OSCAR.
—Letter to Robert Ross.
A VISIT TO THE POPE
c/o COOK & SON, PIAZZA DI SPAGNA, ROME,
April 16th, 1900.
My dear Robbie,—I simply cannot write. It is too horrid, not of me, but to me. It is a mode of paralysis—a cacoëthes tacendi—the one form that malady takes in me.
Well, all passed over very successfully. Palermo, where we stayed eight days, was lovely. The most beautifully situated town in the world—it dreams away its life in the concha d’oro, the exquisite valley that lies between two seas. The lemon groves and the orange gardens were so entirely perfect that I became quite a Pre-Raphaelite, and loathed the ordinary impressionists whose muddly souls and blurred intelligences would have rendered, but by mud and blur, those “golden lamps hung in a green night” that filled me with such joy. The elaborate and exquisite detail of the true Pre-Raphaelite is the compensation they offer us for the absence of motion; literature and motion being the only arts that are not immobile.
Then nowhere, not even at Ravenna, have I seen such mosaics as in the Capella Palatine, which from pavement to domed ceiling is all gold: one really feels as if one was sitting in the heart of a great honey-comb looking at angels singing: and looking at angels, or indeed at people, singing, is much nicer than listening to them, for this reason: the great artists always give to their angels lutes without strings, pipes without vent-holes, and reeds through which no wind can wander or make whistlings.
Monreale you have heard of—with its cloisters and cathedral: we often drove there.
I also made great friends with a young seminarist, who lived in the cathedral of Palermo—he and eleven others, in little rooms beneath the roof, like birds.