FIFTEEN MONTHS IN EUROPE
1851-1852
Mr. and Mrs. Lowell, their two children, a nurse, and a goat sailed from
Boston, Saturday, 12 July, 1851, in the barque Sultana, Watson, master,
which went to the Mediterranean and dropped the little party at Malta.
“We had a very good run from land to land,” Lowell wrote his father a
few days before reaching Malta, “making the light at Cape St. Vincent on
the night of the seventeenth day out. I stayed upon deck until we could
see the light,--the cape we did not see at all, nor any land till the
next morning. Then we saw the coast of Spain very dim and blue,--only
the outline of a mountain and some high land here and there. The day
before we made land we had a tolerably good specimen of a gale of wind,
enough at any rate to get up so much sea that we were in danger of
having our lee quarter boat washed away, the keel of which hangs above
the level of the poop deck. As it was we lost the covering of one of our
port-holes, which was knocked out by the water which was swashing about
on the lower deck.
“I was the only one of the party at table that day, and there was an
amount of vivacity among the dishes such as I never saw before. I took
my soup by the process of absorption, the whole of it having suddenly
leaped out of my plate into my lap. The table was literally at an angle
of 45° all the time, with occasional eccentricities of the horizontal
and the perpendicular, every change of level (or dip rather) being
accomplished with a sudden jerk, which gave us a fine opportunity for
studying the force of projectiles. Imagine the Captain, the First Mate,
and myself at every one of these sudden hiccoughs (as it were) of the
vessel, each endeavoring to think that he has six hands and finding too
late that he has only two, during which interval between doubt and
certainty, I have seen the contents of three dishes, A B C, change
places, A taking the empty space left by B, B in like manner ejecting C,
and C very naturally, having nowhere else to go, is thrown loose upon
society and leads a nomadic life, first upon the tablecloth, then upon
the seat, then upon the floor, every new position being a degradation,
until at last it finds precarious lodging in one of the lee staterooms.
You find your legs in a permanent condition of drunkenness, and that
without any of the previous exhilaration. The surface of the country is
such as I never saw described in any geographical work; the only thing
at all approaching it which I have met with was the state of affairs
during the great earthquake at Lisbon. You have just completed your
arrangements for descending an inclined plane, when you find yourself
climbing an almost perpendicular precipice, the surface of which being,
by a curious freak of nature, of painted floor-cloth, renders your
foothold quite precarious. It is like nothing but a nightmare.
“Mabel was very sick, and her only comfort was to lie in my berth and
take ‘strange food’ (which she immediately returned again) through a
spoon which opens in a very mysterious and interesting manner out of the
handle of a knife which John Holmes gave me the day we sailed.[90]
However, she was up again the next day, and has continued most devoted
in her attendance at table, not to speak of little supernumerary lunches
of crackers and toast which she contrives to extract from the compassion
of the steward or cook. The galley is a favorite place of resort for
her, to which she retires as one would to a summer-house, and where,
inhaling the fumes from a cooking-stove of a very warm temperament, she
converses with the cook (as well as I can learn) on cosmography, and
picks up little separate bits of geography like disjointed fragments of
several different dissected maps. With what extraordinary and thrilling
narratives she repays him I can only guess, but I heard her this morning
assuring Mary that she had seen two rats, one red and the other blue,
running about the cabin. Indeed, her theories on the subject of natural
history correspond with that era of the science when Goldsmith wrote his
‘Animated Nature.’ She cultivates her vocal powers by singing ‘Jeannette
and Jeannot’ with extraordinary vigor, and with a total irrecognition of
the original air, which may arise from some hereditary contempt of the
French. She assists regularly at ‘’bouting ship,’ as she calls it,
standing at the wheel with admirable gravity. The Captain always takes
the wheel and issues the orders when the ship is put about, and as this
ceremony has taken place pretty regularly every few hours for the last
eight days, Mabel has acquired all the requisite phrases. At intervals
during the day, a shrill voice may be heard crying out, “Bout ship!’
‘Mainsail ha-u-l!’ ‘Tacks and sheets!’ ‘Let go and ha-u-ll,’ the whole
prefixed by an exceedingly emphatic ‘Ha-a-a-rd a lee!!’ There is no part
of the vessel except the hold and the rigging which she has not
repeatedly inspected. With all the sailors she is on intimate terms, and
employs them at odd hours in the manufacture of various articles of
furniture.... Nannie has been a constant source of interest and
amusement to Mabel, who climbs up to visit her every day fifty times at
least, and gives her little handfuls of hay and oats which Nannie seems
to eat with a particular relish.”
The humorous account of the chief mate which occurs in the section “In
the Mediterranean,” in “Leaves from my Journal,” is taken from a full
and lively letter written by Lowell a few days later on shipboard to his
brother-in-law, Dr. Estes Howe. By that time they were off Tunis.
“Perhaps the finest thing we have seen,” he writes to Dr. Howe, “was the
first view of the African coast, which was Cape Espartel in Morocco.
There were five mountains in the background, the highest being as tall
as the Catskills, but the outlines much sharper and grander. They were
heaped together as we saw the Adirondacks from Burlington. We were a
whole day and half the night in beating through the Straits of
Gibraltar, and had very fine views of the shores on both sides. The
little Spanish town of Tarifa had a great charm for me, lying under a
mountain opposite the Moorish coast, with its now useless walls all
around it. The fires of the charcoal burners on the mountains were
exceedingly picturesque, especially at night, when they gave to some
dozen peaks on both sides the aspect of volcanoes. Apes Hill, opposite
the rock of Gibraltar, is higher and more peculiar in its forms than the
rock itself. In some views it is almost a perfect cone, and again, some
of the lower peaks, when you can catch their individual outlines, are
pyramidal. After getting through the Straits, we kept along the Spanish
coast, with very light winds and a new moon, as far as Cape de Gat. We
were four days in making these 150 miles (we ran 280 miles in one day on
the Atlantic). All along there were noble mountains, with here and there
a little white town sprinkled along their bases on the edge of the water
like the grains of rice which the girl dropped in the fairy tale.
