Delphi Collected Works of Ouida

by Ouida

  Then his eyes lighted on the little figures and busts in terra cotta and the panels of flowers in alto-rilievo.

  “What are these?” he asked. “Are they your own? I know you have a Greek god and a Latin saint and a new talent for every day of the year in your calendar; I know.”

  I told him they were not mine, — that I only sold them for the artist; they stood there on my board if any one liked to buy them. Did he think well of them?

  Maryx looked more closely at them, and paused the longest over a little figure of the wingless Love, a foot high, the most ambitious of all the little creations.

  “Send the artist to me if he be young,” he said, as he looked.

  “What age may he be?”

  “Sixteen, at most.”

  “There is genius in it,” he said, taking the wingless Love under his arm, and laying a handful of money down for it. “Send him to me, and he shall do what he likes in my workshop, and I will teach him what I can, though more probably he will only teach me.”

  Then he went on his way across the bridge in the autumn sunshine to his home on the old Mons Aureus, — a vigorous and lofty figure, with a noble head like the Ophidian Zeus, and gleaming eyes changeful as the skies, and the laughing mouth of Hercules.

  All Rome adored and all the world honored him. He was a great man, and happy as it is given to few mortals to be. And his fate led him that day past my stall by the fountain in the wall.

  I pondered within myself all that day, with the market-people going to and fro and the crowds chattering. In the end, when evening came, I resolved to go up and tell the story of my Ariadne to him. He was a brave man and a great one, and could be of service to her as I could not. Besides, the creature had never lived whose trust had been wronged by Maryx: the dogs of the streets knew that.

  Germain Maryx had been the son of a poor stone-cutter of Provence; as a child he had worked in the quarries, carrying stones like a little mule; at fourteen he had tramped on foot to Paris, resolute to become a sculptor, and there, friendless and homeless, had roamed the streets like a stray dog, but, keeping life in him by such odds and ends of labor as he could find to do in the day, spent his nights in every kind of self-culture; at eighteen he had studied design and anatomy and the plastic arts so well that he had borne off the sculptor’s prize of Rome and fainted from hunger on the very day he won it; from that triumph and with every succeeding year his fame had grown, until now there was no finer artist and no greater name in all the world.

  He had a force and a majesty in his marbles that made his contemporaries’ best creations look beside his but mere ornaments in sugar. Like the early Greeks, he loved to “hew the rocks,” and his workshop, as he termed it, was as true a temple of the gods of art as ever was raised in Attica or Argos.

  Bitterly contemptuous of mediocrity, and fiercely unsparing of all affectations, Maryx to all true talent, to all unaided excellence, was liberal as the sunlight. Though his enemies were many, — among that mere cleverness which loathes genius as the imitator hates the creator, — he was beloved by multitudes as greatly as was Canova, and with as tender a gratitude.

  He was very noble in his kindliness and generosity to other artists; he had that serene breadth of feeling which is so dulled and narrowed in our day, the grandeur and liberality that made Brunelleschi and Donatello own themselves vanquished by the boy of twenty and unite their prayers that Ghiberti might be chosen for the great work in their stead.

  Maryx loved art; he cared but little for fame. In our day most men care much for fame and but little for art.

  “What does it matter to Jean Goujon,” he would say, “that no one knows whether he really died in the Saint Bartholomew massacres or not? — where he was born or where he lived? — whether he was courted at Chernonçeaux and Amboise, or whether he was but a poor carver all his days: what does it matter, so long as the Diane Chasseresse lives at the Louvre? — so long as every creature that cares for art honors his name, despite all his faults, because of his love of naturalism, and his veneration for antiquity, and the vigor with which he called to life the still paralyzed art that had been stifled and buried under the anathemas of Christian bigotry and the miseries of feudal misrule and strife?”

  After all, it is perhaps greater to have been Jean Goujon, or, greater still, Michael Colomb or Juste de Tours, than to have been Praxiteles.

