LIBRARY 
 
 University of 
 
 California 
 
 Irvine
 
 AS 
 
 E5
 
 THE SOUL OF 
 AN ARTIST
 
 THE SOUL OF 
 AN ARTIST 
 
 TRANSLATED FROM THE ITALIAN OF 
 
 E. L. MURISON 
 
 WITH AN 
 
 INTRODUCTION BY 
 L. D. VENTURA 
 
 Anima mia, mio asilol 
 
 PAUL ELDER AND COMPANY 
 PUBLISHERS, SAN FRANCISCO
 
 Authorized Translation 
 
 Copyright, 1905 
 
 by PAUL ELDER AND COMPANY 
 
 San Francisco 
 
 Entered at Stationers'' Hall 
 Louden 
 
 The Tomoyt Press
 
 TO 
 
 LAWRENCE DUDLEY 
 
 MARQUIS OF MIDDLEFORTH 
 
 WHEREVER HE MAY BE
 
 FOREWORD 
 
 // was a work of duty on my part, who derived 
 a great consolation from the reading of this book by 
 Neera a countrywoman of mine to put before 
 the translator this true and gentle book. It was a 
 work of generosity on her fart to gather the sighs 
 of a lonely soul, to understand them with that intui- 
 tion which has neither geographic nor moral frontier, 
 and to translate them, so that other lonely souls 
 might also derive consolation. 
 
 A romance made up of magnetic atoms in the 
 air hovers over this book: a whole honest romance 
 of sadness, conceived, transmitted and put together, 
 to be found expressed in the language of souls, which 
 has only one alphabet. 
 
 This book of Neera has, according to my idea, 
 no counterpart but, possibly, Amiel's Journal In- 
 time. / shall not say here fully why it appeals to 
 me, neither is it necessary for the translator to do 
 more than to present the book, for it speaks for 
 itself; it will be clear to all those who possess to 
 the highest degree ideality and sentiment, to those 
 for whom common, every-day life is not the last 
 desideratum. 
 
 Is this " Anima Sola" a novel? No. An au- 
 tobiography? No. A poem? No. It is simply 
 a book, in the amplest signification of the word, a
 
 FOREWARD 
 
 companion, a friend, exquisite pages of thoughts, of 
 love, of life. A very original work in conception 
 and form, it elicited, since its appearance in Italy as 
 well as in Germany, the most conflicting criticisms. 
 Pervaded by subdued fervor, it is a refined book 
 which, alas, will not meet with the delirium of the 
 multitude : yet every reader will find amidst the many 
 thoughts expressed something of personal benefit, and 
 will feel its peculiar charm, thus leading to an inter- 
 est in the study of the author, a woman who, with 
 each of her volumes, gives us a surprise either of 
 idea or of form. 
 
 Foremost among the Italian writers of both 
 sexes, in spite of the advertisement which has been 
 lavished in the wrong direction and to which she has 
 a strong antipathy, she shares with the best writers 
 of Italy the healthy privilege of writing to say some- 
 thing with a moral and practical purpose. Her 
 work is signalized by a constant aspiration towards 
 the new and towards the better. She has treated 
 the novel in almost all its forms, realistic, mystic, 
 psychological; she has written pages of morals, of 
 poetry, of sociology, and now, with " Un Anima 
 Sola," she goes out of whatever is known and seen 
 and whatever has been read into a new field. Never 
 before, as in this novel, has she touched the high 
 idealities of life, never has she surpassed herself as 
 a stylist. 
 
 When this book was published in the German 
 translation, the cover bore the portrait of Eleanora 
 
 ii
 
 FOREWARD 
 
 Duse. The translator hinted by this at the possi- 
 bility of Neera having taken Duse as a model of bis 
 heroine. Possibly Duse, one of the most sensitive 
 personalities of our century., has contributed in a large 
 proportion to the composite portrait of Neera s hero- 
 ine, who, for me, represents in one person the soul 
 of many. Blessed those who, like Duse, can live 
 many lives, or assimilate the feelings and the precious 
 sensations of souls. She can check her own misery 
 living in the remembrance of others. The theatre 
 has furnished her the remembrance of many lives 
 that she has impersonated, and she can ruminate over 
 the hours of misery consoled by instants of glory 
 proud of having awakened the conscience of others 
 in becoming a martyr. 
 
 And, since we are on the subject of theatres, and 
 of artists, let me quote Glatigny, who was a poet and 
 a Bohemian actor, and took the stage as a compensa- 
 tion to life. He speaks to the bourgeois, showing 
 his rags: 
 
 "Nos habits vous font voir les cordes de nos 
 lyres." And Clartie in " Brichanteau Celebre" : 
 
 "If you wish to continue to run the chance of 
 this macabre lottery the theatre you must keep 
 until the last hour the love of your art: to love it 
 for its success, for its failures: you must keep until 
 the last minute your love and faith of the first years, 
 to believe in that which exists not, to believe in the 
 dream and say to oneself that, in its distributive 
 justice, destiny has been clement if it has given you 
 
 in
 
 FOREWARD 
 
 one minute of illusion : illusion, my friends, is per- 
 haps the only thing which permits men to live their 
 own lives." 
 
 The author of " Anima Sola" who signs with 
 the nom de plume Neera> in private life is Anna 
 Zuccari, wife of Signor Radius. She is a Florentine 
 by birth, a Milanese by choice. Among her best 
 novels are " Un Romanzo," " Vecchie Catene" 
 "Addio" "II Castigo" " Freccia del Parto" " Un 
 Nido," " Lidia," etc. While indulging in writing 
 of glorious battles, ignoble victories, and of the throes 
 of a soul in the grasp of that overpowering passion, 
 love, she is very domestic, the angel of her home, 
 not at all the portrait of any of the heroines of her 
 books. Personally ten years ago she was considered 
 a beauty, tall, with brilliant black eyes a graceful 
 figure, and a woman of very nervous, sympathetic 
 temperament. 
 
 This new book is a consolation to all those who, 
 endowed with a high sensitive nature, are obliged 
 by circumstances to live alone, and to keep hidden, 
 for fear of deception or disillusion, that sacred flame 
 which otherwise would have shown and lighted the 
 road to a hero. 
 
 L. D. Ventura. 
 
 San Francisco, October, 1905. 
 
 IV
 
 TRANSLATOR'S PREFACE 
 
 If at their first utterance "thoughts break 
 through language and escape" how warily should a 
 translator set to work! Especially difficult is this 
 literary chemistry in dealing with elements so rich 
 in quality and so volatile in their onomatopoetic 
 power as the Italian where sometimes each letter is 
 informed with sweetness and with meaning. 'The 
 proverb " traduttore, traditore" (a translator ', a 
 traitor} is fitted especially to this tongue ', not only from 
 the possible paronomasia but from its exposition of 
 the arduousness of matching the harmonies and sug- 
 gestions of even the most ordinary expressions della 
 lingua dolce. In the work just completed I have 
 aimed above all to be faithful to the original, and 
 have been so in parts almost to too great a liter alness, 
 and I have given the sense of the author always even 
 when a slight perversion might have lent music to a 
 period and given more satisfaction to the ear. For 
 there is but this one excuse for adding another volume 
 to the already overcrowded book-shelves : First, that 
 an author has something of value to say, and, second, 
 that he should know how to say it. 
 
 And it is in place here to render some account of 
 the purpose of this translation. The labor was 
 undertaken in a dark hour to lay the ghost of a 
 haunting sorrow ; for "Anima Sola " is the outpouring
 
 TRANSLATOR'S PREFACE 
 
 of a lonely soul, and had in its very name a prom- 
 ise of sympathy and, perhaps, of comfort. 'The 
 time and effort expended had at least a temporary 
 reward of forgetfulness, and it is my hope that some 
 one else may profit by my work and find solace in 
 the thoughts here transferred to English. 
 
 E. L. Murison. 
 
 July 12, 
 
 VI
 
 THE SOUL OF AN ARTIST 
 
 When between the world and 
 me there was a veil of clouds. 
 
 I am about to undertake something very 
 strange, yes, very strange for me. I am seated 
 at my little table and have opposite me your 
 chair, that chair in which I have seen you seated 
 so many times and which now is empty, yet not 
 absolutely empty ; there yet remains a little of 
 your atmospheric presence, as it were. 
 
 You smile? At least reserve your judgment. 
 I am not a kttarata> one of those women so justly 
 antipathetic to men. I am not writing a romance 
 nor have I a public expecting my pages. I do not 
 know whether these will number ten or twenty or 
 a hundred. I have written so little in my life! 
 
 Do not discourage me then. You see it is a 
 great proof of my confidence in you, my thus 
 selecting you as interlocutor. I confess this is a 
 necessity to me, it would have been impossible 
 for me to write without addressing some one in 
 this manner. How do the romance writers man- 
 age? I cannot imagine. I, for my part, pretend 
 to speak to you and so I accomplish my purpose. 
 
 But there is something else strange: Where 
 are you? Do you still live? Is there a chance in 
 a thousand that you will ever read these pages ?
 
 THE SOUL OF AN ARTIST 
 
 And do you remember me ? I have heard it said 
 that certain planets encounter one another once 
 in the long course of ages; and so may we 
 meet. Should I print, my book might reach you 
 in some solitude whither you have withdrawn 
 your monastic soul disdainful of the world. But 
 I do not write for the press, and I do not believe 
 that my heirs will give themselves the task of 
 having these lines published. I write, then, with 
 almost the certainty that you will never read me. 
 
 And what matter? Have you ever responded 
 to the unquiet interrogatories of my soul? It 
 was enough for me to speak them out to you ! 
 There is a dark and indefinable fascination in 
 speaking to one who does not answer. Is it not 
 in some sort like the prayers murmured at the 
 foot of the cross? To the Invisible one dares 
 to say everything. It would be absurd to write 
 a romance with such a program, but, then, since 
 this is not a romance ! 
 
 I remember one day in my early years, 
 you know, those sad years which I passed so 
 differently from other women, I had not yet 
 loved, but like those buds which in spring make 
 turgid the summits of the trees, my heart was 
 swollen with a passion I could not place. An 
 orphan, without affections, solitary, ignorant, con- 
 fided to the care of a woman even more ignorant 
 than I, with the prospect of poverty and vulgar 
 toil, what could I hope? Nothing.
 
 THE SOUL OF AN ARTIST 
 
 Without knowing them, I renounced all the 
 joys of earth, the most curious thing being that 
 the renunciation was painless, and when, in my 
 own spite, the fire of youth would seek an outlet, 
 instead of bursting forth, it burned within. Do I 
 make myself clear? The growth was all inward. 
 
 Hear what I did one day. It was autumn 
 my aunt made me pass some time at a dairy-farm 
 of I know not what province, I know only that 
 the country was all green, the hills covered with 
 vineyards, and before our house there ran a little 
 torrent called La Versa. I was alone there as 
 everywhere. A stagnant water seemed to hold 
 me prisoner within the confines of a world which 
 I knew was not mine. The sentiment of protec- 
 tion, that security, that abandon which make so 
 sweet the life of children in happy families, all 
 this I lacked, nor had I any model before me, 
 one whom I could trust, could love intensely ; 
 for my admiration, the prime necessity of ardent 
 souls, I had no objective. 
 
 Everything said and done around me, the 
 subjects of discourse, the material interests, the 
 manner of judging, the pleasures, the sorrows, 
 the pastimes, the annoyances, the good and the 
 evil, all left me so indifferent that many pro- 
 nounced me stupid, others heartless, and others 
 again proud. And I was self-reproachful. Since 
 all agreed to blame me they must have been in 
 the right; and, at the same time, I was sure I
 
 THE SOUL OF AN ARTIST 
 
 was not wholly in the wrong; but my emotions 
 were like objects shut up in a box to which there 
 was no key. I knew they were there, but how 
 get them out? 
 
 Thus came the day in which, finding my 
 heart more than ever o'ercharged, I succeeded in 
 escaping surveillance and very softly opening the 
 house door I turned backwards, taking a path 
 which led to the mountains. This, too, will ap- 
 pear singular to you, but everything I have to 
 tell you is singular: I felt then for the first time 
 the pleasure of living; and for the first time I 
 observed that the sky had many gradations of 
 tender blue and rose suffused and veiled by the 
 white, palpitating atmosphere; and the trees 
 seemed alive with their subdued whispers, with 
 their sweetly evanescent perfumes, and in the air, 
 in the light, even in the shadow there was a soul. 
 
 I spread wide my arms and holding them 
 somewhat lifted, I continued to ascend, ascend 
 wonderful sensation! The moment I was alone 
 my isolation ceased. My heart swelled in a 
 wordless and toneless Bacchanal; and it took 
 wings; and all that sang and flew about me, birds, 
 butterflies, flower-petals, all were my friends and 
 brothers. 
 
 And so I reached the hilltop, so light, so 
 happy and with a confused desire mounting 
 through all my being, a need of vent, an ardor 
 which for the first time broke its bounds, almost
 
 THE SOUL OF AN ARTIST 
 
 the need of a prayer, which, in that divine mo- 
 ment, seemed to me must be granted. 
 
 A profound joy and a great audacity invaded 
 me looking at the solitude which surrounded me; 
 that air and that heaven all for me, that horizon, 
 that world which offered itself so vast and so all 
 unknown to me so young. No image of terror 
 mixed with my festival. 
 
 Erect, embracing in my glance as great a space 
 as possible, my brow uplifted, I cried, "God!" 
 I really cried it, measuring for the first time the 
 pitch of my voice, marveling that that cry should 
 fall so sweetly down the green declivity without 
 awaking any protest, any recrimination. "God! 
 God! God!" Three times I said it and listened. 
 N ature listened with me and was witness of the rite. 
 In that moment I had my spousal with some one. 
 
 Would you like to know how I looked at 
 that time? Then I did not know, but now I can 
 see myself as I then was, tall and slender, but 
 not flexible, so that my little head and thin 
 shoulders and my still childlike arms stiffened to 
 almost an attitude of continual protest. A great 
 lack of balance there was between my form hardly 
 yet molded to femininity and the serious pro- 
 found expression of my eyes relieved by a faint 
 sad smile. When later, in the midst of an ele- 
 gant crowd, at a feast day, there reached my ear, 
 pronounced by a stranger, the first compliment 
 
 5
 
 THE SOUL OF AN ARTIST 
 
 to my beauty, it seemed so strange that I have 
 never forgotten it. It was said that my eyes 
 were oriental. 
 
 And you will believe me when I confess that 
 it was not the vanity of the praise nor the stimu- 
 lus of coquetry which piqued me at that moment, 
 but a subtle spiritual curiosity to know which 
 might exercise the greater power upon others, 
 beauty or plainness, joy or sorrow. It is a prob- 
 lem which has always preoccupied me, my in- 
 capacity to enjoy the present moment such as it 
 appears, and to give myself up to it with that 
 philosophic sensuality which so perfectly isolates 
 the today from tomorrow and yesterday. I have 
 never had the fever of life ; mine has been rather 
 a semi-consciousness broken by frequent visions. 
 Nay, the vision itself is imposed as a higher state, 
 as a refuge and a salvation. 
 
 Perhaps magnetic sleep is such, perhaps such 
 the trances of certain poets and certain saints. If 
 I were as learned as you I could formulate some 
 theory of my sensations; ignorant as I am, I at- 
 tempt to describe them, but I feel that in certain 
 particulars even this undertaking surpasses my 
 powers. Pity me and try to comprehend even 
 what I do not know how to express, that above 
 all! 
 
 I have sometimes begun to laugh, reading 
 and thinking; and more often have I wept. But 
 why have I never either laughed or wept with
 
 THE SOUL OF AN ARTIST 
 
 others? In the evenings of my greatest triumphs 
 when all the theatre was stirred and a thousand 
 hands were raised to applaud me, the exterior I 
 was moved, but my true I, always somnambulous, 
 wondered at the noise and sought still in the 
 darkness its internal and solitary way. In truth 
 I tell you: There is one within me who will have 
 me all in all. 
 
 How distant is that day! I confide these 
 things to you, because you too were born a twin ; 
 you too will never find that companion soul 
 whom all seek, according to the Platonic theory 
 (a theory not for us), to the moment when it is 
 ours indeed and forms one soul with our own. 
 It will prevent our ever giving ourselves com- 
 pletely, though loving more than others and with 
 greater force. 
 
 1 comprehended this at once the first time I 
 saw you, do you remember when? 
 
 I know the hour, the light, even the various 
 tints of green which the trees had that day in the 
 Villa Borghese ; and my spiritual state, sad and 
 tranquil, and my posture, somewhat weary, seated 
 upon the edge of the fountain, writing a name in 
 the sand with the point of my parasol, a name 
 which was not yours 
 
 The villa was so deserted at that hour that 
 your step upon the dry leaves made me raise my 
 head suddenly; and as you gradually drew near 
 me, in your figure, in your face, in the indefinable
 
 THE SOUL OF AN ARTIST 
 
 color of your eyes, in your manner of looking 
 at me and in that of your stopping, courteous, 
 but cold and slightly disdainful, I recognized you 
 as different from all others and I thought with a 
 new and palpitating sensation of intimate sur- 
 prise: "Who may this be?" And as if you had 
 heard my question, in that very moment you 
 presented yourself: " I am the Marquis of Mid- 
 dleforth." 
 
 You see these are but little threads, is it not 
 of little threads that all webs are composed ? The 
 webs devoted to modest and familiar uses, those 
 which clothe the soldier and which wave above 
 his head with the proud name of banners, those 
 destined to struggle with winds and waves, those 
 which cover altars, and those which make the 
 sympathies and the relationships of the soul are 
 little fragile threads likewise wound by the Un- 
 known about the unconscious distaffs of the men 
 and women to whose use they are destined. 
 
 A few days before at Milan, after the great 
 fiasco of the "Abbess of Monreal," I had received 
 a letter signed " Marquis of Middleforth," in 
 which, setting aside the failure of the dramatic 
 work, the unknown writer acknowledged the 
 power of sentiment transfused by me into the 
 character of the Abbess. I did not doubt for a 
 moment that, in spite of the distance between the 
 two cities, you and the unknown correspondent 
 were the same person, and not even the slightest 
 
 8
 
 THE SOUL OF AN ARTIST 
 
 suspicion arose in me that you might be other 
 than you are, a man to be trusted. You, then, 
 and it is one of my most profound, most delicate 
 joys, overcoming the repugnance, usually your 
 sentiment towards actresses, you came to me, 
 guided by that invisible thread which leads the 
 soul ; you did this in a manner so natural as to 
 be almost absurd to others. What more natural 
 than to introduce yourself? 
 
 O the sweet mystery of that our first conver- 
 sation ! You began at once to speak of the "Ab- 
 bess of Monreal," saying that, despite its great 
 defects, there pleased you in this work a certain 
 latent ardor which I had known to render almost 
 to perfection. "Almost" you repeated "for 
 I feel within me an ideal stronger and more com- 
 plex." 
 
 At this point we were silent. I was thinking 
 that I could not then explain to you, then or 
 perhaps ever, by what means the character of the 
 Abbess had awakened within me that anguish of 
 broken illusions which you would have desired 
 stronger and more complex. 
 
 The literary success of the Abbesse de Jouarre 
 had inspired one of our young authors with this 
 subject taken from the Spanish Chronicles at the 
 time of the Moors. Do you remember? 
 
 A girl of royal stock, stolen from her native 
 Africa and secluded in a convent of old Castile, 
 grows there in perfect consonance of ideas and
 
 THE SOUL OF AN ARTIST 
 
 of aspirations with the sisters that surround her; 
 only her piety is more ardent, her zeal more pas- 
 sionate, her prayers more poetic, her abstinence 
 more exalted and continuous. In the country of 
 Saint Theresa and Maria Alacoque the young 
 savage was a marvel of sanctity. 
 
 You may imagine how deeply I feel this situ- 
 ation. I see her, the young exile, in those azure 
 nights made delicious by the jasmine scent, kneel- 
 ing in her cell, her eyes and heart turned to that 
 mysterious country of fascinating and distant 
 records. Made Abbess of the convent, her mys- 
 ticism grows. It is in the church paved with 
 funereal marble or in the wide level space of the 
 garden in the center of which there dominates a 
 cross that she gathers about her all the sisters 
 every night, for the day does not suffice for her 
 mania of divine love. All Castile proclaims her 
 saint ; from the most distant countries there is a 
 concourse to implore her benediction. She no 
 longer eats or sleeps or speaks; etherealized, she 
 passes her days in ecstasy. This is the whole 
 first act which so much pleased you, while the 
 audience could not dissemble its impatience. 
 
 But that moment of revulsion, when upon 
 the cloistered silence there fell the clamor of arms, 
 and the howling Moors beat against the doors of 
 the convent! What was my countenance, what 
 the expression of my eyes in that fulminating 
 moment of revelation? And why was it that, 
 
 10
 
 THE SOUL OF AN ARTIST 
 
 when without speaking, moving resolutely towards 
 the sisters, I ran myself to open the doors, a long 
 applause the only occasion throughout the 
 drama shook the theatre from pit to ceiling? 
 
 We discussed, or rather you did, that sudden 
 transition, that apostasy from twenty years of 
 conventual devotion, excited by the unexpected 
 return of voices, of clamor and tumult of warring 
 men which moved her to throw herself into the 
 arms of the invaders with that cry, "O my Coun- 
 try ! " which you thought vulgar, which to me 
 seemed, instead, so profoundly typical. 
 
 Yes, it was under the trees of the Villa Bor- 
 ghese, in the splendid sunset of a Roman sky, 
 that you, a stranger, said to me that you could 
 not comprehend that invocation to a fatherland. 
 
