CHAPTER LIII.

AFTERWARD.

There is little more to write. Four years, with their varying seasons,

their endless procession of events, their multitude of joys and sorrows,

have passed since Sissy died. Her place in the world, which seemed so

blank and strange in its first vacancy, is closed up and lost in the

crowding occupations of our ordinary life. She is not forgotten, but she

has passed out of the light of common day into the quiet world of years

gone by, where there is neither crowd nor haste, but soft shadows and

shadowy sunshine, and time for every tender memory and thought. Even

Aunt Harriet's sorrow is patient and subdued, and she sees her darling's

face, with other long-lost faces, softened as in a gentle dream. She

looks back to the past with no pain of longing. At seventy-eight she

believes that she is nearer to those she loves by going forward yet a

little farther. Nor are these last days sad, for in her loneliness

Godfrey Hammond persuaded her to come to him, and she is happy in her

place by his fireside. He is all that is left to her, and she is wrapped

up in him. Nothing is good enough for Godfrey, and he says, with a

smile, that she would make the planets revolve round him if she could.

It is very possible that if she had her will she might attempt some

little rearrangement of that kind. Her only fear is lest she should ever

be a burden to him. But that will never be. Godfrey likes her delicate,

old-fashioned ways and words, and is glad to see the kind old face which

smiled on him long ago when he was a lad lighted up with gentle pleasure

in his presence now. When he bids her good-night he knows that she will

pray before she lies down, and he feels as if his home and he were the

better for those simple prayers uttered night and morning in an unbroken

sequence of more than seventy years. There is a tranquil happiness in

that house, like the short, golden days of a St. Martin's summer or the

November blooming of a rose.

In the February after Sissy's death Godfrey went to Rookleigh for a day,

to be present at a wedding in the old church where the bridegroom had

once lingered idly in the hot summer-time and pictured his marriage to

another bride. That summer afternoon was not forgotten. Percival,

standing on the uneven pavement above the Shadwells' vault, remembered

his vision of Sissy's frightened eyes even while he uttered the words

that bound him to Judith Lisle. But those words were not the less true

because the thought of Sissy was hidden in his heart for ever.

Since that day Percival has spent almost all his time abroad, leading

such a life as he pictured long ago, only the reality is fairer than the

day-dream, because Judith shares it with him. Together they travel or

linger as the fancy of the moment dictates. Percival does not own a

square yard of the earth's surface, and therefore he is at liberty to

wander over it as he will. He is conscious of a curious loneliness about

Judith and himself. They have no child, no near relations: it seems as

if they were freed from all ordinary ties and responsibilities. His

vague aspirations are even less definite than of old; yet, though his

life follows a wandering and uncertain track, fair flowers of

kindliness, tolerance and courtesy spring up by that wayside. Judith and

he do not so much draw closer day by day as find ever new similarity of

thought and feeling already existing between them. His heart turns to

her as to a haven of peace; all his possibilities of happiness are in

her hands; he rests in the full assurance that neither deed nor word of

hers can ever jar upon him; in his darker moods he thinks of her as

clear, still sunlight, and he has no desire apart from her. Yet when he

looks back he doubts whether his life can hold another moment so supreme

in love and anguish as that moment when he looked into Sissy's eyes for

the last time and knew himself forgiven.

SOME ASPECTS OF CONTEMPORARY ART.

The art of the present day succeeds to the art of past centuries not

immediately nor by an insensible gradation. It is preceded by an

interval of absolute deadness in matters artistic. Sixty years ago art

in almost every branch was a sealed book to the majority of even

well-educated persons, and contentedly contemplated by them as such. All

love for it, with all knowledge of its history and all desire for its

development, was for a generation or two confined to a few professed

followers and a few devoted patrons, the mass of mankind thinking of it

not at all. But slowly a revival came in the main centres of

civilization--not much sooner in one than in another, though somewhat

differently in each. In Germany we see it beginning with the famous

Teutonic colony at Rome, reverent in spirit, cautious in method, severe

in theory, restrained in style--culminating, on the one hand, in the

academic pietism of Overbeck, on the other in the deliberate majesty of

Cornelius. In France the new life begins with the successors of David,

strenuous, impetuous, jealous and innovating, Ingres and outline waging

deadly battle with color and Delacroix. In England architectural

enthusiasm gave the first impulse, the "Gothic Revival" becoming the

basis of all subsequent work.

If, before noting the points of difference between one branch and

another of this modern art, we try to find the characteristics in which

these branches resemble one another, and by which they collectively are

distinguished from earlier developments, we find the most prominent one

to be self-consciousness--not necessarily self-conceit, but the inward

consciousness that they _are_, and the endeavor to realize just what

they are. With these comes, when the art is conscientious, a desire to

discover the noblest goal and to formulate the best methods of reaching

it. Some, casting the horoscope for this struggling art of ours, find

in these facts a great discouragement, believing that the vital germ of

art is spontaneity--believing that there cannot again be a genuine form

of art until there arise a fresh race of artists, unfed by the

mummy-wheat of tradition, unfettered by the cere-cloths of criticism.

Others, more sanguine, believe that spontaneity has done all it can, and

that its place is in the future to be worthily filled by a wide

eclecticism. Let us inquire what testimony as to the value of

spontaneity and the influence of self-consciousness in art may be

gathered from the methods and results of the past, and what from a

contrast between the different contemporary schools in their methods and

their results. Painting, as most prominently before our eyes and minds

just now, will principally concern us.

To the making of every work of art go three things and no more--the

material worked upon, the hand that works, and the intellect or

imagination which guides that hand. When the proportion is perfect

between the three, the work of art is perfect of its kind. But in the

different kinds of art the necessary proportion is not the same. In

music, for example, the medium is at its lowest value, the imagination

at its highest. In architecture, on the other hand, material is most

important. Musicians use the vibration of string and atmosphere,

sculptors use bronze and marble, painters use color and canvas, poets

use rhythm and rhyme, as vehicles to express their ideas. The

architect's ideas are for the sake of his material. He takes his

material as such, and embellishes it with his ideas--creates beauty

merely by disposing its masses and enriching its surface. But in all and

each of these processes, whether mind predominate or matter, there comes

in as a further necessary factor the actual technical manipulation.

Poetic visions and a noble mother-tongue do not constitute a man a poet

if he cannot treat that language nobly according to the technique of his

art. Nor, though Ariel sing in his brain and the everlasting harp of the

atmosphere wait for him, is he a musician if he have not a sensitive

ear and a knowledge of counter-point. More notably yet does the

hand--and in this as a technical term I include the other bodily powers

which go to form technical skill,--more notably yet does the hand come

in play with the painter. Here the material is little, the imagination

mighty indeed, but less overwhelming than with poet and musician; but

the technique, the God-given and labor-trained cunning of retina and

wrist, how all-important! often how all-sufficing!

In all criticism it is necessary first to reflect which of these three

factors--intellectual power, physical endowment or propitious

material--is most imperious. When we find this factor most perfectly

developed, and the others, though subordinate, neither absent nor

stunted, we shall find the art nearest to perfection. And the conditions

of race and climate and society which most helpfully develop that factor

without injuring the others are the conditions which will best further

that art. And the critic who lays most stress on that factor, and is

content to miss, if necessary, though noting the loss, a certain measure

of the other two in order more entirely to gain the one that is

vitalest, is the critic whose words are tonic. And he who, blending the

province of the arts, calling them all with vagueness "art," exalts and

demands the same factor first in all of them, must be detrimental, no

matter how great his sincerity and his knowledge.

Before weighing any contemporary thing in the balance let us mark out in

the past some standards of comparison. For it is useless to speculate

upon theoretical methods if we can discover the actual methods employed

by those whose art, if not ideally perfect, is yet so far beyond our

present power as to be quite perfectly ideal. It needs no discussion to

prove that to find the utmost that has been actually accomplished by

human endeavor we must turn in sculpture and in language to Greece, in

music to Germany, in architecture to Greece or to mediaeval Europe as our

taste may pull, and in painting to the Italians.

The primary conception of art in its productive energy is as a certain

inspiration. How did that inspiration work in those whom we acknowledge

to have received it in fullest measure? If we think a moment we shall

say, "Involuntarily"--by a sort of _possession_ rather than a voluntary

intellectual effort. The sculpture of the Greeks, their tragedies and

their temples, were all wrought simply, without effort, without

conscious travailing, by a natural evolution, not by a potent

egg-hatching process of instructive criticism and morbid self-inspection

and consulting of previous models, native and foreign. Architectural

motives were gathered from Egypt and the East, from Phoenicia and

Anatolia, but they were worked in as material, not copied as patterns;

and the architecture is as original as if no one had ever built before.

Phidias and Praxiteles and the rest shaped and chiselled, aiming at

perfection no doubt, trying to do their best, but without troubling

themselves as to what that best "ought" to be. Criticism was rife in

Athens of all places, but it was a criticism of things existing, not of

things problematically desirable. Statue and temple-front were

criticised, not sculptor and architect--surely not sculpture and

architecture in the abstract. Not sculptors and architects, that is,

when the question was of their works. The men came in for their share of

criticism, but on a different count. Theseus and Athene were judged as

works of art, not as lame though interesting revelations of Phidias's

soul. And be sure no faintest sin of the chisel was excused on the plea

that Phidias meant more than he could express, and so bungled in the

expression. Nor was the plea advanced that such bungling after the

infinite was better than simple perfection in the attainable. An artist

was called upon to be an artist, not a poet nor a philosopher nor a

moralist. When Plato confounded them all in a splendid confusion of

criticism the fruit-time had gone by. There was left but to expatiate on

the hoard which summer had bequeathed, or to speculate, if he chose, on

the possible yield of a future and most problematical year.

In the rich Italian summer one sees the same thing. Men paint because

they must--because put at anything else they come back to art as iron to

the magnet. Not because art is lovely, nor because to be an artist is a

desirable or a noble or a righteous thing, but because they are artists

born, stamped, double-dyed, and, kick as they might, they could be

nothing else--if not artists creative, yet artists critical and

appreciative. Truly, they think and strive over their art, write

treatises and dogmas and speculations, vie with and rival and outdo each

other. But it is their _art_ they discuss, not themselves, not one

another--technical methods, practical instruction, questions of pigment

and model and touch, of perspective and chiaroscuro and varnish, not

psychological aesthetics, biographical and psychical explanations as to

facts of canvas and color. What is done is what is to be criticised.

What can be done technically is what should be done theoretically, and

what cannot be done with absolute and perfect technical success is out

of the domain of art once and for ever. As the Greek did not try to

carve marble eyelashes, so no Venetian tried to put his conscience on a

panel. All Lionardo could see of Mona Lisa's soul he might paint, not

all he could feel of Lionardo's. Mr. Ruskin himself quotes Duerer's note

that Raphael sent him his drawings, not to show his soul nor his

theories, but simply _seine Hand zu weisen_--to prove his touch. In

Raphael's touch was implied Raphael's eye, and those two made the artist

Raphael.

Nothing strikes one more in these men than the oblivion of self in their

work. Only one of the first-rank men was self-conscious, and he, the

most mighty as a man, is by no means the first as an artist. And even

Michael Angelo had not the self-consciousness of to-day: it requires a

clique of commentators and a brotherhood of artists equally infected to

develop that. But just so far as he tried to put his mighty self into

his work, just so far he failed of artistic perfection; and not every

one is Michael Angelo to make even failure beautifully colossal. In

architecture, which in his day was already a dead art to be galvanized,

not alive and manly like the art of the painter, his self-consciousness

shows most strongly and his failure is most conspicuous. Here he did not

create, but avowedly composed--set himself deliberately to study the

past and to decide what was best for the future. And upon none but him

rests the blame of having driven out of the semi-unconscious,

semi-original Renaissance style what elements of power it had, and sent

it reeling down through two centuries crazed with conceit and distorted

with self-inspection.

On the unconscious development of mediaeval architecture, due to no one

man, but to a universal interest in and appreciation of the art, it is

unnecessary to dwell. Nor need we for present purposes seek further

illustration farther afield. Let us take time now to look more narrowly

at the art of to-day, and try to mark the different shapes it has taken

with different nations.

