Delphi Collected Works of Ouida, page 350
“This world of our own immediate day is weak and weary, because it is no longer young: yet it possesses one noble attribute, — it has an acute and almost universal sympathy, which does indeed often degenerate into a false and illogical sentiment, yet serves to redeem an age of egotism. We have escaped both the gem-like hardness of the pagan and the narrowing selfishness of the Christian and the Israelite. We are sick for the woe of creation, and we wonder why such woe is ours, and why it is entailed on the innocent dumb beasts, that perish in millions for us, unpitied, day and night. Rome had no altar to Pity: it is the one god that we own. When that pity in us for all things is perfected, perhaps we shall have reached a religion of sympathy that will be purer than any religion the world has yet seen, and more productive. ‘Save my country!’ cried the pagan to his deities. ‘Save my soul!’ cried the Christian at his altars. We, who are without a god, murmur to the great unknown forces of Nature, ‘Let me save others some little portion of this pain entailed on all simple and guileless things, that are forced to live, without any fault of their own at their birth, or any will of their own in their begetting.’”
When he would speak thus, or in similar moods on similar themes, with that natural power of utterance which gave him a greater sway over the minds of students than any one had possessed since Canova, she would listen to him with silent reverence and grave delight.
All his temper was akin to hers, and no thought of his was alien to her mind.
Yet he was quite right: as a man, she never thought of him; he was her master, and so her ruler; an artist, and so of her kindred; but no more.
And, indeed, he did not seek to be more.
Nothing could be purer, simpler, and more utterly free from any kind of passion than the patience with which he taught her and the goodness with which he befriended her. His care of her was so continual, but so unobtrusive, that perhaps for that very reason she noticed it but little.
Maryx had known the stormy passions of an ardent and imaginative manhood, but of late years he had been little moved by women: he had grown indifferent to them. There was nothing in his conduct or in his manner to her which could indicate that that indifference was altered. Except that he was more gentle, he treated her as he had often treated before her young lads in whose poverty and talent he had seen the image of his own lonely youth.
But, myself, I noticed that he did not go out of Rome this year scarcely for a day; and I noticed the infinitely caressing softness that came into his lustrous eyes whenever she drew near; and I hoped — hoped — that she might lay her young head forever on that brave heart of his, and lose her dreams of greatness in the accomplished greatness of his own.
For his mother was right: the marble was too cold for the soft-beating bosom of a girl to rest on long; and the Daphne of Borghese was right also: when the laurel grows out of the breast of a woman, it hurts.
So, peacefully, the summer came, and waned, and merged in autumn; and September was upon me ere I knew it, and all the little children were growing round-eyed, and eager, to think of the near-coming pleasure of running out into the vineyards, among the tombs and the temples and the buried cities, and dancing before the big grape-wagons down the old tracks across the Campagna, where once the Via Triumphalis was.
For these things Giojà did not care: she cared if among the vines you found the mask of a muse or the head of a satyr; she cared if putting the grass aside you found the marks where an altar had smoked, or the broken pottery that told of an old forgotten city.
One would have been glad for her to be more quickly touched by simple joys, more girlishly alive to natural mirth and pleasure. But the solitude in which all her years had been passed on that silent shore, where the myrtles grow over the buried kingdoms, and the king’s sepulchres shelter the sheep and the goats by the side of the blue sea that once bore the vessels of Æneas and the galleys of Scipio, this solitude, I say, and the manner of her rearing in it, had left their impress on her too deeply engraven ever to be changed.
“I wish I could be happy, — just once, — for one little day!” she said, wistfully, that summer, after watching silently some girls dancing the Saltarella with their lovers, under the vine-hung terrace of a little wine-house in the chestnut woods of Castel Gandolfo.
Maryx, standing by her, shrank a little, as if stung by some sudden pain.
“We do all we can,” he said; and was silent. And his eyes were as wistful as hers.
