Wisdom, Wit, and Pathos of Ouida
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Your women cry out against you because you leave them to starve and to weep while you give your hearts to revolution and your bodies to the sword. Their cry is the cry of selfishness, of weakness, of narrowness, the cry of the sex that sees no sun save the flame on its hearth: yet there is truth in it—a truth you forget. The truth—that, forsaking the gold-mine of duty which lies at your feet, you grasp at the rainbow of glory; that, neglectful of your own secret sins, you fly at public woes and at national crimes. Can you not see that if every man took heed of the guilt of his own thoughts and acts, the world would be free and at peace? It is easier to rise with the knife unsheathed than to keep watch and ward over your own passions; but do not cheat yourself into believing that it is nobler, and higher, and harder. What reproach is cast against all revolutionists?—that the men who have nothing to lose, the men who are reckless and outlawed, alone raise the flag of revolt. It is a satire; but in every satire there lies the germ of a terrible fact.
You—you who are children still, you whose manhood is still a gold scarcely touched in your hands, a gold you can spend in all great ways, or squander for all base uses;—you can give the lie to that public reproach, if only you will live in such wise that your hands shall be clean, and your paths straight, and your honour unsullied through all temptations. Wait, and live so that the right to judge, to rebuke, to avenge, to purify, become yours through your earning of them. Live nobly, first; and then teach others how to live.
"So you have brought Fame to Lélis, my English lord?" said Tricotrin, without ceremony. "That was a good work of yours. She is a comet that has a strange fancy only to come forth like a corpse-candle, and dance over men's graves. It is her way. When men will have her out in the noon of their youth, she kills them; and the painter's bier is set under his Transfiguration, and the soldier's body is chained to the St. Helena rock, and the poet's grave is made at Missolonghi. It is always so."
Estmere bowed his head in assent; he was endeavouring to remember where he had once met this stranger who thus addressed him—where he had once heard these mellow, ringing, harmonious accents.
"Was it because you were afraid of dying in your prime that you would never woo Fame then yourself?" asked Lélis, with a smile.
"Oh-hè!" answered Tricotrin, seating himself on a deal box that served as a table, and whereat he and the artist had eaten many a meal of roast chestnuts and black coffee; "I never wanted her; she is a weather vane, never still two moments; she is a spaniel that quits the Plantagenet the moment the battle goes against him, and fawns on Bolingbroke; she is an alchemist's crucible, that has every fair and rich thing thrown into it, but will only yield in return the calcined stones of chagrin and disappointment; she is a harlot, whose kisses are to be bought, and who runs after those who brawl the loudest and swagger the finest in the world's market-places. No! I want nothing of her. My lord here condemned her as I came in; he said she was the offspring of echoing parrots, of imitative sheep, of fawning hounds. Who can want the creature of such progenitors?"
"There are many kinds of appreciation. The man of science appreciates when he marvels before the exquisite structure of the sea-shell, the perfect organism of the flower; but the young girl appreciates, too, when she holds the shell to her ear for its music, when she kisses the flower for its fragrance. Appreciation! It is an affair of the reason, indeed; but it is an affair of the emotions also."
"And you prefer what is born of the latter?"
"Not always; but for my music I do. It speaks in an unknown tongue. Science may have its alphabet, but it is feeling that translates its poems. Delaroche, who leaves off his work to listen; Descamps, in whose eyes I see tears; Ingres, who dreams idyls while I play; a young poet whose face reflects my thoughts, an old man whose youth I bring back, an hour of pain that I soothe, an hour of laughter that I give; these are my recompense. Think you I would exchange them for the gold showers and the diamond boxes of a Farinelli?"
"Surely not. All I meant was that you might gain a world-wide celebrity did you choose–"
"Gain a honey-coating that every fly may eat me and every gnat may sting? I thank you. I have a taste to be at peace, and not to become food to sate the public famine for a thing to tear."
Estmere smiled; he did not understand the man who thus addressed him, but he was attracted despite all his strongest prejudices.
