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WISDOM, WIT, AND PATHOS
OF
OUIDA.
WISDOM, WIT, AND PATHOS
_SELECTED FROM THE WORKS_
OF
OUIDA
BY F. SYDNEY MORRIS
PHILADELPHIA
J. B. LIPPINCOTT & CO.
1884
CONTENTS.
_SELECTIONS FROM_--
PAGE
ARIADNE 1
CHANDOS 32
FOLLE-FARINE 48
IDALIA 97
A VILLAGE COMMUNE 106
PUCK 115
TWO LITTLE WOODEN SHOES 158
FAME 177
MOTHS 182, 354
IN A WINTER CITY 189
A LEAF IN THE STORM 205
A DOG OF FLANDERS 209
A BRANCH OF LILAC 216
SIGNA 220
TRICOTRIN 264
A PROVENCE ROSE 288
PIPISTRELLO 291
HELD IN BONDAGE 294
PASCARÈL 296
IN MAREMMA 335
UNDER TWO FLAGS 363
STRATHMORE 417
FRIENDSHIP 427
WANDA 452
_ARIADNE._
One grows to love the Roman fountains as sea-born men the sea. Go where
you will there is the water; whether it foams by Trevi, where the green
moss grows in it like ocean weed about the feet of the ocean god, or
whether it rushes reddened by the evening light, from the mouth of an
old lion that once saw Cleopatra; whether it leaps high in air, trying
to reach the gold cross on St. Peter's or pours its triple cascade over
the Pauline granite; whether it spouts out of a great barrel in a wall
in old Trastevere, or throws up into the air a gossamer as fine as
Arachne's web in a green garden way where the lizards run, or in a
crowded corner where the fruit-sellers sit against the wall;--in all its
shapes one grows to love the water that fills Rome with an unchanging
melody all through the year.
* * *
And indeed I do believe all things and all traditions. History is like
that old stag that Charles of France found out hunting in the woods
once, with the bronze collar round its neck on which was written, "Cæsar
mihi hoc donavit." How one's fancy loves to linger about that old stag,
and what a crowd of mighty shades come thronging at the very thought of
him! How wonderful it is to think of--that quiet grey beast leading his
lovely life under the shadows of the woods, with his hinds and their
fawns about him, whilst Cæsar after Cæsar fell and generation on
generation passed away and perished! But the sciolist taps you on the
arm. "Deer average fifty years of life; it was some mere court trick of
course--how easy to have such a collar made!" Well, what have we gained?
The stag was better than the sciolist.
* * *
Life costs but little on these sunny, silent shores; four walls of loose
stones, a roof of furze and brambles, a fare of fish and fruit and
millet-bread, a fire of driftwood easily gathered--and all is told. For
a feast pluck the violet cactus; for a holiday push the old red boat to
sea, and set the brown sail square against the sun--nothing can be
cheaper, perhaps few things can be better.
To feel the western breezes blow over that sapphire sea, laden with the
fragrance of a score of blossoming isles. To lie under the hollow rocks,
where centuries before the fisher folk put up that painted tablet to the
dear Madonna, for all poor shipwrecked souls. To climb the high hills
through the tangle of myrtle and tamarisk, and the tufted rosemary, with
the kids bleating above upon some unseen height. To watch the soft night
close in, and the warning lights shine out over shoals and sunken rocks,
and the moon hang low and golden in the blue dusk at the end there under
the arch of the boughs. To spend long hours in the cool, fresh, break of
day, drifting with the tide, and leaping with bare free limbs into the
waves, and lying outstretched upon them, glancing down to the depths
below, where silvery fish are gliding and coral branches are growing,
and pink shells are floating like rose-leaves, five fathoms low and
more. Oh! a good life, and none better, abroad in the winds and weather,
as Nature meant that every living thing should be, only, alas, the
devil put it into the mind of man to build cities! A good life for the
soul and the body: and from it this sea-born Joy came to seek the
Ghetto!
* * *
With a visible and physical ill one can deal; one can thrust a knife
into a man at need, one can give a woman money for bread or masses, one
can run for medicine or a priest. But for a creature with a face like
Ariadnê's, who had believed in the old gods and found them fables, who
had sought for the old altars and found them ruins, who had dreamed of
Imperial Rome and found the Ghetto--for such a sorrow as this, what
could one do?
* * *
Some said I might have been a learned man, had I taken more pains. But I
think it was only their kindness. I have that twist in my brain, which
is the curse of my countrymen--a sort of devilish quickness at doing
well, that prevents us ever doing best; just the same sort of thing that
makes our goatherds rhyme perfect sonnets, and keeps them dunces before
the alphabet.
* * *
If our beloved Leopardi, instead of bemoaning his fate in his despair
and sickening of his narrow home, had tried to see how many fair strange
things there lay at his house door, had tried to care for the troubles
of the men that hung the nets on the trees, and the innocent woes of the
girl that carried the grass to the cow, and the obscure martyrdom of
maternity and widowhood that the old woman had gone through who sat
spinning on the top of the stairs, he would have found that his little
borgo that he hated so for its dulness had all the comedies and
tragedies of life lying under the sound of its tolling bells. He would
not have been less sorrowful, for the greater the soul the sadder it is
for the unutterable waste, the unending pain of life. But he would never
have been dull: he would never have despised, and despising missed, the
stories and the poems that were round him in the millet fields and the
olive orchards. There is only one lamp which we can carry in our hand,
and which will burn through the darkest night, and make the light of a
home for us in a desert place: it is sympathy with everything that
breathes.
