"And each of us," said Fabio Molza, "felt that in your presence, dominating the throng, before the poet, dwelt a great and rare significance."
"One might almost have said that you alone were about to assist at the mysterious birth of a new idea," said Antimo della Bella. "Everything around us seemed awakening itself to produce it—that idea which must soon be revealed to us, as a reward for the profound faith with which we have awaited it."
The Animator, with another trembling of the heart, felt the work that he cherished within him leap once more, formless yet, but already living; and his whole soul, as if impelled by a lyric breath, suddenly felt drawn toward the fertile and enlightening power that emanated from the Dionysian woman to whom these fervent spirits addressed their praise.
Suddenly she had become very beautiful: a nocturnal creature, fashioned by dreams and passion on a golden anvil, living embodiment of immortal fate and eternal enigmas. She might remain motionless and silent, but her famous accents and her memorable gestures seemed to live around her, vibrating indefinitely, as melodies seem to hover over the cords accustomed to sound them, as rhymes seem to breathe from the poet's closed book, wherein love and sorrow seek comfort and intoxication. The heroic fidelity of Antigone, the oracular fury of Cassandra, the devouring fever of Phædre, the cruelty of Medea, the sacrifice of Iphigenia, Myrrha before her father, Polyxenes and Alceste before the face of death, Cleopatra, fitful as the wind and the fires of the world, Lady Macbeth, the dreamy murderess with the little hands; and those great, fair lilies empearled with dew and tears—Imogen, Juliet, Miranda, Rosalind, Jessica, and Perdita—the tenderest, most terrible, and most magnificent souls dwelt within her, inhabited her body, shone from her eyes, breathed through her lips, which knew both honey and poison, the jeweled chalice and the cup of wormwood. Thus, through unlimited space, and endless, the outlines of human life and substance appeared to perpetuate themselves; and from the simple movement of a muscle, a sign, a start, a quiver of the eyelids, a slight change of color, an almost imperceptible inclination of the head, a fugitive play of light and shade, a lightning-like virtue of expression radiating from that frail and slender body, infinite worlds of imperishable beauty were continually generated.
The genii of the places consecrated by poetry hovered around her, and encircled her with changing visions: the dusty plain of Thebes, the arid Argolide, the parched myrtles of Trezene, the sacred olives of Colonus, the triumphant Cydnus, the pale country of Dunsinane, Prospero's cavern, the Forest of Arden, land dampened with blood, toiled upon with pain, transfigured by a dream or illumined by an inextinguishable smile, seemed to appear, to recede, then to vanish behind her head. And a vision of countries still more remote—regions of mists, northern lands, and, far across the ocean, the immense continent where she had appeared like an unknown force amid astonished multitudes, bearer of the mystic word and the flame of genius—vanished behind her head: the throngs, the mountains, rivers and gulfs, the impure cities, the ancient, enfeebled, savage race, the strong people aspiring to dominate the world, the new nation that wrests from Nature her most secret energies to make them serve an all-powerful work in erecting edifices of iron and of crystal; the bastard colonies that ferment and grow corrupt on virgin soil; all the barbarous crowds she had visited as the messenger of Latin genius; all the ignorant masses to whom she had spoken the sublime language of Dante; all the human herds from which had mounted toward her, on a wave of confused anxieties and desires, the aspiration to Beauty.
She stood there, a creature of perishable flesh, subject to the sad laws of time, but an illimitable mass of reality and poetry weighed upon her, surged around her, palpitated with the rhythm of her breath. And not upon the stage alone had she uttered her cries and suppressed her sobs: this had entered into her daily life. She had loved, fought and suffered violently, in her soul and in her body. What loves? What combats? What pangs? From what abysses of melancholy had she drawn the exaltations of her tragic force? At what springs of bitterness had she watered her free genius? She had certainly witnessed the crudest misery, the darkest ruin; she had known heroic effort, pity, horror, and the threshold of death. All her thirst had burned in the delirium of Phædre, and in the submissiveness of Imogen had trembled all her tenderness. Thus Life and Art, the irrevocable Past and the eternal Present, had made her profound, many-souled, and mysterious, had magnified her ambiguous destiny beyond human limits, and rendered her equal to great temples and natural forests.
Nevertheless, she stood there, a living, breathing woman, under the gaze of the poets, each of whom saw her, and yet in her many others.
"Ah! I will embrace you as in some mad revelry; I will clasp you, shake you; from your ripe experience, I will draw all the divine and abnormal secrets that weigh upon you—the things you have already done, and those on which you still meditate in the mysterious depths of your soul," sang the lyric demon in the ear of the poet, who recognized in the mystery of this woman the surviving power of primitive myth, the renewed initiation of the god that had concentrated in one single ferment all the energies of Nature, and, by a variety of rhythms, had raised, in an enthusiastic worship of himself, the senses and the spirit of man to the highest summits of joy and of pain.
"I have done well, I have done wisely, to wait!" said Stelio to himself. "The passing of years, the tumult of dreams, the agitation of struggle and the swiftness of triumph, the experience of many loves, the enchantment of poets, the acclamations of the people; the marvels of earth, the patience and the fury, the steps in the mud, the blind flight, all evil, all good, that which I know and do not know, that which you know, as well as that which you are ignorant of—all this had to be to prepare the fulness of this night, which belongs to me!"
He felt himself suffocate and turn pale. A wild impulse seized him by the throat, and would not relax its hold. His heart swelled with the same keen emotion that had possessed both in the twilight, as they floated over the water.