i arrived in rome, after staying a few days on the way in london and in florence. in the drury lane pantomime that year, i think it was mother goose, dan leno played a harp solo, which i think is the funniest thing i ever saw on the stage. he had a subtle, early victorian, byronic way of playing, refined and panic-stricken, and he played with a keepsake expression, and with sensibility, as though he might suddenly have the vapours; he became confused and entangled with the pedals, and at one moment the harp—and it was a gigantic harp—fell right on to him.
rome in january was warm; one seldom needed more than a small wood fire. i had rooms at the embassy at the porta pia. the embassy garden is just within the old walls and is a trap of sun and beauty. the ambassador was lord currie. lady currie, his wife, was violet fane, the authoress of edwin and angelina, and of a most amusing novel called sophy, or the adventures of a savage, as well as of many books of poems.
the first secretary was rennell rodd. lord currie was not well, but he entertained a great deal.
shortly after i arrived, madame ristori celebrated her eightieth or her eighty-fifth birthday, and the ambassador asked me to write her a letter of congratulation in french. i did it, and at the end i said that lord currie hoped to be able to send her birthday greetings for many more years to come. i forget the exact phrase, but i know the words de longues années occurred, and lord currie said to me: “don’t you think it is perhaps a little excessive to talk of de longues années to a lady of eighty?” the expression was slightly toned down.
a few days later mrs. crawshay took me to see madame[246] ristori. she was a stately old lady with white hair and a beautiful voice, and i imagine mrs. siddons must have been rather the same kind of person. she talked of d’annunzio making a dramatic version of paolo and francesca; whether he had done so then or not, or whether he had only announced his intention of doing so, i forget. in any case madame ristori disapproved of the idea. she said dante had said all there was to say, and then she repeated the six crucial lines from the inferno about the disiato riso, and i never heard a more melodious human utterance.
talking of some other poetical play, she asked whether it was a tragedy or not. as we seemed to hesitate, she said: “if it’s in five acts, it’s a tragedy; if it’s in four acts, it’s a drama.”
the beauty of rome pierced me like an arrow the first day i spent there. on my first afternoon i drove to st. peter’s, the coliseum, the pincio, and the protestant cemetery, where shelley and keats are buried. i was not disappointed. a few days later i drove along the appian way into the campagna. it was a grey day, with a slight silver fringe on the blue hills, and alone in the desolate majesty of the plain, a shepherd tootled a melancholy tune on the flute, as sad as the shepherd’s tune in the third act of tristan und isolda. as we drove back, st. peter’s shone in a gleam of watery light, and i felt that i had now seen rome.
it was a pleasant embassy to serve at. diplomatic life was different at rome either from life in paris or copenhagen. society consisted of a number of small and separate circles that revolved independently of each other, but in which the members of one circle knew what the members of all the other circles were doing. the diplomats, and there were a great number of them, were most of them an integral part of roman society, and there were also many literary and artistic people whose circles formed part of the same system as that of the romans and of the diplomatic world.
lady currie lived in a world of her own. she seemed to look on at the rest of the world from a detached and separate observation post, from which she quietly noted and enjoyed the doings of others with infinite humour and serious eyes.
she had a quiet, plaintive, half-deprecating way of saying the slyest and sometimes the most enormous things. she left it to you to take them or leave them as you chose. one day[247] in the embassy garden the servants had surrounded a scorpion with a ring of fire to see whether, as the legend says, it would stab itself to death. “leave the poor salamander alone,” said lady currie; “it’s not its fault that it is a salamander. if it had its way it might have been an … ambassador.”
to have luncheon or dinner alone with her and lord currie was one of the most enjoyable entertainments in the world, when she would talk in the most unrestrained manner, and with gentle flashes of the slyest, the most cunning wit, and a deliciously funny seemingly careless but carefully chosen felicity of phrase.
