and the old, had hung itself with garlands and draperies, with pictures
and evergreens, with flags and tapestries, and the grand procession had
passed to and from the church, and the archbishop had blessed the
people, and the king had bared his handsome head to the sun and the Holy
Ghost, and it was all over for the year, and the people were all happy
and satisfied and sure that God was with them and their town; especially
the people of the old quarters, who most loved and clung to these
ceremonials and feasts; good God-fearing families, labouring hard,
living honestly and wholesomely, gay also in a quiet, mirthful, innocent
fashion--much such people as their forefathers were before them, in days
when Gustavus Adolphus called their city the golden saddle on the lean
horse.
The lean horse, by which he meant the sterile plains, which yield little
except hay, looks rich with verdure in the mellow afternoon light, when
midsummer is come, and the whole populace, men, women, and children, on
Sundays and feast-days pour out of the city gates eagerly to their own
little festivities under the cherry-trees of the little blue and white
coffee-houses along the course of the river, when the beanflowers are in
bloom. For out of the old city you go easily beyond the walls to the
grey glacier water of "Isar rolling rapidly," not red with blood now as
after Hohenlinden, but brilliant and boisterous always, with washerwomen
leaning over it with bare arms, and dogs wading where rushes and dams
break the current, and the hay blowing breast-high along the banks, and
the students chasing the girls through it, and every now and then upon
the wind the music of a guitar, light and dancing, or sad and slow,
according as goes the heart of the player that tunes it. At this season
Bavaria grows green, and all is fresh and radiant. Outside the town all
the country is a sheet of cherry-blossom and of clover. Night and day,
carts full of merrymakers rattle out under the alders to the dancing
places amongst the pastures, or to the _Sommerfrischen_ of their country
friends. Whoever has a kreuzer to spend will have a draft of beer and a
whiff of the lilac-scented air, and the old will sit down and smoke
their painted pipes under the eaves of their favourite _Gasthof_, and
the young will roam with their best-loved maidens through the shadows of
the Anlagen, or still farther on under the high beech-trees of
Grosshesslohe.
_MOTHS._
The ear has its ecstasy as have other senses.
* * *
As there is love without dominion, so there is dominion without love.
* * *
When Fame stands by us all alone, she is an angel clad in light and
strength; but when Love touches her she drops her sword, and fades away,
ghostlike and ashamed.
* * *
Society only thought her--unamiable. True, she never said an unkind
thing, or did one; she never hurt man or woman; she was generous to a
fault; and to aid even people she despised would give herself trouble
unending. But these are serious, simple qualities which do not show
much, and are soon forgotten by those who benefit from them. Had she
laughed more, danced more, taken more kindly to the fools and their
follies, she might have been acid of tongue and niggard of sympathy; the
world would have thought her much more amiable.
* * *
"If she would only listen to me!" thought her mother, in the superior
wisdom of her popular little life. "If she would only kiss a few women
in the morning, and flirt with a few men in the evening, it would set
her all right with them in a month. It is no use doing good to anybody;
they only hate you for it. You have seen them in their straits; it is
like seeing them without their wig or their teeth; they never forgive
it. But to be pleasant, always to be pleasant, that is the thing. And
after all it costs nothing."
* * *
Marriage, as our world sees it, is simply a convenience; a somewhat
clumsy contrivance to tide over a social difficulty.
* * *
A sin! did the world know of such a thing? Hardly. Now and then, for
sake of its traditions, the world took some hapless boy, or some still
yet unhappier woman, and pilloried one of them, and drove them out under
a shower of stones, selecting them by caprice, persecuting them without
justice, slaying them because they were friendless. But that was all.
For the most part sin was an obsolete thing, archaic and unheard of.
* * *
Music is not a science, any more than poetry is. It is a sublime
instinct, like genius of all kinds.
* * *
Charity in various guises is an intruder the poor see often; but
courtesy and delicacy are visitors with which they are seldom honoured.
* * *
There is no shame more bitter to endure than to despise oneself. It is
harder to keep true to high laws and pure instincts in modern society
than it was in the days of martyrdom.
* * *
One weeps for the death of children, but perhaps the change of them into
callous men and women is a sadder change to see after all.
* * *
Honour is an old-world thing, but it smells sweet to those in whose hand
it is strong.
