Part 12

“There is something, but so vague that I cannot tell whether it is not merely a dream. It is a recollection of a strange, wild country, even grander in its features than this around me.”

“A cold country?”

“That I do not know. Children seldom feel the cold, and I was never very sensitive to it.”

“What else was there in your dream? Sunshine? snow?”

“I don’t know. Tall trees, herds of cows, I think.”

“Tall trees--that is not Iceland. And what do you remember of the journey to Italy?”

“Absolutely nothing. I believe my companion, or companions, were strangers to me when we set out.”

“Well, go on with your story.”

“That is, I will begin it, Monsieur Goefle; for, so far, I have only been telling you the mysterious circumstances with which, as the poets say, my cradle was surrounded. I will begin with the first clearly-defined recollection in my mind. This is--pray do not be scandalized--an ass.”

“An ass? A quadruped or a biped?”

“A real ass with four legs; a flesh-and-blood ass. He was the favorite animal of Sophia Goffredi for riding, and was called _Nino_, the diminutive of Giovanni. I was so fond of him, that I have called the one I now use to carry my baggage by the name of Jean, in remembrance of him who was the joy of my early childhood.”

“Ah, you have an ass? It must have been he who visited me last evening.”

“And it was you who had him put in the stable?”

“Exactly. You seem to love asses.”

“Fraternally. Indeed, I have been thinking for a quarter of an hour that mine has, perhaps, not had his breakfast. Ulph will be afraid of him. Perhaps he has driven him out of the chateau. The poor fellow may be wandering about in the ice and snow at this very moment, awakening the insensible echoes with his plaintive voice. I beg pardon, Monsieur Goefle, but I must leave you for a moment and look after my ass.”

“You are a queer fellow,” said M. Goefle. “Well, be quick, and give an eye to my horse at the same time. He’s worth more than your ass--no offence to you. But are you going out to the stable in my dress-coat and silk stockings?”

“I shall be back in a moment.”

“No, no, my boy, that won’t do at all. Besides, you will catch cold. Take my furred boots and pelisse, and be quick!”

Cristiano thankfully obeyed, and found Jean in very good case, coughing less than on the day before, and eating contentedly in company with Loki, whom Ulph had brought back from the new chateau.

Ulph was looking at the ass in stupid wonderment. He was beginning to recover a little from his drunkenness, and to suspect that it was not a horse that he had so quietly groomed in the morning. Cristiano, who had learned on the previous evening, while hunting after his supper, what a superstitious poltroon he had to deal with, addressed him at once in Italian, accompanying his remarks with fierce looks and absurd and terrifying gestures. In this fantastic style, he ordered the poor fellow to respect the ass like a mythological divinity, and threatened him with the most fearful punishment in case of disobedience. Ulph, in a great fright, retired in silence, after saluting both the ass and his master, his brain full of indistinct notions that he could not carry forward to any intelligible conclusion, but which the spirituous indulgences of the coming evening would be sure to develop into new alarms and imaginations more and more strange.

“Very well,” continued Cristiano, returning and resuming his pipe, his story, and his position astride of a chair, in the bear-room; “Madame Goffredi’s ass was my first friend. I believe no donkey in the world, not even my own, ever had such beautiful ears and such an agreeable gait. Perhaps, Monsieur Goefle, the reason I think so is, that the first time that quiet pace and those two long ears attracted the attention of my poor little undeveloped mind, I was at the same moment instinctively impressed by one of the most beautiful sights in the universe. It was on the shore of a lake. Lakes, you see, play an important part in my life. But what a lake this was! The lake of Perugia--the ancient lake Thrasymene! Were you never in Italy, Monsieur Goefle?”

“No, very much to my regret. But as to lakes, we have some here in Sweden that would make your Italian ones look like wash-basins.”

“I have nothing to say against your lakes. I have already seen a number of them. Very likely they are beautiful in summer, and even in winter, with their _mjelgars_--is not that the name of those immense avalanches of earth that slide down to the water’s edge with their green trees standing, their rocks and strange fractures?--I admit that they are very remarkable. The hoar-frost and ice that cover so many strange forms, and make a wreath of diamonds out of the smallest blade of grass; these inextricable net-works of brambles that might be taken for immense and elaborate pieces of work in cut-glass; the glorious red sunlight over it all; the jagged peaks above, glittering like shafts of sapphire against the purple of the morning--yes, I confess the grandeur of all this scenery. Even what I can see out of this window is a picture which dazzles me. Dazzles: that is the word; and that is really the only criticism I have to offer upon it. It excites me--carries me beyond myself. Enthusiasm is good, no doubt; but is there nothing else in life? Has not man an immense need for repose, for contemplation, without any sense of effort; for that sort of soft, delicious revery that we call _far niente_? Well, it is down in the south, at such a place as lake Thrasymene, that one feels a glorious consciousness of mere vegetating. It was there that I grew up in perfect quiet, without any violent changes; a poor little weed, transplanted, from some unknown region, to those shores, blessed by the sunshine, shaded by the ancient faint-hued olive-trees, and, as it were, bathed always in warm fluid gold.

