Roman Holidays, and Others Part 7

Their relation to him is the supremely poetic fact of a situation which even one who knows of it merely by hearsay cannot refuse to feel. The tragical effect of the situation is in the straining and sundering of family ties among those who take one side or the other in the difference of the monarchy and papacy. I do not know how equally Roman society, in the large or the small sense, is divided into the Black of the Papists and the White of the Monarchists (for the mediaeval names of Neri and Bianchi are revived in the modern differences), but one cannot help hearing of instances in which their political and religious opinions part fathers and sons and mothers and daughters. These are promptly noted to the least-inquiring foreigner, and his imagination is kindled by the attribution of like variances to the members of the reigning family, who are reported respectively blacker and whiter if they are not as positively black or white as the n.o.bles. Some of these are said to meet one another only in secret across the gulf that divides them openly; but how far the cleavage may descend among other cla.s.ses I cannot venture to conjecture; I can only testify to some expressions of priest-hatred which might have shocked a hardier heretical substance than mine.

One Sunday we went to the wonderful old Church of San Clemente, which is built three deep into the earth or high into the air, one story above or below the other, in the three successive periods of imperial, mediaeval, and modern Rome. It was the day when the church is illuminated, and the visitors come with their Baedekers and Hares and Murrays to identify its antiquities of architecture and fresco; it was full of people, and, if I fancied an unusual proportion of English-speaking converts among them, that might well have been, since the adjoining convent belongs to the Irish Dominicans. But I carried with me through all the historic and artistic interest of the place the sensation left by two inscriptions daubed in black on the white convent wall next the church. One of these read: _"VV. la Repubblica"_ (Long live the Republic), and the other: _"M. ai Preti"_ (Death to the Priests). No attempt had been made to efface them, and as they expressed an equal hatred for the monarchy and the papacy, neither laity nor clergy may have felt obliged to interfere.

Perhaps, however, it was rightly inferred that the ferocity of one inscription might be best left to counteract the influence of the other.

I know that with regard to the priests you experience some such effect from the atrocious attacks in the chief satirical paper of Rome, The name of this paper was given me, with a deprecation not unmixed with recognition of its cleverness, by an Italian friend whom I was making my creditor for some knowledge of Roman journalism; and the sole copy of it which I bought was handed to me with a sort of smiling abhorrence by the kindly old kiosk woman whom I liked best to buy my daily papers of. When I came to look it through, I made more and more haste, for its satire of the priests was of an indecency so rank that it seemed to offend the nose as well as the eye. To turn from the paper was easy, but from the fact of its popularity a painful impression remained. It was not a question of whether the priests were so bad as all that, but whether its many readers believed them so, or believed them bad short of it, in the kind of wickedness they were accused of.

There can be no doubt of the constant rancor between the Clericals and the Radicals in their different phases throughout Italy. There can be almost no doubt that the Radicals will have their way increasingly, and that if, for instance, the catechism is kept in the public schools this year, it will be cast out some other year not far hence. Much, of course, depends upon whether the status can maintain itself. It is, like the status everywhere and always, very anomalous; but it is difficult to imagine either the monarchy or the papacy yielding at any point.

Apparently the State is the more self-a.s.sertive of the two, but this is through the patriotism which is the political life of the people. It must always be remembered that when the Italians entered Rome and made it the capital of their kingdom they did not drive out the French troops, which had already been withdrawn; they drove out the papal troops, the picturesque and inefficient foreign volunteers who remained behind. Every memorial of that event, therefore, is a blow at the Church, so far as the Church is identified with the lost temporal power.

One of the chief avenues is named Twenty-second September Street because the national troops entered Rome on that date; the tablets on the Porta Pia where they entered, the monument on the Pincio to the Cairoli brothers, who died for Italy; the statues of Garibaldi, of Cavour, of Victor Emmanuel everywhere painfully remind the papacy of its lost sovereignty. But the national feeling has gone in its expression beyond and behind the patriotic occupation of Rome; and no one who suffered conspicuously, at any time in the past, for freedom of thought through the piety of the fallen power is suffered to be forgotten. On its side the Church enters its perpetual protest in the self-imprisonment of the pope; and here and there, according to its opportunity, it makes record of what it has suffered from the State. For instance, at St. John Lateran, which theoretically forms part of the Leonine City of the Popes and is therefore extraterritorial to Italy, a stretch of wall is suffered to remain scarred by the cannon-shot which the monarchy fired when it took Rome from the papacy.

Doubtless there are other monuments of the kind, but their enumeration would not throw greater light on a situation which endures with no apparent promise of change. The patience of the Church is infinite; it lives and it outlives. Remembering that Arianism was older than Protestantism when Catholicism finally survived it, we must not be surprised if the Roman Church shall hold out against the Italian State not merely decades, but centuries. In the meanwhile to its children from other lands it means Rome above all the other Romes; and on us, its step-children of different faiths or unfaiths, its prison-house--if we choose so to think of the Vatican--has a supreme claim, if we love the sculpture of pagan Rome or the painting of Christian Rome.

