TRANSCRIBER'S NOTES:
Italic text is denoted by _underscores_.
A number of words in this book have both hyphenated and non-hyphenated
variants. For the words with both variants present the one more used
has been kept.
Obvious punctuation and other printing errors have been corrected.
The book cover was modified by the Transcriber and has been put in the
public domain.
The Transcriber would like to point out to what are considered a couple
of translation inaccuracies from the original Italian language version.
In page 59 the text reads:
"I know of no marsh capable of provoking in human pulses a fever more
violent that that which at times steals up to us from the shadows of a
silent canal."
While in the Italian edition (Publisher: Milano Fratelli Treves; year:
1900), the text reads:
"Io non conosco palude capace di provocare in polsi umani una febbre
più violenta di quella che sentimmo talvolta venire verso di noi
all'improvviso dall'ombra di un canale taciturno."
The Transcriber thinks a more adequate translation would be:
"I know of no marsh capable of causing a fever in human pulses more
violent than the one we sometimes hear coming towards us suddenly from
the shadow of a taciturn channel."
In page 195 the text reads:
"He had astonished even himself by that sudden apparition, that
unexpected discovery which illumined the shadows of his mind, because
exterior reality, and almost tangible."
While in the Italian edition the text reads:
"Si stupiva egli medessimo di quell'apparizione subitanea, di quella
improvvisa scoperta che, illuminandosi nell buio del suo spirito si
esternava e quasi diveniva tangibile."
The Transcriber thinks a more adequate translation would be:
"He was surprised himself by that sudden appearance, of that sudden
discovery that, illuminating itself in the darkness of his spirit, it
became external and almost became tangible."
* * * * *
THE LITERATURE OF ITALY
consists of sixteen volumes, of which
this one forms a part. For full particulars
of the edition see the Official
Certificate bound in the volume entitled
"A HISTORY OF ITALIAN
LITERATURE."
[Illustration]
[Illustration]
Literature of Italy
1265 1907.
Edited by Rossiter Johnson and
Dora Knowlton Ranous
With a General Introduction by William
Michael Rossetti and Special Introductions
by James, Cardinal Gibbons,
Charles Eliot Norton, S. G. W. Benjamin,
William S, Walsh, Maurice
Francis Egan, and others
New translations, and former renderings
compared and revised
Translators: James C. Brogan, Lord Charlemont,
Geoffrey Chaucer, Hartley Coleridge,
Florence Kendrick Cooper, Lady Dacre,
Theodore Dwight, Edward Fairfax, Ugo
Foscolo, G. A. Greene, Sir Thomas Hoby,
William Dean Howells, Luigi Monti, Evangeline
M. O'Connor, Thomas Okey, Dora
Knowlton Ranous, Thomas Roscoe, William
Stewart Rose, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, William
Michael Rossetti, John Addington
Symonds, William S. Walsh, William
Wordsworth, Sir Thomas Wyatt
[Illustration]
THE FLAME
(_IL FUOCO_)
BY
GABRIELE D'ANNUNZIO
TRANSLATED BY DORA KNOWLTON RANOUS
.... _fa come natura face in foco_.
--_DANTE_
THE NATIONAL ALUMNI
COPYRIGHT, 1907, BY
THE NATIONAL ALUMNI
CONTENTS
PAGE
INTRODUCTION ix
BOOK I
THE EPIPHANY OF THE FLAME.
CHAPTER I--The Bells of San Marco 1
CHAPTER II--The Face of Truth 30
CHAPTER III--The Nuptials of Autumn and Venice 40
CHAPTER IV--The Spirit of Melody 67
CHAPTER V--The Epiphany of the Flame 77
CHAPTER VI--The Poet's Dream 95
CHAPTER VII--The Promise 123
CHAPTER VIII--"To Create with Joy!" 134
BOOK II
THE EMPIRE OF SILENCE.
CHAPTER I--"In Time!" 147
CHAPTER II--After the Storm 156
CHAPTER III--A Fallen Giant 173
CHAPTER IV--The Master's Vision 181
CHAPTER V--Sofia 201
CHAPTER VI--A Brother to Orpheus 209
CHAPTER VII--Only One Condition 221
CHAPTER VIII--Illusions 231
CHAPTER IX--The Labyrinth 239
CHAPTER X--The Power of the Flame 262
CHAPTER XI--Reminiscence 270
CHAPTER XII--Cassandra's Reincarnation 291
CHAPTER XIII--The Story of the Archorgan 304
CHAPTER XIV--The World's Bereavement 319
CHAPTER XV--The Last Farewell 333
ILLUSTRATIONS
PAGE
"O espousals of Paris, fatal to the beloved!"--(Page 298) Frontispiece
He gazed deep into her eyes, and saw that she was as pale
as if her blood had been sapped to nourish the rich
fruits of the garden 130
He watched the woman turning and running like a mad
creature along the dark, delusive paths 259
INTRODUCTION
Gabriele D'Annunzio, poet, novelist, and dramatist, was born in 1864,
on the yacht _Irene_ near Pescara in the Abruzzi, his mother being the
Duchess Maria Galesse of Rome. His education was begun in the College
of Prato, in Tuscany, and finished in the University of Rome. His mind
early showed signs of extraordinary power and brilliant versatility;
he studied art and produced very creditable work while a mere lad,
and at the age of sixteen he published his first poem, _Primo Vere_,
which attracted flattering attention and caused him to be hailed as an
infant prodigy. In 1880 he went to Rome and became a contributor to
the _Cronaca Bizantina_, a magazine of art and literature. He remained
in Rome three years, producing in that time _Terra vergine_ ("Virgin
Soil"), _Canto novo_ ("New Song"), and _Intermezzo di rime_ ("Intervals
of Rhyme"), all of which were received with admiration and amazement,
and with not a little criticism for their unconventional boldness of
expression.
D'Annunzio left Rome in 1884 and returned to his native hills, where
he wrote _Il libro delle vergine_ ("The Book of the Virgins") in 1884;
_San Pantaleone_ (1886), and _Isottèo Guttadauro_. Then, abandoning
his revolutionary and realistic though splendid and intoxicating
poetry for prose, the young genius next surprised his public with a
novel, _Giovanni Episcopo_, followed by _Il Piacere_ ("The Child of
Pleasure"), in 1889. The former is a strong yet repelling story of
crude brutalism, told by a victim of relentless fate; the latter is a
kind of poem in prose, in which there is something above mere facility
of literary touch; he shows the power of the master poet or painter to
see the world at a glance, and with a dextrous hand to draw for eyes
less keen that world in all its changeful aspects.
His next important novel, _Il trionfo della morte_ ("The Triumph of
Death") was produced in 1896. This brought upon him a storm of mingled
applause and criticism--admiration for its marvelous beauty of literary
expression, condemnation of the realistic study of a degenerate whose
sins lead him to suicide. But, with a proud defiance of criticism, with
eyes fixed only on his art, he dared after this achievement to write
the self-revelatory novel that is known as his masterpiece--_Il fuoco_
("The Flame"). In this great novel, which may fairly be called unique,
we recognize the personification of a renascence of Latin genius. Under
the thinnest veil of disguise, the author presents his own figure and
that of one of the world's greatest tragic actresses, revealing the
most intimate details of their well known friendship. On this picture
of the most romantic of love-affairs, in Venice, the most romantic
of cities, he has lavished his finest strokes of genius, writing of
feminine nature with rare truth and skill, and an exquisite intuition
as to the workings of a woman's mind and the throbbings of her heart.
Besides his poems and novels, D'Annunzio has written several plays,
the best known being _La Gioconda_ ("Joy"), _La Gloria_ ("Glory"), _La
morta città_ ("The City of the Dead"), and _Francesca da Rimini_. He is
unquestionably the greatest Italian writer of to-day, and few works of
Italian fiction appear that do not show something of his influence. A
European critic of keen discernment says: "Read his works, all ye men
and women for whom life has no secrets and truth has no terror."
D. K. R.
BOOK I
THE EPIPHANY OF THE FLAME
TO TIME AND TO HOPE
_Without hope, it is impossible to find the unhoped-for._
--_HERACLITUS OF EPHESUS._
_He who sings to the god a song of hope shall see his wish
accomplished._
--_ÆSCHYLUS OF ELEUSIS._
_Time is the father of miracles._
--_HARIRI DI BASRA._
CHAPTER I
THE BELLS OF SAN MARCO
"Stelio, does not your heart quail a little, for the first time?"
inquired La Foscarina, with a fleeting smile, as she touched the hand
of the taciturn friend seated beside her. "I see that you are pale and
thoughtful. Yet this is a beautiful evening for the triumph of a great
poet."
With an all-comprehensive glance, she looked around at all the beauty
of this last twilight of September. In the dark wells of her eyes were
reflected the circles of light made by the oar as it flashed in the
water, which was illuminated by the glittering angels that shone from
afar on the campaniles of San Marco and San Giorgio Maggiore.
"As always," she went on, in her sweetest tones, "as always, everything
is in your favor. On such an evening as this, what mortal could shut
out from his mind the dreams that you may choose to evoke by the magic
of your words? Do you not feel already that the multitude is well
disposed to receive your revelation?"
Thus, delicately, she flattered her friend; thus she pleased herself by
exalting him with continual praise.
"It is impossible to imagine a more magnificent and unique festival
than this, to persuade so disdainful a poet as you to come forth from
his ivory tower. For you was reserved this rare joy; to communicate
for the first time with the people in a sovereign place like the Hall
of the Greater Council, from the platform where once the Doge harangued
the assembled patricians, with the _Paradiso_ of Tintoretto for a
background, and overhead the _Gloria_ of Veronese."
Stelio Effrena looked long and searchingly into her eyes.
"Do you wish to intoxicate me?" he said, with a sudden laugh. "Your
words remind me of the soothing cup offered to a man on his way to the
scaffold. Ah, well, my friend, it is true: I own that my heart quails a
little."
The sound of applause rose from the Traghetto di San Gregorio,
echoed through the Grand Canal, reverberating among the porphyry and
serpentine discs ornamenting the ancient mansion of the Dario, which
now leaned over slightly, like a decrepit courtesan loaded with her
jewels.
The royal barge passed.
"There is the one person among your audience whom etiquette demands
that you shall crown with some of your flowers of oratory," pursued the
charming flatterer, alluding to the Queen. "I believe that, in one of
your earlier books, you own to a taste and respect for ceremonials. One
of your most extraordinary flights of fancy is that description of a
day of Charles the Second, King of Spain."
When the royal barge passed the gondola, the man and the woman saluted
it. The Queen, recognizing the poet, the author of _Persephone_,
and the distinguished tragic actress, turned to gaze at them with a
movement of instinctive curiosity. She was blonde and rosy, and her
face was lighted by her ever-ready smile, as she looked out from the
cloud of creamy Buranesi laces clinging around her shoulders. Beside
her sat Andriana Duodo, the patroness of Burano, where, on that
industrious little island, she cultivated flax, and raised the most
marvelous old-fashioned flowers.
"Does it not seem to you that the smiles of those two women are so
similar as to be twin-like?" said La Foscarina, gazing at the silvery
ripples in the wake of the barge, wherein the double light seemed to
prolong its self.
"The Countess has a magnificent and ingenuous soul--one of those
rare Venetian spirits that preserve their warmth, as their ancient
paintings retain their vivid color," said Stelio, earnestly, as if
in gratitude. "I have an absolute devotion for her sensitive hands.
They fairly quiver with pleasure when they touch rare lace or rich
velvet, lingering over the texture with a grace that seems almost shy
of betraying such voluptuous joy in mere touch. One day, when I had
accompanied her to the gallery of the Academia, she stopped before
the _Massacre des Innocents_ by the first Bonifazio. You recollect,
of course, the green robe of the prostrate woman that one of Herod's
soldiers is about to kill--a thing impossible to forget! She paused
long before it, seeming fairly to radiate from her own person the
perfect joy that filled her senses; then she said to me, 'Let us leave
this place now, Effrena! Take me away, but I must leave my eyes on
that robe--I cannot look at anything more!' Ah, do not smile at her,
dear friend! She was perfectly simple and sincere in saying that: she
really did leave her spiritual vision behind her on that bit of canvas
which Art, with a touch of color, has made the center of an infinitely
pleasurable mystery. Besides, it was really a blind woman that I
accompanied there, but I was suddenly seized with reverence for the
privileged soul for whom the magic of color had power to abolish for
the moment all memory of commonplace life, and to cut off all other
worldly communication. What should you call such a state of mind? A
filling of life's goblet to the brim, it seems to me. It is exactly
what I should like to do to-night, if I were not discouraged."
A new clamor, louder and more prolonged, rose between the two guardian
columns of granite, as the royal barge approached the bank of the
Piazzetta, now black with the waiting throng. During the slight pause
that followed, the movement of the crowd shifted, like the changing of
eddies in a current, and all the galleries of the Palace of the Doges
were filled with a confused buzzing, like the mysterious murmur within
a sea-shell. Suddenly the buzz rose to a shout, rending the clear air
and finally dying away in the gathering twilight. The multitude seemed
to realize the divinity of that poetic hour, amid those incomparable
surroundings; and perhaps, in its acclaim to youthful royalty and
beauty, it expressed a vague longing to forget its prosaic existence,
and to revel in the gift of eternal poetry with which its storied walls
and waters were endowed.
"Do you know, Perdita," Stelio suddenly exclaimed, "of any other place
in the world that possesses, like Venice, at certain times, the power
to stimulate all the forces of human life by the exaltation of all
desires to a feverish intensity? Do you know of any more irresistible
temptress?"
She whom he called Perdita did not reply; she bent her head as if from
desire to concentrate her thoughts; but through all her being she felt
the indefinable thrill always felt at the sound of the voice of her
friend when it revealed the vehemence and passionate soul toward which
this woman was drawn by a mingling of love and terror that had no limit.
"Peace! Oblivion! Do you find them down there, at the end of that
deserted canal, when you go home exhausted and fevered after inhaling
the commingled breath of the crowd that you are able to rouse to wild
enthusiasm by a single gesture? As for myself, when I float on these
dead waters, I feel my vital powers increase with bewildering rapidity;
at certain times my brain seems on fire, as if I were in delirium."
"The flame and the power are within yourself, Stelio," said La
Foscarina almost humbly, without raising her eyes.
He was silent, absorbed. Poetic imagery and impetuous music took form
within his brain, as if by virtue of some magic fecundation; and his
spirit reveled in the unexpected delight of that flood of inspiration.
It was still that hour which, in one of his books, he had called
"Titian's hour," because all things glowed with a rich golden light,
like the nude figures of that great painter, appearing almost to
illumine the sky rather than to receive light from it.
"Perdita," said the poet, who, at the sight of so many things
multiplying their beauties around him, was conscious of a kind of
intellectual ecstasy, "does it not seem to you that we are following
the funeral train of the dead Summer? There she lies in her funereal
barge, robed in golden draperies, like a Doge's wife, like a Loredana,
a Morosina, or a Soranza of the golden age; and her cortège conducts
her toward the Isle of Murano, where some lord of the flames will place
her in a coffin of opaline crystal, so that, submerged in the waters of
the lagoon, she can, at least, through her transparent eyelids, behold
the supple movement of the seaweed, and thus fancy herself enwrapped in
the undulating tresses of her own hair, while waiting for the sun of
resurrection to dawn."
A spontaneous smile spread over La Foscarina's face, born in her eyes,
which glowed as if they really had beheld the vision of the beautiful
dead.
"Do you know, Perdita," resumed Stelio, after a moment's pause, during
which both gazed at a file of small boats filled with fruit, floating
upon the water like great baskets, "do you know anything about a
particularly pretty detail in the chronicles of the Doges? The Doge's
wife, to meet the expenses of her robes of ceremony, enjoyed a certain
percentage of the tax on fruit. Does not this seem delightfully
appropriate? The fruits of these isles clothed her in gold and crowned
her with pearls! Pomona paying tribute to Arachne! an allegory that
Paolo Veronese might well have painted on the dome of the Vestiario.
When I conjure up the figure of the noble lady, tall and erect in her
high, jeweled buskins, it pleases me to think that something fresh
and rustic is connected with the rich folds of her heavy brocade:
the tribute of the fruits. What a savor this seems to add to her
magnificence! Only fancy, my friend, that these figs and grapes of the
new-come Autumn are the price of the golden robe that covers the dead
Summer."
"What delightful fancies, Stelio!" said La Foscarina, whose face
became young again when she smiled, as a child to whom one shows a
picture-book. "Who was it that once called you the Image-maker?"
"Ah--images!" said the poet, his fancy warming. "In Venice, just as one
feels everything to a musical rhythm, so he thinks of everything in
poetic imagery. They come to us from everywhere, innumerable, diverse,
more real and living to our minds than the persons we elbow in these
narrow streets. In studying them, we can lose ourselves in the depths
of their haunting eyes, and divine, by the curve of their lips, what
they would say to us. Some art tyrannical as imperious mistresses, and
hold us long beneath the yoke of their power. Others are enfolded in a
veil, like timid virgins, or are tightly swaddled, like infants; and
only he that knows how to rend their veils can lead them to the perfect
life. This morning, when I awakened, my soul was filled with images;
it was like a beautiful tree with its branches laden with chrysalides."
He paused, with a laugh.
"If they come forth from their prison to-night," he added, "I am saved;
if they do not, I am lost!"
"Lost?" said La Foscarina, gazing earnestly at him, with eyes so full
of confidence that his heart went out to her in gratitude. "No, Stelio,
you will not lose yourself. You are always sure of yourself; you
bear your own destiny in your hands. I think your mother never could
have felt any apprehension on your account, even in the most serious
circumstances. Is not that true? Pride is the only thing that makes
your heart falter."
"Ah, sweet friend, how I love you--how I thank you for saying that!"
said the poet frankly, taking her hand. "You continually foster my
pride and encourage me to believe that I have already acquired those
virtues to which I never cease to aspire. Sometimes you seem to have
the power of conferring I know not what divine quality on the things
that are born in my soul, and of making them appear adorable in my
own eyes. Sometimes, too, you fill me with the awe-struck wonder of
the sculptor who, having in the evening borne to the sacred temple
the marble gods still warm from his hands--I might say still clinging
to the fingers that moulded them--the next day beholds them standing
on their pedestals, surrounded by clouds of incense, and seeming to
exhale divinity from every pore of the insensate matter from which
he fashioned them with his perishable hands. And so, each time that
Fortune grants me the favor of being near you, I realize that you are
necessary to my life, although, during our long separations, I can
live without you, and you without me, despite the fact that both of
us well know what splendors would be born of the perfect union of our
lives. Thus, knowing the full value of that which you give me, and,
still more, of that which you could give me, I think of you as lost to
me; and, by that name which it pleases my fancy to call you, I try to
express at the same time this consciousness and this regret."
He interrupted himself, because he felt a quiver of the hand he clasped
in his own.
"When I call you 'Perdita,'" he resumed softly, after a pause, "I fancy
that you can see my desire approaching you, with a deadly blade deep in
its palpitating side. Even should it reach you, the chill of death has
already touched its audacious hand."
The woman experienced an oft-felt suffering as she listened to the
poetic words that flowed from her friend's lips with a spontaneity that
proved them sincere. Again she felt an agitation and a terror that she
knew not how to define. She felt that she was slipping out of her own
life, and was transported into a kind of fictitious life, intense and
hallucinating, where even to breathe was difficult. Drawn into that
atmosphere, as fiery as the glow surrounding a lighted forge, she felt
that she should be capable of passing through any transfigurations that
it might please the master of her spirit to work in her to satisfy his
continual craving for poetry and beauty. She comprehended that, in his
idealistic mind, her own image resembled that of the dead Summer,
wrapped in its opalescent cerements. She felt a childish desire to gaze
into the poet's eyes as in a mirror, to contemplate the likeness of her
real self.
That which rendered her melancholy most painful, was the recognition of
a vague resemblance between this agitation and the anxiety that always
possessed her when she sank her own personality in that of some sublime
creation of dramatic art. Was not this man drawing her, in fact, into
a similar region of higher but artificial life; and, that she might
figure there without remembrance of her everyday self, did he not seek
to cover her with a splendid disguise? But, while she was unable to
maintain so great a degree of intensity except by a painful effort, she
knew that he dwelt within that state of exaltation with perfect ease,
as if in his natural atmosphere, ceaselessly enjoying a marvelous world
of fancy, which he could renew or change at his own pleasure.
He had come to realize in himself the intimate union of art and
of life, thus finding, in the depths of his own soul, a source of
perpetual harmony. He had become able to maintain within himself,
without lapse, the mysterious psychological condition that engenders
works of beauty, and thus, at a single stroke, to crystallize into
ideal types the fleeting figures of his varied existence. It was to
celebrate this conquest over his own mental powers that he put the
following words into the mouth of one of his heroes: "I witnessed
within myself the continual genesis of a higher life, wherein all
appearances metamorphosed themselves as if reflected in a magic
mirror." Endowed with an extraordinary linguistic facility, he could
instantly translate into words the most complicated workings of his
mind, with a precision so exact and vivid that sometimes, as soon
as expressed, they seemed not to be his own, having been rendered
objective by the isolating power of style. His clear and penetrating
voice, which, so to speak, seemed to define each word as distinctly
as if it were a note of music, enhanced still more this peculiar
quality of his speech, so that those who heard him speak for the
first time experienced an ambiguous feeling--a mingling of admiration
and aversion, because he revealed his own personality in a manner so
strongly marked that it seemed to denote an intention to demonstrate
the existence of a profound and impassable difference between himself
and his listeners. But as his sensibility equaled his intelligence, it
was easy for those that knew him well and liked him to absorb, through
his crystalline speech, the glow of his vehement and passionate soul.
These knew how illimitable was his power to feel and to dream, and from
what fiery source sprang the beautiful images into which he converted
the substance of his inner life.
She whom he called Perdita knew it well; and, as a pious soul awaits
from God some supernatural help that shall work out its salvation, so
she seemed to be waiting for him to put her into the state of grace
necessary to enable her to elevate and maintain herself in those
fiery regions toward which a mad desire to be consumed impelled her,
despairing as she was at the thought of her vanished youth, and the
fear of finding herself left alone at last in a desert of ashes.
"It is you now, Stelio," she said, with the slight smile she used to
hide her sadness, "who wish to intoxicate me." She gently drew her hand
from his. Then, to break the spell, she pointed to a loaded barge that
was slowly approaching them, and said:
"Look! Look at your pomegranates!"
But her voice shook a little.
Then, in the dreamy twilight, on the water as silvery-green as the
leaves of the willow, they watched the passing boat overflowing with
that emblematic fruit which suggests things rich and hidden: caskets
of red leather, surmounted by the crown of a royal donor; some closed,
others half-open, revealing their close-packed gems.
In a low tone, the tragic actress repeated the words addressed by Hades
to Persephone in the sacred drama, at the moment when the daughter of
Demeter tastes the fatal pomegranate:
_Quando tu coglierai il colchico in fiore su'l molle
Prato terrestre, presso la madre dal cerulo peplo._
"Ah, Perdita! how well you know how to throw a shadow into your voice!"
interrupted the poet, feeling the harmony of the twilight that seemed
to throw a mystic vagueness over the syllables of his lines. "How well
you know how to become nocturnal, even before the evening is upon us!
Do you recall the scene where Persephone is on the point of throwing
herself into Erebus, to the wailing of the chorus of the Oceanides?
Her face is like yours when a shadow passes over it. Her crowned head
leans backward, as she stands rigidly erect in her saffron-colored
peplum; and the very spirit of the night seems flowing into her
bloodless flesh, deepening under her chin, in the hollows of her eyes
and around her nostrils, giving her face the look of a tragic mask.
It is your mask, Perdita! While I was composing my _Mystery_, the
remembrance of you aided me in evoking her divine person. That little
saffron-velvet ribbon you so often wear around your neck gave me the
note for Persephone's peplum. And one evening at your house, when I
was about to take leave of you at the threshold of a room where the
lamps were not yet lighted--an agitated evening of last autumn, you
remember?--you succeeded, with a single movement, in bringing to full
light in my being the creature that had lain long there undeveloped;
and then, without dreaming that you had brought about that sudden
birth, you shut yourself again within the solitary obscurity of your
own Erebus. Ah, I was certain that I could hear you sob, yet a torrent
of uncontrollable joy ran through my veins. I never have spoken to you
of this before, have I? I ought to have consecrated my work to you, as
to an ideal Lucina."
