THE VISIONARY AND HIS DAUGHTER--AN ENGLISHMAN, SUCH AS FOREIGNERS IMAGINE
THE ENGLISH.
We must now present the reader to characters very diferent from those
which have hitherto passed before his eye. Without the immortal city,
along the Appia Via, there dwelt a singular and romantic visionary, of the
name of Volktman. He was by birth a Dane; and nature had bestowed on him
that frame of mind which might have won him a distinguished career, had
she placed the period of his birth in the eleventh century. Volktman was
essentially a man belonging to the past time: the character of his
enthusiasm was weird and Gothic; with beings of the present day he had no
sympathy; their loves, their hatreds, their politics, their literature,
awoke no echo in his breast. He did not affect to herd with them; his
life was solitude, and its occupation study--and study of that nature
which every day unfitted him more and more for the purposes of existence.
In a word, he was a reader of the stars; a believer in the occult and
dreamy science of astrology. Bred up to the art of sculpture, he had
early in life sought Rome, as the nurse of inspiration; but even then he
had brought with him the dark and brooding temper of his northern tribe.
The images of the classic world; the bright, and cold, and beautiful
divinities, whose natures as well as shapes the marble simulation of life
is so especially adapted to represent; spoke but little to Volktman's
pre-occupied and gloomy imagination. Faithful to the superstitions and
the warriors of the North, the loveliness and majesty of the southern
creations but called forth in him the desire to apply the principles by
which they were formed to the embodying those stern visions which his
haggard and dim fancies only could invoke. This train of inspiration
preserved him, at least, from the deadliest vice in a worshipper of the
arts--commonplace. He was no servile and trite imitator; his very faults
were solemn and commanding. But before he had gained that long experience
which can alone perfect genius, his natural energies were directed to new
channels. In an illness which prevented his applying to his art, he had
accidentally sought entertainment in a certain work upon astrology. The
wild and imposing theories of the science--if science it may be
called--especially charmed and invited him. The clear bright nights of
his fatherland were brought back to his remembrance; he recalled the
mystic and unanalysed impressions with which he had gazed upon the lights
of heaven; and he imagined that the very vagueness of his feelings was a
proof of the certainty of the science.
The sons of the North are pre-eminently liable to be affected by that
romance of emotion which the hushed and starry aspect of night is
calculated to excite. The long-broken luxurious silence that, in their
frozen climate, reigns from the going down of the sun to its rise; the
wandering and sudden meteors that disport, as with an impish life, along
the noiseless and solemn heaven; the peculiar radiance of the stars; and
even the sterile and severe features of the earth, which those stars light
up with their chill and ghostly serenity, serve to deepen the effect of
the wizard tales which are instilled into the ear of childhood, and to
connect the less known and more visionary impulses of life with the
influences, or at least with the associations, of Night and Heaven.
To Volktman, more alive than even his countrymen are wont to be, to
superstitious impressions, the science on which he had chanced came with
an all-absorbing interest and fascination. He surrendered himself wholly
to his new pursuit. By degrees the block and the chisel were neglected,
and, though he still worked from time to time, he ceased to consider the
sculptor's art as the vocation of his life and the end of his ambition.
Fortunately, though not rich, Volktman was not without the means of
existence, nor even without the decent and proper comforts: so that he was
enabled, as few men are, to indulge his ardour for unprofitable
speculations, albeit to the exclusion of lucrative pursuits. It may be
noted, that when a man is addicted to an occupation that withdraws him
from the world, any great affliction tends to confirm, without hope of
cure, his inclinations to solitude. The world, distasteful, in that it
gave no pleasure, becomes irremediably hateful when it is coupled with the
remembrance of pain. Volktman had married an Italian, a woman who loved
him entirely, and whom he loved with that strong though uncaressing
affection common to men of his peculiar temper. Of the gay and social
habits and constitution of her country, the Italian was not disposed to
suffer the astrologer to dwell only among the stars. She sought,
playfully and kindly, to attract him towards human society; and Volktman
could not always resist--as what man earth-born can do?--the influence of
the fair presider over his house and hearth. It happened, that on one day
in which she peculiarly wished his attendance at some one of those parties
in which Englishmen think the notion of festivity strange--for it includes
conversation--Volktman had foretold the menace of some great misfortune.
