Shroud

He is called by many names, and no one can say which was rightfully and originally his; many authorities maintain his name was first of all a sobriquet. He is without doubt of divine essence, if not, indeed, Mercury himself, god of twilight and the wind, the patron of thieves and panders. He is Proteus, too, now delicate, now offensive, comic or melancholic, sometimes lashed into a frenzy of madness. He is the creator of a new form of poetry, accented by gestures, punctuated by somersaults, enriched with philosophic reflections and incongruous noises. He is the first poet of acrobatics and unseemly sounds. His black half-mask completes the impression of something savage and fiendish, suggesting a cat, a satyr, an executioner.

Our beliefs assume curious shapes as dusk descends; what we have loved becomes either more enchanting or more alien; what we have feared glows with illuminant strength; and what we have known sinks into a morass of ruinous doubt. It is not our faith weakening as the light, but our gradual glimpse of the obverse of that old coin we had been carrying so confidently in our pockets. And even if the two-headed coin of conjurors and charlatans, one face will necessarily be darker, the duplicate or understudy. A small hint at the structure of this novel.

Our novel is cloven into three, perhaps because only three characters have any bearing on its outcome. The first and most rotund is a tall, lecherous, one-eyed beast of an academic with the unripe name of Axel Vander. The name, as any speaker of Dutch will tell you, seems to indicate a nobiliary particle with a syncopation of its final and most important component – a fact that Vander duly notes, then, like most everything else, brushes to the side to deal with more pressing problems. The most pressing at hand may come in the form of Catherine Cleave, dite Cass, our second character, apparently Irish, and as young, feminine, and thin as the aging Vander is bulgingly male. She enters our landscape as the novel opens in his own thoughts; she has discovered his secrets and intends, like any unsteady extortionist, to meet her victim in person. He travels, sweating, cursing, knocking a bad leg to the metronome of his cane, to Italy from California, land of the gold rush, of lawlessness and, towards the end of the twentieth century – a century that he knows almost in its entirety – a cultural vacuum where a learned man can hide in peace. More specifically, he will meander to Turin, where he initially plans, like any practiced murderer, to cast Cass Cleave from this famous tower and be done with her.

What our plot entails cannot and should not be elaborated upon in these pages; the pleasure of reading Banville hardly extends into the superficial realm of artifice. His repeated triumphs are the victories of style that frame details so minute as to seem both obvious and radiant. Vander dreams he will rot in a "cavernous hospital in which all the other beds, twenty or thirty of them, were empty, and sinisterly waiting"; America to him "seemed like a nonce-word, or an unsolvable anagram, with too many vowels in it"; when asked for a glass of water, a ubiquitous waiter in the Antwerp hotel where Cass and Axel's paths finally cross, "nodded, or perhaps it was a little bow that he made, briefly letting his eyelids fall as he did so, and murmured something, and padded off into the shadows" (I had initially read the passage as "paddled," which would have been even more magnificent). What can be said is that both Axel and Cass – who almost devolve into a rather fitting anagram – are subject to acute hallucinations that could easily be diagnosed by people who enjoy easy diagnoses and easy living. Such an approach will not, however, get us very far. Vander has something wicked on his conscience; it could very well be the fate of his late wife, Magda, appearing most frequently as a stuffed corpse; or a numinous link to Cass's father who revels in the mendacity of the professional actor; or even something increasingly distant for the contemporary reader – the bottomless perdition of the last European War. Contracts were drawn up, mostly with the Devil or his minions, and persons otherwise unconsulted in battle strategies or occupation policies suddenly tended to chirp from the obscurest branches. Vander recalls one of his Belgian compatriots in this vein:

Although at the time I had a foot in the door of a number of papers and periodicals, the Vlaamsche Gazet was unlikely to have been amongst them. The paper's editorial attitude was one of noisy and confident anticipation of what it called the Day of Unity, when all the country's unnamed enemies would finally be dealt with. This Day of Unity was never defined, and a date was never put on it, but everyone knew what it would be when it came, and knew who those enemies were, too. The editor, Hendriks – I have forgotten his first name – large, overweight, glistening, with a wheezing laugh and furtive eyes, had, in the early years of that dirty decade that was now coming to a calamitous end, decided in which direction the future was headed, despite the fact that, in private, he expressed nothing but contempt for our immediate and increasingly menacing neighbor to the east.