We swarm to its galleries in every variety of nationality, with guide-books in every tongue, and we are very queer, for the most part, to any one of our number who can sufficiently exteriorate himself to get the rest of us in perspective. It is probably well that most of us do not stagger under any great knowledge of the crus.h.i.+ng history of the place, which has been the scene of the most terrible experiences of the race, the most touching, the most august. Provisionally ignorant, at least, we begin to appear at the earliest practicable hour before the outermost stairway of the Vatican, and, while the Swiss Guards still have on their long, blue cloaks to keep their black and yellow legs warm, mount to the Sistine Chapel. Here we help instruct one another, as we stand about or sit about in twos and threes or larger groups, reading aloud from our polyglot Baedekers while we join in identifying the different facts. Here, stupendously familiar, whether we have seen it before or not, is Michelangelo's giant fresco of the Judgment, as prodigious as we imagined or remembered it; here are his mighty Prophets and his mighty Sibyls; and here below them, in incomparably greater charm, are the frescos of Botticelli, with the grace of his Primavera playing through them all like a strain of music and taking the soul with joy.

[Ill.u.s.tration: 34 SISTINE CHAPEL, VATICAN PALACE]

It is the same crowd in the Raphael Stanze, but rather silenter, for by now we have taught ourselves enough from our Baedekers at least to read them under our breaths, and we talk low before the frescos and the canvases. Some of us are even mute in the presence of the School of Athens, whatever reserves we may utter concerning the Transfiguration.

If we are honest, we more or less own what our impressions really are from those other famous works, concerning which our impressions are otherwise altogether and inexpressibly unimportant; it is a question of ethics and not aesthetics, as most of our simple-hearted company suppose it to be; and, if we are dishonest, we pretend to have felt and thought things at first-hand from them which we have learned at second-hand from our reading. I will confess, for my small part, that I had more pleasure in the coloring and feeling of some of the older canvases and in here and there a t.i.tian than in all the Raphaels in the Stanze of his name.

I was not knowing his works for the first time; no one perhaps does that, such is the multiplicity of the copies of them; and I vividly remembered them from my acquaintance with the originals four decades before, as I had remembered the Michelangelos; but in their presence and in the presence of so many other masterpieces in the different rooms, with their horrible miracles and atrocious martyrdoms, I realized as for the first time what a b.l.o.o.d.y religion ours was. It was such relief, such rest, to go from those broilings and beheadings and crucifixions and Sayings and stabbings into the long, tranquil aisles of the museum where the marble men and women, created for earthly immortality by Greek art, welcomed me to their serenity and sanity. The earlier G.o.ds might have been the devils which the early Christians fancied them, but they did not look it; they did not look as if it was they that had loosed the terrors upon mankind out of which the true faith has but barely struggled at last, now when its relaxing grasp seems slipping from the human mind. I remembered those peaceful pagans so perfectly that I could have gone confidently to this or that and hailed him friend; and though I might not have liked to claim the acquaintance of all of them in the flesh, in the marble I fled to it as refuge from the cruel visions of Christian art. If this is perhaps saying too much, I wish also to hedge from the wholesale censure of my fellow-sight-seers which I may have seemed to imply. They did not prevail so clutteringly in the sculpture galleries as in the Sistine Chapel and the Stanze. One could have the statues as much to one's self as one liked; there were courts with murmuring fountains in them; and there was a view of Rome from a certain window, where no fellow-tourist intruded between one and the innumerable roofs and domes and towers, and the heights beyond whose snows there was nothing but blue sky. It was a beautiful morning, with a sun mild as English summer, which did not prevent the afternoon from turning cold with wind and raining and hailing and snowing. This in turn did not keep off a fine red sunset, with an evening star of glittering silver that brightened as the sunset faded. At Rome the weather can be of as many minds in March as in April at New York.

But through all one's remembrance of the Roman winter a sentiment of spring plays enchantingly, like that grace of Botticelli's Primavera in his Sistine frescos. It is not a sentiment of summer, though it is sometimes a summer warmth which you feel, and except in the steam-heated hotels it does not penetrate to the interiors. In the galleries and the churches you must blow your nails if you wish to thaw your fingers, but, if you go out-of-doors, there is a radiant imitation of May awaiting you. She takes you by your thick glove and leads you in your fur-lined overcoat through sullen streets that open upon sunny squares, with fountains streaming into the crystal air, and makes you own that this is the Italian winter as advertised--that is, if you are a wanderer and a stranger; if you are an Italian and at home you keep in the out-door warmth, but shun the sun, and in-doors you wrap up more thickly than ever, or you go to bed if you have a more luxurious prejudice against s.h.i.+vering. If you are a beggar, as you very well may be in Rome, you impart your personal heat to a specific curbstone or the spot which you select as being most in the path of charity, and cling to it from dawn till dark. Or you acquire somehow the rights of a chair just within the padded curtain of a church, and do not leave it till the hour for closing. The Roman beggars are of all claims upon pity, but preferably I should say they were blind, and some of these are quite young girls, and mostly rather cheerful. But the very gayest beggar I remember was a legless man at the gate of the Vatican Museum; the saddest was a sullen dwarf on the way to this cripple, whose gloom a donative even of twenty-five centessimi did not suffice to abate.

