As the weeks went on in our bare, wind-swept palazzo, it became impossible to resist a community in which everyone, from Alessandro to this dear padre parroco, combined to show us that we were not only tolerated, but welcomed. Our Italian was sadly to seek during those first weeks, consisting largely in agonized consultations with Nutt’s Pocket Dictionary, and in practising its phrases over with Alessandro; but his courtesy and patience never failed, so that before long our sentences began to put forth wings and soar. But never, alas, to any great heights, and even when Mrs. Ward was able to carry on animated conversations with our drivers about the traditions of the Alban Hills, she would find herself sitting tongue-tied and exasperated, or descending into French, at luncheon-parties in Rome!
Yet those luncheon-parties, and the visits which we persuaded the new friends, whom we made there, to pay us on our heights, laid the foundations of certain friendships which influenced Mrs. Ward’s whole attitude towards the new Italy, and gave her the conviction, which she never lost in the years that followed, that there exists between the best English and the best Italian minds a certain natural affinity, which transcends the differences of habits and of speech more surely than is the case between ourselves and any other of our Continental neighbours. She put this feeling into the mouth of her ideal Ambassador in Eleanor—that slight but charming sketch which was, I believe, based upon the figure of Lord Dufferin—when he speaks to the American Lucy of the Marchesa Fazzoleni, symbol and type of Italian womanhood. “Look well at her,” he says to Lucy, “she is one of the mothers of the new Italy. She has all the practical sense of the north, and all the subtlety of the south. She is one of the people who make me feel that Italy and England have somehow mysterious affinities that will work themselves out in history. It seems to me that I could understand all her thoughts—and she mine, if it were worth her while. She is a modern of the moderns; and yet there is in her some of the oldest stuff in the world. She belongs, it is true, to a nation in the making—but that nation, in its earlier forms, has already carried the whole weight of European history!”
Figures such as these began, when the storms of an inhospitable April had passed away, to haunt the cool ilex avenue and the terrace beyond, filling Mrs. Ward’s eager mind with new impressions, new perceptions of the infinite variety and delightsomeness of the human race; and the old walls of Domitian’s villa re-echoed to many an animated talk of Pope and Kingdom, Church and State, as well as to Lanciani’s full-voiced exclamations on the buried treasures—nay, even Alba Longa itself!—that must lie at our feet there, only a few yards below the surface! Then, once or twice, we took these guests of ours further afield, to the Lake of Nemi, in its circular crater-cup—“Lo Specchio di Diana”—with the ruined walls of the Temple of Diana rising amid their beds of strawberries at its further end. This was indeed a place of enchantment, and readers of Eleanor will remember how the motif of the “Priest who slew the slayer” is woven into the fabric of the story, while the turning-point in the drama of the three—Eleanor, Lucy and Manisty—is reached during an expedition to the Temple. Here it was that Count Ugo Balzani, best of friends and mentors, bought from the strawberry-pickers for a few francs a whole basketful of little terra-cotta heads—votive offerings of the Tiberian age—and gave them to Mrs. Ward; and here that Henry James, during the few precious days that he spent with us at the Villa, found the peasant youth with the glorious name, Aristodemo, and set him talking of Lord Savile’s diggings, and of the marble head that he himself had found—yes, he!—with nose and all complete, in his own garden, while the sun sank lower towards the crater-rim, and the rest of us sat spell-bound, listening to the dialogue.
Naturally, however, with Rome only fifteen miles away, we did not always remain upon our hill-top, and the days that Mrs. Ward spent in the city, making new friends and seeing old sights, were probably among the richest in her whole experience. The great ceremony in St. Peter’s, when Leo XIII celebrated the twenty-first anniversary of his accession, is too well described in Eleanor to need any mention here, but there were days of mere wandering about the streets, shopping, exploring old churches and talking to the sacristans, when she breathed the very spirit of Rome and let its beauty sink into her soul. And there was one day when a kind and condescending Cardinal—not an Italian—offered to take her over the crypt of St. Peter’s—a privilege not then easy to obtain for ladies—and to show her the treasures it contained. Little, however, did the poor Cardinal guess what a task he had undertaken. “The very kind Cardinal knew nothing whatever about the crypt, which was a little sad,” wrote D. W. that evening, and Mrs. Ward herself thus described it to her husband: “It was very funny! The Cardinal was very kind, and astonishingly ignorant. Any English Bishop going over St. Peter’s would, I think, have known more about it, would have been certainly more intelligent and probably more learned. You would have laughed if you could have seen your demure spouse listening to the Cardinal’s explanations. But I said not a word—and came home and read Harnack!” A lamentable result, surely, of His Eminence’s courteous efforts to grapple with the tombs of the Popes.
