Stray Studies from England and Italy Part 4

CHILDREN BY THE SEA.

Autumn brings its congresses--scientific, ecclesiastical, archaeological--but the prettiest of autumnal congresses is the children's congress by the sea. It is like a leap from prose into poetry when we step away from a.s.sociations and Inst.i.tutes, from stuffy lecture-rooms and dismal sections, to the strip of sand which the children have chosen for their annual gathering. Behind us are the great white cliffs, before us the reach of grey waters with steamers and their smoke-trail in the offing and waves was.h.i.+ng lazily in upon the sh.o.r.e.

And between sea and cliff are a world of little creatures, digging, dabbling, delighted. What strikes us at first sight is the number of them. In ordinary life we meet the great host of children in detail, as it were; we kiss our little ones in the morning, we tumble over a perambulator, we dodge a hoop, we pat back a ball. Child after child meets us, but we never realize the world of children till we see it ma.s.sed upon the sands. Children of every age, from the baby to the schoolboy; big children and tiny children, weak little urchins with pale cheeks and plump little urchins with st.u.r.dy legs; children of all tempers, from the screeching child in arms to the quiet child sitting placid and gazing out of large grey eyes; gay little madcaps paddling at the water's edge; busy children, idle children, children careful of their dress, hoydens covered with sand and seaweed, wild children, demure children--all are mustered in the great many-coloured camp between the cliffs and the sea.

It is their holiday as it is ours, but what is a mere refreshment to us is life to them. What a rapture of freedom looks up at us out of the little faces that watch us as we thread our way from group to group! The mere change of dress is a revolution in the child's existence. These brown-holland frocks, rough sunshades, and sandboots, these clothes that they may wet and dirty and tear as they like, mean deliverance from endless dressings--dressings for breakfast and dressings for lunch, dressings to go out with mamma and dressings to come down to dessert--an escape from fas.h.i.+onable little shoes and tight little hats and stiff little flounces that it is treason to rumple. There is an inexpressible triumph in their return at eventide from the congress by the sea, dishevelled, bedraggled, but with no fear of a scolding from nurse. Then too there is the freedom from "lessons." There are no more of those dreadful maps along the wall, no French exercises, no terrible arithmetic. The elder girls make a faint show of keeping up their practising, but the goody books which the governess packed carefully at the bottom of their boxes remain at the bottom unopened. There is no time for books, the grave little faces protest to you; there is only time for the sea. That is why they hurry over breakfast to get early to the sands, and are moody and restless at the length of luncheon. It is a hopeless business to keep them at home; they yawn over picture-books, they quarrel over croquet, they fall asleep over draughts. Home is just now only an interlude of sleeping or dining in the serious business of the day.

The one interest of existence is in the sea. Its novelty, its vastness, its life, dwarf everything else in the little minds beside it. There is the endless watching for the s.h.i.+ps, the first peep at the little dot on the horizon, the controversies as it rises about its masts or its flag, the questions as to where it is coming from and where it is going to.

There is the endless speculation on the tide, the doubt every morning whether it is coming in or going out, the wonder of its perpetual advance or retreat, the whispered tales of children hemmed in between it and the cliffs, the sense of a mysterious life, the sense of a mysterious danger. Above all there is the sense of a mysterious power.

The children wake as the wind howls in the night, or the rain dashes against the window panes, to tell each other how the waves are leaping high over the pier and s.h.i.+ps tearing to pieces on reefs far away. So charming and yet so terrible, the most playful of playfellows, the most awful of possible destroyers, the child's first consciousness of the greatness and mystery of the world around him is embodied in the sea.

It is amusing to see the precision with which the children's congress breaks up into its various sections. The most popular and important is that of the engineers. The little members come toddling down from the cliffs with a load of implements, shouldering rake and spade, and dangling tiny buckets from their arms. One little group makes straight for its sand-hole of yesterday, and is soon busy with huge heaps and mounds which are to take the form of a castle. A crowing little urchin beside is already waving the Union Jack which is ready to crown the edifice, if the Fates ever suffer it to be crowned. Engineers of less military taste are busy near the water's edge with an elaborate system of reservoirs and ca.n.a.ls, and greeting with shouts of triumph the admission of the water to miniature little harbours. A corps of absolutely unscientific labourers are simply engaged in digging the deepest hole they can, and the blue nets over their sunshades are alone visible above the edge of the excavation. It is delightful to watch the industry, the energy, the absolute seriousness and conviction of the engineers. Sentries warn you off from the limits of the fortress; you are politely asked to "please take care," as your clumsy foot strays along the delicate brink of the ca.n.a.l. Suggestions that have a mechanical turn about them, hints on the best way of reaching the water or the possibility of a steeper slope for the sand-walls, are listened to with attention and respect. You are rewarded by an invitation which allows you to witness the very moment when the d.y.k.e is broken and the sea admitted into basin and ca.n.a.l, or the yet more ecstatic moment when the Union Jack waves over the completed castle.

