and I happened to know where the quotation came from. I stayed for a few days with the Bensons at Addington. Arthur and Fred Benson were there, but none of the rest of the family. Fred Benson had just finished his novel, Dodo, and was correcting the proofs of it. I read the proofs. Arthur Benson had written a great many poems, which he read out to me. They were published later in the year. During the time I had spent at Hildesheim I had continued to write verse every now and then, and I used to send my efforts to Arthur Benson for his criticism. I had also written what must have been a childish play, a modern drama, but I had published nothing except a little verse in a Plymouth newspaper. While I was staying at Osborne with the Ponsonbys and also at Addington with the Bensons I heard a great deal about a Miss Ethel Smyth. Arthur Benson had told me about her at Eton. She was a friend of his family, and he used often to hear from her. She was a newer friend of my aunts and my cousins, and they talked a great deal about her. I heard about her wonderful singing, her energy, her vitality, her talk, how she had said that Mrs. Benson was “as good as God and as clever as the Devil”; how I must hear her sing “l’Anneau d’argent,” and her own Mass. It was arranged that I was to make her acquaintance. Her Mass was to be given at the Albert Hall, and I was invited by Mrs. Charles Hunter (Miss Smyth’s sister) to hear it from her box. The box was full of Miss Smyth’s hunting friends, who gave the music a respectful hearing, and when it was over we went to the Bachelors’ Club and had supper. I sat next to Miss Smyth and we made friends at once. The next night I had dinner at Dover Street, where Mrs. Hunter was staying, and there I met General Smyth, Miss Smyth’s father, and Mr. Brewster, an American by birth, a Frenchman by education, an Italian by residence. His appearance was striking; he had a fair beard and the eyes of a seer; à contre jour, someone said he looked like a Rembrandt. His manner was suave, and at first one thought him inscrutable—a person whom one could never know, surrounded as it were by a hedge of roses. When I got to know him better I found the whole secret of Brewster was this: he was absolutely himself: he said quite simply and calmly what he thought. Nothing leads to such misunderstandings as the truth. Bismarck said the best of all diplomatic policies was to tell the truth, as nobody believed you. But even when you are not prepared to disbelieve, and suspect no diplomatic wiles, the truth is sometimes disconcerting when calmly expressed. I recollect my first conversation with Mr. Brewster. We talked of books, and I was brimful of enthusiasm for Swinburne and Rossetti. “No,” said Brewster, “I don’t care for Rossetti; it all seems to me like an elaborate exercise. I prefer Paul Verlaine.” I knew he was not being paradoxical, but I thought he was lacking in catholicity, narrow in comprehension. Why couldn’t one like both? I thought he was being Olympian and damping. When I got to know him well, I understood how completely sincere he had been, and how utterly unpretentious; how impossible it was for him to pretend he liked something he did not like, and how true it was that Rossetti seemed to him as elaborate as an exercise.
That night we went to a concert at St. James’s Hall, and I saw again the familiar green benches where for so many years my mother had seats in Row 2. “You remind me,” said a lady I was introduced to that night, “of a lady who used to come and sit here at the Pops in the second row, a long time ago.”
I can’t remember where it was I first heard Ethel Smyth sing, whether it was in Dover Street or in her own little house, “One Oak.” I remember the songs she sang—some Brahms, some Schubert, among others “Pause” and “Der Doppelgänger,” “l’Anneau d’argent,” and “Come o’er the Sea,” and I knew at once that I had opened a window on a new and marvellous province. The whole performance was so complete and so poignantly perfect: the accompaniment, the way the words and the music were blended, and the composer’s inmost and most intimate intention and meaning seemed to be revealed and interpreted as if he were singing the song himself for the first time; the rare and exquisite quality and delicacy of her voice, the strange thrill and wail, the distinction and distinct clear utterance, where every word and every note told without effort, and the whirlwind of passion and feeling she evoked in a song such as “Come o’er the Sea” or Brahms’ “Botschaft.”