XII. SUPERFICIAL OBSERVATIONS AND CONJECTURES

It had seemed to me that in the afternoons of the old papal times, so dear to foreigners who never knew them, I used to see a series of patrician ladies driving round and round on the Pincio, reclining in their landaus and s.h.i.+elding their complexions from the November suns of the year 1864 with the fringed parasols of the period. In the doubt which attends all recollections of the past, after age renders us uncertain of the present, I hastened on my second Sunday at Rome in February, 1908, to enjoy this vision, if possible. I found the Pincio unexpectedly near; I found the suns.h.i.+ne; I found the familiar winter warmth which in Southern climates is so unlike the summer warmth in ours; but the drive which I had remembered as a long ellipse had narrowed to a little circle, where one could not have driven round faster than a slow trot without danger of vertigo. I did not find that series of apparent principessas or imaginable marchesas leaning at their lovely lengths in their landaus. I found in overwhelming majority the numbered victorias, which pa.s.s for cabs in Rome, full of decent tourists, together with a great variety of people on foot, but not much fas.h.i.+on and no swells that my sn.o.bbish soul could be sure of. There was, indeed, one fine moment when, at a retired point of the drive, I saw two private carriages drawn up side by side in their encounter, with two stout old ladies, whom I decided to be dowager countesses at the least, partially projected from their opposing windows and lost in a delightful exchange, as I hoped, of scandal. But the only other impressive personality was that of an elderly, obviously American gentleman, in the solitary silk hat and long frock-coat of the scene. There were other Americans, but none so formal; the English were in all degrees of informality down to tan shoes and at least one travelling-cap. The women's dress, whether they were on foot or in cabs, was not striking, though more than half of them were foreigners and could easily have afforded to outdress the Italians, especially the work people, though these were there in their best.

[Ill.u.s.tration: 35 PIAZZA DEL POPOLO FROM THE PINCIAN HILL]

There was a band-stand in the s.p.a.ce first reached by the promenaders, and there ought clearly to have been a band, but I was convinced that there was to be none by a brief colloquy between one of the cab-drivers (doubtless goaded to it by his fair freight) and the gentlest of Roman policemen, whose response was given in accents of hopeful compa.s.sion:

CABMAN: _"Musica, no?"_ (No music?)

POLICEMAN: "_Forse l' avremo oramai"_ (Perhaps we shall have it presently.)

We did not have it at all that Sunday, possibly because it was the day after the a.s.sa.s.sination of the King of Portugal, and the flags were at half-mast everywhere. So we went, such of us as liked, to the parapet overlooking the Piazza del Popolo, and commanding one of those prospects of Rome which are equally incomparable from every elevation. I, for my part, made the dizzying circuit of the brief drive on foot in the dark shadows of the roofing ilexes (if they are ilexes), and then strolled back and forth on the paths set thick with plinths bearing the heads of the innumerable national great--the poets, historians, artists, scientists, politicians, heroes--from the ancient Roman to the modern Italian times. I particularly looked up the poets of the last hundred years, because I had written about them in one of my many forgotten books, till I fancied a growing consciousness in them at this encounter with an admirer; they, at least, seemed to remember my book. Then I went off to the cafe overlooking them in their different alleys, and had tea next a man who was taking lemon instead of milk in his. Here I was beset with an impa.s.sioned longing to know whether he was a Russian or American, since the English always take milk in their tea, but I could not ask, and when I had suffered my question as long as I could in his presence I escaped from it, if you can call it escaping, to the more poignant question of what it would be like to come, Sunday after Sunday, to the Pincio, in the life-long voluntary exile of some Americans I knew, who meant to spend the rest of their years under the spell of Rome. I thought, upon the whole, that it would be a dull, sad fate, for somehow we seem born in a certain country in order to die in it, and I went home, to come again other Sundays to the Pincio, but not all the Sundays I promised myself.

On one of these Sundays I found Roman boys playing an inscrutable game among the busts of their storied compatriots, a sort of "I spy" or "Hide and go whoop," counting who should be "It" in an Italian version of "Oneary, ory, ickory, an," and then scattering in every direction behind the plinths and bushes. They were not more molestive than boys always are in a world which ought to be left entirely to old people, and I could not see that they did any harm. But somebody must have done harm, for not only was a bust here and there scribbled over in pencil, but the bust of Machiavelli had its nose freshly broken off in a jagged fracture that was very hurting to look at. This may have been done by some mistaken moralist, who saw in the old republican adviser of princes that enemy of mankind which he was once reputed to be. At any rate, I will not attribute the mutilation to the boys of Rome, whom I saw at other times foregoing so many opportunities of mischief in the Villa Bor-ghese. One of them even refused money from me there when I misunderstood his application for matches and offered him some coppers.