She shrank under the eyes of the master of her spirit; she suffered
because of that mask which he admired on her face, and because of that
strange joy that she was aware was continually up-springing within him,
like a perpetually playing fountain. She felt oppressed by her own
personality; troubled because of her too-expressive face, the muscles
of which possessed a strange power of mimicry; pained to think of
that involuntary art which governed the significance of her gestures,
and of that expressive shadow which sometimes on the stage, during a
moment of anxious silence, she knew how to throw over her face like a
veil of grief--that shadow which now threatened to remain among the
lines traced by time on the face that was no longer young. She suffered
cruelly by the hand she adored--that hand so delicate and noble which,
even with a gift or a caress, had power to hurt her.
"Do you not believe, Perdita," Stelio continued after another pause,
"in the occult beneficence of signs? I do not mean astral science or
horoscopic signs. I mean that, like those that believe themselves
under the influence of one planet or another, we can create an ideal
correspondence between our own soul and some terrestrial object, in
such a way that this object, becoming impregnated, little by little,
with the essence of ourselves, and being magnified by our illusion,
finally becomes for us the representative sign of our unknown destiny,
and takes on an aspect of mystery when it appears to us in certain
crises of our life. This is the secret whereby we may restore to our
withering hearts something of their pristine freshness. I know by
experience the beneficial effect we may derive from intense communion
with some earthly object. From time to time it is necessary for our
natures to become like a hamadryad, in order to feel within us the
circulation of new energy drawn from the source of life. Of course
you understand that I am thinking of your words just now, when the
boat passed. You expressed the same idea when you said 'Look at
your pomegranates!' For you, and for everyone that loves me, the
pomegranate never can be anything but _mine_. For you and for them,
the idea of my personality is indissolubly linked to that fruit which
I have chosen for an emblem, and which I have charged with significant
ideals, more numerous than its seeds. Had I lived in the times when
men excavated the Grecian marbles and found under the soil the still
damp roots of ancient fables, no painter could have represented me on
his canvas without putting in my hand the Punic apple. To sever from
my person that symbol would have seemed to the ingenuous artist like
the amputation of a living member, for, to his pagan imagination, the
fruit would have seemed to grow to my hand as to its natural branch.
In short, he would not have conceived me in any different way than he
thought of Hyacinthus or Narcissus or Ciparissus, all three of whom
would appear to him as youths symbolized by a plant. But, even in our
day, a few lively and warm imaginations exist that comprehend all the
meaning and enjoy all the savor of my invention.
"You, yourself, Perdita, do you not delight in cultivating in your
garden a pomegranate, the beautiful 'Effrenian' tree, that you may
every summer watch me blossom and bring forth fruit? In one of your
letters, flying to me like a winged messenger, you described to me
the graceful ceremony of decorating the tree with garlands the day
you received the first copy of _Persephone_. So, for you, and for
those that love me, I have in reality renewed an ancient myth when,
in fancy, I have assimilated myself with a form of eternal Nature.
And when I am dead (and may Nature grant that I am able to manifest
my whole self in my work before I die!), my disciples will honor me
under a symbol of that tree; and in the sharp outline of the leaf, in
the flame of the flower, and in the hidden treasure of the ripe fruit,
they will recognize certain qualities of my art. By that leaf, by that
flower and fruit, as if by a posthumous teaching of the master, their
minds will be formed to a similar sharpness, flame-like intensity, and
treasured richness.
"You will see now, Perdita, what is the real beneficence of symbols.
By affinity, I am led to develop myself in accord with the magnificent
genius of the plant which it pleases me to fancy as the symbol of my
aspirations toward a full, rich life. This arboreous image of myself
suffices to assure me that my powers should follow nature in order
to attain naturally the end for which they were created. 'Nature
has disposed me thus' is the epigraph of Leonardo da Vinci, which I
placed on the title-page of my first book; and the pomegranate, as it
continually blossoms and bears its fruit, repeats to me that simple
phrase over and over again. We obey only the laws written in our own
substance, and by reason of this we shall remain intact in the midst of
dissolution, in the unity and plenitude that make our joy. No discord
exists between my art and my life."
He spoke with perfect freedom, as if the mind of the listening woman
were a chalice into which he poured his thoughts till it was full to
the brim. An intellectual felicity filled him, blended with a vague
consciousness of the mysterious action whereby his mind was preparing
itself for the effort it was soon to make. From time to time, as if
by a lightning flash, his mental vision beheld, as he bent toward his
beloved friend and listened to the beat of the oar in the silence of
the great estuary, the crowd, with its thousand faces, gathering in the
vast hall; and he felt a rapid throbbing of his heart.
"It is a very singular thing, Perdita," said he, gazing at the pale
distance of the waters, "to observe how readily chance aids our
imagination in ascribing an element of mystery to the conjunction of
certain appearances with the aim we have fancied. I do not understand
the reason why the poets of to-day are so indignant at the vulgarity
of the present, and complain that they were born either too late
or too early. I am convinced that to-day, as always, every man of
intelligence has power to create for himself his own beautiful fable
of life. We should study the confused whirl of life with the same
lively imagination that Leonardo encouraged in his disciples when
he advised them to study the stains on the wall, the ashes on the
hearth, the clouds, even mud, and similar objects, in order to find
there 'wonderful inventions' and 'infinite things.' In the same way,
he declared, one can find in the sound of bells every name and every
word that can be imagined. That great master knew well that chance--as
the sponge of Apelles had already shown--is always the friend of the
ingenious artist. For example, I never cease to be astonished at the
ease and grace with which chance favors the harmonious development of
my inventions. Do you not believe that the dark god Hades forced his
bride to eat the seven seeds of the pomegranate in order to furnish me
with the subject of a masterpiece?"
He interrupted himself with one of the bursts of boyish laughter that
revealed so clearly the persistence of natural joyousness in the depths
of his heart.
"See, Perdita," he continued, still laughing, "whether I am not
right. Early in October last year I was invited to Burano by Donna
Andriana Duodo. We passed the morning in her flax-fields, and in the
afternoon we went to visit Torcello. At that time I was beginning to
saturate myself with the mythical story of Persephone, and already my
poem had begun to take shape in my brain, and it seemed to me that I
was floating on the waters of the Styx, and that I should arrive at
the abode of the Manes. Never had I experienced a purer and sweeter
understanding of death, and this feeling seemed to render me so
ethereal that I fancied I could tread the field of asphodel without
leaving there the least trace of my footsteps. The air was damp, warm,
the sky was gray; the canals wound between the banks covered with
half-faded verdure. (You know Torcello only by sunlight, perhaps.) But
all this time some one was talking, arguing, and declaiming in Charon's
boat. The sound of praise roused me from my reverie. Francesco di Lizo
was speaking of me, regretting that such an artist, so magnificently
sensual--I quote his own words--should be obliged to live apart from
the obtuse and hostile throng, and to celebrate the feast of sound,
color, and form in the solitary palace of his dream. He abandoned
himself to a lyric impulse, recalling the joyous and splendid life
of the Venetian painters, the popular favor that swept them, like a
whirlwind, up to the heights of the glory, beauty, strength and joy
which they multiplied around them in producing countless images on
walls and domes.
"Then Donna Andriana said: 'Well, I promise solemnly that Stelio
Effrena shall have his triumphal feast in Venice.' The Dogaressa had
spoken! At that moment I beheld, on the low, mossy bank, a pomegranate
laden with fruit, which, like the hallucination of a vision, broke
the infinite squalor of that place. Donna Orsetta Contarini, who was
sitting beside me, uttered a cry of delight, and held out her hands, as
impatient as her lips. Nothing pleases me so much as a frank, strong
expression of desire. 'I adore pomegranates!' she cried, and she seemed
fairly to be tasting its fine, sharp flavor. She was as childish as
her name is archaic. Her cry moved me; but Andrea Contarini appeared
severely to disapprove of his wife's vivacity. He seemed to me like a
Hades that has little faith in the mnemonic virtue of the seven seeds
as applied to legitimate marriage. But the boatmen, too, were stirred
with sympathy, and rowed toward the shore, approaching it so close that
I was able to jump out first, and I began at once to despoil the tree,
my brother. It was another case, albeit from the lips of a pagan of the
words of the Last Supper: 'Take, eat, this is my body, which is given
for you. Do this in remembrance of me.' How does this seem to you,
Perdita? Do not think that I am inventing this story. I assure you it
is true."
La Foscarina allowed herself to be fascinated by the free and elegant
fancy whereby he exercised the quickness of his wit and his facility
of expression. In his words was something intoxicating, variable, and
vigorous, which suggested to her mind the double and diverse image of
water and of fire.
"Now," he continued, "Donna Andriana has kept her promise. Guided by
that hereditary taste for magnificence which she shows so plainly,
she has prepared a truly ducal feast in the Palace of the Doges,
in imitation of those that were held there toward the end of the
sixteenth century. She conceived the idea of rescuing from oblivion
the _Ariadne_ of Benedetto Marcello, and of making her sigh in the
same place where Tintoretto painted the daughter of Minos receiving
the crown of stars from Aphrodite. Don't you recognize in the beauty
of this idea the woman who wished to leave her dear eyes behind her
on that ineffable green robe? Remember, too, that this _musicale_ in
the Hall of the Greater Council has a historic precedent. In fifteen
hundred seventy-three, in this same Hall, was performed a mythological
composition by Cornelio Frangipani, with music by Claudio Merulo, in
honor of his most Christian Majesty Henry Third. Own, Perdita, that my
erudition astonishes you. Ah, if you only knew all that I have learned
on that subject! I will read you my lecture on it, some day when you
deserve a severe punishment!"
"What! Are you not to read it to-night at the festival?" inquired La
Foscarina in surprise, fearing that, with his well known heedlessness
of engagements, Effrena had resolved to disappoint the expectant public.
He understood her anxiety, and chose to amuse himself with it.
"This evening," he replied, with tranquil assurance, "I shall take
a sherbet in your garden, and delight my eyes with the sight of the
pomegranate, with its jewels gleaming in the starlight."
"Ah, Stelio! What do you mean?" she cried, half rising.
In her words and movement was so keen a regret, and at the same time
so strange an evocation of the expectant gathering, that his mind was
troubled. The image of the formidable monster with innumerable human
faces amid the gold and somber purple of the vast hall reappeared
before his mental vision; in fancy he felt its fixed regard and hot
breath. He realized also the peril he had resolved to face in trusting
only to the inspiration of the moment, and felt a horror of a possible
sudden mental obscurity, an unexpected confusion of his thought.
"Reassure yourself," he said. "I was only jesting. I will go _ad
bestias_, and I will go unarmed. Did you not see the sign reappear just
now? Do you believe, after the miracle of Torcello, that it reappeared
in vain? It has come to warn me again that the only attitude that
suits me is the one to which Nature disposes me. Now, you well know, my
friend, that I do not know how to speak of anything but myself. And so,
from the throne of the Doges, I must speak to my listeners only of my
own soul, under the veil of some seductive allegory, with the charm of
flowing musical cadences. I purpose to do this extemporaneously, if the
fiery spirit of Tintoretto will only inspire me, from the heights of
his Paradise, with sufficient ardor and audacity. The risk tempts me.
But into what a strange error I was about to fall, Perdita! When the
Dogaressa announced the feast to me, and begged me to do the honors,
I undertook to compose a dignified discourse, a really ceremonious
effort in prose, ample and solemn as one of those great robes of state
behind glass in the Correr Museum; not without making in the exordium a
profound genuflexion to the Queen; nor omitting to weave an impressive
garland for the head of the most serene Andriana Duodo! And for
several days it has given me a curious pleasure to dwell in spiritual
communion with a Venetian patrician of the sixteenth century, a master
of letters like Cardinal Bembo, a member of the Academy Uracini or
Adorni, a frequent visitor to the gardens of Murano and the hills of
Asolo. Certain it is that I felt a marked resemblance between the turn
of my periods and the massive gold frames that surround the paintings
on the ceiling of the Hall of Council. But, alas! yesterday morning,
when I arrived here, and, in passing along the Grand Canal, when I
wished to steep my weariness in the damp, transparent shade where the
marble still exhales the spirit of the night, I had a sudden impression
that my papers were worth much less than the dead seaweed tossed by
the tide, and they seemed as strange to me as the _Trionfi_ of Celio
Magno and the _Favole Marittime_ of Anton Maria Consalvi, quoted and
commented on in them by me. What should I do, then?"
He threw around him an all-sweeping glance, as if exploring the waters
and the sky in search of an invisible presence, or a newly arrived
phantom. A yellowish light spread toward the solitary shores, which
stood out in sharp lines like the dark veins in agate. Behind him,
toward the Salute, the sky was scattered with light rosy and violet
ribbon-like clouds, giving it the appearance of a glaucous sea, peopled
with Medusas. From the gardens near the water descended the odor of
foliage saturated with light and heat--an odor so heavy one might
almost see it float on the waves like aromatic oil.
"Do you feel the Autumn, Perdita?" Stelio asked his dreamy friend, in a
penetrating voice.
Again she had a vision of the dead Summer, enclosed within opalescent
glass and sunk among the masses of seaweed.
"Yes, I feel it--within myself!" she replied, with a melancholy smile.
"Did you not see it last night, when it descended upon the city? Where
were you last night, at sunset?"
"In a garden of the Giudecca."
"I was here, on the Riva. When human eyes have contemplated such a
spectacle of joy and beauty, does it not seem to you that the eyelids
should close and seal themselves forever? I should like to speak
to-night, Perdita, of these hidden, secret matters. I should like to
celebrate within myself the nuptials of Venice and Autumn, in almost
the same tonality that Tintoretto used when he painted the nuptials of
Ariadne and Bacchus for the hall of the Anticollegio--azure, purple and
gold. Last night an old germ of poetry suddenly blossomed in my soul.
I recalled a fragment of a forgotten poem that I wrote when I began
to write in _nona rima_, one September in my early youth, when I had
come by sea to Venice for the first time. The title of the poem was
simply 'The Allegory of Autumn,' and the god was no longer represented
as crowned with vine-leaves, but with jewels, like one of Paolo
Veronese's princes, his being aglow with passion, about to approach
the Anadyomenean City, with her arms of marble and her thousand green
girdles. But the idea had not at that time reached the right degree
of intensity to be admitted to the realm of Art, and instinctively I
gave up the effort to manifest it in its entirety. But, in an active
mind, as in a fertile soil, no seed is lost; and now this idea returns
to me at an opportune moment and urgently demands expression. What a
just and mysterious fatality governs the mental world! It was necessary
that I should respect that first germ in order to feel its multiplied
virtues develop in me to-day. That Vinci, who looked deep into all
things profound, certainly meant something of this kind in his fable of
the grain of millet that says to the ant: 'If you will be kind enough
to let me satisfy my desire to be born again, I will render myself to
you again a hundredfold.' Admire the touch of grace in those fingers
capable of breaking iron! Ah, he is always the incomparable master! How
can I forget him for a time, that I may give myself to the Venetians?"
The playful irony with which he had been speaking was suddenly
extinguished in his last words, and again he seemed plunged in his own
thoughts.
"It is already late; the hour approaches; we must return," he said
presently, rousing himself as if from a troubled dream, for he had seen
reappear that formidable monster with the thousand human faces filling
the depth and width of the great hall. "I must go back to the hotel in
time to dress."
Then, with a return of his boyish vanity, he thought of the eyes of the
unknown women who would see him that evening for the first time.
"To the Hotel Danieli," La Foscarina said to the boatman.
While the dentellated iron of the prow swung around on the water, with
a slow, animal-like movement, each felt a sadness different but equally
painful at leaving behind them the infinite silence of the estuary,
already overcome by darkness and death, and being compelled to return
toward the magnificent and tempting city, whose canals, like the veins
of a full-blooded woman, began to burn with the fever of night.
They were quiet for some time, absorbed by their interior agitation,
which shook each heart to it depths. And all things around them exalted
the power of life in the man who wished to attract to himself the
universe in order not to die, and in the woman, who would have thrown
her oppressed soul to the flames in order to die pure.
Both started at the unexpected sound of the salute at the lowering of
the flag on board a man-of-war anchored before the gardens. At the
summit of the black mass they saw the tricolored flag slide down the
staff and fold itself up, like a heroic dream that suddenly vanishes.
For a moment the silence seemed deeper, and the gondola glided into
darker shadows, grazing the side of the armed colossus.
"Do you know that Donatella Arvale who is to sing in _Ariadne_?" said
Stelio suddenly.
"She is the daughter of the great sculptor, Lorenzo Arvale," La
Foscarina replied, after an instant of hesitation. "I have no dearer
friend than she--and in fact she is my guest at present. You will meet
her at my house this evening, after the festival."
"Donna Andriana spoke to me of her last night as a prodigy. She said
that the idea of resurrecting _Ariadne_ had come to her on hearing
Donatella Arvale sing divinely the air: _Come mai puoi--Vedermi
piangere?_ We shall have some divine music at your house, Perdita. Oh,
how I long to hear it! Below there, in my solitude, for months and
months, I hear only the music of the sea, which is too terrible, and my
own music, which is too tumultuous."
The bells of San Marco gave the signal for the Angelus, and their
powerful notes spread in great waves of sound over the water,
vibrating among the masts of the vessels, and creeping out upon the
infinite reach of the lagoon. From San Giorgio Maggiore, San Giorgio
dei Greci, San Giorgio degli Schiavoni, San Giovanni in Bragora,
and San Moisé, from the Salute, the Redentore, and beyond, over the
entire domain of the Evangelista, to the distant towers of the Madonna
dell' Orto, San Giobbe and Sant' Andrea, tongues of bronze responded,
mingling in one great chorus, seeming to extend over the silent stones
and waters a single immense and invisible dome of metal, the vibration
of which might almost reach the first sparkling stars. Those sacred
voices seemed to lend to the City of Silence an ideal and infinite
grandeur.
"Can you still pray?" said Stelio in a softened voice, looking at the
woman who, with eyes downcast, and hands clasped on her knees, seemed
absorbed in a silent orison.
She did not reply; she only pressed her lips together more closely.
The minds of both were confused by the strange, the new image, and the
new name, that had risen between them. Perturbation and passion seized
them again, drew them near each other with such force that they dared
not look into each other's eyes, for fear of what might be read there.
"Shall I see you again this evening, after the festival?" said La
Foscarina, with a slight unsteadiness in her voice. "Are you free?"
She was eager now to hold him, to make him her prisoner, as if she
feared he would escape her, as if she had hoped to find this night
some magic philter that would bind him to her forever. And, though
she comprehended now that the gift of all she had to give had become
necessary, she realized only too clearly, nevertheless, even through
the intoxication that bewildered her, the poverty of the gift so long
withheld. And a mournful modesty, a mingling of terror and pride,
contracted her slender frame.
"I am free--and I am yours!" the young man answered in a half whisper,
without raising his eyes to hers. "You know that nothing is worth to me
what you can give."
His heart, too, was stirred to its depths, with the two aims before his
ambition toward which, this night, all his energy bent, like a powerful
bow: the city and the woman, both tempting and mysterious, weary with
having lived too much, and oppressed with too many loves; both were too
much magnified by his imagination, and both were destined to disappoint
his hopes.
In the moment that followed, a violent wave of mingled regret and
desire swept over him. The pride and intoxication of his hard,
persistent labor; his boundless ambition, which had been curbed within
a sphere too narrow for it; his intolerance of mediocrity, his demand
for the privileges of princes; his superb and empurpled dreams; his
insatiable need of preëminence, glory, pleasure--surged in his soul
with a confusing tumult, dazzling and suffocating him. And the craving
of his sadness inclined him to win the final love of this solitary,
nomadic woman, the very folds of whose garments seemed to suggest
the frenzy of the far-off multitudes, whom she had so often thrilled
and shaken with her art, by a cry of passion, a sob of grief, or a
death-like silence. An irresistible impulse drew him toward this woman,
in whom he fancied he saw the traces of all emotions and experiences,
toward that being, no longer young, who had known so many caresses, yet
was unknown by him.
"Is it a promise?" he murmured, bowing his head lower to conceal his
agitation. "Ah! at last!"
She made no reply, but fixed on him a gaze of almost mad intensity,
which he did not see.
They relapsed into silence again, while the reverberation of the bells
passing overhead was so penetrating that they felt it in the roots of
the hair, as from a quiver of their own flesh.
"Good-by," said La Foscarina, as they were landing. "When we leave the
hall, let us meet in the courtyard, near the second well, the nearest
to the Molo."
"Good-by," he answered. "Take some place where I may see you, among the
crowd, when I speak my first word."
A confused clamor arose from San Marco, above the sound of the bells,
spread over the Piazzetta, and died away toward the Fortuna.
"May all light be on your brow, Stelio!" said La Foscarina, holding out
her burning hands to him passionately.
CHAPTER II
THE FACE OF TRUTH
When he entered the court by the south door, Stelio Effrena, seeing the
black and white throng that swarmed up the Giants' Stairway, in the
ruddy light of the torches fixed in the iron candelabra, felt a sudden
sensation of repugnance, and paused at the entrance. He noted the
contrast between this paltry crowd and the noble architecture which,
magnified by the unusual nocturnal illumination, expressed, by their
varied harmoniousness, the strength and the beauty of a day that was
past.
"Oh, how miserable!" he exclaimed, turning to the friends that
accompanied him. "In the Hall of the Greater Council, from the throne
of the Doges, how is it possible to find metaphors that will move a
thousand starched shirt-bosoms? Let us go back; let us inhale the odor
of the real crowd, the true crowd. The Queen has not yet left the royal
palace. We have time enough."
"Until the moment that I see you on the platform, I shall not feel sure
that you will really speak," said Francesco de Lizo, laughing.
"I believe that Stelio would prefer the balcony to the platform," said
Piero Martello, wishing to flatter the master's taste for sedition,
and his factious spirit, which he himself affected, in imitation.
"He would like to harangue, between the two red columns, the mutinous
people who threatened to set fire to the new _Procuratie_ and the old
_Libreria_."
"Yes, certainly," said Stelio, "if the harangue had power to prevent
or to precipitate an irreparable act. I hold that we use the written
word to create a pure form of beauty, which, even in an uncut book,
is enclosed and shut in, as in a tabernacle that may be entered only
by election, with the same premeditated will used in the breaking of
a seal. But the spoken word, it seems to me, when it is addressed
directly to a multitude, should have only action for its aim. On
this condition alone can a proud spirit, without lessening itself in
dignity, communicate with the masses by means of voice and gesture.
Otherwise, his effort becomes merely histrionic. And so I repent
bitterly of having accepted this function of an ornamental orator, who
must not speak unless he speaks agreeably. Consider, I ask you, how
humiliating for me is the honor that they think to do me, and consider
also the uselessness of my speech. All these people, strangers here,
have left their mediocre occupations, or their favorite amusements,
to come and listen to me with the same vain and stupid curiosity that
would lead them to listen to some new virtuoso. For the women that will
listen to me, the art with which I have tied my cravat will be much
more appreciated than the art with which I shall round my periods. And,
after all, the only effect of my speech will be a clapping of hands,
deadened by gloves, or a brief, discreet murmur, to which I shall
reply with a gracious inclination of the head. Does it seem to you that
I am about to attain the summit of my ambition?"
"You are wrong," said Francesco de Lizo. "You should congratulate
yourself for this happy occasion, which will allow you, for several
hours, to impress the rhythm of art on the life of a forgetful city,
and to make us dream of the splendors that might embellish our
existence by a renewed union of Art with Life. If the man that built
the Teatro di Festa were there, he would praise you for that harmony
which he predicted. But the most wonderful thing about this affair is
the fact that, notwithstanding your absence, and your ignorance of the
project, the festival seems to have been prepared under the direct
inspiration of your genius. This is the best proof that it is possible
to restore and diffuse taste, even in the midst of the barbaric
present. Your influence to-day is more powerful than you think. The
lady who has desired to honor you--she that you call the Dogeressa--at
every new idea that came to her, asked herself: 'Would it please
Effrena?' If you only knew how many young and eager spirits put to
themselves to-day the same question, when they consider the aspects of
their inner life!"
"And for whom should you speak, if not for them?" said Daniele Glauro,
the fervent and sterile ascetic of Beauty, with that melodious voice
which seemed to reflect the frank and inextinguishable ardor of the
soul beloved by the master as one of the most faithful. "If, when you
stand upon the platform, you will look about you, you will easily
recognize the expression in their eyes. There are many of them, and
some have come a long distance; they await your words with an eagerness
that you perhaps do not understand. They are those who have imbibed
the spirit of your poetry, who have breathed the fiery ether of your
dream, and felt the grip of your chimera; those to whom you have
announced the transfiguration of the world by the miracle of a new
art. The number that you have attracted as an apostle of hope and of
joy is very great. They have heard that you are to speak in Venice,
in the Ducal Palace--one of the most splendid and glorious places on
earth. They will be able to see you and listen to you for the first
time, surrounded by the magnificence that seems to them an appropriate
frame to your personality. The old Palace of the Doges, which has so
long been wrapped in nocturnal darkness, is suddenly illuminated and
aroused this night for you, and, to their minds, it is you alone that
have had the power to rekindle these long-extinguished torches. Do you
understand now the eagerness of their expectation? Does it not seem to
you that to them only you ought to speak? The condition you impose on
the man that harangues a multitude may be fulfilled. You can awaken an
emotion in their breasts that shall turn them forever toward the Ideal.
