Rome and I had both grown older since I had seen her last, but she
seemed not to show so much as I the forty-three years that had passed.
Naturally a city that was already twenty-seven centuries of age (and no
one knows how much more) would not betray the lapse of time since 1864
as a man must who was then only twenty-seven years of age. In fact, I
should say that Rome looked, if anything, younger at our second meeting,
in 1908, or, at any rate, newer; and I am so warm a friend of youth (in
others) that I was not sorry to find Rome young, or merely new, in so
many good things. At the same time I must own that I heard no other
foreigner praising her for her newness except a fellow-septuagenarian,
who had seen Rome earlier even than I, and who thought it well that the
Ghetto should have been cleared away, though some visitors, who had
perhaps never lived in a Ghetto, thought it a pity if not a shame, and
an incalculable loss to the picturesque. These also thought the Tiber
Embankments a wicked sacrifice to the commonplace, though the mud-banks
of other days invited the torrent to an easy overflow of whole quarters
of the town, which were left reeking with the filth of the flood that
overlay the filth of the streets, and combined with it to an effect of
disease and of discomfort not always personally unknown to the lover of
the picturesque. There used to be a particular type of typhoid known as
Roman fever, but now quite unknown, thanks to the Tiber Embankments and
to the light and air let into the purlieus of that mediaeval Rome for
which the injudicious grieve so loudly. The perfect municipal
housekeeping of our time leaves no darkest and narrowest lane or alley
unswept; every morning the shovel and broom go over the surfaces
formerly almost impassable to the foot and quite impossible to the nose.
I am speaking literally as well as frankly, and though I can understand
why some envious New-Yorker, remembering our blackguard streets and
avenues, should look askance at the decency of the newer Rome and feign
it an offence against beauty and poetry, I do not see why a Londoner,
who himself lives in a well-kept town, should join with any of my
fellow-barbarians in hypocritically deploring the modern spirit which
has so happily invaded the Eternal City. The Londoner should rather
entreat us not to be humbugs and should invite us to join him in
rejoicing that the death-rate of Rome, once the highest in the civilized
world, is now almost the lowest. But the language of Shakespeare and
Milton is too often internationally employed in deploring the modernity
which has housed us aliens there in such perfect comfort and safety. One
must confine one's self to instances, and one may take that of the
Ludovisi Quarter, as it is called, where I dwelt in so much peace and
pleasure except when I was reminded that it was formed by plotting the
lovely Villa Ludovisi in house lots and building it up in attractive
hotels and apartment-houses. Even then I did not suffer so keenly as
some younger people, who had never seen the villa, seemed to do, though
there are still villas to burn in and about Rome, and they could not
really miss the Ludovisi. It was a pretty place, but not beyond praise,
and the quarter also is pretty, though also not beyond praise. The villa
was for the pleasure and pride of one family, but it signified, even in
its beauty, nothing but patrician splendor, which is a poor thing at
best; and the quarter is now for the pleasure and pride of great numbers
of tourists, mostly of that plutocracy from which a final democracy is
inevitably to evolve itself. I could see no cause to beat the breast in
this; and in humbler instances, even to very humble, I could not find
that things were nearly as bad in Rome as they have been painted.
There is no doubt but at one time, directly after the coming of the
capital, Rome was badly overbuilt. There is no doubt, also, that Rome
has grown up to these rash provisions for her growth, and that she now
“stuffs out her vacant garments with her form” pretty fully. One must
not say that all the flats in all the houses are occupied, but most of
them are; and if now the property of the speculators is the property of
the banks, the banks are no bad landlords, and the law does not spare
them the least of their duties to their tenants; or so, at least, it is
said.
Another typical wrong to the old Rome, or rather to the not-yet Rome,
was the building-up, beyond the Tiber, of the Quarter of the Fields, so
called, where Zola in his novel of _Rome_ has placed most of the squalor
which he so lavishly employs in its contrasts. In these he shows
himself the romanticist that he always frankly owned he was in spite of
himself; but after I had read his book I made it my affair to visit the
scenes of poverty and misery in the Quartiere dei Prati. When I did so I
found that I had already passed through the quarter without noting
anything especially poor or specifically miserable, and I went a third
time to make sure that I had not overlooked something impressively
lamentable. But I did not see above three tenement-houses with the wash
hung from the windows, and with the broken shutters of poverty and
misery, in a space where on the East Side or the North Side in New York
I could have counted such houses by the score, almost the hundred. In
this quarter the streets were swept every morning as they are everywhere
in Rome, and though toward noon they were beginning to look as slovenly
as our streets look when they have just been “cleaned,” I knew that the
next morning these worst avenues of Rome would be swept as our best
never have been since the days of Waring.
