“_E se tu sarai solo, tu sarai tutto tuo._”
Ibid
After the inevitable tumult of early youth had been controlled, the
vehemence of conflicting desires defeated, and a barrier raised against
the confused and multifold overflow of sensations, I had sought
during the momentary silence that ensued on my consciousness to find
out whether life might not become something different from the usual
exercise of the faculties of adaptation to changing circumstances; that
is to say, whether my will might not be able, by means of selection and
exclusion, to build up some new and artistic work out of the elements
which life had already stored up within me.
I felt assured, after some self-examination, that my consciousness had
reached that arduous point when it becomes possible to appreciate this
too simple axiom: The world represents the sensibility and the thought
of a few superior men who created it, and in course of time have
enlarged and adorned it, and who in the future will continue to enlarge
and adorn it more and more. The world, as it appears to us to-day, is
a magnificent gift from the few to the many, from free men to slaves,
from those who think and feel to those who work. And then I recognised
my own highest ambition in the desire to bring some ornament, to add
some new value to this human world which is being eternally embellished
with beauty and sorrow.
Face to face with my own soul, I thought again of that dream which came
to Socrates several times over, each time taking a different form, but
always urging him to fulfil the same mission: “O Socrates, compose and
cultivate music.” Then I learned that the real duty of a man of worth
is to discover in the course of his existence a series of harmonies,
varied indeed, but controlled by one dominant motive, and bearing the
impress of one style. And so it appeared to me that the ancient sage,
who excelled in the art of raising the human soul to its utmost degree
of vigour, might teach a great and efficacious lesson to our own age.
By the study of himself and his neighbours, this man discovered what
inestimable benefits assiduous discipline bent always to a fixed
purpose can confer upon life. His supreme wisdom seems to me most
resplendent in this, that he did not place his Ideal out of the
reach of daily practice, beyond the sphere of necessary realities,
but that he made it the living centre of his being, and deduced his
own laws from it; and, in accordance with these laws, he developed
rhythmically throughout the course of years, exercising with calm pride
such rights as they permitted him, and separating--he a citizen of
Athens under the tyranny of the Thirty, and under the tyranny of the
plebeians--deliberately separating his moral existence from that of
the city. He desired, and he was able to preserve himself for himself
until death. “I will be obedient to God only,” meant, “I will be
obedient only to the laws of that genius to which, in order to fulfil
my conception of order and beauty, I have subjected my free nature.”
Far more subtle as an artist than Apelles or Protogenes, he was able to
trace with a firm hand the complete image of himself in one continuous
line. And the sublime joy of the last evening came to him, not from the
hope of that other life which he had spoken of in his discourses, but
rather from the vision of his own image, made one with death.
* * * * *
Ah, why cannot he live again on Latin soil, this Master who understood
with such profound and hidden art how to awaken and stimulate all the
energies of intellect and soul in those who approached to listen to him?
A strange melancholy used to fall over me in my youth when, reading
the Dialogues, I tried to picture to myself that circle of eager and
anxious disciples surrounding him. I used to admire the handsome ones,
those dressed in the richest garments, and on whom his round and
prominent eyes--those _new_ eyes of his, in which there was a look
_peculiar to himself_--rested oftenest. My imagination prolonged
the adventures of the strangers who came to him from afar, like the
Thracian Antisthenes, who travelled forty stadia a day to hear him,
and like Euclides, who--the Athenians having forbidden the citizens of
Megara to enter Athens, and decreed the worst of punishments for the
transgressors--dressed himself in woman’s clothes, and thus clothed and
veiled, left his own city towards evening, and made a long journey in
order to be present at the discourses of the Sage; then at dawn went on
his way again in the same disguise, his breast filled with unquenchable
enthusiasm. And I felt touched by the fate of the beautiful Elian
youth Phaedo, who, after having been made a prisoner of war in his own
country, and sold to the keeper of a house of ill-fame, escaped to
Socrates, and by his means obtained redemption and admission to the
feasts of pure thought.
It seemed to me, indeed, that this genial master surpassed the Nazarene
in generosity. Perhaps the Hebrew, if his enemies had not slain him
in the flower of his years, would at last have shaken off the weight
of his sadness, found new savour in the ripe fruits of his Galilee,
and pointed out a different ideal of good to his followers. The Greek
philosopher had always loved life; he loved it, and taught men to
love it. Nearly infallible as a prophet and seer, he welcomed all
souls in which his penetrating glance had discovered any force, and
in each one he developed and elevated that natural force, so that all
those inspired by his fire revealed themselves in the power of their
diversity. The highest value of his method was that very result of
which his enemies accused him: that from his school--where met honest
Crito and Plato, the follower of Urania, and the raving Apollodorus,
and the kindly Theætetus, who is like a noiseless river of oil--there
went forth also the luxurious Cyrenian, Aristippus, and Critias, the
most violent of the Thirty Tyrants, and the other tyrant Charicles, and
that marvellous breaker of laws, Alcibiades, who put no limit to his
premeditated violence. “My heart leaps when I hear his discourses far
more than at the sound of the Corybantes,” said the son of Clinia, like
a graceful wild animal crowned with ivy and violets, at the close of
a banquet where the guests had received from Silenus’ mouth the grand
initiation of Diotima. No fairer wreath of praise was ever woven to
deify any man upon earth.
* * * * *
Now, what were the energies stimulated in me by this master? What
harmonies did he lead me to find?
At first he captivated me by his singular faculty of feeling the
fascination even of evanescent beauty, of making, with a certain
restraint, distinctions among ordinary pleasures, and of recognising
the value which the idea of death confers upon the grace of earthly
things.
Pure and austere as he was in the act of speculation, he yet possessed
such exquisitely fine senses that they might almost be called the
skilled artists of his sensations.
No guest at any of the banquets--according to Alcibiades, an excellent
judge--knew so well how to enjoy them as he. At the beginning of the
banquet of Xenophon, he, with the others, contemplates the perfect
beauty of Autolycus in long silence, almost as if he recognised in it
some superhuman presence. Afterwards he discourses, with subtle taste,
of perfumes, dancing, and drinking, not without vivid images to adorn
his discourse, as becomes a sage and a poet.
Thus, while contending with Critobulus in jest for the palm of beauty,
he uttered these words: “Since my lips are thicker, thinkest thou not
that my kiss must be softer than thine?” He advised the Syracusan,
who gave a performance there of dancing, in which a flute-player, a
marvellous dancing-girl, and a boy harpist took part, not to force the
three young bodies to unnatural efforts and into dangerous postures,
which give no pleasure to the spectator, but to leave it to their
youthful freshness, accompanied by the sound of the flute, to fall into
such attitudes as belong to the Nymphs, the Graces, or the Hours as
they are commonly painted. And so to the disorder which only amazes he
opposes the order which pleases, and stands revealed once again as a
cultivator of music and a master of style.
That which in days gone by touched me more than anything else were his
last words to a beautiful frail creature whom he loved. They touch
me still, for my soul loves now and then to slacken its tension in
the voluptuous sadness and passionate perplexity which the sense of
continual change, continual passing away, continual decay, is apt to
produce in a life adorned by the noblest culture.
