A few years since we chose to spend the summer in a chalet among the
Dolomites of South Tyrol. Weird, fantastic, inaccessible, mysterious,
grotesque, and yet often wearing a jewelled crown of eternal ice, these
peaks soared into the ether above and around us. "Nothing," says a
recent traveller, "can surpass the majesty and beauty of the towers and
ramparts, the battlemented walls, impregnable castles, and gracefully
pinnacled cathedrals into the forms of which their summits are built
up. Their colouring is another striking characteristic; many of them
rivet the eye with the richness of the tints,--deep reds, bright
yellows, silvery whites, and the dark blues and blacks of the rocks.
But all these colours are modified and softened by a peculiar grayish
white tint. The mountains look as if powdered over with some substance
less hard and cold than newly fallen snow."
Although within a day's drive of Pieve di Cadore,--Titian's
birthplace--and not far from Cortina, we could hardly have found a more
isolated spot. It was a hermitage, and we knew literally no one within
hundreds of miles.
Ossip Schubin, the popular German novelist at that time, had sent us a
volume of stories, with the request that we would translate them. We
selected the story now offered as being most in sympathy with our
romantic surroundings.
A learned Englishman has said, "If histories were written as histories
should be, boys and girls would cry to read them." But alas! how is the
spirit, the tone, of a dead century to be made to breathe again and
report itself? The landscape alone is permanent; new figures constantly
fill the foreground. Poetry, legend, myths, help us to divine some of
the strange chords in the human chant, which, heavily burdened with
sorrow, come down to us through the ages.
In this twentieth century no one sentiment or emotion is allowed so far
to dominate as to crush out all others. But how was it in the days of
the Crusaders, of the Minnesingers, of the Troubadours? If we would
realise the seclusion, the loneliness of many lives centuries ago, we
have only to enter either "The Wartburg" or the castle of Solmes
Brauenfels in the Rhine valley, which dates back a thousand years. Look
into the gloomy keeps; hear the shrieking of the bars in the heavy
portcullis; gaze down into the damp, ugly moats; or listen to the
soughing of the stormy winds in the branches of the tall forest trees
which closely environ these grim abodes. It is conceivable that
Elizabeth languished and died at "The Wartburg," when the chivalrous
Tannhaeuser no longer came to inspire with love and song. Could even
Martin Luther have lived in these cold, black walls without his work
which daily rekindled his soul as he studied the inspired pages of the
Bible?
Among the annals of a wicked old past, this story appears as a legend
dimly connected with the pathetic face of the "Maid of Lille" a copy of
which is in the Boston Art Museum.
There is no appeal here to the modern girl. The word "altruism" had not
been invented. Yet there was genius in loving as Blanche did--what
trustful, boundless love, what exaggeration of the object loved! And
while to-day we strive to master a useless sorrow by a useful activity,
we can still appreciate the beauty and holiness of such love.