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Title: Wisdom, Wit, and Pathos of Ouida
       Selected from the Works of Ouida

Author: Ouida

Compiler: F. Sydney Morris

Release Date: July 8, 2007 [EBook #22019]

Language: English

Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1

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  WISDOM, WIT, AND PATHOS

  OF

  OUIDA.

  WISDOM, WIT, AND PATHOS

  _SELECTED FROM THE WORKS_

  OF

  OUIDA

  BY F. SYDNEY MORRIS

  PHILADELPHIA

  J. B. LIPPINCOTT & CO.

  1884




  CONTENTS.


  _SELECTIONS FROM_--

                                                                   PAGE

  ARIADNE                                                             1

  CHANDOS                                                            32

  FOLLE-FARINE                                                       48

  IDALIA                                                             97

  A VILLAGE COMMUNE                                                 106

  PUCK                                                              115

  TWO LITTLE WOODEN SHOES                                           158

  FAME                                                              177

  MOTHS                                                        182, 354

  IN A WINTER CITY                                                  189

  A LEAF IN THE STORM                                               205

  A DOG OF FLANDERS                                                 209

  A BRANCH OF LILAC                                                 216

  SIGNA                                                             220

  TRICOTRIN                                                         264

  A PROVENCE ROSE                                                   288

  PIPISTRELLO                                                       291

  HELD IN BONDAGE                                                   294

  PASCARÈL                                                          296

  IN MAREMMA                                                        335

  UNDER TWO FLAGS                                                   363

  STRATHMORE                                                        417

  FRIENDSHIP                                                        427

  WANDA                                                             452




_ARIADNE._


One grows to love the Roman fountains as sea-born men the sea. Go where
you will there is the water; whether it foams by Trevi, where the green
moss grows in it like ocean weed about the feet of the ocean god, or
whether it rushes reddened by the evening light, from the mouth of an
old lion that once saw Cleopatra; whether it leaps high in air, trying
to reach the gold cross on St. Peter's or pours its triple cascade over
the Pauline granite; whether it spouts out of a great barrel in a wall
in old Trastevere, or throws up into the air a gossamer as fine as
Arachne's web in a green garden way where the lizards run, or in a
crowded corner where the fruit-sellers sit against the wall;--in all its
shapes one grows to love the water that fills Rome with an unchanging
melody all through the year.

       *       *       *

And indeed I do believe all things and all traditions. History is like
that old stag that Charles of France found out hunting in the woods
once, with the bronze collar round its neck on which was written, "Cæsar
mihi hoc donavit." How one's fancy loves to linger about that old stag,
and what a crowd of mighty shades come thronging at the very thought of
him! How wonderful it is to think of--that quiet grey beast leading his
lovely life under the shadows of the woods, with his hinds and their
fawns about him, whilst Cæsar after Cæsar fell and generation on
generation passed away and perished! But the sciolist taps you on the
arm. "Deer average fifty years of life; it was some mere court trick of
course--how easy to have such a collar made!" Well, what have we gained?
The stag was better than the sciolist.

       *       *       *

Life costs but little on these sunny, silent shores; four walls of loose
stones, a roof of furze and brambles, a fare of fish and fruit and
millet-bread, a fire of driftwood easily gathered--and all is told. For
a feast pluck the violet cactus; for a holiday push the old red boat to
sea, and set the brown sail square against the sun--nothing can be
cheaper, perhaps few things can be better.

To feel the western breezes blow over that sapphire sea, laden with the
fragrance of a score of blossoming isles. To lie under the hollow rocks,
where centuries before the fisher folk put up that painted tablet to the
dear Madonna, for all poor shipwrecked souls. To climb the high hills
through the tangle of myrtle and tamarisk, and the tufted rosemary, with
the kids bleating above upon some unseen height. To watch the soft night
close in, and the warning lights shine out over shoals and sunken rocks,
and the moon hang low and golden in the blue dusk at the end there under
the arch of the boughs. To spend long hours in the cool, fresh, break of
day, drifting with the tide, and leaping with bare free limbs into the
waves, and lying outstretched upon them, glancing down to the depths
below, where silvery fish are gliding and coral branches are growing,
and pink shells are floating like rose-leaves, five fathoms low and
more. Oh! a good life, and none better, abroad in the winds and weather,
as Nature meant that every living thing should be, only, alas, the
devil put it into the mind of man to build cities! A good life for the
soul and the body: and from it this sea-born Joy came to seek the
Ghetto!

       *       *       *

With a visible and physical ill one can deal; one can thrust a knife
into a man at need, one can give a woman money for bread or masses, one
can run for medicine or a priest. But for a creature with a face like
Ariadnê's, who had believed in the old gods and found them fables, who
had sought for the old altars and found them ruins, who had dreamed of
Imperial Rome and found the Ghetto--for such a sorrow as this, what
could one do?

       *       *       *

Some said I might have been a learned man, had I taken more pains. But I
think it was only their kindness. I have that twist in my brain, which
is the curse of my countrymen--a sort of devilish quickness at doing
well, that prevents us ever doing best; just the same sort of thing that
makes our goatherds rhyme perfect sonnets, and keeps them dunces before
the alphabet.

       *       *       *

If our beloved Leopardi, instead of bemoaning his fate in his despair
and sickening of his narrow home, had tried to see how many fair strange
things there lay at his house door, had tried to care for the troubles
of the men that hung the nets on the trees, and the innocent woes of the
girl that carried the grass to the cow, and the obscure martyrdom of
maternity and widowhood that the old woman had gone through who sat
spinning on the top of the stairs, he would have found that his little
borgo that he hated so for its dulness had all the comedies and
tragedies of life lying under the sound of its tolling bells. He would
not have been less sorrowful, for the greater the soul the sadder it is
for the unutterable waste, the unending pain of life. But he would never
have been dull: he would never have despised, and despising missed, the
stories and the poems that were round him in the millet fields and the
olive orchards. There is only one lamp which we can carry in our hand,
and which will burn through the darkest night, and make the light of a
home for us in a desert place: it is sympathy with everything that
breathes.

       *       *       *

Into other lands I wandered, then, and sought full half the world. When
one wants but little, and has a useful tongue, and knows how to be merry
with the young folk, and sorrowful with the old, and can take the fair
weather with the foul, and wear one's philosophy like an easy boot,
treading with it on no man's toe, and no dog's tail; why, if one be of
this sort, I say, one is, in a great manner, independent of fortune; and
the very little that one needs one can usually obtain. Many years I
strayed about, seeing many cities and many minds, like Odysseus; being
no saint, but, at the same time, being no thief and no liar.

       *       *       *

Art was dear to me. Wandering through many lands, I had come to know the
charm of quiet cloisters; the delight of a strange, rare volume; the
interest of a quaint bit of pottery; the unutterable loveliness of some
perfect painter's vision, making a glory in some dusky, world-forgotten
church: and so my life was full of gladness here in Rome, where the
ass's hoof ringing on a stone may show you that Vitruvius was right,
where you had doubted him; or the sun shining down upon a cabbage
garden, or a coppersmith's shreds of metal, may gleam on a signet ring
of the Flavian women, or a broken vase that may have served vile Tullia
for drink.

       *       *       *

Art is, after nature, the only consolation that one has at all for
living.

       *       *       *

I have been all my life blown on by all sorts of weather, and I know
there is nothing so good as the sun and the wind for driving ill-nature
and selfishness out of one.

       *       *       *

Anything in the open air is always well; it is because men now-a-days
shut themselves up so much in rooms and pen themselves in stifling
styes, where never the wind comes or the clouds are looked at, that
puling discontent and plague-struck envy are the note of all modern
politics and philosophies. The open air breeds Leonidas, the factory
room Felix Pyat.

       *       *       *

I lit my pipe. A pipe is a pocket philosopher, a truer one than
Socrates. For it never asks questions. Socrates must have been very
tiresome when one thinks of it.

       *       *       *

I have had some skill in managing the minds of crowds; it is a mere
knack, like any other; it belongs to no particular character or culture.
Arnold of Brescia had it, and so had Masaniello. Lamartine had it, and
so had Jack Cade.

       *       *       *

It is of use to have a reputation for queerness; it gains one many
solitary moments of peace.

       *       *       *

Ersilia was a good soul, and full of kindliness; but charity is a flower
not naturally of earthly growth, and it needs manuring with a promise of
profit.

       *       *       *

The soul of the poet is like a mirror of an astrologer: it bears the
reflection of the past and of the future, and can show the secrets of
men and gods; but all the same it is dimmed by the breath of those who
stand by and gaze into it.

       *       *       *

"You are not unhappy now?" I said to her in farewell.

She looked at me with a smile.

"You have given me hope; and I am in Rome, and I am young."

She was right. Rome may be only a ruin, and Hope but another name for
deception and disappointment; but Youth is supreme happiness in itself,
because all possibilities lie in it, and nothing in it is as yet
irrevocable.

       *       *       *

There never was an Æneas; there never was a Numa; well, what the better
are we? We only lose the Trojan ship gliding into Tiber's mouth, when
the woodland thickets that bloomed by Ostia were reddening with the
first warmth of the day's sun; we only lose the Sabine lover going by
the Sacred Way at night, and sweet Egeria weeping in the woods of Nemi;
and are--by their loss--how much the poorer!

Perhaps all these things never were.

The little stone of truth, rolling through the many ages of the world,
has gathered and grown grey with the thick mosses of romance and
superstition. But tradition must always have that little stone of truth
as its kernel; and perhaps he who rejects all, is likelier to be wrong
than even foolish folk like myself who love to believe all, and who
tread the new paths, thinking ever of the ancient stories.

       *       *       *

There can be hardly any life more lovely upon earth than that of a young
student of art in Rome. With the morning, to rise to the sound of
countless bells and of innumerable streams, and see the silver lines of
the snow new fallen on the mountains against the deep rose of the dawn,
and the shadows of the night steal away softly from off the city,
releasing, one by one, dome and spire, and cupola and roof, till all the
wide white wonder of the place discloses itself under the broad
brightness of full day; to go down into the dark cool streets, with the
pigeons fluttering in the fountains, and the sounds of the morning
chants coming from many a church door and convent window, and little
scholars and singing children going by with white clothes on, or scarlet
robes, as though walking forth from the canvas of Botticelli or
Garofalo; to eat frugally, sitting close by some shop of flowers and
birds, and watching all the while the humours and the pageants of the
streets by quaint corners, rich with sculptures of the Renaissance, and
spanned by arches of architects that builded for Agrippa, under grated
windows with arms of Frangipanni or Colonna, and pillars that
Apollodorus raised; to go into the great courts of palaces, murmurous
with the fall of water, and fresh with green leaves and golden fruit,
that rob the colossal statues of their gloom and gauntness, and thence
into the vast chambers where the greatest dreams that men have ever had,
are written on panel and on canvas, and the immensity and the silence of
them all are beautiful and eloquent with dead men's legacies to the
living, where the Hours and the Seasons frolic beside the Maries at the
Sepulchre, and Adonis bares his lovely limbs, in nowise ashamed because
S. Jerome and S. Mark are there; to study and muse, and wonder and be
still, and be full of the peace which passes all understanding, because
the earth is lovely as Adonis is, and life is yet unspent; to come out
of the sacred light, half golden, and half dusky, and full of many
blended colours, where the marbles and the pictures live, sole dwellers
in the deserted dwellings of princes; to come out where the oranges are
all aglow in the sunshine, and the red camellias are pushing against the
hoary head of the old stone Hermes, and to go down the width of the
mighty steps into the gay piazza, alive with bells tolling, and crowds
laughing, and drums abeat, and the flutter of carnival banners in the
wind; and to get away from it all with a full heart, and ascend to see
the sun set from the terrace of the Medici, or the Pamfili, or the
Borghese woods, and watch the flame-like clouds stream homewards behind
S. Peter's, and the pines of Monte Mario grow black against the west,
till the pale green of evening spreads itself above them, and the stars
arise; and then, with a prayer--be your faith what it will--a prayer to
the Unknown God, to go down again through the violet-scented air and the
dreamful twilight, and so, with unspeakable thankfulness, simply because
you live, and this is Rome--so homeward.

       *       *       *

The strong instinctive veracity in her weighed the measure of her days,
and gave them their right name. She was content, her life was full of
the sweetness and strength of the arts, and of the peace of noble
occupation and endeavour. But some true instinct in her taught her that
this is peace, but is not more than peace. Happiness comes but from the
beating of one heart upon another.

       *       *       *

There was a high wall near, covered with peach-trees, and topped with
wistaria and valerian, and the handsome wild caperplant; and against the
wall stood rows of tall golden sunflowers late in their blooming; the
sun they seldom could see for the wall, and it was pathetic always to
me, as the day wore on, to watch the poor stately amber heads turn
straining to greet their god, and only meeting the stones and the
cobwebs, and the peach-leaves of their inexorable barrier.

They were so like us!--straining after the light, and only finding
bricks and gossamer and wasps'-nests! But the sunflowers never made
mistakes as we do: they never took the broken edge of a glass bottle or
the glimmer of a stable lanthorn for the glory of Helios, and comforted
themselves with it--as we can do.

       *       *       *

Dear, where we love much we always forgive, because we ourselves are
nothing, and what we love is all.

       *       *       *

There is something in the silence of an empty room that sometimes has a
terrible eloquence: it is like the look of coming death in the eyes of a
dumb animal; it beggars words and makes them needless.

       *       *       *

When you have said to yourself that you will kill any one, the world
only seems to hold yourself and him, and God--who will see the justice
done.

       *       *       *

What is it that love does to a woman?--without it she only sleeps; with
it, alone, she lives.

       *       *       *

A great love is an absolute isolation, and an absolute absorption.
Nothing lives or moves or breathes, save one life: for one life alone
the sun rises and sets, the seasons revolve, the clouds bear rain, and
the stars ride on high; the multitudes around cease to exist, or seem
but ghostly shades; of all the sounds of earth there is but one voice
audible; all past ages have been but the herald of one soul; all
eternity can be but its heritage alone.

       *       *       *

Is Nature kind or cruel? Who can tell?

The cyclone comes, or the earthquake; the great wave rises and swallows
the cities and the villages, and goes back whence it came; the earth
yawns, and devours the pretty towns and the sleeping children, the
gardens where the lovers were sitting, and the churches where women
prayed, and then the morass dries up and the gulf unites again. Men
build afresh, and the grass grows, and the trees, and all the flowering
seasons come back as of old. But the dead are dead: nothing changes
that!

As it is with the earth, so it is with our life; our own poor, short,
little life, that is all we can really call our own.

Calamities shatter, and despair engulfs it; and yet after a time the
chasm seems to close; the storm wave seems to roll back; the leaves and
the grass return; and we make new dwellings. That is, the daily ways of
living are resumed, and the common tricks of our speech and act are as
they used to be before disaster came upon us. Then wise people say, he
or she has "got over it." Alas, alas! the drowned children will not come
back to us; the love that was struck down, the prayer that was silenced,
the altar that was ruined, the garden that was ravished, they are all
gone for ever,--for ever, for ever! Yet we live; because grief does not
always kill, and often does not speak.

       *       *       *

I crept through the myrtles downward, away from the house where the
statue lay shattered. The earliest of the nightingales of the year was
beginning her lay in some leafy covert hard by, but never would he hear
music in their piping again; never, never: any more than I should hear
the song of the Faun in the fountain.

For the song that we hear with our ears is only the song that is sung in
our hearts.

And his heart, I knew, would be for ever empty and silent, like a temple
that has been burned with fire, and left standing, pitiful and terrible,
in mockery of a lost religion, and of a forsaken god.

       *       *       *

Men and women, losing the thing they love, lose much, but the artist
loses far more; for him are slaughtered all the children of his dreams,
and from him are driven all the fair companions of his solitude.

       *       *       *

Love art alone, forsaking all other loves, and she will make you happy,
with a happiness that shall defy the seasons and the sorrows of time,
the pains of the vulgar and the changes of fortune, and be with you day
and night, a light that is never dim. But mingle with it any human
love--and art will look for ever at you with the eyes of Christ when he
looked at the faithless follower as the cock crew.

       *       *       *

And, indeed, there are always the poor: the vast throngs born century
after century, only to know the pangs of life and of death, and nothing
more. Methinks that human life is, after all, but like a human body,
with a fair and smiling face, but all the limbs ulcered and cramped and
racked with pain. No surgery of statecraft has ever known how to keep
the fair head erect, yet give the trunk and the limbs health.

       *       *       *

For in a great love there is a self-sustaining strength by which it
lives, deprived of everything, as there are plants that live upon our
barren ruins burned by the sun, and parched and shelterless, yet ever
lifting green leaves to the light.

       *       *       *

And indeed after all there is nothing more cruel than the impotence of
genius to hold and keep those commonest joys and mere natural affections
which dullards and worse than dullards rejoice in at their pleasure; the
common human things, whose loss makes the great possessions of its
imperial powers all valueless and vain as harps unstrung, or as lutes
that are broken.

       *       *       *

"This world of our own immediate day is weak and weary, because it is no
longer young; yet it possesses one noble attribute--it has an acute and
almost universal sympathy, which does indeed often degenerate into a
false and illogical sentiment, yet serves to redeem an age of egotism.
We have escaped both the gem-like hardness of the Pagan, and the
narrowing selfishness of the Christian and the Israelite. We are sick
for the woe of creation, and we wonder why such woe is ours, and why it
is entailed on the innocent dumb beasts, that perish in millions for us,
unpitied, day and night. Rome had no altar to Pity: it is the one God
that we own. When that pity in us for all things is perfected, perhaps
we shall have reached a religion of sympathy that will be purer than any
religion the world has yet seen, and more productive. 'Save my country!'
cried the Pagan to his deities. 'Save my soul!' cries the Christian at
his altars. We, who are without a god, murmur to the great unknown
forces of Nature: 'Let me save others some little portion of this pain
entailed on all simple and guileless things, that are forced to live,
without any fault of their own at their birth, or any will of their own
in their begetting.'"

       *       *       *

How should we have great Art in our day? We have no faith. Belief of
some sort is the lifeblood of Art. When Athene and Zeus ceased to excite
any veneration in the minds of men, sculpture and architecture both lost
their greatness. When the Madonna and her son lost that mystery and
divinity, which for the simple minds of the early painters they
possessed, the soul went out of canvas and of wood. When we carve a
Venus now, she is but a light woman; when we paint a Jesus now, it is
but a little suckling, or a sorrowful prisoner. We want a great
inspiration. We ought to find it in the things that are really
beautiful, but we are not sure enough, perhaps, what is so. What does
dominate us is a passion for nature; for the sea, for the sky, for the
mountain, for the forest, for the evening storm, for the break of day.
Perhaps when we are thoroughly steeped in this we shall reach greatness
once more. But the artificiality of all modern life is against it; so is
its cynicism. Sadness and sarcasm make a great Lucretius as a great
Juvenal, and scorn makes a strong Aristophanes; but they do not make a
Praxiteles and an Apelles; they do not even make a Raffaelle, or a
Flaxman.

Art, if it be anything, is the perpetual uplifting of what is beautiful
in the sight of the multitudes--the perpetual adoration of that
loveliness, material and moral, which men in the haste and the greed of
their lives are everlastingly forgetting: unless it be that it is empty
and useless as a child's reed-pipe when the reed is snapt and the
child's breath spent. Genius is obligation.

       *       *       *

"No woman, I think, ever loved you as this woman does, whom you have
left as I would not leave a dog," said Maryx, and something of his old
ardent eloquence returned to him, and his voice rose and rang clearer as
the courage in him consummated the self-sacrifice that he had set
himself for her sake. "Have you ever thought what you have done? When
you have killed Art in an artist, you have done the cruellest murder
that earth can behold. Other and weaker natures than hers might forget,
but she never. Her fame will be short-lived as that rose, for she sees
but your face, and the world will tire of that, but she will not. She
can dream no more. She can only remember. Do you know what that is to
the artist?--it is to be blind and to weary the world; the world that
has no more pity than you have! You think her consoled because her
genius has not left her: are you a poet and yet do not know that genius
is only a power to suffer more and to remember longer?--nothing else.
You say to yourself that she will have fame, that will beguile her as
the god came to Ariadnê; perhaps; but across that fame, let it become
what it may, there will settle for ever the shadow of the world's
dishonour; it will be for ever poisoned, and cursed, and embittered by
the scorn of fools, and the reproach of women, since by you they have
been given their lashes of nettles, and by you have been given their
by-word to hoot. She will walk in the light of triumph, you say, and
therefore you have not hurt her; do you not see that the fiercer that
light may beat on her, the sharper will the eyes of the world search out
the brand with which you have burned her. For when do men forgive force
in the woman? and when do women ever forgive the woman's greatness? and
when does every cur fail to snarl at the life that is higher than its
fellows? It is by the very genius in her that you have had such power to
wound, such power to blight and to destroy. By so long as her name shall
be spoken, so long will the wrong you have done her cling round it, to
make it meet for reproach. A mere woman dies, and her woe and her shame
die with her, and the earth covers her and them; but such shelter is
denied for ever to the woman who has genius and fame; long after she is
dead she will lie out on common soil, naked and unhouselled, for all the
winds to blow on her and all the carrion birds to tear."

       *       *       *

"No, no. That is accursed! To touch Art without a right to touch it,
merely as a means to find bread--you are too honest to think of such a
thing. Unless Art be adored for its own sake and purely, it must be
left alone. Philip of Macedon had every free man's child taught Art! I
would have every boy and girl taught its sacredness; so, we might in
time get back some accuracy of taste in the public, some
conscientiousness of production in the artist. If artistic creation be
not a joy, an imperious necessity, an instinct of all the forces of the
mind, let the boy go and plough, and the girl go and spin."

       *       *       *

Maybe you turn your back on happiness. I have heard that wise people
often do that. They look up so at the sun and the stars, that they set
their foot on the lark that would have sung to them and woke them
brightly in the morning--and kill it.

       *       *       *

Landscape painting is the only original form of painting that modern
times can boast. It has not exhausted itself yet; it is capable of
infinite development. Ruysdael, Rembrandt, and the rest, did great
scenes, it is true, but it has been left to our painters to put soul
into the sunshine of a cornfield, and suggest a whole life of labour in
a dull evening sky hanging over a brown ploughed upland, with the horses
going tired homewards, and one grey figure trudging after them, to the
hut on the edge of the moor. Of course the modern fancy of making nature
answer to all human moods, like an Eölian harp, is morbid and
exaggerated, but it has a beauty in it, and a certain truth. Our
tenderer souls take refuge in the country now, as they used to do in the
cloister.

       *       *       *

I think if people oftener saw the break of day they would vow oftener to
keep that dawning day holy, and would not so often let its fair hours
drift away with nothing done that were not best left undone.

       *       *       *

We are the sons of our Time: it is not for us to slay our mother. Let us
cover her dishonour if we see it, lest we should provoke the Erinyes.

       *       *       *

How one loves Canova the man, and how one execrates Canova the artist!
Surely never was a great repute achieved by so false a talent and so
perfect a character. One would think he had been born and bred in
Versailles instead of Treviso. He is called a naturalist! Look at his
Graces! He is always Coysevax and Coustou at heart. Never purely
classic, never frankly modern. Louis XIV. would have loved him better
than Bernini.

       *       *       *

If Alexander had believed himself a bubble of gas instead of the son of
a god, he would not have changed the face of the world. Negation cannot
be the parent of heroism, though it will produce an indifference that
counterfeits it not ill, since Petronius died quite as serenely as ever
did the martyrs of the Church.

       *       *       *

Genius cannot escape the taint of its time more than a child the
influence of its begetting. Augustus could have Horace and Ovid; he
could never have had Homer and Milton.

       *       *       *

I do not think with you. Talent takes the mark of its generation; genius
stamps its time with its own impression. Virgil had the sentiment of an
united Italy.

       *       *       *

Tell her that past she thinks so great was only very like the Serapis
which men worshipped so many ages in Theophilis, and which, when the
soldiers struck it down at last, proved itself only a hollow Colossus
with a colony of rats in its head that scampered right and left.

       *       *       *

Falconet struck the death-note of the plastic arts when he said, "Our
marbles have _almost_ colour." That is just where we err. We are
incessantly striving to make Sculpture at once a romance-writer and a
painter, and of course she loses all dignity and does but seem the jay
in borrowed plumes of sable. Conceits are altogether out of keeping with
marble. They suit a cabinet painting or a piece of china. Bernini was
the first to show the disease when he veiled the head of his Nile to
indicate that the source was unknown.

       *       *       *

Whosoever has any sort of fame has lighted a beacon that is always
shining upon him, and can never more return into the cool twilight of
privacy even when most he wishes. It is of these retributions--some call
them compensations--of which life is full.

       *       *       *

Men have forgotten the virile Pyrrhic dance, and have become incapable
of the grace of the Ionian; their only dance is a Danse Macabre, and
they are always hand in hand with a skeleton.

       *       *       *

By night Rome is still a city for the gods; the shadows veil its wounds,
the lustre silvers all its stones; its silence is haunted as no other
silence is; if you have faith, there where the dark gloss of the laurel
brushes the marble as in Agrippa's time, you will see the Immortals
passing by chained with dead leaves and weeping.

       *       *       *

A great love is an absolute isolation and an absolute absorption.
Nothing lives or moves or breathes save one life; for one life alone the
sun rises and sets, the seasons revolve, the clouds bear rain, and the
stars ride on high; the multitudes around cease to exist, or seem but
ghostly shades; of all the sounds of earth there is but one voice
audible; all past ages have been but the herald of one soul; all
eternity can be but its heritage alone.

       *       *       *

Perhaps she was right: for a few hours of joy one owes the debt of
years, and should give a pardon wide and deep as the deep sea.

This Love which she had made in his likeness, the tyrant and compeller
of the world, was to her as the angel which brings perfect dreams and
lets the tired sleeper visit heaven.

       *       *       *

"And when the ship sails away without you?" I said brutally, and
laughing still, because the mention of the schooner had broken the bonds
of the silence that had held me against my will half paralysed, and I
seemed to be again upon the Tyrrhene shore, seeing the white sail fade
against the sky.

"And when that ship sails without you? The day will come. It always
comes. You are my Ariadnê; yet you forget Naxos! Oh, the day will come!
you will kiss the feet of your idol then, and they will not stay; they
will go away, away, away, and they will not tarry for your prayers or
your tears--ay, it is always so. Two love, and one tires. And you know
nothing of that; you who would have love immortal."

And I laughed again, for it seemed to me so horrible, and I was half
mad.

No doubt it would have been kinder had I struck my knife down into her
breast with her words unspoken.

All shade of colour forsook her face; only the soft azure of the veins
remained, and changed to an ashen grey. She shook with a sudden shiver
from head to foot as the name she hated, the name of Ariadnê, fell upon
her ear. The icebolt had fallen in her paradise. A scared and terrible
fear dilated her eyes, that opened wide in the amaze of some suddenly
stricken creature.

"And when he leaves you?" I said, with cruel iteration. "Do you remember
what you told me once of the woman by the marshes by the sea, who had
nothing left by which to remember love save wounds that never healed?
That is all his love will leave you by-and-by."

"Ah, never!"

She spoke rather to herself than me. The terror was fading out of her
eyes, the blood returning to her face; she was in the sweet bewildered
trance of that blind faith which goes wherever it is led, and never asks
the end nor dreads the fate. Her love was deathless: how could she know
that his was mortal?

"You are cruel," she said, with her mouth quivering, but the old, soft,
grand courage in her eyes. "We are together for ever; he has said so.
But even if--if--I only remembered him by wounds, what would that change
in me? He would _have_ loved me. If he would wish to wound me, so he
should. I am his own as the dogs are. Think!--he looked at me, and all
the world grew beautiful; he touched me, and I was happy--I, who never
had been happy in my life. You look at me strangely; you speak harshly.
Why? I used to think, surely you would be glad----"

I gripped my knife and cursed him in my soul.

How could one say to her the thing that he had made her in man's and
woman's sight?

"I thought you would be glad," she said, wistfully, "and I would have
told you long ago--myself. I do not know why you should look so. Perhaps
you are angered because I seemed ungrateful to you and Maryx. Perhaps I
was so. I have no thought--only of him. What he wished, that I did. Even
Rome itself was for me nothing, and the gods--there is only one for me;
and he is with me always. And I think the serpents and the apes are gone
for ever from the tree, and he only hears the nightingales--now. He
tells me so often. Very often. Do you remember I used to dream of
greatness for myself--ah, what does it matter! I want nothing now. When
he looks at me--the gods themselves could give me nothing more."

And the sweet tranquil radiance came back into her eyes, and her
thoughts wandered into the memories of this perfect passion which
possessed her, and she forgot that I was there.

My throat was choking; my eyes felt blind; my tongue clove to my mouth.
I, who knew what that end would be as surely as I knew the day then
shining would sink into the earth, I was dumb, like a brute beast--I,
who had gone to take his life.

Before this love which knew nothing of the laws of mankind, how poor and
trite and trivial looked those laws! What could I dare to say to her of
shame? Ah! if it had only been for any other's sake! But he,--perhaps he
did not lie to her; perhaps he did only hear the nightingales with her
beside him; but how soon their song would pall upon his ear, how soon
would he sigh for the poisonous kiss of the serpents! I knew! I knew!

I stood heart-broken in the warm light that was falling through the
casement and streaming towards her face. What could I say to her? Men
harder and sterner and surer in every way of their own judgment than I
was of mine no doubt would have shaken her with harsh hands from that
dream in which she had wandered to her own destruction.

No doubt a sterner moralist than I would have had no pity, and would
have hurled on her all the weight of those bitter truths of which she
was so ignorant; would have shown her that pit of earthly scorn upon
whose brink she stood; would have torn down all that perfect, credulous
faith of hers, which could have no longer life nor any more lasting root
than the flowering creeper born of a summer's sun, and gorgeous as the
sunset's hues, and clinging about a ruin-mantling decay. Oh yes, no
doubt. But I am only weak, and of little wisdom, and never certain that
the laws and ways of the world are just, and never capable of long
giving pain to any harmless creature, least of all to her.

She seemed to rouse herself with effort to remember I was there, and
turned on me her eyes that were suffused and dreamful with happiness,
like a young child's with sleep.

"I must have seemed so thankless to you: you were so very good to me,"
she said, with that serious sweetness of her rare smile that I had used
to watch for, as an old dog watches for his young owner's--an old dog
that is used to be forgotten, but does not himself forget, though he is
old. "I must have seemed so thankless; but he bade me be silent, and I
have no law but him. After that night when we walked in Nero's fields,
and I went home and learned he loved me;--do you not see I forgot that
there was any one in all the world except himself and me? It must always
be so--at least, so I think. Oh, how true that poem was! Do you
remember how he read it that night after Mozart amongst the roses by the
fire? What use was endless life and all the lore of the spirits and
seers to Sospitra? I was like Sospitra, till he came; always thinking of
the stars and the heavens in the desert all alone, and always wishing
for life eternal, when it is only life _together_ that is worth a wish
or a prayer. But why do you look at me so? Perhaps you do not
understand. Perhaps I am selfish."

This was all that it seemed to her--that I did not understand. Could she
see the tears of blood that welled up in my eyes? Could she see the
blank despair that blinded my sight? Could she see the frozen hand that
I felt clutching at my heart and benumbing it? I did not understand;
that was all that it seemed to her.

She was my Ariadnê, born again to suffer the same fate. I saw the
future: she could not. I knew that he would leave her as surely as the
night succeeds the day. I knew that his passion--if passion, indeed, it
were, and not only the mere common vanity of subjugation and
possession--would pall on him and fade out little by little, as the
stars fade out of the grey morning skies. I knew, but I had not the
courage to tell her.

Men were faithful only to the faithless. But what could she know of
this?

"Thinking of the stars and of the heavens in the desert all alone! Yes!"
I cried; and the bonds of my silence were unloosed, and the words rushed
from my lips like a torrent from between the hills.

"Yes; and never to see the stars any more, and to lose for ever the
peace of the desert--that, you think, is gain! Oh, my dear! what can I
say to you? What can I say? You will not believe if I tell you. I shall
seem a liar and a prophet of false woe. I shall curse when I would
bless. What can I say to you? Athene watched over you. You were of those
who dwell alone, but whom the gods are with. You had the clue and the
sword, and they are nothing to you; you lose them both at his word, at
the mere breath of his lips, and know no god but his idle law, that
shifts as the winds of the sea. And you count that gain? Oh, just
Heaven! Oh, my dear, my heart is broken; how can I tell you? One man
loved you who was great and good, to whom you were a sacred thing, who
would have lifted you up in heaven, and never have touched too roughly a
single hair of your head; and you saw him no more than the very earth
that you trod; he was less to you than the marbles he wrought in; and he
suffers: and what do you care? You have had the greatest wrong that a
woman can have, and you think it the greatest good, the sweetest gift!
He has torn your whole life down as a cruel hand tears a rose in the
morning light, and you rejoice! For what do you know? He will kill your
soul, and still you will kiss his hand. Some women are so. When he
leaves you, what will you do? For you there will only be death. The weak
are consoled, but the strong never. What will you do? What will you do?
You are like a child that culls flowers at the edge of a snake's
breeding-pit. He waked you--yes!--to send you in a deeper sleep, blind
and dumb to everything but his will. Nay, nay! that is not your fault.
Love does not come at will; and of goodness it is not born, nor of
gratitude, nor of any right or reason on the earth. Only that you should
have had no thought of us--no thought at all--only of him by whom your
ruin comes; that seems hard! Ay, it is hard. You stood just so in my
dream, and you hesitated between the flower of passion and the flower of
death. Ah, well might Love laugh. They grow on the same bough; Love
knows that. Oh, my dear, my dear, I come too late! Look! he has done
worse than murder, for that only kills the body; but he has killed the
soul in you. He will crush out all that came to you from heaven; all
your mind and your hopes and your dreams, and all the mystery in you,
that we poor half-dumb fools call genius, and that made the common
daylight above you full of all beautiful shapes and visions that our
duller eyes could not see as you went. He has done worse than murder,
and I came to take his life. Ay, I would slay him now as I would
strangle the snake in my path. And even for this I come too late. I
cannot do you even this poor last service. To strike him dead would only
be to strike you too. I come too late! Take my knife, lest I should see
him--take it. Till he leaves you I will wait."

I drew the fine, thin blade across my knee and broke it in two pieces,
and threw the two halves at her feet.

Then I turned without looking once at her, and went away.

I do not know how the day waned and passed; the skies seemed red with
fire, and the canals with blood. I do not know how I found my road over
the marble floors and out into the air. I only remember that I felt my
way feebly with my hands, as though the golden sunlight were all
darkness, and that I groped my way down the steps and out under an angle
of the masonry, staring stupidly upon the gliding waters.

I do not know whether a minute had gone by or many hours, when some
shivering sense of sound made me look up at the casement above, a high,
vast casement fretted with dusky gold and many colours, and all kinds of
sculptured stone. The sun was making a glory as of jewels on its painted
panes. Some of them were open; I could see within the chamber Hilarion's
fair and delicate head, and his face drooped with a soft smile. I could
see her, with all her loveliness, melting, as it were, into his embrace,
and see her mouth meet his.

If I had not broken the steel!----

I rose from the stones and cursed them, and departed from the place as
the moon rose.

       *       *       *

He was silent; the moonlight poured down between us white and wide;
there lay a little dead bird on the stones, I remember, a redbreast,
stiff and cold. The people traffic in such things here, in the square of
Agrippa; it had fallen, doubtless, off some market stall.

Poor little robin! All the innocent sweet woodland singing-life of it
was over, over in agony, and not a soul in all the wide earth was the
better for its pain; not even the huckster who had missed making his
copper coin by it. Woe is me; the sorrow of the world is great.

I pointed to it where it lay, poor little soft huddled heap of bright
feathers; there is no sadder sight than a dead bird, for what lovelier
life can there be than a bird's life, free in the sun and the rain, in
the blossom and foliage?

"Make the little cold throat sing at sunrise," I said to him. "When you
can do that, then think to undo what you have done."

"She will forget:--"

"You know she never will forget. There is your crime."

"She will have her art----"

"Will the dead bird sing?"

       *       *       *

Here, if anywhere in the "divine city of the Vatican"--for in truth a
city and divine it is, and well has it been called so--here, if
anywhere, will wake the soul of the artist; here, where the very
pavement bears the story of Odysseus, and each passage-way is a Via
Sacra, and every stone is old with years whose tale is told by hundreds
or by thousands, and the wounded Adonis can be adored beside the tempted
Christ of Sistine, and the serious beauty of the Erythean Sibyl lives
beside the laughing grace of ivy-crowned Thalia, and the Jupiter
Maximus frowns on the mortals made of earth's dust, and the Jehovah who
has called forth woman meets the first smile of Eve. A Divine City
indeed, holding in its innumerable chambers and its courts of granite
and of porphyry all that man has ever dreamed of, in his hope and in his
terror, of the Unknown God.

       *       *       *

The days of joyous, foolish mumming came--the carnival mumming that as a
boy I had loved so well, and that, ever since I had come and stitched
under my Apollo and Crispin, I had never been loth to meddle and mix in,
going mad with my lit taper, like the rest, and my whistle of the
Befana, and all the salt and sport of a war of wits such as old Rome has
always heard in midwinter since the seven nights of the Saturnalia.

Dear Lord! to think that twice a thousand years ago and more, along
these banks of Tiber, and down in the Velabrum and up the Sacred Way,
men and women and children were leaping, and dancing, and shouting, and
electing their festal king, and exchanging their new-year gifts of wax
candles and little clay figures: and that now-a-days we are doing just
the same thing in the same season, in the same places, only with all the
real faunic joyfulness gone out of it with the old slain Saturn, and a
great deal of empty and luxurious show come in instead! It makes one
sad, mankind looks such a fool.

Better be Heine's fool on the seashore, who asks the winds their
"wherefore" and their "whence." You remember Heine's poem--that one in
the "North Sea" series, that speaks of the man by the shore, and asks
what is Man, and what shall become of him, and who lives on high in the
stars? and tells how the waves keep on murmuring and the winds rising,
the clouds scudding before the breeze, and the planets shining so cold
and so far, and how on the shore a fool waits for an answer, and waits
in vain. It is a terrible poem, and terrible because it is true.

Every one of us stands on the brink of the endless sea that is Time and
is Death; and all the blind, beautiful, mute, majestic forces of
creation move around us and yet tell us nothing.

It is wonderful that, with this awful mystery always about us, we can go
on on our little lives as cheerfully as we do; that on the edge of that
mystical shore we yet can think so much about the crab in the
lobster-pot, the eel in the sand, the sail in the distance, the child's
face at home.

Well, no doubt it is heaven's mercy that we can do so; it saves from
madness such thinking souls as are amongst us.

       *       *       *

"My dear, of love there is very little in the world. There are many
things that take its likeness: fierce unstable passions and poor
egotisms of all sorts, vanities too, and many other follies--Apatê and
Philotês in a thousand masquerading characters that gain great Love
discredit. The loves of men, and women too, my dear, are hardly better
very often than Minos' love for Skylla; you remember how he threw her
down from the stern of his vessel when he had made the use of her he
wished, and she had cut the curls of Nisias. A great love does not of
necessity imply a great intelligence, but it must spring out of a great
nature, that is certain; and where the heart has spent itself in much
base petty commerce, it has no deep treasury of gold on which to draw;
it is bankrupt from its very over-trading. A noble passion is very rare;
believe me; as rare as any other very noble thing."

       *       *       *

"Do you call him a poet because he has the trick of a sonorous cadence
and of words that fall with the measure of music, so that youths and
maidens recite them for the vain charm of their mere empty sound? It is
a lie--it is a blasphemy. A poet! A poet suffers for the meanest thing
that lives; the feeblest creature dead in the dust is pain to him; his
joy and his sorrow alike outweigh tenfold the joys and the sorrows of
men; he looks on the world as Christ looked on Jerusalem, and weeps; he
loves, and all heaven and all hell are in his love; he is faithful unto
death, because fidelity alone can give to love the grandeur and the
promise of eternity; he is like the martyrs of the church who lay upon
the wheel with their limbs racked, yet held the roses of Paradise in
their hands and heard the angels in the air. That is a poet; that is
what Dante was, and Shelley and Milton and Petrarca. But this man? this
singer of the senses, whose sole lament is that the appetites of the
body are too soon exhausted; this languid and curious analysist who
rends the soul aside with merciless cruelty, and puts away the quivering
nerves with cold indifference, once he has seen their secrets?--this a
poet? Then so was Nero harping! Accursed be the book and all the
polished vileness that his verses ever palmed off on men by their mere
tricks of sound. This a poet! As soon are the swine that rout the
garbage, the lions of the Apocalypse by the throne of God!"

       *       *       *

The glad water sparkles and ripples everywhere; above the broad porphyry
basins butterflies of every colour flutter, and swallows fly; lovers and
children swing balls of flowers, made as only our Romans know how to
make them; the wide lawns under the deep-shadowed avenues are full of
blossoms; the air is full of fragrance; the palms rise against a
cloudless sky; the nights are lustrous; in the cool of the great
galleries the statues seem to smile: so spring had been to me always;
but now the season was without joy, and the scent of the flowers on the
wind hurt me as it smote my nostrils.

For a great darkness seemed always between me and the sun, and I
wondered that the birds could sing, and the children run amongst the
blossoms--the world being so vile.

       *       *       *

Women hope that the dead love may revive; but men know that of all dead
things none are so past recall as a dead passion.

The courtesan may scourge it with a whip of nettles back into life; but
the innocent woman may wet it for ever with her tears, she will find no
resurrection.

       *       *       *

Art is an angel of God, but when Love has entered the soul, the angel
unfolds its plumes and takes flight, and the wind of its wings withers
as it passes. He whom it has left misses the angel at his ear, but he is
alone for ever. Sometimes it will seem to him then that it had been no
angel ever, but a fiend that lied, making him waste his years in a
barren toil, and his nights in a joyless passion; for there are two
things beside which all Art is but a mockery and a curse: they are a
child that is dying and a love that is lost.

       *       *       *

Love art alone, forsaking all other loves, and she will make you happy,
with a happiness that shall defy the seasons and the sorrows of time,
the pains of the vulgar and the changes of fortune, and be with you day
and night, a light that is never dim. But mingle with it any human
love--and art will look for ever at you with the eyes of Christ when he
looked at the faithless follower as the cock crew.

       *       *       *

The little garden of the Rospigliosi seems to have all mediæval Rome
shut in it, as you go up the winding stairs with all their lichens and
water-plants and broken marbles, into the garden itself, with its smooth
emerald turf and spreading magnolias, and broad fish-ponds, and orange
and citron trees, and the frescoed building at the end where Guido's
Aurora floats in unchanging youth, and the buoyant Hours run before the
sun.

Myself I own I care not very much for that Aurora; she is no incarnation
of the morning, and though she floats wonderfully and does truly seem to
move, yet is she in nowise ethereal nor suggestive of the dawn either of
day or life. When he painted her, he must have been in love with some
lusty taverner's buxom wife busked in her holiday attire.

But whatever one may think of the famed Aurora, of the loveliness of her
quiet garden home, safe in the shelter of the stately palace walls,
there can be no question; the little place is beautiful, and sitting in
its solitude with the brown magnolia fruit falling on the grass, and the
blackbirds pecking between the primroses, all the courtly and superb
pageant of the dead ages will come trooping by you, and you will fancy
that the boy Metastasio is reciting strophes under yonder Spanish
chestnut-tree, and cardinals, and nobles, and gracious ladies, and
pretty pages are all listening, leaning against the stone rail of the
central water.

For this is the especial charm and sorcery of Rome, that, sitting idly
in her beautiful garden-ways, you can turn over a score of centuries and
summon all their pomp and pain before you, as easily as little children
can turn over the pages of a coloured picture-book until their eyes are
dazzled.




_CHANDOS._


It is so easy for the preacher, when he has entered the days of
darkness, to tell us to find no flavour in the golden fruit, no music in
the song of the charmer, no spell in eyes that look love, no delirium in
the soft dreams of the lotus--so easy when these things are dead and
barren for himself, to say they are forbidden! But men must be far more
or far less than mortal ere they can blind their eyes, and dull their
senses, and forswear their nature, and obey the dreariness of the
commandment; and there is little need to force the sackcloth and the
serge upon us. The roses wither long before the wassail is over, and
there is no magic that will make them bloom again, for there is none
that renews us--youth. The Helots had their one short, joyous festival
in their long year of labour; life may leave us ours. It will be surely
to us, long before its close, a harder tyrant and a more remorseless
taskmaster than ever was the Lacedemonian to his bond-slaves,--bidding
us make bricks without straw, breaking the bowed back, and leaving us as
our sole chance of freedom the hour when we shall turn our faces to the
wall--and die.

       *       *       *

Society, that smooth and sparkling sea, is excessively difficult to
navigate; its surf looks no more than champagne foam, but a thousand
quicksands and shoals lie beneath: there are breakers ahead for more
than half the dainty pleasure-boats that skim their hour upon it; and
the foundered lie by millions, forgotten, five fathoms deep below. The
only safe ballast upon it is gold dust; and if stress of weather come on
you, it will swallow you without remorse. Trevenna had none of this
ballast; he had come out to sea in as ticklish a cockle-shell as might
be; he might go down any moment, and he carried no commission, being a
sort of nameless, unchartered rover: yet float he did, securely.

       *       *       *

Corals, pink and delicate, rivet continents together; ivy tendrils, that
a child may break, bold Norman walls with bonds of iron; a little ring,
a toy of gold, a jeweller's bagatelle, forges chains heavier than the
galley-slave's: so a woman's look may fetter a lifetime.

       *       *       *

He had passed through life having escaped singularly all the shadows
that lie on it for most men; and he had, far more than most, what may be
termed the faculty for happiness--a gift, in any temperament, whose
wisdom and whose beauty the world too little recognises.

       *       *       *

A temperament that is _never_ earnest is at times well-nigh as wearisome
as a temperament that is never gay; there comes a time when, if you can
never touch to any depth, the ceaseless froth and brightness of the
surface will create a certain sense of impatience, a certain sense of
want.

       *       *       *

A straw misplaced will make us enemies; a millstone of benefits hung
about his neck may fail to anchor down by us a single friend. We may
lavish what we will--kindly thought, loyal service, untiring aid, and
generous deed--and they are all but as oil to the burning, as fuel to
the flame, when spent upon those who are jealous of us.

       *       *       *

Truth is a rough, honest, helter-skelter terrier, that none like to see
brought into their drawing-rooms, throwing over all their dainty little
ornaments, upsetting their choicest Dresden, that nobody guessed was
cracked till it fell with the mended side uppermost, and keeping every
one in incessant tremor lest the next snap should be at their braids or
their boots, of which neither the varnish nor the luxuriance will stand
rough usage.

       *       *       *

When will men learn to know that the power of genius, and the human
shell in which it chances to be harboured, are as distinct as is the
diamond from the quartz-bed in which they find it?

       *       *       *

Had he embraced dishonour, and accepted the rescue that a lie would have
lent him, this misery in its greatest share had never been upon him. He
would have come hither with riches about him, and the loveliness he had
worshipped would have been his own beyond the touch of any rival's hand.
Choosing to cleave to the old creeds of his race, and passing, without a
backward glance, into the paths of honour and of justice, it was thus
with him now. Verily, virtue must be her own reward, as in the Socratic
creed; for she will bring no other dower than peace of conscience in her
gift to whosoever weds her. "I have loved justice, and fled from
iniquity; wherefore here I die in exile," said Hildebrand upon his
death-bed. They will be the closing words of most lives that have
followed truth.

       *       *       *

There are liberties sweeter than love; there are goals higher than
happiness.

Some memory of them stirred in him there, with the noiseless flow of the
lingering water at his feet, and above the quiet of the stars; the
thoughts of his youth came back to him, and his heart ached with their
longing.

Out of the salt depths of their calamity men had gathered the heroisms
of their future; out of the desert of their exile they had learned the
power to return as conquerors. The greater things within him awakened
from their lethargy; the innate strength so long untried, so long lulled
to dreamy indolence and rest, uncoiled from its prostration; the force
that would resist and, it might be, survive, slowly came upon him, with
the taunts of his foe. It was possible that there was that still in him
which might be grander and truer to the ambitions of his imaginative
childhood under adversity, than in the voluptuous sweetness of his rich
and careless life. It was possible, if--if he could once meet the fate
he shuddered from, once look at the bitterness of the life that waited
for him, and enter on its desolate and arid waste without going back to
the closed gates of his forfeited paradise to stretch his limbs within
their shadow once more ere he died.

There is more courage needed oftentimes to accept the onward flow of
existence, bitter as the waters of Marah, black and narrow as the
channel of Jordan, than there is ever needed to bow down the neck to the
sweep of the death-angel's sword.

       *       *       *

He accepted the desolation of his life, for the sake of all beyond life,
greater than life, which looked down on him from the silence of the
night.

       *       *       *

It was sunset in Venice,--that supreme moment when the magical flush of
light transfigures all, and wanderers whose eyes have long ached with
the greyness and the glare of northward cities gaze and think themselves
in heaven. The still waters of the lagunes, the marbles and the porphyry
and the jasper of the mighty palaces, the soft grey of the ruins all
covered with clinging green and the glowing blossoms of creepers, the
hidden antique nooks where some woman's head leaned out of an arched
casement, like a dream of the Dandolo time when the Adriatic swarmed
with the returning galleys laden with Byzantine spoil, the dim, mystic,
majestic walls that towered above the gliding surface of the eternal
water, once alive with flowers, and music, and the gleam of golden
tresses, and the laughter of careless revellers in the Venice of
Goldoni, in the Venice of the Past;--everywhere the sunset glowed with
the marvel of its colour, with the wonder of its warmth.

Then a moment, and it was gone. Night fell with the hushed shadowy
stillness that belongs to Venice alone; and in the place of the riot and
luxuriance of colour there was the tremulous darkness of the young
night, with the beat of an oar on the water, the scent of unclosing
carnation-buds, the white gleam of moonlight, and the odour of
lilies-of-the-valley blossoming in the dark archway of some mosaic-lined
window.

       *       *       *

The ruin that had stripped him of all else taught him to fathom the
depths of his own attainments. He had in him the gifts of a Goethe; but
it was only under adversity that these reached their stature and bore
their fruit.

       *       *       *

The words were true. The bread of bitterness is the food on which men
grow to their fullest stature; the waters of bitterness are the
debatable ford through which they reach the shores of wisdom; the ashes
boldly grasped and eaten without faltering are the price that must be
paid for the golden fruit of knowledge. The swimmer cannot tell his
strength till he has gone through the wild force of opposing waves; the
great man cannot tell the might of his hand and the power of his
resistance till he has wrestled with the angel of adversity, and held it
close till it has blessed him.

       *       *       *

The artist was true to his genius; he knew it a greater gift than
happiness; and as his hands wandered by instinct over the familiar
notes, the power of his kingdom came to him, the passion of his mistress
was on him, and the grandeur of the melody swelled out to mingle with
the night, divine as consolation, supreme as victory.

       *       *       *

The man who puts chains on another's limbs is only one shade worse than
he who puts fetters on another's free thoughts and on another's free
conscience.

       *       *       *

One fetter of tradition loosened, one web of superstition broken, one
ray of light let in on darkness, one principle of liberty secured, are
worth the living for, he mused. Fame!--it is the flower of a day, that
dies when the next sun rises. But to do something, however little, to
free men from their chains, to aid something, however faintly, the
rights of reason and of truth, to be unvanquished through all and
against all, these may bring one nearer the pure ambitions of youth.

Happiness dies as age comes to us; it sets for ever, with the suns of
early years: yet perhaps we may keep a higher thing beside which it
holds but a brief loyalty, if to ourselves we can rest true, if for the
liberty of the world we can do anything.

       *       *       *

Do not believe that happiness makes us selfish; it is a treason to the
sweetest gift of life. It is when it has deserted us that it grows hard
to keep all the better things in us from dying in the blight.

       *       *       *

"Coleridge cried, 'O God, how glorious it is to live!' Renan asks, 'O
God, when will it be worth while to live?' In nature we echo the poet;
in the world we echo the thinker."

       *       *       *

"Yet you are greater than you were then," he said, slowly. "I know it,--I
who am but a wine-cup rioter and love nothing but my summer-day fooling.
You are greater; but the harvest you sow will only be reaped over your
grave."

"I should be content could I believe it would be reaped then."

"Be content then. You may be so."

"God knows! Do you not think Marsy and Delisle de Sales and Linguet
believed, as they suffered in their dungeons for mere truth of speech,
that the remembrance of future generations would solace them? Bichât
gave himself to premature death for science' sake; does the world once
in a year speak his name? Yet how near those men are to us, to be
forgotten! A century, and history will scarce chronicle them."

"Then why give the wealth of your intellect to men?"

"Are there not higher things than present reward and the mere talk of
tongues? The _monstrari digito_ were scarce a lofty goal. We may love
Truth and strive to serve her, disregarding what she brings us. Those
who need a bribe from her are not her true believers."

