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 AKIADNE. 
 
OXIIDA'S NOVELS. 
 
 TJniform Edition, crown Zvo, red cloth 
 extra, 5s. each. 
 
 FOLLE FAPJNE. 
 
 IDALIxV : A Romance. 
 
 CHAXDOS : A NoveL 
 
 UNDER TWO FLAGS. 
 
 TRICOTRIN. 
 
 CECIL CASTLEMAINE'S GAGE. 
 
 HELD IX BOXDAGE. 
 
 PASCAREL : Only a Story. 
 
 PUCK : His Vici.ssitudes, Adventures, &c. 
 
 A DOG OF FLAXDERS. 
 
 STRATHMORE. 
 
 •TWO LITTLE WOODEX SHOES, 
 
 SIGXA. 
 
 IN A WIXTER CITY. 
 
 CHATTO ^ WINDVS, PICCADILLY, W. 
 
Ariadne 
 
 777^ STORY OF A DREAM, 
 
 By OUIDA, 
 
 AUTHOR OF "puck," " SIGN'A," " TRICOTRIN," "TWO LITTLE 
 WOODEN SHOES," ETC. 
 
 " La forza d'Amore non risguarda al delitto." 
 
 IN THREE VOLUMES. 
 VOL. I. 
 
 ILonUon : 
 
 CHAPMAN & HALL, 
 193, PICCADILLY. 
 
 CHATTO & WINDUS, 
 
 74 c\: 75, PICCADILLY. 
 
 1877. 
 \_All Rights Reserved. \ 
 
LONDON : 
 BRADBtlRV, AGNEW, & lO., I'RINIEIiS, WHII'EFRIAKS. 
 
■•5 
 
 A MON AMIE, 
 DONNA ADA COLONNA, 
 
 LA DUCHESSE DE CASTIGLIONE, 
 
 COXNUE DANS LK MARBRE COMME 
 
 "MARCELLO;" 
 
 «UI, A TOUT LE CHARME DE LA FEMME, A SU RiUNIR 
 LA FORCE DE L'ART. 
 
Co 
 
 F^3 ■ 
 
 D 3 7^^ 
 V. I 
 
 a. 
 
 r 
 
 AEIADNE: 
 
 * THE STORY OF A DREAM. 
 
 CHAPTER I. 
 
 "It is an Ariadne, of course it is an Ai'iadne, 
 A Bacchus ? — pooh ! " I said over and over again 
 to myself, sitting before it in the drowsy noon, all 
 b}^ myself in the warm summer weather ; for the 
 porter in the hall j'onder was a friend of mine, 
 and often let me in when the place was closed 
 to the public, knowing that I was more likely to 
 worship the marbles than to harm them. 
 
 It was intensely still. 
 
 Outside, the sun was broad and bright upon 
 
 VOL. I. B 
 
ARIADNA 
 
 the old moss-grown terraces and steps, and not a 
 bough was stirring in the soft gloom of drooping 
 cedar and of spreading pine. There was one of 
 the lattice casements open. I could see the long 
 lush grass full of flowers, the heavy ilex shadows 
 crossing one another, and the white shapes of the 
 cattle asleep in that fragrance and darkness of 
 green leaves. The birds had ceased to sing, and 
 even the lizards were quiet in these deep mossy 
 Faunus' haunted ways of beautiful Borghese, 
 where Eaffaelle used to wander at sunrise, 
 coming out from his little bedchamber that he 
 had painted so prettily with his playing gleeful 
 Loves, and flower-hidden gods, and nymphs with 
 their vases of roses, and the medallions of his 
 Fornarina. 
 
 *'It is an Ai-iadne," I said, sitting in the 
 Caesars' Gallery — that long, light, most lovely 
 chamber, with its wide grated casements open 
 to the woodland greenness, and the gleam of the 
 brown weed-laden waters, and the leaf-tempered 
 glory of the golden sunlight. 
 
 Do you know the bust I mean? — the one in 
 bronze on a plinth of flowered alabaster, with a 
 
ARTABN^. 3 
 
 crown of thickly- woven iv}- leaves on its clustered 
 hail* ? It is not called an Ariadne here in Villa 
 Borghese ; it is called a 3'oung Bacchus ; but 
 that is absurd. It might be Persephone or Libera, 
 but to my thinking it is an Ariadne. 
 
 It has a Hkeness to that Ariadne of the 
 Capitol, which has been called a Bacchus and a 
 Leucothea ; and it has something of extreme 
 youth, of faith, of hope, of inspiration, which 
 is very beautiful, and is all its own. Go you, 
 traveller, and see it where it stands, with all the 
 bestial, bloated, porphjTy emperors around it, 
 and the baby Hercules in his lion-skin hood in 
 front of it, and 3'ou will see that I am right : 
 only it is an Ariadne, mind you, before the 
 abandonment on Naxos. 
 
 There is a Bacchus here — nay, there are many 
 — but there is one in this Gallery of the Caisars 
 that is perhaps the most beautiful ideal of the 
 Homeric Dionysos in the world, and it stands 
 here, too, in this room of the Ci^sars. Do not 
 confound him with the Bacchus of the Vestibule ; 
 that is a finer statue may be, since more famous ; 
 but a far lower deity ; indeed no deity at all for 
 
 B 2 
 
ARIADNI^. 
 
 anj^thing that liis eyes say of soul, or that his 
 mouth breathes of creation; but this Bacchus, 
 younger also, is all a god ; the true Dionysos ere 
 the Asiatic and Lal^in adulterations corroded the 
 Greek conception of his person and his office. 
 He is the incarnation of youth, beneath whose 
 footfall all flowers of passion and of fancy arise, 
 but youth with all the surprise of genius in it, 
 and all its strength : — its strength, and not its 
 weakness, for he is divine, not human ; he re- 
 joices, but he reigns. Looking at him, one knows 
 how far sweeter it must have been to have been 
 old when the world was young, than it is now to 
 be young when the world is old. "You Greeks 
 are for ever boys," said the Eg\^)tian to Solon. 
 But now, " nous vieillards nes dliier^' is the bit- 
 terest and truest epithet for us. 
 
 Then there was childhood even in the highest 
 godhead. 
 
 Now the very children are never young. 
 
 This Bacchus and my Ariadne stand close to 
 one another ; ever near, yet never meeting, like 
 lovers parted by irrevocable wrong. 
 
 I sat and looked at them for the hundredth 
 
ARIADNE. 5 
 
 time ; and I thought, if only the okl myths couhl 
 but have been kept pure, they had never been 
 bettered since Pan's pipe was broken. One 
 couhl wish Euhemerus had never been born : it 
 was he who spoilt them first. 
 
 *' It is an Ariadne — certainly an Ariadne," I 
 said to myself. Maryx, the great sculptor, had 
 laughed at me for saying so, but he had gone 
 into some other of the chambers, and had left me 
 of the same opinion still. 
 
 The warmth was great ; the stillness perfect ; 
 the air was sweet with the smell of the woods and 
 of the cattle's breath. I had slept but little that 
 night, having found a fragment of a book which I 
 thought bore marks of the press of Aldus, and, 
 sitting until near dawn over my treasure in effort 
 to verify it with a dear and learned monk I knew, 
 I had been still up when, with the first Ught 
 on the earth, the nightingales ceased a little, 
 and the thnishes and merles took up the stor}^ 
 and began a riot of song above me in the woods 
 on the hill of Janus. So now I was drowsy as 
 the day was. 
 
 Noon is the midnight of the South. Deep 
 
ARIADN£. 
 
 dreams and peace fall upon all creation. Tlie 
 restless lizard pauses and basks, and even that 
 noisiest denizen of summer sunshine, the cicala, 
 is ashamed to make such an endless self-glorifi- 
 cation with that odd rattle which he carries in 
 his stomach, and is almost quiet in the trees, 
 only creakmg a little now and then to assure 
 inankind that he has not forgotten them; for 
 every cicala, like each of us, believes himself the 
 pivot of the world. 
 
 It was all so still ; so warm and yet so cool ; 
 so full of sweet smells and of balmy quietude, 
 here in Borghese, that a sort of slumber over- 
 took me, and yet I was conscious in it all the 
 while, as the mind in day-sleep often is, of the 
 pleasant passage of the west wind through 
 the opened lattice, and of the noisy chimes that 
 were ringing in the cit}^, and only echoed faintly 
 and softly here through all the woodland thick- 
 ness of green leaves. 
 
 Through half-closed eyes I saw the open win- 
 dow and the iron grating, and the bronze of the 
 ilex boughs dark almost to blackness, and the 
 high grass wherein the cattle were lying, and 
 
ARIADNP.. 7 
 
 the broad blue skies that Raffaelle loved ; and 
 before me I saw tlie white god and the ivy_ 
 crowned head of my Ariadne. 
 
 '* Yes, yes, surely it is an Ariadne," I muttered 
 to myself, for there is such pleasure in one's own 
 opinions. " Of course an Ariadne — how can 
 they be so blind ? There is dawning womanhood 
 in ever}' line. But she knows nothmg about 
 Naxos." 
 
 And as I looked she seemed to change and 
 hear ; the bronze lips parted awhile, and seemed 
 to smile and answer me : " Yes, I am Ariadne. 
 But how do you know ? You, an old man sitting 
 all day long at a street corner, far from all con- 
 verse with the gods ? " 
 
 And then a great change passed over all the 
 bust, and a quiver and glow of life seemed to me 
 to run through all the bronze and alabaster ; the 
 Egyptian stone of the column seemed to melt, 
 and fold and unfold ^s a flower unfolds itself, and 
 became delicate and transparent raunent through 
 which one saw the rosy flesh and the rounded 
 lines of a girl's limbs and bod}- ; the metal in 
 wliich the sculptor had imprisoned his thoughts 
 
8 ARIADNP.. 
 
 seemed to dissolve, and grow warm and living, 
 and become flesh, till breast and throat and cheek 
 and brow blushed into sudden life. 
 
 The ej^es grew liquid and lustrous like lake 
 waters in starlight; the ivy leaves grew green 
 and fresh with dew; the clustered curls took 
 brighter hues of gold and stirred as with the 
 breeze; she gi'ew alive and looked on all these 
 white and silent gods. 
 
 "I am Ariadne," she said sadly. *' Yes. I 
 knew Naxos. AVhat woman escapes it that loves 
 well ? I am on earth once more, to my great 
 woe. I prayed to Aidoneus to remain, lost in 
 the dark, and with Persephone. But she said : 
 ' Nay, go upward into light, though into pain. 
 AVept not Achilles here, and wished to be the 
 meanest thing that lived and labom-ed upon earth 
 rather than king amongst immortal shades ? 
 For better is it to see the sun, though toiling in 
 the dust ; and sweeter is it to be kissed on the 
 mouth, though stabbed to the heart, than to 
 abide in endless night and windless quiet : — go.* 
 What did she mean ? She said the gods would 
 
AETADNA 
 
 tell me. Tell me now. For of life I have for- 
 gotten as the dead forget. Only I forget not 
 Naxos." 
 
 The gods were silent. 
 
 The lewd Caesars hung their heads, and dared 
 not lift their impm'e glance on hers. 
 
 Her own betrayer spoke first, and smiled with 
 a smile that was at once pitiful yet cruel. AVhat 
 was Naxos to him, save as a dull spot that he had 
 left gladly, leaving the dead behind him, to pass 
 across the summer seas in his flower-garlanded 
 vessel. 
 
 " Theseus and I gave you passion, dear: with- 
 out it you could not see the sun nor feel the 
 knife. Be thankful to us." 
 
 Then he touched the marble floor with his 
 thyrsus, and on its barren whiteness a purple 
 passion-flower bloomed, and an asp ate its starry 
 heart. 
 
 The child Hercules, cast from his head down- 
 ward at her feet the lion's skin. 
 
 *' The strong alone know passion. Perhaps 
 their pain is better than the peace of the 
 feeble." 
 
10 ARIADNS. 
 
 And liis curved and rosy mouth grew sorrowful ; 
 he seemed to be foreseeing his own shame 
 when he should sit and spin, and think a woman's 
 lightest laugh of scorn, more worth than smile of 
 Zeus, or Olympus' praise. 
 
 The white cow lying sleeping beneath the ilex 
 boughs rose from her bed in the grasses, and 
 came and looked with lustrous weary eyes through 
 the ii'on bars of the casement. 
 
 " Once men called me lo," she said, with 
 wistful gaze. ''But the gadfly in my flesh left 
 me no peace till I sank content into the beast. 
 It will be so with her when the purple passion- 
 flower fades. The solitude of Naxos kills — if 
 not the body then the soul." 
 
 But Apollo, hearing, where he stood in all his 
 white gloiy in the halls within, came with the 
 sun's rays about his perfect head, and answered 
 for her : 
 
 *' No. Had you had ears for my songs, lo, 
 never could you have been changed into the brute, 
 to browse and graze. The souls my Sj^bils keep 
 are strong." 
 
 Daphne — whom her lover had left alone in her 
 
ARIADN2. 11 
 
 agonj' — Daphne followed, with the boughs of the 
 bay springing from her slender feet and from her 
 beating bosom, and her floating hair becoming 
 twisted leaves of bay. 
 
 " Your Sibyls are too strong for mortals, and 
 there is no wisdom I see but Love ! " she cried 
 in her torment. " Gods and men begrudge us 
 the laurel, but when the laurel grows from the 
 breast of a woman — ah, heaven ! — it hurts ! " 
 
 Apollo smiled. 
 
 " Of Love you would have nothmg. Your 
 wisdom comes too late. Is the bay bitter ? That 
 is not my fault." 
 
 Artemis came and looked : she who ever slew 
 the too audacious or too forgetful mortal, with 
 her slender and unening shaft. 
 
 "My sister Persephone has been more cruel 
 than I," she said, with a smile. "Does she 
 send you back to your isles of Dia again ? And 
 where was your father in that darksome world 
 where he judges, that he lets you come hither to 
 brave me once more ? Oh, fair fool of too much 
 love and too much wisdom ! Why have lifted 
 the sword ? Wliy have found the clue ? The 
 
12 ariabn:^. 
 
 gods ever i^unisli the mortal too daring and too 
 excelling." 
 
 *' Eros is more cruel than von or Persephone, 
 oh, my sovereign of the Silver Bow ! " said 
 Dionysos, and smiled. He knew, had he not 
 betrayed, not even the sacred Huntress could 
 have slain her. 
 
 Anacreon and Alcseus came from the central 
 chambers and stood by : they had become im- 
 mortals also. 
 
 They murmured low one to another : 
 
 " When gods and men speak of Love they 
 wrong him : it is seldom he that reigns : it is 
 only Philotes, who takes his likeness." 
 
 Amongst the deities from the upper cham- 
 ber a mortal came ; the light lewd woman who 
 had bared her charms to live for ever here in 
 marble, in counterfeit of the Yenus Pandemos. 
 
 " There is no Naxos for women who love Love, 
 and not one lover,'* she said, with a wanton 
 laugh. " Gods and men alike are faithful only 
 to the faithless. She who worships the beauty 
 of her own body and its joys, is strong; she 
 only; Aphrodite who made me taught me that." 
 
ARIADN2. 13 
 
 Bacchus touclied her in reproof, and the 
 imperial harlot fled. 
 
 " Aphrodite's bond is hard," he said. *' My 
 sister Helen knew : serving her once, she served 
 for ever ; and daj- and night she drank Lethe and 
 drank in vain." 
 
 The Koman woman lying in a farther chamber 
 on her marble bier, with the poppy flowers of 
 eternal sleep in her folded hands, glided as a shade 
 glides from the asphodel meadows of the 
 dead. 
 
 " If not the temple of Lubentina — then Death," 
 she said. " There is no middle path between 
 the two. Return to Orcus and I)is-Pater.'* 
 
 And she held out to Ariadne the poppies red 
 as war, which yet ai*e S3unbols of the sole sm'e 
 Peace. 
 
 But Psyche, playing with Eros in a niche where 
 the motes of the sun were dancing to tlie sound 
 of a satjT's syrinx, flew in on her rosy wings that 
 are like the leaves of a pomegranate blossom, and 
 caught the butterfly that always hovers above her 
 own head, and woukl liave given with it immortal 
 life. 
 
14 abiadn:^. 
 
 But Love coming after lier, the dancing sun- 
 beams in his curls stayed her hand. 
 
 " Nay — if this be Ariadne, she knows full well 
 if / abide not with her she needs death, not 
 life." 
 
 " Then stay," said Ariadne's traitor, with his 
 sweet and cruel smile. 
 
 Love shook his head and sighed. 
 
 " You and men after you have forbidden me 
 rest. The passion-flower blossoms but a single 
 day and night, and I can lie no longer in one 
 breast." 
 
 Anacreon said : 
 
 " Of old you had no wings, Eros. You were 
 worthier of worship then. I know that, though 
 I was only a drunken, lewd trifler, who merited 
 not ni}" immortality." 
 
 Alcseus said : 
 
 *' The laurel grew even as a high wall betwixt 
 me and Sappho, but it was no fence betwixt her 
 and the grave in the sea." 
 
 Love laughed, for he is often cruel. 
 
 "I am stronger than all the gods, for, even 
 being dead, you cannot forget me. Anacreon, all 
 
ARIADNE:. 15- 
 
 your songs were stupid as the dumb beside the 
 eloquence of one murmur of mine. Alcseus, all 
 your verses and all your valour could not save 
 you from one death-blow that I dealt." 
 
 Anacreon and Alcseus were silent. 
 
 They knew that Love was stronger than men, 
 fiercer than flame, and as the waves and the 
 winds, faithless. 
 
 Ariadne stood silent and irresolute ; the purj^le 
 passion-flower lifted to her bosom, and at her 
 feet the strong and bitter laurel, and the poppies 
 that give death. Her hand hovered now over 
 one, now above the other, like a poised bird that 
 doubts between the east and west. 
 
 Love chose for her, and lifted up the red 
 flower of death. 
 
 " Be wise. When I shall leave you, eat of this 
 and sleep." 
 
 I awoke ; it had been but a dream ; there were 
 no gods near ; only statues that gleamed in a 
 faint whiteness in the dark, for the people of the 
 place had come in to close the casements, and 
 were shutting out the golden sun. 
 
16 ARIABN^:. 
 
 My Ariadne was but bronze once more. lo 
 was Ijing ill the grass without. Psyche and Love 
 and all were gone. Bacchus still, onl}^, seemed 
 to smile. 
 
 My friend the sculptor was coming in to the 
 gallery from his stud}" of the frieze of the Labours 
 of Hercules, and the rilievo of Auge and Tele- 
 phus. 
 
 " Still before your Ariadne ? And it is not 
 an Ariadne," said Marj'x. "And if it be, who 
 cares for her ? The true Ariadne is in the 
 Capitol, or the Pio-Clementino, as you choose. 
 Let us go home ; it is too warm, and I am 
 tired. I was at work at four this morning, 
 whilst my nightingales still were singing. Come 
 and have j^our noonday wine with me.'' 
 
 We went awaj' out of the Emperors' room into 
 the dusky dreamful glades, where all artists love 
 to wander and think of Eaffaelle coming out 
 through the morning dews, under the everlasting 
 oaks. 
 
 " One is always glad to come here," said 
 Maryx ; "no habit dulls the charm of these 
 old gardens ; and no length of time dulls one's 
 
AEIADN£:. 17 
 
 regret for Raffaelle's pavilion — destroj^ed in our 
 own generation, yet we sjDeak evil of the 
 Huns and Visigoths, and revile the Greeks for 
 casting down the statues of the Mausoleum ! 
 These woods must have suited Raffaelle so well ; 
 I daresay his dear violinist played to him here 
 of a si)ring-day morning, where the violets grew 
 thickest. It is a pity there w^as no better nymph 
 for him than the Fornarina ; those little hard, 
 leering, cunning eyes of hers never could have 
 cared for the violets, or for anything except the 
 bracelets on her arms and the ducats in her purse. 
 Are you dreaming of your Ariadne still ? It is 
 not of much value, and it is no Ariadne. I 
 went by chance into the room of the Pauline 
 Venus : my mouth will taste bitter all day. 
 How venal, and gaudy, and vile she is with her 
 gilded upholstery! It is the most hateful thing 
 that ever wasted marble. It is not even sensual ; 
 for sensuality may have its force to burn, its 
 imagery to madden, but Canova's Venus says 
 nothing — unless, indeed, it says what fools men 
 are, and what artificial wantons they have cared 
 for ever since the Roman matrons bought false 
 
 vol,. I. C 
 
18 ariadnj^. 
 
 hair and paint in the Sacred Way. How one 
 loves Canova, the man, and how one execrates 
 Canova, the artist ! Surely never was a great 
 repute achieved by so false a talent, and so per- 
 fect a character ! One would think he had been 
 born and bred in Versailles instead of Treviso. 
 He is called a naturalist ! Look at liis Graces ! 
 He is always Co3^sevox and Coustou at heart. 
 Never purely classic, never frankly modern. 
 Louis XIV. would have loved him better than 
 Bernini." 
 
 We went out of the gates into the broad blaze 
 of light; then away across the white piazza, where 
 scarce a soul was stirring, and there was not a 
 sound save of the rushing of the water from the 
 lions' mouths at the base of the sun-pillar of 
 Heliopolis that was rising like a sword of flame 
 agamst the dazzHng radiance of the air. 
 
 I loved and honoured Maryx ; he was a great 
 man, and good, and lived the life of the men of 
 old, where his nightingales sang under his studio 
 windows, amongst his myrtles and his marbles, on 
 the side of the Sabine hill. 
 
 But I refused to go on across the water, and 
 
ARIADNE. 
 
 19 
 
 make my noonday meal with, him ; I was too full 
 of dreams, and stupid still with sleep ; I let him 
 go home, alone, and stopped at my own place by 
 the corner of the street that leads to the bridge 
 -of Sixtus, where the water gushes from the wall 
 in the fountain that Fontana made for Pope 
 Paul. 
 
 r 'J 
 
CHAPTER II. 
 
 A Faun lives in this Ponte Sisto water. 
 Often in those days I heard him laughing, and 
 under the si)lashing of the sj^outs caught tlie^ 
 tinkle of his pipe. 
 
 In every one of the fountains of my Eome a 
 naiad, or a satyr, a god, or a genius, has taken 
 refuge, and in its depths dreams of the ruined 
 temples and the levelled woods, and hides in its- 
 cool, green, moss-grown nest all day long, and 
 when the night falls, wakes and calls aloud. 
 
 Water is the living jo}- of Rome. 
 
 When the sky is yellow as brass, and the 
 air sickly with the fever mists, and the faces 
 of men are all livid and seared, and all the 
 beasts lie faint with the drought, it is the 
 song of the water that keei)S our life in us, sound- 
 
ARIADNA 21 
 
 ing all through the daylight and the darkness, 
 across the desert of hrick and stane. Men here 
 in Rome have " written their names in water," 
 and it has kept them longer than hronze or 
 marhle. That has been well said by a western 
 wanderer who wrote of the Faun of the Capitol. 
 
 When one is far away across the mountains, 
 and can no more see the golden wings of the 
 Archangel against the setting-sun, it is not of 
 statues or palaces, not of Caesars, or senators, 
 not even of the statues that you think with 
 wistful longing remembrance and desire : it is 
 of the water that is everyAvhere in Rome, float- 
 ing, fallmg, shining, splashing, with the clouds 
 mirrored on its siuface, and the swallows skim- 
 ming its foam. 
 
 I wonder to hear them say that Rome is sad, 
 with all that mirth and music of its water laugh- 
 ing through all its streets, till the steepest and 
 stoniest ways are munnm'ous with it as any 
 brook-fed forest depths. Here water is Pro- 
 tean ; sovereign and slave, sorcerer and servant, 
 slaking the mule's tliirst, and shining in por- 
 phyry on the prince's terrace, filling the well 
 
22 ABIADNA 
 
 in the cabbage garden, and leaping aloft against 
 the Pope's j)alace ; first called to fill the baths 
 of the Agi'ippines, and serve the Naumachia of 
 Augustus, it bubbles from a grifiin's jaws- or a 
 wolf's teeth, or any other of the thousand quaint 
 things set in the masonry at the street corners,, 
 and washes the x)eople's herbs and carrots, and is 
 lapped by the tongues of dogs, and thrashed b}' 
 the bare brown arms of washing women ; first 
 brought from the hills to flood the green Nu- 
 midian marble of the thermae, and lave the limbs 
 of the patricians between the cool mosaic walls 
 of the tepidarium, it contentedly becomes a 
 hotisehold thing, twinkling like a star at the 
 bottom of deep old w^ells in dusky courts, its 
 rest broken a dozen times a day by the clash of 
 the chain on the copper pail, above it the carna- 
 tions of the kitchen balcony and the caged 
 blackbird of the cook. 
 
 One grows to love the Eoman fountains as sea- 
 born men the sea. Go where you will there is 
 the water ; whether it foams by Trevi where the 
 green moss grows in it like ocean weed about 
 the feet of the ocean god, or whether it rushes. 
 
ABIADNZ 2i 
 
 reddened by the evening light, from the mouth of 
 an old lion that once saw Cleopatra ; whether it 
 leaps high in air, trying to reach the gold cross 
 on St. Peter's, or pours its triple cascade over 
 the Pauline granite ; whether it spouts out of 
 a gi'eat barrel in a wall in old Trastevere, or 
 throws up into the air a gossamer as fine as 
 xVrachne's web in a gi'een garden way where the 
 lizards run, or in a crowded comer where the 
 fruit-sellers sit against the wall; — in all its 
 shapes one grows to love the water that fills 
 Piome with an unchanging melody all through 
 the year. 
 
 And best of them all, I love my own torrent 
 that tumbles out of the masonry here close to the 
 bridge of Sixtus, and has its two streams cross- 
 ing one another like sabres gleaming bright 
 against the dark, damp, moss-gi'own stones. There 
 are so many fountains in our Pome, glorious, 
 beautiful, and springing to high heaven, that 
 nobody notices this one much, as, coming down 
 through the Via Giidia, the throngs liuny on 
 over the bridge, few I fear praying for the soul 
 of the man that built it — as the inscription asks 
 
24 ARIADNE. 
 
 of you to do, with a humility that is touching 
 in a pontiff. 
 
 I would not go over the bridge with Maryx that 
 morning,, but sat do^vn underneath my fountain 
 that was so fresh and welcome in the warm June 
 noon, where twenty yesirs before I had raised my 
 stall and dedicated it to Apollo Sandaliarius and 
 the good Saints Crispin and Crispian in that 
 jumbling of the pagan and the ecclesiastic, which 
 is of all Eoman things most Roman. 
 
 ]\Iy faun was singing, sheltered safe under 
 the moss}^ wall. The fauns are nowhere dead. 
 They only hide in the water or the leaves ; 
 laughing and weeping like children ; — then you 
 say, " the fountains play," or you say, " the 
 leaves quiver." 
 
 Birds may not sing at noon. They are afraid 
 to wake great Pan who sleeps all mid-day, as 
 you know, and will have silence. The fauns in 
 the w^ater do not heed Pan's pleasure or dis- 
 pleasure ; he is driven out of all cities, and tliej^ 
 know the grand god has small pleasure in a 
 world that fells all his sacred woods. The birds 
 ar(^ more faithful, being led bj- the woodpecker. 
 
ARIADNE 25 
 
 who once was the friend of Mars, and the 
 father of Fauniis, and made all the kings of the 
 earth meet together in his palace that Virgil has 
 painted for us. 
 
 But all this is nonsense, you sa}^ ; — very well ; 
 if it be nonsense to you, be sure to you Rome is 
 dead, and you walk over its stones, blindfold and 
 deaf. 
 
 '' It is an Ariadne," said I to the Faun in the 
 water, for to keep one's opinion is a sweet 
 pleasure and a cheap one ; and as Winckelmann 
 was certain that the Capitoline Ariadne was a 
 Leucothea, so was I certain that the Borghese 
 Bacchus was an Ariadne. Of course I know 
 little of art, I only love it greath', just as the 
 men who most love women are those who know 
 their moods and minds the least. 
 
 "It is an Ariadne," I said to my dog Pales, 
 left on guard on a little straw under my stool ; a 
 white, fox-faced, female thing, with a shrewisli 
 temper, and many original views of her own. 
 
 There was not a soul about, and not a body 
 astir. The broad sunshine lay on the Tiber, 
 making it look all of a hot brazen 3'ellow ; 
 
26 AHIADNA 
 
 many martyrs used to be thrown into it just liere, 
 so Eusebius says, and it is not very far off that 
 the boatman lived, in the Borgian time, who 
 being asked why he had not given alarm when 
 he saw a corpse thrown in, replied, that he saw 
 so many every night, that he natural^ thought 
 nothing of it. 
 
 There was no one moving, and no shadows on 
 the hot, white stones ; over the bridge and dovrn 
 the Via Giulia all was still and empt}^ and all 
 the shutters of the houses were closed. Only at 
 the house at the corner wdiere I lived, my friend 
 Pippo, the cook, stepped out one moment into 
 the balcony over the bridge, and, with one of his 
 l)et pigeons perched on his forehead, holloaed 
 out that he had a stew read}^ full of onions and 
 peppercorns. 
 
 But a stew" on a noonday in mid-summer 
 was an abomination to the senses and the 
 reason, and I took no notice of liim, and he 
 went in out of the sun, pigeon and all, and the 
 place was quite quiet, except for the splashing 
 and the foaming of the water in the wall, which 
 sounded so cool and babbled so of forest leaves 
 
ABIADN£. 
 
 and brook-feel rushes, tliat no one could be bot 
 within an earshot of it. I scarcely envied Maryx 
 in his mai'ble court upon the liill, above Tasso's 
 cypresses, and under Galba's oaks. 
 
 There was a cabbage-leaf nice and wet upon 
 my head, and above that a square of untanned 
 leather, stretched upon four sticks, and wet, too, 
 with sprinkled water, and on the board before 
 me, amongst the tools and the old leather, were 
 a handful of vine -leaves and the half of a water 
 melon, and a flask of wine : who could be hot 
 with all that ? 
 
 There was nothing that needed haste ; onh* 
 tlie butcher's big old boots that he had brought 
 over that morning from his shop by St. 
 Ciispian's church ; and I let them lie with 
 the i)air of little smart scarlet shoes that I had 
 tacked up for handsome Dea at the seed shop 
 yonder, who dearly loved a students' ball, and had 
 a father as sharp of eye and hard of heart as 
 Shylock ; I took a little wine, and stretched my- 
 self, as Pales was doing at her ease ; and the 
 faun in the fountain was singing and piping liis 
 loudest of the days when men were wise and 
 
28 ARIADNJ£, 
 
 worshipped Sylvanus upon Aventine, and in the 
 green gardens and the meadows and the forests 
 invoked him as Sanctus Salutaris. 
 
 And with the music of their song and the 
 bubbling of the water into the great stone basin 
 in the wall, ni}" unfinished sleep came over me 
 again, and I di'eamt that I was in the Gallery 
 of the Cffisars again, and that again I heard the 
 gods, and the poets, and the wanton, dispute 
 round Ariadne. 
 
 Ariadne stretched her hand and touched mine* 
 
 I awoke. Pales was barking ; the drowsy sun- 
 shine was white and wide about me, and between 
 it and me a figure stood. 
 
 Was it Ariadne's ? 
 
 I stumbled to my feet. 
 
 *' My dear, do not take the poppy," I muttered, 
 stupidl}'. " Love was cruel; that he always is." 
 
 Then I got fuller awakened, and was only more 
 bewildered ; I could not stir, the sun blinded me, 
 and the noise of Pales, and of the fountain, 
 deafened me ; I could onl}- blink my e3'es and 
 stare as an old gi'ey owl may do, startled out of 
 sleep in the daytime, and seeing something fair 
 
ARIADNE. 29 
 
 and strange light on the branches of his hollow, 
 ivy -mantled tree. The figure between me and the 
 Via Giulia was so like the Ariadne of Borghese 
 that I could only gaze at it idiotically, and wish 
 that I were indoors with Pippo and his i^epper- 
 corns. For there are old weird legends here and 
 there in Kome of statues that have come to life 
 and given little peace to those that roused 
 them. 
 
 The figure between me and the golden light 
 and the dark walls had poppies in her hand and a 
 puqile passion-flower ; the stuffs she wore looked 
 to me like the variegated alabaster ; she had the 
 small head, the clustered hair, the youthful eyes, 
 the look as of one whom Aidoneus had sent up to 
 seek for light and Hfe and whom Love claimed. 
 
 **Do not take the poi)pies; they mean death!" 
 I stammered, blinking like an owl ; and then 
 I saw that it was not the bronze of the Borghese 
 made alive, but a mere natiu-ally living creature, 
 a girl, travel- stained and tired, and huldmg 
 gathered flowers that were drooping in the 
 heat. 
 
 She came a little nearer, and leaned her two 
 
30 AEIADN^. 
 
 liands upon my board, and Pales ceased to yell, 
 and smelt at her almost tenderl}'. 
 
 " The poppies are no harm," she said, with a 
 little wonder. " Will you. tell me where the 
 Ghetto is ? I want the Portico of Octavia." 
 
 When I heard her voice speaking, then I knew 
 that it was not my Ariadne with her robes of gold 
 and rose, and her crown of imperishable ivy, but 
 only a mere human thing standing between me and 
 the sunshine. 
 
 Her skirts were white indeed, but of the 
 roughest linen spun on village distaffs, and 
 what I had taken for the hues of the alabaster 
 was an old Roman scarf of manj' colours 
 such as our Trasteverine women wear. Her 
 small and slender feet were disfigured in coarse 
 shoes covered over with gxey powder from the 
 highways and the streets. The poppies were 
 common field flowers such as grow everywhere hy 
 millions, when the corn i^ high, and the i">assion- 
 flower, no doubt, she had iiulled down from any 
 one of the garden walls or the Campagna hedges. 
 But in her face — though the sidn was golden 
 with sun-tan, and the eyes were heavy with 
 
ARIADNE. 31 
 
 fatigue, and the clustering hair was tumbled and 
 dull from, heat and dust — in the face I saw my 
 Ariadne. 
 
 I had not been wholl}" dreaming this time. 
 *' I have come from the sea," she said, with 
 her hands leaning on the plank of my board. 
 *' I have lost my way. I do not know where 
 to go. You look good ; would you tell me 
 where the Portico of Octavia is ? That is what 
 I vv'ant." 
 
 She was a beautiful girl, a child almost. I 
 stumbled to my feet on a sort of instinct of 
 deference to her sex and youth. Though she 
 was very poor, as one could see, there was a 
 strange grace about her as she stood with all 
 the hot sun beating down on her bronze-hued 
 head, that should have had the crown of ivy 
 on it. She looked tired, but not timid in any 
 wa}' ; and there was a look of eager and joyous 
 expectation on her face. Just so might Claudia 
 Quinta have looked when with her own un- 
 aided hands she drew the stranded vessel of the 
 Magna Mater off the banks of Tiber, in triumpli 
 and vindication of her innocence. 
 
32 ARIADNE. 
 
 *' The Portico of Octavia ? " I echoed, stupidly, 
 *' Do you know what it is, now, my dear ? " 
 
 " Yes, I have read of it in old Latin hooks." 
 
 (In Latin hooks — good heavens !) 
 
 " And you want to go to the Ghetto ? " 
 
 *' Yes, that is the name." 
 
 "Do 3'ou know what that is ? " 
 
 ''No." 
 
 " ^Vhy do you go then ? " 
 
 " There lives an old man there that was my 
 mother's father ; I was to go to him." 
 
 An old man in the Ghetto, and she mj Ariadne ! 
 — the two went ill together. Not that I have 
 any prejudices. Though a Eoman horn, I have 
 lived in too many lands, and, in my own way, 
 with too many dead men's minds in books, to 
 have any hostility against class or country. Only 
 for this girl whom all the gods had counselled, 
 and who had Love's poppy-flowers in her hands, 
 to go to that foul quarter that had once the 
 gilded vileness of the Suhurra, and has now the 
 dingy vileness of the Ghetto ! She saw the 
 astonishment and reluctance in me, and the 
 foolish impulse of displeasure that I felt must 
 
ARIADNE!. 33 
 
 have shown itself on my features, for she looked 
 clisap2)omtecl. 
 
 " I can ask some one else," she said, a little 
 sadly. *' You have your stall to leave, and per- 
 haps it is far awsLj, I beg your pardon." 
 
 But I did not like to let her go. It seemed 
 chmiish, and I might never see her again. 
 Rome is large, and the Ghetto foul air for body 
 and spu'it. 
 
 " No, no," I cried to her, for she was already 
 turning away. " It is not that. It is not far off, 
 and if it were, the stall is safe with the dog, but 
 in the heat, and to that pigsty — not but what I 
 will go with you, my dear — oh yes, only wait a 
 little tiU the noon sun passes." 
 
 *' I would rather not wait," she said ; and 
 paused, but looked at me doubtingly, as though 
 my hesitation had suggested to her some mis- 
 giving of herself or me, and that I did not like. 
 
 I wondered what the Faun on the fountain 
 thought of it ; he and I often gossiped together ; 
 but I had no time to take counsel of him, for 
 she was moving away towards the bridge and 
 the nightingale-haunted slope of Janus' liill. 
 
 VOL. I. D 
 
34 ARIADNJE. 
 
 " That is the wrong road," I cried to her. 
 " You have no need to cross the river. My dear, 
 if I seemed to hesitate I must have seemed a 
 brute. I had been asleep in this hot air, and got 
 as empt}^ pated as a scooped-out melon that the 
 bo3^s have emptied in the sun. Just wait here till 
 this great noon glare passes — it is shady here, 
 and cot a soul will come — then I will go with 
 3^ou, for the streets are puzzling when one does 
 not know them ; not that there ever was a time 
 that they were strange to me, the gods be 
 praised ! " 
 
 Sh^ looked at me quickly with confidence. 
 
 " You love Eome ? " 
 
 " Who loves not his mother ? And our mother 
 is the mother of the world." 
 
 She looked glad, and as if pleased with me, 
 and took the stool I pushed to her, where the 
 shadow of the leather could shelter her from the 
 sun. 
 
 Pales licked her hand; Pales, who hated 
 strangers, especially those whose hands were 
 empty. 
 
 She gave a short sigh as of fatigue, once 
 
ARIADNE. 35 
 
 seated ; but her ej-es went to the water sprmging 
 from the v;all, aud to the domes and temples that 
 she coukl see afar off. As I happened to have 
 a little rush basket full of the first figs under 
 my vine leaves, (I had meant them for handsome 
 Dea, but Dea would have the scarlet shoes,) I 
 gave them to this girl, and she thanked me with 
 a smile, and slaked her thirst with one of them, 
 which comforted me, for it seemed to make her 
 more thoroughly human. I was still a little 
 afraid of her, as one is of the creatures of one's 
 dreams. 
 
 '* You spoke of the sea ; you come from the 
 Maremma ? " I asked her ; for no one who sits all 
 his life long at a street corner can bear to sit 
 in silence as she was willing to do. 
 
 " Yes; from the coast." 
 
 " But you seem to remember Rome ? " 
 
 " My father was a Roman." 
 
 She spoke with a flash of pride. 
 
 " Is he dead, my dear ? " 
 
 " He died a year ago," she answered ; and her 
 beautiful curved mouth grew pale and trembled. 
 " He told me, when the money would not last 
 
 J) 2 
 
36 ARIADNE. 
 
 any more, I must try and find tlie old man by 
 the Portico of Octa^da ; and the money was done 
 — so I came." 
 
 " What was yom^ father ? " 
 
 " A sculptor, and he carved wood too." 
 
 " And this old man ? " 
 
 " I do not know. I believe he was cruel to my 
 mother. But I am not sure. I never heard 
 very much. Onty, when he was dying he gave 
 me some papers, and told me to come to Home. 
 And I would have come to Eome if he had not 
 told me, because there was no place on earth he 
 loved so well, and only to see it and die, he said, 
 that was enough" 
 
 *' He lived very near to die without seeing 
 it." 
 
 "He was very poor always and in ill-health," 
 she said, mider her breath. The words rebuked 
 my thoughtless and cynical remark. 
 
 " And this old man who is in Ghetto, is he all 
 you have to look to ? " 
 
 "Yes. I think he will be glad to see me, do 
 not you ? " 
 
 " Surely, if he have eyes," I said, and felt a 
 
ABIADNZ 37 
 
 little choking in my tliroat, there was something 
 so solitary and astray in her, yet nothing afraicL 
 
 " And what is your name, my dear ? " 
 
 " They caUed me Gioja." 
 
 " Gioja. And why that ? " 
 
 " I suppose because my mother thought me a 
 joy to her when I came. I do not know. It was 
 her fancy " 
 
 " A pretty one, but still heathenish as a name, 
 as a baptismal name, you know ; it is not in the 
 Saints' Calendar." 
 
 ** No. I have no saint. I do not know much 
 about the saints. I have read St. Jerome's 
 writings, and the City of God, and Clirj'sostom ; 
 but I do not care for them ; they were hard 
 men and cruel, and they derided the beautiful 
 gods, and broke their statues. It was Julian 
 that was right, not they : only he killed so many 
 beautiful birds. I would not have done that." 
 
 I was of her way of thinking myself; but in 
 Kome, with the monks and the priests every- 
 where at that time, as many as ants that swarm 
 in midsummer dust across a roadway, one had 
 to be guarded how one said such things, or one 
 
38 APdADNiE. 
 
 got no ecclesiastical sandals or sacerdotal slioon 
 to stitcli, and fell into bad odour. 
 
 **No, there is no saint for me," she said, a 
 little sadly again, and looked up at the blue sky, 
 as though conscious that other girls had celestial 
 guardians yonder in the golden shrines, and 
 upward in the azure heavens, but she was all 
 alone. 
 
