Dead letters

by Maurice Baring

All at once, while I was standing by the grassy plain and looking towards Rome, I became aware of a plaintive sound: a Roman shepherd boy dressed in sheepskins was tootling one or two monotonous notes on a wooden pipe. His music seemed to complete the landscape, and to express the very spirit of the Campagna, which brings home to me the Rome of ancient days more poignantly and more nearly than all monuments and museums.

The veil which had hung over me during all these days was abruptly lifted. The old spell and the old charm returned, and I could say to myself: “This is Rome! I have at last found what I was seeking.”

I had remained for some time musing, when I suddenly noticed that a man was sitting not far from me, seated on a stool and making a sketch in water-colour of a broken archway. He had been there the whole time, but I had not noticed him. I do not know why, but I felt a desire to speak to some one, and I approached him and asked in French if he could tell me the time. He answered me civilly, and by his accent I perceived that he was a German, one of the artists no doubt who are here so numerous, although I did not remember having seen him before. He was extremely handsome—I should say between thirty and forty—and though his face was young, his eyes had a penetrating sadness about them, an almost tragic expression, as though they had sounded bitter depths of experience.

We fell into conversation, and he told me that he was a German, that his name was Müller, and that he was spending some months in Rome. I said that I presumed he was an artist; he replied that he was only now learning the rudiments of the art of drawing, but that he had begun too late, and that he would never be anything but a dilettante.

As he spoke he folded up his sketching-book, for it was already too dark to draw, and we walked towards the city together. He said he had never been to Rome before, but that he had been steeped ever since his youth in the culture of antiquity, and the monuments and the pictures which he had seen since his arrival were to him like old friends with whom he had frequently corresponded, but whom he had never seen in the flesh. But all previous study, he said, as far as Rome was concerned, struck him as being ineffectual as soon as he arrived in the city, because he was sure that it is only in Rome itself that one can prepare oneself to study Rome. He had not been here many weeks, but so far, the three things which had impressed him most were the Rotunda, which he considered the thing most spiritually great he had seen, St. Peter’s, and the Apollo Belvidere, which he thought, as a work of genius, was the greatest of all; for although he had seen innumerable casts of this work, and indeed possessed one himself, it was as though he had never seen the statue before.

I told him that he was to be congratulated on never having seen Rome before, since his impressions would not be marred by the memories of a Rome more unspoiled and more charming. He said that he was only too keenly aware of the havoc which the modern architects had wrought, and that he feared that in twenty years’ time Rome would be unrecognizable.

“But perhaps,” he added, “we are mistaken. Rome has an assimilative power so great that it is able to suffer any amount of alteration, vandalism, superstructure, and addition, without losing anything of its eternal character and divinity. In Rome there is a continuity with which nothing can interfere.” And he added that he thought there was something in the atmosphere, the vegetation, the very grass and the weeds of the place which acted like a spell and softened what was ugly and modern, reconciled all differences, and reduced all discords into an eternal harmony which was the genius of the city.

We talked of other matters also, and I found that he was well versed in ancient and modern literature, and had an intimate knowledge of English. He admired the plays of Shakespeare; with Dryden he was less well acquainted, but he possessed a knowledge very striking in a foreigner of the untrodden byways of our literature. For instance, he told me that he had read the plays of Marlowe with great interest, especially the tragical history of Dr. Faustus. This, he told me, was a favourite theme for German writers; in the last few years there had been almost a hundred plays written on the subject.

I asked him if he wrote himself. He said he had done so, and had begun many books, but that he found it difficult to finish them.

“I have dabbled,” he said, “in art, in science, and in literature; they all interest me equally. But I am affected by the malady of our age, which is dilettantism, and I fear I shall be nothing but a dilettante all my life.”