she used to describe her extraordinary childhood and upbringing, which is depicted in the adventures of sophy, and her early adventures in london; and when she said anything particularly funny, she looked as if she was quite unconscious of the meaning of what she had said, as if it had been an accident. she was fond of poetry and used to read it aloud beautifully. she was equally fond of her dogs, and she made splendid use of them as a weapon against bores; by bringing them into the conversation, making them the subject of mock-serious and sentimental rhapsodies, dialogues, monologues, and dramas, and just when the stranger would be thinking, “what a silly woman this is,” there would be a harmless phrase, perhaps only one innocent word, which just gave that person a tiny qualm of doubt as to whether perhaps she was so silly after all. once when she was travelling to london at the time the restrictions against bringing dogs into england were first applied, she tried to smuggle her dog away without declaring its presence. the dog was detected, and there was some official who played a part in this story and in taking away her dog, whom lady currie said she would never forget. lady currie had a turkish maid who had told her of a turkish curse which, if spoken at an open window, had an unpleasant effect on the person against whom you directed it. she directed the curse against the man whom she considered to be responsible for depriving her of the dog. the next morning she was surprised and not a little startled to read in the times the death of this public official. she told me this story in london in 1904.
i went on with my russian lessons in rome, and i got to know a good many russians, among others m. and mme sazonoff, princess bariatinsky, and her two daughters, and a[248] brilliant old lady called princess ourousoff, who lived in a little flat and received almost every evening.
princess ourousoff had known tolstoy and been an intimate friend of tourgenev. she was immensely kind to me and contributed greatly to my education in russian literature. she read me poems by pushkin and introduced me to the prose and verse of many other russian authors. herr jagow was at the german embassy at this time, and he, too, was a friend of princess ourousoff’s. so there were at rome at this time two future ministers of foreign affairs, both of whom were destined to play a part in the war: herr jagow and m. sazonoff.
among the italians, my greatest friends were count and countess pasolini, who had charming rooms in the palazzo sciarra. count pasolini was an historian and the author of a large, serious, and valuable work on catherina sforza. his ways and his conversation reminded me of hamlet. his dignity and his high courtesy were mixed with the most impish humour, and sometimes he would glide from the room like a ghost, or suddenly expose some curious train of thought quite unconnected with the conversation that was going on round him. sometimes he would be unconscious of the numerous guests in the room, which was nearly always full of visitors from every part of europe; or he would startle a stranger by asking him what he thought of countess pasolini, or, if the conversation bored him, hum to himself a snatch of dante. sometimes he would be as naughty as a child, especially if he knew he was expected to be especially good, or he would say a bitingly ironical thing masked with deference.
one day an austrian lady came to luncheon who had rather a strange appearance and still stranger clothes. her hair was remarkable for its high lights, her cheeks and eyebrows for their frank, undisguised artificiality. when the lift porter saw her he was puzzled. her costume enhanced the singularity of her appearance, as she was dressed in pale green, with mermaid-like effects, and details of shells and seaweed. when she was ushered into the drawing-room, pasolini gazed at her with delighted wonder, concealing his amazement with a veil of mock admiration, quite sufficiently to hide it from her, but not well enough to conceal it from those who knew him intimately. she sat next to him at luncheon, and he was as charming and deferential as it was possible to be; but those[249] who knew him well saw that he was taking a cynical enjoyment in every moment of the conversation. when she went away he bowed low, kissed her hand, and said: “madame, je tacherai de vous oublier.”
count pasolini sometimes used to remind me of the fantastic, charming, cultivated, slightly eccentric people that anatole france sometimes allows to wander and discourse through his stories, especially in his early books. those who knew him used often to say if only he could meet anatole france, and if only anatole france could meet him. when the meeting did come off, at a dinner-party, the result was not quite successful. count pasolini knew what was expected of him, and looking at anatole france, who was sitting on the other side of the table, he said to his neighbour in an audible whisper: “qui est ce monsieur un peu chauve?”