The most decided school is in France: her artists, many in number,

confine, whether involuntarily or not, their individual differences

within sharply-marked and easily-noted limits. In Germany the schools

are two--one of so-called historical painting at Munich, one of what we

may name domestic painting at Duesseldorf. This last may be put on one

side as having no specially obtrusive characteristics, and by German

pictures will be meant those of the Munich and Vienna type, whether

actually from the studios of Munich and Vienna or not. In English

contemporary art can one pretend to find a school at all in any true

sense of the word? What we do find is a very widespread art-literature

and talk of art, a large number of working artists varying in

temperament, and a vast horde of amateurs, who are not content to be

patrons, but yearn also to be practisers of art.

In England theories of art are more carefully discussed and more widely

diffused than they are in any other country. But they are theories of an

essentially untechnical, amateurish, literary kind. The English critic

calls all law and philosophy, all rules of morals and manners, of

religion and political economy and science and scientific aesthetics, to

aid his critical faculty when he needs must speak of pictures. In

Germany there is also much theorizing, but of a different kind. It is

not so much the whole physical and psychical cosmos that the German

critic studies as the past history of art in its most recondite phases

and most subtle divergences. Upon this he draws for information as to

the value of the work before him. On the other hand, we shall find

French art-criticism to be almost purely technical.

As the critics differ, so do the criticised by the natural law of

national coherence. An English painter is apt to be primarily an

embodied theory of one sort or another; which theory is more or less

directly connected with his actual work as a painter. A German painting

is apt to be scientifically composed on theory also, but a theory drawn

from the study of art _per se_, not of the whole world external to art.

The work of a Frenchman, like the criticism of his commentator, is

primarily technical.

Because both German work and English work are theoretical compared with

French, I do not wish to imply that technically they are on a par. Aside

from the difference of imaginative power in the two nations, which

renders German conceptions more valuable in every way than contemporary

English ideas, there is a great difference in the technical training of

the two groups of artists. German work often shows technical qualities

as notable as those we find in France, though of another kind. The noble

physical endowment of an artist--that by reason of which, and by reason

of which alone, he _is_ an artist--is twofold: power of eye and power of

hand. By power of the eye I mean simple vision exalted into a special

gift, a special appreciation of line, an ultra delicate and profound

perception of color, and an exact, unconscious memory. This last is not

imagination nor imaginative memory, but an automatic power, if I may so

say, of the retina--as unconscious as is the pianist's memory of his

notes, and as unerring. It is not the power to fix in the mind by

conscious effort the objects before one, and to recall them

deliberately, inch by inch, at any time, but the power, when the brush

pauses trembling for the signal, to put down unerringly facts learned

God knows where, or imagined God knows how. Automatic, I repeat, this

power must be. The tongue might not be able to tell, nor the mind

deliberately to recall in cold blood, what was the depth of blue on a

distant hill or the vagueness of its outlines, or what the anatomical

structure of a mistress's fingers. But the brush knows, as nothing but

the brush of an artist can; and when it comes to painting them, aerial

perspective and anatomical detail _must_ come right. This is the first

and the great endowment. And the second is like unto it in--Shall I use

the fashionable artistic slang and say _preciousness_? It is the gift of

a dexterous hand, winged with lightness and steady as steel, sensitive

as a blind man's finger-tips, yet unerring in its stroke as the piston

of a steamship. This is a gift as well as the other, but it can, far

more than the other, be improved and developed by practice and patience.

Both gifts in equal perfection constitute a technical master. It is

hardly necessary to say that no man--certainly no nation--can to-day

claim the highest measure of both. The French are most highly gifted

with the first, the Germans with the second. In the latter, patience and

science, working upon a natural aptitude, have developed great strength

and accuracy of wrist, and with this the power of composition and

design, purity and accuracy of outline, and good chiaroscuro. But the

whole race is deficient in a sense of color. Its work is marked by

crudeness and harshness, or at the best reticence--splendor without

softness or inoffensiveness without charm. In cases where much is

attempted in color--as in what is undoubtedly one of the best of

contemporary paintings, Knille's _Tannhaeuser and Venus_ in the Berlin

Gallery--the success is by no means on a par with the great excellence

of drawing and composition. In France the eye for color is present--I

will not say as in Venice, but to a greater degree than in the two other

nations.

If we leave now professional painters and professional critics and turn

to the untrained public, we shall find, of course, all our modern faults

more evident. The English public is pre-eminently untechnical in its

judgments, pre-eminently literary or moral. But the French and the

German public approximate more to the English--as is natural--than do

their respective artists. I use the word _literary_ as it has often been

used by others in characterizing the popular art-criticism of the

time--and in England much of the professional criticism also--to denote

a prominence given to the subject, the idea, the story--_l'anecdote_, as

a French critic calls it--over the purely painter's work of a picture.

It denotes the theory that a picture is not first to please the sense,

but to catch the fancy or the intellect or to touch the heart. This

feeling, which in France turns toward sensationalism, in England toward

sentimentality, is something other than the interest which attaches to

historical painting as the record of facts--in itself not the highest

interest one can find in a work of art. If we think back for a moment, we

shall see how different from either of these moods was the mood in which

the great Italians painted. Some "subject" of course a painting must

have that is not a portrait, but these men chose instinctively--hardly,

it is to be supposed, theoretically--such subjects as were most familiar

to their public, and therefore least likely to engage attention

primarily, and to the exclusion of the absolute pictorial value of the

painting as such. We never find Titian telling anecdotes. His portraits

are quiescence itself--portraits of men and women standing in the

fulness of beauty and strength to be painted by Titian. We do not find

likenesses snatched in some occurrence of daily life or in some dramatic

action of historical or biographical importance. Even Raphael's great

frescoes are symbolical more truly than historical, expressing the

significance of a whole series of events rather than literally rendering

one single event. The first remark of many who, accustomed to the

literary interest of modern pictures, are for the first time making

acquaintance with the old masters, is, that the galleries are so

unexcitingly monotonous: the subjects are not interesting. Portraits,

scenes from sacred history or Greek mythology,--that is all among the

Italians. Desiring nothing but beauty of line and color, and

expressiveness provided it was beautiful, they sought a subject merely

as the _raison d'etre_ of beauty. Raphael could paint the Madonna and

Child a score of times, and Veronese his _Marriages of Cana_, and all of

them Magdalenes and St. Sebastians by the dozen, without thinking of

finding fresh subjects to excite fresh interest. Nor does this

restricted range of subjects imply, under the hand of a master,

monotony. There is more unlikeness in Raphael's Madonnas than in the

figures of any modern artist, whatever their variety of name and action.

Even a century later than Raphael, among the Flemings and Hollanders,

the best pictures are the simplest, the least dependent for their

interest upon anything dramatic or anecdotal in their subject. The

triumphs of the Dutch school are the portraits of the guilds. The

masterpieces of Rubens are his children and single figures and biblical

scenes, not his _Marie de Medicis_. And what of Rembrandt is so perfect

as his _Saskia with the Pink_ at Dresden? If we have a photograph even

of such a picture as this constantly before us, with a modern picture of

anecdotal interest, no matter how vivid and pleasant that interest may

have been at first, it is not hard to predict which will please us

longest--which will grow to be an element in the happiness of every day,

while the other becomes at last _fade_ and insipid. This even if we

suppose its technical excellence to be great. How, then, shall such

interest take the place of technical excellence?

This modern love of _l'anecdote_ is not exactly the cause perhaps, nor

yet the effect, of the self-consciousness of modern art, but it goes

hand in hand with it: they are manifestations of the same spirit in the

two different spheres of worker and spectator.

But it may be said, If Michael Angelo was self-conscious, it was

because he first caught the infection of modern times. Life, the world,

the nineteenth century, are self-conscious through and through. It is

impossible to be otherwise. It is impossible for a world which has lived

through what ours has, which has recorded its doings and sufferings and

speculations for our benefit, ever to be naive or spontaneous in

anything. Inspiration unsought and unquestioned is a thing of the past.

Study, reflection, absorption, eclecticism,--these are the watchwords of

the future. If this were granted, many would still think it an open

question whether art of the highest kind would in the future be possible

or not. But is by no means necessary to grant it, for we have had in the

most learned and speculative of nations an art in our century--still

surviving, indeed, in our very midst--the growth of which has been as

rapid and the flowering as superb as the growth and bloom of sculpture

in Greece or of painting in Italy. I mean, of course, music in Germany.

And if we think a moment we shall see that its growth was as

unpremeditated, its direction and development as unbiassed by theories,

its votaries as untroubled with self-consciousness, as if they had been

archaic sculptors or builders of the thirteenth century. Bach, Haydn,

Mozart, Beethoven, Mendelssohn, what sublime unconsciousness of their

own personality as the personality of artists and as influencing art!

Does Richard Wagner seem at first sight to be a glaring exception to

such a rule--seem to strive more than any other artist in any branch of

art to be critic as well--seem, perhaps, to be most notably

self-conscious even in an age of self-consciousness? The most highly

gifted of the generation as an artist, his musical talent developed

spontaneously, irresistibly. It had thus developed before he began to

reason about it, to justify in theory that which had approved itself in

fact. His power lies in the union we find in him of musician and

dramatist. His dogmatizing and theorizing expatiate not on the way he

works in either art, but on the propriety of combining the two. Not his

theories, but his artist's instinct, taught him how to do it as it is

done in the _Meistersinger_. His theories try to explain his work, but

by just so much as his work is consciously founded on his theories, by

just so much is it less perfect than it would have been had he preserved

his unconsciousness. The fact of his self-consciousness tends in many

eyes to mark him as the rearguard of a line of artists, the pioneer of a

generation of critical musicians. May Liszt perhaps serve as a sample of

such--learned, critical, self-conscious, productive, but unoriginal? And

the worst sign in Germany is less that the young musicians copy Wagner

than that they copy him not instinctively and by nature, but

theoretically and of deliberate intent, exalting his theories to rank

beside his work.

It seems at first strange that, music being at once the glory and the

recreation of the whole German nation, and a knowledge of it being

native to the vast majority of individual Germans, there is little

existing musical criticism--none as compared with the abounding German

criticism on every other branch of art and every other subject under the

sun. The field offered here to the cobweb-spinning German brain is wide

and attractive. It seems strange that it should be as yet uncultivated,

unless we fall back on the theory that art at its vitalest is of

necessity uncritical, and that where an inborn love of, and aptitude

for, an art exists with a daily enjoyment of its technical perfection,

we shall be least likely to find it elaborately criticised

theoretically. Where practice is abundantly satisfactory theories are

superfluous.

Below, though still in the same category with, the musical gift of the

Germans we may cite the literary gift of the English. For though this

may not be the greatest literary epoch of England, yet it will not be

denied that the greatest of English aptitudes is for literature. The

wide appreciation of it in England is unmatched by a like appreciation

of any other form of art. The growth of English novel-writing and its

healthy development, accompanied, it may be, by many fungus-growths due

to over-fertility, afford us the spectacle of a contemporary yet

spontaneous English art, unforced by hothouse cultivation, uninfluenced

by theories. A century or so hence the hearty, unconscious bloom of

narrative literature in our day and language may seem as strange as

seems to us the spontaneous blossoming of Venetian painting, of Greek

sculpture, or of architecture in the Ile de France. An Englishman of

to-day who thinks painters can be spun out of theories would surely

laugh with instinctive knowledge of the veritable requirements of their

art if one were to propose supplying novelists or poets in a similar

way.

If we thus acknowledge that two kinds of art--and those two requiring

the greatest amount of imaginative power--can flourish with spontaneity

even in so self-conscious a civilization as ours, we shall fail to see

in that civilization a sufficient _a priori_ reason why the same might

not have been the case with painting. If, however, still keeping to our

own day, we look for the reverse of this picture, we shall find some

approach to it in the condition of the painter's art in England. Here

theory runs wild, practice falls far behind, and a great part of the

practice that exists is inspired and regulated by theory. Artists are

especially self-conscious, and the public, while much concerned with

things artistic and fed on daily food of art-theory and speculation, is

specially devoid of an innate artistic sense and an educated faculty for

appreciating technical perfection.

