London, July 10, 1892. Found that the boys in the Salvation Army convict Shelter had no schooling, but prayer meetings seven evenings a week. Found very few books. The weak point in the work seems the lack of intellectual development. The libraries in the Shelters consist of one or two religious books, nothing more.
“How do the discharged prisoners get to this place?” I asked my guide.
“Every morning, when the prisoners are released, officers of the Salvation Army are waiting for them at the prison gate. They do not wear the uniform, for that would repel the men; at the sight of it they would slink away. The officer accosts the man and asks him what he means to do. The answer is always:
“‘I dunno.’
“‘Come along with me,’ says the officer, ‘I will take you to a place where you can earn a good meal and a “doss” in a clean bed.’
“‘What place is that?’
“‘Do you think any one but the Salvation Army would come here for you?’”
The better class of criminals, first offenders, and down-and-outers generally yield and come with the officers to the Shelter. Hardened criminals, old offenders who do not wish to reform, return to their old haunts and companions. Among the men I talked with at the Shelter was the son of a well-known baronet. His friends had finally cast him off and he had gone from bad to worse. The face was weak and flabby, the bearing slouchy, but he did not look vicious. Among all the faces I saw only one that looked criminal. That belonged to a fellow who was sweeping the room. My guide said of him:
“That man has been wonderfully converted and has been saved in a truly beautiful manner.”
I would not trust him farther than I could see him. Work is found for the men as soon as possible; while they remain at the Shelters nothing is given them; they must earn fourpence to pay for their dinner, twopence for breakfast and supper, fourpence for a bed. Any extra money they may earn is invested for them. Decent clothes are provided, if necessary, and their fare is paid to the place where they are sent to work. The employer either prepays it or keeps the money out of the wages and returns it to the Army. The Bridge was the first and the least cheerful of the places we visited. Sergeant Winch, my guide, always spoke of the men as “dear fellows.”
“This dear man was a housebreaker. All these dear fellows are jailbirds. One dear boy, Curry by name, who is now thoroughly converted, was the worst pickpocket in Whitechapel.” ...
Winch told me his own “experience.” His daughter went out to service in the country and wrote him letters about the “blessed Sundays” she passed, but did not say where she passed them. Then the second daughter went down to the same place and began to write the same sort of letters. About this time he chanced to go to a meeting of the Salvation Army and on coming home said to his wife: “I had rather see my daughter in her coffin than belonging to the Salvation Army.” In spite of what I said, by and by the wife began to look into the work, and she fair fell in love with it. Well, where the women folk go, the men must follow, and it’s three years since I was led to join the Army, and it’s the blessed times I have had. Last Sunday I walked six miles to hold an outdoor meeting, then an indoor meeting, then another outdoor meeting. I led the march. After that six miles’ tramp on foot at the end of a hard week’s work.
The part Winch enjoys the most is the meetings, especially those held out of doors.
“Some of the things we do,” he said, “I can see myself must look ridiculous, like the beating the drum and sich, but if souls are saved, what does it matter?” What, indeed?
We next visited the Elevator, so called because it is planned to elevate the men. On our way we went through a poor Jewish quarter where the children, a crowd of superb, red-haired, brown-haired, black-eyed babies, filled the narrow sidewalks....
It was polling day, the streets were filled with carriages bearing the names of the candidates. The walls everywhere were placarded with the names of the Liberal and Unionist candidates. I asked Sergeant Winch who he had voted for.
“I yielded to a great temptation to-day and voted for the Grand Old Man for the first time in my life.”
In the Hanbury Street Elevator unskilled laborers are set to work chopping wood. The wood is brought in long flat boards. Several men are stationed with a mechanical saw worked by a steam engine that cuts the boards in short lengths. These are given to the men, who sit in little wooden pens, each with a block before him and a hatchet. He takes the small pieces and chops them into tiny ones for kindling. I had always supposed that splitting wood must be desperately hard work till I saw how easily it is done in the Army. Another group sorts the wood into bundles and ties up the bundles with stout twine. Winch was welcomed by all the men. He had lately been in command of this Elevator and had invented the little pens for the wood choppers, to prevent quarreling among them over the amount each man had split. An account of the work is kept, and they are paid in leaden counters stamped two, three, or fourpence. With these counters they buy their food and lodging. The Elevators are only workshops; at night the men march to the Light House where they sleep. We visited the kitchen; neat and nice. The dinner was canned Australian mutton, which looked very good, boiled potatoes, beans and such delicious looking jam puddings! I wish I could have one made so well. When they have fresh roast beef they do not have pudding. Each man has a pint of tea, and all this for fourpence,—as good a dinner as anybody needs. The cook showed me his pantry, made me smell the tea, coffee, and cocoa, and taste the bread which was excellent. For breakfast they can have either tea or coffee with four great hunches of bread and marmalade, or a thick slice of cold meat,—all this for twopence. As a rule they prefer the jam to the meat....
