. History,
dates, periods, schools, sentiment, meaning, attributions, Morelli only
as yet threatening to succeed Ruskin as prophet of art, were not worth
discussion or thought. The concern was for art as a trade--the trade
which creates beauty; the vital questions were treatment, colour,
values, tone, mediums. The price of pictures and the gains of artists,
those absorbing topics of the great little men in England to-day, were
never mentioned: the man who sold was looked down on, rather. There were
nights when I went away believing that nothing mattered in the world
except the ground on a copper plate, or the grain of a canvas, or the
paint in a tube, so long and heated and bitter had been the controversy
over it. They might all be artists, but they were of a hundred opinions
as to the exact meaning of right and wrong, and they could wrangle over
mediums until the German student looked up in reproof from his columns
of advertisements and the Romans shrugged their shoulders at the curious
manners and short tempers of the _forestiere_. But there was one point
upon which I never knew them not to be of one mind, and this was the
supreme importance of art. If I ventured to disagree--which I was far
too timid to do often--they were down upon me like a flash, abusing me
for being so blind as not to see the truth in Rome, of all places, where
of a tremendous past nothing was left but the work of the masters who
built and adorned the city, or who sang and chronicled its splendours.

IV

The noise of their talk is still loud in my ears, but many of the
talkers have grown dim in my memory. Of some of the older men I cannot
recall the faces, not even the names; some of the younger I remember
better, partly I suppose because they were young and starting out in
life with us, partly because one or two later on made their names heard
of by many people outside of the _Nazionale_ and far beyond Rome.

I could not easily forget the young Architect who was then getting ready
to conquer Philadelphia--to borrow a phrase from Zola, as seems but
appropriate in writing of the Eighties--for which great end all the
knowledge of the _Beaux-Arts_ could not have served him as well as his
conviction that the architecture of Europe had waited for him to
discover it. He had never been abroad before and he could not believe
that anybody else had. He would come to our little corner from his
prowls in Rome and tell men, who had lived there for more ye