shut in it, as you go up the winding stairs with all their lichens and
water-plants and broken marbles, into the garden itself, with its smooth
emerald turf and spreading magnolias, and broad fish-ponds, and orange
and citron trees, and the frescoed building at the end where Guido's
Aurora floats in unchanging youth, and the buoyant Hours run before the
sun.
Myself I own I care not very much for that Aurora; she is no incarnation
of the morning, and though she floats wonderfully and does truly seem to
move, yet is she in nowise ethereal nor suggestive of the dawn either of
day or life. When he painted her, he must have been in love with some
lusty taverner's buxom wife busked in her holiday attire.
But whatever one may think of the famed Aurora, of the loveliness of her
quiet garden home, safe in the shelter of the stately palace walls,
there can be no question; the little place is beautiful, and sitting in
its solitude with the brown magnolia fruit falling on the grass, and the
blackbirds pecking between the primroses, all the courtly and superb
pageant of the dead ages will come trooping by you, and you will fancy
that the boy Metastasio is reciting strophes under yonder Spanish
chestnut-tree, and cardinals, and nobles, and gracious ladies, and
pretty pages are all listening, leaning against the stone rail of the
central water.
For this is the especial charm and sorcery of Rome, that, sitting idly
in her beautiful garden-ways, you can turn over a score of centuries and
summon all their pomp and pain before you, as easily as little children
can turn over the pages of a coloured picture-book until their eyes are
dazzled.
_CHANDOS._
It is so easy for the preacher, when he has entered the days of
darkness, to tell us to find no flavour in the golden fruit, no music in
the song of the charmer, no spell in eyes that look love, no delirium in
the soft dreams of the lotus--so easy when these things are dead and
barren for himself, to say they are forbidden! But men must be far more
or far less than mortal ere they can blind their eyes, and dull their
senses, and forswear their nature, and obey the dreariness of the
commandment; and there is little need to force the sackcloth and the
serge upon us. The roses wither long before the wassail is over, and
there is no magic that will make them bloom again, for there is none
that renews us--youth. The Helots had their one short, joyous festival
in their long year of labour; life may leave us ours. It will be surely
to us, long before its close, a harder tyrant and a more remorseless
taskmaster than ever was the Lacedemonian to his bond-slaves,--bidding
us make bricks without straw, breaking the bowed back, and leaving us as
our sole chance of freedom the hour when we shall turn our faces to the
wall--and die.
* * *
Society, that smooth and sparkling sea, is excessively difficult to
navigate; its surf looks no more than champagne foam, but a thousand
quicksands and shoals lie beneath: there are breakers ahead for more
than half the dainty pleasure-boats that skim their hour upon it; and
the foundered lie by millions, forgotten, five fathoms deep below. The
only safe ballast upon it is gold dust; and if stress of weather come on
you, it will swallow you without remorse. Trevenna had none of this
ballast; he had come out to sea in as ticklish a cockle-shell as might
be; he might go down any moment, and he carried no commission, being a
sort of nameless, unchartered rover: yet float he did, securely.
* * *
Corals, pink and delicate, rivet continents together; ivy tendrils, that
a child may break, bold Norman walls with bonds of iron; a little ring,
a toy of gold, a jeweller's bagatelle, forges chains heavier than the
galley-slave's: so a woman's look may fetter a lifetime.
* * *
He had passed through life having escaped singularly all the shadows
that lie on it for most men; and he had, far more than most, what may be
termed the faculty for happiness--a gift, in any temperament, whose
wisdom and whose beauty the world too little recognises.
* * *
A temperament that is _never_ earnest is at times well-nigh as wearisome
as a temperament that is never gay; there comes a time when, if you can
never touch to any depth, the ceaseless froth and brightness of the
surface will create a certain sense of impatience, a certain sense of
want.
* * *
A straw misplaced will make us enemies; a millstone of benefits hung
about his neck may fail to anchor down by us a single friend. We may
lavish what we will--kindly thought, loyal service, untiring aid, and
generous deed--and they are all but as oil to the burning, as fuel to
the flame, when spent upon those who are jealous of us.
