by Ouida
The fruitful soil where flowers rose at every step, as though the sods still felt the touch of the divine thyrsus. The sad cypress rising straight against the sky’s pale gold with stars of cyclamen white about its feet The vast, dim, cavernous churches, dark as night, save where the lamps of the high altars burned. The lonely aisles where tired feet of peasants wore their way across the marble pavement where great men were laid forgotten in their tombs.
The radiant glad dawns when through the air came ringing the clear sounds of countless bells across the fields to wake the sleeping world. The old bruised shrine set at the dusky corner of some populous streets, so that men looking upwards saw, and remembered, and went the better for a fleeting thought of God on to the daily labours of their humble lives.
The moonlight, magical, mystical, unutterable with the dense ebon shadows making but the more lustrous the wondrous silver world on which they slept All these he gave me eyes to see, and, whilst I saw, taught me why they filled me with such soft delight
CHAPTER II.
Étoile qui file.
WE wandered all over the hills and the plains, along the course of the rivers and through the wide and rich champaign of the Valdarno; pausing here, pausing there, as the whim of the moment served, now setting up the wooden theatre on the hillside, amongst the olive woods, now letting it find its momentary resting-place amidst the fortresses and monasteries of some old God-forgotten city.
Sometimes up amongst the mountains we had need to make our home with the peasants, for there was no inn to go to, and no fare but onions and black bread. Sometimes in the cities the harsh laws which still prevailed at that time in some districts swooped down like vultures on the free discourse of Pascarèl, and drove him forth from the gates, leaving his gains behind him.
Sometimes it happened to us to lose our way, or to have night down on us ere we knew where we were, and we had to camp there where we found ourselves, on some hillside, under the chestnut trees, and raise a bonfire with the dead leaves, and sleep around it as best we could until the sun rose.
But all this was little hardship in that gracious weather of the springtime, and above us there was always the brilliance of the deep blue sky, and around us there was always the gay good humour of the hardy and gentle people.
The life was quite beautiful to me, and would have been so, I think, to any one with anything of the child or anything of the poet in them. The people were so fond of us, or, at least, of him, that all the way we roamed was strewed with endless little acts of tenderness and of goodwill that blossomed like the cyclamen along our path.
Quaint old women in huge straw hats and with smiling, brown, shrivelled faces, would bring us little cheeses or golden honeycombs wrapped up in vine leaves. Girls, with lovely dreaming eyes like the San Sisto Madonna’s, would come out from the sun-baked, flat-roofed houses with gifts of eggs packed cosily in rose leaves, or strewn over, for luck’s sake, with Our Lady’s herb.
Sometimes from the white villages with their watch towers in their midst, there would ring out, for us alone, in the golden silence the sweetest melody of chiming bells that seemed to ripple like so much laughter over the low-lying roofs amongst the vines.
We were always amongst the people. Pascarèl played for no one else.
The opera-houses, where the sweet notes of men’s throats were hired with gold and diamonds, were for the rich and well-to-do, for the dainty masked dames in the carnival time, and for the noble lovers who wove their intrigues under the shelter of roulade and fioritura.
Pascarèl’s little theatre was for the populace alone; for the bronzed vine-dressers, who laughed herculean laughter in their broad bare chests; for the tanners and coopers and smiths, who came with the heat and the smirch of their labours upon them; for the peasant women who had worked weeding in the fields all day, and sat in the tent with their big brown children sleeping at their breasts; for any and all whose lives were hard, and whose bodies were bruised by toil, and who were glad to forget with him a little while the tax that emptied their bread-pot, and the hunger that gnawed at their vitals.
Give an Italian a copper coin, and though it be the sole thing that he owns in the world, he will spend four-fifths of it on the playhouse.
Pascarèl knew his countrymen’s foible; and he loved best of all to play for those who had not even the copper piece, and who must have stood all night outside the longed-for paradise had it not been for the joyous summons which rang out to them from his voice crying, “Come in — come in; you can pay me with a laugh if I prove worth it. Not a soldo in any one of your pockets? — oh, my friend, you must be either the utterest fool or the honestest man in all the universe. Well, never mind. Come in — come in; laugh or hiss as you like, but come.”