She turned to him repentantly. “Oh, do not think me thankless. I did not mean that; I have all I could wish, so much more than ever I could have hoped for; only, to be light of heart, and to laugh like that, must be so beautiful, just for once. What makes them so happy?”
“Ask them,” said Maryx.
She went up to one of the girls, a brown, bright, handsome maiden, with a necklet of pearls heaving on her gay and honest breast.
“Why are you so happy?” she asked, her own deep serious eyes questioning the girl’s gravely and wishfully.
The Roman maiden laughed, showing all her white teeth.
“How can I tell? I am glad to dance, and I have got my new pearls, and I shall marry Rufino at the Nativity.”
“You see,” said Maryx, “these are the fountain-springs of all the world’s happiness: heedlessness, possession, and love!”
“I do not understand,” said Giojà, with a disappointed shadow on her face. It was quite true. She understood the passion for the dance and for the pearls as much and as little as she understood the love. She had been able to comprehend the misery of the woman on the Maremma shore, but she could not comprehend the gleesome gladness of the betrothed dancer.
“I am not like others, I see,” she said, sadly, and with a sense of something lurking in her that she could not help.
Maryx’s brown eyes dwelt on her tenderly.
“Dear, you are like Ariadne; you have the clue and the sword; Athene keeps you. No mortal has every gift. Lightness and laughter you must miss sometimes, yes; but love is yours, and art.”
“There is no one to love me now that my father is dead,” she said, with her calm young face unchanged.
For she did not know that love was looking on her from his eyes.
Maryx walked onward, under the green shadow of the chestnuts and the oaks.
“Do not think of those old myths too much,” he said; “and think more of the loveliness of the earth, which outlasts all stories and all faiths. Look at that soft green light yonder, and the clouds of pale faint gold, and the intense deep blue above our heads. Sometimes I almost think we artists are all madmen, and our Athene’s casque no better than a cap and bells; for what can the very greatest that any art can ever achieve look beside one single fleeting moment of the million sunsets that come and go with scarcely any eyes upraised to watch them? The happiness of the world may not be very great, my dear: but I fear the, thanklessness of the world is very great indeed.”
And the sweet melodious depth of his voice sounded to me like the Lenten music of the Sistine chants, as we walked through the Galleria, under the mighty forest boughs.
The thanklessness of the world was great! Would she be thankless?
We passed silently through those noble woodland glades which lead to Nemi or Aricia, as you please, and whence you come, if you will, into a portion of the Appian Way, and find the sheep nibbling among the scattered marbles:
“While to ocean descending,
Sank o’er the yellow dark plain slowly the yellow broad sun,”
we roamed idly through them into the avenues of the Cesarini woods. The nightingales were beginning to sing again, though the season of their song was almost over; goldfinches were reveling and rifling among the red fruit of the many wild cherry-trees; the sky was of the hue of rose-leaves, and seemed to brush through the bronze-and-black boughs of the hoary cedars; now and then a laden mule went by us, or a peasant with a bundle of dead branches; it was so still we could hear the faint, hollow sound of a woodpecker striking at some one of the great trunks.
“There is Picus,” said Maryx. “What a strange thing is Tradition! Perhaps it was in this very forest that Circe, gathering her herbs, saw the bold friend of Mars on his fiery courser, and tried to bewitch him, and, failing, metamorphosed him so. What, I wonder, ever first wedded that story to the woodpecker? Ovid did not invent; he related. And then there is Pilumnus, who was the first to make cheese, and became the god of the bakers and of infants in swaddling clothes, and he is now the pewit or the hoopoe, which you like. How droll and how unreasonable and how charming it all is! And yet, they say, the ancients had no feeling for Nature, when there was not a bush, or a bird, or a portent of the sky, that had not for them its symbol or story!”
Giojà looked with soft, serious eyes through the gloom for the woodpecker: to her all the stories were more than half real.
“Canens searched for him six days and six nights,” she said, very low, as if to herself, “and then she died of grief by the Tiber, you know: perhaps the little brown bird was close beside her all the time, and saw her die, and could not speak — —”
“Yes,” said Maryx, shortly, with a strange tone in his voice: “that is the fate of love very often; to be unable to say, ‘I am here!’ Be sure, though, that Circe was near also, and laughing.”
