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Chapter 7First Journey to Rome — First LoveERSTE RÖMERFAHRT — ERSTE LIEBE

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Yes, my ascent began brilliantly. I travelled by way of Vienna and went to Canon, the great man, the teacher of Ferdinand Keller. There I was set to draw a skull for a whole day in his manner, which drew hot tears from me. Then I visited the beautiful Lili Lauser, my childhood crush. And then on by way of Trieste to Venice. All the stars came into flower above me — every dream of beauty became reality for me. I had put up at the Hotel Sandwirt. The view from my window by moonlight! Was there anything so unreally dreamlike as Venice by moonlight? —

At the hotel I came to know a Polish poet, Edwin Placzek. His bride had just died. He surrounded me with the tenderest care. On his arm, in the shadow of his deep learning, I first visited all the places of my childhood longing. We went out to the Armenian monastery, once again on Byron's traces. On the way back all the bells were ringing, the waters turned purple; the Pole wept with feeling. Never afterwards, however often and however long I was in Venice, did I see it again in such a mood.

And then there was something else that made those Venetian days unforgettable to me. Feuerbach was there at the time, working on his Battle of the Amazons1. He had also painted The Concert shortly before, the girls making music, who were afterwards drowned on a pleasure trip on the lagoon. — His spirit was overshadowed; it was a few years before his end. Perhaps he was already writing his affecting Legacy at that time, and carrying thoughts of death about with him. Who can say? I had sought him out again, and he had remembered in the friendliest way the little painting-woman who had descended on him in Heidelberg some years before. He allowed me to come more often. So now I came daily, while he sat up on the scaffold at his Battle of the Amazons, and rummaged in his portfolios and looked at all the countless study heads, into the furthest corner of the giant studio. He seemed to me different from that time in Heidelberg, much, much quieter. But I had the feeling that my nearness did him good, although we often sat for hours without exchanging a word. My youthful enthusiasm for art, for beauty, for Venice may well have made him think of his own flames of youth, now so heavily darkened — it may have filled him with something like melancholy to think how soon those ideal flames would be damped and dulled by ash and the slag of living. I was so deeply grateful to him for tolerating me, and we took our leave almost with emotion. — Nor did I ever see him again. His fate was soon to be fulfilled. —

Then I went to Florence. There, in the Casa Nardini, I met the architect Schulze, recommended to me by Alfred Waag, his friend, to whom he had given me a letter of introduction. He and his comrade, Dr. Schönfeld (an art historian who died young), took me energetically under their wing. I learned a great deal through those two. Unfortunately my travelling companion for Rome, Miss Fer, then arrived, who soon found these thorough inspections of art boring. She was a beautiful Scottish painter with very little talent, whom I had come to know in my last Karlsruhe days. Since she too wanted to go to Rome for a longer stay, we had agreed, on Frau von Putlitz's advice, to meet in Florence. I was soon to regret it, for she was a weight round my leg for ever and always. —

My whole first Roman period I really need not describe again. I have set it down in my novella “Truggold,” in my volume of novellas Tollkraut2.

But since those novellas are out of print, I will try once more to let those times live again in me. However many times I came back to Rome later, however many years I spent there, — never did the impressions return as they were on my first stay.

The architect Schulze and his friend had likewise come to Rome, and showed us a good deal more, smoothed many paths for us — but with deep regret I soon had to recognise that these two fine and learned men were spoiled for the serious struggle of life for all time, idled and drunk through and through. Schulze also tried to shoot himself ten years later. Taken to the hospital by the Tarpeian Rock, he threw himself out of the window in delirium tremens when he was nearly cured. Another of the many to whom the “thousand voices in the depths”3 have lied. —

And have they not done the same to me, though in quite another way? They lied fame and greatness to me, and a roaring success in return for restless struggle! And now? And now? —