Philippe d'Orvâle tossed his silvery hair from his eyes,--eyes of such
sunny lustre still.

"Ay! And those who held that sublime code of yours, that cleaving to
truth for truth's sake, where are they? How have they fared in every
climate and in every age? Stoned, crucified, burned, fettered, broken on
the vast black granite mass of the blind multitude's brutality, of the
priesthood's curse and craft!"

"True! Yet if through us, ever so slightly, the bondage of the creeds'
traditions be loosened from the lives they stifle, and those
multitudes--so weary, so feverish, so much more to be pitied than
condemned--become less blind, less brute, the sacrifice is not in vain."

"In your sense, no. But the world reels back again into darkness as soon
as a hand has lifted it for a while into light. Men hold themselves
purified, civilised; a year of war,--and lust and bloodthirst rage
untamed in all their barbarism; a taste of slaughter,--and they are
wolves again! There was truth in the old feudal saying, 'Oignez vilain,
il vous poindra; poignez vilain, il vous oindra.' Beat the multitudes
you talk of with a despot's sword, and they will lick your feet; touch
them with a Christ-like pity, and they will nail you to the cross."

There was terrible truth in the words: this man of princely blood, who
disdained all sceptres and wanted nothing of the world, could look
through and through it with his bold sunlit eyes, and see its
rottenness to the core.

Chandos sighed as he heard.

"You are right,--only too right. Yet even while they crouch to the
tyrant's sabre, how bitterly they need release! even while they crucify
their teachers and their saviours, how little they know what they do!
They may forsake themselves; but they should not be forsaken."

Philippe d'Orvâle looked on him with a light soft as woman's tears in
his eyes, and dashed his hand down on the alabaster.

"Chandos, you live twenty centuries too late. You would have been
crowned in Athens, and throned in Asia. But here, as a saving grace,
they will call you--'mad!'"

"Well, if they do? The title has its honours. It was hooted against
Solon and Socrates."

       *       *       *

"I would do all in the world to please _you_, monseigneur," he answered,
sadly; "but I cannot change my nature. The little aziola loves the
shade, and shrinks from noise and glare and all the ways of men; I am
like it. You cannot make the aziola a bird for sunlight; you cannot make
me as others are."

Chandos looked down on him with an almost tender compassion. To him,
whose years were so rich in every pleasure and every delight that men
can enjoy, the loneliness and pain of Lulli's life, divorced from all
the living world, made it a marvel profoundly melancholy, profoundly
formed to claim the utmost gentleness and sympathy.

"I would not have you as others are, Lulli," he said, softly. "If in all
the selfishness and pleasures of our world there were not some here and
there to give their lives to high thoughts and to unselfish things, as
you give yours, we should soon, I fear, forget that such existed. But
for such recluse's devotion to an art as yours, the classics would have
perished; without the cloister-penmen, the laws of science would never
have broken the bondage of tradition."

Lulli looked up eagerly; then his head drooped again with the
inexpressible weariness of that vain longing which "toils to reach the
stars."

"Ah, what is the best that I reach?--the breath of the wind which
passes, and sighs, and is heard no more."

       *       *       *

"How crabbed a scroll!" he went on, throwing himself down a moment on
the thyme and grass. "The characters must baffle even you; the years
that have yellowed the vellum have altered the fashion. Whose is it?"

"An old Elizabethan musician's," answered Lulli, as he looked up. "Yes;
the years take all,--our youth, our work, our life, even our graves."

Something in his Provençal cadence gave a rhythm to his simplest speech:
the words fell sadly on his listener's ear, though on the sensuous
luxuriance of his own existence no shadow ever rested, no skeleton ever
crouched.

"Yes: the years take all," he said, with a certain sadness on him. "How
many unperfected resolves, unachieved careers, unaccomplished ambitions,
immatured discoveries, perish under the rapidity of time, as unripe
fruits fall before their season! Bichât died at thirty-one:--if he had
lived, his name would now have outshone Aristotle's."

"We live too little time to do anything even for the art we give our
life to," murmured Lulli. "When we die, our work dies with us: our
better self must perish with our bodies; the first change of fashion
will sweep it into oblivion."

"Yet something may last of it," suggested Chandos, while his hand
wandered among the blue bells of the curling hyacinths. "Because few
save scholars read the '_Defensio Populi_' now, the work it did for free
thought cannot die. None the less does the cathedral enrich Cologne
because the name of the man who begot its beauty has passed unrecorded.
None the less is the world aided by the effort of every true and daring
mind because the thinker himself has been crushed down in the rush of
unthinking crowds."

"No, if _it_ could live!" murmured Lulli, softly, with a musing pain in
the broken words. "But look! the scroll was as dear to its writer as his
score to Beethoven,--the child of his love, cradled in his thoughts
night and day, cherished as never mother cherished her first-born,
beloved as wife or mistress, son or daughter, never were. Perhaps he
denied himself much to give his time more to his labour; and when he
died, lonely and in want, because he had pursued that for which men
called him a dreamer, his latest thought was of the work which never
could speak to others as it spoke to him, which he must die and leave,
in anguish that none ever felt to sever from a human thing. Yet what
remains of his love and his toil? It is gone, as a laugh or a sob dies
off the ear, leaving no echo behind. His name signed here tells nothing
to the men for whom he laboured, adds nothing to the art for which he
lived. As it is with him, so will it be with me."

His voice, that had risen in sudden and untutored eloquence, sank
suddenly into the sadness and the weariness of the man whose highest joy
is but relief from pain; and in it was a keener pang still,--the grief
of one who strives for what incessantly escapes him.

"Wait," said Chandos, gently. "Are we sure that nothing lives of the
music you mourn? It may live on the lips of the people, in those
Old-World songs whose cause we cannot trace, yet which come sweet and
fresh transmitted to every generation. How often we hear some nameless
melody echo down a country-side! the singers cannot tell you whence it
came; they only know their mothers sang it by their cradles, and they
will sing it by their children's. But in the past the song had its birth
in genius."

Guido Lulli bent his head.

"True: such an immortality were all-sufficient: we could well afford to
have our names forgotten----"

       *       *       *

"Let that fellow alone, Cos," laughed Chandos, to avert the stormy
element which seemed to threaten the serenity of his breakfast-party.
"Trevenna will beat us all with his tongue, if we tempt him to try
conclusions. He should be a Chancellor of the Exchequer or a Cheap John;
I am not quite clear which as yet."

"Identically the same things!" cried Trevenna. "The only difference is
the scale they are on; one talks from the bench, and the other from the
benches; one cheapens tins, and the other cheapens taxes; one has a
salve for an incurable disease, and the other a salve for the national
debt; one rounds his periods to put off a watch that won't go, and the
other to cover a deficit that won't close; but they radically drive the
same trade, and both are successful if the spavined mare trots out
looking sound, and the people pay up. 'Look what I save you,' cry Cheap
John and Chancellor; and while they shout their economics, they pocket
their shillings. Ah, if I were sure I could bamboozle a village, I
should know I was qualified to make up a Budget."

       *       *       *

"Most impudent of men! When will you learn the first lesson of society,
and decently and discreetly _apprendre à vous effacer_?"

"_A m'effacer_? The advice Lady Harriet Vandeleur gave Cecil. Very good
for mediocre people, I dare say; but it wouldn't suit _me_. There are
some people, you know, that won't iron down for the hardest rollers.
_M'effacer_? No! I'd rather any day be an ill-bred originality than a
well-bred nonentity."

"Then you succeed perfectly in being what you wish! Don't you know,
monsieur, that to set yourself against conventionalities is like talking
too loud?--an impertinence and an under-breeding that society resents by
exclusion."

"Yes, I know it. But a duke may bawl, and nobody shuts out _him_; a
prince might hop on one leg, and everybody would begin to hop too. Now,
what the ducal lungs and the princely legs might do with impunity, I
declare I've a right to do, if I like."

"_Bécasse_! no one can declare his rights till he can do much more,
and--purchase them. Have a million, and we may perhaps give you a little
license to be unlike other persons: without the million it is an
ill-bred _gaucherie_."

"Ah, I know! Only a nobleman may be original; a poor penniless wretch
upon town must be humbly and insignificantly commonplace. What a pity
for the success of the aristocratic monopolists that nature puts clever
fellows and fools just in the reverse order! But then nature's a
shocking socialist."

"And so are you."

Trevenna laughed.

"Hush, madame. Pray don't destroy me with such a whisper."

       *       *       *

Talent wears well; genius wears itself out; talent drives a brougham in
fact, genius a sun-chariot in fancy; talent keeps to earth and fattens
there, genius soars to the empyrean, to get picked by every kite that
flies; talent is the part and the venison, genius the seltzer and
souffle of life. The man who has talent sails successfully on the top of
the wave; the man with genius beats himself to pieces, fifty to one, on
the first rock he meets.

       *       *       *

One innocent may be wrongly suspected until he is made the thing that
the libel called him.

       *       *       *

Men shut out happiness from their schemes for the world's happiness.
They might as well try to bring flowers to bloom without the sun.

       *       *       *

The most dastardly sin on earth is the desertion of the fallen.

       *       *       *

Let the world abandon you, but to yourself be true.

       *       *       *

The bread of bitterness is the food on which men grow to their fullest
stature.

       *       *       *

Youth without faith is a day without sun.

       *       *       *

I detest posterity--every king hates his heir.

       *       *       *

Scandals are like dandelion seeds; they are arrow-headed and stick when
they fall, and bring forth and multiply fourfold.

       *       *       *

The puff perfect is the puff personal--adroitly masked.

       *       *       *

I wear the Bonnet Rouge discreetly weighed down with a fine tassel of
British prudence.

       *       *       *

He was a master of the great art of banter. It is a marvellous force; it
kills sanctity, unveils sophistry, travesties wisdom, cuts through the
finest shield, and turns the noblest impulses to hopeless ridicule.

       *       *       *

Immortality is dull work--a hideous statue that gets black as soot in no
time; funeral sermons that make you out a vial of revelations and
discuss the probabilities of your being in the realms of Satan; a bust
that slants you off at the shoulders and sticks you up on a bracket; a
tombstone for the canes of the curious to poke at; an occasional
attention in the way of withered immortelles or biographical
Billingsgate, and a partial preservation shared in common with mummies,
auks' eggs, snakes in bottles, and deformities in spirits of
wine:--that's posthumous fame. I must say I don't see much fun in it.

       *       *       *

It were hard not to be wrong in philosophies when the body starves on a
pinch of oatmeal. It is the law of necessity, the balance of economy;
human fuel must be used up that the machine of the world may spin on;
but it is not, perhaps, marvellous that the living fuel is sometimes
unreconciled to that symmetrical rule of waste and repair, of consumer
and consumed.

       *       *       *

It is many centuries since Caius Gracchus called the mercantile classes
to aid the people against the patricians, and found too late that they
were deadlier oppressors than all the optimates; but the error still
goes on, and the moneymakers churn it into gold, as they churned it then
into the Asiatic revenues and the senatorial amulets.

       *       *       *

The love of a people is the most sublime crown that can rest on the brow
of any man, but the love of a mob is a mongrel that fawns and slavers
one moment, to rend and tear the next.




_FOLLE-FARINE._


In this old-world district, amidst the pastures and corn-lands of
Normandy, superstition had taken a hold which the passage of centuries
and the advent of revolution had done very little to lessen. Few of the
people could read, and fewer still could write. They knew nothing but
what their priests and politicians told them to believe. They went to
their beds with the poultry, and rose as the cock crew: they went to
mass, as their ducks to the osier and weed ponds; and to the
conscription as their lambs to the slaughter. They understood that there
was a world beyond them, but they remembered it only as the best market
for their fruit, their fowls, their lace, their skins. Their brains were
as dim as were their oil-lit streets at night; though their lives were
content and mirthful, and for the most part pious. They went out into
the summer meadows chanting aves, in seasons of drought to pray for rain
on their parching orchards, in the same credulity with which they groped
through the winter-fog bearing torches, and chanting dirges to gain a
blessing at seed-time on their bleak, black fallows.

The beauty and the faith of the old mediæval life were with them still;
and with its beauty and its faith were its bigotry and cruelty likewise.

They led simple and contented lives; for the most part honest, and
amongst themselves cheerful and kindly: preserving much grace of colour,
of costume, of idiosyncrasy, because apart from the hueless communism
and characterless monotony of modern cities.

But they believed in sorcery and in devilry: they were brutal to their
beasts, and could be as brutal to their foes: they were steeped in
legend and tradition from their cradles; and all the darkest
superstitions of dead ages still found home and treasury in their hearts
and at their hearths.

They had always been a religious people in this birth country of the
Flamma race: the strong poetic reverence of their forefathers, which had
symbolised itself in the carving of every lintel, corbel or buttress in
their streets, and the fashion of every spire on which a weather-vane
could gleam against the sun, was still in their blood; the poetry had
departed, but the bigotry remained.

       *       *       *

"The earth and the air are good," she thought, as she lay there watching
the dark leaves sway in the foam and the wind, and the bright-bosomed
birds float from blossom to blossom. For there was latent in her, all
untaught, that old pantheistic instinct of the divine age, when the
world was young, to behold a sentient consciousness in every leaf
unfolded to the light; to see a soul in every created thing the day
shines on; to feel the presence of an eternal life in every breeze that
moves, in every grass that grows; in every flame that lifts itself to
heaven; in every bell that vibrates on the air; in every moth that soars
to reach the stars.

Pantheism is the religion of the poet; and nature had made her a poet,
though man as yet had but made of her an outcast, a slave, and a beast
of burden.

"The earth and the air are good," she thought, watching the sun-rays
pierce the purple hearts of a passion-flower, the shadows move across
the deep brown water, the radiant butterfly alight upon a lily, the
scarlet-throated birds dart in and out through the yellow feathery
blossoms of the limes.

       *       *       *

When a man clings to life for life's sake, because it is fair and sweet,
and good in the sight and the senses, there may be weakness in his
shudder at its threatening loss. But when a man is loth to lose life
although it be hard, and joyless, and barren of all delights, because
this life gives him power to accomplish things greater than he, which
yet without him must perish, there is the strength in him, as there is
the agony of Prometheus.

With him it must die also: that deep dim greatness within him, which
moves him, despite himself; that nameless unspeakable force which
compels him to create and to achieve; that vision by which he beholds
worlds beyond him not seen by his fellows.

Weary of life he may be; of life material, and full of subtlety; of
passion, of pleasure, of pain; of the kisses that burn, of the laugh
that rings hollow, of the honey that so soon turns to gall, of the
sickly fatigues, and the tired, cloyed hunger, that are the portion of
men upon earth. Weary of these he may be; but still if the gods have
breathed on him, and made him mad with the madness that men have called
genius, there will be that in him greater than himself, which he
knows,--and cannot know without some fierce wrench and pang,--will be
numbed and made impotent, and drift away, lost for evermore, into that
eternal night, which is all that men behold of death.

       *       *       *

The grass of the Holy River gathers perfume from the marvellous suns,
and the moonless nights, and the gorgeous bloom of the east, from the
aromatic breath of the leopard, and the perfume of the fallen
pomegranate, and the sacred oil that floats in the lamps, and the caress
of the girl-bather's feet, and the myrrh-dropping unguents that glide
from the maiden's bare limbs in the moonlight,--the grass holds and
feeds on them all. But not till the grass has been torn from the roots,
and been crushed, and been bruised and destroyed, can the full odours
exhale of all it has tasted and treasured.

Even thus the imagination of man may be great, but it can never be at
its greatest until one serpent, with merciless fangs, has bitten it
through and through, and impregnated it with passion and with
poison,--that one deathless serpent which is memory.

       *       *       *

And, indeed, to those who are alive to the nameless, universal, Eternal
Soul which breathes in all the grasses of the fields, and beams in the
eyes of all creatures of earth and air, and throbs in the living light
of palpitating stars, and thrills through the young sap of forest trees,
and stirs in the strange loves of wind-borne plants, and hums in every
song of the bee, and burns in every quiver of the flame, and peoples
with sentient myriads every drop of dew that gathers on a hare-bell,
every bead of water that ripples in a brook--to them the mortal life of
man can seem but little, save at once the fiercest and the feeblest
thing that does exist; at once the most cruel and the most impotent;
tyrants of direst destruction, and bondsmen of lowest captivity.

       *       *       *

The earth has always most charm, and least pain, to the poet or the
artist when men are hidden away under their roofs. Then they do not
break its calm with either their mirth or their brutality; then the vile
and revolting coarseness of their works, that blot it with so much
deformity, is softened and obscured in the purple breaths of shadow, and
the dim tender gleam of stars.

       *       *       *

When the world was in its youth, it had leisure to treasure its
recollections; even to pause and look back; to see what flower of a fair
thought, what fruit of a noble art, it might have overlooked or left
down-trodden. But now it is so old, and is so tired; it is purblind, and
heavy of foot; it does not notice what it destroys; it desires rest and
can find none; nothing can matter greatly to it; its dead are so many
that it cannot count them; and being thus worn and dulled with age, and
suffocated under the weight of its innumerable memories, it is very slow
to be moved, and swift--terribly swift--to forget.

Why should it not be?

It has known the best, it has known the worst that ever can befall it.

And the prayer that to the heart of man seems so freshly born from his
own desire, what is it on the weary ear of the world, save the same old,
old cry which it has heard through all the ages, empty as the sound of
the wind, and for ever--for ever--unanswered?

       *       *       *

For there is nothing so cruel in life as a Faith;--the Faith, whatever
its name may be, that draws a man on all his years through on one narrow
path, by one tremulous light, and then at the last, with a laugh--drowns
him.

       *       *       *

I think I see!--the great God walked by the edge of the river, and he
mused on a gift to give man, on a joy that should be a joy on the earth
for ever; and he passed by the lily white as snow, by the thyme that fed
the bees, by the gold heart in the arum flower, by the orange flame of
the tall sandrush, by all the great water-blossoms which the sun kissed
and the swallows loved, and he came to the one little reed pierced with
the snake's-tongues, and all alone amidst millions. Then he took it up,
and cut it to the root, and killed it; killed it as a reed--but breathed
into it a song audible and beautiful to all the ears of men. Was that
death to the reed?--or life? Would a thousand summers of life by the
waterside have been worth that one thrill of song when a god first spoke
through it?

       *       *       *

It is odd that you should live in a palace, and he should want for
bread; but then he can create things, and you can only buy them. So it
is even, perhaps.

       *       *       *

A word that needs compelling is broken by the heart before the lips give
it. It is to plant a tree without a root to put faith in a man that
needs a bond.

       *       *       *

"You are glad since you sing!" said the old man to her as she passed him
again on her homeward way and paused again beside him.

"The birds in cages sing," she answered him, "but think you they are
glad?"

"Are they not?"

She sat down a moment beside him, on the bank which was soft with moss,
and odorous with wild flowers curling up the stems of the poplars and
straying over into the corn beyond.

"Are they? Look. Yesterday I passed a cottage, it is on the Great South
Road; far away from here. The house was empty; the people no doubt were
gone to labour in the fields; there was a wicker cage hanging to the
wall, and in the cage there was a blackbird. The sun beat on his head;
his square of sod was a dry clod of bare earth; the heat had dried every
drop of water in his pan; and yet the bird was singing. Singing how? In
torment, beating his breast against the bars till the blood started,
crying to the skies to have mercy on him and to let the rain fall. His
song was shrill; it had a scream in it; still he sang. Do you say the
merle was glad?"

"What did you do?" asked the old man, still breaking his stones with a
monotonous rise and fall of his hammer.

"I took the cage down and opened the door."

"And he?"

"He shot up in the air first, then dropped down amidst the grasses,
where a little brook which the drought had not dried was still running;
and he bathed and drank, and bathed again, seeming mad with the joy of
the water. When I lost him from sight he was swaying among the leaves on
a bough over the river; but then he was silent."

"And what do you mean by that?"

Her eyes clouded; she was mute. She vaguely knew the meaning it bore to
herself, but it was beyond her to express it. All things of nature had
voices and parables for her, because her fancy was vivid, and her mind
was still too dark, and too profoundly ignorant, for her to be able to
shape her thoughts into metaphor or deduction. The bird had spoken to
her; by his silence as by his song; but what he had uttered she could
not well utter again. Save indeed that song was not gladness, and
neither was silence pain.

       *       *       *

"The future?" she said at last, "that means something that one has not,
and that is to come--is it so?" "Something that one never has, and that
never comes," muttered the old man, wearily cracking the flints in two;
"something that one possesses in one's sleep, and that is farther off
each time that one awakes; and yet a thing that one sees always, sees
even when one lies a dying they say--for men are fools."

       *       *       *

In one of the most fertile and most fair districts of northern France
there was a little Norman town, very, very old, and beautiful
exceedingly by reason of its ancient streets, its high peaked roofs, its
marvellous galleries and carvings, its exquisite greys and browns, its
silence and its colour, and its rich still life.

Its centre was a great cathedral, noble as York or Chartres; a
cathedral, whose spire shot to the clouds, and whose innumerable towers
and pinnacles were all pierced to the day, so that the blue sky shone
and the birds of the air flew all through them. A slow brown river,
broad enough for market boats and for corn barges, stole through the
place to the sea, lapping as it went the wooden piles of the houses, and
reflecting the quaint shapes of the carvings, the hues of the signs and
the draperies, the dark spaces of the dormer windows, the bright heads
of some casement-cluster of carnations, the laughing face of a girl
leaning out to smile on her lover.

All around it lay the deep grass unshaven, the leagues on leagues of
fruitful orchards, the low blue hills tenderly interlacing one another,
the fields of colza, where the white head-dress of the women-workers
flashed in the sun like a silvery pigeon's wing. To the west there were
the deep green woods, and the wide plains golden with gorse of Arthur's
and of Merlin's lands; and beyond, to the northward, was the dim
stretch of the ocean breaking on a yellow shore, whither the river ran,
and whither led straight shady roads, hidden with linden and with poplar
trees, and marked ever and anon by a wayside wooden Christ, or by a
little murmuring well crowned with a crucifix.

A beautiful, old, shadowy, ancient place: picturesque everywhere; often
silent, with a sweet sad silence that was chiefly broken by the sound of
bells or the chaunting of choristers. A place of the Middle Ages still.
With lanterns swinging on cords from house to house as the only light;
with wondrous scroll-works and quaint signs at the doors of all its
traders; with monks' cowls and golden croziers and white-robed acolytes
in its streets; with the subtle smoke of incense coming out from the
cathedral door to mingle with the odours of the fruits and flowers in
the market-place; with great flat-bottomed boats drifting down the river
under the leaning eaves of its dwellings; and with the galleries of its
opposing houses touching so nearly that a girl leaning in one could
stretch a Provence rose or toss an Easter egg across to her neighbour in
the other.

Doubtless there were often squalor, poverty, dust, filth, and
uncomeliness within these old and beautiful homes. Doubtless often the
dwellers therein were housed like cattle and slept like pigs, and looked
but once out to the woods and waters of the landscapes round for one
hundred times that they looked at their hidden silver in an old delf
jug, or at their tawdry coloured prints of St. Victorian or St. Scævola.

But yet much of the beauty and the nobility of the old, simple, restful,
rich-hued life of the past still abode there, and remained with them. In
the straight, lithe form of their maidens, untrammelled by modern garb,
and moving with the free majestic grace of forest does. In the vast,
dim, sculptured chambers, where the grandam span by the wood fire, and
the little children played in the shadows, and the lovers whispered in
the embrasured window. In the broad market-place, where the mules
cropped the clover, and the tawny awnings caught the sunlight, and the
white caps of the girls framed faces fitted for the pencils of missal
painters, and the flush of colour from mellow wall-fruits and
grape-clusters glanced amidst the shelter of deepest, freshest green. In
the perpetual presence of their cathedral, which, through sun and storm,
through frost and summer, through noon and midnight, stood there amidst
them, and watched the galled oxen tread their painful way, and the
scourged mules droop their humble heads, and the helpless, harmless
flocks go forth to the slaughter, and the old weary lives of the men and
women pass through hunger and cold to the grave, and the sun and the
moon rise and set, and the flowers and the children blossom and fade,
and the endless years come and go, bringing peace, bringing war;
bringing harvest, bringing famine; bringing life, bringing death; and,
beholding these, still said to the multitude in its terrible irony, "Lo!
your God is Love."

This little town lay far from the great Paris highway and all greatly
frequented tracks. It was but a short distance from the coast, but near
no harbour of greater extent than such as some small fishing village had
made in the rocks for the trawlers. Few strangers ever came to it,
except some wandering painters or antiquaries. It sent its apples and
eggs, its poultry and honey, its colza and corn to the use of the great
cities; but it was rarely that any of its own people went thither.

Now and then some one of the oval-faced, blue-eyed, lithe-limbed maidens
of its little homely households would sigh and flush and grow restless,
and murmur of Paris; and would steal out in the break of a warm grey
morning whilst only the birds were still waking; and would patter away
in her wooden shoes over the broad, white, southern road, with a stick
over her shoulder, and a bundle of all her worldly goods upon the stick.
And she would look back often, often, as she went; and when all was lost
in the blue haze of distance save the lofty spire which she still saw
through her tears, she would say in her heart, with her lips parched and
trembling, "I will come back again. I will come back again."

But none such ever did come back.

They came back no more than did the white sweet sheaves of the lilies
which the women gathered and sent to be bought and sold in the city--to
gleam one faint summer night in a gilded balcony, and to be flung out
the next morning, withered and dead.

One amongst the few who had thus gone whither the lilies went, and of
whom the people would still talk as their mules paced homewards through
the lanes at twilight, had been Reine Flamma, the daughter of the miller
of Yprés.

       *       *       *

"There are only two trades in a city," said the actors to her, with a
smile as bitter as her own, "only two trades--to buy souls and to sell
them. What business have you here, who do neither the one nor the
other?"

There was music still in this trampled reed of the river, into which the
gods had once bidden the stray winds and the wandering waters breathe
their melody; but there, in the press, the buyers and sellers only saw
in it a frail thing of the sand and the stream, only made to be woven
for barter, or bind together the sheaves of the roses of pleasure.

       *       *       *

Art was to him as mother, brethren, mistress, offspring, religion--all
that other men hold dear. He had none of these, he desired none of them;
and his genius sufficed to him in their stead.

It was an intense and reckless egotism, made alike cruel and sublime by
its intensity and purity, like the egotism of a mother in her child. To
it, as the mother to her child, he would have sacrificed every living
creature; but to it also, like her, he would have sacrificed his very
existence as unhesitatingly. But it was an egotism which, though
merciless in its tyranny, was as pure as snow in its impersonality; it
was untainted by any grain of avarice, of vanity, of selfish desire; it
was independent of all sympathy; it was simply and intensely the passion
for immortality:--that sublime selfishness, that superb madness, of all
great minds.

Art had taken him for its own, as Demeter, in the days of her
desolation, took the child Demophoon to nurture him as her own on the
food of gods, and to plunge him through the flames of a fire that would
give him immortal life. As the pusillanimous and sordid fears of the
mortal mother lost to the child for evermore the possession of Olympian
joys and of perpetual youth, so did the craven and earthly cares of
bodily needs hold the artist back from the radiance of the life of the
soul, and drag him from the purifying fires. Yet he had not been utterly
discouraged; he strove against the Metanira of circumstance; he did his
best to struggle free from the mortal bonds that bound him; and, as the
child Demophoon mourned for the great goddess that had nurtured him,
refusing to be comforted, so did he turn from the base consolations of
the senses and the appetites, and beheld ever before his sight the
ineffable majesty of that Mater Dolorosa who once and for ever had
anointed him as her own.

       *       *       *

Men did not believe in him; what he wrought saddened and terrified them;
they turned aside to those who fed them on simpler and on sweeter food.

His works were great, but they were such as the public mind deems
impious. They unveiled human corruption too nakedly, and they shadowed
forth visions too exalted, and satires too unsparing, for them to be
acceptable to the multitude. They were compounded of an idealism clear
and cold as crystal, and of a reality cruel and voluptuous as love. They
were penetrated with an acrid satire and an intense despair: the world
caring only for a honied falsehood and a gilded gloss in every art,
would have none of them.

       *       *       *

"See you--what he lacks is only the sinew that gold gives. What he has
done is great. The world rightly seeing must fear it; and fear is the
highest homage the world ever gives. But he is penniless; and he has
many foes; and jealousy can with so much ease thrust aside the greatness
which it fears into obscurity, when that greatness is marred by the
failures and the feebleness of poverty. Genius scorns the power of gold:
it is wrong; gold is the war-scythe on its chariot, which mows down the
millions of its foes and gives free passage to the sun-coursers with
which it leaves those heavenly fields of light for the gross
battle-fields of earth."

       *       *       *

It is true that the great artist is as a fallen god who remembers a time
when worlds arose at his breath, and at his bidding the barren lands
blossomed into fruitfulness; the sorcery of the thyrsus is still his,
though weakened.

The powers of lost dominions haunt his memory; the remembered glory of
an eternal sun is in his eyes, and makes the light of common day seem
darkness; the heart sickness of a long exile weighs on him; incessantly
he labours to overtake the mirage of a loveliness which fades as he
pursues it. In the poetic creation by which the bondage of his material
life is redeemed, he finds at once ecstasy and disgust, because he feels
at once his strength and weakness. For him all things of earth and air,
and sea and cloud, have beauty; and to his ear all voices of the forest
land and water world are audible.

He is as a god, since he can call into palpable shape dreams born of
impalpable thought; as a god, since he has known the truth divested of
lies, and has stood face to face with it, and been not afraid; a god
thus. But a cripple inasmuch as his hand can never fashion the shapes
that his vision beholds; an alien because he has lost what he never will
find upon earth; a beast, since ever and again his passions will drag
him to wallow in the filth of sensual indulgence; a slave, since
oftentimes the divinity that is in him breaks and bends under the
devilry that also is in him, and he obeys the instincts of vileness, and
when he would fain bless the nations he curses them.

       *       *       *

"I do not know," she said, wearily afresh. "Marcellin says that every
God is deaf. He must be deaf--or very cruel. Look; everything lives in
pain; and yet no God pities and makes an end of the earth. I would--if I
were He. Look--at dawn, the other day, I was out in the wood. I came
upon a little rabbit in a trap; a little, pretty, soft black-and-white
thing, quite young. It was screaming in its horrible misery; it
had been screaming all night. Its thighs were broken in the iron teeth;
the trap held it tight; it could not escape, it could only
scream--scream--scream. All in vain. When I had set it free it was
mangled as if a wolf had gnawed it; the iron teeth had bitten through
the fur, and the flesh, and the bone; it had lost so much blood, and it
was in so much pain, that it could not live. I laid it down in the
bracken, and put water to its mouth, and did what I could; but it was of
no use. It had been too much hurt. It died as the sun rose; a little,
harmless, shy, happy thing, you know, that never killed any creature,
and only asked to nibble a leaf or two, or sleep in a little round hole,
and run about merry and free. How can one care for a God since He lets
these things be?"

Arslàn smiled as he heard.

"Child,--men care for a god only as a god means a good to them. Men are
heirs of heaven, they say; and, in right of their heritage, they make
life hell to every living thing that dares dispute the world with them.
You do not understand that,--tut! You are not human then. If you were
human, you would begrudge a blade of grass to a rabbit, and arrogate to
yourself a lease of immortality."

       *       *       *

"Of a winter night," she said, slowly, "I have heard old Pitchou read
aloud to Flamma, and she reads of their God, the one they hang
everywhere on the crosses here; and the story ran that the populace
scourged and nailed to death the one whom they knew afterwards, when too
late, to have been the great man that they looked for, and that, being
bidden to make their choice of one to save, they chose to ransom and
honour a thief: one called Barabbas. Is it true?--if the world's choice
were wrong once, why not twice?"

Arslàn smiled; the smile she knew so well, and which had no more warmth
than the ice floes of his native seas.

"Why not twice? Why not a thousand times? A thief has the world's
sympathies always. It is always the Barabbas--the trickster in talent,
the forger of stolen wisdom, the bravo of political crime, the huckster
of plundered thoughts, the charlatan of false art, whom the vox populi
elects and sets free, and sends on his way rejoicing. 'Will ye have
Christ or Barabbas?' Every generation is asked the same question, and
every generation gives the same answer; and scourges the divinity out of
its midst, and finds its idol in brute force and low greed."

She only dimly comprehended, not well knowing why her words had thus
roused him. She pondered awhile, then her face cleared.

"But the end?" she asked. "The dead God is the God of all these people
round us now, and they have built great places in His honour, and they
bow when they pass His likeness in the highway or the market-place. But
with Barabbas--what was the end? It seems that they loathe and despise
him?"

Arslàn laughed a little.

"His end? In Syria may be the vultures picked his bones, where they lay
whitening on the plains--those times were primitive, the world was
young. But in our day Barabbas lives and dies in honour, and has a tomb
that stares all men in the face, setting forth his virtues, so that all
who run may read. In our day Barabbas--the Barabbas of money-greeds and
delicate cunning, and the theft which has risen to science, and the
assassination that kills souls and not bodies, and the crime that deals
moral death and not material death--our Barabbas, who is crowned Fraud
in the place of mailed Force, lives always in purple and fine linen, and
ends in the odours of sanctity with the prayers of priests over his
corpse."

He spoke with a certain fierce passion that rose in him whenever he
thought of that world which had rejected him, and had accepted so many
others, weaker in brain and nerve, but stronger in one sense, because
more dishonest; and as he spoke he went straight to a wall on his right,
where a great sea of grey paper was stretched, untouched and ready to
his hand.

She would have spoken, but he made a motion to silence.

"Hush! be quiet," he said to her, almost harshly, "I have thought of
something."

And he took the charcoal and swept rapidly with it over the dull blank
surface till the vacancy glowed with life. A thought had kindled in him;
a vision had arisen before him.

The scene around him vanished utterly from his sight. The grey stone
walls, the square windows through which the fading sun-rays fell; the
level pastures and sullen streams, and paled skies without, all faded
away as though they had existed only in a dream.

All the empty space about him became peopled with many human shapes that
for him had breath and being, though no other eye could have beheld
them. The old Syrian world of eighteen hundred years before arose and
glowed before him. The things of his own life died away, and in their
stead he saw the fierce flame of eastern suns, the gleaming range of
marble palaces, the purple flush of pomegranate flowers, the deep colour
of oriental robes, the soft silver of hills olive crested, the tumult of
a city at high festival. And he could not rest until all he thus saw in
his vision he had rendered as far as his hand could render it; and what
he drew was this.

A great thirsty, heated, seething crowd; a crowd that had manhood and
womanhood, age and infancy, youths and maidens within its ranks; a crowd
in whose faces every animal lust and every human passion were let loose;
a crowd on which a noon sun without shadow streamed; a sun which parched
and festered and engendered all corruption in the land on which it
looked. This crowd was in a city, a city on whose flat roofs the myrtle
and the cistus bloomed; above whose walls the plumes of olives waved;
upon whose distant slopes the darkling cedar groves rose straight
against the sky, and on whose lofty temple plates of gold glistened
against the shining heavens. This crowd had scourges, and stones, and
goads in their hands; and in their midst they led one clothed in white,
whose head was thorn-crowned, and whose eyes were filled with a god's
pity and a man's reproach; and him they stoned, and lashed, and hooted.

And triumphant in the throng, whose choice he was, seated aloft upon
men's shoulders, with a purple robe thrown on his shoulders, there sat a
brawny, grinning, bloated, jibbering thing, with curled lips and savage
eyes, and satyr's leer: the creature of greed, of lust, of obscenity, of
brutality, of avarice, of desire. This thing the people followed,
rejoicing exceedingly, content in the guide whom they had chosen,
victorious in the fiend for whom they spurned a deity; crying, with wide
open throats and brazen lungs,--"Barabbas!"

There was not a form in all this close-packed throng which had not a
terrible irony in it, which was not in itself a symbol of some appetite
or of some vice, for which women and men abjure the godhead in them.

A gorged drunkard lay asleep with his amphora broken beneath him, the
stream of the purple wine lapped eagerly by ragged children. A
money-changer had left the receipt of custom, eager to watch and shout,
and a thief clutched both hands full of the forsaken coins and fled.

A miser had dropped a bag of gold, and stopped to catch at all the
rolling pieces, regardless in his greed how the crowd trampled and trod
on him. A mother chid and struck her little brown curly child, because
he stretched his arms and turned his face towards the thorn-crowned
captive.

A priest of the temple, with a blood-stained knife thrust in his girdle,
dragged beside him, by the throat, a little tender lamb doomed for the
sacrifice.

A dancing woman with jewels in her ears, and half naked to the waist,
sounding the brazen cymbals above her head, drew a score of youths after
her in Barabbas' train.

On one of the flat roof tops, reclining on purple and fine linen,
looking down on the street below from the thick foliage of her citron
boughs and her red Syrian roses, was an Egyptian wanton; and leaning
beside her, tossing golden apples in her bosom, was a young centurion of
the Roman guard, languid and laughing, with his fair chest bare to the
heat, and his armour flung in a pile beside him.

And thus, in like manner, every figure bore its parable; and above all
was the hard, hot, cruel, cloudless sky of blue, without one faintest
mist to break its horrible serenity, whilst high in the azure ether and
against the sun, an eagle and a vulture fought, locked close, and
tearing at each other's breasts.

Six nights this conception occupied him. His days were not his own, he
spent them in a rough mechanical labour which his strength executed
while his mind was far away from it; but the nights were all his, and at
the end of the sixth night the thing arose, perfect as far as his hand
could perfect it; begotten by a chance and ignorant word as have been
many of the greatest works the world has seen;--oaks sprung from the
acorn that a careless child has let fall.

When he had finished it his arm dropped to his side, he stood
motionless; the red glow of the dawn lighting the depths of his
sleepless eyes.

       *       *       *

It was a level green silent country which was round her, with little
loveliness and little colour; but as she went she laughed incessantly
in the delirious gladness of her liberty.

She tossed her head back to watch the flight of a single swallow; she
caught a handful of green leaves and buried her face in them. She
listened in a very agony of memory to the rippling moisture of a little
brook. She followed with her eyes the sweeping vapours of the
rain-clouds, and when a west wind rose and blew a cluster of loose apple
blossoms between her eyes--she could no longer bear the passionate pain
of all the long-lost sweetness, but flinging herself downward, sobbed
with the ecstasy of an exile's memories.

The hell in which she had dwelt had denied them to her for so long.

"Ah God!" she thought, "I know now--one cannot be utterly wretched
whilst one has still the air and the light and the winds of the sky."

And she arose, calmer, and went on her way; wondering, even in that
hour, why men and women trod the daily measures of their lives with
their eyes downward and their ears choked with the dust; hearkening so
little to the sound of the breeze in the grasses, looking so little to
the passage of the clouds against the sun.

       *       *       *

The ground ascended as it stretched seaward, but on it there were only
wide dull fields of colza or of grass lying, sickly and burning, under
the fire of the late afternoon sun.

The slope was too gradual to break their monotony.

Above them was the cloudless weary blue; below them was the faint
parched green; other colour there was none; one little dusky panting
bird flew by pursued by a kite; that was the only change.

She asked him no questions; she walked mutely and patiently by his side;
she hated the dull heat, the colourless waste, the hard scorch of the
air, the dreary changelessness of the scene. But she did not say so. He
had chosen to come to them.

A league onward the fields were merged into a heath, uncultivated and
covered with short prickly furze; on the brown earth between the stunted
bushes a few goats were cropping the burnt-up grasses. Here the slope
grew sharper, and the earth seemed to rise up between the sky and them,
steep and barren as a house-roof.

Once he asked her--

"Are you tired?"

She shook her head.

Her feet ached, and her heart throbbed; her limbs were heavy like lead
in the heat and the toil. But she did not tell him so. She would have
dropped dead from exhaustion rather than have confessed to him any
weakness.

He took the denial as it was given, and pressed onward up the ascent.

The sun was slanting towards the west; the skies seemed like brass; the
air was sharp, yet scorching; the dull brown earth still rose up before
them like a wall; they climbed it slowly and painfully, their hands and
their teeth filled with its dust, which drifted in a cloud before them.
He bade her close her eyes, and she obeyed him. He stretched his arm out
and drew her after him up the ascent, which was slippery from drought
and prickly from the stunted growth of furze.

On the summit he stood still and released her.

"Now look."

She opened her eyes with the startled, half-questioning stare of one
led out from utter darkness into a full and sudden light.

Then, with a great cry, she sank down on the rock, trembling, weeping,
laughing, stretching out her arms to the new glory that met her sight,
dumb with its grandeur, delirious with its delight.

For what she saw was the sea.

Before her dazzled sight all its beauty stretched, the blueness of the
waters meeting the blueness of the skies; radiant with all the marvels
of its countless hues; softly stirred by a low wind that sighed across
it; bathed in a glow of gold that streamed on it from the westward;
rolling from north to south in slow, sonorous measure, filling the
silent air with the ceaseless melody of its wondrous voice.

The lustre of the sunset beamed upon it; the cool fresh smell of its
waters shot like new life through all the scorch and stupor of the day;
its white foam curled and broke on the brown curving rocks and wooded
inlets of the shores; innumerable birds, that gleamed like silver,
floated or flew above its surface; all was still, still as death, save
only for the endless movement of those white swift wings and the murmur
of the waves, in which all meaner and harsher sounds of earth seemed
lost and hushed to slumber and to silence.

The sea alone reigned, as it reigned in the young years of the earth
when men were not; as, may be, it will be its turn to reign again in the
years to come, when men and all their works shall have passed away and
be no more seen nor any more remembered.

Arslàn watched her in silence.

He was glad that it should awe and move her thus. The sea was the only
thing for which he cared, or which had any power over him. In the
northern winters of his youth he had known the ocean, in one wild
night's work, undo all that men had done to check and rule it, and
burst through all the barriers that they had raised against it, and
throw down the stones of the altar and quench the fires of the hearth,
and sweep through the fold and the byre, and flood the cradle of the
child and the grave of the grandsire.

He had seen its storms wash away at one blow the corn harvests of years,
and gather in the sheep from the hills, and take the life of the
shepherd with the life of the flock. He had seen it claim lovers locked
in each other's arms, and toss the fair curls of the first-born as it
tossed the riband weeds of its deeps. And he had felt small pity; it had
rather given him a certain sense of rejoicing and triumph to see the
water laugh to scorn those who were so wise in their own conceit, and
bind beneath its chains those who held themselves masters over all
beasts of the field and birds of the air.

Other men dreaded the sea and cursed it; but he in his way loved it
almost with passion, and could he have chosen the manner of his death
would have desired that it should be by the sea and through the sea; a
death cold and serene and dreamily voluptuous: a death on which no woman
should look and in which no man should have share.

He watched her now for some time without speaking. When the first
paroxysm of her emotion had exhausted itself, she stood motionless, her
figure like a statue of bronze against the sun, her head sunk upon her
breast, her arms outstretched as though beseeching that wondrous
brightness which she saw to take her to itself and make her one with it.
Her whole attitude expressed an unutterable worship. She was like one
who for the first time hears of God.

"What is it you feel?" he asked her suddenly. He knew without asking;
but he had made it his custom to dissect all her joys and sufferings
with little heed whether he thus added to either.

At the sound of his voice she started, and a shiver shook her as she
answered him slowly, without withdrawing her gaze from the waters.

"It has been there always--always--so near me?"

"Before the land, the sea was."

"And I never knew!"--

Her head drooped on her breast; great tears rolled silently down her
cheeks; her arms fell to her sides; she shivered again and sighed. She
knew all that she had lost--this is the greatest grief that life holds.

"You never knew," he made answer. "There was only a sand-hill between
you and all this glory; but the sand-hill was enough. Many people never
climb theirs all their lives long."

The words and their meaning escaped her.

She had for once no remembrance of him, nor any other sense save of this
surpassing wonder that had thus burst on her--this miracle that had been
near her for so long, yet of which she had never in all her visions
dreamed.

She was quite silent; sunk there on her knees, motionless, and gazing
straight, with eyes unblenching, at the light.

There was no sound near them, nor was there anything in sight except
where above against the deepest azure of the sky two curlews were
circling around each other, and in the distance a single ship was
gliding, with sails silvered by the sun. All signs of human life lay far
behind; severed from them by those steep scorched slopes swept only by
the plovers and the bees. And all the while she looked slow tears
gathered in her eyes and fell, and the loud hard beating of her heart
was audible in the hushed stillness of the upper air.

He waited awhile: then he spoke to her.

"Since it pains you, come away."

A great sob shuddered through her.

"Give me that pain," she muttered, "sooner than any joy. Pain? pain?--it
is life, heaven--liberty!"

For suddenly those words which she had heard spoken around her, and
which had been to her like the mutterings of the deaf and the dumb,
became real to her with thousand meanings.

The seagulls were lost in the heights of the air; the ship sailed on
into the light till the last gleam of its canvas vanished; the sun sank
westward lower and lower till it glowed in a globe of flame upon the
edge of the water: she never moved; standing there on the summit of the
cliff, with her head drooped upon her breast, her form thrown out dark
and motionless against the gold of the western sky, on her face still
that look of one who worships with intense honour and passionate faith
an unknown God.

The sun sank entirely, leaving only a trail of flame across the heavens;
the waters grew grey and purple in the shadows; one boat, black against
the crimson reflections of the west, swept on swiftly with the
in-rushing tide; the wind rose and blew long curls of seaweed on the
rocks; the shores of the bay were dimmed in a heavy mist, through which
the lights of the little hamlets dimly glowed, and the distant voices of
fishermen calling to each other as they drew in their deep-sea nets came
faint and weirdlike.

       *       *       *

What she wanted was to live. Live as the great moor bird did that she
had seen float one day over these pale, pure, blue skies, with its
mighty wings outstretched in the calm grey weather; which came none knew
whence, and which went none knew whither; which poised silent and
stirless against the clouds; then called with a sweet wild love-note to
its mate, and waited for him as he sailed in from the misty shadows
where the sea lay; and with him rose yet higher and higher in the air;
and passed westward, cleaving the fields of light, and so vanished;--a
queen of the wind, a daughter of the sun; a creature of freedom, of
victory, of tireless movement, and of boundless space, a thing of heaven
and of liberty.

       *       *       *

In the springtime of the year three gods watched by the river.

The golden flowers of the willows blew in the low winds; the waters came
and went; the moon rose full and cold over a silvery stream; the reeds
sighed in the silence.

Two winters had drifted by and one hot drowsy summer since their creator
had forsaken them, and all the white still shapes upon the walls already
had been slain by the cold breath of Time. The green weeds waved in the
empty casements; the chance-sown seeds of thistles and of bell-flowers
were taking leaf between the square stones of the paven places; on the
deserted threshold lichens and brambles climbed together; the filmy ooze
of a rank vegetation stole over the loveliness of Persephone and
devoured one by one the divine offspring of Zeus; about the feet of the
bound sun king in Pheroe and over the calm serene mockery of Hermes'
smile the grey nets of the spiders' webs had been woven to and fro,
across and across, with the lacing of a million threads, as Fate weaves
round the limbs and covers the eyes of mortals as they stumble blindly
from their birthplace to their grave. All things, the damp and the dust,
the frost and the scorch, the newts and the rats, the fret of the
flooded waters, and the stealing sure inroad of the mosses that
everywhere grew from the dews and the fogs, had taken and eaten, in
hunger or sport, or had touched, and thieved from, then left, gangrened
and ruined.

The three gods alone remained; who being the sons of eternal night, are
unharmed, unaltered, by any passage of the years of earth. The only gods
who never bend beneath the yoke of years; but unblenchingly behold the
nations wither as uncounted leaves, and the lands and the seas change
their places, and the cities and the empires pass away as a tale that is
told; and the deities that are worshipped in the temples alter in name
and attributes and cultus, at the wanton will of the age which begot
them.

In the still, cold, moonlit air their shadows stood together. Hand in
hand; looking outward through the white night-mists. Other gods perished
with the faith of each age as it changed; other gods lived by the breath
of men's lips, the tears of prayer, the smoke of sacrifice. But
they,--their empire was the universe.

In every young soul that leaps into the light of life rejoicing blindly,
Oneiros has dominion; and he alone. In every creature that breathes,
from the conqueror resting on a field of blood to the nest bird cradled
in its bed of leaves, Hypnos holds a sovereignty which nothing mortal
can long resist and live. And Thanatos,--to him belongs every created
thing, past, present, and to come; beneath his feet all generations lie;
and in the hollow of his hand he holds the worlds; though the earth be
tenantless, and the heavens sunless, and the planets shrivel in their
courses, and the universe be shrouded in an endless night, yet through
the eternal desolation Thanatos still will reign, and through the
eternal darkness, through the immeasurable solitudes, he alone will
wander, and he still behold his work.

Deathless as themselves their shadows stood; and the worm and the lizard
and the newt left them alone and dared not wind about their calm clear
brows, and dared not steal to touch the roses at their lips, knowing
that ere the birth of the worlds these were, and when the worlds shall
have perished these still will reign on:--the slow, sure, soundless,
changeless ministers of an eternal rest, of an eternal oblivion.

A late light strayed in from the grey skies, pale as the primrose
flowers that grew amongst the reeds upon the shore; and found its way to
them, trembling; and shone in the far-seeing depths of their
unfathomable eyes.

The eyes which spake and said:

"Sleep, dreams, and death:--we are the only gods that answer prayer."

       *       *       *

Night had come; a dark night of earliest spring. The wild day had sobbed
itself to sleep after a restless life with fitful breath of storm and
many sighs of shuddering breezes.

The sun had sunk, leaving long tracks of blood-red light across one-half
the heavens.

There was a sharp crisp coldness as of lingering frost in the gloom and
the dulness. Heavy clouds, as yet unbroken, hung over the cathedral and
the clustering roofs around it in dark and starless splendour.

Over the great still plains which stretched eastward and southward,
black with the furrows of the scarce-budded corn, the wind blew hard;
blowing the river and the many streamlets spreading from it into foam;
driving the wintry leaves which still strewed the earth thickly, hither
and thither in legions; breaking boughs that had weathered the winter
hurricanes, and scattering the tender blossoms of the snowdrops and the
earliest crocuses in all the little moss-grown garden ways.

The smell of wet grass, of the wood-born violets, of trees whose new
life was waking in their veins, of damp earths turned freshly upwards by
the plough, were all blown together by the riotous breezes.

Now and then a light gleamed through the gloom where a little peasant
boy lighted home with a torch some old priest on his mule, or a boat
went down the waters with a lamp hung at its prow. For it grew dark
early, and people used to the river read a threat of a flood on its
face.

A dim glow from the west, which was still tinged with the fire of the
sunset, fell through a great square window set in a stone building, and
striking across the sicklier rays of an oil lamp reached the opposing
wall within.

It was a wall of grey stone, dead and lustreless like the wall of a
prison-house, over whose surface a spider as colourless as itself
dragged slowly its crooked hairy limbs loaded with the moisture of the
place, which was an old tower, of which the country folk told strange
tales, where it stood among the rushes on the left bank of the stream.

A man watched the spider as it went.

It crept on its heavy way across the faint crimson reflection from the
glow of the sunken sun.

It was fat, well-nourished, lazy, content; its home of dusky silver hung
on high, where its pleasure lay in weaving, clinging, hoarding,
breeding. It lived in the dark; it had neither pity nor regret; it
troubled itself neither for the death it dealt to nourish itself, nor
for the light without, into which it never wandered; it spun and throve
and multiplied.

It was an emblem of the man who is wise in his generation; of the man
whom Cato the elder deemed divine; of the Majority and the Mediocrity
who rule over the earth and enjoy its fruits.

This man knew that it was wise; that those who were like to it were wise
also: wise with the holy wisdom which is honoured of other men.

He had been unwise--always; and therefore he stood watching the sun die,
with hunger in his soul, with famine in his body.

For many months he had been half famished, as were the wolves in his own
northern mountains in the winter solstice. For seven days he had only
been able to crush a crust of hard black bread between his teeth. For
twenty hours he had not done even so much as this. The trencher on his
tressel was empty; and he had not wherewithal to re-fill it.

He might have found some to fill it for him no doubt. He lived amidst
the poor, and the poor to the poor are good, though they are bad and
bitter to the rich. But he did not open either his lips or his hand. He
consumed his heart in silence; and his vitals preyed in anguish on
themselves without his yielding to their torments.

He was a madman; and Cato, who measured the godliness of man by what
they gained, would have held him accursed;--the madness that starves and
is silent for an idea is an insanity, scouted by the world and the gods.
For it is an insanity unfruitful; except to the future. And for the
future who cares,--save these madmen themselves?

He watched the spider as it went.

It could not speak to him as its fellow once spoke in the old Scottish
story. To hear as that captive heard, the hearer must have hope, and a
kingdom,--if only in dreams.

This man had no hope; he had a kingdom indeed, but it was not of earth;
and, in an hour of sheer cruel bodily pain, earth alone has dominion and
power and worth.

