Part 13 (2/2)

have congregated to be the ever-ministering and irremovable attendants on the shrine of one who, while he lived, was purest spirit in a veil of flesh.

ON A MOUNTAIN.

Milan is s.h.i.+ning in sunset on those purple fields; and a score of cities flash back the last red light, which shows each inequality and undulation of Lombardy outspread four thousand feet beneath. Both ranges, Alps and Apennines, are clear to view; and all the silvery lakes are over-canopied and brought into one picture by flame-litten mists.

Monte Rosa lifts her crown of peaks above a belt of clouds into light of living fire. The Mischabelhorner and the Dom rest stationary angel-wings upon the rampart, which at this moment is the wall of heaven. The pyramid of distant Monte Viso burns like solid amethyst far, far away.

Mont Cervin beckons to his brother, the gigantic Finsteraarhorn, across tracts of liquid ether. Bells are rising from the villages, now wrapped in gloom, between me and the glimmering lake. A hush of evening silence falls upon the ridges, cliffs, and forests of this billowy hill, ascending into wave-like crests, and toppling with awful chasms over the dark waters of Lugano. It is good to be alone here at this hour. Yet I must rise and go--pa.s.sing through meadows where white lilies sleep in silvery drifts, and asphodel is pale with spires of faintest rose, and narcissus dreams of his own beauty, loading the air with fragrance sweet as some love-music of Mozart. These fields want only the white figure of Persephone to make them poems; and in this twilight one might fancy that the queen had left her throne by Pluto's side to mourn for her dead youth among the flowers uplifted between earth and heaven. Nay, they are poems now, these fields; with that unchanging background of history, romance, and human life--the Lombard plain, against whose violet breadth the blossoms bend their faint heads to the evening air. Downward we hurry, on pathways where the beeches meet, by silent farms, by meadows honey-scented, deep in dew. The columbine stands tall and still on those green slopes of shadowy gra.s.s. The nightingale sings now, and now is hushed again. Streams murmur through the darkness, where the growth of trees, heavy with honeysuckle and wild rose, is thickest. Fireflies begin to flit above the growing corn. At last the plain is reached, and all the skies are tremulous with starlight. Alas, that we should vibrate so obscurely to these harmonies of earth and heaven! The inner finer sense of them seems somehow unattainable--that spiritual touch of soul evoking soul from nature, which should transfigure our dull mood of self into impersonal delight. Man needs to be a mytho-poet at some moments, or, better still, to be a mystic steeped through half-unconsciousness in the vast wonder of the world. Cold and untouched to poetry or piety by scenes that ought to blend the spirit in ourselves with spirit in the world without, we can but wonder how this phantom show of mystery and beauty will pa.s.s away from us--how soon--and we be where, see what, use all our sensibilities on aught or naught?

SIC GENIUS.

In the picture-gallery at Modena there is a masterpiece of Dosso Dossi.

The frame is old and richly carved; and the painting, bordered by its beautiful dull gold, s.h.i.+nes with the l.u.s.tre of an emerald. In his happy moods Dosso set color upon canvas as no other painter out of Venice ever did; and here he is at his happiest. The picture is the portrait of a jester, dressed in courtly clothes and with a feathered cap upon his head. He holds a lamb in his arms, and carries the legend, _Sic Genius_.

Behind him is a landscape of exquisite brilliancy and depth. His face is young and handsome. Dosso has made it one most wonderful laugh. Even so perhaps laughed Yorick. Nowhere else have I seen a laugh thus painted: not violent, not loud, although the lips are opened to show teeth of dazzling whiteness; but fine and delicate, playing over the whole face like a ripple sent up from the depths of the soul within? Who was he?

What does the lamb mean? How should the legend be interpreted? We cannot answer these questions. He may have been the court-fool of Ferrara; and his genius, the spiritual essence of the man, may have inclined him to laugh at all things. That at least is the value he now has for us. He is the portrait of perpetual irony, the spirit of the golden sixteenth century which delicately laughed at the whole world of thoughts and things, the quintessence of the poetry of Ariosto, the wit of Berni, all condensed into one incarnation and immortalized by truthfullest art.

With the Gaul, the Spaniard, and the German at her gates, and in her cities, and encamped upon her fields, Italy still laughed; and when the voice of conscience sounding through Savonarola asked her why, she only smiled--_Sic Genius_.

One evening in May we rowed from Venice to Torcello, and at sunset broke bread and drank wine together among the rank gra.s.ses just outside that ancient church. It was pleasant to sit in the so-called chair of Attila and feel the placid stillness of the place. Then there came lounging by a st.u.r.dy young fellow in brown country clothes, with a marvellous old wide-awake upon his head, and across his shoulders a bunch of ma.s.sive church-keys. In strange contrast to his uncouth garb he flirted a pink j.a.panese fan, gracefully disposing it to cool his sun-burned olive cheeks. This made us look at him. He was not ugly. Nay, there was something of attractive in his face--the smooth-curved chin, the shrewd yet sleepy eyes, and finely-cut thin lips--a curious mixture of audacity and meekness blended upon his features. Yet this impression was but the prelude to his smile. When that first dawned, some breath of humor seeming to stir in him unbidden, the true meaning was given to his face.

Each feature helped to make a smile that was the very soul's life of the man expressed. It broadened, showing brilliant teeth, and grew into a noiseless laugh; and then I saw before me Dosso's jester, the type of Shakespeare's fools, the life of that wild irony, now rude, now fine, which once delighted courts. The laughter of the whole world and of all the centuries was silent in his face. What he said need not be repeated.

The charm was less in his words than in his personality; for Momus-philosophy lay deep in every look and gesture of the man. The place lent itself to irony; parties of Americans and English parsons, the former agape for any rubbishy old things, the latter learned in the lore of obsolete church-furniture, had thronged Torcello; and now they were all gone, and the sun had set behind the Alps, while an irreverent stranger drank his wine in Attila's chair, and nature's jester smiled--_Sic Genius_.

When I slept that night I dreamed of an altar-piece in the Temple of Folly. The G.o.ddess sat enthroned beneath a canopy hung with bells and corals. On her lap was a beautiful winged smiling genius, who flourished two bright torches. On her left hand stood the man of Modena with his white lamb, a new St. John. On her right stood the man of Torcello with his keys, a new St. Peter. Both were laughing after their all-absorbent, divine, noiseless fas.h.i.+on; and under both was written, _Sic Genius_. Are not all things, even profanity, permissible in dreams?

FOOTNOTES:

[E] The down upon their cheeks and chin was yellower than helichrysus, and their b.r.e.a.s.t.s gleamed whiter far than thou, O Moon.

[F] Thy tresses have I oftentimes compared to Ceres' yellow autumn sheaves, wreathed in curled bands around thy head.

[G] Both these and the large frescos in the choir have been chromo-lithographed by the Arundel Society.

THE END.

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