In the dialogue of the last evening I am not so much moved by the
scene where Crito, charged by him who was to administer the hemlock,
interrupts the condemned man’s discourse, and admonishes him not to
heat himself if he wishes the poison to take rapid effect, and the
brave man smiles and goes on with his inquiry; nor is the musical
simile of the swan magicians and their harmonious joy so dear to me;
nor am I so amazed by those last moments, when in brief actions and
brief sayings this man fulfils his ideal of perfection so clearly, and,
like an artist who has given the finishing touch to his work, gazes
contentedly at his own image--a miracle of style--destined for ever to
remain immortal upon earth; I am not touched by any of these as I am
by that unexpected pause which follows the doubts opposed by Cebes and
Simmias to the certainty displayed by the eloquent master.
It was a profound pause, during which all those souls were suddenly
blinded and cast, as it were, into an abyss after the ray of light
thrown upon the great Mystery by him who was about to enter it had
suddenly died out.
The master guessed the sadness produced among his faithful followers
by this sudden gloom, and the wings of his thought soon spread again.
Reality appeared to him through the medium of the senses, and held him
back for a while in the field of the finite and the perceptible. He
felt time fly, life flow on. Perhaps his ears caught some sound from
the stately city, perhaps his nostrils inhaled the perfume of the early
summer just approaching as his eyes rested on Phaedo with the beautiful
hair.
Seated on his bed, with Phaedo beside him on a low stool, he laid his
hand on the head of his disciple, and caressed him and stroked the
hair on his neck, for it was a habit of his thus to let his fingers
stray playfully in that thick young forest. Still he did not speak, so
intense was his emotion, and so chequered with delight. Through this
beautiful and ephemeral living being he was communicating once more
with that earthly life in which he had attained his perfection, in
which he had realised his ideal of virtue; and perhaps he felt that
there was nothing beyond, that this finished existence of his was
sufficient to itself, that its prolongation in eternity was only--like
the halo of a star--an illusion produced by the extraordinary radiance
of his humanity. Never had the locks of the young Elian been so
sublimely precious to him. He was enjoying them for the last time, for
he had to die; indeed, he knew that next day those locks would be cut
off in sign of mourning. At last he said--and his disciples had never
known such a tone in his voice before--he said: “To-morrow, oh Phaedo,
thou wilt cut off these beautiful locks.” And the youth answered: “So
it seems, oh Socrates.”
* * * * *
This sentiment--which I at once absorbed and exalted within me as I
read the episode for the first time in the Platonic dialogue--became
afterwards by means of analogy so complex and so familiar to my mind,
that I made it the open or concealed theme of that music to which I
wished to hearken.
In this way the Ancient Sage taught me the commemoration of death in
a manner conformable to my nature, that I might find a rarer value
and a graver significance in things near at hand. And he taught me
to seek and discover in my own nature genuine virtues and genuine
defects, that I might arrange both in accordance with a premeditated
design, striving with patient care to give a seemly appearance to the
latter, and to raise the former upwards towards the supreme perfection.
And he taught me to exclude everything which was discordant with my
ruling idea, everything which could alter the lines of my design,
which could slacken or interrupt the rhythmical development of my
thought. And he taught me to discern with sure intuition those souls
over whom to exercise benevolence or mastery, or from whom to obtain
some extraordinary revelation. And at last he communicated to me also
his faith in the _dæmon_, which was none other than the mysteriously
significant power of Style, inviolable by any, even by himself in his
own person.
Full of this teaching and quite alone, I set to work, with the hope of
succeeding, in tracing with precise and strong outlines that effigy
of myself, to whose existence so many remote causes had contributed,
operating from time immemorial through an infinite number of
generations. That virtue of race, which in Socrates’ country was called
_eugeneia_, came out stronger and stronger as my discipline became more
severe; and my pride increased with my satisfaction as I thought how
only too many other souls would have sooner or later revealed their
vulgar essence under the ordeal of that fire. But sometimes from the
very roots of my being--where the indestructible soul of ancestors
slumbers--such positive and vehement fountains of energy would spring
up, that I felt sad as I recognised their uselessness in an epoch when
public life is only a miserable spectacle of meanness and dishonour.
“It is marvellous indeed,” the _dæmon_ used to say to me, “that these
ancient barbaric energies should have been preserved in thee with
all their freshness. They are still beautiful even though they be
inopportune. In another age they would assist in performing the duty
worthy of such as thee; that is to say, the duty of the leader who
points out a certain goal, and guides his followers towards it. As that
day seems far off, do thou now attempt, by condensing these energies,
to transform them into living poetry.”
Very distant indeed that day appeared; for even the arrogance of the
populace was not so great as the cowardice of those who tolerated
and supported it. Living in Rome as I did, I was witness of the most
ignominious breaches of faith, of the most obscene connections which
ever dishonoured a sacred spot. Evil-doers gathered together within the
fatal circle of the divine city as within the precincts of an infamous
forest, and it seemed as though only some magnificent power armed with
ideas more brilliant than past memories could be able nowadays to raise
its head above the monstrous phantoms of empire. Like the overflow
of sewers, the flood of base desires was invading the market-place
and the cross-roads, a flood perpetually swelling and growing more
putrid, never even illuminated by any flame of crooked but titanic
ambition, never even bursting out in a flash of magnificent crime. The
lonely dome on the distant side of the Tiber, inhabited by a soul,
which although senile, yet stood firm in the consciousness of its own
aims, was still the most prominent landmark, contrasted as it was with
another unnecessarily exalted dwelling-place, where a king of warlike
race showed a wonderful example of patience in the fulfilment of the
humble and fatiguing office assigned to him by the decree of the people.
One evening in September, as I stood on that acropolis of the Quirinal
guarded by the twin Tindarides, while a dense crowd was commemorating
with bestial howls a conquest, the frightful extent of which they
could not understand (Rome was looking terrible as a crater under a
conflagration of clouds), I thought to myself: “What visions might
not these conflagrations of the Latin sky kindle in the great heart
of a king? Such a vision that under its weight the gigantic horses of
Praxiteles would bend like twigs. Ah, who will ever be able to embrace
the great Mother and fertilise her with his all-powerful idea? To her
alone--within her womb of stone, which for ages has been the pillow of
Death--to her alone it is given to generate such abundance of life that
the world may be renewed with it again.”
And behind the glittering windows of the royal balcony I saw in
imagination a pale contracted brow, carved like the brow of the
Corsican with the mark of a superhuman destiny.
* * * * *
But what signified this turbid seething of servile passions, seen
through that silence which surrounds Rome with its nine circles like
a river of Tartarus? I was consoled for all my disappointment by this
sublime spectacle of the Campagna strewn with great dead things, where
nothing ever springs up save blades of grass, germs of fever, and
terrible thoughts. “Is there a new nation struggling within the walls
of the city? Ere long a few ashes will be borne to me on the wind. My
barrenness is made of a layer of ashes, some precious and some ignoble.