"You are right! Under the coat of honey is a shirt of turpentine. Still—to see so great a gift as yours wasted–"
"Wasted? Because the multitudes have it, such as it is, instead of the units? Droll arithmetic! I am with you in thinking that minorities should have a good share of power, for all that is wisest and purest is ever in a minority, as we know; but I do not see, as you see, that minorities should command a monopoly—of sweet sounds or of anything else."
"I speak to the musician, not to the politician," said Estmere, with the calm, chill contempt of his colder manner: the cold side of his character was touched, and his sympathies were alienated at once.
Tricotrin, indifferent to the hint as to the rebuff, looked at him amusedly.
"Oh, I know you well, Lord Estmere; I told you so not long ago, to your great disgust. You and your Order think no man should ever presume to touch politics unless his coat be velvet and his rent-roll large, like yours. But, you see, we of the école buissonnière generally do as we like; and we get pecking at public questions for the same reason as our brother birds peck at the hips and the haws—because we have no granaries as you have. You do not like Socialism? Ah! and yet affect to follow it."
"I!" Estmere looked at this wayside wit, this wine-house philosopher, with a regard that asked plainly, "Are you fool or knave?"
"To be sure," answered Tricotrin. "You have chapel and chaplain yonder at your château, I believe? The Book of the Christians is the very manual of Socialism: 'You read the Gospel, Marat?' they cried. 'To be sure,' said Marat. 'It is the most republican book in the world, and sends all the rich people to hell.' If you do not like my politics, beau sire, do not listen to the Revolutionist of Galilee."
Not rare on this earth is the love that cleaves to the thing it has cherished through guilt, and through wrong, and through misery. But rare, indeed, is the love that still lives while its portion is oblivion, and the thing which it has followed passes away out to a joy that it cannot share, to a light that it cannot behold.
For this is as the love of a god, which forsakes not, though its creatures revile, and blaspheme, and deride it.
Ever and anon the old, dark, eager, noble face was lifted from its pillow, and the withered lips murmured three words:
"Is she come?"
For Tricotrin had bent over her bed, and had murmured, "I go to seek her, she is near;" and grand'mère had believed and been comforted, for she knew that no lie passed his lips. And she was very still and only the nervous working of the hard, brown, aged hand showed the longing of her soul.
Life was going out rapidly, as the flame sinks fast in a lamp whose oil is spent. The strong and vigorous frame, the keen and cheery will, had warded off death so long and bravely; and now they bent under, all suddenly, as those hardy trees will bend after a century of wind and storm—bend but once, and only to break for ever.
The red sun in the west was in its evening glory; and through the open lattice there were seen in the deep blue of the sky, the bough of a snow-blossomed pear-tree, the network of the ivy, and the bees humming among the jasmine flowers. From the distance there came faintly the musical cries of the boatmen down the river, the voices of the vine-tenders in the fields, the singing of a throstle on a wild-grape tendril.
Only, in the little darkened chamber the old peasant lay quite still—listening, through all the sweet and busy sounds of summer, for a step that never came.
And little by little all those sounds grew fainter on her ear: the dulness of death was stealing over all her senses; and all she heard was the song of the thrush where the bird swayed on the vine, half in, half out, of the lattice.
But the lips moved still, though no voice came, with the same words: "Is she come?" and when the lips no more could move, the dark and straining wistfulness of the eyes asked the question more earnestly, more terribly, more ceaselessly.
The thrush sang on, and on, and on; but to the prayer of the dying eyes no answer came.
The red sun sank into the purple mists of cloud; the song of the bird was ended; the voice of the watching girl murmured, "They will come too late!"
For, as the sun faded off from the vine in the lattice, and the singing of the bird grew silent, grand'mère raised herself with her arms outstretched, and the strength of her youth returned in the hour of dissolution.
"They never come back!" she cried. "They never come back! nor will she! One dead in Africa—and one crushed beneath the stone—and one shot on the barricade. The three went forth together; but not one returned. We breed them, we nurse them, we foster them; and the world slays them body and soul, and eats the limbs that lay in our bosoms, and burns up the souls that we knew so pure. And she went where they went: she is dead like them."
