by Ouida
My music-master was an old man, by name Ambrogiô Rufi; he was most wretchedly poor; he lived in a little square den in the roof of a tumble-down house; he was very dirty, very shabby, very ugly; the world had never heard of him, and he got a bare living as first violinist at the theatre. In his youth he had created things that the world would never listen to; and he had become instead the interpreter of other men’s creations.
He was inexorable as a master; but he was also admirable. His severity had an enthusiasm, and even a tenderness, underlying it which made it endurable. One knew that he was only harsh, because he would allow of nothing slight, or mean, or slurred, to be put forward in the guise of his art. Himself, he was a great master; — yes; — though he had never made a name, and had barely wherewithal to get a daily meal. I have seen the sums of a princely fortune, and the homage of a fastidious society, poured out upon artists who were not fit to hold a candle to my old master for him to read his score.
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, Ambrogiô 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 chariots of their kings.
Ambrogiô had a few pupils — not many. Most of them were young choristers of promise, whom he had sought on hearing them at some office in the S. Zanone; and whom he taught for pure devotion to his art, as Fortunato had taught me to dance. His method of instruction was wonderful, strict, and inexorable, as I have said, and giving infinite labour, infinite repetition to the scholar, but it was of an unapproachable excellence, and sifted the grain from the chaff amongst his aspirants with unerring accuracy.
There was — there is — an academy of music in the old city of Catullus, but such was the blindness of its direction, or such the rabid envy of its professors, that no effort was ever made to secure for it the inestimable value of Ambrogiô’s lessons. Mariuccia’s payments for myself were, I verily believe, almost all the remuneration that he ever received. All the rest were so poor; the children of coppersmiths, and coopers, and vine-dressers, and pottery-painters; boys and girls who had fair voices, and who sang in the choirs of the churches.
We used to stand in a semi-circle before him, a dozen children or so, and sing the scale simply hour by hour. You had to be far advanced before he would permit you to leave that first arduous exercise.
It used to be bitterly cold in winter in that little den of his, with its cold stove and its brick floor; and stiflingly hot in summer there amongst the red and grey roofs, the cupolas, and the towers. There was nothing picturesque or poetic in it; it was all hard work in a wretched little place before an ugly old man who flashed fury upon you through his spectacles if you dared to torture his ear with a false note. And yet we all went to him faithfully; and seldom or never rebelled.
There were in him the sincerity and the excellence which impress themselves upon children long before those children are old enough to reason on what they are awed by and admire. I tormented my other masters sadly enough: but I am thankful to think that I never added to the many pains and the infinite disappointments of Ambrogiô’s life.
I was a favoured pupil with him — I and Raffael Baptista.
Raffaello was the son of a coppersmith in the town, who lived hard by the cathedral, in a quaint old vaulted place filled with coppers of all sorts and sizes, which used to blaze quite red in the sunset It was the workshop as well as the dwelling-house, and was full all day of the clash of hammers on metal as well as the discordant noises of the church bells and the people’s cries.
Yet amidst all that clangour and uproar, the child had been born with the most subtle and perfect instinct for melody. One would have thought that all that clanging and clashing of copper and iron all the livelong day, from the time he had cried in his cradle, would have deadened his ears to all perceptions of harmony; but it seemed as though it had produced the contrary effect, for he detected an incorrect note, and shivered under it as quickly and as painfully as the Maestro himself.
Raffaelino as we called him, when I met him first at our music lessons, was just eight years old when I was ten; his mother came of a Venetian race, and he had the Venetian look and accent; he was a small, slender lad, with eyes full of dreams and a mouth full of smiles; his fair hair clustered thickly round his head; he had dark, straight brows and a curious half-shy vivacity of expression that changed twenty times in an hour. He was the most picturesque figure in all our little group, with his brown legs bare, and his shirt loose about his throat, and a scarlet woollen sash girt in Venice fashion round his loins.
It was not in song that the little Baptista excelled. His voice was pure and true, but of no great compass. It was for the violin that he showed the extraordinary talent which won old Ambrogiô’s heart to him, and one day when he had played on his own little viol a charming little capriccio full of life and grace, and I asked him whence it came, he hung his head and coloured, and confessed at last that it was of his own invention.
He implored me not to tell the Maestro; he was quite sure that Ambrogiô would look up with that frown through his terrible spectacles which we all dreaded, and bid him in tones of thunder go back to his scale practice, and not tempt the wrath of dead Cimarosa and Palestrina, and all the immortal brotherhood with such impious audacities. I thought differently; but Raffael had a right to his own secret, so I did not betray him. Which was unfeminine I suppose; but the only two women I had ever had aught to do with had been the padrona and Mariuccia, both simple people as the world went I liked Raffaello the best of all the children in Verona; he had an infinite tenderness for his mother, who was blind and whom he tended with untiring patience; and he had a profound homage for myself, — the donzella as he called me, — and would never meet me without some spray of roses, some bough of lemon, some knot of violets, or some cluster of chesnuts, for which he had rifled the hedges or had begged some neighbour.
