I went by ship from Athens to Constantinople and admired, as every one must, the superb position of the city; like New York, a queen of many waters.
But I was coming away without having learned much when, as my luck would have it, I fell into talk with a German, a student of Byzantine architecture who raved to me of St. Sophia, took me to see it, played guide and expositor of all its beauties time and again, till at length the scales fell from my eyes and I too saw that it was perhaps as he said, "The greatest church in the world," thought I could never like the outside as much as the inside. The bold arches and the immense sweep of pillars and the mosaics, frescoes, and inscriptions on the walls give an unique impression of splendour and grandeur combined, a union of color and form, singular in magnificence.
Devout Turks were always worshiping Mahomet in the church and here and there on the pavement schools were being held; but on the walls the older frescoes representing the Crucified One were everywhere, showing through the Mahometan paint or plaster, and the impression left on me was that the Cross everywhere was slowly but surely triumphing over the Crescent. In time I came to see that St. Sophia was a greater achievement even than the Parthenon, and learned in this way that the loftier Spirit usually finds in Time the nobler body.
My German friend took me too, to the Church of the Saviour, which he called "the gem of Byzantine work," and indeed the mosaics, at least of the fourteenth century, were richer and more varied than anything I have since seen, even in Palermo.
We had a wild passage through the Black Sea and neither Varna nor the Danube wiped out the sense of discomfort.
But Belgrade with its citadel pleased me intimately, and Buda with Pesth across the great bridge caught my fancy, its fortress hill reminding me of the Acropolis; but Vienna won my heart. The old Burg Theatre with actors and actresses as good as those of Paris, the noble Opera-House with the best music in Europe, and the Belvedere with its gorgeous Venetian pictures, and the wonderful Armoury, all appealed to me intensely! Then too there was the Court and the military pageants of the Hofburg, and the great library, and above all the rich kindly life of the people in the Wurstelprater, the stout German carpet, so to speak, illumined with a thousand colours of Slav and Semite, Bohemian and Polish embroidery, till even the gypsies seemed to add the touches of barbarism and superstition needed to fringe and set off the gorgeous fabric. In many-sided appeal, Vienna seemed to me richer even than Paris; and Pauline Lucca, exquisite singer at once and beautiful charming person, became to my imagination the genius of the city, with Billroth, the great doctor, as symbol of the science on which the whole life was builded. I find it hard to forgive the barbarian Wilson for maiming and impoverishing a nobler corporate life than he and his compatriots are able to produce. It takes a thousand years to make a Vienna and fortunately for us no one man can utterly destroy it.
After spending some months in Vienna, I realized that the Danube was the great patrimony which the Viennese had left unexploited. Vienna should be the greatest port in south-western Europe, but the Austrians haven't dredged and developed the noble stream as they should have done. Will they now, in poverty and misery, repair the fault? It is still time-always time, thank goodness!
Why did I leave Vienna? Because I had met a girl who attracted me, a cafedancer who was returning for a rest to her home in Salzburg, and who talked to me so much of Salzburg, the birthplace of Mozart-"the most beautiful city in the world," she called it-that I had to go and visit it with Marie for guide.
Marie, Marie Kirschner was her real name, and I have tried to sketch her in my story, A Mad Love, for indeed she was the best type of German, or perhaps I should say Austrian. To me she represented Vienna and its charms quite exquisitely. She had a perfect girl's figure, kept slight and lithe with constant exercise, for she danced at least an hour every day to keep up to the mark, as she said. Marie had a piquant, intelligent face with a nez retrousse as cheeky as her light hazel eyes; best of all, she was curiously frank about her sexual experiences and won my heart by telling me, one of the first evenings, how she had been seduced willingly enough, because of her curiosity, by an old banker of Buda-Pesth when she was barely thirteen. "He gave my mother and me enough to live on comfortably for six years or more and let me learn dancing. Otto died in his sleep or he'd have done more for us; he was really kind and I had grown to care for him, though he was a poor lover.
However, he left us the house and furniture and I was already earning a fair living-"
"And since then?" I asked.
Marie tossed her head. "Qui a bu, boira," she said. "Isn't love a part of life and the best part? Even the illusion of love is worth more than anything else, and now and then hope tempts me, as I believe I tempt you. Oh, if we could see Salzburg and the Berchtesgaden and the Geiereck together; what a perfect summer we might have, in most lovely surroundings!"
"It's impossible," I said, "to give you an unforgettable memory; you've had so many lovers!"
