Romanita
Mrs. Arthur Strong : A Memoir. By Gladys Scott Thomson. (Cohen and West. 7s. 6d.) IN the latter part of the nineteenth century. and the first thirty years or so of the twentieth there were to be found in Italy three English women of strong and outstanding personality and character—Janet Ross of Poggio Gherardo near Florence, Vernon Lee also of Florence and Eugenie Strong of the British School at Rome. All three were aristocrats by temperament. The most remarkable is the subject of this memoir. No such women exist today ; they were a Victorian product.
The life of Mrs. Strong (1860-1943) was devoted to Rome and the study of Roman art and archaeology. The daughter of a French Catholic mother and an English Protestant father, she was born within sound of Bow Bells, and her rather chanceful youth might seem to have been a perfect preparation for her life-work. Her girlhood was passed in Spain and at a convent school in France. Italy and Sicily followed ; then Girton and University College London. Later she went to Germany, and at Munich studied under Ludwig Traube and Adolf Furtwangler ; then came Greece, then Rome, in 1892. At thirty-seven she married Arthur Strong, librarian at Chatsworth and later of the House of Lords, and lived and worked in the library and among the treasures of Chatsworth and in London. When her husband died in 1904, Mrs. Strong con- tinued to carry on his work at Chatsworth, but in 1909 she was appointed Assistant Director of the British School at Rome, with Dr. Thomas Ashby as Director. In 1908 she had published her book on Roman Sculpture from Augustus to Constantine, and in 1912 appeared Apotheosis and After Life, a study of Roman religion. But that is by no means the end of the matter. It leaves out the personality and character of this most remarkable woman.
To begin with Eugenie Strong must have been one of the beautiful women of her time, a Juno, a Roman empress. She had, too, one of the loveliest voices, which Lanciana used to compare with the " melody of the Pope's silver trumpets at St. Peter's." No one who ever heard that voice, deep, rich with its slurred Rs, will have forgotten it, whether heard on one of her Sunday afternoons frequented by cardinals, bishops, diplomats and students or at a lecture where, dressed in a plain black gown, she held the audience enthralled. In manner she was imperious, and her movements were purposely studied. She was both loved, as this memoir shows, and revered, but was not an easy person to work with " I am sorry to have annoyed you, but that is your fault, not mine," runs like a left motiv through the score of her life. Her restless, lovable colleague, Thomas Ashby, must often have been thus rebuked. At the same time no one could be more enchanting.
In 1925 Mrs. Strong resigned from the British School and estab- lished herself in the Via Balbo, where she became hostess to all that was most intellectually distinguished in Rome and among its visitors. She met Mussolini too, whom she seems to have regarded as Augustus redivivus and to whom she presented a copy of her book Apotheosis and After Life. In this book she discovers the super- natural within the pagan and Roman religion, and in making this discovery she rediscovered the faith into which she had been baptised and which she had put aside. In 1917 she was reconciled with the Catholic Church. This led her, it seems, to an enthusiasm for Baroque art, the Romanita of which she was as eager to demonstrate as she had been in regard to Roman sculpture. In truth, the dream in her mind perhaps from the beginning had been just that- Romanita throughout the ages. It was the motto of her book:
. . ha in se la lute d'un astro:
non i suoi cieli irragia soli, ma it mondo, Roma"— the eternal mission of Rome at all times, and in all places, to civilise mankind and reconcile the peoples one with another and with herself. This memoir is a loyal and truthful tribute to 'a*remarkable woman. We shall not see her like again. " In pace E. S. September 1943." Perhaps one should point out that the relic in the enamelled reliquary in the Duomo of Orvieto is not a piece of the True Cross (p. 91) but
the Corporal of the Miracle of Bolsena. , EDWARD HUTTON.
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