  Praxiteles was born into an air full of the strength and the sentiment of art, as an orchard is full of the smell of blossom and the promise of fruit in spring-time; from the commonest things of daily usage to the most sacred mysteries of the temple, there was artistic inspiration around him. But those old earliest sculptors of the Valois, France, came after ages of riot, of bloodshed, of sensuality, and of brutality; religion was gross, war alone was deemed heroic, and the people were beyond all measure wretched; it is a miracle that these few early artists snatched sculpture out from the ossification of the ossuaries and the imprecation of the preachers, and found force to be so all unlike their age.

  To go against all the temper of your age, that is the true greatness: it is easy enough to go with it.

  Now, only think, William of Paris did not scruple to call sculptors to build him up a mighty tomb for his cook, and it was already the sixteenth century when Thévet, in his biographies of the illustrious, excused himself for naming an artist among them!

  “Things were otherwise on the southern side of the Alps, to be sure; there were always in Italy royal roads and golden wheels to art; and that is just why I care so much for those old early Breton and Gascon and Touraine sculptors of ours, because they must have fought their fight so much single-handed, and with such a red, fierce world of war around them, and because they were bidden only to carve recumbent knights and meek veiled saints and all the sad unlovely symbolism of the church, and yet did find their way to loveliness and to liberty somehow. Their art is not my art, nor my ways their ways. Yet do I care for them and honor them.

  “The fourteenth century used to say of the Virgin of Senlis that so full was it of majesty and grace that any one would take it to be the work of Phidias or Lysippus. We should not be likely to make that error, nor any similar one. But we may keep our souls for the eternal youth of Phidias, and give some of our hearts to the old Gothic sculptors who had only those two grim spouses, War and Death, to make the noblest marriage out of them they could.”

  So Maryx would talk by the hour when the mood was upon him, having that catholic love of art to which nothing in all the circles of the arts is alien, and which invests with sacredness and interest the curled rim of a Köln potter’s jug as well as the perfect lines of a frieze of Ilissus; the interest only different in degree, not in kind, and as unlike to that narrowed eclecticism which sees no salvation outside the limits of a school as the leap and light of our broad Roman fountains is unlike to a cup of iced water held in a miser’s hand.

  And Fate would lead him by under my Apollo Sandaliarius!

  Well, Fortune had been kind to him for five-and-twenty years. Perhaps she was tired and wanted change.

  “I will go and tell him,” I thought to myself. “It is not as if it were Hilarion—”

  So I took my way over the bridge to the house that he had built for himself upon Janiculum, with the oak woods of the Pamfili Doria above it, and below the cypresses of Sant’ Onofrio, and the fall of the Pauline waters near enough for its cool sound to murmur always through his gardens’ silence when the church-bells were still.

  It was a beautiful house; as nearly Greek as it was possible to make it; its white marbles shone through groves of magnolia and cypress, its walls were painted with frescoes of the Palilia and the Vinalia, and all the Latin and Sabine feasts of spring and summer; the doves fluttered their pretty wings in the fountain in the atrium; mystical Dædalus might have dwelt there and been at home, or Gitiades or Phidias; though, by the way, the Greeks knew not the joys of the open court, if we may believe Vitruvius, — which I for my part do not always. Bu
t perhaps that is my presumption: all cobblers, from the days of Apelles downwards, have been sad meddlers with things beyond them.

  Pomegranates and oleanders grew against its columns, its long white walls turned towards Rome, and there came no sound to it but from the chimes of Sant’ Onofrio and the cascades in the Darian woods.

  Maryx had built his home, and loved it as men love that which long effort and proud labor have made theirs: he loved it as Rome and the world loved him.

  Here he labored, dreamed, gave his marble life, and knew himself greater than monarchs; and in a wing of this beautiful house lived also a little brown woman, eighty years old and more, who wore the high white cap of a Provençal peasant and was happiest when she was spinning coarse flax at a wheel.

