George’s appreciation of the finer arts, in its early period of incubation, was limited by the extent of his readings. There were certain intellectual hazards such as Keats’s Ode to a Grecian Urn which George read to find out why they were considered so exquisite; and without being convinced in his own mind as to the merits of those sine qua nons he accepted the judgment of his superiors, and injected an attraction into them by main force. When he was swamped by their intricacies, he memorized them, so as not to be caught napping on any popular masterpiece. George was the kind of fellow who you could be morally certain would remark: “Ah! ‘Rosemary—that’s for remembrance’,” when brought face to face with that poetic flower in the garden in back of Shakespeare’s birthplace. Behind all this aesthetic posing, however, there was a real seeking after beautiful things in George’s heart, trite as that statement may seem, and if the path to a subtle poetic appreciation led through a rather plebeian state of mind, there was no help for it, and in this case the end certainly justified the means.
There was one typically adolescent trait discernible in the adolescent Ardrath, and that was his ambition to be a heart-breaker—a youthful Don Juan, or Romeo, or even perhaps a more mature Paolo. George could be classified in the number of those who smugly exhibit the farewell salutation of a girl’s letter, discreetly shading the immediately preceding part—the whole process being attended by a certain atmosphere of delightful mystification. So George could hardly be called abnormal—his Relations With Women (awe-full term!) redeemed him to the ranks of gum-chewing, suppressed-book-reading Much Younger Generation.
It so happened that George went abroad with his family, the summer before he planned to enter college. Being a creative as well as appreciative dilettante, he felt it his duty to be inspired by the Atlantic, and composed some rather frightful sea-poems. In this respect George was somewhat of an opportunist; there were certain great occasions, tremendous poetical crises, at which George intended to produce intellectual gems—“Upon Seeing Stratford-on-Avon”, “Lines Written at Montmartre”, “At Westminster Abbey”, and so on. Thus it is evident at once that young Ardrath was destined to experience a profound literary Renaissance in Italy. That, however, comes a little later in the story.
George had the further misfortune (in our own critical judgment, though certainly not in his) of meeting on the eight-day boat a girl who really took him seriously—almost as seriously as he took himself. She was older than he, but not much more sophisticated. Irma had studied in a small seminary in California, and had consequently escaped the superworldliness of students in the large Eastern colleges. She saw that George was not an ordinary type of boy, and in his individualistic traits she made out the factors which distinguished him as a future virtuoso, perhaps even a coming genius. Youth often stumbles, through infatuation, upon real truths of significance, and the glamor of a romantic attachment may indeed be but a superficial coating above a genuine appreciation of latent talent. However that may be, Irma liked George immensely, and George imagined that the feeling was mutual.
The enamored pair pursued their literary and amatory inclinations to the full on board ship. They would slip off between dances on the deck by moonlight, and read Swinburne or Dowson to each other, really enjoying themselves. There was a certain zest in believing themselves superior to the common run of couples who merely embraced each other amorously in covert nooks; it seems elevated to kiss to the music of Swinburne’s Atalanta—to shut the book with a half-gasp of utter emotional exhaustion, and seek each other’s lips. Romeo and Juliet could not have acted out the passion more realistically, with all the stage-craft available.
When George and Irma parted at Cherbourg, bound for different destinations, it was with almost genuine affection, though much of it had been puffed up artificially to merit the setting. They promised to write each other faithfully—George had a visual image of himself sitting down at a desk in the Hotel Palermo in Florence and penning something akin to this:
“Dearest Irma:
“As I sit here, with the Arno flowing mellifluently far below my lattice window, I cannot help thinking of you in Versailles, that beauty-spot of this prosaic world, walking lightly through the magnificent gardens and estates of the great Louis Quatorze....”
The effects of a catholic taste in literature, and four years of French, are only too evident in this prospective outburst.