He put my tip aside with a dignified wave of his hand and a proud backward step; and, indeed, I ought to have seen from the flat, broad cap he wore that he was a school-boy of civil condition. The Romans are not nearly so dramatic as the Neapolitans or Venetians or even as the Tuscans; but once in the same pleasance I saw a controversy between school-boys which was carried on with an animation full of beauty and finish. They argued back and forth, not violently, but vividly, and one whom I admired most enforced his reasons with charming gesticulations, whirling from his opponents with quick turns of his body and many a renunciatory retirement, and then facing about and advancing again upon the unconvinced. I decided that his admirable drama had been studied from the histrionics of his mother in domestic scenes; and, if I had been one of those other boys, I should have come over to his side instantly.

The Roman manners vary from Roman to Roman, just as our own manners, if we had any, would vary from New-Yorker to New-Yorker. Zola thinks the whole population is more or less spoiled with the conceit of Rome's ancient greatness, and shows it. One could hardly blame them if this were so; but I did not see any strong proof of it, though I could have imagined it on occasion. I should say rather that they had a republican simplicity of manner, and I liked this better in the shop people and work people than the civility overflowing into servility which one finds among the like folk, for instance, in England. I heard complaints from foreigners that the old-time deference of the lower cla.s.ses was gone, but I did not miss it. Once in a cafe, indeed, the waiter spoke to me in _Voi_ (you) instead of _Lei_ (lords.h.i.+p), but the Neapolitans often do this, and I took it for a friendly effort to put me at my ease in a strange tongue with a more accustomed form. We were trying to come together on the kind of tea I wanted, but we failed, if I wanted it strong, for I got it very weak and tepid. I thought another day that it would be stronger if I could get it brought hotter, but it was not, and so I went no more to a place where I was liable to be called You instead of Lords.h.i.+p and still get weak tea. I think this was a mistake of mine and a loss, for at that cafe I saw some old-fas.h.i.+oned Italian types drinking their black coffee at afternoon tea-time out of tumblers, and others calling for pen and ink and writing letters, and ladies sweetly asking for newspapers and reading them there; and I ought to have continued coming to study them.

As to my conjectures of republican quality in the Romans, I had explicit confirmation from a very intelligent Italian who said of the anomalous social and political situation in Rome: "We Italians are naturally republicans, and, if it were a question of any other reigning family, we should have the republic. But we feel that we owe everything, the very existence of the nation, to the house of Savoy, and we are loyal to it in our grat.i.tude. Especially we are true to the present king." It is known, of course, that Menotti Garibaldi continues the republican that his father always was, but I heard of his saying that, if a republic were established, Victor Emmanuel III. would be overwhelmingly chosen the first president. It is the Socialists who hold off unrelentingly from the monarchy, and not the republicans, as they can be differenced from them. One of the well-known Roman anomalies is that some members of the oldest families are or have been Socialists; and such a n.o.ble was reproached because he would not go to thank the king in recognition of some signal proof of his public spirit and unselfish patriotism. He owned the generosity of the king's behavior and his claim upon popular acknowledgment, but he said that he had taught the young men of his party the duty of ignoring the monarchy, and he could not go counter to the doctrine he had preached.

If I venture to speak now of a very extraordinary trait of the munic.i.p.al situation at Rome, it must be without the least pretence to authority or to more than such superficial knowledge as the most incurious visitor to Rome can hardly help having. In the capital of Christendom, where the head of the Church dwells in a tradition of supremacy hardly less Italian than Christian, the syndic, or mayor, is a Jew, and not merely a Jew, but an alien Jew, English by birth and education, a Londoner and an Oxford man. More yet, he is a Freemason, which in Italy means things anathema to the Church, and he is a very prominent Freemason. With reference to the State, his official existence, though not inimical, is through the fusion of the political parties which elected him hardly less anomalous. This combination overthrew the late Clerical city government, and it included Liberals, Republicans, Socialists, and all the other anti-Clericals. Whatever liberalism or republicanism means, socialism cannot mean less than the economic solution of regality and aristocracy in Europe, and in Italy as elsewhere. It does not mean the old-fas.h.i.+oned revolution; it means simply the effacement of all social differences by equal industrial obligations. So far as the Socialists can characterize it, therefore, the actual munic.i.p.al government of Rome is as antimonarchical as it is antipapal. But the syndic of Rome is a man of education, of culture, of intelligence, and he is evidently a man of consummate tact. He has known how to reconcile the warring elements, which made peace in his election, to one another and to their outside antagonists, to the Church and to the State, as well as to himself, in the course he holds over a very rugged way. His opportunities of downfall are pretty constant, it will be seen, when it is explained that if a measure with which he is identified fails in the city council it becomes his duty to resign, like the prime-minister of England in the like case with Parliament, But Mr. Nathan, who is as alien in his name as in his race and religion, and is known orally to the Romans as Signor Nahtahn, has not yet been obliged to resign. He has felt his way through every difficulty, and has not yet been identified with any fatally compromising measure. In such an extremely embarra.s.sing predicament as that created by the conflict between the labor unions and the police early in April, and eventuating in the two days' strike, he knew how to do the wise thing and the right thing. As to the incident, he held his hand and he held his tongue, but he went to visit the wounded workmen in the hospital, and he condoled with their families. He was somewhat blamed for that, but his action kept for him the confidence of that large body of his supporters who earn their living with their hands.

