It was true enough, no doubt; Miss Gadge was certain of the fact, she had heard him speak of “picnics in the Campagna” with the Brownings—the throb of the thought was almost painful to me as she said it. But how delightful, she pursued, to know that I was a “Browning-lover” like herself; and she dropped the subject of the picnics in order to quote, to declaim some lines from “Rabbi ben Ezra” in a strangulated sing-song, quite unlike her ordinary voice, which expressed the power of her devotion to the poet. “Grow old along with me—” she intoned the lines in a hoarse and quavering wail; and I broke out on her with a passionate cry, though it remained unheard, over the depth of her misunderstanding. If a wish could have struck her in the face she would have reeled on the spot; but though I had struck her I couldn’t have made her understand how completely she mistook my feeling. “It’s not that,” I might have burst out, “not in the least like that!”—and how should she have understood that my sudden interest in Mr. Vickery was larger and rarer and stranger than that of a “Browning-lover,” even of one who could intone the chant of the Rabbi from end to end. I could any day have repeated the poems of Browning against Miss Gadge, though not on the pitch of her wail; but I was high above them, I felt, when I started at the sight of Mr. Vickery—at the gleam of the eagle-feather. I was with the Brownings in the Campagna, suddenly with them, stopping to speak to them: don’t you understand?—I wasn’t repeating their poems, which I have known by heart for years. It was useless to try explaining this to Miss Gadge, and I let her quaver on while I gazed my fill at the wonder. It was a strange excitement; and I don’t pretend to make light of it as I now look back, or to smile distantly at the thought of the thrill, the wild sweet breeze that ran through the imagination of the youthful onlooker. A man who had known the Brownings—there he stood!
The company thinned at length, and I was able to approach him, though I knew full well that the demon of shyness would prevent my questioning him, as I longed to question, on the subject of the picnics. But first I was held awhile longer by Miss Gadge, who on discovering that I was a less worthy worshipper of the poet than she had imagined went on with her study of type; and this brought her to a shabby and crumpled little old woman who was slipping furtively about the room with a purposeful air, talking to nobody. Miss Gadge named her, and the name was indeed a surprise—Mrs. Vickery; she was actually the wife of our resplendent host, but Miss Gadge threw a world of meaning into her headshake and her delicate grimace as she referred to her. Poor Mr. Vickery, all through his long and sumptuous career that dowdy impediment had hung to him; and Miss Gadge, like all his admirers, was impressed by his fidelity—though indeed you might equally call it his wife’s tenacity. But to do her justice she kept to the background when his brilliance was turned to the world; I could see this for myself, as she slunk among his visitors without attempting to pretend they were hers. Look, however—at that moment Mrs. Vickery did venture to accost one of them, a queer untidy bundle of a woman not unlike herself, though much more colourful and bold-eyed. “Ah yes, of course,” said Miss Gadge, nodding shrewdly, “she talks to the reporter”; for the bold bundle, it seemed, was a common type, a haunter of studios and public places and some drawing-rooms even, where she picked up what she could for the exceedingly vulgar and brazen newspaper that you know so well. Mrs. Vickery fastened upon her with decision and drew her apart; and they stood together by one of the easels—not indeed looking at the picture, but evidently speaking of it, for Mrs. Vickery jerked her thumb at the bandit and proceeded to explain something very minutely to the journalist, emphasizing her points with a finger tapped on her palm. I caught a snatch of her explanation as I passed up the room. “He never asks less,” Mrs. Vickery was saying earnestly—“and he feels it should be known.”
The artist was now at work again; he was mounted on his step-ladder, that is to say, with brush poised and palette displayed, and at intervals he gave a masterly stroke to the Alban hills. He wanted to get “a little more nerve, more race, into the folds”: such was his odd expression. The crowd had cleared, but there was a small knot of people still clustered about him, and the braver occasionally sent a compliment or a question bawling up at him. “Don’t talk to me of ‘movements,’” he genially cried back; “the only movement a painter should think of is this”—and he twirled his brush in a narrowing spiral till it lighted on tiptoe in a fold of the hills. “The only movement I attend to is my own,” he exclaimed, swinging round, flashing on us superbly; “it extends from my house to my studio and back again. ‘Don’t talk about art—show me your work—here’s mine’: that’s what I say to the youngsters. My trade is paint, and I stick to it. An honest tradesman before the world—that’s what an artist should make and keep himself. Before the world, mark you!—his dreams are his own affair. Ah, his dreams—!” Mr. Vickery paused, dropping his brush, and he smote his hand to his eyes and held it there in a long silence. “My God, his dreams!” he murmured. The little group of us stood in a row below him, hushed and intent. The grand old figure of the painter towered against the monument of his toil, and the light of a spacious age seemed to beat on him in the hush. An old master-craftsman of the Renaissance, in his flat velvet cap, his loose blue working-garb—a tradesman he called himself, sturdy in his pride, but we had a glimpse of what he hid from the world. More than a glimpse indeed; for it was a long minute, I should think, before he turned and caught up his brush and set boisterously to work again. As he did so I was sharply prodded from behind—by the lady-reporter, I discovered. “What was that about dreams?” she asked; “did he mean art-dreams?” She wanted to have it clear, but Mrs. Vickery stole swiftly forward and nudged her for another point. “You quite understand,” Mrs. Vickery distinctly whispered, “that it mustn’t appear to come from him—what I told you.”
