by Ouida
“Bernini could not be better than that; he had to please Gregory and Louis the Fourteenth. Genius cannot escape the taint of its time, more than a child the influence of its begetting. Augustus could have Horace and Martial; he could never have had Homer and Milton.”
“I do not think with you. Talent takes the mark of its generation; genius stamps its time with its own impression. Virgil had the sentiment of a united Italy. But then there is so much talent and so little genius at any epoch!”
“Or in any art; and what there is, is dwarfed and cramped by the manner and necessities of modern life. Only think of the Lesbian or Theban poets reciting strophe and antistrophe by moonlight under the cypress-trees, crowned with the olive of victory, and with a whole nation listening in rapture underneath the stars! Nowadays Pindar or Myrnedes or Sappho could only print a book, and ‘those who have failed in literature and art’ would be free to rate, and rail, and lie about them in print, likewise.”
“There are two sides to that. For one, I think that there is something even finer than the crowds and the olive-wreath in the silence and solitude in which a man may work now, without a sign, until his thoughts go out, like a flock of birds suddenly set free, over all lands, and to all peoples, finding welcome and bearing seed to the farthest and the lowliest corners of the earth. Besides, people were not so very different then: critics snarled and sneered till victims hanged themselves for sorrow, and ‘sad and tender songs were sold with silver faces.’ We have Pindar’s and Plato’s own lament for it. No, were I a poet, I would be content with the present time. Instead of Ægina and Hymettus, you have the whole world.”
“And were I a sculptor I would be content. Instead of Olympus, you have a complete knowledge of comparative anatomy! But now make me more known to your living statue there: she, I see, is like Sappho, ‘a nursling of the Graces and Persuasion,’ — only she is so silent.”
“She is thinking of your songs which have silvered faces but are not written for gold,” said Maryx. “Giojà, my dear, look up and speak.”
She lifted her beautiful serious eyes to Hilarion.
Of old, he to whom Phœbus taught the arts of song learned also the arts of magic and of healing. Hilarion had learned the magic, but how to heal he had never cared to ask Phœbus.
The sun had set, and there came cold winds from Soracte, and mists from the sea.
“It grows chilly,” said Hilarion. “Let us go in-doors. There are roses there, and something to drink and eat, and there is a boy who plays the flute not ill; I brought him with me. The flute is almost as sweet as the nightingale, when you shut the player from sight.”
He turned to her, as became his right, for it was he who was master of Daïla, not we. Giojà rose from beside the goddess of freedmen, and, still silent and almost shy, went with him.
I thought of the girl at the well on Akrokorinth, that he had spoken of, whom Apelles found drawing water, and whom he led in with the earthen aryballos on her pretty head to the banquet of the painters in the city of fair women.
“Do you laugh because of her blushes?” said Apelles. “Do not fear; I will make her as skilled in all the ways of love as any one of them that goes up, perfumed and curled, in her tunic of gauze, to worship Aphrodite Melinis.”
Not that I was afraid.
And besides, as Maryx had said, since Laïs left the well so willingly she was but little loss. No doubt if Apelles had not passed that way she would have tired of drawing water, and would have envied those young slaves whom the ship by the quays brought to furnish the hosts of pleasure, and would have gone up of her own will to worship Aphrodite in the sweet secret cypress forest.
And yet again, besides this, I was sure that my sea-born Ariadne had nothing of either Laïs in her.
Nevertheless, I wished Hilarion had not returned, and I was glad that the night closing in let us hear but little of the flute and see only the first freshness of the roses. He let us go with many expressions of regret, and with a smile.
By some miracle he had no women with him, there, and had brought no one but his boy flute-player.
Giojà was still more silent than usual.
“What poems does he write?” she asked me, once, in the darkness of the stairs, as I took her to her door.
“He writes as Heine says that Aristophanes did,” I answered her. “The singing of the nightingale is spoiled by the chattering of the apes that lodge in the blossoming tree of his fancy.”
“Will you give them to me to read?”
“You cannot read his tongue.”
“I can learn. Why does he let the apes come upon his trees?”
