unheeding, in his bright vivacity. "Who are celebrated in Scripture?
Judith, Samuel, David, Moses, Joab. Who is a patriot? Brutus. Who is an
immortal? Harmodius and Aristogiton. Who is a philosopher? Cicero, while
he murmurs '_Vixerunt!_' after slaying Lentulus. Who is a hero? Marius,
who nails the senators' heads to the rostræ. Who is a martyr? Charles,
who murders Strafford. What is religion? Christianity, that has burnt
and slain millions. Who is a priest? Calvin, who destroys Servetus; or
Pole, who kills Latimer, which you like. Who is a saint? George of
Cappadocia, who slaughters right and left. Who is a ruler? Sulla, who
slays Ofella. Who is a queen? Christina, who stabs Monaldeschi;
Catherine, who strangles Peter; Isabella, who slays Moors and Jews by
the thousand. Murderers all! Assassination has always been deified; and
before it is objected to, the world must change its creeds, its
celebrities, and its chronicles. 'Monsieur, you are an assassin,' says
an impolite world. 'Messieurs,' says the polite logician, 'I found my
warrant in your Bible, and my precedent in your Brutus. What you deify
in Aristogiton and Jael you mustn't damn in Ankarström and me.' Voilà!
What could the world say?"
"That you would outwit Belial with words, and beguile Beelzebub out of
his kingdom with sophistry."
_A VILLAGE COMMUNE._
Power is sweet, and when you are a little clerk you love its sweetness
quite as much as if you were an emperor, and maybe you love it a good
deal more.
* * *
He saw no reason why he should not become a deputy, and even a minister
before he died, and indeed there was no reason whatever. He was only a
clerk at fifty pounds a year; but he had a soul above all scruples, and
a heart as hard as a millstone.
* * *
He was only a clerk indeed, at a slender salary, and ate his friends'
tomatoes publicly in the little back room of the caffè; but he had the
soul of a statesman. When a donkey kicks, beat it; when it dies, skin
it; so only will it profit you; that was his opinion, and the public was
the donkey of Messer Nellemane.
* * *
Pippo and Viola feared everything, yet knew not what they feared; it is
a ghostly burden of dread, that which the honest poor carry with them
all through their toiling hungry days, the vague oppressive dread of
this law which is always acting the spy on them, always dogging their
steps, always emptying their pockets. The poor can understand criminal
law, and its justice and its necessity easily enough, and respect its
severities; but they cannot understand the petty tyrannies of civil law;
and it wears their lives out, and breaks their spirits. When it does not
break their spirits it curdles their blood and they become socialists,
nihilists, internationalists, anything that will promise them riddance
of their spectre and give them vengeance. We in Italy are all of us
afraid of socialism, we who have anything to lose; and yet we let the
syndics, and their secretaries, conciliators, and chancellors sow it
broadcast in dragon's teeth of petty injustices and petty cruelties,
that soon or late will spring up armed men, hydra-headed and torch in
hand!
* * *
The law should be a majesty, solemn, awful, unerring: just, as man hopes
that God is just; and from its throne it should stretch out a mighty
hand to seize and grasp the guilty, and the guilty only. But when the
law is only a petty, meddlesome, cruel, greedy spy, mingling in every
household act and peering in at every window pane, then the poor who are
guiltless would be justified if they spat in its face, and called it by
its right name, a foul extortion.
* * *
The Italian tongue chatters like a magpie's; if they did not let the
steam off thus they would be less easily ruled than they are; but no
great talker ever did any great thing yet, in this world.
* * *
A retentive memory is of great use to a man, no doubt; but the talent of
oblivion is on the whole more useful.
* * *
Sarta Rosalia is in a lovely pastoral country; the country that seems to
thrill with Theocritus' singing, as it throbs with the little tamborine
of the cicala; a country running over with beautiful greenery, and with
climbing creepers hanging everywhere, from the vine on the maples to the
china-rose hedges, and with the deep-blue shadows, and the sun-flushed
whiteness of the distant mountains lending to it in the golden distance
that solemnity and ethereal charm which, without mountains somewhere
within sight, no country ever has. But since the advent of "freedom" it
is scarred and wounded; great scar-patches stretch here and there where
woods have been felled by the avarice illumined in the souls of
landowners; hundreds and thousands of bare poles stand stark and stiff
against the river light which have been glorious pyramids of leaf
shedding welcome shadows on the river path; and many a bold round hill
like the _ballons_ of the Vosges, once rich of grass as they, now shorn
of wood, and even of undergrowth, lift a bare stony front to the lovely
sunlight, and never more will root of tree, or seed of flower or of
fern, find bed there.