And the iron for the plough which shall furrow me has not yet been
drawn from the mountain.” This is what the sepulchre of the nations
signified to me.
And yet, though the sight of that voracious desert be a sinister
warning to an unprofitable nation, it can inspire the solitary man
with the wildest intoxication of which the soul is capable. From the
crevices of that soil a feverish vapour ascends like smoke, and works
like a magic philtre in the blood of some men, producing a form of
madness unlike any other.
The young men of the Garibaldian troops, I thought, must have felt
themselves possessed by this madness as they entered the Campagna. They
were suddenly transfigured by a flame which consumed them like dry
wood. And in one here and there that fever magnified his own inward
vision in such a way that he ceased to form part of a compact and
unanimous band, and assumed an individuality of his own, a singularly
warlike aspect, consecrated to a new onward movement. Fair and noble
of race like a virgin hero of the time of Ajax, the type of the old
warlike ideal, strengthened by a spirit of unexampled ardour, which
came to him from the soil he trod, seemed to be renewed in such an one
as he fell.
I envied him that happy fate which was denied to me. Several times
after these inspiring reflections, a furious desire to prove my valour
consumed me, and I would put my horse at some very high piece of ruined
wall, and, the useless danger overcome, I would feel that always and
everywhere I should have known how to die.
I remember as one of the most intense periods in my life an autumn
passed in daily communion with the Latian desert.
Over that theatre, where a drama of races unfolded itself before my
mental vision, there passed a perpetual variety of clouds whose great
fleeting shadows made the commentary on my inward musings. Sometimes
the silence became so heavy, and the odour of death wafted up in my
face from the grass so suffocating, that instinctively I clung closer
to my horse, as though I wished to feel a share in his impetuous
vitality. Then the fine powerful animal would spring forward with
feline agility, and the inextinguishable fire burning in his pure blood
would seem to communicate itself to me. Then for a few minutes I tasted
intoxication. As I followed the line in which I was carried by the
impetus of the gallop and the thoughts in my mind, a line parallel to
the vast skeletons of the aqueducts which crowded the horizon, I felt
the birth and growth within me of an indescribable spirit of fervour--a
mixture of physical impulse, of intellectual pride and of confused
hopes; and my energies were stimulated and multiplied by the presence
of those works of man, of those human witnesses outliving total death,
of those terrible reddened arches which for centuries have risen
unconquered in procession against the menaces of heaven.
Alone, without near relations, without any ordinary ties, independent
of any domestic authority, absolute master of myself and of my goods,
I felt most profoundly in that solitude--more than at any other time
or place--the sense of my progressive and voluntary evolution towards
an ideal Latin type. Day after day I felt my whole nature grow, under
the rigorous discipline of meditation, selection, and exclusion; and
its special characteristics, its distinct peculiarities, become more
marked. The aspect of the country, precise and sober in form and
colour, was a continual example and a continual stimulus to me; it had
an efficacy for my intellect like that of dogmatic teaching. Each group
of lines seemed indeed to be inscribed on the heavens with the pithy
significance of an incisive axiom and the unvarying character of a
single style.
But the marvellous virtue of this teaching was, that although it drove
me to order my inner life with the exactness of a ruled design, it did
not dry up the spontaneous springs of emotion and imagination, indeed
it only stimulated them to greater activity. Of a sudden, some single
thought would become so intense and so ardent within me that it would
possess me almost to delirium, like a phantom created by an illusion;
and by it my whole world would be strewn with shadows and new lights.
A jet of poetry would burst from my inner being, filling my whole soul
with music and ineffable freshness, and causing desires and hopes
to burn higher in a happy flame. Thus sometimes on the Campagna the
autumn sunset would pour out the impalpable lava of its eruption; long
sulphur-coloured streams furrowed the uneven plain; the hollows were
filled with darkness like abysses just opened; the aqueducts caught
fire from base to summit; the whole country seemed to have returned to
its volcanic origin in the dawn of time. Thus sometimes in the morning
the larks would start suddenly out of the soft sparkling grass, singing
as they made their dizzy ascent, like spirits of joy rapt higher and
higher from mortal sight into the purest heaven of blue, and to my
wondering soul the whole dome of heaven seemed to be echoing with their
intoxicating music.
And so this solitude more than any other was able to inspire the degree
of enthusiasm and reasonableness necessary for an ambitious ascetic:
an ascetic in the original meaning of the austere word, desiring, like
the ancient antagonists, to prepare himself by rigid discipline for the
struggles and the conquests of the earth.
“What pillar of fire, what burning desert, what lonely mountain top,
what bottomless cave, what malarious pool, what solitary, barren, or
tragic spot can be surpassed by this place, in the power of kindling
the sacred spark of madness in one who believes himself destined to
engrave on new tables of stone new laws for the religious guidance of
the people?” Thus I used to think while presentiments of forms yet
uncreated arose within me, fostered by that same silence in which so
many extinct forms of our humanity were gathered together. Everything
there is dead, but everything might suddenly come to life again in some
spirit with enough superfluity of strength and heat to accomplish the
prodigy. It is difficult to imagine the grandeur and terror of such
a resurrection. He within whose consciousness it could be realised
would appear to himself and others to be possessed by a mysterious
and incalculable force greater far than that which used to assail the
Pythia of old. Instead of the fury of a god present on the tripod, his
mouth would express that very genius of the races which is the funereal
guardian of innumerable destinies long ago fulfilled. His oracle would
not be merely a chink opened into a world above the senses, but the
sum of all human wisdom mingled with the breath of Earth, that highest
of prophetesses, according to the message of Æschylus. And once again
the multitudes would bend before the divine aspect of his madness; not
as at Delphi, to implore the dark utterances of the ambiguous God, but
to receive the clear answer given by previous existences, that answer
which the Nazarene never gave. He was too illiterate, and the desert
beneath the mountains of Judea on the western bank of the Dead Sea,
in which he chose to find his revelation, was too stony: a place of
rocks and precipices, destitute of foot-prints, blind to all thought.
The solitary youth felt no fear of famishing jackals, but he feared
thought. His pale hand had power to tame savage beasts, but thoughts
as fiery and masterful as those which wander over the Latian desert
would have devoured him. When the bad angel drove him to the top of
the mountain and showed him the fertile land below, and pointed out
the position of the different countries of the world and the deep and
whirling currents of human desire, he closed his eyelids: he would not
see, he would not know. But the great Revealer must extend the horizon
of his consciousness beyond all limits, and embrace within it days and
years, centuries and millenniums. The truth he sets forth must be the
outcome of the whole life lived by men up to the present hour. It must
be a fire in which the ascending powers of many generations may be
absorbed; so that thus harmonised and multiplied, they may move onward
in greater unison and with greater certainty towards an ever purer
ideal.
