Wisdom, Wit, and Pathos of Ouida Part 39

"G.o.d!" he muttered; "how strange it seems that people are there who never once knew what it was to want bread, and to find it nowhere, though the lands all teemed with harvest! They never feel hungry, or cold, or hot, or tired, or thirsty: they never feel their bones ache, and their throat parch, and their entrails gnaw! These people ought not to get to heaven--they have it on earth!"

Tricotrin heard at last: he turned his head and looked down on the old man's careworn, hollow face.

"'Verily they have their reward,' you mean? Nay, that is a cruel religion, which would excruciate hereafter those who enjoy now. Judge them not; in their laurel crowns there is full often twisted a serpent.

The hunger of the body is bad indeed, but the hunger of the mind is worse perhaps; and from that they suffer, because from every fulfilled desire springs the pain of a fresh satiety."

The truffle-hunter, wise in his peasant-fas.h.i.+on, gazed wistfully up at the face above him, half comprehending the answer.

"It may be so," he murmured; "but then--they _have_ enjoyed! Ah, Christ!

that is what I envy them. Now we--we die, starved amidst abundance; we see the years go, and the sun never s.h.i.+nes once in them; and all we have is a hope--a hope that may be cheated at last; for none have come back from the grave to tell us whether _that_ fools us as well."

"I incline to think you live twenty centuries too late, or--twenty centuries too early."

Viva turned on him a swift and eager glance.

"Of course!" she said, with a certain emotion, whose meaning he could not a.n.a.lyse. "Was there ever yet a man of genius who was not either the relic of some great dead age, or the precursor of some n.o.ble future one, in which he alone has faith?"

"Chut!" said Tricotrin, rapidly; he could not trust himself to hear her speak in his own defence. "Fine genius mine! To fiddle to a few villagers, and dash colour on an alehouse shutter! I have the genius of indolence, if you like. As to my belonging to a bygone age,--well! I am not sure that I have not got the soul in me of some barefooted friar of Moyen Age, who went about where he listed, praying here, laughing there, painting a missal with a Pagan love-G.o.d, and saying a verse of Horace instead of a chant of the Church. Or, maybe, I am more like some Greek gossiper, who loitered away his days in the sun, and ate his dates in the market-place, and listened here and there to a philosopher, and--just by taking no thought--hit on a truer philosophy than ever came out of Porch or Garden. Ah, my Lord of Estmere! you have two hundred servants over there at Villiers, I have been told; do you not think I am better served here by one little, brown-eyed, brown-cheeked maiden, who sings her Beranger like a lark, while she brings me her dish of wild strawberries? There is fame too for you--his--the King of the Chansons! When a girl washes her linen in the brook--when a herdsman drives his flock through the lanes--when a boy throws his line in a fis.h.i.+ng-stream--when a grisette sits and works at her attic lattice--when a student dreams under the linden leaves--he is on their lips, in their hearts, in their fancies and joys. What a power! What a dominion! Wider than any that emperors boast!"

"And," added Estmere, with a smile, "if you were not Tricotrin you would be Beranger?"

"Aye! Hymns forbad at noonday are ever so sung at night; and oftentimes, what at noon would have been a lark's chant of liberty, grows at night to a vampire's screech for blood!" he murmured. "They are gay at your chateau up yonder."

Be not a coward who leaves the near duty that is as cruel to grasp as a nettle, and flies to gather the far-off duty that will flaunt in men's sight like a sun-flower.

"A great Character!" says Society, when it means--"a great Scamp!"

Estmere laid the panel down as he heard.

"Whoever painted it must have genius."

"Genius!" interrupted Tricotrin. "Pooh! What is genius? Only the power to see a little deeper and a little clearer than most other people. That is all."

"The power of vision? Of course. But that renders it none the less rare."

"Oh yes, it is rare--rare like kingfishers, and sandpipers, and herons, and black eagles. And so men always shoot it down, as they do the birds, and stick up the dead body in gla.s.s cases, and label it, and stare at it, and bemoan it as 'so singular,' having done their best to insure its extinction!"

Estmere looked keenly at him.

"Surely genius that secretes itself as your friend's must do," he said, touching the panel afresh, "commits suicide, and desires its own extinction."

"Pshaw!" said Tricotrin, impatiently, and with none of his habitual courtesy. "You think the kingfisher and the black eagle have no better thing to live for than to become the decorations of a great personage's gla.s.s cabinets. You think genius can find no higher end than to furnish frescoes and panellings for a n.o.bleman's halls and ante-chambers. You mistake very much; the mistake is a general one in your order. But believe me, the kingfisher enjoys his brown moorland stream, and his tufts of green rushes, and his water-swept bough of hawthorn; the eagle enjoys his wild rocks, and his sweep through the air, and his steady gaze at the sun that blinds all human eyes;--and neither ever imagine that the great men below pity them because they are not stuffed, and labelled, and praised by rule in their palaces! And genius is much of the birds' fas.h.i.+on of thinking. It lives its own life; and is not, as your connoisseurs are given to fancy, wretched unless you see fit in your graciousness to deem it worth the gla.s.s-case of your criticism, and the straw-stuffing of your gold. For it knows, as kingfisher and eagle knew also, that stuffed birds nevermore use their wings, and are evermore subject to be bought and be sold."

Against the foreign foes of your country die in your youth if she need it. But against her internecine enemies live out your life in continual warfare. When I tell you this, do you dream that I spare you?

