Provenance and Early Cinema Early

Cinema in Review Proceedings of

Domitor Joanne Bernardi Editor Paolo
Cherchi Usai Editor Tami Williams
Editor Joshua Yumibe Editor
Visit to download the full and correct content document:
https://textbookfull.com/product/provenance-and-early-cinema-early-cinema-in-review
-proceedings-of-domitor-joanne-bernardi-editor-paolo-cherchi-usai-editor-tami-william
s-editor-joshua-yumibe-editor/
More products digital (pdf, epub, mobi) instant
download maybe you interests ...

Cinema s Military Industrial Complex 1st Edition Haidee

Wasson (Editor)

https://textbookfull.com/product/cinema-s-military-industrial-
complex-1st-edition-haidee-wasson-editor/

The Routledge Handbook of Early Christian Philosophy

Mark Edwards (Editor)

https://textbookfull.com/product/the-routledge-handbook-of-early-
christian-philosophy-mark-edwards-editor/

Routledge Handbook of Early Chinese History Paul R.

Goldin (Editor)

https://textbookfull.com/product/routledge-handbook-of-early-
chinese-history-paul-r-goldin-editor/

Contemporary Balkan Cinema Transnational Exchanges and

Global Circuits 1st Edition Lydia Papadimitriou
(Editor)

https://textbookfull.com/product/contemporary-balkan-cinema-
transnational-exchanges-and-global-circuits-1st-edition-lydia-
papadimitriou-editor/
Muslims and Others in Early Islamic Society Robert
Hoyland Editor Lawrence I Conrad

https://textbookfull.com/product/muslims-and-others-in-early-
islamic-society-robert-hoyland-editor-lawrence-i-conrad/

Protein ligand interactions methods and applications

Third Edition Tina Daviter Editor Christopher M Johnson
Editor Dr Mark A Williams Editor Stephen H Mclaughlin
Editor
https://textbookfull.com/product/protein-ligand-interactions-
methods-and-applications-third-edition-tina-daviter-editor-
christopher-m-johnson-editor-dr-mark-a-williams-editor-stephen-h-
mclaughlin-editor/

Cinema of Exploration Essays on an Adventurous Film

Practice 1st Edition James Leo Cahill (Editor)

https://textbookfull.com/product/cinema-of-exploration-essays-on-
an-adventurous-film-practice-1st-edition-james-leo-cahill-editor/

Architecture and the Politics of Gender in Early Modern

Europe 1st Edition Helen Hills (Editor)

https://textbookfull.com/product/architecture-and-the-politics-
of-gender-in-early-modern-europe-1st-edition-helen-hills-editor/

Soul Travel Spiritual Journeys in Late Medieval and

Early Modern Europe Elizabeth Tingle (Editor)

https://textbookfull.com/product/soul-travel-spiritual-journeys-
in-late-medieval-and-early-modern-europe-elizabeth-tingle-editor/
FILM & MEDIA

Williams, and Yumibe

Bernardi, Cherchi Usai,
“Provenance and Early Cinema turns critical attention back to Domitor’s core commitment
to crossing institutional divides between university film departments and film archives/
museums. This commitment has always informed the work of the organization, but it has

Provenance
only intermittently been an object of inquiry itself.”
—Kaveh Askari, author of Making Movies into Art: Picture Craft from the Magic Lantern to
Early Hollywood

Early
Remnants of early films often have a story to tell.

and

Provenance and Early Cinema

As material artifacts, these film fragments are central to cinema history, perhaps more than
ever in our digital age of easy copying and sharing. If a digital copy is previewed before
preservation or is shared with a researcher outside the purview of a film archive, knowledge
about how the artifact was collected, circulated, and repurposed threatens to become
obscured. When the question of origin is overlooked, the story can be lost. Concerned

Cinema
contributors in Provenance and Early Cinema challenge scholars digging through film
archives to ask, “How did these moving images get here for me to see them?”

This volume, which features the conference proceedings from Domitor, the International
Society for the Study of Early Cinema, 2018, questions preservation, attribution, and
patterns of reuse in order to explore singular artifacts with long and circuitous lives.

JOANNE BERNARDI is Professor of Japanese and Film and Media Studies at the
University of Rochester.

PAOLO CHERCHI USAI is Senior Curator of the Moving Image Department at the George
Eastman Museum and Adjunct Professor of Film at the University of Rochester.

TAMI WILLIAMS is Associate Professor of Film Studies and English at the University of
Wisconsin-Milwaukee and President of Domitor.

