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BOOK IV - THE REWARD: CHAPTER 3
The new Duke sat in his closet. The walls had been stripped of their
pious relics and lined with books, and above the fireplace hung the
Venus of Giorgione, liberated at last from her long imprisonment. The
windows stood open, admitting the soft September air. Twilight had
fallen on the gardens, and through it a young moon floated above the
cypresses.
On just such an evening three years earlier he had ridden down the slope
of the Monte Baldo with Fulvia Vivaldi at his side. How often, since, he
had relived the incidents of that night! With singular precision they
succeeded each other in his thoughts. He felt the wild sweep of the
storm across the lake, the warmth of her nearness, the sense of her
complete trust in him; then their arrival at the inn, the dazzle of
light as they crossed the threshold, and de Crucis confronting them
within. He heard her voice pleading with him in every accent that pride
and tenderness and a noble loyalty could command; he felt her will
slowly dominating his, like a supernatural power forcing him into his
destined path; he felt--and with how profound an irony of spirit!--the
passion of self-dedication in which he had taken up his task.
He had known moments of happiness since; moments when he believed in
himself and in his calling, and felt himself indeed the man she thought
him. That was in the exaltation of the first months, when his
opportunities had seemed as boundless as his dreams, and he had not yet
learned that the sovereign's power may be a kind of spiritual prison to
the man. Since then, indeed, he had known another kind of happiness, had
been aware of a secret voice whispering within him that she was right
and had chosen wisely for him; but this was when he had realised that he
lived in a prison, and had begun to admire the sumptuous adornment of
its walls. For a while the mere external show of power amused him, and
his imagination was charmed by the historic dignity of his surroundings.
In such a setting, against the background of such a past, it seemed easy
to play the benefactor and friend of the people. His sensibility was
touched by the contrast, and he saw himself as a picturesque figure
linking the new dreams of liberty and equality to the feudal traditions
of a thousand years. But this masquerading soon ceased to divert him.
The round of court ceremonial wearied him, and books and art lost their
fascination. The more he varied his amusements the more monotonous they
became, the more he crowded his life with petty duties the more empty of
achievement it seemed.
At first he had hoped to bury his personal disappointments in the task
of reconstructing his little state; but on every side he felt a mute
resistance to his efforts. The philosophical faction had indeed poured
forth pamphlets celebrating his reforms, and comparing his reign to the
return of the Golden Age. But it was not for the philosophers that he
laboured; and the benefits of free speech, a free press, a secular
education did not, after all, reach those over whom his heart yearned.
It was the people he longed to serve; and the people were hungry, were
fever-stricken, were crushed with tithes and taxes. It was hopeless to
try to reach them by the diffusion of popular knowledge. They must first
be fed and clothed; and before they could be fed and clothed the chains
of feudalism must be broken.
Men like Gamba and Andreoni saw this clearly enough; but it was not from
them that help could come. The nobility and clergy must be coaxed or
coerced into sympathy with the new movement; and to accomplish this
exceeded Odo's powers. In France, the revolt from feudalism had found
some of its boldest leaders in the very class that had most to lose by
the change; but in Italy fewer causes were at work to set such
disinterested passions in motion. South of the Alps liberalism was
merely one of the new fashions from France: the men ran after the
pamphlets from Paris as the women ran after the cosmetics; and the
politics went no deeper than the powder. Even among the freest
intellects liberalism resulted in a new way of thinking rather in a new
way of living. Nowhere among the better classes was there any desire to
attack existing institutions. The Church had never troubled the Latin
consciousness. The Renaissance had taught cultivated Italians how to
live at peace with a creed in which they no longer believed; and their
easy-going scepticism was combined with a traditional conviction that
the priest knew better than any one how to deal with the poor, and that
the clergy were of distinct use in relieving the individual conscience
of its obligation to its fellows.
It was against such deep-seated habits of thought that Odo had to
struggle. Centuries of fierce individualism, or of sullen apathy under a
foreign rule, had left the Italians incapable of any concerted political
action; but suspicion, avarice and vanity, combined with a lurking fear
of the Church, united all parties in a kind of passive opposition to
reform. Thus the Duke's resolve to put the University under lay
direction had excited the enmity of the Barnabites, who had been at its
head since the suppression of the Society of Jesus; his efforts to
partition among the peasantry the Caccia del Vescovo, that great waste
domain of the see of Pianura, had roused a storm of fear among all who
laid claim to feudal rights; and his own personal attempts at
retrenchment, which necessitated the suppression of numerous court
offices, had done more than anything else to increase his unpopularity.
