by Ouida
I think the earnestness that lies in the Italian character is altogether overlooked.
Its indolence, its gaiety, its love of pleasure, lie on the surface, and are steadily measured; but the depths of it are graver — very grave indeed — grave even to a profound melancholy.
The Italian character is made up of contrasts, more strongly marked and vividly opposed than that of any other nation; and these contrasts are welded not seldom into as perfect harmony as is possible to human nature; for an Italian is melodious even in his discord, and is symmetrical even in his contrariety.
See the country in a time of flood, of pestilence, of fire — she is heroic, and the woe of one is the woe of all, with an unanimity of action and a strength of emotion that can alone arise out of a national character at once tender and full of force. Northern nations have nothing, for example, comparable for selfsacrifice to the Misericordia. For consolidation, for devotion to duty, for all the deepest and purest forms of charity, the Order has no equal in Europe.
Where else will you see, as you can see all through Tuscany, the nobleman leaving his masked ball, the lover his mistress, the craftsman his labour, the foeman his vengeance, to go at the sound of the tocsin, and aid the poor and the sick and the dying?
Superficial commentators wonder that the disciples of Savonarola could come from the same peo’ple as the debauchees of the Decamerone, but the wonder is very idle.
A passionate sadness underlies in silence the gay and amorous temperament of the Italian; and not only in metaphor, but in fact, will the hair shirt of a silent sorrow be worn by him under the ribboned domino that he carries so airily in his life of intrigue.
No one will ever see it except one woman out of his many loves who is near enough to him to touch his heart as well as stir his passions; — no one else will ever see it, but there it is — and his sword is there too.
This earnestness was in Pascarèl beneath all the vivacity and lightness of his temperament; and it produced in him that mingled strength and tenderness which endeared him to the people.
Often when we have been in the city he has left my side as we laughed at some winestall in the market or played dominoes before some sunshiny trattorià, and has vanished in obedience to the bell of the Misericordia.
Often when we have gone through some village in which pestilence was raging, or where some sudden flood of water had washed away the little wealth of the contadini, he has taken his place by the sick beds or beside the bereaved and homeless peasantry, with a skilful gentleness and brotherliness that was more balm to the sufferer than herbs or gold.
I think that his laughter was all the richer over the cards and the wines in the little vine-hung loggia of the bettolini, because his eyes were dim many a time over a suffering and penniless stranger who would have died unaided and unshriven but for the pity of the player of the Arte. And I am sure that the salterello and the stornello were all the gayer’and the sweeter on his mandoline, because he could touch the strings of it into melody that would soothe the death-bed of a child with visions of the angels.
CHAPTER V.
Fumo di Gloria.
THIS wandering life was to me perfect I wished for nothing better than all that laughter at the wine fairs; than all that merriment at the village festivals; than all those stories told in the great threshing barns; than all that gay chit-chat with the women laying their straw to bleach on the shores, or the men spreading their river nets where the leaves thrilled in the wind; it was all perfect to me, as it would have been to any other creature young and of healthy body, and a soul not spoiled by the world and its ways.
And as for the people; — the dear people! — the more I dwelt amongst them the more I loved them. There is no other people on the face of the earth so entirely loveable even with their many faults as the Italians. But what is known of them by other nations? — hardly anything at all.
That the Italian patrician may be little understood outside the pale of his own immediate associates, it is not difficult to conceive. His confidence is rarely bestowed: and the pride which fences him in is at once the most delicate and the most impenetrable that a man can place betwixt himself and the outer world.
But it is passing strange that the Italian popolano, open to whosoever will to study him at their leisure, the Italian of the people, as seen in his streets and fields, by his hearth, and his market stall, is as little understood and as invariably misrepresented.
French vivacity and ease have passed into a proverb; yet, in reality, the French people are studied and conscious compared to the Italian, who is the most absolutely unstudied and unself-conscious of all God’s creatures.
True, the Italian, even in the lowest strata of social life, has a repose and a dignity in him which befit his physiognomy and evince themselves in his calm and poetical attitudes. See a stone-breaker, or a mason, or a boatman asleep in the noonday sun, and you will surely see attitudes which no sculptor could wish bettered for his marble.