JOSHUA YUMIBE is Professor and Director of Film Studies at Michigan State University.
He is author (with Sarah Street) of Chromatic Modernity: Color, Cinema, and Media of the
1920s, (with Tom Gunning, Jonathon Rosen, and Giovanna Fossati) of Fantasia of Color
in Early Cinema, and of Moving Color: Early Film, Mass Culture, Modernism. He is also
editor (with Kaveh Askari, Scott Curtis, Frank Gray, Louis Pelletier, and Tami Williams) of
Performing New Media, 1890–1915.

Cover Illustration: George Eastman Museum

— Davide Turconi/Josef Joye Collection
iupress.org
ISBN 9780253052995
90000 >

Edited by Joanne Bernardi, Paolo Cherchi Usai,

9 780253 052995
Tami Williams, and Joshua Yumibe
PRESS
PROV EN A NCE A N D E AR LY CINEM A
E A R LY C I N E M A I N R E V I E W: PRO C E E DI N G S OF D OM I T OR
PROVENANCE
AND E ARLY
CINEMA

Edited by
Joanne Bernardi, Paolo Cherchi Usai,
Tami Williams, and Joshua Yumibe

Indiana University Press

 This book is a publication of

Indiana University Press

Office of Scholarly Publishing
Herman B Wells Library 350
1320 East 10th Street
Bloomington, Indiana 47405 USA

iupress.org

© 2020 by Domitor

All rights reserved

No part of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any
means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or by
any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing
from the publisher. The paper used in this publication meets the minimum
requirements of the American National Standard for Information Sciences—
Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48-1992.

Manufactured in the United States of America

Cataloging information is available from the Library of Congress

ISBN 978-0-253-05299-5 (paperback)

ISBN 978-0-253-05300-8 (web PDF)

1 2 3 4 5 25 24 23 22 21 20
 CONTENTS

Domitor Series – Précis 1

Introduction: Provenance and Early Cinema:

From Preservation and Collection to Circulation and
Repurposing / Joanne Bernardi, Paolo Cherchi Usai,
Tami Williams, and Joshua Yumibe 3

Part I. Studying Provenance: From Analog to Digital

1 Film Provenance: A Framework for Analysis /

Paolo Cherchi Usai 23

2 Origins: Early Films and Archival Collections /

Camille Blot-Wellens 34

3 From Provenience to Provenance: The Kerstrat-d’Hauterives

Collection / Germain Lacasse 47

4 Provenance and Film Historiography: 1910s Films at

the George Eastman Museum / Grazia Ingravalle 59

5 Issues of Provenance and Attribution for the Canon:

Bookending Robert Paul / Ian Christie 70

6 Shattered Provenance in the Digitization of Early Color

Films / Barbara Flueckiger, Noemi Daugaard, and
Olivia Kristina Stutz 80

Part II. Preservation and Collection

7 Dreaming in Color: The Image and the Artifact /

Joshua Yumibe 93
vi | Contents

8 Where Did the Costumes in Early Cinema Come From? /

Priska Morrissey 106

9 Thinking with Provenance: Drawing Trajectories in

the Francis Doublier Collection at the George Eastman
Museum / Clara Auclair 118

10 Revisiting the Films of Albert Kahn’s Archives de la Planète:

A Material Survey / Teresa Castro and Anne Sigaud 129

11 The Thanhouser Studio Filmography: Analysis and

Extant Prints / Ned Thanhouser 143

12 The Great War at Scale: New Opportunities for

Provenance in World War I Collections at the National
Archives (NARA) / Bret Vukoder and Mark Williams 155

Part III. Circulation

13 Chicago’s “Censored Casualties” and the Provenance of

Archive Prints / Richard Abel 169

14 What Made the Mechanicals Move? Postcards in Transit /

Patrick Ellis 179

15 “The End of a Foreign Monopoly”: Bausch and Lomb and the

Wartime Provenance of Optical Glass / Allain Daigle 192

16 Pathé Films in Brazil: The Archives of Marc Ferrez & Sons

(1908–1916) / Danielle Crepaldi Carvalho 203

17 Establishing the Provenance of Early Advertising Films:

Film Catalogs and the Creation of the Nontheatrical
Market / Martin L. Johnson 214

18 A Journey on the World’s Most Northerly Railway:

The Renaming and Remaking of Swedish Industrial Films /
Marina Dahlquist 223
 Contents | vii