“We had--it is a sad _we_--a little country-house, or _villetta_, on a small stream called the Sanguineto, or Bloody Brook; in memory, it is said, of the blood that once ran down its bed from the field of the famous battle of Thrasymene. Here we passed all the pleasant summer weather in a delicious rural paradise. There were no more corpses in the stream; the waters of the Sanguineto were as clear as crystal. However, my dear adoptive father used to be absorbed by his quaint occupation of searching for bones, medals, and remains of armor, of which great quantities are still found among the grass and flowers along the shore of the lake. His wife, who adored him--and with good reason--always accompanied him; and I, by this time a great careless boy, whom also, in their loving kindness, they adored--I used to roll about on the warm sand, or ride dreaming along on my dear mother’s lap, rocked by Nino’s even pace.

“Gradually I came to perceive and understand the splendor of the days and nights in that lovely country. The lake is immense. Not that it covers so much space as even the smallest of yours, but grandeur is not the same as dimension. The curves of its outlines are so grand, and its atmosphere is so soft, that its luminous distances give an impression of infinity. I cannot remember, without emotion, certain sunrises and sunsets that I have seen there, over that broad mirror, filled with reflections of headlands crowded with tall, thick trees, and of distant islets, showing as white as alabaster among the rosy waves. And at night, what myriads of stars hung quivering in the tranquil water! How lovely were the mists that climbed the silvery slopes, and how mysterious the harmonies that seemed to creep unobtrusively along the shores, with the slight ebb and flow of that great mass of waters that seemed afraid of disturbing the sleep of the flowers! With you, you must confess, Monsieur Goefle, that nature is violent, even in its winter’s repose. In your mountains everything carries the marks of the perpetual floods of your spring and autumn. But there, all the terrestrial outlines are certain of preservation for a long time, and every plant of maturing in the place where it was born. In breathing such an air, we breathe in with it some similar kindliness of instinct; the eternal happiness of nature diffuses itself in the soul without overpowering or confounding it.”

“You have a poetical vein in you, evidently,” said M. Goefle; “but are not the people of that beautiful country dirty, idle, and voluntarily wretched?”

“Poverty is always half the fault of the government and half of the governed; the blame is never all on one side. I suppose that may be what prevents improvement. But in such a pleasant climate, the poverty produced by indolence finds an excuse in the sensuous pleasure of contemplative existence. In my youth I felt keenly this intoxicating charm of the south, and I appreciated it all the more because I felt also, from time to time, an excess of feverish energy, as if I had really been born five hundred leagues away, in those cold regions where mind exerts more authority over matter.”

“Then you were not altogether indolent yourself?”

“I believe I was not indolent at all, for my parents desired me to become a learned man, and, out of affection for them, I made great efforts to acquire knowledge. But I felt much more inclined towards the natural sciences, arts, and philosophy, than to the difficult and minute researches of the learned M. Goffredi. I thought his line of study rather useless, and was quite unable to experience such a delirium of joy as he felt when we had succeeded in determining the purpose of some ancient landmark or deciphering some Etruscan inscription. In other matters he left me perfectly free to follow my own preferences, and I lived with him in the pleasantest relations that it is possible to imagine. Indulge me in a few details about this period of my life, from infancy to youth--the time when the faculties of my soul were awakening within me.

“Perugia is a university city, a poetical place--one of the old Italian centres of beauty and learning. It is rich in antiquities and monuments of all periods; it has some fine libraries, an academy of fine arts, collections, and so forth. The city itself is beautiful and picturesque; it includes more than a hundred churches and fifty monasteries, all rich in pictures, manuscripts, etc. The Piazza del Duomo is a remarkable place, having on one side a rich Gothic cathedral, a fountain by Giovanni de Pisa, a chef-d’œuvre, and other monuments of different ages, and on the other a great palace in the Venetian style. This is a proud and strange relic of the thirteenth or fourteenth century, of a sombre red, finished with black ornaments in iron, and with its doors and windows pierced with that fantastic irregularity of design which has gone so entirely out of vogue since the introduction of the correct lines and pure taste introduced by the renaissance.

