Vernon Lee

“ I am not speaking of youth or beauty, though it does seem a pity that mature human beings should mostly be too fat or too thin, and lacking either sympathy or intellectual keenness. Charm must comprise all that, but much besides. It is the undefinable quality of nearly every child, and of all nice lads and girls; the quality which (though it can reach perfection in exceptional old people) usually vanishes, no one knows when exactly, into the Limbo marked by the Rabbits' Villa, with its plates and tea-cups, mouldering on its wooden posts in the unweeded garden. ”

“ DIEGO
I am told I had one, gracious Madam. She was, saving your Grace's presence, only a light woman, and sold for a ducat to the Infidels. I cannot say I ever missed her. Forgive me, Madam. Although a courtier, the stock I come from is extremely base. I have no understanding of the words of noble women and saints like you. My vileness thinks them hollow; and my pretty manners are only, as your Grace has unluckily had occasion to see, a very thin and bad veneer. I thank your Grace, and once more crave permission to attend the Duke.
DUCHESS
Nay. That is not true. Your soul is nowise base-born. ”

“ For do not tell me that it is not education, and of the best, to enable a child to feel the passion and poetry of life; to live, while it trudges along the dull familiar streets, in company with dull, familiar, and often stolidly incurious grown-up folk, in that terrible, magnificent past, in dungeons and palaces, loving and worshipping Joan of Arc, execrating Bloody Mary, dreaming strange impossible possibilities of what we would have said and done for Marie Antoinette—said to her, her actually coming towards us, by some stroke of magic, in that advancing carriage! ”

“ The lie of the land has therefore an importance in art, or if it have not, ought to have, quite independent of pleasantness of line or of anything merely visual. An immense charm consists in the fact that the mind can walk about in a landscape. The delight at the beauty which is seen is heightened by the anticipation of further unseen beauty; by the sense of exploring the unknown; and to our present pleasure before a painted landscape is added the pleasure we have been storing up during years of intercourse, if I may use this word, with so many real ones. ”

“ Now you should know that near the sea, where you can clearly hear its roaring even on windless days there is in that forest a clear place, made as by the hand of man, set round with tall pines even like a garden, but in the shape of a horse-course, free from bushes and pools, and covered with the finest greensward. Here, as Nastasio sate him on the trunk of a pine—the hour was sunset, the weather being uncommon clear—he heard a rushing sound in the distance, as of the sea ”

“ Let us rather think gently of things, sad, but sad without ignominy, of friendships still-born or untimely cut off, hurried by death into a place like that which holds the souls of the unchristened babies; often, like them, let us hope, removed to a sphere where such things grow finer and more fruitful, the sphere of the love of those we have not loved enough in life.
But that at best is but a place of ghosts; so let us never forget, dear friends, how close all round lies Limbo, the Kingdom of Might-have-been. ”

“ The world wants useful inhabitants. True. But the clouds building bridges over the sea, the storms modelling the peaks and flanks of the mountains, are a part of the world; and they want creatures to sit and look at them and learn their life's secrets, and carry them away, conveyed perhaps merely in altered tone of voice, or brightened colour of eye, to revive the spiritual and physical hewers of wood and drawers of water. For the poor sons and daughters of men require for sustenance, as well as food and fuel, and intellect and morals, the special mysterious commodity called charm.... ”

“ It is high time that some one should stop the laughing and sniffing at this great sculpture, of Bernini and his Italian and French followers, the last spontaneous outcome of the art of the Renaissance, of the decorative sculpture which worked in union with place and light and surroundings. Mistaken as indoor decoration, as free statuary in the sense of the antique, this sculpture has after all given us the only works which are thoroughly right in the open air, among the waving trees, the mad vegetation which sprouts under the moist, warm Roman sky, from every inch of masonry and travertine. ”

