St. Peter’s, and watched in the immense crowd for the extinction of the
last candle and beginning of the Miserere; but all the effect was lost
and the music inaudible from the incessant moving and talking.
Afterwards there was a fine scene at the blessing of the altar in the
already dark church--the procession, with lights, moving up and down
the altar-steps, and then kneeling all along the central aisle, whilst
the relics were exhibited from the brilliantly lighted gallery.
“Fifty-eight artisans and schoolmasters from the Toynbee Hall Institute,
with some of their wives, have been in Rome for the Easter holidays. On
Thursday I took them all over the Palatine, finding them most delightful
companions, and the most informed and interested audience I have ever
known. So since that I have been with them to the Appian Way, and Miss
Fleetwood Wilson kindly invited the whole party to tea at the old
Palazzo Mattei, unaltered through three hundred years. I made friends
with many of the party individually, and think that for really good,
intelligent, high-minded society, one should frequent the East End.
“What struck me most of all was the absence amongst them of the
scandal-talk which in our own society is so prevalent. ‘Consider how
cheap a kindness it is not to speak ill: it only requires silence,’ is
an exhortation of Bishop Tillotson. They remember this; we don’t.
“Do you recollect the pretty Miss Cators? With them and some pleasant
Americans, and Lanciani the famous archaeologist, I have been up Monte
Cavi. Lanciani was most delightful, and told us about everything in a
way which had all the enthusiasm and colour without the dry bones of
archaeology, and oh! what lilies, violets, cyclamen, narcissus, covered
the woods. Another day he lectured on old Fidenae, standing aloft on the
ancient citadel, with all his listeners in groups on the turf around
him, and afterwards they all had luncheon--still in scattered groups: it
was like the pictures of the miracle of the loaves and fishes.
[Illustration: REMAINS OF TEMPLE OF JUPITER LATIARIS, MONTE CAVI.][505]
“It has been a great pleasure to see a good deal of ‘Mark Twain’ (Mr.
Samuel Clemens) and his most charming wife. He is a wiry, thin old man,
with abundant grey hair, full round the head, like an Italian _zazzara_.
He speaks very slowly, dragging his words and sentences laboriously, and
is long in warming up, and when he does, he walks about the room whilst
he makes all his utterances, which have additional drollery from the
slowness with which they are given. He began life as a wharfinger,
throwing parcels into barges, and as he threw them the overseer called
out ‘Mark one, Mark twain,’ and the chime of the words struck him, and
he took the name. Speaking of the Catacombs he said, ‘I might have
hooked the bone of a saint and carried it off in my carpet-sack, but
then I might get caught with it at the frontier. I should not like to
get caught with a thing like that; I would rather it were something
else.’ ‘That story by Symonds,’ he said, ‘of a crucifix which contained
a dagger, reminds me of the State of Maine. Spirits were strictly
forbidden there, but pocket-testaments became very abundant. They
contained two or three leaves, then there was a whisky flask. Now with
one of those crucifixes and one of these pocket-testaments, one might
cope with the worst society in the world.’
“‘My man George has made his fortune,’ said Mark Twain. ‘He used to bet
on revivals, then he took to betting on horses: he understands it all
round, and he has made a good thing of it.
“‘One night when I came home unawares, I found the house-door open.
After going in and poking round, I rang up George. “Well,” I said,
“George, you’ve been here probably some hours with the house-door
undone.”--“Good heavens!” he cried, striking his forehead, and rushed up
the stairs five steps at a time. When he came down I said, “Why, George,
what was the matter?”--“The matter! why, that the house-door was left
open, and that there were fifteen hundred dollars between my
mattresses.”’
“Mrs. Clemens spoke to George one day about his answering ‘Not at home’
when she did not want to see visitors. In England it is understood, but
in quiet places in America it is not: it is a lie. And Mrs. Clemens
said, ‘George, you really should not say what you know is not true; you
should say I’m engaged or that I beg to be excused.’ George came close
up to her and said, ‘Mrs. Clemens, if I did not lie, you’d not be able
to keep house a month.’
“A rival to Mark Twain, or rather one who draws him out capitally, is an
American Miss Page, a very handsome elderly woman like an ancient Juno.