Sometimes, too, I was haunted by the phantom of him, whom one day
believed to have created King of Rome. “There was lacking,” I used to
think, “even in this most admirable inspirer of heroic feeling, in
this joyful revenger of youthful blood, there was lacking the ascetic
discipline of the sepulchre of the nations. Had he been able even for
a time to turn aside his spirit from the things which pressed upon him
and bend it towards immutable things, he might have discovered some
idea greater than his own mortal person, and might have chosen it to be
ruler of his actions. Then his dream of Latin empire would have grown
closer and weightier and more tenacious, so that the force of events
and himself combined could not have finally dissipated and destroyed it
as they did. But his idea, which was too much bound up with daily life,
too human in fact, was to die with him. He never attained knowledge
of the secret by which man prolongs the efficacy of his action into
all time. The impulses given by the man were as vehement as they
could be, but their propagation was brief and uncertain, because they
originated in a centre of spontaneous powers which were not subject to
any superior conception evolved from a severe order of meditation. And
so his work was not higher than himself, and lasted no longer than the
work of destruction. His destiny was controlled by the old oracles.
The answer given by the Pythia as to the fate of Corinth might, after
thousands of years, serve for him also:--_An eagle has conceived by a
rock, and shall give birth to a fierce lion, greedy for human flesh,
which shall work great slaughter._--He did but obey the prediction,
like the petty tyrant Cypselus. And the King of Rome faded away into
space like a column of smoke.”
Such was the colour of the thoughts awakened in me by the aspect of
a place which--according to Dante’s words--seemed formed by nature
herself for universal empire: _ad universaliter principandum_. And
while Dante’s arguments to prove the divine right of the Roman power
recurred to my memory, the summit of my intellect was occupied by that
motto which the Latin races, if they wish to be born again, would do
well to adopt in its exact and rigid form as the rule of their vital
institutions:--_Maxima nobile, maxima præesse convenit._ It is meet
that the noblest should also be the greatest.
And in the company of that great and tyrannical spirit I used to
think: “Oh, venerable father of our language, thou hadst faith in
the necessity of hierarchies and differences between men; thou didst
believe in the superiority of the virtue transmitted through heredity
in the blood; thou didst firmly believe in a virtue of race which
can by degrees, by one selection after another, elevate man to the
highest splendour of his moral beauty. When thou didst expound the
genealogy of Æneas, thou sawest a manner of divine predestination in
the concourse of blood.” Now, what mysterious concourse of blood, what
vast experience of culture, what propitious harmony of circumstances
shall give birth to the new King of Rome? _Natura ordinatus ad
imperandum_--ordained by nature unto empire--but, unlike any other
monarch, his task will not be to reconfirm or raise the value
which--under the influence of various teachings--the nations have been
used to set upon the things of life; it will rather be to abolish or
invert them. Conscious of the whole significance of those events which
compose man’s history, and familiar with the essence of all the supreme
wills which have directed important movements, he will be capable of
the work of construction, and of throwing out towards the future that
ideal bridge by which the privileged races will at last be able to
cross the abyss now apparently separating them from the power of which
they are ambitious.
And among all the images which the sacred soil suggested to my soul,
this image of the king was the most vivid. Sometimes he almost seemed
to me a created form; and I used to gaze on him eagerly, while sudden
ideas of indescribable beauty flashed across my intellect and faded
away, never perhaps to appear again.
* * * * *
Thus the Roman Campagna with its severe teaching strengthened me
to follow out the perfection of my manhood, to assert my inward
sovereignty, to trace with a firm hand that “line of circumference
from which human beauty is generated,” according to Leonardo’s saying.
And at the close of each day I asked myself: “By what new thoughts
has my treasure been enriched? What new energies have been developed
from my being? What new possibilities have I caught sight of?” And
I wished that every day should bear the impress of my style, should
be distinguished by some sign of vigorous art, by some proud emblem
of victory. My familiarity with Thucydides set before me the example
of those strategists of his, who are constantly making fine, pithy
harangues to their soldiers, then fighting with all their might, and
finally raising a trophy on the field.
_Cui bono?_--was the cry which came from far and wide out of the
mouths of a twilight crowd with voices not unlike eunuchs’.--What
is the meaning, what is the value of life? Why live? Why strive?
All efforts are useless, all is vanity and sorrow. We ought to kill
off our passions one after another, and then extirpate to the very
roots the hope and desire which are the cause of life. Renunciation,
complete unconsciousness, the vanishing away of dreams, absolute
annihilation--that is the final liberation.
They were a miserable race stricken with leprosy reiterating their
dreary complaint. The ancient Persians, as the ever-fresh Herodotus
narrates, used to attribute this foul infirmity to offences committed
_against the Sun_. And these slavish people had indeed offended against
the Sun.
A certain number of them, hoping to be cleansed, had bathed in great
fonts of piety, where they softened and anointed themselves with great
contrition. But the sight of these was quite as repugnant.
I turned away my eyes and ears elsewhere; and my heart-strings throbbed
with proud joy, because my eyes were undimmed by tears, and could
perceive all lines and all colours, because my healthy, watchful ears
could hear all sounds and all rhythms, because my spirit could rejoice
boundlessly in fugitive appearances and know how to cultivate within
itself very different forms of melancholy, how to find the sweetest
value of life in the rapidity of its metamorphoses and in the denseness
of its mysteries. “Oh manifold Beauty of the World,” I used then to
pray, “not to thee alone do my praises ascend; not to thee alone, but
also to my forefathers, to those also who, remote ages ago, understood
how to enjoy thee, and transmitted their fervid and rich blood to me.
Praised be they now and for ever, for the beautiful wounds which they
inflicted, for the beautiful fires they kindled, for the beautiful
goblets they emptied, for the beautiful garments which clothed them,
for the beautiful palfreys they caressed, for the beautiful women
they enjoyed, for all their slaughter, their intoxication, their
magnificence, their luxury, let them be praised; because thus did they
form in me those senses in which thou canst widely and deeply reflect
thyself, oh Beauty of the World, as in five wide and deep seas!”
* * * * *
In the meantime, the poets, discouraged and erring, having exhausted
their store of rhymes in evoking images of other days, in weeping over
their own dead illusions, and in counting the colours of the dying
leaves, were asking, some ironically, some seriously: “What can be our
function now? Are we to exalt universal suffrage in senile rhymes? Are
we to hasten with the breathlessness of hexameters the fall of the
king, the advent of republics, the accession of the people to power?
Is there no demagogue Cleophontes who manufactures _lire_ in Rome, as
in Athens of old? For a modest sum we might persuade the incredulous,
on his very instruments tuned by himself, that power, right, thought,
wisdom, light, are to be found in the masses....”
But not one among them, more generous and more eager than the rest,
arose to answer: “Defend Beauty! That is your only function. Defend the
vision that is within you. Since mortals have now ceased to bear honour
and reverence to the singer scholars of the Muse that favours them,
as Odysseus said, defend yourselves with all your weapons, even with
jests, if such are of more use than invectives. Be careful to sharpen
the point of your scorn with the bitterest poison. Let your sarcasm
have such corrosive strength that it may reach to the very marrow and
destroy it. Brand to the very bone the stupid brows of those who would
put an exact mark on each soul, as on a household utensil, and would
make human heads alike as the heads of nails under the blow of the
hammer. Let your frenzied laughter rise to the very heaven, when you
hear the stablemen of the Great Beast vociferating in the Assembly.
