Читать книгу Twenty Years of My Life - Douglas Brooke Wheelton Sladen - Страница 6

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About this time I was struck with the idea that for a person who intended to make his living by writing books, Travel was a necessity, and while one had no ties, it cost no more to live in various parts of the Continent than to live in London.

The desire materialised sooner than it might have done, because Arthur Chamberlain, whom we had met when we were sharing a house in Scotland with the Wilkies (wife and daughters of the famous Melbourne doctor), wrote letters, which would brook no refusal, for us to come and join him at Heidelberg, where he was now a student, for the Quincentenary of the Heidelberg University.

Before we went abroad we had a foretaste of the many pilgrimages to archæological paradises which we were to make. We spent six weeks at Canterbury, peculiarly delightful to me, because my family have been landowners in East Kent from time immemorial, which made the neighbourhood of Canterbury full of landmarks for me, and Canterbury is, after Oxford, fuller of the Middle Ages than any town in England. Here, having the run of the Cathedral library given me by its curator, Dr. Shepherd (I hope I have spelt his name right), I commenced my studies of Edward, the Black Prince—the local hero, who lies buried in the Cathedral. This led to my writing the most ambitious of my poems, “Edward, the Black Prince.” I wrote it among the ruins of the old Cathedral Monastery at Canterbury, and the first edition was printed in the Piazza of Santa Croce at Florence.

At Heidelberg, living for economy in a delightful pension kept by Miss Abraham, who had been the Kaiser’s English governess, we met the set who pass their years in wandering from one pension to another on the Continent. Our immediate future was marked out for us. One family booked us for a favourite pension at Zurich, another for Lucerne, another for Lugano, another for Florence, another for Rome, another for Castellamare di-Stabia below Pompeii.

And so we began the great trek. We summered at Heidelberg. Autumn in Switzerland was perfectly beautiful, but the two or three months which we spent in Florence formed one of the turning-points of my life. It was there that we found a pension, which called itself an hotel, replete with the atmosphere and charm and the little luxuries which Italy knows so well how to give for seven francs a day. There we met people who came to Florence year after year, and knew every picture, almost every stone, in it—almost every ounce of pleasure which was to be got out of it. They initiated us, in fact, into Florence, which was more of an education than anything in the world.

Florence is Renaissance in architecture, Gothic in feeling. Its inhabitants, native and foreign, live in the past. It was here that I, born with a passion for realising the Middle Ages, acquired the undying desires which have taken me back so often and for such long periods, and have inspired me to write so many books about Italy and Sicily. From the very beginning I plunged into the life of Florence and the study of things Italian with extraordinary zest.

Going on to Rome for a month or two inspired me with the same feeling for the classics as Florence had inspired in me for the Middle Ages.

I own that, when I was persuaded to go on from Rome to Castellamare, I did so with certain misgivings. There did not seem to be the same chances in it. We were going to a villa outside the town, whose sole attraction seemed to be that it was six miles from Pompeii.

But when we got there, it had a profound influence on our lives. It proved to be the villa where the Countess of Blessington had entertained Byron and others of the immortals, a beautiful southern house, standing on the green hill which buries in its bosom the ashes of Vesuvius, and the ruins of Stabiæ, a city which shared the fate of Pompeii. It had a vineyard round it; its quaint garden was overrun with sleepy lizards, which you never catch asleep—the lizards in which the genius of Italy seems to live.

We saw the sunset every night on the Bay of Naples and Ischia, which all the world was talking about then because of the earthquake which had lately ravished it. Every night we saw a tree of fire rising from Vesuvius.

We used to spend our days in the orange groves of Sorrento, or driving in donkey-carts to Pompeii, that city of the resurrection of the ancient world. The weather was somnolently mild; for the first time we were eating of the fruit of the lotus, which we have eaten so often since, and which has pervaded my writings.

If Castellamare had only done that for us, it would be a milestone in my life, but it also planted the seeds of unrest—die Wanderlust—in my veins. Some one we met there—I don’t remember who it was now—had a craze for Greek ruins; Roman ruins meant nothing to him, he said; there were only two places for him, Athens and Sicily.

In Sicily it was Girgenti which won his heart, not Syracuse or Taormina, and he almost persuaded us to go there. He obviously preferred it, even to Athens. But the name meant nothing to me; I had read of Agrigentum in the classics, and he showed me photographs of the glorious Greek temples, which are still preserved in the environs of modern Girgenti. Athens, on the contrary, had been before my mind ever since I was a boy. The literature of Greece is, with the exception of Homer and Theocritus, roughly speaking, the literature of Athens. I knew most of its principal buildings almost as well as if I had seen them. I heard the call of Athens, and to Athens we went from Castellamare.

Going there showed how comparatively cheap and easy it is to get to distant places. We went through Taranto—Tarentum—to Brindisi; from Brindisi to Corfu, in the Ionian Islands, the earthly paradise of the fair Nausicaa, and the empresses of to-day; from Corfu to Patras and Corinth; from Corinth to Athens.