Even the people, in whose behalf these sacrifices were made, looked
askance at his diminished state, and showed a perverse sympathy with the
dispossessed officials who had taken so picturesque a part in the public
ceremonials of the court. All Odo's philosophy could not fortify him
against such disillusionments. He felt the lack of Fulvia's
unquestioning faith not only in the abstract beauty of the new ideals
but in their immediate adaptability to the complex conditions of life.
Only a woman's convictions, nourished on sentiment and self-sacrifice,
could burn with that clear unwavering flame: his own beliefs were at the
mercy of every wind of doubt or ingratitude that blew across his
unsheltered sensibilities.
It was more than a year since he had had news of Fulvia. For a while
they had exchanged letters, and it had been a consolation to tell her of
his struggles and experiments, of his many failures and few results. She
had encouraged him to continue the struggle, had analysed his various
plans of reform, and had given her enthusiastic support to the
partitioning of the Bishop's fief and the secularisation of the
University. Her own life, she said, was too uneventful to write of; but
she spoke of the kindness of her hosts, the Professor and his wife, of
the simple unceremonious way of living in the old Calvinist city, and of
the number of distinguished persons drawn thither by its atmosphere of
intellectual and social freedom.
Odo suspected a certain colourlessness in the life she depicted. The
tone of her letters was too uniformly cheerful not to suggest a lack of
emotional variety; and he knew that Fulvia's nature, however much she
fancied it under the rule of reason, was in reality fed by profound
currents of feeling. Something of her old ardour reappeared when she
wrote of the possibility of publishing her father's book. Her friends in
Geneva, having heard of her difficulty with the Dutch publisher, had
undertaken to vindicate her claims; and they had every hope that the
matter would be successfully concluded. The joy of renewed activity with
which this letter glowed would have communicated itself to Odo had he
received it at a different time; but it came on the day of his marriage,
and since then he had never written to her.
Now he felt a sudden longing to break the silence between them, and
seating himself at his desk he began to write. A moment later there was
a knock on the door and one of his gentlemen entered. The Count Vittorio
Alfieri, with a dozen horses and as many servants, was newly arrived at
the Golden Cross, and desired to know when he might have the honour of
waiting on his Highness.
Odo felt the sudden glow of pleasure that the news of Alfieri's coming
always brought. Here was a friend at last! He forgot the constraint of
their last meeting in Florence, and remembered only the happy
interchange of ideas and emotions that had been one of the quickening
influences of his youth.
Alfieri, in the intervening years, was grown to be one of the foremost
figures in Italy. His love for the Countess of Albany, persisting
through the vicissitudes of her tragic marriage, had rallied the
scattered forces of his nature. Ambitious to excel for her sake, to show
himself worthy of such a love, he had at last shaken off the strange
torpor of his youth, and revealed himself as the poet for whom Italy
waited. In ten months of feverish effort he had poured forth fourteen
tragedies--among them the Antigone, the Virginia, and the Conjuration of
the Pazzi. Italy started up at the sound of a new voice vibrating with
passions she had long since unlearned. Since Filicaja's thrilling appeal
to his enslaved country no poet had challenged the old Roman spirit
which Petrarch had striven to rouse. While the literati were busy
discussing Alfieri's blank verse, while the grammarians wrangled over
his syntax and ridiculed his solecisms, the public, heedless of such
niceties, was glowing with the new wine which he had poured into the old
vessels of classic story. "Liberty" was the cry that rang on the lips of
all his heroes, in accents so new and stirring that his audience never
wearied of its repetition. It was no secret that his stories of ancient
Greece and Rome were but allegories meant to teach the love of freedom;
yet the Antigone had been performed in the private theatre of the
Spanish Ambassador at Rome, the Virginia had been received with applause
on the public boards at Turin, and after the usual difficulties with the
censorship the happy author had actually succeeded in publishing his
plays at Siena. These volumes were already in Odo's hands, and a
manuscript copy of the Odes to Free America was being circulated among
the liberals in Pianura, and had been brought to his notice by Andreoni.
To those hopeful spirits who looked for the near approach of a happier
era, Alfieri was the inspired spokesman of reform, the heaven-sent
prophet who was to lead his country out of bondage. The eyes of the
Italian reformers were fixed with passionate eagerness on the course of
events in England and France. The conclusion of peace between England
and America, recently celebrated in Alfieri's fifth Ode, seemed to the
most sceptical convincing proof that the rights of man were destined to
a speedy triumph throughout the civilised world. It was not of a united
Italy that these enthusiasts dreamed. They were not so much patriots as
philanthropists; for the teachings of Rousseau and his school, while
intensifying the love of man for man, had proportionately weakened the
sense of patriotism, of the interets du clocher. The new man prided
himself on being a citizen of the world, on sympathising as warmly with
the poetic savage of Peru as with his own prosaic and narrow-minded
neighbours. Indeed, the prevalent belief that the savage's mode of life
was much nearer the truth than that of civilised Europeans, made it
appear superfluous to enter into the grievances and difficulties of what
was but a passing phase of human development. To cast off clothes and
codes, and live in a peaceful socialism "under the amiable reign of
Truth and Nature," seemed on the whole much easier than to undertake the
systematic reform of existing abuses.
