Delphi Collected Works of Ouida

by Ouida

  “What has she had in her short life to make her glad? Youth without pleasure is like a flower that comes up too early in the year and is frozen half-blown. Joy is unfamiliar to her; her name is a cruel irony. She is not to be blamed. When I was a lad yonder at the Villa Medici, I bought a bird from an old man in a cellar; it was a large hawk; I gave it a sunny place, good food, and even liberty; but the bird was always dull. It was not my fault, nor was it the bird’s; Nature had been cramped and thwarted, and took her vengeance. So it is here. When she thinks of Art alone, she is happy. When she is awakened to the living world, she sees that she has missed much and is not quite like others. That is all.”

  “All? You are very generous. But will it ever be otherwise, do you think?”

  Maryx smiled a little sadly.

  “Who can say? Yes, I suppose so. Tired of seeing the dull filmy eyes of my hawk, I took it with me to Rocca de Pappa and let it fly one day; it went straight up into the air, and went away over the mountains; I never saw it again. I hope it escaped shot and snare. I had done what I could.”

  “You mean —— ?”

  “Oh, nothing, save that we must leave her quite free to shape her own course. And do not speak of generosity in me: it offends me. I do no more for her than I have done for twenty lads, and she is worthier than any one of them. I told you long ago, nothing that I can ever do for youth or for genius can repay my own debt, — the debt to fortune and to France which began when I stood on the ilex terrace of the Academy and first saw Rome at my feet.”

  We were passing the portico, with its stone mouth of Truth, and I was thinking of St. Augustine, who used the lion-throne inside: in the hot lustrous night, the water of the fountain basin glimmered freshly in the moonlight; in the lane we turned into was once the mighty altar of Fortuna Virilis; the silvery strong light shone on and about the Ionic columns, and the sculptures of the children, and the cattle of sacrifice.

  Maryx uncovered his head to it all, as any Roman might have veiled his, two thousand years before.

  “The goddess has been good to me,” he said.

  I felt chilly in the luminous path we trod under the rays of the bright full moon.

  When men thank Fortune, mostly she turns from them and shuts her hand forever.

  What is she but a woman and blind?

  His own face was grave, and lost its bold, frank brightness, as the moonbeams touched it; perhaps the same thought chilled him.

  By the house of Pilate, he bade me good-night, and went over the river by the Broken Bridge.

  CHAPTER XII.

  “THERE has been a new statue found at Daïla,” said Maryx to me one fair sunny day in the autumn-time, pausing before my stall, as I stitched at some boots of my roisterous neighbor the blacksmith, whose hammers were then ringing loudly enough to split one’s ears at his open forge in the back of the Via Giulià.

  “There has been a new statue found at Daïla. You must come and see it,” said Maryx, with the sun in his handsome fearless eyes. “You must leave off your stitching, and come and see it. She will not care to go without you. No; it is not very ancient. About the time of Severus; I should say a copy of some fairer and earlier original. But it is very graceful—”

  “A Venus?”

  “No. A Feronia, I think, unquestionably. I dare say it will be called a Venus; everything is: it is the one name that ignorance has mastered; such is the power of beauty! Come up the hill to me to-morrow by the twentieth hour, and we will go together. It is a saint’s day: you cannot work, unless you would lose the shoes of Padre Trillo. They will not put it in-doors for a few days; there is no fear of rain, and it looks so well with the grapes and the olives about it. What a pity it is that marble discolors out-of-doors! it never looks so well as with a background of clouds and leaves. If the disputed circumlitio of the Greeks meant some manner of preserving statues from the influence of weather, as sometimes I used to think, the loss of the method should be even more lamented than it is. Farewell. What a noise your friend the smith is making! one forgives him for the sake of Lysippus: it is one of the few trades that remain masterful and poetic.”

  Therewith he went over the bridge to his house, where Giojà was working in the quiet afternoon hours, modeling from the round in clay, or drawing from the antique in charcoal, with that breadth and greatness of treatment which Maryx infused into all that he did and all whom he taught.

  “Avoid mere prettiness as you would the plague,” he would say, always. “A sculptor means a hewer of the rocks, not a modeler in sugar.”