 " It does not matter," I said heathenishly, like 
 the pagan that I was, as Father Trillo, who 
 was a heavy man, and trod heavily, and wore 
 out many a i^air of shoes, would often tell me 
 with a twinkle in his merry eyes. 
 
 ** It is no matter. Let us hoi^e the gods of 
 joy are with you that the Christians killed. 
 Maybe they will serve as good a purpose as the 
 saints. They are not really dead. You may 
 see them everywhere here in Rome, if you have 
 faith. Only wait till the night falls." 
 
 She sat silently, not eating her figs, but 
 watching the water gush out from the wall. She 
 had dipped her poppies in it to refresh them, 
 the passifiora was already dead. There was a 
 perplexed expectant look in her ^dreamj^ eyes. 
 
ARIADN2. 39 
 
 as though indeed Persephone had really sent 
 her up to earth. 
 
 " Have you come all the way from the sea to- 
 day ? and from what part of the coast ? " I asked 
 her, to keep her there in the shade a little. 
 
 " From below Orhetello," she answered. "I 
 have walked a part of the way ; the other part 
 boats brought me that were coastmg. The 
 fisher people are always kind ; and many know 
 me." 
 
 " Were you not sorry to leave the sea ? " 
 
 " I should have been, only I came to Rome. 
 Where we lived it was lovely ; great rocks, and 
 those rocks all thyme-covered, and the sheep and 
 the goats grazing; farther in the marshes it is 
 terrible, you know ; all reeds, and rushes, and 
 swamps, and salt-water pools, and birds that cry 
 strangely, and the black buffalo. But even 
 there, there are all the dead cities, and the 
 Etruscan Idngs' tombs. I did not lose sight of 
 the sea till the day before yesterda}^ when they 
 told me I must turn inland, and indeed I knew 
 it by the maps, but I could not find the birds 
 and the thickets that Virgil writes of, nor the 
 
40 ARIADNE. 
 
 woods along the river, it is all sand now. There 
 was a barge coming up the river with pines 
 that had been felled, and I paid the men in it 
 a little, and they let me come up the Tiber with 
 them, for I was tired. We were all the two 
 nights and j^esterday on the water. I was not 
 dull. I was looking alwaj^s for Eome. But the 
 river is dreary ; it is not at all like what Virgil 
 says." 
 
 ** Virgil wrote two thousand years ago. Did 
 that never occur to you ? " 
 
 " I thought it would be all the same," she 
 said, with a little sigh. " Why should it change ? 
 They have not bettered it. The forests and 
 the roses must have been lovelier than the sand. 
 Last night it ramed, and there was thunder. 
 I got very wet, and I grew a little afraid. The 
 pines looked so helpless, great strong things 
 that had used to stand so straight by the side 
 of the waves, thrown down there and bound, 
 and going to be built into walls for scaffolding, 
 and burnt up in ovens and furnaces, and never 
 going to see the sea and the seagulls and the 
 coral fishing any more ! But nothing really 
 
A1UADN2. 41 
 
 'iiui"t me you see, and when tlie rain passed off 
 it was sunrise, and though we were leagues awa}- 
 I saw a gold cross shining where the clouds 
 had broken, and one of the bargemen said to 
 me, * There — that is St. Peter's ; ' and I thought 
 \i\j heart would have broken with happiness, 
 and when at last we landed at the wharf 
 where the Lions' heads are, I sprang on to the 
 landing-place, and I knelt down and Idssed the 
 earth, and thanked God because at last I saw 
 Rome." 
 
 I Hstened, and felt my eyes w^et, and my heart 
 warmed to her, because Rome is to me — as to all 
 who love her truly — as mother and as brethren, 
 and as the world and the temple of the world. 
 
 " I thank thee who hast led me out of darkness 
 into light," I murmured, as the Hebrew singer 
 does. " That is what Maryx said when first 
 his foot touched Rome. It is a pity Maiyx 
 should be gone across the bridge to his nightin- 
 gales." 
 
 " Who is Maiyx ? " 
 
 " A great man." 
 
 " And you ? " 
 
42 AEUDNR 
 
 "A small one — as you see." 
 " And wli}^ have you Apollo there ? " 
 She was looking at a little statue, a foot high 
 ahove my stall, that MarjTi had made for me 
 man}^ years before, when he was a youth study- 
 ing at the Yilla Medici. 
 
 "That is Apollo Sandaliarius. The shoe- 
 makers had theu' share of the sun-god in Rome ; 
 to be sure it was not till Rome became corrupt 
 which takes from the glory of it; but in his 
 statues he is always sandalled, you know. And 
 underneath there are Crispin and Crispianus, 
 who have theii' church hard by ; the brother- 
 saints who made shoes for the poor for nothing, 
 and the angels brought them the leather : that 
 picture of them is on stained glass ; look at theu' 
 palm leaves and their awls : they are always 
 represented like that." 
 *' You are a Roman ? " 
 
 *' Oh yes. You may have heard of that cobbler 
 whom Pliny tells us of v^^ho had his stall in the 
 midst of the Forum, and who had a crow that 
 talked to the Romans from the rostrum, and was 
 beloved by them, and which crow he slew in a fit 
 
ARIADNE. 43 
 
 of rage because it tore up a new bit of leather, 
 as if the i^oor bird could help destroying something, 
 having consorted with lawgivers and statesmen ! 
 That man they slew, and the crow they buried 
 with divine honours in the Appian Way. I am 
 the ghost of that most unlucky man. I have 
 alwaj^s told the people so, and they will believe 
 anything if only you tell it them often enough 
 and loudly enough. Have they not believed in 
 the vii*tues of kings, and are they not just be- 
 ginning to believe in the virtues of republics ? 
 The sun is off one side of Via Giulia ; now do 
 you wish to be going ? Will you not break a 
 piece of bread with your figs first ? " 
 
 She would not, and we took the way along the 
 river towards the Ghetto. 
 
 As we walked she told me a little more 
 about herself, and it was easy to surmise tlie 
 rest. Her father, when little more than a 
 student, had been ordered out of the city in exile 
 for some real or imagined insult to the church, 
 and ruined in his art and fortunes, had gone, 
 a broken-hearted man at five-and-twcnty, to a 
 
44 ARIADNE. 
 
 dull village on the Ligurian Sea, taking with him 
 the daughter of a Syrian Jew, Ben Suhm, whom 
 he had wedded there, she changing her faith 
 for his. What manner of man he might have 
 been was not xerj clear, because she loved him, 
 and where women love they lie so innocently and 
 unwittingly of the object which they praise ; but 
 I gathered that he had had, probably, talent, 
 and a classic fanc}^, rather than genius, and had 
 been weak and quickly beaten, finding it simpler 
 to lie in the sun and sorrow for his fate, than 
 to arise and fight against it : there are man}^ 
 such. 
 
 She said he had used to carve busts and 
 friezes and panels in the hard arbutus wood, 
 and sometimes in the marble that lies strewn 
 about that coast, and would model also in 
 terra-cotta and cla}^ and send his things bj- 
 hucksters to the towns for sale, and so get a 
 little money for the simple life they led. 
 
 Life costs but little on these sunny, silent 
 shores ; four walls of loose stones, a roof of furze 
 and brambles, a fare of fish and fruit and millet- 
 bread, a fire of driftwood easily gathered — and 
 
ABIADN£. 45 
 
 all is told. For a feast pluck the violet cactus ; 
 for a holiday j)ush the old red boat to sea, and 
 set the brown sail square against the sun — 
 nothing can be cheaj)er, perhaps few things can 
 be better. 
 
 To feel the western breezes blow over that 
 sapphke sea, laden with the fragrance of a 
 score of blossoming isles. To lie under the hollow 
 rocks, where centuries before the fisher follv 
 l)ut up that j)ainted tablet to the dear Madonna, 
 for all poor shipwrecked souls. To climb the 
 high hills through the tangle of myrtle and 
 tamarisk, and the tufted rosemary, with the kids 
 bleating above upon some unseen height. To 
 watch the soft night close in, and the warning 
 lights shine out over shoals and sunken rocks, and 
 the moon hang low and golden in the blue dusk 
 at the end there under the arch of the boughs. 
 To spend, long hours in the cool, fi-esh, break of 
 day, driftmg with the tide, and leaping with bare 
 free limbs mto the waves, and Ijing outstretched 
 upon them, glancing down to the depths below, 
 where silvery fish are gliding and coral branches 
 are gi'owing, and pink shells are floating like 
 
46 ARIADNA 
 
 roseleaves, five fathoms low and more. Oh ! a 
 good life, and none better, abroad in the winds 
 and weather, as Nature meant that every living 
 thing should be, onl}-, alas, the devil put it into 
 the mind of man to build cities ! A good life 
 for the soul and the body : and from it this sea- 
 born Joy came to seek the Ghetto ! 
 
 "We went through the crooked streets whilst the 
 shadow of the houses was still scarce wider than 
 a knife's edge, through the dusty and sorrowful 
 ways once threaded by the silken litters with 
 their closed cm-tains and fringes of gold, and 
 then- amorous secrets and their running slaves, of 
 the beautiful women who once gave fashion and 
 fame to the quarter of the Velabrum. She looked 
 as if such a litter should be bearing her to feast 
 the sight of Caesar, and lean on cushions in that 
 casement " whence the women could see the 
 play of the fountains as they supped." 
 
 But that window is now only a line of shat- 
 tered brick upon the Palatine, and this my 
 Ariadne was going to the Ghetto ! 
 
 What a face she had ! I thought if one could 
 only have jilaited an ivy wreath, and set it on her 
 
AEIADN£. , 47 
 
 curls, instead of tlie hood she had pulled over 
 them, the Borghese bronze would have been her 
 ver}^ likeness. She seemed to me Ariadne, 
 caressed by the sea, and made sweet and strong 
 by it, and with fair young hmbs, and young 
 breasts like seashells — but no lover, mortal or 
 immortal, had touched her yet. 
 
 She went through the streets with happy 
 dreaming eyes, as of one who goes to a beloved 
 friend long unseen. 
 
 " You knew Rome before ? " I asked her. 
 
 *' I never saw it with my eyes, nor walked in 
 it," she answered me. " But I know it well. 
 My father had Pliny and Pausanias and Strabo 
 and all the old books, and pictures, drawings, 
 and models, he had made ; and would bring 
 them out and talk of them half the day and 
 night. AVhen I was quite httle I set oif to 
 walk to Eome. I was three jenvs old, I think ; 
 and they found me asleep among the myrtles 
 on the hills three miles from home. My father 
 would sit on the shore and look over the hills 
 eastward so often, with such a hunger in his 
 eyes. 'The moon is looking on her now,' he 
 
48 , ariadn:^. 
 
 would say ; ' if onty I could see the bronze 
 Aurelius black against the sky before I die ! ' 
 But he never did. It must be so with any 
 Roman. It would be so with you." 
 
 " It was so with me. Only I — returned." 
 
 " Ah, he had not the strength ! But he loved 
 Rome always. Better than my mother, or than 
 me. 
 
 Then her mouth shut close, and she looked 
 vexed to have seemed to pass any reproach on 
 him. 
 
 We went under the Arch of Janus and past 
 the bright spring of the Argentine water. 
 
 *' That is the spring of the Dioscuri, I think?" 
 she said, and looked at me eagerly. 
 
 Who could have had the heart to tell her it 
 was an oft-disputed point ? 
 
 "Yes; they say so," I said to her. "You 
 see, my dear, we must be different men in Rome 
 to any other men ; the very cattle drivers can 
 water their bullocks from where the divine 
 T}Tidarids let their chargers drink." 
 
 ** You believe in the Dioscuri ? " she said, 
 with serious eyes on mine, and I saw that unless 
 
AHIADN^. 49 
 
 I should say I did, I should never win a step 
 farther in her confidence. 
 
 " Of course," I answered ; " who would lose 
 them, the brethren of Light by the lake 
 side ? " 
 
 And indeed I do believe all thinf^s and all tradi- 
 tions. Histor}^ is like that old stag that Charles 
 of France foimd out hunting in the woods once, 
 with the bronze collar round its neck on 
 which was written, "■ C?esar mihi hoc donavit." 
 How one's fancy loves to linger about that old 
 stag, and what a crowd of mighty shades come 
 thronging at the very thought of him ! How 
 wonderful it is to think of — that quiet gi'ej' beast 
 leading his lovely life under the shadows of the 
 woods, with his hinds and their fawns about him, 
 whilst Caesar after Cassar fell and generation 
 on generation passed away and perished ! But 
 the sciolist taps you on the arm. " Deer average 
 Miy years of life ; it was some mere court trick 
 of course — how easy to have such a collar made ! " 
 Well, what have we gained? The stag was 
 better than the sciolist. 
 
 She smiled and lingered tliere, v/ith the look 
 
 VOL. I. K 
 
50 ABIABNE. 
 
 always on lier face as of one who sees his native 
 land at length after long absence. 
 
 For the saints she cared little more than they 
 did for her. I saw she seldom looked at the 
 frescoed virgins, and the china martyrs behind 
 their iron gratings at the turnings of the streets, 
 but wherever an old fluted column was built into 
 the dingy brick, or wdiere a broad semi-circle 
 sprang across a passage-way with green weeds 
 in its crumbled carvings, there her gaze rested, 
 and a certain shadow of diapp ointment and of 
 wonder began to rej^lace the eager expectation 
 on her face. 
 
 " I have seen Eome in my dreams ever}^ 
 night," she said at last. " Only I thought that 
 it was all of marble ; marble, and gold, and 
 ivor}', and the laurels and the palms growing 
 every^'here, and the courts in the temples oj)en 
 to the sky ; and it is all dust — all dust and 
 dirt." 
 
 " It is not dust in Rome, nor du^t," said I. 
 ** It is dead men's ashes. You forget, my dear, 
 Virgil's birds are all silent, and the roses of 
 Ostia are all faded. Nothing blooms two thousand 
 
ABIADNt:. 51 
 
 years, except now and then a woman's face in the 
 marble." 
 
 She sighed a little, heavily. 
 
 " What do you expect the Ghetto to be like ? " 
 I asked her, for it seemed terrible to me that she 
 should have been allowed to grow uj) in this sort 
 of illusion. 
 
 " Oh, I know what that is," she answered 
 quickl}'. "At least my father has told me so 
 often, when I asked him, because it was my 
 mother's biiih-place, and must be beautiful I 
 thought, and I was so little when she died. He 
 always showed me the drawings of the Portico of 
 Octavia, and of that I could read much, and the 
 books all said that there were few places lovelier 
 in Rome, and that Praxiteles' Cupid and other 
 statues were there, and the Theatre of Marcellus 
 and Juno's temple were close by, and so I have 
 always seen it in my fancy, white as snow, and 
 with many fountains, and above head, in the open 
 domes, the swallows flying, and now and then an 
 eagle going across like a great cloud. Tell me 
 —am I not right ? Is it like that ? Tell me ? " 
 
 I turned my head away and felt sick at heart 
 
 E 2 
 
 U. OP lUL Lia 
 
52 ARIADNA 
 
 for her — fed on these fair, cruel visions, and going 
 to the filth of Pescheria and Fiumara ! 
 
 " My dear ! you will always forget the roses 
 hy Ostia," I said to her. " Rome is changed. 
 You remember the sieges she has borne, and 
 she has had masters more cruel to her arts 
 and her antiquity than any enemies. That 
 great black pile joii saw yonder (old to us — 
 it is the Farnese), was built out of the ruins 
 of the Flavian amphitheatre. The Rome 
 you think of is no longer ours. Octavia would 
 know no place where her foot fell could she come 
 fcack and walk by daylight through the city : by 
 jnoonHght one may cheat oneself. But it is the 
 urbs still, the caput mundi — the capital of the. 
 world. Yes, still there is no city upon earth like 
 Rome. Why will you hasten ? Stay here by the 
 spring of your Dioscuri and eat your figs. The 
 sun is warm." 
 
 ** No, let me see it — all — quicld}^," she said, 
 with a restless sigh ; a great troubled fear had 
 come upon her. 
 
 If I had been a prince or cardinal now — or 
 even Maryx or my friend Hilarion — but I was 
 
ARIADNA 53 
 
 only Crispin the cobbler, with no more than was 
 needed for myself and Pales, and only one room 
 in a house hanging over Tiber, and shared with 
 half a hundred other tenants. I could do nothing 
 — notliing — except plod after her in the heat 
 through the empty ways of the quarter of my 
 friends the tanners. 
 
 Was I asleep again, and only dreaming after 
 all ? I began to thmk so. 
 
 She kept walking onward through the thick 
 white dust, with a free swift motion, tired though 
 she was, that might have trodden grass at 
 daydawn and scarce brushed the dew. 
 
 In silence we approached the Doric pillars 
 of the lower arcades of the Theatre of Mar- 
 cellus, and where once the court of Augustus, 
 shuddering, saw the evil omen of the broken 
 curule chair, there were only now the mules 
 munching their fodder or straining under 
 the whip and knife, and their mountam 
 di'ivers laughing and swearing, quarrelling and 
 shrieking, and the peasant women suclding their 
 rough, brown, clamorous babes, and the Jew 
 pedlars slinking from stall to stall, hungry and 
 
54 ABIADNA 
 
 lynx-e^^ed for safe bargain and barter. The 
 great uncouth Orsini walls leant over the pillars 
 and jammed them down into the ground ; lattices 
 varicoloured with multitudinous fluttering" rags 
 gaped between the higher Ionian columns ; black 
 yawning entrances showed piles of lumber and of 
 rude merchandise, old copper, tattered clothes, 
 pots and pans, cabbages and cauldrons, rust}- 
 iron and smokmg stews : — the tit Marcellus eris 
 seemed to sigh tln:ough the riot of screams 
 and oaths and mirth and fury, and shouted songs 
 and vendors' curses. 
 
 She paused in the midst of the dirt, the 
 squalor, the pushing people ; and a vague terror 
 came into her eyes that looked up into mine with 
 a vague distrust. 
 
 *' Do you lead me right ? Are you sure ? " 
 
 I would have given my right hand to have been 
 able to answer her that I led her wrong. 
 
 But what could I do ? I could not build up 
 for her out of my old leather the marble and 
 golden city of her scholars' fancies. 
 
 I answered her almost roughly : men are often 
 rough when they are themselves in pain. 
 
ARIABNi:. 
 
 " Yes, this is right enough. Rome has seen 
 two thousand years of sack and -siege, and fire 
 and sword, and robbery and ruin, since the days 
 you dream of, chikl. I tell you Augustus would 
 not know one stone of all the many that he laid. 
 His own mighty tumulus is only a propped-up 
 ruin ; and the people chuckle there on summer- 
 nights over little comedies ; you maj^ laugh at 
 Harlequin where Livia sat, dishevelled and dis- 
 traught. Hadrian could slay Apollodorus for 
 darmg to disagree with him about the height of 
 a temple, but he could not ensure his own grave 
 from desecration and destruction ; it is a fortress 
 yonder for the fisherman of Galilee ; he has a 
 little better fate than Augustus, but not much. 
 Pass through the market — take care, those craw- 
 fish bite. You see the Corinthian columns 
 all cracked and scorched ? The flames did 
 that in Titus' time. Yes, those built into that 
 ugly church, I mean, and jammed up amongst 
 those hovels. Well, that is all that you or I or 
 anj^one will ever see of the Portico of O eta via ; 
 the one good woman of imperial Rome." 
 
 I said it roughly and brutally ; I knew tliat as 
 
56 ARIADN£. 
 
 I spoke, yet I said it. Men use rude words and 
 harsh, sometunes, by reason of the very gentle- 
 ness and pity that are in their souls. 
 
 AVe were m the middle of the Pescheria. 
 
 It was Friday, and there was a large supply of 
 fish still unexhausted ; rosy mullets, white soles, 
 huge cuttlefish, big spigole, sweet ombrini, black 
 lobsters — all the fish of the Tyrrhene seas were 
 swarming everywhere and filling all the place 
 with salt strong pungent odours. Fish by the 
 thousands and tens of thousands, living and djing, 
 were crowded on the stone slabs and in the stone 
 tanks, and on the ii'on hooks which jutted out 
 between corbels and architraves and pillars and 
 headstones, massive with the might of Ceesarian 
 Kome, and which in their day had seen Titus 
 roll by in his chariot behind his mill\ -white 
 horses, with the trumpets of the Jubilee and 
 the veil of the Temple borne before liim by his 
 Syrian captives. 
 
 She stood in the midst of the naiTOw way with 
 the acrid smells and the writhing fish and the 
 screaming people round her, and in the air the 
 high arch restored by Septimius Severus, now 
 
ARIADNE. 57 
 
 daubed with bruised and peeling frescoes of 
 the Christian Church ; at her side was a filths- 
 hole where a woman crimped a living quivering 
 eel ; above her head was a dusky unglazed window 
 where an old Jew was turnmg over rusty locks 
 and bars. 
 
 She stood and looked : she who came to see 
 the Venus of Pheidias and Praxiteles' Love. 
 
 Then a deathlike paleness overspread her face, 
 an unspeakable horror took the hght out of her 
 eyes ; she dropped her head and shivered as 
 with cold in the hot Pioman sunshine. 
 
 I waited silently. AVhat could I say ? 
 
 AVith a visible and physical ill one can deal ; 
 one can thrust a knife into a man at need, 
 one can give a woman money for bread or 
 masses, one can run for medicine or a priest. 
 But for a creature with a face like Ariadne's, who 
 had believed in the old gods and found them 
 fables, who had sought for the old altars and 
 found them ruins, who had dreamed of Imperial 
 Rome and found the Ghetto — for such a sorrow 
 as this, what could one do ? 
 
CHAPTEE III. 
 
 I WAITED for some j)assionate outbreak from 
 her after the manner of women, but none came ; 
 one might have said she had been frozen there, 
 so silently she stood. 
 
 After a Httle while she turned her face to me. 
 
 So one would fancy any creature would look 
 that finds itself adrift upon a wide and unknown 
 sea, an-d has been dreaming of land and home, 
 and wakes and finds onl}^ the salt water and the 
 unfamiliar stars. 
 
 I tried to comfort her, blunderingly ; a man so 
 often does his worst when he means the best. 
 
 ** Take courage, my dear," I said, ** and do 
 not look like that. They are all that are left, it is 
 true, those columns in the wall and that arch, and 
 a few lintels and capitals and such like, here and 
 
ARIADNE. 59 
 
 there, like this egg-and-cup cornice just ahove 
 
 our heads where that woman crimps her fish — 
 
 and where the Yenus and the Love are gone, w4io 
 
 knows ? The losses of the world are manj^ — the}' 
 
 may be under our verj^ feet beneath the soil, that 
 
 is quite possible. And the place is filthy and the 
 
 people are cruel, and you ma}" well be startled. But 
 
 do not think that it is all as bad as this. Oh no, 
 
 Home is still beautiful ; so you will say when you 
 
 know it well ; and the past is all about you in it 
 
 —only you must have j)atience. It is hke an 
 
 intaglio that has been lying in the sand for a 
 
 score of centui'ies. You must rub the dust away 
 
 — then the fine and noble hues of the classic face 
 
 show clearly still. You thought to see Augustan 
 
 Rome ? I know ! And your heart aches because 
 
 of the squalor and the decay and the endless 
 
 loss everywhere that never will be made up to 
 
 the world, let the ages come and go as they may, 
 
 and cities rise and fall. But you must have 
 
 patience. Rome will not give her secrets up at 
 
 the first glance. Only wait a little wdiile and see 
 
 the moon shine on it all a night or two, and you 
 
 will learn to love her better in her colossal ruin 
 
60 aeiadn:E\ 
 
 than even 3'ou have loved the marble and 
 ivory city of your dreams. For there is nothing- 
 mean or narrow here : the vaults, the domes, the 
 stairs, the courts, the waters, the hills, the plains, 
 the sculpture, the very light itself, they are all 
 wide and vast and noble, and man himself dilates 
 in them, gains stature and soul as it were, one 
 scarce knows how, and someway looks nearer 
 God in Rome than ever he looks elsewhere. But 
 I talk foolishly — and this is Ghetto." 
 
 I had hardly known very well what I did say ; 
 I wanted to solace her, and knew ill how to do it. 
 She stood with wide-opened despairing eyes, look- 
 ing down the narrow lines of stinking Pescheria 
 to the charred and crumbled columns builded 
 into the church wall of Our Lady of the Fishes. 
 She had not heard a single word that I had said. 
 
 '' This is Rome ! " she murmured after a 
 moment, and was still again ; her voice had 
 changed strangely, and all the hope was dead in 
 it ; the hope that a little while before had rung as 
 sweet and clear as rings the linnet's song at day- 
 break in the priorj^ garden upon Aventine. 
 
 " This is the Hebrew quarter of Rome — yes," I 
 
ARIADNE 61 
 
 answered her. It seemed to me as if I said 
 "Yes — this is hell," and led her -there. She 
 went forward without any other word, and entered 
 the Place of AVeeping. 
 
 " Is there one Ben Siilim here — an old man ? " 
 she asked of a youth heating a worn Persian 
 oai*pet, red and white, upon the stones. The lad 
 nodded, tossing his dusky curls out of his jewel- 
 bright eyes to stare at her. 
 
 *' You want him? " he said; "go to the left 
 there — on the fifth floor just underneath the roof ; 
 there, where that bit of gold brocade is hanging 
 out to scare the moths away with the smi. Do 
 you bring any good things to sell ? or come to 
 buy?" 
 
 ** Is he poor ? " she asked dreamily, watching 
 the olive-skinned babies that were rolhng in the 
 dirt. The lad gi'inned from end to end of his 
 mouth, like a tulip flower. 
 
 " We are all poor here," he answered her, and 
 feU again to the thrashing of his carpet, while 
 the babies roUed in the dust with curious deliglit 
 in its filth and their own nakedness. She moved 
 on towards the place that he had pointed out, 
 
62 ABIADNA 
 
 where the brocade that might one day have 
 served Vittoria Colonna was catching on its tar- 
 nished gold such narrow gUnts of sunshine as 
 could come between the close-packed roofs. She 
 seemed to have forgotten me. 
 
 I caught her skirts and tried to hold her back. 
 " Stay — my dear, stay ! " I said to her, not know- 
 ing very well what words I used. '* Let me go 
 first and ask : this is no place for you. Staj'' — 
 see — I am poor too, and old, and of little account, 
 but my home is better than this reekuig desolation, 
 than this stew of thieves and usurers and necro- 
 mancers, and foul women who blend vile philtres 
 to the hurt of maiden's souls. Come, you who 
 belong to all the gods of Joy, you must not be 
 buried there; — j^ou, my Aiiadne, you will grow 
 sick and blind with sorrow, and die like a caged 
 nightingale of never seeing any glimpse of 
 heaven, and how will Love, who loves jon, ever 
 find you there ? Come back " 
 
 She looked at me wonderingi}^ thinldng me 
 mad no doubt, for what could she know of my 
 dream before the Borghese bronze ? But the 
 pain in her was too deep for any lesser emotion 
 
ARIADNK 63 
 
 to prevail much with her. She drew herself from 
 my grasp, and moved onward towards the deep 
 dark doorway like a pit's mouth that was under- 
 neath the gold brocade. 
 
 Two hags were sitting at the doorstep, fat and 
 yellow, picking over rags, rubies of glass and 
 chains of gilt beads shaldng in their ears and on 
 their breasts. They leered upon her as she 
 approached. 
 
 She turned and stretched her hand to 
 me. 
 
 " You have been good and I am thankful," 
 she said faintly. *'But let me go alone. The 
 old man is poor, that is a reason the more ; 
 perhai)S he wants me. Let me go. If I have 
 need of anything I will come to you by yon 
 foimtain — let me go." 
 
 Then the mouth of the pit seemed to swallow 
 her ; the darkness seemed to engulf her, and the 
 red glow of the dying poppies in her hand was 
 lost to me. 
 
 The two hags, who had been all eyes and ears, 
 chuckled and nodded at me. 
 
 *' A fair morsel that ! Does she go to Ben 
 
64 ABIADNE. 
 
 Siilim ? She has a look of Zourah. Oh, yes, 
 she has a look of Zourah ; it is only the other 
 Jay — some sixteen years or so — the handsomest 
 maid in all the Ghetto, and with a voice ! — like a 
 rain of diamonds the notes were when she 
 sang. She used to sing on high there, where the 
 gold stuif hangs, and all the courts were still as 
 death to listen. Ben Sulim had just sold her to 
 a man of Milan for the i:)ublic stage, when one 
 morn the bird was missing, and he searched all 
 Kome in vain : some said she had gone with a 
 student, a Trasteverino, who worked in marble, 
 who had been banished for some irreverence to his 
 omi church, the church of the Christians. But 
 no one ever rightly knew. Is this her daughter ? 
 — a comely maiden. But she will get no welcome 
 
 there. Well, there are princes and cardinals ! " 
 
 And with a leer again and laughter m their 
 thick quaking voices they turned to their old rags. 
 I sought to get from them what manner of man 
 this Syrian Jew was who dwelt there, but they 
 were cautious or else tongue-tied by the comrade- 
 ship of a common faith with him. They would 
 tell me nothing more, except that he was poor. 
 
AFJADXK 65 
 
 and had come to Home many long years before 
 from Smyrna. 
 
 I left them with a shudder, and took my home- 
 ward way. 
 
 There were the butcher's boots waiting, and 
 Padre Trillo's shoes to go to him, and that 
 fragment from the Aldine press to pore over, 
 and many things to interest me, such as, the gods 
 be praised ! I always found in life ; such as any- 
 one may find indeed if they will seek for them. 
 
 If our beloved Leopardi, instead of bemoaning 
 his fate in his despair and sickening of his narrow 
 home, had tried to see how many fair strange 
 things there lay at his house door, had tried 
 to care for the troubles of the men that 
 hung the nets on the trees, and the innocent 
 woes of the girl that carried the gi'ass to the 
 cow, and the obscure martyrdom of maternity 
 and widowhood that the old woman had gone 
 through who sat spinning on the top of the stall's, 
 he would have found that his little borgo that he 
 hated so for its dulness had all the comedies and 
 tragedies of life lying under the sound of its 
 tolling bells. He would not have been less sor- 
 
 VOL, I. V 
 
66 ARIADNE 
 
 ' rowful, for the greater the soul the sadder is. it for 
 the unutterable waste, the unending pain of life. 
 But he would never have been dull : he would 
 never have despised, and despising missed, the 
 stories and the poems that were round him m 
 the millet fields and the olive orchards. There 
 is only one lamp which we can carry in our hand, 
 and which will burn through the darkest night, 
 and make the light of a home for us in a desert 
 place : it is sympathy with everything that 
 breathes. 
 
 My heart was heavy as I left the Place of 
 Weeping and passed into the crooked spot where 
 the schools gather and the Hebrew children learn 
 the lex talionis as a virtue ; just there, there 
 towers, as all the world knows, a dusky, vast, 
 irregular mass of stone and rubble that frowns 
 on the streets beneath like a leaden storm-hued 
 cloud. 
 
 So black it looked and hateful, frowning 
 against the blue sky of the sweet afternoon, 
 that for a moment I forgot what it was ; 
 one moment only, then I knew the shapeless 
 mound was once the Theatre of Balbus; the mass 
 
AniADN£. 67 
 
 built on to it and out of it was the palace of the 
 Cenci. 
 
 On high are the grated casements whence 
 the eyes of Beatrice once looked to see if there 
 were an}' light on earth or hope in heaven, since 
 she had been born in hell and in hell must perish. 
 
 Behind, fathoms deep, as in sea depths, lie 
 the shameful and secret caverns where imperial 
 crimes were done, and death cries stifled, and 
 dead bodies dragged out b}^ the hook to tlie river, 
 and nameless infiimies wrought on hairless inno- 
 cence that never vengeance reached nor an}- judg- 
 ment followed. 
 
 Those two hang togetlier over the Giietto, the 
 sin of the Empire, the horror of the Cenci : in 
 their shadow I left her. 
 
 K 2 
 
CHAPTER TV, 
 
 As I drew near 1113^ stall I heard the people 
 talkmg, commg out a little from their doors as 
 the noon heat passed. 
 
 '' Crispin has been gone all the morning," said 
 Tistic, the barber, who will shave a human head 
 so well that no one shall know it from a 
 pumpkin. 
 
 **And my boots not touched," growled Mas- 
 simo, the butcher. " That's what comes of 
 being so very clever — a fool sticks to his last." 
 
 ^' He is always poring over a book." 
 
 *' Or mooning with the monks." 
 
 " Or fooling with the painters." 
 
 " Or standing moonstruck, staring at old 
 stones." 
 
ARIADNE. 69 
 
 *' But when lie does work, it is the hest work 
 in Rome, and lasts ! AVhy, a niended shoe of 
 Crispin's has triple the wear of a brand-new one 
 from any other stall. And he is honest," so 
 said Lillo, the melon-seller, who is a good soul, 
 and partial to me. 
 
 " Yes, he is honest," most of them sighed, as 
 though sadl}" owning a defect. 
 
 " Yes," said old Meluccio, who sells old books 
 a few yards off. *' The other day he bought a 
 book of me, an old rotten thing ; but some- 
 thing that delighted him. I never know the 
 titles ; I buy them by the weight. And back he 
 comes at nightfall to bring me a paper note he 
 had found between the pages, a note good for 
 twenty florins ! AVhat do you say to that ? " 
 
 " I always thought his pate was cracked, for 
 my part," said Bimbo, the tinker, whose own 
 head I had cracked some years before with a 
 handy bit of Avood, for ill treating a poor 
 pony. 
 
 " He is as good as gold. I often think he is 
 the precious St. Crispin himself come back on 
 earth. Look what he is when anyone of us has 
 
70 ABIADNA 
 
 the fever, or cannot pa}^ up to time with rent ! " 
 said poor hard-working Serafma, the washer- 
 woman, giving kisses to her big brown boy, 
 whose two-year-okl feet were dancing on the top 
 of a wine -barrel. 
 
 I, of whom my good neighbom's talked so 
 kindly, am a Roman born. I was son of old Bere- 
 dino Quintilio, the king of the beggars, who 
 reigned on the Spanish Steps, in good old times, 
 when the whole City agreed with yoii, that you 
 would be a fool to bend your back and stick a 
 spade in the ground, when you could get plenty 
 b}' merely stretching jouv hand out, where you 
 Iaj at your ease, in the sunshine. 
 
 Of course, the world is of the same opinion 
 still, in point of fact ; but it only allows the 
 practice of this philosophy to beggars in good 
 broadcloth and purple phylacteries. The beggar 
 in rags goes to prison now, in Rome as elsewhere. 
 
 We lived very snugly in Trastevere, that is, we 
 always had good wine, and fries of all fashions, 
 and in carnival time never missed money to prank 
 forth with the gayest of them : for Beredino had 
 a noble head, fit for Abraham or Agamemnon, 
 
ARIADNE. 71 
 
 and a really withered leg, that, rightly managed, 
 was a fortune in itself. 
 
 We came of the Gens Quintilii, according to 
 our traditions ; and, indeed, why not ? — and, of 
 course, my father being so noble, and of such 
 ancient lineage, never could work. 
 
 '^Beg too, little wretch," said he to me,, 
 when I was big enough to trot out across the 
 river to the Spanish Square, and I begged ac- 
 cordingly, till I was seven. I never made very 
 much, I was ugly ; and I could never brmg^ 
 myself to whme. 
 
 When I got to be seven years old, I asked a 
 little girl, not much older, for a coin. She was a 
 very pretty little foreign thing, just coming down 
 the steps of the Trinita de Monti. She looked 
 like a little angel, for she had a cloud of light 
 hair, and some roses in her hands. She gave me 
 the roses. 
 
 " You can sell them," she said to me ; *' but 
 why do you beg ? — only thieves and cowards da 
 that." 
 
 And then she ran away to her people. 
 
 That night Beredino beat me with a stout ash 
 
72 ARIADNil. 
 
 stick, because I brought home nothmg. M}" 
 body was sore for three daj'S ; but I did not care. 
 I kept the roses. When the stripes were healed, 
 I went to an old fellow I knew, who cobbled 
 boots and shoes in Trastevere. 
 
 " Will you teach me to do that ? " I asked him. 
 ^' I am tii'ed of the Spanish Steps, and I will not 
 beg any more." 
 
 The old fellow shoved his spectacles on to the 
 crown of his head in amazement. 
 
 *' Little Rufo, you are mad! What are you 
 thinking of? I do not make so much in a week 
 as you do in an hour." 
 
 I hung my head. 
 
 '' But I am ugly ; and I get nothing by beg- 
 ging," I said to hun, for I was ashamed, as young 
 things are, of being ashamed of wrong-doing. 
 
 *' That is another affair then," said the cobbler. 
 **If 3^ou cannot make fraud succeed, it is just as 
 well to be honest. If you cannot get this world, 
 you may as well have a try for the next. Here 
 and there are a few ]3eople who cannot get a lie 
 out of their mouths — just as there are folks 
 colour-blind, who cannot see the red in an apple. 
 
AEIADNZ 73 
 
 AVlien one is deficient like that, one must tell the 
 truth, and cobble leather or break stones, for one 
 will never make a figure amongst men. It is a 
 misfortune — like being born dumb or a cripple ; 
 but there is no help for it. I was one of them. 
 Your father drinks wine ever}- night, and has his 
 stomachfuU of broad beans and good goat's meat. 
 I taste flesh once a 3'ear, on Fat Thursday, and 
 never know what a kid tastes like. If you want 
 to work for your living I will teach you ; but I 
 warn you what it will cost." 
 
 '* Teach me," said I ; and I squatted behind 
 his board, and pierced and bored and sewed the 
 old leather day after day, at the old street-comer, 
 vv'here one could see the angel on Hadrian's 
 tomb, and the people coming and going over the 
 St. Angelo bridge, and the Tiber tumbling away, 
 bilious-looking and sullen, as though angry 
 alwaj^s, because the days of Sallust were done, 
 and the gardens, and the villas, and the j)leasure 
 places of Horace's hymning had passed away 
 into dulness and darkness, and onl}- left to its 
 desolate banks the sough of the wind in the 
 sedges and the rustle of the fox in the thickets. 
 
ARIADNE. 
 
 I hunted often for the fau'-haired rose-child ; 
 but I never saw her any more. 
 
 Only I used to say to myself, " Cowards beg,'^ 
 when sometimes in the drouth of the dusty day 
 I was tempted to drop tool and leather, and sit 
 stitching there no more, but run out into the 
 broad bright sunshine, and get bed and bread by 
 just stretching out a dirty hand and whining for 
 alms. 
 
 *' Cowards beg," I said to myself, and stayed 
 by the cobbler's stall, seeing day come and go- 
 behind the angel with the sword, there upon 
 Hadi'ian's tomb. Little words strike deep some- 
 times — acorns, which grow to timbers, and bear 
 safe to shore, or wreck for instant death, a 
 thousand souls. 
 
 Whenever my father met me in the streets he 
 struck at me with his crutch, and cursed me for 
 letting down the family greatness, and shaming 
 the Gens Quintilii. Italo — who was beautiful as 
 a cherub, and knew how to look starved and 
 woe-begone after eating half a kid, stuffed 
 with prunes — Italo was a son after his own 
 
ARIADNJ^. 75 
 
 heart, and made a dozen crowns a day by weep- 
 ing, in the sweetest fashion, in the. sunshine. 
 
 Italo woukl run to me of a night, having put 
 off his rags and dirt, and sorrowful wounds, and 
 dressed himself in gay shirt and silken sash, to 
 go and dance the tarantala all night with girls at 
 a Avine shop. Italo, who loved me all the same, 
 though I disgraced them so, would plead with all 
 his might, and beg me to go back to the Spanish 
 Steps and the old w^ays of living, and jest at me 
 with all a Iloman's wit, for sitting stitching there 
 at gaping boots, and gnawing leather with my 
 teeth, and earning scarcely, all the while, enough 
 to keep body and soul together. But neither 
 Italo's kisses nor Beredino's blows got me back to 
 begging. I learned the cobbler's trade, and stuck 
 to it — onl}' running oif from the stall every 
 saint's day and holyday, to caper, and dance, and 
 sing, and eat melons, outside the walls, as every 
 Roman will, be he six or sixty. 
 
 So Crispin, the cobbler, I am — nothmg more 
 whatever. 
 
 I am a fool, too, of course. Borne always says 
 so. But I was never a dullard. A good old monk 
 
76 ARIADNE. 
 
 taught me reading, and tlie like. He was a 
 mendicant friar, but knew more than most of 
 them, and was, in a humble, rambling fashion, a 
 scholar, mooning his days awaj with a Latin 
 book on the green hillocks that tumble, like 
 waves, about the leagues of ruins be3^ond the 
 Later an Gate. 
 
 From him I got the little that I know, and 
 a liking for queer reading, and a passion for 
 our Eome. Of course, I was an ignorant 
 youth alwaj^s ; my scraps of learning were jum- 
 bled piecemeal in my brain, like the scraps 
 of cloth in a tailor's bag, which will only, at 
 best, make a suit of motley ; but they served to 
 beguile me as I sat and tinkered a boot, and I 
 learned to i)ick my way in my city, by the lights 
 of Dion Cassius and Livy. 
 
 So I grew up in Rome ; a cobbler, when I 
 wanted to pay for bed and board ; a jumble of 
 merrjanaker, and masquer, and student, and im- 
 provisatore, and antiquar}^ and fool, when I 
 could make holyday about the place — which, 
 thanks to the church calendar, was a hundred 
 and fifty days out of the year always. 
 
