and to calculate the forces; then let them try their strength. If the weak assails me, he thinks me weak; if the strong, he thinks me strong. He is more likely to compute ill his own vigour than mine. At all events, I love inquiry, even when I myself sit down. And I am not offended in my walks if my visitor asks me whither does that alley lead? It proves that he is ready to go on with me; that he sees some space before him; and that he believes there may be something worth looking after. La Fontaine. You have been standing a long time, my lord duke: I must entreat you to be seated. of dignity, let me tell you, a dog accepts the subsidies of his friends, but never claims them: a dog would not take the field to obtain power for a son, but would leave the son to obtain it by his own activity and prowess. He conducts his visitor or inmate out a-hunting, and makes a present of the game to him as freely as an emperor to an elector. Fond as he is of slumber, which is indeed one of the pleasantest and best things in the universe, particularly after dinner, he shakes it off as willingly as he would a gadfly, in order to defend his master from theft or violence. Let the robber or assailant speak as courteously as he may, he waives your diplomatical terms, gives his Rochefoucault. Excuse me, my dear M. la reasons in plain language, and makes war. I Fontaine; I would much rather stand. La Fontaine. Sad doings! sad oversight! The other two chairs were sent yesterday evening to be scoured and mended. But that dog is the best-tempered dog! an angel of a dog, I do assure you; he would have gone down in a moment, at a word. I am quite ashamed of myself for such inattention. With your sentiments of friendship for me, why could you not have taken the liberty to shove him gently off, rather than give me this uneasiness? Rochefoucault. My true and kind friend! we authors are too sedentary; we are heartily glad of standing to converse, whenever we can do it without any restraint on our acquaintance. La Fontaine. I must reprove that animal when he uncurls his body. He seems to be dreaming of Paradise and Houris. Ay, twitch thy ear, my child! I wish at my heart there were as troublesome a fly about the other: God forgive me! The rogue covers all my clean linen! shirt and cravat! what cares he! Rochefoucault. Dogs are not very modest. La Fontaine. Never say that, M. de la Rochefoucault! The most modest people upon earth! Look at a dog's eyes; and he half-closes them, or gently turns them away, with a motion of the lips, which he licks languidly, and of the tail, which he stirs tremulously, begging your forbearance. I am neither blind nor indifferent to the defects of these good and generous creatures. They are subject to many such as men are subject to among the rest, they disturb the neighbourhood in the discussion of their private causes; they quarrel and fight on small motives, such as a little bad food, or a little vain-glory, or the sex. But it must be something present or near that excites them; and they calculate not the extent of evil they may do or suffer. Rochefoucault. Certainly not: how should dogs calculate? La Fontaine. I know nothing of the process. I am unable to inform you how they leap over hedges and brooks, with exertion just sufficient, and no more. In regard to honour and a sense could say many other things to his advantage; but I never was malicious, and would rather let both parties plead for themselves: give me the dog, however. Rochefoucault. Faith! I will give you both, and never boast of my largess in so doing. La Fontaine. I trust I have removed from you the suspicion of selfishness in my client, and I feel it quite as easy to make a properer disposal of another ill attribute, namely cruelty, which we vainly try to shuffle off our own shoulders upon others, by employing the offensive and most unjust term, brutality. But to convince you of my impartiality, now I have defended the dog from the first obloquy, I will defend the man from the last, hoping to make you think better of each. What you attribute to cruelty, both while we are children and afterward may be assigned for the greater part, to curiosity. Cruelty tends to the extinction of life, the dissolution of matter, the imprisonment and sepulture of truth; and if it were our ruling and chief propensity, the human race would have been extinguished in a few centuries after its appearance. Curiosity, in its primary sense, implies care and consideration. Rochefoucault. Words often deflect from their primary sense. We find the most curious men the most idle and silly, the least observant and conservative. La Fontaine. So we think; because we see every hour the idly curious, and not the strenuously; we see only the persons of the one set, and only the works of the other. More is heard of cruelty than of curiosity, because while curiosity is silent both in itself and about its object, cruelty on most occasions is like the wind, boisterous in itself, and exciting a mur mur and bustle in all the things it moves among. Added to which, many of the higher topics whereto our curiosity would turn, are intercepted from it by the policy of our guides and rulers; while the principal ones on which cruelty is most active, are pointed to by the sceptre and the truncheon, and wealth and dignity are the rewards of their attainment. What perversion! He who brings a bullock into a city for its sustenance is called a butcher, and nobody