by Ouida
Into other lands I wandered, then, and sought full half the world. When one wants but little, and has a useful tongue, and knows how to be merry with the young folk and sorrowful with the old, and can take the fair weather with the foul, and wear one’s philosophy like an easy boot, treading with it on no man’s toe and no dog’s tail, — why, if one be of this sort, I say, one is, in a great manner, independent of fortune, and the very little that one needs one can usually obtain.
Many years I strayed about, seeing many cities and many minds, like Odysseus; being no saint, but, at the same time, being no thief and no liar.
I wandered so, I say, for a great many years, and was happy enough, — the gods or the saints be praised (one never knows which to say in Rome), — and should never have wished my lot bettered or changed, only — I was in exile. There were times when only to hear the twang of a lute, and see a red melon gape, under a lamp, at a street-corner shrine in old dark Trastevere, I would have given my soul away. We are made so, — the fools of our fancies; and yet these our foolishnesses are so much the best part of us.
One day, in a little old dull French village, gray and white with summer dust, in the midst of champagne-vineyards, I met a Roman image-seller, a boy of ten or twelve, with his tray full of plaster casts.
I saw scores of such lads, of course, and always spoke to them, and gave them a crust or a coin, for sake of the common country. But this little fellow happened to thrust straight up in my eyes, smiling, a cast of that fairest Madonna of old Mino’s, which I had always loved the best; she who stands in the chapter-room of Santa Maria in Trastevere, with folded and trailing robes, snow-white, and seeming to walk forth to one from out her golden tabernacle.
Do you not know her? I dare say not: hardly anybody ever comes into the sacristy. Go, make a pilgrimage for her sake alone.
By so much as sculpture is above all color, so is she far above in purity and dignity any virgin that was ever painted, even by our Raffaelle himself. For, somehow, on his high, wind-swept, olive-wooded slope, Mino of Fiesole did reach an imagination of the Mother of Christ that for innocence, chastity, womanhood, and sweet, dreaming thoughtfulness has never an equal anywhere. Clothed in purity, seems no metaphor, but simplest fact, before those snow-white and exquisite forms that live after him in so many silent baptisteries and sun-pierced, dusky, jeweled chapels of the dead.
And at the sight of her a very torture of home-sickness came upon me, — all suddenly, as it will do, you know, with the strongest men at the note of a bird, or the sight of a little flower, or the song of a child going down the hedgerows to meet its mother.
That little white image of the Madonna which I had loved so well smote me with a very anguish of longing for Rome.
I seemed to hear the fountains falling through the radiant air, and the ten thousand voices of the swinging bells giving them answer, as the sun sank down behind the blue peaks of Soracte.
I saw the bridge I stood on, and the green straight lines of poplars on the bank, and the face of the little wandering boy, through a rush of tears: things come on one sometimes like that.
That very night I turned my face to Rome, taking the boy with me, for he was ill treated and unhappy.
“If they remember, and I die for it,” thought I, “it will be better to die there than to live elsewhere.”
But so many years had gone by, and I had been so young then, and was still so poor and lowly, I managed to escape all recognition, and by a little cunning and a little care I got into Rome unpersecuted; and, calling myself as I had been called in Germany and France, no one recognized me. I was an ugly, homely, brown-faced man, forty years old then, and already a little gray. My father was dead; my brother had been stabbed long, long before, in a brawl, so they said; and the old cobbler, as I said, had been found dead one noonday at his stall.
Of conspiracy and combat I had had enough. I loved the sound of the fountains, and I set my board up within earshot of this one which gushes from the gray monsters’ mouths there by old Ponte Sisto.
The people found me at my stall one daybreak, as they came over the bridge with their mules from the Janiculan farms and gardens, with their poultry and goats and wines and fruits; and I had not forgotten how to play with the Roman humor, and how to hold my own between a rough jest and a ready steel. I kept a still tongue in my head as to whence I came, and the folk of the Rione had a throng of odd fancies concerning me. So best: it amused them; and many liked to bring their shoes to me to mend, that they might say they had a chatter with that droll chatterbox at the corner.