Such is Progress.
* * *
For the first time his _liberi pensieri_ were distasteful to him and
unsatisfactory; for atheism makes a curse a mere rattle of dry peas in a
fool's bladder, as it makes a blessing a mere flutter of a breath.
Messer Nellemane for the first time felt that the old religion has its
advantages over agnosticism; it gave you a hell for your rivals and your
enemies!
* * *
He had never heard of Virgil and of Theocritus--but it hurt him to have
these sylvan pictures spoiled; these pictures which are the same as
those they saw and sang; the threshing barns with the piles of golden
grain, and the flails flying to merry voices; the young horses trampling
the wheat loose from its husk with bounding limbs and tossing manes; the
great arched doorways, with the maidens sitting in a circle breaking the
maize from its withered leaves, and telling old-world stories, and
singing sweet _fiorellini_ all the while; the hanging fields broken up
in hill and vale with the dun-coloured oxen pushing their patient way
through labyrinths of vine boughs, and clouds of silvery olive leaf: the
bright laborious day, with the sun-rays turning the sickle to a
semi-circlet of silver, as the mice ran, and the crickets shouted, and
the larks soared on high: the merry supper when the day was done, with
the thrill and thrum of the mandolini, and the glisten of the unhoused
fire-flies, whose sanctuary had been broken when the bearded barley and
the amber corn fell prone: all these things rose to his memory: they had
made his youth and manhood glad and full of colour; they were here still
for his sons a little while, but when his sons should be all grown men,
then those things would have ceased to be, and even their very memory
would have perished, most likely, while the smoke of the accursed
engines would have sullied the pure blue sky, and the stench of their
foul vapours would have poisoned the golden air.
He roused himself and said wearily to Pippo,
"There is a tale I have heard somewhere of a man who sold his birthright
for gold, and when the gold was in his hands, then it changed to
withered leaves and brown moss: I was thinking, eh? that the world is
much like that man!"
* * *
When all your politics and policies are summed up in the one intention
to do well for yourself, great simplicity is given to your theories, if
not to your practice.
* * *
The ministerialists ... made florid and beautiful speeches full of
sesquipedalian phrases in which they spoke about the place of Italy
among the great powers, the dangers of jealousy and invasion from other
nations, the magnificence of the future, the blessings of education, the
delights of liberty, the wickedness of the opposition, the sovereign
rights of the people; and said it all so magnificently and so
bewilderingly that the people never remembered till it was too late that
they had said nothing about opposing the cow-tax--or indeed any taxes at
all, but listened and gaped, and shouted, and clapped; and being told
that they could sit at a European Congress to decide the fate of Epirus,
were for the moment oblivious that they had bad bread, dear wine, scant
meat, an army of conscripts, and a bureaucracy that devoured them as
maggots a cheese. What is political eloquence for, if not to make the
people forget such things as these?
* * *
To sell your grapes to foreigners and have none at all at home is a
spirited commerce, and fine free trade; that the poor souls around are
all poisoned with cheap chemicals in the absence of wine, is only an
evidence of all that science can do.
* * *
It is the noblest natures that tyranny drives to frenzy.
* * *
The bureaucratic mind, all the world over, believes the squeak of the
official penny whistle to be as the trump of archangels and the voice of
Sinai. That all the people do not fall down prostrate at the squeak is,
to this order of mind, the one unmentionable sin.
* * *
It is not true that no Italian ever tells the truth, as commentators on
the country say, but it is sadly true that when one does he suffers for
it.
* * *
A day in prison to a free-born son of the soil, used to work with the
broad bright sky alone above his head, is more agony than a year of it
is to a cramped city-worker used only to the twilight of a machine-room
or a workshop, only to an air full of smuts and smoke, and the stench of
acids, and the dust of filed steel or sifted coal. The sufferings of the
two cannot be compared, and one among many of the injustices the law,
all over the world, commits, is that it never takes into consideration
what a man's past has been. There are those to whom a prison is as hell;
there are those to whom it is something better than the life they led.
