A Writer's Recollections Volume II Part 5

Contessa Maria for some thirty years has played a great role in the social and intellectual history of Italy. She is the daughter of one of the leading business families of Milan, sister to the Marchese Ponti, who was for long Sindaco of that great city, and intimately concerned in its stormy industrial history. She married Count Pasolini, the head of an old aristocratic family with large estates in the Romagna, whose father was President of the first Senate of United Italy. It was in the neighborhood of the Pasolini estates that Garibaldi took refuge after 1848; and one may pa.s.s through them to reach the lonely hut in which Anita Garibaldi died.

Count Pasolini's father was also one of Pio Nono's Liberal Ministers, and the family, at the time, at any rate, of which I am speaking, combined Liberalism and sympathies for England with an enlightened and ardent Catholicism. I first made friends with Contessa Maria when we found her, on a cold February day, receiving in an apartment in the Piazza dei Santi Apostoli--rather gloomy rooms, to which her dark head and eyes, her extraordinary expressiveness and grace, and the vivacity of her talk, seemed to lend a positive brilliance and charm. In her I first came to know, with some intimacy, a cultivated Italian woman, and to realize what a strong kindred exists between the English and the Italian educated mind. Especially, I think, in the case of the educated _women_ of both nations. I have often felt, in talking to an Italian woman friend, a similarity of standards, of traditions and instincts, which would take some explaining, if one came to think it out.

Especially on the practical side of life, the side of what one may call the minor morals and judgments, which are often more important to friends.h.i.+p and understanding than the greater matters of the law. How an Italian lady manages her servants and brings up her children; her general att.i.tude toward marriage, politics, books, social or economic questions--in all these fields she is, in some mysterious way, much nearer to the Englishwoman than the Frenchwoman is. Of course, these remarks do not apply to the small circle of "black" families in Italy, particularly in Rome, who still hold aloof from the Italian kingdom and its inst.i.tutions. But the Liberal Catholic, man or woman, who is both patriotically Italian and sincerely religious, will discuss anything or anybody in heaven or earth, and just as tolerantly as would Lord Acton himself. They are cosmopolitans, and yet deep rooted in the Italian soil. Contessa Maria, for instance, was in 1889 still near the beginnings of what was to prove for twenty-five years the most interesting _salon_ in Rome. Everybody met there. Grandees of all nations, amba.s.sadors, ecclesiastics, men of literature, science, archeology, art, politicians, and diplomats--Contessa Pasolini was equal to them all, and her talk, rapid, fearless, picturesque, full of knowledge, yet without a hint of pedantry, gave a note of unity to a scene that could hardly have been more varied or, in less skilful hands, more full of jarring possibilities. But later on, when I knew her better, I saw her also with peasant folk, with the country people of the Campagna and the Alban hills. And here one realized the same ease, the same sympathy, the same instinctive and unerring _success_, as one might watch with delight on one of her "evenings" in the Palazzo Sciarra. When she was talking to a peasant woman on the Alban ridge, something broad and big and primitive seemed to come out in her, something of the _Magna parens_, the Saturnian land; but something, too, that our Englishwomen, who live in the country and care for their own people, also possess.

But I was to see much more of Contessa Maria and Roman society in later years, especially when we were at the Villa Barberini and I was writing _Eleanor_, in 1899. Now I will only recall a little saying of the Contessa's at our first meeting, which lodged itself in memory. She did not then talk English fluently, as she afterward came to do; but she was learning English, with her two boys, from a delightful English tutor, and evidently pondering English character and ways--"Ah, you Englis.h.!.+"--I can see the white arm and hand, with its cigarette, waving in the darkness of the old Roman apartment; the broad brow, the smiling eyes, and glint of white teeth. "You Englis.h.!.+ Why don't you _talk_?--why _won't_ you talk? If French people come here, there is no trouble. If I just tear up an envelope and throw down the pieces, they will talk about it a whole evening, and so _well_! But you Englis.h.!.+--you begin, and then you stop; one must always start you again--always wind you up!"