Maryx, then a student at the Villa Medici, made for me my lovely Apollo Sandaliarius; and another student — now a great man, too — gave me the old stained glass with SS. Crispin and Crispian, so that one might please all tastes and conciliate the good nuns and monks who went to and fro in such numbers and wore out so many shoes upon their stone and mosaic floors.
I never told anybody, except some churchmen, that I was that Rufo Quintilio who had first disgraced the gens by working for my living. I re-baptized myself Crispino, after the patron saint of all shoemakers, whose church was close by; and the people had that vague idea of some mystery connected with me which is to the public as sugared wine to flies.
That there was really none was all the better, because where there is no foundation whatever in fact there is nothing to stop the fancy from wandering as far, and digging as deep, as ever it may like to do.
I had a friend at court, too.
It had chanced to me in my wanderings to be once of signal service to a monsignore travelling on mystic missions of the Church. I happened to be near at hand when he fell into a deep, rapid, unpleasant little river of Transylvania; and I pulled him out of it, whilst his attendants screamed and his horses floundered and sank. And in return he had bidden me claim his aid, if ever I wanted it, in our native city. Years had passed; I found him powerful, and he was not ungrateful; and he procured for me condonation of my youthful riots, and leave to prosecute my simple calling at the corner of the bridge of Sextus, where the fountain is made in the wall, opposite to the Via Giulia; and there I became peaceful and happy enough, for I had some little money laid by (we are a frugal people), and I could sew leather three days out of the week, and all the rest of the time read old books, and peer about old places, and dream old dreams, and saunter in and out of the studios. The artists, great and small, were all fond of me, and liked to hear my opinions, — of course, only as Apelles liked to hear my fellow-craftsman’s; but still it made life pleasant, for Art is, after Nature, the only consolation that one has at all for living.
They used to tell me that I had some little judgment, and that I might make a fortune if I would take to collecting and to selling ancient and artistic things. But that I would never do. To me, whoever can buy a work of true art to sell it again (save from some sudden pressure of poverty and honor) can have no love of art in him, or, thinking of it with any thought soever of barter, can have no true feeling for it, but is a huckster at soul, and deserves no better God than the base Mercurius of the mart and change, whom the Romans prayed to when they wished to pilfer.
Art was dear to me. Wandering through many lands, I had come to know the charm of quiet cloisters, the delight of a strange, rare volume, the interest of a quaint bit of pottery, the unutterable loveliness of some perfect painter’s vision, making a glory in some dusky, world-forgotten church; and so my life was full of gladness here in Rome, where the ass’s hoof ringing on a stone may show you that Vitruvius was right, where you had doubted him; or the sun shining down upon a cabbage-garden or a coppersmith’s shreds of metal may gleam on a signet-ring of the Flavian women, or a broken vase that may have served vile Tullia for drink.
Of course I was an ignorant man always, — beside scholars; but what I did know shed a light upon my path, and made me cease to envy rich men; for was not all Rome mine?
There are worse things than to sit under Apollo Sandaliarius and Crispin and Crispian and hear
the merry Roman tongues wag round you all day long; for the epigrams of Pasquin and Marforio are but a few ripples out of many of the ever-running current of the Roman wit. And who is it that has said so wisely, “If you have nothing left in life, come to Rome”?
Here at least you shall learn your own littleness, and that of gods and men; here in Rome, which has seen Zeus and Aïdoneus pass away, and come to be words upon the mouths of men; Rome, which has beheld Olympus fade like a dream of the night, and the glory depart from Ida; Rome, which killed the Nazarene, and set Borgia and Aldobrandini up in his likeness to reign over earth and heaven; Rome, which has seen nations perish leaving no sign, and deities die like moths, yet lives herself, and still conjures the world with the sorcery of an irresistible and imperishable name!
CHAPTER V.
