In front of the Ara Coeli I stood. A swarthy Italian was telling of
the dramatic death of Cola di Rienzi. His English was lightly worn,
but it seemed to please his audience, and it was for that purpose
they had paid their lire. The crazy-quilt language of the cicerone
and his audacious way of handling history, made him cut an attractive
figure in the eyes of most tourists, whose desires are amusement rather
than study. As a type, to use a phrase borrowed from the school of
psychological novelism, he was a study. To the student Rome is a city
of absorbing interest, to the ordinary American bird of passage a dull
place. It all depends on your point of view. If you are a scholar, a
collector of old lace, or a vandal, Rome is your happy hunting ground.
If these pursuits do not interest you, Roman beggars with all sorts
and conditions of diseases, sometimes by nature, mostly by art, Roman
fleas, and the gaunt ghosts of the Campagna quickly drive you from the
capital of the Cæsars and Popes. A few other annoyances might be added,
such as sour wine, whose mist fumes are not to be shriven by your
bottle-let of eau de Cologne, garlic on the fringe of decay, and the
provoking smell of salt fish in the last stage of decomposition. But
you have come to Rome; it is a name to conjure with, and despite the
drawbacks, you must have a glimpse, an ordinary bowing acquaintance,
with the famed old dame. At the office, an English office, in the
Piazza di Spagna, you have asked for a “droll guide.” Who could listen
to a scholarly one amid such active drawbacks as wine, fleas and fish?
Michael Angelo Orazio Pantacci is your man. What do you care for
good English? Did you not leave New York to leave it behind? What do
you care for Roman history? Pantacci is your man, and his lecture on
Cola di Rienzi is a masterpiece. A stranger joined our little crowd.
Pantacci at that moment had attained his descriptive high-water mark.
His pose and voice were touchingly dramatic. Cola was, as he expressed
it, “to perish.” The stranger smiled and passed on. His smile was a
composite affair. It was easy to see in it Michael Angelo’s historical
duplicity and our ignorant simplicity. The stranger was tall, with the
shoulders slightly stooping, a nose as near an approach to the Grecian
as an American may come, a heavy black mustache, ruddy cheeks, that
whispered of English food mellowed with the glowing Chianti. Who is
that man? I said to my companion, whose eyes had followed the stranger
rather than Pantacci. “That,” said he, “is Marion Crawford, the author
of the Saracenesca books. You remember reading them at Albano.” Tell
me something about him. He is a very clever man. Cola has perished;
let us leave Pantacci. On the way to Cordietti’s tell me something of
his life. He knows how to tell a story, an art hardly to be met with
in contemporary fiction. Fiction has abrogated to herself the whole
domain of life, and thus the art of telling a story for the story’s
sake is lost. Fiction has a mission. She freights herself with all
isms. Scott, Manzoni, even the great wizard of Spanish fiction, could
they live again, were failures. Introspection is the cult, and, happily
for their fame, they knew nothing of it. These great masters told us
how scenes of life were enacted. Why, they left to the inquisitive
and later-day brood of commentators. Since then the all absorbing
scientific spirit prevails, and we moderns brush away the delightful
humor of Dickens for the analytical puzzles of Henry James; the keen
satire of Thackeray for the coxcomberies of George Meredith. Fairy cult
interests none, modern children are ancient men. Scepticism is rampant,
and the cause of it is, in a great manner, due to the modern novelist.
This product of the 19th century world-spirit coolly tells us that
romance lies dead. Realism has taken her place. If we are to believe
the theories of its votaries, it is without an ideal—a mere anatomical
transcript of man. What this theory leads to is well illustrated by
the gutter filth of Zola and Catulle Mendes. It makes novel writing
a trade. One ceases to be astonished at the output, if he thoroughly
grasps the difference between a tradesman and an artist. Trade is a
word much used by realists. Grant Allen, writing of that realistic
necromancer, Guy de Maupassant, has nothing apter to define his
position than the phrase “he knows his trade.” In point of fact, Grant
Allen enunciates a truth in this phrase, one that might be carried
still further, by saying that his whole school are journeymen laborers,
tradesmen, if you prefer, turning out work, tasteless and crude, at the
bidding of the erubescent young person of the period. It is readily
assumed that work of this kind is not, despite the word-jugglery of
their school, realism. It does not deal with the true man, but with
a phrase, and that abnormal. A better phrase in use in speaking of
the works of this school is, “literature of disease.” The artist who
lives must have a model, and that we call the ideal. The nearer he
approaches this the more lasting his work. All the great artists had
ideals. Workmen may be guided by the rule of thumb. The first lesson a
great artist learns is, “The art that merely imitates can only produce
a corpse; it lacks the vital spark, the soul, which is the ideal, and
which is necessary in order to create a living organic reality that
will quicken genius and arouse enthusiasm throughout the ages.” The
gulf between the trade-novelist and the artist-novelist is of vital
importance. The former believes that art is simply imitation, the
latter, that art is interpretation. One is a stone-cutter, the other a
sculptor.