Upstairs we saw the brush factory. They were making hair brushes. The men here were much more cheerful than at the Bridge. In looking from face to face one saw them all clean and intent. The cheeriness of the atmosphere surpassed any workshop I have ever seen. The brushes were some of them beautifully made, others rather roughly put together....
Winch spoke of the dreadful wickedness of the boys, but that they grow out of it so quickly when placed in the right atmosphere, proving that the natural direction of human growth is towards higher things.
The foreman had several blacksmiths and wheelwrights working under him. He showed me two carts they had built and some trucks for the Salvage Brigade, with an excellent arrangement for carrying bottles. In the same Elevator they make the mattresses for all their establishments and in another department men were at work picking rags. One department was devoted to the care of the engines in all the stations. At the Elevator where the bunks are made they also make good simple furniture, all the benches used at the halls and other plain things. I saw here some fine chairs carved by hand, the work of an ivory carver. They could not furnish the man with ivory, so they gave him oak. The difficulty of selling his work has not yet been met. The manufacturers are jealous and will not allow such high-class goods to be put on the market.
Woman’s Shelter, Hanbury Street, Whitechapel. Here women may sleep and have tea and breakfast. For meals twopence each, for a night’s lodging the same. No questions asked. They must be indoors before eleven o’clock. The women are very reserved and reticent. They are from the lowest part of the community. Many old women in pitiful rags and tatters. Some have to be called at one o’clock in the morning to go to the markets, where they earn a few pence by picking over fruit. The shelters are kept 60 to 65 degrees Fahrenheit. The mere warmth is often enough to keep life in bodies weakened by hunger and cold. The long room is filled with bunks, or rather boxes. At one of the shelters men were at work making these sleeping boxes, carefully painted and enameled, the superintendent told me, as a protection against vermin. Inside each bunk are a leather-covered mattress and pillow, but no bedding.
A smaller room leading from the large one is reserved for women with children. I visited the crêche where, by paying a small fee, mothers can leave their children for the day. I saw one of the Slum Posts. The two Lassies in charge were gentlewomen, the daughters of a well-known Church of England clergyman. Their post is in the worst quarter of London.
“No one ever annoys us; we go in parts of the town where no one else could go safely. No one would hurt a Salvation Army Lassie,” they said.
At one of the shelters the women may wash their clothes Tuesday and Friday evenings. Tubs and hot water are provided gratis; the women must bring their own soap.
My interest in the Salvation Army began one hot Sunday afternoon some time in the eighties, at the home of my sister, Laura Richards, in Gardiner, Maine. Looking out in the street, I saw a man beating a drum and a girl with a blue bonnet shaking a tamborine.
“What on earth are those lunatics about?” some one asked. We followed them down to the main street and listened to their simple service of song and prayer. Though this proceeding seemed incongruous in that quiet Maine town, it interested me. The Salvation Army met with that bitterest of all opposition, ridicule. But the more I studied the methods of the Army in London, the more convinced I became that it represented one of the greatest moral forces of my time. At a period when business men were beginning to talk about “by-products” and manufacturers to realize that the by-product was sometimes as important as all the rest of the plant, General Booth was developing the by-product of mankind and turning the wastrels of the race into profitable citizens. On my return to America I was so angered at hearing his methods pooh-poohed that I wrote a lecture describing what I had seen of the Army’s work. Under the management of Major Pond I gave this lecture, “With Booth in Darkest England”, far and wide. I am glad to think that my voice may have had some small influence in bringing about a better understanding of the Salvation Army in our country.
CHAPTER XVII
Arabian Days
It was in the early days of 1894 that J. and I set sail for Italy, whither his work called him, and that on the way I beguiled him into one of our merriest adventures.
“Our tickets allow us to stop over here for a week,” I whispered as the steamer’s anchor chain rattled through the hawseholes and the lights of Gibraltar glittered like golden fireflies fluttering over the huge Rock.
“But our luggage is booked for Naples,” J. objected. He was eager to push on to his studio in Rome. All the afternoon I had been drawn as by a magnet to the mysterious blue coast of Africa. Here we were at the Pillars of Hercules; should we ever be here again? If an ally had not loomed up at that moment I should never have lived my seven Arabian days and nights. He introduced himself with a sweeping bow.
“I am Ferguson, friend of the Americans. You are from Boston; you live, perhaps, upon the Common? I know the best people there, the Quincys, the Shaws, the Winthrops. I will show you their letters.”
“It is not necessary,” I interrupted, “for I also know Mark Twain, who has told all Americans about you.”
