I believe that the establishment of this society will contribute vastly to shake in Italy the old-fashioned belief that to be a person of the most respectable learning it is quite sufficient to be thoroughly acquainted with a few “classic” writers, be they Latin, French, or Italian, and that it is almost a crime to read anything which does not directly serve as a model or a copy whereby to “refine our style.” As regards which the whole world is now entering on a new renaissance, the conflict between the stylists and the more liberally enlightened having already begun.
But Orpheus, with the ecclesiastical witch-doctors, was soon turned into a diabolical sorcerer; and Leloyer writes of him: “He was the greatest wizard who ever lived, and his writings boil over with praises of devils and filthy loves of gods and mortals, . . . who were all only devils and witches.”
That Eve brought death and sin into the world by eating one apple, or a fig, or orange, or Chinese nectarine, or the fruit of the banana tree, or a pear, a peach, or everything pomological, if we are to believe all translators of the Bible, coincides strongly with the fact that Eurydice was lost for tasting a pomegranate. “Of the precise graft of the espalier of Eden,” says the author of the ‘Ingoldsby Legends,’ “Sanchoniathon, Manetho, and Berosus are undecided; the best informed Talmudists have, however . . . pronounced it a Ribstone pippin,” Eve being a rib. The ancients were happy in being certain that their apple was one of Granada.
“Hæc fabula docet,” writes our Flaxius, “that mysteries abound in every myth. Now, whether Orpheus was literally the first man who ever went to hell for a woman I know not, but well I ween that he was not the last, as the majority of French novelists of the present day are chiefly busy in proving, very little, as it seems to me, either to the credit of their country or of themselves. But there are others who read in this tale a dark and mysterious forewarning to the effect that ladies à la mode who fall in love with Italian musicians or music-masters, and especially those who let themselves and their fortunes be sifflées (especially the fortunes), should not be astonished when the fate of Eurydice befalls them. Pass on, beloved, to another tale!
“‘Walk on, amid these mysteries strange and old,
The strangest of them all is yet to come!’”
INTIALO
the spirit of the haunting shadow
“O ombra che dalla luce siei uscita,
Misuri il passo al Sole, all’uom la vita.”“Umbram suam mètuere.”
“Badate.
La vostra ombra vi avrà fatto paura.”—Filippo Pananti.
“There is a feeling which, perhaps, all have felt at times; . . . it is a strong and shuddering impression which Coleridge has embodied in his own dark and supernatural verse that Something not of earth is behind us—that if we turned our gaze backward we should behold that which would make the heart as a bolt of ice, and the eye shrivel and parch within its socket. And so intense is the fancy, that when we turn, and all is void, from that very void we could shape a spectre as fearful as the image our terror had foredrawn.”—Bulwer, The Disowned.
The resemblance and the relation of the shadow to the body is so strangely like that of the body to the soul, that it is very possible that it first suggested the latter. It is born of light, yet is in itself a portion of the mystery of darkness; it is the facsimile of man in every outline, but in outline alone; filled in with uniform sombre tint, it imitates our every action as if in mockery, which of itself suggests a goblin or sprite, while in it all there is something of self, darkling and dream-like, yet never leaving us. It is only evident in brightest hours, like a skeleton at an Egyptian feast, and it has neither more nor less resemblance to man than the latter. Hence it came that the strange “dwellers by the Nile” actually
loved both shade and death by association, and so it happened that
“Full many a time
They seemed half in love with easeful Death;
Called him soft names in many a mused rhyme,”
while they made of the cool shadow a portion of the soul itself, or rather one of the seven or eight entities of which man consisted, these being—Khat, a body; Ba, the spirit; Khon, the intelligence; Khaïbit, the shadow; Ren, the name; Ka, eternal vitality; Ab, the heart; and Sahn, the mask or mummy.