by Ouida
“The history of this one town might be the history of Italy, and of all its wonderful complexities and contrarieties of character and of circumstance.
“By-the-bye I hear they have found a new Etruscan tomb in that olive orchard where you see the little cloud of people. The tomb of a king they say by his ornaments. Myself I should like to know something of the ornament-makers.
“What manner of men were they those earliest gold-workers whose art is the despair of modern goldsmiths?
“Did they sit in the sun as we do now and hear the cicale chatter? Did they labour for love of the art or greed of the shining metal? Did their hearts go down to the grave with those chains on those fair dead women?
“What a sad tender grace there is about that old Etruria! A whole nation swept off the face of the soil, and leaving only a few placid dead that melt to dust as the air touches them, and a handful or two of golden chains that neither rust nor time can alter.
“Their temples, their palaces, their laws, their armies, their very history, all have perished; and only these golden toys of theirs live and shine in the modern daylight “Ah, Dio mio! how full the world is of wonder! Only its wonders are all the children of Death, and chill us when we touch them.”
So he spoke his fanciful thoughts aloud, lying stretched on the hillside, under the walls of the city. His meditations often clothed themselves in that facile and picture-like speech which is national with the Italian; for amongst these people who have all more or less in them of the improvisatore abundant detail and fluent expression are natural as the breath of the lungs and the lips is to others.
“We will go and look when the shadows lengthen at that Etruscan tomb,” he said, taking a little lizard in the hollow of his hand. “We shall not find old Spinello’s if we hunt all the week.
‘Appena i segni
De Faite sue mine il lido serba.
Muoiono le città; muoiono i regni:
Copre i fasti e le pompe arena ed erba:
El ‘uom d’esser mortai par che si sdegni.
Oh nostra mente cupida e superbai’
“His tomb is gone,” he pursued, and his voice sounded hushed and sad in the dreaming silence of the sunny plains. “And that great Latin inscription is trodden somewhere underneath those clods that the bullocks are treading. What does it matter? He had a good life here for ninety years.
“It must have been such a good life — a painter’s — in those days; those early days of art. Fancy the gladness of it then — modern painters can know nothing of it “When all the delicate delights of distance were only half perceived; when the treatment of light and shadow was barely dreamed of; when aerial perspective was just breaking on the mind in all its wonder and power; when it was still regarded as a marvellous boldness to draw from the natural form in a natural fashion; — in those early days only fancy the delights of a painter!
“Something fresh to be won at each step; something new to be penetrated at each moment; something beautiful and rash to be ventured on with each touch of colour, — the painter in those days had all the breathless pleasure of an explorer; without leaving his birthplace he knew the joys of Columbus.
“And then the reverence that waited on him.
“He was a man who glorified God amongst a people that believed in God.
“What he did was a reality to himself and those around him. Spinello fainted before the Satanas he portrayed, and Angelico deemed it blasphemy to alter a feature of the angels who visited him that they might live visibly for men in his colours in the cloister.
“Of all men the artist was nearest to heaven, therefore of all men was he held most blessed.
“When Francis of Valois stooped for the brush he only represented the spirit of the age he lived in. It is what all wise kings do. It is their only form of genius.
“Now-a-days what can men do in the Arts? Nothing.
“All has been painted — all sung — all said.
“All is twice told — in verse, in stone, in colour. There is no untraversed ocean to tempt the Columbus of any Art.
“It is dreary — very dreary — that All has been said and done so much better than we can ever say or do it again. One envies those men who gathered all the paradise flowers half opened, and could watch them bloom.
“Art can only live by Faith: and what faith have we?
“Instead of Art we have indeed Science; but Science is very sad, for she doubts all things and would prove all things, and doubt is endless, and proof is a quagmire that looks like solid earth, and is but shifting waters.”
His voice was sad as it fell on the stillness of Arezzo — Arezzo who had seen the dead gods come and go, and the old faiths rise and fall, there where the mule trod its patient way and the cicala sang its summer song above the place where the temple of the Bona Dea and the Church of Christ had alike passed away, so that no man could tell their place.