She said yesterday, ‘I must be going home soon to see all the coloured
friends and relations. Aunt Maria was groaning very much one day, so I
asked her if she had found religion. She said, “No, but she was on the
anxious bench.” A few days after she had “found religion,” and I asked
her about it. “Why,” she said, “I got religion, and when I found that
I’d got religion, I just did make the chignots (chignons) fly. And so we
did all; we danced so hard that Uncle Adam had to be sent right away the
next day to bring them all home in a wheelbarrow.”
“‘My cousin was begged of by a woman one night,” said Miss Page. ‘She
was very violent, and she said, “You must give me money, you _shall_, or
I’ll say you’re Jack the Ripper.” He went close up to her, and in
sepulchral accents whispered “I _am_!” and the woman ran off as hard as
she could.’
“There are other friends I must tell you about. At No. 38 Gregoriana, in
a delightfully home-like apartment with a view of St. Peter’s, live Miss
Leigh Smith and her friend Miss Blyth. The former is a sister of Madame
Bodichon, who was such an admirable artist, and is of a most serene,
noble, and beautiful countenance, but perhaps severe: the latter is
gentleness and sweetness itself, though she is less striking in
appearance. Every one likes them both, but every one loves Miss Blyth.
They are known as ‘Justitia’ and ‘Misericordia.’
“Another person of interest, another American, who has come to Rome to
visit Miss Hosmer, is Mrs. Powers. She is charming. She said this to me
to-day: ‘I took a young lady with me on a Mississippi steamer. She was
very pretty and attractive. On the deck she sat by an old lady, who
looked at her and ejaculated “Married?”--“No.” “Engaged?”--“No.” Just
then her husband came up, and she said to him, “Here’s a young lady who
says she’s not married and not engaged: how’s that?” He looked her all
over and said, “Guess the pattern don’t take.”’
“And now, that you may be introduced to all my present society, Miss
Hosmer is going to give you one of her dinner enliveners. ‘An American
came in one day with, “Have you heard this extraordinary news from
England?”--“No; what?”--“Why, about the Archbishop of Canterbury.”--“No;
what about him?” “Why, about his having refused to bury a waiter at the
Langham Hotel.”--“No; what a proud contemptuous priest he must be; but
what possible reason could he give for refusing to bury the
waiter?”--“Why, that he was not dead.”
“‘That’s a good catch,’ says Miss Hosmer, who is talking to you; ‘and
now I’ll give you another. A young man--a very charming young man--was
engaged to be married, and he went down from London for the wedding to
the place where his bride lived, full of the brightest hopes and
expectations, and in his pocket he carried the ring with which he was
going to marry his love. But alas! when he reached his destination, his
love had changed her mind, thought better of it, would not marry him at
all. So he came away very miserable, and he thought he would go and hide
his sorrows in a little fishing-village, where he had often been in
happier days; he really could not face the world yet. And as soon as he
arrived at the village, he went out in a boat, and took the ring from
his pocket, and threw it far out to sea. Next day a remarkably fine fish
was brought to table, and when it was opened, what do you think they
found?--“Why, the ring,” of course you will say, as I did--No, a
fishbone.’ A most provoking story!
“There are two Misses Feuchtwanger in the hotel, kindest of elderly
American ladies, full of funny reminiscence. ‘Mrs. Broadhurst,’ said one
of them, ‘liked nothing so much as going to dine with her old “Black
Mammy;” it was the thing she liked best: and so, through a long course
of years, she heard Black Mammy’s old husband say grace, and the words
he used were always the same. “Beautiful mansions, we thee redorable,
many sensations, Amen.” The sound meant a whole world to him.’
“But I shall send you too much anecdotage, so good-night.”
* * * * *
_To the_ HON. G. H. JOLLIFFE _and_ JOURNAL.
“_Rome, April 27._--All the features of this Roman spring have been
American. Mrs. Lee was in this hotel. ‘I was just raised in the South,’
she said, ‘and I’m a Southerner to the backbone. Some one wanted to be
complimentary, and wrote of me in a newspaper as one raised in the lap
of luxury, but I was just raised in the lap of an old nigger.’ She was
very full of having been to the masquerade ball at La Scala. ‘It was
awfully indecent. I could not have let my daughter go, but for me it did
not matter; so I just went, and stayed to the end, for I thought some
one might come along and say, “Ah! you don’t know about that, because it
happened after you left,” so I thought I’d just see what was indecent
for once; it might be my only chance; and I made quite sure nothing
should happen after I left.’
