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IT WAS on Monday, February 13th, 1939, and the day before the burial of Pope Pius XI that I was flung into Rome again. ‘Flung’ is the right word, for on the Saturday evening I was sitting in the town hall of Keswick listening to my friends as they performed that very simple play The Passing of the Third Floor Back; an old lady crept up to me and whispered that I was wanted at the telephone.

So, just outside, even as I caught the squabblings of the very unlikely lodgers in Mr. Jerome’s play, I heard my agent’s voice: “The Pope’s funeral is being hastened. It is to be Monday night. The only way you can get there in time is to fly. You will have to fly by Berlin.”

I detest flying. I didn’t want to go to Germany. I had to motor all through the night to London. Why did I do these hateful things?

To report the Pope’s funeral and subsequent events for an international press syndicate would be interesting. But that wasn’t enough. Just then I was extremely happy writing about Father Campion’s execution in my grand Elizabethan novel. It had rained for a fortnight without stopping, but when you are working rain is a gift from God. You have no urge to climb the hill. You stick to your business.

If, indeed, the Pope were to be buried in any other town but Rome—in New York, say, or Vienna or Berlin—I would not go. Go! I would not even consider going.

I had liked the idea of this pope, Pius XI, whereas of most popes I have been sublimely unaware. Pius XI had a most pleasant countenance. He was strong of body. He had climbed some mountain in the Alps that no one had climbed before. And, of late, he had stood firmly against the enemies of his religion. Yes—but did I want to see him buried?

Not enough to leave my grand Elizabethan novel in which I believe so passionately and shall believe—until the last word is written!

To leave your characters with their legs in the air! There is nothing more discourteous! One of my two heroes, Robin Herries, is on his way now, at 11:50 a.m. Roman time, February 16th, 1939, to witness Campion’s execution. The rain is pouring down, the gullies are alive with running mud; smelling and rude people jostle him at every step. What a situation in which to leave him! No one but I can liberate him. And yet it is likely that he will be standing in the rain for two whole months yet, when I had thought to liberate him before the sun had set, before my evening meal comes on a tray while I am listening to Honegger’s King David from Queen’s Hall, and my friend and companion is laying out the chessmen so that a game may be begun the moment that Honegger has finished.... So Robin Herries should have been allowed his comfort.

As it is I am miserable when I think of him, and last night when, in the crimson and crystal Roman Opera House, I listened to Salome (does anyone know why all the musical women in Rome talk throughout every opera?), at the very moment when they raised the grid above Jokanaan and bid him come forth, I was thinking of Robin and of Campion and of my relation Henry Walpole who, on that melancholy day, was spattered by Campion’s blood and was converted thereby.

Yes, it would have taken more than the Pope’s funeral to force me to leave Robin Herries and the Keswick rain; to leave also the bank of snowdrops and the first three crocuses, about which flowers I have no intention of saying pretty things. But the fact is that when I return to Brackenburn after the new pope’s coronation they will be gone.

On the other hand for a fortnight now we have been making a rockery, turning a stream that runs from the top of Catbells and planting roughly stones and rocks, pulled by an ancient farm horse and Frank the gardener out of the wood below my house and above the lake. At this moment the rockery is very ugly. A little baby earthquake has thrown the stones about my garden, and there they lie, sullenly refusing to be anything but unnatural.

And yet I know, when I return in April, my rockery will seem as permanent as the Bowder Stone. It could not have been that there was ever a garden without a rockery.... But enough. Whatever else may occur I must not be lyrical about gardens. I have too much feeling and too little knowledge—unlike Mr. Evelyn who had so much knowledge and no feeling at all. The best writer about gardens in our time remains still ‘Elizabeth’—whose genius I have the greatest pleasure here in saluting. And why do I say she has genius? Because no one else has been able to perform her especial little step in the universal ballet. No. Not Mrs. E——... and most certainly not Mr. B——. If you doubt me read that very blessed book Fräulein Schmidt and Mr. Anstruther and then, if I am still challenged, read Elizabeth in Rügen.

And so to return. I left for Rome not because of the Pope’s funeral or because of the money that I would get for recording it, but because I wanted to find a lost Fountain.

Don’t think that I intend at this point to become mystical or fantastic. Not at all. I am severely practical and as realistic as Proust when he describes the lift boy at the Grand Hotel at Balbec. Nor do I mention Balbec in order to show you that I have read all the best writers and know them intimately, but simply because the lift boy at Balbec is very real to me and so, before I have done, I would like my lost Roman Fountain to be to you.

To explain about this Fountain I must go back a very long way—all the way back to 1909, when I published my first novel and did all the reviewing on the morning Standard. I was happy then—but not so happy as I am now. I wasn’t so happy then because I was so fiercely ambitious.

