_Tasso and Tusculum._
THE church and convent of S. Onofrio crown the steepest slope of the
Janiculan. Our _cocchieri_ always insisted, more or less strenuously,
that we should alight at the bottom of the short _Salita di S.
Onofrio_, and ascend on foot while the debilitated horses followed at
their ease. Our first drive thither was upon a delicious morning in
February, when the atmosphere was crystalline to the Sabine Hills. The
terrace before the church-portico was clean and sunny, the prospect so
enchanting, that we hung over the parapet guarding the verge of the
hill, for a long quarter of an hour. Under the Papacy, S. Onofrio was
barred against women, except upon the 25th of April, the anniversary of
the death of Torquato Tasso, for whose sake, and that alone, strangers
would care to pass the threshold.
Beyond the tomb of Tasso, and that of the lingual prodigy, Cardinal
Mezzofanti, the church offers no temptation to sight-seers. We
therefore turned almost immediately into the cloisters of the now
sparsely inhabited monastery. The young priests and acolytes are
winning honest bread by honest labor elsewhere. Gray-bearded monks
stumble along the corridors, keep up the daily masses, and sun
themselves among the salad and artichoke beds of the garden.
“Slow to learn!” said Caput, shaking his head before a fresco in the
side-arcade of the church.
It represented St. Jerome, gaunt, wild-eyed and distraught with the
sense of his impotence and sinfulness, at the moment thus described
by him;—“How often, when alone in the desert with wild beasts and
scorpions, _half dead with fasting and penance_, have I fancied myself
a spectator of the sins of Rome, and of the dances of its young women!”
Victor Emmanuel had biting reasons of his own for knowing what is the
sway of the flesh and the devil, leaving the world out of the moral
sum. Merciful humanitarian as well as wise ruler, he led would-be
saints into the wholesome air of God’s working-day world.
The passage from the church to the conventual buildings is decorated
with unlovely scenes from the life of that unlovely hermit, S. Onofrio.
His neglected nakedness and ostentatious contempt for the virtue
very near akin to commonplace godliness, make one wonder the more
at the sweet cleanliness of the halls and rooms nominally under his
guardianship.
“Ecco!” said our guide, opening the door of a large chamber.
Directly opposite, in strong relief against the bare wall, stood a
man. Dressed in the doublet and hose worn by Italian gentlemen two
hundred years ago, he leaned lightly on the nearest wainscot, with the
easy grace of one who listens, ready to reply to friend or guest. The
beautiful head was slightly bent,—a half-smile lighted features that
were else sad. A step into the room, a second’s thought dispelled the
illusion. Some of the company said it had never existed for them. For
myself, I gladly own that I was startled by the life-like expression of
figure and face. It is a fresco, and critics say, cheap and tawdry,—a
mere trick, and not good even as a trick. I got used, after awhile,
to disagreement with the critics, and when a thing pleased me, liked
it, in my own heart, without their permission. This fresco helped me
believe that this was Tasso’s room; that he had trodden this floor,
perhaps leaned against the wall over there, while he looked from that
window upon the Rome that had done him tardy justice by summoning him
to receive in her Capitol the laureate’s crown.
Wrecked in love and in ambition; robbed and maligned; deserted by
friends and hounded by persecutors; confined for cause as yet unknown,
for seven years in a madman’s cell, he was at fifty-one—uncheered by
the blaze of popular favor shed upon him at evening-time—bowed in
spirit, infirm in body. The Coronation was postponed until Spring in
consideration for his feeble health. The ceremony was to surpass all
former literary pageants, and preparations for it were in energetic
progress when Tasso removed, for rest and recuperation, to the
Convent of S. Onofrio. He had worked hard that winter in spite of
steadily-declining strength. He would rally his forces against the
important day that was to declare his life to have been triumph, not
failure. We recall the bitterer address of Wolsey at the door of the
convent in which he had come to lay his bones, in reading Tasso’s
exclamation to the monks who welcomed him: “My fathers! I have come to
die amongst you!” When informed by his physician that the end was very
near, he thanked him for the “pleasant news” and blessed Heaven for “a
haven so calm after a life so stormy.”