Children!--you have yet to learn what life is! Who could think it hard to die in the glory of strife, drunk with the sound of the combat, and feeling no pain in the swoon of a triumph? Few men whose blood was hot and young would ask a greater ending. But to keep your souls in patience; to strive unceasingly with evil; to live in self-negation, in ceaseless sacrifices of desire; to give strength to the weak, and sight to the blind, and light where there is darkness, and hope where there is bondage; to do all these through many years unrecognised of men, content only that they are done with such force as lies within you,--this is harder than to seek the cannons' mouths, this is more bitter than to rush, with drawn steel, on your tyrants.

Your women cry out against you because you leave them to starve and to weep while you give your hearts to revolution and your bodies to the sword. Their cry is the cry of selfishness, of weakness, of narrowness, the cry of the s.e.x that sees no sun save the flame on its hearth: yet there is truth in it--a truth you forget. The truth--that, forsaking the gold-mine of duty which lies at your feet, you grasp at the rainbow of glory; that, neglectful of your own secret sins, you fly at public woes and at national crimes. Can you not see that if every man took heed of the guilt of his own thoughts and acts, the world would be free and at peace? It is easier to rise with the knife unsheathed than to keep watch and ward over your own pa.s.sions; but do not cheat yourself into believing that it is n.o.bler, and higher, and harder. What reproach is cast against all revolutionists?--that the men who have nothing to lose, the men who are reckless and outlawed, alone raise the flag of revolt.

It is a satire; but in every satire there lies the germ of a terrible fact.

You--you who are children still, you whose manhood is still a gold scarcely touched in your hands, a gold you can spend in all great ways, or squander for all base uses;--you can give the lie to that public reproach, if only you will live in such wise that your hands shall be clean, and your paths straight, and your honour unsullied through all temptations. Wait, and live so that the right to judge, to rebuke, to avenge, to purify, become yours through your earning of them. Live n.o.bly, first; and then teach others how to live.

"So you have brought Fame to Lelis, my English lord?" said Tricotrin, without ceremony. "That was a good work of yours. She is a comet that has a strange fancy only to come forth like a corpse-candle, and dance over men's graves. It is her way. When men will have her out in the noon of their youth, she kills them; and the painter's bier is set under his Transfiguration, and the soldier's body is chained to the St. Helena rock, and the poet's grave is made at Missolonghi. It is always so."

Estmere bowed his head in a.s.sent; he was endeavouring to remember where he had once met this stranger who thus addressed him--where he had once heard these mellow, ringing, harmonious accents.

"Was it because you were afraid of dying in your prime that you would never woo Fame then yourself?" asked Lelis, with a smile.

"Oh-he!" answered Tricotrin, seating himself on a deal box that served as a table, and whereat he and the artist had eaten many a meal of roast chestnuts and black coffee; "I never wanted her; she is a weather vane, never still two moments; she is a spaniel that quits the Plantagenet the moment the battle goes against him, and fawns on Bolingbroke; she is an alchemist's crucible, that has every fair and rich thing thrown into it, but will only yield in return the calcined stones of chagrin and disappointment; she is a harlot, whose kisses are to be bought, and who runs after those who brawl the loudest and swagger the finest in the world's market-places. No! I want nothing of her. My lord here condemned her as I came in; he said she was the offspring of echoing parrots, of imitative sheep, of fawning hounds. Who can want the creature of such progenitors?"

"There are many kinds of appreciation. The man of science appreciates when he marvels before the exquisite structure of the sea-sh.e.l.l, the perfect organism of the flower; but the young girl appreciates, too, when she holds the sh.e.l.l to her ear for its music, when she kisses the flower for its fragrance. Appreciation! It is an affair of the reason, indeed; but it is an affair of the emotions also."

"And you prefer what is born of the latter?"

"Not always; but for my music I do. It speaks in an unknown tongue.

Science may have its alphabet, but it is feeling that translates its poems. Delaroche, who leaves off his work to listen; Descamps, in whose eyes I see tears; Ingres, who dreams idyls while I play; a young poet whose face reflects my thoughts, an old man whose youth I bring back, an hour of pain that I soothe, an hour of laughter that I give; these are my recompense. Think you I would exchange them for the gold showers and the diamond boxes of a Farinelli?"

"Surely not. All I meant was that you might gain a world-wide celebrity did you choose----"

"Gain a honey-coating that every fly may eat me and every gnat may sting? I thank you. I have a taste to be at peace, and not to become food to sate the public famine for a thing to tear."

Estmere smiled; he did not understand the man who thus addressed him, but he was attracted despite all his strongest prejudices.

"You are right! Under the coat of honey is a s.h.i.+rt of turpentine.

Still--to see so great a gift as yours wasted----"

"Wasted? Because the mult.i.tudes have it, such as it is, instead of the units? Droll arithmetic! I am with you in thinking that minorities should have a good share of power, for all that is wisest and purest is ever in a minority, as we know; but I do not see, as you see, that minorities should command a monopoly--of sweet sounds or of anything else."

"I speak to the musician, not to the politician," said Estmere, with the calm, chill contempt of his colder manner: the cold side of his character was touched, and his sympathies were alienated at once.

Tricotrin, indifferent to the hint as to the rebuff, looked at him amusedly.

"Oh, I know you well, Lord Estmere; I told you so not long ago, to your great disgust. You and your Order think no man should ever presume to touch politics unless his coat be velvet and his rent-roll large, like yours. But, you see, we of the _ecole buissonniere_ generally do as we like; and we get pecking at public questions for the same reason as our brother birds peck at the hips and the haws--because we have no granaries as you have. You do not like Socialism? Ah! and yet affect to follow it."