THE MASTER'S VISION
"You were strong, Daniele--you who can hardly break a twig! And he was
heavy, that old barbarian; his body seemed built over a framework of
bronze: well constructed, firm, able to stand on a deck that might rise
and fall--the body of a man that nature destined for the sea. Whence
came your strength, Daniele? I almost feared for you, but you did not
even stagger. Do you realize that we have borne a hero in our arms?
This is a day we ought to distinguish and celebrate in some way. His
eyes opened again and looked into mine; his pulse revived under my
hand. We were worthy to carry him, Daniele, because of our fervor."
"You are worthy not only to carry him, but of gathering and preserving
some of the most beautiful promises offered by his art to men who still
have hope."
"Ah, if only I am not overwhelmed by my own abundance, and if I can
master the anxiety that suffocates me, Daniele!"
The two friends walked on and on, side by side, in exalted and
confident mood, as if their friendship had taken on an added nobility.
"It seems as if the Adriatic had overthrown the Murazzi, in this
tempest," said Daniele, pausing to look at the waves that had mounted
even to the Piazza. "We must return."
"No, let us cross the ferry. Here is a boat. Look at the reflection of
San Marco on the water!"
The boatman rowed them to the Torre dell' Orologio. The rising
tide soon overflowed the Piazza, looking like a lake surrounded by
porticoes, reflecting the greenish-yellow twilight sky.
"EN VERUS FORTIS QUI FREGIT VINCULA MORTIS," read Stelio on the curve
of an arch, below a mosaic of the Resurrection. "Did you know that
Richard Wagner held his first colloquy with Death in Venice, exactly
twenty years ago, at the time he produced Tristan? Consumed by a
hopeless passion, he came here to die in silence, and here he composed
that wild second act, which is a hymn to eternal night. And now fate
has led him back to the lagoons. Fate, it seems, has decreed that here
he shall breathe his last, like Claudio Monteverde. Is not Venice full
of musical desire, immense and indefinable? Every sound transforms
itself into an expressive voice. Listen!"
The city of stone and water seemed indeed to have become as sonorous as
a great organ. The hissing and moaning had changed to a sort of choral
supplication, rising and falling in regular rhythm.
"Do you not hear the theme of a melody in that chorus of moans? Listen!"
They had debarked from the little boat, and had resumed their walk
through the narrow streets.
"Listen!" Stelio repeated. "I can detect a melodic theme, which swells
and decreases without power to develop itself. Do you hear it?"
"It is not given to me to hear what you hear," replied the sterile
ascetic to the genius. "I will await the time when you can repeat to me
the word that Nature speaks to you."
"Ah!" Stelio resumed, "to be able to restore to melody its natural
simplicity, its ingenuous perfection, its divine innocence; to draw
it, living, from its eternal source, from the true mystery of nature,
the inmost soul of the Universe! Have you ever reflected upon the myth
connected with the infancy of Cassandra? She had been left one night
in the temple of Apollo; and in the morning she was found lying on the
marble floor, wrapped in the coils of a serpent that licked her ears.
And from that day she understood all the voices of Nature in the air,
all the melodies of the world. The power of the great seeress was only
a high musical power; and a part of that Apollonian virtue entered
the souls of the poets that coöperated in the creation of the tragic
Chorus. One of those poets boasted of understanding the voices of
all birds; another was able to hold converse with the winds; another
comprehended perfectly the language of the sea. More than once I have
dreamed that I too was lying on the marble floor, folded in the coils
of that serpent. The magic of that old myth must be renewed, Daniele,
in order that we may create the new art.
"Have you ever thought what might be the music of that species of
pastoral ode sung by the Chorus in _Œdipus Tyrannus_, Œwhen Jocasta
flees, horror-struck, and the son of Laïus still cherishes the illusion
of a last hope? Do you recall it? Try to imagine the strophes as if
they were a frame, within which an expressive dance-figure is animated
by the perfect life of melody. The spirit of Earth would rise before
you: the consoling apparition of the great common Mother at the
unhappiness of her stricken, trembling children--a celebration, as it
were, of all that is divine and eternal above Man, who is dragged to
madness and death by blind and cruel Destiny. Try now to conceive how
this song has helped me in the writing of my great tragedy to find the
means of the highest and at the same time the simplest expression."