ARIADNE. 77 
 
 And all the time, by dint of dreaming over 
 dead Eome, and getting my head full of republics 
 and their glories, I used to talk in high-flown 
 strains, sometimes, atop of a barrel in the wine 
 shops and fair-booths, and by the time I was 
 twenty years old, the Papal Guard had their eyes 
 on me as perilous matter ; mdeed, I should have 
 fared worse, had it not been that I haunted the 
 chiu'ches often from a real love of them, and 
 had good friends in two or three jovial monks, 
 who loved me, and for whom I did willing work 
 without payment, any da}^ that the hot stones of 
 Piome scorched theii' sandals into holes. 
 
 But one yetiv, when I was still a youth, there 
 came a breath of fire upon Rome. Revolution 
 thundered at the gates like Attila. The old cob- 
 bler was dead, and my father too. I threw my 
 leather apron to the winds ; kicked ni}- stall into 
 the gutter ; shouldered a musket, and rushed into 
 the fray. As all the world knows, it came to 
 nothing. There were dead men in the streets 
 — that was all. The Pope reigned still, and free 
 Rome was a dream. 
 
 I had to run for m}' life, by night, under 
 
78 ARIADNE. 
 
 the thickets, along the course of the Aiiio, and 
 over the old Nomentana bridge. I had a 
 bullet in my shoulder; my feet were blis- 
 tered. I had ix\o copper pieces in my pocket, 
 that was all. I looked up at the Mons Sacer, 
 and tried to tell m^^self that it was great and 
 glorious to suffer thus ; but I fell into a ditch, 
 and a herd of buffaloes trampled me wliere I la}^, 
 and i)atriotism seemed a dreary thing, even in 
 Mons Sacer's shadow. 
 
 A peasant of the Campagna, whose hut stood 
 where Hannibal had encamped, dragged me in- 
 doors, and tended me through months of sick- 
 ness and exliaustion. He was a i^oor creature 
 himself, a mass of disease and weakness, and he 
 only scraped a bare subsistence by tending cattle ; 
 but he was very good to me, a poor lad, wounded, 
 and friendless, who would have been shot down 
 for a rebel without his succour and shelter. 
 
 The world is bad, you know ; human nature is 
 a vile thing — half ape, half fox, most often ; but 
 here and there one finds these golden gleams; 
 and they look the brighter for the darkness 
 round, as lamps do in the catacombs. 
 
AEIADN£. 79 
 
 Well, when I rose upon my feet again, I knew 
 the gates of Eome were closed against me. To 
 go back there, then, was to be shot or thrown into 
 the casemates of St. Angelo. So there was nothing 
 for it but to set the Anio between myself and 
 Rome, and creep across the plains to the sea- 
 shore, and there hide away on a fishmg sloop, 
 and cross to other lands. For the rest, I was 
 not unhandy at other things as well as leather, 
 and, being strong and well agaiuj and young, had 
 not much fear — only a great unending sorrow, 
 because the hills hid Eome. 
 
 For, wander where one will, you know, one's 
 heart is sick for Rome — for the fall of the foun- 
 tains ; for the width of the plains ; for the vast 
 silent courts ; for the grass-grown palaces ; for 
 the moonlight falling on the ruined altars ; for 
 the nightingales singing in the empty temples. 
 
 I got out of my country by the way that Dante 
 did, looldng back, ever and ever, through blind 
 eyes of pain, as he did, and so travelled on foot, as 
 poor men do, across into the Tirolean and the 
 German lands. 
 
 At first I settled down in Nurnburg, where I 
 
80 ariadn:^. 
 
 fell sick, and found friends, and was not ill-con- 
 tent. I was a very young man even then, and, as 
 I sewed leather at my little leafy window, on the 
 street that was Albrecht Diirer's birth-place, I 
 got friends with the students and philosophers, 
 and read man}" a deep old volume that they lent 
 to me, and so picked up such scraps of know- 
 ledge as best I could, as a magpie picks up shreds 
 and straws, and silver spoons, and shoves them 
 all away together. 
 
 Some said I might have been a learned man, 
 had I taken more pains. But I think it was only 
 their kindness. I have that twist in my brain, 
 which is the curse of ni}" countrymen — a sort of 
 devihsh quickness at doing well, that prevents us 
 ever doing best ; just the same soii; of thing that 
 makes our goatherds rhjane perfect sonnets, and 
 keeps them dunces before the alphabet. 
 
 All that beautiful Teutonic world could not 
 console me for the loss of Italy. It is beautiful, 
 that wide, green, cool, silent country, with its 
 endless reahns of forest, and its perpetual melody 
 of river waters. 
 
 The vast seas of tossing foliage ; the broad 
 
ARIADNE. 81 
 
 plains, with their great streams winding tlu'ough 
 them in the smi ; the intense silence of the 
 aisles of pine ; the blue-black woods that 
 stretched, seemingly limitless, away on every side ; 
 the hill-sides, dusky with the thickness of the 
 leaves, and thrilled with the whisper of a thousand 
 legends ; the little burghs, vine-hidden, clustered 
 round their chapel-belfries, and nestled at the 
 foot of towering oak-clad mountains, or rent red 
 rocks all fragrant with the larch and fir and bay 
 tree ; the old grey bridges, with the yellow current 
 flowing underneath ; the round watch-towers, 
 set in the middle of the swii-ling streams ; the 
 black and white houses, gabled and peaked and 
 carved, till they were like so many illumina- 
 tions of the miniaturists' missals and manu- 
 sciipts ; the quaint, peaceful, antique homes, 
 where the people dwelt, from birth to death, 
 spinning their flax and shaping their ivory 
 and wooden toys, in green nests, under grey 
 hills, that the world knew not, and that knew not 
 the world ; — they were all beautiful, these quiet, 
 noble, shadowy things, that made up the old 
 Teutonic kingdoms ; and I knew them well to 
 
 VOL. I. O 
 
82 APJABN^. 
 
 be so. But, amidst them, I was in exile 
 always. 
 
 Wlio can once have laughed m the light of the 
 sun of Itaty, and not feel the world dark else- 
 where ever afterwards ? And it is only in Italj" 
 that the eyes of the people, always, though the}" 
 know it not, speak to men of God. 
 
 But, ere very long, the spirit of unrest pos- 
 sessed me, and I went hither and thither, trj'ing 
 all manner of trades, and even some arts, daubing 
 on pottery — not ill, they told me — only I could 
 not stand the confined life of any factory-room, 
 and playmg, some seasons, with travelling actors 
 — with no bad success, since I could alwaj^s 
 make the people laugh or cry, according as my 
 own mood was ; indeed, I might have remained 
 in that career, perhaps, only I never could con- 
 strain myself from altering the iDart with my own 
 imagination, and imj^rovisation, wliich put out 
 the others, so they said ; and then, agam, 
 though I am a very peaceable man, I stuck a 
 knife into my chief, about a woman, and had 
 some trouble that way, though it was all honest 
 jealousy and fair fight, and the mere rights of 
 
ABIADN£. 83 
 
 man, let them say whatever they will to the 
 contraiy. 
 
 Into other lands I wandered, then, and sought 
 full half the world. YvTlien one wants hut little, 
 and has a useful tongue, and knows how to he 
 merry with the 3'oung folk, and sorrowful with 
 the old, and can take the fair weather with the 
 foul, and wear one's philosophy like an easy 
 boot, treading with it on no man's toe, and no 
 dog's tail ; why, if one he of this sort, I say, 
 one is, in a great manner, independent of for- 
 tune ; and the very httle that one needs one can 
 usually obtain. Many years I strayed about, 
 seemg many cities and many minds, like 
 Odysseus ; bemg no saint, but, at the same time, 
 being no thief and no liar. 
 
 I wandered so, I say, for a great many years, 
 and was happy enough — the gods or the saints 
 be praised (one never knows which to say in 
 Rome), and should never have wished my lot 
 bettered or changed, onl}^ — I was in exile. There 
 were times when only to hear the twang of a 
 lute, and see a red melon gape, under a lamp, at 
 a street-corner shrine in old dark Trastevere, I 
 
 o 2 
 
84 AEIADNA 
 
 would have given my soul away. We are made so 
 — the fools of our fancies ; and yet these, our 
 foolishnesses, are so much the best j)avt of us. 
 
 One da}', in a little old dull French village, 
 grey and white with summer dust, in the midst 
 of champagne vineyards, I met a Roman image - 
 seller — a boy of ten or twelve, with his tray full 
 of plaster casts. 
 
 I saw scores of such lads, of course, and 
 alwaj's spoke to them, and gave them a crust 
 or a coin, for sake of the common country. 
 But this little fellow happened to thrust, 
 straight up in my eyes, smiling, a cast of that 
 fairest Madonna of old Mino's, which I had 
 always loved the best; she who stands in the 
 chapter-room of St. Maria m Trastevere, with 
 folded hands and trailing robes — snow-white, and 
 seemmg to walk forth to one from out her 
 golden tabernacle. 
 
 Do you not know her ? I daresay not — hardly 
 anybody ever comes into the sacrist}^ Go, make 
 a pilgrimage for her sake alone. 
 
 By so much as sculpture is above all colour, 
 so is she far above in purity and dignity any vu'gin 
 
AEIABN£. 85 
 
 that was ever painted, even by our Raifaelle 
 himself. For, somehow, on his high, wmd-swept, 
 olive-wooded slope, Mino of Fiesole did reach an 
 imagination of the Mother of Christ that for 
 innocence, chastit}-, womanhood, and sweet, 
 dreaming thoughtfulness has never an equal an}'- 
 where. Clothed in purit}^, seems no metaphor, 
 but simplest fact, before those snow-white and 
 exquisite forms that live after him in so many 
 silent baptisteries and sun-pierced, dusky, jewelled 
 chapels of the dead. 
 
 And at the sight of her a very tortui'e of 
 home-siclaiess came uj)on me. All suddenl}-, as 
 it will do, you know, with the strongest men at 
 the note of a bird, or the sight of a little flower, 
 or the song of a child going down the hedgerows 
 to meet its mother. 
 
 That little white image of the Madonna which 
 I had loved so well, smote me with a ver}' 
 anguish of longing for Rome. 
 
 I seemed to hear the fountains falling througli 
 the radiant air, and the ten thousand voices of 
 the swinging bells giving them answer, as the 
 sun sank down behind the blue peaks of Soracte. 
 
86 ARIADNA 
 
 I saw the bridge I stood on, and the gi'een 
 straight lines of poplars on the bank, and the 
 face of the little wandering boy through a rush 
 of tears ; things come on one sometimes like 
 that. 
 
 That very night I turned my face to Eome, 
 taking the boy with me, for he was ill-treated 
 and unhappy. 
 
 " If they remember, and I die for it," thought 
 I, "it will be better to die there than to live 
 elsewhere." 
 
 But so many years had gone b}^ and I had 
 been so young then, and was still so poor and 
 lowly, I managed to escape all recognition, and 
 by a little cunning and a little care, I got into 
 Eome unjoersecuted ; and calling myself, as I had 
 been called in Germany and France, no one 
 recognised me. I was an ugly, homel}^ brown- 
 faced man, forty years old then, and akeady a 
 little grey. M}^ father was dead; my brother 
 had been stabbed long, long before, in a brawl, 
 so they said ; and the old cobbler, as I said, had 
 been found dead one noonday at his stall. 
 
 Of conspiracy and combat I had had enough. 
 
AEIADNA 87 
 
 I loved the sound of the fountains, and I set my 
 board up within earshot of this one which gushes 
 from the gi'ey monsters' mouths here by ohi 
 Ponte Sisto. 
 
 Tlie people found me at my stall one daybreak, 
 as they came over the bridge with their mules 
 from the Janiculan farms and gardens, with 
 their poultry and goats, and wines and 
 fruits ; and I had not forgotten how to play 
 with the Eoman humour, and how to hold my 
 own between a rough jest and a ready steel. I 
 kept a still tongue in my head as to whence I 
 came, and the folic of the Eione had a thi'ong 
 of odd fancies concerning me — so best. It 
 amused them ; and many Hked to bring their 
 shoes to me to mend that they might say they 
 had a chatter with that droll chatterbox at the 
 corner of the Via di Pettinari. 
 
 Maryx, then a student at the Villa Medici, 
 made for me my lovely Apollo Sandaliarius ; and 
 another student — now a great man, too — gave 
 me the old stained glass with SS. Crispin and 
 Crispian, so that one might please all tastes and 
 conciliate the good nuns and monks who went 
 
88 ARIADNlE. 
 
 to and fro in such numbers, and vrore out so 
 many shoes upon their stone and mosaic floors. 
 
 I never told anybod}^, except some churchmen, 
 that I was that Rufo Quintilio, who had first 
 disgraced the Gens by working for my living. I 
 re-baptised mj^self Crispino, after the patron 
 saint of all shoemakers, whose church was close 
 by ; and the people had that V9gue idea of some 
 mystery connected with me, which is to the 
 public as sugared wine to flies. 
 
 That there was really none was all the better, 
 because where there is no foundation whatever 
 in fact, there is nothing to stop the fancy from 
 wandering as far, and digging as deep, as ever 
 it may like to do. 
 
 I had a fi'iend at Com't, too. 
 
 It had chanced to me in my wanderings to be 
 once of signal service to a monsignore traveUing 
 on mystic missions of the Church. I happened 
 to be near at hand wiien he fell into a deep, 
 rapid, unpleasant little river of Transjdvania ; 
 and I pulled him out of it, whilst his attendants 
 screamed, and his horses floundered and sunk. 
 And in return he had bidden me claim his aid, if 
 
ABIADNR 89 
 
 ever I wanted it, in our native cit}'. Years had 
 passed ; I found him powerful, and he was not 
 ungrateful ; and he procured for me condonation 
 of my 3'outhful riots, and leave to prosecute my 
 simple calling at this corner of the bridge of 
 Sixtus, where the fountain is made in the wall, 
 opposite to the Via Giulia ; and here I became 
 peaceful and happ}" enough, for I had some little 
 mone}^ laid b}^ (we are a frugal jieople), and I 
 could sew leather three days out of the week, and 
 all the rest of the time read old books, and peer 
 about old places, and dream old dreams, and 
 saunter in and out of the studios. The artists, 
 great and small, were all fond of me, and liked 
 to hear my opinions : — of course, only as Apelles 
 liked to hear my fellow-craftsman's ; but still it 
 made life pleasant, for Art is, after Nature, the 
 only consolation that one has at all for living. 
 
 They used to tell me that I had some little 
 judgment, and that I might make a fortune if I 
 would take to collecting and to selling ancient 
 and artistic things. But that I would never do. 
 To me, whoever can buy a work of true art to 
 sell it again (save from some sudden i)ressure of 
 
90 AEIADN£. 
 
 poverty and honour), can have no love of art in 
 him ; or, thinking of it with any thought soever 
 of barter, can have no true feeling for it, but is a 
 huckster at soul, and deserves no better God 
 than the base Mercurius of the mart and change, 
 whom the Eomans prayed to when they wished 
 to pilfer. 
 
 Art was dear to me. "Wandering through 
 many lands, I had come to know the charm of 
 quiet cloisters ; the delight of a strange, rare 
 volume ; the interest of a quaint bit of i)ottery ; 
 the unutterable loveliness of some perfect painter's 
 vision, making a glory in some dusky, world- 
 forgotten church : and so my life was full of 
 gladness here in Rome, where the ass's hoof 
 ringing on a stone may show you that Yitruvius 
 was right, where you had doubted him ; or the 
 sun shining down upon a cabbage garden, or a 
 coi)persmith's shreds of metal, may gleam on a 
 signet ring of the Flavian women, or a broken 
 vase that may have served vile Tullia for 
 drink. 
 
 Of course I was an ignorant man always — 
 beside scholars ; but what I did know shed a 
 
AEIADN£. ' 91 
 
 light upon my path, and made me cease to envy 
 rich men — for was not all Rome mine ? 
 
 There are worse things than to sit under 
 Apollo Sandaliarius and Crispin and Crispian, 
 and hear the merrj^ Roman tongues wag round 
 you all day long ; for the e]3igrams of Pasquin 
 and Marforio are hut a few ripples out of many 
 of the ever-running current of the Roman wit. 
 And who is it that has said so wisely, " If you 
 have nothing left in life, come to Rome." 
 
 Here at least you shall learn your own little- 
 ness, and that of gods and men ; here in Rome, 
 which has seen Zeus and Aidoneus pass away, 
 and come to he words upon the mouths of men ; 
 Rome, which has heheld Olympus fade like a 
 dream of the night, and the glory depart from 
 Ida; Rome, which kiUed the Nazarene, and set 
 Borgia and Aldohrandini \\\) in his likeness to 
 reign over earth and heaven ; Rome, which has 
 seen nations perish leaving no sign, and deities 
 die like moths — yet lives herself, and still con- 
 jures the world with the sorcery of an iiTesistible 
 and imperishable name. 
 
CHAPTER V. 
 
 So I lived ; — what tliey said of me at the bridge 
 corner was fau' enough ; only that silly soul, 
 Serafina, thought too much of a trumpery pair 
 of little red boots for her baby, only big enough 
 for a grasshopper, and costing one nothing but a 
 palm's breadth of kid. But women are so ; the}" 
 have ' no medium ; either they drink the sea dr}' 
 and are thankless, and if they got the stars down 
 out of heaven, would stamp them in the dust — 
 or else they are like the poor washer- woman, 
 and give all their loyal soul's big gratitude for 
 the broken crust of a careless gift. 
 
 So I lived, I say ; and had done nearly twenty 
 years, in Eome. In the summers sometimes I 
 went up amongst the little villages on the sides of 
 
ABIADN£. 93 
 
 the Sabine and Volscian Mountains, under the 
 cork and chestnut woods, where the women foot 
 it merrily in front of the wineshop, and the pipe 
 and mandoline chirp all through the rosy even- 
 ing. But I never wandered so far awaj^ that I 
 could not see the gold cross on St. Peter's ; and 
 many a summer day, when all in Rome was lifeless 
 as a gravej'ard, and only a few chaunting friars 
 bore a dead man through the streets, I and 
 Pales stayed in the city for love's sake, and 
 talked only to the gods that haunt the fountains. 
 
 I was content with my life, which is more 
 than most great men can sa}'. I had a love of 
 droning and dreaming, and was well satisfied if I 
 had enough to get me a plate of beans and a 
 flask of thin red wine ; and I had all m}' days 
 through been cursed or blessed with that sort 
 of brain which makes a man understand a great 
 many things, but never enables him to achieve 
 any one thing. 
 
 It is not an unhappy way of being constituted 
 — at least, when one basks under the Roman 
 sun, and asks no other good of the gods. All 
 the twenty odd years since I had come back into 
 
94 ARIADNE. 
 
 Rome I had been liappy enough in a whimsical — 
 and I daresaj^ foolish — fashion, here in my 
 nook b}^ the Ponte Sisto, close on to Tiber, 
 where the soft hyacinthine hills curve fold on 
 fold beyond the yellow water; and under the 
 ilex shadows on the other bank the women hang 
 out the linen of Eome to blow and to bleach in 
 the breeze from the sea. 
 
 I had got with time to be a feature of the place, 
 and to belong to it as much as the stone lions 
 did ; and the people, with that power of eternal 
 tongue-wagging with which heaven has endowed 
 ni}^ country-people beyond any other folk of the 
 earth, had made as many traditions for me as 
 though I were a headless saint, instead of a brain- 
 less sinner; and there I had stayed beside my 
 stall, without any change, except in dogs that 
 died in the course of nature. 
 
 My friend the ferr3^man, going to and fro the 
 Eipetta Wharf, in his httle brown boat shaped 
 like Noah's Ark, i)assed not more regularly than 
 the course of -my own days w^ent and came — till I 
 dreamed m}" dream in the drowsy noon. 
 
 I was always dreaming, indeed : over old coins 
 
ARIADNE. 95 
 
 thrown up by tlie plough ; over some beautiful 
 marble lunb, uncovered as they diig for a -wine- 
 cellar; before some dim shrine under an archway, 
 where a fading frescoed Christ child smiled on a 
 ruined, moss-grown torso of Hercules ; on any 
 and every thing of the million of wonders and of 
 memories that are about us here thick as golden 
 tulips in the grass in April. But this noonday 
 dream was different : it kept with me all the 
 hot slumbrous afternoon, when even Pales was too 
 sound asleep to get up and kill a fl}^ or smell a 
 cat. And my conscience was ill at ease ; I 
 seemed to myself to have behaved ill, yet how I 
 did not very well know. 
 
 It seemed to me that I ought, against her will, 
 to have gone with her to see that S3Tian Jew. 
 Her face haunted me — that pale, sad face, of 
 unsi)eakable sorrow, as she had looked down the 
 Pescheria. So must have looked Beatrice, gazing 
 from the grated casement in the j)alace there. 
 
 How much one cares for Beatrice ! If I owned 
 Barberini, her portrait should hang no longer in 
 that shabby chamber, where the very sunbeams 
 look like cobwebs, companioned by vile Forna- 
 
96 AEIADNJE. 
 
 rina, and that yet viler wife of Sarto's ; it should 
 hang aU by itself in a little chapel, draped with 
 black, with a lamp always burning before it, in 
 emblem of the soul, that all the brutes encom- 
 passing her had no j)ower to destroy. 
 
 Only fifteen, yet strong as women are not, 
 Beatrice had the strength of passion : the 
 strength to dare and to endure. There is no 
 passion in your modern lives, or barely any. You 
 have lewdness and hypocrisy. They are your twin 
 darlings, most worshipped on the highest heights. 
 But passion you have not, so you fear it. 
 
 I was tliinking of Beatrice, and of this other 
 girl, gone after Beatrice down into the shadow of 
 the old walls of Balbus ; and was listening to 
 the music of a lute and a fiddle chiming together 
 somewhere on the bridge, and watching two 
 mites of children dancing outside a doorway, 
 with tangled curls aflying, and little naked rosy 
 feet t^\inkling on the stones. 
 
 Sitting at a' stall may be dull work — Pales 
 thinks so sometimes ; but when it is a stall in 
 the open ah', and close against a fountain and a 
 bridge, it has its pleasures. 
 
\ 
 
 ARIADNA 97 
 
 I have been all m}^ life blown on by all sorts 
 of weather, and I know there is nothing so good 
 as the sun and the wind for driving ill-nature 
 and selfishness out of one. 
 
 Anything in the open air is always well ; it is 
 because men now-a-days shut themselves so 
 much in rooms, and pen themselves in stifling 
 styes, where never the wind comes or the clouds 
 are looked at, that puling discontent and plague- 
 struck envy are the note of all modern politics 
 and philosophies. The open air breeds Leonidas, 
 the factory room Felix Pyat. 
 
 If I worked in an attic, and saw nought but 
 the shoe that I sew, no doubt I should fall think- 
 ing where that shoe had been, what stealth it had 
 stolen to, what intrigue it had stepped softly to 
 smother, how many times it had crossed a church 
 doorway, how many times it had stumbled over 
 a wineshop threshold, — all manner of speculation 
 and spite, in a word, of my neighbour who wore 
 it, because I should see nothing but the shoe, 
 and it would fill my atmosphere, and dwell on 
 my retina, a black S2)ot obscuring all creation. 
 But here the shoe is only a shoe to me, because 
 
 TOL. I. H 
 
98 ABIADNA 
 
 I see the wide blue skies, and the splashing 
 water, and the broad sunshine, and ihe changing 
 crowds, and the little children's flying hair, and 
 the silver wings of the wheeling pigeons. I 
 work at the shoe, but it is only a shoe to me. 
 
 When one thmks of the Greeks playing, 
 praying, labouring, lecturing, dreaming, sculp- 
 turing, training, living, everlastingly in the free 
 wind, and under the pure heavens, and then 
 thinks that the chief issue of civilization is to 
 pack human beings in rooms like salt fish in a 
 l)arrel, with never a sight of leaf or cloud, never 
 a whisper of breeze or bird ; oh ! the blessed 
 
 blind men who talk of Progress ! 
 
 Progress ! that gives four cubic feet of air 
 
 a-piece to its children, and calls the measurement 
 
 Public Health ! 
 
 But I am only Crispin of the Ponte Sisto, 
 
 stitching for my bread ; these are fool's fancies 
 
 — let them pass. 
 
 We of Italy keep something of the old classic 
 
 love of air, we live no time indoors that we can 
 
 live out; and though Progress is pushing our 
 
 chairs off the pavements, and doing its best to 
 
ARIADN£:. 99 
 
 huddle us sheep-like into our pens, we resist 
 toto corcle, and we still sit, and smoke, and 
 saunter, and eat and drink, and pursue our 
 trade and our talk with no roof but the bright, 
 broad, kindly sk3\ 
 
 As I sat at my stall in the warm smiling after- 
 noon, getting drowsy, tapping at worn soles, and 
 stupidly wondering how those little things could 
 find the fire in them to dance so in the heat, 
 I could not in any way get my Ariadne out of my 
 head, were it ever so, as I tmkered split leather 
 in the sunshine. 
 
 It was as if one had seen a yellow-winged 
 oriola, that has been fed on flower-dew and pome- 
 granate buds, shut down into the low wooden 
 traps that the boys go bird-hmiting with in the 
 thickets along Tiber. 
 
 The day lengthened ; the shadows deepened ; 
 the air cooled ; the ventiquattro rang from many 
 clocks and bells ; people began to wander out 
 into the street. 
 
 Handsome Dea came smihng for her scarlet 
 shoes; big Massimo swore at me good-temperedly 
 because his butcher-boots were not read}' ; 
 
 H 2 
 
100 ABIADNA 
 
 Padre Sjivio grumbled because bis sandals 
 lay untouched ; Marietta, the vintner's wife, 
 told me of a fine marriage that Pippo had 
 made up for her eldest daughter with a tailor of 
 Yelletri; Mar^'x, my sculptor, came and talked 
 to me of a portfolio full of designs of Bramante, 
 that he had discovered, and got for a song in an 
 old shop in Trastevere ; even Hilarion going by 
 with his swift horses, leaped out in his easy, 
 gracious fashion, and bade me come up to his 
 villa, and drink his old French wines there, 
 whilst he should idle amongst his roses, and 
 scrawd half a sonnet, and lie half asleep with his 
 head in a woman's lap, under the awning on his 
 marble terrace. 
 
 But I even let Hilarion go on his way, with 
 that black-browed singer whom he favoured for 
 the moment ; and I did not care for Bramante's 
 beautiful porticoes, and domes, and bridges ; and 
 heard nothing that Marietta was telling me of the 
 fine trade receipts of that young tailor of Vel- 
 letri, because I kept thinking of that sea-born 
 Joy \sith the face of the Borghese bronze, who 
 had gone down into the darkness of the Ghetto. 
 
ARIADN2. 101 
 
 " Gioja ! Gioja ! they should have called her 
 Ariadne," I muttered, tossing the old hits of 
 leather together on the hoard, and thinking of 
 her likeness to that bronze and of ni}' dream. 
 And Marietta, and all the rest of them coming 
 out into the cooling air as the Ave Maria rang, 
 gi'ew ver}' cross with me because I did not listen 
 to them ; and Padre Sylvio came again and 
 grumbled for full ten minutes about his un- 
 xnended sandals. 
 
 He gone, there came a fisherfellow that I knew, 
 ■with empty baskets on his head, and loitered by 
 my stall a minute, a red carnation in his mouth ; 
 iis big black-browed and lusty a Roman as you 
 •could want to see, who led a pleasant life 
 enough, knee deep, for the most part of it, in the 
 tawny Tiber water, dredging for small fish, with 
 half the spoils of Judea, and half the glories of 
 Nero's house, for anything he knew, under the 
 sands that he waded on, unthinking. 
 
 He tossed me a bright little pair of shining 
 mullets on the board as a gift. 
 
 '•'AVhat were you doing in Fiumara this 
 morning ? " he asked me. " I saw you there, as 
 
102 ARlADNt:. 
 
 I sold my fish. It was a girl j^ou showed the- 
 way to ? — yes. I spied her skirt flutter — and 
 asked ; she went to old Ben Sulim, eh ? I could 
 have told 3'ou what he would do, the meanest, 
 sulkiest Jew-dog in Ghetto. It was not pretty 
 of you, Crispin — not pretty to leave her there - 
 I would have brought her home myself, onh' 
 my Candida has a jealous eye, and would wel- 
 come her with the big chopping- adze for certain." 
 
 " AVhat happened ? What did the man do?" I 
 asked him, my conscience p)ricking sharply, for I 
 had had no Candida with a chopping-adze to- 
 fear. 
 
 " Cursed her, and drove her down the stairs. 
 What else could she look for — unless she went to- 
 buy, or took him a bargain. The rascal is so 
 j)oor ! I do not know her errand rightlj'. But 
 so I heard. Pray, what was she ? " 
 
 " She said that she was the daughter of his* 
 daughter. And he has driven her away? " 
 
 " So they said in Fiumara. I did not see 
 myself. But if she be of the old S^Tian blood,, 
 she will do well enough; the hags there will 
 show her fiftv roads to fortune. All those; 
 
AEIADNR 103 
 
 singing-wenches whose throats get choked with 
 gold and diamonds, are all of that accursed race ; 
 great eyes, and a thrush's voice, and a shark's 
 maw — that is 3'our Jewess all the world over. 
 Make your mind easy, Crispin. She will do." 
 
 And he went on his way with his empty 
 baskets, singing lustily, to pour some crawfish 
 into his fair Candida's pot at home. 
 
 Great eyes, and a thrush's voice, and a shark's 
 maw. Well, say it were a Jewess the world 
 over ; say it were Woman — very often — every- 
 where ; yet that did not make my conscience 
 quieter, for the fate of that sea-born Joy swal- 
 lowed up in Ghetto. 
 
 Of course it was no business of mine ; of 
 course it mattered nothing to me ; still it 
 harassed me, and made me ill at ease ; so ill at 
 ease that I stripped off my apron once again, 
 and put Pales again on guard, and left the stall, 
 just as the pleasant, chattering, gossiping, 
 populace's hour of sunset drew near at hand, 
 and went my way much faster than at noonday, 
 down towards the black shadows of the Cenci 
 pile. 
 
104 ARIADNA 
 
 **1 am an ass," I said to myself; there was 
 a nice little fry cooking on Pippo's stove for my 
 eating ; there was a barrel of fine Veil wine that 
 had been given me because I had found a Venus in 
 the vineyards that had brought a million of scudi 
 to the owner of the soil ; there was a game at 
 zecchinetto with my neighbours, which we played 
 so regulai'ly after dark whenever I was not roam- 
 ing ; there was a strange little black-letter copy 
 of an annotated Satyricon that I had picked up 
 the day before, and had barely had time to re- 
 joice in ; there were all these things and a dozen 
 more to pass the time agreeably, for we always 
 were merry in the Quarter of the Tanners, where 
 the lutes twanged all night long; and yet I 
 turned my back on them all, and went after what 
 could be no concern of mine down into the 
 Ghetto. 
 
 I envy the people who are occupied only with 
 their own fortunes, and never turn aside to 
 follow the fates of others. Selfishness is the 
 spinal marrow of comfort. As for me, I nevBr 
 could help troubling myself about the troubles 
 of other folk ; I suppose when one is always 
 
ARIADNE:. 105 
 
 mending the holes that others have trodden their 
 leather into along the highway stones and dust, 
 one gets a habit of sympathy with tlie pilgrims 
 that break down — perhaps. 
 
 ''lam an ass," I said to myself; and yet I 
 went on and on towards the palace prison of poor 
 dead Beatrice. 
 
 I made my way quickly into the Pescheria, 
 and found the same two hags picking at the same 
 old rags ; they looked up and grinned. 
 
 " Are you come for that pretty maiden of 
 yours?" they said to me. "Well, we know 
 nothing of her ; she came down the stairs as she 
 went up them ; she was barely a second above - 
 head. We would have kept her, for she is one of 
 those morsels that your great churchmen love ; 
 but she would not listen, she looked stupid, — 
 she went away yonder." 
 
 They pointed to the north-west; perhaps, I 
 thought, she had been coming to me ; my first 
 impulse was to go and see the Syrian miser in 
 his den ; my next, to leave liim for a while until 
 I found her, for it was sunset, and night was 
 near at hand. 
 
106 ARIADNE. 
 
 I searched about the surrounding streets, 
 asking hither and thither, but it was not easj^ to 
 describe her, for in the streets she had drawn 
 her hood over her head, and there were other 
 girls in linen dresses. But I lighted on one or 
 two who had noticed such a figui'e pass, and by 
 these mere threads of guidance, I traced her to 
 the Forum Romanum, and the Capitol, and the 
 little dusky church tliat covers the depths of 
 dread old Tullianum. 
 
 You think of Peter and of Paul whenever you 
 pass there ; I think of Jugurtha and Vercinge- 
 torix ; iJiey perished without hope. It had been 
 better for Caesar to have saved that noblest foe, 
 than to have gone on his knees up yonder stairs 
 of Jupiter Feretrius. 
 
 But for once I thought not of Caesar, not even 
 of Vercingetorix this summer evening, as the 
 shadows deepened, and the bells for vespers 
 tolled ; for on those steps of Ara Coeli I saw her, 
 sittmg wearily, her whole frame drooped together 
 with the listlessness of bodily fatigue and moral 
 abandonment. 
 
 There were the brick arches that artists love. 
 
AliIADX£\ 107 
 
 and the mosaic of the Madonna above her head ; 
 there was a dim rose flush in the gloom from the 
 set sun ; within the church choristers were 
 chaunting their lessons ; the solemn strains and 
 the distant voices sounded sad and mystical. 
 
 She was not crymg, as most girls would have 
 been, but her head was drooped, and her arms 
 fell wearily over her knees, in an attitude which 
 had a despairing desolation in it, mute and very 
 deep. She must have been very tired too ; and 
 as I drew near to her I saw — for a cobbler looks 
 first at the feet — that one of hers had bled a 
 little, where a stone had pierced through the 
 leather of her poor worn shoe. 
 
 Somehow — because it moved me professionally 
 I suppose — that Uttle stain of blood upon the 
 stones touched me more than the most violent 
 sorrow and weeping would have done. 
 
 She was alone on the steps. 
 
 The place was deserted ; with the glad summer 
 night at hand, llomans liad other sport than to- 
 roam under the well-known pile of the Capitol ; 
 there were blind-cat, and many another game, to- 
 play in the wide squares, gossip to hear by the- 
 
lOS ARIADX£. 
 
 cool-sounding fountain edge ; figs and fish to be 
 eaten in great piles at all street comers ; jaunts 
 out to be made in rattling pony carts along the 
 blossoming Campagna to the wine-house ; a 
 thousand, and ten thousand things to do, rather 
 than to come to vespers in this sad old chui'ch, 
 or go yonder to St. Joseph of the Carpenters. 
 
 I went up to her, and touched her gently ; she 
 raised her head with a bewildered look. 
 
 " Is it true ? " I asked her. " Is it true that 
 your mother's father has driven you out so 
 cruelly ? " 
 
 *' He does not believe ! " she said, simply. 
 
 ** Believe ! But you have papers ? " 
 
 '' He would not look at them." 
 
 "But he could be made, forced, obliged," I 
 said, hotly ; not so sure of the law as of my 
 own temper, and of my fierce fmy against this 
 ■wretched Syrian in the Ghetto. 
 
 " I would not wish it," she said, 'R'ith a sort 
 of shudder of disgust. *'I would rather think 
 that he is right — that I am nothing to him — 
 there is some mistake. These are the steps 
 where Gracchus was struck down ? " 
 
ABIADy£. 109 
 
 " Yes ; and after him Rienzi,*' I answered her, 
 not wondering much at her thinking of such 
 things at such a moment, because I always think 
 of them myself in season and out of it. " But 
 what did he do ? what did he say ? Was he indeed 
 brutal to you ? TeU me more." 
 
 ** It does not matter," she said wearily. 
 *•' Yes, he was unkind. But then he did not 
 believe, you know — so it was natural." 
 " But why did you not come to me *? '* 
 " I went to see the Faun in the CapitoL" 
 " The Faun I He could not help you." 
 " Yes. It is help — ^it gives courage — to see 
 those things that one has dreamt of always. 
 How he smiles — he does not care that Praxiteles 
 is dead ! " 
 
 There was a dreamy faintness in her voice, 
 like the voice of one light-headed from fever or 
 from want of food. 
 
 She was so calm and so dry -eyed, she fii^t- 
 ened me. She was all alone on earth, and 
 sixteen years old, and without a roof to cover 
 her in aU the width of Rome ; and yet could 
 talk of Gracchus and of Praxiteles ! 
 
110 ARIALNi:. 
 
 '' What will you do, my dear? " I said to her, 
 trying to draw her back to the perils of her 
 present place. " Shall I go see this Syrian, 
 and try to soften him ? If he be your mother's 
 father, lie must have some sort of feeling, and 
 some right " 
 
 She shuddered, and looked at me with sad, 
 strained eyes. "No. He called my mother 
 evil names. I would not go to him — not if he 
 begged me. And it was so vile there, so vile, 
 and I was so happy — thinking I came to 
 Rome ! " 
 
 Then at last she broke down into a passion of 
 tears, her head bowed upon lier knees ; I 
 think her grief w\as still much more for Rome 
 than for herself. Men hate tlie tears of women ; 
 so do I ; yet I felt more at ease to see them 
 then. 
 
 I touched, and tried to raise her. 
 
 The singing of the choristers echoed from the 
 church within ; the warm glow died ; the night 
 fell quite ; there were only a stray dog and the 
 solitary figure of a monk — here, — where the con- 
 querors had used to come, with clash of arms. 
 
ARIADNE:. Ill 
 
 and loud rejoicings, whilst their captives passed 
 downward into the eternal darkness of the 
 Pelasgic prisons. 
 
 **Come with me, my dear," I said to her, for 
 she was so helpless now, and so young that she 
 seemed nothing more than a child, and I lost 
 my awe of her as of the awakened Ariadne. 
 *' Come with me," I said. "You are sorely- 
 tired, and must be wanting food too. I will do 
 you no harm, and I have a little clean place, 
 though poor; and we can sj^eak about your 
 trouble better there than in the street here. I 
 am Crispin tlie cobbler — nothing else. But you 
 may trust me. Come." 
 
 It was some time before she stilled herself, 
 and fully understood me, for she was stupefied 
 with fatigue and pain, and followed me when her 
 passionate low weeping ceased, with the ex- 
 hausted docility of a poor animal that has been 
 overdriven. 
 
 She was only sixteen years old — and slic liad 
 thought to come to the Rome of Octavia ! 
 
 I led her almost in silence to my home. 
 
 As you come from Janiculan, across tlie 
 
112 AEIADNA 
 
 bridge of Pope Sixtus, you may see on your left 
 hand, liigh up in the last house wall, a window, 
 with pots of carnations on a wooden balcony, 
 and bean-flowers iiinning up their strings across 
 it, and it hangs brightly right above the water, 
 and anyone sitting at it can look right away 
 up and down the grand curves of Tiber upon 
 either side, with the tumble-down houses and 
 the ancient temples jumbled together upon the 
 yellow edges of the shores. 
 
 It is the window of my room ; of course I was 
 most at home in the open air, but I had to sleep 
 somewhere, and the old marbles and the old 
 books that I had got together could not lie out 
 in the rain of nights ; so this is my home, and 
 Pippo, who lives on the same landing, cooks for 
 me ; and Ersilia, who lives below, looks after it 
 for me ; and old bhnd Pipistrello, who Hves 
 above, and fiddles so sweetly that aU the gold- 
 finches and nightingales high above in the 
 woods that were Galba's gardens, strain their 
 throats for envy, used to come and fiddle there 
 sometimes, with his blind eyes turned to the 
 yellow water, and the Temple of Vesta, and the 
 
AF:IADy£. 113 
 
 Sacred Island, and the ruins of the Temple of 
 Healing. 
 
 To this one room of mine I took mv Borghese 
 Ariadne, who had gained human limbs, and 
 dragged them verv wearily along. "What else 
 could I do ? One could not leave a girl like that 
 to go to her death, or to worse than death, in the 
 streets of a city quite strange to her, where she 
 had not a friend, and only sought gods that were 
 dead. 
 
 I talked on to her as we went, rambling non- 
 sense no doubt, and I do not think she heard a 
 word of it — at least, she never answered ; she 
 moved dully and silently, her head drooping, her 
 feet seeming heavy as lead. As I turned to her 
 on the threshold of the house upon the bridge, 
 she grew paler and paler, stumbled a little, put 
 out her hands with a feeble gesture, and would 
 have fallen but for me. She had gi'own giddy, 
 and lost consciousness from exhaustion and long 
 fi\sting, and being in the sun all through the 
 hours of the day. Old Ersiha was spinning in 
 the doorway ; she cried out and came to help — a 
 good soul always, though of direful hot temper ; 
 
 VOL. I. 1 
 
114 ARlADNi!. 
 
 between us we bore lier within into Ersilia's 
 bed, and then I left her for a little to the 
 woman's care, and stood troubled in the street 
 without. 
 
 I lit m}^ pipe. A pipe is a pocket philosopher, 
 a truer one than Socrates, for it never asks ques- 
 tions. Socrates must have been very tiresome, 
 when one thinks of it. 
 
 With the help of the pipe I made up my mind, 
 and went uj)stairs into my chamber. 
 
 It would have looked a poor, bare place enough 
 to rich people, no doubt ; but yet it looked fine 
 to the people of my quarter — much too fine for a 
 vagabond cobbler, even when he sat quiet and 
 respectable at his stall, and might be almost 
 called a shoemaker. For in twenty years' living, 
 with odd tastes and many persons kind to me, 
 and ideas of a dwelling-place difi'erent to my 
 countryfolks — from having travelled far and lived 
 with men sometimes very far above me in posi- 
 tion of life, — I had collected tilings in it that 
 took off for me its desolateness and homeliness, 
 and made it unlike any other room in that 
 Kione. 
 