"Never fear a number," she replied, smiling. "The great majority leave us nothing worth remembering; men know little about love. Why till now, my old banker's the best memory I have: he was really affectionate und hatte mich auf den Handen tragen mogen (he would have carried me in his hands)"-a German expression meaning "he took every care of me"
"He taught me a lot too; oh, Otto was a dear," and with this assurance I took Marie to Salzburg.
I had never even heard Salzburg mentioned before among the beautiful cities of Europe, but I found by chance that Wilkie, the Scottish painter, had used something like the right words to describe it. He said that "If the old town of Edinburgh with its castle on a rock were planted in the Trossachs and had a broad swift river like the Tay flowing between the houses of the town, it might resemble Salzburg." Salzburg itself is set amongst mountains and nearby are numberless scenes of romantic beauty: the Traunsee to the east, and the Chiemsee with the King of Bavaria's wonderful palace to the west; while to the south across the Bavarian border is Berchtesgaden, one of the most beautiful regions in Europe. Here is the Untersberg, nearly 7000 feet in height, with the famous Kolowrat caverns containing ice-masses that look like great waterfalls suddenly frozen; and on the eastern side, the Geiereck with the cliffs and precipices that have earned it its name. Marie was an incomparable guide, of the sweetest temper, a born companion and as good a lover as a man. Better indeed in that she made all the preliminaries of love fascinating: Marie was the first to tell me that my voice was musical-a delight to hear-exceedingly powerful, yet resonant and sweet. "I'd rather hear you recite than anyone," she said. "No actor was ever your equal; and your face too: I love the courage in it and the amazing life in it."
Marie was a born flatterer and found new compliments continually. Every day she discovered some new trait to praise, but goodness and sweetness of nature are not dramatic or interesting. I did my best forty years later to picture Marie in A Mad Love, and trying to find some fault to make her human, hit upon the fact that she would give her lips readily to any one who touched her heart, even tho' she didn't love him. But-I've not done her goodness justice. Time and again she reminded me of Browning's wonderful verses:
Teach me only teach, love,
As I ought!
I will speak thy speech, love,
Think thy thought.
Meet if thou require it
Both demands
Laying flesh and spirit
In thy hands.
But after six weeks or so I began to feel tired. Eirene's passion had weakened me, and charming, faultless as Marie was, I wanted to learn something new, and I had for the time being at least exhausted German. When we returned from the lovely country and its exquisite walks and drives, I bought Marie a gorgeous picture of Leopold's fairy palace on the Chiemsee and fairly ran away to Florence for the fall.
There I worked at Italian first and then at the pictures and the art-life. And now my education in art, always growing, took in the mosaics at Ravenna, and in Milan I came upon a small collection of Visconti armour of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, some suits of which I managed to secure for very small sums. Before the American demand began to grow imperious in the middle eighties, good suits of armour cost very little. I bought a gold inlaid suit complete for?. 100 that I sold five years later In London for?. 5,000; and the dealer got?. 15,000 for it.
Italy appears to have taught most visitors a great deal. It taught me very little, but one experience in Milan was valuable. I got to know Lamperti, the great teacher of singing, and his German wife; and from Lamperti I learned a good deal about il bel canto and that culture of the voice for which Italy is famous. Lamperti wanted to teach me his art; he tried my voice and assured me that I'd have a great career, for without training I could sing two notes lower than were ever written. "Your patrimony is in your throat," he used to say, but I assured him it was in my head, and the career of a basso profundo did not appeal to me, though I believe I might have made a good actor.
Lamperti had a fund of interesting anecdotes about singers and musicians, and he was the first to tell me that my rooted dislike of the piano came from a good ear. "You have "absolute pitch,'" he said, "an extraordinary ear and a great voice. It's a ski not to cultivate your voice," but I had more important things to cultivate-at least that was my conviction. I've often thought since what a different life I might have had, had I taken Lamperti's advice and used his teaching, but at the time I never even considered it.
I picked up whatever I could about music. I read Leopardi morning, noon, and night, for his profound pessimism appealed to me intensely, even in the flower of youth. He says to his heart: … non val cosa nessuna I moti tuoi, ne di sospiri e degna La terra. Amaro e noia La vita, altro mai nulla, e fango e il mondo.
I learned there in Florence for the first time the lesson that Whistler afterwards taught everyone who had ears to hear, that there was no such thing as an artistic period or an artistic people, that great artists were sporadic products, like all other great men, that in fact genius was as rare as talent is common. But I had then no idea that the world is always suffering from want of genius to direct it, and that reverence for it and love of it is always a forecast of its possession. But one amusing experience of this time in Florence may find a place here.