True, too, you will do ill to make a mock of him; high or low, it is the one unpardonable sin which no Italian will pardon; he is given also to the immoveable obstinacy of that animal which he will never name save under the delicate euphuism of “the little black gentleman;” and he has a lightning-like passion in him which may smite his neighbour to the earth in a trice about a cherry-stone, or a broken broom, or any other casus belli of the hour.
But, then, lo! how bright he is, how gregarious, how neighbourly, how instant and graceful in courtesy, how eager and kindly in willingness; how poetic his glee in song and dance, and holy day and pageant; how absolute his content upon the most meagre fare that ever held body and soul together; how certain his invariable selection of a pleasure for the eye and the ear rather than one for the mouth and the stomach. —
See the gay, elastic grace of him; the mirth that ripples all day long about him like the sunlight, the laughter that shows his white teeth, the tumultuous shouts in which his lungs delight, the cheery sociability that brings him with a knot of his own kind at the street corners and under the house archways to talk the hours away with tireless tongue and shrewdest wit, and say, is there a creature kindlier or more mirthful anywhere in the width of the world?
And he will always have some delicate touch of the artist in him too, and always some fine instinct of the gentleman — let him be poor as he will, ill clad, half-starved, and ignorant even of the letters that make his name, let him feel the summer dust with bare feet, and the mountain wind through a ragged shirt, nay, let him be the veriest scamp and sinner in the world — but he will wear his tatters with a grace; he will bring a flower to a woman with the bow of a king; and he will resent an insolence with an air to which no purples and fine linen could lend dignity.
With the people I was happy all through that sweet season of the spring and the summer; and to pleasure Pascarèl, there was nothing they would not do to smooth the hardness of their modes of life to the donzella.
Not that such hardships counted for much with me.
From my infancy I had known what hunger meant to the full as well as any beggar child, and my years in old Verona had been bare of all save the sternest necessities of existence.
Pascal èl was true to his word.
It was always well with me. I never saw or heard anything that dear old dead Mariuccia would have deemed unfit for me had she been living then to shield me. Full of mirth indeed we were; mirth, endless and unstrained, babbling like a brook amongst the flowers and weeds of daily acts and words; but amongst it all there was not so much as a coarse word which could have harmed me; and when we were with the populace, who were apt to be coarse enough themselves in their jests and songs, Brunétta, at a sign from him, would slide her hand in mine and draw me gently away up to some little attic in the roof, or aside under some leafy pergola, and keep me there talking, always, as my habit was, of the miracles and the perfections of the life and ways of Pascarèl.
I was always to her the donzella; she was always
a little shy with me and a little humble.
“Tanta bellina, tanta bellina!” she would murmur often, looking at me with a soft puzzled wistfulness in her bird-like eyes: and all that I could do availed nothing to induce her to set herself upon an equality with me. Day by day, instead of growing more familiar with me, she seemed to feel the difference that was between us with a clearer perception, and treated me with a wondering homage, of which my natural vanity was well contented to avail itself.
Nothing in the way of worship came much amiss to me at that time.
I had ceased to be troubled about the tinker’s pot; I was consoled by the memories of the great race whence he came.
I had got in my mind a little picture of him as he must needs have been in those days: a slender, lithe brown child with beautiful eyes; full of mischief and of tenderness; of odd fancies and of loyal impulses; running along the white sun-baked roads of his beloved country with a little clattering burden of kettles, and flagons, and stewpans slung behind his shoulders.
And his father, too; I pictured him also, a man of much humour, as he said, telling strange, marvellous stories as he sat in the dust of the wayside tinkering his pots; a man who never could utterly forget that his people in old remote times had been great in the land, and who was always a little grave, with a little touch of the old arrogance, though a good kindly soul and a boon companion when the wine went round after the village games.
For those vanished grandeurs and powers of his race, which were almost mythical to him, Pascarèl himself never once cast a sigh down the wind. What his father had told him in childhood many an evening sitting under a wayside crucifix mending the copper pots and pans of the countryfolk might be true or might not The perished nobility of his forefathers woke no envy from him.