The spider crawled across the grey wall; across the glow from the
vanished sun; across a coil of a dead passion-vine, that strayed loose
through the floor; across the classic shapes of a great cartoon drawn in
chalks upon the dull rugged surface of stone.

Nothing arrested it; nothing retarded it, as nothing hastened it. It
moved slowly on; fat, lustreless, indolent, hueless; reached at length
its den, and there squatted aloft, loving the darkness; its young
swarming around, its prey held in its forceps, its nets cast about.

Through the open casement there came on the rising wind of the storm,
in the light of the last lingering sunbeam, a beautiful night-moth,
begotten by some cruel hot-house heat in the bosom of some frail exiled
tropical flower.

It swam in on trembling pinions, and alighted on the golden head of a
gathered crocus that lay dying on the stones--a moth that should have
been born to no world save that of the summer world of a Midsummer
Night's Dream.

A shape of Ariel and Oberon; slender, silver, purple, roseate,
lustrous-eyed, and gossamer-winged.

A creature of woodland waters, and blossoming forests; of the yellow
chalices of kingcups and the white breasts of river lilies, of moonbeams
that strayed through a summer world of shadows, and dew-drops that
glistened in the deep folded hearts of roses. A creature to brush the
dreaming eyes of a poet, to nestle on the bosom of a young girl
sleeping: to float earthwards on a falling star, to slumber on a lotus
leaf.

A creature that amidst the still soft hush of woods and waters still
tells, to those who listen, of the world when the world was young.

The moth flew on, and poised on the fading crocus leaves, which spread
out their pale gold on the level of the grey floor.

It was weary, and its delicate wings drooped; it was storm-tossed,
wind-beaten, drenched with mist and frozen with the cold; it belonged to
the moon, to the dew, to the lilies, to the forget-me-nots, and to the
night; and it found that the hard grip of winter had seized it whilst
yet it had thought that the stars and the summer were with it. It lived
before its time,--and it was like the human soul, which being born in
the darkness of the world dares to dream of light, and, wandering in
vain search of a sun that will never rise, falls and perishes in
wretchedness.

It was beautiful exceedingly, with the brilliant tropical beauty of a
life that is short-lived. It rested a moment on the stem of the pale
flower, then with its radiant eyes fastened on the point of light which
the lamp thrust upward, it flew on high; and, spreading out its
transparent wings and floating to the flame, kissed it, quivered once,
and died.

There fell among the dust and cinder of the lamp a little heap of
shrunken, fire-scorched, blackened ashes.

The wind whirled them upward from their rest, and drove them forth into
the night to mingle with the storm-scourged grasses, the pale dead
violets, the withered snow-flowers, with all things frost-touched and
forgotten.

The spider sat aloft, sucking the juices from the fettered flies,
teaching its spawn to prey and feed; content in squalor and in
plenitude; in sensual sloth, and in the increase of its body and its
hoard.

He watched them both: the success of the spider, the death of the moth;
trite as a fable; ever repeated as the tides of the sea; the two symbols
of humanity; of the life which fattens on greed and gain, and the life
which perishes of divine desire.

       *       *       *

There were no rare birds, no birds of moor and mountain, in that
cultivated and populous district; but to her all the little home-bred
things of pasture and orchard were full of poetry and of character.

The robins, with that pretty air of boldness with which they veil their
real shyness and timidity; the strong and saucy sparrows, powerful by
the strength of all mediocrities and majorities; all the dainty families
of finches in their gay apparellings; the plain brown bird that filled
the night with music; the gorgeous oriole ruffling in gold, the gilded
princeling of them all; the little blue warblers, the violets of the
air; the kingfishers who had hovered so long over the forget-me-nots
upon the rivers that they had caught the colours of the flowers on their
wings; the bright blackcaps green as the leaves, with their yellow
waistcoats and velvet hoods, the innocent freebooters of the woodland
liberties: all these were her friends and lovers, various as any human
crowds of court or city.

She loved them; they and the fourfooted beasts were the sole things that
did not flee from her; and the woeful and mad slaughter of them by the
peasants was to her a grief passionate in its despair. She did not
reason on what she felt; but to her a bird slain was a trust betrayed,
an innocence defiled, a creature of heaven struck to earth.

Suddenly on the silence of the garden there was a little shrill sound of
pain; the birds flew high in air, screaming and startled; the leaves of
a bough of ivy shook as with a struggle.

She rose and looked; a line of twine was trembling against the foliage;
in its noosed end the throat of the mavis had been caught; it hung
trembling and clutching at the air convulsively with its little drawn-up
feet. It had flown into the trap as it had ended its joyous song and
soared up to join its brethren.

There were a score of such traps set in the miller's garden.

She unloosed the cord from about its tiny neck, set it free, and laid it
down upon the ivy. The succour came too late; the little gentle body was
already without breath; the feet had ceased to beat the air; the small
soft head had drooped feebly on one side; the lifeless eyes had started
from their sockets; the throat was without song for evermore.

"The earth would be good but for men," she thought, as she stood with
the little dead bird in her hand.

Its mate, which was poised on a rose bough, flew straight to it, and
curled round and round about the small slain body, and piteously
bewailed its fate, and mourned, refusing to be comforted, agitating the
air with trembling wings, and giving out vain cries of grief.

Vain; for the little joyous life was gone; the life that asked only of
God and Man a home in the green leaves; a drop of dew from the cup of a
rose; a bough to swing on in the sunlight; a summer day to celebrate in
song.

All the winter through, it had borne cold and hunger and pain without
lament; it had saved the soil from destroying larvæ, and purified the
trees from all foul germs; it had built its little home unaided, and had
fed its nestlings without alms; it had given its sweet song lavishly to
the winds, to the blossoms, to the empty air, to the deaf ears of men;
and now it lay dead in its innocence; trapped and slain because a human
greed begrudged it a berry worth the thousandth part of a copper coin.

Out from the porch of the mill-house Claudis Flamma came, with a knife
in his hand and a basket, to cut lilies for one of the choristers of the
cathedral, since the morrow would be the religious feast of the
Visitation of Mary.

He saw the dead thrush in her hand, and chuckled to himself as he went
by.

"The tenth bird trapped since sunrise," he said, thinking how shrewd and
how sure in their make were these traps of twine that he set in the
grass and the leaves.

She said nothing; but the darkness of disgust swept over her face, as he
came in sight in the distance.

She knelt down and scraped a hole in the earth; and laid moss in it, and
put the mavis softly on its green and fragrant bier, and covered it with
handfuls of fallen rose leaves, and with a sprig or two of thyme.

Around her head the widowed thrush flew ceaselessly, uttering sad
cries;--who now should wander with him through the sunlight?--who now
should rove with him above the blossoming fields?--who now should sit
with him beneath the boughs hearing the sweet rain fall between the
leaves?--who now should wake with him whilst yet the world was dark, to
feel the dawn break ere the east were red, and sing a welcome to the
unborn day?

       *       *       *

And, indeed, to those who are alive to the nameless, universal, eternal
soul which breathes in all the grasses of the fields, and beams in the
eyes of all creatures of earth and air, and throbs in the living light
of palpitating stars, and thrills through the young sap of forest trees,
and stirs in the strange loves of wind-borne plants, and hums in every
song of the bee, and burns in every quiver of the flame, and peoples
with sentient myriads every drop of dew that gathers on a harebell,
every bead of water that ripples in a brook--to these the mortal life of
man can seem but little, save at once the fiercest and the feeblest
thing that does exist; at once the most cruel and the most impotent;
tyrant of direst destruction and bondsman of lowest captivity.

Hence, pity entered very little into his thoughts at any time; the
perpetual torture of life did indeed perplex him, as it perplexes every
thinking creature, with wonder at the universal bitterness that taints
all creation, at the universal death whereby all forms of life are
nurtured, at the universal anguish of all existence which daily and
nightly assails the unknown God in piteous protest at the inexorable
laws of inexplicable miseries and mysteries. But because such suffering
was thus universal, therefore he almost ceased to feel pity for it; of
the two he pitied the beasts far more than the human kind:--the horse
staggering beneath the lash in all the feebleness of hunger, lameness,
and old age; the ox bleeding from the goad on the hard furrows, or
stumbling through the hooting crowd, blind, footsore, and shivering, to
its last home in the slaughter-house; the dog, yielding up its noble
life inch by inch under the tortures of the knife, loyally licking the
hand of the vivisector while he drove his probe through its quivering
nerves; the unutterable hell in which all these gentle, kindly, and
long-suffering creatures dwelt for the pleasure or the vanity, the
avarice or the brutality of men,--these he pitied perpetually, with a
tenderness for them that was the softest thing in all his nature.

       *       *       *

"There lived once in the East, a great king; he dwelt far away, amongst
the fragrant fields of roses, and in the light of suns that never set.

"He was young, he was beloved, he was fair of face and form; and the
people, as they hewed stone, or brought water, said amongst themselves,
'Verily, this man is as a god; he goes where he lists, and he lies still
or rises up as he pleases; and all fruits of all lands are culled for
him; and his nights are nights of gladness, and his days, when they
dawn, are all his to sleep through or spend as he wills.' But the people
were wrong. For this king was weary of his life.

"His buckler was sown with gems, but his heart beneath it was sore. For
he had been long bitterly harassed by foes who descended on him as
wolves from the hills in their hunger, and he had been long plagued with
heavy wars and with bad rice harvests, and with many troubles to his
nation that kept it very poor, and forbade him to finish the building of
new marble palaces, and the making of fresh gardens of delight, on which
his heart was set. So he, being weary of a barren land and of an empty
treasury, with all his might prayed to the gods that all he touched
might turn to gold, even as he had heard had happened to some magician
long before in other ages. And the gods gave him the thing he craved;
and his treasury overflowed. No king had ever been so rich, as this king
now became in the short space of a single summer-day.

"But it was bought with a price.

"When he stretched out his hand to gather the rose that blossomed in his
path, a golden flower scentless and stiff was all he grasped. When he
called to him the carrier-dove that sped with a scroll of love words
across the mountains, the bird sank on his breast a carven piece of
metal. When he was athirst and shouted to his cupbearer for drink, the
red wine ran a stream of molten gold. When he would fain have eaten, the
pulse and the pomegranate grew alike to gold between his teeth. And lo!
at eventide, when he sought the silent chambers of his harem, saying,
'Here at least shall I find rest,' and bent his steps to the couch
whereon his best-beloved slave was sleeping, a statue of gold was all he
drew into his eager arms, and cold shut lips of sculptured gold were all
that met his own.

"That night the great king slew himself, unable any more to bear this
agony; since all around him was desolation, even though all around him
was wealth.

"Now the world is too like that king, and in its greed of gold it will
barter its life away.

"Look you,--this thing is certain--I say that the world will perish,
even as that king perished, slain as he was slain, by the curse of its
own fulfilled desire.

"The future of the world is written. For God has granted their prayer to
men. He has made them rich, and their riches shall kill them.

"When all green places have been destroyed in the builder's lust of
gain:--when all the lands are but mountains of brick, and piles of wood
and iron:--when there is no moisture anywhere; and no rain ever
falls:--when the sky is a vault of smoke; and all the rivers reek with
poison:--when forest and stream, and moor and meadow, and all the old
green wayside beauty are things vanished and forgotten:--when every
gentle timid thing of brake and bush, of air and water, has been killed
because it robbed them of a berry or a fruit:--when the earth is one
vast city, whose young children behold neither the green of the field
nor the blue of the sky, and hear no song but the hiss of the steam, and
know no music but the roar of the furnace:--when the old sweet silence
of the country-side, and the old sweet sounds of waking birds, and the
old sweet fall of summer showers, and the grace of a hedgerow bough, and
the glow of the purple heather, and the note of the cuckoo and cushat,
and the freedom of waste and of woodland, are all things dead, and
remembered of no man:--then the world, like the Eastern king, will
perish miserably of famine and of drought, with gold in its stiffened
hands, and gold in its withered lips, and gold everywhere:--gold that
the people can neither eat nor drink, gold that cares nothing for them,
but mocks them horribly:--gold for which their fathers sold peace and
health, and holiness and liberty:--gold that is one vast grave."

       *       *       *

The earth is crowded full with clay gods and false prophets, and fresh
legions for ever arriving to carry on the old strife for supremacy; and
if a man pass unknown all the time that his voice is audible, and his
hand visible, through the sound and smoke of the battle, he will dream
in vain of any remembrance when the gates of the grave shall have closed
on him and shut him for ever from sight.

When the world was in its youth, it had leisure to treasure its
recollections; even to pause and look back, and to see what flower of a
fair thought, what fruit of a noble art it might have overlooked or left
down-trodden.

But now it is so old, and is so tired; it is purblind and heavy of foot;
it does not notice what it destroys; it desires rest, and can find none;
nothing can matter greatly to it; its dead are so many that it cannot
count them; and being thus worn and dulled with age, and suffocated
under the weight of its innumerable memories, it is very slow to be
moved, and swift--terribly swift--to forget.

Why should it not be?

It has known the best, it has known the worst, that ever can befall it.

And the prayer that to the heart of a man seems so freshly born from his
own desire, what is it on the weary ear of the world, save the same old
old cry which it has heard through all the ages, empty as the sound of
the wind, and for ever--for ever--unanswered?

       *       *       *

There is no more terrible woe upon earth than the woe of the stricken
brain, which remembers the days of its strength, the living light of its
reason, the sunrise of its proud intelligence, and knows that these have
passed away like a tale that is told; like a year that is spent; like an
arrow that is shot to the stars, and flies aloft, and falls in a swamp;
like a fruit that is too well loved of the sun, and so, over-soon ripe,
is dropped from the tree and forgot on the grasses, dead to all joys of
the dawn and the noon and the summer, but still alive to the sting of
the wasp, to the fret of the aphis, to the burn of the drought, to the
theft of the parasite.

She only dimly understood, and yet she was smitten with awe and
reverence at that endless grief which had no taint of cowardice upon it,
but was pure as the patriot's despair, impersonal as the prophet's
agony.

For the first time the intellect in her consciously awoke. For the first
time she heard a human mind find voice even in its stupor and its
wretchedness to cry aloud, in reproach to its unknown Creator:

"I am _yours_! Shall I perish with the body? Why have you ever bade me
desire the light and seek it, if for ever you must thrust me into the
darkness of negation? Shall I be Nothing?--like the muscle that rots,
like the bones that crumble, like the flesh that turns to ashes, and
blows in a film on the winds? Shall I die so? I?--the mind of a man, the
breath of a god?"

       *       *       *

He could not bear to die without leaving behind his life some work the
world would cherish.

Call it folly, call it madness, it is both: the ivory Zeus that was to
give its sculptor immortality, lives but in tradition; the bronze
Athene, that was to guard the Piræus in eternal liberty, has long been
levelled with the dust; yet with every age the artist still gives life
for fame, still cries, "Let my body perish, but make my soul immortal!"

       *       *       *

The spider had drawn his dusty trail across them; the rat had squatted
at their feet; the darkness of night had enshrouded and defaced them;
yet with the morning they arose, stainless, noble, undefiled.

Amongst them there was one colossal form, on which the sun poured with
its full radiance.

This was the form of a captive grinding at a millstone; the majestic,
symmetrical, supple form of a man who was also a god.

In his naked limbs there was a supreme power; in his glance there was a
divine command; his head was lifted as though no yoke could ever lie on
that proud neck; his foot seemed to spurn the earth as though no mortal
tie had ever bound him to the sod that human steps bestrode: yet at the
corn-mill he laboured, grinding wheat like the patient blinded oxen
that toiled beside him.

For it was the great Apollo in Pheræ.

The hand which awoke the music of the spheres had been blood-stained
with murder; the beauty which had the light and lustre of the sun had
been darkened with passion and with crime; the will which no other on
earth or in heaven could withstand had been bent under the chastisement
of Zeus.

He whose glance had made the black and barren slopes of Delos to laugh
with fruitfulness and gladness--he whose prophetic sight beheld all
things past, present, and to come, the fate of all unborn races, the
doom of all unspent ages--he, the Far-Striking King, laboured here
beneath the curse of crime, greatest of all the gods, and yet a slave.

In all the hills and vales of Greece his Io pæan sounded still.

Upon his holy mountains there still arose the smoke of fires of
sacrifice.

With dance and song the Delian maidens still hailed the divinity of
Lêtô's son.

The waves of the pure Ionian air still rang for ever with the name of
Delphinios.

At Pytho and at Clarus, in Lycia and in Phokis, his oracles still
breathed forth upon their fiat terror or hope into the lives of men; and
still in all the virgin forests of the world the wild beasts honoured
him wheresoever they wandered, and the lion and the boar came at his
bidding from the deserts to bend their free necks and their wills of
fire meekly to bear his yoke in Thessaly.

Yet he laboured here at the corn-mill of Admetus; and watching him at
his bondage there stood the slender, slight, wing-footed Hermes, with a
slow, mocking smile upon his knavish lips, and a jeering scorn in his
keen eyes, even as though he cried:

"O brother, who would be greater than I! For what hast thou bartered to
me the golden rod of thy wealth and thy dominion over the flocks and the
herds? For seven chords strung on a shell--for a melody not even thine
own! For a lyre outshone by my syrinx hast thou sold all thine empire to
me. Will human ears give heed to thy song now thy sceptre has passed to
my hands? Immortal music only is left thee, and the vision foreseeing
the future. O god! O hero! O fool! what shall these profit thee now?"

Thus to the artist by whom they had been begotten the dim white shapes
of the deities spoke. Thus he saw them, thus he heard, whilst the pale
and watery sunlight lit up the form of the toiler in Pheræ.

For even as it was with the divinity of Delos, so is it likewise with
the genius of a man, which, being born of a god, yet is bound as a slave
to the grindstone. Since even as Hermes mocked the Lord of the Unerring
Bow, so is genius mocked of the world, when it has bartered the herds,
and the grain, and the rod that metes wealth, for the seven chords that
no ear, dully mortal, can hear.

And as he looked upon this symbol of his life, the captivity and the
calamity, the strength and the slavery of his existence overcame him;
and for the first hour since he had been born of a woman Arslàn buried
his face in his hands and wept.

He could bend great thoughts to take the shapes that he chose, as the
chained god in Pheræ bound the strong kings of the desert and forest to
carry his yoke; yet, like the god, he likewise stood fettered to the
mill to grind for bread.

       *       *       *

One evening, a little later, he met her in the fields on the same spot
where Marcellin first had seen her as a child amongst the scarlet blaze
of the poppies.

The lands were all yellow with saffron and emerald with the young corn;
she balanced on her head a great brass jar; the red girdle glowed about
her waist as she moved: the wind stirred the folds of her garments; her
feet were buried in the shining grass; clouds tawny and purple were
behind her; she looked like some Moorish phantom seen in a dream under a
sky of Spain.

He paused and gazed at her with eyes half content, half cold.

She was of a beauty so uncommon, so strange, and all that was his for
his art:--a great artist, whether in words, in melody, or in colour, is
always cruel, or at the least seems so, for all things that live under
the sun are to him created only to minister to his one inexorable
passion.

Art is so vast, and human life is so little. It is to him only supremely
just that the insect of an hour should be sacrificed to the infinite and
eternal truth which must endure until the heavens themselves shall
wither as a scroll that is held in a flame. It might have seemed to
Arslàn base to turn her ignorance, and submission to his will, for the
gratification of his amorous passions; but to make these serve the art
to which he had himself abandoned every earthly good was in his sight
justified, as the death agonies of the youth whom they decked with roses
and slew in sacrifice to the sun, were in the sight of the Mexican
nation.

The youth whom the Mexicans slew, on the high hill of the city, with his
face to the west, was always the choicest and the noblest of all the
opening flower of their manhood: for it was his fate to be called to
enter into the realms of eternal light, and to dwell face to face with
the unbearable brightness without whose rays the universe would have
perished frozen in perpetual night. So the artist, who is true to his
art, regards every human sacrifice that he renders up to it; how can he
feel pity for a thing which perishes to feed a flame that he deems the
life of the world?

The steel that he draws out from the severed heart of his victim he is
ready to plunge into his own vitals: no other religion can vaunt as much
of its priests.

"What are you thinking of to-night?" he asked her where she came through
the fields by the course of a little flower-sown brook, fringed with
tall bulrushes and waving willow-stems.

She lifted her eyelids with a dreamy and wistful regard.

"I was thinking--I wonder what the reed felt that you told me of--the
one reed that a god chose from all its millions by the waterside and cut
down to make into a flute."

"Ah?--you see there are no reeds that make music now-a-days; the reeds
are only good to be woven into kreels for the fruits and the fish of the
market."

"That is not the fault of the reeds?"

"Not that I know; it is the fault of men, most likely, who find the
chink of coin in barter sweeter music than the song of the syrinx. But
what do you think the reed felt then?--pain to be so sharply severed
from its fellows?"

"No--or the god would not have chosen it."

"What then?"

A troubled sigh parted her lips; these old fables were fairest truths to
her, and gave a grace to every humblest thing that the sun shone on, or
the waters begat from their foam, or the winds blew with their breath
into the little life of a day.

"I was trying to think. But I cannot be sure. These reeds have
forgotten. They have lost their soul. They want nothing but to feed
among the sand and the mud, and grow in millions together, and shelter
the toads and the newts,--there is not a note of music in them
all--except when the wind rises and makes them sigh, and then they
remember that long, long-ago the breath of a great god was in them."

Arslàn looked at her where she stood; her eyes resting on the reeds, and
the brook at her feet; the crimson heat of the evening all about her, on
the brazen amphora, on the red girdle on her loins, on the thoughtful
parted lips, on the proud bent brows above which a golden butterfly
floated as above the brows of Psyche.

He smiled; the smile that was so cold to her.

"Look: away over the fields, there comes a peasant with a sickle; he
comes to mow down the reeds to make a bed for his cattle. If he heard
you, he would think you mad."

"They have thought me many things worse. What matter?"

"Nothing at all;--that I know. But you seem to envy that reed--so long
ago--that was chosen?"

"Who would not?"

"Are you so sure? The life of the reed was always pleasant;--dancing
there in the light, playing with the shadows, blowing in the winds; with
the cool waters all about it all day long, and the yellow daffodils and
the blue bell-flowers for its brethren."

"Nay;--how do you know?"

Her voice was low, and thrilled with a curious eager pain.

"How do you know?" she murmured. "Rather,--it was born in the sands,
amongst the stones, of the chance winds, of the stray germs,--no one
asking, no one heeding, brought by a sunbeam, spat out by a toad--no one
caring where it dropped. Rather,--it grew there by the river, and such
millions of reeds grew with it, that neither waters nor winds could
care for a thing so common and worthless, but the very snakes twisting
in and out despised it, and thrust the arrows of their tongues through
it in scorn. And then--I think I see!--the great god walked by the edge
of the river, and he mused on a gift to give man, on a joy that should
be a joy on the earth for ever; and he passed by the lily white as snow,
by the thyme that fed the bees, by the gold heart in the arum flower, by
the orange flame of the tall sandrush, by all the great water-blossoms
which the sun kissed, and the swallows loved, and he came to the one
little reed pierced with the snakes' tongues, and all alone amidst
millions. Then he took it up, and cut it to the root, and killed
it;--killed it as a reed,--but breathed into it a song audible and
beautiful to all the ears of men. Was that death to the reed?--or life?
Would a thousand summers of life by the waterside have been worth that
one thrill of song when a god first spoke through it?"

Her face lightened with a radiance to which the passion of her words was
pale and poor; the vibrations of her voice grew sonorous and changing as
the sounds of music itself; her eyes beamed through unshed tears as
planets through the rain.

       *       *       *

Of all the forms with which he had peopled its loneliness, these had the
most profound influence on her in their fair, passionless, majestic
beauty, in which it seemed to her that the man who had forgotten them
had repeated his own likeness. For they were all alike, yet unlike; of
the same form and feature, yet different even in their strong
resemblance, like elder and younger brethren who hold a close
companionship. For Hypnos was still but a boy with his blue-veined
eyelids closed, and his mouth rosy and parted like that of a slumbering
child, and above his golden head a star rose in the purple night.
Oneiros standing next was a youth whose eyes smiled as though they
beheld visions that were welcome to him; in his hand, amongst the white
roses, he held a black wand of sorcery, and around his bended head there
hovered a dim silvery nimbus. Thanatos alone was a man fully grown; and
on his calm and colourless face there were blended an unutterable
sadness, and an unspeakable peace; his eyes were fathomless,
far-reaching, heavy laden with thought, as though they had seen at once
the heights of heaven and the depths of hell; and he, having thus seen,
and knowing all things, had learned that there was but one good possible
in all the universe,--that one gift which his touch gave, and which men
in their blindness shuddered from and cursed. And above him and around
him there was a great darkness.

So the gods stood, and so they spoke, even to her; they seemed to her as
brethren, masters, friends--these three immortals who looked down on her
in their mute majesty.

They are the gods of the poor, of the wretched, of the outcast, of the
proscribed,--they are the gods who respect not persons nor palaces,--who
stay with the exile and flee from the king,--who leave the tyrant of a
world to writhe in torment, and call a smile beautiful as the morning on
the face of a beggar child,--who turn from the purple beds where wealth
and lust and brutal power lie, and fill with purest visions the darkest
hours of the loneliest nights, for genius and youth,--they are the gods
of consolation and of compensation,--the gods of the exile, of the
orphan, of the outcast, of the poet, of the prophet, of all whose bodies
ache with the infinite pangs of famine, and whose hearts ache with the
infinite woes of the world, of all who hunger with the body or the
soul.

       *       *       *

It became mid-April. It was market-day for all the country lying round
that wondrous cathedral-spire, which shot into the air far-reaching and
ethereal, like some fountain whose column of water had been arrested
aloft and changed to ice.

The old quiet town was busy, with a rich sunshine shed upon it, in which
the first yellow butterflies of the year had begun to dance.

It was high noon, and the highest tide of the market.

Flower-girls, fruit-girls, egg-sellers, poultry-hucksters, crowds of
women, old and young, had jolted in on their docile asses, throned on
their sheepskin saddles; and now, chattering and chaffering, drove fast
their trade. On the steps of the cathedral boys with birds'-nests,
knife-grinders making their little wheels fly, cobblers hammering, with
boards across their knees, travelling pedlars with knapsacks full of
toys and mirrors, and holy images, and strings of beads, sat side by
side in amicable competition.

Here and there a priest passed, with his black robe and broad hat, like
a dusky mushroom amongst a bed of many-hued gillyflowers. Here and there
a soldier, all colour and glitter, showed like a gaudy red tulip in
bloom amidst tufts of thyme.

The old wrinkled leathern awnings of the market-stalls glowed like
copper in the brightness of noon. The red tiles of the houses edging the
great square were gilded with yellow houseleeks. The little children ran
hither and thither with big bunches of primroses or sheaves of blue
wood-hyacinths, singing. The red and blue serges of the young girls'
bodices were like the gay hues of the anemones in their baskets. The
brown faces of the old dames under the white roofing of their headgear
were like the russet faces of the home-kept apples which they had
garnered through all the winter.

Everywhere in the shade of the flapping leather, and the darkness of
the wooden porches, there were the tender blossoms of the field and
forest, of the hedge and garden. The azure of the hyacinths, the pale
saffron of the primroses, the cool hues of the meadow daffodils, the
ruby eyes of the cultured jonquils, gleamed amongst wet rushes, grey
herbs, and freshly budded leafage. Plovers' eggs nestled in moss-lined
baskets; sheaves of velvet-coated wallflowers poured fragrance on the
air; great plumes of lilac nodded on the wind, and amber feathers of
laburnum waved above the homelier masses of mint and marjoram, and sage
and chervil.




_IDALIA._


Whatever fate rose for them with the dawn, this night at least was
theirs: there is no love like that which lives victorious even beneath
the shadow of death: there is no joy like that which finds its paradise
even amid the cruelty of pain, the fierce long struggle of despair.

Never is the voluptuous glory of the sun so deep, so rich, as when its
last excess of light burns above the purple edge of the tempest-cloud
that soars upward to cover and devour it.

       *       *       *

"And we reign still!"

She turned, as she spoke, towards the western waters, where the sea-line
of the Ægean lay, while in her eyes came the look of a royal pride and
of a deathless love.

"Greece cannot die. No matter what the land be now, Greece--_our_
Greece--must live for ever. Her language lives; the children of Europe
learn it, even if they halt it in imperfect numbers. The greater the
scholar, the humbler he still bends to learn the words of wisdom from
her school. The poet comes to her for all his fairest myths, his noblest
mysteries, his greatest masters. The sculptor looks at the broken
fragments of her statues, and throws aside his calliope in despair
before those matchless wrecks. From her soldiers learn how to die, and
nations how to conquer and to keep their liberties. No deed of heroism
is done but, to crown it, it is named parallel to hers. They write of
love, and who forgets the Lesbian? They dream of freedom, and to reach
it they remember Salamis. They talk of progress, and while they talk
they sigh for all that they have lost in Academus. They seek truth, and
while they seek, wearily long, as little children, to hear the golden
speech of Socrates, that slave, and fisherman, and sailor, and
stonemason, and date-seller were all once free to hear in her Agora. But
for the light that shone from Greece in the breaking of the Renaissance,
Europe would have perished in its Gothic darkness. They call her dead:
she can never die while her life, her soul, her genius breathe fire into
the new nations, and give their youth all of greatness and of grace that
they can claim. Greece dead! She reigns in every poem written, in every
art pursued, in every beauty treasured, in every liberty won, in every
god-like life and godlike death, in your fresh lands, which, but for
her, would be barbarian now."

Where she stood, with her eyes turned westward to the far-off snows of
Cithæron and Mount Ida, and the shores which the bronze spear of Pallas
Athene once guarded through the night and day, the dark light in her
eyes deepened, and the flush of a superb pride was on her brow--it
seemed Aspasia who lived again, and who remembered Pericles.

       *       *       *

The chant of the Imaum rang up from the shore, deep and sonorous,
calling on the Faithful to prayer, an hour before midnight. She listened
dreamily to the echoes that seemed to linger among the dark foliage.

"I like those national calls to prayer," she said, as she leaned over
the parapet, while the fire-flies glittered among the mass of leaves as
the diamond sprays glistened in her hair. "The Ave Maria, the Vespers,
the Imaum's chant, the salutation of the dawn or of the night, the hymn
before sleep, or before the sun;--you have none of those in your chill
islands? You have only weary rituals, and stuccoed churches, where the
'Pharisees for a pretence make long prayers!' As if _that_ was not the
best--the only--temple!"

She glanced upward at the star-studded sky, and on her face was that
graver and gentler look which had come there when she sang.

"I have held it so many a time," he answered her, lying awake at night
among the long grass of the Andes, or under the palms of the desert. It
was a strange delusion to build shrines to the honour of God while there
are still his own--the forests and the mountains.

       *       *       *

"It was a fair heritage to lose through a feeble vanity--that beautiful
Constantinople!" she said musingly. "The East and the West--what an
empire! More than Alexander ever grasped at--what might not have been
done with it? Asian faith and Oriental sublimity, with Roman power and
Gothic force; if there had been a hand strong enough to weld all these
together, what a world there might have been!"

"But to have done that would have been to attain the Impossible," he
answered her. "Oil and flame, old and new, living and dying, tradition
and scepticism, iconoclast and idolater, you cannot unite and harmonise
these antagonisms?"

She gave a sign of dissent.

"The prophet or the hero unites all antagonisms, because he binds them
all to his own genius. The Byzantine empire had none such; the nearest
was Julian, but he believed less in himself than in the gods; the
nearest after him was Belisarius--the fool of a courtesan, and he was
but a good soldier; he was no teacher, no liberator, no leader for the
nations. John Vatices came too late. A man must be his own convert
before he can convert others. Zoroaster, Christ, Mahommed, Cromwell,
Napoleon, believed intensely in their own missions; hence their
influence on the peoples. How can we tell what Byzantium might have
become under one mighty hand? It was torn in pieces among courtesans,
and parasites, and Christian fanatics, and Houmousians and
Houmoiousians! I have the blood of the Commneni in me. I think of it
with shame when I remember what they might have been."

"You come from the Roman Emperors?"

"The Roman Emperors?" she repeated. "When the name was a travesty, an
ignominy, a reproach! When Barbarians thronged the Forum, and the
representative of Galilee fishermen claimed power in the Capitol? Yes; I
descend, they say, from the Commneni; but I am far prouder that, on the
other hand, I come from pure Athenians. I belong to two buried worlds.
But the stone throne of the Areopagus was greater than the gold one of
Manuel."

       *       *       *

"That animal life is to be envied perhaps," she said.

"Their pride is centred in a silver hairpin; their conscience is
committed to a priest; their credulity is contented with tradition;
their days are all the same, from the rising of one sun to another; they
do not love, they do not hate; they are like the ass that they drive,
follow one patient routine, and only take care for their food. Perhaps
they are to be envied!"

"You would not lose 'those thoughts that wander through eternity,' to
gain in exchange the peace from ignorance of the peasant or the
dullard?"

She turned her face to him, with its most beautiful smile on her lips
and in her eyes.

"No, I would not: you are right. Better to know the secrets of the gods,
even though with pain, than to lead the dull, brute life, though
painless. It is only in our dark hours that we would sell our souls for
a dreamless ease."

"Dark hours! _You_ should not know them. Ah, if you would but trust me
with some confidence! if there were but some way in which I could serve
you!"

Her eyes met his with gratitude, even while she gave him a gesture of
silence. She thought how little could the bold, straight stroke of this
man's frank chivalry cut through the innumerable and intricate chains
that entangled her own life. The knightly Excalibur could do nothing to
sever the filmy but insoluble meshes of secret intrigues.

"It is a saint's-day: I had forgotten it," she said to turn his words
from herself, while the bell of the campanile still swung through the
air. "I am a pagan, you see: I do not fancy that you care much for
creeds yourself."

"Creeds? I wish there were no such word. It has only been a rallying-cry
for war, an excuse for the bigot to burn his neighbour."

"No. Long ago, under the Andes, Nezahualcoytl held the same faith that
Socrates had vainly taught in the Agora; and Zengis Khan knew the truth
of theism like Plato; yet the world has never generally learnt it. It is
the religion of nature--of reason. But the faith is too simple and too
sublime for the multitude. The mass of minds needs a religion of
mythics, legend, symbolism, and fear. What is impalpable escapes it; and
it must give an outward and visible shape to its belief, as it gives in
its art a human form to its deity. Come, since we agree in our creed, I
will take you to my temple--a temple not made by hands."

       *       *       *

"I never had a fair field!"--it may be sometimes a coward's apology; but
it is many a time the epitome of a great, cramped, tortured, wasted
life, which strove like a caged eagle to get free, and never could beat
down the bars of the den that circumstances and prejudice had forged.
The world sees the few who do reach freedom, and, watching their bold
upright flight, says rashly, "will can work all things." But they who
perish by the thousand, the fettered eagles who never see the sun; who
pant in darkness, and wear their breasts bare beating on the iron that
will never yield; who know their strength, yet cannot break their
prison; who feel their wings, yet never can soar up to meet the sweet
wild western winds of liberty; who lie at last beaten, and hopeless, and
blind, with only strength enough to long for death to come and quench
all sense and thought in its annihilation,--who thinks of them--who
counts them?

       *       *       *

The earliest dawn had broken eastward, where the mountains
stretched--the dawn of a southern summer, that almost touches the sunset
of the past night--but under the dense shadows of the old woods that had
sheltered the mystic rites of Gnostics and echoed with the Latin hymns
to Pan, no light wandered. There was only a dim silvery haze that seemed
to float over the whiteness of the tall-stemmed arum lilies and the
foam-bells of the water that here and there glimmered under the rank
vegetation, where it had broken from its hidden channels up to air and
space. Not a sound disturbed the intense stillness; that the night waned
and the world wakened, brought no change to the solitudes that men had
forgotten, and only memories of dead-deserted gods still haunted in the
places of their lost temples, whose columns were now the sea-pines'
stems, and on whose fallen altars and whose shattered sculptures the
lizard made her shelter and the wind-sown grasses seeded and took root.
Of the once graceful marble beauty and the incense-steeped stones of
sacrifice nothing remained but moss-grown shapeless fragments, buried
beneath a pall of leaves by twice a thousand autumns. Yet the ancient
sanctity still rested on the nameless, pathless woods; the breath of an
earlier time, of a younger season of the earth, seemed to lie yet upon
the untroubled forest ways; the whisper of the unseen waters had a
dream-like, unreal cadence; in the deep shade, in the warm fragrance and
the heavy gloom, there was a voluptuous yet mournful charm--the world
seemed so far, the stars shone so near; there were the sweetness of rest
and the oblivion of passion.

       *       *       *

Death is not ours to deal. And were it ours, should we give him the
nameless mystic mercy which all men live to crave--give it as the
chastisement of crime? Death! It is rest to the aged, it is oblivion to
the atheist, it is immortality to the poet! It is a vast, dim,
exhaustless pity to all the world. And would you summon it as your
hardest cruelty to sin?

They were silent; she stirred their souls--she had not bound their
passions.

"A traitor merits death," they muttered.

"Merits it! Not so. The martyr, the liberator, the seeker of truth, may
deserve its peace; how has the traitor won them? You deem yourselves
just; your justice errs. If you would give him justice, make him live.
Live to know fear lest every wind among the leaves may whisper of his
secret; live to feel the look of a young child's eyes a shame to him;
live to envy every peasant whose bread has not been bought with tainted
coin; live to hear ever in his path the stealing step of haunting
retribution; live to see his brethren pass by him as a thing accurst;
live to listen in his age to white-haired men, who once had been his
comrades, tell to the youth about them the unforgotten story of his
shame. Make him live thus if you would have justice."

They answered nothing; a shudder ran through them as they heard.

"And--if you have as I--a deliverance that forbids you even so much
harshness, still let him live, and bury his transgression in your
hearts. Say to him as I say, 'Your sin was great, go forth and sin no
more.'"

       *       *       *

"One is not an assassin!"

"Since when have you discovered that?"

The flush grew darker on Count Conrad's forehead; he moved restlessly
under the irony, and drank down a draught of red fiery Roussillon
without tasting it more than if it had been water. Then he laughed; the
same careless musical laughter with which he had made the requiem over a
violet--a laugh which belonged at once to the most careless and the most
evil side of his character.

"Since sophism came in, which was with Monsieur Cain, when he asked, 'Am
I my brother's keeper?' It was ingenious that reply; creditable to a
beginner, without social advantages. 'An assassin!' Take the word boldly
by the beard, and look at it. What is there objectionable?"

"Nothing--except to the assassinated."

"It has had an apotheosis ever since the world began," pursued Phaulcon,
unheeding, in his bright vivacity. "Who are celebrated in Scripture?
Judith, Samuel, David, Moses, Joab. Who is a patriot? Brutus. Who is an
immortal? Harmodius and Aristogiton. Who is a philosopher? Cicero, while
he murmurs '_Vixerunt!_' after slaying Lentulus. Who is a hero? Marius,
who nails the senators' heads to the rostræ. Who is a martyr? Charles,
who murders Strafford. What is religion? Christianity, that has burnt
and slain millions. Who is a priest? Calvin, who destroys Servetus; or
Pole, who kills Latimer, which you like. Who is a saint? George of
Cappadocia, who slaughters right and left. Who is a ruler? Sulla, who
slays Ofella. Who is a queen? Christina, who stabs Monaldeschi;
Catherine, who strangles Peter; Isabella, who slays Moors and Jews by
the thousand. Murderers all! Assassination has always been deified; and
before it is objected to, the world must change its creeds, its
celebrities, and its chronicles. 'Monsieur, you are an assassin,' says
an impolite world. 'Messieurs,' says the polite logician, 'I found my
warrant in your Bible, and my precedent in your Brutus. What you deify
in Aristogiton and Jael you mustn't damn in Ankarström and me.' Voilà!
What could the world say?"

"That you would outwit Belial with words, and beguile Beelzebub out of
his kingdom with sophistry."




_A VILLAGE COMMUNE._


Power is sweet, and when you are a little clerk you love its sweetness
quite as much as if you were an emperor, and maybe you love it a good
deal more.

       *       *       *

He saw no reason why he should not become a deputy, and even a minister
before he died, and indeed there was no reason whatever. He was only a
clerk at fifty pounds a year; but he had a soul above all scruples, and
a heart as hard as a millstone.

       *       *       *

He was only a clerk indeed, at a slender salary, and ate his friends'
tomatoes publicly in the little back room of the caffè; but he had the
soul of a statesman. When a donkey kicks, beat it; when it dies, skin
it; so only will it profit you; that was his opinion, and the public was
the donkey of Messer Nellemane.

       *       *       *

Pippo and Viola feared everything, yet knew not what they feared; it is
a ghostly burden of dread, that which the honest poor carry with them
all through their toiling hungry days, the vague oppressive dread of
this law which is always acting the spy on them, always dogging their
steps, always emptying their pockets. The poor can understand criminal
law, and its justice and its necessity easily enough, and respect its
severities; but they cannot understand the petty tyrannies of civil law;
and it wears their lives out, and breaks their spirits. When it does not
break their spirits it curdles their blood and they become socialists,
nihilists, internationalists, anything that will promise them riddance
of their spectre and give them vengeance. We in Italy are all of us
afraid of socialism, we who have anything to lose; and yet we let the
syndics, and their secretaries, conciliators, and chancellors sow it
broadcast in dragon's teeth of petty injustices and petty cruelties,
that soon or late will spring up armed men, hydra-headed and torch in
hand!

       *       *       *

The law should be a majesty, solemn, awful, unerring: just, as man hopes
that God is just; and from its throne it should stretch out a mighty
hand to seize and grasp the guilty, and the guilty only. But when the
law is only a petty, meddlesome, cruel, greedy spy, mingling in every
household act and peering in at every window pane, then the poor who are
guiltless would be justified if they spat in its face, and called it by
its right name, a foul extortion.

       *       *       *

The Italian tongue chatters like a magpie's; if they did not let the
steam off thus they would be less easily ruled than they are; but no
great talker ever did any great thing yet, in this world.

       *       *       *

A retentive memory is of great use to a man, no doubt; but the talent of
oblivion is on the whole more useful.

       *       *       *

Sarta Rosalia is in a lovely pastoral country; the country that seems to
thrill with Theocritus' singing, as it throbs with the little tamborine
of the cicala; a country running over with beautiful greenery, and with
climbing creepers hanging everywhere, from the vine on the maples to the
china-rose hedges, and with the deep-blue shadows, and the sun-flushed
whiteness of the distant mountains lending to it in the golden distance
that solemnity and ethereal charm which, without mountains somewhere
within sight, no country ever has. But since the advent of "freedom" it
is scarred and wounded; great scar-patches stretch here and there where
woods have been felled by the avarice illumined in the souls of
landowners; hundreds and thousands of bare poles stand stark and stiff
against the river light which have been glorious pyramids of leaf
shedding welcome shadows on the river path; and many a bold round hill
like the _ballons_ of the Vosges, once rich of grass as they, now shorn
of wood, and even of undergrowth, lift a bare stony front to the lovely
sunlight, and never more will root of tree, or seed of flower or of
fern, find bed there.

Such is Progress.

       *       *       *

For the first time his _liberi pensieri_ were distasteful to him and
unsatisfactory; for atheism makes a curse a mere rattle of dry peas in a
fool's bladder, as it makes a blessing a mere flutter of a breath.
Messer Nellemane for the first time felt that the old religion has its
advantages over agnosticism; it gave you a hell for your rivals and your
enemies!

       *       *       *

He had never heard of Virgil and of Theocritus--but it hurt him to have
these sylvan pictures spoiled; these pictures which are the same as
those they saw and sang; the threshing barns with the piles of golden
grain, and the flails flying to merry voices; the young horses trampling
the wheat loose from its husk with bounding limbs and tossing manes; the
great arched doorways, with the maidens sitting in a circle breaking the
maize from its withered leaves, and telling old-world stories, and
singing sweet _fiorellini_ all the while; the hanging fields broken up
in hill and vale with the dun-coloured oxen pushing their patient way
through labyrinths of vine boughs, and clouds of silvery olive leaf: the
bright laborious day, with the sun-rays turning the sickle to a
semi-circlet of silver, as the mice ran, and the crickets shouted, and
the larks soared on high: the merry supper when the day was done, with
the thrill and thrum of the mandolini, and the glisten of the unhoused
fire-flies, whose sanctuary had been broken when the bearded barley and
the amber corn fell prone: all these things rose to his memory: they had
made his youth and manhood glad and full of colour; they were here still
for his sons a little while, but when his sons should be all grown men,
then those things would have ceased to be, and even their very memory
would have perished, most likely, while the smoke of the accursed
engines would have sullied the pure blue sky, and the stench of their
foul vapours would have poisoned the golden air.

He roused himself and said wearily to Pippo,

"There is a tale I have heard somewhere of a man who sold his birthright
for gold, and when the gold was in his hands, then it changed to
withered leaves and brown moss: I was thinking, eh? that the world is
much like that man!"

       *       *       *

When all your politics and policies are summed up in the one intention
to do well for yourself, great simplicity is given to your theories, if
not to your practice.

       *       *       *

The ministerialists ... made florid and beautiful speeches full of
sesquipedalian phrases in which they spoke about the place of Italy
among the great powers, the dangers of jealousy and invasion from other
nations, the magnificence of the future, the blessings of education, the
delights of liberty, the wickedness of the opposition, the sovereign
rights of the people; and said it all so magnificently and so
bewilderingly that the people never remembered till it was too late that
they had said nothing about opposing the cow-tax--or indeed any taxes at
all, but listened and gaped, and shouted, and clapped; and being told
that they could sit at a European Congress to decide the fate of Epirus,
were for the moment oblivious that they had bad bread, dear wine, scant
meat, an army of conscripts, and a bureaucracy that devoured them as
maggots a cheese. What is political eloquence for, if not to make the
people forget such things as these?

       *       *       *

To sell your grapes to foreigners and have none at all at home is a
spirited commerce, and fine free trade; that the poor souls around are
all poisoned with cheap chemicals in the absence of wine, is only an
evidence of all that science can do.

       *       *       *

It is the noblest natures that tyranny drives to frenzy.

       *       *       *

The bureaucratic mind, all the world over, believes the squeak of the
official penny whistle to be as the trump of archangels and the voice of
Sinai. That all the people do not fall down prostrate at the squeak is,
to this order of mind, the one unmentionable sin.

       *       *       *

It is not true that no Italian ever tells the truth, as commentators on
the country say, but it is sadly true that when one does he suffers for
it.

       *       *       *

A day in prison to a free-born son of the soil, used to work with the
broad bright sky alone above his head, is more agony than a year of it
is to a cramped city-worker used only to the twilight of a machine-room
or a workshop, only to an air full of smuts and smoke, and the stench of
acids, and the dust of filed steel or sifted coal. The sufferings of the
two cannot be compared, and one among many of the injustices the law,
all over the world, commits, is that it never takes into consideration
what a man's past has been. There are those to whom a prison is as hell;
there are those to whom it is something better than the life they led.

       *       *       *

She was an old woman, and had been bred up in the old faiths; faiths
that were not clear indeed to her nor ever reasoned on, but yet gave her
consolation, and a great, if a vague hope. Now that we tell the poor
there is no such hope, that when they have worked and starved long
enough, then they will perish altogether, like bits of candle that have
burnt themselves out, that they are mere machines made of carbon and
hydrogen, which, when they have had due friction, will then crumble back
into the dust; now that we tell them all this, and call this the spread
of education, will they be as patient?

       *       *       *

Take hope from the heart of man, and you make him a beast of prey.

       *       *       *

One of the cruellest sins of any state, in giving petty and tyrannous
authority into petty and tyrannous hands, is that it thus brings into
hatred and disgust the true and high authority of moral law.

       *       *       *

In these modern times of cowardice, when great ministers dare not say
the thing they think, and high magistrates stoop to execute decrees they
abhor, it is scarcely to be hoped for that moral courage will be a plant
of very sturdy growth in the souls of carpenters, and coopers, and
bakers, and plumbers, and day-labourers, who toil for scarce a shilling
a day.

       *       *       *

He had been wronged, and a great wrong is to the nature as a cancer is
to the body; there is no health.

       *       *       *

A just chastisement may benefit a man, though it seldom does, but an
unjust one changes all his blood to gall.

       *       *       *

In these days, Christian Europe decides that not only the poor man lying
by the wayside, but also the Samaritan who helps him, are sinners
against political economy, and its law forbids what its religion orders:
people must settle the contradiction as they deem best; they generally
are content to settle it by buttoning up their pockets, and passing by,
on the other side.

       *       *       *

In this lovely land that brims over with flowers like a cup over-filled,
where the sun is as a magician for ever changing with a wand of gold all
common things to paradise; where every wind shakes out the fragrance of
a world of fruit and flower commingled; where, for so little, the lute
sounds and the song arises; here, misery looks more sad than it does in
sadder climes, where it is like a home-born thing, and not an alien
tyrant as it is here.

       *       *       *

You cannot cage a field bird when it is old; it dies for want of flight,
of air, of change, of freedom. No use will be the stored grain of your
cages; better for the bird a berry here and there, and peace of gentle
death at last amidst the golden gorse or blush of hawthorn buds.

       *       *       *

"What is England?"

"It is a place where the poor souls have no wine of their own, I think;
and they make cannons and cheese. You see their people over here now
and then. They carry red Bibles, and they go about with their mouths
open to catch flies, and they run into all the little old dusty places;
you must have seen them."

"And why do we want to have anything to do with them?"

"They will come in ships and fire at us, if we are not bigger and
stronger than they. We must build iron houses that float, and go on the
sea and meet them."




_PUCK._


"Animalism," forsooth!--a more unfair word don't exist. When we animals
never drink only just enough to satisfy thirst, never eat except when we
have genuine appetites, never indulge in any sort of debauch, and never
strain excess till we sink into the slough of satiety, shall "animalism"
be a word to designate all that men and women dare to do? "Animalism!"
You ought to blush for such a libel on our innocent and reasonable lives
when you regard your own! You men who scorch your throats with alcohols,
and kill your lives with absinthe; and squander your gold in the
Kursaal, and the Cecle, and the Arlington; and have thirty services at
your dinner betwixt soup and the "chasse;" and cannot spend a summer
afternoon in comfort unless you be drinking deep the intoxication of
hazard in your debts and your bets on the Heath or the Downs, at
Hurlingham or at Tattersalls' Rooms. You women, who sell your souls for
bits of stones dug from the bowels of the earth; who stake your honour
for a length of lace two centuries old; who replace the bloom your
passions have banished with the red of poisoned pigments; who wreathe
your aching heads with purchased tresses torn from prisons, and
madhouses, and coffins; who spend your lives in one incessant struggle,
first the rivalry of vanity and then the rivalry of ambition; who deck
out greed, and selfishness, and worship of station or gold, as "love,"
and then wonder that your hapless dupes, seizing the idol that you offer
them as worthy of their worship, fling it from them with a curse,
finding it dumb, and deaf, and merciless, a thing of wood and stone.

"Animalism," forsooth! God knows it would be well for you, here and
hereafter, men and women both, were you only patient, continent, and
singleminded, only faithful, gentle, and long-suffering, as are the
brutes that you mock, and misuse, and vilify in the supreme blindness of
your egregious vanity!

       *       *       *

I was horribly cold and hungry; and this is a combination which kills
sentiment in bigger people than myself. The emotions, like a hothouse
flower or a sea-dianthus, wither curiously when aired in an east wind,
or kept some hours waiting for dinner.

       *       *       *

In truth, too, despite all the fine chances that you certainly give your
peasants to make thorough beasts of themselves, they are your real
aristocrats, and have the only really good manners in your country. In
an old north-country dame, who lives on five shillings a week, in a
cottage like a dream of Teniers' or Van Tol's, I have seen a fine
courtesy, a simple desire to lay her best at her guest's disposal, a
perfect composure, and a freedom from all effort, that were in their way
the perfection of breeding. I have seen these often in the peasantry, in
the poor. It is your middle classes, with their incessant flutter, and
bluster, and twitter, and twaddle; with their perpetual strain after
effect; with their deathless desire to get one rung of the ladder higher
than they ever can get; with their preposterous affectations, their
pedantic unrealities, their morbid dread of remark, their everlasting
imitations, their superficial education, their monotonous commonplaces,
and their nervous deference to opinion;--it is your middle classes that
have utterly destroyed good manners, and have made the prevalent mode of
the day a union of boorishness and servility, of effervescence and of
apathy--a court suit, as it were, worn with muddy boots and a hempen
shirt.

       *       *       *

I think Fanfreluche spoke with reason. Coincidence is a god that greatly
influences mortal affairs. He is not a cross-tempered deity either,
always; and when you beat your poor fetish for what seems to you an
untoward accident, you may do wrong; he may have benefited you far more
than you wot.

