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NIGHTS
Rome Venice London Paris
* * * * *
LIFE OF
JAMES McNEILL WHISTLER
BY ELIZABETH ROBINS PENNELL
AND JOSEPH PENNELL
THOROUGHLY REVISED, FIFTH EDITION
The Authorized Life, with much new matter added which was not available
at the time of issue of the elaborate two-volume edition, now out of
print. Fully illustrated with 97 plates reproduced from Whistler's
works. Crown octavo. XX-450 pages, Whistler binding, deckle edge. $8.50
net. Three-quarter grain levant, $7.50 net.
OUR PHILADELPHIA
BY ELIZABETH ROBINS PENNELL
ILLUSTRATED BY JOSEPH PENNELL
An intimate personal record in text and in picture of the lives of the
famous author and artist in the city whose recent story will be to many
an absolute surprise--a city with a brilliant history, great beauty,
immense wealth. Mr. Pennell's one hundred and five illustrations, made
especially for this volume, will be a revelation in their interest and
as art inspired by the love of his native town. Quarto, 7-1/2 by 10
inches, XIV-552 pages. Handsomely bound in red buckram, boxed. $7.50
net.
JOSEPH PENNELL'S PICTURES
OF THE PANAMA CANAL
_FIFTH PRINTING_
Twenty-eight reproductions of lithographs made on the Isthmus of Panama,
January-March, 1912, with Mr. Pennell's introduction, giving his
experiences and impressions, and a full description of each picture.
Volume 7-1/4 by 10 inches. Beautifully printed on dull-finished paper.
Lithograph by Mr. Pennell on cover. $1.25 net.
JOSEPH PENNELL'S PICTURES
IN THE LAND OF TEMPLES
Forty reproductions of lithographs made in the Land of Temples,
March-June, 1913, together with impressions and notes by the artist.
Introduction by W.H.D. Rouse, Litt. D. Crown quarto, printed on
dull-finished paper, lithograph by Mr. Pennell on cover. $1.25 net.
[Illustration: Painting by J. McLure Hamilton
"J--."]
* * * * *
NIGHTS
Rome Venice
in the Æsthetic Eighties
London Paris
in the Fighting Nineties
by
ELIZABETH ROBINS PENNELL
With Sixteen Illustrations
[Illustration]
Philadelphia and London
J. B. Lippincott Company
MCMXVI
Copyright, 1916, by J. B. Lippincott Company
Published March, 1916
Printed by J. B. Lippincott Company
at the Washington Square Press
Philadelphia, U.S.A.
PREFACE
There are times when we recall old memories much as we take down old
favourites from our bookshelves, just to see how they have worn, how
they have stood the test of years. Sometimes the books have worn so well
that we cannot put them away until we have read every word to the very
last again, we have not done with the memories until we have lived again
through every moment of the past to which they belong. It is in this
spirit that I brought my Nights of long ago to the test, and, finding
that for me they stand it triumphantly and are still as vivid and
vociferous and full of life as they were of old, I have not had the
courage to loose my hold upon them and let them drift back once more
into unfriendly silence.
It contributes to my pleasure in this revival of my Nights, that I have
been helped in many ways to give more substantial form to the familiar
ghosts who wander through them. My debt of gratitude is great. Mr.
William Nicholson has been willing for me to use his portrait of Henley
and from Mrs. Henley I have the bust by Rodin. Mr. Frederick H. Evans
has lent me the very interesting photograph he made of Beardsley, to
whom he was so good a friend, and to Mr. John Lane, the publisher of the
_Yellow Book_, I owe Beardsley's sketch of Harland. To Mr. John Ross I
am indebted for the drawing of Phil May by himself never before
published, to the Houghton Mifflin Company for the portrait of Vedder,
to Mr. Duveneck for the painting of himself by Mr. Joseph de Camp. The
photograph of Iwan-Müller and George W. Steevens reminds me of the day
so long since when I went with them and Mrs. Steevens to Mr. Frederick
Hollyer's and we were all photographed in turn, so that this record of
the visit seems surely mine by right. It was Mr. Hollyer, too, who
photographed the fine portrait "Bob" Stevenson painted of himself, and
it was Mrs. Stevenson who gave me my copy of it. I have Mr. J. McLure
Hamilton's permission to publish his portrait of J--, while J--has been
so generous with his prints, portraits of old backgrounds of the Nights,
that I can add this book to the many in which I have profited by his
collaboration. I have also to thank the Editor of the _Atlantic
Monthly_, in which my Nights in Rome and in Venice first appeared, for
his consent to their re-publication now in book form.
