laid the foundations of Rome and tunnelled its drains with all
thoroughness; the notes on the pad were still dubious, but Mrs. Rollesby
began to wonder if we hadn’t now reached the surface of the soil--she
too had taken her share of the ooze of the ages. She signed to Julia
with winks and nudges--and Mr. Ram appealed to Julia with a woeful
smile, to which Kathleen added an imperative frown; everybody looked to
Julia to take action--everybody except the maiden with the pad, intent
upon the uncertainties of learning. The Professor was Julia’s property,
it was for her to deal with him; and he had clearly forgotten that we
were still underground, he didn’t even notice that the reason why he
couldn’t get at the pocket in his coat-tail (he made a sketchy motion
towards it now and then) was that the hen’s-neck stretched in the way.
We might just as well be sitting comfortably in the sun, and between her
responsibility and her rapture poor Julia was flustered. “Soon, very
soon--the blue-eyed infusion predominant--I’ll get him to move in a
moment--their pots were shallower”: Julia tried to whisper encouragingly
to Mrs. Rollesby without dropping the thread of the message. (I don’t
answer for her version of it.) But the Professor swept over her head,
beaming in the zest of his approach to the real inwardness, the ultimate
significance, the true truth of the origin of Rome--it appeared that we
were only there, even now, and the first damp stone, so homely and said
to be so Etruscan, had still to be laid. We were to stick in our cleft
indefinitely, I thought, for Julia’s tactful advances and coughs made no
impression. The hen-necked girl scratched out “Etruscan” and wrote
wildly “theory abandoned (if at all)”; and the Professor struck her
forcibly on the jaw as he flung out upon the climax, the glad surprise
to which he had been gradually leading us--his discovery of the
solution, the answer to all the queries of the distracted student.
“But first,” he said, “I fear I must disturb you.” He explained with
apologies that we should be better able to judge the weight of his
argument if we followed him--and he was gone, leaping to the upper air
with a sudden agility that brought on one of the tiresome attacks to
which Mrs. Rollesby is subject on being startled. These attacks take the
form of an extraordinary surging and quaking of the bosom, and she has
to be seized and supported and propelled to a spot where she can sit on
something less painful than a heap of brickbats. So she says; but the
girl Kathleen (who proved to be her niece) declared rather brutally that
a little smart exercise would do her all the good in the world. “If she
_will_ gobble at breakfast she’ll palpitate before lunch--naturally,”
said Kathleen, who was as taut and muscular as a young tree. With all
this the Professor had given us the slip, our party was adrift and
scattered, Mr. Ram saw a chance of escape--he feared and detested
Kathleen. But Julia signalled so excitedly through a gap in some ruinous
brickwork, not far off, that she drew us together again for the
Professor’s revelation. Mrs. Rollesby, still surging, was somehow
hoisted through the gap, and here we found a more convenient space and a
less Etruscan boulder, on which she was deposited. There was more room;
but it seemed that the secret of Rome still lurks in rather confined and
dingy places. The Forum on a spring morning is a sweet spot, and Mr. Ram
assured me that he loved every stone of it; the columns tower against
the blue sky, roses scramble among the mouldering walls, the dark
ilex-crown of the Palatine hangs nobly on its height. But the Professor
dragged us away from the view and the roses, he thrust us into a dusty
corner where there was nothing to be seen except the blank face of the
brickwork to which he joyously pointed. Now, he said, we could perceive
for ourselves the conclusion to which his argument had tended; and he
shone so radiantly with his glee in the surprise prepared for us that
Julia bravely gave a cry and a gasp of recognition on behalf of all. He
was enchanted with his success. “I knew you would see it at once,” he
said proudly; “_that_ speaks for itself.” He patted and caressed it with
the hand of a collector, a connoisseur; it appeared to be a little rim
or ledge of greyish cement between the reddish bricks.
His triumph illuminated the shabby corner. Julia’s falsity, Mrs.
