PASCAREL.*
"Iv you do not love Florence, this book will bore you," is the author's intimation preceding the title-page. But it could not bore any one. It is faulty, but fascinating, it is provoking, it is disappointing, it is occasionally preposterous, but it is delightful to read, for all that. It has less tawdriness and more grace than anything" Oujda" has yet written, it is far less cynical, and though it is profoundly immoral, in the sense that it does not recognise or trouble itself with any distinction between the wrong and the right, and is entirely lawless, it departs widely from the vulgar vice, the gilded saloon, and dashing-dragoon debauchery of her former works. It is full of paradox, but there is a good deal of poetry in it also, and its enthusiasm, its vitality, its wild imaginativeness are captivating. It is masterly as a romance, in that it is so vague, so free from even a conventional setting, that the two impossible creatures, as fanciful as Hawthorne's Faun and Hugo's Esmeralda, with whom it has to do, sweep through it like two circling figures in that Carnival which it describes as Carnival never has been described before, as detached from real life as they. No touch of realism, of possibility, spoils the patrician singing-girl whom the people call L'Uccello, and who is dressed in amber satin and purple velvet, and forced to wear a petticoat sewn with gold thread and a stomacher of seed pearls because she is too poor to buy seemlier clothing—of course no one ever heard of raising money on such things, above all, in an art-city like Verona—and whose old nurse dies of want while the dead mother's jewels lie in the immemorial casket, and L'Uccello has brought "her amber and her purples" home laden with the tribute of the people. She is frankly, fairly impossible, and Pascarel, the player, the patriot, the poet, the pagan, the dramatist, the scholar, the soldier, the satirist, the being of God-like beauty who idealises tinkering, sheds the divine light of art over the performance of dancing-dogs, and talks Florentine history, art, and antiquities, and politics as he strolls with his little human and canine company, is no less so. There are touches of realism in the book, and
* Pasearel. Only a Story. By "Oulda," Author of " Chandos," &e. London: Chapman and Hall,
even of humour, with which quality " Ouida "—though she can be epigrammatic to the purpose sometimes—is not richly gifted ; but they are all to be found in the inferior, incidental positions and people. Brunotta, the peasant mistress of Pascarel, is a very real little Tuscan woman, a common, pretty, pleasure-loving, bargain- making animal, and she is perfectly in her right—if any right could be among these people anyhow—when she objects to Pas- carel's dreamy poetising, which meant love-making, as the shrewd little woman knew right well, with the " Donzella," who believes Brunotta to be Pascarel's sister, and when she finds out their true relation is driven to frenzy by the discovery. Brunotta is real, and so is Cocomero, and there is an old stocking-mender who is possible, and highly pathetic ; but the Donzella, Raffaelino, and Pescara are thoroughly charming absurdities. There is a wonderful harmony in the book. The tide of Carnival flows ceaselessly through it, with the booming music, the swift, fantastic, whirling rush of the opening chapter. Images press, associations swarm, sounds are tumultuous, there are dash and glitter everywhere, and one is fairly smothered in flowers and synonyms, bewildered by the strange mixture of good and bad taste, of keen delicate definition of beauty and vulgar daubing, the piling-up of epithets, the attractiveness of some and the repulsiveness of other sentiments, the inveterately false art which
first describes a beautiful object beautifully, and then spoils the effect by likening it to something else, or many things else. "Oujda" constantly does that which she praises the Italians for never doing ; she "overloads her harmonies." Her writing is
frequently beautiful, much more so in this book than in any of its predecessors ; but it is monotonous, and never simple when simplicity is called for—to throw up the colouring of of her perpetual pictures so that each should be striking, and all not bewildering. Her women "trail their purples" when other people merely walk about ; they are "wrapped in some cash- meres," when other people put on their dressing-gowns, and they never by any chance hear a clock strike any hour ; a "tolling of bells" or a "clanging of chimes" always "comes" to them ; or the hours are "clashed out" from a belfry, or "shaken from brazen throats." Her people are always flinging themselves down on banks of violets, pressing their scarlet lips to cool magnolia cups, and coming in with their hands full of sheaves of lilies, which is much prettier than going for a nice country walk, and gathering wild flowers, but apt to flatten the effect of more important actions, for which hardly bigger and more blustering phrases can be found. Her vehemence leads " Oujda " into queer blunders sometimes, as, for instance, when she assigns "fifteen hundred centuries" of art life to Bologna, and "five hundred centuries" to Florence ; when