So I lived. What they said of me at the bridge-corner was fair enough; only that silly soul, Serafina, thought too much of a trumpery pair of little red boots, only big enough for a grasshopper, and costing one nothing but a palm’s-breadth of kid. But women are so: they have no medium; either they drink the sea dry and are thankless, and if they got the stars down out of heaven would stamp them in the dust, or else they are like the poor taverner’s wife, and give all their loyal souls’ big gratitude for the broken crust of a careless gift.
So I lived, I say, and had done nearly twenty years, in Rome. In the summers sometimes I went up among the little villages on the sides of the Sabine and Volscian Mountains, under the cork-and chestnut-woods, where the women foot it merrily in front of the wine-shop, and the pipe and mandolin chirp all through the rosy evening. But I never wandered so far away that I could not see the gold cross on St. Peter’s; and many a summer day, when all in Rome was lifeless as a graveyard, and only a few chanting friars bore a dead man through the streets, I and Palès stayed in the city for love’s sake, and talked only to the gods that haunt the fountains.
I was content with my life, — which is more than most great men can say. I had a love of droning and dreaming, and was well satisfied if I had enough to get me a plate of beans and a flask of thin red wine; and I had all my days through been cursed or blessed with that sort of brain which makes a man understand a great many things but never enables him to achieve any one thing.
It is not an unhappy way of being constituted, — at least, when one basks under the Roman sun and asks no other good of the gods. All the twenty odd years since I had cone back into Rome I had been happy enough in a whimsical — and I dare say foolish — fashion, here in my nook by the Ponte Sisto, close on to Tiber, where the soft hyacinthine hills curve fold on fold beyond the yellow water, and under the ilex shadows on the other bank the women hang out the linen of Rome to blow and to bleach in the breeze from the sea.
I got with time to be a feature of the place, and to belong to it as much as the stone lions did; and the people, with that power of eternal tongue-wagging with which heaven has endowed my country-people beyond any other folk of the earth, made as many traditions for me as though I were a headless saint instead of a brainless sinner; and there I stayed beside my stall, without any change, except on dogs that died in the course of nature.
My friend the ferryman, going to and fro the Ripetta wharf, in his little green boat shaped like Noah’s ark, passed not more regularly than the course of my own days went and came, — till I dreamed my dream in the drowsy noon.
I was always dreaming, indeed: over old coins thrown up by the plow; over some beautiful marble limb, uncovered as they dug for a wine-cellar; before some dim shrine under an archway, where a fading frescoed Christ-child smiled on a ruined, moss-grown torso of Hercules; on any and every thing of the million of wonders and of memories that are about us here thick as golden tulips in the grass in April. But this noonday dream was different: it kept with me all the hot slumberous afternoon, when even Palès was too sound asleep to get up and kill a fly or smell a cat. And my conscience was ill at ease: I seemed to myself to have behaved ill, yet how I did not very well know.
It seemed to me that I ought, against her will, to have gone with her to see that Syrian Jew. Her face haunted me, — that pale, sad face, of unspeakable sorrow, as she had looked down the Pescheria. So must have looked Beatrice, gazing from the grated casement in the palace there.
How much one cares for Beatrice! If I owned Barberini, her portrait should hang no longer in that shabby chamber, where the very sunbeams look like cobwebs, companioned by vile Fornarina, and that yet viler wife of Sarto’s: it should hang all by itself in a little chapel, draped with black, with a lamp always burning before it, in emblem of the soul, that all the brutes encompassing her had no power to destroy.
Only fifteen! Yet strong as women are not. Beatrice had the strength of passion, — the strength to dare and to endure. There is no passion in your modern lives, or barely any. You have lewdness and hypocrisy. They are your twin darlings, most worshiped on the highest heights. But passion you have not: so you fear it.
I was thinking of Beatrice, and of this other girl, gone after Beatrice down into the shadow of the old walls of Balbus, and was listening to the music of a lute and a fiddle chiming together somewhere on the bridge, and watching two mites of children dancing outside a doorway, with tangled curls flying, and little naked rosy feet twinkling on the stones.