Sometimes you see larger buildings on the slope of the mountain, which
seem to be convents. All are white except the watch-towers, which you
see now and then on points, and these are commonly of a soft brown, the
color of the stone. The hues of the mountains at sunset and just after
were exquisite. The nearer ones were of a deep purple, and I now
understand what was meant by the Mediterranean atmosphere....”
The travellers made a brief halt at Malta, whence they took steamer to
Naples, and from there went by rail to Florence. There they stayed,
living in the Via Maggio, from the 26th of August to the 30th of
October. Neither in his letters nor in the sketches which he afterward
published under the title of “Leaves from my Journal in Italy and
Elsewhere” can one find more than a slight record of Lowell’s sojourn in
a city which was especially endeared to him by that study of Dante which
had been his real introduction to the great world. “I liked my
Florentine better than my Roman walks,” he said; “apart from any
difference in the men, I had a far deeper emotion when I stood on the
_Sasso di Dante_, than at Horace’s Sabine farm, or by the tomb of
Virgil;”[91] for he found it harder “to bridge over the gulf of Paganism
than of centuries,” and the marked individuality of mediæval Italian
towns attracted him all the more for their being modern and Christian.
In Florence there was an added pleasure in the companionship of Mr. and
Mrs. Frank Shaw, and in the society of William Page.
In a letter to Mr. John Holmes, written from Rome half a year later,
Lowell writes: “Once when I was in Florence, Page and Shaw and I took a
walk out of the city to see a famous _Cenacolo_ of Andrea del Sarto in
the refectory of a suppressed convent, about a mile and a half outside
the Porta Santa Croce. We took a roundabout course among the hills,
going first to Galileo’s tower, and then to that of the old Church of
San Miniato which Michelangelo defended. Thence we descended steeply
toward the Arno, crossed it by a ferry-boat, and then found ourselves
opposite a _trattoria_. It was a warm October day, and we unanimously
turned in at the open door. There were three rooms, one upstairs, where
one might dine ‘more obscurely and courageously’ the kitchen, and the
room in which we were. As I sat upon the corner of the bench, I looked
out through some grape-trailers which hung waving over the door, and saw
first the Arno, then, beyond it a hill on which stood a villa with a
garden laid out in squares with huge walls of box and a clump of tall
black cypresses in the middle, then, to the right of this, the ruined
tower of San Miniato, and beyond it that from which Milton had doubtless
watched the moon rising ‘o’er the top of Fesole.’ This was my landscape.
Behind me was the kitchen. The cook in his white linen cap was stirring
alternately a huge cauldron of soup and a pan of sausages, which
exploded into sudden flame now and then, as if by spontaneous
combustion. A woman wound up at short intervals a jack which turned
three or four chickens before the fire, and attended a kind of lake of
hot fat in which countless tiny fishes darted, squirmed, and turned
topsy-turvy in a way so much more active and with an expression of so
much more enjoyment than is wont to characterize living fish, that you
would have said they had now for the first time found their element, and
were created to revel in boiling oil. The wine sold here was the produce
of the vineyard which you could see behind and on each side of the
little _trattoria_. We had a large loaf of bread, and something like a
quart and a half of pure cool wine for nine of our cents. During the
whole time I was in Florence, though I never saw any one drink water, I
also never saw a single drunken man, except some Austrian soldiers, and
only four of these--two of them officers. In Rome, also, drunkenness is
exceedingly rare, but less so, I think, than in Florence. Here you see
everywhere the sign, _Spaccio d’ Acqua Vitæ_. In Florence I never
remember to have seen spirits advertised for sale, except by those who
dealt in the wants of the _Forestieri_.”
Just before leaving the city for Rome, Lowell was filled with
consternation at a letter received from home, telling him that his
father had been stricken with paralysis. His first impulse was to take
his family to Rome and then return at once to America, but a little
reflection showed him how useless this would be. “I should never have
left home,” he wrote his father from Pisa, where they had halted on
their way to Leghorn, “if I had not thought that you wished it, or
rather wished that we should have been abroad and got back. I hope to
find a letter awaiting us at Rome. But at any rate we shall come home as
soon as we can. I hardly know what I am writing, for I have just got
word from Mr. Black at Leghorn, saying that our places are engaged on
board the steamer for Civita Vecchia, and that we must be there as soon
as possible in the morning. I am going on in the early train, leaving
Maria to come at one o’clock with a servant from the hotel. It is now
between nine and ten, and the rain still falls heavily. I fear a bad day
to-morrow, and what with that and thinking about you and home, my mind
is confused. I find nothing abroad which, after being seen, would tempt
me away from Elmwood again. I enjoy the Art here, but I shall equally
enjoy it there in the retrospect. I wish some of the buildings were on
the other side of the water, but I suppose we should be more contented
not to see them if they were.”
The voyage by steamer to Civita Vecchia was a very rough one, occupying
five days instead of the eleven hours in which it sometimes was made. A
letter from Dr. Howe was received a few days after the Lowells reached
Rome, which gave more exact account of Dr. Lowell’s illness and left
little hope of anything like permanent restoration. “Had it been
possible,” Lowell replied to his brother-in-law, “I should have come
home at once. But I could neither leave Maria here, nor safely expose
her to the inclemencies of a winter passage across the Atlantic. There
is nothing for it, but to hope and pray. But the thought that I have no
right to be here casts a deeper shadow over everything in the dreary
city of ruin and of an activity that is more sad than ruin itself. The
dear Elmwood that has always looked so sunny in my memory comes now
between me and the sun, and the long shadow of its eclipse follows and
falls upon me everywhere. It is a wonderful satisfaction to me now to
feel that dear Father and I have been so much at one and have been
sources of so much happiness to each other for so many years.”