For how many of them, Stelio, you might make this Venetian night an
experience never to be forgotten!"
Stelio laid his hand on the prematurely bent shoulders of the mystic
doctor, and, smiling, repeated Petrarch's words: "_Non ego loquar
omnibus, sed tibi, sed mihi, et his_."
He saw within himself the radiant eyes of his unknown disciples, and
heard within his soul, in clear tones, the sound of his own exordium.
"Nevertheless," he replied gayly, addressing Piero Martello, "it would
be amusing to conjure up a tempest on this sea."
They were standing under the arch, near a column, in contact with the
noisy, unanimous crowd, which gathered in the Piazzetta, stretched out
toward the Zecca, was swallowed up near the _Procuratie_, barred the
Torre dell'Orologio, occupied every space like a wave without form, and
communicated its living warmth to the marble columns and the walls,
against which it surged in its violent movement. From time to time, a
louder cry arose from the distance, at the farther end of the Piazza,
swelling higher and stronger until it burst out near them like a clap
of thunder, then diminishing until it died away in a murmur.
"I should like to-night to find myself for the first time with a woman
I loved, on a floating couch, over there, beyond the gardens, toward
the Lido," said the romantic poet, Paris Eglano, a blond, beardless
youth, whose handsome mouth, with its full red lips, contrasted with
the almost angelic delicacy of his other features. "Within an hour,
Venice will present to some Nero-like lover, hidden in a gondola, the
spectacle of a city set on fire by its own delirium."
Stelio smiled, noting to what extent his intimates had become imbued
with his own spiritual essence, and how deep the seal of his own style
had stamped itself on their minds. Suddenly the image of La Foscarina
flashed across his mental vision: La Foscarina, poisoned by too much
art, remembering too many amatory experiences, with the stamp of
maturity and of corruption on her eloquent mouth, the aridity of the
vein fever that burned in those hands that pressed out the juices of
deceitful fruits, and the marks of a hundred masks on that face which
had simulated the fury of all mortal passions. Thus she appeared to his
ardent thought of her, and his heart throbbed faster as he pictured her
emerging soon from the multitude, as from some element that enslaved
her, and thought that from her glance he should draw the necessary
inspiration.
"Come, let us go," said he resolutely to his friends. "It is the hour."
The cannon announced that the Queen had left the royal palace. A
prolonged quiver ran through the living human mass, like that which
precedes a storm at sea. From the bank of San Giorgio Maggiore, a
rocket rushed up with a long hiss, rising in the air like a fiery
stem and bursting into a mass of pink splendor at the top; then it
curved, grew fainter, and dissolved in trembling sparks, extinguished
finally with a slight crackling in the water. And the joyous clamor
that greeted the beautiful Queen, repeating her name--the name of the
starry, white flower and of the pearl--evoked in Stelio's imagination
the pomp of the ancient Promissione, the triumphal procession of the
Arts escorting the new Dogaressa to the palace; the wave of joy on
which Morosina Grimani mounted to her throne, shimmering with gold,
while all the Arts bowed before her, laden with gifts as if they bore
horns of plenty.
"Certainly," said Francesco de Lizo, "if the Queen loves your books,
she will wear all her pearls this evening. You will have before you a
veritable labyrinth of jewels--all the hereditary gems of the Venetian
patricians."
"Look toward the foot of the stairway, Stelio," said Daniele Glauro. "A
group of devotees is waiting for you to pass that way."
Stelio stopped at the well indicated by La Foscarina. He leaned over
the bronze edge, his knees touching the little carved caryatides, and
saw in the dark water the reflection of the stars. For the moment his
soul isolated itself, shut out the surrounding sounds, and withdrew
into the shadowy disc, from which rose a slight dampness betokening
the presence of water. His excited desire felt a need to attain even
greater intoxication than this night promised him, and he felt that in
the farthest depths of his being lay a secret soul, which, like this
dark, watery mirror, remained immovable, strange, and intangible.
"What do you see there?" inquired Piero Martello, also leaning over the
rim, worn in places by the ropes of centuries.
"The face of Truth!" the master answered.
* * * * *
In the apartments contiguous to the Hall of the Greater Council, once
occupied by the Doge, but now by the pagan statues that were seized
as booty in ancient wars, Stelio awaited the summons from the master
of the ceremonies to mount to the platform. He was quite calm, and
smiled on the friends that spoke to him, but their words reached his
ear between pauses, like interrupted sounds borne from afar by the
wind. From time to time, with an abrupt, involuntary movement, he drew
near to one of the statues, and ran his hand nervously over it, as if
seeking some weak spot, that he might break it; or he bent curiously
over some rare medal, as if to read on it some indecipherable sign.
But his eyes saw nothing of all this; they were turned within, where
the multiplied power of his will evoked the silent forms that his
voice would presently transform into the perfection of verbal music.
His whole being contracted itself in an effort to raise to the highest
degree of intensity the representation of the extraordinary feelings
that possessed him. Since he could speak only of himself, and of his
own universe, at least he would unite in one ideal figure the sovereign
qualities of his art, and show to his disciples by his genius for
imagery what an invincible force hastened him through this life. Once
more he intended to show them that, in order to obtain the victory
over men and circumstances, there is no other way than to persevere in
exalting oneself and to magnify one's own dream of beauty or of power.
He bent over a medallion by Pisanello, feeling at his temples the
ardent, rapid pulsation of his thought.
"See, Stelio," said Daniele Glauro to him, with that pious reverence
which veiled his voice whenever he spoke of his religion, "see how the
mysterious affinities of Art work upon you, and how an infallible
instinct leads you, amid so many forms, and at the very moment when
your thought is about to reveal itself, toward the example of the most
perfect expression, the highest model of style. At the very instant
of coining your own idea, you are led to study one of Pisanello's
medallions; you are attracted by the impression of one of the greatest
stylists that ever have lived in the world, the most frankly Hellenic
soul of the whole Renaissance. And suddenly your forehead is illumined
by a ray of light."
The pure bronze bore the effigy of a young man with beautiful, waving
hair, an imperial profile and Apollo-like neck, and the head was so
perfect a type of elegance and vigor that the imagination could not
picture him in life except as free from all decadence and eternally
unchangeable, as the artist had presented him in this circle of
bronze.--_Dux equitum præstans Malatesta Novellus Cesenæ dominus.
Opus Pisani pictoris._--And beside it was another medallion by the
same artist, bearing the effigy of a virgin, with narrow chest, a
swan-like throat, and hair drawn back in the shape of a heavy bag; the
forehead, high and receding, seemed already to promise the aureole of
the blessed, and she was like a vase of purity sealed forever, hard,
precise, and limpid as a diamond, an adamantine pyx where the spirit,
consecrated like the Host, rested as a sacrifice.--_Cicilia Virgo,
filia Johannis Francesco primi Marchionis Mantuae._
"Here comes La Foscarina, with Donatella Arvale," announced Francesco
de Lizo, who had been watching the crowd that climbed the Censors'
Stairway and pressed into the vast hall.
Again Stelio Effrena felt a wave of agitation sweep over him. The
murmur of the throng seemed to come from afar and mingle in his ears
with the throbbing of his arteries, and in this murmur he fancied he
heard once more the last words of Perdita.
CHAPTER III
THE NUPTIALS OF AUTUMN AND VENICE
The murmur swelled louder, diminished, then ceased, as Stelio, with
firm, light movement, ascended the marble steps of the platform. As he
turned toward the audience, his dazzled eyes rested upon the formidable
monster with a thousand human faces, amid the gold and somber purple of
the immense hall.
A sudden thrill of pride gave him complete self-control. He bowed
to the Queen and to Donna Andriano Duodo, who smiled upon him with
the same twin smiles he had seen from the gliding gondola on the
Grand Canal. He threw a keen glance toward the scintillating first
rows, seeking La Foscarina, then looked toward the farther end of
the hall, where only a dark zone, dotted with white spots, could be
distinguished. The silent, attentive multitude seemed to him like an
enormous, many-eyed chimera, its breast covered with glittering scales,
extending its black bulk under the arches of the rich, heavy ceiling
that hung over it like a suspended treasure.
Dazzling was that chimeric breast, where sparkled necklaces that
must once have flashed their fires under the same ceiling on the
night of a coronation banquet. The tiara and the necklaces of the
Queen--the rows of pearls, like grains of light, somehow suggesting
the miraculous image of a smile just about to appear--the dark emeralds
of Andriano Duodo, taken long ago from the handle of a scimitar;
the rubies of Giustiniana Memo, set in the semblance of carnations
by the inimitable craftsmanship of Vettor Camelio; the sapphires of
Lucrezia Priuli, taken from the shoes in which the Most Serene Zilia
had walked to her throne on the day of her triumph; the beryls of
Orsetta Contarini, delicately set in dull gold by the art of Silvestro
Grifo; the turquoises of Zenobia Corner, bathed in a strange pallor
by the mysterious malady that, in a single night, changed them as
they lay on the warm breast of the Princess de Lusignan, among the
delights of Asolo--all the rich jewels that had illumined the nights
of the Anadyomenean city glowed with renewed fire on the breast of the
chimera, from which rose a moist odor of feminine breaths and many
perfumes. The rest of that strangely marked and shapeless body extended
to the rear of the hall, in a sort of long tail, passing between the
two gigantic spheres, which recalled to the memory of the "Image-maker"
the two bronze spheres that the monster with the bandaged eyes presses
with his paws in Giambellino's allegory. And this vast animal life,
devoid of all thought for the time before him who alone at that moment
must think, endowed with the inert fascination of enigmatic idols,
covered with its own silence as with a shield capable of receiving and
resisting any shock, awaited the first thrill of his dominating word.
Stelio Effrena measured this silence, upon which his first syllable
must fall. While his voice was rising to his lips, an effort of
will summoning it and fortifying it against instinctive hesitation,
he perceived La Foscarina standing near the railing that encircled
the celestial sphere. The pale face of the tragic actress rose from
her bare neck, and the purity of her white shoulders was just above
the orbit of the zodiacal figures. Stelio admired the art of this
apparition. With his own eyes fixed upon those distant, adoring ones,
he began to speak slowly, as if the rhythm of the oars still lingered
in his ears.
"One afternoon, not long ago, while I was returning from the gardens
along the warm bank of the Schiavoni, where the souls of poets
sometimes believe they see I know not what magic golden bridge spanning
a sea of light and silence toward a dream of infinite beauty, I
thought--or rather, I witnessed with my thoughts, as at some intimate
spectacle--of the nuptial alliance, under those skies, of Autumn and
Venice.
"Everywhere was disseminated a spirit of life, arising from passionate
expectation and restrained ardor, which made me marvel at its
vehemence, but which seemed not altogether new to me; I had already
seen it in some shadowy zones, under the almost death-like immobility
of Summer; and sometimes I had felt it vibrating, like a mysterious
pulse, in the strange feverish odor of the water. Thus, I thought, it
is true, then, that this pure city of Art aspires to a supreme state
of beauty which for her returns annually, as the flowers return to the
forest. She tends to reveal herself in full harmony, as if always
she bore within her bosom, powerful and conscious, the same desire of
perfection from which she sprang and was formed throughout the ages,
like some divine creature. Under the motionless fire of Summer, she
seemed to palpitate no more, to breathe no more, but to lie dead in her
green waters. My feeling did not deceive me, however, when I fancied I
saw her secretly inspired by a spirit of life sufficient to renew the
most sublime of the ancient miracles.
"That is what I thought, and what I saw. But how can I convey to
you that listen to me any idea of that vision of joy and beauty? No
sunrise, no sunset, could equal the glory of that hour of light on the
water and the marble. The unexpected apparition of the beloved woman
in a forest in springtime could not be as intoxicating as this sudden
revelation by daylight of the heroic and voluptuous city, which carries
in its marble embrace the richest dream of a Latin soul."
The voice of the orator, clear, penetrating, almost icy at the
beginning, was suddenly warmed by the invisible sparks kindled within
him by the effort of improvisation, yet governed by the extreme nicety
of his ear. While his words flowed without hesitation, and the rhythmic
line of his periods set forth their beauty with the clearness of a
figure drawn at one stroke by a bold hand, his auditors were conscious
of the excessive tension of his mind, and it captivated them as one of
those terrifying feats at the circus, where all the herculean energies
of the athlete show the test by his quivering tendons and swelling
arteries. They felt the reality, the living warmth of the thought
thus expressed, and their pleasure was the greater because unexpected,
for most of his auditors had anticipated from this indefatigable
searcher after perfection the studied reading of a laboriously composed
discourse. His devotees observed with emotion this audacious test, as
if they saw before them, unveiled, the secret labor that had brought
forth the forms that had given them so much joy. And this first wave of
emotion, spreading by contagion, indefinitely multiplied and becoming
unanimous, returned to him who caused it, and seemed almost to overcome
him.
This was the expected danger. Under the pressure of a wave so strong,
the speaker faltered. For a few seconds a thick cloud darkened his
brain; the light of his mind was extinguished, as a torch before an
irresistible wind; his eyes grew dim, as if he were about to faint. But
he felt how mortifying would be the shame of defeat if he yielded to
this seizure; and in that darkness, by a sort of effort of brute force,
or like the striking of steel on flint, his will rose in triumph over
the instinctive weakness. With glance and gesture, he directed the eyes
of the assemblage to the great masterpiece in the ceiling of that hall,
spreading there in a kind of sun-like radiance.
"I am certain," he exclaimed, "that Venice appeared thus to Paolo
Veronese, when he sought within himself for an image of the Queen
triumphant."
He explained the reason why the great master, after throwing upon his
canvas a profusion of gold, jewels, silks, purple, ermine, and all
imaginable richness, at last could represent the glorious face only in
the nimbus of a shadow.
"We ought to exalt Veronese for that shadowy veil alone! Representing
by a human face the Queen of Cities, he yet knew how to express its
essential spirit, whose symbol was an inextinguishable flame seen
through a watery veil. And one I know well, who, having plunged his
soul in this sublime element, has withdrawn it enriched with a new
power, and consequently has lived a fuller and more ardent spiritual
life."
This one he knew well--was it not himself? In the assertion of his own
personality he found again all his courage, and felt that henceforth
he was master of his thoughts and words, freed from danger, capable of
drawing within the charmed circle of his dream the enormous, many-eyed
chimera, with the glittering breast--the ephemeral and versatile
monster from whose side emerged its offspring, the Tragic Muse, her
head rising above the constellations.
Obedient to his movement, the innumerable faces turned toward the
Apotheosis, their awakened eyes contemplating with wonder this marvel,
as if they beheld it for the first time, or under a new aspect. The
naked back of the woman with the golden helmet shone under the cloud
with an effect of muscular life so perfect that it looked as attractive
as palpable flesh. And, from this nudity, more realistic than all the
rest, victorious over Time, which had darkened around it heroic images
of sieges and battles, seemed to emanate a powerful enchantment, the
sweetness of which was augmented by the breath of the autumn night
coming through the open windows; while, from above, the princesses of a
former day, leaning over the balustrades between two columns, inclined
their illumined faces and opulent breasts toward their worldly sisters
below.
Under the new spell of enchantment, the poet threw off his winged
words, harmonious as lyric strophes. He described the Queen City
palpitating with ardor within her thousand green girdles, extending her
marble arms toward the wild Autumn, whose humid breath reached her,
balmy with the delicious death of the fields and islands, making her
sigh like a bride awaiting her hour of joy. By the magic of his words,
Venice seemed to be possessed of marvelous hands, with which she wove
for herself the inimitable tissue of allegory that covered her.
"And since, in all the world, poetry alone is truth, he that knows how
to contemplate it, and to draw it into his own soul by the virtue of
his thought, will be very near to mastering the secret of victory over
life."
In pronouncing these last words, Stelio sought the eyes of Daniele
Glauro, and saw that they sparkled with happiness beneath that large,
meditative brow, which seemed swollen by the weight of an unborn world.
The mystic doctor was there, near the platform, with several of those
unknown disciples that he had described to the master as eager and
anxious, full of faith and expectation, impatient to break the chain
of their daily servitude, and to know the free intoxication of joy
and sadness. Stelio noted that they were grouped, like a nucleus of
compressed force, against the great red bookcases, wherein lay buried
innumerable volumes of useless and forgotten lore. He marked their
eager and attentive faces, their long hair, their lips, half parted
with child-like absorption, or closed tightly in a kind of violent
sensitiveness, their bright eyes, to which the breath of his words
carried lights and shadows, as a changeful breeze stirs a parterre of
delicate flowers. He felt that in his own hand he held all their souls
blended into one spirit, which he could at will agitate, crush, tear,
or burn, as if it were a filmy scarf.
While his mind expanded and relaxed, in its continued effort, he still
retained a strange power of exterior investigation, a faculty of
material observation which became the clearer and more penetrating with
the warmth and quickening of his eloquence.
Suddenly he saw with his mental vision the picture he wished to
present, and his verbal expression of it was after the manner of the
master painters that had reigned in that place, with the luxuriance of
Veronese, and the fire of Tintoretto.
"All the vitalities and all the transfigurations of the ancient stones,
where Time has accumulated so many mysteries, and where glory has set
her emblems; all the alternations of marvelously easy creations and
destructions were reflected in the water; the effulgence of a jubilant
light glittered between the crosses of cupolas inflated by prayer, and
the slender saline crystals hanging under the arch of the bridges. Like
a sentinel on a rampart uttering his shrill cry to him that listens
for the signal, so the golden angel from the summit of the highest
tower at last flashed out the announcement.
"And He appeared! The Bridegroom appeared, seated in his fiery chariot,
which he turned toward the Queen of Cities, and in his youthful,
superhuman countenance was a strange fascination springing from an
animal-like cruelty and delicacy contrasting with the deep eyes, full
of all knowledge. His blood rioted through his veins, from the tips of
his fingers to his nimble feet; mysterious, occult things veiled his
being, concealing joy as the grape in bloom conceals the vine; and all
the tawny gold and purple that surrounded him were like the vestment of
his senses.
"With what passion, throbbing under her thousand emerald girdles, and
the richness of her jewels, the Queen of Cities gave herself to the
magnificent god!"
Swept up in this rushing flight of words, the soul of the multitude
seemed to reach the sentiment of Beauty, as if it were a summit never
before attained. The pulse of the people and the voice of the poet
seemed to give back to those ancient walls their former life, and to
reawaken in that cold museum its original spirit: a flood of powerful
ideas, concrete, and organized in the most durable substance to attest
the nobility of a great race.
The splendor of divine youth descended upon the women, as it might
have descended in a sumptuous alcove, for each felt within herself the
breathlessness of expectation and the joy of yielding, like that of the
Queen of Cities. They smiled with vague languor as if wearied by the
strain upon their emotions; their cool, polished shoulders rose from
their corollas of jewels.
Stelio looked down upon the sparkling breast of the great, many-eyed
chimera, on which rose and fell many fluttering feather fans, like tiny
wings; and over his spirit passed an intoxicating glow that disquieted
him. The vibration of his nerves, acting upon those of his auditors
and thus reacting upon himself, unsettled him so much as almost to
unbalance him. For an instant he felt that he was oscillating above the
crowd, like a concave and sonorous body, the resonances of which were
engendered by an indistinct yet infallible will.
He was surprised at the unknown power that dwelt within him, abolishing
his own personal limits and conferring the fulness of a chorus on his
single voice.
This, then, was the mysterious truce which the revelation of Beauty
could grant to the daily existence of wearied man; this was the
mysterious will that could possess the poet at the moment when he
replied to the souls of his followers who questioned him as to the
value of life and tried to raise themselves, if only once, to the
height of the eternal Ideal. He was only the messenger through whom
Beauty offered to those men, assembled in this place consecrated by
centuries of human glory, the divine gift of oblivion. He was only the
translator into rhythmic speech of the visible language whereby, in
this same place, the noble craftsmen of a former day had expressed the
prayers and aspirations of the race. And for one hour, at least, those
men would contemplate the world with different eyes; they would think
and dream with different souls.
In fancy, he passed beyond the walls that enclosed the palpitating
throng in a kind of heroic cycle, a circle of red triremes, fortified
towers, and triumphal theories. The place now seemed too narrow for
the exaltation of his new feeling; and once more he was drawn toward
the real people, the immense, unanimous crowd he had seen outside the
palace, who had sent upward in the starry night a clamor that, like
blood or wine, intoxicated them as they uttered it.
And not alone to this multitude did his thoughts turn; his fancy beheld
an infinity of multitudes, massed together in theaters, dominated by an
idea of truth and of beauty, pale and intent before the great arch of
the stage, which should open before them some marvelous transfiguration
of life, or frenzied by the sudden splendor radiating from an immortal
phrase. And the dream of a higher Art, as it surged up again in his
thought showed him mankind once more reverencing poets, as those who
alone can interrupt at intervals its daily anguish, quench its thirst,
and dispense oblivion. He even judged too slight the test he was now
undergoing; he felt himself capable of creating gigantic fictions. The
still formless work that he nourished in his soul shook him with a
thrill of life as he looked again at the tragedienne, standing above
the sphere of constellations--the Muse with the transcendent voice, who
seemed to carry the frenzy of far-off throngs, now silenced, in the
classic folds of her robes.
Almost overcome by the incredible intensity of emotion that had
possessed him during the brief pause, he began to speak again in
a lower tone. He spoke of the growth of art between the youth of
Giorgione and the old age of Tintoretto, and described it as golden,
purple, rich and expressive as the pomp of the earth irradiated by the
glow of sunset.
"When I consider the impetuous creators of such marvelous beauty, my
mind recalls an image from a fragment of Pindar's: 'When the centaurs
became acquainted with the virtues of wine, sweet as honey and a
conqueror of men, they banished milk from their tables and hastened to
quaff their wine from silver horns.' No one in the world better knew
than they how to taste the wine of life. They drew from it a kind of
lucid intoxication that multiplied their powers and communicated to
their eloquence a fertilizing energy. And in their greatest creations,
the violent throbbing of their pulses seems to have persisted
throughout the ages, like the veritable rhythm of Venetian art.
"Ah, how pure and poetic is the slumber of the Virgin Ursula on her
immaculate bed! The most religious silence reigns in that chamber,
where the pious lips of the sleeper seem to form themselves into the
act of uttering prayer. Through the doors and the windows steals the
timid light of dawn, illumining the syllables inscribed on her pillow:
INFANTIA is the simple word that spreads around that virginal head,
like the fresh aurora of the morning: INFANTIA. She sleeps, the maiden
already betrothed to the pagan prince and destined to martyrdom. So
chaste, so ingenuous, so fervent, is she not the image of Art such as
the precursors saw it, with the sincerity of their child-like eyes?
INFANTIA! The word evokes around that couch all those forgotten ones:
Lorenzo Veneziano, Simone da Cusighe, Catarino, Jacobello, Maestro
Paolo, Giambono, Semitecolo, Antonio, Andrea, Quirizio da Murano, and
all the laborious family by whom color--which later was the rival of
fire--was prepared in the burning island of furnaces. But would not
they themselves have uttered a cry of admiration if they had seen the
drops of blood that sprang from the maiden's heart when it was pierced
by the arrow of the beautiful pagan archer? A current so red from a
virgin nourished on white milk! This victory was a sort of festival: to
it the archers brought their finest bows, their richest garments, their
most elegant air. The golden-haired barbarian, aiming his arrows at the
martyr, with a movement so proud and graceful, does he not resemble an
adolescent and wingless Eros? That gracious slayer of innocence (or
perhaps his brother), after laying aside his bow, will abandon himself
to the enchantment of music to dream a dream of infinite pleasure.
"It was indeed Giorgione that poured into him a new soul, and kindled
it with an implacable longing. The music that charms him is not the
melody that last night the lutes diffused among the curving arches,
over radiant thrones, or diminishing in the silence of distances in the
visions of the third Bellini. Under the touch of religious hands, it
still rises from the harpsichord; but the world it awakens is full of
a joy and a sadness wherein sin hides its head.
"He that has looked at the _Concerto_ with the eyes of wisdom has
comprehended an extraordinary and irrevocable moment of the Venetian
soul. By means of a harmony of color--whose power of expression is
as boundless as the mystery of sounds--the artist reveals the first
agitation of an eager spirit to whom life has suddenly appeared under
the aspect of a rich inheritance.