Vander will gain the by-lines he so craves, and only at the cost of a few scruples; Hendriks gets his comeuppance a few years after the war as one of the swinging sacks of Jack Ketch. Whether Vander sees this fate as justice depends in no small part to what he thinks of destiny, whether what we do and those who fall as our victims could play any role in our own condemnation – and perhaps enough has been said on the matter.

There is a topical undercurrent to Shroud that may rile those who believe in art as an island replete with apolitical fauna and flora. At worst, the implications come off as a thin crutch, no more supportive than Vander's own Faustian staff; at best, the historical context infuses the tale with much-needed logic and causality. And yet, there are many unlikelihoods. That long and horrific night when an anonymous letter, in a Satanic reversal of a Biblical passage, saves Vander from certain destruction; the random appearances of a secondary character of impossible age best accounted for as "an off-duty clown"; the syndrome (perhaps lifted from this novel) that causes Cass to smell almonds and then slowly unfurl the foolscap of her very troubled mind; the whole conceit of Lady Laura, whose life is an amalgamation of so many woeful habits that it would seem well-nigh impossible for her to exist for the years and the circumstances provided (although her nasty form of retribution is spot-on); yet the most unlikely of all the scenarios involves Cass herself. That Kristina Kovacs, a former flame now dying as slowly as Vander's memories, would be interested in one last carnal exploration in which she might recall the Sapphic nights of her enlightened youth is perfectly plausible; that Vander himself could see anything in his blackmailer except insanity may suggest what state his mind and soul currently inhabit. Yet through this long and lusty poem, one face stands out as true and enduring, the "raptor's profile of a desert monarch," a thin and eternally pensive physician who comes to Vander's aid then hovers in his vicinity. Perhaps he is convincing because his secret is unambiguously clear; perhaps his utter indifference and opposition to Vander can be taken as a symbol of what Vander has long since avoided. And we haven't even mentioned who gets to play the Harlequin.

Denkwürdigkeiten eines Antisemiten

This novel's title was chosen, one may suppose, for its shock marketing value, a gimmick that has repeatedly forced reviewers to justify its inclusion to unknowing readers ("It's ironic"; "Of course, this is the opposite of the truth"; "This is not the memoir of an old Nazi," etcetera). Our climate of political correctness values non-offensiveness over precision – which is another way of saying if you don't really think we were all created equal you had better try and pretend – and we are now unable to criticize anyone with any regularity except white Christian men, that universally acknowledged most fortunate of demographic segments. The matter is ridiculous and exploitable, although quite natural in our development as we globalize, level out, and forget that inequalities can promote cooperation as much as envy. An admirable principle that flickers throughout the life of Arnulf, our narrator.

The novel itself is broken into five easy pieces, all of which can and should stand alone. Apart, they incorporate the changing perspective of one man; together they ache for company and commitment, both of which they do not deserve. Arnulf, who resembles our author in many ways, will begin and end his story with Russian words, perhaps because he secretly believes Russia and Marxism to be the downfall of his childhood home and memories (even the second chapter, Youth, echoes this Russian author's early work). While the final chapter, Pravda, needs little introduction or translation, the first word and chapter, Skuchno, can suggest both boredom and yearning – that is to say, a feeling of not being where one would like to be. From the very beginning, then, Arnulf, who does not give us his first name until the fourth chapter, Troth, feels horribly out of place:

We are all of mixed blood, we Austrians, especially we so-called German Austrians: children of an imperium of diverse peoples, races, religions. If, that legendary imperium having disappeared, we did not still, comically enough, feel Austrian, then we would have to own up to being American ... but we lack the political insight for that. Such is life, alas; thinking is often replaced by moods. They are more durable, they are livelier in withstanding time, and, in fact, the more irrational they are, the better.

