I—You ate magro to-day? (It was a fast day.)

She—Good gracious! Magro every day just now!

I—Do you know, Filomena, that I eat grasso?

She—Yes, and it is your duty to do so.

I—Why?

She—Because you are ill, and you must eat meat; the Pope himself ate meat when he was ill. Religion does not mean that we are to injure our health.

I—How do you know, Filomena, what Religion means?

She—From my Confessor. I had a little headache the other day, and he ordered me at once to eat meat.

I—The worst of it is that I have no Confessor and do not go to church. Shall I be damned for that?

She—Oh! no, sir, that does not follow! Do you think I am so stupid as not to see that you others are far better Christians than we? You are good; the friends who come to see you are good. The Romans, on the other hand, who go to church one day, kill people the next, and will not let go about the streets in peace.

I am quite sorry that she is to go home at Easter; I shall miss her face about the house. But I have missed more.

Late evening. They have come back from the Carnival. Filomena came in and presented me with an object the use of which is an enigma to me. A roll of silver paper. Now I see what it is, a Carnival cap. My Danish friend R. declares she has got it into her head that when I am better I shall marry her, or rather that Maria has put it into her head. I thought I would see how matters stood. I began talking to Maria about marriages with foreigners. Maria mentioned how many girls from Rome and Capri had married foreigners, but added afterwards, not without significance, addressing me: "It is not, as you believe, and as you said once before, that a girl born in a warm country would complain of being taken to a cold one. If she did, she would be stupid. But a Roman girl will not do for a foreign gentleman. The Roman girls learn too little."

Much, the lower classes certainly do not learn. Before I came, Filomena did not know what ink was. Now I have discovered that she does not know what a watch is. She reckons time by the dinner and the Ave Maria. Not long ago her uncle spent a week in trying to teach this great child to make and read figures, but without success. Not long ago she had to write to her mother in the mountains, so went to a public writer, and had it done for her. She came in to me very innocently afterwards to know whether the right name and address were upon it. I told her that she could very well have let me write the letter. Since then, all the people in the house come to me when there is anything they want written, and ask me to do it for them.

The news of my skill has spread. Apropos of letters, I have just read the four letters that I received to-day. Filomena is perpetually complaining of my sweetheart's uncontrollable passion as revealed in this writing madness. She imagines that all the letters I receive from Denmark are from one person, and that person, of course, a woman. She herself hardly receives one letter a year.

I have (after careful consideration) committed a great imprudence, and escaped without hurt. I had myself carried down the stairs, drove to the Corso, saw the Carnival, and am back home again. I had thought first of driving up and down the Corso in a carriage, but did not care to be wholly smothered with confetti, especially as I had not the strength to pelt back. Nor could I afford to have the horses and carriage decorated. So I had a good seat in a first-floor balcony engaged for me, first row. At 3 o'clock I got up, dressed, and was carried down. I was much struck by the mild Summer air out of doors (about the same as our late May), and I enjoyed meeting the masked people in the streets we passed through. The few but rather steep stairs up to the balcony were a difficulty. But at last I was seated, and in spite of sickness and weakness, enjoyed the Carnival in Rome on its most brilliant day. I was sitting nearly opposite to the high box of Princess Margharita, from which there was not nearly so good a view as from my seat. This was what I saw: All the balconies bedecked with flags; red, white and green predominating. In the long, straight street, the crowd moving in a tight mass. In between them, an up and a down stream of carriages, drawn at a walking pace by two horses, and forced at every moment to stop. The streets re-echoed with the jingle of the horses' bells, and with shouts of glee at a magnificently decorated carriage, then at some unusually beautiful women, then at a brisk confetti fight between two carriages, or a carriage and a balcony. And this air, re-echoing with the ring of bells, with shouting, and with laughter, was no empty space. Anyone reaching the Corso, as I had done, after the play had only been going on for an hour and a half, found themselves in the midst of a positive bombardment of tiny little aniseed balls, or of larger plaster balls, thrown by hand, from little tin cornets, or half-bushel measures, and against which it is necessary to protect one's self by a steel wire mask before the face. For whilst some gentle young ladies almost pour the confetti down from their carriages, so that it falls like a soft shower of rain, many of the Romans fling it with such force that without a mask the eyes might suffer considerably. The brim of one's hat, and every fold in one's clothes, however, are full of little balls. Most people go about with a huge, full bag by their side, others on the balconies have immense baskets standing, which are hardly empty before they are re- filled by eager sellers. All the ladies standing in the windows, who were disguised as Turkish ladies, or workwomen from the port, had a deep wooden trough, quite full, brought outside their windows, and into this supply dipped continually—in the street, which had been covered with soil for the sake of the horse-racing, was a crowd of people in fancy dress, many of them having great fun, and being very amusing. One old woman in a chemise was amongst the best. A young fellow, dressed entirely in scarlet, more particularly amused himself by putting the officers of the National Guard, who were walking about to keep order, out of countenance. When they were looking especially stern, he would go up to them and tickle them on the cheeks, and talk baby talk to them, and they had to put the best face they could on it. The street life and the pedestrians, however, did not attract much attention. All the interest was centred on the carriages, and the games between them and the windows and balconies. The people in carriages were all in fancy dress. Amongst them one noticed charming groups of Roman ladies in light cloaks of red silk with a red steel wire mask before their faces, through which one could catch a glimpse of their features; there was a swarm of delightful figures, certainly half of them in men's clothes, armed young sailors, for instance. Fine, happy faces! And the young men, how handsome! Not flashing eyes, as people affectedly say, but happy eyes; a good, healthy physique, an expression which seemed to say that they had breathed in sunshine and happiness and all the beatitude of laziness, all the mild and good-humoured comfort of leisure, all their lives long. One party had a colossal cart with outriders and postilions, and hung in the yards and stood on the thwarts of a large cutter poised upon it, in becoming naval officers' dress, flinging magnificent bouquets to all the beautiful ladies who drove past. The bouquets would have cost several lire each, and they flung them by the hundred, so they must have been young fellows of means. The throwing of confetti is merely bellicose and ordinary. Infinitely more interesting is the coquettish, ingratiating, genuinely Italian flinging backwards and forwards of bouquets. The grace and charm of the manner in which they are flung and caught, nothing can surpass; there may be real passion in the way in which six or seven bouquets in succession are flung at one and the same lady, who never omits to repay in similar coin. One carriage was especially beautiful; it had a huge square erection upon it, entirely covered with artificial roses and greenery, which reached almost to the second storey of the houses, and upon it, in two rows, facing both sides of the streets, stood the loveliest Roman girls imaginable, flinging bouquets unceasingly. Most of the carriages have tall poles sticking up with a crossway bar at the top, and there are bouquets on every bar, so there is a constant supply to draw from. Beautiful Princess Margharita was, of course, the object of much homage, although her balcony was on the second floor. One form this took was very graceful. A few young gentlemen in blue and white drove slowly past; one of them had a large flat basket filled with lovely white roses; he stuck a long halberd through the handle and hoisted the basket up to the Princess, being richly rewarded with bouquets. One wag hit upon an idea that was a brilliant success. At five o'clock he sent a bladder, in the shape of a huge turkey, up in the flickering sunlight. It was so fixed up as to move its head about, with an expression of exceedingly ridiculous sentimentality, now to the right, now caressingly to the left, as it ascended. The whole Corso rang again with laughter and clapping. The horse-racing at the end was not of much account. The horses start excited by the rocket let off at their tails, and by all the sharp pellets hanging around about them, to say nothing of the howling of the crowd. At six o'clock I was at home and in bed.

K.B. has been here to see me; Filomena hates and despises him from the bottom of her heart since the day that he got drunk on my wine. When he was gone she said: "Brutta bestia, I forgot to look whether he was clean to-day." She and Maria declare that he is the only one of all my acquaintances who does not wear clean linen. This point of cleanliness is a mild obsession of Filomena's just now. She prides herself greatly on her cleanliness, and asks me every day whether she is clean or not. She is a new convert to cleanliness, and renegades or newly initiated people are in all religions the most violent. When I came to the house, her face was black and she washed her hands about once a day. R—- then remarked about her—which was a slight exaggeration—that if one were to set her up against the wall, she would stick fast. She noticed with unfeigned astonishment how many times I washed myself, and asked for fresh water, how often I had clean shirts, etc. This made a profound impression on her young mind, and after I came back from the hospital she began in earnest to rub her face with a sponge and to wash herself five or six times a day, likewise to wash the handkerchiefs she wears round her neck. Maria looks on at all this with surprise. She says, like the old woman in Tonietta, by Henrik Hertz: "A great, strong girl like that does not need to wash and splash herself all over like an Englishwoman." The lectures she has given me every time I have wanted to wash myself, on the harm water does an invalid, are many and precious. Whenever I ask for water I might be wanting to commit suicide; it is only after repeated requests that she brings it, and then with a quiet, resigned expression, as if to say: "I have done my best to prevent this imprudence: I wash my hands of all responsibility." Filomena, in her new phase of development, is quite different. She looks at my shirt with the eyes of a connoisseur, and says: "It will do for to-morrow; a clean one the day after to-morrow!" or, "Did you see what beautiful cuffs the tall, dark man (M. the painter) had on yesterday?" or, "Excuse my skirt being so marked now, I am going to have a clean one later in the day," or, "Is my cheek dirty? I don't think so, for I have washed myself twice to-day; you must remember that I am very dark- complexioned, almost like a Moor." Or else there will be a triumphal entry into my room, with a full water-can in her hand, one of the very large ones that are used here. "What is that, Filomena? What am I to do with that?" "Look, sir, it is full." "Well, what of that?" "It is the waiter's water-can; it has been standing there full for ten days (scornfully): he is afraid of water; he only uses it for his coffee." She has forgotten how few months it is since she herself was afraid of water.

