by Ouida
“A man, be he bramble or vine, likes to grow in the open air in his own fashion; but a woman, be she flower or weed, always thinks she would be better under glass. When she gets the glass she breaks it — generally; but till she gets it she pines.
“As for my art, the art of the stage needs much study, though, I dare say, to you, as to all lookers on, nothing seems easier than to rattle through a part.
“The actor must be born, like the poet, the painter, the sculptor, no doubt; but also, like them, he must be made perfect by study. Gesture, glance, feeling, passion — all these come by nature: but accent, knowledge, oratory, effect — all these are the mechanical parts of the whole, which only long application will acquire.
“To the art of the stage, as to every other art, there are two sides: the truth of it, which comes by inspiration — that is, by instincts subtler, deeper, and stronger than those of most minds — and the artifice of it, in which it must clothe itself to get understood by the people.
“It is this latter which must be learnt; it is the leathern harness in which the horses of the sun must ran when they come down to race upon earth.
“Do I talk nonsense? Never mind, if you know what I mean.”
I think my face showed him I knew, for he went on without pausing for my reply.
“We Italians have always needed less of this harness than men of other nations. The French and the Italians are the only great actors that the world ever sees. The northern races cannot act, just as they cannot paint “After all, both acting and painting are a matter of colour, and the northern peoples have no feeling for colour, no sense of it Perhaps because it is not about them in their daily lives, nor visible in their landscapes. They are great in very much, but they are not great in art.
“The French are great, but they are three-parts artifice; it is a very perfect study, but it is a study always. With us we do hold closely that ars est celare artem; and we are infinitely more natural than the French are upon the stage. This is national in us, no doubt; we are always ourselves at home and abroad, and we concern ourselves very little as to what other people may think of us. We carry this happy immunity on to the stage with us, and the result is, that on the stage Italians are without rivals.
“But, with all this, it is not the happy-go-lucky hit-or-miss sort of thing that you may fancy it. No art can be good unless into it be brought something of all other arts.
“A man may be a passable actor if Nature has given him the trick of it; but he will not be a great one unless he study the literature of his own and other nations, unless he know something of the intricacies of colour and of melody — above all, unless he can probe and analyse human nature, alike in its health and in its disease.
“To be a great artist one must be a student, and a sincere and humble one, at the foot of every greatness — ay, and every weakness — which has preceded us.
“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.”
He paused, while a dreamy thoughtfulness cast its shadow over his features; he had been speaking rather to himself than to me, I saw. I thought of what Brunétta had said of him, that he had been a great student of many sciences once, away there in old Pisa.
And yet he had no ambition: it seemed to me very strange.
“You are a great artist, surely,” I said’, slowly. “And yet — yet you play only for the people.”
He looked up with the quick, contemptuous flash of his eloquent eyes.
“Only for the people! Altro! did not Sperone and all the critics at his heels pronounce Ariosto only fit for the vulgar multitude? and was not Dante himself called the laureate of the cobblers and the bakers?
“And does not Sacchetti record that the great man took the trouble to quarrel with an ass driver and a blacksmith because they recited his verses badly?
“If he had not written ‘only for the people,’ we might never have got beyond the purisms of Virgilio, and the Ciceronian imitations of Bembo.
“Dante now-a-days may have become the poet of the scholars and the sages,.but in his own times he seemed to the sciolists a most terribly low fellow for using his mother tongue; and he was most essentially the poet of the vulgar — of the vulgare eloquio, of the vulgare illustre; and pray what does the ‘Commedia’ mean if not a canto villereccio, a song for the rustics? Will you tell me that?
“Only for the people! Ah, that is the error. Only! how like a woman that is! Any trash will do for the people; that is the modern notion; vile roulades in music, tawdry crudities, in painting, cheap balderdash in print — all that will do for the people. So they say now-a-days.
“Was the bell tower yonder set in a ducal garden or in a public place? Was Cimabue’s masterpiece veiled in a palace or borne aloft through the throngs of the streets?
“I am a Florentine, donzella; and I have enough of the blood of my fathers in me to know that the higher and truer the art, the more surely should it belong to the people.
“It is the people that make your nation great or vile in the sight of the universe. Shall you nourish them, then, on the garbage of ribald feebleness, or on the pure strong meats of the mind? As you feed them, so will be their substance and sinew; as you graft them, so will be the fruit that they bear.
“How would it have been with Florence if she had not perpetually borne that vital truth even as the very marrow of her bones?
“Her great men gave their greatest — not to the empire, not to the pope, not to princes only, whether temporal or spiritual, but into the very midst of the populace, into the very hands and hearts of the people, so that through the blackest ages of oppression and superstition, through the deadliest losses of liberty and of peace, she was still as a shining light in the face of the nations, and still held fast, to bequeath them to others, the unquenchable fires of freedom and art,”
The rapid words coursed like fire off his lips in passionate enthusiasm; then, as his habit was, he laughed at his own emotions.
“Forgive my vehemence, cara mia,” he said, as he lit another spagnoletto. “As I told you, I come of Florentine race.”
