woods, through the avenues of the park. The whole front of the antique
building was lighted, and the painted oriels gleamed ruby, and amber,
and soft brown, in the dusky evening, through the green screen of
foliage.
The fragrance of the orange alleys, and of the acres of flowers, was
heavy on the air; there was the sound of music borne down the low
southerly wind; here and there through the boughs was the dainty glisten
of gliding silks:--it was such a scene as once belonged to the terraces
and gardens of Versailles.
From beyond the myrtle fence and gilded railings which severed the park
from the pleasaunce, enough could be seen, enough heard, of the
brilliant revelry within to tell of its extravagance, and its elegance,
in the radiance that streamed from all the illumined avenues.
He stood and looked long; hearing the faint echo of the music, seeing
the effulgence of the light through the dark myrtle barrier.
A very old crippled peasant, searching in the grass for truffles, with a
little dog, stole timidly up and looked too.
"How can it feel, to live like _that?_" he asked, in a wistful,
tremulous voice.
Tricotrin did not hear: his hand was grasped on one of the gilded rails
with a nervous force as from bodily pain.
The old truffle-gatherer, with his little white dog panting at his feet,
crossed himself as he peered through the myrtle screen.
"God!" he muttered; "how strange it seems that people are there who
never once knew what it was to want bread, and to find it nowhere,
though the lands all teemed with harvest! They never feel hungry, or
cold, or hot, or tired, or thirsty: they never feel their bones ache,
and their throat parch, and their entrails gnaw! These people ought not
to get to heaven--they have it on earth!"
Tricotrin heard at last: he turned his head and looked down on the old
man's careworn, hollow face.
"'Verily they have their reward,' you mean? Nay, that is a cruel
religion, which would excruciate hereafter those who enjoy now. Judge
them not; in their laurel crowns there is full often twisted a serpent.
The hunger of the body is bad indeed, but the hunger of the mind is
worse perhaps; and from that they suffer, because from every fulfilled
desire springs the pain of a fresh satiety."
The truffle-hunter, wise in his peasant-fashion, gazed wistfully up at
the face above him, half comprehending the answer.
"It may be so," he murmured; "but then--they _have_ enjoyed! Ah, Christ!
that is what I envy them. Now we--we die, starved amidst abundance; we
see the years go, and the sun never shines once in them; and all we have
is a hope--a hope that may be cheated at last; for none have come back
from the grave to tell us whether _that_ fools us as well."
* * *
"I incline to think you live twenty centuries too late, or--twenty
centuries too early."
Viva turned on him a swift and eager glance.
"Of course!" she said, with a certain emotion, whose meaning he could
not analyse. "Was there ever yet a man of genius who was not either the
relic of some great dead age, or the precursor of some noble future one,
in which he alone has faith?"
"Chut!" said Tricotrin, rapidly; he could not trust himself to hear her
speak in his own defence. "Fine genius mine! To fiddle to a few
villagers, and dash colour on an alehouse shutter! I have the genius of
indolence, if you like. As to my belonging to a bygone age,--well! I am
not sure that I have not got the soul in me of some barefooted friar of
Moyen Age, who went about where he listed, praying here, laughing there,
painting a missal with a Pagan love-god, and saying a verse of Horace
instead of a chant of the Church. Or, maybe, I am more like some Greek
gossiper, who loitered away his days in the sun, and ate his dates in
the market-place, and listened here and there to a philosopher,
and--just by taking no thought--hit on a truer philosophy than ever
came out of Porch or Garden. Ah, my Lord of Estmere! you have two
hundred servants over there at Villiers, I have been told; do you not
think I am better served here by one little, brown-eyed, brown-cheeked
maiden, who sings her Béranger like a lark, while she brings me her dish
of wild strawberries? There is fame too for you--his--the King of the
Chansons! When a girl washes her linen in the brook--when a herdsman
drives his flock through the lanes--when a boy throws his line in a
fishing-stream--when a grisette sits and works at her attic
lattice--when a student dreams under the linden leaves--he is on their
lips, in their hearts, in their fancies and joys. What a power! What a
dominion! Wider than any that emperors boast!"
"And," added Estmere, with a smile, "if you were not Tricotrin you would
be Béranger?"