She came in while I was eating my supper, and remarked: "You always read at your meals; how can you eat and read at the same time? I do not know what reading is like, but I thought it was more difficult than that. It is a great misfortune for me that I can neither read nor write. Supposing I were to be ill like you, how should I pass away the time! There was no school at Camarino, where I was born, and I lived in the country till I was eighteen, and learnt nothing at all. We were nine brothers and sisters; there was seldom any food in the house; sometimes we worked; sometimes we lay on the ground. It is unfortunate that I cannot read, for I am not at all beautiful; if I could only do something, I should be able to get a husband."

"Don't you know any of the letters, Filomena?"

"No, sir." "Don't trouble about that. You are happier than I, who know a great deal more than you. You laugh and sing all day long; I neither laugh nor sing." "Dear sir, you will laugh, and sing as well, when you get home. Then your little girl (ragazza) who is so appassionato that she writes four letters a day, will make fete for you, and I think that when you go to the osteria with your friends you laugh. It is enough now for you to be patient." As she had spoken about getting a husband, I asked: "Are your sisters married?" "They are all older than I, and married." (Saving her pride in the first part of her reply.) After a few minutes' reflection she went on: "I, for my part, will not have a husband under thirty; the young ones all beat their wives." Shortly afterwards, I put an end to the audience. We had had a few short discussions, and I had been vanquished, apparently by her logic, but chiefly by reason of her better mastery of the language, and because I defended all sorts of things in joke. At last I said: "Have you noticed, Filomena, that when we argue it is always you who silence me? So you can see, in spite of all my reading, that you have better brains than I." This compliment pleased her; she blushed and smiled, without being able to find a reply.

She realises the Northern ideal of the young woman not spoilt by novel- reading. Nor does she lack intelligence, although she literally does not know what North and South mean; she is modest, refined in her way, and happy over very little. For the moment she is engaged in making the little dog bark like mad by aggravatingly imitating the mewing of a cat.

Later. The boy from the cafe brings me my supper. What has become of Filomena? I wonder if she is out? I cannot hear her having her evening fight with the boy in the passage. She likes to hit him once a day for exercise.

Maria comes in. "Do you hear the cannon, sir? What do you think it is?" I reply calmly: "It is war; the Zouaves (papal troops) are coming." Maria goes out and declares the reply of the oracle in the next room. Some cannon salutes really were being fired. Maria hurries down into the street to hear about it and Filomena comes in to me. "I am afraid," she says. "Do you mean it?" She was laughing and trembling at the same time. I saw that the fear was quite real. "Is it possible that you can be so afraid? There is not really any war or any Zouaves, it was only a joke." That pacified her. "I was afraid, if you like," said she, "when the Italians (the Romans never call themselves Italians) marched into Rome. One shell came after another; one burst on the roof of the house opposite." "Who are you for, the Pope or Vittorio?" "For neither. I am a stupid girl; I am for the one that will feed and clothe me. But I have often laughed at the Zouaves. One of them was standing here one day, taking pinch after pinch of snuff, and he said to me: 'The Italians will never enter Rome.' I replied: 'Not if they take snuff, but they will if they storm the town.'" "Do you think that the Pope will win?" "No, I think his cause is lost. Perhaps there will even come a time when no one goes to churches here." She: "Who goes to church! The girls to meet their lovers; the young men to see a pretty shop-girl. We laugh at the priests." "Why?" "Because they are ridiculous: if it thunders, they say at once that it is a sign from God. The sky happens to be flaming red, like it was last October. That was because the Italians entered Rome in September. Everything is a sign from God, a sign of his anger, his exasperation. He is not angry, that is clear enough. If he had not wanted the Italians to come in, they would not have come, but would all have died at once." She said this last with great earnestness and pathos, with an upward movement of her hand, and bowed her head, like one who fears an unknown power. Maria returned, saying people thought the shots meant that Garibaldi had come. Said I: "There, he is a brave man. Try to be like him, Filomena. It is not right for a big strong girl to tremble." She: "I am not strong, but still, I am stronger than you, who have been weakened so much by your illness,—and yet, who knows, you have been much better the last few days. Shall we try?" I placed my right hand in hers, first tested her strength a little, and then found to my surprise that her arm was not much stronger than that of an ordinary lady; then I bent my fingers a little, and laid her very neatly on the floor. I was sitting in bed; she was on her knees in front of the bed, but I let her spring up. It was a pretty sight; the blue- black hair, the laughing mouth with the fine, white teeth, the brown, smiling eyes. As she got up, she said: "You are well now; I am not sorry to have been conquered."

* * * * *

Have taken my second flight. I have been at the Moccoli fete, had myself carried and driven there and back, like last time. Saredo had taken a room on the Corso; I saw everything from there, and now I have the delightful impressions of it all left. What exuberant happiness! What jubilation! What childlike gaiety! It is like going into a nursery and watching the children play, hearing them shout and enjoy themselves like mad, as one can shout and enjoy things one's self no longer.

I arrived late and only saw the end of the processions; far more carriages, wilder shouting, more madness,—bacchantic, stormy,—than last time. The whole length of the Corso was one shriek of laughter. And how many lovely faces at the windows, on the balconies and verandas! Large closed carriages with hidden music inside and graceful ladies on the top. As i preti (the Catholic papers) had said that all who took part in the Carnival were paid by the government, a number of men and women, in the handsomest carriages—according to the Nuova Roma for to-day, more than 20,000—had the word pagato (paid) fastened to their caps, which evoked much amusement. Then the lancers cleared the street at full galop for the horse races (barberi), and at once an immense procession of Polichinelli and ridiculous equestrians in Don Quixote armour organised itself and rode down the Corso at a trot in parody. Then came the mad, snorting horses. Then a few minutes,—and night fell over the seven heights of Rome, and the Corso itself lay in darkness. Then the first points of light began to make their appearance. Here below, one little shimmer of light, and up there another, and two there, and six here, and ten down there to the left, and hundreds on the right, and then thousands, and many, many thousands. From one end of the great long street to the other, from the first floor to the roof of every house and every palace, there is one steady twinkling of tiny flames, of torches, of large and small lights; the effect is surprising and peculiar. As soon as the first light appeared, young men and girls ran and tried to blow each other's candles out. Even the children took part in the game; I could see into several houses, where it was going on briskly. Then, from every side-street decorated carriages began to drive on to the Corso again, but this time every person held a candle in his hand. Yes, and that was not all! at least every other of the large waggons—they were like immense boxes of flowers—had, on poles, or made fast, Bengal fire of various colours, which lighted up every house they went past, now with a red, now with a green flare. And then the thousands of small candles, from every one in the throng, from carriages, balconies, verandas, sparkled in the great flame, fighting victoriously with the last glimmer of daylight. People ran like mad down the Corso and fanned out the lights in the carriages. But many a Roman beauty found a better way of lighting up her features without exposing herself to the risk of having her light put out. Opposite me, for instance, on the second floor, a lovely girl was standing in a window. In the shutter by her side she had fixed one of those violent red flares so that she stood in a bright light, like sunlight seen through red glass, and it was impossible not to notice her. Meanwhile, the people on the balconies held long poles in their hands, with which they unexpectedly put out the small candles in the carriages. You heard incessantly, through the confusion, the shouts of individuals one to another, and their jubilation when a long-attempted and cleverly foiled extinguishing was at length successful, and the clapping and shouts of bravo! at an unusually brightly lighted and decorated carriage. The pickpockets meanwhile did splendid business; many of the Danes lost their money.

