; the same
destiny weighed upon them; and during the evenings, heavy with anxiety,
one of them from time to time would lay her brow on the shoulder or the
breast of another, while the darkness effaced the diversity of their
faces, and fused their three souls in one. But when the prophesied
guest--to their waiting hearts already appearing with the gestures
of the lover who elects and who promises--was about to set foot on
their deserted threshold, they lifted up their heads with a thrill,
and loosed their clasped hands, and exchanged a look which had the
violence of a sudden flash of lightning. And while from the depth of
their troubled souls there welled up an unknown feeling which had none
of the old sweetness, that one look brought them consciousness at
last of all their waning grace, of the contrast between their three
figures coloured by the same blood, of the spirit of night lurking in
the mass of hair heaped up like a load on the nape of a white neck, of
the marvellous persuasion expressed by the curve of a silent mouth, of
the enchantment woven like a net by the ingenuous frequency of some
inimitable gesture, and of every other magic power.
And a dim instinct of strife dismayed them.
Thus do I picture to myself those who were waiting for me in that
glowing hour.
The first breath of spring, faintly warm, which had touched the dry
summits of the rocks, was caressing the brows of the anxious maidens.
Within the great cloister, carpeted with jonquils and violets, the
fountains repeated the melodious accompaniment which for centuries
the waters had made to the thoughts of voluptuousness and of wisdom
expressed in the leonine verses on the pediment. On certain trees and
on certain bushes the delicate leaves were shining as though coated
with gum or diaphanous wax. The ancient and immovable things of time
which could only decay were touched with an indefinable softness,
communicated to them by the things that had power to renew themselves.
“Ah, which of us will be the chosen one?”
The three sisters, who had secretly become rivals in face of this
deceptive offer of apparent life, composed their attitudes according to
the inward rhythm of their natural beauty, which time had already begun
to threaten. Perhaps not till that day had they understood that beauty
in its true sense; just as a sick person, hearing the unaccustomed
sound of the blood beating in the ear which presses the pillows, for
the first time understands the portentous music which sustains his
feeble frame.
But perhaps in them this rhythm had no words.
Nevertheless, I can now distinctly hear the words of that rhythm within
me, strengthening the pure outlines of those ideal figures.
“A boundless desire for slavery makes me suffer,” says Massimilla
silently, as she sits on the stone seat, her hands, with fingers
interwoven, clasped round her weary knee. “I have not the gift of
communicating happiness; but my whole being, more than any other
creature, more than any inanimate thing, is ready to become the perfect
and perpetual possession of a master.
“A boundless desire for slavery makes me suffer. I am devoured by an
unquenchable yearning to give myself up entirely, to belong to a higher
and stronger being, to dissolve myself in his will, to burn like a
holocaust in the fire of his great soul. I envy the frail things which
lose themselves, which are swallowed up in an abyss, or carried away
by a whirlwind; and I gaze often and long at the drops of water which
fall into the great basin, and hardly awake the slightest smile on its
surface.
“When a perfume envelopes me and vanishes, when a sound reaches me and
dies out, sometimes I feel myself grow pale and almost faint away, for
it seems to me that the aroma and the harmony of my life are tending to
the same evanescence. And yet sometimes my little soul is straitened
within me like a knot. Who shall untie it and absorb it?
“Ah me! perhaps I should not know how to console him in his sadness;
but my dumb and anxious face should be always turned towards his, quick
to perceive hope reviving in his secret heart. Perhaps I should not
know how to let fall on his silence those rare syllables, seeds of the
soul, which in a moment can generate a boundless dream; but no faith
in the world should surpass the ardour of my faith as I listened, even
when the things I heard were such as must remain inaccessible to my
intellect.
“I am she who listens, admires, and is silent.
“From my birth I bear on my forehead between my eyebrows the sign of
attention.
“I have learned from the calm and intensity of statues the immobility
of harmonious attitude. I can keep my eyes open and turned upwards for
a long time, because my eyelids are light.
“The shape of my lips forms the living and visible image of the word
'Amen.’”
* * * * *
“I suffer,” says Anatolia, “from a virtue within me which is wasting
itself uselessly. My strength is the last support of a solitary ruin,
whereas it might safely guide the current of a river full of all life’s
abundance from its source to the sea.