Like von Rezzori, Arnulf is of Italian stock but born in Bukowina as the Great War destroys old Austria, an empire that claims to be an heir to Charlemagne. These fantastic circumstances not only make Arnulf a redoubtable polyglot, they also strip him to a certain extent of what all of us need at one point or another, a sense of home. Such moments are easier to abide when one has been raised in a multilingual and multicultural setting, and when travel and movement are as commonplace and tried as one's morning ablutions, the obvious parallel being those with no homeland in particular. Two such nations wandered about Europe in larger numbers up through the 1930s, the Roma people and, of course, the sons and daughters of Abraham. 

Sooner or later – be in a neighbor, a love interest, a rival, or an employer – Arnulf will discover the rich Jewish life that varnished Europe until the evil of the Second World War. He will belittle it, despise it, and enjoy it; but most of all he will quote his own relatives' hatred rather than come up with reasons of his own to feel animosity to these outsiders:

The specifically Jewish quality in Jews had never repelled me so much as the attempt – doomed from the start – to hush it up, cover it over, deny it. The yiddling of the Jews, their jittery gesticulation, their disharmony, the incessant alternation of obsequiousness and presumptuousness, were inescapable and inalienable attributes of their Jewishness. If they acted as one expected them to act, so that one could recognize them at first glance, one was rather pleasantly touched. They were true to themselves – that was estimable. One related to Jews in the same way as an Englishman to foreigners: one assumed they would not act like us. If they did so nevertheless, it made them look suspicious. 

A casual reader may protest the irony of the title, but those who actually finish the novel will be handed a plausible explanation for its use. As layer upon layer is peeled off Arnulf's fantastically rich life, we come to see the designation as that of an opponent in the literal sense of the word. Arnulf's clean-cut Anglo looks, mastery of several languages, sophistication, and inherent restraint allow him to pass for a citizen of any European country ("the biography of a model White European"), including a Jew. As it were, a shallow mind might think Arnulf's cosmopolitan meanderings mimic all too closely the stereotypical restlessness of the constantly displaced Hebrew, making the novel an exercise in self-loathing, but again this approach should be discouraged. We never get anything about his survival of the war because his life was in no danger, nor did he take an active role in combating the forces that wasted a generation. He existed as he always had – for himself and his artistic whims.   

I have said little of the plot because the plot, like the dull and darned topicality it wends itself around, is a flimsy clothesline for Arnulf's artistic observations. His peripatetic antics will not strike anyone as particular original or even wise, but their context, and the cultures negotiated for them to take place as they did, are quite remarkable and, with the possible exception of this writer's work, unparalleled in German letters. We can appreciate the novel for exactly these details. A Romantic encounter unfolds as, "behind us the city pinned lights all over itself," while another tryst is stymied as "all the myths of vigorous malehood surrounded me like totem poles." Arnulf has many things on his mind as a young man, and they usually devolve into some need for female attention. As such, the Jews we encounter are purposive in their roles: a prodigy pianist; a lonely thirty-something shop owner; a family of innkeepers and a curious Ladino-speaking guest (another tip of the hat to Canetti); a drunkard with a lame hip resulting from unhappy love and her aforementioned addiction; and then Arnulf's second wife, who hates him for one thing above all:

Already the previous, East Prussian wife had soon discerned his habit of incorporating other people's memories into his own when they were suitable and colorful enough; but she had held her tongue, just as she had held her tongue about everything, especially about her contempt for him; for she had loved him and been disappointed; and to avoid sharing the guilt of this disappointment, she had to keep his defects in mind. But the second, Jewish wife .... his Jewish wife attacked him from the very start for his heedless outlook on biographical property, and she was so rabid about it that he was offended ... He could not understand the vehemence with which she championed authenticity, documentary truth for every autobiographical detail ("Even at the expense of vividness?" he had once asked her ironically, and she had answered like a fanatic, "Yes!  Yes!  Yes!").