* * *
Into other lands I wandered, then, and sought full half the world. When
one wants but little, and has a useful tongue, and knows how to be merry
with the young folk, and sorrowful with the old, and can take the fair
weather with the foul, and wear one's philosophy like an easy boot,
treading with it on no man's toe, and no dog's tail; why, if one be of
this sort, I say, one is, in a great manner, independent of fortune; and
the very little that one needs one can usually obtain. Many years I
strayed about, seeing many cities and many minds, like Odysseus; being
no saint, but, at the same time, being no thief and no liar.
* * *
Art was dear to me. Wandering through many lands, I had come to know the
charm of quiet cloisters; the delight of a strange, rare volume; the
interest of a quaint bit of pottery; the unutterable loveliness of some
perfect painter's vision, making a glory in some dusky, world-forgotten
church: and so my life was full of gladness here in Rome, where the
ass's hoof ringing on a stone may show you that Vitruvius was right,
where you had doubted him; or the sun shining down upon a cabbage
garden, or a coppersmith's shreds of metal, may gleam on a signet ring
of the Flavian women, or a broken vase that may have served vile Tullia
for drink.
* * *
Art is, after nature, the only consolation that one has at all for
living.
* * *
I have been all my life blown on by all sorts of weather, and I know
there is nothing so good as the sun and the wind for driving ill-nature
and selfishness out of one.
* * *
Anything in the open air is always well; it is because men now-a-days
shut themselves up so much in rooms and pen themselves in stifling
styes, where never the wind comes or the clouds are looked at, that
puling discontent and plague-struck envy are the note of all modern
politics and philosophies. The open air breeds Leonidas, the factory
room Felix Pyat.
* * *
I lit my pipe. A pipe is a pocket philosopher, a truer one than
Socrates. For it never asks questions. Socrates must have been very
tiresome when one thinks of it.
* * *
I have had some skill in managing the minds of crowds; it is a mere
knack, like any other; it belongs to no particular character or culture.
Arnold of Brescia had it, and so had Masaniello. Lamartine had it, and
so had Jack Cade.
* * *
It is of use to have a reputation for queerness; it gains one many
solitary moments of peace.
* * *
Ersilia was a good soul, and full of kindliness; but charity is a flower
not naturally of earthly growth, and it needs manuring with a promise of
profit.
* * *
The soul of the poet is like a mirror of an astrologer: it bears the
reflection of the past and of the future, and can show the secrets of
men and gods; but all the same it is dimmed by the breath of those who
stand by and gaze into it.
* * *
"You are not unhappy now?" I said to her in farewell.
She looked at me with a smile.
"You have given me hope; and I am in Rome, and I am young."
She was right. Rome may be only a ruin, and Hope but another name for
deception and disappointment; but Youth is supreme happiness in itself,
because all possibilities lie in it, and nothing in it is as yet
irrevocable.
* * *
There never was an Æneas; there never was a Numa; well, what the better
are we? We only lose the Trojan ship gliding into Tiber's mouth, when
the woodland thickets that bloomed by Ostia were reddening with the
first warmth of the day's sun; we only lose the Sabine lover going by
the Sacred Way at night, and sweet Egeria weeping in the woods of Nemi;
and are--by their loss--how much the poorer!
Perhaps all these things never were.
The little stone of truth, rolling through the many ages of the world,
has gathered and grown grey with the thick mosses of romance and
superstition. But tradition must always have that little stone of truth
as its kernel; and perhaps he who rejects all, is likelier to be wrong
than even foolish folk like myself who love to believe all, and who
tread the new paths, thinking ever of the ancient stories.
* * *
There can be hardly any life more lovely upon earth than that of a young
student of art in Rome. With the morning, to rise to the sound of
countless bells and of innumerable streams, and see the silver lines of
the snow new fallen on the mountains against the deep rose of the dawn,
and the shadows of the night steal away softly from off the city,
releasing, one by one, dome and spire, and cupola and roof, till all the
wide white wonder of the place discloses itself under the broad
brightness of full day; to go down into the dark cool streets, with the
pigeons fluttering in the fountains, and the sounds of the morning
chants coming from many a church door and convent window, and little
scholars and singing children going by with white clothes on, or scarlet
robes, as though walking forth from the canvas of Botticelli or
Garofalo; to eat frugally, sitting close by some shop of flowers and
birds, and watching all the while the humours and the pageants of the
streets by quaint corners, rich with sculptures of the Renaissance, and
spanned by arches of architects that builded for Agrippa, under grated
windows with arms of Frangipanni or Colonna, and pillars that
Apollodorus raised; to go into the great courts of palaces, murmurous
with the fall of water, and fresh with green leaves and golden fruit,
that rob the colossal statues of their gloom and gauntness, and thence
into the vast chambers where the greatest dreams that men have ever had,
are written on panel and on canvas, and the immensity and the silence of
them all are beautiful and eloquent with dead men's legacies to the
living, where the Hours and the Seasons frolic beside the Maries at the
Sepulchre, and Adonis bares his lovely limbs, in nowise ashamed because
S. Jerome and S. Mark are there; to study and muse, and wonder and be
still, and be full of the peace which passes all understanding, because
the earth is lovely as Adonis is, and life is yet unspent; to come out
of the sacred light, half golden, and half dusky, and full of many
blended colours, where the marbles and the pictures live, sole dwellers
in the deserted dwellings of princes; to come out where the oranges are
all aglow in the sunshine, and the red camellias are pushing against the
hoary head of the old stone Hermes, and to go down the width of the
mighty steps into the gay piazza, alive with bells tolling, and crowds
laughing, and drums abeat, and the flutter of carnival banners in the
wind; and to get away from it all with a full heart, and ascend to see
the sun set from the terrace of the Medici, or the Pamfili, or the
Borghese woods, and watch the flame-like clouds stream homewards behind
S. Peter's, and the pines of Monte Mario grow black against the west,
till the pale green of evening spreads itself above them, and the stars
arise; and then, with a prayer--be your faith what it will--a prayer to
the Unknown God, to go down again through the violet-scented air and the
dreamful twilight, and so, with unspeakable thankfulness, simply because
you live, and this is Rome--so homeward.