one day i took an english lady to tea with him, and he was so enchanted with her beauty and wit that he said he must have a souvenir of her, and quite suddenly he cut off a lock of her hair with a pair of scissors; and this lock he kept in his museum, and he showed it to me years afterwards. his eyes were remarkable, they were so thoughtful, so wistful, so deep, so piercing, and so melancholy; and sometimes you felt he was not there at all, but on some other plane, pursuing a fantasy, or chasing a dream or a thought, and all at once he would gently let you into the secret of his day-dream by a sudden question or an unexpected quotation. at other times he would join hotly in the fray of conversation; dispute, argue, pour out fantastic monologues, and embroider absurd themes.
but whatever he said or did, in whatever mood he was, whether wistful, combative, naughty, perverse, lyrical, or fantastic, he never lost his silvery courtesy, his melancholy dignity. when i said he was like hamlet, i can imagine him so well looking at a skull and saying: “prithee, horatio, tell me one thing. dost think alexander looked o’ this fashion i’ the earth?” that is just the kind of remark he would suddenly make in the middle of a dinner-party. his thoughts and his dreams flitted about him like dragon-flies, and he sometimes caught them for you and let you have a fugitive glimpse of their shining wings.
at rome i got to know brewster very well. he lived in the palazzo antici mattei, and he often gave luncheon and[250] dinner-parties. i often dined with him when he was alone. his external attitude was one of unruffled serenity and olympian impartiality, but i often used to tell him that this mask of suavity concealed opinions and prejudices as absolute as those of dr. johnson. his opinions and tastes were his own, and his appreciations were as sensitive as his expression of them was original. he had the serene, rarefied, smiling melancholy of great wisdom, without a trace of bitterness. he took people as they were, and had no wish to change or reform them. he was catholic in his taste for people, and liked those with whom he could be comfortable. he was appreciative of the work of others when he liked it, a discriminating and inspiriting critic. while i was in rome, he published his french book, l’?me pa?enne; but his most characteristic book is probably the prison. some day i feel sure that book will be republished, and perhaps find many readers; it is like a quiet tower hidden in the side street of a loud city, that few people hear of, and many pass by without noticing, but which those who visit find to be a place of peace, haunted by echoes, and looking out on sights that have a quality and price above and beyond those of the market-place.
besides the prison, brewster wrote two other books in english, and a play in french verse, which he had not finished correcting when he died.
few people had heard of his books. he used never to complain of this. he once told me that his work lay in a narrow and arid groove, that of metaphysical speculation, in which necessarily but few people were interested. he talked of it as a narrow strip of stiff ploughland on which just a few people laboured. he said he would have far preferred a different soil, and a more fruitful form of labour, but that happened to be the only work he could do, the soil which had been allotted him. he was latin by taste, tradition, and education; a lover of rabelais, montaigne, ronsard, and villon, but seventeenth century french classics bored him. he disputed the idea that french was necessarily a language which necessitated perspicuity of expression and clearness of thought. he thought that in the hands of a poet like verlaine the french language could achieve all possible effects of vagueness, of shades of feeling, of overtones in ideas and in expression. he admired dante, goethe, byron, and keats, but not milton, wordsworth, or[251] shelley. he disliked wagner’s music intensely. it had, he said, the same effect on him as the noise of a finger rubbed round the edge of a piece of glass, and he said that he could gauge from the intensity of his dislike how keen the enjoyment of those who did enjoy it must be.
in 1906, discussing the revolutionary troubles of russia, he said to me: “all europe seems bent on proving that liberty is the tyranny of the rabble. the equation may work itself out more or less quickly, but it is bound to triumph.” and again: “as the intelligent are liberals, i am on the side of the idiots.” and in rome he often used to say to me that the fanaticism of free-thinkers and the intolerance of anti-clericals was to him not only more distasteful than the dogmatism of the orthodox, but appeared to him to be a more violent and a more tyrannous thing.
