CHAPTER XIIIROME

“Si tu veux faisons un rêve,Montons sur deux palefrois;Tu m’emmènes, je t’enlève,L’oiseau chante dans les bois.Je suis ton maître et ta proie;Partons, c’est la fin du jour;Mon cheval sera la joie;Ton cheval sera l’amour.”

“Si tu veux faisons un rêve,Montons sur deux palefrois;Tu m’emmènes, je t’enlève,L’oiseau chante dans les bois.

“Si tu veux faisons un rêve,

Montons sur deux palefrois;

Tu m’emmènes, je t’enlève,

L’oiseau chante dans les bois.

Je suis ton maître et ta proie;Partons, c’est la fin du jour;Mon cheval sera la joie;Ton cheval sera l’amour.”

Je suis ton maître et ta proie;

Partons, c’est la fin du jour;

Mon cheval sera la joie;

Ton cheval sera l’amour.”

Ritz and the well-dressed crowd, and the raw November air, and the gloom of the war, the depression and the discomfort all disappeared.

“Nous ferons toucher leurs têtes;Les voyages sont aisés;Nous donnerons à ces bêtesUne avoine de baisers.Viens! nos doux chevaux mensongesFrappent du pied tous les deux,Le mien au fond des songesEt le tien au fond des cieux.Un bagage est nécessaire;Nous emporterons nos vœux,Nos bonheurs, notre misère,Et la fleur de tes cheveux.”

“Nous ferons toucher leurs têtes;Les voyages sont aisés;Nous donnerons à ces bêtesUne avoine de baisers.

“Nous ferons toucher leurs têtes;

Les voyages sont aisés;

Nous donnerons à ces bêtes

Une avoine de baisers.

Viens! nos doux chevaux mensongesFrappent du pied tous les deux,Le mien au fond des songesEt le tien au fond des cieux.

Viens! nos doux chevaux mensonges

Frappent du pied tous les deux,

Le mien au fond des songes

Et le tien au fond des cieux.

Un bagage est nécessaire;Nous emporterons nos vœux,Nos bonheurs, notre misère,Et la fleur de tes cheveux.”

Un bagage est nécessaire;

Nous emporterons nos vœux,

Nos bonheurs, notre misère,

Et la fleur de tes cheveux.”

We heard the champing of the steeds in an enchanted forest,the song of the calling bird, and the laughter of adventurous lovers.

“Viens, le soir brunit les chênes,Le moineau rit; ce moqueurEntend le doux bruit des chaînesQue tu m’as mises au cœur.Ce ne sera point ma fauteSi les forêts et les monts,En nous voyons côte à côte,Ne murmurent pas: Aimons!Viens, sois tendre, je suis ivre.O les verts taillis mouillés!Ton soufle te fera suivreDes papillons réveillés.”

“Viens, le soir brunit les chênes,Le moineau rit; ce moqueurEntend le doux bruit des chaînesQue tu m’as mises au cœur.

“Viens, le soir brunit les chênes,

Le moineau rit; ce moqueur

Entend le doux bruit des chaînes

Que tu m’as mises au cœur.

Ce ne sera point ma fauteSi les forêts et les monts,En nous voyons côte à côte,Ne murmurent pas: Aimons!

Ce ne sera point ma faute

Si les forêts et les monts,

En nous voyons côte à côte,

Ne murmurent pas: Aimons!

Viens, sois tendre, je suis ivre.O les verts taillis mouillés!Ton soufle te fera suivreDes papillons réveillés.”

Viens, sois tendre, je suis ivre.

O les verts taillis mouillés!

Ton soufle te fera suivre

Des papillons réveillés.”

In the second line of the last stanza quoted:

“O les verts taillis mouillés!”

her voice suddenly changed its key and passed, as it were, from a minor of tenderness to an abrupt major of childlike wonder or delighted awe; it half broke into something between a sob of joy and a tearful smile; we saw the dew-drenched grasses and the gleaming thickets, and then as she said the two next lines the surprise died away in mystery and an infinite homage:

“Was it love or praise?Speech half asleep or song half awake?”

“Was it love or praise?

Speech half asleep or song half awake?”

And when further on in the poem she said:

“Allons nous en par l’Autriche!Nous aurons l’aube à nos fronts;Je serai grand, et toi riche,Puisque nous nous aimerons,”

“Allons nous en par l’Autriche!

