The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 4, No. 24, Oct. 1859

V >> Various >> The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 4, No. 24, Oct. 1859

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"I received the news, strange to say, one evening at the opera in St.
Petersburg, while I was listening to the music of 'Tancredi.' Two
gentlemen were talking behind me, and one was telling the other his
recollection of that brilliant scene I have just recounted. Then
followed the account of her illness; and I could not restrain myself, as
I had in the _caffe_ at Venice; for I had known Adelaide as a girl, and
loved her as a brother. I presented myself, explaining the cause of my
interest in their conversation, and found the news was only too
true. The gentlemen had just come from Southern Europe, and knew the
Montresors personally. He said that her mind was gone, even more
hopelessly than her health. She lingered eleven years in this sad state,
and then, happily for herself, died."

"And Rossini," I asked,--"how did he take her illness?"

"Oh, three years after his Venetian infatuation, he was off here in
Naples, worshipping the Spanish beauty, a little _passee_ to be sure, of
La Colbrand. She, however, possessed more lasting attractions than mere
physical ones. She had amassed a large fortune in a variety of ways.
Rossini was not over-nice; he wanted money most of all things, and he
carried off La Colbrand from her _cher ami_, the Neapolitan director of
San Carlo, and married her. It was a regular elopement, as if of a young
miss from her papa. Do not look so shocked. Rossini could not help his
changeability. You women always throw away a real gem, and receive, nine
times out of ten, a mock one in return. But the fault lies not with us,
but with you; you almost invariably select the wrong person. Now such
men as Montresor and I knew how to return a real gem for Adelaide's
heart-gift; but such men as Rossini have no real feelings in their
hearts."

"And you think she loved him?"

"I try to think otherwise, for I cannot bear to remember Adelaide
Montresor as an unworthy woman; and when the unwelcome thought will
thrust itself in, I think of her youth, her beauty, her genius, and
the sudden blinding effect that rapid prosperity and brilliant success
produce on an enthusiastic, warm temperament--Good-morning; to-morrow
let me come again, and we will go over 'Tancredi,' and I will sing with
you the '_Ah, se de' mali miei_.'"

My friend left me alone. I sat by the window, watching the waving of the
tasselled branches of the acacia, and the purple fiery vapor that arose
from the overflowing Vesuvius; and I thought of Adelaide Malanotte,
and wondered at the strange, fatal necessity attendant on genius, its
spiritual labor and pain. Like all things beautiful in Art, made by
human hands, it must proceed from toil of brain or heart. It takes
fierce heat to purify the gold, and welding beats are needed to mould
it into gracious shapes; the sharp chisel must cut into the marble,
to fashion by keen, driving blows the fair statue; the fine, piercing
instrument, "the little diamond-pointed ill," it is that traces the
forms of beauty on the hard onyx. There had been sorrow in the tale of
my friend, temptation at least, if not sinful yielding, labor and pain,
which had broken down the fair mind itself,--but it had all created a
gracious form for the memory to dwell on, an undying association with
the "Tancredi," as beautiful, instructive, and joy-giving as the "Divino
Amore" of Raphael, the exquisite onyx heads in the "Cabinet of Gems," or
that divine prelude the Englishman was at that moment pouring out from
his piano in a neighboring _palazzo_, in a flood of harmony as golden
and rich as the wine of Capri, every note of which, we know, had been a
life-drop wrung from the proud, breaking heart of Chopin, when he sat
alone, that solemn, stormy midnight, in the old convent-chamber at
Majorca. But the toil and suffering are forgotten in the enjoyment of
creation, and genius itself, when going down into the fiery baptism of
sorrow, or walking over the red-hot ploughshares of temptation, would
rather take all its suffering and peril than not be itself;--and well it
may; for it is making, what poor heart-broken Keats sung,

"A thing of beauty--a joy forever."

THE PROFESSOR AT THE BREAKFAST-TABLE.

WHAT HE SAID, WHAT HE HEARD, AND WHAT HE SAW.

Iris, her Book.

I pray thee by the soul of her that bore thee,
By thine own sister's spirit I implore thee,
Deal gently with the leaves that lie before thee!

For Iris had no mother to infold her,
Nor ever leaned upon a sister's shoulder,
Telling the twilight thoughts that Nature told her.

She had not learned the mystery of awaking
Those chorded keys that soothe a sorrow's aching,
Giving the dumb heart voice, that else were breaking.

