it. The sunshine that laughs around us nine months of every year, the
fruits that grow almost without culture, the flowers that we throw to
the oxen to eat, the very stones that are sweet with myrtle, the very
sea sand that is musical with bees in the rosemary, everything we grow
up amongst from infancy, makes our love of Nature only a kind of
unconscious joy in it; but here even the peasant has that, and the songs
of the men that cannot read or write are full of it. If a field labourer
sing to his love he will sing of the narcissus and the crocus, as
Meleager sang to Heliodora twenty centuries ago."
* * *
That is an Italian amorous fancy. Romeo and Othello are the typical
Italian lovers. I never can tell how a northerner like Shakespeare could
draw either. You are often very unfaithful; but _while_ you are faithful
you are ardent, and you are absorbed in the woman. That is one of the
reasons why an Italian succeeds in love as no other man does. "L'art de
brûler silencieusement ment le coeur d'un femme" is a supreme art with
you. Compared with you, all other men are children. You have been the
supreme masters of the great passion since the days of Ovid.
* * *
Boredom is the ill-natured pebble that always _will_ get in the golden
slipper of the pilgrim of pleasure.
* * *
"They say," the great assassin who slays as many thousands as ever did
plague or cholera, drink or warfare; "they say," the thief of
reputation, who steals, with stealthy step and coward's mask, to filch
good names away in the dead dark of irresponsible calumny; "they say," a
giant murderer, iron-gloved to slay you, a fleet, elusive, vaporous
will-o'-the-wisp, when you would seize and choke it; "they say," mighty
Thug though it be which strangles from behind the purest victim, had not
been ever known to touch the Lady Hilda.
* * *
All her old philosophies seemed falling about her like shed leaves, and
her old self seemed to her but a purposeless frivolous chilly creature.
The real reason she would not face, and indeed as yet was not conscious
of; the reason that love had entered into her, and that love, if it be
worth the name, has always two handmaidens: swift sympathy, and sad
humility, keeping step together.
* * *
The Femme Galante has passed through many various changes, in many
countries. The dames of the Decamerone were unlike the fair
athlete-seekers of the days of Horace; and the powdered coquettes of the
years of Molière, were sisters only by the kinship of a common vice to
the frivolous and fragile faggot of impulses, that is called Frou-frou.
The Femme Galante has always been a feature in every age; poets, from
Juvenal to Musset, have railed at her; artists, from Titian to
Winterhalter, have painted her; dramatists, from Aristophanes to
Congreve and Dumas Fils, have pointed their arrows at her; satirists,
from Archilochus and Simonides to Hogarth and Gavarni, have poured out
their aqua-fortis for her. But the real Femme Galante of to-day has been
missed hitherto.
Frou-frou, who stands for her, is not in the least the true type.
Frou-frou is a creature that can love, can suffer, can repent, can die.
She is false in sentiment and in art, but she is tender after all; poor,
feverish, wistful, changeful morsel of humanity. A slender, helpless,
breathless, and frail thing who, under one sad, short sin, sinks down to
death.
But Frou-frou is in no sense the true Femme Galante of her day.
Frou-frou is much more a fancy than a fact. It is not Frou-frou that
Molière would have handed down to other generations in enduring
ridicule, had he been living now. To her he would have doffed his hat
with dim eyes; what he would have fastened for all time in his pillory
would have been a very different, and far more conspicuous offender.
The Femme Galante, who has neither the scruples nor the follies of poor
Frou-frou, who neither forfeits her place nor leaves her lord; who has
studied adultery as one of the fine arts and made it one of the domestic
virtues; who takes her wearied lover to her friends' houses as she takes
her muff or her dog, and teaches her sons and daughters to call him by
familiar names; who writes to the victim of her passions with the same
pen that calls her boy home from school; and who smooths her child's
curls with the same fingers that stray over her lover's lips; who
challenges the world to find a flaw in her, and who smiles serene at her
husband's table on a society she is careful to conciliate; who has woven
the most sacred ties and most unholy pleasures into so deft a braid,
that none can say where one commences or the other ends; who uses the
sanctity of her maternity to cover the lawlessness of her license; and
who, incapable alike of the self-abandonment of love or of the
self-sacrifice of duty, has not even such poor, cheap honour as, in the
creatures of the streets, may make guilt loyal to its dupe and partner.