has the civility to take off the hat to him, although knowing him as perfectly as I know Matthieu le Mince, who served me with those fine kidneys you must have remarked in passing through the kitchen: on the contrary, he who reduces the same city to famine is styled M. le General or M. le Marechal, and gentlemen like you, unprejudiced (as one would think) and upright, make room for him in the antechamber. Rochefoucault. He obeys orders without the degrading influence of any passion. La Fontaine. Then he commits a baseness the more, a cruelty the greater. He goes off at another man's setting, as ingloriously as a rat-trap: he produces the worst effects of fury, and feels none: a Cain unirritated by a brother's incense. Rochefoucault. I would hide from you this little rapier, which, like the barber's pole, I have often thought too obtrusive in the streets. La Fontaine. Never shall I think my countrymen half civilised while on the dress of a courtier is hung the instrument of a cut-throat. How deplorably feeble must be that honour which requires defending at every hour of the day! | cravat. Furthermore, the slit in the coat behind tells in a moment what it was made for: a thing of which, in regard to ourselves, the best preachers have to remind us all our lives: then the central part of our habiliment has either its loop-hole or its portcullis in the opposite direction, still more demonstrative. All these are for very mundane purposes: but Religion and Humanity have whispered some later utilities. We pray the more commodiously, and of course the more frequently, for rolling up a royal ell of stocking round about our knees: and our high-heeled shoes must surely have been worn by some angel, to save those insects which the flat-footed would have crushed to death. Rochefoucault. Ah! the good dog has awakened: he saw me and my rapier, and ran away. Of what breed is he? for I know nothing of dogs. La Fontaine. And write so well! Rochefoucault. Is he a trufler? La Fontaine. No, not he; but quite as innocent. Rochefoucault. Something of the shepherd-dog, I suspect.. La Fontaine. Nor that neither; although he fain would make you believe it. Indeed he is very like one pointed nose, pointed ears, appa Rochefoucault. Ingenious as you are, M. Fontaine, I do not believe that, on this subject, you could add anything to what you have spoken already but really, I do think, one of the most instructive things in the world would be a disser-rently stiff, but readily yielding; long hair, partation on dress by you. La Fontaine. Nothing can be devised more commodious than the dress in fashion. Perukes have fallen among us by the peculiar dispensation of Providence. As in all the regions of the globe the indigenous have given way to stronger creatures, so have they (partly at least) on the human head. At present the wren and the squirrel are dominant there. Whenever I have a mind for a filbert, I have only to shake my foretop. Improvement does not end in that quarter. I might forget to take my pinch of snuff when it would do me good, unless I saw a store of it on another's ticularly about the neck; noble tail over his back, three curls deep, exceedingly pleasant to stroke down again; straw-colour all above, white all below. He might take it ill if you looked for it; but so it is, upon my word: an ermeline might envy it. Rochefoucault. What are his pursuits? La Fontaine. As to pursuit and occupation, he is good for nothing. In fact, I like those dogs best. . and those men too. Rochefoucault. Send Nanon then for a pair of silk stockings, and mount my carriage with me: it stops at the Louvre. VITTORIA COLONNA AND MICHEL-ANGELO BUONAROTTI. Vittoria. What has detained you so long, Michel-Angelo? Were we not to have read together, early in the forenoon, the little book of poetry which is lying there on the table? somewhat grizzly, of a complexion rather cindery than pale, with a look half leering and half imploring, and in a voice half querulous and half passionate, accosted me. He offered many The apologies for never having heard of me until this morning, although my fame (he protested) had filled the universe. Whatever he said at one instant he unsaid the next, in like manner. Michel-Angelo. Excuse me, Madonna. fault, if mine at all, is mine only in part. Vittoria. I will pardon it the rather, because, whatever it was, it has removed the traces of care and of study from your brow, and supplanted them with an unwonted smile. Pray now what provokes this hilarity? Michel Angelo. Not the delay, I assure you, which never has any such effect when I am coming to the Palazzo Pescara, but merely the mention of poetry. Vittoria. Why so? I perceive there is mischief in your countenance; let me also have a hand in it, if I find it is such as I like. Michel-Angelo. When I was walking hither, a middle-aged gentleman, tall, round-shouldered, "But you shall forgive me; you shall soon forgive me," cried he, thrusting into my hand a large volume, from its more opportune station under the coat-flap. I felt it damp, having lain perhaps in the middle of a thousand, two entire winters; and I apprehended cold and rheumatism as much almost at the cover as at the contents, While I held it, uncertain how to reply, he suddenly snatched it back, and cut open the leaves with a very sharp penknife, injuring few of them by the operation, for he was cautious and tender in the extreme. "I would not delay you in the reading," said