The entrance into Rome is thus described in a letter to Miss Maria
Fay:--
“It has been raining fast, but as we approach Rome, winding up and down
among the hills and hollows of the Campagna between high stone walls,
the clouds break and the moon shines out with supreme clearness. The
tall reeds which lean over the road here and there glisten like steel,
wet as they still are with the rain. The orange-trees have all silver
leaves, and even the dark laurels and cypresses glitter. It is like an
enchanted garden of the Arabian Nights. Presently we overtake other
lumbering diligences (we are _posting_ and have done the thirty-five
miles from Civita Vecchia in ten hours), and rattling through the gate
are stopped by cocked-hatted officials, who demand passports. Opposite
are the high walls of the Inquisition. We are in Rome. One ought to have
a sensation, and one has. It is that of chill. One climbs stiffly down
from the coupé, and stamps about with short-skirted and long-booted
postilions whose huge spurs are clanking in every direction. Very soon
we, being armed with a _lascia passare_,--there are three coach loads of
us,--drive off, leaving four other loads behind still wrangling and
jangling with the cocked hats. As we rattle away, the light from the
window of the _uffizio di polizia_ gleams upon the musket of a blue
overcoated French soldier marching to and fro on guard. Five minutes
more rattle and the Dome glistens silverly in the moonlight, and the
Titanic colonnade marches solemnly by us in ranks without end. Then a
glimpse of feathery fountains, a turn to the right, a strip of gloomy
street, a sudden turn to the left, and we are on the bridge of St.
Angelo. Bernini’s angels polk gayly on their pedestals with the emblems
of the Passion in their arms, and by wringing your neck you may see
behind you on the left the huge castle refusing to be comforted by the
moonlight, with its triumphant archangel just alighting on its summit.
Another sharp turn to the left, and you are in a black slit of street
again, which at last, after half a mile of unsavoriness, becomes the
Corso, the main street of modern Rome. And everything thus far is
palpably modern, especially the Hotel d’Angleterre, at which we
presently alight. Next day we remove to lodgings already engaged for us
by F. Boott, near the Pincio, in the highest part of the city. Here we
manage to be comfortable through a month of never-ceasing rain. Then it
clears, and we have a month of cloudless sunshine, with roses blooming
in the gardens and daisies in the fields. To-day is the first rainy day,
and I devote it to you.”
The Lowells had their quarters at Capo le Case, No. 68, on the third
_piano_, and were surrounded by a few English and American friends. Mr.
and Mrs. Story were not in Rome when they first arrived, but joined them
in about a fortnight, when the rains had ceased at last and so permitted
walks in the Campagna. The first part of their stay had been dreary
enough, and drew from Lowell the whimsical remark: “Sometimes as I look
from the Pincian, I think that the best thing about [modern Rome] is
that the hills look like Brighton.” And Mrs. Lowell draws a humorous
picture of her husband, and their half homesick feelings, when she
writes: “Through Mr. Black we have the English journals and papers, and
it really gives me a little home feeling when I see a bundle of
_Examiners_ and _Athenæums_ brought in just as they used to be from Mr.
Wells’s, and see James selecting his cigar with particular satisfaction
and giving the fire an express arrangement, and then drawing up his
chair to it and putting his feet on the fender, beginning to read.”
The anxiety, also, which Lowell felt over his father’s illness benumbed
his faculties and made him restless; but with fair weather, better news
came, and the travellers gave themselves up more unreservedly to the
pleasures which the great city afforded them. But Rome does not thrill
one from the start. It takes time for its ancient hands to get that
clutch which at last never loosens, and Lowell at first seemed somewhat
unaffected. “I like,” he wrote to his father, just before Christmas,
“to walk about in the fine sunshine and get unexpected and
unguide-booked glimpses of fine scenery, but systematic sight-seeing is
very irksome to me. Though we have been in Rome now nearly as long as we
were in Florence, I have not learned to like it as well. We were able to
enjoy Florence sincerely and without any reproaches, because we had not
heard of your illness. Then, too, the churches here are nearly all
alike. Going to see them is like standing to watch a procession of
monks,--the same thing over and over again, and when you have seen one
you have seen all. There is a kind of clumsy magnificence about them,
like that of an elephant with his castle on his back and his gilded
trappings, and the heaviness somehow weighs on one. There is no spring
and soar in their architecture as in that of the Lombard churches I have
seen. The Roman columns standing here and there look gentleman-like
beside them, and reproach them with their tawdry _parvenuism_. The
finest interior in Rome is that of the Sta. Maria degli Angeli, which
Michelangelo made out of a single room in the baths of Diocletian. Even
the _size_ of St. Peter’s seems inconsiderable in a city where the
Coliseum still stands in crater-like ruin, and where one may trace the
foundations of a palace large enough almost for a city.... Yesterday I
walked out upon the Campagna, but by a different gate from my favorite
San Sebastiano. Leaving the Porta del Popolo, we followed the road as
far as the Ponte Molle, then turned to the right on the hither bank of
the Tiber, which we followed as far as the confluence of the Tiber and
Anio, where was once the city of Antemnæ. As it had been destroyed by
Romulus, however, there was nothing to be seen of the old Sabine
stronghold except the flatiron-shaped bluff on which it stood, the
natural height and steepness of which, aided no doubt by art, must have
made the storming of it no very agreeable diversion. The view from the
top is very beautiful, and it is a good place to study the Campagna
scenery from,--I mean the Campagna in a state of nature. Below us flowed
the swift and dirty Tiber, and the yet swifter and dirtier Anio. In
front the Campagna wallowed away as far as the line of snow-streaked
mountains which wall it in. Herds of cattle and of horses dotted it here
and there, the gray cows looking like sheep in the distance to an eye
used always to expect red in kine. Sometimes a sort of square tower
rose, lonely and with no sign of life about it. Looking more carefully,
however, it would turn out to be no tower at all, but only the cottage
of a shepherd perched high above the inundation of malaria on the top of
some ruinous tomb. Add malaria and the idea of desolation to an Illinois
prairie, and you have the Campagna. Where Antemnæ had stood there now
rose a conical wigwam built wholly of thatch, surmounted by a cross, at
the door of which stood a woman in scarlet bodice and multitudinous
petticoat, with a little girl ditto, ditto, but smaller. Seeing us get
out a pocket spyglass, a boy of about eighteen years contrived to muster
energy enough to come out and stare at us. He was dressed in sheepskin
breeches with the wool on, short wide jacket, red waistcoat, and hat
turned up at the side, and would have looked extremely well in a
landscape--but nowhere else. A smaller boy came up with more
impetuosity--fat, rosy-cheeked, Puck-like, and with eyes that looked as
if their normal condition was that of being close-shut, but which once
opened to the width necessary to take in the extraordinary apparition of
three _forestieri_ at once, would require some maternal aid to get back
again. Large hawks were sliding over the, air above us, and there was no
sound except the sharp whistle of a peasant attending a drove of horses
in the pasture below. Jemmy will like to know that the horses are belled
here (I mean in the fields) as cows are with us, only that the bells are
large enough for a town school. To-night I am going to make the _giro_
of the churches to see the ceremonies with which Christmas is ushered
in. First an illumination at Santa Maria Maggiore and the cradle of the
Saviour carried in procession at ten o’clock, then mass at midnight in
the San Luigi dei Francesi, then mass at St. Peter’s at three o’clock
A.M. I have not seen a ceremony of the church yet that was impressive,
and hope to be better pleased to-night.”