To such dreamers--whose ideas were those of the majority of intelligent
men in France and Italy--Alfieri's high-sounding tirades embodied the
noblest of political creeds; and even the soberer judgment of statesmen
and men of affairs was captivated by the grandeur of his verse and the
heroic audacity of his theme. For the first time in centuries the
Italian Muse spoke with the voice of a man; and every man's heart in
Italy sprang up at the call.
In the midst of these triumphs, fate in the shape of Cardinal York had
momentarily separated Alfieri from his mistress, despatching the
too-tender Countess to a discreet retreat in Alsace, and signifying to
her turbulent adorer that he was not to follow her. Distracted by this
prohibition, Alfieri had resumed the nomadic habits of his youth, now
wandering from one Italian city to another, now pushing as far as Paris,
which he hated but was always revisiting, now dashing across the Channel
to buy thoroughbreds in England--for his passion for horses was
unabated. He was lately returned from such an expedition, having led his
cavalcade across the Alps in person, with a boyish delight in the
astonishment which this fantastic exploit excited.
The meeting between the two friends was all that Odo could have wished.
Though affecting to scorn the courts of princes, Alfieri was not averse
to showing himself there as the poet of the democracy, and to hearing
his heroes mouth their tyrannicidal speeches on the boards of royal and
ducal stages. He had lately made some stay in Milan, where he had
arrived in time to see his Antigone performed before the vice-regal
court, and to be enthusiastically acclaimed as the high-priest of
liberty by a community living placidly under the Austrian yoke. Alfieri
was not the man to be struck by such incongruities. It was his fate to
formulate creeds in which he had no faith: to recreate the political
ideals of Italy while bitterly opposed to any actual effort at reform,
and to be regarded as the mouthpiece of the Revolution while he
execrated the Revolution with the whole force of his traditional
instincts. As usual he was too deeply engrossed in his own affairs to
feel much interest in any others; but it was enough for Odo to clasp the
hand of the man who had given a voice to the highest aspirations of his
countrymen. The poet gave more than he could expect from the friend; and
he was satisfied to listen to Alfieri's account of his triumphs,
interspersed with bitter diatribes against the public whose applause he
courted, and the Pope to whom, on bended knee, he had offered a copy of
his plays.
Odo eagerly pressed Alfieri to remain in Pianura, offering to put one of
the ducal villas at his disposal, and suggesting that the Virginia
should be performed before the court on the Duchess's birthday.
"It is true," he said, "that we can offer you but an indifferent company
of actors; but it might be possible to obtain one or two of the leading
tragedians from Turin or Milan, so that the principal parts should at
least be worthily filled."
Alfieri replied with a contemptuous gesture. "Your Highness, our leading
tragedians are monkeys trained to dance to the tune of Goldoni and
Metastasio. The best are no better than the worst. We have no tragedians
in Italy because--hitherto--we have had no tragic dramatist." He drew
himself up and thrust a hand in his bosom. "Ah!" he exclaimed, "if I
could see the part of Virginia acted by the lady who recently recited,
before a small company in Milan, my Odes to Free America! There indeed
were fire, sublimity and passion! And the countenance had not lost its
freshness, the eye its lustre. But," he suddenly added, "your Highness
knows of whom I speak. The lady is Fulvia Vivaldi, the daughter of the
philosopher at whose feet we sat in our youth."
Fulvia Vivaldi! Odo raised his head with a start. She had left Geneva
then, had returned to Italy. The Alps no longer divided them--a scant
day's journey would bring him to her side! It was strange how the mere
thought seemed to fill the room with her presence. He felt her in the
quickened beat of his pulses, in the sudden lightness of the air, in a
lifting and widening of the very bounds of thought.
From Alfieri he learned that she had lived for some months in the
household of the distinguished naturalist, Count Castiglione, with whose
daughter's education she was charged. In such surroundings her wit and
learning could not fail to attract the best company of Milan, and she
was become one of the most noted figures of the capital. There had been
some talk of offering her the chair of poetry at the Brera; but the
report of her liberal views had deterred the faculty. Meanwhile the very
fact that she represented the new school of thought gave an added zest
to her conversation in a society which made up for its mild servitude
under the Austrian by much talk of liberalism and independence. The
Signorina Vivaldi became the fashion. The literati celebrated her
scholarship, the sonneteers her eloquence and beauty; and no foreigner
on the grand tour was content to leave Milan without having beheld the
fair prodigy and heard her recite Petrarch's Ode to Italy, or the latest
elegy of Pindamonte.