It was settled that I was to learn Italian, and for that purpose I went to Florence. I stayed in Paris a few days on the way at the Hôtel St. Romain, Rue St. Roch, and I went to several plays and saw Bartet at the Théâtre français, in Le Père Prodigue. Then I travelled to Florence in a crowded second-class carriage. I had expected Florence to be a dismal place, full of buildings like Dorchester House, grey and cold. It was cold when the Tramontana blew, but I had forgotten or rather I had not imagined the Italian sun. I arrived late, at one in the morning, and when I got up and saw the sun streaming from a cloudless blue sky on warm, yellow, sun-baked houses with red flat roofs, I was amazed. I stayed the first night I arrived at an hotel, and then moved into a pension at Lung’Arno della Borsa 2 bis, which belonged to Signora Agnese Traverso. I began to learn Italian at once, and had lessons from a charming old Italian called Signor Benelli. Signor Benelli had been a soldier in Garibaldi’s Army; he was an intense enthusiast both in politics and literature—a Dante scholar and an admirer of the moderns: Carducci, and Gabriele d’Annunzio’s early poems, which were not well known then. I never had a better master before or afterwards. He knew English well and revelled in English poetry, especially in Shelley and Keats. As soon as I got to understand Italian we read Dante, and I read the whole of the Divina Commedia aloud with Signor Benelli, all Leopardi, and a great deal of Tasso and Ariosto. I also made other discoveries for myself in other branches of literature. There was a large lending library at Florence, full of books in every European literature. I there discovered by myself the works of Anatole France and read Thaïs, Balthazar, and L’Etui de Nacre, le Crime de Sylvestre Bonnard, and La Rôtisserie de la Reine Pédauque. I read a great deal of Maupassant as well, the complete works of Merimée, some Balzac, and the plays of Dumas fils, and all the Sardou I could get hold of. I also had a few Russian lessons from a lady, but I did not go on with them as I had not the time. I made the acquaintance of Miss Violet Paget (Vernon Lee), who lived in a lovely little villa called “The Palmerino” on the Fiesole side of the town.
The spring in Florence is a wonderful pageant. At first you do not see where there can be any room for it. The trees seem all evergreen—cypresses and silvery olives. The landscape seems complete as it is. Then suddenly the brown hills are alive with wild, fluttering, red jagged-edged tulips. Large bunches of anemones, violets, and lilies of the valley are sold in the streets, and soon roses. Then the young corn shoots up, and all the hills become green and the cornfields are fringed with wild dog-roses, and soon the tall red and white lilies come out, and then the wistaria, and the Judas trees—a dense mass of blossom against the solid, speckless blue sky.
In May I met Hubert Cornish at Naples and spent a few days with him, and we went for a night to Sorrento, and in June I went to Venice by myself and stayed there for one long and deliciously hot week. I saw the pictures, drifted about on the lagoon, and bathed at the Lido in the Adriatic, the only sea that is really hot enough.
At the end of June I was back again in England. I was to go to Oxford or Cambridge, but to do either of these things it is necessary to pass an examination in which sums had to be done. At first I was going to Oxford, but it was thought that I would never be able to pass Smalls, so it was decided I should go to Cambridge, but in order to pass the examination before matriculating I had to go to a crammer’s to brush up my Latin and Greek and try to learn Arithmetic.
At the end of July I went to Eton and stayed with the Cornishes. Mr. Cornish had just been made Vice-Provost, and was moving into the Cloisters from Holland House. It was a hot, beautiful August and we spent most of our days on the river. One day there was a regatta going on at Datchet. As we passed it we made triolets on the events of the regatta. “My shirt is undone, here comes the regatta,” one of them began. The incident that struck us most was the passage of Miss Tarver in a boat. She appeared to be in distress, and was weeping. This incident was at once put to verse in this triolet:
“Oh! there’s Lily Tarver
In oceans of tears,