TRANSCRIBER'S NOTES

In the plain text version words in Italics are denoted by _underscores_ and text in bold like =this=.

A number of words in this book have both hyphenated and non-hyphenated variants. For the words with both variants present the one more used has been kept.

Obvious punctuation and other printing errors have been corrected.

BY THE SAME AUTHOR

THE TRIUMPH OF DEATH

Uniform with this Volume.

Pall Mall Gazette.—'A masterpiece. The story holds and haunts one. Unequalled even by the great French contemporary whom, in his realism, D’Annunzio most resembles, is the account of the pilgrimage to the shrine of the Virgin by the sick, deformed, and afflicted. It is a great prose poem, that of its kind cannot be surpassed. Every detail of the scene is brought before us in a series of word-pictures of wonderful power and vivid colouring, and the ever-recurring refrain, 'Viva Maria! Maria Evviva!’ rings in our ears as we lay down the book. It is the work of a master, whose genius is beyond dispute.’

Daily Telegraph.—'The author gives us numerous delightful pictures, pictures of Italian scenery, simple sketches, too, of ordinary, commonplace, innocent lives. The range of his female portrait gallery is almost as wide and varied as that of George Meredith. His Ippolita, his Marie Ferrès, his Giuliana Hermil, live as strong and vivid presentments of real and skilfully contrasted women. The Triumph of Death ends with a tragedy, as it also begins with one. Between the two extremes are to be found many pages of poetry, of tender appreciation of nature, of rare artistic skill, of subtle and penetrative analysis.’

Daily News.—'The close of the tragedy is swift and haunting. It is impossible to overpraise the art. Every page is enriched with descriptive passages of effects of nature, of music, of art, that arrest the imagination and linger in the memory. In his words seem entangled the very breath and sunshine of Italy—its translucent moonlight skies, its incomparable horizons. It is difficult by quotation to do justice to the author’s power of giving the vivid impression of a scene.’

Daily Chronicle.—'The little effects of landscape are skilfully touched in and harmonised with the emotion of the moment. The incidental pictures of peasant life are most interesting, and the terrible pandemonium at the shrine of Casalbordino is described with Zolaesque vigour.’

Scotsman.—'The imaginative and penetrative force, the eloquence and the artistic skill, are beyond question.’

Westminster Gazette.—'For a vivid and searching description of the Italian peasant on his religious side, written with knowledge and understanding, these pages could hardly be surpassed. We see their Paganism, and their poverty, and their squalor, yet also that imaginative temper which lends a certain dignity to their existence. The narrative is remorseless ... yet it is rich and full of atmosphere. M. D’Annunzio has a tender eye for natural detail; the landscape of Italy, its flowers and trees, kindle him to genuine poetry. We are left at the close of his story with a feeling that something like genius is at work. This book is one which will not yield to any simple test. It is a work of singular power, which cannot be ignored, left unread when once started, or easily banished from the mind when read.’

The Morning Post.—'It compels attention for its intense and minute “realism” in the presentation of the relations of the man and the woman, and equal intensity and minuteness in the description of things in general.’

THE CHILD OF PLEASURE

Uniform with this Volume.

Literature.—'For the work of a man of twenty-five, this book is nothing less than marvellous. There is no stumbling or hesitation in it. The command of language, the confidence of thought, the knowledge of character and sensation, displayed by D’Annunzio, at an age when the majority of novelists and poets have been groping in the dark for style and substance, are ever awe-inspiring. D’Annunzio began his career as a writer of verse; his prose is written with the delight in language, the love of words, of a poet.’

Manchester Guardian.—'Wonderfully absorbing, for it is written with a strange psychological intelligence, it is full of vivid descriptions, vehement narrative, and contains pages of rare beauty in which an ideal language really evokes the moods of the soul that it interprets. There is in the novel some lovely verse which has been rendered with rare felicity by Mr. Symons.’

Daily Graphic.—'The wonderful beauty of the descriptions, the wealth of colour, and most of all the realisation of a certain emotional pleasure which the contemplation of the beautiful produces in some natures, this is all so finely given, that if only as a study of human character the work would be interesting. But the greatest merit of the book is the poetic beauty and richness of the language, which makes it a glowing poem in prose.’

THE VICTIM

Uniform with this Volume.

The Pall Mall Gazette.—'The Victim will most certainly not lessen the enthusiasm of the English cult of D’Annunzio; it will, and should, attract new admirers. No word but genius will fit his analysis of the mental history of the faithless husband.... The genius of D’Annunzio is shown alike in the bold directness of the conception, and the perfection with which he works out every mental detail that follows therefrom, and compels every sentence to do its full share of the work without effort. It is a gloomy, saddening book, but a great one.’

The Daily Chronicle.—'The book contains many descriptive passages of rare beauty, passages which by themselves are lovely little prose lyrics. It is a story of a terrible experience told by the man who had endured it. It is therefore a self-revelation; the revelation of the sort of self that D’Annunzio delineates with a skill and knowledge so extraordinary. The soul of the man, raw, bruised, bleeding, is always before us.’

The Daily Mail.—'The vivid imagination of D’Annunzio’s novels, their power of analysis, their grip of human emotions, and their grim truth, are beyond dispute. In The Victim there is the same quality of genius that was so readily recognisable in The Triumph of Death and in The Child of Pleasure, and in reading it one is impressed anew with the young author’s precise knowledge of life, his skill in interpretation, and his earnestness. The whole narrative is so hauntingly real, that one cannot put it aside until the end is reached.’

LONDON: WILLIAM HEINEMANN, 21 BEDFORD ST.

The Virgins
of the Rocks

THE WORKS OF

Signor Gabriele D’Annunzio

I

The Romances of the Rose

The Child of Pleasure. (Il Piacere.)
The Victim. (L’Innocente.)
The Triumph of Death. (Il Trionfo della Morte.)

II

The Romances of the Lily

The Virgins of the Rocks. (Le Vergini delle Rocce.)
The Prodigy. (La Grazia.)
The Annunciation. (L’Annunziazione.)

III

The Romances of the Pomegranate

Fervour. (Il Fuoco.)
The Dictator. (Il Donatore.)
The Triumph of Life. (Il Trionfo della Vita.)

LONDON: WILLIAM HEINEMANN
21 Bedford Street, W.C.

The Virgins of the Rocks

Translated from the Italian of

Gabriele D’Annunzio

By Agatha Hughes

'Io farò una finzione, che significherà cose grandi.’

LEONARDO DA VINCI

London
William Heinemann
1899

All rights reserved

PROLOGUE

“Una cosa naturale vista in un grande specchio.”

Leonardo da Vinci.

With these mortal eyes I beheld within a brief space of time three peerless souls unfold and blossom, and then wither away and perish one by one: the most beautiful, most passionate, and most miserable souls ever embodied in the latest descendants of a haughty race.

From the scenes where their desolation, their pride, and their grace wandered every day, clear and terrible thoughts came to me, such as the most ancient ruins of illustrious cities had never suggested. In hopes of unravelling the mystery of their strange ascendency, I used to explore the depths of the vast ancestral mirrors, where, often unnoticed by themselves, their three figures were reflected bathed in a pallor like that which heralds dissolution after death; and I gazed long and earnestly at the old, worn-out things which they touched with their chilled or fevered hands, using the same gestures perhaps as had been used by other hands long since crumbled into dust.

Was it thus, indeed, that I knew them in the tedious monotony of daily life, or are they only creations of my yearning desire and perplexity?

It was thus, indeed, that I knew them in the tedious monotony of daily life, and yet they are also creations of my yearning desire and perplexity.

That fragment of the web of my life, unconsciously woven by them, is of such priceless value to me, that I would fain embalm it in the strongest of spices to prevent it from becoming faded or destroyed in me by Time.

Therefore I now try the power of art.

Ah! but what magic could impart the coherency of tangible and durable matter to that spiritual texture which the three prisoners wove in the barren monotony of their days, and embroidered little by little with images of the noblest and most heart-rending things in which human passion has ever been hopelessly reflected?

Unlike the three ancient sisters, because victims rather than daughters of necessity, they seemed nevertheless, as they wove the richest zone of my life, to be preparing the destiny of him who was to come. Together they toiled, scarcely ever accompanying their labour with a song, but less rarely shedding visible tears—tears in which the essence of their unexhausted, cloistered souls was sublimated.

And because from the first hour that I knew them a dark cloud had overhung them, a cruel decree had struck them to the heart, and left them discouraged and gasping, and ready to die—all their attitudes and gestures and lightest words seemed to me heavy with a meaning of which they, in their profound unconsciousness, were ignorant.

Bending and breaking as they were beneath the weight of their own maturity, like autumn trees overladen with bounteous fruit, they were unable either to sound the depth of their misery or to give voice to it. Their anguished lips revealed to me only a small portion of their secrets. But I could understand the ineffable things spoken by the blood flowing in the veins of their beautiful bare hands.

“E il ricettacolo delle virtù sarà pieno di sogni e vane speranze.”

Leonardo da Vinci.

The hour which preceded my arrival in the ancestral garden, where they awaited me, seems to me—as I see it in imagination—illuminated with a light of unaccustomed poetry.

To him who knows what slow or sudden fertilisations, what unexpected transfigurations, are possible to an intense soul communicating with other souls in the vicissitudes of this most uncertain life—to him for whom the whole dignity of existence lies in exerting or submitting to a moral force, and who approaches his kind with a secret anxiety to dominate or be dominated—to every man who is curious about the inner mystery, who is ambitious of spiritual power, or feels the need of slavery, no hour has such a charm as that in which he moves forward, with a vague anticipation, to meet the living Unknown and Infinite, a dim world which he will either conquer, or by which he will be absorbed.

I was about to enter an enclosed garden. There the three virgin princesses were awaiting the friend who had been absent so long, him to whom, as their contemporary in age, they were bound by recollections of childhood and adolescence, him who was sole heir to a name no less ancient and distinguished than their own. And thus they were awaiting the return of an equal, of a sojourner in great cities, one who should bring them a breath of that larger life which they had renounced.

And each one of them perhaps in her secret heart was awaiting the Bridegroom.

This time of waiting appears to me vehement in its anxiety when I think of the bare and gloomy solitude of the house in which, until that day, they had languished, their beautiful hands overflowing with the treasures of youth, surrounded by a phantom pomp of existence called up by their mother’s delirium to people the emptiness of the vast mirrors. There, as if in twilight pools, the raving soul of the mother was wont to be immersed. On the infinite distance of those colourless expanses, had not each one of the maidens beheld the apparition of the youthful, ardent figure of the Bridegroom who was to tear her from this obscure decay, and carry her away in a whirlwind of delight?

Thus each one waited anxiously within her enclosed garden for the coming of him who was only after all to delude her, to watch her perish without possessing her.

“Ah! which of us will be the elect?”

Never perhaps—so I think—were their beautiful dim eyes so earnestly strained as at that hour; those eyes dimmed by melancholy and weariness, the light of inquiry quenched in them by too long familiarity with never-changing objects: eyes dimmed by mutual pity, reflecting the forms of familiar things without mystery or variety, in hard outlines and lifeless colouring.

And suddenly each of them perceived in the other a new creature, armed for combat.