“Heine would say because the tree was set in the darksome swamp of Weltvernichtungsidee. There is a long word for you that you cannot translate. Not that he is the least like Aristophanes. The apes in Hilarion’s tree never laugh; they mock. But, to do him justice, his nightingales are sweet and sad as Philomel herself, — who, by the by, had murder on her soul. Good-night, my dear. Palès is quite tired; so must you be.”
“Could no one persuade him to send the apes away?”
She had her hand on the latch of the door. The old, dim lamp she carried shone upon her face.
“When a man has once kept company with such apes as these, it is hard for him to forego them,” I said to her. “And it is best not to meddle with his taste: he has his hours for the nightingales. Good-night, my dear.”
“Good-night.”
She went within, and dreamt, I fear, of Apollo Soranus with the face of Hilarion, of the “sweet glad angels of the spring,” that sang of heaven, and of apes and snakes out of Soracte’s sacred caverns that hissed and drowned the song.
I had not done very wisely. I had made her pity him, with a soft vague pity, all the tenderer because she could not in the most distant way understand the disease from which he suffered, — the moral disease of Apollo Soranus, who, through his sweet music, with the celestial rays above his head, yet breathed miasmic vapors upon men, and bade them sin and die.
CHAPTER XIII.
NEXT day I had divers errands to execute, and shoes to take home; among them, I went to the old Palazzo Spada, having some boots of a custodian there, and looked in for the five-hundredth time at Pompey’s statue, which always seduces one to stand and think, remembering what blood was once set flowing at its feet.
If Cæsar had not gone out that day, but had hearkened to the warning, of Calphurnia’s dream, would the fate and the face of the world have been very much changed, after all? Probably not: for, anyway, when his death should have come, Octavius would have succeeded him. Augustus found Rome brick and left it marble, — perhaps, though there was a deal of brick underneath his marble. But he found men virile and left them venal; and the world is still eating the lotus-seeds that he sowed broadcast.
Liberty and the old wooden Ovilia, like a sheep-pen, was better than the ornamental and stately Septa of Agrippa, with liberty a laughing-stock, and manliness sunk in the laps of courtesans and the couches of slaves.
Thinking of Cæsar and Cæsarism, — which never will thoroughly pass off the earth, because it is safe-rooted in the chronic cowardice and indolence and need of leadership ingrained in human nature, — I crossed the Square of Cape di Ferro, and, passing an arched kitchen where they were baking loaves and pastries, which they sold just outside it on the pavement, I heard the master-baker beating and belaboring a little baker-boy.
I always rescue little cook-boys, for the sake of Golden Claude, and I went in and freed the child by a few reasonable words, and more strongly reasoning pence. One may be a genius and yet burn a biscuit. Saxon Alfred did, who was here too in Rome, you know, a fair-haired seven-year-old child. I wish Julius and Bramante had left the old basilica standing, if only for the sake of that pretty Northern boy who came so far on pilgrimage from the Barbarian isle.
I went along the dirty vegetable-market of the Campo di Fiore, where once the flames bore “to those worlds which he had imagined” the great master
of Free Thought. I walked on, hearing still my little baker-boy’s sobs of gratitude, and thinking of Claude Lorraine, and what an odd thing it was that a creature too stupid to slip a cake properly into an oven, and too awkward to put it properly on a plate when baked, should have had the sense of the sunset and the soul of the sunrise in him as he had.
It is very wonderful; for, say what you like, a great painter he is, though artificial, and if anything would make one hate a classic temple he would do it, but a great painter, beyond doubt, and one who would not have been even artificial if he would but have worked out of doors; but, though he would sit for hours out of doors, he would always go within to paint, — which is what spoiled him.
Thinking of Claude, and of that fugitive golden glow which he who could not brown a biscuit could imprison on his canvas, I walked across the Field of the Flower, where not a flower grows, so much death has it seen and still does see: and my thoughts strayed away to the time when on its stories a grocer’s lad recited and improvised there to an enraptured throng, and Hellenic scholars metamorphosed his name to Metastasio.
“Dreaming by daylight, Crispino?” said a voice I knew. “But that you always do. Well, you are right; for dreams are the best part of life.”