Crawford’s canon is that art is interpretative, not imitative, and,
moreover, he has a story to tell and tells it for the story’s sake. He
has no affinity with that school so pointedly described by the Scotch
novelist, Barrie, as the one “which tells, in three volumes, how Hiram
K. Wilding trod on the skirt of Alice M. Sparkins without anything
coming of it.” “Cordietti’s,” said my friend, “give the order and I
will tell you what I know of Crawford.” Paulo, said I to the waiter,
some Chianti, and—well, a pigeon. “Crawford,” said my friend, “was born
in Rome about thirty-five years ago. His career has been a strange one,
full of life. His early years were spent in Rome, where his father was
known as a sculptor, his boyhood in the vicinity of Union Square, his
early manhood in England and India. In the latter country he was the
editor, proof-reader, typesetter of a small journal in the natives’
interest. As such he was a thorn to the notorious freak, Blavatsky.
Crawford is an American by inheritance, an Italian by breeding, an
Englishman by training, an Indian by virtue of writing about India
with the knowledge of a native. In 1873, by the financial panic, Mrs.
Crawford lost her large fortune, and Marion was forced to shift for
himself. He became a journalist, and as such wandered over most of
the interesting part of the globe. On his return to New York, at the
request of his uncle, Sam Ward, the epicurean, who had discerned his
kinsman’s rare power of story-telling, he wrote his first book, Mr.
Isaacs. It was a success. Of the writing of that book, Crawford has
told us it was “very curious. I did not imagine that I possessed a
faculty for story-writing, and I prepared for a career very different
from the career of a novelist. Yet I have found that all my early life
was an unconscious preparation for that work. My boyhood was spent
in Rome, where my parents had lived for many years. There I was put
through the usual classical training—no, it was not the usual one, for
the classics are much better taught in Italy than in this country. A
boy in Italy by the time he is twelve is taught to speak Latin, and his
training is so thorough that he can read it with ease. From Rome I went
to Cambridge, England, and remained at the university several years.
Then I studied for a couple of years at the German universities. During
this time I went in for the sciences, and I expected to devote myself
to scientific work. Finally I went off to the East, where I did a good
deal of observing, and continued my studies of the Oriental languages,
in which I had taken considerable interest. It was while I was in the
East that I met Jacobs, the hero of Mr. Isaacs. Many of the events I
have recorded in Mr. Isaacs were the actual experiences of Jacobs.”
The writing of his first novel occupied the months of May and June,
1882; it was published the same year, and at once established its
author in the front rank of living American writers of fiction. Since
then Crawford has written twenty volumes of fiction. Crawford is frank
and he tells us how he manages to produce in a few years the amount
of an ordinary lifetime. “By living in the open air, by roughing it
among the Albanian mountaineers, wandering by the sunny olive slopes
and vineyards of Calabria, and by taking hard work and pot luck with
the native sailors on long voyages in their feluccas,” are the means
of the novelist to hold health and make his pen work a laxative
employment. In these picturesque journeys, he lays the foundation of
his stories, makes the plots and evolves the characters. He does not
believe in Trollope’s idea of sitting down, pen in hand, and keep on
sitting until at its own wild will the story takes ink. The story in
these excursions has been fully fashioned, and it becomes but a matter
of penmanship to record it. How quickly this is done may be seen from
the rapid writing of the novelist, which averages 6,000 words the
working day. This rapid composition has its defects, defects that are
in some measure compensated by the photographic views of the life and
manners of the people. These views are in the rough, but they are truer
than when toned down. Poetry needs paring. The greatest novels have
been those that came like Crawford’s, fresh from the brain, and were
hastily despatched to the printer. Scott did not mope over the sheets.