In England, more even than on the Continent or with ourselves, is there

a passion for story-telling with the brush, a desire to give ideas

instead of pictures, a denial of the fact that the main object of a

picture is to please the eye just as truly and as surely as the main

object of a symphony is to please the ear. If we look through the

catalogue of a Royal Academy exhibition, we notice the preponderance of

scenes illustrative of English or other literature--of canvases that

tell a story or point a moral or bear a punning or a sentimental title.

And we notice the great number of quotations introduced into the

catalogue without any actual explanatory necessity. Even landscapes are

dragged into the domain of sentiment, and Mr. Millais, who copies Nature

with the exactest reverence, cannot call his brook a brook, but "The

sound of many waters;" and a graveyard is not named a graveyard, but

"Where heaves the turf in many a mouldering heap;" and instead of

_Winding the Clock_ we are told "The clock beats out the life of little

men." A canvas representing "untrodden snow" must be ticketed, for

increase of interest, "Within three miles of Charing Cross." Another is

marked, "Christmas Eve: a welcome to old friends. (See _Silas Marner_.)"

And so on, _ad infinitum_. May one not say _ad nauseam_ before a piece

of marble labelled "Baby doesn't like the water," or a canvas by Faed,

R. A., called "Little cold tooties," or the portrait by the president of

the Academy of a child on her pony denoted not only by the child's name

in full, but her pony's also?

Prominent also at a first visit to a London exhibition stands out the

hesitancy; of English artists to deal with large canvases and life-size

figures--their strict confinement to _genre_ of a domestic or bookishly

archaeological type. This is not the place to discuss the causes of such

a fact, nor to insist on the lack of certain technical qualities in even

the best English work. Such discussions can only be profitable when the

originals are at hand to recriticise the criticism.

More striking than anything to be seen in 1877 at the Royal Academy was

the small collection of pictures at the Grosvenor Gallery, organized and

controlled by a noble amateur--himself a painter also--with the avowed

intention of exhibiting the latest and most eccentric phases of English

art. To a Londoner the opening day was interesting, as revealing the

newest works of the most conspicuous London artists. To a stranger fresh

from continental pictures, old and new, eager to see the touch of hands

so often described in print, it was a revelation not only of a few men's

work, but of the tendency of a national art and the artistic

temperament of a whole people. Superficially, these pictures seemed the

exact opposite of those at the conservative Academy--as aberrant as the

latter were commonplace. But to one who knew them as the work of a

fashionable, highly-educated clique they seemed merely a reaction of the

same spirit that produced the elder style. In striving to get out of the

rut of commonplace which had so long held in its grip the wheels of

English art, not originality, so much as deliberate, sought-out

eccentricity, was the result. The scale of work, starting from the

original bathos of domestic sentimentality, runs up to the veriest

contortions of affected mediaevalism, rarely striking out a note of

common sense. Simple English art is the apotheosis of the British

middle-class spirit, of Mr. Arnold's "Philistinism." English art

departing from this spirit shows, not Mr. Arnold's "sweetness and

light," not calmness, repose, sureness of self, unconsciousness of its

own springs of life, but theories running into vague contradictions, a

far-fetched abnormalness, a morbid conception of beauty, a defiant

disregard of the fact that a public exists which judges by common sense

and the eye, not by a fine-spun confusion of theories and an undefined

but omnipotent and deified "aesthetic sense" non-resident in the optic

nerve. Mr. Whistler's pictures to-day, cleverly as he can paint if he

will, are not pictures--I do not mean in fact, which is certainly

true--but in title. They are "Natures in Black and Gold," or "In Blue

and Silver," or "In Blue and Gold," or "Arrangements in Black," or

"Harmonies in Amber and Brown." Here we have the desperate reaction from

the idea that _l'anecdote_ is everything to the idea that it is

sufficient to represent nothing (poetically conceived!) with little

color and less form, with the vaguest and slightest and most untechnical

technique. It is hard to say which would most puzzle Titian

redivivus--"Little cold tooties," or a blue-gray wash with a point or

two of yellow, bearing some imaginary resemblance to the Thames with its

gaslights, and called a "Nocturne in Blue and Gold."

The French "impressionalist" clique, similar in spirit to these

Englishmen, though less outre in practice, is not by any means of so

great importance in France as they are in England. It has more than once

been remarked in England that the old-fashioned amateur--patron and

critic, _kenner_--is dying out, and that his modern substitute must not

only choose, but experiment--not only admire, but be admired. This

spirit, spreading through a nation, will not make it a nation of

artists, but will make the nation's artists amateurs. No critic, no

amateur, is more loath to try his own hand than the one who most deeply

and rightly appreciates the skill of others, and the rare and God-given

and difficult nature of that skill. The confusion of amateur with

professional work lowers the standard, so there will be every year fewer

to tell the mass of the nation that most useful of truths--how earnest a

thing is true art, and how rare a native appreciation of its truest

worth.

There is no place where the interest excited by national art is so

widespread, where the exhibitions are so crowded, where they so regulate

times and seasons, annual excursions to and departures from town, as in

England. Yet there is no place where the interest in art seems to a

stranger so factitious, so much a matter of fashion and custom, of

instinctive following of chance-appointed bell-wethers. It would

scarcely be a matter of surprise if the whole thing should collapse

through some pin-thrust of rival interest or excitement, and next year's

exhibition be a desert, next year's artists paint their theories and

their souls for unregarding eyes, or rather for unheeding brains. Have

we not an apology for such a suggestion in the history of the rage for

Gothic architecture, so thoroughly demonstrated in every possible

theoretical and philosophical way to be the only proper style for

Englishmen present or future, so devotedly and exclusively followed for

a while by the profession, only to be suddenly abandoned for its fresher

rivals, the so-called styles of Queen Elizabeth and Queen Anne?

In the throngs that flocked to the opening of the Royal Academy, waiting

hours before the doors were opened, fighting and struggling for a

foothold on the stairs, eager to be the first to see, though there were

weeks of opportunities ahead--in the rare recurrence through the hum of

the vast criticising crowd of a word of technical judgment or sober

artistic criticism--it was easy to recognize the same spirit that

confuses morality with chair-legs, that finds a knocker more "sincere"

and "right" than a door-bell, that insists as upon a vital necessity

that the heads of all nails should be visible and that all lines should

be straight, and would as soon have a shadow on its conscience as in the

pattern of wall-paper. Nowhere was decorative art so non-existent a few

years ago as in England--nowhere is it so universally dwelt upon to-day.

Yet it is easy to see how entirely the revival is a child of theory and

books and teachers and rules--how little owing to a spontaneous

development of art-instinct in the people, a spontaneous desire for more

beauty in their surroundings, a spontaneous knowledge of how it is best

to be obtained.

The literary and un-painterlike--if I may use such an awkward

term--nature of English art is shown perhaps more forcibly in its

critics than in artists or public. One is especially struck in reading

criticisms of whatever grade with the excessive prominence given to the

artist's personality. The work of this year is judged not so much by its

excellence as by comparison with the work of last year. A----'s

pictures, and B----'s and C----'s and D----'s, are interesting and

valuable mainly as showing A----'s improvement, or B----'s falling off,

or C----'s unexpected change of theme, or D----'s fine mind and delicate

sensibilities.

Mr. Ruskin is without doubt the most remarkable of English critics, and

summarizes so many opposite theories and tendencies that his pages may

in some sort be taken as an epitome of the whole matter. It would be

impossible to abstract from their great bulk any consecutive or

consistent system of thought or precept. His influence has been mainly

by isolated ideas of more or less truth and value. It is impossible here

to analyze his work. Such is the mixed tissue of his woof that the

captive princess who was set to sort a roomful of birds' feathers had

scarcely a harder task than one who should try to separate and classify

his threads, some priceless and steady, some rotten, false, misleading.

Morals, manners, religion, political economy, are mixed with art in

every shape--art considered theoretically and technically, historically,

philosophically and prophetically. Various as are his views on these

varying subjects, on no one subject even do they remain invariable. Yet

such is the charm of his style, delightfully sarcastic, and eloquent as

a master's brush, so vividly is each idea presented in itself, that,

each idea being enjoyed as it comes, all seem at first of equal value.

We realize neither the fallacy of many taken singly nor the conflict of

all taken together. His points are often cleverly and faithfully put,

and our attention is so riveted on this cleverness and faithfulness that

we take for granted the rightness of his deductions, slovenly, illogical

or false though they may be. What we most remark in his books is how the

purely artistic element in his nature--of a very high grade and very

true instincts--is dwarfed of full development and stunted of full

results by the theorizing literary bent which he has in common with his

time and people. In theorizing even on truly-felt and clearly-stated

facts, in explaining their origin and unfolding their effects, his

guidance is least valuable. We may more safely ask him _what_ than

_why_. His influence on English art has been great at the instant:

whether it will be permanent is doubtful. At one time it was said that

without having read his books one could tell by an inspection of the

Royal Academy walls what Mr. Ruskin had written in the past year. Now,

the most notable exponents of his teaching, whether consciously so or

not, are on the one hand the shining lights of the Grosvenor

Gallery--hierophants of mysticism and allegory and symbolism and

painted souls and moral beauty expressed in the flesh, copying Ruskin's

_Botticelli_ line for line, forgetting that what was naivete in him, and

in him admirable, because all before him had done so much less well,

becomes to-day in them the direst affectation, is reprehensible in them

because many before them have done so much better. On the other hand, we

have a naturalistic throng which follows Mr. Ruskin's precepts when he

overweights the other side of the scale and says that art should "never

exist alone, never for itself," never except as "representing a

true"--defined as actually-existing--"thing or decorating a useful

thing;" when he declares that every attempt by the imagination to "exalt

or refine healthy humanity has weakened or caricatured it." Mr. Ruskin

bade men "go to Nature in all singleness of heart, and walk with her

laboriously and trustingly, having no other thought but how best to

penetrate her meaning, _rejecting nothing, selecting nothing and

scorning nothing_;" and Mr. Hamerton was literally obeying him when he

exiled himself for five years in a hut on an island in a bleak Scotch

lake to learn faithfully to portray the shores of that single lake. Was

it thus that Titian studied in his youth, and learned how, years after

in Venice, to paint the chestnuts and the hills of Cadore a

thousand-fold more artistically and more truly, because more abstractly

and more ideally, than could all the "pre-Raphaelite" copyists of

to-day? Thus we see the two extremes of Mr. Ruskin's teaching--see him

at one time exalting imagination and feeling over the pictorial part of

art, at another degrading art into the servilest copying.

Observers may disagree as to whether these cognate

things--self-consciousness in the artist, aesthetic philosophizing in the

critic, and the taste for a literary rather than a pictorial value in

the public--are on the increase or on the decrease in the various

centres of art. Annual exhibitions--a significant illustration of our

high-pressure life in art as in other things--would seem to tend toward

deepening these faults. Attention must be attracted at all hazards, and

the greater the number of exhibitors and the average attractiveness of

their canvases the greater becomes the temptation to shine, not by

excellence, but by eccentricities of treatment, or, still more, by the

factitious interest of a "telling" subject. Is it due, perhaps, to this

constant desire for notoriety on the part of the artist, and for more

and more excitement on the part of the public, that in all modern

schools, landscape art, as less possibly influenced by such a state of

things, stands ahead of the art which has humanity for its subject? It

is scarcely possible to find in France to-day a figure-painter who is a

Daubigny, still less a Jules Dupre. Next to these unquestionably stand

such animal-painters as Bonheur and Troyon; and it would be hard among

the youngest file of artists to find a figure-painter who in his line

should rival Van Marcke in his. In England also landscape ranks ahead,

and it is perhaps in comparing it with French landscape that the

difference between the schools is most truly though not most glaringly

displayed. Even here, and in the allied fields of animal-painting, the

desire for _l'anecdote_ creeps in, and Landseer with all his talent

often prostitutes his brush in the attempt to make his brutes the centre

of dramatic action, and forces into them semi-human characteristics in

order to extract from them tales or ideas of human interest. It was not

thus that Veronese painted dogs or Franz Snyders his lions and

boars--not thus that the Greeks have put the horse into art. Nor, to

take the best contemporary comparison, is it thus that Barye's bronzes

are designed.