It was all quiet around.
The black and gold demoizelle hummed above in the red pomegranate flowers. The long curling leaves and auburn feathers of the maize were motionless in the windless air. Beneath the vines great pumpkins shone like gold, and little lizards glanced like emeralds in the light It was all so bright, so quiet, so full of sweet summer life, here, where a whole nation had passed away from the face of the earth, leaving but a few crumbled stones as the sum of its story.
“I would rather have been Spinello than Petrarca,” he pursued, after awhile. “Yes; though the sonnets will live as long as men love: and the old man’s work has almost every line of it crumbled away.
“But one can fancy nothing better than a life such as Spinello led for nigh a century up on the hill here, painting, because he loved it, till death took him. Of all lives, perhaps, that this world has ever seen, the lives of painters, I say, in those days were the most perfect “Not only the magnificent pageants of Leonardo’s, of Raffaelle’s, of Giorgone’s: but the lowlier lives — the lives of men such as Santi, and Ridolfi, and Benozzo, and Francia, and Timoteo, and many lesser men than they, painters in fresco, and grisaille, painters of miniatures, painters of majolica and montelupo, painters who were never great, but who attained infinite peacefulness and beauty in their native towns and cities all over the face of Italy.
“In quiet places, such as Arezzo and Volterra, and Modena and Urbino, and Cortona and Perugia, there would grow up a gentle lad who from infancy most loved to stand and gaze at the missal paintings in his mother’s house, and the ccena in the monk’s refectory, and when he had fulfilled some twelve or fifteen years, his people would give in to his wish and send him to some bottega to learn the management of colours.
“Then he would grow to be a man; and his town would be proud of him, and find him the choicest of all work in its churches and its convents, so that all his days were filled without his ever wandering out of reach of his native vesper bells.
“He would make his dwelling in the heart of his birthplace, close under its cathedral, with the tender sadness of the olive hills stretching above and around; in the basiliche or the monasteries his labour would daily lie; he would have a docile band of hopeful boyish pupils with innocent eyes of wonder for all he did or said; he would paint his wife’s face for the Madonna’s, and his little son’s for the child Angel’s; he would go out into the fields and gather the olive bough, and the feathery corn, and the golden fruits, and paint them tenderly on grounds of gold or blue, in symbol of those heavenly things of which the bells were for ever telling all those who chose to hear; he would sit in the lustrous nights in the shade of his own vines and pity those who were not as he was; now and then horsemen would come spurring in across the hills and bring news with them of battles fought, of cities lost and won; and he would listen with the rest in the market-place, and go home through the moonlight thinking that it was well to create the holy things before which the fiercest reiter and the rudest free lance would drop the point of the sword and make the sign of the cross.
“It must have been a goo
d life — good to its close in the cathedral crypt — and so common too; there were scores such lived out in these little towns of Italy, half monastery and half fortress, that were scattered over hill and plain, by sea and river, on marsh and mountain, from the daydawn of Cimabue to the afterglow of the Carracci.
“And their work lives after them; the little towns are all grey and still and half-peopled now; the iris grows on the ramparts, the canes wave in the moats, the shadows sleep in the silent market-place, the great convents shelter half a dozen monks, the dim majestic churches are damp and desolate, and have the scent of the sepulchre.
“But there, above the altars, the wife lives in the Madonna and the child smiles in the Angel, and the olive and the wheat are fadeless on their ground of gold and blue; and by the tomb in the crypt the sacristan will shade his lantern and murmur with a sacred tenderness:
“‘Here he sleeps.’
“‘He,’ even now, so long, long after, to the people of his birthplace. Who can want more of life — or death?”
So he talked on in that dreamy, wistful manner that was as natural with him in some moments as his buoyant and ironical gaiety at others.
