Dreamers of the Ghetto Part 59

Christ had been to me merely a theme for artists; my studies and travels had familiarized me with every possible conception of the Man of Sorrows. I had seen myriads of Madonnas nursing Him, miles of Magdalens bewailing Him. Yet the sorrows I had never felt. Perhaps it was my Jewish training, perhaps it was that none of the Christians I lived with had ever believed in Him. At any rate, here for the first time the Christ story came home to me as a real, living fact--something that had actually happened. I saw this simple son of the people--made more simple by my knowledge that His representative was a baker--moving amid the ancient peasant and fisher life of Galilee; I saw Him draw men and women, saints and sinners, by the magic of His love, the simple sweetness of His inner suns.h.i.+ne; I saw the suns.h.i.+ne change to lightning as He drove the money-changers from the Temple; I watched the clouds deepen as the tragedy drew on; I saw Him bid farewell to His mother; I heard suppressed sobs all around me.

Then the heavens were overcast, and it seemed as if earth held its breath waiting for the supreme moment. They dragged Him before Pilate; they clothed Him in scarlet robe, and plaited His crown of thorns, and spat on Him; they gave Him vinegar to drink mixed with gall; and He so divinely sweet and forgiving through all. A horrible oppression hung over the world. I felt choking; my ribs pressed inwards, my heart seemed contracted. He was dying for the sins of the world, He summed up the whole world's woe and pitifulness--the two ideas throbbed and fused in my troubled soul. And I, a Jew, had hitherto ignored Him.

What would they say, these simple peasants sobbing all around, if they knew that I was of that hated race? Then something broke in me, and I sobbed too--sobbed with bitter tears that soon turned sweet in strange relief and glad sympathy with my rough brothers and sisters." He paused a moment, and sipped silently at his absinthe. I did not break the silence. I was moved and interested, though what all this had to do with his glowing, joyous picture I could only dimly surmise. He went on--

"When it was all over, and I went out into the open air, I did not see the sunlight. I carried the dusk of the theatre with me, and the gloom of Golgotha brooded over the sunny afternoon. I heard the nails driven in; I saw the blood spurting from the wounds--there was realism in the thing, I tell you. The peasants, accustomed to the painful story, had quickly recovered their gaiety, and were pouring boisterously down the hill-side, like a glad, turbulent mountain stream, unloosed from the dead hand of frost. But I was still ice-bound and fog-wrapped. Outside the _Gasthaus_ where I went to dine, gay groups a.s.sembled, an organ played, some strolling Italian girls danced gracefully, and my artistic self was aware of a warmth and a rush. But the inmost Me was neck-deep in gloom, with which the terribly pounded steak they gave me, fraudulently overlaid with two showy fried eggs, seemed only in keeping. St. John came in, and Christ and the schoolmaster--who had conducted the choir--and the thick tenor and some supers, and I congratulated them one and all with a gloomy sense of dishonesty.

When, as evening fell, I walked home with St. John, I was gloomily glad to find the valley shrouded in mist and a starless heaven sagging over a blank earth. It seemed an endless uphill drag to my lodging, and though my bedroom was unexpectedly dainty, and a dear old woman--St. John's mother--metaphorically tucked me in, I slept ill that night. Formless dreams tortured me with impalpable tragedies and apprehensions of horror. In the morning--after a cold sponging--the oppression lifted a little from my spirit, though the weather still seemed rather gray. St. John had already gone off to his field-work, his mother told me. She was so lovely, and the room in which I ate breakfast so neat and demure with its whitewashed walls--pure and stainless like country snow--that I managed to swallow everything but the coffee. O that coffee! I had to nibble at a bit of chocolate I carried to get the taste of it out of my mouth. I tried hard not to let the blues get the upper hand again. I filled my pipe and pulled out my sketch-book. My notes of yesterday seemed so faint, and the morning to be growing so dark, that I could scarcely see them. I thought I would go and sit on the little bench outside. As I was sauntering through the doorway, my head bending broodingly over the sketch-book, I caught sight out of the corner of my eye of a little white match-stand fixed up on the wall. Mechanically I put out my left hand to take a light for my pipe. A queer, cold wetness in my fingers and a little splash woke me to the sense of some odd mistake, and in another instant I realized with horror that I had dipped my fingers into holy water and splashed it over that neat, demure, spotless, whitewashed wall."