he, returning it, "for your praise will richly crown my labours." Vittoria. What was it? and where is it? Michel-Angelo. Madonna, let me be an example of patience to you. Wait a little, and you shall hear the whole. Vittoria. No, no, no! Michel-Angelo. I do not mean the whole of the poem, I mean only the whole of the occurrence. I saw on the title-page that it was a poem in twenty-four cantos, each containing a hundred stanzas, entitled The Strangulation of Cethegus. Between the moments of my surprise and my dismay,.. "You will find," exclaimed the author, "how wrongfully I have been accused by the malevolent and invidious (and there are few others in the world) of copying our most celebrated writers, and of being destitute of originality myself. If occasionally I resemble them in some sort, it is only to show them how they might have written, with a little more care, judgment, and . we will not say.. genius!" Vittoria. On such emergencies, a spice of ridicule is our speediest and most palatable remedy for disgust. . Michel-Angelo. When I inquired of him to what gentleman I was indebted for so valuable a present, he stood in amaze at first; then he repeated his family name, then his baptismal, then a poetical intermediate one of his own invention. These, he told me, I must frequently have heard. I now recognised the peculiar object of ebullient jocularity among my juvenile scholars, one of whom said, "He has cracked a biscuit which was baked for a long voyage, and, pouring a profusion of tepid water on it, he has quadrupled its bulk and heaviness!" Vittoria. Poor man! his vanity must often be wounded. Michel-Angelo. He has none. Michel-Angelo. He told me so himself. "I have been called vain," said he; "but only by those who never knew me. Proud! yes, proud I am! Vanity, in my opinion, (and I am certain that you and all sensible men must think with me,) belongs only to weak minds; pride to the strongest and most sublime. Poets, we hear, are often vain; ay, but what poets?" His eyes, which before were only on a level with the cheek-bones and the frontal, now expanded beyond, and assumed the full majesty of the orbicular. Vittoria. Well, in what manner has he treated his subject? Michel-Angelo. pleasure of telling me: He could not resist the they fell early. The man of genius will seize on the most trifling objects in nature, and raise up a new creation from them. Did you never see an apple or a strawberry which had another more diminutive growing to it? Well, now from this double strawberry or apple I have made out a double Cæsar, such as never was seen before; one the stern resolute senator; the other the gentle sentimental young lover." On which I submissively asked, whether the stripling who had been received so favorably by the lady, would on the same afternoon be sure of the same facility at his entrance into the senate; and whether it was not requisite to have attained his fortieth year? He smiled at me, and said, "Surely no, when a poet of the first order gives him a ticket of admission. Does not Horace say we poets have the privilege of daring anything?" I was afraid to answer, "Yes: but, unhappily, we readers have not the power of bearing anything." He continued, "Cicero is an old gentleman." Here I ventured to interrupt him, asking if there were in reality more than five or six years between their ages, and by remarking, that although in obscure men and matters, introduced into works of invention, facts might be represented not quite accordant with exact chronology, yet that the two most remarkable characters in the Roman Commonwealth, known by every schoolboy to have entered into public life at the same time, could safely be pushed so far asunder. "No matter, sir!" replied he sharply; "there they are, the poet's own creation. Observe, if you please, I have placed Cethegus between them; a well-grown personage, in his meridian. Behold my pyramid !" I was silent. "No originality, I suppose?" "Very great indeed!" answered I. "Here is one man," cried he, seizing my hand, one man in the world, willing to the uttermost of his power to do me justice. Strangers give me praise; friends give me only advice; and such advice, Signor Buonarotti, as would impoverish the realms of literature, if taken." I stared at him even more wildly than before. "Perhaps you do not recognise me?" said he. Many have taken me for Ariosto; but I hope I am loftier and graver, and more innocent. Wherever he has gone I have followed him, in order to abolish the impression of wantonness, and to purify (I repeat the words of our mutual admirers) the too warm air of his enchantments." "I hope you have not forgotten," said I, "that in lustral water salt is always an ingredient." He thrust his hands into his pockets, misunderstanding me; at which action I could not "I believe, Signor Buonarotti, you are, among but smile. He perceived it; and, after a pause, other things, a painter. Proportions! ay, pro-"Ha! ha! ha!" replied he, in measured laughter, portions! The pyramidal, ay! We look to that, don't we? See here then. Cæsar is a stripling, just old enough to fall in love. In Pagan Rome "you are a wit too, Messer Michel-Angelo! Who would have thought it of so considerable a man? Well now, I never venture on it, even among friends. We may be easy and familiar in writing or conversing, without letting ourselves down; we may countenance wit; we may even suggest it; I am not rigorous on that head, as