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............