To a friend, he wrote—“I am come to begin my conversation in Heaven
in this elevated place.” The Pope sent him absolution under his own
hand and seal. “I _shall_ be crowned!” said the dying poet. “Not with
laurel, as a poet in the Capitol, but with a better crown of glory in
Heaven.”
The monk who watched and prayed with him on the night ending with the
dawn of April 25, 1595, caught his last murmur:—
“_In manus tuas, Domine!_”
He had instructed his friend, Cardinal Aldobrandini, to collect and
destroy all his printed works, the mutilation of which had nettled
him to frenzy, a few years before. They were nothing to him now;
the memories of his turbulent life a dream he would forget “in this
elevated place.”
A glass case in this chamber holds a wax cast of his face taken after
death. It is brown, cracked, dreesome, the features greatly changed by
sorrow and pain from those of a marble bust near by, and very unlike
those of the frescoed portrait. The head is small and well-formed, the
forehead high, with cavernous temples. A shriveled laurel-wreath is
bound about them, discolored and brittle as the wax. The crucifix used
by him in his last illness and which was enclasped by his dead hands
is also exhibited, with his inkstand, a page of MS. and the iron box
in which he lay buried until the erection of his monument. But for the
graceful figure upon the wall in the corner by the left-hand window,
and the view framed by the casements, we could not have remembered that
life, no less than death, had been here;—still less, that this was, in
truth, a Coronation-room.
Through the garden a broad alley leads between beds of thrifty
vegetables to Tasso’s oak. From the shattered trunk, which has suffered
grievously from the winds, shoots a single vigorous branch. We picked
ivy and grasses from the earth about the roots where Tasso sat each
day, while he could creep so far;—the city at his feet, the Campagna
beyond the city unrolled to the base of the mountains, and Heaven
beyond the hills. The only immortelle I saw growing in Italy, I found
so near to Tasso’s oak that his foot must often have pressed the spot.
At the left of the oak, and winding along the crest of the hill is
a terrace bordered by a low, broken wall, bright that day, with
mid-winter turf and bloom. Rust-brown and golden wall-flowers were
rooted among the stones; pansies smilingly pushed aside the grass to
get a good look at the sun; daisies, like happy, lawless children, ran
everywhere.
“This is what I crossed the Atlantic to see and to be!” Caput
pronounced, deliberately, throwing himself down on the sward, and
resting an elbow upon the wall, just where the flowers were thickest,
the sunshine warmest, the prospect fairest. “You can go home when you
like. I shall remain here until the antiquated fathers up at the house
drive me from the premises. I can touch Heaven—as the Turks say—with my
finger!”
While we affected to wait upon his pleasure, we remembered that a more
genial saint than the patron of the convent—to wit—S. Filippo Neri, was
wont to assemble here Roman children and teach them to sing and act his
oratorios. What a music-gallery! And what a theme for artist’s brush
or pen were those rehearsals under this sky, at this height, with the
shadow of Tasso’s oak upon the al fresco concert-hall!
“The view from Tusculum is said to be more beautiful than this,”
observed our head, murmurously, from the depths of his Turkish trance.
“We will see it before the world is a week older!”
Nevertheless, the earth was two months further on in her swing around
the sun, and that sun had kissed into life a thousand blushing flowers,
where one had bloomed in February, when we really set out for the site
of that venerable town. We had appointed many other seasons for the
excursion, and been thwarted in design, crippled in execution. Mrs.
Blimber’s avowal that she could go down to the grave in peace could
she but once have seen Cicero in his villa at Tusculum, was worn into
shreds among us. When we did meet, by appointment, our friends, the
V——s at the station in time for the eleven o’clock train to Frascati,
we had a story of an inopportune call that had nearly been the fortieth
obstacle to the fruition of our scheme.
It was April, but the verdure of early summer was in trees and herbage.
Nature never sleeps in Italy. At the worst, she only lapses into
drowsiness on winter nights, and, next morning, confesses the breach
of decorum with a bewitching smile that earns for her abundant pardon.