* * *
Truth is a rough, honest, helter-skelter terrier, that none like to see
brought into their drawing-rooms, throwing over all their dainty little
ornaments, upsetting their choicest Dresden, that nobody guessed was
cracked till it fell with the mended side uppermost, and keeping every
one in incessant tremor lest the next snap should be at their braids or
their boots, of which neither the varnish nor the luxuriance will stand
rough usage.
* * *
When will men learn to know that the power of genius, and the human
shell in which it chances to be harboured, are as distinct as is the
diamond from the quartz-bed in which they find it?
* * *
Had he embraced dishonour, and accepted the rescue that a lie would have
lent him, this misery in its greatest share had never been upon him. He
would have come hither with riches about him, and the loveliness he had
worshipped would have been his own beyond the touch of any rival's hand.
Choosing to cleave to the old creeds of his race, and passing, without a
backward glance, into the paths of honour and of justice, it was thus
with him now. Verily, virtue must be her own reward, as in the Socratic
creed; for she will bring no other dower than peace of conscience in her
gift to whosoever weds her. "I have loved justice, and fled from
iniquity; wherefore here I die in exile," said Hildebrand upon his
death-bed. They will be the closing words of most lives that have
followed truth.
* * *
There are liberties sweeter than love; there are goals higher than
happiness.
Some memory of them stirred in him there, with the noiseless flow of the
lingering water at his feet, and above the quiet of the stars; the
thoughts of his youth came back to him, and his heart ached with their
longing.
Out of the salt depths of their calamity men had gathered the heroisms
of their future; out of the desert of their exile they had learned the
power to return as conquerors. The greater things within him awakened
from their lethargy; the innate strength so long untried, so long lulled
to dreamy indolence and rest, uncoiled from its prostration; the force
that would resist and, it might be, survive, slowly came upon him, with
the taunts of his foe. It was possible that there was that still in him
which might be grander and truer to the ambitions of his imaginative
childhood under adversity, than in the voluptuous sweetness of his rich
and careless life. It was possible, if--if he could once meet the fate
he shuddered from, once look at the bitterness of the life that waited
for him, and enter on its desolate and arid waste without going back to
the closed gates of his forfeited paradise to stretch his limbs within
their shadow once more ere he died.
There is more courage needed oftentimes to accept the onward flow of
existence, bitter as the waters of Marah, black and narrow as the
channel of Jordan, than there is ever needed to bow down the neck to the
sweep of the death-angel's sword.
* * *
He accepted the desolation of his life, for the sake of all beyond life,
greater than life, which looked down on him from the silence of the
night.
* * *
It was sunset in Venice,--that supreme moment when the magical flush of
light transfigures all, and wanderers whose eyes have long ached with
the greyness and the glare of northward cities gaze and think themselves
in heaven. The still waters of the lagunes, the marbles and the porphyry
and the jasper of the mighty palaces, the soft grey of the ruins all
covered with clinging green and the glowing blossoms of creepers, the
hidden antique nooks where some woman's head leaned out of an arched
casement, like a dream of the Dandolo time when the Adriatic swarmed
with the returning galleys laden with Byzantine spoil, the dim, mystic,
majestic walls that towered above the gliding surface of the eternal
water, once alive with flowers, and music, and the gleam of golden
tresses, and the laughter of careless revellers in the Venice of
Goldoni, in the Venice of the Past;--everywhere the sunset glowed with
the marvel of its colour, with the wonder of its warmth.
Then a moment, and it was gone. Night fell with the hushed shadowy
stillness that belongs to Venice alone; and in the place of the riot and
luxuriance of colour there was the tremulous darkness of the young
night, with the beat of an oar on the water, the scent of unclosing
carnation-buds, the white gleam of moonlight, and the odour of
lilies-of-the-valley blossoming in the dark archway of some mosaic-lined
window.
* * *
The ruin that had stripped him of all else taught him to fathom the
depths of his own attainments. He had in him the gifts of a Goethe; but
it was only under adversity that these reached their stature and bore
their fruit.
* * *
The words were true. The bread of bitterness is the food on which men
grow to their fullest stature; the waters of bitterness are the
debatable ford through which they reach the shores of wisdom; the ashes
boldly grasped and eaten without faltering are the price that must be
paid for the golden fruit of knowledge. The swimmer cannot tell his
strength till he has gone through the wild force of opposing waves; the
great man cannot tell the might of his hand and the power of his
resistance till he has wrestled with the angel of adversity, and held it
close till it has blessed him.