* * *
Young lives are tossed upon the stream of life like rose-leaves on a
fast-running river, and the rose-leaves are blamed if the river be too
strong and too swift for them and they perish. It is the fault of the
rose-leaves.
* * *
Every pretty woman should be a flirt, every clever woman a politician;
the aim, the animus, the intrigue, the rivalry which accompany each of
these pursuits make the salt without which the great dinner were
tasteless.
* * *
In these old Austrian towns the churches are always very reverent
places; dark and tranquil; overladen, indeed, with ornament and image,
but too full of shadow for these to much offend; there is the scent of
centuries of incense; the walls are yellow with the damp of ages.
Mountain suzerains and bold reiters, whose deeds are still sung of in
twilight to the zither, deep beneath the moss-grown pavement; their
shields and crowns are worn flat to the stone they were embossed on by
the passing feet of generations of worshippers. High above in the
darkness there is always some colossal carved Christs. Through the
half-opened iron-studded door there is always the smell of pinewood, the
gleam of water, the greenness of Alpine grass; often, too, there is the
silvery falling of rain, and the fresh smell of it comes through the
church by whose black benches and dim lamps there will be sure to be
some old bent woman praying.
* * *
The moths will eat all that fine delicate feeling away, little by
little; the moths of the world will eat the unselfishness first, and
then the innocence, and then the honesty, and then the decency; no one
will see them eating, no one will see the havoc being wrought, but
little by little the fine fabric will go, and in its place will be dust.
Ah, the pity of it! The pity of it! The webs come out of the great
weaver's loom lovely enough, but the moths of the world eat them all.
* * *
She had five hundred dear friends, but this one she was really fond of;
that is to say, she never said anything bad of her, and only laughed at
her good-naturedly when she had left a room; and this abstinence is as
strong a mark of sincerity now-a-days as dying for another used to be in
the old days of strong feeling and the foolish expression of them.
* * *
Gratitude is such an unpleasant quality, you know; there is always a
grudge behind it!
* * *
The richest soil always bears the rankest mushrooms: France is always
bearing mushrooms.
* * *
Position, she thought, was the only thing that, like old wine or oak
furniture, improved with years.
* * *
Position is a pillory: sometimes they pelt one with rose-leaves, and
sometimes with rotten eggs, but one is for ever in the pillory!
* * *
We are too afraid of death: that fear is the shame of Christianity.
* * *
He never could prevail on his vanity to break with her, lest men should
think she had broken with him.
* * *
She would go grandly to the guillotine, but she will never understand
her own times. She has dignity; we have not a scrap; we have forgotten
what it was like; we go into a passion at the amount of our bills; we
play and never pay; we smoke and we wrangle; we laugh loud, much too
loud; we inspire nothing unless, now and then, a bad war or a disastrous
speculation; we live showily, noisily, meanly, gaudily.
* * *
Big brains do not easily hold trifles ... little packets of starch that
this world thinks are the staff of life.
* * *
Pehl, like a young girl, is prettiest in the morning. Pehl is calm and
sedate, and simple and decorous. Pehl is like some tender, fair,
wholesome yet patrician beauty, like the pretty aristocratic Charlotte
in Kaulbach's picture, who cuts the bread-and-butter, yet looks a
patrician. Pehl has nothing of the _belle petite_, like her sister of
Baden; nothing of the titled _cocadetta_, like her cousin of Monaco;
Pehl does not gamble or riot or conduct herself madly in any way; she is
a little old-fashioned still in a courtly way; she has a little
rusticity still in her elegant manners; she is like the noble dames of
the past ages, who were so high of rank and so proud of habit, yet were
not above the distilling-room and the spinning-wheel; who were quiet,
serious, sweet, and smelt of the rose-leaves with which they filled
their big jars.
* * *
The pity of modern Society is that all its habits make as effectual a
disguise morally as our domino in carnival does physically. Everybody
looks just like everybody else. Perhaps, as under the domino, so under
the appearance, there may be great nobility or great deformity; but all
look alike. Were Socrates amongst us, he would only look like a club
bore; and were there Messalina, she would only look--well--look much
like our Duchesse Jeunne!
