“For none other, you may be sure. I do not like my task.”
“Put it into a song—into many songs. That will lighten it for you. I wish, for the occasion, I could sing myself. But, in spite of policy, I will woo my own way in this.”
He dismissed the subject in a little. Its temporary glamour evaporated. After all he had much, and of paramount importance, to think upon apart from it.
CHAPTER IV.
LOVE’S AMBASSADOR
The Italy of the eighteenth century has always given me a sense of distressing incongruity, such a sense of incongruity as I feel in the presence of performing animals, pitifully and patiently caricaturing their own native dignity in forced postures and mirthless habiliments. To see a petticoated elephant seated on a stool drinking tea, to see a dog on his hind legs, with a shako on his head, shouldering a musket, makes me, I confess, uneasy and ashamed. So in the land of the Visconti, of the Sforza, of the Medici, a land where both the magnificence of crime and the magnificence of achievement have always gone habited in a certain appropriate splendour, akin to that of the leopard in his forest and the tiger in his jungle, the vision of powder and patches, with their concomitants of mincing uncleanness and affectation, seems an outrage on one’s conception of the accepted fitness of things. If you would study that incongruity, as at least I feel it, in its more plausible phases, turn to the finer works of Canaletto; if in its grossest, read the memoirs of that arch-scoundrel Casanova—memoirs which to me, a fond enough student of the period in its prettier aspects, reek with that sort of fetor which gets into one’s clothes, as it were, and for a time infects all healthier savours.
The fact is, I suppose, that codes of manners and of conduct, evolved under particular conditions of society, are not always applicable to alien conditions. During the era of the aristocracy in England, powder and punctilio were some visible tokens of an amelioration in the old order of things, which had considered overbearance and pugnacity essential to the man of spirit; they spoke a real improvement in the attitude of class towards class; and, if that attitude was at first superficial, its practice gradually engendered the consideration which it had begun only by affecting. In Italy, it is to be feared, society adopted the code but eschewed its moral. All the observances, all the extravagances of an accepted fashion were seized upon by it with greed; only the underlying truth was never recognised or developed. The essential inhumanity remained the same; the arrogance of rank was unsoftened; torture survived without a thought of its outrage, not to man but to reason. Fashion, in its baser aspects, produced, I suppose, more preposterous fops in eighteenth-century Italy than in any other country of Europe. And all because that hot, vivid Latin race had accepted the imposition of a code which was quite alien to its blood and its instincts. It was not yet ripe for the change implied. It was idle dressing-up for a part it did not understand. It could not, in bagwig and velvet shorts, think Garrick and play Macbeth.
It is most natural to picture the monarchs and Infantes of Spain in trunk-hose and with bristling “stiletto” beards—fierce, haughty tyrants, of a piece with the colour and fury of their times. You must picture Don Philip, however, under a very different aspect. He sits at the moment at a table in his private cabinet at Parma, a rather solemn-looking macaroni of thirty-eight, writing, like Buffon, in lace ruffles with a gold pen, and appearing more concerned over the right balance of his toupet than over the equilibrium of the European concert. You would observe, were he to rise, that he has a defect, still noticeable though mitigated by the craft of his tailor. One of his shoulders is distinctly higher than the other, which gives him, in his efforts to correct the discrepancy, a rather stiff unelastic appearance. In his younger days, he was said, by flattering chroniclers, to possess, nevertheless, a charming figure. He had also an equable temper, which, for an Infante of Spain and son of that moody monarch Philip V. and his imperious spouse Elizabeth Farnese was something to his credit. It is more to his credit now, perhaps, that, through much and prolonged test of its qualities, his temper preserves its even character. He takes life, in fact, very easily, and has no objection in the world to have his wife described, and treated, as the better horse. He is quite willing to take the picturesque lead in the tandem while she pulls the cart of state. After all, he has played his effective part in the achievement of their present position, and has laurels, if rather withered ones, to rest upon. He was inclined as a youth, it was said, to the study of military science; and he has actually been a soldier, and has fought his way, and stubbornly fought it, to the enjoyment of these possessions of his, which were procured him originally through the persistent restless intriguing of his mother. Now, in the sense of prolonged security, he has grown slothful, and satisfied with minor triumphs, the greatest of which latterly has turned upon the successful nature of the negotiations for his daughter’s marriage with the Austrian Crown Prince. Isabelita is, it would really appear, to be an empress some day—not so bad a match for the daughter of only a younger son of Spain. Papa is very pleased, and inclined to regard the occasion as in the nature of a personal reward for years of, comparative, privation and ducal cheese-paring. He has not, in fact, to this day succeeded in bringing the profit and loss accounts of the duchy into line.