At eight o'clock I was in bed again, and shortly afterwards the people of the house came home for a moment. Filomena looked splendid, and was very talkative. "Lei e ingrassato," she called in through the door. It is her great pleasure that the hollows in my cheeks are gradually disappearing. She was now ascribing a special efficacy in this direction to Moccoli Eve.

* * * * *

At half-past ten in the morning, there is a curious spectacle in the street here. At that time Domenico comes and the lottery begins. Lotteries are forbidden in Rome, but Domenico earns his ten lire a day by them. He goes about this and the neighbouring streets bawling and shouting until he has disposed of his ninety tickets.

Girls and women lean out through the windows and call out the numbers they wish to have—in this respect they are boundlessly credulous. They do not believe in the Pope; but they believe that there are numbers which they must become possessed of that day, even at the highest price, which is two soldi. The soldi are thrown out through the window, and each one remembers her own number. Then Domenico goes through all the numbers in a loud voice, that there may be no cheating. A child draws a number out of the bag, and Domenico shouts: "Listen, all Purificazione, No. 34 has won, listen, Purificazione, 34 ... 34." The disappointed faces disappear into the houses. All those who have had 33, 35 and 36 rail against unjust Fate, in strong terms.

At the first rattle of the lottery bag, Filomena rushes in here, opens the window, and calls for a certain number. If anyone else wants it, she must manage to find two soldi in her pocket. If I fling a few soldi from my bed towards the window, this facilitates the search. However, we never win. Filomena declares that I have indescribable ill-luck in gambling, and suggests a reason.

* * * * *

She was again singing outside. I called her, wanting to know what it was she kept singing all the time. "They are songs from the mountains," she replied, "all canzone d'amore." "Say them slowly, Filomena. I will write them down." I began, but was so delighted at the way she repeated the verses, her excellent declamatory and rhythmic sense, that I was almost unable to write. And to my surprise, I discovered that they were all what we call ritornellos. But written down, they are dull larvae, compared with what they are with the proper pronunciation and expression. What is it Byron says?:

I love the language, that soft bastard Latin, Which melts like kisses from a female mouth, And sounds as if it should be writ on satin.

I shall really feel a void when Filomena goes away. The unfortunate part of it is that her dialect pronunciation is so difficult to make out, and that she swallows so many syllables in order to make the metre right, as there are generally too many feet, and it is only the delicacy of her declamation that makes up for the incorrectness of the rhymes and the verses. For instance, she constantly says lo instead of il (lo soldato), and she can never tell me how many words there are in a line, since neither she nor Maria knows what a single word, as opposed to several, is, and because it is no use spelling the word to her and asking: "Is that right?" since she cannot spell, and does not recognise the letters. Saredo tells me that a driver who once drove him and his wife about for five days in Tuscany sang all day long like Filomena, and improvised all the time. This is what she, too, does continually; she inserts different words which have about the same meaning, and says: "It is all the same" (c'e la stessa cosa). On the other hand, she always keeps to the metre, and that with the most graceful intonation; never a faulty verse:

Fior di giacinto! La donna che per l'uomo piange tanto— Il pianto delle donne e pianto finto.

Amore mio! Non prendite le fiori di nessuno, Se vuoi un garofletto, lo do io.

Fior di limone! Limone e agra, e le fronde son' amare, Ma son' piu' amare le pene d'amor'.

Lo mi' amore che si chiama Peppe, Lo primo giuocatore delle carte Prende 'sto cuore e giuoca a tre-sette.

[Footnote:

Flower of the hyacinth! The woman who weeps so much for the man's sake— Yet, the complaint of women is a feigned one.

My love! Do not accept flowers from anyone. If thou wilt have a wall-flower, I will give it thee.

Flower of the lemon! The lemon is sharp, and its leaves are bitter; But more bitter are the torments of love.

My beloved, whose name is Peppe, He is the first to play cards, He has taken this heart and is playing a game of Three to Seven with it.]

In this way I wrote out some scores.

* * * * *

Spent an hour teaching Filomena her large letters up to N, and making her say them by rote, and with that end in view have divided them into three portions—ABCD—EFG—ILMN. She manages all right, except that she always jumps E and L. Lesson closed: "Were you at church to-day, Filomena?" "No, I have nothing to confess." "Did you go to church last Sunday?" "No, I have not been for six weeks now. I have committed no sin. What wrong do I do? I have no love affair, nothing." "What used you to confess?" "A few bad words, which had slipped out. Now I do nothing wrong." "But one can go wrong, without committing any sin, when one is high-minded, for instance." "I am not high-minded. If you, on the other hand, were to imagine yourself better than the friends who come to visit you, that would be quite natural; for you are better."

* * * * *

The day has been long. This evening the girl had errands to do for me. She came in here after her Sunday walk in the Campagna. I said: "Shall we read?" (Just then a band of young people passed along the street with a harmonica and a lot of castanets, and commenced a song in honour of Garibaldi. With all its simplicity, it sounded unspeakably affecting; I was quite softened.) She replied: "With pleasure." I thought to myself: "Now to see whether she remembers a word of what I said to her yesterday." But she went on at once: "Signore, I have been industrious." She had bought herself an ABC and had taught herself alone not only all the large letters, but also all the little ones, and had learnt them all off by heart as well. I was so astonished that I almost fell back in the bed. "But what is this, Filomena? Have you learnt to read from someone else?" "No, only from you yesterday. But for five years my only wish has been to learn to read, and I am so glad to be able to." I wanted to teach her to spell. "I almost think I can a little." And she was already so far that—without spelling first—she read a whole page of two-letter spellings, almost without a mistake. She certainly very often said: "Da —ad," or read fo for of, but her progress was amazing. When she spells, she takes the words as a living reality, not merely as words, and adds something to them, for instance, s—a, sa; l—i, li; r—e, re; salire alle scale, (jump down the stairs.) "Filomena, I could teach you to read in three weeks." She: "I have always thought it the greatest shame for a man or woman not to be able to read." I told her something about the progress of the human race, that the first men and women had been like animals, not at all like Adam and Eve. "Do you think I believe that Eve ate an apple and that the serpent could speak? Non credo mente. Such things are like mal'occhi (belief in the evil eye)." And without any transition, she begins, sempre allegra, as she calls herself—to sing a gay song. Just now she is exceedingly delighted with a certain large red shawl. There came a pedlar to the door; she sighed deeply at the sight of the brilliant red; so I gave it her.

She is a great lover and a connoisseur of wine, like myself. We taste and drink together every dinner-time. As she always waits upon me, I often give her a little cake and wine while I am eating. Now we have begun a new wine, white Roman muscat. But I change my wine almost every other day. Filomena had taken the one large bottle and stacked up newspapers round it on the table, so that if K.B. came he should not see it. It so happened that he came to-day, whilst I was dining and she eating with me. There was a ring; she wanted to go. "Stay; perhaps it is not for me at all; and in any case, I do not ask anyone's permission for you to be here." He came in, and said in Danish, as he put his hat down: "Oh, so you let the girl of the house dine with you; I should not care for that." Filomena, who noticed his glance in her direction, and his gesture, said, with as spiteful a look, and in as cutting a voice as she could muster: "Il signore prende il suo pranzo con chi lui pare e piace." (The gentleman eats with whomsoever he pleases.) "Does she understand Danish?" he asked, in astonishment. "It looks like it," I replied. When he had gone, her furia broke loose. I saw her exasperated for the first time, and it sat very comically upon her. "Did you ask him whom he eats with? Did he say I was ugly? Did you ask him whether his ragazza was prettier?" (She meant a Danish lady, a married woman, with whom she had frequently met K.B. in the street.)

She said to me yesterday: "There is one thing I can do, sir, that you cannot. I can carry 200 pounds' weight on my head. I can carry two conchas, or, if you like to try me, all that wood lying there." She has the proud bearing of the Romans.

