CHAPTER XLVIII
THE LAST
HERE BELVISO LIES WHO DIED TO SAVE HIS FRIEND
Under this superscription we consigned to the dust the dust of our dear benefactor; and that reverently done, we settled ourselves in Lucca, where we have remained ever since, where I have written these pages, where I intend to live and die. Of my true marriage with my beloved, expect no raptures in this place, seek no further, ask no more. This is holy ground. In all these years wherein she has been spared to be my well of bliss, my fountain of nourishment, my stem of solace, I declare with my hand on my heart, never for one moment did she cease to be my loving, willing, chaste and discerning wife. We have been poor, for I renounced my inheritance in favour of my next brother, retaining nothing of it, and began the world again where I left it when I was driven from Lucca by misfortunes; and by industry and thrift we have risen to a competence enough to educate our children according to the degree marked out by their birth. I did this deliberately, having found out by hard experience that money was the bondslave of lust, and rank the breastplate of inanity. Had I taken my wife to England I must have retained my wretched panoply; but England also I renounced, and that also deliberately. I shall take leave to close my relation with a few words upon my choice of life.
It has been said, with truth and reason, that our vices are but the excrescences of our virtuous essence. If I am justly to be called a Fool then, and my folly a vice, it is because it has ever been a ruling need of my nature to be naked, and to desire to deal nakedly with my neighbours, who, to serve my ends, must themselves be unclad. Let the light scoffer understand me. I speak of the soul, and of spiritual and moral matters. All my good fortune, and I have had much, was due to my ability to indulge that spiritual urgency of mine, and to my having been dealt with as I desired to deal; all my troubles, and they were not few, were bruises inflicted upon my simple soul by others, who opposed their mail-clad might to my tenderness. Not once, but many times, in the course of this narration, I have had occasion to show how the poor, the outcast, the forsaken and the very young entreated me, as one must suppose the Saviour of us all, His Divine Mother, and the guardian angels would entreat each other or us. The proud, the greatly circumstanced, the rich, the enclosed, the sitters in chief seats, wounded me, shocked, rebuffed, cast me down. But in this land the Genius of the place delights only to dwell in the hearts of the poor. They are the true Tuscan nations, and in spite of governments they remain the salt of the earth and the heirs of all that is good in it. In England it is not so. There the poor are serfs; there feudalism forbids intercourse; there the weak suspect (and rightly) the benevolence of the strong; and the strong can only be benevolent in proportion as they are weak. Consider for a moment what flows from these axiomata; it will result, I think, that Honour, Religion, and Love, the three fortresses of the human soul, will be found deeply involved with them.
Honour, as I understand it, consists in the nice adjustment of what is due to me from my neighbours, and to them from me. Here, among the poor, where a native reserve has not grown, as a fungus upon it, a native cant, where there is no desire to seem better than one is, and no belief that one is so by seeming—here, I say, among the Tuscan poor, there is never any difficulty, for here there is no excrescence to the substantial quality of the soul, but precisely to the contrary, there is, if anything, a denudation. The fault of the Tuscans is, perhaps, a carelessness of opinion, and an ignorance of it, and, springing from that, a lack of reserve which occasionally approaches the shocking. Be this as it may, here it is possible for man to envisage man, each as he really is and can be discerned to be.
In England it is not so. Honour is an artificial, manufactured thing, depending upon accepted, volunteered relationships. What is due from me to my lord differs from that which his lordship owes to me: so in any traffic between me and my valet, or my valet and the kitchen-boy. So also it is with Religion. The Englishman dare not even strip before his God, but will bear his garter or his worsted-braid, his cocked or cockaded hat, his sword or his dung-fork up to the very sanctuary rails— lest, forsooth, by leaving them at home he should either seem so poor as to be without them, or so rich as to be able to discard them. But here, what a difference! Not only is man naked before God, but God stands naked before man. The church is their common ground; the church is their inn, and the blessed table their market ordinary. At this board, God and man, man and the saints, meet as friends. The sweetest intercourse possible on earth is not denied them. They may be gossips, God and man; they may be lovers, bosom friends. Is this not a hopeful estate for the tried and erring, naturally affectionate soul? I trow that it is.
And as with Honour, as with Religion, so with that child of the pair, so with Love. Boy and maid, man and woman, in this country stand as children hand in hand before their parent, who is God. Hand in hand, in seemly innocence, naked, without shame, or underthought or afterthought, they stray about the flowery meads. Their hearts are by chance enkindled, each burns, fire seeks the embrace of fire; they touch, they mingle, they soar together. Wedded love, which neither soars nor leaps like a furnace, but glows steadily with equable and radiant heat—wedded love ensues this passionate commingling. But the pair remain what they were at first, simple, naked, unashamed, unshameful, with all things displayed, even to the very aspirations of the secret soul, in blessed sympathy, in union blessed and to be blessed.
Such, I say, may be, and indeed is, the case with many honoured, wedded pairs observed by me. Such, I thank God, has been my own lot, since that day when, after long tribulation, I took Virginia into my arms and held her to my breast. But of that, and of her, I dare write no more. Judge me favourably, reader, for her sake; and so farewell.
LUCCA, October 20, 1741.
[Mr. Strelley lived, I believe, until the spring of 1759, and was buried behind the altar of San Romano. His house, now a hospital, is still intact, and may be visited by the curious, as it was by me.—M. H.]