It was the spirit of those old fine men, the scholars of the great revival, to whom the glory of antiquity was disclosed in the recovery of the lost books and the forgotten tongue; and even more, perhaps, it was the spirit of the artist, the lover of the marble and the bronze, who stood in breathless expectation while the spade unearthed the buried goddess and gave her back after long eclipse to a newly adoring world. As Poggio over a brown Greek manuscript, as Michael over the great smooth limbs that had lain for a thousand years of oblivion in the soil of the vineyard—so our Professor was hailing no less than a revelation in his turn. What is the mere fidget of the foreground, the present, the transient, compared with the huge unchanging past, where everything is secured and established under the appearance of eternity?—and how, when the obstruction is wonderfully pierced, the page restored, the earth of the present shovelled away, shall we refrain from dashing headlong into the world thrown open, serenely offering itself to our exploration? “There, there’s the appropriate country”—for no man can think rarely and intensely in the rattle of things proceeding, changing, palpitating, catching the eye momently with their ambiguous queries. A scholar shares the blest opportunity of the higher mathematician, and the two of them share it with the artist; all three, and doubtless the saint for a fourth, inhabit a region of completed things, of motionless truth. It is not to say that they are calm and motionless themselves—the Professor almost dances and leaps in the inspiration of his research, returning again and again to the wonder of the speaking brickwork. But the truth that he seeks is there before him, eternally disposed for the hand, the eye, the brain—and I am not afraid of Mr. Ram’s own word, for the poetic imagination—that is able to discern and seize it.
To the Professor it was as lovely as a lyric of Sappho or a torso of the golden age. His fingers rested on the battered brick, the rubbish, the rubble—whichever it was that held the secret—with a touch that might have been laid on the exquisite curves of the perfect marble. His statue had come to the light, he chanted its beauty, he was ready to linger over its gracious lines for the benefit even of a few ignorant gapers like ourselves. Homely indeed!—and human!—Julia was wide of the mark. It was divine, if the word means anything, in its immortal completeness; and as for homeliness, why it carries you off into the clouds, a soft tattered cloud yourself, so that the earth with its gapers and its great fat panting gobblers is forgotten—or would be if it weren’t for the singular moanings of the dying storm in Mrs. Rollesby’s breast. These, as I have said, did occasionally penetrate to the Professor; he glanced earthward with a puzzled look, as though he asked himself whether he had heard or only fancied the report of some commotion. Only fancy, he concluded; and he returned to the height of his discourse—which all this time you must imagine to have been ranging onward, sweeping backward, darting and circling as vivaciously as ever. The wretched Hicksie tore leaf after leaf from her pad, scattering fresh interrogations as fast as the last were answered. Julia was still bright and eager, but her bad conscience was beginning to show in the flush of her dishevelment. The Professor alone didn’t flag; we had given up all thought of the roses and the view, and we gazed stonily at his vigour. Oh, the common earth of the present had little with which to retain such a man; he was caught into the past, into the loving celebration of his statue, his lyric—which is my figure for the secret revealed to his exploring and divining scholarship. I envy him as I envy an artist and a saint, or even a mathematician; there, there’s where I would be, where things stand still and are silent, and you roam among them, chanting the rapture of your research, till you drop. That is a life.
And what was the secret after all? I picture it vaguely as a brilliant divination and revival of the past, the result of the play of the Professor’s penetrating insight upon the vast amassment of his learning. I think of his jubilant glee as aroused, how naturally, by some great spectacle of the ancient world that he perceives in the light of his patient faithful studies. Alas, it is vague to me; but he sees it as clearly, no doubt, beneath the dust and rubbish of the Forum, as I see the green-veiled woman who strays drearily into our corner, murmuring over her red handbook “to our right lie the rude substructures of the peristyle.” And in point of fact I am quite as wide of the mark as Julia herself. The Professor was not the man to have spent good time and good thought over the visionary fancies I ascribed to him; not for him to be a mere “popularizer of the specious”—a phrase that he utters with hissing scorn, for it is one of his side-hits at the showier lore of a “sister university.” No, the Professor took a different view of the scholar’s privilege. It is for the scholar to find a loose stone or an insidious chink in the work of his predecessors and to leave it tightened and slopped; then as he dies he tells himself that he has done something which needed doing—not every man can say as much. Was it a small thing?—it may seem a small thing to you or me, but the Professor retorts that in these matters our clumsy measure is of no authority; if a fact has been inserted where no fact was, then truth is the better for it—and with what sort of scale, pray, will you undertake to estimate the betterment of truth? All this nonsense of torsos and secrets and lyrics may be well enough in a pretty book; but the Professor has been putting a great deal of energy into an explanation, which I seem to have totally misunderstood, of the point that had baffled—or worse, that had deceived and misled—all researchers before him. He has demonstrated his own theory, and when I mention that it has found complete acceptance even at the “sister university” (where to be sure they consider it a trifling matter—they would!) I think we may assume that a fanciful amateur, vacantly gaping, is not likely to find a flaw in it. Here is something accomplished for a man to rest upon with satisfaction—so much so that even now, after an hour of mercurial discourse, the Professor is still prepared to go springing off to the next dusty corner and rude substructure that speaks for itself in support of his view.