Rollesby’s palpitation, Mr. Ram’s uneasy mistrust in the neighbourhood
of Kathleen--he was rapt above all these in his blissful vision. I don’t
know that any of us attained to a share in it; for even Julia, who
perhaps came nearest, was so much disturbed by her own rashness and by
the fear of being unmasked that she was altogether thrown out in her
absorption of the message. She was soon in a fearful state of muddle
between the homely touch and the human note, and if the Professor had
had eyes for anything post-Iberian (but the pad must surely have got
this word wrong) he couldn’t have failed to see that her attention
wandered. I attribute my own confusion in the matter of the sewer and
the grey cement in the first place to the hen-necked girl (whom Julia
addressed as “Hicksie dear”)--for the eye was fatally drawn by her pad;
and secondly to Mrs. Rollesby’s alarming attack--which in spite of her
niece’s treatment abated little on the boulder, some of the symptoms
being so tumultuous that they even affected the Professor in his cloud.
Mr. Ram, moreover, was inclined to attach himself to me, as the only
member of the party who wasn’t rather rough with him; for the dry bones
of learning, he said, left him cold, and he wanted to point out to
somebody that the past only lives for us when it is touched by a poetic
imagination. So he pointed it out to me, and in principle I agreed with
him; but I couldn’t admit that the Professor was wanting in poetry. To
me he seemed romantically poetic, and though his argument escaped me I
appreciated the spirit of his dream.
It was the spirit of those old fine men, the scholars of the great
revival, to whom the glory of antiquity was disclosed in the recovery of
the lost books and the forgotten tongue; and even more, perhaps, it was
the spirit of the artist, the lover of the marble and the bronze, who
stood in breathless expectation while the spade unearthed the buried
goddess and gave her back after long eclipse to a newly adoring world.
As Poggio over a brown Greek manuscript, as Michael over the great
smooth limbs that had lain for a thousand years of oblivion in the soil
of the vineyard--so our Professor was hailing no less than a revelation
in his turn. What is the mere fidget of the foreground, the present, the
transient, compared with the huge unchanging past, where everything is
secured and established under the appearance of eternity?--and how, when
the obstruction is wonderfully pierced, the page restored, the earth of
the present shovelled away, shall we refrain from dashing headlong into
the world thrown open, serenely offering itself to our exploration?
“There, there’s the appropriate country”--for no man can think rarely
and intensely in the rattle of things proceeding, changing, palpitating,
catching the eye momently with their ambiguous queries. A scholar shares
the blest opportunity of the higher mathematician, and the two of them
share it with the artist; all three, and doubtless the saint for a
fourth, inhabit a region of completed things, of motionless truth. It is
not to say that they are calm and motionless themselves--the Professor
almost dances and leaps in the inspiration of his research, returning
again and again to the wonder of the speaking brickwork. But the truth
that he seeks is there before him, eternally disposed for the hand, the
eye, the brain--and I am not afraid of Mr. Ram’s own word, for the
poetic imagination--that is able to discern and seize it.
To the Professor it was as lovely as a lyric of Sappho or a torso of the
golden age. His fingers rested on the battered brick, the rubbish, the
rubble--whichever it was that held the secret--with a touch that might
have been laid on the exquisite curves of the perfect marble. His statue
had come to the light, he chanted its beauty, he was ready to linger
over its gracious lines for the benefit even of a few ignorant gapers
like ourselves. Homely indeed!--and human!--Julia was wide of the mark.
It was divine, if the word means anything, in its immortal completeness;
and as for homeliness, why it carries you off into the clouds, a soft
tattered cloud yourself, so that the earth with its gapers and its great
fat panting gobblers is forgotten--or would be if it weren’t for the
singular moanings of the dying storm in Mrs. Rollesby’s breast. These,
as I have said, did occasionally penetrate to the Professor; he glanced
earthward with a puzzled look, as though he asked himself whether he had
heard or only fancied the report of some commotion. Only fancy, he
concluded; and he returned to the height of his discourse--which all
this time you must imagine to have been ranging onward, sweeping
backward, darting and circling as vivaciously as ever. The wretched
Hicksie tore leaf after leaf from her pad, scattering fresh
interrogations as fast as the last were answered. Julia was still bright
and eager, but her bad conscience was beginning to show in the flush of
her dishevelment. The Professor alone didn’t flag; we had given up all
thought of the roses and the view, and we gazed stonily at his vigour.