Yet lived, wrought, suffered. Lo, the pictured token!
Why should her fleeting day-dreams fade unspoken,
Like daffodils that die with sheaths unbroken?

She knew not love, yet lived in maiden fancies,--
Walked simply clad, a queen of high romances,
And talked strange tongues with angels in her trances.

Twin-souled she seemed, a twofold nature wearing,--
Sometimes a flashing falcon in her daring,
Then a poor mateless dove that droops despairing.

Questioning all things: Why her Lord had sent her?
What were these torturing gifts, and wherefore lent her?
Scornful as spirit fallen, its own tormentor.

And then all tears and anguish: Queen of Heaven,
Sweet Saints, and Thou by mortal sorrows riven,
Save me! oh, save me! Shall I die forgiven?

And then--Ah, God! But nay, it little matters:
Look at the wasted seeds that autumn scatters
The myriad germs that Nature shapes and shatters!

If she had--Well! She longed, and knew not wherefore.
Had the world nothing she might live to care for?
No second self to say her evening prayer for?

She knew the marble shapes that set men dreaming,
Yet with her shoulders bare and tresses streaming
Showed not unlovely to her simple seeming.

Vain? Let it be so! Nature was her teacher.
What if a lonely and unsistered creature
Loved her own harmless gift of pleasing feature,

Saying, unsaddened,--This shall soon be faded,
And double-hued the shining tresses braided,
And all the sunlight of the morning shaded?

--This her poor book is full of saddest follies
Of tearful smiles and laughing melancholies,
With summer roses twined and wintry hollies.

In the strange crossing of uncertain chances,
Somewhere, beneath some maiden's tear-dimmed glances
May fall her little book of dreams and fancies.

Sweet sister! Iris, who shall never name thee,
Trembling for fear her open heart may shame thee,
Speaks from this vision-haunted page to claim thee.

Spare her, I pray thee! If the maid is sleeping,
Peace with her! she has had her hour of weeping.
No more! She leaves her memory in thy keeping.

These verses were written in the first leaves of the locked volume. As I
turned the pages, I hesitated for a moment. Is it quite fair to take
advantage of a generous, trusting impulse to read the unsunned depths of
a young girl's nature, which I can look through, as the balloon-voyagers
tell us they see from their hanging-baskets through the translucent
waters which the keenest eye of such as sail over them in ships might
strive to pierce in vain? Why has the child trusted _me_ with such
artless confessions,--self-revelations, which might be whispered by
trembling lips, under the veil of twilight, in sacred confessionals, but
which I cannot look at in the light of day without a feeling of wronging
a sacred confidence?

To all this the answer seemed plain enough after a little thought.
She did not know how fearfully she had disclosed herself; she was too
profoundly innocent. Her soul was no more ashamed than the fair shapes
that walked in Eden without a thought of over-liberal loveliness. Having
nobody to tell her story to,--having, as she said in her verses, no
musical instrument to laugh and cry with her,--nothing, in short, but
the language of pen and pencil,--all the veinings of her nature were
impressed on these pages, as those of a fresh leaf are transferred
to the blank sheets which inclose it. It was the same thing which I
remember seeing beautifully shown in a child of some four or five years
we had one day at our boarding-house. This child was a deaf mute. But
its soul had the inner sense that answers to hearing, and the shaping
capacity which through natural organs realizes itself in words. Only
it had to talk with its face alone; and such speaking eyes, such rapid
alternations of feeling and shifting expressions of thought as flitted
over its face, I have never seen in any other human countenance.

I wonder if something of spiritual _transparency_ is not typified in
the golden-_blonde_ organization. There are a great many little
creatures,--many small fishes, for instance,--that are literally
transparent, with the exception of some of the internal organs. The
heart can be seen beating as if in a case of clouded crystal. The
central nervous column with its sheath runs as a dark stripe through
the whole length of the diaphanous muscles of the body. Other little
creatures are so darkened with pigment that we can see only their
surface. Conspirators and poisoners are painted with black, beady eyes
and swarthy hue; Judas, in Leonardo's picture, is the model of them all.

However this may be, I should say there never had been a book like this
of Iris,--so full of the heart's silent language, so transparent that
the heart itself could be seen beating through it. I should say there
never could have been such a book, but for one recollection, which is
not peculiar to myself, but is shared by a certain number of my former
townsmen. If you think I overcolor this matter of the young girl's book,
hear this, which there are others, as I just said, besides myself, will
tell you is strictly true.