Read with Filomena for an hour and a half. She can now spell words with three letters fairly well. This language has such a sweet ring that her spelling is like music. And to see the innocent reverence with which she says g-r-a, gra,—it is what a poet might envy me. And then the earnest, enquiring glance she gives me at the end of every line. It is marvellous to see this complete absorption of a grown-up person in the study of a-b, ab, and yet at the same time there is something almost great in this ravenous thirst for knowledge, combined with incredulity of all tradition. It is a model such as this that the poets should have had for their naive characters. In Goethe's Roman Elegies, the Roman woman's figure is very inconspicuous; she is not drawn as a genuine woman of the people, she is not naive. He knew a Faustina, but one feels that he afterwards slipped a German model into her place. Filomena has the uncompromising honesty and straightforwardness of an unspoilt soul. Her glance is not exactly pure, but free—how shall I describe it? Full, grand, simple. With a concha on her head, she would look like a caryatid. If I compare her mentally with a feminine character of another poet, Lamartine's Graziella, an Italian girl of the lower classes, like herself, I cannot but think Graziella thin and poetised, down to her name. The narrator, if I remember rightly, teaches her to read, too; but Graziella herself does not desire it; it is he who educates her. Filomena, on the contrary, with her anxiety to learn, is an example and a symbol of a great historic movement, the poor, oppressed Roman people's craving for light and knowledge. Of Italy's population of twenty-six millions, according to the latest, most recent statistics, seventeen millions can neither read nor write. She said to me to-day: "What do you really think, sir, do you not believe that the Holy Ghost is una virtu and cannot be father of the child?" "You are right, Filomena." "That is why I never pray." "Some day, when you are very unhappy, perhaps you will pray." "I have been very unhappy; when I was a child I used to suffer horribly from hunger. I had to get up at five o'clock in the morning to work and got eight soldi for standing all day long in a vineyard in the sun and digging with a spade, and as corn was dear and meat dear, we seven children seldom had a proper meal. Last year, too, I was hungry often, for it was as the proverb says: 'If I eat, I cannot dress myself, and if I dress myself I cannot eat.' (What a sad and illuminating proverb!) Sir, if there were any Paradise, you would go there, for what you do for me. If I can only read and write, I can earn twice as much as I otherwise could. Then I can be a cameriera, and bring my mistress a written account of expenditure every week."

Filomena knows that Saredo is a professor at the University. But she does not know what a professor or a University is. She puts her question like this: "Probably my idea of what a university is, may not be quite correct?"

No one comes now. An invalid is very interesting at first, and arouses sympathy. If he continue ill too long, people unconsciously think it impossible for him to get well, and stay away. So the only resource left me all day is to chat with Filomena, to whom Maria has entrusted the nursing of me. Every evening I read with her; yesterday she had her fourth lesson, and could almost read straight off. Her complexion and the lower part of her face are like a child's; her undeveloped mental state reveals itself, thus far, in her appearance. I told her yesterday, as an experiment, that there were five continents and in each of them many countries, but she cannot understand yet what I mean, as she has no conception of what the earth looks like. She does not even know in what direction from Rome her native village, Camerino, lies. I will try to get hold of a map, or a globe. Yesterday, we read the word inferno. She said: "There is no hell; things are bad enough on earth; if we are to burn afterwards, there would be two hells." "Good gracious! Filomena, is life so bad? Why, you sing all day long." "I sing because I am well; that is perfectly natural, but how can I be content?" "What do you wish for then?" "So much money (denari) that I should be sure of never being hungry again. You do not know how it hurts. Then there is one other thing I should like, but it is impossible. I should like not to die; I am so horribly afraid of death. I should certainly wish there were a Paradise. But who can tell! Still, my grandmother lived to be a hundred all but three years, and she was never ill for a day; when she was only three years from being a hundred she still went to the fields like the rest of us and worked, and was like a young woman (giovanotta). Mother is forty-two, but although she is two years older than my aunt, she looks quite young. Chi lo sa! Perhaps I may live to be a hundred too, never be ill— I never have been yet, one single day,—and then go in and lie down on the bed like she did and be dead at once."

"She really is sweet!" said R. this evening. The word does not fit. Her laugh, her little grimaces, her witticisms, quaint conceits and gestures are certainly very attractive, but her mode of expression, when she is talking freely, is very unreserved, and if I were to repeat some of her remarks to a stranger, he would perhaps think her coarse or loose. "We shall see what sort of a girl you bring home to us when you are well again, and whether you have as good taste as our Frenchman. Or perhaps you would rather visit her? I know how a fine gentleman behaves, when he visits his friend. She is often a lady, and rich. He comes, knocks softly at the door, sits down, and talks about difficult and learned things. Then he begs for a kiss, she flings her arms round his neck; allora, il letto rifatto, va via." She neither blushes nor feels the slightest embarrassment when she talks like this. "How do you know such things, when you have no experience?" "People have told me; I know it from hearsay. I myself have never been in love, but I believe that it is possible to love one person one's whole life long, and never grow tired of him, and never love another. You said the other day (for a joke?) that people ought to marry for a year or six months; but I believe that one can love the same person always."

In such chat my days pass by. I feel as though I had dropped down somewhere in the Sabine Mountains, been well received in a house—Maria is from Camarino, too,—and were living there hidden from the world among these big children.

Yesterday, Uncle had his National Guard uniform on for the first time. He came in to show himself. I told him that it suited him very well, which delighted him. Filomena exhibited him with admiration. When Maria came home later on, she asked the others at once: "Has the signore seen him? What did he say? Does not he want to see him again?"

Written down a score of ritornellos; I have chosen the best of them. Many of them are rather, or very, indecent. But, as Filomena says: "You do not go to Hell for singing canzone; you cannot help what they are like." The indecent ones she will only say at a terrific rate, and not a second time. But if one pay attention, they are easy to understand. They are a mixture of audacity and simple vulgarity. They all begin with flowers. She is too undeveloped to share the educated girl's abhorrence of things that are in bad taste; everything natural, she thinks, can be said, and she speaks out, quite unperturbed. Still, now she understands that there are certain things—impossible things— that I do not like to hear her say.

I was sitting cutting a wafer (to take powders with) into oblates. She: "You must not cut into consecrated things, not even put the teeth into it. The priest says: 'Thou shalt not bite Christ.'" Unfortunately, she has not any real impression of religion, either of its beauty or its underlying truth. None of them have any idea of what the New Testament is or contains; they do not know its best-known quotations and stories. Religion, to them, is four or five rigmaroles, which are printed in our Abecedario, the Creed, the Ave Maria, the various Sacraments, etc., which they know by heart. These they reject, but they have not the slightest conception of what Christianity is. If I quote a text from the New Testament, they have never heard it.

But they can run the seven cardinal virtues, and the seven other virtues, off by rote. One of these last, that of instructing the ignorant, is a virtue which the priesthood (partly for good reasons) have not practised to any remarkable extent in this country.

Yesterday Maria came home in a state of great delight, from a trattoria, where a gentleman had spoken tanto bene, tanto bene against religion and the Pope and the priests; there were a few Caccialepri present (a derogatory expression for adherents of the priests), who had just had to come down a peg or two. When she had finished, to my astonishment, she said to me, exactly this: "It is Nature that is God, is it not so?"

An expression almost symbolical of the ignorance and credulity of the Romans is their constant axiom, Chi lo sa? (Who knows?) I said to Maria the other day, after she had said it for the fourth time in a quarter of an hour: "My good Maria! The beginning of wisdom is not to fear God, but to say Perche? (why?), instead of Chi lo sa?"

Yesterday, while I was eating my dinner, I heard Filomena's story. She came to Rome last December: "You think I came because Maria wanted to help mother. I came to Rome because there was a man who wanted to marry me." "What was his name?" "His name was Peppe." "Lo mi' amore, che si chiama Peppe."... "Ah, I do not love him at all. No, the thing is that at Camerino all the men beat their wives. My sister, for instance, has always a black eye, and red stripes on her back. My friend Marietta always gets beaten by her husband, and the more he beats her, the more she loves him: sometimes she goes away from him for a few days to her sister, but she always goes back again." "What has that to do with our friend Peppe?" "Well, you see, mother knew that Peppe's brother beat his wife all day and all night; so she would not give me to him." "Yes, it was bad, if it were a family failing." "So one evening father said to me: 'Your aunt has written to us from Rome, to ask whether you will pay her a visit of a few days.' And he showed me a false letter. Aunt cannot write and knew nothing about any letter. I did not want to, much, said I would not, but came here all the same, and found that I was to stay here, and that mother did not want me to have Peppe. So I began to cry, and for five whole days I cried all the time and would neither eat nor drink. Then I thought to myself: It is all over between Peppe and me. Shall I cry myself to death for a man? So I left off crying, and very soon forgot all about him. And after a week's time I did not care anything about the whole matter, and sang and was happy, and now I want to stay in Rome always."