Beyond the tenements the generous breadth of the new streets has been
bordered by pleasant stucco houses of the pretty Italian type,
fleetingly touched but not spoiled by the taste of the _art nouveau,_
standing in their own grounds, and not so high-fenced but one could look
over their garden-walls into the shrubs and flowers about them. Like
suburban effects are characteristic of the new wide residential streets
on the hither side of the Tiber, and on both shores the streets expand
from time to time into squares, with more or less tolerable new
monuments--say, of the Boston average--in them. The business streets
where they bear the lines of the frequently recurrent trams are spacious
and straight, and though they are not the Corso, the Corso itself, it
must be remembered, is only a street of shops by no means impressive,
and is mostly dim under the overtowering walls of palaces which have no
space to be dignified in. Now and then their open portals betray a
glimpse of a fountained or foliaged court, but whether these palaces are
outwardly beautiful or not no one can tell from what sight one can get
of them; no, not even the most besotted sentimentalist of those who
bewail the loss of mediaeval Rome when they mean Rome of the
Renaissance. How much of that Rome has been erased by modern Rome I do
not know, but I think not so much as people pretend. Some of the ugly
baroque churches have been pulled down to allow the excavation of
imperial Rome, but there are plenty of ugly baroque churches left. It is
said the princely proprietors of the old palaces which are let in
apartments along the different Corsos (for the Corso is several) are
going to pull them down and put up modern houses, with the hope of
modern rents, but again I do not know. More than once the fortuities of
hospitality found one the guest of dwellers in such stately domiciles,
and I could honestly share the anxiety with which they spoke of these
rumors; but there are a great many vast edifices of the sort, and I
should not be surprised if I went back to Rome after another forty-three
years to find most of them standing in 1951 where they now stand in
1908. Rome was not built in a day, and it will not be unbuilt or rebuilt
within the brief period that will make me one hundred and fourteen years
old. By that time I shall have outlived most of the medievalists, and I
can say to the few survivors: “There, you see that new Rome never went
half so far as you expected.”
But no doubt it will go further than it has yet gone, in the way that is
for the good and comfort of mankind. In one of the newer quarters, of
which the Baths of Diocletian form the imperial centre, my just American
pride was flattered by the sign on a handsome apartment-house going up
in gardened grounds, which advertised that it was to be finished with a
lift and steam-heating. Many of the newer houses are already supplied
with lifts, but central heating is as yet only beginning to spread from
the hotels, where steam has been installed in compliance with the
impassioned American demand to be warm all round when one is in-doors.
New Rome is not going so fast and so far but that it will keep, to
whatever end it reaches, one of the characteristic charms of the old and
older Rome. I shall expect to see when I come back in 1951 the same or
the like corners of garden walls, with the tops of shining foliage
peering over them, that now enchant the passer in the street; from the
windows of my electric-elevatored, steam-heated apartment I shall look
down into the seclusion of gardens, with the golden globes of orange
espaliers mellowing against the walls, and the fountain in the midst of
oleanders and of laurels
“Shaking its loosened silver in the sun.”
Slim cypresses will then as now blacken through the delicate air against
the blue sky, and a stone-pine will spread its umbrella over some
sequestered nook. By that time the craze for the eucalyptus which now
possesses all Italy will be over, and every palm-tree will be cut down,
while the ilex will darken in its place and help the eternal youth of
the marbles to a greener old age of moss and mould in the gloom of its
spreading shade. All these things beautifully abound in Rome now, as
they always have abounded, and there is no reason to fear that they will
cease to abound.
Rome grows, and as Italy prospers it will grow more and more, for there
must forever be a great and famous capital where there has always been
one. The place is so perfectly the seat of an eternal city that it might
well seem to have been divinely chosen because of the earth and heaven
which are more in sympathy there than anywhere else in the world. The
climate is beyond praise for a winter which is mild without being weak;
there is a summer of tolerable noonday heat, and of nights deliciously
cool; the spring is scarcely earlier than in our latitudes, but the fall
is a long, slow decline from the temperature of October to the lowest
level of January without the vicissitudes of other autumns. The
embrowning or reddening or yellowing leaves turn sere, but drop or cling
to their parent boughs as they choose, for there is seldom a frost to
loosen their hold, and seldom a storm to tear them away.