Through April, May, and half through June we stayed at the Villa, till the sun grew burning hot, and we were fain to adopt the customs of the country, keeping windows and shutters closed against the fierce mid-day. During the hot weather Mrs. Ward made an excursion, for purposes of Eleanor, to the wonderful forest-country in the valley of the Paglia, north of Orvieto, where the Marchese di Torre Alfina, a nephew of Mr. Stillman, had placed his agent’s house at her disposal, and charged his people to look after her. There, with her husband and daughter, she spent two or three days exploring the forest roads and the volcanic torrent-bed, down which the Paglia rushes, learning all she could of the life and traditions of the village and of the Maremma country beyond. It was a district wholly unknown to her and full of attraction and romance, which she has infused into the last chapters of Eleanor; it gave her, too, a feeling of the inexhaustible wealth of the Italian soil and race which reinforced her growing love for this land of her adoption. As the chapters of Eleanor swelled during the remainder of this year, so its theme took form and presence in the writer’s mind—the eternal theme of the supplanting of the old by the young, whether in the history of States or of persons. Steadily Mrs. Ward’s faith in the destiny of that vast Italy into whose life she had looked, if only for a moment, grew and strengthened, till she put it into words in the mouth of her Marchesa Fazzoleni, speaking to a group gathered in the Villa Borghese garden: “I tell you, Mademoiselle,” she says to Lucy, “that what Italy has done in forty years is colossal—not to be believed! Forty years—not quite—since Cavour died. And all that time Italy has been like that cauldron—you remember?—into which they threw the members of that old man who was to become young. There has been a bubbling, and a fermenting! And the scum has come up—and up. And it comes up still, and the brewing goes on. But in the end the young, strong nation will step forth!” And Manisty himself, the upholder of the Old against the New, the contemner of Governments and officials, admits at last that Italy has defeated him, because, as he confesses to Lucy, “your Italy is a witch.” “As I have been going up and down this country,” so runs his recantation, “prating about their poverty, and their taxes, their corruption, the incompetence of their leaders, the folly of their quarrel with the Church; I have been finding myself caught in the grip of things older and deeper—incredibly, primævally old!—that still dominate everything, shape everything here. There are forces in Italy, forces of land and soil and race, only now fully let loose, that will re-make Church no less than State, as the generations go by. Sometimes I have felt as though this country were the youngest in Europe; with a future as fresh and teeming as the future of America. And yet one thinks of it at other times as one vast graveyard; so thick it is with the ashes and the bones of men.”
Thus Mrs. Ward wove into her book, as was her wont, all the rich experience of her own mind, as she had gathered and brooded over it during these months in Italy, and then, when all was finished, gave to it the prophetic dedication which has made her name beloved by many an Italian reader:
“To Italy the beloved and beautiful,
Instructress of our past,
Delight of our present,
Comrade of our future—
The heart of an Englishwoman
Offers this book.”
CHAPTER IX
MRS. WARD AS CRITIC AND PLAYWRIGHT—FRENCH AND ITALIAN FRIENDS—THE SETTLEMENT VACATION SCHOOL
1899-1904
IN spite of the close and continuous toil that she put into the writing of Eleanor during the year 1899, Mrs. Ward found time, in the course of that year, for an effort of literary criticism to which she devoted the best powers of her mind, but which has never, perhaps, received the recognition it deserves. I refer to the Prefaces that she wrote to Messrs. Smith & Elder’s “Haworth Edition” of the Brontë novels.