* * *
The strong instinctive veracity in her weighed the measure of her days,
and gave them their right name. She was content, her life was full of
the sweetness and strength of the arts, and of the peace of noble
occupation and endeavour. But some true instinct in her taught her that
this is peace, but is not more than peace. Happiness comes but from the
beating of one heart upon another.
* * *
There was a high wall near, covered with peach-trees, and topped with
wistaria and valerian, and the handsome wild caperplant; and against the
wall stood rows of tall golden sunflowers late in their blooming; the
sun they seldom could see for the wall, and it was pathetic always to
me, as the day wore on, to watch the poor stately amber heads turn
straining to greet their god, and only meeting the stones and the
cobwebs, and the peach-leaves of their inexorable barrier.
They were so like us!--straining after the light, and only finding
bricks and gossamer and wasps'-nests! But the sunflowers never made
mistakes as we do: they never took the broken edge of a glass bottle or
the glimmer of a stable lanthorn for the glory of Helios, and comforted
themselves with it--as we can do.
* * *
Dear, where we love much we always forgive, because we ourselves are
nothing, and what we love is all.
* * *
There is something in the silence of an empty room that sometimes has a
terrible eloquence: it is like the look of coming death in the eyes of a
dumb animal; it beggars words and makes them needless.
* * *
When you have said to yourself that you will kill any one, the world
only seems to hold yourself and him, and God--who will see the justice
done.
* * *
What is it that love does to a woman?--without it she only sleeps; with
it, alone, she lives.
* * *
A great love is an absolute isolation, and an absolute absorption.
Nothing lives or moves or breathes, save one life: for one life alone
the sun rises and sets, the seasons revolve, the clouds bear rain, and
the stars ride on high; the multitudes around cease to exist, or seem
but ghostly shades; of all the sounds of earth there is but one voice
audible; all past ages have been but the herald of one soul; all
eternity can be but its heritage alone.
* * *
Is Nature kind or cruel? Who can tell?
The cyclone comes, or the earthquake; the great wave rises and swallows
the cities and the villages, and goes back whence it came; the earth
yawns, and devours the pretty towns and the sleeping children, the
gardens where the lovers were sitting, and the churches where women
prayed, and then the morass dries up and the gulf unites again. Men
build afresh, and the grass grows, and the trees, and all the flowering
seasons come back as of old. But the dead are dead: nothing changes
that!
As it is with the earth, so it is with our life; our own poor, short,
little life, that is all we can really call our own.
Calamities shatter, and despair engulfs it; and yet after a time the
chasm seems to close; the storm wave seems to roll back; the leaves and
the grass return; and we make new dwellings. That is, the daily ways of
living are resumed, and the common tricks of our speech and act are as
they used to be before disaster came upon us. Then wise people say, he
or she has "got over it." Alas, alas! the drowned children will not come
back to us; the love that was struck down, the prayer that was silenced,
the altar that was ruined, the garden that was ravished, they are all
gone for ever,--for ever, for ever! Yet we live; because grief does not
always kill, and often does not speak.
* * *
I crept through the myrtles downward, away from the house where the
statue lay shattered. The earliest of the nightingales of the year was
beginning her lay in some leafy covert hard by, but never would he hear
music in their piping again; never, never: any more than I should hear
the song of the Faun in the fountain.
For the song that we hear with our ears is only the song that is sung in
our hearts.
And his heart, I knew, would be for ever empty and silent, like a temple
that has been burned with fire, and left standing, pitiful and terrible,
in mockery of a lost religion, and of a forsaken god.
* * *
Men and women, losing the thing they love, lose much, but the artist
loses far more; for him are slaughtered all the children of his dreams,
and from him are driven all the fair companions of his solitude.
* * *
Love art alone, forsaking all other loves, and she will make you happy,
with a happiness that shall defy the seasons and the sorrows of time,
the pains of the vulgar and the changes of fortune, and be with you day
and night, a light that is never dim. But mingle with it any human
love--and art will look for ever at you with the eyes of Christ when he
looked at the faithless follower as the cock crew.
* * *
And, indeed, there are always the poor: the vast throngs born century
after century, only to know the pangs of life and of death, and nothing
more. Methinks that human life is, after all, but like a human body,
with a fair and smiling face, but all the limbs ulcered and cramped and
racked with pain. No surgery of statecraft has ever known how to keep
the fair head erect, yet give the trunk and the limbs health.
