Chapter XXII By the Tiber and by the Charles
Boston, January 1, 1901. We thought we had seen the birth of the Twentieth Century in Rome; when we reached Boston we found out we were mistaken, for here the new century begins to-day—what luck to celebrate twice! Last night at fifteen minutes before midnight, we were on Beacon Hill, outside the State House, where half of Boston had gathered for a mass meeting, called by the Twentieth Century Club. The services began by Boston’s G. O. M., Edward Everett Hale, reading the Nineteenth Psalm. The night was mild, not a breath of east wind, the stars like diamonds, the opening words most appropriate:
“The Heavens declare the glory of God; and the firmament showeth his handiwork.”
The Handel and Haydn Society sang a cantata in great form, then a host of trumpets rang out a splendid call, the retreat of the dear old Nineteenth Century—I felt that I held it dying in my arms. The whole vast crowd that had stood silent then burst out with “My Country, ’tis of Thee” as I never quite heard it sung before. At twelve o’clock the bells swung and rung themselves hoarse in every belfry in Boston, and people began to wish each other “Happy Century”, instead of “Happy New Year!”
January 2. Last evening to an original festivity arranged by the Saturday Morning Club. All the dresses were of the styles worn between 1800 and 1880. The prettiest was a tulle ball dress of 1859 worn over a large crinoline; the ugliest one a magenta silk of about 1870 with a ruffled train and an enormous bustle.
The papers are full of stories of old people who have lived in three centuries; we who were born in the fifties haven’t that chance.
January 7. Gave a talk upon my Roman experiences before the New England Woman’s Club. I sounded a blast for the American School for Classical Study in Rome and for Richard Norton, who made it the vital place it now is. The school was dead-alive till he took it, breathed upon it and made it alive with his life. A greater transformation I never saw, nor a more striking illustration of how a man can work his vitality into a stodgy institution like yeast into heavy dough, and see it rise, almost overnight.
1902 was a year filled with the absorbing interests of travel. We had for our companions two young friends, Gladys and Marion Lawson. As I write, vingt ans après, my clearest memories are of our visit to Greece, and of London in this the coronation year.
[To my Mother.]
Athens, March 29. We arrived yesterday at Piraeus, more dead than alive, on the Prince Abbas, a cockleshell that brought us from Alexandria. Things are no better to-day on the Mediterranean boats than when Lord Byron made his memorable trip on board the Lisbon packet! Mr. Cook, or his agent, plucked us and our baggage out of that dark hold where we had languished many days and seated us, a demoralized party, in a comfortable landau. We each drooped languidly in our corner, our spines damp macaroni. Gradually limp vertebrae stiffened up, heads lifted, eyes opened. We were restored by the elixir of the air, the color of the sky and fields. At a turn in the road, before we were quite prepared for it, came the first view of the Acropolis. Half a lifetime had passed since I had left it, and it has only grown in beauty. Athens is much improved. The roads are better, the streets cleaner, the whole city better kept than I remembered it. The people look prosperous; there is a general air of well-being in all classes.
We hurried to the Acropolis, where we found the old immortal glories and much that was new and interesting in the small museum behind the Parthenon. The two most precious objects of Greek art which the last twenty years’ research has brought to light, you are familiar with,—the Victory untying her sandal and the Hermes of Olympia. The museum contains curious archaic statues discovered buried in a deep trench. The theory is that in the age of Pericles and the consummate art of the sculptors of that time, these earlier sacred statues of earthenware and painted stone were dethroned and decorously interred in the sacred soil of the Acropolis. It does seem a little shabby to unearth these poor discarded gods and tuck them away as curiosities in a little shed behind the temple of Athena Parthena, where they once reigned supreme! We sat on the steps of the Parthenon and watched the sky change from blue to purple and gold, waiting for the moment when the violet mist rose up out of the sea and draped Mount Hymettus with a veil.
My audience with Queen Olga was rather sad. The palace was positively shabby and badly in need of fresh paint. The Queen was kind and gracious. She had been well coached for the visit and spoke of what Greece owes to Papa. In spite of all this, I took away a melancholy impression, the Queen seemed so grave and preoccupied. She was tastefully dressed in heliotrope serge with amethyst ornaments of the same color. I learned afterwards that she has lately had a trying experience. As an act of devotion she had a new translation of the Greek Scriptures made at her own expense by eminent scholars, inspired doubtless by the English revised edition of the Bible. This act of grace was taken very ill by the people, and she was made to feel their displeasure bitterly. The Crown Princess, the Kaiser’s sister, is more popular.