some other great writers are. You see I have helped you to a trifle of it; a mere trifle. Now you must confess you caught the spark from me," added he, coaxingly. "I will never claim it in public; I will not indeed! I scarcely consider it in the light of a plagiarism. I have forborne greater things very long, and have only been compelled at last to declare, in a preface, that I wrote the better part of Orlando Furioso many years before it was conceived by Messer Ludovico. I heard his injurious claims, and told nobody the fact." "How does your poem end, sir?" said I, with all the rapidity of impatience. He mistook my motive, and cried, "Really I am flattered and charmed at the interest you take in it. You have devoured it in your mind already, and would have the very shell. In compliance with your earnestness I will answer the question, although it might be hurtful, I fear, to the effect the whole composition, grasped at once, would produce on you." I declared the contrary, with many protestations. He raised up his head from its slanting position of distrust and doubt. Again I assured him of my resolution to despatch it at a sitting. Vittoria. I never thought you capable of such duplicity. Michel-Angelo. Of what may I not be capable, if you absolve me with so gracious a smile? "I will then tell you how it ends," continued he, "if you never have read the history. Cethegus was, I am sorry to say, a person of bad character, although of birth. With perfect fidelity I have translated the speeches of Sallust; but Sallust had no notion (and history could do nothing for him) of placing the culprit bound between two Turkish mutes, with a friar in the rear, while the great bell tolled from Santa Maria Maggiore." I started. moral, social, political, and," I was about to add inwardly, poetical, when he seized my hand, and said, with firm deliberation, "There are two men in degenerate Rome who abhor the vicious in conduct and embrace the pure in poetry. When you have bestowed as much time as I have on the contemplation and composition of it, your surprise (but not your admiration, I humbly trust) will be considerably diminished, on the repeated perusal of my few edited volumes. I am as sure of eternal fame as if I had it in my pocket. Fame, Signor MichelAngelo, has a snail's growth; true, real, genuine fame has, and you may know it by that. But, I | promise you, in another century or two you shall see mine a very giant. I have sometimes thought I have a host of enemies: I now begin to think I can have only one: I have him in my eye. He is capable of putting on all manner of faces. I myself have seen him looking like an elderly man; some of my friends have seen him looking quite young; and others have seen him what they thought was middle-aged. He manages his voice equally well. If you go into twenty streets, only mention me, and you will find him at the same moment in all of them. Happily, he always hits in the wrong place. He says I am restless for celebrity! he says I want vigour and originality!" He ended with three little titters; and these at least were in good metre, and showed care in the composition. Vittoria. Happy man! for vanity is rarely attended by vexation of spirit, and nobody is oppressed by a sense of emptiness. I must now undertake his defence. Michel-Angelo. Properly then have you exclaimed happy man! Vittoria. The clock and bell indeed are stumbling-blocks; but there are some instances in which even so inopportune an introduction of them is less censurable than in others. Suppose for example a dramatic poet in an age when the greater part of his audience was rude and igno "That is the place, the real place; he was rant. After he had supplied the more learned strangled just below." "Bell!" I soliloquized, rather too audibly. "If you never have felt the effect of a bell at executions, and particularly on the stage; if you never have felt the effect of a bell, Signor Buonarotti, through your brain and heart," said he, breathing hard, and allowing his watery diagonal eyes only half their width, "then do I most sincerely pity you, Signor Buonarotti, and wish you a very good morning." I bowed, and fancied my deliverance was accomplished. But he instantly turned round again, and added, and intellectual with the requisites of his art, I would not quarrel with him for indulging the market-folk with a hearty peal of bells, or perhaps a discharge of artillery, while they are following the triumphal car of Cæsar, or shouting round the conflagration of Persepolis! But if another, in offering his tragedy for the perusal of our times, should neglect to sweep away the remnants of an old largess given to the multitude, it can only be from the conviction that they are his proper company; that he is about to be tried by his own order; that his services are mostly due to the majority; and that the world's population in simpletons is by no means on the wane. Consider now, my dear Michel-Angelo, if inconsistencies, absurdities, anachronisms, are to be found only in one department of the arts. I appeal to you, the president, prince, dictator of them all, whether it is as ridiculous to represent an angel playing on a violin, for which your master Ghirlandaio and some other more ancient painters have been reprehended, as it is to represent, what we find on many recent monuments, a poet or a musician with a lyre in his hand. For, if angels play on any instrument at all, they may as well play