 I thought that you must always have been 
 very happy, and looked closely at the perfect 
 form of your head, at your brow upon which 
 eight or ten scholarly generations had set the seal 
 of sovereignty and impressed upon every line of 
 your countenance an infallible distinction of race. 
 A few moments before, you had told me that it 
 was your intention to tour Italy without any limit 
 of time or place; you were, then, rich and free, 
 besides noble and intellectual. A young life with- 
 out struggle, beautified by the brightest smiles of 
 fortune, had conducted you to the full and com- 
 plete possession of your rights as a superior man. 
 
 And again silence was between us, after these 
 
 1 1
 
 THE SOUL OF AN ARTIST 
 
 reflections. The evening fell. The dampness 
 of the trees made me think with a shudder of 
 the days of my childhood passed in a cottage, 
 beside an ignorant old woman, among people 
 whose rudimental goodness was poor excuse in 
 my eyes for their invincible vulgarity; of the 
 piece of bread which they gave me and of the 
 hunger of the soul in which they let me languish ; 
 and an indescribable tenderness moved me for the 
 poor girl that I had been. 
 
 In you, the hour must have awakened very 
 different images; perhaps your paternal castle 
 gay with the flames of crackling pine logs leaping 
 under the arabesque arch of the fireplace, the 
 style of the Stuart reign; and the fantastic park 
 seen through the polychromatic crystal ; and your 
 mother, your sweet mother, who caressed you. 
 
 "You should go to see the cupola of St. Peter 
 gilded by the reflections of the last rays," you 
 said. 
 
 I arose as the most natural thing, as if it had 
 been understood that we should leave together, 
 as if I had known you always. As I moved I 
 saw that your foot had canceled the name written 
 by me in the sand with the point of my parasol, 
 nor did I grieve it seemed, as it were, a libera- 
 tion. I believe I gave no sign of feeling, although 
 every memory slighted leaves a wound, and from 
 then I knew your extraordinary delicacy. With 
 an accent and a glance which I had not yet 
 
 12
 
 THE SOUL OF AN ARTIST 
 
 observed in you, you murmured softly, in an 
 affectionate tone which contrasted the dominat- 
 ing timbre of your voice: 
 
 "I hope I have not displeased you. At any 
 rate, shall we be friends?" 
 
 The mysterious veil of your eyes raised itself, 
 and I gazed deep into a heaven of radiant blue. 
 How we understood each other in that moment! 
 Two or three times only, in the days that fol- 
 lowed, did I see in your pupils and in the iris, 
 usually clouded, that surrounded them, that sud- 
 den and rapid gleam, like a momentary baring 
 of your soul. 
 
 It is sweet to me thus to turn back to hours 
 of the past, because I have no doubt that happi- 
 ness consists more of hours than of days, and 
 more of thoughts than of things. 
 
 How should I forget the lively pleasure, 
 frank and reciprocal, which neither of us tried to 
 dissimulate, when we met a few days after at the 
 Pantheon ! For the horror of the common words, 
 we had parted without any promise of another 
 meeting, but the certainty of our coming together 
 again had made our farewell very sweet. With 
 that passionate regret for the irrevocable, I think 
 now of the ardor with which you must have 
 sought me, feverishly, madly, through the streets 
 of Rome. 
 
 "Among the tombs," you said, saluting me. 
 
 13
 
 THE SOUL OF AN ARTIST 
 
 I looked at you, surprised to find you so 
 young; and while at first you had seemed to me 
 pale and almost too serious, I discovered now, 
 with a certain timidity, the delicate freshness of 
 your color and your mouth so childlike in its 
 austere beard, giving the effect of a bud peeping 
 from dark foliage. I had an instant of shame, 
 and during this I believe I blushed. 
 
 "You have not acted recently," you said 
 again. 
 
 I answered a dry No! without giving any 
 cause, busied as I was in asking myself your age. 
 
 We had stopped before the tomb of the great 
 King, but you stood at one side, with your face 
 raised, and the light from the impbtvixm so clearly 
 revealed your face that I could trace the lines of 
 that strange mouth at once so young and so cruel, 
 forming in your smile an acute arc. I observed, 
 too, under the pride of your profile, the evidence 
 of that spirituality which your eyes so fully con- 
 firmed and which emanated from all your person, 
 like a fluid between you and the world, which I 
 call your air. Alfred di Vigny and Chateau- 
 briand must have looked something like you. 
 
 "I love these tombs (withdrawing from the 
 arch of Victor Emanuel, we followed the curve 
 of the Pantheon, regarding the other sepulchres), 
 and it is a strange sentiment I experience here; 
 rather than admiration, a proud joy possesses me, 
 the serenity of one who was lost and has found
 
 THE SOUL OF AN ARTIST 
 
 his way again. If you knew the thoughts that 
 always crowd upon me in this place! I think 
 perhaps " 
 
 I said no more. Repeating these words over 
 now to myself, I am surprised that you probed 
 their proud and wild meaning. And that you 
 did I was made aware by the sudden darkening 
 of your eyes and by that cold sternness in which 
 you vest yourself as with a cuirass whenever you 
 suspect rivalship in your pride. 
 
 But I did not know you well then. Con- 
 fused at my boldness and your reserve, I jest- 
 ingly asked you if I had spoken foolishly. You 
 gave me this reply: "Quite the contrary," and 
 the silence that followed seemed sweeter than 
 any words you could have spoken. 
 
 From the tombs there came a voice so sym- 
 pathetic to my heart and you so well entered into 
 the melancholy spirit of the scene, we felt our- 
 selves so close to one another, so in harmony 
 with that King and those geniuses that never, 
 perhaps, as then has the invisible accord of two 
 intelligences vibrated a tone sharper and more 
 penetrating. Yes, I need to evoke you as you 
 then were if I am to continue these confidences. 
 The luminous dawn of a tempestuous period, 
 those first days are not to be forgotten. What 
 boots it that at so great distance your real pres- 
 ence vanishes in a fantastic vision? Is not life 
 all dream? You taught me that .good and evil
 
 THE SOUL OF AN ARTIST 
 
 do not exist absolutely; at that rate, what is to 
 be or not to be? I see you, I create you, there- 
 fore you exist. 
 
 Accords. 
 
 To know a soul, a heart, an intelligence, and 
 to love it without hope of return, to love it for 
 itself and for its inherent beauty; to enlighten 
 oneself by its rays, to burn in its fires, is not this 
 a proof that one is worthy of that soul? What 
 need of response from that soul ? Our satisfac- 
 tion is in feeling our equality to it. 
 
 I wrote this thought, long ago, upon the first 
 page of a book you gave me. (Do you know 
 which?) 
 
 It was my habit to note my thoughts beside 
 those of the authors most sympathetic to me, 
 sometimes but a word, a name ; it seemed to me in 
 the infinite sadness of my youth that thus I com- 
 muned with a friend, and I may say that my only 
 joy for many a year were these ideal conversations. 
 
 I found in them not a fantastic world, but the 
 true world, the true land where I was arbitress, 
 that country from which I had been torn, before 
 my birth, by some cruelty of fate, my possession, 
 my right. That was the door behind which I 
 heard the battering weapons of my brothers ; but 
 how long, oh, how long it remained closed 
 against my ardent desires ! And you did not 
 understand this! 
 
 16
 
 THE SOUL OF AN ARTIST 
 
 A minute description of the world in which 
 passed my youth, all that petty, prosaic environ- 
 ment, would certainly tempt the pen of a realist. 
 But I know that you despise such vulgar recitals 
 and I myself would sicken to stir again that heap 
 of rubbish in which I suffered too much to have 
 treasured for it either rancor or hate or, I might 
 say, even a memory. I will picture to you rather 
 certain isolated scenes, fragments of my existence, 
 which have survived the destruction of the rest. 
 Truly this is woman's work to unstitch from the 
 ragged canvas of old tapestry some flowers of 
 embroidery. Alas, poor flowers ! many of them 
 will crumble in my ringers and not one of them 
 can be transferred to other material. 
 
 The Prince. 
 
 I have in mind a street, sunny and dusty ; a 
 great excited crowd, a throng of bodies, voices, 
 laughter, all that animal and mechanical confluence 
 which makes me so averse to popular reunions 
 and I, a fragile, dreamy girl, jostled, knocked 
 about, bruised and irritated and mute groan- 
 ing in spirit, while my companions mocked me; 
 and all about as far as my eye could reach, or my 
 ear catch a sound or my mind a thought, a surg- 
 ing mass beating against me; against my most 
 cherished and profoundest ideals, a brutal shout 
 from a thousand throats: "Thou art alone!" 
 
 They had said in the house: "Let us go to
 
 THE SOUL OF AN ARTIST 
 
 see the prince." It was the crown prince who 
 was on his way to a military review. It was the 
 first time that I found myself in presence of a 
 form of superior life, of a being really royal and 
 really alive. It seemed to be the incarnation of 
 one of my visions. The prince! This magic 
 word aroused in me a tumult of ideas, confused 
 and obscure in outline, but radiant and mysteri- 
 ously attractive. The vulgar remarks, the witti- 
 cisms, the jests which were exchanged among the 
 crowd during the leisure of their waiting disgusted 
 me; disgusted me the stupidly beatific prayers 
 of some, wounded me like swords the bursts of 
 coarse laughter; certain gestures cut in the air 
 descended upon me like blows; sly smiles and 
 certain eye gleams brought the blood to my brow 
 as assaults against my modesty. All seemed gay, 
 satisfied, stimulated by the curiosity of seeing the 
 prince, of finding themselves joined flank to flank, 
 elbow to elbow, mixing the unconscious instincts 
 of their carnality to the somewhat cynical merry- 
 making in their brains, each one feeling strong in 
 the force of the others, in the spirit of the others, 
 each personality losing itself voluptuously in that 
 morbid self-oblivion which holds the masses as a 
 unit. 
 
 And I drew my dress close about me, striv- 
 ing for a current of air between me and them, 
 shrinking from contact, trying to isolate myself a 
 little by stopping my ears with my fingers. 
 
 18
 
 THE SOUL OF AN ARTIST 
 
 Every little while from the end of the street 
 a shining helmet sent a quiver through the crowd : 
 " Here he is ! Here he is ! " Then I was pos- 
 sessed by a curious sense of bitterness, a sob, a 
 swelling of my throat choked me. If the prince 
 should look at me! If from above that thick 
 wall of heads with his eagle eye he should recog- 
 nize me! 
 
 My agitation grew from moment to moment; 
 it seemed to me that the greatest event of my life 
 was about to take place ; my heart beat, perspira- 
 tion bathed me, and yet my hands were like ice. 
 
 Three or four times the crowd had cried, 
 " Here he is ! " without any one appearing. Fi- 
 nally a little group of horsemen arrives. It is he ! 
 That is he ! 
 
 All stood tiptoe, gazing eagerly, all excited, 
 electrified, attracted to one point. Then I was 
 moved by a contrary sensation, and a most strange 
 one. I remember well that at the very moment 
 that the horses' hoofs beat the ground before me, 
 although I too had stood upon tiptoe, yet I fell 
 back and lowered my eyes. 
 
 A respectful silence for an instant dominated 
 the crowd, a more rapid pulsation of my heart, 
 almost a sense of suffocation, a shout: "Long 
 live the prince!" He was gone. 
 
 Then raising my glance, I saw the white 
 plume waving upon his head and rapidly disap- 
 pearing. The crowd dissolved suddenly, chat- 
 
 19
 
 THE SOUL OF AN ARTIST 
 
 ting, commenting, light, ironical, merry, forget- 
 ful. 
 
 I should tell you that I slept badly that night, 
 that the day following my heart was full, mor- 
 tally sad, and that for a long year the prince who 
 had not looked at me mastered all my thoughts? 
 And I lived, in this dream, hours of delicious 
 folly, imagining plots and conspiracies which I 
 should discover, risking my life to save my hero. 
 
 You will agree that for a first love this was no 
 common affair. It filled that need of exaltation 
 which in my struggle with destiny had saddened 
 all my youth. Immature yet for love, I thought 
 I loved, and did indeed a symbol, him who 
 in my inexpert eyes represented the greatest 
 beauty, the greatest talent, the highest nobility, 
 the impossible, the unattainable, my dream ! 
 There are words which have the power of sub- 
 stantiating an ideal even when there is no corre- 
 spondent reality. 
 
 Gropings. 
 
 You once said to me that you had no antipa- 
 thies, but more than twenty times I have sur- 
 prised such in your eyes, in a gesture, in an in- 
 voluntary exclamation. Give me the pleasure of 
 contradicting you. It is impossible that you are 
 without this sensation peculiar to the superior 
 races. The lower one descends in the social 
 scale the rarer it is, because animalism blunts 
 
 20
 
 THE SOUL OF AN ARTIST 
 
 sensibility. You strive to conquer this, I well 
 believe, for the good of others and as much or 
 more for your own, it being a perennial fount of 
 suffering; but you feel it and that is enough for 
 me. 
 
 There are a thousand causes of antipathy: 
 stupidity, arrogant dullness, pretension, bad taste; 
 all that seems and is not. Certain smiles (think, 
 I pray you, of certain smiles) with the voice, the 
 whole bearing, the hand ( have you ever observed 
 the physiognomy of the hand?) present the most 
 common causes of antipathy. Old women who 
 persist in seeming young, fools who pretend to 
 be intellectual, vulgar souls attitudinizing as ex- 
 quisites, how can you endure these without pain? 
 
 I suffer likewise in seeing a coarse woman 
 tricked out in lace, and objects of art in keeping 
 of a gambler, and riches in the hands of the 
 ignorant and the miserly. 
 
 And ugliness? Certain uglinesses, ignoble, 
 mean, vicious, cretinous, hurt me like a blow. It 
 is not so with others. In a group of five persons, 
 the sight of ugliness will provoke in one a laugh, 
 in one compassion, in one triumph, one it will 
 leave indifferent and one will be unobservant. 
 I suffer, suffer, I tell you. My aunt used to say: 
 "It is not the poor thing's fault, is it?" And 
 how about me ? 
 
 My sensibility has always been, even in this 
 connection, excessive, and I have not a doubt 
 
 21
 
 THE SOUL OF AN ARTIST 
 
 thaf I have suffered for the pains and the ugli- 
 ness of others more than they themselves. 
 
 My aunt made me learn embroidery from a 
 girl much older than I, a poor lymphatic creature, 
 with great swollen hands spotted with purplish 
 stains, and yellow teeth ridged with green which 
 seemed to leap from her mouth every time she 
 opened it, and as I was not a model pupil, she 
 opened it often: "No, no, not that way; be at- 
 tentive, smaller points," and those hands, those 
 horrible hands, would pass and repass before me, 
 grazing mine, touching me, so swollen on some 
 days that I could not keep my eyes off them, 
 although sickened by the sight. But, one day 
 when the poor girl, aware of my repugnance, bent 
 her head in humiliation, I threw myself on her 
 neck all ardor, and kissed her and embraced her. 
 She soon grew serene, but how many a time after- 
 wards had I to embrace her, and no one pitied 
 me! 
 
 Such were my sorrows, diverse from those of 
 others, but were they the less grievous for that? 
 Or rather were they not doubled by their very 
 isolation? 
 
 At the bottom of an old trunk my aunt found 
 a pair of black silk stockings; there were holes 
 in the feet, a red line ran around the hem at the 
 top. She presented them to me and I exulted 
 in the possession, but I never put them on. I 
 thought that when they were worn out and 
 
 22
 
 THE SOUL OF AN ARTIST 
 
 that they would be soon I should never again 
 have a pair of silk stockings; and if I could not 
 have them always, why at all? The delight of 
 the first moment changed to sadness whenever I 
 took them in my hand, seized as I was by the 
 thought of their frailty, of their ephemeral influ- 
 ence in the satisfactions of my life. I looked at 
 them from time to time and put them away like 
 relics. Never seeing them on me, my aunt said 
 to a neighbor, "She is pride itself." 
 
 My aunt formed such cruel judgments which 
 struck deep into my heart, which made me weep 
 as if I found myself wandering lonely in a desert, 
 crying with faint, faint voice unheard of human 
 ears. Oh, horrible case! a voice which /only 
 heard. 
 
 You cannot imagine how some phrases grate 
 upon my ear: When a glass is broken, "What 
 have you done? " When complaint is made of 
 pain in stomach or foot or what not, "It's the 
 weather;" and when one announces with spas- 
 modic outcry the death of a person dear to one, 
 this question: "When was it?" 
 
 But my horror for elegant women you will 
 think exaggerated, those who in following the 
 fashion know neither heat nor cold, nor weariness, 
 nor sense, nor modesty, who bare themselves, lace 
 themselves, torture themselves, fast or stuff, with 
 equal indifference, whence I have reached this
 
 THE SOUL OF AN ARTIST 
 
 conclusion, that the skin of an ass stretched over 
 an old drum is the fitting comparison for the 
 white epidermis of a practiced mondaine. 
 
 No words can express my disdain for those 
 who speak of love while curling their whiskers or 
 of religion while chewing a toothpick, or for those 
 ladies who declare themselves nervous and lovers 
 of music. 
 
 And there is something graver in my character 
 which has always exacerbated the wounds of my 
 sensibility. It is the mania of seeking the truth 
 at any cost. To gain this end I have been at 
 times foolish, imprudent, graceless and heartless ; 
 you know that terrible aspersion from which you 
 too are not clear. From a heartless person (how 
 often did I hear that in my childhood ! ) there is 
 nothing to be hoped. 
 
 Heartless! what does this mean? Good- 
 hearted those are called who smile at every one, 
 love every one, those who are gentle, attentive 
 and obsequious to every one. 
 
 But is that good-hearted? They need every 
 one ; hence their goodness. And because I need 
 no one, must I call myself heartless? 
 
 There was a time when I wept for every form 
 of unhappiness in the world, if I saw a funeral 
 pass, if a man were ragged and naked to the cold, 
 if a child were beaten, and even if a horse fell 
 under its load, and even, yes, even for the tree 
 stoned by gamins, its branches falling like severed
 
 THE SOUL OF AN ARTIST 
 
 limbs. I fancied the tree groaned; more than 
 once I wept at seeing branches stripped from 
 their stock. 
 
 One day a hospital litter passed me, carrying 
 a mason who had fallen from a bridge; he was 
 hidden under the white curtains, but his hoarse, 
 raucous moans, scarcely human, could be heard. 
 I was obliged to lean for support against the 
 wall, and I do not think greater compassion could 
 be than that I felt at that moment. However, 
 following the litter with my eyes, I thought how 
 much greater must be the heart of the physician, 
 who, without the quiver of an eyelid, would 
 plunge his hand into the wounds of the wretched 
 man, and I was ashamed of my weakness. The 
 supreme scientists, the discoverers, the bene- 
 factors, Jenner and Charcot in their laboratories 
 filled with dismembered animals, what hearts 
 must they have had in contrast with those soft 
 persons who keep dogs on velvet cushions and 
 feed almonds to caged birds ! 
 
 Compassion, neighborly love, even tenderness 
 towards animals, are not these sometimes altru- 
 istic forms of a profoundly egoistic sentiment? 
 
 It is the instinct which speaks in human pas- 
 sions as it speaks in the cat which is gentle, 
 placable, affectionate, and cleanly, because other- 
 wise it would not attain its own end, that of liv- 
 ing with men. 
 
 It is like the "good heart" of those ladies
 
 THE SOUL OF AN ARTIST 
 
 who take up subscription charities for the oppor- 
 tunity they offer of display. Vulgarity, vulgarity ! 
 
 I knew a family most respected for the "good 
 heart" of its component members. There was the 
 mother who bore a great name and was convinced 
 that she combined in herself all the virtues of the 
 Almanac of Gotha and those of the Gospel be- 
 sides. The elder son, a roue, went to confession 
 because he was "good-hearted" and wanted to 
 please his mother. The second, a consumptive, 
 heard a perpetual hymn ascend for his health, his 
 strength, through the goodness of his mother and 
 brothers. And the daughter, an old parchment 
 creature, was attended by the greatest compli- 
 ments which can console a poor woman for the 
 lack of all the rest. But why console oneself? I 
 would never console myself. 
 
 All the family joined with one accord in this 
 mute service of lies and, all beatification, lived in 
 the most complete density, smiling at one another, 
 exchanging tender kisses, inebriated by their mu- 
 tual praises; the mother with her virginal air, 
 the first-born with his pompous pretensions of 
 ability, the other challenging the human race be- 
 tween two fits of coughing, and the daughter 
 emotionally repeating, as it were, an accompani- 
 ment to the rhythm of her own personality. 
 
 I, too, have tried to be consolatory, and have 
 never succeeded in my efforts. I said to the 
 
 26
 
 THE SOUL OF AN ARTIST 
 
 sick : Look at the suffering in all this world, in- 
 finite, greater than thine, inevitable, obedient to 
 an occult will. He replied : " What are to me 
 the sufferings of others? I feel my own." 
 
 I said to the weak and weary disheartened by 
 the struggle of life : "All this is transitory; it is 
 but a trial; one day you will marvel that you 
 were cast down for so little." And he replied: 
 " The present only has value." 
 
 And a hundred times my arms fell helpless, 
 and, full of dismay, I asked myself what divided 
 me from my neighbor and why we could not un- 
 derstand each other. I would blush to offer a lie 
 as comfort; it seems to me a derision, an insult. 
 And yet this is what they wish, what they love, 
 what they give with great zeal that they may 
 receive the same again; for, prodigal today of 
 ignoble words of adulation and blandishment, 
 they unconsciously feel that tomorrow these will 
 be spent upon them again: and if at the moment 
 of pronouncing them they feel the insincerity of 
 the words, when they listen the tone seems 
 altogether another. 
 