The Richardsons at the American School of Archaeology were most kind and told us of the latest amazing discoveries. Dr. Evans, an Englishman, has found in Crete the palace of the Minotaur, that must have been four stories in height. We saw at the Museum some of the small gold double axes and the beautiful gold Vappie cups found there. Miss Boyd, an American girl, has discovered and excavated a prehistoric village in Crete. It was cruel we could only stay a matter of days in Greece when there is so much of absorbing interest to see and learn!
Ye Miller of Manchester, Goring, England, June 30, 1902. The disappointment of the postponement of the Coronation fêtes on account of King Edward’s illness was so dire that to compensate I brought my young people to this lovely spot. The inn is like one on the stage, with tiny diamond-paned windows, climbing roses and honeysuckles. The life is of the waterside; all the hours when we are not asleep are passed in boats, canoes or punts. ’Tis the most beautiful bit of the Thames I have seen. To-day is gloriously filled by the joyous vitality of the two young creatures, who are drinking deep from the cup of life. It is very stimulating to go about with them; my bones are being well rattled and I hope I am getting very much up to date. If you haven’t young people of your own, you must borrow them from time to time or fall hopelessly out of the running.
Cornish, New Hampshire, August 15, 1903. In spite of the untold tedium of rainy days, doubtless no more here than elsewhere, we are in an ecstasy over the beauty of this place. I never could describe the world I see from this hilltop. The mountain opposite is a sort of Fujiyama; people become magnetized by its beauty. Every morning we watch for the moment when the veil of mist is dropped and the dark-blue beauty of Mount Ascutney shines out on us. I am reading with deep interest William James’ “Varieties of Religious Experience.” Very illuminating and coördinating to my mixed and scattered thoughts. Nothing new yet, even to me, but the orderliness of the ideas is useful. Yesterday Clara Potter Davidge (one of the Bishop’s twins) called; we are to have supper with her to-night, and to-morrow with St. Gaudens. The people here are all painters, sculptors or “literary fellers.” Lucia Fuller comes back to-morrow. Her house is picturesque, her children ditto.
Cornish, September 5. We are working away on our hilltop. I have finished another Roman paper. At last J. has found a place in America where he can work. He is doing a good many landscapes. The beauty of Cornish is not believable. It is like Italy. I look out upon a scene I call the Val d’Arno, it is so like the part of the Arno one sees from above Florence. The atmosphere of work counts for something too. We don’t see people much, for they all, like ourselves, are “grind-stoning” away. All are kind as kind, however, willing and anxious to be friendly. Newport has given me such a horror of summer society—not the dear Papeterie, nor our cronies, but the big Newport—that it is stimulating to be among people of our own sort who observe as a sacred commandment the rule that nobody goes to anybody else’s house till four or five in the afternoon. Sherman Jordan, the stone mason, is a slow giant who only works when he feels like it, an enormous Hercules of a man who could fell an ox with his fist. He speaks in a high silly voice that is enough to make you scream with laughter.
“Why didn’t you come to finish laying that wall to-day?” J. asked him.
“Because I did not feel very well,” he said. Speaking of Winston Churchill, who is much in the public eye, Jordan said:
“Mr. Churchill is very tony; he has an automobile that scares the hosses to death and he drives tantrums (tandem) besides.”
I remember the early years of the new century as a time of inspiration; the spirit of hope was abroad, the whole world seemed to have received a new impulse; good resolutions blossomed into good works. Men felt their strength to be as the strength of ten, and women that the twentieth century was theirs as no other had ever been. Like everybody else, I felt the impetus and finally finished, in collaboration with my sister Florence Hall, our long-delayed book, “Dr. Howe and his Famous Pupil, Laura Bridgman.”
[To my Mother.]
January 9, 1904. Twenty-eight years ago to-day Papa died. For the first time since I began to work on the Laura Bridgman book, I can think of the day without smiting myself. Now another stunt will be to see that a statue, or some appropriate monument, is set up to his memory. I suppose one might trust his grandchildren, but I remember your old slogan:
“If you want a thing done you must do it yourself.”