"Do you purpose, then, to reëstablish the ancient Chorus on the stage?"
"Oh, no! I shall not revive any ancient form; I intend to create a
new form, obeying only my instinct and the genius of my own race, as
did the Greeks when they created that marvelous structure of beauty,
forever inimitable--the Greek drama. For a very long time, the three
practicable arts of music, poetry, and dancing have been separated; the
first two have developed toward a superior form of expression, but the
third is in its decadence, and I think that now it is impossible to
combine them in a single rhythmical structure without taking from one
or another its own dominant character, which has already been acquired.
If they are to blend in one common effect, each must renounce its own
particular effect--in other words, become diminished. Among the things
most susceptible of rhythm, Language is the foundation of every art
that aspires to perfection. Do you think that language is given its
full value in the Wagnerian drama? Do you not think that the musical
conception itself often loses some of its primitive purity by being
made to depend on matters outside the realm of music? Wagner himself
certainly realizes this weakness, and shows it when he approaches
a friend in Bayreuth, covering his eyes with his hand, that he may
abandon his sense of hearing entirely to the virtue of the pure sound
of the voice."
"This is all new to me," said Glauro, "yet it rejoices and intoxicates
me as we rejoice when we hear something that has been long foreseen and
felt by presentiment. Then, as I understand, you will not superpose
the three rhythmic arts, but will present them each in its single
manifestation, yet all linked by a sovereign idea, and raised to the
supreme degree by their own significant energy?"
"Ah, Daniele! how can I give you any idea of the work that lives within
me?" Stelio exclaimed. "The words you use in trying to formulate my
meaning are hard and mechanical."
They stood at the foot of the Rialto steps. The gale swept over them;
the Grand Canal, dark in the shadow of the palaces, seemed to bend like
a river hastening to a cataract.
"We cannot remain here," said Glauro, leaning against a door; "the wind
will blow us down."
"Go on; I will overtake you. Only a moment," cried the master,
covering his eyes with his hand, and concentrating his soul upon sound
alone.
Formidable was the voice of the tempest, in the midst of the immobility
of centuries, turned to stone. Its unaccompanied song, its hopeless,
wailing lamentation, was raised in memory of the multitudes that
had become ashes, the scattered pageants, the fallen grandeur, the
innumerable days of birth and of death--things of an age without name
or form. All the melancholy of the world rushed in the wind over that
eager, listening soul.
"Ah! I have seized you!" Stelio cried suddenly, with triumphant joy.
The complete and perfect line of the melody had been revealed to him,
now belonged to him, and would become immortal in his spirit and in the
world.
"Daniele! I have found it!"
He raised his eyes, and saw the first stars in the adamantine sky.
He feared to lose the precious treasure he had found. Near, a column
he now saw a man with a flickering light at the end of a long pole,
and heard the slight sound of the lighting of a lantern. Swiftly and
eagerly he jotted down in his notebook, under the lamplight, the notes
of the melodic theme, compressing into five lines the message of the
elements.
"O day of marvels!" said Daniele Glauro, on seeing Stelio on the
steps, as light and agile as if he had robbed the air of some of its
elasticity. "May Nature cherish you forever, my brother!"
"Come, come!" said Stelio, taking him by the arm and urging him on with
boyish gayety. "I must run!"
He drew him through the narrow streets leading to San Giovanni
Elemosinario.
"What you told me one day, Daniele, is quite true. I mean that the
voice of things is essentially different from their sound," said
Stelio. "The sound of the wind may represent the moans of a frightened
throng, the howling of wild animals, the falling of cataracts, the
rustle of waving banners, or mockery, threats, and despair. But the
voice of the wind is the synthesis of all these sounds: that is the
voice which sings and tells of the terrible travail of time, the
cruelty of human destiny, the eternal warfare for an illusion eternally
born anew."
"And have you never thought that the essence of music does not lie in
the sounds alone?" asked the mystic doctor. "It often dwells in the
silence that precedes and follows sound. Rhythm makes itself felt in
these intervals of silence. Rhythm is the very heart of music, but its
pulsation is inaudible except during the intervals between sounds."
This metaphysical law confirmed Stelio in his belief of the justness of
his own intuition.
