Wisdom, Wit, and Pathos of Ouida Part 2

We are the sons of our Time: it is not for us to slay our mother. Let us cover her dishonour if we see it, lest we should provoke the Erinyes.

How one loves Canova the man, and how one execrates Canova the artist!

Surely never was a great repute achieved by so false a talent and so perfect a character. One would think he had been born and bred in Versailles instead of Treviso. He is called a naturalist! Look at his Graces! He is always Coysevax and Coustou at heart. Never purely cla.s.sic, never frankly modern. Louis XIV. would have loved him better than Bernini.

If Alexander had believed himself a bubble of gas instead of the son of a G.o.d, he would not have changed the face of the world. Negation cannot be the parent of heroism, though it will produce an indifference that counterfeits it not ill, since Petronius died quite as serenely as ever did the martyrs of the Church.

Genius cannot escape the taint of its time more than a child the influence of its begetting. Augustus could have Horace and Ovid; he could never have had Homer and Milton.

I do not think with you. Talent takes the mark of its generation; genius stamps its time with its own impression. Virgil had the sentiment of an united Italy.

Tell her that past she thinks so great was only very like the Serapis which men wors.h.i.+pped so many ages in Theophilis, and which, when the soldiers struck it down at last, proved itself only a hollow Colossus with a colony of rats in its head that scampered right and left.

Falconet struck the death-note of the plastic arts when he said, "Our marbles have _almost_ colour." That is just where we err. We are incessantly striving to make Sculpture at once a romance-writer and a painter, and of course she loses all dignity and does but seem the jay in borrowed plumes of sable. Conceits are altogether out of keeping with marble. They suit a cabinet painting or a piece of china. Bernini was the first to show the disease when he veiled the head of his Nile to indicate that the source was unknown.

Whosoever has any sort of fame has lighted a beacon that is always s.h.i.+ning upon him, and can never more return into the cool twilight of privacy even when most he wishes. It is of these retributions--some call them compensations--of which life is full.

Men have forgotten the virile Pyrrhic dance, and have become incapable of the grace of the Ionian; their only dance is a Danse Macabre, and they are always hand in hand with a skeleton.

By night Rome is still a city for the G.o.ds; the shadows veil its wounds, the l.u.s.tre silvers all its stones; its silence is haunted as no other silence is; if you have faith, there where the dark gloss of the laurel brushes the marble as in Agrippa's time, you will see the Immortals pa.s.sing by chained with dead leaves and weeping.

A great love is an absolute isolation and an absolute absorption.

Nothing lives or moves or breathes save one life; for one life alone the sun rises and sets, the seasons revolve, the clouds bear rain, and the stars ride on high; the mult.i.tudes around cease to exist, or seem but ghostly shades; of all the sounds of earth there is but one voice audible; all past ages have been but the herald of one soul; all eternity can be but its heritage alone.

Perhaps she was right: for a few hours of joy one owes the debt of years, and should give a pardon wide and deep as the deep sea.

This Love which she had made in his likeness, the tyrant and compeller of the world, was to her as the angel which brings perfect dreams and lets the tired sleeper visit heaven.

"And when the s.h.i.+p sails away without you?" I said brutally, and laughing still, because the mention of the schooner had broken the bonds of the silence that had held me against my will half paralysed, and I seemed to be again upon the Tyrrhene sh.o.r.e, seeing the white sail fade against the sky.

"And when that s.h.i.+p sails without you? The day will come. It always comes. You are my Ariadne; yet you forget Naxos! Oh, the day will come!

you will kiss the feet of your idol then, and they will not stay; they will go away, away, away, and they will not tarry for your prayers or your tears--ay, it is always so. Two love, and one tires. And you know nothing of that; you who would have love immortal."

And I laughed again, for it seemed to me so horrible, and I was half mad.

No doubt it would have been kinder had I struck my knife down into her breast with her words unspoken.

All shade of colour forsook her face; only the soft azure of the veins remained, and changed to an ashen grey. She shook with a sudden s.h.i.+ver from head to foot as the name she hated, the name of Ariadne, fell upon her ear. The icebolt had fallen in her paradise. A scared and terrible fear dilated her eyes, that opened wide in the amaze of some suddenly stricken creature.

"And when he leaves you?" I said, with cruel iteration. "Do you remember what you told me once of the woman by the marshes by the sea, who had nothing left by which to remember love save wounds that never healed?