Her head fell back; her mouth was grey and parched, her eyes had no longer sight; a shiver ran through the hardy frame that winter storms and summer droughts had bruised and scorched so long; and a passionless and immeasurable grief came on the brown, weary, age-worn face.
"All dead!" she murmured in the stillness of the chamber, where the song of the bird had ceased, and the darkness of night had come.
Then through her lips the last breath quivered in a deep-drawn sigh, and the brave, patient, unrewarded life passed out for ever.
"You surely find no debtor such an ingrate, no master such a tyrant, as the People?"
"Perhaps. But, rather I find it a dog that bullies and tears where it is feared, but may be made faithful by genuine courage and strict justice shown to it."
"The experience of the musician, then, must be much more fortunate than the experience of the statesman."
"Why, yes. It is ungrateful to great men, I grant; but it has the irritation of its own vague sense that it is but their tool, their ladder, their grappling-iron, to excuse it. Still—I know well what you mean; the man who works for mankind works for a taskmaster who makes bitter every hour of his life only to forget him with the instant of his death; he is ever rolling the stone of human nature upward toward purer heights, to see it recoil and rush down into darkness and bloodshed. I know–"
A PROVENCE ROSE
Flowers are like your poets: they give ungrudgingly, and, like all lavish givers, are seldom recompensed in kind.
We cast all our world of blossom, all our treasure or fragrance, at the feet of the one we love; and then, having spent ourselves in that too abundant sacrifice, you cry, "A yellow, faded thing! to the dust-hole with it!" and root us up violently, and fling us to rot with the refuse and offal; not remembering the days when our burden of beauty made sunlight in your darkest places, and brought the odours of a lost paradise to breathe over your bed of fever.
Well, there is one consolation. Just so likewise do you deal with your human wonder-flower of genius.
I sighed at my square open pane in the hot, sulphurous mists of the street, and tried to see the stars and could not. For, between me and the one small breadth of sky which alone the innumerable roofs left visible, a vintner had hung out a huge gilded imperial crown as a sign on his roof-tree; and the crown, with its sham gold turning black in the shadow, hung between me and the planets.
I knew that there must be many human souls in a like plight with myself, with the light of heaven blocked from them by a gilded tyranny, and yet I sighed, and sighed, and sighed, thinking of the white pure stars of Provence throbbing in the violet skies.
A rose is hardly wiser than a poet, you see: neither rose nor poet will be comforted, and be content to dwell in darkness because a crown of tinsel swings on high.
Ah! In the lives of you who have wealth and leisure we, the flowers, are but one thing among many: we have a thousand rivals in your porcelains, your jewels, your luxuries, your intaglios, your mosaics, all your treasures of art, all your baubles of fancy. But in the lives of the poor we are alone: we are all the art, all the treasure, all the grace, all the beauty of outline, all the purity of hue that they possess: often we are all their innocence and all their religion too.
Why do you not set yourselves to make us more abundant in those joyless homes, in those sunless windows?
For the life of a painter is beautiful when he is still young, and loves truly, and has a genius in him stronger than calamity, and hears a voice in which he believes say always in his ear, "Fear nothing. Men must believe as I do in thee, one day. And meanwhile—we can wait!"
And a painter in Paris, even though he starve on a few sous a day, can have so much that is lovely and full of picturesque charm in his daily pursuits: the long, wondrous galleries full of the arts he adores; the réalité de l'idéal around him in that perfect world; the slow, sweet, studious hours in the calm wherein all that is great in humanity alone survives; the trance—half adoration, half aspiration, at once desire and despair—before the face of the Mona Lisa; then, without, the streets so glad and so gay in the sweet, living sunshine; the quiver of green leaves among gilded balconies; the groups at every turn about the doors; the glow of colour in market-place and peopled square; the quaint grey piles in old historic ways; the stones, from every one of which some voice from the imperishable Past cries out; the green and silent woods, the little leafy villages, the winding waters garden-girt; the forest heights, with the city gleaming and golden in the plain; all these are his.
With these—and youth—who shall dare say the painter is not rich—ay, though his board be empty, and his cup be dry?