_The Book of the Three Maiden Sisters_.

In the town called Cantabridge, now a city, water-veined and
gas-windpiped, in the street running down to the Bridge, beyond which
dwelt Sally, told of in a book of a friend of mine, was of old a house
inhabited by three maidens. They left no near kinsfolk, I believe; if
they did, I have no ill to speak of them; for they lived and died in
all good report and maidenly credit. The house they lived in was of the
small, gambrel-roofed cottage pattern, after the shape of Esquires'
houses, but after the size of the dwellings of handicraftsmen. The lower
story was fitted up as a shop. Specially was it provided with one of
those half-doors now so rarely met with, which are to whole doors as
spencers worn by old folk are to coats. They speak of limited commerce
united with a social or observing disposition on the part of the
shopkeeper,--allowing, as they do, talk with passers-by, yet keeping off
such as have not the excuse of business to cross the threshold. On the
door-posts, at either side, above the half-door, hung certain perennial
articles of merchandise, of which my memory still has hanging among its
faded photographs a kind of netted scarf and some pairs of thick woollen
stockings. More articles, but not very many, were stored inside; and
there was one drawer, containing children's books, out of which I once
was treated to a minute quarto ornamented with handsome cuts. This was
the only purchase I ever _knew_ to be made at the shop kept by the three
maiden ladies, though it is probable there were others. So long as I
remember the shop, the same scarf and, I should say, the same stockings
hung on the door-posts.--[You think I am exaggerating again, and that
shopkeepers would not keep the same article exposed for years. Come to
me, the Professor, and I will take you in five minutes to a shop in this
city where I will show you an article hanging now in the very place
where more than _thirty years ago_ I myself inquired the price of it of
the present head of the establishment.]

The three maidens were of comely presence, and one of them had
had claims to be considered a Beauty. When I saw them in the old
meeting-house on Sundays, as they rustled in through the aisles in silks
and satins, not gay, but more than decent, as I remember them, I thought
of My Lady Bountiful in the history of "Little King Pippin," and of the
Madame Blaize of Goldsmith (who, by the way, may have taken the hint of
it from a pleasant poem, "Monsieur de la Palisse," attributed to De la
Monnoye, in the collection of French songs before me). There was some
story of an old romance in which the Beauty had played her part. Perhaps
they all had had lovers; for, as I said, they were shapely and seemly
personages, as I remember them; but their lives were out of the flower
and in the berry at the time of my first recollections.

One after another they all three dropped away, objects of kindly
attention to the good people round, leaving little or almost nothing,
and nobody to inherit it. Not absolutely nothing, of course. There must
have been a few old dresses,--perhaps some bits of furniture, a Bible,
and the spectacles the good old souls read it through, and little
keepsakes, such as make us cry to look at, when we find them in old
drawers;--such relics there must have been. But there was more. There
was a manuscript of some hundred pages, closely written, in which the
poor things had chronicled for many years the incidents of their daily
life. After their death it was passed round somewhat freely, and fell
into my hands. How I have cried and laughed and colored over it! There
was nothing in it to be ashamed of, perhaps there was nothing in it to
laugh at, but such a picture of the mode of being of poor simple good
old women I do believe was never drawn before. And there were all the
smallest incidents recorded, such as do really make up humble life, but
which die out of all mere literary memoirs, as the houses where the
Egyptians or the Athenians lived crumble and leave only their temples
standing. I know, for instance, that on a given day of a certain year,
a kindly woman, herself a poor widow, now, I trust, not without special
mercies in heaven for her good deeds,--for I read her name on a proper
tablet in the churchyard a week ago,--sent a fractional pudding from her
own table to the Maiden Sisters, who, I fear, from the warmth and detail
of their description, were fasting, or at least on short allowance,
about that time. I know who sent them the segment of melon, which in her
riotous fancy one of them compared to those huge barges to which we give
the ungracious name of mudscows. But why should I illustrate further
what it seems almost a breach of confidence to speak of? Some kind
friend, who could challenge a nearer interest than the curious strangers
into whose hands the book might fall, at last claimed it, and I was glad
that it should be henceforth sealed to common eyes. I learned from it
that every good and, alas! every evil act we do may slumber unforgotten
even in some earthly record. I got a new lesson in that humanity which
our sharp race finds it so hard to learn. The poor widow, fighting
hard to feed and clothe and educate her children, had not forgotten the
poorer ancient maidens. I remembered it the other day, as I stood by her
place of rest, and I felt sure that it was remembered elsewhere. I know
there are prettier words than _pudding_, but I can't help it,--the
pudding went upon the record, I feel sure, with the mite which was cast
into the treasury by that other poor widow whose deed the world shall
remember forever, and with the coats and garments which the good women
cried over, when Tabitha, called by interpretation Dorcas, lay dead in
the upper chamber, with her charitable needlework strewed around her.