“ Since then, as I hinted, Ravenna has become the home of dear friends, to which I periodically return, in autumn or winter or blazing summer, without taking thought for any of the ghosts. And the impressions of Ravenna are mainly those of life; the voices of children, the plans of farmers, the squabbles of local politics. I am waked in the morning by the noises of the market; and opening my shutters, look down upon green umbrellas and awnings spread over baskets of fruit and vegetables, and heaps of ironware and stalls of coloured stuffs and gaudy kerchiefs. The streets are by no means empty. ”

“ But in the broader, truer sense, the life of all art goes on in the mind and heart, not merely of those who make the work, but of those who see and read it. Nay, is not the work, the real one, a certain particular state of feeling, a pattern woven of new perceptions and impressions and of old memories and feelings, which the picture, the statue or poem, awakens, different in each different individual? 'Tis a thought perhaps annoying to those who have slaved seven years over a particular outline of muscles, a particular colour of grass, or the cadence of a particular sentence. ”

“ They say that Ferdinand is, thanks to you, once more in full possession of his mind. It cannot be. Something still lacks; he is not fully cured.
DIEGO
Alas, he is. The Duke remembers everything, save me.
DUCHESS
There is some mystery in this. I do not understand such matters. But I know that Ferdinand could never be base towards you knowingly. And you, methinks, would never be base towards him. Diego, time will bring light into this darkness. Let us pray God together that He may make our eyes and souls able to bear it. ”

“ My fancy never went so far, good Diego. There was a grain of reason left. But if it had——Well, I should have taken Magdalen's hand, and said, "Welcome, dear sister. This is a world of spells; let us repeat some. Become henceforth my brother; be the Duke of Mantua's best and truest friend; turn into Diego, Magdalen."
The DUKE presses DIEGO'S arm, and, letting it go, walks away into the moonlight with an enigmatic air. A long pause.
Hark, they are singing within; the idle pages making songs to their ladies' eyebrows. Shall we go and listen?
(They walk in the direction of the palace.) ”

“ I am speaking of a Roman sarcophagus, on which you can still trace the outlines of garlands, which stands turned into a cattle trough, behind the solitary farm in the depth of the forest of St. Vitalis. Round it the grass is covered in summer by the creeping tendrils of the white clematis; and, in winter, the great thorn bushes and barberries and oaks blaze out crimson and scarlet and golden. The big, long-horned, grey cows pass to and fro to be milked; and the shaggy ponies who haunt the pine wood come there to drink. ”

“ I make this remark because there have been very fine gardens without any flowers at all; in fact, when the art of gardening reached its height, it took to despising its original material, as, at one time, people came to sing so well that it was considered vulgar to have any voice. There is a magnificent garden near Pescia, in Tuscany, built in terraces against a hillside, with wonderful waterworks, which give you shower-baths when you expect them least; and in this garden, surrounded by the trimmest box hedges, there bloom only imperishable blossoms of variegated pebbles and chalk. ”

“ You speak too learnedly, good Signor Diego, and your words pass my poor understanding. The virtue in any of us is but God's finger-touch or breath; but those He chooses as His instruments are, methinks, angels or saints; and whatsoever you be, I look upon you with loving awe. You smile? You are a courtier, while I, although I have not left this palace for twenty years, have long forgotten the words and ways of courts. I am but a simpleton: a foolish old woman who has unlearned all ceremony through many years of many sorts of sorrow ”

“ What to him is this miserable little swish past of to-day?
There is only one circumstance when this vacuity, this suspension of all real life, is in its place; when one is hurrying to some dreadful goal, a death-bed or perhaps a fresh-made grave. The soul is precipitated forward to one object, one moment, and cannot exist meanwhile; ruit not hora, but anima; emptiness suits passion and suffering, for they empty out the world. ”

“ The movement of the train seems, after sunset, particularly in the South where night fall is rapid, to take a quality of mystery. It glides through a landscape of which the smaller details are effaced, as are likewise effaced the details of the railway itself. And that rapid gliding brings home to one the instability of the hour, of the changing light, the obliterating form. It makes one feel that everything is, as it were, a mere vision; bends of poplared river with sunset redness in their grey swirls ”