* * *
The artist was true to his genius; he knew it a greater gift than
happiness; and as his hands wandered by instinct over the familiar
notes, the power of his kingdom came to him, the passion of his mistress
was on him, and the grandeur of the melody swelled out to mingle with
the night, divine as consolation, supreme as victory.
* * *
The man who puts chains on another's limbs is only one shade worse than
he who puts fetters on another's free thoughts and on another's free
conscience.
* * *
One fetter of tradition loosened, one web of superstition broken, one
ray of light let in on darkness, one principle of liberty secured, are
worth the living for, he mused. Fame!--it is the flower of a day, that
dies when the next sun rises. But to do something, however little, to
free men from their chains, to aid something, however faintly, the
rights of reason and of truth, to be unvanquished through all and
against all, these may bring one nearer the pure ambitions of youth.
Happiness dies as age comes to us; it sets for ever, with the suns of
early years: yet perhaps we may keep a higher thing beside which it
holds but a brief loyalty, if to ourselves we can rest true, if for the
liberty of the world we can do anything.
* * *
Do not believe that happiness makes us selfish; it is a treason to the
sweetest gift of life. It is when it has deserted us that it grows hard
to keep all the better things in us from dying in the blight.
* * *
"Coleridge cried, 'O God, how glorious it is to live!' Renan asks, 'O
God, when will it be worth while to live?' In nature we echo the poet;
in the world we echo the thinker."
* * *
"Yet you are greater than you were then," he said, slowly. "I know it,--I
who am but a wine-cup rioter and love nothing but my summer-day fooling.
You are greater; but the harvest you sow will only be reaped over your
grave."
"I should be content could I believe it would be reaped then."
"Be content then. You may be so."
"God knows! Do you not think Marsy and Delisle de Sales and Linguet
believed, as they suffered in their dungeons for mere truth of speech,
that the remembrance of future generations would solace them? Bichât
gave himself to premature death for science' sake; does the world once
in a year speak his name? Yet how near those men are to us, to be
forgotten! A century, and history will scarce chronicle them."
"Then why give the wealth of your intellect to men?"
"Are there not higher things than present reward and the mere talk of
tongues? The _monstrari digito_ were scarce a lofty goal. We may love
Truth and strive to serve her, disregarding what she brings us. Those
who need a bribe from her are not her true believers."
Philippe d'Orvâle tossed his silvery hair from his eyes,--eyes of such
sunny lustre still.
"Ay! And those who held that sublime code of yours, that cleaving to
truth for truth's sake, where are they? How have they fared in every
climate and in every age? Stoned, crucified, burned, fettered, broken on
the vast black granite mass of the blind multitude's brutality, of the
priesthood's curse and craft!"
"True! Yet if through us, ever so slightly, the bondage of the creeds'
traditions be loosened from the lives they stifle, and those
multitudes--so weary, so feverish, so much more to be pitied than
condemned--become less blind, less brute, the sacrifice is not in vain."
"In your sense, no. But the world reels back again into darkness as soon
as a hand has lifted it for a while into light. Men hold themselves
purified, civilised; a year of war,--and lust and bloodthirst rage
untamed in all their barbarism; a taste of slaughter,--and they are
wolves again! There was truth in the old feudal saying, 'Oignez vilain,
il vous poindra; poignez vilain, il vous oindra.' Beat the multitudes
you talk of with a despot's sword, and they will lick your feet; touch
them with a Christ-like pity, and they will nail you to the cross."
There was terrible truth in the words: this man of princely blood, who
disdained all sceptres and wanted nothing of the world, could look
through and through it with his bold sunlit eyes, and see its
rottenness to the core.
Chandos sighed as he heard.
"You are right,--only too right. Yet even while they crouch to the
tyrant's sabre, how bitterly they need release! even while they crucify
their teachers and their saviours, how little they know what they do!
They may forsake themselves; but they should not be forsaken."
Philippe d'Orvâle looked on him with a light soft as woman's tears in
his eyes, and dashed his hand down on the alabaster.
"Chandos, you live twenty centuries too late. You would have been
crowned in Athens, and throned in Asia. But here, as a saving grace,
they will call you--'mad!'"
"Well, if they do? The title has its honours. It was hooted against
Solon and Socrates."