It is said that the common Romans do not willingly earn their living with their hands; that they like better being idle and, so far as they can, ornamental. In this they would not differ from the uncommon Romans, the moneyed, the leisured, the pedigreed cla.s.ses, who reproach them for their indolence; but I do not know whether they are so indolent as all that or not. I heard it said that they no longer want work, and that when they get it they do not do it well--a supposed effect of the socialism which is supposed to have spoiled their manners. I heard it said more intelligently, as I thought, that they are not easily disciplined, and that they cannot be successfully a.s.sociated in the industries requiring workmen to toil in large bodies together; they will not stand that. Also I heard it said, as I thought again rather intelligently, that where work is given them to do after a certain model, they will conform perfectly for the first three or four times; then their fatal creativeness comes into play, and they begin to better their instruction by trying to improve upon the patterns--that is, they are artists, not artisans. They must please their fancy in their work or they cannot do it well. From my own experience I cannot say whether this is generally or only sometimes true, but I can affirm that where they delayed or erred in their work they took their failure very amiably. I never saw sweeter patience than that of the Roman matron who had undertaken a small job of getting spots out of a garment, and who quite surpa.s.sed me in self-control when she announced, day after appointed day, that the work was not done yet or not done perfectly; she was politeness itself.

On the other hand, some young ladies at a fas.h.i.+onable concert which the queen-mother honored with her presence did not seem very polite. They kept on their immense hats, as women still do in all public places on the European continent, and they seized as many chairs as they could for friends who did not come, and at supreme moments they stood up on their chairs and spoiled such poor chance of seeing the queen-mother as the stranger might have had. While the good King Umberto lived the stranger would have had many other chances, for it is said that the queen showed herself with him to the people at the windows of their palace every afternoon; but in her widowhood she lives retired, though now and then her carriage may be seen pa.s.sing through the streets, with four special policemen on bicycles following it. These waited about the doorway of the concert-hall that afternoon and formed a very simple, if effective, guard. In fact, it might be said that in its relations with the popular life the reigning family could hardly be simpler. The present king and queen are not so much seen in public as King Umberto and Queen Margherita were, but it is known from many words and deeds that King Victor Emmanuel wishes to be the friend, if not the acquaintance, of his people. When it was proposed to push the present tunnel, with its walks and drives and trolley-lines, under the Quirinal Palace and gardens, so as to connect the two princ.i.p.al business quarters of the city, the king was notified that the noise and jar of the traffic in it might interfere with his comfort. He asked if the tunnel would be for the general advantage, and, when this could not be denied, he gave his consent in words to some such effect as "That settles it." When the German Emperor last visited Rome he is said to have had some state question as to whether he should drive on a certain occasion to the Palatine with the king's horses or the pope's. He who told the story did not remember how the question was solved by the emperor, but he said, "Our king walked."

All this does not mean republican simplicity in the king; a citizen king is doubtless a contradiction in terms anywhere out of France, and even there Louis Philippe found the part difficult. But there is no doubt that the King of Italy means to be the best sort of const.i.tuional king, and, as he is in every way an uncommon man, he will probably succeed.

One may fancy in him, if one likes, something of that almost touching anxiety of thoughtful Italians to be and to do all that they can for Italy, in a patriotism that seems as enlightened as it is devoted. If I had any criticism to make of such Italians it would be that they expected, or that they asked, too much of themselves. To be sure, they have a right to expect much, for they have done wonders with a country which, without great natural resources except of heart and brain, entered bankrupt into its national existence, and has now grown financially to the dimensions of its vast treasury building, with a paper currency at par and of equal validity with French and English money. If the industrial conditions in Italy were so bad as we compa.s.sionate outsiders have been taught to suppose, this financial change is one of the most important events accomplished in Europe since the great era of the racial unifications began. No one will pretend that there have not been great errors of administration in Italy, but apparently the Italians have known how to learn wisdom from their folly.

There has been a great deal of industrial adversity; the cost of living has advanced; the taxes are very heavy, and the burdens are unequally adjusted; many speculators have been ruined, and much honestly invested money has been lost. But wages have increased with the prices and rents and taxes, and in a country where every ounce of coal that drives a wheel of production or transportation has to be brought a thousand miles manufactures and railroads have been multiplied.