Indolence and adventure charm the dabblers, as industry absorbs the engineers. The sands are of all earthly spots the most delightful; but a greater delight than any earthly spot can afford awaits the dabbler in the sea. It is mostly the girls who dabble; the gaiety and frolic suit them better than the serious industry of castles and ca.n.a.ls. Deliverance from shoes and stockings, the first thrill of pleasure and surprise at the cool touch of the water, the wild rush along the brim, the dainty advance till the sea covers the little ankles, the tremulous waiting with an air of defiance as the wave deepens round till it touches the knee, the firm line with which the dabblers grasp hand in hand and face the advancing tide, the sudden panic, the break, the disorderly flight, the tears and laughter, the run after the wave as it retreats again, the fresh advance and defiance--this is the paradise of the dabbler. Hour after hour, with clothes tucked round their waist and a lavish display of stout little legs, the urchins wage their mimic warfare with the sea. Meanwhile the scientific section is encamped upon the rocks. With torn vestments and bruised feet the votaries of knowledge are peeping into every little pool, detecting mussel-sh.e.l.ls, picking up seaweed, hunting for anemones. A shout of triumph from the tiny adventurer who has climbed over the rough rock-shelf announces that he has secured a prize for the gla.s.s jar at home, where the lumps of formless jelly burst into rosy flowers with delicate tendrils waving gently round them for food. A cry of woe tells of some infantile Whymper who has lost his hold on an Alpine rock-edge some six inches high. Knowledge has its difficulties as well as its dangers, and the difficulty of forming a rock-section in the face of the stern opposition of mothers and nurses is undoubtedly great. Still, formed it is, and science furnishes a goodly company of votaries and martyrs to the congress by the sea.

But of course the naval section bears away the palm. It is for the most part composed of the elder boys and of a few girls who would be boys if they could. Its members all possess a hopeless pa.s.sion for the sea, and besiege their mothers for promises that their future life shall be that of middies. They wear straw hats and loose blue s.h.i.+rts, and affect as much of the sailor in their costume as they can. Each has a boat, or as they call it a "vessel," and the build and rig of these vessels is a subject of constant discussion and rivalry in the section. Much critical inquiry is directed to the propriety of Arthur's jib, or the necessity of "ballasting" or pouring a little molten lead into Edward's keel. The launch of a new vessel is the event of the week. The coast-guardsman is brought in to settle knotty questions of naval architecture and equipment, and the little seamen listen to his verdicts, his yarns, the records of his voyages, with a wondering reverence. They ask knowingly about the wind and the prospects of the weather; they submit to his higher knowledge their theories as to the nature and destination of each vessel that pa.s.ses; they come home with a store of naval phrases which are poured recklessly out over the tea-table. The pier is a favourite haunt of the naval section. They delight in sitting on rough coils of old rope. Nothing that is of the sea comes amiss to them. "I like the smell of tar," shouts a little enthusiast. They tell tales among themselves of the life of a middie and the fun of the "fo-castle," and watch the waves leaping up over the pier-head with a wild longing to sing 'Rule Britannia.' Every s.h.i.+p in the offing is a living thing to them, and the appearance of a man-of-war sends them sleepless to bed.

There is but one general meeting of the children's congress, and that is in front of the bathing-machines. Rows of little faces wait for their turn, watching the dash of the waves beneath the wheels, peeping at the black-robed figures who are bobbing up and down in the sea, half longing for their dip, half shrinking as the inevitable moment comes nearer and nearer, das.h.i.+ng forward joyously at last as the door opens and the bathing woman's "Now, my dear," summons them to the quaint little box.

One lingers over the sight as one lingers over a bed of flowers. There is all the fragrance, the colour, the sweet caprice, the wilfulness, the delight of childhood in the tiny figures that meet us on the return from their bath, with dancing eyes and flushed cheeks and hair streaming over their shoulders. What a hero the group finds in the urchin who never cries! With what envy they regard the big sister who never wants to come out of the water! It is pleasant to listen to their prattle as they stroll over the sands with a fresh life running through every vein, to hear their confession of fright at the first dip, their dislike of putting their head under water, their chaff of the delicate little sister who "will only bathe with mamma." Mammas are always good-humoured by the sea; papas come out of their eternal newspaper and toss the wee brats on their shoulders, uncles drop down on the merry little group with fresh presents every day. The restraint, the distance of home vanishes with the practical abolition of the nursery and the schoolroom.