Uncertain, from the character of the prediction, whether to wish his wife
to remain at home or to go abroad, he yielded to her wish, and accompanied
her to her friend's house. A young Englishman lately arrived at Rome, and
already celebrated in the circles of that city for eccentricity of life
and his passion for beauty, was of the party. He appeared struck with the
sculptor's wife; and in his attentions, Volktman, for the first and the
last time, experienced the pangs of jealousy; he hurried his wife away.
On their return home, whether or not a jewel worn by the signora had
attracted the cupidity of some of the lawless race who live through
gaining, and profiting by, such information, they were attacked by two
robbers in the obscure and ill-lighted suburb. Though Volktman offered no
resistance, the manner of their assailants was rude and violent. The
signora was fearfully alarmed; her shrieks brought a stranger to their
assistance; it was the English youth who had so alarmed the jealousy of
Volktman. Accustomed to danger in his profession of a gallant, the
Englishman seldom, in those foreign lands, went from home at night without
the protection of pistols. At the sight of firearms, the ruffians felt
their courage evaporate; they fled from their prey; and the Englishman
assisted Volktman in conveying the Italian to her home. But the terror of
the encounter operated fatally on a delicate frame; and within three weeks
from that night Volktman was a widower.
His marriage had been blessed with but one daughter, who at the time of
this catastrophe was about eight years of age. His love for his child in
some measure reconciled Volktman to life; and as the shock of the event
subsided, he returned with a pertinacity which was now subjected to no
interruption, to his beloved occupations and mysterious researches. One
visitor alone found it possible to win frequent ingress to his seclusion;
it was the young English man. A sentiment of remorse at the jealous
feelings he had experienced, and for which his wife, though an Italian,
had never given him even the shadow of a cause, had softened--into a
feeling rendered kind by the associations of the deceased, and a vague
desire to atone to her for an acknowledged error,--the dislike he had at
first conceived against the young man. This was rapidly confirmed by the
gentle and winning manners of the stranger, by his attentions to the
deceased, to whom he had sent an English physician of great skill, and, as
their acquaintance expanded, by the animated interest which he testified
in the darling theories of the astrologer.
It happened also that Volktman's mother had been the daughter of Scotch
parents. She had taught him the English tongue; and it was the only
language, save his own, which he spoke as a native. This circumstance
tended greatly to facilitate his intercourse with the traveller; and he
found in the society of a man ardent, sensitive, melancholy, and addicted
to all abstract contemplation, a pleasure which, among the keen, but
uncultivated intellects of Italy, he had never enjoyed.
Frequently, then, came the young Englishman to the lone house on the Appia
Via; and the mysterious and unearthly conversation of the starry visionary
afforded to him, who had early learned to scrutinise the varieties of his
kind, a strange delight, heightened by the contrast it presented to the
worldly natures with which he usually associated, and the commonplace
occupations of a life in pursuit of pleasure.
And there was one who, child as she was, watched the coming of that young
and beautiful stranger with emotion beyond her years. Brought up alone;
mixing, since her mother's death, with no companions of her age; catching
dim and solemn glimpses of her father's wild but lofty speculations; his
books, filled with strange characters and imposing "words of mighty
sound," open for ever to her young and curious gaze; it can scarce be
matter of wonder that something strange and unworldly mingled with the
elements of character which Lucilla Volktman early developed--a character
that was nature itself, yet of a nature erratic and bizarre. Her impulses
she obeyed spontaneously, but none fathomed their origin. She was not of
a quiet and meek order of mind; but passionate, changeful, and restless.
She would laugh and weep without apparent cause; and the colour on her
cheek never seemed for two minutes the same; and the most fitful changes
of an April heaven were immutability itself compared with the play and
lustre of expression that undulated in her features and her wild, deep,
eloquent eyes.
Her person resembled her mind; it was beautiful; but the beauty struck you
less than the singularity of its character. Her eyes were of a darkness
that at night seemed black; but her hair was of the brightest and purest
auburn; her complexion, sometimes pale, sometimes radiant even to the
flush of a fever, was delicate and clear; her teeth and mouth were lovely
beyond all words; her hands and feet were small to a fault; and as she
grew up (for we have forestalled her age in this description) her shape,
though wanting in height, was in such harmony and proportion, that the
mind of the sculptor would sometimes escape from the absorption of the
astrologer and Volktman would gaze upon her with the same admiration that
he would have bestowed, in spite of the subject, on the goddess-forms of
Phidias or Canova. But then, this beauty was accompanied with such
endless variety of gesture, often so wild, though always necessarily
graceful, that the eye ached for that repose requisite for prolonged
admiration.
