As I have told, the first visit I paid to the antique world in Rome was
at the Colosseum the day after our arrival. For some unknown reason I
was going to begin with the Baths of Caracalla, but, as it happened,
these were the very last ruins we visited in Rome; and I do not know
just what accident diverted us to the Colosseum; perhaps we stopped
because it was on the way to the Baths and looked an easier conquest. At
any rate, I shall never regret that we began with it.
After twoscore years and three it was all strangely familiar. I do not
say that in 1864 there was a horde of boys at the entrance wishing to
sell me postcards--these are a much later invention of the Enemy--but I
am sure of the men with trays full of mosaic pins and brooches, and
looking, they and their wares, just as they used to look. The Colosseum
itself looked unchanged, though I had read that a minion of the wicked
Italian government had once scraped its flowers and weeds away and
cleaned it up so that it was perfectly spoiled. But it would take a good
deal more than that to spoil the Colosseum, for neither the rapine of
the mediaeval nobles, who quarried their palaces from it, nor the
industrial enterprise of some of the popes, who wished to turn it into
workshops, nor the archeology of United Italy had sufficed to weaken in
it that hold upon the interest proper to the scene of the most
stupendous variety shows that the world has yet witnessed. The terrible
stunts in which men fought one another for the delight of other men in
every manner of murder, and wild beasts tore the limbs of those glad to
perish for their faith, can be as easily imagined there as ever, and the
traveller who visits the place has the assistance of increasing hordes
of other tourists in imagining them.
I will not be the one to speak slight of that enterprise which marshals
troops of the personally conducted through the place and instructs them
in divers languages concerning it. Save your time and money so, if you
have not too much of either, and be one of an English, French, or German
party, rather than try to puzzle the facts out for yourself, with one
contorted eye on your Baedeker and the other on the object in question.
In such parties a sort of domestic relation seems to grow up through
their associated pleasures in sight-seeing, and they are like family
parties, though politer and patienter among themselves than real family
parties. They are commonly very serious, though they doubtless all have
their moments of gayety; and in the Colosseum I saw a French party
grouped for photography by a young woman of their number, who ran up and
down before them with a kodak and coquettishly hustled them into
position with pretty, bird-like chirpings of appeal and reproach, and
much graceful self-evidencing. I do not censure her behavior, though
doubtless there were ladies among the photographed who thought it
overbold; if the reader had been young and blond and _svelte,_ in a
Parisian gown and hat, with narrow russet shoes, not too high-heeled for
good taste, I do not believe he would have been any better; or, if he
would, I should not have liked him so well.
On the earlier day which I began speaking of I found that I was
insensibly attaching myself to an English-hearing party of the
personally conducted, in the dearth of my own recollections of the local
history, but I quickly detached myself for shame and went back and
meekly hired the help of a guide who had already offered his services in
English, and whom I had haughtily spurned in his own tongue. His
English, though queer, was voluminous; but I am not going to drag the
reader at our heels laden with lore which can be applied only on the
spot or in the presence of postal-card views of the Colosseum. It is
enough that before my guide released us we knew where was the box of
Caesar, whom those about to die saluted, and where the box of the
Vestals whose fatal thumbs gave the signal of life or death for the
unsuccessful performer; where the wild beasts were kept, and where the
Christians; where were the green-rooms of the gladiators, who waited
chatting for their turn to go on and kill one another. One must make
light of such things or sink under them; and if I am trying to be a
little gay, it is for the readers' sake, whom I would not have perish of
their realization. Our guide spared us nothing, such was his conscience
or his science, and I wish I could remember his name, for I could
commend him as most intelligent, even, when least intelligible.
However, the traveller will know him by the winning smile of his
rosy-faced little son, who follows him round and is doubtless bringing
himself up as the guide of coming generations of tourists. There had
been a full pour of forenoon sunshine on the white dust of the street
before our hotel, but the cold of the early morning, though it had not
been too much for the birds that sang in the garden back of us, had left
a skim of ice in damp spots, and now, in the late gray of the afternoon,
the ice was visible and palpable underfoot in the Colosseum, where
crowds of people wandered severally or collectively about in the
half-frozen mud. They were, indeed, all over the place, up and down, in
every variety of costume and aspect, but none were so picturesque as a
little group of monks who had climbed to a higher tier of the arches and
stood looking down into the depths where we looked up at them, denned
against the sky in their black robes, which opened to show their under
robes of white. They were picturesque, but they were not so monumental
as an old, unmistakable American in high-hat, with long, drooping
side-whiskers, not above a purple suspicion of dye, who sat on a broken
column and vainly endeavored to collect his family for departure.
