Roman Spring: Patterns of Life. I

I

MY father, Luther Terry, achieved a modest success as a painter in the innocent ’50s, ’60s, and ’70s. He sold pictures to his compatriots and often painted their portraits. In the ’80s his clients became rarer. The public had become more sophisticated. The new manner had made the old seem obsolete; unknown visitors rarely rang the little jangling studio bell, and the studio became a hermitage. During the last twenty-five years of his life my father went on painting with unflagging ardor for the great pleasure that it gave him. He died in 1900, eighty-seven years old. The art world had gone by him, but I think his days passed very happily in the colorless studio light ; for he lived in Rome, the city of his choice, and painting is of all the arts the one that seems to give most constant pleasure to the craftsman.

He was very gentle and conventional; he had left his own people and the land of his fathers for the sake of art; he had fallen in love with the Rome of the Popes, but he highly disapproved of anything that resembled artistic Bohemia, and he held unaltered his Calvinistic views on Catholicism and the Roman clergy.

In the year 1861 he married my mother, Louisa Cutler Ward, widow of Thomas Crawford, an Irish-American sculptor of some note. It was Crawford who decorated the dome of the Capitol in Washington with the bronze statue of an Indian. Its bronze doors and some of the marble bas-reliefs surrounding them are also by him; and when he died in 1857 he had just completed the sculptures which adorn the Washington Monument of Richmond, Virginia. My mother was left a widow with three daughters and one son, the youngest child, Francis Marion, who eventually wrote Mr. Isaacs and Saracinesca and many other novels.

My mother was beautiful and much beloved, a radiating centre of kindness and pleasantness. She could never cease from caring and providing for people. Our clothes were given away just when we began to feel comfortable in them; she had a drawerful of candle ends for a poor boy who wanted to study at night; books were in perpetual circulation; jellies for invalids; pumpkin pies for homesick American travelers. She had the gift of helpful understanding and was, I believe, wholly charming to all who knew her; she was a little shy and quite unworldly.

She really seemed to prefer the society of those she could benefit to that of people who could interest or amuse her, and was to a certain extent the victim of her virtues; she could not and would not deny her door to those who knocked. Bores and importunates were never discriminated against; she considered it a part of Christian duty to suffer them gladly, and how they flocked! I think there must have been some sort of line drawn, for they were never invited to meals, nor did they come to the Wednesday afternoon receptions. They generally arrived about eleven o’clock and stayed till lunch was announced. They came to pour out their troubles; to ask for help, material or spiritual; to talk about themselves. They always found what they sought and went away comforted and assisted, but Mamma’s morning had been laid waste and trampled by wild asses.

I think I owe to these very early impressions a certain hardness of heart. Our parents influence us incalculably by their example, but it sometimes works by reaction. I often overheard people saying I should never be like my mother and I realized that this meant I should be less beautiful and less charming, but in my secret soul I hugged the assurance that I should never spend long hours closeted with dreary suppliants.

II

We lived on the second floor of the Palazzo Odescalchi, designed by Bernini, but not for the Odescalchi family, who acquired it in the eighteenth century. It is a sober specimen of Bernini’s work, built in stone and brick around a handsome colonnaded court, its proportions very nobly Roman. (The modern wing facing the Corso was built at the end of the nineteenth century.) It had a broad white marble barrelvaulted staircase and beautiful highstudded rooms with coffered ceilings. The hall, anteroom, and drawing-rooms formed a long enfilade.

First there was a sala, a big nearly empty hall with benches for waiting messengers or footmen; then the camera verde, a large green anteroomlibrary furnished with old carved bookcases; the red room, which was used as a sitting room, where the family assembled before dinner and spent the evening when there was no party; then a stiff little square room hung with yellow damask, where the piano stood; and the so-called magenta room. Do not start at the name of the color. It recorded a French and Piedmontese victory and had not yet been associated with the ugly aniline tint it has come to suggest. This was the real drawingroom and much the most beautiful in the house. The walls were hung with panels of a deep oleander pink brocade with silver-gray flowers, the vaulted ceiling painted with a heavy trellis of grapevines on a burnished gold background. The centre of the vault flattened to a square picture of Bellerophon on Pegasus, slaying the Chinæra, painted in pale blue and white camaieu, like Wedgwood pottery.