In my way I was very proud; Mariuccia continually reproached me for it; but I was not the least beset by that sort of pride, which would have made me regret Raffael Baptista’s companionship, because his father was a coppersmith, and he ran about the streets without shoes. I had lived too much amongst the people; and I had too much of the bohemian in me for that.
Indeed I enjoyed vastly, when I left Ambrogiô’s attic, drawing my little velvet hood over my curls and running home hand in hand with Raffaelino, past the dancing hall, at the hour when Fortunato’s pupils, of whom I no longer needed to be one, were coming forth from his lessons.
The little feminine respectabilities, — my born foes, — glorious in starch and ribbons, and coral and silk stockings, would recognise me by a solemn stare and a general drawing together of themselves for mutual protection, and I would laugh in their faces and flash by them holding ‘Ino’s hand the tighter, and shaking the rose petals all over my little weather-stained purples, which like all purples fared ill when brought down into the streets.
Mariuccia never objected to my complaisance for Raffael. There was much of the old genuine, sturdy Florentine democrat in her. His mother, too, was a gossip of her own.
“It is a rare good lad,” she used to say; and that he ran the streets with bare feet was no social sin in her eyes.
At such rare times as Mariuccia allowed herself a spare hour from her incessant baking and washing, spinning and sewing, she used to cross
the piazza to the coppersmith’s workshop, under the sign of the Spiked Mace, and drink a cup of black coffee with the blind woman, not losing her time, but whilst she gossipped going on with her weaving of rough linen garments for us from the little distaff which in true old Tuscan fashion was seldom absent from her, being hung round the waist with its hank of flax in readiness for any unfilled moment of her rare leisure.
I used to go with her, and Raffaelino and I used to sit on the threshold and play dominoes on the bottom of some big copper turned downwards to serve us as a table; or at other times he would bring out from its corner his little old quattrocentiste viol, which he had found amongst some lumber, and we would play and sing stornelli whilst the white moonlight was flooding the pavement, and the marbles of the buildings turned to silver in its lustre: Mariuccia beating time with her spindle, and his blind mother nodding her head to the measures.
One of the young painters then in Verona made a little picture of Raffael and of me, playing and singing thus in the moonlight, with the background of the huge arched doors and the innumerable coppers with just the glimmer of a brass oil-lamp behind us where Mariuccia sat and span.
It was a pretty little bit of genre; he was delighted to sell it for twelve gulden notes to a German Jew dealer. I have seen it since in a great collector’s galleries; and the holder of it told me he had given for it some fifteen thousand francs.
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 have 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?
I was great friends with all those youthful artists who lived in nooks and corners all over the town, and who got their living by copying or by counterfeiting the old masters.
From the time that I had been old enough to climb up their steep stairs unaided, they had made a pet of me always, and often a model. I liked nothing better than to be perched on a table in any one of their big barns, arrayed in peacock’s plumes, or old laces, or ancient brocades, or any other of the picturesque useless dusty lumber: and I think the dealers and buyers in the old town must have got very tired of my dark-eyed, golden fringed little face, which these students were wont to use for every allegory or childish subject that was ordered of them.
But painters, if one chance to please them at all, always see so many types in one’s face, all more or less contradictory of each other, that one comes to the irresistible conclusion that it must after all only be typical of the poor human nature which makes us all akin, — when it does not set us all at strife.
They were very good to me all those poor lads; though they quarrelled often enough amongst themselves, and not seldom got into trouble for fierce wrangle with the invader. They all of them lived high up in the air, amongst the open rafters of the unceiled roofs; with wondrous lights streaming in through the vast bare garrets and magnificent views of limitless horizons, southward to the plains and northward to the mountains.
They used to be very good to me. They would dance with me unweariedly at the open air balls; they would take me to laugh my heart out over the dear delicious rheumatic burattini; they would play me all sorts of sweet little mad canzoni, rippling all over with a very phrenzy of mirth; and when I sat to them they would run out at noonday down six pairs of stairs into the street to fetch me a noonday meal of coffee, simmering in its brass pipkin, and little patties crisp in their white papers. I fear they must often have spent on me the only coins they had for their own dinners, for they lived on about three soldi a day, two of which would go for the theatre and the nightly smoke at their clubs.