* * * * *

----Such was the Book of the Maiden Sisters. You will believe me more
readily now when I tell you that I found the soul of Iris in the one
that lay open before me. Sometimes it was a poem that held it, sometimes
a drawing,--angel, arabesque, caricature, or a mere hieroglyphic
symbol of which I could make nothing. A rag of cloud on one page, as I
remember, with a streak of red zigzagging out of it across the paper as
naturally as a crack runs through a China bowl. On the next page a dead
bird,--some little favorite, I suppose; for it was worked out with a
special love, and I saw on the leaf that sign with which once or twice
in my life I have had a letter sealed,--a round spot where the paper is
slightly corrugated, and, if there is writing there, the letters are
somewhat faint and blurred. Most of the pages were surrounded with
emblematic traceries. It was strange to me at first to see how often she
introduced those homelier wild-flowers which we call _weeds_,--for it
seemed there was none of them too humble for her to love, and none too
little cared for by Nature to be without its beauty for her artist eye
and pencil. By the side of the garden-flowers,--of Spring's curled
darlings, the hyacinths, of rosebuds, dear to sketching maidens, of
flower-de-luces and morning-glories,--nay, oftener than these, and more
tenderly caressed by the colored brush that rendered them,--were those
common growths that fling themselves to be crushed under our feet and
our wheels, making themselves so cheap in this perpetual martyrdom that
we forget each of them is a ray of the Divine beauty.

Yellow japanned buttercups and star-disked dandelions,--just as we see
them lying in the grass, like sparks that have leaped from the kindling
sun of summer; the profuse daisy-like flower which whitens the fields,
to the great disgust of liberal shepherds, yet seems fair to loving
eyes, with its button-like mound of gold set round with milk-white rays;
the tall-stemmed succory, setting its pale blue flowers aflame, one
after another, sparingly, as the lights are kindled in the candelabra of
decaying palaces when the heirs of dethroned monarchs are dying out; the
red and white clovers; the broad, flat leaves of the plantain,--"the
white man's foot," as the Indians called it,--the wiry, jointed stems of
that iron creeping plant which we call "knot-_grass_" and which loves
its life so dearly that it is next to impossible to murder it with a
hoe, as it clings to the cracks of the pavement;--all these plants, and
many more, she wove into her fanciful garlands and borders.--On one of
the pages were some musical notes. I touched them from curiosity on a
piano belonging to one of our boarders. Strange! There are passages that
I have heard before, plaintive, full of some hidden meaning, as if
they were gasping for words to interpret them. She must have heard the
strains that have so excited my curiosity, coming from my neighbor's
chamber. The illuminated border she had traced round the page that held
these notes took the place of the words they seemed to be aching for.
Above, a long, monotonous sweep of waves, leaden-hued, anxious and jaded
and sullen, if you can imagine such an expression in water. On one side
an Alpine _needle_, as it were, of black basalt, girdled with snow. On
the other a threaded waterfall. The red morning-tint that shone in
the drops had something fearful,--one would say the cliff was
bleeding;--perhaps she did not mean it. Below, a stretch of sand, and
a solitary bird of prey, with his wings spread over some unseen
object.--And on the very next page a procession wound along, after the
fashion of that on the title-page of Fuller's "Holy War," in which I
recognized without difficulty every boarder at our table in all the
glory of the most resplendent caricature,--three only excepted,--the
Little Gentleman, myself, and one other.