Beyond this was my mother’s room, all painted in flowers and light colors, and smelling of orris root and violets. My father brought home a bunch of them every day, bought on the Piazza di Spagna, as he walked back from his studio in the Via Margutta; they were placed on her dressing table, and I cannot think of the room without remembering their fragrance. The dressing table was hung about with pink silk under pleated flounces of lace-trimmed lawn; there was ample room for me to creep in and sit under it, in a lovely rosy solitude with a doll or a book, while Mamma was dressing or writing letters. Some friend or relative had sent me from America two picture books, one about Little Red RidingHood and the other about ‘Who Killed Cock Robin.’ This last I gloated over in a rapture of melancholy. Its doleful refrain seemed infinitely pathetic, —

All the birds of the air fell sighing and sobbing When they heard the bell toll for poor Cock Robin, —

and moved me to delicious tears, especially when I had the book all to myself under the curtained table. Every time I read it I could cry a little more, and one day Mamma was disturbed by the sound of convulsive sobs. She raised the sheltering flounces and found me in a tempest of tears. The book was taken away from me, in spite of my protests and promises that I would never cry again, nor did I ever find another that moved me half so much.

My father’s room was very handsome, with sober eighteenth-century landscapes painted on the walls, but less gay and inviting than Mamma’s; at least I did not like it half so well.

I linger wistfully over the details of these rooms; their faded splendors were infinitely dear to me. How often do I visit them in my dreams, always with a glad sense of home-coming. They were swept by fire soon after we left the Odescalchi in 1878, so that gilded carvings, looking-glasses, brocades, and painted silks exist only in my memory of them, and when I try to put this into words I am describing a ghost seen only by myself.

But the best of all was our play room — a very large ballroom left nearly unfurnished for our use. Its walls were covered with panels of India silk decorated with classic arabesque patterns painted in gouache, alternating with very tall mirrors made in sections — those dim, eighteenth-century mirrors which reflect the light very softly and seem to hold the shadows of things long past. The six doors were elaborately decorated with mirrors and gold carvings, with classic medallions on the lower panels. The door knobs were in the shape of incense boats, for the Odescalchi claimed descent from Balthazar, one of the three Kings who brought the frankincense to Bethlehem, following the Star. The whole decorative scheme was unusually rich, yet so delicate in its detail, its colors so skillfully blended, that all who saw it were in admiration of its beauty.

There were three French windows with iron railings, looking on to the Piazza and Church of the Holy Apostles, their embrasures so deep that by letting down the portières we obtained the cosy privacy of a small room. From these windows we watched the world go by. We could sit on the floor with our legs through the railings dangling over the great wooden shield painted with the armorial bearings of the Odescalchi family, a double-headed eagle and gold incense boats, surrounded by the collar of the Golden Fleece.

Stare in finestra — to stay at the window was a great feature of Roman life. There was always so much to see; the streets were so full of leisurely happenings; there were weddings and funerals in the church opposite which were always interesting. I remember a particularly magnificent occasion—the funeral of the last Grand Duke of Tuscany, Francis VI, with whom that line of the Hapsburgs became extinct. There were endless processions of monks, Knights of Malta, and diplomatic representatives. The Roman Senate sent three glass coaches with outriders and footmen — real footmen in the sense that four of them walked by each coach holding long silken cords which were fastened to the top, presumably to steady the vehicle on bad roads. The Senatorial turnout was very gaudy — bright crimson and yellow, the footmen in knee breeches and white cotton stockings well padded with straw at the calf. To our great amusement we saw some street urchins dart out of the crowd and plant little pin flags in these while their owners walked on unconcerned.

III

Every evening the great bronze bell rang out the Ave Maria a quarter of an hour after sunset, and the Roman day began then, ‘ One hour of night,”Three hours of night/ were current expressions. Time was not regulated by clocks, but by the ringing of the Angelus. All opera goers are familiar with the phrase in Leoncavallo’s Pagliacci, ‘ alle ventitre ore’; few know that twenty-three o’clock means an hour before sunset and Ave Maria.

Then the lamplighter would come with his long stick on his shoulder at the end of which burned a little guarded flame. He opened a tiny iron shutter in the wall under the lantern that served as a street lamp and let this down by a chain; the lamp burned some sort of oil, perhaps kerosene — it had to be filled and trimmed and lighted with the burning stick and then drawn up again to its place and the iron shutter locked. This was always interesting to watch in the twilight; it seemed so kind and faithful of the man to take all that trouble every evening.