“Why did the gods let such a thing as Circe be? that is what I do not understand — —”
“My dear, Circe is stronger than all the gods; and what she symbolizes is so too, now as then. Perhaps, after all, however, she could only make beasts of those who had the beast in them: passion can do no more. It is the touchstone of character.”
He spoke rather to himself than to her.
I fell thinking, as I walked behind him, of Jacopone of Umbria, who wrote the Stabat Mater hymn; he was a great master of jurisprudence, and was already growing very famous, when the woman he loved died suddenly, and they found a hair-shirt under her gay festal dress, — for she fell dead at a Carnival ball. He turned to Christ, and joined the Franciscans. They found him weeping one day, and asked him wherefore. He said, “I weep because love goes about unloved.”
No doubt, when he so answered, he was thinking of the unknown sin for which that fair wife by whom his own heart had been broken had done that secret penance; no doubt he was thinking, “Lo! the whole of my life I gave, and it was wasted like water spilled upon the ground.”
There is no greater bitterness.
“When I was here last,” said Maryx, “I was with Hilarion. Corôt was with us, and other great men too. There was just such a sunset as this. Corôt, who was very silent that day, sat down and sketched it for a time; then he shut up his book in sheer despair. Yet landscape-painters are happy, I think; they have a future; there is much to be done that has never been done in their art. Perhaps the time will come, too, when, the earth having been all built over with brick, and the skies all blackened with furnaces, and the lands all over peopled to the very edge of the farthest shores, the wretched crowds will look at one of our landscapes, trying to understand, as we look at pictures on the Etruscan tombs: and they will say, ‘Was the world ever like that? — was there ever space to breathe, and green leaves?’ Sometimes I fancy the end of our world will come so; the greed of gold and the innumerable multitudes making an awful famine, a universal famine, of the body and of the soul, in which every creature will perish as in the eternal Arctic night and reign of ice that men of science predict for the future of the earth. Look, there is Monte Cavo, where Juno was throned to see the combat. It is more beautiful when there is snow upon its height, and you see the snow through the budding branches of March or April. But it is beautiful always.”
We walked on till the sun sank out of sight, and left only the reflection of its light upon the sky made rosy red, — men of science tell us why, with learned exposition. The Greeks said that the tired coursers of the sun, weary with climbing the great passage of the sky, were sinking to their rest: that fancy pleases me more, being a foolish man, to whom the glories and the mysteries of the air are so wonderful and sacred that it hurts me to hear them glibly explained away with chatter of absorption and refraction, and the rest, by pert-tongued mortals.
We walked onward and downward, until many miles away we saw a great dome afar off, rising against the faint rose-leaf flush of the skies, which deepened towards the horizon in the ruddier red as of the pomegranate-flower.
“Why does St. Peter’s always move us so?” said Maryx, shading his eyes with his hand. “It moves us more even than the dome of Agrippa, and seems more Roman, — which is absurd. Yet, when you are within it, glorious though it is, it is only the heaven of John of Patmos, — a Semitic Eden of gold and jewels. When men prefigured their heaven in the asphodel meadows of Elysium and the fields of Leuke, their white temples shone against the sun; laurels and myrtles grew against their steps; their roofs were open to the changing sky, to the wheeling swallows, to the falling rain; their altar-offerings were the fruits of the earth, the spoils of harvest, and the gifts of the spring.”
“And yet there are people so daft,” I murmured, “as to argue that the Greek and Latin temples were not hypothetic!”
“Dear Crispin,” said Maryx, “there are people who argue that the Pantheon was once closed in by the bronze pigna in the Vatican gardens. I dare say it was, — in some early Pope’s or some late Emperor’s time.”
