as his shadow went beside him on the sand; never to waste the sunlit
hours hidden in the bowels of the earth; never to be afraid of every
leaf that stirred, of every bird that flew, of every moon-beam that fell
across his path!--he laughed and sobbed with the ecstasy of his release.
"O God, Thou hast not forgotten!" he cried in that rapture of freedom.
All the old childish faiths that had been taught him by dim old altars
in stately Mantuan churches came back to his memory and heart.
On the barren rock of Gorgona he had cursed and blasphemed the Creator
and creation of a world that was hell; he had been without hope: he had
derided all the faiths of his youth as illusions woven by devils to make
the disappointment of man the more bitter.
But now in the sweetness of his liberty, all the old happy beliefs
rushed back to him; he saw Deity in the smile of the seas, in the light
upon the plains. He was free!
* * *
The world has lost the secret of making labour a joy; but nature has
given it to a few. Where the maidens dance the _Saltarello_ under the
deep Sardinian forests, and the honey and the grapes are gathered
beneath the snowy sides of Etna, and the oxen walk up to their loins in
flowing grass where the long aisles of pines grow down the Adrian shore,
this wood-magic is known still of the old simple charm of the pastoral
life.
* * *
"Does it vex you that I am not a boy?" said the girl--"why should it vex
you? I can do all they can, I can row better than many, and sail and
steer; I can drive too, and I know what to do with the nets; if I had a
boat of my own you would see what I could do."
"All that is very well," said Joconda with a little nod. "I do not say
it is not. But you have not a boat of your own, that is just it; that is
what women always suffer from; they have to steer, but the craft is some
one else's, and the haul too."
* * *
Wild bird of sea and cloud, you are a stormy petrel, but there may come
a storm too many--and I am old. I have done my best, but that is little.
If you were a lad one would not be so uneasy. I suppose the good God
knows best--if one could be sure of that--I am a hard working woman, and
I have done no great sin that I know of, but up in heaven they never
take any thought of me. When I was young, I asked them at my marriage
altar to help me, and when my boys were born, I did the same, but they
never noticed; my man was drowned, and my beautiful boys got the fever
and sickened one by one and died: that was all I got. Priests say it is
best; priests are not mothers.
* * *
"They were greater than the men that live now," she said with a solemn
tenderness,
"Perhaps; Why think so?"
"Because they were not afraid of their dead; they built them beautiful
houses, and gave them beautiful things. Now, men are afraid or ashamed,
or they have no remembrance. Their dead are huddled away in dust or mud
as though they were hateful or sinful. That is what I think so cowardly,
so thankless. If they will not bear the sight of death, it were better
to let great ships go slowly out, far out to sea, and give the waves
their lost ones."
_MOTHS._
When gardeners plant and graft, they know very well what will be the
issue of their work; they do not expect the rose from a bulb of garlic,
or look for the fragrant olive from a slip of briar; but the culturers
of human nature are less wise, and they sow poison, yet rave in
reproaches when it breeds and brings forth its like. "The rosebud garden
of girls" is a favourite theme for poets, and the maiden in her likeness
to a half-opened blossom, is as near purity and sweetness as a human
creature can be, yet what does the world do with its opening buds?--it
thrusts them in the forcing-house amidst the ordure, and then, if they
perish prematurely, never blames itself. The streets absorb the girls of
the poor; society absorbs the daughters of the rich; and not seldom one
form of prostitution, like the other, keeps its captives "bound in the
dungeon of their own corruption."
* * *
The frivolous are always frightened at any strength or depth of nature,
or any glimpse of sheer despair.
Not to be consoled!
What can seem more strange to the shallow? What can seem more obstinate
to the weak? Not to be consoled is to offend all swiftly forgetting
humanity, most of whose memories are writ on water.
* * *
It is harder to keep true to high laws and pure instincts in modern
society than it was in days of martyrdom. There is nothing in the whole
range of life so dispiriting and so unnerving as a monotony of
indifference. Active persecution and fierce chastisement are tonics to
the nerves; but the mere weary conviction that no one cares, that no one
notices, that there is no humanity that honours, and no deity that
pities, is more destructive of all higher effort than any conflict with
tyranny or with barbarism.