  With the morrow he and she and I went up the old Flaminian Way, past the place of Sulla’s tomb, out into the open country towards Soracte, behind those spirited little black horses of his which scorned the shoes of smiths and would scramble like goats up the steepest paved lanes of hilly Rome, — the horses whose likeness one sees on the old friezes chiseled in the days when the horse was in a manner a free creature, and not the mere hapless piece of mechanism to which centuries of harness and stall-life have now reduced him.

  The villa of Hilarion was vast as a king’s palace, and almost as full of magnificence and profusion. It was always kept ready for him. There were many years when he never went near it; there were other years when he lived there all the four seasons through. In these painted marble halls, brilliant with Giulio Romano’s bold colors, where the windows opened on the great avenues of cedar and evergreen oak, arching like cloisters on all sides to show some temple, lake, or statue, it was easy to believe that one was still in the era of magnificent Leo, or that luxurious Lucrezia might have been coming thither on her palfrey, or the Vatican court floating up Tiber in its barges with Bernado Accolti rhyming his madrigals and sonnets to the rhythm of the oars.

  The statue found that morning was left lying on the turf a little way from where it had been discovered, away from the house, under the vines and olives, where the farms began and the gardens ended.

  Oxen had plowed above it for many a century, and many a soldier tramped to war, yet the marble was uninjured, save that the left arm was missing. It was lovely, and doubtless some copy of a Greek original adapted to a Latin divinity.

  Maryx examined it long and lovingly, and decided that it was of workmanship not later than the time of Adrian, and that it was a Feronia, and not a Flora, as the master of the works had at first considered it to be, from the heavy wreath of various blossoms and leaves that crowned the head; and he gave us many a learned reason why it was the younger divinity that “loved garlands,” rather than the greater goddess of all things that flowered and brought forth.

  It was a Feronia, no doubt, said Maryx.

  The Romans had loved Feronia, and had always given her beautiful festivals, not so licentious as the Floralia or the Liberalia, with which they had possessed much in common, however. She had been an Etruscan and Volscian deity, and was always dearer to the Sabine than to the Latin. She had had of old her chief temple at the foot of Soracte; Hannibal’s soldiers had violated her shrine; before that she had been the cause of war between the Romans and the Sabines; she had been always a most beautiful though not supreme goddess, no doubt sprung from the same myth as Persephone at the beginning of time; she had had always most lovely attributes; wells and fountains had been consecrated to her; she had been in especial the deity of freedmen; “benemeriti servi sederunt surgent liberi” had been the inscription on her altars; her feasts had been all in the summer; they had used to invoke her with Apollo Soranus; she had clearly sprung from the Demeter legend as Libera did; what a pity that the freedmen had mostly been but panders and fawning sycophants and bloated moneymakers! the fancy was so fine, that gift of liberty in the temples of flowers. So said Maryx, with much more that was worth hearing, as he sat on a block of tufa under an olive-tree, beside the fair white Feronia who had been under the earth a thousand years if one, more likely two, and still was none the worse.

  There was a great charm in hearing Maryx talk: his very voice was eloquence, and his fancy discu
rsive, and his learning vast in all that belonged to the arts or to their history.

  Giojà listened to him with a charmed delight. He was her beloved master.

  The light fell through the silver leaves on to the marble in the grass: beyond the olives and the vines were the deeper green and purple shadows of great pine woods; through an opening there was the golden light which told that the city was shining in the sunset; behind us was sublime Soracte.

  “How well it will be with them some day!” I thought, looking from the noble head of Maryx, lightened by the sunlight that fell through the olive-boughs, to the face of my Ariadne, as it bloomed with youth and the freshness of air and the warmth of high and tender thoughts. “How well it will be!” I thought, and was glad that I had meddled with that dread blind goddess who was throned of old upon Præneste.

  There came a step through the olives, and over the grass, to the place where we sat. Palès sprang from her rest in a delirium of rapture.

  “Which is the found Feronia?” said Hilarion, as he looked from the statue to the girl. “Since when have your marbles breathed, Maryx? It is true, they always looked as though they did so.”