Terribly true! But in her company, even we halting English learned to talk, in our bad French, or whatever came along.

The summer of 1889 was filled with an adventure to which I still look back with unalloyed delight, which provided me, moreover, with the setting and one of the main themes of _Marcella_. We were at that time half-way through the building of a house at Haslemere, which was to supersede Borough Farm. We had grown out of Borough and were for the moment houseless, so far as summer quarters were concerned. And for my work's sake, I felt that eagerness for new scenes and suggestions which is generally present, I think, in the story-teller of all shades.

Suddenly, in a house-agent's catalogue, we came across an astonis.h.i.+ng advertis.e.m.e.nt. Hampden House, on the Chiltern Hills, the ancestral home of John Hampden, of s.h.i.+p-money fame, was to let for the summer, and for a rent not beyond our powers. The new Lord Buckinghams.h.i.+re, who had inherited it, was not then able to live in it. It had, indeed, as we knew, been let for a while, some years earlier, to our old friends, Sir Mountstuart and Lady Grant Duff, before his departure for the Governors.h.i.+p of Madras. The agents reported that it was scantily furnished, but quite habitable; and without more ado we took it! I have now before me the letter in which I reported our arrival, in mid-July, to my husband, detained in town by his _Times_ work.

Hampden is enchanting!--more delightful than even I thought it would be, and quite comfortable enough. Of course we want a mult.i.tude of things--(baths, wine-gla.s.ses, tumblers, cans, etc.!) but those I can hire from Wycombe. Our great deficiency is lamps! Last night we crept about in this vast house, with hardly any light.... As to the ghost, Mrs. Duval (the housekeeper) scoffs at it! The ghost-room is the tapestry-room, from which there is a staircase down to the breakfast-room. A good deal of the tapestry is loose, and when there is any wind it flaps and flaps. Hence all the tales.... The servants are rather bewildered by the size of everything, and--like me--were almost too excited to sleep.... The children are wandering blissfully about, exploring everything.

And what a place to wander in! After we left it, Hampden was restored, beautified, and refurnished. It is now, I have no doubt, a charming and comfortable country-house. But when we lived in it for three months--in its half-finished and tatterdemalion condition--it was Romance pure and simple. The old galleried hall, the bare rooms, the neglected pictures--among them the "Queen Elizabeth," presented to the owner of Hampden by the Queen herself after a visit; the gray walls of King John's garden, and just beyond it the little church where Hampden lies buried; the deserted library on the top floor, running along the beautiful garden-front, with books in it that might have belonged to the patriot himself, and a stately full-length portrait--painted about 1600--which stood up, torn and frameless, among lumber of various kinds, the portrait of a beautiful lady in a flowered dress, walking in an Elizabethan garden; the locked room, opened to us occasionally by the agent of the property, which contained some of the ancestral treasures of the house--the family Bible among them, with the births of John Hampden and his cousin, Oliver Cromwell, recorded on the same fly-leaf; the black cedars outside, and the great glade in front of the house, stretching downward for half a mile toward the ruined lodges, just visible from the windows--all this mingling of nature and history with the slightest, gentlest touch of pathos and decay, seen, too, under the golden light of a perfect summer, sank deep into mind and sense.

Whoever cares to turn to the first chapters of _Marcella_ will find as much of Hampden as could be transferred to paper--Hampden as it was then--in the description of Mellor.

Our old and dear friend, Mrs. J.R. Green, the widow of the historian, and herself the most distinguished woman-historian of our time, joined us in the venture. But she and I both went to Hampden to work. I set up in one half-dismantled room, and she in another, with the eighteenth-century drawing-room between us. Here our books and papers soon made home. I was working at _David Grieve_; she, if I remember right, at the brilliant book on _English Town Life_ she brought out in 1891. My husband came down to us for long week-ends, and as soon as we had provided ourselves with the absolute necessaries of life, visitors began to arrive: Professor and Mrs. Huxley; Sir Alfred Lyall; M.

