always; but what matter?--he will be saved; he will be innocent once
more; he will hear his 'beautiful things' again; he will never know the
truth; he will be at peace with himself, and forget before the summer
comes. He never has loved me--not much. What does it matter?--so that he
is saved. When he sees his mother in heaven some day, then she will say
to him--'It was done for your sake.' And I shall know that he sees then,
as God sees. That will be enough."
* * *
The boy looked out through the iron bars of his open lattice into the
cold, still night, full of the smell of fallen leaves and fir cones. The
tears fell down his cheeks; his heart was oppressed with a vague
yearning, such as made Mozart weep, when he heard his own Lacrimosa
chanted.
It is not fear of death, it is not desire of life.
It is that unutterable want, that nameless longing, which stirs in the
soul that is a little purer than its fellow, and which, burdened with
that prophetic pain which men call genius, blindly feels its way after
some great light, that knows must be shining somewhere upon other
worlds, though all the earth is dark.
When Mozart wept, it was for the world he could never reach--not for the
world he left.
* * *
He had been brought up upon this wooded spur, looking down on the Signa
country; all his loves and hatreds, joys and pains, had been known here;
from the time he had plucked the maple leaves in autumn for the cattle
with little brown five-year-old hands he had laboured here, never seeing
the sun set elsewhere except on that one night at the sea. He was close
rooted to the earth as the stonepines were and the oaks. It had always
seemed to him that a man should die where he took life first, amongst
his kindred and under the sods that his feet had run over in babyhood.
He had never thought much about it, but unconsciously the fibres of his
heart had twisted themselves round all the smallest and the biggest
things of his home as the tendrils of a strong ivy bush fasten round a
great tower and the little stones alike.
The wooden settle where his mother had sat; the shrine in the house
wall; the copper vessels that had glowed in the wood-fuel light when a
large family had gathered there about the hearth; the stone well under
the walnut-tree where dead Dina had often stayed to smile on him; the
cypress-wood presses where Pippa had kept her feast-day finery and her
pearls; the old vast sweet-smelling sheds and stables where he had
threshed and hewn and yoked his oxen thirty years if one: all these
things, and a hundred like them, were dear to him with all the memories
of his entire life; and away from them he could know no peace.
He was going away into a great darkness. He had nothing to guide him.
The iron of a wasted love, of a useless sacrifice, was in his heart. His
instinct drove him where there was peril for Pippa's son--that was all.
If this woman took the lad away from him, where was there any mercy or
justice, earthly or divine? That was all he asked himself, blindly and
stupidly; as the oxen seem to ask it with their mild, sad eyes as they
strain under the yoke and goad, suffering and not knowing why they
suffer.
Nothing was clear to Bruno.
Only life had taught him that Love is the brother of Death.
One thing and another had come between him and the lad he cherished. The
dreams of the child, the desires of the youth, the powers of art, the
passion of genius, one by one had come in between him and loosened his
hold, and made him stand aloof as a stranger. But Love he had dreaded
most of all; Love which slays with one glance dreams and art and genius,
and lays them dead as rootless weeds that rot in burning suns.
Now Love had come.
He worked all day, holding the sickness of fear off him as best he
could, for he was a brave man;--only he had wrestled with fate so long,
and it seemed always to beat him, and almost he grew tired.
He cut a week's fodder for the beasts, and left all things in their
places, and then, as the day darkened, prepared to go.
Tinello and Pastore lowed at him, thrusting their broad white foreheads
and soft noses over their stable door.
He turned and stroked them in farewell.
"Poor beasts!" he muttered; "shall I never muzzle and yoke you ever
again?"
His throat grew dry, his eyes grew dim. He was like a man who sails for
a voyage on unknown seas, and neither he nor any other can tell whether
he will ever return.
He might come back in a day; he might come back never.
Multitudes, well used to wander, would have laughed at him. But to him
it was as though he set forth on the journey which men call death.
In the grey lowering evening he kissed the beasts on their white brows.
There was no one there to see his weakness, and year on year he had
decked them with their garlands of hedge flowers and led them up on
God's day to have their strength blessed by the priest--their strength
that laboured with his own from dawn to dark over the bare brown fields.