“What were your people?” I asked him, expecting from him any one of the great names of the great Republic.
“My father was a tinker,” he said brusquely, but with the shadow of a laugh about his mouth.
“A tinker! Impossible!”
He laughed outright at the accent of my voice.
“Not impossible at all. An Italian tinker, mind you; that is something very different to a tinker anywhere else. You know us; we are never vulgar.”
“But a tinker!” I murmured, in unconquerable disappointment Pascarèl laughed on, radiantly and inextinguishably, and busied himself with his little paper roll of tobacco.
“That is why Brunétta cannot read, I suppose?” I said, after a pause, trying to shake off the curious coldness of disenchantment which this announcement of his cast upon me.
He got up, and walked to and fro about the room.
“Of course! A poor devil of a tinker has to mend several millions of stew-pans and braziers before he can solder the alphabet to the empty heads of his children.
“I went to Pisa? Yes: who told you that?
“Poor blind old Pisa! She was very glad to be rid of me, I fear. I won all her honours, but I played her very sad pranks.
“Poor old widowed Pisa! she always seems to be lamenting, Dido-like, her lost lover the Sea. She is unutterably sad; and yet I am never abroad on a moonlit night without wanting to watch it shine on her wonderful palaces, on her empty desolate squares, on her perfection of desolation.
“Do you remember how the Florentines went forth in arms to guard the gates of her, when her walls were weak because her sons were all away on the high
seas subduing Minorca? She was their old hereditary foe, but they defended her honour for her in her day of weakness. I doubt if there be anything in all history manlier than that is.
“But to talk of yourself, mia bella.
“Is it indeed true that, lacking all better friends, you would like to wander awhile with us? Nay, no fair words. Let us speak honestly. I know that it is not the least likely that if you had any other sort of protection you would seek that of a set of strolling players. But you have no other, and so—”
He came back, and cast aside his cigar, and stood by the table looking down on me; his eyes grew almost melancholy, and his voice was very grave when he spoke.
“See here, donzella; you are but a child, as one may say, and know nothing of life but its dreams. It is but fair to warn you; to be a player for the populace with us may hurt you in time to come. I told you yesterday we are not over reputable people.
“We are honest, and we hurt no one, it is true; we may, perhaps, even do some little good in our way; but in the very nature of things we cannot be respectable. We could not be if we wished, and I am afraid we don’t wish. Well, all this may hurt you in some time to come. I dare not say it will not At any rate, it is only fair that you should know so much.
“You are much above the life that we lead; you heard me say so; above it in temper, and tastes, and, no doubt, by your birth. On the other hand, friendless and lonely as you are, worse may easily befall you than to stay with us.
“You shall hear no evil, and shall see none that I can keep you from; that I swear.
“We owe no man anything, and we do the best we can that no creature shall go out from our little house of canvas baser than he entered by even so much as a licentious thought We are poor, indeed, but, as you have seen, we are none the less glad and gay for that; and we find, perhaps, a fairer side to daily life and human nature than do those whose honey of gold draws the thieves and panders and liars to lick them over with tongues false and foul. As you are now, your fate is a very terrible one for your sex and your age.”
His voice had a sweet, persuasive force in it, and lulled me into a dreamy silence; I did not answer to him; I listened as to some delicious music.
“I have been thinking, donzella,” he pursued, after a while, “that it may be ill for you to associate yourself with us. Association, you know, is like a burr off the hedges; it clings ere we know it, and we can scarcely free ourselves of it without losing something, be it only a shred.
“The life of the stage — it is only fair you should know — at its best has a certain slur in it. You spoke thoughtlessly, but you spoke as the world speaks, when you uttered your scorn for us living Burattini. At its greatest the life of the player has only false glitter in it, and never true honour. We are toys for the rest of mankind; and the world, having done with us, laughs and then breaks us.
“Why not? We are only its playthings.
“Yesterday, when you said this, I rebuked you, for you wounded me more than you knew. But, to be frank with you, as it is only just I should be, I confess that your gay disdain had its grim root in fact, whilst my reproaches were baseless and worthless, because they were only the fanciful utterance of a fanatical enthusiasm. Sincere, indeed, in its way, but, for all that, self-deceiving.
“Perhaps we never so fatally deceive others as when we are ourselves the first dupes of our falsehoods.
“Altro! I love the life that I lead, but I will not wrong you by saying that it is a fit one for you.
Nevertheless, perhaps a broken crust is better than no bread whatever at all. You must choose for yourself. I have said all there is now to say.”
I stood and thought bewilderedly, withheld from him by my pride, drawn towards him by the nameless seduction which existed in all his words and ways.
The brightness of the sun shone across us; the brazen tumults of the bells filled all the air; the people streamed past the casement, laughing, chattering, dressed in their best, and eager to enjoy.
The fulness and gladness of human life was all about me; I had not courage enough to turn away from them and go out into the darkness and the loneliness by myself. I was but a child, and I was afraid of gloom, of solitude, of misfortune. This man, with his passionate tones, with his radiant courage, with his eloquent eyes, had an influence over me that I hardly attempted to resist, and attempted not at all to dissect What matter if he were only a bohemian, an adventurer, a strolling player, a tinker’s son; he was an artist, a poet even; it was surely better to laugh with him than to perish miserably all alone in the very onset of my warfare with the world.