This is the Femme Galante of the passing century, who, with her hand on
her husband's arm, babbles of her virtue in complacent boast; and
ignoring such a vulgar word as Sin, talks with a smile of Friendship.
Beside her Frou-frou were innocence itself, Marion de l'Orme were
honesty, Manon Lescaut were purity, Cleopatra were chaste, and Faustine
were faithful.
She is the female Tartuffe of seduction, the Précieuse Ridicule of
passion, the parody of Love, the standing gibe of Womanhood.
* * *
She was always in debt, though she admitted that her husband allowed her
liberally. She had eighty thousand francs a year by her settlements to
spend on herself, and he gave her another fifty thousand to do as she
pleased with: on the whole about one half what he allowed to Blanche
Souris, of the Château Gaillard theatre.
She had had six children, three were living and three were dead; she
thought herself a good mother, because she gave her wet-nurses ever so
many silk gowns, and when she wanted the children for a fancy ball or a
drive, always saw that they were faultlessly dressed, and besides she
always took them to Trouville.
She had never had any grief in her life, except the loss of the Second
Empire, and even that she got over when she found that flying the Red
Cross flag had saved her hotel, without so much as a teacup being broken
in it, that MM. Worth and Offenbach were safe from all bullets, and
that society, under the Septennate, promised to be every bit as _leste_
as under the Empire.
In a word, Madame Mila was a type of the women of her time.
The women who go semi-nude in an age which has begun to discover that
the nude in sculpture is very immoral; who discuss "Tue-la" in a
generation which decrees Molière to be coarse, and Beaumont and Fletcher
indecent; who have the Journal pour Rire on their tables in a day when
no one who respects himself would name the Harlot's Progress; who read
Beaudelaire and patronise Térésa and Schneider in an era which finds
"Don Juan" gross, and Shakespeare far too plain; who strain all their
energies to rival Miles. Rose Thé and La Petite Boulotte in everything;
who go shrimping or oyster-hunting on fashionable sea-shores, with their
legs bare to the knee; who go to the mountains with confections, high
heels, and gold-tipped canes, shriek over their gambling as the dawn
reddens over the Alps, and know no more of the glories of earth and sky,
of sunrise and sunset, than do the porcelain pots that hold their paint,
or the silver dressing-box that carries their hair-dye.
Women who are in convulsions one day, and on the top of a drag the next;
who are in hysterics for their lovers at noon, and in ecstasies over
baccarat at midnight; who laugh in little nooks together over each
other's immoralities, and have a moral code so elastic that it will
pardon anything except innocence; who gossip over each other's dresses,
and each other's passions, in the self-same, self-satisfied chirp of
contentment, and who never resent anything on earth, except any
eccentric suggestion that life could be anything except a perpetual fête
à la Watteau in a perpetual blaze of lime-light.
Pain?--Are there not chloral and a flattering doctor? Sorrow?--Are there
not a course at the Baths, play at Monte Carlo, and new cases from
Worth? Shame?--Is it not a famine fever which never comes near a
well-laden table? Old Age?--Is there not white and red paint, and heads
of dead hair, and even false bosoms? Death? Well, no doubt there is
death, but they do not realise it; they hardly believe in it, they think
about it so little.
There is something unknown somewhere to fall on them some day that they
dread vaguely, for they are terrible cowards. But they worry as little
about it as possible. They give the millionth part of what they possess
away in its name to whatever church they belong to, and they think they
have arranged quite comfortably for all possible contingencies
hereafter.
If it make things safe, they will head bazaars for the poor, or wear
black in holy week, turn lottery-wheels for charity, or put on fancy
dresses in the name of benevolence, or do any little amiable trifle of
that sort. But as for changing their lives,--_pas si bête!_
A bird in the hand they hold worth two in the bush; and though your
birds may be winged on strong desire, and your bush the burning portent
of Moses, they will have none of them.
These women are not all bad; oh, no! they are like sheep, that is all.