I confess I did expect to see something that would remind me of the
girl's little deformed neighbor, if not portraits of him.--There is
a left arm again, though;--no,--that is from the "Fighting
Gladiator,"--the "_Jeune Heros combatiant_" of the Louvre;--there is the
broad ring of the shield. From a cast, doubtless. [The separate casts
of the "Gladiator's" arm look immense; but in its place the limb looks
light, almost slender,--such is the perfection of that miraculous
marble. I never felt as if I touched the life of the old Greeks until I
looked on that statue.]--Here is something very odd, to be sure. An Eden
of all the humped and crooked creatures! What could have been in her
head when she worked out such a fantasy? She has contrived to give them
all beauty or dignity or melancholy grace. A Bactrian camel lying under
a palm. A dromedary flashing up the sands,--spray of the dry ocean
sailed by the "ship of the desert." A herd of buffaloes, uncouth,
shaggy-maned, heavy in the forehand, light in the hind-quarter. [The
buffalo is the _lion_ of the ruminants.] And there is a Norman horse,
with his huge, rough collar, echoing, as it were, the natural form of
the other beast. And here are twisted serpents; and stately swans, with
answering curves in their bowed necks, as if they had snake's blood
under their white feathers; and grave, high-shouldered herons, standing
on one foot like cripples, and looking at life round them with the cold
stare of monumental effigies.--A very odd page indeed! Not a creature in
it without a curve or a twist, and not one of them a mean figure to look
at. You can make your own comment; I am fanciful, you know. I believe
she is trying to idealize what we vulgarly call deformity, which she
strives to look at in the light of one of Nature's eccentric curves,
belonging to her system of beauty, as the hyperbola and parabola belong
to the conic sections, though we cannot see them as symmetrical and
entire figures, like the circle and ellipse. At any rate, I cannot help
referring this paradise of twisted spines to some idea floating in
her head connected with her friend whom Nature has warped in the
moulding.--That is nothing to another transcendental fancy of mine. I
believe her soul thinks itself in his little crooked body at times,--if
it does not really get freed or half freed from her own. Did you ever
see a case of catalepsy? You know what I mean,--transient loss of sense,
will, and motion; body and limbs taking any position in which they are
put, as if they belonged to a lay-figure. She had been talking with him
and listening to him one day when the boarders moved from the table
nearly all at once. But she sat as before, her cheek resting on her
hand, her amber eyes wide open and still. I went to her,--she was
breathing as usual, and her heart was beating naturally enough,--but she
did not answer. I bent her arm; it was as plastic as softened wax, and
kept the place I gave it.--This will never do, though,--and I sprinkled
a few drops of water on her forehead. She started and looked round.--I
have been in a dream,--she said;--I feel as if all my strength were in
this arm;--give me your hand!--She took my right hand in her left, which
looked soft and white enough, but--Good Heaven! I believe she will crack
my bones! All the nervous power in her body must have flashed through
those muscles; as when a crazy lady snaps her iron window-bars,--she who
could hardly glove herself when in her common health. Iris turned pale,
and the tears came to her eyes;--she saw she had given pain. Then she
trembled, and might have fallen but for me;--the poor little soul
had been in one of those trances that belong to the spiritual pathology
of higher natures, mostly those of women.

To come back to this wondrous book of Iris. Two pages faced each other
which I took for symbolical expressions of two states of mind. On the
left hand, a bright blue sky washed over the page, specked with a single
bird. No trace of earth, but still the winged creature seemed to be
soaring upward and upward. Facing it, one of those black dungeons such
as Piranesi alone of all men has pictured. I am sure she must have
seen those awful prisons of his, out of which the Opium-Eater got his
nightmare vision, described by another as "cemeteries of departed
greatness, where monstrous and forbidden things are crawling and twining
their slimy convolutions among mouldering bones, broken sculpture, and
mutilated inscriptions." Such a black dungeon faced the page that held
the blue sky and the single bird; at the bottom of it something was
coiled,--what, and whether meant for dead or alive, my eyes could not
make out.

I told you the young girl's soul was in this book. As I turned over the
last leaves I could not help starting. There were all sorts of faces
among the arabesques which laughed and scowled in the borders that ran
round the pages. They had mostly the outline of childish or womanly or
manly beauty, without very distinct individuality. But at last it seemed
to me that some of them were taking on a look not wholly unfamiliar to
me; there were features that did not seem new.--Can it be so? Was there
ever such innocence in a creature so full of life? She tells her heart's
secrets as a three-years-old child betrays itself without need of being
questioned! This was no common miss, such as are turned out in scores
from the young-lady-factories, with parchments warranting them
accomplished and virtuous,--in case anybody should question the fact. I
began to understand her;--and what is so charming as to read the secret
of a real _femme incomprise_?-for such there are, though they are not
the ones who think themselves uncomprehended women.

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