"Fumo di gloria non vale fumo di pipa."
"Fumo di gloria non vale fumo di pipa."
I, for one, at any rate, am thoroughly convinced of that truth of truths.
I hearkened to him sorrowful; for to my ignorant eyes the witch candle of fame seemed a pure and perfect planet; and I felt that the planet might have ruled his horoscope had he chosen.
Is there no glory at all worth having, then? I murmured.
He stretched himself where he rested amongst the arum-whitened grass, and took his cigaretto from his mouth:
Well, there is one, perhaps. But it is to be had about once in five centuries.
You know Or San Michele? It would have been a world's wonder had it stood alone, and not been companioned with such wondrous rivals that its own exceeding beauty scarce ever receives full justice.
Where the jasper of Giotto and the marble of Brunelleschi, where the bronze of Ghiberti and the granite of Arnolfo rise everywhere in the sunlit air to challenge vision and adoration, or San Michele fails of its full meed from men. Yet, perchance, in all the width of Florence there is not a nobler thing.
It is like some massive casket of silver oxydised by time; such a casket as might have been made to hold the Tables of the Law by men to whose faith Sinai was the holy and imperishable truth.
I know nothing of the rule or phrase of Architecture, but it seems to me surely that that square-set strength, as of a fortress, towering against the clouds, and catching the last light always on its fretted parapet, and everywhere embossed and enriched with foliage, and tracery, and the figures of saints, and the shadows of vast arches, and the light of niches gold-starred and filled with divine forms, is a gift so perfect to the whole world, that, passing it, one should need say a prayer for great Taddeo's soul.
Surely, nowhere is the rugged, changeless, mountain force of hewn stone piled against the sky, and the luxuriant, dreamlike, poetic delicacy of stone carven and shaped into leafage and loveliness more perfectly blended and made one than where Or San Michele rises out of the dim, many-coloured, twisting streets, in its mass of ebon darkness and of silvery light.
Well, the other day, under the walls of it I stood, and looked at its Saint George where he leans upon his shield, so calm, so young, with his bared head and his quiet eyes.
"That is our Donatello's," said a Florentine beside me—a man of the people, who drove a horse for hire in the public ways, and who paused, cracking his whip, to tell this tale to me. "Donatello did that, and it killed him. Do you not know? When he had done that Saint George, he showed it to his master. And the master said, 'It wants one thing only.' Now this saying our Donatello took gravely to heart, chiefly of all because his master would never explain where the fault lay; and so much did it hurt him, that he fell ill of it, and came nigh to death. Then he called his master to him. 'Dear and great one, do tell me before I die,' he said, 'what is the one thing my statue lacks.' The master smiled, and said, 'Only—speech.' 'Then I die happy,' said our Donatello. And he died—indeed, that hour."
"Now, I cannot say that the pretty story is true; it is not in the least true; Donato died when he was eighty-three, in the Street of the Melon; and it was he himself who cried, 'Speak then—speak!' to his statue, as it was carried through the city. But whether true or false the tale, this fact is surely true, that it is well—nobly and purely well—with a people when the men amongst it who ply for hire on its public ways think caressingly of a sculptor dead five hundred years ago, and tell such a tale standing idly in the noonday sun, feeling the beauty and the pathos of it all.
"'Our Donatello' still to the people of Florence. 'Our own little Donato' still, our pet and pride, even as though he were living and working in their midst to-day, here in the shadows of the Stocking-maker's Street, where his Saint George keeps watch and ward.
"'Our little Donato' still, though dead so many hundred years ago.
"That is glory, if you will. And something more beautiful than any glory—Love."
He was silent a long while, gathering lazily with his left hand the arum lilies to bind them together for me.
Perhaps the wish for the moment passed over him that he had chosen to set his life up in stone, like to Donato's, in the face of Florence, rather than to weave its light and tangled skein out from the breaths of the wandering winds and the sands of the shifting shore.
Come out here in the young months of summer, and leave, as we left, the highways that grim walls fence in, and stray, as we strayed, through the field-paths and the bridle-roads in the steps of the contadini, and you will find this green world about your feettouched with the May-day suns to tenderest and most lavish wealth of nature.
The green corn uncurling underneath the blossoming vines. The vine foliage that tosses and climbs and coils in league on league of verdure. The breast-high grasses full of gold and red and purple from the countless flowers growing with it.
The millet filled with crimson gladioli and great scarlet poppies. The hill-sides that look a sheet of rose-colour where the lupinelli are in bloom. The tall plumes of the canes, new-born, by the side of every stream and rivulet.
The sheaves of arum leaves that thrust themselves out from every joint of masonry or spout of broken fountain. The flame of roses that burns on every handbreadth of untilled ground and springs like a rainbow above the cloud of every darkling roof or wall. The ocean spray of arbutus and acacia shedding its snow against the cypress darkness. The sea-green of the young ilex leaves scattered like light over the bronze and purple of the older growth. The dreamy blue of the iris lilies rising underneath the olives and along the edges of the fields.
All greatest gifts that have enriched the modern world have come from Italy. Take those gifts from the world, and it would lie in darkness, a dumb, barbaric, joyless thing.
Leave Rome alone, or question as you will whether she were the mightiest mother, or the blackest curse that ever came on earth. I do not speak of Rome, imperial or republican, I speak of Italy.
Of Italy, after the greatness of Rome dropped as the Labarum was raised on high, and the Fisher of Galilee came to fill the desolate place of the Cæsars.
Of Italy, when she was no more a vast dominion, ruling over half the races of the globe, from the Persian to the Pict, but a narrow slip bounded by Adriatic and Mediterranean, divided into hostile sections, racked by foreign foes, and torn by internecine feud.
Of Italy, ravaged by the Longobardo, plundered by the French, scourged by the Popes, tortured by the Kaisers; of Italy, with her cities at war with each other, her dukedoms against her free towns, her tyrants in conflict with her municipalities; of Italy, in a word, as she has been from the days of Theodoric and Theodolinda to the days of Napoleon and Francis Joseph. It is this Italy—our Italy—which through all the centuries of bloodshed and of suffering never ceased to bear aloft and unharmed its divining-rod of inspiration as S. Christopher bore the young Christ above the swell of the torrent and the rage of the tempest.
All over Italy from north to south men arose in the darkness of those ages who became the guides and the torchbearers of a humanity that had gone astray in the carnage and gloom.