this description (in a letter written in 1903) of how he discovered verlaine’s poetry is extremely characteristic:
“in 1870 or ’71 i found in the galeries of the odéon a little plaquette—a few rough pages of verse. nobody that knew had ever heard of the author, and it was years before i saw his name mentioned in the press, or heard him talked of. but i had stored the name in my memory as that of a great poet. it was verlaine… perhaps verlaine’s friends told him that his verse was doubtless pretty, but that he had better write plays for the gymnase. certainly they never made him rich, and it is a chance, a mere chance, that he did not die unknown. if he had, it wouldn’t have harmed him. he had touched his full salary the moment he wrote them. i don’t believe garlands ever fall on the poet’s head. they collect round the neck of his ghost which stands in front of him, or behind. and the ghost bows and smiles or struts, and it is all so indifferent and so far-off to the other fellow, who sits, like verlaine, strumming rhythms on the table of a dirty little café.”
he believed in treating shakespeare’s plays like opera, and paying the greatest importance to the bravura passages. he deplored shakespeare being the victim of pedants and a national institution. he saw in shakespeare the renaissance poet and nothing else. he thought that any kind of realism was as out of place in shakespeare as in the libretto of an opera; that dramatic poems were not plausible things, nor exhibitions of[252] real people, and that bravura passages, however absurd their occurrence in a particular context, looked at from the point of view of reality, were not only legitimate, but came with authority if considered as lovely arias, duets, or concerted pieces.
this view of the production of shakespeare is now widely held, though unfortunately it is seldom practised; managers and players still try to make shakespeare realistic, and too often succeed in smothering his plays with scenery, business, and acting.
the most refreshing thing about brewster was that he was altogether without that exaggerated reverence for culture in general and books in particular that sometimes hampers his countrymen (he was an american) when they have been transplanted early into europe and brought up in france, italy, or england, and saturated with art and literature. he liked books; he enjoyed plays, poetry, and certain kinds of music; but he didn’t think these things were a matter of life and death. he enjoyed them as factors in life, an adjunct, an accompaniment, an interlude, just as he enjoyed a fine day; but he was never solemn and never pompous, and he knew how much and how little things mattered. he liked people for what they were, and not for what they did, or for what they achieved. the important thing in his eyes was not the quantity of achievement, or the amount of effort, but the quality of the life lived. with such ideas he was as detached from the modern world as a chinese poet or sage, not from the modern world, but rather from the world, for to the human beings who lived in it there never can have been a moment when the world was not modern, even in the stone age; and in the game of life he strove for no prize; the game itself was to him its own reward.
in the prison he writes: “there is a greater reward than any which the teachers can warrant; they might teach you to lead a decorous life, help you to learn the rules of the game, show you how to succeed in it. but the profit of the game itself, that which makes it worth playing at all, even to those who succeed best, this they can neither grant nor refuse; you bear it in yourselves, inalienably, whether you succeed or fail.”
i imagine that a man like dr. johnson might have said severe things about him, and i once heard a critic (who[253] admired and appreciated him) say it was a pity brewster was such an idle and ignorant man. but his ignorance was more suggestive than the knowledge of others, for he ignored not what he was unable to learn, but what he had no wish to learn, and his idleness was a benefit to others as well as to himself: a fertile oasis in an arid country. his mind had the message of the flowers that need neither to toil nor to spin.
in february 1902 pope leo the thirteenth celebrated his jubilee. i heard him officiate at mass at the sixtine chapel, and i also went—although i forget if this was later or not—to high mass at st. peter’s, when the pope was carried in on his chair and blessed the crowd. i had a place under the dome. at the elevation of the host the papal guard went down on one knee, and their halberds struck the marble floor with one sharp, thunderous rap, and presently the silver trumpets rang out in the dome. at that moment i looked up and my eye caught the inscription, written in large letters all round it: “tu es petrus,” and i reflected the prophecy had certainly received a most substantial and concrete fulfilment. not that at that time i felt any sympathy with the catholic church; indeed, it might not have existed for me at rome at that time. i thought, too, that the english catholic inhabitants of rome were on the look out for converts, and were busy casting their nets. of this, however, i saw no trace, although i met several of them at various times.