And they did come by thousands; it was the audience that he preferred — he who surely by his gifts and graces might have done with the world almost whatever he might have chosen.
“You have no ambition!” I said to him one day.
He answered me, with his bright laugh, “None — absolutely none!”
We were resting on the slope of a hill in the Casentino in the sweet maytime.
It was late in the day. The land beneath us was white with the delicate, sad pallor of the endless olive woods. Above, the west was all one soft flame-radiance of that miraculous rose which is to all the other hues of heaven as the ethereal grace of Petrarca is beside all other odes of love.
“But that is very strange?” I reasoned to him. “Where would the world be if all men thought as you do?”
“Much where it is, no doubt,” he answered me, “and unstained, moreover, by the bloodshed of war. Do you think that the world owes anything that is worth keeping in its Arts to so personal a passion as ambition! You are very wrong.
“No true artist ever worked yet for ambition. He does the thing which is in him to do by a force far stronger than himself.
“The first fruits of a man’s genius are always pure of greed.
“In time, indeed, the world gets at him and tempts him, and if he be not strong, will bribe and weaken him. That is one reason why the creations of an artist’s maturity seldom realise the promise of his youth.
“But no mere ambition ever raised the piles of Brunelleschi, shaped the gates of Ghiberti, created the Inferno and the Hamlet, or gave us the Concerto in C minor of Felix Mendelssohn.
“In these days men are governed by personal ambitions, and, as a consequence, they have ceased to produce greatly. In these days no man will be content to chisel humbly, but to his very best, a corbel or a spandril for another man’s St. Peter’s; not a whit; every one will have his own building all to himself, be it only a gaze-a-bo or a magnified cucumber-frame.
“After all, it was not only that Michelangelo and Lionardo were greater men than we, it was also because their pupils were content to grind the colours and prepare the earths with uttermost perfectness in their simple share of the great work. Now-a-days, did you ask a young artist to grind your colours, he would tell you with scorn that he was not a shopboy.
“When we can get back that single-hearted absorption into Art which characterised the mediaeval schools of Italy, then we shall get back with it greatness of execution in Art.
“You remember II Panneggiano, who never heard the tumult of the sack of Rome go on in the streets around him because he was so engrossed with painting at the time? The soldiers broke into his studio and found him, brush in hand, and ignorant that the city had been stormed.
“Well, nothing less than that makes a great artist, and it is just that vital absolute absorption of all personality of which there is nothing — absolutely nothing — in the modern mind. It is always outside its own creations; vainly or coldly always outside them.
“The modern priest of art does not believe in his own God — and in art, above all other religions, who that has not faith can work miracles? Art is the divining rod that will blossom like the almond-tree; but it will be bare and barren if the magician himse
lf half scoff and wholly doubt.”
“But, surely,” I reasoned with him, wistfully, “surely those men dreamed that they were doing what would keep their memories fresh in the thoughts of men for many ages?”
“I doubt it,” said Pascarèl. “I doubt very much that they ever thought at all about it in that light. The true artist does his work because he loves it — because he cannot choose but do it. Do you suppose the architect of Cologne Cathedral would have torn his plans up if he had foreseen his name would have been forgotten?”
“But surely an immortality of remembrance—”
“Fine immortality!” quoted Pascarèl. “Napoleon was right in his scoff at our Tiziano. Immortality? Bah! the brief noonday that carrion flies take to suck at a dead eagle. Immortality — be so good as to tell me, donzella mia, if you can, who were Eugœan of Samos, Bion and Diocchus, Eudemus of Paras, Lampsacus, Damastes, Xanthus of Sardis, orPhericydes of Leros?”
“I never heard of any one of them.”
“No? And plenty of people, more learned than you, are in the same plight And yet they were all authors of Asiatic Greece who, in their day, looked for as much ‘immortality’ as Herodotus. To come into our own country — tell me who Trissino was, and what he did?”