It was the voice of Hilarion. He was coming across the square, with the calm smile in his eyes that had always a little mockery in them, — an indulgent mockery, for human nature indeed was a very poor thing in his sight, but then be admitted that was not its own fault.
He greeted me in kindly manner, and turned and walked beside me. He had none of the pride which would have moved some men to be ashamed at being seen with an old cobbler with a leather apron twisted up about his loins. Indeed, he had too much pride for any such poor sentiment; what he chose to do was his own law and other people’s, or if it were not other people’s it ought to be so. Besides, Hilarion, practically the most tyrannical of masters, was theoretically the most democratic of thinkers. In his eyes all men were equal, — in littleness of worth.
How handsome he was as he came across the old desolate place, with the shadows of the huge Cancelleria and of the granite colonnades from the Theatre of Pompey falling sombrely across his path! — almost more so than when I had first seen his face as a boy on the night that his light-o’-love died.
How handsome he was! — one could not but feel it, as one feels the beauty of a roebuck, of a diamond, of a palm-tree, of a statue, of a summer night. It was real beauty, mournful and tender, but not emasculated: he had the form of the disk-thrower in the Vatican, and the face of my Borghese Bacco. I could understand how women loved Hilarion just because he looked at them, just because they could not help it. I did the same, though there were things and thoughts I hated in him, and times when I fancied it might be possible for one to kill him, — and do well.
“If you had really loved one woman,” I had sometimes said to him. And he had smiled.
“Women are best in numbers. Who makes a pasty with one truffle?”
That was all he knew. The poet who would write of Sappho and of Sospitra and of the great passion in the words that burn, knew no more of it than a man moulding casts in plaster here knows of the art of Phidias or of the face of the bronze Athene.
To Hilarion love was an appetite, an animal pleasure, and no more. Women were soft pretty brutes like panthers, that one stroked with the more pleasure because of the peril in their velvet paws. They were all like Lilas to him, some lower, some higher, but no more worth to weep over when lost. So he said in his delicate, bitter, amorous, cruel voice; and so he said in his heart.
“Who is she?” he asked of me, without preface, moving beside me across the cabbage-strewn stones of the Campo di Fiore.
“Maryx told you,” I answered him.
“Of course he did not tell the truth. How could he before her? Tell me their story.”
“There is no other to tell, and Maryx never lies. It is not what you think. She learns with him. No more. For myself — —”
Then I told him how I had found her coming travel-worn and weary from the sea.
“It is very pretty,” he said, when I had ended. “And Maryx and you are good enough for anything: even to play the part of the divine Lupercus to such a lamb!”
There was more of sincerity than sarcasm in his words, yet there was enough of the latter to anger me.
It does not need much virtue,” I said, roughly, “still less divinity, to act like decent men.”
“Lupercus objected to the wolf, but never to the Flamen’s fire and knife,” said Hilarion, with a little laugh at my irritation. “You have given her over to the Flamen, since you have devoted her to art. Art for a woman! and that insatiable art, too! Think of Properzia of Bologna.”
“It was not art that killed Properzia. It was the love, or rather the cruelty, of men. Do you stay long this winter?”
“My dear Lupercus, I do not know. Life loses something — spent out of Rome. It is only here that each day holds for us two thousand years. Now tell me all you have done besides finding an Ariadne; not that the Borghese bust is an Ariadne, but that does not matter at all. What palimpsests have you lighted on, what early Boccaccio or black-letter St. Jerome have you picked up for a drink of wine, what mural paintings have you stumbled on through a hole in the grass that Palès made after a rat, what ivory pyx beyond price have you found an old woman keeping her pills or her pins in? And to think there are people in the world who do not care for a pyx or a palimpsest! And to think that learning has ever been figured as a serious and wearisome thing! As if there were any other thing that could make life one-half so entertaining! What else can paint a whole teeming Agora on the dull face of a single old coin, and embalm a whole nation’s faith in a mere branch of rosemary? Do you not pity from your soul the poor folks to whom the palimpsest is only an old scrawled scroll, and the pyx a box of bone? And then learning is the only pleasure that one cannot exhaust. It is the deep sea that the child showed St. Augustine. The deepest waders among us touch scarcely more than its surf. If love were but like learning — —”
“What has become of Neria?”