Landscape brings us inevitably to Turner. The most highly gifted of all

English artists, past or present, his genius was hardly a logical

outcome of the contemporary spirit of his nation. We have no right to

say this of an artist, no right to call him anomalous, while we are

still in doubt as to whether he may be only the advance-guard of a new

national art, the herald of a new avatar. But when he with his

generation dies, when another generation develops and bears fruit, and

a third is beginning to blossom, and he still seems anomalous, it is

fair to hold him exceptional in his country's art, rather than

characteristic thereof. Together with wonderful endowments of eye and

hand, and a prodigious power of work, Turner's earlier works show us an

unconscious development and a healthy oblivion of his own personality.

But later the fatal modern fever entered his blood, ending in something

very like delirium. From a painter he became a theorist, contaminated by

a rush of criticism alike indiscriminate in praise and injudicious in

blame. We shall see the baleful effects of modern methods if we look, in

the wonderful series at the National Gallery, first at the pictures

painted when Turner was an artist thinking of painting, then to those

done when he was a self-conscious experimentalist thinking of

Turner--Turner worshipped by Ruskin, Turner sick with envy of the

Dutchmen and defiance of Claude.

I have but a line to give to the one or two other men of abnormally

splendid gifts whom this century has seen. Henri Regnault's

extraordinary talent was extinguished almost at the first spark, and it

is beyond prophecy to tell what it might have produced. His

eccentricities seem to have been quite genuine, due to an overflow of

power rather than to posing or grimace. His love of his art, his passion

for color, were almost frantic in their intensity, but sincere. A

certain exaggerated phrase of his is but the protest of reaction against

the literary painting, the erudite and philosophical art, of his time.

"La vie," he cries, "etant courte, il faut peindre tant qu'on a des

yeux. Donc on ne doit pas les fatiguer a lire des stupides journaux." A

crude way of putting the idea that to be an artist one needs but art.

Another wonderful talent is Hans Makart. Such an eye for color, it is

quite safe to say, has not been born since Veronese. Had he been born at

Venice among his peers, forced to work instead of experiment, outvied

instead of foolishly extolled, surrounded by artists to surpass him if

he tripped for a single instant, instead of critics to laud his most

glaring faults and amateurs to pay thousands for his spoiled paper, we

should have had another name to use as explanatory of genius. As it is,

he is, according to present indications, utterly spoiled. Only those who

know how he can draw if he will, how he has painted--portraits best,

perhaps--when he would, are vexed beyond endurance by the folly and the

carelessness and the sins he chooses to give us. It has been said that

Raphael Mengs was a born genius spoiled by the coldness, the

pseudo-classicism, the artificiality and eclecticism of the eighteenth

century. A companion portrait is Hans Makart, ruined by the

amateurishness, the rhapsodizing, the theorizing, the morbid

self-consciousness of the nineteenth.

The so-called Spanish school of to-day is as yet too new for us to see

exactly whither it tends. Its passion for glaring, metallic, aniline

compound tints--tints that "scream," to use a French phrase--its horror

of all shade and depth and of pure and simple colors, are, however, most

certainly unhealthy. It is a diseased eye that in the desire for violent

color loses all memory of chiaroscuro.

I have left till now unnoticed the contemporary Netherland artists,

though their works are perhaps more entirely satisfactory than those of

either of the three schools we have discussed. But their characteristics

are less markedly distinct, less available for comparison, and can be

best noted and appraised by a previously-gained knowledge of the

peculiarities of English, French and German painting. The Belgian school

is most closely allied to the French, and in technique is often its

equal. In landscape and cattle-painting the types are similar, while

Belgian figure-painting gains by the lack of the element which a French

critic notes when he says modern art has become _mondain--surtout

demi-mondain_. Nowhere does contemporary art seem so healthy and sane,

so sure of itself, so consonant with the best nature and gifts of the

people, as in the Netherlands: nowhere are its ideals so free from

morbidness, affectation or sentimentality. Is it perhaps that in the

studios of Amsterdam, in the great school of Antwerp, even in the

galleries of Brussels, one is somewhat out of the wildest stream of

modern life--less driven to analysis and theorizing and

self-consciousness than in London, Paris or Munich? Whatever is cause,

whatever effect, the Netherland school shows two things side by

side--the least measure of self-consciousness, and the soundest

contemporary painting: if not the most effective, it is, I think, the

most full of promise. There seems to be forming the most healthy

national soil for the development of future genius.

In conclusion, it may be noted that we in America, whose art is just

beginning even to strive, are subjected to a somewhat strange cross-fire

of influences. Lineally the children of England, we are spiritually and

by temperament in many things her opposites. Our taste in art seems to

turn resolutely away from her. For each hundred of French and score of

German pictures that comes to us, how many come from England? What can

one who has not crossed the sea learn of English pictures from our

private collections and picture-dealers' shops? Was not all we knew

prior to the Exhibition of 1876 gleaned from _Vernon Gallery_ plates and

Turner's _Rogers_ or _Rivers of France_? But while our dealers and

students and millionaires throng the studios of Paris and Munich, and

our eyes are being daily educated to demand above all things

_technique_, our brains are constantly being worked upon by a stream of

art-literature from England. Taste pulls us one way--identity of English

speech, with consequent openness to English ideas, pulls us the other.

Pictures preach one thing, books another. Our boy who has worked in

Paris comes home to try to realize Ruskin. Both influences are too new,

and our art is as yet too unsteady, for any one to guess as to the

ultimate result. One thing only can be unreservedly inculcated: Let us

shun self-analyzation, self-consciousness, morbidness, affectation,

attitudinizing. Let us look ahead as little as possible, keeping our

eyes on our brushes and on the world of beauty around us. One thing

only can with safety be predicted: If we are, or are to be, a people of

artists, creative or appreciative as the case may be, we shall learn

whatever of technique the world has to teach us, and shall improve upon

it, and we shall perhaps digest the small measure of theory for which we

have appetites left. But if we are _not_ artists, actual or future,

technique will be impossible, and will seem undesirable. We shall

greedily fill our stomachs with the wind of art-philosophy, shall work

with the reason instead of with the eye and the fingers, shall symbolize

our aspirations, our theorizings, our souls and our consciences, and

fondly dream we are painting pictures. Or we shall copy with a hopeless

effort after literalness the first face or weed we meet, and call the

imperfect, mechanical result a work of art.

M. G. VAN RENSSELAER.

THREE WATCHES

I sat in the silence, in moonlight that gathered and glowed

Far over the field and the forest with tender increase:

The low, rushing winds in the trees were like waters that flowed

From sources of passionate joy to an ocean of peace.

And I watched, and was glad in my heart, though the shadows were deep,

Till one came and asked me: "Say, why dost thou watch through the

night?"

And I said, "I am watching my joy. They who sorrow may sleep,

But the soul that is glad cannot part with one hour of delight."

Again in the silence I watched, and the moon had gone down;

The shadows were hidden in darkness; the winds had passed by;

The midnight sat throned, and the jewels were bright in her crown,

For stars glimmered softly--oh softly!--from depths of the sky.

And I sighed as I watched all alone, till again came a voice:

"Ah! why dost thou watch? Joy is over, and sorrow is vain."

And I said, "I am watching my grief. Let them sleep who rejoice,

But the spirit that loves cannot part with one hour of its pain."

Once more I sat watching, in darkness that fell like a death--

The deep solemn darkness that comes to make way for the dawn:

I looked on the earth, and it slept without motion or breath,

And blindly I looked on the sky, but the stars were withdrawn.

And the voice spoke once more: "Cease thy watching, for what dost

thou gain?"

But I said, "I am watching my soul, to this darkness laid bare.

Let them sleep to whom love giveth joy, to whom love giveth pain,

But the soul left alone cannot part with one moment of prayer."

MARION COUTHOUY.

SISTER SILVIA.

Monte Compatri is one of the eastern outlying peaks of the Alban

Mountains, and, like so many Italian mountains, has its road climbing to

and fro in long loops to a gray little city at the top. This city of

Monte Compatri is a full and busy hive, with solid blocks of houses, and

the narrowest of streets that break now and then into stairs. For those

old builders respected the features of a landscape as though they had

been the features of a face, and no more thought of levelling

inequalities of land than of shaving down or raising up noses. When a

man had a house-lot in a hollow, he built his house there, and made

Steps to go down to it: his neighbor, who owned a rocky knoll, built his

house at the top, and made stairs to go up to it. Moreover, if the land

was a bit in the city, the house was made in the shape of it, and was as

likely to have corners in obtuse or acute as in right angles.

The inhabitants of Monte Compatri have two streets of which they are

immensely proud--the Lungara, which wriggles through the middle of the

town, and the Giro, which makes the entire circuit of the town, leaving

outside only the rim of houses that rise from the edge of the mountain,

some of them founded on the natural rock, others stretching roots of

masonry far down into the earth.

One of these houses on the Giro had for generations been in the

possession of the Guai family. One after another had held it at an easy

rent from Prince Borghese, the owner of the town. The vineyard and

orchard below in the Campagna they owned, and from those their wealth

was derived. For it was wealth for such people to have a house full of

furniture, linen and porcelain--where, perhaps, a connoisseur might have

found some rare bits of old china--besides having a thousand scudi in

bank.

In this position was the head of the family when he died, leaving a

grown-up son and daughter, and his wife about to become a mother for the

third time.

"Pepina shall have her portion in money, since she is to marry soon,"

the father said. "Give her three hundred scudi in gold and a hundred in

pearls. The rest of the money shall be for my wife to do as she likes

with. For the little one; when it shall come, Matteo shall put in the

bank every year thirty scudi, and when it shall be of age, be it girl or

boy, he shall divide the land equally with it."

So said Giovanni Guai, and died, and his wife let him talk

uncontradicted, since it was for the last time. They had lived a stormy

life, his heavy fist opposed to her indefatigable tongue, and she

contemplated with silent triumph the prospect of being left in

possession of the field. Besides, would he not see afterward what she

did--see and be helpless to oppose? So she let him die fancying that he

had disposed of his property.

"The child is sure to be a girl," she said afterward, "and I mean her to

be a nun. The land shall not be cut up. Matteo shall be a rich man and

pile up a fortune. He shall be the richest man in Monte Compatri, and a

girl shall not stand in his way."

Nature verified the mother's prophecy and sent a little girl. Silvia

they called her, and, since she was surely to be a nun, she grew to be

called Sister Silvia by everybody, even before she was old enough to

recognize her own name.

The house of the Guai, on its inner wall, opened on the comparatively

quiet Giro. From the windows and door could be heard the buzz and hum of

the Lungara, where everybody--men, women, children, cats and dogs--were

out with every species of work and play when the sun began to decline.

This was the part of the house most frequented and liked by the family.

They could see their neighbors even when they were at work in their

houses, and could exchange gossip and stir the polenta at the same

time. The other side of the house they avoided. It was lonely and it was

sunny. For Italians would have the sun, like the Lord, to be for ever

knocking at the door and for ever shut out. It must shine upon their

outer walls, but not by any means enter their windows.

As years passed, however, there grew to be one exception in this regard.

Sister Silvia loved not the town with its busy streets, nor the front

windows with their gossiping heads thrust out or in. She had her own

chamber on the Campagna side, and there she sat the livelong day with

knitting or sewing, never going out, except at early morning to hear

mass. There her mother accompanied her--a large, self-satisfied woman

beside a pallid little maiden who never raised her eyes. Or, if her

mother could not go, Matteo stalked along by her side, and with his

black looks made everybody afraid to glance her way. Nobody liked to

encounter the two black eyes of Matteo Guai. It was understood that the

knife in his belt was sharp, and that no scruple of conscience would

stand between him and any vengeance he might choose to take for any

affront he might choose to imagine.

