CHAPTER 1.I.
Vergina era
D' alta belta, ma sua belta non cura:
. . . .
Di natura, d' amor, de' cieli amici
Le negligenze sue sono artifici.
“Gerusal. Lib. , ” canto ii. xiv. -xviii.
(She was a virgin of a glorious beauty, but regarded
not her
beauty. . . Negligence itself is art in those
favoured by Nature, by
love, and by the heavens. )
At Naples, in the latter half of the last century, a
worthy artist named Gaetano Pisani lived and flourished. He was a
musician of great genius, but not of popular reputation; there was
in all his compositions something capricious and fantastic which
did not please the taste of the Dilettanti of Naples. He was fond
of unfamiliar subjects into which he introduced airs and symphonies
that excited a kind of terror in those who listened. The names of
his pieces will probably suggest their nature. I find, for
instance, among his MSS. , these titles: “The Feast of the Harpies,
” “The Witches at Benevento, ” “The Descent of Orpheus into Hades,
” “The Evil Eye, ” “The Eumenides, ” and many others that evince a
powerful imagination delighting in the fearful and supernatural,
but often relieved by an airy and delicate fancy with passages of
exquisite grace and beauty. It is true that in the selection of his
subjects from ancient fable, Gaetano Pisani was much more faithful
than his contemporaries to the remote origin and the early genius
of Italian Opera.
That descendant, however effeminate, of the ancient
union between Song and Drama, when, after long obscurity and
dethronement, it regained a punier sceptre, though a gaudier
purple, by the banks of the Etrurian Arno, or amidst the lagunes of
Venice, had chosen all its primary inspirations from the unfamiliar
and classic sources of heathen legend; and Pisani's “Descent of
Orpheus” was but a bolder, darker, and more scientific repetition
of the “Euridice” which Jacopi Peri set to music at the august
nuptials of Henry of Navarre and Mary of Medicis. * Still, as I
have said, the style of the Neapolitan musician was not on the
whole pleasing to ears grown nice and euphuistic in the more dulcet
melodies of the day; and faults and extravagances easily
discernible, and often to appearance wilful, served the critics for
an excuse for their distaste. Fortunately, or the poor musician
might have starved, he was not only a composer, but also an
excellent practical performer, especially on the violin, and by
that instrument he earned a decent subsistence as one of the
orchestra at the Great Theatre of San Carlo. Here formal and
appointed tasks necessarily kept his eccentric fancies in tolerable
check, though it is recorded that no less than five times he had
been deposed from his desk for having shocked the conoscenti, and
thrown the whole band into confusion, by impromptu variations of so
frantic and startling a nature that one might well have imagined
that the harpies or witches who inspired his compositions had
clawed hold of his instrument.
The impossibility, however, to find any one of equal
excellence as a performer (that is to say, in his more lucid and
orderly moments) had forced his reinstalment, and he had now, for
the most part, reconciled himself to the narrow sphere of his
appointed adagios or allegros. The audience, too, aware of his
propensity, were quick to perceive the least deviation from the
text; and if he wandered for a moment, which might also be detected
by the eye as well as the ear, in some strange contortion of
visage, and some ominous flourish of his bow, a gentle and
admonitory murmur recalled the musician from his Elysium or his
Tartarus to the sober regions of his desk. Then he would start as
if from a dream, cast a hurried, frightened, apologetic glance
around, and, with a crestfallen, humbled air, draw his rebellious
instrument back to the beaten track of the glib monotony. But at
home he would make himself amends for this reluctant drudgery. And
there, grasping the unhappy violin with ferocious fingers, he would
pour forth, often till the morning rose, strange, wild measures
that would startle the early fisherman on the shore below with a
superstitious awe, and make him cross himself as if mermaid or
sprite had wailed no earthly music in his ear.
(*Orpheus was the favourite hero of early Italian
Opera, or
Lyrical Drama. The Orfeo of Angelo Politiano was
produced in
1475. The Orfeo of Monteverde was performed at
Venice in
1667. )
This man's appearance was in keeping with the
characteristics of his art. The features were noble and striking,
but worn and haggard, with black, careless locks tangled into a
maze of curls, and a fixed, speculative, dreamy stare in his large
and hollow eyes. All his movements were peculiar, sudden, and
abrupt, as the impulse seized him; and in gliding through the
streets, or along the beach, he was heard laughing and talking to
himself. Withal, he was a harmless, guileless, gentle creature, and
would share his mite with any idle lazzaroni, whom he often paused
to contemplate as they lay lazily basking in the sun. Yet was he
thoroughly unsocial. He formed no friends, flattered no patrons,
resorted to none of the merry-makings so dear to the children of
music and the South. He and his art seemed alone suited to each
other, — both quaint, primitive, unworldly, irregular. You could
not separate the man from his music; it was himself. Without it he
was nothing, a mere machine! WITH it, he was king over worlds of
his own. Poor man, he had little enough in this! At a manufacturing
town in England there is a gravestone on which the epitaph records
“one Claudius Phillips, whose absolute contempt for riches, and
inimitable performance on the violin, made him the admiration of
all that knew him! ” Logical conjunction of opposite eulogies! In
proportion, O Genius, to thy contempt for riches will be thy
performance on thy violin!