* * *
Yet as he thought, so he did not realise that he would ever cease to be
in the world--who does? Life was still young in him, was prodigal to him
of good gifts; of enmity he only knew so much as made his triumph finer,
and of love he had more than enough. His life was full--at times
laborious--but always poetical and always victorious. He could not
realise that the day of darkness would ever come for him, when neither
woman nor man would delight him, when no roses would have fragrance for
him, and no song any spell to rouse him. Genius gives immortality in
another way than in the vulgar one of being praised by others after
death; it gives elasticity, unwearied sympathy, and that sense of some
essence stronger than death, of some spirit higher than the tomb, which
nothing can destroy. It is in this sense that genius walks with the
immortals.
* * *
A cruel story runs on wheels, and every hand oils the wheels as they
run.
* * *
You may weep your eyes blind, you may shout your throat dry, you may
deafen the ears of your world for half a lifetime, and you may never get
a truth believed in, never have a simple fact accredited. But the lie
flies like the swallow, multiplies itself like the caterpillar, is
accepted everywhere, like the visits of a king; it is a royal guest for
whom the gates fly open, the red carpet is unrolled, the trumpets sound,
the crowds applaud.
* * *
She lived, like all women of her stamp and her epoch, in an atmosphere
of sugared sophisms; she never reflected, she never admitted, that she
did wrong; in her world nothing mattered much, unless, indeed, it were
found out, and got into the public mouth.
Shifting as the sands, shallow as the rain-pools, drifting in all danger
to a lie, incapable of loyalty, insatiably curious, still as a friend
and ill as a foe, kissing like Judas, denying like Peter, impure of
thought, even where by physical bias or political prudence still pure in
act, the woman of modern society is too often at once the feeblest and
the foulest outcome of a false civilisation. Useless as a butterfly,
corrupt as a canker, untrue to even lovers and friends because mentally
incapable of comprehending what truth means, caring only for physical
comfort and mental inclination, tired of living, but afraid of dying;
believing some in priests, and some in physiologists, but none at all in
virtue; sent to sleep by chloral, kept awake by strong waters and raw
meat; bored at twenty, and exhausted at thirty, yet dying in the harness
of pleasure rather than drop out of the race and live naturally;
pricking their sated senses with the spur of lust, and fancying it love;
taking their passions as they take absinthe before dinner; false in
everything, from the swell of their breast to the curls at their
throat;--beside them the guilty and tragic figures of old, the Medea,
the Clytemnæstra, the Phædra, look almost pure, seem almost noble.
When one thinks that they are the only shape of womanhood which comes
hourly before so many men, one comprehends why the old Christianity
which made womanhood sacred dies out day by day, and why the new
Positivism, which would make her divine, can find no lasting root.
The faith of men can only live by the purity of women, and there is both
impurity and feebleness at the core of the dolls of Worth, as the canker
of the phylloxera works at the root of the vine.
* * *
"What an actress was lost in your mother!" he added with his rough
laugh; but he confused the talent of the comedian of society with that
of the comedian of the stage, and they are very dissimilar. The latter
almost always forgets herself in her part; the former never.
* * *
The scorn of genius is the most arrogant and the most boundless of all
scorn.
* * *
"The fame of the singer can never be but a breath, a sound through a
reed. When our lips are once shut, there is on us for ever eternal
silence. Who can remember a summer breeze when it has passed by, or
tell in any after-time how a laugh or a sigh sounded?"
* * *
"When the soldier dies at his post, unhonoured and unpitied, and out of
sheer duty, is that unreal because it is noble?" he said one night to
his companions. "When the sister of charity hides her youth and her sex
under a grey shroud, and gives up her whole life to woe and solitude, to
sickness and pain, is that unreal because it is wonderful? A man paints
a spluttering candle, a greasy cloth, a mouldy cheese, a pewter can;
'How real!' they cry. If he paint the spirituality of dawn, the light of
the summer sea, the flame of arctic nights, of tropic woods, they are
called unreal, though they exist no less than the candle and the cloth,
the cheese and the can. Ruy Blas is now condemned as unreal because the
lovers kill themselves; the realists forget that there are lovers still
to whom that death would be possible, would be preferable, to low
intrigue and yet more lowering falsehood. They can only see the mouldy
cheese, they cannot see the sunrise glory. All that is heroic, all that
is sublime, impersonal, or glorious, is derided as unreal. It is a
dreary creed. It will make a dreary world. Is not my Venetian glass with
its iridescent hues of opal as real every whit as your pot of pewter?