ELIZABETH ROBINS PENNELL
3. Adelphi Terrace House, London
December 25, 1915
CONTENTS
I. DAYS: A WORD TO EXPLAIN 11
II. NIGHTS: IN ROME 27
III. NIGHTS: IN VENICE 71
IV. NIGHTS: IN LONDON 115
V. NIGHTS: IN PARIS 225
ILLUSTRATIONS
PAGE
"J--" _Frontispiece_
From the Painting by J. McLure Hamilton
OLD AND NEW ROME 35
From the Etching by Joseph Pennell
ELIHU VEDDER 56
FRANK DUVENECK 76
From the Painting by Joseph R. DeCamp
THE CAFÉ ORIENTALE, VENICE 82
From the Etching by Joseph Pennell
OUT OF OUR LONDON WINDOWS 122
From the Mezzotint by Joseph Pennell
W.E. HENLEY 125
From the Bust by Auguste Rodin
W.E. HENLEY 127
From the Painting by William Nicholson
IWAN-MÜLLER AND GEORGE W. STEEVENS 154
From a Photograph by Frederick Hollyer
"BOB" STEVENSON 160
From the Painting by Himself
HENRY HARLAND 172
From the Drawing by Aubrey Beardsley
AUBREY BEARDSLEY 178
From the Photograph by Frederick H. Evans
PHIL MAY IN CAP AND BELLS 193
From a previously unpublished Drawing by Himself
IN THE CHAMPS-ELYSÉES, PARIS 235
From the Etching by Joseph Pennell
THE HALF HOUR BEFORE DINNER, PARIS 244
From the Etching by Joseph Pennell
ARISTIDE BRUANT OF THE CABARET DU MIRLITON, PARIS 290
From the Poster by Toulouse-Lautrec
I
DAYS
A WORD TO EXPLAIN
NIGHTS
DAYS
A WORD TO EXPLAIN
I
If I wrote the story of my days during these last thirty years, it would
be the story of hard work. No doubt the work often looked to others
uncommonly like play, but it was work all the same.
From the start it must have struck those who did not understand and
who were interested, or curious enough to spare a thought, that my
principal occupation was to amuse myself. When I was young, in
America the "trip to Europe" was considered the crowning pleasure,
or symbol of pleasure, within the possibility of hope for even those
who were most given to pleasure. In Philadelphia it also stood for
money--not necessarily wealth, but the comfortably assured income
that made existence behind Philadelphia's spacious red brick fronts
the average Philadelphian's right. And it was with this trip that J.
and I began our life together. But misleading as was the impression
made to all whom it did not concern, great satisfaction as it was to
my family, who saw in it the ease and comfort it represented to the
Philadelphian, we ourselves, with the best will in the world, could
imagine it no holiday for us, nor accept it as the symbol of the
correct Philadelphia income. Our pleasure was in the fact of the
many and definite commissions which obliged us to go to Europe to
earn any sort of an income, correct or otherwise--commissions
without which we could have faced neither the trip nor marriage. I
can remember that during the two or three weeks between our wedding
and our sailing we were both kept busy, J. with drawings he had to
finish for the _Century_, and I with the last touches to an article
for the _Atlantic_. And if the days on the boat gave us breathing
space, if not much work, except in preparation, was done, the reason
was that the new commissions commenced only with our landing at
Liverpool.
From the moment of our arrival in England I see in memory my life by day
as one long vista of work. It is mostly a beautiful vista, the more
beautiful, I am ready to admit, because the work I owed the beauty to
forced me to keep my eyes open and my wits about me. Under the
circumstances, I simply could not afford to let what small powers of
observation I possess grow rusty, for, no matter what else might happen,
I had to turn my journey into some sort of readable "copy" afterwards.
If I know parts of Europe fairly well, I am indebted not to the
fashionable need of taking waters, not to following the approved routes
of travel, not to meeting my fellow countrymen in hotels as alike as two
peas no matter how different the capitals to which they belong, not to
any fatuous preference of another country to my own, but to the work
that brought us to England and the Continent and has kept us there, with
fresh commissions, ever since.
It was work that sent us from end to end of Great Britain and gave me my
knowledge of the land. As I look back to those remote days after our
arrival in Liverpool, I see J. and myself on an absurd, old-fashioned,
long-superannuated Rotary tandem tricycle riding along winding roads and
lanes, between the hedgerows and under the elms English prose and verse
had long since made familiar, in and out of little grey or red villages
clustered round the old church tower, passing through great towns of
many factories and high smoke-belching chimneys, halting for months
under the shadow of some old castle or cathedral that had been
appointed one of our stations by the way. Or I see us both trudging on
foot, knapsacks on our backs, climbing up and down the brown and purple
hills of the Highlands, circling the peaceful lochs, skirting the swift
mountain streams, tramping along the lonely roads of the far Hebrides:
summer after summer journeying to the beautiful places the usual tourist
in Britain journeys to for pleasure, but where we went because papers
and magazines at home, with a wisdom we applauded, had asked us to go
and make the drawings and write the articles by which we paid our way in
the world.
And it was work that sent us from end to end of France, and now in
looking back I see J. and myself on the neat, compact Humber
tandem,--then so new-fashioned, to-day as out-moded as the
Rotary,--riding along straight poplared roads, through well-ordered
forests and over wild hills, between vineyards, one year under the grey
skies of Flanders or among the lagoons of Picardy and another under the
brilliant sunshine of Provence or through the rich pastures of the sweet
Bourbonnais, in and out of ancient villages and towns as full of romance
as their names, with halts as long under the shadow of still nobler
churches and fairer castles, getting to know the people and their ways
and how pleasant life is in the land where beauty and thrift, gaiety and
toil, courtesy and wit, go ever hand in hand.
