by Ouida
What life can be fuller or be sweeter than this, even if your home be near the skies, in some old house of some crowded quarter with the doves flying about your roof all the day long?
What matter poverty, or any straits of it, if you be young and be in Rome?
All this mighty world that has been making here for nearly three thousand years is all your own, and Praxiteles and Raffaelle are your ministers. For you Popes greater than Emperors gathered their treasures from the East and West, and raised those endless temples of marble and of jewels; and for you they made these deep green aisles and avenues, where the ilex and the cypress intermingle, and the birds sing in the soft darkness of the boughs; not a Medici nor a Borgia of them all possessed the capital of the world as you can do, entering into your heritage of art’s great heirloom.
And beside a life in Rome all life elsewhere is but barren and narrow and must miss something both of color and sanctity. If it were only for the endless possibilities that lie in our life here, it would eclipse all others: you may watch a cabbage-garden being dug, and under the careless stroke of the spade it may yield up imperial marbles or broken household gods; you may speak to a village workman coming down from the hills into the streets, and he may give you, by mere chance, some priceless secret of the past, as only a few years since the poor artificer of the Sabine mountains gave up the secret of the Etruscan goldsmiths’ chains.
The city was full of mighty people, and stirred with all that life of fashion and of folly which must make the old stones of the Carinæ and the Sacred Way think the years of the Agrippines are come back again to Rome. But all its fume and fuss touched my Ariadne in no way.
Maryx, indeed, was sought by that illustrious though motley world, and could not always say it nay. But no one saw her at his house; and our own world, that gossiped on the door-steps, and clanked brass pails at the water-spouts, and told its beads at the shoemaker’s church, and ate its macaroni at the street-corners, and drove its mules over the bridge to the gardens, and pranked itself in gay masquerade, and beat its tambourine at Carnivals, did not change in any way, but let her alone, — a girl that did not go to mass, and had no saint, and came the Lord knew whence.
So the months went by, and Maryx would often leave the great personages who courted him, to join her and me and Palès, when on holy-days and feast-days we would ramble far and wide over the city and the country round. Maryx cared but little for this world which was at his feet: he thought it monotonous, but a myope: he said to it as Pierre Puget, another Provençal, said to it when it told him that he eclipsed Phidias: “Have you studied the works of Phidias?”
Maryx, despite his lofty free grace and often haughty speech, kept much of the peasant in him, — of the free and dauntless peasant who dwells on the broad plains, among his sheep-dogs, and has for his couch the wild thyme once dedicated to Venus. A king could not sway him; nor either easily could a siren allure.
The wiles of women fell away impotent from this man, who could imagine and create a loveliness that no living woman ever could equal, — Helen being dead.
Gay people began to go up and down the avenues by the Lateran, and foreign crowds to saunter under the palm of Augustus, and foolish fashionable chirupings twittered round the Moses and the Gladiator and all the great solemn noble marbles, and mummers began to twang their lutes before the time under gloomy convent-walls, and passing under the shadow of great palaces at night one heard strains of merry music, and caught glimpses, through the vast arched courts, of ladies’ gems and lacqueys’ liveries.
For me, I wished they would leave Rome alone. It should be visited as Mecca is; and in no other way.
But all the twitter and turmoil and flutter and frippery always rushed in like the waves of the Goths’ armies whenever winter came; and trade was bettered, and the grim old streets were bright, and not very many people came my way to the brown corner where the Ponte Sisto water fell in the great arched niche all green with moss. To me winter made no change, for my clients did not lie at all among that wealthy foreign world: I munched chestnuts instead of figs, and hugged a brazier instead of a water-melon: that was all.
Others of my calling retreated from their stalls into cellars, and sat with their heads just above the pavement, looking very droll, and like the jacks in boxes that the children play with; but for myself I never did. I stuck to my stall whenever I worked, and fixed a big red umbrella, if it rained, above my head, and defied the wind and all the forces of the elements.
Having braved in my younger manhood the icy winters of old German cities far northward, I was not afraid of the blasts that come over the Alps and Apennines and make one shiver, as they used to make Cato do, no doubt, despite all his philosophy, — whistling up under his toga, and sporting with his dignity.
I confess I like to think of Cato shivering in the winter wind. I have no love for him, nor honor, nor any veneration.