19 In Search of “The Edison Biograph Company”:

Film History through Philippine Archives /
Nadi Tofighian 236

20 Ownership, Exploitation, Stewardship: Tracking the

Footage of the 1911–1913 Australian Antarctic Expedition /
Gregory A. Waller 247

Part IV. Repurposing

21 Finding Early Cinema in the Avant-Garde:

Research and Investigation / André Habib 261

22 Ernie Gehr’s The Collector (2003) and Ernie Gehr

the Collector / Ken Eisenstein 275

23 Flicker: Thom Andersen Takes Muybridge to the Movies /

Eszter Polonyi 287

24 Provenance on Ice: Dawson City: Frozen Time and

the Dawson City Collection / Charlie Keil and
Christina Stewart 305

25 Praxis as Media Historiography: The Peep Box’s

“Expanding View” as Virtual Reality /
Christina Corfield 317

26 How Newspaper Novels and Their Illustrations

Shaped Japanese Films / Norie Taniguchi 329

27 Archival Object or Object Lesson? Bricolage as Process

and as Concept in the Edmundo Padilla Collection /
Kim Tomadjoglou 340

Appendix: French Language Essay

28 La collection de Kerstrat-d’Hauterives, de
sa provenience à sa provenance / Germain Lacasse 353
viii | Contents

Appendix: French Language Essay

29 D’où viennent les costumes du cinéma des

premiers temps? / Priska Morrissey 365

Appendix: Dryden Theatre Screening Program 377

Index 407
PROV EN A NCE A N D E AR LY CINEM A
 DOMITOR SERIES – PRÉCIS

D omitor, the international society for the study of early cin-

ema, is a nonprofit, bilingual association for scholars interested in all
aspects of early cinema from its beginnings to 1915. Domitor is dedicated to
exploring new methods of historical research; understanding and promot-
ing the international exchange of information, documents, and ideas; forg-
ing alliances with curators and film archivists; and nurturing the work of
early career researchers. One of its most important activities is its biennial
international conference. The first was held in Quebec in 1990, and subse-
quent conferences were staged in Lausanne; New York; Paris; Washington,
DC; Udine; Montreal; Utrecht; Ann Arbor; Perpignan/Girona; Toronto;
Brighton; Chicago/Evanston; and Stockholm. The George Eastman Mu-
seum and University of Rochester in New York jointly hosted the Fifteenth
International Domitor Conference in 2018, and this book stems from its
proceedings.1
Domitor conferences often prompt scholars to consider early cinema
in terms of a theme (religion, borders, the body) or some facet of the object
itself (intertextuality, sound, technology, distribution). Recently, the con-
ferences have encouraged members to view early cinema through the lenses
of different disciplines, such as image studies and performance studies. The
present collection continues this tradition by asking contributors to exam-
ine the film object through the art historical concept of provenance, central
to archives and museums in the domains of preservation and curation.

Note

1. Joanne Bernardi (University of Rochester), Paolo Cherchi Usai (George Eastman

Museum), June Hwang (University of Rochester), Tami Williams (University of Wisconsin-
Milwaukee), Caroline Yeager (George Eastman Museum), and Joshua Yumibe (Michigan
State University) comprised the Domitor 2018 Program Committee.
 INTRODUCTION
Provenance and Early Cinema: From
Preservation and Collection to Circulation
and Repurposing

Joanne Bernardi, Paolo Cherchi Usai,

Tami Williams, and Joshua Yumibe

T he exploration of provenance as a concept and method for early

cinema studies marks both a critical return to origins and a vital and
generative step forward. The very founding of Domitor in 1985 was the re-
sult of an important return to the archive. The archival reassessment of
specific film prints and collections has brought with it profound historical
insights into the chosen modes, styles, intermedial practices, and cultural
investments of early cinema. As a practice, this has fostered a bottom-up
approach to film history based on archival research and implicitly rooted
in the provenance of filmic objects. A concept derived from museums, art
history, and the art market, provenance has long been essential for deter-
mining the origins, history, legacy, and value of artifacts.
The provenance of an artifact—how it was created and subsequently
whose hands it passed through—has always been crucial for assessing the
economic, cultural, and aesthetic heritage of the object. Even as provenance
has been implicit to scholarly understandings of artworks, it is only rela-
tively recently that the concept has become a pressing field of study within
art history.
Art historical interest in provenance has been fueled in part by a grow-
ing interrogation of the economic and cultural capital of the art market, as
well as by the ethical imperatives of repatriating looted artworks in the Nazi
context, a subject of increased research over the past few decades.1 To art
historical accounts, we would also signal the importance of provenance in
4 | Provenance and Early Cinema