And again it was work that sent us still further south, to Italy which
in my younger years I had longed for the more because I fancied it as
inaccessible to me as Lhassa or the Grande Chartreuse. And again down
the beautiful vista of work I see J. and myself still on the neat
compact Humber, but now pushing up long white zigzags to grim
hill-towns, rushing down the same zigzags into radiant valleys of fruit
and flowers, winding between vineyards where the vines were festooned
from tree to tree, and fields where huge, white, wide-horned oxen pulled
the plough, bumping over the stones of old Roman roads, parting with the
wonderful tandem only for the long stay in wonderful Rome and wonderful
Venice.
And again it was work that sent us, now each on a safety bicycle--a
change that explains how time was flying--by the canals and on the flat
roads of Belgium and Holland; into Germany, through the Harz with Heine
for guide, by the castled Rhine and Moselle that may have lost their
reputation for a while but that can never lose their loveliness; into
Austria, on to Hungary, up in the Carpathians and to those heights from
which the Russian Army but the other day looked down upon the Hungarian
plain; into Spain, to sun-burnt Andalusia, for weeks in the Alhambra, to
windy Madrid, for days in the Prado; into Switzerland, the "Playground
of Europe," where our work must have seemed more than ever like play as
we climbed, on our cycles and on foot, over the highest of the high
Alpine passes, one after the other; again into Italy; again into France;
again through England; again--but they were too numerous to count, all
those journeys that claimed so many of my days and taught me, while I
worked, all I have learned of Europe.
Of such well-travelled roads anyway, it may be said people have heard as
much as people can stand, and therefore I am wise to hold my peace about
days spent upon them. But on the best-travelled road adventure lies in
wait for the traveller who seeks it, chance awaits the discoverer who
knows his business. Why, to this day J. and I are appealed to for facts
about Le Puy because a quarter of a century ago we made our discovery of
the town as the Most Picturesque Place in the World and sought our
adventure by proclaiming the fact in print. But our discoveries might
have been greater, our adventures more daring, and I should be silent
about them now for quite another and far more sensible reason, and this
is that I was not silent at the time. The tale of those old days is
told.
II
Other journeys I made had no less an air of holiday-taking and meant no
less hard labour. For most men work is bounded by the four walls of the
office or the factory, or the shop, or the school, and rigidly regulated
by hours, and they consequently suspect the amateur or the dawdler in
the artist or writer who works where and when and as he pleases.
Journalism has led me into pleasant places but never by the path of
idleness. Rare has been the month of May that has not found me in Paris,
not for the sunshine and gaiety that draw the tourist to it in that gay
sunlit season, but for industrious days, with my eyes and catalogue and
note-book, in the _Salons_. Few have been the International Exhibitions,
from Glasgow to Ghent, from Antwerp to Venice, that I have missed, and
if in my devoted attendance I might easily have been mistaken for the
tireless pleasure-seeker, if I got what fun I could at odd moments out
of my opportunities, never was I without my inseparable note-book and
pencil in my hand or in my pocket, never without good, long, serious
articles to be written in my hotel bedroom. Even in London when I might
have passed for the idlest stroller along Bond Street or Piccadilly on
an idle afternoon, oftener than not I have been bound for a gallery
somewhere with the prospect of long hours' writing as the result of it.
But though the task varied, the tale of these days as well has been
told, and has duly appeared in the long columns of many a paper, in the
long articles of many a magazine.
III
As time went on, my journeys were fewer and J. took his oftener by
himself. A new variety of task was set me that left so little leisure
for the galleries that I gave up "doing" them for my London papers. My
days went to the making of books which, whether I wrote them alone or in
collaboration with J., required my undivided attention. When these were
such books as the Life of My Uncle, Charles Godfrey Leland, or the Life
of Whistler, they called for research, days of reading in the Art
Library at South Kensington, the British Museum, the London Library,
days of seeing people and places, days of travelling, days of
correspondence, days upon days at my desk writing--these days crowded
with interesting incident, curious surprises, amusing talk, hours of
hope, hours of black despair--in their own way days of discovery and
adventure. But in this case again the tale has been told and I am not so
foolish as to sit down and tell it anew, sorely as I may be tempted.
Anybody who reads further will find that the principal truth my nights
have revealed to me is that the man who is interested--really
interested--in something, does not want to talk, and often cannot think,
about anything else. But it does not follow that he can make sure of
listeners as keen to hear about it. The writer may, in his enthusiasm,
write the same book twice, but even if it prove a "best-seller" the
first time, he runs a risk the second of seeing it disposed of as a
remainder.
IV
So it has been throughout my working life: my day's task has had no
other object than to get itself chronicled in print. If _what_ the work
was that filled my day is not known, it could not interest anybody were
I to write about it now. If _how_ I worked during all those long hours
is to me an all-absorbing subject and edifying spectacle, I am not so
vain as not to realize that I must be the only person to find it so.
Most men--and women too--were brought into the world to work, but most
of them would be so willing to shirk the obligation that the best they
ask is to be allowed to forget their own labours while they can, and not
to be bothered with a report of other people's. By nature I am inclined
to Charles Lamb's belief that a man--or a woman--cannot have too little
to do and too much time to do it in. But necessity having forced me to
give over my days to work, it happens that I, personally, would from
sheer force of habit find days without it a bore. However, I would not,
for that reason, argue that work is its own reward to any save the
genius, or that methods of work are of importance to any save the
workman who employs them.
