EXTRACT FROM THE DIARY OF SALVIATI
Ingenium nobis ipsa puella facit.
(_Propertius_, II, I.)
Bologna, _April 29th_, 1818.
Driven to despair by the misfortune to which love has reduced me, I
curse existence. I have no heart for anything. The weather is dull; it
is raining, and a late spell of cold has come again to sadden nature,
who after a long winter was hurrying to meet the spring.
Schiassetti, a half-pay colonel, my cold and reasonable friend, came to
spend a couple of hours with me "You should renounce your love."
"How? Give me back my passion for war."
"It is a great misfortune for you to have known her."
I agree very nearly--so low-spirited and craven do I feel--so much has
melancholy taken possession of me to-day. We discuss what interest
can have led her friend to libel me, but find nothing but that old
Neapolitan proverb: "Woman, whom love and youth desert, a nothing
piques." What is certain is that that cruel woman is _enraged_ with
me--it is the expression of one of her friends. I could revenge myself
in a fearful way, but, against her hatred, I am without the smallest
means of defence. Schiassetti leaves me. I go out into the rain, not
knowing what to do with myself. My rooms, this drawing-room, which I
lived in during the first days of our acquaintance, and when I saw her
every evening, have become insupportable to me. Each engraving, each
piece of furniture, brings up again the
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happiness I dreamed of in their presence--which now I have lost for
ever.
I tramped the streets through a cold rain: chance, if I can call it
chance, made me pass under her windows. Night was falling and I went
along, my eyes full of tears fixed on the window of her room. Suddenly
the curtains were just drawn aside, as if to give a glimpse into the
square, then instantly closed again. I felt within me a physical
movement about the heart. I was unable to support myself and took
refuge under the gateway of the next house. A thousand feelings crowd
upon my soul. Chance may have produced this movement of the curtains;
but oh! if it was her hand that had drawn them aside.
There are two misfortunes in the world: passion frustrated and the
"dead blank."
In love--I feel that two steps away from me exists a boundless
happiness, something beyond all my prayers, which depends upon nothing
but a word, nothing but a smile.
Passionless like Schiassetti, on gloomy days I see happiness nowhere, I
come to doubt if it exists for me, I fall into depression. One ought to
be without strong passions and have only a little curiosity or vanity.
It is two o'clock in the morning; I have seen that little movement of
the curtain; at six o'clock I paid some calls and went to the play, but
everywhere, silent and dreaming, I passed the evening examining this
question: "After so much anger with so little foundation (for after
all did I wish to offend her and is there a thing on earth which the
intention does not excuse?)--has she felt a moment of love?"
Poor Salviati, who wrote the preceding lines on his Petrarch, died a
short time after. He was the intimate friend of Schiassetti and myself;
we knew all his thoughts, and it is from him that I have all the
tearful part of this essay. He was imprudence incarnate; moreover,
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the woman, for whom he went to such wild lengths, is the most
interesting creature that I have met. Schiassetti said to me: "But do
you think that that unfortunate passion was without advantages for
Salviati? To begin with, the most worrying of money troubles that can
be imagined came upon him. These troubles, which reduced him to a very
middling fortune after his dazzling youth, and would have driven him
mad with anger in any other circumstances, crossed his mind not once in
two weeks.
"And then--a matter of importance of a quite different kind for a mind
of his range--that passion is the first true course of logic, which
he ever had. That may seem peculiar in a man who has been at Court;
but the fact is explained by his extreme courage. For example, he
passed without winking the day of ----, the day of his undoing; he was
surprised then, as in Russia(16), not to feel anything extraordinary.
It is an actual fact, that his fear of anything had never gone so far
as to make him think about it for two days together. Instead of this
callousness, the last two years he was trying every minute to be brave.
Before he had never seen danger.
"When as a result of his imprudence and his faith in the generosity of
critics,[1] he had managed to get condemned to not seeing the woman he
was in love with, except twice a month, we would see him pass those
evenings, talking to her as if intoxicated with joy, because he had
been received with that noble frankness which he worshipped. He held
that Madame ---- and he were two souls without their like, who should
understand each other with a glance. It was beyond him to grasp that
she should pay the least attention to petty bourgeois comments, which
tried to make a criminal of him. The result of this fine confidence in
a woman, surrounded by his enemies, was to find her door closed to him.
"'With M----,' I used to say to him, 'you forget
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your maxim--that you mustn't believe in greatness of soul, except in
the last extremity.'