For the sake of the glory of Mind proclaim and demonstrate that their
sayings are not less ignoble than the groans of the flatulent peasant.
Proclaim and demonstrate that their hands--to which your father Dante
would give the same epithet as he gave to the nails of Thais--may be
fit to gather manure, but are not worthy of being raised to sanction a
law in the Assembly. Defend the Thought which they threaten, the Beauty
which they outrage! A day will come when they will attempt to burn the
books, shatter the statues, rip up the canvases. Defend the ancient
generous work of your masters and the future work of your disciples
against the rage of these drunken slaves. Do not despair because ye
are few. Ye possess the supreme knowledge and the supreme power of the
world--the Word. Words may have more murderous power than a chemical
formula. Oppose destruction resolutely with destruction.”
And the patricians, stripped of their authority in the name of
equality, and looked upon as ghosts from a world which has disappeared
for ever; unfaithful, the greater part of them at least, to their
lineage, and ignorant or forgetful of the art of mastery professed
by their forefathers, were also asking: “What can be our function
now? Are we to deceive the age and ourselves by attempting to revive
some slender hope among faded memories of the past, under those
vaulted roofs storied with sanguine mythology, which are too vast for
our restricted breathing? Or must we recognise the great dogma of
Eighty-nine, and open the porticoes of our courts to popular applause,
illuminate our travertine balconies for State festivals, associate with
Jewish bankers, exercise our small share of sovereignty by filling
up the voting ticket with the names of men of the middle classes, of
our tailors, our hatters, our bootmakers, our money-lenders, and our
lawyers?”
A few among them--ill-inclined for peaceful renunciation, elegant
boredom, and barren irony--answered: “Train yourselves as you train
your race-horses, and wait for the opportunity. Learn the method of
asserting yourselves and strengthening your own persons, as you have
learned that of winning on the turf. By strength of will force all
your energies, even your stormiest passions and darkest vices, into a
straight line and towards a definite aim. Be assured that the essence
of personality far exceeds all accessory attributes in value, and that
inward sovereignty is the chief mark of the aristocrat. Believe only
in force tempered by long discipline. Force is the first law of nature;
it is indestructible, not to be abolished. Discipline is the supreme
virtue of the freeman. The world can be based only on force, as truly
in civilised ages as in the epochs of barbarism. If all the races of
the earth were destroyed by another deluge, and new generations were
to arise from the stones, as in the old fable, men would begin to
fight amongst themselves as soon as they had issued from their mother
earth, until one of them the strongest, should succeed in mastering the
others. Wait, therefore, and prepare for your opportunity. Fortunately,
the State built on foundations of popular suffrage and equality,
cemented by fear, is not only an ignoble, but also a precarious
structure. The State ought to be nothing less than an institution
perfectly adapted to promote the gradual elevation of a privileged
class towards an ideal form of existence. Therefore, upon the economic
and political equality to which democracy aspires, you must go on
forming a new oligarchy, a new realm of force; and before long, sooner
or later, you will succeed in taking the reins into your own hands
again, so as to rule the multitude for your own profit. Indeed, you
will have little difficulty in bringing back the common herd to its
obedience. The masses always remain slaves; they have a natural impulse
to stretch out their wrists to the fetters. The sense of liberty will
never to the end of time exist in them. Do not be deceived by their
vociferations and their hideous contortions; but always remember that
the soul of the Multitude is in the power of Panic. It will be your
policy, therefore, when the opportunity comes, to provide yourselves
with cutting whips, to assume an imperious mien, to plan some humorous
stratagem. When the cunning Ulysses was ranging the field to call in
every one to the council, if he came across a noisy plebeian, he used
to chastise him with his sceptre, scolding him thus: 'Silence, silence,
coward, pusillanimous one, thing of naught in the council.’ The noble
demagogue Alcibiades, who was more versed than any in the government
of the Great Beast, began one of his orations on the expedition into
Sicily thus: 'This command, oh Athenians--this command belongs to me
rather than to any one else, and I hold myself worthy of this command.’
But truly there is no teaching more profound and more suitable for you
than that given by Herodotus in the beginning of the book of Melpomene.
Here it is: 'The Scythians, having spent twenty-eight years away from
their own country in ruling over Upper Asia, and desirous, after such a
long interval, to return home, found that to do so involved hardships
no less great than those they had suffered in the Median war. A great
and hostile army barred their entrance. And this came to pass because
the Scythian women, having been left so long without men of their own
race, had given themselves to their slaves. And from the slaves and
the women had sprung a generation of young men who, conscious of their
origin, had set themselves against those who were returning from Media;
and in order to hold the pass, had first of all made an entrenchment
stretching from the mountains of Taurus to the Mæotian marsh, which
is very wide. They then proceeded to repulse the attempted assault of
the Scythians, defending themselves with many deeds of valour; and as,
after various conflicts, the Scythians found they could make no advance
by fighting, one of them began to speak thus: Oh Scythians, why do we
labour thus? By fighting against our slaves we weaken ourselves by the
number of our deaths, and by killing them we only reduce the number of
our future subjects. Wherefore it seems to me fitting that we should
put aside our spears and darts, and that each of us should be armed
only with his horsewhip, and thus we should confront these slaves.
Because up till now, seeing us march against them in arms, they have
no doubt thought themselves our equals, and sons of equals; but when
they see us coming against them wielding whips instead of arms, they
will feel at once that they are our slaves, and they will not dare to
resist us any longer. The Scythians followed this advice; and their
adversaries, thunderstruck by the change, ceased fighting and took to
flight. Thus did the Scythians win back their country.’ Oh ye masters
without mastery, think upon it.”
* * * * *
Perhaps in my busy solitude--although I feared neither sickness, nor
madness, nor death, having within me that tutelary flame of pride, of
thought, and of faith--perhaps there lay hidden beneath my melancholy
a real need for communion with some kindred spirit as yet unknown, or
with some circle of minds disposed to care sincerely and passionately
for those things for which I so passionately cared. It seemed to me
that this need was betrayed by a mental habit I had of casting my
theory of ideas and images into a concrete oratorical or lyrical form,
almost as if for an imaginary audience. Warm bursts of eloquence and
poetry would suddenly flood my being, and silence was at times a burden
to my overflowing soul.
Then, to comfort my solitude, I thought of giving corporeal form to
that _dæmon_ in whom, according to my first master’s teaching, I
believed as the infallible pledge which was to lead me to achieve
the integrity of my moral being. I thought of committing to a noble,
masterful mouth, red with the same blood as mine, the duty of repeating
to me, “Oh thou, be what thou oughtest to be.”
Among the figures of my ancestors one above all others is most dear
to me, and sacred as a votive image. He is the noblest and the most
brilliant flower of my race, represented by the brush of a divine
artist. It is the portrait of Alessandro Cantelmo, Count of Volturara,
painted by Da Vinci between the years 1493 and 1494, at Milan, where
Alessandro, attracted by the unheard-of magnificence of that Sforza
who wished to turn the Lombard city into a _New Athens_, had taken up
his abode with a company of men-at-arms.