* * *
She was an old woman, and had been bred up in the old faiths; faiths
that were not clear indeed to her nor ever reasoned on, but yet gave her
consolation, and a great, if a vague hope. Now that we tell the poor
there is no such hope, that when they have worked and starved long
enough, then they will perish altogether, like bits of candle that have
burnt themselves out, that they are mere machines made of carbon and
hydrogen, which, when they have had due friction, will then crumble back
into the dust; now that we tell them all this, and call this the spread
of education, will they be as patient?
* * *
Take hope from the heart of man, and you make him a beast of prey.
* * *
One of the cruellest sins of any state, in giving petty and tyrannous
authority into petty and tyrannous hands, is that it thus brings into
hatred and disgust the true and high authority of moral law.
* * *
In these modern times of cowardice, when great ministers dare not say
the thing they think, and high magistrates stoop to execute decrees they
abhor, it is scarcely to be hoped for that moral courage will be a plant
of very sturdy growth in the souls of carpenters, and coopers, and
bakers, and plumbers, and day-labourers, who toil for scarce a shilling
a day.
* * *
He had been wronged, and a great wrong is to the nature as a cancer is
to the body; there is no health.
* * *
A just chastisement may benefit a man, though it seldom does, but an
unjust one changes all his blood to gall.
* * *
In these days, Christian Europe decides that not only the poor man lying
by the wayside, but also the Samaritan who helps him, are sinners
against political economy, and its law forbids what its religion orders:
people must settle the contradiction as they deem best; they generally
are content to settle it by buttoning up their pockets, and passing by,
on the other side.
* * *
In this lovely land that brims over with flowers like a cup over-filled,
where the sun is as a magician for ever changing with a wand of gold all
common things to paradise; where every wind shakes out the fragrance of
a world of fruit and flower commingled; where, for so little, the lute
sounds and the song arises; here, misery looks more sad than it does in
sadder climes, where it is like a home-born thing, and not an alien
tyrant as it is here.
* * *
You cannot cage a field bird when it is old; it dies for want of flight,
of air, of change, of freedom. No use will be the stored grain of your
cages; better for the bird a berry here and there, and peace of gentle
death at last amidst the golden gorse or blush of hawthorn buds.
* * *
"What is England?"
"It is a place where the poor souls have no wine of their own, I think;
and they make cannons and cheese. You see their people over here now
and then. They carry red Bibles, and they go about with their mouths
open to catch flies, and they run into all the little old dusty places;
you must have seen them."
"And why do we want to have anything to do with them?"
"They will come in ships and fire at us, if we are not bigger and
stronger than they. We must build iron houses that float, and go on the
sea and meet them."
_PUCK._
"Animalism," forsooth!--a more unfair word don't exist. When we animals
never drink only just enough to satisfy thirst, never eat except when we
have genuine appetites, never indulge in any sort of debauch, and never
strain excess till we sink into the slough of satiety, shall "animalism"
be a word to designate all that men and women dare to do? "Animalism!"
You ought to blush for such a libel on our innocent and reasonable lives
when you regard your own! You men who scorch your throats with alcohols,
and kill your lives with absinthe; and squander your gold in the
Kursaal, and the Cecle, and the Arlington; and have thirty services at
your dinner betwixt soup and the "chasse;" and cannot spend a summer
afternoon in comfort unless you be drinking deep the intoxication of
hazard in your debts and your bets on the Heath or the Downs, at
Hurlingham or at Tattersalls' Rooms. You women, who sell your souls for
bits of stones dug from the bowels of the earth; who stake your honour
for a length of lace two centuries old; who replace the bloom your
passions have banished with the red of poisoned pigments; who wreathe
your aching heads with purchased tresses torn from prisons, and
madhouses, and coffins; who spend your lives in one incessant struggle,
first the rivalry of vanity and then the rivalry of ambition; who deck
out greed, and selfishness, and worship of station or gold, as "love,"
and then wonder that your hapless dupes, seizing the idol that you offer
them as worthy of their worship, fling it from them with a curse,
finding it dumb, and deaf, and merciless, a thing of wood and stone.
"Animalism," forsooth! God knows it would be well for you, here and
hereafter, men and women both, were you only patient, continent, and
singleminded, only faithful, gentle, and long-suffering, as are the
brutes that you mock, and misuse, and vilify in the supreme blindness of
your egregious vanity!
