Che non vuol che ‘l destrier piu vada in alto,
Poi lo lega nel margine marino
A un verde mirto in mezzo un lauro E UN PINO.
“Orlando Furioso,” c. vi. xxiii.
(As he did not wish that his charger (the hippogriff) should take
any further excursions into the higher regions for the present,
he bound him at the sea-shore to a green myrtle between a laurel
and a pine.)
O Musician! art thou happy now? Thou art reinstalled at thy stately
desk,--thy faithful barbiton has its share in the triumph. It is thy
masterpiece which fills thy ear; it is thy daughter who fills the
scene,--the music, the actress, so united, that applause to one is
applause to both. They make way for thee, at the orchestra,--they no
longer jeer and wink, when, with a fierce fondness, thou dost caress
thy Familiar, that plains, and wails, and chides, and growls, under thy
remorseless hand. They understand now how irregular is ever the symmetry
of real genius. The inequalities in its surface make the moon luminous
to man. Giovanni Paisiello, Maestro di Capella, if thy gentle soul could
know envy, thou must sicken to see thy Elfrida and thy Pirro laid aside,
and all Naples turned fanatic to the Siren, at whose measures shook
querulously thy gentle head! But thou, Paisiello, calm in the long
prosperity of fame, knowest that the New will have its day, and
comfortest thyself that the Elfrida and the Pirro will live forever.
Perhaps a mistake, but it is by such mistakes that true genius conquers
envy. “To be immortal,” says Schiller, “live in the whole.” To be
superior to the hour, live in thy self-esteem. The audience now would
give their ears for those variations and flights they were once wont to
hiss. No!--Pisani has been two-thirds of a life at silent work on his
masterpiece: there is nothing he can add to THAT, however he might have
sought to improve on the masterpieces of others. Is not this common?
The least little critic, in reviewing some work of art, will say, “pity
this, and pity that;” “this should have been altered,--that omitted.”
Yea, with his wiry fiddlestring will he creak out his accursed
variations. But let him sit down and compose himself. He sees no
improvement in variations THEN! Every man can control his fiddle when it
is his own work with which its vagaries would play the devil.
And Viola is the idol, the theme of Naples. She is the spoiled sultana
of the boards. To spoil her acting may be easy enough,--shall they
spoil her nature? No, I think not. There, at home, she is still good
and simple; and there, under the awning by the doorway,--there she still
sits, divinely musing. How often, crook-trunked tree, she looks to thy
green boughs; how often, like thee, in her dreams, and fancies, does she
struggle for the light,--not the light of the stage-lamps. Pooh, child!
be contented with the lamps, even with the rush-lights. A farthing
candle is more convenient for household purposes than the stars.
Weeks passed, and the stranger did not reappear; months had passed, and
his prophecy of sorrow was not yet fulfilled. One evening Pisani was
taken ill. His success had brought on the long-neglected composer
pressing applications for concerti and sonata, adapted to his more
peculiar science on the violin. He had been employed for some weeks, day
and night, on a piece in which he hoped to excel himself. He took, as
usual, one of those seemingly impracticable subjects which it was his
pride to subject to the expressive powers of his art,--the terrible
legend connected with the transformation of Philomel. The pantomime of
sound opened with the gay merriment of a feast. The monarch of Thrace
is at his banquet; a sudden discord brays through the joyous notes,--the
string seems to screech with horror. The king learns the murder of his
son by the hands of the avenging sisters. Swift rage the chords, through
the passions of fear, of horror, of fury, and dismay. The father pursues
the sisters. Hark! what changes the dread--the discord--into that long,
silvery, mournful music? The transformation is completed; and Philomel,
now the nightingale, pours from the myrtle-bough the full, liquid,
subduing notes that are to tell evermore to the world the history of
her woes and wrongs. Now, it was in the midst of this complicated and
difficult attempt that the health of the over-tasked musician, excited
alike by past triumph and new ambition, suddenly gave way. He was taken
ill at night. The next morning the doctor pronounced that his disease
was a malignant and infectious fever. His wife and Viola shared in their
tender watch; but soon that task was left to the last alone. The Signora
Pisani caught the infection, and in a few hours was even in a state more
alarming than that of her husband. The Neapolitans, in common with the
inhabitants of all warm climates, are apt to become selfish and brutal
in their dread of infectious disorders. Gionetta herself pretended to be
ill, to avoid the sick-chamber. The whole labour of love and sorrow
fell on Viola. It was a terrible trial,--I am willing to hurry over the
details. The wife died first!
One day, a little before sunset, Pisani woke partially recovered from
the delirium which had preyed upon him, with few intervals, since the
second day of the disease; and casting about him his dizzy and feeble
eyes, he recognised Viola, and smiled. He faltered her name as he rose
and stretched his arms. She fell upon his breast, and strove to suppress
her tears.
“Thy mother?” he said. “Does she sleep?”
“She sleeps,--ah, yes!” and the tears gushed forth.
“I thought--eh! I know not WHAT I have thought. But do not weep: I shall
be well now,--quite well. She will come to me when she wakes,--will
she?”