"The monk, seated at his harpsichord, and his older companion, do not
resemble those monks that Vettor Carpaccio represented as flying before
the wild beast tamed by Jerome, in San Giorgio degli Schiavoni. Their
essence is nobler and stronger; they breathe an atmosphere higher and
richer, propitious to the birth of a great joy, a great sadness, or
a superb dream. What notes do those beautiful, sensitive hands draw
from the keys on which they linger? Magic notes, no doubt, since they
have power to work in the musician a transfiguration so great. He is
half-way through his mortal existence, already far from his youth and
near his decline, yet only now life reveals itself to him, rich with
all good things, like a forest full of ripe, red fruit, the velvety
freshness of which his always busy hands never before have known. As
his senses still slumber, he has not yet fallen under the domination
of a single seductive image, but he suffers a sort of confused anguish
wherein regret overcomes desire, while in the web of harmonies that he
seeks, the vision of his past--but only as it might have been and was
not--weaves itself like the tissue of a chimera.
"His companion divines this inner agitation, for he is already at the
threshold of old age; calm, sweet, and serious, he touches the shoulder
of the passionate player with a pacifying movement. But there, emerging
from the warm shadows like the embodiment of youthful ardor itself,
is the young man with hat beplumed and flowing locks, the glowing
flower of adolescence which Giorgione created under the influence of
a reflection from that Hellenic myth whence arose the ideal form of
Hermaphrodite. He is there, present, yet a stranger, separated from the
others, like a being that cares only for his own welfare. The music
exalts his inexpressible dream, and seems to multiply indefinitely his
capacity to enjoy. He knows himself master of that life which escapes
the other two, and the harmonies sought by the musician seem to him
only the prelude to his own feast. His glance is sidewise and intent,
turned toward a certain point, as if he would attract to himself
something that charms him; his closed lips are ready with a kiss as yet
ungiven; his brow is so spacious that the thickest garland would not
encumber it; but if I think of his hands, I fancy them crushing the
laurel leaves to perfume his fingers."
The hands of the Inspirer illustrated the gesture of the covetous
youth, as if they were really pressing out the essence of the aromatic
leaf; and his voice lent to the image an illusion so strong that the
young men felt that here at last was one who could express their
cherished and secret thoughts and dreams, and give voice to their
unspeakable, continuous, and ceaseless longings. They occupied the free
space at the back of the seated audience, making a living border for
that compact mass; and, as the edges of a flag that waves in the breeze
have a stronger flutter, these youthful hearts beat faster than those
of older men at the warm breath of the poet's words.
Stelio recognized them, distinguishing them by their singularity of
attitude, the intensity of emotion revealed by their compressed lips
and the glow of ardor in their cheeks. On the face of one, turned
toward the open balcony, he read the enchantment of the autumn night,
and the delicious breeze coming from the lagoon. The glance of another
indicated, by a ray of love, some woman, seated near by, looking as if
she were lost in tender recollections, her face white, her red lips
slightly parted, like the entrance to a hive moist with honey.
His eyes continually returned to the promised woman, who looked as she
stood there like the living support of a starry sphere. He was grateful
to her for her choice of this manner of appearing to him when, for the
first time, he gave himself to the people. He no longer regarded her
as merely the passing fancy of a single night, a woman ripened by long
experience, but the marvelous instrument of a new art, the interpreter
of the greatest poetry, she that should incarnate in her changeful
personality his future fictions of beauty, she whose unforgettable
voice should carry to mankind the long-expected word. He now felt
attached to her, not by a promise of love, but by a promise of glory;
and the formless work that he still cherished in his breast again
leaped within him.
"You that listen to me," he continued, "do you not see some analogy
between these three symbols of Giorgione's and the three generations,
all living at the same time, that illumined the dawn of a new century?
Venice, the City Triumphant, reveals herself to their eyes like a
great, a superabundant banquet, where all the riches accumulated
throughout centuries of war and commerce are to be set out without
stint. What richer fountain of pleasure could there be to initiate life
in insatiable desire? It is a time of agitation, almost of distraction,
which, because of its fulness, is worth an hour of heroic violence.
Alluring voices and laughter seem to float from the hills of Asolo
where, surrounded by all delights, reigns the daughter of San Marco,
Domina Aceli, who found in a myrtle grove of Cyprus the cincture of
Aphrodite. Now approaches the youth with the white plumes; he comes to
the banquet, followed by his uncurbed escort, and all desires kindle
and burn like torches quickened by the wind. And this was the beginning
of that divine Autumn of Art toward which men will always turn with
deep emotion as long as the human soul strives to transcend the
narrowness of its common existence in order to live a life more fervent
or to die a nobler death.
"I see Giorgione imminent on the marvelous sphere, but I do not
recognize his mortal person; I seek him in the mystery of the fiery
cloud that envelops him. He appears to us more myth-like than human.
The destiny of no poet on earth is comparable to his. All concerning
his life is unknown; some even go so far as to deny his existence.
His name is inscribed on no work, and many refuse to attribute any
work to him with absolute certainty. But the whole of Venetian art was
illumined by his revelation; it was from him that the great Titian
received the secret of infusing glowing blood into the veins of the
beings he created. In fact, that which Giorgione represents in Art is
the Epiphany of the Flame. He deserves to be called 'the Flame-Bearer,'
like Prometheus.
"When I consider the rapidity with which this sacred gift has passed
from one artist to another, glowing with increasing splendor from color
to color, I think of one of those _lampadeforie_, or festivals, in
which the Greeks tried to perpetuate the memory of the Titan son of
Japetus. On the day of the festival, a group of young Athenian horsemen
would set off at a gallop, riding from Ceramicus to Colonos, their
chief waving a torch that had been lighted at the altar of a temple. If
the torch was extinguished by the swiftness of the course, the bearer
handed it to a companion, who re-lighted it as he rode; and this one
gave it to a third; the third to a fourth, and so on, always galloping,
until the last bearer laid it, still alight, on the altar of the Titan.
This image, with all it suggests of fiery vehemence, represents to my
fancy the feast of the master-colorists of Venice. Each of them, even
to the least illustrious, held in his hand the sacred gift, if only for
an instant. Some of them, like that first Bonifacio, whom we should
glorify, gathered with incombustible fingers the inmost flower of the
flame."
His fingers made a movement in the air as if to pluck the ideal flower.
His eyes turned again toward the celestial sphere, as if he wished to
offer the fiery gift to her who guarded the divine zodiacal beasts. "To
you, Perdita!" But the woman was smiling at some one at a distance.
Following the thread of her smile, Stelio's eyes were led to an unknown
woman, who suddenly seemed to stand out illumined against a shadowy
background.
Was not that the creature of music whose name had resounded against the
iron sides of the ship that evening, in the silence and the shadow?
She seemed to Stelio to be almost an interior image, suddenly
engendered in that part of his soul where the brief sensation he had
felt while passing through the shadow of the vessel had remained like
an isolated and indistinct point. For a second she was beautiful--as
beautiful as were his yet unexpressed thoughts.
"The city to which such creators have given a soul so powerful," he
continued, floating himself on the rising wave, "is considered to-day,
by the greater number, only as a vast inert reliquary, or as a refuge
of peace and oblivion.
"In truth, I know of no other place in the world--unless it be
Rome--where a bold and ambitious spirit can better foster the active
virtue of his intellect, and all the energies of his being toward
the supreme heights, than on these quiet waters. I know of no marsh
capable of provoking in human pulses a fever more violent that that
which at times steals up to us from the shadows of a silent canal. Nor
do those men who, at noontide in the midsummer heat, lie among the ripe
grain, feel in their veins a more fiery wave of blood than that which
suffuses our eyes when we lean too intently over these waters, to see
whether, perchance, we may descry in their depths some old sword or
ancient diadem.
"Do not all gracious spirits come hither, as to a place of sweet
refuge--those that hide some secret pain, those that have accomplished
some final renunciation, those that have become weak through some
morbid affection, and those that seek silence only to hear the soft
step of advancing Death? Perhaps in their fading eyes Venice appears
like a clement city of death, embraced by the waters of oblivion. But
their presence is no more important than the wandering weeds that float
at the foot of the steps of the marble palaces. They only increase the
odor of sickly things, that strange, feverish odor on which at times,
toward evening, after a laborious day, we nourish the fulness of our
own feelings.
"But the ambiguous city does not always indulge the illusions of those
that look to her as a giver of peace. I know one who, in the midst of
sweet repose on her breast, started up as terror-struck as if when
lying beside his loved one, with her hand resting on his weary eyelids,
he had heard serpents hissing in her hair!
"Ah, if I only knew how to tell you of that prodigious life which
palpitates beneath her great necklaces and her thousand green girdles!
Not a day passes that she does not absorb more and more of our souls:
sometimes she gives them back to us fresh and intact, restored to their
original newness, whereon to-morrow's events will be imprinted with
indelible clearness; again, she gives them back to us infinitely subtle
and voracious, like a flame that destroys all that it touches, so that,
at evening, among the cinders and the ashes, we may light upon some
wonderful sublimate. Each day she urges us to the act that is the very
genesis of our species: the unceasing effort to surpass ourselves. She
shows us the possibility of transforming pain into the most efficacious
stimulating energy; she teaches us that pleasure is the most certain
means of knowledge given to us by Nature, and that the man who has
suffered much is less wise than he that has enjoyed much."
At these audacious words, a slight murmur of disapproval passed over
the auditorium; the Queen shook her head ever so little, in token of
denial; several ladies, in a rapid exchange of glances, seemed to
signify to one another a sentiment of graceful horror. But these signs
were overbalanced by the acclamation of youthful approval that rose
from all sides toward him that taught with a boldness so frank the art
of rising to the superior forms of life by the virtue of joy.
Stelio smiled as he recognized his own, and so numerous; he smiled
to recognize the efficacy of his teaching, which already, in more
than one spirit, had dissipated the clouds of inert sadness, shown it
the cowardice of weak tears, and infused it with a lasting disdain
for feeble complaint and soft compassion. He rejoiced at having
been able to proclaim once more the principle of his doctrine,
emanating naturally from the soul of the art he glorified. And those
that had retired to a hermit's cell, there to adore a sad phantom
that lived only in the dim mirror of their own eyes; those that had
created themselves kings of palaces without windows, where, from time
immemorial, they had awaited a Visitation; those that had sought to
unearth among ruins the image of Beauty, but who had found only a
worn sphinx, which had tormented them with its endless enigmas; those
that stood every evening at their thresholds to greet the mysterious
Stranger bearing gifts under his mantle, and who, with pale cheeks,
laid their ears against the ground to catch the first sound of the
Stranger's approach; those whose souls were sterilized by resigned
mourning or devoured by desperate pride; those that were hardened
by useless obstinacy, or deprived of sleep by hope continually
disappointed--all these spirits he wished now to summon that they might
recognize their ailment under the splendor of that ancient yet ever-new
soul.
"In truth," said he, in a tone full of exultation, "if the whole
population, abandoning their homes, should emigrate, attracted to-day
toward other shores as formerly their heroic youth were tempted by the
arch of the Bosphorus, in the time of the Doge Pietro Ziani, and the
voice of prayer should no more strike against the sonorous gold of the
concave mosaics, nor the sound of the oar perpetuate with its rhythmic
stroke the meditation of the silent stones, Venice would still remain
a City of Life. The ideal creatures protected by its silence live
in the whole past and for the whole future. In them we shall always
discover new concordances with the edifice of the universe, unforeseen
meetings with the idea born only yesterday, clear announcements of that
which is with us only a presentiment as yet, open answers to that which
as yet we have not dared to ask.
"These ideal creatures are simple, but they are full of innumerable
meanings; they are ingenuous, yet are clothed in strange attire. Should
we contemplate them for an indefinite time, they never would cease to
pour dissimilar truths into our minds. Should we visit them every day,
every day they would appear to us under a new aspect, as do the sea,
the rivers, the fields, the woods, the rocks. At times the things they
say to us do not really reach our intellects, but reveal themselves to
us in a sort of confused happiness, which causes our own substance to
dilate and quiver to its inmost depths. Some bright day they will point
out to us the path to the distant forest, wherein Beauty has awaited us
from time immemorial, buried in her mystic hair.
"Whence came to them their immeasurable power?
"From the pure unconsciousness of the artificers that created them.
"Those profound men ignored the immensity of the things they wished
to express. Penetrating with a million roots into the soil of life,
not like single trees, but like vast forests, they absorbed infinite
elements, which they transfused and condensed into ideal species,
whose essences nevertheless remained unknown to them, as the flavor
of the apple is unknown to the branch that bears it. They were the
mysterious means chosen by Nature in her effort to represent in an
integral form those types in which she has not yet succeeded. Because
of this, continuing the work of the Divine Mother, their minds, as
Leonardo says, have become transformed into 'a likeness of the Divine
Mind.' And because creative force rushed to their fingers incessantly,
like sap to the buds of trees, they created with joy."
All the desire of the determined artist, panting and struggling to
obtain this Olympian gift, all his envy of those gigantic creators
of Beauty, all his insatiable thirst for happiness and glory, were
revealed in the tone in which he pronounced these last words. Once more
the soul of the multitude was under the magic of the poet's spell,
strained and vibrating like a single cord composed of a thousand
strands, the resonance of which could be incalculably prolonged. That
resonance awakened within the multitude the sense of a truth that had
lain dormant, but which the poet's words now revealed for the first
time.
In the sonority of the deep silence, the solitary voice reached its
climax.
"To create with joy! It is the attribute of Divinity! It is impossible
to imagine at the summit of the spirit an act more triumphal. Even the
words that signify it possess something of the splendor of sunrise.
"And these artists created by a medium that is in itself a joyous
mystery: by color, which is the ornament of the world; by color, which
seems the effort of matter to become light.
"And the newly awakened musical sense they had for color was such that
their creations transcend the narrow limits of figured symbols, and
assume the high revealing power of an infinite harmony.
"Never have the words of Vinci, on whom Truth flashed one day with her
thousand secrets, appeared so true as when we stand before the great
symphonic canvases of the masters: 'Music cannot be called anything but
the sister of Painting.' They are not alone silent poetry, but also
silent music. The most subtle seekers of rare symbols, and those most
desirous to impress the sign of an internal universe on the purity of
a meditative brow, seem to us almost sterile compared with these great
unconscious musicians.
"When we behold Bonifacio, in the parable of Dives, intoning with a
note of fire the most powerful harmony of color in which the essence
of a proud and voluptuous nature ever has revealed itself, we do not
ask questions about the blond youth, listening to the music and seated
between the two magnificent courtesans, whose faces glow like lamps
of purest amber; but, passing beneath the material symbol, we abandon
ourselves to the power of evocation of those chords, wherein our
spirits seem to-day to find a presentiment of I know not what evening,
heavy with beautiful destiny and autumnal gold, in a harbor as quiet
as a basin of perfumed oil where a galley palpitating with oriflammes
shall enter with a strange silence, like a butterfly of twilight
darting into the chalice of some great flower.
"Shall we not, with our mortal eyes, really see it, some glorious
evening, approaching the Palace of the Doges? Does it not appear to us
from a prophetic horizon in the Allegory of Autumn which Tintoretto
offers us, like a superior, concrete image of our dream of yesterday?
"Seated on the shore, like a deity, Venice receives the ring from the
young, vine-wreathed god who descends into the water, while Beauty
floats in the air with a starry diadem to crown the marvelous alliance!
"Behold yon distant ship! It seems to bring a message from the gods.
Behold the symbolic Woman! Her body is capable of bearing the germs of
a world!"
A whirlwind of applause broke out, dominated by the clamor of the young
men, who hailed him who had kindled before their anxious eyes a hope
so glowing, who had professed a faith so strong in the occult genius
of the race, in the lofty virtue of the ideals handed down by their
fathers, in the sovereign dignity of their spirit, the indestructible
power of beauty, in all the great things held as naught by modern
barbarity. The disciples extended their arms toward the master with
an effusion of gratitude, an impulse of love, for he had illumined
their souls as with a torch. In each lived again Giorgione's creation:
the youth with the beautiful white plumes, who advanced toward the
rich mass of spoils; and each fancied as multiplied to infinity his
own power to enjoy all things. Their cry expressed so plainly their
perturbation of spirit, that the master felt an inward tremor and the
inrush of a wave of sadness as he thought of the ashes of this sudden
fire, and of the cruel wakening of the morrow. Against what sharp
obstacles must be broken this terrible desire to live, this violent
will of each to shape the wings of Victory to his own destiny, and to
bend all the energies of his nature toward the sublime end!
But that night favored youthful delirium. All the dreams of domination,
of pleasure and of glory, that Venice has first cradled, then stifled,
in her marble arms, seemed to rise anew from the foundations of the
palace, to enter from the open balconies, palpitating like a people
revivified under the arch of that rich and heavy ceiling, which was
like a suspended treasure. The strength which, on the ceiling and the
walls, seemed to swell the muscles of the gods, the kings, and the
heroes, the beauty which, in the nudity of the goddesses, the queens,
and the courtesans, ran like visible music--all that human strength and
beauty, transfigured by centuries of art, harmonized itself in a single
figure, which these intoxicated ones fancied they beheld, real and
breathing, erected before them by the new poet.
They vented their intoxicated enthusiasm in that great cry which they
sent up to him who had offered to their thirsty lips a cup of his own
wine. Henceforth, all would be able to see the inextinguishable flame
through its watery veil. Some one among them already imagined himself
crumpling laurel leaves to perfume his hands; and another resolved to
seek at the bottom of a silent canal for the old sword and the ancient
diadem.
CHAPTER IV
THE SPIRIT OF MELODY
Alone with the statues in one of the rooms of the neighboring museum,
Stelio Effrena rested for a moment, shrinking from any other contact,
feeling the need of gathering his strength and quieting his nerves,
to free himself from the unusual vibration through which it seemed to
him all the essence of his spirit had been dissipated and scattered
over the composite soul of the throng. Of his recent words, no trace
remained in his memory, and of recent images he perceived no vestige.
The only phrase that lingered in his mind was that "inmost flower of
the flame," which he had conjured up in speaking of the glory of the
first Bonifacio, and which he had plucked with his own incombustible
fingers to offer to his promised love. He remembered how, at the
precise instant of this spontaneous offering, the woman had turned
away her head, and how, instead of a glance from her dreamy eyes, he
had encountered the indicating smile. Then the intoxicating cloud that
had been just on the point of melting away, seemed to condense itself
anew in his brain, in the vague form of the creature of music; and
he fancied that she held in her hand the flower of flame, as, in a
dominating attitude, she emerged above his inward agitation as from
the trembling waves of a summer sea.
As if to celebrate that image, from the Hall of the Greater Council
came the first notes of the symphony of Benedetto Marcello, the
fugue-like movement of which revealed at once its grand style. A
sonorous idea, clear and strong as a living person, developed itself in
the powerful measure; and in that melody Stelio recognized the virtue
of the same principle around which, as around a thyrsus, he had twined
the garlands of his poesy.
Then the name that had already resounded against the sides of the
vessel, in the silence and the shadow, that name which, in the great
wave of sound from the evening bells, had been lost like a sibylline
leaf, seemed to his fancy to propose its syllables to the orchestra
as a new theme to be interpreted by the musicians' bows. The violins,
viols, and violoncellos sang it in turn; the sudden blasts of the
heroic trumpets exalted it; and at last a whole quartette, in one
great, thrilling chord, flung it toward that heaven of joy where
later would sparkle the starry crown offered to Ariadne by the golden
Aphrodite.
In the pause that followed, Stelio experienced a singular agitation,
almost like a religious ecstasy, before that annunciation. He realized
what it was worth to him, in that inestimable lyric moment, to find
himself alone amid this group of white and motionless statues. A shred
of the same mystery which, under the quarter of the ship, had seemed
to float lightly across his senses like a misty veil, again waved
before his eyes in that deserted hall, which was so near to the human
throng. It was like the silence of the sea-shell, lying on the shore
beside the stormy ocean. He again felt a conviction, such as he had
already experienced in certain extraordinary hours of his journey, of
the presence of his fate, which was about to give to his spirit a new
impulse, perhaps to quicken within him a marvelous act of will. And,
as he remembered the thousands of obscure destinies hanging over the
heads of that crowd, which had been so stirred by his images of an
ideal life, he congratulated himself on being able to adore alone the
propitious demon that came to visit him secretly, to offer to him a
veiled gift, in the name of an unknown mistress.
He thrilled at the burst of human voices that saluted with triumphal
acclamation the unvanquished god.
_Viva il forte, viva il grande!_
The vast hall resounded like a great timbrel, and the reverberation
penetrated through the Censors' Stairway, the Golden Stairway, the
corridors and the vestibules to the furthermost parts of the palace,
like a thunder of joy echoing in the serene night.
_Viva il forte, viva il grande!
Vincitor dell' Indie dome!_
It seemed indeed that the chorus was saluting the apparition of the
magnificent god invoked by the poet on the City Beautiful. It seemed
that in those vocal notes the folds of his purple draperies quivered
like flames in a crystal tube. The living image hung suspended over
the assemblage, which nourished it with its own dream.
_Viva il forte, viva il grande!_
In the impetuous fugue movement, the bass, the contraltos, the sopranos
repeated the frenzied acclamation to the Immortal of the thousand names
and the thousand crowns, "born on an ineffable bed, like to a young man
in his first youth."
The old Dionysian intoxication seemed born again, diffusing itself
through that divine chorus. The fulness and freshness of life in the
smile of Zeus, who freed men's souls from sadness, expressed itself
in a luminous outburst of joy. The torches of the Bacchantes blazed
and crackled in the sound. As in an Orphic hymn, the brightness of
conflagration illumined that youthful brow, surmounted by azure hair.
"When the splendor of fire invaded the whole earth, he alone checked
the whirlwinds of flame." As in the Homeric hymn, there palpitated
the sterile bosom of the sea, expressing in regular cadences the
measured stroke of the oars that propelled the stout vessel toward
unknown lands. The Flower-bearer, the Fructifier, the visible Remedy
for mortal man, the sacred Flower, The Friend of Pleasure, Dionysius,
the liberator, suddenly appeared before mankind on the wings of song,
crowning for them that nocturnal hour with happiness, placing before
them once more the cup overflowing with all the good things of life.
The song increased in power; all the voices blended in the rush
of melody. The hymn celebrated the tamer of tigers, of panthers,
lions and lynxes. A cry seemed to rise from Mænads with heads turned
backward, flying locks and floating robes, who struck their cymbals and
shook their castanets: _Evoé!_
But now suddenly surged above these heroic measures a broad, pastoral
rhythm, invoking the Theban Bacchus, of the pure brow and gentle
thoughts:
_Quel che all'olmo la vite in stretto nodo
Pronuba accoppia, e i pampini feconda_ ...
Only two voices, in a succession of sixths, now sang the flowery
nuptials, the leafy marriage, the flexible bonds. Before the eyes of
the multitude again passed that image already created by the poet
of the barque laden with clusters, like a vat filled with grapes to
be made into wine. And again the song seemed to recall the miracle
witnessed by the prudent pilot Medeia: "And behold! a sweet and
fragrant wine ran over the swift, black boat.... And behold! a vine
climbed to the top of the sail, and from it hung innumerable clusters
of grapes. And a dark ivy twined about the mast, and it was covered
with flowers, and beautiful fruits amid their foliage grew thereon, and
garlands were wound about the rowlocks."
The spirit of the fugue then passed into the orchestra, and mounted in
exquisitely light roulades, while the voices struck on the orchestral
web with simultaneous percussion. And, like a thyrsus waving over the
Bacchic troop, a single voice floated out in the nuptial melody, with
the laughing joy and grace of the pastoral marriage:
_Viva dell'olmo,
E della vite
L'almo fecondo
Sostenitor!_
The voices seemed to evoke the image of erect and graceful Tiades,
gently waving their thyrsi in the mists of divine intoxication, dressed
in long saffron-hued robes, their faces lighted up, ardent as those
women of Veronese, who leaned over their aerial balconies to listen to
the song.
But the heroic acclamation once more sprang up with final vehemence.
The face of the conquering god reappeared amid torches frantically
waved aloft. Then, in unison, in a supreme burst of joy, voices and
orchestra thundered together at the many-eyed chimera under the
suspended treasure of that dome circled by red triremes, armed towers,
and triumphal bands:
_Viva dell'Indie,
Viva de' mari,
Viva de' mostri
Il domator._
Stelio Effrena had gone as far as the threshold; through the throng
that made way before him he penetrated into the hall and halted
near the platform occupied by the orchestra and the singers. His
restless eyes sought La Foscarina near the celestial sphere, but
did not find her. The head of the Tragic Muse no longer rose above
the constellations. Where was she? To what place has she withdrawn?