Last night I got up for a little, read with Filomena, and determined to go in and have supper with the family in their little room. Filomena opened the door wide, and called out along the corridor: "Eccolo!" and then such a welcome as there was for the invalid, now that he had at last got up! and I was obliged to drink two large beer-glasses of the home-grown wine. First Maria told how it was that I had always had everything so punctually whilst I was ill. It was because Filomena had made the little boy from the cafe believe that I was going to give him my watch when I got well, if he never let anything get cold. So the boy ran as though possessed, and once fell down the stairs and broke everything to atoms. "He is delirious," said Filomena one day, "and talks of nothing but of giving you his watch." "How can he be so ill," said the boy suspiciously, "when he eats and drinks?" "Do you want the watch or not?" said Filomena, and off the lad ran. I let the others entertain me. Maria said: "You told Filomena something yesterday about savages; I know something about them, too. Savage people live in China, and the worst of all are called Mandarins. Do you know what one of them did to an Italian lady? She was with her family over there; suddenly there came a Mandarin, carried her off, and shut her up in his house. They never found her again. Then he had three children by her; but one day he went out and forgot to shut the door; she ran quickly out of the house, down to the water, and saw a ship far away. Do you know what the mandarin did, sir, when he came home and found that his wife was gone? He took the three children, tore them through the middle, and threw the pieces out into the street." It reminded one of Lucidarius, and other mediaeval legends. Then our good zio, the honest uncle, began, and told Maria and Filomena the history of Napoleon I., fairly correctly. He had heard it from his master Leonardo, who taught him his trade; the man had taken part in five of the campaigns. The only egregious mistake he made was that he thought the Austrians had gradually poisoned the Duke of Reichstadt, because he threatened to become even more formidable than his father. But that the old grenadier might easily have believed. The thing that astonished me was that the narrative did not make the slightest impression upon either Maria or Filomena. I asked Filomena if she did not think it was very remarkable. But she clearly had a suspicion that it was all lies, besides, what has happened in the world before her day is of as little importance to her as what goes on in another planet; finally, she abominates war. Zio concluded his story with childlike self-satisfaction: "When I learnt about all this, I was only an apprentice; now I am mastro Nino."

These last few days that I have been able to stumble about the room a little, I have had a feeling of delight and happiness such as I have hardly experienced before. The very air is a fete. The little black- haired youngsters, running about this picturesquely steep street, are my delight, whenever I look out of the window. All that is in front of me: the splendours of Rome, the Summer, the art of Italy, Naples in the South, Venice in the North, makes my heart beat fast and my head swim. I only need to turn round from the window and see Filomena standing behind me, knitting, posed like a living picture by Kuechler to feel, with jubilation: I am in Rome. Saredo came to-day at twelve o'clock, and saw me dressed for the first time. I had put on my nicest clothes. I called Filomena, had three dinners fetched, and seated between him and her, I had my banquet. I had just said: "I will not eat any soup to-day, unless it should happen to be Zuppa d'herba." Filomena took the lid off and cried: "A punto." This is how all my wishes are fulfilled now. I had a fine, light red wine. It tasted so good that if the gods had known it they would have poured their nectar into the washtub. Filomena poured it out, singing:

L'acqua fa mare, Il vino fa cantare; Il sugo della gresta Fa gira' la testa.

(Water is bad for one; Wine makes one sing; The juice of the grape Makes the head swim.)

To-morrow I may go out. After Sunday, I shall leave off dining at home. On Sunday Filomena goes to Camerino.



SECOND LONGER STAY ABROAD

(Continued)

Reflections on the Future of Denmark—Conversations with Giuseppe Saredo—Frascati—Native Beauty—New Susceptibilities—Georges Noufflard's Influence—The Sistine Chapel and Michael Angelo—Raphael's Loggias—A Radiant Spring.

I

Saredo said to me one day: "I am not going to flatter you—I have no interest in doing so; but I am going to give you a piece of advice, which you ought to think over. Stay in Italy, settle down here, and you will reach a far higher position than you can possibly attain in your own country. The intellectual education you possess is exceedingly rare in Italy; what I can say, without exaggeration, is that in this country it is so extraordinary that it might be termed an active force. Within two years you would be a power in Italy, at home, you will never be more than a professor at a University. Stay here! Villari and I will help you over your first difficulties. Write in French, or Italian, which you like, and as you are master of the entire range of Germanic culture, which scarcely any man in Italy is, you will acquire an influence of which you have not the least conception. A prophet is never honoured in his own country. We, on the other hand, need you. So stay here! Take Max Mueller as an example. It is with individuals as with nations; it is only when they change their soil that they attain their full development and realise their own strength."

I replied: "I am deaf to that sort of thing. I love the Danish language too well ever to forsake it. Only in the event of my settlement in Denmark meeting with opposition, and being rendered impossible, shall I strap on my knapsack, gird up my loins, and hie me to France or Italy; I am glad to hear that the world is not so closed to me as I had formerly believed."

My thoughts were much engaged on my sick-bed by reflections upon the future of Denmark. The following entry is dated March 8, 1871:

What do we mean by our national future, which we talk so much about? We do not purpose to extend our borders, to make conquests, or play any part in politics. For that, as is well comprehensible, we know we are too weak. I will leave alone the question as to whether it is possible to live without, in one way or another, growing, and ask: What do we want? To continue to exist. How exist? We want to get Slesvig back again, for as it is we are not existing; we are sickening, or else we are living like those lower animals who even when they are cut in pieces, are quite nimble; but it is a miserable life. We are in a false position with regard to Germany. The centripetal force that draws the individual members of one nationality together, and which we in Denmark call Danishness, that which, further, draws nationalities of the same family together, and which in Denmark is called Scandinavianism, must logically lead to a sympathy for the merging of the entire race, a kind of Gothogermanism. If we seek support from France, we shall be behaving like the Poles, turning for help to a foreign race against a nation of our own. I accuse us, not of acting imprudently, but of fighting against a natural force that is stronger than we. We can only retard, we cannot annihilate, the attraction exerted by the greater masses on the lesser. We can only hope that we may not live to feel the agony.

Holland and Denmark are both threatened by Germany, for in this geography is the mighty ally of Germany. The most enlightened Dane can only cherish the hope that Denmark, conquered, or not conquered, will brave it out long enough for universal civilisation, by virtue of the level it has reached, to bring our independence with it. As far as the hope which the majority of Danes cherish is concerned (including the noble professors of philosophy), of a time when Nemesis (reminiscence of theology!), shall descend on Prussia, this hope is only an outcome of foolishness. And even a Nemesis upon Prussia will never hurt Germany, and thus will not help us.

But the main question is this: If we—either through a peaceable restoration of Slesvig, or after fresh wars, or through the dawning of an era of peace and civilisation—regain our integrity and independence, shall we exist then? Not at all. Then we shall sicken again. A country like Denmark, even including Slesvig, is nowadays no country at all. A tradesman whose whole capital consists of ten rigsdaler is no tradesman. The large capitals swallow up the small. The small must seek their salvation in associations, partnerships, joint-stock companies, etc.

Our misfortune lies in the fact that there is no other country with which we can enter into partnership except Sweden and Norway, a little, unimportant state. By means of this association, which for the time being, is our sheet-anchor, and which, by dint of deploying enormous energy, might be of some importance, we can at best retard our destruction by a year or two. But the future! Has Denmark any future?

It was France who, to her own unspeakable injury, discovered, or rather, first proclaimed, the principle of nationality, a principle which at most could only give her Belgium and French Switzerland, two neutral countries, guaranteed by Europe, but which gave Italy to Piedmont, Germany to Prussia, and which one day will give Russia supremacy over all the Slavs.

Even before the war, France was, as it were, squeezed between bucklers; she had no possible chance of gaining anything through her own precious principle, and did not even dare to apply it to the two above-mentioned points. While she fearfully allowed herself to be awarded Savoy and Nice, Prussia grew from nineteen million inhabitants to fifty millions; and probably in a few years the Germans of Austria will fall to Germany as well. Then came the war, and its outcome was in every particular what Prevost-Paradol, with his keen foresight, had predicted: "Afterwards," he wrote, "France, with Paris, will take up in Europe the same position as Hellas with Athens assumed in the old Roman empire; it will become the city of taste and the noble delights; but it will never be able to regain its power." It has, in fact, been killed by this very theory of nationality; for the only cognate races, Spain and Italy, are two countries of which the one is rotten, the other just entered upon the convalescent stage. Thus it is clear that Germany will, for a time, exercise the supreme sway in Europe. But the future belongs neither to her nor to Russia, but, if not to England herself, at any rate to the Anglo-Saxon race, which has revealed a power of expansion in comparison with which that of other nations is too small to count. Germans who go to North America, in the next generation speak English. The English have a unique capacity for spreading themselves and introducing their language, and the power which the Anglo-Saxon race will acquire cannot be broken in course of time like that of ancient Rome; for there are no barbarians left, and their power is based, not on conquest, but on assimilation, and the race is being rejuvenated in North America.

How characteristic it is of our poor little country that we always hear and read of it as "one of the oldest kingdoms in the world." That is just the pity of it. If we were only a young country! There is only one way by which we can rejuvenate ourselves. First, to merge ourselves into a Scandinavia; then, when this is well done and well secured, to approach the Anglo-Saxon race to which we are akin. Moral: Become an Anglo-Saxon and study John Stuart Mill!

And I studied Mill with persevering attention, where he was difficult, but instructive, to follow, as in the Examination of Hamilton's Philosophy, which renews Berkeley's teachings, and I read him with delight where, accessible and comprehensible, he proclaims with freshness and vigour the gospel of a new age, as in the book On Liberty and the one akin to it, Representative Government.