The faith of Columbus of Genoa gave to mankind a new world. The insight of Galileo of Pisa revealed to it the truth of its laws of being. Guido Monacco of Arezzo bestowed on it the most spiritual of all earthly joys by finding a visible record for the fugitive creations of harmony ere then impalpable and evanescent as the passing glories of the clouds. Dante Alighieri taught to it the might of that vulgar tongue in which the child babbles at its mother's knee, and the orator leads a breathless multitude at his will to death or triumph. Teofilo of Empoli discovered for it the mysteries of colour that lie in the mere earths of the rocks and the shores, and the mere oils of the roots and the poppies. Arnoldo of Breccia lit for it the first flame of free opinion, and Amatus of Breccia perfected for it themost delicate and exquisite of all instruments of sound, which men of Cremona, or of Bologna, had first created. Maestro Giorgio, and scores of earnest workers whose names are lost in Pesaro and in Gubbio, bestowed on it those homelier treasures of the graver's and the potter's labours which have carried the alphabet of art into the lowliest home. Brunelleschi of Florence left it in legacy the secret of lifting a mound of marble to the upper air as easily as a child can blow a bubble; and Giordano Bruno of Nola found for it those elements of philosophic thought, which have been perfected into the clear and prismatic crystals of the metaphysics of the Teuton and the Scot.
From south and north, from east and west, they rose, the ministers and teachers of mankind.
From mountain and from valley, from fortress smoking under battle, and from hamlet laughing under vines; from her great wasted cities, from her small fierce walled towns, from her lone sea-shores ravaged by the galleys of the Turks, from her villages on hill and plain that struggled into life through the invaders' fires, and pushed their vineshoots over the tombs of kings, everywhere all over her peaceful soil, such men arose.
Not men alone who were great in a known art, thought or science, of these the name was legion; but men in whose brains, art, thought, or science took new forms, was born into new life, spoke with new voice, and sprang full armed a new Athene.
Leave Rome aside, I say, and think of Italy; measure her gifts, which with the lavish waste of genius she has flung broadcast in grand and heedless sacrifice, and tell me if the face of earth would not be dark and drear as any Scythian desert without these?
She was the rose of the world, aye—so they bruised and trampled her, and yet the breath of heaven was ever in her.
She was the world's nightingale, aye—so they burned her eyes out and sheared her wings, and yet she sang.
But she was yet more than these: she was the light of the world: a light set on a hill, a light unquenchable. A light which through the darkness of the darkest night has been a Pharos to the drowning faiths and dying hopes of man.
"It must have been such a good life—a painter's—in those days; those early days of art. Fancy the gladness of it then—modern painters can know nothing of it.
"When all the delicate delights of distance were only half perceived; when the treatment of light and shadow was barely dreamed of; when aerial perspective was just breaking on the mind in all its wonder and power; when it was still regarded as a marvellous boldness to draw from the natural form in a natural fashion;—in those early days only fancy the delights of a painter!
"Something fresh to be won at each step; something new to be penetrated at each moment; something beautiful and rash to be ventured on with each touch of colour,—the painter in those days had all the breathless pleasure of an explorer; without leaving his birthplace he knew the joys of Columbus.
"And then the reverence that waited on him.
"He was a man who glorified God amongst a people that believed in God.
"What he did was a reality to himself and those around him. Spinello fainted before the Satanas he portrayed, and Angelico deemed it blasphemy to alter a feature of the angels who visited him that they might live visibly for men in his colours in the cloister.
"Of all men the artist was nearest to heaven, therefore of all men was he held most blessed.
"When Francis Valois stooped for the brush he only represented the spirit of the age he lived in. It is what all wise kings do. It is their only form of genius.
"Now-a-days what can men do in the Arts! Nothing.
"All has been painted—all sung—all said.
"All is twice told—in verse, in stone, in colour. There is no untraversed ocean to tempt the Columbus of any Art.
"It is dreary—very dreary—that. All had been said and done so much better than we can ever say or do it again. One envies those men who gathered all the paradise flowers half opened, and could watch them bloom.
"Art can only live by Faith: and what faith have we?
"Instead of Art we have indeed Science; but Science is very sad, for she doubts all things and would prove all things, and doubt is endless, and proof is a quagmire that looks like solid earth, and is but shifting waters."
His voice was sad as it fell on the stillness of Arezzo—Arezzo who had seen the dead gods come and go, and the old faiths rise and fall, there where the mule trod its patient way and the cicala sang its summer song above the place where the temple of the Bona Dea and the Church of Christ had alike passed away, so that no man could tell their place.
It was all quiet around.
"I would rather have been Spinello than Petrarca," he pursued, after a while. "Yes; though the sonnets will live as long as men love: and the old man's work has almost every line of it crumbled away.
"But one can fancy nothing better than a life such as Spinello led for nigh a century up on the hill here, painting, because he loved it, till death took him. Of all lives, perhaps, that this world has ever seen, the lives of painters, I say, in those days were the most perfect.
"Not only the magnificent pageants of Leonardo's, of Raffaelle's, of Giorgone's: but the lowlier lives—the lives of men such as Santi, and Ridolfi, and Benozzo, and Francia, and Timoteo, and many lesser men than they, painters in fresco and grisaille, painters of miniatures, painters of majolica and montelupo, painters who were never great, but who attained infinite peacefulness and beauty in their native towns and cities all over the face of Italy.
"In quiet places, such as Arezzo and Volterra, and Modena and Urbino, and Cortona and Perugia, there would grow up a gentle lad who from infancy most loved to stand and gaze at the missal paintings in his mother's house, and the cœna in the monk's refectory, and when he had fulfilled some twelve or fifteen years, his people would give in to his wish and send him to some bottega to learn the management of colours.
"Then he would grow to be a man; and his town would be proud of him, and find him the choicest of all work in its churches and its convents, so that all his days were filled without his ever wandering out of reach of his native vesper bells.
"He would make his dwelling in the heart of his birthplace, close under its cathedral, with the tender sadness of the olive hills stretching above and around; in the basiliche or the monasteries his labour would daily lie; he would have a docile band of hopeful boyish pupils with innocent eyes of wonder for all he did or said; he would paint his wife's face for the Madonna's, and his little son's for the child Angel's; he would go out into the fields and gather the olive bough, and the feathery corn, and the golden fruits, and paint them tenderly on ground of gold or blue, in symbol of those heavenly things of which the bells were for ever telling all those who chose to hear; he would sit in the lustrous nights in the shade of his own vines and pity those who werenot as he was; now and then horsemen would come spurring in across the hills and bring news with them of battles fought, of cities lost and won; and he would listen with the rest in the market-place, and go home through the moonlight thinking that it was well to create the holy things before which the fiercest reiter and the rudest free-lance would drop the point of the sword and make the sign of the cross.