Could she see him, although he could not see her? A confused anxiety
agitated him, and the remembrance of the early evening on the water
returned to him indistinctly, accompanied by the words of her recent
promise. Glancing up at the open balconies, he thought that perhaps she
had stepped outside to breathe the fresh night air, and that, perhaps,
leaning against the balustrade she felt passing over her cool throat
the wave of music, which would seem as sweet to her as the delight of a
kiss from beloved lips.
But his impatience to hear the divine voice dominated all other
impatience, abolished all other desire. He observed that again a
profound silence reigned throughout the hall, as at the instant when he
had opened his lips to speak his first word. And, as at that instant,
the versatile and ephemeral monster, with a thousand human faces,
seemed to extend itself and yawn to receive a new soul.
Some one near Stelio whispered the name of Donatella Arvale. He turned
his eyes toward the platform, past the row of violoncellos, which
formed a brown hedge. The singer remained invisible, hidden in the
delicate, quivering forest of bows, whence would arise the mournful
harmony that must accompany the Lament of Ariadne.
Amid a sympathetic silence rose a prelude of violins. Then the
viols and violoncellos added a sigh more profound to that imploring
plaint. Was not this--after the Phrygian flute and the castanets,
after the instruments of orgies, which trouble the reason and provoke
delirium--was not this the august Doric lyre, grave and sweet, the
harmonious support of song? Thus was the Drama born from the boisterous
Dithyramb. The great metamorphosis of the Dionysian rite, the frenzy
of the sacred festival before the creative inspiration of the tragic
poet, were figured in that musical alternance. The fiery breath of the
Thracian god gave life to a sublime form of Art. The crown and the
tripod, the prize of the poet's victory, had displaced the lascivious
goat and the Attic basket of figs. Æschylus, keeper of a vineyard, had
been visited by the god, who had infused into him his spirit of flame.
On the bank of the Acropolis, near the sanctuary of Dionysius, a marble
theater had risen, capable of containing the chosen people.
Thus suddenly opened in the mind of the Master the pathways of
centuries, extending through the distance of primitive mysteries.
That form of Art, toward which now tended the effort of his genius,
attracted by the obscure aspirations of human multitudes, appeared to
him in the sanctity of its origins. The divine sadness of Ariadne,
up-springing like a melodious cry from the furious Thiaros, made leap
once more within him the work he nourished in his soul, unformed
yet alive. With a glance, again he sought the Muse of the revealing
voice against the sphere of constellations, but he did not see her,
and turned once more to the forest of instruments, whence rose the
imploring plaint.
Then, amid the slender bows, that rose and fell upon the strings
with alternating movement, appeared the singer, erect as a stem;
and, like a stem, she seemed to balance herself an instant on the
softened harmony. The youthfulness of her agile and robust body shone
resplendent through the texture of her robes, as a flame is seen
through the thinness of polished ivory. Rising and falling around
her white form, the bows seemed to draw their melody from the secret
music that dwelt within her. When her lips opened in an enchanting
curve, Stelio recognized the strength and purity of the voice before
the singer had uttered one modulation, as if she were a crystal statue
wherein he could behold the unspringing of a jet of living water.
_Come mai puoi
Vedermi piangere?_
The melody of a by-gone love and long-dead sorrow flowed from those
lips with an expression so pure and strong that suddenly, within the
soul of the multitude, it was changed into a mysterious happiness.
Was that strain indeed the divine plaint of the daughter of Minos, as
she held out her arms in vain to the fair Stranger on the deserted
shore of Naxos? The fable vanished; the illusion of the moment was
abolished. The eternal love and eternal sorrow of gods and of men were
exhaled in that perfect voice. The futile regret for each lost joy,
the recollection of each fugitive blessing, the supreme prayer flying
toward every sail on the sea, toward every sun hiding itself among
the mountains, the implacable desire and the promise of death--all
these things passed into the great, solitary song, transformed by
the power of Art into sublime essences which the soul could receive
without suffering. The words were dissolved in tone, losing their
significance, changed into notes of love and sadness, indefinitely
illuminating. Like a circle that is closed, and yet dilates continually
in accordance with the rhythm of universal life, the melody encircled
the composite soul which dilated with it in immeasurable joy. Through
the open balconies, in the perfect calm of the autumn night, the
enchantment spread over the peaceful waters and mounted to the watchful
stars, higher than the motionless masts of the ships, higher than the
sacred towers, inhabited by the now silent bronze bells. During the
interludes the singer drooped her youthful head and stood motionless
as a white statue among the forest of instruments, where the long bows
rose and fell in alternate movement, perhaps unconscious of that world
which in a few brief moments her song had transfigured.
CHAPTER V
THE EPIPHANY OF THE FLAME
Descending to the courtyard hastily, in order to escape importunate
curiosity, Stelio took refuge in a shadowy corner, to watch, among the
crowd coming down the Giants' Stairway, for the appearance of the two
women, the actress and the singer, who were to meet him near the well.
Every instant his expectation became more anxious, while around him
rose the tumultuous cry that extended to the outer walls of the
palace and lost itself among the clouds, now lighted with a glare as
of a conflagration. An almost terrible joy seemed to spread over the
Anadyomenean City, as if a vehement breath had suddenly dilated all
breasts, filling the veins of all men with a superabundance of life.
The repetition of the Bacchic Chorus celebrating the crown of stars,
placed by Aphrodite on the forgetful head of Ariadne, had drawn a cry
from the throng on the Molo beneath the open balconies. When, at the
final elevation, the word _Viva!_ rang out from the chorus of Mænads,
Satyrs, and Egipans, the chorus of the populace had responded to it
like a formidable echo from the harbor of San Marco. And in this moment
of Dionysian delirium it seemed as if the people remembered the forests
of old that were burned on sacred nights, and had given a signal for
the conflagration that must light up the beauty of Venice in final,
dazzling splendor.
The dream of Paris Eglano--the spectacle of marvelous flames offered
to love on a floating couch--flashed before Stelio's vision. The
persistent image of Donatella Arvale lingered in his thought: a supple,
youthful figure, strong and shapely, rising erect amid the sonorous
forest of bows, which seemed to draw their notes from the hidden music
within herself. And, seized with a strange distress, through which
passed something like the shadow of horror, he saw the image of the
other woman: poisoned by art, worn with experience, with the taste of
maturity and worldly corruptness on those eloquent lips, a feverish
dryness in those hands, which had pressed the juice from deceitful
fruits, and with the marks of a thousand masks on the face that had
simulated the fury of all mortal passions. To-night, at last, after a
long period of waiting and of hope, he was to receive the gift of that
heart, no longer young, which had been claimed by others before him,
but which he never yet had called his own. How his heart had throbbed
in the early evening as he sat beside that silent woman, floating
toward the City Beautiful over the waters that seemed to bear them on
with the terrifying smoothness of mysterious machinery. Ah, why did
she come now to meet him in company with the other temptress? Why did
she place beside her despair and worldly wisdom the pure splendor of
innocent youth?
He started suddenly as he perceived in the throng at the top of the
marble staircase, by the light of the smoking torches, the form of La
Foscarina pressed so closely against that of Donatella Arvale that the
robes of both blended into one mass of whiteness. He followed them with
his eyes until they reached the lowest stair, anxious as if at each
step they had approached the edge of an abyss. The unknown during these
hours had already led in the heart of the poet a life so intense that
on seeing her approach him he experienced the emotion that would have
seized him before a breathing incarnation of one of the ideal creatures
born of his art.
She descended slowly on the human wave. Behind her, the Palace of the
Doges, filled with streams of lights and confused sounds, made one
think of those fairy-tale awakenings which suddenly, in the depths of
the forest, transfigure inaccessible castles where for centuries the
hair on royal heads had grown longer and longer during a protracted
sleep. The two guardian Giants shone red in the blaze of the torches;
the cuspid of the Golden Gate sparkled with tiny lights. And still
the clamor rose and swelled above the groups of marbles, loud as the
moaning of the stormy sea against the walls of Malamocco.
In this tumult, Effrena saw advancing toward him the two temptresses,
escaping from the crowd as if from the clasp of a monster. And his
fancy pictured extraordinary assimilations, which should be realized
with the ease of dreams and the solemnity of liturgic ceremonies. He
said to himself that Perdita was leading this magnificent prey to
him, that he might discover some rarely beautiful secret, that some
great work of love might be accomplished, in which she desired to be
his fellow artisan. He told himself that this very night she would
say to him most marvelous words. Across his spirit passed once again
the indefinable melancholy he had felt when he leaned over the bronze
rim to contemplate the reflection of the stars in that dark mirror;
he waited in expectation of some event that should stir that secret
soul in the furthermost depths of his being, where it lay motionless,
strange, intangible. By the whirling of his thoughts, he comprehended
that he was again plunged into that delirium which the glamor of the
lagoon had given him at twilight. Then, emerging from the shadowy
corner, he went forward to meet the two women with an intoxicating
presentiment.
"Oh, Effrena!" said La Foscarina, as she reached the well, "I had given
up all hope of finding you here. We are very late, are we not? But we
were caught in the crowd and could not escape."
Then, turning toward her companion with a smile, she said:
"Donatella, this is the Master of the Flame."
Without speaking, but with a slight smile, Donatella Arvale responded
to the low bow of the young man.
"We must find our gondola," said La Foscarina. "It is waiting for us at
the Ponte della Paglia. Will you come with us, Effrena? We must profit
by the opportunity. The crowd is rushing toward the Piazzetta. The
Queen will leave by the Porta della Carta."
A long, unanimous cry saluted the appearance of the fair Queen in her
pearls, as she stood at the head of the stairs, where long ago, in the
presence of the populace, the Doge received the ducal ensign. Again the
name of the white starry flower and the pearl arose from the crowd and
was echoed among the marbles. Flashes of joy sparkled against the dark
sky, a thousand fiery doves flew from the pinnacles of San Marco, like
messengers of Fire.
"The Epiphany of the Flame!" cried La Foscarina, as she reached the
Molo and gazed upon the marvelous spectacle.
Donatella Arvale and Stelio Effrena stood side by side, astonished;
then they looked into each other's eyes, bewildered. And their faces,
illumined by the reflections, shone as if they were leaning over a
furnace or a glowing crater.
All the innumerable appearances of the volatile and multi-colored Fire
spread over the firmament, crept over the waters, curled around the
masts of the ships, enwreathed the cupolas and the towers, adorned
the friezes, draped the statuary, bejeweled the capitals, enriched
every line and transfigured every aspect of the sacred and profane
architectures around that profound and mysterious watery mirror,
which multiplied these marvels. The astonished eye could no longer
distinguish between the contour and the quality of the elements, but
it was charmed by a moving vision wherein all forms lived a lucid,
fluid life, suspended in vibrating ether, so that the slender prows
curving over the waves and the myriad of golden doves against the dark
sky seemed to rival one another in the glory of swift motion, and
together to reach the summit of immaterial beauty. That which in the
twilight had seemed a silvery palace of Neptune, built in imitation
of a rare shell, at this hour had become a new temple, erected by the
nimble genii of the Fire. It seemed like one of those labyrinthian
constructions of our dreams, prodigiously enlarged, that rise on
andirons, at the hundred gates of which stand the two-faced augurs who
make ambiguous gestures to the watching maiden; or like one of those
fairy-like red palaces, at the thousand windows of which appear the
faces of salamander princesses, who smile amorously upon the dreaming
poet.
Rosy as a setting moon, the sphere of the Fortuna, borne on the
shoulders of the Atlantides, radiated on the triple loggia, its rays
engendering a cycle of satellites. From the Riva, from San Giorgio,
from the Giudecca, with a continual crackling, clusters of fiery stems
rose toward the clouds, and there blossomed into sparkling roses,
lilies, and palms, a flowery paradise, forming an aerial garden that
continually faded and bloomed again with yet stranger and richer
blossoms. It was like a rapid succession of springs and autumns in the
empyrean. An immense sparkling shower of leaves and petals fell from
the celestial dissolutions, enveloping all things in its golden shimmer.
From a distance, through gaps in the glittering rain, a flotilla gay
with flags could be seen approaching over the waters of the lagoon: a
fairy-like fleet such as might float through the dream of a sybarite
sleeping his last sleep on a bed steeped in deadly perfumes. Like
those, perhaps, their ropes were made from the twisted hair of slaves
captured in conquered cities, and still redolent of fragrant oils; like
those, perhaps, their hulls were laden with myrrh, spikenard, benzoin,
cinnamon, aromatic herbs; with sandal-wood, cedar, terebinth, and all
oderiferous woods in rich profusion. The indescribable colors of the
flags suggested perfumes and spices. Of blue-green peacock shades,
saffron, violet, and indistinct hues, those flaming flags seemed to
spring from some burning interior and to have been colored by some
unknown process.
"The Epiphany of the Flame!" repeated La Foscarina. "What an unforeseen
commentary on your poem, Effrena! The City of Life responds by a
miracle to your act of adoration. She burns, through her watery veil.
Are you not satisfied? Look! Millions of golden pomegranates are
hanging everywhere!"
The actress was smiling, her face illumined by the magic fire. She was
suddenly possessed by that singular gayety of hers which Stelio knew
well, and which, because of its effect of incongruity with her usual
pose, suggested to him the image of a dark, closed house where violent
hands had suddenly opened on rusty hinges all the doors and windows.
"We must praise Ariadne," he replied, "for having uttered, in all this
harmony, the most sublime note."
Stelio said those flattering words only to induce the fair singer to
speak, only through a desire to know the _timbre_ of that voice when
it descended from the heights of song. But his praise was lost in the
reiterated clamor of the crowd, which overflowed on the Molo, making a
longer stay impossible. From the bank, Stelio assisted the two friends
into their gondola; then he sat down on a stool at their knees, and the
long, dentellated prow sparkled, like all else, in the magic fire.
"To the Rio Marin, by the Grand Canal," La Foscarina ordered the
gondolier. "Do you know, Effrena, we are to have at supper some of your
best friends: Francesco de Lizo, Daniele Glauro, Prince Hoditz, Antimo
della Bella, Fabio Molza, Baldassare Stampa"--
"Then it will be a banquet?"
"But not, alas! like that of Cana."
"And will not Lady Myrta, with her Veronese greyhounds, be there?"
"Rest assured that we shall have Lady Myrta. Did you not see her in the
hall? She sat in the first row, lost in admiration of you."
Because they had looked into each other's eyes as they spoke, a sudden
emotion seized them. The remembrance of that full twilight hour on the
water that rippled beneath their oar filled their hearts with a wave of
troubled blood; and each was surprised by a swift return of the same
agitation felt when leaving the silent estuary already in the power
of shadow and death. Their lips refused to utter vain, light words;
their souls refused to make the effort to incline themselves through
prudence toward the passing trivialities of the superficial life, which
now seemed worthless to both; and their spirits became absorbed in
the contemplation of the strange fancies that rose from their inmost
thoughts in a garb of indescribable richness, like the heaped-up
treasures the streams of light seemed to reveal in the depths of the
nocturnal waters.
And, because of that very silence, they felt the presence of the singer
weigh heavily upon them, as in the moment when her name had first
been spoken between them; and little by little the oppression became
intolerable. Although Stelio was seated close to her, she appeared no
less distant than when she rose above the forest of instruments; she
was as absent and unconscious as she had been when her voice soared
high in song. She had not yet spoken.
Simply to hear her speak, and almost timidly, Stelio said:
"Shall you remain some time longer in Venice?"
He had pondered on the first words he should say to her, but was
dissatisfied with whatever rose to his lips, for all phrases seemed too
vivid, insidious, full of ambiguous significance, capable of infinite
changes and transformations, like the unknown seed from which may
spring a thousand roots. And it seemed to him that Perdita could not
hear one of those phrases without feeling that a shadow darkened her
love.
After he had spoken those simple, conventional words, he reflected that
even that question might suggest an infinity of hope and eagerness.
"I must leave Venice to-morrow," Donatella replied. "I ought not to be
here even now."
Her voice, so clear and powerful in the heights of song, was low and
sober, as if suffused with a slight opacity, suggesting the image
of the most precious metal wrapped in the most delicate velvet. Her
brief reply indicated that there was a place of suffering to which she
must return, where she must undergo some familiar torture. Like iron
tempered with tears, a strong though sorrowful will shone through the
veil of her youthful beauty.
"To-morrow!" Stelio exclaimed, not seeking to hide his sincere regret.
"Have you heard, Signora?"
"I know," the actress replied, gently taking Donatella's hand. "I am
filled with regret to see her go. But she cannot remain away longer
from her father. Perhaps you do not yet know"--
"What?" asked Stelio quickly. "Is he ill? Is it true, then, that
Lorenzo Arvale is ill?"
"No, he is only fatigued," said La Foscarina, touching her forehead
with a gesture perhaps involuntary but which revealed to Stelio the
horrible menace hanging over the genius of the artist who had seemed as
fertile and indefatigable as one of the old masters--a Della Robbia or
a Verrocchio.
"He is only fatigued," repeated La Foscarina. "He needs repose and
quiet. And his daughter's singing is very soothing to him. Do you not
believe, also, Effrena, in the healing power of music?"
"Certainly," Stelio replied, "Ariadne possesses a divine gift whereby
her power transcends all limits."
The name of Ariadne came spontaneously to his lips to indicate the
singer as she appeared to his fancy, for it seemed to him impossible
to pronounce the young girl's real name preceded by the ordinary
appellation imposed by social usage. In his eyes she was perfect
and singular, free from the little ties of custom, living her own
sequestered life, like a work of art on which style had set its
inviolable seal. He thought of her as isolated like those figures that
stand out with clear contour, far from common life, lost in mystic
reverie; and already, before that impenetrable character, he felt a
sort of passionate impatience, somewhat similar to that of a curious
man before something hermetically sealed that tempts him.
"Ariadne had for the soothing of her griefs the gift of forgetfulness,"
said Donatella, "and that I do not possess."
A bitterness perhaps involuntary infused these words, in which Stelio
fancied he detected the indication of an aspiration toward a life
less oppressed by useless suffering. He guessed at her revolt against
a certain form of domestic slavery, the horror of her self-imposed
sacrifice, her vehement desire to rise toward joy, and her inborn
aptitude for being drawn like a beautiful bow by a strong hand that
would know how to use it for some high conquest. He divined that she
had no longer any hope of her father's recovery, and that she was
saddened at the thought that henceforth she could only be the guardian
of a darkened hearth, of ashes without a spark. The image of the great
artist rose in his mind, not as he was, since Stelio never had known
him personally, but such as he had fancied the sculptor after studying
his ideas of beauty expressed in imperishable bronze and marble. His
mind fixed itself on that image with a sensation of terror more
icy than that which the most appalling aspects of death could have
inspired. And all his strength, all his pride and his ardor seemed to
resound within him like weapons shaken by a menacing hand, sending a
quiver through every fiber of his heart.
Presently La Foscarina lifted the funereal black curtain, which
suddenly, amid the splendors of the festival, had seemed to change the
gondola into a coffin.
"Look!" she said, pointing out to Stelio the balcony of Desdemona's
palace: "See the beautiful Nineta receiving the homage of the Serenade,
as she sits between her pet monkey and her little dog."
"Ah, the beautiful Nineta!" said Stelio, rousing himself from his
wild thoughts, and saluting the smiling occupant of the balcony, a
little woman who was listening to the music, her face illumined from
two silver candelabra, from the branches of which hung wreaths of the
last roses of the year. "I have not yet seen her this time. She is
the gentlest and most graceful animal I know. How fortunate was our
dear Howitz to discover her behind the lid of an old harpsichord when
he was rummaging in that curiosity shop at San Samuele! Two pieces
of good fortune in one day: the lovely Nineta and a harpsichord lid
painted by Pordenone. Since that day, the harmony of his life has
been complete. How I should like to have you penetrate to his nest!
You would find there a perfect example of that which I spoke of this
evening, at twilight. There is a man who, by obeying his native taste
for simplicity, has arranged for himself with minute art his own little
love-story, in which he lives as happily as did his Moravian ancestor
in the Arcady of Rosswald. Ah! I know a thousand exquisite things about
him!"
A large gondola, decorated with many-colored lanterns, and laden with
singers and musicians, had stopped beneath the balcony of Desdemona's
house. The old song of brief youth and fleeting beauty rose sweetly
toward the little woman who listened with her child-like smile, sitting
between the monkey and the lapdog, making a group like one of Pietro
Longhi's prints.
_Do beni vu gharè
Beleza e zoventù;
Co i va no i torna più,
Nina mia cara...._
"Does it not seem to you, Effrena, that these surroundings express the
true soul of Venice, and that the other picture, which you presented
to the multitude, is only your own fancy?" said La Foscarina, nodding
her head slightly in time with the rhythm of the sweet song that spread
through the Grand Canal and was reechoed from afar by singers in other
gondolas.
"No," Stelio replied, "this does not at all represent the true soul of
Venice. In each one of us, fluttering like a butterfly over the surface
of our deeper nature, is a lighter soul, an _animula_, a little playful
sprite that often dominates us for the moment, and leads us toward
simple and mediocre pleasures, toward puerile pastimes and frivolous
music. This _animula vagula_ exists even in the gravest and most
violent natures, like the clown attached to the person of Othello; and
sometimes it misleads our better judgment. That which you hear now, in
the songs and the melodies of the guitars, is the _animula_, or lighter
spirit, of Venice; but her real soul is discovered only in silence,
and most terribly, be assured, in full summer, at noonday, like the
soul of the great god Pan. Out in the harbor of San Marco, I thought
that you felt its mystic vibration during those moments of the great
conflagration. You are forgetting Giorgione for Rosalba!"
Around the large gondola beneath the balcony had gathered other
gondolas bearing languid women who leaned out to listen to the music in
attitudes of graceful _abandon_, as if in fancy they felt themselves
sinking into invisible arms. And around this romantic group the
reflections of the lanterns in the water quivered like a flowering of
rare and luminous water-lilies.
_Se lassarè passar
La bela e fresca età,
Un zorno i ve dirà
Vechia maura,
E bramarè, ma invan,
Quel che ghavevi in man
Co avè lassà scampar
La congiontura._
It was, in truth, the song of the last roses that entwined the
candelabra. It called up in Perdita's mind the funeral cortège of the
dead Summer, the opalescent veil in which Stelio had wrapped the sweet
body in its golden robe. Through the glass, sealed by the Master of
Fire, she could see her own image at the bottom of the lagoon, lying on
a field of seaweed. A sudden chill stole over her; once more she felt
horror and disgust of her own body, no longer young. And, remembering
her recent promise, thinking that perhaps this very night the beloved
one would claim its fulfilment, she shuddered with a sort of sorrowful
modesty, a mingling of fear and pride. Her experience and despairing
eyes ran over the young girl beside her, studying her, penetrating her,
realizing her occult but certain power, her intact freshness, pure
health, and that indefinable virtue of love that emanates like an aroma
from chaste maidens when they have arrived at the perfection of their
bloom. She felt that some secret current of affinity existed between
this fair creature and the poet; she could almost divine the words he
addressed to her in the silence of his heart. A bitter pang seized her,
so intolerable that, with an involuntary movement, her fingers clutched
convulsively the black rope of the arm-rest beside her, so that the
little metal griffin that held it creaked audibly.
This movement did not escape Stelio's anxious vigilance. He understood
her agitation, and for a moment he experienced the same pang, but it
was mingled with impatience and almost with anger, for her anguish,
like a cry of destruction, interrupted the fiction of transcendent life
that he had been constructing within himself in order to conciliate the
contrast, to conquer this new force that offered itself to him like a
bow to be drawn, yet at the same time not to lose the savor of that
ripe maturity which life had impregnated with all its essences, and the
benefit of that devotion and that passionate faith which sharpened his
intelligence and fed his pride.
"Ah, Perdita!" he said to himself, "From the ferment of your human
loves, why has not a love more than human sprung. Ah, why have I
finally vanquished you by my pleading, although I know it is too late?
and why do you allow me to read in your eyes the certainty of your
yielding, amid a flood of doubts which, nevertheless, never again
will have power to reëstablish the abolished interdiction. Each of us
knows full well that that interdiction conferred the highest dignity
upon our long communion, yet we have not known how to preserve its
rule, and at the last hour we yield blindly to an imperious internal
call. Yet, a short time ago, when your noble head dominated the belt
of constellations, I no longer saw in you an earthly love, but the
illuminating, revelatory Muse of my poetry; and all my heart went out
to you in gratitude, not for the promise of a fleeting happiness, but
for the promise of glory. Do you not understand--you, who understand
everything? By a marvelous inspiration, such as always comes to you,
have you not turned my inclination, by the ray of your smile, toward
a resplendent youthfulness which you have chosen and reserved for me?
When you descended the stairway together, and approached me, had you
not the appearance of one that bears a gift or an unexpected message?
Not wholly unexpected, perhaps, Perdita! For I have anticipated from
your infinite wisdom some extraordinary action toward me."