Jusserand, then _Conseiller d'Amba.s.sade_ under M. Waddington, now the French Amba.s.sador to Was.h.i.+ngton; Mr. and Mrs. Lyulph Stanley, now Lord and Lady Sheffield; my first cousin, H. O. Arnold-Forster, afterward War Minister in Mr. Balfour's Cabinet, and his wife; Mrs. Graham Smith, Laura Lyttelton's sister, and many kinsfolk. In those days Hampden was six miles from the nearest railway station; the Great Central Railway which now pa.s.ses through the valley below it was not built, and all round us stretched beechwoods and commons and lanes, untouched since the days of Roundhead and Cavalier, where the occasional sound of wood-cutters in the beech solitudes was often, through a long walk, the only hint of human life. What good walks and talks we had in those summer days! My sister had married Professor Huxley's eldest son, so that with him and his wife we were on terms always of the closest intimacy and affection. "Pater" and "Moo," as all their kith and kin and many of their friends called them, were the most racy of guests. He had been that year pursuing an animated controversy in the _Nineteenth Century_ with Doctor Wace, now Dean of Canterbury, who had also--about a year before--belabored the author of _Robert Elsmere_ in the _Quarterly Review_. The Professor and I naturally enjoyed dancing a little on our opponents--when there was none to make reply!--as we strolled about Hampden; but there was never a touch of bitterness in Huxley's nature, and there couldn't have been much in mine at that moment, life was so interesting, and its horizon so full of light and color! Of his wife, "Moo," who outlived him many years, how much one might say! In this very year, 1889, Huxley wrote to her from the Canaries, whither he had gone alone for his health:

Catch me going out of reach of letters again. I have been horridly anxious. n.o.body--children or any one else--can be to me what you are. Ulysses preferred his old woman to immortality, and this absence has led me to see that he was as wise in that as in other things.

They were indeed lovers to the end. He had waited and served for her eight years in his youth, and her sunny, affectionate nature, with its veins both of humor and of stoicism, gave her man of genius exactly what he wanted. She survived him for many years, living her own life at Eastbourne, climbing Beachy Head in all weathers, interested in everything, and writing poems of little or no technical merit, but raised occasionally by sheer intensity of feeling--about her husband--into something very near the real thing. I quote these lines from a privately printed volume she gave me:

If you were here,--and I were where you lie, Would you, beloved, give your little span Of life remaining unto tear and sigh?

No!--setting every tender memory Within your breast, as faded roses kept For giver's sake, of giver when bereft, Still to the last the lamp of work you'd burn For purpose high, nor any moment spurn.

So, as you would have done, I fain would do In poorer fas.h.i.+on. Ah, how oft I try, Try to fulfil your wishes, till at length The scent of those dead roses steals my strength.

As to our other guests, to what company would not Sir Alfred Lyall have added that touch of something provocative and challenging which draws men and women after it, like an Orpheus-music? I can see him sitting silent, his legs crossed, his white head bent, the corners of his mouth drooping, his eyes downcast, like some one spent and wearied, from whom all virtue had gone out. Then some one, a man he liked--but still oftener a woman--would approach him, and the whole figure would wake to life--a gentle, whimsical, melancholy life, yet possessed of a strange spell and pungency. Brooding, sad and deep, seemed to me to hold his inmost mind. The fatalism and dream of those Oriental religions to which he had given so much of his scholar's mind had touched him profoundly.

His poems express it in mystical and somber verse, and his volumes of _Asiatic Studies_ contain the intellectual a.n.a.lysis of that background of thought from which the poems spring.

Yet no one was shrewder, more acute, than Sir Alfred in dealing with the men and politics of the moment. He swore to no man's words, and one felt in him not only the first-rate administrator, as shown by his Indian career, but also the thinker's scorn for the mere party point of view.

