by Ouida
The people were all sitting in their doorways, or half out in the street, after the manner of Italian dwellers and traders, with little lights burning before some pile of faggots, some stall of chestnuts, some tray of amaretti, some stand of pizzicheria fare, or some image of San Giovanni. They incontinently left their trades and their pastimes and clustered round him in vociferous homage — whom would he sup with! — where would he drink! — did he play to-night beyond the Prato Gate! Beppe and Pippo had been fighting in the Sdrucciolò, he had been wanted badly; — had he heard! — who was that pretty purple and yellow thing he had got with him! — a new dancer! So their stream of questions poured out rapid and mellifluous as olive oil from a tilted flask.
But he shook himself free of them, and leaving the laughing, clinging, delighted crowd as best he might, he took me into the little tavern where they tarried in the town. It was a smaller place, and humbler than the Golden Boar; a great fig-tree climbed over it, just coming into leaf, and on an iron stanchion swung its sign of two crossed halberds, a relic, no doubt, of old Bianchi and Neri strife. But it was clean, and its people worshipped Pascarèl; and their laughter and their welcome, and the colour and pleasantness of the little place made it bright and cheerful in the midst of the dusky old age of grim Oltrarno.
There we dined frugally, as became Italians, whilst the brass stands of the lucernati threw a feeble light over the pretty black head of Brunétta, and the golden folds of my poor Court dress, and the Florentine face of Pascarèl.
It was only a poor little tavern; the chamber we dined in was only parted from the kitchen by an open arch.
We saw the food stewed and fried ere it came to us, and near at hand to us were some smiths and tapestry-workers playing dominoes and drinking innocent bibiti; and yet — I do not know how it might have been in other countries — but in Italy it was not vulgar, was not even common, but was only a homely, picturesque, pretty scene, full of colour, and movement, and mirth; a noble might have shared in it, an artist would have been happy in it They have suffered so much, these people, and yet through all they have kept their hold on so much; for they have kept the smile on their eyes and they have kept the grace in their limbs, and they have kept the poetry in their hearts.
When our meal was over, the clocks chimed the half-hour after six. Pascarèl rose, and we went out into the clear and cold evening, where the young moon was rising above the immense dark masses of the city buildings.
“You play to-night, caro mio?” cried the smiths and the weavers, and they flung their dominoes in a heap, and rose and followed us, talking and laughing with him.
I gathered from their talk that it was his habit to stroll through the country, taking the large towns and the little as they came, sometimes even pausing in the smallest villages, and setting up for himself a little theatre of canvas and wood, in the midst of any breezy pasture on the plain or sheltered nook upon the hills that took his errant fancy.
Brunótta and he and the two lads were all the little company which wandered as it would, subject to no dictation except that impulse of the moment, which was always law to Pascarèl. By the enthusiasm displayed to him, he seemed to have a strange power to charm, or, at any rate, to amuse the people; and as I listened, the seduction of this nomadic, changeful, careless, adventurous life bewitched me, as it has bewitched so many in their youth.
From their discourse and the confidences of Brunótta I gathered that Pascarèl was always a bohemian, often a beggar; he led an idle, roving life, and preferred it to any other.
His stage had often been any plank across a cart or any board in a fair booth that might offer to him; he wrote the pieces he played that they might serve for his little troop, of which the dogs and the parrot were the stars; he rarely knew one night where he would lay his head another; he often ate his supper at a trattoria, trusting to his skill that same evening to pay off the score; when he made money, as sometimes happened — for he was popular everywhere, except with the directors of theatres — he spent it royally in a mingling of revelry and charity that left him as poor as ever on the morrow.
He was a stroller and a vagabond, so far as social status went, an idle rogue, and a dissolute; but at his heart he was a great artist; and in many a little village, and township, and country fair, and wayside tavern the people had found it out, and the cry of “Pascarèl” brought men and maidens, old women and young children, poor students and day-labourers, in a great eager crowd round any place where his changeful face, with its speaking eyes and its flexile lips, laughed out its mirth upon them.