I had not loved Paris—I, a little imprisoned rose, caged in a clay pot, and seeing nothing but the sky-line of the roofs. But I grew to love it, hearing from René and from Lili of all the poetry and gladness that Paris made possible in their young and burdened lives, and which could have been thus possible in no other city of the earth.
City of Pleasure you have called her, and with truth; but why not also City of the Poor? For what city, like herself, has remembered the poor in her pleasure, and given to them, no less than to the richest, the treasure of her laughing sunlight, of her melodious music, of her gracious hues, of her million flowers, of her shady leaves, of her divine ideals?
PIPISTRELLO
It was a strange, gaunt wilderness of stone, this old villa of the Marchioni. It would have held hundreds of serving-men. It had as many chambers as one of the palaces down in Rome; but life is homely and frugal here, and has few graces. The ways of everyday Italian life in these grand old places are like nettles and thistles set in an old majolica vase that has had knights and angels painted on it. You know what I mean, you who know Italy. Do you remember those pictures of Vittario Carpacio and of Gentile? They say that is the life our Italy saw once in her cities and her villas;—that is the life she wants. Sometimes when you are all alone in these vast deserted places the ghosts of all that pageantry pass by you, and they seem fitter than the living people for these courts and halls.
I had been no saint. I had always been ready for jest or dance or intrigue with a pretty woman, and sometimes women far above me had cast their eyes down on the arena as in Spain ladies do in the bull-ring to pick a lover out thence for his strength: but I had never cared. I had loved, laughed, and wandered away with the stroller's happy liberty; but I had never cared. Now all at once the whole world seemed dead; dead, heaven and earth; and only one woman's two eyes left living in the universe; living, and looking into my soul and burning it to ashes. Do you know what I mean? No?—ay, then you know not love.
Sometimes I think love is the darkest mystery of life: mere desire will not explain it, nor will the passions or the affections. You pass years amidst crowds, and know naught of it; then all at once you meet a stranger's eyes, and never are you free. That is love. Who shall say whence it comes? It is a bolt from the gods that descends from heaven and strikes us down into hell. We can do nothing.
In Italy one wants so little; the air and the light, and a little red wine, and the warmth of the wind, and a handful of maize or of grapes, and an old guitar, and a niche to sleep in near a fountain that murmurs and sings to the mosses and marbles—these are enough in Italy.
Petty laws breed great crimes. Few rulers, little or big, remember that.
L'esprit du clocher is derided nowadays. But it may well be doubted whether the age which derides it will give the world anything one-half as tender and true in its stead. It is peace because it is content; and it is a peace which has in it the germ of heroism: menaced, it produces patriotism—the patriotism whose symbol is Tell.
The tyrannies of petty law hurt the authority of the State more with the populace than all the severity of a Draconian code against great offences. Petty laws may annoy but can never harm the rich, for they can always evade them or purchase immunity; but petty laws for the poor are as the horse-fly on the neck and on the eyelids of the horse.
It was in the month of April; outside the walls and on the banks of Tiber, still swollen by the floods of winter, one could see the gold of a million daffodils and the bright crimson and yellow of tulips in the green corn. The scent of flowers and herbs came into the town and filled its dusky and narrow ways; the boatmen had green branches fastened to their masts; in the stillness of evening one heard the song of crickets, and even a mosquito would come and blow his shrill little trumpet, and one was willing to say to him "Welcome!" because on his little horn he blew the glad news, "Summer is here!"