When she was spoken to, she did not often answer to the purpose, but
rather appeared to reply as to some interrogatory of her own; in the midst
of one occupation, she would start up to another; leave that, in turn,
undone, and sit down in silence lasting for hours. Her voice, in singing,
was exquisitely melodious; she had too, an intuitive talent for painting;
and she read all the books that came in her way with an avidity that
bespoke at once the restlessness and the genius of her mind.
This description of Lucilla must, I need scarcely repeat, be considered as
applicable to her at some years distant from the time in which the young
Englishman first attracted her childish but ardent imagination. To her,
that face, with its regular and harmonious features, its golden hair, and
soft, shy, melancholy aspect, seemed as belonging to a higher and brighter
order of beings than those who, with exaggerated lineaments and swarthy
hues, surrounded and displeased her. She took a strange and thrilling
pleasure in creeping to his side, and looking up, when unobserved, at the
countenance which, in his absence, she loved to imitate with her pencil by
day; and to recall in her dreams at night. But she seldom spoke to him,
and she shrank, covered with painful blushes, from his arms, whenever he
attempted to bestow on her those caresses which children are wont to claim
as an attention. Once, however, she summoned courage to ask him to teach
her English, and he complied. She learned that language with surprising
facility; and as Volktman loved its sound she grew familiar with its
difficulties, by always addressing her father in a tongue which became
inexpressibly dear to her. And the young stranger delighted to hear that
soft and melodious voice, with its trembling, Italian accent, make music
from the nervous and masculine language of his native land. Scarce
accountably to himself, a certain tender and peculiar interest in the
fortunes of this singular and bewitching child grew up within
him--peculiar and not easily accounted for, in that it was not wholly the
interest we feel in an engaging child, and yet was of no more interested
nor sinister order. Were there truth in the science of the stars, I
should say that they had told him her fate was to have affinity with his;
and with that persuasion, something mysterious and more than ordinarily
tender, entered into the affection he felt for the daughter of his friend.
The Englishman was himself of a romantic character. He had been
self-taught; and his studies, irregular though often deep, had given
directions to his intellect frequently enthusiastic and unsound. His
imagination preponderated over his judgment; and any pursuit that
attracted his imagination won his entire devotion, until his natural
sagacity proved it deceitful. If at times, living as he did in that daily
world which so sharpens our common sense, he smiled at the persevering
fervour of the astrologer, he more often shared it; and he became his
pupil in "the poetry of heaven," with a secret but deep belief in the
mysteries cultivated by his master. Carrying the delusion to its height,
I fear that the enthusiast entered upon ground still more shadowy and
benighted;--the old secrets of the alchymist, and perhaps even of those
arcana yet more gloomy and less rational, were subjected to their serious
contemplation; and night after night, they delivered themselves wholly up
to that fearful and charmed fascination which the desire and effort to
overleap our mortal boundaries produce even in the hardest and best
regulated minds. The train of thought so long nursed by the abstruse and
solitary Dane was, perhaps, a better apology for the weakness of
credulity, than the youth and wandering fancy of the Englishman. But the
scene around--not alluring to the one--fed to overflowing the romantic
aspirations of the other.
On his way home, as the stars (which night had been spent in reading)
began to wink and fade, the Englishman crossed the haunted Almo, renowned
of yore for its healing virtues, and in whose stream the far-famed
simulacrum, (the image of Cybele), which fell from heaven, was wont to be
laved with every coming spring: and around his steps, till he gained his
home, were the relics and monuments of that superstition which sheds so
much beauty over all that, in harsh reasoning, it may be said to degrade;
so that his mind, always peculiarly alive to external impressions, was
girt, as it were, with an atmosphere favourable both to the lofty
speculation and the graceful credulities of romance.
The Englishman remained at Rome, with slight intervals of absence, for
nearly three years. On the night before the day in which he received
intelligence of an event that recalled him to his native country, he
repaired at an hour accidentally later than usual to the astrologer's
abode.