There is nothing in the world that I prize so much, nor was treasure
ever guarded with more passionate jealousy. I am never weary of
thanking fortune for having caused such a noble figure to brighten
my life, and for having granted me the incomparable luxury of such
a secret. “If thou possess a beautiful object, remember that every
glance cast on it by another is a usurpation of thy possession. The
joy of possession is diminished when it is divided, therefore do thou
refuse to share it. They say that some one declined to enter a public
museum lest his glance should be mingled with that of strangers. Now,
if thou do indeed possess a beautiful object, enclose it within seven
doors, and cover it with seven veils.” And a veil hangs over the
magnetic face; but the dream in it is so profound, the fire in it is so
powerful, that at times the woven stuff trembles with the vehemence of
the breathing.
And so I gave my _dæmon_ the form of this familiar genius, and in my
solitude I felt him alive with a life far more intense than my own. Had
I not before me by means of the lasting miracle of one of the world’s
greatest revealers--had I not before me an heroic spirit, sprung from
my own stock, and constituted of all the distinctive characteristics of
that lineage which I was so eagerly striving to manifest in myself, and
which in him appeared in such fierce relief as to be almost terrible?
There he is still before me, always the same, yet always new! Such a
body is not the prison of the soul, but its faithful semblance. All
the lines of the beardless face are as precise and firm as those of a
deeply-chiselled bronze; the dark pallor of the skin conceals tough
muscles, wont in moments of anger and desire to stand out clearly with
a fierce tremor; the straight, rigid nose, the bony, narrow chin,
the curved but energetically-locked lips express the boldness of the
will; and his glance is like the flash of a beautiful sword coming
from beneath the shadow of thick and heavy hair, violet-black in hue
like the bunches of grapes on a branch in the burning sun. He stands
immovable, visible from the knees upwards; but the imagination pictures
at once how the strong, flexible legs will start when the enemy
appears, giving a formidable impetus to the beautiful frame. “_Cave,
adsum_”--well does the old device apply to him. He is dressed in very
light armour, evidently inlaid by a most accomplished workman, and his
hands are bare; pale, sensitive hands, yet with something tyrannical,
almost homicidal, about their clear outlines: the left hand is resting
on the Gorgon’s head on his sword-hilt, the right on the corner of a
table covered with dark velvet, of which a fold is visible. Lying on
the table beside the gauntlets and helmet are a statuette of Pallas and
a pomegranate, whose pointed leaf and brilliant flower are growing on
the same stalk as the fruit. Through the opening of a window behind his
head is seen a bare landscape ending in a group of hills, over which
rises a peak, standing solitary as a proud thought; and on a scroll
beneath is this verse--
“Frons viridis ramo antiquo et flos igneus uno tempore (prodigium)
fructus et uber inest.”
Where and by what chance did Alessandro first meet with the Florentine
master, who was at that time attaining the supreme splendour of his
manhood? Perhaps at one of Ludovico’s feasts, full of the marvels
created by the occult arts of the Magician? Or perhaps rather at the
palace of Cecilia Gallerani, where military men discussed the science
of war, musicians sang, architects and painters drew, philosophers
argued about natural science, and poets recited compositions of their
own and of others “in the presence of this heroine,” as Bandello
relates. It is here that I like to imagine their first meeting, about
the time when the favourite of the Moor was already beginning to love
Alessandro secretly.
What a fire of audacious intelligence and of masterful will must
have been apparent in the youth, for Leonardo to be so taken with
him from that very day! Perhaps Alessandro discussed with him, apart
from the others, “the methods of destroying any rock or fortress not
founded on stone,” and grew eager to know the formidable secrets of
this fascinating creator of Madonnas, who surpassed all masters and
makers of instruments of war in the novelty of his ideas. Perhaps in
the course of the argument Leonardo may have uttered one of those deep
sayings of his about the art of life; and looking into the eyes of the
youth on whom silence had fallen, recognised in him a spirit determined
to take everything that can be got out of life, an ambitious man
disposed, instead of following his fate blindly, to attain the mastery
for himself with the help of that science which multiplies the energies
of him who possesses it and concentrates them on the attainment of his
aim. And perhaps the man who was a few years later to become Cæsar
Borgia’s military architect, who was invoking and waiting for some
magnanimous prince to offer him unlimited means of carrying out his
innumerable designs, may have perceived in this curly-headed patrician
the future founder of a royal dynasty, and loved him and placed his
proudest hopes in him.
I like to think that a brief entry in the commentaries of Da Vinci
(who was then busy with studies for the equestrian statue of Francesco
Sforza) refers to the evening of this first meeting: “The penultimate
day of April 1492. Messer Alessandro Cantelmo’s fine jennet: has a good
neck and a very beautiful head.”
After leaving Cecilia’s palace together, they both paused for awhile
in the street, still arguing; and when Leonardo noticed the jennet,
he went up to look at it. As he stroked the beautiful neck, some
involuntary expression escaped him regarding the terrible labour his
insatiable spirit underwent in researches for the monument which
the Moor desired to erect in honour of the fame of his father, the
conqueror of the duchy and the vanquisher of Genoa. With a wide sweep
the creative hand of the artist traced the outline of the Colossus in
the air, making it visible to the youth’s inner vision. The day was
sinking; the hour of spring twilight was trembling on the pinnacles of
the glorious city; a company of musicians passed by singing; and the
horse neighed with impatience. Then the soul of Alessandro swelled with
an heroic sentiment which made him seem like a phantom of the great
captain. “Ah, to set out on my conquests!” he thought, as he vaulted
into the saddle. And then seeing that in reality he was only setting
out on some common affair of daily life, he said suddenly, with a
bitter impulse: “Seemeth it to you, Master Leonardo, that life can be
of any worth to a man of my station?” And Leonardo, who did not marvel
at these unexpected words: “It is everything that the eagle should take
his first flight.” And perhaps the beardless horseman riding away among
his men-at-arms may have seemed to him destined to be a king, “like him
who in the bee-hive is born leader of the bees.”
The following morning a servant brought the jennet to the sculptor as a
gift, with compliments from his master.
Thus do I imagine the beginning of their mutual liberality. The
master rewarded his disciple with the true riches, since “that cannot
be called riches which it is possible to lose.” Like Socrates, he
preferred to have for his disciples those who had beautiful hair
and were richly clothed. Like Socrates, he excelled in the art of
elevating the human soul to its supreme degree of vigour. Certainly
Alessandro was for a time the chosen one in that _Academia Leonardo
Vincii_, where a noble spiritual lineage was developed little by
little under teaching which drew its warmth from the central truth as
from a sun which cannot be darkened. “Nothing can be loved or hated,
unless first there be knowledge of that thing. The love of anything is
child to the knowledge of it. The more certain the knowledge, the more
fervent the love.”