Now, as he sits writing, he strikes us as being a thought over-bedizened for the task and the hour, which is early. Everything upon him, you will remark, is conceived according to a taste slightly in excess of that which is the northman’s limit. His smooth-fronted toupet stands up eight inches from his forehead, and is surmounted by a roll of sausage curls, which descend to two veritable pains à café behind his ears; his cravat is a very muffler of Valenciennes, and is fastened by a brooch as big as a shoe-buckle; though presumably in négligé, he wears over a lace-ruffled cambric shirt, puffed from elbow to wrist, and garnished with mushroom-coloured ribbons, a pink silk vest covered with silver net; and shoes and breeches to match, dividing a space of white silk stockings, complete the elaborate picture. The only concession to business apparent about him is his ample loose-sleeved camisole; and even that is made of grey velvet lined with ermine. Altogether he suggests a Hogarth beau—a thing which, somewhat travestying fact in the artist’s own country, would pass for a faithful transcript here.
The room in which we discover his Excellency is small but appropriately furnished. There is a good deal of glass and glitter in it, a characteristic perfume, some bright sketches by Boucher and a Lancret fête galante; and as noticeable a feature as any is a great dish of sweetmeats, having a little table of rosewood with brass mouldings to itself. The duke is writing to his wife at Versailles. He sucks a comfit as he evolves without difficulty his periods. Simple souls, often better than intellectual, write good letters: I have known an ingenuous athlete express himself with a neatness and clarity I could envy without reaching. Here are some sentences which I extract, as pertinent to our story, from the ducal epistle:—
“All goes well, according to our latest advices; and the official demand for our daughter’s hand will certainly be presented to his Majesty your father within a month from this date. So far, so excellent; and the days when, in your own phrase, we lived like ‘ragamuffins,’ are buried even to their shadows. Let us have a mass said for their souls, poor things, for they possessed some virtues. ... We have here, lately arrived, the most popular chanteur since Farinelli. He comes, with a letter of recommendation to the Marquise de Ravilla from the archduke himself, and is to charm our daughter into love with a shadow whose approach she has dreaded a little. That suggestion is for your exclusive ear, ma mie. It emanates from one who is very cunning and very observant—the Gonzalès, no less; and is founded upon the presumed consciousness of somebody that he had belittled himself, his rank, and his moral stature, in somebody else’s eyes. You will recall that little incident of the carriage and the ford, as I passed it on to you in madam’s own words. Certainly, according to her, it had its effect upon an over-sensitive nature, predisposed, perhaps, to prejudice. Somebody had already been pictured to this frank nature, it seems, in the light of a philosopher and prig. She may not associate the two—the stranger of the ford, that is to say, and the philosopher—but she may come to, or may have her suspicions; and anyhow he may think that she does, and be anxious to eliminate at once a bad impression. So this Tiretta is despatched to play the part of Love’s advocate with offended beauty. I do not vouch for the truth of this, or endorse its policy; I repeat only for your private ear what the marquise of her shrewdness conjectures. She, for her part, is so sure of the truth of her surmise that she wants the man sent to Colorno, that there, amid romantic environments suggestive to the heart of contemplation, the points of his fond advocacy may be sympathetically pondered. She says that it would be flying in the face of love’s providence to frustrate somebody’s obvious purpose and design; that that impression referred to—whether it concerns itself with prig or roué, or, worse still, with both—is hardly one of happy augury for the future, and calls for exceptional treatment; that, in fine, if somebody has contrived this thing, somebody knows what he is about and has made himself responsible for his instrument.