After mass, then, and the little work her mother permitted the girl to

do for health's sake, Silvia sat alone by her window and looked out on

the splendor which her eyes alone could appreciate. There lay the

Campagna rolling and waving for miles and miles around, till the

Sabines, all rose and amethyst, hemmed it in with their exquisite wall,

and the sea curved a gleaming sickle to cut off its flowery passage, or

the nearer mountains stood guard, almost covered by the green spray it

threw up their rocky sides. She sat and stared at Rome while her busy

fingers knit--at the wonderful city where she was one day to go and be a

nun, where the pope lived and kings came to worship him. In the morning

light the Holy City lay in the midst of the Campagna like her mother's

wedding-pearls when dropped in a heap on their green cushion; and Silvia

knelt with her face that way and prayed for a soul as white, for she

was to be the spouse of Christ, and her purity was all that she could

bring Him as a dowry. But when evening came, and that other airy sea of

fine golden mist flowed in from the west, and made a gorgeous blur of

all things, then the city seemed to float upward from the earth and rise

toward heaven all stirring with the wings of its guardian angels, and

Silvia would beg that the New Jerusalem might not be assumed till she

should have the happiness of being in it.

But there was a lovely view nearer than this visionary one, though the

little nun seldom looked at it. If she should lean from her window she

would see the mountain-side dropping from the gray walls of her home,

with clinging flowery vines and trees growing downward, while the olives

and grapevines of the Campagna came to meet them, setting here and there

a precarious little garden halfway up the steep. Just under her window

an almost perpendicular path came up, crept round the walls and entered

the town. But no one ever used this road now, for a far wider and better

one had been constructed at the other side of the mountain, and all the

people came up that way when the day's work was over in the Campagna.

One summer afternoon Silvia's reveries were broken by her mother's voice

calling her: "Silvia, come and prepare the salad for Matteo."

It was an extraordinary request, but the girl went at once without

question. She seized upon every opportunity to practise obedience in

preparation for that time when her life would be made up of obedience

and prayer.

Her mother was sitting by one of the windows talking with Matteo, who

had just came up from the Campagna. He had an unsocial habit of eating

alone, and, as he ate nothing when down in the vineyard, always wanted

his supper as soon as he came up. The table was set for him with

snow-white cloth and napkin, silver knife, fork and spoon, a loaf of

bread and a decanter of golden-sparkling wine icy cold from the grotto

hewn in the rock beneath the house; and he was just eating his

_minestra_ of vegetables when his sister came in. At the other end of

the long table was a head of crisp white lettuce lying on a clean linen

towel, and two bottles--one of white vinegar, the other of oil as sweet

as cream and as bright as sunshine. Monte Compatri had no need to send

to Lucca for oil of olives while its own orchards dropped such streams

of pure richness.

The room was large and dingy. The brick floor had never known other

cleansing than sprinkling and sweeping, the yellow-washed walls had

become with time a pale, mottled brown, the paint had disappeared under

a fixed dinginess which the dusting-brush alone could not remove, and

the glass of the windows had never been washed except by the rain. Yet,

for all that, the place had an air of cleanliness. For though these

people do not clean their houses more than they clean their yards, yet

their clothing and tables and beds are clean. Plentiful white linen,

stockings like snow, and bright dishes and metals give a look of

freshness and show well on the dim background. Heavy walnut presses,

carved and black with age, stood against the walls, drinking-glasses and

candlesticks sparkled on a dark bureau-top, there was a bright picture

or two, and the sunlighted tinware of a house at the other side of the

street threw a cluster of tiny rays like a bouquet of light in at the

window. Silvia received these sun-blossoms on her head when she placed

herself at the lower end of the table. She pushed the sleeves of her

white sack back from her slim white arms, and began washing the

lettuce-leaves in a bowl of fresh water and breaking them in the towel.

The leaves broke with a fine snap and dropped in pieces as stiff as

paper into a large dark-blue plate of old Japanese ware. A connoisseur

in porcelain would have set such a plate on his drawing-room wall as a

picture.

"How does Claudio work?" the mother asked of her son.

"He works well," Matteo replied. "He is worth two of our common fellows,

if he _is_ educated."

"Nevertheless, I should not have employed him," the mother said. "He

has disobeyed and disappointed his parents, and he should be punished.

They meant him to be a priest, and raked and scraped every soldo to

educate him. Now, just when he is at the point of being able to repay

them, he makes up his mind that he has no vocation for the priesthood,

and breaks their hearts by his ingratitude. It is nonsense to set one's

will up so and have such scruples. Obedience is vocation enough for

anything. There should be a prison where parents could put the children

who disobey them."

The Sora Guai spoke sternly, and looked as if she would not have

hesitated to put a refractory child in the deepest of dungeons.

"He was a fool, but he earns his money," Matteo responded, and, drawing

a plate of deliciously fried frogs toward him, began to gnaw them and

throw the bones on the floor.

Silvia gave him the salad, and poured wine and water into the tumbler

for him, while his mother went to the kitchen for a dish of fricasseed

pigeons.

"There's no onion in the salad," Matteo grumbled when she came back.

Silvia uttered an exclamation of dismay, ran for a silvery-white little

onion and sliced it thinly into the salad.

"Forgive me, Matteo," she said. "I was distracted by the thought of

Claudio. It seems such a terrible thing."

"It would be a much more terrible thing if it were a girl who

disobeyed," Matteo growled. He did not like that girls should criticise

men.

"So it would," the girl responded with meek readiness.

"I don't know why I feel so tired to-day," the mother said, sinking into

a chair again. "My bones ache as if I had been working in the vineyard

all day."

"You are not ill, mamma?" exclaimed Silvia, blushing with alarm.

The answer was a hesitating one: "I don't see what can ail me. It

wouldn't be anything, only that I am so tired without having done much."

"Perhaps it's the weather, mamma," Silvia suggested.

Gentle as she was, she had adopted the ruthless and ungrateful Italian

custom of ascribing every ache and pain of the body to some almost

imperceptible change in their too beautiful weather. The smallest cloud

goes laden with more accusations than it holds drops of rain, and the

ill winds that blow nobody any good blow through those shining skies

from morning till night and from night till morning again.

The Sora Guai was sicker than she dreamed. It was not the summer sun

that scorched her so, nor the _scirocco_ that made her head so heavy.

What malaria she had found to breathe on the mountain-top it would be

hard to say; but the dreaded _perniciosa_ had caught her in its grasp,

and she was doomed. The fever burned fiercely for a few days, and when

it was quenched there was nothing left but ashes.

And thus died the only earthly thing to which Sister Silvia's heart

clung. The mother had been stern, but the daughter was too submissive to

need correction. She had never had any will of her own, except to love

and obey. Collision between them was therefore impossible, and the

daughter felt as a frail plant growing under a shadowing tree might feel

if the tree were cut down. She was bare to every wind that blew. She had

no companions of her own age--she had no companion of any age, in

fact--and she had not been accustomed to think for herself in the

smallest thing.

She had got bent into a certain shape, however, and her brother and

sister felt quite safe on her account. Everybody knew that she was to be

a nun of the Perpetual Adoration; that she was soon to go to the convent

of Santa Maria Maddalena on the Quirinal in Rome; and that, once entered

there, she would never again see a person from outside. The

town's-people were accustomed to the wall of silence and seclusion which

had already grown up about her, and they did not even seek to salute her

when they met her going to and from church in the morning. To these

simple citizens, ignorant but reverential, Sister Silvia's lowered

eyelids were as inviolate as the pearl gates of the New Jerusalem.

Besides, to help their reverence, there were the fierce black eyes and

strange reputation of Matteo. So when, a day or two after her mother's

death, his sister begged him to accompany her to church in the early

morning, and leave her in the care of some decent woman there, Matteo

replied that she might go by herself.

She set out for the first time alone on what had ever been to her a _via

sacra_, and was now become a _via dolorosa_, where her tears dropped as

she walked. And going so once, she went again. Pepina, the elder sister,

a widow now, had come home to keep house for Matteo, but she was too

much taken up with work, the care of her two children and looking out

for a second husband to have time to watch Silvia, and after a few weeks

the young girl went as unheeded as a matron in her daily walk.

At home her life was nearly the same. She mended the clothes from the

washing and knit stockings, and sat at her window and looked off over

the Campagna toward Rome.

One evening she sat there before going to bed and watched the moonlight

turn all the earth to black and silver under the purple sky--a black

like velvet, so deep and soft was it, and a silver like white fire,

clear and splendid, yet beautifully soft. She was feeling desolate, and

her tears dropped down, now and then breaking into sobs. It had been

pleasant to sit there alone when she knew that her mother was below

stairs, strong, healthy and gay. All that life had been as the oil over

which her little flame burned. Lacking it, she grew dim, just as the

floating wick in her little blue vase before the Madonna grew dim when

the oil was gone.

As she wept and heard unconsciously the nightingales, she grew conscious

of another song that mingled with theirs. It was a human voice, clear

and sweet as an angel's, and it sang a melody she knew in little

snatches that seemed to begin and end in a sigh. The voice came nearer

and paused beneath a fig tree, and the words grew distinct.

"Pieta, signore, di me dolente," it sang.

Silvia leaned out of the window and looked down at the singer. His face

was lifted to the white moonlight, and seemed in its pallid beauty a

concentration of the moonlight. Only his face was visible, for the

shadow of the tree hid all his figure. One might almost have expected to

catch a glimmer of two motionless wings bearing up that face, so fair it

was.

To Silvia it was as if another self, who grieved also, but who could

speak, were uttering all her pain, and lightening it so. She recognized

Claudio's voice. He was the chief singer in the cathedral, and sang like

an angel. She was afraid that Claudio had done very wrong in not being a

priest, but, for all that, she had often found her devotion increased by

his singing. The Christmas night would not have been half so joyful

lacking his _Adeste Fideles_; the _Stabat Mater_ sung by him in Holy

Week made her tears of religious sorrow burst forth afresh; and when on

Easter morning he sang the _Gloria_ it had seemed to her that the

heavens were opening.

For all that, however, he had been to her not a person, but a voice.

That he should come here and express her sorrow made him seem different.

For the first time she looked at his face. By daylight it was thin and

finely featured, and of a clear darkness like shaded water, through

which the faintest tinge of color is visible. In this transfigurating

moonlight it became of a luminous whiteness.

The song ended, the singer turned his head slightly and looked up at

Silvia's window. She did not draw back. There was no recognition of any

human sympathy with him, and no slightest consciousness of that airy and

silent friendship which had long been weaving itself over the tops of

the mountains that separated them. How could she know that Claudio had

sung for her, and that it had been the measure of his success to see her

head droop or lift as he sang of sorrow and pain or of joy and triumph?

The choir had their post over the door; and, besides, she never glanced

up even in going out. Therefore she gazed down into his uplifted face

with a sweet and sorrowful tranquillity, her soul pure and candid to its

uttermost depths.

For Claudio, who had sung to express his sympathy for her, but had not

dreamed of seeing her, it was as if the dark-blue sky above had opened

and an angel had looked out when he saw her face. He could only stretch

his clasped hands toward her.

The gesture made her weep anew, for it was like human kindness. She hid

her face in her handkerchief, and he saw her wipe the tears away again

and again.

Claudio remembered a note he carried. It had been written the night

before--not with any hope of her ever seeing it, but, as he had written

her hundreds of notes before, pouring out his heart into them because it

was too full to bear without that relief. He took the note out, but how

should he give it to her? The window was too far above for him to toss

so light a thing unless it should be weighted with a stone; and he could

not throw a stone at Silvia's window. He held it up, and, that she might

see it more clearly, tore up a handful of red poppies and laid it white

on the blossoms that were a deep red by night.

Silvia understood, and after a moment's study dropped him down the ball

of her knitting; and soon the note came swaying up through the still air

resting on its cushion of poppies, for Claudio had wound the thread

about both flowers and letter.