“I felt a passionate admiration for what I may call the dramatic physiognomy of this old palace, though M. Goffredi despised it as belonging to a period of barbarism. He admired only the antique, and such modern periods as are inspired by the antique. For my part, I plainly confess that all these masterpieces of exactly the same school, ancient and modern, sometimes tried very severely my power of admiring. This predetermined preference of the Italians for always going over that same old ground again, and their obstinate neglect of exactly the period when the national character was most freely expressing itself, between the absolutism of the emperors and that of the popes, had become so consecrated by public opinion, that you will pass there for a Vandal if you allow yourself to use any other than the recognized standards of excellence.[5]

“I was natural and spontaneous in my character, and accordingly I was often reproved in consequence of my love for what was indiscriminately called ‘The Gothic’--that is, everything not pertaining to the ages of Pericles, Augustus, or Raphael. It was with some effort, indeed, that my adoptive father could bring himself to admire the last of these three. His only enthusiasm was for the ruins of Rome; and when he took me thither he was surprised and scandalized to hear me say that I saw nothing there to make me forget the royal imaginativeness and effective grouping of our own Piazza del Duomo, with its great red and black palace, its assemblage of varied splendors, and its narrow, crooked streets, that suddenly plunge under gloomy arcades, with a sort of air of tragic mystery.

“I was by this time fifteen or sixteen years old, and began to be able to explain my tastes and ideas. I managed to make my father understand that it was a matter of necessity for me to be absolutely independent in all that related to taste and feeling. I could not help admiring and enjoying all efforts of genius and of invention. I found it impossible to imprison my views within a system, an epoch, or a school. In a word, I must have liberty to adore the universe, God, and that divine spark which He has given to man, wherever visible in the works of nature or of art.

“‘Thus,’ I said to him, ‘I love the beautiful sunshine and the gloomy night; our own austere Perugino and the impetuous Michael Angelo; the mighty substructures of the Romans, and the delicate pierced work of the Saracens. I love our own quiet lake Thrasymene, and the furious cataract of Terni. I love your beloved Etruscans and all your sublime ancients, but I also love the Greco-arabic cathedrals; I love equally the monumental fountain of Trevi, and the little brook that runs between two rocks in the depths of some rural solitude. Everything that is new seems to me worthy of interest and of attention; everything is dear to me that at any time seizes hold of my heart or of my thoughts. Feeling these impulses to admire whatever is beautiful or sublime, and even whatever is merely charming or agreeable, I have a great repugnance for a devotion confined to certain forms of the beautiful exclusively.

“‘But,’ I continued, ‘if you are convinced that in this I am in a wrong road, that the impulse which I feel--the desire for development in all directions--is dangerous, a symptom of an ill-regulated mental action, I will do my best to repress it, and throw myself entirely into whatever course of study you may mark out for me. I desire, above all things, to be what you wish me to be; but, my dear father, before you cut my wings, please to make yourself certain that there is nothing worth preserving in all this vain plumage.’

“M. Goffredi, though exclusively devoted to a very narrow range of studies, was the most generous character I ever met. He reflected much about the matter, and often consulted his wife, a woman of the divinest susceptibilities. Sophia Goffredi was what the Italians call a _letterata_; not a _femme de lettres_, as that term is generally understood in France, but a woman at once cultivated, charming, inspired, erudite, simple. She loved me so tenderly that she believed me a prodigy; and these two excellent friends decided with one accord that my wishes must be regarded, and that at any rate they would not extinguish my fire until they were certain whether it was a flame from heaven, or a mere blaze of straw.

“What gave them confidence in me was, that this disposition of mine to permit my mind to pursue its own impulses in every direction, did not originate in inconstancy of character. I was warm-hearted, and felt kindly disposed towards all my fellow-creatures, and yet I was not disposed to waste my life with all manner of company. My attachments were exclusively for the two persons who had adopted me, and whom I preferred to all others. Their society was my greatest, I may say my only pleasure, apart from the various studies that had captivated me.

“It was decided, then, that my mind should be at my own disposal, particularly as, all things considered, it was a pretty good mind; and I was not obliged to confine myself rigorously to the university course. I was allowed to take my own way, and to give free career to the enormous facility with which I was gifted. Was this an error? I cannot think so. It is true that I might have been restricted to one specialty, which would have cased me up forever in some one corner of art or science, where I should never have known privation; but how many intellectual enjoyments should I have lost! And who can tell whether what are called practical ideas, and my own personal interests, if forced upon my attention in this way, might not have withered all the religion of my heart and my conscience? You will see shortly that Sophia Goffredi had no reason to regret having allowed me to be myself.

“My first conviction was that I was born for literature. Sophia trained me to write both in prose and verse, and while still a child, I composed several romances and comedies in rhyme, which our circle of friends were so kind, or so simple, as to admire. I might have become very conceited, for I was excessively spoiled by all our visitors; but Sophia used often to tell me that the day when one is satisfied with one’s self is the last day of improvement; and this simple warning saved me from the foolishness of self-admiration. And besides, I very soon saw that in order to produce anything worth while in literature, I must know a great many things, or else I should merely float in a sea of empty phrases. I read enormously; but my studies in history and natural science caused me to entirely lose sight of myself; and instead of gathering booty like a bee, to make honey and wax, I simply coursed to and fro through the vast field of human knowledge, merely for the pleasure of knowing and understanding.

