LOVE’S AMBASSADOR
The Italy of the eighteenth century has always given me a sense of
distressing incongruity, such a sense of incongruity as I feel in the
presence of performing animals, pitifully and patiently caricaturing
their own native dignity in forced postures and mirthless habiliments.
To see a petticoated elephant seated on a stool drinking tea, to see a
dog on his hind legs, with a shako on his head, shouldering a musket,
makes me, I confess, uneasy and ashamed. So in the land of the
Visconti, of the Sforza, of the Medici, a land where both the
magnificence of crime and the magnificence of achievement have always
gone habited in a certain appropriate splendour, akin to that of the
leopard in his forest and the tiger in his jungle, the vision of
powder and patches, with their concomitants of mincing uncleanness and
affectation, seems an outrage on one’s conception of the accepted
fitness of things. If you would study that incongruity, as at least I
feel it, in its more plausible phases, turn to the finer works of
Canaletto; if in its grossest, read the memoirs of that arch-scoundrel
Casanova--memoirs which to me, a fond enough student of the period in
its prettier aspects, reek with that sort of fetor which gets into
one’s clothes, as it were, and for a time infects all healthier
savours.
The fact is, I suppose, that codes of manners and of conduct, evolved
under particular conditions of society, are not always applicable to
alien conditions. During the era of the aristocracy in England, powder
and punctilio were some visible tokens of an amelioration in the old
order of things, which had considered overbearance and pugnacity
essential to the man of spirit; they spoke a real improvement in the
attitude of class towards class; and, if that attitude was at first
superficial, its practice gradually engendered the consideration which
it had begun only by affecting. In Italy, it is to be feared, society
adopted the code but eschewed its moral. All the observances, all the
extravagances of an accepted fashion were seized upon by it with
greed; only the underlying truth was never recognised or developed.
The essential inhumanity remained the same; the arrogance of rank was
unsoftened; torture survived without a thought of its outrage, not to
man but to reason. Fashion, in its baser aspects, produced, I suppose,
more preposterous fops in eighteenth-century Italy than in any other
country of Europe. And all because that hot, vivid Latin race had
accepted the imposition of a code which was quite alien to its blood
and its instincts. It was not yet ripe for the change implied. It was
idle dressing-up for a part it did not understand. It could not, in
bagwig and velvet shorts, think Garrick and play Macbeth.
It is most natural to picture the monarchs and Infantes of Spain in
trunk-hose and with bristling “stiletto” beards--fierce, haughty
tyrants, of a piece with the colour and fury of their times. You must
picture Don Philip, however, under a very different aspect. He sits at
the moment at a table in his private cabinet at Parma, a rather
solemn-looking macaroni of thirty-eight, writing, like Buffon, in lace
ruffles with a gold pen, and appearing more concerned over the right
balance of his toupet than over the equilibrium of the European
concert. You would observe, were he to rise, that he has a defect,
still noticeable though mitigated by the craft of his tailor. One of
his shoulders is distinctly higher than the other, which gives him, in
his efforts to correct the discrepancy, a rather stiff unelastic
appearance. In his younger days, he was said, by flattering
chroniclers, to possess, nevertheless, a charming figure. He had also
an equable temper, which, for an Infante of Spain and son of that
moody monarch Philip V. and his imperious spouse Elizabeth Farnese was
something to his credit. It is more to his credit now, perhaps, that,
through much and prolonged test of its qualities, his temper preserves
its even character. He takes life, in fact, very easily, and has no
objection in the world to have his wife described, and treated, as the
better horse. He is quite willing to take the picturesque lead in the
tandem while she pulls the cart of state. After all, he has played his
effective part in the achievement of their present position, and has
laurels, if rather withered ones, to rest upon. He was inclined as a
youth, it was said, to the study of military science; and he has
actually been a soldier, and has fought his way, and stubbornly fought
it, to the enjoyment of these possessions of his, which were procured
him originally through the persistent restless intriguing of his
mother. Now, in the sense of prolonged security, he has grown
slothful, and satisfied with minor triumphs, the greatest of which
latterly has turned upon the successful nature of the negotiations for
his daughter’s marriage with the Austrian Crown Prince. Isabelita is,
it would really appear, to be an empress some day--not so bad a match
for the daughter of only a younger son of Spain. Papa is very pleased,
and inclined to regard the occasion as in the nature of a personal
reward for years of, comparative, privation and ducal cheese-paring.
He has not, in fact, to this day succeeded in bringing the profit and
loss accounts of the duchy into line.