Home, schoolroom, nursery, all are crammed together in the little c.o.c.klesh.e.l.l of a boat where the little ones are packed round father and mother and tossing gaily over the waves. What endless fun in the rising and falling, the creaking of the sail, the gruff voice of the boatman, the sight of the distant cliffs, the flock of sea-gulls nestling in the wave-hollows! The little ones trail their hands in the cool water and fancy they see mermaids in the cool green depths. The big boy watches the boatman and studies navigation. The little brother dips a hook now and then in a fond hope of whiting. The tide has come in ere they return, and the little voyagers are lifted out, tired and sleepy, in the boatman's arms, to dream that night of endless sailings over endless seas.

It is a terrible morning that brings the children news of their recall to the smoke and din of town. They wander for a last visit down to the beach, listen for the last time to the young bandit in his Spanish sombrero who charms the nursery-maids with lays of love, club their pence for a last interview with the itinerant photographer. It is all over; the sands are thinner now, group after group is breaking up, autumn is dying into winter, and rougher winds are blowing over the sea.

But the sea is never too rough for the little ones. With hair blown wildly about their faces they linger disconsolately along the brink, count the boats they shall never see again, make pilgrimages to the rock caves to tell its separate story of enjoyment in each of them, and fling themselves with a last kiss on the dear, dear sands! Then they shoulder their spade and rake, and with one fond look at the cliffs turn their backs on the sea. But the sea is with them still, even when the crowded train has whirled them far from waves that the white gull skims over.

They have their tales of it to tell to their governess, their memories of it to count over before they fall asleep, their dreams of it as they lie asleep, their hopes of seeing it again when weary winter and spring and summer have at last slipped away. They listen to stories of wrecks, and find a halfpenny for the sham sailor who trolls his ballads in the street. Now and then they look lovingly at the s.h.i.+ps and the sand-buckets piled away in the play-cupboard. So with one abiding thought at their little hearts the long days glide away till autumn finds them again children by the sea.

THE FLORENCE OF DANTE.

The one story in the history of the modern world which rivals in concentrated interest the story of Athens is the story of Florence in the years just before and after the opening of the fourteenth century--the few years, that is, of its highest glory in freedom, in letters, in art. Never since the days of Pericles had such a varied outburst of human energy been summed up in so short a s.p.a.ce.

Architecture reared the n.o.ble monuments of the Duomo and Santa Croce.

Cimabue revolutionized painting, and then "the cry was Giotto's."

Italian poetry, preluded by the canzonets of Guido Cavalcanti and his rivals, rose to its fullest grandeur in the 'Commedia' of Dante. Italian prose was born in the works of Malaspina and Dino. Within, the Florentines worked out patiently and bravely amidst a thousand obstacles the problem of free and popular government. Without, they covered sea and land with their commerce; their agents supplied the Papal treasury, while private firms were already beginning that career of vast foreign loans which at a later time enabled the victor of Crecy to equip his armies with Florentine gold.

We can only realize the att.i.tude of Florence at this moment by its contrast with the rest of Europe. It was a time when Germany was sinking down into feudal chaos under the earlier Hapsburgs. The system of despotic centralization invented by St. Louis and perfected by Philippe le Bel was crus.h.i.+ng freedom and vigour out of France. If Parliamentary life was opening in England, literature was dead, and a feudalism which had become embittered by the new forms of law which the legal spirit of the age gave it was pressing harder and harder on the peasantry. Even in Italy Florence stood alone. The South lay crushed beneath the oppression of its French conquerors. In the North the earlier communal freedom had already made way for the rule of tyrants when it was just springing into life in the city by the Arno. For it is noteworthy that of all the cities of Italy Florence is the most modern. Genoa and Pisa had been rivals in commercial activity a hundred years before the merchants of Florence were known out of Tuscany. Sicily had caught the gift of song from the Provencal troubadours half a century before the Florentine singers. Too insignificant to share in the great struggle of the Empire and the Papacy, among the last to be divided into Guelph and Ghibelline, Florence emerged into communal greatness when that of Milan or Bologna was already in decay.