* * *
For in a great love there is a self-sustaining strength by which it
lives, deprived of everything, as there are plants that live upon our
barren ruins burned by the sun, and parched and shelterless, yet ever
lifting green leaves to the light.
* * *
And indeed after all there is nothing more cruel than the impotence of
genius to hold and keep those commonest joys and mere natural affections
which dullards and worse than dullards rejoice in at their pleasure; the
common human things, whose loss makes the great possessions of its
imperial powers all valueless and vain as harps unstrung, or as lutes
that are broken.
* * *
"This world of our own immediate day is weak and weary, because it is no
longer young; yet it possesses one noble attribute--it has an acute and
almost universal sympathy, which does indeed often degenerate into a
false and illogical sentiment, yet serves to redeem an age of egotism.
We have escaped both the gem-like hardness of the Pagan, and the
narrowing selfishness of the Christian and the Israelite. We are sick
for the woe of creation, and we wonder why such woe is ours, and why it
is entailed on the innocent dumb beasts, that perish in millions for us,
unpitied, day and night. Rome had no altar to Pity: it is the one God
that we own. When that pity in us for all things is perfected, perhaps
we shall have reached a religion of sympathy that will be purer than any
religion the world has yet seen, and more productive. 'Save my country!'
cried the Pagan to his deities. 'Save my soul!' cries the Christian at
his altars. We, who are without a god, murmur to the great unknown
forces of Nature: 'Let me save others some little portion of this pain
entailed on all simple and guileless things, that are forced to live,
without any fault of their own at their birth, or any will of their own
in their begetting.'"
* * *
How should we have great Art in our day? We have no faith. Belief of
some sort is the lifeblood of Art. When Athene and Zeus ceased to excite
any veneration in the minds of men, sculpture and architecture both lost
their greatness. When the Madonna and her son lost that mystery and
divinity, which for the simple minds of the early painters they
possessed, the soul went out of canvas and of wood. When we carve a
Venus now, she is but a light woman; when we paint a Jesus now, it is
but a little suckling, or a sorrowful prisoner. We want a great
inspiration. We ought to find it in the things that are really
beautiful, but we are not sure enough, perhaps, what is so. What does
dominate us is a passion for nature; for the sea, for the sky, for the
mountain, for the forest, for the evening storm, for the break of day.
Perhaps when we are thoroughly steeped in this we shall reach greatness
once more. But the artificiality of all modern life is against it; so is
its cynicism. Sadness and sarcasm make a great Lucretius as a great
Juvenal, and scorn makes a strong Aristophanes; but they do not make a
Praxiteles and an Apelles; they do not even make a Raffaelle, or a
Flaxman.
Art, if it be anything, is the perpetual uplifting of what is beautiful
in the sight of the multitudes--the perpetual adoration of that
loveliness, material and moral, which men in the haste and the greed of
their lives are everlastingly forgetting: unless it be that it is empty
and useless as a child's reed-pipe when the reed is snapt and the
child's breath spent. Genius is obligation.
* * *
"No woman, I think, ever loved you as this woman does, whom you have
left as I would not leave a dog," said Maryx, and something of his old
ardent eloquence returned to him, and his voice rose and rang clearer as
the courage in him consummated the self-sacrifice that he had set
himself for her sake. "Have you ever thought what you have done? When
you have killed Art in an artist, you have done the cruellest murder
that earth can behold. Other and weaker natures than hers might forget,
but she never. Her fame will be short-lived as that rose, for she sees
but your face, and the world will tire of that, but she will not. She
can dream no more. She can only remember. Do you know what that is to
the artist?--it is to be blind and to weary the world; the world that
has no more pity than you have! You think her consoled because her
genius has not left her: are you a poet and yet do not know that genius
is only a power to suffer more and to remember longer?--nothing else.
You say to yourself that she will have fame, that will beguile her as
the god came to Ariadnê; perhaps; but across that fame, let it become
what it may, there will settle for ever the shadow of the world's
dishonour; it will be for ever poisoned, and cursed, and embittered by
the scorn of fools, and the reproach of women, since by you they have
been given their lashes of nettles, and by you have been given their
by-word to hoot. She will walk in the light of triumph, you say, and
therefore you have not hurt her; do you not see that the fiercer that
light may beat on her, the sharper will the eyes of the world search out
the brand with which you have burned her. For when do men forgive force
in the woman? and when do women ever forgive the woman's greatness? and
when does every cur fail to snarl at the life that is higher than its
fellows? It is by the very genius in her that you have had such power to
wound, such power to blight and to destroy. By so long as her name shall
be spoken, so long will the wrong you have done her cling round it, to
make it meet for reproach. A mere woman dies, and her woe and her shame
die with her, and the earth covers her and them; but such shelter is
denied for ever to the woman who has genius and fame; long after she is
dead she will lie out on common soil, naked and unhouselled, for all the
winds to blow on her and all the carrion birds to tear."
* * *
"No, no. That is accursed! To touch Art without a right to touch it,
merely as a means to find bread--you are too honest to think of such a
thing. Unless Art be adored for its own sake and purely, it must be
left alone. Philip of Macedon had every free man's child taught Art! I
would have every boy and girl taught its sacredness; so, we might in
time get back some accuracy of taste in the public, some
conscientiousness of production in the artist. If artistic creation be
not a joy, an imperious necessity, an instinct of all the forces of the
mind, let the boy go and plough, and the girl go and spin."