postcolonial scholarship for critiquing the appropriation of indigenous and

diasporic cultures in music and fashion, as well as for repatriating colonial
objects accumulated by museums of the Global North. These legacies have
been important to Homi Bhabha’s theorization of cultural hybridity in rela-
tion to the “postcolonial provenance” of language and subjectivity, which
are marked by North-South flows of cultural meaning and identity.2
In a like manner, in film history, there is much to gain from the
consideration of provenance as both concept and method. As material
artifacts, early films often have crucial stories to tell. Yet, the question of
their provenance has rarely been discussed outside of archives: the mi-
gration of specific films and collections, and who has developed, owned,
accessed, repurposed, and hybridized them, is now of increasing concern.
The movements of film—across formats and from producers and distribu-
tors to collectors, artists, and archival institutions around the globe—have
implicitly shaped our written histories. Now, through explicit attention,
the provenance of film promises to open further insights into cinema’s cir-
culation, value, and heritage, particularly in a global context. Repatriat-
ing films and collections to their country of origin plays a smaller, though
not insignificant, role in filmic provenance. Archives are often committed
in significant ways to national heritage and, when feasible, collaborate in-
ternationally to repatriate duplicates of restorations. But, cinema was also
built to circulate widely, and provenance provides a means of establishing
not just cultural patrimony but also transnational flows. Given the grow-
ing, global dissemination of film through digital technologies as well as
its recycling in experimental and new media practice, the need for greater
attention to provenance is vital to track these flows.
As the essays collected in this volume demonstrate, provenance pro-
vides a powerful heuristic to assess the origins, circulation, and repurpos-
ing of films throughout cinema history. Many of the chapters also consider
how we might connect the material provenance of a film print or a collec-
tion to its broader cultural and aesthetic histories. For instance, how can
provenance be deployed for thinking about the cultural circulation and in-
fluence of ideas, patents, images, styles, and technologies, from analog to
digital? What does the provenance of prints and collections tell us about
film heritage, preservation, and the privileging of certain works over oth-
ers? And how does the provenance of the nonextant, of lost prints and for-
gotten films, also speak to the antipathies, lacunae, and silences of history?
Finally, what does the material history of provenance tell us about early
 Introduction | 5

film networks, local and global circulation, colonial imaging and extrac-
tion, and the reuse of media in different contexts? This volume turns to
these foundational issues around provenance and early cinema and bears
the fruit of many rich conversations, which could not have taken place in a
more appropriate location than the George Eastman Museum in Rochester,
the historic site of the founding of the Eastman Kodak enterprise.

Studying Provenance from Analog to Digital

The chapters in this volume’s first section explore methodologies of prove-
nance in relation to early cinema, with particular attention to the medium’s
shifting material form, from analog to digital. The opening contribution by
Paolo Cherchi Usai, “Film Provenance: A Framework for Analysis,” pro-
vides a rich and concise overview of print provenance while announcing
its relevance for the entire spectrum of cinema’s material objects (prints,
negatives, technologies). Cherchi Usai shows that provenance is germane
to understanding the impact of shifting geographical and geopolitical con-
texts through which film prints travel—that is, from place to place and
from hand to hand, in the commercial circuit and beyond, whether for ar-
chival preservation, collection, or reuse in diverse sociocultural contexts.
Cherchi Usai usefully argues that the study of film provenance requires
understanding the “connections and differences between the image carrier
and the work it carries,” implicating the mutability of the material object,
the alteration of its content over time, and what this means for film histori-
ans and curators alike. Significantly, Cherchi Usai’s chapter also announc-
es issues taken up in this section’s subsequent chapters, from linguistic
and/or disciplinary distinctions (or lack thereof) between archaeological
provenience (the origins of an object) and art historical provenance (the
successive owners of an object) explored by Germain Lacasse to consid-
erations of how provenance extends to “postanalog” reincarnations of the
cinematic object, echoed in the research findings of Barbara Flueckiger
and others.
In chapter 2, independent archivist and film historian Camille Blot-
Wellens follows Cherchi Usai’s inaugural, theoretical, and historical study
with a close inspection of provenance in its most material form in her
penetrating essay “Origins: Early Films and Archival Collections.” By ex-
amining early moving images (from Skladanowsky Bros. to Pathé) held at
the Swedish Film Institute, Blot-Wellens approaches “origins” from three
 Introduction | 17