I confessed that the name of Trissino said no more to me than the name of any one of the little flowers that sprang up by millions underneath the vines.
“Do you know who Trissino was?” he repeated.
“No.”
“There again! — why, he believed that he had restored the epic to Italian verse in all its most heroic proportions, and sneered at his contemporary, Ariosto, as only good for the vulgar. Did never you hear, then, of Tito and Ercole Strozzi?”
‘“No.”
“Heavens! And yet they were, or were thought, famous poets; but the world is like you, and only remembers Luisa Strozzi because men were mad for her face, and she made a picturesque figure coming down the hill by San Miniato that night of the fair at the Feast of the Pardon. But to descend a century or so; — what, pray, were Chauvelin, Daunou, Riouffe, Ganilh, Ginguéne, Larromiguière?”
I confessed my ignorance, looking across at the sapphire lights on the Carrara mountains.
“No, again? And yet those men, with the rest of the hundred Frenchmen of the Tribunal of Ninety-Nine, dreamed, surely, of imperishable renown. ‘A line in an universal history!’ as my wise Napoleon said again after Cairo. True, he arrived later on at getting a whole page for himself; but to print such a page, you must distil seas of human blood to make the only ink that will not rub out with the wear of the ages; and even then, as soon as a greater conqueror comes, you will have your page blotted and turned into a palimpsest. You remember how, in your old Verona, there is a rude, dusky, nameless grave in the mausoleum of the Scala, and above it a superb equestrian in marble, with three stages of sculptured saints and prophets all to himself in might and glory; the first, the tomb of the assassinated; the second, the tomb of the assassin? Believe me, Fame in the world allots things very much like the Scala’s sculptor.”
I was silent; I thought of poor old wronged Ambrogiò dying by his fireless and childless hearth, whilst as we had passed through Florence the names of Rothwald and Alkestis had loomed large upon the walls.
“Besides — ambition for a player!” laughed Pascarèl, not waiting for my answer, “you might as well say let the dog-grass blowing there try to root itself and grow like that stone-pine. ‘Ci-gît le bruit du vent’ is our only fit epitaph.
“Thistle-down, smoke, soap-bubbles, ‘les étoiles qui filent, qui filent, qui filent et disparaissent,’ those are all our emblems.
“They reproach us that we only live to laugh and to love, and take no thought for the morrow. Why not? There is no morrow for us.
“The player can leave nothing behind him; not even a memory. ‘You should have heard him,’ say the old people to the young of the dead actor. ‘You should have heard him; he was great, indeed, if you like.’ But what do the young believe of that? There is no proof.
“Such greatness as the dead man had went out with his breath like a lamp that was spent “We live in the present; we live for the present. Why not, I say?
“We are straws on the wind of the hour, too frail and too brittle to float into the future. Our little day of greatness is a mere child’s puff-ball, inflated by men’s laughter, floated by women’s tears; what breeze so changeful as the one, what waters so shallow as the other? — the bladder dances a little while; then sinks: and who -remembers?
“Ambition for such a thing as that?
“Grow oaks from the thistle-down; weave ships’ cables from the smoke; change the soap-bubble into a prism for astronomers; arrest the falling star as a fixed planet in the spheres; and then, if you will, talk of ambition for a player!”
He had risen as he spoke, and walked to and fro, brushing the tall foliage of the undergrowth of acacia and cane; he spoke with passionate scorn, and though he laughed, there was for once some undertone of bitterness in his easy mirth.
He jeered at the thing he himself was; no man’s heart is wholly free of care and doubt when he trenches on the semi-suicide of any self-contempt “But players have been great,” I said to him, not knowing well what to say. “Great in their lives at least! And rich?”
“Rich, oh yes!” he echoed, breaking down with one hand a head of iris. “A million francs a week you mean, and diamond snuff-boxes from a prince’s hand — oh yes — if that be greatness. Good heavens! before you have fairly entered on a woman’s years, how thoroughly a woman’s heart beats in you!”