I had read a good deal of Italian when a friend one day asked me had I read Ariosto. Strange to say, I had passed him over, though I had read a good deal of Tassoff and some of the moderns and been disappointed. But Ariosto! What had he done? Well, my friend recited his first sonnet on beauty and the riches of love and lent me the book which contained also this lively and witty story.
It seems there was a painter whose name Ariosto had forgotten (non mi ricordo il nome), who always painted the devil as a beautiful young man with lovely eyes and thick dark hair. His feet, too, were well-shaped and there were no horns on his head; in everything he was as lovable and as fair as an angel of God.
Not wishing to be outdone in courtesy, the devil came once just before daybreak to the painter when he was sleeping and told him to ask whatever he most desired and his wish would be granted him.
Now the poor painter had a lovely wife and lived in jealous ecstasies, extremes of doubt and fear; consequently, he begged the devil to show him how he could guard against any infidelity on the part of his wife.
The devil at once put a ring on his finger, assuring him that so long as his finger was in this ring, he could make his mind easy, for there would be no cause for even a shadow of suspicion.
Glad at heart the painter woke up to find his finger in his wife's sex (it dito ha nella fica all moglier).
Even afterwards the name of Ariosto had a meaning to me and significance, for he goes on to say that he isn't sure of the efficacy of the cure: if the woman took it into her head to give herself and deceive the man, she would accomplish even the impossible-a purely Latin view of the matter.
I returned to Paris, and in the early spring of 1881 I went out to live in Argenteuil. I don't remember why I went to Argenteuil, but I took an apartment in a villa on the river and there I passed a great summer. I worked hard at French and came to speak it with fluency and fair correctness, but I did not attempt to master it as I had mastered German, though French literature and French art too of the nineteenth century appealed to me infinitely more than the German literature or art of the same period. It was at Argenteuil in this spring that I read Balzac through and quickly came to the conviction that he was the greatest of all modern Frenchmen, the only one indeed who has enlarged our conception of French genius and added a story to the noble building designed and decorated by Montaigne. Balzac is one of the choice and master spirits of the world, but not intellectual enough, or perhaps not dreamer enough, to be in the foremost file and help to steer humanity. In spite of his prodigious creative faculty, he has added no new generic figure to the Pantheon. He knew women profoundly; but even his Baronne Hulot has not the significance of Goethe's Gretchen.
This year in Paris was made memorable to me also by meeting Turgenev, as I've told in my "snapshot" of him. I knew then that he was a great man, but I did not put him nearly as high as I did later. Far and away the greatest Russian writer, I see now that by his creation of Bazarof, the realist, he ranks among the leaders and guides of men: a greater artist even than Balzac, though not so productive, perhaps because artistic productivity depends on living a great part of one's life amongst one's own compatriots.
In this summer too I met Guy de Maupassant at dinner, thanks to Blanche Macchetta, and our acquaintance began, which was destined to grow year by year more intimate, till his tragic death some ten years later, At the time I thought him at least as great as Turgenev: now I know better.
I got to know, too, the handsome Jew journalist Catulle Mendes, surely one of the most wonderful improvisatori ever seen. He could write you a poem like Hugo or De Musset in a few minutes; could imitate any and every master of French prose or verse with equal ease and astounding mastery. Ever afterwards he was to me the perfect model of the man of talent without a touch of genius that might have ennobled or destroyed his unique gift of words. At the time I could only admire him, though I felt that something was lacking in him. His nickname in Paris hit off his beauty of person perfectly- un Christ de Bordel!
I had a memorable summer in Paris. In spite of a want of introductions, I came to know this man and that, here a writer on the Figaro, there an artist, and they introduced me to others.
Towards the end of the summer I made up my mind to go to Ireland again and study the country and conditions for myself. A little while before, Disraeli had spoken of the cloud in Ireland no larger than a man's hand that might yet develop into a great storm. The increasing power of the Land League, the growth of the court for fixing rents, the advent to power of Parnell, made me eager to study the problem for myself; and so I crossed from Holyhead to Dublin and gazed again at scenes familiar to me in boyhood. From the beginning I went to all the Nationalist meetings, and I suppose it was only natural that my strong bias in favour of Irish freedom should have been strengthened.