Sitting at a stall may be dull work, — Palès thinks so sometimes, — but when it is a stall in the open air, and close against a fountain and a bridge, it has its pleasures.
I have been all my life blown on by all sorts of weather, and I know there is nothing so good as the sun and the wind for driving ill nature and selfishness out of one.
Anything in the open air is always well: it is because men nowadays shut themselves so much in rooms, and pen themselves in stifling styes, where never the wind comes or the clouds are looked at, that puling discontent and plague-struck envy are the note of all modern politics and philosophies. The open air breeds Leonidas, the factory-room Félix Pyat.
If I worked in an attic, and saw naught but the shoe that I sew, no doubt I should fall thinking where that shoe had been, what stealth it had stolen to, what intrigue it had stepped softly to smother, how many times it had crossed a church doorway, how many times it had stumbled over a wine-shop threshold, — all manner of speculation and spite, in a word, of my neighbour who wore it, because I should see nothing but the shoe, and it would fill my atmosphere, and dwell on my retina, a black spot obscuring all creation. But here the shoe is only a shoe to me, because I see the wide blue skies, and the splashing water, and the broad sunshine, and the changing crowds, and the little children’s flying hair, and the silver wings of the wheeling pigeons. I work at the shoe, but it is only a shoe to me.
When one thinks of the Greeks playing, praying, labouring, lecturing, dreaming, sculpturing, training, living, everlastingly in the free wind and under the pure heavens, and then thinks that the chief issue of civilization is to pack human beings in rooms like salt fish in a barrel, with never a sight of leaf or cloud, never a whisper of breeze or bird, — oh! the blessed blind men who talk of Progress!
Progress! that gives four cubic feet of air apiece to its children, and calls the measurement Public Health!
But I am only Crispin of the Ponte Sisto, stitching for my bread: these are fool’s fancies: let them pass.
We of Italy keep something of the old classic love of air, we live no time in-doors that we can live out; and though Progress is pushing our chairs off the pavements, and doing its best to huddle us sheep-like into our pens, we resist toto corde, and we still sit, and smoke, and saunter, and eat and drink, and pursue our trade and our talk, with no roof but the bright, broad, kindly sky.
As I sat at my stall in the warm smiling afternoon, getting drowsy, tapping at worn soles, and stupidly wondering how those little things could find the fire in them to dance so in the heat, I could not in any way get my Ariadne out of my head, were it ever so, as I tinkered split leather in the sunshine.
It was a
s if one had seen a yellow-winged oriole, that has been fed on flower-dew and pomegranate-buds, shut down into the low wooden traps that the boys go bird-hunting with in the thickets along Tiber.
The day lengthened; the shadows deepened; the air cooled; the ventiquattro rang from many clocks and bells; people began to wander out into the street.
Handsome Dea came smiling for her yellow shoes; big Basso swore at me good-temperedly because his butcher-boots were not ready; Padre Sylvio grumbled because his sandals lay untouched; Marietta, the vintner’s wife, told me of a fine marriage that Pippo had made up for her eldest daughter with a tailor of Velletri; Maryx, my sculptor, came and talked to me of a portfolio full of designs of Bramante, that he had discovered and got for a song in an old shop in Trastevere; even Hilarion, going by with his swift horses, leaped out in his easy, gracious fashion, and bade me come up to his villa and drink his old French wines there, whilst he should idle among his roses, and scrawl half a sonnet, and lie half asleep with his head in a woman’s lap, under the awning on his marble terrace.
But I even let Hilarion go on his way, with that black-browed singer whom he favored for the moment; and I did not care for Bramante’s beautiful porticoes and domes and bridges; and I heard nothing that Marietta was telling me of the fine trade receipts of that young tailor of Velletri, — because I kept thinking of that sea-born Joy with the face of the Borghese bronze, who had gone down into the darkness of the Ghetto.