Donoghue's story. "And he answered as loud as he could: '_Nichts!
Nichts!_' And I said: '_Zwei Bier_,' and of course the Americans took us
for Germans. Then we hid in the shadows a little further on and we both
yelled together at the top of our voices, 'Three cheers for Cleveland!'
and the Americans jumped, and they forgot the moon, and they wouldn't
listen to the guide, and I tell you it was just great."
I was not overcome myself with the wit or humour of the jest, but
Donoghue was, and he roared with laughter until none of us could help
roaring with him in sheer sympathy. He was as enchanted with his method
of learning Italian. He was reading Wilkie Collins and Bret Harte in an
Italian translation, and when he yawned in our faces and left the _café_
early, it was because the night before the Dago's _Woman in White_ or
_Luck of Roaring Camp_ had kept him up until long after dawn, though
really he knew it was a waste of time since anybody had only to get
himself half seas over and he'd talk any darned lingo in the world.
He joined us less often after he gave up the hopeless hunt for the model
who never was found and whom it would have been useless anyway to find,
for Donoghue always spent his quarter's allowance the day he got it, and
most models could not wait three months to be paid. To this conclusion
he came soon after the first of the year and settled down seriously to
posing for himself and, as the world knows, the Young Sophocles was
finished in the course of time and a very fine statue it is said to be.
But even if he did desert our table he would still seem to me in memory
the centre of the little group gathered about it, had it not been for
Forepaugh.
Of course his name was not Forepaugh--though something very like it--but
Forepaugh answers my every purpose. For though I did know his name I did
not know then, and I do not know now, who he was and why he was. I do
not think anybody ever knew anything about him except that he was
Forepaugh, which meant, according to his own reckoning, the most
wonderful person on earth. He was one of the sort of men whose habit is
to turn up wherever you may happen to be, in whatever part of the world,
with no apparent reason for being there except to talk to you,--the last
time we met was in a remote corner of Kensington Gardens in London,
where he took up the talk just where we had left off at the _Nazionale_
in Rome--and as it is years since he has turned up anywhere to talk to
us, I fear he has joined the Philadelphia Architect and Donoghue where
he will talk no more.
In sheer physical power of speech he was without a rival and none
surpassed him in appreciation of his eloquence. His interest never
flagged so long as he held the floor, though when we wanted him to
listen to us, he did not attempt to conceal his indifference. We could
not tell him anything, for there was nothing about which he did not know
more than we could hope to. He, at any rate, had no doubt of his own
omniscience. Judging from the intimate details with which he regaled us,
he was equally in the confidence of the Vatican and the Quirinal,
equally at home with the Blacks and the Whites. The secrets of the Roman
aristocracy were his, he was the first to hear the scandals of the
foreign colony. The opera depended upon his patronage and balls
languished without him, though I could never understand how or why, so
rarely did he leave us to enjoy them. Every archæologist, every scholar,
every historian in Rome appealed to him for help, and as for art, it was
folly for others to pretend to speak of it in his presence. He called
himself an artist and for a time he used to go with J. to Gigi's, the
life school where artists then in Rome often went of an afternoon to
draw from the model. But J. never saw him there with as much as a scrap
of paper or a pencil in his hands, and nobody ever saw him at work
anywhere. For what he did not do he made up by telling us of what he
might do. His were the pictures unpainted which, like the songs unsung,
are always the best. He condescended to approve of the Old Masters,
assured that the masterpieces he might choose to produce must rank with
theirs, but he never forgot the great gulf fixed between himself and the
Modern Masters, whose pictures were worthy of his approval only when he
had been their inspiration. It was fortunate for American Art that
scarcely an American artist could be named whom Forepaugh had not
inspired. And if he praised Abbey and Millet more than most, it was
because he had posed for both and could answer for it that Millet's
porch, or studio, or dining-room, which had had the honour of serving as
his background, was as true as the figure of himself set against it.