The moral effect began before ever we reached Athens; it was so vivifying to a student of the classics to pass Tarentum, and Cæsar’s Brundusium, the Lesbos of Sappho, the Ithaca of Ulysses, Corinth and the Piræus.

Lesbos! Corinth! Athens! Sappho! Ulysses! there was romance and undying poetry in the very names.

The Greece of those days really was something out of the beaten track. There were only two little railways of a few miles each, and there was not an hotel worthy of the name anywhere outside of Athens. Even in Athens, if you were not at a first-class hotel, kid’s flesh, and sheep’s-milk butter, black bread and honey of Hymettus, and wine which was full of resin, were the staples of diet. But what did it matter? We lived in a house and a street with beautiful classical names—we lived in the house of Hermes. And when we climbed up to the Acropolis at sunset, we were in an enchanted land midway between earth and heaven, for we were in the very heart of history surrounded by milk-white columns of the marble of Pentelicus, and facing a rich curtain of sunset, which hung over Ægina, and trailed into the waters of the Bay of Salamis. Athens is gloriously romantic and beautiful, and Time has laid its lightest fingers on her rocks and ruins, whose names are the commonplaces of Greek history.

We spent some glorious weeks at Athens, made interesting by the acquaintance of Tricoupis, the famous Prime Minister, and the presence of the President of my college at Oxford—now Bishop of Hereford, from whom I heard only the other day. From Athens Miss Lorimer’s unappeasable hunger to see the world swept us on, after several happy weeks, to Constantinople—the outpost of the East in Europe. Constantinople was one of the most delightful experiences of my life. There is no call which I hear like the call of the East, and in Constantinople you have the noblest mosques west of India, and bazaars almost as barbarous as the bazaars of North Africa, thronged, like the broad bridge of boats which crosses the Golden Horn, with the mixed races of the Levant, in their gay, uncouth costumes. The scene, too, is one of rare beauty, for the great mosques are rooted in dark cypress-groves, and rear their domes and minarets on the horizon, and the calm waters of the Golden Horn and the Sea of Marmora are dotted with fantastic caïques.

We spent all too short a time there, dipping into the bowl of Oriental mystery, in perfect April weather, when we were called home to meet a sister-in-law coming from Australia.

I had, in the interval, published two more volumes of verse, A Summer Christmas and In Cornwall and Across the Sea, and I had printed at Florence Edward, the Black Prince, begun during that long visit to Canterbury in the spring of 1886, during which I steeped myself deeper and deeper in the study of Gothic architecture, not yet realising what an important part it was to play in my writing.

When we returned from Constantinople I had The Black Prince properly published in England, and though its sales were trifling, like those of A Summer Christmas, it met with warm commendation from the critics.

Shortly after this we were inspired with the desire to visit the United States in the autumn of 1888, and as we were going so far, we determined so stay in one place while we were in England.

The place we chose was Richmond. I had always loved it since I was a little boy at Temple Grove School in the neighbouring village of East Sheen. It was sufficiently in the country for us to pass a spring and summer there without irksomeness, and sufficiently beautiful and old-fashioned to satisfy my cravings.

At Richmond we took a house in the Queen’s Road, and but for the very large sum demanded for fixtures, we should have abandoned our American trip, and taken the part of the Old Palace which has now been restored at great expense by Mr. J. L. Middleton, for which I had a great inclination. Mr. Middleton is a friend of mine and I have been over it many times with him. It stands right opposite my study window. We liked Richmond as much then as we do now, except for the long trail up from the railway station to the Queen’s Road when we went to the theatre. We were in the Park or on the adjoining commons every day, watching the operations of Nature from the growth to the fall.

It was a busy time, for I wrote The Spanish Armada on the occasion of the Tercentenary of the immortal sea-fight, and I edited two anthologies of Australian verse, Australian Ballads and A Century of Australian Song, for Walter Scott, Ltd. The pleasure of compiling these two anthologies, the first books by which I ever made any money, was enhanced because I did them at the unsolicited invitation of the late William Sharp, the poet and author of the rhapsodies of “Fiona Macleod,” who afterwards became a dear and intimate friend. He introduced me to Charles Mackay, the editor of the famous Thousand and One Gems of English Poetry, who adopted Marie Corelli as his daughter, and was father of Eric Mackay. It was through him that I received the invitation to do the Australian part of the Slang Dictionary, edited by M. Barrére, the French Ambassador’s brother, for which also I received some money.

These encouragements made me ask my friend, the late S. H. Jeyes, who went to Trinity, Oxford, on the same day as I did, and was at the time one of the editors of the St James’s Gazette, from which he afterwards changed to the Standard, whether he thought that I ought to go to America, or stay and pursue my chances in England.

He said, “Go; in America they will take you at your own valuation, and when you get back, it will be your valuation.”

And so it came that we took our passages in the old Cunarder Catalonia from Liverpool to Boston.