 Thus one day a lie for good-heartedness, 
 another day for egoism; today, not to offend the 
 pride of a friend, tomorrow another, not to crush 
 his weakness. There is some effort in the lie, 
 but the reflection that it is due to friendship, or 
 to prudence, or to social duty, makes it almost a 
 virtue. Once having gained this point, this logic 
 
 27
 
 THE SOUL OF AN ARTIST 
 
 soon enlarges its borders, and having exercised 
 its powers for others, we feel justified in employ- 
 ing it for ourselves. 
 
 Evidently, I reason too closely, but to love 
 truth, and to suffer for it and to sacrifice oneself 
 to it, is this to have a bad heart? Perhaps I love 
 ideas more than persons; this may be, but prove 
 to me the superior worth of persons. From the 
 deep pool, the stagnant waters which surrounded 
 me, I looked around, and what could I do? I 
 hoped to find unexpectedly some revelation, some 
 path, a ray, perhaps a voice, who knows? 
 
 Religion I knew only in the petty practices 
 of my old aunt. Boiled eggs on Friday, ancho- 
 vies on Saturday, the rosary every evening, and 
 confession once a month; a squalid wooden cru- 
 cifix, often kissed by my aunt, was my only and 
 repugnant symbol of a religion I did neither love 
 nor understand. And yet I had a lively desire 
 of God and sought Him again and again with 
 eyes upraised to the limpid night. But what God 
 did I seek? Who could declare Him to me? 
 Where was He? I know that once while gazing 
 at the stars I was overcome by a tenderness so 
 profound, so devotional, so mysteriously sad that 
 my face was wet with tears; seeing which, my 
 aunt cried: "Simpleton!" and then added, "Say 
 a requiem for your poor dead." 
 
 28
 
 THE SOUL OF AN ARTIST 
 
 Discords. 
 
 I remember, also, an old man whom my aunt 
 obsequiously called Signer Professor. He was 
 a neighbor of ours and as he always had some 
 books on his big table and spoke ever of instruc- 
 tion, of culture, of wisdom, I felt myself drawn 
 to him by a vague hope of light. I did not dare 
 speak much, for I was timid and too much con- 
 strained by my humble condition, but I listened 
 to him eagerly, and with a certain pulsing in my 
 veins. I expected from one moment to another 
 that he would utter some sublime word, and in 
 this attitude I trembled. 
 
 One day finding me more than usually 
 thoughtful, he had the goodness to interrogate 
 me. What a commotion! What could I say? 
 And how should he reply ? Blushing deeply, and 
 with drooping lids, I confessed how distressed I 
 was not to know what in this world was truly true. 
 
 The professor burst into solemn laughter, 
 which instead of disconcerting me, suggested 
 very suddenly this doubt: "Perhaps you are 
 not yourself true"; and then I had the courage 
 to raise my eyes and to look him in the face. 
 
 "Well," said he, struggling to recover his 
 seriousness, "virtue, knowledge, good and evil 
 are true things. There is one other truer still 
 and that is arithmetic. Do you know, child, 
 that two and two are truly four?" 
 
 I replied that I had been told so but that I 
 
 29
 
 THE SOUL OF AN ARTIST 
 
 did not know, and this reply, which might have 
 seemed a profound repartee, was naught else but 
 a candid confession of my ignorance. 
 
 A few days after, the professor took me to a 
 manufactory, where in a long row a great number 
 of machines were turning, puffing, whistling. 
 Bending to my ear, he said ironically: "Behold 
 truth. These machines which never make a mis- 
 take, which regularly fulfil their functions as if 
 they were living beings, are precisely the fruit of 
 that superior science that begins with two and 
 two are four." 
 
 At this very moment the workman who was 
 guiding one of the machines exclaimed: "It's 
 stopped; one of the wheels is broken." The 
 professor at once understood the accident, but 
 did he also understand my glance, immovable, 
 filled with sadness, fixed upon the machine which 
 turned no more ? 
 
 And for a long while I believe that I did not 
 love nature. Except for the momentary revela- 
 tion which I had that day upon mounting one of 
 the hills of the Versa, the trees, the mountains, 
 the heavens were for me but the cold and monot- 
 onous scenery of exasperating excursions. 
 
 We went in companies of four, five or six, as 
 many as could be gathered together, furnished 
 with something to eat which must be guarded 
 during the whole expedition and which was the 
 
 30
 
 THE SOUL OF AN ARTIST 
 
 real object of our setting out. We walked in 
 procession at each other's heels through narrow 
 paths bounded by hedgerows, keeping our eyes 
 down to avoid the dirt of the path and obeying 
 directions sent back from the head of the file : 
 "Turn to the right; keep to the left." 
 
 Upon the dusty breadth of the highroad, 
 however, the company disposed itself in flank, 
 and, if I delayed a little or advanced, my aunt's 
 voice soon called me to order. 
 
 A cup of black leather, cracked with long 
 use, circulated from pocket to pocket, from hand 
 to hand, from mouth to mouth, profaning all the 
 springs which issued by our way. I remember 
 how I longed for a voluptuous draught from the 
 pure source itself, my mouth in the delicious 
 freshness ; but one day when I risked this delight, 
 my scandalized aunt cried out: " How dreadful ! 
 You drink like a beast!" 
 
 Little by little there overcame me a deep 
 loathing for the straight paths, for the crystal 
 streams filtered into the black cup, for the 
 shadowy levels defaced by empty paper bags and 
 chicken bones, for the numberless tiny meadow- 
 lands, for the jasmine hedges, for the golden buds 
 gathered for button-hole adornment, for the heads 
 of chicory from which opened like clear blue eyes 
 the dear flowers which I had so loved, and which 
 I detested from the day I saw them pranking 
 above a salad. Then all the popular songs,
 
 THE SOUL OF AN ARTIST 
 
 amorous or patriotic, sung in chorus under the 
 trees, put a climax to my sadness. It was then I 
 learned to weep internally. 
 
 Once I had a compensation. Stirred always 
 by the impulse of flight, I profited by some dis- 
 traction of the company, occupied as they were 
 in eating, to withdraw myself, were it only by a 
 few steps, and on such occasion under the thick 
 cover of a plant with earth-bowed branches, I 
 discovered an apparition so delicate that I am 
 even now moved by the pleasure of the remem- 
 bered vision. 
 
 It was a group of flowers I had never seen 
 before (crocuses?) without stem, and leafless, 
 springing one bygone from the ground, bare and 
 white, with a whiteness fleshy rather than diaphan- 
 ous, coloring to a pale lilac, the long slender 
 calyx opening with exquisite grace. These noble 
 flowers gathered in sweet consort and protected 
 by the branching shade seemed to me aristocratic 
 dames in dignified repose, or sad and gracious 
 poets escaped the throng and in close covert from 
 touch or observation. 
 
 I repelled the temptation to pluck them as a 
 brutality. Lightly, lightly, it seeming almost as 
 if I should disturb them, I kneeled down and 
 then sliding along my length in the sward, I lay 
 outstretched with my face close to them, looking, 
 looking, only looking at them. 
 
 Were they flowers indeed? Need had they
 
 THE SOUL OF AN ARTIST 
 
 of this secluded solitude, a solitude complete, for 
 not another plant was near, all shut out by the 
 green curtain of this princely retreat. Did those 
 frail lilac forms breathe out a perfume? No, 
 rather than the rude sensation which we associate 
 with such a word, there was a fragrant sweetness 
 of purity, almost the emanation of an intimate 
 essence far too delicate and spiritual to be allied 
 to the materiality of an odor. 
 
 I lay in a delicious ecstasy of contemplation. 
 It seemed to me my presence was felt and not 
 resented. I counted them; there were seven and 
 two tiny ones hardly yet above ground. They 
 were close together, but without contact. I felt 
 within me a most curious satisfaction: here were 
 my people ! But even this innocent revelry cost 
 me dear. My aunt reproved me sharply, saying 
 it was not "civil" to leave the company, that I 
 should do as others did and not wish to appear 
 eccentric and ill-bred. At the very moment of 
 this reprimand, a young lady was making little 
 balls of bread-crumbs and throwing them in the 
 faces of the guests, and this did not seem eccen- 
 tric or ill-bred, but rather provoked laughter as 
 something winningly witty. 
 
 My soul! My refuge! 
 
 "My mother," you once said to me, "was a 
 superior woman, a profound intellect, a pure 
 heart." 
 
 33
 
 THE SOUL OF AN ARTIST 
 
 I begged you then, and many times after, to 
 speak to me of her, which you did with an ex- 
 pansive confidence which remains the sweetest 
 memory of our intercourse. You permitted me 
 to participate in this maternal cult, and through 
 you I knew and loved your mother. The dear 
 dead, whose shroud you lifted for a moment, 
 abides with me, and you are gone! She makes 
 a part of that inner world of my soul which I 
 call my temple. 
 
 I do not know whether in reality or in some 
 dream I have seen a Gothic temple standing in 
 the solitary space of a wide champaign, girded 
 by a woody plantation, tranquil and dim in the 
 interior, lit by the stained ogive windows whose 
 colored rays touched the tombs to a seeming 
 warmth. 
 
 Often it seems to me my soul, weary of the 
 world, of life, of my fellow beings, retires within 
 me for repose. Then I find all the sensations of 
 a sacred retreat, a great peace, a sweet and solemn 
 mystery, a gentle gleam of exalted melancholy, a 
 poetic sentiment and a glad delirium of isolation. 
 There, too, from the windows of thought comes 
 a warm and equal light, and in a tender glow my 
 elect dead breathe again and surround me, risen 
 for me alone from their eternal oblivion. 
 
 You well know that some must weep in this 
 world, but you have never. You have no sep- 
 ulchre in your soul, although you go often to 
 
 34
 
 THE SOUL OF AN ARTIST 
 
 meditate at the tomb of your mother that stone 
 which you have described to me and whose 
 inscription the invading ivy conceals from all but 
 you who alone have the right to move the veil 
 from the dear recording name. The nostalgia 
 of grey mornings passed in your village cemetery 
 assailed you often in this sunny land. Once when 
 we were seated beneath the arches of the Coliseum 
 do you remember? you said to me: "You 
 do not know what it is to think of a distant 
 tomb." 
 
 The sad certainty of your tone, wounding my 
 pride, precluded any reply. But listen to me 
 now. Do you know what it is to think of an 
 unknown tomb, whose very existence is doubtful ? 
 Can you conceive that profound, that maddening 
 sorrow, not to know, not even to hope to know, 
 of whom you are begotten ? 
 
 Oh, all that you told me of your mother 
 her caresses, her anxieties, the prayers she taught 
 you, your little hands clasped upon your crib, 
 her injunctions to be good, to be just, to be great; 
 and that book in which she noted from day to 
 day your progressions; and the little museum of 
 your tiny garments; the first baby shoe, the first 
 glove, and those sweet eyes fixed upon you, 
 watchful, loving, protecting ever, and which fol- 
 low you across mountains and seas, breaking the 
 bonds of the grave! Even that sepulchre I 
 envy you, that spot of earth, that short stone 
 
 35
 
 THE SOUL OF AN ARTIST 
 
 over which you may say, weeping, " Here lies my 
 mother." 
 
 I have nothing. 
 
 When at last she died, the old woman who 
 called herself my aunt, died unexpectedly, the 
 neighbors said that she herself did not know who 
 I was. She had taken me for a certain money 
 compensation, and as I gave her no trouble, was 
 rather an aid and a companion, she had persuaded 
 herself, as it were, that we were related, but either 
 because of limited intelligence, or of ignorance or 
 of indolence, she had never taken the pains to 
 acquaint me of this mystery of my birth; and 
 the atmosphere that pervaded me was so unfor- 
 tunate, so low and so destructive of all ideals, that 
 I myself had never felt the need to know more. 
 
 The death of the poor woman awakened me 
 as from a heavy, troubled dream, except that to 
 dream one must have lived, and with me life had 
 been only a dream. 
 
 Who was I? Whither was I tending? What 
 should I do? Think of these three problems 
 given to a girl of fourteen years, alone in the 
 world. The first night I wept; the second, I did 
 not weep but I did not sleep. Betimes the next 
 morning I followed the bier of the stranger who 
 had shared with me her roof and her bread. Once 
 more at home, I seated myself amidst the few 
 movables which adorned our three rooms and 
 
 36
 
 THE SOUL OF AN ARTIST 
 
 gazed at them in a kind of stupor. They as- 
 sumed a new aspect to me; it seemed I had never 
 seen them before. 
 
 Would not that armoire open unexpectedly, 
 and would not some shadow rise from the hollow 
 of that green armchair, or issue from the mantel 
 mirror whose shining surface reflected the clock 
 the clock, the only living thing near me, what 
 company it was for me in those first hours! The 
 hand moved slowly around at the feet of a lady 
 leaning against a column with an amphora in her 
 arms, and the voice of the inner mechanism lulled 
 me like the rhythm of a cradle-song. 
 
 A neighbor came to take me to her home. I 
 passed several toneless days. A black veil was 
 wound about my neck and black earrings were 
 hung in my ears, and I made mechanical responses 
 to a quantity of requiems. Then there arrived 
 some persons whom I did not know, who made 
 me write my name and who examined all the 
 dead woman's belongings. 
 
 It appeared the good creature had lived on a 
 pension, which ceased immediately upon her death, 
 and likewise that all the furniture was to be sold 
 for my profit, since I heard them talk of giving 
 me a profession. So I was put in a convent, 
 where I remained a little more than two years, 
 when I was taken out by a lady to be companion 
 to her daughter. 
 
 During this interval I had experienced a com- 
 
 37
 
 THE SOUL OF AN ARTIST 
 
 plete evolution of thought. As long as I believed 
 that I belonged to the family of the old woman 
 with whom I lived, the humiliation and the sor- 
 row of being in continual discord, in an unspeak- 
 ably painful straitness of means, had compressed 
 every spring of my organism. I felt myself a 
 prisoner, and like many prisoners I sighed for 
 liberty without any design of flight. Whatever 
 my instincts, the discipline to which they were 
 inured promised nothing but complete atrophy. 
 How could I find energy to rebel against a past 
 of traditions, of prejudices, of ignorance, man- 
 acled as I was by my own ignorance ? 
 
 All this changed when I knew that I belonged 
 to no one, and that the past was mine, exclusively 
 mine, as was the future. 
 
 This great responsibility fallen thus unforeseen 
 upon me, and the first numbness of the blow hav- 
 ing ceased, the austere and penetrating melan- 
 choly of my environment revealed me to myself. 
 No longer was I the daughter of a vulgar and 
 degenerate race, reduced to a life of mere instinct. 
 I was I, that is, a free force, an absolute will, an 
 integral consciousness. Even the dark cloud 
 which hung about my nascence, far from vilify- 
 ing me, gave me at certain times a kind of exal- 
 tation. I saw within the gloom sparkling points 
 of gold to which my fancy attached mysterious 
 filaments.
 
 THE SOUL OF AN ARTIST 
 
 Who would ever tell me whose daughter I 
 was ? But is a name really all ? I feel that I 
 have a noble ancestry, a scale ascending towards 
 the highest human ideals and all these germs of 
 good have been transmitted to me. What im- 
 ports the name ? And what are riches ? Who- 
 ever you are, grandparents of my grandparents, 
 I bless you ! 
 
 There is a friend dearer than a brother. What 
 are relatives ? Whom can I so name ? Suppose 
 our relatives are clownish or malicious, must we 
 then love them, and why? 
 
 A stolid mother gives birth to a genius, a 
 man of genius finds himself father of an imbecile. 
 How much of him is in that son and how much 
 of others whom he never saw, never knew of, 
 never loved ? Is this flesh of flesh, spirit of 
 spirit? 
 
 Of what sum total of ill-assorted unions is 
 this fruit which he thinks all his own ? Uncles 
 and aunts, brothers and sisters-in-law, cousins, 
 what are these but fortuitous combinations of our 
 life, independent of our will ? 
 
 Like names, like interests, like customs, do 
 these, perchance, constitute the union of souls ? 
 And, after all, of what importance is such union? 
 
 My relatives ? Why, they are such as I love 
 and choose, not those who are imposed upon me. 
 Who are you in the eyes of the world, Lawrence, 
 but a stranger born under a heaven, oh, so far 
 
 39
 
 THE SOUL OF AN ARTIST 
 
 distant from me ! But shall I declare the world 
 right? Shall not I rather say that the world 
 knows nothing of the links that bind soul to 
 soul quite apart from the social compact, from 
 every sentiment of gratitude ? 
 
 When I encounter one who loves the grey 
 mists of winter, who prefers the green depths of 
 a thicket to the bluest of seas or the most golden 
 of suns, cold to heat, to external life reflection, 
 to music silence, to color shadow, to action 
 thought, then I say this is my relative. When I 
 encounter one who lives in his soul as a priest in 
 his temple, serving and adoring the mystery of 
 his office, there is my brother. But when he 
 appears who opens to me the supreme beauty 
 and the supreme good of this recondite sanctu- 
 ary, he will be truly my comrade. Who will deny 
 me this? In name of what law, what right? 
 Elective affinity is the most worthy of man, the 
 only one in which he can engage his whole con- 
 tingent of intelligence, of learning, of experience, 
 of desire. Great is the compass of a love which 
 says : In all the amplitude of the world, from 
 among those near and those far, through all the 
 obstacles of time, of space, of men, I choose thee. 
 
 The Convent. 
 
 The two years passed in the convent were 
 most sweet. It was a new prospect opened before 
 me, with its daily instruction, the books, the lofty 
 
 40
 
 THE SOUL OF AN ARTIST 
 
 speech of the sisters, the order, the silence, the 
 restraint, somewhat rigorous, but in no way re- 
 pellent. Even in the pale, shadowless light of 
 the corridors, in the garden enclosure, in the re- 
 tired chapel, so silent, with its altar-cloths of 
 white velvet fringed with silver, I found an am- 
 bient sympathetic for my dreams. 
 
 The sisters, either very indulgent or little 
 observant, gave no heed to my abstraction ; the 
 truth is I did not always recite the obligatory 
 prayers, but an inarticulate oblation must have 
 issued from my heart and risen to God in those 
 dear hours of mystic preparation which have left 
 a pure white ray in my inmost soul darkened by 
 so many sorrows. No longer did I ask myself 
 "What shall I do?" but within me there was a 
 vague conviction that I should do something. 
 
 I was surprised to find myself always different 
 from those about me. The simplest and most 
 common objects had for me a secondary aspect ; 
 words changed often to living, concrete things ; 
 I made animate not only form but idea. My 
 imagination was so alert that without an effort it 
 transformed the convent garden into a kind of 
 Elysium, a fanciful and primitive world as yet 
 uninhabited by man. The shadow of a group 
 of three plants was enough to make me believe 
 myself in a primeval forest, the yellowing apri- 
 cots seemed to me the golden fruit of the Hes- 
 perides and the subtile spider threads, pendulous 
 
 41
 
 THE SOUL OF AN ARTIST 
 
 in the sun's rays, I really believed to be the locks 
 of dryads or of nymphs, fluttering upon the 
 breeze. 
 
 I remember a hot day in August, the whole 
 school depressed, cross, and overcome by the 
 stifling air which even in the wide hall seemed to 
 weigh us down. I can yet see the streak of yel- 
 low light which pierced the fissures of the cur- 
 tains, I feel the hard bench, the numbness of the 
 limbs from the enforced immobility, and I can 
 yet hear the monotonous voice of the sister as 
 she reads the lives of the saints. At one point, 
 where occurs the description of a grotto in 
 Thebes, this sentence made me thrill with pleas- 
 ure: "There issued from the rock a spring of 
 freshest, purest water," and for an instant the 
 heat, the drought was gone and I was happy, 
 transported to that delicious region of stream and 
 mountain. 
 
 So little was needed, for my imagination con- 
 quering reality, I almost felt the cool water 
 plashing about my limbs and gurgling in my 
 parched throat. I said this to my neighbor and 
 she bantered me many a day after. 
 
 O the fascination of words ! Do you remem- 
 ber those written upon the fa9ade of a little 
 church in a hidden quarter of a city dear to us? 
 "Ascendit quasi aurora consurgens" How we loved 
 them, do you remember? How our lips pro- 
 
 42
 
 THE SOUL OF AN ARTIST 
 
 nounced them one by one, deliciously, caress- 
 ingly ! Your voice had a profound note of 
 sympathy for the first, ascendit^ and I repeated 
 with a warm and tremulous sweetness the two 
 following, quasi aurora; and it seemed to us that 
 we really were uplifted with the rays of the morn- 
 ing. That ineffable joy of enjoying together, 
 with the same soul, I had never had till I knew 
 you. In my prayer-book, however, there were 
 phrases which particularly touched me a version 
 of the dies ir<> which begins : "In quel di che le 
 Sibille" and a canzonet of the beatific Alfonso de 
 Luguori, "Sefoa romita e oscura." I repeated them 
 for whole days, carried away by the mysterious 
 harmony of the syllables, the mysterious signifi- 
 cation of the symbols. And for this, too, I was 
 a mock to my companions. 
 
 We all have a great number of cherished fan- 
 cies ; for the larger part of girls these are toys 
 of the imagination, for one a sacred object, as a 
 complement to prayer or other rites, and for 
 another a means of surpassing her companions. 
 Each of these was to me the revelation of a 
 world. I remember St. Francesco Saverio preach- 
 ing to a crowd of savages ; they were rude faces, 
 badly drawn, yet in the diverse expressions of the 
 faces I read the avidity of the new word and the 
 ardor of his mission in the saint who in stature 
 dominated all, girt about with the brown tunic 
 which contrasted with the feathers and other orna- 
 
 43
 
 THE SOUL OF AN ARTIST 
 
 ments of the savages. I remember a certain 
 ethereal evanescent Madonna, and certain angels 
 who guided souls through flowery paths, which 
 aroused within me a passionate tenderness, and a 
 longing for those unknown spheres to which I 
 was drawn not by ascetic temperament, but rather 
 by a lively fancy and the irresistible thirst for the 
 beautiful. 
 