she gives two springs and two autumns to one year ; when she makes Pascarel tell the Donzella, after they have been wandering for months, that the old "maestro," who died on the night she left Verona, is buried on the day on which he is speaking ; and when she tells how Brunotta was not to be restrained from meat on even the solemn "fast" of Passion Sunday ! She has written this book too hastily for all that it contains of observation, and of miscellaneous, superficial, jumbled reading about the warriors, the poets, the artists, and the statesmen of Italy. History and fable, romance and guide-book, are all here, served up pictorially, sometimes to great advantage, and with quite wonderful effect, at others with pompous effort and overstrained association which barely clear the ridiculous ; as, for instance, when the Temple of the Bona Dea and the tombs of the Etruscan kings, dragged in as an episode, obstruct the action of the story, and entirely justify Brunotta's in- dignation with people who cannot come home to their meals in time, especially when one has smuggled in a plump peahen undetected by the authorities of the octroi. But the beautiful preponderates in the story of the strollers, and the repetitions do not weary, because they are like the repetitions in a journey in which one passes by a succession of objects alike in kind, but endlessly various. The rich colouring is overdone, but the revel in life, in song, in beauty, in art, in the merriment and kindliness of the people, in the air, in the flowers (with which everybody is perpetually loading every- body else), is very fascinating. The keynote of the book is struck in the following lines of the first chapter, which describes the Carnival at Verona, and bewails its decline :—
" Here, nel aer dolce, che del sol s'allegra,' life is brighter and more buoyant than elsewhere. Here the people still laugh from clear throats, and the hours still reel away marked with flowers; here they sit in the sun, and still know the priceless pleasures and true uses of leisure ; and here the heart of a child still beats in the war-scarred breast of the nation. Yet even here the world is older, greyer, sadder than of yore ; and even here the day is close at hand when King Carnival will ride his last ride round the city walls, and be burned for
the last time, in all the panoply of his historic robes, upon a pyre whence his ashes shall never rise again. The world is too wise to be foolish,—so they say. Or is it too foolish to be wise ? Perhaps King Carnival would answer :—‘ In the days when men were so great that they did not fear to stoop. and were so strong that their dignity lost nothing by their mirth, they rode in my train, and laughed as children laugh.—those men of those days of Dante, of those days of Leonardo, of those days of Shakespeare. Are you wiser than they ? or weaker? or only more weary, perhaps? No matter. I have held high feasts with the giants, and they were not ashamed to be glad. But you, who blush for your mirth because your mirth is vice, bury me quickly. I am a thing of the
Past.' In the old days,—when he reigned supreme, over all men's lives, from sovereign's to serf's, for a few weeks' span of full feast and fair folly,—in the old days men lived greatly quiet lives to great ends. Their faith was ever present with them,—a thing of daily use and hourly sweetness. Their households were wisely ruled and simply ordered. They denuded themselves of their substance to give their gold to the raising of mighty works—rivis kipidibus—which to this day do live and speak. Great artists narrowed not themselves to one meagre phase of Art, but filled with all its innumerable powers the splendid plenitude of their majestic years. And that art was in the hearts of the people who followed it, and adored its power, and were nourished by it, so that it was no empty name, but an ever-vivifying presence,—a divinity at once of hearth and temple that brooded over the cities with shattering and stainless love. Therefore in those days men, giving themselves leave to be glad for a little space, were glad with the same sinewy force and manful singleness of purpose as made them in other times laborious, self-denying, patient, and fruitful of high thoughts and deeds. Because they laboured for their fellows, therefore they could laugh with them, and because they served God, therefore they dared be glad. They had aimed highly, and highly achieved ; therefore they could go forth amidst their children and rejoice. But we,—in whom all art is the mere empty shibboleth of a religion whose priests are all dead ; we,— whose whole year-long course is one Dance of Death over the putridity of our pleasures ; we,—whose solitary purposo is to fly faster and faster from desire to satiety, from satiety to desire, in an endless eddy of fruitless effort ; we,—whose greatest genius can only raise for us some inarticulate protest of despair against some unknown God ; we have strangled King Carnival and killed him, and buried him in the ashes of our own unutterable weariness and woe. For the old King is heart- sick to hear the manful laughter that he heard in his youth ; and we,— we cannot laugh; all we can give is a sneer,—and a sob."