I could not help smiling. "Ah, I know; one of those porcelain things with a crucified Saviour over a little font. Fancy taking heaven for brimstone!"

"It didn't seem the least bit funny at the time. I just felt awful.

What would the dear old woman say to this profanation? Why the d.i.c.kens did people have whitewashed walls on which sacrilegious stains were luridly visible? I looked up and down the hall like Moses when he slew that Egyptian, trembling lest the old woman should come in. How could I make her understand I was so ignorant of Christian custom as to mistake a font for a matchbox? And if I said I was a Jew, good heavens! she might think I had done it of fell design. What a wound to the gentle old creature who had been so sweet to me! I could not stay in sight of that accusing streak, I must walk off my uneasiness. I threw open the outer door; then I stood still, paralyzed. Monstrous evil-looking gray mists were clumped at the very threshold. Sinister formless vapors blotted out the mountain; everywhere vague, drifting hulks of malarious mist. I sought to pierce them, to find the landscape, the cheerful village, the warm human life nesting under G.o.d's heaven, but saw only--way below--as through a tunnel cut betwixt mist and mountain, a dead, inverted world of houses and trees in a chill, gray lake. I shuddered. An indefinable apprehension possessed me, something like the vague discomfort of my dreams; then, almost instantly, it crystallized into the blood-curdling suggestion: What if this were divine chastis.e.m.e.nt? what if all the outer and inner dreariness that had so steadily enveloped me since I had witnessed the tragedy were punishment for my disbelief? what if this water were really holy, and my sacrilege had brought some grisly Nemesis?"

"You believed that?"

"Not really, of course. But you, as an artist, must understand how one dallies with an idea, plays with a mood, works oneself up imaginatively into a dramatic situation. I let it grow upon me till, like a man alone in the dark, afraid of the ghosts he doesn't believe in, I grew horribly nervous."

"I daresay you hadn't wholly recovered from your fall, and your nerves were unstrung by the blood and the nails, and that steak had disagreed with you, and you had had a bad night, and you were morbidly uneasy about annoying the old woman, and all those chunks of mist got into your spirits. You are a child of the sun!"

"Of course I knew all that, down in the cellars of my being, but upstairs, all the same, I had this sense of guilt and expiation, this anxious doubt that perhaps all that great, gloomy, mediaeval business of saints and nuns, and bones, and relics, and miracles, and icons, and calvaries, and cells, and celibacy, and horsehair s.h.i.+rts, and blood, and dirt, and tears, was true after all! What if the world of beauty I had been content to live in was a Satanic show, and the real thing was that dead, topsy-turvy world down there in the cold, gray lake under the reeking mists? I sneaked back into the house to see if the streak hadn't dried yet; but no! it loomed in tell-tale ghastliness, a sort of writing on the wall announcing the wrath and visitation of heaven. I went outside again and smoked miserably on the little bench. Gradually I began to feel warmer, the mists seemed clearing. I rose and stretched myself with an ache of luxurious languor. Encouraged, I stole within again to peep at the streak. It was dry--a virgin wall, innocently white, met my delighted gaze. I opened the window; the draggling vapors were still rising, rising, the bleakness was merging in a mild warmth. I refilled my pipe, and plunged down the yet gray hill. I strode past the old saw-mill, skirted the swampy border of the lake, came out on the firm green, when bing! zim! br-r-r! a heavenly bolt of suns.h.i.+ne smashed through the raw mists, scattering them like a bomb to the horizon's rim; then with sovereign calm the sun came out full, flooding hill and dale with luminous joy; the lake s.h.i.+mmered and flashed into radiant life, and gave back a great white cloud-island on a stretch of glorious blue, and all that golden warmth stole into my veins like wine. A little goat came skipping along with tinkling bell, a horse at gra.s.s threw up its heels in ecstasy, an ox lowed, a dog barked. Tears of exquisite emotion came into my eyes; the beautiful soft warm light that lay over all the happy valley seemed to get into them and melt something. How unlike those tears of yesterday, wrung out of me as by some serpent coiled round my ribs! Now my ribs seemed expanding--to hold my heart--and all the divine joy of existence thrilled me to a religious rapture. And with the lifting of the mists all that ghastly mediaeval nightmare was lifted from my soul; in that sacred moment all the lurid tragedy of the crucified Christ vanished, and only Christ was left, the simple fellows.h.i.+p with man and beast and nature, the love of life, the love of love, the love of G.o.d. And in that yearning ecstasy my picture came to me--The Joyous Comrade. Christ--not the tortured G.o.d, but the joyous comrade, the friend of all simple souls; the joyous comrade, with the children clinging to him, and peasants and fishers listening to his chat; not the theologian spinning barren subtleties, but the man of genius protesting against all forms and dogmas that would replace the direct vision and the living ecstasy; not the man of sorrows loving the blankness of underground cells and scourged backs and s.e.xless skeletons, but the lover of warm life, and warm sunlight, and all that is fresh and simple and pure and beautiful."

