Mona Caird

"Baseness rusts, wears out and seals up young-heartedness."

Raimbaut d'Aurenga.

CHAPTER XXVII

"ARTISTS IN HAPPINESS"

It is doubtful if there is a country in Europe where the spirit of the past is so strong as it is in Provence.

One needs not to dive down for it below the surface; it lives before one's eyes everywhere, every day. That strange cheer and blitheness that seems to belong to the centuries gone by has not yet been beaten down by the care and heaviness of modern life. The mere act of living is still joyful, the zest and charm of simple things still survives among the people. They live without hurry, yet they work to good purpose; far more quickly and efficiently than in England.

They seem to work hard, yet without toil; no doubt because they know also how to play.

This has all to be said with reservations, however, for the modern spirit is stealing into the country; it is like the little edge of the earth's shadow when the moon begins to be eclipsed. But the old is still dominant and will not easily be destroyed.

It is not merely the world of yesterday, of the Middle Ages that lingers, but—as we have seen—the world of the ancients. That is half the secret of the country.

It is this element that underlies and mingles so quaintly with the picturesque side of religious mediÆvalism. No wonder men and women have passionately tried to recover the charm of that old, fresh, lost world. Perhaps that is why the Renaissance is so endlessly fascinating. It was a wild, brilliant, vain attempt to find happiness and the real goal of human life.

Men may indeed be turned from their natural quest by some harsh faith or blinding habit, but the hunger of the heart never leaves them.

One is constrained to believe in the possibility of a fresh Renaissance that will bring us further on our way towards the gates of Paradise, for have we not learnt since that earlier attempt, that happiness must be built on happiness, not on sacrifice and burnt offerings? This at least is certain: human cruelty leads to human woe. The misery and the cruelty below the glitter of a brilliant civilisation gnaws like some evil creature at its heart.

There was the flaw in that splendid claim on life made by the men and women of the Renaissance. Each age brings its contributions and commits its errors. But it is stupid to go on committing the old errors over and over again.

Maulde de la ClaviÈre describes the attitude of the women during all these times of movement, which is very curious, very subtle, and very modern. "Properly to understand their spiritual condition," he says, "we should have to do as they did: solve the problem of feminism in the feminine way; be women, and more than women—arch-women. It was the conviction of all the sons of the Renaissance," he goes on, "that sentiment has higher lights than reason, and that certain intuitions of the heart unfold to us, as in bygone days to Socrates, horizons hitherto beyond our ken—a foretaste of the divine.... And now the new generations were no longer willing to regard earthly happiness as an illusion, ... and flattered themselves on finding a means of building life upon liberty.... People wished to live henceforth under a calm and radiant sky; they talked of taking the gifts of God as they found them, idealising everything. From that time it belongs truly to women to govern the higher world, the realm of sentiment.... So many noble things lack the sap of life! They will give that sap, that vitality, that soul. The sap of love brings grapes from thorns. And thereby the transformation of the world is to be achieved."

In short, women were to take life into their hands and turn it into a fine art. They were to become priestesses in the Temple of the World, and the object of worship was to be the Beautiful. They were to become the creators of no less a thing than happiness. Our author quotes Ruskin's saying about a woman that "the violets should not droop when she passes, but burst into flower."

"Love is the sum of genius," the writer further quotes from Schiller, apropos of this astonishing outbreak of romantic thought. "The formula," he says, "is this: to live, that is, to love life, to attain a mastery of life, without allowing it to crush or dominate us.... In those days they sincerely studied to love life; they loved it, rejecting all negations and obstructions, all that overwhelms and paralyses...."

To treat existence—as some tried to treat it in the sixteenth century in Italy—from the point of view of the artist, must at least bring rich fruits—though it depends perilously upon the artist!

It was to the newly liberated women of the chivalrous age that all instinctively turned for the realisation of the universal longing. It was for them to add some treasure to the world that they had so lately entered. And more was done than perhaps we shall ever realise to make life liveable and human by the women of the troubadour days and their successors of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries.

Unhappily they lived too near to barbaric times, with the blood of mediÆval savages still running in their veins, to be able to understand one essential ingredient in the magic philtre that they sought so eagerly.

They could not follow the counsel of their historian, who says "the woman must steep her hands in beauty, fill her eyes with love, and then look at things courageously and truthfully."[33] They followed and worshipped Beauty, but they terribly sinned against Love.

"The first duty of woman," the author says, "is to exhibit in themselves every lovable quality."

"Oh! is that all?" asked Barbara, with genial sarcasm.