Oh, the common earth of the present had little with which to retain such
a man; he was caught into the past, into the loving celebration of his
statue, his lyric--which is my figure for the secret revealed to his
exploring and divining scholarship. I envy him as I envy an artist and a
saint, or even a mathematician; there, there’s where I would be, where
things stand still and are silent, and you roam among them, chanting the
rapture of your research, till you drop. That is a life.
And what was the secret after all? I picture it vaguely as a brilliant
divination and revival of the past, the result of the play of the
Professor’s penetrating insight upon the vast amassment of his learning.
I think of his jubilant glee as aroused, how naturally, by some great
spectacle of the ancient world that he perceives in the light of his
patient faithful studies. Alas, it is vague to me; but he sees it as
clearly, no doubt, beneath the dust and rubbish of the Forum, as I see
the green-veiled woman who strays drearily into our corner, murmuring
over her red handbook “to our right lie the rude substructures of the
peristyle.” And in point of fact I am quite as wide of the mark as Julia
herself. The Professor was not the man to have spent good time and good
thought over the visionary fancies I ascribed to him; not for him to be
a mere “popularizer of the specious”--a phrase that he utters with
hissing scorn, for it is one of his side-hits at the showier lore of a
“sister university.” No, the Professor took a different view of the
scholar’s privilege. It is for the scholar to find a loose stone or an
insidious chink in the work of his predecessors and to leave it
tightened and slopped; then as he dies he tells himself that he has done
something which needed doing--not every man can say as much. Was it a
small thing?--it may seem a small thing to you or me, but the Professor
retorts that in these matters our clumsy measure is of no authority; if
a fact has been inserted where no fact was, then truth is the better for
it--and with what sort of scale, pray, will you undertake to estimate
the betterment of truth? All this nonsense of torsos and secrets and
lyrics may be well enough in a pretty book; but the Professor has been
putting a great deal of energy into an explanation, which I seem to have
totally misunderstood, of the point that had baffled--or worse, that had
deceived and misled--all researchers before him. He has demonstrated his
own theory, and when I mention that it has found complete acceptance
even at the “sister university” (where to be sure they consider it a
trifling matter--they _would_!) I think we may assume that a fanciful
amateur, vacantly gaping, is not likely to find a flaw in it. Here is
something accomplished for a man to rest upon with satisfaction--so much
so that even now, after an hour of mercurial discourse, the Professor
is still prepared to go springing off to the next dusty corner and rude
substructure that speaks for itself in support of his view.
But what is it, what is it? At this distance of time I long to know, but
I confess that at the moment, what with the wear and tear of the various
distractions I have described, I could only agree with Mr. Ram that the
day was indeed growing “sultry”--I never heard this word on the lips of
anyone else--and that it would be pleasant to seek a little repose and
refreshment. Mr. Ram looked at his watch--“Time for a little _vino_, a
little _spaghetti_,” he insinuated gently and playfully; and though he
spoke aside to me, the suggestion was caught up with promptitude by Mrs.
Rollesby. All eyes were again directed upon Julia, and poor harassed
Julia had once more to begin coughing and sniffing significantly at each
of the Professor’s full slops. Kathleen indeed told her aunt plainly
that lunch on the top of “all that stodge” at breakfast would be
disastrous for one so lately startled; and Mr. Ram drew a sharp breath
between his teeth as she added, swinging round at him and pointing to
his waist, “Yes, and for you too, Mr. Ram--you’d much better come for a
tramp with me before you lay on any more of that deposit.” Hicksie also
seemed to have no thought of food or rest; her scribbling was by this
time almost delirious in the fever of its queries, but she stuck to it.
And the Professor ran on, ran on, blind to Mrs. Rollesby, deaf to
Julia--until it happened as before, he suddenly apologized for being
compelled to disturb us again, and was gone. This time he was gone so
imperceptibly that Mrs. Rollesby was unfluttered; she was consulting
Mr. Ram with regard to the handiest place for her lunch. Might we
decently take it that the lecture was finished? Not so--Julia, beckoning
me to follow, had dashed in pursuit of the Professor; we saw her
scrambling up a steep bank to a sort of platform among the ruins,
elevated and exposed, where he was renewing his exposition to an
audience of one--for the faithful Hicksie had kept pace with him and was
sitting at his feet, bent already over a new page. Julia gained the
height and doubled his audience; and Mr. Ram and I, glancing at each
other rather guiltily, suggested that they seemed very well as they
were. The Professor was clearly quite unconscious of the dwindling of
his audience; we seized our chance.