I know not if there be anything sadder than these lightning-like revelations made to tender hearts by the desire for happiness. The virtuous sisters breathed in the same circle of sorrow; the same destiny weighed upon them; and during the evenings, heavy with anxiety, one of them from time to time would lay her brow on the shoulder or the breast of another, while the darkness effaced the diversity of their faces, and fused their three souls in one. But when the prophesied guest—to their waiting hearts already appearing with the gestures of the lover who elects and who promises—was about to set foot on their deserted threshold, they lifted up their heads with a thrill, and loosed their clasped hands, and exchanged a look which had the violence of a sudden flash of lightning. And while from the depth of their troubled souls there welled up an unknown feeling which had none of the old sweetness, that one look brought them consciousness at last of all their waning grace, of the contrast between their three figures coloured by the same blood, of the spirit of night lurking in the mass of hair heaped up like a load on the nape of a white neck, of the marvellous persuasion expressed by the curve of a silent mouth, of the enchantment woven like a net by the ingenuous frequency of some inimitable gesture, and of every other magic power.

And a dim instinct of strife dismayed them.

Thus do I picture to myself those who were waiting for me in that glowing hour.

The first breath of spring, faintly warm, which had touched the dry summits of the rocks, was caressing the brows of the anxious maidens. Within the great cloister, carpeted with jonquils and violets, the fountains repeated the melodious accompaniment which for centuries the waters had made to the thoughts of voluptuousness and of wisdom expressed in the leonine verses on the pediment. On certain trees and on certain bushes the delicate leaves were shining as though coated with gum or diaphanous wax. The ancient and immovable things of time which could only decay were touched with an indefinable softness, communicated to them by the things that had power to renew themselves.

“Ah, which of us will be the chosen one?”

The three sisters, who had secretly become rivals in face of this deceptive offer of apparent life, composed their attitudes according to the inward rhythm of their natural beauty, which time had already begun to threaten. Perhaps not till that day had they understood that beauty in its true sense; just as a sick person, hearing the unaccustomed sound of the blood beating in the ear which presses the pillows, for the first time understands the portentous music which sustains his feeble frame.

But perhaps in them this rhythm had no words.

Nevertheless, I can now distinctly hear the words of that rhythm within me, strengthening the pure outlines of those ideal figures.

“A boundless desire for slavery makes me suffer,” says Massimilla silently, as she sits on the stone seat, her hands, with fingers interwoven, clasped round her weary knee. “I have not the gift of communicating happiness; but my whole being, more than any other creature, more than any inanimate thing, is ready to become the perfect and perpetual possession of a master.

“A boundless desire for slavery makes me suffer. I am devoured by an unquenchable yearning to give myself up entirely, to belong to a higher and stronger being, to dissolve myself in his will, to burn like a holocaust in the fire of his great soul. I envy the frail things which lose themselves, which are swallowed up in an abyss, or carried away by a whirlwind; and I gaze often and long at the drops of water which fall into the great basin, and hardly awake the slightest smile on its surface.

“When a perfume envelopes me and vanishes, when a sound reaches me and dies out, sometimes I feel myself grow pale and almost faint away, for it seems to me that the aroma and the harmony of my life are tending to the same evanescence. And yet sometimes my little soul is straitened within me like a knot. Who shall untie it and absorb it?

“Ah me! perhaps I should not know how to console him in his sadness; but my dumb and anxious face should be always turned towards his, quick to perceive hope reviving in his secret heart. Perhaps I should not know how to let fall on his silence those rare syllables, seeds of the soul, which in a moment can generate a boundless dream; but no faith in the world should surpass the ardour of my faith as I listened, even when the things I heard were such as must remain inaccessible to my intellect.

“I am she who listens, admires, and is silent.

“From my birth I bear on my forehead between my eyebrows the sign of attention.

“I have learned from the calm and intensity of statues the immobility of harmonious attitude. I can keep my eyes open and turned upwards for a long time, because my eyelids are light.

“The shape of my lips forms the living and visible image of the word 'Amen.’”

“I suffer,” says Anatolia, “from a virtue within me which is wasting itself uselessly. My strength is the last support of a solitary ruin, whereas it might safely guide the current of a river full of all life’s abundance from its source to the sea.

“My heart is inexhaustible. All the sorrows of the world could never succeed in wearying its throbs; the fiercest violence of joy could not break it, nor can it be weakened by this long and slow grief. A vast multitude of thirsty creatures might drink of the well of its tenderness without exhausting it.

“Ah! why should fate condemn me to this narrow duty, to this slow torture? Why should she forbid me that sublime union for which my heart yearns?

“I could guide the soul of a man up to that highest sphere where the value of the act and the splendour of the dream converge to the selfsame apex; from the depths of his unconsciousness I could extract unseen energies which lie hidden like ore in the veins of rough stone.

“The most hesitating of men would feel secure by my side; he who had strayed from the light would once more see a steady beacon at the end of his path; he who had been buffeted about and maimed would become healthy and whole again. My hands know how to bind up wounds, and how to tear the bandages off heavy eyelids. When I stretch them out—my purest heart’s-blood flows magnetically to the tips of my fingers.

“I possess the two supreme gifts which enrich life, and prolong it beyond the illusion of death: I fear no suffering, and I feel the imprint of eternity on my thoughts and acts.

“And therefore I am troubled by a desire to create—to become through love her who propagates and perpetuates the ideal qualities of a race favoured by Heaven. I could nourish the superhuman within me.

“Once in a dream I kept mysterious watch a whole night long over the sleep of a child. While with deep-drawn breaths his body lay slumbering I upheld his soul in my hands, and it was tangible like a globe of crystal, and my breast swelled with marvellous premonitions.”

Violante says: “I am humbled. When I felt the mass of my hair weigh upon my brow, I fancied myself to be wearing a crown, and beneath that regal burden my thoughts wore a purple hue.

“My childhood’s memories are all lit up by visions of fire and slaughter. Blood ran before my innocent eyes; my delicate nostrils breathed the odour of unburied corpses. A young and eager queen, hunted from her throne, took me in her arms before she departed into an exile from which there was no return. From that time, therefore, the splendour of great and tragic destinies hangs over my soul.

“In my dreams I have lived a thousand lives of magnificence; I have passed through all sovereignties as safely as one who retraces a well-known path; I have discovered in the aspect of the most dissimilar things secret analogies with the aspect of my own form, and by hidden arts have pointed them out for man to wonder at; and I have found out how to compel light and shade, as truly as robes and jewels, to form the divine and unforeseen adornment of my decline.

“Poets saw in me the ideal apparition in whose lineaments the highest mystery of life is expressed—that mystery of beauty which has been revealed in mortal flesh at intervals of long ages, through all the imperfection of innumerable generations. And they thought: 'This is doubtless the perfected image of that idea of which the peoples of the earth have had an intuition from the beginning, and which artists have unceasingly invoked in poems, in symphonies, on canvas, in clay. Everything in her is expressive, everything is a symbol. The lines of her form speak a language whose eternal truth would make him that could understand it like unto a god; and her slightest movements produce within the contours of her body ineffable music like the harmony of midnight skies.’

“But now I am humbled—deprived of my kingdoms. The fire in my blood is growing paler and dying out. I shall vanish away, less fortunate than the statues which testified to the joy of life on the brows of the cities of the past. For ever unknown, I shall dissolve away, whereas they will endure in the safe keeping of mould and darkness among the roots of the flowers, and some day, when unburied, they will seem to the ecstatic soul of kneeling poets as great as the gifts of earth.

“I have now dreamed every dream, and my hair weighs heavier on my brow than a hundred crowns. I have dazed myself with perfumes. I love to linger near the fountains as they go on eternally telling the same tale. Through the thick locks of hair which cover my ears I seem to hear time ebbing away on the monotonous waters.”

Thus when I evoke them do the three princesses speak within my soul, as they wait for the irrevocable hour. Thus, perhaps, believing that a messenger of life had appeared at the gates of their closed garden, did each one recognise her own charm, display her own seductiveness, revive her own hope, quicken the dream within her which had almost died away.

O Hour! lit up by grand and solemn poetry! Most brilliant Hour in which all possibilities emerged and shone on the inward heaven of the soul!

I

“Non si può avere maggior signoria che quella di sè medesimo.”

Leonardo da Vinci

“E se tu sarai solo, tu sarai tutto tuo.”

Ibid

After the inevitable tumult of early youth had been controlled, the vehemence of conflicting desires defeated, and a barrier raised against the confused and multifold overflow of sensations, I had sought during the momentary silence that ensued on my consciousness to find out whether life might not become something different from the usual exercise of the faculties of adaptation to changing circumstances; that is to say, whether my will might not be able, by means of selection and exclusion, to build up some new and artistic work out of the elements which life had already stored up within me.

I felt assured, after some self-examination, that my consciousness had reached that arduous point when it becomes possible to appreciate this too simple axiom: The world represents the sensibility and the thought of a few superior men who created it, and in course of time have enlarged and adorned it, and who in the future will continue to enlarge and adorn it more and more. The world, as it appears to us to-day, is a magnificent gift from the few to the many, from free men to slaves, from those who think and feel to those who work. And then I recognised my own highest ambition in the desire to bring some ornament, to add some new value to this human world which is being eternally embellished with beauty and sorrow.

Face to face with my own soul, I thought again of that dream which came to Socrates several times over, each time taking a different form, but always urging him to fulfil the same mission: “O Socrates, compose and cultivate music.” Then I learned that the real duty of a man of worth is to discover in the course of his existence a series of harmonies, varied indeed, but controlled by one dominant motive, and bearing the impress of one style. And so it appeared to me that the ancient sage, who excelled in the art of raising the human soul to its utmost degree of vigour, might teach a great and efficacious lesson to our own age.

By the study of himself and his neighbours, this man discovered what inestimable benefits assiduous discipline bent always to a fixed purpose can confer upon life. His supreme wisdom seems to me most resplendent in this, that he did not place his Ideal out of the reach of daily practice, beyond the sphere of necessary realities, but that he made it the living centre of his being, and deduced his own laws from it; and, in accordance with these laws, he developed rhythmically throughout the course of years, exercising with calm pride such rights as they permitted him, and separating—he a citizen of Athens under the tyranny of the Thirty, and under the tyranny of the plebeians—deliberately separating his moral existence from that of the city. He desired, and he was able to preserve himself for himself until death. “I will be obedient to God only,” meant, “I will be obedient only to the laws of that genius to which, in order to fulfil my conception of order and beauty, I have subjected my free nature.”

Far more subtle as an artist than Apelles or Protogenes, he was able to trace with a firm hand the complete image of himself in one continuous line. And the sublime joy of the last evening came to him, not from the hope of that other life which he had spoken of in his discourses, but rather from the vision of his own image, made one with death.

Ah, why cannot he live again on Latin soil, this Master who understood with such profound and hidden art how to awaken and stimulate all the energies of intellect and soul in those who approached to listen to him?

A strange melancholy used to fall over me in my youth when, reading the Dialogues, I tried to picture to myself that circle of eager and anxious disciples surrounding him. I used to admire the handsome ones, those dressed in the richest garments, and on whom his round and prominent eyes—those new eyes of his, in which there was a look peculiar to himself—rested oftenest. My imagination prolonged the adventures of the strangers who came to him from afar, like the Thracian Antisthenes, who travelled forty stadia a day to hear him, and like Euclides, who—the Athenians having forbidden the citizens of Megara to enter Athens, and decreed the worst of punishments for the transgressors—dressed himself in woman’s clothes, and thus clothed and veiled, left his own city towards evening, and made a long journey in order to be present at the discourses of the Sage; then at dawn went on his way again in the same disguise, his breast filled with unquenchable enthusiasm. And I felt touched by the fate of the beautiful Elian youth Phaedo, who, after having been made a prisoner of war in his own country, and sold to the keeper of a house of ill-fame, escaped to Socrates, and by his means obtained redemption and admission to the feasts of pure thought.