Then he turned his back on his old home, and went down the green sides
of the hill, and lost sight of his birthplace as the night fell.
All through the night he was borne away by the edge of the sea, along
the wild windy shores, through the stagnant marshes and the black pools
where the buffalo and the wild boar herded, past the deserted cities of
the coast, and beyond the forsaken harbours of Æneas and of Nero.
The west wind blew strong; the clouds were heavy; now and then the moon
shone on a sullen sea; now and then the darkness broke over rank maremma
vapours; at times he heard the distant bellowing of the herds, at times
he heard the moaning of the water; mighty cities, lost armies,
slaughtered hosts, foundered fleets, were underneath that soil and sea;
whole nations had their sepulchres on that low, wind-blown shore. But of
these he knew nothing.
It only seemed to him, that day would never come.
Once or twice he fell asleep for a few moments, and waking in that
confused noise of the stormy night and the wild water and the frightened
herds, thought that he was dead, and that this sound was the passing of
the feet of all the living multitude going for ever to and fro,
unthinking, over the depths of the dark earth where he lay.
* * *
To behold the dominion of evil; the victory of the liar; the empire of
that which is base; to be powerless to resist, impotent to strip it
bare; to watch it suck under a beloved life as the whirlpool the
gold-freighted vessel; to know that the soul for which we would give our
own to everlasting ruin is daily, hourly, momentarily subjugated,
emasculated, possessed, devoured by those alien powers of violence and
fraud which have fastened upon it as their prey; to stand by fettered
and mute, and cry out to heaven that in this conflict the angels
themselves should descend to wrestle for us, and yet know that all the
while the very stars in their courses shall sooner stand still than this
reign of sin be ended:--this is the greatest woe that the world holds.
Beaten, we shake in vain the adamant gates of a brazen iniquity; we may
bruise our breasts there till we die; there is no entrance possible. For
that which is vile is stronger than all love, all faith, all pure
desire, all passionate pain; that which is vile has all the forces that
men have called the powers of hell.
* * *
To him the world was like the dark fathomless waste of waters shelving
away to nameless shapeless perils such as the old Greek mariners drew
upon their charts as compassing the shores they knew.
He had no light of knowledge by which to pursue in hope or fancy the
younger life that would be launched into the untried realms. To him such
separation was as death.
He could not write; he could not even read what was written. He could
only trust to others that all was well with the boy.
He could have none of that mental solace which supports the scholar;
none of that sense of natural loveliness which consoles the poet; his
mind could not travel beyond the narrow circlet of its own pain; his
eyes could not see beauty everywhere from the green fly at his foot to
the sapphire mountains above his head; he only noticed the sunset to
tell the weather; he only looked across the plain to see if the
rain-fall would cross the river. When the autumn crocus sank under his
share, to him it was only a weed best withered; in hell he believed, and
for heaven he hoped, but only dully, as things certain that the priests
knew; but all consolations of the mind or the fancy were denied to him.
Superstitions, indeed, he had, but these were all;--sad-coloured fungi
in the stead of flowers.
The Italian has not strong imagination.
His grace is an instinct; his love is a frenzy; his gaiety is rather joy
than jest; his melancholy is from temperament, not meditation; nature is
little to him; and his religion and his passions alike must have
physical indulgence and perpetual nearness, or they are nothing.
He lived in almost absolute solitude. Sometimes it grew dreary, and the
weeks seemed long.
Two years went by--slowly.
Signa did not come home. The travel to and fro took too much money, and
he was engrossed in his studies, and it was best so; so Luigi Dini said,
and Bruno let it be. The boy did not ask to return. His letters were
very brief and not very coherent, and he forget to send messages to old
Teresina or to Palma. But there was no fear for him.
The sacristan's friends under whose roof he was wrote once in a quarter,
and spoke well of him always, and said that the professors did the same,
and that a gentler lad or one more wedded to his work they never knew.
And so Bruno kept his soul in patience, and said, "Do not trouble him;
when he wishes he will come--or if he want anything. Let him be."
To those who have traversed far seas and many lands, and who can bridge
untravelled countries by the aid of experience and of understanding,
such partings have pain, but a pain lessened by the certain knowledge of
their span and purpose. By the light of remembrance or of imagination
they can follow that which leaves them.