Whatever man's endurance may be, I know one weak woman whose powers of
work are limited. There was never anybody to regulate my day of work
save myself, since I am glad to say it has not been my lot to waste the
golden years of my life in an office, and I am not the stern task-master
or tiresome trade-unionist who insists upon so many hours and so much
work in them, and will make not an inch of allowance either more or
less. Sometimes my hours were more, sometimes they were less, but always
my energy was apt to slacken with the slackening of the day. I never
found inspiration in the midnight oil and oceans of coffee. I have
always wanted my solid eight hours of sleep, and would not shrink from
nine or ten if they fitted in with a worker's life. Youth often gave me
the courage I have not now to take up work again--a promised article,
necessary reading, making notes, copying--at night. But youth never
induced me to rely upon this night work if I could help it. My nearest
approach to a rule was that at the end of the day I was at liberty to
play, that my nights at least could be free of work.
The play to many might pass for a mild form of mild amusement, for it
usually consisted in nothing more riotous than meeting my friends and
talking with them. But I confess that the talk and the quality of it,
the meeting and its informality did strike me as so singularly
stimulating as to verge upon the riotous. The manner of playing was
entirely new to me in the beginning. All conventions bind with a heavy
chain, but none with a heavier than the Philadelphia variety. Spruce
Street nights had never been so free and so vociferous and so late, and,
being a good Philadelphian, I am not sure if the nights that succeeded
have yet lost for me their novelty. As a consequence, if, in looking
back, my days appear to be wholly monopolized by work, my nights seem
consecrated as wholly to amusement. The poet's "hideous" is the last
adjective I could apply to the night my busy day sank into.
How I worked may concern nobody save myself, but how I played I cannot
help hoping has a wider interest. Those old nights were typical of a
period, and they threw me with many people, contemporaries of J.'s and
mine, who did much to make that period what it was. The nights as gay,
as stimulating, that I have spent in other people's houses I have not
the courage to recall except in the utmost privacy. Pepys and N.P.
Willis in their time, no less than a whole army of Pamelas and
Priscillas in ours, have shown the lengths and indiscretions to which so
intimate a breach of hospitality may lead. I have had my experience. For
some years a house with closely curtained windows has reproached me
daily for not understanding that the man who invites the world to stare
at him and is not happy if it won't, objects when his neighbours say
lightly what they see. I am every bit as afraid to speak openly of
those people who shared our nights and who, with us, have outlived them.
Cowardice long since convinced me that it is not of the dead, but of the
living, only good should be spoken--and if good cannot be spoken, what
then? However, it is not in pursuit of problems that I have busied
myself in reviving those old nights, but rather for the pleasure we all
of us have, as the years go on, in feeling our way back along the
Corridors of Time and living our past over again in memory. If I go
further and live mine over again in print, it is because I like to think
the fault will not lie with me if it altogether dies--I have given it,
anyway, the chance of a longer lease of life.
II
NIGHTS
IN ROME
IN ROME
I
It will give an idea of what ages ago those nights were, and of the
youth I brought to them, if I say that I arrived in Rome on the first
tandem tricycle ever seen in Italy.
I can look back to it now with pride, for I was, in my way, a pioneer,
but there was not much to be proud about at the time. Rome was so little
impressed that J., my fellow pioneer, and I,--J. and I who in every town
on the way from Florence had been the delight of the gaping crowd, J.
and I who in all those beautiful October days on the white roads of
Italy had suffered from nothing save the excess of the people's amiable
attentions,--scarcely showed ourselves beyond the _Porta del Popolo_ and
the Piazza of the same name, before we were arrested for driving the
tandem furiously through the _Corso_--as if anybody could drive anything
furiously through the _Corso_ at the hour before sunset, when all the
world comes home from the _Borghese_. But two policemen, drawing their
swords as if they meant business, commanded us to dismount and, between
them, we walked ignominiously to the hotel, pushing the tricycle; and
an astonished and not in the least admiring crowd followed; and the
policeman asked us for a _lira_, which we refused, taking it for a proof
of the corruption of modern Rome--and they were so within their legal
rights that I do not care to say for how many more than one we were
asked a few weeks later by the Syndic, whom we could not refuse; and
altogether I do not think we were to blame if, after the policemen and
the swords and the crowd had gone and the tricycle was locked up, and we
wandered from the hotel in the gathering dusk, we were the two most
ill-tempered young people who ever set out to enjoy their first night in
Rome.
Nor was our temper improved when J.'s instinct, which in a strange place
takes him straight where he wants to go, having got us into the
_Ghetto_, failed to get us out again. The _Ghetto_ itself was all right,
so what a _Ghetto_ ought to be that had I been the Romans, I would not
have pulled it down, I would have preserved it as a historical
monument,--dirty, dark and mysterious, a labyrinth of narrow crooked
streets, lined with tall grim houses, filled with melodramatic shadows
and dim figures skulking in them, but a nightmare of a labyrinth which
kept bringing us forever back to the same spot. And we could not dine
on picturesqueness, and we would not have dined in any of the
murderous-looking houses at any price, and at last J. admitted that
there were times when a native might be a better guide than instinct,
and in his best Italian he asked the way of two men who were passing.