“He studies nothing; he outrages all traditions; he violates every precedent and canon,” said the directors whom he quarrelled with.
The people did not care for that; they only knew that Pascarèl, with a dog for his sole supporter, and a rag of carpet or a broken bough for all his scenery, could make them laugh or cry, hate or love, be miserable or be in ecstasy, whichever he chose in the irresistible dominance of genius.
At a stone’s throw from the Cascine woods was an open space; the moon was already shining clearly upon it; a large tent, braced with timbers, was set up in the centre of the place; the canvas was fluttering in the cool evening breeze.
“There is my theatre, donzella,” said Pascarèl “Oh, your Burattini have finer abodes; I know that When one only hangs on wires and has wooden legs, one must have a fine house, or who will come and look at one? But an artist, if he be worth his salt, can make his temple in the minds of his audience, if he have only the roof of a bam over his head and theirs.”
These were not the golden showers and Easter lilies of Lillo! and a little contempt for this nomadic drama rose up in me.
It stood on a breadth of meadow land outside the Prato Gate, with the shadow of the mountain sides behind it, and around it the scents of growing grasses from the fields that had been sown for hay.
The people were trooping to it eagerly; townsfolk of all trades and crafts, cobblers, tinkers, smiths, alabaster workers, mosaic workers, conscripts, carabineers, market women, mule drivers, heaven knows what not; and in from the villages of the Val de Grève there were coming in the opposite direction many country women who plaited their straw as they walked, and contadini who had stuck a flower behind their ear as evening dress.
It was a pretty little wooden house, light and cleverly put together; sometimes its walls were open to the sky like the old Basiliche of the Latins, sometimes its canvas roof fluttered over spectators as close packed and as eager as ever the canvas roof of the Coliseum shaded.
It had the flag of Florence with the red lily flying merrily above it, and above its entrance place was painted in gay letters the words “Dell’ Arte.”
I asked Pascarèl what the name meant.
“Oh, I broke a flask of wine against it, and named it so ages ago,” he answered me. “Why? Because the first wooden home of Pulcinello and his brethren was called so when it rolled one fine Carnival day into Venice.
“A presumptuous name! Oh, I don’t see that We are all the arts in one, if we are worth anything at all.
“And besides, when they grew up in Italy, all that joyous band, — Arlecchino in Bergamo, Stenterello in Florence, Pulcinello in Naples, Pantaleone in Venice, Dulcamara in Bologna, Beltramo in Milan, Brighella in Brescia, masked their mirthful visages and ran together and jumped on that travelling stage before the world, and what a force they were for the world, those impudent mimesi “‘Only Pantomimi?’ When they joined hands with one another and rolled their wandering house before St Mark’s they were only players indeed; but their laughter blew out the fires of the Inquisition, their fools’ caps made the papal tiara look but paper toy, their wooden swords struck to earth the steel of the nobles, their arrows of epigram, feathered from goose and from falcon, slew flying the many-winged dragon of Superstition.
“They were old as the old Latin land, indeed.
“They had mouldered for ages in Etruscan cities, with the dust of uncounted centuries upon them, and
been only led out in Carnival times, pale voiceless frail ghosts of dead powers, whose very meaning the people had long forgotten. But the trumpet call of the Renaissance woke them from their Rip Van Winkle sleep.
“They got up, young again, and keen for every frolic — Barbarossas of sock and buskin, whose helmets were caps and bells, breaking the magic spell of their slumber to burst upon men afresh; buoyant incarnations of the new-born scorn for tradition, of the nascent revolts of democracy, with which the air was rife.
‘“Only Pantomimi?’ Oh altro!
“The world when it reckons its saviours should rate high all it owed to the Pantomimi, — the privileged Pantomimi — who first dared take licence to say in their quips and cranks, in their capers and jests, what had sent all speakers before them to the rack and the faggots.
“Who think of that when they hear the shrill squeak of Pulcinello in the dark bye-streets of northern towns, or see lean Pantaleone slip and tumble through the transformation scene of some gorgeous theatre?
“Not one in a million.