ARIADNE. 115 
 
 There were some old German pipes, witli 
 mediaeval potters' i)ainting on their bowls, relics 
 of my old days in Dilrer's city ; there were little 
 bits of delicate French china, little cups and 
 figures and milkbowls, that women had given me 
 in those good times of my youth and my wander- 
 ings ; there were three massive old quattrocento 
 chairs, with seats of gilded leather ; there were a 
 few old mezzotint prints, and some of Stefano 
 della Bella's animals, that artists had given me ; 
 there was a grand old tarsia cassone, too, tliat 
 Hilarion had sent there one day to be kept for 
 him, and pever had taken away again ; and there 
 were many pieces of agate and cameo, of bronze 
 and of marble, that I had found myself in the 
 teeming soil of the Agro Romano, as the 
 v/ooden plough of some peasant turned them 
 upward, or the browsing mouth of some ox 
 cropped the herbage that had hidden them. 
 
 And, above all, I had my arndess ^lercury, 
 really and truly Greek, and almost as well pre- 
 served as the Mercury of the Vatican; a very 
 thoughtful, doubting Hermes, mine, as thougli 
 he had just made woman, and in his young, cold 
 
 I 2 
 
llfi ABIADNi:. 
 
 heart was sony for licr, as tliough foreseeing 
 that the fair and dark brothers, Eros and 
 Anteros, woukl one or other always conquer 
 and bmd her, so that the wiles and waj^s, the 
 facile tongue and the uneriing sight, with which 
 he himself dowered her, Avould be powerless to 
 keep her from slavery and from kissing the 
 steel of her chains, and from most worshipping 
 the one who locked them fastest and made their 
 fetters surest with a blow. 
 
 That is, I used to fancy wliat my Greek Hermes 
 thought of w^here he stood, a fair, maimed thing, 
 in the pentelic marble. Some said that Ciphesio- 
 dorus made him and some said Scopas; for 
 myself, I loved to go yet higher, and believed 
 that one mightier even than they did so. 
 Anyhow, it was too good for ni}'' little, shabby,, 
 dusky, stone chamber, where it had to be 
 companioned with oil flasks and wine flasks, 
 and melons and cabbages, and leather and old 
 shirts, and the straw of Pales' bedding. But 
 when the sun came in red over the red bean 
 flowers on the balcony, and touched his delicate 
 and noble head, I loved him very dearly, and he 
 
ABIADN£. 117 
 
 gave a tender grace, of iin earlier and gladder 
 age than ours, to the old have room upon the 
 river, and seemed to shed a light about it that 
 -did not come from the broad blue sky of Home. 
 
 I had a few other little things : — carved arms, 
 whose beaut}' made one see the whole woman 
 that is lost ; an old Etrurian bracelet, bronze, 
 and green as the mould that grows over the 
 tombs of peasants and of kings ; a lamp with a 
 mouse upon it, that might have shed light upon 
 the brow of S. Agnese herself, kneeling in the 
 bowels of the earth, where never dajdight or 
 moonlight came ; a colossal head of Greek sculp- 
 ture, shattered from the throat on some day of 
 siege when the marble temples fell like axe- 
 hewn saplings ; blackened and bruised, and 
 cracked by fire, but with the crown of flowers 
 and of fruit still fresh, as though Glycera had 
 Just plucked them to be mimicked in the Parian 
 by her lover's chisel. These things I had, and 
 the}' lent a grace to my attic ; and now and then 
 they offered me gold for them, and I ate my bit of 
 black bread and refused. It was pleasant to feel 
 •that I, only Crisi)in the cobbler, had something 
 
118 ABIADNZ 
 
 the world would like to have and could not, unless 
 I chose. 
 
 Possession is the murderer of human love ;. 
 but of artistic love it is the ver}- crown and 
 chaj)let, unfading and life renewing. 
 
 Still, though I would not sell m}' Hermes, I 
 was a very poor man ; for in all trades — from 
 statecraft to shoemaking — it is he who makes 
 holes, not he who mends them, that prosj^ers. 
 
 *' See how well I fare," said old Lii)po Fede, 
 Avho is a cobbler, too, in another Rione, and 
 who one day got warmed with wine, and spoke 
 incautiously. " Look you, Crispin, whenever I 
 sew up a hole I slit another, just a snick with a 
 knife — blacked over, and never seen when the 
 shoes go home. Eh, praise the saints ! the self- 
 same pair is back upon my stall within a fort- 
 night, and I make my moan over the rottenness 
 of leather. But you, my dear, you mend the 
 hole, you see, and never pierce a new one. Well 
 you may be poor ! Besides, it is not fair to the 
 craft; not fau' in any way. What riglit have 
 you to mend shoes so that people, seeing how 
 yours wear, may get to think the rest of us a set 
 
ARIADNE. 119 
 
 of cheats and rascals ? There is no good fellow- 
 ship in that, nor common sense, nor brother- 
 hood." 
 
 Thus Fede. 
 
 You greater ones, who are not shoemakers or 
 shoemenders, but lawgivers, book-writers, poli- 
 ticians, philosophers, logicians, reformers, and 
 all the rest, do you not find Humanity your 
 Lippo Fede? **Do not spoil trade," your 
 brethren cry, when you would fain be honest. 
 
 But I do not drill holes, despite good Fede's 
 grmnbhng and reproaches ; and so I am poor. 
 
 Yet I thought to myself : — 
 
 " A girl cannot cost much to keep, not much 
 more than a couple of thrushes, I suppose ; at 
 least, to be sure, the thrushes wear no garments ; 
 still, just for a week or two, till she can look 
 round her, one would not be ruined. Into the 
 streets she cannot go, and the convents would 
 not do for her. Instead of entering Ai-a Coeli, she 
 went to see the Faun." 
 
 So I thought to myself, and set to work clear- 
 ing away Pales' straw nest and the old flasks, 
 and the general litter, and smelling all the while 
 
120 ARIADNZ 
 
 with hungry nostrils the fry that Pippo was 
 frying for me, and which I never should taste — 
 at least, if she could manage to eat it. 
 
 "When I had made my room neat, which was 
 easy to me, because I can turn my hand to most 
 kinds of work, and see no shame in any of it, 
 when I had done it — feeling glad, I remember, to 
 see those scarlet beans at the casement all so 
 bravely flowering up their strings, because they 
 might please her with the sunset-gilded water 
 shining through their leaves, — I went down again 
 to Ersilia. 
 
 ** Is she better ? " I asked, and heard that she 
 was so. 
 
 " Then, like a good soul, take the linen 
 off my bed up there,'* I said to her ; " and 
 put fresh linen on, and let her have that room of 
 mine for to-nis^ht, at anv rate : and let her fancv 
 it an empty room we have here doing nothing.'* 
 
 "You know nothing of her?" said the old 
 soul, suspicious of me. 
 
 *• On my word, nothing ; but I am not afraid. 
 And you, Ersilia, my 'dear, you would not have 
 wished your daughter, had she lived, to want a 
 
ARIADNE. 121 
 
 roof between her and the sliame or the starvation 
 of the streets?" 
 
 " No," said Ersilia, with her bright, fierce 
 eyes dimming. She had had an only chikl, and 
 lost her at sixteen years old of cholera. " No ; 
 and you have a true tongue, Crispino, and are an 
 honest man. But if I do what you want, where 
 will you sleep ? " 
 
 ** Oh, anywhere. Pales and I can always 
 find a bed together. Go ujj and get the linen 
 now, and take her there ; and do not frighten 
 her, and I will bring her something she can 
 eat." 
 
 " But she is of foul Jew spawn." 
 
 " No more than you or I, or Pales. The Jew 
 disowns her. Anjdiow, she is a girl ; and the 
 streets are vile." 
 
 *' She is handsome," said Ersilia, still sus- 
 picious. 
 
 *' So much the worse for her. Go up and 
 get the bed read}-, dear Ersilia," said I. 
 
 And then I went out and gossiped a little 
 with the people, so as to turn their liearts 
 towards her ; because, did tliey tliink her of 
 
122 ^ AEIADNS. 
 
 Jewish blood, I knew they woukl hoot at her, 
 to say the least, and veiy likely drive her out 
 with stones, or accuse her of poisoning the bright 
 waters of our fountam. 
 
 But I have had some skill in managing the 
 minds of crowds ; it is a mere knack, hke any 
 other ; it belongs to no particular character or 
 culture. Arnold of Brescia had it, and so had 
 Masaniello. Lamartine had it, and so had 
 Jack Cade. 
 
 They were all ready to hear, or rather ta 
 scream questions, which is a crowd's favourite- 
 way of hearing, especially wdien that crowd is 
 three parts female. The mere sight of the tired, 
 drooping figm'e following me across my threshold 
 had been enough to set them all aflame with 
 curiosity; — so small a thing is enough for us 
 to chatter of, ten hours long, in Home. 
 
 I set their sj'mpathies for, and not against 
 her ; and told a lie flatty, and said there was 
 nothing of Jewish blood in her, and had no time- 
 to do more, but ran in and got the fry from 
 Pij)po's kitchen. Brown and golden it was, 
 lovelv as a frv could be, hot as hot, and seething 
 
JRIADNj^. 12$ 
 
 and smoking in the sweetest manner— all its 
 little bubbles singing loud ; but I covered it up, 
 and put a nice little roll of white bread and a 
 little fruit beside it, and put it all into Ersilia's 
 hand, with a glass of Lachryma Cristi from the 
 little dark hole in the stairs where I keep my 
 wine. 
 
 I did not like to go up to her myself. 
 
 ** Is she in my room ? " I asked. 
 
 Ersilia nodded. She was cross ; she went up 
 into the darkness of the stairwaj-. 
 
 I smoked my pipe in Pippo's kitchen, to escape 
 the questions of the people ; for that corner 
 by the fountain, and the bridge itself, were 
 growing full and resonant with voices as the 
 evening coolness came. 
 
 Pippo, who was always deaf, and was then 
 bus}' getting ready a su^jper to go across in a tin 
 dish to a j^lump priest, had heard nothing, and 
 so asked nothmg. I was not willing that he sliould 
 hear. Pijipo was the best of souls, but a devout 
 believer, to whom Jews and heretics were lower 
 than the garbage-seeking swine. Pippo fried his 
 cutlets b}' the saints' grace, and kept nigh two 
 
124 ABIABNE. 
 
 hundred days out of eacli year holy, by snoring 
 through them, and drmking a Uttle more than 
 ordinary. 
 
 In half-an-hour's time, Ersilia came down the 
 stairs again : the plate was emptied. 
 
 " That looks well," said I, cheerfully. '' She 
 has got back her appetite, at least." 
 
 " Nay, not a bit did she touch. She ate the 
 fruit ; I ate the fritter. It were a shame to 
 waste good food the good saints give ! " said 
 Ersilia, and expected me to be pleased. I ! — 
 who w^as hungry as a peasant's donkey, and could 
 not for shame's sake ask Pipi)o for another 
 supper. Besides, his charcoal was gone out, all 
 its live ashes being shovelled into the tin box 
 to keep his reverence's platter warm. 
 
 *'She ate nothing!" I said, ruefully. And, 
 indeed, it was haji'd upon me. 
 
 " The saints will remember it to you, just as 
 well as though she had eaten it," said Ersilia, 
 with a gleam of humour in her eyes. '' It was 
 more fit for me. She picked a little of the fruit, 
 bird-lilie, being thirsty. I think she has got 
 fever.'* 
 
ABIADN^. 125 
 
 ** You will not leave her alone ? " I begged ; 
 and felt that the sharf>, honest soul was worth a 
 hundred fries and fritters. 
 
 Ersilia nodded. 
 
 *' Oh, for the matter of that, they want no- 
 thing in fever ; they lie like stocks and stones. 
 But I will see to her. AVhere do you sleep to- 
 night yourself ? " 
 
 " I shall do well anywhere — with Pales ! " I 
 answered ; and walked out, knowing they would 
 only laugh at me for being so anxious about a 
 stray strange girl — I, an old man, and past all 
 follies of the heart and fancy. 
 
 Pales was sitting, bolt upright, and with a 
 shrewd and anxious face, beside the stall, for it 
 was past her hour to be released ; at sunset she 
 and I were always drinking and eating cosily in 
 some nook if it were bad weather, or off rambling 
 beyond the gates along the broad green level if 
 it were fair. Pales detested change of any kind : 
 there is no more conservative politician than a 
 dog. 
 
 But to-night I only gave her leave to go away 
 and hunt her cats or meet her lovers, as she 
 
126 ARIADNE. 
 
 chose, within the length of the street and bridge, 
 and sat down myself to my board. 
 
 "I must finish Padre Trillo's shoes," I said 
 to my neighbours, and stitched away at them, 
 and kept my pipe in my mouth to escape gossip- 
 ing, with the little oil lamp swinging to and fro 
 on its cord under ni}^ awning, and the people 
 coming and gomg, with its light upon their 
 faces. 
 
 *' He is in one of his queer moods," they said 
 to one another, passing me. 
 
 It is of use to have a reputation for queerness ; 
 it gains one many solitary moments of peace. 
 
 Meanwhile the night drew on, and the bean- 
 flowers before my window up on high lost their 
 •colour in the moonlight. 
 
 I wondered what my Hermes thought of the 
 new form that he gazed upon — he who made 
 woman. 
 
 Have you never known what it is to believe 
 in the thoughts of a statue ? You have never 
 lived with marble, then ; — marble that speaks to 
 you like a living thing, only that is so much 
 greater than any living thing ever was ! 
 
ARIADNE. 127 
 
 I worked half the night at Padre Trillo's 
 shoes. He was a heavy mart, who trod heavily ; 
 and there was much to be done to them. The 
 people cleared away one by one, -little by little, 
 till all the gay, mirthful, dancing, love-making, 
 wine-dfinldng little groups were broken up and 
 gone ; and one began to hear in the stillness the 
 singing of the nightingales up on lugh, where 
 the woods and gardens were, and the boughs 
 still rustled that saw Tasso die. 
 
 AVhen I had driven in the last brass nail, there 
 was no sound at all but of theii* distant sinoinj?, 
 and of the falling of the fountain near at hand. 
 It was an hour past midnight, the hour, you 
 know, when the buried and forgotten gods arise, 
 they say, and pass through Rome, weei)ing, 
 bound together by fetters of dead leaves. 
 
 I laid myself down upon my plank, with Pales 
 curled beneath it, and fell asleep : I dreamed of 
 other lives than this, and in my dreams the night- 
 ingales sorrowing for Itys, and the faun in llie 
 fountain water piping of dead days, mingled 
 themselves together, and told me many things. 
 
 But who cares what they said, or would be- 
 
128 
 
 ARIADNJS. 
 
 lieve ? These are only brown birds and perished 
 fables — so you say! And I am only Crispino 
 the cobbler, stitching at old leather for old 
 Rome. 
 
CHAPTER YI. 
 
 Waking, the Faun was silent, and the night- 
 ingales, if they were not silent, had all theii' 
 voices drowned in the loud chorus of all the 
 other hirds, which had heen sound asleep all 
 night, and now fluttered into joyousness and 
 movement, with the coming of the da}-, amongst 
 the mj'ille and the ilex leaves in the monastic 
 gardens up yonder upon the Golden Hill. 
 
 AVaking, I woke cramped, of course, and cold, 
 and with the smell of the dying lampwick in my 
 nostrils, and the broad ros}' flush of the sky like 
 the glory of the last judgment above my head. 
 
 Waking, I wondered a moment, then looked 
 up at my own window, where the bean-flowers. 
 
 VOL. I. K 
 
130 ARIADN:E\ 
 
 were, and remembered whj^ I was there, and thus, 
 with Pales crouchmg in her straw and yawning, 
 and the fomitain so near to us both. 
 
 "Waking, I yawned like Pales, and shook my- 
 self, and dipped my head in a pailfull of the 
 fountain-water, and looked, as I always look at 
 daybreak, down the beautiful golden surface of 
 the river, where it is all so cahn and stirless, and 
 the great black shadows lie so still, and the sails 
 of the boats droop idle, and the ruined temples 
 shine golden in the morning light. 
 
 Everyone still was sleeping. It was not yet 
 iive by the clocks. Sweet clear-toned bells were 
 l)ealing from the churches dovrn the shores ; and 
 they and the call of a fisherman setting his. 
 girella in the sweep of the current, and the 
 murmurs of the water rippling and falling, and 
 the song of the thrushes and the woodlarks m 
 the thickets, were the only sounds there were. 
 
 The day was still so young that no one was 
 astir ; I sat down and stitched at those big boots 
 of the butcher; but very soon I saw Ersiliawith 
 a mop in her hand, and a pail ; she came to get 
 the fountain water. 
 
ARIADNE:. 131 
 
 " Your precious waif and stray is in high 
 fever," she said to me, with that pleasure in had 
 news which j^our true gossip always takes. 
 *' Begins to say nonsense, and all that; a heavy 
 stupid fever — there is nothing to be done ; I did 
 not like to send her to hospital without your 
 word, hut " 
 
 " I will go find an apothecar}'," said I ; and 
 went and found one ; seeking an old man, as old 
 as I myself, whom I knew well. 
 
 " What little she costs shall be my charge," I 
 told Ersilia, when I returned ; and put a new 
 little piece or two of mono}- in her hand, be- 
 cause money is more eloquent than all your 
 poets, i)reacliers, or philosophers, and has the 
 onl}" tongue that, strange to no one, needs no 
 dictionary to explain it to the simplest unlearned 
 soul. 
 
 The apothecary said it was not dangerous, but 
 might be long ; it was the common fever of tlie 
 cit}' ; tedious and wearisome rather than very 
 perilous to life. It seemed she was always talk- 
 ing of Kome in a faint delirious way, and liad a 
 foncy that she had been brought there for mar- 
 
 K 2 
 
132 AEIADNA 
 
 tjrdom ; only not martyrdom for Christ's sake, 
 but for tlie sake of the old dead gods that every 
 one else had abandoned, whilst she herself to 
 them was faithful. 
 
 '* An odd fanc}^" said the apothecar}-, taking 
 snuff. 
 
 To me it did not seem so odd ; I half believed 
 in them, only it did not do to say so with Canon 
 Sjdvio's and Padre Trillo's shoes just taken home, 
 and good coins i^aid me for them. 
 
 So she lay sick there whilst I stitched leather 
 more steadily than ever I had done in all my 
 life ; and Pales, who disliked the turn that things 
 had taken, almost split her triangle of a black 
 mouth with yawning. 
 
 " You make a rod for your back, Crispin," said 
 my friend Pippo, the cook. 
 
 ** You make a clog for your hoof, Crispin," 
 said my friend Tino, the tinker. 
 
 " You make a fool of yourself, Crispin," said 
 all my neighbours of the Ponte Sisto corner, 
 and the fishers watching their nets in the 
 stream ; and what was worse, the curved mouth 
 of my Hermes said it likewise. Only the faun 
 
ARIADNE. 133 
 
 in the fountain water said "AVlien men are fools, 
 then onl}^ are the}' wise ; " and that little voice 
 that lives in us, and must be destined to live 
 after us I think, said ver}' clearly to me, " What 
 matter being a fool — in other's eyes — if only thou 
 dost right?" 
 
 I might be doing foolishly. I could not well 
 be doing wrong. As for the rod and as for the 
 clog, he has them both who once admits into him 
 any human affection. But without the rod we 
 are hard and selfish, and without the clog we are 
 idle as feathers on the wind. 
 
 Still a fool I was ; that all people around the 
 Ponte Sisto, and in the Quarter of the Tanners, 
 and all the fisheifolk down both banks of the 
 Tiber, were agreed ; but they liked me tlie 
 more because they could laugh at me. To be 
 lowered in 3'our neighbour's estimation is to be 
 heightened in his love. 
 
 Such a fool ! to turn out of a good chamber, 
 and eat sparsely, and sleep with the dog, and 
 pay a doctor's fees, and stitch, stitch, stitch, to 
 buy ice and fruit, and so forth, all for a stray 
 girl, come from the Lord knows where, and of 
 
134 ARIADNE. 
 
 no more kin to me (if I were to be believed), 
 than the human dust of the Appian Way, or the 
 long-fleeced goats coming tinkling at dawn through 
 the streets ! '^ Eh, such a fool ! " said the men 
 and the women standing about the house doors, 
 and under the winesellers' withered green boughs, 
 and beside the bright water splashing out of the 
 lions' mouths at our own fountain. 
 
 I let them sa}^ their say, and sat at my stall ; 
 and the giid on high, with Hermes and the 
 bean-flowers, meanwhile was ill, as was only to 
 be looked for after her fatigue, and the hot sun, 
 and the pain that had met her at the close of her 
 weary travel. 
 
 *' There was the hospital," they said. 
 
 Yes, there was, no doubt ; and I would speak 
 reverentty of all such places ; but one would not 
 wish to die in one all the same ; and beside — I 
 had loved women, and lost them ; I knew what 
 theii- fancies are, and how they shrink from 
 things; quite little things, that men would 
 laugh at, or would altogether disregard, but 
 which to them are as torments of Antinora. 
 
 So I sat on at my stall through the sweet 
 
AFdADNl^, 135 
 
 summer weather ; and she lay ill up j-onder be- 
 hind the scarlet blossoms of my bean-flowers. 
 
 It would be foolish to saj^ that it did not 
 cost me a good deal. Everj^thing costs to the 
 poor, and costs twice what the rich would give 
 for it. But I had a little money put away in 
 an old stocking, in that cupboard in the wall 
 where the wine was ; and then after all no man 
 need spend much on himself unless he chooses. 
 
 Whose business was it if I smoked but once a 
 day at sunset ? or if I troubled Pippo no more 
 to fry for me ? Smoking is dr}' work for the 
 throat in warm weather ; and a hunch of bread 
 with a little wine may suffice for any mortal whose 
 paunch is not his god. 
 
 Anyhow she lay ill up there, and I did what 
 I could for her, stitching down below. Ersilia 
 was a good soul, and full of kindliness ; but 
 charity is a flower not naturally of earthly 
 growth, and it needs manuring with a promise 
 of profit. 
 
 I do not think Ersilia left to herself would 
 have been at all unkind, but she would have been 
 peifectly certain of the excellence of hospitals, 
 
136 ARIADNE. 
 
 and the superior chances of life in them, and 
 would have acted on her ceitaint}^ ■with perfect 
 honesty of intent ; for people are always most 
 honest when they are in any sincere fear for 
 themselves. . 
 
 The fever was very tedious, and the city grew 
 ver}^ hot with the heavy, drowsy, sickly heat of 
 the midsummer time ; and the poor child lay 
 there, parching and weary, and sleeping very 
 little, they told me, with the glaring sun beating 
 all day long at the closed shutters of the room, 
 and getting through the crevices, and burning in 
 upon her. 
 
 Once, as I thought was my dut}^, I betook my- 
 self down to the Ghetto, and saw the old man — 
 Ben Sulim. He was a tall, gaunt, fierce-eyed 
 man, who had been handsome most likely in his 
 youth, but was hungry-looking as any vulture, 
 and savage -looking as an}^ wolf. He was in a 
 miserable attic strewn with rust}^ dusty odds and 
 ends of things that he had bought from rag- 
 pickers and beggars ; the}'' said that was his 
 trade. • 
 
 I told her tale and mine with such eloquence. 
 
ARIADN£. 137 
 
 in hope to move him — though ho looked a brute 
 — as I could command to my usage. He heard 
 in silence, rubbing up an old iron lock red with 
 rust ; then showed his teeth as wolves do. 
 
 " My daughter was a wanton," he said. ** Her 
 daughter — if there be one — ma}' go and be the 
 like for i\ie. Get you gone, whoever 3'ou are. 
 I am poor, very poor, as 3'ou see ; but were I 
 rich with all the riches of Solomon, the maiden 
 — if she be one — should starve for me. I have 
 spoken." 
 
 Then he glowered upon me with his impene- 
 trable eyes, and turned his back, still rubbing at 
 his rust}- lock. Brutality, poverty, wretchedness ; 
 who would not deem her best saved from such a 
 triad ? I hurled a few unsavoury words at him, 
 and told him liis threshold was accursed, and 
 departed ; his mercy would have been more cruel 
 than his cruelty. 
 
 I went and bathed in the open baths of the 
 Tiber to be luuified after all that beastliness ; 
 come what might to her, anything would be 
 better than life with such an one as he. 
 
 It was a hot evening ; I splashed and plunged, 
 
13S ARIADNE. 
 
 Pales "with me ; the water was yellow, and 
 scarcely cool ; still it was water, and so allured 
 me ; the moon was up wlien I returned to my 
 corner by the Ponte Sisto. My window above 
 the bridge stood open of course ; Ersilia put 
 her head out of it : " She is much better, she is 
 safe to live," she cried to me. 
 
 " What shall we do with her ? " I said to Pales. 
 Pales stuck her tail out stiffly ; she was not in- 
 terested ; if it had been a cat indeed 
 
 Pales had been born in a wine-cart, and had 
 at that time a lover in a public letter-writer's 
 dog, and knew the world, and knew that your 
 wise man does not bestir himself about another's 
 fate — unless to lift its burden off his own. 
 
 But I have never been a wise man — or I had 
 not now been stitching boots and shoes for the 
 tired feet of the Ecman 2>lehs. 
 
 One day as I was working, — it was ver}" early 
 morning, and Pales and I and the Faun in the 
 water were all alone, — two slender hands were 
 laid upon ni}^ stall, and looking up, I saw her, 
 just as I had seen her that day when I dreamed of 
 my Ariadne of Borghese ; clad just the same, and 
 
AEIAI)N2. 130 
 
 looking just the same, only she had no flowers in 
 her hands, and had the pallor of illness on her 
 face. 
 
 Her eyes were wet with tears. 
 
 " I have come to thank you," slie said, very 
 low. " Onl}' I cannot thank you — ever. You 
 have been so good. I do not know what to say. 
 And I have nothing " 
 
 " There is no need to sa}-," I answered, almost 
 roughly. " And Ersilia was to tell you nothing. 
 I mean — an empty room there doing no good to 
 an3'one — and you are not even well now ; should 
 you be out like this ? You cannot be very 
 strong ! " 
 
 " I awoke at daybreak, and I could not rest 
 longer without coming to you ; Ersilia would not 
 let me leave the room before ; you have been all 
 
 so good — so good — and I " 
 
 "There has been but little goodness; had 
 there been less we had been brutes. Are you 
 sure that you are strong enough to stand ? Sit 
 here ! " 
 
 I drew my bench out for her, and she sank 
 down on it ; for me, I was stupefied by the love- 
 
140 ' ARIADNJS. 
 
 liness of her, and her likeness to that Borghese 
 bronze. 
 
 "You should be with them there in that cool 
 green place ; you and PsjThe ; only Bacchus should 
 never come near to you, nor Theseus either," 
 I murmured to myself. She lifted her head in 
 surprise, thinking me mad, no doubt ; or else not 
 understanding, probabl}^ ; for indeed how should 
 she have understood ? 
 
 She had a little tumbled paper in her hand, 
 which she put out to me. 
 
 '* This is the receipt I had given me ; they were 
 to send such few things as I had ; could you ask 
 for me ? There is not much save some busts 
 of m}" father's ; the}" might sell, and pa}" what is 
 owing all this time. How long is it that I have 
 been ill ? Ersilia would not sa}"." 
 
 "Oh, a few weeks ; this is midsummer, and 
 you will suffer from the heat," I answered her. 
 " Yes, I will go and ask after your things ; but 
 as for paj^ment — the room was empt}", and ErsiHa, 
 I am sure, would never wish — my dear, she lost 
 a daughter of your age." 
 
 A certain proud shadow stole over her face. 
 
ARIADNE. Ml 
 
 " And I am grateful. Do not think I -want to 
 acquit so great a debt as that. I only hope to 
 -pay the money it has cost. That can make no 
 difference in one's heart. I say it ver}' badly — 
 but you know what it is I mean !" 
 
 ** Oh, yes ! I know — Pales, be silent." 
 
 *' The room is your room ; that Ersilia told 
 me ; " she said, with the colour rising up over 
 her brow. " I cannot bear to be so much trouble ; 
 I wish to go away. I will try and keep myself. 
 I can make little things in clay. I might help 
 sculptors " 
 
 " My dear, go back to my room, since you will 
 have it, it is mine ; and do not pain us all by 
 taking flight like this," I said to her, feeling like 
 a fool, not knowing what to sa}-, and deafened 
 with the jealous noise of Pales. " I will go and 
 get your things when I have done this pair of 
 boots ; and do you rest, and then in the evening 
 I will bring them to you, and we will talk. But 
 have no fear ; the gods love youth ; and we are 
 all 3'our friends." 
 
 She thanked me once more with the loveliest 
 smile, like sunrise illumining the sadness of her 
 
142 AEIADNi:. 
 
 face, then went, with an obedience I could not 
 have looked for, away to the corner of the bridge, 
 and into the darkness of Ersilia's doorwaj^ 
 
 I had been anxious to have her well away 
 before all the 3"0ung peasants trooped in from 
 Janiculan with theii' market fruits and greener}' ; 
 and before two or three students who dwelt upon 
 the bridge, should come out on their morning 
 stroll to the academies. There was no harm in 
 any of these lads — but they were lads ; and she 
 was the livmg image of that Ariadne awaj^ in the 
 gallery of the Borghese, in the shadow of the old 
 green ilex woods. 
 
 I stitched on manfully at the boots ; they be- 
 longed to the blacksmith round the corner. 
 
 Why is a blacksmith always a half-heroic, and 
 even almost poetic person, and a cobbler alwa3's 
 more or less absurd ? 
 
 Is it viler to shoe men than horses ? Or is it 
 that the grim divinity of Hephaestus and Mulciber 
 has given a sort of grandeur for ever to the 
 anvil and the forge '? Or is it because great Lysip- 
 pus was a blacksmith '? and because it was a 
 cobbler that set the murderers on Cicero ? You 
 
ARIADN2. 143 
 
 may make a shoeing- smith a very Od^'sseus or 
 Hector in your poem, and no one will laugh 
 at you or j'our picture ; but your human shoe- 
 maker is always beneath contempt : it is very 
 unjust. 
 
 There was a crashing and jingling confusion 
 of sounds, and a clatter of restless horses' hoofs 
 upon uneven stones. 
 
 '* I turned out of my way to say farewell to 
 you, Crispin," said the sweet melodious voice of 
 Hilarion on my ear. " No, there is nothing the 
 matter, and it is never too warm for me ; but the 
 fancy came to us an hour or so ago ; I shall be 
 back — ah, who knows when ? When the}' un- 
 earth any fresh nymph from my fields. Go up 
 to the villa when 3'ou will, and how 3'ou will ; go 
 and stay there all summer through, as though I 
 were there. But you must be at your corner when 
 I come, or Rome will not be Rome. It could 
 better lose the faun from the Cajiitol tlian the 
 faun of your fountain." 
 
 He leaned downwards and sliook my hands, 
 the horses sprang forward, angry at tlie noise of 
 the water ; in a moment he had both come and 
 
144 ARIADNE. 
 
 gone ; the black-browed singer, who was his 
 latest fancy, was beside him ; they swept on, and 
 left me there. 
 
 Onlj' a few da3's before he had spoken of 
 passing all the summer in his beautiful home 
 under Soracte ; had planned a thousand excur- 
 ' sions and excavations ; it had been ascertained, 
 or imagined, that his villa of Daila was on the site 
 of what had once been a country-seat of Petronius 
 Ai'biter; he had undertaken excavations on a 
 large scale in its vinej^ards ; a few days before 
 they had found a broken but \ery lovelj^ marble 
 of the n3'mph Canens, and he was eager to lay bare 
 the earth for more treasures ; he had insisted with 
 his channing imperious way that I should spend 
 all the summer and vintage months with him ; he 
 had meant to banish women, to be alone, to 
 translate the songs of the Greek of Gadarene, to 
 write a IjtIc di'ama upon the necklace of Erij^hyle 
 — and now he was gone. 
 
 For myself I was sorrowful ; Hilarion to me 
 was both a solace and delight. Looking up at 
 the bean-flowers above the bridge, I was glad. 
 For she, up 3'onder, was f^iu'er than that nymph 
 
ARIADNt:. 145 
 
 Canens whom lie had unearthed from liis fields 
 beneath Soracte ; and he — 
 
 It was many years smce I had first met Hila- 
 rion. When I had seen him first he had been 
 only a most lovely bo}' ; beautiful as any whom 
 IMimnermus and Theognis delighted to sing of 
 in then* odes. 
 
 It was in an earlier time, just before I had 
 ceased wandering about, and, being smitten with 
 that homesickness at sight of the Madonnina of 
 old Jlino, had come to set up mj^ stall to Crispin- 
 Crisi)ianus. 
 
 It happened thus. 
 
 There was plague in the city of Paris ; the 
 cholera killed its thousands and tens of thousands. 
 The gay sprmg and midsummer months were made 
 ghastly by it, and in the open-air theatre, where 
 the comedians I then belonged to were acting and 
 singing merrily enough for the meagrest pittance, 
 night after night some workman or student or 
 sewing girl would be seized with the pangs of the 
 dire disease as the}' sat and laughed there, chew- 
 ing a peach, or smelling a knot of jasmine, and 
 vol.. r. L 
 
146 ARIADNE. 
 
 were carried out of the place, neither to laugh 
 nor to weep any more. 
 
 There were burnmg drought and hideous sick- 
 ness, and people talked wildly of poisoned wells, 
 and suspected foul faith everywhere, as they will 
 in the fear of contagion and in the contagion of 
 fear. I did what I could ; it was not much; the 
 silence of death made itself felt everj^where ; one 
 used to look in a sort of infuriated despair down 
 the Seine — that had shrunk from its yellow banks 
 — and think of Tiber and our Sacred Island, and 
 wonder where the old fair days had gone, when 
 in this Idnd of misery the Cities could pray to 
 Zeus, and believe that they beheld him bring 
 health and mercy as the golden serpent crept 
 from sea to shore. 
 
 One night, in the height of the plague, going 
 along, as the moon had risen, where the street 
 was solitar}^, I met a man carr3'ing a woman in 
 his arms. 
 
 He cried aloud to me, and I went to him. 
 
 " It seized her a little while ago," he said to 
 me. '' We were in the opera-house — my horses 
 and servants had not come — no one would touch 
 
ARIADNA 147 
 
 lier ; help me to get her home — if you liave no 
 fear." 
 
 I had no fear. I helped hmi to carry her. She 
 was perhaps twenty j^ears of age ; not more. She 
 was ah'eady livid and unconscious, though she 
 writhed and moaned. She was a very pretty 
 pink and white thing, and the jewels on her 
 si^arkled and seemed to laugh horribly in the 
 moonlight. 
 
 He was a 3'outli, not more than twenty himself, 
 if so much ; tall, and fair, and beautiful, with 
 something imperious and tired on his face 
 already. 
 
 The streets were empty, though a few folks 
 like him were of the Decamerone temper, and 
 went to song and feast in the midst of the uni- 
 versal death ; yet these were few, and carriages 
 were rarely met, because so many had fled out of 
 the doomed cit}'. 
 
 AVe bore her .between us as best we miglit 
 to where she lived ; it was not ver}' far ; a 
 great place, in wliicli she had several rooms, 
 luxurious, and full of scattered, useless riches, 
 such as young men lavish on such women as slie 
 
 L 2 
 
14S ABIADNA 
 
 was. The chambers were decorated in tlie taste 
 of Paris, light and white, silver and golden. 
 
 AYe laid her down upon her delicate bed. I 
 remember it was all curtained with white satin 
 embroidered with pale roses, and above it hung 
 a little Love — laughing. There were lamps burn- 
 ing, and a heavy sweet smell upon the air from 
 jars of lilies and of hothouse flowers. 
 
 I left him with her, and ran for aid. When I 
 found a doctor, and took him wp the stah's, with 
 one glance he saw death written there. He tried 
 his remedies, but without any hope in their 
 power. He, like all men in that season, had grown 
 used to seeing human bodies drop like swarms 
 of stifled bees. In less than an hour the girl lay 
 dead ; grey and dusky and swollen under her 
 blossoming roses and her laughing Love. She 
 died horribly, in short but mortal agony, and 
 rather like a poisoned rat than like a human 
 creature. 
 
 All the while her young lover watched her with 
 little emotion; he seemed rather curious than 
 pained. He was a beautiful boy — hardly more 
 than eighteen, but no cynic of eighty years 
 
ABIADNi:. 149 
 
 could have been colder before that deathbed 
 than he was. 
 
 There was no farewell even between them in 
 her intervals of consciousness. She had only 
 muttered curses on her pain, and he had onl}- 
 said " Poor Lilas ! " as carelessly almost as a 
 heartless man might say a word passing a dying 
 horse by the wayside. 
 
 When she was quite dead, he rose and offered 
 me his hand. 
 
 " You have been so good ! How can I thank 
 you ? To bear such a scene, and for a stranger. 
 In your place I think I should have refused. She 
 is dead, j^ou see. Poor Lilas ! — an hour ago 
 laughing at the theatre, and counting on 
 having a big emerald she had screamed for in the 
 morning. It is droll, you know — no religion of 
 an}" kind could explain that. If ever one doubted 
 that death is an end of all things, one would 
 know it seeing such women as these die. Think 
 of heaven or hell for Lilas ! it is making a midge 
 a giant. She was munching sweetmeats an hour 
 ago, and teasing me for emeralds — and there she 
 is now, * an immortal soul' in their jargon. Look, 
 
150 AFJADNE. 
 
 Love laughs — well lie may. Her eternity must 
 
 be about as good a jest as his." 
 
 He spoke rather with indifference than levity. 
 
 A diamond flower-spray had fallen off her bosom 
 
 on the bed. He took it up and tossed it in his 
 
 hand. 
 
 *' That was the price of the soul. Let it be 
 
 buried with her as the Etruscans buried toys 
 
 with their children. Come away. The surgeon 
 will send the women, and she has no beauty to 
 
 show us now " 
 
 *' You will leave her here alone ! " I said in 
 disgust at this boy, so beautiful and so brutal. 
 
 '' AYhy not?" he said, dreamily. " It is only 
 a dead butterfly. There w^as no harm in her, and 
 no good. She was a pretty animal, with a sleek 
 skin and an insatiable appetite. Nature made 
 her — which was a pity perhaps ; and Natm-e has 
 unmade her, which is no pity whatever, though 
 you seem to think so. What is she to me? I 
 only saw her first three months since here in 
 Paris. Her own Love laughs ; why should any 
 one w^eep ? Come away ; there are the women, and 
 she is ugly to look on — all in an hour, you see ! " 
 
ARIADNE. 151 
 
 He took me with him through various rooms 
 into one which looked down on a garden ; we 
 saw the stars through the lace-hung windows ; 
 there was a rich supper on the table, and lights 
 were burning. 
 
 He poured out wine and pushed it to me, and 
 sat down and di'ank himself. 
 
 I refused it. I thought he gave it me because 
 I seemed a low fellow to him, and the kind of 
 man to be paid for service. 
 
 " Why do you not drink ?" he said, impatiently. 
 "It is good wine — my wine — if you are doubting 
 that." 
 
 " Death and wine do not go together, though 
 the Etruscans thought they did," I answered him 
 bluntly. " And I will take my leave of you. I 
 cannot see a woman die, and laugh — if you can.' 
 
 " Have I laughed ? I think not. As for a 
 woman — Lilas was not a woman. She was a 
 pretty cat, a little sleek beast of pre}', a ball of 
 soft wool with a needle hidden in it — anything 
 3'ou like ; but not a woman. I suppose there are 
 women somewhere ; creatures that love men, and 
 bear their 3'oung, and are faithful. I suppose 
 
152 ARIADNE. 
 
 the}' did not all die with Andromaclie and the 
 rest. But these things we play with are not 
 women. They have as man}^ bloodsuckers as the 
 fish Octopus, only the}" are prett}^ to look at, and 
 suck you softl}" as a . cooing dove. Can you 
 read Shakespeare ? You think Dante greater ? 
 Of course you do, being an Italian. But you 
 are wrong. Dante never got out of his own 
 narrow world. He filled the great blank of Here- 
 after with his own spites and despites. He 
 marred his finest verse with false imagery to rail 
 at a foe or flaunt a polemic. His Eternity was 
 onl}' a millpond in which he should be able to 
 drow^n the dogs he hated. A great man ! — oh, 
 yes ! — but never by a league near Shakesi)eare. 
 Sympathy is the hall-mark of the poet. Genius 
 should be wide as the heavens and deep as the 
 sea in infinite comprehension. To understand 
 intuitively — that is the breath of its life. Whose 
 understanding was ever as boundless as Shake- 
 speare's ? From the woes of the mind diseased, to 
 the coy joys of the yielding virgin ; from the am- 
 bitions of the king and the conqueror, to the clums}' 
 ^iee of the clown and the milkmaid ; from the 
 
ARIADNE. lo3 
 
 liigliest heights of human life to the lowest follies 
 of it — he comprehended all. That is the wonder 
 of Shakespeare. Xo other writer was ever so 
 miraculously impersonal. And if one thinks of his 
 manner of life it is the more utterl}' surprising. 
 With everything in his hirth, in his career, in his 
 temper, to make him C3'nic and revolutionist, he 
 has never a taint of either pessimism or revolt. 
 For Shakespeare to have to bow, as a mere mime 
 in Leicester's house ! — it would have given any 
 other man the gall of a thousand Marats. AVith 
 that divinit}' in him, to sit content under the mul- 
 berr}' trees, and see the Squires Lucy ride b}' in 
 state, — one would say it would have poisoned the 
 ver\' soul of St. John himself. Yet never a drop of 
 spleen or env}' came in him, he had onl}^ a witty 
 smile at false dignities, and a matchless univer- 
 sality of compassion that pitied the t3Tant as well 
 as the serf, and the loneliness of royalty as well as 
 the loneliness of poverty. That is where Shake- 
 speare is unapproachable. He is as absolutely 
 impai-tial as a Greek Chorus. And thinking of the 
 manner of his life, it is marvellous that it sliould 
 have bent him to no bias, warped liim to no preju- 
 
154 ARIADNE. 
 
 dice. If it were the impartiality of coldness, it 
 would be easy to imitate ; but it is tlie impartiality 
 of sympathy, boundless and generous as the sun 
 which * shines upon the meanest thing that lives 
 as liberall}" as on the summer rose.' That is 
 where Shakespeare is as far higher from your 
 Dante as one of Dante's angels from the earth." 
 