I am tearing away at my Roman papers; they are acting like the devil. I may have to go to Margaret Deland to consult about them. I seemed to get a fine start; now the work grows stodgy, dull, soulless! Have had a letter from the Century, accepting my “St. John’s Eve in Rome” and offering me $100 for it. I have finished another paper for the Lippincotts; that will make five.
The Roman papers were published in book form in two volumes, “Roma Beata” and “Two in Italy.” Of the many letters received about the Laura Bridgman book, two seem best worth preserving.
[From Henry James.]
Lamb House, Rye, Sussex,
November 9th, 1903.
My dear Maud Howe.
There is a process known as heaping coals of fire, of which you are past mistress, and I uncover my poor old bald head to it, and kneel before you abjectly and take all you will give me. This A.M. comes to me your book and your sister’s, about your illustrious father and Laura Bridgman, and the generosity of it leaves me so touched and confused that I scarce know where to look or what to do. I daresay you are generous enough perhaps not to remember that you sent me months and months ago another book, a book of verse (by some hand not known to me, or apparently much known to you) and that this offering was basely never acknowledged, though it was accompanied by the kindest of notes, and though I have been helplessly meaning to until this hour. It is the thought of my baseness that makes me beat my breast and bless your charity now. The source of evil was the embarrassing little book of verse. I couldn’t read it and by no fault, doubtless of its own, and I was shy of telling you I couldn’t, and I thought that by waiting I might be able to say, brazenly, I had; and then with this, waited so long that I was ashamed to say anything, there seemed so much to explain and such a mountain to lift, and it all came from my not writing the very day with the wisdom of the serpent to say I was going, as soon as possible to devour the graceful volume; which I didn’t do really, because that is what one does to the importunate and the intruder, and you were such millions of miles from either. Now, somehow, you cheer me up, and I don’t mind being brazen about anything. I have already been looking into Laura B., of whom you make a wondrous tale and who shines out as pathetically human through her strange prison bars. It is among other things a most curious and characteristic American document. I like immensely your aunt’s story of the girl’s feeling for her rings, bracelets, etc. and finding none, and saying luminously, “Poor?” and then, when she did find her earrings, exclaiming promptly, “Vain!” “Poor but vain!” is a delightful verdict from such a source. I wish your solid book a large success.—For the rest, I am afraid that I have done nothing more distinct or definite (for the page of history) since that evening of so long ago at the Henry Harlands, but hope and pray that the chance might be given me of meeting you again. But you haven’t come, and though I think I have vaguely heard of your being again in Europe, I have fully lost track of you and the waters have closed over the question. I am a very rusty country cousin now, as far as the terrible London of the early summer is concerned. I put in each year 3 or 4 winter months, but I flee when the season begins, like some great dangerous beast, ominously to growl.
November 3rd. I blush to confess to this length of interval. I was obliged to break off this unfinished apology for something better and before I could resume it again I was obliged to go for several days up to town. Hence endless complications and further interruptions and delays. But meanwhile I have been reading further your Laura Bridgman, which has not only brought back a hundred old recollections and reverberations to me, things of the past, images and persons, which I more or less perceivingly knew about then, but has freshly reconstituted for me your father’s high distinction and the greatness of his beneficent career. When you last wrote me you told me of your mother and of her continued triumph over time. I hope it is even yet not seriously menaced, and I beg to be recalled to her indulgent remembrance. Your husband has my best wishes for whatever of beautiful and slow he may have in hand. To which I must add my goodnight before I am again interrupted and despoiled of the last tatters of what has tried to be the reparatory promptness of yours very constantly,
Henry James.
[From Theodore Roosevelt.]
White House,
Washington.
October 29, 1903.
My dear Mrs. Elliott:
I shall read the book with the greatest interest and refresh my memory of the story. I have always felt peculiarly drawn to your family, and I appreciate the compliment of receiving such a book from your father’s daughter.
Sincerely yours,
Theodore Roosevelt.
[To my Mother.]
New York, March 20, 1905. The Reverend Percy Grant of Ascension Church sent me a photograph of J.’s drawing of you, with the request that you write a few words on the same and return it to him with some remarks concerning your memories of Ascension Church, where grandfather sat with you beside him and listened to the good English preached by Bishop Eastborn.