One, who wore the tweeds and flannel shirt by which in calmer moments we
must have recognized him, pulled the other by the sleeve and growled in
English: "Come on, don't bother about the beastly foreigners!" I can
afford to forgive him to-day when I remember what his incivility cost
him not only that night, when we would not let him off until he had
shown us out of the _Ghetto_, but on a succession of our nights in Rome,
Fate having neatly arranged that at the one house whose doors were
opened to us he should be a constant visitor.
Other doors might have opened had we had the clothes in which to knock
at them. But we had come to Rome for four days with no more baggage than
the tandem could carry, and we stayed four months without adding to it.
We could have sent for our trunks, of course, or we could have bought
new things in the Roman shops, but we did neither, I can hardly say why
except that the story of our journey had to be finished, and other
delightful articles we had crossed the Atlantic to do were waiting, and
these were commissions that could not be neglected, since they were the
capital upon which we had started out on our married life five months
before. And our Letter of Credit was small, and Youth is stern with
itself;--or, more likely, we did not trouble simply because it saved so
much more trouble not to. No woman would have to be taught by Ibsen or
anybody else how to live her own life, were she willing to live it in
shabby clothes. It is not an easy thing to do, I know. I share the
weakness of most women in feeling it a disgrace, or a misfortune, to be
caught in the wrong clothes in the right place. But that year in Rome I
had not outgrown the first ardours of work and, besides, in the old
days, a cycle seemed an excuse for any and all degrees of shabbiness. In
my short skirts, at a time when short skirts were not the mode, covered
with mud, and carrying a tiny bag, I have walked into the biggest hotels
of Europe without a tremor, conscious that the cycle at the door was my
triumphant apology. The cyclist's dress, like the nun's uniform, was a
universal passport, and I have never had the cleverness to invent
another to replace it since I gave up cycling.
II
If we could not spend our nights in other people's houses, neither could
we spend them in the rooms we had taken for ourselves at the top of one
of the highest houses on the top of one of the highest hills in Rome.
There was no objection to the rooms: they were charming, but we had
found them on a warm November day when the sun was streaming in through
the windows that looked far and wide over the town, and beyond to the
_Campagna_, and still beyond to a shining line on the horizon we knew
was the Mediterranean, and we did not ask about anything save the price,
which to our surprise we could pay, and so we moved in at once. Nor for
days, as we sat at our work in the sunlight, the windows open and Rome
at our feet, did we imagine there could be anything to ask about, except
if, by asking, we could prevail upon the _Padrona's_ son-in-law to go
and blow his melancholy cornet anywhere rather than on the roof directly
over our heads. Living in rooms was the nearest approach I had made in
all my life to housekeeping, I was still in a state of wonderment at
everything in Rome, from Romulus and Remus on the morning pat of butter
to the November roses in full bloom on the Pincian, I was quite content
to let practical affairs and domestic details look out for
themselves--or, perhaps it would be more true to say that I never gave
them a thought.
But even in Rome the sun must set and November nights grow chill, and a
night came when, after a day of rain, a fire would have been pleasant,
and suddenly we discovered there was no place to make it in. It had
never occurred to us that there could not be, fresh as we were from the
land where heat in the house is as much a matter of course as a sun in
the sky. At first we wrapped ourselves in shawls and blankets, hired the
_padrona's_ biggest _scaldino_, and called it an experience. After a few
evenings we decided it was an experience we could do without and, like
all miserable Romans who have no fireplace, we settled down to spending
our nights in the restaurants and _cafés_ of Rome.
I doubt if I should care to spend my nights that way now; a quarter of a
century has added unexpected charm to a dinner-table and fireside of my
own; but no Arabian Nights could then have been fuller of entertainment
than the Roman Nights that drove us from home in search of warmth and
food. In Philadelphia there never had been a suspicion of chance, a
shadow of adventure about my dinner. It was as inevitable as six
o'clock and as inevitably eaten in the seclusion of the Philadelphia
second-story back-building dining-room, if not of my family, then of one
or another of my friends. In Rome it became a delightful uncertainty
that transformed the six flights of stairs leading to it from our rooms
into the "Road to Anywhere". That road was by no means an easy one to
climb up again and if we could help it, we never climbed down more than
once a day, usually a little before dusk, a few hours earlier when we
were in a rare holiday mood, and always in time for a long or short
tramp before dinner. If we came to a church we dropped into it, or a
gallery, or a palace, or a garden, when we were in time. We followed the
streets wherever they might lead,--along the brand-new _Via Nazionale_
to the Forum or the narrow alleys to St. Peter's, beyond the gates to
the _Campagna_--seeing a good deal of Rome without setting out
deliberately to see anything. When we were hungry, we stopped at the
first _Trattoria_ we passed, provided it looked as if we could afford
it, and the chance dinner in a chance place at a chance hour was the
biggest adventure of all that had crowded the way to it.