"Imagine," said he, "an interval between two scenic symphonies wherein
all the _motifs_ concur in expressing the inmost essence of the
characters that are struggling in the drama as well as in revealing
the inmost depths of the action, as, for instance, in Beethoven's
great prelude in _Leonora_, or the prelude to _Coriolanus_. That
musical silence, pulsating with rhythm, is like the mysterious living
atmosphere where alone can appear words of pure poetry. Thus the
personages seem to emerge from the symphonic sea as if from the
hidden truth that works within them; their spoken words will possess
an extraordinary resonance in that rhythmic silence, will reach the
farthest limit of verbal power, because it will be animated by a
continuous aspiration to song that cannot be appeased except by the
melody which must rise again from the orchestra, at the close of the
tragic episode. Do you understand me?"
"Then you place the episode between two symphonies, which prepare it
and also terminate it, because music is the beginning and the end of
human utterance."
"Thus I bring nearer to the spectator the personages of the drama.
Do you recall the figure employed by Schiller in the ode he wrote in
honor of Goethe's translation of _Mahomet_, to signify that, on the
stage, only the ideal world seems real. The chariot of Thespis, like
the barque of Acheron, is so slight that it can carry only shadows or
the images of human beings. On the stage commonly known, these images
are so unreal that any contact with them seems as impossible as would
be contact with mental forms. They are distant and strange, but in
making them appear in the rhythmic silence, accompanied by music to
the threshold of the visible world, I shall be able to bring them
marvelously close, because I shall illumine the most secret depths
of the will that produces them. I shall reveal, in short, the images
painted on the veil and that which happens beyond the veil. Do you
understand?"
They were now entering the Campo di San Cassiano lonely and deserted
on the banks of the gray stream; their voices and their footsteps
echoed there as if in an amphitheater of stone, distinct above the
sound of the Grand Canal, which made a rushing noise like that of
a river. A purple mist rose from the fever-laden waters, spreading
like a poisonous breath. Death seemed to have reigned there a long
time. The shutter of a high window beat in the wind against the wall,
grinding on its hinges, a sign of abandonment and ruin. But, in the
mind of the Inspirer, all these appearances produced extraordinary
transfigurations. He saw again the wild and solitary spot near the
tomb of Mycenæ. Myrtles flourished between the rugged rocks and the
cyclopic ruins. Beside a rock lay the rigid, pure body of the Victim.
In the death-like silence he could hear the murmuring water and the
intermittent breath of the breeze among the myrtles.
"It was in an august place," said he, "that I had the first vision of
my new work--at Mycenæ, under the gateway of the Lions, while I was
re-reading _Orestes_. Land of fire, country of thirst and delirium,
birthplace of Clytemnestra and of the Hydra, earth forever sterile by
the horror of the most tragic destiny that ever has overtaken a human
race. Have you ever thought about that barbarian explorer who, after
passing the greater part of his existence among his drugs behind a
counter, undertook to find the tombs of the Atridæ among the ruins
of Mycenæ, and who one day (the sixth anniversary of the event is of
recent date) beheld the greatest and strangest vision ever offered to
mortal eyes? Have you ever pictured to yourself that fat Schliemann at
the moment when he discovered the most dazzling treasure ever held by
Death in the dark obscurity of the earth for centuries--for thousands
of years? Have you ever fancied that this superhuman and terrible
spectacle might have been revealed to some one else--to a youthful and
fervent spirit, to a poet, a life-giver, to you, to me, perhaps? Then
the fever, the frenzy, the madness--Imagine!"
He was on fire and vibrating, suddenly swept away by his own fancy as
by a whirlwind. His seer's eyes sparkled with the gleam of the buried
treasure. Creative force flowed to his brain as blood to his heart.
He was an actor in his own drama, with accent and movement expressing
transcendent beauty and passion, surpassing the power of the spoken
word, the limit of the letter. And his brother spirit hung upon his
speech, trembling before the sudden splendor that proved to him the
truth of his own divinations.
"Imagine! Imagine that the earth in which you explore is baleful--it
must still exhale the miasma of monstrous wickedness. The curse upon
the Atridæ was so terrific that some vestige of it must still have
remained to be feared in the dust that they once trod upon. You are
bewitched: the dead you seek and cannot find are reincarnated in you,
and breathe in your body with the terrible breath with which Æschylus
infused them, huge and sanguinary as they appear in the _Orestes_,
pierced perpetually with the darts and flames of their destiny.