on such as men invented late as early; since, at whatever time men invented them, angels may have invented them before. forced into my hand, I sadly suspect would have produced but little. Vittoria. Have you brought your treasure with you? Where is it? Michel-Angelo. Knowing your antipathy to bad smells and bad poems, knowing also that Father Tiber is accustomed to both of them, I devoutly made my offering to him as I crossed the bridge. Vittoria. Indeed I am not over-curious about a specimen; and few things that are hopeless ever gave anyone less concern. "Signor Cetego! la preghiera é vana. Spicciti! senti! suona la campana.” and these two in sequence, which are the conclusion: Michel-Angelo. A lyre in the hand of poet or musician born in our times, is a contradiction to ages, a defiance to chronology, and might mislead in regard to usages a remote posterity. So indeed Michel-Angelo. Such resignation merits all posmight our silly inscriptions about the manes and sible reward; and all that lies in me you shall ashes of our uncles and aunts, who would have receive. As the last page fluttered on the batbeen horrified at the idea of being burnt like tlement, I caught two verses, without the interPagans, bottled up in urns, and standing bolt-up-mediate: right, where milk and honey are lapped and sucked before their faces, by an ugly brood of devils unamenable to priest or purgatory. But while emperors and kings are hoisted upon columns a hundred palms above the earth, where only a pigeon would feel secure, and while saints and martyrs, instead of receiving us at the door or on the steps, are perched on the slope of a ballustrade, we need not look on the ground for a fresh crop of absurdities. The ancient Romans, quite barbarous enough in violating the pure architecture of Greece, abstained from such as these, and went no farther (nor truly was there any occasion) than to narrow the street, instead of enlarging it, for the march of armies through triumphal arches. The idea, so abused, was taken from the boughs and branches hung on poles, which shaded their forefathers at their return from plunder, while wine was poured out to them in the dusty path by wives and daughters. The songs alone continued just the same as they were at first, coarse, ribald, in the trochaic measure, which appears to be the commonest and earliest in most nations. "Cetego casca in terra come un bove, E l'anima gli scappa.. che sà dove !" Vittoria. If I could suppress my smile, perhaps I should reprove you; but at last I will be grave. Men like yourself, men of reputation and au thority, should not only be lenient and indulgent, but even grateful, to the vain and imbecile who attempt to please us. If we are amused at an ebullition of frowardness in children, at their little contortions, stamps, and menaces, are not the same things at least inoffensive to us, when children of the same character are grey, wrinkled, and toothless? From those of three feet we only see ourselves in a convex mirror; we see what we were at the same age; but from others of six feet we gather stores for pleasantry, for imagination, and for thought. Against their blank wall is inserted the standard by which we may measure our friends and ourselves. As we look up at it, Comedy often lays her playful hand on our shoulder; and, as we turn our faces back, we observe Philosophy close behind her. If men in general were much nearer to perfection than they Vittoria. The difference between poetry and all other arts, all other kinds of composition, is this in them utility comes before delight; in this, delight comes before utility. Michel-Angelo. In some pleasing poems there are, the noblest of human works would be faris nothing whatsoever of the useful. Vittoria. My friend, I think you are mistaken. An obvious moral is indeed a heavy protuberance, which injures the gracefulness of a poem; but there is wisdom of one kind or other in every sentence of a really good composition, and it produces its effect in various ways. You employ gold in your pictures; not always of the same consistency or the same preparation, but several of your colours, even the most different, are in part composed of it. This is a matter of which those in general who are gratified with the piece are unsuspicious. The beautiful in itself is useful by awakening our finer sensibilities, which it must be our own fault if we do not often carry with us into action. A well-ordered mind touches no branch of intellectual pleasure so brittle and incompliant as never to be turned to profit. Michel-Angelo. The gift that was just now ther from it. From the fall of Adam to the slaughter of Hector, how vastly has genius been elevated by our imperfections! What history, what romance, what poem, interests us by unmixed good or by unwavering consistency? We require in you strong motives, pertinacious resolves, inflexible wills, and ardent passions; you require in us all our weaknesses. From your shore start forth abrupt and lofty precipices; on ours, diametrically opposite, lie sequestered bays and deep recesses. We deride the man who is, or would be, like us in anything, the vain one in particular. Vanity in women is not invariably, though it is too often, the sign of a cold and selfish heart; in men it always is therefore we ridicule it in society, and in private hate it. Michel-Angelo. You prove to me, Donna Vittoria, that from base materials may rise clear and true reflections! |