Still, I went too to Trinity College, Dublin, and got an independent scholarly view that found some good points occasionally even in the castle and English domination. Of course I went to Galway and equally of course to Kerry, where my mother was buried, and I may as well give here the only independent judgment I ever heard of her. A famous Plymouth brother was lecturing once and I went up to him afterwards to inform myself more exactly on some point of his strange creed. As soon as he saw my card he said, "I knew some Harrises well once in Kerry, a Captain and Mrs. Harris; you don't come from that stock, I presume."
"Indeed I do!" I exclaimed, and it turned out that he knew both my father and mother very well indeed. As may be imagined, I was intensely interested,
particularly when I found that my religious friend was a gentleman with a very good head of his own and a judgment free at least from ordinary bias. He spoke of my father's energy, though clearly he did not like him particularly; but my mother to him was a saint of the sweetest disposition and very goodlooking,
"a thousand tunes too good for her domineering, little husband. I had a very great admiration for her," he went on. "Though I was younger, I was really pained to hear of her death. You lost a good mother in her, my friend," was his summing up, and curiously enough, my own childish recollections corroborated the impression he gave of her sweet kindliness of nature. My father too when he spoke of her, which was very seldom, always laid stress on the fact that it was difficult to make her angry: "a very sweet and gentle nature" which her eldest son, Vernon, had inherited.
The thing I noticed most in Ireland was the way it rained, and the poverty of the wretched land impressed me the more, the more I studied it. The moral influence of the Catholic Church too was to be seen everywhere in the splendid physique of the people, and I was fated to experience its vigour very sharply. It was at Ballinasloe that I was surprised by the sheer loveliness of the innkeeper's daughter. I had been walking and working hard for some time and was minded to take it easy for a week or so when I came to his inn.
The girl captivated me. She hadn't much to do and they liked to hire their jaunting-car to me, and I got into the habit of taking Molly (Margaret was her name) with me everywhere as a guide. Her mother had long been dead and the father found enough to do in his bar, while an elder sister took charge of the house. So Molly and I spent a good deal of time together: I made up to her from the beginning. Naturally I kissed her as soon as I could and as often as I got the chance; and when I told her I loved her, I found she took it much more seriously than I did. "You wouldn't be after marrying me," she said.
"You'd be ashamed of me over there in London and Paris and Vienna." My boxes showed labels that were known to everyone in the house.
"You're an angel," I replied, "but I have a lot to do before I can think of marrying"; still the kissing and caressing went on continually.
I got into the habit of taking my dinner in my sitting-room, for there was seldom anyone in the public dining-room, and when my things were cleared away and I sat reading, Molly would come in and we'd talk like lovers. One evening I asked her why she didn't come to me in bed after everyone was asleep; to my amazement she said she'd love to and I made her promise to come that very night, scarcely daring to believe in my good fortune. About eleven I heard the pattering of bare feet, and as I opened the door that gave into my sitting-room, there was Molly with nothing but a red Indian shawl over her nightie. In bed together I kissed and kissed her and she responded, but as soon as I tried further she held me off: "Sure, you wouldn't be doing anything like that."
"You don't care for me much or you wouldn't deny me," was my retort.
"Indeed I would; you must be good for I love to cuddle you," and she slipped her arms round me and held me to her till I grew almost crazy with desire. At first I smiled to myself: a few nights of preliminaries and nature would be too strong, but I had reckoned without my host.
I have not even described Molly and yet I shall always see her as she stood before me nude that first night. She was as tall as I was and splendidly formed, of the mother-type with large breasts and hips. She held her head turned away, as if she did not want to see me while I perused her naked charms. But her flower face was finer even than her figure: the great grey eyes shaded with long black lashes that curled up, while masses of very dark hair fell to her waist. Curiously enough, her skin was as fair as that of a blonde. When she turned, half-smiling, half-fearful, to me, "Have you seen enough now," I drew down the nightie I had half round her neck.
"I could look a long time without ever having enough, you beauty!"
"Sure, I'm like everybody else and my cousin Anne Moriarty's the beauty, with her golden hair!"
"Nothing like so beautiful as you!" For answer, I kissed her. "You'll catch cold; you'll come to-morrow?" She nodded and I went to bed in a fever. I had failed absolutely, but I was in no hurry and ultimate failure was unthinkable.
The next night I began by showing her the syringe and explaining its use. She would hardly hear me out, so I began kissing her sex till she sobbed breathless in my arms; but still she wouldn't let me come to the natural act.
"Please not; be good now!"
"But why, why?" The question stung her.
"How could I ever go to church? I confess every month; sure it's a mortal sin!"
"No sin at all and who'd know?"
"Father Sheridan would ask me; sure, he knows I like you; I told him."
"And he'd condemn it?"