How he spent his Christmas is told in a letter to Miss Fay:--
“Let me tell you about Christmas week, first premising that I go to
church ceremonies here merely that I may see for myself that they are
not worth seeing. Otherwise they are great bores and fitter for
children. The chief quality of the music is its interminableness, made
up of rises and falls, and of the ceremonies generally you may take a
yard anywhere as of printed cotton, certain that in figure and quality
it will be precisely like what has gone before, and what will follow
after. On Christmas eve the _Presepio_, a piece of the manger in which
the Saviour was cradled, was carried in procession at the church of
Santa Maria Maggiore. Torches were stuck in the ground for nearly a
quarter of a mile from the church, and ghostly dragoons in their long
white cloaks (like Leonora’s lover) appeared and vanished at intervals
in the uncertain light. The interior of the church is fine, but
completely ruined by the trumpery hangings put up for the occasion.
There were ambassadors’ boxes, as at the opera, and rows of raised seats
on each side near the high altar, for such ladies as chose to come in
black, with black veils upon their heads. I stood among the
undistinguished faithful, and it being a fast, there was such a smell as
if Wethersfield had been first deluged and then cooked by subterranean
fires. I stood wedged between some very strong devotees (who must have
squandered the savings of a year in a garlic debauch) in abject terror
lest my head should be colonized from some of the overpopulated
districts around me.
“At the end of the church I could dimly see the Pope, with a mitre on
and off at intervals. There was endless Gregorian chanting, then
comparative silence, with sudden epidemics among the crowd of standing
painfully on tiptoe to stare at nothing; then more endless Gregorian
chantings, more epidemics, and a faint suspicion of frankincense among
the garlic; then something incomprehensible performed in dumb show by
what seemed automaton candles, then an exceedingly slim procession with
the _Presepio_, which I could not see for the simple reason that it was
inclosed in a silver case. At this point the Hallelujahs of the choir
were fine. Having now fairly bagged my spectacle, I crowded my way out
at the risk of my ribs (for stone doorways are not elastic), and went
home to smoke a cigar preparatory to a midnight excursion to San Luigi
dei Francesi, where, according to rumor, there was to be fine music.
Here I found more sight-seeing Inglesi, more garlic, more populous
neighbors, more endless Gregorian chanting, more automaton candles, and
at midnight a clash of music from a French band, not so good as our
Brigade Band at home.
“Christmas day, went to St. Peter’s to hear mass celebrated by the Pope
in person. Here were all kinds of antique costumes,--gentlemen in black
velvet doublets with slashed sleeves and ruffs, other gentlemen in
crimson ditto ditto, officers of the Swiss Guard in inlaid corselets,
and privates of ditto in a kind of striped red and yellow barber’s pole
uniform invented by Michelangelo, cardinals, bishops, ambassadors, etc.,
but not nearly so large a crowd as I expected. The music was good, and
the whole ended by the Pope’s being carried through the Basilica
blessing the people at intervals as he went along. I stood quite near
and had a good view of his face. He looks like a fatter Edward Everett.
This is one of the greatest ceremonies of the year. After it was over I
stood in the piazza watching the equipages of the cardinals. Speaking of
cardinals: I was walking the other day with an English friend, and we
saw a cardinal coming toward us accompanied by his confessor and two
footmen. Behind followed his carriage with a cocked-hatted coachman and
another footman. Should we bow? He was old enough to deserve it,
cardinal or not, so we bowed. Never did man get such percentage for an
investment. First came off his Eminence’s hat. At a respectful interval
came that of the confessor, at another respectful interval those of the
coachman and footmen. It was like a detachment of the allied army
marching on Dunsinane with a _bough_.
“I have spoken rather disrespectfully of the music here, but I have
heard good since I came. On New Year’s day the Jesuits have a great
celebration in the church of the Gesu. I took a two hours’ slice of it
in the afternoon. The music was exceedingly fine, a remarkably
well-trained choir accompanied by the finest organ in Rome. The soprano
was a boy with a voice that, with my eyes shut, I could not have
distinguished from that of a woman. We are having also, every Tuesday,
concerts by the St. Peter’s choir, with music of Palestrina, Guglielmi,
Mozart, etc. The music of Palestrina has a special charm for me,
reminding me more than any I ever heard of the æolian harp with its
dainty unexpectedness....