(One’s sin, 1908). While the film does not survive, Taniguchi has been able
to trace through surviving still images of the film its iconic relationship
to production stills from theater and also to the original illustrations of
the published novel. She thus elaborates on an iconic provenance taken up
through the process of adaptation in early Japanese cinema.
In “Archival Object or Object Lesson? Bricolage as Process and as Con-
cept in the Edmundo Padilla Collection,” Kim Tomadjoglou recuperates
the work of itinerant showmen Félix Padilla and his son Edmundo, who
were based in the twin cities of Juarez, Mexico, and El Paso, Texas. Fron-
tizero (borderlander) entrepreneurs who presented films throughout the
northern border region between 1921 and 1937, the Padillas were amateur
filmmakers and producers as well as exhibitors. Staying current with con-
temporary business practices as well as print duplication, editing, and color
lithography techniques, they created original and hybrid entertainment by
mixing original scripts, staged reenactments, and repurposed popular me-
dia (e.g., fictional and newsreel footage, print ephemera, and sound record-
ings) that they purchased in Mexico and the United States. Tomadjoglou
focuses on an extant Padilla reel to illustrate their binational, improvisa-
tional, and heterogenous approach to film production and presentation,
which she persuasively argues is best described as bricolage. She reveals how
such artifacts challenge conventional concepts of provenance as a standard
for “best practices,” both in theory and application. As fragmentary traces
of a transitory, borderland cinema practice, they are evidence of cinema’s
“unfixed materiality” and the limitations of “a film history bounded by na-
tional borders.”
As this book seeks to demonstrate, through a wide range of approaches
and the excavation of a variety of previously neglected areas, a return to
provenance fosters a significant expansion of the boundaries of early cin-
ema studies. This expansive engagement with provenance offers a deeper
understanding of film both as a material object and in its circulation. A
central motivation for exploring provenance in this volume is the ongoing
transformation of the contemporary media landscape by new technologies,
which continues to affect how moving images are created, consumed, and
restored. Fortunately, this shift from analog to digital, which is now a criti-
cal aspect of the medium’s provenance, is also simultaneously precipitating
an expansion of resources for research into material provenance, such as
the bounty of film prints, trade materials, and analytical tools (e.g., full
frame scans and time-based annotation) made available through online
18 | Provenance and Early Cinema

platforms such as the Media Ecology Project, the Media History Digital
Library, and the Timeline of Historical Film Colors. Such platforms give us
increased historical access and “distance reading” data on issues of preser-
vation, collecting, circulation, and repurposing as well as the investigative
tools for studying the material traces of provenance scratched into the ni-
trate film frame itself.
In light of these digital changes both to the medium and the research
tools used to study it, it is worth reemphasizing the provenance of this
volume on early cinema. Initially presented at the Fifteenth International
Domitor Conference, hosted by the George Eastman Museum and the Uni-
versity of Rochester in New York, the essays of this collection, revised and
expanded into the form collected here, took shape at one of the premier
film archives in the world, where the provenance of film was formed out of
the ineluctable legacy of the Eastman Kodak Company. Thus in the shadow
of Kodak, which defined so much of the material provenance of cinema’s
analog form, and whose fortunes have declined with the digital revolu-
tion, this volume’s formative questions about provenance and early cinema
have pressing technical and geographic stakes that continue to resonate
globally.

Acknowledgments
The editors would like to express their deepest gratitude and warmly ac-
knowledge the generous support of the institutions and people who made
the fifteenth annual Domitor conference such a tremendous success: from
Caroline Yeager, associate curator of the George Eastman Museum, for her
infinite creativity, energy, and efficiency, and the tireless staff of the George
Eastman Museum, to Dr. June Hwang at the University of Rochester and
Clara Auclair at the University of Rochester / Université Paris Diderot for
their assistance with the program and its translations. The wonderfully
collaborative nature of this project, with its dual archival and scholarly
components, was made possible by the contributions of so many archives
and scholars, from the Cinémathèque française, the Fondation Jérôme
Seydoux-Pathé, and the Swedish Film Institute to the ever-expanding and
internationalizing Domitor membership, who proposed and presented
such high-caliber work.
The editors would also like to thank Timothy Barnard for his exem-
plary translations and Janice Frisch, Allison Chaplin, and the dedicated
Another random document with
no related content on Scribd:
 ACT III
Scene: The Garden and Cloisters of Monte Casino.
MARCOMIR.

[striking himself with a stone]

What tides of rapture spring at every stroke!
Have mercy, God! Such agony of pleasure
I felt when she came near. Oh, can it be
I have not yet inflicted utter pain?
Is there some chaste and vigorous suffering
Beyond the shameful wiles, with which the lash
Unnerves me? Pain, more pain!

[He strikes himself without pity; then, seeing Damiani enter the court, he
hurriedly drops the shard.]
DAMIANI.

Your hand is bleeding.

I see!—Although I took away your silex
You yet have braved my will.

MARCOMIR.

I need the rod.

DAMIANI.

You need obedience. Flog yourself again,

You will be locked in prison like your friend.