"How happy the beautiful Nineta is, with her monkey and her little
dog!" sighed the actress, looking back at the light songsters and the
smiling woman on the balcony.
_La zoventù xe un fior
Che apena nato el mor,
E un zorno gnanca mi
No sarò quela._
Donatella Arvale and Stelio also looked back, while the light barque,
without sinking, bore over the water and past the music the three faces
of a heavy destiny.
_E vegna quel che vol,
Lassè che voga!_
Suddenly, in front of the red palace of the Foscari, at the curve of
the canal, they saw the state vessel of the Doge of Venice so brightly
illumined that it looked like a burning tower. New streaks of fire
flashed against the sky. Other flaming doves flew up from the deck,
rose above the terraces, sank among the statues, hissed as they fell
into the water, multiplied themselves in thousands of sparks, and
floated along in smoke. Along the parapets, from the decks, the poop,
the prow, in a simultaneous explosion, a thousand fountains of fire
opened, dilated, blended, illuminating with an intense, fiery radiance
each side of the canal as far as San Vitale and the Rialto. Then the
vessel of the Doge glided out of sight, transformed into a purple
thunder-cloud.
"Go through San Polo!" called La Foscarina to the gondolier, bending
her head as under a storm, and shutting out the roar with her palms
over her ears.
Again Donatella Arvale and Stelio Effreno looked at each other with
dazzled eyes. Again their faces, lighted by the glare, glowed as if
they were leaning over a furnace or a burning crater.
The gondola turned into the canal of San Polo, gliding along through
the darkness. A cold shadow seemed suddenly to fall over the spirits of
the three silent occupants. Under the arch of the bridge, the hollow
echo of the dipping oar struck upon their souls, and the hilarity of
the festival sounded infinitely far-away. All the houses were dark;
the campanile rose silent and solitary toward the stars; the Campiello
del Remer and the Campiello del Pistor were deserted, and the grass
breathed there in untrodden peace; the trees, bending over the low
walls of the little gardens, seemed to feel their leaves dying on the
branches pointing to the serene sky.
CHAPTER VI
THE POET'S DREAM
"So, for a few hours at least, the rhythm of Art and the pulse of Life
have again throbbed in unison in Venice," said Daniele Glauro, raising
from the table an exquisite chalice, to which only the Sacred Host was
wanting. "Allow me to express, for myself and also for the many that
are absent, the gratitude and fervor that blend in one single image of
beauty the three persons to whom we owe this miracle: the mistress of
the feast, the daughter of Lorenzo Arvale, and the poet of Persephone."
"And why the mistress of the feast, Glauro?" asked La Foscarina,
smiling in graceful surprise. "I, like you, have not given joy, but
have received it. Donatella and the Master of the Flame: they alone
merit the crown; and to them alone the glory must be given."
"But, a short time ago, in the Hall of the Greater Council," said the
mystic doctor, "your silent presence beside the celestial sphere was
not less eloquent than the words of Stelio, nor less musical than the
song of Ariadne. Once again you have divinely carved your own statue in
silence, and it will live in our memories blended with the music and
the words."
Stelio shuddered as he recalled to mind the ephemeral flexible monster
from the side of which had emerged the Tragic Muse above the sphere of
constellations.
"That is true, very true," said Francesco de Lizo. "I, too, had the
same thought. As we looked at you, we all realized that you were the
soul of that ideal world which each of us forms for himself, according
to his own aspirations and thoughts when listening to the mystic word,
the song, the symphony."
"And each of us," said Fabio Molza, "felt that in your presence,
dominating the throng, before the poet, dwelt a great and rare
significance."
"One might almost have said that you alone were about to assist at the
mysterious birth of a new idea," said Antimo della Bella. "Everything
around us seemed awakening itself to produce it--that idea which must
soon be revealed to us, as a reward for the profound faith with which
we have awaited it."
The Animator, with another trembling of the heart, felt the work that
he cherished within him leap once more, formless yet, but already
living; and his whole soul, as if impelled by a lyric breath, suddenly
felt drawn toward the fertile and enlightening power that emanated
from the Dionysian woman to whom these fervent spirits addressed their
praise.
Suddenly she had become very beautiful: a nocturnal creature, fashioned
by dreams and passion on a golden anvil, living embodiment of immortal
fate and eternal enigmas. She might remain motionless and silent, but
her famous accents and her memorable gestures seemed to live around
her, vibrating indefinitely, as melodies seem to hover over the cords
accustomed to sound them, as rhymes seem to breathe from the poet's
closed book, wherein love and sorrow seek comfort and intoxication.
The heroic fidelity of Antigone, the oracular fury of Cassandra, the
devouring fever of Phædre, the cruelty of Medea, the sacrifice of
Iphigenia, Myrrha before her father, Polyxenes and Alceste before the
face of death, Cleopatra, fitful as the wind and the fires of the
world, Lady Macbeth, the dreamy murderess with the little hands; and
those great, fair lilies empearled with dew and tears--Imogen, Juliet,
Miranda, Rosalind, Jessica, and Perdita--the tenderest, most terrible,
and most magnificent souls dwelt within her, inhabited her body, shone
from her eyes, breathed through her lips, which knew both honey and
poison, the jeweled chalice and the cup of wormwood. Thus, through
unlimited space, and endless, the outlines of human life and substance
appeared to perpetuate themselves; and from the simple movement of a
muscle, a sign, a start, a quiver of the eyelids, a slight change of
color, an almost imperceptible inclination of the head, a fugitive play
of light and shade, a lightning-like virtue of expression radiating
from that frail and slender body, infinite worlds of imperishable
beauty were continually generated.
The genii of the places consecrated by poetry hovered around her,
and encircled her with changing visions: the dusty plain of Thebes,
the arid Argolide, the parched myrtles of Trezene, the sacred olives
of Colonus, the triumphant Cydnus, the pale country of Dunsinane,
Prospero's cavern, the Forest of Arden, land dampened with blood,
toiled upon with pain, transfigured by a dream or illumined by an
inextinguishable smile, seemed to appear, to recede, then to vanish
behind her head. And a vision of countries still more remote--regions
of mists, northern lands, and, far across the ocean, the immense
continent where she had appeared like an unknown force amid astonished
multitudes, bearer of the mystic word and the flame of genius--vanished
behind her head: the throngs, the mountains, rivers and gulfs, the
impure cities, the ancient, enfeebled, savage race, the strong people
aspiring to dominate the world, the new nation that wrests from Nature
her most secret energies to make them serve an all-powerful work in
erecting edifices of iron and of crystal; the bastard colonies that
ferment and grow corrupt on virgin soil; all the barbarous crowds
she had visited as the messenger of Latin genius; all the ignorant
masses to whom she had spoken the sublime language of Dante; all the
human herds from which had mounted toward her, on a wave of confused
anxieties and desires, the aspiration to Beauty.
She stood there, a creature of perishable flesh, subject to the sad
laws of time, but an illimitable mass of reality and poetry weighed
upon her, surged around her, palpitated with the rhythm of her breath.
And not upon the stage alone had she uttered her cries and suppressed
her sobs: this had entered into her daily life. She had loved, fought
and suffered violently, in her soul and in her body. What loves? What
combats? What pangs? From what abysses of melancholy had she drawn the
exaltations of her tragic force? At what springs of bitterness had
she watered her free genius? She had certainly witnessed the crudest
misery, the darkest ruin; she had known heroic effort, pity, horror,
and the threshold of death. All her thirst had burned in the delirium
of Phædre, and in the submissiveness of Imogen had trembled all her
tenderness. Thus Life and Art, the irrevocable Past and the eternal
Present, had made her profound, many-souled, and mysterious, had
magnified her ambiguous destiny beyond human limits, and rendered her
equal to great temples and natural forests.
Nevertheless, she stood there, a living, breathing woman, under the
gaze of the poets, each of whom saw her, and yet in her many others.
"Ah! I will embrace you as in some mad revelry; I will clasp you,
shake you; from your ripe experience, I will draw all the divine and
abnormal secrets that weigh upon you--the things you have already done,
and those on which you still meditate in the mysterious depths of your
soul," sang the lyric demon in the ear of the poet, who recognized
in the mystery of this woman the surviving power of primitive myth,
the renewed initiation of the god that had concentrated in one single
ferment all the energies of Nature, and, by a variety of rhythms, had
raised, in an enthusiastic worship of himself, the senses and the
spirit of man to the highest summits of joy and of pain.
"I have done well, I have done wisely, to wait!" said Stelio to
himself. "The passing of years, the tumult of dreams, the agitation of
struggle and the swiftness of triumph, the experience of many loves,
the enchantment of poets, the acclamations of the people; the marvels
of earth, the patience and the fury, the steps in the mud, the blind
flight, all evil, all good, that which I know and do not know, that
which you know, as well as that which you are ignorant of--all this had
to be to prepare the fulness of this night, which belongs to me!"
He felt himself suffocate and turn pale. A wild impulse seized him by
the throat, and would not relax its hold. His heart swelled with the
same keen emotion that had possessed both in the twilight, as they
floated over the water.
And, as the exaggerated radiance of the city and the event had suddenly
disappeared, the glory of this woman of the night reappeared to
his mind still more closely blended with the city of the wonderful
necklaces and the thousand emerald girdles. In the city and in the
woman, the poet now saw a power of expression that he never had seen
before: each glowed in the Autumn night; the same feverish fire that
coursed through the canals ran also in her veins.
The stars sparkled, the trees waved their branches behind Perdita's
head, back of which were the shadows of a garden. Through the open
balconies the sweet air of heaven entered the room; shook the flames of
the candelabra and the chalices of flowers; swept through the doorways,
making the draperies wave to and fro, animating that old house of the
Capello, wherein the last great daughter of San Marco whom the people
had covered with gold and glory had gathered relics of republican
magnificence. Galleon lamps, Turkish targets, bronze helmets, leathern
quivers, and velvet scabbards ornamented the apartments inhabited by
the last descendant of that marvelous Cesare Darbes who maintained the
Art of Comedy against the Goldonian reform, and changed the agony of
the Most Serene Republic into a burst of laughter.
"I only ask that I may be the humble servitor of that idea," was La
Foscarina's reply to Antimo della Bella's words. Her voice trembled a
little, her eyes had met Stelio's gaze.
"You alone could make it triumphant," said Francesco de Lizo. "The soul
of the people is yours forever."
"The drama can only be a rite or a message," declared Glauro
sententiously. "Acting should again become as solemn as a religious
ceremony, since it embraces the two constituent elements of all
worship: the living person, in whom, on the stage as before an altar,
the word of the revealer is made incarnate, before a multitude as
silent as if in a temple"--
"Bayreuth!" interrupted Prince Hoditz.
"No; the Janiculum!" exclaimed Stelio, suddenly breaking his silence of
blissful dizziness. "A Roman hill. We do not need the wood and brick of
Upper Franconia; we will have a marble theater on a Roman hill."
The sudden opposition of his words seemed to spring from a light,
good-natured disdain.
"Do you not admire the work of Richard Wagner?" Donatella Arvale
inquired, with a slight frown that for a moment made her Hermes-like
face look almost hard.
Stelio looked deep into her eyes; he felt that there was something
obscurely hostile in the young girl's manner, and also that he himself
experienced against her an indistinct suggestion of enmity. At this
moment he again saw her living her own isolated life, fixed in some
deep, secret thought, strange and inviolable.
"The work of Richard Wagner," he replied, "is founded in the German
spirit, and its essence is purely northern. His reform is not without
analogy with that attempted by Luther; his drama is the supreme flower
of the genius of a race, the extraordinarily powerful summary of
the aspirations that have stirred the souls of the symphonists and
national poets, from Bach to Beethoven, from Wieland to Goethe. If
you could imagine his work on the Mediterranean shores, amid our pale
olive-trees, our slender laurels, under the glorious light of the Latin
sky, you would see it grow pale and dissolve. Since, according to his
own words, it is given to the artist to behold a world as yet unformed
resplendent in its future perfection, and to enjoy it prophetically
through desire and through hope, I announce to you the coming of a new,
or rather a renewed, art which, by the strong, sincere simplicity of
its lines, by its vigorous grace, by its ardor of inspiration, by the
pure power of its harmonies, will continue and crown the immense ideal
edifice of our elect race. I glory in being Latin, and--will you pardon
me, most exquisite Lady Myrta, and you, my delicate Hoditz?--in every
man of different blood I see a barbarian."
"But Wagner, too," said, Baldassare Stampa, who, having just returned
from Bayreuth, was still full of ecstasy, "when he first unwound the
thread of his theories, departed from the Greeks."
"It was an uneven and a tangled thread," the poet replied. "Nothing
is further from the Orestiades than the tetralogy of the Ring. The
Florentines of the Casa Bardi have penetrated much deeper into the true
meaning of Greek tragedy. All honor to the Camerata of the Conte di
Vernio!"
"I have always thought that the Camerata was only an idle reunion of
scholars and rhetoricians," said Baldassare Stampa.
"Did you hear that, Daniele?" exclaimed Stelio, addressing the mystic
doctor. "When was there in the world a more fervid intelligence? They
sought the spirit of life in Grecian antiquity; they tried to develop
harmoniously all human energies, to manifest man in his integrity
by every method of art. Giulio Caccini taught that that, which
contributed to the excellence of the musician is not only the study
of particular things, but of everything in general; the tawny hair of
Jacopo Peri and of Zazzerino flamed in their song like that of Apollo.
In the discourse that serves as a preface to the _Rappresentazione
di Anima et di Corpo_, Emilio del Cavaliere presents the same ideas
on the organization of the new theater that have since been realized
at Bayreuth, comprising the rules of perfect silence, an invisible
orchestra, and appropriate darkness. Marco da Gagliano, in celebrating
a festal performance, eulogizes all the arts that contributed to it 'in
such a way that through the intellect all the noblest sentiments are
flattered at the same time by the most delightful art that the human
mind has discovered.' That is sufficient, I think."
"Bermino," resumed Francesco de Lizo, "presented an opera in Rome, for
which he himself built the theater, painted the decorations, carved the
ornamental statues, invented the machinery, wrote the words, composed
the music, arranged the dances, rehearsed the actors, and in which he,
too, danced, sang, and acted."
"Enough! Enough!" cried Prince Hoditz, laughing. "The barbarian is
vanquished."
"No, that is not yet enough," said Antimo della Bella; "it remains
to us to glorify the greatest of all these innovators; him that was
consecrated a Venetian by his passion and death, him whose tomb is in
the Church of the Frari, and is worthy of a pilgrimage--the divine
Claudio Monteverde."
"There was a heroic soul, of pure Italian essence," warmly acceded
Daniele Glauro.
"He accomplished his work in the tempest, loving, suffering,
struggling, alone with his faith, his passion, and his genius," said La
Foscarina slowly, as if absorbed in a vision of that sad and courageous
life that had nourished the creations of its art with its warmest
blood. "Tell us about him, Effrena."
Stelio thrilled as if she had suddenly touched him. Again her
expressive mouth called up an ideal figure, which rose as if from a
sepulcher before the eyes of the poets, with the color and the breath
of life. The ancient viola-player, bereaved, ardent, and sorrowful,
like the Orpheus of his own fable, seemed to appear before them.
It was a fiery apparition, more fervid and dazzling than that which had
glowed in the harbor of San Marco; a flaming force of life, expelled
from the deepest recesses of Nature toward the expectant multitude;
a vehement zone of light, flashing out from an interior sky to
illumine the most secret depths of human will and desire; an unheard
word emerging from original silence to say that which is eternal and
eternally ineffable in the heart of the world.
"Who could speak of him, even if he himself should speak to us?" said
the Inspirer, agitated, unable to conceal the wave of emotion surging
in his soul like the troubled waters of a stormy sea.
He looked at the singer, and beheld her as she had appeared during
the pauses, when she stood amid the forest of instruments, white and
inanimate as a statue.
But the spirit of Beauty they had called up was to manifest itself
through her.
"Ariadne!" Stelio murmured, as if to awaken her from a dream.
She arose without speaking, reached the door, and entered the adjoining
room. The light sweep of her skirts and her soft footfall were audible;
then they heard the sound of the piano being opened. All were silent
and expectant. A musical silence filled the vacant place in the
supper-room. A sudden gust of wind shook the flames of the candles
and swayed the flowers. Then all became motionless in the anxiety of
anticipation.
_Lasciatemi morire!_
Suddenly their souls were ravished by a power comparable to the
strength of the eagle which, in Dante's dream, bore the poet to the
region of flame. They burned together in eternal truth; they heard the
melody of the world pass through their luminous ecstasy:
_Lasciatemi morire!_
Was it Ariadne, still Ariadne, weeping in some new grief, still rising
to higher martyrdom?
_E che volete
Che mi conforte
In cosa dure sorte,
In cosi gran martire?
Lasciatemi morire!_
The voice ceased; the singer did not reappear. The aria of Claudio
Monteverde composed itself in the auditors' memories like an immutable
lineament.
"Is there any Greek marble that has a perfection of style more sure
and simple?" said Daniele Glauro softly, as if he feared to break the
musical silence.
"But what sorrow on earth ever has wept like that?" stammered Lady
Myrta, her eyes full of tears, that ran down her poor, pale cheeks,
which she wiped with her trembling hands, misshaped by gout.
The austere intellect of the ascetic and the sweet, sensitive soul shut
within the old, infirm body bore witness to the same power. In the same
way, nearly three centuries before, at Mantua, in the famous theater,
six thousand spectators had been unable to repress their sobs; and the
poets had believed in the living presence of Apollo on the new stage.
"See, Baldassare," said Stelio, "here is an artist of our own race
who by the simplest means succeeded in attaining the highest degree
of that beauty which the German but rarely approached in his confused
aspirations toward the land of Sophocles."
"Do you know the lament of the ailing king?" asked the young man with
the sunny locks, which he wore long as a heritage from the Venetian
Sappho, the "high Gaspara," unfortunate friend of Collalto.
"All the agony of Amfortas is contained in a _mottetto_ that I know:
_Peccantem me quotidie_, but with what lyric impetus, what powerful
simplicity! All the forces of tragedy are there, sublimated, so to
speak, like the instincts of a multitude in a heroic heart. The
language of Palestrina, much more ancient, appears to me still purer
and more virile.
"But the contrast between Kundry and Parsifal, in the second act, the
Herzeleide _motif_, the impetuous figure, that figure of pain drawn
from the word of the sacred feast, the _motif_ of Kundry's aspiration,
the prophetic theme of the promise, the kiss on the lips of the 'pure
fool,' all that rending and intoxicating contrast of desire and
horror.... 'The wound, the wound! Now it burns, now it bleeds within
me!' And above the despairing frenzy of the temptress, the melody of
submission: 'Let me weep on thy breast! Let me unite myself with thee
for one hour; then, even if God repel me, through thee I shall be
redeemed and saved.' And Parsifal's response, in which the _motif_
of the 'pure fool,' now transfigured into the promised Hero, returns
with lofty solemnity: 'Hell would be our fate for all eternity if for
one single hour I should permit thee to clasp me in thy arms.' Then
the wild ecstasy of Kundry: 'Since my kiss has made thee a prophet,
embrace me wholly, and my love will render thee divine! One hour, one
single hour with thee, and I shall be saved!' And the last effort of
her demoniac will, the last gesture of enticement, the entreaty and the
furious words: 'Only thy love can save me! Oh, let me love thee! Mine
for a single hour! Thine for a single hour!'"
Perdita and Stelio, entranced, gazed into each other's eyes; for an
instant their spirits rushed together and mingled, in all the joy of an
actual embrace.
La Marangona, the largest bell of San Marco, sounded midnight, and,
as at the eventide, the two enamored ones felt the reverberation of
the bronze bell in the roots of their hair, almost like a quiver of
their own flesh. Once more they felt, hovering over them, the whirlwind
of sound, in the midst of which, in the twilight, they had suddenly
become aware of the rising apparition of consoling Beauty, evoked
by unanimous prayer. All the beauty of the waters, the timidity of
concealed longing, the anxiety, the promise, the parting, the festival,
the formidable, many-headed monster, the great, starry sphere, the
clamor, the music, the song, and the wonders of the miraculous Flame,
the return through the echoing canal, the song of brief youth, the
mental struggle and silent agitation in the gondola, the sudden shadow
over their three destinies, the banquet illumined by beautiful thought,
the presentiments, hopes, pride, all the strongest pulsations of life
were renewed between those two, quickened, became a thousand, and again
one. They felt that in that one moment they had lived beyond all human
limits, and that before them was opening a vast unknown, which they
might absorb as the ocean absorbs, for, though they had lived so much,
they felt their hearts were empty; though they had drunk so deep, they
were still athirst. An overmastering illusion seized upon these rich
natures, and each seemed to grow immeasurably more desirable in the
other's eyes. The young girl had disappeared. The expression of the
despairing, nomadic actress seemed to repeat: "Embrace me wholly, and
my love will render thee divine! One hour, one single hour with thee,
and I shall be saved! Mine for a single hour! Thine for a single hour!"
The eloquent commentary of the enthusiast still dwelt upon the sacred
tragedy. Kundry, the mad temptress, the slave of desire, the Rose of
Hell, the original perdition, the accursed, now reappeared in the
spring dawn; she reappeared humble and pale in her messenger's attire,
her head bent, her eyes cast down; and her harsh, broken voice spoke
only the single phrase: "Let me serve! Let me serve!"
The melodies of solitude, of submission, of purification prepared
around her humility the enchantment of Good Friday. And behold
Parsifal, in black armor and closed helmet, his spear lowered, lost
in an infinite dream: "I have come by perilous paths, but perhaps
this day I shall be saved, since I hear the murmur of the sacred
forest." ... Hope, pain, remorse, memory, the promise, faith panting
for the soul's health, and the sacred, mysterious melodies wove the
ideal mantle that should cover the Simple One, the Pure, the promised
Hero sent to heal the incurable wound. "Wilt thou take me to Amfortas
to-day?" He languished and fainted in the old man's arms. "Let me
serve! Let me serve!" The melody of submission rose again from the
orchestra, drowning the original impetuous _motif_. "Let me serve!" The
faithful woman brings water, kneels humbly and eagerly, and washes the
feet of her beloved. The faithful one drew from her bosom a vase of
balm, anointed the beloved feet, and wiped them with her flowing hair.
"Let me serve!" The Pure One bent over the sinner, sprinkling water on
her wild head: "Thus I accomplish my first office; receive this baptism
and believe in the Redeemer!" Kundry burst into tears, and knelt with
her brow in the dust, freed from impurity, freed from the curse. And
then, from the profound final harmonies of the prayer to the Redeemer,
rose and spread with superhuman sweetness the melody of the flowery
fields: "How beautiful to-day is the meadow! Once I was entwined with
marvelous flowers; but never before were the grass and wild blossoms so
fragrant!" In ecstasy, Parsifal contemplated the fields and forests,
dewy and smiling in the light of morn.
"Ah! who could forget that sublime moment?" cried the fair-haired
enthusiast, whose thin face seemed to reflect the light of that joy.
"All, in the darkness of the theater, remained motionless, like one
solid, compact mass. One would have said that, in order to listen to
that marvelous music, the blood had ceased to flow in our veins. From
the Mystic Gulf, the symphony rose like a shaft of light, the notes
transformed into rays of sunshine, born with the same joy as the blade
of grass that pierces the earth, the opening flower, the budding
branch, the insect unfolding its wings. And all the innocence of
new-born things entered into us, and our souls lived over again I know
not what dream of our far-away childhood.... INFANTIA, the device of
Carpaccio! Ah, Stelio! how well you brought it back to our riper age!
How well you knew how to inspire us with regret for all that we have
lost, and with hope of recovering it by means of an art that shall be
indissolubly reunited to life!"
Stelio Effrena was silent, oppressed by the thought of the gigantic
work accomplished by the barbaric creator, which the enthusiasm of
Baldassare Stampa had evoked as a contrast to the fervid poet of
_Orpheus_ and of _Ariadne_. A kind of instinctive rancor, an obscure
hostility that did not spring from the intellect, sustained him against
the tenacious German who had succeeded, by his own unaided effort,
in inflaming the world. To achieve his victory over men and things,
he, too, had exalted his own image and magnified his own dreams of
dominating beauty. He, too, had approached the multitude as if it were
his chosen prey; he, too, had imposed upon himself, as if it were a
discipline, an unceasing effort to surpass himself. And now he had the
temple of his creed on the Bavarian hill.
"Art alone can lead men back to unity," said Daniele Glauro. "Let us
honor the nobler master that has proclaimed this dogma for all time.
His Festival Theater, though built of bricks and wood, though narrow
and imperfect, has none the less a sublime significance, for within it
Art appears as a religion in a living form; the drama there becomes a
rite."