And indeed he was right: the Greek and the Roman wrote little of water and air, but they loved them both with healthy unconscious strength-giving instinct. It was when Ceres Mammosa fell, that the worship of nature fell with her: under the new creed men roofed in their temples with metal and timber, and feared to see the light; they lighted lamps, and shut out the sun when they prayed. When the Jew begot the Christian and the Christian governed the world, it was no longer in summer flowers and watered meadows that paradise found its fancied parallels. The passion of Solomon for baskets of gold and apples of silver colored the visions of the recluse on Patmos. The barbaric and coarse instincts of a predatory race lent their hues to the fancies of the Apocalypse.
It was the glowing web of the Syrian loom, the purple of Tyre, the gold of the Ark, the sapphire and ruby of Persia, the unforgotten spoils of ruined Babylon, that tinged the reveries of the early Christians as they slept in the dens of amphitheatres, waiting death, or wandered hungry and footsore over parching deserts, or crouched together trembling in the bowels of the earth.
The Jew, and, by the Jew, his offspring, the Christian, shut his deity in a gold Tabernacle, builded in his altars with ceilings of cedar and cypress, and in his all-compensating Future believed that he would tread streets studded with gems and find eternal life in mansions blazing with precious stones. Sophocles and Shelley, Homer and Shakspeare, Virgil and Vincent de Paul, could have worshiped together in any one of the white temples on the myrtle-clad hills of old Rome; but in the New Jerusalem no poet could find a place: it is the heaven of a jeweler, or a money-lender; it has no greatness, no spirituality, no purity; it is tawdry and hard, like a blaze of ill-set paste gewgaws.
And this, the temper of the Jew, has tainted all religious art and architecture for almost a score of centuries.
It vulgarizes the Transfiguration; it corrupts the Vita Nuova; it colors every Calvary, from that of Rubens to that of the street-corner; it puts the hues of the rainbow into the cherubim wings of Botticelli, and clothes with tinsel the angels of Angelico. The Hebraic vulgarism is everywhere to be traced in Christian art, even in the highest: it is here perpetually about us in Christian Rome. It puts crosses on Asiatic obelisks; it puts paintings of saints on the Pantheon; it puts a statue of Peter on Trajan’s column. It has no sense of the fitness of things; and, worst of all, it has no remembrance of Nature.
Men call this tawdriness, Catholic; they do not seem to see that it is something much older, — namely, Jewish. And the taint of it is in the glory of St. Peter’s.
Only, as in the Gothic cathedrals the grim force of Odin and the sea-kings prevailed over it, so in St. Peter’s the vigor and majesty of early Rome, of pagan Rome, have come into it and given it a magnitude and magnificence that redeem it from the Semetic coarseness. There is the old Sabine and Latin strength in it, the old splendor of the Capitoline Jupiter; its temple, indeed, is still a palace, its altars, indeed, are still thrones, but all in it is so vast, so noble, almost so divine, that one forgets the golden roof is not the sun, one forgets the arch of lapis-lazuli is not the dome of the open sky.
As he spoke of St. Peter’s, the horses met us, and took us back to Rome, by way of what was once the Via Triumphalis, whilst the soft flush faded out of the sky, and the stars began to quiver in the violet dusk which was not darkness.
“It has been a beautiful day,” said Giojà, with a little sigh of repose and fatigue.
Maryx looked at her wistfully.
“To say the day has been beautiful, is not that to have been happy in it?”
She looked a little troubled and ashamed.
“One may be quite content, most thankful and content, and yet one may imagine — —”
“Yes,” said Maryx, understanding her; and he said no more.
It angered me. Why should she not be happy as any other girl or woman would have been?
I suppose, in truth, from her loneliness and her many dreams, she lived in a certain isolation and missed a certain warmth that the youth in her wanted without knowing well its want. No doubt in her it was natural and not to be helped. But on us it seemed hard.
I said so to Maryx, when we had left her, and were coming down the Via della Greca from seeing a sick student who lived close by to Santa Maria in Cosmedin, where they show the skull of St. Valentine wreathed with roses on his festal day. He answered me with some sternness.
