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

Contents

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 tobe found that insistent little touch which is her sign-manualwhen dealing with Italy or its makers of forgotten melodies.In other words, the music of her rhythmic prose is summed upin one poignant vocable—Forlorn.

As for her vanished world of dear dead women and their loverswho are dust, we may indeed for a brief hour enter thatenchanted atmosphere. Then a vapour arises as out of long lostlagoons, and, be it Venice or Mantua, we come to feel "howdeep an abyss separates us—and how many faint and namelessghosts crowd round the few enduring things bequeathed to us bythe past."

T.B.M.

PREFACE

"Alles Vergängliche ist nur ein Gleichniss"

It is in order to give others the pleasure of reading orre-reading a small masterpiece, that I mention the likelihoodof the catastrophe of my Ariadne having been suggested bythe late Mr. Shorthouse's Little Schoolmaster Mark; but Imust ask forgiveness of my dear old friend, Madame EmileDuclaux (Mary Robinson), for unwarranted use of one of thesongs of her Italian Garden.

Readers of my own little volume Genius Loci may meanwhilerecognise that I have been guilty of plagiarism towards myselfalso.[1]

For a couple of years after writing those pages, the image ofthe Palace of Mantua and the lakes it steeps in, haunted myfancy with that peculiar insistency, as of the half-lapsedrecollection of a name or date, which tells us that we know(if we could only remember!) what happened in a place. I letthe matter rest. But, looking into my mind one day, I foundthat a certain song of the early seventeenth century—(notMonteverde's Lamento d'Arianna but an air, Amarilli, byCaccini, printed alongside in Parisotti's collection)—hadentered that Palace of Mantua, and was, in some manner noteasy to define, the musical shape of what must have happenedthere. And that, translated back into human personages, wasthe story I have set forth in the following little Drama.

So much for the origin of Ariadne in Mantua, supposing anyfriend to be curious about it. What seems more interesting ismy feeling, which grew upon me as I worked over and over thepiece and its French translation, that these personages had animportance greater than that of their life and adventures, ameaning, if I may say so, a little sub specie aeternitatis.For, besides the real figures, there appeared to me vagueshadows 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 absolutelytrue to its aim; and all the moderating, the weighing andrestraining influences of civilisation, with their idealism,their vacillation, but their final triumph over the mereforces of nature. These well-born people of Mantua,privileged beings wanting little because they have much, andable therefore to spend themselves in quite harmonious effort,must necessarily