[Illustration: Etching by Joseph Pennell
OLD AND NEW ROME]
One night the _Trattoria_ happened to be the _Posta_ in a narrow
street back of the _Piazza Colonna_. It was small: not more than
twenty could have dined there together in any comfort. It was
beautifully clean. And the _padrone_, his son, and the one
waiter--all the establishment--greeted us with that enchanting smile
to which, during my first year in Italy, I fell only too ready a
victim. Once we had dined at the _Posta_, we found it so pleasant
that we fell into the habit of getting hungry in its neighbourhood.
I have since got to know many more famous or pretentious restaurants,
but never have dinners tasted so good as at this little Roman
_trattoria_ where we had to consider the _centesimi_ in the price of
every dish, and the quarter of a flask of cheap _Chianti_ shared between
us was an extravagance, and we ate with the appetite that came of having
eaten nothing all day save rolls and coffee for breakfast, and fruit and
rolls for lunch, that we might afford a dinner at night. And I have
dined in many restaurants of gilded and mirrored magnificence, but in
none I thought so well decorated as the _Posta_ with its bare walls and
coarse clean linen and no ornament at all, except the stand in the
centre where we could pick out our fruit or our vegetable. Nor has any
restaurant, crowded with the creations of Paquin and Worth, seemed more
brilliant than the _Posta_ filled with officers. In Philadelphia I had
never seen an army officer in uniform in my life; at the _Posta_ I saw
hardly anything else. We were surrounded by lieutenants and captains and
colonels, and as I watched them come and go with clank and clatter of
spurs and swords, and military salutes at the door, and military cloaks
thrown dramatically off and on, and gold braid shining, I began to think
a big standing army worth the money to any country, on condition that it
always went in uniform--on condition, I might now add, that this uniform
is not khaki, then not yet heard of. When the old spare, grizzled
General, always the last, appeared and all the other officers rose upon
his entrance, our dinner was dignified into a ceremony. Sometimes, I
fancied he felt his importance more than anybody, for he is the only man
I have ever known courageous enough in public to begin his dinner with
cake and finish it with soup.
Now and then, on very special occasions, when we had sent off an article
or received a cheque, we went to the _Falcone_ and celebrated the event
by feasting on _Maccheroni alla Napolitana_, _Cinghale all'Agra Dolce_
and wine of Orvieto. The _Falcone_ was another accident of our tramps,
though we afterwards found it starred in Baedeker. It looked the
centuries old it was said to be, such a shabby, sombre crypt of a
restaurant that I accepted without question the tradition it cherished
of itself as a haunt of the Cæsars, and was prepared to believe the
waiters when they pointed out the mark of the Imperial head on the
greasy walls, just as the waiters of the Cheshire Cheese in London point
to the mark of Dr. Johnson's, while the flamboyancy of the cooking
revealed to me the real reason of the decline and fall of Rome. I am
afraid I should be telling the story of our own decline and fall had we
sent off articles and received cheques every day. Fortunately, the
intervals were long between the feasts, but unfortunately our digestion
can never again be imperilled at the _Falcone_, for they tell me it has
gone with the _Ghetto_ and so many other things in the Rome I knew and
loved.
By the middle of the winter we gave up the _Posta_ and went to the
_Cavour_ instead. I don't know how we had the heart to, for the _Cavour_
never had the same charm for us, we never got to like it so well. It was
too large and popular for friendliness, the officers carried their
ceremony and gorgeousness to a room apart, and the _padrone_ and his
waiters were too busy for more than one fixed smile of general welcome.
But then there, if we paid for our dinner by the month, it cost us next
to nothing by the day, and our Letter of Credit allowed as narrow a
margin for sentiment as for clothes. Moreover, the dinner was good as
well as cheap. And when the streets of Rome were rivers of rain, as they
often were that winter, it was brought to our rooms in a dinner pail by
a waiter, after he had first come half a mile to submit the _menu_ to
us, and in that cold, bleak interior, wrapped in blankets, a _scaldino_
at our feet, a newspaper for tablecloth, we made a picnic of it,
freezing, but thankful not to be drowned. And on great holidays, the
_padrone_ spared us a smile all to ourselves as he offered us, with the
compliments of the season, a plate of _torrone_ and a bottle of old wine
from his vineyard.
III
With dinner the night was but beginning and smiles must have faded had
we lingered over it indefinitely. I learned to my astonishment, however,
that hours could be, or rather were expected to be, devoted to the
drinking of one small cup of coffee, and that always near the
_trattoria_ was a _café_[A] which provided the coffee and, at the cost
of a few cents, could become our home for as long and as late as might
suit us. In Philadelphia after dinner coffee had been swallowed
promptly, in the back parlour if we were dining alone, in the front if
people were dining with us, and I was startled to find it in Rome an
excuse to loaf at a convenient distance from the domestic hearth for
Romans with apparently nothing to do and all their time to do it in.
[Footnote A: _Note._--Let me anticipate the amiable critic--and say that
I know this is not the Italian spelling of _café_. I use the French
spelling here, as in later chapters where it belongs, for the sake of
uniformity throughout.]