 Above all I was attracted by a little image, 
 the gift of the Lady Superior, a delicate relief 
 representing a youth kneeling upon an empty 
 cross in the midst of a sublime scenery, his hands 
 and face uplifted with such an intensity of desire 
 that, forgetting the subject altogether, I was en- 
 rapt by the mystery of that sad adoration, and 
 could never let my glance fall there without the 
 most violent commotion. For a long time I 
 loved that youth, knelt beside him upon his 
 cross, lifting as he my arms to a dream distant 
 and divine. 
 
 Yet another picture the butt of my jesting 
 companions was a cage, a simple cage contain- 
 ing a little bird and above it a flaming heart. 
 The crude design, and yet the extraordinary in- 
 genuity of the whole, was far from provoking 
 mirth in me. I saw a being imprisoned by one 
 greater than he, and the symbol made conquest 
 of the form ; materiality dissolved into ideality. 
 
 This vision, evoked by so miserable a repre- 
 sentation, struck measureless depths in my mind, 
 
 44
 
 THE SOUL OF AN ARTIST 
 
 a succession of scenes at once ardent and spiritual, 
 a whole phantasmagoria of latent desires, of 
 incomplete thoughts, of fevers, of discourage- 
 ments, of researches, of expectations, of strange 
 clairvoyance involved and impeded by dense 
 shadows, all which broke my speech, made my 
 eye glassy, my hands moist and icy at the same 
 time, a real state of nervous excitement not new 
 in me, which my poor aunt declared a sign of 
 worms and which under her regime was always 
 cured by a dose of absinthe. 
 
 In the quiet Sunday vespers which my com- 
 panions chose to spend in chat and walks I waited 
 for a furtive visit to the chapel, and if I found 
 myself alone there I exulted. 
 
 I was not very religious, mindful of the nar- 
 row rites practiced by my aunt, but a sentiment 
 of profound respect for the mysterious, a serious, 
 solemn sentiment made me love the majesty of 
 the temple. The solitude of God seemed to me 
 a thing so lofty and divine, the true state of per- 
 fection above the world and all its pettinesses, so 
 that the adoration which found no issue at my 
 lips made the depths of my soul its humble place 
 of attitude. 
 
 I was not an artist, nevertheless the frescoes 
 of the arch, the thirteenth century virgins sur- 
 rounded by angels, guided by patriarchs under a 
 roseate heaven which time had here and there 
 discolored, giving a transparent and dream-like 
 
 45
 
 THE SOUL OF AN ARTIST 
 
 quality to the painting, all this was to me in- 
 vincible attraction. Certain white diaphanous 
 arms, certain faces of the saints, certain tempestu- 
 ous folds of the tunics which issued from the 
 cornice invading the pilasters, all this world of 
 inanimate personages I vivified with my imagina- 
 tion and I loved. Here was no strident affront. 
 These beings were as silent as I. 
 
 Certainly I was not a poet; it would have 
 been impossible for me to write one line of verse, 
 and yet I heard in my brain a harmony of sounds 
 which disturbed me deliciously, and which, I 
 think, some one could have put into measure. 
 The fresh roses of the altar, with their delicate 
 odor and the ivory-colored linen, gave me an in- 
 tensity of delight; with my eyes I followed en- 
 chanted the metal lacework of the lamp, the 
 tabernacle incrusted with stones whose changing 
 tints were reflections of the mysterious Orient 
 whence they were taken. The sun's ray, which 
 penetrated the narrow window, sweet with the 
 song of birds, played lightly about the azure cur- 
 tain before gaining the interior of the chapel, 
 and brought with it the joyousness of the fields 
 toned by a sentiment more intimate and more 
 ideal. But what did not please me in this sacred 
 refuge when I could be there alone? The impres- 
 sion was very different in company of the other 
 pupils. 
 
 I had asked them one by one and all mar-
 
 THE SOUL OF AN ARTIST 
 
 veled at my enthusiasms; the greater part did 
 not know what was painted on the walls ; they all 
 agreed that one must go to church to say prayers, 
 but there was no diversion in this, so that they 
 found compensation in whispering together, and 
 trading pictures from their missals. 
 
 By force of observations and deductions I 
 began to doubt if even the sisters, the good and 
 pious sisters who so methodically adorned their 
 chapel with roses and laces, measuring the nave 
 with their tranquil step, eyes abased, chaste hands 
 on scapulary oh! so good and pious whether 
 even they understood or felt in the ardent way I 
 did all the poetry of the Invisible. 
 
 Whither gout thou? Who calls thee? 
 
 Ardor, a reserved and almost violent ardor, 
 was the characteristic of all my impressions; this 
 excess of sensation is the daily battle I fight, 
 which scourges me at every hour, at every mo- 
 ment, leaving its livid marks through all my 
 being. 
 
 It is not true, as has been said of me, that 
 from my youth I cherished the intention of giv- 
 ing myself to the theatre. I never thought of 
 becoming an actress till I was one; and I was one 
 without knowing why. Art has this unconscious- 
 ness that it walks straight to a point which is not 
 the limit but the means of reaching this. Do you 
 believe the ideal to be an airy and unscalable 
 
 47
 
 THE SOUL OF AN ARTIST 
 
 castle, or not rather a succession of steps ever 
 rising and so steep that when the last is reached 
 the first is out of sight? 
 
 Oh, no! I solemnly assure you, into my 
 girlish dreams there entered no lustre of the 
 stage and that that day when on the peak of a 
 hill I invoked God as my greatest aspiration, I 
 knew not myself what I desired. Was it love? 
 Was it glory? Perhaps something more than 
 these. My longings were boundless. 
 
 St. Augustine says: "What I wish, what I 
 yearn for, is to love and to be loved." Yes, but 
 what is meant by being loved? And to love? O 
 deep and difficult knowledge ! 
 
 Issued from the convent, I thought I loved 
 my new condition, the family that housed me and 
 the children confided to my care. I do not know 
 how I discharged my duties, but I was thought 
 affectionate. My operative seriousness, the jus- 
 tice and dignity which informed my conduct had 
 their due appreciation. 
 
 The new companions thus accidentally mine 
 appeared externally more elevated than the poor 
 woman whom for fourteen years I had called 
 aunt. Their gentle, courteous manners, their 
 lordly way of living, at first impressed me most 
 agreeably. They belonged to that category of 
 individuals who, wishing to rise above their class 
 and not having means within themselves, employ 
 
 48
 
 THE SOUL OF AN ARTIST 
 
 the most distinguished physician, attend the most 
 fashionable church, and for nothing in the world 
 would frequent a house where it was not severely 
 prohibited to speak in a loud voice. 
 
 I acknowledge that their ideal was not abso- 
 lutely vulgar, but all my sympathy was gone 
 when I saw them exercise the same zeal in not 
 losing a mass or in not touching fish with a knife. 
 
 Education, they often repeated, is the thing 
 most necessary to a superior person, and by edu- 
 cation everything was meant in this family; it was 
 the pivot upon which turned all their affections, 
 interests, customs, tastes, amusements, relations, 
 decisions. They admired talent, for that indi- 
 cated an educated person; they admired music, 
 the sea, moonlight, / Promessi Sposi, the " Excel- 
 sior" of Longfellow, the "Angelus" of Millet. I 
 learned much while I was with them. A quantity 
 of exact and cold data began to populate the va- 
 cant places in my memory; I divested myself 
 of gestures and improper phrases, rags of my 
 wretched childhood. There was revealed to me 
 then a faculty which I possess in the highest de- 
 gree, that of a perfect digestion ; to assimilate 
 from a scanty nutriment the best ingredients. In 
 one year I absorbed the psychical material which 
 that whole family had been patiently accumulating 
 through two or three generations of learned ped- 
 ants; I had sucked all the blood that there was 
 in that pompous display of soft brawn incapable 
 
 49
 
 THE SOUL OF AN ARTIST 
 
 of reactionary nourishment; as for me I was like 
 a snake when in the tepidity of the summer sun 
 he invests himself with a new skin, issuing from 
 the old and leaving it dry behind him. 
 
 But to issue from that skin was not easy. I 
 often accused myself of ingratitude and tried to 
 persuade myself that I could not have a better 
 fate. In fact, what was lacking to me? Certain 
 gradual asphyxiations that slowly kill do not give 
 the victim any sense of a want of air; and that 
 death is the sweetest of all, in the midst of 
 flowers, a smile upon the lips, the mind lost in 
 visions. 
 
 Sometimes I seemed to move in a Japanese 
 scene, one of those scenes painted upon paunchy 
 vases and upon delicate screens, where the houses 
 are transparent, the people incorporeal and the 
 trees and animals fossilized; scenes without per- 
 spective, irritating in their lack of shadow con- 
 cepts, where the storks, stretched out above a 
 lonely plain, glide with motionless, laminate, 
 argent wings through an unatmospheric heaven. 
 
 A languorous illness beset me, which they 
 called anemia. They said I had grown too 
 fast, which was not true, and they said, too, 
 that I lived too much within myself, and this 
 was true. 
 
 To show myself grateful to my benefactors 
 who wished to procure me some distraction, I 
 went into society. At first, because this was new, 
 
 50
 
 THE SOUL OF AN ARTIST 
 
 I was amused, or, rather, I hoped to be (truly, it 
 is thought that a cage of canary birds in a draw- 
 ing-room amuse themselves, and that the dear 
 little creatures keep each other company); but I 
 understood very soon that amusement is not for 
 me; the very word is an aversion to me. In the 
 very midst of an entertainment, when every one 
 else was gay, I would ask myself: Wherefore? 
 And I felt myself solitary. It was impossible 
 for me to establish any kind of communication 
 between me and all those people, men and women. 
 Their language was mine, but they gave a differ- 
 ent expression to their words and how many 
 of these were in flight, from insufferable feminine 
 verbosity, from insolent male presumption so 
 rapidly darting, circulating, blatant, fleeting like 
 boisterous winds and as empty. The more the 
 others talked, the muter I grew. I experienced 
 a genuine suffering made up of humiliation and 
 disdain, and even more of profound melancholy. 
 I tried to conquer myself, but in vain. I said to 
 myself: Why do all these people live, move, 
 speak, and not one such as I dream? 
 
 The contrasts between being and seeming 
 which had irritated me from childhood renewed 
 themselves on a greater scale, giving me an in- 
 ternal exasperation I am powerless to describe. 
 
 When I was living in the miserable home of 
 my aunt I had formed an idea of a world apart, 
 
 5'
 
 THE SOUL OF AN ARTIST 
 
 a world in which should materialize for me the 
 things I loved beauty, distinction, intelligence. 
 Did such a world really exist, and where? In the 
 aristocracy, perhaps? I had always delighted in 
 this word, and now that I was already beginning 
 to be called aristocratic with a manifest intention 
 of distinguishing me, I rejoiced and accepted the 
 baptism. The idea of an uninterrupted chain of 
 superior generations seemed to me a great and 
 beautiful thing. I thought then that society 
 should be precisely divided into two parts, and I 
 sought the better one, there to stretch my pilgrim 
 tent. Having no family ties, I could indeed 
 form these by election; no rank intimidated me, 
 and in complete innocence of vanity I would 
 have mounted a throne, simply because this 
 would take me some steps nearer to heaven; to 
 be great, beneficent, saintly, to lift up those about 
 me, what a dream ! Or even this, to know true 
 beauty in some one else, true greatness, true 
 saintliness, to prostrate myself and to adore! I 
 made almost no distinction between these two 
 extrinsic modes, if only the thing might be. You 
 understand, do you not? 
 
 But I was not content with a fraction, I 
 wished the ideal splendid and entire. I reasoned 
 thus : I am beautiful, I am healthy, I am intel- 
 ligent, I am noble, therefore I please myself. 
 However, my pleasure is not complete because 
 my beauty is not absolute, nor my health unas-
 
 THE SOUL OF AN ARTIST 
 
 sailable, nor my intelligence genius, nor my 
 nobility perfection. But if I could attain to this, 
 I should have happiness I, in its perfection and 
 omnipotence that is, in the possibility of diffus- 
 ing the greatest good and in the increasing the 
 number of the happy. Is not this the noblest 
 scope of life? 
 
 Suddenly I decided upon the theatre. Was 
 not that my way to console, to do good? Ought 
 every one to work out his righteous impulses in 
 the one way, or not rather each one according to 
 his own means? To give a piece of bread is per- 
 haps more meritorious or more profitable than 
 to give a ray of light, a livelier pulsation, a 
 smile? To nourish the body is a nobler deed 
 than to nourish the soul? When I broke the 
 divine bread of my art to a hungry public who 
 went away happier and better, nobler and purer, 
 was my work wholly different from hers who 
 reaches to the poor clothes wrought by her own 
 hands? Others have wool, crochet-needles and 
 the skill to use them and give of their industry 
 for the comfort of those who suffer from the 
 cold. I have but a soul, ardent, vibrant, and I 
 open this up to those who are cold in their in- 
 most being. I give love, faith, interest, which 
 solaces, exalts and recreates. 
 
 Have men ever thought of the good which 
 comes to them from the stage, of the sorrows 
 
 53
 
 THE SOUL OF AN ARTIST 
 
 which the actress has assuaged, of the smiles she 
 has enticed, of the new thoughts dropped like 
 seeds in young minds, of the words which have 
 calmed stormy hearts? Verily I say, that when 
 the actress weeps, she sheds the tears of a whole 
 world. 
 
 O that heart which throbs with love and hate ! 
 
 To think how many believe they love who 
 have souls so cold, so impassive! Yet they 
 bestir themselves with art, with poetry, with pas- 
 sion, with idealism. 
 
 They do not hate, therefore they think they 
 love. 
 
 Hate, behold the great and noble sentiment, 
 the sentiment ideal par excellence. Are you 
 not persuaded that Dante and Shakespeare, the 
 two poets of profound and obscure passions, 
 were inspired above all by hate? Ophelia and 
 Beatrice have emerged from a hecatomb of per- 
 sons and of things which these writers hated, and 
 it is from a stupendous mound of such cadavers 
 angrily trodden under foot that genius evokes its 
 most potent creations. Love knows not itself 
 without its herald, hate. Otherwise what appre- 
 ciations were possible? To love, is not that to 
 choose? To choose, is not that to prefer one to 
 many, one to all others? 
 
 It is like this: We see filing before us a 
 crowd (the indifferent say the indifferent but 
 
 54
 
 THE SOUL OF AN ARTIST 
 
 there is no such thing as indifference to an ardent 
 soul, our indifference is aversion). They file, one, 
 two, a thousand, each one wounding some sensi- 
 bility, tearing away the folds of a jealous veil, 
 accumulating in our hearts disdain, contempt, 
 nausea, until the Elect appears. He appears, and 
 the whole accumulation of hate breaks up and 
 divides like the waters of the mysterious sea at 
 the touch of the divine rod, and from the depths 
 Love emerges, love, great for all who have 
 suffered, secure for those who have seen, love 
 that is not the innocent flower fallen from the 
 wing of an angel, but a flame that has burned its 
 way out of the soul, love that knows, "a grown- 
 up god." 
 
 My patrons who were on the watch for every 
 occasion to practice the culture, and to have ever- 
 more the reputation of intelligent people, took 
 me to see the furniture of an old palace fated for 
 the auctioneer's hammer in consequence of the 
 bankruptcy of its owner. Making the tour of 
 these magnificent rooms, they said : "Poor duke, 
 so good, so kind, and so well educated!" 
 
 This sort of sympathy found no echo in me. 
 The goodness, the kindness, the education of the 
 duke seemed to me small compared with the 
 mortification of the great idea which that ruin 
 represented, compared with the compassion I felt 
 for the abandoned house, with all its treasures of 
 
 55
 
 THE SOUL OF AN ARTIST 
 
 association, those portraits, those vestments, those 
 long, patient embroideries, those closed coffers, 
 all that paraphernalia so eloquently mute in the 
 noble melancholy of a seeming death. What 
 especially touched me was a framed portrait of 
 the duke when a baby. It was a design in chiar- 
 oscuro, done by his mother, and had this inscrip- 
 tion written in a light and trembling hand : " Love 
 made thee and here Love paints thee." What 
 could be more delicate? And what sadder in the 
 midst of this ruin? 
 
 From earliest girlhood, when taste is yet but 
 instinct, and in a time when the predominate style 
 was cold and inharmonious, the style which the 
 beginning of the century imposed upon furniture 
 and apparel, I was drawn by the blind passion of 
 a child to the fragments of great antique art. 
 Relegated to a rubbish heap, there was in my 
 aunt's house a rusty little coffer of beaten iron 
 covered with faded velvet eaten away at the 
 corners, its lock battered, and with two feet in- 
 stead of four the two back ones so that it 
 stood all humble, in a prostrate attitude, almost 
 as if begging the grace of being let live; and this 
 coffer had from me a long tribute of admiration, 
 of desire, of sweet and fantastic thoughts, of 
 legends strange, amorous, palpitating. It seemed 
 to me most beautiful, while every one else called 
 it ugly. I found interesting, too, an "Agnus 
 Dei" my aunt had from a relative, a nun, which 
 
 56
 
 THE SOUL OF AN ARTIST 
 
 must have been very old, with its yellow satin 
 and its undefinable perfume of incense and of 
 dried roses, suggestive to me of the ringers of 
 dead sisters; and another thing of beauty to me 
 was a majolica plate, white and perforated, from 
 which my aunt let the cat feed. 
 
 All, all these old things, things which had 
 lived and must have known smiles and tears I 
 loved them every one. And plastic beauty, too, 
 the floriture of the beaten iron, the form of the 
 lock, the woof of the velvet on the coffer, the 
 color of the satin on the "Agnus Dei," the simple 
 perforation of the plate spoke to my eyes the 
 language of a proud art, which was not then the 
 fashion, for which no one cared, and to which was 
 preferred the frumpish arrangement of rigid and 
 angular lines. Ah ! I loved antique art too much, 
 with a silent, reserved and isolated passion when 
 it was abandoned and derided, to be able to join 
 the chorus of the formerly indifferent who now 
 are loud in homage, following the fashion, cata- 
 logue in hand. 
 
 Two or three days before, my patrons had 
 read, conscientiously, reviews and books of art 
 to get by heart how far they should enthuse for 
 Donatello rather than for Luca della Robbia, for 
 Holbein or for Albert Durer, and had thoroughly 
 studied the style of the fourteenth century artists 
 in order not to confound these with their suc- 
 cessors; therefore each picture or statue waited 
 
 57
 
 THE SOUL OF AN ARTIST 
 
 its meed of praise till the name of the author 
 was assured. The asterisks in the catalogue were 
 needed to heat them up, but steam once on, away 
 the good people went like locomotives, keep- 
 ing well to the track. They said : "A Raphael, 
 what a marvel! a Dolci, a little effeminate! a 
 Titian, what luxuriance ! a Veronese, what force ! 
 a Del Sarto, what delicacy!" (O dear picture 
 seen at San Miniato, away back at the left, 
 which the guide, to my consummate joy, classi- 
 fied as "by an unknown artist"! Do you 
 remember it?) 
 
 The antique armor, the gigantic cuirasses 
 made them arch their brows with an expression 
 at once of terror and of admiration. The ivories, 
 the Japanese lacquer, the enamels, so delicate in 
 their azure and diaphanous tints, bent them over 
 the glass cases in respectful attitude, while they 
 were tempted to touch, but refrained, being the 
 well-educated people that they were. They pro- 
 nounced no opinion concerning the jewels; they 
 really did not admire the ornaments, but the 
 mode was too strong a current to pull against. 
 With great care they lifted the cups, the little 
 porcelain vases, and when they discovered two 
 crossed swords or the three DDD they ex- 
 changed a look of intelligence not devoid of 
 pride. They discussed the names of the laces: 
 Malines, Valencienne, Venetian Point? A fan 
 of mother-of-pearl which had belonged to the
 
 THE SOUL OF AN ARTIST 
 
 Princess of Lamballe made them exclaim in 
 chorus : " Unfortunate woman ! " 
 
 The other visitors looked with wonder upon 
 so well-informed a family who spoke so apropos 
 of everything, but all this calculated enthusiasm 
 turned me to ice. Enthusiasm I understand only 
 a deux; three even is too many. 
 
 Different friends and acquaintances joined 
 our group, among them an old poet, a young 
 novelist and two ladies. The novelist, very ele- 
 gant, with shoes so varnished that they distracted 
 attention from the crystals, was turning over a 
 portfolio of authentic papers. 
 
 "He is seeking c material' !" said the poet. 
 
 "And you, what do you seek in that table- 
 service?" was asked him. 
 
 "Oh, naturally the perfume of the food of the 
 seventeenth century," the novelist sarcastically 
 exclaimed. (The poet had once been a patriotic 
 verse-maker, but, his ardor extinguished, he now 
 declared that the greatest poetry is that of a good 
 dinner.) 
 
 The two ladies were looking at a purse of 
 pearl-colored satin, embroidered in pink in high 
 relief, the exquisite work of the great -grand- 
 mother of the duke. 
 
 "Pity," said one of them, "that it's not full 
 of yellow money !" 
 
 " I," replied the other in noble rivalry, 
 "would prefer it without." 
 
 59
 
 THE SOUL OF AN ARTIST 
 
 "Who are they?" I asked softly of my pro- 
 tectrix, who replied with great eagerness : 
 
 "Two great ladies; their ancestors were at 
 the crusades." 
 