The famous guide of the “Innocents Abroad” seemed to dilate at this, till he shut out the Rock itself. He was an impressive-looking person, tall, handsome, with splendid and seductive manners. He came to my aid, and in ten minutes the matter was settled.
“I will show you Spain. I know what you want; some ladies do not understand traveling, but you shall see everything! Gypsy dances, eh? Palaces, pictures, Seville, Granada? Yes, we will go to Morocco. You shall visit the Sultan’s harem!”
Letters to my mother and sisters give some impressions of that precious stolen week.
[To my Mother.]
Tangier, January 12, 1894.
We took ship at Gibraltar for Morocco, a pleasant sail of not more than three hours. As the steamer drew near the shore a swarm of boats rowed by turbaned Moors came out to meet us. Tangier lies at the foot of a spur of the Atlas Mountains on the edge of an almost circular bay; from the boat it looked like a round white pearl set in a ring of yellow sand. We clambered into a small craft rowed by four Moors and crowded with rival guides and interpreters who fought for us and our possessions. A young Jew, Abraham Levy, won the fight. Ferguson, finding us too small game for his picking, had handed us on to him. We soon found that in Morocco the Jew stands for what in some parts of the world the Christian stands for,—education, intelligence, cleanliness; in a word, the higher civilization. The Moors are a fine race, tall, handsome, with haughty austere faces and a pride of bearing I have yet to see surpassed.
At the city gate our porters laid down our luggage at the feet of three grave Moors dressed in white turbans and bournouses, reclining gracefully in a small cell smoking keef, a mixture of hashish and snuff. No word was spoken; the Moors looked calmly at us and we at them for what seemed a long time. Then the eldest of the trio nodded, the bearers took up our traps and we passed through the gate into the city.
“All right,” whispered Abraham, “you see I understand these people. Did you ever pass through a customhouse so easily?”
None of us had guessed that it was a customhouse!
The whole life of Tangier seems to be lived in the streets. The market is a perfect babel of strange tongues. Veiled women seated on the ground sell queer flat loaves of bread and great bunches of violets. The stalls are piled with golden tangerines, tiny limes, mammoth lemons, scarlet peppers, purple eggplant—every fruit or vegetable you ever saw and many you never heard of!
The children are very handsome with enormous eyes and skins of bronze velvet! The Moorish is the best Oriental dress I have seen, save that of the Bedouins of the Pyramids, which it resembles. Abraham piloted us through a maze of narrow twisted streets crowded with strange figures; Moors in white bournouses, Jews in black gaberdines, negro slaves with gashed cheeks and wild-looking Berbers with blue eyes, the descendants of white men settled centuries ago in the hills and fiercer looking even than the Moors....
In the late afternoon Dr. Baltzell (a fellow traveler) and I went for a ride in the outlying country. It might better be called desert, for it was all sand with an occasional fig tree. The sand from the beach seems to have been driven inland and rises up in little hills, reaching far into the interior. We rode into the sunset till we reached the ruins of an old Roman bridge and then back to town in a wonderful pink twilight under a crescent moon. Abraham lifted up his voice and sang a wild Hebrew melody, while Abdallah the donkey boy trotted along beside me, twisting the tail of Zuleiman, my unfortunate mule. When our retinue learned that Baltzell was an M.D., every door flew open to him, as physicians are held in high respect. Abraham consulted him about his fiancée, and Abdallah about his wife. The doctor’s offer to go and see the patients was respectfully declined. The symptoms of both ladies were minutely described, and he was urged to prescribe. The doctor’s own stock of simples soon gave out, and we commandeered my bottle of soda mints and my box of Brown’s bronchial troches, which he distributed freely. At dinner there was quail for the doctor, mere larks for us; his pillow was of down, ours of straw; he had a fine horse to ride, the rest of us had to put up with mules or donkeys!
I liked the Moors immensely, but they did not like us. A handsome boy bit his thumb at me! When I laughed at his insolence, Abraham whispered anxiously, “Do not notice them—it is better not—it is not safe!”
Raisuli, the brigand chief, was believed to be near the city and we were not allowed to ride far beyond the gates. I asked to see a school. Abraham led me to the open door of a cellar, where twenty boys from three to ten years old were seated upon the earth floor repeating verses from the Koran. The master, an old Moor with a long beard, frowned at us, and a youth of fifteen who was writing neatly in a book closed it hurriedly and started to his feet, muttering angrily.
“He is afraid that the shadow of a Christian might fall upon the page. If that happened, he would tear it out and all his labor would be lost,” Abraham explained.
Outside the gate is the Sok, or market place. Here we heard a native teller of tales recite the story of the Fisherman and the Genie. While we were there a caravan from Fez arrived at the Sok, the camels grunted and scolded just like those you remember we rode in the Egyptian desert. That night a friend arranged a concert for us. There were six musicians with a lute, a tambourine, a reban and a shepherd’s pipe. The leader chanted a wailing song, the others joining in the chorus.