“‘Don’t you know,’ she says, ‘that we call a story we have heard before
“a chestnut”? Why, in America the smart young men used to wear a little
bell on their watch-chains, and if they heard a story too often, they
rung it to show the story was stale. That was the chestnut-bell.’
“Perhaps the most interesting American here is the Bishop of Nova
Scotia. ‘“I’ve captured a church,” said a young American parson to me.
“Captured a church! what in the world do you mean?”--“Why, I went into a
church where the boys (soldiers) go, and I was asked to take the
service. Soon the boys came in, and I saw that there was going to be a
row. A lot of them sat down by the door, and as soon as I began to
preach, one of them crowed like a cock. I said, ‘Just crow again, will
you; I’m not ready for you yet.’ So he crowed again. Then I said, ‘Now,
if you crow again, I’ll just fix up your beak to the anvil of God’s
righteousness, and I’ll beat out your brains with the sledge-hammer of
the wrath of God. Now, crow again, if you dare,’ and he did not crow any
more, so I captured the church.”
“‘I would not give five cents to hear what Bob Ingleson considers to be
the faults of Moses, but I’d give every cent I possess to know what
Moses thinks of the faults of Bob Ingleson.
“‘I asked somebody if he thought my sermon was too low or too high, and
he said “Neither, but I thought it was too long.”’
“I always dine at a little table with Miss Hosmer, where I am sure her
fun and wit are more nourishing than all the rest of the viands put
together. She says, ‘Our real name is Osmer, but our country people
could never manage a name like that, so we voluntarily added the H.
Generally, provided we are born somehow, we never care who our fathers
and mothers were; but I did, and I had an uncle who found out that we
were descended from a robber chieftain on the Rhine. Afterwards, in
Turner’s “History of the Anglo-Saxons,” I found that the robber chief
Osmer was one of the sons of Ida, king of Northumberland, and Ida
claimed descent from Odin, so it is from Odin that I descend.’
“‘I promised to tell you about the siege of Rome,’ said Miss Hosmer the
other day. ‘All that year we knew it was coming, and at last it came.
The Italians had 70,000 men, and the Pope had only 11,000, so of course
all effectual resistance was out of the question; but it was necessary
to make a semblance of defence, to show that the Romans only gave in to
force. September came, and the _forestieri_ who remained in Rome were
all urged to leave, but Miss Brewster and I elected to stay. We were not
likely to have another chance of seeing a bombardment, so we just hung
an American flag out of our windows; that we were told we must do, as it
might be necessary to protect us from pillage. All the other
_forestieri_ left, and most of the Roman aristocracy. In the last days,
when the Sardinians were just going to enter, there was a solemn Mass in
St. Peter’s for the Pope, to implore protection for him against his
enemies. I went with Miss Brewster. It was the most striking sight I
ever saw. Every corner of the vast church was filled. Every one was in
black--every one except the Pope in his white robes, and when he
appeared, a universal wail echoed through the church. It was not a
silent cry; it was the wail of thousands. There was not a dry eye in the
church. The Pope passed close to me. His face was as white as his dress,
and down his face the large tears kept rolling, and all his clergy, in
black, were crying too. Oh, it was a terrible sight. I am not a
Catholic, I am much the contrary, but I sobbed; every one did. Well, the
Pope passed into the chapel where he was to say Mass, and he said it,
and he walked back again; but he was still crying. It was very piteous,
and when we went out into the piazza, there was Monte Mario white with
the tents of the Italians, waiting, like vultures, to descend. It was
uncertain, for the last few days, by which gate they would enter. It
was thought it would be by the Porta Angelica, then by the Porta del
Popolo; finally, it was by the Porta Pia.
“‘We were told that there would be no bombardment, but at five in the
morning we were waked by the cannon, and they went on till ten. Shells
came flying over our house, and one of them struck the church near us,
and carried part of it away. At ten there seemed to be a cessation, so I
sallied out as far as the Quattro Fontane, with my man Pietro behind me.
When I got into the Via Pia (now Venti Settembre), I heard a cry of “In
dietro! in dietro!” and the people ran. I thought I might as well get
out of the way too, but indeed, any way, I was carried back by the
crowd. I heard what I thought was a scampering of feet behind me, and
when I reached the Quattro Fontane, I looked back, and seeing a man I
knew, I said, “Why, what is the matter with you?” for he was covered
with blood, and he said, “Why, Signorina, did not you know that a shell
burst close behind you, and it has carried off several of my fingers,
Signorina?” So I just took him into my house and gave him some wine, and
bound his hand up as well as I could, and then sent him on to a surgeon.