"They overlaid life," he adds, "with that varnish of wonderful singular sweetness which has never been wholly rubbed off."

Barbara listened in silence, whilst I read on.

"Love, and go straight on your way—that is the new formula—a very effective one, since it converts dogmas into sentiments." Again this definition: "The kingdom of God—that is a state in which every one's actions would be prompted by love."

"It sounds nice," said Barbara, with a sceptical note in her voice.

"All the possible definitions of beauty apply also to life; life and beauty are one and the same thing."

Barbara demurred at this.

But, after all, the somewhat grim-looking family which she adduced as refutation were really not exactly alive in any serious sense of the word. Truly living people are always in some way beautiful. I left her pondering this risky statement while I prudently hastened on.

Our gallant author seemed to see things after a fashion of his own. One might, of course, summarily dismiss it as sentimentalism, but that would be meaningless, for our whole life is founded on sentiment of one kind and another. It is monstrous without it.

"He seems to think sentiment very important; more so than most men do," said Barbara, whose male relatives were mostly of a solid order.

A proverb, he points out, says that "one does not die of love: perhaps not; but what we know with absolute certainty, what stares us everywhere in the face in letters of fire and blood, is that one dies of the absence of love."

And it is always to women he looks for the founding of the gentler dispensation. He really does seem to appreciate us! He declares that we are one and all, without exception, "artists in happiness!"

"Oh! then he has never met Aunt Rebecca," said Barbara conclusively.

Only a few more days in Provence were now before us, and we had worked our way across country to the main line at Arles for the homeward journey.

It was a pleasure to find ourselves again in that strange flat country of the Crau and the Camargue, with the grey city on its hill above the Rhone.

We were wearied with the mad, sad doings of men and turned to the natural features of the surrounding country for rest and relief. And they did not fail us as far as interest was concerned. Only they, too, had their dramas and their tragedies. Those strange solitudes had a wild and stirring past; while the vast lagoons at the Rhone's mouth have a long story all to themselves.

Whole volumes have been written about their formation and the geological romance of this brilliant coast. Once, as we have seen, the Mediterranean washed the cliffs at Beaucaire and Nimes, and swept up to the base of the Alpilles. The country, in truth, seems to have retained something of the sea-song in its wide reminiscent spaces.

There were deluges and avalanches, and all sorts of exciting events of mountain and river; the Rhone and the Durance playing the principal parts in this melodrama of the elements. Those impulsive heroes carried off vast masses of stone and rubble from the mountains and covered the low-lying land with the "wreckage of the Alps."

Then the secondary characters trooped along: the Herault, the Ley, and other streams, and they helped to heap up great bars at the river's mouth, so that the monster could not find his way to the sea without much uneasy wandering; and always as he wandered, murmuring angrily, more and more mud and stones were deposited to heighten the bars. And so with the passing of the centuries the great lagoons were formed so big and blue that the unwary traveller nearing Arles may almost mistake them for the Mediterranean. When at last the sea is found, there is another flinging down of Alpine spoils, for the difference in the weight and in the temperature of the salt and the river waters at their meeting, causes the river to drop what it carries rapidly—perhaps in joy at this final home-coming to the brightest of all seas.

Louis XIV., it appears, built miles and miles of dykes, and Adam de Craponne accomplished wonders of engineering work, and has become one of the heroes of ProvenÇal history; but still the waters now and again come down in floods and do terrible damage. Indeed engineers are beginning to think that the system of dykes is a mistaken one, for by confining the river within narrow limits, the force is enormously concentrated and presses on the dykes, while there is always a tendency to raise the bed by the deposits.

Consequently the danger is constantly increased by the very means they have taken to avert it.

"C'est comme une grande passion. Le Rhone a toujours ÉtÉ audessus des forces de l'homme."

So must have thought the poor woman and her husband, guardians of the shattered bridge of St. BÉnÉzet at Avignon, for they told us that the flood had risen to the second storey of their house. And this happened, and was bound to happen at intervals, when the ice broke up in the mountains. The Government might raise the dykes at vast expense till it was tired; the river rose too. Better let it spread quietly over the land and enrich it. But now the system was begun it could not be abandoned. Very dangerous it would seem, a big river—or a big passion! And if ever there was a big passion that river is possessed by it!

No dream too lovely, no joy too perfect to be within the scope of human destiny while the spirit is held by the incantation of those waters.

All things are possible! That is the song of the Rhone.

