Read Ebook: The Flame by D Annunzio Gabriele Ranous Dora Knowlton Translator

Font size: 10 px 15 px 20 px 25 px 30 px 35 px

Background color: BlackWhiteGrayLight GrayDark GrayDim Gray

Text color: BlackWhiteGrayLight GrayDark GrayDim Gray

Apply/Save settings

Ebook has 1541 lines and 90947 words, and 31 pages

PAGE

INTRODUCTION ix

BOOK I

THE EPIPHANY OF THE FLAME.

BOOK II

THE EMPIRE OF SILENCE.

PAGE

"O espousals of Paris, fatal to the beloved!"-- Frontispiece

He gazed deep into her eyes, and saw that she was as pale as if her blood had been sapped to nourish the rich fruits of the garden 130

He watched the woman turning and running like a mad creature along the dark, delusive paths 259

INTRODUCTION

D. K. R.

BOOK I

THE EPIPHANY OF THE FLAME

TO TIME AND TO HOPE

THE BELLS OF SAN MARCO

"Stelio, does not your heart quail a little, for the first time?" inquired La Foscarina, with a fleeting smile, as she touched the hand of the taciturn friend seated beside her. "I see that you are pale and thoughtful. Yet this is a beautiful evening for the triumph of a great poet."

With an all-comprehensive glance, she looked around at all the beauty of this last twilight of September. In the dark wells of her eyes were reflected the circles of light made by the oar as it flashed in the water, which was illuminated by the glittering angels that shone from afar on the campaniles of San Marco and San Giorgio Maggiore.

"As always," she went on, in her sweetest tones, "as always, everything is in your favor. On such an evening as this, what mortal could shut out from his mind the dreams that you may choose to evoke by the magic of your words? Do you not feel already that the multitude is well disposed to receive your revelation?"

Thus, delicately, she flattered her friend; thus she pleased herself by exalting him with continual praise.

Stelio Effrena looked long and searchingly into her eyes.

"Do you wish to intoxicate me?" he said, with a sudden laugh. "Your words remind me of the soothing cup offered to a man on his way to the scaffold. Ah, well, my friend, it is true: I own that my heart quails a little."

The sound of applause rose from the Traghetto di San Gregorio, echoed through the Grand Canal, reverberating among the porphyry and serpentine discs ornamenting the ancient mansion of the Dario, which now leaned over slightly, like a decrepit courtesan loaded with her jewels.

The royal barge passed.

"There is the one person among your audience whom etiquette demands that you shall crown with some of your flowers of oratory," pursued the charming flatterer, alluding to the Queen. "I believe that, in one of your earlier books, you own to a taste and respect for ceremonials. One of your most extraordinary flights of fancy is that description of a day of Charles the Second, King of Spain."

"Does it not seem to you that the smiles of those two women are so similar as to be twin-like?" said La Foscarina, gazing at the silvery ripples in the wake of the barge, wherein the double light seemed to prolong its self.

A new clamor, louder and more prolonged, rose between the two guardian columns of granite, as the royal barge approached the bank of the Piazzetta, now black with the waiting throng. During the slight pause that followed, the movement of the crowd shifted, like the changing of eddies in a current, and all the galleries of the Palace of the Doges were filled with a confused buzzing, like the mysterious murmur within a sea-shell. Suddenly the buzz rose to a shout, rending the clear air and finally dying away in the gathering twilight. The multitude seemed to realize the divinity of that poetic hour, amid those incomparable surroundings; and perhaps, in its acclaim to youthful royalty and beauty, it expressed a vague longing to forget its prosaic existence, and to revel in the gift of eternal poetry with which its storied walls and waters were endowed.

"Do you know, Perdita," Stelio suddenly exclaimed, "of any other place in the world that possesses, like Venice, at certain times, the power to stimulate all the forces of human life by the exaltation of all desires to a feverish intensity? Do you know of any more irresistible temptress?"

She whom he called Perdita did not reply; she bent her head as if from desire to concentrate her thoughts; but through all her being she felt the indefinable thrill always felt at the sound of the voice of her friend when it revealed the vehemence and passionate soul toward which this woman was drawn by a mingling of love and terror that had no limit.