* * *
She did not know that from these swamps of flattery, intrigue, envy,
rivalry, and emulation there rises a miasma which scarcely the
healthiest lungs can withstand. She did not know that though many may be
indifferent to the tempting of men, few indeed are impenetrable to the
smile and the sneer of women; that to live your own life in the midst of
the world is a harder thing than it was of old to withdraw to the
Thebaid; that to risk "looking strange" requires a courage perhaps
cooler and higher than the soldier's or the saint's; and that to stand
away from the contact and custom of your "set" is a harder and sterner
work than it was of old to go into the sanctuary of La Trappe or Port
Royal.
* * *
The world has grown apathetic and purblind. Critics rage and quarrel
before a canvas, but the nations do not care; quarries of marble are
hewn into various shapes, and the throngs gape before them and are
indifferent; writers are so many that their writings blend in the public
mind in a confused phantasmagoria, where the colours run into one
another, and the lines are all waved and indistinct; the singer alone
still keeps the old magic power, "The beauty that was Athens, once the
glory that was Rome's," still holds the divine Cadmus, still sways the
vast thronged auditorium, till the myriads hold their breath like little
children in delight and awe. The great singer alone has the magic sway
of fame; and if he close his lips, "The gaiety of nations is eclipsed,"
and the world seems empty and silent, like a wood in which the birds are
all dead.
_IN A WINTER CITY._
The Duc found no topic that suited her. It was the Corso di Gala that
afternoon, would she not go?
No: her horses hated masks, and she hated noise.
The Veglione on Sunday--would she not go to that?
No: those things were well enough in the days of Philippe d'Orléans, who
invented them, but they were only now as stupid as they were vulgar;
anybody was let in for five francs.
Did she like the new weekly journal that was electrifying Paris?
No: she could see nothing in it: there was no wit now-a-days--only
personalities, which grew more gross every year.
The Duc urged that personalities were as old as Cratinus and
Archilochus, and that five hundred years before Christ the satires of
Hipponax drove Bupalus to hang himself.
She answered that a bad thing was not the better for being old.
People were talking of a clever English novel translated everywhere,
called "In a Hothouse," the hothouse being society--had she seen it?
No: what was the use of reading novels of society by people who never
had been in it? The last English "society" novel she had read had
described a cabinet minister in London as going to a Drawing-room in
the crowd, with everybody else, instead of by the _petite entrée_; they
were always full of such blunders.
Had she read the new French story "Le Bal de Mademoiselle Bibi?"
No: she had heard too much of it; it made you almost wish for a
Censorship of the Press.
The Duc agreed that literature was terribly but truly described as "un
tas d'ordures soigneusement enveloppé."
She said that the "tas d'ordures" without the envelope was sufficient
for popularity, but that the literature of any age was not to be
blamed--it was only a natural growth, like a mushroom; if the soil were
noxious, the fungus was bad.
The Duc wondered what a censorship would let pass if there were one.
She said that when there was one it had let pass Crebillon, the
Chevalier Le Clos, and the "Bijoux Indiscrets;" it had proscribed
Marmontel, Helvetius, and Lanjuinais. She did not know how one man could
be expected to be wiser than all his generation.
The Duc admired some majolica she had purchased.
She said she began to think that majolica was a false taste; the
metallic lustre was fine, but how clumsy the forms! one might be led
astray by too great love of old work.
The Duc praised a magnificent Sèvres panel, just painted by Riocreux and
Goupil, and given to her by Princess Olga on the New Year.
She said it was well done, but what charm was there in it? All their
modern iron and zinc colours, and hydrate of aluminum, and oxide of
chromium, and purple of Cassius, and all the rest of it, never gave
one-tenth the charm of those old painters who had only green greys and
dull blues and tawny yellows, and never could get any kind of red
whatever; Olga had meant to please her, but she, for her part, would
much sooner have had a little panel of Abruzzi, with all the holes and
defects in the pottery, and a brown contadina for a Madonna; there was
some interest in that,--there was no interest in that gorgeous landscape
and those brilliant hunting figures.
The Duc bore all the contradictions with imperturbable serenity and
urbanity, smiled to himself, and bowed himself out in perfect
good-humour.
"Tout va bien," he thought to himself; "Miladi must be very much in love
to be so cross."
The Duc's personal experience amongst ladies had made him of opinion
that love did not improve the temper.