“Yet it is true for all that Free speech was first due to the Pantomimi. A proud boast that. They hymn Tell and chant Savonarola and glorify the Gracchi, but I doubt if any of the gods in the world’s Pantheon or the other world’s Valhalla did so much for freedom as those merry mimes that the children scamper after upon every holyday.
“And we players are all their sons and their successors; and so I baptize my house after them ‘Dell’
Arte.’ Why not? If we be not artist we have no business to profane a stage at all.”
And therewith he bade me adieu, and ran in his room to dress.
We entered the booth — for in truth it was hardly more — as the Florentine clocks tolled the quarter before seven. The people were already gathering thickly in the meadow, and he could only break free of their vociferous welcome by reminding them that if they kept him there without, he could not play within; a sober fact which they recognized at last, though with some reluctance.
Pascarèl drew me to a place where I could see both actors and audience, unseen by the latter; the portion of the tent where the stage was made was divided from the public part of it by a curtain; behind this I was stationed.
They all left me and disappeared; Toccò ran round to light the oil wicks which were to illumine the performance. In an incredibly short space, so brief that it seemed to me Pascarèl must first have whisked a sorcerer’s wand to change them all, Brunótta in short skirts of tinsel, and white and rose, and Cocomero in the vari-coloured dress of Arlecchino, and the dogs in quaint little brilliant coats — Toto preeminent by cap and plume — all bounded pell mell on to the boards together.
The curtain swung aside, the violin of Toccò thrummed a gay melody, whilst a drum, ingeniously beaten by his foot, rolled now and then its deeper melody.
They commenced one of those pretty and unintelligible dumb dramas of gesture, which are so popular in Italy, and hold the stage longer than opera, or tragedy, or comedy of voice, whether in their grander form of ballet at the Pergola or the Fenice, or in their humblest species such as that in which Brunétta and Cocomero now danced.
Brunétta danced with all the agility and vivacity of a girl who had spun round in the fairs and feste from the earliest days of her existence; Cocomero was a comic and untiring harlequin, and the quaint tricks and astounding intelligence of Maestro Toto were beyond all praise and would baffle all description.
The spectacle was received with glee and good humour by an audience which was by far too large for the limits of the theatre, and stretched far out into the open air in a sea of out-stretched throats and eager faces, in a curious chiaroscuro from the dark without and the oil lamps within, whilst they hummed the melody of the dance tunes all the way through themselves — a detestable mode of testifying musical delight, from which the most patrician musical audiences of Italy unhappily are not free.
The curtain fell, Toto as primo-uomo was thrice summoned and received a shower of sweet cakes and sugar, plaudits which were to his comprehension.
Then loud and imperious rose the cry:
“Pascarèl! Pascarèl! Il Pascarello!”
Pascarèl soon obeyed the summons, amidst the tumult of delight that greeted him from the throngs of coppersmiths, and carpet-weavers, and craftsmen of all kinds, and students, and beggars, and idlers of every sort who made up his motley clientela.
The little piece he played in was called “Le miraculose fortune e gli amori pietosissimi del Calzolajo e del Conte.”
It had been written by himself, to suit the resources of his scanty company; a thing of the slightest and the simplest, in which he played himself the two chief parts, those of the cobbler and the count It was only a trifle; but it abounded in wit; it sparkled with irony, it contained epigrams worthy of the palmy days of Pasquin, and every now and then, amidst the rippling exuberance of its play of nonsense, it deepened and had an exquisite pathos hidden in it; it was like a blue forget-me-not that the rains have just dashed where it lifts its blue eyes in the sunshine.
With the utmost ingenuity, the play was constructed so that the old man and the young, the cobbler and the noble, whilst rivals throughout for the love of a contadina, never met one another in all the accidents of their fortunes.
His transitions from age to youth, from youth to age, were so sudden, so marvellous, so perfect, each in its kind, that none who had not known him could have told which years were the real with him or which the assumed.