"Peace! Oblivion! Do you find them down there, at the end of that deserted canal, when you go home exhausted and fevered after inhaling the commingled breath of the crowd that you are able to rouse to wild enthusiasm by a single gesture? As for myself, when I float on these dead waters, I feel my vital powers increase with bewildering rapidity; at certain times my brain seems on fire, as if I were in delirium."

"The flame and the power are within yourself, Stelio," said La Foscarina almost humbly, without raising her eyes.

He was silent, absorbed. Poetic imagery and impetuous music took form within his brain, as if by virtue of some magic fecundation; and his spirit reveled in the unexpected delight of that flood of inspiration.

It was still that hour which, in one of his books, he had called "Titian's hour," because all things glowed with a rich golden light, like the nude figures of that great painter, appearing almost to illumine the sky rather than to receive light from it.

"Perdita," said the poet, who, at the sight of so many things multiplying their beauties around him, was conscious of a kind of intellectual ecstasy, "does it not seem to you that we are following the funeral train of the dead Summer? There she lies in her funereal barge, robed in golden draperies, like a Doge's wife, like a Loredana, a Morosina, or a Soranza of the golden age; and her cort?ge conducts her toward the Isle of Murano, where some lord of the flames will place her in a coffin of opaline crystal, so that, submerged in the waters of the lagoon, she can, at least, through her transparent eyelids, behold the supple movement of the seaweed, and thus fancy herself enwrapped in the undulating tresses of her own hair, while waiting for the sun of resurrection to dawn."

A spontaneous smile spread over La Foscarina's face, born in her eyes, which glowed as if they really had beheld the vision of the beautiful dead.

"Do you know, Perdita," resumed Stelio, after a moment's pause, during which both gazed at a file of small boats filled with fruit, floating upon the water like great baskets, "do you know anything about a particularly pretty detail in the chronicles of the Doges? The Doge's wife, to meet the expenses of her robes of ceremony, enjoyed a certain percentage of the tax on fruit. Does not this seem delightfully appropriate? The fruits of these isles clothed her in gold and crowned her with pearls! Pomona paying tribute to Arachne! an allegory that Paolo Veronese might well have painted on the dome of the Vestiario. When I conjure up the figure of the noble lady, tall and erect in her high, jeweled buskins, it pleases me to think that something fresh and rustic is connected with the rich folds of her heavy brocade: the tribute of the fruits. What a savor this seems to add to her magnificence! Only fancy, my friend, that these figs and grapes of the new-come Autumn are the price of the golden robe that covers the dead Summer."

"What delightful fancies, Stelio!" said La Foscarina, whose face became young again when she smiled, as a child to whom one shows a picture-book. "Who was it that once called you the Image-maker?"

"Ah--images!" said the poet, his fancy warming. "In Venice, just as one feels everything to a musical rhythm, so he thinks of everything in poetic imagery. They come to us from everywhere, innumerable, diverse, more real and living to our minds than the persons we elbow in these narrow streets. In studying them, we can lose ourselves in the depths of their haunting eyes, and divine, by the curve of their lips, what they would say to us. Some art tyrannical as imperious mistresses, and hold us long beneath the yoke of their power. Others are enfolded in a veil, like timid virgins, or are tightly swaddled, like infants; and only he that knows how to rend their veils can lead them to the perfect life. This morning, when I awakened, my soul was filled with images; it was like a beautiful tree with its branches laden with chrysalides."

He paused, with a laugh.

"If they come forth from their prison to-night," he added, "I am saved; if they do not, I am lost!"

"Lost?" said La Foscarina, gazing earnestly at him, with eyes so full of confidence that his heart went out to her in gratitude. "No, Stelio, you will not lose yourself. You are always sure of yourself; you bear your own destiny in your hands. I think your mother never could have felt any apprehension on your account, even in the most serious circumstances. Is not that true? Pride is the only thing that makes your heart falter."