* * *
I was horribly cold and hungry; and this is a combination which kills
sentiment in bigger people than myself. The emotions, like a hothouse
flower or a sea-dianthus, wither curiously when aired in an east wind,
or kept some hours waiting for dinner.
* * *
In truth, too, despite all the fine chances that you certainly give your
peasants to make thorough beasts of themselves, they are your real
aristocrats, and have the only really good manners in your country. In
an old north-country dame, who lives on five shillings a week, in a
cottage like a dream of Teniers' or Van Tol's, I have seen a fine
courtesy, a simple desire to lay her best at her guest's disposal, a
perfect composure, and a freedom from all effort, that were in their way
the perfection of breeding. I have seen these often in the peasantry, in
the poor. It is your middle classes, with their incessant flutter, and
bluster, and twitter, and twaddle; with their perpetual strain after
effect; with their deathless desire to get one rung of the ladder higher
than they ever can get; with their preposterous affectations, their
pedantic unrealities, their morbid dread of remark, their everlasting
imitations, their superficial education, their monotonous commonplaces,
and their nervous deference to opinion;--it is your middle classes that
have utterly destroyed good manners, and have made the prevalent mode of
the day a union of boorishness and servility, of effervescence and of
apathy--a court suit, as it were, worn with muddy boots and a hempen
shirt.
* * *
I think Fanfreluche spoke with reason. Coincidence is a god that greatly
influences mortal affairs. He is not a cross-tempered deity either,
always; and when you beat your poor fetish for what seems to you an
untoward accident, you may do wrong; he may have benefited you far more
than you wot.
* * *
Now I believe that when a woman's own fair skin is called rouge, and her
own old lace is called imitation, she must in some way or other have
roused sharply the conscience or the envy of her sisters who sit in
judgment.
* * *
I canna go to church. Look'ee,--they's allus a readin' o' cusses, and
damnin', and hell fire, and the like; and I canna stomach it. What for
shall they go and say as all the poor old wimmin i' tha parish is gone
to the deil 'cause they picks up a stick or tew i' hedge, or likes to
mumble a charm or tew o'er their churnin'? Them old wimmin be rare an'
good i' ither things. When I broke my ankle three years agone, old Dame
Stuckley kem o'er, i' tha hail and the snaw, a matter of five mile and
more, and she turned o' eighty; and she nursed me, and tidied the
place, and did all as was wanted to be done, 'cause Avice was away,
working somewhere's; and she'd never let me gie her aught for it. And I
heard ta passon tell her as she were sold to hell, 'cause the old soul
have a bit of belief like in witch-stones, and allus sets one aside her
spinnin' jenny, so that the thrid shanna knot nor break. Ta passon he
said, God cud mak tha thrid run smooth, or knot it, just as He chose,
and 'twas wicked to think she could cross His will. And the old dame,
she said, Weel, sir, I dinna b'lieve tha Almighty would ever spite a
poor old crittur like me, don't 'ee think it? But if we're no to help
oursells i' this world, what for have He gied us the trouble o' tha
thrid to spin? and why no han't He made tha shirts, an' tha sheets, an'
tha hose grow theersells? And ta passon niver answered her that, he only
said she was fractious and blas-_phe_-mous. Now she warn't, she spoke i'
all innocence, and she mint what she said--she mint it. Passons niver
can answer ye plain, right-down, nataral questions like this'n, and
that's why I wunna ga ta tha church.
* * *
Dinna ye meddle, Tam; it's niver no good a threshin' other folk's corn;
ye allays gits the flail agin i' yer own eye somehow.
* * *
The flowers hang in the sunshine, and blow in the breeze, free to the
wasp as to the bee. The bee chooses to make his store of honey, that is
sweet, and fragrant, and life-giving; the wasp chooses to make his from
the same blossoms, but of a matter hard, and bitter, and useless. Shall
we pity the wasp because, of his selfish passions, he selects the
portion that shall be luscious only to his own lips, and spends his
hours only in the thrusting-in of his sting? Is not such pity--wasted
upon the wasp--an insult to the bee who toils so wearily to gather in
for others; and who, because he stings not man, is by man maltreated?
Now it seems to me, if I read them aright, that vicious women, and women
that are of honesty and honour, are much akin to the wasp and to the
bee.