Viola could not speak; but she busied herself in pouring forth an
anodyne, which she had been directed to give the sufferer as soon as the
delirium should cease. The doctor had told her, too, to send for him the
instant so important a change should occur.
She went to the door and called to the woman who, during Gionetta’s
pretended illness, had been induced to supply her place; but the
hireling answered not. She flew through the chambers to search for her
in vain,--the hireling had caught Gionetta’s fears, and vanished. What
was to be done? The case was urgent,--the doctor had declared not a
moment should be lost in obtaining his attendance; she must leave her
father,--she must go herself! She crept back into the room,--the anodyne
seemed already to have taken benign effect; the patient’s eyes were
closed, and he breathed regularly, as in sleep. She stole away, threw
her veil over her face, and hurried from the house.
Now the anodyne had not produced the effect which it appeared to
have done; instead of healthful sleep, it had brought on a kind of
light-headed somnolence, in which the mind, preternaturally restless,
wandered about its accustomed haunts, waking up its old familiar
instincts and inclinations. It was not sleep,--it was not delirium;
it was the dream-wakefulness which opium sometimes induces, when every
nerve grows tremulously alive, and creates a corresponding activity in
the frame, to which it gives a false and hectic vigour. Pisani missed
something,--what, he scarcely knew; it was a combination of the two
wants most essential to his mental life,--the voice of his wife, the
touch of his Familiar. He rose,--he left his bed, he leisurely put on
his old dressing-robe, in which he had been wont to compose. He smiled
complacently as the associations connected with the garment came over
his memory; he walked tremulously across the room, and entered the small
cabinet next to his chamber, in which his wife had been accustomed more
often to watch than sleep, when illness separated her from his side. The
room was desolate and void. He looked round wistfully, and muttered
to himself, and then proceeded regularly, and with a noiseless step,
through the chambers of the silent house, one by one.
He came at last to that in which old Gionetta--faithful to her own
safety, if nothing else--nursed herself, in the remotest corner of the
house, from the danger of infection. As he glided in,--wan, emaciated,
with an uneasy, anxious, searching look in his haggard eyes,--the old
woman shrieked aloud, and fell at his feet. He bent over her, passed his
thin hands along her averted face, shook his head, and said in a hollow
voice,--
“I cannot find them; where are they?”
“Who, dear master? Oh, have compassion on yourself; they are not here.
Blessed saints! this is terrible; he has touched me; I am dead!”
“Dead! who is dead? Is any one dead?”
“Ah! don’t talk so; you must know it well: my poor mistress,--she caught
the fever from you; it is infectious enough to kill a whole city. San
Gennaro protect me! My poor mistress, she is dead,--buried, too; and
I, your faithful Gionetta, woe is me! Go, go--to--to bed again, dearest
master,--go!”
The poor musician stood for one moment mute and unmoving, then a slight
shiver ran through his frame; he turned and glided back, silent and
spectre-like, as he had entered. He came into the room where he had been
accustomed to compose,--where his wife, in her sweet patience, had so
often sat by his side, and praised and flattered when the world had but
jeered and scorned. In one corner he found the laurel-wreath she had
placed on his brows that happy night of fame and triumph; and near it,
half hid by her mantilla, lay in its case the neglected instrument.
Viola was not long gone: she had found the physician; she returned with
him; and as they gained the threshold, they heard a strain of music from
within,--a strain of piercing, heart-rending anguish. It was not like
some senseless instrument, mechanical in its obedience to a human
hand,--it was as some spirit calling, in wail and agony from the forlorn
shades, to the angels it beheld afar beyond the Eternal Gulf. They
exchanged glances of dismay. They hurried into the house; they hastened
into the room. Pisani turned, and his look, full of ghastly intelligence
and stern command, awed them back. The black mantilla, the faded
laurel-leaf, lay there before him. Viola’s heart guessed all at a single
glance; she sprung to his knees; she clasped them,--“Father, father, _I_
am left thee still!”
The wail ceased,--the note changed; with a confused association--half of
the man, half of the artist--the anguish, still a melody, was connected
with sweeter sounds and thoughts. The nightingale had escaped the
pursuit,--soft, airy, bird-like, thrilled the delicious notes a moment,
and then died away. The instrument fell to the floor, and its chords
snapped. You heard that sound through the silence. The artist looked
on his kneeling child, and then on the broken chords... “Bury me by her
side,” he said, in a very calm, low voice; “and THAT by mine.” And with
these words his whole frame became rigid, as if turned to stone. The
last change passed over his face. He fell to the ground, sudden and
heavy. The chords THERE, too,--the chords of the human instrument were
snapped asunder. As he fell, his robe brushed the laurel-wreath, and
that fell also, near but not in reach of the dead man’s nerveless hand.
Broken instrument, broken heart, withered laurel-wreath!--the setting
sun through the vine-clad lattice streamed on all! So smiles the eternal
Nature on the wrecks of all that make life glorious! And not a sun that
sets not somewhere on the silenced music,--on the faded laurel!