THE VISIONARY AND HIS DAUGHTER--AN ENGLISHMAN, SUCH AS FOREIGNERS
IMAGINE THE ENGLISH.
We must now present the reader to characters very different from those
which have hitherto passed before his eye. Without the immortal city,
along the Appia Via, there dwelt a singular and romantic visionary, of
the name of Volktman. He was by birth a Dane; and nature had bestowed on
him that frame of mind which might have won him a distinguished career,
had she placed the period of his birth in the eleventh century. Volktman
was essentially a man belonging to the past time: the character of his
enthusiasm was weird and Gothic; with beings of the present day he
had no sympathy; their loves, their hatreds, their politics, their
literature, awoke no echo in his breast. He did not affect to herd with
them; his life was solitude, and its occupation study--and study of that
nature which every day unfitted him more and more for the purposes of
existence. In a word, he was a reader of the stars; a believer in the
occult and dreamy science of astrology. Bred up to the art of sculpture,
he had early in life sought Rome, as the nurse of inspiration; but
even then he had brought with him the dark and brooding temper of his
northern tribe. The images of the classic world; the bright, and cold,
and beautiful divinities, whose natures as well as shapes the marble
simulation of life is so especially adapted to represent; spoke but
little to Volktman’s pre-occupied and gloomy imagination. Faithful to
the superstitions and the warriors of the North, the loveliness and
majesty of the southern creations but called forth in him the desire to
apply the principles by which they were formed to the embodying those
stern visions which his haggard and dim fancies only could invoke. This
train of inspiration preserved him, at least, from the deadliest vice
in a worshipper of the arts--commonplace. He was no servile and trite
imitator; his very faults were solemn and commanding. But before he had
gained that long experience which can alone perfect genius, his natural
energies were directed to new channels. In an illness which prevented
his applying to his art, he had accidentally sought entertainment in
a certain work upon astrology. The wild and imposing theories of the
science--if science it may be called--especially charmed and invited
him. The clear bright nights of his fatherland were brought back to
his remembrance; he recalled the mystic and unanalysed impressions with
which he had gazed upon the lights of heaven; and he imagined that
the very vagueness of his feelings was a proof of the certainty of the
science.
The sons of the North are pre-eminently liable to be affected by that
romance of emotion which the hushed and starry aspect of night is
calculated to excite. The long-broken luxurious silence that, in their
frozen climate, reigns from the going down of the sun to its rise; the
wandering and sudden meteors that disport, as with an impish life, along
the noiseless and solemn heaven; the peculiar radiance of the stars;
and even the sterile and severe features of the earth, which those stars
light up with their chill and ghostly serenity, serve to deepen
the effect of the wizard tales which are instilled into the ear of
childhood, and to connect the less known and more visionary impulses of
life with the influences, or at least with the associations, of Night
and Heaven.
To Volktman, more alive than even his countrymen are wont to be, to
superstitious impressions, the science on which he had chanced came with
an all-absorbing interest and fascination. He surrendered himself wholly
to his new pursuit. By degrees the block and the chisel were neglected,
and, though he still worked from time to time, he ceased to consider the
sculptor’s art as the vocation of his life and the end of his ambition.
Fortunately, though not rich, Volktman was not without the means of
existence, nor even without the decent and proper comforts: so that
he was enabled, as few men are, to indulge his ardour for unprofitable
speculations, albeit to the exclusion of lucrative pursuits. It may be
noted, that when a man is addicted to an occupation that withdraws him
from the world, any great affliction tends to confirm, without hope of
cure, his inclinations to solitude. The world, distasteful, in that it
gave no pleasure, becomes irremediably hateful when it is coupled with
the remembrance of pain. Volktman had married an Italian, a woman
who loved him entirely, and whom he loved with that strong though
uncaressing affection common to men of his peculiar temper. Of the gay
and social habits and constitution of her country, the Italian was not
disposed to suffer the astrologer to dwell only among the stars. She
sought, playfully and kindly, to attract him towards human society; and
Volktman could not always resist--as what man earth-born can do?--the
influence of the fair presider over his house and hearth. It happened,
that on one day in which she peculiarly wished his attendance at some
one of those parties in which Englishmen think the notion of festivity
strange--for it includes conversation--Volktman had foretold the
menace of some great misfortune. Uncertain, from the character of the
prediction, whether to wish his wife to remain at home or to go abroad,
he yielded to her wish, and accompanied her to her friend’s house. A
young Englishman lately arrived at Rome, and already celebrated in
the circles of that city for eccentricity of life and his passion for
beauty, was of the party. He appeared struck with the sculptor’s wife;
and in his attentions, Volktman, for the first and the last time,
experienced the pangs of jealousy; he hurried his wife away.