The exuberance of her mood on this day was tropical and superb. The
tall grasses of the Campagna were gleaming surges before the wind,
laden with odors stolen from plains of tossing purple spikes—not
balls—yet which were clover to taste and smell. Red rivulets of
poppies twisted in and out of the corn-fields and splashed up to the
edge of the railway, and ox-eyed daisies were foamy masses upon the
scarlet streams. Even in Italy, and in spring-tide, the olive is the
impersonation of calm melancholy. In all the voluptuous glory of this
weather, the olive trees stood pale, passionless, patient, holding on
to their hillsides, not for life’s, but for duty’s sake, sustaining
resolution and disregarding gravitation, by casting backward, grappling
roots above the soil, like anchors played out in rough seas. They could
not make the landscape sad, but they chastened it into milder beauty.
Between dark clumps of ilex, overtopped by stately stone pines—ruined
towers and battlements told their tale of days and races now no more,
as the white walls of modern villas, embosomed in groves of nectarine
and almond, and flowering-chestnut trees—like sunset clouds for rosy
softness—bespoke present affluence and tranquillity in which to enjoy
it.
In half an hour we were at the Frascati station. A mile of steep
carriage-drive that granted us, at every turn in the ascent, new and
delightful views, brought us to the cathedral. It is very ugly and
uninteresting except for the circumstance that just within it is the
monument dedicated by Cardinal York to his brother, Charles Edward,
better known by his sobriquet of “Young Pretender,” than by the string
of Latin titles informing us of his inherited rights and claim.
Vexatious emptiness though these were, the recitation of them appears
to have been the pabulum of soul and spirit to the exiled Stuarts unto
the third generation.
We lunched moderately well—being hungry—at the best inn in Frascati,
and discarding the donkeys and donkey-boys clustering like flies in
the cathedral piazza, we bargained for four “good horses” to take us
up to Tusculum. Mrs. V—— was not well, and remained at the hotel while
our cavalcade, attended by two guides, wound up the hill. The element
of the ludicrous, never lacking upon such expeditions, came promptly
and boldly to the front by the time we were fairly mounted, and hung
about the party until we alighted in the same spot on our return. Dr.
V—— stands six feet, four, in low-heeled slippers, and to him, as
seemed fit, was awarded the tallest steed. Prima’s was a gaunt beast,
whose sleepy eyes and depressed head bore out the master’s asseveration
that he was quiet as a lamb. Caput’s horse was of medium height and
abounding in capers, a matter of no moment until it was discovered that
my lamb objected to be mounted, and refused to be guided by a woman.
After a due amount of prancing and curveting had demonstrated this
idiosyncrasy to be no mere notion on my part, a general exchange,
leaving out Prima, was effected. I was lifted to the back of the
lofty creature who had borne Dr. V——. Caput demanded the privilege of
subduing the misogynist. To the lot of our amiable son of Anak fell a
Rosinante, who, as respectable perhaps in his way as his rider was in
his, became, by the conjunction of the twain, an absurd hexaped that
provoked the spectators to roars of laughter, his rider leading and
exceeding the rest.
“The tomb of Lucullus!” he sobered us by exclaiming, pointing to a
circular mass of masonry by the roadside. “That is to say, the reputed
tomb. We know that he was Cicero’s neighbor—that they borrowed one
another’s books in person.”
The books that, Cicero tells Atticus, “gave a soul to his house!”
The brief, every-day phrase indicative of the neighborliness of the
two celebrated Romans made real men of them, and the region familiar
ground. The road lay between oaks, chestnuts, laurels, and thickets
of laurestinus, the leaves shining as with fresh varnish—straight up
the mountain, until it became a shaded lane, paved with polygonal
blocks of lava. This is, incontestably, the ancient road to Tusculum,
discovered and opened within fifty years. The banks were a mosaic
of wild flowers;—the largest daisies and anemones we had yet seen,
cyclamen, violets, and scores of others unknown by sight or name to
us. In response to our cry of delight, both gentlemen reined in their
horses, and Dr. V—— alighted to collect a bouquet. The tightening of
Caput’s rein brought his horse’s ears so near his own, he had to throw
his head back suddenly to save his face. The animal had a camel’s neck
in length and suppleness,—a mule’s in stubbornness, and put upon, or
off, his mettle by the abrupt jerk, he gave marvelous illustrations
of these qualities. He could waltz upon four legs or upon two; dance
fast or slow; rear and kick at once, or stand like a petrifaction under
whip, spur, and an enfilading fire of Italian and American expletives;
but his neck was ever _the_ feature of the performance. Whether he made
of it a rail, an inclined iron plane, the handle of a jug, or a double
bow-knot, it was true to one purpose—not to obey rein or rider.
