grated windows; the pillars of many-coloured marbles, the frescoed roof;
the country people massed together in the public place, with faces that
were like paintings of Mantegna or Masaccio; the slender supple form of
the accused drooping like a bruised lily between the upright figures of
two carabineers; the judge leaning down over his high desk in black
robes and black square cap, like some Venetian lawgiver of Veronese or
of Titian; and beyond, through an open casement, the silvery, watery,
sun-swept landscape that was still the same as when Romeo came,
banished, to Mantua. All these had remained impressed upon his mind by
the tragedy which there came to its close as a lover, passionate as
Romeo and yet more unfortunate, was condemned to the galleys for his
life. "They have ill judged a guiltless man," he had said to himself as
he had left the court with a sense of pain before injustice done, and
went with heart saddened by a stranger's fate into the misty air, along
the shining water where the Mills of the Twelve Apostles were churning
the great dam into froth, as they had done through seven centuries,
since first, with reverent care, the builder had set the sacred statues
there that they might bless the grinding of the corn.
Sitting now in the silence of the tomb, Sanctis recalled that day, when,
towards the setting of the sun, he had strolled there by the
water-wheels of the twelve disciples, and allowed the fate of an unknown
man, declared a criminal by impartial judges, to cloud over for him the
radiance of evening on the willowy Serraglio and chase away his peaceful
thoughts of Virgil. He remembered how the country people had come out by
the bridge and glided away in their boats, and talked of the murder of
Donna Aloysia; and how they had, one and all of them, said, going back
over the lake water or along the reed-fringed roads, to their
farmhouses, that there could be no manner of doubt about it--the lover
had been moon-struck and mad with jealousy, and his dagger had found
its way to her breast. They had not blamed him much, but they had never
doubted his guilt; and the foreigner alone, standing by the mill
gateway, and seeing the golden sun go down beyond the furthermost fields
of reeds that grew blood-red as the waters grew, had thought to himself
and said half aloud:
"Poor Romeo! he is guiltless, even though the dagger were his"----
And a prior, black-robed, with broad looped-up black hat, who was also
watching the sunset, breviary in hand, had smiled and said, "Nay, Romeo,
banished to us, had no blood on his hand; but this Romeo, native of our
city, has. Mantua will be not ill rid of Luitbrand d'Este."
Then he again, in obstinacy and against all the priest's better
knowledge as a Mantuan, had insisted and said, "The man is innocent."
And the sun had gone down as he had spoken, and the priest had smiled--a
smile cold as a dagger's blade--perhaps recalling sins confessed to him
of love that had changed to hate, of fierce delight ending in as fierce
a death-blow. Mantua in her day had seen so much alike of love and hate.
"The man is innocent," he had said insisting, whilst the carmine light
had glowed on the lagoons and bridges, and on the Lombard walls, and
Gothic gables, and high bell-towers, and ducal palaces, and feudal
fortresses of the city in whose street Crichton fell to the hired steel
of bravoes.
* * *
She had the heaven-born faculty of observation of the poets, and she had
that instinct of delight in natural beauty which made Linnæus fall on
his knees before the English gorse and thank God for having made so
beautiful a thing.
Her sympathies and her imaginings spent themselves in solitary song as
she made the old strings of the lute throb in low cadence when she sat
solitary by her hearth on the rock floor of the grave; and out of doors
her eyes filled and her lips laughed when she wandered through the leafy
land and found the warbler's nest hung upon the reeds, or the first
branching asphodel in flower. She could not have told why these made her
happy, why she could watch for half a day untired the little wren
building where the gladwyn blossomed on the water's edge. It was only
human life that hurt her, embittered her, and filled her with hatred of
it.