September 3, 1905. How dreadful the news of the Russo-Japanese War. I seem to be the only person who is for Russia. Every one I meet says,
“Plucky little Japan!”
But Russia is Christian and her people are white, and Tolstoi is Russian. I suppose in the eternal verities it is all right, and that out of her humiliation a new life will spring for Russia. I am dreadfully sorry for both peoples; the loss of life is so inhuman that it makes the Boer War seem like child’s play.
Cordova, Spain, December 18, 1905. The great mosque of Cordova is one of the wonders of the world. It represents the finest religious architecture left by the Moors, as the Alhambra is the finest monument of their secular architecture. It was rather late and the light was not good, but the impression was one of surprising beauty. The forest of columns of alabaster and every kind of precious marble brought back your lines:
Columns that demurely paired guard the solemn aisles!
Spain seems two hundred years behind Italy. Already I feel I am getting some understanding of this strange race. The racial type, after the Egyptian, is the strongest I have seen; there are a few varieties often repeated. I fancy there has been little intermarriage with other races, for the dominant traits do not seem to have changed since the time of Philip II. I see him everywhere! The people all look like Velasquez portraits. The gravity, the politeness, the pride all weigh upon one like tangible atmospheric conditions. Such manners I have not seen, even in France; honesty, cleanliness, sobriety, seem common virtues.
In Seville I had a wonderful morning in the cathedral, where I heard High Mass with both organs pealing grandly and such a choir! It was very moving to stand beside the sarcophagus that it is claimed actually holds the ashes of Columbus and to remember that we had seen both in Santo Domingo and in Havana, the places where his bones formerly lay!—Found your letter here. What a gay time you have had lately. “First in fun, first in sport, first in the heart of her familee.”
Madrid, December 21, 1905. Our good friends, Villegas and Lucia, met us at the train and brought us to their house, bag and baggage, scrip and scrippage, typewriter too. We have an alcove room with an open fire where we burn olive wood. Lucia’s housekeeping is a fine art, the most perfect neatness imaginable. The cook they brought with them from Rome gives us the dear old Italian dishes; the Spanish cooking is good but deadly rich. Here’s the best recipe for “left-overs” I know. Take whatever scraps of meat, poultry and fish you have and bake them in a foundation of rice, olives and tomatoes, slightly flavoured with onion. It sounds incredible, it is delicious.
Christmas was a nice bright day. I wanted to go to Mass, but the English doctor, called in for a slight cold, forbade it. There is a lot of influenza and some smallpox in the city. In a family where there is illness the old women and the children are sent to church to pray for the sick person, and so the contagion is spread.
In the evening, Rosilio, the painter who followed Villegas from Spain to Italy and has now followed him back from Rome to Madrid, came to greet us. When J. first knew him in Rome he was a lad of twenty, with a divine tenor voice. Rosilio, like Villegas, is an Andalusian, the race that has inherited most of the art and feeling of the Moor. In Rome R. used to be pounced upon by the other artists of the Spanish colony and made to sing Spanish songs, Andalusian ballads, Zingari ditties. His listeners were torn by homesickness and moved to tears by his songs. Now a strange thing has happened. With the translation of Villegas, the leading spirit of the group, to Spain, the colony broke up and many of them followed Villegas to Madrid. Now the tables are turned; the homesickness is for Rome. Last night Rosilio was called upon for song after song in the soft Roman dialect; he is a nightingale and sang the tears into my eyes and the heart into my throat!
Among the habitués of the house is Don Antonio Weyler, son of General Weyler, once military governor of Cuba. Until recently the General has been the Secretary of War, but with the change of government is now out of office. Antonio has adopted us and we call him “the key” because he seems able to open all manner of locked doors to us. He intends to enter the Church,—the call seems to be more a political than a spiritual one, as he wishes to devote himself to diplomacy. His model seems to be our old friend, Monsignor Merry del Val, who is now Secretary of the State to the Pope.
December 30, 1905. J. is posing for the figure of the King of Spain in the wonderful portrait Villegas is making of Don Alfonso. He looks very nice in the court suit with the little dress sword and the order of the garter. This has only just been awarded to the King, and J. wore it to pose in, before Don Alfonso himself ever put it on. Yesterday his leg went to sleep—the King’s breeches are woefully tight for him—and nearly fell off the model table, spraining his finger. The King will hardly sit at all for the portrait and so J. sits or rather stands. The pose is a killing one, which accounts for the downfall.