“The wretched brute has no martingale on!” cried the latter, at length.
“See, here! you scamp! Ecco! Voilà! V——! what is the Italian for
martingale? Ask that fellow what he means by giving such a horse to a
lady, or to any one whose life is of any value, without putting curb or
martingale upon him?”
The doctor, who, by the way, was once described to me by a Roman
shopkeeper as the “tall American, with the long beard, and who speaks
Italian so beautifully,” opened parley, when he could control his
risibles, with the owner of the “_molto buono_” animal.
“He says he could not put upon him what he does not possess,” was the
epitome of the reply. “That he has but three martingales. And there are
four horses. Supply inadequate to demand, my dear fellow! He implores
the _signore Americano_ to be reasonable.”
“Reasonable!” The signore swung himself to the ground. “Say to him,
with my compliments, that I implore him to take charge of a horse that
is altogether worthy,—if that could be—of his master! I shall walk!
_He_ ought to be made to ride!”
We begged off the cowering delinquent from this extreme of retribution.
Picking up the bridle flung to him, he followed us at a disconsolate
and respectful distance. Cicero had a fine, peppery temper of his own.
Did he ever have a fracas with his charioteer in this steep lane, I
wonder?
We dismounted at what are supposed to be the ruins of his Villa. Some
archæologists give the preference to the spot now occupied by the Villa
Ruffinella, which we had seen on our way up. The best authorities had
decided, at the date of our excursion to Tusculum, that the orator’s
favorite residence, “_ad latera superiora_” of the eminence culminating
in the Tusculan fortress, stood nearer the city than was once thought,
and that its remains are the thick walls and vaulted doorway we
examined in profound belief in this theory. It is not an extensive
nor a very picturesque remainder, although the buried foundations
may be traced over a vast area. Against the sunniest wall grows an
immense ivy-tree, spreading broad arms and tenacious fingers over
the brick-work. The side adhering to the wall is flat, of course. We
measured the outer surface, at the height of five feet from the ground.
It was thirty-nine inches from side to side. This may almost be rated
as the diameter, the bark being very slightly protuberant.
For beauty of situation the Villa was without an equal. Forsyth
says,—“On the acclivity of the hill were scattered the villas of
Balbus, Brutus, Catullus, Metellus, Crassus, Pompey, Cæsar, Gabinus,
Lucullus, Lentulus and Varro, so that Cicero was in the midst of his
acquaintances and friends.”
“In that place, alone”—wrote Cicero of his Tusculan home to his best
friend and correspondent—“do I find rest and repose from all my
troubles and toil.”
In his “Essay upon Old Age,” he drawls an attractive picture of the
country-life of a gentleman-farmer at that time. I have not room
to transcribe it here, faithfully as it portrays the real tastes
and longings of the ambitious lawyer and successful politician.
“What need”—and there is a sigh for the Tusculan upper hillside in
the sentence—“to dwell upon the charm of the green fields, the
well-ordered shrubberies, the beauty of vineyards and olive-groves?”
These smile no more about the site of the desolated villa. Terraces,
slopes and summits are overgrown with wild grass. A few goats were
feeding upon these at the door where little Tullia—the “Tulliola” of
the fond father—his “_delicia nostræ_”—may have frolicked while he
watched her from the colonnade overlooking Rome,—or one of “the seats
with niches against the wall adorned with pictures;”—or, still, within
sound of her voice, wrote in his library to Atticus, that the young
lady threatened to sue him, (Atticus,) for breach of contract in not
having sent her a promised gift.
The paved road, firm velvet ridges of turf rising between the blocks,
runs beyond the Villa, directly to a small theatre. The upper walls
are gone, but the foundations are entire, with fifteen rows of seats.