“In its modern architecture Rome does not please me so much as Florence,
Pisa, Lucca, or Siena, on all of which the religion and politics of the
Middle Ages have stamped themselves ineffaceably. The characteristic of
Roman architecture is ostentation, not splendor, much less grace. Of
course I am speaking generally--there are exceptions. But even in size
the Roman remains dwarf all modern attempts.... There is something epic
in the gray procession of aqueduct arches across the Campagna. They seem
almost like the building of Nature, and are worthy of men whose eyes
were toned to the proportions of an amphitheatre of mountains and of a
city which received tribute from the entire world. Exceeding beautiful
are the mountains which sentinel Rome,--the purple Alban mount, the
gray-peaked Monte Gennaro, the hoary Lionessa, and farther off the blue
island-like Soracte.
“In art also Rome is wondrously rich, especially in sculpture. For the
study of painting I have seen no gallery like that of the Uffizi at
Florence. And let me advise you, my dear Maria, to see all the Titians
(of which there are many and good) in England. To me he is the greatest
of the painters. This has one quality and that has another, but he
combines more than any. I would rather be the owner of his ‘Sacred and
Profane Love’ in the Borghese collection than of any single picture in
Rome.[92]
“What do I _do_? I walk out upon the Campagna, I go to churches and
galleries inadvertently (for I will not convert Italy into a monster
exhibition), and I walk upon the Pincio. Here one may see all the
Fashion and the Title of Rome. Here one may meet magnificent wet-nurses,
bareheaded and red-bodiced, and insignificant princesses Paris-bonneted
and corseted. Here one may see ermine mantles with so many tails that
they remind you of the Arabian Nights. Here one may see the neat,
clean-shirted, short-whiskered, always-conceited Englishman, feeling
himself quite a Luther if he have struggled into a wide-awake hat; or
the other Englishman with years of careful shaving showing unconquerably
through the newly-assumed beard which he wears as unconsciously as Mrs.
Todd might the Bloomer costume for the first time. Here you may see the
American, every inch of him, from his hat to his boots, looking anxious
not to commit itself. Here you may see all the foreign children in Rome,
and among them Mabel, seeming as if her whole diet were _capers_, and
that they had gradually penetrated and inspired her whole constitution.
I have seen no pair of legs there which compared with hers either for
size or for untamable activity. Here you may see the worst riding you
can possibly imagine: Italians emulating the English style of rising in
the stirrups and bumping forlornly in every direction; French officers,
reminding one of the proverb of setting a beggar on horseback, and John
Bulls, with superfluous eyeglass wedged in the left eye, chins run out
over white chokers, and a general upward tendency of all the features as
who should say, ‘Regard me attentively but awfully; I am on intimate
terms with Lord Fitzpollywog.’ On Saturday evenings we are ‘at home.’ We
have tea, cake, and friends.... The evening before last I went to a
musical party at Mrs. Rich’s. You know what an English musical party is.
Your average Englishman enjoys nothing beyond ‘God save the Queen,’ and
that because he can either beat time or swell the chorus with his own
private contribution of discord. But I saw here the dogged resolution of
the people who have conquered America and India. There was no shrinking
under long variations on the pianoforte, and I could well imagine a
roast beef and plum-pudding basis under the solid indifference which
outlasted a half-hour’s fiddling. Miss Fanny Erskine, a niece of our
hostess, sang well, especially in German, and Emiliani is really a fine
artist with the violin.”
In an earlier letter to Dr. Howe, Lowell had said: I begin to think
myself too old to travel. As to men,--as I used to say at home,--the
average of human nature to the square foot is very much the same
everywhere; and as to buildings and such like monuments, I bring to them
neither the mind nor the eye of twenty. In almost all such I find myself
more interested, as they are exponents and illustrations of the
spiritual and political life and progress of the people who built them.
The relations of races to the physical world do not excite me to study
and observation (only to be fruitfully pursued on the spot) in any
proportion to the interest I feel in those relations to the moral
advance of mankind, which one may as easily trace at home, in their
history and literature, as here. But of Rome hereafter. I feel as if I
should continue a stranger and foreigner during my whole six months’
residence here.” A month or so later he revised a little of this
judgment in a letter to his father, in which he wrote: “You need not be
afraid of our getting attached to Europe. I find the modes of life here
more agreeable to me in some respects, but nothing can replace Elmwood.
In regard to our coming home, the exact time will depend entirely on the
accounts we get of your health. I do not wish to have the money we have
spent thrown away, for I see no chance of our ever coming hither again,
and so I wish to do everything as thoroughly as I can. I have profited
already, I think, in the study of art. I make it a rule now on entering
a gallery to endeavor to make out the painters of such pictures as I
like by the internal characteristics of the works themselves. After I
have made up my mind, I look at my catalogue. I find this an exceedingly
good practice. Of all the more prominent painters, I can now distinguish
the style and motive almost at a glance. Sometimes I make a particular
study of a particular artist, if any gallery is especially rich in his
works. Life is rather more picturesque here than with us, and I find
that I am accumulating a certain kind of wealth which may be useful to
me hereafter. The condition and character of the people also interest me
much, and I think that my understanding of European politics will be
much clearer than before my visit to Europe. To understand properly,
however, requires time and thought and the power of dissociating real
from accidental causes. I wish to see well what I see at all--and, if
possible, would like to visit Germany, France, and England before coming
home.”
The social life of Rome in the English and American circles engaged the
travellers, and Lowell made his début as an actor. Private theatricals,”
he writes his father, 1 February, 1852, “are all the rage now in Rome.
There are three companies. I have an engagement in one of them under the
management of Mr. Black, who has erected a pretty enough little theatre
in the Palazzo Cini, where he has apartments,--or an apartment, as they
would say here. We gave our first representation last Thursday night to
a select audience of English and Americans. Our play was a portion of
Midsummer Night’s Dream, including part of the fairy scenes, and the
whole of the interlude of the clowns. In this interlude, I was the star,
having the part of Bottom assigned to me. On the morning of Thursday, I
wrote a prologue of some thirty lines which I recited to open the
performances. This, to me, was the plum of the evening’s entertainment.