So it is said by those who profess a more intimate acquaintance with the
Roman meteorology than I can boast, but from the little I know I can
believe anything of it that is of good report. Everywhere the prevalence
of the ilex, the orange, the laurel, the pine, flatters January with an
illusion of June, and under our hotel windows I was witness of the
success of the sycamore leaves in keeping a grip of their native twigs
even after the new buds came to push them away. In the last days of
March a plum-tree hung its robe of white blossoms over the wall of the
Capuchin convent from the garden within; but the almond-trees had been
in bloom for six weeks before, and the deeper pink of the peach had more
warmly flushed the suburbs for fully a fortnight.
Still, a mild winter and an endurable summer will not of themselves make
a great capital, and it was probably the Romans themselves who in the
past made Rome the capital of the world, first politically and then
religiously. Whether they will make it so hereafter remains to be seen.
In the sense of all the Italians being Romans, I believe, with my
profound faith in the race, that they are very capable of doing it; and
they will have the help of the whole world in the work, or what is most
liberal and enlightened in the whole world. As it is, Rome has a pull
with Occidental civilization which forever constitutes her its head
city. The only European capitals comparable with her are London, Paris,
and Berlin; one cannot take account of New York, which is merely the
commercial metropolis of America, with a possibility of becoming the
business centre of both hemispheres. Washington is still in its nonage
and of a numerical unimportance in which it must long remain almost
ludicrously inferior to other capitals, not to dwell upon its want of
anything like artistic, literary, scientific, and historical primacy. It
is the voluntary political centre of the greatest republic of any time
and of a nation which is already unrivalled in its claim upon the
future. But it is not of the involuntary and unconscious growth of a
capital like London, which is the centre of a mighty state, deep-rooted
in the past, and the capital of that Anglo-Saxon race of which we are
ourselves a condition, and of a colonial empire without a present equal.
Paris is France in the sense of representing the intense life of a
nation unsurpassed in the things which enlighten and ennoble the human
intellect and advance mankind. Berlin is the concentration of the strong
will of a state which has made itself great out of the weak will of
sundry inferior states, homogeneous in their disunity more than in any
positive quality, and which stands for a political ideal more nearly
reactionary, more nearly mediaeval, than any other modern state. Berlin
is not German as Paris is French, and Rome is not so exclusively
Italian. In fact, her greatness, accomplished and destined, lies in just
the fact that she is not and never can be exclusively Italian. Human
interests too universal and imperative for the control of a single race,
even so brilliant and so gifted as the Italian race, which is naturally
and necessarily in possession, centre about her through history,
religion, art, and make every one at home in the city which is the
capital of Christendom. Now and then I saw some shining and twinkling
Japs going about with Baedekers, and I imagined them giving a modest and
unprejudiced mind to Rome without claiming, tacitly or explicitly, the
right to dispute the Italian theory and practice in its control. But
every Occidental stranger (if any one of European blood is a stranger in
the home of Christianity) I knew to be there in a mood more or less
critical, and in a disposition to find fault with the Rome which is now
making, or making over.
[Illustration: 15 GLIMPSE INSIDE OF IMPERIAL ROME]
We journeyers or sojourners can do this without expense or inconvenience
to ourselves, and we can easily blame the Italian conception of the
future city which, to name but one fact, has made it possible for us to
visit her in comfort at every season and to come away without having
come down with the Roman fever. In spite of the sort of motherly, or at
the worst step-motherly, welcome which she gives to all us closely or
distantly related children of hers; in spite of her immemorial fame and
her immortal beauty; in spite of her admirable housekeeping, in which
she rises every morning at daybreak and sweeps clean every hole and
corner of her dwelling; in spite of her wonderful sky, her life-giving
air; in spite of the level head she keeps in her political affairs, and
the miraculous poise she maintains between the antagonism of State and
Church; in spite of her wise eclecticism in modern improvements; in
spite of her admirable hygiene, which has constituted her one of the
healthiest, if not the healthiest city in Europe; in spite of the
solvency which she preserves amid expenses to which the vast scale of
antiquity obliges her in all her public enterprises (a thing to be
hereafter studied), we, the ungracious offspring of her youth, come from
our North and West and censure and criticise and carp. I have seldom
conversed with any fellow-visitor in Rome who could not improve her in
some phase or other, who could not usefully advise her, who, at the
best, did not patronize her. I offer myself as almost the sole example
of a stranger who was contented with her as she is, or as she is going
to be without his help; and I am the more confident, therefore, in
suggesting to Rome an expedient by which she can repair the finances
which her visitors say are so foolishly and wastefully mismanaged in her
civic schemes. A good round tax, such as Carlsbad levies upon all
sojourners, if laid upon the multitudinous tourists joining in such a
chorus of criticism of Rome would give them the indefeasible right to
their opinions and would help to replete a treasury which they believe
is always in danger of being exhausted.