Then again, maybe the best method to breathe eternal life into old stories is to make them your own. Even if many of the stories belonged to members of a decimated people who have since forsaken Europe and its hidden hates? Yes, yes, yes, indeed.  

Nerval, "Octavie (part 2)"

The conclusion to a short story ("Octavia") by this French writer. You can read the original here.

"But where before had this image appeared to me? Ah, I have already told you that! It was in Naples, three years ago. I had an encounter one night near the Villa Reale with a young girl that looked like you, a pious creature whose art was to weave gilded embroideries to adorn her church. In spirit she seemed lost; I took her home although she spoke to me about a lover she had in the Swiss Guard and who she was afraid might drop by. Nevertheless she did not hesitate to confess that I pleased her more greatly. What should I tell you? That whole evening I lost myself to reverie and headiness and imagined that this woman, whose language I could barely understand, was actually you come to me in enchanted form from up above. Why should I hush up this adventure and the bizarre delusion that my soul accepted without any pain, especially after a few glasses of foamy lacryma Christi poured for me at dinner? The room which I entered had something mystical either by chance or by the particular selection of objects it contained. A black Madonna cloaked in rags, whose old finery had been entrusted to my hostess for restoration, was sitting on a chest of drawers next to a bed with baize green curtains; a figure of Saint Rosalie wreathed in roses seemed from afar to be protecting the cradle of a child; the walls white with lime were decorated with old paintings of the four elements depicting the mythological divinities. Add to this a fine assortment of brilliant fabrics, artificial flowers, and Etruscan vases; then mirrors surrounding one copper light reflected so splendidly, and a Treatise on divination and dreams that made me think that my companion was a sorceress or at least a gypsy.

"A pleasant old woman with solemn features would come and go, bringing us things. I think it had to be her mother! And I, pensive as ever, never took my eyes off her nor said a word – she who could not stop reminding me of you.

"And this woman kept repeating to me: 'Are you sad?' And I responded: 'Do not talk. I can hardly understand what you are saying.' Both listening to and speaking Italian tired me out immensely. 'Oh!' she said. 'I know how to speak differently.' And suddenly she broke into a language that I had never heard before. Sonorous and guttural syllables, twitterings full of charm; doubtless an ancient tongue: Hebrew, Syriac, I know not. She smiled at my surprise and went over to the chest of drawers. From here she took out some costume jewelry, necklaces, bracelets, a tiara. Putting on the jewelry there, she returned to the table and remained serious for a long time. The old woman came back in and seeing her thus, began laughing vociferously and said to me, I believe, that this what she looked like at celebrations. At this point the child awoke and began to cry. The two women ran over to the cradle, and soon enough the young woman was back with me, this time holding the bambino who had just been mollified.

"She spoke to the child in the language that I had so admired, and she kept him amused with graceful prods and pokes. And I, hardly accustomed to wines burned by Vesuvius, I sensed the room and its contents spinning around. This woman of curious manners and dressed like a queen, proud and capricious, seemed to me one of the magicians of Thessaly to whom one gives one's soul for a dream. Oh, why was I not afraid to relate all of this to you? Because it was nothing more than a dream, a dream in which you alone reigned!

"I tore myself from this phantom that seduced and scared me at the same time and wandered through the deserted city until the first church bells. Then, sensing dawn's rosy fingers upon my neck, I amended my steps through the small streets behind Chiaia and began to climb up Posilippo above the grotto. Arriving at the summit, I walked around gazing at the already-blue sea, the city emitting only early morning sounds, and the islands in the bay where the sun had begun to engild the villa roofs. I was not saddened in the least. I walked with broad strides, rolled in the wet grass, but in my heart sank deeper into notions of death.