To my coming and going with them, Mariuccia having once satisfied herself that they were honest lads, offered seldom any opposition. The Italians are not a people who think evil of every trifle, and Mariuccia had a good deal in her of the stanch, uncompromising republicanism of old Florence.
We amused ourselves; that seemed to Mariuccia the right and proper thing for childhood and youth; and moreover, as she used to say, with a laugh and a frown together, the “signorina is proud enough for six; how she queens it over them, the little imperious thing.”
No doubt a nurse duly reared to a sense of her duties would have thought the judgment of heaven would have fallen on her had she allowed a little “illustrissima” of ten years old to clamber up into the roof of houses to sing stornelli amongst paints and pots, and cans and lumber, with a circle of bearded bohemians, or clamber down again in company with some stout-limbed peasant in gold ear-rings and scarlet kirtle, with a grand head like the Donatello Judith’s, and a profession which was frankly and undesignedly that of a model. But the songs had never a line in them for which I could have been the worse, and the model was a good gentle soul who had babies at home that she loved, and whose only care was to get broth and polenta enough for them. And dear old Mariuccia was too straight and simple a soul to be on the watch for evil; besides, as she sometimes mumbled to herself as she unlaced her bodice at night before coming to her small straw bed in my chamber, she thought it might be well if I should take to the people altogether, and be happy and marry amidst them in due time, for of a surety money there would be none for me, and my father’s people made no sign.
But when I heard her breathe these wishes for me, she standing over me perhaps with her dull oil lamp and fancying me asleep, I used to laugh her to scorn in silence under the rough hempen sheet.
“Never, never, never!” I used to say in my heart Mariuccia used to close her soliloquies by kneeling down to a picture of the Mother of Many Sorrows, and praying to her for my future; but I, silent beneath the sheets, used impiously to think, “what use is it to be handsome if one cannot do for oneself without the Madonna?”
The Madonna was all very well no doubt, for these poor lean old folks who had not a friend in the world, or those pale foolish lovesick girls who could not keep their lovers, but could only kneel down and pray for them in the chapels; it was very well to have a Madonna, no doubt, when one was ugly or old, and when with one’s life all was finished: but for me! — there was a little triangular mirror hung in the corner of my room to which I am afraid I said many more orisons than I ever offered to Mary.
I loved the people: who would not in Italy? — the dear, graceful, sunny-natured people, whose very selfishness is more engaging than other nations’ virtues.
Where else but in Italy, when you give a franc for an armful of roses will the seller cast to you in free gift of pure good will his choicest magnolia flower?
Where else will the old porter to whom you offer two sous for his trouble in hobbling up and down the stairs for you, limp off to his snuggery and bring you thence a bough from his lemon tree with a courtesy and a smile that courtiers might envy?
Where else will the facchino who has toiled after you on a summer’s day with a heavy load, put his hands behind his back and shake his curly head, and steadily refuse reward, crying: —
“No, no, no! it is pleasure enough just to see the signora!”
Where else, if you pause at a little music shop in a bye street, will the master of the shop come
out and hum you the songs that you seek harmoniously in a mezza-voce, whilst your coachman turns round to correct a change to the minor, and the baker-boy pauses to join in the refrain, and a girl, mending her shoe at a window, chaunts her share in the measure, and every mortal leaves off his or her occupation to loiter out and join the chorus with sweet singing rhythm, till the whole narrow street is filled with the melody?
Where else, indeed?
True, if you fail to buy roses next day, the seller may petulantly wish you an accidente. True, the porter next week may keep you languishing for your letters while he gossips over your affairs in the street, and allots you more lovers than there are days in the year. True, the facchino may expect you to nod and smile and be buon amico with him all the rest of your life. True, the music-seller may feel not the smallest scruple in giving you imperfect copies at six times their due value.
But all the same how genuine were the grace and the courtesy and the vivacity and the kindliness! how genuine they will be again a million times over! how they smooth and illumine the rough and dark pathways of life! how easy they render the cordial intercourse between far-sundered classes! how pleasantly they make melody amidst our rude human nature, like the singing flower-sown brooks amidst the hillside stones!
“Italians cheat one as much as other nations do,” said a shrewd Frenchman to me, the other day. “Oh, yes, no doubt; some say they cheat one a little more. But then they alone know how to do it amiably; they alone save one’s self-respect”
Such was his verdict (a very superficial one, for, except Stendahl, where is the Frenchman who ever could understand the Italian?); but myself I would go farther than he did.
I would much sooner say, and surely more justly, that the Italian, to the fine subtleties of civilisation and the keen astuteness of his natural intelligence, unites a rare simplicity and a joyous frankness which he alone of all people has retained amidst the artifice of modern life.