HELD IN BONDAGE
"A young man married is a man that's marred." That's a golden rule, Arthur; take it to heart. Anne Hathaway, I have not a doubt, suggested it; experience is the sole asbestos, only unluckily one seldom gets it before one's hands are burnt irrevocably. Shakespeare took to wife the ignorant, rosy-cheeked Warwickshire peasant girl at eighteen! Poor fellow! I picture him, with all his untried powers, struggling like new-born Hercules for strength and utterance, and the great germ of poetry within him, tingeing all the common realities of life with its rose hue; genius giving him power to see with god-like vision the "fairies nestling in the cowslip chalices," and the golden gleam of Cleopatra's sails; to feel the "spiced Indian air" by night, and the wild working of kings' ambitious lust; to know by intuition, alike the voices of nature unheard by common ears, and the fierce schemes and passions of a world from which social position shut him out! I picture him in his hot, imaginative youth, finding his first love in the yeoman's daughter at Shottery, strolling with her by the Avon, making her an "odorous chaplet of sweet summer buds," and dressing her up in the fond array of a boy's poetic imaginings! Then—when he had married her, he, with the passionate ideals of Juliets and Violas, Ophelias and Hermiones in his brain and heart, must have awakened to find that the voices so sweet to him were dumb to her. The "cinque spotted cowslip bells" brought only thoughts of wine to her. When he was watching "certain stars shoot madly from their spheres," she most likely was grumbling at him for mooning there after curfew bell. When he was learning Nature's lore in "the fresh cup of the crimson rose," she was dinning in his ear that Hammet and Judith wanted worsted socks. When he was listening in fancy to the "sea-maid's song," and weaving thoughts to which a world still stands reverentially to listen, she was buzzing behind him, and bidding him go card the wool, and weeping that, in her girlhood, she had not chosen some rich glover or ale-taster, instead of idle, useless, wayward Willie Shakespeare. Poor fellow! He did not write, I would swear, without fellow-feeling, and yearning over souls similarly shipwrecked, that wise saw, "A young man married is a man that's marred."
PASCARÈL
When a man's eyes meet yours, and his faith trusts you, and his heart upon a vague impulse is laid bare to you, it always has seemed to me the basest treachery the world can hold to pass the gold of confidence which he pours out to you from hand to hand as common coin for common circulation.
Circumstance is so odd and so cruel a thing. It is wholly apart from talent.
Genius will do so little for a man if he do not know how to seize or seduce opportunity. No doubt, in his youth, Ambrogiò had been shy, silent, out of his art timid, and in his person ungraceful, and unlovely. So the world had passed by him turning a deaf ear to his melodies, and he had let it pass, because he had not that splendid audacity to grasp it perforce, and hold it until it blessed him, without which no genius will ever gain the benediction of the Angel of Fame.
Which is a fallen Angel, no doubt; but still, perhaps, the spirit most worth wrestling with after all; since wrestle we must in this world, if we do not care to lie down and form a pavement for other men's cars of triumph, as the Assyrians of old stretched themselves on their faces before the coming of the chariot of their kings.
One of the saddest things perhaps in all the sadness of this world is the frightful loss at which so much of the best and strongest work of a man's life has to be thrown away at the onset. If you desire a name amongst men, you must buy the crown of it at such a costly price!
True, the price will in the end be paid back to you, no doubt, when you are worn out, and what you do is as worthless as the rustling canes that blow together in autumn by dull river sides: then you scrawl your signature across your soulless work, and it fetches thrice its weight in gold.
But though you thus have your turn, and can laugh at your will at the world that you fool, what can that compensate you for all those dear dead darlings?—those bright first-fruits, those precious earliest nestlings of your genius, which had to be sold into bondage for a broken crust, which drifted away from you never to be found again, which you know well were a million fold better, fresher, stronger, higher, better than anything you have begotten since then; and yet in which none could be found to believe, only because you had not won that magic spell which lies in—being known?
When I think of the sweet sigh of the violin melodies through the white winter silence of Raffaelino's eager, dreamy eyes, misty with the student's unutterable sadness and delight; of old Ambrogiò, with his semicircle of children round him, lifting their fresh voices at his word; of the little robin that came every day upon the waterpipe, and listened, and thrilled in harmony, and ate joyfully the crumbs which the old maestro daily spared to it from his scanty meal—when I think of those hours, it seems to me that they must have been happiness too.
"Could we but know when we are happy!" sighs some poet. As well might he write, "Could we but set the dewdrop with our diamonds! could we but stay the rainbow in our skies!"
Every old Italian city has this awe about it—holds close the past and moves the living to a curious sense that they are dead and in their graves are dreaming; for the old cities themselves have beheld so much perish around them, and yet have kept so firm a hold upon tradition and upon the supreme beauty of great arts, that those who wander there grow, as it were, bewildered, and know not which is life and which is death amongst them.