That is all his love will leave you by-and-by."

"Ah, never!"

She spoke rather to herself than me. The terror was fading out of her eyes, the blood returning to her face; she was in the sweet bewildered trance of that blind faith which goes wherever it is led, and never asks the end nor dreads the fate. Her love was deathless: how could she know that his was mortal?

"You are cruel," she said, with her mouth quivering, but the old, soft, grand courage in her eyes. "We are together for ever; he has said so.

But even if--if--I only remembered him by wounds, what would that change in me? He would _have_ loved me. If he would wish to wound me, so he should. I am his own as the dogs are. Think!--he looked at me, and all the world grew beautiful; he touched me, and I was happy--I, who never had been happy in my life. You look at me strangely; you speak harshly.

Why? I used to think, surely you would be glad----"

I gripped my knife and cursed him in my soul.

How could one say to her the thing that he had made her in man's and woman's sight?

"I thought you would be glad," she said, wistfully, "and I would have told you long ago--myself. I do not know why you should look so. Perhaps you are angered because I seemed ungrateful to you and Maryx. Perhaps I was so. I have no thought--only of him. What he wished, that I did. Even Rome itself was for me nothing, and the G.o.ds--there is only one for me; and he is with me always. And I think the serpents and the apes are gone for ever from the tree, and he only hears the nightingales--now. He tells me so often. Very often. Do you remember I used to dream of greatness for myself--ah, what does it matter! I want nothing now. When he looks at me--the G.o.ds themselves could give me nothing more."

And the sweet tranquil radiance came back into her eyes, and her thoughts wandered into the memories of this perfect pa.s.sion which possessed her, and she forgot that I was there.

My throat was choking; my eyes felt blind; my tongue clove to my mouth.

I, who knew what that end would be as surely as I knew the day then s.h.i.+ning would sink into the earth, I was dumb, like a brute beast--I, who had gone to take his life.

Before this love which knew nothing of the laws of mankind, how poor and trite and trivial looked those laws! What could I dare to say to her of shame? Ah! if it had only been for any other's sake! But he,--perhaps he did not lie to her; perhaps he did only hear the nightingales with her beside him; but how soon their song would pall upon his ear, how soon would he sigh for the poisonous kiss of the serpents! I knew! I knew!

I stood heart-broken in the warm light that was falling through the cas.e.m.e.nt and streaming towards her face. What could I say to her? Men harder and sterner and surer in every way of their own judgment than I was of mine no doubt would have shaken her with harsh hands from that dream in which she had wandered to her own destruction.

No doubt a sterner moralist than I would have had no pity, and would have hurled on her all the weight of those bitter truths of which she was so ignorant; would have shown her that pit of earthly scorn upon whose brink she stood; would have torn down all that perfect, credulous faith of hers, which could have no longer life nor any more lasting root than the flowering creeper born of a summer's sun, and gorgeous as the sunset's hues, and clinging about a ruin-mantling decay. Oh yes, no doubt. But I am only weak, and of little wisdom, and never certain that the laws and ways of the world are just, and never capable of long giving pain to any harmless creature, least of all to her.

She seemed to rouse herself with effort to remember I was there, and turned on me her eyes that were suffused and dreamful with happiness, like a young child's with sleep.

"I must have seemed so thankless to you: you were so very good to me,"

she said, with that serious sweetness of her rare smile that I had used to watch for, as an old dog watches for his young owner's--an old dog that is used to be forgotten, but does not himself forget, though he is old. "I must have seemed so thankless; but he bade me be silent, and I have no law but him. After that night when we walked in Nero's fields, and I went home and learned he loved me;--do you not see I forgot that there was any one in all the world except himself and me? It must always be so--at least, so I think. Oh, how true that poem was! Do you remember how he read it that night after Mozart amongst the roses by the fire? What use was endless life and all the lore of the spirits and seers to Sospitra? I was like Sospitra, till he came; always thinking of the stars and the heavens in the desert all alone, and always wis.h.i.+ng for life eternal, when it is only life _together_ that is worth a wish or a prayer. But why do you look at me so? Perhaps you do not understand. Perhaps I am selfish."

This was all that it seemed to her--that I did not understand. Could she see the tears of blood that welled up in my eyes? Could she see the blank despair that blinded my sight? Could she see the frozen hand that I felt clutching at my heart and benumbing it? I did not understand; that was all that it seemed to her.