In the first place, I do not think that the audience had any idea that
I was a prologue at all, till I had got nearly through; for I was
obliged to speak it in the costume of Bottom, not having time to dress
in the interval between the prologue and my first appearance in
character. But even if they guessed what I was about, it never entered
their heads that it was intended to be funny till about the middle, when
a particularly well-defined pun touched off a series of
laughter-explosions which kept going off at intervals during the rest of
my recitation, as the train ran along from one mind to another. It was
exceedingly diverting to me, for, knowing the requisitions of a
prologue, I had written it down to the meanest capacity, and all the
jokes were _a-b-abs_. I was very much struck with the difference between
an English and an American audience. The minds of our countrymen are
infinitely quicker both in perception and conception, and I am certain
my prologue would have set a room full of them in roars of laughter.”
The list of persons who engaged in these private theatricals is an
interesting one. Mr. Charles C. Black, to whom Lowell refers, was the
begetter of the entertainment, and with him were W. W. Story, Charles
Hemans, Shakespeare Wood, W. Temple, J. Hayllar, and T. Crawford. There
were two different representations of “A Midsummer Night’s Dream,” and
Lowell wrote two separate prologues. The first began:--
“When Thespis rode upon his one-horse cart,
The first exponent of the Drama’s art,
Earliest of managers, and happiest too,
Having a theatre which always drew.”
Then followed a comparison of the stationary theatre with the vagrant
one, and the brief prologue ended with some jests on the actors, as on
himself:
“If Pyramus be short, restrain your ire,
Remember none of us appear for hire;”
and on Crawford:--
“Forgive our Thisbe the moustache she wears,
Ladies, you know, _will_ put on little ’airs.”
Story, who was to play Snug, hunted through Rome for a lion’s skin, and
finally had to content himself with the skin of a tiger.
“But now comes one fact I proclaim with glory,
Snug is enacted by our attic Story,
Who sought a lion’s hide through Rome, a week,
Quite a new way of playing hide and seek.”
In the first representation Lowell had the part of Pyramus, in the
second he was Bottom, and as he intimates made his new prologue more
comprehensible by his audience. He pretended to have received a request
from Mr. Black to write the prologue, and so begins:--
“‘Dear Bottom, if you can, I wish you’d write
A prologue for our comedy to-night;
Just tap that comic vein of yours which runs
Discharging a continuous stream of puns.’”
And that is what the second prologue consists of, with some repetition
even of the jokes of the first, ending:--
“Now who plays Pyramus! no, that won’t go well,
I cannot get a good thing out of Lowell.
Faith, that’s too near the truth, it’s past my power,
For I’ve been trying at it half an hour.
At all events I can proclaim with glory
Snug is enacted by our Attic Story;
Who sought a lion’s skin through Rome a week,
Quite a nice way of playing hide and seek.
But the last lion that was seen in Rome
Was Dickens,--and he carried his skin home.
Thisbe’s moustache. The Greek girls never had any?
I’ll just remind them of Miss Hairyadne.
But I can’t do it. Dite al Signore,--
What’s more I won’t--che sono fuori.”[93]
An undercurrent of anxiety and affection for his father runs through the
correspondence at this time, and a month later he seeks to gratify a
grandfather’s feelings by devoting a whole letter, written as clearly as
possible that his father might read it himself, about the sayings and
doings of the two children. Some theologic questions are beginning,” he
writes, “to vex her [Mabel’s] mind somewhat. She inquired of me very
gravely the other day, when I said something to her about her Heavenly
Father, ‘Papa, have I got a Heavenly Grandfather?’ The pictures in the
churches make a great impression (and not always a pleasant one) upon
her. She said to me one day: ‘O my dear papa, I love you so very much,
because you take care of me; and I love mamma very much because she
takes care of me; and I love Mary very much because she takes care of
me; and I love Heavenly Father because he takes care of me; and I love
the Madonna very much because she takes care of me; and I love the
angels because they take care of me; and I love that one with the swords
stuck into her, and that other one with the stick.’ These last were no
doubt pictures she had seen somewhere. During Carnival, we did not let
her go to the Corso much, because there was so much throwing of
_confetti_, which are small seeds or pellets of clay about as large as
peas, coated with plaster of Paris. However, she saw the edges of the
great stream, here and there, as it overflowed into the side streets,
and talked a great deal to Faustina about _Pulcinelli_ and _Pagliacci_.
She threatened rather sharply to pay back ‘Mister _Pulcinello_’ (as she
always respectfully called him when she spoke of him in English) in his
own coin, if he threw any _confetti_, or oftener, _nasty confetti_, at
her. One day she was walking with me through the Piazza di Spagna, with
half a roll in her hand, when she saw one of the lacqueys of the S. P.
Q. R. in his queer costume. She instantly set him down for a
_Pulcinello_, and I had much ado to hinder her from hurling the fragment
of her roll at him, much as she once threw a dry bun at somebody else
who shall be nameless. She is making great progress in Italian under the
tuition of Dinda and Amelia, two nice little girls, daughters of our
Padrone. One of the great events in her day is always the pudding--in
_trattoria_ Italian _il budino_. As soon as the great tin _stufa_ has
safely made its descent from the head of the _facchino_ to the floor,
she begins a dance around it, shouting in a voice loud enough to be
heard as far as the Trinità dei Monti, ‘_O Faustina, ditemi! C’è un
puddino oggi?_’ And if it turn out that there be only a pie, which is a
forbidden _dolce_ to her, she forthwith drops her voice to its lowest
key and growls--‘_Mi dispiace molto, mo-o-lto, Faustina; pudino non c’è:
ce sono solamente pasticcie_.’ Sometimes I have heard her add with a
good deal of dignity, ‘_Dite al cuoco che mi dispiace molto_.’ A day or
two ago, when she saw a plum-pudding come upon the table, she could not
contain herself, but, springing up into her chair (for she can never
express satisfaction without using her legs--her intoxications seeming
to take direction the reverse of common), she began dancing and waving
her arms quite like a Bacchanal, at the same time singing--
‘Oh, quanto mi piace, roba dolce, il puddino!