It seemed to me, indeed, that this genial master surpassed the Nazarene in generosity. Perhaps the Hebrew, if his enemies had not slain him in the flower of his years, would at last have shaken off the weight of his sadness, found new savour in the ripe fruits of his Galilee, and pointed out a different ideal of good to his followers. The Greek philosopher had always loved life; he loved it, and taught men to love it. Nearly infallible as a prophet and seer, he welcomed all souls in which his penetrating glance had discovered any force, and in each one he developed and elevated that natural force, so that all those inspired by his fire revealed themselves in the power of their diversity. The highest value of his method was that very result of which his enemies accused him: that from his school—where met honest Crito and Plato, the follower of Urania, and the raving Apollodorus, and the kindly Theætetus, who is like a noiseless river of oil—there went forth also the luxurious Cyrenian, Aristippus, and Critias, the most violent of the Thirty Tyrants, and the other tyrant Charicles, and that marvellous breaker of laws, Alcibiades, who put no limit to his premeditated violence. “My heart leaps when I hear his discourses far more than at the sound of the Corybantes,” said the son of Clinia, like a graceful wild animal crowned with ivy and violets, at the close of a banquet where the guests had received from Silenus’ mouth the grand initiation of Diotima. No fairer wreath of praise was ever woven to deify any man upon earth.

Now, what were the energies stimulated in me by this master? What harmonies did he lead me to find?

At first he captivated me by his singular faculty of feeling the fascination even of evanescent beauty, of making, with a certain restraint, distinctions among ordinary pleasures, and of recognising the value which the idea of death confers upon the grace of earthly things.

Pure and austere as he was in the act of speculation, he yet possessed such exquisitely fine senses that they might almost be called the skilled artists of his sensations.

No guest at any of the banquets—according to Alcibiades, an excellent judge—knew so well how to enjoy them as he. At the beginning of the banquet of Xenophon, he, with the others, contemplates the perfect beauty of Autolycus in long silence, almost as if he recognised in it some superhuman presence. Afterwards he discourses, with subtle taste, of perfumes, dancing, and drinking, not without vivid images to adorn his discourse, as becomes a sage and a poet.

Thus, while contending with Critobulus in jest for the palm of beauty, he uttered these words: “Since my lips are thicker, thinkest thou not that my kiss must be softer than thine?” He advised the Syracusan, who gave a performance there of dancing, in which a flute-player, a marvellous dancing-girl, and a boy harpist took part, not to force the three young bodies to unnatural efforts and into dangerous postures, which give no pleasure to the spectator, but to leave it to their youthful freshness, accompanied by the sound of the flute, to fall into such attitudes as belong to the Nymphs, the Graces, or the Hours as they are commonly painted. And so to the disorder which only amazes he opposes the order which pleases, and stands revealed once again as a cultivator of music and a master of style.

That which in days gone by touched me more than anything else were his last words to a beautiful frail creature whom he loved. They touch me still, for my soul loves now and then to slacken its tension in the voluptuous sadness and passionate perplexity which the sense of continual change, continual passing away, continual decay, is apt to produce in a life adorned by the noblest culture.

In the dialogue of the last evening I am not so much moved by the scene where Crito, charged by him who was to administer the hemlock, interrupts the condemned man’s discourse, and admonishes him not to heat himself if he wishes the poison to take rapid effect, and the brave man smiles and goes on with his inquiry; nor is the musical simile of the swan magicians and their harmonious joy so dear to me; nor am I so amazed by those last moments, when in brief actions and brief sayings this man fulfils his ideal of perfection so clearly, and, like an artist who has given the finishing touch to his work, gazes contentedly at his own image—a miracle of style—destined for ever to remain immortal upon earth; I am not touched by any of these as I am by that unexpected pause which follows the doubts opposed by Cebes and Simmias to the certainty displayed by the eloquent master.

It was a profound pause, during which all those souls were suddenly blinded and cast, as it were, into an abyss after the ray of light thrown upon the great Mystery by him who was about to enter it had suddenly died out.

The master guessed the sadness produced among his faithful followers by this sudden gloom, and the wings of his thought soon spread again. Reality appeared to him through the medium of the senses, and held him back for a while in the field of the finite and the perceptible. He felt time fly, life flow on. Perhaps his ears caught some sound from the stately city, perhaps his nostrils inhaled the perfume of the early summer just approaching as his eyes rested on Phaedo with the beautiful hair.

Seated on his bed, with Phaedo beside him on a low stool, he laid his hand on the head of his disciple, and caressed him and stroked the hair on his neck, for it was a habit of his thus to let his fingers stray playfully in that thick young forest. Still he did not speak, so intense was his emotion, and so chequered with delight. Through this beautiful and ephemeral living being he was communicating once more with that earthly life in which he had attained his perfection, in which he had realised his ideal of virtue; and perhaps he felt that there was nothing beyond, that this finished existence of his was sufficient to itself, that its prolongation in eternity was only—like the halo of a star—an illusion produced by the extraordinary radiance of his humanity. Never had the locks of the young Elian been so sublimely precious to him. He was enjoying them for the last time, for he had to die; indeed, he knew that next day those locks would be cut off in sign of mourning. At last he said—and his disciples had never known such a tone in his voice before—he said: “To-morrow, oh Phaedo, thou wilt cut off these beautiful locks.” And the youth answered: “So it seems, oh Socrates.”

This sentiment—which I at once absorbed and exalted within me as I read the episode for the first time in the Platonic dialogue—became afterwards by means of analogy so complex and so familiar to my mind, that I made it the open or concealed theme of that music to which I wished to hearken.

In this way the Ancient Sage taught me the commemoration of death in a manner conformable to my nature, that I might find a rarer value and a graver significance in things near at hand. And he taught me to seek and discover in my own nature genuine virtues and genuine defects, that I might arrange both in accordance with a premeditated design, striving with patient care to give a seemly appearance to the latter, and to raise the former upwards towards the supreme perfection. And he taught me to exclude everything which was discordant with my ruling idea, everything which could alter the lines of my design, which could slacken or interrupt the rhythmical development of my thought. And he taught me to discern with sure intuition those souls over whom to exercise benevolence or mastery, or from whom to obtain some extraordinary revelation. And at last he communicated to me also his faith in the dæmon, which was none other than the mysteriously significant power of Style, inviolable by any, even by himself in his own person.

Full of this teaching and quite alone, I set to work, with the hope of succeeding, in tracing with precise and strong outlines that effigy of myself, to whose existence so many remote causes had contributed, operating from time immemorial through an infinite number of generations. That virtue of race, which in Socrates’ country was called eugeneia, came out stronger and stronger as my discipline became more severe; and my pride increased with my satisfaction as I thought how only too many other souls would have sooner or later revealed their vulgar essence under the ordeal of that fire. But sometimes from the very roots of my being—where the indestructible soul of ancestors slumbers—such positive and vehement fountains of energy would spring up, that I felt sad as I recognised their uselessness in an epoch when public life is only a miserable spectacle of meanness and dishonour. “It is marvellous indeed,” the dæmon used to say to me, “that these ancient barbaric energies should have been preserved in thee with all their freshness. They are still beautiful even though they be inopportune. In another age they would assist in performing the duty worthy of such as thee; that is to say, the duty of the leader who points out a certain goal, and guides his followers towards it. As that day seems far off, do thou now attempt, by condensing these energies, to transform them into living poetry.”

Very distant indeed that day appeared; for even the arrogance of the populace was not so great as the cowardice of those who tolerated and supported it. Living in Rome as I did, I was witness of the most ignominious breaches of faith, of the most obscene connections which ever dishonoured a sacred spot. Evil-doers gathered together within the fatal circle of the divine city as within the precincts of an infamous forest, and it seemed as though only some magnificent power armed with ideas more brilliant than past memories could be able nowadays to raise its head above the monstrous phantoms of empire. Like the overflow of sewers, the flood of base desires was invading the market-place and the cross-roads, a flood perpetually swelling and growing more putrid, never even illuminated by any flame of crooked but titanic ambition, never even bursting out in a flash of magnificent crime. The lonely dome on the distant side of the Tiber, inhabited by a soul, which although senile, yet stood firm in the consciousness of its own aims, was still the most prominent landmark, contrasted as it was with another unnecessarily exalted dwelling-place, where a king of warlike race showed a wonderful example of patience in the fulfilment of the humble and fatiguing office assigned to him by the decree of the people.

One evening in September, as I stood on that acropolis of the Quirinal guarded by the twin Tindarides, while a dense crowd was commemorating with bestial howls a conquest, the frightful extent of which they could not understand (Rome was looking terrible as a crater under a conflagration of clouds), I thought to myself: “What visions might not these conflagrations of the Latin sky kindle in the great heart of a king? Such a vision that under its weight the gigantic horses of Praxiteles would bend like twigs. Ah, who will ever be able to embrace the great Mother and fertilise her with his all-powerful idea? To her alone—within her womb of stone, which for ages has been the pillow of Death—to her alone it is given to generate such abundance of life that the world may be renewed with it again.”

And behind the glittering windows of the royal balcony I saw in imagination a pale contracted brow, carved like the brow of the Corsican with the mark of a superhuman destiny.

But what signified this turbid seething of servile passions, seen through that silence which surrounds Rome with its nine circles like a river of Tartarus? I was consoled for all my disappointment by this sublime spectacle of the Campagna strewn with great dead things, where nothing ever springs up save blades of grass, germs of fever, and terrible thoughts. “Is there a new nation struggling within the walls of the city? Ere long a few ashes will be borne to me on the wind. My barrenness is made of a layer of ashes, some precious and some ignoble. And the iron for the plough which shall furrow me has not yet been drawn from the mountain.” This is what the sepulchre of the nations signified to me.

And yet, though the sight of that voracious desert be a sinister warning to an unprofitable nation, it can inspire the solitary man with the wildest intoxication of which the soul is capable. From the crevices of that soil a feverish vapour ascends like smoke, and works like a magic philtre in the blood of some men, producing a form of madness unlike any other.

The young men of the Garibaldian troops, I thought, must have felt themselves possessed by this madness as they entered the Campagna. They were suddenly transfigured by a flame which consumed them like dry wood. And in one here and there that fever magnified his own inward vision in such a way that he ceased to form part of a compact and unanimous band, and assumed an individuality of his own, a singularly warlike aspect, consecrated to a new onward movement. Fair and noble of race like a virgin hero of the time of Ajax, the type of the old warlike ideal, strengthened by a spirit of unexampled ardour, which came to him from the soil he trod, seemed to be renewed in such an one as he fell.

I envied him that happy fate which was denied to me. Several times after these inspiring reflections, a furious desire to prove my valour consumed me, and I would put my horse at some very high piece of ruined wall, and, the useless danger overcome, I would feel that always and everywhere I should have known how to die.

I remember as one of the most intense periods in my life an autumn passed in daily communion with the Latian desert.

Over that theatre, where a drama of races unfolded itself before my mental vision, there passed a perpetual variety of clouds whose great fleeting shadows made the commentary on my inward musings. Sometimes the silence became so heavy, and the odour of death wafted up in my face from the grass so suffocating, that instinctively I clung closer to my horse, as though I wished to feel a share in his impetuous vitality. Then the fine powerful animal would spring forward with feline agility, and the inextinguishable fire burning in his pure blood would seem to communicate itself to me. Then for a few minutes I tasted intoxication. As I followed the line in which I was carried by the impetus of the gallop and the thoughts in my mind, a line parallel to the vast skeletons of the aqueducts which crowded the horizon, I felt the birth and growth within me of an indescribable spirit of fervour—a mixture of physical impulse, of intellectual pride and of confused hopes; and my energies were stimulated and multiplied by the presence of those works of man, of those human witnesses outliving total death, of those terrible reddened arches which for centuries have risen unconquered in procession against the menaces of heaven.