“ And an adjective, a metaphor, may evoke an entire atmospheric effect, paint us a sunset or a star-lit night. But the far subtler and more individual relations of visible line defy expression: no poet or prose writer can give you the tilt of a roof, the undulation of a field, the bend of a road. Yet these are the things in landscape which constitute its individuality and which reach home to our feelings.
For colour and light are variable—nay, more, they are relative. The same tract will be green in connection with one sort of sky, blue with another, and yellow with a third. ”

“ Now I suspect that Charm is closely related to Leisure. Charm is a living harmony in the individual soul. It is organised internally, the expression of mere inborn needs, the offspring of free choice; and as it is the great giver of pleasure to others, sprung probably from pleasure within ourselves; making life seem easier, more flexible, even as life feels in so far easier and more flexible to those who have it. ”

“ Ravenna, which is now an inland town, was at that time built in a lagoon; and we must picture Classe in much the same relation to it that Malamocco or the Port of Lido is to Venice, the open sea-harbour, where big ships and flotillas were stationed, while smaller craft wound through the channels and sand-banks up to the city. But now the lagoon has dried up, the Adriatic has receded, and there remains of Classis not a stone, save, in the midst of stagnant canals, rice marsh and brown bogland, a gaunt and desolate church, with a ruinous mildewed house and a crevassed round tower by its side. ”

“ But the bulk of happiness stacked up in Limbo appears, on careful looking, to be an agglomeration of other lost things; justice, charm, appreciation, and faith in one another, all recklessly packed off as so much lumber, sometimes to make room for fine new qualities instead! Justice, I am inclined to think, is usually sent to Limbo through the agency of others. A work in many folios might be written by condensing what famous men have had said against them in their days of struggle, and what they have answered about others in their days of prosperity. ”

“ DIEGO
Is this not wisdom? Princes should not see those burdens which they cannot, which they must not, try to carry. And after all, princes or slaves, can others ever help us, save with their purse, with advice, with a concrete favour, or, say, with a song? Our troubles smart because they are our troubles; our burdens weigh because on our shoulders; they are part of us, and cannot be shifted. But God doubtless loves such kind thoughts as you have, even if, with your Grace's indulgence, they are useless. ”

“ DUKE
Methinks it may be Diego now, tormenting his Master with needless questions. Loved her, boy! I love her.
A long pause. Diego has covered his face, with a gesture as if about to speak. But the moon has suddenly risen from behind the poplars, and put scales of silver light upon the ripples of the lake, and a pale luminous mist around the palace. As the light invades the terrace, a sort of chill has come upon both speakers; they walk up and down further from one another. ”

“ The world, for many people, and unfortunately, for the finer and nobler (those most afraid of ennui) is like a painter's garret, where some half-daubed canvas, eleven feet by five, hides the Jaconda on the wall, the Venus in the corner, and blocks the charming tree-tops, gables, and distant meadows through the window.
Art, literature, and philanthropy are notoriously expressions no longer of men's and women's thoughts and feelings, but of their dread of finding themselves without thoughts to think or feelings to feel. ”

“ Leisure implies a superabundance not only of time but of the energy needed to spend time pleasantly. And it takes the finest activity to be truly at Leisure. Since Being at Leisure is but a name for being active from an inner impulse instead of a necessity; moving like a dancer or skater for the sake of one's inner rhythm instead of moving, like a ploughman or an errand-boy, for the sake of the wages you get for it. Indeed, for this reason, the type of all Leisure is art. ”

“ Imagine it set in the loveliest mossy grass, full of delicate half-Alpine flowers; beautiful butterflies everywhere about; and the sort of ditch surrounding it overgrown with blackberries, haws, sloes, ivy, all manner of berries; a sort of false garden of paradise for the poor birds.
But when I craned over the locked wicket and climbed on to the ladder alongside, what I saw was more uncanny yet. I looked down on to rows of clipped, regular, hornbeam hedges, with grass paths between them, maze-like. A kind of Versailles for the birds, you might think. ”