As she walked one golden noon by the Sasso Scritto, clothed with its
myrtle and thyme and its quaint cacti that later would bear their purple
heads of fruit; the shining sea beside her, and above her the bold
arbutus-covered heights, with the little bells of the sheep sounding on
their sides, she saw a large fish, radiant as a gem, with eyes like
rubies. Some men had it; a hook was in its golden gills, and they had
tied its tail to the hook so that it could not stir, and they had put it
in a pail of water that it might not die too quickly, die ere they could
sell it. A little further on she saw a large green and gold snake, one
of the most harmless of all earth's creatures, that only asked to creep
into the sunshine, to sleep in its hole in the rock, to live out its
short, innocent life under the honey smile of the rosemary; the same men
stoned it to death, heaping the pebbles and broken sandstone on it, and
it perished slowly in long agony, being large and tenacious of life. Yet
a little further on, again, she saw a big square trap of netting, with a
blinded chaffinch as decoy. The trap was full of birds, some fifty or
sixty of them, all kinds of birds, from the plain brown minstrel,
beloved of the poets, to the merry and amber-winged oriole, from the
dark grey or russet-bodied fly-catcher and whinchat to the glossy and
handsome jay, cheated and caught as he was going back to the north; they
had been trapped, and would be strung on a string and sold for a copper
coin the dozen; and of many of them the wings or the legs were broken
and the eyes were already dim. The men who had taken them were seated on
the thymy turf grinning like apes, with pipes in their mouths, and a
flask of wine between their knees.
She passed on, helpless.
She thought of words that Joconda had once quoted to her, words which
said that men were made in God's likeness!
* * *
While it is winter the porphyrion sails down the willowy streams beside
the sultan-hen that is to be his love, and sees her not, and stays not
her passage upon the water or through the air; she does not live as yet
to him. But when the breath of the spring brings the catkins from the
willows, and the violets amidst the wood-moss on the banks, then he
awakes and beholds her; and then the stream reflects but her shape for
him, and the rushes are full of the melody of his love-call. It was
still winter with Este--a bitter winter of discontent; and he had no
eyes for this water-bird that swam with him through the icy current of
his adversity.
To break the frozen flood that imprisoned him was his only thought.
* * *
Air is the king of physicians; he who stands often with nothing between
him and the open heavens will gain from them health both moral and
physical.
* * *
"Yes; you have a right to know. After all, it was ruin to me, but it is
not much of a story; a tale-teller with his guitar on a vintage night
would soon make a better one. I loved a woman. She lived in Mantua. So
did I, too. For her sake I lost three whole years--three years of the
best of my life. And yet, what is gain except love, and what better than
joy can we have? A pomegranate is ripe but once. And I--my pomegranate
is rotten for evermore! We lived in Mantua. It is a strange sad place.
It was great and gay enough once. Grander pomp than Mantua's there was
never known in Italy. Felix Mantua!--and now it is all decaying,
mouldering, sinking, fading; it is silent as death; the mists, the
waters, the empty palaces, the walls that the marshes are eating little
by little every day, the grass and the moss and the wild birds' nests on
the roofs, on the temples, on the bridges, all are desolate in Mantua
now. Yet is it beautiful in its loneliness, when the sunrise comes over
the seas of reeds, and the towers and the arches are reflected in the
pools and streams; and yet again at night, when the moon is high and the
lagoons are as sheets of silver, and the shadows come and go over the
bulrushes and St. Andrea lifts itself against the stars. Yes; then it is
still Mantova la Gloriosa."
His voice dropped; the tears came into his closing eyes as though he
looked on the dead face of a familiar friend.
He felt the home sickness of the exile, of the wanderer who knows not
where to lay his head.
The glory was gone from the city.
Its greatness was but as a ghost that glided through its deserted
streets calling in vain on dead men to arise.
The rough red sail of the fishing-boat was alone on the waters once
crowded with the silken sails of gilded galleys; the toad croaked and
the stork made her nest where the Lords of Gonzaga had gone forth to
meet their brides of Este or of Medici; Virgil, Alboin, great Karl,
Otho, Petrarca, Ariosto, had passed by here over this world of waters
and become no more than dreams; and the vapours and the dust together
had stolen the smile from Giulio's Psyche, and the light from Mantegna's
arabesques. On the vast walls the grass grew, and in the palaces of
princes the winds wandered and the beggars slept. All was still,
disarmed, lonely, forgotten; left to a silence like the silence of the
endless night of death. Yet it was dear to him; this sad and stately
city, waiting for the slow death of an unpitied and lingering decay.
It was dear to him from habit, from birth, from memory, from affinity,
as the reeds of its stagnant waters were dear to the sedge-warbler that
hung its slender nest on the stem of a rush. A price was set on his
head; and never more, he thought, would he see the sunshine in ripples
of gold come over the grey lagoons.
* * *
No one cared; the terrible, barren, acrid truth, that science trumpets
abroad as though it were some new-found joy, touched her ignorance with
its desolating despair. No one cared. Life was only sustained by death.
