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- Herausgeber: Booksell-Verlag
- Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
- Sprache: Englisch
In 'Roman Fountain,' Hugh Walpole immerses readers in the vibrant, sun-drenched landscapes of Italy, weaving a tale that intertwines themes of art, love, and the intricacies of human relationships. The narrative unfolds with a rich, descriptive literary style that captures the essence of Roman life, juxtaposing the allure of the city with the personal struggles of its characters. Walpole's adept use of symbolism, particularly through the titular fountain, echoes the themes of reflection and the passage of time, enriching the text with a sense of longing and nostalgia reminiscent of early 20th-century literary modernism. Hugh Walpole, a prominent figure in British literature, draws upon his extensive travels and profound appreciation for the arts to create this work. His experiences in Italy deeply influenced his understanding of the interplay between setting and character, shaping 'Roman Fountain' into a masterful portrayal of how a place can resonate with personal history and emotional complexities. Walpole's earlier works, often exploring the nuances of English society, inform the depth with which he crafts the lives of his Italian figures. For readers seeking an evocative exploration of love and transformation set against the backdrop of Rome's enchanting beauty, 'Roman Fountain' is an essential read. Walpole's lyrical prose and insightful characterizations not only illuminate the human condition but also invite reflection on one's own life's narratives, making this novel a timeless addition to any literary collection.
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Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2021
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Roman Fountain
Table of Contents
1
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.
......
......
......
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?
2
I KNOW that the afternoon was warm, but the Romans thought it cold, for they were all wearing overcoats. I was the only young man in the whole of Rome on that day not wearing an overcoat. Sometimes you would see quite an old Roman with grizzled cheeks, grizzled moustaches, grizzled coat, his shirt open at the neck. No overcoat. He wasn’t cold!
I was still in a state to be astonished by the flowers. Nowhere out of Italy do you see them banked up into a kind of pyramid of lovely freshness as you do in Italy, and especially in Rome—but of course everyone knows about flowers in Rome. Why be naïvely excited at this late day? Except that I was naïf then, and I was excited, and I wanted to buy and buy and buy. ... Two kinds of things I wanted to buy—flowers and the little bronze copies of the classical statues—the Faun, the Boy with the Water Bottle, the Narcissus, the Venus.
But I had no money, or very, very little. I had to watch every lira. I had my return ticket in my pocketbook so that I knew that I should see England again. But that was about all.
I did buy, however, a pot of lilies of the valley. I had never seen lilies of the valley in a pot before, and I felt as though I had been given an especial prize. I gave the pot, when I left, to the black-haired, brown-faced, big-stomached rascal who cleaned my room in the little hotel near the station. I know he was a rascal, for he stole my silver cigarette case—my cigarette case that some friends of mine had given me at Cambridge on my twenty-first birthday. He was a rascal and also I was afraid of him. I have been afraid of only four people in my life since I have grown up: this Italian rascal, Katherine Mansfield, Rebecca West, and—a friend of mine.
Of Katherine Mansfield I was so desperately afraid that I trembled at the sound of her voice. This happened almost directly after my return to England from this first visit to Rome. In 1910 Mansfield and Murry had a paper called Rhythm, and I contributed. We had meetings in Murry’s room (he and she were known as The Tigers in those days). Besides Mansfield and Murry there were D. H. Lawrence, Gaudier-Breszka, J. D. Beresford, Gilbert Cannan. These were the Highbrows of that day.
I wanted to be a Highbrow but didn’t know how to be one. So I went in agitation to these gatherings, and there was Lawrence, his long thin legs expressing contemptuous energy (but he was charming in those days—soft and gentle and feeling very little of the ‘dark urge’ that obsessed him in later years). And there was Katherine Mansfield with her black bang of hair and eyes like gimlets. It was entirely my own fault that I was frightened. She didn’t want me to be. But whenever she spoke to me I said the most idiotic things, answering questions with such foolishness that there was embarrassment in the room. No one wanted to be unkind. The trouble was that I wanted to be clever, and of course Mansfield saw through me—at once, long before I spoke.
Of Rebecca West I have long ceased to be afraid. She is kind and friendly. There remains, then, only one person in the world now of whom I, fifty-five years of age, am afraid. He frightens me because he makes me suspicious of my own honesty, my own kindliness of heart, my own sincerity. I am honest, kind, sincere, just, like my fellows—that is, at this moment and at that. We are all capable of amazing kindliness, wonderful sincerity. The right moments, the noble feelings, they come and they go.
But my friend makes me, when I meet him, wonder whether I am ever sincere, ever kind—whether there is not a base and mean motive behind all my actions. And so, although I like and admire him, I am afraid of him and meet him as seldom as may be.