Gaetano Pisani's talents as a composer had been
chiefly exhibited in music appropriate to this his favourite
instrument, of all unquestionably the most various and royal in its
resources and power over the passions. As Shakespeare among poets
is the Cremona among instruments. Nevertheless, he had composed
other pieces of larger ambition and wider accomplishment, and chief
of these, his precious, his unpurchased, his unpublished, his
unpublishable and imperishable opera of the “Siren. ” This great
work had been the dream of his boyhood, the mistress of his
manhood; in advancing age “it stood beside him like his youth. ”
Vainly had he struggled to place it before the world. Even bland,
unjealous Paisiello, Maestro di Capella, shook his gentle head when
the musician favoured him with a specimen of one of his most
thrilling scenas. And yet, Paisiello, though that music differs
from all Durante taught thee to emulate, there may— but patience,
Gaetano Pisani! bide thy time, and keep thy violin in tune!
Strange as it may appear to the fairer reader, this
grotesque personage had yet formed those ties which ordinary
mortals are apt to consider their especial monopoly, — he was
married, and had one child. What is more strange yet, his wife was
a daughter of quiet, sober, unfantastic England: she was much
younger than himself; she was fair and gentle, with a sweet English
face; she had married him from choice, and (will you believe it? )
she yet loved him. How she came to marry him, or how this shy,
unsocial, wayward creature ever ventured to propose, I can only
explain by asking you to look round and explain first to ME how
half the husbands and half the wives you meet ever found a mate!
Yet, on reflection, this union was not so extraordinary after all.
The girl was a natural child of parents too noble ever to own and
claim her. She was brought into Italy to learn the art by which she
was to live, for she had taste and voice; she was a dependant and
harshly treated, and poor Pisani was her master, and his voice the
only one she had heard from her cradle that seemed without one tone
that could scorn or chide. And so— well, is the rest natural?
Natural or not, they married. This young wife loved her husband;
and young and gentle as she was, she might almost be said to be the
protector of the two. From how many disgraces with the despots of
San Carlo and the Conservatorio had her unknown officious mediation
saved him! In how many ailments— for his frame was weak— had she
nursed and tended him! Often, in the dark nights, she would wait at
the theatre with her lantern to light him and her steady arm to
lean on; otherwise, in his abstract reveries, who knows but the
musician would have walked after his “Siren” into the sea! And then
she would so patiently, perhaps (for in true love there is not
always the finest taste) so DELIGHTEDLY, listen to those storms of
eccentric and fitful melody, and steal him— whispering praises all
the way— from the unwholesome night-watch to rest and sleep!
I said his music was a part of the man, and this
gentle creature seemed a part of the music; it was, in fact, when
she sat beside him that whatever was tender or fairy-like in his
motley fantasia crept into the harmony as by stealth. Doubtless her
presence acted on the music, and shaped and softened it; but, he,
who never examined how or what his inspiration, knew it not. All
that he knew was, that he loved and blessed her. He fancied he told
her so twenty times a day; but he never did, for he was not of many
words, even to his wife. His language was his music, — as hers, her
cares! He was more communicative to his barbiton, as the learned
Mersennus teaches us to call all the varieties of the great viol
family. Certainly barbiton sounds better than fiddle; and barbiton
let it be. He would talk to THAT by the hour together, — praise it,
scold it, coax it, nay (for such is man, even the most guileless),
he had been known to swear at it; but for that excess he was always
penitentially remorseful. And the barbiton had a tongue of his own,
could take his own part, and when HE also scolded, had much the
best of it. He was a noble fellow, this Violin! — a Tyrolese, the
handiwork of the illustrious Steiner. There was something
mysterious in his great age. How many hands, now dust, had awakened
his strings ere he became the Robin Goodfellow and Familiar of
Gaetano Pisani! His very case was venerable, — beautifully painted,
it was said, by Caracci. An English collector had offered more for
the case than Pisani had ever made by the violin. But Pisani, who
cared not if he had inhabited a cabin himself, was proud of a
palace for the barbiton. His barbiton, it was his elder child! He
had another child, and now we must turn to her.