"O gods! I know not what profound sadness resided in my soul, but it was nothing more than the cruel thought that I was not loved. I had seen as the phantom of happiness, I had employed all the gifts of God, I was beneath the most beautiful sky in the world, in the presence of nature at its most perfect, at the greatest spectacle that man is allowed to behold, but four hundred leagues away from the only woman who existed for me and who knew nothing of me, not even of my existence. Not loved and without hope ever to be loved! And so it was here that I sought to seek compensation from God for my singular existence. There was but one step to take: at the location where I found myself, the mountain was cut like a cliff, the sea moaned below, blue and pure, and I would only suffer for a second. Oh, the dizziness of that thought was terrible! Twice I hurled myself down and I know not what power returned me alive to land which I grasped. No, my God, you did not create me for eternal suffering, and so I will not offend you with my death. But give me the resolution that leads some to thrones, some to glory, and others to love!"

During this strange night a rather rare phenomenon had taken place. Towards the end of the night all the openings to the house in which I found myself were lit up; a warm, sulphuric dust prevented me from breathing, and leaving my easy conquest asleep on the terrace, I set out through the alleyways which led to Château Elme, and as I clambered up the mountain, the pure morning air came and inflated my lungs. I rested sumptuously on the vine arbors of the villas and fearlessly contemplated Vesuvius, newly bound in a cupola of smoke.

And it was here that I was seized with the dizziness of which I spoke. The thought of the encounter with the English girl roused me from the fatal ideas which I had conceived. After having refreshed my mouth with one of the enormous bunches of grapes sold at the market by women vendors, I headed to Portici to visit the ruins of the Herculaneum. All the roads were sprinkled with a metallic ash. Arriving at the ruins I descended into the underground city and strolled for a time from building to building, trying to extract from each monument the secret of its past. The temple of Venus and that of Mercury spoke in vain to my imagination; they needed to be populated with the living. I went back to Portici, stopped pensively below the arbor and waited there for my stranger to come.

She was not long in coming, steering her father's wretched gait. She seized my hand and said: 'It's alright.' We hailed a small coach and went to visit Pompeii. What happiness filled me as I guided her through the silent streets and the old Roman colony! I had studied the most secret passages in advance, and when we arrived at the small temple of Isis I had the pleasure of explaining to her in faithful detail the religion and ceremonies about which I had read in Apuleius. She wanted to play the role of the Goddess herself, whereas I was tasked with the role of Osiris in which I was to explain the divine mysteries.  

Dreaming, seized by the grandeur of the ideas which we had begun to raise, I dared not speak to her of love ... She thought me so cold that I had to be reproached, and then I confessed that I no longer felt worthy of her. I related to her the story of that apparition which had awakened a past love within my heart, as well as all the sadness which had constricted me that fatal night in which the phantom of happiness had been nothing more than a lie.

Alas, all of this is very distant from us! Ten years ago, coming from the East, I went back to Naples. I went down to the hotel of Rome, and again I found the English girl. She had married a famous painter who had been stricken with complete paralysis shortly after their marriage. Lying on a daybed, he had almost no movement in his facial features apart from his large black eyes, and since he was still young he could not hope that other climes would provide relief. The poor girl had devoted her existence between caring for her father and caring for her husband, and still, her softness and virginal candor could not relieve the atrocious jealousy that seethed in the latter's soul. Nothing could ever bring him to let her go free during their walks, and he reminded me of that black giant who lurked eternally in the cavern of the djinns, with his wife continuously having to stave off sleep. O mystery of the human soul! Should one descry in such a scene the cruel marks of the vengeance of the gods?

I could only endure a day of this anguish. The boat that took me back to Marseilles carried with it like a dream the memory of this cherished apparition, and I thought that perhaps I had forsaken my happiness there. And its secret Octavia will guard with her always.