“They are singing ‘The Lament for Granada’!” said our host.
It was on a later visit to Tangier that I made the acquaintance of the famous Sharifa, Madame Wazzan, the English wife of the late Sharif, the native ruler of this part of the country. She was an interesting personage and for many years played an important part in Moroccan affairs. She was a strong, masterful-looking woman rather Oriental in type, but thoroughly British in her tastes. Her drawing-room was the most characteristically English room I ever saw out of Great Britain. On the walls hung signed photographs of royalties and distinguished personages from all over the world, for this vigorous woman with iron-gray hair and aquiline features was a power in the land of her adoption. She spoke of her late husband with affection. His portrait held the central place on the walls. I met the wife of her son, a pretty Oriental with the regulation henna-tinted nails and palms. Tea was served English fashion and it was not till I was introduced to the Oriental part of the establishment that I realized what the Sharifa meant when she said:
“I lead a double life. With Arabs I am an Arab; with Europeans I am a European.”
The Sharifa has done much to help civilize her adopted country. She told me that she had introduced vaccination to Tangier, where she vaccinates hundreds of children every year. I met Muli Hassan, her grandson and heir to the title, a pretty, well-mannered child.
“In certain respects,” the Sharifa told me, “my grandchildren are brought up English fashion, as my children were. But I never forget that they are not only noble, but in the eyes of the people here, almost sacred persons. The crowd of cripples and beggars you saw outside my gate were waiting for the chance of touching Muli Hassan’s garments when he goes out to ride.”
The influence of such English women as the Sharifa of Wazzan and Lady Hester Stanhope upon the Mohammedan world into which they married, is beyond calculation. It must have been a very potent one, and perhaps worth to the British Empire the awful price they must have paid!
[To Laura Richards.]
On board the steamer, bound
for Naples, January 19, 1894.
When we saw Granada we did not wonder that the Moors still mourned for their lost paradise.
At Seville we found a good English pension, honest and cheap, and best of all Don Antonio Sucillio, a friend of J.’s and one of the leading Spanish sculptors. He took us to his heart and we had two days of pure unmixed delight at Seville in the shadow of the Giralda, one of the perfect towers in the world, as lovely in its way as the Giglio at Florence. We saw some fine Murillos, the unique cathedral, the Alcazar, and the House of Pilate, only less beautiful than the Alhambra and the fitting prelude to this brightest jewel in the crown of Spain.
We reached the marvelous garden of delight, Granada, at nine o’clock on a full moonlight night. The next morning we were in the Alhambra in the very room where Queen Isabella first listened to Columbus and promised him her jewels for his quest. The capital of the Moors is perched on a high hill behind which rise the snow-clad Sierras. The town of Granada lies at the foot of the hill reserved for the palaces and gardens. The exterior of the Alhambra is grim and simple, but noble in its somber strength. The interior—but it is indescribable! The beauty of design, the wealth of color, the wonderful harmony, the romance, the hot passionate quality of it all makes Greece seem cold and Italy thin compared to it. Charles the Fifth did a little butchering and Ferdinand and Isabella a little more, but on the whole it has been wonderfully preserved. Restoration is only made when necessary and is so perfectly done that one asks not to be told where the original work leaves off and the reproduction begins.
We saw the Zingari of Andalusia living in caves scooped from the living rock. A dance was arranged for us; four girls and one man trod strange and beautiful measures. The best dancer of the five, whose name is Incarnacion, is partly Spanish. When the performance was half over, each of the women kissed me on the cheek and gave a little mock embrace to the gentlemen of our party. As they were well scrubbed and freshly dressed, I enjoyed the pretty ceremony. We were offered wine, which we declined and they drank.
Andalusia was inhabited by the Moors for seven hundred and seventy-seven years before the Spaniards drove them out! Poor dears, how sorry I am they ever left it. Many of them took with them the massive iron doorkeys of their houses, believing that they would surely return some day to the land their industry had made fruitful, their art made beautiful. To-day in some ancient houses of Morocco these keys of the lost homes of Granada and Andalusia still hang upon the wall!
Andalusia is now chiefly important to the rest of the world as the treasure house of their scattered buildings, each one a gem, while the Moors, since they went back to Morocco, do not seem to have done much for themselves or for anybody else. Was it pleasant, do you think, to stand in the room of the Alhambra where Washington Irving lived, and to pick a leaf from the tree that bore his favorite oranges, also to eat an orange from the same? Our guide, Antonia Jimenez, was the great, great nephew of his guide. Irving’s “Alhambra” is a classic; it gives the feeling of the place wonderfully.