"Yes, let us honor Richard Wagner," said Antimo della Bella, "but, if
this hour is to be memorable by an announcement and a promise from
him who this night has shown the mysterious ship to the people, let
us invoke once more the heroic soul that has spoken to us through
the voice of Donatella Arvale. In laying the corner-stone of his
Festival Theater, the poet of _Siegfried_ consecrated it to the hopes
and victories of Germany. The Apollo Theater, which is now rising
rapidly on the Janiculum, where eagles once descended, bearing their
prophecies, must be the monumental revelation of the idea toward which
our race is led by its genius. Let us reaffirm the privilege with which
nature has ennobled our Latin blood."
Still Stelio remained silent, deeply stirred by turbulent forces that
worked within his soul with a sort of blind fury, like the subterranean
energies that swell, rend, and transform volcanic regions for the
creation of new mountains and new chasms. All the elements of his inner
life, assailed by this violence, seemed to dissolve and multiply at
the same time. Images of grandeur and of terror passed through this
tumult, accompanied by strange harmonies. Swift concentrations and
dispersions of thought succeeded one another, like electric flashes
in a tempest. At certain moments, it seemed to him that he could hear
songs and wild clamors through a doorway that was opened and closed
incessantly; sounds as if a tempestuous wind bore to his ears the
alternate cries of a massacre and an apotheosis.
Suddenly, with the intensity of a feverish vision, he saw the scorched
and fatal spot of earth whereon he wished to create the souls of his
great tragedy; he felt all its parching thirst within himself. He saw
the mythical fountain which alone could quench the burning aridity; and
in the bubbling of its springs the purity of the maiden that must die
there. He saw on Perdita's face the mask of the heroine, quiescent in
the beauty of an extraordinarily calm sorrow. Then the ancient dryness
of the plain of Argos converted itself into flames; the fountain of
Perseia flowed with the swiftness of a stream. The fire and the water,
the two primitive elements, rushed over all things, effaced all other
traces, spread and wandered, struggled, triumphed, acquired a word,
a language wherewith to unveil their inner essence and to reveal the
innumerable myths born of their eternity. The symphony expressed the
drama of the two elementary Souls on the stage of the Universe, the
pathetic struggle of two great living and moving Beings, two cosmic
Wills, such as the shepherd Arya fancied it when he contemplated the
spectacle from the high plateau with his pure eyes. And, of a sudden,
from the very center of the musical mystery, from the depths of
the symphonic Ocean, arose the Ode, brought by the human voice, and
attaining the loftiest heights.
The miracle of Beethoven renewed itself. The winged Ode, the Hymn,
sprang from the midst of the orchestra to proclaim, in phrases absolute
and imperious, the joy and the sorrow of Man. It was not the Chorus,
as in the Ninth Symphony, but the Voice, alone and dominating, the
interpreter, the messenger to the multitude. "Her voice! her voice!
She has disappeared. Her song seemed to move the heart of the world,
and she was beyond the veil," said the Animator, who in mental vision
saw again the crystal statue within which he had watched the mounting
wave of melody. "I will seek thee, I shall find thee again; I will
possess myself of thy secret. Thou shalt sing my hymns, towering at
the summit of my music!" Freed now from all earthly desire, he thought
of that maiden form as the receptacle of a divine gift. He heard the
disembodied voice surge from the depths of the orchestra to reveal the
part of eternal truth that exists in ephemeral fact. The Ode crowned
the episode with light. Then, as if to lead back to the play of
imagery his ravished spirit from "beyond the veil," a dancing figure
stood out against the rhythm of the dying Ode. Between the lines of a
parallelogram drawn beneath the arch of the stage, as within the limits
of a strophe, the mute dancer, with her body seemingly free for a
moment from the sad laws of gravity, imitated the fire, the whirlwind,
the revolutions of the stars. "La Tanagra, flower of Syracuse, made
of wings, as a flower is made of petals!" Thus he invoked the image
of the already famous Sicilian who had re-discovered the ancient
orchestic art as it had been in the days when Phrynichus boasted that
he had within himself as many figures of the dance as there were
waves on the ocean on a stormy winter night. The actress, the singer,
the dancer--the three Dionysian women--appeared to him like perfect
and almost divine instruments of his creations. With an incredible
rapidity, in word, song, gesture and symphony, his work should
crystallize itself and live an all-powerful life before the conquered
multitude.
He was still silent, lost in an ideal world, waiting to measure the
effort necessary to manifest it. The voices surrounding him seemed to
come from a long distance.
"Wagner declares that the only creator of a work of art is the people,"
said Baldassare Stampa, "and that the sole function of the artist is to
gather and express the creation of the unconscious multitude."
The extraordinary emotion that had stirred Stelio when, from the throne
of the Doges, he had spoken to the throng seized on him once more. In
that communion between his soul and the soul of the people an almost
divine mystery had existed; something greater and more exalted was
added to the habitual feeling he had for his own person; he had felt
that an unknown power converged within him, abolishing the limits of
his earthly being and conferring upon his solitary voice the full
harmony of a chorus.
There was, then, in the multitude a secret beauty, in which only the
poet and the hero could kindle a spark. Whenever that beauty revealed
itself by the sudden outburst from a theater, a public square, or
an entrenchment, a torrent of joy must swell the heart of him who
had known how to inspire it by his verse, his harangue, or a signal
from his sword. Thus, the word of the poet, when communicated to the
people, was an act comparable to the deed of a hero--an act that
brought to birth in the great composite soul of the multitude a sudden
comprehension of beauty, as a master sculptor, from the mere touch of
his plastic thumb upon a mass of clay, creates a divine statue. Then
the silence that had spread like a sacred veil over the completed poem
would cease. The material part of life would no longer be typified by
immaterial symbols: life itself would be manifested in its perfection
by the poet; the word would become flesh, rhythm would quicken in
breathing, palpitating form, the idea would be embodied with all the
fulness of its force and freedom.
"But," said Fabio Molza, "Richard Wagner believes that the real heart
of the people is composed only of those that experience grief in
common--you understand, grief in common."
"Toward Joy--still toward eternal Joy," Stelio reflected. "The real
heart of the people is composed of those that feel vaguely the
necessity of raising themselves, by means of Fiction, Poetry, the
Ideal, out of the daily prison in which they serve and suffer."
In his waking dream he beheld the disappearance of the small theaters
of the city, where, amid suffocating air heavy with impurities, before
a crowd of rakes and courtesans, the actors make public prostitution
of their talents. And then, on the steps of the new theater, his mental
vision beheld the true people, the great, unanimous multitude, whose
human odor he had inhaled, whose clamor he had listened to in the great
marble shell, under the stars. By the mysterious power of rhythm, his
art, imperfectly understood though it was, had stirred the rude and
ignorant ones with a profound emotion, penetrating as that felt by a
prisoner about to be released from his chains. Little by little, the
sensation of joy at their deliverance had crept over the most abject;
the deep-lined brows cleared; lips accustomed to brutal vociferation
had parted in amazement; and, above all, the hands--the rough hands
enslaved by instruments of toil--had stretched out in one unanimous
gesture of adoration toward the heroine who in their presence had
wafted toward the stars the spirit of immortal sorrow.
"In the life of a people like ours," said Daniele Glauro, "a great
manifestation of art has much more weight than a treaty of alliance
or a tributary law. That which never dies is more prized than that
which is ephemeral. The astuteness and audacity of a Malatesta are
crystallized for all time in a medal of Pisanello's. Of Machiavelli's
politics nothing survives but the power of his prose."
"That is true, most true!" thought Stelio; "the fortunes of Italy are
inseparable from the fate of the Beauty of which she is the Mother."
This sovereign truth now appeared to him the rising sun of that divine,
ideal land through which wandered the great Dante. "Italy! Italy!"
Throughout his being, like a call to arms, seemed to thrill that name,
that name which intoxicates the world. From its ruins, bathed in so
much heroic blood, should not the new art, robust in root and branch,
arise and flourish? Should it not become a determining and constructive
force in the third Rome, reawakening all the latent power possessed by
the hereditary substance of the nation, indicating to her statesmen
the primitive truths that are the necessary bases of new institutions?
Faithful to the oldest instincts of his race, Richard Wagner had
foreseen, and had fostered by his own efforts, the aspiration of the
German States to the heroic grandeur of the Empire. He had evoked the
noble figure of Henry the Fowler, standing erect beneath the ancient
oak: "Let warriors arise from every German land!" And at Sadowa and
at Sedan these warriors had won. With the same impulse, the same
tenacity, people and artist had achieved their glorious aim. The same
degree of victory had crowned the work of the sword and the work of
melody. Like the hero, the poet had accomplished an act of deliverance.
Like the will of the Iron Chancelor, like the blood of his soldiers,
the Master's musical numbers had contributed toward the exalting and
perpetuating of the soul of his race.
"He has been here only a few days, at the Palazzo Vendramin-Calergi,"
said Prince Hoditz.
And suddenly the image of the barbaric creator seemed to Stelio to
approach him; the lines of his face became visible, the blue eyes
gleamed under the wide brow, the lips closed tight above the powerful
chin, armed with sensuousness, pride, and disdain. The slight body,
bent with the weight of age and glory, straightened itself, appeared
almost as gigantic as his work, took on the aspect of a god. The blood
coursed like a swift mountain torrent, its breath sighed like a forest
breeze. Suddenly the youth of Siegfried filled the figure and permeated
it, radiant as the dawn shining through a cloud. "To follow the impulse
of my heart, to obey my instinct, to listen to the voice of Nature
within myself--that is my supreme law!" The heroic, resounding words,
springing from the depths, expressed the young and healthy will that
had triumphed over all obstacles and all evil, always in accord with
the law of the Universe. And the flames, called forth from the rock by
the wand of Wotan, arose in the magic circle: "On the flaming sea a way
has opened! To plunge into that fire, oh, ineffable joy! To find my
bride within that flaming circle!" All the phantoms of the myth seemed
to blaze anew and then vanish.
Then the winged helmet of Brunehilde gleamed in the sunlight: "Glory
to the sun! Glory to the light! Glory to the radiant day! My sleep
was long. Who has awakened me?" The phantoms fled in tumult, and
dispersed. Then arose from the dark shadows the maiden of the song,
Donatella Arvale, as she had appeared to him amid the purple and gold
of the immense hall in a commanding attitude and holding a fiery
flower in her hand: "Dost thou not see me, then? Do not my burning
gaze and ardent blood make thee tremble. Dost thou not feel this wild
ardor?" Though she was absent, she seemed to resume her power over his
dream. Infinite music seemed to rise from the silent, empty place in
the supper-room. Her Hermes-like face seemed to retain an inviolable
secret: "Do not touch me; do not trouble my repose, and I will reflect
forever thy luminous image. Love only thyself and renounce all thought
of me!" And again, as on the feverish water, a passionate impatience
tortured the Animator, and again he fancied the absent one like a
beautiful bow to be drawn by a strong hand that would know how to use
it as an instrument to achieve some great conquest: "Awake, virgin,
awake! Live and laugh! Be mine!"
Stelio's spirit was drawn violently into the orbit of the magic world
created by the German god; its visions and harmonies overwhelmed him;
the figures of the Northern myth towered above those of his own art
and passion, obscuring them. His own desire and his own hope spoke the
language of the barbarian: "I must love thee, blindly, and laughing:
and, laughing, we must unite and lose ourselves, each in the other. O
radiant Love! O smiling Death!" The joyousness of the warrior-virgin
on the flame-circled summit reached the loftiest height; her cry of
love and liberty mounted to the heart of the sun. Ah, what heights and
what depths had he not touched, that formidable Master of human souls!
What effort could ever equal his? What eagle could ever hope to soar
higher? His gigantic work was there, finished, amidst men. Throughout
the world swelled the last mighty chorus of the Grail, the canticle of
thanksgiving: "Glory to the Miracle! Redemption to the Redeemer!"
"He is tired," said Prince Hoditz, "very tired and feeble. That is
the reason why we did not see him at the Doge's Palace. His heart is
affected." ...
Once more the giant became a man: the slight body, bent with age and
glory, consumed by passion, slowly dying. And Stelio heard again in
his heart Perdita's words, which had called up the image of another
stricken artist--the father of Donatella Arvale. "The name of the bow
is BIOS ("life"), and its work is death!"
The young man saw his pathway blazed before him by victory--the long
art, the short life. "Forward, still forward! Higher, ever higher!"
Every hour, every second, he must strive, struggle, fortify himself
against destruction, diminution, oppression, contagion. Every hour,
every second, his eye must be fixed on his aim, concentrating and
directing all his energies, without truce, without relaxation. He felt
that victory was as necessary to his soul as air to his lungs. At the
contact with the German barbarian, a furious thirst for conflict awoke
in his Latin blood. "To you now belongs the will to do!" Wagner had
declared, on the day of the opening of the new theater: "In the work
of art of the future, the source of invention will never run dry." Art
was infinite, like the beauty of the world. There are no limits to
courage or to power. Man must seek and find, further and still further.
"Forward, still forward!"
Then a single wave, vast and shapeless, embodying all the aspirations
and all the agitations of that delirium, whirling itself into a
maelstrom, seemed to take on the qualities of plastic matter, obeying
the same inexhaustible energy that forms all animals and all things
under the sun. An extraordinary image, beautiful and pure, was born
of this travail, lived and glowed with unbearable intensity. The poet
saw it, absorbed it with a pure gaze, felt that it took root in the
very depths of his being. "Ah, to express it, to manifest it to the
world, to fix it in perfection for all eternity!" Sublime moment that
never would return! All visions vanished. Around him flowed the current
of daily life; fleeting words sounded; expectation palpitated, desire
still lived.
He looked at the woman. The stars sparkled; the trees waved, and the
dark garden spread out behind Perdita, and her eyes still said: "Let me
serve! Let me serve!"
CHAPTER VII
THE PROMISE
Descending the terrace to the garden, the guests had dispersed among
the shady paths and under the vine-covered trellises. The night breeze
was damp and warm, touching the long lashes on delicate eyelids like
lips brushing them in a caress. The invisible stars of the jasmine
perfumed the darkness; the rich fragrance of fruit, too, was even
stronger than in the island gardens. A vivid power of fertility
emanated from this narrow trace of cultivated earth, which appeared
like a place of exile, surrounded by a girdle of water, and, like an
exiled soul, all the more intense.
"Do you wish me to remain here? Shall I return after the others have
gone? Say quickly! It is late!"
"No, no, Stelio, I beg of you! It is late--it is too late! You yourself
say it is."
La Fosacarina's voice was full of mortal terror. Her white arms and
shoulders trembled in the shadows. She wished at once to refuse and to
yield; she wished to die, yet she wished to feel his strong embrace.
She trembled more and more; her teeth chattered slightly, for a glacial
stream seemed to submerge her, chilling her from head to foot. The
strange emotion caused a fancy that her very limbs were ready to break,
and she was conscious that the stiffness of her set features had even
changed the sound of her voice. And still she longed at once to die
and to be loved; still, over her terror, her chill, her body no longer
young, hung the terrible sentence the beloved had pronounced, which she
herself had repeated: "It is late--it is too late!"
"Your promise, your promise, Perdita! I will not be put off!"
The tide, swelling like a full, fair throat, the estuary, lost in
darkness and death, the City, when illumined by the twilight fire, the
water flowing in the invisible clepsydra, the bronze bells with their
vibrations reaching to the sky, the eager wish, the contracted lips,
lowered eyelids, feverish hands, all recurred with the memory of the
silent promise. With wild ardor he longed to clasp that being, whose
knowledge of all things was immeasurably deep and rich.
"No, I will not be put off!"
His ardor had come to him from far-distant ages, from the most ancient
origins, the primitive simplicity of sudden unions, the antique mystery
of sacred furies. Like the horde that was possessed by the enchantment
of the gods, and descended the mountain side, tearing up trees, rushing
on with blind fury, momentarily increasing, its numbers swelled by
other madmen, spreading madness in its way, and finally becoming one
vast bestial yet human multitude, impelled by a monstrous will, so the
crudest of instincts urged him on, confusing all his ideas in a dizzy
whirl. And what most attracted him in that wandering and despairing
woman, whose knowledge was deep and rich, was the consciousness that
she was a being oppressed by the eternal servitude of her nature,
destined to succumb to the sudden convulsions of her sex; a being who
soothed the fever of stage life in sensuous repose, the fiery actress,
who passed from the frenzied plaudits of the multitude to the embrace
of a lover; the Dionysian creature who chose to crown her mysterious
rites as they were crowned in the ancient orgies.
His amorous madness was now immeasurable, and was a mingling of
cruelty, jealousy, poetry and pride. He regretted that he never had
sought her after some dramatic triumph, warm from the breath of the
people, breathless and disheveled, showing the traces of the tragic
soul that had wept and cried in her, with the tears of that alien
spirit still damp on her agitated face. As by a flash of light, he had
a sudden vision of her reclining, at rest, yet full of the power that
had drawn forth a howl from the monster, panting like a Mænad after the
dance, athirst and weary.
"Ah, do not be cruel!" entreated the woman, who felt in the voice of
the beloved, and read in his eyes, the madness that possessed him. From
the burning gaze of the young man she shrank with pathetic modesty. His
insistence hurt the sensitive delicacy of her spirit. She recognized
in it all that there was of mere selfish impulse; she well knew that
he thought of her as something poisonous and corrupt, with memories of
many loves, a wandering, implacable temptress. She divined the sudden
grudgingness, jealousy and feverish resentment that had blazed up in
the long-beloved friend, to whom she had consecrated all of herself
that was most precious and most sincere, preserving the perfection of
that sentiment by her steadfast refusal to break down all barriers.
Now, all was lost; all was suddenly devastated, like a fair domain
at the mercy of rebellious and vindictive slaves. Then, almost as if
she were passing through the last agonies of death, her whole bitter
and stormy past rose before her: that life of struggle and pain,
bewilderment, effort, passion, and triumph. She felt all its heavy
burden weighing on her, and recalled the ineffable joy, the feeling
of mingled terror and freedom, with which, in her far-distant youth,
she had given her first, fresh love to the man who had deceived her.
And through her mind passed the image of herself, that maiden who had
disappeared, who perhaps was still dreaming in some solitary place,
or weeping, or promising herself future happiness. "Too late--it is
too late!" The irrevocable word rang continually in her ears like the
reverberation of the bronze bells.
"Do not be cruel, Stelio!" she repeated, white and delicate as the
swansdown that encircled her shoulders. She seemed suddenly to have
shorn herself of her power, to have become slight and weak, to have
assumed a secret, tender personality, easy to kill, to destroy, to
immolate as a bloodless sacrifice.
"No, Perdita, I will not be cruel," he stammered, suddenly discomposed
by her face and voice, his heart stirred with human pity, arising from
the same depths that had harbored his wilder instincts. "Pardon me!
Forgive!"
He would have liked to take her in his arms that moment, to nurse her,
console her, let her weep on his breast, and to dry her tears. He felt
that he no longer recognized her, that some unknown creature stood
before him, infinitely humble and sad, deprived of all strength. His
pity and remorse were like the emotion we feel if we unwillingly hurt
or offend an invalid or a child--some lonely and inoffensive little
being.
"Pardon me!"
He would have liked to kneel, to kiss her feet in the grass, to murmur
little fond phrases in her ear. He bent toward her and touched her
hand. She started violently, opened wide her large eyes upon him; then
lowered her eyelids and stood motionless. Shadows seemed to gather
under her arched brows, throwing into relief the curve of her cheeks.
Again the glacial wave submerged her.
Voices arose from the guests dispersed about the garden, then a long
silence followed.
Presently a crunching of gravel, as if trodden by a heavy foot, was
heard, followed by another long silence. Soon a confused clamor was
heard coming from the canals; the jasmine's fragrance was heavier than
before, as a heart in suspense quickens in movement. The night seemed
fraught with miracles, and eternal forces worked harmoniously between
the earth and the stars.
"Pardon me! If my love oppresses you, I will continue to stifle it; I
will even renounce it forever, and obey you. Perdita! Perdita! I will
forget all that your eyes said to me a little while ago, in the midst
of the idle talk. What embrace, what caress could more wholly unite our
souls? All the passion of the night threw us together. I received your
soul like a wave. And now it seems that never again can I separate my
heart from yours, nor can you separate yours from mine. Together we
must go forward to meet I know not what mysterious dawn...."
He spoke in a low tone, with absolute abandon, having become for the
moment a vibrating substance that responded to every change in the
nocturnal spirit that bewitched him. That which he saw before him was
no longer a corporeal form, an impenetrable prison of flesh; it was a
soul unveiled by a succession of appearances not less expressive than
melody itself, an infinite sensibility, delicate and powerful, which,
in that slight frame, created in turn the fragility of the flower, the
vigor of marble, the flash of the flame, all shadows and all light.
"Stelio!"
She hardly breathed that name aloud; yet in the sigh that died on her
soft lips was as thrilling a note of wonder and exultation as would
have been revealed in the most piercing cry. In the accent of the
man she had recognized love: love, real love! She, who had so often
listened to beautiful and perfect words pronounced by that clear voice,
and who had suffered under them as from a torture or a heartless jest,
now saw her own life and all the world suddenly transformed at this
new accent. Her very soul seemed changed; that which had encumbered
it fell away into dim, far-off obscurity, while to the surface rose
something free and immaculate, that dilated and curved over her like
the sky; and, as the wave of light mounts from the horizon to the
zenith with mute harmony, the illusion of happiness mounted to her
lips. A smile softly spread over her lips, which quivered like leaves
in the breeze, showing a glimpse as pearly as the jasmine's starry
flowers.
"All is abolished--all is vanished. I never have lived, I never have
loved, I never have suffered. I am renewed. I never have known any love
but this. My heart is pure. I should wish to die in the joy of your
love. Years and experience have passed over me without reaching that
part of my soul which I have kept for you, that secret heaven which has
suddenly opened to the unforeseen, has triumphed over all my sadness,
and has remained alone to cherish the strength and the sweetness of
your name. Your love will save me; the fulness of my love will render
you divine!"
Words of wildest transport sprang from her liberated heart, though
her lips dared not speak them. But she smiled--smiled her infinite,
mysterious, silent smile!
"Is it not true? Speak--answer me, Perdita! Do you not feel too our
need of each other--all the stronger from our long renunciation, from
the patience with which we have awaited this hour? Ah, it seems to me
that all my presentiments and all my hopes would count as nothing, if
it were fated that this hour should not come to pass. Say that without
me you could not have waited, after life's darkness, for the glorious
dawn, as I could not wait without you!"
"Yes, yes!"
In that stifled syllable, she was lost irrevocably. The smile faded,
the lines of the mouth became heavy, causing it to appear in sharply
drawn relief against the pallor of her face; the lips seemed athirst,
strong to attract, to cling, insatiable. And her whole body, which just
before had seemed to shrink in sensitiveness and apprehension, now drew
itself up again, as if formed anew, recovering all its physical power,
and inundated by an impetuous wave of emotion.
"Let us have no more uncertainty. It is late."
He could not disguise his impatience of the social restraints that must
be observed on account of the other guests.
"Yes!" La Foscarina repeated, but in a new accent, her eyes dwelling
upon his, commanding, imperious, as if she felt certain now of
possessing a philter that should bind him to her forever.
Stelio felt his heart-throbs quicken still more at the thought of the
love this mysterious being must be able to give. He gazed deep into her
eyes, and saw that she was as pale as if all her blood had been sapped
by the earth to nourish the rich fruits of the garden; and it seemed to
him that the present was part of a dream-life, wherein he and she lived
alone in all the world.
[Illustration: _HE GAZED DEEP INTO HER EYES AND SAW THAT SHE WAS AS
PALE AS IF HER BLOOD HAD BEEN SAPPED TO NOURISH THE RICH FRUITS OF THE
GARDEN_]
_From an Original Drawing by Arthur H. Ewer_
La Foscarina was standing under a shrub laden with fruit. The sudden
beauty that had illumined her in the supper-room, made up of a thousand
ideal forces, reappeared in her face with still greater intensity,
kindled now from the flame that never dies, the fervor that never
languishes. The magnificent fruits hung over her head, bearing the
crown of a royal donor. The myth of the pomegranate was revivified in
the mystery of midnight, as it had been at the passing of the boat in
the mystic twilight. Who was this woman? Was she Persephone herself,
Queen of Shades? Had she dwelt in that unknown region where all human
agitations seem as trifling as idle winds on a dusty, interminable
road? Had she contemplated the springs of the world, sunk deep in the
earth? Had she counted the roots of the flowers, immobile as the veins
in a petrified body? Was she weary or intoxicated with human tears,
laughter, and sensuousness, and with having touched, one after another,
all things mortal, to make them bloom only to see them perish? Who was
she? Had she struck upon cities like a scourge, silenced forever with
her kiss all lips that sang, stopped the pulsation of tyrannous hearts?