Alone, without near relations, without any ordinary ties, independent of any domestic authority, absolute master of myself and of my goods, I felt most profoundly in that solitude—more than at any other time or place—the sense of my progressive and voluntary evolution towards an ideal Latin type. Day after day I felt my whole nature grow, under the rigorous discipline of meditation, selection, and exclusion; and its special characteristics, its distinct peculiarities, become more marked. The aspect of the country, precise and sober in form and colour, was a continual example and a continual stimulus to me; it had an efficacy for my intellect like that of dogmatic teaching. Each group of lines seemed indeed to be inscribed on the heavens with the pithy significance of an incisive axiom and the unvarying character of a single style.

But the marvellous virtue of this teaching was, that although it drove me to order my inner life with the exactness of a ruled design, it did not dry up the spontaneous springs of emotion and imagination, indeed it only stimulated them to greater activity. Of a sudden, some single thought would become so intense and so ardent within me that it would possess me almost to delirium, like a phantom created by an illusion; and by it my whole world would be strewn with shadows and new lights. A jet of poetry would burst from my inner being, filling my whole soul with music and ineffable freshness, and causing desires and hopes to burn higher in a happy flame. Thus sometimes on the Campagna the autumn sunset would pour out the impalpable lava of its eruption; long sulphur-coloured streams furrowed the uneven plain; the hollows were filled with darkness like abysses just opened; the aqueducts caught fire from base to summit; the whole country seemed to have returned to its volcanic origin in the dawn of time. Thus sometimes in the morning the larks would start suddenly out of the soft sparkling grass, singing as they made their dizzy ascent, like spirits of joy rapt higher and higher from mortal sight into the purest heaven of blue, and to my wondering soul the whole dome of heaven seemed to be echoing with their intoxicating music.

And so this solitude more than any other was able to inspire the degree of enthusiasm and reasonableness necessary for an ambitious ascetic: an ascetic in the original meaning of the austere word, desiring, like the ancient antagonists, to prepare himself by rigid discipline for the struggles and the conquests of the earth.

“What pillar of fire, what burning desert, what lonely mountain top, what bottomless cave, what malarious pool, what solitary, barren, or tragic spot can be surpassed by this place, in the power of kindling the sacred spark of madness in one who believes himself destined to engrave on new tables of stone new laws for the religious guidance of the people?” Thus I used to think while presentiments of forms yet uncreated arose within me, fostered by that same silence in which so many extinct forms of our humanity were gathered together. Everything there is dead, but everything might suddenly come to life again in some spirit with enough superfluity of strength and heat to accomplish the prodigy. It is difficult to imagine the grandeur and terror of such a resurrection. He within whose consciousness it could be realised would appear to himself and others to be possessed by a mysterious and incalculable force greater far than that which used to assail the Pythia of old. Instead of the fury of a god present on the tripod, his mouth would express that very genius of the races which is the funereal guardian of innumerable destinies long ago fulfilled. His oracle would not be merely a chink opened into a world above the senses, but the sum of all human wisdom mingled with the breath of Earth, that highest of prophetesses, according to the message of Æschylus. And once again the multitudes would bend before the divine aspect of his madness; not as at Delphi, to implore the dark utterances of the ambiguous God, but to receive the clear answer given by previous existences, that answer which the Nazarene never gave. He was too illiterate, and the desert beneath the mountains of Judea on the western bank of the Dead Sea, in which he chose to find his revelation, was too stony: a place of rocks and precipices, destitute of foot-prints, blind to all thought. The solitary youth felt no fear of famishing jackals, but he feared thought. His pale hand had power to tame savage beasts, but thoughts as fiery and masterful as those which wander over the Latian desert would have devoured him. When the bad angel drove him to the top of the mountain and showed him the fertile land below, and pointed out the position of the different countries of the world and the deep and whirling currents of human desire, he closed his eyelids: he would not see, he would not know. But the great Revealer must extend the horizon of his consciousness beyond all limits, and embrace within it days and years, centuries and millenniums. The truth he sets forth must be the outcome of the whole life lived by men up to the present hour. It must be a fire in which the ascending powers of many generations may be absorbed; so that thus harmonised and multiplied, they may move onward in greater unison and with greater certainty towards an ever purer ideal.

Sometimes, too, I was haunted by the phantom of him, whom one day believed to have created King of Rome. “There was lacking,” I used to think, “even in this most admirable inspirer of heroic feeling, in this joyful revenger of youthful blood, there was lacking the ascetic discipline of the sepulchre of the nations. Had he been able even for a time to turn aside his spirit from the things which pressed upon him and bend it towards immutable things, he might have discovered some idea greater than his own mortal person, and might have chosen it to be ruler of his actions. Then his dream of Latin empire would have grown closer and weightier and more tenacious, so that the force of events and himself combined could not have finally dissipated and destroyed it as they did. But his idea, which was too much bound up with daily life, too human in fact, was to die with him. He never attained knowledge of the secret by which man prolongs the efficacy of his action into all time. The impulses given by the man were as vehement as they could be, but their propagation was brief and uncertain, because they originated in a centre of spontaneous powers which were not subject to any superior conception evolved from a severe order of meditation. And so his work was not higher than himself, and lasted no longer than the work of destruction. His destiny was controlled by the old oracles. The answer given by the Pythia as to the fate of Corinth might, after thousands of years, serve for him also:—An eagle has conceived by a rock, and shall give birth to a fierce lion, greedy for human flesh, which shall work great slaughter.—He did but obey the prediction, like the petty tyrant Cypselus. And the King of Rome faded away into space like a column of smoke.”

Such was the colour of the thoughts awakened in me by the aspect of a place which—according to Dante’s words—seemed formed by nature herself for universal empire: ad universaliter principandum. And while Dante’s arguments to prove the divine right of the Roman power recurred to my memory, the summit of my intellect was occupied by that motto which the Latin races, if they wish to be born again, would do well to adopt in its exact and rigid form as the rule of their vital institutions:—Maxima nobile, maxima præesse convenit. It is meet that the noblest should also be the greatest.

And in the company of that great and tyrannical spirit I used to think: “Oh, venerable father of our language, thou hadst faith in the necessity of hierarchies and differences between men; thou didst believe in the superiority of the virtue transmitted through heredity in the blood; thou didst firmly believe in a virtue of race which can by degrees, by one selection after another, elevate man to the highest splendour of his moral beauty. When thou didst expound the genealogy of Æneas, thou sawest a manner of divine predestination in the concourse of blood.” Now, what mysterious concourse of blood, what vast experience of culture, what propitious harmony of circumstances shall give birth to the new King of Rome? Natura ordinatus ad imperandum—ordained by nature unto empire—but, unlike any other monarch, his task will not be to reconfirm or raise the value which—under the influence of various teachings—the nations have been used to set upon the things of life; it will rather be to abolish or invert them. Conscious of the whole significance of those events which compose man’s history, and familiar with the essence of all the supreme wills which have directed important movements, he will be capable of the work of construction, and of throwing out towards the future that ideal bridge by which the privileged races will at last be able to cross the abyss now apparently separating them from the power of which they are ambitious.

And among all the images which the sacred soil suggested to my soul, this image of the king was the most vivid. Sometimes he almost seemed to me a created form; and I used to gaze on him eagerly, while sudden ideas of indescribable beauty flashed across my intellect and faded away, never perhaps to appear again.

Thus the Roman Campagna with its severe teaching strengthened me to follow out the perfection of my manhood, to assert my inward sovereignty, to trace with a firm hand that “line of circumference from which human beauty is generated,” according to Leonardo’s saying. And at the close of each day I asked myself: “By what new thoughts has my treasure been enriched? What new energies have been developed from my being? What new possibilities have I caught sight of?” And I wished that every day should bear the impress of my style, should be distinguished by some sign of vigorous art, by some proud emblem of victory. My familiarity with Thucydides set before me the example of those strategists of his, who are constantly making fine, pithy harangues to their soldiers, then fighting with all their might, and finally raising a trophy on the field.

Cui bono?—was the cry which came from far and wide out of the mouths of a twilight crowd with voices not unlike eunuchs’.—What is the meaning, what is the value of life? Why live? Why strive? All efforts are useless, all is vanity and sorrow. We ought to kill off our passions one after another, and then extirpate to the very roots the hope and desire which are the cause of life. Renunciation, complete unconsciousness, the vanishing away of dreams, absolute annihilation—that is the final liberation.

They were a miserable race stricken with leprosy reiterating their dreary complaint. The ancient Persians, as the ever-fresh Herodotus narrates, used to attribute this foul infirmity to offences committed against the Sun. And these slavish people had indeed offended against the Sun.

A certain number of them, hoping to be cleansed, had bathed in great fonts of piety, where they softened and anointed themselves with great contrition. But the sight of these was quite as repugnant.

I turned away my eyes and ears elsewhere; and my heart-strings throbbed with proud joy, because my eyes were undimmed by tears, and could perceive all lines and all colours, because my healthy, watchful ears could hear all sounds and all rhythms, because my spirit could rejoice boundlessly in fugitive appearances and know how to cultivate within itself very different forms of melancholy, how to find the sweetest value of life in the rapidity of its metamorphoses and in the denseness of its mysteries. “Oh manifold Beauty of the World,” I used then to pray, “not to thee alone do my praises ascend; not to thee alone, but also to my forefathers, to those also who, remote ages ago, understood how to enjoy thee, and transmitted their fervid and rich blood to me. Praised be they now and for ever, for the beautiful wounds which they inflicted, for the beautiful fires they kindled, for the beautiful goblets they emptied, for the beautiful garments which clothed them, for the beautiful palfreys they caressed, for the beautiful women they enjoyed, for all their slaughter, their intoxication, their magnificence, their luxury, let them be praised; because thus did they form in me those senses in which thou canst widely and deeply reflect thyself, oh Beauty of the World, as in five wide and deep seas!”

In the meantime, the poets, discouraged and erring, having exhausted their store of rhymes in evoking images of other days, in weeping over their own dead illusions, and in counting the colours of the dying leaves, were asking, some ironically, some seriously: “What can be our function now? Are we to exalt universal suffrage in senile rhymes? Are we to hasten with the breathlessness of hexameters the fall of the king, the advent of republics, the accession of the people to power? Is there no demagogue Cleophontes who manufactures lire in Rome, as in Athens of old? For a modest sum we might persuade the incredulous, on his very instruments tuned by himself, that power, right, thought, wisdom, light, are to be found in the masses....”