"It must have been a good life—good to its close in the cathedral crypt—and so common too; there were scores such lived out in these little towns of Italy, half monastery and half fortress, that were scattered over hill and plain, by sea and river, on marsh and mountain, from the day-dawn of Cimabue to the afterglow of the Carracci.
"And their work lives after them; the little towns are all grey and still and half peopled now; the iris grows on the ramparts, the canes wave in the moats, the shadows sleep in the silent market-place, the great convents shelter half-a-dozen monks, the dim majestic churches are damp and desolate, and have the scent of the sepulchre.
"But there, above the altars, the wife lives in the Madonna and the child smiles in the Angel, and the olive and the wheat are fadeless on their ground of gold and blue; and by the tomb in the crypt the sacristan will shade his lantern and murmur with a sacred tenderness:—
"'Here he sleeps.'
"'He,' even now, so long, long after, to the people of his birthplace. Who can want more of life—or death?"
So he talked on in that dreamy, wistful manner that was as natural with him in some moments as his buoyant and ironical gaiety at others.
Then he rose as the shadows grew longer and pulled down a knot of pomegranate blossom for me, and we went together under the old walls, across the maize fields,down the slope of the hills to the olive orchard, where a peasant, digging deep his trenches against the autumn rains, had struck his mattock on the sepulchre of the Etruscan king.
There was only a little heap of fine dust when we reach the spot.
"There was so much more colour in those days," he had said, rolling a big green papone before him with his foot. "If, indeed, it were laid on sometimes too roughly. And then there was so much more play for character. Now-a-days, if a man dare go out of the common ways to seek a manner of life suited to him, and unlike others, he is voted a vagabond, or, at least, a lunatic, supposing he is rich enough to get the sentence so softened. In those days the impossible was possible—a paradox? oh, of course. The perfection of those days was, that they were full of paradoxes. No democracy will ever compass the immensity of Hope, the vastness of Possibility, with which the Church of those ages filled the lives of the poorest poor. Not hope spiritual only, but hope terrestrial, hope material and substantial. A swineherd, glad to gnaw the husks that his pigs left, might become the Viceregent of Christ, and spurn emperors prostrate before his throne. The most famished student who girt his lean loins to pass the gates of Pavia or Ravenna, knew that if he bowed his head for the tonsure he might live to lift it in a pontiff's arrogance in the mighty reality and the yet mightier metaphor of a Canosa. The abuses of the mediæval Church have been gibbeted in every language; but I doubt if the wonderful absoluteequalitywhich that Church actually contained and caused has ever been sufficiently remembered. Then only think how great it was tobegreat in those years, when men were fresh enough of heart to feel emotion and not ashamed to show it. Think of Petrarca's entry into Rome; think of the superb lifeof Raffael; think of the crowds that hung on the lips of the Improvisatori: think of the influence of S. Bruno, of S. Bernard, of S. Francis; think of the enormous power on his generation of Fra Girolamo! And if one were not great at all, but only a sort of brute with stronger sinews than most men, what a fearless and happy brute one might be, riding with Hawkwood's Lances, or fighting with the Black Bands! Whilst, if one were a peaceable, gentle soul, with a turn for art and grace, what a calm, tender life one might lead in little, old, quiet cities, painting praying saints on their tiptoes, or moulding marriage-plates in majolica! It must have been such a great thing to live when the world was still all open-eyed with wonder at itself, like a child on its sixth birthday. Now-a-days, science makes a great discovery; the tired world yawns, feels its pockets, and only asks, "Will it pay?" Galileo ran the risk of the stake, and Giordano Bruno suffered at it; but I think that chance of the faggots must have been better to bear than the languid apathy and the absorbed avarice of the present age, which is chiefly tolerant because it has no interest except in new invented ways for getting money and for spending it."
He remembered two years before, when he had passed through Italy on his way eastward, pausing in Ferrara, and Brescia, and Mantua, and staying longer in the latter city on account of a trial then in course of hearing in the court of justice, which had interested him by its passionate and romantic history; it had been the trial of the young Count d'Este, accused of the assassination of his mistress. Sanctis had gone with the rest of the town to the hearing of the long and tedious examination of the witnesses and of accused. It had been a warm day in early autumn, three months after the night of the murder; Mantua had looked beautiful in her golden mantle of sunshine and silver veil of mist; there was a white, light fog on the water meadows and the lakes, and under it the willows waved and the tall reeds rustled; whilst the dark towers, the forked battlements, the vast Lombard walls, seemed to float on it like sombre vessels on a foamy sea.
He remembered the country people flocking in over the bridge, the bells ringing, the red sails drifting by, the townsfolk gathering together in the covered arcades and talking with angry rancour against the dead woman's lord. He remembered sitting in the hush and gloom of the judgment-hall and furtively sketching the head of the prisoner because of its extreme and typical beauty. He remembered how at the time he had thought this accused lover guiltless, and wondered that the tribunal did notsooner suspect the miserly, malicious, and subtle meaning of the husband's face. He remembered listening to the tragic tale that seemed so well to suit those sombre, feudal streets, those melancholy waters, seeing the three-edged dagger passed from hand to hand, hearing how the woman had been found dead in her beauty on her old golden and crimson bed with the lilies on her breast, and looking at the attitude of the prisoner—in which the judges saw remorse and guilt, and he could only see the unutterable horror of a bereaved lover to whom the world was stripped and naked.
He had stayed but two days in Mantua, but those two days had left an impression on him like that left by the reading at the fall of night of some ghastly poem of the middle ages. He had thought that they had condemned an innocent man, as the judge gave his sentence of the galleys for life: and the scene had often come back to his thoughts.
The vaulted audience chamber; the strong light pouring in through high grated windows; the pillars of many-coloured marbles, the frescoed roof; the country people massed together in the public place, with faces that were like paintings of Mantegna or Masaccio; the slender supple form of the accused drooping like a bruised lily between the upright figures of two carabineers; the judge leaning down over his high desk in black robes and black square cap, like some Venetian lawgiver of Veronese or of Titian; and beyond, through an open casement, the silvery, watery, sun-swept landscape that was still the same as when Romeo came, banished, to Mantua. All these had remained impressed upon his mind by the tragedy which there came to its close as a lover, passionate as Romeo and yet more unfortunate, was condemned to the galleys for his life. "They have ill judged a guiltless man," he had said to himself as he had left the court with a sense of pain before injustice done, and went withheart saddened by a stranger's fate into the misty air, along the shining water where the Mills of the Twelve Apostles were churning the great dam into froth, as they had done through seven centuries, since first, with reverent care, the builder had set the sacred statues there that they might bless the grinding of the corn.