“It was while thus engaged that I felt such a powerful impulse towards the natural sciences, and that my desire to devote my life to this pursuit became a vocation more definitely resolved upon in my mind than the former one. With this ardor for understanding, was joined a similar ardor for observing; and I might say that there awoke in me two distinct persons: one seeking to discover the secrets of creation for the love of science, that is, for the sake of humanity; and the other seeking to enjoy the varied beauties of creation as a poet--that is, to some extent, for his own pleasure.

“From that moment, I was possessed by the idea of making long voyages. While absorbed in studying the collections and museums of Perugia, I was dreaming of the antipodes; and the sight of a little stone or dried flower would carry me in imagination to the summits of lofty mountains, or across vast oceans. I thirsted to see the great cities, the centres of enlightenment, the scientific men of my time, and great and precious scientific collections. Sophia Goffredi had taught me French, German, and a little Spanish. I felt, likewise, the necessity of learning the northern languages, so as not to be a stranger in any part of Europe. I learned English, Dutch, and particularly Swedish, with extreme rapidity. My pronunciation, however, was defective; or rather, I had none. I did not try to master the characteristic music--so to speak--of languages which I could not hear spoken; but relied upon the correctness of my ear, and my facility in catching accents, for quickly mastering the spoken use of any language when necessary. The event has shown that these expectations were quite justified; I only need fifteen days to speak, without any foreign accent, a language which I have studied only in books.

“While I was thus learning languages, I was also studying drawing and a little painting; in order to be able to fix permanently my travelling recollections, by sketches of sites, remarkable plants, costumes, monuments,--in short, all that would have to be retained in the memory alone, if the hand had not the power to delineate the mental conception. Besides, I studied good writers, for the sake of enabling myself to narrate clearly and rapidly; for I had often been displeased at the obscure and confused style of books of travels. And so well did I use my time, Monsieur Goefle, that at eighteen, I was well prepared, in virtue of my knowledge, activity, power of labor, and faculty of observation, to become at least a useful, if not an actually scientific man. That was the happiest time of my life, the purest and sweetest. Ah, if it could have lasted a few years longer, I should have been a different man!

“M. Goffredi was buried in his antiquarian researches, and did not directly superintend my education. He, however, from time to time, reviewed my studies with me, and observed me with care, and when he was satisfied that I was not losing my time and labor, he became quite confident in my judgment. He had at first been tempted to dissuade me from trying too many things at once; but when he was satisfied that all my various acquisitions found their places in good order in my mind, he began to dream with me and for me everything that I dreamed myself. He had himself travelled before his marriage, and he was even now projecting another archæological tour, to reach certain points not yet explored. He was thinking the more seriously of this plan, since receiving a small inheritance that had recently fallen to him, and which enabled him to resign his professorship at the university. He had been for ten years employed on a work which he could not complete without visiting the coast of Africa and some of the Greek Islands. I should mention that his way of working was painful and slow, for his style lacked clearness, and there was also perhaps some want of clearness of thought in his way of presenting his reasonings, however ingenious in themselves. He was a genius without talent.

“He was pleased with the manner in which I wrote up some pages of his work for him, and resolved to take me with him, and have me write it all out after we came home. I was almost wild with delight when he communicated this design to me; but my joy was quickly changed to sadness at the idea of leaving alone at home my adoptive mother, that excellent woman whose whole life was devoted to us, and I asked to remain with her.

“She was grateful to me for this, but suggested, by way of satisfying all three of us, the plan of going herself--a proposition which was received with enthusiasm. Our preparations for departure were now made as joyfully as if for a feast. Ah, everything smiled upon us! _La Sofia_--you know that with us the _le_ or _la_ is a superlative of admiration, and not a term of contempt--was accustomed to long walks. In the country she used to go everywhere with us. She was active, courageous, and enthusiastic, and was never the least hindrance to us. If we were ever weary or discouraged, she raised our spirits, and put us into good humor, by her gayety and energy. She was still young and strong, and the angelic tenderness and goodness of her smile made you forget all about the plainness of her features. Her husband loved her devotedly; and as for her, nobody could have convinced her that Silvio Goffredi was not a demigod, despite his lameness, his prematurely rounded shoulders, and his fabulous absence of mind. But how pure and generous was the soul hidden by that frail body, and those timid and irresolute manners! His disinterestedness as to money was admirable, and a proof of it was this very work, for which he was sacrificing his employment and his habits. He was aware that such books cost more than they bring, especially in Italy; and he calculated upon no gain from this one; yet it was the glory, the purpose, the dream of his whole life.

“My poor mother was the most impatient to start of any of us, and she felt an absolute confidence in our good fortune. It was decided that we should begin by visiting some of the islands of the Archipelago.