But Bruno had no such solace.
To him all that was indefinite was evil; all that was unfamiliar was
horrible. It is the error of ignorance at all times.
* * *
He played for himself, for the air, for the clouds, for the trees, for
the sheep, for the kids, for the waters, for the stones; played as Pan
did, and Orpheus and Apollo.
His music came from heaven and went back to it. What did it matter who
heard it on earth?
A lily would listen to him as never a man could do; and a daffodil would
dance with delight as never woman could;--or he thought so at least,
which was the same thing. And he could keep the sheep all round him,
charmed and still, high above on the hillside, with the sad pines
sighing.
What did he want with people to hear? He would play for them; but he did
not care. If they felt it wrongly, or felt it not at all, he would stop,
and run away.
"If they are deaf I will be dumb," he said. "The dogs and the sheep and
the birds are never deaf--nor the hills--nor the flowers. It is only
people that are deaf. I suppose they are always hearing their own steps
and voices and wheels and windlasses and the cries of the children and
the hiss of the frying-pans. I suppose that is why. Well, let them be
deaf. Rusignuola and I do not want them."
So he said to Palma under the south wall, watching a butterfly, that
folded was like an illuminated shield of black and gold, and with its
wings spread was like a scarlet pomegranate blossom flying. Palma had
asked him why he had run away from the bridal supper of Griffeo, the
coppersmith's son,--just in the midst of his music; run away home, he
and his violin.
"They were not deaf," resumed Palma. "But your music was so sad--and
they were merry."
"I played what came to me," said Signa.
"But you are merry sometimes."
"Not in a little room with oilwicks burning, and a stench of wine, and
people round me. People always make me sad."
"Why that?"
"Because--I do not know:--when a number of faces are round me I seem
stupid; it is as if I were in a cage; I feel as if God went away,
farther, farther, farther!"
"But God made men and women."
"Yes. But I wonder if the trapped birds, and the beaten dogs, and the
smarting mules, and the bleeding sheep think so."
"Oh, Signa!"
"I think they must doubt it," said Signa.
"But the beasts are not Christians, the priests say so," said Palma, who
was a very true believer.
"I know. But I think they are. For they forgive. We never do."
"Some of us do."
"Not as the beasts do. Agnoto's house-lamb, the other day, licked his
hand as he cut its throat. He told me so."
"That was because it loved him," said Palma.
"And how can it love if it have not a soul?" said Signa.
Palma munched her crust. This sort of meditation, which Signa was very
prone to wander in, utterly confused her.
She could talk at need, as others could, of the young cauliflowers, and
the spring lettuces, and the chances of the ripening corn, and the look
of the budding grapes, and the promise of the weather, and the
likelihood of drought, and the Parocco's last sermon, and the gossips'
last history of the neighbours, and the varying prices of fine and of
coarse plaiting; but anything else--Palma was more at ease with the
heavy pole pulling against her, and the heavy bucket coming up sullenly
from the water-hole.
She felt, when he spoke in this way, much as Bruno did--only far more
intensely--as if Signa went away from her--right away into the sky
somewhere--as the swallows went when they spread their wings to the
east, or the blue wood-smoke when it vanished.
"You love your music better than you do Bruno, or me, or anything,
Signa," she said, with a little sorrow that was very humble, and not in
the least reproachful.
"Yes," said Signa, with the unconscious cruelty of one in whom Art is
born predominant. "Do you know, Palma," he said suddenly, after a
pause--"Do you know--I think I could make something beautiful, something
men would be glad of, if only I could be where they would care for it."
"We do care," said the girl gently.
"Oh, in a way. That is not what I mean," said the boy, with a little
impatience which daily grew on him more, for the associates of his life.
"You all care; you all sing; it is as the finches do in the fields,
without knowing at all what it is that you do. You are all like birds.
You pipe--pipe--pipe, as you eat, as you work, as you play. But what
music do we ever have in the churches? Who amongst you really likes all
that music when I play it off the old scores that Gigi says were written
by such great men, any better than you like the tinkling of the
mandolines when you dance in the threshing barns? I am sure you all like
the mandolines best. I know nothing here. I do not even know whether
what I do is worth much or nothing. I think if I could hear great music
once--if I could go to Florence----"
"To Florence?" echoed Palma.
