Among the Italians, my greatest friends were Count and Countess Pasolini, who had charming rooms in the Palazzo Sciarra. Count Pasolini was an historian and the author of a large, serious, and valuable work on Catherina Sforza. His ways and his conversation reminded me of Hamlet. His dignity and his high courtesy were mixed with the most impish humour, and sometimes he would glide from the room like a ghost, or suddenly expose some curious train of thought quite unconnected with the conversation that was going on round him. Sometimes he would be unconscious of the numerous guests in the room, which was nearly always full of visitors from every part of Europe; or he would startle a stranger by asking him what he thought of Countess Pasolini, or, if the conversation bored him, hum to himself a snatch of Dante. Sometimes he would be as naughty as a child, especially if he knew he was expected to be especially good, or he would say a bitingly ironical thing masked with deference.
One day an Austrian lady came to luncheon who had rather a strange appearance and still stranger clothes. Her hair was remarkable for its high lights, her cheeks and eyebrows for their frank, undisguised artificiality. When the lift porter saw her he was puzzled. Her costume enhanced the singularity of her appearance, as she was dressed in pale green, with mermaid-like effects, and details of shells and seaweed. When she was ushered into the drawing-room, Pasolini gazed at her with delighted wonder, concealing his amazement with a veil of mock admiration, quite sufficiently to hide it from her, but not well enough to conceal it from those who knew him intimately. She sat next to him at luncheon, and he was as charming and deferential as it was possible to be; but those who knew him well saw that he was taking a cynical enjoyment in every moment of the conversation. When she went away he bowed low, kissed her hand, and said: “Madame, je tâcherai de vous oublier.”
Count Pasolini sometimes used to remind me of the fantastic, charming, cultivated, slightly eccentric people that Anatole France sometimes allows to wander and discourse through his stories, especially in his early books. Those who knew him used often to say if only he could meet Anatole France, and if only Anatole France could meet him. When the meeting did come off, at a dinner-party, the result was not quite successful. Count Pasolini knew what was expected of him, and looking at Anatole France, who was sitting on the other side of the table, he said to his neighbour in an audible whisper: “Qui est ce Monsieur un peu chauve?”
One day I took an English lady to tea with him, and he was so enchanted with her beauty and wit that he said he must have a souvenir of her, and quite suddenly he cut off a lock of her hair with a pair of scissors; and this lock he kept in his museum, and he showed it to me years afterwards. His eyes were remarkable, they were so thoughtful, so wistful, so deep, so piercing, and so melancholy; and sometimes you felt he was not there at all, but on some other plane, pursuing a fantasy, or chasing a dream or a thought, and all at once he would gently let you into the secret of his day-dream by a sudden question or an unexpected quotation. At other times he would join hotly in the fray of conversation; dispute, argue, pour out fantastic monologues, and embroider absurd themes.
But whatever he said or did, in whatever mood he was, whether wistful, combative, naughty, perverse, lyrical, or fantastic, he never lost his silvery courtesy, his melancholy dignity. When I said he was like Hamlet, I can imagine him so well looking at a skull and saying: “Prithee, Horatio, tell me one thing. Dost think Alexander looked o’ this fashion i’ the earth?” That is just the kind of remark he would suddenly make in the middle of a dinner-party. His thoughts and his dreams flitted about him like dragon-flies, and he sometimes caught them for you and let you have a fugitive glimpse of their shining wings.
At Rome I got to know Brewster very well. He lived in the Palazzo Antici Mattei, and he often gave luncheon and dinner-parties. I often dined with him when he was alone. His external attitude was one of unruffled serenity and Olympian impartiality, but I often used to tell him that this mask of suavity concealed opinions and prejudices as absolute as those of Dr. Johnson. His opinions and tastes were his own, and his appreciations were as sensitive as his expression of them was original. He had the serene, rarefied, smiling melancholy of great wisdom, without a trace of bitterness. He took people as they were, and had no wish to change or reform them. He was catholic in his taste for people, and liked those with whom he could be comfortable. He was appreciative of the work of others when he liked it, a discriminating and inspiriting critic. While I was in Rome, he published his French book, L’Âme païenne; but his most characteristic book is probably The Prison. Some day I feel sure that book will be republished, and perhaps find many readers; it is like a quiet tower hidden in the side street of a loud city, that few people hear of, and many pass by without noticing, but which those who visit find to be a place of peace, haunted by echoes, and looking out on sights that have a quality and price above and beyond those of the market-place.
Besides The Prison, Brewster wrote two other books in English, and a play in French verse, which he had not finished correcting when he died.
Few people had heard of his books. He used never to complain of this. He once told me that his work lay in a narrow and arid groove, that of metaphysical speculation, in which necessarily but few people were interested. He talked of it as a narrow strip of stiff ploughland on which just a few people laboured. He said he would have far preferred a different soil, and a more fruitful form of labour, but that happened to be the only work he could do, the soil which had been allotted him. He was Latin by taste, tradition, and education; a lover of Rabelais, Montaigne, Ronsard, and Villon, but seventeenth century French classics bored him. He disputed the idea that French was necessarily a language which necessitated perspicuity of expression and clearness of thought. He thought that in the hands of a poet like Verlaine the French language could achieve all possible effects of vagueness, of shades of feeling, of overtones in ideas and in expression. He admired Dante, Goethe, Byron, and Keats, but not Milton, Wordsworth, or Shelley. He disliked Wagner’s music intensely. It had, he said, the same effect on him as the noise of a finger rubbed round the edge of a piece of glass, and he said that he could gauge from the intensity of his dislike how keen the enjoyment of those who did enjoy it must be.
In 1906, discussing the revolutionary troubles of Russia, he said to me: “All Europe seems bent on proving that Liberty is the tyranny of the rabble. The equation may work itself out more or less quickly, but it is bound to triumph.” And again: “As the intelligent are liberals, I am on the side of the idiots.” And in Rome he often used to say to me that the fanaticism of free-thinkers and the intolerance of anti-clericals was to him not only more distasteful than the dogmatism of the orthodox, but appeared to him to be a more violent and a more tyrannous thing.
This description (in a letter written in 1903) of how he discovered Verlaine’s poetry is extremely characteristic: