MY LIFE (1886-1888)
ABOUT this time I was struck with the idea that for a person who
intended to make his living by writing books, Travel was a necessity,
and while one had no ties, it cost no more to live in various parts of
the Continent than to live in London.
The desire materialised sooner than it might have done, because Arthur
Chamberlain, whom we had met when we were sharing a house in Scotland
with the Wilkies (wife and daughters of the famous Melbourne doctor),
wrote letters, which would brook no refusal, for us to come and join him
at Heidelberg, where he was now a student, for the Quincentenary of the
Heidelberg University.
Before we went abroad we had a foretaste of the many pilgrimages to
archæological paradises which we were to make. We spent six weeks at
Canterbury, peculiarly delightful to me, because my family have been
landowners in East Kent from time immemorial, which made the
neighbourhood of Canterbury full of landmarks for me, and Canterbury is,
after Oxford, fuller of the Middle Ages than any town in England. Here,
having the run of the Cathedral library given me by its curator, Dr.
Shepherd (I hope I have spelt his name right), I commenced my studies of
Edward, the Black Prince—the local hero, who lies buried in the
Cathedral. This led to my writing the most ambitious of my poems,
“Edward, the Black Prince.” I wrote it among the ruins of the old
Cathedral Monastery at Canterbury, and the first edition was printed in
the Piazza of Santa Croce at Florence.
At Heidelberg, living for economy in a delightful pension kept by Miss
Abraham, who had been the Kaiser’s English governess, we met the set who
pass their years in wandering from one pension to another on the
Continent. Our immediate future was marked out for us. One family booked
us for a favourite pension at Zurich, another for Lucerne, another for
Lugano, another for Florence, another for Rome, another for Castellamare
di-Stabia below Pompeii.
And so we began the great trek. We summered at Heidelberg. Autumn in
Switzerland was perfectly beautiful, but the two or three months which
we spent in Florence formed one of the turning-points of my life. It was
there that we found a pension, which called itself an hotel, replete
with the atmosphere and charm and the little luxuries which Italy knows
so well how to give for seven francs a day. There we met people who came
to Florence year after year, and knew every picture, almost every stone,
in it—almost every ounce of pleasure which was to be got out of it. They
initiated us, in fact, into Florence, which was more of an education
than anything in the world.
Florence is Renaissance in architecture, Gothic in feeling. Its
inhabitants, native and foreign, live in the past. It was here that I,
born with a passion for realising the Middle Ages, acquired the undying
desires which have taken me back so often and for such long periods, and
have inspired me to write so many books about Italy and Sicily. From the
very beginning I plunged into the life of Florence and the study of
things Italian with extraordinary zest.
Going on to Rome for a month or two inspired me with the same feeling
for the classics as Florence had inspired in me for the Middle Ages.
I own that, when I was persuaded to go on from Rome to Castellamare, I
did so with certain misgivings. There did not seem to be the same
chances in it. We were going to a villa outside the town, whose sole
attraction seemed to be that it was six miles from Pompeii.
But when we got there, it had a profound influence on our lives. It
proved to be the villa where the Countess of Blessington had entertained
Byron and others of the immortals, a beautiful southern house, standing
on the green hill which buries in its bosom the ashes of Vesuvius, and
the ruins of Stabiæ, a city which shared the fate of Pompeii. It had a
vineyard round it; its quaint garden was overrun with sleepy lizards,
which you never catch asleep—the lizards in which the genius of Italy
seems to live.
We saw the sunset every night on the Bay of Naples and Ischia, which all
the world was talking about then because of the earthquake which had
lately ravished it. Every night we saw a tree of fire rising from
Vesuvius.
We used to spend our days in the orange groves of Sorrento, or driving
in donkey-carts to Pompeii, that city of the resurrection of the ancient
world. The weather was somnolently mild; for the first time we were
eating of the fruit of the lotus, which we have eaten so often since,
and which has pervaded my writings.
If Castellamare had only done that for us, it would be a milestone in my
life, but it also planted the seeds of unrest—_die Wanderlust_—in my
veins. Some one we met there—I don’t remember who it was now—had a craze
for Greek ruins; Roman ruins meant nothing to him, he said; there were
only two places for him, Athens and Sicily.
In Sicily it was Girgenti which won his heart, not Syracuse or Taormina,
and he almost persuaded us to go there. He obviously preferred it, even
to Athens. But the name meant nothing to me; I had read of Agrigentum in
the classics, and he showed me photographs of the glorious Greek
temples, which are still preserved in the environs of modern Girgenti.
Athens, on the contrary, had been before my mind ever since I was a boy.
The literature of Greece is, with the exception of Homer and Theocritus,
roughly speaking, the literature of Athens. I knew most of its principal
buildings almost as well as if I had seen them. I heard the call of
Athens, and to Athens we went from Castellamare.
Going there showed how comparatively cheap and easy it is to get to
distant places. We went through Taranto—Tarentum—to Brindisi; from
Brindisi to Corfu, in the Ionian Islands, the earthly paradise of the
fair Nausicaa, and the empresses of to-day; from Corfu to Patras and
Corinth; from Corinth to Athens.