Yet the time is coming when every one, morally and mentally at least,
will be allowed no other than a pewter pot to drink out of, under pain
of being 'writ down an ass'--or worse. It is a dreary prospect."
* * *
"Good? bad? If there were only good and bad in this world it would not
matter so much," said Corrèze a little recklessly and at random. "Life
would not be such a disheartening affair as it is. Unfortunately the
majority of people are neither one nor the other, and have little
inclination for either crime or virtue. It would be almost as absurd to
condemn them as to admire them. They are like tracts of shifting sand,
in which nothing good or bad can take root. To me they are more
despairing to contemplate than the darkest depth of evil; out of that
may come such hope as comes of redemption and remorse, but in the vast,
frivolous, featureless mass of society there is no hope."
* * *
"No!" he said with some warmth: "I refuse to recognise the divinity of
noise; I utterly deny the majesty of monster choruses; clamour and
clangour are the death-knell of music as drapery and so-called realism
(which means, if it mean aught, that the dress is more real than the
form underneath it!) are the destruction of sculpture. It is very
strange. Every day art in every other way becomes more natural and music
more artificial. Every day I wake up expecting to hear myself _dénigré_
and denounced as old-fashioned, because I sing as my nature as well as
my training teaches me to do. It is very odd; there is such a cry for
naturalism in other arts--we have Millet instead of Claude; we have Zola
instead of Georges Sand; we have Dumas _fils_ instead of Corneille; we
have Mercié instead of Canova; but in music we have precisely the
reverse, and we have the elephantine creations, the elaborate and
pompous combinations of Baireuth, and the Tone school, instead of the
old sweet strains of melody that went straight and clear to the ear and
the heart of man. Sometimes my enemies write in their journals that I
sing as if I were a Tuscan peasant strolling through his corn--how
proud they make me! But they do not mean to do so. I will not twist and
emphasise. I trust to melody. I was taught music in its own country, and
I will not sin against the canons of the Italians. They are right.
Rhetoric is one thing, and song is another. Why confuse the two?
Simplicity is the soul of great music; as it is the mark of great
passion. Ornament is out of place in melody which represents single
emotions at their height, be they joy, or fear, or hate, or love, or
shame, or vengeance, or whatsoever they will. Music is not a science any
more than poetry is. It is a sublime instinct, like genius of all kinds.
I sing as naturally as other men speak; let me remain natural"----
* * *
Childhood goes with us like an echo always, a refrain to the ballad of
our life. One always wants one's cradle-air.
* * *
"The poor you have always with you," she said to a bevy of great ladies
once. "Christ said so. You profess to follow Christ. How have you the
poor with you? The back of their garret, the roof of their hovel,
touches the wall of your palace, and the wall is thick. You have
dissipations, spectacles, diversions that you call charities; you have a
tombola for a famine, you have a dramatic performance for a flood, you
have a concert for a fire, you have a fancy fair for a leprosy. Do you
never think how horrible it is, that mockery of woe? Do you ever wonder
at revolutions? Why do you not say honestly that you care nothing? You
do care nothing. The poor might forgive the avowal of indifference; they
will never forgive the insult of affected pity."
* * *
"Why do you go to such a place?" he asked her as she stood on the
staircase.
"There are poor there, and great misery," she answered him reluctantly;
she did not care to speak of these things at any time.
"And what good will you do? You will be cheated and robbed, and even if
you are not, you should know that political science has found that
private charity is the hotbed of all idleness."
"When political science has advanced enough to prevent poverty, it may
have the right to prevent charity too," she answered him, with a
contempt that showed thought on the theme was not new to her. "Perhaps
charity--I dislike the word--may do no good; but friendship from the
rich to the poor must do good; it must lessen class hatreds."
"Are you a socialist?" said Zouroff with a little laugh, and drew back
and let her pass onward.