"'Do you think,' he answered, 'that the world contains another heart
which is more suited to hers? True, I pay for this passionate way of
being, which Léonore, in anger, made me see on the horizon in the line
of the rocks of Poligny, with the ruin of all the practical enterprises
of my life--a disaster which comes from my lack of patient industry and
imprudence due to the force of momentary impressions.'" One can see the
touch of madness!
For Salviati life was divided into periods of a fortnight, which took
their hue from the last interview, which he had been granted. But
I noticed often, that the happiness he owed to a welcome, which he
thought less cold, was far inferior in intensity to the unhappiness
with which a hard reception overwhelmed him.[2] At times Madame
---- failed to be quite honest with him; and these are the only two
criticisms I ever dared offer him. Beyond the more intimate side of his
sorrow, of which he had the delicacy never to speak even to the friends
dearest to him and most devoid of envy, he saw in a hard reception
from Léonore the triumph of prosaic and scheming beings over the
open-hearted and the generous. At those times he lost faith in virtue
and, above all, in glory. It was his way to talk to his friends only
of sad notions, to which it is true his passion led up, but notions
capable besides of having some interest in the eyes of philosophy. I
was curious to observe that uncommon soul. Ordinarily passion-love is
found in people, a little simple in the German way.[3] Salviati, on the
contrary, was among the firmest and sharpest men I have known.
I seemed to notice that, after these cruel visits, he had
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no peace until he had found a justification for Léonore's severities.
So long as he felt that she might have been wrong in ill-using him, he
was unhappy. Love, so devoid of vanity, I should never have thought
possible.
He was incessantly singing us the praises of love.
"If a supernatural power said to me: Break the glass of that watch and
Léonore will be for you, what she was three years ago, an indifferent
friend--really I believe I would never as long as I live have the
courage to break it." I saw in these discourses such signs of madness,
that I never had the courage to offer my former objections.
He would add: "Just as Luther's Reformation at the end of the Middle
Ages, shaking society to its base, renewed and reconstructed the world
on reasonable foundations, so is a generous character renewed and
retempered by love.
"It is only then, that he casts off all the baubles of life; without
this revolution he would always have had in him a pompous and
theatrical _something_. It is only since I began to love that I have
learnt to put greatness into my character--such is the absurdity of
education at our military academy.
"Although I behaved well, I was a child at the Court of Napoleon and at
Moscow. I did my duty, but I knew nothing of that heroic simplicity,
the fruit of entire and whole-hearted sacrifice. For example, it is
only this last year, that my heart takes in the simplicity of the
Romans in Livy. Once upon a time, I thought them cold compared to our
brilliant colonels. What they did for their Rome, I find in my heart
for Léonore. If I had the luck to be able to do anything for her, my
first desire would be to hide it. The conduct of a Regulus or a Decius
was something confirmed beforehand, which had no claim to surprise
them. Before I loved, I was small, precisely because I was tempted
sometimes to think myself great; I felt a certain effort, for which I
applauded myself.
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"And, on the side of affection, what do we not owe to love? After
the hazards of early youth, the heart is closed to sympathy. Death
and absence remove our early companions, and we are reduced to
passing our life with lukewarm partners, measure in hand, for ever
calculating ideas of interest and vanity. Little by little all the
sensitive and generous region of the soul becomes waste, for want of
cultivation, and at less than thirty a man finds his heart steeled to
all sweet and gentle sensations. In the midst of this arid desert,
love causes a well of feelings to spring up, fresher and more abundant
even than that of earliest youth. In those days it was a vague hope,
irresponsible and incessantly distracted[4]--no devotion to one thing,
no deep and constant desire; the soul, at all times light, was athirst
for novelty and forgot to-day its adoration of the day before. But,
than the crystallisation of love nothing is more concentrated, more
mysterious, more eternally single in its object. In those days only
agreeable things claimed to please and to please for an instant: now
we are deeply touched by everything which is connected with the loved
one--even by objects the most indifferent. Arriving at a great town,
a hundred miles from that which Léonore lives in, I was in a state of
fear and trembling; at each street corner I shuddered to meet Alviza,
the intimate friend of Madame ----, although I did not know her. For me
everything took a mysterious and sacred tint. My heart beat fast, while
talking to an old scholar; for I could not hear without blushing the
name of the city gate, near which the friend of Léonore lives.
"Even the severities of the woman we love have an infinite grace, which
the most flattering moments in the company of other women cannot offer.
It is like the great shadows in Correggio's pictures, which far from
being, as in other painters, passages less pleasant, but necessary in
order to give effect to the lights and relief to the figures,
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have graces of their own which charm and throw us into a gentle
reverie.[5]
"Yes, half and the fairest half of life is hidden from the man, who has
not loved with passion."