We found an atmospheric apartment, Miss Fer and I, on the first floor of the Via del Campidoglio 51, with the full view over the whole Forum, bounded by the Tempio della Pace and, on the right, by the Colosseum on the Palatine. For the first few nights I did not want to go to bed, so vast did I find the moonlit view over that ancient world of ruins. And once especially, during a thunderstorm at night. — Yes, Italian life went into us and dawned on us in deep draughts. Soon, in a trattoria in the Via Giulio Romano (the “tre re,” which along with the whole lane has since had to give way to the national monument), we came to know an older Munich painter, Herr Leinecker, who offered himself as our escort on longer expeditions into the Campagna. That suited me very well! The good man sniffed out every path, and although he spoke frightful Italian he could make himself understood everywhere. So we undertook the greatest excursions. Miss Fer seldom came along; it was too far and too strenuous for her, and she also maintained: “Why, the man is head over heels in love with you!” That struck me as unspeakably comic, the honest old boy, who looked like a brother of Garibaldi. He called me “Principessa Maccheroni” and Fer “Signora Castania.” — But I enjoyed the Via Appia, the Campagna and the Alban Hills in deep draughts.

I also came to know Rome in quite another way besides. Ferdinand Gregorovius4, the great historian of Rome, became my guide. He was living in the Via Sistina then, and I brought him a recommendation from his friend Mathilde Muhr. He took me up in the heartiest way and went off with me on forays into the inner city. Also to the green osterias of the Via Nazionale, which a few years later shot up like mushrooms. It was shortly before the dreaming vineyards were parcelled out! Only a few years later all this seemed to me like an improbable dream! Yes, how I enjoyed Rome!

At San Pietro in Montorio, too, I began a picture, “At the Grave of Beatrice Cenci5,” a marble balustrade with white putti, and before it a garland of laurel and spring blossom: the flowers that the people still bring her today on the anniversary of her death, thanks to the picture by Guido Reni.

I lived through a great flooding of the Tiber, which alarmed my parents enormously at a distance but brought me the most remarkable impressions. The Piazza del Popolo under water, with boats going about on it! A little Venice!

From Darmstadt the mourning news reached me that the Grand Duchess Alice had died of diphtheria6, which she had caught from kissing her diphtheritic child. The news shook me deeply! So little happiness, even on the heights of life!

We lived very sociably, Miss Fer and I, but we had no grand dresses. Margaret a white silk and I a black velvet. These we then trimmed with the appropriate flowers of the season. I went a great deal to Frau Professor Helbig7, a Russian princess by birth, “la principessa grassa,” as she was called in the popular mouth. One of the most brilliant and original women I have ever met. Ah, I saw her often again in the course of the years! The last time she was completely deranged in mind. — “Oh what a noble mind was here destroyed”; I could not get that word of Shakespeare's out of my head. In those days, then, she drew me and loved me and preached at me to wear her own fashion after all — a loose sack. Later the “own-dress” movement proved her right in a good deal. But for barrel figures like “la principessa grassa” the loose black monk's cowl will never be the right thing.

And then — I was to meet my first real love! It was “Cino Goggia,” Capitano del Stato maggiore. At an Italian officials' ball! He danced with me and then sat down beside me, spoke fluent German, for he had been educated in Austria, and proposed to me on that very first evening that he should give me Italian lessons. So he came to our apartment two afternoons a week with I miei prigioni. Leinecker met him there once, withdrew without a word, and the next day I found him taking down from our sitting-room walls the studies he had lent us for decoration. To my astonished question he answered curtly: “You are walking the paths of emancipation, and so our paths part.”8 But when he saw that everything was going on quite respectably, he brought them back one day, repentant, and planned a new Campagna expedition with me. With Goggia I also translated Goethe's Tasso into Italian. We pursued these studies altogether seriously, but love crept in between them. Yet no word of it had ever been spoken. Then, when spring came, I undertook a journey to Naples and Sicily with six German ladies, as their travel marshal. It was no rest for me, since I was to haggle everything down to a quarter price for these six women, who did not speak a word of Italian, and when that did not always quite succeed I got the full benefit of all six being dissatisfied. I would not wish such a journey on my worst enemy.

Cino wrote diligently. At every poste restante I had named to him I found a letter. In the last he wrote to me: “Mia dolce amica, preparatevi a sentire grande cose.” How my soul twined itself around those words! In my mind I saw myself as his bride.

