Читать книгу Roman Fountain - Hugh Walpole - Страница 7
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ОглавлениеTHE BOY WHO, in 1909, talked to Mr. Montmorency did not question his happiness at all or think it wrong that he should be happy.
Until the age of twenty he had been nearly always unhappy, had had no friends, had been constantly misunderstood. So at least he felt, not at all realizing that it had been his own fault that people had disliked him—because he was dislikable. (The good and excellent reason why people are disliked.) He was now only twenty-five years of age, so that he had had little time as yet to be happy.
And I had, as I have already said, another reason for happiness that morning. On my way I had hung for a long, long time outside a small, rather dusty-windowed shop, much as small boys stand outside sweetshops with their noses pressed to the window. This little shop displayed bronze replicas of some of the famous bronzes—all the familiar ones were there: certainly the Faun, the Boy with the Thorn, the Narcissus, the Michael Angelo David. One or two of the larger ones were priced. Too high, too high, alas, for my powers! There were also little bronzes, especially of the Faun and the Narcissus, but they were so cheaply made as to be almost boneless and featureless.
I hung there, on suspended desire, panting! When I want something that seems to me beautiful I do not just want it. I want it with a desire that is hunger and thirst and lechery and longing to be good all in one!
Should I run all the risks and buy one of the larger bronzes? “After all,” said the tempter, “you have your return fare to London. Tomorrow you need have but one meal. You know that you will be able to pay your hotel bill. It is true that you must eat very little in the train on your return journey, but that will do you no harm. A little starvation, a little martyrdom of the body—how excellent for you! Moreover, within three days from now this suffering will be forgotten. You will remember none of it, or if you do remember it, it will be with pride. And you will have the statue—the Faun, the David, the Narcissus—whichever you prefer. You will have it for ever. It will be on your writing table, its beauty, its strength, its symmetry ever before you. And how much better you will write because of its presence!
“You cannot obtain such bronzes in London save at an impossible price. It will be long before you return to Rome, although you did throw your penny into the Trevi Fountain. Come! Purchase! Purchase! Hasn’t some great man said somewhere that the only acquisitions in his life that he regretted were those he hadn’t made! Think how, in a week’s time, you will be regretting your lost opportunity! There, seated in your Chelsea room with your copper coal scuttle, your coloured print on the wall of Botticelli’s Venus, your set of Walter Pater that you won as an essay prize at Cambridge, your vase of cut glass that will be holding, in all probability, daffodils—think how these, your beloved possessions, now so intimately connected with you, so rightly proud of their friendship with you—think how they will gently reproach you for refusing to add to their number one whom they would so gladly welcome. And see! The Narcissus has raised his head, his uplifted finger admonishes you. He is eager to leave his dusty window and become your friend and learn the English language and make the acquaintance of Walter Pater! Can you resist him? Ought you to resist him?”
This did not seem to me a kind of Barrie whimsy at the time, and for one very good reason: because we did not, in 1909, consider Barrie the worse for his whimsy—not, that is, when he was at his best. The Admirable Crichton we considered one of the best comedies in English, cynical, if anything—whimsical not at all.
For another, I remember quite clearly that the Narcissus did seem to me, in my then excited state of imagination, to make a personal appeal. The little statue was in that grey-green bronze proper to its Naples original and was then (catching light from its original), as it is now, one of the loveliest things on earth.
My hand was on the door of the shop—I was almost inside it—when I saw that the shop was closed. A little notice hung there from which, although I knew no Italian, I rightly understood that the proprietor was away until three. I was saved then—saved and defeated, for I walked away, hanging my head, feeling that I was leaving behind me a Narcissus affronted, insulted, deserted.
And then, only two steps further and I was facing a window filled with postcards, maps, guides, bottles of ink, coils of string and penholders. The postcards were of the kind to which I was already accustomed—views of Rome, the Palatine, the Colosseum, the Pantheon, the Trevi Fountain, St. Peter’s—but beside them was something that made my eyes dilate: a page of rough drawings on what seemed to be faded yellow paper, a page of drawings labelled ‘Disegni dei Grandi Maestri—Sanzio Raffaelo’ and priced three lire!
I knew of course at once that these could not be the original drawings. Young and foolish though I was, I yet knew enough for that! Not the originals, but how close to them? Could anyone save an expert tell the difference? Well, yes, perhaps anybody could.
But, in all essentials, they were the same.
It was at that moment, standing in front of that little shop, that I realized the great truth that fragments from a master’s workshop have often more of the master in them than the finished works themselves. It seemed to me that I could trace the hand of Raphael, careless, prodigal, in every line. It was as though he himself had stepped forward to me and said: “There, young man, if you want it, take it. I am only too glad.” And three lire! Three lire! That I could afford. This could and should be mine and I would still be rich, still have three meals on the train and a good full day in Rome tomorrow.
I entered the shop. The fine woman with jet-black hair so dark that it seemed to have purple shadows in it, a plump sallow countenance, dark hair on the upper lip, a firm massive bosom, a black dress that had the sombre dinginess of a Pirandello widow (although I knew of course nothing at all of Pirandello at that time)—this Roman lady is close to me now, at my very elbow. For, in that dark little shop, smelling of glue and pasta, I tasted to the full of the Rome that I had really expected to find, the Rome that until now had never offered me a glimpse of its melodramatic presence.
The Rome that I had expected to find was the Rome of three persons, a Rome of literature and uninhibited romance, a Rome, as I shall presently explain, empty of all details, composed of atmosphere, of one or two speechless figures as full of fate as the Statue of the Commander.