* * *
"Aye! Hymns forbad at noonday are ever so sung at night; and oftentimes,
what at noon would have been a lark's chant of liberty, grows at night
to a vampire's screech for blood!" he murmured. "They are gay at your
château up yonder."
* * *
Be not a coward who leaves the near duty that is as cruel to grasp as a
nettle, and flies to gather the far-off duty that will flaunt in men's
sight like a sun-flower.
* * *
"A great Character!" says Society, when it means--"a great Scamp!"
* * *
Estmere laid the panel down as he heard.
"Whoever painted it must have genius."
"Genius!" interrupted Tricotrin. "Pooh! What is genius? Only the power
to see a little deeper and a little clearer than most other people. That
is all."
"The power of vision? Of course. But that renders it none the less
rare."
"Oh yes, it is rare--rare like kingfishers, and sandpipers, and herons,
and black eagles. And so men always shoot it down, as they do the birds,
and stick up the dead body in glass cases, and label it, and stare at
it, and bemoan it as 'so singular,' having done their best to insure its
extinction!"
Estmere looked keenly at him.
"Surely genius that secretes itself as your friend's must do," he said,
touching the panel afresh, "commits suicide, and desires its own
extinction."
"Pshaw!" said Tricotrin, impatiently, and with none of his habitual
courtesy. "You think the kingfisher and the black eagle have no better
thing to live for than to become the decorations of a great personage's
glass cabinets. You think genius can find no higher end than to furnish
frescoes and panellings for a nobleman's halls and ante-chambers. You
mistake very much; the mistake is a general one in your order. But
believe me, the kingfisher enjoys his brown moorland stream, and his
tufts of green rushes, and his water-swept bough of hawthorn; the eagle
enjoys his wild rocks, and his sweep through the air, and his steady
gaze at the sun that blinds all human eyes;--and neither ever imagine
that the great men below pity them because they are not stuffed, and
labelled, and praised by rule in their palaces! And genius is much of
the birds' fashion of thinking. It lives its own life; and is not, as
your connoisseurs are given to fancy, wretched unless you see fit in
your graciousness to deem it worth the glass-case of your criticism, and
the straw-stuffing of your gold. For it knows, as kingfisher and eagle
knew also, that stuffed birds nevermore use their wings, and are
evermore subject to be bought and be sold."
* * *
Against the foreign foes of your country die in your youth if she need
it. But against her internecine enemies live out your life in continual
warfare. When I tell you this, do you dream that I spare you?
Children!--you have yet to learn what life is! Who could think it hard
to die in the glory of strife, drunk with the sound of the combat, and
feeling no pain in the swoon of a triumph? Few men whose blood was hot
and young would ask a greater ending. But to keep your souls in
patience; to strive unceasingly with evil; to live in self-negation, in
ceaseless sacrifices of desire; to give strength to the weak, and sight
to the blind, and light where there is darkness, and hope where there is
bondage; to do all these through many years unrecognised of men, content
only that they are done with such force as lies within you,--this is
harder than to seek the cannons' mouths, this is more bitter than to
rush, with drawn steel, on your tyrants.
Your women cry out against you because you leave them to starve and to
weep while you give your hearts to revolution and your bodies to the
sword. Their cry is the cry of selfishness, of weakness, of narrowness,
the cry of the sex that sees no sun save the flame on its hearth: yet
there is truth in it--a truth you forget. The truth--that, forsaking the
gold-mine of duty which lies at your feet, you grasp at the rainbow of
glory; that, neglectful of your own secret sins, you fly at public woes
and at national crimes. Can you not see that if every man took heed of
the guilt of his own thoughts and acts, the world would be free and at
peace? It is easier to rise with the knife unsheathed than to keep watch
and ward over your own passions; but do not cheat yourself into
believing that it is nobler, and higher, and harder. What reproach is
cast against all revolutionists?--that the men who have nothing to lose,
the men who are reckless and outlawed, alone raise the flag of revolt.
It is a satire; but in every satire there lies the germ of a terrible
fact.
You--you who are children still, you whose manhood is still a gold
scarcely touched in your hands, a gold you can spend in all great ways,
or squander for all base uses;--you can give the lie to that public
reproach, if only you will live in such wise that your hands shall be
clean, and your paths straight, and your honour unsullied through all
temptations. Wait, and live so that the right to judge, to rebuke, to
avenge, to purify, become yours through your earning of them. Live
nobly, first; and then teach others how to live.