The Roman fire brigade — pompieri — are fine showy fellows with brass helmets, but they came in, I think, with the Italian régime. When I was a child the fire engine was a sort of pushcart with a tub and a hose and a little hand pump attached to it. I think it was part of the chimney sweep’s outfit. A fire started in the Palazzo Odescalchi and burned for three days without doing much damage. No one suggested our moving out. My mother woke up one morning hearing a child whimper in her room. She looked up and saw a sad little black face looking out of a hole in the wall with tears streaking the soot-grimed cheeks. The poor sweep had lost his way in the labyrinth of black chimneys; he had been sent up to try and find out what the fire was doing. In the thick stone and brick walls, the great oak rafters could stand a few days’ smouldering.

When night fell the place was full of terrors and darkness. For the drawing-rooms there were Carcel lamps which had to be wound up from time to time with queer gurgling noises from the mechanism that pumped the oil up into the wick, but the halls and passageways, any rooms that were not being lived in, were lighted with tiny floating wicks, whose flickering flame merely outlined the darkness it could not dispel. The high ceilings were lost in blackness. The house was full of strange noises and unaccountable shadows. The carpets were laid over a thin layer of straw which rustled a little at every footfall. At night in my bed I heard footsteps and was sure of ghostly presences.

We seem to have been encouraged to believe in ghosts; the grown-ups believed in them and were sure of their visitations. Mr. Augustus Hare was a frequent guest. He came to Rome every winter for a few months, and I think he dined with us every Sunday night. He was a dapper little man with a narrow aquiline nose and rather beady penetrating eyes, with an extraordinary gift for story-telling.

My brother Arthur and I had our supper with the nurses in the ballroom, but when Mr. Hare was expected I was allowed to sit up after supper and join the family in the drawing-room in order to listen to his wonderful tales. It was not a case of listening, but almost of actual experience. Mr. Hare was a master in the art, and exacted conditions which precluded any possible distraction or interruption among his listeners. The lights were turned low. No one was allowed to do fancywork. The doors were locked; no servant must come in to put wood on the fire or even to deliver a message. And in this crepuscular stillness he told us with nerve-racking vividness of the Secret of Glamis Castle, or the terrible story of the Vampire, or of Madame de Traffard’s night journey with his sister. All his stories seemed to have happened to members of his own family or to intimate friends. He told them slowly in a curious, rather nasal voice which had an extraordinary variety of tone and pitch — as he neared the climax it would tremble, and break, and rise almost to a shriek while he writhed on his chair, twisting and wringing his hands, tortured, as it were, by the intolerable horror of what he was telling.

Some of these stories can be found in his Story of My Life and they make excellent reading, but it is impossible to convey how much more thrilling they were as he told them. And when the dreadful thing had happened and left us all shattered with mysterious terror the lights were turned up and the fire was poked into a blaze, the servant came in with the mulled wine, and life resumed its reassuring reality. But I had been up long enough and must find my way through the outer darkness of the ballroom, the corridor, and many rooms and passageways, to my shadowcrowded bedroom where I lay for hours quaking in a sort of ecstasy of fear: Was the Vampire rattling the window lock? Was it the werewolf howling out in the storm?

Lord Houghton¹ was another English friend whom we all liked. He was a frequent visitor. I can only remember that he was charming in spite of a curious but to me very fascinating grimace. He wore false teeth, which must have been uncomfortable to him, for every now and then in the course of conversation he would click them together and dart his tongue out above the upper row — to relieve, I suppose, the distress of the ill-fated gums. It gave for a flashing instant an indescribably Satanic look to the otherwise kindly face. This moment was so brief that one must not let one’s eyes wander for an instant for fear of losing it. Perhaps I embarrassed him with my rapt and steadfast gaze.

IV

Some of our happiest hours were spent in Roman villas. Even as children we would be sent with our nurses to spend an afternoon in one or another of these beautiful places to vary the monotony of going to the Pincio.

But in midsummer Rome became unbearably hot, and July, August, and September were spent either in the mountains or by the sea, generally in a villa hired by the family after endless debate. My father never felt the heat; he would stay behind and write us of afternoon breezes which cooled the atmosphere. We knew that it was his great love of Rome which made him prefer almost any temperature to absence from its precincts.

The summer of 1870 we spent in the mountains south of Turin, memorable to me for my first experience in heroworship. Those were the days of the table d’hôte. The guests assembled and sat together at long tables, one talked with one’s neighbor, occasionally the chance acquaintance ripened to friendship. Perhaps the traveling public was more homogeneous then than it is now; people were less on the defensive against fellow travelers and we never dreamed of asking for separate tables in the dining room — there were none.

