Talk by the way, while Pippa is passing from the
hill-side to Orcana. Foreign Students of painting and sculpture,
from Venice, assembled opposite the house of Jules, a young French statuary, at Possagno.
1st Student.
Attention! My own post is beneath this
window, but the pomegranate clump yonder will hide
three or four of you with a little squeezing, and Schramm
and his pipe must lie flat in the balcony. Four, five—
who's a defaulter? We want everybody, for Jules must
not be suffered to hurt his bride when the jest's found out.
2nd Student.
All here! Only our poet's away—never
having much meant to be present, moonstrike him!
The airs of that fellow, that Giovacchino! He was in
violent love with himself, and had a fair prospect of
thriving in his suit, so unmolested was it,—when suddenly
a woman falls in love with him, too; and out of
pure jealousy he takes himself off to Trieste, immortal
poem and all: whereto is this prophetical epitaph
appended already, as Bluphocks assures me,—“Here
a mammoth-poem lies, Fouled to death by butterflies.”
His own fault, the simpleton! Instead of cramp
couplets, each like a knife in your entrails, he should
write, says Bluphocks, both classically and intelligibly.
—Æsculapius, an Epic. Catalogue of the drugs: Hebe's
plaister—One strip Cools your lip. Phœbus' emulsion—
One bottle Clears your throttle. Mercury's bolus—One
box Cures . . .
3rd Student.
Subside, my fine fellow! If the marriage
was over by ten o'clock, Jules will certainly be here in a
minute with his bride.
2nd Student.
Good!—only, so should the poet's muse
have been universally acceptable, says Bluphocks, et
canibus nostris . . . and Delia not better known to our
literary dogs than the boy Giovacchino!
1st Student.
To the point, now. Where's Gottlieb,
the new-comer? Oh,—listen, Gottlieb, to what has called
down this piece of friendly vengeance on Jules, of which
we now assemble to witness the winding-up. We are all
agreed, all in a tale, observe, when Jules shall burst out
on us in a fury by and by: I am spokesman—the verses
that are to undeceive Jules bear my name of Lutwyche
—but each professes himself alike insulted by this strutting
stone-squarer, who came alone from Paris to Munich,
and thence with a crowd of us to Venice and Possagno
here, but proceeds in a day or two alone again—oh,
alone indubitably!—to Rome and Florence. He, forsooth,
take up his portion with these dissolute, brutalized,
heartless bunglers!—so he was heard to call us all: now,
is Schramm brutalized, I should like to know? Am I
heartless?
Gottlieb.
Why, somewhat heartless; for, suppose Jules
a coxcomb as much as you choose, still, for this mere
coxcombry, you will have brushed off—what do folks
style it?—the bloom of his life. Is it too late to alter?
These love-letters now, you call his—I can't laugh at them.
4th Student.
Because you never read the sham letters of
our inditing which drew forth these.
Gottlieb.
His discovery of the truth will be frightful.
4th Student.
That's the joke. But you should have
joined us at the beginning: there's no doubt he loves
the girl—loves a model he might hire by the hour!
Gottlieb.
See here! “He has been accustomed,” he
writes, “to have Canova's women about him, in stone,
“and the world's women beside him, in flesh; these
“being as much below, as those above, his soul's aspi-
“ration: but now he is to have the reality.” There
you laugh again! I say, you wipe off the very dew of his youth.
1st Student.
Schramm! (Take the pipe out of his
mouth, somebody!) Will Jules lose the bloom of his youth?
Schramm.
Nothing worth keeping is ever lost in this
world: look at a blossom—it drops presently, having
done its service and lasted its time; but fruits succeed,
and where would be the blossom's place could it
continue? As well affirm that your eye is no longer
in your body, because its earliest favourite, whatever it
may have first loved to look on, is dead and done with—
as that any affection is lost to the soul when its first
object, whatever happened first to satisfy it, is superseded
in due course. Keep but ever looking, whether with the
body's eye or the mind's, and you will soon find something
to look on! Has a man done wondering at
women?—there follow men, dead and alive, to wonder
at. Has he done wondering at men?—there's God to
wonder at: and the faculty of wonder may be, at the
same time, old and tired enough with respect to its first
object, and yet young and fresh sufficiently, so far as
concerns its novel one. Thus . . .