 He spoke with grace, and animation, and sin- 
 cerity ; he had a sweet voice, and a sort of 
 eloquence which, when I came to know him well, 
 I loiew was a matter of natural imj^ulse with him, 
 and neither studied nor assumed. But at that 
 moment, for a minute I thought liim mad, and for 
 another he filled me with disgust. He drank 
 more of his light wine when he had ceased to 
 speak ; for me, I threw the glass that he had filled 
 me out of the wmdow into the moonlight. 
 
 '' You talk very well, no doubt," I said to him 
 bluntly, " and about your Shakespeare you may 
 be right. The Germans alwa^^s told me the same 
 thing, only they say, some of them, that he was 
 Lord Bacon — which, if true, upsets your theories. 
 But when your light o' love lies dead ten seconds 
 ago, and you heed her no more than if she were a 
 
ARIADNE. 155 
 
 poisoned rat, it is an odd time to take to i)reacli 
 in praise of sjinpatliy, or say pretty things about 
 a poet." 
 
 He smiled, in no wise provoked. 
 
 " I am a i:)oet, too, or think so — that is why. 
 AVe break our hearts in verse." 
 
 " Break it in solitude, then," said I roughly. 
 " You do not want me ; you must have troox)s of 
 fiiends ; for you must be rich, or you never had 
 been favoui-ed by that poor dead wretch. The 
 less I hear you talk, the less bitter my mouth will 
 taste for the next month. Good night to you." 
 
 I tmuied my back on him, surUly I dare say, 
 for he was nothing to me excex)t a base-souled, 
 cjaiical-tongued youth, and that breed I hated, 
 ha-sdng known the true wants and woes, and the 
 real mirthful joys of life, as poor men do perhaps 
 oftener than the rich ; that is, if they be not 
 peevish with their poverty, which sj^oils every- 
 thing, as sour cheese spoils the best maccaroni. 
 But when I had crossed the room half-wa}' he 
 crossed it too, and overtook me. 
 
 *' No — stay with me," he said pleadingly, as a 
 woman might. ** I hke your face, and you were 
 
156 ARIADNE. 
 
 kind to-night. Islx friends will not come for two 
 hours and more. The supper was fixed for late, 
 and I do not care to be alone — with that thing 
 dead so near." 
 
 I looked at him in surprise ; there was emotion 
 in his voice and in his face. I wondered which 
 was real — the levity or the feelincj ; now I think 
 that each was, turn by turn. 
 
 " What is that dead thing to you?" I said, 
 echoing his own words. ** She is so ugly to look 
 at — just in an hour — and she had no soul, 3'ou 
 know." 
 
 He looked at me with a look of curious bewil- 
 dered pain, and contempt, and passion, all 
 together. 
 
 **No; she had no soul. She is like a dead 
 rat. That is just the horror of it. It is so with 
 us all, of course ; oh yes! But still it sickens 
 one, in spite of reason." 
 
 He threw liimself into a chair, and a dark 
 shadow came upon his face, that took all its 
 youth away, and made it Avear}-. He covered his 
 eyes with his hand some minutes ; then he looked 
 up, and rose and pushed more wine to me, 
 
AEIADNA 157 
 
 saying, *' Drink." I saw on his fair cheeks 
 two great slow coursing tears. I drank his 
 wdne. 
 
 From that night Hilarion and I had often 
 been together. We had been friends so far as 
 two men coiikl be, sundered by different age and 
 different tempers, and most utter difference in all 
 outward circumstances of life. I had learned to 
 love him, he being one of those who compel your 
 liking against j'our judgment ; and Hilarion, with 
 his strange liking in turn for me, his fancies, his 
 riches, his grace, his charming talk, his wanton 
 wanderings through all the realms of all the arts 
 and the philosophies, gave me many a bright hour 
 in ni}' life, for which I was his debtor in many a 
 year that brought him to that great white villa 
 under the shadow of Soracte, which it had been 
 his whim to buy, that he might as nearly as 
 possible lead the life of Catullus and of Horace 
 in this age of prose. 
 
 When Hilarion was not in Eome, or near it, 
 I m3'self lost much ; yet now I was glad that he 
 was going ; going for away for any indeftnite 
 space of time that his caprice might dictate. 
 
158 ARIAJDNJE!. 
 
 "It is best so — be quiet," I said to Pales; 
 but Pales was howling after liim, because slie 
 adored him, as did all female things. Yet he 
 would strike her — when he was in the mood, or 
 she was in the way. 
 
 He killed a dog vath a blow once ; a careless 
 blow of mere impatience. He gave the dog a 
 marble tomb amidst the flowers, and wrote a 
 poem on it that made the whole wide world weep. 
 But that could not make the dog alive again : — 
 
 poor brute ! 
 
 Pales howled after him ; she had seen the 
 tomb, and doubtless heard the storj" from other 
 dogs, but that wrought no difference in her, she 
 being a female thmg. 
 
 For me I was glad, as I sa}^ for Hilarion would 
 at times climb up into ni}^ room upon the bridge, 
 to gaze at the Hermes, and send his many dreamy 
 fancies out over the bean-flowers, and down the 
 reaches of the river with the pale rings of the 
 smoke ; and he was not one whom it was easy to 
 baffle about anything, or send on an}^ false scent 
 at any time. 
 
 When he told me his name that first night in 
 
ARIADNE. 159 
 
 Paris it was one that the -world had heard of, 
 very young though he was. 
 
 He was only a boy, indeed, but within 
 the year then past he had leaped into that 
 kind of sudden and lurid fame which is the 
 most perilous stuff that can test the strong 
 sense of a man or a woman. It is a tarantula 
 bite to most, fev/ can have been bitten with it 
 without craving for ever the music of applause, 
 or losing their brain giddil}', and dying in dizzj' 
 g}Tations. 
 
 Hilarion had as much strong sense as lies in a 
 strong scorn, and this preserves the head cool, 
 since nothing in all the world is so cold as is 
 contempt ; but he had no other strength, so his 
 f^ime hurt him, because it mcreased his egotism, 
 and rendered effort needless. With different 
 fortunes, and tossed on a sea of endeavour in a 
 dark night of adversity, he would have been a 
 great man. As it was, he was onl}' a clever 
 idler, despite his fame. 
 
 That night when the poor wretch of a Lilas 
 died he had been only a brilliant boy, but as the 
 years had rolled on he liad done mightier things. 
 
160 ABIJDNI!. 
 
 \ 
 
 and become more celebrated. But to be cele- 
 brated is still far off from being great. 
 
 He bad tbe temper of Heine and tbe muse ot 
 Musset ; talent like tliis wben given witli many 
 otlier gifts that command fortune, easily passes 
 Avitli the world for genius. And, in a sense, 
 genius it was : only it was genius witbout 
 immortalit}" in it — it was a rose that bad a 
 stinging insect at its core, instead of tbe morning 
 dew. 
 
 Life bad been always smootb for Hilarion, and 
 tbougb tbe sadness in bim was real and not as- 
 sumed, it was tbat more selfisb sadness wliicb 
 takes its rise from fatigue at tbe insufficiency of 
 any pleasure or passion to long enchant or 
 reign. 
 
 He came of two oi)posing races : his father bad 
 been a German noble, bis mother a Greek 
 princess ; bis w^bole education bad been in Paris ; 
 he bad considerable wealth, and large estates 
 tbat be scarcely ever visited ; he had been his 
 own master from very early years ; and in mind 
 and person Nature bad been most prodigal to 
 him. Yet, despite all tliis, none could have said 
 
 dhjjij. Ill m^^saBsi^^Bmmimmm^^SMmmm^mmmmmmmmM 
 
ARIADNE. 161 
 
 that he was satisfied with life : one ought to say, 
 perhaps, because of all this. 
 
 Half his sadness was discontent, and the other 
 satiety ; but this kind of sadness is widely dif- 
 ferent to the noble and passionate grief which 
 l)rotests against the illimitable torture of all 
 creation, and the terrible silence of the Creator. 
 
 It is a melancholy that is morbid rather than 
 majestic : the morbidness that has eaten into the 
 whole tenour of modern life. Men have forgotten 
 the vmle Pyrrhic dance, and have become in- 
 capable of the grace of the Ionian : their only 
 dance is a Danse Macabre, and they are always 
 hand in hand with a skeleton. 
 
 This age of yours is, in sooth, perhaps the sad- 
 dest-tempered that the races of man have ever 
 kno-svn ; but this is the cause of its sadness — 
 that it has lost the faculty to enjoy. 
 
 Hilarion, and such men as Hilarion, are its 
 chosen prophets ; and their curse is for ever on 
 the barrenness of the land. 
 
 The old poets knew the fruitfulness of life^ 
 and sang of it. But Hilarion and his brethren 
 only see that Demeter has passed over the eartli, 
 
 VOL. I. M 
 
162 ARIADNA 
 
 and that all is sicklied and sear. And tlieir 
 passionate protest of pain would be grand 
 in its very hopelessness — only that it is spoiled 
 by being too often rather querulousness than 
 despair. 
 
 From the night Lilas died to the d^cj he drove 
 past me now with his Eoman smging-woman the 
 life of Hilarion had been eventful, but quite 
 shadowless, except for that faint, gTay, unchang- 
 ing shadow of satiety. A shadow like death, 
 which stretched across all his ^vritten pages : the 
 shadow of that universal incredulit}^ which is 
 the note of this generation. 
 
 Horace believed as little as Hilarion ; but 
 Horace, in whose time the world yet was young, 
 said: "Let us eat and drink and enjo}-, for to- 
 morrow we die ; " and found pleasure in the 
 carpe diem. But the school of Hilarion saj^s, 
 rather : "Of what use to eat, and how shall we 
 enjoy? All beauty is unlovel}-, once possessed, 
 and so soon we sleep the dreamless death-sleep 
 with the womis." 
 
 Between Horace and Hilarion there is a 
 bottomless gulf, filled with the dull deep waters 
 
ARIADNE. 163 
 
 of satiety ; and in that gulf so much of manhood 
 lies di'owned. 
 
 An age is like a climate : the hardier may 
 escape its influence in much, but the hardiest will 
 not escape its influence entirel}-. 
 
 Now the poetic temperament is never robust : 
 no more so than the mimosa is, or the night- 
 ingale. 
 
 The soul of the poet is like a mirror of an 
 astrologer : it bears the reflection of the past 
 and of the future, and can show the secrets 
 of men and gods ; but all the same it is dimmed 
 by the breath of those who stand by and gaze 
 into it. 
 
 When Hilaiion came past me in this earh' 
 morning he was many years older than when he 
 had seen Lilas die ; he was very celebrated ; he 
 had a genius that was facile and never ftiiled him, 
 more than a good lute does a good player; 
 women loved, men sought, and enemies feared 
 him ; he did as he chose, and wandered where he 
 liked, and failed in notlimg that he wished. And 
 yet I would not have changed x^laces witli liim — 
 I, Crispino, shaping leather for my bread, with a 
 
 M 2 
 
164 ABIADNE. 
 
 cabbage-leaf on 1113' skull, between me and the 
 hot Eoman sunshine. 
 
 For the world was beautiful to me, and its 
 past seemed full of wonder ; and the joys and 
 pangs of the people thrilled me like music. And 
 when I went up and down the streets I saw 
 faces lighten at sight of me, and I cared for 
 that ; — that is, jom see, because I am an ignorant 
 man, and was soon content at that time. Con- 
 tent is ignorance. 
 
 Hilaiion, who had everj'thing and knew everj'- 
 thing, and sav/ ten thousand people turn to look 
 at him if he passed through a strange cit}^ — 
 Hilarion was restless and dissatisfied. 
 
 The parable of Paradise is a ver}^ just one. 
 The tree of knowledge may have its roots in 
 wisdom and its branches in action, perhaps : but 
 its fruit is for ever unrest. 
 
 Well ! he was gone, and gone far away. I 
 sighed a little for my own sake, and stitched on 
 in the lovely light warmth of the forenoon. 
 
 My blacksmith was a drunken, dissolute 
 fellow ; and being often idle — for shoeing-smiths 
 are at a discount on our Seven Hills — as often 
 
ARIADNA 165 
 
 as not used his hammers to split open a neigh- 
 bom*'s brain-pan. But we do not think much of 
 these trifles, and he paid well, and I did honour 
 to his boots — brave boots for feast-days, that 
 were alike his miser}^ and glor}'. When they 
 were done I left them at his place, and went on 
 in search of the girl's things. 
 
 After much difficulty and delay — as there 
 happen always in such matters — I found them 
 and had them given over to me, and trundled 
 them home upon a friendly bagarino's barrow, 
 and sent them up to her ; poor small sad bm'dens, 
 smelling of the sea, and of the rosemaiy of the 
 shores whence they had come. 
 
 AVhen evening fell and coohiess came, I went 
 up, as I had promised her, to my own room, 
 where Hermes was, and the carnations and the 
 bean-flowers. 
 
 Ersiha had shoved the little low bedstead 
 decorously within a recess, and made no opposi- 
 tion to ni}' entrance. The girl was in the old 
 wooden balcony, which at tliat time of the year, 
 and indeed at almost every other, was brimming 
 over with flowers. There were some small busts 
 
166 AEIADNE. 
 
 new to me, standing about ; two in marble, a few 
 in clay, a few more carved in wood. 
 
 Slie did not hear me enter. 
 
 She was leanmg over the wooden rail, with 
 
 her forehead against the bean-flowers, and her 
 
 feet amidst the tufts of sweet-smellhig th^-me; 
 
 and indeed, when the stars are coming out, but 
 
 the sunset warmth is still upon the skies, and the 
 
 river of Midas is stealing silentl}^ by to lose itself 
 
 amongst the dense gTass and tangled lilies of the 
 
 marshes, there are many less lovely things to do 
 
 in this life than to stand thus before a window 
 
 and look down through the heads of the flowers 
 
 over the million roofs of Eome ; over the yellow 
 
 curves of the water, and the masses of trees that 
 
 grow down to its edge in many places, and the 
 
 grey and brown piles of the buildings, and the 
 
 pmes of the Pamphili and Corsmi woods, and 
 
 the beloved dome of St. Peter's : — the Church 
 
 of the World, the Altar of the Universe. 
 
 Before disturbmg her, I glanced at the busts 
 upon the table : they were gTaceful things, but 
 sadly weak. There was elegance of fancy and of 
 outline in them, but no strength and no origi- 
 
ARIADNE. 167 
 
 nality. One could well believe tliem the work of 
 a man who had been a recluse and a dreamer, 
 and had refused to do any battle with the world. 
 There was a bust of Faunus, that was pretty ; — 
 dear god Faunus, the most despised of all the 
 gods in this day. But, then, scidpture should 
 have so much more than prettiness. Canova's 
 prettiness cursed him ; it was almost barremiess. 
 
 " They are my father's," she said, coming in 
 fi'om the balcony. 
 
 She did not say, "Are they not beautiful?" 
 Perhaps some truer, stronger artistic sense in her 
 made her conscious where they were deficient. 
 But she looked on them with tender eyes of 
 lingering affection ; and I could see that to part 
 with them was hurting her. 
 
 *' He was a classic scholar, I see by them ? " I 
 said, evasively ; and indeed the choice of themes 
 was far out of the common. 
 
 " A gi'eat scholar," she said, with the warmth 
 of love upon her face. " He taught me all I 
 know. He lived m his Greek and Latm books. 
 The books and these are all he had to leave 
 me." 
 
168 AEIADNE. 
 
 " You know Latin and Greek ? " 
 
 *' Oh, 3'es/' she answered, in a sort of surprise, 
 as at so simple a question, as though I had asked 
 her — had she learned to read. 
 
 *' He would wish me to sell them," she said, 
 with that look of stronglj^-repressed pain wliich 
 gave her young face so much force. " If they 
 ought all to go, take them all. I must owe 
 Ersilia so much. And should I have enough to 
 get a little chamber for myself near this, and buy 
 some clay to work in ? " 
 
 " You cannot owe much," said I, lying, as the 
 best of us do lie on occasion. " And one of 
 these busts, or two at most, should bring enough 
 to pay it all and keep you for weeks afterwards, 
 if that be what you are thmking. You wish to 
 stay in Rome ? " 
 
 " I know no one anywhere. I have no friend," 
 she said, with a sunplicit}^ of desolation that 
 wounded one more than all the eloquence of 
 woe. 
 
 " You have me, my dear," I said, huskily ; 
 for I felt lilie a fool, and was cross with m^-self 
 for being no better and no mightier than I was, 
 
ARIADNE. 160 
 
 to be of use to lier. " I am an old man, as you 
 see, and of no account, and work for my daily 
 bread ; but you may count on me — I tn-iU be 
 true to you. I can do little ; but what I can 
 do " 
 
 ** You are good, and I was ungrateful and for- 
 got," she answered, and laid her hand in mine. 
 
 I let it lie there, and bent my head over it. 
 I felt as any old cordwainer of Venice might have 
 felt to Catherine of C^'prus : her youth compelled 
 my age to loyalty. 
 
 Then I put on a sheepish look. 
 
 " Now you want a room, you say. Wh}' not 
 keep mine, paying me something ? It would suit 
 me ver}^ well," I said ; " because you see, my 
 dear, I am a poor man, and of even the little 
 you would pay I should be glad. And so we 
 should do one another mutual service, as poor 
 people should ; and I have another place to 
 sleep in, because, you see, I keep late unseeml}- 
 hours ; and Ersilia is angry if one knocks her uj), 
 and tells so quickly if one be the worse for wine ; 
 not that a Roman ever is, 3'ou know, except 
 sometimes in October, out of remembrance of 
 
170 ARIADNE. 
 
 Anna Perenna, avIio was not Dido's sister, oil ! 
 dear no, thougli the scholars tried to make her so 
 when Hellenism hecame the rage, and the Julii 
 would have it they were Trojans. We Trasteve- 
 rini all sajMve are Trojans to tliis day, and indeed 
 the stor}^ of .Eneas is so prett}^ one would he 
 loth to lose it, and the thirty little white pigs, 
 and the old white-haired shepherd king of 
 Arcadia. "Will you please me, and keep the 
 room?" 
 
 She looked at me with her clear, pathetic 
 eyes. 
 
 " Will it really suit you ? Are you sure you do 
 not speak against yourself from kindness ? " 
 
 And, may the gods forgive me ! I swore hy all 
 of them that not only would it suit, hut he the 
 making of me ; and I persuaded her I spoke the 
 truth. My marhle Hermes seemed to me to 
 smile ; I suppose he was thinking how many 
 millions of lies men have been tellmg for 
 Woman's sake since first he made her out of 
 sport one da}-. 
 
 But there was no other way that I could so 
 well have served her, for there was no room 
 
ABIADNL'. 171 
 
 empty in Ersilia's house, nor liad there been one 
 could I have been sure that I could always be 
 able to pay for it ; but I knew that I could 
 always lend my own and sleep with Pales, or any- 
 where about, on bench, or under porch, as poor 
 men do. I might get madness from the moon, 
 or death from the bad air ; but who is sure that 
 he is wholly sane ? And better company has 
 gone before us to the tomb than any that lives 
 now ! 
 
 " We understand one another, then," I said, 
 after a pause, for I do not like the sadder side of 
 life, and would always turn away from it were it 
 possible. " I am only Crispino the cobbler, a 
 queer fellow, as you will hear ; and an old man, 
 and poor, but very well contented — and how 
 much that is to say ! I am so glad you will keep 
 this room. It is no use to me ; my business lies 
 in the street from night to morning, and Hermes 
 here must be so glad to see your face instead 
 of mine." 
 
 I then asked her if there was nothing that she 
 had moulded herself wliich she coidd show me. 
 She said that they were very little things, not worth 
 
172 ARIADNE. 
 
 the looking at, but fetched them. I found them 
 fully worth: graceful, yet strong. Little naked 
 figures of fisher-children, full ofspiiit; and some 
 heads and figures of classic themes, treated with 
 far more strength than was in any of her father's. 
 One wingless Love of the early Greek poets 
 seemed to me wonderful from such a child. I 
 told her so. 
 
 " How can you look at them after my father's ? " 
 she said, almost in reproof. " And indeed, you 
 know, the working was in so much his : the idea 
 was mine, and he helped me to put it into 
 shape." 
 
 " The idea is the art," I said, angry mth her 
 that she should so depreciate herself for that 
 dead and useless man, whom I myself could have 
 lacked almost in his coffin. 
 
 However, I did not say that, but took two 
 busts — the one of Heliodora and the other of 
 the boy Zagreus looking in the fatal mirror ; and 
 I praj^ed her to accept hospitalit}?' of me for a 
 day longer at the least, and left her looking out 
 through the red flowers at the deep-blue skies of 
 the night, with the stars shining on the moss- 
 
ARIADNE. 173 
 
 grown roof of the little Temple of Yesta, and in 
 the sleepy, brown waters of Tiber. 
 
 "You are not unhappy now ? " I said to her 
 in farewell. 
 
 She looked at me with a smile. 
 
 " You have given me hope ; and I am in 
 Rome, and I am young." 
 
 She was right. Eome may be onl}- a ruin, and 
 Hope but another name for deception and disap- 
 pomtment ; but Youth is supreme happiness in 
 itself, because all possibihties lie in it, and 
 nothing in it is as yet irrevocable. 
 
 Ersilia hunied in at that moment, angry be- 
 cause the casement was open, the wind cool, the 
 river dangerous, and all the trouble she had 
 taken in the fever impeiilled b}- so much impru- 
 dence. 
 
 Ersilia was a grand old Roman woman, 
 majestic and imposing ; but she was furious of 
 tongue and violent about small tilings, and much 
 given to driving other people hither and thither 
 with her will and fiery word. Of men she had 
 alwaj'S the most miserable opinion. Pippo was 
 the only good one of all his worthless set 
 
174 ARIADNE. 
 
 Pippo, y;1io liad been her lover once and lier 
 lodger alwaj^s, and who, havmg sung his passion 
 to her on a lute fifty years before, now showed it 
 in a less poetic but as palatable a manner, by 
 frying her many a pm'ple artichoke and golden 
 little fish, and cooldng for everybody in her 
 hive-like house. 
 
 The busts I did sell at a shop I knew in 
 the Spanish Square, much frequented by the 
 foreigners. I got a small sum for each ; I 
 quadrupled it with that money in the jar in the 
 wall, and took it to her. 
 
 "I had double this, but I have"' paid all j^ou 
 owe Ersilia," I said to her. *' I thought you 
 wished it so. Also I have taken a month's rent 
 for my room, as you desired. Ersilia will see 
 to you. It will cost little ; and she is a good 
 woman, honest and true ; you will not mind 
 her tongue. Let it run on as we let the wind 
 blow. Yes ; those busts sold well. When you 
 have done this money we can sell two others. 
 You think the money too much ? Pooh! Dealers 
 know their own business. It is not for us to 
 teach it to them." 
 
ARIADNE. 175 
 
 Now, of course, all this was pure lying. But 
 then it soothed her and set her heart at rest. 
 She never would have taken money from me ; 
 she would have gone out and wandered in the 
 streets till she would have fallen senseless with 
 homelessness and hunger, and then they would 
 have taken her to some public hospital and so 
 the end would have come — therefore I lied. 
 
 I was thankful that I had had that little store 
 put hy in case of my own sickness or of some 
 street accident. It was but ver}^ little ; but it 
 served its turn. 
 
 So she settled down in my chamber, nothing 
 doubting, with a weary sort of peacefulness such 
 as a wounded bird might feel sinlving under 
 fresh leaves after a heavy storm. She was not 
 happy ; how should she have been ? But she was 
 at rest. It was the best thing for her. 
 
 One could not do better for her ; and at 
 least she was safe, body and soul. That is 
 much for a girl, friendless and homeless and 
 beautiful to look upon as any jewel-like flower 
 of the sea. 
 
 She was tired and confused and feverish still, 
 
176 ARIADNJ^. 
 
 and tlie great close heats of Rome, the heat 
 that has no wmcl to stu*, no ram to freshen it, 
 tried her, reared as she had been all her short 
 life on the high cliffs amongst the breeze-swept 
 rosemary and arbutus above the blue Ligurian 
 sea. But this she never would allow, because 
 she would let no complaint of anything of Rome 
 escape her. 
 
 And there was Hilarion's beautiful cool 
 marble-paved villa amongst the flowers and the 
 fountains, in the shadow of the hills, standing 
 empty for all but a few idle servants; and its 
 master meanwhile away heaven knew where — in 
 deep Danubian woods, or beside blue northern 
 lakes, or on wind-freshened western seas, in cool- 
 ness and in calm, going wherever the current of 
 his fancy drifted him. 
 
 The contrast made me irritable ; as I never 
 had been at such contrasts for my own sake ; for 
 it is contrast that gives the colour to life, and 
 communism is but a poor short-sighted creed, 
 and would make the w^orld a blank were it re- 
 ducible to practice. 
 
 For me, I have no prejudices of that kind, or 
 
ARIADNt:. 177 
 
 of any other ; when one comes of the Gens Qiiin- 
 tiHi, and is a cobbler by trade, one may be said 
 to be bound to the two uttermost extremes of the 
 social scale, and so may sit in judgment in the 
 middle fairly, and survey both with equal impar- 
 tiality. Where there is hatred of one or of the 
 other, true judgment is possible of neither : that 
 is quite certain. 
 
 So she became settled in our midst, and all 
 the j)eople of the Rione got to say she was my 
 daughter whom I did not like fairly to own. 
 
 It was absurd ; but they might have said 
 worse things, and it did no harm. Indeed, in 
 a measure, it seemed to protect her. 1 was 
 thought to be very close and unpleasant because 
 I never would talk of her, but when you know 
 nothing it is alwaj^s best to sa}' nothing — every- 
 body thinks you know so much. And, indeed, 
 there was always something in her that escaped 
 me. Her mind seemed to be always far 
 away. 
 
 I got her some clay and she worked upon it ; 
 it passed the time for her, and she really had 
 lovely fancies and greater skill in giving them 
 
 VOL. I. N 
 
ITS ABIADN^. 
 
 shape than could have been looked for in one so 
 young. 
 
 Of course they were only small things ; but 
 as she made them I set them up uj^on my stall ; 
 and sometimes people bought them, and that 
 pleased her. It served to beguile her out of 
 that intense, unspoken, heavy sadness which 
 had fallen on her with her pain at the ruin of 
 Rome. 
 
 To see her work upon the clay was like seeing 
 a young Muse herself ; her close white linen 
 dress hung almost like the tunic of Virgil's 
 Lycoris; her arms were bare to the shoulder 
 because of the great heat ; her hair, of a rich 
 dusky golden bronze, was like a sun-bathed 
 cloud over her forehead ; her lustrous, intense 
 eyes were grave and brilHant with meditation 
 and with teeming fancy. If Hilarion could see 
 her, I used to think, — and was thankful he was 
 far awa}'. 
 
 With all artists, who are artists indeed and 
 not artizans, the conception is always immea- 
 surably superior to the power of execution ; the 
 visible form which they can give their ideas 
 
AEIADN^!. 179 
 
 alwaj's is, to them, utterly inferior to the wonders 
 and the beauties that thej^ dream of; with her, 
 of course, it was necessarily so in the very largest 
 measure, she herself being so 3'oung and her 
 art the most difficult of an}'. She saw things 
 beautiful and perfect as all the buried treasures 
 of Pheidias, but Pheidias himself could hardly 
 have given them an embodiment that would 
 have contented her. 
 
 Meanwhile her brain dreamed conjured visions ; 
 and her hands modelled in the grey clay and the 
 red earth little heads of children and shapes of 
 animals and of birds and of leaves that were 
 pretty to see, and drew many an idler to them. 
 
 They sold for only a few copi^er pieces indeed, 
 because the joeople were all poor that came 
 near, and for the matter of that the works cost 
 as much as the little things brought ; but it 
 kept her quiet and contented to believe that 
 she earaed her owtq bread and bed, and it made 
 it easy for me to cheat her into that belief. 
 
 Indeed a baby could have cheated her ; those 
 large brilliant eyes of hers, that saw so far into 
 the past ages and were always looking for thingJi 
 
 :( 2 
 
180 ARIADNJE. 
 
 not to be found upon earth, saw veiy little waj^ into 
 the disguises of men and vromen, and the cob- 
 webs their words weave. 
 
 It is always so ; the far sight that can discern 
 the eagle flying in the rarified air above the 
 distant mountain snows, will not see the mosqui- 
 toes that are hissing within the distance of an 
 inch, or the dust that lies close at hand up the 
 corner. 
 
 The only thing I ever said to the people about 
 her was : 
 
 " I am the cobbler of the Forum, who owned 
 the crow, you know this ; well, this girl was the 
 daughter of Virginius, and before that she was 
 Ai'iadne." 
 
 And this, of course, the}^ knew was nonsense, 
 but they laughed and the}' left her alone, and 
 the good folks of my quarter used to learn to call 
 her Ariadne. 
 
 " I do not like Ariadne," she said herself. 
 " I am sorry I am like that bronze of hers. She 
 was so faithless " 
 
 ** Faithless! She was deserted herself. Have 
 you forgotten Naxos ? " 
 
AllIADN^. 181 
 
 " Oh, no. It is Naxos I mean. Why did 
 she let Bacchus come near her ? " 
 
 " But she was cruelly abandoned." 
 
 " She should have been faithful herself." 
 
 '* That is saying very much." 
 
 She looked at me with a little contempt. 
 
 " She could not have helj)ed being faithful 
 had she been worth anything." 
 
 " That is your idea of love, then ? " 
 
 " Yes." 
 
 " How should you know of it, child ? AVhat 
 should you know of love ? " I said to her. 
 
 " I have thought about it,'' she answered 
 gravely: then added, after a pause, " It must be 
 very terrible to have no life any longer of youi* 
 own ; only to live through the eyes and the 
 breath and the heart of another." 
 
 " Who told you it was all that '? " 
 
 •'* Oh ! the poets ; and something in one's-self. 
 It must be terrible." 
 
 " My dear ! there are not many who feel love 
 at all in that sort of way." 
 
 "There can be no other wa}-," she said, with 
 that soft, calm resoluteness wliich was so in- 
 
182 ARIADNE. 
 
 flexible in her. There were things, one felt, in 
 which one never could change her. 
 
 And she was right. Truh^, there is no other 
 way ; the plaything which the chief number of 
 men and women call love is no more that sacred 
 thing, that imperishable and unutterable passion, 
 than fireflies upon the summer night are Alde- 
 baran and Orion. 
 
 The girl sat thoughtful, with her level brows 
 a little drawn together and her eyes looking at 
 the Tiber swirling round the piles of the Quattro 
 Capi, and lapping the marshy ground of the 
 Velabrum ; great Tiber, that far away yonder in 
 the dusky oak woods of Umbria — of that Umbria 
 w^hich is older than Etruria ! — runs a little rill 
 amongst the mountain mosses ; Tiber, a brook 
 that a baby can wade and a rabbit skip across ; 
 Tiber, a mere thread of water where lovers 
 mirror their smiling eyes, and charcoal burners 
 dip their birch-bark cups; Tiber, that comes 
 down fi-'om the oak woods to roll like molten 
 bronze towards the setting sun, big with the 
 mightiest memories of the world; Tiber, that 
 has enf:(ulfed the statues of Etruria and the 
 
ARIADNE. 183 
 
 osier figures of the Vestals, and tlie treasures 
 of Hadrian, and the golden toys of the 
 Agrippines, and the spoils of Jerusalem, and 
 the corpses of the Spolarium, and holds them 
 all fast and only yields them to the sea. 
 
 I did not like to see her so thoughtful. 
 
 " Let us go for a walk," I said to her ; " the 
 evening is beautiful. Let us go on the same 
 pilgrimage that Ovid sent his last manuscript ; 
 from the laurels that grew before the door of his 
 tyrant, past the Dana'ids, whose labours were 
 not more fruitless than his pra3'ers, on to the 
 library' of Pollion in the Atrium of Liberty — 
 you remember ? Oh, 3'es, I can shovv^ you every 
 step of the way. I picked it out by myself many 
 3'ears ago. Poor little book ! Knocking at 
 all the library doors and everywhere refused! 
 * AVhy do I send you ni}^ songs only that I 
 may be in some manner with j^ou,' he wrote : and 
 how the whole nature of him is painted in those 
 words ! Ovid adored Rome. But he would 
 have been happier in the Athens of Pericles or 
 the Paris of our day. The smell of blood must 
 have spoilt the moonlit nights for him when he 
 
184 ARIADNA 
 
 sat by liis open window looking out on the 
 Capitol : the Capitol was all ablaze with gold 
 then, but Freedom cannot dwell with too much 
 gold ; it chokes her as rich food does the dog. 
 Will you not come, m}^ dear ?" 
 
 She came, and willingly. We had many such 
 walks together when the sun had set and my 
 work was done and the fauns were all piping in 
 the fountains. 
 
 She was not easily tired ; the fleet young feet 
 that had waded all their few years in the clear 
 blue shallows of the Maremma shores were as 
 enduring as Atalanta's. Noi* was she tu-ed of 
 my rambling tallv, because all the memories and 
 legends of the city were vivid in her own mind, 
 and for me, I had all the crooks and turns of 
 the mediaeval and the modern streets at my toes' 
 ends, and had puzzled out all the old Rome that 
 lay beneath them, — Cesarean, Latm, Eti'urian, 
 Sabine, and Pelasgic. 
 
 For myself I confess I cared most for the 
 C cesarean. Not for the Caesars themselves ; 
 who can care '? — but for the men who lived in all 
 those terrible days, so terrible even at their 
 
AEIADNA 185 
 
 best, the men whose books are household words 
 to-day. 
 
 The Satires and the Fastes, the Epistles and 
 Odes, have proved more lasting powers than the 
 Conscriptions and the Conquests. 
 
 I had always loved to wander about and think 
 of them, and I was glad that she would go so 
 often with me in that black muiSing which 
 Ersilia made her wear to escape notice, only 
 showing out of it her delicate head, with the 
 lustrous hair wound close above it, yet always 
 tumbling over her eyes because of its abundance. 
 
 Ersilia wished her to be veiled also, but that 
 she woidd not; she wanted all the air, here where 
 the scented winds that come through orange 
 blooms and cedars still seem to bring some 
 scent of murdered millions. 
 
 We would go together to the old bookstalls 
 and hunt for quaint, black-letter folios and little 
 old out-of-the-way volumes of classics. We 
 would try and find out the very sx)ot where 
 ^Martial's garret was, in the Quarter of the Pear- 
 tree, by the temj)le of Quirinus, high enough to 
 look right downwards and see the laurels of 
 
186 AEIADNJ^. 
 
 Agrippa by the Flaminian Wa^'. We would sit on 
 the steps of the Pincian hill, under the palm, by 
 what was once the palace of Belisarius, and talk ot 
 the conquests and of the cherry trees of LucuUus, 
 and think of that awful night in these, of old 
 his, gardens when Messalina lay on the tun 
 amongst her bacchantes, and Yettius, climbing 
 the trees and looking seaward, said: "I see a 
 great storm that comes from Ostia," the storm 
 that was bringing Death. 
 
 We would go up the Sacred Way and picture the 
 great Eoman dames getting then- strence for the 
 January visits as the}'' get them in Paris now, 
 and buying their false golden tresses "at the 
 portico of Philip in front of the temple of Her- 
 cules." We would go out at the gates and talk 
 of the Palilia, and the Vinalia, and of Tibullus, 
 and of the springtime when he used to leap 
 oyer the fires, and sprinkle the flocks from a 
 bough of laurel, with his shepherds up at Pedum. 
 We would wander about amongst the vines and 
 cabbage gardens of the Esquiline and fancy that 
 we found the spot where Virgil lived (though no 
 one ever will know it), and where Propertius 
 
ARIADNE. 187 
 
 sighed to that red and ^vhite Cynthia whose 
 mules seemed to trot still with ' their tails 
 tied up along the Appian Wa3\ 
 
 Do 3'ou remember the da}^ Propertius lost his 
 tablets and bewailed them — the tablets that he 
 wrote his pra3'ers on to her, and on which she in 
 return would write back " come : " was there 
 ever another lost trifle whose advertisement has 
 been read two thousand years by all the world ? 
 
 Cynthia was a good-for-naught, and what a 
 temper ! she boxed his ears and flew on Phyllis 
 and Tela like a fury, though the ground was 
 strewn deep with white roses, and there was 
 sweet flute-playing ; she did not even affect to 
 be so much as faithful ; she found the rich 
 money-lender from Illyria more sohd in-ey than 
 her poet, who perhaps ma}' have been a little 
 too scholarly for her ; she painted her face, she 
 had false hair, she drank, she gambled, she did 
 everything she ought not to have done, that 
 beautiful Cynthia, all lilies and roses ; indeed 
 she was just like your women of the j^resent 
 day in everj'thing ; and yet she has been sung 
 of by her lover in such a fashion that the world 
 
188 ARIADNA 
 
 will never forget lier — no more than it will forget 
 
 its Caesars. 
 
 Such is justice ; and so kind is Venus 
 
 Volgivaga. 
 
 One wonders if they gave Propeiiius the tomb 
 he asked her for, underneath the shelter of the 
 leaves, unseen and unknown by all, " since crowds 
 insult the grave of love." Perhaps they did ; at 
 any rate no one can ever find it now. 
 
 These were the things I thought of most ; 
 it may be contemptible, it no doubt is, but when 
 I go about the Forum it is not half so much of 
 Cicero or of Yu-ginius that I think as it is of 
 Horace going into that one of his bookseller's 
 shops that was hard by the statue of the Etruscan 
 Vertumnus ; of the copyists writing in the offices 
 of Atrectus, with the titles of the new books 
 pasted up at the doors for the lazy people of plea- 
 sure to see as they passed to their evening drive ; 
 or of Ovid — dear, hapless Ovid — applauding 
 above all others the statue of Aphrodite as the 
 procession of the gods passed by, brushing the 
 dust from the white roses of his fair friend, 
 fanning her with the flabellum, or telling her 
 
 -^"^'^ ^^--^::.»rt=;v^. ^".c-»-.- — i . T J , K i r- im rsi , i fi i ■ i r- , -urn , IT I i MW -n pfj^.* 
 
ARIADNP.. 180 
 
 who would win in tlie circus, who were the cap- 
 tive kings in the triumph and what the con- 
 quered countries — "3'onder, Euphrates with liis 
 crown of reeds, and here with azure hair gi'eat 
 Tigris." Ah, dear me ! Ovid died in exile; and 
 yet 3'ou call Augustus great ? 
 
 But Ovid has his desire in death. 
 
 " So long as Rome shall look down from her 
 mountains on the universe, / shall be there," he 
 wrote ; and he is here. Pie was weak in his 
 life ; but no hero ever spoke greater words than 
 those last words of his. All tlie might of Caesar 
 cannot outlaw nor dethrone him now. He has 
 conquered Augustus in the end. 
 
 So she and I went about the old waj's together, 
 companioned with these shades. Only she 
 would think less of my beloved writers, and 
 more of Scipio and his one word Zara, of 
 the Horatii, of the Antonines ; more of the old 
 Etrurian and Sabine Home ; more of Vii'gil and 
 of his .Eneas lying down at night upon the bear- 
 skins in the tent, of the old shephei-d king in the 
 sliadow of the Sacred Woods upon the Palatine. 
 
 It was all true and real to lier. So best. 
 
190 ARIADNA 
 
 Scholars, and sciolists maybe, even more than 
 scholars, strip the past too bare. 
 
 There never was an iEneas ; there never was a 
 Numa ; well, what the better are we ? We only 
 lose the Trojan ship gliding into Tiber's mouth, 
 when the woodland thickets that bloomed by 
 Ostia were reddening with the first warmth of the 
 day's smi ; we onl}^ lose the Sabine lover going 
 by the Sacred Way at night, and sweet Egeria 
 weeping in the woods of Nemi ; and are — by their 
 loss — how much the poorer ! 
 
 Perhaps all these things never were. 
 
 The little stone of truth, rolling through the 
 many ages of the world, has gathered and grown 
 gi^ey with the thick mosses of romance and super- 
 stition. But tradition must alwaj^s have that 
 little stone of truth as its kernel ; and perhaps 
 he who rejects all, is likelier to be wrong than 
 even foolish folk lilve myself who love to believe 
 all, and who tread the new paths, thinkmg ever 
 of the ancient stories. 
 
 Will the arts ever have a lovelier origin than 
 that fair daughter of Dibutades tracing the 
 beloved shadow on the wall ? And 'whilst one 
 
ARIADNE. 191 
 
 mother's heart still beats amongst women, who 
 shall coldly dissect and deny the sorrows of 
 gi'eat Demeter ? 
 
 It is all fable. It is all metaphor. It never 
 was. One is a fool, they say. 
 
 Well, say so if you choose, you wise genera- 
 tions, who have made your god of a yelling 
 steam-engine, and dwell in herds under a pall of 
 soot, and call this — Progress. 
 
CHAPTEE VII. 
 
 The summer passed away. 
 
 Gioja was- not unliapp}'^ rambling through the 
 storied streets with me, reading my old books 
 and all others I could borrow for her, and fol- 
 lowing out all her own fancies with the wax and 
 the clays that bent so facilely under her fingers. 
 She was an artist at soul, and she was in Rome ; 
 she was a child in years, and the people that 
 were about her supplied her few simple wants. 
 She needed nothing more. 
 