MARCOMIR.
 [in a low voice]
He has no guilt.

DAMIANI.

No guilt! You have not heard

I caught him flushed with triumph at the news
That Astolph in defiance of the Pope
Is laying siege to Rome. Good Rachis wept
As well he might, but Carloman blasphemed
Would I were with your brother! and for this
I had him shut in darkness fourteen days.
The term is over, and to change your sullen,
Ascetic mood—it is a festival—
You shall restore your friend to liberty.
You err through over-discipline, a fault,
But one that brings us honour; stubbornness
Like his disgraces the whole brotherhood.
Admonish him! If he is quite subdued
He shall be suffered to resume his rank
Among his fellows: for yourself, remember
Humility is satisfied with penance
The Church inflicts. No private luxury!
Do not offend again.

[Exit.]

MARCOMIR.
 Not use the rod!
Not use it when I feel incitements rapid
As points of fire awake me to the knowledge
That all my flesh is burning! Every flint
Becomes a new temptation. How confess
To him I love his wife, and guiltily!
O Geneviva, do the swans still crowd
Round you to feed them? Are you mistress still
In the old palace? Can there be a doubt?
If Pepin dare insult you—O this frock,
This girdle, not a sword belt! And your husband
Who brought you to such peril with his dreams,
Let the light wake him!

[Marcomir unlocks the prison-door, flings it open and draws back behind
the trellis of vines.]
CARLOMAN.

What has struck my eyes?

Is it the air, the sun, an open door?
Oh, it is dark with brightness, and half-blinds,
So rushing in! I would have been with God
When the light broke in answer to His cry;
I would have seen it pushing its broad leaves
Through Chaos as it travelled!—

MARCOMIR.

[advancing] I am come
To give you freedom.

CARLOMAN.
[seizing his hand like a boy]
Are the throstles fledged
I left within the orchard?

MARCOMIR.

They are gone ...

Besides, we must not wander—recollect!

CARLOMAN.

I do; I was a goatherd on those hills

Before my punishment [pointing to the prison].
How sad you look! Come with me; I will show you
The flock of goats leaping from crag to crag—
And have you ever drunk their milk? It foams;
Its thousand little bubbles seem themselves
Full of an airy life, and in the smack
Of the warm draught something exhilarates
And carries one along. Come to the hills!

MARCOMIR.

Dear Carloman—

CARLOMAN.

These cloisters are so dull

Where you sit brooding morn and eve; beyond
One sees the clouds laying their restless fingers
Across the scaurs.

MARCOMIR.
 But is that meditation,
And does one so find peace?

CARLOMAN.

The dew is there

In the green hollows; when I see those steeped
And shining fields, my heart fills to the brim,
And, though I yearn, my yearning satisfies.
Come with me: fast as I attain, with you
I share the secret.

MARCOMIR.

But you strike me dumb.

You have forgotten, we are bound by vows,
By our obedience.

CARLOMAN.

Are we bound by hopes,

By yesterday’s lost hopes?

MARCOMIR.

But promises—

CARLOMAN.

I promised to be God’s, ah yes, I promised,

As two on earth agree to be together
For evermore, vowed lovers. Is the marriage
In the companionship or in the vow?
Why, Geneviva is still vowed my wife.
 MARCOMIR.

But we must keep our troth.

CARLOMAN.

We must escape
From anything that is become a bond,
No matter who has forged the chain,—ourselves,
An enemy, a friend: and this escape,
This readjustment is the penitence,
The sole that I will practise.
[looking more narrowly at Marcomir] But your eyes
Are witheringly remorseful. One would say
That you had been some sunshines in the dark,
You, and not I. Open your heart to me.

MARCOMIR.

I hate you.

CARLOMAN.

Hate me, why? For heresy?

MARCOMIR.

No, for your blindness: think what you have done,

Think of ... at least, think of your only child
Mewed within convent walls.

CARLOMAN.

There is escape.

MARCOMIR.
 What, for a child?

CARLOMAN.

[clenching his hand] Per Baccho, but my son

Shall never wear a tonsure.

MARCOMIR.

Time will prove!

You stand so free and noble in the light
Yet it is you who brought me to despair.
One cannot be a fool, one of God’s fools,
Unconscious of the ill in others’ hearts,
And not breed deadly mischief.

CARLOMAN.

I entreated
You would not come with me.

MARCOMIR.

You drew me on;

You cannot help it, you make life so royal
Men follow you and think they will be Kings,
And then—

CARLOMAN.

What ails you?