The City of the Lily came late to the front to inherit and give fresh vigour to the gifts of all. As the effigies of Byzantine art became living men and women beneath the pencil of Giotto, so the mere imitative poetry of the Sicilian Court became Italian literature in Dante and Boccaccio. Freedom, slow as it seemed in awakening, nowhere awakened so grandly, nowhere fought so long and stubbornly for life. Dino Compagni sets us face to face with this awakening, with this patient pitiful struggle. His 'Chronicle' indeed has been roughly attacked of late by the sweeping scepticism of German critics, but the attack has proved an unsuccessful one. The strongest evidence of its genuineness indeed lies in the impression of a distinct personality which is left on us by a simple perusal of the 'Chronicle' itself. Some of its charm no doubt rises from the nave simplicity of Dino's story-telling. With him and with his contemporaries, Malaspina, Dante, and Villani, Italian prose begins; and we can hardly fancy a better training in style for any young Italian than to be brought face to face in Dino with the nervous picturesque accents that marked the birth of his mother-tongue. But the charm is more one of character than one of style. Throughout we feel the man, a man whose temper is so strongly and clearly marked in its contrast with so reflective a temper as Villani's that the German theory which makes his chronicle a mere cento from the later work hardly needs discussion. Dino has the quaint directness, the dramatic force, the tenderness of Froissart, but it is a n.o.bler and more human tenderness; a pity not for the knight only, but for knight and burgher as well. The sham tinsel of chivalry which flutters over the pages of the gay Canon of Liege is exchanged in Dino for a manly patriotism, a love of civic freedom, of justice, of religion. In his quiet way he is a great artist.

There is an Herodotean picturesqueness as well as an Herodotean simplicity in such a picture as that of Dante's first battle-field, the Florentine victory of Campaldino:--

"On the appointed day the men of Florence advanced their standards to go into the enemies' land, and pa.s.sed by Casentino along an ill road where, had the enemy found them, they had received no little damage; but such was not the will of G.o.d. And they came near to Bibbiena, at a place called Campaldino where was the enemy, and there they halted in array of battle. The captains of war sent the light-armed foot to the front; and each man's s.h.i.+eld, with a red lily on a white ground, was stretched out well before him. Then the Bishop, who was short-sighted, asked, 'Those there: what walls be they?' They answered him, 'The s.h.i.+elds of the enemy.' Messer Barone de' Mangiadori da San Miniato, a chevalier frank and well skilled in deeds of arms, gathered his men-at-arms together and said to them, 'My masters, in Tuscan wars men were wont to conquer by making a stout onset, and that lasted but a while, and few men died, for it was not in use to kill.

Now is the fas.h.i.+on changed, and men conquer by holding their ground stoutly, wherefore I counsel you that ye stand firm and let them a.s.sault you.' And so they settled to do. The men of Arezzo made their onset with such vigour and so great force that the body of the Florentines fell back not a little. The fight was hard and keen. Messer Corso Donati with a brigade of the men of Pistoja charged the enemy in flank; the quarrels from the crossbows poured down like rain; the men of Arezzo had few of them, and were withal charged in flank where they were exposed; the air was covered with clouds, and there was a very great dust. Then the footmen of Arezzo set themselves to creep under the bellies of the horses, knife in hand, and disembowelled them, and some of them penetrated so far that in the very midst of the battalion were many dead of either part.

Many that were counted of great prowess were shown vile that day, and many of whom none spoke word won honour.... The men of Arezzo were broken, not by cowardice or little prowess, but by the greater number of their enemies were they put to the rout and slain. The soldiers of Florence that were used to fighting slew them; the villeins had no pity."

"Pity" is almost the characteristic word of Dino Compagni--pity alike for foe or friend; for the warriors of Arezzo or the starved-out patriots of Pistoja as well as for the heroes of his own Florence; pity for the victims of her feuds, and even for the men who drove them into exile; pity, most of all, for Florence herself. We read his story indeed at first with a strange sense of disappointment and surprise. To the modern reader the story of Florence in the years which Dino covers is above all the story of Dante. As the 'Chronicle' jots patiently down the hopes and fears, the failures and successes of the wiser citizens in that struggle for order and good government which brought Dante to his long exile, we feel ourselves standing in the very midst of events out of which grew the threefold Poem of the After-World and face to face with the men who front us in the 'Inferno' and 'Paradise.' But this is not the world Dino stands in. Of what seem to us the greater elements of the life around him he sees and tells us nothing. Of art or letters his 'Chronicle' says never a word. The name of Dante is mentioned but once and then without a syllable of comment. It is not in Dante that Dino interests himself: his one interest, his one pa.s.sion is Florence.

And yet as we read page after page a new interest in the story grows on us, the interest that Dino himself felt in the tragedy around him. Our sympathies go with that earnest group of men to which he belonged, men who struggled honestly to reconcile freedom and order in a State torn with antipathies of the past, with jealousies and ambitions and feuds of the present. The terrible sadness of the 'Divina Commedia' becomes more intelligible as we follow step by step the ruin of those hopes for his country which Dante entertained as well as Dino. And beyond this interest there is the social picture of the Florence of the fourteenth century itself, its strange medley of past and present, the old world of feudalism jostling with the new world of commerce, the trader elbowing the n.o.ble and the artisan the trader, an enthusiastic mystical devotion jealous of the new cla.s.sicalism or the scepticism of men like Guido Cavalcanti, the petty rivalries of great houses alternating with large schemes of public policy, the tenderest poetry with brutal outrage and l.u.s.t, the art of Giotto with the slow, patient bloodthirst of the vendetta.