Nerval, "Octavie (part 1)"

The first part of a short story ("Octavia") by this French writer. You can read the original here.

It was in the spring of 1835 that I was overcome by a lively desire to see Italy. Every day as I rose, I breathed in the bitter scent of the alpine chestnut trees; in the evening, the waterfall of Terni, the effervescent font of the Aniene gushed forth on me alone among the hoarse backstage in a small theater. A delicious murmur like the voice of a siren rustled in my ears, as if the reeds of the Trasimeno themselves had gained sound. I had to quit Paris and leave behind a thwarted love whom I wanted to escape for distraction.

My first stop was Marseilles. Every morning I would bathe in the sea by Châteauvert, and as I swam I could espy elegant isles far off in the gulf. And within this azure bay I would meet daily with an English girl whose slender body split the green waters before me. One day this water girl, who was called Octavia, swam over reveling in the strange catch she had made: in her white hands she held a fish that she gave to me.

I could not but smile at such a gift. Nevertheless, cholera was still sweeping through the city and to avoid the quarantines, I opted for a land route. I saw Nice, Genoa and Florence; I admired both the Dome and the Baptistery, the masterpieces of Michelangelo, and the leaning tower of Pisa. Then, taking the route of Spoleto, I stopped for ten days in Rome. The Dome of Saint Peter, the Vatican, the Colosseum all appeared to be a dream. I rushed to take the post for Civitaveccha, where I would be embarking. For three days the furious sea delayed the arrival of the steamship. On this desolate beach I walked pensively, one day almost getting myself eaten alive by some dogs. On the eve of my departure a French vaudeville was showing in the local theater. A blond and spirited head attracted my attention: it was the English girl who had taken a seat in the forestage box. She was accompanying her father, who looked ill; as a cure doctors had recommended the climate of Naples.

The next morning I gleefully took up my ticket. The English girl was on the bridge which she crossed with long strides, and, impatient with the ship's slowness, she plunged her ivory teeth into a lemon peel. "Poor thing," I told her, "I'm sure you're suffering from angina pectoris and that is certainly not what you need." She fixed her eyes upon me and asked: "Who taught you that?" "The Sibyl of Tivoli," I replied without discomforting myself. "Come off it!" she answered. "I don't believe a word of that."

Saying this she gave me a tender look and I could not prevent myself from kissing her hand. "If I were stronger," she said, "I would teach you how to lie!" And she threatened me, laughing, with a thin golden loaf that she held in her hand.

Our vessel docked at Naples and we crossed the gulf between Ischia and Nisida flooded with the fires of the Orient. "If you love me," she said, "you'll wait for me tomorrow in Portici. It's not every day that I commit myself to such encounters." She disembarked at La Mole square and accompanied her father to the Hotel of Rome, while I took up residence in the Florentin. My day was spent promenading down Toledo and La Mole and visiting the pictures in the museum; in the evening I went to see the San Carlos ballet. There I bumped into the Marquis Gargallo, whom I had known in Paris, and who invited me to accompany him after the show to take tea with him and his sisters. 

I will never forget the sumptuous evening that followed. The Marquise played host to a vast room of strangers and conversation veered towards that of the précieuses, and for a time I believed myself to be in the blue salon of Rambouillet. The Marquise's sisters, as beautiful as the Three Graces, revived in me all the prestige of Ancient Greece. We talked at length about the shape of the Ninnion tablet, whether it was triangular or square. Since she was beautiful and proud like Vesta herself, the Marquise could talk with complete assurance. I left the palace with my head still spinning from this philosophical discussion and could not manage to locate my hotel. By dint of wandering through the city I was finally going to become the hero of some kind of adventure. The encounter I had that night is the subject of the following letter which I later addressed to her from whose love I had thought myself absolved when I quit Paris. 