Then I went up to Rossetti’s house beyond the Cappuccini, because I
thought from his loggia I should be able to see all that was to be seen;
but as soon as we reached the roof a musket-ball grazed my face, and
others were playing round us, so I said, “We had better get out of
this,” and we went down.
“‘After the firing finally stopped, we went to Porta Pia to see the
damage. The house which is now the British Embassy was completely
riddled. Six dead Zouaves were lying in the Villa Napoleone opposite,
and though the statues of S. Peter and S. Paul, which you will remember
at the gate, were otherwise intact, both their heads were lying at their
feet.
“‘At four, we went out again to see the Italian troops march into the
city. There was no enthusiasm whatever. The troops divided, some going
by S. Niccola, others by the Quattro Fontane, to their different
barracks.’
“No one who did not know the ‘has been’ can believe how the sights of
the Rome of our former days have dwindled away. All is now vulgarity and
tinsel: the calm majesty of the Rome of our former winters is gone for
ever.”
* * * * *
_To_ MISS LEYCESTER.
“_Cadenabbia, May 13._--At Florence, I went with the Duchess of
Sermoneta and Lady Shrewsbury to spend an evening with the grand old
family of Torrigiani, in the palace where the four sons, their wives,
and children innumerable, live with their charming mother, the Marchesa
Elisabetta, in perfect harmony and love; and another day went out to
Poggio Gherardo, a grand fortified villa, approached through half-a-mile
of roses, where the Ross’s now live. Then I was half a day at Padua,
visiting it as a tourist after many years, with my own book as a guide,
and a most delightful book I thought it!
“At Venice, I went to see ‘Pen Browning’ at the Palazzo Rezzonico, his
most beautiful old palace, full of memorials of Pope Clement XIII. The
son Browning has no likeness to either father or mother: he has worked
hard, both as painter and sculptor, and has a good portrait as well as a
bust of his father, from his own hands. There were many relics of his
parents and their friends, amongst them a sketch by Rossetti of Tennyson
reading one of his own poems to them, with an inscription by Mrs.
Browning. ‘Pen’ was going off to his house at Asolo, a place which his
father first brought into notice when he walked there and wrote ‘Pippa
Passes.’
“Calling on a Mrs. Bronson in a neighbouring house, I met a young lady
with fluffy hair, a Countess Mocenigo. ‘My dear, how many Doges had you
in your family?’ said Mrs. B. ‘Seven,’ she answered, and there really
were seven Doges of the name Mocenigo, besides all those from whom she
was descended by the different marriages of her ancestors.
“Venice is still as full of odd stories as when my sister went to a
party there, and was surprised because the oddly dressed old lady by her
side never answered when she spoke, and then found she was made of wax.
Most of the company were, being ancestors present thus in the family
life of the present. Recently a lady named Berthold has lived at Venice
who was of marvellous beauty and charm. All the society flocked to her
parties. One evening she invited all her friends as usual. They found
the palace splendidly lighted, and listened to the most exquisite music.
At the close of the evening, curtains which concealed a platform at the
end of the principal room were drawn aside, and within, the beautiful
hostess was seen, seated on a throne, and sparkling with jewels, in all
her resplendent loveliness. And then, as she waved a farewell to all
present, the curtains were suddenly drawn, and she disappeared for ever.
No human eye has seen her since. She had observed signs, unperceived by
others, that her beauty was beginning to wane!
[Illustration: VENETIAN POZZO.][506]
“In the hotel was a charming old lady who had just come back from Japan,
and who was arrayed in a thick quilted and embroidered dress, presented
to her by a Japanese lady. Her name, American fashion, was Mrs. Mary
Ridge Perkins. Her husband had sent her abroad, as she said, ‘with a
big letter of credit.’ ‘Mary, you may just go and do the honours of the
old country alone.’ She hates English aristocrats, but was ameliorated
towards Lord Digby, with whom she travelled back from Japan. He pressed
her to come and see him in London--‘Not if you have your paint on.’ She
has no children of her own, but, in the war, she and her husband adopted
no less than thirty, who were rendered homeless. They all call her
‘Auntie Perkins,’ but their children call her grandmother. All the
thirty are married now, and Mrs. Perkins never intends to leave her own
home again, except to visit them. She came down to the gondola to see me
off to the station with no bonnet on her aureole of short white curls,
and I was touched by her parting benediction: ‘May your life always be
happy, for you have always made others happy.’