MARCOMIR.
 Have you watched the lepers?
Waiting outside the churches to be blest?—
They pray, they linger, they receive their God,
And yet depart uncleansed.
Do not continue
To question me, but listen. Bend your eyes
Full on me! I have never told the Prior,
I cannot; and I would not breathe it now
But for her sake. The lady Geneviva
Is spotless; but my thoughts have been defiled.
I love her, I have never won her love,
Must never strive to win it. It is hell
To think of her.

CARLOMAN.

You never won her love?

MARCOMIR.

Never.

CARLOMAN.

She had so many favourites,

Poor boy! and you were thwarted.

MARCOMIR.

But her bond,

My deep disloyalty!

CARLOMAN.
 No more of this—

MARCOMIR.

If I were in the world, it is to her

I should return.

CARLOMAN.

The doors are strongly barred:

There is no other hindrance.

MARCOMIR.

They are come

The brethren and the prior: you must kneel
And then be reinstated. I forgot.

[Enter Damiani and a number of monks.]

DAMIANI.

Brother, we have great joy in your release,

And hasten to embrace you. Own your fault
Submissively, then rise and take your place
In our rejoicing band.

CARLOMAN.

I will not kneel.

DAMIANI.

Respect your vow.

 CARLOMAN.

But there is no such thing—

A vow! as well respect the case that sheathes
The chrysalis, when the live creature stirs!
We make these fetters for ourselves, and then
We grow and burst them. It is clear no man
Can so forecast the changes of his course
That he can promise so I will remain,
Such, and no other. Words like these are straws
The current plays with as it moves along.

DAMIANI.

My brethren, do not listen; he is mad.

CARLOMAN.

No, you are mad; you cannot see that Time

Is God’s own movement, all that He can do
Between the day a man is born and dies.
Listen a little: is there one of you
Who looks upon the sunlight and the buds
That moss the vines in March, and does not feel
Now I am living with these changeful things;
The instant is so golden for us all,
And this is life? Think what the vines would be
If they were glued forever, and one month
Gave them a law—the richness that would cease,
The flower, the shade, the ripening. We are men,
With fourscore years for season, and we alter
So exquisitely often on our way
To harvest and the end. It must be so.

DAMIANI.
 Is this what darkness and strict punishment
Have wrought in the corruption of your mind?

CARLOMAN.

I lay as seeds lie in the prison-house,

Dying and living—living evermore,
Pushed by a spark of time to join the hours,
To go along with them.

A MONK.

But, brother, this

Is overwhelming.

MARCOMIR.

Sin, can that be dropped?

CARLOMAN.

Never, there is no need. Life seizes all

Its own vile refuse, hurries it along
To something different; religion makes
The master-change, turning our black to white;
But so, as from earth’s foulness, the stem drains
Corruption upward, and the cleanly flower
Waves like a flame at last.

MARCOMIR.

O Carloman,
My brother, I am saved!

[The monks press round Carloman tumultuously.]

 CARLOMAN.

But all of you

Be saved, and on the instant! Yes, the prior,
You all of you, do not believe me mad.
It is your misery, I think, that more,
More than the urgent torment of my soul
Has brought me to the truth, the healing truth
That we must give our natures to the air,
To light and liberty, suppressing nothing,
Freeing each passion: we have slaves within,
So many slaves, and I have learnt that saints
Have dungeons that they dare not look into,
The horror is so deadly. Force the locks,
Let the fierce captives ravage. Better far
Murder and rapine in the city-streets,
Than lust and hatred’s unfulfilled desires!
Be saved; strike free into the world—come out!
Oh, you can do it—I have spoken truth,
I see that by your faces.

OLD MONK.

[touching Damiani’s shoulder] Surely, prior,

We must arrest this traitor.

DAMIANI.
[in a whisper] Half the brethren
Are in the chapel: I will bring them down
In mass on these insurgent novices.
[aloud] Children, I leave you: wrestle with temptation;
I now can only aid you with my prayers.
When you have heard him through, decide; and either
Lead him in chains to me; or if his lies
Prevail with you, then put me in your prisons,
And let the devil rule.
[to Carloman] Now do your worst
With your blaspheming tongue.

[Exit.]

OLD MONK.

We should be fools
To listen to him—it is mutiny;
And there are walled-up dungeons.

CARLOMAN.

No, the hills

For all, if all are reckless; it is just
The one that fears who is the traitor-foe
Imperilling brave men.

Ist OLD MONK.

But how break free?

CARLOMAN.
 How? All of us march with a single mind
Making a strong procession from the gates.

2nd OLD MONK.

The Church has soldiers: whither could we go

Unarmed and with an angry multitude ...