* * *
Maybe you turn your back on happiness. I have heard that wise people
often do that. They look up so at the sun and the stars, that they set
their foot on the lark that would have sung to them and woke them
brightly in the morning--and kill it.
* * *
Landscape painting is the only original form of painting that modern
times can boast. It has not exhausted itself yet; it is capable of
infinite development. Ruysdael, Rembrandt, and the rest, did great
scenes, it is true, but it has been left to our painters to put soul
into the sunshine of a cornfield, and suggest a whole life of labour in
a dull evening sky hanging over a brown ploughed upland, with the horses
going tired homewards, and one grey figure trudging after them, to the
hut on the edge of the moor. Of course the modern fancy of making nature
answer to all human moods, like an Eölian harp, is morbid and
exaggerated, but it has a beauty in it, and a certain truth. Our
tenderer souls take refuge in the country now, as they used to do in the
cloister.
* * *
I think if people oftener saw the break of day they would vow oftener to
keep that dawning day holy, and would not so often let its fair hours
drift away with nothing done that were not best left undone.
* * *
We are the sons of our Time: it is not for us to slay our mother. Let us
cover her dishonour if we see it, lest we should provoke the Erinyes.
* * *
How one loves Canova the man, and how one execrates Canova the artist!
Surely never was a great repute achieved by so false a talent and so
perfect a character. One would think he had been born and bred in
Versailles instead of Treviso. He is called a naturalist! Look at his
Graces! He is always Coysevax and Coustou at heart. Never purely
classic, never frankly modern. Louis XIV. would have loved him better
than Bernini.
* * *
If Alexander had believed himself a bubble of gas instead of the son of
a god, he would not have changed the face of the world. Negation cannot
be the parent of heroism, though it will produce an indifference that
counterfeits it not ill, since Petronius died quite as serenely as ever
did the martyrs of the Church.
* * *
Genius cannot escape the taint of its time more than a child the
influence of its begetting. Augustus could have Horace and Ovid; he
could never have had Homer and Milton.
* * *
I do not think with you. Talent takes the mark of its generation; genius
stamps its time with its own impression. Virgil had the sentiment of an
united Italy.
* * *
Tell her that past she thinks so great was only very like the Serapis
which men worshipped so many ages in Theophilis, and which, when the
soldiers struck it down at last, proved itself only a hollow Colossus
with a colony of rats in its head that scampered right and left.
* * *
Falconet struck the death-note of the plastic arts when he said, "Our
marbles have _almost_ colour." That is just where we err. We are
incessantly striving to make Sculpture at once a romance-writer and a
painter, and of course she loses all dignity and does but seem the jay
in borrowed plumes of sable. Conceits are altogether out of keeping with
marble. They suit a cabinet painting or a piece of china. Bernini was
the first to show the disease when he veiled the head of his Nile to
indicate that the source was unknown.
* * *
Whosoever has any sort of fame has lighted a beacon that is always
shining upon him, and can never more return into the cool twilight of
privacy even when most he wishes. It is of these retributions--some call
them compensations--of which life is full.
* * *
Men have forgotten the virile Pyrrhic dance, and have become incapable
of the grace of the Ionian; their only dance is a Danse Macabre, and
they are always hand in hand with a skeleton.
* * *
By night Rome is still a city for the gods; the shadows veil its wounds,
the lustre silvers all its stones; its silence is haunted as no other
silence is; if you have faith, there where the dark gloss of the laurel
brushes the marble as in Agrippa's time, you will see the Immortals
passing by chained with dead leaves and weeping.
* * *
A great love is an absolute isolation and an absolute absorption.
Nothing lives or moves or breathes save one life; for one life alone the
sun rises and sets, the seasons revolve, the clouds bear rain, and the
stars ride on high; the multitudes around cease to exist, or seem but
ghostly shades; of all the sounds of earth there is but one voice
audible; all past ages have been but the herald of one soul; all
eternity can be but its heritage alone.
* * *
Perhaps she was right: for a few hours of joy one owes the debt of
years, and should give a pardon wide and deep as the deep sea.
This Love which she had made in his likeness, the tyrant and compeller
of the world, was to her as the angel which brings perfect dreams and
lets the tired sleeper visit heaven.
* * *
"And when the ship sails away without you?" I said brutally, and
laughing still, because the mention of the schooner had broken the bonds
of the silence that had held me against my will half paralysed, and I
seemed to be again upon the Tyrrhene shore, seeing the white sail fade
against the sky.
"And when that ship sails without you? The day will come. It always
comes. You are my Ariadnê; yet you forget Naxos! Oh, the day will come!
you will kiss the feet of your idol then, and they will not stay; they
will go away, away, away, and they will not tarry for your prayers or
your tears--ay, it is always so. Two love, and one tires. And you know
nothing of that; you who would have love immortal."
And I laughed again, for it seemed to me so horrible, and I was half
mad.
No doubt it would have been kinder had I struck my knife down into her
breast with her words unspoken.
All shade of colour forsook her face; only the soft azure of the veins
remained, and changed to an ashen grey. She shook with a sudden shiver
from head to foot as the name she hated, the name of Ariadnê, fell upon
her ear. The icebolt had fallen in her paradise. A scared and terrible
fear dilated her eyes, that opened wide in the amaze of some suddenly
stricken creature.