"Every man makes his G.o.d in his own image," I thought, too touched to jar him by saying it aloud.

"And so--ever since--off and on--I have worked at this human picture of him--The Joyous Comrade--to restore the true Christ to the world."

"Which you hope to convert?"

"My business is with work, not with results. 'Whatsoever thy hand findeth to do, do with all thy might.' What can any single hand, even the mightiest, do in this great weltering world? Yet, without the hope and the dream, who would work at all? And so, not without hope, yet with no expectation of a miracle, I give the Jews a Christ they can now accept, the Christians a Christ they have forgotten. I rebuild for my beloved America a type of simple manhood, unfretted by the feverish l.u.s.t for wealth or power, a simple lover of the quiet moment, a sweet human soul never dispossessed of itself, always at one with the essence of existence. Who knows but I may suggest the great question: What shall it profit a nation to gain the whole world and lose its own soul?"

His voice died away solemnly, and I heard only the click of the billiard-b.a.l.l.s and the rumble and roar of New York.

CHAD GADYA

"And it shall be when thy son asketh thee in time to come, saying: What is this? that thou shalt say unto him, By strength of hand the Lord brought us out from Egypt, from the house of bondage. And ... the Lord slew all the first-born in the land of Egypt, ... but all the first-born of my children I redeem."--EXODUS xiii. 14, 15.

_Chad Gadya! Chad Gadya! One only kid of the goat._

At last the Pa.s.sover family service was drawing to an end. His father had started on the curious Chaldaic recitative that wound it up:

_One only kid, one only kid, which my father bought for two zuzim.

Chad Gadya! Chad Gadya!_

The young man smiled faintly at the quaintness of an old gentleman in a frock-coat, a director of the steamboat company in modern Venice, talking Chaldaic, wholly unconscious of the incongruity, rolling out the sonorous syllables with unction, propped up on the prescribed pillows.

_And a cat came and devoured the kid which my father bought for two zuzim. Chad Gadya! Chad Gadya!_

He wondered vaguely what his father would say to him when the service was over. He had only come in during the second part, arriving from Vienna with his usual unquestioned unexpectedness, and was quite startled to find it was Pa.s.sover night, and that the immemorial service was going on just as when he was a boy. The rarity of his visits to the old folks made it a strange coincidence to have stumbled upon them at this juncture, and, as he took his seat silently in the family circle without interrupting the prayers by greetings, he had a vivid artistic perception of the possibilities of existence--the witty French novel that had so amused him in the train, making him feel that, in providing raw matter for _esprit_, human life had its joyous justification; the red-gold sunset over the mountains; the floating homewards down the Grand Ca.n.a.l in the moonlight, the well-known palaces as dreamful and mysterious to him as if he had not been born in the city of the sea; the gay reminiscences of Goldmark's new opera last night at the Operntheater that had haunted his ear as he ascended the great staircase; and then this abrupt transition to the East, and the dead centuries, and Jehovah bringing out His chosen people from Egypt, and bidding them celebrate with unleavened bread throughout the generations their hurried journey to the desert.

Probably his father was distressed at this glaring instance of his son's indifference to the traditions he himself held so dear; though indeed the old man had realized long ago the bitter truth that his ways were not his son's ways, nor his son's thoughts his thoughts. He had long since known that his first-born was a sinner in Israel, an "Epikouros," a scoffer, a selfish sensualist, a lover of bachelor quarters and the feverish life of the European capitals, a scorner of the dietary laws and tabus, an adept in the forbidden. The son thought of himself through his father's spectacles, and the faint smile playing about the sensitive lips became bitterer. His long white fingers worked nervously.