The moral effect began before ever we reached Athens; it was so
vivifying to a student of the classics to pass Tarentum, and Cæsar’s
Brundusium, the Lesbos of Sappho, the Ithaca of Ulysses, Corinth and the
Piræus.
Lesbos! Corinth! Athens! Sappho! Ulysses! there was romance and undying
poetry in the very names.
The Greece of those days really was something out of the beaten track.
There were only two little railways of a few miles each, and there was
not an hotel worthy of the name anywhere outside of Athens. Even in
Athens, if you were not at a first-class hotel, kid’s flesh, and
sheep’s-milk butter, black bread and honey of Hymettus, and wine which
was full of resin, were the staples of diet. But what did it matter? We
lived in a house and a street with beautiful classical names—we lived in
the house of Hermes. And when we climbed up to the Acropolis at sunset,
we were in an enchanted land midway between earth and heaven, for we
were in the very heart of history surrounded by milk-white columns of
the marble of Pentelicus, and facing a rich curtain of sunset, which
hung over Ægina, and trailed into the waters of the Bay of Salamis.
Athens is gloriously romantic and beautiful, and Time has laid its
lightest fingers on her rocks and ruins, whose names are the
commonplaces of Greek history.
We spent some glorious weeks at Athens, made interesting by the
acquaintance of Tricoupis, the famous Prime Minister, and the presence
of the President of my college at Oxford—now Bishop of Hereford, from
whom I heard only the other day. From Athens Miss Lorimer’s unappeasable
hunger to see the world swept us on, after several happy weeks, to
Constantinople—the outpost of the East in Europe. Constantinople was one
of the most delightful experiences of my life. There is no call which I
hear like the call of the East, and in Constantinople you have the
noblest mosques west of India, and bazaars almost as barbarous as the
bazaars of North Africa, thronged, like the broad bridge of boats which
crosses the Golden Horn, with the mixed races of the Levant, in their
gay, uncouth costumes. The scene, too, is one of rare beauty, for the
great mosques are rooted in dark cypress-groves, and rear their domes
and minarets on the horizon, and the calm waters of the Golden Horn and
the Sea of Marmora are dotted with fantastic _caïques_.
We spent all too short a time there, dipping into the bowl of Oriental
mystery, in perfect April weather, when we were called home to meet a
sister-in-law coming from Australia.
I had, in the interval, published two more volumes of verse, _A Summer
Christmas_ and _In Cornwall and Across the Sea_, and I had printed at
Florence _Edward, the Black Prince_, begun during that long visit to
Canterbury in the spring of 1886, during which I steeped myself deeper
and deeper in the study of Gothic architecture, not yet realising what
an important part it was to play in my writing.
When we returned from Constantinople I had _The Black Prince_ properly
published in England, and though its sales were trifling, like those of
_A Summer Christmas_, it met with warm commendation from the critics.
Shortly after this we were inspired with the desire to visit the United
States in the autumn of 1888, and as we were going so far, we determined
so stay in one place while we were in England.
The place we chose was Richmond. I had always loved it since I was a
little boy at Temple Grove School in the neighbouring village of East
Sheen. It was sufficiently in the country for us to pass a spring and
summer there without irksomeness, and sufficiently beautiful and
old-fashioned to satisfy my cravings.
At Richmond we took a house in the Queen’s Road, and but for the very
large sum demanded for fixtures, we should have abandoned our American
trip, and taken the part of the Old Palace which has now been restored
at great expense by Mr. J. L. Middleton, for which I had a great
inclination. Mr. Middleton is a friend of mine and I have been over it
many times with him. It stands right opposite my study window. We liked
Richmond as much then as we do now, except for the long trail up from
the railway station to the Queen’s Road when we went to the theatre. We
were in the Park or on the adjoining commons every day, watching the
operations of Nature from the growth to the fall.
It was a busy time, for I wrote _The Spanish Armada_ on the occasion of
the Tercentenary of the immortal sea-fight, and I edited two anthologies
of Australian verse, _Australian Ballads_ and _A Century of Australian
Song_, for Walter Scott, Ltd. The pleasure of compiling these two
anthologies, the first books by which I ever made any money, was
enhanced because I did them at the unsolicited invitation of the late
William Sharp, the poet and author of the rhapsodies of “Fiona Macleod,”
who afterwards became a dear and intimate friend. He introduced me to
Charles Mackay, the editor of the famous _Thousand and One Gems of
English Poetry_, who adopted Marie Corelli as his daughter, and was
father of Eric Mackay. It was through him that I received the invitation
to do the Australian part of the _Slang Dictionary_, edited by M.
Barrére, the French Ambassador’s brother, for which also I received some
money.
These encouragements made me ask my friend, the late S. H. Jeyes, who
went to Trinity, Oxford, on the same day as I did, and was at the time
one of the editors of the _St James’s Gazette_, from which he afterwards
changed to the _Standard_, whether he thought that I ought to go to
America, or stay and pursue my chances in England.
He said, “Go; in America they will take you at your own valuation, and
when you get back, it will _be_ your valuation.”
And so it came that we took our passages in the old Cunarder _Catalonia_
from Liverpool to Boston.
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