"And when he leaves you?" I said, with cruel iteration. "Do you remember
what you told me once of the woman by the marshes by the sea, who had
nothing left by which to remember love save wounds that never healed?
That is all his love will leave you by-and-by."
"Ah, never!"
She spoke rather to herself than me. The terror was fading out of her
eyes, the blood returning to her face; she was in the sweet bewildered
trance of that blind faith which goes wherever it is led, and never asks
the end nor dreads the fate. Her love was deathless: how could she know
that his was mortal?
"You are cruel," she said, with her mouth quivering, but the old, soft,
grand courage in her eyes. "We are together for ever; he has said so.
But even if--if--I only remembered him by wounds, what would that change
in me? He would _have_ loved me. If he would wish to wound me, so he
should. I am his own as the dogs are. Think!--he looked at me, and all
the world grew beautiful; he touched me, and I was happy--I, who never
had been happy in my life. You look at me strangely; you speak harshly.
Why? I used to think, surely you would be glad----"
I gripped my knife and cursed him in my soul.
How could one say to her the thing that he had made her in man's and
woman's sight?
"I thought you would be glad," she said, wistfully, "and I would have
told you long ago--myself. I do not know why you should look so. Perhaps
you are angered because I seemed ungrateful to you and Maryx. Perhaps I
was so. I have no thought--only of him. What he wished, that I did. Even
Rome itself was for me nothing, and the gods--there is only one for me;
and he is with me always. And I think the serpents and the apes are gone
for ever from the tree, and he only hears the nightingales--now. He
tells me so often. Very often. Do you remember I used to dream of
greatness for myself--ah, what does it matter! I want nothing now. When
he looks at me--the gods themselves could give me nothing more."
And the sweet tranquil radiance came back into her eyes, and her
thoughts wandered into the memories of this perfect passion which
possessed her, and she forgot that I was there.
My throat was choking; my eyes felt blind; my tongue clove to my mouth.
I, who knew what that end would be as surely as I knew the day then
shining would sink into the earth, I was dumb, like a brute beast--I,
who had gone to take his life.
Before this love which knew nothing of the laws of mankind, how poor and
trite and trivial looked those laws! What could I dare to say to her of
shame? Ah! if it had only been for any other's sake! But he,--perhaps he
did not lie to her; perhaps he did only hear the nightingales with her
beside him; but how soon their song would pall upon his ear, how soon
would he sigh for the poisonous kiss of the serpents! I knew! I knew!
I stood heart-broken in the warm light that was falling through the
casement and streaming towards her face. What could I say to her? Men
harder and sterner and surer in every way of their own judgment than I
was of mine no doubt would have shaken her with harsh hands from that
dream in which she had wandered to her own destruction.
No doubt a sterner moralist than I would have had no pity, and would
have hurled on her all the weight of those bitter truths of which she
was so ignorant; would have shown her that pit of earthly scorn upon
whose brink she stood; would have torn down all that perfect, credulous
faith of hers, which could have no longer life nor any more lasting root
than the flowering creeper born of a summer's sun, and gorgeous as the
sunset's hues, and clinging about a ruin-mantling decay. Oh yes, no
doubt. But I am only weak, and of little wisdom, and never certain that
the laws and ways of the world are just, and never capable of long
giving pain to any harmless creature, least of all to her.
She seemed to rouse herself with effort to remember I was there, and
turned on me her eyes that were suffused and dreamful with happiness,
like a young child's with sleep.
"I must have seemed so thankless to you: you were so very good to me,"
she said, with that serious sweetness of her rare smile that I had used
to watch for, as an old dog watches for his young owner's--an old dog
that is used to be forgotten, but does not himself forget, though he is
old. "I must have seemed so thankless; but he bade me be silent, and I
have no law but him. After that night when we walked in Nero's fields,
and I went home and learned he loved me;--do you not see I forgot that
there was any one in all the world except himself and me? It must always
be so--at least, so I think. Oh, how true that poem was! Do you
remember how he read it that night after Mozart amongst the roses by the
fire? What use was endless life and all the lore of the spirits and
seers to Sospitra? I was like Sospitra, till he came; always thinking of
the stars and the heavens in the desert all alone, and always wishing
for life eternal, when it is only life _together_ that is worth a wish
or a prayer. But why do you look at me so? Perhaps you do not
understand. Perhaps I am selfish."
This was all that it seemed to her--that I did not understand. Could she
see the tears of blood that welled up in my eyes? Could she see the
blank despair that blinded my sight? Could she see the frozen hand that
I felt clutching at my heart and benumbing it? I did not understand;
that was all that it seemed to her.
She was my Ariadnê, born again to suffer the same fate. I saw the
future: she could not. I knew that he would leave her as surely as the
night succeeds the day. I knew that his passion--if passion, indeed, it
were, and not only the mere common vanity of subjugation and
possession--would pall on him and fade out little by little, as the
stars fade out of the grey morning skies. I knew, but I had not the
courage to tell her.
Men were faithful only to the faithless. But what could she know of
this?
"Thinking of the stars and of the heavens in the desert all alone! Yes!"
I cried; and the bonds of my silence were unloosed, and the words rushed
from my lips like a torrent from between the hills.