Like all talkers who know too much, Forepaugh had, what Carlyle called,
a terrible faculty for developing into a bore. Some of our little group
would run when they saw him at the door, others took malicious pleasure
in interrupting him and suddenly changing the conversation in the hope
to catch him tripping. But out of all such tests he came triumphantly. I
never thought him more wonderful than the evening when somebody abruptly
began to talk about Theosophy in the middle of one of his confidences
about the Italian Court. It was no use. Without stopping to take breath,
at once Forepaugh began to tell us the most marvellous theosophical
adventures, which he knew not by hearsay, but because he had passed
through them himself. We might express an opinion: he stated facts. And
it seemed that he had no more intimate friend than Sinnett, and that to
Sinnett he had confessed his scepticism, asking for a sign, a
manifestation, and that one afternoon when they were smoking over their
coffee and cognac after lunch in Sinnett's chambers, then on the third
floor of a house near the Oxford Street end of Bond Street--Forepaugh
was carefully exact in his details--Sinnett smiled mysteriously but said
nothing except to warn him to hold on tight to the table. And up rose
the table, with the litter of coffee cups, cigars, and cognac, up rose
the two chairs, one at either end with Sinnett and Forepaugh sitting on
them, and away they floated out of the open window--it was a June
afternoon--and along Bond Street, above the carriages and the hansoms
and omnibuses and the people as far as Piccadilly, and round the lamp
post by Egyptian Hall, up Bond Street again, and in at the window. "Hold
on," said Sinnett, and "I never held on to anything as tight in my life
as I did to that table," said Forepaugh in conclusion.
He always reminded me of the man who so annoyed my Uncle, Charles
Godfrey Leland, by always knowing, doing, or having everything better or
bigger than anybody else. "Why, if I were to tell him I had an elephant
in my back yard," my Uncle used to say, "he would at once invite me to
see the mastodon in his." Forepaugh had a mastodon up his sleeve for
everybody else's elephant.
V
[Illustration: By Courtesy of Houghton Mifflin Company
ELIHU VEDDER]
If Forepaugh gave us a great deal of information we had no possible use
for and talked us to despair, he was really a good fellow whom we should
have missed from our table. And it was through him J. and I were first
made welcome in that one house open to us, to which I have been all this
time in coming. For it was Forepaugh who told Vedder we were in Rome,
and Vedder, once he knew it, would not hear of our shutting his door
in our own faces, nor would Mrs. Vedder, whatever the condition of our
wardrobe.
Vedder may have revealed many things in his recent _Digressions_, but
not the extent of the hospitality he and his wife showed to the American
who was a stranger in Rome, where, even then, they had been long at
home. Mrs. Vedder carried her amiability to the point of climbing our
six flights of stairs and calling on me in the rooms that suited us
admirably for our work but were less adapted to afternoon receptions,
and she would have gone further and shown me how to adapt them by moving
every bit of furniture from where it was and arranging it all over
again. Not the least part of her friendliness was not to mind when I did
not fall in with her plans, as I couldn't, since so long as the sun
shone in at the windows all was right with the rooms as far as I could
see. I was in the absurd stage of industry when I did not care where my
Roman furniture stood so long as my Roman tasks got done. Even our
_padrona_ told me her surprise that, foreigner as I was, I seemed to do
as much work as she did, which I accepted as a compliment. After that
first attempt Mrs. Vedder did not return to climb our six flights, but
she would not let us off from climbing her four or five.
Often as we took advantage of their hospitality, we never found the
Vedders alone and, chiefly American as was the group at their fireside,
it was never without a foreigner or two. The first person we were
introduced to on the first visit was the Englishman who would have
deserted us in the _Ghetto_ had we let him have his way, and who, when
he saw us, looked as if he wished the Vedders had learned to be less
indiscriminate in their hospitality. We had the satisfaction of knowing
that we made him supremely uncomfortable. He frowned upon us then as he
continued to all through the winter. He could not forgive us for having
found him out and was evidently afraid we were going to tell everybody
about it. He was something very learned and was occupied in writing a
book on Ancient Rome; later he became something more important at South
Kensington. But no degree of learning and importance helped him to
forget, or anyway to forgive. At chance meetings years afterwards in
London he frowned, as no doubt he would still had he not long since gone
to the land where I hope all frowns are smoothed from his frowning brow.
