Early in October my husband and I crossed to Antwerp and stopped at Bonn. The Rhine disappointed William’s expectations. He wrote to a friend: “The real charm of the Rhine, beyond the fascination that all rivers and riverine scenery have for most people, is that of literary and historical romance. The Rhine is in this respect the Nile of Europe: though probably none but Germans feel thus strongly. For myself I cannot but think it ought not to be a wholly German river, but from every point of view be the Franco-German boundary.... Germany has much to gain from a true communion with its more charming neighbour. The world would jog on just the same if Germany were annihilated by France, Russia and Italy: but the disappearance of brilliant, vivacious, intellectual France would be almost as serious a loss to intellectual Europe, as would be to the people at large the disappearance of the Moon.”
From Rome he wrote to Mrs. Janvier:
Dec., 1890.
“ ... Well, we were glad to leave Germany. Broadly, it is a joyless place for Bohemians. It is all beer, coarse jokes, coarse living, and domestic tyranny on the man’s part, subjection on the woman’s—on the one side: pedantic learning, scientific pedagogism, and mental ennui; on the other: with, of course, a fine leavening somewhere of the salt of life. However, it is only fair to say that we were not there at the best season in which to see the blither side of Germans and German life. I saw a good deal of the southern principalities and kingdoms—the Rhine provinces, Baden, Würtemberg, and Bavaria. Of course Heidelberg, where we stayed six wet weeks, is the most picturesque of the residential places (towns like Frankfort-am-Main and Mannheim are only for merchants and traders, though they have music “galore”), but I would rather stay at Stuttgart than any I saw. It is wonderfully animated and pleasing for a German town, and has a charming double attraction both as a mediæval city and as a modern capital. There, too, I have a friend: the American novelist, Blanche Willis Howard (author of Guenn, The Open Door, etc.), who is now the wife of the Court-Physician to the King of Würtemberg and rejoices in the title “Frau Hof-Arzt von Teuffel.” Dr. von Teuffel himself is one of the few Germans who seem to regard women as equals.
“But what a relief it was to be in Italy again, though not just at first, for the weather at Verona was atrocious, and snow lay thick past Mantua to Bologna. But once the summit of the Apennines was reached, and the magnificent and unique prospect of Florentine Tuscany lay below, flooded in sunshine and glowing colour (though it was in the second week of December) we realised that at last we were in Italy.... When we came to Rome we had at first some difficulty in getting rooms which at once suited our tastes and our pockets. But now we are settled in an “apartment” of 3-1/2 rooms, within a yard or so of the summit of the Quirinal Hill. The 1/2 is a small furnished corridor or ante-room: the comfortable salotto, is at once our study, drawing-room, and parlour.
“We have our coffee and our fruit in the morning: and when we are in for lunch our old landlady gives us delightful colazioni of maccaroni and tomatoes, or spinach and lentils, or eggs and something else, with roasted chestnuts and light wine and bread. We have our dinner sent in from a trattoria.
“In a sense, I have been indolent of late: but I have been thinking much, and am now, directly or indirectly, occupied with several ambitious undertakings. Fiction, other imaginative prose, and the drama (poetic and prose), besides a lyrical drama, and poetry generally, would fain claim my pen all day long. As for my lyrical drama—which is the only poetic work not immediately modern in theme—which is called ‘Bacchus in India’; my idea is to deal in a new and I hope poetic way with Dionysos as the Joy-Bringer, the God of Joyousness. In the first part there is the union of all the links between Man and the World he inhabits: Bacchus goes forth in joy, to give his serene message to all the world. The second part, ‘The Return,’ is wild disaster, and the bitterness of shame: though even there, and in the Epilogue, will sound the clarion of a fresh Return to Joy. I transcribe and enclose the opening scene for you—as it at present stands, unrevised. The ‘lost God’ referred to in the latter part is really that deep corrosive Melancholy whom so many poets and artists—from Dante and Durer to our own time—have dimly descried as a terrible Power.
“At the moment I am most of all interested in my blank-verse tragedy. It deals with a most terrible modern instance of the scriptural warming as to the sins of the father being visited upon his children: an instance where the father himself shares the doom and the agony. Then I have also schemed out, and hope soon to get on with, a prose play, dealing with the deep wrong done to women by certain existing laws. Among other prose books (fiction) which I have “on the stocks” nothing possesses me more than a philosophical work which I shall probably publish either anonymously or under a pseudonym, and, I hope, before next winter. How splendid it is to be alive! O if one could only crush into a few vivid years the scattered fruit of wasted seasons. There is such a host of things to do: such a bitter sparsity of time, after bread-and-butter making, to do them in—even to dream of them!”
These various schemes planned mentally were never realised. William constantly projected and of the roughly drafted out possible work that absorbed him during its conception, but was put aside when a more dominating idea demanded full expression. “Bacchus in India” remained a fragment. Neither the tragedy nor that prose play was finished, and the philosophical work was never begun. A new impulse came, new work grew out of the impressions of that Roman winter which swept out of his mind all other cartooned work.