"Yes; and never to see the stars any more, and to lose for ever the
peace of the desert--that, you think, is gain! Oh, my dear! what can I
say to you? What can I say? You will not believe if I tell you. I shall
seem a liar and a prophet of false woe. I shall curse when I would
bless. What can I say to you? Athene watched over you. You were of those
who dwell alone, but whom the gods are with. You had the clue and the
sword, and they are nothing to you; you lose them both at his word, at
the mere breath of his lips, and know no god but his idle law, that
shifts as the winds of the sea. And you count that gain? Oh, just
Heaven! Oh, my dear, my heart is broken; how can I tell you? One man
loved you who was great and good, to whom you were a sacred thing, who
would have lifted you up in heaven, and never have touched too roughly a
single hair of your head; and you saw him no more than the very earth
that you trod; he was less to you than the marbles he wrought in; and he
suffers: and what do you care? You have had the greatest wrong that a
woman can have, and you think it the greatest good, the sweetest gift!
He has torn your whole life down as a cruel hand tears a rose in the
morning light, and you rejoice! For what do you know? He will kill your
soul, and still you will kiss his hand. Some women are so. When he
leaves you, what will you do? For you there will only be death. The weak
are consoled, but the strong never. What will you do? What will you do?
You are like a child that culls flowers at the edge of a snake's
breeding-pit. He waked you--yes!--to send you in a deeper sleep, blind
and dumb to everything but his will. Nay, nay! that is not your fault.
Love does not come at will; and of goodness it is not born, nor of
gratitude, nor of any right or reason on the earth. Only that you should
have had no thought of us--no thought at all--only of him by whom your
ruin comes; that seems hard! Ay, it is hard. You stood just so in my
dream, and you hesitated between the flower of passion and the flower of
death. Ah, well might Love laugh. They grow on the same bough; Love
knows that. Oh, my dear, my dear, I come too late! Look! he has done
worse than murder, for that only kills the body; but he has killed the
soul in you. He will crush out all that came to you from heaven; all
your mind and your hopes and your dreams, and all the mystery in you,
that we poor half-dumb fools call genius, and that made the common
daylight above you full of all beautiful shapes and visions that our
duller eyes could not see as you went. He has done worse than murder,
and I came to take his life. Ay, I would slay him now as I would
strangle the snake in my path. And even for this I come too late. I
cannot do you even this poor last service. To strike him dead would only
be to strike you too. I come too late! Take my knife, lest I should see
him--take it. Till he leaves you I will wait."
I drew the fine, thin blade across my knee and broke it in two pieces,
and threw the two halves at her feet.
Then I turned without looking once at her, and went away.
I do not know how the day waned and passed; the skies seemed red with
fire, and the canals with blood. I do not know how I found my road over
the marble floors and out into the air. I only remember that I felt my
way feebly with my hands, as though the golden sunlight were all
darkness, and that I groped my way down the steps and out under an angle
of the masonry, staring stupidly upon the gliding waters.
I do not know whether a minute had gone by or many hours, when some
shivering sense of sound made me look up at the casement above, a high,
vast casement fretted with dusky gold and many colours, and all kinds of
sculptured stone. The sun was making a glory as of jewels on its painted
panes. Some of them were open; I could see within the chamber Hilarion's
fair and delicate head, and his face drooped with a soft smile. I could
see her, with all her loveliness, melting, as it were, into his embrace,
and see her mouth meet his.
If I had not broken the steel!----
I rose from the stones and cursed them, and departed from the place as
the moon rose.
* * *
He was silent; the moonlight poured down between us white and wide;
there lay a little dead bird on the stones, I remember, a redbreast,
stiff and cold. The people traffic in such things here, in the square of
Agrippa; it had fallen, doubtless, off some market stall.
Poor little robin! All the innocent sweet woodland singing-life of it
was over, over in agony, and not a soul in all the wide earth was the
better for its pain; not even the huckster who had missed making his
copper coin by it. Woe is me; the sorrow of the world is great.
I pointed to it where it lay, poor little soft huddled heap of bright
feathers; there is no sadder sight than a dead bird, for what lovelier
life can there be than a bird's life, free in the sun and the rain, in
the blossom and foliage?
"Make the little cold throat sing at sunrise," I said to him. "When you
can do that, then think to undo what you have done."
"She will forget:--"
"You know she never will forget. There is your crime."
"She will have her art----"
"Will the dead bird sing?"
* * *
Here, if anywhere in the "divine city of the Vatican"--for in truth a
city and divine it is, and well has it been called so--here, if
anywhere, will wake the soul of the artist; here, where the very
pavement bears the story of Odysseus, and each passage-way is a Via
Sacra, and every stone is old with years whose tale is told by hundreds
or by thousands, and the wounded Adonis can be adored beside the tempted
Christ of Sistine, and the serious beauty of the Erythean Sibyl lives
beside the laughing grace of ivy-crowned Thalia, and the Jupiter
Maximus frowns on the mortals made of earth's dust, and the Jehovah who
has called forth woman meets the first smile of Eve. A Divine City
indeed, holding in its innumerable chambers and its courts of granite
and of porphyry all that man has ever dreamed of, in his hope and in his
terror, of the Unknown God.
* * *
The days of joyous, foolish mumming came--the carnival mumming that as a
boy I had loved so well, and that, ever since I had come and stitched
under my Apollo and Crispin, I had never been loth to meddle and mix in,
going mad with my lit taper, like the rest, and my whistle of the
Befana, and all the salt and sport of a war of wits such as old Rome has
always heard in midwinter since the seven nights of the Saturnalia.