The harmless and lovely children of the air and of the moor were given
over, year after year, century after century, to the bestial play and
the ferocious appetites of men. The wondrous beauty of the earth renewed
itself only to be the scene of endless suffering, of interminable
torture. The human tyrant, without pity, greedy as a child, more brutal
than the tiger in his cruelty, had all his way upon the innocent races
to which he begrudged a tuft of reeds, a palm's breadth of moss or sand.
The slaughter, the misery, the injustice, renewed themselves as the
greenness of the world did. No one cared. There was no voice upon the
blood-stained waters. There was no rebuke from the offended heavens. To
all prayer or pain there was eternal silence as the sole reply.
* * *
The uneducated are perhaps unjustly judged sometimes. To the ignorant
both right and wrong are only instincts; when one remembers their
piteous and innocent confusion of ideas, the twilight of dim
comprehension in which they dwell, one feels that oftentimes the laws of
cultured men are too hard on them, and that, in a better sense than that
of injustice and reproach, there ought indeed to be two laws for rich
and poor.
* * *
It needs a great nature to bear the weight of a great gratitude.
To a great nature it gives wings that bear it up to heaven; a lower
nature feels it always as a clog that impatiently is dragged only so
long as force compels.
* * *
When the thoughts of youth return, fresh as the scent of new-gathered
blossoms, to the tired old age which has so long forgot them, the coming
of Death is seldom very distant.
* * *
The boat went through the waters swiftly, as the wind blew more
strongly; the sandy shore with its scrub of low-growing rock-rose and
prickly Christ's thorn did not change its landscape, but what she looked
at always was the sea; the sea that in the light had the smiling azure
of a young child's eyes, and when the clouds cast shadows on it, had the
intense impenetrable brilliancy of a jewel.
In the distance were puffs of white and grey, like smoke or mist; those
mists were Corsica and Caprajà.
Elba towered close at hand.
Gorgona lay far beyond, with all the other little isles that seem made
to shelter Miranda and Ariel, but of Gorgona she knew nothing; she was
steering straight towards it, but it was many a league distant on the
northerly water.
When she at last stopped her boat in its course she was at the Sasso
Scritto: a favourite resting-place with her, where, on feast-days, when
Joconda let her have liberty from housework and rush-plaiting and
spinning of flax, she always came.
Northward, there was a long smooth level beach of sand, and beyond that
a lagoon where all the waterbirds that love both the sea and the marsh
came in large flocks, and spread their wings over the broad spaces in
which the salt water and the fresh were mingled. Beyond this there were
cliffs of the humid red tufa, and the myrtle and the holy thorn grew
down their sides, and met in summer the fragrant hesperis of the shore.
These cliffs were fine bold bluffs, and one of them had been called from
time immemorial the Sasso Scritto,--why, no one knew; the only writing
on it was done by the hand of Nature. It was steep and lofty; on its
summit were the ruins of an old fortress of the middle ages; its sides
were clothed with myrtle, aloe, and rosemary, and at its feet were
boulders of marble, rose and white in the sun; rock pools, with
exquisite network of sunbeams crossing their rippling surface, and
filled with green ribbon-grasses and red sea-foliage, and shining gleams
of broken porphyry, and pieces of agate and cornelian.
The yellow sands hereabouts were bright just now with the sea-daffodil,
and the sea-stocks, which would blossom later, were pricking upward to
the Lenten light; great clusters of southern-wood waved in the wind, and
the pungent sea-rush grew in long lines along the shore, where the
sand-piper was dropping her eggs, and the blue-rock was carrying dry
twigs and grass to his home in the ruins above or the caverns beneath,
and the stock-doves in large companies were winging their way over sea
towards the Maritime or the Pennine Alps.
This was a place that Musa loved, and she would come here and sit for
hours, and watch the roseate cloud of the returning flamingoes winging
their way from Sardinia, and the martins busy at their masonry in the
cliffs, and the Arctic longipennes going away northward as the weather
opened, and the stream-swallows hunting early gnats and frogs on the
water, and the kingfisher digging his tortuous underground home in the
sand. Here she would lie for hours amongst the rosemary, and make silent
friendships with the populations of the air, while the sweet blue sky
was above her head, and the sea, as blue, stretched away till it was
lost in light.
Once up above, on these cliffs, the eye could sweep over the sea north
and south, and the soil was more than ever scented with that fragrant
and humble blue-flowered shrub of which the English madrigals and glees
of the Stuart and Hanoverian poets so often speak, and seem to smell.