“The King, the King,” Villegas kept grumbling, “he can go hunting and amusing himself all the time, and I must stay and work on his picture, about which he doesn’t care enough to give me a decent number of sittings!”
“A hundred years from now who will know or care that the King went hunting?” I said to Villegas; “and how many people will be glad that you stayed at home and worked on his picture?”
He went back to his work, comforted as a child who has been coaxed into good humor. Villegas has an itch for work as compelling as that of Brother Harry or any other over-nerved Yankee. He is never satisfied with what he paints, always falling short of his ideal and agonizing at the failure all the world applauds as a success. He greatly enjoys his position as Director of the Prado Museum and Court Painter.
Naples, June 16, 1906. Steamship Schleswig. The outline of Vesuvius is sadly altered; instead of the one great peak you remember there are two gentler ones, twins as it were. This startling change took place at the time of the late eruption, when ships in the Bay of Naples were covered with fine dust like that which destroyed Pompeii, and the splendid peak of the mountain simply crumpled up and disappeared.
Rome, August 24, 1906. Here is a petal of the great Egyptian lotus that has for days past bloomed in the salon and delighted our eyes. It grew in the lake of the Villa Doria and was brought to me by our old gardener, Ignazio. He is the same lean brown faun you remember. He welcomed us back to Rome so prettily and hoped we would have a terrace or a garden and that he might minister to it. He confessed that in all his days no terrace like the Rusticucci had he ever seen.
To-day J. had a great pleasure. Enrico Coleman has been doing some of his finest work this summer, but has had no luck, has not sold a picture for a long time and is in the worst way for money. J. got him to send us his summer sketches—a wonderful showing—twenty landscapes, each handsomer than the other. J. knew that the fellows at the British Embassy had just made up a purse to buy one of their colleagues a wedding gift. He got them over here, showed them the pictures, and it ended by settling the question of the wedding present,—it won’t be silver or furniture but a lovely painting of the Roman campagna with a bit of the aqueduct. Then one of the young secretaries wanted a picture for himself, and there were two sold. A third may be bought by a young spark named Paliaret, or as we call him, Pantelet! J. went to Coleman with the news. The old fellow was rather torn at hearing it, said there was no money in the house, and had not been for days. He felt insulted at the word “subscription”, thought there had been one to buy his picture, whereas it was made to buy the wedding present and, as one of the young men expressed it, “collared the bood” for him.
Yesterday to hear a lecture and see an amazing chart of the Italian telegraph system, prepared by an American company that is trying to induce the Government to accept its system of telegraphy, the quadruplex, the best yet, according to my friend who has the matter in hand. When he asked the Italian Government for a map of its wires, he was told such a thing did not exist and could not be made. My Yankee friend promptly made the map and presented it to the Government. The occasion was instructive though I found my friend’s lecture dry. It now looks as if the Italians would adopt this new American telegraph system. How pleasant it is to find every day the American genius reaching out farther and farther. Mr. Vickers, an English diplomat, told me a curious thing; in a remote Greek country town he found American dollar bills circulated as currency; all the inhabitants have relations in the United States who send them money!
I am rather cross with the President for sending the Harry Whites to Paris. They have gone to great trouble and expense to fit up an Embassy magnificently, and before they have time to turn round in it, they are whisked off to France. I hear the Whites are much put out by this treatment. The man who is coming as next Ambassador, young Lloyd Griscom, is a nice fellow, I believe, with a young handsome wife.
Rome, Via Maria Adelaide, October 27, 1906. You see a new address on this letter, did I tell you we had taken a nice little apartment with a terrace? Not a patch on the Rusticucci, of course, but with some improvements,—an elevator in the house, an up-to-date bathroom, tiled floors, instead of brick, consequently no fleas. I have but to turn my head to see out of the window my great friend, St. Peter’s dome, with a pink morning flush upon it. I have counted the wash, must see the cook, and be off to the Classical School where I am taking a course of lectures on Roman History, or rather the history of Rome—not quite the same thing.
