PREFACE

There are two great traditions of womanhood. One presents the Madonnabrooding over the mystery of motherhood; the other, more confusedly, tells ofthe acolyte, the priestess, the clairvoyante of the unknown gods. This latterexists complete in herself, a personality as definite and as significant as asymbol. She is behind all the processes of art, though she rarely becomes aconscious artist, except in delicate and impassioned modes of living. Indeed,matters are cruelly complicated for her if the entanglements of destiny drag herforward into the deliberate aesthetic effort. Strange, wistful, bitter andsweet, she troubles and quickens the soul of man, as earthly or as heavenlylover redeeming him from the spiritual sloth which is more to be dreaded thanany kind of pain.

The second tradition of womanhood does not perish; but, in these presentconfusions of change, women of the more emotional and imaginative type are lesspotent than they have been and will be again. They appear equally inimical andheretical to the opposing camps of hausfrau and of suffragist. Theirintellectual forces, liberated and intensified, prey upon the more instinctivepart of their natures, vexing them with unanswerable questions. So Fiammettamistakes herself to some degree, loses her keynote, becomes embittered andperplexed. The equilibrium of soul and body is disturbed; and she fortifiesherself in an obstinate idealism that cannot come to terms with the assaults oflife. No single sonnet expresses absolute truth from even her own point of view.The verses present the moods, misconceptions, extravagances, revulsions,reveries—all the obscure crises whereby she reaches a state of illumination andreconciliation regarding the enigma of love as it is, making her transition fromthe purely romantic and ascetic ideal fostered by the exquisitely selectiveconspiracies of the art of the great love-poets, through a great darkness ofdisillusion, to a new vision infinitely stronger and sweeter, because unafraidof the whole truth.

Fiammetta is frankly an enthusiast of the things of art; and her meditationsunfortunately betray the fact that Etruscan mirrors are as dear to her as thedaisies, and that she cannot find it more virtuous to contemplate a few cows ina pasture than a group of Leonardo's people in their rock-bound cloisters. Forthe long miracle of the human soul and its expression is for her not lesssacredly part of the universal process than the wheeling of suns and planets: aGreek vase is to her as intimately concerned with Nature as the growingcorn—with that Nature who formed the swan and the peacock for decorativedelight, and who puts ivory and ebony cunningly together on the blackthorn everypatterned Spring.

The Shaksperean form of sonnet yields most readily the piercing quality ofsound that helps to describe a malady of the soul. But the system of completedquatrains in that model suits more assured and dominating passion than thepresent matter provides. A more agitated hurry of the syllables, a more involvedsentence-structure, sometimes a fainter rime-stress, seem necessary to the musicof bewilderment.