CHAPTER II
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.