Odo scarce knew with what feelings he listened. He could not but
acknowledge that such a life was better suited to one of Fulvia's gifts
and ambitions than the humdrum existence of a Swiss town; yet his first
sensation was one of obscure jealousy, of reluctance to think of her as
having definitely broken with the past. He had pictured her as adrift,
like himself, on a dark sea of uncertainties; and to learn that she had
found a safe anchorage was almost to feel himself deserted.
The court was soon busy with preparations for the coming performance. A
celebrated actress from Venice was engaged to play the part of Virginia,
and the rehearsals went rapidly forward under the noble author's
supervision. At last the great day arrived, and for the first time in
the history of the little theatre, operetta and pastoral were replaced
by the buskined Muse of tragedy. The court and all the nobility were
present, and though it was no longer thought becoming for ecclesiastics
to visit the theatre, the easy-going Bishop appeared in a side-box in
company with his chaplains and the Vicar-general.
The performance was brilliantly successful. Frantic applause greeted the
tirades of the young Icilius. Every outburst against the abuse of
privileges and the insolence of the patricians was acclaimed by
ministers and courtiers, and the loudest in approval were the Marquess
Pievepelago, the recognised representative of the clericals, the
Marchioness of Boscofolto, whose harsh enforcement of her feudal rights
was among the bitterest grievances of the peasantry, and the good
Bishop, who had lately roused himself from his habitual indolence to
oppose the threatened annexation of the Caccia del Vescovo. One and all
proclaimed their ardent sympathy with the proletariat, their scorn of
tyranny and extortion in high places; and if the Marchioness, on her
return home, ordered one of her linkmen to be flogged for having trod on
her gown; if Pievepelago the next morning refused to give audience to a
poor devil of a pamphleteer that was come to ask his intercession with
the Holy Office; if the Bishop at the same moment concluded the purchase
of six able-bodied Turks from the galleys of his Serenity the Doge of
Genoa--it is probable that, like the illustrious author of the drama,
all were unconscious of any incongruity between their sentiments and
actions.
As to Odo, seated in the state box, with Maria Clementina at his side,
and the court dignitaries grouped in the background, he had not listened
to a dozen lines before all sense of his surroundings vanished and he
became the passive instrument on which the poet played his mighty
harmonies. All the incidental difficulties of life, all the vacillations
of an unsatisfied spirit, were consumed in that energising emotion which
seemed to leave every faculty stripped for action. Profounder meaning
and more subtle music he had found in the great poets of the past; but
here was an appeal to the immediate needs of the hour, uttered in notes
as thrilling as a trumpet-call, and brought home to every sense by the
vivid imagery of the stage. Once more he felt the old ardour of belief
that Fulvia's nearness had fanned in him. His convictions had flagged
rather than his courage: now they started up as at her summons, and he
heard the ring of her voice in every line.
He left the theatre still vibrating with this new inrush of life, and
jealous of any interruption that should check it. The Duchess's birthday
was being celebrated by illuminations and fireworks, and throngs of
merry-makers filled the moonlit streets; but Odo, after appearing for a
moment at his wife's side on the balcony above the public square,
withdrew quietly to his own apartments. The casement of his closet stood
wide, and he leaned against the window-frame, looking out on the silent
radiance of the gardens. As he stood there he saw two figures flit
across the farther end of one of the long alleys. The moonlight
surrendered them for a moment, the shade almost instantly reclaiming
them--strayed revellers, doubtless, escaping from the lights and music
of the Duchess's circle.
A knock roused the Duke and he remembered that he had bidden Gamba wait
on him after the performance. He had been curious to hear what
impression Alfieri's drama had produced upon the hunchback; but now any
interruption seemed unwelcome, and he turned to Gamba with a gesture of
dismissal.
The latter however remained on the threshold.
"Your Highness," he said, "the bookseller Andreoni craves the privilege
of an audience."
"Andreoni? At this hour?"
"For reasons so urgent that he makes no doubt of your Highness's
consent; and to prove his good faith, and the need of presenting himself
at so undue an hour, and in this private manner, he charged me to give
this to your Highness."
He laid in the Duke's hand a small object in blackened silver, which on
nearer inspection proved to be the ducal coat-of-arms.
Odo stood gazing fixedly at this mysterious token, which seemed to come
as an answer to his inmost thoughts. His heart beat high with confused
hopes and fears, and he could hardly control the voice in which he
answered: "Bid Andreoni come to me."
Content of BOOK IV - THE REWARD: CHAPTER 3 [Edith Wharton's novel: The Valley Of Decision]
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