He was an excellent gossip, of a refined and subtle sort; he was the soul of honor; and there was that in his fragile and delicate personality which earned the warm affection of many friends. So gentle, so absent-minded, so tired he often seemed; and yet I could imagine those gray-blue eyes of Sir Alfred's answering inexorably to any public or patriotic call. He was a disillusioned spectator of the "great mundane movement," yet eternally interested in it; and the man who loves this poor human life of ours, without ever being fooled by it, at least after youth is past, has a rare place among us. We forgive his insight, because there is nothing in it Pharisaical. And the irony he uses on us we know well that he has long since sharpened on himself.

When I think of M. Jusserand playing tennis on the big lawn at Hampden, and determined to master it, like all else that was English, memory leads one back behind that pleasant scene to earlier days still. We first knew the future Amba.s.sador as an official of the French Foreign Office, who spent much of his scanty holidays in a scholarly pursuit of English literature. In Russell Square we were close to the British Museum, where M. Jusserand, during his visits to London, was deep in Chaucerian and other problems, gathering the learning which he presently began to throw into a series of books on the English centuries from Chaucer to Shakespeare. Who introduced him to us I cannot remember, but during his work at the Museum he would drop in sometimes for luncheon or tea; so that we soon began to know him well. Then, later, he came to London as _Conseiller d'Amba.s.sade_ under M. Waddington, an office which he filled till he became French Minister to Denmark in 1900. Finally, in 1904, he was sent as French Amba.s.sador to the United States, and there we found him in 1908, when we stayed for a delightful few days at the British Emba.s.sy with Mr. and Mrs. Bryce.

It has always been a question with me, which of two French friends is the more wonderful English scholar--M. Jusserand or Andre Chevrillon, Taine's nephew and literary executor, and himself one of the leaders of French letters; with whom, as with M. Jusserand, I may reckon now some thirty years of friends.h.i.+p. No one could say that M. Jusserand speaks our tongue exactly like an Englishman. He does much better. He uses it--always, of course, with perfect correctness and fluency--to express French ideas and French wits, in a way as nearly French as the foreign language will permit. The result is extraordinarily stimulating to our English wits. The slight differences both in accent and in phrase keep the ear attentive and alive. New shades emerge; old _cliches_ are broken up. M. Chevrillon has much less accent, and his talk is more flowingly and convincingly English; for which, no doubt, a boyhood partly spent in England accounts. While for vivacity and ease there is little or nothing to choose.

But to these two distinguished and accomplished men England and America owe a real debt of grat.i.tude. They have not by any means always approved of _our_ national behavior. M. Jusserand during his official career in Egypt was, I believe, a very candid critic of British administration and British methods, and in the days of our early acquaintance with him I can remember many an amusing and caustic sally of his at the expense of our politicians and our foreign policy.

[Ill.u.s.tration: JEAN JULES JUSSERAND]

M. Chevrillon took the Boer side in the South African war, and took it with pa.s.sion. All the same, the friends.h.i.+p of both the diplomat and the man of letters for this country, based upon their knowledge of her, and warmly returned to them by many English friends, has been a real factor in the growth of that broad-based sympathy which we now call the Entente. M. Chevrillon's knowledge of us is really uncanny. He knows more than we know ourselves. And his last book about us--_L'Angleterre et la Guerre_--is not only photographically close to the facts, but full of a spiritual sympathy which is very moving to an English reader. Men of such high gifts are not easily multiplied in any country. But, looking to the future of Europe, the more that France and England--and America--can cultivate in their citizens some degree, at any rate, of that intimate understanding of a foreign nation which s.h.i.+nes so conspicuously in the work of these two Frenchmen the safer will that future be.

CHAPTER V

AMALFI AND ROME. HAMPDEN AND _MARCELLA_

It was in November, 1891, that I finished _David Grieve_, after a long wrestle of more than three years. I was tired out, and we fled south for rest to Rome, Naples, Amalfi, and Ravello. The Cappucini Hotel at Amalfi, Madame Palumbo's inn at Ravello, remain with me as places of pure delight, shone on even in winter by a more than earthly sun.