Whenever he had gathered two or three about him they strayed off as the
others came up, and we left him sardonically patient of their adhesions
and defections, which seemed destined to continue indefinitely, while we
struggled out through the postal-card boys and mosaic-pin men to our
carriage. Then we drove away through the quarter of somewhat jerry-built
apartment-houses which neighbor the Colosseum, and on into the salmon
sunset which, after the gray of the afternoon, we found waiting us at
our hotel, with the statues on the balustrated wall of the villa garden
behind it effectively posed in the tender light, together with the
eidolons of those picturesque monks and that monumental American.
[Illustration: 16 INTERIOR OF COLOSSEUM FROM THE SOUTH]
We could safely have stayed longer, for the evening damp no longer
brings danger of Roman fever, which people used to take in the
Colosseum, unless I am thinking of the signal case of Daisy Miller. She,
indeed, I believe, got it there by moonlight; but now people visit the
place by moonlight in safety; and there are even certain nights of the
season advertised when you may see it by the varicolored lights of the
fireworks set off in it. My impression of it was quite vivid enough
without that, and the vision of the Colosseum remained, and still
remains, the immense skeleton of the stupendous form stripped of all
integumental charm and broken down half one side of its vast oval, so
that wellnigh a quarter of the structural bones are gone.
[Illustration: 17 THE SACRED WAY THROUGH THE FORUM]
With its image there persisted and persists the question constantly
recurrent in the presence of all the imperial ruins, whether imperial
Rome was not rather ugly than otherwise. The idea of those
world-conquerors was first immensity and then beauty, as much as could
survive consistently with getting immensity into a given space. The
question is most of all poignant in the Forum, which I let wait a full
fortnight before moving against it in the warm sun of an amiable
February morning. On my first visit to Rome I could hardly wait for day
to dawn after my arrival before rushing to the Cow Field, as it was then
called, and seeing the wide-horned cattle chewing the cud among the
broken monuments now so carefully cherished and, as it were, sedulously
cultivated. It is doubtful whether all that has since been done, and
which could not but have been done, by the eager science as much
involuntarily as voluntarily applied to the task, has resulted in a more
potent suggestion of what the Forum was in the republican or imperial
day than what that simple, old, unassuming Cow Field afforded. There
were then as now the beautiful arches; there were the fragments of the
temple porches, with their pillars; there was the “unknown column with
the buried base”; there were all the elements of emotion and meditation;
and it is possible that sentiment has only been cumbered Avith the
riches which archaeology has dug up for it by lowering the surface of
the Cow Field fifteen or twenty feet; by scraping clean the buried
pavements; by identifying the storied points; by multiplying the
fragments of basal or columnar marbles and revealing the plans of
temples and palaces and courts and tracing the Sacred Way on which the
magnificence of the past went to dusty death. After all, the imagination
is very childlike, and it prefers the elements of its pleas-ures simple
and few; if the materials are very abundant or complex, it can make
little out of them; they embarrass it, and it turns critical in
self-defence. The grandeur that was Rome as visioned from the Cow Field
becomes in the mind's eye the kaleidoscopic clutter which the
resurrection of the Forum Romanum must more and more realize.
If the visitor would have some rash notion of what the ugliness of the
place was like when it was in its glory, he may go look at the plastic
reconstruction of it, indefinitely reduced, in the modest building
across the way from the official entrance to the Forum. One cannot say
but this is intensely interesting, and it affords the consolation which
the humble (but not too humble) spirit may gather from witness of the
past, that the fashion of this world and the pride of the eyes and all
ruthless vainglory defeated themselves in ancient Rome, as they must
everywhere when they can work their will. If one had thought that in
magnitude and multitude some entire effect of beauty was latent, one had
but to look at that huddle of warring forms, each with beauty in it, but
beauty lost in the crazy agglomeration of temples and basilicas and
columns and arches and statues and palaces, incredibly painted and
gilded, and huddled into spaces too little for the least, and crowding
severally upon one another, without relation or proportion. Their mass
is supremely tasteless, almost senseless; that mob of architectural
incongruities was not only without collective beauty, but it was without
that far commoner and cheaper thing which we call picturesqueness. This
has come to it through ruin, and we must give a new meaning to the word
vandalism if we would appreciate what the barbarians did for Rome in
tumbling her tawdry splendor into the heaps which are now at least
paint-able. Imperial Rome as it stood was not paintable; I doubt if it
would have been even photographable to anything but a picture post-card
effect.