What was the cause--the question presses on us through every page of Dino or of Dante--what was the cause of that ruin which waited in Florence as in every Italian city on so short a burst of freedom? What was it that foiled alike the counsel of statesmen and the pa.s.sionate love of liberty in the people at large? What was it which drove Dante into exile and stung the simple-hearted Dino into a burst of eloquent despair? The answer--if we set aside the silly talk about "democracy"

and look simply at the facts themselves--is a very simple one. The ruin of Florentine liberty, like the ruin of liberty elsewhere throughout Italy, lay wholly with its _n.o.blesse_. It was equally perilous for an Italian town to leave its n.o.bles without the walls or to force them to reside within. In their own robber-holds or their own country estates they were a scourge to the trader whose wains rolled temptingly past their walls. Florence, like its fellow Italian States, was driven to the demolition of the feudal castles, and to enforcing the residence of their lords within its own civic bounds. But the danger was only brought nearer home. Excluded by civic jealousy, wise or unwise, from all share in munic.i.p.al government, their huge palazzi rose like fortresses in every quarter of the city. Within them lay the n.o.ble, a wild beast all the fiercer for his confinement in so narrow a den, with the old tastes, hatreds, preferences utterly unchanged, at feud as of old with his fellow-n.o.bles, knit to them only by a common scorn of the burghers and the burgher life around them, stung to madness by his exclusion from all rule in the commonwealth, bitter, revengeful, with the wilfulness of a child, shameless, false, unprincipled.

The story which lies at the opening of the great feud between Guelph and Ghibelline in Florence throws a picturesque light on the temper of its n.o.bility. Buondelmonte, the betrothed lover of a daughter of Oderigo Giantrufetti, pa.s.ses beneath a palace of the Donati at whose window stands Madonna Aldruda with her two fair daughters. Seeing him pa.s.s by Aldruda calls aloud to him, pointing with her finger to the damsel by her side. "Whom have you taken to wife?" she says, "This is the wife I kept for you." The damsel pleased the youth, but his troth bound him, and he answered, "I can wed none other, now at any rate!" "Yes," cried Aldruda, "for I will pay the penalty for thee." "Then will I have her,"

said Buondelmonte. "Cosa fatta capo ha," was the famous comment of the outraged house--"stone dead has no fellow"--and as Dino puts it, in the most ordinary way in the world, "they settled to kill him the day he was to have married the damsel, and so they did." "Kill, kill," echoes everywhere through the story of these Florentine n.o.bles. a.s.sa.s.sination is an event of every day. Corso Donati sends murderers to kill an enemy among the Cerchi. Guido Cavalcanti strives to stab Corso in the back as he pa.s.ses him. Where the dagger fails, they try poison without scruple.

The best of them decline a share in a murder much as an Irish peasant may decline a share in an agrarian outrage, with a certain delicacy and readiness to stand by and see it done. When the a.s.sa.s.sination of the Bishop of Arezzo was decided on, Guglielmo da Pazzi, who was in the counsel, protested "he would have been content had it been done without his knowledge, but were the question put to him he might not be guilty of his blood."

Among such men even Corso Donati towers into a certain grandeur:--

"Knight he was of great valour and renown, gentle of blood and manners, of a most fair body even to old age, comely in figure, with delicate features, and a white skin; a pleasing, prudent, and eloquent speaker; one who ever aimed at great ends; friend and comrade of great lords and n.o.bles; a man too of many friends and great fame throughout all Italy. Foe he was of the people and its leaders; the darling of soldiers, full of evil devices, evil-hearted, cunning."

Such was the man who drove Dante into exile:--

"Who for his pride was called 'Il Barone,' so that when he pa.s.sed through the land many cried 'Viva Il Barone!' and the land seemed all his own."

He stood not merely at the head of the Florentine n.o.bility, but at the head of the great Guelph organization which extended from city to city throughout Tuscany--a league with its own leaders, its own policy, its own treasure. In the attempt to seize this treasure for the general service of the State the most popular of Florentine leaders, Giano della Bella, had been foiled and driven into exile. An honest attempt to secure the peace of the city by the banishment of Corso and his friends brought about the exile of Dante. It is plain that powerless as they were before the united forces of the whole people the n.o.bles were strong enough by simply biding their time and availing themselves of popular divisions to crush one opponent after another. And yet the struggle against them was one of life and death for the city. No atom of the new civilization, the new spirit of freedom or humanity, seems to have penetrated among them. Behind the gloomy walls of their city fortresses they remained the mere murderous tyrants of a brutal feudalism. "I counsel, lords, that we free ourselves from this slavery," cried Berto Frescobaldi to his brother n.o.bles in the church of San Jacopo; "let us arm ourselves and run on to the Piazza, and there kill friend and foe alike as many as we find, so that neither we nor our children be ever subject to them more." Those who, like Sismondi, censure the sternness of the laws which pressed upon the n.o.bles forget what wild beasts they were intended to hold down. Their outbreaks were the blind outbreaks of mere ruffians. The victory of Corso over Dante and the wiser citizens was followed by a carnival of bloodshed, firing of houses, pillage and lawlessness which wrings from Dino curses as bitter as those of the 'Inferno.'