       *       *       *

Now I believe that when a woman's own fair skin is called rouge, and her
own old lace is called imitation, she must in some way or other have
roused sharply the conscience or the envy of her sisters who sit in
judgment.

       *       *       *

I canna go to church. Look'ee,--they's allus a readin' o' cusses, and
damnin', and hell fire, and the like; and I canna stomach it. What for
shall they go and say as all the poor old wimmin i' tha parish is gone
to the deil 'cause they picks up a stick or tew i' hedge, or likes to
mumble a charm or tew o'er their churnin'? Them old wimmin be rare an'
good i' ither things. When I broke my ankle three years agone, old Dame
Stuckley kem o'er, i' tha hail and the snaw, a matter of five mile and
more, and she turned o' eighty; and she nursed me, and tidied the
place, and did all as was wanted to be done, 'cause Avice was away,
working somewhere's; and she'd never let me gie her aught for it. And I
heard ta passon tell her as she were sold to hell, 'cause the old soul
have a bit of belief like in witch-stones, and allus sets one aside her
spinnin' jenny, so that the thrid shanna knot nor break. Ta passon he
said, God cud mak tha thrid run smooth, or knot it, just as He chose,
and 'twas wicked to think she could cross His will. And the old dame,
she said, Weel, sir, I dinna b'lieve tha Almighty would ever spite a
poor old crittur like me, don't 'ee think it? But if we're no to help
oursells i' this world, what for have He gied us the trouble o' tha
thrid to spin? and why no han't He made tha shirts, an' tha sheets, an'
tha hose grow theersells? And ta passon niver answered her that, he only
said she was fractious and blas-_phe_-mous. Now she warn't, she spoke i'
all innocence, and she mint what she said--she mint it. Passons niver
can answer ye plain, right-down, nataral questions like this'n, and
that's why I wunna ga ta tha church.

       *       *       *

Dinna ye meddle, Tam; it's niver no good a threshin' other folk's corn;
ye allays gits the flail agin i' yer own eye somehow.

       *       *       *

The flowers hang in the sunshine, and blow in the breeze, free to the
wasp as to the bee. The bee chooses to make his store of honey, that is
sweet, and fragrant, and life-giving; the wasp chooses to make his from
the same blossoms, but of a matter hard, and bitter, and useless. Shall
we pity the wasp because, of his selfish passions, he selects the
portion that shall be luscious only to his own lips, and spends his
hours only in the thrusting-in of his sting? Is not such pity--wasted
upon the wasp--an insult to the bee who toils so wearily to gather in
for others; and who, because he stings not man, is by man maltreated?
Now it seems to me, if I read them aright, that vicious women, and women
that are of honesty and honour, are much akin to the wasp and to the
bee.

       *       *       *

My dear, a gentleman may forget his appointments, his love vows, and his
political pledges; he may forget the nonsense he talked, the dances he
engaged for, the women that worried him, the electors that bullied him,
the wife that married him, and he may be a gentleman still; but there
are two things he must never forget, for no gentleman ever does--and
they are, to pay a debt that is a debt of honour, and to keep a promise
to a creature that can't force him to keep it.

       *       *       *

A genius? You must mistake. I have always heard that a genius is
something that they beat to death first with sticks and stones, and set
up on a great rock to worship afterwards. Now they make her very happy
whilst she is alive. She cannot possibly be a genius.

       *       *       *

I learned many wondrous things betwixt Epsom and Ascot. A brief space,
indeed, yet one that to me seemed longer than the whole of my previous
life, so crowded was it every hour with new and marvellous experiences.
Worldly experiences, I mean. Intellectually, I am not sure that I
acquired much.

Indeed, to a little brain teeming with memories of the Théâtres
Beaumarchais, Voltaire, Molière, Feuillet, Sardou, Sandeau, &c., which
I had heard read so continually at the Dower-House amongst the Fens, the
views of dramatic literature held at the Coronet appeared of the most
extraordinary character. They certainly had one merit--simplicity.

The verb "to steal" was the only one that a successful dramatic author
appeared to be required to conjugate.

For your music steal from the music-halls; for your costumes steal from
_Le Follet_; for your ideas steal from anybody that happens to carry
such a thing about him; for your play, in its entirety, steal the plot,
the characters, the romance, the speeches, and the wit, if it have any,
of some attractive novel; and when you have made up your parcel of
thefts, tie it together with some string of stage directions, herald it
as entirely original, give a very good supper to your friends on the
press, and bow from your box as the "Author."

You will certainly be successful: and if the novelist ever object,
threaten him with an action for interference with _your_ property.

These I found were the laws laid down by London dramatists; and they
assuredly were so easy to follow and so productive to obey, that if any
Ben Jonson or Beaumarchais, Sheridan or Marivaux, had arisen and
attempted to infringe them, he would have infallibly been regarded as a
very evil example, and been extinguished by means of journalistic
slating and stall-siflage.

       *       *       *

By the way, permit me, in parenthesis, to say that one of the chief
causes of that preference for the _demi-monde_ which you daily and
hourly discover more and more, is the indulgence it shows to idleness.
Because your lives are so intense now, and always at high pressure--for
that very reason are you more indolent also in little things. It bores
you to dress; it bores you to talk; it bores you to be polite. Sir
Charles Grandison might find ecstasy in elaborating a bow, a wig, or a
speech; you like to give a little nod, cut your hair very short, and
make "awfully" do duty for all your adjectives.

"_Autres temps, autres mæurs._" You are a very odd mixture. You will go
to the ends of the earth on the scent of big game; but you shirk all
social exertion with a cynical laziness. You will come from Damascus at
a stretch without sleeping, and think nothing of it; but you find it a
wretched thing to have to exert yourself to be courteous in a
drawing-room.

Therefore the _demi-monde_ suits you with a curious fitness, and suits
you more and more every year. I am afraid it is not very good for you. I
don't mean for your morals; I don't care the least about them, I am a
dog of the world; I mean for your manners. It makes you slangy, inert,
rude, lazy. And yet what perfect gentlemen you can be still, and what
grace there is in your careless, weary ease, when you choose to be
courteous; and you always _do_ choose, that I must say for you, when you
find a woman who is really worth the trouble.

       *       *       *

I never knew quite whether I liked her--how can you with those women of
the world? She was kind and insincere; she was gentle and she was cruel;
she was generous and ungenerous; she was true as steel, and she was
false as Judas--what would you?--she was a woman of the world, with
several sweet natural impulses, and all a coquette's diplomacies.

She tended me with the greatest solicitude one day that autumn, when I
had run a thorn into my foot: and the very next day, when I was well
again, she laughed to see me worried on the lawn by a bull-terrier. If
you have not met a woman like that, I wonder where you have lived.

       *       *       *

You must be spider or fly, as somebody says. Now all my experience tells
me that men are mostly the big, good-natured, careless blue-bottles,
half-drunk with their honey of pleasure, and rushing blindly into any
web that dazzles them a little in the sunshine; and women are the
dainty, painted, patient spiders that just sit and weave, and weave, and
weave, till--pong!--Bluebottle is in head foremost, and is killed, and
sucked dry, and eaten up at leisure.

You men think women do not know much of life. Pooh! I, Puck, who have
dwelt for many of my days on their boudoir cushions, and eaten of their
dainty little dinners, and been smuggled under their robes even into
operas, balls, and churches, tell you that is an utter fallacy. They do
not choose you to know that they know it, very probably; but there is
nothing that is hidden from them, I promise you.

       *       *       *

Don't you know that whilst broad, intellectual scepticism is masculine,
narrow, social scepticism is feminine? To get hearty, reverent, genuine
belief in the innocence of a slandered woman, go to a man: where the
world has once doubted, women, the world-worshippers, will for ever
after doubt also. You can never bring women to see that the pecked-at
fruit is always the richest and sweetest; they always take the benison
of the wooing bird to be the malison of the hidden worm!

       *       *       *

Not very long ago I was down away in the vale of Belvoir. I stayed with
my friends at a great stately place, owned by as gallant a gentleman as
ever swung himself into saddle. His wife was a beautiful woman, and he
treated her with the courtliest tenderness: indeed, I often heard their
union cited as one of almost unequalled felicity. "He never had a
thought that he did not tell me," I heard his wife once say to a friend.
"Not a single thought, I know, all these twelve years of our marriage."
It was a happy belief--many women have the like--but it was an
unutterably foolish one; for the minds of the best and truest amongst
you are, in many things, as sealed books to those whom you care for the
most.

One bitter, black hunting-day, a day keen and cold, with frost, as men
feared, in the air, and with the ground so hard that even the Duke's
peerless "dandies," perfect hounds though they are, scarcely could keep
the scent, there came terrible tidings to the Hall--he had met with a
crashing fall. His horse had refused at timber, and had fallen upon him,
kicking his head with the hind hoofs repeatedly. They had taken him to
the nearest farmhouse, insensible; even dead already, they feared. His
wife and the elder amongst the beautiful children fled like mad
creatures across the brown fallows, and the drear blackened meadows. The
farm, happily, was not far: I sped with them.

When they reached him he was not quite lifeless, but he knew none of
them; his head had been beaten in by the plates of the kicking hoofs;
and they waited for his death with every moment, in the little old dusky
room, with its leaded lattices, and its odour of dried lavender, and its
bough of holly above the hearth. For this had chanced upon Christmas
Eve.

To his wife's agonies, to his children's moans, he was silent: he knew
nothing; he lay with closed eyes and crushed brain--deaf, blind, mute.
Suddenly the eyes opened, and stared at the red winter sun where it
glowed dimly through the squares of the lattice-panes. "Dolores!" he
cried aloud; "Dolores! Dolores!" It was the name of none there.

"My God! What woman is it he calls?" his wife asked in her torture. But
none ever knew. Through half the night his faint pulse beat, his faint
breath came and went; but consciousness never more returned, and for
ever he muttered only that one name, that name which was not her own.
And when they laid the dead body in its shroud, they found on the left
arm above the elbow the word "Dolores" marked on the skin, as sailors
stamp letters in their flesh. But whose it was, or what woe or passion
it recorded, none ever knew--not even his wife, who had believed she
shared his every thought. And to his grave his dead and secret love went
with him.

This man was but a gay, frank, high-spirited gentleman, of no great
knowledge, and of no great attainments, riding fearlessly, laughing
joyously, living liberally; not a man, one would have said, to know any
deep passions, to treasure any bitter memories--and yet he had loved one
woman so well that he had never spoken of her, and never forgotten her;
never--not even in his death-hour, when the poor, stunned, stifled brain
had forgotten all other things of earth.

And so it seems to me that it is very often with you, and that you bear
with you through your lifetime the brand of an unforgotten name, branded
deep in, in days of passion, that none around you ever wot of, and that
the wife who sleeps on your heart never knows.

It is dead--the old love--long dead. And yet, when your last hour shall
come, and your senses shall be dizzy with death, the pale loves of the
troth and the hearth will fade from you, and this love alone will abide.

       *       *       *

"Modern painters do not owe you much, sir," said a youngster to him
once, writhing under the _Midas'_ ruthless flagellation of his first
Academy picture.

"On the contrary," said the great censor, taking his snuff; "they owe me
much, or might have owed me much. If they had only listened to me, they
would have saved every shilling that they have thrown away on canvas!"

       *       *       *

In your clubs and your camps, in your mischievous moods and your
philosophic moods, always indeed theoretically, you consider all women
immoral (except just, of course, your own mothers); but practically,
when your good-feeling is awakened, or your honest faith honestly
appealed to, you will believe in a woman's honour with a heartiness and
strength for which she will look in vain in her own sex. According to
your jests, the world is one vast harem, of which all the doors are open
to every man, and whose fair inmates are all alike impressionable to the
charm of intrigue or to the chink of gold. But, in simple earnest and
reality, I have heard the wildest and most debonair amongst you--once
convinced of the honour and innocence looking from a woman's eyes--stand
up in defence of these when libelled in her absence, with a zeal and a
stanchness that did my heart good.

       *       *       *

His simple creed, "the good faith of a gentleman," forbade him to injure
what lay defenceless at his mercy.

Ah! revile that old faith as you will, it has lasted longer than any
other cultus; and whilst altars have reeled, and idols been shattered,
and priests changed their teachings, and peoples altered their gods, the
old faith has lasted through all; and the simple instinct of the Greek
eupatrid and of the Roman patrician still moves the heart of the English
gentleman--the instinct of _Noblesse oblige_.

       *       *       *

"The exception proves the rule," runs your proverb; but why, I wonder,
is it that you always only believe in the rule, and are always utterly
sceptical as to the existence of the exception?

       *       *       *

The sun shone in over the roofs; the bird in its cage began a low
tremulous song; the murmur of all the crowded streets came up upon the
silence; and Nellie lay there dead;--the light upon her curly hair, and
on her mouth the smile that had come there at his touch.

"Ah, my dear!" said Fanfreluche, as she ceased her story, with a
half-soft and half-sardonic sadness, "she was but a little, ignorant,
common player, who made but three pounds a week, and who talked the
slang of the streets, and who thought shrimps and tea a meal for the
gods, and who made up her own dresses with her own hands, out of tinsel
and tarlatanes and trumperies, and who knew no better than to follow the
blind, dumb instincts of good that, self-sown and uncultured, lived in
her--God knows how!--as the harebells, with the dew on them, will live
amidst the rank, coarse grass of graveyards. She was but a poor little
player, who tried to be honest where all was corruption, who tried to
walk straightly where all ways were crooked. So she died to-day in a
garret, my dear."

       *       *       *

If all men in whose hearts lives a dull, abiding grief, whose throbs
death and death only ever will still, deserted for desert or ocean your
world of fame and of fashion, how strangely that world would look! How
much eloquence would be dumb in your senatorial chambers; how many a
smile would be missing from your ball-rooms and hunting-fields; how many
a frank laugh would die off for ever from your ear; how many a
well-known face would vanish from your clubs, from your park, from your
dinner-tables, from your race-stands!

And how seldom would it be those that you had pitied who would go!--how
often would the vacant place be that place where so many seasons through
you had seen, and had envied, the gayest, the coldest, the most
light-hearted, the most cynical amongst you!

Ah! let Society be thankful that men in their bitterness do not now fly,
as of old, to monastery or to hermitage; for, did they do so, Society
would send forth her gilded cards to the wilderness.

       *       *       *

"_Une vie manquée!_" says the world.

Is there any threnody over a death half so unutterably sad as that one
jest over a life?

"_Manquée!_"--the world has no mercy on a hand that has thrown the die
and has lost; no tolerance for the player who, holding fine cards, will
not play them by the rules of the game. "_Manquée!_" the world says,
with a polite sneer, of the lives in which it beholds no blazoned
achievement, no public success.

And yet, if it were keener of sight, it might see that those lives, not
seldom, may seem to have missed of their mark, because their aim was
high over the heads of the multitude; or because the arrow was sped by
too eager a hand in too rash a youth, and the bow lies unstrung in that
hand when matured. It might see that those lives which look so lost, so
purposeless, so barren of attainment, so devoid of object or fruition,
have sometimes nobler deeds in them and purer sacrifice than lies in
the home-range of its own narrowed vision. "_Manquée!_"--do not cast
that stone idly: how shall you tell, as you look on the course of a life
that seems to you a failure, because you do not hear its "_Io triumphe_"
on the lips of a crowd, what sweet dead dreams, what noble vain desires,
what weariness of futile longing, what conscious waste of vanished
years--nay, what silent acts of pure nobility, what secret treasures of
unfathomed love--may lie within that which seems in your sight even as a
waste land untilled, as a fire burnt out, as a harp without chords, as a
bird without song?

       *       *       *

Genius is oftentimes but a poor fool, who, clinging to a thing that
belongs to no age, Truth, does oftentimes live on a pittance and die in
a hospital; but whosoever has the gift to measure aright their
generation is invincible--living, they shall enjoy all the vices
undetected; and dead, on their tombstones they shall possess all the
virtues.

       *       *       *

Cant, naked, is honoured throughout England. Cant, clothed in gold, is a
king never in England resisted.

       *       *       *

"Ben Dare, he be dead?" he asked suddenly. "They telled me so by
Darron's side."[A]

[A] The river Derwent.

Ambrose bent his head, silently.

"When wur't?"

"Last simmar-time, i' th' aftermath."

"It were a ston' as killed him?"

"Ay," said Ambrose, softly shading his eyes with his hand from the sun
that streamed through the aisles of pine.

"How wur't?"

"They was a blastin'. He'd allus thoct as he'd dee that way, you know.
They pit mair pooder i' quarry than common; and the ston' it split, and
roared, and crackit, wi' a noise like tha crack o' doom. And one bit on
't, big as ox, were shot i' th' air, an' fell, unlookit for like, and
dang him tew the groun', and crushit him,--a-lyin' richt athwart his
brist."

"An' they couldna stir it?"

"They couldna. I heerd tha other min screech richt tew here, an' I knew
what it wur, tha shrill screech comin' jist i' top o' tha blastin' roar;
an' I ran, an' ran--na gaze-hound fleeter. An' we couldna raise it--me
an' Tam, an' Job, an' Gideon o' the Mere, an' Moses Legh o' Wissen Edge,
a' strong min and i' our prime. We couldna stir it, till Moses o' Wissen
Edge he thoct o' pittin' fir-poles underneath--poles as was sharp an'
slim i' thur ends, an' stout an' hard further down. Whin tha poles was
weel thrust under we heaved, an' heaved, an' heaved, and got it slanted
o' one side, and drawed him out; an' thin it were too late, too late! A'
tha brist was crushit in--frushed flesh and bone together. He jist
muttered i' his throat, 'Tha little lass, tha little lass!' and then he
turned him on his side, and hid his face upo' the sod. When we raised
him he wur dead."

The voice of Ambrose sank very low; and where he leaned over his smithy
door the tears fell slowly down his sun-bronzed cheeks.

"Alack a day!" sighed Daffe, softly. "Sure a better un niver drew breath
i' the varsal world!"

"An' that's trew," Ambrose made answer, his voice hushed and very
tender.

"He was varra changed like," murmured Daffe, his hand wandering amongst
the golden blossoms of the stonecrop. "He niver were the same crittur
arter the lass went awa'. He niver were the same--niver. Ta seemed tew
mak an auld man o' him a' at once."

"It did," said Ambrose, brokenly. "He couldna bear tew look na tew spik
to nane o' us. He were bent i' body, an' gray o' head, that awfu' night
when he kem back fra' the waking. It were fearfu' tew see; and we
couldna dew naught. Th' ony thing as he'd take tew were Trust."

"Be dog alive?"

"Na. Trust he'd never quit o' Ben's grave. He wouldna take bit na drop.
He wouldna be touchit; not whin he was clem would he be tempted awa'.
And he died--jist tha fifth day arter his master."

"An' the wench? Hev' 'ee e'er heerd on her?"

"Niver--niver. Mappen she's dead and gone tew. She broke Ben's heart for
sure; long ere tha ston' crushit life out o't."

"And wheer may he lie?"

Ambrose clenched his brawny hand, his eyes darkened, his swarthy face
flushed duskily.

"Wheer? What think 'ee, Daffe? When we took o' him up for the burial, ta
tha church ower theer beyant tha wood, the passon he stoppit us, a' tha
gate of tha buryin' field. The passon he med long words, and sed as how
a unb'liever sud niver rest i' blessed groun', sin he willna iver enter
into the sight o' tha Lord. He sed as how Ben were black o' heart and
wicked o' mind, an' niver set fute i' church-door, and niver ate o' tha
sacrament bread, and niver not thocht o' God nor o' Devil; an' he
wouldna say tha rites o'er him an' 'twere iver so, an' he wouldna let
him lie i' tha holy earth, nor i' tha pale o' tha graveyard. Well, we
couldna gae agin him--we poor min, an' he a squire and passon tew. Sae
we took him back, five weary mile; and we brocht him here, and we dug
his grave under them pines, and we pit a cross o' tha bark to mark the
place, and we laid old Trust, when he died, by his side. I were mad with
grief like, thin; it were awfu' ta ha' him forbad Christian burial."

"Dew it matter?" asked the gentle Daffe, wistfully. He had never been
within church-doors himself.

Ambrose gave a long troubled sigh.

"Aweel! at first it seemed awfu'--awfu'! And to think as Ben 'ud niver
see the face o' his God was mair fearfu' still. But as time gees on and
on--I can see his grave fra' here, tha cross we cut is tha glimmer o'
white on that stem ayont,--it dew seem as 'tis fitter like fer him to
lie i' tha fresh free woods, wi' tha birds a' chirmin' abuve him, an' a'
tha forest things as he minded a flyin', an' nestin', an' runnin', an'
rejoicin' arount him. 'Tis allus so still there, an' peacefu'. 'Tis blue
and blue now, wi' tha hy'cinths; and there's one bonnie mavis as dew
make her home wi' each spring abuve the gravestone. 'Bout not meetin'
his God, I dunno--I darena saw nowt anent it--but, for sure, it dew seem
to me that we canna meet Him no better, nor fairer, than wi' lips that
ha ne'er lied to man nor to woman, and wi' hands as niver hae harmed the
poor dumb beasts nor the prattlin' birds. It dew seem so. I canna tell."

As the words died off his lips the sun fell yet more brightly through
the avenues of the straight, dark, odorous pines; sweet silent winds
swept up the dewy scents of mosses, and of leaves, and of wild
hyacinths; and on the stillness of that lonely place there came one
tremulous, tender sound. It was the sound of the mavis singing.

"I canna tell; but for sure it is well with him?" said Ambrose; and he
bared his head, and bowed it humbly, as though in the voice of the mavis
he heard the answer of God:

"It is well."

Ah! I trust that it may be so for you; that the sweetness of your
arrogant dreams of an unshared eternity be not wholly a delusion; that
for you--although to us you do deny it--there may be found pity,
atonement, compensation, in some great Hereafter.

       *       *       *

"I have heard a very great many men and women call the crows carrion
birds, and the jackals carrion beasts, with an infinite deal of disgust
and much fine horror at what they were pleased to term 'feasting on
corpses;' but I never yet heard any of them admit their own appetite for
the rotten 'corpse' of a pheasant, or the putrid haunch of a deer, to be
anything except the choice taste of an epicure!"

"But they do cook the corpses!" I remonstrated; whereupon she grinned
with more meaning than ever.

"Exactly what I am saying, my dear. Their love of synonyms has made them
forget that they are _carnivori_, because they talk so sweetly of the
_cuisine_. A poor, blundering, honest, ignorant lion only kills and eats
when the famine of his body forces him to obey that law of slaughter
which is imposed on all created things, from the oyster to the man, by
what we are told is the beautiful and beneficent economy of Creation. Of
course, the lion is a brutal and bloodthirsty beast of prey, to be
hunted down off the face of the earth as fast as may be. Whereas
man--what does he do? He devours the livers of a dozen geese in one
_pâté_; he has lobsters boiled alive, that the scarlet tint may look
tempting to his palate; he has fish cut up or fried in all its living
agonies, lest he should lose one _nuance_ of its flavour; he has the
calf and the lamb killed in their tender age, that he may eat dainty
sweetbreads; he has quails and plovers slaughtered in the
nesting-season, that he may taste a slice of their breasts; he crushes
oysters in his teeth whilst life is in them; he has scores of birds and
animals slain for one dinner, that he may have the numberless dishes
which fashion exacts; and then--all the time talking softly of _rissôle_
and _mayonnaise_, of _consommé_ and _entremet_, of _croquette_ and
_côtelette_--the dear _gourmet_ discourses on his charming science, and
thanks God that he is not as the parded beasts that prey!"

"Well," said I, sulkily, for I am fond myself of a good
_vol-au-vent_,--"well, you have said that eating is a law in the
economies--or the waste--of creation. Is it not well to clothe a
distasteful and barbaric necessity in a refining guise and under an
elegant nomenclature?"

"Sophist!" said Fanfreluche, with much scorn, though she herself is as
keen an epicure and as suave a sophist, for that matter, as I know,--"I
never denied that it was well for men to cheat themselves, through the
art of their cooks, into believing that they are not brutes and beasts
of prey--it is well exceedingly--for their vanity. Life is sustained
only by the destruction of life. Cookery, the divine, can turn this
horrible fact into a poetic idealism; can twine the butcher's knife with
lilies, and hide the carcass under roses. But I do assuredly think that,
when they sit down every night with their _menu_ of twenty services,
they should not call the poor lion bad names for eating an antelope once
a fortnight."

And, with the true consistency of preachers, Fanfreluche helped herself
to a Madeira stewed kidney which stood amongst other delicacies on the
deserted luncheon table.

       *       *       *

"If this play should succeed it will be a triumph of true art," said
another critical writer to Dudley Moore.

That great personage tapped his Louis-Quinze snuffbox with some
impatience.

"Pardon me, but it is not possible to have art at all on the stage. Art
is a pure idealism. You can have it in a statue, a melody, a poem; but
you cannot have it on the stage, which is at its highest but a graphic
realism. The very finest acting is only fine in proportion as it is an
exact reproduction of physical life. How, then, can it be art, which is
only great in proportion as it escapes from the physical life into the
spiritual?"

"But may not dramatic art escape thither also?" asked the critic, who
was young, and deferred to him.

"Impossible, sir. It is shackled with all the forms of earth, and--worse
still--with all its shams and commonplaces. When we read _Othello_, we
only behold the tempest of the passions and the wreck of a great soul;
but when we see _Othello_, we are affronted by the colour of the Moor's
skin, and are brought face to face with the vulgarities of the bolster!"

"Then there is no use in a stage at all?"

"I am not prepared to conclude that. It is agreeable to a vast number of
people: as a Frith or an O'Neil is agreeable to a vast number of people
to whom an Ary Scheffer or a Delaroche would be unintelligible. It is
better, perhaps, that this vast number should look at Friths and O'Neils
than that they should never look on any painting at all. Now the stage
paints rudely, often tawdrily; still it does paint. It is better than
nothing. I take it that the excellence, as the end, of histrionic art is
to portray, to the minds of the many, poetic conceptions which, without
such realistic rendering, would remain unknown and impalpable to all
save the few. Histrionic art is at its greatest only when it is the
follower and the interpreter of literature; the actor translates the
poet's meanings into the common tongue that is understood of the people.
But how many on the miserable stage of this country have ever had either
humility to perceive, or capability to achieve this?"

The other critic smiled.

"I imagine not one, in our day. Their view of their profession is
similar to Mrs. Delamere's, when Max Moncrief wrote that sparkling
comedy for her. 'My dear,' she said to him, 'why did you trouble
yourself to put all that wit and sense into it? We didn't want _that_. I
shall wear all my diamonds, and I have ordered three splendid new
dresses!'"

       *       *       *

All day long the fowls kept it alive with sound and movement; for of all
mercurial and fussy things there is nothing on the face of the earth to
equal cocks and hens. They have such an utterly exaggerated sense, too,
of their own importance; they make such a clacking and clucking over
every egg, such a scratching and trumpeting over every morsel of
treasure-trove, and such a striding and stamping over every bit of
well-worn ground. On the whole, I think poultry have more humanity in
them than any other race, footed or feathered; and cocks certainly must
have been the first creatures that ever hit on the great art of
advertising. Myself I always fancy that the souls of this feathered
tribe pass into the bodies of journalists; but this may be a mere
baseless association of kindred ideas in my mind.

       *       *       *

She kissed the dog on the forehead; then pointed to the kreel of shells
and seaweed on the red, smooth piece of rock.

"Take care of them, dear Bronze," she murmured; "and wait till I come
back. Wait here."

She did not mean to command; she only meant to console him by the
appointment of some service.

Bronze looked in her face with eyes of woe and longing; but he made no
moan or sound, but only stretched himself beside the kreel on guard. I
am always glad to think that as she went she turned, and kissed him once
again.

The boat flew fast over the water. When boats leave you, and drag your
heart with them, they always go like that; and when they come, and your
heart darts out to meet them, then they are so slow!

The boat flew like a seagull, the sun bright upon her sail. Bronze, left
upon the rock, lifted his head and gave one long, low wail. It echoed
woefully and terribly over the wide, quiet waters. They gave back no
answer--not even the poor answer that lies in echo.

It was very still there. Nothing was in sight except that single little
sail shining against the light, and flying--flying--flying.

Now and then you could hear a clock striking in the distant village, the
faint crow of a cock, the far-off voices of children calling to one
another.

The little sea-mouse stole athwart a pool; the grey sea-crabs passed
like a little army; the tiny sea creatures that dwelt in rosy shells
thrust their delicate heads from their houses to peep and wonder at the
sun. But all was noiseless. How dared they make a sound, when that great
sea, that was at once their life and death, was present with its
never-ceasing "Hush!"

Bronze never moved, and his eyes never turned from the little boat that
went and left him there--the little boat that fast became merely a flash
and speck of white against the azure air, no bigger than the breadth of
a seagull's wings.

An hour drifted by. The church-clock on the cliffs had struck four
times; a deep-toned, weary bell, that tolled for every quarter, and must
often have been heard, at dead of night, by dying men, drowning
unshriven and unhouselled.

Suddenly the sand about us, so fawn-hued, smooth, and beautifully
ribbed, grew moist, and glistened with a gleam of water, like eyes that
fill with tears.

Bronze never saw: he only watched the boat. A little later the water
gushed above the sand, and, gathering in a frail rippling edge of foam,
rolled up and broke upon the rock.

And still he never saw; for still he watched the boat.

Awhile, and the water grew in volume, and filled the mouse's pool till
it brimmed over, and bathed the dull grasses till they glowed like
flowers; and drew the sea-crabs and the tiny dwellers of the shells back
once more into its wondrous living light.

And all around the fresh tide rose, silently thus about the rocks and
stones; gliding and glancing in all the channels of the shore, until the
sands were covered, and the grasses gathered in, and all the creeping,
hueless things were lost within its space; and in the stead of them, and
of the bronzed palm-leaves of weed, and of the great brown boulders
gleaming in the sun, there was but one vast lagoon of shadowless bright
water everywhere.

And still he never saw; for still he watched the boat.

By this time the tide, rolling swiftly in before a strong sou'-wester,
had risen midway against the rock on which we had been left, and was
breaking froth and foam upon the rock's worn side. For this rock alone
withstood the passage of the sea: there was naught else but this to
break the even width of water. All other things save this had been
subdued and reapen.

It was all deep water around; and the water glowed a strange emerald
green, like the green in a lizard or snake. The shore, that had looked
so near, now seemed so far, far off; and the woods were hidden in mist,
and the cottages were all blurred with the brown of the cliff, and there
came no sound of any sort from the land--no distant bell, no farm-bird's
call, no echo of children's voices. There was only one sound at all;
and that was the low, soft, ceaseless murmuring of the tide as it glided
inward.

The waters rose till they touched the crest of the rock; but still he
never moved. Stretched out upon the stone, guarding the things of her
trust, and with his eyes fastened on the sail which rose against the
light, he waited thus--for death.

I was light, and a strong swimmer. I had been tossed on those waves from
my birth. Buffeted, fatigued, blind with the salt sea-spray, drenched
with the weight of the water, I struggled across that calm dread width
of glassy coldness, and breathless reached the land.

By signs and cries I made them wot that something needed them at sea.
They began to get ready a little boat, bringing it down from its wooden
rest on high dry ground beneath the cliff. Whilst they pushed and
dragged through the deep-furrowed sand I gazed seaward. The shore was
raised; I could see straight athwart the waters. They now were level
with the rock; and yet he had never moved.

The little skiff had passed round the bend of a bluff, and was out of
his sight and ours.

The boat was pushed into the surf; they threw me in. They could see
nothing, and trusted to my guidance.

I had skill enough to make them discover whither it was I wanted them to
go. Then, looking in their eagerness whither my eyes went, they saw him
on the rock, and with a sudden exercise of passionate vigour, bent to
their oars and sent the boat against the hard opposing force of the
resisting tide. For they perceived that, from some cause, he was
motionless there, and could not use his strength; and they knew that it
would be shame to their manhood if, within sight of their land, the
creature who had succoured their brethren in the snow, and saved the
two-year child from the storm, should perish before their sight on a
calm and unfretted sea and in a full noon sun.

It was but a furlong to that rock; it was but the breadth of the beach,
that at low water stretched uncovered; and yet how slowly the boat sped,
with the ruthless tide sweeping it back as fast as the oars bore it
forward!

So near we seemed to him that one would have thought a stone flung from
us through the air would have lit far beyond him; and yet the space was
enough, more than enough, to bar us from him, filled as it was with the
strong adverse pressure of those low, swift, in-rushing waves.

The waters leaped above the summit of the rock, and for a moment covered
him. A great shout went up from the rowers beside me. They strained in
every nerve to reach him; and the roll of a fresh swell of water lifted
the boat farther than their uttermost effort could achieve, but lifted
her backward, backward to the land.

When the waters touched him he arose slowly, and stood at bay like a
stag upon a headland, when the hounds rage behind, and in front yawns
the fathomless lake.

He stood so that he still guarded the things of his trust; and his eyes
were still turned seaward, watching for the vanished sail.

Once again the men, with a loud cry to him of courage and help, strained
at their oars, and drove themselves a yard's breadth farther out. And
once again the tide, with a rush of surf and shingle, swept the boat
back, and seemed to bear her to the land as lightly as though she were a
leaf with which a wind was playing.

The waters covered the surface of the rock. It sank from sight. The foam
was white about his feet, and still he stood there--upon guard.
Everywhere there was the brilliancy of noontide sun; everywhere there
was the beaming calmness of the sea, that spread out, far and wide, in
one vast sheet of light; from the wooded line of the shore there echoed
the distant gaiety of a woman's laugh. A breeze, softly stirring through
the warm air, brought with it from the land the scent of myrtle thickets
and wild flowers. How horrible they were--the light, the calm, the
mirth, the summer fragrance!

For one moment he stood there erect; his dark form sculptured,
lion-like, against the warm yellow light of noon; about his feet the
foam.

Then, all noiselessly, a great, curled, compact wave surged over him,
breaking upon him, sweeping him away. The water spread out quickly,
smooth and gleaming like the rest. He rose, grasping in his teeth the
kreel of weed and shells.

He had waited until the last. Driven from the post he would not of
himself forsake, the love of life awoke in him; he struggled against
death.

Three times he sank, three times he rose. The sea was now strong, and
deep, and swift of pace, rushing madly in; and he was cumbered with that
weight of osier and of weed, which yet he never yielded, because it had
been her trust. With each yard that the tide bore him forward, by so
much it bore us backward. There was but the length of a spar between us,
and yet it was enough!

He rose for the fourth time, his head above the surf, the kreel uplifted
still, the sun-rays full upon his brown weary eyes, with all their
silent agony and mute appeal. Then the tide, fuller, wilder, deeper with
each wave that rolled, and washing as it went all things of the shore
from their places, flung against him, as it swept on, a great rough limb
of driftwood. It struck him as he rose; struck him across the brow. The
wave rushed on; the tide came in; the black wood floated to the shore;
he never rose again.

And scarcely that span of the length of a spar had parted us from him
when he sank!

All the day through they searched, and searched with all the skill of
men sea-born and sea-bred. The fisher, whose little child he had saved
in the winter night, would not leave him to the things of the deep. And
at sunset they found him, floating westward, in the calm water where the
rays of the sun made it golden and warm. He was quite dead; but in his
teeth there still was clenched the osier kreel, washed empty of its
freight.

They buried him there; on the shore underneath the cliff, where a great
wild knot of myrtle grows, and the honeysuckle blooms all over the sand.
And when Lord Beltran in that autumn came, and heard how he had died in
the fulfilling of a trust, he had a stone shapen and carved; and set it
against the cliff, amongst the leafage and flowers, high up where the
highest winter tide will not come. And by his will the name of Bronze
was cut on it in deep letters that will not wear out, and on which the
sun will strike with every evening that it shall pass westward above the
sea; and beneath the name he bade three lines be chiselled likewise, and
they are these:

  "HE CHOSE DEATH RATHER THAN UNFAITHFULNESS.
              HE KNEW NO BETTER.
                HE WAS A DOG."

"They are all words. Creatures that take out their grief in crape and
mortuary tablets can't feel very much."

"There are many lamentations, from Lycidas to Lesbia, which prove that
whether for a hero or a sparrow--" I began timidly to suggest.

"That's only a commonplace," snapped my lady. "They chatter and
scribble; they don't feel. They write stanzas of 'gush' on Maternity;
and tear the little bleating calf from its mother to bleed to death in
a long, slow agony. They maunder twaddle about Infancy over some ugly
red lump of human flesh, in whose creation their vanity happens to be
involved; and then go out and send the springtide lamb to the slaughter,
and shoot the parent birds as they fly to the nest where their
fledglings are screaming in hunger! Pooh! Did you never find out the
value of their words? Some one of them has said that speech was given
them to conceal their thoughts. It is true that they use it for that
end; but it was given them for this reason. At the time of the creation,
when all except man had been made, the Angel of Life, who had been
bidden to summon the world out of chaos, moving over the fresh and yet
innocent earth, thought to himself, 'I have created so much that is
doomed to suffer for ever, and for ever be mute; I will now create an
animal that shall be compensated for all suffering by listening to the
sound of its own voluble chatter.' Whereon the Angel called Man into
being, and cut the _frænum_ of his tongue, which has clacked incessantly
ever since, all through the silence of the centuries."

       *       *       *

There was once a dog, my dear, that was hit by three men, one after
another, as they went by him where he lay in the sun; and in return he
bit them--deep--and they let him alone then, and ever after sought to
propitiate him. Well, the first he bit in the arm, where there was a
brand for deserting; and the second he bit in the throat, where there
was a hideous mole; and the third he bit in the shoulder, where there
was the mark of a secret camorra. Now, not one of these three durst
speak of the wounds in places they all wished to hide; and whenever
afterwards they passed the dog, they gave him fair words, and sweet
bones, and a wide berth. It is the dogs, and the satirists, and the
libellers, and the statesmen who know how to bite like that--in the
weak part--that get let alone, and respected, and fed on the fat of the
land.

       *       *       *

For him by whom a thirsty ear is lent to the world's homage, the tocsin
of feebleness, if not of failure, has already sounded.

The gladness of the man is come when the crowds lisp his name, and the
gold fills his hand, and the women's honeyed adulations buzz like golden
bees about his path; but how often is the greatness of the artist gone,
and gone for ever!

Because when the world denies you it is easy to deny the world; because
when the bread is bitter it is easy not to linger at the meal; because
when the oil is low it is easy to rise with dawn; because when the body
is without surfeit or temptation it is easy to rise above earth on the
wings of the spirit. Poverty is very terrible to you, and kills your
soul in you sometimes; but it is like the northern blast that lashes men
into Vikings; it is not the soft, luscious south wind that lulls them
into lotos-eaters.

       *       *       *

I have grave doubts of Mrs. Siddons. She was a goddess of the age of
fret and fume, of stalk and strut, of trilled R's and of nodding plumes.
If we had Siddons now I fear we should hiss; I am quite sure we should
yawn. She must have been Melpomene always; Nature never.

       *       *       *

Oh, how wise you are and how just!--if there be a spectacle on earth to
rejoice the angels, it is your treatment of the animals that you say God
has given unto you!

It is not for me, a little dog, to touch on such awful mysteries;
but--sometimes--I wonder, if ever He ask you how you have dealt with His
gift, what will you answer then?

If all your slaughtered millions should instead answer for you--if all
the countless and unpitied dead, all the goaded, maddened beasts from
forest and desert who were torn asunder in the holidays of Rome; and all
the innocent, playful, gentle lives of little home-bred creatures that
have been racked by the knives, and torn by the poisons, and convulsed
by the torments, of your modern Science, should, instead, answer, with
one mighty voice, of a woe no longer inarticulate, of an accusation no
more disregarded, what then? Well! Then, if it be done unto you as you
have done, you will seek for mercy and find none in all the width of the
universe; you will writhe, and none shall release you; you will pray,
and none shall hear.

       *       *       *

"These fine things don't make one's happiness," I murmured pensively to
Fanfreluche.

"No, my dear, they don't," the little worldling admitted. "They do to
women; they're so material, you see. They are angels--O yes, of
course!--but they're uncommonly sharp angels where money and good living
are concerned. Just watch them--watch the tail of their eye--when a
cheque is being written or an _éprouvette_ being brought to table. And
after all, you know, minced chicken is a good deal nicer than dry bread.
Of course we can easily be sentimental and above this sort of thing,
when the chicken _is_ in our mouths where we sit by the fire; but if we
were gnawing wretched bones, out in the cold of the streets, I doubt if
we should feel in such a sublime mood. All the praises of poverty are
sung by the minstrel who has got a golden harp to chant them on; and
all the encomiums on renunciation come from your _bon viveur_ who never
denied himself aught in his life!"

       *       *       *

Emotions are quite as detrimental to a dog's tail as they are to a
lady's complexion. Joseph Buonaparte's American wife said to an American
gentleman, whom I heard quote her words, that she "never laughed because
it made wrinkles:" there is a good deal of wisdom in that cachinatory
abstinence. There is nothing in the world that wears people (or dogs) so
much as feeling of any kind, tender, bitter, humoristic, or emotional.

How often you commend a fresh-coloured matron with her daughters, and a
rosy-cheeked hunting squire in his saddle, who, with their half-century
of years, yet look so comely, so blooming, so clear-browed, and so
smooth-skinned. How often you distrust the weary delicate creature, with
the hectic flush of her rouge, in society; and the worn, tired,
colourless face of the man of the world who takes her down to dinner.
Well, to my fancy, you may be utterly wrong. An easy egotism, a
contented sensualism, may have carried the first comfortably and
serenely through their bank-note-lined paradise of commonplace
existence. How shall you know what heart-sickness in their youth, what
aching desires for joys never found, what sorrowful power of sympathy,
what fatal keenness of vision, have blanched the faded cheek, and lined
the weary mouth, of the other twain?

       *       *       *

"Sheep and men are very much alike," said Trust, who thought both very
poor creatures. "Very much alike indeed. They go in flocks, and can't
give a reason why. They leave their fleece on any bramble that is strong
enough to insist on fleecing them. They bleat loud at imagined evils,
while they tumble straight into real dangers. And for going off the
line, there's nothing like them. There may be pits, thorns, quagmires,
spring-guns, what not, the other side of the hedge, but go off the
straight track they will--and no dog can stop them. It's just the sheer
love of straying. You may bark at them right and left; go they will,
though they break their legs down a limekiln. Oh, men and sheep are
wonderfully similar; take them all in all."

       *       *       *

Ah! you people never guess the infinite woe we dogs suffer in new homes,
under strange tyrannies; you never heed how we shrink from unfamiliar
hands, and shudder at unfamiliar voices, how lonely we feel in unknown
places, how acutely we dread harshness, novelty, and scornful treatment.
Dogs die oftentimes of severance from their masters; there is
Greyfriars' Bobby now in Edinboro' town who never has been persuaded to
leave his dead owner's grave all these many years through. You see such
things, but you are indifferent to them. "It is only a dog," you say;
"what matter if the brute fret to death?"

You don't understand it of course; you who so soon forget all your own
dead--the mother that bore you, the mistress that loved you, the friend
that fought with you shoulder to shoulder; and of course, also, you care
nothing for the measureless blind pains, the mute helpless sorrows, the
vague lonely terrors, that ache in our little dumb hearts.

       *       *       *

Lucretius has said how charming it is to stand under a shelter in a
storm, and see another hurrying through its rain and wind; but a woman
would refine that sort of cruelty, and would not be quite content
unless she had an umbrella beside her that she refused to lend.

       *       *       *

"Oh, pooh, my dear!" cried Fanfreluche. "He has robbed his host at
cards, and abused his host behind his back; to fulfil the whole duty of
a nineteenth century guest it only remains for him to betray his host in
love!"

"You think very ill of men?" I muttered; I was, indeed, slightly weary
of her sceptical supercilious treatment of all things; your
pseudo-philosopher, who will always think he has plumbed the ocean with
his silver-topped cane, is a great bore sometimes.

"I think very well of men," returned Fanfreluche. "You are mistaken, my
dear. There are only two things that they never are honest about--and
that is their sport and their women. When they get talking of their
rocketers, or their runs, their pigeon-score, or their _bonnes
fortunes_, they always lie--quite unconsciously. And if they miss their
bird or their woman, isn't it always because the sun was in their eyes
as they fired, or because she wasn't half good-looking enough to try
after?--bless your heart, I know them!"

"If you do, you are not complimentary to them," I grumbled.

"Can't help that, my dear," returned Fanfreluche. "Gracious! whatever is
there that stands the test of knowing it well? I have heard Beltran say,
that you find out what an awful humbug the Staubbach is when you go up
to the top and see you can straddle across it. Well, the Staubbach is
just like everything in this life. Keep your distance, and how well the
creature looks!--all veiled in its spray, and all bright with its
prismatic colours, so deep, and so vast, and so very impressive. But
just go up to the top, scale the crags of its character, and measure the
height of its aspirations, and fathom the torrent of its passions, and
sift how much is the foam of speech, and how little is the well-spring
of thought. Well, my dear, it is a very uncommon creature if it don't
turn out just like the Staubbach."

       *       *       *

I think if you knew what you did, even the most thoughtless amongst you
would not sanction with your praise, and encourage with your coin, the
brutality that trains dancing-dogs.

Have human mimes if you will; it is natural to humanity to caper and
grimace and act a part: but for pity's sake do not countenance the
torture with which Avarice mercilessly trains us "dumb beasts" for the
trade of tricks.

"The Clown-dog draws throngs to laugh and applaud," says some
advertisement: yes, and I knew a very clever clown-dog once. His feet
were blistered with the hot irons on which he had been taught to dance;
his teeth had been drawn lest he should use his natural weapons against
his cowardly tyrants; his skin beneath his short white hair was black
with bruises; though originally of magnificent courage, his spirit had
been so broken by torture that he trembled if a leaf blew against him;
and his eyes--well, if the crowds that applauded him had once looked at
those patient, wistful, quiet eyes, with their unutterable despair,
those crowds would have laughed no more, unless they had indeed been
devils.

Who has delivered us unto you to be thus tortured, and martyred?
Who?--Oh, that awful eternal mystery that ye yourselves cannot explain!

       *       *       *

Believe me, it is the light or the darkness of our own fate that either
gives "greenness to the grass and glory to the flower," or leaves both
sickly, wan, and colourless. A little breadth of sunny lawn, the
spreading shadow of a single beech, the gentle click of a little
garden-gate, the scent of some simple summer roses--how fair these are
in your memory because of a voice which then was on your ear, because of
eyes that then gazed in your own. And the grandeur of Nile, and the
lustre of the after-glow, and the solemn desolation of Carnac, and the
wondrous beauty of the flushed sea of tossing reeds, are all cold, and
dead, and valueless, because in those eyes no love now lies for you;
because that voice, for you, is now for ever silent.

       *       *       *

For, write as you will of the glory of poverty, and of the ennui of
pleasure, there is no life like this life, wherein to the sight and the
sense all things minister; wherefrom harsh discord and all unloveliness
are banished: where the rare beauty of high-born women is common; where
the passions at their wildest still sheathe themselves in courtesy's
silver scabbard; where the daily habits of existence are made graceful
and artistic; where grief, and woe, and feud, and futile longing for
lost loves, can easiest be forgot in delicate laughter and in endless
change. Artificial? Ah, well, it may be so! But since nevermore will you
return to the life of the savage, to the wigwam of the squaw, it is
best, methinks, that the Art of Living--the great _Savoir Vivre_--should
be brought, as you seek to bring all other arts, up to uttermost
perfection.

       *       *       *

Men are very much in society as women will them to be. Let a woman's
society be composed of men gently born and bred, and if she find them
either coarse or stupid, make answer to her--"You must have been coarse
or stupid yourself."

And if she demur to the _tu quoque_ as to a base and illogical form of
argument, which we will grant that it usually is, remind her that the
cream of a pasturage may be pure and rich, but if it pass into the hands
of a clumsy farm serving-maid, then shall the cheese made thereof be
neither Roquefort nor Stilton, but rough and flavourless and uneatable,
"like a Banbury cheese, nothing but paring." Now, the influence of a
woman's intelligence on the male intellects about her is as the churn to
the cream: it can either enrich and utilise it, or impoverish and waste
it. It is not too much to say that it almost invariably, in the present
decadence of the salon and parrot-jabbering of the suffrage, has the
latter effect alone.

       *       *       *

Humiliation is a guest that only comes to those who have made ready his
resting-place, and will give him a fair welcome. My father used to say
to me, "Child, when you grow to womanhood, whether you be rich or poor,
gentle or simple, as the balance of your life may turn for or against
you, remember always this one thing--that no one can disgrace you save
yourself. Dishonour is like the Aaron's Beard in the hedgerows, it can
only poison if it be plucked." They call the belladonna Aaron's Beard in
the country, you know; and it is true that the cattle, simple as they
are, are never harmed by it; just because, though it is always in their
path, they never stop and taste it. I think it may just be so with us;
with any sort of evil.

       *       *       *

"Every pleasure has its penalty. If a woman be celebrated, the world
always thinks she must be wicked. If she's wise, she laughs. It is the
bitter that you must take with the sweet, as you get the sorrel flavour
with the softness of the cream, in your soup à la Bonne Femme. But the
cream would clog without it, and the combination is piquant."

"Only to jaded palates," I retorted; for I have often tasted the Bonne
Femme, and detest it.

By the way, what exquisite irony lies in some of your kitchen
nomenclature!

       *       *       *

Once at a great house in the west I saw a gathering on the young lord's
coming of age. There were half the highest people in England there; and
a little while before the tenantry went to their banquet in the
marquees, the boy-peer and his guests were all out on the terraces and
the lawns. With him was a very noble deer-hound, whom he had owned for
four years.

Suddenly the hound, Red Comyn, left his titled master, and plunged
head-foremost through the patrician crowd, and threw himself in wild
raptures on to a poor, miserable, tattered, travelling cobbler, who had
dared to creep in through the open gates and the happy crowds, hoping
for a broken crust. Red Comyn pounced on him, and caressed him, and laid
massive paws upon his shoulders, and gave him maddest welcome--this poor
hungry man, in the midst of that aristocratic festival.

The cobbler could scarcely speak awhile; but when he got his breath, his
arms were round the hound, and his eyes were wet with tears.

"Please pardon him, my lord," he said, all in a quiver and a tremble.
"He was mine once from the time he was pupped for a whole two year; and
he loved me, poor soul, and he ha'n't forgot. He don't know no better,
my lord--he's only a dog."

No; he didn't know any better than to remember, and be faithful, and to
recognise a friend, no matter in what woe or want. Ah, indeed, dogs are
far behind you!

For the credit of "the order," it may be added that Red Comyn and the
cobbler have parted no more, but dwell together still upon that young
lord's lands.

       *       *       *

Appearances are so and so, hence facts must be so and so likewise, is
Society's formula. This sounds mathematical and accurate; but as facts,
nine times out of ten, belie appearances, the logic is very false. There
is something, indeed, comically stupid in your satisfied belief in the
surface of any parliamentary or public facts that may be presented to
you, varnished out of all likeness to the truth by the suave periods of
writer or speaker. But there is something tragically stupid about your
dogged acceptation of any social construction of a private life, damned
out of all possibility of redemption by the flippant deductions of
chatter-box or of slanderer.

Now and then you poor humanities, who are always so dimly conscious that
you are all lies to one another, get a glimpse of various truths from
some cynical dead man's diary, or some statesman's secret papers. But
you never are warned: you placidly continue greedily to gobble up,
unexamined, the falsehoods of public men; and impudently to adjudicate
on the unrevealed secrets of private lives.

       *       *       *

You are given, very continually, to denouncing or lamenting the gradual
encroachment of mob-rule. But, alas! whose fault, pray, is it that
bill-discounters dwell as lords in ancient castles; that money-lenders
reign over old, time-honoured lands; that low-born hirelings dare to
address their master with a grin and sneer, strong in the knowledge of
his shameful secrets; and that the vile daughters of the populace are
throned in public places, made gorgeous with the jewels which, from the
heirlooms of a great patriciate, have fallen to be the gew-gaws of a
fashionable infamy?

Ah, believe me, an aristocracy is a feudal fortress which, though it has
merciless beleaguers in the Jacquerie of plebeian Envy, has yet no foe
so deadly as its own internal traitor of Lost Dignity!

       *       *       *

"But ye dunna get good wage?" said the miner, with practical wisdom.

"We doan't," confessed the East Anglian, "we doan't. And that theer
botherin' machinery as do the threshin', and the reapin', and the
sawin', and the mowin', hev a ruined us. See!--in old time, when ground
was frost-bit or water-soaked, the min threshed in-doors, in barns, and
kep in work so. But now the machine, he dew all theer is to dew, and dew
it up so quick. Theer's a many more min than theer be things to dew. In
winter-time measter he doan't want half o' us; and we're just out o'
labour; and we fall sick, cos o' naethin' to eat; and goes tew
parish--able-bodied min strong as steers."

"Machine's o' use i' mill-work," suggested one of the northerners.