It is a semicircular hollow in the turfy bank, excavated by Lucien
Bonaparte while he lived at Villa Ruffinella. We descended half a
dozen steps and stood upon the stone platform where it is generally
believed Cicero held the famous Tusculan Disputations. The topics of
these familiar dialogues or talks were “Contempt of Death,” “Constancy
in Suffering,” and the like. Did he draw consolation from a review of
his own philosophy, upon that bitter day when, deserted by partisans,
and chased by his enemies, he withdrew to his beloved “Tusculaneum” and
from these heights looked down upon the city whose pride he had been?—
“_Rerum, pulcherrima Roma!_”
Waiting, doubting, dreading, he at length received the news that a
price had been set upon his head, fled in a blind, strange panic;
returned upon his steps; again took flight, doubled a second time upon
the track, and sat down, stunned and desperate, to await the death-blow.
Instead of the myrtle-tree, thorn-bushes and brambles grow rankly in
“The white streets of Tusculum.”
The reservoir that fed the aqueducts; the ruins of Forum and Theatre;
piles of nameless stones breaking through uncultivated moors; on the
side nearest Rome, mossy pillars of the old gateway; outside of this,
a stone drinking-trough set there in the days of the Consulate, and
through which still runs a stream of pure cold water,—this is what is
left of the town founded by the son of Circe and Ulysses; erst the
stanch ally of Rome, and the queen-city of Latium up to the battle of
Lake Regillus. The best view of the encompassing country is to be had
a little beyond the gateway. From this point is visible the natural
basin, shut in by wooded hills, which contains Lake Regillus, now a
stagnant pond, quite dry in summer. Under our feet were the stones from
which the hoofs of Mamilius’ dark-gray charger struck fire on the day
of battle.
Repeating the rhyme, we looked around to trace the route by which
“He rushed through the gate of Tusculum;
He rushed up the long white street;
He rushed by tower and temple,
And paused not from his race
’Till he stood before his master’s door
In the stately market-place.”
“Poetry—not history!” objected one.
“Better than statistical facts!” said another.
Glancing in the direction of Rome, we were the witnesses of an
extraordinary atmospheric phenomenon. The city, a dozen miles away,
was lifted from the plain and floating upon a low-lying band of
radiant mist. The dome of St. Peter’s actually appeared to sway and
tremble as a balloon strains at its cords. The roofs were silver; the
pinnacles aërial towers. Thus the background, while between it and our
mountain, the Campagna was a gulf black as death with the shadow of a
thundercloud that had come we know not from what quarter. It was not
there five minutes ago. We had barely time to exclaim over the marvel
of contrasted light and gloom, when the cloud dropped like monstrous
bat-wings upon the valley, flew faster than did ever bird of day or
night toward us. There was not a roof in Tusculum. The guides brought
up the horses in haste, and three of us were in the saddle by the time
the first big drops dashed in our faces.
“_Ride!_” ejaculated the fourth, in response to the supplicating
pantomime of the leader of the unmartingaled beast. “On _that_ thing!”
Tusculum rain had not extinguished his sense of injury, and this was
insult. There was but one umbrella amongst us, and this was forced
upon me. Caput threw my bridle over his arm and walked at my tall
horse’s head, calmly regardless of the drenching storm. Dr. V—— and
his four-footed adjunct jogged placidly at the head of the line. Next
rode Prima, humming softly to herself, while cascades poured from her
hat-brim upon her shoulders, and her soaked dress distilled green
tears upon the sides of her white horse. We followed, I very high, and
selfishly dry. The guides, to whose outer men the plentiful washing was
an improvement, straggled along in the rear, leading the recalcitrant
horse. It was a forlorn-looking, but perfectly good-humored procession.
There was little danger of taking cold from summer rain in this
warm air. However this might be, to fret would be childish, to
rebel foolishly useless. Caput uttered the only protest against the
proceedings of the day, and that not until we left our horses in the
piazza in front of the cathedral, and waited in the sunshine succeeding
the shower, while the guides were paid.
“I don’t mind the walk up and down the mountain,” beating the wet from
his hat, and wiping the drops from his face. “Nor the wetting very
much, although my boots are ruined. I _do_ grudge giving ten francs for
the privilege of seeing that brigand lead his villanous horse three
miles!”
But he paid the bill.