From the hopeless task of curbing the various elements of disorder by the single force of each isolated city the wiser and more patriotic among the men of that day turned in despair to the Empire. Guelph and Ghibelline, Papalist and Imperialist, were words which as Dante saw had now lost their old meaning. In the twelfth century the Emperor was at once the foe of religion and the one obstacle to the rising freedom of the towns. In the fourteenth that freedom had either perished by its own excesses, or, as at Florence, was strong enough to defy even an Imperial a.s.sailant. Religion found its bitterest enemy in such a Pope as Boniface VIII., or the church over which he ruled. Whatever might have been its fortune under happier circ.u.mstances, the great experiment of democratic self-government, of free and independent city-states, had failed, whether from the wars of city with city, or from the civil feuds that rent each in sunder. The papacy could furnish no centre of union; its old sanct.i.ty was gone, its greed and worldliness weakened it every day.

On the other hand, the remembrance of the tyranny of Barbarossa, of the terrible struggle by which the peace of Constance had been won, had grown faint and dim in the course of years. It was long since Italy had seen an Emperor at all.

But the old Ghibellinism had recovered new vigour from an unlooked-for quarter. As the revival of the Roman law had given an artificial prestige to the Empire in the twelfth century, so the revival of cla.s.sical literature threw a new halo around it in the fourteenth. To Dante, penetrated with the greater Latin authors, Henry of Luxemburg is no stranger from over the Alps, but the descendant of the Augustus whom his own Vergil had loved and sung. The same cla.s.sical feeling tells on Dino. With him Florence is "the daughter of Rome." The pages of Sall.u.s.t and of Livy have stirred him to undertake her annals. "The remembrance of ancient histories has long spurred my mind to write the events, full of danger yet reaching to no prosperous end, that this n.o.ble city, daughter of Rome, has encountered." It was the same sense that united with his own practical appreciation of the necessities of the time in his impatient longing for the intervention of the new Emperor. As Prior, Dino had acted the part of a brave and honest man, striving to conciliate party with party, refusing to break the law, chased at last with the rest of the magistracy from the Palace of the Signory by the violence of Corso Donati and the n.o.bles. If he did not share Dante's exile, he had at any rate acted with Dante in the course of policy which brought that penalty on him. Both were Priors together in 1300; both have the same pa.s.sionate love of Florence, the same haughty disdain of the factions that tore it to pieces. If the appeal of Dino to his fellows in Santa Trinita is less thrilling than the verse of Dante, it has its own pathetic force:--"My masters, why will ye confound and undo so good a city? Against whom do ye will to fight? Against your brethren?

What victory will ye gain?--none other than weeping!" The words fell on deaf ears, and the smoke of burning streets, slaughter, and exile forced Dino to look to the stranger. There is something strangely touching in the dry, pa.s.sionless way in which he tracks Henry of Luxemburg from city to city, the fire of his real longing only breaking out here and there in pettish outbursts at each obstacle the Emperor finds. The weary waiting came to nothing. Dino leaves us still looking for Henry's coming; Dante tells us of the death that dashed all hope to the ground.

Even in the hour of his despair the poet could console himself by setting his "divino Arrigo" in the regions of the blest. What comfort the humble chronicler found whose work we have been studying none can know.

b.u.t.tERCUPS.

It is not the least debt we owe to the holidays that they give us our b.u.t.tercups back again. Few faces have stirred us with a keener touch of pity through the whole of the season than the face of the pale, awkward girl who slips by us now and then on the stairs, a face mutinous in revolt against its imprisonment in brick and mortar, dull with the boredom of the schoolroom, weary of the formal walk, the monotonous drive, the inevitable practice on that hated piano, the perpetual round of lessons from the odd creatures who leave their odder umbrellas in the hall. It is amazingly pleasant to meet the same little face on the lawn, and to see it blooming with new life at the touch of freedom and fresh air. It blooms with a sense of individuality, a sense of power. In the town the b.u.t.tercup was n.o.body, silent, unnoticed, lost in the bustle and splendour of elder sisterdom. Here among the fields and the hedges she is queen. Her very laugh, the reckless shout that calls for mamma's frown and dooms the governess to a headache, rings out like a claim of possession. Here in her own realm she rushes at once to the front, and if we find ourselves enjoying a scamper over the common or a run down the hill-side, it is the b.u.t.tercup that leads the way.