  “This is my mother,” Maryx would say to all the mighty persons who from time to time visited him, and the little brown woman would spin on, disturbed neither by fear nor by triumph. She had seen her husband brought crushed to death from under a great rock that he had helped to split, and two of her sons had gone down with their coasting-brig carrying marbles in the gulf, and the third had been shot in a revolt of the people in the streets of Lyons; and that was all so very long ago, and this her only remaining lad had come to be a great man, and rich, and sought by kings, and treating nobles as his equals! She did not comprehend: she span and told her beads.

  As for him, he never let a day go by without paying homage to the little olive-skinned woman in the high winged cap with the big gold pins, and, though he was a pagan and believed in no gods, — as how should any one believe who knows that Athene was hurled from the Acropolis, and that even the sanctity of Delphos could not conquer Time? — still bent his head to her withered hands, and rose the gladder-hearted when she blessed him.

  I climbed Janiculum slowly, and went into the gardens of Maryx, bounded with their cactus and azalea hedges. Nightingales were singing loud beneath his myrtles, and all the family of thrushes in his rose-thickets.

  It was sunset: through the white blossoms of his orange-trees one could look down and down to where Tiber rolled by the black piles of the Ponte Rotto; and through the sharp spears of the aloes one saw the stolen travertine of the Farnese, and the dome of St. Peter’s dark against the pale green and gold of the sky.

  Maryx had been at work all day, and had just come out of his studio-door, and was leaning over the terrace-wall, looking as he had looked ten thousand times on that spot, whence the resolute eyes of Tarquin had first fallen upon Rome.

  Scarcely any other place holds so many memories and keeps embalmed so many legends as does this old Sabine hill of Janus, where “the darling of the gods fell asleep full of days upon its shining sands.” From Ancus Marcius and Lars Porsenna to sad Tasso and soft Raffaelle, all are here. Mutius Scævola and Clelia haunt it, and the singing children of Saint Philip Neri; wider contrast no spot on earth, hardly, can hold.

  When Tarquin stood here that memorable day, — as into his restless and ambitious soul the desire to have those great hills above the Marta first had entered, — the wild woods that harbored wolves and bears still were dark about what was even then the old citadel of the warriors of the lance, and Janus, who had his altars here, was even then a god hoary with many years: it is strange to think of how near one seems to them, all those dead peoples and dead deities.

  Janus with his keys of peace and war has passed into a mere memory, powerless, and without worshipers; soon Peter, with his keys of heaven and earth, will have done the same. What will men worship then, I wonder?

  Mercurius, under some new name or another, no doubt. He is the only god that never perishes.

  Maryx welcomed me with a smile: king or cobbler, you were alike welcome to him had you only a frank purpose and a reverence for the arts. People accused him, indeed, of being too off-hand and haughty with his many princes; but no one ever found him otherwise than pitiful and generous to the poor. “I have known their pains,” he would say to those who thought he gave too much away.

  He heard my little story attentively, leaning over the balustrade of his terrace, looking down over his roses and aloes, and the white bells of the flowering yuccas, to the trees that enshrined the Galatea of Raffaelle, and the marshy grounds far below of the Velabrum, where the reedy waters had drowned Sabine and Latin in unrelenting struggle.

  “I wish it were a youth,” he said, when I had told him all. “One could do so much more, so much more easily. Besides — —”

  Besides, though he did not finish his phrase, the great sculptor thought no woman worthy of his art.

  “But you said there was genius in it?” I said to him, reminding him of the wingless Love.

  “There is. But it may have been her father’s.”

  “But if she could do but small, slight things, only to keep herself — she has nothing else,” I added, at a hazard.

  The lustrous eyes of Maryx, wide, brilliant, and brown, under brows fit for a Greek Zeus, lighted in wrath.

  “No, no! That is accursed! To touch Art without a right to touch it, merely as a means to find bread, — you are too honest to think of such a thing. Unless Art be adored for its own sake and purely, it must be left alone. Philip of Macedon had every free man’s child taught Art; I would have every boy and girl taught its sacredness: so, we might in time get back some accuracy of taste in the public, some conscientiousness of production in the artist. If artistic creation be not a joy, an imperious necessity, an instinct of all the forces of the mind, let the boy go and plow, and the girl go and spin.”