If it were fashionable to be virtuous, very likely they would be so. If
it were _chic_ to be devout, no doubt they would pass their life on
their knees. But, as it is, they know that a flavour of vice is as
necessary to their reputation as great ladies, as sorrel-leaves to soup
à la bonne femme. They affect a license if they take it not.
They are like the barber, who said, with much pride, to Voltaire, "Je ne
suis qu'un pauvre diable de perruquier, mais je ne crois pas en Dieu
plus que les autres."
They may be worth very little, but they are desperately afraid that you
should make such a mistake as to think them worth anything at all. You
are not likely, if you know them. Still, they are apprehensive.
Though one were to arise from the dead to preach to them, they would
only make of him a nine days' wonder, and then laugh a little, and yawn
a little, and go on in their own paths.
Out of the eater came forth meat, and from evil there may be begotten
good; but out of nullity there can only come nullity. They have wadded
their ears, and though Jeremiah wailed of desolation, or Isaiah
thundered the wrath of heaven, they would not hear,--they would go on
looking at each other's dresses.
What could Paul himself say that would change them?
You cannot make sawdust into marble; you cannot make sea-sand into gold.
"Let us alone," is all they ask; and it is all that you could do, though
the force and flame of Horeb were in you.
* * *
It is very curious, but loss of taste in the nobles has always been
followed by a revolution of the mob. The _décadence_ always ushers in
the democracy.
* * *
Pleasure alone cannot content any one whose character has any force, or
mind any high intelligence. Society is, as you say, a book we soon read
through, and know by heart till it loses all interest. Art alone cannot
fill more than a certain part of our emotions; and culture, however
perfect, leaves us unsatisfied. There is only one thing that can give to
life what your poet called the light that never was on sea or land--and
that is human love.
* * *
"Yes, it is a curious thing that we do not succeed in fresco. The grace
is gone out of it; modern painters have not the lightness of touch
necessary; they are used to masses of colour, and they use the palette
knife as a mason the trowel. The art, too, like the literature of our
time, is all detail; the grand suggestive vagueness of the Greek drama
and of the Umbrian frescoes are lost to us under a crowd of elaborated
trivialities; perhaps it is because art has ceased to be spiritual or
tragic, and is merely domestic or melodramatic; the Greeks knew neither
domesticity nor melodrama, and the early Italian painters were imbued
with a faith which, if not so virile as the worship of the Phidian Zeus,
yet absorbed them and elevated them in a degree impossible in the tawdry
Sadduceeism of our own day. By the way, when the weather is milder you
must go to Orvieto; you have never been there, I think; it is the
Prosodion of Signorelli. What a fine Pagan he was at heart! He admired
masculine beauty like a Greek; he must have been a singularly happy
man--few more happy----"
_A LEAF IN THE STORM._
The Berceau de Dieu was a little village in the valley of the Seine.
As a lark drops its nest amongst the grasses, so a few peasant people
had dropped their little farms and cottages amidst the great green woods
on the winding river. It was a pretty place, with one steep, stony
street, shady with poplars and with elms; quaint houses, about whose
thatch a cloud of white and grey pigeons fluttered all day long; a
little aged chapel with a conical red roof; and great barns covered with
ivy and thick creepers, red and purple, and lichens that were yellow in
the sun.
All around it there were the broad, flowering meadows, with the sleek
cattle of Normandy fattening in them, and the sweet dim forests where
the young men and maidens went on every holy-day and feast-day in the
summer-time to seek for wood-anemones, and lilies of the pools, and the
wild campanula, and the fresh dogrose, and all the boughs and grasses
that made their house-doors like garden-bowers, and seemed to take the
cushat's note and the linnet's song into their little temple of God.
The Berceau de Dieu was very old indeed.
Men said that the hamlet had been there in the day of the Virgin of
Orléans; and a stone cross of the twelfth century still stood by the
great pond of water at the bottom of the street, under the
chestnut-tree, where the villagers gathered to gossip at sunset when
their work was done.
It had no city near it, and no town nearer than four leagues. It was in
the green core of a pastoral district, thickly wooded and intersected
with orchards. Its produce of wheat, and oats, and cheese, and fruit,
and eggs, was more than sufficient for its simple prosperity. Its people
were hardy, kindly, laborious, happy; living round the little grey
chapel in amity and good-fellowship.