Nous aurons l’aube à nos fronts;

Je serai grand, et toi riche,

Puisque nous nous aimerons,”

we heard the call of youth, the soaring of first love, the spirit of adventure, of romance, and of spring. When she came to the last stanza of all:

“Tu sera dame, et moi comte;Viens, mon cœur s’épanouit,Viens, nous conterons ce conteAux étoiles de la nuit,”

“Tu sera dame, et moi comte;

Viens, mon cœur s’épanouit,

Viens, nous conterons ce conte

Aux étoiles de la nuit,”

she opened wide her raised arms, and one could have sworn a girl of eighteen, “April’s lady,” was calling to her “lord in May.”

When she had done, a great many people in the audience were crying; the applause was deafening, and she had to saythe whole poem over a second time, which she did, with the same effect on the audience.

Another occasion which I shall never forget was the first night that she playedHamletin Paris. The audience was brilliant and hypercritical, and the play was received coldly until the first scene between Polonius and Hamlet. When Hamlet answers Polonius’s question: “What do you read, my Lord?” with his “Words, words, words,” Sarah Bernhardt played it like this. (She was dressed and got up like the pictures of young Raphael, with a fair wig; she was the soul of courtesy in the part, a gentle Prince.) Hamlet was lying on a chair reading a book. The first “des mots” he said with an absent-minded indifference, just as anyone speaks when interrupted by a bore; in the second “des mots” his answer seemed to catch his own attention, and the third “des mots” was accompanied by a look, and charged with an intense but fugitive intention: something

“between a smile and a smothered sigh,”

with a break in the intonation, that clearly said: “Yes, it is words, words, words, and all books and everything else in life and in the whole world is only words, words, words.” This delicate shadow, this adumbration of a hint was instantly seized by the audience from the gallery to the stalls; and the whole house cried: “Bravo! bravo!” It was a fine example of the receptivity, the flair, and the corporate intelligence of a good French audience.

Personally I think her Hamlet was one of the four greatest achievements of her career. I will come to the others later. Excepting Sir Johnston Forbes Robertson’s Hamlet, it was the only intelligible Hamlet of our time. One great point of difference between this Hamlet and that of any other actors I have seen is, whereas most Hamlets seem isolated from the rest of the players, as if they were reciting something apart from the play and speaking to the audience, this Hamlet spoke to the other persons of the play, shared their life, their external life, however wide the spiritual gulf might be between them and Hamlet. This Hamlet was in Denmark; not in splendid isolation, on the boards, in order to show how well he could spout Shakespeare’s monologues, or that he was an interesting fellow.

Another point: her Hamlet is the only one I have seen inwhich there was real continuity, in which one scene seemed to have any connection with the preceding scenes.

She had already shown what she could do in the progression of a single scene by crescendo, diminuendo transition, and modulation, in the dialogue with Ophelia—“Get thee to a nunnery.” The transition between the tenderness of “Nymph, in thy orisons be all my sins remembered,” and the brutality of “I have heard of your paintings too, well enough,” was made plausible by Hamlet catching sight of the King and Polonius in the arras—a piece of business recommended, I think, by Coleridge; but the naturalness and the progression of this scene were a marvel; the profound gravity and bitterness with which she spoke the words: “I am myself indifferent honest: but I could accuse me of such things, that it were better my mother had not borne me: I am very proud, revengeful, ambitious.” One seemed to be overhearing Shakespeare himself in a confessional when she said that speech, and the cynicism of the final words of the scene were whispered and hissed with a withering, blighting bitterness, her voice sinking to a swift whisper, as though all the utterance of the body has been exhausted, and these words were the cry of a broken heart. But an example of what I mean by the continuity of the interpretation is when the play within the play is finished, when Hamlet breaks up the whole entertainment by his startling behaviour. In that scene Sarah Bernhardt was like a tiger; her glance transfixed and pierced through the King, and towards the end of the play within the play she crept across the stage and climbed up on to the high, raised, balconied dais on the right of the stage, from which he was looking on, and stared straight into his face with the accusing, questioning challenge of an avenging angel. But the point I want to make is this: when that scene is over, most players take the interview with Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, which follows immediately after it, as though nothing had happened. Not so Sarah Bernhardt; during the whole of this interview she played in a manner which let you see that Hamlet was still trembling with excitement from what had happened immediately before; and this not only brought out the irony and the point of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern’s flat conventionality, but gave the audience the sharp sensation that they were face to face with life itself. So was it throughouther Hamlet; each scene depended on all the others; and the various moods of the Dane succeeded one another, like clouds that chased one another but belonged to one sky, and not like separate slides of a magic lantern.