Before long the painter stepped down from his ladder, inspected the nerve of the hills from the proper distance and declared himself satisfied. He stretched his arms with a long happy sigh. “Well, well, well, it’s a great game—thank the gods for it! Where should I have been without it these fifty years? Can you imagine me without my poor old toys, Marchesa? Colour-box and canvas—give me them and take the rest! ‘He was born, he painted, he died’—my biography; when you write it don’t add another word.” The Marchesa looked at him with kind timid eyes (she was a very tall and angular Englishwoman) and answered vaguely; she spoke vaguely because it was impossible for her to reach Mr. Vickery’s hearing with her gentle huskiness, so that it didn’t matter what she said. The artist motioned her to a big divan and threw himself beside her among the cushions. He talked on. “Ah, there has been some work done in this old room for fifty years! What’s been happening all that time in the world, Marchesa? You great ones of the earth have had your hour and your power, and I hope you’ve enjoyed it. A poor painter wishes well to the world, always, for so long as the world is happy and busy it will forget the poor painter—he counts on that.” Mr. Vickery’s glance roved for a moment, taking in the circle of his listeners; his wife was still engaged with the reporter at a distance, but she looked hastily round on the pause and gave the reporter a little push, directing her towards the divan. This lady hurried across and took a vacant chair by my side. Mr. Vickery had turned again to address the Marchesa, and he proceeded to speak with emotion of the long lonely laborious service to which a painter is dedicated; and insensibly he lifted the veil, musing to himself, and the light fell upon the hope, the faith, the ambition that an artist so jealously hugs and hides. “He hugs them like a secret,” said Mr. Vickery, his voice dropping almost to a whisper, “a secret that he daren’t profane.” Once more there was a silence. My neighbour bent to me anxiously: “Did he say ‘profane’?” she enquired; “why profane, do you think?—do ask him.”
I don’t know in what form the “Roman studio-chat” appeared in the brazen journal, but if the good lady had as much difficulty in sorting her impressions as I had over mine she can’t have got them ready for the following Saturday. The Marble Faun, the Brownings, the goatherd and the bandit, and then the resplendence of Mr. Vickery—in all this there was far too much for an easy cosy column with plenty of “cross-headings,” even if one left out the array of the types. Mrs. Vickery by herself might be the substance of a leisurely chat; she didn’t attend the session of the divan—she was very busy at a writing-table in a far corner, where she seemed to be sorting papers, making entries in books, stowing things into drawers and locking them up with jingling keys. She at least was forgotten by the world and obviously knew she could count on it; but if one happened to notice her she appeared as the one small sign of lonely concentration in the decorative staging of an artist’s life. I watched her examining a slip of paper, biting her pen; and presently she left her place, edged round the wall to the divan, and unobtrusively offered the paper and the pen to one of our party, a well-fed middle-aged man with side-whiskers. “You’ve forgotten to fill in the date,” I heard her say softly. He filled it in, apologizing, and as she moved away she added that it would be sent without fail to his hotel next morning. Mrs. Vickery was attending to business, assured that the world was happy without her; she locked up the slip of paper and returned to the entries in her note-book. Yes, I think she would have made the best subject of all for one of the “jottings in Rome”; but the jotter missed it—she was preparing to ask Mr. Vickery about the profanity that she had also inadvertently missed.
He gave her no opportunity, however, so I suppose she had to supply it herself in the chat. I too had had my own question for Mr. Vickery, if I could have found the courage to bawl it—or rather if I could have framed it in any words. But I no longer desired to ask him about the Brownings, and indeed the air of the studio wasn’t favourable to questions, with its comfort so easy and public and its pictures so candid and explicit. If you want the answer to any question, look round you!—the room tells you all there is to be told. There was certainly nothing mysterious about the pictures; with one voice they declared themselves, repeating their frank formula with the glibness of fifty voluble years. There was nothing questionable about the luxurious installation of their maker—nothing, at any rate, if one noticed the obscure corner of industry that attracted so little attention. And least of all did the painter himself provoke any doubts that he didn’t plainly satisfy, with his picturesque frontage turned so full to the light; the fumbling reporter was the only person who had missed a syllable of anything he intended to convey. And the upshot of it all was that Mr. Vickery had endured from a blander age, bringing a waft of its goodly confidence and ease, trailing a train of its illustrious memories—only not bringing, as it happened, the forgotten secret on which its glory and its confidence reposed. The blander world of romantic Rome didn’t greatly trouble itself with questions, didn’t object to a florid style, wasn’t afraid of the telling effect of a handsome old head against the bluest hills of Italy; but there had been something else, and Mr. Vickery didn’t chance to have brought it with him—it remained with the Brownings, they kept it. Let me ask Miss Gadge what it was. She thinks it must have been their depth, and she is ready to intone the whole of “Abt Vogler” to bear out her opinion.