How shall I describe thee, Viola? Certainly the
music had something to answer for in the advent of that young
stranger. For both in her form and her character you might have
traced a family likeness to that singular and spirit-like life of
sound which night after night threw itself in airy and goblin sport
over the starry seas. . . Beautiful she was, but of a very uncommon
beauty, — a combination, a harmony of opposite attributes. Her hair
of a gold richer and purer than that which is seen even in the
North; but the eyes, of all the dark, tender, subduing light of
more than Italian— almost of Oriental— splendour. The complexion
exquisitely fair, but never the same, — vivid in one moment, pale
the next. And with the complexion, the expression also varied;
nothing now so sad, and nothing now so joyous.
I grieve to say that what we rightly entitle
education was much neglected for their daughter by this singular
pair. To be sure, neither of them had much knowledge to bestow; and
knowledge was not then the fashion, as it is now. But accident or
nature favoured young Viola. She learned, as of course, her
mother's language with her father's. And she contrived soon to read
and to write; and her mother, who, by the way, was a Roman
Catholic, taught her betimes to pray. But then, to counteract all
these acquisitions, the strange habits of Pisani, and the incessant
watch and care which he required from his wife, often left the
child alone with an old nurse, who, to be sure, loved her dearly,
but who was in no way calculated to instruct her.
Dame Gionetta was every inch Italian and Neapolitan.
Her youth had been all love, and her age was all superstition. She
was garrulous, fond, — a gossip. Now she would prattle to the girl
of cavaliers and princes at her feet, and now she would freeze her
blood with tales and legends, perhaps as old as Greek or Etrurian
fable, of demon and vampire, — of the dances round the great
walnut-tree at Benevento, and the haunting spell of the Evil Eye.
All this helped silently to weave charmed webs over Viola's
imagination that afterthought and later years might labour vainly
to dispel. And all this especially fitted her to hang, with a
fearful joy, upon her father's music. Those visionary strains, ever
struggling to translate into wild and broken sounds the language of
unearthly beings, breathed around her from her birth. Thus you
might have said that her whole mind was full of music;
associations, memories, sensations of pleasure or pain, — all were
mixed up inexplicably with those sounds that now delighted and now
terrified; that greeted her when her eyes opened to the sun, and
woke her trembling on her lonely couch in the darkness of the
night. The legends and tales of Gionetta only served to make the
child better understand the signification of those mysterious
tones; they furnished her with words to the music. It was natural
that the daughter of such a parent should soon evince some taste in
his art. But this developed itself chiefly in the ear and the
voice. She was yet a child when she sang divinely. A great
Cardinal— great alike in the State and the Conservatorio— heard of
her gifts, and sent for her. From that moment her fate was decided:
she was to be the future glory of Naples, the prima donna of San
Carlo.
The Cardinal insisted upon the accomplishment of his
own predictions, and provided her with the most renowned masters.
To inspire her with emulation, his Eminence took her one evening to
his own box: it would be something to see the performance,
something more to hear the applause lavished upon the glittering
signoras she was hereafter to excel! Oh, how gloriously that life
of the stage, that fairy world of music and song, dawned upon her!
It was the only world that seemed to correspond with her strange
childish thoughts. It appeared to her as if, cast hitherto on a
foreign shore, she was brought at last to see the forms and hear
the language of her native land. Beautiful and true enthusiasm,
rich with the promise of genius! Boy or man, thou wilt never be a
poet, if thou hast not felt the ideal, the romance, the Calypso's
isle that opened to thee when for the first time the magic curtain
was drawn aside, and let in the world of poetry on the world of
prose!
And now the initiation was begun. She was to read,
to study, to depict by a gesture, a look, the passions she was to
delineate on the boards; lessons dangerous, in truth, to some, but
not to the pure enthusiasm that comes from art; for the mind that
rightly conceives art is but a mirror which gives back what is cast
on its surface faithfully only— while unsullied. She seized on
nature and truth intuitively. Her recitations became full of
unconscious power; her voice moved the heart to tears, or warmed it
into generous rage. But this arose from that sympathy which genius
ever has, even in its earliest innocence, with whatever feels, or
aspires, or suffers.