And yet he thought kindly enough of his father; admired the perseverance that had brought him wealth, the generosity with which he expended it, the fidelity that resisted its temptations and made this _Seder_ service, this family reunion, as homely and as piously simple as in the past when the Ghetto Vecchio, and not this palace on the Grand Ca.n.a.l, had meant home. The beaker of wine for the prophet Elijah stood as navely expectant as ever. His mother's face, too, shone with love and goodwill. Brothers and sisters--shafts from a full quiver--sat around the table variously happy and content with existence. An atmosphere of peace and restfulness and faith and piety pervaded the table.

_And a dog came and bit the cat which had devoured the kid which my father bought for two zuzim. Chad Gadya! Chad Gadya!_

And suddenly the contrast of all these quietudes with his own restless life overwhelmed him in a great flood of hopelessness. His eyes filled with salt tears. _He_ would never sit at the head of his own table, carrying on the chain of piety that linked the generations each to each; never would his soul be lapped in this atmosphere of faith and trust; no woman's love would ever be his; no children would rest their little hands in his; he would pa.s.s through existence like a wraith, gazing in at the warm firesides with hopeless eyes, and sweeping on--the wandering Jew of the world of soul. How he had suffered--he, modern of moderns, dreamer of dreams, and ponderer of problems!

_Vanitas Vanitatum! Omnia Vanitas!_ Modern of the moderns? But it was an ancient Jew who had said that, and another who had said "Better is the day of a man's death than the day of a man's birth." Verily an ironical proof of the Preacher's own maxim that there is nothing new under the sun. And he recalled the great sentences:

"Vanity of vanities, saith the Preacher, vanity of vanities; all is vanity.

"One generation pa.s.seth away and another generation cometh: but the earth abideth for ever.

"All the rivers run into the sea; yet the sea is not full; unto the place from whence the rivers come, thither they return again.

"The thing that hath been, it is that which shall be; and that which is done is that which shall be done: and there is no new thing under the sun.

"That which is crooked cannot be made straight; and that which is wanting cannot be numbered.

"For in much wisdom is much grief; and he that increaseth knowledge increaseth sorrow."

Yes, it was all true, all true. How the Jewish genius had gone to the heart of things, so that the races that hated it found comfort in its Psalms. No sense of form, the end of Ecclesiastes a confusion and a weak repet.i.tion like the last disordered spasms of a prophetic seizure. No care for art, only for reality. And yet he had once thought he loved the Greeks better, had from childhood yearned after forbidden G.o.ds, thrilled by that solitary marble figure of a girl that looked in on the Ghetto alley from a boundary wall. Yes; he had wors.h.i.+pped at the shrine of the Beautiful; he had prated of the Renaissance. He had written--with the multiform adaptiveness of his race--French poems with h.e.l.lenic inspiration, and erotic lyrics--half felt, half feigned, delicately chiselled. He saw now with a sudden intuition that he had never really expressed himself in art, save perhaps in that one brutal Italian novel written under the influence of Zola, which had been so denounced by a world with no perception of the love and the tears that prompted the relentless unmasking of life.

_And a staff came and smote the dog which had bitten the cat, which had devoured the kid, which my father bought for two zuzim. Chad Gadya! Chad Gadya!_

Yes, he was a Jew at heart. The childhood in the Ghetto, the long heredity, had bound him in emotions and impulses as with phylacteries. Chad Gadya! Chad Gadya! The very melody awakened a.s.sociations innumerable. He saw in a swift panorama the intense inner life of a curly-headed child roaming in the narrow cincture of the Ghetto, amid the picturesque high houses. A reflex of the child's old joy in the Festivals glowed in his soul. How charming this quaint sequence of Pa.s.sover and Pentecost, New Year and Tabernacles; this survival of the ancient Orient in modern Europe, this living in the souls of one's ancestors, even as on Tabernacles one lived in their booths. A sudden craving seized him to sing with his father, to wrap himself in a fringed shawl, to sway with the rhythmic pa.s.sion of prayer, to prostrate himself in the synagogue. Why had his brethren ever sought to emerge from the joyous slavery of the Ghetto? His imagination conjured it up as it was ere he was born: the one campo, bordered with a colonnade of shops, the black-bearded Hebrew merchants in their long robes, the iron gates barred at midnight, the keepers rowing round and round the open ca.n.a.l-sides in their barca. The yellow cap? The yellow O on their b.r.e.a.s.t.s? Badges of honor; since to be persecuted is n.o.bler than to persecute. Why had they wished for emanc.i.p.ation? Their life was self-centred, self-complete. But no; they were restless, doomed to wander. He saw the earliest streams pouring into Venice at the commencement of the thirteenth century, German merchants, then Levantines, helping to build up the commercial capital of the fifteenth century. He saw the later accession of Peninsular refugees from the Inquisition, their shelter beneath the lion's wing negotiated through their fellow-Jew, Daniel Rodrigues, Consul of the Republic in Dalmatia. His mind halted a moment on this Daniel Rodrigues, an important skeleton. He thought of the endless s.h.i.+fts of the Jews to evade the harsher prescriptions, their subtle, pa.s.sive refusal to live at Mestre, their final relegation to the Ghetto. What well-springs of energy, seething in those paradoxical progenitors of his, who united the calm of the East with the fever of the West; those idealists dealing always with the practical, those lovers of ideas, those princes of combination, mastering their environment because they never dealt in ideas except as embodied in real concrete things.