The state has now taken over the roads and has added their cost to that of its expensive army and navy, but no reasonable witness can doubt that the Italians will be equal to this as well as their other national undertakings. These in Rome are peculiarly difficult and onerous, because they must be commensurate with the scale of antiquity. In a city surviving amid the colossal ruins of the past it would be grotesque to build anything of the modest modern dimensions such as would satisfy the eye in other capitals. The Palace of Finance, at a time when Italian paper was at a discount almost equal to that of American paper during the Civil War, had to be prophetic of the present solvency in size. The yet-unfinished Palace of Justice (one dare not recognize its beauty above one's breath) must be planned so huge that the highest story had to be left off if the foundations were to support the superstructure; the memorial of Victor Emmanuel II. must be of a vastness in keeping with the monuments of imperial Rome, some of which it will partly obscure. Yet as the nation has grown in strength under burdens and duties, it will doubtless prove adequate to the colossal architectural enterprises of its capital. Private speculation in Rome brought disaster twenty-five years ago, but now the city has overflowed with new life the edifices that long stood like empty sepulchres, and public enterprises cannot finally fail; otherwise we should not be digging the Panama Ca.n.a.l or be trying to keep the New York streets in repair. We may confide in the ability of the Italians to carry out their undertakings and to pay the cost out of their own pockets. It is easy to criticise them, but we cannot criticise them more severely than they criticise themselves; and perhaps, as our censure cannot profit them, we might with advantage to ourselves, now and then, convert it into recognition of the great things they have accomplished.

XIII. CASUAL IMPRESSIONS

The day that we arrived in Rome the unclouded sun was yellow on the white dust of the streets, which is never laid by a munic.i.p.al watering-cart, though sometimes it is sprinkled into mire from the garden-hose of the ab.u.t.ting hotels; and in my rashness I said that for Rome you want sun and you want youth. Yet there followed many gray days when my age found Rome very well indeed, and I would not have the septuagenarian keep away because he is no longer in the sunny sixties.

He may see through his gla.s.ses some things hidden even from the eyes of the early forties. If he drives out beyond the Porta Pia, say, some bright afternoon, and notes how the avenue between the beautiful old villas is also bordered by many vacant lots advertised for sale as well as built up with pleasant new houses, he will be able to carry away with him the significant fact that a convenient and public-spirited trolley-line has the same suburban effect in Rome, Italy, as in Rome, New York. If he meets some squadrons of cavalry or some regiments of foot, in that military necessity of constant movement which the civilian can never understand, he may make the useful reflection that it is much better to have the troops out of the city than in it, and he can praise the wisdom of the Italian government accordingly. On the neighboring mountains the presence or absence of snow forms the difference between summer and winter in Rome, and will suggest the question whether, after all, our one continental weather is better than the many local weathers of Europe; and perhaps he will acquire national modesty in owning that there is something more picturesque in the indications of those azure or silvery tops than in his morning paper's announcement that there is or is not a lower pressure in the region of the lakes.

At any rate, I would not have him note the intimations of such a drive at less worth than those of any more conventional fact of his Roman sojourn. If one is quite honest, or merely as honest as one may be with safety, one will often own to one's self that something merely incidental to one's purpose, in visiting this memorable place or that, was of greater charm and greater value than the fulfilment of a direct purpose. One happy morning I went, being in the vicinity, to renew the acquaintance with the Tarpeian Rock, which I had hastened to make on my first visit to Rome. I had then found it so far from such a frightfully precipitous height as I had led myself to expect that I came away and rather mocked it in print. But now, possibly because the years had moderated all my expectations in life, I thought the Tarpeian Rock very respectably steep and quite impressively lofty; either the houses at its foot had sunk with their chimneys and balconies, or the rock had risen, so that one could no longer be hurled from it with impunity. We looked at it from an arbor of the lovely little garden which we were let into beyond the top of the rock, and which was the pleasance of some sort of hospital. I think there were probably flowers there, since it was a garden, but what was best was the almond-tree covering the whole s.p.a.ce with a roof of bloom, and in this roof a score of birds that sang divinely.

[Ill.u.s.tration: 36 THE BATHS OF DIOCLETIAN]

I am aware of bringing a great many birds into these papers; but really Rome would not be Rome without them; and I could not exaggerate their number or the sweetness of their song. They particularly abounded in the cloistered and gardened close of the Cistercian Convent, which three hundred years ago ensconsed itself within the ruinous Baths of Diocletian. I have no fable at hand to explain what seems the special preference of the birds for this garden; it is possibly an idiosyncrasy, something like that of the cats which make Trajan's Forum their favorite resort. All that I can positively say is that if I were a bird I would ask nothing better than to frequent the cypresses of that garden and tune my numbers for the entertainment of the audience of extraordinary monsters in the aisles below, which bea'in plinths of clipped privet and end marble heads of horses, bulls, elephants, rhinoceroses, and their like. I do not pretend to be exact in their nomination; they may be other animals; but I am sure of their attention to the birds. I am not quite so sure of the attention of the antique shapes in the rooms of the Ludovisi collection looking into the close. I fancy them preoccupied with the in-doors cold, so great in all Italian galleries, and scarcely tempered for them by the remote and solitary brazier over which the custodians take turns in stifling themselves. They cannot come down into the sun and song of the garden, to which the American tourist may return from visiting them, to thaw out his love of the beautiful.

