ZANONI.
BOOK I.
THE MUSICIAN.
Due Fontane
Chi di diverso effeto hanno liquore!
"Ariosto, Orland. Fur." Canto 1.7.
(Two Founts
That hold a draught of different effects.)
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.