It knows so much, this child of the mountains, born to all the secrets of solitary places, and laden now with the sad, strange lore of its journeyings by city and strand, by quiet lands where the plough traces glistening furrows in the slant morning light, and the vines throw their arms to the sun with all the grace and all the enchantment that made men drunk in the old days when not one of them was afraid to be happy.

The race lived in communion with the things of the soil and the heavens, so that their religion was an ecstatic sense of life and beauty; "that tingling in the veins sympathetic with the yearning life of the earth, which apparently in all times and places prompted some mode of wild dancing."

Of the Bacchanalia we still have the fury and the terror, hidden in dark places, poisoning existence, but the splendour and the grace, the sweet freshness of those wild festivals are banished from the earth. How much of beauty they have given to the world only an artist or a poet here and there understands.

"It is from this fantastic scene," says one of the fraternity, "that the beautiful wind-touched draperies, the rhythm, the heads suddenly thrown back, of many a Pompeian wall-painting and sarcophagus frieze are originally derived." And the same eye sees in the figure of Dionysus the "mystical and fiery spirit of the earth—the aroma of the green world is retained in the fair human body." "Sweet upon the mountains" is the presence of the far-wandering god "who embodies all the voluptuous abundance of Asia, its beating sun, its fair-towered cities."

To see the sun shining through the classic vine-leaves in a southern land, is to begin to understand the emotions of the people who gave birth to the myth of Dionysus; and we may "think we see the green festoons of the vine dropping quickly from foot-place to foot-place down the broken hill-side in the spring."

Some mirage of the ancient world comes to us with the picture. And laughter—laughter, which was "an essential element of the earlier worship of Dionysus," seems to be shaking the tendrils in some half literal, half symbolical fashion. The living curves, the little merry whirls and spirals are full of it.

The vine and the graver ivy crowned the white brow of Dionysus, plants dear to the Hamadryads, "spinning or weaving with airiest fingers, the foliage of the trees, the petals of the flowers, the skins of the fruits, the long thin stalks on which the poplar leaves are set so lightly that Homer compares them, in their constant motion, to the maids who sit spinning in the house of Alcinous."

And by road and river are great growths of reeds, the plant of Dionysus and the merry satyrs who make their pipes from the hollow stems.

It was surely this beautiful province of a beautiful land that inspired the first conscious determined effort towards the art of living that has been made by man since an evil fate had plunged him into the awful martyrdom of the Middle Ages. The spirit that came into being at that auspicious hour lingers like a presence. It is not due merely to bright sky and clear air. There are skies as blue and air as clear in lands where the very stones breathe forth tragedy. The Campagna of Rome is a case in point, nor is the siren country about the Bay of Naples untouched by this under-shadow.

Even here indeed, in Provence itself, the deep wound in the heart of Life inflicted by mediÆval superstition has never quite ceased to bleed, and the country seems at moments to sadden and grow chill in the face of the sun; but this is the tribute paid to the spiritual CÆsar of the new Empire, and does not spring from the ancient genius of the country.

That genius presses upon the imagination, as if some hidden intelligence were playing the part of generous host, and sending forth the parting guest laden with gifts and valedictions.

These invisible hosts have no regard for any timid dread of enthusiasm and faith. They boldly whisper of a new Creed and Cult, a Temple of Happiness to be set up even in our own indignant land!

They are quite unabashed at the audacity of the proposition; at doubts and limitations they laugh.

But the leave-taking traveller knows that he is under a spell, and asks himself if these dreams of powers and destinies will live under grey skies, grey creeds and customs.

Here it is easy to believe in exquisite audacities.

"Here a thousand hamlets laugh by the river-side, our skies laugh; everything is happy, everything lives," as the poet Jasmin sings of his native land.

At once inspiring and restful! This perfect balance is possible. Supremely good things may be in contrast but not in contradiction. So at least one believes in Provence.

The parting guest thinks wistfully of that delicious journey down stream, of the happy company in the Caburle, in Mistral's Poem of the Rhone; the old barge drifting with the current through the very heart of the country of Romance. Every city and hamlet, every bridge and ruin, the scene of a thousand stories....

He remembers with what an outburst the poet sings of the towers of Avignon, as the barge comes in sight of the city, flame-tinted with the setting sun:—

Always that word! Joie, joie! One meets it in story, in song, in the voices of the people. Provence must certainly have been its birthplace—or its sanctuary.

Driven from every other land, when the Goddess of Sorrow came to usurp the temples of the ancient gods, reviled, feared, stricken to the heart, the beautiful fugitive at last found shelter in the land of Love and Chivalry.

THE END.