But not one among them, more generous and more eager than the rest, arose to answer: “Defend Beauty! That is your only function. Defend the vision that is within you. Since mortals have now ceased to bear honour and reverence to the singer scholars of the Muse that favours them, as Odysseus said, defend yourselves with all your weapons, even with jests, if such are of more use than invectives. Be careful to sharpen the point of your scorn with the bitterest poison. Let your sarcasm have such corrosive strength that it may reach to the very marrow and destroy it. Brand to the very bone the stupid brows of those who would put an exact mark on each soul, as on a household utensil, and would make human heads alike as the heads of nails under the blow of the hammer. Let your frenzied laughter rise to the very heaven, when you hear the stablemen of the Great Beast vociferating in the Assembly. For the sake of the glory of Mind proclaim and demonstrate that their sayings are not less ignoble than the groans of the flatulent peasant. Proclaim and demonstrate that their hands—to which your father Dante would give the same epithet as he gave to the nails of Thais—may be fit to gather manure, but are not worthy of being raised to sanction a law in the Assembly. Defend the Thought which they threaten, the Beauty which they outrage! A day will come when they will attempt to burn the books, shatter the statues, rip up the canvases. Defend the ancient generous work of your masters and the future work of your disciples against the rage of these drunken slaves. Do not despair because ye are few. Ye possess the supreme knowledge and the supreme power of the world—the Word. Words may have more murderous power than a chemical formula. Oppose destruction resolutely with destruction.”

And the patricians, stripped of their authority in the name of equality, and looked upon as ghosts from a world which has disappeared for ever; unfaithful, the greater part of them at least, to their lineage, and ignorant or forgetful of the art of mastery professed by their forefathers, were also asking: “What can be our function now? Are we to deceive the age and ourselves by attempting to revive some slender hope among faded memories of the past, under those vaulted roofs storied with sanguine mythology, which are too vast for our restricted breathing? Or must we recognise the great dogma of Eighty-nine, and open the porticoes of our courts to popular applause, illuminate our travertine balconies for State festivals, associate with Jewish bankers, exercise our small share of sovereignty by filling up the voting ticket with the names of men of the middle classes, of our tailors, our hatters, our bootmakers, our money-lenders, and our lawyers?”

A few among them—ill-inclined for peaceful renunciation, elegant boredom, and barren irony—answered: “Train yourselves as you train your race-horses, and wait for the opportunity. Learn the method of asserting yourselves and strengthening your own persons, as you have learned that of winning on the turf. By strength of will force all your energies, even your stormiest passions and darkest vices, into a straight line and towards a definite aim. Be assured that the essence of personality far exceeds all accessory attributes in value, and that inward sovereignty is the chief mark of the aristocrat. Believe only in force tempered by long discipline. Force is the first law of nature; it is indestructible, not to be abolished. Discipline is the supreme virtue of the freeman. The world can be based only on force, as truly in civilised ages as in the epochs of barbarism. If all the races of the earth were destroyed by another deluge, and new generations were to arise from the stones, as in the old fable, men would begin to fight amongst themselves as soon as they had issued from their mother earth, until one of them the strongest, should succeed in mastering the others. Wait, therefore, and prepare for your opportunity. Fortunately, the State built on foundations of popular suffrage and equality, cemented by fear, is not only an ignoble, but also a precarious structure. The State ought to be nothing less than an institution perfectly adapted to promote the gradual elevation of a privileged class towards an ideal form of existence. Therefore, upon the economic and political equality to which democracy aspires, you must go on forming a new oligarchy, a new realm of force; and before long, sooner or later, you will succeed in taking the reins into your own hands again, so as to rule the multitude for your own profit. Indeed, you will have little difficulty in bringing back the common herd to its obedience. The masses always remain slaves; they have a natural impulse to stretch out their wrists to the fetters. The sense of liberty will never to the end of time exist in them. Do not be deceived by their vociferations and their hideous contortions; but always remember that the soul of the Multitude is in the power of Panic. It will be your policy, therefore, when the opportunity comes, to provide yourselves with cutting whips, to assume an imperious mien, to plan some humorous stratagem. When the cunning Ulysses was ranging the field to call in every one to the council, if he came across a noisy plebeian, he used to chastise him with his sceptre, scolding him thus: 'Silence, silence, coward, pusillanimous one, thing of naught in the council.’ The noble demagogue Alcibiades, who was more versed than any in the government of the Great Beast, began one of his orations on the expedition into Sicily thus: 'This command, oh Athenians—this command belongs to me rather than to any one else, and I hold myself worthy of this command.’ But truly there is no teaching more profound and more suitable for you than that given by Herodotus in the beginning of the book of Melpomene. Here it is: 'The Scythians, having spent twenty-eight years away from their own country in ruling over Upper Asia, and desirous, after such a long interval, to return home, found that to do so involved hardships no less great than those they had suffered in the Median war. A great and hostile army barred their entrance. And this came to pass because the Scythian women, having been left so long without men of their own race, had given themselves to their slaves. And from the slaves and the women had sprung a generation of young men who, conscious of their origin, had set themselves against those who were returning from Media; and in order to hold the pass, had first of all made an entrenchment stretching from the mountains of Taurus to the Mæotian marsh, which is very wide. They then proceeded to repulse the attempted assault of the Scythians, defending themselves with many deeds of valour; and as, after various conflicts, the Scythians found they could make no advance by fighting, one of them began to speak thus: Oh Scythians, why do we labour thus? By fighting against our slaves we weaken ourselves by the number of our deaths, and by killing them we only reduce the number of our future subjects. Wherefore it seems to me fitting that we should put aside our spears and darts, and that each of us should be armed only with his horsewhip, and thus we should confront these slaves. Because up till now, seeing us march against them in arms, they have no doubt thought themselves our equals, and sons of equals; but when they see us coming against them wielding whips instead of arms, they will feel at once that they are our slaves, and they will not dare to resist us any longer. The Scythians followed this advice; and their adversaries, thunderstruck by the change, ceased fighting and took to flight. Thus did the Scythians win back their country.’ Oh ye masters without mastery, think upon it.”

Perhaps in my busy solitude—although I feared neither sickness, nor madness, nor death, having within me that tutelary flame of pride, of thought, and of faith—perhaps there lay hidden beneath my melancholy a real need for communion with some kindred spirit as yet unknown, or with some circle of minds disposed to care sincerely and passionately for those things for which I so passionately cared. It seemed to me that this need was betrayed by a mental habit I had of casting my theory of ideas and images into a concrete oratorical or lyrical form, almost as if for an imaginary audience. Warm bursts of eloquence and poetry would suddenly flood my being, and silence was at times a burden to my overflowing soul.

Then, to comfort my solitude, I thought of giving corporeal form to that dæmon in whom, according to my first master’s teaching, I believed as the infallible pledge which was to lead me to achieve the integrity of my moral being. I thought of committing to a noble, masterful mouth, red with the same blood as mine, the duty of repeating to me, “Oh thou, be what thou oughtest to be.”

Among the figures of my ancestors one above all others is most dear to me, and sacred as a votive image. He is the noblest and the most brilliant flower of my race, represented by the brush of a divine artist. It is the portrait of Alessandro Cantelmo, Count of Volturara, painted by Da Vinci between the years 1493 and 1494, at Milan, where Alessandro, attracted by the unheard-of magnificence of that Sforza who wished to turn the Lombard city into a New Athens, had taken up his abode with a company of men-at-arms.

There is nothing in the world that I prize so much, nor was treasure ever guarded with more passionate jealousy. I am never weary of thanking fortune for having caused such a noble figure to brighten my life, and for having granted me the incomparable luxury of such a secret. “If thou possess a beautiful object, remember that every glance cast on it by another is a usurpation of thy possession. The joy of possession is diminished when it is divided, therefore do thou refuse to share it. They say that some one declined to enter a public museum lest his glance should be mingled with that of strangers. Now, if thou do indeed possess a beautiful object, enclose it within seven doors, and cover it with seven veils.” And a veil hangs over the magnetic face; but the dream in it is so profound, the fire in it is so powerful, that at times the woven stuff trembles with the vehemence of the breathing.

And so I gave my dæmon the form of this familiar genius, and in my solitude I felt him alive with a life far more intense than my own. Had I not before me by means of the lasting miracle of one of the world’s greatest revealers—had I not before me an heroic spirit, sprung from my own stock, and constituted of all the distinctive characteristics of that lineage which I was so eagerly striving to manifest in myself, and which in him appeared in such fierce relief as to be almost terrible?

There he is still before me, always the same, yet always new! Such a body is not the prison of the soul, but its faithful semblance. All the lines of the beardless face are as precise and firm as those of a deeply-chiselled bronze; the dark pallor of the skin conceals tough muscles, wont in moments of anger and desire to stand out clearly with a fierce tremor; the straight, rigid nose, the bony, narrow chin, the curved but energetically-locked lips express the boldness of the will; and his glance is like the flash of a beautiful sword coming from beneath the shadow of thick and heavy hair, violet-black in hue like the bunches of grapes on a branch in the burning sun. He stands immovable, visible from the knees upwards; but the imagination pictures at once how the strong, flexible legs will start when the enemy appears, giving a formidable impetus to the beautiful frame. “Cave, adsum”—well does the old device apply to him. He is dressed in very light armour, evidently inlaid by a most accomplished workman, and his hands are bare; pale, sensitive hands, yet with something tyrannical, almost homicidal, about their clear outlines: the left hand is resting on the Gorgon’s head on his sword-hilt, the right on the corner of a table covered with dark velvet, of which a fold is visible. Lying on the table beside the gauntlets and helmet are a statuette of Pallas and a pomegranate, whose pointed leaf and brilliant flower are growing on the same stalk as the fruit. Through the opening of a window behind his head is seen a bare landscape ending in a group of hills, over which rises a peak, standing solitary as a proud thought; and on a scroll beneath is this verse—

“Frons viridis ramo antiquo et flos igneus uno tempore (prodigium) fructus et uber inest.”

Where and by what chance did Alessandro first meet with the Florentine master, who was at that time attaining the supreme splendour of his manhood? Perhaps at one of Ludovico’s feasts, full of the marvels created by the occult arts of the Magician? Or perhaps rather at the palace of Cecilia Gallerani, where military men discussed the science of war, musicians sang, architects and painters drew, philosophers argued about natural science, and poets recited compositions of their own and of others “in the presence of this heroine,” as Bandello relates. It is here that I like to imagine their first meeting, about the time when the favourite of the Moor was already beginning to love Alessandro secretly.

What a fire of audacious intelligence and of masterful will must have been apparent in the youth, for Leonardo to be so taken with him from that very day! Perhaps Alessandro discussed with him, apart from the others, “the methods of destroying any rock or fortress not founded on stone,” and grew eager to know the formidable secrets of this fascinating creator of Madonnas, who surpassed all masters and makers of instruments of war in the novelty of his ideas. Perhaps in the course of the argument Leonardo may have uttered one of those deep sayings of his about the art of life; and looking into the eyes of the youth on whom silence had fallen, recognised in him a spirit determined to take everything that can be got out of life, an ambitious man disposed, instead of following his fate blindly, to attain the mastery for himself with the help of that science which multiplies the energies of him who possesses it and concentrates them on the attainment of his aim. And perhaps the man who was a few years later to become Cæsar Borgia’s military architect, who was invoking and waiting for some magnanimous prince to offer him unlimited means of carrying out his innumerable designs, may have perceived in this curly-headed patrician the future founder of a royal dynasty, and loved him and placed his proudest hopes in him.

I like to think that a brief entry in the commentaries of Da Vinci (who was then busy with studies for the equestrian statue of Francesco Sforza) refers to the evening of this first meeting: “The penultimate day of April 1492. Messer Alessandro Cantelmo’s fine jennet: has a good neck and a very beautiful head.”