Hereafter, all the ideal life with which you have nourished yourself
must assume the form and impress of reality. And still you go on in
this land of thirst, at the foot of the bare mountain, enclosed within
the fascination of the dead city, always delving in the earth, with
those terrifying phantoms ever before your eyes in the burning dust. At
each thrust of the spade you tremble to the very marrow, eager to see
the face of one of the Atridæ, still perfect, but with the signs still
visible of the violence he suffered, the inhuman carnage. And behold
it! the gold, the gold, the bodies, piles of gold, bodies covered with
gold"--
The Atridæ princes seemed to be lying there on the stones, a miracle
evoked in the obscurity of the pathway. And the one who had evoked
these images, as well as his listener, shuddered at the same instant.
"A succession of tombs: fifteen bodies, intact, one lying beside
another, on a golden bed, with masks of gold on their faces, their
brows crowned with gold and breasts bound with gold; and covering
them, on their forms, at their sides, at their feet, everywhere, a
prodigality of golden things, countless as the leaves falling in a
fairy forest. Do you see? Do you see?"
"Yes, yes, I see! I see!"
"For a second, that man's soul has traversed hundreds and thousands of
years, has breathed the terrible legend, has palpitated in the horror
of the ancient carnage. For a second, his soul has lived that antique
life of violence. The slain ones were all there: Agamemnon, Eurymedon,
Cassandra, and the royal escort, and for a moment they lay under
his eyes, motionless. Then--they vanished into nothingness--do you
see?--like a vapor exhaled, like scattered foam, like flying dust, like
I know not what frail and fleeting thing--engulfed in the same fatal
silence that surrounded their radiant immobility. And there was only
a handful of dust and a mass of gold!" Daniele Glauro, deeply moved,
seized his friend's hand; and the Inspirer read in his faithful eyes
the mute flame of enthusiasm consecrated to the great work.
They stopped near a door in the dark wall. A mysterious sense of
distance possessed the mind of each, as if their souls were lost in the
mists of time; and they fancied that behind that door an ancient people
lived enthralled by a changeless Destiny. The sound of a rocking cradle
came from the house, and the croon of a soft lullaby to a wailing
child. The stars glowed in the narrow glimpse of sky; against the walls
the sea was moaning. And in another spot a hero's heart suffered while
waiting for death.
"Life!" said Stelio, resuming his walk, and drawing Daniele with him.
"Here, at this moment, all that trembles, weeps, hopes, breathes, and
raves in the immensity of life, gathers itself in your mind, condensing
itself there with a sublimation so rapid that you believe yourself able
to express it all in a single word. But what word? What word? Do you
know it? Who will ever know it well enough to speak it?"
Again he was distressed at his inability to embrace all and express all.
"Have you ever seen, at certain times, the whole universe standing
before you, as distinct as a human head? I have, a thousand times. Ah,
to cut it off, like him that cut off Medusa's head, at one stroke, and
hold it up before the multitude so that it never should be forgotten!
Have you ever thought that a great tragedy might resemble the attitude
of Perseus? I tell you this: I should like to take the bronze of
Benvenuto Cellini from the Loggia of Orcagna and place it in the
_foyer_ of the new theater as an admonition. But who will give to a
poet the sword of Hermes and the mirror of Athena?
"Perseus!" continued the Inspirer. "In the ravine, below the citadel
of Mycenæ, is a fountain called Perseia, and it is the only living
thing in that place where all is parched and dead. Men are attracted
toward it as to a spring of life in that region where the melancholy
whiteness of the dried river-beds is visible late in the twilight. All
human thirst ardently approaches that freshness. And throughout my
work the music of that stream shall be heard--the water, the melody
of the water. I have found it! In that, the pure element, shall be
accomplished the pure Act which is the aim of the new tragedy. On its
clear, cold waters shall sleep the virgin destined to die 'deprived
of nuptials,' like Antigone. Do you understand? The pure Act marks
the defeat of antique Destiny. The new soul suddenly breaks the iron
band that held it, with a determination born of madness, of a lucid
delirium that resembles ecstasy, or a deeper, clearer vision of Nature.