Other actors in their youth have counterfeited as wonderfully the age of Richelieu or of Louis XI.; but they have been elaborately prepared by costume and by paint, and have sustained the one part unbroken; but here Pascarèl changed from youth to age with scarce breathing time between the phases, and made his personification a vivid living fact by no aid but that of his own consummate powers.
It would have been impossible to say with which impersonation the sympathies of the public were the stronger; each won them in its turn.
The youth of the young noble was so charming, so full of happy insolence, of generous impulse, of audacious ease, of irresistible assurance, of gay, good-tempered grace.
The age of the old cobbler was so full of sad genuine irony, of wistful loneliness, of pathetic fear of mockery, of trembling tenderness that scarcely dared be uttered; no slippered pantaloon, no palsied dotard, shrunken target for the gibes of fools, but Age — faithful, venerable, true to its own self-respect; but Age — unutterably sad because — alone.
It was a trifle, unaided by any scenic deception, or any delusion for the senses; but it was perfect as only the exquisite delicacy, the unerring truthfulness, and the supreme histrionic instincts of a great genius could make it; and as such it swept away to itself, with the rush of the storm wind, all the pity and all the passion that throbbed in the countless hearts of its audience.
When it was over, and the “Fuori! fuori! fuori!” of the enraptured people had brought him for the last time before their hurricane of applause, he came to me where I stood.
“Well?” he said, with the smile in his eyes.
I trembled before him, burning, breathless, entranced, amazed; so wondrous did his power seem to me, I could have cast myself at his feet and worshipped him for the divine force of the Art that was in him.
“Well?” he said again; but his voice shook a little, though it had a laugh in it “Well? — say — is it better than the Burattini?”
I could not answer him; but I burst into tears.
When we left the wooden Arte that night where it stood, with its flag dropping in the quiet air, and its gay scroll facing the line of the Apennines, we were escorted in royal honour homeward by a half hundred or so of sturdy popolani, singing, laughing, shouting, dancing in universal acclaim and fellowship, as only Italians can sing, and laugh, and shout, and dance, when the moon is high, and a mandoline is making tinkling melody before their steps.
It was late, and a beautiful, lustrous, cold night, full of the
smell of the young spring, as the breeze blew in from over the budding contado.
We passed through the Porta al Prato, and glanced up at white Fiesole, and went on under the limes of the piazzone and along the edge of the glancing water.
The music of the mandoline drew the steps of the loiterers, of whom there were many about in those luminous, tranquil night-hours.
A youth with a guitar slung across him joined us, and a man with a violin ran out from under an archway, and caught the strains, and skipped before us in many grotesque capers; some people above, on a lighted balcony, threw some violets and daffodils at us as we went by; the moonlight lay broad and white upon the river; all the towers and spires rose clear against the stars; the music passed on, glad as the singing of Pan.
So we went homeward through Florence.
CHAPTER II.
The Rose and the Florins.
WHEN we reached the little tavern, our escort utterly refused to let him enter it They claimed Pascarèl as theirs by every human right, and insisted on bearing him off amidst them to supper to a noted wine-house, where the alabaster workers that night were about to hold high revelry. Pascarèl laughed and consented to go with them, but before he turned away, he swept the earth with his sombrero in a good-night to me, and murmured some parting counsel in the ear of his sister.
Then off he went; the rapture of his comrades no longer restrained by the presence of the “donzella,” at whom they had glanced as a new and not altogether welcome addition to his little party.
They lifted him fairly off the ground and bore him along aloft on the shoulders and backs of half a dozen sturdy craftsmen of Florence, the mandoline twanging cheerily before them, and all their far-reaching voices blending together.
It was not the white lilies of Lillo; but it was a homage full as genuine in its way.
I stood in the doorway and watched them pass down the sombre, darkling ancient street; the moon shone whitely here and there upon their path, the grim arcades and the mighty walls were upon either side; above, between the roofs, was the dark blue sky of night Their riotous glee died softly in the distance as they turned out of sight by the base of the old Guadagni Palace, and thè last echo I heard was the shout of their homage, “Viva il Pascarello! Pascarèl! Pascarèl!”