Ist OLD MONK.

Whither?

3rd OLD MONK.

Besides we are not of one mind

Now he stops preaching; it was like a spell.

4th OLD MONK.

The heretic!

OLD MONK.

Tush! ’Tis the kind of frenzy

That seizes every novice. Carloman,
Will you not hear my voice?

CARLOMAN.

No, good old monk,

God’s servants must not listen but to Him.
You have grown comfortable as the years
Rolled on,—no matter. What the novice suffers,
What every novice suffers, speak of that.
 OLD MONK.

I have forgotten it.

CARLOMAN.

You can forget

What you have suffered; then ’tis waste of time
To listen to you. What we suffer once
In youth—in childhood and our secret youth,
We suffer to our grave.
[turning to another monk] Have you forgotten?

Ist OLD MONK.

No, but the pain is numb, so long ago

My parents spoilt my life to have their will;
I must endure the best they could conceive,
And save their souls.

CARLOMAN.

If you should lose your own!

A curse on parents! The one truth that led me
To seek the cloister was my certitude
A man’s existence lodges in himself
And is not owned by kindred.

OLD MONK.

Gently, brother,
You had your way, and made yourself a monk;
Now you are all for change—so is the world
For bitter change.

Ist OLD MONK.

 My mistress has been married,
And would but laugh at me.

OLD MONK.

Time works such wonders

If we will give him time to work them in.

IST MONK.

It is too late.

CARLOMAN.

A maxim for the dead.

It never is too late for any seeing,
For any recognition we are wrong.
It is a man’s despair, not his confession
Proves him contemptible. Too late, you say,
Too late—but there are countries where ’tis spring
And harvest many times within the year.
Besides, we must not tarry in a place
The moments do not wash with dew; we wither,
Death has his secret will with us. Believe!
Act on the instant.

OLD MONK.

The high gates are barred,

And yonder is the Prior.

[Damiani, with Rachis and a large troop of monks, is seen coming from the
Chapel.]
CARLOMAN.
 The gates are strong;
But you and I and all of us can pass
Through them in simple triumph if we will—
With one consent.
Why, they are opening now!
How gloriously! Armed riders!

[Enter Astolph with a band of Lombard soldiers.]

MONKS.

Miracle!
A sign from God.

CARLOMAN.

Not one of you shall come.

What, flocking to my side because a door
Turns on its hinges—shame!

ASTOLPH.

Where’s Carloman?

DAMIANI.

[advancing] Who asks?

ASTOLPH.

The King of Lombardy.

Give place!

CARLOMAN.
 My saviour!

ASTOLPH.

Are you Carloman the Frank?

I like you—yes, your face is eloquent.
You do not keep your eyes upon the ground,
Like this dear relative.

CARLOMAN.

[staring fixedly at Astolph] You glitter so,

You glitter like the golden Vines, your hair
Is gold, your armour full of spokes and rays.

ASTOLPH.

And you are muffled in a sackcloth-bag;

The contrast strikes you.
[to Damiani] Lunatic?

DAMIANI.

And worse—
A rebel, an apostate, noble prince,
For whom I bring these manacles.

ASTOLPH.
 And I
An extra horse; for, lunatic or sane,
I must have speech with——

[turning to Carloman with a laugh]

Do you know your name?

We who are kings and soldiers know it well,
And Christendom remembers. Ah, I see!
You are not happy, so they call you mad.

RACHIS.

Have you no word for me? I am a King,

A King discrowned—and more, you have my crown.
Are you grown sick of it?

ASTOLPH.

My dear old Rachis,

Do not look covetous! I am not come
To take you from your prayers.

RACHIS.

You think you triumph,

But when you roll your thirsty tongue in hell,
And see me in the peace of Abraham’s bosom,
Watching your pain—

ASTOLPH.
 To every dog his day!
[with a shudder]
Ah, then—meanwhile there is a blowing wind,
And all the world to ravish ... Carloman,
We are the brothers now ... [to Damiani] Yes, I and this
[Rachis sneaks off, hissing curses.]
Fraternal soul, your madman.

DAMIANI.

Do you need
An interview?

ASTOLPH.

I take it, thank you. Glance

A moment at my soldiers—and retire.

[They all withdraw.]

Come to the well, where we can sit and talk,

And I can have a draught.

[He looses his helmet and dips it in the well. Carloman puts both hands
round it as soon as it is full of water.]
CARLOMAN.

Wait! [drinking] Cool and strong!

That prison-stuff was stagnant. Sunshine’s warmth,
The cool of water, how they both refresh!
[looking up with a smile]
Now, brilliant one, your business?