How do you suppose it felt to be in Seville and to have Don Antonio Sucillio announced and go out with this fascinating Spaniard and partake of breakfast in a summer house lost in orange trees, to have a hidden singer caroling fierce war ballads and passionate love songs and a guitarist do the things with his instrument that only a Spaniard can do? Oh, week of romance and joy stolen from the workaday winter! A never-failing fount of happy memory. Even the beggars, the sturdiest of their breed in all the world, have a charm. Spain! Spain! It has taken the flavor out of everything else. I must go back if only for Madrid, where only one sees Velasquez. At Seville one gains a good idea of Murillo, who was a native of that charming city of roses. The finest specimens are
in the damp dreadful old gallery where the pictures are suffering horribly. There is the divine San Antonio with the child Christ appearing to him, and a very fine Conception. The week in Spain was comparable to nothing but an Arabian Nights’ tale; the dazzle of the Alhambra is still in my eyes!
CHAPTER XVIII
Artist Life in Rome
1894
When we arrived in Italy some of our English and American friends said, “You will find Rome dreadfully changed!”
Having known it in the seventies, I welcomed the changes that had brought comfort and health to the modern capital. The old Rome was all there, if you only knew how to look for it!
King Umberto, whom I had seen take the oath of office sixteen years before, reigned at the Quirinal with Queen Margherita, and Leo the Thirteenth at the Vatican. Francesco Crispi, the last of the great figures of the Risorgimento, was prime minister and ruled Italy with a firm hand, while Cardinal Rampolla, strong and astute, was the Pope’s Secretary of State.
Mr. Wayne MacVeagh was American ambassador and Larz Anderson first secretary of embassy. The British Embassy in the old Villa Torlonia close by the Porta Pia was a far more attractive meeting place than the American. We had pleasant relations with both American and English diplomats; of the latter I remember most distinctly Lord Currie, who came to Rome from Constantinople. I had known Lady Currie in London when she was Mrs. Singleton, writing under the pseudonym of Violet Fane.
I first met her at a dinner given for my mother by Edmund Yates at the Star and Garter at Richmond. She was gay and handsome then, and I remember her keeping up a brilliant running fire of talk with Louis Jennings and W. H. Mallock. She was graver now, but kept the charm that had made her one of the most sought after women in London.
She still wrote occasionally and was always an omnivorous reader. She often read books for her busy husband. A propos of this, she told me a story of their Constantinople days. Lord Currie had given her a life of the Sultan, recently published in England. Was it interesting? he asked her one day. “Yes,” she said, “but”—and got no further, “people of importance” interrupting. They dined that night with the Sultan; during the dinner the conversation flagging, Lord Currie had a happy inspiration. “Sire,” he said, “an interesting book has just appeared about yourself!” Lady Currie made a frantic effort to reach his foot under the table.
“Ah!” said the Sultan. “I should like to see that book!”
“You shall have my copy!” exclaimed the Ambassador.
The Sultan’s parting words were, “I will send for the book in the morning.” When they were in the carriage Lady Currie said to her husband:
“The book you recommended to the Sultan opens with this sentence, ‘A more loathsome toad than the Sultan Abdul Hamid I never saw!’”
When the Sultan’s servant called next day, the volume was not to be found. It was sent for more than once, and the next time the Ambassador had an audience, the Sultan reproached him with duplicity.
Rome in the last decade of the nineteenth century was as fascinating to me as it had been to my mother in 1843, when she came here on her wedding journey. My aunt still held her little court at Palazzo Odescalchi where I met many of the elder artists. Mr. Richard Greenough, the sculptor, rarely failed to appear on her reception days; he was an exquisite man with the old fashioned “hair-trigger breeding” of a Boston gentleman of the early Victorian age. Mr. William Story was at work upon his last statue, the “Genius of Grief”, a kneeling figure of an angel, for his wife’s grave in the Protestant cemetery, of which Shelley wrote, “It might make one in love with death to think one should be buried in so sweet a place.”
Marion Crawford was living at Sorrento with his wife and four children. He had become famous and, for a writer, rich. I would rather have found him poor and obscure; the price he had paid for fame and fortune was too high. He had an iron constitution and phenomenal powers of work. I have known him to write a book in six weeks and doubt if he ever took more than three months over any novel. He worked under great pressure, with a full head of steam on, day in day out. The pace he had set was beginning to tell on him, but it seemed he could not alter it. He had little sense of self-preservation and was full of whimsies about his diet. We owed our first Roman home to him, for he lent us his apartment in the historic Palazzo Santa Croce, where tradition says Beatrice Cenci lived at one time. During the first part of our stay here I was harried by a recurrent nightmare. Night after night I found myself in a room that my waking eye had never seen, a blind room, without windows or doors, in the center of which stood a funeral catafalque draped in black. This vision obsessed me: even by day I could not wholly escape it.