Mr. Vickery, then, survived in our thin and acid air, to meet the assault of carping doubts from which his prime was protected; and he hadn’t the depth (if that is Miss Gadge’s word) to keep the faith of the romantic age as impressively as it was kept in his youth. I was glad that he had escaped the eye of Deering, to whom I should never betray him; Mr. Vickery, taken as he stood, too freely gave away the honour of Roman romance to be revealed to Deering. With me it was safe; but that sardonic observer, I am sure, wouldn’t consent to view the old survivor as I did, as I still can, when he placed himself before the dark tapestry with the golden light streaming full upon his patriarchal nobility. For me he was the man who remembered the great days, who had roamed in the Campagna with poets, and the man in whose studio the shadows of genius were still to be seen and talked with if one loved them. I loved them myself so dearly that I could easily give Mr. Vickery the benefit of their presence; and in their presence one didn’t take him as he stood, far from it, but with the lustre of his association upon him, strange and new. Deering wouldn’t have had this fond understanding; indeed he would have steeled himself against it with his modern doctrine that one mustn’t read books, at any rate in Rome. “Come out of your books,” he had exhorted me, and it wasn’t likely that he would relapse with me into Browning at this hour—into Browning, whose influence had been strong on him during a period of manly piety through which he had passed in the nursery. So I kept Mr. Vickery to myself, hugging him in secret, and I was content to ask no questions about those eagle-feathered picnics of the past. It is much for us if we can catch but a reflection of the light of the great days; it is enough, even though their depth is screened from us by fifty commoner years. Mr. Vickery shall not be exposed to the daunting chill of Deering’s irony if I can help it.
Such was my feeling; for it seemed clear to me that Mr. Vickery had lived on incautiously till he faced a critical age, knowing nothing of its deadly arts, needing protection. And thereupon I noticed that he was now conducting the Marchesa and the well-fed man on a tour round the studio, pausing at one after another of the pictures; and I began to perceive, following and listening, how much he required my kindly care while he was flanked by the great ones of the earth. The well-fed man was Lord Veneering (or something to that effect), and he explained to the Marchesa that he was “forming a gallery” at a little place he had bought in the country, and that Mr. Vickery had very obligingly “aided him with expert advice”; and the Marchesa said pleasantly that one couldn’t do better than follow Mr. Vickery’s taste, because he possessed, what is nowadays so rare, the spirit of the great masters. “This,” said Mr. Vickery, indicating one of the canvases, “is a little smudge of paint that pleases me as well as anything I ever did—which may seem odd to a layman, for it’s purely a painter’s picture. Very bad policy, in these days, to spend time over work like that; but we paint for each other, we of the trade—we understand.” The velvet breeches and the sheepskin seemed to me to occupy their usual places in this picture, but his lordship was particularly struck by their “high relief.” Mr. Vickery didn’t hear, he was lost for a moment in contemplation. “Yes,” he said, “a painter would understand what I’ve tried to say there.” Our carping age, represented by the Marchesa and Lord Veneering, reverently gazed. Mrs. Vickery, still over her papers at the table, glanced up at her husband with a look that understood more, I incline to think, than many painters. Certainly he was well muffled against our chilling and doubting day; but I wonder how he would have shielded his complacency if his wife had spoken her mind. However she was much too deep in her entries and reckonings for a wild idea like that.
XV. VIA DELLE BOTTEGHE OSCURE
I DON’T pledge myself to the actual street, twisting into the dark heart of Rome, that led me to the great solemn palace of the Marchesa; but it might have been the street of the Dark Shops, and I am apt to think it may. It rambled vaguely into the gloom of all the ages and brought me to a stand before an immense portone, the doorway of a family whose classic name was inscribed in monumental lettering upon the lintel. What a name!—it strode away across the long centuries, it wore the purple and the tiara, it raised its shout in the bloody brawls of its faction, it disappeared into the barbaric night; and again it emerged, plain to see, clear in the classic day, the pride and the renown of the young republic. It seems, as you read it over the doorway, to speak casually of Scipio, of Cincinnatus, friends of yesterday, vanished so lately that there has barely been time to miss them; and there may be a touch of parade in this, but who shall prove it?—and anyhow it is a great and glorious name, nobly time-worn from its immemorial journey, and it is written over the dark archway of the palace for its only and sufficient decoration. You enter accordingly under the sign of all the Roman history that you ever read, you cross the cloistered court and mount the broad sweep of the staircase; and you find yourself in the presence of a shy kind elderly Englishwoman, who appears to be still wondering a little, after many years, how she came there.