1st Student.
Put Schramm's pipe into his mouth again!
There, you see! Well, this Jules . . . a wretched fribble
—oh, I watched his disportings at Possagno, the other
day! Canova's gallery—you know: there he marches
first resolvedly past great works by the dozen without
vouchsafing an eye: all at once he stops full at the
Psiche-fanciulla—cannot pass that old acquaintance without
a nod of encouragement—“In your new place,
beauty? Then behave yourself as well here as at Munich
—I see you!” Next he posts himself deliberately before
the unfinished Pietà for half an hour without moving,
till up he starts of a sudden, and thrusts his very nose
into—I say, into—the group; by which gesture you are
informed that precisely the sole point he had not fully
mastered in Canova's practice was a certain method of
using the drill in the articulation of the knee-joint—and
that, likewise, has he mastered at length! Good-bye,
therefore, to poor Canova—whose gallery no longer
needs detain his successor Jules, the predestinated novel
thinker in marble!
5th Student.
Tell him about the women: go on to the
women!
1st Student.
Why, on that matter he could never be
supercilious enough. How should we be other (he said)
than the poor devils you see, with those debasing habits
we cherish? He was not to wallow in that mire, at
least: he would wait, and love only at the proper time,
and meanwhile put up with the
Psiche-fanciulla. Now,
I happened to hear of a young Greek—real Greek girl at
Malamocco; a true Islander, do you see, with Alciphron's
“hair like sea-moss”—Schramm knows!—white and
quiet as an apparition, and fourteen years old at farthest,
—a daughter of Natalia, so she swears—that hag Natalia,
who helps us to models at three
lire an hour. We
selected this girl for the heroine of our jest. So first,
Jules received a scented letter—somebody had seen his
Tydeus at the Academy, and my picture was nothing to
it: a profound admirer bade him persevere—would make
herself known to him ere long. (Paolina, my little friend
of the
Fenice, transcribes divinely.) And in due time,
the mysterious correspondent gave certain hints of her
peculiar charms—the pale cheeks, the black hair—whatever,
in short, had struck us in our Malamocco model:
we retained her name, too—Phene, which is, by interpretation,
sea-eagle. Now, think of Jules finding himself
distinguished from the herd of us by such a creature!
In his very first answer he proposed marrying his
monitress: and fancy us over these letters, two, three
times a day, to receive and despatch! I concocted the
main of it: relations were in the way—secrecy must be
observed—in fine, would he wed her on trust, and only
speak to her when they were indissolubly united? St—
st—Here they come!
6th Student.
Both of them! Heaven's love, speak
softly, speak within yourselves!
5th Student.
Look at the bridegroom! Half his hair
in storm and half in calm,—patted down over the left
temple,—like a frothy cup one blows on to cool it:
and the same old blouse that he murders the marble in.
2nd Student.
Not a rich vest like yours, Hannibal
Scratchy!—rich, that your face may the better set it off.
6th Student.
And the bride! Yes, sure enough, our
Phene! Should you have known her in her clothes?
How magnificently pale!
Gottlieb.
She does not also take it for earnest, I hope?
1st Student.
Oh, Natalia's concern, that is! We settle with Natalia.
6th Student.
She does not speak—has evidently let out
no word. The only thing is, will she equally remember
the rest of her lesson, and repeat correctly all those
verses which are to break the secret to Jules?
Gottlieb.
How he gazes on her! Pity—pity!
1st Student.
They go in: now, silence! You three,—
not nearer the window, mind, than that pomegranate:
just where the little girl, who a few minutes ago passed
us singing, is seated!