But what is it, what is it? At this distance of time I long to know, but I confess that at the moment, what with the wear and tear of the various distractions I have described, I could only agree with Mr. Ram that the day was indeed growing “sultry”—I never heard this word on the lips of anyone else—and that it would be pleasant to seek a little repose and refreshment. Mr. Ram looked at his watch—“Time for a little vino, a little spaghetti,” he insinuated gently and playfully; and though he spoke aside to me, the suggestion was caught up with promptitude by Mrs. Rollesby. All eyes were again directed upon Julia, and poor harassed Julia had once more to begin coughing and sniffing significantly at each of the Professor’s full slops. Kathleen indeed told her aunt plainly that lunch on the top of “all that stodge” at breakfast would be disastrous for one so lately startled; and Mr. Ram drew a sharp breath between his teeth as she added, swinging round at him and pointing to his waist, “Yes, and for you too, Mr. Ram—you’d much better come for a tramp with me before you lay on any more of that deposit.” Hicksie also seemed to have no thought of food or rest; her scribbling was by this time almost delirious in the fever of its queries, but she stuck to it. And the Professor ran on, ran on, blind to Mrs. Rollesby, deaf to Julia—until it happened as before, he suddenly apologized for being compelled to disturb us again, and was gone. This time he was gone so imperceptibly that Mrs. Rollesby was unfluttered; she was consulting Mr. Ram with regard to the handiest place for her lunch. Might we decently take it that the lecture was finished? Not so—Julia, beckoning me to follow, had dashed in pursuit of the Professor; we saw her scrambling up a steep bank to a sort of platform among the ruins, elevated and exposed, where he was renewing his exposition to an audience of one—for the faithful Hicksie had kept pace with him and was sitting at his feet, bent already over a new page. Julia gained the height and doubled his audience; and Mr. Ram and I, glancing at each other rather guiltily, suggested that they seemed very well as they were. The Professor was clearly quite unconscious of the dwindling of his audience; we seized our chance.
Over our sorso di vino, as Mr. Ram still called it, I was inclined to think that we had indeed been very near the heart of things Roman that morning—very near, if not completely in touch with it. The Professor’s single-minded certainty was contagious; he held his faith as a grain of mustard-seed, and his passion almost convinced me that we waste our time in our random researches, away from his guidance, after the heart of Rome. Suppose Julia was right, and it was the Professor who had really the clue—for indeed there was a quality in his faith, with its blankness to vulgar appeals, which hadn’t been noticeable on the whole among the rest of our band. Unfortunately I couldn’t put my question to Mr. Ram; he was pre-occupied with his own more tender, more understanding and sensitive love of every stone of the Forum. It hurt him to see the Forum treated as a class-room, and he blamed himself for having suffered Miss Julia to include him, much against his rule, in the class. He didn’t wish to speak of the Professor, but rather of the impression that the Forum, familiar as it was, had made upon himself last evening in a strangely “bistred” afterglow, whatever that may be. But with all his tenderness the faith of Mr. Ram was a languid thing beside that of the Professor, and I returned to the impression that the Forum had made upon myself in the iridescent halo (thus I capped Mr. Ram) of the Professor’s ardour. Where had I seen the like of it? Nowhere at all, I reflected, except perhaps in one place—and that was the great church, when the genius of Rome came riding and swaying over the heads of the multitude. Those eager votaries, yelling their homage—the Professor dancing in his zeal: they had come to Rome with something in common, their single mind.
XIV. VIA MARGUTTA
A STUDIO!—I found myself at last in the studio of an artist. Deering had mocked my bookish and antiquated notions of Roman life and I had obediently dropped them; I had thrown over Hawthorne and Andersen, even the ingenuous romance of poor old Zola, and my pursuit of reality had carried me along the path that I have traced. But at last I arrived at a studio, and I hadn’t spent ten minutes there before I was back again in the dear familiar company of the Improviser and the Faun, the friends of my sentimental and pre-Deering past. I had had an inkling of them even as I approached the door; for the Via Margutta, tucked under the terrace of the Pincian Hill, is a corner of Rome where you might well expect to be brushed by their gentle ghosts. It is a street of studios, or it was a few days ago—perhaps it is a street of motor-works and cinema-houses by now; and a quiet bystreet not far from the Spanish Steps, full of shabby buildings with high northern lights, was still populous with Kenyon and Donatello and Roderick, for me at least it was, in that spring-time of the middle distance to which I now look back. Even as I turned into the Via Margutta, then, I had a hint that Deering had deceived me; and ten minutes later I knew he had, for I stood before the canvases that lined the studio of Mr. Vickery.