  We were too surprised to speak. No one had had any notice of his return. But then he never wrote to any living soul, and seldom was certain of his own moods one hour on another.

  “Is there no welcome for me?” he said, with his eyes still resting wonderingly on Giojà.

  She had risen, and was looking at him with a slow startled recollection and gladness waking on her face.

  “You are the Apollo Citharœdus,” she said, and paused in a little awe.

  “I am a graceless singer of sad songs,” said Hilarion, with a smile. “Have they been kind enough to make you think of me, though I was unknown? I said I should return when a fairer nymph than my marble Canens should be released from earth. I have kept my word., and I find Daïla thrice blessed.”

  Then he threw himself on the grass between her and the marble Feronia.

  We began to tell him something both of her and of the statue.

  “Tell me nothing,” said Hilarion. “Let us cheat ourselves. We are living under Augustus. There is no shadow of the cross on the world yet. The Feronia will be raised on her altar to-morrow. We shall have the races with the rose-crowned boys, that symbolize the swiftness of time and the vainness of pleasure. We do not believe in her, nor in anything, very much. Lucian and Apuleius have made us mockers; but we keep the grace of the old faiths about us. Let us cheat ourselves, — no one is happy except in delusion; and we will send for Tibullus to supper.”

  Giojà all the while was looking at him with grave soft eyes, still wondering. No woman ever looked at him once only; and to her he was the Apollo Citharœdus.

  The rose-crowned boys raced for Flora,” said Maryx. “But if you choose to worship your Feronia with roses or anything else who shall prevent you? she is yours.”

  “No, she is yours. You found her, Maryx.”

  “Perhaps. But you own her.”

  “What! because she lies on my earth, and lay under it? That is no such title as yours, who could call as fair as she any day out of a block of stone. Take her, and set her in your atrium. It is not Feronia that I am disposed to envy you.”

  He looked towards Giojà, as he leaned near her on his elbow, full length on the grass.

  Maryx understood.

  “You mistake, my friend,” he said, quickly, with a little frown. “There may be Divæ Virgines unpolluted with any adoration.”

  “Even of the little red dogs that were sacrificed in the Robigalia to avert the canicular fever? said Hilarion, listlessly, still gazing at the face near him.

  He too understood; but he did not believe.

  “Perhaps those red dogs suggested for later legends the red mouse; who knows?”

  “The red mouse has never entered where you look,” said Maryx.

  Giojà listened: she did not understand. She seldom asked questions. She studied, and she thought. “Few women can be silent and let God speak.” She could be so. As her recompense she heard beautiful things, and missed many bad ones.

  Hilarion laughed.

  “Sculptors are always passionless,” he said. “I wonder why there are no stories of them, as there are of poets and of painters? They have no Laïs and no Laura, — at least, for history. I suppose the marble chills you all.”

  “Do you call Laïs at the well, and Laura at the mass, passion?” said Maryx, with a little contempt.

  “There are few things in tradition prettier than the meeting of Apelles and Laïs upon Akrokorinth,” said Hilarion, not heeding. “I wonder no artist has made it his subject. But people are always confounding her with the too famous or infamous Laïs of Alkibiades, which is a pity. Apelles’s treasure-trove was killed for her surpassing beauty by the jealousy of woman on the steps of the temple of Aphrodite, before she had had very many years to profit by his teaching.”

  “She was not much loss,” said Maryx. “She left the well too willingly. So you care little for your Feronia? Well, it is not of the best epoch. In her time they had already begun to manufacture statues, — to make the figures of gods and emperors, and await orders what heads to affix to them. When Christianity killed sculpture, after all she did not strangle a muse, but a mechanical toy.”

  “A muse cannot be strangled; she may be starved. When Christianity crushed the mechanism of Art, the muses veiled themselves, and hid from men; but they lived, and can be found again. You know their dwelling-place.”