"Ah, sweet friend, how I love you--how I thank you for saying that!" said the poet frankly, taking her hand. "You continually foster my pride and encourage me to believe that I have already acquired those virtues to which I never cease to aspire. Sometimes you seem to have the power of conferring I know not what divine quality on the things that are born in my soul, and of making them appear adorable in my own eyes. Sometimes, too, you fill me with the awe-struck wonder of the sculptor who, having in the evening borne to the sacred temple the marble gods still warm from his hands--I might say still clinging to the fingers that moulded them--the next day beholds them standing on their pedestals, surrounded by clouds of incense, and seeming to exhale divinity from every pore of the insensate matter from which he fashioned them with his perishable hands. And so, each time that Fortune grants me the favor of being near you, I realize that you are necessary to my life, although, during our long separations, I can live without you, and you without me, despite the fact that both of us well know what splendors would be born of the perfect union of our lives. Thus, knowing the full value of that which you give me, and, still more, of that which you could give me, I think of you as lost to me; and, by that name which it pleases my fancy to call you, I try to express at the same time this consciousness and this regret."

He interrupted himself, because he felt a quiver of the hand he clasped in his own.

"When I call you 'Perdita,'" he resumed softly, after a pause, "I fancy that you can see my desire approaching you, with a deadly blade deep in its palpitating side. Even should it reach you, the chill of death has already touched its audacious hand."

The woman experienced an oft-felt suffering as she listened to the poetic words that flowed from her friend's lips with a spontaneity that proved them sincere. Again she felt an agitation and a terror that she knew not how to define. She felt that she was slipping out of her own life, and was transported into a kind of fictitious life, intense and hallucinating, where even to breathe was difficult. Drawn into that atmosphere, as fiery as the glow surrounding a lighted forge, she felt that she should be capable of passing through any transfigurations that it might please the master of her spirit to work in her to satisfy his continual craving for poetry and beauty. She comprehended that, in his idealistic mind, her own image resembled that of the dead Summer, wrapped in its opalescent cerements. She felt a childish desire to gaze into the poet's eyes as in a mirror, to contemplate the likeness of her real self.

That which rendered her melancholy most painful, was the recognition of a vague resemblance between this agitation and the anxiety that always possessed her when she sank her own personality in that of some sublime creation of dramatic art. Was not this man drawing her, in fact, into a similar region of higher but artificial life; and, that she might figure there without remembrance of her everyday self, did he not seek to cover her with a splendid disguise? But, while she was unable to maintain so great a degree of intensity except by a painful effort, she knew that he dwelt within that state of exaltation with perfect ease, as if in his natural atmosphere, ceaselessly enjoying a marvelous world of fancy, which he could renew or change at his own pleasure.

He had come to realize in himself the intimate union of art and of life, thus finding, in the depths of his own soul, a source of perpetual harmony. He had become able to maintain within himself, without lapse, the mysterious psychological condition that engenders works of beauty, and thus, at a single stroke, to crystallize into ideal types the fleeting figures of his varied existence. It was to celebrate this conquest over his own mental powers that he put the following words into the mouth of one of his heroes: "I witnessed within myself the continual genesis of a higher life, wherein all appearances metamorphosed themselves as if reflected in a magic mirror." Endowed with an extraordinary linguistic facility, he could instantly translate into words the most complicated workings of his mind, with a precision so exact and vivid that sometimes, as soon as expressed, they seemed not to be his own, having been rendered objective by the isolating power of style. His clear and penetrating voice, which, so to speak, seemed to define each word as distinctly as if it were a note of music, enhanced still more this peculiar quality of his speech, so that those who heard him speak for the first time experienced an ambiguous feeling--a mingling of admiration and aversion, because he revealed his own personality in a manner so strongly marked that it seemed to denote an intention to demonstrate the existence of a profound and impassable difference between himself and his listeners. But as his sensibility equaled his intelligence, it was easy for those that knew him well and liked him to absorb, through his crystalline speech, the glow of his vehement and passionate soul. These knew how illimitable was his power to feel and to dream, and from what fiery source sprang the beautiful images into which he converted the substance of his inner life.

She whom he called Perdita knew it well; and, as a pious soul awaits from God some supernatural help that shall work out its salvation, so she seemed to be waiting for him to put her into the state of grace necessary to enable her to elevate and maintain herself in those fiery regions toward which a mad desire to be consumed impelled her, despairing as she was at the thought of her vanished youth, and the fear of finding herself left alone at last in a desert of ashes.

"It is you now, Stelio," she said, with the slight smile she used to hide her sadness, "who wish to intoxicate me." She gently drew her hand from his. Then, to break the spell, she pointed to a loaded barge that was slowly approaching them, and said:

"Look! Look at your pomegranates!"

But her voice shook a little.

Share on: WhatsApp @Hash Facebook Tweet