It is an arrangement I take now as a matter of course. But then, it must
be borne in mind, for me only five months separated Rome from
Philadelphia, and Philadelphia bonds are not easily broken. I suspected
something wrong in so agreeable a custom, as youth usually does in the
pleasant things of life, and as a Philadelphian always does in the
unaccustomed, and at first, when we went to the ancient _Greco_, I tried
to believe it was entirely the result of J.'s interest in a place where
artists had drunk coffee for generations. When we deserted it because,
despite its traditions, nobody went there any longer save a few
grey-bearded old men and a few gold-laced hall porters, and the dulness
fell like a pall upon us, and the atmosphere was rank, and when we
patronized instead a brand-new _café_ in the _Corso_ that called itself
in French the _Café de Venise_ and in English the _Meet of Best
Society_, I put down the attraction to the _Daily News_, to which the
_café_ subscribed, and for which in those days Andrew Lang was writing
the leaders everybody was reading. But Lang could not reconcile us to
the nightly _Gran Concerto_ of a piano, a flute and a violin of
indifferent merit concealed in a thicket of artificial trees, and the
_Best Society_ meant tourists, and after we had shocked a family of New
England friends by inviting them to share its tawdry pleasures with us,
and after a few evenings had given us, unaccompanied, all and more than
we could stand of it, we exchanged it for a _café_ without a past and
with no aspirations as the Meet of any save the usual _café_ society of
a big Italian town. By this time I had ceased to worry about excuses and
had settled down to idleness and coffee with as little scruple as the
natives.
The _café_ we chose was the _Nazionale Aragno_ in the Corso, the largest
and most gorgeous in Rome. The three or four rooms that opened one out
of the other had a magnificence that we could never have achieved in
furnished rooms and would not have wanted to if we could, and a
succession of mirrors multiplied them indefinitely. We leaned
luxuriously against blue plush, gilding glittered wherever gilding could
on white walls, waiters rushed about with little shining nickel-plated
trays held high above their heads, spurs and swords clanked and
clattered, by the middle of the evening not a table was vacant.
It was simply the usual big Continental _café_, but to me as new and
strange as everything else in the wonderful life in the wonderful world
into which I had strayed from the old familiar ways of Philadelphia,
with a long halt between only in England where the _café_ does not
exist. To the marble-topped tables, the gilding, mirrors and plush,
novelty lent a charm they have never had since and probably would soon
have lost had we been left to contemplate them in solitary state, as it
seemed probable we should. For we knew nobody in Rome except Sandro, the
youthful enthusiastic Roman cyclist we had picked up in Montepulciano,
cycled with through the Val di Chiana on a sunny October Sunday, and run
across again in Rome where he amiably showed us the hospitality of the
capital by occasionally drinking coffee with us at our expense, and by
once introducing a friend, a tall, slim, good-looking young man of such
elegance of manner and such a princely air of condescension, that Sandro
himself was impressed and joined us again, later on the same evening, to
explain our privilege in having entertained the Queen's hair-dresser
unawares. Foreigners did not often find their way into the _Nazionale_.
They were almost as few in number as women, who were very few, for as
women in Rome never dined,--or so I gathered from my observations at the
_Posta_, the _Falcone_ and the _Cavour_,--they never drank coffee. Only
on Sundays would they descend upon the _café_ with their husbands and
children, and then it was to devour ices and cakes at a rate that
convinced me they devoured little else from one Sunday to the next. When
I asked for the _Times_--they took the _Times_ at the _Nazionale_--the
waiter almost invariably answered: "It reads itself, the _Signore
Tedesco_ has it," and the _Signore Tedesco_, a mild German student who
for his daily lesson in English read the advertisement columns from
beginning to end, was the only foreigner who appeared regularly at any
table save our own.
And yet at ours, before I could say how it came about, a little group
collected, and every evening in the furthest room J. and I began to hold
an informal reception which gave us all the advantages of social life
and none of its responsibilities. We could preside in the travel-worn
tweeds of cycling and not bother because we were not dressed; we could
welcome our friends the more cordially because, as we did not provide
the entertainment, it was no offence to us if they did not like it, nor
to them if we failed to sit it out. In the _café_ we found the "oblivion
of care," the same "freedom from solitude," though not the big words to
express it, which Dr. Johnson "experienced" in a tavern. Were all social
functions run on the same broad principles, society would not be half
the strain it is upon everybody's patience and good-nature and purse.
Almost all the group were artists. In those days artists and students
were no longer rushing to Rome as the one place to study art in, nor had
the effort begun to revive its old reputation among them. Still a good
many were always about. Some lived there, others, like ourselves, were
spending the winter, or else were just passing through, and, once we had
collected the group round our table, I do not believe we were ever left
to pass an evening alone.
Artists were as great a novelty to me as the _café_--I had been married
so short a time that J. had not ceased to be a problem, if he ever
has--and nothing was more amazing to me than the talk. Its volubility
took my breath away. I thought of the back parlour at home after dinner,
my Father playing interminable games of Patience, the rest of us deep in
our books until bed-time. And these men talked as if talk was the only
business, the only occupation of life.
Still more surprising was the subject of their talk. If they had so much
to say that it made me grateful I was born a listener, they had only one
thing to say it about. It was art from the moment we met until we
parted, though we might sit over our coffee for hours. Often it was next
morning when J. and I reached the house at the top of the hill, and he
dragged the huge key from his pocket, undid the ponderous lock and
struck the overgrown match, or undersized candle, by which the Roman lit
himself to his rooms, and we panted up our six flights afraid ours would
not last, for we had but the one supplied by the restaurant.