Over our _sorso di vino_, as Mr. Ram still called it, I was inclined to
think that we had indeed been very near the heart of things Roman that
morning--very near, if not completely in touch with it. The Professor’s
single-minded certainty was contagious; he held his faith as a grain of
mustard-seed, and his passion almost convinced me that we waste our time
in our random researches, away from his guidance, after the heart of
Rome. Suppose Julia was right, and it was the Professor who had really
the clue--for indeed there was a quality in his faith, with its
blankness to vulgar appeals, which hadn’t been noticeable on the whole
among the rest of our band. Unfortunately I couldn’t put my question to
Mr. Ram; he was pre-occupied with his own more tender, more
understanding and sensitive love of every stone of the Forum. It hurt
him to see the Forum treated as a class-room, and he blamed himself for
having suffered Miss Julia to include him, much against his rule, in the
class. He didn’t wish to speak of the Professor, but rather of the
impression that the Forum, familiar as it was, had made upon himself
last evening in a strangely “bistred” afterglow, whatever that may be.
But with all his tenderness the faith of Mr. Ram was a languid thing
beside that of the Professor, and I returned to the impression that the
Forum had made upon myself in the iridescent halo (thus I capped Mr.
Ram) of the Professor’s ardour. Where had I seen the like of it? Nowhere
at all, I reflected, except perhaps in one place--and that was the great
church, when the genius of Rome came riding and swaying over the heads
of the multitude. Those eager votaries, yelling their homage--the
Professor dancing in his zeal: they had come to Rome with something in
common, their single mind.
XIV. VIA MARGUTTA
A Studio!--I found myself at last in the studio of an artist. Deering
had mocked my bookish and antiquated notions of Roman life and I had
obediently dropped them; I had thrown over Hawthorne and Andersen, even
the ingenuous romance of poor old Zola, and my pursuit of reality had
carried me along the path that I have traced. But at last I arrived at a
studio, and I hadn’t spent ten minutes there before I was back again in
the dear familiar company of the Improviser and the Faun, the friends of
my sentimental and pre-Deering past. I had had an inkling of them even
as I approached the door; for the Via Margutta, tucked under the terrace
of the Pincian Hill, is a corner of Rome where you might well expect to
be brushed by their gentle ghosts. It is a street of studios, or it was
a few days ago--perhaps it is a street of motor-works and cinema-houses
by now; and a quiet bystreet not far from the Spanish Steps, full of
shabby buildings with high northern lights, was still populous with
Kenyon and Donatello and Roderick, for me at least it was, in that
spring-time of the middle distance to which I now look back. Even as I
turned into the Via Margutta, then, I had a hint that Deering had
deceived me; and ten minutes later I knew he had, for I stood before the
canvases that lined the studio of Mr. Vickery.
He was as loud and deaf and picturesque as I had seen and heard at Miss
Gainsborough’s; he wore a great blue smock and a loose slouch-cap of
black velvet, his white hair coiled upon his shoulders. There was a
bewildering crowd of people in the big room, and there were several low
tables spread out with fine old china and a lavish refection; and at
first I was rather taken aback, for Mr. Vickery’s invitation to me had
implied that I should find him lost to the world as usual and dabbling
in his paints, but glad to welcome a friend to the casual cheer of an
old Bohemian. He was casually welcoming such a crowd, and the
strawberry-dishes were so many, and the room was so grand with
tapestries and armour and cushioned divans, that I was struck shy and
lonely at the start, forgetting my pleasant hint of Kenyon outside; but
Mr. Vickery rolled jovially to greet me--he had a large rocking movement
on his legs that was full of heartiness--and begged me to put up with
the easy ways of an old Bohemian like himself. He was very loud and
clear upon the point, and I heard him reiterate it as he rambled among
his guests; I made out that we had all dropped in upon him casually, and
must take him as we found him in the rude simplicity of his workshop.