The fight with Laertes was terribly natural; the business of the exchange of swords, and the expression in Hamlet’s eyes when he realised, and showed that he had realised, that one of the swords was poisoned and now in his hands, which, in the hands of mediocre players, becomes so preposterously extravagant, was tremendous.

The whole performance was natural, easy, life-like, and princely, and perhaps the most poignant scene of all, and what is the most poignant scene in the play, if it is well played, was the conversation with Horatio, just before the final duel when Hamlet says: “If it be not to come, it will be now.” Sarah charged these words with a sense of doom, with the set courage that faces doom and with the underlying certainty of doom in spite of the courage that is there to meet it. It made one’s blood run cold.

Another occasion when Sarah Bernhardt’s acting seemed to me tremendous, was a performance ofLa Dame aux Caméliasnot long before the war. I had seen her play the part dozens of times, and during a space of twenty years both in Paris and in London. She was not well; she was suffering from rheumatism; the stage had to be marked out in chalk for her, showing where she could stand up. She was too unwell to stand up for more than certain given moments. I went to see her with a Russian actress who had seen her play in St. Petersburg or Moscow, and not been able to endure her acting; she had seen her walk through a part before an indifferent audience that wondered what her great reputation was founded on. We arrived late after the second act, and I went behind the scenes and talked to Sarah, and told her of this Russian actress. She played the last three acts in so moving and simple a manner, and the last act with such agonising poignancy and reserve that not only was my Russian friend in tears, but the actors on the stage cried so much that their tears discoloured their faces and made runnels in their grease paint.

As we went away my Russian friend said to me that was the finest bit of acting she had ever seen or hoped to see again.

Another time, I think it was 1896, I was present at aperformance ofMagdain Paris at the Renaissance Theatre by Sarah; in her own phrase,le Dieu était là, and I shall never forget the thrill that passed through the audience when Magda, at the thought of being separated from her child, let loose her passion, and spoke the elemental love of a mother defending her child. Here theadvocatus Diaboliwill chuckle and say something about “tearing a passion to pieces.” This was just what it was not. The tirade was concentrated and subdued, and it culminated in a whisper which had the vehemence of a whirlwind. The scene was interrupted by a spontaneous cry of applause. I have sometimes heard applause like this before and since, when Sarah Bernhardt has been acting, but I have never seen the art of any other actor or actress provoke so great and so loud a cry.

I said Sarah Bernhardt’s Hamlet was one of the four great achievements of her career. These are what I think were the others:

The greatest thing an actor or an actress can do is to create a poet. It used at one time to be said that Sarah Bernhardt had failed to do this. Yet the only really remarkable French dramatic poet of modern times, whose plays really moved and held the public, Edmond Rostand, was a creation of Sarah Bernhardt. The younger generation of his time, and some men of letters in France, but not all (Émile Faguet was a notable exception, and Jules Lemaître writes of his art with great discrimination), used to despise the verse of Edmond Rostand. But whatever anyone can say about the literary value of his work, there is no doubt about its dramatic value. Rostand may or may not have been a great poet or even a great artist in verse, but that he was a great poetical dramatist was proved by the only possible test—that of the rapturous enthusiasm of his audience, wherever and in whatever language his plays are performed. Since Victor Hugo, he is the one writer of our time, and the only writer in this century in the whole of Europe, who made a direct and successful appeal to the public, to the public in all countries where his plays were performed, and stirred and delighted them to the depths of their being through the medium of dramatic poetry. Surely this is no mean achievement; besides this, even among French critics, there are many who maintain that he is a genuine poet. Well, Sarah Bernhardt is in the main responsible for Rostand, forhad there been no Sarah there would have been noPrincesse Lointaine, and noCyrano(for it was Coquelin’s delight inLa Princesse Lointainewhich made him ask Rostand for a play), noSamaritaine, and noL’Aiglon.

This is one of the achievements of Sarah Bernhardt. Another and perhaps a more important achievement was accomplished before this—her resuscitation of Racine. Let everyone interested in this question get M. Émile Faguet’sPropos de Théâtre. M. Faguet shows with great wealth of detail and abundance of contemporary evidence that in the ’seventies, until Sarah Bernhardt played inAndromaqueandPhèdre, Racine’s plays were thought unsuited for dramatic representation. Even Sarcey used to say in those days that Racine was notun homme de théâtre. Sarah Bernhardt changed all this. She revealed the beauties of Racine to her contemporaries. She put new life into his plays, and by her incomparable delivery she showed off, as no one else can hope to do, the various and subtle secrets of Racine’s verse.