Thackeray’s were written to the tune of “more copy.” Your American
critic, Stoddard, says:—“That Crawford is a man with many talents, and
with great fertility of invention, is evident in every story that he
has written. He has written more good stories and in more diverse ways
than any English or American novelist. It does not seem to matter to
him what countries or periods he deals with, or what kind of personages
he draws, he is always equal to what he undertakes.” It may interest
you, in ending this biographic sketch, to add that he is a convert to
the Catholic Church, and with the American critic’s idea in view, a
cosmopolitan. I was not astonished by the former information. To those
who know Italy and Mr. Crawford’s wonderful drawing of it, there could
be but one opinion, that the faith of the novelist was the same as that
of his characters. No Protestant novelist, no matter how many years he
had lived in Italy, could have drawn the portraits that play in the
Saracenesca pages. One of his friends had this in his mind’s eye when
he wrote of the superiority of the novelist’s writings on Italy over
those of his countrymen. This writer tells us that “Crawford added the
indispensable advantage of being a Catholic in religion, a circumstance
that has not only allowed him a truer sympathy with the life there,
but has afforded him an open sesame to many things which must be
sealed books to Protestants.” As to my friend’s summing up Crawford as
a cosmopolitan, in the every-day meaning of that word, I take issue.
Cosmopolitan novelist is one who can produce a three-volume novel,
whose scenes are laid in all the great centers of commerce, while
he sits calmly in his library. No previous study of his novelistic
surroundings are necessary. Does the age want the beginning of the plot
in Cairo or Venice, half-way at Tokio, and a grand finale beyond the
Gates Ajar? Your novelist is ready to turn out the regulation type
with the greatest ease. Cosmopolitan novel-writing is simply a trade.
The living through of local and artistic impressions, the study of
types in their environment, the color of surroundings are unnecessary.
Imagination, divorced from nature study, is left to guide the way.
Once Crawford followed this school, and the result was “An American
Politician,” the “worst novel ever produced by an American.” Had
Crawford been a tradesman he might have produced a passable book, but
being an artist, he failed, not knowing what paint to mix in order
to get the coloring. The difference between an artist and tradesman,
the one must go to nature direct, the other takes her secondhand. No
artist can catch the lines of an Italian sunset from a studio window
in London. “Art is interpretive, not imitative.” Crawford is only a
novelist in the true sense when he knows his characters and their
surroundings. This is amply proven in the charming volumes that make
his Saracenesca series. Here he is at home, so to speak. The Rome
of Pius IX, with its struggles, its ambitions, the designs of wily
intriguers, the fall of the temporal power of the Papacy, the rise of
an united Italy, the flocking to Rome of the scourings and outcasts of
the provincial cities, the money-mad schemes of daring but ignorant
speculators, and over all the lovely blue Italian sky, rise before us
in all their minuteness at the biddance of Marion Crawford. His work is
hardly inferior to genuine history; “for it affords that insight into
the human mind, that acquaintance with the spirit of the age, without
which the most minute knowledge is only a bundle of dry and meaningless
facts.” Who that knows Rome of the Popes and Rome of the Vandals will
not feel heavy-hearted at these lines?
“Old Rome is dead, too, never to be old Rome again. The last breath has
been breathed, the aged eyes are closed forever, corruption has done
its work and the grand skeleton lies bleaching on seven hills, half
covered with the piecemeal stucco of a modern architectural body. The
result is satisfactory to those who have brought it, if not to the rest
of the world. The sepulchre of old Rome in the new capital of united
Italy.” The exclusiveness of the patrician families of Rome, families
that a brood of novelists pretend to draw life-like, is happily hit by
the painter Gouache.
Gouache, long resident in Rome, being asked what he knows of Roman
families, replies, “Their palaces are historic. Their equipages are
magnificent. That is all foreigners see of Roman families.” Who that
has seen the great Leo carried through the grand sala, a vision of
intellectual loveliness, will not recall it as he reads? “The wonderful
face that seemed to be carved out of transparent alabaster, smiled and
slowly turned from side to side as it passed by. The thin, fragile hand
moved unceasingly, blessing the people.” “True,” said my friend, “his
pages are delicious bits of the dead past. At every sentence we halt
and find a memory. He has the sense of art, if Maupassant’s definition
of it as ‘the profound and delicious enjoyment which rises to your
heart before certain pages, before certain phrases’ be correct.”
Dinner was finished. A check, Paulo. We rose and went.