Madame Palumbo was, as her many guests remember, an Englishwoman, and showed a special zeal in making English folk comfortable. And can one ever forget the sunrise over the Gulf of Salerno from the Ravello windows? It was December when we were there; yet nothing spoke of winter. From the inn, perched on a rocky point above the coast, one looked straight down for hundreds of feet, through lemon-groves and olive-gardens, to the blue water. Flaming over the mountains rose an unclouded sun, s.h.i.+ning on the purple coast, with its innumerable rock-towns--"_tot congesta manu praeruptis oppida saxis_"--and sending broad paths over the "wine-dark" sea. Never, I think, have I felt the glory and beauty of the world more rapturously, more _painfully_--for there is pain in it!--than when one was standing alone on a December morning, at a window which seemed to make part of the precipitous rock itself, looking over that fairest of scenes. From Ravello we went back to Rome, and a short spell of its joys. What is it makes the peculiar pleasure of society in Rome? A number of elements, of course, enter in.

The setting is incomparable; while the clas.h.i.+ng of great world policies, represented by the diplomats, and of the main religious and Liberal forces of Europe, as embodied in the Papacy and modern Italy, kindles a warmth and animation in the social air which matches the clearness of the Roman day, when the bright spells of the winter weather arrive, and the omnipresent fountains of the Eternal City flash the January or February sun through its streets and piazzas. Ours, however, on this occasion, was only a brief stay. Again we saw Contessa Maria, this time in the stately setting of the Palazzo Sciarra; and Count Ugo Balzani, an old friend of ours and of the Creightons since Oxford days, historian and thinker, and, besides, one of the kindest and truest of men. But the figure, perhaps, which chiefly stands out in memory as connected with this short visit is that of Lord Dufferin, then our Amba.s.sador in Rome.

Was there ever a greater charmer than Lord Dufferin? In the sketch of the "Amba.s.sador" in _Eleanor_, there are some points caught from the living Lord Dufferin, so closely, indeed, that before the book came out I sent him the proofs and asked his leave--which he gave at once, in one of the graceful little notes of which he was always master. For the diplomatic life and successes of Lord Dufferin are told in many official doc.u.ments and in the biography of him by Sir Alfred Lyall; but the key to it all lay in cradle gifts that are hard to put into print.

In the first place, he was--even at sixty-five--wonderfully handsome. He had inherited the beauty, and also the humor and the grace, of his Sheridan ancestry. For his mother, as all the world knows, was Helen Sheridan, one of the three famous daughters of Tom Sheridan, the dramatist's only son. Mrs. Norton, the innocent heroine of the Melbourne divorce suit, was one of his aunts, and the "Queen of Beauty" at the Eglinton Tournament--then Lady Seymour, afterward d.u.c.h.ess of Somerset--was the other. His mother's memory was a living thing to him all his life; he published her letters and poems; and at Clandeboye, his Ulster home,--in "Helen's Tower"--he had formed a collection of memorials of her which he liked to show to those of whom he made friends. "You must come to Clandeboye and let me show you Helen's Tower," he would say, eagerly, and one would answer with hopeful vagueness. But for me the time never came. My personal recollections of him, apart from letters, are all connected with Rome, or Paris, whither he was transferred the year after we saw him at the Roman Emba.s.sy, in December, 1891.

It was, therefore, his last winter at Rome, and he had only been Amba.s.sador there a little more than two years--since he ceased to be Viceroy of India in 1889. But he had already won everybody's affection.

The social duties of the British Emba.s.sy in Rome--what with the Italian world in all its shades, the more or less permanent English colony, and the rush of English tourists through the winter and spring--seemed to me by no means easy. But Lady Dufferin's dignity and simplicity, and Lord Dufferin's temperament, carried them triumphantly through the tangle.