“It had bean certainly a great race once; yes,” he was wont to say, while half sceptical of the fact himself, “at least, so my father would have it; and Malespini, if that old liar may be believed about anything, which is doubtful. Traces of it crop up here and there in quaint old places; here a tomb, there a fortress, here a bronze knight that the children aim at in their games; there a manuscript, that some old monk unearths from his chapter rolls for want of something to do.
“Oh, I believe it was all true enough.
“There were mighty Pascarèlli in the olden days. But I am very glad that I was not of them; except, indeed, that I should have liked to strike a blow or two for Guido Calvacanti and have hindered the merrymaking of those precious rascals who sent him out to die of the marsh fever.
“Great?
“No; certainly I would not be great To be a great man is endlessly to crave something that you have not; to kiss the hands of monarchs and lick the feet of peoples. To be great? Who was ever more great than Dante, and what was his experience? — the bitterness of begged bread, and the steepness of palace stairs.
“Besides, given the genius to deserve it, the upshot of a life spent for greatness is absolutely uncertain. Look at Machiavelli.
“After having laid infallible rules for social and public success with such unapproachable astuteness that his name has become a synonym for unerring policy, Machiavelli passed his existence in obedience and submission to Rome, to Florence, to Charles, to Cosmo, to Leo, to Clement.
“He was born into a time favourable beyond every other to sudden changes of fortune — a time in which any fearless audacity might easily become the stepping-stone to a supreme authority; and yet Machiavelli, whom the world still holds as its ablest statesman — in principle — never, in practice rose above the level of a servant of civil and papal tyrannies, and, when his end came, died in obscurity and almost in penury.
“Theoretically, Machiavelli could rule the universe; but practically he never attained to anything finer than a more or less advantageous change of masters. To reign doctrinally may be all very well, but when it only results in serving actually, it seems very much better to be obscure and content without any trouble.
‘Fumo di gloria non vale fumo di pipa.”
“I, for one, at any rate, am thoroughly convinced of that truth of truths.”
I hearkened to him sorrowful; for to my ignorant eyes the witch candle of fame seemed a pure and perfect planet; and I felt that the planet might have ruled his horoscope had he chosen.
“Is there no glory at all worth having, then?” I murmured.
He stretched himself where he rested amongst the arum-whitened grass, and took his cigaretto from his mouth:
“Well, there is one, perhaps. But it is to be had about once in five centuries.
“You know Or San Michele? It would have been a world’s wonder had it stood alone, and not been companioned with such wondrous rivals that its own exceeding beauty scarce ever receives full justice.
“Where the jasper of Giotto and the marble of Brunelleschi, where the bronze of Ghiberti and the granite of Arnolfo rise everywhere in the sunlit air to challenge vision and adoration, Or San Michele fails of its full meed from men. Yet, perchance, in all the width of Florence there is not a nobler thing.
“It is like some massive casket of silver oxydised by time; such a casket as might have been made to hold the Tables of the Law by men to whose faith Sinai was a holy and imperishable truth.
“I know nothing of the rule or phrase of Architecture, but it seems to me surely that that square set strength, as of a fortress, towering against the clouds, and catching the last light always on its fretted parapet, and everywhere embossed and enriched with foliage, and tracery, and the figures of saints, and the shadows of vast arches, and the light of niches gold-starred and filled with divine forms, is a gift so perfect to the whole world, that passing it, one should need say a prayer for great Taddeo’s soul.
“Surely, nowhere is the rugged, changeless, mountain force of hewn stone piled against the sky, and the luxuriant, dreamlike, poetic delicacy of stone carven and shaped into leafage and loveliness more perfectly blended and made one than where Or San Michele rises out of the dim, many-coloured, twisting streets, in its mass of ebon darkness and of silvery light “Well, the other day, under the walls of it I stood, and looked at its Saint George where he leans upon his shield, so calm, so young, with his bared head and his quiet eyes.