He was as loud and deaf and picturesque as I had seen and heard at Miss Gainsborough’s; he wore a great blue smock and a loose slouch-cap of black velvet, his white hair coiled upon his shoulders. There was a bewildering crowd of people in the big room, and there were several low tables spread out with fine old china and a lavish refection; and at first I was rather taken aback, for Mr. Vickery’s invitation to me had implied that I should find him lost to the world as usual and dabbling in his paints, but glad to welcome a friend to the casual cheer of an old Bohemian. He was casually welcoming such a crowd, and the strawberry-dishes were so many, and the room was so grand with tapestries and armour and cushioned divans, that I was struck shy and lonely at the start, forgetting my pleasant hint of Kenyon outside; but Mr. Vickery rolled jovially to greet me—he had a large rocking movement on his legs that was full of heartiness—and begged me to put up with the easy ways of an old Bohemian like himself. He was very loud and clear upon the point, and I heard him reiterate it as he rambled among his guests; I made out that we had all dropped in upon him casually, and must take him as we found him in the rude simplicity of his workshop. Presently he had picked up a palette daubed with colours and was wearing it on his thumb; and he clutched a sheaf of long-handled brushes that he threw down with splendid geniality to grasp the hand of somebody arriving or departing. We had surprised him, it appeared, at work on a gigantic canvas, a landscape, which was hoisted on an easel so tremendous that he had to climb by a step-ladder to reach the azure distances of the Alban hills. He climbed to them again from time to time, and he looked wonderfully striking, I must say, as he stood on the steps, his brush poised, glancing over his shoulder with a laughing boyish word to the crowd below.
The great picture represented a view of the Roman Campagna; the azure hills were seen through the straddling stilted arches of one of the ruined aqueducts; in the foreground was a party of goats, attended by a handsome old man, sheepskin-clad, who shaded his eyes and looked benignantly across at a boy blowing a pipe in the left-hand corner—and the boy, as I live, had matted curls and a pair of weather-stained velvet breeches. My mind flew to Deering—he should hear of this! Deering was too clever by half, with his derision of my innocent fancies; here was an artist, just as I had supposed, who duly studied the “picturesque models” of the English ghetto and introduced them into a picture as venerable and as romantic and as big almost as the Campagna itself. Is it into a picture, moreover? It is into fifty pictures, hung on the walls or tilted on easels all about the studio; and I wandered from one to another, very pleasantly, in the recovered company of my familiar old friends. Hawthorne murmured his prim harmonious phrases; another and a younger figure, very watchful under the careful correctness of his bearing, noticed everything and said little; and we passed from picture to picture, pausing before each with a smile of charmed recognition. The old man in his sheepskin, the boy in his curls, met us by many a crumbling arch of a sun-bathed aqueduct; and sometimes they met us in a street-scene, by a splashing fountain and a gay flower-stall, where they were joined by a girl with gleaming teeth and black provocative eyes; and again they met us in deep mountain-valleys, very verdurous and lonely, where there was a ruined temple on the height of a crag and a bandit at the mouth of a cavern; and everywhere the sheepskin and the curls and the fine dark glances had a charm for us, away from Deering’s sarcastic eye, to which I for one surrendered in comfort and peace. This was a world I knew; it was quite a relief to cease from facing reality for a few minutes.
I was brought back to reality by encountering Miss Gadge, who said (as my shadowy companions vanished) that there was nothing she enjoyed more, as an old Roman, than a prowl round the studio of a true artist. She delighted in the temple and the bandit, but she seemed a little distraught in her reverence by her desire to talk about the people present. She had a great deal of information concerning all the company, and she hastened to impart it—for it would interest me, she said, to know something of the kind of types one met in a typically Roman studio. She went through them all, giving of each what is called a “thumbnail” sketch; she admitted that the phrase was Emmeline’s, and that in Emmeline’s society she had fallen into the habit of seeing people always in an intensely typical light—Emmeline says that a novelist does so quite instinctively. “Now that girl there with the blue beads—she’s a kind you only see in Rome: very charming, very lady-like and that—pretty I don’t say, and a bad complexion, but that’s neither here nor there; well, her name is Sandra Deeprose (an odd name, isn’t it?)—” Miss Gadge’s sketches seemed to be wanting in crispness, and for an observer of type she was excessively occupied with the individual, but she wandered on over the company and presented me with a large number of facts and names. Mr. Vickery, she told me, was held to be the doyen of the “colony” in Rome; he had lived in Rome for ever, from far back in the ancient days of the Pope-King; he had known everybody, he had known the Brownings—and sharply on that word I looked round to devour the strange new wonderful sight of a man who had known the Brownings. He happened to be standing at the far end of the room with his back against a darkly figured hanging of tapestry; and his head in its florid grandeur, so carefully composed, was relieved upon its background like a daring portrait—brilliantly, slashingly painted, you might say, by some artist not afraid of an obvious effect. Of his own effect Mr. Vickery was very sure, and with reason; he offered himself as a finished achievement of art and nature, sufficient as he stood. But far from it, he was at that moment nothing in himself, he was everything for what he implied—to one pair of eyes at least, fixed on him with intensity. He had known the Brownings—how strange it seems and new!