Sitting now in the silence of the tomb, Sanctis recalled that day, when, towards the setting of the sun, he had strolled there by the water-wheels of the twelve disciples, and allowed the fate of an unknown man, declared a criminal by impartial judges, to cloud over for him the radiance of evening on the willowy Serraglio and chase away his peaceful thoughts of Virgil. He remembered how the country people had come out by the bridge and glided away in their boats, and talked of the murder of Donna Aloysia; and how they had, one and all of them, said, going back over the lake water or along the reed-fringed roads, to their farmhouses, that there could be no manner of doubt about it—the lover had been moon-struck and mad with jealousy, and his dagger had found its way to her breast. They had not blamed him much, but they had never doubted his guilt; and the foreigner alone, standing by the mill gateway, and seeing the golden sun go down beyond the furthermost fields of reeds that grew blood-red as the waters grew, had thought to himself and said half aloud:
"Poor Romeo! he is guiltless, even though the dagger were his"——
And a prior, black-robed, with broad looped-up black hat, who was also watching the sunset, breviary in hand, had smiled and said, "Nay, Romeo, banished to us, had no blood on his hand; but this Romeo, native of our city, has. Mantua will be not ill rid of Luitbrand d'Este."
Then he again, in obstinacy and against all the priest's better knowledge as a Mantuan, had insisted and said, "The man is innocent."
And the sun had gone down as he had spoken, and the priest had smiled—a smile cold as a dagger's blade—perhaps recalling sins confessed to him of love that had changed to hate, of fierce delight ending in as fierce a death-blow. Mantua in her day had seen so much alike of love and hate.
"The man is innocent," he had said insisting, whilst the carmine light had glowed on the lagoons and bridges, and on the Lombard walls, and Gothic gables, and high bell-towers, and ducal palaces, and feudal fortresses of the city in whose street Crichton fell to the hired steel of bravoes.
She had the heaven-born faculty of observation of the poets, and she had that instinct of delight in natural beauty which made Linnæus fall on his knees before the English gorse and thank God for having made so beautiful a thing.
Her sympathies and her imaginings spent themselves in solitary song as she made the old strings of the lute throb in low cadence when she sat solitary by her hearth on the rock floor of the grave; and out of doors her eyes filled and her lips laughed when she wandered through the leafy land and found the warbler's nest hung upon the reeds, or the first branching asphodel in flower. She could not have told why these made her happy, why she could watch for half a day untired the little wren building where the gladwyn blossomed on the water's edge. It was only human life that hurt her, embittered her, and filled her with hatred of it.
As she walked one golden noon by the Sasso Scritto, clothed with its myrtle and thyme and its quaint cacti that later would bear their purple heads of fruit; the shining sea beside her, and above her the bold arbutus-covered heights, with the little bells of the sheep sounding ontheir sides, she saw a large fish, radiant as a gem, with eyes like rubies. Some men had it; a hook was in its golden gills, and they had tied its tail to the hook so that it could not stir, and they had put it in a pail of water that it might not die too quickly, die ere they could sell it. A little further on she saw a large green and gold snake, one of the most harmless of all earth's creatures, that only asked to creep into the sunshine, to sleep in its hole in the rock, to live out its short, innocent life under the honey smile of the rosemary; the same men stoned it to death, heaping the pebbles and broken sandstone on it, and it perished slowly in long agony, being large and tenacious of life. Yet a little further on, again, she saw a big square trap of netting, with a blinded chaffinch as decoy. The trap was full of birds, some fifty or sixty of them, all kinds of birds, from the plain brown minstrel, beloved of the poets, to the merry and amber-winged oriole, from the dark grey or russet-bodied fly-catcher and whinchat to the glossy and handsome jay, cheated and caught as he was going back to the north; they had been trapped, and would be strung on a string and sold for a copper coin the dozen; and of many of them the wings or the legs were broken and the eyes were already dim. The men who had taken them were seated on the thymy turf grinning like apes, with pipes in their mouths, and a flask of wine between their knees.
She passed on, helpless.
She thought of words that Joconda had once quoted to her, words which said that men were made in God's likeness!
While it is winter the porphyrion sails down the willowy streams beside the sultan-hen that is to be his love, and sees her not, and stays not herpassage upon the water or through the air; she does not live as yet to him. But when the breath of the spring brings the catkins from the willows, and the violets amidst the wood-moss on the banks, then he awakes and beholds her; and then the stream reflects but her shape for him, and the rushes are full of the melody of his love-call. It was still winter with Este—a bitter winter of discontent; and he had no eyes for this water-bird that swam with him through the icy current of his adversity.
To break the frozen flood that imprisoned him was his only thought.
Air is the king of physicians; he who stands often with nothing between him and the open heavens will gain from them health both moral and physical.
"Yes; you have a right to know. After all, it was ruin to me, but it is not much of a story; a tale-teller with his guitar on a vintage night would soon make a better one. I loved a woman. She lived in Mantua. So did I, too. For her sake I lost three whole years—three years of the best of my life. And yet, what is gain except love, and what better than joy can we have? A pomegranate is ripe but once. And I—my pomegranate is rotten for evermore! We lived in Mantua. It is a strange sad place. It was great and gay enough once. Grander pomp than Mantua's there was never known in Italy. Felix Mantua!—and now it is all decaying, mouldering, sinking, fading; it is silent as death; the mists, the waters, the empty palaces, the walls that the marshes are eating little by little every day, the grass and the moss and the wild birds' nests on the roofs, on the temples, on the bridges,all are desolate in Mantua now. Yet is it beautiful in its loneliness, when the sunrise comes over the seas of reeds, and the towers and the arches are reflected in the pools and streams; and yet again at night, when the moon is high and the lagoons are as sheets of silver, and the shadows come and go over the bulrushes and St. Andrea lifts itself against the stars. Yes; then it is still Mantova la Gloriosa."
His voice dropped; the tears came into his closing eyes as though he looked on the dead face of a familiar friend.
He felt the home sickness of the exile, of the wanderer who knows not where to lay his head.
The glory was gone from the city.
Its greatness was but as a ghost that glided through its deserted streets calling in vain on dead men to arise.