* * *
"So you have brought Fame to Lélis, my English lord?" said Tricotrin,
without ceremony. "That was a good work of yours. She is a comet that
has a strange fancy only to come forth like a corpse-candle, and dance
over men's graves. It is her way. When men will have her out in the noon
of their youth, she kills them; and the painter's bier is set under his
Transfiguration, and the soldier's body is chained to the St. Helena
rock, and the poet's grave is made at Missolonghi. It is always so."
Estmere bowed his head in assent; he was endeavouring to remember where
he had once met this stranger who thus addressed him--where he had once
heard these mellow, ringing, harmonious accents.
"Was it because you were afraid of dying in your prime that you would
never woo Fame then yourself?" asked Lélis, with a smile.
"Oh-hè!" answered Tricotrin, seating himself on a deal box that served
as a table, and whereat he and the artist had eaten many a meal of roast
chestnuts and black coffee; "I never wanted her; she is a weather vane,
never still two moments; she is a spaniel that quits the Plantagenet the
moment the battle goes against him, and fawns on Bolingbroke; she is an
alchemist's crucible, that has every fair and rich thing thrown into it,
but will only yield in return the calcined stones of chagrin and
disappointment; she is a harlot, whose kisses are to be bought, and who
runs after those who brawl the loudest and swagger the finest in the
world's market-places. No! I want nothing of her. My lord here condemned
her as I came in; he said she was the offspring of echoing parrots, of
imitative sheep, of fawning hounds. Who can want the creature of such
progenitors?"
* * *
"There are many kinds of appreciation. The man of science appreciates
when he marvels before the exquisite structure of the sea-shell, the
perfect organism of the flower; but the young girl appreciates, too,
when she holds the shell to her ear for its music, when she kisses the
flower for its fragrance. Appreciation! It is an affair of the reason,
indeed; but it is an affair of the emotions also."
"And you prefer what is born of the latter?"
"Not always; but for my music I do. It speaks in an unknown tongue.
Science may have its alphabet, but it is feeling that translates its
poems. Delaroche, who leaves off his work to listen; Descamps, in whose
eyes I see tears; Ingres, who dreams idyls while I play; a young poet
whose face reflects my thoughts, an old man whose youth I bring back, an
hour of pain that I soothe, an hour of laughter that I give; these are
my recompense. Think you I would exchange them for the gold showers and
the diamond boxes of a Farinelli?"
"Surely not. All I meant was that you might gain a world-wide celebrity
did you choose----"
"Gain a honey-coating that every fly may eat me and every gnat may
sting? I thank you. I have a taste to be at peace, and not to become
food to sate the public famine for a thing to tear."
Estmere smiled; he did not understand the man who thus addressed him,
but he was attracted despite all his strongest prejudices.
"You are right! Under the coat of honey is a shirt of turpentine.
Still--to see so great a gift as yours wasted----"
"Wasted? Because the multitudes have it, such as it is, instead of the
units? Droll arithmetic! I am with you in thinking that minorities
should have a good share of power, for all that is wisest and purest is
ever in a minority, as we know; but I do not see, as you see, that
minorities should command a monopoly--of sweet sounds or of anything
else."
"I speak to the musician, not to the politician," said Estmere, with the
calm, chill contempt of his colder manner: the cold side of his
character was touched, and his sympathies were alienated at once.
Tricotrin, indifferent to the hint as to the rebuff, looked at him
amusedly.
"Oh, I know you well, Lord Estmere; I told you so not long ago, to your
great disgust. You and your Order think no man should ever presume to
touch politics unless his coat be velvet and his rent-roll large, like
yours. But, you see, we of the _école buissonnière_ generally do as we
like; and we get pecking at public questions for the same reason as our
brother birds peck at the hips and the haws--because we have no
granaries as you have. You do not like Socialism? Ah! and yet affect to
follow it."
"I!" Estmere looked at this wayside wit, this wine-house philosopher,
with a regard that asked plainly, "Are you fool or knave?"