The quality of the talk was as amazing: bewildering, revolutionary, to
anybody who had never heard art talked about by artists, as I never had
before I met J. All I had thought right turned out to be wrong, all I
had never thought of was right, all that was essential to the critic of
art, to the Ruskin-bred, had nothing to do with it whatever. History,
dates, periods, schools, sentiment, meaning, attributions, Morelli only
as yet threatening to succeed Ruskin as prophet of art, were not worth
discussion or thought. The concern was for art as a trade--the trade
which creates beauty; the vital questions were treatment, colour,
values, tone, mediums. The price of pictures and the gains of artists,
those absorbing topics of the great little men in England to-day, were
never mentioned: the man who sold was looked down on, rather. There were
nights when I went away believing that nothing mattered in the world
except the ground on a copper plate, or the grain of a canvas, or the
paint in a tube, so long and heated and bitter had been the controversy
over it. They might all be artists, but they were of a hundred opinions
as to the exact meaning of right and wrong, and they could wrangle over
mediums until the German student looked up in reproof from his columns
of advertisements and the Romans shrugged their shoulders at the curious
manners and short tempers of the _forestiere_. But there was one point
upon which I never knew them not to be of one mind, and this was the
supreme importance of art. If I ventured to disagree--which I was far
too timid to do often--they were down upon me like a flash, abusing me
for being so blind as not to see the truth in Rome, of all places, where
of a tremendous past nothing was left but the work of the masters who
built and adorned the city, or who sang and chronicled its splendours.
IV
The noise of their talk is still loud in my ears, but many of the
talkers have grown dim in my memory. Of some of the older men I cannot
recall the faces, not even the names; some of the younger I remember
better, partly I suppose because they were young and starting out in
life with us, partly because one or two later on made their names heard
of by many people outside of the _Nazionale_ and far beyond Rome.
I could not easily forget the young Architect who was then getting ready
to conquer Philadelphia--to borrow a phrase from Zola, as seems but
appropriate in writing of the Eighties--for which great end all the
knowledge of the _Beaux-Arts_ could not have served him as well as his
conviction that the architecture of Europe had waited for him to
discover it. He had never been abroad before and he could not believe
that anybody else had. He would come to our little corner from his
prowls in Rome and tell men, who had lived there for more years than he
had hours, all about the churches and palaces and galleries, like a new
Columbus revealing to his astonished audience the wonders of a New
World. And it amused me to see how patiently the older men listened,
sparing his illusions, no doubt because they heard in his ardent,
confident, decidedly dictatorial voice the voice of their own youth
calling. He carried his convictions home with him unspoiled, and his
first building--a hospital or something of the kind--was a monument to
his discoveries, a record of his adventures among the masterpieces of
Europe, beginning on the ground floor as the Strozzi Palace, developing
into various French castles, and finishing on the top as a Swiss
_châlet_, atrocious as architecture, but amusing as autobiography. All
his buildings were more or less reminiscent, and told again in stone the
story so often told in words at the _Nazionale_, for Death was kind and
claimed him before he had ceased to be the discoverer to become himself.
Donoghue too has gone, Donoghue the sculptor who as I knew him in Rome
was so overflowing with life, so young that I felt inclined to credit
him with the gift of immortal youth, so big and handsome and gay that
wherever he went laughter went with him. He too was a discoverer, but
his discovery was of Paris and the Latin Quarter. It had filled a year
between Chicago, where he had been Oscar Wilde's discovery, and Rome,
and he had had time to work off his first fantastic exuberance as
discoverer before I met him. "Donoghue is all right," they would say of
him at the _Nazionale_; "he has got past the brass buttons and pink
swallow tail stage, even if he does cling to low collars and tight pants
and spats."
Certainly, he had got so far as to think he ought to be beginning to
work, and he was in despair because he could not find in Rome a youth as
beautiful as himself to pose for his Young Sophocles. To listen to him
was to believe that Narcissus had come to life again. We would meet him
during our afternoon rambles in all sorts of out-of-the-way places, when
he would stop and take half an hour to assure us he hadn't time to stop,
he was hunting for a model he had just heard of, and then he would drop
into the _Nazionale_ at night to report his want of progress, for no
model ever came up to his standard. He referred to his own beauty with
the frank simplicity and vanity of a child--a real Post-Impressionist;
not one by pose, for there was not a trace of pose in him. I wish I
could say how astonishing he was to me. Life has since thrown many young
artists and writers my way and I am used to their conceits and
affectations and splendid belief in themselves. But my experience then
was of the most limited and bound by Philadelphia convention, and I
cannot imagine a greater contrast than between the Philadelphia youth to
whom I was accustomed, talking of the last reception and the next party
over his chicken salad at the Dancing Class, and Donoghue talking
dispassionately of his own surpassing beauty over a small cup of coffee
at the _Nazionale_.
Donoghue was a child, not merely in his vanity, but in everything, with
the schoolboy's sense of fun. I never knew him happier than the evening
he hurried to the _café_ from his visit to the Coliseum by moonlight to
tell us of his joke on the Americans he found waiting there in silence
for the guide's announcement that the moon was in the proper place for
their proper emotion. A friend was with him.