II

During the months of February and March, my conversations with Giuseppe Saredo had been all I lived for. We discussed all the questions which one or both of us had at heart, from the causes of the expansion of Christianity, to the method of proportionate representation which Saredo knew, and correctly traced back to Andrae. When I complained that, by reason of our different nationality, we could hardly have any recollections in common, and by reason of our different languages, could never cite a familiar adage from childhood, or quote a common saying from a play, that the one could not thoroughly enjoy the harmony of verses in the language of the other, Saredo replied: "You are no more a Dane than I am an Italian; we are compatriots in the great fatherland of the mind, that of Shakespeare and Goethe, John Stuart Mill, Andrae, and Cavour. This land is the land of humanity. Nationality is milk, humanity is cream. What is there in all the world that we have not in common? It is true that we cannot enjoy together the harmony of some Northern verses, but we can assimilate together all the great ideas, and we have for each other the attraction of the relatively unknown, which fellow- countrymen have not."

He very acutely characterised his Italian compatriots: "Our intelligence amounts to prudence and common sense. At a distance we may appear self- luminous; in reality we are only passivity and reflected light. Solferino gave us Lombardy, Sadowa gave us Venice, Sedan gave us Rome. We were just active enough to take advantage of fortunate circumstances, and passively clever enough not to wreck our advantage by stupidity. In foreign novels we are scoundrels of the deepest dye, concocters of poisons and wholesale swindlers. In reality we are indifferent and indolent. Dolce far niente, these words, which, to our shame, are repeated in every country in Italian, are our watchword. But things shall be different, if it means that the few amongst us who have a little share of head and heart have to work themselves to death—things shall be different. Massimo d'Azeglio said: 'Now we have created an Italy; there remains to create Italians.' That was a true saying. Now we are creating the new people, and what a future there is before us! Now it is we who are taking the leadership of the Latin race, and who are giving back to our history its brilliance of the sixteenth century. At present our Art is poor because we have no popular type; but wait! In a few years Italy will show a profile no less full of character than in the days of Michael Angelo, and Benvenuto Cellini."

III

Then the moment arrived when all abstract reflections were thrust aside once more by convalescence. I was well again, after having been shut up for over four months. I still felt the traces of the mercury poisoning, but I was no longer tied to my bed, and weak though I was, I could walk.

And on the very first day,—it was March 25th—armed with a borrowed stick (I possessed none, having never used a stick before), and equipped with a little camp-stool, I took the train to Frascati, where there was a Madonna Fete.

It was life opening out before me again. All that I saw, witnessed to its splendour. First, the scenery on the way, the Campagna with its proud ruins, and the snow-covered Sabine Mountains, the whole illuminated by a powerful Summer sun; the villas of old Romans, with fortress-like thick walls, and small windows; then the fertile lava soil, every inch of which was under vineyard cultivation. At last the mountains in the neighborhood of Frascati. A convent crowned the highest point; there, in olden days, the first Italian temple to Jupiter had stood, and there Hannibal had camped. Underneath, in a hollow, like an eagle's nest, lay Rocca di Papa. By the roadside, fruit-trees with violet clusters of blossoms against a background of stone-pines, cypresses, and olive-groves.

I reached Frascati station. There was no carriage to be had up to the town, so I was obliged to ascend the hill slowly on foot, a test which my leg stood most creditably. In the pretty market-place of Frascati, with its large fountain which, like Acqua Paola, was divided into three and flung out a tremendous quantity of water, I went into an osteria and asked for roast goat with salad and Frascati wine, then sat down outside, as it was too close within. Hundreds of people in gay costumes, with artificial flowers and silver feathers in their headgear, filled the square in front of me, crowded the space behind me, laughed and shouted.

The people seemed to be of a grander type, more lively, animated and exuberant, than at the fair at Fiesole. The women were like Junos or Venuses, the men, even when clad in abominable rags, looked like Vulcans, blackened in their forges; they were all of larger proportions than Northern men and women. A Roman beau, with a riding-whip under his arm, was making sheep's eyes at a young local beauty, his courtship accompanied by the whines of the surrounding beggars. A signora from Albano was lecturing the waiter with the dignity of a queen for having brought her meat that was beneath all criticism, yes, she even let the word porcheria escape her. A brown-bearded fellow came out of the inn with a large bottle of the heavenly Frascati wine, which the landlords here, even on festival occasions, never mix with water, and gave a whole family, sitting on donkeys, to drink out of one glass; then he went to two little ones, who were holding each other round the waist, sitting on the same donkey; to two youths who were riding another; to a man and wife, who sat on a third, and all drank, like the horsemen in Wouwerman's pictures, without dismounting.

I got into an old, local omnibus, pulled by three horses, to drive the two miles to Grotta Ferrata, where the fair was. But the vehicle was hardly about to start up-hill when, with rare unanimity, the horses reared, behaved like mad, and whirled it round four or five times. The driver, a fellow with one eye and a grey cap with a double red camelia in it, being drunk, thrashed the horses and shouted, while an old American lady with ringlets shrieked inside the omnibus, and bawled out that she had paid a franc beforehand, and now wanted to get out. The road was thronged with people walking, and there was just as many riding donkeys, all of them, even the children, already heated with wine, singing, laughing, and accosting everybody. Many a worthy woman supported her half-drunk husband with her powerful arm. Many a substantial signora from Rocca di Papa sat astride her mule, showing without the least bashfulness her majestic calves.

At Grotta Ferrata, the long, long street presented a human throng of absolute density without the slightest crush, for no one stuck his elbows into his neighbour's sides. The eye could only distinguish a mass of red, yellow and white patches in the sunlight, and in between them a few donkeys' heads and mules' necks. The patches were the kerchiefs on the women's heads. Folk stood with whole roast pigs in front of them on a board, cutting off a piece with a knife for anyone who was hungry; there were sold, besides, fruits, knives, ornaments, provisions, and general market wares. One osteria, the entrance to which was hung all over with sausages, onions and vegetables, in garlands, had five huge archways open to the street. Inside were long tables, at which people sat, not on benches, but on trestles, round bars supported by two legs, and ate and drank in the best of good spirits, and the blackest filth, for the floor was the black, sodden, trampled earth. Just over the way, arbours had been made from trees, by intertwining their branches and allowing them to grow into one another; these were quite full of gay, beautiful girls, amongst them one with fair hair and brown eyes, who looked like a Tuscan, and from whom it was difficult to tear one's eyes away.

After having inspected the courtyard of an old monastery, the lovely pillars of which rejoiced my heart, I sat down a little on one side in the street where the fair was, on my little camp-stool, which roused the legitimate curiosity of the peasant girls. They walked round me, looked at me from behind and before, and examined with grave interest the construction of my seat. In front of me sat an olive and lemon seller. Girls bargained with him as best they could in the press, others stood and looked on. I had an opportunity here of watching their innate statuesque grace. When they spoke, the right arm kept time with their speech. When silent, they generally placed one hand on the hip, bent, but not clenched. There were various types. The little blonde, blue-eyed girl with the mild Madonna smile, and absolutely straight nose, and the large-made, pronounced brunette. But the appearance of them all was such that an artist or a poet could, by a slight transformation, have portrayed from them whatever type of figure or special characteristic he required. In my opinion, the form Italian beauty took, and the reason of the feeling one had in Italy of wading in beauty, whereas one hardly ever saw anything in the strict sense of the word beautiful in Copenhagen, and rarely in Paris, was, that this beauty was the beauty of the significant. All these women looked to be unoppressed, fullblown, freely developed. All that makes woman ugly in the North: the cold, the thick, ugly clothes that the peasant women wear, the doublet of embarrassment and vapidity which they drag about with them, the strait- waistcoat of Christiansfeldt morality in which they are confined by the priests, by protestantism, by fashion, by custom and convention—none of this oppressed, confined or contracted women here. These young peasant girls looked as if they had never heard such words as "You must not," or "You shall not," and as here in Italy there is none of the would-be witty talk, the grinning behind people's backs, which takes the life out of all intrepidity in the North, no one thought: "What will people say?" Everyone dressed and deported himself with complete originality, as he, or rather as she, liked. Hence eyes were doubly brilliant, blood coursed twice as red, the women's busts were twice as rounded and full.

IV

From this time forth I had a strange experience. I saw beauty everywhere. If I sat at the window of a cafe on the Corso on a Sunday morning, as the ladies were going to Mass, it seemed to me that all the beauty on earth was going past. A mother and her three daughters went by, a mere grocer's wife from the Corso, but the mother carried herself like a duchess, had a foot so small that it could have lain in the hollow of my hand, and the youngest of the three daughters was so absolutely lovely that people turned to look after her; she might perhaps have been fifteen years of age, but there was a nobility about her austere profile, and she had a way of twisting her perfect lips into a smile, that showed her to be susceptible to the sweetest mysteries of poetry and music. My long illness had so quickened the susceptibility of my senses to impressions of beauty that I lived in a sort of intoxication.