Presently he had picked up a palette daubed with colours and was wearing
it on his thumb; and he clutched a sheaf of long-handled brushes that he
threw down with splendid geniality to grasp the hand of somebody
arriving or departing. We had surprised him, it appeared, at work on a
gigantic canvas, a landscape, which was hoisted on an easel so
tremendous that he had to climb by a step-ladder to reach the azure
distances of the Alban hills. He climbed to them again from time to
time, and he looked wonderfully striking, I must say, as he stood on the
steps, his brush poised, glancing over his shoulder with a laughing
boyish word to the crowd below.
The great picture represented a view of the Roman Campagna; the azure
hills were seen through the straddling stilted arches of one of the
ruined aqueducts; in the foreground was a party of goats, attended by a
handsome old man, sheepskin-clad, who shaded his eyes and looked
benignantly across at a boy blowing a pipe in the left-hand corner--and
the boy, as I live, had matted curls and a pair of weather-stained
velvet breeches. My mind flew to Deering--he should hear of this!
Deering was too clever by half, with his derision of my innocent
fancies; here was an artist, just as I had supposed, who duly studied
the “picturesque models” of the English ghetto and introduced them into
a picture as venerable and as romantic and as big almost as the Campagna
itself. Is it into a picture, moreover? It is into fifty pictures, hung
on the walls or tilted on easels all about the studio; and I wandered
from one to another, very pleasantly, in the recovered company of my
familiar old friends. Hawthorne murmured his prim harmonious phrases;
another and a younger figure, very watchful under the careful
correctness of his bearing, noticed everything and said little; and we
passed from picture to picture, pausing before each with a smile of
charmed recognition. The old man in his sheepskin, the boy in his curls,
met us by many a crumbling arch of a sun-bathed aqueduct; and sometimes
they met us in a street-scene, by a splashing fountain and a gay
flower-stall, where they were joined by a girl with gleaming teeth and
black provocative eyes; and again they met us in deep mountain-valleys,
very verdurous and lonely, where there was a ruined temple on the height
of a crag and a bandit at the mouth of a cavern; and everywhere the
sheepskin and the curls and the fine dark glances had a charm for us,
away from Deering’s sarcastic eye, to which I for one surrendered in
comfort and peace. This was a world I knew; it was quite a relief to
cease from facing reality for a few minutes.
I was brought back to reality by encountering Miss Gadge, who said (as
my shadowy companions vanished) that there was nothing she enjoyed more,
as an old Roman, than a prowl round the studio of a true artist. She
delighted in the temple and the bandit, but she seemed a little
distraught in her reverence by her desire to talk about the people
present. She had a great deal of information concerning all the company,
and she hastened to impart it--for it would interest me, she said, to
know something of the kind of types one met in a typically Roman studio.
She went through them all, giving of each what is called a “thumbnail”
sketch; she admitted that the phrase was Emmeline’s, and that in
Emmeline’s society she had fallen into the habit of seeing people always
in an intensely typical light--Emmeline says that a novelist does so
quite instinctively. “Now that girl there with the blue beads--she’s a
kind you only see in Rome: very charming, very lady-like and
that--pretty I _don’t_ say, and a bad complexion, but that’s neither
here nor there; well, her name is Sandra Deeprose (an odd name, isn’t
it?)--” Miss Gadge’s sketches seemed to be wanting in crispness, and for
an observer of type she was excessively occupied with the individual,
but she wandered on over the company and presented me with a large
number of facts and names. Mr. Vickery, she told me, was held to be the
_doyen_ of the “colony” in Rome; he had lived in Rome for ever, from far
back in the ancient days of the Pope-King; he had known everybody, he
had known the Brownings--and sharply on that word I looked round to
devour the strange new wonderful sight of a man who had known the
Brownings. He happened to be standing at the far end of the room with
his back against a darkly figured hanging of tapestry; and his head in
its florid grandeur, so carefully composed, was relieved upon its
background like a daring portrait--brilliantly, slashingly painted, you
might say, by some artist not afraid of an obvious effect. Of his own
effect Mr. Vickery was very sure, and with reason; he offered himself as
a finished achievement of art and nature, sufficient as he stood. But
far from it, he was at that moment nothing in himself, he was everything
for what he implied--to one pair of eyes at least, fixed on him with
intensity. He had known the Brownings--how strange it seems and new!