but that ceremony in st. peter’s would have impressed anyone. and when the pope was carried through st. peter’s, with his cortège of fan-bearers, and rose from his chair and blessed the crowd with a sweeping, regal, all-embracing gesture, the solemnity and the majesty of the spectacle were indescribable, especially as the pallor of the pope’s face seemed transparent, as if the veil of flesh between himself and the other world had been refined and attenuated to the utmost and to an almost unearthly limit.
during holy week i attended some of the ceremonies at st. peter’s, and i think what impressed me most was the blessing of the oils on maundy thursday, and the washing of the altar, when that great church is full of fragrant sacrificial smells of wine and myrrh, and when the vastness of the crowd suddenly brings home to you the immense size of the building which the scale of the ornamentation dwarfs to the eye.
[254]
in may i went to greece in a yacht belonging to madame de béarn. there were on board besides myself two austrians and a german professor called krumbacher. we started from naples and landed somewhere on the west coast, and went straight to olympia. as we landed we were met by a sight which might have come straight from the greek anthology: a fisherman spearing some little silver fishes with a wooden trident, and wading in the transparent water; and that water had the colour of a transparent chrysoprase—more transparent and deeper than a turquoise, brighter and greener than a chrysoprase. olympia was carpeted with flowers, and the fields were like persian carpets: white and mauve and purple, with the dark blood-red poppies flung on the bright green corn. at every turn sights met you that might have been illustrations to greek poems: a woman with a spindle; a child with an amphora on its head. the air was the most iridescent i have ever seen. at sunset time it was as if it was powdered with the dust of a million diamonds, and in the background were the wonderful blue mountains, and against the sky the small shapes of the trees.
at olympia, in the museum, the only intact or nearly intact masterpiece of one of the great greek sculptors has a little museum to itself: the hermes of praxiteles. there are still traces, faint traces, of the pink colour on some parts of the limbs, and even of faded gilding. the marble has the texture and ripple of live flesh; the statue is different in kind from all the statues in the vatican, the capitol, or the naples museum, and to see it is to have one of those impressions that are like shocks and take the breath away, and leave one stunned with admiration, wonder, and awe.
from olympia we went to tragic heights and rocks of delphi, where we saw the bronze statue of the charioteer, so magnificent in its effect and in its simplicity, and so startling in its trueness to the coachman type, for the face might be that of a hansom-cab driver; and from delphi to corinth and athens. the first sight of the acropolis and the parthenon takes the breath away; the parthenon is so much larger than one expects it to be; and the colour of the pillars is not white, but a tawny amber, as though the marble had been changed to gold. in the evening these pillars stand like large ghosts against the purple hills, that are dry, arid, like a volcanic crust. in the distance you see the[255] blue ocean. and byron’s lines, with which the “curse of minerva” opens:
“slow sinks, more lovely ere his race be run,
along morea’s hills, the setting sun;”
describe exactly what you see. byron is by far the most satisfactory singer of greece, for he wrote with his eye on the spot, and there is something in his verse of the exhilarating and incandescent quality of the greek air; something of the fiery strength of the greek soil, and of the golden warmth of the greek marbles.
and next to byron in this business i should put a widely different poet, heredia; but they both seize on the characteristic things in greek landscape; byron, when he says:
“yet these proud pillars claim no passing sigh,
unmoved the moslem sits, the light greek carols by,”
perhaps even more than heredia, when he writes:
“je suis né libre au fond du golfe aux belles lignes,
où l’hybla plein de miel mire ses bleus sommets.”
an architect once pointed out to me that one of the most striking instances of the greek fastidiousness in matters of art is to be found in the pavement of the parthenon, which is not quite flat, but which is made on a slight curved incline, so that the effect of perfect flatness to the eye should be complete. the curve cannot be detected unless the measurements are taken, showing, as the architect said to me, that the greeks aimed at the maximum of effect with the minimum of advertisement.
while i was at athens there was a scaffolding on the pediment of the parthenon. one could climb up and examine in detail the marbles spared by lord elgin, the wonderful horses and men which were wrought in the workshop of pheidias. i bought photographs of all this part of the frieze, and i used to have them later in my little house in london, which made my servant, who had been in the 10th hussars, remark to a lady who was doing some typing for me, that there were some very rum pictures in the house.