Behind the cliffs stretched moorland, marshes, woodland, intermingled,
crossed by many streams, holding many pools, blue-fringed in May with
iris, and osier beds, and vast fields of reeds, and breadths of forest
with dense thorny underwood, where all wild birds came in their season,
and where all was quiet save for a bittern's cry, a boar's snort, a
snipe's scream, on the lands once crowded with the multitudes that gave
the eagle of Persia and the brazen trumpets of Lydia to the legions of
Rome.
Under their thickets of the prickly sloe-tree and the sweet-smelling bay
lay the winding ways of buried cities; their runlets of water rippled
where kings and warriors slept beneath the soil, and the yellow marsh
lily, and the purple and the rose of the wind-flower and the
pasque-flower, and the bright red of the Easter tulips, and the white
and the gold of the asphodels, and the colours of a thousand other rarer
and less homelike blossoms, spread their innocent glory in their turn to
the sky and the breeze, above the sunken stones of courts and gates and
palaces and prisons.
These moors were almost as solitary as the deserts are.
Now and then against the blue of the sky and the brown of the wood,
there rose the shapes of shepherds and their flocks; now and then herds
of young horses went by, fleet and unconscious of their doom; now and
then the sound of a rifle cracked the silence of the windless air; but
these came but seldom.
Maremma is wide, and its people are scattered.
In autumn and in winter, hunters, shepherds, swineherds, sportsmen,
birdcatchers, might spoil the solemn peace of these moors, but in spring
and summer no human soul was seen upon them. The boar and the buffalo,
the flamingo and the roebuck, the great plover and the woodcock, reigned
alone.
* * *
"They say he sang too well, and that was why they burnt him," said
Andreino to her to-day, after telling her for the hundredth time of what
he had seen once on the Ligurian shore, far away yonder northward, when
he, who knew nothing of Adonais or Prometheus, had been called, a stout
seafaring man in that time, amongst other peasants of the country-side,
to help bring in the wood for a funeral pyre by the sea.
He had known nought of the songs or the singer, but he loved to tell the
tale he had heard then; and say how he had seen, he himself, with his
own eyes, the drowned poet burn, far away yonder where the pines stood
by the sea, and how the flames had curled around the heart that men had
done their best to break, and how it had remained unburnt in the midst,
whilst all the rest drifted in ashes down the wind. He knew nought of
the Skylark's ode, and nought of the Cor Cordium; but the scene by the
seashore had burned itself as though with flame into his mind, and he
spoke of it a thousand times if once, sitting by the edge of the sea
that had killed the singer.
"Will they burn me if I sing too well?" the child asked him this day,
the words of Joconda being with her.
"Oh, that is sure," said Andreino, half in jest and half in earnest.
"They burnt him because he sang better than all of them. So they said.
I do not know. I know the resin ran out of the pinewood all golden and
hissing and his heart would not burn, all we could do. You are a female
thing, Musa; your heart will be the first to burn, the first of all!"
"Will it?" said Musa seriously, but not any way alarmed, for the thought
of that flaming pile by the seashore by night was a familiar image to
her.
"Ay, for sure; you will be a woman!" said Andreino, hammering into his
boat.
* * *
"Though there is not a soul here, still sometimes they come--Lucchese,
Pistoiese, what not--they come as they go; they are a faithless lot;
they love all winter, and while the corn is in the ear it goes well, but
after harvest--phew!--they put their gains in their pockets and they are
off and away back to their mountains. There are broken hearts in Maremma
when the threshing is done."
"Yes," said Musa again.
It was nothing to her, and she heeded but little.
"Yes, because men speak too lightly and women hearken too quickly; that
is how the mischief is born. With the autumn the mountaineers come. They
are strong and bold; they are ruddy and brown; they work all day, but in
the long nights they dance and they sing; then the girl listens. She
thinks it is all true, though it has all been said before in his own
hills to other ears. The winter nights are long, and the devil is always
near; when the corn goes down and the heat is come there is another sad
soul the more, another burden to carry, and he--he goes back to the
mountains. What does he care? Only when he comes down into the plains
again he goes to another place to work, because men do not love women's
tears. That is how it goes in Maremma."