He smiled with an almost incredulous delight as he saw the package

arrive safely at its destination and caught afterward the faint red

light of the lamp that Silvia had taken down from before her Madonna to

read the note by. Since she was a little thing only five or six years

old his heart had turned toward her, and her small white face had been

to him the one star in a dim life. He still kept two or three tiny

flowers she had given him years before when his family and hers were

coming together down from Monte San Silvestro at the other side of

Monte Compatri. The two children, with others, had stopped to stick

fresh flowers through the wire screen before the great crucifix halfway

up the mountain, and Silvia had given Claudio these blossoms. He had

laid them away with his treasures and relics--the bit of muslin from the

veil of Our Lady of Loretto, the almost invisible speck from the cord of

St. Francis of Assisi and the little paper of the ashes of Blessed

Joseph Labre. In those days he was the little priest and she the little

nun, and their companions stood respectfully back for them. Now he was

no more the priest, and she was up there in her window against the sky

reading the note he had written her.

This is what the note said:

"My heart is breaking for your sorrow. Why should such eyes as yours be

permitted to weep? Who is there to wipe those tears away? Oh that I

might catch them as they fall! Drop me down a handkerchief that has been

wet with them, that I may keep it as a relic. Tell me of some way in

which I can console you and spend my life to serve you."

She read with a mingling of consolation and astonishment. Why, this was

more than her mother cared for her! But perhaps men were really more

strongly loving than women. It would seem so, since God, who knows all,

when He wanted to express His love to mankind, took the form of a man,

not of a woman. Then she considered whether, and how, she should answer

this note, and the result of her considering was this, written hastily

on a bit of paper in which some Agnus Dei had been wrapped:

"I do not know what I ought to write to you, but I thank you for

your kindness. It comforts me, and I have need of comfort. I think,

though, that it may be wrong for you to speak of my handkerchief as

if it were a relic. Relics are things which have belonged to the

saints, and I am not a saint at all, though I hope to become one. I

frequently do wrong. Spend your life in serving God, and pray for

me. You pray in singing, and your singing is very sweet.

SILVIA."

It seemed to her a simple and merely polite note. To him it was as the

spark to a magazine of powder. All the possibilities of his life, only

half hoped or half dreamed of, burst at once into a flame of certainty.

She had need of comfort, and he comforted her! His voice was sweet to

her, and his singing was a prayer!

Silvia should not be a nun. She should break the bond imposed by her

mother, as he had broken that imposed by his parents. She should be his

wife, and they would live in Rome. He knew that his voice would find

bread for them.

All this flashed through his mind as he read, and pressed to his lips

the handkerchief which she had dropped down to him, though it was not a

relic. He lifted his arms upward toward her window with a rapturous joy,

as if to embrace her, but she did not look out again. A little scruple

for having deprived the Madonna for a moment of her lamp had made her

resolve to say at once a decade of the rosary in expiation. He waited

till the sound of closing doors and wandering voices told that the

inhabitants gathered for the evening in the Lungara were separating to

their homes, then went reluctantly away. Matteo would be at home, and

Matteo's face might look down at him from that other window beside

Silvia's. So he also went home, with the moonlight between his feet and

the ground and stars sparkling in his brain. He felt as if his head were

the sky.

This was an August night. One day in October, Matteo told his sister

that she was to go to Rome with him the next morning to pass a month

with a family they knew there, and afterward begin her noviciate in the

convent of the Sacramentarians at Monte Cavallo. He had received a

letter from the Signora Fantini, who would receive her and do everything

for her. He and Pepina had no time, now that the vintage had begun, to

attend to such affairs, even if they knew how.

Silvia grew pale. She had not expected to go before the spring, and now

all was arranged without a word being said to her, and she was to go

without saying good-bye to any one.

Matteo's sharp eyes were watching her. "You will be ready to start at

seven o'clock," he said: "I must be back to-morrow night."

"Yes, Matteo," she faltered, hesitated a moment, then ventured to add,

"I did not expect to go so soon."

"And what of that?" he demanded roughly. "You were to go at the proper

time, and the proper time is to-morrow."

She trembled, but ventured another word: "I should like to see my

confessor first."

"He will come here this evening to see you," her brother replied: "I

have already talked with him. You have nothing else to do. Pepina will

pack your trunk while you are talking with the priest."

Silvia had no more to say. She was bound hand and foot. Besides, she was

willing to go, she assured herself. It was her duty to obey her parents,

or the ones who stood in their place and had authority over her. Matteo

said she must go; therefore it was her duty to go, and she was willing.

But the willing girl looked very pale and walked about with a very

feeble step, and it was hard work to keep the tears that were every

moment rising to her eyes from falling over her cheeks. It was such a

pitiful face, indeed, that Father Teodoli, when he came just before Ave

Maria, asked if Silvia were ill.

"She has had a toothache," Matteo said quickly, and gave his sister a

glance.

"And what have you done for it, my child?" the priest asked kindly.

"Nothing," Silvia faltered out.

"I will leave you to give Silvia all the advice she needs," Matteo said

after the compliments of welcome were over. "I have to go down the

Lungara for men to work in the vineyard to-morrow.--Silvia, come and

shut the door after me: there is too much draught here."

Silvia followed her brother to the door, trembling for what he might say

or do. Well she knew that his command was given only that he might have

a chance to speak with her alone.

"Mind what you say to your confessor," he whispered, grasping her arm

and speaking in her ear. "You are to be a nun: you wish to be, and you

are willing to set out to-morrow. Tell him no nonsense--do you hear?--or

it will be worse for you. I shall know every word you say. If he asks if

you had a toothache say Yes. Do you hear?"

"Yes, Matteo."

She went back half fainting, and did as she had been commanded. If there

had been any little lurking impulse to beg for another week or month, it

died of fear. If she had any confession to make of other wishes than

those chosen for her, she postponed it. Matteo might be behind the door

listening, or in the next room or at the window. It seemed to her that

he could make himself invisible in order to keep guard over her.

So the priest talked a little, learned nothing, gave some advice,

recommended himself to her prayers, gave her his benediction, and went.

Then Pepina called her to see the trunk all packed with linen that had

been laid by for her for years, and Matteo, who had really been lurking

about the house, told her to go to bed, and himself really went off this

time to the Lungara. Pepina's lover came for her to sit out on the

doorstep with him, and Silvia was left alone. Nobody cared for her. All

had other interests, and they forgot her the moment she was out of their

sight. Worse, even: they wanted her to be for ever out of their sight,

that they might never have to think of her.

But no: there was one who did not forget her--who would perhaps now have

heard that she was going away, and be waiting in the mountain-path for

her. She hastened to her room, locked the door and went to the window.

He made a gesture of haste, and she dropped the ball down to him. This

was not the second time that their conversation had been held by means

of a thread. Indeed, they had come to talk so every night. At first it

had been a few words only, and Silvia's unconsciousness and her

sincerity in her intention to follow her mother's will had imposed

silence on the young man. But little by little he had ventured, and she

had understood; and within the last week there had been no concealments

between them, though Silvia still resisted all his prayers to change her

resolution and brave her brother.

His first note was in her hands in a moment:

"Is it possible that what I hear is true? I will not believe it: I will

not let you go."

"Yes, and I must go," she wrote back. "I have to start at seven in the

morning. Dear Claudio, be resigned: there is no help for it."

"Silvia, why will you persist in ruining your life and mine? It is a

sin. Say that you are too sick to go to-morrow. Stay in bed all day, and

by night I will have a rope-ladder for you to come down to me. We can

run away and hide somewhere."

"I cannot. We could never hide from Matteo: he would find us out and

kill us both."

"I will go to the Holy Father and tell him all. We could be in Rome

early in the morning if we should walk all night."

"Matteo would hear us: he hears everything. We should never reach Rome.

He would find us wherever we might be hidden. If we were dead and buried

he would pull us out of the ground to stab us. I must go. I have sinned

in having so much intercourse with you. Be resigned, Claudio. Be a good

man, and we shall meet in heaven. The earth is a terrible place: I am

afraid of it. I want to shut myself up in the convent and be at peace. I

fear so much that I tremble all the time. Say addio."

"I cannot. Will you stay in bed to-morrow, and let me try if I cannot go

to Rome?"

"Say addio, Claudio. I dare not stay here any longer: I hear some one

outside my door. I say addio to you now. I shall not drop the ball

again."

She did not even draw it up again, for the thread caught on a nail in

the wall and broke. And at the same time there was a knock at her door.

"Silvia, why do you not go to bed?" Matteo called out: "I hear you up."

"I am going now," she made haste to answer, and in her terror threw

herself on the bed without undressing. She wondered if Matteo could hear

her heart beat through the wall or see how she was shaking.

The next morning at seven o'clock Silvia and her brother took their

seats in the clumsy coach that goes from Monte Compatri to Rome whenever

there are passengers enough to fill it, and after confused leavetakings

from all but the one she wished most to see they set out. Claudio was

invisible. In fact, he had lain on the ground all night beneath her

window, and now, hidden in a tree, was watching the winding road for an

occasional glimpse of the carriage as it bore his love away.

The peasants of Italy, when they see the Milky Way stretching its

wavering, cloudy path across the sky, shining as if made up of the

footprints of innumerable saints, say that it is the road to Jerusalem.

The road to the New Jerusalem has no such pallid and spiritual glory:

its colors are those of life. No death but that of martyrdom, with its

rosy blood, waving palm-branch and golden crown, is figured there. Life,

and the joy of life, beauty so profuse that it can afford to have a few

blemishes like a slatternly Venus, and the _dolce far niente_ of poverty

that neither works nor starves,--they lie all along the road.

Silvia was young, and had all her life looked forward to this journey.

She could not be quite indifferent. She looked and listened, though all

the time her heart was heavy for Claudio. They reached the gate of St.

John Lateran just as all the bells began to ring for the noon _Angelus_,

and in fifteen minutes were at the Signora Fantini's door and Silvia in

the kind lady's arms. It seemed to the girl that she had found her

mother again. That this lady was more gracious, graceful, kind and

beautiful than her mother had ever been she would not think. She was

simply another mother. And when Matteo had gone away home again, not

too soon, and when, after a few days' sightseeing, the signora,

suspecting that the continued sadness of her young guest had some other

cause than separation from her brother and sister, sought persistently

and artfully to win her secret, Silvia told her all with many tears. She

was going to be a nun because her mother had said that she must; and she

was willing to be a nun--certainly she was willing. But, for all that,

if it could have been so, she would have been so happy with Claudio, and

she never should be quite happy without him.

"Then you must not be a nun," the signora said decidedly. "The thing is

all wrong. You have no vocation. You should have said all this before."

For already the signora had taken Silvia to see the Superior at Monte

Cavallo, who had promised to receive the young novice in three weeks,

and had told her what work she could perform in the convent. "You are

not strong, I think," she had said, "but you can knit the stockings. All

have to work."

And Monsignor Catinari, whose business it was to examine all candidates

for the conventual life, had held a long conversation with her and gone

away perfectly satisfied.

But when the signora proposed to undo all this, Silvia was wild with

terror. No, no, she would be a nun. Her mother had said so, she wished

it, and Matteo would kill her if she should refuse.

"Leave it all to me," the signora said, and laid her motherly hand on

the trembling little ones held out to her in entreaty. "We will look out

for that. Matteo shall not hurt you or Claudio. I am going to send for

Monsignor Catinari again, and you must tell him the truth this time. And

then we will see what can be done in the case. Don't look so terrified,

child. Do you think that Matteo rules the world?"

Poor little Silvia could not be reassured, for to her other terrors was

now added Monsignor Catinari's possible wrath. To her, men were objects

of terror. The doctrine of masculine supremacy, so pitilessly upheld in

Italy, was exaggerated to her mind by her brother's character; and

though she believed that help was sometimes possible, she also believed

that it often came too late, as in the case of poor Beatrice Cenci. They

might stand between her and Matteo, but if he had first killed her, what

good would it do? She had a fixed idea that he would kill her.

Monsignor Catinari was indeed much provoked when the signora told him

the true story of the little novice.

"Just see what creatures girls are!" he exclaimed. "How are we to know

if they have a vocation or not? That girl professed herself both willing

and desirous to be a nun."