“Here, at pleasant Cadenabbia, I have been glad to fall in with Lord and
Lady Ripon. He said, ‘Do you know that _you_ have been the cause of my
buying a property in Italy?’ It was in consequence of the sentence in my
‘Cities of Central Italy’ beseeching some Roman Catholic nobleman to
save such a sacred and historic place, that he had bought S. Chiara’s
convent of S. Damiano near Assisi, giving its use to the monks on the
sole condition that it was never to be ‘restored.’
“An odd thing has happened to me here, almost like a slight shadow on
the path. I met ---- who lives here, and whom I used to know very well,
and went up to meet him with pleasure, and he cut me dead! I have not an
idea why, and he will give no explanation. ‘Il faut apprendre de la vie
à souffrir la vie.’
“The Archbishop of York and Augusta are at Cadenabbia, and have taken me
across the lake in their little boat to tea with Charlie Dalison on that
lovely terrace of Villa Serbelloni.”
XXVIII
A KNOCKING AT THE DOOR
“Let us try to see, try to do, better always and better. No
honourable, truly good and noble thing we do or have done for one
another, but will bear its good fruit. That is as true as truth
itself, a faith that should never fail us.”--CARLYLE’S _Letters_.
“What I must do is all that concerns me, and not what the people
think. This rule, equally arduous in actual and in intellectual
life, may serve for the whole distinction between greatness and
meanness.
“It is the harder because you will always find those who think they
know what your duty is better than you know it. It is easy in the
world to live after the world’s opinion: it is easy in solitude to
live after your own; but the great man is he who, in the midst of
the crowd, keeps with perfect sweetness the independence of
solitude.”--EMERSON.
“On parent knees, a naked new-born child,
Weeping thou sat’st, while all around thee smiled:
So live, that, sinking in thy last long sleep,
Calm thou may’st smile while all around thee weep.”
--SIR W. JONES, _from the Persian_.
The summer of 1892 was full of quiet pleasures. Visits to Cobham,
Chevening, and to Mrs. Rycroft at Everlands, leave little to be
remembered except the pleasant parties and the extreme kindness of hosts
and hostesses everywhere. I am indeed glad that my visiting-lines are
cast in such pleasant places, that I so seldom have to consort with the
drearier part of human nature--the “Hem-haw, really, you don’t say so”
sort of people. In these houses, where the conversation is perfectly
charming, yet where no evil is spoken of any one or by any one, one sees
truly how a christian spirit will christianise everything it touches,
and one learns--as, indeed, when does one not learn?--that the best
shield against slander is to live so that nobody may believe it.
In September I was at gloriously picturesque Montacute in Somersetshire,
a noble house of yellow grey stone, where all the surroundings,
terraces, vases, flowers, chime into the most harmonious whole. With its
charming owner, Mrs. Phelips, I made an excursion to Ford, a grand old
abbey altered into a luxurious dwelling-house by Inigo Jones, and where
Time has blended the new work with the old, till they are equally
picturesque. The great hall has its gothic roof of abbatial times, and
in the stately saloon are noble Mortlake tapestries, said to have been
presented by Charles I. to his Chancellor, but more probably the gift of
Anne. Then I was with Lord Zouche, a pleasant friend of late times, at
his fine old haunted house and ferny deer-park at Parham, meeting, with
others, Lord Robert Bruce, called “the King of Hayling Island,” where he
lives and brims over with fun and anecdote. I saw from Parham the new
castle at Arundel, magnificently uncomfortable and containing little of
interest. But there was something touching in looking into the open
grave in which Cardinal Howard was to be laid in a few days, and
remembering the different phases in which I had known him well--as the
smartest of young Guardsmen, as a priest, where he seemed so unnatural,
and finally as Cardinal. The recollection came back of how, when the
other cardinals were shuffling along St. Peter’s, Cardinal Howard
marched along in stately complacency, holding back his train on one side
as a lady does her dress. “E troppo soldato,” said the other cardinals.