"I am in a state of extreme inquietude. For four days now I have not seen you, or I have only seen you amidst the swirling rabble. I have something akin to a fatal presentiment. That you were sincere with me, I truly believe; that you have changed in the last few days, I know not but it is this I fear. My God! Have pity on my incertitude or you will bring us into misfortune. Nonetheless, it is I whom I blame. I was meeker and more devoted than a man should be. I surrounded my love with so many reservations; I so feared to offend you, you who had punished me so severely once before that perhaps I went too far in my tact, and perhaps you thought me cold and distant as a result. In any case, I did not spoil an important day for you, I stifled my emotions until it almost cracked open my soul, and my face was covered in a smiling mask, while all this time my heart sighed and burned. Others would not have been so swayed, and yet no one could have shown as much genuine affection nor sensed all that you were worth.

"Let us be frank: I am well aware that there are connections that a woman is loath to break without difficulty, uneasy relationships that can only be severed slowly. Did I ask you for sacrifices that were too great? Tell me your concerns and I shall understand. Your fears, your fantasies, the necessities of your position, none of this can shake the immense affection that I have for you, nor dilute the purity of my love. But together we will see what we can admit and what we must fight, and you can leave it to me to determine whether these are knots that must be cut and not undone. It might be inhuman to be bereft of liberty in such a moment because, as I have said, my life is nothing but your will, and you must know that my greatest wish is to die for you and you alone!

"To die, great God! Why does this idea come to me now and linger as if my death were precisely the equivalent of the happiness that you promise? Death! Somehow that word does not suggest anything somber to my mind. It appears crowned in pale roses just like at the end of a feast. Often I have dreamt that it would be waiting for me at the bedside of the woman I love, after happiness, after intoxication, and it would say to me: 'Young man, you've had your share of joy in this world, now come sleep, come lie down in my arms. I may not be beautiful, but I am good and safe, and it is not happiness that I will bestow upon you but eternal peace.'

La Beatrice di Dante

The concluding part to an essay ("Dante's Beatrice") by this Italian man of letters.  You can read the original here.

In The New Life, therefore, we have a Beatrice oscillating between woman and angel; in The Banquet, a Beatrice consumptive from symbol and allegory, a creature without blood or flesh like Anacreon's cicada; in The Divine Comedy, in which everything is completed and merged, here we find ourselves face to face with a whole Beatrice, simultaneously woman and angel, sentiment and reason, symbol and reality. Sketched from the sentiment in The New Life, affected by The Banquet's syllogisms, she is represented as completely derived from the genius of The Divine Comedy, in which Faith, Science, and Art beautifully embrace one another like The Three Graces of Canova.

For sure, we do not find herein all the characteristics of a mortal creature, transported alive and palpitating from the immortal realm of art; nor are we speaking directly and powerfully to the heart like Francesca, Desdemona, or Margarete. Yet I say given such a Beatrice, this youngest of angelets, quickly vanished from the world in this way. And given all the circumstances of time and place in which she was born and in which the genius, the love, the character, and the poetry of Dante occurred, she is as she ought to have been. She is not an idea or the symbol of art embodied in a living creature, but a living creature whom Faith, Science, and Art lift upon their wings and then confuse with the light of the supernatural and the infinite.

If you were to snatch her from such an environment, she would lose both substance and life; and she would be destroyed by your hands like the delicate wings of a butterfly. Behold her from afar and leave her in that world in which she was born and where she grew up. Then you will see her drawn only against a diffuse light, like the image of the Madonna seen in dreams and depicted by Fra Angelico. This Beatrice, however, as it were, does not miraculously leap out from the brain of Dante. She is the result of a slow and extremely long elaboration, not only from the mind of our Poet, but also from tradition and the popular poetic consciousness.