He did not scold Silvia, however. When he saw her pretty frightened face

his heart relented. "You have told me a good many lies, my child," he

said, "but I forgive you, since they were not intended in malice. We

will say no more about it. I learn from the signora that this Claudio is

a good young man, so the sooner you are married the better. Cheer up: we

will have you a bride by the first week of November; and if Claudio has

such a wonderful voice, he can make his way in Rome."

The reassurances of a man were more effectual than those of a woman.

"At last I believe! at last I fear no more!" Silvia cried, throwing

herself into the arms of the Signora Fantini when the Monsignor was

gone. "Oh how beautiful the earth is! how beautiful life is!"

"We will then begin immediately to enjoy life," the signora replied.

"Collation is ready, and Nanna has bought us some of the most delicious

grapes. See how large and rich they are! One could almost slice them.

There! these black figs are like honey. Try one now, before your soup.

The macaroni that will be brought in presently was made in the

house--none of your Naples stuff, made nobody knows how or by whom. What

else Nanna has for us I cannot say. She was very secret this morning,

and I suspect that means riceballs seasoned with mushrooms and hashed

giblets of turkey. She always becomes mysterious when those are in

preparation. Eat well, child, and get a little flesh and color before

Claudio comes."

They made a merry breakfast, with the noon sun sending its golden arrows

through every tiniest chink of the closed shutters and an almost summer

heat reigning without. Then there was an hour of sleep, then a drive to

the Pincio to see all the notable people who came up there to look at or

speak to each other while the sun sank behind St. Peter's. And in the

evening after dinner they went to the housetop to see the fireworks

which were being displayed for some festa or other; and later there was

music, and then to bed.

Life became an enchantment to the little bride-elect, as life in Italy

will become to any one who has not too heavy a cross to bear. For peace

in this beautiful land means delight, not merely the absence of pain.

How the sun shone! and how the fountains danced! What roses bloomed

everywhere! what fruits of Eden were everywhere piled! How soft the

speech was! and how sweet the smiles! And when it was discovered that

Silvia had a beautiful voice, so that she and Claudio would be like a

pair of birds together, then it seemed to her that a nest of twigs on a

tree-branch would be all that she could desire.

They took her to see the pope on one of those days. It was as if they

had taken her to heaven. To her he was the soul of Rome, the reason why

Rome was; and when she saw his white figure against the scarlet

background of cardinals she remembered how Rome looked against the rosy

Campagna at sunset from her far-away window in Monte Compatri.

"A little _sposa_, is she?" the pope said when Monsignor Catinari

presented her.--"I bless you, my child: wear this in memory of me." He

gave her a little gold medal from a tiny pocket at his side, laid his

hand on her head and passed on. It was too much: she had to weep for

joy.

Then, when the audience was over, they took her through the museum and

library, and some one gave her a bunch of roses out of the pope's

private garden, and she was put into a carriage and driven home, her

heart beating somewhere in her head, her feet winged and her eyes

dazzled.

There was a rapturous letter from Claudio awaiting her, and by that she

knew that it was not all a dream. She rattled the paper in her hands as

she sat with her eyes shut, half dreaming, to make sure and keep sure

that she was not to wake up presently to bitterness. Claudio would come

to Rome in a week, and perhaps they would be married before he should go

back. There was no letter from Matteo. So much the better.

One golden day succeeded another, and Silvia changed from a lily to a

rose with marvellous rapidity. She was not a ruddy, full-leaved rose,

though, but like one of those delicate ones with clouds of red on them

and petals that only touch the calyx, as if they were wings and must be

free to move. She was slim and frail, and her color wavered, and her

head had a little droop, and her voice was low. She had always been the

stillest creature alive; and now, full of happiness as she was, her

feelings showed themselves in an uneasy stirring, like that of a flower

in which a bee has hidden itself. After the first outburst she did not

so much say that she was happy as breathe and look it.

One noonday, when life seemed too beautiful to last, and they all sat

together after breakfast, the signora, her daughter and Silvia, too

contented to say a word, the door opened, and Matteo Guai came in with a

black, smileless face, and not the slightest salutation for his sister.

He had come to take Silvia home, he replied briefly to the signora's

compliments. She must be ready in an hour. The vintage was suffering by

his absence, and it was necessary that he should return at once.

Signora Fantini poured out the most voluble exclamations, prayers and

protests. She had forty engagements for Silvia. They had had only a few

days' visit from her, and she was to have stayed a month. They would

themselves accompany her to Monte Compatri later if it was necessary

that she should go. But, in fine, Monsignor Catinari did not expect her

to return.

"I am the head of the family, and my sister has to obey me till she is

married," Matteo replied doggedly. "I suppose that Monsignor Catinari

will not deny that. The Church always supports the authority of the

master of the family."

"Why, of course," the signora replied, rather confused by this

irresistible argument, "you have the right, and no one will resist you.

But as a favor now--" and the signora assumed her most coaxing smile,

and even advanced a plump white hand to touch Matteo's sleeve.

She might as well have tried to bewitch and persuade the bronze Augustus

on the Capitoline Hill.

"Things are changed since it was promised that Silvia should stay a

month with you," Matteo replied. "There is work at home for her to do.

Since she is not to be a nun, she must work. Let her be ready to start

in an hour: my carriage is waiting at the door. I am going out into the

piazza for a little while. I will send a man up for her trunk when I am

ready to start."

Silvia uttered not a word. At sight of her brother she had sunk back in

her chair white and speechless. On hearing his voice she had closed her

eyes.

He half turned to her before going out, looking at her out of the

corners of his evil eyes, a cold, strange smile wreathing his lips. "So

you are not going to be a nun?" he said.

She did not respond. Only the quiver of her lowered eyelids and a slight

shiver told that she knew he was addressing her.

Matteo went out, and the signora, at her wits' end, undertook to

encourage Silvia. There was no time to see Monsignor Catinari or to

appeal to any authority; and if there were, it would have availed

nothing perhaps. Almost any one would have said that the girl's terrors

were fanciful, and that it was quite natural her brother, who would lose

five hundred scudi by her change of purpose, should require her to work

as other girls of her condition worked.

"Cheer up and go with him, _figlia mia_," she said, "and leave all to

me. I will see Monsignor Catinari this very evening, and post a letter

to you before I go to bed. If Matteo is unkind to you, we will have you

taken away from him at once. And, in any case, you shall be married in a

few weeks at the most, as Monsignor promised. Don't cry so: don't say

that you cannot go. I am sorry and vexed, my dear, but I see no way but

for you to go. Depend upon me. No harm shall come to you. I will myself

come to Monte Compatri within the week, and arrange all for you.

Besides, recollect that you will see Claudio: he is there waiting for

you. Perhaps you may see him this very evening."

The Signora Fantini's efforts to cheer and reassure the sister were as

ineffectual as her efforts to persuade the brother had been. Silvia

submitted because she had no strength to resist.

"O Madonna mia!" she kept murmuring, "he will kill me! he will kill me!

O Madonna mia! pray for me."

When an Italian says that he will come back in an hour, you may look for

him after two hours. Matteo was no exception to the rule. It was already

mid-afternoon when the porter came up and said that Silvia's brother was

waiting for her below.

The signora gave her a tumbler half full of _vin santo_, which she kept

for special occasions--a strong, delicious wine with the perfume of a

whole garden in it. "Drink every drop," she commanded: "it will give you

courage. You had better be a little tipsy than fainting away. And put

this bottle into your pocket to drink when you have need on the way."

More dead than alive, Silvia was placed in the little old-fashioned

carriage that Matteo had hired to come to Rome in, and her brother took

his seat beside her. The Signora Fantini and her daughter leaned from

the window, kissing their hands to her and shaking their handkerchiefs

as long as she was in sight. And as long as she was in sight they saw

her pale face turned backward, looking at them. Then the tawny stone of

a church-corner hid her from their eyes for ever.

Who knows or can guess what that drive was? The two passed through

Frascati, and Matteo stopped to speak to an acquaintance there. They

drove around Monte Porzio, and Matteo stopped again, to buy a glass of

wine and some figs. He offered some to his sister, but she shook her

head.

"She is sleepy," her brother said to the man of whom he had bought.

"Give me another tumbler of wine: it isn't bad."

"It is the last barrel I have of the vintage of two years ago," the man

replied. "It was a good vintage. If the signorina would take a drop she

would sleep the better. Besides, the night is coming on and there is a

chill in the air."

Silvia opened her eyes and made the little horizontal motion with her

fore finger which in Italy means no.

"She will sleep well enough," Matteo said, and drove on.

Night was coming on, and they had no more towns to pass--only a bit more

of lonely level road and the lonely road that wound to and fro up the

mountain-side. At the best, they could not reach home before ten

o'clock. The road went to and fro--sometimes open, to give a view of the

Campagna and the Sabine Mountains, and Soracte swimming in a lustrous

dimness on the horizon; sometimes shut in closely by trees, that made it

almost black in spite of the moon. For the moon was low and gave but

little light, being but a crescent as yet. There was a shooting star now

and then, breaking out like a rocket with a trail of sparks or slipping

small and pallid across the sky.

One of these latter might have been poor Silvia's soul slipping away

from the earth. It went out there somewhere on the mountain-side. Matteo

said the carriage tilted, and she, being asleep, fell out before he

could prevent. Her temple struck a sharp rock, and Claudio missed his

bride.

He had to keep quiet about it, though. What could he prove? what could

any one prove? Where knives are sharp and people mind their own

business, or express their opinions only by a shrug of the shoulders and

a grimace, how is a poor boy, how is even a rich man or a rich woman, to

come at the truth in such a case? Besides, the truth would not have

brought her back, poor little Silvia!

MARY AGNES TINCKER.

A SPANISH STORY-TELLER

In these days of pessimism in literature, when Tourgueneff and

Sacher-Masoch represent man as the victim of blind Chance and

annihilation his greatest happiness, it is pleasant to turn to a writer

who still believes in God, his country and the family, and recognizes an

overruling Providence that directs the world. It is not strange that

these old-fashioned ideas should be found in Spain, where, in spite of

much ignorance and superstition, the lower classes are deeply religious

in the best sense of the word, and distinguished for their patriotism

and intense love for their homes.

Antonio de Trueba, the subject of this sketch, was born in 1821 at

Montellano, a little village in Biscay. He thus describes the home of

his childhood in the preface to his collected poems: "On the brow of one

of the mountains that surround a valley of Biscay there are four little

houses, white as four doves, hidden in a grove of chestnut and walnut

trees--four houses that can only be seen at a distance when the autumn

has removed the leaves from the trees. There I spent the first fifteen

years of my life. In the bottom of the valley there is a church whose

belfry pierces the arch of foliage and rises majestic above the ash and

walnut trees, as if to signify that the voice of God rises above

Nature; and in that church two masses were said on Sunday--one at

sunrise and the other two hours later. We children rose with the song of

the birds and went down to the first mass, singing and leaping through

the shady oak-groves, while our elders came down later to high mass.

While our parents and grand-parents were attending it I sat down beneath

some cherry trees that were opposite my father's house--for from that

spot could be seen the whole valley that ended in the sea--and shortly

after four or five young girls came to seek me, red as the cherries that

hung over my head or as the graceful knots of ribbon that tied the long

braids of their hair, and made me compose couplets for them to sing to

their sweethearts in the afternoon, to the sound of the tambourine,

under the walnut trees where the young people danced and the elders

chatted and enjoyed our pleasure."

The young poet's parents were simple tillers of the soil, who gave their

son a meagre education. In one of his letters he says that his father's

library consisted of the _Fueros de Viscaya_ (the old laws of Biscay),

the _Fables_ of Samaniego, _Don Quixote_, some ballads brought from

Valmaseda or Bilbao, and two or three lives of the saints. Antonio seems

to have had from his earliest childhood an ardent love of poetry, and in

the passage quoted above he mentions his own compositions. He continues

by saying, "I remember one day one of those girls was very sad because

her sweetheart was going away for a long time. She wanted a song to

express her grief, and I composed one at her request. A few days later

she did not need my aid to sing her sorrow: in proportion as it had

increased her ability to sing it herself had also increased, for poetry

is the child of feeling. Her songs, as well as those I composed, soon

became popular in the valley."