On their return home, whether or not a jewel worn by the signora had
attracted the cupidity of some of the lawless race who live through
gaining, and profiting by, such information, they were attacked by two
robbers in the obscure and ill-lighted suburb. Though Volktman offered
no resistance, the manner of their assailants was rude and violent. The
signora was fearfully alarmed; her shrieks brought a stranger to their
assistance; it was the English youth who had so alarmed the jealousy
of Volktman. Accustomed to danger in his profession of a gallant, the
Englishman seldom, in those foreign lands, went from home at night
without the protection of pistols. At the sight of firearms, the
ruffians felt their courage evaporate; they fled from their prey; and
the Englishman assisted Volktman in conveying the Italian to her home.
But the terror of the encounter operated fatally on a delicate frame;
and within three weeks from that night Volktman was a widower.
His marriage had been blessed with but one daughter, who at the time of
this catastrophe was about eight years of age. His love for his child in
some measure reconciled Volktman to life; and as the shock of the event
subsided, he returned with a pertinacity which was now subjected to no
interruption, to his beloved occupations and mysterious researches.
One visitor alone found it possible to win frequent ingress to his
seclusion; it was the young English man. A sentiment of remorse at the
jealous feelings he had experienced, and for which his wife, though
an Italian, had never given him even the shadow of a cause, had
softened--into a feeling rendered kind by the associations of the
deceased, and a vague desire to atone to her for an acknowledged
error,--the dislike he had at first conceived against the young man.
This was rapidly confirmed by the gentle and winning manners of the
stranger, by his attentions to the deceased, to whom he had sent an
English physician of great skill, and, as their acquaintance expanded,
by the animated interest which he testified in the darling theories of
the astrologer.
It happened also that Volktman’s mother had been the daughter of Scotch
parents. She had taught him the English tongue; and it was the only
language, save his own, which he spoke as a native. This circumstance
tended greatly to facilitate his intercourse with the traveller; and
he found in the society of a man ardent, sensitive, melancholy, and
addicted to all abstract contemplation, a pleasure which, among the
keen, but uncultivated intellects of Italy, he had never enjoyed.
Frequently, then, came the young Englishman to the lone house on the
Appia Via; and the mysterious and unearthly conversation of the starry
visionary afforded to him, who had early learned to scrutinise the
varieties of his kind, a strange delight, heightened by the contrast it
presented to the worldly natures with which he usually associated, and
the commonplace occupations of a life in pursuit of pleasure.
And there was one who, child as she was, watched the coming of that
young and beautiful stranger with emotion beyond her years. Brought up
alone; mixing, since her mother’s death, with no companions of her
age; catching dim and solemn glimpses of her father’s wild but lofty
speculations; his books, filled with strange characters and imposing
“words of mighty sound,” open for ever to her young and curious gaze;
it can scarce be matter of wonder that something strange and unworldly
mingled with the elements of character which Lucilla Volktman early
developed--a character that was nature itself, yet of a nature erratic
and bizarre. Her impulses she obeyed spontaneously, but none fathomed
their origin. She was not of a quiet and meek order of mind; but
passionate, changeful, and restless. She would laugh and weep without
apparent cause; and the colour on her cheek never seemed for two
minutes the same; and the most fitful changes of an April heaven were
immutability itself compared with the play and lustre of expression that
undulated in her features and her wild, deep, eloquent eyes.
Her person resembled her mind; it was beautiful; but the beauty struck
you less than the singularity of its character. Her eyes were of a
darkness that at night seemed black; but her hair was of the brightest
and purest auburn; her complexion, sometimes pale, sometimes radiant
even to the flush of a fever, was delicate and clear; her teeth and
mouth were lovely beyond all words; her hands and feet were small to
a fault; and as she grew up (for we have forestalled her age in this
description) her shape, though wanting in height, was in such harmony
and proportion, that the mind of the sculptor would sometimes escape
from the absorption of the astrologer and Volktman would gaze upon her
with the same admiration that he would have bestowed, in spite of the
subject, on the goddess-forms of Phidias or Canova. But then, this
beauty was accompanied with such endless variety of gesture, often so
wild, though always necessarily graceful, that the eye ached for that
repose requisite for prolonged admiration.