The rough red sail of the fishing-boat was alone on the waters once crowded with the silken sails of gilded galleys; the toad croaked and the stork made her nest where the Lords of Gonzaga had gone forth to meet their brides of Este or of Medici; Virgil, Alboin, great Karl, Otho, Petrarca, Ariosto, had passed by here over this world of waters and become no more than dreams; and the vapours and the dust together had stolen the smile from Giulio's Psyche, and the light from Mantegna's arabesques. On the vast walls the grass grew, and in the palaces of princes the winds wandered and the beggars slept. All was still, disarmed, lonely, forgotten; left to a silence like the silence of the endless night of death. Yet it was dear to him; this sad and stately city, waiting for the slow death of an unpitied and lingering decay.
It was dear to him from habit, from birth, from memory, from affinity, as the reeds of its stagnant waters were dear to the sedge-warbler that hung itsslender nest on the stem of a rush. A price was set on his head; and never more, he thought, would he see the sunshine in ripples of gold come over the grey lagoons.
No one cared; the terrible, barren, acrid truth, that science trumpets abroad as though it were some new-found joy, touched her ignorance with its desolating despair. No one cared. Life was only sustained by death. The harmless and lovely children of the air and of the moor were given over, year after year, century after century, to the bestial play and the ferocious appetites of men. The wondrous beauty of the earth renewed itself only to be the scene of endless suffering, of interminable torture. The human tyrant, without pity, greedy as a child, more brutal than the tiger in his cruelty, had all his way upon the innocent races to which he begrudged a tuft of reeds, a palm's breadth of moss or sand. The slaughter, the misery, the injustice, renewed themselves as the greenness of the world did. No one cared. There was no voice upon the blood-stained waters. There was no rebuke from the offended heavens. To all prayer or pain there was eternal silence as the sole reply.
The uneducated are perhaps unjustly judged sometimes. To the ignorant both right and wrong are only instincts; when one remembers their piteous and innocent confusion of ideas, the twilight of dim comprehension in which they dwell, one feels that oftentimes the laws of cultured men are too hard on them, and that, in a better sense than that of injustice and reproach, there ought indeed to be two laws for rich and poor.
It needs a great nature to bear the weight of a great gratitude.
To a great nature it gives wings that bear it up to heaven; a lower nature feels it always as a clog that impatiently is dragged only so long as force compels.
When the thoughts of youth return, fresh as the scent of new-gathered blossoms, to the tired old age which has so long forgot them, the coming of Death is seldom very distant.
The boat went through the waters swiftly, as the wind blew more strongly; the sandy shore with its scrub of low-growing rock-rose and prickly Christ's thorn did not change its landscape, but what she looked at always was the sea; the sea that in the light had the smiling azure of a young child's eyes, and when the clouds cast shadows on it, had the intense impenetrable brilliancy of a jewel.
In the distance were puffs of white and grey, like smoke or mist; those mists were Corsica and Caprajà.
Elba towered close at hand.
Gorgona lay far beyond, with all the other little isles that seem made to shelter Miranda and Ariel, but of Gorgona she knew nothing; she was steering straight towards it, but it was many a league distant on the northerly water.
When she at last stopped her boat in its course she was at the Sasso Scritto: a favourite resting-place with her, where, on feast-days, when Joconda let her have liberty from housework and rush-plaiting and spinning of flax, she always came.
Northward, there was a long smooth level beach of sand, and beyond that a lagoon where all the waterbirds that love both the sea and the marsh came in large flocks, and spread their wings over the broad spaces in which the salt water and the fresh were mingled. Beyond this there were cliffs of the humid red tufa, and the myrtle and the holy thorn grew down their sides, and met in summer the fragrant hesperis of the shore.
These cliffs were fine bold bluffs, and one of them had been called from time immemorial the Sasso Scritto,—why, no one knew; the only writing on it was done by the hand of Nature. It was steep and lofty; on its summit were the ruins of an old fortress of the middle ages; its sides were clothed with myrtle, aloe, and rosemary, and at its feet were boulders of marble, rose and white in the sun; rock pools, with exquisite network of sunbeams crossing their rippling surface, and filled with green ribbon-grasses and red sea-foliage, and shining gleams of broken porphyry, and pieces of agate and cornelian.
The yellow sands hereabouts were bright just now with the sea-daffodil, and the sea-stocks, which would blossom later, were pricking upward to the Lenten light; great clusters of southern-wood waved in the wind, and the pungent sea-rush grew in long lines along the shore, where the sand-piper was dropping her eggs, and the blue-rock was carrying dry twigs and grass to his home in the ruins above or the caverns beneath, and the stock-doves in large companies were winging their way over sea towards the Maritime or the Pennine Alps.
This was a place that Musa loved, and she would come here and sit for hours, and watch the roseate cloud of the returning flamingoes winging their way from Sardinia, and the martins busy at their masonry in the cliffs, and the Arctic longipennes going away northward as the weather opened, and the stream-swallows hunting early gnats and frogs on the water,and the kingfisher digging his tortuous underground home in the sand. Here she would lie for hours amongst the rosemary, and make silent friendships with the populations of the air, while the sweet blue sky was above her head, and the sea, as blue, stretched away till it was lost in light.
Once up above, on these cliffs, the eye could sweep over the sea north and south, and the soil was more than ever scented with that fragrant and humble blue-flowered shrub of which the English madrigals and glees of the Stuart and Hanoverian poets so often speak, and seem to smell. Behind the cliffs stretched moorland, marshes, woodland, intermingled, crossed by many streams, holding many pools, blue-fringed in May with iris, and osier beds, and vast fields of reeds, and breadths of forest with dense thorny underwood, where all wild birds came in their season, and where all was quiet save for a bittern's cry, a boar's snort, a snipe's scream, on the lands once crowded with the multitudes that gave the eagle of Persia and the brazen trumpets of Lydia to the legions of Rome.
Under their thickets of the prickly sloe-tree and the sweet-smelling bay lay the winding ways of buried cities; their runlets of water rippled where kings and warriors slept beneath the soil, and the yellow marsh lily, and the purple and the rose of the wind-flower and the pasque-flower, and the bright red of the Easter tulips, and the white and the gold of the asphodels, and the colours of a thousand other rarer and less homelike blossoms, spread their innocent glory in their turn to the sky and the breeze, above the sunken stones of courts and gates and palaces and prisons.
These moors were almost as solitary as the deserts are.
Now and then against the blue of the sky and the brown of the wood, there rose the shapes of shepherds and their flocks; now and then herds of young horseswent by, fleet and unconscious of their doom; now and then the sound of a rifle cracked the silence of the windless air; but these came but seldom.
Maremma is wide, and its people are scattered.
In autumn and in winter, hunters, shepherds, swineherds, sportsmen, birdcatchers, might spoil the solemn peace of these moors, but in spring and summer no human soul was seen upon them. The boar and the buffalo, the flamingo and the roebuck, the great plover and the woodcock, reigned alone.