 I did not reply, but a deep sadness welled up 
 in me, and the accustomed flame of odium and 
 the usual violent longing for solitude, so that, 
 feigning fatigue, I let myself fall into a big chair, 
 exhausted really by the thirst to be loved and to 
 be understood. 
 
 O God! when would this be? To be loved 
 is nothing if we are not understood. 
 
 Au temps ou vous m ' aimiez ( bien sur ) ? 
 
 Do you remember one evening? I was 
 seated with my back towards the window, you 
 almost in front of me, in a somewhat dark cor- 
 ner, under that French intaglio which represents 
 L'Orage y and which so much pleases you. 
 
 You had spoken much of the English poets, 
 of their sane sentiment, simple and pure, of the 
 moral force which dominates your country and 
 makes it great above all others. Your so virile 
 voice, firm and sonorous as bronze, still resounded 
 in the quiet room, in the mild evening, and 
 why not say it ? in my heart. The ideas evolved 
 by you with skilled and certain logic awakened 
 in me a hundred records, sweet, dubious, quiet, 
 distant, confused, among which, like the tuner of 
 an instrument, I sought the key-note. Suddenly, 
 
 60
 
 THE SOUL OF AN ARTIST 
 
 a little impatiently, but still very gently, you 
 said: "Do you not know how to talk?" (The 
 night had come upon us unawares, and of L'Orage 
 nothing now was to be seen but the floating veil 
 of the girl.) 
 
 I bent my head how well I remember! a 
 string of pearls about my neck broke, and while 
 I gropingly sought the pearls as a moment before 
 I had sought ideas, I replied: 
 
 "It is true, I do not know how to talk." 
 
 What did you think of so silly a remark ? I 
 well saw that you did not understand it in its 
 profound moral agony. But I tell you now that 
 I have passed my life with the desire of speech. 
 How I have dreamed of some one who might 
 feel as I, think as I, suffer and enjoy in every 
 way as I had suffered and enjoyed, and who 
 should love me as I him, to whom I could say 
 everything. But if you cannot say everything, 
 why speak at all ? Do you understand ? 
 
 So it was, in consequence of the silence of all 
 my youth that by a desperate reaction I entered 
 upon a career in which I should speak, not in 
 my own words, of which I never was mistress, 
 but in the words of men of genius, of poets, of 
 heroes. At last I could cry out in hate or love, 
 lift a hymn to my ideals, be by turns pure, proud, 
 ardent, submissive, implacable Phedra, Ophe- 
 lia, Marguerite. 
 
 Do you conceive the joy of unrestrained utter- 
 
 61
 
 THE SOUL OF AN ARTIST 
 
 ance before a thousand of people, and of be- 
 ing able to weep deep and loud without offense 
 to our reserve, without treason to our secret, 
 feeling that a thousand hearts weep with ours ? 
 Well, believe one who knows, it is a superhuman 
 
 I have always acted "The Wedding Visit," 
 putting my heart's blood into it, and will you 
 believe that many regard this jewel of tears as a 
 light comedy, and if its epigrams do not take it 
 is a complete failure ! I mean it when I say that 
 my blood goes into the part as I am called upon 
 to express that disgust of love which has reached 
 its limit, which is no longer either to believe or 
 hope, to desire or lament, which, in fine, is dead, 
 dead indeed, for its soul has been taken from it. 
 I have acted all this for I have felt it, oh, so well ! 
 
 It is not all vanity which makes us prefer 
 our opera to all others. It is because we so 
 thoroughly understand it, as it is, and as it should 
 be. You see, do you not, the disproportion? A 
 great artist is a great lover, and for a lover his 
 own is the only love. 
 
 Study is for pedagogues, the learned, the 
 wise ; to become artists it is necessary to love one 
 thing intensely, and when that thing is within us 
 we are called egoists. 
 
 Critics, however, suggest to me to consult 
 this or that author, and my fellow actors exhort 
 me to go into society so that I may know how 
 
 62
 
 THE SOUL OF AN ARTIST 
 
 to render the passions well. I have always smiled 
 disdainfully at such counsel; and when once a 
 novice, beautiful, elegant, rosy, cold, asked me 
 how she should learn my art, I answered, " Weep, 
 if you can, as I do." Yes, I repeat it, there is no 
 other art; weep burning tears, and write and 
 paint and speak them. 
 
 They call me proud: it is true. They call 
 me scornful : it is true. They say I do not love 
 my fellow beings; to this you alone could make 
 reply. You know if I love my fellow beings. 
 
 Which is the bee? 
 
 There flourished (the memory of it is still 
 recent) a sweet April, and I was coming through 
 the St. Augustine gate at Bergamo, taking the 
 road to the left leading from the mountain. 
 
 I was thinking that you did not know Ber- 
 gamo, the delicious, and in thought I was show- 
 ing it to you with all the pomp and majesty of 
 its past, so concealed by fresh and ever-renascent 
 beauty. Your image combined with the intense 
 blue of the sky, with the charm of the valley, 
 with the tender green springing on all sides ! 
 Your name rose odorously through the air with 
 the perfume of the elegant glycyrrhiza, remind- 
 ing me of your phrase "elegance! that rare 
 quality," a phrase which emphasizes deficiency 
 in a great deal of modern art.
 
 THE SOUL OF AN ARTIST 
 
 A whole congregation of lofty ideas, yours, 
 kept pace with me, now silent, now loquacious, 
 as you yourself would have accompanied me. 
 Where were your profound eyes? There they 
 were, I saw them; and I saw your mouth with 
 its spiritual smile. My admiration was redoubled, 
 evoking what you would have felt. You would 
 have said (I am most certain), "What purity!" 
 and I would have answered: "It is true." 
 
 Above, in the hanging gardens of the wall, 
 below, along the gentle slope, among the shadows 
 of the vine-trellises, along the now rainless eaves, 
 about the windows, within the arches of the aban- 
 doned gateways, the ivy and the vine, the convol- 
 vulus and the honeysuckle, and in the interstices 
 of the old stones there spread great patches of 
 green and red from the clove-odorous gilly- 
 flower, the ranunculus, the dandelion, and upon 
 the window-sills, jealously guarded, double ge- 
 raniums of a deep crimson. I thought: Which 
 is the bee? Ants, butterflies, flies, worms fly or 
 crawl towards the flowers, but which knows how 
 to extract the honey, which is the bee ? 
 
 Upon the deserted road all white and sunny 
 in the midst of the green, a man's step sounded 
 behind me. If it might be You ! In my almost 
 hypnotic condition the lines of reality lost them- 
 selves in the vapors of dream. I turned quickly. 
 It was a young man, handsome and courteous
 
 THE SOUL OF AN ARTIST 
 
 enough not too much to profane you, and for 
 this I was almost grateful to him, and as I had 
 stopped in my ecstatic attitude, he also paused. 
 The shadow of my parasol surrounded me 
 almost like a veil, and across this I looked at 
 him; but I was thinking of you, seeking you, 
 and for a moment he looked at me as if he recog- 
 nized me and expected from me some revelation. 
 Curious, these glances which sometimes pass be- 
 tween man and woman, laden with remembrances 
 and desires, sudden, audacious, naked, leaving an 
 impression of a confusing stroke, as if from an 
 arrow intended for another and coming whence 
 one knows not. The moment of embarrassment 
 and I know not what recondite curiosity could 
 not be prolonged. To release us both in some 
 way or other I asked the direction to the Carrara 
 Gallery. 
 
 I went thither because I had been told there 
 were three madonnas of Giambellini. O my 
 Master, you see indeed that you were with me! 
 You it was who made known to me this kind of 
 sentiment. 
 
 Passing from the white glare of the street to 
 the penumbra of the gallery, every external im- 
 pression vanished. I had before my eyes, precise 
 and complete, our Madonna, her, the true mother 
 of Jesus, so pallid, so sad under her green mantle, 
 her weary gaze fixed in the presageful void, gaze 
 that saw already the via dolorosa, gaze which 
 
 65
 
 THE SOUL OF AN ARTIST 
 
 waited, which knew! I had before me that mouth 
 already sealed by mysterious sorrow, that line 
 which cut the cheek, removing every vestige of 
 innocent voluptuousness, so spiritually, so se- 
 verely beautiful. I remembered the ecstatic 
 wonder which took us both when we saw it for 
 the first time at Brera, and how it was impossible 
 for us to speak, and how we pressed each other's 
 hands in silence, somewhat aghast, you pale with 
 emotion, and I red. And then how, very slowly, 
 and lowering my voice as if in a sacred place, I 
 said to you : " Look, too, at the tiny Jesus. 
 Have you ever seen its equal? He is really 
 the son of that mother; he resembles her, has 
 the same intent and sombre eyes, the same 
 mouth which, not being able to express the 
 sorrow of a mature man, curves to the mute 
 plaint of a baby surprised by some great an- 
 guish." And you nodded "Yes." "No other 
 painter has even thought of the necessary re- 
 semblance between mother and son, above all 
 between this mother and this son. How great 
 this is, is it not?" Again you nodded "Yes." 
 "Look, look, the fruit he holds in his hand is 
 about to fall, and he pays no attention, does not 
 seem to care perhaps it is a baby like others, 
 He?" "Yes, yes," you said at last, "all this is 
 great. In this Madonna, Giambellini has sur- 
 passed himself." 
 
 Renewing this scene mentally, I was aware 
 
 66
 
 THE SOUL OF AN ARTIST 
 
 that I found a new sweetness in it. Could it be 
 true that a happy memory is sometimes sweeter 
 than reality itself? The fugitive joy of a moment 
 may grow and endure with the moments which 
 thought adds to it. 
 
 Along the walls of the gallery there was a 
 file of the battles of Borgognone, the peasants 
 of Teniers, the landscapes of Zuccarelli. In the 
 profound silence there could scarcely be heard 
 my guide's step you know mine falls most 
 lightly. I looked for the madonnas of Giam- 
 bellini with a passionate curiosity, full of desire, 
 sending distracted glances towards the portraits 
 of Moroni which gloom amidst the warm tints 
 of Titian's school. 
 
 A beautiful little madonna of Gandenzio 
 Ferrari smiled at me from its deep frame. "It is 
 not thou," 1 murmured, passing by. I was sud- 
 denly taken by two strange heads of Mantegna. 
 What would You have thought of them? This 
 became my keen preoccupation. I felt your ad- 
 miration; bent over the canvas I saw the shadow 
 of your profile, attentive, serious, and your fine 
 lips pressed still closer in the intensity of your 
 interest. The room containing Mantegna's paint- 
 ing is very little, a kind of cabinet annexed to 
 the principal gallery; the custodian had not fol- 
 lowed me I was alone before the master-piece 
 so alone that in the ravishment of admiration I 
 murmured: "Lawrence" 
 
 6?
 
 THE SOUL OF AN ARTIST 
 
 Exquisite pleasure this of pronouncing a dear 
 name in the presence of beauty! 
 
 But it seemed to me since I felt you so 
 close to me that your soul, too, had come back 
 to our Madonna, so pale, so sad, and more touch- 
 ing and truer than that of Mantegna, greater 
 above all in its extraordinary internal melancholy 
 which had once so moved us. 
 
 And I looked no farther, not even for the 
 other madonnas of Giambellini, for which I had 
 come. 
 
 "Lawrence" I murmured again, coming 
 out upon the sunny road which smote my 
 lids close, and underneath them trembled the 
 picture of our Lady of Sorrows. 
 
 I make confession. When I conceived the 
 idea of writing my impressions, when the first 
 pages were complete and I saw the work growing 
 under my hands, I asked a celebrated author: 
 " How does one write a book in which one wishes 
 to say everything one has at heart?" The author 
 looked at me smilingly, but with an expression of 
 interest and extreme kindness. 
 
 "For whom are you writing this book? For 
 the public?" 
 
 "Oh, no!" 
 
 I pronounced this "no" so resolutely that he 
 added quickly : 
 
 "Since this is so, pay no heed to method. 
 
 68
 
 THE SOUL OF AN ARTIST 
 
 Open your hearts as the ancients did the .fliolian 
 harps to the shock of the winds and let it sing, 
 let it cry." 
 
 You knew this author, and, after your manner, 
 a little loved him. He belongs to no school, lives 
 apart from the world, feels intensely, writes sin- 
 cerely. I follow his counsel. 
 
 The greatest joys of my life I owe to the 
 resolution which made me an actress: I think 
 often of the ancient belief in the fairy donations 
 at the cradle. My fairy, after having given gen- 
 erously of beauty, power, money, talent, happi- 
 ness, family affections, not finding any of these 
 gifts for me unimpaired, must have said: Let us 
 give this girl the soul of an artist and she shall 
 have rich compensation. Thanks, my good fairy ! 
 
 We read together the preface of Amiel's in- 
 timate diary, and you will remember that passage 
 you thought applicable to me: "The intensity 
 of internal life makes a man inept for his work. 
 A thinker like Amiel has no interest whatever in 
 persuading the spirits or in bending the will." 
 "I never think of the public," Amiel writes, 
 "and I experience a sufficient joy in participating 
 in a mystery, in divining a profound matter, or in 
 touching a sacred reality. To know is sufficient 
 for me, to express myself seems to me sometimes 
 profane." 
 
 You often reproved my aversion to activity;
 
 THE SOUL OF AN ARTIST 
 
 here is my justification. If I had done, if I had 
 spoken, I should be like all the others. 
 
 My success, it must be acknowledged, is due 
 to this intensity of reserve, to this solitary and 
 jealous participation in that which Amiel so effec- 
 tively calls mystery. From my first appearance 
 on the stage, I have adopted as my device this 
 verse from an unknown and profound poet: Tous 
 entendront ma voix, nul ne verra mes pleurs. 
 
 In vain the gossipy public and the superficial 
 critic have essayed to discover my individuality 
 in the various characters I represent: I keep 
 guard over my secret, my sentiments, and my 
 experiences. For the rest, there is no human ex- 
 perience which may not be briefly summed up 
 thus: I have suffered, and have made suffer. 
 
 Consider for a moment, I pray you, the sig- 
 nificance of this most beautiful verse: "My 
 voice shall be heard by all and none shall see my 
 tears." Is not this the secret of those works of 
 art which take souls by storm ? The public be- 
 lieves in the story the poet tells, is moved by 
 Marguerite, Ermengarde, Eloise, who have never 
 existed; what matter? What matters the name, 
 the flame is burning and sears where it touches. 
 The more cunning think: In these personages 
 the author has given his own character; and they 
 seek the particulars, the remote accessories, lose 
 themselves in words, in the small involutions of 
 form, ignoring the long and profound artistic 
 
 70
 
 THE SOUL OF AN ARTIST 
 
 elaboration, where from the marriage of sensation 
 and art is born a fruit which people may admire 
 or condemn, very rarely understand, never com- 
 pletely elucidate. 
 
 An obscure little critic once said : "How well 
 one can see that you act for yourself!" Did he 
 intend a compliment or an offense? I never 
 cared to inquire; however, he spoke a great 
 truth. Of course, I act for myself; what else 
 did he think? It is a shoemaker who makes 
 shoes for other people, the artist works for him- 
 self. 
 
 I took up dramatic art to satisfy a need of 
 my own soul : I should have preferred to be a 
 poet or a prose writer, if such things lay in 
 choice ; I took the medium of those who knew 
 better to speak to my understanding, not having 
 an understanding fitted to communicate to others, 
 and that I have preserved on the stage the same 
 spontaneous subjectivity, that I have never seen 
 my audiences, never looked at them, nor have 
 wept or laughed for them, although I have shed 
 tears before thousands of people, as solitary and 
 distant from them as though a cloister sheltered 
 me, this has been the universal wonder. An ex- 
 ceptional form of sensibility is regarded as ex- 
 ceptional art, and triumph has come to me so 
 unexpectedly that I can hardly make it mine. 
 
 Such unconsciousness is perhaps the most 
 pleasing part of an artist's powers, and is that 
 
 7 1
 
 THE SOUL OF AN ARTIST 
 
 which bears the seal of her superior origin, does 
 it not seem so to you? 
 
 Argument is the language of science, that of 
 art is divination. Young people think it is good 
 intentions, but with good intentions one may 
 transport one by one a mass of stones, but not 
 create one single immortal line nor thrill an audi- 
 ence as I myself did with the cry, "O my 
 Country ! " Behold, even now in writing the 
 words I am rigid from head to foot. 
 
 My country! magic word! The confines of 
 nations are being canceled, one's country is no 
 longer circumscribed by seas and mountains, but 
 though less concrete, it is not less real. You and 
 I, have we not perhaps a common country though 
 not the same nation ? And scattered through the 
 world, unknown, distant, divided, have we not, 
 perhaps, brothers ? 
 
 The union of like to like is a natural senti- 
 ment which no doctrine shall ever destroy. The 
 very anarchists who deny country and family love 
 one another and join with their propaganda that 
 sentiment which they would annihilate. Let 
 words, then, change their post, let the vulgar 
 adopt them ; what value have words if not the 
 transitory and superficial one of clothes, which 
 wear out and fall to rags ? The truth within 
 them, like the flame of a lamp, is alone invari- 
 able. Is it not this we seek? 
 
 72
 
 THE SOUL OF AN ARTIST 
 
 I feel I have a Northern soul. Everything at- 
 tracts me to those lands where nature is tranquil, 
 where little cities rise, ploughed into by quiet 
 waters, where the woods are green and the rain 
 falls often. 
 
 I love to think of the old houses, time-black- 
 ened, where the walls are thick and the shadows 
 deep in the corners. 
 
 The mere sight of an object which recalls the 
 fireside to me gives me an intense thrill of delight, 
 that voluptuous and imaginative delight which 
 others feel by the azure sea, under an azure sky ; 
 but not only that, my pleasure is something 
 more intimate, more acute, more obscure, more 
 profound, and if I were not afraid of your sarcasm 
 I would say that cold pleases me because I love 
 heat. 
 
 To bask in the sun, the light blinding me and 
 the scene about me distracting, is a pleasure not 
 to be compared with that of watching the rain or 
 the snow from a warm, secluded room. The joy 
 of thinking diminishes in the open and noises 
 lessen its intensity; I do not love nature in parade 
 nor a city in festal array. 
 
 The sun, you must admit, is a little vulgar. 
 It clothes us and nourishes us, and this is well, 
 and I am very grateful for it, but I prefer to eat 
 without seeing my cook, and when I dress, the 
 presence of my milliner annoys me. I do not 
 say I am right, but this is how I feel. 
 
 73
 
 THE SOUL OF AN ARTIST 
 
 Love me when I am dead. 
 
 I have just come from the cemetery where I 
 have been thinking of your sympathy for these 
 melancholy and fascinating places. Do you re- 
 member a certain time ? We had gone to look in 
 an old abandoned graveyard for the tomb of a 
 Russian girl who had died in despair of her ideals. 
 We did not find the tomb, and, a little disap- 
 pointed and even vexed, we were returning amidst 
 the crosses. 
 
 It was late November. From the grassy plots, 
 from the marbles, from all those forgotten names, 
 from all those hearts which had ceased to beat, 
 from those sepulchred dramas closed in the irony 
 of eternal peace, a cold moisture rose and de- 
 scended from heaven in a subtile fog, transparent, 
 still, yet about to fold its draperies more densely 
 like a weeping figure of sorrow. In silence I 
 took your arm and pressed close to your shoulder. 
 
 Do you remember? 
 
 You said: "How lonely the dead are!" 
 
 I cried out almost in pain : " No, no, do you 
 not see the love of the living follows the dead ? 
 Are not we here ? " 
 
 I saw you compress your lips as you always 
 did when I pleased you, and then we plunged 
 into the fog. 
 
 Above us brooded the enchantment of that 
 first day of winter ; we felt the poetic charm of 
 the grey light, of the closed-in sky, so deeply 
 
 74
 
 THE SOUL OF AN ARTIST 
 
 spiritual, so fit for silent souls. Unsought there 
 came to our minds verses toned to pallid faces, to 
 phantasms evoked from the shadows among the 
 dead branches of the trees, where the eye rested 
 with such profound quietude that sense seemed to 
 resign its place to thought. A peace not of this 
 earth took possession of us. 
 
 Before an antique tomb almost hidden by the 
 tresses of a willow, we stopped, both at once, as 
 often happened to us ; and, as so many other times 
 on the point of pronouncing the same word, our 
 glances divined it together. Together! What 
 a rapturous thing when this is spoken of the 
 soul ! 
 
 Do you remember ? Do you remember ? 
 
 And today again it was your unforgotten face 
 that I evoked from the weeping willows of that 
 village cemetery ; it was to you I would have 
 spoken, it was upon your breast I would have 
 wept. I sat down near a small hedge of myrtle 
 surrounding the grave of a baby : the myrtle erect, 
 sharp, resistant, always green, strong, and pure, 
 tolerating no other vegetation near it and flour- 
 ishing in dear little white roses. How like 
 you! 
 
 I gathered a branch of this myrtle into which, 
 perchance, had passed something of the inno- 
 cence of the child, and I thought that life and 
 death may have occult channels by which an 
 
 75
 
 THE SOUL OF AN ARTIST 
 
 uninterrupted current of sympathy may flow to us 
 from those who are no more. 
 
 I have heard many times that there is noth- 
 ing permanent in the poor art of actors. But 
 among these surely there are passionate souls 
 whom we still love, and whose voices, hushed for 
 centuries, have left an echo which reverberates 
 from generation to generation. Souls are not the 
 property of the bodies which contain them. When 
 they are grand, they have within them the treas- 
 ure of all consolations, of all loves, of all aspira- 
 tions, and from every part of the earth, whatever 
 the distance of time, little needy souls rise and 
 fly to them like flocks of wounded birds. 
 