The three writers who had given me this Rome were Nathaniel Hawthorne, J. H. Shorthouse and Francis Marion Crawford. Of Hawthorne’s Transformation I will say little at this point. The story of Transformation had always seemed to me, even when I first read it at the age of twelve or thereabouts, extremely silly, and it seems to me extremely silly still. But Transformation had been my spiritual guidebook to Rome—not that I absorbed from it, with any accuracy, interesting details.
Inaccurate I have always been and will always be. My mind floats in a kind of summer mist. All objects are veiled, but by a beautiful, shimmering sun. I think also that to be hazy about detail has the happy effect of making detail for ever new—nothing is old or stale on the tenth beholding when the nine preceding it have been radiantly myopic. In any case what I got from Hawthorne was a place of sun and heat, of fountains and pines, of flowers and ancient ruins. Yes, and of dark figures moving in and out of the savage Colosseum, the lovely Palatine, the high Janiculum. Murder was never far away, and the thunderclouds stealthily invaded the sun.
Nor will I say much here of John Inglesant, for that has its later place; save that here also I commingled Rome with sin and resolved revenge. But of Francis Marion Crawford—how base and ungrateful I would be not to pay him my tribute whenever, on turning a corner, his altar, neglected now, the stone chipped, the homely bunch of flowers faded, the very letters of the name obscured, comes into view!
After the great Names have been named—Homer, Sophocles, Aeschylus, Dante, Shakespeare, Milton, Goethe—how uncertain, how subject to every turn and twist of the current of fashion, taste, world affairs, individual experiences, are all the others in the mighty stream of literature! What has any writer to do but fulfil the creative impulse within him, stronger than any other impulse? Indeed he cannot help himself, and will know no greater joy, wherever his life will take him, than that supreme moment when, suspended in air, he can look down on the creative impulse, just satisfied, and believe for a brief instant that the created work is good!
For how brief an instant! But, because of that, he is, however loudly he may protest and curse his fate and abuse his fellow-man, one of the most fortunate of mortals! After that the rest is, for the most part, silence. And yet, not altogether so. Kipling, in his autobiography, tells us he was creatively strengthened by a romance by Walter Besant—All in a Garden Fair. It is to that work that he pays his tribute, and a pretty poor book it is, too. The history of no published book is ever ended. An awful truth, but for every author, cherishing his works of creation as fathers cherish their plainer children, a consoling one.
It may be that the romances of Francis Marion Crawford will never be read again, although I fancy that the future historian may find his ‘Risorgimento’ Roman novels—Saracinesca, Sant’ Ilario, Don Orsino, Corleone—so interesting and fruitful a record of a place and a period that he will forgive their stiffness, their triteness, their platitudes, their simple figures of good and bad morality.
But now—what am I about? Am I already betraying ingratitude? I am not. An artist lives by his faults as well as his virtues. He lives by anything at all that gives him personality and makes him, however slight his stature, someone apart from all other men.
There will never be a Francis Marion Crawford again. His very naïveté prevents it. And yet was it naïveté? He had precisely the standards that Joseph Conrad had after him. He believed in fidelity, courage, the honourable word, patriotism, love between masculine men and feminine women. His men indeed were so very masculine, his women so very feminine, that you feel it to be remarkable, as you read, that they ever found a common ground. Perhaps they did not; for after love has joined them, they are apt to disappear from view. Even although he seems to tell you of their married state he is in reality telling you nothing. Anything that he learnt about matrimony he kept to himself.
He was a story-teller, and by that I mean he could (and, I think, still can) keep your interest alive and excited over the very tiniest events. He had in this a kinship with Anthony Trollope, whom he resembled in many things—in his stories too long drawn out, in his friendly but obvious moralizings, in his love for his own characters, and in a certain very charming and rather melancholy modesty—as though he would say, “I tell you these stories. It is kind of you to listen. I enjoy telling them to you. But life, in my own case, has not been quite as I represent it for these others. My own thoughts about my own life are nobody’s business but mine.” When Trollope wrote his Autobiography he composed as honest a book as there is in the English language, but he omitted from it everything that was deeply personal to himself. His spiritual, sexual, inner life is his own secret.
How different, naturally, from these our present times, when boys of eighteen publish long works about their inner life and every novel is a more than sexual autobiography. Why should anyone complain of this? And, perhaps, only on this count—that the autobiography must spring from a most unusual personality to sustain the interest of a novel, and how many novelists have remarkable personalities?
It is of Marion Crawford’s Roman novels that I am speaking. In them I found, in my lonely and self-frustrated boyhood, precisely what I needed. I was not myself handsome, courageous, successful. I was not in this at least self-deceived, but, because I had no friends in my own world, I sought them passionately elsewhere. Saracinesca, Sant’ Ilario, those were the men for me! And Marion Crawford himself (I had cut out his photograph from one of Macmillan’s catalogues) with his handsome, kindly countenance, his athletic habits (he could sail a little boat from one corner of the Mediterranean to the other, they said), his beautiful palace at Sorrento—he was the man for me too!
When a new novel of his was announced in the papers I prepared myself, as his humble servant, to do battle for him before the world. If in the Academy or the Athenaeum or the Spectator there were reviews of a mocking or contemptuous kind (as, alas, there sometimes were), I composed letters of rebuke and astonishment which, indeed, I did not post but conceived, mystically, must be known to the author and gratefully cherished by him.
I think he did what, oddly enough, only one other novelist writing in the English language has succeeded in doing (Henry James): he made Rome alive. Save for Stendhal’s Rome, Crawford’s Ave Roma Immortalis is, even yet, my favourite descriptive work on Rome—simple, sometimes melodramatic, but alive!