"O' use! ay, o' coorse 'tis o' use--tew tha measters," growled the East
Anglian. "But if ye warn't needed at yer mill cos the iron beast was a
weavin' and a reelin' and a dewin' of it all, how'd yer feel? Wi' six
children, mebbe, biggest ony seven or eight, a crazin' ye for bread. And
ye mayn't send 'em out, cos o' labour-laws, to pick up a halfpenny for
theerselves; and tha passon be all agin yer, cos ye warn't thrifty and
didn't gev a penny for the forrin blacks out o' the six shillin' a week?
Would yer think iron beast wor o' use thin? or would yer damn him hard?"

       *       *       *

The poetic faculty--as you call the insight and the sympathy which feels
a divinity in all created things and a joy unutterable in the natural
beauty of the earth--is lacking in the generality of women,
notwithstanding their claims to the monopoly of emotion. If it be not,
how comes it that women have given you no great poet since the days of
Sappho?

It is women's deficiency in intellect, you will observe. Not a whit: it
is women's deficiency in sympathy.

The greatness of a poet lies in the universality of his sympathies. And
women are not sympathetic, because they are intensely self-centred.

       *       *       *

All living things seemed to draw closer together in the perils and
privations of the winter, as you men do in the frost of your frights or
your sorrows. In summer--as in prosperity--every one is for himself, and
is heedless of others because he needs nothing of them.

       *       *       *

It was covered, from the lowest of its stones to the top of its peaked
roof, with a gigantic rose-thorn.

"Sure the noblest shrub as ever God have made," would Ben say, looking
at its massive, cactus-like branches, with their red, waxen,
tender-coloured berries. The cottage was very old, and the rose-thorn
was the growth of centuries. Men's hands had never touched it. It had
stretched where it would, ungoverned, unhampered, unarrested. It had a
beautiful dusky glow about it always, from its peculiar thickness and
its blended hues; and in the chilly weather the little robin red-breasts
would come and flutter into it, and screen themselves in its shelter
from the cold, and make it rosier yet with the brightness of their
little ruddy throats.

"Tha Christ-birds do allus seem safest like i' tha Christ-bush," Ben
would say softly, breaking off the larger half of his portion of oaten
cake, to crumble for the robins with the dawn. I never knew what he
meant, though I saw he had some soft, grave, old-world story in his
thoughts, that made the rose-thorn and the red-breasts both sacred to
him.

       *       *       *

"Ah, my dear, you little dream the ecstatic delight that exists in
Waste, for the vulgarity of a mind that has never enjoyed Possession,
till it comes to riot at one blow in Spoliation!"

"I do wish you would answer me plainly," I said, sulkily,
"without--without----"

"Epigrams!" she added, sharply; "I daresay you do, my dear. Epigrams are
the salts of life; but they wither up the grasses of foolishness, and
naturally the grasses hate to be sprinkled therewith."

       *       *       *

We are ill appreciated, we cynics; on my honour if cynicism be not the
highest homage to Virtue there is, I should like to know what Virtue
wants. We sigh over her absence, and we glorify her perfections. But
Virtue is always a trifle stuck-up, you know, and she is very difficult
to please.

She is always looking uneasily out of the "tail of her eye" at her
opposition-leader Sin, and wondering why Sin dresses so well, and drinks
such very good wine. We "cynics" tell her that under Sin's fine clothes
there is a breast cancer-eaten, and at the bottom of the wine there is a
bitter dreg called satiety; but Virtue does not much heed that; like the
woman she is, she only notes that Sin drives a pair of ponies in the
sunshine, while she herself is often left to plod wearily through the
everlasting falling rain. So she dubs us "cynics" and leaves us--who can
wonder if we won't follow her through the rain? Sin smiles so merrily if
she makes us pay toll at the end; whereas Virtue--ah me, Virtue _will_
find such virtue in frowning!

       *       *       *

Women always put me in mind of that bird of yours, the cuckoo.

Your poetry and your platitudes have all combined to attach a most
sentimental value to cuckoos and women. All sorts of pretty phantasies
surround them both; the springtide of the year, the breath of early
flowers, the verse of old dead poets, the scent of sweet summer rains,
the light of bright dewy dawns--all these things you have mingled with
the thought of the cuckoo, till its first call through the woods in
April brings all these memories with it. Just so in like manner have you
entangled your poetic ideals, your dreams of peace and purity, all
divinities of patience and of pity, all sweet saintly sacrifice and
sorrow, with your ideas of women.

Well--cuckoos and women, believe me, are very much like each other, and
not at all like your phantasy:--to get a well-feathered nest without the
trouble of making it, and to keep easily in it themselves, no matter who
may turn out in the cold, is both cuckoo and woman all over; and, while
you quote Herrick and Wordsworth about them as you walk in the dewy
greenwood, they are busy slaying the poor lonely fledglings, that their
own young may lie snug and warm.

       *       *       *

"Then everybody is a hypocrite?"

"Not a bit, child. We always like what we haven't got; and people are
quite honest very often in their professions, though they give the lie
direct to them in their practice. People can talk themselves into
believing that they believe anything. When the preacher discourses on
the excellence of holiness, he may have been a thoroughgoing scamp all
his life; but it don't follow he's dishonest, because he's so accustomed
to talk goody-goody talk that it runs off his lips as the thread off a
reel----"

"But he must know he's a scamp?"

"Good gracious me, why should he? I have met a thousand scamps; but I
never met one who considered himself so. Self-knowledge isn't so common.
Bless you, my dear, a man no more sees himself, as others see him, in a
moral looking-glass, than he does in a mirror out of his dressing-box. I
know a man who has forged bills, run off with his neighbour's wife, and
left sixty thousand pounds odd in debts behind him; but he only thinks
himself 'a victim of circumstances'--honestly thinks it too. A man never
is so honest as when he speaks well of himself. Men are always optimists
when they look inwards, and pessimists when they look round them."

I yawned a little; nothing is so pleasant, as I have known later, as to
display your worldly wisdom in epigram and dissertation, but it is a
trifle tedious to hear another person display theirs.

When you talk yourself, you think how witty, how original, how acute you
are; but when another does so, you are very apt to think only--What a
crib from Rochefoucauld!




_TWO LITTLE WOODEN SHOES._


Brussels has stones that are sermons, or rather that are quaint,
touching, illuminated legends of the middle ages, which those who run
may read.

Brussels is a gay little city that lies as bright within its girdle of
woodland as any butterfly that rests upon moss.

The city has its ways and wiles of Paris. It decks itself with white and
gold. It has music under its trees and soldiers in its streets, and
troops marching and counter-marching along its sunny avenues. It has
blue and pink, and yellow and green, on its awnings and on its
house-fronts. It has a merry open-air life on its pavements at little
marble tables before little gay-coloured cafés. It has gilded balconies
and tossing flags and comic operas, and leisurely pleasure-seekers, and
tries always to believe and make the world believe that it is Paris in
very truth.

But this is only the Brussels of the noblesse and the foreigners.

There is a Brussels that is better than this--a Brussels that belongs to
the old burgher-life, to the artists and the craftsmen, to the master
masons of Moyen-age, to the same spirit and soul that once filled the
free men of Ghent and the citizens of Bruges and the besieged of Leyden,
and the blood of Egmont and of Horne.

Down there by the water-side, where the old quaint walls lean over the
yellow sluggish stream, and the green barrels of the Antwerp barges
swing against the dusky piles of the crumbling bridges:

In the grey square desolate courts of the old palaces, where in
cobwebbed galleries and silent chambers the Flemish tapestries drop to
pieces:

In the great populous square, where, above the clamorous and rushing
crowds, the majestic front of the Maison du Roi frowns against the sun,
and the spires and pinnacles of the Burgomaster's gathering-halls tower
into the sky in all the fantastic luxuriance of Gothic fancy:

Under the vast shadowy wings of angels in the stillness of the
cathedral, across whose sunny aisles some little child goes slowly all
alone, laden with lilies for the Feast of the Assumption, till their
white glory hides its curly head:

In all strange quaint old-world niches withdrawn from men in silent
grass-grown corners, where a twelfth-century corbel holds a pot of
roses, or a Gothic arch yawns beneath a wool-warehouse, or a water-spout
with a grinning faun's head laughs in the grim humour of the Moyen-age
above the bent head of a young lace-worker;----

In all these, Brussels, although more worldly than her sisters of Ghent
and Bruges, and far more worldly yet than her Teuton cousins of Freiburg
and Nürnberg, Brussels is in her own way still like some monkish story,
mixed up with the Romaunt of the Rose, or rather like some light French
vaudeville, all jests and smiles, illustrated in motley contrast with
helm and hauberk, cope and cowl, praying knights and fighting priests,
winged griffins and nimbused saints, flame-breathing dragons and
enamoured princes, all mingled together in the illuminated colours and
the heroical grotesque romance of the Middle Ages.

And it was this side of the city that Bébée knew, and she loved it well
and would not leave it for the market of the Madeleine.

       *       *       *

It was a warm grey evening, the streets were full; there were blossoms
in all the balconies, and gay colours in all the dresses. The old tinker
put his tools together and whispered to her--

"Bébée, as it is your feast-day, come and stroll in St. Hubert's
gallery, and I will buy you a horn of sugarplums or a ribbon, and we can
see the puppet-show afterwards, eh?"

But the children were waiting at home: she would not spend the evening
in the city; she only thought she would just kneel a moment in the
cathedral and say a little prayer or two for a minute--the saints were
so good in giving her so many friends.

There is something very touching in the Netherlander's relation with his
Deity. It is all very vague to him; a jumble of veneration and
familiarity, of sanctity and profanity, without any thought of being
familiar, or any idea of being profane.

There is a homely poetry, an innocent affectionateness, in it
characteristic of the people.

He talks to his good angel Michel, and to his friend that dear little
Jesus, much as he would talk to the shoemaker over the way, or the
cooper's child in the doorway.

It is a very unreasonable, foolish, clumsy sort of religion, this
theology in wooden shoes; it is half grotesque, half pathetic; the
grandmothers pass it on to the grandchildren, as they pass the bowl of
potatoes round the stove in the long winter nights; it is as silly as
possible, but it comforts them as they carry faggots over the frozen
canals or wear their eyes blind over the squares of lace; and it has in
it the supreme pathos of a perfect confidence, of an utter childlike and
undoubting trust.

This had been taught to Bébée, and she went to sleep every night in the
firm belief that the sixteen little angels of the Flemish prayer kept
watch and ward over her bed.

       *       *       *

She said her prayer, and thanked the saints for all their gifts and
goodness, her clasped hands against her silver shield; her basket on the
pavement by her; abovehead the sunset rays streaming purple and crimson
and golden through the painted windows that are the wonder of the world.

When her prayer was done she still kneeled there; her head thrown back
to watch the light; her hands clasped still; and on her upturned face
the look that made the people say, "What does she see?--the angels or
the dead?"

She forgot everything. She forgot the cherries at home, and the children
even. She was looking upward at the stories of the painted panes; she
was listening to the message of the dying sun-rays; she was feeling
vaguely, wistfully, unutterably the tender beauty of the sacred place
and the awful wonder of the world in which she with her sixteen years
was all alone, like a little blue cornflower amongst the wheat that goes
for grist, and the barley that makes men drunk.

For she was alone, though she had so many friends. Quite alone
sometimes, for God had been cruel to her, and had made her a lark
without song.

       *       *       *

He went leisurely, travelling up the bright Meuse river, and across the
monotony of the plains, then green with wheat a foot high, and musical
with the many bells of the Easter kermesses in the quaint old-world
villages.

There was something so novel, so sleepy, so harmless, so mediæval, in
the Flemish life, that it soothed him. He had been swimming all his life
in salt, sea-fed rapids; this sluggish, dull canal-water, mirroring
between its rushes a life that had scarcely changed for centuries, had a
charm for him.

He stayed awhile in Antwerpen. The town is ugly and beautiful; it is
like a dull, quaint, grès de Flandre jug, that has precious stones set
inside its rim. It is a burgher ledger of bales and barrels, of sale and
barter, of loss and gain; but in the heart of it there are illuminated
leaves of missal vellum, all gold and colour, and monkish story and
heroic ballad, that could only have been executed in the days when Art
was a religion.

       *       *       *

"Oh--to-morrow perhaps, or next year--or when Fate fancies.

"Or rather--when I choose," he thought to himself, and let his eyes rest
with a certain pleasure on the little feet that went beside him in the
grass, and the pretty neck that showed ever and again, as the frills of
her linen bodice were blown back by the wind, and her own quick motion.

Bébée looked also up at him; he was very handsome, or seemed so to her,
after the broad, blunt, characterless faces of the Brabantois around
her. He walked with an easy grace, he was clad in picture-like velvets,
he had a beautiful poetic head, and eyes like deep-brown waters, and a
face like one of Jordaens' or Rembrandt's cavaliers in the galleries
where she used to steal in of a Sunday, and look up at the paintings,
and dream of what that world could be in which those people had lived.

"_You_ are of the people of Rubes' country, are you not?" she asked him.

"Of what country, my dear?"

"Of the people that live in the gold frames," said Bébée, quite
seriously. "In the galleries, you know. I know a charwoman that scrubs
the floors of the Arenenberg, and she lets me in sometimes to look--and
you are just like those great gentlemen in the gold frames, only you
have not a hawk and a sword, and they always have. I used to wonder
where they came from, for they are not like any of us one bit, and the
charwoman--she is Lisa Dredel, and lives in the street of the Pot
d'Etain--always said, 'Dear heart, they all belong to Rubes' land--we
never see their like now-a-days.' But _you_ must come out of Rubes'
land--at least, I think so; do you not?"

He caught her meaning; he knew that Rubes was the homely abbreviation of
Rubens, that all the Netherlanders used, and he guessed the idea that
was reality to this little, lonely, fanciful mind.

"Perhaps I do," he answered her with a smile, for it was not worth his
while to disabuse her thoughts of any imagination that glorified him to
her. "Do you not want to see Rubes' world, little one? To see the gold
and the grandeur, and the glitter of it all?--never to toil or get
tired?--always to move in a pageant?--always to live like the hawks in
the paintings you talk of, with silver bells hung round you, and a hood
all sewn with pearls?"

"No," said Bébée, simply. "I should like to see it--just to see it, as
one looks through a grating into the king's grapehouses here. But I
should not like to live in it. I love my hut, and the starling, and the
chickens--and what would the garden do without me?--and the children,
and the old Annémie? I could not anyhow, anywhere be any happier than I
am. There is only one thing I wish."

"And what is that?"

"To know something. Not to be so ignorant. Just look--I can read a
little, it is true; my hours, and the letters, and when Krebs brings in
a newspaper I can read a little of it--not much. I know French well,
because Antoine was French himself, and never did talk Flemish to me;
and they, being Flemish, cannot, of course, read the newspapers at all,
and so think it very wonderful indeed in me. But what I want is to know
things, to know all about what _was_ before ever I was living. Ste.
Gudule now--they say it was built hundreds of years before; and Rubes
again--they say he was a painter-king in Antwerpen before the oldest
woman like Annémie ever began to count time. I am sure books tell you
all those things, because I see the students coming and going with them;
and when I saw once the millions of books in the Rue de la Musée, I
asked the keeper what use they were for, and he said, 'to make men wise,
my dear.' But Bac the cobbler, who was with me,--it was a fête day--Bac,
_he_ said, 'Do you not believe that, Bébée? they only muddle folk's
brains; for one book tells them one thing, and another book another, and
so on, till they are dazed with all the contrary lying; and if you see a
bookish man, be sure you see a very poor creature who could not hoe a
patch, or kill a pig, or stitch an upper-leather, were it ever so.' But
I do not believe that Bac said right. Did he?"

"I am not sure. On the whole, I think it is the truest remark on
literature I have ever heard, and one that shows great judgment in Bac.
Well?"

"Well--sometimes, you know," said Bébée, not understanding his answer,
but pursuing her thoughts confidentially; "sometimes I talk like this to
the neighbours, and they laugh at me. Because Mère Krebs says that when
one knows how to spin, and sweep, and make bread, and say one's prayers,
and milk a goat or a cow, it is all a woman wants to know this side of
heaven. But for me, I cannot help it--when I look at those windows in
the cathedral, or at those beautiful twisted little spires that are all
over our Hôtel de Ville, I want to know who the men were that made
them--what they did and thought--how they looked and spoke--how they
learned to shape stone into leaves and grasses like that--how they could
imagine all those angel faces on the glass. When I go alone in the quite
early morning or at night when it is still--sometimes in winter I have
to stay till it is dark over the lace--I hear their feet come after me,
and they whisper to me close, 'Look what beautiful things we have done,
Bébée, and you all forget us quite. We did what never will die, but our
names are as dead as the stones.' And then I am so sorry for them and
ashamed. And I want to know more. Can you tell me?"

He looked at her earnestly; her eyes were shining, her cheeks were warm,
her little mouth was tremulous with eagerness.

"Did any one ever speak to you in that way?" he asked her.

"No," she answered him. "It comes into my head of itself. Sometimes I
think the cathedral angels put it there. For the angels must be tired,
you know; always pointing to God and always seeing men turn away. I used
to tell Antoine sometimes. But he used to shake his head and say that it
was no use thinking; most likely Ste. Gudule and St. Michael had set the
church down in the night all ready made--why not? God made the trees,
and they were more wonderful, he thought, for his part. And so perhaps
they are, but that is no answer. And I do _want_ to know. I want some
one who will tell me,--and if you come out of Rubes' country as I think,
no doubt you know everything, or remember it?"

He smiled.

       *       *       *

The Sun came and touched the lichens of the roof into gold.

Bébée smiled at it gaily as it rose above the tops of the trees, and
shone on all the little villages scattered over the plains.

"Ah, dear Sun!" she cried to it. "I am going to be wise. I am going into
great Rubes' country. I am going to hear of the Past and the Future. I
am going to listen to what the Poets say. The swallows never would tell
me anything; but now I shall know as much as they know. Are you not glad
for me, O Sun?"

The Sun came over the trees, and heard and said nothing. If he had
answered at all he must have said:--

"The only time when a human soul is either wise or happy, is in that one
single moment when the hour of my own shining or of the moon's beaming
seems to that single soul to be past and present and future, to be at
once the creation and the end of all things. Faust knew that; so will
you."

But the Sun shone on and held his peace. He sees all things ripen and
fall. He can wait. He knows the end. It is always the same.

He brings the fruit out of the peach-flower, and rounds it and touches
it into ruddiest rose and softest gold; but the sun knows well that the
peach must drop--whether into the basket to be eaten by kings, or on to
the turf to be eaten by ants. What matter which very much after all?

The Sun is not a cynic; he is only wise because he is Life and He is
death, the creator and the corrupter of all things.

       *       *       *

"And where are you going so fast, as if those wooden shoes of yours were
sandals of mercury?"

"Mercury--is that a shoemaker?"

"No, my dear. He did a terrible bit of cobbling once, when he made
Woman. But he did not shoe her feet with swiftness that I know of; she
only runs away to be run after, and if you do not pursue her, she comes
back--always."

Bébée did not understand at all.

"I thought God made women?" she said, a little awe-stricken.

       *       *       *

There is a dignity of peasants as well as of kings--the dignity that
comes from all absence of effort, all freedom from pretence. Bébée had
this, and she had more still than this: she had the absolute simplicity
of childhood with her still.

Some women have it still when they are fourscore.

       *       *       *

Prosper Bar, who is a Calvinist, always says, "Do not mix up prayer and
play; you would not cut a gherkin in your honey;" but I do not know why
he called prayer a gherkin, because it is sweet enough--sweeter than
anything, I think.

       *       *       *

There is not much change in the great Soignies woods. They are aisles on
aisles of beautiful green trees, crossing and recrossing; tunnels of
dark foliage that look endless; long avenues of beech, of oak, of elm,
or of fir, with the bracken and the brushwood growing dense between; a
delicious forest growth everywhere, shady even at noon, and, by a little
past midday, dusky as evening; with the forest fragrance, sweet and
dewy, all about, and under the fern the stirring of wild game, and the
white gleam of little rabbits, and the sound of the wings of birds.

Soignies is not legend-haunted like the Black Forest, nor king-haunted
like Fontainebleau, nor sovereign of two historic streams like the brave
woods of Heidelberg; nor wild and romantic, and broken with black rocks,
and poetised by the shade of Jaques, and swept through by a perfect
river, like its neighbours of Ardennes; nor throned aloft on mighty
mountains like the majestic oak glades of the Swabian hills of the
ivory-carvers.

Soignies is only a Flemish forest in a plain, throwing its shadow over
corn-fields and cattle-pastures, with no panorama beyond it and no
wonders in its depth. But it is a fresh, bold, beautiful forest for all
that.

It has only green leaves to give--green leaves always, league after
league; but there is about it that vague mystery which all forests have,
and this universe of leaves seems boundless, and Pan might dwell in it,
and St. Hubert, and John Keats.

       *       *       *

"I am going to learn to be very wise, dear," she told them; "I shall not
have time to dance or to play."

"But people are not merry when they are wise, Bébée," said Franz, the
biggest boy.

"Perhaps not," said Bébée; "but one cannot be everything, you know,
Franz."

"But surely you would rather be merry than anything else?"

"I think there is something better, Franz. I am not sure; I want to find
out; I will tell you when I know."

"Who has put that into your head, Bébée?"

"The angels in the Cathedral," she told them, and the children were awed
and left her, and went away to play blindman's buff by themselves on the
grass by the swan's water.

"But for all that the angels have said it," said Franz to his sisters,
"I cannot see what good it will be to her to be wise, if she will not
care any longer afterwards for almond gingerbread and currant cake."

       *       *       *

To vice, innocence must always seem only a superior kind of chicanery.

       *       *       *

"Ay dear; when the frost kills your brave rosebush, root and bud, do you
think of the thorns that pricked you, or only of the fair sweet-smelling
things that flowered all your summer?"

       *       *       *

Flowers belong to fairyland; the flowers and the birds, and the
butterflies are all that the world has kept of its golden age; the only
perfectly beautiful things on earth, joyous, innocent, half divine,
useless, say they who are wiser than God.

       *       *       *

When the day was done, Bébée gave a quick sigh as she looked across the
square. She had so wanted to tell him that she was not ungrateful, and
she had a little moss-rose ready, with a sprig of sweetbriar, and a tiny
spray of maiden-hair fern that grew under the willows, which she had
kept covered up with a leaf of sycamore all the day long.

No one would have it now.

The child went out of the place sadly, as the carillon rang. There was
only the moss-rose in her basket, and the red and white currants that
had been given her for her dinner.

She went along the twisting, many-coloured, quaintly-fashioned streets,
till she came to the water-side.

It is very ancient, there still; there are all manner of old buildings,
black and brown and grey, peaked roofs, gabled windows, arched doors,
crumbling bridges, twisted galleries leaning to touch the dark surface
of the canal, dusky wharves crowded with barrels, and bales, and cattle,
and timber, and all the various freightage that the good ships come and
go with all the year round, to and from the Zuyder Zee, and the Baltic
water, and the wild Northumbrian shores, and the iron-bound Scottish
headlands, and the pretty grey Norman seaports, and the white sandy
dunes of Holland, with the toy towns and the straight poplar-trees.

Bébée was fond of watching the brigs and barges, that looked so big to
her, with their national flags flying, and their tall masts standing
thick as grass, and their tawny sails flapping in the wind, and about
them the sweet, strong smell of that strange, unknown thing, the sea.

Sometimes the sailors would talk with her; sometimes some old salt,
sitting astride of a cask, would tell her a mariner's tale of far-away
lands and mysteries of the deep; sometimes some curly-headed cabin-boy
would give her a shell or a plume of seaweed, and try and make her
understand what the wonderful wild water was like, which was not quiet
and sluggish and dusky as this canal was, but was for ever changing and
moving, and curling and leaping, and making itself now blue as her eyes,
now black as that thunder-cloud, now white as the snow that the winter
wind tossed, now pearl-hued and opaline as the convolvulus that blew in
her own garden.

And Bébée would listen, with the shell in her lap, and try to
understand, and gaze at the ships and then at the sky beyond them, and
try to figure to herself those strange countries, to which these ships
were always going, and saw in fancy all the blossoming orchard province
of green France, and all the fir-clothed hills and rushing rivers of the
snow-locked Swedish shore, and saw too, doubtless, many lands that had
no place at all except in dreamland, and were more beautiful even than
the beauty of the earth, as poets' countries are, to their own sorrow,
oftentimes.

But this dull day Bébée did not go down upon the wharf; she did not want
the sailor's tales; she saw the masts and the bits of bunting that
streamed from them, and they made her restless, which they had never
done before. Instead she went in at a dark old door and climbed up a
steep staircase that went up and up and up, as though she were mounting
Ste. Gudule's belfry towers; and at the top of it entered a little
chamber in the roof, where one square unglazed hole that served for
light looked out upon the canal, with all its crowded craft, from the
dainty schooner yacht, fresh as gilding and holystone could make her,
that was running for pleasure to the Scheldt, to the rude, clumsy
coal-barge, black as night, that bore the rough diamonds of Belgium to
the snow-buried roofs of Christiania and Stromsöon.

In the little dark attic there was a very old woman in a red petticoat
and a high cap, who sat against the window, and pricked out lace
patterns with a pin on thick paper. She was eighty-five years old, and
could hardly keep body and soul together.

Bébée, running to her, kissed her.

"O mother Annémie, look here! Beautiful red and white currants, and a
roll; I saved them for you. They are the first currants we have seen
this year. Me? oh, for me, I have eaten more than are good! You know I
pick fruit like a sparrow, always. Dear mother Annémie, are you better?
Are you quite sure you are better to-day?"

The little old withered woman, brown as a walnut and meagre as a rush,
took the currants, and smiled with a childish glee, and began to eat
them, blessing the child with each crumb she broke off the bread.

"Why had you not a grandmother of your own, my little one?" she mumbled.
"How good you would have been to her, Bébée?"

"Yes," said Bébée seriously, but her mind could not grasp the idea. It
was easier for her to believe the fanciful lily-parentage of Antoine's
stories. "How much work have you done, Annémie? Oh, all that? all that?
But there is enough for a week. You work too early and too late, you
dear Annémie."

"Nay, Bébée, when one has to get one's bread, that cannot be. But I am
afraid my eyes are failing. That rose now, is it well done?"

"Beautifully done. Would the Baës take them if they were not? You know
he is one that cuts every centime in four pieces."

"Ah! sharp enough, sharp enough--that is true. But I am always afraid of
my eyes. I do not see the flags out there so well as I used to do."

"Because the sun is so bright, Annémie; that is all. I myself, when I
have been sitting all day in the Place in the light, the flowers look
pale to me. And you know it is not age with _me_, Annémie?"

The old woman and the young girl laughed together at that droll idea.

"You have a merry heart, dear little one," said old Annémie. "The saints
keep it to you always."

"May I tidy the room a little?"

"To be sure, dear, and thank you too. I have not much time, you see; and
somehow my back aches badly when I stoop."

"And it is so damp here for you, over all that water!" said Bébée, as
she swept and dusted and set to rights the tiny place, and put in a
little broken pot a few sprays of honeysuckle and rosemary that she had
brought with her. "It is so damp here. You should have come and lived in
my hut with me, Annémie, and sat out under the vine all day, and looked
after the chickens for me when I was in the town. They are such
mischievous little souls; as soon as my back is turned one or other is
sure to push through the roof, and get out amongst the flower-beds. Will
you never change your mind, and live with me, Annémie? I am sure you
would be happy, and the starling says your name quite plain, and he is
such a funny bird to talk to; you never would tire of him. Will you
never come? It is so bright there, and green and sweet-smelling, and to
think you never even have seen it!--and the swans and all,--it is a
shame."

"No, dear," said old Annémie, eating her last bunch of currants. "You
have said so so often, and you are good and mean it, that I know. But I
could not leave the water. It would kill me.

"Out of this window you know I saw my Jeannot's brig go
away--away--away--till the masts were lost in the mists. Going with iron
to Norway; the Fleur d'Epine of this town, a good ship, and a sure, and
he her mate; and as proud as might be, and with a little blest Mary in
lead round his throat.

"She was to be back in port in eight months bringing timber. Eight
months--that brought Easter time.

"But she never came. Never, never, never, you know.

"I sat here watching them come and go, and my child sickened and died,
and the summer passed, and the autumn, and all the while I
looked--looked--looked; for the brigs are all much alike; only his I
always saw as soon as she hove in sight because he tied a hank of flax
to her mizzen mast; and when he was home safe and sound I spun the hank
into hose for him; that was a fancy of his, and for eleven voyages, one
on another, he had never missed to tie the flax nor I to spin the hose.

"But the hank of flax I never saw this time; nor the brave brig; nor my
good man with his sunny blue eyes.

"Only one day in winter, when the great blocks of ice were smashing
hither and thither, a coaster came in and brought tidings of how off in
the Danish waters they had come on a waterlogged brig, and had boarded
her, and had found her empty, and her hull riven in two, and her crew
all drowned and dead beyond any manner of doubt. And on her stern there
was her name painted white, the Fleur d'Epine, of Brussels, as plain as
name could be; and that was all we ever knew--what evil had struck her,
or how they had perished, nobody ever told.

"Only the coaster brought that bit of beam away, with the Fleur d'Epine
writ clear upon it.

"But you see I never _know_ my man is dead.

"Any day--who can say?--any of those ships may bring him aboard of her,
and he may leap out on the wharf there, and come running up the stairs
as he used to do, and cry, in his merry voice, 'Annémie, Annémie, here
is more flax to spin, here is more hose to weave!' For that was always
his homeward word; no matter whether he had had fair weather or foul, he
always knotted the flax to his mast-head.

"So you see, dear, I could not leave here. For what if he came and found
me away? He would say it was an odd fashion of mourning for him.

"And I could not do without the window, you know. I can watch all the
brigs come in; and I can smell the shipping smell that I have loved all
the days of my life; and I can see the lads heaving, and climbing, and
furling, and mending their bits of canvas, and hauling their flags up
and down.

"And then who can say?--the sea never took him, I think--I think I shall
hear his voice before I die.

"For they do say that God is good."

Bébée sweeping very noiselessly, listened, and her eyes grew wistful and
wondering. She had heard the story a thousand times; always in different
words, but always the same little tale, and she knew how old Annémie was
deaf to all the bells that tolled the time, and blind to all the
whiteness of her hair, and all the wrinkles of her face, and only
thought of her sea-slain lover as he had been in the days of her youth.

       *       *       *

When we suffer very much ourselves, anything that smiles in the sun
seems cruel--a child, a bird, a dragonfly--nay, even a fluttering
ribbon, or a spear-grass that waves in the wind.

       *       *       *

Bébée, whose religion was the sweetest and vaguest mingling of Pagan and
Christian myths, and whose faith in fairies and in saints was exactly
equal in strength and in ignorance--Bébée filled the delf pot anew
carefully, then knelt down on the turf in that little green corner, and
prayed in devout hopeful childish good faith to the awful unknown Powers
who were to her only as gentle guides and kindly playmates.

Was she too familiar with the Holy Mother?

She was almost fearful that she was; but then the Holy Mother loved
flowers so well, Bébée could not feel aloof from her, nor be afraid.

"When one cuts the best blossoms for her, and tries to be good, and
never tells a lie," thought Bébée, "I am quite sure, as she loves the
lilies, that she will never altogether forget me."

       *       *       *

The loveliest love is that which dreams high above all storms, unsoiled
by all burdens; but, perhaps, the strongest love is that which, whilst
it adores, drags its feet through mire, and burns its brow in heat for
the thing beloved.

       *       *       *

It is, perhaps, the most beautiful square in all Northern Europe, with
its black timbers and gilded carvings, and blazoned windows, and
majestic scutcheons, and fantastic pinnacles. This Bébée did not know,
but she loved it, and she sat resolutely in front of the Broodhuis,
selling her flowers, smiling, chatting, helping the old woman, counting
her little gains, eating her bit of bread at noon-day like any other
market girl; but, at times, glancing up to the stately towers and the
blue sky, with a look on her face that made the old tinker and cobbler
whisper together--"What does she see there?--the dead people or the
angels?"

The truth was that even Bébée herself did not know very surely what she
saw--something that was still nearer to her than even this kindly crowd
that loved her. That was all she could have said had anybody asked her.

But none did.

No one wanted to hear what the dead said; and for the angels, the tinker
and the cobbler were of opinion that one had only too much of them
sculptured about everywhere, and shining on all the casements--in
reverence be it spoken of course.




_FAME._


"There is no soul in them," he muttered, and he set down his lamp and
frowned; a sullen mechanical art made him angered like an insult to
heaven; and these were soulless; their drawing was fine, their anatomy
faultless, their proportions and perspective excellent; but there all
merit ended. They were worse than faulty--they were commonplace. There
is no sin in Art so deadly as that.

       *       *       *

He had been only a poor lad, a coppersmith's son, here in Munich; one
among many, and beaten and cursed at home very often for mooning over
folly when others were hard at work. But he had minded neither curse nor
blow. He had always said to himself, "I am a painter." Whilst camps were
soaked with blood and echoing only the trumpets of war, he had only seen
the sweet divine smile of Art. He had gone barefoot to Italy for love of
it, and had studied, and laboured, and worshipped, and been full of the
fever of great effort and content with the sublime peace of conscious
power. He had believed in himself: it is much. But it is not all. As
years had slid away and the world of men would not believe in him, this
noble faith in himself grew a weary and bitter thing. One shadow climbed
the hills of the long years with him and was always by his side: this
constant companion was Failure.

Fame is very capricious, but Failure is seldom inconstant. Where it once
clings, there it tarries.

       *       *       *

It was a brilliant and gay day in Munich. It was the beginning of a
Bavarian summer, with the great plain like a sea of grass with flowers
for its foam, and the distant Alps of Tyrol and Vorarlberg clearly seen
in warm, transparent, buoyant weather.

Down by the winding ways of the river there were birch and beechen
thickets in glory of leaf; big water-lilies spread their white beauty
against the old black timbers of the water-mills; and in the quaint,
ancient places of the old streets, under the gables and beams, pots of
basil, and strings of green pease, and baskets of sweet-smelling
gillyflowers and other fragrant old-fashioned things, blossomed wherever
there was a breadth of blue sky over them or a maiden's hand within;
whilst above the towers and steeples, above the clanging bells of the
Domkirche and the melon-shaped crest of the Frauenkirche, and all the
cupolas and spires and minarets in which the city abounds, the pigeons
went whirling and wheeling from five at sunrise to seven of sunset,
flocks of grey and blue and black and white, happy as only birds can be,
and as only birds can be when they are doves of Venice or of Munich,
with all the city's hearths and homes for their granaries, and with the
sun and the clouds for their royal estate.

In the wide, dull new town it was dusty and hot; the big squares were
empty and garish-looking; the blistering frescoes on the buildings were
gaudy and out of place; the porticoes and friezes were naked and
staring, and wanted all that belongs to them in Italy. All the deep,
intense shadows, the sultry air, the sense of immeasurable space and of
unending light, the half-naked figures graceful as a plume of maize, the
vast projecting roofs, the spouts of tossing water, the brown barefoot
straw-plaiter passing in a broad path of sunshine, the old bronze lamp
above the painted shrine, the gateway framing the ethereal landscape of
amethystine horizons and silvery olive ways--they want all these, do
these classic porticoes and pediments of Italy, and they seem to stare,
conscious of a discordance and a lack of harmony in the German air. But
in the old town there is beauty still; in the timbered house-fronts, in
the barred and sculptured casements, in the mighty gables, in the gilded
and pictured signs, in the sunburnt walls, in the grey churches, in the
furriers' stalls, in the toysellers' workshops, in the beetling
fortresses, in the picturesque waysides, here is the old Munich of the
Minnesingers and master masons, of the burghers and the _burschen_, of
the Schefflertanz, and of the merry Christchild Fair. And old Munich
keeps all to itself, whether with winter snow on its eaves, or summer
leaves in its lattices; and here the maidens still wear coloured
kerchiefs on their heads and clattering shoes on their feet; and here
the students still look like etchings for old ballads, with long hair on
their shoulders and grey cloaks worn jauntily; and here something of the
odour and aspect of the Middle Ages lingers as about an illuminated roll
of vellum that has lain long put away and forgotten in a desk, with
faded rose-leaves and a miniature that has no name.

The Munich of builder-king Ludwig is grand, no doubt, and tedious and
utterly out of place, with mountains of marble and granite, and acres of
canvas more or less divine, and vast straight streets that make one weep
from weariness, and frescoed walls with nude women that seem to shiver
in the bitter Alpine winds; it is great, no doubt, but ponderously
unlovely, like the bronze Bavaria that looks over the plain, who can
hold six men in her head, but can never get fire in her eyes nor
meaning in her mouth--clumsy Athenæ-Artemis that she is.

New Munich, striving to be Athens or Rome, is monotonous and tiresome,
but old Munich is quaint and humble, and historical and romancical, with
its wooden pavements under foot, and its clouds of doves above head;
indeed, has so much beauty of its own, like any old painted Missal or
golden goblet of the _moyen âge_, that it seems incredible to think that
any man could ever have had the heart to send the hammers of masons
against it, and set up bald walls of plaster in its stead. Wandering in
old Munich--there is not much of it left, alas!--is like reading a
black-letter ballad about Henry the Lion or Kaiser Max; it has sombre
nooks and corners, bright gleams of stained casements, bold oriels, and
sculptured shields, arcades and arches, towers and turrets, light and
shade, harmony and irregularity, all, in a word, that old cities have,
and old Teutonic cities beyond all others; and when the Metzgersprung is
in full riot round the Marienplatz, or on Corpus Christi day, when the
King and the Court and the Church, the guilds and the senate and the
magistracy, all go humbly through the flower-strewn streets, it is easy
to forget the present and to think that one is still in the old days
with the monks, who gave their name to it, tranquil in their work-rooms
and the sound of battle all over the lands around them.

It was the Corpus Christi day in Munich now, and the whole city, the new
and the old, had hung itself with garlands and draperies, with pictures
and evergreens, with flags and tapestries, and the grand procession had
passed to and from the church, and the archbishop had blessed the
people, and the king had bared his handsome head to the sun and the Holy
Ghost, and it was all over for the year, and the people were all happy
and satisfied and sure that God was with them and their town; especially
the people of the old quarters, who most loved and clung to these
ceremonials and feasts; good God-fearing families, labouring hard,
living honestly and wholesomely, gay also in a quiet, mirthful, innocent
fashion--much such people as their forefathers were before them, in days
when Gustavus Adolphus called their city the golden saddle on the lean
horse.

The lean horse, by which he meant the sterile plains, which yield little
except hay, looks rich with verdure in the mellow afternoon light, when
midsummer is come, and the whole populace, men, women, and children, on
Sundays and feast-days pour out of the city gates eagerly to their own
little festivities under the cherry-trees of the little blue and white
coffee-houses along the course of the river, when the beanflowers are in
bloom. For out of the old city you go easily beyond the walls to the
grey glacier water of "Isar rolling rapidly," not red with blood now as
after Hohenlinden, but brilliant and boisterous always, with washerwomen
leaning over it with bare arms, and dogs wading where rushes and dams
break the current, and the hay blowing breast-high along the banks, and
the students chasing the girls through it, and every now and then upon
the wind the music of a guitar, light and dancing, or sad and slow,
according as goes the heart of the player that tunes it. At this season
Bavaria grows green, and all is fresh and radiant. Outside the town all
the country is a sheet of cherry-blossom and of clover. Night and day,
carts full of merrymakers rattle out under the alders to the dancing
places amongst the pastures, or to the _Sommerfrischen_ of their country
friends. Whoever has a kreuzer to spend will have a draft of beer and a
whiff of the lilac-scented air, and the old will sit down and smoke
their painted pipes under the eaves of their favourite _Gasthof_, and
the young will roam with their best-loved maidens through the shadows of
the Anlagen, or still farther on under the high beech-trees of
Grosshesslohe.




_MOTHS._


The ear has its ecstasy as have other senses.

       *       *       *

As there is love without dominion, so there is dominion without love.

       *       *       *

When Fame stands by us all alone, she is an angel clad in light and
strength; but when Love touches her she drops her sword, and fades away,
ghostlike and ashamed.

       *       *       *

Society only thought her--unamiable. True, she never said an unkind
thing, or did one; she never hurt man or woman; she was generous to a
fault; and to aid even people she despised would give herself trouble
unending. But these are serious, simple qualities which do not show
much, and are soon forgotten by those who benefit from them. Had she
laughed more, danced more, taken more kindly to the fools and their
follies, she might have been acid of tongue and niggard of sympathy; the
world would have thought her much more amiable.

       *       *       *

"If she would only listen to me!" thought her mother, in the superior
wisdom of her popular little life. "If she would only kiss a few women
in the morning, and flirt with a few men in the evening, it would set
her all right with them in a month. It is no use doing good to anybody;
they only hate you for it. You have seen them in their straits; it is
like seeing them without their wig or their teeth; they never forgive
it. But to be pleasant, always to be pleasant, that is the thing. And
after all it costs nothing."

       *       *       *

Marriage, as our world sees it, is simply a convenience; a somewhat
clumsy contrivance to tide over a social difficulty.

       *       *       *

A sin! did the world know of such a thing? Hardly. Now and then, for
sake of its traditions, the world took some hapless boy, or some still
yet unhappier woman, and pilloried one of them, and drove them out under
a shower of stones, selecting them by caprice, persecuting them without
justice, slaying them because they were friendless. But that was all.
For the most part sin was an obsolete thing, archaic and unheard of.

       *       *       *

Music is not a science, any more than poetry is. It is a sublime
instinct, like genius of all kinds.

       *       *       *

Charity in various guises is an intruder the poor see often; but
courtesy and delicacy are visitors with which they are seldom honoured.

       *       *       *

There is no shame more bitter to endure than to despise oneself. It is
harder to keep true to high laws and pure instincts in modern society
than it was in the days of martyrdom.

       *       *       *

One weeps for the death of children, but perhaps the change of them into
callous men and women is a sadder change to see after all.

       *       *       *

Honour is an old-world thing, but it smells sweet to those in whose hand
it is strong.

       *       *       *

Young lives are tossed upon the stream of life like rose-leaves on a
fast-running river, and the rose-leaves are blamed if the river be too
strong and too swift for them and they perish. It is the fault of the
rose-leaves.

       *       *       *

Every pretty woman should be a flirt, every clever woman a politician;
the aim, the animus, the intrigue, the rivalry which accompany each of
these pursuits make the salt without which the great dinner were
tasteless.

       *       *       *

In these old Austrian towns the churches are always very reverent
places; dark and tranquil; overladen, indeed, with ornament and image,
but too full of shadow for these to much offend; there is the scent of
centuries of incense; the walls are yellow with the damp of ages.
Mountain suzerains and bold reiters, whose deeds are still sung of in
twilight to the zither, deep beneath the moss-grown pavement; their
shields and crowns are worn flat to the stone they were embossed on by
the passing feet of generations of worshippers. High above in the
darkness there is always some colossal carved Christs. Through the
half-opened iron-studded door there is always the smell of pinewood, the
gleam of water, the greenness of Alpine grass; often, too, there is the
silvery falling of rain, and the fresh smell of it comes through the
church by whose black benches and dim lamps there will be sure to be
some old bent woman praying.

       *       *       *

The moths will eat all that fine delicate feeling away, little by
little; the moths of the world will eat the unselfishness first, and
then the innocence, and then the honesty, and then the decency; no one
will see them eating, no one will see the havoc being wrought, but
little by little the fine fabric will go, and in its place will be dust.
Ah, the pity of it! The pity of it! The webs come out of the great
weaver's loom lovely enough, but the moths of the world eat them all.

       *       *       *

She had five hundred dear friends, but this one she was really fond of;
that is to say, she never said anything bad of her, and only laughed at
her good-naturedly when she had left a room; and this abstinence is as
strong a mark of sincerity now-a-days as dying for another used to be in
the old days of strong feeling and the foolish expression of them.

       *       *       *

Gratitude is such an unpleasant quality, you know; there is always a
grudge behind it!

       *       *       *

The richest soil always bears the rankest mushrooms: France is always
bearing mushrooms.

       *       *       *

Position, she thought, was the only thing that, like old wine or oak
furniture, improved with years.

       *       *       *

Position is a pillory: sometimes they pelt one with rose-leaves, and
sometimes with rotten eggs, but one is for ever in the pillory!

       *       *       *

We are too afraid of death: that fear is the shame of Christianity.

       *       *       *

He never could prevail on his vanity to break with her, lest men should
think she had broken with him.

       *       *       *

She would go grandly to the guillotine, but she will never understand
her own times. She has dignity; we have not a scrap; we have forgotten
what it was like; we go into a passion at the amount of our bills; we
play and never pay; we smoke and we wrangle; we laugh loud, much too
loud; we inspire nothing unless, now and then, a bad war or a disastrous
speculation; we live showily, noisily, meanly, gaudily.

       *       *       *

Big brains do not easily hold trifles ... little packets of starch that
this world thinks are the staff of life.

       *       *       *

Pehl, like a young girl, is prettiest in the morning. Pehl is calm and
sedate, and simple and decorous. Pehl is like some tender, fair,
wholesome yet patrician beauty, like the pretty aristocratic Charlotte
in Kaulbach's picture, who cuts the bread-and-butter, yet looks a
patrician. Pehl has nothing of the _belle petite_, like her sister of
Baden; nothing of the titled _cocadetta_, like her cousin of Monaco;
Pehl does not gamble or riot or conduct herself madly in any way; she is
a little old-fashioned still in a courtly way; she has a little
rusticity still in her elegant manners; she is like the noble dames of
the past ages, who were so high of rank and so proud of habit, yet were
not above the distilling-room and the spinning-wheel; who were quiet,
serious, sweet, and smelt of the rose-leaves with which they filled
their big jars.

       *       *       *

The pity of modern Society is that all its habits make as effectual a
disguise morally as our domino in carnival does physically. Everybody
looks just like everybody else. Perhaps, as under the domino, so under
the appearance, there may be great nobility or great deformity; but all
look alike. Were Socrates amongst us, he would only look like a club
bore; and were there Messalina, she would only look--well--look much
like our Duchesse Jeunne!

       *       *       *

She did not know that from these swamps of flattery, intrigue, envy,
rivalry, and emulation there rises a miasma which scarcely the
healthiest lungs can withstand. She did not know that though many may be
indifferent to the tempting of men, few indeed are impenetrable to the
smile and the sneer of women; that to live your own life in the midst of
the world is a harder thing than it was of old to withdraw to the
Thebaid; that to risk "looking strange" requires a courage perhaps
cooler and higher than the soldier's or the saint's; and that to stand
away from the contact and custom of your "set" is a harder and sterner
work than it was of old to go into the sanctuary of La Trappe or Port
Royal.

       *       *       *

The world has grown apathetic and purblind. Critics rage and quarrel
before a canvas, but the nations do not care; quarries of marble are
hewn into various shapes, and the throngs gape before them and are
indifferent; writers are so many that their writings blend in the public
mind in a confused phantasmagoria, where the colours run into one
another, and the lines are all waved and indistinct; the singer alone
still keeps the old magic power, "The beauty that was Athens, once the
glory that was Rome's," still holds the divine Cadmus, still sways the
vast thronged auditorium, till the myriads hold their breath like little
children in delight and awe. The great singer alone has the magic sway
of fame; and if he close his lips, "The gaiety of nations is eclipsed,"
and the world seems empty and silent, like a wood in which the birds are
all dead.




_IN A WINTER CITY._


The Duc found no topic that suited her. It was the Corso di Gala that
afternoon, would she not go?

No: her horses hated masks, and she hated noise.

The Veglione on Sunday--would she not go to that?

No: those things were well enough in the days of Philippe d'Orléans, who
invented them, but they were only now as stupid as they were vulgar;
anybody was let in for five francs.

Did she like the new weekly journal that was electrifying Paris?

No: she could see nothing in it: there was no wit now-a-days--only
personalities, which grew more gross every year.

The Duc urged that personalities were as old as Cratinus and
Archilochus, and that five hundred years before Christ the satires of
Hipponax drove Bupalus to hang himself.

She answered that a bad thing was not the better for being old.

People were talking of a clever English novel translated everywhere,
called "In a Hothouse," the hothouse being society--had she seen it?

No: what was the use of reading novels of society by people who never
had been in it? The last English "society" novel she had read had
described a cabinet minister in London as going to a Drawing-room in
the crowd, with everybody else, instead of by the _petite entrée_; they
were always full of such blunders.

Had she read the new French story "Le Bal de Mademoiselle Bibi?"

No: she had heard too much of it; it made you almost wish for a
Censorship of the Press.

The Duc agreed that literature was terribly but truly described as "un
tas d'ordures soigneusement enveloppé."

She said that the "tas d'ordures" without the envelope was sufficient
for popularity, but that the literature of any age was not to be
blamed--it was only a natural growth, like a mushroom; if the soil were
noxious, the fungus was bad.

The Duc wondered what a censorship would let pass if there were one.

She said that when there was one it had let pass Crebillon, the
Chevalier Le Clos, and the "Bijoux Indiscrets;" it had proscribed
Marmontel, Helvetius, and Lanjuinais. She did not know how one man could
be expected to be wiser than all his generation.

The Duc admired some majolica she had purchased.

She said she began to think that majolica was a false taste; the
metallic lustre was fine, but how clumsy the forms! one might be led
astray by too great love of old work.

The Duc praised a magnificent Sèvres panel, just painted by Riocreux and
Goupil, and given to her by Princess Olga on the New Year.

She said it was well done, but what charm was there in it? All their
modern iron and zinc colours, and hydrate of aluminum, and oxide of
chromium, and purple of Cassius, and all the rest of it, never gave
one-tenth the charm of those old painters who had only green greys and
dull blues and tawny yellows, and never could get any kind of red
whatever; Olga had meant to please her, but she, for her part, would
much sooner have had a little panel of Abruzzi, with all the holes and
defects in the pottery, and a brown contadina for a Madonna; there was
some interest in that,--there was no interest in that gorgeous landscape
and those brilliant hunting figures.

The Duc bore all the contradictions with imperturbable serenity and
urbanity, smiled to himself, and bowed himself out in perfect
good-humour.

"Tout va bien," he thought to himself; "Miladi must be very much in love
to be so cross."

The Duc's personal experience amongst ladies had made him of opinion
that love did not improve the temper.

       *       *       *

"In love!" she echoed, with less languor and more of impetuosity than
she had ever displayed, "are you ever in love, any of you, ever? You
have senses and vanity and an inordinate fear of not being in the
fashion--and so you take your lovers as you drink your stimulants and
wear your wigs and tie your skirts back--because everybody else does it,
and not to do it is to be odd, or prudish, or something you would hate
to be called. Love! it is an unknown thing to you all. You have a sort
of miserable hectic passion, perhaps, that is a drug you take as you
take chlorodyne--just to excite you and make your jaded nerves a little
alive again, and yet you are such cowards that you have not even the
courage of passion, but label your drug Friendship, and beg Society to
observe that you only keep it for family uses like arnica or like
glycerine. You want notoriety; you want to indulge your fancies, and yet
keep your place in the world. You like to drag a young man about by a
chain, as if he were the dancing monkey that you depended upon for
subsistence. You like other women to see that you are not too _passée_
to be every whit as improper as if you were twenty. You like to
advertise your successes as it were with drum and trumpet, because if
you did not, people might begin to doubt that you had any. You like all
that, and you like to feel there is nothing you do not know and no
length you have not gone, and so you ring all the changes on all the
varieties of intrigue and sensuality, and go over the gamut of sickly
sentiment and nauseous license as an orchestra tunes its strings up
every night! That is what all you people call love; I am content enough
to have no knowledge of it."

       *       *       *

"I would rather have the crudest original thing than the mere galvanism
of the corpse of a dead genius. I would give a thousand paintings by
Froment, Damousse, or any of the finest living artists of Sèvres, for
one piece by old Van der Meer of Delft; but I would prefer a painting on
Sèvres done yesterday by Froment or Damousse, or even any much less
famous worker, provided only it had originality in it, to the best
reproduction of a Van der Meer that modern manufacturers could produce."

"I think you are right; but I fear our old pottery-painters were not
very original. They copied from the pictures and engravings of Mantegna,
Raffaelle, Marcantonio, Marco di Ravenna, Beatricius, and a score of
others."

"The application was original, and the sentiment they brought to it.
Those old artists put so much heart into their work."

"Because when they painted a _stemma_ on the glaze they had still feudal
faith in nobility, and when they painted a Madonna or Ecce Homo they had
still childlike belief in divinity. What does the pottery-painter of
to-day care for the coat of arms or the religious subject he may be
commissioned to execute for a dinner service or a chapel? It may be
admirable painting--if you give a very high price--but it will still be
only manufacture."