After a time it happened that certain repairs were needed on the foundations of the palace. In making them, the workmen came upon a small closed cellar filled with human bones. Further search was made, and over the cellar was found an oubliette whose entrance, walled up for centuries, was directly below my room. Two nights after this, as the bells of the Pietà del Monte rang midnight, a funeral car drew up before the palace, the bones were carried away, and buried with whatever ceremony the church allowed. After that I slept in peace.
The tower room where Crawford had worked became J.’s studio. On the walls hung casts from the faces of the great men described in Crawford’s “With the Immortals”, Napoleon, Beethoven, and best of all the famous death mask of Dante. This last so much impressed J. that he made a drawing of it in colored pastels. Dissatisfied with the work, he crumpled up the drawing and threw it in the waste basket. I rescued it, smoothed out the tumbled paper and “unbeknownst” took it to the framer’s. When the drawing came home I hung it up in the salon.
“See how nicely your Dante looks now!” I exclaimed.
“Not nice at all! Don’t let anybody see it!” was the answer.
Crestfallen I took the drawing to my bedroom. One day when I was ill my Uncle Terry came to see me and caught sight of the Dante.
“What a good drawing!” he exclaimed.
Uncle Terry was an excellent draftsman and J. had great respect for his opinion. The Dante came back to the salon. On my next reception day Mrs. David Kimball, a Boston collector, saw it and bought it on the spot. Later Curtis and Cameron reproduced it as a Copley Print; it has gone all over the world, taken prizes in Australia and Japan and is, I believe, the most popular modern portrait of the great Italian poet. I tell this story for the benefit of other artists’ wives, for it has been my experience that artists are often the worst judges of their own work. They seem to value most the work that has cost them the greatest labor, whereas it sometimes happens that things struck off at white heat, quickly and easily, have more of the artist’s personality, which of course is what gives every work of art its value.
Before leaving America, I had arranged to write a syndicate newspaper letter for the Boston Transcript, the Kansas City Star, the New Orleans Times Democrat, a Chicago, and a New York paper. Gathering materials for this correspondence added much to the interest of my life in Rome. I had the sense of being eyes and ears for thousands of readers in different parts of the world. My letters to my family, however, give more intimate glimpses of Rome at this time.
[To my Mother.]
Rome. February, 1894. I see many fine functions at St. Peter’s. I never tire of it all, the arrogant scarlet cardinals, the ermine-tippeted canons, the great feather fans carried before Pope Leo, his extraordinary waxen face where only the eyes seem alive, as he passes through the throng carried high above the people, giving the papal benediction with three fingers of the right hand. The uniforms of the Swiss Guard and the Guardia Nobile, the papal chamberlains, the vested choir, the voices of the Pope’s “angels”, the rich smell of incense are all just as you knew them before I was born. Did you remember that some of the splendid costumes were designed by Michael Angelo?
“St. Peter’s is the theater of the Church,” Monsignor (now Cardinal) O’Connell once said to me. He is right. A function there moves me just like any other great pageant. I hadn’t been here a week when I saw the King, the Queen and the Pope. She is like a queen in a fairy story, tall, beautiful, with golden hair. The King seems better loved by the Romans, the Queen by the diplomats and foreigners. She is very dévote, doubtless a fortunate thing for the dynasty. I find matters political very difficult to understand. Mr. Stillman, who is the London Times correspondent and hardly less important a personage than the British Ambassador, tells me that Crispi is a giant and the only man able to hold Italy in hand. He is seventy-four years old and after him “the deluge” is feared.
Yesterday Colonel and Mrs. John Hay gave a pleasant reception at their hotel, where I met the Bishop Potters, Mrs. Edward ditto and Stillman’s tall wife and daughters. Mrs. S. (Marie Spartali) interests me more than any person I have met so far. A superb romantic creature, a hard worker, a good painter, one of the last of the Pre-Raphaelites. I remember your telling me of her when she was the rage of London, the idol of that group. They all painted her,—Morris, Rossetti, Burne-Jones. The last portrait is by Du Maurier. We are convinced she is the original of the Duchess in “Peter Ibbetson.” She has a thousand little tricks he describes, the likeness is too strong to be mistaken.—Cold to-day, tramontana blows and I hug my open fire. I wonder the Romans were ever Christianized; the sun is so all-important for health, happiness, life itself, that it seems strange they could have turned from the altars of Apollo.
Rome, March 5, 1894. At two o’clock to-day Mrs. Potter Palmer and I drove into the courtyard of the Quirinal Palace and got out at the glass doors under the clock. The porter, an immense scarlet-coated person with cocked hat and a long cane of office, received us with ceremonious bows and scrapes.