Especially do I remember the informal Christmas dance to which we took, by the Amba.s.sador's special wish, our young daughter of seventeen, who was not really "out." And no sooner was she in the room, shyly hiding behind her elders, than he discovered her. I can see him still, as he made her a smiling bow, his n.o.ble gray head and kind eyes, the blue ribbon crossing his chest. "You promised me a dance!" And so for her first waltz, in her first grown-up dance, D. was well provided, nervous as the moment was.

There is a pa.s.sage in _Eleanor_ which commemorates first this playful sympathy and tact which made Lord Dufferin so delightful to all ages, and next, an amusing conversation with him that I remember a year or two later in Paris. As to the first--Lucy Foster, the young American girl, is lunching at the Emba.s.sy.

"Ah! my dear lady!" said the Amba.s.sador, "how few things in this world one does to please one's self! This is one of them."

Lucy flushed with a young and natural pleasure. She was on the Amba.s.sador's left, and he had just laid his wrinkled hand for an instant on hers--with a charming and paternal freedom.

"Have you enjoyed yourself?--have you lost your heart to Italy?"

said her host stooping to her....

"I have been in fairyland," said she, shyly, opening her blue eyes upon him. "Nothing can ever be like it again."

"No--because one can never be twenty again," said the old man, sighing. "Twenty years hence, you will wonder where the magic came from. Never mind--just now, anyway, the world's your oyster."

Then he looked at her a little more closely.... He missed some of that quiver of youth and enjoyment he had felt in her before; and there were some very dark lines under the beautiful eyes. What was wrong? Had she met the man--the appointed one?

He began to talk to her with a kindness that was at once simple and stately.

"We must all have our ups and downs," he said to her, presently.

"Let me just give you a word of advice. It'll carry you through most of them. Remember you are very young, and I shall soon be very old."

He stopped and surveyed her. His eyes blinked through their blanched lashes. Lucy dropped her fork and looked back at him with smiling expectancy.

"Learn Persian!" said the old man, in an urgent whisper--"and get the dictionary by heart!"

Lucy still looked--wondering.

"I finished it this morning," said the Amba.s.sador, in her ear.

"To-morrow I shall begin it again. My daughter hates the sight of the thing. She says I overtire myself, and that when old people have done their work they should take a nap. But I know that if it weren't for my dictionary I should have given up long ago. When too many tiresome people dine here in the evening--or when they worry me from home--I take a column. But generally half a column's enough--good tough Persian roots, and no nonsense. Oh! of course I can read Hafiz and Omar Khayyam, and all that kind of thing. But that's the whipped cream. That don't count. What one wants is something to set one's teeth in. Latin verse will do. Last year I put half Tommy Moore into hendecasyllables. But my youngest boy, who's at Oxford, said he wouldn't be responsible for them--so I had to desist. And I suppose the mathematicians have always something handy. But, one way or another, one must learn one's dictionary. It comes next to cultivating one's garden."

The pretty bit of kindness to a very young girl, in 1892, which I have described, suggested part of this conversation; and I find the foundation of the rest in a letter written to my father from Paris in 1896.

We had a very pleasant three days in Paris ... including a most agreeable couple of hours with the Dufferins. Lord Dufferin showed me a number of relics of his Sheridan ancestry, and wound up by taking me into his special little den and telling me Persian stories with excellent grace and point! He is wild about Persian just now, and has just finished learning the whole dictionary by heart. He looks upon this as his chief _dela.s.s.e.m.e.nt_ from official work. Lady Dufferin, however, does not approve of it at all! His remarks to Humphry as to the ignorance and inexperience of the innumerable French Foreign Ministers with whom he has to do, were amusing. An interview with Berthelot (the famous French chemist and friend of Renan) was really, he said, a deplorable business. Berthelot (Foreign Minister 1891-92) knew _everything_ but what he should have known as French Foreign Minister. And Jusserand's testimony was practically the same! He is now acting head of the French Foreign Office, and has had three Ministers in bewildering succession to instruct in their duties, they being absolutely new to everything.

Now, however, in Hanotaux he has got a strong chief at last.