"Oh my! That's why I can come to you, because none of them would even dream that I'd come like this to you. But I love to hold you and hear you talk, and to think I please you makes me so proud and glad."
"Don't you love my kisses best?"
"They make me afraid. Talk to me now; tell me of all the places you've seen.
I've been reading of Paris-it must be lovely-wonderful-and the French girls dress so well-oh, I'd love to travel."
Again and again I tried, but the denial was adamant. Molly thrilled and melted under my kissing, but would not consent to what she'd have to confess afterwards to the priest.
A few days later, I made it my business to meet Father Sheridan and found him very intelligent. He was of the old school, had been brought up in St.
Omer and had a delightful French tincture of reading and humour, but alas!
He was as crazy as any Irish-bred priest on the necessity of chastity. I drew him out on the subject and found him eloquent. At his fingers' tips, he had all the statistics of illegitimacy and was proud of the fact that it was five times less frequent in Ireland than in England; and to my amusement I found it was commoner in Wales than in Scotland. Sheridan would never admit that the Welsh were Christians at all-"all pagans," he'd say, with intense emphasis,
"mere savages without a church or a saint!" He was proud of the fact, I found, that it was his duty to denounce a young man and woman from the pulpit if they kept company too long, or with a suspicion of undue intimacy. "They should marry and not burn," was a favorite phrase of his. "The children of young parents are always healthy and strong": it was an obsession with him.
Yet he would drink whisky with me till we both had had more than enough.
How do the Irish come to have this insane belief in the necessity and virtue of chastity? It is their unquestioned religious belief that gives it them, yet in the mountains of Bavaria and in parts of the Abruzzi, the peasants are just as religious, and there, too, chastity is highly esteemed, but nothing to be compared to its power in Ireland. I've often wondered why?
To cut a long story short, I used all the knowledge I had with Molly, yet failed completely. I knew that at certain periods women feel more intensely than at others; I found out that three or four times each month Molly was easily excited, especially about the eighth day after her monthlies had ceased. I used every advantage; but nothing gave me victory. One night, I was halfinsane, so I promised to do nothing and thus got permission to lie on her, intending if necessary to use a little force. "That's nothing," I repeated,
"nothing," as I rubbed my sex on her clitoris; "I'm not going in." But suddenly she took my head in her hands and kissed me. "I trust you, dear; you are too good to take advantage of me," and as I pressed forward, she said quietly,
"You know I'd kill myself if anything happened." At once I drew away. I couldn't speak, could hardly think.
"All right!" I cried at last. "You've won because you don't care," and I threw myself away from her.
"Don't care!" she repeated. "I love you, and I'll love you all my life," and as she took me in her arms all my stupid resentment vanished and I set myself to interest her as much as I could.
But with failure in the nightly lists, Ballinasloe soon became intolerable to me. I had long ago exhausted all the beauties of the neighbourhood and had come to the conclusion that outside love, the place was as devoid of intellectual interest as a town in western America. The clergyman I couldn't talk to, the lawyers and doctors were all tenth-rate. Some of the younger men were eager to learn and came to the inn in the evening to hear me talk, but I, too, had to be about my Father's business. I went for a trip to Londonderry to study the citadel of Irish Protestantism and to make the final parting with Molly easier. When I returned, I didn't ask her to come to me at night: what was the good? But the night before I went to Belfast she came and I explored with her some of the side-paths of affection and confessed, with all frankness, that since I met Smith I was all ambition-under a vow, so to speak, to develop every faculty I had at any cost. "I am not ambitious, Molly, of place or power or riches, but of knowledge and wisdom I'm the lover and priest, resolved to let nothing stand in the way."
I explained to her that that was the reason why I had come to Ireland, just as the same desire of knowledge had driven me years before round the world, and would no doubt drive me again. "I don't want happiness even, Molly, nor comfort, though I'll take all I can get of both, but they're not my aim or purpose. I'm wedded to the one quest like a knight of the Holy Grail and my whole life will go to the achievement. Don't ask me why, I don't know. I only know that Smith, my friend and professor in Lawrence, Kansas, lit the sacred fire in me and I'll go on till death. You must not think I don't care for you; I do with all my heart. You're a great woman, heart and soul and body, but my work calls me and I must go."
"I've always felt it," she said quietly, "always felt that you would not stay here or marry anyone here. I understand and I only hope your ambition may make you happy, for without happiness, without love, is there anything worth having in life? I can't believe it, but then I'm only a girl. If you ever thought of coming back, write first. To see you suddenly would stop my heart with joy."