"Then what pleasant lives those pottery painters of the early days must
have led! They were never long stationary. They wandered about
decorating at their fancy, now here and now there; now a vase for a
pharmacy, and now a stove for a king. You find German names on Italian
ware, and Italian names on Flemish grès; the Nuremberger would work in
Venice, the Dutchman would work in Rouen. Sometimes, however, they were
accused of sorcery; the great potter, Hans Kraut, you remember, was
feared by his townsmen as possessed by the devil, and was buried
ignominiously outside the gates, in his nook of the Black Forest. But on
the whole they were happy, no doubt; men of simple habits and of worthy
lives."

"You care for art yourself, M. Della Rocca?"

There came a gleam of interest in her handsome, languid, hazel eyes, as
she turned them upon him.

"Every Italian does," he answered her. "I do not think we are ever, or I
think, if ever, very seldom connoisseurs in the way that your Englishman
or Frenchman is so. We are never very learned as to styles and dates; we
cannot boast the huckster's eye of the northern bric-à-brac hunter; it
is quite another thing with us; we love art as children their nurses'
tales and cradle-songs. It is a familiar affection with us, and
affection is never very analytical. The Robbia over the chapel-door, the
apostle-pot that the men in the stables drink out of; the Sodoma or the
Beato Angelico that hangs before our eyes daily as we dine; the old
bronze _secchia_ that we wash our hands in as boys in the Loggia--these
are all so homely and dear to us that we grow up with a love for them
all as natural as our love for our mothers. You will say the children of
all rich people see beautiful and ancient things from their birth: so
they do, but not _as_ we see them. Here they are too often degraded to
the basest household uses, and made no more account of than the dust
which gathers on them; but that very neglect of them makes them the more
kindred to us. Art elsewhere is the guest of the salon--with us she is
the playmate of the infant and the serving-maid of the peasant: the
mules may drink from an Etruscan sarcophagus, and the pigeons be fed
from a _patina_ of the twelfth century."

       *       *       *

Taste, mon cher Della Rocca, is the only sure guarantee in these
matters. Women, believe me, never have any principle. Principle is a
backbone, and no woman--except bodily--ever possesses any backbone.
Their priests and their teachers and their mothers fill them with
doctrines and conventionalities--all things of mere word and wind. No
woman has any settled principles; if she have any vague ones, it is the
uttermost she ever reaches, and those can always be overturned by any
man who has any influence over her. But Taste is another matter
altogether. A woman whose taste is excellent is preserved from all
eccentricities and most follies. You never see a woman of good sense
_afficher_ her improprieties or advertise her liaisons as women of
vulgarity do. Nay, if her taste be perfect, though she have weaknesses,
I doubt if she will ever have vices. Vice will seem to her like a gaudy
colour, or too much gold braid, or very large plaits, or buttons as big
as saucers, or anything else such as vulgar women like. Fastidiousness,
at any rate, is very good _postiche_ for modesty: it is always decent,
it can never be coarse. Good taste, inherent and ingrained, natural and
cultivated, cannot alter. Principles--ouf!--they go on and off like a
slipper; but good taste is indestructible; it is a compass that never
errs. If your wife have it--well, it is possible she may be false to
you; she is human, she is feminine; but she will never make you
ridiculous, she will never compromise you, and she will not romp in a
cotillon till the morning sun shows the paint on her face washed away in
the rain of her perspiration. Virtue is, after all, as Mme. de Montespan
said, "une chose tout purement géographique." It varies with the
hemisphere like the human skin and the human hair; what is vile in one
latitude is harmless in another. No philosophic person can put any trust
in a thing which merely depends upon climate; but, Good Taste----

       *       *       *

Gossip is like the poor devil in the legend of Fugger's Teufelspalast at
Trent; it toils till cock-crow picking up the widely-scattered grains of
corn by millions till the bushel measure is piled high; and lo!--the
five grains that are _the_ grains always escape its sight and roll away
and hide themselves. The poor devil, being a primitive creature,
shrieked and flew away in despair at his failure. Gossip hugs its false
measure and says loftily that the five real grains are of no consequence
whatever.

       *       *       *

The Lady Hilda sighed. This dreadful age, which has produced communists,
pétroleuses, and liberal thinkers, had communicated its vague
restlessness even to her; although she belonged to that higher region
where nobody ever thinks at all, and everybody is more or less devout in
seeming at any rate, because disbelief is vulgar, and religion is an
"affaire des moeurs," like decency, still the subtle philosophies and
sad negations which have always been afloat in the air since Voltaire
set them flying, had affected her slightly.

She was a true believer, just as she was a well-dressed woman, and had
her creeds just as she had her bath in the morning, as a matter of
course.

Still, when she did come to think of it, she was not so very sure. There
was another world, and saints and angels and eternity; yes, of
course--but how on earth would all those baccarat people ever fit into
it? Who could, by any stretch of imagination, conceive Madame Mila and
Maurice des Gommeux in a spiritual existence around the throne of Deity?

And as for punishment and torment and all that other side of futurity,
who could even think of the mildest purgatory as suitable to those poor
flipperty-gibbet inanities who broke the seventh commandment as gaily as
a child breaks his indiarubber ball, and were as incapable of passion
and crime as they were incapable of heroism and virtue?

There might be paradise for virtue and hell for crime, but what in the
name of the universe was to be done with creatures that were only all
Folly? Perhaps they would be always flying about like the souls Virgil
speaks of, "suspensæ ad ventos," to purify themselves; as the sails of a
ship spread out to dry. The Huron Indians pray to the souls of the fish
they catch; well, why should they not? a fish has a soul if Modern
Society has one; one could conceive a fish going softly through shining
waters for ever and for ever in the ecstasy of motion; but who could
conceive Modern Society in the spheres?

       *       *       *

"One grows tired of everything," she answered with a little sigh.

"Everything that is artificial, you mean. People think Horace's love of
the rural life an affectation. I believe it to be most sincere. After
the strain of the conventionality and the adulation of the Augustan
court, the natural existence of the country must have been welcome to
him. I know it is the fashion to say that a love of Nature belongs only
to the Moderns, but I do not think so. Into Pindar, Theocritus,
Meleager, the passion for Nature must have entered very strongly; what
_is_ modern is the more subjective, the more fanciful feeling which
makes Nature a sounding-board to echo all the cries of man."

"But that is always a northern feeling?"

"Inevitably. With us Nature is too _riante_ for us to grow morbid about
it. The sunshine that laughs around us nine months of every year, the
fruits that grow almost without culture, the flowers that we throw to
the oxen to eat, the very stones that are sweet with myrtle, the very
sea sand that is musical with bees in the rosemary, everything we grow
up amongst from infancy, makes our love of Nature only a kind of
unconscious joy in it; but here even the peasant has that, and the songs
of the men that cannot read or write are full of it. If a field labourer
sing to his love he will sing of the narcissus and the crocus, as
Meleager sang to Heliodora twenty centuries ago."

       *       *       *

That is an Italian amorous fancy. Romeo and Othello are the typical
Italian lovers. I never can tell how a northerner like Shakespeare could
draw either. You are often very unfaithful; but _while_ you are faithful
you are ardent, and you are absorbed in the woman. That is one of the
reasons why an Italian succeeds in love as no other man does. "L'art de
brûler silencieusement ment le coeur d'un femme" is a supreme art with
you. Compared with you, all other men are children. You have been the
supreme masters of the great passion since the days of Ovid.

       *       *       *

Boredom is the ill-natured pebble that always _will_ get in the golden
slipper of the pilgrim of pleasure.

       *       *       *

"They say," the great assassin who slays as many thousands as ever did
plague or cholera, drink or warfare; "they say," the thief of
reputation, who steals, with stealthy step and coward's mask, to filch
good names away in the dead dark of irresponsible calumny; "they say," a
giant murderer, iron-gloved to slay you, a fleet, elusive, vaporous
will-o'-the-wisp, when you would seize and choke it; "they say," mighty
Thug though it be which strangles from behind the purest victim, had not
been ever known to touch the Lady Hilda.

       *       *       *

All her old philosophies seemed falling about her like shed leaves, and
her old self seemed to her but a purposeless frivolous chilly creature.
The real reason she would not face, and indeed as yet was not conscious
of; the reason that love had entered into her, and that love, if it be
worth the name, has always two handmaidens: swift sympathy, and sad
humility, keeping step together.

       *       *       *

The Femme Galante has passed through many various changes, in many
countries. The dames of the Decamerone were unlike the fair
athlete-seekers of the days of Horace; and the powdered coquettes of the
years of Molière, were sisters only by the kinship of a common vice to
the frivolous and fragile faggot of impulses, that is called Frou-frou.

The Femme Galante has always been a feature in every age; poets, from
Juvenal to Musset, have railed at her; artists, from Titian to
Winterhalter, have painted her; dramatists, from Aristophanes to
Congreve and Dumas Fils, have pointed their arrows at her; satirists,
from Archilochus and Simonides to Hogarth and Gavarni, have poured out
their aqua-fortis for her. But the real Femme Galante of to-day has been
missed hitherto.

Frou-frou, who stands for her, is not in the least the true type.
Frou-frou is a creature that can love, can suffer, can repent, can die.
She is false in sentiment and in art, but she is tender after all; poor,
feverish, wistful, changeful morsel of humanity. A slender, helpless,
breathless, and frail thing who, under one sad, short sin, sinks down to
death.

But Frou-frou is in no sense the true Femme Galante of her day.
Frou-frou is much more a fancy than a fact. It is not Frou-frou that
Molière would have handed down to other generations in enduring
ridicule, had he been living now. To her he would have doffed his hat
with dim eyes; what he would have fastened for all time in his pillory
would have been a very different, and far more conspicuous offender.

The Femme Galante, who has neither the scruples nor the follies of poor
Frou-frou, who neither forfeits her place nor leaves her lord; who has
studied adultery as one of the fine arts and made it one of the domestic
virtues; who takes her wearied lover to her friends' houses as she takes
her muff or her dog, and teaches her sons and daughters to call him by
familiar names; who writes to the victim of her passions with the same
pen that calls her boy home from school; and who smooths her child's
curls with the same fingers that stray over her lover's lips; who
challenges the world to find a flaw in her, and who smiles serene at her
husband's table on a society she is careful to conciliate; who has woven
the most sacred ties and most unholy pleasures into so deft a braid,
that none can say where one commences or the other ends; who uses the
sanctity of her maternity to cover the lawlessness of her license; and
who, incapable alike of the self-abandonment of love or of the
self-sacrifice of duty, has not even such poor, cheap honour as, in the
creatures of the streets, may make guilt loyal to its dupe and partner.

This is the Femme Galante of the passing century, who, with her hand on
her husband's arm, babbles of her virtue in complacent boast; and
ignoring such a vulgar word as Sin, talks with a smile of Friendship.
Beside her Frou-frou were innocence itself, Marion de l'Orme were
honesty, Manon Lescaut were purity, Cleopatra were chaste, and Faustine
were faithful.

She is the female Tartuffe of seduction, the Précieuse Ridicule of
passion, the parody of Love, the standing gibe of Womanhood.

       *       *       *

She was always in debt, though she admitted that her husband allowed her
liberally. She had eighty thousand francs a year by her settlements to
spend on herself, and he gave her another fifty thousand to do as she
pleased with: on the whole about one half what he allowed to Blanche
Souris, of the Château Gaillard theatre.

She had had six children, three were living and three were dead; she
thought herself a good mother, because she gave her wet-nurses ever so
many silk gowns, and when she wanted the children for a fancy ball or a
drive, always saw that they were faultlessly dressed, and besides she
always took them to Trouville.

She had never had any grief in her life, except the loss of the Second
Empire, and even that she got over when she found that flying the Red
Cross flag had saved her hotel, without so much as a teacup being broken
in it, that MM. Worth and Offenbach were safe from all bullets, and
that society, under the Septennate, promised to be every bit as _leste_
as under the Empire.

In a word, Madame Mila was a type of the women of her time.

The women who go semi-nude in an age which has begun to discover that
the nude in sculpture is very immoral; who discuss "Tue-la" in a
generation which decrees Molière to be coarse, and Beaumont and Fletcher
indecent; who have the Journal pour Rire on their tables in a day when
no one who respects himself would name the Harlot's Progress; who read
Beaudelaire and patronise Térésa and Schneider in an era which finds
"Don Juan" gross, and Shakespeare far too plain; who strain all their
energies to rival Miles. Rose Thé and La Petite Boulotte in everything;
who go shrimping or oyster-hunting on fashionable sea-shores, with their
legs bare to the knee; who go to the mountains with confections, high
heels, and gold-tipped canes, shriek over their gambling as the dawn
reddens over the Alps, and know no more of the glories of earth and sky,
of sunrise and sunset, than do the porcelain pots that hold their paint,
or the silver dressing-box that carries their hair-dye.

Women who are in convulsions one day, and on the top of a drag the next;
who are in hysterics for their lovers at noon, and in ecstasies over
baccarat at midnight; who laugh in little nooks together over each
other's immoralities, and have a moral code so elastic that it will
pardon anything except innocence; who gossip over each other's dresses,
and each other's passions, in the self-same, self-satisfied chirp of
contentment, and who never resent anything on earth, except any
eccentric suggestion that life could be anything except a perpetual fête
à la Watteau in a perpetual blaze of lime-light.

Pain?--Are there not chloral and a flattering doctor? Sorrow?--Are there
not a course at the Baths, play at Monte Carlo, and new cases from
Worth? Shame?--Is it not a famine fever which never comes near a
well-laden table? Old Age?--Is there not white and red paint, and heads
of dead hair, and even false bosoms? Death? Well, no doubt there is
death, but they do not realise it; they hardly believe in it, they think
about it so little.

There is something unknown somewhere to fall on them some day that they
dread vaguely, for they are terrible cowards. But they worry as little
about it as possible. They give the millionth part of what they possess
away in its name to whatever church they belong to, and they think they
have arranged quite comfortably for all possible contingencies
hereafter.

If it make things safe, they will head bazaars for the poor, or wear
black in holy week, turn lottery-wheels for charity, or put on fancy
dresses in the name of benevolence, or do any little amiable trifle of
that sort. But as for changing their lives,--_pas si bête!_

A bird in the hand they hold worth two in the bush; and though your
birds may be winged on strong desire, and your bush the burning portent
of Moses, they will have none of them.

These women are not all bad; oh, no! they are like sheep, that is all.
If it were fashionable to be virtuous, very likely they would be so. If
it were _chic_ to be devout, no doubt they would pass their life on
their knees. But, as it is, they know that a flavour of vice is as
necessary to their reputation as great ladies, as sorrel-leaves to soup
à la bonne femme. They affect a license if they take it not.

They are like the barber, who said, with much pride, to Voltaire, "Je ne
suis qu'un pauvre diable de perruquier, mais je ne crois pas en Dieu
plus que les autres."

They may be worth very little, but they are desperately afraid that you
should make such a mistake as to think them worth anything at all. You
are not likely, if you know them. Still, they are apprehensive.

Though one were to arise from the dead to preach to them, they would
only make of him a nine days' wonder, and then laugh a little, and yawn
a little, and go on in their own paths.

Out of the eater came forth meat, and from evil there may be begotten
good; but out of nullity there can only come nullity. They have wadded
their ears, and though Jeremiah wailed of desolation, or Isaiah
thundered the wrath of heaven, they would not hear,--they would go on
looking at each other's dresses.

What could Paul himself say that would change them?

You cannot make sawdust into marble; you cannot make sea-sand into gold.
"Let us alone," is all they ask; and it is all that you could do, though
the force and flame of Horeb were in you.

       *       *       *

It is very curious, but loss of taste in the nobles has always been
followed by a revolution of the mob. The _décadence_ always ushers in
the democracy.

       *       *       *

Pleasure alone cannot content any one whose character has any force, or
mind any high intelligence. Society is, as you say, a book we soon read
through, and know by heart till it loses all interest. Art alone cannot
fill more than a certain part of our emotions; and culture, however
perfect, leaves us unsatisfied. There is only one thing that can give to
life what your poet called the light that never was on sea or land--and
that is human love.

       *       *       *

"Yes, it is a curious thing that we do not succeed in fresco. The grace
is gone out of it; modern painters have not the lightness of touch
necessary; they are used to masses of colour, and they use the palette
knife as a mason the trowel. The art, too, like the literature of our
time, is all detail; the grand suggestive vagueness of the Greek drama
and of the Umbrian frescoes are lost to us under a crowd of elaborated
trivialities; perhaps it is because art has ceased to be spiritual or
tragic, and is merely domestic or melodramatic; the Greeks knew neither
domesticity nor melodrama, and the early Italian painters were imbued
with a faith which, if not so virile as the worship of the Phidian Zeus,
yet absorbed them and elevated them in a degree impossible in the tawdry
Sadduceeism of our own day. By the way, when the weather is milder you
must go to Orvieto; you have never been there, I think; it is the
Prosodion of Signorelli. What a fine Pagan he was at heart! He admired
masculine beauty like a Greek; he must have been a singularly happy
man--few more happy----"




_A LEAF IN THE STORM._


The Berceau de Dieu was a little village in the valley of the Seine.

As a lark drops its nest amongst the grasses, so a few peasant people
had dropped their little farms and cottages amidst the great green woods
on the winding river. It was a pretty place, with one steep, stony
street, shady with poplars and with elms; quaint houses, about whose
thatch a cloud of white and grey pigeons fluttered all day long; a
little aged chapel with a conical red roof; and great barns covered with
ivy and thick creepers, red and purple, and lichens that were yellow in
the sun.

All around it there were the broad, flowering meadows, with the sleek
cattle of Normandy fattening in them, and the sweet dim forests where
the young men and maidens went on every holy-day and feast-day in the
summer-time to seek for wood-anemones, and lilies of the pools, and the
wild campanula, and the fresh dogrose, and all the boughs and grasses
that made their house-doors like garden-bowers, and seemed to take the
cushat's note and the linnet's song into their little temple of God.

The Berceau de Dieu was very old indeed.

Men said that the hamlet had been there in the day of the Virgin of
Orléans; and a stone cross of the twelfth century still stood by the
great pond of water at the bottom of the street, under the
chestnut-tree, where the villagers gathered to gossip at sunset when
their work was done.

It had no city near it, and no town nearer than four leagues. It was in
the green core of a pastoral district, thickly wooded and intersected
with orchards. Its produce of wheat, and oats, and cheese, and fruit,
and eggs, was more than sufficient for its simple prosperity. Its people
were hardy, kindly, laborious, happy; living round the little grey
chapel in amity and good-fellowship.

Nothing troubled it. War and rumours of war, revolutions and
counter-revolutions, empires and insurrections, military and political
questions--these all were for it things unknown and unheard of--mighty
winds that arose and blew and swept the lands around it, but never came
near enough to harm it, lying there, as it did, in its loneliness like
any lark's nest.

       *       *       *

"I am old: yes, I am very old," she would say, looking up from her
spinning-wheel in her house-door, and shading her eyes from the sun,
"very old--ninety-two last summer. But when one has a roof over one's
head, and a pot of soup always, and a grandson like mine, and when one
has lived all one's life in the Berceau de Dieu, then it is well to be
so old. Ah, yes, my little ones--yes, though you doubt it, you little
birds that have just tried your wings--it is well to be so old. One has
time to think, and thank the good God, which one never seemed to have a
minute to do in that work, work, work, when one was young."

       *       *       *

The end soon came.

From hill to hill the Berceau de Dieu broke into flames. The village was
a lake of fire, into which the statue of the Christ, burning and
reeling, fell. Some few peasants, with their wives and children, fled to
the woods, and there escaped one torture to perish more slowly of cold
and famine. All other things perished. The rapid stream of the flame
licked up all there was in its path. The bare trees raised their
leafless branches on fire at a thousand points. The stores of corn and
fruit were lapped by millions of crimson tongues. The pigeons flew
screaming from their roosts and sank into the smoke. The dogs were
suffocated on the thresholds they had guarded all their lives. The calf
was stifled in the byre. The sheep ran bleating with the wool burning on
their living bodies. The little caged birds fluttered helpless, and then
dropped, scorched to cinders. The aged and the sick were stifled in
their beds. All things perished.

The Berceau de Dieu was as one vast furnace, in which every living
creature was caught and consumed and changed to ashes.

The tide of war has rolled on and left it a blackened waste, a smoking
ruin, wherein not so much as a mouse may creep or a bird may nestle. It
is gone, and its place can know it never more.

Never more.

But who is there to care?

It was but as a leaf which the great storm withered as it passed.

       *       *       *

"Look you," she had said to him oftentimes, "in my babyhood there was
the old white flag upon the château. Well, they pulled that down and put
up a red one. That toppled and fell, and there was one of three
colours. Then somebody with a knot of white lilies in his hand came one
day and set up the old white one afresh; and before the day was done
that was down again, and the tricolour again up where it is still. Now
some I know fretted themselves greatly because of all these changes of
the flags, but as for me, I could not see that any one of them mattered:
bread was just as dear, and sleep was just as sweet, whichever of the
three was uppermost."




_A DOG OF FLANDERS._


In the spring and summer especially were they glad. Flanders is not a
lovely land, and around the burgh of Rubens it is perhaps least lovely
of all.

Corn and colza, pasture and plough, succeed each other on the
characterless plain in wearying repetition, and save by some gaunt grey
tower, with its peal of pathetic bells, or some figure coming athwart
the fields, made picturesque by a gleaner's bundle or a woodman's
faggot, there is no change, no variety, no beauty anywhere; and he who
has dwelt upon the mountains or amidst the forests feels oppressed as by
imprisonment with the tedium and the endlessness of that vast and dreary
level.

But it is green and very fertile, and it has wide horizons that have a
certain charm of their own even in their dulness and monotony; and
amongst the rushes by the water-side the flowers grow, and the trees
rise tall and fresh where the barges glide with their great hulks black
against the sun, and their little green barrels and vari-coloured flags
gay against the leaves.

Anyway, there is a greenery and breadth of space enough to be as good as
beauty to a child and a dog; and these two asked no better, when their
work was done, than to lie buried in the lush grasses on the side of the
canal, and watch the cumbrous vessels drifting by, and bringing the
crisp salt smell of the sea amongst the blossoming scents of the country
summer.

       *       *       *

Antwerp, as all the world knows, is full at every turn of old piles of
stones, dark and ancient and majestic, standing in crooked courts,
jammed against gateways and taverns, rising by the water's edge, with
bells ringing above them in the air, and ever and again out of their
arched doors a swell of music pealing.

There they remain, the grand old sanctuaries of the past, shut in amidst
the squalor, the hurry, the crowds, the unloveliness and the commerce of
the modern world; and all day long the clouds drift and the birds
circle, and the winds sigh around them, and beneath the earth at their
feet there sleeps--RUBENS.

And the greatness of the mighty Master still rests upon Antwerp;
wherever we turn in its narrow streets his glory lies therein, so that
all mean things are thereby transfigured; and as we pace slowly through
the winding ways, and by the edge of the stagnant water, and through the
noisome courts, his spirit abides with us, and the heroic beauty of his
visions is about us, and the stones that once felt his footsteps and
bore his shadow seem to arise and speak of him with living voices. For
the city which is the tomb of Rubens still lives to us through him, and
him alone.

Without Rubens, what were Antwerp? A dirty, dusky, bustling mart, which
no man would ever care to look upon save the traders who do business on
its wharves. With Rubens, to the whole world of men it is a sacred name,
a sacred soil, a Bethlehem where a god of Art saw light, a Golgotha
where a god of Art lies dead.

It is so quiet there by that great white sepulchre--so quiet, save only
when the organ peals, and the choir cries aloud the Salve Regina or the
Kyrie Eleison. Sure no artist ever had a greater gravestone than that
pure marble sanctuary gives to him in the heart of his birthplace in the
chancel of St. Jacques?

O nations! closely should you treasure your great men, for by them alone
will the future know of you. Flanders in her generations has been wise.
In his life she glorified this greatest of her sons, and in his death
she magnifies his name. But her wisdom is very rare.

       *       *       *

The night was very wild. The lamps under the wayside crosses were blown
out: the roads were sheets of ice; the impenetrable darkness hid every
trace of habitations; there was no living thing abroad. All the cattle
were housed, and in all the huts and homesteads men and women rejoiced
and feasted. There was only the dog out in the cruel cold--old and
famished and full of pain, but with the strength and the patience of a
great love to sustain him in his search.

The trail of Nello's steps, faint and obscure as it was under the new
snow, went straightly along the accustomed tracks into Antwerp. It was
past midnight when Patrasche traced it over the boundaries of the town
and into the narrow, tortuous, gloomy streets. It was all quite dark in
the town. Now and then some light gleamed ruddily through the crevices
of house-shutters, or some group went homeward with lanterns chanting
drinking songs. The streets were all white with ice: the high walls and
roofs loomed black against them. There was scarce a sound save the riot
of the winds down the passages as they tossed the creaking signs and
shook the tall lamp-irons.

So many passers-by had trodden through and through the snow, so many
diverse paths had crossed and re-crossed each other, that the dog had a
hard task to retain any hold on the track he followed. But he kept on
his way, though the cold pierced him to the bone, and the jagged ice cut
his feet, and the hunger in his body gnawed like a rat's teeth. But he
kept on his way--a poor, gaunt, shivering, drooping thing in the frozen
darkness, that no one pitied as he went--and by long patience traced the
steps he loved into the very heart of the burgh and up to the steps of
the great cathedral.

"He is gone to the things that he loved," thought Patrasche; he could
not understand, but he was full of sorrow and of pity for the
art-passion that to him was so incomprehensible and yet so sacred.

The portals of the cathedral were unclosed after the midnight mass. Some
heedlessness in the custodians, too eager to go home and feast or sleep,
or too drowsy to know whether they turned the keys aright, had left one
of the doors unlocked. By that accident the footfalls Patrasche sought
had passed through into the building, leaving the white marks of snow
upon the dark stone floor. By that slender white thread, frozen as it
fell, he was guided through the intense silence, through the immensity
of the vaulted space--guided straight to the gates of the chancel, and
stretched there upon the stones he found Nello. He crept up noiselessly,
and touched the face of the boy. "Didst thou dream that I should be
faithless and forsake thee? I--a dog?" said that mute caress.

The lad raised himself with a low cry and clasped him close.

"Let us lie down and die together," he murmured. "Men have no need of
us, and we are all alone."

In answer, Patrasche crept closer yet, and laid his head upon the young
boy's breast. The great tears stood in his brown sad eyes: not for
himself--for himself he was happy.

They lay close together in the piercing cold. The blasts that blew over
the Flemish dykes from the northern seas were like waves of ice, which
froze every living thing they touched. The interior of the immense vault
of stone in which they were was even more bitterly chill than the
snow-covered plains without. Now and then a bat moved in the shadows;
now and then a gleam of light came to the ranks of carven figures. Under
the Rubens they lay together, quite still, and soothed almost into a
dreaming slumber by the numbing narcotic of the cold. Together they
dreamed of the old glad days when they had chased each other through the
flowering grasses of the summer meadows, or sat hidden in the tall
bulrushes by the water's side, watching the boats go seaward in the sun.

No anger had ever separated them; no cloud had ever come between them;
no roughness on the one side, no faithlessness on the other, had ever
obscured their perfect love and trust. All through their short lives
they had done their duty as it had come to them, and had been happy in
the mere sense of living, and had begrudged nothing to any man or beast,
and had been quite content because quite innocent. And in the faintness
of famine and of the frozen blood that stole dully and slowly through
their veins, it was of the days they had spent together that they
dreamed, lying there in the long watches of the night of the Noël.

Suddenly through the darkness a great white radiance streamed through
the vastness of the aisles; the moon, that was at her height, had broken
through the clouds; the snow had ceased to fall; the light reflected
from the snow without was clear as the light of dawn. It fell through
the arches full upon the two pictures above, from which the boy on his
entrance had flung back the veil: the Elevation and the Descent of the
Cross were for one instant visible as by day.

Nello rose to his feet and stretched his arms to them: the tears of a
passionate ecstasy glistened on the paleness of his face.

"I have seen them at last!" he cried aloud. "O God, it is enough!"

His limbs failed under him, and he sank upon his knees, still gazing
upward at the majesty that he adored. For a few brief moments the light
illumined the divine visions that had been denied to him so long--light,
clear and sweet and strong as though it streamed from the throne of
Heaven.

Then suddenly it passed away: once more a great darkness covered the
face of Christ.

The arms of the boy drew close again the body of the dog.

"We shall see His face--_there_," he murmured; "and He will not part us,
I think; He will have mercy."

On the morrow, by the chancel of the cathedral, the people of Antwerp
found them both. They were both dead: the cold of the night had frozen
into stillness alike the young life and the old. When the Christmas
morning broke and the priests came to the temple, they saw them lying
thus on the stones together. Above, the veils were drawn back from the
great visions of Rubens, and the fresh rays of the sunrise touched the
thorn-crowned head of the God.

As the day grew on there came an old, hard-featured man, who wept as
women weep.

"I was cruel to the lad," he muttered, "and now I would have made
amends--yea, to the half of my substance--and he should have been to me
as a son."

There came also, as the day grew apace, a painter who had fame in the
world, and who was liberal of hand and of spirit.

"I seek one who should have had the prize yesterday had worth won," he
said to the people,--"a boy of rare promise and genius. An old
woodcutter on a fallen tree at eventide--that was all his theme. But
there was greatness for the future in it. I would fain find him, and
take him with me and teach him art."

       *       *       *

Death had been more pitiful to them than longer life would have been. It
had taken the one in the loyalty of love, and the other in the innocence
of faith, from a world which for love has no recompense, and for faith
no fulfilment.

All their lives they had been together, and in their deaths they were
not divided; for when they were found the arms of the boy were folded
too closely around the dog to be severed without violence, and the
people of their little village, contrite and ashamed, implored a special
grace for them, and, making them one grave, laid them to rest there side
by side--for ever.




_A BRANCH OF LILAC._


And indeed I loved France: still, in the misery of my life, I loved her
for all that I had had from her.

I loved her for her sunny roads, for her cheery laughter, for her
vine-hung hamlets, for her contented poverty, for her gay, sweet mirth,
for her pleasant days, for her starry nights, for her little bright
groups at the village fountain, for her old, brown, humble peasants at
her wayside crosses, for her wide, wind-swept plains all red with her
radiant sunsets. She had given me beautiful hours; she is the mother of
the poor, who sings to them so that they forget their hunger and their
nakedness; she had made me happy in my youth. I was not ungrateful.

It was in the heats of September that I reached my country. It was just
after the day of Sedan. I heard all along the roads, as I went, sad,
sullen murmurs of our bitter disasters. It was not the truth exactly
that was ever told at the poor wine-shops and about the harvest-fields,
but it was near enough to the truth to be horrible.

The blood-thirst which had been upon me ever since that night when I
found her chair empty seemed to burn and seethe, till I saw nothing but
blood--in the air, in the sun, in the water.

       *       *       *

I remember in that ghastly time seeing a woman put the match to a piece
whose gunner had just dropped dead. She fired with sure aim: her shot
swept straight into a knot of horsemen on the Neuilly road, and emptied
more than one saddle.

"You have a good sight," I said to her.

She smiled.

"This winter," she said slowly, "my children have all died for want of
food--one by one, the youngest first. Ever since then I want to hurt
something--always. Do you understand?"

I did understand: I do not know if you do. It is just these things that
make revolutions.

       *       *       *

When I sit in the gloom here I see all the scenes of that pleasant life
pass like pictures before me.

No doubt I was often hot, often cold, often footsore, often ahungered
and athirst: no doubt; but all that has faded now. I only see the old,
lost, unforgotten brightness; the sunny roads, with the wild poppies
blowing in the wayside grass; the quaint little red roofs and peaked
towers that were thrust upward out of the rolling woods; the clear blue
skies, with the larks singing against the sun; the quiet, cool,
moss-grown towns, with old dreamy bells ringing sleepily above them; the
dull casements opening here and there to show a rose like a girl's
cheek, and a girl's face like the rose; the little wine-shops buried in
their climbing vines and their tall, many-coloured hollyhocks, from
which sometimes a cheery voice would cry, "Come, stay for a stoup of
wine, and pay us with a song."

Then, the nights when the people flocked to us, and the little tent was
lighted, and the women's and the children's mirth rang out in peals of
music; and the men vied with each other as to which should bear each of
us off to have bed and board under the cottage roof, or in the old
mill-house, or in the weaver's garret; the nights when the homely
supper-board was brightened and thought honoured by our presence; when
we told the black-eyed daughter's fortunes, and kept the children
round-eyed and flushing red with wonder at strange tales, and smoked
within the leaf-hung window with the father and his sons; and then went
out, quietly, alone in the moonlight, and saw the old cathedral white
and black in the shadows and the light; and strayed a little into its
dim aisles, and watched the thorn-crowned God upon the cross, and in the
cool fruit-scented air, in the sweet, silent dusk, moved softly with
noiseless footfall and bent head, as though the dead were there.

Ah, well! they are all gone, those days and nights. Begrudge me not
their memory. I am ugly, and very poor, and of no account; and I die at
sunrise, so they say. Let me remember whilst I can: it is all oblivion
_there_. So they say.

       *       *       *

Whether I suffered or enjoyed, loved or hated, is of no consequence to
any one. The dancing-dog suffers intensely beneath the scourge of the
stick, and is capable of intense attachment to any one who is merciful
enough not to beat him; but the dancing-dog and his woe and his love are
nothing to the world: I was as little.

There is nothing more terrible, nothing more cruel, than the waste of
emotion, the profuse expenditure of fruitless pain, which every hour,
every moment, as it passes, causes to millions of living creatures. If
it were of any use who would mind? But it is all waste, frightful waste,
to no end, to no end.

       *       *       *

Ah, well! it is our moments of blindness and of folly that are the sole
ones of happiness for all of us on earth. We only see clearly, I think,
when we have reached the depths of woe.

       *       *       *

France was a great sea in storm, on which the lives of all men were as
frail boats tossing to their graves. Some were blown east, some west;
they passed each other in the endless night, and never knew, the tempest
blew so strong.

       *       *       *

Winter tries hardly all the wandering races: if the year were all
summer, all the world would be Bohemians.

       *       *       *

We poured out blood like water, and much of it was the proud blue blood
of the old nobility. We should have saved France, I am sure, if there
had been any one who had known how to consolidate and lead us. No one
did; so it was all of no use.

Guerillas like us can do much, very much, but to do so much that it is
victory we must have a genius amidst us. And we had none. If the First
Bonaparte had been alive and with us, we should have chased the foe as
Marius the Cimbri.

I think other nations will say so in the future: at the present they are
all dazzled, they do not see clearly--they are all worshipping the
rising sun. It is blood-red, and it blinds them.

       *       *       *

It is so strange! We see a million faces, we hear a million voices, we
meet a million women with flowers in their breasts and light in their
fair eyes, and they do not touch us. Then we see one, and she holds for
us life or death, and plays with them idly so often--as idly as a child
with toys. She is not nobler, better, or more beautiful than were all
those we passed, and yet the world is empty to us without her.




_SIGNA._


In the garden of these children all the flora of Italy was gathered and
was growing.

The delights of an Italian garden are countless. It is not like any
other garden in the world. It is at once more formal and more wild, at
once greener with more abundant youth and venerable with more antique
age. It has all Boccaccio between its walls, all Petrarca in its leaves,
all Raffaelle in its skies. And then the sunshine that beggars words and
laughs at painters!--the boundless, intense, delicious, heavenly light!
What do other gardens know of that, save in orange-groves of Granada and
rose thickets of Damascus?

The old broken marble statues, whence the water dripped and fed the
water-lily; the great lemon-trees in pots big enough to drown a boy, the
golden globes among their emerald leaves; the magnolias, like trees cast
in bronze, with all the spice of India in their cups; the spires of
ivory bells that the yuccas put forth, like belfries for fairies; the
oleanders taller than a man, red and white and blush colour; the broad
velvet leaves of the flowering rush; the dark majestic ilex oaks, that
made the noon like twilight; the countless graces of the vast family of
acacias; the high box hedges, sweet and pungent in the sun; the stone
ponds, where the gold-fish slept through the sultry day; the wilderness
of carnations; the huge roses, yellow, crimson, snow-white, and the
small noisette and the banksia with its million of pink stars; myrtles
in dense thickets, and camellias like a wood of evergreens; cacti in all
quaint shapes, like fossils astonished to find themselves again alive;
high walls, vine-hung and topped by pines and cypresses; low walls with
crowds of geraniums on their parapets, and the mountains and the fields
beyond them; marble basins hidden in creepers where the frogs dozed all
day long; sounds of convent bells and of chapel chimes; green lizards
basking on the flags; great sheds and granaries beautiful with the
clematis and the wisteria and the rosy trumpets of the bignonia; great
wooden places cool and shady, with vast arched entrances, and scent of
hay, and empty casks, and red earthen amphoræ, and little mice scudding
on the floors, and a sun-dial painted on the wall, and a crucifix set
above the weather-cock, and through the huge unglazed windows sight of
the green vines with the bullocks in the harvest-carts beneath them, or
of some hilly sunlit road with a mule-team coming down it, or of a blue
high hill with its pine-trees black against the sky, and on its slopes
the yellow corn and misty olive. This was their garden; it is ten
thousand other gardens in the land.

The old painters had these gardens, and walked in them, and thought
nothing better could be needed for any scene of Annunciation or
Adoration, and so put them in beyond the windows of Bethlehem or behind
the Throne of the Lamb--and who can wonder?

       *       *       *

In these little ancient burghs and hillside villages, scattered up and
down between mountain and sea, there is often some boy or girl, with a
more wonderful voice, or a more beautiful face, or a sweeter knack of
song, or a more vivid trick of improvisation than the others; and this
boy or girl strays away some day with a little bundle of clothes, and a
coin or two, or is fetched away by some far-sighted pedlar in such human
wares, who buys them as bird-fanciers buy the finches from the nets; and
then, years and years afterwards, the town or hamlet hears indistinctly
of some great prima donna, or of some lark-throated tenor, that the big
world is making happy as kings, and rich as kings' treasurers, and the
people carding the flax or shelling the chestnuts say to one another,
"That was little black Lià, or that was our old Momo;" but Momo or Lià
the village or the vine-field never sees again.

       *       *       *

The heart of silver falls ever into the hands of brass. The sensitive
herb is eaten as grass by the swine.

       *       *       *

Fate will have it so. Fate is so old, and weary of her task; she must
have some diversion. It is Fate who blinded Love for sport, and on the
shoulders of Possession hung the wallet full of stones and
sand--Satiety.

       *       *       *

As passion yet unknown thrills in the adolescent, as maternity yet
undreamed of stirs in the maiden; so the love of art comes to the artist
before he can give a voice to his thought or any name to his desire.

Signa heard "beautiful things" as he sat in the rising moonlight, with
the bells of the little bindweed white about his feet.

That was all he could have said.

Whether the angels sent them on the breeze, or the birds brought them,
or the dead men came and sang them to him, he could not tell. Indeed,
who can tell?

Where did Guido see the golden hair of St. Michael gleam upon the wind?
Where did Mozart hear the awful cries of the risen dead come to
judgment? What voice was in the fountain of Vaucluse? Under what nodding
oxlip did Shakespeare find Titania asleep? When did the Mother of Love
come down, chaster in her unclothed loveliness than vestal in her veil,
and with such vision of her make obscure Cleomenes immortal?

Who can tell?

Signa sat dreaming, with his chin upon his hands, and his eyes wandering
over all the silent place, from the closed flowers at his feet to the
moon in her circles of mist.

Who walks in these paths now may go back four hundred years. They are
changed in nothing. Through their high hedges of rhododendron and of
jessamine that grow like woodland trees it would still seem but natural
to see Raffaelle with his court-train of students, or Signorelli
splendid in those apparellings which were the comment of his age; and on
these broad stone terraces with the lizards basking on their steps and
the trees opening to show a vine-covered hill with the white oxen
creeping down it and the blue mountains farther still behind, it would
be but fitting to see a dark figure sitting and painting lilies upon a
golden ground, or cherubs' heads upon a panel of cypress wood, and to
hear that this painter was the monk Angelico.

The deepest charm of these old gardens, as of their country, is, after
all, that in them it is possible to forget the present age.

In the full, drowsy, voluptuous noon, when they are a gorgeous blaze of
colour and a very intoxication of fragrance, as in the ethereal white
moonlight of midnight, when, with the silver beams and the white
blossoms and the pale marbles, they are like a world of snow, their
charm is one of rest, silence, leisure, dreams, and passion all in one;
they belong to the days when art was a living power, when love was a
thing of heaven or of hell, and when men had the faith of children and
the force of gods.

Those days are dead, but in these old gardens you can believe still that
you live in them.

       *       *       *

"Pippa!" echoed Istriel. His memories were wakened by the name, and went
back to the days of his youth, when he had gone through the fields at
evening, when the purple beanflower was in bloom.

"What is your name then?" he asked, with a changed sound in his voice,
and with his fair cheek paler.

"I am Bruno Marcillo; I come from the hills above the Lastra a Signa."

Istriel rose, and looked at him; he had not remembered dead Pippa for
many a year. All in a moment he did remember: the long light days, the
little grey-walled town, the meetings in the vine-hung paths, when
sunset burned the skies; the girl with the pearls on her round brown
throat, the moonlit nights, with the strings of the guitar throbbing,
and the hearts of the lovers leaping; the sweet, eager, thoughtless
passion that swayed them one to another, as two flowers are blown
together in the mild soft winds of summer; he remembered it all now.

And he had forgotten so long; forgotten so utterly; save now and then,
when in some great man's house he had chanced to see some painting done
in his youth, and sold then for a few gold coins, of a tender
tempestuous face, half smiling and half sobbing, full of storm and
sunshine, both in one; and then at such times had thought, "Poor little
fool! she loved me too well;--it is the worst fault a woman has."

Some regret he had felt, and some remorse when he had found the garret
empty, and had lost Pippa from sight in the great sea of chance; but
she had wearied him, importuned him, clung to him; she had had the worst
fault, she had loved him too much. He had been young and poor, and very
ambitious; he had been soon reconciled; he had soon learned to think
that it was a burden best fallen from his shoulders. No doubt she had
suffered; but there was no help for that--some one always suffered when
these ties were broken--so he had said to himself. And then there had
come success and fame, and the pleasures of the world and the triumphs
of art, and Pippa had dropped from his thoughts as dead blossoms from a
bough; and he had loved so many other women, that he could not have
counted them; and the memory of that boy-and-girl romance in the green
hill country of the old Etruscan land had died away from him like a song
long mute.

Now, all at once, Pippa's hand seemed to touch him--Pippa's voice seemed
to rouse him--Pippa's eyes seemed to look at him.

       *       *       *

It was very early in the morning.

There had been heavy rains at night, and there was, when the sun rose,
everywhere, that white fog of the Valdarno country which is like a
silvery cloud hanging over all the earth. It spreads everywhere and
blends together land and sky; but it has breaks of exquisite
transparencies, through which the gold of the sunbeam shines, and the
rose of the dawn blushes, and the summits of the hills gleam here and
there, with a white monastery, or a mountain belfry, or a cluster of
cypresses seen through it, hung in the air as it were, and framed like
pictures in the silvery mist.

It is no noxious steam rising from the rivers and the rains: no grey and
oppressive obliteration of the face of the world like the fogs of the
north; no weight on the lungs and blindness to the eyes; no burden of
leaden damp lying heavy on the soil and on the spirit; no wall built up
between the sun and men; but a fog that is as beautiful as the full
moonlight is--nay, more beautiful, for it has beams of warmth, glories
of colour, glimpses of landscape such as the moon would coldly kill; and
the bells ring, and the sheep bleat, and the birds sing underneath its
shadow; and the sun-rays come through it, darted like angels' spears:
and it has in it all the promise of the morning, and all the sounds of
the waking day.

       *       *       *

A great darkness was over all his mind like the plague of that unending
night which brooded over Egypt.

All the ferocity of his nature was scourged into its greatest strength;
he was sensible of nothing except the sense that he was beaten in the
one aim and purpose of his life.

Only--if by any chance he could still save the boy.

That one thought--companion with him, sleeping and waking, through so
many joyless nights--stayed with him still.

It seemed to him that he would have strength to scale the very heights
of heaven, and shake the very throne of God until He heard--to save the
boy.

The night was far gone; the red of the day-dawn began to glow, and the
stars paled.

He did not know how time went; but he knew the look of the daybreak.
When the skies looked so through his grated windows at home, he rose and
said a prayer, and went down and unbarred his doors, and led out his
white beasts to the plough, or between the golden lines of the reaped
corn; all that was over now.

The birds were waking on the old green hills and the crocus flowers
unclosing; but he----

"I shall never see it again," he thought, and his heart yearned to it,
and the great, hot, slow tears of a man's woe stole into his aching eyes
and burned them. But he had no pity on himself.

He had freedom and health and strength and manhood, and he was still not
old, and still might win the favour of women, and see his children
laugh--if he went back to the old homestead, and the old safe ways of
his fathers. And the very smell of the earth there was sweet to him as a
virgin's breath, and the mere toil of the ground had been dear to him by
reason of the faithful love that he bore to his birthplace. But he had
no pity on himself.

"My soul for his," he had said; and he cleaved to his word and kept it.

In his day he had been savage to others. He was no less so to himself.

He had done all that he knew how to do. He had crushed out the natural
evil of him and denied the desires of the flesh, and changed his very
nature to do good by Pippa's son: and it had all been of no use; it had
all been spent in vain, as drowning seamen's cries for help are spent on
angry winds and yawning waters. He had tried to follow God's will and to
drive the tempter from him, for the boy's sake; and it had all been of
no avail. Through the long score of years his vain sacrifices echoed
dully by him as a dropt stone through the dark shaft of a well.

Perhaps it was not enough.

Perhaps it was needful that he should redeem the boy's soul by the utter
surrender and eternal ruin of his own--perhaps. After all it was a poor
love which balanced cost; a meek, mean love which would not dare to take
guilt upon it for the thing it cherished.

To him crime was crime in naked utter blackness; without aught of those
palliatives with which the cultured and philosophic temper can streak it
smooth and paint its soft excuse, and trace it back to influence or
insanity. To him sin was a mighty, hideous, hell-born thing, which being
embraced dragged him who kissed it on the mouth, downward and downward
into bottomless pits of endless night and ceaseless torment. To him the
depths of hell and heights of heaven were real as he had seen them in
the visions of Orgagna.

Yet he was willing to say, "Evil, be thou my good!" if by such evil he
could break the bonds of passion from the life of Pippa's son.

He had in him the mighty fanaticism which has made at once the tyrants
and the martyrs of the world.

"Leave him to me," he had said, and then the strength and weakness, and
ruthless heat, and utter self-deliverance of his nature leaped to their
height, and nerved him with deadly passion.

"There is but one way," he said to himself;--there was but one way to
cut the cords of this hideous, tangled knot of destiny and let free the
boy to the old ways of innocence.

"He will curse me," he thought; "I shall die--never looking on his
face--never hearing his voice. But he will be freed--so. He will
suffer--for a day--a year. But he will be spared the truth. And he is so
young--he will be glad again before the summer comes."

For a moment his courage failed him.

He could face the thought of an eternity of pain, and not turn pale, nor
pause. But to die with the boy's curse on him--that was harder.

"It is selfishness to pause," he told himself. "He will loathe me
always; but what matter?--he will be saved; he will be innocent once
more; he will hear his 'beautiful things' again; he will never know the
truth; he will be at peace with himself, and forget before the summer
comes. He never has loved me--not much. What does it matter?--so that he
is saved. When he sees his mother in heaven some day, then she will say
to him--'It was done for your sake.' And I shall know that he sees then,
as God sees. That will be enough."

       *       *       *

The boy looked out through the iron bars of his open lattice into the
cold, still night, full of the smell of fallen leaves and fir cones. The
tears fell down his cheeks; his heart was oppressed with a vague
yearning, such as made Mozart weep, when he heard his own Lacrimosa
chanted.

It is not fear of death, it is not desire of life.

It is that unutterable want, that nameless longing, which stirs in the
soul that is a little purer than its fellow, and which, burdened with
that prophetic pain which men call genius, blindly feels its way after
some great light, that knows must be shining somewhere upon other
worlds, though all the earth is dark.

When Mozart wept, it was for the world he could never reach--not for the
world he left.

       *       *       *

He had been brought up upon this wooded spur, looking down on the Signa
country; all his loves and hatreds, joys and pains, had been known here;
from the time he had plucked the maple leaves in autumn for the cattle
with little brown five-year-old hands he had laboured here, never seeing
the sun set elsewhere except on that one night at the sea. He was close
rooted to the earth as the stonepines were and the oaks. It had always
seemed to him that a man should die where he took life first, amongst
his kindred and under the sods that his feet had run over in babyhood.
He had never thought much about it, but unconsciously the fibres of his
heart had twisted themselves round all the smallest and the biggest
things of his home as the tendrils of a strong ivy bush fasten round a
great tower and the little stones alike.

The wooden settle where his mother had sat; the shrine in the house
wall; the copper vessels that had glowed in the wood-fuel light when a
large family had gathered there about the hearth; the stone well under
the walnut-tree where dead Dina had often stayed to smile on him; the
cypress-wood presses where Pippa had kept her feast-day finery and her
pearls; the old vast sweet-smelling sheds and stables where he had
threshed and hewn and yoked his oxen thirty years if one: all these
things, and a hundred like them, were dear to him with all the memories
of his entire life; and away from them he could know no peace.

He was going away into a great darkness. He had nothing to guide him.
The iron of a wasted love, of a useless sacrifice, was in his heart. His
instinct drove him where there was peril for Pippa's son--that was all.

If this woman took the lad away from him, where was there any mercy or
justice, earthly or divine? That was all he asked himself, blindly and
stupidly; as the oxen seem to ask it with their mild, sad eyes as they
strain under the yoke and goad, suffering and not knowing why they
suffer.

Nothing was clear to Bruno.

Only life had taught him that Love is the brother of Death.

One thing and another had come between him and the lad he cherished. The
dreams of the child, the desires of the youth, the powers of art, the
passion of genius, one by one had come in between him and loosened his
hold, and made him stand aloof as a stranger. But Love he had dreaded
most of all; Love which slays with one glance dreams and art and genius,
and lays them dead as rootless weeds that rot in burning suns.

Now Love had come.

He worked all day, holding the sickness of fear off him as best he
could, for he was a brave man;--only he had wrestled with fate so long,
and it seemed always to beat him, and almost he grew tired.

He cut a week's fodder for the beasts, and left all things in their
places, and then, as the day darkened, prepared to go.

Tinello and Pastore lowed at him, thrusting their broad white foreheads
and soft noses over their stable door.

He turned and stroked them in farewell.

"Poor beasts!" he muttered; "shall I never muzzle and yoke you ever
again?"

His throat grew dry, his eyes grew dim. He was like a man who sails for
a voyage on unknown seas, and neither he nor any other can tell whether
he will ever return.

He might come back in a day; he might come back never.

Multitudes, well used to wander, would have laughed at him. But to him
it was as though he set forth on the journey which men call death.

In the grey lowering evening he kissed the beasts on their white brows.
There was no one there to see his weakness, and year on year he had
decked them with their garlands of hedge flowers and led them up on
God's day to have their strength blessed by the priest--their strength
that laboured with his own from dawn to dark over the bare brown fields.

Then he turned his back on his old home, and went down the green sides
of the hill, and lost sight of his birthplace as the night fell.

All through the night he was borne away by the edge of the sea, along
the wild windy shores, through the stagnant marshes and the black pools
where the buffalo and the wild boar herded, past the deserted cities of
the coast, and beyond the forsaken harbours of Æneas and of Nero.

The west wind blew strong; the clouds were heavy; now and then the moon
shone on a sullen sea; now and then the darkness broke over rank maremma
vapours; at times he heard the distant bellowing of the herds, at times
he heard the moaning of the water; mighty cities, lost armies,
slaughtered hosts, foundered fleets, were underneath that soil and sea;
whole nations had their sepulchres on that low, wind-blown shore. But of
these he knew nothing.

It only seemed to him, that day would never come.

Once or twice he fell asleep for a few moments, and waking in that
confused noise of the stormy night and the wild water and the frightened
herds, thought that he was dead, and that this sound was the passing of
the feet of all the living multitude going for ever to and fro,
unthinking, over the depths of the dark earth where he lay.

       *       *       *

To behold the dominion of evil; the victory of the liar; the empire of
that which is base; to be powerless to resist, impotent to strip it
bare; to watch it suck under a beloved life as the whirlpool the
gold-freighted vessel; to know that the soul for which we would give our
own to everlasting ruin is daily, hourly, momentarily subjugated,
emasculated, possessed, devoured by those alien powers of violence and
fraud which have fastened upon it as their prey; to stand by fettered
and mute, and cry out to heaven that in this conflict the angels
themselves should descend to wrestle for us, and yet know that all the
while the very stars in their courses shall sooner stand still than this
reign of sin be ended:--this is the greatest woe that the world holds.