They are not so many or so famous as their marble brothers and sisters in the Vatican Museum, but the tourist should not miss seeing them.

Neither should he miss any accessible detail of the environing ruins of the Diocletian Baths. Let him not think because they are so handy, and so next door, as it were, to the railway station where he arrives, and to Cook's office where he goes for his letters next morning, that they are of less merit than other monuments of imperial Rome. They are not only colossally vast, but they are singularly n.o.ble, as well as so admirably convenient. Because they are so convenient, the modern Romans have turned their cavernous immensity to account in the trades and industries, and have built them up in carpenters' and blacksmiths' and plumbers' shops, where there is a cheerful hammering and banging much better than the sullen silence of more remote and difficult ruins. In color they are a very agreeable reddish brown, though not so soft to the eye as the velvety ma.s.ses of the Palatine, which at any distance great enough to obscure their excavation have a beauty like that of primitive nature. I do not know but you see these best from the glazed terrace of that restaurant on the Aventine which is the resort of the well-advised Romans and visitors, and from which you look across to the mount of fallen and buried grandeur over a champaign of gardens and orchards. All round is a landscape which I was not able to think of as less than tremendous, with the whole of Rome in it, and the snow-topped hills about it--a scene to which you may well give more than a moment from the varied company at the other tables, where English, German, French, and Americans, as well as Italians, are returning to the simple life in their enjoyment of the local dishes, washed down with golden draughts of local wine, served ciderwise in generous jugs.

If your mind is, as ours was in that place, to drive farther and see the chapter-house of the Knights of Malta, clinging to the height over the Tiber, and looking up and down its yellow torrent and the black boats along the sh.o.r.e, with universal Rome melting into the distance, you must not fail to stop at the old, old Church of St. Sabina. You will naturally want to see this, not only because there in the cloister (as the ladies can ascertain at the window let into the wall for their dangerous eyes to peer through from the outside) is the successor of the orange-tree transplanted from the Holy Land by St. Dominic six or seven hundred years ago; not only because one of the doors of the church, covered with Bible stories, is thought the oldest wood-carving in the world, but also because there will be sitting in his white robes on a bench beside the nave an aged Dominican monk reading some holy book, with his spectacles fallen forward on his nose and his cowl fallen back on his neck, and his wide tonsure gleaming glacially in the pale light, whom nothing in the church or its visitors can distract from his devotions.

It is very, very cold in there, but he probably would not, if he could, follow you into the warm outer world and on into the garden of the Knights, who came here after they had misruled Malta for centuries and finally rendered a facile submission to General Bonaparte of the French Republican army in 1798. Their fixing here cannot be called anything so vigorous as their last stand; but, without specific reference to the easy-chairs in their chapter-house, it may be fitly called their last seat; and, if it is true that none of plebeian blood may enjoy the order's privileges, the place will afford another of those satisfactions which the best of all possible worlds is always offering its admirers.

Even if one were disposed to moralize the comfortable end of the poor Knights harshly, one must admit that their view of Rome is one of the unrivalled views, and that the glimpse of St. Peter's through the key-hole of their garden-gate is little short of tin-rivalled. I could not manage the glimpse myself, but I can testify to the unique character of the avenue of clipped box and laurel which the key-hole also commands. Lovers of the supernatural, of which I am the first, will like to be reminded, or perhaps instructed, that the Church of the Priory stands on the spot where Remus had a seance with the spiritual authorities and was advised against building Rome where he proposed, being shown only six vultures as against twelve that Romulus saw in favor of his chosen site. The fact gave the Aventine Hill the fame of bad luck, but any one may safely visit it now, after the long time that has pa.s.sed.

I do not, however, advise visiting it above any other place in Rome.

What I always say is, take your chances with any or every time or place; you cannot fail of some impression which you will always like recurring to as characteristically delightful. For instance, I once walked home from the Piazza di Spagna with some carnival masks frolicking about me through the sun-shotten golden dust of the delicious evening air, and I had a pleasure from the experience which I shall never forget. It was as rich as that I got from the rosy twilight in which I wandered homeward another time from the Piazza di Venezia and found myself pa.s.sing the Fountain of Trevi, and lingered long there and would not throw my penny into its waters because I knew I could not help coming back to Rome anyhow. Yet another time I was driving through a certain piazza where the peasants stand night long waiting to be hired by the proprietors who come to find them there, and suddenly the piety of the Middle Ages stood before me in the figure of the Brotherhood of the Misericordia, draped to the foot and hooded in their gray, unbleached linen. The brothers were ranged in a file at the doors of the church ready to visit the house of sickness or of mourning, barefooted, with their eyes showing spectrally through their masks and their hands coming soft and white out of their sleeves and betraying the lily cla.s.s that neither toils nor spins and yet is bound, as in the past, to the poorest and humblest through the only Church that knows how to unite them in the offering and acceptance of reciprocal religious duties.

