Alfred Austin

“ But Veronica is worth all of us put together a hundred times over.‘
‘Quite so,’ said Lamia. ‘Veronica is our Minerva Medica, whose salutary if sometimes unpalatable wisdom keeps us in such tolerable health as moral valetudinarians like myself are capable of; whereas I am but a would-be Egeria, who have not yet succeeded in inducing any one, and you, dear Poet, least of all, to be my Numa. Still, do not judge me altogether by the way in which I conduct myself here, among a people very much after my own heart. ”

“ But certainly it is not true of Veronica, nor yet, I think, of Lamia. Indeed, speaking generally, I think one ought to entertain one’s friends with a record of one’s happiness rather than with a recital of one’s woes; but it does not follow, does it, that there is no pathetic minor in one’s life because one is not always sounding it? Indeed, amid all the enchantments of that Italian season when Spring and Summer are indistinguishable, we had been conscious of the shadow of pain which is cast by the surely approaching extinction of a young life in one’s own immediate precincts ”

“ Just as wandering along a river is more agreeable than walking along a canal, so people who canalise their lives and prearrange their enjoyments lose much of the enchantment which attends the guiding beneficence of chance. In Florence, you can scarcely halt anywhere, but story sacred or profane, saint or scholar, painter or patriot, poet, martyr, or enthusiast, has left some indelible trace to mark and glorify the spot, and to make you lift your head and then your heart. ”

“ No other plant of such supreme beauty has so solid a stem and such imposing foliage for so fragile a flower; and this it is, I think, which mainly constitutes its fresh charm. Every one now loves flowers, and I have no need to weary you with a catalogue of those in the Garden that I Love. But I doubt if there be any perennial plant of real beauty and value that will grow in our latitude which is not to be found there ”

“ There is no second Dante, but there are many exiles in this modern world, and I fear their number every day increases. As the struggle for existence waxes fiercer and fiercer, I think I hear them, too, exclaiming, Dona nobis pacem.‘
‘Listening first to Veronica,’ said Lamia, ‘and then to you, I am forced to the conclusion that many things are intolerable which we cannot do without. ”

“ But would it not be more indulgent, and equally true, to say that Italy is the one country, and the Italians are the one race, whose vitality is inexhaustible? They have been well before the world, if you will pardon that expression, for more than two thousand five hundred years; and, during all that period, they have never altogether dropped out of sight. Neither do they now appear in the least disposed to retire into private life, or to preserve their ruins, however much some of us would like them to do so, for the satisfaction of our romantic feelings. ”

“ In a few minutes we shall be among the olive woods. Are we not there already? See! bare-headed women are washing the clothes of their husbands and children in the Grima. Look there, beyond! The goats are clambering up the precipitous slopes, and browsing on the myrtle. What now do we behold through sunny openings in dense dark foliage? Meditating mountains and laughing sea. Let us recant all we have said. There is room enough in this large world for everybody, and manifestly quite enough for us. ”

“ For us women marriage is necessarily the chief mercantile transaction of our lives; and, if one marries a peer, one becomes a peeress; if one weds a millionaire, one may hope to be a million-heiress. But the wife of a poet does not become a poetess. She cannot share with him his only valuable asset; and the supposed romantic nature of his disposition, which is usually a sheer fiction, not unoften diverts from her the curiosity to which every woman is entitled, and which every woman who marries reasonably invariably gets.’
‘But if you happen to love a poet?’ I persisted. ”

“ Of the manifold charms of Tuscany, perhaps there is none so great or so enduring as the charm of manner peculiar to its rural population. Frank without being free, deferential but never servile, not without a fine reserve yet with never a touch of shyness, withholding not a certain tribute to social superiority, while tacitly intimating the fundamental equality that appertains to human brotherhood, the demeanour and speech of Tuscan contadini keep intercourse perpetually fresh, and impart to conversation on the tritest and most familiar themes perennial liveliness and interest. ”

“ I made some observation of the kind to Veronica, imagining we were alone, and got for reply,—
‘My dear, you will never understand women.’
‘How is it possible,’ I asked, a little nettled by the implied rebuke,162 ‘when no two women are alike?’
‘No one woman is alike,’ said Lamia, suddenly emerging from a luxuriance of leaf and flower that had concealed her from view; and, though Veronica was there to disprove the universal application of her aphorism, I think she spoke from the very depths of her own inner consciousness. ”

“ Were we comfortable and happy in the villa? They hoped we were going to stay a long time. Could they do anything for us? Did we love Italy? Had we been there before? O, but it was evident we had; for we talked their language like one of themselves (somewhat of an exaggeration, save in the case of Veronica) . Yes, the season was fairly forward, and there was good promise for everything, given what was now wanted, plenty of sunshine. Commonplaces, you perhaps will say. Indeed, yes. But which of us in this world is so surprisingly original? ”