Rome, November 16, 1907. The most important thing since our return has been the improvement of the terrace. The long summer had not hurt the beginnings of our roof garden and now we are much excited over our bulbs. The flowers “lap”, you know, in this blessed country. There are seven fine chrysanthemums in bloom and two cyclamens; we have high hopes of jonquils and hyacinths. The most interesting fact I have to tell you after the flower news is that the new American Ambassadress, Mrs. Lloyd Griscom, née Elsa Bronson, is a diamond of the first water. She is a lovely young woman full of ardor and charm.
Rome, November 28, 1907. To-day to Thanksgiving dinner at the American School. We sat down forty-one at table. Lloyd Griscom, the new Ambassador, was there, just back from a flying trip to America. It took him seven and one half days to get from Washington to Rome. He calls it the record trip. So we aren’t so far apart, are we?
In the apartment below us lives Mme. Rubinstein, widow of the Russian composer—do you remember our hearing him play when he came to Boston? To-night she has a man with a stupendous baritone voice singing Russian folk songs. After a Cecilia concert lately I told her how well Sgambati had played something of her husband’s. She wept with pleasure and exclaimed,
“They have forgotten him too much; it is long, long since they have given any of his glorious compositions.”
At twilight we sometimes hear her softly playing her husband’s music; as she never practices and only rarely plays, her piano is a pleasure not a pest.
Rome, December 29, 1907. You will feel dear Minnie Pratt’s death very much. She was a fine soul, but she was one, I think, who would not have been very happy as an old person—we are not all “built that way.” I think of her as always young and sparkling. Bell and Pratt no longer. What will become of the twin who is left?
Marion Crawford had been very devoted lately—darling old fellow, for he seems very old. He comes up to Rome a good deal and always comes to see us. He wrote a nice Christmas letter and sent me a calendar, and for luck, a ball of red string with all sorts of warnings about it; you must not throw it away, you must keep every scrap not used or light a candle with it; he really is superstitious! He does not forgive A.; he told me the other day that he never forgot the way you “flew at her like a wildcat in his mother’s defence.” Curious what things stick; he adores you for that flash of the cold greys!
On Christmas Eve J. brought home vast branches of holly to put round your portrait by Villegas in the dining room. Just below we arranged and decorated a group of the family portraits on a table. This made our festa pleasant and ancestral. The custom of adorning the family effigies comes to us from the ancient Romans. In the early days before the Greek gods came into Italy, they had practically only ancestor worship, in a spirit quite like that of the Japanese to-day.
I read my Outlook faithfully. It does not give altogether an accurate view of things at home; what publication does? It is on the right side of enthusiastic optimism, however, and that is the best reading for American exiles.
Rome, January 6, 1908. The festas are not yet over. To-day is the feast of the Epiphany, Twelfth Night. I do hope and believe the last of the Christmas fêtes. It is a trying time; everybody you want to do any work for you is completely demoralized; the laborers will not labor, and the servants are forever gadding. It would be a good thing for Italy if these long holiday rites of junketing and idleness could be shortened. It isn’t that the people do anything disorderly or wrong, they just don’t do anything but amuse themselves. At home we keep adding new holidays—fatal policy! Last night being the eve of the Befana, we went over to the Piazza Navona to see the fun, and buy toys for the porter’s children. The piazza was lined with booths with toys and goodies for sale; the fun was fast and furious and I must confess quite innocent. Nobody gets drunk and there is no brawling, only bedlam of tin trumpets and other festive noises. Befana is to the children here what Christmas is at home. Christmas is little made of save as one of the great feasts of the Church. New Year is the day for the exchange of presents and felicitations among “grown ups”, and Befana for children. Befana is an old woman for whose coming the children hang up their stockings beside the kitchen fireplaces as we do for St. Nicholas.
March 4, 1908. Spring looked at us and then shook her head and took another nap. We are having the cold spell that always comes between the first and fifteenth of March.
Our friend, the Monsignor, comes to see us a great deal and is a real comfort. The other day I passed him in a cab. It had come on to rain furiously; as he had no umbrella and I was going past his door, I stopped and asked if I should give him a lift. He refused shortly and soon after came to see me and told me that it would have made a scandal if he had been seen driving about Rome in a cab with a lady.