* * *
"So the saints will pluck her to themselves at last," thought Joconda;
and the dreariness, the lovelessness, the hopelessness of such an
existence did not occur to her, because age, which has learned the
solace and sweetness of peace, never remembers that to youth peace seems
only stagnation, inanition, death.
The exhausted swimmer, reaching the land, falls prone on it, and blesses
it; but the outgoing swimmer, full of strength, spurns the land, and
only loves the high-crested wave, the abyss of the deep sea.
* * *
Imagination without culture is crippled and moves slowly; but it can be
pure imagination, and rich also, as folk-lore will tell the vainest.
* * *
It is this narrowness of the peasant mind which philosophers never
fairly understand, and demagogues understand but too well, and warp to
their own selfish purposes and profits.
* * *
Flying, the flamingoes are like a sunset cloud; walking, they are like
slender spirals of flame traversing the curling foam. When one looks on
them across black lines of storm-blown weeds on a November morning in
the marshes, as their long throats twist in the air with the flexile
motion of the snake, the grace of a lily blown by wind, one thinks of
Thebes, of Babylon, of the gorgeous Persia of Xerxes, of the lascivious
Egypt of the Ptolemies.
The world has grown grey and joyless in the twilight of age and fatigue,
but these birds keep the colour of its morning. Eos has kissed them.
* * *
For want of a word lives often drift apart.
* * *
Nausicaa, in the safe shelter of her father's halls, had never tended
Odysseus with more serenity and purity than the daughter of Saturnino
tended his fellow-slave.
The sanctity of the tombs lay on them, the dead were so near; neither
profanity nor passion seemed to have any place here in this mysterious
twilight alive with the memories of a vanished people. Her innocence was
a grand and noble thing, like any one of the largest white lilies that
rose up from the noxious mud of the marshes; a cup of ivory wet with the
dewdrops of dawn, blossoming fair on fetid waters. And in him the
languor of sickness and of despair borrowed unconsciously for awhile the
liveries of chastity; and he spoke no word, he made no gesture, that
would have scared from its original calm the soul of this lonely
creature, who succoured him with so much courage and so much compassion
that they awed him with the sense of an eternal, infinite, and
overwhelming obligation. It needs a great nature to bear the weight of a
great gratitude.
To a great nature it gives wings that bear it up to heaven; a lower
nature feels it always a clog that impatiently is dragged only so long
as force compels.
* * *
Her daily labours remained the same, but it seemed to her as if she had
the strength of those immortals he told her she resembled. She felt as
though she trod on air, as though she drank the sunbeams and they gave
her force like wine; she had no sense of fatigue; she might have had
wings at her ankles, and nectar in her veins. She was so happy, with
that perfect happiness which only comes where the world cannot enter,
and the free nature has lifted itself to the light, knowing nothing of,
and caring nothing for, the bonds of custom and of prejudice with which
men have paralysed and cramped themselves, calling the lower the higher
law.
* * *
The world was so far from her; she knew not of it; she was a law to
herself, and her whole duty seemed to her set forth in one single word,
perhaps the noblest word in human language--fidelity. When life is cast
in solitary places, filled with high passions, and led aloof from men,
the laws which are needful to curb the multitudes, but yet are poor
conventional foolish things at their best, sink back into their true
signification, and lose their fictitious awe.
* * *
Moreover, love is for ever measureless, and the deepest and most
passionate love is that which survives the death of esteem.
Friendship needs to be rooted in respect, but love can live upon itself
alone. Love is born of a glance, a touch, a murmur, a caress; esteem
cannot beget it, nor lack of esteem slay it. _Questi che mai da me non
fia diviso_, shall be for ever its consolation amidst hell. One life
alone is beloved, is beautiful, is needful, is desired: one life alone
out of all the millions of earth. Though it fall, err, betray, be mocked
of others and forsaken by itself, what does this matter? This cannot
alter love. The more it is injured by itself, derided of men, abandoned
of God, the more will love still see that it has need of love, and to
the faithless will be faithful.
* * *
He stood mute and motionless awhile. Then as the truth was borne in on
him, tears gushed from his eyes like rain, and he laughed long, and
laughed loud as madmen do.
He never doubted her.
He sprang up the stone steps, and leapt into the open air: into that
light of day which he had been forbidden to see so long.
To stand erect there, to look over the plains, to breathe, and move, and
gaze, and stretch his arms out to the infinite spaces of the sea and
sky--this alone was so intense a joy that he felt mad with it.