* * *
"In love!" she echoed, with less languor and more of impetuosity than
she had ever displayed, "are you ever in love, any of you, ever? You
have senses and vanity and an inordinate fear of not being in the
fashion--and so you take your lovers as you drink your stimulants and
wear your wigs and tie your skirts back--because everybody else does it,
and not to do it is to be odd, or prudish, or something you would hate
to be called. Love! it is an unknown thing to you all. You have a sort
of miserable hectic passion, perhaps, that is a drug you take as you
take chlorodyne--just to excite you and make your jaded nerves a little
alive again, and yet you are such cowards that you have not even the
courage of passion, but label your drug Friendship, and beg Society to
observe that you only keep it for family uses like arnica or like
glycerine. You want notoriety; you want to indulge your fancies, and yet
keep your place in the world. You like to drag a young man about by a
chain, as if he were the dancing monkey that you depended upon for
subsistence. You like other women to see that you are not too _passée_
to be every whit as improper as if you were twenty. You like to
advertise your successes as it were with drum and trumpet, because if
you did not, people might begin to doubt that you had any. You like all
that, and you like to feel there is nothing you do not know and no
length you have not gone, and so you ring all the changes on all the
varieties of intrigue and sensuality, and go over the gamut of sickly
sentiment and nauseous license as an orchestra tunes its strings up
every night! That is what all you people call love; I am content enough
to have no knowledge of it."
* * *
"I would rather have the crudest original thing than the mere galvanism
of the corpse of a dead genius. I would give a thousand paintings by
Froment, Damousse, or any of the finest living artists of Sèvres, for
one piece by old Van der Meer of Delft; but I would prefer a painting on
Sèvres done yesterday by Froment or Damousse, or even any much less
famous worker, provided only it had originality in it, to the best
reproduction of a Van der Meer that modern manufacturers could produce."
"I think you are right; but I fear our old pottery-painters were not
very original. They copied from the pictures and engravings of Mantegna,
Raffaelle, Marcantonio, Marco di Ravenna, Beatricius, and a score of
others."
"The application was original, and the sentiment they brought to it.
Those old artists put so much heart into their work."
"Because when they painted a _stemma_ on the glaze they had still feudal
faith in nobility, and when they painted a Madonna or Ecce Homo they had
still childlike belief in divinity. What does the pottery-painter of
to-day care for the coat of arms or the religious subject he may be
commissioned to execute for a dinner service or a chapel? It may be
admirable painting--if you give a very high price--but it will still be
only manufacture."
"Then what pleasant lives those pottery painters of the early days must
have led! They were never long stationary. They wandered about
decorating at their fancy, now here and now there; now a vase for a
pharmacy, and now a stove for a king. You find German names on Italian
ware, and Italian names on Flemish grès; the Nuremberger would work in
Venice, the Dutchman would work in Rouen. Sometimes, however, they were
accused of sorcery; the great potter, Hans Kraut, you remember, was
feared by his townsmen as possessed by the devil, and was buried
ignominiously outside the gates, in his nook of the Black Forest. But on
the whole they were happy, no doubt; men of simple habits and of worthy
lives."
"You care for art yourself, M. Della Rocca?"
There came a gleam of interest in her handsome, languid, hazel eyes, as
she turned them upon him.
"Every Italian does," he answered her. "I do not think we are ever, or I
think, if ever, very seldom connoisseurs in the way that your Englishman
or Frenchman is so. We are never very learned as to styles and dates; we
cannot boast the huckster's eye of the northern bric-à-brac hunter; it
is quite another thing with us; we love art as children their nurses'
tales and cradle-songs. It is a familiar affection with us, and
affection is never very analytical. The Robbia over the chapel-door, the
apostle-pot that the men in the stables drink out of; the Sodoma or the
Beato Angelico that hangs before our eyes daily as we dine; the old
bronze _secchia_ that we wash our hands in as boys in the Loggia--these
are all so homely and dear to us that we grow up with a love for them
all as natural as our love for our mothers. You will say the children of
all rich people see beautiful and ancient things from their birth: so
they do, but not _as_ we see them. Here they are too often degraded to
the basest household uses, and made no more account of than the dust
which gathers on them; but that very neglect of them makes them the more
kindred to us. Art elsewhere is the guest of the salon--with us she is
the playmate of the infant and the serving-maid of the peasant: the
mules may drink from an Etruscan sarcophagus, and the pigeons be fed
from a _patina_ of the twelfth century."
* * *
Taste, mon cher Della Rocca, is the only sure guarantee in these
matters. Women, believe me, never have any principle. Principle is a
backbone, and no woman--except bodily--ever possesses any backbone.