Who was she--who? What secret past made her so pale, so passionate,
so perilous? Had she already divulged all her secrets and given all
her gifts, or could she still, by new arts, enchant her new lover, for
whom life, love, and victory were one and the same thing? All this,
and more, was suggested to him by the little veins in her temples, the
curve of her cheeks, the lithe strength of her body.
"All evil, all good, that which I know and do not know, that which you
know, as well as that which you are ignorant of--all this had to be, to
prepare the fulness of this night." Life and the dream had become one.
Thought and sense were as wines poured into the same cup. Even their
garments, their faces, their hopes, their glances, were like the plants
of the garden, like the air, the stars, the silence.
Sublime moment, never to return! Before he realized it, his hands
involuntarily reached out to draw her to himself. The woman's head
fell backward, as if she were about to faint; between her half-closed
eyelids and her parted lips her eyes and her teeth gleamed as things
gleam for the last time. Then swiftly she raised her head again and
recovered herself; her lips sought the lips that sought hers.
After a moment they saw each other again in a lucid way. The voices of
the guests in the garden were wafted to their ears, and an indistinct
clamor from the far-off canal rose from time to time.
"Well?" demanded the young man feverishly, after that burning kiss of
body and soul.
The lady bent to lift a fallen pomegranate from the grass. The fruit
was ripe; it had burst open in its fall and now poured out its blood
from the wound it had received. With the vision of the fruit-laden
boat, the pale islet, and the field of asphodels, to the impassioned
woman's mind returned the words of the Inspirer: "This is my body....
Take, eat!"
"Well?"
"Yes!"
With a mechanical movement she crushed the fruit in her hand, as if she
wished to expel all its juice, which trickled in a stream over her
wrist. She trembled, as the glacial wave rushed over her anew.
"Go away when the others go, but then--return! I will wait for you at
the gate of the Gradenigo garden."
She trembled still, partly from terror, a prey to an invincible power.
As by a flash of light, again he saw her reclining, at rest, panting
like a Mænad after the dance. They gazed at each other, but could not
bear the fierce light of each other's eyes. They parted.
She went in the direction of the voices of the poets who had exalted
her ideal power.
CHAPTER VIII
"TO CREATE WITH JOY!"
Lost! Lost! Now she was lost! She still lived--vanquished, humiliated,
as if some one had trampled pitilessly upon her; she still lived, and
dawn was breaking, the days were beginning again, the fresh tide was
flowing once more into the City Beautiful, and Donatella was still
sleeping upon her pure pillow. Into an infinite distance had faded the
hour, in reality so short a time before, when she had waited at the
gate for her beloved, recognized his step in the funereal silence of
the deserted path, and felt her knees weaken as if from a blow, while
a strange reverberation rang in her ears. How far-away now seemed that
hour! yet the little incidents of her vigil returned to her mind with
intensity: the cold iron rail against which she had leaned her head,
the sharp, acrid odor that rose from the grass as from a retting-vat,
the moist tongue of Lady Myrta's greyhounds that came noiselessly and
licked her hands.
"Good-by! Good-by!"
She was lost! He had left her as he would have left some light love,
almost with the manner of a stranger, almost impatient even, drawn by
the freshness of the dawn, by the freedom of the morning.
"Good-by!"
From her window she perceived Stelio on the bank of the canal; he was
inhaling deep breaths of the fresh morning air; then in the perfect
calm that reigned over all things, she heard his clear, confident voice
calling the gondolier:
"Zorzi!"
The man was asleep in the bottom of his gondola, and his human slumber
resembled that of the curved boat that obeyed his movements. Stelio
touched him lightly with his foot, and instantly he sprang up, jumped
to his place and seized the oar. Man and boat awoke at the same time,
as if they had but one body, ready to glide over the water.
"Your servant, Signor!" said Zorzi with a smile, glancing up at the
brightening sky. "Sit down, Signor, and I will row."
Opposite the palace, the door of a large workshop was thrown open. It
was a stonecutter's shop, where steps were fashioned from the stone of
Val-di-Sole.
"To ascend!" thought Stelio, and his superstitious soul rejoiced at
the good omen. On the sign, the name of the quarry seemed radiant with
promise--the Valley of the Sun. He had already seen, a short time
before, the image of a stairway, on a coat-of-arms in the Gradenigo
garden--a symbol of his own ascension. "Higher, always higher!" Joy
came bubbling up from the depths of his being. The morning awakened all
manly energies.
"And Perdita? And Ariadne?" He saw them again, as they descended the
marble stairway, in the light of the smoking torches. "And La Tanagra?"
The Syracusan appeared to his vision, with her long, goat-like eyes,
reposing gracefully upon her mother earth, motionless as a bas-relief
on the marble in which it is carved. "The Dionysian Trinity!" He
fancied them as exempt from all passion, immune from all evil, like
creations of art. The surface of his soul seemed covered with swift and
splendid images, like sails scattered over a swelling sea. His heart
beat calmly, and with the approaching sunrise he felt a renewal of his
life-forces, as if he were born anew with the morning.
"We do not need this light any longer," murmured the gondolier slyly,
extinguishing the lantern of the gondola.
"To the Grand Canal, by San Giovanni Decollato!" cried Stelio, seating
himself.
As the dentellated prow swung into the Canal of San Giacomo dall'Orio,
he turned to look once more at the palace, of a leaden hue in the early
dawn. One lighted window grew dark at that moment, like an eye suddenly
blinded. "Good-by! Good-by!" The woman no longer young was up there
alone, sad with the sadness of death; the Song-Maiden was preparing to
return to the place of her long sacrifice. He knew not how to pity,
he could only promise. From the abundance of his strength, he drew an
illusion that he might change those two destinies for his own joy.
"Stop before the Palazzo Vendramin-Calergi!" he ordered the gondolier.
The canal, ancient stream of silence and of poetry, was deserted. The
pale green sky was reflected in it with its last fading stars. At
first glance, the palace had an aerial appearance, like an artificial
cloud hung over the water. The shadows in which it was still wrapped
suggested the quality of velvet, the beauty of something soft and
magnificent. And, just as in studying a deep-piled velvet, the pattern
gradually becomes discernible, the architectural lines revealed
themselves in the three Corinthian columns that rose with rhythmic
grace and strength to the point where the emblems of nobility, the
eagles, the horses, and the amphora, were mingled with the roses of
Loredan. NON NOBIS, DOMINE, NON NOBIS.
Within that palace throbbed the great ailing heart. Stelio saw again
the image of the barbaric creator: the blue eyes gleaming under the
broad brow, the lips compressed above the powerful chin, armed with
sensuousness, pride, and disdain. Was he sleeping? Could he sleep,
or was he lying sleepless with his glory? The young man recalled
strange things that were told of Wagner. Was it true that he could
not sleep unless his head rested on his wife's bosom, and that,
despite advancing years, he clung to her as a lover to his mistress?
He remembered a story told him by Lady Myrta, who, while she was in
Palermo, had visited the Villa d'Angri, where the very closets in the
room occupied by the master had remained impregnated with an essence
of rose so strong that it made her ill. He fancied that slight, tired
body, wrapped in sumptuous draperies, ornamented with jewels, perfumed
like a corpse ready for the pyre. Was it not Venice that had given
him, as long ago it had given Albert Dürer, a taste for luxury and
magnificence? Yes, and it was in the silence of her canals that he
had heard the passing of the most ardent breath of all his music--the
deadly passion of Tristan and Isolde.
And now, within that palace throbbed the great ailing heart, and there
its formidable impetuosity was flagging. The patrician palace, with
its eagles, its horses, amphora, and roses, was as tightly closed and
silent as a great tomb. Above its marble towers the sunrise turned the
pale green sky to rosy pink.
"Hail to the Victorious One!" Stelio stood up and cast his flowers at
the threshold of the palace door.
"On! On!" he cried.
Urged by this sudden impatience, the gondolier bent to his oar, and
the light craft threaded its way along the stream. A brown sail
passed silently. The sea, the rippling waves, the laughing cry of the
sea-gulls, the sweeping breeze arose before his desire.
"Row, Zorzi, row! To the Veneta Marina, by the Canal dall'Olio!" the
young man cried.
The canal seemed too narrow for the expanse of his soul. Victory was
now as necessary to his spirit as air to his lungs. After the delirium
of the night, he wished to prove the perfection of his physical nature
by the light of day and in the sharp breeze of the sea. He did not wish
to sleep. He felt a circle of freshness around his eyes, as if he had
bathed them with dew. He had no desire for repose, and the thought of
his bed in the hotel filled him with disgust. "The deck of a ship, the
odor of pitch and of salt, the flutter of a red sail.... Row, Zorzi!"
The gondolier redoubled his efforts. The Fondaco dei Turchi disappeared
from their view, a vision of marvelously yellow old ivory, like the
only remaining portico of some ruined mosque. They passed the Palazzo
of the Cornaro and the Palazzo of the Pesaro, those two giants
blackened by time as by smoke from a fire; they passed the Ca' d'Oro, a
divine marvel of air and stone; and suddenly the Rialto bridge showed
its ample back, laden with shops, already bustling with life, sending
forth the odor of vegetables and fish, like a great horn of plenty
pouring out upon the shores the fruits of earth and sea to feed the
Queen of Cities.
"I am hungry, Zorzi, I am very hungry!" said Stelio, laughing.
"A good sign when a wakeful night makes one hungry; it makes only the
old feel sleepy," said Zorzi.
"Row to shore!"
He bought at a stall some grapes of the Vignole and some figs from
Malamocco, laid on a plate of vine-leaves.
"Row, Zorzi!"
The gondola turned, then sped under the Fondaco dei Tedeschi, making
its way toward the Rio de Palazzo. The bells were now ringing joyously
in the full daylight, drowning the noises of the market-place with
their brazen tongues.
"To the Ponte della Paglia!"
A thought, spontaneous as an instinct, led him back to the glorious
spot where it seemed some trace must remain of his lyric inspiration
and of the great Dionysian chorus: _Viva il forte!_ The gondola
grazed the side of the Palace of the Doge, massive as a monolith cut
by chisels not less apt in finding melodies than the bows of the
musicians. With all his new-born soul he embraced the mass; he heard
once more the sound of his own voice and the bursts of applause. He
said again to himself: "To create with joy! That is an attribute of
Divinity! Impossible to imagine, in the highest flight of the spirit,
a more triumphal act. Even the phrase itself has something of the
splendor of the dawn."
Again and again he repeated to the air, the waters, the stones, to the
ancient city, to the young dawn: "To create with joy! To create with
joy!"
When the prow passed under the bridge and entered the mirror of light,
a freer breath gave him fresh realization, with his hope and his
courage, of the beauty and strength of the life of the past.
"Find me a boat, Zorzi--a boat that will go out to sea."
He longed for still wider space in which to breathe; he longed to feel
a strong wind, salt air and dashing spray; to see the sails swell, and
the bowsprit pointed toward a boundless horizon.
"To the Veneta Marina! Find me a fishing-boat, a _bragozzo_ from
Chioggia."
He perceived a large red and black sail, just hoisted, and now flapping
in the breeze, superb as an ancient banner of the Republic, with the
device of the Lion and the Book.
"That one there--that will do. Let us catch it, Zorzi."
In his impatience he waved his hand, to sign to the boat to stop.
"Call out to them to wait for me, Zorzi!"
The gondolier, heated and dripping, cried out to the man at the sail.
The gondola flew like a canoe in a regatta.
"Bravo, Zorzi!"
But Stelio was panting, too, as if he were in pursuit of fortune, some
happy aim, or the certainty of a kingdom.
"We have won the flag!" laughed the gondolier, rubbing his burning
palms. "What foolishness!"
The movement, the tone, the good-humor, the astonished faces of the
fishermen leaning over the rail, the reflection of the red sail in the
water, the cordial odor of fresh bread from a neighboring bake-shop,
the smell of boiling pitch from a dock-yard, the voices of workmen
entering the arsenal, the strong emanations from the quays, impregnated
with the odor of the old rotten vessels of the Serene Republic, the
resounding blows of the hammer on the vessels of the new Italy--all
these rude and healthful things aroused a wonderful joyousness in the
heart of the young man, who laughed aloud for very gladness.
"What do you wish?" demanded the older of the fishermen, bending toward
the ringing laughter his bearded bronzed face. "What can I do for you,
Signor?"
The mast creaked as if it were alive, swaying from top to bottom.
"You can come on board, if you like," he said. "Is that all you want?"
He brought a ladder and attached it to the stern. It was a simple
affair of ropes and pegs, but to Stelio it seemed, like all else in the
rough craft, to have a life of its own. As he stepped upon it he felt
almost ashamed of his light, glossy shoes. The heavy, calloused hand of
the sailor, covered with blue tattoo-marks, helped him to climb up and
pulled him on board with a jerk.
"The grapes and the figs, Zorzi!"
From the gondola, Zorzi handed him the vine-leaf plate.
"May it make new blood for you, Signor!"
"And the bread?"
"We have some warm bread," said one of the sailors, "just out of the
oven."
Hunger would certainly give that bread a delicious flavor, finding
therein all the nourishment of the grain.
"Your servant, Signor, and a fair wind to you!" said the gondolier,
taking leave.
"Starboard!"
The lateen sail, with the Lion and the Book, swelled crimson. The craft
turned toward the open sea, directing its course toward San Servolo.
The shore seemed to assume a sharp curve, as if to repel it.
"To the right!"
The boat veered with great force. A miracle met it: the first rays of
the sun pierced the fluttering sail and illumined the angels on the
campaniles of San Marco and San Giorgio Maggiore, setting on fire the
globe of the Fortuna and crowning the five miters of the Basilica with
a diadem of light. Venice Anadyomene reigned over the waters, and from
her beauty all her veils were ravished.
"Glory to the Miracle!" An almost superhuman feeling of power and of
freedom swelled the young man's heart as the wind had swollen the sail
transfigured for him. In its crimson splendor, he saw himself as in the
splendor of his own blood. It seemed to him that all the mystery of
this beauty demanded of him a triumphal act. He felt confident that he
was able to accomplish it. "To create with joy!"
And the world was his!
BOOK II
THE EMPIRE OF SILENCE
CHAPTER I
"IN TIME!"
"In time!" In a room of the Academy, La Foscarina had stopped before
_La Vecchia_, by Francesco Torbido--that wrinkled, toothless, flaccid,
yellow old woman, who could no longer either smile or weep, that human
ruin worse than decay, that species of earthly Parca, who, instead of
spindle, thread, or scissors, held in her hand a card bearing that
significant warning.
"In time!" she said again, when she and her companion were once more in
the open air. She said it to break the pensive silence, during which
she had felt her heart sink, like a stone cast into dark waters. She
spoke again suddenly:
"Stelio, do you know that closed house in the Calle Gambara?"
"No--which house?"
"The house of the Countess of Glanegg."
"No, I don't know it."
"Do you not know the story of the beautiful Austrian?"
"No, Fosca. Tell it to me."
"Will you go with me as far as the Calle Gambara; it is only a short
distance?"
"Yes, I will go."
They walked along, side by side, toward the closed mansion. Stelio
fell back a step, that he might observe the actress, that he might
behold her grace as she walked in that warm, dead air. With his ardent
gaze he seemed to embrace her whole person: the line of her shoulders
sloping with noble grace, the free and pliant waist on the strong
hips, the knees that moved lightly among the folds of her robe, and
that pale, passionate face, those eloquent lips, that brow, lofty
and beautiful as that of a man, the fringe of dark lashes over the
elongated eyes, that sometimes were clouded over, as if tears rose to
them and remained unshed--the whole passionate face full of lights and
shadows, love and sadness, feverish force and quivering life.
"I love you! I love you! You alone please me! Everything about you
pleases me!" he said to her suddenly, whispering the words close to
her cheek. He was now walking so close as almost to press against her,
as he accommodated his step to hers, his arm passed under her arm. He
could not bear to know that she was seized with startled anguish at
those terrible warning words.
She trembled, stopped; her eyelids drooped, her cheeks turned pale.
"My friend!" she said, in a tone so faint that the two words seemed
modulated less by her lips than by the rare smile of her spirit.
Her sudden sadness melted away, changed into a wave of tenderness that
poured in a lavish flood over her friend. Her unbounded gratitude
inspired her with an eager desire to find some great gift for him.
"Tell me, Stelio, what can I do for thee?"
She imagined some marvelous test, some unheard-of proof of love. "Let
me serve! Let me serve!" cried her heart. She yearned to own the whole
earth, that she might offer it to him.
"What dost thou wish? Tell me--what can I do for thee?"
"Love me--only love me!"
"Poor friend, my love is sad."
"It is perfect; it crowns my life."
"But you are young."
"I love you!"
"You should possess one with strength equal to your own."
"But it is you, and only you, that each day increases my strength and
exalts my hope. My blood runs quicker when I am near you in your mystic
silence. At those times things are born in my brain that in time you
will marvel to see. You are necessary to me."
"Do not say that!"
"Each day you confirm me in the assurance that all promises made to me
will be kept."
"Yes, you will have your own beautiful destiny. For you I have no fear;
you are sure of yourself. No peril can surprise you, no obstacle can
impede your progress. Oh, to be able to love without fear! One always
fears when one loves. It is not for you that I fear. You seem to me
invincible. I thank you for that also."
She showed him her faith, deep as her passion, lucid and unlimited. For
a long time, even in the heat of her own struggles and the vicissitudes
of her wandering life, she had kept her eyes fixed on this young,
victorious existence, as on an ideal form born of the purification of
her own desire. More than once, in the sadness of vain loves and the
nobility of the prohibition imposed between them, she had thought: "Ah,
if, some day, from all my courage, hardened in many storms, from all
the strong, clear things that grief and revolt have revealed in the
depths of my soul, from the best of myself, I could fashion for thee
the wings that shall bear thee upward in thy last supreme flight!" More
than once, her melancholy had been dissipated in a heroic presentiment.
And then she had subjected her soul to restraint, had raised it to the
highest plane of moral beauty that she could, had guided it in paths of
purity, solely to merit that for which she hoped and feared at once--to
be worthy of offering her servitude to him who was so impatient to
conquer the world.
And now a sudden violent shock of Fate had thrown her before him in
the guise of a mere weak woman, overcome by earthly passion. She had
united herself to him by the closest tie; she had watched him at dawn,
sleeping; she had had sudden awakenings, alarmed by cruel fear, and had
found it impossible to close her tired eyes again, lest he should gaze
on her while she slept, and see in her face the lines of care and years.
"Nothing is worth the inspiration you give me," said Stelio, pressing
her arm close and seeking her soft wrist under her glove, urged by a
longing to feel the pulsation of that devoted life. "Nothing is worth
the assurance that nevermore until death shall I be alone."
"Ah, you too feel that, do you--that it is forever?" she cried in a
transport of joy at seeing the triumph of her love. "Yes, forever,
Stelio--whatever happens, wherever your destiny may lead you, in
whatever way you wish me to serve you, either near you or afar...."
In the misty air rose a confused and monotonous sound, which La
Foscarina recognized as the chorus of sparrows gathered among the dying
trees in the garden of the Countess of Glanegg. The words died on her
lips; she made an instinctive movement as if to turn back and to draw
her companion with her.
"Where are we going?" Stelio asked, surprised at her sudden movement,
and at the unforeseen interruption, that came like a burst of magic
music.
She stopped, smiling her faint smile that showed her heart was aching.
("IN TIME!")
"I wished to escape," she replied, "but I cannot."
She looked like a pale flame, as she stood there.
"I had forgotten, Stelio, that I was to take you to the closed house."
Like one lost in a desert, she stood there, helpless, under the gray
sky.
"It seemed to me that we were to go somewhere else. But we are already
here. 'In time'!"
She appeared to him now as she had in that memorable night, when she
had said "Do not be cruel, Stelio!" Clothed in her sweet, tender
soul she stood there, so easy to kill, to destroy, to immolate in a
bloodless sacrifice.
"Come away--let us go," he said, trying to lead her with him. "Let us
go somewhere else."
"I cannot."
"Let us go home--let us go to your house; we will light a fire, the
first fire of October. Let me pass this evening with you, Foscarina. It
will rain soon. It would be so sweet to sit in your room and talk, or
be silent, hand-in-hand. Come! Let us go."
He would have liked to take her in his arms, to nurse her, soothe
her, charm away her sadness. The sweetness of his own words augmented
his tenderness. Of all her lovable person, he loved most fondly the
delicate little lines that radiated from the corners of her eyes to
her temples, the little purple veins that made her eyelids look like
violets, the curve of her cheeks, the pointed chin, and all that seemed
touched by the finger of Autumn, every shadow that overspread that
passionate face.
"Foscarina! Foscarina!"
Whenever he called her by her real name, his heart beat faster, as if
something more deeply human had entered into his love, as if suddenly
her whole past had seized once more the figure he was pleased to
isolate in his dream, and as if innumerable threads formed a bond
uniting it more closely than ever to implacable life.
"Come! Let us go!"
She smiled pensively.
"But why? The house is very near. Let us pass it by the Calle Gambara.
Do you not wish to know the story of the Countess of Glanegg? Look! One
would think it a convent."
The street was deserted as the path leading to a hermitage; it was
gray, damp, strewn with dead leaves. The east wind had brought a light,
warm mist that softened all sounds.
"Behind those walls, a desolate soul survives the beauty of its body,"
said La Foscarina softly. "Look! The windows are closed, the blinds
are nailed, the doors are sealed. Only one door is still open for the
servants, and through it they carry the dead woman her nourishment,
though she is walled up as if in an Egyptian tomb. The servants feed a
body that no longer has the spirit of life."
The naked trees, which rose to the top of the cloister-like enclosure,
looked almost smoky in the mist; the sparrows, more numerous than the
leaves, twittered incessantly.
"Guess the Countess's name, Stelio. It is beautiful and rare--as
beautiful as if you had originated it."
"I do not know."
"Radiana! The prisoner is called Radiana."
"But whose prisoner is she?"
"The prisoner of Time, Stelio. Time stands on guard at her door, with
his scythe and hour-glass, as she is shown in old prints."
"Are you trying to describe an allegory?"
A boy passed, whistling. When he saw the two strangers looking at
the closed windows, he stopped to gaze too, his large eyes full of
curiosity and astonishment. They were silent. Presently the little boy
grew tired of staring; nothing interesting could be seen; the windows
were not opened; everything was motionless, so he ran away. They heard
the flight of his little bare feet on the wet stones and rotting leaves.
"Well," said Stelio, "and what did Radiana do? You have not yet told
me who is this woman, nor the reason why she is a recluse. Tell me her
story. I have already been thinking of Soranza Soranzo."
"The Countess Glanegg is one of the greatest ladies of the aristocratic
Viennese world, and perhaps the most beautiful I ever have seen.
Franz Lenbach has painted her in the armor of the Valkyries, with the
four-winged helmet. Have you ever visited his red studio in the Palazzo
Borghese?"
"No, never."
"Go there some day, and ask him to show you that portrait. You will
see it unchanged, as I see it now through all those walls. She has
wished to remain like that in the memory of those that saw her in the
splendor of her beauty. One day, when the sun shone too bright, she saw
that the time had come for that beauty to fade, and she resolved to
take leave of the world in such a way that men should not be witnesses
of the decay and destruction of her famous beauty. Perhaps it was her
sympathy with things that disintegrate and fall in ruins that has kept
her in Venice. She gave a magnificent farewell banquet, where she
appeared, still sovereignly beautiful; then she withdrew forever from
the world to this house that you see, in this walled garden, where,
alone with her servants, she awaits the end. She has become a legendary
figure. They say that there are no mirrors in her house, and that she
has forgotten her own face. She has forbidden even her most devoted
friends and her nearest relatives to visit her. How does she live? What
are her thoughts? By what means does she wile away the time of waiting?
Is her soul in a state of grace?"
Every pause in that veiled voice questioning the mystery was filled
with deepest melancholy.
"Does she pray? Does she contemplate? Does she weep? Or, perhaps, has
she become inert, and suffers no more than a withered apple in the back
of some old closet."
"What if she should suddenly show herself at that window?" said Stelio,
feeling something like a real sensation, as he fancied he heard a
creaking hinge.
Both looked closely at the nailed blinds.
"Perhaps she is sitting behind them, looking at us," he added, in a
half whisper.
This thought made them both shudder.
They were leaning against a wall facing the house, and did not wish to
move a step. The encircling inertia affected them, the smoke-like mist
enveloped them more and more thickly; the chatter of the birds lulled
their senses as a drug given to feverish patients. The siren whistles
pierced the air from afar. The brown leaves dropped from the trees. How
long it took for a floating leaf to reach the earth! All around them
was mist, heaviness, slow consumption, ashes.