  “They turn their faces from me oftener than you think,” said Maryx, with a sigh. “How should we have great Art in our day? We have no faith. Belief of some sort is the life-blood of Art. When Athene and Zeus ceased to excite any veneration in the minds of men, sculpture and architecture both lost their greatness. When the Madonna and her son lost that mystery and divinity which for the simple minds of the early painters they possessed, the soul went out of canvas and of wood. When we carve a Venus now, she is but a light woman; when we paint a Jesus now, it is but a little suckling or a sorrowful prisoner. We want a great inspiration. We ought to find it in the things that are really beautiful, but we are not sure enough, perhaps, what is so. What does dominate us is a passion for nature, — for the sea, for the sky, for the mountain, for the forest, for the evening storm, for the break of day. Perhaps when we are thoroughly steeped in this we shall reach greatness once more. But the artificiality of all modern life is against it; so is its cynicism. Sadness and sarcasm make a great Lucretius or a great Juvenal, and scorn makes a strong Aristophanes; but they do not make a Praxiteles and an Apelles; they do not even make a Raffaelle, or a Flaxman.”

  “Even !”

  “Yes, even. Raffaelle was the most wondrous draughtsman, and the sweetest of all living poems; but there have been painters far higher than he in vision and far nobler in grasp. Really, looking into them, his pictures say very little, almost nothing. It is his perfect life that dazzles us; it is so perfect, — cradled in that old eyrie of Urbino, and dropping in its bloom like a pomegranate-flower, mourned by the whole of Rome. Nothing could be lovelier than such a life — save such a death!”

  “No. ‘Celui qui a passée par la porte de la désillusion est mort deux fois.’ Raffaelle alone of all men that have ever lived never passed that fatal door of disenchantment. Yet I am not sure that Domenichino was not a truer artist at heart. Domenichino lived under a continued shadow of pain and calumny, but in that stormy twilight he saw great visions, though he could ill embody them.”

  “And they broke his heart among them. It is very sad always to be born for Art where Art is decaying and dying Raffaelle must have seen that the miraculous gourd of the Renaissance was withering, but he does not seem to have sorrowed.”

  “We, ourselves, are only eating the stalk of the gourd now: do we suffer?”

  “I think we do. All that we create that is worth anything — it is not much that is so — is marked out by two things, melancholy and doubt
; not a puerile melancholy or an insolent doubt, but the immeasurable dreariness of a soul that is adrift like a rudderless ship on a unknown sea. There never was any age so sad at heart as ours.”

  “Is that a praise, or a reproach?”

  “Neither. Only a fact.”

  “It at least shows we have no vanity. We have ceased to believe ourselves the care of gods, the heirs of eternity. We know ourselves to be only motes upon the rays of a light which is but made of mere empty gases as the marsh-lights are.”

  “And that is not the temper which conceives greatly or produces greatly. If Alexander had believed himself a bubble of gas instead of the son of a god, he would not have changed the face of the world. Negation cannot be the parent of heroism, though it will produce an indifference that counterfeits it not ill, since Petronius here died quite as serenely as ever did the martyrs of the Church.”

  “You would argue, then, that superstition is the soul of the hero and of the artist! A sorry conclusion.”

  “Faith is, — of some sort. It matters little whether it be in divinity or humanity. The worst fault of the arts now is that they have not even faith in themselves. Take my own: it has lost belief in its own power to charm. Falconet, — who, nevertheless, was a clever man, and more right, perhaps, about Michael Angelo than we like to allow, — Falconet exactly struck the death-note of the plastic arts (though he meant praise) when he said, ‘Our marbles have almost color.’ That is just where we err. We are incessantly striving to make sculpture at once a romance-writer and a painter, and of course she loses all dignity, and does but seem the jay in borrowed plumes of fable. There is no greater sign of the weakness and feverishness of the arts in our day than the way in which they all borrow one from another, mistrusting their own isolated force, — the musicians with their compositions in chiaroscuro, the painters with their symphonies in red and gray, the poets with their studies in sepia or their motives in brown and white: it is all false and unreal, sickly and borrowed, and sculpture does not escape the infection. Conceits are altogether out of keeping with marble. They suit a cabinet painting or a piece of china. Bernini was the first to show the disease when he veiled the head of his Nile to indicate that its source was unknown! — a costume-designer’s trick for a carnival masquerade.”