“Have their Excellencies been summoned for an audience with her Majesty the Queen?”
We “allowed” that we had, whereupon with even deeper salaams he ushered us up a winding stairway with the tiniest steps I ever saw, to the piano nobile. Here we passed through several magnificent apartments filled with flunkies in scarlet liveries and silk stockings to an anteroom. The walls and furniture were covered with blue satin brocade, there were many flowering plants, superb hangings and a few good old portraits. Here we found the Marchesa Villamarina, lady in waiting to the Queen in perpetua, and the lady in waiting for the month, both of whom wore on the left shoulder a diamond M (the Queen’s initial) on a blue ribbon like an order. As we entered, a little old lady very plainly dressed passed into the inner room.
“That is Mme. ——, the widow of a distinguished general,” the Marchesa said, “your turn is next.”
When the old lady came out we were announced and ushered into the reception room. We courtesied at the entrance, halfway across the room, and again as we stood before the Queen, who received us standing. She was dressed in black velvet embroidered with jet, and wore one string of gigantic pearls. Her earrings, immense, perfectly round solitaire pearls, were in shape and size the twins of Mrs. Palmer’s; Mrs. P.’s were the best I thought.
The room was large and luxuriously furnished with windows looking out on the Quirinal garden. The Queen seated herself and motioned us to sit. She had beside her a little table with silver smelling bottle and writing materials. She opened the conversation by telling Mrs. Palmer that she had seen her mother-in-law some years ago. Mrs. Palmer thinks she meant Mrs. Bryan, who came to Rome to arrange for the loan of the Queen’s collection of laces for the Chicago World’s Fair. The Queen then turned to me and asked if I had written the book about the Woman’s Department of the Fair, presented to her by our Ambassador, Mr. MacVeagh. When I pleaded guilty, she said, with the prettiest accent:
“Thank you for the book. It is very interesting. I hear the Fair was a great success; many Italians went to Chicago and I have heard much about it. They tell me that the Woman’s Building was beautiful and the Italian exhibit well arranged and much admired.”
When we had threshed out the subject of the Fair, there was a pause. In the presence of royalty you must not speak till you are spoken to; this leaves the choice of the topic of conversation to the royal personage. After a moment’s silence the Queen turned to me and asked:
“Are you fond of music?” adding, “It is my greatest pleasure. I had a Steinway piano that I bought in Germany. When Mr. Steinway heard of this he asked me to send it to him and sent me in exchange a piano he thought better. The tone is admirable. The Chickering pianos are also good.” She was evidently aware of the rivalry of the two famous firms.
The Queen had obviously been prepared for our visit, for she spoke to me chiefly on matters of art.
“Your artists in America are doing very good work,” she said, “and what excellent architects you have. I know that from the pictures of your fine houses I see in the illustrated magazines. I enjoy reading them, the literature is so fresh. We see a great many American ladies here, but few gentlemen. Your men, I hear, are too busy to travel. Two of my ladies in waiting are Americans, so I learn many things about your country.”
She rose, shook hands, “hoped to see us again,” and the audience was over. Taking pains not to turn our backs (it wasn’t easy) we courtesied out of the room with three genuflections as on entering.
When she was young, the Queen was a great beauty; she is still handsome, graceful, charming, and took as much pains to be agreeable as if the whole business of holding audiences with strangers was a pleasure and not the unmitigated grind it must be; still she doubtless calls it part of the day’s work and likes to do it well.
June, 1894. We have taken an apartment close to J.’s studio in an old palace built by Sixtus the Fifth. It looks out upon the Square of St. Peter’s and it has a divine terrace. What a view! The whole of Rome and the Alban Hills, St. Peter’s and the fountains, the Vatican and the windows of the Pope’s private apartments just opposite! At the studio J.’s happy family, a pair of pigeons and a falcon, has an addition in the shape of two pretty kittens.
Queen Margherita is a brave woman. She drives about the town constantly, passing this house twice a day with only a lady in waiting beside her. The scarlet liveries of her coachman and footman make the landau a fine target for the anarchist’s knife or pistol, but the Queen is quite fearless. Crispi laughs at the attempts to kill him, and they have begun to say he has a charmed life. The King looks as if he would like to be in anybody’s boots but his own. Some of Crispi’s acts would have brought about a revolution in any other country; the King alone has prevented this, and the unconscious triumph of his simple, honest character is most impressive. He is not a brilliant man, but he loves his people and Italy better than his own dynasty, which he has not scrupled to jeopardize. Crispi is perfectly sincere in the belief that for the country’s sake his government must continue. Whether he is right is another question. No matter what happens, have no fear for us. The Romans are the peaceablest people in the world. At Milan, Naples, Turin, Florence, there may be some excitement, but the Romans do not interest themselves in what is happening in the world to-day and won’t do so for another generation. You can’t make people free in twenty-five years; it takes at least fifty.