“‘That is our Donatello’s,’ said a Florentine beside me — a man of the people, who drove a horse for hire in the public ways, and who paused, cracking his whip, to tell this tale to me. ‘Donatello did that, and it killed him. Do you not know? When he had done that Saint George, he showed it to his master. And the master said, “It wants one thing only.” Now this saying our Donatello took gravely to heart, chiefly of all because his master would never explain where the fault lay; and so much did it hurt him, that he fell ill of it, and came nigh to death. Then he called his master to him. “Dear and great one, do tell me before I die,” he said, “what is the one thing my statue lacks.” The master smiled, and said, “Only — speech,”
“Then I die happy,” said our Donatello. And he — died — indeed, that hour.’
“Now, I cannot say that the pretty story is true; it is not in the least true; Donato died when he was eighty-three, in the Street of the Melon; and it was he himself who cried, ‘Speak then — speak!’ to his statue, as it was carried through the city. But whether true or false the tale, this fact is surely true, that it is well — nobly and purely well — with a people when the men amongst it who ply for hire on its public ways think caressingly of a sculptor dead five hundred years ago, and tell such a tale standing idly in the noonday sun, feeling the beauty and the pathos of it all.
“‘Our Donatello’ still to the people of Florence. ‘Our own little Donato’ still, our pet and pride, even as though he were living and working in their midst to-day, here in the shadows of the Stocking-maker’s Street, where his Saint George keeps watch and ward.
“‘Our little Donato’ still, though dead so many hundred years ago.
“That is glory, if you will. And something more beautiful th
an any glory — Love.”
He was silent a long while, gathering lazily with his left hand the arum lilies to bind them together for me.
Perhaps the wish for the moment passed over him that he had chosen to set his life up in stone, like to Donato’s, in the face of Florence, rather than to weave its light and tangled skein out from the breaths of the wandering winds and the sands of the shifting shore.
CHAPTER VI.
Gwyn Araun.
“WHAT life then would you really like?” I asked him once, in bewilderment at his utter scorn for all manner and degree of aggrandisement, and the touch of impatience at his own mode of existence which now and then escaped him.
“Gwyn Araun’sl” he responded, promptly; “I think that is the only perfect one that ever was known upon earth.”
“Gwyn Araun?” I asked, in amaze. “He was not a Florentine.”
“No; he was not a Florentine. He comes of a race called Fable. We have never been famous for harbouring his kind. They loved shade; and we are all light. Gwyn Araun and his race are ferns that grow where it is moist and dark. They belong to the primaeval ages of the world. Gwyn Araun, to begin with, had a horse that could transport him anywhere in an instant — to the moon if he wished. He could converse with the stars and the flowers, the clouds and the trees, the gods and the butterflies, turn by turn. He could wander invisible, and take any shape that he desired. He had absolute omniscience, and he used his power always to save and to soothe and to pleasure mankind. Finally he had an ivory horn, at whose note of enchantment all melancholy fled. That is the only perfect existence I ever heard of, and he lived in the golden age of Myth, in the depths of the Scandinavian woods or Teuton forests, I do not quite remember which.”
“And what became of him?”
“He disappeared. That is another perfection of Gwyn Araun’s species. They never die, they disappear. If we did the same it would be much more agreeable; it is difficult to retain much idealism, when one knows one must end in a wooden box, and have the flies buzzing about one as about a sheep’s trotters on a butcher’s stall. Gwyn Araun vanished because he fell in with a sage of prosaic mind, who, being bidden by him to a feast of spiced meats and ambrosial draughts in jewelled dishes and cups of gold, saw with the eyes of the flesh only, and stubbornly maintained that there was no food or drink at all in all the place, but only dead forest-leaves and brook-water. Which so disgusted Gwyn Araun that he fled from earth for evermore. But he comes back sometimes even still in the shape of a poet, invisible to men, and riding on his winged horse that can circle the sun in five seconds; and then he spreads the divine feast again; and again the prosaic sage which calls himself the World repeats the same scoff at it; and, again, Gwyn Araun flies away in sorrow and disdain. That is, as the World phrases it — the poet perishes broken-hearted.”