‘Not,’ said Veronica, ‘if in the notion of success be included that of succession. Congratulated to-day, will they not be consigned to oblivion to-morrow, when right taste has resumed its authority, or when some one yet more extravagant creates an impression, equally sudden and equally transitory, of a somewhat similar character?’
‘I think so,’ said the Poet, ‘and I am sufficiently enamoured of venustà di stile to hope so. As great a master of style as this century has produced says somewhere, “On peut tout dire dans le style simple et correct des bons auteurs. Les expressions violentes viennent toujours ou d’une prétention, ou de l’ignorance de nos richesses réelles.” Do you mind, Lamia, committing that sentence to memory, for I see you sometimes deeply immersed in works of much pretension, but consisting for the most part of expressions violentes, though I never observe you admiring in marble or on canvas the violence or the profuse colouring you occasionally tolerate in language?‘
‘Is it not,’ said Veronica, ‘that in architecture, painting, and sculpture, the manner in which a thing is done is so much more conspicuous, so to speak, than what is done, that failure, whether it arise from feebleness or from violence, strikes us at once; whereas, in language, what is said, if interesting in itself, makes us indulgent to, and indeed forgetful of, the manner of saying it?’
‘I suppose that is so,’ he answered; ‘and perhaps it is one of the incidental drawbacks to literature. Fortunately, however, what you say is more true of prose than of verse; defect of style in poetry being at least as obvious to fastidious readers as in marble. And yet,’ he added, ‘in our time, a grotesque, violent, and what seems to me lamentable way of saying things has been more than tolerated in verse, for the sake of the things said. For my part, I should be sorry to be original, either in prose or verse, at the expense of truth or beauty.’
ROSES AND IRIS
The absence of method in our visits to cloister or gallery seemed to govern most of our movements. Sometimes we were but two, sometimes but three, of a company; and it would happen that, when we were four, we lost touch of each other for a time, and went our separate ways. Veronica not infrequently was missing; and generally, when this occurred, when she returned alone to the villa, she brought with her some ‘object of antiquity,’ as the Florentine dealers in curios and old furniture call such things, purchased after considerable thought and much bargaining. I think you know Veronica has a large heart, and would defraud no one of his due, and indeed would give any one more than his due, where no bargaining was in question. But she knows just as much about the date and value of cassettone, triptych, or embroidery, as any of the various dealers on the Ponte Vecchio or in the Via de’ Serragli; and she not unnaturally enjoyed displaying her peculiar learning in those interesting haunts. Her perfect familiarity with the language, and indeed even with Florentine patois, added to her advantage and strengthened her position in appraising the value of mediæval picture-frame or sixteenth-century mirror. Moreover, it is the greatest possible error to suppose that Florentine dealers are consumed with a single-minded desire to rob unwary purchasers; and I am convinced they much preferred to conclude a fair bargain with Veronica, than an unfair one with the first ignorant comer. Oriental ways and traditions of business still linger sufficiently with them to make prezzo fisso or a rigidly-fixed price exceedingly distasteful. Their day is long, they have abundance of time on their hands, and, if the few things they sell in the course of the week were sold without demur and in a couple of minutes, life would be insufferably tedious for want of human intercourse and agreeable conversation. Veronica invariably regaled us with minute accounts, on the occasion of each fresh purchase, of the polite but protracted controversy that had attended it; and very diverting these were. She preferred to conduct these transactions without our company; for, in the first place, as she truly enough remarked, we knew nothing whatever upon the subject and could therefore be of no use to her, and, in the second place, when we honoured her with our useless society, one or other of us invariably ended by showing signs of impatience, and to be impatient over a bargain is inevitably to get the worst of it. She did not always come off a winner in these friendly encounters; and she was just as candid and as diverting in confessing her defeats as in recording her victories. On one occasion she suffered a peculiarly humiliating disaster, which she detailed with much zest at her own expense. Wishing to give an agreeable surprise to Lamia on the occasion of that Birthday, when, as you will perhaps remember, I was so sorely discomfited, she went in search of some amber beads which Lamia had more than once expressed a longing to find in order to complete a set she already possessed. But it was indispensable they should be of a special hue. At length, Veronica discovered some in a shop in the Por Santa Maria, but, do what she would, and notwithstanding all her Florentine wit, she could not bring the owner of them into what she deemed a reasonable frame of mind as regards price.
‘Ebbene,’ she said, ‘I will try elsewhere,’
She tried everywhere, but in vain, and so at length had to go back to the Por Santa Maria, and say she would take the beads at the man’s own price.