In the orchestra, the final ode is of the salvation and liberation of
man, obtained through pain and sacrifice. The monstrous Fate is there,
vanquished, near the tombs of the Atridæ, before the very corpses of
the victims. Do you understand? He that frees himself by means of the
pure Act, the brother that kills his sister to save her soul from the
horror that was about to seize her, has himself in reality seen the
face of Agamemnon!"
The fascination of the funereal gold had taken fresh hold upon his
fancy; the evidence of his internal vision gave him a look as of one
under a spell of hallucination.
"One of the corpses surpasses all the others in height and in majesty:
his brow is crowned with a golden diadem, and he wears a cuirass,
shoulder-plates, and a girdle of gold, surrounded with swords, lances,
daggers, cups, and countless golden discs scattered like petals over
his body, more venerable than a demigod. The man bends over this body,
while it is vanishing in the light before his very eyes, and lifts
the heavy mask. Ah, does he not then see the face of Agamemnon? Is
not this corpse perhaps the King of kings? The mouth and the eyes
are open. Do you remember that passage of Homer's? 'As I lay dying,
I raised my hands to my sword; but the woman with dog-like eyes went
away, and would not close my eyes and my mouth, at the moment when I
was about to descend to the abode of Hades.' Do you remember? Well,
the mouth of this corpse is open, and its eyes are open. He has a high
brow, ornamented with a single large golden leaf; the nose is long and
straight, the chin oval"--
The magician paused an instant, his eyes fixed and dilated. He was a
seer. All about him disappeared, and his fiction remained the only
reality. Daniele trembled, for he too was able to see through the eyes
of the other.
"Ah, the white spot on the shoulder, too! He has raised the armor. The
spot, the spot! the hereditary mark of the race of Pelops 'of the ivory
shoulder'! Is he not indeed the King of kings?"
The rapid, half-broken utterances of the seer were like a succession of
flashes whereby he himself was dazzled. 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.
How had he been able to discover that spot on Agamemnon's shoulder?
From what abyss of his memory had suddenly surged up that detail so
strange, yet precise and decisive as a mark that affords recognition of
a body dead since the preceding day?
"You were there!" exclaimed Daniele, intoxicated. "It was you yourself
that lifted that armor and that mask! If you have really seen what you
have just described, you are no longer a man!"
"I have seen! I have seen!"
Again he became an actor in his own drama, and it was with a violent
palpitation that he heard, from the lips of a living person, the words
of the drama--the very words that were to be spoken in the episode
itself: "If you have really seen what you have described, you are no
longer a man." From that instant, the explorer of sepulchers took on
the aspect of a noble hero fighting against the ancient destiny that
had risen from the ashes of the Atridæ to contaminate and overthrow him.
"Not with impunity," he continued, "does a man open tombs and gaze
upon the faces of the dead--and what dead! He lives alone with his
sister, the sweetest creature that ever has breathed the air of
earth--alone with her, in the dwelling full of light and silence, as in
a prayer, a consecration. Now, imagine one that unconsciously drinks
poison, a philter, I know not what impure thing, which poisons his
blood and corrupts his thoughts--suddenly, while his soul is at peace.
Imagine this terrible evil, this vengeance of the dead! He is suddenly
seized by an unholy passion; he becomes the miserable, trembling prey
of a monster; he fights a desperate, secret fight, without truce,
without mercy, day and night, every hour, every moment--all the more
atrocious the more the innocent pity of the poor creature inclines
toward his evil. How can this man be freed? From the very beginning
of the tragedy, as soon as the innocent one begins to speak, it is
evident that she is destined to die. And all that is said and done in
the episodes, all that is expressed by the music, and by the songs and
dances of the interludes, serves to lead her slowly but inexorably
toward death. She is the equal of Antigone. In her brief, tragic
hour, she passes accompanied by the light of hope and the shadow of
presentiment; she passes accompanied by songs and tears, by the noble
love that offers joy, by the mad love that engenders mourning; and
she never pauses except to fall asleep on the cold, clear waters of
the fountain that called to her from the solitudes with its continual
murmur. Hardly has her brother killed her when he receives from her,
through death, the gift of his redemption. 'All stain,' he cries,
'is effaced from my soul! I have become wholly pure! All the sanctity
of my former love has reëntered my soul like a torrent of light. Were
she here now, all my thoughts of her would be pure as lilies. Were she
to rise again, she could walk over my heart as over immaculate snow.