The American pilgrims are teaching the Romans a thing or two. Among them are Bishop Ireland, his sister and a large group of “sisters”, traveling together. They take cabs every day and drive about with the Bishop, and nobody seems shocked!
Rome, Palm Sunday, 1908. Isn’t it wonderful that the winter is really over and that we are again going to have summer? It is a new mystery every year and how the things in nature go regularly on, and the acorns swell, the grain germinates, the coral insects toil and only this silly fool’s work does not grow and finish itself! Man’s a blur and a blot on the whole scheme, on account, I suppose, of his free will.
I hope to go down to Sorrento on Thursday for Eleanor Crawford’s wedding. I shall be better perhaps for a little sea air and change, as I have been pretty steadily at it since I returned to Rome nearly a year ago. I am by nature what the Arabs call “a son of the way”! If there are female tramps among them, I suppose it would be called a daughter of the way.
The first great Woman’s Congress will be held here soon at the new Palace of Justice. Etta de Viti and Cora Brazza (two American girls married to Italian noblemen) have worked so hard for it they are on the verge of breaking down. Last night we had an interesting man for dinner, Wilfranc Hubbard, the new correspondent of the London Times, who takes the place of Wickham Steed, who has been sent to Berlin. The position of the Times correspondent here is almost an official one, and ten times as important as most official appointments. Carl Federn came too, the man who, I am told, first gave Emerson to Germany through his translation. He is a little flame of a creature like zigzag lightning; he is a friend of Elizabeth Fairchild and the defender of Linda Murri, whom he believes was falsely accused of murdering her husband. Most interesting of all our guests was Cunninghame Graham. He is a writer and a lovely person of exquisite charm. Of an old Scotch family, he has inherited much from a Spanish grandfather. He is a liberal if not a socialist. He has comforted much, for I get so confused with the pressure on my mind of Rome’s conservatism. You see almost all artists are naturally conservatives. They say there has never been a great art without great art patrons. The argument that neither republicanism or socialism makes for art is hard to refute. “The greatest good of the greatest number may be a high ideal, for a state to strive for,” they say, “but it is leveling! Every man will be his own poet and painter.”
Rome, December 28, 1908. I reached home safely at six o’clock in the evening of Christmas Day. The great Christmas present was the fact that the picture (Diana of the Tides) was finished. Just as J. was signing his name to the big canvas the telegram announcing my arrival was slipped under his door. Rather a neat coincidence!
Towards the close of the year 1908 there occurred the most stupendous disaster that, until that time, had come within my ken; this was more than five years before that fatal day when Germany let fall the mask and the World War was declared. During the night of December twenty-eighth, Sicily and Calabria were visited by one of the greatest earthquakes in history, the cities of Reggio and Messina were destroyed and two hundred thousand people were killed, among others the American Consul and his wife. For the next six months my husband and I threw ourselves into relief work for the survivors. He played a really important part, being one of the volunteers who under the gallant leadership of Commander Reginald R. Belknap, the naval attaché of the American Embassy, sailed on the relief ship Bayern for the stricken region with a cargo of food, clothing, tools, and medicines. The expedition was organized by an American Committee headed by our Ambassador, Mr. Griscom.
The report of conditions brought back from the devastated country was so terrific that our government, acting in conjunction with the American Red Cross, followed it up with a relief expedition on a much larger scale. This undertook and accomplished nothing less than the building of a whole series of villages to shelter the survivors. They established headquarters at Messina, where a complete village was erected in record time, with a large church, a comfortable hotel, schools, offices and dwellings for twelve thousand people. The story of this unique undertaking has been well told by Commander (now Captain) Belknap in his interesting book, “American House Building at Messina.” In my “Sicily in Shadow and in Sun” I have given some description of the American village on the plain of the Mosella at Messina and of what our people contributed to the Villaggio Regina Elena, where a modern, up-to-date hospital was erected and named for the wife of our ambassador. In all this work my husband had the privilege of acting as architect, designer, and general helper to his intrepid and resourceful chief Belknap, who in his report to the Secretary of the Navy, in 1909, pays Mr. Elliott the following tribute:
“Thanks are due in a measure that I cannot express to Mr. John Elliott, who shared every hardship with unfailing good humor, and left his beautifying touch on every part of our work. He was the first volunteer, and the most devoted worker; rendering service that can be appreciated only by one who enjoyed his close companionship and discerning counsel throughout a long period of pressing occupation.”
