Sit modus lasso maris et viarum
Militiæque.”
That was the first Ode of Horace I ever read when I was up to Arthur Benson, in Remove, at Eton. I remember wondering at the time, what sort of place Tibur was, where Horace, tired of journeys by land and by sea, and tired of wars and rumours of war, wished to build himself a final nest.
When I saw Tivoli, with its divinely elegant waterfall, I understood his wish; nor could I imagine a more enchanting haven, a more complete and peaceful final goal for the end of a pilgrimage.
I see the lake of Nemi, where the barges of Tiberius—is it Tiberius?—still rest beneath the water; and Frascati, and the view from the roof of a house in the Via—which Via? I forget, but it was not far from Porta Pia; and from thence, in the red sunset, you saw St. Peter’s; and I see the view of the whole city from the Janiculum … more memories here, and older ones from Macaulay … and the Palatine by moonlight; the moon streaming on all the thousand fragments, and the few large plinths of the Forum; and Vernon Lee saying that moonlight on the Palatine sounded like a stage direction in a play of Shelley’s; and I see the marbles coloured like some pale seaweed in Santa Maria in Cosmedìn, and the peep at St. Peter’s, through the keyhole of one of the College gardens, and the fountains in the moonlight, on the top of the hill, as you drive from the station, and the fountain of Trevi into which I threw a penny, wishing that I might come back to Rome, one day, but not as a diplomat; and the Milanese shops in the Corso, and the vast cool spaces of St. Peter’s, on a hot day, when you swung back the heavy curtain; and the courtyard in Brewster’s Palace; and then the heat; the great heat when the shutters were shut, and one stayed indoors all day; and the arrival of an Indian Prince, whom we met in frock-coats, at six in the morning, at the railway station, and who turned out not to be a Prince at all, but a man of inferior caste, and who drank far too much whisky, and far too little soda, in the Embassy garden, and became painfully loud and familiar; and at a little tea-party in my rooms, with Brewster and someone else; a Roman lady, looking like a Renaissance picture, regal, stately, in a white fur and tippet; a lady with hosts of adorers, who, when she saw a book on the Burmese or Buddhism, on my table, called The Hearts of Men, said with a smile: “That is a subject, I think, I know something about”; and the Roman women, no less majestic, but more vociferous, in the Trastevere, or kneeling with the grace of sculpture before the Pietà in St. Peter’s.
To look back upon, it is all a wonderful dream-world of sunshine and flowers and beauty; but at the time, I did not really like Rome. In spite of the many charming people I met there, in spite of the associations of the past, and the daily beauty of the present, I did not enjoy living at Rome as a diplomat. There was a good deal to do at the Embassy, and not a large staff, and I only once went for an expedition that lasted more than one day. Besides which, a diplomat at Rome was caught in a net of small social duties, visits, days on which one had to call at the Embassies, cards to be left; one could not enjoy Rome freely. Besides which, I felt as if I were living in a cemetery, and I was oppressed by the army of ghosts in the air, the host of memories, so many crumbling walls and momentous ruins.
At the end of July, I went to Russia, and spent three weeks at Sosnofka, where the whole of the Benckendorff family and one of their cousins were staying. I could now understand Russian and read it without difficulty, and could talk enough to get on. I had come to the definite conclusion that I did not care for Diplomacy as a career. I did not think then, and I do not think now, that it is worse than any other career. “Il n’y a pas de sot métier,” and Diplomacy, like anything else, is what you make it. But unless your heart is in the work, unless you like it for its own sake, you will never make anything of it, and I did not like it. I wanted literary work.
My first step was to try and get back to England. I applied for a temporary exchange into the Foreign Office and got it. I went back to London in January 1903, and worked in the Foreign Office, in the Commercial Department, for the rest of that summer. In the autumn, I went to Russia once more, and spent most of my time translating a selection of Leonardo da Vinci’s Thoughts on Art and Life for the Humanists’ Library, published by the Merrymount Press, Boston.
I wanted to devote myself to literature; but it was difficult to find an opening. I had little to show except a book of poems published in 1902, three articles in the Encyclopædia Britannica, an article in the Saturday Review, and one in the National Review.
I approached a publisher with the proposal of translating all Dostoievsky’s novels, or those of Gogol. But he said there would be no market for such books in England. Dostoievsky had not yet been discovered, and in one of the leading literary London newspapers, even as late as 1905, he was spoken of in a long, serious article, as being a kind of Xavier de Montépin! Gogol has not yet been discovered, and only one of his books has been adequately translated.