from athens we went to sunium, the whitest and most beautifully placed of the temples, and thence to the greek[256] islands—scyra, delos, and paros. the skipper of the yacht, who was like one of jacobs’ characters, made an elaborate plan for taking in professor krumbacher, whom he used to call “crumb-basket.” we were to go to rhodes later, and the skipper, by misleading him on the chart, led him to think the yacht was arriving at rhodes when in reality we were arriving at candia in crete. the professor believed him so absolutely and greeted the pretended rhodes with such certainty of recognition that it was difficult to undeceive him. i had to leave the expedition at scyra, to get back to rome, which i did by taking a passage in the only available steamer, a small, rickety, and extremely unreliable-looking craft, like a tin toy-boat. it was bound for some port not far from the pir?us. it had no accommodation to speak of, and it was overloaded with soldiers and with sheep, and both the sheep and the soldiers were sea-sick without stopping.
it was a rough passage and lasted all night and all the next morning. i stood on the little bridge the whole time, which was the only place where there was space to breathe. i was deposited somewhere on the coast, where the only train had left for athens. a tramp steamer called later, which was going on to the pir?us, and i got a passage in that. i stayed two more days in athens by myself. one afternoon while i was at the acropolis i met a peasant and had a little talk with him. i had with me in a little book sappho’s “ode to aphrodite,” and i asked him to read it aloud, which he did, remarking that it was in patois.
i went back to rome by corfu, where i stopped to see the todten-insel and the complicated classical villa of the german emperor.
as the summer progressed, i went for one or two delightful expeditions in the environs of rome. one was to limfa, which i think is the most magical spot i have ever seen. a deserted castle rises from a lake, which is entirely filled with water-lilies, tangled weeds, and green leaves. it was deserted owing to the malaria that infested it, but it is difficult to imagine it haunted by anything except fairies or water-nymphs.
in rome itself i often went for walks with vernon lee. she used to stay with countess pasolini, and take me to see out-of-the-way sights and places rich with peculiar association. i remember on one walk passing a little low wall by a stream, with[257] an image of a river god, which she said might have been the demarcation between two small kingdoms, the kind of limit that divided the kingdoms of romulus and remus; one afternoon we went to the pincio, and in the walks and trees of that enchanted garden we spoke of the past and the future and built castles in the air, or smoked what balzac called enchanted cigarettes, that is to say, talked of the books that never would be written.
lord currie went away before the summer, and rennell rodd was left in charge of the embassy. i got to know a quantity of people: russians, romans, americans, germans, austrians; and a stream of foreigners and english people poured through rome. i went on taking russian lessons and also lessons in modern greek, and slowly and gradually i made my first discoveries in russian literature written in the russian language. i read pushkin’s prose stories aloud, some of his poems, and alexis tolstoy’s poems, and some of tourgenev’s prose.
one of the poems that affected me like a landmark and eye-opener in my literary travels was a poem called tropar (tro-parion: a dirge for the dead), by alexis tolstoy. i think even a bald prose version will give some idea of the majesty of that poem.
hymn
“what delight is there in this life that is not mingled with earthly sorrow? whose hopes have not been in vain, and where among mortals is there one who is happy? of all the fruits of our labour and toil, there is nothing that shall last and nothing that is of any worth. where is the earthly glory that shall endure and shall not pass away? all things are but ashes, and a phantom, shadow and smoke. everything shall vanish as the dust of a whirlwind; and face to face with death, we are defenceless and unarmed; the hand of the mighty is feeble, and the commands of kings are as nothing. receive, o lord, thy departed servant into thy happy dwelling-place.
“death like a furious knight-at-arms encountered me, and like a robber he laid me low; the grave opened its jaws and took away from me all that was alive. kinsmen and children, save yourselves, i call to you from the grave. be saved, my brothers and my friends, so that you may not behold the flames of hell.[258] life is the kingdom of vanity, and as we sniff the odour of death, we wither like flowers. why do we toss about in vain? our thrones are all graves, and our palaces are but ruins. receive, o lord, thy departed servant into thy happy dwelling-place.
“amidst the heap of rotting bones, who is king or servant, or judge or warrior? who is deserving of the kingdom of god and who is the rejected and the evil-doer? o brothers, where is the gold and the silver, where are the many hosts of servants? who is a rich man and who is a poor man? all is ashes and smoke, and dust and mould, phantom and shadow and dream; only with thee in heaven, o lord, there is refuge and safety; that which was flesh shall perish, and our pomp fall in corruption. receive, o lord, thy departed servant into thy happy dwelling-place.
“and thou, who dost intercede on behalf of us all, thou, the defender of the oppressed, to thee, most blessed one, we cry, on behalf of our brother who lies here. pray to thy divine son. pray, o most pure among women, for him. grant that having lived out his life upon earth, he may leave his affliction behind him. all things are ashes, dust and smoke and shadow. o friends, put not your faith in a phantom! when, on some sudden day, the corruption of death shall breathe upon us, we shall perish like wheat, cut down by the sickle in the cornfields. receive, o lord, thy departed servant into thy happy dwelling-place.
“i follow i know not what path; half-hopeful, half-afraid, i go; my sight is dim, my heart has grown cold, my hearing is faint, my eyes are closed. i am lying sightless and without motion, i cannot hear the wailing of the brethren, and the blue smoke from the censer pours forth for me no fragrance; yet my love shall not die; and in the name of that love, o my brothers, i implore you, that each one of you may thus call upon god: lord, on that day, when the trumpet shall sound the end of the world, receive thy departed servant, o lord, into thy happy dwelling-place.”
looking back on that summer in rome, i shut my eyes now, and i see the campagna, with its prodigal wealth of tail grasses and gay wild flowers; its little sharp asphodels with their faint smell of garlic; the villa d’este, with its overgrown[259] terraces, and musical waterfalls, and tangled vegetation—the home of an invisible slumbering princess; and tivoli.
“tibur arg?o positum colono
sit me? sedes utinam senect?
sit modus lasso maris et viarum
militi?que.”
that was the first ode of horace i ever read when i was up to arthur benson, in remove, at eton. i remember wondering at the time, what sort of place tibur was, where horace, tired of journeys by land and by sea, and tired of wars and rumours of war, wished to build himself a final nest.
when i saw tivoli, with its divinely elegant waterfall, i understood his wish; nor could i imagine a more enchanting haven, a more complete and peaceful final goal for the end of a pilgrimage.
i see the lake of nemi, where the barges of tiberius—is it tiberius?—still rest beneath the water; and frascati, and the view from the roof of a house in the via—which via? i forget, but it was not far from porta pia; and from thence, in the red sunset, you saw st. peter’s; and i see the view of the whole city from the janiculum … more memories here, and older ones from macaulay … and the palatine by moonlight; the moon streaming on all the thousand fragments, and the few large plinths of the forum; and vernon lee saying that moonlight on the palatine sounded like a stage direction in a play of shelley’s; and i see the marbles coloured like some pale seaweed in santa maria in cosmedìn, and the peep at st. peter’s, through the keyhole of one of the college gardens, and the fountains in the moonlight, on the top of the hill, as you drive from the station, and the fountain of trevi into which i threw a penny, wishing that i might come back to rome, one day, but not as a diplomat; and the milanese shops in the corso, and the vast cool spaces of st. peter’s, on a hot day, when you swung back the heavy curtain; and the courtyard in brewster’s palace; and then the heat; the great heat when the shutters were shut, and one stayed indoors all day; and the arrival of an indian prince, whom we met in frock-coats, at six in the morning, at the railway station, and who turned out not to be a prince at all, but a man of inferior caste, and who drank far too much whisky, and far too little soda, in the embassy garden, and[260] became painfully loud and familiar; and at a little tea-party in my rooms, with brewster and someone else; a roman lady, looking like a renaissance picture, regal, stately, in a white fur and tippet; a lady with hosts of adorers, who, when she saw a book on the burmese or buddhism, on my table, called the hearts of men, said with a smile: “that is a subject, i think, i know something about”; and the roman women, no less majestic, but more vociferous, in the trastevere, or kneeling with the grace of sculpture before the pietà in st. peter’s.