There is truth in this, and the story " Ouida " weaves from it is beautiful; but she unconsciously contradicts herself, for the uni- versal genius, Pascarel, who roams over the Tuscan land in the ideal art style, who brings light, joy, laughter in his train like Aurora and the Hours, is a perfectly godless and lawless being, the merest child of impulse, a pagan who burns no incense on any altar ; and the Donzella, an exquisite fancy, it is true, in every other respect, is as ignorant of the moral law which ruled the men "who lived greatly quiet lives to great ends," as Pascarel. So extensive is this truth respecting them, that if the book were less of a wild, unmitigated romance, it must shock the sense of the reader. As it is, it only charms by its wildness, its vivid- ness, its glow, even its glare ; its delicious bits of description, and its pictures of the country life to which one can turn from the cities, "where one is choked up to one's neck with fools." Here is one of the simplest and prettiest of these pictures :-
"We came down front the height, and wandered whither we knew not exactly. Amongst fresh-turned fields and vines just set with leaf, and orchards of olive and mulberry, where many a little quiet passe nestled with white-walled houses and rod-roofed dovecotes. At one of these poderi there was a woman with a merry, handsome face and a scarlet kirtle, sitting spinning on the top of a flight of steps under a dark arch- way hung with convolvulus. Marco Roses asked her if she could give us a draught of milk. She assented joyfully, and brought out not only milk, but honey, and pomegranates, and black sweet bread, and set them out on a stone bench on the top of tho steps, under the convolvu- lases ; and would have us eat there and then, she spinning all the while and telling us her own history and her grandmother's before her, look- ing across the great sunny plains that stretched away like the sea-green ocean, some white towers rising hero and there out of the sun-mist like a seagull on the wing. She was a cheery, good-hearted creature ; she lived on the most wondrous battle-field of all Europe, but she knew nothing of that ; she only knew that her eggs sold well in Bologna mar- ket, and her bit of land was fruitful, and her husband was a good man, though careless, and her olive trees had been bit by the frost, and would bear ill that summer. We had a pleasant hour with her there on the sunny steps facing the low tumbled crests of the Apennines, hyacinth- hued in the clear spring weather."
" Ouida" has done well to seek her inspiration this time in nature, and in joy. "A little laughter and a great love" are all her beautiful strollers want, and all they believe in. She gives them these, and she is quite as gorgeous in her revels amid the beauty and the art of the City of Lilies, as in her most luscious pictures of impossible wealth and vicious pleasure. She is more truly, keenly, pathetic in the touches of grief, of poverty, of weariness, neglect, and human cruelty, than in her ghastly powerful Folle-Farine ; she is always charming and sympathetic in her love and comprehension of the animal world. Not only the happy dancing-dogs stroll with Pascarel and his " donzella " and the reader, but beautiful living things are always stirring, the doves of the campanile, the downy owls, the soft grey cats, the silver-breasted pigeons, the brown rabbits, the great dun oxen, the swift little lizards, the cicale, the robins, and the grilli. A swift harmonious tide of life carries the reader along with the fortunes of Pascarel.
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