Beaten, we shake in vain the adamant gates of a brazen iniquity; we may
bruise our breasts there till we die; there is no entrance possible. For
that which is vile is stronger than all love, all faith, all pure
desire, all passionate pain; that which is vile has all the forces that
men have called the powers of hell.

       *       *       *

To him the world was like the dark fathomless waste of waters shelving
away to nameless shapeless perils such as the old Greek mariners drew
upon their charts as compassing the shores they knew.

He had no light of knowledge by which to pursue in hope or fancy the
younger life that would be launched into the untried realms. To him such
separation was as death.

He could not write; he could not even read what was written. He could
only trust to others that all was well with the boy.

He could have none of that mental solace which supports the scholar;
none of that sense of natural loveliness which consoles the poet; his
mind could not travel beyond the narrow circlet of its own pain; his
eyes could not see beauty everywhere from the green fly at his foot to
the sapphire mountains above his head; he only noticed the sunset to
tell the weather; he only looked across the plain to see if the
rain-fall would cross the river. When the autumn crocus sank under his
share, to him it was only a weed best withered; in hell he believed, and
for heaven he hoped, but only dully, as things certain that the priests
knew; but all consolations of the mind or the fancy were denied to him.
Superstitions, indeed, he had, but these were all;--sad-coloured fungi
in the stead of flowers.

The Italian has not strong imagination.

His grace is an instinct; his love is a frenzy; his gaiety is rather joy
than jest; his melancholy is from temperament, not meditation; nature is
little to him; and his religion and his passions alike must have
physical indulgence and perpetual nearness, or they are nothing.

He lived in almost absolute solitude. Sometimes it grew dreary, and the
weeks seemed long.

Two years went by--slowly.

Signa did not come home. The travel to and fro took too much money, and
he was engrossed in his studies, and it was best so; so Luigi Dini said,
and Bruno let it be. The boy did not ask to return. His letters were
very brief and not very coherent, and he forget to send messages to old
Teresina or to Palma. But there was no fear for him.

The sacristan's friends under whose roof he was wrote once in a quarter,
and spoke well of him always, and said that the professors did the same,
and that a gentler lad or one more wedded to his work they never knew.
And so Bruno kept his soul in patience, and said, "Do not trouble him;
when he wishes he will come--or if he want anything. Let him be."

To those who have traversed far seas and many lands, and who can bridge
untravelled countries by the aid of experience and of understanding,
such partings have pain, but a pain lessened by the certain knowledge of
their span and purpose. By the light of remembrance or of imagination
they can follow that which leaves them.

But Bruno had no such solace.

To him all that was indefinite was evil; all that was unfamiliar was
horrible. It is the error of ignorance at all times.

       *       *       *

He played for himself, for the air, for the clouds, for the trees, for
the sheep, for the kids, for the waters, for the stones; played as Pan
did, and Orpheus and Apollo.

His music came from heaven and went back to it. What did it matter who
heard it on earth?

A lily would listen to him as never a man could do; and a daffodil would
dance with delight as never woman could;--or he thought so at least,
which was the same thing. And he could keep the sheep all round him,
charmed and still, high above on the hillside, with the sad pines
sighing.

What did he want with people to hear? He would play for them; but he did
not care. If they felt it wrongly, or felt it not at all, he would stop,
and run away.

"If they are deaf I will be dumb," he said. "The dogs and the sheep and
the birds are never deaf--nor the hills--nor the flowers. It is only
people that are deaf. I suppose they are always hearing their own steps
and voices and wheels and windlasses and the cries of the children and
the hiss of the frying-pans. I suppose that is why. Well, let them be
deaf. Rusignuola and I do not want them."

So he said to Palma under the south wall, watching a butterfly, that
folded was like an illuminated shield of black and gold, and with its
wings spread was like a scarlet pomegranate blossom flying. Palma had
asked him why he had run away from the bridal supper of Griffeo, the
coppersmith's son,--just in the midst of his music; run away home, he
and his violin.

"They were not deaf," resumed Palma. "But your music was so sad--and
they were merry."

"I played what came to me," said Signa.

"But you are merry sometimes."

"Not in a little room with oilwicks burning, and a stench of wine, and
people round me. People always make me sad."

"Why that?"

"Because--I do not know:--when a number of faces are round me I seem
stupid; it is as if I were in a cage; I feel as if God went away,
farther, farther, farther!"

"But God made men and women."

"Yes. But I wonder if the trapped birds, and the beaten dogs, and the
smarting mules, and the bleeding sheep think so."

"Oh, Signa!"

"I think they must doubt it," said Signa.

"But the beasts are not Christians, the priests say so," said Palma, who
was a very true believer.

"I know. But I think they are. For they forgive. We never do."

"Some of us do."

"Not as the beasts do. Agnoto's house-lamb, the other day, licked his
hand as he cut its throat. He told me so."

"That was because it loved him," said Palma.

"And how can it love if it have not a soul?" said Signa.

Palma munched her crust. This sort of meditation, which Signa was very
prone to wander in, utterly confused her.

She could talk at need, as others could, of the young cauliflowers, and
the spring lettuces, and the chances of the ripening corn, and the look
of the budding grapes, and the promise of the weather, and the
likelihood of drought, and the Parocco's last sermon, and the gossips'
last history of the neighbours, and the varying prices of fine and of
coarse plaiting; but anything else--Palma was more at ease with the
heavy pole pulling against her, and the heavy bucket coming up sullenly
from the water-hole.

She felt, when he spoke in this way, much as Bruno did--only far more
intensely--as if Signa went away from her--right away into the sky
somewhere--as the swallows went when they spread their wings to the
east, or the blue wood-smoke when it vanished.

"You love your music better than you do Bruno, or me, or anything,
Signa," she said, with a little sorrow that was very humble, and not in
the least reproachful.

"Yes," said Signa, with the unconscious cruelty of one in whom Art is
born predominant. "Do you know, Palma," he said suddenly, after a
pause--"Do you know--I think I could make something beautiful, something
men would be glad of, if only I could be where they would care for it."

"We do care," said the girl gently.

"Oh, in a way. That is not what I mean," said the boy, with a little
impatience which daily grew on him more, for the associates of his life.
"You all care; you all sing; it is as the finches do in the fields,
without knowing at all what it is that you do. You are all like birds.
You pipe--pipe--pipe, as you eat, as you work, as you play. But what
music do we ever have in the churches? Who amongst you really likes all
that music when I play it off the old scores that Gigi says were written
by such great men, any better than you like the tinkling of the
mandolines when you dance in the threshing barns? I am sure you all like
the mandolines best. I know nothing here. I do not even know whether
what I do is worth much or nothing. I think if I could hear great music
once--if I could go to Florence----"

"To Florence?" echoed Palma.

       *       *       *

The contadino not seldom goes through all his life without seeing one
league beyond the fields of his labour, and the village that he is
registered at, married at, and buried at, and which is the very apex of
the earth to him. Women will spin and plait and hoe and glean within
half a dozen miles of some great city whose name is an art glory in the
mouths of scholars, and never will have seen it, never once perhaps,
from their birth down to their grave. A few miles of vine-bordered
roads, a breadth of corn-land, a rounded hill, a little red roof under a
mulberry tree, a church tower with a saint upon the roof, and a bell
that sounds over the walnut-trees--these are their world: they know and
want to know no other.

A narrow life, no doubt, yet not without much to be said for it. Without
unrest, without curiosity, without envy; clinging like a plant to the
soil; and no more willing to wander than the vinestakes which they
thrust into the earth.

To those who have put a girdle round the earth with their footsteps, the
whole world seems much smaller than does the hamlet or farm of his
affections to the peasant:--and how much poorer! The vague, dreamful
wonder of an untravelled distance--of an untracked horizon--has after
all more romance in it than lies in the whole globe run over in a year.

Who can ever look at the old maps in Herodotus or Xenophon without a
wish that the charm of those unknown limits and those untraversed seas
was ours?--without an irresistible sense that to have sailed away, in
vaguest hazard, into the endless mystery of the utterly unknown, must
have had a sweetness and a greatness in it that is never to be extracted
from "the tour of the world in ninety days."

       *       *       *

"She takes a whim for him; a fancy of a month; he thinks it heaven and
eternity. She has ruined him. His genius is burned up; his youth is
dead; he will do nothing more of any worth. Women like her are like the
Indian drugs, that sleep and kill. How is that any fault of mine? He
could see the thing she was. If he will fling his soul away upon a
creature lighter than thistle-down, viler than a rattlesnake's poison,
poorer and quicker to pass than the breath of a gnat--whose blame is
that except his own? There was a sculptor once, you know, that fell to
lascivious worship of the marble image he had made; well,--poets are not
even so far wise as that. They make an image out of the gossamer rainbow
stuff of their own dreams, and then curse heaven and earth because it
dissolves to empty air in their fond arms--whose blame is that? The
fools are made so----"

       *       *       *

Not only the fly on the spoke takes praise to itself for the speed of
the wheel, but the stone that would fain have hindered it, says, when
the wheel unhindered has passed it, "Lo! see how much I helped!"

       *       *       *

The woman makes or mars the man: the man the woman. Mythology had no
need of the Fates.

There is only one; the winged blind god that came by night to Psyche.

       *       *       *

All in a moment his art perished.

When a human love wakes it crushes fame like a dead leaf, and all the
spirits and ministers of the mind shrink away before it, and can no more
allure, no more console, but, sighing, pass into silence and are dumb.

       *       *       *

Life, without a central purpose around which it can revolve, is like a
star that has fallen out of its orbit. With a great affection or a great
aim gone, the practical life may go on loosely, indifferently,
mechanically, but it takes no grip on outer things, it has no vital
interest, it gravitates to nothing.

       *       *       *

Men who dwell in solitude are superstitious. There is no "chance" for
them.

The common things of earth and air to them grow portents: and it is
easier for them to believe that the universe revolves to serve the
earth, than to believe that men are to the universe as the gnats in the
sunbeam to the sun; they can sooner credit that the constellations are
charged with their destiny, than that they can suffer and die without
arousing a sigh for them anywhere in all creation. It is not vanity, as
the mocker too hastily thinks. It is the helpless, pathetic cry of the
mortal to the immortal nature from which he springs:

"Leave me not alone: confound me not with the matter that perishes: I am
full of pain--have pity!"

To be the mere sport of hazard as a dead moth is on the wind--the heart
of man refuses to believe it can be so with him. To be created only to
be abandoned--he will not think that the forces of existence are so
cruel and so unrelenting and so fruitless. In the world he may learn to
say that he thinks so, and is resigned to it; but in loneliness the
penumbra of his own existence lies on all creation, and the winds and
the stars and the daylight and night and the vast unknown mute forces of
life--all seem to him that they must of necessity be either his
ministers or his destroyers.

       *       *       *

Of all the innocent things that die, the impossible dreams of the poet
are the things that die with most pain, and, perhaps, with most loss to
humanity. Those who are happy die before their dreams. This is what the
old Greek saying meant.

The world had not yet driven the sweet, fair follies from Signa's head,
nor had it yet made him selfish. If he had lived in the age when
Timander could arrest by his melodies the tide of revolution, or when
the harp of the Persian could save Bagdad from the sword and flame of
Murad, all might have been well with him. But the time is gone by when
music or any other art was a king. All genius now is, at its best, but a
servitor--well or ill fed.

       *       *       *

Silently he put his hand out and grasped Signa's, and led him into the
Spanish Chapel, and sank on his knees.

The glory of the morning streamed in from the cloister; all the dead
gold and the faded hues were transfigured by it; the sunbeams shone on
the face of Laura, the deep sweet colours of Bronzino's Coena glowed
upward in the vault amidst the shadows; the company of the blessed,
whom the old painters had gathered there, cast off the faded robes that
the Ages had wrapped them in, and stood forth like the tender spirits
that they were, and seemed to say, "Nay, we, and they who made us, we
are not dead, but only waiting."

It is all so simple and so foolish there; the war-horses of Taddeo that
bear their lords to eternity as to a joust of arms; the heretic dogs of
Memmi, with their tight wooden collars; the beauteous Fiammetta and her
lover, thronging amongst the saints; the little house, where the Holy
Ghost is sitting, with the purified saints listening at the door, with
strings tied to their heads to lift them into paradise; it is all so
quaint, so childlike, so pathetic, so grotesque,--like a set of wooden
figures from its Noah's Ark that a dying child has set out on its little
bed, and that are so stiff and ludicrous, and yet which no one well can
look at and be unmoved, by reason of the little cold hand that has found
beauty in them.

As the dying child to the wooden figures, so the dead faith gives to the
old frescoes here something that lies too deep for tears; we smile, and
yet all the while we say;--if only we could believe like this; if only
for us the dead could be but sleeping!

       *       *       *

It was past midnight, and the moon had vanished behind her mountain,
withdrawing her little delicate curled golden horn, as if to blow with
it the trumpet-call of morning.

       *       *       *

Such pretty, neat, ready lying as this would stand him in better stead
than all the high spirit in the world; which, after all, only serves to
get a man into hot water in this life and eternal fire in the next.

       *       *       *

In the country of Virgil, life remains pastoral still. The field
labourer of northern countries may be but a hapless hind, hedging and
ditching dolefully, or at best serving a steam-beast with oil and fire;
but in the land of the Georgics there is the poetry of agriculture
still.

Materially it may be an evil and a loss--political economists will say
so; but spiritually it is a gain. A certain peace and light lie on the
people at their toil. The reaper with his hook, the plougher with his
oxen, the girl who gleans amongst the trailing vines, the child that
sees the flowers tossing with the corn, the men that sing to get a
blessing on the grapes--they have all a certain grace and dignity of the
old classic ways left with them. They till the earth still with the
simplicity of old, looking straight to the gods for recompense. Great
Apollo might still come down amidst them and play to them in their
threshing-barns, and guide his milk-white beasts over their
furrows,--and there would be nothing in the toil to shame or burden him.
It will not last. The famine of a world too full will lay it waste; but
it is here a little while longer still.

       *       *       *

For Discontent already creeps into each of these happy households, and
under her fox-skin hood says, "Let me in--I am Progress."

       *       *       *

In most men and women, Love waking wakes, with itself, the soul.

In poets Love waking kills it.

       *       *       *

When God gives genius, I think He makes the brain of some strange,
glorious stuff, that takes all strength out of the character, and all
sight out of the eyes. Those artists--they are like the birds we blind:
they sing, and make people weep for very joy to hear them; but they
cannot see their way to peck the worms, and are for ever wounding their
breasts against the wires. No doubt it is a great thing to have genius;
but it is a sort of sickness after all; and when love comes--

       *       *       *

Lippo knew that wise men do not do harm to whatever they may hate.

They drive it on to slay itself.

So without blood-guiltiness they get their end, yet stainless go to God.

       *       *       *

He was a little shell off the seashore that Hermes had taken out of
millions like it that the waves washed up, and had breathed into, and
had strung with fine chords, and had made into a syrinx sweet for every
human ear.

Why not break the simple shell for sport? She did not care for music.
Did the gods care--they could make another.

       *       *       *

Start a lie and a truth together, like hare and hound; the lie will run
fast and smooth, and no man will ever turn it aside; but at the truth
most hands will fling a stone, and so hinder it for sport's sake, if
they can.

       *       *       *

He heard the notes of a violin, quite faint and distant, but sweet as
the piping of a blackbird amongst the white anemones of earliest
spring.

       *       *       *

"Nature makes some folks false as it makes lizards wriggle," said he.
"Lippo is a lizard. No dog ever caught him napping, though he looks so
lazy in the sun."

       *       *       *

He did not waver. He did not repine. He made no reproach, even in his
own thoughts. He had only lost all the hope out of his life and all the
pride of it.

But men lose these and live on; women also.

He had built up his little kingdom out of atoms, little by little; atoms
of time, of patience, of self-denial, of hoarded coins, of snatched
moments;--built it up little by little, at cost of bodily labour and of
bodily pain, as the pyramids were built brick by brick by the toil and
the torment of unnoticed lives.

It was only a poor little nook of land, but it had been like an empire
won to him.

With his foot on its soil he had felt rich.

And now it was gone--gone like a handful of thistle-down lost on the
winds, like a spider's web broken in a shower of rain. Gone: never to be
his own again. Never.

He sat and watched the brook run on, the pied birds come to drink, the
throstle stir on the olive, the cloud shadows steal over the brown, bare
fields.

The red flush of sunrise faded. Smoke rose from the distant roofs. Men
came out on the lands to work. Bells rang. The day began.

He got up slowly and went away; looking backwards, looking backwards,
always.

Great leaders who behold their armed hosts melt like snow, and great
monarchs who are driven out discrowned from the palaces of their
fathers, are statelier figures and have more tragic grace than he
had;--only a peasant leaving a shred of land, no bigger than a rich
man's dwelling-house will cover;--but vanquished leader or exiled
monarch never was more desolate than Bruno, when the full sun rose and
he looked his last look upon the three poor fields, where for ever the
hands of other men would labour, and for ever the feet of other men
would wander.

       *       *       *

He only heard the toads cry to one another, feeling rain coming, "Crake!
crake! crake! We love a wet world as men an evil way. The skies are
going to weep; let us be merry. Crock! crock! crock!"

And they waddled out--slow, quaint, black things, with arms akimbo, and
stared at him with their shrewd, hard eyes. They would lie snug a
thousand years with a stone and be quite happy.

Why were not men like that?

Toads are kindly in their way, and will get friendly. Only men seem to
them such fools.

The toad is a fakeer, and thinks the beatitude of life lies in
contemplation. Men fret and fuss and fume, and are for ever in haste;
the toad eyes them with contempt.

       *       *       *

I would die this hour, oh, so gladly, if I could be quite sure that my
music would be loved, and be remembered. I do not know: there can be
nothing like it, I think:--a thing you create, that is all your own,
that is the very breath of your mouth, and the very voice of your soul;
which is all that is best in you, the very gift of God; and then to know
that all this may be lost eternally, killed, stifled, buried, just for
want of men's faith and a little gold! I do not think there can be any
loss like it, nor any suffering like it, anywhere else in the world. Oh,
if only it would do any good, I would fling my body into the grave
to-morrow, happy, quite happy; if only afterwards, they would sing my
songs, all over the earth, and just say, "God spoke to him; and he has
told men what He said."

       *       *       *

No one can make much music with the mandoline, but there is no other
music, perhaps, which sounds so fittingly to time and place, as do its
simple sonorous tender chords when heard through the thickets of
rose-laurel or the festoons of the vines, vibrating on the stillness of
the night under the Tuscan moon. It would suit the serenade of Romeo;
Desdemona should sing the willow song to it, and not to the harp; Paolo
pleaded by it, be sure, many a time to Francesca; and Stradella sang to
it the passion whose end was death; it is of all music the most Italian,
and it fills the pauses of the love-songs softly, like a sigh or like a
kiss.

Its very charm is, that it says so little. Love wants so little said.

And the mandoline, though so mournful and full of languor as Love is,
yet can be gay with that caressing joy born of beautiful nothings, which
makes the laughter of lovers the lightest-hearted laughter that ever
gives silver wings to time.

       *       *       *

It was a quaint, vivid, pretty procession, full of grace and of
movement--classic and homely, pagan and mediæval, both at once--bright
in hue, rustic in garb, poetic in feeling.

Teniers might have painted the brown girls and boys leaping and singing
on the turf, with their brandishing boughs, their flaring torches, their
bare feet, their tossing arms; but Leonardo or Guercino would have been
wanted for the face of the young singer whom they carried, with the
crown of the leaves and of the roses on his drooped head, like the
lotus flowers on the young Antinous.

Piero di Cosimo, perhaps, in one of his greatest moments of brilliant
caprice, might best have painted the whole, with the background of the
dusky hillside; and he would have set it round with strange arabesques
in gold, and illumined amongst them in emblem the pipe of the shepherd,
and the harp of the muse, and the river-rush that the gods would cut
down and fill with their breath and the music of heaven.

Bruno stood by, and let the innocent pageant pass, with its gold of
autumn foliage and its purples of crocus-like colchicum.

He heard their voices crying in the court: "We have got him--we have
brought him. Our Signa, who is going to be great!"

       *       *       *

All life had been to him as the divining-rod of Aaron, blooming ever
afresh with magic flowers. Now that the flame of pain and passion burned
it up, and left a bare sear brittle bough, he could not understand.

Love is cruel as the grave.

The poet has embraced the universe in his visions, and heard harmony in
every sound, from deep calling through the darkest storm to deep, as
from the lightest leaf-dancing in the summer wind; he has found joy in
the simplest things, in the nest of a bird, in the wayside grass, in the
yellow sand, in the rods of the willow; the lowliest creeping life has
held its homily and solace, and in the hush of night he has lifted his
face to the stars, and thought that he communed with their Creator and
his own. Then--all in a moment--Love claims him, and there is no melody
anywhere save in one single human voice, there is no heaven for him save
on one human breast; when one face is turned from him there is darkness
on all the earth; when one life is lost--let the stars reel from their
courses and the world whirl and burn and perish like the moon; nothing
matters; when Love is dead there is no God.

       *       *       *

Bruno lay down that night, but for an hour only. He could not sleep.

He rose before the sun was up, in the grey wintry break of day, while
the fog from the river rose like a white wall built up across the plain.

It is the season when the peasant has the least to do. Ploughing, and
sowing, and oil-pressing, all are past; there is little labour for man
or beast; there is only garden work for the vegetable market, and the
care of the sheep and cattle, where there are any. In large households,
where many brothers and sisters get round the oil lamp and munch roast
chestnuts and thrum a guitar, or tell ghost stories, these short empty
days are very well; sometimes there is a stranger lost coming over the
pinewoods, sometimes there is a snow-storm, and the sheep want seeing
to; sometimes there is the old roistering way of keeping Twelfth-night,
even on these lonely wind-torn heights; where the house is full and
merry, the short winter passes not so very dully; but in the solitary
places, where men brood alone, as Bruno did, they are heavy enough; all
the rest of the world might be dead and buried, the stillness is so
unbroken, the loneliness so great.

He got up and saw after his few sheep above amongst the pines; one or
two of them were near lambing; then he laboured on his garden mould
amongst the potato plants and cauliflowers, the raw mist in his lungs
and the sea-wind blowing. It had become very mild; the red rose on his
house-wall was in bud, and the violets were beginning to push from
underneath the moss; but the mornings were always very cold and damp.

An old man came across from Carmignano to beg a pumpkin-gourd or two; he
got a scanty living by rubbing them up and selling them to the fishermen
down on the Arno. Bruno gave them. He had known the old creature all his
life.

"You are dull here," said the old man, timidly; because every one was
more or less afraid of Bruno.

Bruno shrugged his shoulders and took up his spade again.

"Your boy does grand things, they say," said the old man; "but it would
be cheerfuller for you if he had taken to the soil."

Bruno went on digging.

"It is like a man I know," said the pumpkin-seller, thinking the sound
of his own voice must be a charity. "A man that helped to cast
church-bells. He cast bells all his life; he never did anything else at
all. 'It is brave work,' said he to me once, 'sweating in the furnace
there and making the metal into tuneful things to chime the praise of
all the saints and angels; but when you sweat and sweat and sweat, and
every bell you make just goes away and is swung up where you never see
or hear it ever again--that seems sad; my bells are all ringing in the
clouds, saving the people's souls, greeting Our Lady; but they are all
gone ever so far away from me. I only hear them ringing in my dreams.'
Now, I think the boy is like the bells--to you."

Bruno dug in the earth.

"The man was a fool," said he. "Who cared for his sweat or sorrow? It
was his work to melt the metal. That was all."

"Ay," said the pumpkin-seller, and shouldered the big, yellow, wrinkled
things that he had begged; "but never to hear the bells--that is sad
work."

Bruno smiled grimly.

"Sad! He could hear some of them as other people did, no doubt, ringing
far away against the skies while he was in the mud. That was all he
wanted; if he were wise, he did not even want so much as that.
Good-day."

It was against his wont to speak so many words on any other thing than
the cattle or the olive harvest or the prices of seeds and grain in the
market in the town. He set his heel upon his spade and pitched the
earth-begrimed potatoes in the skip he filled.

The old man nodded and went--to wend his way to Carmignano.

Suddenly he turned back: he was a tender-hearted, fanciful soul, and had
had a long, lonely life himself.

"I tell you what," he said, a little timidly; "perhaps the bells,
praising God always, ringing the sun in and out, and honouring Our Lady;
perhaps they went for something in the lives of the men that made them?
I think they must. It would be hard if the bells got everything, the
makers nothing."

Over Bruno's face a slight change went. His imperious eyes softened. He
knew the old man spoke in kindness.

"Take these home with you. Nay; no thanks," he said, and lifted on the
other's back the kreel full of potatoes dug for the market.

The old man blessed him, overjoyed; he was sickly and very poor; and
hobbled on his way along the side of the mountains.

Bruno went to other work.

If the bells ring true and clear, and always to the honour of the
saints, a man may be content to have sweated for it in the furnace and
to be forgot; but--if it be cracked in a fire and the pure ore of it
melt away shapeless?

       *       *       *

"Toccò" was sounding from all the city clocks. He met another man he
knew, a farmer from Montelupo.

"Brave doings!" said the Montelupo man. "A gala night to-night for the
foreign prince, and your boy summoned, so they say. No doubt you are
come in to see it all?"

Bruno shook himself free quickly, and went on; for a moment it occurred
to him that it might be best to wait and see Signa in the town; but then
he could not do that well. Nothing was done at home, and the lambs could
not be left alone to the shepherd lad's inexperience; only a day old,
one or two of them, and the ground so wet, and the ewes weakly. To leave
his farm would have seemed to Bruno as to leave his sinking ship does to
a sailor. Besides, he had nothing to do with all the grandeur; the king
did not want _him_.

All this stir and tumult and wonder and homage in the city was for
Signa; princes seemed almost like his servants, the king like his
henchman! Bruno was proud, under his stern, calm, lofty bearing, which
would not change, and would not let him smile, or seem so womanish-weak
as to be glad for all the gossiping.

The boy wanted no king or prince.

He said so to them with erect disdain.

Yet he was proud.

"After all, one does hear the bells ringing," he thought; his mind
drifting away to the old Carmignano beggar's words. He was proud, and
glad.

He stopped his mule by Strozzi palace, and pushed his way into the
almost empty market to the place called the Spit or Fila, where all day
long and every day before the roaring fires the public cooks roast flesh
and fowl to fill the public paunch of Florence.

Here there was a large crowd, pushing to buy the frothing, savoury hot
meats. He thrust the others aside, and bought half a kid smoking, and a
fine capon, and thrust them in his cart. Then he went to a shop near,
and bought some delicate white bread, and some foreign chocolate, and
some snowy sugar.

"No doubt," he thought, "the boy had learned to like daintier fare than
theirs in his new life;" theirs, which was black crusts and oil and
garlic all the year round, with meat and beans, perhaps, on feast
nights, now and then, by way of a change. Then as he was going to get
into his seat he saw among the other plants and flowers standing for
sale upon the ledge outside the palace a damask rose-tree--a little
thing, but covered with buds and blossoms blushing crimson against the
stately old iron torch-rings of the smith Caprera. Bruno looked at
it--he who never thought of flowers from one year's end on to another,
and cut them down with his scythe for his oxen to munch as he cut grass.
Then he bought it.

The boy liked all beautiful innocent things, and had been always so
foolish about the lowliest herb. It would make the dark old house upon
the hill look bright to him. Ashamed of the weaknesses that he yielded
to, Bruno sent the mule on at its fastest pace; the little red rose-tree
nodding in the cart.

He had spent more in a day than he was accustomed to spend in three
months' time.

But then the house looked so cheerless.

As swiftly as he could make the mule fly, he drove home across the
plain.

The boy was there, no doubt; and would be cold and hungry, and alone.

Bruno did not pause a moment on his way, though more than one called to
him as he drove, to know if it were true indeed that this night there
was to be a gala for the Lamia and the princes.

He nodded, and flew through the chill grey afternoon, splashing the deep
mud on either side of him.

The figure of St. Giusto on his high tower; the leafless vines and the
leafless poplars; the farriers' and coopers' workshops on the road; grim
Castel Pucci, that once flung its glove at Florence; the green low dark
hills of Castagnolo; villa and monastery, watch-tower and bastion,
homestead and convent, all flew by him, fleeting and unseen; all he
thought of was that the boy would be waiting, and want food.

He was reckless and furious in his driving always, but his mule had
never been beaten and breathless as it was that day when he tore up the
ascent to his own farm as the clocks in the plain tolled four.

He was surprised to see his dog lie quiet on the steps.

"Is he there?" he cried instinctively to the creature, which rose and
came to greet him.

There was no sound anywhere.

Bruno pushed his door open.

The house was empty.

He went out again and shouted to the air.

The echo from the mountain above was all his answer. When that died away
the old silence of the hills was unbroken.

He returned and took the food and the little rose-tree out of his cart.

He had bought them with eagerness, and with that tenderness which was in
him, and for which dead Dina had loved him to her hurt. He had now no
pleasure in them. A bitter disappointment flung its chill upon him.

Disappointment is man's most frequent visitor--the uninvited guest most
sure to come; he ought to be well used to it; yet he can never get
familiar.

Bruno ought to have learned never to hope.

But his temper was courageous and sanguine: such madmen hope on to the
very end.

He put the things down on the settle, and went to put up the mule. The
little rose-tree had been too roughly blown in the windy afternoon; its
flowers were falling, and some soon strewed the floor.

Bruno looked at it when he entered.

It hurt him; as the star Argol had done.

He covered the food with a cloth, and set the flower out of the draught.
Then he went to see his sheep.

There was no train by the seaway from Rome until night. Signa would not
come that way now, since he had to be in the town for the evening.

"He will come after the theatre," Bruno said to himself, and tried to
get the hours away by work. He did not think of going into the city
again himself. He was too proud to go and see a thing he had never been
summoned to; too proud to stand outside the doors and stare with the
crowd while Pippa's son was honoured within.

Besides, he could not have left the lambs all a long winter's night; and
the house all unguarded; and nobody there to give counsel to the poor
mute simpleton whom he had now to tend his beasts.

"He will come after the theatre," he said.

The evening seemed very long.

The late night came. Bruno set his door open, cold though it was; so
that he should catch the earliest sound of footsteps. The boy, no doubt,
he thought, would drive to the foot of the hill, and walk the rest.

It was a clear night after the rain of many days.

He could see the lights of the city in the plain fourteen miles or so
away.

What was doing down there?

It seemed strange;--Signa being welcomed there, and he himself knowing
nothing--only hearing a stray word or two by chance.

Once or twice in his younger days he had seen the city in gala over some
great artist it delighted to honour; he could imagine the scene and
fashion of it all well enough; he did not want to be noticed in it, only
he would have liked to have been told, and to have gone down and seen
it, quietly wrapped in his cloak, amongst the throng.

That was how he would have gone, had he been told.

He set the supper out as well as he could, and put wine ready, and the
rose-tree in the midst. In the lamplight the little feast did not look
so badly.

He wove wicker-work round some uncovered flasks by way of doing
something. The bitter wind blew in; he did not mind that; his ear was
strained to listen. Midnight passed. The wind had blown his lamp out. He
lighted two great lanthorns, and hung them up against the doorposts; it
was so dark upon the hills.

One hour went; another; then another. There was no sound. When yet
another passed, and it was four of the clock, he said:

"He will not come to-night. No doubt they kept him late, and he was too
tired. He will be here by sunrise."

He threw himself on his bed for a little time, and closed the door. But
he left the lanthorns hanging outside; on the chance.

He slept little; he was up while it was still dark, and the robins were
beginning their first twittering notes.

"He will be here to breakfast," he said to himself, and he left the
table untouched, only opening the shutters so that when day came it
should touch the rose at once and wake it up; it looked so drooping, as
though it felt the cold.

Then he went and saw to his beasts and to his work.

The sun leapt up in the cold, broad, white skies. Signa did not come
with it.

The light brightened. The day grew. Noon brought its hour of rest.

The table still stood unused. The rose-leaves had fallen in a little
crimson pool upon it. Bruno sat down on the bench by the door, not
having broken his fast.

"They are keeping him in the town," he thought. "He will come later."

He sat still a few moments, but he did not eat.

In a little while he heard a step on the dead winter leaves and tufts of
rosemary. He sprang erect; his eyes brightened; his face changed. He
went forward eagerly:

"Signa!--my dear!--at last!"

He only saw under the leafless maples and brown vine tendrils a young
man that he had never seen, who stopped before him breathing quickly
from the steepness of the ascent.

"I was to bring this to you," he said, holding out a long gun in its
case. "And to tell you that he, the youth they all talk of--Signa--went
back to Rome this morning; had no time to come, but sends you this, with
his dear love and greeting, and will write from Rome to-night. Ah, Lord!
There was such fuss with him in the city. He was taken to the foreign
princes, and then the people!--if you had heard them!--all the street
rang with the cheering. This morning he could hardly get away for all
the crowd there was. I am only a messenger. I should be glad of wine.
Your hill is steep."

Bruno took the gun from him, and put out a flask of his own wine on the
threshold; then shut close the door.

It was such a weapon as he had coveted all his life long, seeing such in
gunsmiths' windows and the halls of noblemen: a breech-loader, of
foreign make, beautifully mounted and inlaid with silver.

He sat still a little while, the gun lying on his knees; there was a
great darkness on his face. Then he gripped it in both hands, the butt
in one, the barrel in the other, and dashed the centre of it down across
the round of his great grindstone.

The blow was so violent, the wood of the weapon snapped with it across
the middle, the shining metal loosened from its hold. He struck it
again, and again, and again; until all the polished walnut was flying in
splinters, and the plates of silver, bent and twisted, falling at his
feet; the finely tempered steel of the long barrel alone was whole.

He went into his woodshed, and brought out branches of acacia brambles,
and dry boughs of pine, and logs of oak; dragging them forth with fury.
He piled them in the empty yawning space of the black hearth, and built
them one on another in a pile; and struck a match and fired them,
tossing pine-cones in to catch the flames.

In a few minutes a great fire roared alight, the turpentine in the
pine-apples and fir-boughs blazing like pitch. Then he fetched the
barrel of the gun, and the oaken stock, and the silver plates and
mountings, and threw them into the heat.

The flaming wood swallowed them up; he stood and watched it.

After a while a knock came at his house-door.

"Who is there?" he called.

"It is I," said a peasant's voice. "There is so much smoke, I thought
you were on fire. I was on the lower hill, so I ran up--is all right
with you?"

"All is right with me."

"But what is the smoke?"

"I bake my bread."

"It will be burnt to cinders."

"I make it, and I eat it. Whose matter is it?"

The peasant went away muttering, with slow unwilling feet.

Bruno watched the fire.

After a brief time its frenzy spent itself; the flames died down; the
reddened wood grew pale, and began to change to ash; the oaken stock was
all consumed, the silver was melted and fused into shapeless lumps, the
steel tube alone kept shape unchanged, but it was blackened and choked
up with ashes, and without beauty or use.

Bruno watched the fire die down into a great mound of dull grey and
brown charred wood.

Then he went out, and drew the door behind him, and locked it.

The last red rose dropped, withered by the heat.

       *       *       *

There is always song somewhere. As the wine waggon creaks down the hill,
the waggoner will chant to the corn that grows upon either side of him.
As the miller's mules cross the bridge, the lad as he cracks his whip
will hum to the blowing alders. In the red clover, the labourers will
whet their scythes to a trick of melody. In the quiet evenings a Kyrie
Eleison will rise from the thick leaves that hide a village chapel. On
the hills the goatherd, high in air amongst the arbutus branches, will
scatter on the lonely mountain-side stanzas of purest rhythm. By the
sea-shore, where Shelley died, the fisherman, rough and salt and
weather-worn, will string notes of sweetest measure under the
tamarisk-tree on his mandoline. But the poetry and the music float on
the air like the leaves of roses that blossom in a solitude, and drift
away to die upon the breeze; there is no one to notice the fragrance,
there is no one to gather the leaves.

       *       *       *

But then life does not count by years. Some suffer a lifetime in a day,
and so grow old between the rising and the setting of a sun.

       *       *       *

But he was not obstinate. He only stretched towards the light he saw, as
the plant in the cellar will stretch through the bars.

Tens of millions of little peasants come to the birth, and grow up and
become men, and do the daily bidding of the world, and work and die, and
have no more of soul or Godhead in them than the grains of sand. But
here and there, with no lot different from his fellows, one is born to
dream and muse and struggle to the sun of higher desires, and the world
calls such a one Burns, or Haydn, or Giotto, or Shakespeare, or whatever
name the fierce light of fame may burn upon and make irridescent.

       *       *       *

The mighty lives have passed away into silence, leaving no likeness to
them on earth; but if you would still hold communion with them, even
better than to go to written score or printed book or painted panel or
chiselled marble or cloistered gloom is it to stray into one of these
old quiet gardens, where for hundreds of years the stone naiad has
leaned over the fountain, and the golden lizard hidden under the fallen
caryatide, and sit quite still, and let the stones tell you what they
remember, and the leaves say what the sun once saw; and then the shades
of the great dead will come to you. Only you must love them truly, else
you will see them never.

       *       *       *

"How he loves that thing already--as he never will love me," thought
Bruno, looking down at him in the starlight, with that dull sense of
hopeless rivalry and alien inferiority which the self-absorption of
genius inflicts innocently and unconsciously on the human affections
that cling to it, and which later on love avenges upon it in the same
manner.

       *       *       *

Who can look at the old maps in Herodotus or Xenophon, without a wish
that the charm of those unknown limits and those untraversed seas was
ours?--without an irresistible sense that to have sailed away, in
vaguest hazard, into the endless mystery of the utterly unknown, must
have had a sweetness and a greatness in it that is never to be extracted
from the "tour of the world in ninety days."

       *       *       *

Fair faiths are the blossoms of life. When the faith drops, spring is
over.

       *       *       *

In the country of Virgil, life remains pastoral still. The
field-labourer of northern counties may be but a hapless hind, hedging
and ditching dolefully, or at least serving a steam-beast with oil and
fire, but in the land of the Georgics there is the poetry of agriculture
still.

       *       *       *

The fatal desire of fame, which is to art the corroding element, as the
desire of the senses is to love--bearing with it the seeds of satiety
and mortality--had entered into him without his knowing what it was that
ailed him.

       *       *       *

Genius lives in isolation, and suffers from it. But perhaps it creates
it. The breath of its lips is like ether; purer than the air around it,
it changes the air for others into ice.

       *       *       *

Conscience and genius--the instinct of the heart, and the desire of the
mind--the voice that warns and the voice that ordains: when these are in
conflict, it is bitter for life in which they are at war; most bitter of
all when that life is in its opening youth, and sure of everything, and
yet sure of nothing.

       *       *       *

Between them there was that bottomless chasm of mental difference,
across which mutual affection can throw a rope-chain of habit and
forbearance for the summer days, but which no power on earth can ever
bridge over with that iron of sympathy which stands throughout all
storms.

       *       *       *

When the heart is fullest of pain, and the mouth purest with truth,
there is a cruel destiny in things, which often makes the words worst
chosen and surest to defeat the end they seek.

       *       *       *

There is a chord in every human heart that has a sigh in it if touched
aright. When the artist finds the key-note which that chord will answer
to--in the dullest as in the highest--then he is great.

       *       *       *

Life without a central purpose around which it can revolve, is like a
star that has fallen out of its orbit. With a great affection or a great
aim gone, the practical life may go on loosely, indifferently,
mechanically, but it takes no grip on outer things, it has no vital
interest, it gravitates to nothing.

       *       *       *

Fame has only the span of a day, they say. But to live in the hearts of
the people--that is worth something.

       *       *       *

Keep young. Keep innocent. Innocence does not come back: and repentance
is a poor thing beside it.

       *       *       *

The chimes of the monastery were ringing out for the first mass; deep
bells of sweet tone, that came down the river like a benediction on the
day. Signa kneeled down on the grass.

"Did you pray for the holy men?" Bruno asked him when they rose, and
they went on under the tall green quivering trees.

"No," said Signa under his breath. "I prayed for the devil."

"For him?" echoed Bruno aghast; "what are you about, child? Are you
possessed? Do you know what the good priests would say?"

"I prayed for him," said Signa. "It is he who wants it. To be wicked
_there_ where God is, and the sun, and the bells"----

"But he is the foe of God. It is horrible to pray for him."

"No," said Signa, sturdily. "God says we are to forgive our enemies, and
help them. I only asked Him to begin with His."

Bruno was silent.




_TRICOTRIN._


At every point where her eyes glanced there was a picture of exquisite
colour, and light, and variety.

But the scene in its loveliness was so old to her, so familiar, that it
was scarcely lovely, only monotonous. With all a child's usual ignorant
impatience of the joys of the present--joys so little valued at the
time, so futilely regretted in the after-years--she was heedless of the
hour's pleasure, she was longing for what had not come.

       *       *       *

On the whole, the Waif fared better, having fallen to the hands of a
vagabond philosopher, than if she had drifted to those of a respected
philanthropist. The latter would have had her glistening hair shorn
short, as a crown with which that immortal and inconsistent socialist
Nature had no justification in crowning a foundling, and, in his desire
to make her fully expiate the lawless crime of entering the world
without purse or passport, would have left her no choice, as she grew
into womanhood, save that between sinning and starving. The former bade
the long fair tresses float on the air, sunny rebels against bondage,
and saw no reason why the childhood of the castaway should not have its
share of childish joyousness as well as the childhood prince-begotten
and palace-cradled; holding that the fresh life just budded on earth
was as free from all soil, no matter whence it came, as is the brook of
pure rivulet water, no matter whether it spring from classic lake or
from darksome cavern.

       *       *       *

The desire to be "great" possessed her. When that insatiate passion
enters a living soul, be it the soul of a woman-child dreaming of a
coquette's conquests, or a crowned hero craving for a new world, it
becomes blind to all else. Moral death falls on it; and any sin looks
sweet that takes it nearer to its goal. It is a passion that generates
at once all the loftiest and all the vilest things, which between them
ennoble and corrupt the world--even as heat generates at once the
harvest and the maggot, the purpling vine and the lice that devour it.
It is a passion without which the world would decay in darkness, as it
would do without heat, yet to which, as to heat, all its filthiest
corruption is due.

       *       *       *

A woman's fair repute is like a blue harebell--a touch can wither it.

       *       *       *

Viva had gained the "great world;" and because she had gained it all the
old things of her lost past grew unalterably sweet to her now that they
no longer could be called hers. The brown, kind, homely, tender face of
grand'mère; the gambols of white and frolicsome Bébé; the woods where,
with every spring, she had filled her arms with sheaves of delicate
primroses; the quaint little room with its strings of melons and sweet
herbs, its glittering brass and pewter, its wood-fire with the soup-pot
simmering above the flame; the glad free days in the vineyard and on
the river, with the winds blowing fragrance from over the clover and
flax, and the acacias and lindens; nay, even the old, quiet, sleepy
hours within the convent-walls, lying on the lush unshaven grass, while
the drowsy bells rang to vespers or compline,--all became suddenly
precious and dear to her when once she knew that they had drifted away
from her for evermore.

       *       *       *

Then he bent his head, letting her desire be his law; and that music,
which had given its hymn for the vintage-feast of the Loire, and which
had brought back the steps of the suicide from the river-brink in the
darkness of the Paris night, which sovereigns could not command and
which held peasants entranced by its spell, thrilled through the
stillness of the chamber.

Human in its sadness, more than human in its eloquence, now melancholy
as the Miserere that sighs through the gloom of a cathedral at midnight,
now rich as the glory of the afterglow in Egypt, a poem beyond words, a
prayer grand as that which seems to breathe from the hush of mountain
solitudes when the eternal snows are lighted by the rising of the
sun--the melody of the violin filled the silence of the closing day.

The melancholy, ever latent in the vivid natures of men of genius, is
betrayed and finds voice in their Art. Goethe laughs with the riotous
revellers, and rejoices with the summer of the vines, and loves the glad
abandonment of woman's soft embraces, and with his last words prays for
Light. But the profound sadness of the great and many-sided master-mind
thrills through and breaks out in the intense humanity, the passionate
despair of Faust; the melancholy and the yearning of the soul are there.

With Tricotrin they were uttered in his music.

       *       *       *

"Let me be but amused! Let me only laugh if I die!" cries the world in
every age. It has so much of grief and tragedy in its own realities, it
has so many bitter tears to shed in its solitude, it has such weariness
of labour without end, it has such infinitude of woe to regard in its
prisons, in its homes, in its battlefields, in its harlotries, in its
avarices, in its famines; it is so heart-sick of them all, that it would
fain be lulled to forgetfulness of its own terrors; it asks only to
laugh for awhile, even if it laugh but at shadows.

"The world is vain, frivolous, reckless of that which is earnest; it is
a courtesan who thinks only of pleasure, of adornment, of gewgaws, of
the toys of the hour!" is the reproach which its satirists in every age
hoot at it.

Alas! it is a courtesan who, having sold herself to evil, strives to
forget her vile bargain; who, having washed her cheeks white with
saltest tears, strives to believe that the paint calls the true colour
back; who, having been face to face for so long with blackest guilt,
keenest hunger, dreadest woe, strives to lose their ghosts, that
incessantly follow her, in the tumult of her own thoughtless laughter.

"Let me be but amused!"--the cry is the aching cry of a world that is
overborne with pain, and with longing for the golden years of its youth;
that cry is never louder than when the world is most conscious of its
own infamy.

In the Roman Empire, in the Byzantine Empire, in the Second Empire of
Napoleonic France, the world, reeking with corruption, staggering under
the burden of tyrannies, and delivered over to the dominion of lust, has
shrieked loudest in its blindness of suffering, "Let me only laugh if I
die!"

       *       *       *

Not as others! Why, my Waif? Is your foot less swift, your limb less
strong, your face less fair than theirs? Does the sun shine less often,
have the flowers less fragrance, does sleep come less sweetly to you
than to them? Nature has been very good, very generous to you, Viva. Be
content with her gifts. What you lack is only a thing of man's
invention--a quibble, a bauble, a Pharisee's phylactery. Look at the
river-lilies that drift yonder--how white they are, how their leaves
enclose and caress them, how the water buoys them up and plays with
them! Well, are they not better off than the poor rare flowers that live
painfully in hothouse air, and are labelled, and matted, and given long
names by men's petty precise laws? You are like the river-lilies. O
child, do not pine for the glass house that would ennoble you, only to
force you and kill you?

       *       *       *

Wrong to be proud, you ask? No. But then the pride must be of a right
fashion. It must be the pride which says, "Let me not envy, for that
were meanness. Let me not covet, for that were akin to theft. Let me not
repine, for that were weakness." It must be the pride which says, "I can
be sufficient for myself. My life makes my nobility; and I need no
accident of rank, because I have a stainless honour." It must be pride
too proud to let an aged woman work where youthful limbs can help her;
too proud to trample basely on what lies low already; too proud to be a
coward, and shrink from following conscience in the confession of known
error; too proud to despise the withered toil-worn hands of the poor and
old, and be vilely forgetful that those hands succoured you in your
utmost need of helpless infancy!

       *       *       *

Philosophy, Viva, is the pomegranate of life, ever cool and most
fragrant, and the deeper you cut in it the richer only will the core
grow. Power is the Dead-Sea apple, golden and fair to sight while the
hand strives to reach it, dry grey ashes between dry fevered lips when
once it is grasped and eaten!

       *       *       *

Pleasure is but labour to those who do not know also that labour in its
turn is pleasure.

       *       *       *

Happy! As a mollusc is happy so long as the sea sweeps prey into its
jaws; what does the mollusc care how many lives have been shipwrecked so
long as the tide wafts it worms? She has killed her conscience, Viva;
there is no murder more awful. It is to slay what touch of God we have
in us!

       *       *       *

Have I been cruel, my child? Your fever of discontent needed a sharp
cure. Life lies before you, Viva, and you alone can mould it for
yourself. Sin and anguish fill nine-tenths of the world: to one soul
that basks in light, a thousand perish in darkness; I dare not let you
go on longer in your dangerous belief that the world is one wide
paradise, and that the high-road of its joys is the path of reckless
selfishness. Can you not think that there are lots worse than that of a
guiltless child who is well loved and well guarded, and has all her
future still before her?

       *       *       *

It rests with you to live your life nobly or vilely. We have not our
choice to be rich or poor, to be happy or unhappy, to be in health or in
sickness; but we have our choice to be worthy or worthless. No
antagonist can kill our soul in us; that can perish only from its own
suicide. Ever remember that.

       *       *       *

But they are hollow inside, you still urge? fie, for shame! What a plea
that is! Have you the face to make it? If you have, let me bargain with
you.

When all the love that is fair and false goes begging for believers, and
all the passion that is a sham fails to find one fool to buy it; when
all the priests and politicians clap in vain together the brazen cymbals
of their tongues, because their listeners will not hearken to brass
clangour, nor accept it for the music of the spheres; when all the
creeds, that feast and fatten upon the cowardice and selfishness of men,
are driven out of hearth and home, and mart and temple, as impostors
that put on the white beard of reverence and righteousness to pass
current a cheater's coin; when all the kings that promise peace while
they swell their armouries and armies; when all the statesmen that
chatter of the people's weal as they steal up to the locked casket where
coronets are kept; when all the men who talk of "glory," and prate of an
"idea" that they may stretch their nation's boundary, and filch their
neighbour's province--when all these are no longer in the land, and no
more looked on with favour, then I will believe your cry that you hate
the toys which are hollow.

       *       *       *

Can an ignorant or an untrained brain follow the theory of light, or the
metamorphosis of plants? Yet it may rejoice in the rays of a summer sun,
in the scent of a nest of wild-flowers. So may it do in my music. Shall
I ask higher payment than the God of the sun and the violets asks for
Himself?

       *       *       *

Once there were three handmaidens of Krishna's; invisible, of course, to
the world of men. They begged of Krishna, one day, to test their wisdom,
and Krishna gave them three drops of dew. It was in the season of
drought,--and he bade them go and bestow them where each deemed best in
the world.

Now one flew earthward, and saw a king's fountain leaping and shining in
the sun; the people died of thirst, and the fields and the plains were
cracked with heat, but the king's fountain was still fed and played on.
So she thought, "Surely, my dew will best fall where such glorious water
dances?" and she shook the drop into the torrent.

The second hovered over the sea, and saw the Indian oysters lying under
the waves, among the sea-weed and the coral. Then she thought, "A
rain-drop that falls in an oyster's shell becomes a pearl; it may bring
riches untold to man, and shine in the diadem of a monarch. Surely it is
best bestowed where it will change to a jewel?"--and she shook the dew
into the open mouth of a shell.

The third had scarcely hovered a moment over the parched white lands,
ere she beheld a little, helpless brown bird dying of thirst upon the
sand, its bright eyes glazed, its life going out in torture. Then she
thought, "Surely my gift will be best given in succour to the first and
lowliest thing I see in pain?"--and she shook the dew-drop down into the
silent throat of the bird, that fluttered, and arose, and was
strengthened.

Then Krishna said that she alone had bestowed her power wisely; and he
bade her take the tidings of rain to the aching earth, and the earth
rejoiced exceedingly. Genius is the morning dew that keeps the world
from perishing in drought. Can you read my parable?

       *       *       *

To die when life can be lived no longer with honour is greatness indeed;
but to die because life galls and wearies and is hard to pursue--there
is no greatness in that? It is the suicide's plea for his own self-pity.
You live under tyranny, corruption, dynastic lies hard to bear, despotic
enemies hard to bear, I know. But you forget--what all followers of your
creed ever forget--that without corruption, untruth, weakness, ignorance
in a nation itself, such things could not be in its rulers. Men can
bridle the ass and can drive the sheep; but who can drive the eagle or
bridle the lion? A people that was strong and pure no despot could yoke
to his vices.

       *       *       *

No matter! He must have _race_ in him. Heraldry may lie; but voices do
not. Low people make money, drive in state, throng to palaces, receive
kings at their tables by the force of gold; but their antecedents always
croak out in their voices. They either screech or purr; they have no
clear modulations; besides, their women always stumble over their train,
and their men bow worse than their servants.

       *       *       *

Ere long he drew near a street which in the late night was still
partially filled with vehicles and with foot-passengers, hurrying
through the now fast-falling snow, and over the slippery icy pavements.
In one spot a crowd had gathered--of artisans, women, soldiers, and
idlers, under the light of a gas-lamp. In the midst of the throng some
gendarmes had seized a young girl, accused by one of the bystanders of
having stolen a broad silver piece from his pocket.

She offered no resistance; she stood like a stricken thing, speechless
and motionless, as the men roughly laid hands on her.

Tricotrin crossed over the road, and with difficulty made his way into
the throng of blouses and looked at her. Degraded she was, but scarcely
above a child's years; and her features had a look as if innocence were
in some sort still there, and sin still loathed in her soul. As he drew
near he heard her mutter,

"Mother, mother! She will die of hunger!--it was for her, only for her!"

