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,