It was no premature woman comprehending the love or
the jealousy that the words expressed; her art was one of those
strange secrets which the psychologists may unriddle to us if they
please, and tell us why children of the simplest minds and the
purest hearts are often so acute to distinguish, in the tales you
tell them, or the songs you sing, the difference between the true
art and the false, passion and jargon, Homer and Racine, — echoing
back, from hearts that have not yet felt what they repeat, the
melodious accents of the natural pathos. Apart from her studies,
Viola was a simple, affectionate, but somewhat wayward child, —
wayward, not in temper, for that was sweet and docile; but in her
moods, which, as I before hinted, changed from sad to gay and gay
to sad without an apparent cause. If cause there were, it must be
traced to the early and mysterious influences I have referred to,
when seeking to explain the effect produced on her imagination by
those restless streams of sound that constantly played around it;
for it is noticeable that to those who are much alive to the
effects of music, airs and tunes often come back, in the commonest
pursuits of life, to vex, as it were, and haunt them. The music,
once admitted to the soul, becomes also a sort of spirit, and never
dies. It wanders perturbedly through the halls and galleries of the
memory, and is often heard again, distinct and living as when it
first displaced the wavelets of the air. Now at times, then, these
phantoms of sound floated back upon her fancy; if gay, to call a
smile from every dimple; if mournful, to throw a shade upon her
brow, — to make her cease from her childishmirth, and sit apart and
muse.
Rightly, then, in a typical sense, might this fair
creature, so airy in her shape, so harmonious in her beauty, so
unfamiliar in her ways and thoughts, — rightly might she be called
a daughter, less of the musician than the music, a being for whom
you could imagine that some fate was reserved, less of actual life
than the romance which, to eyes that can see, and hearts that can
feel, glides ever along WITH the actual life, stream by stream, to
the Dark Ocean.
And therefore it seemed not strange that Viola
herself, even in childhood, and yet more as she bloomed into the
sweet seriousness of virgin youth, should fancy her life ordained
for a lot, whether of bliss or woe, that should accord with the
romance and reverie which made the atmosphere she breathed.
Frequently she would climb through the thickets that clothed the
neighbouring grotto of Posilipo, — the mighty work of the old
Cimmerians, — and, seated by the haunted Tomb of Virgil, indulge
those visions, the subtle vagueness of which no poetry can render
palpable and defined; for the Poet that surpasses all who ever
sang, is the heart of dreaming youth! Frequently there, too, beside
the threshold over which the vine-leaves clung, and facing that
dark-blue, waveless sea, she would sit in the autumn noon or summer
twilight, and build her castles in the air. Who doth not do the
same, — not in youth alone, but with the dimmed hopes of age! It is
man's prerogative to dream, the common royalty of peasant and of
king. But those day-dreams of hers were more habitual, distinct,
and solemn than the greater part of us indulge. They seemed like
the Orama of the Greeks, — prophets while phantasma.
CHAPTER 1.II.
Fu stupor, fu vaghezza, fu diletto!
“Gerusal. Lib. , ” cant. ii. xxi.
(“Desire it was, 't was wonder, 't was delight. ”
Wiffen's Translation. )
Now at last the education is accomplished! Viola is nearly sixteen. The Cardinal declares that the time is come when the new name must be inscribed in the Libro d'Oro, — the Golden Book set apart to the children of Art and Song. Yes, but in what character? — to whose genius is she to give embodiment and form? Ah, there is the secret! Rumours go abroad that the inexhaustible Paisiello, charmed with her performance of his “Nel cor piu non me sento, ” and his “Io son Lindoro, ” will produce some new masterpiece to introduce the debutante. Others insist upon it that her forte is the comic, and that Cimarosa is hard at work at another “Matrimonia Segreto. ” But in the meanwhile there is a check in the diplomacy somewhere. The Cardinal is observed to be out of humour. He has said publicly, — and the words are portentous, — “The silly girl is as mad as her father; what she asks is preposterous! ” Conference follows conference; the Cardinal talks to the poor child very solemnly in his closet, — all in vain. Naples is distracted with curiosity and conjecture. The lecture ends in a quarrel, and Viola comes home sullen and pouting: she will not act, — she has renounced the engagement.
Pisani, too inexperienced to be aware of all the dangers of the stage, had been pleased at the notion that one, at least, of his name would add celebrity to his art. The girl's perverseness displeased him. However, he said nothing, — he never scolded in words, but he took up the faithful barbiton. Oh, faithful barbiton, how horribly thou didst scold! It screeched, it gabbled, it moaned, it growled. And Viola's eyes filled with tears, for she understood that language. She stole to her mother, ...