* * *
The contadino not seldom goes through all his life without seeing one
league beyond the fields of his labour, and the village that he is
registered at, married at, and buried at, and which is the very apex of
the earth to him. Women will spin and plait and hoe and glean within
half a dozen miles of some great city whose name is an art glory in the
mouths of scholars, and never will have seen it, never once perhaps,
from their birth down to their grave. A few miles of vine-bordered
roads, a breadth of corn-land, a rounded hill, a little red roof under a
mulberry tree, a church tower with a saint upon the roof, and a bell
that sounds over the walnut-trees--these are their world: they know and
want to know no other.
A narrow life, no doubt, yet not without much to be said for it. Without
unrest, without curiosity, without envy; clinging like a plant to the
soil; and no more willing to wander than the vinestakes which they
thrust into the earth.
To those who have put a girdle round the earth with their footsteps, the
whole world seems much smaller than does the hamlet or farm of his
affections to the peasant:--and how much poorer! The vague, dreamful
wonder of an untravelled distance--of an untracked horizon--has after
all more romance in it than lies in the whole globe run over in a year.
Who can ever look at the old maps in Herodotus or Xenophon without a
wish that the charm of those unknown limits and those untraversed seas
was ours?--without an irresistible sense that to have sailed away, in
vaguest hazard, into the endless mystery of the utterly unknown, must
have had a sweetness and a greatness in it that is never to be extracted
from "the tour of the world in ninety days."
* * *
"She takes a whim for him; a fancy of a month; he thinks it heaven and
eternity. She has ruined him. His genius is burned up; his youth is
dead; he will do nothing more of any worth. Women like her are like the
Indian drugs, that sleep and kill. How is that any fault of mine? He
could see the thing she was. If he will fling his soul away upon a
creature lighter than thistle-down, viler than a rattlesnake's poison,
poorer and quicker to pass than the breath of a gnat--whose blame is
that except his own? There was a sculptor once, you know, that fell to
lascivious worship of the marble image he had made; well,--poets are not
even so far wise as that. They make an image out of the gossamer rainbow
stuff of their own dreams, and then curse heaven and earth because it
dissolves to empty air in their fond arms--whose blame is that? The
fools are made so----"
* * *
Not only the fly on the spoke takes praise to itself for the speed of
the wheel, but the stone that would fain have hindered it, says, when
the wheel unhindered has passed it, "Lo! see how much I helped!"
* * *
The woman makes or mars the man: the man the woman. Mythology had no
need of the Fates.
There is only one; the winged blind god that came by night to Psyche.
* * *
All in a moment his art perished.
When a human love wakes it crushes fame like a dead leaf, and all the
spirits and ministers of the mind shrink away before it, and can no more
allure, no more console, but, sighing, pass into silence and are dumb.
* * *
Life, without a central purpose around which it can revolve, is like a
star that has fallen out of its orbit. With a great affection or a great
aim gone, the practical life may go on loosely, indifferently,
mechanically, but it takes no grip on outer things, it has no vital
interest, it gravitates to nothing.
* * *
Men who dwell in solitude are superstitious. There is no "chance" for
them.
The common things of earth and air to them grow portents: and it is
easier for them to believe that the universe revolves to serve the
earth, than to believe that men are to the universe as the gnats in the
sunbeam to the sun; they can sooner credit that the constellations are
charged with their destiny, than that they can suffer and die without
arousing a sigh for them anywhere in all creation. It is not vanity, as
the mocker too hastily thinks. It is the helpless, pathetic cry of the
mortal to the immortal nature from which he springs:
"Leave me not alone: confound me not with the matter that perishes: I am
full of pain--have pity!"
To be the mere sport of hazard as a dead moth is on the wind--the heart
of man refuses to believe it can be so with him. To be created only to
be abandoned--he will not think that the forces of existence are so
cruel and so unrelenting and so fruitless. In the world he may learn to
say that he thinks so, and is resigned to it; but in loneliness the
penumbra of his own existence lies on all creation, and the winds and
the stars and the daylight and night and the vast unknown mute forces of
life--all seem to him that they must of necessity be either his
ministers or his destroyers.
