The Aspern Papers | Page 4

we went, however, in her gondola, gliding there under the
sociable hood with the bright Venetian picture framed on either side by
the movable window, I could see that she was amused by my
infatuation, the way my interest in the papers had become a fixed idea.
"One would think you expected to find in them the answer to the riddle
of the universe," she said; and I denied the impeachment only by
replying that if I had to choose between that precious solution and a
bundle of Jeffrey Aspern's letters I knew indeed which would appear to
me the greater boon. She pretended to make light of his genius, and I
took no pains to defend him. One doesn't defend one's god: one's god is
in himself a defense. Besides, today, after his long comparative
obscuration, he hangs high in the heaven of our literature, for all the
world to see; he is a part of the light by which we walk. The most I said
was that he was no doubt not a woman's poet: to which she rejoined
aptly enough that he had been at least Miss Bordereau's. The strange
thing had been for me to discover in England that she was still alive: it
was as if I had been told Mrs. Siddons was, or Queen Caroline, or the
famous Lady Hamilton, for it seemed to me that she belonged to a
generation as extinct. "Why, she must be tremendously old--at least a
hundred," I had said; but on coming to consider dates I saw that it was
not strictly necessary that she should have exceeded by very much the
common span. Nonetheless she was very far advanced in life, and her
relations with Jeffrey Aspern had occurred in her early womanhood.
"That is her excuse," said Mrs. Prest, half-sententiously and yet also
somewhat as if she were ashamed of making a speech so little in the
real tone of Venice. As if a woman needed an excuse for having loved
the divine poet! He had been not only one of the most brilliant minds of
his day (and in those years, when the century was young, there were, as
everyone knows, many), but one of the most genial men and one of the
handsomest.
The niece, according to Mrs. Prest, was not so old, and she risked the
conjecture that she was only a grandniece. This was possible; I had
nothing but my share in the very limited knowledge of my English
fellow worshipper John Cumnor, who had never seen the couple. The

world, as I say, had recognized Jeffrey Aspern, but Cumnor and I had
recognized him most. The multitude, today, flocked to his temple, but
of that temple he and I regarded ourselves as the ministers. We held,
justly, as I think, that we had done more for his memory than anyone
else, and we had done it by opening lights into his life. He had nothing
to fear from us because he had nothing to fear from the truth, which
alone at such a distance of time we could be interested in establishing.
His early death had been the only dark spot in his life, unless the papers
in Miss Bordereau's hands should perversely bring out others. There
had been an impression about 1825 that he had "treated her badly," just
as there had been an impression that he had "served," as the London
populace says, several other ladies in the same way. Each of these cases
Cumnor and I had been able to investigate, and we had never failed to
acquit him conscientiously of shabby behavior. I judged him perhaps
more indulgently than my friend; certainly, at any rate, it appeared to
me that no man could have walked straighter in the given
circumstances. These were almost always awkward. Half the women of
his time, to speak liberally, had flung themselves at his head, and out of
this pernicious fashion many complications, some of them grave, had
not failed to arise. He was not a woman's poet, as I had said to Mrs.
Prest, in the modern phase of his reputation; but the situation had been
different when the man's own voice was mingled with his song. That
voice, by every testimony, was one of the sweetest ever heard.
"Orpheus and the Maenads!" was the exclamation that rose to my lips
when I first turned over his correspondence. Almost all the Maenads
were unreasonable, and many of them insupportable; it struck me in
short that he was kinder, more considerate than, in his place (if I could
imagine myself in such a place!) I should have been.
It was certainly strange beyond all strangeness, and I shall not take up
space with attempting to explain it, that whereas in all these other