After leaving Cecilia’s palace together, they both paused for awhile in the street, still arguing; and when Leonardo noticed the jennet, he went up to look at it. As he stroked the beautiful neck, some involuntary expression escaped him regarding the terrible labour his insatiable spirit underwent in researches for the monument which the Moor desired to erect in honour of the fame of his father, the conqueror of the duchy and the vanquisher of Genoa. With a wide sweep the creative hand of the artist traced the outline of the Colossus in the air, making it visible to the youth’s inner vision. The day was sinking; the hour of spring twilight was trembling on the pinnacles of the glorious city; a company of musicians passed by singing; and the horse neighed with impatience. Then the soul of Alessandro swelled with an heroic sentiment which made him seem like a phantom of the great captain. “Ah, to set out on my conquests!” he thought, as he vaulted into the saddle. And then seeing that in reality he was only setting out on some common affair of daily life, he said suddenly, with a bitter impulse: “Seemeth it to you, Master Leonardo, that life can be of any worth to a man of my station?” And Leonardo, who did not marvel at these unexpected words: “It is everything that the eagle should take his first flight.” And perhaps the beardless horseman riding away among his men-at-arms may have seemed to him destined to be a king, “like him who in the bee-hive is born leader of the bees.”

The following morning a servant brought the jennet to the sculptor as a gift, with compliments from his master.

Thus do I imagine the beginning of their mutual liberality. The master rewarded his disciple with the true riches, since “that cannot be called riches which it is possible to lose.” Like Socrates, he preferred to have for his disciples those who had beautiful hair and were richly clothed. Like Socrates, he excelled in the art of elevating the human soul to its supreme degree of vigour. Certainly Alessandro was for a time the chosen one in that Academia Leonardo Vincii, where a noble spiritual lineage was developed little by little under teaching which drew its warmth from the central truth as from a sun which cannot be darkened. “Nothing can be loved or hated, unless first there be knowledge of that thing. The love of anything is child to the knowledge of it. The more certain the knowledge, the more fervent the love.”

Here and there in Leonardo’s interrupted memoirs one comes across signs of the passionate curiosity with which the indefatigable experimentalist used to watch over the precious soul of his young friend. He had no secrets from him, for he desired to contribute by all the means in his power towards increasing the accumulated forces of his soul so as to render its future action in a wider field more efficacious. He noted down for remembrance: “Speak to Volturara about a certain way of shooting a dart.” And again: “Show Volturara ways of raising and letting down bridges, ways of burning and destroying those of the enemy, and the ways of placing mortar pieces by day and by night.” Or: “Messer Alessandro wishes to give me Valturio’s De re militari, and the Décades, and Lucretius’ Delle cose naturali.”

He used to be struck by the terse, proud sayings of the young man, and noted down some of them: “Messer Alessandro says one must grasp fortune firmly from the front, since behind she is bald.” And again: “As I was working at the book on dividing rivers into numerous branches, and making them fordable, Volturara said boldly: Truly, Cyrus son of Cambyses understood all that when he chastised a river in that very way for carrying away a white horse of his.”

One day—so I imagine—they had both been invited to the magnificent house of Cecilia Gallerani; and Leonardo had transported the souls of all present by his performance on a new lyre of his own manufacture, made almost entirely of silver, in the shape of a horse’s skull. During the pause which followed the applause, the second Sappho ordered a beautiful little casket, richly inlaid with enamel and gems, the Duke’s gift, to be brought to her; and she showed it to those present, and asked them what object was, in their opinion, sufficiently precious to deserve to be kept in it. Every one expressed a different opinion. “And you, Messer Alessandro?” asked Madonna Cecilia, with a soft glance. And he replied audaciously: “Alexander of old chose the most precious casket among all the treasures of Darius, that which was richer than aught that eyes had ever beheld, as a shrine for Homer’s Iliad.”

Da Vinci immediately noted down this answer in his memoirs, and added: “One can see that he feeds on the marrow and nerves of lions.”

Another day they had both been invited by the same hostess to her garden; and Alessandro, after an argument with some of those “famous spirits,” drew apart, to follow out some new thought which the heat of the discussion had generated in that pregnant intellect. The beautiful Bergamese Countess called him several times, but it was long ere he turned round, for it was long ere he heard the call. Met by a gracious reproof, or perhaps a stinging remark, he answered, smiling: “He who is fixed to a star does not look round.”

In the evening Da Vinci noted down this answer also in his memoirs, and to it added his prophecy: “Soon he will take his first flight, fill the universe with wonder, fill all writings with his renown, and confer eternal glory on the place of his birth.”

Perhaps it was that very evening, as he meditated on the intensity and versatility of that youthful temperament, that his mind, ever inclined to the mysterious significations of emblems and allegories, hit upon that beautiful symbol of the pomegranate, including and bearing upon one stalk the fruit, the pointed leaf, and the flaming flower.

But on the 9th of July in the year 1495, three days after the battle of Fornovo, he noted down: “Volturara died on the field, as was meet for one like him. Never did blind steel cut off a brighter hope for the world.”

Thus lived and died the young hero in whom the purest essence of my warlike race had seemed to be concentrated. Thus fully was he revealed to me in the faithful likeness handed down to his distant heir by an artist who might be called Prometheus.

“O thou,” he seemed to say to me, as with his magnetic glance he took possession of my soul, “be what thou oughtest to be.”

“For thy sake,” I used to say to him, “for thy sake I will be what I ought to be; because I love thee, O brilliant flower of my race; because I desire to place all my pride in obeying thy law, O master. Thou didst bear within thyself strength sufficient to subjugate the earth, but thy royal destiny was not to be fulfilled in the age wherein thou didst first appear. In that age thou wast but the herald and forerunner of thyself, for thou wast destined to reappear higher up thy ancient stem in the maturity of future ages, on the threshold of a world not explored by the warriors, but promised by the wise men: to reappear as the messenger, the interpreter, and the lord of a new life. Therefore didst thou suddenly disappear like a demi-god by the banks of a swollen river, amid the roar of battle and storm, just as the sun was entering the sign of the Lion. Death did not cut off thy great promise, but fate willed to alter its marvellous fulfilment. Thy virtue, which could not then be manifested to the earth by triumphant actions, must necessarily revive some day in thy still surviving lineage. And may it be to-morrow! May thy equal be begotten by me! I invoke and await and prepare the renewal of thy genius with unfailing faith, the while adoring thy living image, O conqueror and sage, thou who didst lay the blade of thy beautiful naked sword as a mark in the books of wisdom.”

Thus I used to address him. And under his glance and inspired by him, not only were my actual energies multiplied, but my task lay clear before me in definite outlines. “Thou, therefore, shalt labour to carry out thy own destiny and that of thy race. Thou shalt have before thy eyes at the same time the premeditated plan of thy existence and the vision of an existence superior to thine own. Thou shalt live in the idea that each life being the sumtotal of past lives is the condition of future lives. Thou shalt not, therefore, look upon thyself only as the beginning, aim, and end of thy own destiny, but thou shalt feel the whole value and the whole weight of the inheritance received from thy ancestors, which thou must transmit to thy descendant countersigned with the stamp of thy most vigorous characteristics. Let the supreme conception of thy dignity be founded on the certainty, so sure in thee, that thou art the preserving link of a multifold energy which to-morrow, or after the lapse of a century, or at some indefinite time, may reassert itself in a sublime manifestation. But hope that it may be to-morrow! Triple, therefore, is thy task, for thou dost possess the gift of poetry, and must study to acquire the science of words. Triple is thy task:—by direct methods to conduct thy being to attain the perfect integrity of the Latin type; to concentrate the purest essence of thy spirit, and to reproduce in a single and supreme work of art thy deepest vision of the universe; to preserve the ideal riches of thy race and thine own individual conquests in a son, who, under paternal instruction, shall recognise and co-ordinate them in himself, and shall thus feel worthy of aspiring to the realisation of ever higher possibilities.”

Then, with the tables of my laws thus clearly set before me, there came over me not only the sadness of doubt, but an anxiety akin to fear—a new and horrible anxiety. “If some blind, unforeseen violence from exterior forces were to shake, or deform, or crush my work! If I should have to bend and submit to some brutal injury of chance. If one of those destructive gusts which burst suddenly out of the darkness should cause the fall of my edifice before its completion.” This fear came over me during a strange hour of agitation and depression, and I felt my faith failing me. But soon after I felt ashamed when my monitor said to me: “Judging from the quality of thy thoughts, thou seemest to me like one contaminated by the crowd, or in the power of a woman. See, even passing through the crowd which was gazing at thee has lessened thee in thine own eyes. Seest thou not that those men who frequent it become unfruitful as mules? The gaze of the crowd is worse than a splash of mud; the breath of it is poisonous. Go afar off while the sewer discharges itself. Go afar off and ponder on that which thou hast gathered up. Thy hour will come. What fearest thou? Of what worth would be all this discipline, did it not make thee stronger than circumstances? Even by this it is sometimes possible to create by force of will. Therefore go afar off while the sewer discharges itself. Delay not; let not thyself be contaminated by the crowd, or fall into the power of a woman. It is true thou wilt have to form an alliance in order to accomplish one part of the task thou hast assigned to thyself. But better is it for thee to wait and remain alone; better even to slay thy hope than to submit body and spirit to unworthy fetters. If the thing loved is contemptible, the lover is contemptible. Thou must never forget this saying of thy Leonardo, that, like Castruccio, thou mayest always be able proudly to reply: 'I have chosen her; she did not choose me.’”

Justly did this admonition come to me at that time. And without delay I made ready to depart from the tainted city.

It was a time when the active zeal of destroyers and builders was raging feverishly over the soil of Rome. With the clouds of dust a species of madness for lucre seemed to spread like a poisonous whirlwind, taking hold not only of the men of the labouring classes, the familiar spirits of lime and bricks, but also of the proudest heirs of papal families, who till then had looked scornfully at all intruders from the windows of travertine palaces, which stood obdurately firm under the crust of ages. One by one these magnificent families—founded, carried on, strengthened by nepotism and civil wars—sank lower, slid down into the new mire, went under and disappeared. Famous fortunes accumulated by centuries of successful rapine and Mæcenatic luxury were exposed to the risks of the Stock Exchange.

The laurels and roses of the Villa Sciarra, whose praises had been sung by the nightingales for such a long succession of nights, were being cut down to the ground, or survived in a humble position inside the gates of little gardens surrounding new villas built for grocers. The gigantic Ludovisi cypresses, those of the Aurora, the very same which had once spread the solemnity of their ancient mystery over the Olympian head of Goethe, lay on the ground (I see them always in imagination as my eyes saw them one November afternoon) side by side in a row, with the smoke from their naked roots rising up to the pale heaven above, with their black roots all laid bare, and seeming still to hold prisoner within their vast intricacies the phantom of omnipotent life. And those lordly meadows all round, where only one spring ago violets more numerous than the blades of grass were springing up for the last time, were now ghastly with white lime-pits, red heaps of bricks, the creaking of cart-wheels loaded with stones; while the shouts of the master builders alternated with the hoarse cries of the carters, and the brutal work which was to occupy places so long sacred to Beauty and Visions went on rapidly.

It seemed as though a blast of barbarism were blowing over Rome, and threatening to tear away that radiant crown of patrician villas, incomparable in the world of memories and poetry. The menace of the barbarians hung over the very box-trees of the Villa Albani, though they had seemed as immortal as the Caryatids and the solitude.

The contagion was spreading rapidly everywhere. In the midst of the incessant current of business, of the ferocious fury of appetites and passions, of the disordered and exclusive exercise of utilitarian activity, all sense of decorum had been lost, all respect for the Past laid aside. The battle for gain was being fought with unbridled, implacable violence. The arms used were the pickaxe, the trowel, and bad faith. And from week to week, with almost chimerical rapidity, enormous empty cages, pierced with rectangular holes, their artificial cornices coated with shameful stucco, were rising on foundations filled with heaps of ruins. A species of huge whitish tumour was rising out of the side of the ancient city and sucking away its life.