Then he rose as the shadows grew longer and pulled down a knot of pomegranate blossom for me, and we went together under the old walls, across the maize fields, down the slope of the hills to the olive orchard, where a peasant, digging deep his trenches against the autumn rains, had struck his mattock on the sepulchre of the Etruscan king.
There was only a little heap of fine dust when we reach the spot.
When they uncover the dead faces — the faces dead two thousand years — they are always perfect in these Etruscan tombs; but at the first touch of light they seem to shiver; they cannot bear the day; in a moment they dissolve like a snow flower that the sunrays strike; there are only left the golden chains lying in the grey soft dust.
The violated grave yawned under the olive tree; the coffin had been broken open; the peasant had eagerly rifled its jewels; a little throng of people from Arezzo were standing looking at the mound of ashes; the sad silvery olives were all around; above, in the city, there were bells ringing.
We looked too: then went away in silence along the edge of the ripening maize.
The dead king had reigned here on the hills ages ere Rome had been; ages ere Horace had sung of Soracte; ages ere the chariots of Augustus had rolled through the broad amber seas of the Umbrian harvests; ages ere the marshes by Trasinone southward, yonder across the fields, had been red with the slaughter of consul and cohort, and strewn with the fasces and eagles.
The dead king had reigned here; and after two thousand years his nameless dust was rifled for the greed of peasants, and lay friendless in the sun there beneath the olive branches.
We went through the gates in silence.
At our resting-place in the Via dell’ Orto, where the eyes of Petrarca had opened to the light, Brunétta met us in the arched entrance, in the rosy evening stillness, with shrill rebuke for her peahen overstewed and spoilt by waiting.
CHAPTER XIV.
The Gold of Etruria.
PASCAREL played that night in Arezzo. But a strange fancy came to him.
At the last moment, as his turn came for the stage, he flung off his gay dress and abandoned the jesting little piece he was prepared for, and flung the grave Florentine lucco about him, and went before the lamps with only his mandoline.
He struck a few chords of it, tender and far-reaching, that made silence fall on the little crowd of Tuscans and Umbrians that filled the Arte, which was unroofed that night to the breathless summer skies.
Then he began to speak to them, quite quietly at first, with his luminous eyes drooped and full of retrospection, his voice as clear as a bell on the great stillness.
A certain fire of improvisation fell on him, and his words dropped naturally into the swing and measure of the terza rima. Verse to the Italian is natural as laughter to the child or as tears to the woman.
The dust of the dead king under the olive trees outside their gates was his key-note; a note grave and tender, on which his redundant fancy strung every variety of meditation and of metaphor.
All the life of the dead ages revived in his words and gestures.
The lost people of unknown Etruria lived again in his passionate fancy.
“There was a gold worker in Etruscan Arezzo; the delicate metal bent to his hand finedrawn as the thread of a spider’s web; he was poor and alone, but quite happy; an old olive grew by his door and he worked in its shade all the day; the gold was in his hands like a maiden’s hair, and he talked to it, and wove it, and loved it.
“One day the king’s daughter went by, and her horse sought a drink at his well. She rode on and took no thought of him; but his olive was no more the tree of peace by his threshold.
“He haunted the steps of her temples and palaces until the king’s people beat him away with rods. He could work no more for his masters, and he fell into great wretchedness, and the olive tree pined for him and withered away grey and useless as the silver beard of an old dead man.
“Now it came to pass that there was a famine in the land — in these broad plains of Tuscany and Umbria, where the yellow waves of the wheat spread so far and wide: and all the people besought the Bona Dea whose curse was on the black and barren land.
“And the oracle of the temple spake and said, ‘Let a sheaf of corn be made of gold and bound up with twelve thousand gossamer threads in gold, finer than the web of the spider, and the lands shall blossom and bear full harvest.’
“Etruria was full of gold workers, and hundreds on hundreds essayed the task, but all failed; for who should work gold so that the spider’s spinning should be less fine and less frail?
“Then he who had loved the king’s daughter rose from his wretchedness, and remembered his ancient learning, and said, ‘Give me gold, I will try.’