All the silent defiance of her town bondage vanishes in the chatty familiarities of home. She has a story about the elm and the pond, she knows where Harry landed the trout last year, she is intimate with the keeper, and hints to us his mysterious hopes about the pheasants. She is great in short cuts through the woods, and has made herself wondrous lurking-places which she betrays under solemn promises of secrecy. She is a friend of every dog about the place, and if the pony lies nearest to her heart her lesser affections range over a world of favourites. It is hard to remember the pale, silent, schoolgirl of town in the vivid, chatty little b.u.t.tercup who hurries one from the parrot to the pigeon, from the stables to the farm, and who knows and describes the merits of every hound in the kennels.

It is natural enough, that the dethroned beauties who meet us at luncheon should wonder at our enthusiasm for nymphs of bread-and-b.u.t.ter, and ask with a certain severity of scorn the secret of our happy mornings. The secret is simply that the b.u.t.tercup is at home, and that with the close of her bondage comes a grace and a naturalness that take her out of the realms of bread-and-b.u.t.ter. However difficult it may be for her maturer rivals to abdicate, it is the b.u.t.tercup in fact who gives the tone to the holidays. There is a subtle contagion about pleasure, and it is from her that we catch the sense of largeness and liberty and physical enjoyment that gives a new zest to life. She laughs at our moans about suns.h.i.+ne as she laughs at our moans about mud, till we are as indifferent to mud and suns.h.i.+ne as she is herself. The whole atmosphere of our life is in fact changed, and it is amusing to recognize how much of the change we owe to the b.u.t.tercup.

It is impossible perhaps to be whirled in this fas.h.i.+on out of the whisperings and boredoms of town without longing to know a little more of the pretty magician who works this wonderful transformation scene.

But it is no easy matter to know much of the b.u.t.tercup. Her whole charm lies in her freedom from self-consciousness; she has a reserved force of shyness behind all her familiarity, and of a very defiant sort of shyness. Her character in fact is one of which it is easier to feel the beauty than to a.n.a.lyse or describe it. Like all transitional phases, girlhood is full of picturesque inequalities, strange slumbers of one faculty and stranger developements of another; full of startling effects, of contrasts and surprises, of light and shade, that no other phase of life affords. Unconsciously month after month drifts the b.u.t.tercup on to womanhood; consciously she lives in the past of the child. She comes to us trailing clouds of glory--as Wordsworth sings--from her earlier existence, from her home, her schoolroom, her catechism. The girl of twenty summers whose faith has been wrecked by clerical croquet looks with amazement on the implicit faith which the b.u.t.tercup retains in the clergy. Even on the curate, shy and awkward as he is, she looks as on a being sacred and ineffable. Perhaps his very shyness and awkwardness creates a sympathy between the two, and rouses a keener remorse for her yawns under his sermons and a keener grat.i.tude for the heavenly generosity with which he bestowed on her the confirmation ticket. Free as she is from fancies, her conception of the daily life of her clergyman shows amusingly enough that she can attain a very fair pitch of idealism. We remember the story of a certain parson of our acquaintance who owned to a meek little b.u.t.tercup his habit of carrying a book in his pocket for reading in leisure hours. "Ah, yes,"

replied the eager little auditor, with a hush of real awe in her voice--"the Bible, of course! Unluckily," it was the _Physiologie du Gout_.

Still more does the sister of a couple of seasons wonder at the ardour and fidelity of b.u.t.tercup friends.h.i.+ps. In after-life men have friends and women have lovers. The home and the husband and the child absorb the whole tenderness of a woman where they only temper and moderate the old external affections of her spouse. But then girl-friends.h.i.+p is a much more vivid and far more universal thing than friends.h.i.+p among boys. The one means, in nine cases out of ten, an accident of neighbourhood in school that fades with the next remove, or a partners.h.i.+p in some venture, or a common attachment to some particular game. But the school friends.h.i.+p of a girl is a pa.s.sionate idolatry and devotion of friend for friend. Their desks are full of little gifts to each other. They have pet names that no strange ear may know, and hidden photographs that no strange eye may see. They share all the innocent secrets of their hearts, they are fondly interested in one another's brothers, they plan subtle devices to wear the same ribbons and to dress their hair in the same fas.h.i.+on. No amount of affection ever made a boy like the business of writing his friend a letter in the holidays, but half the charm of holidays to a girl lies in the letters she gets and the letters she sends. Nothing save friends.h.i.+p itself is more sacred to girlhood than a friend's letter; nothing more exquisite than the pleasure of stealing from the breakfast-table to kiss it and read it, and then tie it up with the rest that lie in the nook that n.o.body knows but the one pet brother.