And then day after day at sunset—as the quarrelsome bands of workmen were dispersing to fill the taverns of the Via Salaria and Via Nomentana—down the princely avenues of the Villa Borghese they drove in shining carriages, these new favourites of fortune, the stamp of whose ignoble origin neither hairdresser, nor tailor, nor bootmaker had been able to remove. One saw them passing to and fro, to the resounding trot of their bay or their black horses, easily recognisable by the insolent awkwardness of their attitudes, the embarrassed look of their rapacious hands imprisoned in gloves always either too large or too small for them. And they seemed to be saying: “We are the new masters of Rome. Bow down to us!”

Such, indeed, were the masters of that Rome which seers and prophets, drunk with the burning fumes of all the Latin blood that has been shed, have compared to the bow of Ulysses—“One must bend it or die.” But these very seers, who for so long had shone as stars in the heroic heaven of their country, before her liberation, had now become “sordid charcoal, only fit to trace an ugly figure or an unseemly word upon the wall,” according to the atrocious simile of an indignant rhetorician. They, too, gave themselves up to selling and bartering, to legal quibbling and setting of snares, and no one alluded any more to the destroying bow. And there seemed in truth no prospect of the cry suddenly arising to terrify them: “O suitors, devourers of other men’s substance, beware! Ulysses is at hand in Ithaca!”

The best thing to do was to withdraw from the scene for a while. And I left with my horses and my household gods without taking farewell of anybody.

For my dwelling-place I had chosen Rebursa, my favourite among my hereditary estates, as it had been my father’s favourite before me; it was a suitable retreat for a healthy soul, a country with a rocky backbone, peculiarly sober in outline and vigorous in style; fit to welcome and nurse the lordly dream of my ambition, as it had welcomed and nursed my father’s lofty melancholy after the fall of his king, and the death of him who, when living, had seemed to be the light of our house, our surest possession.

Besides, not far from there—at Trigento—I had friends, not forgotten although not seen for many years, friends to whom I was bound by grateful memories of childhood and youth. And the thought of seeing them again cheered my spirit.

At Trigento, in the old baronial palace, surrounded by a garden almost as vast as a park, lived the Capea Montaga, one of the most illustrious and magnificent families in the two Sicilies, a family ruined by ten years’ devotion to the fortunes of their exiled king, and obliged now to live a retired life on the only estate left to them, in the heart of the silent province. The old Prince of Castromitrano—who had enjoyed the highest honours at the Courts of Ferdinand and Francis, and who had faithfully followed the exile to Rome and across the Alps without ever renouncing the pomp of happier times—had been dreaming in the shade for years, and for years waiting in vain for the Restoration; he was now sinking into the grave with premature old age, while his children were fading away in the lifeless monotony of their existence. The madness of the Princess Aldoina alone disturbed this long agony by throwing over it gleams of the fantastic splendour of the Past. And nothing could equal the desolation of the contrast between the miserable reality and the pompous phantoms which issued from the brain of the mad woman.

This great and dying race added a kind of funereal beauty to the rocky country for my soul, which was already seeking to absorb all the soul enclosed within that stony cloister. Already a mysterious presentiment had arisen from the depths of my being that my destiny was approaching and mingling with that lonely destiny. And the names of the three maiden princesses resounded in my memory with a faint magical music: Massimilla, Anatolia, Violante—names in which there seemed to me to be something vaguely visible, like a pale portrait behind a clouded glass; names expressive as faces full of light and shade, in which an infinity of grace, passion, and sorrow was already apparent to me.

II

“Grandissima grazia d’ombre e di lumi s’aggiunge ai visi di quelli che
seggono sulle porte di quelle abitazioni che sono oscure....”

Leonardo da Vinci.

I was sincerely glad when I recognised on the road to Rebursa, Oddo and Antonello Montaga, who had found out the hour of my arrival and had come to meet me. Both of them embraced me with effusion, delivered messages of welcome from Trigento, and asked me a thousand questions at the same moment; they seemed delighted to see me, and still more delighted when I spoke of my intention of remaining some time in the country.

“You are going to stay with us!” exclaimed Antonello, as he pressed my hand almost beside himself with joy. “Then you are sent by God....” “You must come this very day to Trigento,” said Oddo, interrupting his brother. “They are all expecting you there. You must come to-day....”

They both seemed to me overcome by a strange, almost feverish agitation; their gestures were wild and convulsive, their speech rapid and anxious; they were like two feeble prisoners just set free from an imprisonment which seems like a terrible dream, whom the first contact with outward life has disturbed and confused, making them almost dizzy. The more I looked at them, the more clearly I noticed these strange signs about their persons; and I began to feel anxious and distressed about them.

“I don’t know,” I replied, “I don’t know if I can come to-day. I am weary after so many hours of travelling. But to-morrow....”

I felt a vague desire to be alone, to collect myself, to taste the quality of the strange melancholy that had suddenly fallen upon me. A flood of memories rolled towards me from the things around, and the presence of those two unfortunate beings prevented my receiving it.

“Then,” said Oddo, “you will come to luncheon with us to-morrow. Do you consent?”

“Yes, I will come.”

“You cannot imagine how eagerly they are expecting you over there.”

“Then you had not forgotten me?”

“Oh, no! It is you who had forgotten us.”

“You had forgotten us,” repeated Antonello with a somewhat distorted smile. “You were right. We are buried.”

The tone of his voice struck me more than his words. His tones, gestures, looks, and all his actions had a singular intensity, like those of a man stricken by a mysterious disease or tormented by a continual hallucination, living in the midst of apparitions invisible to the eyes of others. It did not escape my notice that he was making an effort to break through some atmosphere that surrounded him, and to communicate more directly with me. This effort imparted a contracted and convulsed look to his whole person. My anxiety and distress grew greater.

“You will see our house,” he added with the same smile.

Involuntarily I asked—

“How is Donna Aldoina?”

Both the brothers hung their heads and did not answer.

They were like each other; in fact, they were twins. Both were tall and thin, and a little bent. They had the same light-coloured eyes, the same small silky beards, the same pale, restless, nervous hands, the hands of hysterical subjects. But in Antonello these marks of weakness and disorder were deeper and more irreparable. He was doomed.

During the pause that followed, I vainly sought for words to express myself. I was in bondage to a kind of melancholy stupor; it seemed as if the whole weight of my weary body had fallen on my soul. The road skirted a line of cliffs, and the horses’ trot as it resounded on the hard ground awoke echoes in the lonely hollows. At a turn of the road the river came in sight in the valley, its innumerable windings shining in the sun. A mass of white ruins was visible, enclosed like an island within one of these curves.

“Is not that Linturno over there?” I asked, as I recognised the dead city.

“Yes, that is Linturno,” replied Oddo. “Do you remember? We once went there together....”

“I remember.”

“What a long time ago it is!”

“What a long time!”

“Now there is not much difference between Linturno and Trigento,” said Antonello, stroking his beard hesitatingly with slender fingers, while his eyes seemed to have lost consciousness of outward things. “You will see to-morrow.”

“You are disheartening him!” interrupted Oddo with some irritation. “He won’t come to-morrow.”

“Yes, yes, I will come,” I assured them, but I had to force myself to smile and shake off my own overpowering melancholy. “I will come, and shall find some way of cheering you up. You seem to me a little ill from loneliness, a little depressed.”

Antonello, who was sitting opposite me, laid his hand on my knee and leant forward to look into my eyes with an indefinable expression of fear and anxiety written in his face, as though he had perceived some terrible meaning in my words, and wished to question me about it. And once more his white face close to my own seemed even in the daylight to belong to a different world, where it existed alone; and brought to my mind those emaciated, spiritual faces that stand out from the mysterious backgrounds of sacred pictures darkened by time and the smoke of candles.

It was only for a moment. He drew back again without speaking.

“I have brought my horses with me,” I added, controlling my agitation; “we shall go for long rides every day. You must take exercise and shake off the idleness and ennui. How do you pass the hours?”

“In counting them,” said Oddo.

“And your sisters?”

“Oh, poor things!” murmured Oddo with tremulous tenderness in his voice. “Massimilla prays; Violante stifles herself with the perfumes sent her by the Queen; Anatolia—Anatolia is the one who keeps us alive, she is our soul, she lives entirely for us.”

“And the prince?”

“He has aged very much; he is quite white now.”

“And Don Ottavio?”

“He hardly ever leaves his rooms. We have almost forgotten the sound of his voice.”

“And Donna Aldoina?” I was just going to ask again, but I restrained myself and was silent.

We were now in the undulating valley of the Saurgo, in a warm hollow. “How early the spring is here!” I exclaimed, with a desire to console these wretched beings and myself as well. “In February the first flowers come out. Is not that in itself a privilege? You do not know how to enjoy the things life offers you. You convert a garden into a prison and torture yourselves within it.”

“Where are the flowers?” asked Antonello with his painful smile.

We all three began to look out for flowers. The ground was tawny and rugged as a lion’s skin; it seemed made to nourish this dry and harassed but in reality fruitful vegetation. “There they are!” I cried with a keen feeling of pleasure, as I pointed out a row of almond trees on a long billowy-looking mound.

“They are on your property,” said Oddo.

We had indeed reached the neighbourhood of Rebursa. The rocky chain of hills with its broken outlines and sharp peaks, and the winding Saurgo lapping at its foot, stretched out on the right, and rose step by step up to the highest summit, Mount Corace, which glittered in the sun like a helmet. To the left of the road the ground sloped away in undulations, like a wide stretch of sandy shore, and further away it rose into brown lumpy hills like the humps of camels in the desert.

“Look! look! There are some more up there!” I cried as I noticed another pale silvery cloud of blossom. “Don’t you see, Antonello?”

He looked less at the almond blossom than at me, a timorous smile of amazement hovering on his lips, wondering perhaps at the childish joy which the sight of the early flowers had awaked in me. “But what fairer welcome could the land beloved of my father have given me? What brighter festal decorations could this hardy country with its backbone of rock have worn?”

“If Anatolia, Violante, and Massimilla were only here!” exclaimed Oddo, who began to share my unexpected enthusiasm. “Ah, if they were only here!” and regret was expressed in his voice.

“We must bring them here among the flowers,” said Antonello softly.

“See what a quantity!” I continued, giving myself up to the novel pleasure with the more confidence that I felt able to transfer some share of it to these poor pent-up souls. “I am glad they belong to me, Oddo.”

“We must bring them here among the flowers,” repeated Antonello softly, as if in a dream.

It seemed to me that his feverish eyes were refreshed by the sight of these pure blossoms, and that in his gentle words they were fused with the vague outlines of his three sisters: “Massimilla prays; Violante stifles herself with perfumes; Anatolia is our life and soul.”

“Stop!” I rose and said to the coachman, for a sudden idea had struck me, and filled me with singular delight. “Let us get out; let us go into the fields. I want you to carry home some branches. It will be a treat for them down there.”

Oddo and Antonello looked at each other with rather a puzzled air, half smiling, half shy, as if the idea were something unforeseen and strange which at once scared them and gave them a delicious sensation. They had shown me their malady, they had revealed to me their sorrow, they had spoken to me of the gloomy prison from which they had come, and were now about to enter again; and here was I, on the high road, asking them to acknowledge and celebrate the feast of spring: of that spring which they had forgotten, and which they appeared to be seeing for the first time after long years, gazing on it with mingled fear and joy as if it were a miracle.

“Let us get out!”