I had had such luck. Smith, Elder published The Wooden Horse; Mr. Jeyes—whose name be for ever blessed—had engaged me on the Standard at £150 a year; Robert Ross had given a luncheon for me to which he invited H. G. Wells, Max Beerbohm, Clutton-Brock, Harold Nicolson (he said to Harold: “Lunch with me to meet a new young genius.” How sarcastically Harold told me that years later, and I expect Robert said it sarcastically too!). Best of all Henry James was befriending me. All this within a year! But of course I was off my head and thought that genius was the right word for me—the only time, before or since, that I ever did.

But this isn’t an autobiography. No, no. It will be twenty years before I write one. This at the moment is to explain how I went to Rome for the first time all those years ago.

I suddenly decided one afternoon to go. An American friend of mine was off on business to Switzerland and Venice. Venice! Oh no! Venice? I had never been to Italy. Would I come that very night? Yes, I would. And before that evening I was given a letter that Henry James wrote to his old lady friend who lived in the old Venetian Palace that comes into The Wings of the Dove—or is it The Golden Bowl? Perhaps it comes into both.

But this isn’t now about my American friend or Switzerland or Venice, where I was sick with happiness—yes, actually sick in a room above a shop hung with strings of onions and the green-blue water lapping its feet—sick in that very room that had a ‘Pietà’ on the rough mottled wall and they said it was Sienese School, but I can remember to this very day that old crushed rose colour and the white thin feet of the Christ. Sick just after I had been introduced to Horatio Brown, who didn’t mind, but said it was shellfish probably and not happiness.

He was exceedingly kind and advised me to make my permanent home in Venice. He said Venice would make me the kind of writer I’d like to be. Would it? I have never been the writer I’d like to be—not austere, nor with a style like a well-built house, no cracks, no paper in the broken windows, no mice eating the cheese. I’d like to be a writer with Addison’s prose, Dickens’ vitality, Montaigne’s realism, Proust’s apprehension, Hardy’s first-hand creativeness. So here I am—all alone by myself and writing as best I can and enjoying it most of the time.

But what about Rome? I went on there from Venice. Three days I had there. I slept in a hotel by the station. When I saw the Colosseum for the first time, I’ll swear there was a lion poking out its brown anxious face near the urinal, but there were no Christians. No one but myself, the lion and the urinal attendant.

I did a lot of sight-seeing in those three days. I was ravished with delight, except for the Vatican Museum where the white blobs of clay puritanically clumped on as fig leaves spoilt all the beauty. I lay on my back in the Sistine Chapel and looked through the glass the guide gave me. I bought a coloured reproduction of Adam and Eve, with the serpent twined round the tree exactly like Bernini’s pillars in St. Peter’s. I was drunk with wonder and sharp-tasting Chianti, discovered by me for the first time here.

However—what about the Fountain?

I discovered the Trevi on my very first dark evening, and threw a penny into it. I was told to do this by a book that I still have: Rome in Three Days.

My other books were Zola’s Rome, George Moore’s Esther Waters, Paradise Lost and Wilkie Collins’ Armadale. I read Paradise Lost right through from beginning to end on this happy journey. Why I brought it with me I can’t think. Snobbery, I suspect, to impress my American friend. I had read only little pieces of it before. Now I couldn’t stop. Yes. I read it through from end to end. And have linked it in my mind with the Colosseum ever since.

There are many delightful things I would care to say about Paradise Lost, but who would care to read them? ‘Hugh Walpole on Paradise Lost.’ No, no; it would never do. ‘Aldous Huxley on Paradise Lost,’ ‘Virginia Woolf on Paradise Lost,’ everyone will rush to read.

Why would no one be interested in me on Paradise Lost?—for I have really some delightful things to say.

Only a week or two ago at luncheon Ethel Sands said: “You would be, I am sure, a very bad critic.” (‘Would be’ was hard. Didn’t she know that I did a page of literary criticism in a newspaper every week of my life?) She added kindly: “Because you are creative.” But that was only a friendly sop.

No, why is it I would not myself even read ‘Hugh Walpole on Paradise Lost’ while Virginia, whose Common Reader is before me at this moment ...

I feel, as Tonks says he felt, before these intellects as a rustic before his Squire.

But that is not truly so. I admire my brain. I see it quite clearly as a comfortably bodied, bright-eyed animal with a frisky tail and soft strong paws. It goes everywhere and can eat practically anything. It is handsome, rare and strong. What does it lack? I don’t know and I don’t want anyone to tell me. I just know that no one wants to hear anything I have to say about Paradise Lost—and that is that.

I shall never tell anyone what I think about Paradise Lost except that I look back and see Satan, contemplating this planet before he makes his descent. How handsome, sad and evil he is!

And so exactly was Chaliapin in the Norodney Dom in Petrograd, in the Brocken scene of Boito’s Mefistofele—stark naked, brooding, on the top of the hill ...

But to return to my Fountain.

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One afternoon of March 1909, I came upon this Fountain in Rome.

It was my second day in Rome. What can I recall of the surrounding circumstances?