Reality! Reality!

That was the note of Jewish genius, which had this affinity at least with the Greek. And he, though to him his father's real world was a shadow, had yet this instinctive hatred of the cloud-spinners, the word-jugglers, his idealisms needed solid substance to play around.

Perhaps if he had been persecuted, or even poor, if his father had not smoothed his pa.s.sage to a not unprosperous career in letters, he might have escaped this haunting sense of the emptiness and futility of existence. He, too, would have found a joy in outwitting the Christian persecutor, in piling ducat on ducat. Ay, even now he chuckled to think how these _strazzaroli_--these forced vendors of second-hand wares--had lived to purchase the faded purple wrappings of Venetian glory.

He remembered reading in the results of an ancient census: Men, women, children, monks, nuns--and Jews! Well, the Doges were done with, Venice was a melancholy ruin, and the Jew--the Jew lived sumptuously in the palaces of her proud n.o.bles. He looked round the magnificent long-stretching dining-room, with its rugs, oil-paintings, frescoed ceiling, palms; remembered the ancient scutcheon over the stone portal--a lion rampant with an angel volant--and thought of the old Latin statute forbidding the Jews to keep schools of any kind in Venice, or to teach anything in the city, under penalty of fifty ducats' fine and six months' imprisonment. Well, the Jews had taught the Venetians something after all--that the only abiding wealth is human energy. All other nations had had their flowering time and had faded out. But Israel went on with unabated strength and courage. It was very wonderful. Nay, was it not miraculous? Perhaps there was, indeed, "a mission of Israel," perhaps they were indeed G.o.d's "chosen people." The Venetians had built and painted marvellous things and died out and left them for tourists to gaze at. The Jews had created nothing for ages, save a few poems and a few yearning synagogue melodies; yet here they were, strong and solid, a creation in flesh and blood more miraculous and enduring than anything in stone and bronze. And what was the secret of this persistence and strength? What but a spiritual? What but their inner certainty of G.o.d, their unquestioning trust in Him, that He would send His Messiah to rebuild the Temple, to raise them to the sovereignty of the peoples? How typical his own father--thus serenely singing Chaldaic--a modern of moderns without, a student and saint at home! Ah, would that he, too, could lay hold on this solid faith! Yes, his soul was in sympathy with the brooding immovable East; even with the mysticisms of the Cabalists, with the trance of the ascetic, nay, with the fantastic frenzy-begotten ecstasy of the Dervishes he had seen dancing in Turkish mosques,--that intoxicating sense of a satisfying meaning in things, of a unity with the essence of existence, which men had doubtless sought in the ancient Eleusinian mysteries, which the Mahatmas of India had perhaps found, the tradition of which ran down through the ages, misconceived by the Western races, and for lack of which he could often have battered his head against a wall, as in literal beating against the baffling mystery of existence. Ah! there was the h.e.l.l of it! His soul was of the Orient, but his brain was of the Occident. His intellect had been nourished at the breast of Science, that cla.s.sified everything and explained nothing. But explanation! The very word was futile! Things were. To explain things was to state A in terms of B, and B in terms of A. Who should explain the explanation? Perhaps only by ecstasy could one understand what lay behind the phenomena. But even so the essence had to be judged by its manifestations, and the manifestations were often absurd, unrighteous, and meaningless. No, he could not believe. His intellect was remorseless. What if Israel was preserved? Why should the empire of Venice be destroyed?