Surely never more curiously than in Cato were mediocrity and narrow-mindedness deified and immortalized: always arrayed with persistent obstinacy against innovation of any kind; a foe to all genius and all elegance; so brutal to his slaves that one of them hanged himself out of sheer fear of his displeasure; so rapacious of their labor that, whilst counseling festivals should be religiously kept in the letter and the plow laid aside, he recommends that slaves shall be meanwhile put to all other kind of work; furious against all immorality, whilst considering chastity in marriage in no wise binding on the husband; never rising to a higher view of moral excellence than lay in the range of a. strict police discipline, and never imagining a loftier honor than lay locked in the merchant’s ledger; considering every man of versatile powers and graceful accomplishments fit only for a harlequin, and despising a poet as only level with a woman or a mountebank; in old age, changing from the sturdy farmer and the plebeian soldier of the Hannibalic, Punic, and Macedonian wars, into the likeness of a prude, and something more disgusting than a prude, and spending long hours of inspection before the washing, swaddling, and nursing of his children: — how has he ever come to be revered by posterity?
Such qualities as he possessed of independence, integrity, and a very illiberal patriotism, never rose to any grandeur, and cannot redeem the egotism, the self-sufficiency, and the narrowness of the rest of his character, and, indeed, were virtues general in almost every citizen of his time. He had all the faults, and no more than the excellencies, of any sturdy, prejudiced, opinionated, commonplace character who represents the householder; and yet Lucius Porcius Cato, who refused a holiday to his labor-worn creatures by a miserable quibble, and who thought that to die worth more gold than you inherited showed a divine spirit, has come to be named in the same breath with Socrates and Plato and Marcus Antoninus. Oh, triumph sublime of the Mediocrities!
When the full winter was come, very great and grand people, foreigners, princes, and the like, came up constantly, as I say, to the famous studio on the Sabine hill; for Maryx was illustrious, and his name known wherever anything of art was in any way comprehended, and he might have dined, had he chosen, at any sovereign’s table in Europe. He but seldom saw his great guests among his marbles: when obliged to do so, he received them with that noble, frank courtesy which he showed alike to the highest and the lowest. “He looks like Pergolesi’s shepherd king,” said a woman once; and indeed it was not ill said, for he had something unworldly and untamable yet majestic and royal in all his air and bearing.
Giojà, as I say, too, was never seen by all these people, for his house had many chambers, and the one set apart for her work, where the Apollo Cytharœdus was, he never allowed to be invaded. At entertainments, which he occasionally gave, for, though of extreme simplicity, almost austerity, in his own habits, he lived with the magnificence of a great artist in his conduct to others, — he would have had her be present, and often pressed her to be so; but she resisted, and begged to be left alone, studying under the old bronze lamp that burned before Hermes in my room on the river.
“She i
s quite right; and, besides, she is so young,” said Maryx, and ceased to think of it.
His mother never alluded again to any thought of love or marriage about the girl. She grew used to seeing Giojà come and go across the court, with the sun on the golden bronze of her hair, and accepted her presence there with the half-stupid, half-puzzled feeling with which the once shrewd but now clouded mind of the old peasant accepted all the strange things around her, rebellious, yet resigned.
“Only you have made a clay image of her: that is bad,” she said, one day, seeing a cast that he had made, and recognizing in it the straight delicate limbs and the classic face that she saw every morning come up through the aloes and the myrtle on to the terrace steps.
“That is bad,” she would say. “Only the Holy Mother should be worshiped like that; and to put a maiden among your false gods and light women, — that is not well, either.”
Maryx would smile.
He, like his mother, grew used to seeing the tall slender form of the maiden pass up through his trees and his flowers into that beautiful house of his, which without her now would have seemed too cold and too silent; even as I at sunset grew used to seeing her come across the bridge to dip her hands in the fountain-water and lean over my board, and tell me what progress she had made that day, and what her master had said to her or had bidden her do.
At times she would pass the evening on the Golden Hill; but it was always when he was alone and unoccupied; and at such times she would spin to please his mother, or weave some piece of tapestry, on which she imitated flowers she had gathered and set in water near her, or draw in black and white, whilst Maryx, who had vast stores of the most miscellaneous learning, and the most capacious memory in the world, illustrated his own theories of art with passages from the most recondite of the classic writers, and manuscripts of the Vatican and the libraries of old Italian cities and of Paris, that scarcely any eyes but his own had ever been at the pains to decipher.
Ah, happy nights and innocent, in the quiet vaulted chamber, sweet with the scent of burning pines, and spacious as the hall of Alcinoüs, with the light of the hearth spreading broad and bright where the old dark figure of the woman sat and span, and the girl sped the swift shuttle, as Athene taught the Phæacian maids to do, and the deep soft tones of Maryx filled the silence with the sonorous sounds of Greek and Latin prose! — ah, happy nights and innocent! They should have had more abiding spell to bind, more lasting power to endear! But such are the ways of fate, and life is as the maze of Lars Porsena’s tomb, whereof no man knows the clue or holds the plan.