Of the end of the journey, after receiving that letter, I have no memory left; I had only the one thought, to hear these “grande cose” from him himself as soon as possible. At last we came back. We had given up our beautiful quarters on the Capitol; I had put up at what was then the “Trattoria del Genio” in the Via Due Macelli, and asked Cino to meet me in the Giardino Corsini, the present public gardens. How I dreaded that meeting! — He came an hour later than I expected him — I can still hear the faint clinking of his sabre. When I looked up he was standing before me, but not alone. His best friend, Capitano Giglioli, was at his side. Both seemed to me curiously constrained. I asked them to sit beside me on the stone bench. Goggia took out his handkerchief, spread it out and sat down on it. — — “And the great things?” I asked, trembling. — “I have become engaged, to a lady from Alexandria.” —

I took it, calmly, with composure. I congratulated him with a smiling mouth. Then they went. The clinking of the sabre died away; I was alone. — —

All day I raced about aimlessly. At eleven at night an acquaintance met me. “For God's sake, what is the matter with you?” she cried, horrified. “Why, you look like a Niobe.” And she wanted to stay the night with me. But I pushed her away. Only alone, alone! —

That summer was the saddest of my life! The passion came with elemental force! And would accept no reason, would not. — Cino was shaken. But he was conscious of no fault; no word of love had ever passed between us. But now I wrote him the truth of my feelings. He came once more, and our tears flowed together. A hundred times I wanted to die. What nights of despair I had on the balcony of my room, high on the top floor of a house in the Via Sistina. One thing only I did not understand at the time: that it no longer showed on me outwardly, this sudden shattering of my first love. On the contrary, it is precisely from that period that I remember most vividly the naïve popular delight in my “beauty.” I could not go into any of the little botteghe without the shopman staring at me in rapture or the shopwoman saying with a smile: “E bella, bella.” How indifferent that was to me then! What use had it been to me! — Later I should have taken far more pleasure in these outward successes, but by then they were over. —

I stayed in Rome the whole summer through, and painted, painted! In Tivoli I camped for several weeks with two old painters, Helene Richter and Anna Planck9. They are both dead by now, I suppose. For decades they lived together in cosy community, picturesquely boxed in in the Vicolo Avignonese. “Where other people have children, we have rooms,” said Planck, laughing, whenever they had fitted up another partition somewhere. Later they did separate after all. Friendship between women, or perhaps rather friendship between human beings! — — πάντα ῥεῖ — all things flow! — — — In those days in Tivoli — I was painting in the Villa d'Este — when despair threatened to come over me all too violently, I would go into the grotto behind the falling water and scream — scream. —

I often walked down into the gorge, too, from the temple of the Sibyl to the wildly thundering waters of the Arno. The pomegranates were in flower, my pomegranates, out of every cleft in the rock there and in the Villa d'Este. But nobody wanted them, since Cino had scorned them, the pomegranate flowers of my hot, red love. Often now I thought of the words of the dead Grand Duchess Alice: “Only in unhappiness do we learn to recognise what we possess in painting.”

I got over this mountain of life too, as later over so many that I believed could not be got over. I got over it — to what end?

After decades I heard of Goggia again, quite recently. He had become a general; the rich silk merchant's daughter from Alexandria had died early and childless; he had married a second time and had the pleasure of small children late in life. The other day I read in his letters again. “Mia dolce amica.” Yes, that was my first love! — —

In the Villa d'Este, by the way, in the autumn — before I came to know Cino I was a good deal more enterprising — I had descended on the Abbé Liszt10. From below on the terrace I had seen his white hair fluttering above a black soutane. “Who is that?” I asked the caretaker's wife. “L'Abbé Liszt!” — “Here, take him my card.” — And I was led up. He was most gracious, for I was young. I stayed for hours, and he improvised for me! There was caffè nero with it. — That was an event for me! Unfortunately he was away in the summer, or his playing might perhaps have brought me deliverance in my despair. —

... Up out of the lap of night's dream my first loving rises, like a moonrise, golden, great — and left unattained ...