 Beside the record of virile genius for which 
 immortality is expected, passionate feminine souls 
 live, too. I know and see that burning flame of 
 passion which was Desclee. Painters have pre- 
 served for us her pensive profile ; biographies have 
 described her to us as pale, with great magnetic 
 eyes ; Dumas, who had the good fortune first to 
 discover her unusual gifts, says that he received 
 the simple country girl dressed in an old-fash- 
 ioned green gown and followed by the old nurse, 
 who never left her ; they tell us no more. 
 
 But I remember a lady who had attended all 
 the performances given by Desclee, in Italy, and 
 when near the grave she was still all animation, 
 her eyes sparkling and yet tearful when she spoke 
 of the actress. 
 
 76
 
 THE SOUL OF AN ARTIST 
 
 That animation and those tears were not in 
 vain, because the passion of Desclee reached me 
 through her. And why may I not transmit it to 
 some one else? This is immortality. 
 
 Ah! that invisible breath, genius or senti- 
 ment, passion or thought, which remains after 
 the dissolution of the flesh and awakens, without 
 any material aid, so ardent a sympathy, is not 
 that a proof of the superiority and immortality 
 of the spirit? Besides Desclee, how many un- 
 knowns I love! a great distant family of conge- 
 nial ones who are my sisters, whom I have never 
 seen and never shall see. 
 
 And to speak to the soul! To think that 
 when my body lies under the sod, my voice shall 
 still vibrate, and that I shall be loved, and that I 
 shall live, shall live in all the loves to be, in 
 the great new ideals which shall enlighten the 
 earth, shall live always, as long as passion stirs 
 the heart of man. No, no, the dead are not alone. 
 
 Who has not been happy one hour in his 
 life? But what is this fleeting happiness? In the 
 joy of the moment I have always panted for in- 
 finite joy. The clock goes, goes, goes, and that 
 continuity of movement surprises and attracts 
 me; but a blow, a change of temperature stops 
 it, and I think that the beauty of its mechanism 
 is but relative, since it depends upon the resist- 
 ance of brute force. I seek that which is lasting, 
 which ends never. The immortality conceived 
 
 77
 
 THE SOUL OF AN ARTIST 
 
 by paganism for its heroes, the second life prom- 
 ised to the Christians, do they meet this great 
 need? Nothing is really beautiful, nothing is 
 really true if it ends; but believe this, too: noth- 
 ing which is truly beautiful ever ends. How 
 many dead are more alive than the living! 
 
 In the hours of the happy past, when you 
 were at my side, and I read in your eyes, and 
 listened to your bronze-like, sonorous voice, in 
 the complete reality of your presence which 
 seemed to promise the culmination of my prayers, 
 oh! then, even then, and who knows what you 
 may have thought of me? I silently groaned; 
 this will end 
 
 But now, in the desperate certainty of never 
 seeing you again, when the world and perhaps 
 death divides us, when you cannot hear me, and 
 I can hope nothing, what so ardently dear to me 
 as that which has survived the transitory associa- 
 tion of our friendship and that which shall have 
 no end, your thought, your soul, O my Law- 
 rence! Not your brow, which must bend to the 
 destiny of mortals, nor your young body ap- 
 pointed for the worms, You ! You ! that in you 
 which shall never die, which none can contest 
 with me, none can take from me ! 
 
 About love. 
 
 I blush when I think how many I have 
 pleased as woman only for this; for my face, 
 
 78
 
 THE SOUL OF AN ARTIST 
 
 for my form only for this; I have been loved 
 for my eyes and not for my thought not for its 
 depth of passion. This I hold an insult to my 
 better part. 
 
 How different my mode of thinking from 
 that of Marie Bashkirtseff! She says : " When I 
 suffer, I am humiliated." The more I suffer, the 
 purer and loftier I feel myself becoming. Is this 
 a form of pride superior to that of BashkirtsefF? 
 
 She says again: "We should not be seen 
 very much, even by those who love us. We 
 should keep to the middle of the road and leave 
 behind us regrets and illusions. Thus we make 
 a better figure and appear more beautiful." Hor- 
 rible! We are, then, both women, and yet so 
 different ! 
 
 The sight of passion has always moved me, 
 like the view of lightning, of floods, of volcanoes, 
 or any other great spectacle of nature. Is this 
 not also a great spectacle of occult forces, of that 
 which is within us ? Whenever I see a man at 
 my feet, I admire God in the most profound of 
 his manifestations. So great is man in passion ! 
 Then truly in him there flashes forth the majesty 
 of whirlwinds and of tempests. 
 
 Even when I could not return the love, I 
 have always had a deep feeling of respect, a sweet 
 and solemn emotion for the new mystery. It is 
 sad not to be loved, but it is sad, too, not to be 
 able to love, not to be able to respond to an 
 
 79
 
 THE SOUL OF AN ARTIST 
 
 affection we inspire, knowing that perhaps it may 
 change to hate. 
 
 Many times I am terrified at the evil that we 
 do unwillingly, unconsciously. When a word 
 offends me, I cannot free myself from the memory 
 of the words I myself have spoken that may have 
 wounded too. It seems to me a just reparation 
 of pain, and I seem to feel myself in the equi- 
 librium of nature. The fruits piled in a basket 
 spoil one another, and one cannot say which is the 
 most guilty offender. Is it not so ? 
 
 There reached your ear the voice of a poet 
 who cursed me because I could not respond to 
 his love. But why do we love one another ? O 
 great and melancholy mystery which broods over 
 us, inevitable fatality of suffering and of caus- 
 ing suffering! If love were not a blind boy, he 
 would lead to us the souls made for ours; and it 
 is not so, it is almost never so. We consume 
 ourselves in expectations, in desires, in struggles, 
 in regrets, and love passes by and smiles. 
 
 But why do we love one another? again I 
 ask you. We say : I love his beauty, his talent, 
 his goodness ; I love his hair because it is black, 
 his voice because it is sweet. But this is not 
 true, not a word of all this is true. I love be- 
 cause I love. This is love's formula ; there is 
 none other. 
 
 We obey blindly a prophetic law ; the proof 
 is that we do not love where we will, and, when 
 
 80
 
 THE SOUL OF AN ARTIST 
 
 amorous revelation strikes us, we accuse others 
 and do not realize that we are at once victims and 
 executioners, faithful and unfaithful, mysterious 
 and fatal instruments of a great and guiding 
 Unknown. 
 
 Rereading the ardent verses of anger written 
 by that poet, I am invaded by an inexpressible 
 melancholy. What would I not give to reverse 
 our parts ! Oh, such a little thing, less than noth- 
 ing, this transference! If I had loved him, he would 
 not love me now, and he would be the cruel one. 
 
 An Idyl. 
 
 Has every one had a first love ? For amor- 
 ous passion this must be like the spring of day. 
 Positive people have established the precise hour 
 of sunrise; but before the sun rises, is there 
 not something in the heaven that proclaims the 
 day? It is a light, pale at first, then rosy. 
 Over the earth there is a thrill of rustling leaves, 
 of opening nests, a trepidation of wings not yet 
 extended, a quiver of perfumes not yet shaken 
 from the bosoms of the flowers, all nature in 
 quiet, mysterious, almost sacred palpitation. 
 
 When I was beginning to forget the image of 
 the prince / had not looked at, some country rela- 
 tives of my aunt who had been visiting her took 
 me back with them. Their home was quite 
 poor, even more so than the one to which I was 
 
 81
 
 THE SOUL OF AN ARTIST 
 
 accustomed, and they were vulgar people from 
 association with whom I learned that to change 
 my place did not mean a change of my fortunes. 
 There, too, I languished in the midst of low 
 ordered discourse, mean ideas and wretched hab- 
 its, getting no good from the fresh air and the 
 liberty of the country, rising always unwillingly 
 in the morning and praying all day for the time 
 to throw myself upon my bed, as a haven of 
 peace and oblivion. 
 
 There was in that house a rather wild and 
 unfriendly youth of whom I saw scarcely more 
 than an occasional gleam of big eyes from the 
 darkest corner of the room ; I never heard his 
 voice ; at table he occupied the most humble 
 place and escaped always before the end of the 
 meal. 
 
 One evening, more bored than usual, I tried 
 to get to bed unseen, mounting in the dark the 
 little stairway that led from the two miserable 
 lower rooms to the two upper, but when I reached 
 the landing place I stopped. I had perceived a 
 little flame from the fragment of a candle which 
 the boy held in his hand while he was squatted on 
 the floor, holding on his knees a tattered book in 
 which he was too engrossed to have heard my 
 step. 
 
 " Good night," I said at last, passing by him. 
 
 He leaped to his feet, extinguishing the can- 
 dle-end and making ready to flee. I begged him 
 
 82
 
 THE SOUL OF AN ARTIST 
 
 to remain, assuring him that I was sorry to have 
 disturbed him and that I would get him a match 
 to relight his candle. This last consideration 
 seemed to decide him. He did not reply, but 
 he stayed ; I felt him more than saw him. He 
 was breathing heavily, and the leaves of his 
 book rustled in his hands. 
 
 When he had relit the tiny flame " Good- 
 ness! " I exclaimed, " and how do you come to be 
 reading ? " 
 
 He blushed. 
 
 Then I glanced at his book. 
 
 " May I ask what book that is ? " 
 
 I felt that I was a little his superior and I 
 wished to encourage him. 
 
 At last he unlocked his lips and said that it 
 was the remnant of an old anthology. I bent 
 over his hand and read : 
 
 " Dagli atri muscoli, dai fort cadenti." 
 
 " That is poetry." 
 
 " Yes, the poetry of Alessandro Manzoni." 
 " I think I know it, but I am not sure." 
 He turned the leaves until he found "/ Sep- 
 
 " This," he said, " I like quite well." 
 " Do you study ? " 
 
 The flush on his cheeks grew deeper. Fi- 
 nally he whispered : 
 " I must work."
 
 THE SOUL OF AN ARTIST 
 
 " But now you are studying." 
 He did not answer and I left him. 
 The next day at table our glances met with a 
 kind of curiosity. His eyes were very beautiful. 
 It was then I mentally dubbed him Stella, by 
 which name I always remember him. That eve- 
 ning the women of the house took me to a reli- 
 gious function, from which we returned rather 
 late and we went to bed together. But in the 
 few days following, going to bed early, I would 
 find him on the landing and he no longer tried to 
 escape. 
 
 One evening he asked me eagerly : 
 " What does c the boundaries of Dis ' mean? " 
 I confessed my ignorance. He seemed dis- 
 appointed, and added : 
 
 " I don't understand, either." Then he read 
 slowly from his fragmentary anthology : 
 
 " But why do mortals, ere the time decreed, 
 Diminish those illusions, which, once spent, 
 Will leave them at the boundaries of Dis ? " 
 
 We were both mute over these mysterious 
 words. I was the first to break silence : 
 
 " This is the poetry which pleases you so 
 much ? " 
 
 " Yes, but I don't understand it all." 
 
 I was not surprised. I, too, loved certain 
 things which I did not understand. Our common 
 ignorance drew us nearer together, and, more, a 
 
 84
 
 THE SOUL OF AN ARTIST 
 
 certain I know not what of intimate resem- 
 blance between us. 
 
 I asked him to let me read the whole poem. 
 He handed me the book, holding the candle-end 
 before me, with his eyes following the lines as I 
 read, which I did neither rapidly nor easily, but 
 from which there came to me such an ecstasy of 
 pleasure that it was like a revelation. 
 
 Several phrases particularly struck me : 
 
 " * * * Celestial interchange 
 Of amorous sentiments." 
 
 And this, too : 
 
 "To shelter me beneath the mighty wings 
 Of God's forgiveness." 
 
 There were head notes, by which we man- 
 aged to understand the allusions to Parini and 
 others ; however, my friend was troubled over 
 those first three incomprehensible lines, and I 
 was distressed not to be able to aid him. 
 
 In the meanwhile the candle-end was smokily 
 dying out. I was remorseful for that portion of it 
 which I had consumed, and running into my 
 room I took the half-candle from my candle- 
 stick and carried it to him, saying that I could do 
 without it, as the moon was shining brightly into 
 my room. 
 
 Stello was not overgracious ; he hesitated a 
 moment, gave me a glance from his wild-like 
 eyes, and said simply, "Thank you." I thought 
 
 85
 
 THE SOUL OF AN ARTIST 
 
 it very pleasant that evening to go to bed by 
 moonlight. 
 
 Was it intended as a reward for that little 
 service? I believe so. On the subsequent 
 evenings, when I greeted him on the landing, he 
 always offered me a bunch of flowers. These 
 bouquets deserve a description : very, very small, 
 made up of common flowers, tied tightly by a 
 piece of string, gathered, who knows when, and 
 often withered, they were an evidence of the 
 ingenuous rawness of the boy ; from them was 
 exhaled a sharp perfume, like the odor of his 
 person, a perfume not delicate, nor refreshing, 
 but penetrated by an acid aroma which had a 
 particular charm. I was aware that this perfume 
 came from a little leaf slightly notched, of a 
 modest green, a green almost dust powdered, a 
 shade common to flowers grown in arid soil. I 
 asked him the name of this plant, and he replied 
 that it was an African geranium, his geranium, 
 which he had planted with his own hand in the 
 little garden of the house. 
 
 "Would you like to see it?" he asked 
 brusquely. And without waiting an answer, he 
 slipped down the stairway, making me a sign to 
 follow. 
 
 A few minutes after we were in the tiny gar- 
 den, without having made more noise than two 
 little squirrels in a tree. The moon was at full, 
 and in her clear light he showed me the little 
 
 86
 
 THE SOUL OF AN ARTIST 
 
 plant. I said it was very puny and that pluck- 
 ing its leaves every day would utterly ruin it. 
 
 " What does that matter ? " he replied, shrug- 
 ging his shoulders. " I must give it up." 
 
 "Give it up? And why?" 
 
 " I am going away." 
 
 "When?" 
 
 " Next month. They have found me a place 
 as " 
 
 He pronounced the word in so low a voice 
 that I could not hear. His embarrassment dis- 
 turbed me very much. I felt a peculiar tender- 
 ness for the strange boy condemned like me to 
 an uncongenial life. I was seeking some consol- 
 atory phrase, when he began again : 
 
 " However, I will not stay there always ; I wish 
 to be a printer. In a publishing house work will 
 not be so unpleasant, and then I shall read and 
 then " 
 
 He lifted his eyes to heaven, without com- 
 pleting his thought, and my emotion was too 
 deep to pass unnoticed by him. 
 
 Neither of us moved. 
 
 The evening was delicious, the garden bathed 
 in light, and all around such intense quiet and 
 peace, the stars above our heads and so many 
 thoughts within us. 
 
 From that evening the landing was some- 
 what neglected. We often found ourselves by 
 tacit accord in the garden so sweetly illumined 
 
 8?
 
 THE SOUL OF AN ARTIST 
 
 by the moon; our talks were not long, but it 
 pleased us to be together in silence. Often our 
 glances crossed ; always he gave me a leaf of his 
 geranium, and I showed him the old ones I had 
 preserved. I showed them to him because then 
 he smiled and I liked to see him smile, for at that 
 moment he seemed happy. 
 
 When the day was fixed for my return to the 
 city, I was really grieved. He seemed greatly 
 agitated. He did not say that he loved me, but 
 I knew it well. 
 
 I need not say how sad was our last even- 
 ing. We spoke even less than usual, but every 
 little while we said " Good-by," without a glance. 
 At each little bush he stopped and plucked me a 
 flower which he put into my apron ; when all the 
 flowers were gone, he reaped the odorous herbs, 
 some thyme, mignonette, and a little marjoram. 
 All his geranium was gone, though I had op- 
 posed this devastation. But he had said reso- 
 lutely : 
 
 " No, no, let it die. It is better so." 
 
 Finally we parted, hardly keeping back our 
 tears; my apron was full of flowers, and in my 
 hand I had pressed a little leaf of his geranium. 
 
 Once in my chamber, I could not sleep ; my 
 bed repelled me. I did not have a room of my 
 own and the good woman who yielded me half 
 hers was already in bed and insisted that I, too, 
 should lie down. I made my little packing an 
 
 88
 
 THE SOUL OF AN ARTIST 
 
 excuse for some delay, for truly my sorrow was 
 choking me. Then, when I thought my room- 
 mate was asleep, I opened the window, and like 
 a dear consoling friend the pure moonlight en- 
 folded me, and my tears had their way. 
 
 After a little, drying my eyes and looking 
 down into the small garden below the window, 
 I thought I saw a dark figure prone upon 
 the ground. My heart began a disordered beat, 
 and instinctively and mutely I held out my 
 arms. 
 
 Leaping to its feet, the figure came towards 
 me. Prayers, salutations, impossible desires, 
 what all were not in that dumb adoration ? I 
 know not, but my heart beat still more violently. 
 To speak was impossible. I had already heard 
 my companion turn and re-turn in her bed, and 
 I feared she might awaken. 
 
 I had to close the window, but first I took 
 a handful of the flowers which he had gathered 
 for me and I began to rain them down upon his 
 head. 
 
 Scatteringly there fell upon the night air 
 petals of gelsemine, rose leaves, twigs of thyme 
 and of marjoram, there fell some leaves of the 
 African geranium, filling the moist atmosphere 
 with their sharp odor, and Stello, his arms up- 
 lifted, was flooded with the fragrant shower. 
 
 This was our last greeting. 
 
 89
 
 THE SOUL OF AN ARTIST 
 
 Renunciation. 
 
 And when does one really love ? Many 
 times, in the evenings of my greatest triumphs, 
 before a theatre crowded with people hanging on 
 my words, whose pulses quicken with mine and 
 for me, in that marvelous thrill which runs from 
 stage to audience, when enthusiasm beats its 
 wings, I long with a wild desire for one among so 
 many. One only. And it was for him, for the 
 unknown brother, that passion warmed my glance 
 and stirred my voice. Where was he ? Did he 
 exist ? Have I not been too often deceived ? 
 Have we not been reciprocally deceived, and 
 subject all to that natural disillusion, the ever- 
 lasting disillusion of love ? 
 
 The hearts of the young are like trees 
 flowering over the high road : upon the first 
 passer-by the petals fall and the perfume. How 
 gather them up again ? And whom accuse of 
 the profusion ? 
 
 When the spring winds blow, the hardly 
 opened flowers fall, fall upon a dunghill, fall 
 upon the brow of a poet. What merit or what 
 blame in this ? Who knows aught of this blow- 
 ing wind ? 
 
 Love is sad. 
 
 Sad above all is taking love up again. To 
 repeat unbelievingly the same words which were 
 once pronounced with the smile of illusion, to 
 invite with eyes which have wept, to kiss with 
 
 90
 
 THE SOUL OF AN ARTIST 
 
 the mouth which has imprecated, to swear where 
 faith is dead ; to be happy and to know that this 
 will pass, to desire and to know that the end of 
 desire is nausea or indifference 
 
 You, perchance, cannot comprehend, O happy 
 youth, this horrible thing, the weariness of love! 
 We are in a green field panting with life, or else 
 in a chamber steeped in mystery; our hearts we 
 feel beating in unison with the virgin energies of 
 nature, or with the refined forces of a salon ; one 
 or the other enraptures, inebriates us. We love 
 for the first time. 
 
 But let the scene be again either the green 
 champaign with its flowers, its perfumes, its 
 susurrus, its silence, its seduction, or the little 
 room with its softness, its complex penumbras, 
 its suggestive arts of luxury, it is the second 
 time ! And then once more, once more 
 
 The verdure, which is always the same, repeats 
 to us that we are not; for we know that it is not 
 the verdure of that time and that the flowers 
 wither and the perfumes are dissipated and that 
 the traces of tears and kisses in the trembling 
 grasses are destroyed by new grasses, new nests ; 
 and from the silken pillows all memories are 
 removed by the feathers used to take away the 
 dust, and, in our hearts, our bleeding and mourn- 
 ful hearts, the science of life has written: Finis. 
 
 All this is of a sweetness and sadness com- 
 parable in my mind only with the song of a child 
 
 91
 
 THE SOUL OF AN ARTIST 
 
 at a bier, which is the sweetest and saddest thing 
 I know. 
 
 I mentioned Desclee, but I have another 
 spiritual sister in my art, that Adrienne Lecou- 
 vreur, whose extraordinary sensibility was perhaps 
 her greatest charm. She had that deep and 
 thoughtful pathos which is so powerful in the in- 
 terpretation of passion, a pathos rare and unique 
 which springs in certain privileged souls without 
 any exploiting and in absolutely contrary en- 
 vironments, as must have been for Adrienne 
 the corrupt, frivolous and voluptuous theatri- 
 cal world of the seventeenth century. She was 
 a shining proof of the theory that there are 
 elect persons who may touch pitch and be un- 
 defiled. 
 
 There is a sentiment of Adrienne Lecou- 
 vreur's which seems to me very striking. It is 
 that directed to a young man who asked her 
 love : " Let us be friends, but for love choose a 
 virgin heart. The happy creature should not yet 
 have lost the blissful illusions which make every- 
 thing attractive, should not yet have been deceived 
 or deserted ; should believe you and all other 
 men to be good." 
 
 And such is love. Faith and hope, as in the 
 ingenuous simulacra of our grandfathers, always 
 accompany love. The heart, the cross and the 
 anchor, carved in cornelian, was, fifty years ago, 
 you know a kind of amulet. They were worn 
 
 92
 
 THE SOUL OF AN ARTIST 
 
 about the neck, attached to a cord, and woe, if 
 one were lost! 
 
