One afternoon of April in the year 1774, Odo Valsecca, riding down thehillside below the church of the Superga, had reined in his horse at apoint where a group of Spanish chestnuts overhung the way. The air waslight and pure, the shady turf invited him, and dismounting he bid hisservant lead the horses to the wayside inn half way down the slope.
The spot he had chosen, though secluded as some nook above the gorge ofDonnaz, commanded a view of the Po rolling at his feet like a flood ofyellowish metal, and beyond, outspread in clear spring sunshine, thegreat city in the bosom of the plain. The spectacle was fair enough totouch any fancy: brown domes and facades set in new-leaved gardens andsurrounded by vineyards extending to the nearest acclivities;country-houses glancing through the fresh green of planes and willows;monastery-walls cresting the higher ridges; and westward the Po windingin sunlit curves toward the Alps.
Odo had lost none of his sensitiveness to such impressions; but the swayof another mood turned his eye from the outstretched beauty of the cityto the vernal solitude about him. It was the season when old memories ofDonnaz worked in his blood; when the banks and hedges of the freshhill-country about Turin cheated him with a breath of buddingbeech-groves and the fragrance of crushed fern in the glens of the highPennine valleys. It was a mere waft, perhaps, from some clod of loosenedearth, or the touch of cool elastic moss as he flung himself facedownward under the trees; but the savour, the contact filled hisnostrils with mountain air and his eyes with dim-branched distances. AtDonnaz the slow motions of the northern spring had endeared to him allthose sweet incipiencies preceding the full choral burst of leaf andflower: the mauve mist over bare woodlands, the wet black gleams infrost-bound hollows, the thrust of fronds through withered bracken, theprimrose-patches spreading like pale sunshine along wintry lanes. He hadalways felt a sympathy for these delicate unnoted changes; but thefeeling which had formerly been like the blind stir of sap in a plantwas now a conscious sensation that groped for speech and understanding.
He had grown up among people to whom such emotions were unknown. The oldMarquess's passion for his fields and woods was the love of theagriculturist and the hunter, not that of the naturalist or the poet;and the aristocracy of the cities regarded the country merely as so muchsoil from which to draw their maintenance. The gentlefolk never absentedthemselves from town but for a few weeks of autumn, when they went totheir villas for the vintage, transporting thither all the diversions ofcity life and venturing no farther afield than the pleasure-grounds thatwere but so many open-air card-rooms, concert-halls and theatres. Odo'stenderness for every sylvan function of renewal and decay, everyshifting of light and colour on the flying surface of the year, wouldhave been met with the same stare with which a certain enchantingCountess had received the handful of wind-flowers that, fresh from asunrise on the hills, he had laid one morning among her toilet-boxes.
The Countess Clarice had stared and laughed, and every one of hisacquaintance, Alfieri even, would have echoed her laugh; but one man atleast had felt the divine commotion of nature's touch, had felt andinterpreted it, in words as fresh as spring verdure, in the pages of avolume that Odo now drew from his pocket.
"I longed to dream, but some unexpected spectacle continually distractedme from my musings. Here immense rocks hung their ruinous masses abovemy head; there the thick mist of roaring waterfalls enveloped me; orsome unceasing torrent tore open at my very feet an abyss into which thegaze feared to plunge. Sometimes I was lost in the twilight of a thickwood; sometimes, on emerging from a dark ravine, my eyes were charmed bythe sight of an open meadow...Nature seemed to revel in unwontedcontrasts; such varieties of aspect had she united in one spot. Here wasan eastern prospect bright with spring flowers, while autumn fruitsripened to the south and the northern face of the scene was still lockedin wintry frosts...Add to this the different angles at which the peakstook the light, the chiaroscuro of sun and shade, and the variations oflight resulting from it at morning and evening...sum up the impressionsI have tried to describe and you will be able to form an idea of theenchanting situation in which I found myself...The scene has indeed amagical, a supernatural quality, which so ravishes the spirit and sensesthat one seems to lose all exact notion of one's surroundings andidentity."This was a new language to eighteenth-century readers. Already it hadswept through the length and breadth of France, like a spring storm-windbursting open doors and windows, and filling close candle-lit rooms withwet gusts and the scent of beaten blossoms; but south of the Alps thenew ideas travelled slowly, and the Piedmontese were as yet scarce awareof the man who had written thus of their own mountains. It was truethat, some thirty years earlier, in one of the very monasteries on whichOdo now looked down, a Swiss vagrant called Rousseau had embraced thetrue faith with the most moving signs of edification; but the rescue ofHelvetian heretics was a favourite occupation of the Turinese nobilityand it is doubtful if any recalled the name of the strange proselyte whohad hastened to signalise his conversion by robbing his employers andslandering an innocent maid-servant. Odo in fact owed his firstacquaintance with the French writers to Alfieri, who, in the intervalsof his wandering over Europe, now and then reappeared in Turin ladenwith the latest novelties in Transalpine literature and haberdashery.
What his eccentric friend failed to provide, Odo had little difficultyin obtaining for himself; for though most of the new writers were on theIndex, and the Sardinian censorship was notoriously severe, there wasnever yet a barrier that could keep out books, and Cantapresto was askilled purveyor of contraband dainties. Odo had thus acquainted himselfwith the lighter literature of England and France; and though he hadread but few philosophical treatises, was yet dimly aware of the newstandpoint from which, north of the Alps, men were beginning to test theaccepted forms of thought. The first disturbance of his childish faith,and the coincident reading of the Lettres Philosophiques, had beenfollowed by a period of moral perturbation, during which he sufferedfrom that sense of bewilderment, of inability to classify the phenomenaof life, that is one of the keenest trials of inexperience. Youth andnature had their way with him, however, and a wholesome reaction ofindifference set in. The invisible world of thought and conduct had beenthe frequent subject of his musings; but the other, tangible world wasclose to him too, spreading like a rich populous plain between himselfand the distant heights of speculation. The old doubts, the olddissatisfactions, hung on the edge of consciousness; but he was tooprofoundly Italian not to linger awhile in that atmosphere of carelessacquiescence that is so pleasant a medium for the unhampered enjoymentof life. Some day, no doubt, the intellectual curiosity and the moraldisquietude would revive; but what he wanted now were books whichappealed not to his reason but to his emotions, which reflected as in amirror the rich and varied life of the senses: books that were warm tothe touch, like the little volume in his hand.
For it was not only of nature that the book spoke. Amid scenes of suchrustic freshness were set hu............