“My heart is inexhaustible. All the sorrows of the world could never
succeed in wearying its throbs; the fiercest violence of joy could
not break it, nor can it be weakened by this long and slow grief. A
vast multitude of thirsty creatures might drink of the well of its
tenderness without exhausting it.
“Ah! why should fate condemn me to this narrow duty, to this slow
torture? Why should she forbid me that sublime union for which my heart
yearns?
“I could guide the soul of a man up to that highest sphere where
the value of the act and the splendour of the dream converge to the
selfsame apex; from the depths of his unconsciousness I could extract
unseen energies which lie hidden like ore in the veins of rough stone.
“The most hesitating of men would feel secure by my side; he who had
strayed from the light would once more see a steady beacon at the end
of his path; he who had been buffeted about and maimed would become
healthy and whole again. My hands know how to bind up wounds, and how
to tear the bandages off heavy eyelids. When I stretch them out--my
purest heart’s-blood flows magnetically to the tips of my fingers.
“I possess the two supreme gifts which enrich life, and prolong it
beyond the illusion of death: I fear no suffering, and I feel the
imprint of eternity on my thoughts and acts.
“And therefore I am troubled by a desire to create--to become through
love her who propagates and perpetuates the ideal qualities of a race
favoured by Heaven. I could nourish the superhuman within me.
“Once in a dream I kept mysterious watch a whole night long over the
sleep of a child. While with deep-drawn breaths his body lay slumbering
I upheld his soul in my hands, and it was tangible like a globe of
crystal, and my breast swelled with marvellous premonitions.”
* * * * *
Violante says: “I am humbled. When I felt the mass of my hair weigh
upon my brow, I fancied myself to be wearing a crown, and beneath that
regal burden my thoughts wore a purple hue.
“My childhood’s memories are all lit up by visions of fire and
slaughter. Blood ran before my innocent eyes; my delicate nostrils
breathed the odour of unburied corpses. A young and eager queen, hunted
from her throne, took me in her arms before she departed into an
exile from which there was no return. From that time, therefore, the
splendour of great and tragic destinies hangs over my soul.
“In my dreams I have lived a thousand lives of magnificence; I have
passed through all sovereignties as safely as one who retraces a
well-known path; I have discovered in the aspect of the most dissimilar
things secret analogies with the aspect of my own form, and by hidden
arts have pointed them out for man to wonder at; and I have found out
how to compel light and shade, as truly as robes and jewels, to form
the divine and unforeseen adornment of my decline.
“Poets saw in me the ideal apparition in whose lineaments the highest
mystery of life is expressed--that mystery of beauty which has been
revealed in mortal flesh at intervals of long ages, through all the
imperfection of innumerable generations. And they thought: 'This is
doubtless the perfected image of that idea of which the peoples of
the earth have had an intuition from the beginning, and which artists
have unceasingly invoked in poems, in symphonies, on canvas, in clay.
Everything in her is expressive, everything is a symbol. The lines of
her form speak a language whose eternal truth would make him that could
understand it like unto a god; and her slightest movements produce
within the contours of her body ineffable music like the harmony of
midnight skies.’
“But now I am humbled--deprived of my kingdoms. The fire in my blood
is growing paler and dying out. I shall vanish away, less fortunate
than the statues which testified to the joy of life on the brows of the
cities of the past. For ever unknown, I shall dissolve away, whereas
they will endure in the safe keeping of mould and darkness among the
roots of the flowers, and some day, when unburied, they will seem to
the ecstatic soul of kneeling poets as great as the gifts of earth.
“I have now dreamed every dream, and my hair weighs heavier on my brow
than a hundred crowns. I have dazed myself with perfumes. I love to
linger near the fountains as they go on eternally telling the same
tale. Through the thick locks of hair which cover my ears I seem to
hear time ebbing away on the monotonous waters.”
* * * * *
Thus when I evoke them do the three princesses speak within my soul,
as they wait for the irrevocable hour. Thus, perhaps, believing that a
messenger of life had appeared at the gates of their closed garden, did
each one recognise her own charm, display her own seductiveness, revive
her own hope, quicken the dream within her which had almost died away.
O Hour! lit up by grand and solemn poetry! Most brilliant Hour in which
all possibilities emerged and shone on the inward heaven of the soul!
I
“_Non si può avere maggior signoria che quella di sè medesimo._”