_And a fire came and burnt the staff, which had smitten the dog, which had bitten the cat, which had devoured the kid, which my father bought for two zuzim. Chad Gadya! Chad Gadya!_

He thought of the energy that had gone to build this wonderful city; the deep sea-soaked wooden piles hidden beneath; the exhaustless art treasures--churches, pictures, sculptures--no less built on obscure human labor, though a few of the innumerable dead hands had signed names. What measureless energy petrified in these palaces! Carpaccio's pictures floated before him, and Tintoretto's--record of dead generations; and then, by the link of size, those even vaster paintings--in gouache--of Vermayen in Vienna: old land-fights with crossbow, spear, and arquebus, old sea-fights with inter-grappling galleys. He thought of galley-slaves chained to their oar--the sweat, the blood that had stained history. "So I returned and considered all the oppressions that are done under the sun: and behold the tears of such as were oppressed, and they had no comforter." And then he thought of a modern picture with a beautiful nude female figure that had cost the happiness of a family; the artist now dead and immortal, the woman, once rich and fas.h.i.+onable, on the streets. The futility of things--love, fame, immortality! All roads lead nowhere! What profit shall a man have from all his labor which he hath done under the sun?

No; it was all a flux--there was nothing but flux. ?a?ta ?e?. The wisest had always seen that. The cat which devoured the kid, and the dog which bit the cat, and the staff which smote the dog, and the fire which burnt the staff, and so on endlessly. Did not the commentators say that that was the meaning of this very parable--the pa.s.sing of the ancient empires, Egypt, a.s.syria, Persia, Greece, Rome? Commentators!

what curious people! What a making of books to which there was no end!

What a wilderness of waste logic the Jewish intellect had wandered in for ages! The endless volumes of the Talmud and its parasites! The countless codes, now obsolescent, over which dead eyes had grown dim!

As great a patience and industry as had gone to build Venetian art, and with less result. The chosen people, indeed! And were they so strong and sane? A fine thought in his brain, forsooth!

He, worn out by the great stress of the centuries, such long in-breeding, so many ages of persecution, so many manners and languages adopted, so many nationalities taken on! His soul must be like a palimpsest with the record of nation on nation. It was uncanny, this clinging to life; a race should be content to die out. And in him it had perhaps grown thus content. He foreshadowed its despair. He stood for latter-day Israel, the race that always ran to extremes, which, having been first in faith, was also first in scepticism, keenest to pierce to the empty heart of things; like an orphan wind, homeless, wailing about the lost places of the universe. To know all to be illusion, cheat--itself the most cheated of races; lured on to a career of sacrifice and contempt. If he could only keep the hope that had hallowed its sufferings. But now it was a viper--not a divine hope--it had nourished in its bosom. He felt so lonely; a great stretch of blackness, a barren mere, a gaunt cliff on a frozen sea, a pine on a mountain. To be done with it all--the sighs and the sobs and the tears, the heart-sinking, the dull dragging days of wretchedness and the nights of pain. How often he had turned his face to the wall, willing to die.

Perhaps it was this dead city of stones and the sea that wrought so on his spirit. Tourgenieff was right; only the young should come here, not those who had seen with Virgil the tears of things. And then he recalled the lines of Catullus--the sad, stately plaint of the cla.s.sic world, like the suppressed sob of a strong man:

"Soles occidere et redire possunt, n.o.bis c.u.m semel occidit brevis lux, Nox est perpetuo una dormienda."

And then he thought again of Virgil, and called up a Tuscan landscape that expressed him, and lines of cypresses that moved on majestic like hexameters. He saw the terrace of an ancient palace, and the grotesque animals carven on the bal.u.s.trade; the green flicker of lizards on the drowsy garden-wall; the old-world sun-dial and the grotto and the marble fountain, and the cool green gloom of the cypress-grove with its delicious dapple of shadows. An invisible blackbird fluted overhead. He walked along the great walk under the stone eyes of sculptured G.o.ds, and looked out upon the hot landscape taking its siesta under the ardent blue sky--the green sunlit hills, the white nestling villas, the gray olive-trees. Who had paced these cloistral terraces? Mediaeval princesses, pa.s.sionate and scornful, treading delicately, with trailing silks and faint perfumes. He would make a poem of it. Oh, the loveliness of life! What was it a local singer had carolled in that dear soft Venetian dialect?