Quando lo mangio, sono felice, padrino!’
I offer this to Jemmy to translate, as an Italian exercise, for his
paper. If it be not equal to Dante, upon my word I think it quite up to
a good deal of Tasso, and much more to the point than nine tenths of
Petrarca. Improvisations are seldom put to the test of being written
down, but this bears it very well. The tender _padrino_--_Dear little
Father_--was an adroit bribe, which got her a third piece of pudding by
the unanimous vote of our household senate. Ask Charlie to read over
the muddy stuff which Byron thought it necessary to pump up about St.
Peter’s, etc., in ‘Childe Harold,’ and say if he do not agree with me
that his lordship would have made a better hand of it if he had devoted
himself to sincerities like this?...
“As for Walter, he grows and thrives finely. He can say A, B, C, D, or
something considerably like it--nearer, in fact, a good deal, than the
first four letters of the Chinese alphabet would be. He has done, during
the last week, what I have challenged many older persons to do, namely,
cut a double tooth. I doubt if a cabinet minister in Europe can say the
same of himself. He has grown very fond of his papa, and sometimes
crawls to my door of a morning before I am out of bed, and then, getting
upon his feet, knocks and calls ‘Papa! papa!’ laying the accent very
strongly on the first syllable. If he hears my voice, he immediately
springs up in Mary’s lap, and begins shouting lustily for me. He is the
fairest boy that ever was seen, and has the bluest eyes, and is the
baldest person in Rome except two middle-aged Englishmen, who, you know,
have a great knack that way.... In a word, he is one of that countless
number of extraordinary boys out of which the world contrives afterward
to make such ordinary men. I think him rather intelligent--but, as the
picture dealers say, _chi sa_? As he is mine, I shall do rather as the
picture-buyers, and call what I have got by any name I please. One
cannot say definitely so early. It is hard to tell of a green shoot
just worming out of the ground whether it will be an oak or an
onion--they all look much alike at first.”
Not an oak, but a plant and flower of light, Lowell might shortly have
said, for this is the last reference in life to the child suddenly
stricken down and left behind in a Roman grave by the mourning parents,
when, on the 29th of April, they went away from Rome to Naples with the
one child of their four who lived to them. On the 13th of the month
Lowell wrote to his eldest sister: “We are now within a fortnight of
bidding farewell to what I am now forced to call dear old Rome. In spite
of its occupation by an army of ten thousand French soldiers, in spite
of its invasion by that more terrible force, the column of English
travellers, in spite of the eternal drumming and bugling and
sentinelling in the streets, and the crowding of that insular Bull--_qui
semper habet fœnum in cornu_--there is an insensible charm about the
place which grows upon you from hour to hour. There must be few cities
where one can command such absolute solitude as here. One cannot expect
it, to be sure, in the Colosseum by moonlight, for thither the English
go by carriage loads to be lonely with a footman in livery behind them,
and to quote Byron’s stuff out of Murray’s Guide; there perch the French
in voluble flocks, under the necessity (more painful to them than to any
other people) of being poetical--chattering _Mon Dieu! qu’un joli
effet!_ But an hour’s walk will take one out into the Campagna, where
you will look across the motionless heave of the solitude dotted here
and there with lazy cattle to the double wall of mountain, the nearest
opaline with change of light and shadow, the farther Parian with snow
that only grows whiter when the cloud shadows melt across it--the air
overhead rippling with larks too countless to be watched, and the turf
around you glowing with strange flowers, each a wonder, yet so
numberless that you would as soon think of gathering a nosegay of grass
blades. On Easter Sunday I spent an incomparable day at the Fountain of
Egeria, stared at sullenly, now and then, by one of those great gray
Campagna bulls, but totally safe from the English variety which had gone
to get broken ribs at St. Peter’s. The show-box unholiness of Holy Week
is at last well over. The best part of it was that on Holy Thursday all
the Vatican was open at once--fifteen miles of incomparable art. For me
the Pope washed perfumed feet, and the Cardinal Penitentiary wielded his
long rod in vain. I dislike such spectacles naturally, and saw no reason
why I should undergo every conceivable sort of discomfort and annoyance
for the sake of another discomfort or annoyance at the end....
“The finest _show_ I have seen in Rome is the illumination of St.
Peter’s. Just after sunset I saw from the head of the _scalinata_, the
little points of light creeping down from the cross and lantern
(trickling, as it were) over the dome. Then I walked over to the Piazza
di San Pietro, and the first glimpse I caught of it again was from the
Ponte Sant’ Angelo. I could not have believed it would have been so
beautiful. There was no time or space to pause here. Foot passengers
crowding hither and thither as they heard the shout of _Avanti!_ from
the coachmen behind--dragoon-horses getting unmanageable just where
there were most women to be run over--and all the while the dome drawing
all eyes and thoughts the wrong way, made a hubbub to be got out of as
soon as possible. Five minutes more of starting and dodging, and we were
in the piazza. You have seen it and know how it seems, as if the setting
sun had lodged upon the horizon and then burnt out, the fire still
clinging to its golden ribs as they stand out against the evening sky.
You know how, as you come nearer, you can see the soft travertine of the
façade suffused with a tremulous golden gloom like the innermost shrine
of a water-lily. And then the change comes as if the wind had suddenly
fanned what was embers before into flame. If you could see _one_ sunset
in a lifetime and were obliged to travel four thousand miles to see it,
it would give you a similar sensation; but an everyday sunset does not,
for we take the gifts of God as a matter of course.
“After wondering long enough in the piazza, I went back to the Pincio
(or rather the Trinità dei Monti) and watched it for an hour longer. I
did not wish to see it go out. To me it seemed better to go home with
the consciousness that it was still throbbing, as if I could make myself
believe that there was a kind of permanence in it, and that I should
see it there again some happy evening. Before leaving it, I went away
and came back several times, and at every return it was a new
miracle--the more miraculous for being a human piece of fairy work.
