“He was an American poet, but his mother had a Dutch name.”
“Did he come to the teatrino?”
“He never came to Europe. I wish he had been to the teatrino. He would have liked your Escape from Paris, but perhaps he would not have cared so much for the paladins. He wrote something about them.”
“What did he say?”
“If he had seen the end of the story, when the angel takes Guido Santo’s soul out of his mouth, I believe he would have said that instead of flying up to heaven he flew across the Atlantic with it and installed it ‘amid the
kitchenware’ to animate all the machinery and things in one of the Exhibitions held by the American Institute in New York.”
“Is that what he said?”
“No. What he said was that all that world of romance was dead:
Passed to its charnel vault—laid on the shelf—coffin’d with crown and armour on,
Blazon’d with Shakespeare’s purple page,
And dirged by Tennyson’s sweet sad rhyme.
“Well, it is not true. But of course if he never came to the teatrino he could not know. Americans do come to the teatrino. I never know which are Americans and which are English; for the English come too. They come in the winter and the spring, and when they are pleased with some stage trick—”