* * *
Of all the innocent things that die, the impossible dreams of the poet
are the things that die with most pain, and, perhaps, with most loss to
humanity. Those who are happy die before their dreams. This is what the
old Greek saying meant.
The world had not yet driven the sweet, fair follies from Signa's head,
nor had it yet made him selfish. If he had lived in the age when
Timander could arrest by his melodies the tide of revolution, or when
the harp of the Persian could save Bagdad from the sword and flame of
Murad, all might have been well with him. But the time is gone by when
music or any other art was a king. All genius now is, at its best, but a
servitor--well or ill fed.
* * *
Silently he put his hand out and grasped Signa's, and led him into the
Spanish Chapel, and sank on his knees.
The glory of the morning streamed in from the cloister; all the dead
gold and the faded hues were transfigured by it; the sunbeams shone on
the face of Laura, the deep sweet colours of Bronzino's Coena glowed
upward in the vault amidst the shadows; the company of the blessed,
whom the old painters had gathered there, cast off the faded robes that
the Ages had wrapped them in, and stood forth like the tender spirits
that they were, and seemed to say, "Nay, we, and they who made us, we
are not dead, but only waiting."
It is all so simple and so foolish there; the war-horses of Taddeo that
bear their lords to eternity as to a joust of arms; the heretic dogs of
Memmi, with their tight wooden collars; the beauteous Fiammetta and her
lover, thronging amongst the saints; the little house, where the Holy
Ghost is sitting, with the purified saints listening at the door, with
strings tied to their heads to lift them into paradise; it is all so
quaint, so childlike, so pathetic, so grotesque,--like a set of wooden
figures from its Noah's Ark that a dying child has set out on its little
bed, and that are so stiff and ludicrous, and yet which no one well can
look at and be unmoved, by reason of the little cold hand that has found
beauty in them.
As the dying child to the wooden figures, so the dead faith gives to the
old frescoes here something that lies too deep for tears; we smile, and
yet all the while we say;--if only we could believe like this; if only
for us the dead could be but sleeping!
* * *
It was past midnight, and the moon had vanished behind her mountain,
withdrawing her little delicate curled golden horn, as if to blow with
it the trumpet-call of morning.
* * *
Such pretty, neat, ready lying as this would stand him in better stead
than all the high spirit in the world; which, after all, only serves to
get a man into hot water in this life and eternal fire in the next.
* * *
In the country of Virgil, life remains pastoral still. The field
labourer of northern countries may be but a hapless hind, hedging and
ditching dolefully, or at best serving a steam-beast with oil and fire;
but in the land of the Georgics there is the poetry of agriculture
still.
Materially it may be an evil and a loss--political economists will say
so; but spiritually it is a gain. A certain peace and light lie on the
people at their toil. The reaper with his hook, the plougher with his
oxen, the girl who gleans amongst the trailing vines, the child that
sees the flowers tossing with the corn, the men that sing to get a
blessing on the grapes--they have all a certain grace and dignity of the
old classic ways left with them. They till the earth still with the
simplicity of old, looking straight to the gods for recompense. Great
Apollo might still come down amidst them and play to them in their
threshing-barns, and guide his milk-white beasts over their
furrows,--and there would be nothing in the toil to shame or burden him.
It will not last. The famine of a world too full will lay it waste; but
it is here a little while longer still.
* * *
For Discontent already creeps into each of these happy households, and
under her fox-skin hood says, "Let me in--I am Progress."
* * *
In most men and women, Love waking wakes, with itself, the soul.
In poets Love waking kills it.
* * *
When God gives genius, I think He makes the brain of some strange,
glorious stuff, that takes all strength out of the character, and all
sight out of the eyes. Those artists--they are like the birds we blind:
they sing, and make people weep for very joy to hear them; but they
cannot see their way to peck the worms, and are for ever wounding their
breasts against the wires. No doubt it is a great thing to have genius;
but it is a sort of sickness after all; and when love comes--
* * *
Lippo knew that wise men do not do harm to whatever they may hate.
They drive it on to slay itself.
So without blood-guiltiness they get their end, yet stainless go to God.
* * *