Now, as he sits writing, he strikes us as being a thought
over-bedizened for the task and the hour, which is early. Everything
upon him, you will remark, is conceived according to a taste slightly
in excess of that which is the northman’s limit. His smooth-fronted
toupet stands up eight inches from his forehead, and is surmounted by
a roll of sausage curls, which descend to two veritable _pains à
café_ behind his ears; his cravat is a very muffler of Valenciennes,
and is fastened by a brooch as big as a shoe-buckle; though presumably
in _négligé_, he wears over a lace-ruffled cambric shirt, puffed
from elbow to wrist, and garnished with mushroom-coloured ribbons, a
pink silk vest covered with silver net; and shoes and breeches to
match, dividing a space of white silk stockings, complete the
elaborate picture. The only concession to business apparent about him
is his ample loose-sleeved camisole; and even that is made of grey
velvet lined with ermine. Altogether he suggests a Hogarth beau--a
thing which, somewhat travestying fact in the artist’s own country,
would pass for a faithful transcript here.
The room in which we discover his Excellency is small but
appropriately furnished. There is a good deal of glass and glitter in
it, a characteristic perfume, some bright sketches by Boucher and a
Lancret _fête galante_; and as noticeable a feature as any is a great
dish of sweetmeats, having a little table of rosewood with brass
mouldings to itself. The duke is writing to his wife at Versailles. He
sucks a comfit as he evolves without difficulty his periods. Simple
souls, often better than intellectual, write good letters: I have
known an ingenuous athlete express himself with a neatness and clarity
I could envy without reaching. Here are some sentences which I
extract, as pertinent to our story, from the ducal epistle:--
“All goes well, according to our latest advices; and the official
demand for our daughter’s hand will certainly be presented to his
Majesty your father within a month from this date. So far, so
excellent; and the days when, in your own phrase, we lived like
‘ragamuffins,’ are buried even to their shadows. Let us have a mass
said for their souls, poor things, for they possessed some virtues.
... We have here, lately arrived, the most popular chanteur since
Farinelli. He comes, with a letter of recommendation to the Marquise
de Ravilla from the archduke himself, and is to charm our daughter
into love with a shadow whose approach she has dreaded a little. That
suggestion is for your exclusive ear, ma mie. It emanates from one who
is very cunning and very observant--the Gonzalès, no less; and is
founded upon the presumed consciousness of somebody that he had
belittled himself, his rank, and his moral stature, in somebody else’s
eyes. You will recall that little incident of the carriage and the
ford, as I passed it on to you in madam’s own words. Certainly,
according to her, it had its effect upon an over-sensitive nature,
predisposed, perhaps, to prejudice. Somebody had already been pictured
to this frank nature, it seems, in the light of a philosopher and
prig. She may not associate the two--the stranger of the ford, that is
to say, and the philosopher--but she may come to, or may have her
suspicions; and anyhow he may think that she does, and be anxious to
eliminate at once a bad impression. So this Tiretta is despatched to
play the part of Love’s advocate with offended beauty. I do not vouch
for the truth of this, or endorse its policy; I repeat only for your
private ear what the marquise of her shrewdness conjectures. She, for
her part, is so sure of the truth of her surmise that she wants the
man sent to Colorno, that there, amid romantic environments suggestive
to the heart of contemplation, the points of his fond advocacy may be
sympathetically pondered. She says that it would be flying in the face
of love’s providence to frustrate somebody’s obvious purpose and
design; that that impression referred to--whether it concerns itself
with prig or roué, or, worse still, with both--is hardly one of happy
augury for the future, and calls for exceptional treatment; that, in
fine, if somebody has contrived this thing, somebody knows what he is
about and has made himself responsible for his instrument.
“In the meantime, our newly-arrived improvisatore exhibits his
qualities to triumphant effect. He is a soldier and a fine man; but
this gift comes to him apart from his training, God knows whence. He
will sing and rhyme you an hour on end; and, observe, he is very
flattering, though veiled, in allusions to a supreme lord and comrade
who possesses his heart.”
To these passages the sick duchess answered in due course, and with a
characteristic warning, the whole gist of which may be conveyed in a
single sentence:
“As to this minstrel, beware that the medicine, my Pippo, does not
prove a drug, given for a definite purpose, but afterwards indulged in
for its own sake”--a really preposterous suggestion, which it was
incumbent on a _cadet_ of Spain to wave aside with the briefest
comment:
“You make me smile, dearest wife; you positively amuse me. The man is
to be regarded, like a courier, as a mere vehicle for the conveyance
of an august document of the heart. He would hardly commit the
absurdity, I think, of associating his own personal insignificance
with the message he was employed to deliver, any more than the fiddle,
could it speak, would claim to be other than a vulgar structure of
wood and string, obedient only to the hand of its master, and denuded
of all importance the moment that hand was withdrawn. Believe me, ma
chérie, the percipience of the unelect is not so negligible a
quantity as you would seem to imagine. This instrument--if indeed an
instrument it is--will play its part with a full sense of the
momentary distinction that part confers upon it, yet without a thought
but of sinking thereafter into the oblivion which is its necessary
destiny. If it were otherwise, there remain means to persuade it. Yet
it cannot be otherwise. I think I may answer for _our_ daughter that
she will entertain no delusions as to the relative values of the hand
and of the instrument upon which it plays. Which, certainly, is quite
enough said upon that small subject.”
Yet it was a very small subject who once crept through the keyhole of
the King’s treasury and robbed his Magnificence’s coffers.