When she was spoken to, she did not often answer to the purpose, but
rather appeared to reply as to some interrogatory of her own; in the
midst of one occupation, she would start up to another; leave that, in
turn, undone, and sit down in silence lasting for hours. Her voice, in
singing, was exquisitely melodious; she had too, an intuitive talent
for painting; and she read all the books that came in her way with an
avidity that bespoke at once the restlessness and the genius of her
mind.
This description of Lucilla must, I need scarcely repeat, be considered
as applicable to her at some years distant from the time in which the
young Englishman first attracted her childish but ardent imagination.
To her, that face, with its regular and harmonious features, its golden
hair, and soft, shy, melancholy aspect, seemed as belonging to a higher
and brighter order of beings than those who, with exaggerated lineaments
and swarthy hues, surrounded and displeased her. She took a strange
and thrilling pleasure in creeping to his side, and looking up, when
unobserved, at the countenance which, in his absence, she loved to
imitate with her pencil by day; and to recall in her dreams at night.
But she seldom spoke to him, and she shrank, covered with painful
blushes, from his arms, whenever he attempted to bestow on her those
caresses which children are wont to claim as an attention. Once,
however, she summoned courage to ask him to teach her English, and he
complied. She learned that language with surprising facility; and as
Volktman loved its sound she grew familiar with its difficulties, by
always addressing her father in a tongue which became inexpressibly dear
to her. And the young stranger delighted to hear that soft and melodious
voice, with its trembling, Italian accent, make music from the nervous
and masculine language of his native land. Scarce accountably to
himself, a certain tender and peculiar interest in the fortunes of
this singular and bewitching child grew up within him--peculiar and not
easily accounted for, in that it was not wholly the interest we feel in
an engaging child, and yet was of no more interested nor sinister order.
Were there truth in the science of the stars, I should say that they
had told him her fate was to have affinity with his; and with that
persuasion, something mysterious and more than ordinarily tender,
entered into the affection he felt for the daughter of his friend.
The Englishman was himself of a romantic character. He had been
self-taught; and his studies, irregular though often deep, had given
directions to his intellect frequently enthusiastic and unsound. His
imagination preponderated over his judgment; and any pursuit that
attracted his imagination won his entire devotion, until his natural
sagacity proved it deceitful. If at times, living as he did in that
daily world which so sharpens our common sense, he smiled at the
persevering fervour of the astrologer, he more often shared it; and
he became his pupil in “the poetry of heaven,” with a secret but deep
belief in the mysteries cultivated by his master. Carrying the delusion
to its height, I fear that the enthusiast entered upon ground still more
shadowy and benighted;--the old secrets of the alchymist, and perhaps
even of those arcana yet more gloomy and less rational, were subjected
to their serious contemplation; and night after night, they delivered
themselves wholly up to that fearful and charmed fascination which the
desire and effort to overleap our mortal boundaries produce even in the
hardest and best regulated minds. The train of thought so long nursed
by the abstruse and solitary Dane was, perhaps, a better apology for
the weakness of credulity, than the youth and wandering fancy of the
Englishman. But the scene around--not alluring to the one--fed to
overflowing the romantic aspirations of the other.
On his way home, as the stars (which night had been spent in reading)
began to wink and fade, the Englishman crossed the haunted Almo,
renowned of yore for its healing virtues, and in whose stream the
far-famed simulacrum, (the image of Cybele), which fell from heaven, was
wont to be laved with every coming spring: and around his steps, till
he gained his home, were the relics and monuments of that superstition
which sheds so much beauty over all that, in harsh reasoning, it may be
said to degrade; so that his mind, always peculiarly alive to external
impressions, was girt, as it were, with an atmosphere favourable both to
the lofty speculation and the graceful credulities of romance.
The Englishman remained at Rome, with slight intervals of absence, for
nearly three years. On the night before the day in which he received
intelligence of an event that recalled him to his native country, he
repaired at an hour accidentally later than usual to the astrologer’s
abode.