第10章

I grieve to say that what we rightly entitle education was much neglected for their daughter by this singular pair.To be sure, neither of them had much knowledge to bestow; and knowledge was not then the fashion, as it is now.But accident or nature favoured young Viola.She learned, as of course, her mother's language with her father's.And she contrived soon to read and to write; and her mother, who, by the way, was a Roman Catholic, taught her betimes to pray.But then, to counteract all these acquisitions, the strange habits of Pisani, and the incessant watch and care which he required from his wife, often left the child alone with an old nurse, who, to be sure, loved her dearly, but who was in no way calculated to instruct her.

Dame Gionetta was every inch Italian and Neapolitan.Her youth had been all love, and her age was all superstition.She was garrulous, fond,--a gossip.Now she would prattle to the girl of cavaliers and princes at her feet, and now she would freeze her blood with tales and legends, perhaps as old as Greek or Etrurian fable, of demon and vampire,--of the dances round the great walnut-tree at Benevento, and the haunting spell of the Evil Eye.

All this helped silently to weave charmed webs over Viola's imagination that afterthought and later years might labour vainly to dispel.And all this especially fitted her to hang, with a fearful joy, upon her father's music.Those visionary strains, ever struggling to translate into wild and broken sounds the language of unearthly beings, breathed around her from her birth.

Thus you might have said that her whole mind was full of music;associations, memories, sensations of pleasure or pain,--all were mixed up inexplicably with those sounds that now delighted and now terrified; that greeted her when her eyes opened to the sun, and woke her trembling on her lonely couch in the darkness of the night.The legends and tales of Gionetta only served to make the child better understand the signification of those mysterious tones; they furnished her with words to the music.It was natural that the daughter of such a parent should soon evince some taste in his art.But this developed itself chiefly in the ear and the voice.She was yet a child when she sang divinely.

A great Cardinal--great alike in the State and the Conservatorio --heard of her gifts, and sent for her.From that moment her fate was decided: she was to be the future glory of Naples, the prima donna of San Carlo.

The Cardinal insisted upon the accomplishment of his own predictions, and provided her with the most renowned masters.To inspire her with emulation, his Eminence took her one evening to his own box: it would be something to see the performance, something more to hear the applause lavished upon the glittering signoras she was hereafter to excel! Oh, how gloriously that life of the stage, that fairy world of music and song, dawned upon her! It was the only world that seemed to correspond with her strange childish thoughts.It appeared to her as if, cast hitherto on a foreign shore, she was brought at last to see the forms and hear the language of her native land.Beautiful and true enthusiasm, rich with the promise of genius! Boy or man, thou wilt never be a poet, if thou hast not felt the ideal, the romance, the Calypso's isle that opened to thee when for the first time the magic curtain was drawn aside, and let in the world of poetry on the world of prose!