One night that winter I went with my father and my sisters to the first night of the Notorious Mrs. Ebbsmith at the Garrick Theatre. Sir John Hare and Mrs. Patrick Campbell both played magnificently, and Mrs. Campbell enjoyed a triumph. She held the audience at the beginning of the play by her grace, and by her quiet magnetic intensity, and then swept everyone off their feet by her outbursts of vituperation. Mr. Shaw, writing in the Saturday Review about it, said that one of the defects of the play, the unreality of the chief female character, had “the lucky effect of setting Mrs. Patrick Campbell free to do as she pleases in it, the result being an irresistible projection of that lady’s personal genius, a projection which sweeps the play aside and imperiously becomes the play itself. Mrs. Patrick Campbell, in fact, pulls her author through by playing him clean off the stage. She creates all sorts of illusions, and gives one all sorts of searching sensations. It is impossible not to feel that those haunting eyes are brooding on a momentous past, and the parting lips anticipating a thrilling imminent future, whilst some enigmatic present must no less surely be working underneath all that subtle play of limb and stealthy intensity of tone.” After the third act the audience applauded deliriously, and the next day the critics declared unanimously that Mrs. Campbell had the ball at her feet. They all prophesied that this was the beginning of undreamed-of triumphs. They little dreamed how recklessly she would kick the ball.
At Easter I went to Florence once more and stayed there far into June. I think it was that year I spent a little time at Perugia. One day I drove to Assisi. The country was in the full glory of spring. We passed groaning carts drawn by slow, white oxen; poppies flared in the green corn; little lizards sunned themselves on the walls; one felt one was no longer in Italy, but in an older country, in Latium; in some little kingdom in which Remus might have been king, or that kindly monarch, Numa Pompilius, with Egeria, his gracious consort. I saw the Italy that I had dreamt of ever since as a child I had read with Mrs. Christie in the Lays of Ancient Rome of “where sweet Clanis wanders through corn and vines and flowers,” of milk-white steer grazing along Clitumnus, and the struggling sheep plunging in Umbro. And when at last Assisi appeared, with its shining snow-white basilica crowning the hill like a diadem, one seemed to be driving up to a celestial city.
On the 18th of May, life was made exciting by an earthquake. It happened about nine o’clock in the evening. We had just finished dinner at the pension. I had walked to my bedroom to fetch something, when there came a noise like a gas explosion or a bomb exploding, and I was thrown on to my bed. The pictures fell from the walls, and the ground seemed to be slipping away from one. Outside on the landing—we lived on the second floor of the Palazzo Alberti, up two flights of stairs—I heard the servants crying: “Sono i Ladri” (“The thieves are upon us”), and there was a scamper down the stairs, as the maid and the cook rushed down to bolt the front door and keep out the thieves. Then various objects of value were saved, or at least a mysterious process of salvage was begun. A box containing family deeds was carried from one room to another, and some American children were carried downstairs in a blanket. The shock, I think, lasted only seven seconds, but had been, while it lasted, intense. Then there was a good deal of bustle and discussion, and everybody suggested something different that ought to be done; and Madame Traverso carried on a conversation with the landlady of the house, who lived on the first floor. Relations between the two households had hitherto been strained, and a state of veiled hostilities had existed between them. The earthquake changed all this and brought about a reconciliation. From her window Madame Traverso called to the landlady and assured her that we were: “Nelle mani di Dio” (“We are in the hands of God”). “Si,” answered the landlady: “Siamo nelle mani di Dio” (“Yes, we are in the hands of God”). Signora Traverso said we could not sleep in the house that night. It was not to be thought of, and we joined the population in the streets. No sooner had people begun to say it was all over, and that we could quietly go home, than another faint tremor was felt. People encamped in carriages; others walked about the streets. The terror inspired by an earthquake is unlike any other, because you feel there is no possible escape from it. At eleven o’clock in the evening there was another faint shock. We got to bed late; some of the inmates of the pension slept in a cab. The next day one could inspect the damage done. The village of Grassina near the Certosa had been destroyed. I had just been to the Certosa, and one of the monks there, an Irishman, when we asked him what the green liqueur was made of, that he sold, said: “Shamrocks and melted emeralds.” Grassina was a village where on Good Friday I had seen the procession of Gesù Morto by torchlight, in the April twilight, with its centurions in calico and armour, its tapers, its nasal brasses and piercing lamentation, and crowd of nut-sellers; a ceremony as old as the soil, and said to be a new incarnation of the funeral of Pan.
The Palazzo Strozzi was rent from top to bottom with a huge crack. Pillars in Piazza dell’Anunziata had fallen down; and at San Miniato, the school of the Poggio Imperiale had been seriously damaged. Had the shock lasted a few seconds longer the destruction in Florence would have been extremely serious, and many irreplaceable treasures would have been destroyed.
The afternoon after the earthquake I bicycled out to see Vernon Lee, and she said that the butcher boy in her village declared that in the afternoon before the earthquake he had seen the Devil leap from a cleft in the ground in a cloud of sulphurous fumes and fires. In the night there was another slight shock towards one in the morning. I was asleep and I was woken suddenly, and experienced the strange sensation of feeling the floor slightly oscillating, but it only lasted a second or two, and that was the last of the earthquake.
I made that year the acquaintance of Professor Nencioni, a poet and a critic, and a profound student of English literature and English verse. He was saturated with English literature, and his poems show the influence and impress of the English poets of the nineteenth century. He used to give lectures on English poetry in Italian; he was a stimulating, eloquent lecturer, and his knowledge of English was amazing. I went to his lectures and made his acquaintance, and we had long talks about literature. He asked me if I had written anything, and I told him I had some typed poems, but that I had given up trying to write verse. He asked me to show them him. The next time I went to his lecture I took my typed MSS. and left it with him. The next Sunday after the lecture he came up to me with the MSS. in his hand and said: “Lei è poeta,” and he said: “Never mind what anyone may tell you, I tell you it is a fact.” I was greatly exhilarated by Nencioni’s encouragement, but I thought that being a foreigner he was perhaps too indulgent, and I would have felt uncomfortable had a Cambridge undergraduate overheard his conversation. It had nevertheless an effect, and I thought that I would some day try to write verse again.
Towards the end of the summer, I went back to Germany. Edward Marsh joined me at Hildesheim and stayed at the Timmes’. E. was the most painstaking and industrious pupil Professor Timme ever had, and he enjoyed the German life to the full, but it was his misfortune rather than his fault that he offended the easily ruffled susceptibilities of the Timme family.
On one occasion he made what turned out to be an unfortunate remark about the river Innerste, which is Hildesheim’s river. He said it was dirty; upon which Professor Timme, much nettled, said: “Das will ich nicht sagen. Sie ist viel reiner als mancher Fluss, der von einer Grosstadt kommt, und vielleicht ganz rein aussieht.” [I won’t say that; it is much cleaner than many a river that comes from a big town and perhaps looks quite clean.]
There was a delightful German pupil living in the house called Erich Wippern, a brother of Hans Wippern, who had been there before. We arranged to give a Kneipe for him and the other boys in one of the villages. The matter had been publicly discussed and seemed to be settled, but at the last minute, Professor Timme objected to it, and we had a long and painful interview on the subject. He said the Kneipe was not to be, and when I reminded him that he had already given his consent, he lost his temper. We decided after this distressing scene to go away, and we left for Heidelberg, our ultimate objective in any case, the next day.