In the Scandinavian Club I was received with endless expressions of sympathy, courteous remarks, and more or less sincerely meant flatteries, as if in compensation for the suffering I had been through. All spoke as though they had themselves been deeply distressed, and especially as though Copenhagen had been sitting weeping during my illness. I certainly did not believe this for a moment, but all the same it weighed down a little, the balance of my happiness, and the first meetings with the Northern artists in these glorious surroundings were in many respects very enjoyable. The Scandinavian Club was in the building from which you enter the Mausoleum of Augustus, a colossal building in the form of a cross, several storeys in height. A festival had been got up on the flat roof for a benevolent object one of the first evenings in April. You mounted the many flights of stairs and suddenly found yourself, apparently, in an immense hall, but with no roof save the stars, and brilliantly illuminated, but with lights that paled in the rays of the Italian moon. We took part in the peculiarly Italian enjoyment of watching balloons go up; they rose by fire, which exhausted the air inside them and made them light. Round about the moon we could see red and blue lights, like big stars; one balloon ignited up in the sky, burst into bright flames, and looked very impressive.

Troops of young women, too, were sitting there, and dazzled anew a young man who for a second time had given the slip to the old gentleman with the scythe. There was one young servant girl from the country, in particular, a child of thirteen or fourteen, to whom I called the attention of the painters, and they went into ecstasies over her. The type was the same as that which Raphael has reproduced in his Sistine Madonna. Her clear, dark blue eyes had a look of maidenly shyness, and of the most exquisite bashfulness, and yet a look of pride. She wore a string of glass beads round her lovely neck. We ordered two bottles of wine to drink her health, and, while we were drinking it, the rotunda was lighted up from a dozen directions with changing Bengal fire. The ladies looked even handsomer, the glass lamps dark green in the gleam, the fire-borne balloons rose, the orchestra played, the women smiled at the homage of their friends and lovers—all on the venerable Mausoleum of Augustus.

V

I made the acquaintance that evening of a young and exceedingly engaging Frenchman, who was to become my intimate friend and my travelling companion. He attracted me from the first by his refined, reserved, and yet cordial manner.

Although only thirty-five years of age, Georges Noufflard had travelled and seen surprisingly much. He was now in Italy for the second time, knew France and Germany, had travelled through Mexico and the United States, had visited Syria, Egypt, Tunis, and Algiers to the last oasis. When the conversation touched upon Art and Music, he expressed himself in a manner that revealed keen perception, unusual knowledge, and a very individual taste.

The following morning, when we met on the Corso, he placed himself at my disposal, if he could be of use to me; there was nothing he had arranged to do. He asked where I was thinking of going; as he knew Rome and its neighbourhood as well as I knew my mother's drawing-room, I placed myself in his hands. We took a carriage and drove together, first to the baths of Caracalla, then to the Catacombs, where we very nearly lost our way, and thought with a thrill of what in olden times must have been the feelings of the poor wretches who fled there, standing in the dark and hearing footsteps in the distance, knowing that it was their pursuers coming, and that they were inevitably going to be murdered, where there was not even room to raise a weapon in their own defence. Next we drove to San Paolo fuori le mure, of the burning of which Thorwaldsen's Museum possesses a painting by Leopold Robert, but which at that time had been entirely re-built in the antique style. It was the most beautiful basilica I had ever seen. We enjoyed the sight of the courtyard of the monastery nearly 1,700 years old, with its fine pillars, all different, and so well preserved that we compared, in thought, the impressions produced by the two mighty churches, San Paolo and San Pietro. Then we dined together and plunged into interminable discussions until darkness fell. From that day forth we were inseparable. Our companionship lasted several months, until I was obliged to journey North. But the same cordial relations continued to subsist between us for more than a quarter of a century, when Death robbed me of my friend.

Georges Noufflard was the son of a rich cloth manufacturer at Roubaix, and at an early age had come into possession of a considerable fortune. This, however, was somewhat diminished through the dishonesty of those who, after the death of his father, conducted the works in his name. He had wanted to become a painter, but the weakness of his eyes had obliged him to give up Art; now he was an Art lover, and was anxious to write a book on the memorials and works of art in Rome, too great an undertaking, and for that reason never completed; but at the same time, he pursued with passion the study of music, played Beethoven, Gluck and Berlioz, for me daily, and later on published books on Berlioz and Richard Wagner.

As a youth he had been an enthusiast such as, in the Germanic countries, they fancy is impossible elsewhere, to such an extent indeed as would be regarded even there as extraordinary. At seventeen years of age he fell in love with a young girl who lived in the same building as himself. He was only on terms of sign language with her, had not even secured so much as a conversation with her. None the less, his infatuation was so great that he declared to his father that he wished to marry her. The father would not give his consent, and her family would not receive him unless he was presented by his father. The latter sent him to America with the words: "Forget your love and learn what a fine thing industrialism is." He travelled all over the United States, found all machinery loathsome, since he had not the most elementary knowledge of the principles of mechanics, and no inclination for them, and thought all the time of the little girl from whom they wished to separate him. It did not help matters that the travelling companion that had been given him lived and breathed in an atmosphere of the lowest debauchery, and did his best to initiate the young man into the same habits. On his return home he declared to his father that he persisted in his choice. "Good," said his father, "Asia Minor is a delightful country, and so is Northern Africa; it will also do you good to become acquainted with Italy." So he set off on his travels again, and this time was charmed with everything he saw. Then his father died, and he became pretty much his own master and free to do as he liked. Then he learned that the father of the girl had been guilty of a bank fraud. His family would not receive hers, if, indeed, herself. So he gave up his intention; he did not wish to expose her to humiliation and did not wish himself to have a man of ill-fame for his father-in-law; he set off again on his travels, and remained a long time away. "The proof that I acted wisely by so doing," he said in conclusion, "is that I have completely forgotten the girl; my infatuation was all fancy."

When he commenced by telling me that for three years he had loved, and despite all opposition, wished to marry a girl to whom he had never spoken, I exclaimed: "Why, you are no Frenchman!" When he concluded by telling me that after remaining constant for three years he had abandoned her for a fault that not she, but her father, had committed, I exclaimed: "How French you are, after all!"

While mutual political, social, and philosophical interests drew me to Giuseppe Saredo, all the artistic side of my nature bound me to Georges Noufflard. Saredo was an Italian from a half-French part,—he was born at Savona, near Chambery,—and his culture was as much French as Italian; Noufflard was a Frenchman possessed by such a love for Italy that he spoke the purest Florentine, felt himself altogether a Southerner, and had made up his mind to take up his permanent abode in Italy. He married, too, a few years afterwards, a lovely Florentine woman, and settled down in Florence.

What entirely won my heart about him was the femininely delicate consideration and unselfish devotion of his nature, the charm there was about his manner and conversation, which revealed itself in everything he did, from the way in which he placed his hat upon his head, to the way in which he admired a work of art. But I could not have associated with him day after day, had I not been able to learn something from him. When we met again ten years later, it turned out that we had nothing especially new to tell each other. I had met him just at the right moment.

It was not only that Noufflard was very well and widely informed about the artistic treasures of Italy and the places where they were to be found, but his opinions enriched my mind, inasmuch as they spurred me on to contradiction or surprised me and won my adherence. Fresh as Julius Lange's artistic sense had been, there was nevertheless something doctrinaire and academic about it. An artist like Bernini was horrible, and nothing else to him; he had no sympathy for the sweet, half-sensual ecstasy of some of Bernini's best figures. He was an enemy of eighteenth-century art in France, saw it through the moral spectacles which in the Germanic countries had come into use with the year 1800. It was easy for Noufflard to remain unbiased by Northern doctrines, for he did not know them; he had the free eye of the beauty lover for every revelation of beauty, no matter under what form, and had the intellectual kinship of the Italianised Frenchman for many an artist unappreciated in the North. On the other hand, he naturally considered that we Northmen very much over-estimated our own. It was impossible to rouse any interest in him for Thorwaldsen, whom he considered absolutely academic. "You cannot call him a master in any sense," he exclaimed one day, when we had been looking at Thorwaldsen bas-reliefs side by side with antiques. I learnt from my intimacy with Noufflard how little impression Thorwaldsen's spirit makes on the Romance peoples. That indifference to him would soon become so widespread in Germany, I did not yet foresee.