“What do you count greatness, then?” I asked, gathering, as I rested on my arms, face downward on the grass, the clusters of the white anemoni, and all the bright spring flowers of the hills.
Pascarèl, standing beside me, looked away to the rose-radiance of the west with that strange introspective musing look in his eyes which comes so suddenly into Italian eyes, and has so intense a melancholy in it, and also so much of that spiritual beauty which their country has.
“There is an old legend,” he made answer to me, “an old monkish tale, which tells how, in the days of King Clovis, a woman, old and miserable, forsaken of all, and at the point of death, strayed into the Merovingian woods, and lingering there, and harkening to the birds, and loving them, and so learning from them of God, regained, by no effort of her own, her youth; and lived, always young and always beautiful, a hundred years; through all which time she never failed to seek the forests when the sun rose and hear the first song of the creatures to whom she owed her joy.
Whoever to the human soul can be, in ever so faint a sense, that which the birds were to the woman in the Merovingian woods, he, I think, has a true greatness. But I am but an outcast, you know; and my wisdom is not of the world.”
Yet it seemed the true wisdom, there, at least, with the rose light shining across half the heavens, and the bells ringing far away in the plains below over the white waves of the sea of olives.
CHAPTER III.
The Riband and the Mandoline.
NOT many weeks after, whilst the year was still young, the old city of Pisa came in our way in our wanderings; and Pascarèl would fain turn aside from the bright sea-road, and stay within its walls a little.
I saw the ruined rival of Florence, the city “senza fede,” once the mart of the world and now a desert. I saw, too, the scholar Luceone, a gentle, meek-eyed man, with the brow of Ghiberti and the mouth of Fra Giovanni. I saw the old Faustus-like room in the tower, with the owls in its broken masonry, and with the Arno washing its base at one side, and on the other the narrow darkling street that the comedians had gone through with jest and song on that Easter morning which had decided the fortunes of Pascarèl.
The old city was sad and sombre with Orcagna’s Death reigning over its solitudes as the only sovereign left to it out of all the arrogance and plenitude of its years of power.
So still it was, so unbroken the shadows slept upon it
s grass-grown stones, so dully the yellow water dragged its way through the yellow sand, one might have thought that it was only that very day that the deathblow had fallen on it away there where the wanton sea abandoned it to kiss and serve Genoa.
“Do you not see Margharità of France?” said Pascarèl to me in Pisa one evening, as we strayed along, “leaning there out of the old palace window in just such a stormy red and gold night as this, perhaps, sick to despair of the gilded captivity, and planning with the gipsies to escape? I wonder no one has ever painted that scene; the delicate wanton royal head stretching out in the crimson dusk to hold council with the black-browed vagabonds. Can you not fancy the fret of her, and the fever and the revolt, that made a barefoot liberty seem sweeter than all the Medicean pomp?”
But I shook my head, and told him no, which saddened him a little as we went A barefoot liberty was well in its way, no doubt, but to be a princess, was not that better?
It seemed to me that Marguerite must have been but jesting with the gipsies when she schemed thus with them here in dead old Pisa.
So thankless are we to Fate when it is fair for us.
I had all for which the heart of Margaret had hungered, beating itself like a caged bird under its jewelled bodice; I had it all as I went along the sad, windless, unpeopled streets, which his voice filled with sweetest music for me, and the red sun burnished into ancient pomp and panoply; I had it all and but half valued it — alas! alas!
At Pisa, as I say, I saw that old college friend of Pascarèl, the scholar Luceone. He was a gentle, meek-eyed man, with pensive eyes, and a tender sad face, like the face of Masaccio.
He lived up in the Faustus chambers, with the owls outside his casement, and the river water washing below, and on the other the narrow pent-up street that led away to the gate for Leghorn, and was very content in them, and grateful to his fate, asking nothing better of the gods and men than to dwell there in the heart of the academic city, in the midst of the dreary sand plains, with the zanzari hooting and hissing all night amongst the ancient walls.