  “All that is very well; but the wingless Love — —”

  Maryx smiled his frank and kindly smile, and went into his studio, and took up the little figure, some eight inches high, in gray clay scarcely dried, which he had set upon a shelf, among masks and casts and busts.

  He looked at it long.

  “Yes. There is feeling in it, and it is not borrowed,” he said, at length. “Dear Crispin, I would do much more for you: let her come and study here. I go to-night myself to Paris, and shall be away till winter, as I always am; but my foreman — you know him, he is an old man and to be trusted, and can give good instruction; she can learn here, and be put in right ways, for the wrong ones in Art, as in everything else, are the easiest; she might live in the house, too, only by what you say she would be too proud. Let her come, and learn. Not that I think she can ever achieve much, — being a girl; and indeed why should you wish it, since you wish her well? Fame is a bad thing for a woman. She cannot wear the glory-disk that the Greeks put on the heads of their statues in public places to preserve them from the pressing and the fingering of the crowd. The glory-disk of a woman is only a crown of thorns; and the hands of the curious are always forcing the thorns in to see if the blood will flow. Still, let her learn, since there is nothing better, and she did indeed do that Love, you say. Come out upon the terrace.”

  So he granted what I sought, as Maryx granted almost everything that was ever asked of him.

  “Did you tell Hilarion of her?” he asked, as he went out on to the marble steps.

  “No.”

  “No? He would have written a poem on her.”

  “More likely he would have made one of her, — the sort of poem that goes into the fire or into the dust when a few months are past.”

  “And yet you love him?” said Maryx, who indeed did so himself.

  “Yes. One loves him. So do women. That is why he can hurt them so.”

  “In love there is always one that can hurt the other; it is the one that loves least,” said Maryx.

  “And Hilarion is always that one. Tiber down there wonders to hear us talk of love. It knows that Arno is the river of Love. Arno knew Beatrice and Ginevra. Tiber only knew Agrippina and Messalina or, at the best, Cynthia.”

  “You forget Actæa,” said Maryx.

  “She was a slave, and she loved a beast.”

  “Do not slight her. She purifies all those centuries of Cæsarism reeking of blood and filth. Her beas
t was a god to her; she was a slave, but she was faithful. Your loveliest of all the saints, Francesca Romana, could find no higher law to give than ‘Love and be faithful.’ That Asiatic girl of Nero’s had found that law a thousand years before her.”

  The last glow from the set sun faded off the pale sea-green of the evening sky; far below on the bridge a little light shone under the dark clustered roofs of the houses: it was the lamp in the room where my Hermes was, — Hermes, who made woman out of sport!

  “You have not seen my Actæa?” said Maryx, turning back into the house.

  No one had seen it. He had but that spring called it into life from the gray lumps of clay. It was all alone in a little room whose single window let in on it the faint light of the rising moon. He lighted a three-wicked lamp, and let me look.

  It was great, like all that he did. Maryx was a mighty master of his art. He had boundless scorn for the frivolities and fripperies of modern sculpture; their puerilities were to him so many blasphemies; to make your marble into ribbons and tassels and broideries and flowers, and express under all these tawdrinesses the maladif desire and the false sentiment of a hurried and heated generation, — Maryx had for this as superb a contempt as Praxiteles or stern Lysippus would have had.

  Some one has very truly said that this age is not sculptural. It has no repose; it has no leisure; it has little health, physical and mental; and it has but little grandeur, moral or corporeal. Now, calm rest, vigor, and beauty are the indispensable attributes of sculpture.

  In default of these your modern stone-cutter takes pretty conceits, coquetries, ornaments, and trivialities.

  He clothes his statues; instead of sinews and veins, he moulds buttons and fringes; his chief ambition is to produce a successful trompe-l’œil; if he represent a bather, he will concentrate his talent on the towel, not on the muscles and the limbs; his sponge shall be so life-like it shall seem to be sponge itself, but the dorsal nerves will be all out of place, and the features will express nothing, save perhaps some grimace at the cold of the water, or annoyance at a gnat upon his shoulder.