He stooped in the snow, and letting fall, unperceived, a five-franc
piece, picked it up again.

"Here is some silver," he said, turning to the infuriated owner, a
lemonade-seller, who could ill afford to lose it now that it was winter,
and people were too cold for lemonade, and who seized it with rapturous
delight.

"That is it, monsieur, that is it. Holy Jesus! how can I thank you? Ah,
if I had convicted the poor creature--and all in error!--I should never
have forgiven myself! Messieurs les gendarmes, let her go! It was my
mistake. My silver piece was in the snow!"

The gendarmes reluctantly let quit their prey: they muttered, they
hesitated, they gripped her arms tighter, and murmured of the
prison-cell.

"Let her go," said Tricotrin quietly: and in a little while they did
so,--the girl stood bareheaded and motionless in the snow like a
frost-bound creature.

Soon the crowd dispersed: nothing can be still long in Paris, and since
there had been no theft there was no interest! they were soon left
almost alone, none were within hearing.

Then he stooped to her: she had never taken off him the wild, senseless,
incredulous gaze of her great eyes.

"Were you guilty?" he asked her.

She caught his hands, she tried to bless him and to thank him, and broke
down in hysterical sobs.

"I took it--yes! What would you have? I took it for my mother. She is
old, and blind, and without food. It is for her that I came on the
streets; but she does not know it, it would kill her to know; she thinks
my money honest; and she is so proud and glad with it! That was the
first thing I _stole_! O God! are you an angel? If they had put me in
prison my mother would have starved!"

He looked on her gently, and with a pity that fell upon her heart like
balm.

"I saw it was your first theft. Hardened robbers do not wear your
stricken face," he said softly, as he slipped two coins into her hand.
"Ah, child! let your mother die rather than allow her to eat the bread
of your dishonour: which choice between the twain do you not think a
mother would make? And know your trade she must, soon or late. Sin no
more, were it only for that love you bear her."

       *       *       *

Their lives had drifted asunder, as two boats drift north and south on a
river, the distance betwixt them growing longer and longer with each
beat of the oars and each sigh of the tide. And for the lives that part
thus, there is no reunion. One floats out to the open and sunlit sea;
and one passes away to the grave of the stream. Meet again on the river
they cannot.

       *       *       *

"They shudder when they read of the Huns and the Ostrogoths pouring down
into Rome," he mused, as he passed toward the pandemonium. "They keep a
horde as savage, imprisoned in their midst, buried in the very core of
their capitals, side by side with their churches and palaces, and never
remember the earthquake that would whelm them if once the pent volcano
burst, if once the black mass covered below took flame and broke to the
surface! Statesmen multiply their prisons, and strengthen their laws
against the crime that is done--and they never take the canker out of
the bud, they never save the young child from pollution. Their political
economy never studies prevention; it never cleanses the sewers, it only
curses the fever-stricken!"

       *       *       *

"What avail?" he thought. "What avail to strive to bring men nearer to
the right? They love their darkness best--why not leave them to it? Age
after age the few cast away their lives striving to raise and to ransom
the many. What use? Juvenal scourged Rome, and the same vices that his
stripes lashed then, laugh triumphant in Paris to-day! The satirist, and
the poet, and the prophet strain their voices in vain as the crowds rush
on; they are drowned in the chorus of mad sins and sweet falsehoods! O
God! the waste of hope, the waste of travail, the waste of pure desire,
the waste of high ambitions!--nothing endures but the wellspring of lies
that ever rises afresh, and the bay-tree of sin that is green, and
stately, and deathless!"

       *       *       *

He himself went onward through the valley, through the deep belt of the
woods, through the avenues of the park. The whole front of the antique
building was lighted, and the painted oriels gleamed ruby, and amber,
and soft brown, in the dusky evening, through the green screen of
foliage.

The fragrance of the orange alleys, and of the acres of flowers, was
heavy on the air; there was the sound of music borne down the low
southerly wind; here and there through the boughs was the dainty glisten
of gliding silks:--it was such a scene as once belonged to the terraces
and gardens of Versailles.

From beyond the myrtle fence and gilded railings which severed the park
from the pleasaunce, enough could be seen, enough heard, of the
brilliant revelry within to tell of its extravagance, and its elegance,
in the radiance that streamed from all the illumined avenues.

He stood and looked long; hearing the faint echo of the music, seeing
the effulgence of the light through the dark myrtle barrier.

A very old crippled peasant, searching in the grass for truffles, with a
little dog, stole timidly up and looked too.

"How can it feel, to live like _that?_" he asked, in a wistful,
tremulous voice.

Tricotrin did not hear: his hand was grasped on one of the gilded rails
with a nervous force as from bodily pain.

The old truffle-gatherer, with his little white dog panting at his feet,
crossed himself as he peered through the myrtle screen.

"God!" he muttered; "how strange it seems that people are there who
never once knew what it was to want bread, and to find it nowhere,
though the lands all teemed with harvest! They never feel hungry, or
cold, or hot, or tired, or thirsty: they never feel their bones ache,
and their throat parch, and their entrails gnaw! These people ought not
to get to heaven--they have it on earth!"

Tricotrin heard at last: he turned his head and looked down on the old
man's careworn, hollow face.

"'Verily they have their reward,' you mean? Nay, that is a cruel
religion, which would excruciate hereafter those who enjoy now. Judge
them not; in their laurel crowns there is full often twisted a serpent.
The hunger of the body is bad indeed, but the hunger of the mind is
worse perhaps; and from that they suffer, because from every fulfilled
desire springs the pain of a fresh satiety."

The truffle-hunter, wise in his peasant-fashion, gazed wistfully up at
the face above him, half comprehending the answer.

"It may be so," he murmured; "but then--they _have_ enjoyed! Ah, Christ!
that is what I envy them. Now we--we die, starved amidst abundance; we
see the years go, and the sun never shines once in them; and all we have
is a hope--a hope that may be cheated at last; for none have come back
from the grave to tell us whether _that_ fools us as well."

       *       *       *

"I incline to think you live twenty centuries too late, or--twenty
centuries too early."

Viva turned on him a swift and eager glance.

"Of course!" she said, with a certain emotion, whose meaning he could
not analyse. "Was there ever yet a man of genius who was not either the
relic of some great dead age, or the precursor of some noble future one,
in which he alone has faith?"

"Chut!" said Tricotrin, rapidly; he could not trust himself to hear her
speak in his own defence. "Fine genius mine! To fiddle to a few
villagers, and dash colour on an alehouse shutter! I have the genius of
indolence, if you like. As to my belonging to a bygone age,--well! I am
not sure that I have not got the soul in me of some barefooted friar of
Moyen Age, who went about where he listed, praying here, laughing there,
painting a missal with a Pagan love-god, and saying a verse of Horace
instead of a chant of the Church. Or, maybe, I am more like some Greek
gossiper, who loitered away his days in the sun, and ate his dates in
the market-place, and listened here and there to a philosopher,
and--just by taking no thought--hit on a truer philosophy than ever
came out of Porch or Garden. Ah, my Lord of Estmere! you have two
hundred servants over there at Villiers, I have been told; do you not
think I am better served here by one little, brown-eyed, brown-cheeked
maiden, who sings her Béranger like a lark, while she brings me her dish
of wild strawberries? There is fame too for you--his--the King of the
Chansons! When a girl washes her linen in the brook--when a herdsman
drives his flock through the lanes--when a boy throws his line in a
fishing-stream--when a grisette sits and works at her attic
lattice--when a student dreams under the linden leaves--he is on their
lips, in their hearts, in their fancies and joys. What a power! What a
dominion! Wider than any that emperors boast!"

"And," added Estmere, with a smile, "if you were not Tricotrin you would
be Béranger?"

       *       *       *

"Aye! Hymns forbad at noonday are ever so sung at night; and oftentimes,
what at noon would have been a lark's chant of liberty, grows at night
to a vampire's screech for blood!" he murmured. "They are gay at your
château up yonder."

       *       *       *

Be not a coward who leaves the near duty that is as cruel to grasp as a
nettle, and flies to gather the far-off duty that will flaunt in men's
sight like a sun-flower.

       *       *       *

"A great Character!" says Society, when it means--"a great Scamp!"

       *       *       *

Estmere laid the panel down as he heard.

"Whoever painted it must have genius."

"Genius!" interrupted Tricotrin. "Pooh! What is genius? Only the power
to see a little deeper and a little clearer than most other people. That
is all."

"The power of vision? Of course. But that renders it none the less
rare."

"Oh yes, it is rare--rare like kingfishers, and sandpipers, and herons,
and black eagles. And so men always shoot it down, as they do the birds,
and stick up the dead body in glass cases, and label it, and stare at
it, and bemoan it as 'so singular,' having done their best to insure its
extinction!"

Estmere looked keenly at him.

"Surely genius that secretes itself as your friend's must do," he said,
touching the panel afresh, "commits suicide, and desires its own
extinction."

"Pshaw!" said Tricotrin, impatiently, and with none of his habitual
courtesy. "You think the kingfisher and the black eagle have no better
thing to live for than to become the decorations of a great personage's
glass cabinets. You think genius can find no higher end than to furnish
frescoes and panellings for a nobleman's halls and ante-chambers. You
mistake very much; the mistake is a general one in your order. But
believe me, the kingfisher enjoys his brown moorland stream, and his
tufts of green rushes, and his water-swept bough of hawthorn; the eagle
enjoys his wild rocks, and his sweep through the air, and his steady
gaze at the sun that blinds all human eyes;--and neither ever imagine
that the great men below pity them because they are not stuffed, and
labelled, and praised by rule in their palaces! And genius is much of
the birds' fashion of thinking. It lives its own life; and is not, as
your connoisseurs are given to fancy, wretched unless you see fit in
your graciousness to deem it worth the glass-case of your criticism, and
the straw-stuffing of your gold. For it knows, as kingfisher and eagle
knew also, that stuffed birds nevermore use their wings, and are
evermore subject to be bought and be sold."

       *       *       *

Against the foreign foes of your country die in your youth if she need
it. But against her internecine enemies live out your life in continual
warfare. When I tell you this, do you dream that I spare you?
Children!--you have yet to learn what life is! Who could think it hard
to die in the glory of strife, drunk with the sound of the combat, and
feeling no pain in the swoon of a triumph? Few men whose blood was hot
and young would ask a greater ending. But to keep your souls in
patience; to strive unceasingly with evil; to live in self-negation, in
ceaseless sacrifices of desire; to give strength to the weak, and sight
to the blind, and light where there is darkness, and hope where there is
bondage; to do all these through many years unrecognised of men, content
only that they are done with such force as lies within you,--this is
harder than to seek the cannons' mouths, this is more bitter than to
rush, with drawn steel, on your tyrants.

Your women cry out against you because you leave them to starve and to
weep while you give your hearts to revolution and your bodies to the
sword. Their cry is the cry of selfishness, of weakness, of narrowness,
the cry of the sex that sees no sun save the flame on its hearth: yet
there is truth in it--a truth you forget. The truth--that, forsaking the
gold-mine of duty which lies at your feet, you grasp at the rainbow of
glory; that, neglectful of your own secret sins, you fly at public woes
and at national crimes. Can you not see that if every man took heed of
the guilt of his own thoughts and acts, the world would be free and at
peace? It is easier to rise with the knife unsheathed than to keep watch
and ward over your own passions; but do not cheat yourself into
believing that it is nobler, and higher, and harder. What reproach is
cast against all revolutionists?--that the men who have nothing to lose,
the men who are reckless and outlawed, alone raise the flag of revolt.
It is a satire; but in every satire there lies the germ of a terrible
fact.

You--you who are children still, you whose manhood is still a gold
scarcely touched in your hands, a gold you can spend in all great ways,
or squander for all base uses;--you can give the lie to that public
reproach, if only you will live in such wise that your hands shall be
clean, and your paths straight, and your honour unsullied through all
temptations. Wait, and live so that the right to judge, to rebuke, to
avenge, to purify, become yours through your earning of them. Live
nobly, first; and then teach others how to live.

       *       *       *

"So you have brought Fame to Lélis, my English lord?" said Tricotrin,
without ceremony. "That was a good work of yours. She is a comet that
has a strange fancy only to come forth like a corpse-candle, and dance
over men's graves. It is her way. When men will have her out in the noon
of their youth, she kills them; and the painter's bier is set under his
Transfiguration, and the soldier's body is chained to the St. Helena
rock, and the poet's grave is made at Missolonghi. It is always so."

Estmere bowed his head in assent; he was endeavouring to remember where
he had once met this stranger who thus addressed him--where he had once
heard these mellow, ringing, harmonious accents.

"Was it because you were afraid of dying in your prime that you would
never woo Fame then yourself?" asked Lélis, with a smile.

"Oh-hè!" answered Tricotrin, seating himself on a deal box that served
as a table, and whereat he and the artist had eaten many a meal of roast
chestnuts and black coffee; "I never wanted her; she is a weather vane,
never still two moments; she is a spaniel that quits the Plantagenet the
moment the battle goes against him, and fawns on Bolingbroke; she is an
alchemist's crucible, that has every fair and rich thing thrown into it,
but will only yield in return the calcined stones of chagrin and
disappointment; she is a harlot, whose kisses are to be bought, and who
runs after those who brawl the loudest and swagger the finest in the
world's market-places. No! I want nothing of her. My lord here condemned
her as I came in; he said she was the offspring of echoing parrots, of
imitative sheep, of fawning hounds. Who can want the creature of such
progenitors?"

       *       *       *

"There are many kinds of appreciation. The man of science appreciates
when he marvels before the exquisite structure of the sea-shell, the
perfect organism of the flower; but the young girl appreciates, too,
when she holds the shell to her ear for its music, when she kisses the
flower for its fragrance. Appreciation! It is an affair of the reason,
indeed; but it is an affair of the emotions also."

"And you prefer what is born of the latter?"

"Not always; but for my music I do. It speaks in an unknown tongue.
Science may have its alphabet, but it is feeling that translates its
poems. Delaroche, who leaves off his work to listen; Descamps, in whose
eyes I see tears; Ingres, who dreams idyls while I play; a young poet
whose face reflects my thoughts, an old man whose youth I bring back, an
hour of pain that I soothe, an hour of laughter that I give; these are
my recompense. Think you I would exchange them for the gold showers and
the diamond boxes of a Farinelli?"

"Surely not. All I meant was that you might gain a world-wide celebrity
did you choose----"

"Gain a honey-coating that every fly may eat me and every gnat may
sting? I thank you. I have a taste to be at peace, and not to become
food to sate the public famine for a thing to tear."

Estmere smiled; he did not understand the man who thus addressed him,
but he was attracted despite all his strongest prejudices.

"You are right! Under the coat of honey is a shirt of turpentine.
Still--to see so great a gift as yours wasted----"

"Wasted? Because the multitudes have it, such as it is, instead of the
units? Droll arithmetic! I am with you in thinking that minorities
should have a good share of power, for all that is wisest and purest is
ever in a minority, as we know; but I do not see, as you see, that
minorities should command a monopoly--of sweet sounds or of anything
else."

"I speak to the musician, not to the politician," said Estmere, with the
calm, chill contempt of his colder manner: the cold side of his
character was touched, and his sympathies were alienated at once.

Tricotrin, indifferent to the hint as to the rebuff, looked at him
amusedly.

"Oh, I know you well, Lord Estmere; I told you so not long ago, to your
great disgust. You and your Order think no man should ever presume to
touch politics unless his coat be velvet and his rent-roll large, like
yours. But, you see, we of the _école buissonnière_ generally do as we
like; and we get pecking at public questions for the same reason as our
brother birds peck at the hips and the haws--because we have no
granaries as you have. You do not like Socialism? Ah! and yet affect to
follow it."

"I!" Estmere looked at this wayside wit, this wine-house philosopher,
with a regard that asked plainly, "Are you fool or knave?"

"To be sure," answered Tricotrin. "You have chapel and chaplain yonder
at your château, I believe? The Book of the Christians is the very
manual of Socialism: '_You_ read the Gospel, Marat?' they cried. 'To be
sure,' said Marat. 'It is the most republican book in the world, and
sends all the rich people to hell.' If you do not like my politics,
_beau sire_, do not listen to the Revolutionist of Galilee."

       *       *       *

Not rare on this earth is the love that cleaves to the thing it has
cherished through guilt, and through wrong, and through misery. But
rare, indeed, is the love that still lives while its portion is
oblivion, and the thing which it has followed passes away out to a joy
that it cannot share, to a light that it cannot behold.

For this is as the love of a god, which forsakes not, though its
creatures revile, and blaspheme, and deride it.

       *       *       *

Ever and anon the old, dark, eager, noble face was lifted from its
pillow, and the withered lips murmured three words:

"Is she come?"

For Tricotrin had bent over her bed, and had murmured, "I go to seek
her, she is near;" and grand'mère had believed and been comforted, for
she knew that no lie passed his lips. And she was very still and only
the nervous working of the hard, brown, aged hand showed the longing of
her soul.

Life was going out rapidly, as the flame sinks fast in a lamp whose oil
is spent. The strong and vigorous frame, the keen and cheery will, had
warded off death so long and bravely; and now they bent under, all
suddenly, as those hardy trees will bend after a century of wind and
storm--bend but once, and only to break for ever.

The red sun in the west was in its evening glory; and through the open
lattice there were seen in the deep blue of the sky, the bough of a
snow-blossomed pear-tree, the network of the ivy, and the bees humming
among the jasmine flowers. From the distance there came faintly the
musical cries of the boatmen down the river, the voices of the
vine-tenders in the fields, the singing of a throstle on a wild-grape
tendril.

Only, in the little darkened chamber the old peasant lay quite
still--listening, through all the sweet and busy sounds of summer, for a
step that never came.

And little by little all those sounds grew fainter on her ear: the
dulness of death was stealing over all her senses; and all she heard was
the song of the thrush where the bird swayed on the vine, half in, half
out, of the lattice.

But the lips moved still, though no voice came, with the same words: "Is
she come?" and when the lips no more could move, the dark and straining
wistfulness of the eyes asked the question more earnestly, more
terribly, more ceaselessly.

The thrush sang on, and on, and on; but to the prayer of the dying eyes
no answer came.

The red sun sank into the purple mists of cloud; the song of the bird
was ended; the voice of the watching girl murmured, "They will come too
late!"

For, as the sun faded off from the vine in the lattice, and the singing
of the bird grew silent, grand'mère raised herself with her arms
outstretched, and the strength of her youth returned in the hour of
dissolution.

"They never come back!" she cried. "They never come back! nor will she!
One dead in Africa--and one crushed beneath the stone--and one shot on
the barricade. The three went forth together; but not one returned. We
breed them, we nurse them, we foster them; and the world slays them body
and soul, and eats the limbs that lay in our bosoms, and burns up the
souls that we knew so pure. And she went where they went: she is dead
like them."

Her head fell back; her mouth was grey and parched, her eyes had no
longer sight; a shiver ran through the hardy frame that winter storms
and summer droughts had bruised and scorched so long; and a passionless
and immeasurable grief came on the brown, weary, age-worn face.

"All dead!" she murmured in the stillness of the chamber, where the song
of the bird had ceased, and the darkness of night had come.

Then through her lips the last breath quivered in a deep-drawn sigh, and
the brave, patient, unrewarded life passed out for ever.

       *       *       *

"You surely find no debtor such an ingrate, no master such a tyrant, as
the People?"

"Perhaps. But, rather I find it a dog that bullies and tears where it is
feared, but may be made faithful by genuine courage and strict justice
shown to it."

"The experience of the musician, then, must be much more fortunate than
the experience of the statesman."

"Why, yes. It is ungrateful to great men, I grant; but it has the
irritation of its own vague sense that it is but their tool, their
ladder, their grappling-iron, to excuse it. Still--I know well what you
mean; the man who works for mankind works for a taskmaster who makes
bitter every hour of his life only to forget him with the instant of his
death; he is ever rolling the stone of human nature upward toward purer
heights, to see it recoil and rush down into darkness and bloodshed. I
know----"




_A PROVENCE ROSE._


Flowers are like your poets: they give ungrudgingly, and, like all
lavish givers, are seldom recompensed in kind.

We cast all our world of blossom, all our treasure or fragrance, at the
feet of the one we love; and then, having spent ourselves in that too
abundant sacrifice, you cry, "A yellow, faded thing! to the dust-hole
with it!" and root us up violently, and fling us to rot with the refuse
and offal; not remembering the days when our burden of beauty made
sunlight in your darkest places, and brought the odours of a lost
paradise to breathe over your bed of fever.

Well, there is one consolation. Just so likewise do you deal with your
human wonder-flower of genius.

       *       *       *

I sighed at my square open pane in the hot, sulphurous mists of the
street, and tried to see the stars and could not. For, between me and
the one small breadth of sky which alone the innumerable roofs left
visible, a vintner had hung out a huge gilded imperial crown as a sign
on his roof-tree; and the crown, with its sham gold turning black in the
shadow, hung between me and the planets.

I knew that there must be many human souls in a like plight with
myself, with the light of heaven blocked from them by a gilded tyranny,
and yet I sighed, and sighed, and sighed, thinking of the white pure
stars of Provence throbbing in the violet skies.

A rose is hardly wiser than a poet, you see: neither rose nor poet will
be comforted, and be content to dwell in darkness because a crown of
tinsel swings on high.

       *       *       *

Ah! In the lives of you who have wealth and leisure we, the flowers, are
but one thing among many: we have a thousand rivals in your porcelains,
your jewels, your luxuries, your intaglios, your mosaics, all your
treasures of art, all your baubles of fancy. But in the lives of the
poor we are alone: we are all the art, all the treasure, all the grace,
all the beauty of outline, all the purity of hue that they possess:
often we are all their innocence and all their religion too.

Why do you not set yourselves to make us more abundant in those joyless
homes, in those sunless windows?

       *       *       *

For the life of a painter is beautiful when he is still young, and loves
truly, and has a genius in him stronger than calamity, and hears a voice
in which he believes say always in his ear, "Fear nothing. Men must
believe as I do in thee, one day. And meanwhile--we can wait!"

And a painter in Paris, even though he starve on a few sous a day, can
have so much that is lovely and full of picturesque charm in his daily
pursuits: the long, wondrous galleries full of the arts he adores; the
_réalité de l'idéal_ around him in that perfect world; the slow, sweet,
studious hours in the calm wherein all that is great in humanity alone
survives; the trance--half adoration, half aspiration, at once desire
and despair--before the face of the Mona Lisa; then, without, the
streets so glad and so gay in the sweet, living sunshine; the quiver of
green leaves among gilded balconies; the groups at every turn about the
doors; the glow of colour in market-place and peopled square; the quaint
grey piles in old historic ways; the stones, from every one of which
some voice from the imperishable Past cries out; the green and silent
woods, the little leafy villages, the winding waters garden-girt; the
forest heights, with the city gleaming and golden in the plain; all
these are his.

With these--and youth--who shall dare say the painter is not rich--ay,
though his board be empty, and his cup be dry?

I had not loved Paris--I, a little imprisoned rose, caged in a clay pot,
and seeing nothing but the sky-line of the roofs. But I grew to love it,
hearing from René and from Lili of all the poetry and gladness that
Paris made possible in their young and burdened lives, and which could
have been thus possible in no other city of the earth.

City of Pleasure you have called her, and with truth; but why not also
City of the Poor? For what city, like herself, has remembered the poor
in her pleasure, and given to them, no less than to the richest, the
treasure of her laughing sunlight, of her melodious music, of her
gracious hues, of her million flowers, of her shady leaves, of her
divine ideals?




_PIPISTRELLO._


It was a strange, gaunt wilderness of stone, this old villa of the
Marchioni. It would have held hundreds of serving-men. It had as many
chambers as one of the palaces down in Rome; but life is homely and
frugal here, and has few graces. The ways of everyday Italian life in
these grand old places are like nettles and thistles set in an old
majolica vase that has had knights and angels painted on it. You know
what I mean, you who know Italy. Do you remember those pictures of
Vittario Carpacio and of Gentile? They say that is the life our Italy
saw once in her cities and her villas;--that is the life she wants.
Sometimes when you are all alone in these vast deserted places the
ghosts of all that pageantry pass by you, and they seem fitter than the
living people for these courts and halls.

       *       *       *

I had been no saint. I had always been ready for jest or dance or
intrigue with a pretty woman, and sometimes women far above me had cast
their eyes down on the arena as in Spain ladies do in the bull-ring to
pick a lover out thence for his strength: but I had never cared. I had
loved, laughed, and wandered away with the stroller's happy liberty; but
I had never cared. Now all at once the whole world seemed dead; dead,
heaven and earth; and only one woman's two eyes left living in the
universe; living, and looking into my soul and burning it to ashes. Do
you know what I mean? No?--ay, then you know not love.

       *       *       *

Sometimes I think love is the darkest mystery of life: mere desire will
not explain it, nor will the passions or the affections. You pass years
amidst crowds, and know naught of it; then all at once you meet a
stranger's eyes, and never are you free. That is love. Who shall say
whence it comes? It is a bolt from the gods that descends from heaven
and strikes us down into hell. We can do nothing.

       *       *       *

In Italy one wants so little; the air and the light, and a little red
wine, and the warmth of the wind, and a handful of maize or of grapes,
and an old guitar, and a niche to sleep in near a fountain that murmurs
and sings to the mosses and marbles--these are enough in Italy.

       *       *       *

Petty laws breed great crimes. Few rulers, little or big, remember that.

       *       *       *

_L'esprit du clocher_ is derided nowadays. But it may well be doubted
whether the age which derides it will give the world anything one-half
as tender and true in its stead. It is peace because it is content; and
it is a peace which has in it the germ of heroism: menaced, it produces
patriotism--the patriotism whose symbol is Tell.

       *       *       *

The tyrannies of petty law hurt the authority of the State more with the
populace than all the severity of a Draconian code against great
offences. Petty laws may annoy but can never harm the rich, for they can
always evade them or purchase immunity; but petty laws for the poor are
as the horse-fly on the neck and on the eyelids of the horse.

       *       *       *

It was in the month of April; outside the walls and on the banks of
Tiber, still swollen by the floods of winter, one could see the gold of
a million daffodils and the bright crimson and yellow of tulips in the
green corn. The scent of flowers and herbs came into the town and filled
its dusky and narrow ways; the boatmen had green branches fastened to
their masts; in the stillness of evening one heard the song of crickets,
and even a mosquito would come and blow his shrill little trumpet, and
one was willing to say to him "Welcome!" because on his little horn he
blew the glad news, "Summer is here!"




_HELD IN BONDAGE._


"A young man married is a man that's marred." That's a golden rule,
Arthur; take it to heart. Anne Hathaway, I have not a doubt, suggested
it; experience is the sole asbestos, only unluckily one seldom gets it
before one's hands are burnt irrevocably. Shakespeare took to wife the
ignorant, rosy-cheeked Warwickshire peasant girl at _eighteen_! Poor
fellow! I picture him, with all his untried powers, struggling like
new-born Hercules for strength and utterance, and the great germ of
poetry within him, tingeing all the common realities of life with its
rose hue; genius giving him power to see with god-like vision the
"fairies nestling in the cowslip chalices," and the golden gleam of
Cleopatra's sails; to feel the "spiced Indian air" by night, and the
wild working of kings' ambitious lust; to know by intuition, alike the
voices of nature unheard by common ears, and the fierce schemes and
passions of a world from which social position shut him out! I picture
him in his hot, imaginative youth, finding his first love in the
yeoman's daughter at Shottery, strolling with her by the Avon, making
her an "odorous chaplet of sweet summer buds," and dressing her up in
the fond array of a boy's poetic imaginings! Then--when he had married
her, he, with the passionate ideals of Juliets and Violas, Ophelias and
Hermiones in his brain and heart, must have awakened to find that the
voices so sweet to him were dumb to her. The "cinque spotted cowslip
bells" brought only thoughts of wine to her. When he was watching
"certain stars shoot madly from their spheres," she most likely was
grumbling at him for mooning there after curfew bell. When he was
learning Nature's lore in "the fresh cup of the crimson rose," she was
dinning in his ear that Hammet and Judith wanted worsted socks. When he
was listening in fancy to the "sea-maid's song," and weaving thoughts to
which a world still stands reverentially to listen, she was buzzing
behind him, and bidding him go card the wool, and weeping that, in her
girlhood, she had not chosen some rich glover or ale-taster, instead of
idle, useless, wayward Willie Shakespeare. Poor fellow! He did not
write, I would swear, without fellow-feeling, and yearning over souls
similarly shipwrecked, that wise saw, "A young man married is a man
that's marred."




_PASCARÈL._


When a man's eyes meet yours, and his faith trusts you, and his heart
upon a vague impulse is laid bare to you, it always has seemed to me the
basest treachery the world can hold to pass the gold of confidence which
he pours out to you from hand to hand as common coin for common
circulation.

       *       *       *

Circumstance is so odd and so cruel a thing. It is wholly apart from
talent.

Genius will do so little for a man if he do not know how to seize or
seduce opportunity. No doubt, in his youth, Ambrogiò had been shy,
silent, out of his art timid, and in his person ungraceful, and
unlovely. So the world had passed by him turning a deaf ear to his
melodies, and he had let it pass, because he had not that splendid
audacity to grasp it perforce, and hold it until it blessed him, without
which no genius will ever gain the benediction of the Angel of Fame.

Which is a fallen Angel, no doubt; but still, perhaps, the spirit most
worth wrestling with after all; since wrestle we must in this world, if
we do not care to lie down and form a pavement for other men's cars of
triumph, as the Assyrians of old stretched themselves on their faces
before the coming of the chariot of their kings.

       *       *       *

One of the saddest things perhaps in all the sadness of this world is
the frightful loss at which so much of the best and strongest work of a
man's life has to be thrown away at the onset. If you desire a name
amongst men, you must buy the crown of it at such a costly price!

True, the price will in the end be paid back to you, no doubt, when you
are worn out, and what you do is as worthless as the rustling canes that
blow together in autumn by dull river sides: then you scrawl your
signature across your soulless work, and it fetches thrice its weight in
gold.

But though you thus have your turn, and can laugh at your will at the
world that you fool, what can that compensate you for all those dear
dead darlings?--those bright first-fruits, those precious earliest
nestlings of your genius, which had to be sold into bondage for a broken
crust, which drifted away from you never to be found again, which you
know well were a million fold better, fresher, stronger, higher, better
than anything you have begotten since then; and yet in which none could
be found to believe, only because you had not won that magic spell which
lies in--being known?

       *       *       *

When I think of the sweet sigh of the violin melodies through the white
winter silence of Raffaelino's eager, dreamy eyes, misty with the
student's unutterable sadness and delight; of old Ambrogiò, with his
semicircle of children round him, lifting their fresh voices at his
word; of the little robin that came every day upon the waterpipe, and
listened, and thrilled in harmony, and ate joyfully the crumbs which the
old maestro daily spared to it from his scanty meal--when I think of
those hours, it seems to me that they must have been happiness too.

"Could we but know when we are happy!" sighs some poet. As well might
he write, "Could we but set the dewdrop with our diamonds! could we but
stay the rainbow in our skies!"

       *       *       *

Every old Italian city has this awe about it--holds close the past and
moves the living to a curious sense that they are dead and in their
graves are dreaming; for the old cities themselves have beheld so much
perish around them, and yet have kept so firm a hold upon tradition and
upon the supreme beauty of great arts, that those who wander there grow,
as it were, bewildered, and know not which is life and which is death
amongst them.

       *       *       *

The sun was setting.

Over the whole Valdarno there was everywhere a faint ethereal golden
mist that rose from the water and the woods.

The town floated on it as upon a lake; her spires, and domes, and
towers, and palaces bathed at their base in its amber waves, and rising
upward into the rose-hued radiance of the upper air. The mountains that
encircled her took all the varying hues of the sunset on their pale
heights until they flushed to scarlet, glowered to violet, wavered with
flame, and paled to whiteness, as the opal burns and fades. Warmth,
fragrance, silence, loveliness encompassed her; and in the great
stillness the bell of the basilica tolled slowly the evening call to
prayer.

Thus Florence rose before me.

A strange tremor of exceeding joy thrilled through me as I beheld the
reddened shadows of those close-lying roofs, and those marble heights of
towers and of temples. At last my eyes gazed on her! the daughter of
flowers, the mistress of art, the nursing mother of liberty and of
aspiration.

I fell on my knees and thanked God. I pity those who, in such a moment,
have not done likewise.

       *       *       *

There is nothing upon earth, I think, like the smile of Italy as she
awakes when the winter has dozed itself away in the odours of its
oakwood fires.

The whole land seems to laugh.

The springtide of the north is green and beautiful, but it has nothing
of the radiance, the dreamfulness, the ecstasy of spring in the southern
countries. The springtide of the north is pale with the gentle
colourless sweetness of its world of primroses; the springtide of Italy
is rainbow-hued, like the profusion of anemones that laugh with it in
every hue of glory under every ancient wall and beside every hill-fed
stream.

Spring in the north is a child that wakes from dreams of death; spring
in the south is a child that wakes from dreams of love. One is rescued
and welcomed from the grave; but the other comes smiling on a sunbeam
from heaven.

       *       *       *

The landscape that has the olive is spiritual as no landscape can ever
be from which the olive is absent; for where is there spirituality
without some hue of sadness?

But this spiritual loveliness is one for which the human creature that
is set amidst it needs a certain education as for the power of
Euripides, for the dreams of Phædrus, for the strength of Michaelangelo,
for the symphonies of Mozart or Beethoven.

The mind must itself be in a measure spiritualised ere aright it can
receive it.

It is too pure, too impalpable, too nearly divine, to be grasped by
those for whom all beauty centres in strong heats of colour and great
breadths of effect; it floats over the senses like a string of perfect
cadences in music; it has a breath of heaven in it; though on the earth
it is not of the earth; when the world was young, ere men had sinned on
it, and gods forsaken it, it must have had the smile of this light that
lingers here.

       *       *       *

Bad? Good? Pshaw! Those are phrases. No one uses them but fools. You
have seen the monkeys' cage in the beast-garden here. That is the world.
It is not strength, or merit, or talent, or reason that is of any use
there; it is just which monkey has the skill to squeeze to the front and
jabber through the bars, and make his teeth meet in his neighbours'
tails till they shriek and leave him free passage--it is that monkey
which gets all the cakes and the nuts of the folk on a feast-day. The
monkey is not bad; it is only a little quicker and more cunning than the
rest; that is all.

       *       *       *

It is a kind of blindness--poverty. We can only grope through life when
we are poor, hitting and maiming ourselves against every angle.

       *       *       *

Count art by gold, and it fetters the feet it once winged.

       *       *       *

"Is that all you know?" he cried, while his voice rang like a
trumpet-call. "Listen here, then, little lady, and learn better. What is
it to be a player? It is this. A thing despised and rejected on all
sides; a thing that was a century since denied what they call Christian
burial; a thing that is still deemed for a woman disgraceful, and for a
man degrading and emasculate; a thing that is mute as a dunce save when,
parrot-like, it repeats by rote with a mirthless grin or a tearless sob;
a wooden doll, as you say, applauded as a brave puppet in its prime,
hissed at in its first hour of failure or decay; a thing made up of
tinsel and paint, and patchwork, of the tailor's shreds and the barber's
curls of tow--a ridiculous thing to be sure. That is a player. And yet
again--a thing without which laughter and jest were dead in the sad
lives of the populace; a thing that breathes the poet's words of fire so
that the humblest heart is set aflame; a thing that has a magic on its
lips to waken smiles or weeping at its will; a thing which holds a
people silent, breathless, intoxicated with mirth or with awe, as it
chooses; a thing whose grace kings envy, and whose wit great men will
steal; a thing by whose utterance alone the poor can know the fair
follies of a thoughtless hour, and escape for a little space from the
dull prisons of their colourless lives into the sunlit paradise where
genius dwells--_that_ is a player, too!"

       *       *       *

The instrument on which we histrions play is that strange thing, the
human heart. It looks a little matter to strike its chords of laughter
or of sorrow; but, indeed, to do that aright and rouse a melody which
shall leave all who hear it the better and the braver for the hearing,
that may well take a man's lifetime, and, perhaps, may well repay it.

       *       *       *

Oh, cara mia, when one has run about in one's time with a tinker's
tools, and seen the lives of the poor, and the woe of them, and the
wretchedness of it all, and the utter uselessness of everything, and
the horrible, intolerable, unending pain of all the things that breathe,
one comes to think that in this meaningless mystery which men call life
a little laughter and a little love are the only things which save us
all from madness--the madness that would curse God and die.

       *       *       *

It always seems as if that well-spring of poetry and art which arose in
Italy, to feed and fertilise the world when it was half dead and wholly
barren under the tyrannies of the Church and the lusts of Feudalism; it
would always seem, I say, as though that water of life had so saturated
the Italian soil, that the lowliest hut upon its hills and plains will
ever nourish and put forth some flower of fancy.

The people cannot read, but they can rhyme. They cannot reason, but they
can keep perfect rhythm. They cannot write their own names, but written
on their hearts are the names of those who made their country's
greatness. They believe in the virtues of a red rag tied to a stick
amidst their fields, but they treasure tenderly the heroes and the
prophets of an unforgotten time. They are ignorant of all laws of
science or of sound, but when they go home by moonlight through the
maize yonder alight with lùcciole, they will never falsify a note, or
overload a harmony, in their love-songs.

The poetry, the art, in them is sheer instinct; it is not the genius of
isolated accident, but the genius of inalienable heritage.

       *       *       *

Do you ever think of those artist-monks who have strewed Italy with
altar-pieces and missal miniatures till there is not any little lonely
dusky town of hers that is not rich by art? Do you often think of them?
I do.

There must have been a beauty in their lives--a great beauty--though
they missed of much, of more than they ever knew or dreamed of, let us
hope. In visions of the Madonna they grew blind to the meaning of a
woman's smile, and illuminating the golden olive wreath above the heads
of saints they lost the laughter of the children under the homely
olive-trees without.

But they did a noble work in their day; and leisure for meditation is no
mean treasure, though the modern world does not number it amongst its
joys.

One can understand how men born with nervous frames and spiritual
fancies into the world when it was one vast battle-ground, where its
thrones were won by steel and poison, and its religion enforced by torch
and faggot, grew so weary of the never-ending turmoil, and of the
riotous life which was always either a pageant or a slaughter-house,
that it seemed beautiful to them to withdraw themselves into some
peaceful place like this Badià and spend their years in study and in
recommendation of their souls to God, with the green and fruitful fields
before their cloister windows, and no intruders on the summer stillness
as they painted their dreams of a worthier and fairer world except the
blue butterflies that strayed in on a sunbeam, or the gold porsellini
that hummed at the lilies in the Virgin's chalice.

       *       *       *

Florence, where she sits throned amidst her meadows white with Lenten
lilies, Florence is never terrible, Florence is never old. In her
infancy they fed her on the manna of freedom, and that fairest food gave
her eternal youth. In her early years she worshipped ignorantly indeed,
but truly always the day-star of liberty; and it has been with her
always so that the light shed upon her is still as the light of
morning.

Does this sound a fanciful folly? Nay, there is a real truth in it.

The past is so close to you in Florence. You touch it at every step. It
is not the dead past that men bury and then forget. It is an
unquenchable thing; beautiful, and full of lustre, even in the tomb,
like the gold from the sepulchres of the Ætruscan kings that shines on
the breast of some fair living woman, undimmed by the dust and the
length of the ages.

The music of the old greatness thrills through all the commonest things
of life like the grilli's chant through the wooden cages on Ascension
Day; and, like the song of the grilli, its poetry stays in the warmth of
the common hearth for the ears of the little children, and loses nothing
of its melody.

The beauty of the past in Florence is like the beauty of the great
Duomo.

About the Duomo there is stir and strife at all times; crowds come and
go; men buy and sell; lads laugh and fight; piles of fruit blaze gold
and crimson; metal pails clash down on the stones with shrillest
clangour; on the steps boys play at dominoes, and women give their
children food, and merry maskers grin in carnival fooleries; but there
in their midst is the Duomo all unharmed and undegraded, a poem and a
prayer in one, its marbles shining in the upper air, a thing so majestic
in its strength, and yet so human in its tenderness, that nothing can
assail, and nothing equal it.

Other, though not many, cities have histories as noble, treasuries as
vast; but no other city has them living and ever present in her midst,
familiar as household words, and touched by every baby's hand and
peasant's step, as Florence has.

Every line, every rood, every gable, every tower, has some story of the
past present in it. Every tocsin that sounds is a chronicle; every
bridge that unites the two banks of the river unites also the crowds of
the living with the heroism of the dead.

In the winding dusky irregular streets, with the outlines of their logge
and arcades, and the glow of colour that fills their niches and
galleries, the men who "have gone before" walk with you; not as
elsewhere mere gliding shades clad in the pallor of a misty memory, but
present, as in their daily lives, shading their dreamful eyes against
the noonday sun or setting their brave brows against the mountain wind,
laughing and jesting in their manful mirth and speaking as brother to
brother of great gifts to give the world. All this while, though the
past is thus close about you the present is beautiful also, and does not
shock you by discord and unseemliness as it will ever do elsewhere. The
throngs that pass you are the same in likeness as those that brushed
against Dante or Calvacanti; the populace that you move amidst is the
same bold, vivid, fearless, eager people with eyes full of dreams, and
lips braced close for war, which welcomed Vinci and Cimabue and fought
from Montaperto to Solferino.

And as you go through the streets you will surely see at every step some
colour of a fresco on a wall, some quaint curve of a bas-relief on a
lintel, some vista of Romanesque arches in a palace court, some dusky
interior of a smith's forge or a wood-seller's shop, some Renaissance
seal-ring glimmering on a trader's stall, some lovely hues of fruits and
herbs tossed down together in a Tre Cento window, some gigantic mass of
blossoms being borne aloft on men's shoulders for a church festivity of
roses, something at every step that has some beauty or some charm in it,
some graciousness of the ancient time, or some poetry of the present
hour.

The beauty of the past goes with you at every step in Florence. Buy eggs
in the market, and you buy them where Donatello bought those which fell
down in a broken heap before the wonder of the crucifix. Pause in a
narrow bye-street in a crowd and it shall be that Borgo Allegri, which
the people so baptized for love of the old painter and the new-born art.
Stray into a great dark church at evening time, where peasants tell
their beads in the vast marble silence, and you are where the whole city
flocked, weeping, at midnight to look their last upon the face of their
Michael Angelo. Pace up the steps of the palace of the Signorìa and you
tread the stone that felt the feet of him to whom so bitterly was known
"_com' è duro calle, lo scendere è'l salir per l'altrúi scale_." Buy a
knot of March anemoni or April arum lilies, and you may bear them with
you through the same city ward in which the child Ghirlandajo once
played amidst the gold and silver garlands that his father fashioned for
the young heads of the Renaissance. Ask for a shoemaker and you shall
find the cobbler sitting with his board in the same old twisting,
shadowy street way, where the old man Toscanelli drew his charts that
served a fair-haired sailor of Genoa, called Columbus. Toil to fetch a
tinker through the squalor of San Niccolò, and there shall fall on you
the shadow of the bell-tower where the old sacristan saved to the world
the genius of the Night and Day. Glance up to see the hour of the
evening time, and there, sombre and tragical, will loom above you the
walls of the communal palace on which the traitors were painted by the
brush of Sarto, and the tower of Giotto, fair and fresh in its perfect
grace as though angels had builded it in the night just past, "_ond'
ella toglie ancora e terza e nona_," as in the noble and simple days
before she brake the "_cerchia antìca_."

Everywhere there are flowers, and breaks of songs, and rills of
laughter, and wonderful eyes that look as if they too, like their Poets,
had gazed into the heights of heaven and the depths of hell.

And then you will pass out at the gates beyond the city walls, and all
around you there will be a radiance and serenity of light that seems to
throb in its intensity and yet is divinely restful, like the passion and
the peace of love when it has all to adore and nothing to desire.

The water will be broad and gold, and darkened here and there into
shadows of porphyrine amber. Amidst the grey and green of the olive and
acacia foliage there will arise the low pale roofs and flat-topped
towers of innumerable villages.

Everywhere there will be a wonderful width of amethystine hills and
mystical depths of seven-chorded light. Above, masses of rosy cloud will
drift, like rose-leaves leaning on a summer wind. And, like a magic
girdle which has shut her out from all the curse of age and death and
man's oblivion, and given her a youth and loveliness which will endure
so long as the earth itself endures, there will be the circle of the
mountains, purple and white and golden, lying around Florence.

       *       *       *

Amidst all her commerce, her wars, her hard work, her money-making,
Florence was always dominated and spiritualised, at her noisiest and
worst, by a poetic and picturesque imagination.

Florentine life had always an ideal side to it; and an idealism, pure
and lofty, runs through her darkest histories and busiest times like a
thread of gold through a coat of armour and a vest of frieze.

The Florentine was a citizen, a banker, a workman, a carder of wool, a
weaver of silk, indeed; but he was also always a lover, and always a
soldier; that is, always half a poet. He had his Caròccio and his
Ginevra as well as his tools and his sacks of florins. He had his sword
as well as his shuttle. His scarlet giglio was the flower of love no
less than the blazonry of battle on his standard, and the mint stamp of
the commonwealth on his coinage.

Herein lay the secret of the influence of Florence: the secret which
rendered the little city, stretched by her river's side, amongst her
quiet meadows white with arums, a sacred name to all generations of men
for all she dared and all she did.

"She amassed wealth," they say: no doubt she did--and why?

To pour it with both hands to melt in the foundries of Ghiberti--to
bring it in floods to cement the mortar that joined the marbles of
Brunelleschi! She always spent to great ends, and to mighty uses.

When she called a shepherd from his flocks in the green valley to build
for her a bell-tower so that she might hear, night and morning, the call
to the altar, the shepherd built for her in such fashion that the belfry
has been the Pharos of Art for five centuries.

Here is the secret of Florence--supreme aspiration.

The aspiration which gave her citizens force to live in poverty, and
clothe themselves in simplicity, so as to be able to give up their
millions of florins to bequeath miracles in stone and metal and colour
to the Future. The aspiration which so purified her soil, red with
carnage, black with smoke of war, trodden continuously by hurrying feet
of labourers, rioters, mercenaries, and murderers, that from that soil
there could spring, in all its purity and perfection, the
paradise-blossom of the Vita Nuova.

Venice perished for her pride and carnal lust; Rome perished for her
tyrannies and her blood-thirst; but Florence--though many a time nearly
strangled under the heel of the Empire and the hand of the
Church--Florence was never slain utterly either in body or soul;
Florence still crowned herself with flowers even in her throes of agony,
because she kept always within her that love--impersonal, consecrate,
void of greed--which is the purification of the individual life and the
regeneration of the body politic. "We labour for the ideal," said the
Florentines of old, lifting to heaven their red flower de luce--and to
this day Europe bows before what they did and cannot equal it.

"But she had so many great men, so many mighty masters!" I would urge,
whereon Pascarèl would glance on me with his lightest and yet utmost
scorn.

"O wise female thing, who always traces the root to the branch and
deduces the cause from the effect! Did her great men spring up
full-armed like Athene, or was it the pure, elastic atmosphere of her
that made her mere mortals strong as immortals? The supreme success of
modern government is to flatten down all men into one uniform likeness,
so that it is only by most frightful, and often destructive, effort that
any originality can contrive to get loose in its own shape for a
moment's breathing space; but in the Commonwealth of Florence a man,
being born with any genius in him, drew in strength to do and dare
greatly with the very air he breathed."

Moreover, it was not only the great men that made her what she was.

It was, above all, the men who knew they were not great, but yet had the
patience and unselfishness to do their appointed work for her zealously,
and with every possible perfection in the doing of it.

It was not only Orcagna planning the Loggia, but every workman who
chiselled out a piece of its stone, that put all his head and heart into
the doing thereof. It was not only Michaelangelo in his studio, but
every poor painter who taught the mere a, b, c, d of the craft to a
crowd of pupils out of the streets, who did whatsoever came before them
to do mightily and with reverence.

In those days all the servants as well as the sovereigns of art were
penetrated with the sense of her holiness.

It was the mass of patient, intelligent, poetic, and sincere servitors
of art, who, instead of wildly consuming their souls in envy and desire,
cultured their one talent to the uttermost, so that the mediocrity of
that age would have been the excellence of any other.

Not alone from the great workshops of the great masters did the light
shine on the people. From every scaffold where a palace ceiling was
being decorated with its fresco, from every bottega where the children
of the poor learned to grind and to mingle the colours, from every cell
where some solitary monk studied to produce an offering to the glory of
his God, from every nook and corner where the youths gathered in the
streets to see some Nunziata or Ecce Homo lifted to its niche in the
city wall, from every smallest and most hidden home of art--from the
nest under the eaves as well as from the cloud-reaching temples,--there
went out amidst the multitudes an ever-flowing, ever-pellucid stream of
light, from that Aspiration which is in itself Inspiration.

So that even to this day the people of Italy have not forgotten the
supreme excellence of all beauty, but are, by the sheer instinct of
inherited faith, incapable of infidelity to those traditions; so that
the commonest craftsman of them all will sweep his curves and shade his
hues upon a plaster cornice with a perfection that is the despair of the
maestri of other nations.

       *       *       *

The broad plains that have been the battle-ground of so many races and
so many ages were green and peaceful under the primitive husbandry of
the contadini.

Everywhere under the long lines of the yet unbudded vines the seed was
springing, and the trenches of the earth were brimful with brown
bubbling water left from the floods of winter, when Reno and Adda had
broken loose from their beds.

Here and there was some old fortress grey amongst the silver of the
olive orchards; some village with white bleak house-walls and flat roofs
pale and bare against the level fields; or some little long-forgotten
city once a stronghold of war and a palace for princes, now a little
hushed and lonely place, with weed-grown ramparts and gates rusted on
their hinges, and tapestry weavers throwing the shuttle in its deserted
and dismantled ways.

But chiefly it was always the green, fruitful, weary, endless plain
trodden by the bullocks and the goats, and silent, strangely silent, as
though fearful still of its tremendous past.

       *       *       *

The long bright day draws to a close. The west is in a blaze of gold,
against which the ilex and the acacia are black as funeral plumes. The
innumerable scents of fruits and flowers and spices, and tropical seeds,
and sweet essences, that fill the streets at every step from shops and
stalls, and monks' pharmacies, are fanned out in a thousand delicious
odours on the cooling air. The wind has risen, blowing softly from
mountain and from sea across the plains through the pines of Pisa,
across to the oak-forests of green Casentìno.

Whilst the sun still glows in the intense amber of his own dying glory,
away in the tender violet hues of the east the young moon rises.

Rosy clouds drift against the azure of the zenith, and are reflected as
in a mirror in the shallow river waters.

A little white cloud of doves flies homeward against the sky.

All the bells chime for the Ave Maria.

The evening falls.

Wonderful hues, creamy, and golden, and purple, and soft as the colours
of a dove's throat, spread themselves slowly over the sky; the bell
tower rises like a shaft of porcelain clear against the intense azure;
amongst the tall canes by the river the fire-flies sparkle; the shores
are mirrored in the stream with every line and curve, and roof and
cupola, drawn in sharp deep shadow; every lamp glows again thrice its
size in the glass of the current, and the arches of the bridges meet
their own image there; the boats glide down the water that is now white
under the moon, now amber under the lights, now black under the walls,
for ever changing; night draws on, then closes quite.

But it is night as radiant as day, and ethereal as day can never be; on
the hills the cypresses still stand out against the faint gold that
lingers in the west; there is the odour of carnations and of acacias
everywhere.

Noiseless footsteps come and go.

People pass softly in shadow, like a dream.

       *       *       *

You know how St. Michael made the Italian? he is saying to them, and the
clear crystal ring of the sonorous Tuscan reaches to the farthest corner
of the square. Nay?--oh, for shame! Well, then, it was in this fashion;
long, long ago, when the world was but just called from chaos, the
Dominiddio was tired, as you all know, and took his rest on the seventh
day; and four of the saints, George and Denis and Jago and Michael,
stood round him with their wings folded and their swords idle.

So to them the good Lord said: "Look at those odds and ends, that are
all lying about after the earth is set rolling. Gather them up, and make
them into four living nations to people the globe." The saints obeyed
and set to the work.

St. George got a piece of pure gold and a huge lump of lead, and buried
the gold in the lead, so that none ever would guess it was there, and so
sent it rolling and bumping to earth, and called it the English people.

St. Jago got a bladder filled with wind, and put in it the heart of a
fox, and the fang of a wolf, and whilst it puffed and swelled like the
frog that called itself a bull, it was despatched to the world as the
Spaniard.

St. Denis did better than that; he caught a sunbeam flying, and he tied
it with a bright knot of ribbons, and he flashed it on earth as the
people of France; only, alas! he made two mistakes, he gave it no
ballast, and he dyed the ribbons blood-red.

Now St. Michael, marking their errors, caught a sunbeam likewise, and