Nothing troubled it. War and rumours of war, revolutions and
counter-revolutions, empires and insurrections, military and political
questions--these all were for it things unknown and unheard of--mighty
winds that arose and blew and swept the lands around it, but never came
near enough to harm it, lying there, as it did, in its loneliness like
any lark's nest.
* * *
"I am old: yes, I am very old," she would say, looking up from her
spinning-wheel in her house-door, and shading her eyes from the sun,
"very old--ninety-two last summer. But when one has a roof over one's
head, and a pot of soup always, and a grandson like mine, and when one
has lived all one's life in the Berceau de Dieu, then it is well to be
so old. Ah, yes, my little ones--yes, though you doubt it, you little
birds that have just tried your wings--it is well to be so old. One has
time to think, and thank the good God, which one never seemed to have a
minute to do in that work, work, work, when one was young."
* * *
The end soon came.
From hill to hill the Berceau de Dieu broke into flames. The village was
a lake of fire, into which the statue of the Christ, burning and
reeling, fell. Some few peasants, with their wives and children, fled to
the woods, and there escaped one torture to perish more slowly of cold
and famine. All other things perished. The rapid stream of the flame
licked up all there was in its path. The bare trees raised their
leafless branches on fire at a thousand points. The stores of corn and
fruit were lapped by millions of crimson tongues. The pigeons flew
screaming from their roosts and sank into the smoke. The dogs were
suffocated on the thresholds they had guarded all their lives. The calf
was stifled in the byre. The sheep ran bleating with the wool burning on
their living bodies. The little caged birds fluttered helpless, and then
dropped, scorched to cinders. The aged and the sick were stifled in
their beds. All things perished.
The Berceau de Dieu was as one vast furnace, in which every living
creature was caught and consumed and changed to ashes.
The tide of war has rolled on and left it a blackened waste, a smoking
ruin, wherein not so much as a mouse may creep or a bird may nestle. It
is gone, and its place can know it never more.
Never more.
But who is there to care?
It was but as a leaf which the great storm withered as it passed.
* * *
"Look you," she had said to him oftentimes, "in my babyhood there was
the old white flag upon the château. Well, they pulled that down and put
up a red one. That toppled and fell, and there was one of three
colours. Then somebody with a knot of white lilies in his hand came one
day and set up the old white one afresh; and before the day was done
that was down again, and the tricolour again up where it is still. Now
some I know fretted themselves greatly because of all these changes of
the flags, but as for me, I could not see that any one of them mattered:
bread was just as dear, and sleep was just as sweet, whichever of the
three was uppermost."
_A DOG OF FLANDERS._
In the spring and summer especially were they glad. Flanders is not a
lovely land, and around the burgh of Rubens it is perhaps least lovely
of all.
Corn and colza, pasture and plough, succeed each other on the
characterless plain in wearying repetition, and save by some gaunt grey
tower, with its peal of pathetic bells, or some figure coming athwart
the fields, made picturesque by a gleaner's bundle or a woodman's
faggot, there is no change, no variety, no beauty anywhere; and he who
has dwelt upon the mountains or amidst the forests feels oppressed as by
imprisonment with the tedium and the endlessness of that vast and dreary
level.
But it is green and very fertile, and it has wide horizons that have a
certain charm of their own even in their dulness and monotony; and
amongst the rushes by the water-side the flowers grow, and the trees
rise tall and fresh where the barges glide with their great hulks black
against the sun, and their little green barrels and vari-coloured flags
gay against the leaves.
Anyway, there is a greenery and breadth of space enough to be as good as
beauty to a child and a dog; and these two asked no better, when their
work was done, than to lie buried in the lush grasses on the side of the
canal, and watch the cumbrous vessels drifting by, and bringing the
crisp salt smell of the sea amongst the blossoming scents of the country
summer.
* * *
Antwerp, as all the world knows, is full at every turn of old piles of
stones, dark and ancient and majestic, standing in crooked courts,
jammed against gateways and taverns, rising by the water's edge, with
bells ringing above them in the air, and ever and again out of their
arched doors a swell of music pealing.