 Love will perhaps disappear from the world. 
 It is a good sentiment for simple creatures, two 
 children who go hand in hand and are credulous. 
 One day this will be no longer possible, I say to 
 myself. Admiration, sympathy, desires, ecstasies 
 which come to thee, fascinations that stimulate, 
 ideals that inspire, take them all with the convic- 
 tion that they will resolve themselves into noth- 
 ing. Keep not one small particle of these tributes, 
 render them all back to their divine source. In 
 them there is something really good, really pure, 
 but it is not for thee. It is a loan ; it is the 
 circulating coin of the world to be given back 
 to it. 
 
 And again I say to myself: 
 
 Do not condense thy dream, nor seek to 
 make of it a reality. Thou shalt see in the 
 heavenly vault forms of flowers strange and 
 mighty, angels, flames, symbolic words, but do 
 not try to arrest them, for they would dissolve in 
 cloud. 
 
 I was obliged to stop ; the evening had 
 already set in. I took a seat at the window, and 
 little by little a superhuman sweetness swelled at 
 my heart, as if an invisible hand had pressed it 
 and brought forth tears of relief. I wept in the 
 coolness of the night, feeling all my sorrows 
 
 93
 
 THE SOUL OF AN ARTIST 
 
 present in the shadow, and yet, too, a comfort, a 
 hope, a dawn of peace. 
 
 I wrote almost in the dark: 
 
 There flower upon my lips 
 
 Kisses for thee, 
 
 For thine Olympian brow, 
 
 For thine eyes divine, 
 
 For thee. 
 
 But this shall never be, 
 
 Nor now, nor in all time, 
 
 Shall ever be. 
 
 Knowest thou the joy, 
 
 The melancholy joy 
 
 Of No? 
 
 An offering sweet I make 
 
 Of my inmost desires ; 
 
 And these I bind 
 
 Like fragrant roses dead, 
 
 Like sacred candles spent, 
 
 And rise, 
 
 Thus dearly freighted, 
 
 Serenely rise 
 
 To thee. 
 
 Do you not hear in these words a mute 
 ardor? And a plaint from afar, which shall never, 
 never end ? 
 
 How can I say everything? I did so desire 
 to, but it cannot be. Oh ! if you would divine 
 me! Behold me! Are these groans, these 
 struggles, these cries, these lamentations not 
 enough? Music might express more. You 
 
 94
 
 THE SOUL OF AN ARTIST 
 
 understand that. Why not understand me ? I 
 know this is the reason: you have never suf- 
 ered, nor wept, and though your talents will 
 carry you far, you will always fall, always stop 
 before the sphinx which is named Sorrow, and 
 yours will never be the melancholy, boundless, 
 lamentable, made of wounds and tears, the state 
 of him who knows. 
 
 One day you had the cruel courage to say to 
 me that I could not love. Lawrence! when the 
 earth enters her shadow you know well that she 
 has drunk in all the rays of the sun, and is warm 
 with them. You say the pure, the cold, the 
 chaste night, but you are ignorant of the fervor 
 she conceals, and that her coldness is modesty, 
 and her chastity is a veil of tears. 
 
 A terrible fatality weighs upon lofty and sen- 
 sitive hearts. They love and are deceived. You 
 see, I endeavor to be scrupulously just. I cer- 
 tainly shall not repeat the vulgar truisms that 
 many have thought to discover, accusing now 
 men, now women, nor even the patent phrases: 
 "men egoistic, proud, sensual" "women vain, 
 frivolous, capricious." Every one pronouncing 
 one of these phrases gives vent to his own pain 
 and shows his own limitations and egotistic ex- 
 perience. 
 
 How can it be said : It is the man that causes 
 suffering or it is the woman, for we are each a 
 planet, and for one turn which we make around 
 
 95
 
 THE SOUL OF AN ARTIST 
 
 others how many revolutions have we completed 
 around ourselves ! 
 
 If we must accuse some one for our disen- 
 chantments, let it be ourselves, for it is we our- 
 selves who fabricate our loves, painting with the 
 colors of our fantasy. When our hearts are 
 young and ardent they are like prisms, and lend 
 their tints to the objects that most nearly ap- 
 proach them. The ideal is within us, and we try 
 with all our powers to extract it from some other 
 person. Love is the great soul of the universe, 
 which is eternal in the hymn of life, and we wish 
 to fix it in two eyes which a cataract may dim 
 today or tomorrow and which death will certainly 
 close forever. 
 
 Do souls meet in life, in time, in possibility, 
 in election ? Really no ? 
 
 Given two equal souls, with difficulty shall 
 they mutually reveal themselves interpenetrate 
 each other, hardly. If there is the time, the cause 
 will be lacking; if the cause is at hand, absence 
 will supervene; and when time, cause and presence 
 are consenting, does there not always exist the 
 past of which one shadow is enough to obscure 
 whatever joy? A slight indisposition of the 
 spirit is enough for this. We have sublime 
 impulses, but no one sees these at their moment, 
 and, called back, their worth is gone. We would 
 often be heroic, godlike, impassioned, if a thou- 
 sand little invisible influences did not work upon
 
 THE SOUL OF AN ARTIST 
 
 our timidity or there were not awakened that 
 vague terror of action which so easily besets him 
 who is used to a life of meditation. 
 
 Last night there was a marvelous moon, mov- 
 ing so lightly in the midst of clouds, lower than 
 they and so luminously withdrawn from the firm- 
 ament that she seemed to be making with rapid 
 progress towards the earth. A god bearing a 
 message of inconceivable grandeur might look 
 like this. What noble things you would have 
 had to say to me ! But could I have spoken to 
 you ? 
 
 All the difference between life and dream lies 
 in this : 
 
 In dreams all the outer circumstances are in 
 harmony with the inner, while in life there is 
 always something wanting something which is, 
 which exists, but which arrives either too soon or 
 too late. 
 
 Then why be so obstinate in loving ? Why, 
 once enlightened, renew the deceit ? It is good for 
 simple hearts, as I have already said. Wounded 
 and impassioned hearts should be lifted up to 
 where love changes its nature. In the highest 
 atmospheric regions the rarefaction of the air 
 prevents the development of organic life, but 
 the light of the sun is more ardent and purer 
 there. 
 
 Fidelity, the elevated form of terrestrial love, 
 is an insensibility to the great love, whose 
 
 97
 
 THE SOUL OF AN ARTIST 
 
 principal aspiration is evolution to an ever more 
 perfect type. 
 
 The symbol of a dog in his kennel fits itself 
 to the love and fidelity of men, because these 
 sentiments have in them part instinct, part habit, 
 part bestiality. I, for the symbol of my love, 
 would have a star and this motto : " De claritate 
 in claritatem" 
 
 He was near to thee and spoke to thee. 
 
 In the gardens of Milan (after Rome that is 
 the city where we lived most together, and, after 
 the Villa Borghese, the gardens of Milan are the 
 dearest in the world to me) we stopped once 
 melancholy word ! before the tiny village of 
 birds. Two splendid specimens of I know not 
 what rare species were lodged apart in a building 
 something between court and garden, like old 
 aristocratic palaces, and their sections were divided 
 by the very closest lattice work. Leaning upon 
 the iron bar, we silently looked at the birds for a 
 while. (How ideally transparent was, that day, 
 your Anglo-Saxon complexion under the Italian 
 sky!) 
 
 Every one around us was chattering: the 
 nurses with their charges, the little girls with their 
 dolls, meeting friends, an old man who found 
 himself seated by another old man; but we, no. 
 
 Meanwhile, the two noble fowls, separated by 
 their light barrier, felt each other's presence, and 
 
 98
 
 THE SOUL OF AN ARTIST 
 
 sought one another. From both sides there were 
 bold assaults, pauses full of expectation, impos- 
 sible attempts at flight, attitudes of defiance, 
 sweet and disdainful lamentations, and beatings 
 of the beak against the barrier ; a whole war, a 
 drama, a poem. Animated by the same fury, 
 the one did not see the forces of the other, and 
 perhaps undervalued these. The one ran the 
 length of the lattice, attracted by the voice and 
 movements of his fellow, the warmth of whose 
 breath he could feel without being able to see or 
 to touch him, and then retreated as if beaten; 
 but the other found the same obstacle, and re- 
 peated the same movements, the cries, the beak- 
 ings, the laments, the dolorous calls, insistent 
 almost to spasms, he, too, to recede defeated and 
 discouraged. They were neighbors, they heard 
 each other, felt each other, and could not love 
 each other. 
 
 Why did I not then speak ? The heaven above 
 us was so sweet, and mild the air and the hour. 
 I tremblingly listened to the life passing by me, 
 and from the depths of my heart there arose an 
 old song which I love : 
 
 "There where the restless waves sigh, night and day; 
 There where the lark sings, thou hast not met love. 
 He was near thee and spoke to thee." 
 
 For a moment I was tempted to repeat this 
 aloud; but always when I am deeply moved, a 
 
 99
 
 THE SOUL OF AN ARTIST 
 
 kind of timidity or modesty, I know not which, 
 urges me to assume a demeanor at variance with 
 my feeling lest the sentiment should be entirely 
 lost. I said : 
 
 " What beautiful plane-trees ! " 
 
 " Those are not plane-trees," you replied. 
 
 " I think they are." 
 
 " They are not." 
 
 " Then what are they ? " 
 
 My heart kept repeating " restless waves," 
 and my lips questioned for themselves. 
 
 " I do not remember ; I will tell you later." 
 
 " But they have the palmate leaf of the 
 plane." 
 
 ( The eye can look, too, without heeding the 
 heart.) 
 
 But the music ( our brief chat was like rapid 
 archery ) did not cover the words murmured in 
 our inmost being, the words we did not speak. 
 
 Soon you raised your voice to tell me of a 
 dispute you had had with a friend at a restau- 
 rant ; your eyes sparkled with boyish gaiety ; 
 your voice had the high and slightly emotional 
 quality of one who recites a part ; however, you 
 did not proceed. The glorious beauty of the 
 hour took us both ; the joy of living penetrated 
 through eye and heart. 
 
 I saw you, you, in that inexpressibly pure air, 
 in the light, slightly veiled, like a proud ardor 
 enshrouding itself in the general mildness of 
 
 100
 
 THE SOUL OF AN ARTIST 
 
 tints and breezes, which was almost enough to 
 make one believe in a suspension of terrestrial 
 misery, in a happy instant of pardon. 
 
 An imperceptible, almost involuntary move- 
 ment drew the hem of my skirt across your feet. 
 
 "What an enchanting day!" I murmured, 
 very softly, not to trouble the sweet tumult 
 within me. 
 
 You assented silently with a smile. And 
 meanwhile the hour was passing. A slight cool- 
 ness in the air was the first warning. From the 
 summits of the trees the sun was withdrawing 
 little by little, trailing its glory along the sand of 
 the paths, granting to the very last its gracious 
 warmth to the little nests, to the holes deep in 
 the grass where, through shining threads, the 
 cicadas were taking a few last leaps, and the mys- 
 terious dragon-flies were disappearing with the 
 graceful flight of their gauzy wings. An ever 
 sweeter and gentler whisper thrilled the leaves of 
 the tall trees. I lifted my eyes, thinking, "When 
 the lark sings." But the larks and the swallows 
 were descending in large circles, silently skimming 
 the tops of the magnolias in whose shade we had 
 seated ourselves, sweet, shining green of the 
 magnolias, a little cold (like us?) and aristocratic, 
 a green, which defies the frost ! 
 
 My fan fell to the ground, you picked it up, 
 and it seems to me that I looked at you with a 
 great and unexpressed sweetness, delaying some- 
 
 101
 
 THE SOUL OF AN ARTIST 
 
 what to take it from your hand, while you your- 
 self hesitated to yield it to me. 
 
 In that moment of divided sensation I 
 relived in the beating of our hearts all the en- 
 chantment of the vanished hour, and it abides 
 with me yet, combined with the fragrance of the 
 magnolias, with the green, with the dying sun, 
 with the warmth of your arm against which I had 
 leaned, with your hand which had lightly touched 
 mine, with the desire which had enwrapped us, 
 so subtle and so secret, not entirely were we 
 masters of ourselves, nor yet slaves. 
 
 The invisible dominated us, surged from our 
 souls to our lips which closed in jealous custody, 
 pressed against our hearts which suspended, almost 
 to finality, their pulses. 
 
 I shut my eyes for a moment, and was glad 
 to be aware that even from the lowered lids I 
 saw the sky, the trees, and you. I saw you bet- 
 ter without the distraction of secondary objects, 
 as in an ever purer spiritual selection, and in this 
 sweet oblivion my unhappy past seemed annihi- 
 lated. "This is happiness!" I thought. 
 
 To breathe beside a sister soul without merg- 
 ing oneself, with full self-consciousness, to love 
 with something yet incomplete, uncomprehended, 
 is not this, perhaps, the greater charm, the sole 
 one, expectation ? 
 
 I had not yet thanked you for having lifted 
 my fan, and it was now too late to do so. I'oo 
 
 IO2
 
 THE SOUL OF AN ARTIST 
 
 late! I repeated to myself. I drew my black boa 
 closer, controlling a shiver, and rose to my feet. 
 
 You looked at me doubtfully, with a dull 
 flame in your eyes. You remember? 
 
 The white book. 
 
 You saw it once on my writing-desk, the 
 little white book. It was you who so named it, 
 giving a certain importance and recondite sweet- 
 ness to those poor pages, which I would never 
 let you read. 
 
 Many women keep a journal, not I. The 
 book of my life would have so many ugly records 
 that I am happy never to have written it. I must 
 tell you, too, that I do not like to write; I am 
 astonished to be doing so now to you, yielding 
 to an irresistible impulse. 
 
 It must have been an irresistible power which 
 made me set forth so many thoughts upon these 
 pages, thoughts given in so unusual a form as 
 sometimes to be like verse, and in which I find 
 something better than my life, the synthesis, the 
 very result of my life. Yes, it is indeed my life 
 which I have written in the little white book. 
 Look so to understand it; of what import the 
 facts ? 
 
 Now I love nature. It is almost my only 
 consolation. Everything has voice, every form 
 an expression, every change a signification. The 
 white book knows it. I have made moan with 
 
 103
 
 THE SOUL OF AN ARTIST 
 
 the trees and with the fountains ; we have told 
 each other many things in a language I once did 
 not understand. 
 
 I made no search for the words written here. 
 They came to me already formed, as if suggested 
 by an invisible mouth ; they came instead of tears, 
 instead of groans and sighs ; they came in unac- 
 customed throng, I know not why. I know 
 nothing of what I say except that it is what I 
 feel. 
 
 In the greater part of mankind admiration of 
 nature has been cultivated, like the need of dress- 
 ing, like the habit of reading, or of making music. 
 It is my pride to have discovered nature by the 
 mere force of my love. 
 
 I did so detest it when they wished to impose 
 it upon me after their manner that now I have a 
 special right to love it for my own, with a passion 
 mute and profound, with a jealousy, too, for this 
 love will admit no companionship. To be alone 
 in the wood is for me the highest esthetic sensa- 
 tion. 
 
 It is not the verdure, nor the freshness, nor 
 the shade, nor the whispers, nor the perfume, nor 
 the gay sensuousness of the velvety sward that 
 attracts me; it is rather the meaning of all this, 
 that obscure meaning through which the heart of 
 man has relationship with the blade of grass, with 
 the flower, with the brook, with the insect, and 
 even with the ultrasensible space, with the grand, 
 
 104
 
 THE SOUL OF AN ARTIST 
 
 the mysterious, the marvelous, the unknown. 
 This is what I wished to write in the white book. 
 Listen : 
 
 The Lament of the Little Waterfall. 
 
 I was a tiny thread, a slender stream 
 
 From high rocks tumbling down. 
 Silent I fell, disturbing none who passed, 
 
 And none took note of me. 
 One day a stranger saw me, and had thirst, 
 
 Had burning thirst of me. 
 Graceful he bent, took me within his hand, 
 
 And pressed me to his lips. 
 And then he went his way and I went mine, 
 
 But from that day I weep. 
 
 The Storm of Leaves. 
 
 We are errant voices, 
 We are sighs and kisses, 
 We are groans and dirges. 
 On we fly, we whirl 
 In the air, the sun, 
 Over mount and plain. 
 We are illusion, 
 We are hope, 
 We are passion. 
 
 The Secret of a Stone. 
 I am inflexible, 
 Hard, severe, 
 Show no pulse, 
 Voice have I none ; 
 But the new Hamlet 
 Of the valley, 
 I have a secret 
 I'll not tell. 
 
 105
 
 THE SOUL OF AN ARTIST 
 
 What I have seen, 
 What thought, 
 The wood knows, 
 And the sky knows, too. 
 But why, cold, I fell 
 Upon the river-bed, 
 That is my secret, 
 I'll not tell. 
 
 The Voice of the Madonna in the Little Chapel in the Wood. 
 
 Thy brow is pure, 
 Thine eye serene, 
 Thy mantle azure 
 With stars of gold. 
 But seven swords 
 Have pierced thy breast, 
 Mother of God 
 And of Sorrow. 
 
 What the Mountain Heights Think. 
 
 We are immovable, stony. No passion 
 troubles us. The winds and tempests pass over 
 us and leave us intact. The rain storms down, 
 the snow falls, and we rise ever pure and erect to 
 meet the sun. We see everything, and nothing 
 touches us. (So think the mountain heights, 
 and they reign.) 
 
 The Song of the Cicada. 
 
 Joy, joy, joy is mine ! 
 Love seeks not me. 
 Joy, joy, joy is mine ! 
 From thought I'm free. 
 
 106
 
 THE SOUL OF AN ARTIST 
 
 Joy, joy, joy is mine ! 
 I challenge sorrow. 
 Joy, joy, joy is mine ! 
 I know no morrow. 
 
 Dialogue of the Roses and the Thorns. 
 
 - We are beauty, 
 
 And we are power. 
 We are sweetness, 
 
 And we are constancy. 
 
 We are love, 
 
 And we are sorrow. 
 
 We are poetry, 
 
 And we are wisdom. 
 
 We bind the brows of the happy, 
 
 And we the temples of heroes. 
 
 The Trees. 
 
 How often when I rest beneath the trees, 
 Those sheltering trees whose verdant shades I love, 
 I question of the tremulous leaves : You know ? 
 You know both when I speak and when I laugh, 
 And when I'm sadly mute, you know me, too? 
 
 Yes, yes, they understand me, they alone ; 
 Into their secret depths I searching look 
 And find serenity's infinitude. 
 Sorrow they understand, and when a heart 
 Is wounded unto death, they understand. 
 
 They listen, too, they listen, grave and sweet, 
 As those who all things and for ever know, 
 All the great mysteries of the human soul. 
 And tenderly as mothers to their babes 
 They with their soft caresses heal my pain. 
 
 107
 
 THE SOUL OF AN ARTIST 
 
 verdant fronds and branches ! O delight 
 Of streaming odors ! and above all dear 
 Unto this weary heart, your shadows pure 
 To you I yield myself, oblivious quite, 
 Sweet is oblivion within your arms ! 
 
 1 feel you are my brothers, living trees ! 
 Trees linked with man in common destiny! 
 For you are sentient creatures, stirred by mood, 
 Not solid granite force immovable, 
 
 But born like me and like me mortal, too. 
 
 Like me you're born to gentle aims, and good, 
 Your slender arms uplifted to the sky ; 
 You're ever warred upon by wind and man, 
 Your young leaves' graces ever stripped away 
 And ever budding new like me again. 
 
 Kisses you have, and shudders, for you feel ! 
 
 And in the cosmic struggle, in the grey 
 
 And desolate sunsets and the gloomy dawns 
 
 Of pale Octobers, when the heavens weep, 
 
 Your drooping branches have their weight of tears. 
 
 And when the awful sea in quiet sleeps 
 Upon its heap of corpses new engulfed, 
 Impassive witnesses the mountains stand ; 
 But you with long-drawn sobs and wailings make 
 Responsive moan, O my beloved trees ! 
 
 Upon the Shore. 
 I said to the wave : 
 
 Why with such passionate kisses meet the rock ? 
 Canst thou not see it is insensible ? 
 Thy wooing warm, 
 
 The gentle words thou'rt ever murmuring 
 Are lost upon the shore's rude masonry. 
 
 108
 
 THE SOUL OF AN ARTIST 
 
 Kisses for roses ! 
 
 Seek them, for they know the answers fit. 
 
 Soft are they, and their petals richly sweet. 
 
 To me the wave said : 
 
 A great Power I know not teaches me 
 
 To give, to give and never to receive : 
 
 Human impurity 
 
 To touch and still to make me pure again ; 
 
 Prodigal, noble, simple, all unprized, 
 
 I pass, forgetful, 
 
 Leaving this precept unto humankind : 
 
 " Nothing to ask : to love for love alone." 
 
 The Absolute. 
 
 That there should be people who do not like 
 me seems very natural to me. To please every 
 one is a vulgar aspiration. What I cannot en- 
 dure are feigned brothers. These impress me 
 always as one who, having warmed himself back 
 and front at a fire, feeling the generous heat with- 
 out and within, thinks himself to be the fire, and 
 stretching his glowing hand to the flame calls it 
 sister. 
 
 The world is big enough for even those who 
 know nothing of art, of poetry, of beauty, but 
 at least let them not trifle with these consecrated 
 things. It is the only grace we ask of them. 
 There are certain sacred words it is not given to 
 every one to pronounce, which may not be put 
 with others without profanation, words which are 
 revealed in the midst of thorny places to those 
 who brave the pricks for the great passion of the 
 
 109
 
 THE SOUL OF AN ARTIST 
 
 revelation. Calm and reasonable people have, 
 however, one compensation. They may call us 
 mad, that is their privilege, and let them profit by 
 it ; it displeases us less than to hear them name 
 us brothers. 
 