* * *
"My dear! I never say rude things; but, if you wish me to be sincere, I
confess I think everybody is a little vulgar now, except old women like
me, who adhered to the Faubourg while you all were dancing and changing
your dresses seven times a day at St. Cloud. There is a sort of
vulgarity in the air; it is difficult to escape imbibing it; there is
too little reticence, there is too much tearing about; men are not
well-mannered, and women are too solicitous to please, and too
indifferent how far they stoop in pleasing. It may be the fault of
steam; it may be the fault of smoking; it may come from that flood of
new people of whom 'L'Etrangère' is the scarcely exaggerated sample;
but, whatever it comes from, there it is--a vulgarity that taints
everything, courts and cabinets as well as society. Your daughter
somehow or other has escaped it, and so you find her odd, and the world
thinks her stiff. She is neither; but no dignified long-descended
point-lace, you know, will ever let itself be twisted and twirled into a
cascade and a _fouillis_ like your Brétonne lace that is just the
fashion of the hour, and worth nothing. I admire your Vera very greatly;
she always makes me think of those dear old stately hotels with their
grand gardens in which I saw, in my girlhood, the women who, in theirs,
had known France before '30. These hotels and their gardens are gone,
most of them, and there are stucco and gilt paint in their places. And
here are people who think that a gain. I am not one of them."
_UNDER TWO FLAGS._
The old viscount, haughtiest of haughty nobles, would never abate one
jot of his magnificence; and his sons had but imbibed the teaching of
all that surrounded them; they did but do in manhood what they had been
unconsciously moulded to do in boyhood, when they were sent to Eton at
ten with gold dressing-boxes to grace their dame's tables, embryo dukes
for their co-fags, and tastes that already knew to a nicety the worth of
the champagnes at Christopher's. The old, old story--how it repeats
itself! Boys grow up amidst profuse prodigality, and are launched into a
world where they can no more arrest themselves, than the feather-weight
can pull in the lightning-stride of the two-year-old, who defies all
check, and takes the flat as he chooses. They are brought up like young
dauphins, and tossed into the costly whirl to float as best they can--on
nothing. Then on the lives and deaths that follow; on the graves where a
dishonoured alien lies forgotten by the dark Austrian lake-side, or
under the monastic shadow of some crumbling Spanish crypt; where a red
cross chills the lonely traveller in the virgin solitudes of Amazonian
forest aisles, or the wild scarlet creepers of Australia trail over a
nameless mound above the trackless stretch of sun-warmed waters--then,
at them the world
"Shoots out its lips with scorn."
Not on _them_ lies the blame.
* * *
His influence had done more to humanise the men he was associated with
than any preachers or teachers could have done.
Almost insensibly they grew ashamed to be beaten by him, and strove to
do like him as far as they could. They never knew him drunk, they never
heard him swear, they never found him unjust, even to a poverty-stricken
_indigène_, or brutal, even to a _fille de joie_. Insensibly his
presence humanised them. Of a surety, the last part Bertie dreamed of
playing was that of a teacher to any mortal thing. Yet--here in
Africa--it might reasonably be questioned if a second Augustine or
François Xavier would ever have done half the good among the
devil-may-care Roumis that was wrought by the dauntless, listless,
reckless soldier, who followed instinctively the one religion which has
no cant in its brave, simple creed, and binds man to man in links that
are as true as steel--the religion of a gallant gentleman's loyalty and
honour.
* * *
The child had been flung upward, a little straw floating in the gutter
of Paris iniquities; a little foam-bell, bubbling on the sewer waters of
barrack vice; the stick had been her teacher, the baggage-waggon her
cradle, the camp-dogs her playfellows, the _caserne_ oaths her lullaby,
the _guidons_ her sole guiding-stars, the _razzia_ her sole fete-day: it
was little marvel that the bright, bold, insolent little friend of the
flag had nothing left of her sex save a kitten's mischief and coquette's
archness. It said much rather for the straight, fair, sunlit instincts
of the untaught nature, that Cigarette had gleaned, even out of such a
life, two virtues that she would have held by to the death, if tried--a
truthfulness that would have scorned a lie as only fit for cowards, and
a loyalty that cleaved to France as a religion.
* * *
Tired as over-worked cattle, and crouched or stretched like worn-out
homeless dogs, they had never wakened as he had noiselessly harnessed
himself, and he looked at them with that interest in other lives which
had come to him through adversity; for if misfortune had given him
strength, it had also given him sympathy.