* * * * *
Here and there in Leonardo’s interrupted memoirs one comes across
signs of the passionate curiosity with which the indefatigable
experimentalist used to watch over the precious soul of his young
friend. He had no secrets from him, for he desired to contribute by
all the means in his power towards increasing the accumulated forces
of his soul so as to render its future action in a wider field more
efficacious. He noted down for remembrance: “Speak to Volturara about
a certain way of shooting a dart.” And again: “Show Volturara ways
of raising and letting down bridges, ways of burning and destroying
those of the enemy, and the ways of placing mortar pieces by day and
by night.” Or: “Messer Alessandro wishes to give me Valturio’s _De re
militari_, and the _Décades_, and Lucretius’ _Delle cose naturali_.”
He used to be struck by the terse, proud sayings of the young man, and
noted down some of them: “Messer Alessandro says one must grasp fortune
firmly from the front, since behind she is bald.” And again: “As I
was working at the book on dividing rivers into numerous branches,
and making them fordable, Volturara said boldly: Truly, Cyrus son of
Cambyses understood all that when he chastised a river in that very way
for carrying away a white horse of his.”
One day--so I imagine--they had both been invited to the magnificent
house of Cecilia Gallerani; and Leonardo had transported the souls of
all present by his performance on a new lyre of his own manufacture,
made almost entirely of silver, in the shape of a horse’s skull. During
the pause which followed the applause, the second Sappho ordered a
beautiful little casket, richly inlaid with enamel and gems, the Duke’s
gift, to be brought to her; and she showed it to those present, and
asked them what object was, in their opinion, sufficiently precious to
deserve to be kept in it. Every one expressed a different opinion. “And
you, Messer Alessandro?” asked Madonna Cecilia, with a soft glance.
And he replied audaciously: “Alexander of old chose the most precious
casket among all the treasures of Darius, that which was richer than
aught that eyes had ever beheld, as a shrine for Homer’s _Iliad_.”
Da Vinci immediately noted down this answer in his memoirs, and added:
“One can see that he feeds on the marrow and nerves of lions.”
Another day they had both been invited by the same hostess to her
garden; and Alessandro, after an argument with some of those “famous
spirits,” drew apart, to follow out some new thought which the heat of
the discussion had generated in that pregnant intellect. The beautiful
Bergamese Countess called him several times, but it was long ere he
turned round, for it was long ere he heard the call. Met by a gracious
reproof, or perhaps a stinging remark, he answered, smiling: “He who is
fixed to a star does not look round.”
In the evening Da Vinci noted down this answer also in his memoirs, and
to it added his prophecy: “Soon he will take his first flight, fill the
universe with wonder, fill all writings with his renown, and confer
eternal glory on the place of his birth.”
Perhaps it was that very evening, as he meditated on the intensity and
versatility of that youthful temperament, that his mind, ever inclined
to the mysterious significations of emblems and allegories, hit upon
that beautiful symbol of the pomegranate, including and bearing upon
one stalk the fruit, the pointed leaf, and the flaming flower.
But on the 9th of July in the year 1495, three days after the battle
of Fornovo, he noted down: “Volturara died on the field, as was meet
for one like him. Never did blind steel cut off a brighter hope for the
world.”
Thus lived and died the young hero in whom the purest essence of my
warlike race had seemed to be concentrated. Thus fully was he revealed
to me in the faithful likeness handed down to his distant heir by an
artist who might be called Prometheus.
“O thou,” he seemed to say to me, as with his magnetic glance he took
possession of my soul, “be what thou oughtest to be.”
“For thy sake,” I used to say to him, “for thy sake I will be what
I ought to be; because I love thee, O brilliant flower of my race;
because I desire to place all my pride in obeying thy law, O master.
Thou didst bear within thyself strength sufficient to subjugate the
earth, but thy royal destiny was not to be fulfilled in the age wherein
thou didst first appear. In that age thou wast but the herald and
forerunner of thyself, for thou wast destined to reappear higher up
thy ancient stem in the maturity of future ages, on the threshold of a
world not explored by the warriors, but promised by the wise men: to
reappear as the messenger, the interpreter, and the lord of a new life.
Therefore didst thou suddenly disappear like a demi-god by the banks of
a swollen river, amid the roar of battle and storm, just as the sun was
entering the sign of the Lion. Death did not cut off thy great promise,
but fate willed to alter its marvellous fulfilment. Thy virtue, which
could not then be manifested to the earth by triumphant actions, must
necessarily revive some day in thy still surviving lineage. And may
it be to-morrow! May thy equal be begotten by me! I invoke and await
and prepare the renewal of thy genius with unfailing faith, the while
adoring thy living image, O conqueror and sage, thou who didst lay the
blade of thy beautiful naked sword as a mark in the books of wisdom.”
Thus I used to address him. And under his glance and inspired by him,
not only were my actual energies multiplied, but my task lay clear
before me in definite outlines. “Thou, therefore, shalt labour to carry
out thy own destiny and that of thy race. Thou shalt have before thy
eyes at the same time the premeditated plan of thy existence and the
vision of an existence superior to thine own. Thou shalt live in the
idea that each life being the sumtotal of past lives is the condition
of future lives. Thou shalt not, therefore, look upon thyself only as
the beginning, aim, and end of thy own destiny, but thou shalt feel the
whole value and the whole weight of the inheritance received from thy
ancestors, which thou must transmit to thy descendant countersigned
with the stamp of thy most vigorous characteristics. Let the supreme
conception of thy dignity be founded on the certainty, so sure in
thee, that thou art the preserving link of a multifold energy which
to-morrow, or after the lapse of a century, or at some indefinite time,
may reassert itself in a sublime manifestation. But hope that it may be
to-morrow! Triple, therefore, is thy task, for thou dost possess the
gift of poetry, and must study to acquire the science of words. Triple
is thy task:--by direct methods to conduct thy being to attain the
perfect integrity of the Latin type; to concentrate the purest essence
of thy spirit, and to reproduce in a single and supreme work of art thy
deepest vision of the universe; to preserve the ideal riches of thy
race and thine own individual conquests in a son, who, under paternal
instruction, shall recognise and co-ordinate them in himself, and
shall thus feel worthy of aspiring to the realisation of ever higher
possibilities.”
* * * * *
Then, with the tables of my laws thus clearly set before me, there
came over me not only the sadness of doubt, but an anxiety akin to
fear--a new and horrible anxiety. “If some blind, unforeseen violence
from exterior forces were to shake, or deform, or crush my work! If I
should have to bend and submit to some brutal injury of chance. If one
of those destructive gusts which burst suddenly out of the darkness
should cause the fall of my edifice before its completion.” This fear
came over me during a strange hour of agitation and depression, and
I felt my faith failing me. But soon after I felt ashamed when my
monitor said to me: “Judging from the quality of thy thoughts, thou
seemest to me like one contaminated by the crowd, or in the power of
a woman. See, even passing through the crowd which was gazing at thee
has lessened thee in thine own eyes. Seest thou not that those men
who frequent it become unfruitful as mules? The gaze of the crowd is
worse than a splash of mud; the breath of it is poisonous. Go afar off
while the sewer discharges itself. Go afar off and ponder on that which
thou hast gathered up. Thy hour will come. What fearest thou? Of what
worth would be all this discipline, did it not make thee stronger than
circumstances? Even by this it is sometimes possible to create by
force of will. Therefore go afar off while the sewer discharges itself.