"They say he sang too well, and that was why they burnt him," said Andreino to her to-day, after telling her for the hundredth time of what he had seen once on the Ligurian shore, far away yonder northward, when he, who knew nothing of Adonais or Prometheus, had been called, a stout seafaring man in that time, amongst other peasants of the country-side, to help bring in the wood for a funeral pyre by the sea.
He had known nought of the songs or the singer, but he loved to tell the tale he had heard then; and say how he had seen, he himself, with his own eyes, the drowned poet burn, far away yonder where the pines stood by the sea, and how the flames had curled around the heart that men had done their best to break, and how it had remained unburnt in the midst, whilst all the rest drifted in ashes down the wind. He knew nought of the Skylark's ode, and nought of the Cor Cordium; but the scene by the seashore had burned itself as though with flame into his mind, and he spoke of it a thousand times if once, sitting by the edge of the sea that had killed the singer.
"Will they burn me if I sing too well?" the child asked him this day, the words of Joconda being with her.
"Oh, that is sure," said Andreino, half in jest and half in earnest. "They burnt him because he sang betterthan all of them. So they said. I do not know. I know the resin ran out of the pinewood all golden and hissing and his heart would not burn, all we could do. You are a female thing, Musa; your heart will be the first to burn, the first of all!"
"Will it?" said Musa seriously, but not any way alarmed, for the thought of that flaming pile by the seashore by night was a familiar image to her.
"Ay, for sure; you will be a woman!" said Andreino, hammering into his boat.
"Though there is not a soul here, still sometimes they come—Lucchese, Pistoiese, what not—they come as they go; they are a faithless lot; they love all winter, and while the corn is in the ear it goes well, but after harvest—phew!—they put their gains in their pockets and they are off and away back to their mountains. There are broken hearts in Maremma when the threshing is done."
"Yes," said Musa again.
It was nothing to her, and she heeded but little.
"Yes, because men speak too lightly and women hearken too quickly; that is how the mischief is born. With the autumn the mountaineers come. They are strong and bold; they are ruddy and brown; they work all day, but in the long nights they dance and they sing; then the girl listens. She thinks it is all true, though it has all been said before in his own hills to other ears. The winter nights are long, and the devil is always near; when the corn goes down and the heat is come there is another sad soul the more, another burden to carry, and he—he goes back to the mountains. What does he care? Only when he comes down into the plains again he goes to another place to work, because men do not love women's tears. That is how it goes in Maremma."
"So the saints will pluck her to themselves at last," thought Joconda; and the dreariness, the lovelessness, the hopelessness of such an existence did not occur to her, because age, which has learned the solace and sweetness of peace, never remembers that to youth peace seems only stagnation, inanition, death.
The exhausted swimmer, reaching the land, falls prone on it, and blesses it; but the outgoing swimmer, full of strength, spurns the land, and only loves the high-crested wave, the abyss of the deep sea.
Imagination without culture is crippled and moves slowly; but it can be pure imagination, and rich also, as folk-lore will tell the vainest.
It is this narrowness of the peasant mind which philosophers never fairly understand, and demagogues understand but too well, and warp to their own selfish purposes and profits.
Flying, the flamingoes are like a sunset cloud; walking, they are like slender spirals of flame traversing the curling foam. When one looks on them across black lines of storm-blown weeds on a November morning in the marshes, as their long throats twist in the air with the flexile motion of the snake, the grace of a lily blown by wind, one thinks of Thebes, of Babylon, of the gorgeous Persia of Xerxes, of the lascivious Egypt of the Ptolemies.
The world has grown grey and joyless in the twilight of age and fatigue, but these birds keep the colour of its morning. Eos has kissed them.
For want of a word lives often drift apart.
Nausicaa, in the safe shelter of her father's halls, had never tended Odysseus with more serenity and purity than the daughter of Saturnino tended his fellow-slave.
The sanctity of the tombs lay on them, the dead were so near; neither profanity nor passion seemed to have any place here in this mysterious twilight alive with the memories of a vanished people. Her innocence was a grand and noble thing, like any one of the largest white lilies that rose up from the noxious mud of the marshes; a cup of ivory wet with the dewdrops of dawn, blossoming fair on fetid waters. And in him the languor of sickness and of despair borrowed unconsciously for awhile the liveries of chastity; and he spoke no word, he made no gesture, that would have scared from its original calm the soul of this lonely creature, who succoured him with so much courage and so much compassion that they awed him with the sense of an eternal, infinite, and overwhelming obligation. It needs a great nature to bear the weight of a great gratitude.
To a great nature it gives wings that bear it up to heaven; a lower nature feels it always a clog that impatiently is dragged only so long as force compels.
Her daily labours remained the same, but it seemed to her as if she had the strength of those immortals he told her she resembled. She felt as though she trod on air, as though she drank the sunbeams and they gave her force like wine; she had no sense of fatigue; she might have had wings at her ankles, and nectar in her veins. She was so happy, with that perfect happiness which only comes where the world cannot enter, and thefree nature has lifted itself to the light, knowing nothing of, and caring nothing for, the bonds of custom and of prejudice with which men have paralysed and cramped themselves, calling the lower the higher law.
The world was so far from her; she knew not of it; she was a law to herself, and her whole duty seemed to her set forth in one single word, perhaps the noblest word in human language—fidelity. When life is cast in solitary places, filled with high passions, and led aloof from men, the laws which are needful to curb the multitudes, but yet are poor conventional foolish things at their best, sink back into their true signification, and lose their fictitious awe.
Moreover, love is for ever measureless, and the deepest and most passionate love is that which survives the death of esteem.
Friendship needs to be rooted in respect, but love can live upon itself alone. Love is born of a glance, a touch, a murmur, a caress; esteem cannot beget it, nor lack of esteem slay it.Questi che mai da me non fia diviso, shall be for ever its consolation amidst hell. One life alone is beloved, is beautiful, is needful, is desired: one life alone out of all the millions of earth. Though it fall, err, betray, be mocked of others and forsaken by itself, what does this matter? This cannot alter love. The more it is injured by itself, derided of men, abandoned of God, the more will love still see that it has need of love, and to the faithless will be faithful.
He stood mute and motionless awhile. Then as the truth was borne in on him, tears gushed from his eyes like rain, and he laughed long, and laughed loud as madmen do.
He never doubted her.
He sprang up the stone steps, and leapt into the open air: into that light of day which he had been forbidden to see so long.