But as yet I wandered in the Forum safe from the realization of its
ugliness when it was in its glory. I cannot say that even now it is
picturesque, but it is paintable, and certainly it is pathetic. Stumps
of columns, high and low, stand about in the places where they stood in
their unbroken pride, and though it seems a hardship that they should
not have been left lying in the kindly earth or on it instead of being
pulled up and set on end, it must be owned that they are scarcely
overworked in their present postures. More touching are those
inarticulate heaps, cairns of sculptured fragments, piled here and there
together and waiting the knowledge which is some time to assort them and
translate them into some measure of coherent meaning. But it must always
be remembered that when they were coherent they were only beautiful
parts of a whole that was brutally unbeautiful. We have but to use the
little common-sense which Heaven has vouchsafed some of us in order to
realize that Rome, either republican or imperial, was a state for which
we can have no genuine reverence, and that mostly the ruins of her past
can stir in us no finer emotion than wonder. But necessarily, for the
sake of knowledge, and of ascertaining just what quantity and quality of
human interest the material records of Roman antiquity embody,
archaeology must devote itself with all possible piety to their
recovery. The removal, handful by handful, of the earth from the grave
of the past which the whole Forum is, tomb upon tomb, is as dramatic a
spectacle as anything one can well witness; for that soil is richer than
any gold-mine in its potentiality of treasure, and it must be strictly
scrutinized, almost by particles, lest some gem of art should be cast
aside with the accumulated rubbish of centuries. Yet this drama,
poignantly suggestive as it always must be, was the least incident of
that morning in the Forum which it was my fortune to pass there with
other better if not older tourists as guest of the Genius Loci. It was
not quite a public event, though the Commendatore Boni is so well known
to the higher journalism, and even to fiction (as the reader of Anatole
France's _La Pierre Blanche_ will not have forgotten), that nothing
which he archaeologically does is without public interest, and this
excursion in the domain of antiquity was expected to result in
identifying the site of the Temple of Jupiter Stator. It was conjectured
that the temple vowed to this specific Jupiter for his public spirit in
stopping the flight of a highly demoralized Roman army would be found
where we actually found it. Archaeology seems to proceed by hypothesis,
like other sciences, and to enjoy a forecast of events before they are
actually accomplished. I do not say that I was very vividly aware of the
event in question; I could not go now and show where the temple stood,
but when I read of it in a cablegram to the American newspapers I almost
felt that I had dug it up with my own hands.
[Illustration: 18 THE ROMAN FORUM]
Of many other facts I was at the time vividly aware: of the charm of
finding the archaeologist in an upper room of the mediaeval church which
is turning itself into his study, of listening to his prefatory talk, so
informal and so easy that one did not realize how learned it was, and
then of following him down to the scene of his researches and hearing
him speak wisely, poetically, humorously, even, of what he believed he
had reason to expect to find. We stood with him by the Arch of Titus and
saw how the sculptures had been broken from it in the fragments found at
its base, and how the carved marbles had been burned for lime in the
kiln built a few feet off, so that those who wanted the lime need not
have the trouble of carrying the sculptures away before burning them. A
handful of iridescent glass from a house-drain near by, where it had
been thrown by the servants after breaking it, testified of the
continuity of human nature in the domestics of all ages. A somewhat
bewildering suggestion of the depth at which the different periods of
Rome underlie one another spoke from the mouth of the imperial well or
cistern which had been sunk on the top of a republican well or cistern
at another corner of the arch. In a place not far off, looking like a
potter's clay pit, were graves so old that they seem to have antedated
the skill of man to spell any record of himself; and in the small
building which seems the provisional repository of the archaeologist's
finds we saw skeletons of the immemorial dead in the coffins of split
trees still shutting them imperfectly in. Mostly the bones and bark were
of the same indifferent interest, but the eternal pathos of human grief
appealed from what mortal part remained of a little child, with beads on
her tattered tunic and an ivory bracelet on her withered arm. History in
the presence of such world-old atomies seemed an infant babbling of
yesterday, in what it could say of the Rome of the Popes, the Rome of
the Emperors, the Rome of the Republicans, the Rome of the Kings, the
Rome of the Shepherds and Cowherds, through which a shaft sunk in the
Forum would successively pierce in reaching those aboriginals whose
sepulchres alone witnessed that they had ever lived.
It is the voluble sorrow common to all the emotional visitors in Rome
that the past of the different generations has not been treated by the
present with due tenderness, and the Colosseum is a case notoriously in
point. But, if it was an Italian archaeologist who destroyed the wilding
growths in the Colosseum and scraped it to a bareness which nature is
again trying to clothe with grass and weeds, it ought to be remembered
that it is another Italian archaeologist who has set laurels all up and
down the slopes of the Forum, and has invited roses and honeysuckles to
bloom wherever they shall not interfere with science, but may best help
repair the wounds he must needs deal the soil in researches which seem
no mere dissections, but feats of a conservative, almost a constructive
surgery. It is said that the German archaeologists objected to those
laurels where the birds sing so sweetly; perhaps they thought them not
strictly scientific; but when the German Kaiser, who always knows so
much better than all the other Germans put together, visited the Forum,
he liked them, and he parted from the Genius Loci with the imperial
charge, “Laurels, laurels, evermore laurels.” After that the emotional
tourist must be hard indeed to please who would begrudge his laurels to
Commendatore Boni, or would not wish him a perpetual crown of them.