She did the same for Victor Hugo when she played Doña Sol and the Queen inRuy Bias. Théodore de Banville, in hisCamées Parisiens, says there could never be another Queen inRuy Biaslike Sarah, and that, whenever the words:

“Elle avait un petit diadème en dentelle d’argent”

are spoken, the vision of Sarah Bernhardt will rise, as though it were that of a real person, frail, slender, with a small crown set in her wonderful hair.

Yet, when all is said and done, Sarah Bernhardt’s supreme achievement is another and a fourth: her Phèdre. I do not think that anyone will disagree with this. It was inPhèdrethat she gave the maximum of beauty, and exhibited the whole range of her highest artistic qualities. InPhèdreher movements and her gestures, her explosions of fury and her outbursts of passion, were subservient to a commanding rhythm; from the moment Phèdre walked on to the stage trembling under the load of her unconfessed passion until the moment she descended into Hades,par un chemin plus lent, the spectator witnessed the building up of a miraculous piece of architecture, in time and not in space; and followed the progressions, the rise, the crisis, and the tranquil close of a mysterious symphony. Moreover, a window was opened for him wide on to the enchantedland: the realm of beauty in which there are no conflicts of times and fashions, but in which all who bear the torch have an equal inheritance. He saw a woman speaking the precise, stately, and musical language of the court of Louis XIV., who, by her utterance, the plastic beauty of her attitudes, and the rhythm of her movements, opened the gates of time, and beyond the veil of the seventeenth century evoked the vision of ancient Greece. Or, rather, time was annihilated, seventeenth-century France and ancient Greece, Versailles and Trézène, were merged into one; he was face to face with involuntary passion and the unequal struggle between it and reluctant conscience.

There was the unwilling prey of the goddess, “a lily on her brow with anguish moist and fever dew”; but at the sound of her voice and the music of her grief, perhaps we forgot all this, perhaps we forgot the ancient tales of Greece, and Crete, we forgot Racine and Versailles; perhaps we thought only of the woman that was there before us, who surely was something more than human: was it she who plied the golden loom in the island of Ææa and made Ulysses swerve in mid-ocean from his goal? Or she who sailed down the Cydnus and revelled with Mark Antony? Or she for whom Geoffroy Rudel sailed to Tripoli, and sang and died? Or she who haunted the vision but baffled the pencil of Leonardo da Vinci? Or she who excelled “all women in the magic of her locks,” and beckoned to Faust on the Brocken? She was something of all these things, an incarnation of the spirit that, in all times and in all countries, whether she be called Lilith or Lamia or La Gioconda, in the semblance of a “Belle Dame sans Merci,” bewitches the heart and binds the brain of man with a spell, and makes the world seem a dark and empty place without her, and Death for her sake and in her sight a joyous thing.

So used we to dream when we saw those harmonious gestures and heard that matchless utterance. Then the curtain fell, and we remembered that it was only a play, and that even Sarah Bernhardt must “fare as other Empresses,” and “wane with enforc’d and necessary change.”

Nevertheless, we give thanks—we that have lived in her day; for, whatever the future may bring, there will never be another Sarah Bernhardt:

“Yea, they shall say, earth’s womb has borne in vainNew things, and never this best thing again.”

“Yea, they shall say, earth’s womb has borne in vain

New things, and never this best thing again.”

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 wasMother 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 ofEdwin and Angelina, and of a most amusing novel calledSophy, 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 wordsde longues annéesoccurred, and Lord Currie said to me: “Don’t you think it is perhaps a little excessive to talk ofde longues annéesto a lady of eighty?” The expression was slightly toned down.

A few days later Mrs. Crawshay took me to see MadameRistori. 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 ofPaolo 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 theInfernoabout thedisiato 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 ofTristan 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 dayin 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 inThe 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 theTimesthe 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 abrilliant 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 thosewho 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 tâcherai 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 anddinner-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’Âme païenne; but his most characteristic book is probablyThe 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.

BesidesThe 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, orShelley. 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 thegaleriesof the Odéon a littleplaquette—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 theGymnase. 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 thebravurapassages. 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 ofreal people, and thatbravurapassages, however absurd their occurrence in a particular context, looked at from the point of view of reality, were not only legitimate, but came withauthorityif 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.

InThe Prisonhe 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 (whoadmired 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.

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 theblue 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;”

“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,”

“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.”

“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 Greekislands—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 Piræus. 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 Piræus, 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, withan 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 calledTropar(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.

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