* * *
"I would do all in the world to please _you_, monseigneur," he answered,
sadly; "but I cannot change my nature. The little aziola loves the
shade, and shrinks from noise and glare and all the ways of men; I am
like it. You cannot make the aziola a bird for sunlight; you cannot make
me as others are."
Chandos looked down on him with an almost tender compassion. To him,
whose years were so rich in every pleasure and every delight that men
can enjoy, the loneliness and pain of Lulli's life, divorced from all
the living world, made it a marvel profoundly melancholy, profoundly
formed to claim the utmost gentleness and sympathy.
"I would not have you as others are, Lulli," he said, softly. "If in all
the selfishness and pleasures of our world there were not some here and
there to give their lives to high thoughts and to unselfish things, as
you give yours, we should soon, I fear, forget that such existed. But
for such recluse's devotion to an art as yours, the classics would have
perished; without the cloister-penmen, the laws of science would never
have broken the bondage of tradition."
Lulli looked up eagerly; then his head drooped again with the
inexpressible weariness of that vain longing which "toils to reach the
stars."
"Ah, what is the best that I reach?--the breath of the wind which
passes, and sighs, and is heard no more."
* * *
"How crabbed a scroll!" he went on, throwing himself down a moment on
the thyme and grass. "The characters must baffle even you; the years
that have yellowed the vellum have altered the fashion. Whose is it?"
"An old Elizabethan musician's," answered Lulli, as he looked up. "Yes;
the years take all,--our youth, our work, our life, even our graves."
Something in his Provençal cadence gave a rhythm to his simplest speech:
the words fell sadly on his listener's ear, though on the sensuous
luxuriance of his own existence no shadow ever rested, no skeleton ever
crouched.
"Yes: the years take all," he said, with a certain sadness on him. "How
many unperfected resolves, unachieved careers, unaccomplished ambitions,
immatured discoveries, perish under the rapidity of time, as unripe
fruits fall before their season! Bichât died at thirty-one:--if he had
lived, his name would now have outshone Aristotle's."
"We live too little time to do anything even for the art we give our
life to," murmured Lulli. "When we die, our work dies with us: our
better self must perish with our bodies; the first change of fashion
will sweep it into oblivion."
"Yet something may last of it," suggested Chandos, while his hand
wandered among the blue bells of the curling hyacinths. "Because few
save scholars read the '_Defensio Populi_' now, the work it did for free
thought cannot die. None the less does the cathedral enrich Cologne
because the name of the man who begot its beauty has passed unrecorded.
None the less is the world aided by the effort of every true and daring
mind because the thinker himself has been crushed down in the rush of
unthinking crowds."
"No, if _it_ could live!" murmured Lulli, softly, with a musing pain in
the broken words. "But look! the scroll was as dear to its writer as his
score to Beethoven,--the child of his love, cradled in his thoughts
night and day, cherished as never mother cherished her first-born,
beloved as wife or mistress, son or daughter, never were. Perhaps he
denied himself much to give his time more to his labour; and when he
died, lonely and in want, because he had pursued that for which men
called him a dreamer, his latest thought was of the work which never
could speak to others as it spoke to him, which he must die and leave,
in anguish that none ever felt to sever from a human thing. Yet what
remains of his love and his toil? It is gone, as a laugh or a sob dies
off the ear, leaving no echo behind. His name signed here tells nothing
to the men for whom he laboured, adds nothing to the art for which he
lived. As it is with him, so will it be with me."
His voice, that had risen in sudden and untutored eloquence, sank
suddenly into the sadness and the weariness of the man whose highest joy
is but relief from pain; and in it was a keener pang still,--the grief
of one who strives for what incessantly escapes him.
"Wait," said Chandos, gently. "Are we sure that nothing lives of the
music you mourn? It may live on the lips of the people, in those
Old-World songs whose cause we cannot trace, yet which come sweet and
fresh transmitted to every generation. How often we hear some nameless
melody echo down a country-side! the singers cannot tell you whence it
came; they only know their mothers sang it by their cradles, and they
will sing it by their children's. But in the past the song had its birth
in genius."
Guido Lulli bent his head.
"True: such an immortality were all-sufficient: we could well afford to
have our names forgotten----"
* * *
"Let that fellow alone, Cos," laughed Chandos, to avert the stormy
element which seemed to threaten the serenity of his breakfast-party.