So the thoughts drifted vaguely and restlessly through my brain; self-centered as the thoughts of all young creatures are. He spoke of my future, but it was not of that I then thought; the present was enough for me.
“If I remain with you, can I earn enough to pay my way?” I asked him, suddenly.
He gave a gesture of impatience.
“Certainly. Your florins will last for all eternity’ in so simple a life as ours; and even if they do not, we can find a place for you, no doubt.”
“Then I will stay,” I said, on an eager impulse that I did not dream of defining; and I remember that I held my hands out to him with a little triumphant laugh.
That wonderful luminance, which gave so subtle a charm to his face at such times as it lightened there, flashed over his features.
He caught my hands and touched them lightly with his lips, as one may brush with a kiss the leaves of a rose or the curls of a child.
“Altro! So be it!” he cried, with a laugh which covered, I thought, a deeper emotion. “Ah, dear donzellina, did I not give you the Fates? For me it was ill, very ill, I fear; but for you it shall be well, if the will of a man count for aught in this world.”
“Does it not count for much?” I asked him.
And he answered sadly:
“I have lived to think not; for in this world there is — Woman.”
CHAPTER III.
The Golden Celandine.
MY future being thus determined, Pascarèl said no more about it; it was a thing resolved on and done with; his sunny temper threw off its momentary shadow, and he gave himself up, as his habit was, to the easy, light-hearted, debonair enjoyment of the present All that day we enjoyed Berlingancio, and the next he sauntered about Florence with me, whilst Brunétta stayed in to mend her torn kirtle. He was bent upon making me happy, and he succeeded. That day lives now, golden, and long, and clear, in my remembrance — a very king of days.
The weather was so radiant with the coming of the spring that even in those deepest shadows of the walls it was bright with the sweet youth of the year.
There were great masses of violets and of the snow-white wood anemoli selling at all the corners of the streets. The people sat out before their doorways, working and talking, laughing and chaffering, glad of heart because the winter was gone for nine good months, in which they would be free to live at pleasure in their heaven of the open air.
Between the grey grim piles of the war-worn stone, looking up, one saw the smile of the blue blue skies; beyond the gates there was the silver gleam of the loosened waters, of the budding fields, of the fruitful olives, of the far-off hills.
All the day long we sauntered there, he talking often of the city’s past, with phrase so teeming with the colour of language and the poetry of history, that one listened in enchanted breathlessness as to some sorcerer’s tale.
Lelio Pascarèllo, whom one and all called Pascarèl, was artist in every fibre of his temperament. Passionate, sensitive to external influences as any woman, full of poetic thoughts and impulses, he joined to this the vivid Florentine energy and the gay Florentine ardour.
There was much in him of the bright vivacious humour which was in Buffulmaco and Bramante; of that love of sport and of ready jest which laughs like so much sunlight over the great memories of Giorgione and Da Vinci.
Linked to an incapable companion he would have rid himself o
f the burden with the same witty skill as Brunelleschi, and locked in his study by an exacting patron, he would have escaped by the window to enjoy his pleasures in the streets, in the same ardent and amorous determination as Fra Lippi’s.
He seemed to have just left those wise, fearless, gay, tumultuous times when the great sculptors went laughing to buy their eggs and cheese in the market; when the great painters challenged each other to gay duello with pencil and with chisel; when the great artists held their rapiers no less ready than their brushes; when men worked and loved, and fought and jested, and swept all the Arts within the one magic circle of their universal genius in that easy strength which looks the miracle of saints to this weakling world.
He loved light, and air, and indolence, and mirth; the mere sense of living sufficed for him with a voluptuous content which those of northern lands can never know; to lie and dream on a grassy slope, and watch the lithe brown arms of a girl as she washed linen in the brook below; to go singing through the luminous moonlight with a dozen comrades, waking the echoes of old, dim, marble streets; to laugh and jest round the charcoal fires in the winter veglie, or lying in the deep corn on the moonlit threshing-floors at harvest time; to toss a draught of wine behind the thick screen of a pergola foliage, whilst bright eyes laughed at him and bright sunbeams darted on him through the leaves, and made his year as one long holiday, from the Beffano to the feast of Ognissanti — these were enough for Pascarèl.
Sometimes, as we went that day, he stopped before some cobbler’s stall or some stove where the last chestnuts of the year were toasting, and exchanged with the Florentines presiding over them fantastic passages of drollery and wit Sometimes he encountered some barrow rolling on its way with woollen stuffs and silken handkerchiefs, or some truckful of oranges and lemons, and took the sale of these out of the hands and the mouths of their vendors, and made the crowd around them split their sides with his quaint and subtle Tuscan humour. Sometimes he would enter some old dusky church where some world-famous picture made a glory in the darkness, and, standing before it, would let his thoughts and his words roam dreamily over the deepest meanings of art and the remotest mysteries of history in all that abstract meditation which is the most precious indulgence of the scholar.