Delay not; let not thyself be contaminated by the crowd, or fall into
the power of a woman. It is true thou wilt have to form an alliance in
order to accomplish one part of the task thou hast assigned to thyself.
But better is it for thee to wait and remain alone; better even to slay
thy hope than to submit body and spirit to unworthy fetters. If the
thing loved is contemptible, the lover is contemptible. Thou must never
forget this saying of thy Leonardo, that, like Castruccio, thou mayest
always be able proudly to reply: 'I have chosen her; she did not choose
me.’”
Justly did this admonition come to me at that time. And without delay I
made ready to depart from the tainted city.
It was a time when the active zeal of destroyers and builders was
raging feverishly over the soil of Rome. With the clouds of dust
a species of madness for lucre seemed to spread like a poisonous
whirlwind, taking hold not only of the men of the labouring classes,
the familiar spirits of lime and bricks, but also of the proudest
heirs of papal families, who till then had looked scornfully at
all intruders from the windows of travertine palaces, which stood
obdurately firm under the crust of ages. One by one these magnificent
families--founded, carried on, strengthened by nepotism and civil
wars--sank lower, slid down into the new mire, went under and
disappeared. Famous fortunes accumulated by centuries of successful
rapine and Mæcenatic luxury were exposed to the risks of the Stock
Exchange.
The laurels and roses of the Villa Sciarra, whose praises had been
sung by the nightingales for such a long succession of nights, were
being cut down to the ground, or survived in a humble position inside
the gates of little gardens surrounding new villas built for grocers.
The gigantic Ludovisi cypresses, those of the Aurora, the very same
which had once spread the solemnity of their ancient mystery over
the Olympian head of Goethe, lay on the ground (I see them always
in imagination as my eyes saw them one November afternoon) side by
side in a row, with the smoke from their naked roots rising up to the
pale heaven above, with their black roots all laid bare, and seeming
still to hold prisoner within their vast intricacies the phantom
of omnipotent life. And those lordly meadows all round, where only
one spring ago violets more numerous than the blades of grass were
springing up for the last time, were now ghastly with white lime-pits,
red heaps of bricks, the creaking of cart-wheels loaded with stones;
while the shouts of the master builders alternated with the hoarse
cries of the carters, and the brutal work which was to occupy places so
long sacred to Beauty and Visions went on rapidly.
It seemed as though a blast of barbarism were blowing over Rome, and
threatening to tear away that radiant crown of patrician villas,
incomparable in the world of memories and poetry. The menace of the
barbarians hung over the very box-trees of the Villa Albani, though
they had seemed as immortal as the Caryatids and the solitude.
The contagion was spreading rapidly everywhere. In the midst of the
incessant current of business, of the ferocious fury of appetites and
passions, of the disordered and exclusive exercise of utilitarian
activity, all sense of decorum had been lost, all respect for the
Past laid aside. The battle for gain was being fought with unbridled,
implacable violence. The arms used were the pickaxe, the trowel, and
bad faith. And from week to week, with almost chimerical rapidity,
enormous empty cages, pierced with rectangular holes, their artificial
cornices coated with shameful stucco, were rising on foundations filled
with heaps of ruins. A species of huge whitish tumour was rising out of
the side of the ancient city and sucking away its life.
And then day after day at sunset--as the quarrelsome bands of workmen
were dispersing to fill the taverns of the Via Salaria and Via
Nomentana--down the princely avenues of the Villa Borghese they drove
in shining carriages, these new favourites of fortune, the stamp of
whose ignoble origin neither hairdresser, nor tailor, nor bootmaker had
been able to remove. One saw them passing to and fro, to the resounding
trot of their bay or their black horses, easily recognisable by the
insolent awkwardness of their attitudes, the embarrassed look of their
rapacious hands imprisoned in gloves always either too large or too
small for them. And they seemed to be saying: “We are the new masters
of Rome. Bow down to us!”
Such, indeed, were the masters of that Rome which seers and prophets,
drunk with the burning fumes of all the Latin blood that has been
shed, have compared to the bow of Ulysses--“One must bend it or die.”
But these very seers, who for so long had shone as stars in the
heroic heaven of their country, before her liberation, had now become
“sordid charcoal, only fit to trace an ugly figure or an unseemly word
upon the wall,” according to the atrocious simile of an indignant
rhetorician. They, too, gave themselves up to selling and bartering, to
legal quibbling and setting of snares, and no one alluded any more to
the destroying bow. And there seemed in truth no prospect of the cry
suddenly arising to terrify them: “O suitors, devourers of other men’s
substance, beware! Ulysses is at hand in Ithaca!”
* * * * *
The best thing to do was to withdraw from the scene for a while. And I
left with my horses and my household gods without taking farewell of
anybody.
For my dwelling-place I had chosen Rebursa, my favourite among my
hereditary estates, as it had been my father’s favourite before me;
it was a suitable retreat for a healthy soul, a country with a rocky
backbone, peculiarly sober in outline and vigorous in style; fit to
welcome and nurse the lordly dream of my ambition, as it had welcomed
and nursed my father’s lofty melancholy after the fall of his king, and
the death of him who, when living, had seemed to be the light of our
house, our surest possession.
Besides, not far from there--at Trigento--I had friends, not forgotten
although not seen for many years, friends to whom I was bound by
grateful memories of childhood and youth. And the thought of seeing
them again cheered my spirit.
At Trigento, in the old baronial palace, surrounded by a garden almost
as vast as a park, lived the Capea Montaga, one of the most illustrious
and magnificent families in the two Sicilies, a family ruined by ten
years’ devotion to the fortunes of their exiled king, and obliged now
to live a retired life on the only estate left to them, in the heart of
the silent province. The old Prince of Castromitrano--who had enjoyed
the highest honours at the Courts of Ferdinand and Francis, and who
had faithfully followed the exile to Rome and across the Alps without
ever renouncing the pomp of happier times--had been dreaming in the
shade for years, and for years waiting in vain for the Restoration;
he was now sinking into the grave with premature old age, while his
children were fading away in the lifeless monotony of their existence.
The madness of the Princess Aldoina alone disturbed this long agony
by throwing over it gleams of the fantastic splendour of the Past.
And nothing could equal the desolation of the contrast between the
miserable reality and the pompous phantoms which issued from the brain
of the mad woman.
This great and dying race added a kind of funereal beauty to the rocky
country for my soul, which was already seeking to absorb all the soul
enclosed within that stony cloister. Already a mysterious presentiment
had arisen from the depths of my being that my destiny was approaching
and mingling with that lonely destiny. And the names of the three
maiden princesses resounded in my memory with a faint magical music:
Massimilla, Anatolia, Violante--names in which there seemed to me to be
something vaguely visible, like a pale portrait behind a clouded glass;
names expressive as faces full of light and shade, in which an infinity
of grace, passion, and sorrow was already apparent to me.