 "If only my father were with me ! " she would 
 say, and it was the only thing lacking to her. 
 She did not look forward in any way ; she was 
 always looking backward as students do. If 
 she could only go and spend the long hot hours 
 in the cool chambers of the Capitol or the halls 
 
ARIADNE. 103 
 
 of the Pio-Clementino, she asked notliing else 
 of Fate. 
 
 I could not take her future so lightl}'. 
 
 It was not the cost of her that troubled me, 
 that was but slight ; she scarcely ate more bread 
 than Pales ; it was the character of tlie girl her- 
 self and her uncommon beaut}-. 
 
 She seemed to me no more fit for the harsh 
 realities of the world than the marble child, that 
 doubts between the dove and serpent in the 
 Capitol, Avere fit to stop a breach in a fortress 
 against cannon balls. 
 
 What would become of her, seen only by the 
 eyes of Ezio the water-carrier, and Rufo the 
 melon seller, and Tancredo the fisherman, and 
 the youths of the tanners' quarter, and the 3'oung 
 men from the fruit-gardens pushing their loaded 
 beasts across her path ? And her one talent, 
 what could, it avail her ? It was not like the talent 
 of the singing sorceresses who carry a life's for- 
 tune in their throats. 
 
 Marble costs gold, and sculpture is not for 
 women. Sculpture is always an epic ; and what 
 woman ever has written one ? 
 
 VOL, I. o 
 
194 ARIADNE. 
 
 I \Yislied that Maryx were in Eome. 
 
 But tliat very clay that I had dreamed my 
 dream before the Ariadne, he had gone to his 
 own comitr}^ and all the hot months went by 
 and the city saw nothing of the great French 
 sculptor, who was more Eoman than the Romans, 
 who had come thither a boy of eighteen to the 
 gardens that once were Sallust's, and therein 
 had learned to love Eome as hardly any one of 
 her own sons could do, and wrested from its 
 marbles and its ruins all the lost secrets of 
 Etruria and Greece ; and, not from pride's sake 
 but from love's, cherished a tradition of his ])vo- 
 vince that his own family had sprung from an old 
 Eoman stock planted in Gallic soil, b}" what is 
 now called Aries, in days of Julian. 
 
 " If Maryx were here ! " I sighed to myself, 
 stitching under the Apollo Sandaliarius that he 
 had modelled for me when he had been a lad in 
 the Villa Medici. 
 
 And one day in autumn he passed b}', and 
 paused before me with his frank smile. 
 
 *' Dear Cris^^in, how are 3'ou all this while ? 
 AVh}^ how you look ! Are you still moon- 
 
ARIADNE. 195 
 
 struck or sun-sti*iick by your Borgliese bronze ? 
 I returned last night, and go again to-morrow." 
 
 Then his eyes lighted on the little figures and 
 busts in terra cotta and the j^anels of flowers in 
 alto-rilievo. 
 
 " What are these ? " he asked. " Are they 
 your own ? I know you have a Greek god and 
 a Latin saint and a new talent for every day of 
 the year in your calendar, I know that of old." 
 
 I told him they were not mine — that I only 
 sold them for the artist ; the}- stood there on my 
 board if anyone liked to bu}^ them. Did he think 
 well of them ? 
 
 Maryx looked more closely at them, and paused 
 the longest over a little figure of the wmgless- 
 Love, a foot high, the most ambitious of all the 
 little creations. 
 
 " Send the artist to me if he be yomig," he 
 said, as he looked. 
 
 " You think well of him then ? " 
 
 *' What age may he be ? " 
 
 " Sixteen, at most." 
 
 " There is genius in it," he said, takmg the 
 wingless Love mider his arm, and laymg a 
 
 2 
 
196 ARIADNE. 
 
 liandful of money down for it. " Send liim 
 to me and lie shall do what he likes in my 
 workshop, and I will teach him what I can; 
 though more probably he will only teach me." 
 
 Then he went on his way across the bridge in 
 the autumn sunshine to his home on the old 
 Mons Aureus ; a \agorous and lofty figure, with 
 a noble head, like the Ophidian Zeus, and gleam- 
 ing eyes changeful as the skies, and the laughing 
 mouth of Hercules. 
 
 All Rome adored and all the world honoured 
 him. He was a great man, and happy as it is 
 given to few mortals to be. And his fate led 
 him that day past my stall by the fountain in 
 the w^all. 
 
 I pondered within myself all that morning, with 
 the market people going to and fro and the crowds 
 chattering. In the end, when evening came, I 
 resolved to go up and tell the stor}- of my Ariadne 
 to him. He was a brave man and a great one, 
 and could be of service to her as I could not. 
 Besides, the creature had never lived whose trust 
 had been wronged by Maryx; the dogs of the 
 ■streets knew that. 
 
ABIABNt:. 1^\ 
 
 Germain Maryx had been tlie son of a i^oor 
 stone cutter of Provence ; as a child he had 
 worked in the quarries carrying stones like a 
 little mule ; at foiu'teen he had tramped on foot 
 to Paris, resolute to become a sculptor, and there, 
 friendless and homeless, had roamed the streets 
 like a stray dog, but keeping hfe in him by such 
 odds and ends of labour as he could find to do 
 in the day, and spent liis nights in every kind of 
 self- culture ; at eighteen he had studied design 
 and anatomy and the plastic arts so well that he 
 bore off the sculptor's prize of Pome and fainted 
 from hunger on the ver}- da}' he won it ; from 
 that time with every succeedhig year his fame 
 had grown, until now there was no finer ai-tist and 
 no greater name in all the world. 
 
 He had a force and a majesty in liis marbles 
 that made his contemporaries' best creations look 
 beside his but mere ornaments in sugar. Like 
 the early Greeks he loved to '' hew the rocks," 
 and his workshop, as he termed it, was as true a 
 temple of the gods of art as ever was raised in 
 Attica or Argos. 
 
 Bitterly contemptuous of mediocrity, and 
 
198 ARIADNA 
 
 fiercely unsparing of all affectations, Maryx to 
 all true talent, to all unaided excellence, was 
 liberal as the sunlight. Though his enemies 
 were many, amongst that mere cleverness which 
 loathes genius as the imitator hates the creator, 
 he was beloved b}^ multitudes as greatl}^ as was 
 Canova, and with as tender a gratitude. 
 
 He was very noble in his kindliness and gene- 
 rosit}' to other artists ; he had that serene 
 breadth of feeling which is so dulled and nar- 
 rowed in our day, the grandeur and the liberality 
 that made Brunelleschi and Donatello own 
 themselves vanquished by the boy of tw^ent}^, and 
 unite their prayers that Ghiberti might be chosen 
 for the great work in their stead. 
 
 But then Maryx loved art ; he cared but little 
 for fame. In our day most men care much for 
 fame, and but little for art. 
 
 **What does it matter to Jean Goujon," he 
 i\'ould say, " that no one knows whether he reall}^ 
 •died in the Saint Bartholomew massacres or not ? 
 — where he was born nor where he lived? — 
 whether he was courted at Chernonoeau and 
 Amboise, or whether he Avas but a poor carver 
 
ABIADNR 109 
 
 all his daj's ; what does it matter so long as the 
 Diane Chasseresse lives at the Louvre, so long 
 as eveiy creature that cares for art, honours his 
 name, despite all his faults, hecause of his love 
 of naturalism, and of his veneration for anti- 
 quity, and of the vigour with which he called to 
 life the still paral3'sed art that had heen stifled 
 and bm'ied under the anathemas of Christian 
 bigotry and the miseries of feudal misrule and 
 strife. 
 
 "When one comes to think of it, after all it is 
 perhaps greater to have heen Jean Goujon, or 
 greater still, Michael Colomh or Juste de Tom's, 
 than to have been Praxiteles. Praxiteles was born 
 into an air full of the strength and the sentiment 
 of art, as an orchai-d is full of the smell of blossom 
 and the promise of fruit in sprmg time ; from the 
 commonest things of daily usage to the most 
 sacred mysteries of the temple, there was artistic 
 inspiration everj'where around him. But those 
 old earliest sculptors of the Valois France, came 
 after ages of riot, of bloodshed, of sensuality, and 
 of brutality. Peligion was gross, war alone was 
 deemed heroic, and the people were beyond all 
 
200 ABIADNA 
 
 measiu'e wretched ; it is a miracle that those few 
 scattered early artists snatched sculpture out 
 from the ossification of the ossuaries and the 
 imprecation of the preachers, and found force to 
 be so all unlike their age. 
 
 " To go against all the temper of jouy age, 
 that is the true greatness ; it is easy enough 
 to go with it. 
 
 ** Now only reflect, AYilliam of Paris did not 
 scruple to call sculptors to build him up a mighty 
 tomb for his cook, and it was already the six- 
 teenth century when Thevet, still, in his bio- 
 graphies of the illustrious, excused himself with 
 humble apology for naming an artist amongst 
 them ! 
 
 '' Things were otherwise on the southern side of 
 the Alps to be sure ; in Italy there were royal 
 roads and golden wheels to art ; and that is just 
 why I care so much for those old early Breton and 
 Gascon and Touraine sculj^tors of ours, because 
 they must have fought their fight in so much 
 single-handed, and with such a red fierce world 
 of war around them, and because the}' were 
 bidden only to carve recumbent knights and 
 
ABIADN2. 201 
 
 meek veiled saints and all tlie sad unlovely 
 symbolism of the cliurcli, and yet did find their 
 wa}' to loveliness and to libeily somehow. Their 
 art is not my art, nor ai'e my ways their ways. 
 Yet do I care for them and honour them. 
 
 *' The fourteenth century used to say of the 
 Virgin of Senlis, so full was it of majesty and 
 grace, that anyone would take it to he the work 
 of Pheidias or L3'sippus. AVe should not be likel}' 
 now to make that error nor any similar one. 
 But we may keep dur souls for the eternal 3'outh 
 of Pheidias, and give some oi our hearts to the 
 old Gothic sculx)tors who had only those two 
 glim spouses. War and Death, to nnike the noblest 
 maiTiage out of that they could." 
 
 80 Maryx would talk by the hour when the 
 mood was upon him, having that cathohc love 
 of ait to which nothing in all the circles of the 
 arts is alien, and which invests with sacredness 
 and interest the curled rim of a Kohi i)otter's 
 jug as the peifect lines of a frieze of Bryaxis, 
 the interest only dift'erent hi degree but not in 
 kind, and as unhke to that narrowed eclecticism, 
 which sees no salvation outside the limits of a 
 
202 ARIADNE. 
 
 school, as the leap and light of our hroad Eoman 
 fountains is unlike to a cup of iced water held in 
 a miser's hand. 
 
 He was a great man and a good. And Fate 
 would lead him by under my Apollo Sanda- 
 liarius ! 
 
 Well, Fortune had been kind to him for five 
 and twenty years. Perhaps she was tired and 
 wanted change. 
 
 "I will go and tell him," I thought to myself, 
 *' It is not as if it were Hilarion " 
 
 So I took my way over the bridge to the house 
 that he had built for himself upon Janiculan 
 with the oak woods of the Pamfili-Doria above 
 it and below the cypresses of S. Onofrio, and the 
 fall of the Pauline waters near enough for its 
 cool somid to be audible always through his 
 gardens' silence when the church bells were 
 still. 
 
 It was a beautiful house ; as nearl}- Greek as 
 it was possible to make it ; its white marbles 
 shone through groves of magnolia and cypress, its 
 walls were painted with frescoes of the Consualia 
 and the Floralia, and all the Latin and Sabine 
 
ARIADNE. 203 
 
 feasts of spring and summer ; the doves fluttered 
 their pretty wings in the fountain in the atrium ; 
 mystical Da^dahis might have dwelt there and 
 been at home, or Gitiadas or Pheidias, though 
 hy the way the Greeks knew not the joys of the 
 open court — if we may believe Yitruvius, which 
 I for my part do not always do. But, })erhaps, 
 that is my presumption ; all cobblers, from the 
 days of Apelles downwards, have been sad 
 meddlers with things be3'ond them. 
 
 Maryx had built his home, and loved it as men 
 love that which long effort and proud labour have 
 made theirs ; he loved it as Eome and the world 
 loved him. 
 
 Pomegi'anates and oleanders grew against its 
 •columns, its long white walls turned towards 
 Piome, and there came no sound to it but from 
 the chimes of S. Onofiio and the cascades in the 
 Dorian woods. 
 
 Here he laboured, dreamed, gave his marble 
 life, and knew himself greater than monarchs; and 
 in a wing of this beautiful house lived also a 
 little brown woman, eight}^ years old and more, 
 who wore the high white cap of a Provencal 
 
204 ARIADNE. 
 
 peasant, and was happiest when she was spinning 
 coarse flax at a wheel. 
 
 " This is my mother," Maryx would sa}' to all 
 the mighty x^ersons who from time to time visited 
 him, and the little brown woman would spin on, 
 neither disturbed by fear nor triumph. 
 
 She had seen her husband brought, crushed 
 to death, from under a great rock that he had 
 helped to split ; and two of her sons had gone 
 down with their coasting brig carr^^mg marbles 
 in the gulf, and the third had been shot in 
 a revolt of the people in the streets of Lyons ; 
 and that was all so very long ago, and this, her 
 only remaining lad, had come to be a great man, 
 and rich, and sought hj kings, and treating 
 nobles as his equals ! She did not comprehend ; 
 she span and told her beads. 
 
 As for himself, he never let a day go by without 
 paying homage to the little olive-sldnned woman 
 in the high winged cap with the big gold pins ; 
 and though he was a pagan, and believed in no 
 gods — as how should anyone believe who knows 
 that Athene was hurled from the Acropolis, and 
 that even the sanctity of Delphos could not 
 
ARIADNE. 205 
 
 conquer Time ? — still bent his head to her 
 withered hands, and rose the gladder-hearted 
 when she blessed him. 
 
 I climbed Janiculan slowl}^ that evening, and 
 went into the lovely gardens, bomided with their 
 cactus and azalea hedges ; nightingales were sing- 
 ing loud beneath his myrtles, and all the fomily 
 of thnishes in his rose thickets. 
 
 It was sunset ; through the white blossoms of 
 his orange trees one could look down and down 
 to where Tiber rolled by the black piles of the 
 Ponte Rotto ; and through the sharp spears of the 
 aloes one saw the stolen travertine of the Farnese, 
 and the dome of St. Peter's dark against the 
 pale green and gold of the sky. 
 
 Maryx had been at work all day, and had just 
 come out of his studio door, and was leaning 
 over the terrace wall, looking as he had looked 
 ten thousand times on that spot, whence the 
 resolute eyes of Tarquinius had first fallen upon 
 Rome. 
 
 Scarcely any other place holds so many 
 memories, and keeps embalmed so many legends 
 as does this old Sabine hill of Janus, where 
 
206 ARIADNI!. 
 
 " the darling of the gods fell asleep full of days 
 upon its shining sands/' From Ancus Mar- 
 cius and Lars Porsenna to sad Tasso and soft 
 Eaffaelle, all are here. Mutius Scsevola and 
 Clelia haunt it, and the singing children of 
 S. Philip Neri — wider contrast no spot on earth 
 hardly can hold. 
 
 When Tarquin stood here that memorahle day, 
 — as into his restless and ambitious soul the 
 desire to leave those quiet hills above the 
 Marta first had entered, — the wild woods that 
 harboured wolves and bears, still were dark 
 about what was even then the old citadel of the 
 warriors of the lance ; and Janus, who had his 
 altars here, was even then a god hoary with 
 many years. It is strange to think of how near 
 one seems to them, all those dead peoples and 
 dead deities. 
 
 Janus, with his keys of peace and war, has 
 passed into a mere memory, powerless, and 
 without worshippers ; soon Peter, with his keys 
 of heaven and earth, will have done the 
 same. 
 
 What will men worship then, I wonder ? 
 
AUIADNi:. 207 
 
 Mercurius, under some new name or another, 
 no doubt. He is the only god that never 
 perishes. 
 
 Mar^'x welcomed me with a smile ; king or 
 cobbler, you were alike welcome to him had you 
 only a frank purpose and a reverence for the 
 arts. People accused him, indeed, of being too 
 off-hand and haught}^ with his many princes, but 
 no one ever found him otherwise than pitiful 
 and generous to the poor. " I have known their 
 pains," he would say to those who thought he 
 gave too much awa3\ 
 
 He heard my little story attentively, leaning 
 over the balustrade of his terrace, looking down 
 over his roses and aloes, and the white bells of 
 the flowering yuccas, to the trees that enshrined 
 the Galatea of Raffaelle, and the marshy grounds 
 far below of the Velabrum, where the reedy 
 waters had drowned Sabine and Latin in unre- 
 lenting struggle. 
 
 " I wish it were a youth," he said, when I had 
 told him all. '* One could do so nmch more, so 
 much more easil}-. Besides " 
 
 Besides, though 4ie did not finish his i)hrase, 
 
208 ARIADNE. 
 
 the great sculx)tor tliouglit no -woman worthy of 
 his art. 
 
 ** But you said there was genius in it ? " I said 
 to him, reminding him of the wingless Love. 
 
 " There is. But it may have been her 
 father's." 
 
 '' But if she coukl do but small, slight things, 
 onlj^ to keep herself — she has nothing else ! " I 
 added, at a hazard. 
 
 The lustrous e3'es of Maryx, wide, brilliant, 
 and brown, under brows fit for a Greek Zeus, 
 lighted in wrath. 
 
 "No, no. That is accursed! To touch Art 
 without a right to touch it, merely as a means to 
 find bread — you are too honest to think of such 
 a thing. Unless Art be adored for its own sake 
 and purely, it must be left alone. Philip of 
 Macedon had ever^^ free man's child taught Art ; 
 I would have ever}" boy and girl taught its 
 sacredness ; so, we might in time get back some 
 accuracy of taste in the public, some conscien- 
 tiousness of production in tlie artist. If 
 artistic creation be not a joy, an imperious ne- 
 cessity, an instinct of all the forces of the mind, 
 
AEIADN^. 209 
 
 let the boy go and plough, and the giii go and 
 spin." 
 
 "All that is very well, but the wingless 
 Love " 
 
 Maryx smiled his frank and kindly smile, and 
 went into his studio, and took up the little figure, 
 some eight inches high, in grey clay scarcely 
 dried, which he had set upon a shelf, amongst 
 masks and casts and busts. 
 
 He looked at it long. 
 
 "Yes. There is feeling in it, and it is not 
 borrowed," he said at length. " Dear Crispin, 
 I would do much more for you ; let her come 
 and study here. I go to-night myself to Paris, 
 and shall be away till winter, as I always am ; 
 but my foreman — ^you know him, he is an old 
 man and to be trusted, and can give good in- 
 struction ; she can learn here, and be put in 
 right ways, for the wrong ones in Art, as in 
 everything else, are the easiest ; she might live 
 in the house too, only by what you say she would 
 be too proud. Let her come, and learn. Not 
 that I think she can ever achieve much — 
 being a girl — and indeed why should you wish it, 
 
 VOL. I. p 
 
210 ARIADNE. 
 
 since you wish her well ! Fame is a bad 
 tiling for a woman. She cannot wear the glorj^- 
 disc that the Greeks put on the heads of their 
 statues in public places to preserve them from 
 the pressing and the fingering of the crowd. 
 The glory-disc of a woman is only a crown of 
 thorns, and the hands of the curious are alwaj'S 
 forcing the thorns in to see if the blood will 
 flow. Still, let her learn, since there is nothing 
 better, and she did indeed do that Love, you saj-. 
 •Come out upon the terrace." 
 
 So he gi-anted what I sought, as Maryx 
 •granted almost everything that was ever asked of 
 him. 
 
 *' Did you tell Hilarion of her ? " he asked, as 
 lie went out on to the marble steps. 
 
 " No." 
 
 " No ? He would have written a poem on 
 fcer." 
 
 * * More Hkel}' he would have made one of 
 'her; the sort of poem that goes into the fire 
 or into the dust when a few months are past." 
 
 " And yet you love him ? " said Maryx, who 
 indeed did so himself. 
 
ARIADNE. 211 
 
 " Yes. One loves liim. So do women. That 
 is why he can hurt them so." 
 
 " In love there is ahva5^s one that can hurt 
 the other ; it is the one that loves least," said 
 Maryx. 
 
 " And Hilarion is alwaj's that one. Tiber 
 ■down there wonders to hear us talk of love. It 
 knows that Arno is the river of Love. Arno 
 knew Beatrice and Ginevra. Tiber onh' knew 
 Agrippina and Messalina, or, at the best, 
 Cynthia." 
 
 " You forget Actea," said Maryx. 
 
 " She was a slave, and she loved a beast." 
 
 " Do not slight her. She purifies all those 
 -centuries of Csesarism, reeking of blood and 
 filth. Her beast was a god to her ; she was a 
 slave, but she was faithful. Your loveliest of 
 i\ll the saints, Francesca Piomana, could find no 
 higher law to give than ' I^ove and be faithful.' 
 That Asiatic girl of Nero's had found that law a 
 tliousand years before her." 
 
 The last glow from the set sun faded ofl' the 
 pale sea-gi'een of the evening sky ; far below on 
 the bridge a little light shone under the dark 
 
 p 2 
 
212 ARIADNt:. 
 
 clustered roofs of the houses ; it was the lamp in 
 the room where my Hermes was. Hermes, who 
 made women out of sport ! 
 
 " You have not seen my Actea? " said MarjTc, 
 turning back into the house. 
 
 No one had seen it. He had but that spring 
 called it into life from the grey lumps of clay. It 
 was all alone in a little room whose single 
 window let in on it the faint light of the rising 
 moon. He lighted a three-wicked lamp, and let 
 me look. 
 
 It was gi-eat, like all that he did. Mar^TC 
 was a mighty master of his ai-t. He had 
 boundless scorn for the frivolities and fripperies 
 of modem sculpture ; their puerilities were to 
 him so many blasphemies ; to make your marble 
 into ribbons, and tassels, and broideries, and 
 flowers, and express under all these tawdrinesses 
 the onaladif desire and the false sentiment 
 of a huiTied and heated generation — Maryx had 
 for this as superb a contempt as Praxiteles, as 
 stem Lysippus would have had. 
 
 Some one has very truly said that this age is 
 not sculptural. It has no repose ; it has no 
 
ARIADN2. 213 
 
 leisure ; it has little health, physical and mental ; 
 and it has hut little grandeur, moral or cor- 
 poreal. Now, calm rest, vigour, and heauty, are 
 the indispensahle attributes of sculpture. 
 
 In default of these your modern stonecutter 
 takes pretty conceits, coquetteries, ornaments, 
 and trivialities. 
 
 He clothes his statues ; instead of sinews 
 and veins, he moulds buttons and fringes ; 
 his chief ambition is to produce a success- 
 ful tvompe Voeil; if he represent a bather, he 
 will concentrate his talent on the towel, not on 
 the muscles and the limbs ; liis sponge shall be 
 so life-lilce it shall seem to be sponge itself, but 
 the dorsal nerves will be all out of place, and the 
 features will express nothing save perhaps some 
 grimace at the cold of the water, or annoyance 
 at a gnat upon liis shoulder. 
 
 This may be clever, but it is not sculp tm'e. I 
 have seen in Paris a statue that was very much 
 admii'ed because of its realism ; it was a j)easant 
 in a stuff gown and wooden shoes. I have seen 
 another equally admired because of its ingenuity ; 
 it was a masker, so managed that from one side 
 
214 ARIADNE. 
 
 you could see the face, and from the other side 
 onl}" the mask. 
 
 AVhat would Pheidias have said of such things,. 
 or Scopas ? 
 
 Breadth and simplicity are the soul of 
 marble. It was never meant to be tortured into 
 trills and roulades like a singer's voice, into 
 crotchets and twists like a sugar-baker's sweet- 
 meats. A wooden shoe ! — instead of the beautiful 
 human foot with the daylight underneath it and 
 all the speed of Atalanta in the curve of its instep I 
 And I have seen even worse things in modern 
 statuary. I have seen a ball-room shoe with its 
 high heel and its rosette. Oh, shades of Helen 
 and of Praxiteles ! 
 
 Mai-jTJ: was incapable of such degradation. He 
 had the force of Michelangelo, and he had an 
 adoration of beauty Avhicli Michelangelo had 
 not; Michelangelo adored the horrible, and he 
 did not perceive where it merged into the gi'o- 
 tesque. He has been called a baptised Pheidias — 
 it is unjust to Pheidias, no Greek would ever sin 
 agamst the laws of beaut}'. 
 
 This Actea was beautiful. She was seated on 
 
ARIADNE. 215 
 
 the gi'oimd ; the head of Nero was on her hip, his 
 dead naked body was stretched on those windmg 
 sheets, in which she was about to fokl him, to hiy 
 him in his grave upon the garden hilL 
 
 All the story was there. 
 
 The anatomy was as fine as any of the 
 Greek marbles, and on the dead face of Nero 
 was all that perhaps only the subtlety and 
 analysis of the modern artist could have put 
 there ; the imiumerable contrasts and con- 
 tradictions of that strange mmd, so cruel, so 
 sensitive, so open to the influences of nature, so 
 dead to the emotions of humanity, so arrogantly 
 vain, so pitifully humble (for is not he humble 
 who pmes for the ai)plause of others?), so fated 
 to be loved, so fated to be loathed, capable of 
 weeping at the sight of a sunset and at the sound 
 of the harp of Terpnos, capable of laughing at 
 the agonies of virgins dishonoured and devoured, 
 and at the red glow in the sky which tokl him 
 Home was burning. 
 
 In this dead Nero you coukl sec the man 
 who discussed like an artist the physical 
 charms of hi^; motlier, tranquilly touching her 
 
216 ARIADNA 
 
 murdered corpse, and drinking wine between 
 whiles, and the man who, hiding Hke a coward in 
 the sand hole from his death, could yet say, in 
 full belief in himself, " quaHs artifex pereo ! '* 
 
 It was a great conception, like all, indeed, that 
 MarjTC ever called into life from the stone ; and 
 in Actea, as she hung over the body, the " grief 
 that cannot speak," the despair which is for the 
 moment paralysed till it counterfeits composure, 
 was miraculously rendered in every line and curve 
 of her drooping frame, which seemed frozen by 
 the breath of that death which yet had had no 
 meaner terrors for her. 
 
 *' It is very great," I said to him, not of 
 course that my opinion is worth anything ; I am 
 an ignorant man. 
 
 ** The Nero contents me," he answered. " But 
 the Actea — no. She is too Roman. She must 
 be more Asiatic. I have given her the calm of 
 the oriental, but her face is not yet what I wish ; 
 it escapes me." 
 
 " Take the face of my Ariadne," I said ; and 
 was sorry a moment later that I did say so. 
 
 " Ay ! Is it of that type ? " said Maryx, with 
 
ARIADNE:. 217 
 
 the interest of the true artist, in whom all things 
 are subordinate to his art. 
 
 " Very much," I answered him. " And she 
 has the intensity yet the composm'e — it is strange 
 — she is so yoimg, but I suppose so lonely a life 
 by the sea that " 
 
 " I will stay and see her. It is no moment to 
 me one day more or less in Rome. But we must 
 wish her a better fate than Actea's." 
 
 "Do you think Actea was unhappy ? Be sure 
 she believed no evil of him, and she had him all 
 to herself in death, Poppea was gone." . 
 
 " You talk like a woman," said Maryx, with a 
 smile, putting back the linen covering over the 
 body of his dead Caesar. I bade him good 
 night and thanked liim for his goodness, and 
 went out through his glades of rose-laurel, all 
 rosy-red even in the moonlight. He said he 
 would come on the morrow and see lier. 
 
 I was Sony after all that I had suggested to 
 him to wait. AVe should never meddle witli For- 
 tune. When the great goddess of Praneste 
 speaks through the mouths of mortals, it is usually 
 to lead them, or those who hear them, astra}'. 
 
CHAPTER VIII. 
 
 " My clear, 3-011 have genius," said Maiyx to 
 her with emotion in his voice when he came on 
 the morrow and offered her his aid and his in- 
 struction with that noble frankness which was a 
 imrt of him ; he was touched by her beauty, but 
 he was more touched by the love of his own art,, 
 which had been born in and lived with her on 
 those lonely Ligurian shores. 
 
 "You have genius," he said, standing by my 
 Greek Hermes. " And I am sure you biow— 
 genius is nobility, and like nobility is obligation." 
 
 " Yes," she said, simply, with her great eyes 
 fixed on him ; she did not say anything more, but 
 he felt that she understood him. 
 
 " I wish to learn," she added after a pause. " I 
 see such beautiful things, but they go away Hke 
 
ARIADNE. 219^ 
 
 dreams, I cannot make tliem stay ; it was so with 
 my father." 
 
 *' It is so with all of us ; with all artists," said 
 Marj^x. *' Our dreams are like Etruscan tombs. 
 When we break into them with the noise of the 
 world the crowned shapes vanish ; if we can grasp 
 a little of the gold, a fragment of the purple, it is 
 all we can do to bring what we have seen out to 
 others, and show that we have been witli ' the 
 gods that sleep.' Since you have such (beams 
 and would tell them to others, come and learn 
 with me. At least — you scarcely want to learn, 
 you chiefly want to acquire fticility and accurac}', 
 and they only come from long practice and a 
 kind of study that is tedious. I modelled the 
 human arm for three years before I could per- 
 fectly content myself, and even now — none but a 
 fool is content with himself. And even my poor 
 fool, Nero, never was that quite ; I am sorry for 
 Nero, are not you ? If he had not been Caisar, 
 and so cursed, he might have been a harmless 
 liarper all his daj's." 
 
 *' A lovely child," said Maryx to me by my 
 stall that day. *' Most lovely. And what a iiite I 
 
220 ABIABN2. 
 
 You must let me share in your imiocent cheat, 
 and you must make believe for me that her work 
 in m}^ studio is worth a price. A young female 
 thing like that must want so many comforts, so 
 many graces, about her : how can we persuade her, 
 she seems so proud " 
 
 " Let her be so," said -I. " And she does not 
 want much. She has been reared in all priva- 
 tions except those of the mind. She is hardy, 
 and simple in her tastes : why spoil them ? " 
 
 ** If she were a lad — no. But a gui — maybe 
 though you are right. What pleases me the most 
 in her is her impersonal love of art. She has no 
 idea of seeking reputation for herself, of being 
 * great,' as little souls all seek to be ; she only 
 wishes to learn because she sees 'beautiful 
 things.' That is very rare. Well, let her come 
 to me to-morrow. She shall have what good I 
 can give to her. And I will do my best by her in 
 all ways that I can — you are sm-e of that." 
 
 He held his hand out to me as he spoke ; the 
 firm and delicate hand that had called such noble 
 shapes out of the lifeless rocks. 
 
 I was sm-e. The faith of Maryx was strong as 
 
ARIADNA 221 
 
 the marble that he carved, and as pure from 
 stam. Yet I was not quite satisfied as I resumed 
 my stitching under my Apollo and Crispin ; I had 
 meddled with Fate ; it is presumptuous work for 
 a mortal. 
 
 " Dig not the isthmus there, nor cut it through. 
 Jove would have made a channel had he wished 
 it so," said the Oracle to the Cnidians. And we 
 are always cutting the isthmus and lettmg the 
 sea run in, thinking we know more than Jove. 
 No wonder all Oracles are tked and silent now-a- 
 days. 
 
 Perhaps, too, my misgivings were half com- 
 pounded of selfishness. I had found her, and I 
 had done my best by her ; I should have liked to 
 have been her only friend : — only I could not 
 isolate her so with any justice to her. 
 
 Maryx was a noble-hearted man as well as 
 great. I ought to have stitched on with a lighter 
 mind after he had left me, but I did not. 
 
 I was afraid that he would lead her from her 
 simple habits with too generous gifts. Not that 
 he was otherwise than most simple in his own 
 tastes, but like many manly men who have borne 
 
222 ARIADNE. 
 
 with iiidifference the full force of poverty and 
 labour, he had a horror of them as befalling 
 T/omen. 
 
 Now myself I have seen " the marriage of S. 
 Francis " productive enough of peace, and I do 
 not believe it is the lack of riches that makes 
 misery half so much as it is the desire of them. 
 
 The modern ideal of joy lies in riches. I think 
 it is a wrong one, certainly wrong to be placed 
 before the people. 
 
 You think the Lancashu'e operative, diinking 
 himself drunk with strong wines, and gorging 
 «very day on meat, under the smoke of a thousand 
 furnaces, without a blade of grass or a hand's- 
 breadth of clear sky near him for a dozen square 
 miles, is higher and nearer happiness than the 
 southern peasant, in the width of glorious air, 
 with the yellow corn, and the grey olive, and the 
 green vine about him, because he can eat but a 
 few leaves or some chestnut bread with an onion. 
 
 Are you not very wrong? Can there be a 
 doubt that the purer, fresher existence is far the 
 happier, as it is far the healthier ? 
 
 And even in the matter of intelligence, the true 
 
ARIADNE. 223 
 
 balance may incline another way than it is j^our 
 fashion to think. 
 
 ^' Why do you call 3'our dog Giordano ? " said 
 I once to a Tuscan contadino, who could neither 
 read nor write. He looked at me with surprise. 
 
 " Did you never hear of Luca Giordano ? " 
 said he. *' He was one of our artists in the old 
 time." 
 
 Now pray tell me, would ^''our Lancashire 
 workman, yelHng hideous songs in his music 
 hall, or chuckling in a rat i^it, be likel}' to call 
 his dog Eejiiolds or Gainsborough, and say to 
 you, " that was a painter of ours ? " 
 
 There are two sides to the medal of Progress. 
 Myself I cannot see that New York is so much 
 an improvement upon Athens, nor the Stafford- 
 shire potteries upon Etrurian Tarquinii. But 
 then I am only an ignorant man, no doubt, and 
 bom a Trasteverino, who loves the happy laugh 
 of the sun-fed children, and the unobscured smile 
 of the azure skies. 
 
 "Did Hilarion see her?" Maryx asked me 
 next day, when I took her up to his studio, 
 while the nightingales were still singing in 
 
224 abiadn:^. 
 
 the early morning. When I told him no, he 
 smiled and frowned hoth at once in a way that 
 he has. 
 
 " If he had done," he said, " he would have 
 stayed." 
 
 " But he is not commg hack for a year," said 
 I, with a vague misgiving following his thoughts. 
 
 " He may always stay away for ten years ; he 
 may always he hack to-morrow," said Maryx. 
 
 As for her, she was so entranced amongst all 
 that marhle, and so ahsorhed in the sense 
 that she might follow her father's art there 
 as she chose, that she had no remembrance of 
 Marjrx or of me. Only once, before the Actea, 
 she turned her eyes on him, full of reverence and 
 of dehght. 
 
 " You are great, as the Greeks were," she said, 
 breathlessly. 
 
 Maryx, whom the adulation of com'ts and 
 courtiers had never moved more than the stone 
 that he wrought in could be moved by the breeze, 
 coloured suddenly Hke any woman. He was 
 pleased. 
 
 " My dear, no modern can be great," he said, 
 
ARIADNE. 225 
 
 with a smile. " We at our best only echo and 
 repeat. Beside Alexander and Caesar, Napoleon 
 did very little ; it is the same thing in the Arts. 
 That is wh}^ I envy musicians. Their art is still 
 only in its infanc}^ ; it is the only one that has 
 not been excelled in past all excelling." 
 
 " But there is something there which they 
 would not have had," said the child, thoughtfully, 
 meanmg the classic sculptors by her thci/. " The}^ 
 would not have understood Actea's pain ; thej' 
 would onl}' have i:)ermitted it had Nero been a 
 wanior, and strong and heroic." 
 
 " You mean that we moderns can sjanpathise 
 with weakness and failure. Perhaps it is because 
 we are weak, and because we fail," said Maryx. 
 " You may be right, however. The chief cha- 
 racteristic, the only originality of all modern 
 art, do lie in its expressions of sympathy. We 
 have ceased to tliink sorrow shameful ; we have 
 exalted the emotions ; we analyse and we pity ; 
 we should hoot the first Brutus, and send the 
 second to prison ; we prefer affection to dut}'. 
 Perhaps we are right, but this weakness emascu- 
 lates us. And you — do you symimthise with 
 
 VOL. I. Q 
 
226 ABIAJDNP.. 
 
 Actea ? Would 3^011 not have let that base cur 
 lie unburiecl in the sanclholes ? " 
 
 She was silent a moment, thinking. 
 
 "No," she said, slowly; "no, I think not. 
 You see, she loved him ; and he had loved her — 
 once." 
 
 " We are wasting time," said Maryx, shortly. 
 " There is a square of clay upon its base within 
 there. Look ! if you have an idea, show me 
 what you would do. But that is only for to-day ; 
 afterwards you must model what I give you to 
 copy, and that onl}^; and I shall make 3^ou 
 design in black and white a long time before I 
 allow 3^ou to touch clay and marble. Your 
 anatomy is all at fault. In joxvc wingless Love 
 the shoulders are impossible. And listen — for 
 myself I shall have little time to give you. For 
 days you will not see me, even when I am in 
 Eome. Giulio there, my foreman, will give j^ou 
 direction and instruction ; and do not dream of 
 Actea, or of any other stories. Work, — and 
 most of all at geometr}', and at drawing from 
 the round, for of natm-al aptitude you have 
 only too much. You know, in all schools of 
 
ARIATJNt:. 227 
 
 sculpture it is an eternal dispute whether 
 modelling or drawing be of the most importance 
 — as if both were not equally so ! To acquire 
 excellence, draw unceasingly and model unceas- 
 ingly. If Michelangelo would have deigned to 
 model, instead of dashing with his chisel at 
 the mound of marble, with no certain knowledge 
 of what he meant to do, he would have spared 
 himself the mistakes which make him often 
 unequal and unworthj-, and would have made 
 any lesser man ridiculous. You have great 
 talent, but you need training : you are at present 
 lilve a young poet who begins to write sonnets 
 and epics of his own before he has studied 
 Homer or read Virgil." 
 
 She looked at him with such humid and 
 raptm'ous eyes of gratitude, that they would 
 have moved a man far colder than Maryx, who 
 had the warm blood of Provence in his veins. 
 
 "I do thank you so much, only I say it ill,"" 
 she mui-mm-ed. " To be with a great master in 
 Rome — that is what I have always dreamt of; 
 and you are gi'eat ! " 
 
 His face grew warm. 
 
 Q 2 
 
228 ABIADNZ 
 
 *' No, no," lie said, with a certain emotion in 
 liis voice. " We are not great now-a-daj^s ; we 
 echo the past when we are at our best, we hardly 
 do more. And for me, my dear, to do what little I 
 can for youth, is to do no more than to pay my 
 debt. I owe it to my country to give a little 
 back for all she did to me. Onl}- think what it 
 was for a lad of eighteen to come here to the 
 gardens of Sallust. Think what it was for me. 
 I, having known nothing but hunger and toil and 
 effort, the stone quarries of Provence, and the 
 stone wilderness of Paris; having worked in 
 wretched garrets, always fh-eless in winter, 
 often breadless in summer ; seldom, indeed, 
 being able to tell one night whether I should 
 get food enough next day to keep breath in 
 me, I was suddenl}^ transported from all that 
 famme and misery, and ahnost hopeless conflict, 
 to that matchless scene, to that enchanting 
 existence ! Think what such a change meant ! 
 To sit and read in the tapestried librar}^ ; to roam 
 through the ilex avenues ; to lean over the 
 balcony, and look across Rome and its plains to 
 the very sea ; to wake at sunrise and know that 
 
AEIJDX£. 229 
 
 all day long there was no necessity to do an}^- 
 thing, except to study the great marbles and the 
 lovely frescoes, that * di'ew one's soul outward 
 through the eyes,' and to commune with the 
 dead, and try and beguile out of them the lost 
 secrets of the Arts ! All ! if ever perfect peace 
 were upon earth, I knew it then in my boyish 
 years at the Villa Medici. I wish I could give such 
 years to any j'omig life that loves the Arts. Athens 
 herself never had a nobler thought than those 
 years France gives her students. Only one 
 ought to do things so much greater after them. 
 The uttermost one acliieves seems but sorry 
 payment. There is an idea, general enough, 
 that talent is best left alone to sink or swim. I 
 fear that many smk who might be worth the 
 saving. The soul may peiish for sheer lack of a 
 spoonful of soup in the mouth. Protagenes 
 might be now a household word, like Apelles, if 
 he had not had to live on a handful of beans, 
 and have much trouble even in gettmg them. 
 Buonarotti might have been greater without GiuHo 
 and all the meddling, dictating cardinals — that is 
 true ; but if he had had to break stones for his 
 
230 ABIADN£!. 
 
 daily bread, lie would never have had time to 
 look up and see the faces of Jehovah and the 
 Sybils. I am thankful to the Villa Medici, as a 
 bird is to the hand that opens its cage door and 
 sets it free. It gave me the best gifts of life — 
 leisure and liberty. They are the twin genii 
 that the poor can never see ; Dioscuri that seldom 
 lend their lance and buckler save to a battle 
 already won. If an}^ aid of mine can bring them 
 to your side, do not thank me ; I only -pay to 
 your youth the debt that I owe to Rome for 
 my own." 
 
 The full, deep sweetness of his voice w^as verj' 
 gentle ; he spoke thus to take from her anj^ 
 doubt or fear that she might feel, and he told 
 her of himself that she might know he also had 
 passed through the lonelj^ efforts and the wistful 
 visions that were her portion. Then he touched 
 her gently : 
 
 " Come and see m}^ mother. She is old, and 
 cannot talk to you ; but it will make you happier 
 to think there is a w^oman near." 
 
 He shut the Actea up in her darkness, with 
 the nightingales singing outside ; and went into 
 
AEIADN£. 231 
 
 anotlier room to the lump of moist claj'. Such 
 a mere moist himp was once the Belvedere 
 Mercuiy, the Thespian Love, and the Venus of 
 Cleomenes. 
 