There they remain, the grand old sanctuaries of the past, shut in amidst
the squalor, the hurry, the crowds, the unloveliness and the commerce of
the modern world; and all day long the clouds drift and the birds
circle, and the winds sigh around them, and beneath the earth at their
feet there sleeps--RUBENS.
And the greatness of the mighty Master still rests upon Antwerp;
wherever we turn in its narrow streets his glory lies therein, so that
all mean things are thereby transfigured; and as we pace slowly through
the winding ways, and by the edge of the stagnant water, and through the
noisome courts, his spirit abides with us, and the heroic beauty of his
visions is about us, and the stones that once felt his footsteps and
bore his shadow seem to arise and speak of him with living voices. For
the city which is the tomb of Rubens still lives to us through him, and
him alone.
Without Rubens, what were Antwerp? A dirty, dusky, bustling mart, which
no man would ever care to look upon save the traders who do business on
its wharves. With Rubens, to the whole world of men it is a sacred name,
a sacred soil, a Bethlehem where a god of Art saw light, a Golgotha
where a god of Art lies dead.
It is so quiet there by that great white sepulchre--so quiet, save only
when the organ peals, and the choir cries aloud the Salve Regina or the
Kyrie Eleison. Sure no artist ever had a greater gravestone than that
pure marble sanctuary gives to him in the heart of his birthplace in the
chancel of St. Jacques?
O nations! closely should you treasure your great men, for by them alone
will the future know of you. Flanders in her generations has been wise.
In his life she glorified this greatest of her sons, and in his death
she magnifies his name. But her wisdom is very rare.
* * *
The night was very wild. The lamps under the wayside crosses were blown
out: the roads were sheets of ice; the impenetrable darkness hid every
trace of habitations; there was no living thing abroad. All the cattle
were housed, and in all the huts and homesteads men and women rejoiced
and feasted. There was only the dog out in the cruel cold--old and
famished and full of pain, but with the strength and the patience of a
great love to sustain him in his search.
The trail of Nello's steps, faint and obscure as it was under the new
snow, went straightly along the accustomed tracks into Antwerp. It was
past midnight when Patrasche traced it over the boundaries of the town
and into the narrow, tortuous, gloomy streets. It was all quite dark in
the town. Now and then some light gleamed ruddily through the crevices
of house-shutters, or some group went homeward with lanterns chanting
drinking songs. The streets were all white with ice: the high walls and
roofs loomed black against them. There was scarce a sound save the riot
of the winds down the passages as they tossed the creaking signs and
shook the tall lamp-irons.
So many passers-by had trodden through and through the snow, so many
diverse paths had crossed and re-crossed each other, that the dog had a
hard task to retain any hold on the track he followed. But he kept on
his way, though the cold pierced him to the bone, and the jagged ice cut
his feet, and the hunger in his body gnawed like a rat's teeth. But he
kept on his way--a poor, gaunt, shivering, drooping thing in the frozen
darkness, that no one pitied as he went--and by long patience traced the
steps he loved into the very heart of the burgh and up to the steps of
the great cathedral.
"He is gone to the things that he loved," thought Patrasche; he could
not understand, but he was full of sorrow and of pity for the
art-passion that to him was so incomprehensible and yet so sacred.
The portals of the cathedral were unclosed after the midnight mass. Some
heedlessness in the custodians, too eager to go home and feast or sleep,
or too drowsy to know whether they turned the keys aright, had left one
of the doors unlocked. By that accident the footfalls Patrasche sought
had passed through into the building, leaving the white marks of snow
upon the dark stone floor. By that slender white thread, frozen as it
fell, he was guided through the intense silence, through the immensity
of the vaulted space--guided straight to the gates of the chancel, and
stretched there upon the stones he found Nello. He crept up noiselessly,
and touched the face of the boy. "Didst thou dream that I should be
faithless and forsake thee? I--a dog?" said that mute caress.
The lad raised himself with a low cry and clasped him close.
"Let us lie down and die together," he murmured. "Men have no need of
us, and we are all alone."
In answer, Patrasche crept closer yet, and laid his head upon the young
boy's breast. The great tears stood in his brown sad eyes: not for
himself--for himself he was happy.