To stand erect there, to look over the plains, to breathe, and move, and gaze, and stretch his arms out to the infinite spaces of the sea and sky—this alone was so intense a joy that he felt mad with it.
Never again to hide with the snake and the fox; never again to tremble as his shadow went beside him on the sand; never to waste the sunlit hours hidden in the bowels of the earth; never to be afraid of every leaf that stirred, of every bird that flew, of every moon-beam that fell across his path!—he laughed and sobbed with the ecstasy of his release.
"O God, Thou hast not forgotten!" he cried in that rapture of freedom.
All the old childish faiths that had been taught him by dim old altars in stately Mantuan churches came back to his memory and heart.
On the barren rock of Gorgona he had cursed and blasphemed the Creator and creation of a world that was hell; he had been without hope: he had derided all the faiths of his youth as illusions woven by devils to make the disappointment of man the more bitter.
But now in the sweetness of his liberty, all the old happy beliefs rushed back to him; he saw Deity in the smile of the seas, in the light upon the plains. He was free!
The world has lost the secret of making labour a joy; but nature has given it to a few. Where themaidens dance theSaltarellounder the deep Sardinian forests, and the honey and the grapes are gathered beneath the snowy sides of Etna, and the oxen walk up to their loins in flowing grass where the long aisles of pines grow down the Adrian shore, this wood-magic is known still of the old simple charm of the pastoral life.
"Does it vex you that I am not a boy?" said the girl—"why should it vex you? I can do all they can, I can row better than many, and sail and steer; I can drive too, and I know what to do with the nets; if I had a boat of my own you would see what I could do."
"All that is very well," said Joconda with a little nod. "I do not say it is not. But you have not a boat of your own, that is just it; that is what women always suffer from; they have to steer, but the craft is some one else's, and the haul too."
Wild bird of sea and cloud, you are a stormy petrel, but there may come a storm too many—and I am old. I have done my best, but that is little. If you were a lad one would not be so uneasy. I suppose the good God knows best—if one could be sure of that—I am a hard working woman, and I have done no great sin that I know of, but up in heaven they never take any thought of me. When I was young, I asked them at my marriage altar to help me, and when my boys were born, I did the same, but they never noticed; my man was drowned, and my beautiful boys got the fever and sickened one by one and died: that was all I got. Priests say it is best; priests are not mothers.
"They were greater than the men that live now," she said with a solemn tenderness,
"Perhaps; Why think so?"
"Because they were not afraid of their dead; they built them beautiful houses, and gave them beautiful things. Now, men are afraid or ashamed, or they have no remembrance. Their dead are huddled away in dust or mud as though they were hateful or sinful. That is what I think so cowardly, so thankless. If they will not bear the sight of death, it were better to let great ships go slowly out, far out to sea, and give the waves their lost ones."
When gardeners plant and graft, they know very well what will be the issue of their work; they do not expect the rose from a bulb of garlic, or look for the fragrant olive from a slip of briar; but the culturers of human nature are less wise, and they sow poison, yet rave in reproaches when it breeds and brings forth its like. "The rosebud garden of girls" is a favourite theme for poets, and the maiden in her likeness to a half-opened blossom, is as near purity and sweetness as a human creature can be, yet what does the world do with its opening buds?—it thrusts them in the forcing-house amidst the ordure, and then, if they perish prematurely, never blames itself. The streets absorb the girls of the poor; society absorbs the daughters of the rich; and not seldom one form of prostitution, like the other, keeps its captives "bound in the dungeon of their own corruption."
The frivolous are always frightened at any strength or depth of nature, or any glimpse of sheer despair.
Not to be consoled!
What can seem more strange to the shallow? What can seem more obstinate to the weak? Not to be consoled is to offend all swiftly forgetting humanity, most of whose memories are writ on water.
It is harder to keep true to high laws and pure instincts in modern society than it was in days of martyrdom. There is nothing in the whole range of life so dispiriting and so unnerving as a monotony of indifference. Active persecution and fierce chastisement are tonics to the nerves; but the mere weary conviction that no one cares, that no one notices, that there is no humanity that honours, and no deity that pities, is more destructive of all higher effort than any conflict with tyranny or with barbarism.
Yet as he thought, so he did not realise that he would ever cease to be in the world—who does? Life was still young in him, was prodigal to him of good gifts; of enmity he only knew so much as made his triumph finer, and of love he had more than enough. His life was full—at times laborious—but always poetical and always victorious. He could not realise that the day of darkness would ever come for him, when neither woman nor man would delight him, when no roses would have fragrance for him, and no song any spell to rouse him. Genius gives immortality in another way than in the vulgar one of being praised by others after death; it gives elasticity, unwearied sympathy, and that sense of some essence stronger than death, of some spirit higher than the tomb, which nothing can destroy. It is in this sense that genius walks with the immortals.
A cruel story runs on wheels, and every hand oils the wheels as they run.
You may weep your eyes blind, you may shout your throat dry, you may deafen the ears of your world for half a lifetime, and you may never get a truth believed in, never have a simple fact accredited. But the lie flies like the swallow, multiplies itself like the caterpillar, is accepted everywhere, like the visits of a king; it is a royal guest for whom the gates fly open, the red carpet is unrolled, the trumpets sound, the crowds applaud.
She lived, like all women of her stamp and her epoch, in an atmosphere of sugared sophisms; she never reflected, she never admitted, that she did wrong; in her world nothing mattered much, unless, indeed, it were found out, and got into the public mouth.
Shifting as the sands, shallow as the rain-pools, drifting in all danger to a lie, incapable of loyalty, insatiably curious, still as a friend and ill as a foe, kissing like Judas, denying like Peter, impure of thought, even where by physical bias or political prudence still pure in act, the woman of modern society is too often at once the feeblest and the foulest outcome of a false civilisation. Useless as a butterfly, corrupt as a canker, untrue to even lovers and friends because mentally incapable of comprehending what truth means, caring only for physical comfort and mental inclination, tired of living, but afraid of dying; believing some in priests, and some in physiologists, but none at all in virtue; sent to sleep by chloral, kept awake by strong waters and raw meat; bored at twenty, and exhausted at thirty, yet dying in the harness of pleasure rather than drop out of the raceand live naturally; pricking their sated senses with the spur of lust, and fancying it love; taking their passions as they take absinthe before dinner; false in everything, from the swell of their breast to the curls at their throat;—beside them the guilty and tragic figures of old, the Medea, the Clytemnæstra, the Phædra, look almost pure, seem almost noble.
When one thinks that they are the only shape of womanhood which comes hourly before so many men, one comprehends why the old Christianity which made womanhood sacred dies out day by day, and why the new Positivism, which would make her divine, can find no lasting root.