Now she is perfect; now she can be adored as a divinity. I will lay
her in the deepest of my sepulchers, and around her I will lay all my
treasures.' Thus, the act of death, into which he has been drawn by
his lucid madness, becomes an act of purification and of liberation,
marking the defeat of ancient Destiny. Emerging from the symphonic
ocean, the ode shall sing of the victory of man, shall illumine the
darkness of the catastrophe with an unknown light, and shall elevate to
the summit of music the first word of the Drama renewed."
"The gesture of Perseus!" exclaimed Daniele, still under the spell of
exaltation. "At the end of the tragedy you cut off the head of the
Moira, and show it to the multitude, ever young and ever-new, which
shall bring the spectacle to a close amid great cries of enthusiasm."
Both saw, as in a dream, the marble theater on the Janiculum, the
multitude swayed by the idea of truth and of beauty, the illimitable
starry Roman sky; they saw the frenzied multitude descending the slope
of the hill, bearing in their rude hearts the confused revelation of
poetry; they heard the clamor prolonging itself in the darkness of the
immortal city.
"And now good-by, Daniele," said the master, reminded of his need to
hasten, as if some one waited for him or called him.
The eyes of the Tragic Muse remained immovable in the depths of his
dream, sightless, petrified in the divine blindness of statues.
"Where are you going?"
"To the Palazzo Capello."
"Does La Foscarina know the thread of your work?"
"Vaguely."
"And what figure shall you give to her?"
"She shall be blind, having already passed into another world, and gone
beyond the life of this. She shall see that which others do not see.
Her feet shall be in the shadows, but her head in the light of eternal
truth. The contrasts of the tragic hour shall reverberate in the
darkness of her soul, multiplying themselves there like thunder among
the deep circles of solitary rocks. Like Tiresias, she shall comprehend
everything, permitted or forbidden, celestial and terrestrial, and she
shall know 'how hard it is to know when knowing is useless.' Ah, I
shall put marvelous words into her mouth, and silences that shall give
birth to infinite beauties."
"On the stage," said Glauro, "whether she speaks or is silent, her
power is almost more than human. She reveals to us the existence in
our own hearts of the most secret evil and the most hidden hopes;
by her enchantment, our past becomes present; and, by the virtue of
her aspect, we recognize ourselves in the trials suffered by others
throughout time, as if the soul she reveals to us were our own."
They stopped on the Ponte Savio. Stelio was silent, under a flood of
love and melancholy, which had suddenly come upon him.
"I wish I had not to leave you to-night, Stelio," confessed the
faithful brother, who was also invaded by a peculiar melancholy. "When
I am with you, I breathe more freely, and live a swifter life."
Stelio was silent. The wind had abated somewhat. The brown church and
the square tower of naked brick seemed to be praying silently to the
stars.
"Do you know the green column that stands in San Giacomo dall' Orio?"
Daniele resumed, intending to hold his friend a little longer, because
he dreaded to say farewell. "What sublimity! It is like the fossilized
condensation of an immense green forest. In following its innumerable
veins, the eye travels in a dream through sylvan mysteries. When I look
at it I fancy myself visiting Sila and Ercinna."
Stelio knew the column. One day Perdita had leaned long against the
precious shaft, contemplating the magic frieze of gold that curves
above the canvas of Bassano, obscuring it.
"To dream--always to dream," he sighed, with a return of that bitter
impatience which had suggested sneering words to him when he had come
on the boat from the Lido. "To live on relics! Think of Dandolo, who
overthrew the column and an empire at the same time, and who preferred
to remain doge when he might have become emperor. Perhaps he lived more
than you, who wander in fancy through forests when you examine the
marble he pillaged. Good-by, Daniele."
"I shall stop at the Palazzo Vendramin for news," said the faithful
brother.
These words recalled afresh the thought of the great ailing heart, the
weight of the hero in their arms, the terrible removal.
"He has conquered--he can die," said Stelio.