“Last night there was another wonder, the Girandola, which we saw
excellently well from the windows of the American legation. Close behind
me, by the way, stood Silvio Pellico (a Jesuit now), a little withered
old man in spectacles, looking so very dry that I could scarce believe
he had ever been shut up in a _damp_ dungeon in his life. This was (I
mean the Girandola) the most brilliant and at the same time tasteful
display of fireworks I ever saw. I had no idea that so much powder could
be burned to so good purpose. For the first time in my life I saw
rockets that seemed endowed with life and intelligence. They might have
been thought filled with the same vivacity and enjoyment so
characteristic of the people. Our rockets at home seem business-like in
comparison. They accomplish immense heights in a steady straight-forward
way, explode as a matter of course, and then the stick hurries back to
go about its terrestrial affairs again. And yet why should I malign
those beautiful slow curves of fire, that I have watched with Charlie
and Jemmie from Simonds’s Hill, and which I would rather see again than
twenty Girandolas? If Michelangelo had designed our fireworks, and if it
did not by some fatal coincidence always rain on the evening of 4th
July, doubtless they would be better.”
Something of the total impression made upon Lowell in this first visit
to Rome may be seen in the fragment of a letter to Mr. John Holmes,
written near the end of his stay:--
“After all, this is a wonderful place. One feels disappointed at first,
everything looks so modern. But as the mind, taking in ruin after ruin,
gradually reconstructs for itself the grandeur and the glory, of which
these city-like masses are but the splinters sprinkled here and there by
the fall of the enormous fabric, and conceives the spiritual which has
outlived that temporal domination, and even surpassed it, laying its
foundations deeper than the reach of earthquake or Gaul, and conquering
worlds beyond the ken of the Roman eagles in their proudest flight, a
feeling of the sublime, vague and vast, takes the place of the first
hurried curiosity and interest. Surely the American (and I feel myself
more intensely American every day) is last of all at home among
ruins--but he is at home in Rome. I cannot help believing that in some
respects we represent more truly the old Roman Power and sentiment than
any other people. Our art, our literature, are, as theirs, in some sort
exotics; but our genius for politics, for law, and, above all, for
colonization, our instinct for aggrandizement and for trade, are all
Roman. I believe we are laying the basis of a more enduring power and
prosperity, and that we shall not pass away till we have stamped
ourselves upon the whole western hemisphere so deeply, so nobly, that
if, in the far-away future, some Gibbon shall muse among our ruins, the
history of our Decline and Fall shall be more mournful and more epic
than that of the huge Empire amid the dust of whose once world-shaking
heart these feelings so often come upon me.”
The last week before leaving Rome was spent in an excursion with Story
to Subiaco, as related at length in “Leaves from my Journal in Italy.”
On their way to Naples the Lowells made a halt at Terracina, from which
place Lowell wrote to Robert Carter: “Here I am, with a magnificent
cliff opposite my window crowned by twelve arches of what is called the
Palace of Theodoric. I have just come in from seeing the Cathedral, the
dirtiest church I have seen in Italy (with a very picturesque old
Campanile, however), and the remains of the old Roman port, which
astonished me by their size even after all I had seen of Roman hugeness.
The port is now filled with soil, and there is a fine orange garden
where vessels used to lie. Terracina is nothing like what I expected to
see. The inn (or ‘Grand’ Albergo, as it is called) is one of the least
cutthroat looking places I ever saw. It is quite out of the town,
between the great cliff and the sea. Behind it, on the beach, the scene
is quite Neapolitan--forty or fifty bare-legged fishermen are drawing a
great seine out of the water, and forty or fifty dirty, laughing,
ragged, happily-wretched children gather round you and beg for _caccose_
or CECCO, by which they mean _qualche cosa_. The women sit round the
doors, nasty and contented, urging on their offspring in their
professional career. They are the most obstinate beggars I have seen
yet. In Rome the waving of the two first fingers of the hand and a
decided _non c’è_ is generally sufficient, but here I tried every
expedient in vain. The prickly pear grows bloatedly in all the ledges of
the cliff, an olive orchard climbs half-way up the back of it where the
hill is less steep, and farther to the left there are tall palms in a
convent garden, but I cannot see them.
“The drive over the Pontine marshes is for more than twenty miles a
perfectly straight, smooth avenue, between double rows of elms. I had
been told it was very dull, but did not find it so; for there were
mountains on one side of us, cultivated, or cattle and horse-covered
fields or woods on the other, and the birds sang and the sun shone all
the way. It seemed like the approach to some prince’s pleasure-house....
On the whole, the result of my experience thus far is that I am glad
that I came abroad, though the knowledge one acquires must rust for want
of use in a great measure at home. To be sure, one’s political ideas are
also somewhat modified--I don’t mean retrograded.”
The progress of the travellers is but briefly recorded after this. They
were in Naples early in May, and thence they appear to have made their
way to Venice, and to have spent the summer in leisurely travel through
the Italian lakes, Switzerland, Germany, Provence, and France, reaching
England in the early autumn. Here they saw London, Oxford, and
Cambridge. “We have been also,” Lowell wrote to his father, “at Ely,
where the cathedral is one of the most interesting I have seen. I know
nothing for which I am more thankful than the opportunity I have had of
seeing fine buildings. I think they give me a more absolute pleasure
than anything except fine natural scenery. Perhaps I should not except
even this, for the sense that it is a triumph of the brain and hand of
man certainly heightens the delight we feel in them. I think that Ely,
more than anything else, turned the scale and induced us to stay a month
longer.” From London, Lowell made an excursion with Kenyon to Bath to
see Landor, and thirty-six years later he jotted down some of the
impressions he then received of the man, whose writings he had long
admired.[94]
A trip followed through England and into Scotland and Wales, which took
in Peterborough, Lincoln, York, Ripon, Fountains Abbey, Durham,
Edinburgh, and the haunts of Scott, the Scottish and English lakes, and
then the Lowells took steamer from Liverpool, 30 October, 1852.