Maryx, in these winter months, made her in marble, as Nausicaa, — Nausicaa as she had gone down through the orchards and the olive-gardens to the sea, holding the golden cruse of oil in one hand, with her feet bare, so that she might wade in the waves, and in her eyes the great soft wonder that must have come there when Odysseus awoke. Nothing more delicately, seriously beautiful had ever come from his chisel, and nothing more purely Greek.
How one wishes that they had told us the fate of Nausicaa! When she leaned against the pillar, and bade her farewell to the great wanderer, we know her heart was heavy: never again could she play by the shore glad-hearted with her maidens; when she had passed, that day, out between the silver dogs of Hephæstus, through the west wind and the pomegranate-blossoms, to the sea, she had left her happy youth behind her.
So much we feel sure of; but we would fain know more. Were it a modern poem, how it would be amplified! how much we should hear of her conflict of silence and sorrow! no modern would have the coldness to leave her there, leaning against the column in Alcinoüs’s hall, and never add a word of her fate!
But that is our weakness: we cannot “break off the laurel-bough,” shortly and sharply, unburnt, as they did of old.
Did she live to be the mother of a line of kings? I like better to think that she never forgot the stranger who passed away to Ithaca, thinking never of her, but only — when he did look back — of the burning daughters of Atlas and of Helios, weaving songs and charms in their magical isles for the shame and the souls of men.
For me, I always wish — sinfully, perhaps — to strangle Penelope in her own web, and wed Ulysses to the sweet Phæacian maid.
This Nausicaa, which Maryx imaged, was exceedingly fair.
It had the peculiar charm of Giojà’s own look, — that look which had all the mysterious depth of a young goddess’s and the clear innocence of a child’s. It was Nausicaa going to the sea, not come from it. Giojà also had not as yet seen what slept on an untouched shore to make her sorrow.
She was happy, but she was happy with her mind, not with her heart. In her simplicity of habits and her seriousness of thought, she resembled rather a beautiful Greek youth than a girl of her own time. She was so ignorant of her own power, she was so serenely unconscious that when she threw back the sleeve from her arm to work the better the action might quicken the pulse of man into passion, that she scarcely seemed mortal to me, used to the ardent and tender women of my city. Her poor foolish father, who had given up so weakly to his fate and sat down under his burden by the Ligurian waves, had had, at the least, wisdom to educate her into that love of the world’s past, and that absorption into the arts, which are the surest shield against the perils of youth. Athene Ergane has a surer shield than even Athene Promachos.
“You admire him? you like him? he is kind to you?” I asked her, at the close of her first week’s study on the Golden Hill.
“He teaches me; he will make me an artist too,” she answered me, in surprise.
That was all she thought of or needed. Had he been the ugliest dwarf in all creation, Maryx would have been none the less a deity to her. She grew, as the time went by, into an adoration of him; but it was only with such a sentiment as that wherewith she adored the memory of the son of Charmidas, the idea of the strength of Lysippus.
Maryx was a great artist; he was her master.
She sighed for his smile; she feared his frown: she hung with reverence on all his words. But it was only because he was to her Art incarnate. She never knew all that she owed to him. For he would never let me tell her, and, swift as she was to see an error in a line, an imperfection in a fancy, things of daily life escaped her. She took what she found without thinking about it.
Her body wanted so little, and her mind demanded so much. If you had fed her mind and delighted it, she would have let you beat her, or starve her, and would not have complained.
“If she had not happily been dedicated to Apollo and Athene, she would have seen visions and died in a convent, like Teresa of Spain,” said Maryx of her, one day. “She is like those flowers which hang by a thread and live on the sun.”
I thought that he hardly read her aright.
She had more strength than Teresa of Spain, and the storm would feed her, I thought, scarcely less than the sun. But, like Santa Teresa, she saw immortals come to her, and she had little to do with the human creatures about her, — scarcely enough to make her human. It hurt her more to see a mutilated marble than to see a woman worn with disease and pain. Her angel was Apollo. For such defiance of the common fate there is always an avenging destiny.
What did Maryx feel to this flower?
I did not know; it seemed to me he scarcely knew himself. He thought much more at first of her genius than of herself.
“No woman ever did any good thing in marble, and she is a girl,” he would say. “Yet — —”
Yet he gave much time and thought to her instruction, and found in her a power of imagery and a mastery of execution which he allowed to be wonderful, her youth and her age both considered.
His mother’s suggestion seemed to have passed by him unheeded, and to be forgotten. He treated her as he would have treated a youth in whose talent and fate he had interest; nothing more.
“Who would talk of love to her?” he said, once, a little roughly. “She would understand you no more than my Nausicaa yonder.”
“She is not like Na
usicaa at all,” he added. “Nausicaa dreamed of love, and of the nuptial joys: she never does. I think men scarcely exist for her. She has no thought of me, for instance, save as of some abstract incarnation of her art, that leads her in its right ways, and so is worth regarding.”