



Produced by Andrea Ball, Christine Bell & Marc D'Hooghe
at http://www.freeliterature.org (From images generously
made available by the Internet Archive)





ARIADNE IN MANTUA

A ROMANCE IN FIVE ACTS

BY

VERNON LEE


Portland, Maine

THOMAS B. MOSHER

MDCCCCXII




TO

ETHEL SMYTH

THANKING, AND BEGGING, HER FOR MUSIC




PREFACE


Ariadne _in Mantua_, _A Romance in Five Acts, by Vernon Lee.
Oxford: B.H. Blackwell 50 and 51 Broad Street. London:
Simpkin, Marshall, Hamilton, Kent & Company. A.D. MCMIII.
Octavo. Pp. x: 11-66_.


Like almost everything else written by Vernon Lee there is to
be found that insistent little touch which is her sign-manual
when dealing with Italy or its makers of forgotten melodies.
In other words, the music of her rhythmic prose is summed up
in one poignant vocable--_Forlorn_.

As for her vanished world of dear dead women and their lovers
who are dust, we may indeed for a brief hour enter that
enchanted atmosphere. Then a vapour arises as out of long lost
lagoons, and, be it Venice or Mantua, we come to feel "how
deep an abyss separates us--and how many faint and nameless
ghosts crowd round the few enduring things bequeathed to us by
the past."

T.B.M.




PREFACE


_"Alles Vergaengliche ist nur ein Gleichniss"_


_It is in order to give others the pleasure of reading or
re-reading a small masterpiece, that I mention the likelihood
of the catastrophe of my_ Ariadne _having been suggested by
the late Mr. Shorthouse's_ Little Schoolmaster Mark; _but I
must ask forgiveness of my dear old friend, Madame Emile
Duclaux_ (Mary Robinson), _for unwarranted use of one of the
songs of her_ Italian Garden.

_Readers of my own little volume_ Genius Loci _may meanwhile
recognise that I have been guilty of plagiarism towards myself
also_.[1]

_For a couple of years after writing those pages, the image of
the Palace of Mantua and the lakes it steeps in, haunted my
fancy with that peculiar insistency, as of the half-lapsed
recollection of a name or date, which tells us that we know
(if we could only remember!)_ what happened in a place. _I let
the matter rest. But, looking into my mind one day, I found
that a certain song of the early seventeenth century_--(not
_Monteverde's_ Lamento d'Arianna _but an air_, Amarilli, _by
Caccini, printed alongside in Parisotti's collection_)--_had
entered that Palace of Mantua, and was, in some manner not
easy to define, the musical shape of what must have happened
there. And that, translated back into human personages, was
the story I have set forth in the following little Drama_.

_So much for the origin of_ Ariadne in Mantua, _supposing any
friend to be curious about it. What seems more interesting is
my feeling, which grew upon me as I worked over and over the
piece and its French translation, that these personages had an
importance greater than that of their life and adventures, a
meaning, if I may say so, a little_ sub specie aeternitatis.
_For, besides the real figures, there appeared to me vague
shadows cast by them, as it were, on the vast spaces of life,
and magnified far beyond those little puppets that I twitched.
And I seem to feel here the struggle, eternal, necessary,
between mere impulse, unreasoning and violent, but absolutely
true to its aim; and all the moderating, the weighing and
restraining influences of civilisation, with their idealism,
their vacillation, but their final triumph over the mere
forces of nature. These well-born people of Mantua,
privileged beings wanting little because they have much, and
able therefore to spend themselves in quite harmonious effort,
must necessarily get the better of the poor gutter-born
creature without whom, after all, one of them would have been
dead and the others would have had no opening in life. Poor_
Diego _acts magnanimously, being cornered; but he (or she) has
not the delicacy, the dignity to melt into thin air with a
mere lyric Metastasian "Piangendo parte", and leave them to
their untroubled conscience. He must needs assert himself,
violently wrench at their heart-strings, give them a final
stab, hand them over to endless remorse; briefly, commit that
public