The pet brother is as necessary an element in b.u.t.tercup life as the friend. He is generally the dullest, the most awkward, the most silent of the family group. He takes all this sisterly devotion as a matter of course, and half resents it as a matter of boredom. He is fond of informing his adorer that he hates girls, that they are always kissing and crying, and that they can't play cricket. The b.u.t.tercup rushes away to pour out her woes to her little nest in the woods, and hurries back to wors.h.i.+p as before. Girlhood indeed is the one stage of feminine existence in which woman has brothers. Her first season out digs a gulf between their sister and "the boys" of the family that nothing can fill up. Henceforth the latter are useful to get tickets for her, to carry her shawls, to drive her to Goodwood or to Lord's. In the mere fetching and carrying business they sink into the general ruck of cousins, grumbling only a little more than cousins usually do at the luck that dooms them to hew wood and draw water for the belle of the season. But in the pure equality of earlier days the b.u.t.tercup shares half the games and all the secrets of the boys about her, and brotherhood and sisterhood are very real things indeed.

Unluckily the holidays pa.s.s away, and the b.u.t.tercup pa.s.ses away like the holidays. There is a strange humour about the subtle gradations by which girlhood pa.s.ses out of all this free, genial, irreflective life into the self-consciousness, the reserve, the artificiality of womanhood. It is the sudden discovery of a new sense of enjoyment that first whirls the b.u.t.tercup out of her purely family affections. She laughs at the wors.h.i.+p of her new adorer. She is as far as Dian herself from any return of it; but the sense of power is awakened, and she has a sort of Puckish pride in bringing her suitor to her feet. n.o.body is so exacting, so capricious, so uncertain, so fascinating as a b.u.t.tercup, because no one is so perfectly free from love. The first touch of pa.s.sion renders her more exacting and more charming than ever. She resents the suspicion of a tenderness whose very novelty scares her, and she visits her resentment on her wors.h.i.+pper. If he enjoys a kind farewell overnight, he atones for it by the coldest greeting in the morning. There are days when the b.u.t.tercup runs amuck among her adorers, days of snubbing and sarcasm and bitterness. The poor little bird beats savagely against the wires that are closing her round. And then there are days of pure abandon and coquetry and fun. The b.u.t.tercup flirts, but she flirts in such an open and ingenuous fas.h.i.+on that n.o.body is a bit the worse for it. She tells you the fun she had overnight with that charming young fellow from Oxford, and you know that to-morrow she will be telling that hated Guardsman what fun she has had with you. She is a little dazzled with the wealth and profusion of the new life that is bursting on her, and she wings her way from one charming flower to another with little thought of more than a sip from each. Then there is a return of pure girlhood, days in which the b.u.t.tercup is simply the b.u.t.tercup again.

Flirtations are forgotten, conquests are abandoned, brothers are wors.h.i.+pped with the old wors.h.i.+p; and we start back, and rub our eyes, and wonder whether life is all a delusion, and whether this pure creature of home and bread-and-b.u.t.ter is the volatile, provoking little puss who gave our hand such a significant squeeze yesterday.

But it is just this utterly illogical, unreasonable, inconsequential character that gives the pursuit of the b.u.t.tercup its charm. There is a pleasure in this irregular warfare, with its razzias and dashes and repulses and successes and skirmishes and flights, which we cannot get out of the regular operations of the sap and the mine. We sympathize with the ingenious gentleman who declined to study astronomy on the ground of his dislike to the sun for the monotonous regularity of its daily rising and setting. There is something delightfully cometary about the affection of the b.u.t.tercup. Any experienced strategist in the art of getting married will tell us the exact time within which her elder sister may be reduced, and sketch for us a plan of the campaign. But the b.u.t.tercup lies outside of the rules of war. She gives one the pleasure of adoration in its purest and most ideal form, and she adds to this the pleasure of _rouge et noir_. One feels in the presence of a b.u.t.tercup the possibility of combining enjoyments which are in no other sphere compatible with each other--the delight, say, of a musing over 'In Memoriam' with the fiercer joys of the gaming-table. And meanwhile the b.u.t.tercup drifts on, recking little of us and of our thoughts, into a world mysterious and unknown to her. Tones of deeper colour flush the pure white light of her dawn, and announce the fuller day of womanhood.

And with the death of the dawn the b.u.t.tercup pa.s.ses insensibly away. The next season steals her from us; it is only the holidays that give her to us, and dispel half our conventionality, our shams, our conceit with the laugh of the b.u.t.tercup.