 I am grateful to all who love me ; some have 
 known me as child or young girl, others are my 
 benefactors ; my inferiors believe me good, and 
 all think they should admire me. They smile 
 benevolently when they hear it said that I am the 
 greatest Italian actress, the only one who has in- 
 tuition of a soul : this word exalts them. They 
 proclaim me superior to every one, and no one is 
 worthy to loose the latchet of my shoe ; but one 
 little discussion, one adverse opinion, and throne 
 and altar vanish into air. In a few seconds I can 
 negotiate the exchange left of my merit and my 
 intelligence. Is my intelligence to be the fuel to 
 illumine and warm theirs ? Their favor costs too 
 dear. I prefer that given me gratis. 
 
 This class is more antipathetic, but from a 
 lesser height I am dragged down by enthusiastic 
 youths who have seen in me the ladder of their 
 ambition and come to burn before me the incense 
 of their admiration, manuscripts in their pockets. 
 
 The saddest is when I meet old friendships 
 which time has fossilized into the monstrous im- 
 mobility of the mammoth. We do not under- 
 stand each other any more, and we mourn with 
 a touch of irony that we have so much changed 
 
 no
 
 THE SOUL OF AN ARTIST 
 
 The faculty of progression is very rare. They 
 knew me poor, crushed under the weight of my 
 destiny, and cannot forgive me for having re- 
 leased myself. They think perhaps that I have 
 robbed them. Property seems always illegitimate 
 to those prud'hommes who imagine the highest 
 ideal to be their level. 
 
 And my associates in art ? What have we in 
 common? Nothing. Our principles and our 
 aims are diametrically opposed. I look at them 
 sometimes, marveling, without hatred, without 
 contempt, and I listen to them timidly, a little as 
 might an inhabitant fallen from the moon regard 
 us all; bien entendu that the heavenly visitant is 
 always in the wrong. 
 
 The public ? Oh ! the public almost hissed 
 me one evening in the second act of Frou-Frou 
 because I wore a cheap dress costing sixty lire. 
 
 I shall not say a word of the critics. The 
 first, the true critics, are the philosophers, the 
 poets, the romancers ; they make the critiques of 
 life. It was only after them that were self-con- 
 stituted the critics of critics. There might be 
 much said on this subject and it would be very 
 little worth the pains. Here as elsewhere it is 
 the spirit that makes alive and the letter that 
 kills. A true critic is evolved only from a great 
 intelligence. For the rest, the women folk upon 
 their balconies, at the cross-roads or about the 
 well, are time-honored critics. 
 
 in
 
 THE SOUL OF AN ARTIST 
 
 All this, you understand, is very different 
 from what I feel when I weep or groan or impre- 
 cate or implore or pardon from the boards of the 
 stage, beauty and absolute truth in my line of 
 vision. In that moment of intoxication I know 
 nothing but the ideal phantasm of the crowd, the 
 better part, the nobler instincts, the gentle aspira- 
 tions which vibrate under the touch of art, a 
 divine music from a borrowed instrument. 
 
 And may they not be deceived in their ideali- 
 zation of the actress ? Perhaps. We are indeed 
 jiEolian harps which a celestial breath stirs at 
 intervals to music. What may be thought of us 
 when we are found sometimes with silent strings ? 
 
 Yes, when we are known, the instrument is 
 found toneless, twisted, worn out. Our genius 
 is not in us ; it has died away with our voice, 
 with the fire of our glances, with the enlightening 
 flash of our intelligence, with the fervor of our 
 passion, prodigals that we are in our revelation 
 of beauty. 
 
 Blessed are those who can embalm their souls 
 in a masterpiece. We, we give our poor souls to 
 the wind. 
 
 And I think often, too, of a stranger who 
 may never have seen me, whom I shall never see, 
 who alone and from a distance ( whether upon an 
 ideal summit girded with snow, or in a sad marsh 
 mid grey and weeping willows, or in the dizzy 
 
 112
 
 THE SOUL OF AN ARTIST 
 
 noises of a great city, or in the austere quiet of 
 an ancient country home) follows my career, 
 my thoughts, and feels and sighs and hopes with 
 me. He the unknown has loved me, I 
 know it, I feel it, across the vibrations of my name, 
 and this pure love which from the frailty of mat- 
 ter can never reach me, is my frequent consola- 
 tion ; it is like the perfume of a flower which I 
 have folded in my gown. I have its sweetness 
 with me though I do not see it. 
 
 But I tremble always when one comes out 
 from the multitude to accost me ; I know I am 
 to lose a friend. Accepting the grave responsi- 
 bility of speaking to the heart of the masses, I 
 have renounced the gift of treating with the heart 
 of the individual. The man who embraces me 
 has a phantasm in his arms. My soul, a pilgrim 
 ever, has no home, no roof, its dwelling is the 
 whole world. 
 
 "Why do you come to me?" I would cry 
 to the curious visitor. " The hour I give you is 
 sweet, you pay me compliments, and I believe 
 you, more or less, but still I do believe you." 
 And then ? The visitor rises. " Will he come 
 again?" "Soon." "Soon?" "Very soon." 
 A hand-shake, the door opens, the visitor is seen 
 only in profile, he is already distant, he has dis- 
 appeared. It is all at an end. Months will 
 pass before such another visit, and when this 
 comes the sweetness will be spoiled, a melancholy 
 
 "3
 
 THE SOUL OF AN ARTIST 
 
 curtain will have fallen upon the enthusiasm, 
 faith will be no more. 
 
 And letters, those letters which are received 
 with all the fascination of the unknown, which 
 are read with an ever-perishing and ever-renascent 
 desire, those distant cities which have left in our 
 memories so many graceful outlines, pure hori- 
 zons, impressions, regrets, and which rise before 
 us with so certain and sonorous a voice from the 
 chaste mystery of the envelope ! Indeed they are 
 a joy. But can one be writing all one's life, all 
 one's life be at the same pitch of passion? In 
 the evenings a lamp-lighter passes by, lighting 
 the gas-jets one by one. My neighbor, standing 
 at the window, with his head turned to the left, 
 watches with deep interest each flame ; when the 
 lamps on the left are all burning, my neighbor 
 tranquilly turns his head to the right. Is it pos- 
 sible to stand all one's life gazing at a flaming 
 gas-jet? 
 
 There was in the home of my childhood a 
 cut-glass bottle with little golden stars upon each 
 facet, which, according to the good woman who 
 brought me up, had been the property of my 
 mother. The bottle remained empty, but of the 
 essence once contained therein there was left so 
 rich a perfume that it was one of my delights to 
 enjoy it in the dark, like a mysterious caress that 
 perfume which my mother had enjoyed before 
 
 114
 
 THE SOUL OF AN ARTIST 
 
 me and which lasted still when she was here no 
 longer. Since then I have sought in vain a per- 
 manent essence; no flower grown on earth and 
 strained through a limbec can give an unalterable 
 perfume. The best modern products last a year 
 or two at most; my mother's cologne bottle has 
 had thirty or forty years of life, perhaps. How- 
 ever, now, even it is a little less odorous 
 
 A party of artists and some others were re- 
 turning from an excursion beyond the walls of 
 the city. Near the gates we came upon a 
 peasant driving a small herd of oxen to the 
 slaughter-house. With us was a novelist, you 
 know the little fat one v, ho talks so much of art 
 and gets drunk so often, who announces every 
 little while that he wishes to set his ladder to the 
 stars, but who is always held down by the weight 
 of his stomach, well, he seemed deeply to reflect, 
 and then said : " Poor creatures, walking of them- 
 selves to their death!" But are we not all walk- 
 ing every day, every hour of our lives, to our 
 death ? 
 
 One morning in April I had a rendezvous 
 with you in a delicious bit of country ; the air was 
 sweet with early flowers, joy awaited me, I was 
 happy; and yet within me I thought: "I go to 
 death; over these stones which my feet lightly 
 tread, other feet not yet created, borne on by 
 other illusions, shall pass, erasing the footprints 
 
 "5
 
 THE SOUL OF AN ARTIST 
 
 of those who passed before us." I seek them 
 always, those footprints, and question them with 
 reverent curiosity. 
 
 Does nothing, then, of the earlier wayfarers 
 survive? Ah! yes, indeed! there live still their 
 joys, their sorrows, their ecstasies, their tears. 
 We are they, a little more melancholy. The 
 sadness which oppresses our young and ardent 
 hearts, what is it but the shadow of their grief? 
 We feel the weight of the ashes of so many dead, 
 and this is why we grow silent sometimes in the 
 midst of joy. 
 
 You were awaiting me, no reality could be 
 truer than your smile. You had written some 
 verses, and asked my opinion of them. Instead 
 of replying at once, I delayed that I might take 
 pleasure in your gaiety, not yet quite equal to it, 
 knowing that five minutes of the hour had already 
 run, that time was flying, and that I should lose 
 you. The sadness of many happy days weighed 
 me down, days which one knows will never come 
 again. 
 
 The stronger and the more ardent we are, 
 the greater is the power of love within us, and 
 the more we attach ourselves to life. Is this 
 not so? 
 
 We love all there is in life, our own part and 
 the parts of others, the future and the past. 
 
 Whatever our sensation, pleasure or sorrow, 
 it is one with the joy or pain of the universe. 
 
 116
 
 THE SOUL OF AN ARTIST 
 
 We are not to think ourselves the centre of mo- 
 tion, turning like wheels and alone upon our own 
 axis ; we know that around us, above us, and be- 
 low us there is a marvelously progressive machin- 
 ery, and that we partake as much of the dust and 
 the mud over which we advance as of the luxu- 
 riant herbage and the triumphal flowers which 
 climb the summits. 
 
 This is why we love the dead. Not one of 
 these has perished or is canceled from our mem- 
 ory. Great heroisms, great geniuses perpetuate 
 themselves and resurge under other names. Who 
 do you think was Dante ? Dante was Homer. 
 And when beauty is gloriously eloquent in the 
 face of a woman, you think: Behold Helen! 
 Not into dust fell those divine arms, that breast, 
 that hair, those sweetest eyes. Helen lives. 
 Helen shall live ever. 
 
 Let us love the past, let us love the future, 
 unless we wish to die. We are the world. 
 
 It was that day that we fell into talk about 
 jealousy. I assured you that I was not jealous, 
 a little as said St. Theresa, "I die lest I die." 
 Jealousy is of its nature sensual, and this is why 
 we say "jealous as a tiger or a hyena." But when 
 love is elevated to the great heights of sentiment, 
 jealousy does not exist. We love God and are 
 not jealous of Him. 
 
 If I were disposed to jealousy, I should feel 
 
 117
 
 THE SOUL OF AN ARTIST 
 
 it most for the breast that had borne and had 
 nourished my beloved, and then for the first ob- 
 jects which had struck his imagination his toys, 
 his baby-clothes, the playfellows whom he first 
 loved ; and then for the house in which he lived, 
 the paths he frequented, his favorite poets, his 
 regretted dead, and finally those persons whom 
 he did not yet know, but whom he should know, 
 who should enter and make part of his life, have 
 place in his heart, give him amusement or inter- 
 est, make him weep or smile, curse or bless. 
 Jealous of a woman? Well, perhaps, for a mo- 
 ment. But what woman could wholly possess 
 him, and forever? Death only and of her, of 
 her indeed I could be jealous! 
 
 But love has sometimes vanquished death; 
 has always vanquished when a supreme genius 
 lends love its wings. Death has laid low the 
 beautiful bodies of Atala and Juliet, love has 
 made their spirits immortal. 
 
 Think of Sappho's triumph! For centuries 
 her obscure rivals sleep in oblivion, she only pos- 
 sesses Phaon. 
 
 This is my understanding of jealousy: to 
 contest my beloved not with a wretched woman, 
 but with nature, with eternity. Can you conceive 
 anything more sublime? Consider: they have 
 lowered the loved one in the dark grave, they 
 have covered him with flowers, they have recited 
 over him the prayers of the dead, they have given 
 
 118
 
 THE SOUL OF AN ARTIST 
 
 him their last farewell, they have said: "He is 
 dead." The mother weeps ; the relatives prepare 
 their mourning; friends think: "We shall see 
 him no more"; they are all resigned. But she 
 that sublime mistress descends into the sepul- 
 chre, takes the body, presses it to her breast, 
 infuses into it a new soul, and, for the frail life 
 lost, offers him an eternal being. He is hers at 
 last, and hers alone ! They will soar through the 
 world above all human loves, above all human 
 joys, and posterity those late-comers will still 
 speak of their love, and bold or timid youth will 
 repeat with jealous wonder the two names im- 
 mortally conjoined. 
 
 No, I will not be jealous until I feel that I 
 can love better than any other. To give with- 
 out asking, without receiving, without hoping 
 anything, this for a proud heart is the greatest 
 voluptuousness. 
 
 Poor Marie Bashkirtseff! Her proud aim 
 was to reach such a grade of celebrity that she 
 should attract all glances when she entered a 
 room. 
 
 But when a whole room and a theatre and a 
 city acclaims me, I shrink and hide myself. No, 
 this is not yet what I wish ! 
 
 I would I speak it to you softly and mys- 
 teriously I would conquer Her whom alone I 
 recognize as my rival. 
 
 The tumult of applause gives me not the 
 
 119
 
 THE SOUL OF AN ARTIST 
 
 smallest part of that radiant joy which would be 
 mine did I but know that I should be loved and 
 desired beyond the grave, forever. Do you un- 
 derstand ? Could I be sure that a hundred years 
 from now a soul would feel what I feel, as I feel 
 it, and that such sympathy, repairing time, should 
 meet me across the bounds and mystery of 
 death, this, this would be my love, my ambi- 
 tion ! Not a stage, not a public No ! No ! 
 a soul like my own ! Is not this the resurrection 
 and the life ? 
 
 Meditations under the elms. 
 
 In this world, to love the invisible soul- 
 mate, the dear, the dreamed-of one, the unknown, 
 the unattainable, whom we shall never meet, 
 or to love in fractions to love, that is, those 
 portions which it is permitted us to attain, to 
 gather these like precious gems, to make a circle 
 of them, of which we may say, this is intelli- 
 gence, this sentiment, this beauty, this genius, 
 and upon such separate pearls to recite the 
 rosary of our devotion, which is to be pre- 
 ferred ? 
 
 The first theory is the more ideal, the second 
 the more human. But what is humanity ? Am 
 not I a member of humanity, and why shall I 
 acknowledge in others a greater right than mine 
 to determine which is the better life ? The sole 
 duty which man owes to men is not to disturb 
 
 1 20
 
 THE SOUL OF AN ARTIST 
 
 natural laws. Really, who can be more right 
 than we ourselves ? 
 
 What have men done for truth except invent 
 systems? In philosophy, in religion, in morals, 
 in art, in science, everything has been filtered 
 through systems, but all the evangels and all the 
 treatises reveal us nothing which we did not 
 already know, which we have not already felt 
 surge through our spirits, quiver in our nerves. 
 
 Every system makes a road, not one assures 
 its limits. 
 
 Systems circumscribe ideals within given 
 forms, and the need of the ideal is the absolute. 
 Until this is shown me, I shall continue to be- 
 lieve that the first duty of man is research, 
 ascent, slow, but sure and free. 
 
 Since in theory everything is ideal, and in 
 practice nothing is so, to love and to cultivate 
 our souls is the best employment of time for 
 each and every one of us. It is an error to seek 
 our happiness from others. The course of 
 supreme happiness goes rather from us to others. 
 
 What physical pleasure does not pall ? It is 
 well that it is so. Eternity of pleasure is due the 
 spirit, and we are spiritual. Two eyes, two 
 hands, two feet, a mouth to eat, ears to hear 
 withal, who possesses not these and who com- 
 bines them not for the increase of his own proper 
 delight? 
 
 But what is there in common between such 
 
 121
 
 THE SOUL OF AN ARTIST 
 
 pleasures and ours? There exists in nature a 
 mysterious sense which reveals itself, and that 
 hardly, to certain particularly responsive fibres of 
 poets and seers, and which the masses ignore in 
 the same way that inner chains of mountains and 
 people of wood and grotto would deny the echo 
 not conceded them. But as our way, so our hap- 
 piness, and is not our duty plain Ascoltare la 
 Voce ( Listen to the Voice)? 
 
 Time presses, let us be up and doing. 
 
 I regret the years and powers lost. It seems 
 to me that my mind now divests itself of old 
 trappings, throwing aside old rags of being, and 
 rises to the sight of purer heavens succeeding 
 one another with promises of yet unheard of joys. 
 
 From my earliest reading I recall the legend 
 of a fairy condemned to live always alone in a 
 splendid palace. All the beauties of art adorned 
 her dwelling, and nature herself was present in 
 the ample and marvelous gardens. But the fairy 
 longed for another self; love's natural instinct 
 made her long for a being made in her likeness 
 and image for whom to be beautiful. But this 
 should not be. Not only should we not seek 
 from our inferiors, not even from among our 
 equals or superiors should we seek that greatest 
 ideal, the fusion of souls. A soul which loses 
 itself in another is at rest, and ends its mission. 
 Our scope should be much higher. 
 
 122
 
 THE SOUL OF AN ARTIST 
 
 You said to me ( Lawrence, I speak to you in 
 the very nakedness of my soul robbed of all its 
 illusions, you know this ) : " Let us be united ; 
 we are made for this." Did you think of this 
 union ? For we are united, united as no other 
 two human beings, in spite of distance and deser- 
 tion, in the absence of all joy, all communication. 
 The principle alone is ideal, and we are united in 
 principle. What other advantage could our love 
 have brought us ? We are united in all we have 
 loved together, in our common aspirations, and 
 because we did not close our love within our- 
 selves but set it free to all things beautiful and 
 immortal. 
 
 The world is in danger, threatened by mon- 
 strous struggles. It is the hour of sursum corda. 
 And just because all idols are beaten down and all 
 standards despised, just because faith is no more, 
 we will believe. Because we have searched the 
 cold souls of sceptics we feel proudly the fervor 
 of our own, and we will believe that it is not the 
 ideal that falls, but only the powers of man. 
 
 The ideal does not fall, if by the ideal is 
 meant that grasp of personal good and that dis- 
 passionate admiration of the good that exists out- 
 side of us : to feel ourselves happy for this alone, 
 that good exists. 
 
 What hatefulness, what misfortune, can can- 
 cel the facts of beauty and happiness ? 
 
 Wild longings spring suddenly from the 
 
 123
 
 THE SOUL OF AN ARTIST 
 
 shades of barbarous ancestry, rise and proclaim 
 the rights of our race. I hear coming from dis- 
 tant mirages of light the voices of my precur- 
 sors, of my soul's kinsmen, which incite and 
 reassure me. Who are they ? I see them not : 
 warriors, princes, poets, martyrs for love, heroes 
 of thought, or poor and humble people, poor 
 souls having dwelt far from any fecundatory sun, 
 unknown, uncomprehended, debased or great in 
 the strength of the love which consumed them, 
 they all have a blazonry that I recognize as mine. 
 They say to me : " Beauty is eternal, believe 
 in her!" 
 
 Everything lies here is it not so? in under- 
 standing beauty, in having the soul to understand 
 her in all her manifestations, and in not subject- 
 ing her to the miserable and vulgar thing called 
 pain. 
 
 " The world is hateful," says the sceptic of 
 the arid heart, " because I have suffered." No, 
 the world is beautiful because all sorrows lend 
 themselves to a plan infinitely ideal. 
 
 Great actors, when, from the exigences of a 
 drama, they must accept a small or antipathetic 
 part, play their mean role with the same ardor, 
 the same conscientiousness, the same perfection 
 as they do the heroic. The pity is that there are 
 so few great actors either upon the stage or in 
 life. 
 
 124
 
 THE SOUL OF AN ARTIST 
 
 Imagine how harmonious existence would be 
 if each one of us undertook to fulfil well the 
 duty for which nature brought him forth ! Is not 
 the fool perhaps necessary to the man of intel- 
 lect, as the cruel to the generous, the deformed 
 to the perfect? 
 
 Those stars which most palpitate are thought 
 the most beautiful of all. If the greater part of 
 men suffer it is because they do not feel enough. 
 They feel pain, which is a low grade of sensibility, 
 and do not feel beauty, which is its coronation. 
 
 The man capable of understanding beauty in 
 its most intimate and most complex signification 
 will little heed a headache, and he who possesses 
 the rare gift of creation, giving birth to a work 
 of art, can control the agony of his heart. Pain, 
 like pleasure, is only a means of life: the effects 
 follow soon or late, the cause abides sole and 
 immortal. 
 
 But these are not the words now current in 
 the world. We are like the early Christians, our 
 religion is persecuted and derided. We have 
 need to hide ourselves sometimes; we live in 
 catacombs and have our watchword. The cult 
 of our God has taken refuge at a little altar, at a 
 bare sacramental table, palely lit with candles, 
 among scant flowers, without incense, without 
 attendant hosanna-singing choirs, but if lives, it 
 lives, it must suffice for our hopes. If we are not 
 happy, no matter, others will be so. 
 
 125
 
 THE SOUL OF AN ARTIST 
 
 I have not been in bed tonight. I have re- 
 read these pages, thinking of You who inspired 
 them and who perhaps will see them, perhaps 
 will read them, so far distant from me 
 
 I open the window, and above the horizon a 
 rosy flush gladdens the eyes, vigil-weary. Day 
 breaks ! 
 
 Little loves, little sorrows, little cares of little 
 souls, how they all vanish before the light! 
 Arise, my soul, on through thorns and brambles, 
 or through flowers, even on up to the stars ! This 
 is my last word. 
 
 126
 
 DATE DUE
 
 000 521 390 5