Part 5 (2/2)
”Messere, I give you welcome,” said Bardo, with some condescension; ”misfortune wedded to learning, and especially to Greek learning, is a letter of credit that should win the ear of every instructed Florentine; for, as you are doubtless aware, since the period when your countryman, Manuelo Crisolora, diffused the light of his teaching in the chief cities of Italy, now nearly a century ago, no man is held worthy of the name of scholar who has acquired merely the transplanted and derivative literature of the Latins; rather, such inert students are stigmatised as _opici_ or barbarians according to the phrase of the Romans themselves, who frankly replenished their urns at the fountain-head. I am, as you perceive, and as Nello has doubtless forewarned you, totally blind: a calamity to which we Florentines are held especially liable, whether owing to the cold winds which rush upon us in spring from the pa.s.ses of the Apennines, or to that sudden transition from the cool gloom of our houses to the dazzling brightness of our summer sun, by which the _lippi_ are said to have been made so numerous among the ancient Romans; or, in fine, to some occult cause which eludes our superficial surmises.
But I pray you be seated: Nello, my friend, be seated.”
Bardo paused until his fine ear had a.s.sured him that the visitors were seating themselves, and that Romola was taking her usual chair at his right-hand. Then he said--
”From what part of Greece do you come, Messere? I had thought that your unhappy country had been almost exhausted of those sons who could cherish in their minds any image of her original glory, though indeed the barbarous Sultans have of late shown themselves not indisposed to engraft on their wild stock the precious vine which their own fierce bands have hewn down and trampled under foot. From what part of Greece do you come?”
”I sailed last from Nauplia,” said t.i.to; ”but I have resided both at Constantinople and Thessalonica, and have travelled in various parts little visited by Western Christians since the triumph of the Turkish arms. I should tell you, however, Messere, that I was not born in Greece, but at Bari. I spent the first sixteen years of my life in Southern Italy and Sicily.”
While t.i.to was speaking, some emotion pa.s.sed, like a breath on the waters, across Bardo's delicate features; he leaned forward, put out his right-hand towards Romola, and turned his head as if about to speak to her; but then, correcting himself, turned away again, and said, in a subdued voice--
”Excuse me; is it not true--you are young?”
”I am three-and-twenty,” said t.i.to.
”Ah,” said Bardo, still in a tone of subdued excitement, ”and you had, doubtless, a father who cared for your early instruction--who, perhaps, was himself a scholar?”
There was a slight pause before t.i.to's answer came to the ear of Bardo; but for Romola and Nello it began with a slight shock that seemed to pa.s.s through him, and cause a momentary quivering of the lip; doubtless at the revival of a supremely painful remembrance.
”Yes,” he replied, ”at least a father by adoption. He was a Neapolitan, and of accomplished scholars.h.i.+p, both Latin and Greek. But,” added t.i.to, after another slight pause, ”he is lost to me--was lost on a voyage he too rashly undertook to Delos.”
Bardo sank backward again, too delicate to ask another question that might probe a sorrow which he divined to be recent. Romola, who knew well what were the fibres that t.i.to's voice had stirred in her father, felt that this new acquaintance had with wonderful suddenness got within the barrier that lay between them and the alien world. Nello, thinking that the evident check given to the conversation offered a graceful opportunity for relieving himself from silence, said--
”In truth, it is as clear as Venetian gla.s.s that this fine young man has had the best training; for the two Cennini have set him to work at their Greek sheets already, and it seems to me they are not men to begin cutting before they have felt the edge of their tools; they tested him well beforehand, we may be sure, and if there are two things not to be hidden--love and a cough--I say there is a third, and that is ignorance, when once a man is obliged to do something besides wagging his head.
The _tonsor inequalis_ is inevitably betrayed when he takes the shears in his hand; is it not true, Messer Bardo? I speak after the fas.h.i.+on of a barber, but, as Luigi Pulci says--
”'Perdonimi s'io fallo: chi m'ascolta Intenda il mio volgar col suo latino.'”