If he frowned, there was another Englishman who smiled: an elderly man
with the imperturbable serenity of a Buddha. He also had written books,
I believe. I remember articles by him, with art for subject, in the
_Portfolio_ at a time when everybody had taken to writing about art, and
I think his name was Davies. But it would be more in character to forget
that he ever worked or had a name. When I was in Rome he had risen above
activity and toil to the contemplative life and, I suppose, to the
income that made it possible. One night he explained his philosophy to
me. Men could not be happy without sunshine, he thought. The sun was
house, food, clothes, furniture, identity, everything, and as most of
the year in England sunshine was not to be had at any price, he had come
to live in Rome where almost all the year it was his for nothing. He sat
on the Pincian or in other gardens during the day, doing nothing in the
sunshine--that was living. And he urged me to follow his example and not
to wait until half my life had been wasted in the pursuit of happiness
where it was not to be found. He may have been right, but I never needed
to become a philosopher to value the virtue of indolence,--my trouble is
that I have never had the money to pay for it. Any man has the ability
to do nothing, a great authority has said, and I can answer for one
woman who has more than her fair share of it. I have always envied the
North American Indians for their enjoyment of what it seems Burke
attributed to them: "the highest boon of Heaven, supreme and perpetual
indolence."
As regular a visitor was a huge long-bearded Norwegian who looked a
prophet and was an artist, and who spent most of the winter in the study
of Marion Crawford's novels, I cannot imagine why, as they roused him to
fury.
"Marion Crawford," he would thunder at us as if somehow we were
responsible, "Bah! He is a weak imitator of Bulwer, that is all, and he
has not Bulwer's power of construction. He is not Bulwer. No. He is a
weakling. Bah!"
My only quarrel with Marion Crawford's books was that they never excited
strong emotion in me, one way or the other, and I was so puzzled by his
excitement that I remember I went to the trouble of getting out _Mr.
Isaacs_ and _A Roman Singer_ from Piali's Library in the _Piazza di
Spagna_, that centre of learning and literature for the English in Rome
where, one day when I asked for Pepys's Diary, they offered me Marcus
Ward's. A new course of Marion Crawford left me as puzzled as ever for
the reason of the Norwegian's rage, and I was the more impressed with
the possibilities of a temperament that could heat itself to such a
degree at so lukewarm a fire.
We were as certain to find this fiery Norseman and the two Englishmen
any night we called as Vedder himself. Other men came and went, amongst
them a few Italians and Frenchmen and more Americans, Coleman for one
among them, but none could have appeared as regularly, so much fainter
is the impression they have left with me. Naturally, they were mostly
artists and at Vedder's, as at the _café_, the talk was chiefly of art.
There was little of his work to see, for his studio was some distance
from his apartment. But it was enough to see Vedder himself or, for that
matter, enough to hear him. In his own house he led the talk, even
Forepaugh having small chance against him. He was as prolific, a
splendidly determined and animated talker. It was stimulating just to
watch him talk. He was never still, he rarely sat down, he was always
moving about, walking up and down, at times breaking into song and even
dance. He was then in his prime, large, with a fine expressive face, and
as American in his voice, in his manner, in his humour as if he had
never crossed the Atlantic. The true American never gets Europeanized,
nor does he want to, however long he may stay on the wrong side of the
Atlantic. When I was with Vedder, Broadway always seemed nearer than the
_Corso_.
He had recently finished the illustrations for the _Rubaiyat_ and the
book was published while we were in Rome. It was never long out of his
talk. He would tell us the history of every design and of every model or
pot in it. He exulted in the stroke of genius by which he had invented a
composition or a pose. I have heard him describe again and again how he
drew the flight of a spirit from a model, outstretched and flopping up
and down on a feather bed laid upon the studio floor, until she almost
fainted from fatigue, while he worked from a hammock slung just above. I
recall his delight when a friend of Fitzgerald's sent him Fitzgerald's
photograph with many compliments, asking for his in return. And he
rejoiced in the story of Dr. Chamberlain filling a difficult tooth for
the Queen and all the while singing the praises of the _Rubaiyat_ until
she ordered a copy of the _édition de luxe_. In looking back, I always
seem to see Mrs. Vedder pasting notices into a scrap book, and to hear
Vedder declaiming Omar's quatrains and describing his own drawings.
There was one evening when he came to a dead stop in his walk and his
talk, and shaking a dramatic finger at us all, said:
"I tell you what it is. I am not Vedder. I am Omar Khayyam!"