 Alexander used to say that the only things 
 which made him doubt liis immortality were 
 sleep and love ; I think the onl}- things that 
 may make men hope for theirs, avQ love and 
 Art. 
 
 In this room, where she was henceforth to 
 work — a bare place, of course, as sculptors' rooms 
 must be, but with two great windows that looked 
 through the orange-trees and cacti down the 
 Golden Hill — there stood a bust of a young 
 man, with beautiful features, dreamful brows, 
 and the firm, cold lips that you maj^ see in the 
 mouth of Adrian — Adrian, who pmiished an 
 epigi'am with death, and came to desire death 
 unavailingly. 
 
 " How beautiful that is ! it is some god ! " 
 she said, and paused before it. 
 
 " It is Hilarion," said Maryx. ** It was done 
 long ago " 
 
 ** Hilarion ? He was a saint." 
 
232 ABIADNE. 
 
 She had no love for samts ; she knew that the 
 Thehakl had destroj^ed Olympus. 
 
 " Hilarion ! What country is that name ? 
 Hilarion was a sahit in the desei*t," she said 
 again ; *^ he was a sorcerer, too ; for he made the 
 horse of Italicus wm the chariot race hy a 
 charm." 
 
 She said it seriousl3\ To this gu4, fed from 
 bii'th on all the legends of the past ages, all these 
 tilings were far more vivid and living than the 
 people that went by her every day. 
 
 Maryx smiled. 
 
 " I thinli he is more sorcerer than saint; and 
 he has won the chariot race with his own horses. 
 His face and his form, too, served me for this 
 also." 
 
 He drew the cloth off a statue of the Apollo 
 Cytharfedus, a copy of one of his works that had 
 raised a storm of adulation round his name in 
 the salon of Paris years before, and was now in 
 the Gl}T3totheckea of Munich. 
 
 It was different to any Apollo of the ancient 
 marbles, and there was a certain melancholy in 
 its divine dignit}^ and perfect grace, as though 
 
AItIADN£. 233 
 
 the god had let fall his lyre out of very weari- 
 ness, thinking that he who could move the very 
 rocks b}' music, and tame the beasts of the forest 
 and desert, and charm the souls of men with 
 irresistible influence till they wept like little 
 childi'en, yet could be baffled and betrayed by 
 the low cunning of his brother, of the bo}' whom 
 men worshipped when they wished to lie and 
 cheat. 
 
 " Oh, it is all wrong," said Maiyx, as she 
 gazed. "It is modern feeling; it is too sub- 
 jective ; it is not Greek at all ; it is a poet, not 
 a god. It is Alfred de Musset, it is not ApoUo. 
 Yes, the w^orld went mad for it ; but that is no 
 proof of excellence. I have done better things, 
 though one never creates as greatly as one 
 imagines." 
 
 " He must be beautiful ! " she said, under her 
 breath, with her eyes lifted to the face of Apollo. 
 " Is he as beautiful as that ? " she asked. 
 
 Mai-}^^ threw a cloth over the bust. 
 
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 CHAPTER IX. 
 
 The mother of Maryx was growing veiy old. 
 The hard life of the poor enfeebles as age comes 
 on the frame that it braced in earlier life. 
 
 She had lvno\\'n heat and cold, and hmiger and 
 loain, all her 3'outh through. Now that her son 
 was a gi-eat man, and kept her in comfort, and 
 women waited on all her wants, and she dwelt in 
 beautiful chambers, she did not understand. 
 
 She would have lilvcd to go and wash the vege- 
 tables for the soup ; she would have liked to have 
 gone with her hoe out in the cabbage ground; 
 she thought that it was only yesterday that they 
 had brought her the dead body out of the quarr}'. 
 She was very quiet, and spun on at the flax ; — a 
 little brown woman, Hke a squirrel, with bright 
 
ARIADNi). 235 
 
 eyes, who vv'as always bewildered wlieii her 
 wooden shoes that she would not ciiange sank 
 into the soft thick carpets, and when she saw the 
 great grand people round her son. 
 
 " I must cost him so much ; if he would only 
 let me wear my old gowns," she would say. 
 And — like a true peasant, as she was — she would 
 hoard awa}^ all her gold x)ieces in holes and 
 corners against a rain}- day, 
 
 ** He is so good ; but he ma}^ be poor to- 
 moiTow," she would say. " For me, I would not 
 care if it came so ; I could work still. I could 
 hoe a little, and weed in the fields. But he would 
 not lilvc it now ; he is always living with kings." 
 
 And she would bmy her money against the 
 evil time, and spin on, that at least when the 
 time came he should have a store of linen. 
 
 She had a horror of the statues ; they were 
 onl)' "the stone" to her; the same pitiless rocks 
 which had been the murderer of her husband. 
 Like Menutius Felix she believed that evil 
 demons hid themselves in the marbles. She 
 detested them like the early Christians ; lilve 
 Martin of Tours, or Marcellus. 
 
236 ARIADNE. 
 
 Could she have read a book, she wouki have 
 loved better than any other that passaf:je of 
 Clement of Alexandria, m which he rails against 
 '' those workmen who pass their lives maldng 
 dangerous toj's : I mean sculptors, painters, 
 goldsmiths, and poets." 
 
 She had lost sight of her son for j^ears ; all 
 those 3^ears in which Maryx was stud}ing and 
 starving in Paris, and tasting the first deep 
 joys of art as a student of the Villa Medici; 
 and then all of a minute he had borne her 
 away, and she had found him a great man, 
 and what to her seemed sm*prisingiy rich : she 
 was always afraid that there was some sorcery 
 in it. If he had made imagds of the saints, 
 indeed it might have been right, but all these 
 l)agan gods and light women — it troubled her, she 
 prayed for his soul unceasingly. 
 
 If he had not been her beloved son, and so 
 good, she would have been sure that he had sold 
 his soul to one of those false gods of his, with 
 the lotus flowers on their foreheads, or with the 
 goat's hoofs for their feet. As it was, she 
 could not understand ; so she told her beads half 
 
ARIADNi). 237 
 
 the clay thro ugh, unci though she was infirm, 
 wouhl go to mass every moniing in the church 
 of S. Onofrio, and with the gohl and silver that 
 he gave her — it had always to be gold and silver, 
 she had the peasant-distrust of paper-mone}', 
 and disbelief in it — she would buy prayers for 
 him with one half, and put the rest away in little 
 nooks and corners. 
 
 *' He is a very great man, you know," she 
 would say to me, for I could speak her dialect a 
 little, having wandered much in that country. 
 *' Oh, yes, very very great. He chips the stones 
 into figures as big as those that they have in the 
 churches. His father used to bring the stones 
 up in square solid pieces ; I liked them better ; 
 you could build with them. But I suppose these 
 are greatei:. Nobody ever came to look at the 
 square lueces. The oxen dragged them away ; 
 I never heard where they went." 
 
 And then she would spin on again, thinking. 
 She could never understand very much, except 
 that her youngest born was a great man, and 
 that where they lived the Pope lived too, which 
 made it almost like living with God. She could 
 
238 
 
 ARIADNE. 
 
 never understand : not any more than we, who 
 have had the light of stud}^ on us all our days, 
 and walk with the lamp of knowledge in our 
 hand, can ever understand the ahsolute night 
 of ignorance which enshrouds the peasant in its 
 unbroken obscmity. 
 
 ** I was alwaj's afraid of the stone," she said 
 once after a pause, twirling her wheel. " Alwaj^s. 
 It is a cold hard thing and cruel. It let my 
 husband toil at it all those years, and then all in 
 a moment fell on him — how can they sa}^ it has 
 no life ? It knows very well what it is about. 
 It Idlls men. My son laughs, and says it is his 
 servant ; he has mastered it ; he deals it blow 
 after blow, and it keeps still, and takes the 
 shape he wants and will have. But it killed his 
 father. He will not remember that. One day 
 perhaj)s it will give him back his blows ; that is 
 what I am afraid of; for him, he only laughs. 
 But I know what the marble is ; I know there 
 were ten of my family, old and young, little and 
 big, one mth another, all over the years that are 
 gone, ten of them whom the marble killed in our 
 own country : I am afraid. 
 
 fi 
 
ARIADNE 230 
 
 **'If he would make it into the likeness of 
 Christ and his saints, always, nothing else,'' she 
 went on, feeling the beads of her rosary, '^then 
 perhaps it might not he allowed to hui't him. 
 But all he makes are the images of hght women 
 and bluid gods that had false priests — so our 
 priests tell one : that is not holy work. And he 
 so good liimself — an angel ! Perhaps he has gone 
 astray to the false gods, looking alwa3's at their 
 faces, and thinking of them." 
 
 " Whatever his god be, it leads him to love 
 his mother," I said to her. 
 
 " And that is true," she said, with her weather- 
 worn bronzed face softened with tender recollec- 
 tions. *' And when he was Httle I was a hard 
 mother to him sometimes, for he was masterful 
 and yet idle, and sat dreaming when others were 
 working, and we with so man}' mouths to fill, 
 and a soup-pot never full — but he is so good to 
 me. Look ! There was some monarch or another 
 he was to go dine with — some very mighty king, 
 come a veiy long wa}' off over the seas — and that 
 night I was ill. I was taken numb, and dumb, 
 and stupid ; they called it by some long name ; 
 
240 ARIADNi:. 
 
 and never a moment did lie leave me. He let the 
 king send and send, and only said, * My mother 
 is ill, I cannot come ; ' and he was gentle with 
 me like a girl. And I a hard mother to him 
 when he was little ! For boj^s tr}^ your patience, 
 love 3'ou them ever so. Aye, he is good to me. 
 Ma}^ the saints render it back to him, and save 
 him from the works of his hands. For I am 
 always afraid. I would sooner he were taking 
 his oxen over the plough, and I cooking, and 
 washing, and mending, and waiting for him when 
 the sun went down." 
 
 She would have been much happier so, in a 
 little hut on the broad sun-fed plains of her birth, 
 living hardly, and trudging a day's walk to sell a 
 few eggs and herbs for a few pence, than she was 
 in the wing of this beautiful house, where all 
 luxmies surrounded her, and the windows of her 
 chamber opened on the pillars of the atrium, 
 looldng across the river to the convent-gardens 
 upon Aventine, and the ruins of the Golden 
 House, and the marshes where Acca Lau- 
 rentia reared her mighty nurslings to brave 
 the fierce Quirites. 
 
ARIADN2. 241 
 
 Yet she was j^roiid in her way, so far as her dim 
 mind, which had only the gleam of a peasant's 
 shrewdness and a mother's 'tenderness to give it 
 any light, and in any manner grasp the fact of 
 the gi'eat fame of Maryx. But she was always 
 unquiet. 
 
 " I suppose he is glad," she would say. " But 
 for me I always thought it was bad to be lifted 
 out over your fellows : it is always the big trees 
 the woodman takes, it is always the finest bird 
 that first feels the knife. Look you, when I was 
 a little child I saw in the village a beautiful 
 3'oung man, and they were beating him and 
 stoning him, and some one got a musket and put 
 him out of his misery as if he were a mad dog, 
 and they said they did that because he was great 
 and rich, nothing more : it w^as in the days when 
 everj'where they were burning the castles — I do 
 not know why — that people might be free, and do 
 nothing, they said. But how should jieoj^le be 
 free like that — the land must be turned and the 
 corn must be beaten ; and for me I can always see 
 that .young man's face, with his hair soaked in 
 blood — it was fair-coloured hair ; very likely he 
 
 VOL. I. R 
 
242 ABIADNi:. 
 
 liad a mother at home. I do not think he had 
 •ever hurt any one." 
 
 And thus she woukl spin on anxiously, because 
 her son had become great and rich, and could 
 live with princes. 
 
 Though she did not understand, she was shrewd 
 in her way ; the shrewdness that the peasant 
 acquires as a kind of instinct of self-preservation 
 in the world where he has to grope his way like 
 a beetle, with every foot lifted against him, per- 
 petually rolling upward his ball of clay through 
 the mire as best he can. 
 
 This day, when Maryx took his new pupil 
 to her, she was sitting as usual in the 
 room that, with three others, was especially 
 her own : it opened on the atrium brilliant 
 in the mornmg-light, with its white marbles 
 and its red roses, and its breadth of azAire 
 sky. 
 
 She was spinning, she had her wooden shoes 
 on, for she would never wear any others ; she 
 had a little wooden crucifix near her, and a 
 wooden rosary : she had brought them from the 
 village ; her sunken but still bright eyes lost their 
 
ARIADNE. 243 
 
 ■wrtiideriiig sharpness, and softened greatl}' at 
 sight of her son. 
 
 Maryx approached her, and, bending down, 
 spoke to her some moments in her o^^^l provincial 
 tongue, tlien beckoned Gioja to them. 
 
 She looked at the lovely face of the girl witli 
 kmdliness and suspicion — tlie kindliness of the 
 woman, and the suspicion of the peasant. 
 
 *' Why do you bring her to me ? " she said, 
 fiharpl}'. 
 
 " She comes to study my art, that is all," lie 
 answered. '' She is motherless and fatherless, 
 and ver}' desolate indeed. We must do for her 
 what we can. I thought it would please you to 
 see a young face near." /• 
 
 " It does not disj^lease me." 
 
 She let her wlieel stop, looking hardly all the 
 while at Gioja, who stood motionless, under- 
 standing none of the words spoken, and glancing 
 out into the court, where tlie doves were flut- 
 tering on the edge of the central tank. 
 
 ** Slie comes to cut the stone ? " his mother 
 said, after a moment. 
 
 " As I do— yes." 
 
 11 2 
 
214 ARIADNi:. 
 
 The dark, liarsli e3'es of the okl woman grew 
 half angrv ; she knotted and entangled her hank 
 of flax. 
 
 Her face grew very troubled. 
 
 "You make the stone into women — into the 
 likeness of them, all evil women and light, or 
 how would the}' bear the sun and the gaze of 
 men on their naked limbs — is it fit that a girl 
 should see that? It is shameful." 
 
 ''Mother, you do not understand " 
 
 " No : I do not understand anything. But it 
 is shameful. AVhat should a girl do in that 
 place with all those carved images of vileness ? 
 She has a pure face, and a true look. Marry her^ 
 and give me little children about me before I 
 cUe." 
 
 Marj'x flushed all over his wide proud brows^ 
 and turned abruptty away. 
 
 " She is nothing to me. You mistake, mother. 
 But she is very desolate. AVill you not give her 
 yoiu' blessing ? " 
 
 She laid her old brown hand on Gioja. 
 
 " My dear, I bless you — yes — why not ? You 
 are young and I am old. I do not understand,. 
 
AEIADX£. 245 
 
 as he sa^'s. But do not you touch the stone. It 
 will turn you into its own likeness, or else kill 
 you, making you think a stone a human thing. 
 It killed his father. But he vrill not he warned." 
 
 The girl hent her knees to receive what she 
 saw hy the gesture was a henediction : the words 
 Avere unintelligible to her. 
 
 '* AVhat does your mother say to me ? *' she 
 iisked of Maryx. 
 
 " She wishes you well," he answered. " ^ly 
 mother is old, and cannot speak your tongue. 
 But you will he gentle to her. To be old is 
 always to be sad." 
 
 Gioja-was vagueh' oppressed and troubled; 
 «lie was glad to go out into the sunlight of the 
 atrium, and throw grain to the doves bathing 
 there, and watch the gauze-winged sphinxes dart 
 through the red gold of the bignonia blossoms 
 twisting round the columns. 
 
CHAPTER X. 
 
 Maryx did not leave Rome that day nor the 
 next, nor many a day after. For he fomid in her 
 face the face of his Actea, and she found in him 
 a true and a great master. 
 
 He did not cop3^her features line by line. She- 
 never knew that he Avas studying her, for he dis- 
 liked ever}' set expression, and his j)rayer was 
 ever that of Diderot's artist, " Oh God, deliver 
 me from models ; " but, nevertheless, he changed 
 his Actea's face for hers, and his statue gained 
 the onl}' thing it wanted, and then he stayed on to* 
 make it into marble, only going for an occasional 
 absence, of a week or two at most ; for Maryx 
 worked, like Donatello and Michelangelo, with 
 his own hands, leaving nothing to his workmen,, 
 save the merest elementar}- labour. Thus, indeed,. 
 
ARIADNE. 247 
 
 he produced but few works as far as numbers 
 went, compared with his contemporaries, who 
 scarcel}^ touch their marble themselves, and 
 create vicariously, and so multiply with rapidity 
 their colossal dolls and their millinery in stone : 
 ]\Iaryx loved to feel the idea grow out of the 
 rock under the blows of his own chisel, and 
 would not yield to a paid labourer the delight 
 of carving the rounded limb and making the 
 mute mouth smile. 
 
 When he was absent, as when he was present, 
 the girl went backwards and forwards to the 
 Janiculan, and learned and laboured thoroughly 
 as though she were a male student of this the 
 most virile of all the arts. It was not very far 
 to go, but it is a rough, populous way until you 
 get to the Pauline cascades and the green gardens ; 
 and Ersilia went with her in the morning, and I 
 went for her, or the old foreman, or one of 
 the old artizans, or sometimes Maryx himself 
 returned with her at sunset. 
 
 She would never eat anything at his studio, 
 though he wished it, but would take with lier a 
 morsel of dry bread and some fruit. She was 
 
248 ARIADNA 
 
 very grateful to everyone, but very proud in 
 her way. 
 
 *' My father always told me to take nothing ; 
 that it was the only way to be free," she would 
 say. 
 
 So the weeks went on one after another, very 
 quietly ; and the total absorption of her into art, 
 and her delight in it, and her patient yet passion- 
 ate study of it, all brought her strength and health, 
 and she ceased to look ill and to suffer from the 
 heat, and became quite content. Very familiar 
 she never became with anyone, except, perhaps, 
 with me ; she had the meditative temperament 
 of the artist, and all the turmoil and triHing 
 of the Httle world around her seldom reached 
 her ear. 
 
 As for the people of the quarter, they were 
 always a little afraid of her, and they abandoned 
 the idea that she was my daughter, and wove 
 wonderful romances about her, in which princes 
 and cardinals figured with small credit to their 
 morality. What did it matter ? 
 
 A girl who did not go to mass at any 
 church, seemed very damnable to all the good 
 
ARIADN2. 249 
 
 folks of our Rione, mothers and maids, who 
 might, indeed, have theii* love affairs like other 
 women, and their quarrels, and who could sell 
 a rotten fruit, or twist a hu'd's neck, or stick 
 their bodkin in a rival as well as anyone, but 
 who always squatted on theii* heels right 
 virtuously before the Madonna once a week, 
 at least, and got the public writer at the corner 
 to pen their little notes for them to that lovel}' 
 saint, S. Luigi Gonzaga, who smiles in June 
 like a ver}' Adonis amongst his flowers and his 
 love-letters. 
 
 And as for the men — well, she was beautiful 
 to look at, certainly ; but then she never seemed 
 to know it or to want anyone else to see it, so 
 what charm was there in it ? She went on 
 her way looking at none of them, always 
 looking at some moss-grown roof of an old 
 temple afar off, or some defaced fresco on some 
 wall hard by. She made them angry, and they 
 let her be. 
 
 She onl}' saw Clelia pushing her horse's breast 
 against the reed}^ shores of the Velabrum, or 
 the fair-faced Improvisatore leaning from his 
 
250 ARIADNE. 
 
 violin a moment to watch for Raffaelle coming 
 on the bridge. 
 
 She was very tranquil at this time, stucljdng 
 long and closely, and then going out into all 
 the broad brightness of the noon, or the white 
 radiance of moonlit evenings, and remembering, 
 all the ages of the world. 
 
 There can be hardl}' any life more lovely upon 
 earth than that of a young student of art in Rome. 
 With the morning, to rise to the sound of count- 
 less bells and of innumerable streams, and see 
 the silver lines of the snow new fallen on the- 
 mountains against the deep rose of the dawn, 
 and the shadows of the night steal away softly 
 from off the cit}-, releasing, one by one, dome- 
 and spire, and cupola and roof, till all the wide 
 white wonder of the place discloses itself under 
 the broad brightness of full da}^ ; to go down inta 
 the dark cool streets, with the pigeons fluttering 
 in the fountains, and the sounds of the morning 
 chaunts coming from many a church door and 
 convent window, and little scholars and singing 
 children going b}' with white clothes on, or 
 scarlet robes, as though walking forth from the 
 
ARIADNA 251 
 
 canvas of Botticelli or Garofalo ; to eat fru- 
 gall}', sitting close by some shop of' flowers and 
 birds, and watching all the while the humours 
 and the pageants of the streets by quaint corners, 
 rich with sculptures of the Iienaissance, and 
 spanned by arches of architects that builded for 
 Agrippa, under grated windows with arms of 
 Frangipanni or Colonna, and pillars that Apollo- 
 doiiis raised ; to go mto the great courts of 
 palaces, murmurous with the fall of water, and 
 fresh with green leaves and golden fruit, that rob 
 the colossal statues of their gloom and gauntness, 
 and thence into the vast chambers where the 
 greatest dreams that men have ever had are 
 written on panel and on canvas, and the immensity 
 and the silence of them all are beautiful and 
 eloquent with dead men's legacies to the living, 
 where the Hours and the Seasons frolic beside the 
 Maries at the Sepulchre, and Adonis bares his 
 lovely limbs, in nowise ashamed because St. 
 Jerome and St. Mark are there ; to stud}- and 
 muse, and wonder and be still, and be full of the 
 peace which passes all understanding, because 
 the earth is lovely as Adonis is, and life is yet 
 
252 ARIADNE. 
 
 unspent; to come out of tlie sacred light, half 
 golden, and half dusky, and full of man}' blended 
 colours, where the marbles and the pictures live, 
 sole dwellers in the deserted dwellings of princes ; 
 to come out where the oranges are all aglow in 
 the sunshine, and the red camellias are pushing 
 against the hoary head of the old stone Hermes, 
 and to go down the width of the might}' steps into 
 the gay piazza, alive with bells tolling, and crowds 
 laughing, and drums abeat, and the flutter of 
 carnival banners in the wind ; and to get away 
 from it all with a full heart, and ascend to see 
 the sun set from the terrace of the Medici, or 
 the Pamfili, or the Borghese woods, and watch 
 the flame-like clouds stream homewards behind 
 St. Peter's, and the pines of Monte Mario grow 
 black against the west, till the pale green of 
 evening spreads itself above them, and the stars 
 arise ; and then, with a prayer — be your faith 
 what it will — a prayer to the Unknown God, to 
 go down again through the violet- scented air and 
 the dreamful twilight, and so, with unspeakable 
 thankfulness, simj^ly because you live, and this is 
 Home — so homeward. 
 
ARIADNE. 253 
 
 What life can be fuller or be sweeter than this, 
 even if your home be near the skies, in some old 
 house of some crowded quarter, with the doves 
 flying about your roof all the day long ? 
 
 What matter poverty, or any straits of it, if 
 you be young and be in Rome ? 
 
 All this mighty world that has been making 
 here for nearly three thousand years is all 3'our 
 own, and Praxiteles and RafFaelle are your min- 
 isters. For you, Popes greater than Emperors 
 gathered their treasures from tlie east and 
 west, and raised these endless temples of marble 
 and of jewels ; and for you they made tliese deep 
 green aisles and avenues, where the ilex and the 
 cypress intermingle, and the birds sing in the 
 soft darkness of the boughs ; not a Medici, nor 
 a P)orgia of them all, possessed the capital of the 
 world as you can do, entering into your heritage 
 of Art's great heirloom. 
 
 And beside a life in Rome, all life elsewhere is 
 but barren and narrow, and must miss something 
 both of colour and sanctity. If it were only 
 for the endless possibilities that lie in existence 
 here, it would eclipse all others ; you may watch 
 
254 ARIAJJNZ 
 
 a cabbage garden being dug, and under the 
 •careless stroke of the spade it may yiekl up 
 impeiial marbles or broken household gods ; you 
 may speak to a village workman coming down 
 from the hills into the streets, and he may give 
 3^ou, b}' mere chance, some priceless secret of the 
 past, as only a few j^ears since the poor artificer 
 of the Sabine mountains gave up the secret of 
 the Etruscan goldsmiths' chains. 
 
 Well, — the cit}^ was full of might}^ people, and 
 stirred with all that life of fashion and of foil}-, 
 which must make the old stones of the Carinae and 
 the Sacred Way think the years of the Agrippines 
 are come back again to Rome. But all its fume 
 and fuss touched my Ariadne in no way. 
 
 Ma.ryx, indeed, was sought by that illustrious 
 though motley world, and could not always say 
 it nay. But no one saw her at his house ; 
 and our own world that gossipped on thxi 
 doorsteps, and clanked brass pails at the water 
 spouts, and told its beads at the shoemaker's 
 church, and ate its maccaroni at the street 
 comers, and drove its mules over the bridge to 
 the gardens, and pranked itself in gay masque- 
 
ABIADN£\ 255 
 
 rade, and beat its tambourine at carnivals, did not 
 change in any way, but let her alone — a girl that 
 did not go to mass and had no saint, and came 
 the Lord knew w^hence. 
 
 So the months went by, and Maryx would 
 often leave the great i^ersonages who courted 
 him, to join her and me and Pales, when on 
 holy daj's and feast days we would ramble far 
 and wide over the city and the country round. 
 Marj'x cared but little for this world which was 
 ixt his feet : he thought it monotonous, but a 
 myope : he said to it as Pierre Puget, another 
 Provencal, said to it when it told him that he 
 eclipsed Pheidias, '' Have you studied the works 
 •of Pheidias ? " 
 
 Maryx, despite his lofty free grace and often 
 haughty speech, kept much of the peasant in 
 him ; of the free and dauntless peasant who 
 dwells on the broad plains, amongst his sheep 
 dogs, and has for his couch the wild thyme once 
 dedicated to Venus. A king could not sway 
 him ; nor either easily could a syren allure. 
 
 The wiles of women fell away impotent from this 
 man, who could imagine and create a loveliness 
 
256 ABIADNA 
 
 that no living woman ever could equal : — Helen • 
 being dead. 
 
 Gay people began to go up and down the 
 avenues by the Lateran, and foreign crowds 
 to saunter under the palm of Augustus, and 
 foolish fashionable chirrupings twittered round 
 the Moses and the Gladiator, and all the gi-eat 
 solemn noble marbles, and mummers began to 
 twang their lutes before the time under gloomy 
 convent walls, and passing under the shadow of 
 great palaces at night, one heard strains of merry 
 music, and caught glimpses, through the vast 
 arched courts, of ladies' gems and lacquays' 
 liveries. 
 
 For me, I wished they would leave Rome 
 alone. It should be visited as Mecca is ; and 
 in no other way. 
 
 But all the twitter and turmoil and flutter and 
 frippery, always rushed in like the waves of the 
 Goths' armies whenever winter came ; and trade 
 was bettered, and the grim old streets were 
 bright, and not very many people came my way 
 to the brown corner where the Ponte Sisto water 
 fell in the great arched niche all green with 
 
ARIADNZ 257 
 
 moss. To me winter made no change, for my 
 clients did not lie at all amongst that wealthy 
 foreign world ; I munched chesnuts instead of 
 figs, and hugged a brazier instead of a water 
 melon — that was all. 
 
 Others of my caUing retreated from their stalls 
 into cellars, and sat with their heads just above 
 the pavement, looking very ch'oll, and like the 
 jacks m boxes that the children play with ; but 
 for myself I never did. I stuck to my stall 
 whenever I worked ; and fixed a big red umbrella, 
 if it rauied, above my head, and defied the winds 
 and all forces of the elements. 
 
 Having braved in my younger manhood the icy 
 winters of old German cities far noithward, I was- 
 not afraid of the blasts that come over the Alps 
 and Apennines and make one shiver, as they used 
 to make Cato do, no doubt, despite all his philo- 
 sophy ; whistling up under his toga, and sportmg 
 with his dignity. 
 
 I confess I like to tliink of Cato shivering in 
 the winter wind. I have no love for him, nor 
 honom', nor any veneration. 
 
 Surely never more curiously than in Cato were 
 
 VOL. I, 8 
 
258 ARIADNA 
 
 mediocrity and narrow-mindedness deified and 
 immortalised ; alwaj's arrayed witli persistent ob- 
 stinacy against innovation of an}^ kind ; a foe to 
 all genius and all elegance ; so brutal to his slaves 
 that one of them handed himself out of sheer 
 fear of his displeasure ; so rapacious of their 
 labour, that, whilst counselling festivals should 
 be religiously kept in the letter and the plough 
 laid aside, he recommends that slaves shall 
 be meanwhile put to all other kind of work ; 
 furious against all immorality, whilst considering 
 chastity in marriage in nowise bindmg on the 
 liusband ; never rising to a higher view of moral 
 excellence than lies in the range of a strict 
 police discipline, and never imagining a loftier 
 lionour than lies locked in the merchant's 
 ledger ; considering every man of versatile 
 IDOwers and gi'aceful accomplishments fit only 
 ■for a harlequin, and despising a poet as only 
 level with a woman or a mountebank; in old 
 -age, changing from the sturdy 'farmer and the 
 plebeian soldier of the Hannibalic, Punic, and 
 Macedonian wars, into the likeness of a prude, 
 iind something more disgusting than a prude, and 
 
ARIADN£. 259 
 
 •spending long hours of inspection before the wash- 
 ing, swaddHug, and nursing of his chiklren : — 
 how has he ever come to be revered by posterity ? 
 
 Such qualities as he possessed of independence, 
 integrit}-, and a very illiberal patriotism, never 
 rose to anj^ grandeur, and cannot redeem the 
 egotism, the self-sufficiency, and the narrowness 
 of the rest of his character, and, indeed, were 
 virtues general in almost every citizen of his time. 
 He had all the faults, and no more than the ex- 
 cellencies of any sturdy, prejudiced, opinionated, 
 commonplace character, who represents the house- 
 holder; and yet Lucius Porcius Cato, who re- 
 fused a holiday to his labour-worn creatures by 
 a miserable quibble, and who thought that to die 
 worth more gold than you inherited * showed a 
 divine spirit,' has come to be named in the same 
 breath with Socrates and Plato, and Marcus 
 Aurelius — oh, triumph sublime of the ]Medi- 
 ocrities ! 
 
 When the full winter was come, ver}^ great and 
 
 gi'and people, foreigners, princes, and the like, 
 
 came up constantly, as I say, to the famous studio 
 
 on the Sabine hill ; fur ^laryx was illustrious, and 
 
 s ii 
 
260 ARIADNA 
 
 his name known wherever anj'tliing of Art was in 
 any way comprehended, and he might have duied 
 had he' chosen at any sovereign's table inEuroj)e. 
 He but seldom saw his great guests amongst his 
 marbles; when obliged to do so, he received 
 them with that noble, frank courtes}^, which he 
 showed alike to the highest and the lowest. " He 
 looks hke Pergolesi's shepherd Idng," said a 
 woman once, and indeed it was not ill said, for 
 he had something unworldty and untameable, yet 
 majestic and royal, in all hisau' and bearing. 
 
 Gioja, as I sa}-, too, was never seen by all these 
 people, for his house had many chambers, and the 
 one set apart for her work, where the Apollo 
 Cytharsedus was, he never allowed to be invaded. 
 At entertainments, which he occasionally gave — 
 for, though of extreme simi)Hcity, almost austerit}^, 
 in his own habits, he lived with the magnificence 
 of a great artist in his conduct to others, — he 
 would have had her be present, and often pressed 
 her to be so ; but she resisted, and begged to be 
 left alone, studying under the old bronze lamp 
 that burned before Hermes in my room on the 
 river. 
 
ARIADNE:. 261 
 
 " She is quite right, and besides, she is so 
 3'oimg," said Maryx, and ceased to think of it. 
 
 His mother never alhided again to an}' thought 
 of love or mariiage about the girl. She gi-ew 
 used to seeing Gioja come and go across the court, 
 with the smi on the golden bronze of her hair, and 
 accepted her presence there with the half stupid, 
 half puzzled feeling, with wliicli the once shrewd 
 but now clouded mind of the old peasant ac- 
 cepted all the strange things around her, re- 
 bellious, 3'et resigned. 
 
 " Only 3'ou have made a clay image of her — 
 that is bad," she said, one day, seeing a cast 
 that he had made, and recognising in it the 
 straight delicate limbs and the classic face that 
 she saw ever^^ morning come up tlu'ough the 
 aloes and the mp-tle on to the terrace steps. 
 
 " That is bad," she would say. " Only the 
 Holy Mother should be worshipped like that ; 
 and to put a maiden amongst 3'our false gods and 
 light women — that is not well either." 
 
 Mai*yx would smile. 
 
 He, like his mother, grew used to seeing the 
 tall slender foim of the maiden pass up through 
 
262 AEIADNt:. 
 
 liis trees and liis flowers into that beautiful 
 house of liis, which, without her now, would have 
 seemed too cold and too silent; even as I at 
 sunset grew used to seeing her come across the 
 bridge to dij) her hands in the fountain water, 
 and lean over my board, and tell me what pro- 
 gress she had made that day, and what her 
 master had said to her, or had bidden her do. 
 
 At times she would pass the evenmg on the 
 Golden Hill, but it was always when he was alone 
 and unoccupied, and at such times she would 
 spin to please his mother, or weave some piece of 
 tapestr}", on which she imitated flowers she had 
 gathered and set in water near her, or draw m black 
 and white, whilst Mar3^x, who had vast stores of 
 the most miscellaneous learning, and the most 
 capacious memory in the world, illustrated his 
 own theories of ai*t, with passages from the most 
 recondite of the classic writers, and manuscripts 
 of the Vatican, and the libraries of old Italian 
 cities, and of Paris, that scarcely any eyes but 
 his own had ever been at the pains to decipher. 
 
 Ah happy nights and innocent, in the quiet 
 vaulted chamber, sweet with the scent of burninij 
 
ARIADNZ 263 
 
 pines, and spacious as the hall of Alcinous, with 
 the light of the hearth spreading broad and bright 
 where the old dark figure of the woman sat and 
 span, and the girl sped the swift shuttle, as 
 Athene taught the Pha^acian maids to do, and 
 the deep soft tones of Maryx filled the silence 
 with the sonorous sounds of Greek and Latin 
 prose ; — ah, happy nights and mnocent ! They 
 should have had more abiding spell to bind, more 
 lasting power to endear ! — but such are the ways 
 of fate, and life is as the maze of Lars Porsenna's. 
 tomb, whereof no man knows the clue or holds 
 the plan. 
 
 Mar3'x, in these winter months, made her in 
 marble, as Nausicaa. 
 
 Nausicaa, as she had gone down through the 
 orchards and the olive gardens to the sea, hold- 
 ing the golden cruse of oil in one hand, with 
 her feet bare, so that she might wade in the 
 waves, and in her eyes the great soft wonder 
 that must have come there when Odysseus awoke. 
 Nothing more delicately, seriously beautiful had 
 ever come from his chisel, and nothing more 
 purely Greek. 
 
264 ARIADN^!. 
 
 How one wishes that they liad told us the fate 
 ■of Nausicaa : when she leaned against the pillar, 
 and bade her farewell to the great wanderer, we 
 know her heart was heavy : never again could 
 she play b}- the shore glad-heai'ted with her 
 maidens ; when she had passed that day out, 
 between the silver dogs of Hephaestus, through 
 the west wind, and the pomegranate blossoms, 
 to the sea, she had left her happy youth behmd 
 her. 
 
 So much we feel sure, but we would fain 
 know more. Were it a modern poem, how it 
 would be amplified ; how much we should hear 
 of her conflict of silence and sorrow ; no modern 
 would have the coldness to leave her there, 
 leaning against the column in Alcinous' hall, and 
 never add a word of her fate ! 
 
 But that is our weakness, we cannot "break 
 off the laurel bough," shortly and sharply, un- 
 burnt, as they did of old. 
 
 Did she live to be the mother of a line of 
 kings ? I like better to think that she never 
 forgot the stranger who passed away to Ithaca, 
 thinking never of her, but only — when he did 
 
ARIADNE. 265 
 
 look back — of the burning (lunghters of Atlas 
 and of Helios, weaving songs and clianns in 
 tlieii* magical isles for the shame and the souls of 
 men. 
 
 For me, I always wish, sinfull}' perhaps, to 
 strangle Penelope in her own web, and wed 
 Ulysses to the sweet Phseacian maid. 
 
 Tliis Nausicaa, which Maryx imagined, was 
 exceedingly fair. 
 
 It had the peculiar charm of Gioja's own look ; 
 tliat look which had all the mysterious depth of 
 a young goddess's, and the clear innocence of a 
 child's. It was Nausicaa going to the sea, not 
 come from it. Gioja also had not as yet seen 
 what slept on an untouched shore to make her 
 sorrow. 
 
 She was happy, but she was happy with her 
 mind, not with her heart. In her simplicity 
 of habits and her seriousness of thought, she 
 resembled rather a beautiful Greek youth than 
 a girl of her own time. She was so ignorant of 
 her own power ; she was so serenely imconscious 
 that when she threw back the sleeve from her 
 aim to work the better the action might quicken 
 
266 ARIADNE. 
 
 the pulse of a man into passion, that she scarcely 
 seemed mortal to me, used to the ardent and 
 tender women of my city. Her poor foolish 
 father, who had given up so weakly to his 
 fate, and sat down under his hm'den by the Ligu- 
 rian waves, had had, at the least, wisdom to 
 educate her into that love of the world's past,, 
 and that ahsoi-ption into the arts, wliich are the 
 sm-est shield against the perils of youth. Athene 
 Ergane has a surer shield than even Athene 
 Promachos. 
 
 " You admii'e him ; you like him ? he is kind 
 to you ? " I asked her at the close of her first 
 week's study on the Golden Hill. 
 
 **He teaches me ! — he will make me an artist 
 too ! " she answered me in surprise. 
 
 That was all she thought of or needed. Had 
 he been the ugliest dwarf in all creation, Maryx 
 would have been none the less a deity to her. 
 She gi^ew as the time went by into an adoration 
 of him, but it was onl}- with such a sentiment as 
 that wherewith she adored the memory of the 
 son of Charmidas, the idea of the strength ot 
 Lysippus. 
 
AEIADN2. 267 
 
 Maiyx was a great artist ; lie was her master. 
 
 Slie sighed for his smile ; she feared his frown : 
 she hung with reverence on all his words. . But 
 it was only because he was to her Ai't incarnate. 
 She never knew all that she owed to him. For he 
 would never let me tell her, and swift as she was 
 to see an error in a line, an imperfection in a 
 fancy, things of daily life escaped her. She took 
 what she found without thinking about it. 
 
 Her body wanted so Httle, and her mind de- 
 manded so much. If you had fed her mind and 
 delighted it, she would have let you beat her, 
 or starve her, and would not have complained. 
 
 "If she had not happil}' been dedicated to 
 Apollo and Athene, she would have seen visions 
 and died in a convent, Hke Teresa of Spain," 
 said Maryx of her one day. " She is like those 
 flowers which hang by a thread and live on the 
 smi." 
 
 I thought that he hardly read her aright. 
 
 She had more strength than Teresa of Spain, 
 and the stoiin would feed her, I thought, scarcely 
 less than the sun. But, like Santa Teresa, she 
 saw immo]-tals come to her, and she had little to 
 
268 ARIADNE. 
 
 do with the human creatures about her. Scarcely 
 enough to make her human. It hurt her more 
 to see a mutilated marble, than to see a woman 
 worn with disease and pain. Her angel was 
 Apollo. For such defiance of the common fate 
 there is always an avenging destin}-. 
 
 What did Maryx feel to this flower ? 
 
 I did not know ; it seemed to me he scarcel}^ 
 knew himself. He thought much more at first 
 of her genius than of himself. 
 
 " No woman ever did any good thing in marble, 
 and she is a girl," he would say. " Yet " 
 
 Yet he gave much time and thought to her 
 instruction, and found in her a power of imagery 
 and a master}- of execution which he allowed 
 to be wonderful, her youth and her age both con- 
 sidered. 
 
 His mother's suggestion seemed to have passed 
 by him unheeded, and to be forgotten. He treated 
 her as he would have treated a 3'outh in whose 
 talent and fate he had interest — nothing more. 
 
 "AVlio would talk of love to her?" he said 
 once, a little roughl}^ " She would understand 
 you no more than my Nausicaa yonder ! " 
 
ARIADNA 209 
 
 ** She is not like Nausicaa at all," lie added. 
 " Nausicaa di'eamed of love, and of the nuptial 
 joys : she never does. I think men scarcely 
 exist for her. She has no thought of me, for 
 instance, save as of some abstract incarnation of 
 her art, that leads her in its right ways, and so 
 is worth regarding." 
 
 " Well, would you change that 7 Is it not a 
 blessing for her '? '' 
 
 " Xo, I would not change it," he answered 
 thoughtfully. " It has a great chann — to see 
 those clear deep eyes of hers look so far out 
 beyond oneself, and all about one. But it will 
 change, I suppose, some day. Xo one remains 
 for ever beyond the common fate of human lives. 
 And just in i^roportion to the previous strength 
 is the force of the fall from it. It would be 
 better for her if she were like Xausicaa, playing 
 ball, and thinkmg of the bridal clothes." 
 
 "Alas, alas ! who would many her?" said I, 
 
 with all a Roman's prejudice. 
 
 « 
 " Any one who loved lier, no doubt," said 
 
 Maryx, judging the mmds of men by the great- 
 ness of his own. 
 