On Friday, the day of Santa Lucia, we were bidden to the festa of Signora Villegas. Here they celebrate your saint’s day instead of your birthday. At dinner I sat between Villegas and Adolfo Apolloni, the sculptor. The Signora is Italian, but Villegas is an Andalusian from Seville. There were Spanish guests, Spanish wine and viands, much talk and merriment.
Our home between 1894 and 1900 was the old Palazzo Accoramboni, or, as we called it, the Palazzo Rusticucci. The agent who let us our apartment was an ignorant man, and when we asked the name of the palace he told us it was the Rusticucci. It was only after we had had the name engraved upon our note paper and visiting cards, and had lived there two years, that Crawford told us of our mistake. It seemed too late to correct it, so we kept the name, and now it is a source of satisfaction to me to remember that we are the only people who ever lived in Palazzo Rusticucci! The quarter, properly called the Leonine City, is more familiarly spoken of as the Borgo, and is inhabited chiefly by people connected with the Vatican. Our apartment was both picturesque and comfortable. Our terrace, transformed by J. into a sort of hanging garden of Babylon, where we cut roses every month of the year, became one of the sights of Rome, and strangers often rang our doorbell and asked to see it.
Rome is the most hospitable place I have ever known. From the time of the Empire the chief business of the city has been to entertain strangers; it never had any other business and it has never lost the habit of making strangers feel at home. The society is most amusing, for one only has to “sit tight” and sooner or later every important personage in the world passes your way!
[To my Mother.]
July 5, 1894. Yesterday the Ambassador gave a Fourth of July reception with lots of champagne, American flags and a band playing the Star Spangled Banner. There were one hundred and ten Americans present, so you see we are not the only ones left in Rome. I am brisk and well. If one has to be in any city in summer, Rome is the best. Tuesday night Mariano Benlliure came to dine. He is called the first living Spanish sculptor. He has a strong dash of the Moor, as his genius and his name show; all the Bens are of Moorish descent. We also had Mrs. Taylor, a clever newspaper woman, correspondent of the London Standard, sister of Mrs. Augustus Trollope, and Joe Hunt. He has grown a beard and is not quite so cherubic.
I have had two bright letters from William Henry Hurlburt, who is at Cadennabbia on the Lake of Como. He wrote for homeopathic medicines which I sent him. The poor old fellow isn’t long for this world. He has an insight into spiritual truths as keen and as fine as when he was an associate of the Transcendentalists at Cambridge; one hears he has another side, but I have never seen it.
You ask me how I pass my days. Up at five and out for a spin on my bicycle. The other day I rode to Ostia and back before lunch. After my ride I get out stores and linen and settle accounts; everything is under lock and key and every centesimo accounted for. Out again for errands and at my writing by half-past ten or eleven. In the morning I write and read the papers in the salotto. The Paris edition of the New York Herald has much home news. Lunch at one. After lunch to bed for a siesta.
I make a rule to be indoors by eleven in the morning and not to go out again till five in the afternoon. After the siesta, I go up to my workroom on the terrace where there is a thorough draft and no sun, and work there till six, when I go over to the studio to see how J.’s painting goes on. For a little stroll, and then dinner on the terrace at eight. We sit there till bedtime—so nice and cool, the stars very homelike and pleasant, the same constellations that you see, and just now many falling stars.
During the years of our life in Rome we spent most of the summers there. As the heat increased, one by one the English and American friends and the more well-to-do Roman friends departed, until our circle narrowed down to a few artists, two or three of the younger diplomats left in charge of the embassies, and certain friendly priests, who found our house a convenient stopping place on the way to the Vatican. I learned more of Rome in these lonely summer months than during the gay season. One August I heard of the death of an elderly American woman whom I had never seen. As I knew her niece, I felt impelled to drive out to the Protestant cemetery to the funeral, for I did not know of any other American in Rome who could be there. The Ambassador, the Consul, the clergymen of both the English and American churches were out of town. When I reached the little chapel, I found a strange clergyman getting into his surplice. The coffin was already there, and a carriage had just stopped containing the niece and the doctor who had attended the dead woman.
“I am a stranger. I only arrived this morning,” said the clergyman. “I do not speak the language, I do not know for whom I am to read the service.”
“I too am a stranger,” I began. The solitary mourner was entering the chapel.
“At least you can tell me,” in an agonized whisper, “whether I am to read the service for a man or a woman.”
“Oh, for a woman!” I gasped.
I think the memory of that lonely funeral had much to do with our coming home to America for the “last heat” of life. Much as I adored Rome, I did not want to grow old and die there!