"No," drawled the voice of a disgusted artist who had not got a word in
for more than an hour, "No, you're not. You're the Great I Am!"
Vedder laughed with the rest of us, but I am not sure he liked it. He
could and did enjoy a joke, even if at his expense. I remember his
delight one night in telling the story of an old lady who had visited
his studio during the day and who sat so long in front of one of his
pictures he thought it was having its effect, but whose only comment at
the end of several minutes was: "That's a pretty frame you have there!"
He was sensitive to criticism, however, though he carried it off with a
laugh. Clarence Cook was one of the critics of his Omar who offended
him.
"It's funny," Vedder said, "all my life I've hurt Clarence's feelings.
He always has been sure I have done my work for no other reason than to
irritate him, and now that's the way he feels about the Omar."
The laugh was not so ready when Andrew Lang--I think it was Lang--wrote
that Vedder's Omar Khayyam was not of Persia, but of Skaneateles. And
after I suggested that it was really of Rome, and some mistaken friend
at home sent my article to Vedder, I never thought him quite so cordial.
VI
And so the winter passed. For us there was always a refuge from our cold
rooms at the _café_ or at Vedder's, and it was seldom we did not profit
by it.
Occasionally during our rambles we stumbled unexpectedly upon old
friends "doing Italy" and genuinely glad to see us, as we were to see
them, inviting us to their hotels at every risk of the disapproval of
manager and porters and waiters; and so powerful was the influence of
Rome and the _café_ that now the marvel was to sit and listen to talk
about Philadelphia, and where everybody was going for the summer, and
who was getting married, and who had died, and what Philadelphia was
thinking and doing, as if, after all, there were still benighted people
in the world who believed not in art, but in Philadelphia as of supreme
importance.
Occasionally we made new friends outside of our pleasant _café_ life. I
have forgotten how, though I have not forgotten it was in Rome, thanks
to a letter of introduction from Dr. Garnett of the British Museum, that
we first met Miss Harriet Waters Preston, who, for her part, had already
introduced me to Mistral--how many Americans had heard of Mistral before
she translated _Mirèio_?--and who now accepted us, cycling tweeds and
all, notwithstanding the shock they must have been to the admirably
appointed _pension_ where she stayed. She also climbed our six flights,
her niece and collaborator, Miss Louise Dodge, with her, probably both
busy that winter collecting facts for their _Private Life of the
Romans_, and where could they have found a more perfect background for
the past they were studying than when they looked down from our windows
over Rome, to the _Campagna_ beyond, and upon the horizon the shining
line that we knew was the Mediterranean,--over all the beauty that has
not changed in the meanwhile, though old streets and old villas and old
slums have vanished. And at these times, in the talk, not Philadelphia,
but literature was for a while art's rival.
And there were days when we played truant and climbed down in the
morning's first freshness from the high room overlooking Rome and the
work that had to be done in it, and loafed all day in Roman galleries
and at Roman ceremonies, or strayed to places further afield--Tivoli,
Albano, Ostia, Marino, Rocca di Papa,--getting back to Rome with feet
too tired to take us anywhere except up our six flights again. And there
were nights when the affairs of Rome drew us from the _café_. I remember
once our little group interrupted their interminable arguments long
enough to see the Tiber in flood, down by the _Ripetta_, where people
were going about in boats, and Rome looked like the Venice to which I
had then never been, and we met King Humbert and Queen Margherita in his
American trotting wagon driving down alone so as to show their sympathy,
for, whatever they may not have done, they always appeared in person
when their people were in trouble: not so many weeks before we had
watched the enthusiasm with which the Romans greeted King Humbert on his
return from visiting the cholera-stricken town of Naples. And I remember
on _Befana_ Night we adjourned to the _Piazza Navona_ to blow horns and
reed whistles into other people's ears and to have them blown into ours.
For the humours of the Carnival there was no need to leave the _café_,
where one _Pulcinello_ after another broke into our talk with witticisms
that kept the _café_ in an uproar, and for me destroyed whatever
sentiment there might have been in the thought that this was my last
night in Rome--the last of the friendly nights of talk in the
_Nazionale_ to which we always returned no matter how far we might
occasionally stray from it--the friendly nights of talk when I learned
my folly in ever having believed that anything in the world mattered,
that anything in the world existed, save art.