270 ABIADNE. 
 
 Meanwhile of such things Gioj a had no thought. 
 At times ahnost I grew^superstitious, and thought 
 she was hardly human; she was so indifferent to 
 everything outside the pale of art, and so un- 
 touched by all that usually touches girls : she 
 never seemed to see the children laughing in her 
 path, the lovers in the twilight of the trees, the 
 strings of pearl and coral in the artificers' win- 
 dows, the baby at its mother's breast, the birds 
 on their spring nests. 
 
 What she cared for was to stand in the damp 
 moss-grown niches of the Vatican with the Mer- 
 cury and Apollo, and to wander through the 
 great stone galleries of the Capitol, until one 
 really began to think she was some Vestal 
 buried alive, and kept by some freak of nature 
 fresh and fair in the bosom of mother earth, and 
 released and awakened, but feeling astray in the 
 sunlight, and bewildered to find so much of 
 Eome remaining, jei so much destroyed. 
 
 One day we passed our lovel}^ Sta. Maria in 
 Trastevere, when a marriage party were coming 
 out from the doors. They were people of the 
 labouring class, but the girl was very graceful, 
 
ARIADNE. 271 
 
 and the man was bold and handsome, and both 
 looked hapi\y, with that perfect happmess which 
 has " the life of the rose," but, milike the rose, 
 fades, not to bloom again with the next summer. 
 
 Thej^ were coming out, and we stepped back 
 to give them room. 
 
 " AVhat are they doing? " she asked me. 
 
 " They have been to the priest to be married," 
 said I. " I know them — the}' will be very poor. 
 He is a fruitseller. They will live in one room 
 under the street. Thej' will never eat meat. 
 Tliej^ will have many troubles. But for all that 
 they will be happy. The}' love one another. 
 They will run out in the sun, and laugh, and sing, 
 and play with their children, and go to the 
 theatre when they can " 
 
 " And Avhen he does not love her any more ?" 
 asked Gioja. 
 
 I was silent. It took my breath away. What 
 should she know about men's faithlessness *? 
 
 '* AMiy should he cease to care for her?" I 
 stammered. " She is a good girl, and young 
 and so pretty." 
 
 "I do not know. In all the old tales one or 
 
272 ABIADNE. 
 
 the other changes," she said, gravely. " I sup- 
 pose it is always so. There was a woman lived 
 near us on the shore. She had grown quite old. 
 But when she had heen young she had been 
 handsome, and a man loved her very much. She 
 was then at Naples, and after a time he grew 
 jealous, and he drew his knife, and gashed her 
 all across the eyes and forehead, so that she 
 should never be beautiful for any one any more, 
 but hideous — which she was. And after that, 
 though he came to know that she had always 
 deserved good of him, and never ill, he deserted 
 her, and w^ent to other women, and she fell into 
 great misery ; and when she lived upon oui' shore 
 she was glad to boil the seaweed and the jellyfish 
 to make a little food. But she told me her story, 
 and though she was disfigui*ed, and one of her 
 eyes was bhnded, she said she would not have, 
 had it otherwise. ' My sight is dark,' she said, 
 * and in the wound he made you can lay two fin- 
 gers still, and it still aches and throbs when the 
 nights are cold; but I am glad he hurt me so — it 
 tells me how he loved me once. When I think I 
 must be dreaming, and that I never could have 
 
ARIADNA 273 
 
 been lovely and beloved, then I put my hand up 
 to the great cruel wound, and I know it was true, 
 and I feel his kisses again. He left me, yes — he 
 was a man, and I was a woman — but he loved 
 me once. Else he would not have hurt me.' 
 That was what she said. She was old, and half 
 blind, and wretched. But she had not forgotten.'* 
 
 I shivered a little as I heard. There was a 
 sound in her voice of sympathy with that poor 
 wounded soul which frightened me for her. 
 
 "And you understand her?" I said. ''Faith 
 to the faithless ? Is that well ? " 
 
 "I think I understand it," she said slowly. 
 " And I suppose if she had loved him once, 
 whether he ceased to love her or not, that could 
 not make any difference. But it must be terrible. 
 Why do peoi)le love at all ? " 
 
 " It is nature," I said feebly. 
 
 '' Nature is cruel," said the girl. 
 
 And from that I could not dissent, seeing that 
 the only motive power and the sole keynote oi 
 all creation is cruelty in some form or another. 
 
 The marriage party by this time were well away 
 down the street, their voit'ts carolling a chorus, 
 
 VOL. I. T 
 
:274 ARIADNE. 
 
 and the bright colours of their costumes glancing 
 in the sun. She looked after them. 
 
 '^ What will she do when he does not love her 
 an}' longer ? " she said, vrith that first touch of 
 human pity that I have ever known in her. 
 
 " AVhen he does not — if he do not — I dare say 
 she will stab him ; she is a Trasteverina. If not, 
 she will weep a little, and play with her babies, 
 and get over it ; most women do so." 
 
 A supreme disdain came on the thoughtful 
 calmness of her face. ^' Women are poor crea- 
 tures, then," she said, and moved on past the 
 Monastery of St. Anna, whose true saint is 
 Vittoria Colonna. 
 
 As a man I could not assent to her ; as a phi- 
 losopher I could not dissent. 
 
 But I saw that Maryx and I both had been 
 wrong in our belief, and that she had indeed 
 thought of love and of its obligations, only perhaps 
 too much ; at an}" rate she had learned a belief 
 in Love's great canon : better throbbing wounds 
 by which to mark remembered kisses after death, 
 than peace and solitude without a sign. 
 
 "Only, alas!" I groaned to myself, as I 
 
ARIADXJ>. 
 
 275 
 
 istumbled on in lier steps, " tliey were right tliat 
 day in the Borghese Gallery : it is so seldom 
 Eros; it is so often Apute and Philotes." 
 
 But tlien of these mock gods she knew nothing. 
 
 T 2 
 
CHAPTER XI. 
 
 With spring tlie city tliinnecl, and the pleasure 
 folks went on their ways, and never stayed to see 
 the Sabine mountains, and all the rest, grow like 
 one soft sea of green with the young grass, and 
 the Campagna a very ocean of blossoming flowers, 
 with the great cattle knee-deep in it, and the 
 mounted shepherds riding through a glory of 
 wavmg colour. 
 
 With spring Maryx usually went to his own 
 
 land, but this year he did not stir, nor speak of 
 
 • leaving Eome. The Nausicaa went to sustain 
 
 his great name, and the Xero ; but he himself 
 
 remained. 
 
 With the sweet glad spring weather, when one 
 could lie and laugh all day on the turf of the 
 Pamfili Doria woodlands, and grouj)s stood 
 
ARIJDNA 277 
 
 chatting and love-making about the great cool 
 fountains half the radiant night, he and she and 
 I went on many a ramble together. 
 
 Together we feasted on porcupine in Ariosto's 
 tavern, and traced the ways of Tullia's blood- 
 stained chariot ; together we bowed our heads to 
 ruined altars in the bowels of the earth, and saw 
 the salterello danced under the spring-blossom- 
 ing vines; together we pulled the anemones under 
 the old oaks of Galba's gardens, and traced the 
 fancied sites of vanished temples under crowding 
 hovels or frowning convent-walls ; together we 
 fomid our roads, by Strabo and Suetonius and 
 Dion Cassius, through twisting lanes and heaps 
 of rubble, and talked of buried cities that la}' 
 beneath us as we sat on the grassy mounds in 
 the silent country, with tlie oxen coming to us 
 between the high tufa banks, and the caper flowers 
 covering the fallen stones of nameless tombs. 
 
 ''Are you hap2)y now ?" I asked of Gioja one 
 day. She was silent a moment, then answered : 
 
 *' I am content." 
 
 The strong instinctive veracity in her weighed 
 the measure of her days, and gave them their 
 
278 AFdADNE. 
 
 right name. She was content : her life was full 
 of the sweetness and strength of the arts, and of 
 the peace of noble occupation and endeavour. 
 But some true instinct in her taught her that 
 this is peace, but is not more than peace. Hap- 
 piness comes but from the beating of one heart 
 upon another. 
 
 She was Nausicaa on her path through the 
 orchards, in the cool of the early morning, to 
 the sea, with all the day to come. 
 
 Amongst our pilgrimages we went at times to 
 Daila : the estate of Hilarion. The site of it had 
 once Tbeen a Sabine tov.n, and in the vmej^ards 
 were the foundations of a villa that, as I have said, 
 according to tradition, had belonged to the ga}' 
 sad author of the Satyricon, and coins found in 
 the soil, and letters cut in the leaden water-jupes, 
 seemed to confirm this supposition of antiquaries, 
 which especially pleased its present owner, smce 
 between Petronius and Hilarion there was that 
 certain sympathy which makes two thousand 
 years seem but a moment. 
 
 Later it must have belonged to Julia Domna, 
 or some other of the Syrian empresses, or 
 
ARIADN$. 279 
 
 some great creature of their household, for 
 there were all the symhols, and many of the 
 deities, of the eastern creeds found in those 
 excavatione which for years Hilarion had had 
 made there. The present villa there, which 
 he had purchased, was one of the sixteenth 
 century, and magnificent enough, with its vast 
 halls painted b}' Giulio Romano and his scholars, 
 with clouds of angels and throngs of heroes on 
 the vaults and domes ; and, without, the high 
 clipped arbutus hedges, the stone terraces, the 
 fishponds with their marble stairs and moss- 
 gi'own nereids of an artificial age, and beyond 
 these again the wide-spreading gTeen glades,, 
 dusky with the ilex oak, and the cedar, and the 
 cork tree, and the stone pine, through whose 
 stately trunks one saw the silver gleam of the 
 distant sea of ^l^hieas, and the dark shadows of 
 the Pontine marshes, and the bold blue moun- 
 tains of the ** people of the lance," and the 
 whiteness of snowy i^eaks that rose against the 
 azure of the skies. 
 
 Gioja liad gone but seldom there, for it was 
 some twelve cA* fourteen miles out towards the 
 
280 ARIADNE. 
 
 north-west ; but no place had so great a fascma- 
 tion for her, except the heart of Rome itself. 
 
 The mere name of Hilarion had a charm for her 
 ear, and often in the studio of Mar3'x» she would 
 .stand and look up to the face of his bust, and that 
 -of the Aj^ollo Cytharsedus, which was his also ; 
 und whenever we spoke of him, as indeed we 
 did often, she would listen with that look in her 
 eyes which came into them for the marbles, and 
 the fountains, and the dear dead gods. 
 
 "When will he come back?" she asked me 
 •often ; and that I never could tell her, for the 
 moods of Hilarion were as variable as the winds 
 that blew over Rome. 
 
 But he almost seemed to be at Daila : there 
 •was his inkstand open in the library ; there was 
 Ms velvet coat thrown across a chair ; there was 
 his Martial Ij'ing open, with a dead rose in it to 
 keep the place ; there were his mares neighing 
 in the stable ; there were his flowers blossoming 
 under the terraces ; there were his labourers 
 labom'ing for him amongst the buried marbles 
 •under the vines : and there was the tomb of the 
 >dog he had killed in a fit of petiiance, kept with 
 
ARIADNE:. 281 
 
 Si care that the shades of Augustus and of Livia 
 might have envied. 
 
 Hilaiion absent, became at DaVla a living 
 reahty to this girl, to whom Apollo and Vii'gil, 
 and Adonis and ^^alel•ia, and all the gods and all 
 the mortals of the old Latin land were in a 
 manner nearer than we who gave her her daily 
 bread and touched her hand. 
 
 For me I only wished that he might for ever 
 remain to her thus, like a Hellenic myth, looming 
 larger and lovelier than life through tlie golden 
 haze of mystical imaginations. For the sight of 
 Hilarion was not less cruel to woman than was 
 his soft, bitter, amorous verse. 
 
 When the very great heats of the midsummer 
 came, Maryx took me aside one day. 
 
 ** She is well now, but she will not be well 
 much longer, if she stay in the drought of July," 
 he said to me. " Rome does not hurt you and 
 me, but a creature as young as that, and a girl — 
 it is different. Listen to what I want you to do. 
 It is an innocent subterfuge, and I see no other 
 way." 
 
 Then he told tne of a fann of his own — for he 
 
282 ARIADNE. 
 
 liad pui'cliased largely in and about the ciij, being 
 now a rich man — which was close to Frascatiy 
 on those breezier heights, where health may be- 
 better kept than down in the Avays of the tovrn 
 itself; and he told me that I was to go thither 
 for the two perilous months, speaking of it as 
 needful for my health, and persuade her by any 
 means I could to accompan}^ me, taking care not 
 to speak of him in connection with it. For him- 
 self, he intended to sta}^ on the Golden Hill. 
 
 " I have too much work in hand to leave," he- 
 said ; but the blood came into the clear oHve 
 skin of his cheeks as he spoke, and I thought mj 
 own thoughts, and was glad. 
 
 ^' You must not let her dream the place is- 
 mine," he said, a little later. " She is so proud,, 
 and it would pain her ; — and, indeed, what obli- 
 gation to me is there ? None at all." 
 
 I promised compHance ; but when I sought tO' 
 persuade her I found the task quite beyond my 
 powers. 
 
 ** I will not leave Rome," she said, and was- 
 resolute. 
 
 *' Eome will never hm-t me," she said. ''It 
 
ABIADN^. 283 
 
 would hurt me much more to leave it. This 
 room is high and cool, and you know this part 
 of the river is health}', even though the floods 
 come. I could not go out of Rome, and besides, 
 I am learning so much ; and he has promised to 
 let me touch the clay next month." 
 
 And to be moved she was not, and so I stayed 
 as I had sta^-ed for many a year, stitching at my 
 stall in the summer heat, with the big melons 
 and the bursting honey-filled figs all agape at the 
 street comers, and the lads and lasses coming 
 over the bridge at midnight, with traiUng rose- 
 boughs, and the hlies of Mary in their hands, 
 twangmg their lutes and laughing. 
 
 As it happened, mercifully, the summer was 
 unusually cool, and she did not suffer from it in 
 anj' way, and worked arduously in the studio on 
 the Mons Aureus, and gained from her great 
 master much of his technical skill, and much of 
 liis catholic and noble views of art, and its obli- 
 gations. 
 
 ^laryx, with all liis passion of reverence for the 
 art of the past, had a percex)tion of the excellen- 
 cies and of the failures of his own generation 
 
J84 ARIADNE. 
 
 truer than that which is given to most men. He 
 did not overrate the present age of the worki, but 
 neither did he deride it. It moved him rather to 
 sympathy and compassion than to either of those 
 two extremes of vanity and of scorn, into one of 
 whose opposite camps most of us are driven in 
 too great heat and violence. 
 
 Hilarion, who had written much to emasculate 
 it, spent all the brilliancy of his brain in heaping 
 endless contumely u^^on his own generation ; 
 MarjTc, who had done much to enrich itj regarded 
 it with affection and regret, as a man may do his 
 country when its wa3"s are uneven and its future 
 is dark. 
 
 *' We are the sons of our time," he would say. 
 ''It is not for us to slay our mother. Let 'us 
 cover her dishonour if we see it, lest we provoke 
 the Erinyes." 
 
 And he held that our own age was not so much 
 debased as it was despairing ; not so often base 
 as it was weary. 
 
 " Surel}^," he said one day, in those moments 
 of eloquence which vrere frequent with him, for 
 he had a trick of natural eloquence when with 
 
ARIADNE. . 285 
 
 those for whom lie had a liking, and who liked to 
 listen to him. " Surely, the world, made up of 
 human beings as it is, is only like one human 
 being in his i^assage through life. To j'outh 
 belong ineffable graces all its own, and charms 
 never to be counterfeited when youth has passed 
 aw^ay : hope and faith and the freshness of un- 
 broken illusions are with it ; it has the bloom as 
 of the untouched fruit, the charm as of the half- 
 opened flower : it is rich in the treasures of its 
 untried years, and strong in the insolence of its 
 beauty and its strength ; it is without suspicion and 
 without fear ; but, also, it is without sympath}' : 
 it is glorious as the glory of the morning, but he 
 who seeks its pity finds it hard, from pure joyous- 
 ness of soul, and ignorance of sorrow : its sel- 
 fishness is onl}^ ignorance, but it is selfish : it 
 says to every passing hour, * thou art fiiir,' why 
 should it look elsewhere ? When youth is gone, 
 the character that has gained from living any 
 2)rofit will have softened, and mellowed, under 
 the suns and stonns of many daj's ; with wide 
 experience it will have wide toleration and com- 
 prehension ; its sympathies will be unfailing, 
 
286 APdADNJi!. 
 
 because it will be aware that ' to understand is to 
 pardon,' since for all evil there is excuse, could 
 all influences, and motives, and accidents of cir- 
 .cumstance be traced : its own past lies behind it, 
 a land for ever lost, and its onward path is dark : 
 it looks back so often because it has not heart to 
 look forward, since all it sees is death : many 
 are the graves of its desires and of its friends : 
 it is full of pity for all things that breathe, be- 
 cause it has learned that nearly every breath is 
 pain : there is nothing in which it can have much 
 belief, but there is little to which it can refuse 
 compassion, since all creation sufiers : the un- 
 utterable sadness and mystery of all forms of life 
 oppress it, and it hears the chihben and the 
 lovers say *for ever,' knowing itself too well that 
 the mortal's ' for ever' is but the gnat's day upon 
 a ray of sun and breath of vapour. 
 
 " As thus with the individual character of man, 
 so it is with the character of the world, and of 
 those arts in which the voice of the world's soul 
 speaks. 
 
 ** Fearlessness, loveliness, and force character- 
 ised all that it did, and all that it sang of in an 
 
ARIADNE. 287 
 
 earlier time : tenderness jmd pity are tlie ex- 
 cellencies of all tlie best that it produces now. 
 In the first ages all achievement and inspii'ation 
 -were fresh as the dews of da^vn, and he who struck 
 the l3Te had no fear that his hymns w^ere but weak 
 echoes of a stronger sound. All was new, all was 
 spontaneous. Now all this is changed. We feel 
 that our production can hardly ever be more than 
 repetition. We are, like the priests and the 
 people of Lyonesse, powerless to raise the magic 
 sword wielded by stronger hands' than ours ; and 
 we have no child Arthui* amongst us, or if we 
 have we deny and put him aside, and the sword 
 lies unlifted. 
 
 ** But if we have lost the force and the fresh- 
 ness of an earlier day, we have gained something 
 else not wholly to be despised. 
 
 " I think that whilst Ave have, perhaps, lost 
 dignity, and certainl}" have lost concentration, 
 our sight is more extended, our range of feehng 
 more varied, our understanding of pain and of 
 joy more acute. 
 
 *' The pathos and mirth of the Knight of Man- 
 cha and the passions of Juliet and Francesca are 
 
288 ARIADNE. 
 
 our own ; the vast comprehension of Shakespeare 
 and the microscopic analysis of Balzac are purely 
 modern ; what depths of complex emotion and 
 passion divide Heloise from Helen, or Imogene 
 from Antigone, and sever Shelley from Sophocles, 
 and Faust from Paris ! 
 
 " This world of our own immediate day is 
 weak and weary, because it is no longer young ; 
 yet it possesses one noble attribute — it has an 
 acute and almost universal sympathy, which 
 does indeed often degenerate into a false and 
 illogical sentiment, yet serves to redeem an 
 age of egotism. We have escaped both the 
 gem-like hardness of the Pagan, and the nar- 
 rowing selfishness of the Christian and the 
 Israelite. We are sick for the woe of creation, 
 and we wonder why such woe is ours, and why 
 it is entailed on the iiniocent dumb beasts, that 
 perish in milhons for us, unpitied, day and night. 
 Rome had no altar to Pity : it is the one god 
 that we own. When that pity in us for all things 
 is perfected, perhaps we shall have reached a 
 religion of sympathy that will be purer than any 
 religion the world has yet seen, and more pro- 
 
ARIADN£:. 289 
 
 ductive. * Save my country ! ' cried the Pagan 
 to his deities. * Save my soul ! ' cries the Chi-is- 
 tian at his altars. We, who are without a god, 
 murmur to the great unknown forces of Nature : 
 * Let me save others some little portion of this 
 pain entailed on all simple and guileless things, 
 that are forced to live, without any fault of theii* 
 own at their birth, or any will of their own in 
 their begetting.' " 
 
 AVhen he would speak thus, or in similar 
 moods on similar themes, with that natural 
 power of utterance which gave limi a greater 
 sway over the minds of students than anyone 
 had possessed since Canova, she would listen to 
 him with silent reverence and grave delight. 
 
 All his temper was akin to hers, and no 
 tliought of his was alien to her mind. 
 
 Yet he was quite right : as a man, she never 
 thought of him ; he was her master, and so her 
 ruler ; an ailist, and so of her kindred ; but no 
 more. 
 
 And, indeed, he did not seek to be more. 
 
 Nothing could be purer, simpler, and more 
 utterly free from any kind of i)assion than the 
 
 VOL. I. u 
 
290 ARIADNE. 
 
 patience with which he taught her, and the good- 
 ness with which he befriended her. His care of 
 her was so continual, but so unobtrusive, that 
 perhaps for that very reason she noticed it but 
 little. 
 
 Maryx had known the stormy passions of an 
 ■ardent and imaginative manhood, but of late 
 years he had been little moved by Avomen; he 
 had grown indifferent to them. There was no- 
 thing in his conduct, or in his manner to her, 
 which could indicate that that indifference was 
 •altered. Except that he was more gentle, he 
 treated her as he had often treated before her 
 young lads in whose poverty and talent he had 
 seen the image of his own lonely youth. 
 
 But, myself, I noticed that he did not go out 
 of Rome this year scarcel}' for a day; and I 
 noticed the infinitely' caressing softness that came 
 into his lustrous eyes whenever she drew near ; 
 •and I hoped — hoped — that she might lay her 
 yoimg head for ever on that brave heart of 
 his, and lose her dreams of greatness in the 
 ^accomplished greatness of his own. 
 
 For his mother was ris^ht, the marble was too 
 
ABIADN£:. 291 
 
 •cold for the soft-beating bosom of a girl to rest 
 on long ; and the Daphne of Borghese was right 
 also — when the laurel grows out of the breast of 
 a woman, it hurts !. 
 
 So, peacefully, the summer came and waned 
 and merged in autumn ; and September was upon 
 me ei'e I knew it, and all the little children were 
 growing round-eyed, and eager, to think of the 
 near-commg pleasure of running out into the 
 vineyards, amongst the tombs and the temples 
 and the buried cities, and dancing before the big 
 grape waggons down the old tracks across the 
 Campfigna, where once the Via Triumphahs 
 was. 
 
 For these things Gioja did not care : she 
 cared if amongst the vines you found the mask 
 of a muse or the head of a satyr ; she cared if 
 putting the grass aside you found the marks 
 where an altar had smoked, or the broken pottery 
 that told of an old forgotten city. 
 
 One would have been glad for lier to be more 
 quickly touched by simple joys, more girlishly 
 alive to natural mirtli and pleasure. But tlie 
 solitude in which all lior years liad been passed 
 
 u 2 
 
>- 
 
 292 ABIADN£. 
 
 on that silent shore, where the m3'rtles grow 
 over the bnried kingdoms, and the kings' sepul- 
 chres shelter the sheej) and the goats by the 
 side of the blue sea that once bore the vessels of 
 -.Eneas and the galleys of Scipio — this solitude, I 
 sa}^ and the manner of her rearing in it, had 
 left their impress on her too deeply engraven 
 ever to be changed. 
 
 " I wish I could be happ}' — just once — for one 
 little day ! " she said, wistful!}", that sammer, 
 after watching silentl}^ some girls dancing the 
 salterello with their lovers, under the vine-hung 
 ten'ace of a little winehouse in the chestnut 
 woods of Castel Gandolfo. 
 
 Maryx, standing by her, shrank a little, as if 
 stung by some sudden pain. 
 
 " We do all we can," he said; and was silent* 
 And liis eyes were as wistful as hers. 
 
 She turned to him repentantly. 
 
 " Oh, do not thmk me thankless. I did not 
 mean that; I have all I could wish, so much more 
 than ever I could have hoped for ; only — to be 
 light of heart, and to laugh lilve that, must be so 
 beautiful, just for once. "What makes . them 
 so happy ? " 
 
ARIADNE. 203 
 
 ** Ask them," suid Maiyx. 
 
 She went up to one of the girls, a brown, 
 l)right, handsome maiden, with a necklet of 
 l)eaiis heaving on her gay and honest breast. 
 
 " Wh}' are you so happy ? " she asked, her 
 own deep serious ej^es questioning the girl's 
 gravely and wishfuLl}-. 
 
 The Roman maiden laughed, showing all her 
 white teeth. 
 
 " How can I tell ? I am glad to dance, and I 
 Lave got my new pearls, and I shall marry Eufino 
 ;at the Nativit}'." 
 
 " You see," said Maryx, " these are the fountain 
 springs of all the world's happiness: heedless- 
 ness, i)ossession, and — love ! " 
 
 " I do not understand," said Gioja, with a 
 disappomted shadow on her face. 
 
 It was quite true. She understood the passion 
 for the dance and for the pearls as much and as 
 little as she understood the love. She had been 
 able to comprehend the misery of the woman on 
 the Maremma shore, but she could not compre- 
 hend the gleesome gladness of the betrothed 
 dancer. 
 
294 ARIABNE. 
 
 " I am not like others, I see," she said, sadly, 
 and with a sense of something lacking in her 
 that she could not help. ' 
 
 Maryx's brown e^^es dwelt on her tenderly. 
 
 " Dear, you are like Ariadne ; you have the 
 clue and the sword ; Athene keeps you. No- 
 mortal has every gift. Lightness and laughter 
 you must miss sometimes. Yes; — but love is 
 yours, and art." 
 
 " There is no one to love me now that my 
 father is dead," she said, with her calm young 
 face unchanged. 
 
 For she did not know that love was looking on 
 her fi'om his eyes. 
 
 Maryx walked onward, under the green shadow^ 
 of the chestnuts and the oaks. 
 
 '' Do not think of those old myths too much," 
 he said; ''and think more of the loveliness of 
 the earth, which outlasts all stories and all faiths.- 
 Look at that soft green light 3^onder, and the 
 clouds of pale faint gold, and the intense deep- 
 blue above our heads. Sometimes I almost 
 think we artists are all madmen, and our Athene's 
 casque no better than a cap and bells ; for what 
 
ARIADNA 29i> 
 
 can the very gi'eatest that any art can ever 
 achieve look beside one single fleeting moment, 
 of the million smisets that come and go witli 
 scarcely any eyes upraised to watch them ? The 
 happiness of the world may not be veiy great, 
 my dear; but I fear the thanldessness of the 
 world is very great indeed." 
 
 And the sweet melodious depth of his voice 
 sounded to me like the Lenten music of the 
 Sistine chaunts, as we walked through the Gal- 
 leria, under the mighty forest boughs. 
 
 The thanldessness of the world was great I 
 "Would she be thankless *? 
 
 We passed silentl}^ through those noble wood- 
 land glades which lead to Nemi or Ai-icia, as you 
 please ; and whence you come, if you will, into a 
 portion of the Appian Way, and find the sheep 
 nibbling amongst the scattered mai'bles : 
 
 "While to ocean descending, 
 Sank o'er the yellow dark plain slowly the yellow broad sun, * 
 
 we roamed idly through them into the avenues 
 of the Cesarini woods. The nightingales were 
 beginnmg to sing again, though the season of their 
 
296 ARIADNi:. 
 
 song was almost over ; goldfinches were revelling 
 and rifling amongst the red fruit of the many 
 wild cherry-trees ; the sky was of the hue of 
 rose-leaves, and seemed to blush through the 
 bronze-and-black boughs of the hoary cedars; now 
 and then a laden mule went by us, or a peasant 
 with a bundle of dead branches ; it was so still 
 we could hear the faint, hollow sound of a wood- 
 pecker striking at some one of the great trunks. 
 
 " There is Picus," said Mar3^x. *' What a 
 strange thing is Tradition ! Perhaps it was in this 
 ver}'' forest that Cii'ce, gathering her herbs, saw the 
 bold friend of Mars on his fiery com'ser, and tried 
 to bewitch him, and, failing, metamorj)hosed him 
 so. What, I wonder, ever first wedded that story to 
 the woodpecker? Ovid did not invent, he related. 
 And then there is Pilumnus, who was the first to 
 make cheese, and became the god of the bakers 
 and of infants in swaddling clothes, and he is 
 now the pewit or the hoopoe, which 3^011 like. 
 How droll and how unreasonable, and how 
 charming it all is ! And yet, they say, the 
 ancients had no feeling for Nature, wlien 
 there was not a bush, or a bird, or a portent 
 
/ 
 
 ARTADNZ 297 
 
 of the sk}^ that had not lor them its symbol or 
 story ! " 
 
 Gioja looked with soft, serious eyes through 
 the gloom for the woodpecker : to her all the 
 stories were more than half real. 
 
 " Canens searched for him six days and six 
 nights," she said, very low, as if to herself, '' and 
 then she died of grief by the Tiber, you know ; 
 perhaps the little brown bird was close beside 
 her all the time and saw her die and could not 
 speak " 
 
 " Yes," said Marj^x shortl}-, with a strange 
 tone in his voice, "that is the fate of love very 
 often; to be unable to say — *I am here! ' Be 
 sure though that Circe was near also, and 
 laughing.'* 
 
 " Why did the gods let such a thing as Circe 
 be, that is what I do not understand " 
 
 " j\Iy dear, Circe is stronger than all the gods ; 
 xind what she symbolizes is so too, now as then. 
 Perhaps, after all, however, she could only make 
 beasts of those who had the beast in them ; 
 passion can do no more. It is the touchstone of 
 -character." 
 
v^ 
 
 298 ABIADNA 
 
 He spoke rather to himself than to her. 
 
 I fell thmking as I walked behmd him of 
 Jacopone of Umbria, who wrote the Stabat Mater 
 hymn ; he was a great master of jurisprudence, 
 and was already growing very famous, when the 
 woman he loved died suddenly, and they found a 
 haii'-shirt imder her gay festal dress — for she fell 
 dead at a carnival ball. He turned to Christ, 
 and joined the Franciscans. They found him 
 wee^nng one day and asked liim wherefore. He 
 said, " I weep because love goes about unloved.'* 
 
 No doubt, when he so answered, he was 
 thinking of the unknown sin for which that fair 
 wife by whom his own heart had been broken 
 had done that secret penance ; no doubt he was 
 thinking " lo ! the whole of my life I gave, and it 
 was wasted like water si)illed upon the ground." 
 
 There is no greater bitterness. 
 
 "When I was here last," said Maryx, "I was 
 with Hilarion. Corot was with us, and other great 
 men too. There was just such a sunset as this. 
 Corot, who was very silent that day, sat down 
 and sketched it for a time ; then he shut up his 
 book in sheer despair. Yet landscape painters. 
 
-/ 
 
 ABIADNZ 29f> 
 
 are liaj^py, I think ; they have a future ; there is 
 iiiucli to be done that has never been clone in 
 their art. Perhaps the time will come too, when, 
 the earth having been all built over with brick, 
 and the skies all blackened with furnaces, and 
 the lands all over peopled to the very edge of the 
 farthest shores, the wretched crowds will look 
 at one of our landscapes, trying to understand, 
 as we look at pictures on the Etruscan tombs : 
 and they will say, * Was the world ever like that ? 
 — was there ever space to breathe, and gi*een 
 leaves ? ' Sometimes I fancy the end of our 
 world will come so ; the greed of gold and the 
 innmnerable multitudes making an awful famine, 
 a universal famine, of the body and of the soul ; 
 in which everv creature will perish as in the 
 eternal Arctic night and reign of ice that men 
 of science x^i'edict for the future of the earth. 
 Look, there is Monte Cavo, where Juno was 
 throned to see the combat. It is more beautiful 
 when there is snow upon its height, and you see 
 the snow through the budding branches of March 
 or April. But it is beautiful always." 
 
 We walked on till the sun sank out of 
 
'"V 
 
 300 ABIADNt:. 
 
 sight, and left only the reflection of its light 
 upon the sky made I'osy red — men of science 
 tell us wh}', with learned exposition. The Greeks 
 said that the tired coursers of the sun, weary with 
 climhing the great passage of the sk}^, were sink- 
 ing to their rest ; that fancy pleases me more, 
 being a foolish man, to whom the glories and the 
 mysteries of the air are so wonderful and sacred 
 that it hurts me to hear them glibly explained 
 iiway with chatter of absoi*ption and refraction, 
 and the rest, by pert-tongued mortals. 
 
 We walked onward and downward, until many 
 miles away we saw a great dome afar off, rismg 
 against the faint rose-leaf flush of the skies, which 
 <leepened towards the horizon into the ruddier 
 red as of the pomegranate flower. 
 
 ** Why does St. Peter's alwa3's move us so ? '* 
 said Maryx, shading his eyes with his hand. 
 " It moves us more even than the dome of 
 Agrippa, and seems more Roman — which is ab- 
 surd. Yet, when 3'ou are within it, glorious 
 though it is, it is only the heaven of John of 
 Patmos ; a Semitic Eden of gold and jewels. 
 When men prefigured their heaven in the as- 
 
/ 
 
 ^v; 
 
 ARIADNE. 301 
 
 plioclel meadows of Elysium and the fields of 
 Leuke, their white temples shone against the 
 sun ; laurels and myrtles grew against their 
 steps ; their roofs were open to the changing 
 sky, to the wheeling swallows, to the falling 
 rain ; their altar offerings were the fruits of 
 the eai-th, the spoils of harvest, and the gifts of 
 spring." 
 
 " And yet there are people so daft," I mur- 
 mured, "as to argue that the Greek and Latin 
 temples were only lighted by the portico ! " 
 
 "Dear Crispin," said Maryx, "there are 
 people who argue that the Pantheon was once 
 closed in by the bronze pigna in the Vatican 
 gardens. I dare say it was, — in some early 
 Pope's or some late Emperor's time ! '* 
 
 And indeed he was right : the Greek and 
 the Roman wrote little of water and aii", but 
 they loved them both with health}- miconscious 
 strength-giving instinct. It was when Ceres 
 Mammosa fell, that the worship of nature fell 
 "with her : under the new creed men roofed in their 
 temples with metal and timber, and feared to see 
 the light ; they lighted lamps, and shut out the 
 
302 ARIABNE. 
 
 sun when they prayed. Yvlien the Jew begot the 
 Christian and the Christian governed the world, 
 it was no longer in summer flowers and watered 
 meadows, that Paradise found its fancied parallels. 
 The passion of Solomon for baskets of gold and 
 apples of silver, coloured the visions of the 
 recluse on Patmos. The barbaric and coarse 
 instmcts of a predatory race lent their hues to 
 the fancies of the Apocalypse. 
 
 It was the glowing web of the Syrian loom, the 
 purple of Tyre, the gold of the Ark, the sapphire 
 and ruby of Persia, the unforgotten spoils of 
 ruined Babylon, that tinged the reveries of the 
 early Christians as they slept in the dens of 
 amphitheatres, waiting death, or wandered hungry 
 and footsore over parching deserts, or crouched 
 together trembling in the bowels of the earth. 
 
 The Jew, and by the Jew, his offspring, the 
 Christian, shut his deity in a gold Tabernacle, 
 builded in his altars with ceilings of cedar and 
 cypress, and in his all-compensating Future, be- 
 lieved that he would tread streets studded with 
 gems, and find eternal life in mansions blazing 
 with precious stones. Sophocles and Shelle}-, 
 
y 
 
 ARIADNE:. 303 
 
 Homer and Shakespeare, Virgil and Vincent de 
 Paul, could have worshipped together in any one 
 of the white temples on the myrtle-clad hills of 
 old Rome, but in the New Jerusalem no poet 
 could find a place ; it is the heaven of a jeweller, 
 or a money-lender ; it has no greatness, no 
 spirituality, no purity ; it is tawdry and hard, 
 like a blaze of ill-set paste gewgaws. 
 
 And this, the temper of the Jew, has tainted 
 all religious art and architecture for almost a 
 score of centuiies. 
 
 It vulgarises the Transfiguration ; it corrupts 
 the Vita Nuova ; it colours every Calvary from 
 that of Eubens to that of the street corner ; it 
 puts the hues of the rainbow into the cherubim 
 wings of Botticelli, and clothes with tinsel the 
 angels of Angelico. Tlie Hebraic vulgarism is 
 everywhere to be traced in Christian art, even in 
 the highest ; it is liere perpetually about us in 
 Christian Rome. It puts crosses oir Asiatic 
 obelisks ; it puts paintings of saints on the Pan- 
 theon ; it puts a statue of Peter on Trajan's 
 Column. It has no sense of the fitness of things ; 
 and worst of all it has no remembrance of Natui'e. 
 
304 ABIADNA 
 
 Men call this tawdriness, Catholic ; they do 
 not seem to see that it is something much older 
 — namely, Jewish. And the taint of it is in the 
 glory of St. Peter's. 
 
 Only, as in the Gothic cathedral, the grim force 
 of Odin and the sea-kings i)re vailed over it, so in 
 St. Peter's, the vigour and majesty of early Rome, 
 of pagan Rome, have come into it and given it a 
 magnitude and magnificence that redeem it from 
 the Semitic coarseness. There is the old Sahine 
 and Latin strength in it ; the old splendour of 
 the Capitoline Jupiter ; its temple, indeed, is still 
 a palace, its altars, indeed, are still thrones, but 
 all in it is so vast, so noble, almost so divine, 
 that one forgets the golden roof is not the sun ; 
 one forgets the arch of lapis lazuli is not the 
 dome of the oj)en sk}'. 
 
 As he spoke of St. Peter's, the horses met us 
 and took us back to Rome, by wa}" of what was 
 once the Via Triumphalis, whilst the soft flush 
 faded out of the sky, and the stars began to quiver 
 in the violet dusk which was not darkness. 
 
 *'It has been a beautiful day," said Gioja, 
 with a little sigh of repose and fatigue. 
 
ARIADXi:. 305 
 
 Mar}rx looked at her wistful!}'. 
 
 ** To say the day has been beautiful — is not 
 that to have been happy in it ? " 
 
 She looked a little troubled and ashamed. 
 
 ** One may be quite content — most thankful 
 and content, and yet one may imagine " 
 
 **Yes," said Maryx, understanding her; and 
 he said no more. 
 
 It angered me. Why could she not be happy 
 as any other girl or woman would have been ? 
 
 I suppose, in truth, from her loneliness and 
 her many dreams, she lived in a certain isolation 
 and missed a certain warmth that the youth in her 
 wanted without Ivn owing well its want. No doubt 
 in her it was natural and not to be helped. But 
 on us it seemed hard. 
 
 I said so to Maryx, when we had left her, and 
 were coming down the Via della Greca from 
 seeing a sick student, who lived close by to Sta. 
 Maria in Cosmedin, where the}' show the skull of 
 St. Valentine, wreathed with roses on his festal 
 day ; — he answered me with some sternness. 
 
 " What has she had in her short life to make 
 her glad ? Youth without pleasure is like a flower 
 
 VOL. I. X 
 
303 ARIADNi:. 
 
 that comes up too early in the year and is frozen 
 half-blown. ' Joy is unfamHiar to her ; her name 
 is a cruel iron}^ She is not to be blamed. 
 When I was a lad yonder at the Villa Medici, I 
 bought a bird from an old man in a cellar ; it was 
 a large hawk ; I gave it a sunny place, good 
 food, and even liberty ; but the bird was always 
 dull : — it was not my fault, nor was it the bird's ; 
 Nature had been cramped and thwarted, and took 
 her vengeance. So it is here. When she thinks 
 of Art alone she is happy, Wlien she is awakened 
 to the living world, she sees that she has missed 
 much and is not quite like others. That is all.'* 
 
 " All ? You are very generous. But will it 
 ever be otherwise do j^ou think ? " 
 
 Maryx smiled a little sadly. 
 
 "Who can say? Yes, I suppose so. Tired 
 of seeing the dull filmy eyes of my hawk, I took 
 it with me to Rocca de Pappa and let it fly one 
 day ; it went straight up into the air, and went 
 away over the mountains ; I never saw it again. 
 I hope it escaped shot and snare. I had done 
 what I could." 
 
 " You mean ? " 
 
ARIADNE. 307 
 
 " Oh, nothinf^: ; — save that we must leave her 
 quite free to shape her own course ; and do not 
 speak of generosity in me, it offends me. I do 
 no more for her than I have done for twenty 
 lads, and she is wortliier than any one of them. 
 I told you long ago, nothmg that I can ever do 
 for youth or for genius can repay m}^ own debt — 
 the debt to fortune and to France which began 
 when I stood on the ilex terrace of the Academy 
 and first saw Home at n\y feet." 
 
 We were i)assmg the portico "sntli its stone 
 mouth of Truth, and I was thinking of St. Augus- 
 tine, who used the lion-throne mside : in the hot 
 lustrous night, the water of the fountain basin 
 ghmmered freshly m the moonlight ; in the lane 
 we turned into was once the mighty altar of For- 
 tuna Virilis ; the silvery strong light shone on 
 and about the Ionic columns, and the sculptures 
 of the children, and the cattle of sacrifice, 
 
 MarjTC uncovered his head to it all, as any 
 Eoman might have veiled his, two thousand years 
 before. 
 
 ** The goddess has been good to me," he said. 
 
3oa auiadn:^. • . 
 
 I felt cliilly in the luminous path we trod under 
 the rays of the bright full moon. 
 
 "When men thank Fortune, mostly she turns 
 from them and shuts her hand for ever. 
 
 What is she but a woman and blind ? 
 
 His own face was grave, and lost its bold, 
 frank brightness, as the moonbeams touched it ; 
 perhaps the same thought chilled him. 
 
 By the house of Pilate, he bade me good 
 night, and went over the river by the Broken 
 Bridge. 
 
 END OF VOL. I. 
 
 ■BR/:.DBURY, AGNEW, & CO., PRINTERS, WHITEFRIARS. 
 
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