When the poet was fifteen years old the civil war waged by Don Carlos

was desolating Spain. The inhabitants of Biscay espoused his cause, but

Antonio's parents were unwilling to expose their son to the dangers he

must run if he remained at home, and therefore decided to send him to a

distant relative in Madrid who kept a hardware-shop. "One night in

November," says Trueba, "I departed from my village, perhaps--my

God!--never to return. I descended the valley with my eyes bathed in

tears. The cocks began to crow, the dogs barked, the owls hooted in the

mountains, the wind moaned in the tops of the walnut trees, and the

river roared furiously rushing down the valley; but the inhabitants of

the village slept peaceably, except my parents and brothers, who from

the window followed weeping the sound of my footsteps, about to be lost

in the noise of the valley. I was just leaving the last house of the

village when one of those girls who had so often sought me under the

cherry trees approached the window and took leave of me sobbing. On

crossing a hill, about to lose the valley from my sight, I heard a

distant song, and stopped. That same girl was sending me her last

farewell in a song as beautiful as the sentiment that inspired it."

Antonio devoted himself to his duties during the day and pursued his

studies with eagerness during the night. What he suffered from

home-sickness the reader can easily imagine. All through his later works

are scattered reminiscences of those unhappy years in Madrid, when his

memory fondly turned to the mountains and cherry-groves of his beloved

Encartaciones.[1] Often dreaming of the country, which, he says, is his

perpetual dream, he imagined the moment in which God would permit him to

return to the valley in which he was born. "When this happens, I say to

myself, my brow will be wrinkled and my hair gray. The day on which I

return to my native valley will be a festal day, and on crossing the

hill from which I can behold the whole valley, I shall hear the bells

ringing for high mass. How sweetly will resound in my ears those bells

that so often rilled my childhood with delight! I shall enter the

valley, my heart beating, my breathing difficult and my eyes bathed with

tears of joy. There will be, with its white and sonorous belfry, the

church where the holy water of baptism was poured upon the brows of my

parents and my own; there will be the walnut and chestnut trees beneath

whose shade we danced on Sunday afternoons; there will be the wood where

my brothers and I looked for birds' nests and made whistles out of the

chestnut and walnut bark; there, along the road, will be the apple trees

whose fruit my companions and I knocked off with stones when we went to

school; there will be the little white house where my grand-parents, my

father, my brothers and I were born; there will be all that does not

feel or breathe. But where will be, my God, all those who with tears in

their eyes bade me farewell so many years ago? I shall follow the valley

down: I shall recognize the valley, but not its inhabitants. Judge

whether there will be among sorrows a greater sorrow than mine! The

people gathered in the portico of the church waiting for mass to begin

will look over the wall along the road, and others will look out of the

windows, all to see the stranger pass. And they will not know me, and I

shall not know them, for those children and those youths and those old

men will not be the old men nor the youths nor the children whom I left

in my native valley. I shall follow sadly the valley down. 'All that has

felt,' I shall exclaim, 'has changed or died. What is it that preserves

here pure and immaculate the sentiments which I inspired?' And then some

village-woman will sing one of those songs in which I enclosed the

deepest feelings of my soul, and on hearing her my heart will want to

leap from my breast, and I shall fall on my knees, and, if emotion and

sobs do not stifle my voice, I shall exclaim, 'Holy and thrice holy,

blessed and thrice blessed, poetry which immortalizes human sentiment!'"

Antonio after a time left his relative's shop to enter another in the

same business, from which he was relieved by the owner's financial

difficulties. He then determined to devote himself to literature, and

became a writer for the papers. In 1852 he published _Libro de Cantares_

(_Book of Songs_), which at once made his name a household word

throughout Spain. He tells us that most of the poems in it were composed

mentally while dreaming of his native country and wandering about the

environs of Madrid, "wherever the birds sing and the people display

their virtues and their vices, for the noble Spanish people have a

little of everything." He warns his readers not to expect from him what

he cannot give them: "Do not seek in this book erudition or culture or

art. Seek recollections and feeling, and nothing more. Fifteen years ago

I left my solitary village: these fifteen years, instead of singing

under the cherry trees of my native country, I sing in the midst of the

Babylon which rises on the banks of the Manzanares; and,

notwithstanding, I still amuse myself with counting from here the trees

that shade the little white house where I was born, and where, God

willing, I shall die: my songs still resemble those of fifteen years

ago. What do I understand of Greek or Latin, of the precepts of Horace

or of Aristotle? Speak to me of the blue skies and seas, of birds and

boughs, of harvests and trees laden with golden fruit, of the loves and

joys and griefs of the upright and simple villagers, and then I shall

understand you, because I understand nothing more than this."

These poems are what the author calls them, nothing more--pure and

simple records of the life of the people around him, their loves and

griefs, their hopes and disappointments. The most usual metre is the

simple Spanish _asonante_, or eight-syllable trochaic verse, with the

vowel rhyme called _asonante_.[2] They are pervaded by a tender spirit

of melancholy, very different from the _Weltschmerz_ of Heine, with some

of whose lyrics the Spanish poet's _cantares_ may be compared without

losing anything by the comparison. In one poem he says: "In the depths

of my heart are great sorrows: some of them are known to men, others to

God alone. But I shall rarely mention my griefs in my songs, for I have

no hope that they can be alleviated; and where is the mortal who, in

passing through this valley, has not encountered among the flowers some

sharp thorn?" In the same poem he says: "All ask me, Who taught you to

sing? No one: I sing because God wills it--I sing like the birds;" and

he explains his method by a touching incident. One evening he was

singing on the bank of the Manzanares when he saw a child smiling on the

breast of its mother. The poet went and caressed it, and the child threw

its arms about Antonio's neck and turning to its mother cried, "Mother,

Antonio, he of the songs, is a blind man who sees."[3] The poet

continues: "I am a blind man who sees: that angel told the truth. With

my guitar resting on my loving heart, you may see me wandering from the

city to the valley, from the cabin of the poor to the palace of the

great, weeping with those who weep, singing with those who sing, for my

rude guitar is the lasting echo of all joys and all sorrows. I shall

sing my songs in the simple language of the laborer and the soldier, of

the children and the mothers, of those who have not frequented learned

schools.... In this language I shall extol the faith and the holy

combats of the soldiers of Christ with the sacrilegious Saracen; I shall

sing the heroic efforts of our fathers to conquer the proud legions of

Bonaparte; and the beauty of the skies, and the flowers of the valley,

and love and innocence--all that is beautiful and great--will find a

lasting echo in my rude guitar."

Many of these songs are ingenious variations on a theme supplied by some

old and well-known poem, a few lines of which are woven into each

division of the new song.

The success of the _Libro de los Cantares_ was immediate and great; the

first three editions were exhausted in a few months; the duc de

Montpensier wished to defray the expenses of the fourth, and Queen

Isabella of the fifth; since then others have followed. Some years later

the poet married, and since then has written chiefly in prose.

In 1859 appeared a volume of short tales entitled _Rose-colored Stories_

(_Cuentos de Color de Rosa_): these were followed by _Tales of the

Country_ (_Cuentos campesinos_), _Popular Tales_ (_Cuentos popolares_),

_Popular Narrations_ (_Narraciones popolares_), _Tales of Various

Colors_, _Tales of the Dead and Living_, etc.[4]

Before examining in detail any of these collections it may be well to

learn the author's views of his task and definition of his subject. In

the introduction to the _Popular Tales_ he says, addressing his friend

Don Jose de Castro y Serrano: "The object of this preface is simply to

tell you why I have given the name of _Popular Tales_ to those contained

in this volume, what I understand by popular literature, and why I write

tales instead of writing novels or comedies or cookbooks. There are two

reasons why I have called these tales popular. First, because many of

them are told by the people; and, secondly, because in retelling them I

have used the simple and plain style of the people.... In my conception,

popular literature can be defined in this manner: That literature which

by its simplicity and clearness is within the reach of the intelligence

of the people.... However, in popular literature the simplicity of form

is not enough: it is necessary to reproduce Nature, because if not

reproduced there will be no truth in it; and if there is no truth in it

the people will not believe it; and if they do not believe it they will

not feel it. For my part, I take such pains in studying Nature, in order

that my pictures may be true, that I fear you will accuse me of

extravagance, and will laugh at me when you read the two examples I am

going to cite. On a very severe night in January I was writing in the

fourth story of the street Lope de Vega, No. 32, the tale which I named

_De Patas en el Infierno_ ('The Feet in Hell'), and when a detail

occurred which consisted in explaining the changes in the sound made by

water in filling a jar at a fountain, I found that I had never studied

these changes, and I did not have in the house at that moment water

enough to study them. The printers were going to send for the story

early in the morning, and it must be finished that night. Do you know

what I did to get out of my difficulty? At three o'clock in the morning,

facing the darkness, rain and wind, I went to the little fountain near

by with a jar under my cloak, and spent a quarter of an hour there

listening to the sound of the water as it fell into the jar. A short

time after I was preparing to write the rural tale called _Las Siembras

y las Cosechas_ ('Seed-time and Harvest'), and the description of a

sunrise in the country entered into my plan. I had often seen the sun

rise in the country, but it was necessary to contemplate and study anew

that beautiful spectacle in order to describe it exactly; and early one

morning, long before the dawn, accompanied by two friends, I went to the

hills of Vicalvaro, where we made some good studies, but were very much

frightened by some thieves who attacked us knife in hand, believing we

were people who carried watches."

These words of the author reveal better than we could explain his aim

and method. He is a follower of Fernan Caballero, in so far as he has

devoted himself to illustrate the every-day life of the Spanish people.

The former writer has filled her pages with brilliant pictures of the

life of Andalusia. Her canvas is, however, larger than Trueba's: she

depicts the society of the South in all its grades; Trueba has chosen a

more limited circle on which he has lavished all his care.

The volume of _Rose-colored Tales_ is in many respects the best that

Trueba has produced. The dedication to his wife explains the title and

reveals the author's optimistic views. He says: "I call them

_Rose-colored Tales_ because they are the reverse of that pessimistic

literature which delights in representing the world as a boundless

desert in which no flower blooms, and life as a perpetual night in which

no star shines. I, poor son of Adam, in whom the curse of the Lord on

our first parents has not ceased to be accomplished a single day since

the time when, still a child, I left my beloved valley of the

Encartaciones,--I shall love this life, and shall not believe myself

exiled in the world while God, friendship, love and the family exist in

it, while the sun shines on me every morning, while the moon lights me

every night and the flowers and birds visit me every day."

The scene of all the stories of this collection is in the Encartaciones,

and an examination of a few of them will make us acquainted with the

usual range of characters and the author's mode of treatment. The first

is entitled "The Resurrection of the Soul" (_La Resurreccion del Alma_),

and opens with an account of the village of C----, one of the fifteen

composing the Encartaciones. Here lived Santiago and Catalina, the

latter a foundling whom Santiago's parents had found at their door one

winter morning. The good people, who had always desired a daughter,

cared tenderly for the little stranger, and she grew up with their son,

who was a few years older. It had been decided that when Santiago was

fifteen he should go to his uncle in Mexico; which country, for the

simple inhabitants of Biscay, is still "India," and the retired

merchants who return to spend their last days in their native towns are

"Indians"--a class that often play an important part in the denouement

of Trueba's simple plots. At the beginning of the story the two children

(Santiago was nearly fifteen) had gone off to play and allowed the goats

to get into the fields. The angry father is about to punish Catalina,

who has assumed all the blame, but his wife mollifies him by reminding

him that they have received a piece of good news. Ramon good-humoredly

says, "You women always have your own way," and proceeds to tell a story

to illustrate it. We give it as an example of the popular tales that

Trueba often weaves into his stories:

"Once upon a time, when Christ went through the world healing the sick

and raising the dead, a woman came out to meet him and said to him,

seizing hold of his cloak and weeping like a Magdalen, 'Lord, do me the

favor to come and raise my husband, who died this morning.'