Noufflard had a very alert appreciation of the early Renaissance, especially in sculpture; he was passionately in love with the natural beauties of Italy, from North to South, and he had a kind of national- psychological gift of singling out peculiarly French, Italian or German traits. He did not know the German language, but he was at home in German music, and had studied a great deal of German literature in translation; just then he was reading Hegel's "Aesthetics," the abstractions in which veritably alarmed him, and to which he very much preferred modern French Art Philosophy. In English Science, he had studied Darwin, and he was the first to give me a real insight into the Darwinian theory and a general summary of it, for in my younger days I had only heard it attacked, as erroneous, in lectures by Rasmus Nielsen on teleology.

Georges Noufflard was the first Frenchman of my own age with whom I had been intimate and whose character I partly understood and entered into, partly absorbed into my own. If many of the various opinions evident in my first lectures were strikingly emancipated from Danish national prejudices which no one hitherto had attempted to disturb, I owed this in a great measure to him. Our happy, harmonious intimacy in the Sabine Hills and in Naples was responsible, before a year was past, for whole deluges of abuse in Danish newspapers.

VI

One morning, the Consul's man-servant brought me a permesso for the Collection of Sculpture in the Vatican for the same day, and a future permesso for the Loggias, Stanzas, and the Sistine Chapel. I laid the last in my pocket-book. It was the key of Paradise. I had waited for it so long that I said to myself almost superstitiously: "I wonder whether anything will prevent again?" The anniversary of the day I had left Copenhagen the year before, I drove to the Vatican, went at one o'clock mid-day up the handsome staircase, and through immense, in part magnificently decorated rooms to the Sistine Chapel. I had heard so much about the disappointment it would be that not the very slightest suggestion of disappointment crossed my mind. Only a feeling of supreme happiness shot through me: at last I am here. I stood on the spot which was the real goal of my pilgrimage. I had so often examined reproductions of every figure and I had read so much about the whole, that I knew every note of the music beforehand. Now I heard it.

A voice within me whispered: So here I stand at last, shut in with the mind that of all human minds has spoken most deeply home to my soul. I am outside and above the earth and far from human kind. This is his earth and these are his men, created in his image to people his world. For this one man's work is a world, which, though that of one man only, can be placed against the productions of a whole nation, even of the most splendid nation that has ever lived, the Greeks. Michael Angelo felt more largely, more lonely, more mightily than any other. He created out of the wealth of a nature that in its essence was more than earthly. Raphael is more human, people say, and that is true; but Michael Angelo is more divine.

After the lapse of about an hour, the figures detached themselves from the throng, to my mental vision, and the whole composition fixed itself in my brain. I saw the ceiling, not merely as it is to-day, but as it was when the colours were fresh, for in places there were patches, the bright yellow, for instance, which showed the depth of colouring in which the whole had been carried out. It was Michael Angelo's intention to show us the ceiling pierced and the heavens open above it. Up to the central figures, we are to suppose that the walls continue straight up to the ceiling, as though the figures sat upright. Then all confusion disappears, and all becomes one perfect whole.

The principal pictures, such as the creation of Adam, Michael Angelo's most philosophical and most exquisite painting, I had had before my eyes upon my wall every day for ten years. The expression in Adam's face was not one of languishing appeal, as I had thought; he smiled faintly, as if calmly confident of the dignity of the life the finger of God is about to bestow upon him. The small, bronze-painted figures, expressed the suspension and repose of the ceiling; they were architectonic symbols. The troops of young heroes round about the central pillars were Michael Angelo's ideals of Youth, Beauty and Humanity. The one resting silently and thoughtfully on one knee is perhaps the most splendid. There is hardly any difference between his build and that of Adam. Adam is the more spiritual brother of these young and suffering heroes.

I felt the injustice of all the talk about the beginnings of grotesqueness in Michael Angelo's style. There are a few somewhat distorted figures, Haman, the knot of men and women adoring the snake, Jonas, as he flings himself backwards, but except these, what calm, what grandiose perfection! And which was still more remarkable, what imposing charm! Eve, in the picture of "The Fall," is perhaps the most adorable figure that Art has ever produced; her beauty, in the picture on the left, was like a revelation of what humanity really ought to have been.

It sounded almost like a lie that one man had created this in twenty-two months. Would the earth ever again produce frescoes of the same order? The 360 years that had passed over it had damaged this, the greatest pictorial work on earth, far less than I had feared.

A large aristocratic English family came in: man, wife, son, daughter, another daughter, the governess, all expensively and fashionably dressed. They stood silent for a moment at the entrance to the hall. Then they came forward as far as about the middle of the hall, looked up and about a little, said to the custodian: "Will you open the door for us?" and went out again very gracefully.

VII

I knew Raphael's Loggias from copies in l'Ecole des Beaux Arts in Paris. But I was curious to see how they would appear after this, and so, although there was only three-quarters of an hour left of the time allotted to me on my permesso, I went up to look at them. My first impression, as I glanced down the corridor and perceived these small ceiling pictures, barely two feet across, was: "Good gracious! This will be a sorry enjoyment after Michael Angelo!" I looked at the first painting, God creating the animals, and was quite affected: There goes the good old man, saying paternally: "Come up from the earth, all of you, you have no idea how nice it is up here." My next impression was: "How childish!" But my last was: "What genius!" How charming the picture of the Fall, and how lovely Eve! And what grandeur of style despite the smallness of the space. A God a few inches high separates light from darkness, but there is omnipotence in the movement of His arm. Jacob sees the ladder to Heaven in his dream; and this ladder, which altogether has six angels upon it, seems to reach from Earth to Heaven, infinitely long and infinitely peopled; above, we see God the Father, at an immense distance, spread His gigantic embrace (which covers a space the length of two fingers). There was the favourite picture of my childhood, Abraham prostrated before the Angels, even more marvellous in the original than I had fancied it to myself, although it is true that the effect of the picture is chiefly produced by its beauty of line. And there was Lot, departing from Sodom with his daughters, a picture great because of the perfect illusion of movement. They go on and on, against the wind and storm, with Horror behind them and Hope in front, at the back, to the right, the burning city, to the left, a smiling landscape. How unique the landscapes on all these pictures are, how marvellous, for instance, that in which Moses is found on the Nile! This river, within the narrow limits of the picture, looked like a huge stream, losing itself in the distance.

It was half-past five. My back was beginning to ache in the place which had grown tender from lying so long; without a trace of fatigue I had been looking uninterruptedly at pictures for four hours and a half.

VIII

Noufflard's best friend in Rome was a young lieutenant of the Bersaglieri named Ottavio Cerrotti, with whom we were much together. Although a Roman, he had entered the Italian army very young, and had consequently been, as it were, banished. Now, through the breach at Porta Pia, he had come back. He was twenty-four years of age, and the naivest Don Juan one could possibly meet. He was beloved by the beautiful wife of his captain, and Noufflard, who frequented their house, one day surprised the two lovers in tears. Cerrotti was crying with his lady-love because he had been faithless to her. He had confessed to her his intimacy with four other young ladies; so she was crying, and the end of it was that he cried to keep her company.

At meals, he gave us a full account of his principal romance. He had one day met her by chance in the gardens of the Palazzo Corsini, and since that day, they had had secret meetings. But the captain had now been transferred to Terni, and tragedy had begun. Letters were constantly within an ace of being intercepted, they committed imprudences without count. He read aloud to us, without the least embarrassment, the letters of the lady. The curious thing about them was the moderation she exercised in the expression of her love, while at the same time her plans for meetings were of the most foolhardy, breakneck description.

Another fresh acquaintance that I made in those days was with three French painters, Hammon, Sain and Benner, who had studios adjoining one another. Hammon and Sain both died long since, but Benner, whom I met again in Paris in 1904, died, honoured and respected, in 1905. I was later on at Capri in company with Sain and Benner, but Hammon I saw only during this visit to Rome. His pretty, somewhat sentimental painting, Ma soeur n'y est pas, hung, reproduced in engraving, in every shop-window, even in Copenhagen. He was painting just then at his clever picture, Triste Rivage.

Hammon was born in Brittany, of humble, orthodox parents, who sent him to a monastery. The Prior, when he surprised him drawing men and women out of his head, told him that painting was a sin. The young man himself then strongly repented his inclination, but, as he felt he could not live without following it, he left the monastery, though with many strong twinges of conscience.

Now that he was older, he was ruining himself by drink, but had manifested true talent and still retained a humorous wit. One day that I was with him, a young man came to the studio and asked for his opinion of a painting; the man talked the whole time of nothing but his mother, of how much he loved her and all that he did for her. Hammon's patience gave out at last. He broke out: "And do you think, sir, that I have murdered my mother? I love her very much, I assure you, not enough to marry her, I grant, but pretty well, all the same." After that he always spoke of him as "the young man who loves his mother."