The faith of men can only live by the purity of women, and there is both impurity and feebleness at the core of the dolls of Worth, as the canker of the phylloxera works at the root of the vine.
"What an actress was lost in your mother!" he added with his rough laugh; but he confused the talent of the comedian of society with that of the comedian of the stage, and they are very dissimilar. The latter almost always forgets herself in her part; the former never.
The scorn of genius is the most arrogant and the most boundless of all scorn.
"The fame of the singer can never be but a breath, a sound through a reed. When our lips are once shut, there is on us for ever eternal silence. Who canremember a summer breeze when it has passed by, or tell in any after-time how a laugh or a sigh sounded?"
"When the soldier dies at his post, unhonoured and unpitied, and out of sheer duty, is that unreal because it is noble?" he said one night to his companions. "When the sister of charity hides her youth and her sex under a grey shroud, and gives up her whole life to woe and solitude, to sickness and pain, is that unreal because it is wonderful? A man paints a spluttering candle, a greasy cloth, a mouldy cheese, a pewter can; 'How real!' they cry. If he paint the spirituality of dawn, the light of the summer sea, the flame of arctic nights, of tropic woods, they are called unreal, though they exist no less than the candle and the cloth, the cheese and the can. Ruy Blas is now condemned as unreal because the lovers kill themselves; the realists forget that there are lovers still to whom that death would be possible, would be preferable, to low intrigue and yet more lowering falsehood. They can only see the mouldy cheese, they cannot see the sunrise glory. All that is heroic, all that is sublime, impersonal, or glorious, is derided as unreal. It is a dreary creed. It will make a dreary world. Is not my Venetian glass with its iridescent hues of opal as real every whit as your pot of pewter? Yet the time is coming when every one, morally and mentally at least, will be allowed no other than a pewter pot to drink out of, under pain of being 'writ down an ass'—or worse. It is a dreary prospect."
"Good? bad? If there were only good and bad in this world it would not matter so much," saidCorrèze a little recklessly and at random. "Life would not be such a disheartening affair as it is. Unfortunately the majority of people are neither one nor the other, and have little inclination for either crime or virtue. It would be almost as absurd to condemn them as to admire them. They are like tracts of shifting sand, in which nothing good or bad can take root. To me they are more despairing to contemplate than the darkest depth of evil; out of that may come such hope as comes of redemption and remorse, but in the vast, frivolous, featureless mass of society there is no hope."
"No!" he said with some warmth: "I refuse to recognise the divinity of noise; I utterly deny the majesty of monster choruses; clamour and clangour are the death-knell of music as drapery and so-called realism (which means, if it mean aught, that the dress is more real than the form underneath it!) are the destruction of sculpture. It is very strange. Every day art in every other way becomes more natural and music more artificial. Every day I wake up expecting to hear myselfdénigréand denounced as old-fashioned, because I sing as my nature as well as my training teaches me to do. It is very odd; there is such a cry for naturalism in other arts—we have Millet instead of Claude; we have Zola instead of Georges Sand; we have Dumasfilsinstead of Corneille; we have Mercié instead of Canova; but in music we have precisely the reverse, and we have the elephantine creations, the elaborate and pompous combinations of Baireuth, and the Tone school, instead of the old sweet strains of melody that went straight and clear to the ear and the heart of man. Sometimes my enemies write in their journals that I sing as if I were a Tuscan peasant strolling through his corn—how proudthey make me! But they do not mean to do so. I will not twist and emphasise. I trust to melody. I was taught music in its own country, and I will not sin against the canons of the Italians. They are right. Rhetoric is one thing, and song is another. Why confuse the two? Simplicity is the soul of great music; as it is the mark of great passion. Ornament is out of place in melody which represents single emotions at their height, be they joy, or fear, or hate, or love, or shame, or vengeance, or whatsoever they will. Music is not a science any more than poetry is. It is a sublime instinct, like genius of all kinds. I sing as naturally as other men speak; let me remain natural"——
Childhood goes with us like an echo always, a refrain to the ballad of our life. One always wants one's cradle-air.
"The poor you have always with you," she said to a bevy of great ladies once. "Christ said so. You profess to follow Christ. How have you the poor with you? The back of their garret, the roof of their hovel, touches the wall of your palace, and the wall is thick. You have dissipations, spectacles, diversions that you call charities; you have a tombola for a famine, you have a dramatic performance for a flood, you have a concert for a fire, you have a fancy fair for a leprosy. Do you never think how horrible it is, that mockery of woe? Do you ever wonder at revolutions? Why do you not say honestly that you care nothing? You do care nothing. The poor might forgive the avowal of indifference; they will never forgive the insult of affected pity."
"Why do you go to such a place?" he asked her as she stood on the staircase.
"There are poor there, and great misery," she answered him reluctantly; she did not care to speak of these things at any time.
"And what good will you do? You will be cheated and robbed, and even if you are not, you should know that political science has found that private charity is the hotbed of all idleness."
"When political science has advanced enough to prevent poverty, it may have the right to prevent charity too," she answered him, with a contempt that showed thought on the theme was not new to her. "Perhaps charity—I dislike the word—may do no good; but friendship from the rich to the poor must do good; it must lessen class hatreds."
"Are you a socialist?" said Zouroff with a little laugh, and drew back and let her pass onward.
"My dear! I never say rude things; but, if you wish me to be sincere, I confess I think everybody is a little vulgar now, except old women like me, who adhered to the Faubourg while you all were dancing and changing your dresses seven times a day at St. Cloud. There is a sort of vulgarity in the air; it is difficult to escape imbibing it; there is too little reticence, there is too much tearing about; men are not well-mannered, and women are too solicitous to please, and too indifferent how far they stoop in pleasing. It may be the fault of steam; it may be the fault of smoking; it may come from that flood of new people of whom 'L'Etrangère' is the scarcely exaggerated sample; but, whatever it comes from, there it is—a vulgarity that taints everything, courtsand cabinets as well as society. Your daughter somehow or other has escaped it, and so you find her odd, and the world thinks her stiff. She is neither; but no dignified long-descended point-lace, you know, will ever let itself be twisted and twirled into a cascade and afouillislike your Brétonne lace that is just the fashion of the hour, and worth nothing. I admire your Vera very greatly; she always makes me think of those dear old stately hotels with their grand gardens in which I saw, in my girlhood, the women who, in theirs, had known France before '30. These hotels and their gardens are gone, most of them, and there are stucco and gilt paint in their places. And here are people who think that a gain. I am not one of them."