第11章

And now the initiation was begun.She was to read, to study, to depict by a gesture, a look, the passions she was to delineate on the boards; lessons dangerous, in truth, to some, but not to the pure enthusiasm that comes from art; for the mind that rightly conceives art is but a mirror which gives back what is cast on its surface faithfully only--while unsullied.She seized on nature and truth intuitively.Her recitations became full of unconscious power; her voice moved the heart to tears, or warmed it into generous rage.But this arose from that sympathy which genius ever has, even in its earliest innocence, with whatever feels, or aspires, or suffers.

It was no premature woman comprehending the love or the jealousy that the words expressed; her art was one of those strange secrets which the psychologists may unriddle to us if they please, and tell us why children of the simplest minds and the purest hearts are often so acute to distinguish, in the tales you tell them, or the songs you sing, the difference between the true art and the false, passion and jargon, Homer and Racine,--echoing back, from hearts that have not yet felt what they repeat, the melodious accents of the natural pathos.Apart from her studies, Viola was a simple, affectionate, but somewhat wayward child,--wayward, not in temper, for that was sweet and docile; but in her moods, which, as I before hinted, changed from sad to gay and gay to sad without an apparent cause.If cause there were, it must be traced to the early and mysterious influences I have referred to, when seeking to explain the effect produced on her imagination by those restless streams of sound that constantly played around it; for it is noticeable that to those who are much alive to the effects of music, airs and tunes often come back, in the commonest pursuits of life, to vex, as it were, and haunt them.The music, once admitted to the soul, becomes also a sort of spirit, and never dies.It wanders perturbedly through the halls and galleries of the memory, and is often heard again, distinct and living as when it first displaced the wavelets of the air.Now at times, then, these phantoms of sound floated back upon her fancy; if gay, to call a smile from every dimple;if mournful, to throw a shade upon her brow,--to make her cease from her childishmirth, and sit apart and muse.

Rightly, then, in a typical sense, might this fair creature, so airy in her shape, so harmonious in her beauty, so unfamiliar in her ways and thoughts,--rightly might she be called a daughter, less of the musician than the music, a being for whom you could imagine that some fate was reserved, less of actual life than the romance which, to eyes that can see, and hearts that can feel, glides ever along WITH the actual life, stream by stream, to the Dark Ocean.

And therefore it seemed not strange that Viola herself, even in childhood, and yet more as she bloomed into the sweet seriousness of virgin youth, should fancy her life ordained for a lot, whether of bliss or woe, that should accord with the romance and reverie which made the atmosphere she breathed.Frequently she would climb through the thickets that clothed the neighbouring grotto of Posilipo,--the mighty work of the old Cimmerians,--and, seated by the haunted Tomb of Virgil, indulge those visions, the subtle vagueness of which no poetry can render palpable and defined; for the Poet that surpasses all who ever sang, is the heart of dreaming youth! Frequently there, too, beside the threshold over which the vine-leaves clung, and facing that dark-blue, waveless sea, she would sit in the autumn noon or summer twilight, and build her castles in the air.Who doth not do the same,--not in youth alone, but with the dimmed hopes of age! It is man's prerogative to dream, the common royalty of peasant and of king.But those day-dreams of hers were more habitual, distinct, and solemn than the greater part of us indulge.They seemed like the Orama of the Greeks,--prophets while phantasma.