“ Congratulated to-day, will they not be consigned to oblivion to-morrow, when right taste has resumed its authority, or when some one yet more extravagant creates an impression, equally sudden and equally transitory, of a somewhat similar character?’
‘I think so,’ said the Poet, ‘and I am sufficiently enamoured of venustà di stile to hope so. As great a master of style as this century has produced says somewhere, “On peut tout dire dans le style simple et correct des bons auteurs. Les expressions violentes viennent toujours ou d’une prétention, ou de l’ignorance de nos richesses réelles.” ”

“ It was in a podere some two miles or so outside the Porta San Niccolò, whence, over a wall lined with irises, one looks down the river immediately in front of one straight away to Florence, but sees nothing there save, through the feathery foliage of distant poplars, the cupola of the Duomo, Giotto’s campanile, and the Tower of the Palazzo Vecchio. Beyond, far beyond, are visible, on propitious days, the majestic peaks of the Carrara Mountains, and, a little farther towards the north, the snowy summits of the Apennines above Pistoia. ”

“ If people love their home, there is no wrong time for coming back to it; and, were it not for the delight of returning, I doubt if it would be wise, save under compulsion, ever to leave it. Tacitus asks, Who would quit Italy for Germany, were it not that Germany is his own country? Over English folk, at all worthy of their great descent, the name of England exercises a more enthralling spell even than that of Italy; and the Garden that I love is all the dearer to me because it is thoroughly English. ”

“ A few feet behind was a red-brick wall, and along its foot three rows of pelargoniums in full flower, and evidently most carefully hoed and watered. A comely looking woman, with her sleeves tucked up as far as they would go, came out of the house, peeped into the hammock, kissed, or rather hugged the baby, and then turned it round to screen it a little from the direct rays of the sun that were shining on this little paradise. ”

“ But even these are so reared that the purchaser alone gets any delectation out of them, and the spot where they are produced is but little more of a garden in consequence of their temporary presence. The difficulty is to induce an Italian gardener to believe that you care for flowers for their own sake, that you regard the sale of them as a sort of desecration, that you feel they ought to be love-gifts, tokens of present or mementoes of absent affection, and, in any case, cherished companions of one’s private thoughts, one’s habitual pursuits, and one’s transitory emotions. ”

“ But indeed every great poet is the lineal descendant of every other great poet. At any given moment, what exercises most influence is, not the present, but the Past. I ventured, the other day, to observe that there are only two sorts of people, the noble and the ignoble. Dear Lamia, let us try to belong to the noble, since every one may be a member of that untitled aristocracy ”

“ Along that magical coast, where we turned our gaze first to the sea-fringe, then to the hill declivities, then back again to the white-laced bays, and never being able to determine which were the more beautiful, I observe that persons who have travelled many hundreds of miles in order to enjoy the sunshine and glamour of the South, are well content to make this entrancing journey in a railway carriage, pulling down the blinds if the sun be a trifle too hot, and conning their newspaper or turning over the leaves of some conventional novel, in any case. ”

“ Tranquil survey is not enough, and scrutinising curiosity is fatal.’
‘I am sure,’ said Lamia, ‘Veronica is not intoxicated. She is tranquillity itself.’
‘Veronica, you mean,’ was his reply,7 ‘does not effervesce. But her silence is, perhaps, the measure of her emotion.’
‘O stop! stop! I must have some of those anemones.‘ How often a kindred need of this kind arose on the part of Lamia, it would be hard to say; but, by degrees, every part of the carriage that was not occupied by ourselves was filled with tulips, windflowers, roses, and long branches of early-flowering golden acacia. ”

“ They will do anything on earth for you, if you go the right way about it; but they will not be turned into machines. Nothing I have ever seen in Veronica is more admirable, or shows so conclusively the discrimination she can blend with her love of order, than the amount of method, limited no doubt but quite unusual, with which, for the time at least, she imbued those about us; and Lamia, as we have seen, indulged in a little characteristic raillery on the subject.
‘It is all very well,’ said the Poet, ‘for us to have our little joke about a certain person’s passion for discipline. ”

“ Then came hills more rounded, softer declivities, a gradual narrowing of the plain, a forest of domes, belfries, and towers, and I was in Florence.‘
‘Why was your visit so brief?’
‘You ask why. Can one give a reason for anything one does in one’s youth? Only I remember, as I reluctantly quitted it, I vowed to return to it ere long.‘
‘And you kept your vow,’ said Veronica.
‘I remember,’ said Lamia. ”

“ We grieved for them, and felt, moreover, a separate grief of our own; and neither the luminous May moon, nor the fairy-flitting fireflies, nor the silvery fluting of the nightingale, could wean us from the gravity of our thoughts. Even the purest and most generous sympathy borrows something of its tenderness, I suppose, from the knowledge that we are one and all subject to the dispensation of grief, and that those who console to-day may themselves need to be consoled to-morrow ”

“ You will find many shapely but no comfortable chairs, no superfluity of cushions, nowhere a footstool, and, if you choose to lie on what looks like a sofa, you will soon find you are not reposing on rose-leaves. You must not come to me and complain that there is not a bell in your room, or, if there is, that it apparently has no communication with the outer world. If Lamia wishes to make a mess indoors with her flowers and branches of blossom, she shall not be denied ”