”Nay, my good Nello,” said Bardo, with an air of friendly severity, ”you are not altogether illiterate, and might doubtless have made a more respectable progress in learning if you had abstained somewhat from the _cicalata_ and gossip of the street-corner, to which our Florentines are excessively addicted; but still more if you had not clogged your memory with those frivolous productions of which Luigi Pulci has furnished the most peccant exemplar--a compendium of extravagances and incongruities the farthest removed from the models of a pure age, and resembling rather the _grylli_ or conceits of a period when mystic meaning was held a warrant for monstrosity of form; with this difference, that while the monstrosity is retained, the mystic meaning is absent; in contemptible contrast with the great poem of Virgil, who, as I long held with Filelfo, before Landino had taken upon him to expound the same opinion, embodied the deepest lessons of philosophy in a graceful and well-knit fable. And I cannot but regard the multiplication of these babbling, lawless productions, albeit countenanced by the patronage, and in some degree the example of Lorenzo himself, otherwise a friend to true learning, as a sign that the glorious hopes of this century are to be quenched in gloom; nay, that they have been the delusive prologue to an age worse than that of iron--the age of tinsel and gossamer, in which no thought has substance enough to be moulded into consistent and lasting form.”
”Once more, pardon,” said Nello, opening his palms outwards, and shrugging his shoulders, ”I find myself knowing so many things in good Tuscan before I have time to think of the Latin for them; and Messer Luigi's rhymes are always slipping off the lips of my customers:--that is what corrupts me. And, indeed, talking of customers, I have left my shop and my reputation too long in the custody of my slow Sandro, who does not deserve even to be called a _tonsor inequalis_, but rather to be p.r.o.nounced simply a bungler in the vulgar tongue. So with your permission, Messer Bardo, I will take my leave--well understood that I am at your service whenever Maso calls upon me. It seems a thousand years till I dress and perfume the damigella's hair, which deserves to s.h.i.+ne in the heavens as a constellation, though indeed it were a pity for it ever to go so far out of reach.”
Three voices made a fugue of friendly farewells to Nello, as he retreated with a bow to Romola and a beck to t.i.to. The acute barber saw that the pretty youngster, who had crept into his liking by some strong magic, was well launched in Bardo's favourable regard; and satisfied that his introduction had not miscarried so far, he felt the propriety of retiring.
The little burst of wrath, called forth by Nello's unlucky quotation, had diverted Bardo's mind from the feelings which had just before been hemming in further speech, and he now addressed t.i.to again with his ordinary calmness.
”Ah! young man, you are happy in having been able to unite the advantages of travel with those of study, and you will be welcome among us as a bringer of fresh tidings from a land which has become sadly strange to us, except through the agents of a now restricted commerce and the reports of hasty pilgrims. For those days are in the far distance which I myself witnessed, when men like Aurispa and Guarino went out to Greece as to a storehouse, and came back laden with ma.n.u.scripts which every scholar was eager to borrow--and, be it owned with shame, not always willing to restore; nay, even the days when erudite Greeks flocked to our sh.o.r.es for a refuge, seem far-off now-- farther off than the on-coming of my blindness. But doubtless, young man, research after the treasures of antiquity was not alien to the purpose of your travels?”
”a.s.suredly not,” said t.i.to. ”On the contrary, my companion--my father-- was willing to risk his life in his zeal for the discovery of inscriptions and other traces of ancient civilisation.”
”And I trust there is a record of his researches and their results,”
said Bardo, eagerly, ”since they must be even more precious than those of Ciriaco, which I have diligently availed myself of, though they are not always illuminated by adequate learning.”
”There _was_ such a record,” said t.i.to, ”but it was lost, like everything else, in the s.h.i.+pwreck I suffered below Ancona. The only record left is such as remains in our--in my memory.”
”You must lose no time in committing it to paper, young man,” said Bardo, with growing interest. ”Doubtless you remember much, if you aided in transcription; for when I was your age, words wrought themselves into my mind as if they had been fixed by the tool of the graver; wherefore I constantly marvel at the capriciousness of my daughter's memory, which grasps certain objects with tenacity, and lets fall all those minutiae whereon depends accuracy, the very soul of scholars.h.i.+p. But I apprehend no such danger with you, young man, if your will has seconded the advantages of your training.”
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