I am to take my fill of memories
and conjure up certain bitter-sweet phantoms of the past.
Meals must be
taken in definite restaurants; a certain church must be entered; a sip
of water taken from a fountain - from one, and one only (no easy task,
this, for most of the fountains of Rome are so constructed that, however
abundant their flow, a man may die of thirst ere obtaining a mouthful);
I must linger awhile at the very end, the dirty end, of the horrible Via
Principe Amedeo and, again, at a corner near the Portico d'Ottavia;
perambulate the Protestant cemetery, Monte Mario, and a few quite
uninteresting modern sites; the Acqua Acetosa, a stupid place, may on no
account be forgotten, nor yet that bridge on the Via Nomentana - not the
celebrated bridge but another one, miles away in the Campagna, the
dreariest of little bridges, in the dreariest of landscapes. Why? It has
been hallowed by the tread of certain feet.
Thus, by a kind of sacred procedure, I immerge myself into those old
stones and recreate my peculiar Roman mood. It is rather ridiculous.
Tradition wills it.
To-day came the turn of the Protestant cemetery. I have a view of this
place, taken about the 'seventies - I wish I could reproduce it here, to
show how this spot has been ruined. A woman who looks after the
enclosure was in a fairly communicative mood; we had a few minutes'
talk, among the tombs. What a jumble of names and nationalities, by the
way! What a mixed assemblage lies here, in this foreign earth! One would
like to write down all their names, shake them in a bag, pick out fifty
at random and compose their biographies. It would be a curious
cosmopolitan document.
They have now a dog, the woman tells me, a ferocious dog who roams among
the tombs, since several brass plates have been wrenched off by
marauders. At night? I inquire. At night. At night.... Slowly, warily, I
introduce the subject of fiammelle. It is not a popular theme. No! She
has heard of such things, but never seen them; she never comes here at
night, God forbid!
What are fiammelle? Little flames, will-o'-the-wisps which hover about
the graves at such hours, chiefly in the hot months or after autumn
rains. It is a well-authenticated apparition; the scientist Bessel saw
one; so did Casanova, here at Rome. He describes it as a pyramidal flame
raised about four feet from the ground which seemed to accompany him as
he walked along. He saw the same thing later, at Cesena near Bologna.
There was some correspondence on the subject (started by Dr. Herbert
Snow) in the Observer of December 1915 and January 1916. Many are the
graveyards I visited in this country and in others with a view to
"satisfying my curiosity," as old Ramage would say, on this point, and
all in vain. My usual luck! The fiammelle, on that particular evening,
were coy - they were never working. They are said to be frequently
observed at Scanno in the Abruzzi province, and the young secretary of
the municipality there, Mr. L. O., will tell you of our periodical
midnight visits to the local cemetery. Or go to Licenza and ask for my
intelligent friend the schoolmaster. What he does not know about
fiammelle is not worth knowing. Did he not, one night, have a veritable
fight with a legion of them which the wind blew from the graveyard into
his face? Did he not return home trembling all over and pale as
death?...
Here reposes, among many old friends, the idealist Malwida von
Meysenbug; that sculptured medallion is sufficient to proclaim her
whereabouts to those who still remember her. It is good to pause awhile
and etheralize oneself in the neighbourhood of her dust. She lived a
quiet life in an old brown house, since rebuilt, that overlooks the
Coliseum, on whose comely ellipse and blood-stained history she loved to
pasture eyes and imagination. Often I walked thence with her, in those
sparkling mornings, up the Palatine hill, to stroll about the ilexes and
roses in view of the Forum, to listen to the blackbirds, or the siskins
in that pine tree. She was of the same type, the same ethical parentage,
as the late Mathilde Blind, a woman of benignant and refined enthusiasm,
full of charity to the poor and, in those later days, almost
shadowy - remote from earth. She had saturated herself with Rome, for
whose name she professed a tremulous affection untainted by worldly
considerations such as mine; she loved its "persistent spiritual life";
it was her haven of rest. So, while her arm rested lightly on mine, we
wandered about those gardens, the saintly lady and myself; her mind
dwelling, maybe, on memories of that one classic love-adventure and the
part she came nigh to playing in the history of Europe, while mine was
lost in a maze of vulgar love-adventures, several of which came nigh to
making me play a part in the police-courts of Rome.
What may have helped to cement our strange friendship was my
acquaintance, at that time, with the German metaphysicians. She must
have thought me a queer kind of Englishman to discuss with such
familiarity the tenets of these cloudy dreamers. Malwida loved them in a
bland and childlike fashion. She would take one of their dicta as a
starting-point - establish herself, so to speak, within this or that
nebular hypothesis - and argue thence in academic fashion for the sake of
intellectual exercise and the joy of seeing where, after a thousand
twists and turnings, you were finally deposited. A friend of ours - some
American - had lately published a Socratic dialogue entitled "The
Prison"; it formed a fruitful theme of conversation. [9] Nietzsche was
also then to the fore, and it pleases me to recollect that even in those
days I detected his blind spot; his horror of those English materialists
and biologists.
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