Dear Lord! to think that twice a thousand years ago and more, along
these banks of Tiber, and down in the Velabrum and up the Sacred Way,
men and women and children were leaping, and dancing, and shouting, and
electing their festal king, and exchanging their new-year gifts of wax
candles and little clay figures: and that now-a-days we are doing just
the same thing in the same season, in the same places, only with all the
real faunic joyfulness gone out of it with the old slain Saturn, and a
great deal of empty and luxurious show come in instead! It makes one
sad, mankind looks such a fool.
Better be Heine's fool on the seashore, who asks the winds their
"wherefore" and their "whence." You remember Heine's poem--that one in
the "North Sea" series, that speaks of the man by the shore, and asks
what is Man, and what shall become of him, and who lives on high in the
stars? and tells how the waves keep on murmuring and the winds rising,
the clouds scudding before the breeze, and the planets shining so cold
and so far, and how on the shore a fool waits for an answer, and waits
in vain. It is a terrible poem, and terrible because it is true.
Every one of us stands on the brink of the endless sea that is Time and
is Death; and all the blind, beautiful, mute, majestic forces of
creation move around us and yet tell us nothing.
It is wonderful that, with this awful mystery always about us, we can go
on on our little lives as cheerfully as we do; that on the edge of that
mystical shore we yet can think so much about the crab in the
lobster-pot, the eel in the sand, the sail in the distance, the child's
face at home.
Well, no doubt it is heaven's mercy that we can do so; it saves from
madness such thinking souls as are amongst us.
* * *
"My dear, of love there is very little in the world. There are many
things that take its likeness: fierce unstable passions and poor
egotisms of all sorts, vanities too, and many other follies--Apatê and
Philotês in a thousand masquerading characters that gain great Love
discredit. The loves of men, and women too, my dear, are hardly better
very often than Minos' love for Skylla; you remember how he threw her
down from the stern of his vessel when he had made the use of her he
wished, and she had cut the curls of Nisias. A great love does not of
necessity imply a great intelligence, but it must spring out of a great
nature, that is certain; and where the heart has spent itself in much
base petty commerce, it has no deep treasury of gold on which to draw;
it is bankrupt from its very over-trading. A noble passion is very rare;
believe me; as rare as any other very noble thing."
* * *
"Do you call him a poet because he has the trick of a sonorous cadence
and of words that fall with the measure of music, so that youths and
maidens recite them for the vain charm of their mere empty sound? It is
a lie--it is a blasphemy. A poet! A poet suffers for the meanest thing
that lives; the feeblest creature dead in the dust is pain to him; his
joy and his sorrow alike outweigh tenfold the joys and the sorrows of
men; he looks on the world as Christ looked on Jerusalem, and weeps; he
loves, and all heaven and all hell are in his love; he is faithful unto
death, because fidelity alone can give to love the grandeur and the
promise of eternity; he is like the martyrs of the church who lay upon
the wheel with their limbs racked, yet held the roses of Paradise in
their hands and heard the angels in the air. That is a poet; that is
what Dante was, and Shelley and Milton and Petrarca. But this man? this
singer of the senses, whose sole lament is that the appetites of the
body are too soon exhausted; this languid and curious analysist who
rends the soul aside with merciless cruelty, and puts away the quivering
nerves with cold indifference, once he has seen their secrets?--this a
poet? Then so was Nero harping! Accursed be the book and all the
polished vileness that his verses ever palmed off on men by their mere
tricks of sound. This a poet! As soon are the swine that rout the
garbage, the lions of the Apocalypse by the throne of God!"
* * *
The glad water sparkles and ripples everywhere; above the broad porphyry
basins butterflies of every colour flutter, and swallows fly; lovers and
children swing balls of flowers, made as only our Romans know how to
make them; the wide lawns under the deep-shadowed avenues are full of
blossoms; the air is full of fragrance; the palms rise against a
cloudless sky; the nights are lustrous; in the cool of the great
galleries the statues seem to smile: so spring had been to me always;
but now the season was without joy, and the scent of the flowers on the
wind hurt me as it smote my nostrils.
For a great darkness seemed always between me and the sun, and I
wondered that the birds could sing, and the children run amongst the
blossoms--the world being so vile.
* * *
Women hope that the dead love may revive; but men know that of all dead
things none are so past recall as a dead passion.
The courtesan may scourge it with a whip of nettles back into life; but
the innocent woman may wet it for ever with her tears, she will find no
resurrection.
* * *
Art is an angel of God, but when Love has entered the soul, the angel
unfolds its plumes and takes flight, and the wind of its wings withers
as it passes. He whom it has left misses the angel at his ear, but he is
alone for ever. Sometimes it will seem to him then that it had been no
angel ever, but a fiend that lied, making him waste his years in a
barren toil, and his nights in a joyless passion; for there are two
things beside which all Art is but a mockery and a curse: they are a
child that is dying and a love that is lost.
* * *
Love art alone, forsaking all other loves, and she will make you happy,
with a happiness that shall defy the seasons and the sorrows of time,
the pains of the vulgar and the changes of fortune, and be with you day
and night, a light that is never dim. But mingle with it any human
love--and art will look for ever at you with the eyes of Christ when he
looked at the faithless follower as the cock crew.
* * *