I was tired no longer, for I felt within me the abundance of life, and that exaltation which spontaneous acts of generosity give to the spirit. I was liberal of myself to these two needy souls; I warmed them at my fire, I slaked their thirst with my wine. I read in their eyes (and they were continually looking at me) a kind of submission and faithful surrender. Already they both belonged to me; so I could exert my benevolence and my power over them without fear of failure. “What are you waiting for? Won’t you get out?” I asked Antonello, who was standing with his foot on the step, hesitating as if some danger threatened him.

The contracted smile was still on his face. He was making a visible effort as he put his foot to the ground; he staggered as though he had miscalculated the height, and his first steps were jerky and uncertain. I helped him up the path. As he felt the soft earth sink under his footsteps he paused; and with face turned towards the blossoming trees, he breathed hard, drank in the beautiful sight with his pale eyes, and appeared to be almost dazzled.

I touched his arm and said—

“You didn’t remember these things.”

Oddo, who had already entered the orchard, exclaimed in a kind of intoxication—

“Ah! if Violante were only here! This perfume is worth far more than the essences sent her by Maria Sophia.”

Antonello repeated softly—

“We must bring them here among the flowers.”

It seemed as though the sound of these words had fascinated his ear from the first, like a musical cadence. His voice kept the same inflections as he repeated them. And as I heard the words again I felt strangely disturbed, almost as if he had addressed them to me. Again the desire to cut some of the branches arose within me. It had died out at the sight of so much living beauty. And vaguely I pictured to myself the great gift of spring arriving at the gloomy palace in the twilight.

“Is there no one about?” I asked impatiently. A peasant came running up. Breathlessly he bent his head, and began to kiss my hand passionately.

“Cut some of the finest branches,” I ordered him.

He was a magnificent example of his species, a worthy inhabitant of this rugged flint-strewn land. He seemed to me like a survivor of Deucalion’s ancient race, sprung from the pebbles. He brandished his bill-hook, and with clean, rapid strokes began to mutilate the joyous vegetable creation. Each stroke sent down a shower of loose petals, which lay like snow on the ground.

“Look,” I said to Antonello, showing him a branch; “did you ever see anything so delicate and so fresh?”

He raised his weak, effeminate hand and touched a flower with the tips of his fingers. It was the gesture of the invalid or convalescent, who touches a living thing with the dim notion that the contact will leave some small part of its vitality with him, just as butterflies leave behind the ephemeral dust of their wings. He turned to his brother with almost tender melancholy in his painful smile.

“Do you see, Oddo? We had forgotten, we did not know ...”

“But don’t you live in a garden?” I asked, marvelling at the amazement and emotion caused by a simple branch of almond blossom, as though it were an unheard-of novelty. “Don’t you pass your whole time among leaves and flowers?”

“Yes, that is true,” answered Antonello; “but somehow I had ceased to notice them. Besides, these are, or seem to me, quite different. I can’t explain the impression they make on me. You would not understand.”

The ringing sound of the bill-hook went on, and he turned towards the almond tree, which was trembling under the blows. The man was sitting up in the tree, with the trunk in the grip of his muscular legs, and above his head, which was dark as a mulatto’s, hung the fresh silvery cloud, quivering at the glitter of the hooked steel.

“Tell him to stop,” begged Antonello. “We shall not be able to carry all those branches.”

“The carriage shall take you to Trigento with your burden.”

And I lingered on, picturing the arrival of the springlike gift at the gates of the park where the three sisters were waiting. Their faces came before me indistinctly, yet with some trace of the features associated with memories of childhood and youth. And the desire to see them again, to hear their voices, to recall those memories in their presence, to know their troubles, and to take part in their unknown life, grew stronger and stronger within me, till it began to take the acuteness of anxiety.

Following out my own line of thought and feeling (the carriage had already begun to roll towards Rebursa), I said—

“Long ago the park of Trigento used to be full of jonquils and violets.”

“So it is still,” said Oddo.

“There were great hedges of box.”

“So there are still.”

“I remember so well the year you came back from Monaco. Massimilla was very ill. I used to come over to Trigento nearly every day with my mother ...”

We were immersed in spring. The carriage was crammed with almond blossom; it was piled behind our backs and on our knees. Antonello’s white face looked more wasted than ever in the midst of that fragrant whiteness, and the melancholy of his feverish eyes, contrasted with that living expression of youth eternally renewed, went to my heart.

“What a pity you are not coming to Trigento to-day!” said Oddo, with deep regret in his voice. “I don’t like leaving you.”

“Yes, indeed,” added Antonello. “We have seen you to-day for the first time after years and years of silence and oblivion, and now it seems impossible to do without you.”

They spoke these affectionate words with that simplicity and candour which belong to solitary men, not accustomed to the affectations of ordinary life. I felt already that they cared for me and I for them; that the great gap made by the years was already bridged over; and that their fate was about to be bound up irrevocably with mine. Why did my soul incline so specially towards these two prostrate beings? why did it yearn with such infinite desire over graces and sorrows of which it had only caught a glimpse? why was it so impatient to pour out its riches over this poverty? Was it true, then, that the long and hard discipline I had undergone had not dried up the springs of emotion and imagination, but had made them deeper and more fervent? On that February afternoon, warmed by the breath of early spring, a vapour of poetry rose around me. The babbling flow of the Saurgo at the foot of rocks fashioned by fire; the dead city in the marshy river; the peak of Corace, glittering like a helmet on a threatening brow; the brown fields, strewn with flints full of dormant life; the vines and olives, contorted with the huge effort of producing such rich fruit from such meagre limbs; the whole aspect of the country around was symbolical of the power of thoughts nourished in secret, of the tragic mystery of destinies fulfilled, of painful energy, tyrannical constraint, proud passion, of every harsh and rigid virtue peculiar to lonely scenery or lonely man. And yet the softest of spring airs breathed over the austere land; silver almond blossom crowned the hills, as foam crowns the waves; under the slanting rays the slopes here and there wore the look of soft velvet; the rocky peaks were turned to rosy gold against a sky fading into delicate green. And so the influence of the season and the magic of the hour were able to soften the severe genius of the place, clothe its harshness with tenderness, temper its violence, and throw a gentle enchantment over that rocky basin, fashioned by fire at the terrible bidding of an ancient volcano; afterwards continually invaded and corroded by the greed, or enriched by the liberality, of an ancient river.

“We shall see each other very often,” I said, after a pause, in reply to their kind words. “From Rebursa to Trigento is a short distance; and I know that in you I have found two brothers——”

They both started as a mountain keeper passed us at a gallop, discharging his carbine in the air to give the signal for the salute of welcome and joy. Rebursa rose before me with its four towers of stone, still strong and fair, still bearing intact the impress of its former pride, casting the shadow of its power over a vigorous race, among whom obedience and fidelity were transmitted from father to son as a portion of their inheritance.

But anguish such as I had not felt for long came over my soul as I set foot on the threshold, strewn with myrtle and laurel, where there was no beloved voice to bid me welcome and call me by name. The figures of my dead appeared to me at the foot of the staircase, and fixed their colourless eyes on me without a movement, without a sign, without a smile.

A little later I followed the carriage with my eyes for a long, long way on the road to Trigento, as it bore away the two sad invalids, nearly buried under flowers. And my soul was there before them at the park gates, where the three sisters were waiting—Anatolia, Violante, Massimilla!—and I caught a glimpse of them as they received the fresh gift of spring in their outstretched arms; and I tried to recognise their noble faces through the fragrant thicket, and to discern the brow of her whom my soul would have elected for the desired union. The gathering twilight heightened this strange and sudden agitation caused by the desire for love. Blue shadows filled the valley of the Saurgo, hid the dead city, crept slowly up the steep terraces of rock; and when stars began to twinkle in the sky, down below festal bonfires were lit; they flared up, multiplied, formed large wreaths. Lonely and lofty, far apart from these signs of life below, the pinnacles of rock still shone, withdrawn almost into the remoteness of a myth, into the sphere of a supernatural atmosphere. And all of a sudden they blazed like fireworks with an extraordinary light, which only lasted a few moments; then they grew paler, turned violet, faded away, and went out. The lofty peak of Corace was the last to remain aflame; its point clove the sky sharply, like the cry of hopeless passion; then, with the rapidity of a lightning flash, it faded away also, and entered the universal night.

“If the severity of thy discipline should have no other reward than the divine emotion that has overwhelmed thee since yesterday, thou mightest still rejoice over the result of thy efforts,” said the dæmon to me, as we rode slowly towards the walled garden. “Now at last thou hast reached maturity! Until yesterday thou knewest not what a degree of maturity and completeness thy soul had attained. The happy revelation comes to thee from the desire thou hast suddenly felt to pour out thy riches, to spread them, to spend them without stint. Thou dost feel thyself inexhaustible, capable of nourishing a thousand lives. This is indeed the prize of thy diligent efforts; thou possessest now the ready fertility of deeply cultivated land. Therefore enjoy thy spring; leave thyself open to all influences; welcome the unknown and unforeseen, and anything else that fate may bring thee; abolish all prohibitions. The first part of thy task is completed. Thou hast given integrity and intensity to thy nature; let it now be sacred to thee. Respect the slightest motions of thy thought and sentiment, because thy nature alone produces them. Since this nature is entirely thy own, thou mayest yield to it and enjoy it without limits. From henceforth everything is permitted to thee, even that which thou didst hate and despise in others, because everything becomes ennobled after passing through the ordeal of fire. Fear not to be merciful, thou who art strong and able to dominate and chastise. Be not ashamed of thy perplexity and thy languor, thou who hast made thyself a will tempered as hard as beaten swords. Repel not the tenderness which overwhelms thee, the illusion which enfolds thee, the melancholy which attracts thee, all the new indefinable feelings which now approach thy astonished soul. They are but the dim shapes of vapour which escape from the life fermenting in the depths of thy fertile nature. Therefore welcome them without suspicion, for they are not foreign to thee, nor will they diminish or corrupt thy nature. Perhaps on the morrow they will appear to thee as heralds of that new birth which is thy desire.”

Never since then have I passed an hour at once so delicious and so painful. I know not if the trees laden with blossom had as keen a sense of their vital power as I had of mine on that clear morning; but they certainly could not feel my vast bewildering perplexity, innumerable feelings, and innumerable thoughts. In order to prolong both pain and delight, I kept my horse at a walk, and lingered on the way, as if that hour were to close for ever a phase of my intimate life, and on my arrival at the fated spot a new and unforeseen phase were to open, the dim presentiment of which was to be found in my increasing uneasiness. From time to time the breath of spring, with its whispering warmth around me, seemed to waft me up into an ether of dreams, to efface in me for a few seconds the consciousness of real personality, and to breathe into me the virgin ardent soul of one of those hero lovers in fairy tales who ride to find Sleeping Beauties in the Wood. Was not I riding towards the maiden princesses imprisoned in a walled garden? And was not each one of them perhaps in her secret heart expecting the Bridegroom?

Already they appeared before me as pictured by my desire, and already my desire met its first perplexity in the triple image. I asked myself: “Which will be the chosen one?” for within my soul I felt at the same moment the nuptial joy of the one, and the sepulchral sadness of the other two; I felt all the germs of future trouble, and already perceived regret hidden under hope. And again that fear crossed my spirit which once before had disturbed me in the midst of my voluntary discipline: the fear of those blind forces of fate against which the strongest will may struggle in vain; the fear of that sudden whirlwind which in a second may seize the boldest and most tenacious of men, and carry him far away from the promised goal.