One day there appeared at luncheon sitting opposite to us a rosy, graybearded, bald-headed, gold-spectacled little old gentleman who captivated my attention. My mother must have met him before, for they greeted each other as friendly acquaintances. Something seemed to bubble and sparkle in his talk, and his eyes twinkled benignly behind the shining glasses. I had heard of uncles; mine were in America and I had never seen them. I whispered to my mother that I should like to have that gentleman opposite for an uncle. She smiled and did not keep my secret. The delighted old gentleman, who was no other than Edward Lear, glowed, bubbled, and twinkled more than ever; he seemed bathed in kindly effulgence. The adoption took place there and then; he became my sworn relative, and devoted friend. He took me for walks in the chestnut forests; we kicked the chestnut burrs before us, the ‘yongy bongy bos,’ as we called them; he sang to me ‘The Owl and the Pussycat’ to a funny little crooning tune of his own composition; he drew pictures for me.

I still have a complete nonsense alphabet beautifully drawn in pen and ink and delicately tinted in water colors, done on odd scraps of paper, backs of letters, and discarded manuscript. Every day Arthur and I found a letter of it on our plate at luncheon, and he made a title-page for the collection with a dedication and a portrait of himself with his smile and his spectacles, as the ‘Adopty Duncle.’ The drawing is much finer, more masterly than would appear in the rough reproductions in the published copies of his work, for he was a professional painter. He had been drawing master to Queen Victoria and her children. His health had suffered from the English climate and he had come to Italy for the sunshine. He published some delightful books of travels in Italy with very carefully drawn illustrations. These have been forgotten and overlooked. His immortal nonsense is part of English literature, some of it, indeed, part of English poetry. I never saw him again, but he has never faded from my memory — a fixed star twinkling across the waste of years.

V

The winter that I was twelve I was sent to a very small boarding school in Florence. It was hardly a school; Fräulein Johanna Muller took a few pupils to live with her in a sunny apartment with a pretty walled garden in the Via del Mandorlo. She had been a governess, the old-fashioned type of really cultivated teacher and educator to whom her work was a vocation; ardent to communicate her knowledge and contented with her lot if she succeeded in forming and guiding a few young minds and morals.

Nowadays a woman of Fraulein Müller’s attainments would be at the head of somecollege,organizing liberal education for the many, a great deal busier and better paid, but missing perhaps the intimate satisfaction of kindling the love of learning and thinking in this or that well-disposed child, in establishing a close, often lasting, and almost parental relation with the girl or boy whose mind she had brought to bud. The born teacher is a living torch and cannot but pass the flame to all that are capable of fire.

Under her guidance I became passionately interested in my lessons — history, languages, literature, music, all it was then thought necessary for a young girl to know. Science and mathematics were left aside, but languages were taught very carefully. Literature was the corner stone; we read a great deal of Dante, Shakespeare, and Goethe.

I was only allowed to stay with Fräulein Müller for seven months. Then my mother learned that she was an ‘atheist,’ that her friends were all freethinkers, that my soul was imperiled. But my education did not come to the complete standstill foreseen by Fräulein Müller when I was taken away from her school. It became more desultory, less scientifically planned; I was allowed to study the things I liked and had interesting teachers to humor me in my choice. One of these was a very learned German governess, Fräulein Hoepfner, who wrote articles for the Deutsche Rundschau and knew more history than anyone I ever met. She had some degree of literary reputation, for when the Dowager Empress Friedrich Karl (mother of Emperor William) came to Rome she sent for Fräulein Hoepfner to come and see her. She wrote an excellent little handbook for travelers about the saints in Christian art, giving a short outline of their lives and the attributes by which they may be identified; and she could write out the genealogies of every reigning house in Europe, including those that had long ceased to reign. She was not at all good-looking, but had a vague likeness to Botticelli’s portrait of the Tornabuoni lady that made her face interesting. She fell in love with my handsome brother Marion and wrote a good deal of melancholy verse on the subject of her unrequited affection, speaking of herself as the poor pale flower left to wither by the roadside. Marion liked her well enough and enjoyed talking to her; she was a brilliant woman in her way, but doomed to dimness in the field of romance.