to look back upon, it is all a wonderful dream-world of sunshine and flowers and beauty; but at the time, i did not really like rome. in spite of the many charming people i met there, in spite of the associations of the past, and the daily beauty of the present, i did not enjoy living at rome as a diplomat. there was a good deal to do at the embassy, and not a large staff, and i only once went for an expedition that lasted more than one day. besides which, a diplomat at rome was caught in a net of small social duties, visits, days on which one had to call at the embassies, cards to be left; one could not enjoy rome freely. besides which, i felt as if i were living in a cemetery, and i was oppressed by the army of ghosts in the air, the host of memories, so many crumbling walls and momentous ruins.
at the end of july, i went to russia, and spent three weeks at sosnofka, where the whole of the benckendorff family and one of their cousins were staying. i could now understand russian and read it without difficulty, and could talk enough to get on. i had come to the definite conclusion that i did not care for diplomacy as a career. i did not think then, and i do not think now, that it is worse than any other career. “il n’y a pas de sot métier,” and diplomacy, like anything else, is what you make it. but unless your heart is in the work, unless you like it for its own sake, you will never make anything of it, and i did not like it. i wanted literary work.
my first step was to try and get back to england. i applied for a temporary exchange into the foreign office and got it. i went back to london in january 1903, and worked in the foreign office, in the commercial department, for the rest of that summer. in the autumn, i went to russia once more, and spent most of my time translating a selection of leonardo da[261] vinci’s thoughts on art and life for the humanists’ library, published by the merrymount press, boston.
i wanted to devote myself to literature; but it was difficult to find an opening. i had little to show except a book of poems published in 1902, three articles in the encyclop?dia britannica, an article in the saturday review, and one in the national review.
i approached a publisher with the proposal of translating all dostoievsky’s novels, or those of gogol. but he said there would be no market for such books in england. dostoievsky had not yet been discovered, and in one of the leading literary london newspapers, even as late as 1905, he was spoken of in a long, serious article, as being a kind of xavier de montépin! gogol has not yet been discovered, and only one of his books has been adequately translated.
i cared for the foreign office even less than for diplomacy; and the only incident of interest i remember was one day when one of those toy snakes that you squeeze and shut up in a box, and which expand when released to an enormous size, and hurtle through the air with a scream, was circulated in the office in a red box. every department was taken in, in turn; and when it reached my department, i sent it up to the typists’ department, where it was opened by the head lady typist, a severe lady, who was so overcome that she at once applied for and received three weeks’ leave, as well as a letter of abject apology from myself.
i made up my mind to abandon diplomacy and the foreign office as a career, to go to russia, to study russian thoroughly, and then to make the most of my knowledge later, and to use it as a means for doing something in literature; but before doing this, i applied to be put en disponibilité for six months, and i went back to russia just after christmas in 1904.
count benckendorff had been appointed ambassador to london and had taken up his duties in january, 1903. all through the autumn of 1903, the political situation in the far east had given rise to anxiety. russia and japan seemed to be drifting into war. the russian government apparently did not want to go to war, but nobody in it had a definite policy; and the strings were being pulled by various incompetent adventurers in the far east. the japanese took advantage of this and brought matters to a head.
before i went to russia, i saw lord currie and lady currie[262] for the last time in london. lord currie had given up diplomacy. he did not believe there would be war, nor did many people at the foreign office, but they based their belief on what they thought were the wishes of the russian government. they knew nothing of the more definite intentions of the japanese, nor of the irresponsible factors among the russians in the far east.
i arrived at st. petersburg just after christmas.