"Trevenna will beat us all with his tongue, if we tempt him to try
conclusions. He should be a Chancellor of the Exchequer or a Cheap John;
I am not quite clear which as yet."
"Identically the same things!" cried Trevenna. "The only difference is
the scale they are on; one talks from the bench, and the other from the
benches; one cheapens tins, and the other cheapens taxes; one has a
salve for an incurable disease, and the other a salve for the national
debt; one rounds his periods to put off a watch that won't go, and the
other to cover a deficit that won't close; but they radically drive the
same trade, and both are successful if the spavined mare trots out
looking sound, and the people pay up. 'Look what I save you,' cry Cheap
John and Chancellor; and while they shout their economics, they pocket
their shillings. Ah, if I were sure I could bamboozle a village, I
should know I was qualified to make up a Budget."
* * *
"Most impudent of men! When will you learn the first lesson of society,
and decently and discreetly _apprendre à vous effacer_?"
"_A m'effacer_? The advice Lady Harriet Vandeleur gave Cecil. Very good
for mediocre people, I dare say; but it wouldn't suit _me_. There are
some people, you know, that won't iron down for the hardest rollers.
_M'effacer_? No! I'd rather any day be an ill-bred originality than a
well-bred nonentity."
"Then you succeed perfectly in being what you wish! Don't you know,
monsieur, that to set yourself against conventionalities is like talking
too loud?--an impertinence and an under-breeding that society resents by
exclusion."
"Yes, I know it. But a duke may bawl, and nobody shuts out _him_; a
prince might hop on one leg, and everybody would begin to hop too. Now,
what the ducal lungs and the princely legs might do with impunity, I
declare I've a right to do, if I like."
"_Bécasse_! no one can declare his rights till he can do much more,
and--purchase them. Have a million, and we may perhaps give you a little
license to be unlike other persons: without the million it is an
ill-bred _gaucherie_."
"Ah, I know! Only a nobleman may be original; a poor penniless wretch
upon town must be humbly and insignificantly commonplace. What a pity
for the success of the aristocratic monopolists that nature puts clever
fellows and fools just in the reverse order! But then nature's a
shocking socialist."
"And so are you."
Trevenna laughed.
"Hush, madame. Pray don't destroy me with such a whisper."
* * *
Talent wears well; genius wears itself out; talent drives a brougham in
fact, genius a sun-chariot in fancy; talent keeps to earth and fattens
there, genius soars to the empyrean, to get picked by every kite that
flies; talent is the part and the venison, genius the seltzer and
souffle of life. The man who has talent sails successfully on the top of
the wave; the man with genius beats himself to pieces, fifty to one, on
the first rock he meets.
* * *
One innocent may be wrongly suspected until he is made the thing that
the libel called him.
* * *
Men shut out happiness from their schemes for the world's happiness.
They might as well try to bring flowers to bloom without the sun.
* * *
The most dastardly sin on earth is the desertion of the fallen.
* * *
Let the world abandon you, but to yourself be true.
* * *
The bread of bitterness is the food on which men grow to their fullest
stature.
* * *
Youth without faith is a day without sun.
* * *
I detest posterity--every king hates his heir.
* * *
Scandals are like dandelion seeds; they are arrow-headed and stick when
they fall, and bring forth and multiply fourfold.
* * *
The puff perfect is the puff personal--adroitly masked.
* * *
I wear the Bonnet Rouge discreetly weighed down with a fine tassel of
British prudence.
* * *
He was a master of the great art of banter. It is a marvellous force; it
kills sanctity, unveils sophistry, travesties wisdom, cuts through the
finest shield, and turns the noblest impulses to hopeless ridicule.
* * *
Immortality is dull work--a hideous statue that gets black as soot in no
time; funeral sermons that make you out a vial of revelations and
discuss the probabilities of your being in the realms of Satan; a bust
that slants you off at the shoulders and sticks you up on a bracket; a
tombstone for the canes of the curious to poke at; an occasional
attention in the way of withered immortelles or biographical
Billingsgate, and a partial preservation shared in common with mummies,
auks' eggs, snakes in bottles, and deformities in spirits of
wine:--that's posthumous fame. I must say I don't see much fun in it.
* * *