Salviati had need of the whole force of his dialectic powers, to hold
his own against the wise Schiassetti, who was always saying to him:
"You want to be happy, then be content with a life exempt from pains
and with a small quantity of happiness every day. Keep yourself from
the lottery of great passions."
"Then give me your curiosity," was Salviati's answer.
I imagine there were not a few days, when he would have liked to be
able to follow the advice of our sensible colonel; he made a little
struggle and thought he was succeeding; but this line of action was
absolutely beyond his strength. And yet what strength was in that soul!
A white satin hat, a little like that of Madame ----, seen in the
distance in the street, made his heart stop beating, and forced him
to rest against the wall. Even in his blackest moments, the happiness
of meeting her gave him always some hours of intoxication, beyond the
reach of all misfortune and all reasoning.[6] For the rest, at the time
of his death[7] his character had certainly contracted more than one
noble habit, after two years of
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this generous and boundless passion; and, in so far at least, he judged
himself correctly. Had he lived, and circumstances helped him a little,
he would
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have made a name for himself. Maybe also, just through his simplicity,
his merit would have passed on this earth unseen.
O lasso
Quanti dolci pensier, quanto desio
Menò costui al doloroso passo!
Biondo era, e bello, e di gentile aspetto;
Ma l'un de' cigli un colpo avea diviso.
(_Dante._)[8]
[1] Sotto l'usbergo del sentirsi pura. [Under the shield of conscious
purity.--Tr.] (Dante, _Inf._, XXVIII, 117.)
[2] That is a thing which I have often seemed to notice in love--that
propensity to reap more unhappiness from what is unhappy than happiness
from what is happy.
[3] Don Carlos,(17) Saint-Preux,(17) Racine's _Hippolyte_ and _Bajazet_.
[4] Mordaunt Mertoun, _Pirate_, Vol. I.
[5] As I have mentioned Correggio, I will add that in the sketch of an
angel's head in the gallery of the museum at Florence, is to be seen
the glance of happy love, and at Parma in the Madonna crowned by Jesus
the downcast eyes of love.
[6] Come what sorrow can
It cannot countervail the exchange of joy
That one short moment gives me in her sight.--(_Romeo and Juliet_.)
[7] Some days before the last he made a little ode, which has the merit
of expressing just the sentiments, which formed the subject of our
conversations:--.
L'ULTIMO DI.
Anacreontica.
A ELVIRA.
Vedi tu dove il rio
Lambendo un mirto va,
Là del riposo mio
La pietra surgerà.
Il passero amoroso,
E il nobile usignuol
Entro quel mirto ombroso
Raccoglieranno il vol.
Vieni, diletta Elvira,
A quella tomba vien,
E sulla muta lira,
Appoggia il bianco sen.
Su quella bruna pietra,
Le tortore verran,
E intorno alia mia cetra,
Il nido intrecieran.
E ogni anno, il di che offendere
M'osasti tu infedel,
Faro la su discendere
La folgore del ciel.
Odi d'un uom che muore
Odi l'estremo suon
Questo appassito fiore
Ti lascio, Elvira, in don
Quanto prezioso ei sia
Saper tu il devi appien
Il di che fosti mia,
Te l'involai dal sen.
Simbolo allor d'affetto
Or pegno di dolor
Torno a posarti in petto
Quest' appassito fior.
E avrai nel cuor scolpito
Se crudo il cor non è,
Come ti fu rapito,
Come fu reso a te.--(_S. Radael._)*
* [Lo! where the passing stream laps round the myrtle-tree, raise
there the stone of my resting-place. The amorous sparrow and the noble
nightingale within the shade of that myrtle will rest from flight.
Come, beloved Elvira, come to that tomb and press my mute lyre to your
white bosom. Turtles shall perch on that dark stone and will twine
their nest about my harp. And every year on the day when you did dare
cruelly betray me, on this spot will I make the lightning of heaven
descend. Listen, listen to the last utterances of a dying man. This
faded flower, Elvira, is the gift I leave you. How precious it is you
must know full well: from your bosom I stole it the day you became
mine. Then it was a symbol of love; now as a pledge of suffering I
will put it back in your bosom--this faded flower. And you shall
have engraved on your heart, if a woman's heart you have, how it was
snatched from you, how it was returned.]
[8] "Poor wretch, how many sweet thoughts, what constancy brought him
to his last hour. He was fair and beautiful and gentle of countenance,
only a noble scar cut through one of his eyebrows."
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