"To be sure," answered Tricotrin. "You have chapel and chaplain yonder
at your château, I believe? The Book of the Christians is the very
manual of Socialism: '_You_ read the Gospel, Marat?' they cried. 'To be
sure,' said Marat. 'It is the most republican book in the world, and
sends all the rich people to hell.' If you do not like my politics,
_beau sire_, do not listen to the Revolutionist of Galilee."
* * *
Not rare on this earth is the love that cleaves to the thing it has
cherished through guilt, and through wrong, and through misery. But
rare, indeed, is the love that still lives while its portion is
oblivion, and the thing which it has followed passes away out to a joy
that it cannot share, to a light that it cannot behold.
For this is as the love of a god, which forsakes not, though its
creatures revile, and blaspheme, and deride it.
* * *
Ever and anon the old, dark, eager, noble face was lifted from its
pillow, and the withered lips murmured three words:
"Is she come?"
For Tricotrin had bent over her bed, and had murmured, "I go to seek
her, she is near;" and grand'mère had believed and been comforted, for
she knew that no lie passed his lips. And she was very still and only
the nervous working of the hard, brown, aged hand showed the longing of
her soul.
Life was going out rapidly, as the flame sinks fast in a lamp whose oil
is spent. The strong and vigorous frame, the keen and cheery will, had
warded off death so long and bravely; and now they bent under, all
suddenly, as those hardy trees will bend after a century of wind and
storm--bend but once, and only to break for ever.
The red sun in the west was in its evening glory; and through the open
lattice there were seen in the deep blue of the sky, the bough of a
snow-blossomed pear-tree, the network of the ivy, and the bees humming
among the jasmine flowers. From the distance there came faintly the
musical cries of the boatmen down the river, the voices of the
vine-tenders in the fields, the singing of a throstle on a wild-grape
tendril.
Only, in the little darkened chamber the old peasant lay quite
still--listening, through all the sweet and busy sounds of summer, for a
step that never came.
And little by little all those sounds grew fainter on her ear: the
dulness of death was stealing over all her senses; and all she heard was
the song of the thrush where the bird swayed on the vine, half in, half
out, of the lattice.
But the lips moved still, though no voice came, with the same words: "Is
she come?" and when the lips no more could move, the dark and straining
wistfulness of the eyes asked the question more earnestly, more
terribly, more ceaselessly.
The thrush sang on, and on, and on; but to the prayer of the dying eyes
no answer came.
The red sun sank into the purple mists of cloud; the song of the bird
was ended; the voice of the watching girl murmured, "They will come too
late!"
For, as the sun faded off from the vine in the lattice, and the singing
of the bird grew silent, grand'mère raised herself with her arms
outstretched, and the strength of her youth returned in the hour of
dissolution.
"They never come back!" she cried. "They never come back! nor will she!
One dead in Africa--and one crushed beneath the stone--and one shot on
the barricade. The three went forth together; but not one returned. We
breed them, we nurse them, we foster them; and the world slays them body
and soul, and eats the limbs that lay in our bosoms, and burns up the
souls that we knew so pure. And she went where they went: she is dead
like them."
Her head fell back; her mouth was grey and parched, her eyes had no
longer sight; a shiver ran through the hardy frame that winter storms
and summer droughts had bruised and scorched so long; and a passionless
and immeasurable grief came on the brown, weary, age-worn face.
"All dead!" she murmured in the stillness of the chamber, where the song
of the bird had ceased, and the darkness of night had come.
Then through her lips the last breath quivered in a deep-drawn sigh, and
the brave, patient, unrewarded life passed out for ever.
* * *
"You surely find no debtor such an ingrate, no master such a tyrant, as
the People?"
"Perhaps. But, rather I find it a dog that bullies and tears where it is
feared, but may be made faithful by genuine courage and strict justice
shown to it."
"The experience of the musician, then, must be much more fortunate than
the experience of the statesman."
"Why, yes. It is ungrateful to great men, I grant; but it has the
irritation of its own vague sense that it is but their tool, their
ladder, their grappling-iron, to excuse it. Still--I know well what you
mean; the man who works for mankind works for a taskmaster who makes
bitter every hour of his life only to forget him with the instant of his
death; he is ever rolling the stone of human nature upward toward purer
heights, to see it recoil and rush down into darkness and bloodshed. I
know----"
_A PROVENCE ROSE._
Flowers are like your poets: they give ungrudgingly, and, like all
lavish givers, are seldom recompensed in kind.