Neria was the dark-browed singer who had left Rome with him.
“Neria? Her temper was insupportable, or mine was, I have forgotten which. Neria was the mistress of Mars; I am no Mars, and I like peace.”
“That is, you like to be inconstant without being reproached for it.”
“Perhaps. All men do, I suppose. Reproaches are an error: when they begin to reproach me I give them something that they wish for, — very much as the Romans sacrificed the parca præsyntanea when they buried a dead body, — and then I see them no more. There are two women that I should like to have known: they are the second Faustina, and St. Elizabeth of Hungary. They are the most singular women that ever lived, and the most unlike to each other that the world ever saw.”
“Which would keep you longest?”
“Faustina, no doubt: innocent women are always forsaken. One is too sure of them.”
And with that terrible truth he paused by an old stall in the street, allured by the glimmer of an onyx on which was carved the veiled figure of Pudicitia, with one hand hidden in her robe.
Some Roman lover had had it engraved for his bride, I dare say, — some soft serious creature who put all her soul into the ubi to Gaius, ego Gaia, when she crossed his threshold and lived at home, and never opened her doors to the roisterers of the Bona Dea in the December nights, and never donned a transparent tunic and drank the philtres of the East and spent all his substance in love-gifts and license when all the town was shouting Io Saturnalia, but went in quiet and humility to her own altar, and prayed for her unborn child to mother Ops and Spes. There were such women even in Cæsarean Rome. There are such women always everywhere, — lest men should quite despair.
“Poor Pudicitia! Perhaps this was a signet-stone of one of the Agrippinas,” said Hilarion, with a little laugh, buying the seal. “It was a fashion to salute the foulest empresses in he
r name. There are many fashions of old Rome we cling to still. Do you remember that the first statue of Modesty, the veiled one of the Forum Boarium, was always called by the people the statue of Fortune? It may serve as a pretty enough allegory that the good fortune of a nation does lie in the chastity of its women, though I do not suppose that the Romans meant that. I wonder what other statues I shall find at Daïla. I shall give myself up for a while to Daïla. If one could only discover the Kypris Anadyomene! But it never came into Italy. What would you like the best if you could choose of all the lost treasures of the world? I think I would have that copy of the Iliad corrected by Aristotle, that Alexander always carried about with him shut in its golden box.”
“Or the famous three lines that Apelles and Protogenes drew, — if it were only to stop the eternal squabbling of artists about it.”
“Yes, Pliny does not tell one enough, though he saw it himself: so he might have said more. I would sooner, perhaps, have the portrait of Kampaspe, or the Kypris, or the Zeus. Not but what, though Maryx would call it a heresy, I always fancy, myself, that those chryselephantine and polylithic statues, with their eyes of precious stones, must have been in reality very ugly. I would rather have the lost Lycurgeia, or the Montefeltro Menander, or the missing books of Tacitus. or that history of Etruria which Claudius wrote, — because he was a scholar, you know, though an imbecile in other things, and it might have given us the key to the language. Perhaps, though, better than all, I would choose in a heap all those lovely pagan things that Savonarola and his boys burnt on Palm Sunday, the Petrarch with the illuminated miniatures included. When one thinks of all those things it does really seem just that he was burnt himself! Indeed, why does the world make such a lament over his burning? It does not care for Giordano Bruno’s, who perished on this very spot we are crossing. Yet Giordano Bruno was far the finer man of the two. It required a thousandfold more courage to refuse the crucifix than to raise it in those days. Savonarola was a narrow ascetic, who preached the miserly creeds that have sheared the earth bare of all beauty. Yes, when one thinks of all the classic marbles and erotic pictures and priceless relics of the early arts that his fanaticism lost to us forever, one cannot but feel that though the world sees but little fair measure, it did see some for once when the pile was lit for the preacher. Not that anybody meant to be just in burning him: men always stumble on justice by the merest accident when they do chance to arrive at it all.”