I gave the Italian at the hotel the pot of lilies of the valley because I was afraid of him, because I knew that my farewell tip was too small and because I was sure that he had stolen my cigarette case. We hunted for it together, and he patted me on the back because I had lost it.
On this especial day it was warm, and I had luncheon in a little restaurant in a side street not far from that huge and hideous white-and-gold monstrosity, the Victor Emmanuel monument.
It was in this little restaurant that I met Mr. Montmorency, and it was he who showed me the Fountain.
I pushed the door and entered from the sunlight into the dark, and blinked. Then my sight cleared and I saw it was a very simple place, with large water bottles on the tables, sand on the floor and a picture of the King of Italy on the wall. The half-dozen little tables were occupied, and I hesitated before I sat down all alone at the big table that glittered with water bottles and rather unfriendly emptiness.
I heard then an English ‘almost Oxford’ voice behind me say: “There is room here.”
I turned round blushing, for I felt that I must look so very English for a stranger to be so very sure of my nationality simply by glancing at me. There sat Mr. Montmorency, wiping his mouth very carefully after his soup. He was, I saw at once, on the seedy side. He was stout and short, and the top of his head was bald except for one lock of greasy hair pasted like seaweed on the shining surface. His round fat face had been shaved yesterday perhaps but certainly not today, the cuffs of his shirt were frayed, his soft collar was grey so that you must not say that it was dirty. His fingernails were also grey. He had a soft wet mouth, a pudgy nose, but his eyes were touching, asking for kindliness, but restless with insecurity. All this I did not, perhaps, notice at once, but I sat down quite eagerly beside him because I thought it kind of him to invite me.
I wore in those days very ridiculous pince-nez that perched on the end of my nose and were attached by a little chain to my waistcoat. This attachment was a wheel that, often unexpectedly, would give a whirl, absorbing the chain and dragging the pince-nez from my nose. They flew off now and, with my own shining wondering eyes, I gazed on Mr. Montmorency. My gaze made him uncomfortable; his eyes almost disappeared, and he lifted one pudgy soiled hand and said, “Two is company ...”
(I am recovering all this as I write. I have not thought of Mr. Montmorency for many many years, but now he is with me in this room. I can hear every word. I need to invent nothing at all. He is at my very elbow prompting me, for, now that he is a ghost, it is the truth only that he cares about.)
“Now—what are you going to eat? Let me advise you.”
But I knew what I was going to eat. Spaghetti al Burro. (I had discovered already that any kind of sauce with it, whether meat or tomato, was for me a crime) and Vitello. Oh, Vitello, Vitello, Vitello, how constant, how inevitable are you in Italy! How many millions of little calves there must be pressing about the butcher, offering their innocent throats! But I didn’t know that. Roman veal seemed to me a miracle of succulent cheapness, another wonder in a wonderful land.
Mr. Montmorency appeared disappointed at my simpleness. He said something about fritto misto al mare and scampi. I hadn’t the least idea what these were, but, when he explained, I told him that I didn’t want fish.
“When you are sight-seeing all day,” I said, “you need meat.”
His eloquent eyes sparkled.
“Ah, you are new to Rome?”
“I have never been here before.”
“You are staying long?”
I sighed. “Tomorrow is my last day.”
“How long have you been here?”
“I have only three days in all.”
At once then he took charge of me. I was, I suppose, exactly what he was needing.
“What have you seen?”
“St. Peter’s, the Vatican Museum, the Forum, the Colosseum,” I answered proudly. It seemed a lot in such a very short time. “And whatever happens I must see Keats’ grave.”
“Ah, Keats.” His whole body sighed. “There was a poet. ‘One whose name was writ in water.’ You care for poetry?”
“More than anything else in the world—except music. Oh yes, and painting of course.”
“The Arts. You are yourself an artist?”
“I am a writer—a novelist and a critic.”
He enquired further.
“One novel of mine has been published, another shortly will be. I do all the reviewing on the Standard newspaper.”
It was a splendid record. I didn’t mind in the least that the whole world should know it. That, in all probability, I should find on my return to England that I was a reviewer no longer, because of this little unpermitted holiday, had not as yet occurred to me.
Mr. Montmorency laid his pudgy hand on my arm.
“I too am a writer,” he said softly, and producing from his pocket a very shabby pocketbook he laid before me a little collection of dirty dog-eared cuttings.
Politely I examined them and read that the East Lothian Herald considered in 1903 that Mr. Montmorency’s Lilac and Violet was ‘a volume of mellifluous verse, agreeable to the ear and wholesome in tone,’ and that the Wiltshire Journal held that ‘Mr. Robert Montmorency shows promise in many of these pleasant verses,’ and that the Hull Observer considered that ‘this little volume cannot fail to please.’
“You are a poet?” I said appreciatively.