We cast all our world of blossom, all our treasure or fragrance, at the
feet of the one we love; and then, having spent ourselves in that too
abundant sacrifice, you cry, "A yellow, faded thing! to the dust-hole
with it!" and root us up violently, and fling us to rot with the refuse
and offal; not remembering the days when our burden of beauty made
sunlight in your darkest places, and brought the odours of a lost
paradise to breathe over your bed of fever.
Well, there is one consolation. Just so likewise do you deal with your
human wonder-flower of genius.
* * *
I sighed at my square open pane in the hot, sulphurous mists of the
street, and tried to see the stars and could not. For, between me and
the one small breadth of sky which alone the innumerable roofs left
visible, a vintner had hung out a huge gilded imperial crown as a sign
on his roof-tree; and the crown, with its sham gold turning black in the
shadow, hung between me and the planets.
I knew that there must be many human souls in a like plight with
myself, with the light of heaven blocked from them by a gilded tyranny,
and yet I sighed, and sighed, and sighed, thinking of the white pure
stars of Provence throbbing in the violet skies.
A rose is hardly wiser than a poet, you see: neither rose nor poet will
be comforted, and be content to dwell in darkness because a crown of
tinsel swings on high.
* * *
Ah! In the lives of you who have wealth and leisure we, the flowers, are
but one thing among many: we have a thousand rivals in your porcelains,
your jewels, your luxuries, your intaglios, your mosaics, all your
treasures of art, all your baubles of fancy. But in the lives of the
poor we are alone: we are all the art, all the treasure, all the grace,
all the beauty of outline, all the purity of hue that they possess:
often we are all their innocence and all their religion too.
Why do you not set yourselves to make us more abundant in those joyless
homes, in those sunless windows?
* * *
For the life of a painter is beautiful when he is still young, and loves
truly, and has a genius in him stronger than calamity, and hears a voice
in which he believes say always in his ear, "Fear nothing. Men must
believe as I do in thee, one day. And meanwhile--we can wait!"
And a painter in Paris, even though he starve on a few sous a day, can
have so much that is lovely and full of picturesque charm in his daily
pursuits: the long, wondrous galleries full of the arts he adores; the
_réalité de l'idéal_ around him in that perfect world; the slow, sweet,
studious hours in the calm wherein all that is great in humanity alone
survives; the trance--half adoration, half aspiration, at once desire
and despair--before the face of the Mona Lisa; then, without, the
streets so glad and so gay in the sweet, living sunshine; the quiver of
green leaves among gilded balconies; the groups at every turn about the
doors; the glow of colour in market-place and peopled square; the quaint
grey piles in old historic ways; the stones, from every one of which
some voice from the imperishable Past cries out; the green and silent
woods, the little leafy villages, the winding waters garden-girt; the
forest heights, with the city gleaming and golden in the plain; all
these are his.
With these--and youth--who shall dare say the painter is not rich--ay,
though his board be empty, and his cup be dry?
I had not loved Paris--I, a little imprisoned rose, caged in a clay pot,
and seeing nothing but the sky-line of the roofs. But I grew to love it,
hearing from René and from Lili of all the poetry and gladness that
Paris made possible in their young and burdened lives, and which could
have been thus possible in no other city of the earth.
City of Pleasure you have called her, and with truth; but why not also
City of the Poor? For what city, like herself, has remembered the poor
in her pleasure, and given to them, no less than to the richest, the
treasure of her laughing sunlight, of her melodious music, of her
gracious hues, of her million flowers, of her shady leaves, of her
divine ideals?
_PIPISTRELLO._
It was a strange, gaunt wilderness of stone, this old villa of the
Marchioni. It would have held hundreds of serving-men. It had as many
chambers as one of the palaces down in Rome; but life is homely and
frugal here, and has few graces. The ways of everyday Italian life in
these grand old places are like nettles and thistles set in an old
majolica vase that has had knights and angels painted on it. You know
what I mean, you who know Italy. Do you remember those pictures of
Vittario Carpacio and of Gentile? They say that is the life our Italy
saw once in her cities and her villas;--that is the life she wants.
Sometimes when you are all alone in these vast deserted places the
ghosts of all that pageantry pass by you, and they seem fitter than the
living people for these courts and halls.
* * *