* * *
My dear, a gentleman may forget his appointments, his love vows, and his
political pledges; he may forget the nonsense he talked, the dances he
engaged for, the women that worried him, the electors that bullied him,
the wife that married him, and he may be a gentleman still; but there
are two things he must never forget, for no gentleman ever does--and
they are, to pay a debt that is a debt of honour, and to keep a promise
to a creature that can't force him to keep it.
* * *
A genius? You must mistake. I have always heard that a genius is
something that they beat to death first with sticks and stones, and set
up on a great rock to worship afterwards. Now they make her very happy
whilst she is alive. She cannot possibly be a genius.
* * *
I learned many wondrous things betwixt Epsom and Ascot. A brief space,
indeed, yet one that to me seemed longer than the whole of my previous
life, so crowded was it every hour with new and marvellous experiences.
Worldly experiences, I mean. Intellectually, I am not sure that I
acquired much.
Indeed, to a little brain teeming with memories of the Théâtres
Beaumarchais, Voltaire, Molière, Feuillet, Sardou, Sandeau, &c., which
I had heard read so continually at the Dower-House amongst the Fens, the
views of dramatic literature held at the Coronet appeared of the most
extraordinary character. They certainly had one merit--simplicity.
The verb "to steal" was the only one that a successful dramatic author
appeared to be required to conjugate.
For your music steal from the music-halls; for your costumes steal from
_Le Follet_; for your ideas steal from anybody that happens to carry
such a thing about him; for your play, in its entirety, steal the plot,
the characters, the romance, the speeches, and the wit, if it have any,
of some attractive novel; and when you have made up your parcel of
thefts, tie it together with some string of stage directions, herald it
as entirely original, give a very good supper to your friends on the
press, and bow from your box as the "Author."
You will certainly be successful: and if the novelist ever object,
threaten him with an action for interference with _your_ property.
These I found were the laws laid down by London dramatists; and they
assuredly were so easy to follow and so productive to obey, that if any
Ben Jonson or Beaumarchais, Sheridan or Marivaux, had arisen and
attempted to infringe them, he would have infallibly been regarded as a
very evil example, and been extinguished by means of journalistic
slating and stall-siflage.
* * *
By the way, permit me, in parenthesis, to say that one of the chief
causes of that preference for the _demi-monde_ which you daily and
hourly discover more and more, is the indulgence it shows to idleness.
Because your lives are so intense now, and always at high pressure--for
that very reason are you more indolent also in little things. It bores
you to dress; it bores you to talk; it bores you to be polite. Sir
Charles Grandison might find ecstasy in elaborating a bow, a wig, or a
speech; you like to give a little nod, cut your hair very short, and
make "awfully" do duty for all your adjectives.
"_Autres temps, autres mæurs._" You are a very odd mixture. You will go
to the ends of the earth on the scent of big game; but you shirk all
social exertion with a cynical laziness. You will come from Damascus at
a stretch without sleeping, and think nothing of it; but you find it a
wretched thing to have to exert yourself to be courteous in a
drawing-room.
Therefore the _demi-monde_ suits you with a curious fitness, and suits
you more and more every year. I am afraid it is not very good for you. I
don't mean for your morals; I don't care the least about them, I am a
dog of the world; I mean for your manners. It makes you slangy, inert,
rude, lazy. And yet what perfect gentlemen you can be still, and what
grace there is in your careless, weary ease, when you choose to be
courteous; and you always _do_ choose, that I must say for you, when you
find a woman who is really worth the trouble.
* * *
I never knew quite whether I liked her--how can you with those women of
the world? She was kind and insincere; she was gentle and she was cruel;
she was generous and ungenerous; she was true as steel, and she was
false as Judas--what would you?--she was a woman of the world, with
several sweet natural impulses, and all a coquette's diplomacies.
She tended me with the greatest solicitude one day that autumn, when I
had run a thorn into my foot: and the very next day, when I was well
again, she laughed to see me worried on the lawn by a bull-terrier. If
you have not met a woman like that, I wonder where you have lived.
* * *
You must be spider or fly, as somebody says. Now all my experience tells
me that men are mostly the big, good-natured, careless blue-bottles,
half-drunk with their honey of pleasure, and rushing blindly into any
web that dazzles them a little in the sunshine; and women are the
dainty, painted, patient spiders that just sit and weave, and weave, and
weave, till--pong!--Bluebottle is in head foremost, and is killed, and
sucked dry, and eaten up at leisure.