“I was a poet,” he answered with a deep bitterness, “but one cannot live on poetry—no—unless one truckles to a base public. That too Keats found—yes, and many another.”
Hurriedly he collected the cuttings as though he feared lest I should steal them, and replaced them in his pocket.
“You live in Rome?” I asked him.
“Live! Yes—if you can call it living.”
I could see that he already considered me his private personal property. I didn’t mind that in the least. I was, I was sure, well able to keep my independence, and I felt for him a warm patronizing superiority. I was filled with an eager benevolence towards the whole world. I loved every dog and wished that every dog should love me—a motto from Jean Paul Richter that I had already placed on the first page of my first novel.
Some of my superiority, I must confess, immediately after this deserted me; for I was sadly embarrassed by my spaghetti. Alone I managed not too badly, but now I wished to show that eating spaghetti was a very old game to me, and so in my eagerness and attempted assurance I made a sad mess of it.
Mr. Montmorency showed me what I ought to do, but my pince-nez behaved just then like the very devil. I was the more uncomfortable too because I had an odd feeling that Mr. Montmorency wanted himself to eat my spaghetti. He stared at it with a real and hungry longing.
I had ordered a bottle of red Chianti and to my surprise saw that this was already half finished. Then I saw that Mr. Montmorency had been helping himself with friendly liberality. I had by now, hunger having conquered shyness, all but finished my plate of spaghetti. There was still some more in the dish, and the waiter moved forward to fill my plate again. But I waved my hand with the overfed lazy patronage of a Tiberius. ‘Enough is as good as a feast.’
“If you don’t want it——” said Mr. Montmorency.
His eyes glistened—with greed, with affection, with gratitude? And in any case he had been drinking my Chianti.
“Another bottle,” I said resplendently, for I had learnt by now that Chianti is very cheap in Italy.
“My friend”—Mr. Montmorency’s voice quivered—“this is one of the first happy moments I have had for weeks.”
I was a little drunk myself, and I beamed beneficently. I was drunk really with happiness rather than with Chianti. To be sitting in this kindly, genial Rome in a restaurant with sand on the floor, and with all these great monuments of Time on every side of me. And there was another reason for happiness of which I will speak in a moment. I know that I am touching danger here. It is wrong to be happy and to be happy for such very insufficient reasons. I will be platitudinous. I will say that one man is happy and another is not for reasons far apart from virtue or vice, worldly success or failure, possessions or lack of them—even from considerations of good health or bad.
Happiness comes, I know, from some spring within a man—from some curious adjustment to life. The happiest people I have known in this world have been the Saints—and, after these, the men and women who get immediate and conscious enjoyment from little things. I know that great physical pain, long continued, can override this happiness, for five years ago I experienced that, and I believe that the loss of some loved person can change the body and colour of life so completely that it is not a question of happiness or unhappiness any more, but a business of discipline and control.
My own happiness has come so clearly from three things—my consciousness of enjoyment at the time I experience it, and enjoyment especially of the Arts; my work; and my friends—that I am naturally inclined to suppose that others too get their happiness from these sources. But often they do not. One man I know is happy only when he is playing bridge, but as he plays bridge morning, noon and night he is always happy. A woman I know has no friends, but she loves clothes and, as she is rich, she can change her dresses four times a day—and does. She is a very happy woman.
I am sure that it is this question of adjustment to conditions that brings happiness, but in my own case it is to this day—and will be until I die—a matter of surprise, constant and unfailing, that I have the fun I do, see and hear the lovely things I do, enjoy the friendships I do. It is as though I expect to wake up at any moment and find this all a dream, to wake up and discover that I am back in the dormitory at R——, with the sudden sleep-awakened terror of immediate pain, pain spiritual, pain mental, pain physical. So do not envy me my happiness. Somewhere, once, it was otherwise. ...
My desire that everyone else should be happy makes me often sentimental. But I do not think that I see this cruel and remorseless world falsely. With my personal belief that this world is a place for soul-training, I do not see how this life could be other than the extraordinary mixture of terror and splendour that it is. After all in actual experience it is, I suppose, a matter of choice. ‘You pay your money ...’
One of my greatest friends, a man whom I admire and love, is exactly the opposite from me in this. He is, by reason of his temperament, bound to choose ‘thumbs down’ rather than ‘thumbs up.’ He has had everything that man can desire—fantastic success, a delightful wife, charming children. But things are never as they might be. Something always spoils the picture.
I would be intensely irritating to him (sometimes I am) were it not that my optimism seems to him so childish, so foolish, that he has developed an almost paternal feeling for me, although in years he is much my junior.
“Poor old Hugh! He has never grown up and never will.”
I don’t resent this at all. I like it. If I met myself somewhere I should feel, in all probability, like that about myself!
3
THE 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.