Rome, January 12, 1909. Friday J. sailed bravely away from Civitavecchia for Messina with the American Relief Expedition. Last night I had a message from the Embassy saying he was well and doing splendid work on the Bayern, the ship fitted out by the American Committee to go to the smaller desolated Calabrian villages that have as yet had little or no help. The Bayern is a North German Lloyd steamer our committee chartered and loaded with food, clothes, tools, nails, household and field utensils, coffee, medicines and tobacco. One dear American sent ten thousand cigars and five hundred boxes of cigarettes. He said:
“The poor devils will need a little luxury!”
From J.’s letter he spends most of his time in the hold, sorting out stores, when he is not interpreting for commander Belknap, or ravaging the cargo for sterilized milk. I had begun to write something of the Roman end of the frightful earthquake when I was taken ill from overwork for the profughi. How terrible it is that in this shuddering horror which really has engulfed all of us and turned the idlest into tremendous workers, I should still want to make notes for future use as “copy”? I do, though. It is like doctors and undertakers. They are not glad to have people suffering or dead, but as people must suffer and die, they must pull something out of it to their advantage.
Rome, January 25, 1909. J. came home last Sunday, none the worse, indeed much the better, for his errand of mercy in spite of the fact that he had been in a motor accident and his face was done up with sticking plaster. Commander Belknap, the leader of the expedition, called to tell me what good service he had done. My committee work keeps me very busy. Rome is crowded with the refugees and we are all at work trying to feed, clothe, and work for these poor bereft people. Of course this dreadful calamity, one of the most tragic events in history, has thrown everything out of kilter in the life of the city and the individual. The exhibition of “Diana of the Tides” had to be postponed—nobody has wanted to see pictures or do anything but his share in helping the sufferers. Queen Margherita has sent word that she will come in the early days of February to open the show.
One of my families of Messinesi, who have lost seventeen near relations, have asked me to try and find some black clothes for them. Poor lambs, we have all been so busy trying to keep them fed and alive that we have overlooked too much their natural feelings of grief and their desire to show respect to those they have lost by wearing mourning. I am buying up enormous quantities of handkerchiefs for my people—they all weep so terribly. It is a detail the larger committees leave out perforce.
Rome, February 23, 1909. To-day “Diana of the Tides” will be taken off the stretcher and packed. Till the last both Romans and tourists have swarmed to the studio. To-day came dear Mme. Helbig and the Professor. He called me his Aspasia and remembered my having posed for his tableau all those years ago. Mme. Barrère, the French Ambassadress, came to-day for the second time, bringing her daughter, who was a great friend of Mme. Blanc and knew all about you. It was one of the pleasant things to have the tables turned and to have the Romans who did not happen to have met or heard of you, admire your portrait as the mother-in-law and sometimes as the mother of the painter. You must not mind; the Romans had never heard of Paderewski when he came here quite lately to play. During his first concert they treated him rather cavalierly; that put him on his mettle, and before the end of the programme he had won out, but his audience with few exceptions had never heard about him, and were quite unaware that he was held to be the first living pianist!
Now comes the break-up of our second Roman home and our return to you. We shall have “wot larks” together. I shall not leave you again as long as you and I live, except at your request.
Boston, January 2, 1910. Went to our old friend Bowdoin’s (formerly my father’s steward) funeral and sent a wreath with this legend:
“From the children of Dr. Samuel G. Howe, in loving memory of their friend, Anthony Bowdoin.” The service was all as one would have wished, very properly done. I felt it deeply! The last of the old faithful hunting hounds of our great Huntsman gone! I think so much of that quality of leadership he had; when he wound his horn how these good hounds leaped to the chase,—Anagnos, Paddock, Bradford, Bowdoin, how many others, hardly a puling one in the pack.
Mr. Clement sent me a heavenly article about Papa. Not a review, but inspired by Laura’s book.5 He has views, good ones, that we should interest ourselves in the memorial to S. G. H. If the movement is still-born as I fear, and there is nothing doing, I should like well to tell you Clement’s views. Where do we most belong,—in to-day, yesterday or to-morrow? That is the problem that confronts us all! We owe much to those who are gone, more to those who are living and most, perhaps, to those who will come after!