_Pulcinello_, the newest of our Roman friends, went with us from Rome,
following us to Naples, a familiar face to lighten our homesickness for
the rooms full of sunshine at the top of the high house on the top of
the high hill, and for the blue plush and the gilding and the mirrors
and the talk of the _Nazionale_.
And _Pulcinello_ went with us to Pompeii, reappearing during our nights
at the _Albergo del Sole_, that most delightful and impossible of all
the inns that ever were. It may have vanished in the quarter of a
century that has passed since the February day I came to it, when the
sky was as blue as the sea, and a soft cloud hung over Vesuvius, and
flowers were sweet in the land--can anyone who ever smelt it forget the
sweetness of the flowering bean in the wide fields near the Bay of
Naples? But Pompeii could never be the same without the _Sole_. And it
was made for our shabbiness, its three tumbled-down little houses ranged
round the three sides of an unkempt, mud-floored court; our bedroom
without lock or latch and with a mirror cracked from side to side like
the Lady of Shalott's, though for other reasons; the dining-room with
earthen floor, walls decorated by a modern-primitive fresco of the
_padrone_ holding a plate of _maccheroni_ in one hand and a flask of
_Lachrima Christi_ in the other, a central column spreading out branches
like a tree and bearing for fruit row upon row of still unopened
bottles, a door free to all the stray monks and beggars of Pompeii--to
all the fowls too, including the gorgeous peacock that strolled in after
its evening walk with the young Swiss artist on the flat roof of the inn
where, together, they went before dinner to watch the sunset.
Throughout dinner, at the head of the long table where we sat with the
Swiss artist and an old German professor of art and an older Italian
archæologist, the talk, as at the _Nazionale_, was of art, so that it
also, like _Pulcinello_, crying his jests through the window or at our
elbow, made me feel at home. While we helped ourselves from that amazing
dish into which you stuck a fork and pulled out a bit of chicken or
duck or beef or mutton or sausage; while the old professor and
archæologist absent-mindedly stretched a hand to the column behind them,
and plucked from it bottle after bottle of wine; while the beggars
whined at the open door, and the monks begged at our side, and
_Pulcinello_ capered and jested and sang; while the American tourists at
the other end of the table deplored the disorder and noise until we sent
them the longest and most expensive way up Vesuvius to get rid of them;
while the fowls fought for the crumbs;--the talk was still of art and
again of art, in the end as in the beginning. I might not understand
half of it, coming as it did in a confused torrent of German, Italian,
French, and English, but the nights at the _Sole_, like the nights at
the _Nazionale_, made this one truth clear: that nothing matters in the
world, that nothing exists in the world, save art.
III
NIGHTS
IN VENICE
IN VENICE
I
We reached Venice at an unearthly hour of a March morning and the first
thing I knew of it somebody was shouting, "_Venezia!_" and I was
startled from a sound sleep, and porters were scrambling for our bags,
and we were stumbling after them, up a long platform, between a crowd of
men in hotel caps yelling: "_Danieli!_" "_Britannia!_" and I hardly
heard what, out into a fog as impenetrable as night or London. The
muffled, ghostly cries of "_gundola! gundola!_" from invisible
gondoliers on invisible waters would have sent me back into the station
even had there been a chance to find so modest a hotel as the _Casa
Kirsch_ open so preposterously early, and my first impressions of Venice
were gathered in the freezing, foggy station restaurant where J. and I
drank our coffee and yawned, and I would have thought Ruskin a fraud
with his purple passage describing the traveller's arrival in Venice
upon which I had based my expectations, had I been wide enough awake to
think of anything at all, and the hours stretched themselves into
centuries before a touch of yellow in the fog suggested a sun shining
in some remote world, and we crawled under the cover of one of the dim
black boats that emerged vaguely, a shadow from the shadows.
I had looked forward to my first _gondola_ ride for that "little first
Venetian thrill" that Venice owes to the stranger. But I did not thrill,
I shivered with cold and damp and fog as the _gondola_ pushed through
the yellow gloom in the sort of silence you can feel, and tall houses
towered suddenly and horribly above us, and strange yells broke the
stillness before and behind, when another black boat with a black figure
at the stern, came out of the gloom, scraped and bumped our side, and
was swallowed up again.