“At first they mocked him; a poor naked outcast, crawling feebly in the sun. But the famine increased; all the city was full of lamentation by day and night; mothers slew their children not to hear their piercing cries.
“The king came down from his weary throne and said, ‘Let the beggar have gold, and try; it can be no worse with us if he fail, since thus we perish.’
“So they gave him gold, and he shut himself alone for six days, and on the seventh he opened the door and came out into the sunshine amongst the multitude of the breathless people, and in his hands were the golden webs of twelve thousand threads, so fine that the spider’s gauze beside them seemed coarse.
“The people were silent; the passion of a great joy and fear was on them; by tens of thousands they dragged their fleshless limbs after him, always in silence, to the temple of the Bona Dea.
“There was a great blight everywhere; the black earth sickened under it; the famished people watched with bloodshot ravenous eyes; was the weaving fine enough? Would the goddess accept the offering?
“There was silence in the temple; the strong sun shone on the web of twelve thousand threads.
“Then the oracle spoke, and said, ‘By gold shall Etruria live. Let the earth rejoice and bear.’
“And in one moment, on all the earth whereon Etruria held dominion, the green blades broke through the parching soil, and grew and ripened in a second’s space in every valley and on every hill.
“Then the multitude cried with one voice, ‘Bear him to the palace, crown him on the king’s right hand. Let him have his will in all the land. From the bonds of death he has set us free!’
“But he, still on his knees on the threshold of the temple, looked up, and said, ‘Nay, I want nothing; — has it made her smile?’
“And with that he stretched his hands gently outwards to the sun and died.
“The king’s daughter never knew that it was for her the golden web was woven.
“But the gods knew, and said, ‘By its gold-workers let Etruria live. For this man’s love was great, and its witness shall endure when the
nation has perished from the earth and its very records have passed away as the clouds dissolve before daylight.’
“So to this hour, through all the Etrurian land, the vanished people are ever to be traced by the golden links that shine -through the dust of the tombs; and the Etrurian gold is without speck or flaw, or equal anywhere, but rises from its burial ever and again where the olives shiver in the summer winds and the maize feathers blow above the buried cities.”
It is nothing as I say it now, this tale of his, that fell from his lips that night instead of jest and laughter: but as he spoke it, with the deep blue skies over our heads, with the sweet, cool, acacia-scented air streaming in from the open doors, with the rise and fall of his wonderful voice that could sigh like a sea-shell and sound defiance like a clarion, with that old Etrurian land around lying white beneath the moon, with the mighty Tiber rolling there away beyond the oak-woods, with the dust of the dead king so near, under the olive-tree on the side of the hill; — with all these — with the shadows on the Florentine robes and the Florentine face of Pascarèl, in the tawny half-lights of the dim Arte, the tale had a strange poetry and pathos that moved the passionate people as they heard it to tears.
And when, as it drew to a close, the swift facile words came faster and faster from his lips, falling without strain or visible consciousness into’ the sonorous rhythm of the Petrarcan sonnets; — when he passed from the past to the present and spoke of the living Italy which had become the inheritrix of Etruscan grace and Latin power, and was the daughter of such mighty dead, that her descended nobility became a divine obligation; — when, with all his soul kindling at the fire of his thoughts into a poet’s faith and a prophet’s inspiration, he stood, with outstretched arms and flashing eyes, calling on the treasures of the past to become the weapons of the future, and the divided children of the nation to bind themselves into one bond of brotherhood by the chain of a perfect purpose woven fine and indestructible as the gold chain of Etruria by the force of love; — when his impetuous and impassioned improvisation swept like a storm-wind over the listening people, the moonlight from the cloudless skies shining full upon his face, — then a greater force than that of the player fell upon him, and he who held them thus silent in Arezzo, ruled them by the strength of the patriot and the spell of the poet The people streamed out quite quiet when his voice had ceased, and went quietly along their various ways through the haunted streets of Petrarca’s city.