Works of art in accordance with the laws are the processes of the creations of nature: isolated phenomena that do not simply appear, but rather are derived from the miraculous disruption of laws. Everything is the product of an ordered and more or less visible labor, and only in a state of superstitious ignorance could one call portentous the existence of a fact whose concatenations and projections are not known. Since art was able to reach all representations of Beatrice, the hetaera of Athens and the matron of Rome would have had to transform themselves gradually into the woman of the Gospels; that Semele and Psyche, victims of the supernatural, became the Virgin Mother, spouse of the Holy Spirit, indicate origins of divinity incarnate.

The religion of Christ provided art with two types of women: the virgin mother – the enigma – and the regenerate adulteress – the scandal. The first is thrust into flight on the art of the supernatural, that is, of mystery, and was the legitimate mother of all the madonnas sung by the medieval poets, in particular by our poets who have babbled on in this matter almost until now. The second, placing art on that spectrum between forgivable and forgiven sensuality, flies upon faith, on the florid path, to slide back ultimately into the brothel. Manon Lescaut, Marion Delorme, and La Dame aux camélias are natural outgrowths of the famous phrase: Let he who is without sin cast the first stone.

From all these evanescent madonnas of the Platonic Italian cycle, the firmest, most decisive and most luxuriant figure is certainly that of Beatrice, who is not a complete woman, but rather a complete creature of art. Mandetta, Selvaggia, Laura, to name only some of the most beautiful, remain inferior to the creation of Dante: they have less of the symbolic and more of the real. They are neither women nor ideas; their beloved names are repeated in all tones and with all the sweetness of their lovers. The being who is complete, human, and living, the true divination of the woman of medieval art, is Francesca. She is neither an angel nor a prostitute, but very humanly and almost fatally culpable; not wholly damned by an ascetic and Pharisee art, and not wholly regenerated by an art that is both stingily liberal and unabashedly vulgar. Thus she is a complete woman in the human and artistic sense of the word, whose fatal weakness is a piteous halo, the infinite martyrdom, and love.

After her we would be at pains to find in all of Italian poetry a perfect figure of woman. In Tasso's Jerusalem Delivered, Sophronia is a statue, Erminia an idyll, Armida an animate symbol recalling both Medea and Ariadne. Ariosto's women are either extravagantly true or extravagantly beautiful: either they are stern and indifferent warriors who later evaporate in a pastoral honeymoon, or legendary figures of magic, or adventurers of seductive nakedness. The best of all of them, Olympia, is simply the restoration of two ancient pictures: one painted by Catullus on two old designs from Euripides and Apollonius of Rhodes; the other a watercolor on similar plans by Ovid.   

For the poets of the sixteenth century, woman was either a sheet of white paper on which their Platonic courtesan songs were inscribed in a beautiful hand, or a filthy sheet of paper on which, gentlemen as they were, they dared to write nothing, leaving to Marino the glory of capsizing on the splendid cornucopia of his obscenities. Among the women of modern poetry, noteworthy are only those of Leopardi; yet Eloisa, Aspasia, and Nerina do not actually live from a life of their own, as they are merely reflections of the poet's soul. 

Of the others it is better not to say a word. It is not worth mentioning that they remain figurines of decalcomania carved with the base shears of Romantic sentimentalism and badly glued to the bottom of a cooking tray, from which the only thing that might surface is the covetous scent of a prepared dish and a simpering crowd of convalescents. Very few of these accused parties, yawning, show any sign of life, because even those born with scrofula would go to take a cure at an ospizio marino.

Our poets need to persuade themselves one blessed time that they may write about their pastoral visions and their stoves, that they may descend from their clouds in which they have lived hitherto, that they may live on earth with mankind and breathe with full lungs the wholesome oxygen of reality. Woman here will not be as singularly feminine as in novels; she will not dominate them like she dominates gentlemen; she will not be an idea or a symbol as in Platonic writings. She will no longer be in the heavens or on the altar, but on earth, amid society, and first and foremost in the family, which is the true domain and perhaps the only one of her virtues.