In Rome, as elsewhere in Catholic countries, it seemed to me that the wors.h.i.+ppers were mostly of the poorer cla.s.ses and were mostly old women, but in the Church of the Jesuits I saw wors.h.i.+ppers almost as well dressed as the average of our Christian Scientists, and in that church, whose name I forget, but which is in the wide street or narrow piazza below the windows of the palace where the last Stuarts lived and died, my ineradicable love of gentility was flattered and my faith in the final sanctification of good society restored by the sight of gentlemen coming to and going from prayer with their silk hats in their hands.

The performance of ritual implies a certain measure of mechanism, and the wonder is that in the Catholic churches it is not more mechanical than it actually is. I was no great frequenter of functions, and I cannot claim that my superior spirituality was ever deeply wounded; sometimes it was even supported and consoled. I noted, without offence, in the Church of San Giuseppe how the young monk, who preached an eloquent sermon on the saint's life and character, exhausted himself before he exhausted his topic, and sat down between the successive heads of his discourse and took a good rest. It was the saint's day, which seemed more generally observed than any other saint's day in Rome, and his baroque church in Via Capo le Case was thronged with people, mostly poor and largely peasants, who were apparently not so fatigued by the preacher's shrill, hard delivery as he was himself. There were many children, whom their elders held up to see, and there was one young girl in a hat as wide as a barrel-head standing up where others sat, and blotting out the prospect of half the church with her flaring brim and flaunting feathers. The wors.h.i.+ppers came and went, and while the monk preached and reposed a man crept dizzyingly round the cornice with a taper at the end of a long pole lighting the chandeliers, while two other men on the floor kindled the candles before the altars. As soon as their work was completed, the monk, as if he had been preaching against time, sat definitely down and left us to the rapture of the perfected splendor. The high-altar was canopied and curtained in crimson, fringed with gold, and against this the candle-flames floated like yellow flowers. Suddenly, amid the hush and expectance, a tenor voice pealed from the organ-loft, and a train of priests issued from the sacristy and elbowed and shouldered their way through the crowd to the high-altar, where their intoning, like so many

"Silver snarling trumpets 'gan to glide,"

and those flower-like flames and that tenor voice seemed to sing together, and all sense of mortal agency in the effect was lost.

[Ill.u.s.tration: 37 CHURCH OF ST. JOHN LATERAN AND LATERAN PALACE]

How much our pale Northern faith has suffered from the elimination of the drama which is so large an element in the wors.h.i.+p of the South could not be conjectured without offence to both. Drama I have said, but, if I had said opera, it would have been equally with the will merely to recognize the fact and not to censure it. Many have imagined a concert of praise in heaven, and portrayed it as a spectacle of which the elder Christian wors.h.i.+p seems emulous. Go, therefore, to Rome, dear fellow-Protestant, with any measure of ignorance short of mine, but leave as much of your prejudice behind you as you can. You are not more likely to become a convert because of your tolerance; in fact, you may be the safer for it; and it will prepare you for a gentler pleasure than you would otherwise enjoy in the rites and ceremonies which seem exotic in our wintrier world, but which are here native to the climate, or, at least, could not have had their origin under any but oriental or meridional skies. The kindlier mood will help you to a truer appreciation of that peculiar keeping of the churches which the stranger is apt to encounter in his approach. Be tender of the hapless mendicants at the door; they are not there for their pleasure, those blind and halt and old. Be modestly receptive of the good office of the whole tribe of cicerones, of custodians, of sacristans; they can save you time, which, though it is not quite the same as money, even in Rome is worth saving, and are the repository of many rejected fables waiting to be recognized as facts again. I, for instance, committed the potential error of wholly rejecting with scorn the services of an authorized guide to the Church of St. John Lateran because he said the tariff was three francs. But after wandering, the helpless prey of my own Baedeker, up and down the huge temple, I was glad to find him waiting my emergence where I had left him, in the church porch, one of the most pathetic figures that ever wrung the remorseful heart.

His poor black clothes showed the l.u.s.tre of inveterate wear; his waistcoat would have been the better for a whole bottle of benzine; his shoes, if they did not share the polish of those threadbare textures, reciprocated the effect of his broken-spirited cuffs and collar, and the forlorn gentility of his hat. His beard had not been shaved for three days; I do not know why, but doubtless for as good a reason as that his s.h.i.+rt had not been washed for seven. It was with something like a cry for pardon of my previous brutality that I now closed with his unabated demand of a three-franc fee, and we went with him wherever he would, from one holy edifice to another of those that const.i.tute the church; but I will not ask the reader to follow us in the cab which he mounted into with us, but which would not conveniently hold four. Let him look it all up in the admirably compendious pages of Hare and Murray, and believe, if he can, that I missed nothing of that history and mystery.

If I speak merely of the marvellous baptistery, it is doubtless not because the other parts were not equally worthy of my wonder, but because I would not have even an enemy miss the music of the singing doors, mighty valves of bronze which, when they turn upon their hinges, emit a murmur of grief or a moan of remorse for whatever heathen uses they once served the wicked Caracalla at his baths. Not to have heard their rich harmony would be like not having heard the echo in the baptistery of Pisa, a life-long loss.