Their priests and their teachers and their mothers fill them with
doctrines and conventionalities--all things of mere word and wind. No
woman has any settled principles; if she have any vague ones, it is the
uttermost she ever reaches, and those can always be overturned by any
man who has any influence over her. But Taste is another matter
altogether. A woman whose taste is excellent is preserved from all
eccentricities and most follies. You never see a woman of good sense
_afficher_ her improprieties or advertise her liaisons as women of
vulgarity do. Nay, if her taste be perfect, though she have weaknesses,
I doubt if she will ever have vices. Vice will seem to her like a gaudy
colour, or too much gold braid, or very large plaits, or buttons as big
as saucers, or anything else such as vulgar women like. Fastidiousness,
at any rate, is very good _postiche_ for modesty: it is always decent,
it can never be coarse. Good taste, inherent and ingrained, natural and
cultivated, cannot alter. Principles--ouf!--they go on and off like a
slipper; but good taste is indestructible; it is a compass that never
errs. If your wife have it--well, it is possible she may be false to
you; she is human, she is feminine; but she will never make you
ridiculous, she will never compromise you, and she will not romp in a
cotillon till the morning sun shows the paint on her face washed away in
the rain of her perspiration. Virtue is, after all, as Mme. de Montespan
said, "une chose tout purement géographique." It varies with the
hemisphere like the human skin and the human hair; what is vile in one
latitude is harmless in another. No philosophic person can put any trust
in a thing which merely depends upon climate; but, Good Taste----
* * *
Gossip is like the poor devil in the legend of Fugger's Teufelspalast at
Trent; it toils till cock-crow picking up the widely-scattered grains of
corn by millions till the bushel measure is piled high; and lo!--the
five grains that are _the_ grains always escape its sight and roll away
and hide themselves. The poor devil, being a primitive creature,
shrieked and flew away in despair at his failure. Gossip hugs its false
measure and says loftily that the five real grains are of no consequence
whatever.
* * *
The Lady Hilda sighed. This dreadful age, which has produced communists,
pétroleuses, and liberal thinkers, had communicated its vague
restlessness even to her; although she belonged to that higher region
where nobody ever thinks at all, and everybody is more or less devout in
seeming at any rate, because disbelief is vulgar, and religion is an
"affaire des moeurs," like decency, still the subtle philosophies and
sad negations which have always been afloat in the air since Voltaire
set them flying, had affected her slightly.
She was a true believer, just as she was a well-dressed woman, and had
her creeds just as she had her bath in the morning, as a matter of
course.
Still, when she did come to think of it, she was not so very sure. There
was another world, and saints and angels and eternity; yes, of
course--but how on earth would all those baccarat people ever fit into
it? Who could, by any stretch of imagination, conceive Madame Mila and
Maurice des Gommeux in a spiritual existence around the throne of Deity?
And as for punishment and torment and all that other side of futurity,
who could even think of the mildest purgatory as suitable to those poor
flipperty-gibbet inanities who broke the seventh commandment as gaily as
a child breaks his indiarubber ball, and were as incapable of passion
and crime as they were incapable of heroism and virtue?
There might be paradise for virtue and hell for crime, but what in the
name of the universe was to be done with creatures that were only all
Folly? Perhaps they would be always flying about like the souls Virgil
speaks of, "suspensæ ad ventos," to purify themselves; as the sails of a
ship spread out to dry. The Huron Indians pray to the souls of the fish
they catch; well, why should they not? a fish has a soul if Modern
Society has one; one could conceive a fish going softly through shining
waters for ever and for ever in the ecstasy of motion; but who could
conceive Modern Society in the spheres?
* * *
"One grows tired of everything," she answered with a little sigh.
"Everything that is artificial, you mean. People think Horace's love of
the rural life an affectation. I believe it to be most sincere. After
the strain of the conventionality and the adulation of the Augustan
court, the natural existence of the country must have been welcome to
him. I know it is the fashion to say that a love of Nature belongs only
to the Moderns, but I do not think so. Into Pindar, Theocritus,
Meleager, the passion for Nature must have entered very strongly; what
_is_ modern is the more subjective, the more fanciful feeling which
makes Nature a sounding-board to echo all the cries of man."
"But that is always a northern feeling?"