Jean Paul Richter, who later made a name for himself as an art critic and collector, first came to Rome as tutor to some little German princes, children of the Grand Duke of Nassau, which was still an independent principality, He became so interested in art and archæology that he gave up his position and remained in Rome to study these, supporting himself by giving private lessons. He used to take me and my governess sight-seeing once a week, and the history of art was diligently studied under his direction. Germans have a sense of ‘high seriousness’ in this field and a happy combination of spiritual enthusiasm (Begeisterung) with intellectual thoroughness.

Twice a week the learned Don Raffaelle Pagliare came to read Dante with us; my mother always shared these lessons and they were delightful. Don Raffaelle seemed to have stepped out of a Longhi picture, in his buckled knee breeches and shoes with larger buckles, his broad-skirted coat and tricorn hat — the eighteenth-century abbé. His clean-shaven face had a Socratic nose which he liked one to notice. He was profoundly learned and owned one of the most important collections of Dante editions. He was chaplain to the Prince Gabrieli, who had married one of the Bonaparte princesses. We sometimes went to see him in his rooms in the Palazzo Gabrieli, literally stacked with books, partitions made of bookcases dividing and subdividing the by no means spacious apartment till there was barely room for Don Raffaelle to sleep there in a little corner behind a bookcase.

He had the heart of a child, with great but entirely specialized learning of that infinitely painstaking, accumulative, unproductive variety to which Italian scholarship often tends. He was over sixty when he came to give us lessons and had spent his whole laborious life studying the Divina Commedia, making endless notes, following up every allusion. He knew where and how all the people mentioned had lived and all their private feuds and happenings. He intended some day to write a book about it, but was, I suspect, incapable of synthesis and lost, in the great forest of which he so faithfully studied the trees.

It took us three years to read the Divine Comedy through with him, giving two or three lessons to each of the hundred cantos. I suppose no human work takes in more human experience, no poet has combined such eagle flights of the imagination with such deep sense of the ultimate, inexorable order of divine justice. Dante’s poetry, his philosophy, his faith, sank very deep into my soul, and I am always grateful to Don Raffaelle for his painstaking initiation.

So we grew up in several creeds and several languages. I cannot remember learning to speak German, French, or Italian. English was taken for granted. We spoke it with a foreign accent, but it was the mother tongue. To this day I cannot quite refrain from a sense of pity for those who grow up with only one language. What pleasure do I not owe to this freedom of the Western World!

VI

While I was with Fräulein Müller, music had suddenly become more important to me than all else; I suppose it was part of my general awakening; it came upon me with the intensity of a conversion. I happened to read a life of Beethoven in a German periodical. Not unlike Michelangelo, Beethoven, that other Promethean Titan, completed and transcended a great, cycle of classic art. His tragic story seemed to kindle my spirit with some of the fire he had brought down from heaven; it was another initiation. We are told that reading Beethoven’s life had the same effect on Richard Wagner when he was a boy and was the spark that kindled that mighty beacon. The same torch may set fire to a palace or a haycock.

From always having enjoyed music, I found myself transported by it; from practising half-heartedly for an hour a day, I began to work seriously at scales and finger exercises, to study Czerny, Cramer, and Clementi. In a couple of years I began to feel the need of a more interesting teacher, my first teacher, poor old Mr. Ravnkilde, being one of the many called by the Muse and then not chosen. Mr. Ravnkilde was very pathetic. I think I was the only pupil he ever had who worked hard and ambitiously. ‘I knew,’ he said with tears in his eyes, ‘that you would have to go to Sgambati, but I thought I was good enough to teach you for another year.’ Youth is cruel; I was sorry for Ravnkilde, but entirely happy when Sgambati consented to give me lessons.

Giovanni Sgambati was Liszt’s pupil, an admirable pianist and composer of merit. From Liszt he had received the Chopin tradition at first hand.

He would not teach unless he felt there was something to be done with the pupil. His method of eliminating the undesirables was to go to them once and never again. This was said to happen very often, and it was for this reason that he never gave new pupils lessons in his own house. Once interested in a pupil, he was the kindest and most stimulating of teachers.

Several attempts were made to thrust him out into the greater musical world. He actually went to London once and played there with so much success that a manager engaged him and arranged a string of concerts for the following season. When the time came to leave Rome and undertake the journey, his valises were on the cab and he in it on his way to the station, when a horror of the adventure overcame him, and the futility of fame. The vetturino was told to go back to the house in the Via della Croce, the valises were unpacked, the London manager was notified that the Maestro was unavoidably prevented from appearing in London, and he, the dear Maestro, since he remained in Rome, felt he had chosen the better part.

(To be continued)