* * *
And he did her that injustice which the best amongst us are apt to do to
those whom we do not feel interest enough in to study with that
closeness which can alone give comprehension of the intricate and
complex rebus, so faintly sketched, so marvellously involved, of human
nature.
* * *
The gleam of the dawn spread in one golden glow of the morning, and the
day rose radiant over the world; they stayed not for its beauty or its
peace; the carnage went on hour upon hour; men began to grow drunk with
slaughter as with raki. It was sublimely grand; it was hideously
hateful--this wild-beast struggle, that heaving tumult of striving lives
that ever and anon stirred the vast war-cloud of smoke and broke from it
as the lightning from the night. The sun laughed in its warmth over a
thousand hills and streams, over the blue seas lying northward, and over
the yellow sands of the south; but the touch of its heat only made the
flame in their blood burn fiercer; and the fulness of its light only
served to show them clearer where to strike, and how to slay.
* * *
She might be a careless young coquette, a lawless little brigand, a
child of sunny caprices, an elf of dauntless mischief; but she was more
than these. The divine fire of genius had touched her, and Cigarette
would have perished for her country not less surely than Jeanne d'Arc.
The holiness of an impersonal love, the glow of an imperishable
patriotism, the melancholy of a passionate pity for the concrete and
unnumbered sufferings of the people, were in her instinctive and inborn,
as fragrance in the heart of flowers. And all these together moved her
now, and made her young face beautiful as she looked down upon the
crowding soldiery.
* * *
After all, Diderot was in the right when he told Rousseau which side of
the question to take. On my life, civilisation develops comfort, but I
do believe it kills nobility. Individuality dies in it, and egotism
grows strong and specious. Why is it that in a polished life a man,
whilst becoming incapable of sinking to crime, almost always becomes
also incapable of rising to greatness? Why is it that misery, tumult,
privation, bloodshed, famine, beget, in such a life as this, such
countless things of heroism, of endurance, of self-sacrifice--things
mostly of demigods--in men who quarrel with the wolves for a wild-boar's
carcase, for a sheep's offal?
* * *
As for death--when it comes it comes. Every soldier carries it in his
wallet, and it may jump out on him any minute. I would rather die young
than old. Pardi! age is nothing else but death that is _conscious_.
* * *
It is misery that is glory--the misery that toils with bleeding feet
under burning suns without complaint; that lies half dead through the
long night with but one care, to keep the torn flag free from the
conqueror's touch; that bears the rain of blows in punishment rather
than break silence and buy release by betrayal of a comrade's trust;
that is beaten like the mule, and galled like the horse, and starved
like the camel, and housed like the dog, and yet does the thing which is
right, and the thing which is brave, despite all; that suffers, and
endures, and pours out his blood like water to the thirsty sands whose
thirst is never stilled, and goes up in the morning sun to the combat as
though death were the Paradise of the Arbico's dream, knowing the while
that no Paradise waits save the crash of the hoof through the throbbing
brain, or the roll of the gun-carriage over the writhing limb. _That_ is
glory. The misery that is heroism because France needs it, because a
soldier's honour wills it. _That_ is glory. It is to-day in the hospital
as it never is in the Cour des Princes where the glittering host of the
marshals gather!
* * *
Spare me the old world-worn, thread-bare formulas. Because the flax and
the colza blossom for use, and the garden flowers grow trained and
pruned, must there be no bud that opens for mere love of the sun, and
swings free in the wind in its fearless fair fashion? Believe me, it is
the lives which follow no previous rule that do the most good, and give
the most harvest.
* * *
"The first thing I saw of Cigarette was this: She was seven years old;
she had been beaten black and blue; she had had two of her tiny teeth
knocked out. The men were furious, she was a pet with them; and she
would not say who had done it, though she knew twenty swords would have
beaten him flat as a fritter if she had given his name. I got her to sit
to me some days after. I pleased her with her own picture. I asked her
to tell me why she would not say who had ill-treated her. She put her
head on one side like a robin, and told me, in a whisper: 'It was one of
my comrades--because I would not steal for him. I would not have the
army know--it would demoralise them. If a French soldier ever does a
cowardly thing, another French soldier must not betray it.' That was
Cigarette--at seven years. The _esprit du corps_ was stronger than her
own wrongs."
* * *