It was but a few minutes' walk from the hotel to the Porta Pinciana,
and, if you took this short walk, you found yourself almost before you
knew it in the Villa Borghese. You might then, on your first Sunday in
Rome, have fancied yourself in Central Park, for all difference in the
easily satisfied Sunday-afternoon crowd. But with me a difference began
in the grove of stone-pines, and their desultory stretch toward the
Casino, where in the simple young times which are now the old we had
hurried, with our Kugler in our hands and other reading in our heads, to
see Titian's Sacred and Profane Love (it has got another name now) and
Canova's Pauline Bonaparte, who was also the Princess Borghese, and all
the rest of the precious gallery. However, if I had any purpose of
visiting the Casino now, I put it aside, and contented myself with the
gentle sun, the gentle shade, and the sweet air, which might have had
less dust in it, breathing over grass as green in late January as in
early June. I did not care so much for a mounted corporal who was
jumping his horse over a two-foot barrier in the circular path rounding
between the Villa Borghese and the Pincian Hill, though his admirers
hung in rows on the rail beside it so thickly that I could hardly have
got a place to see him if I had tried. But there was room enough to the
fathers and mothers who had brought their children, and young lovers who
had brought each other for the afternoon's outing, just as the people in
Central Park do, and, no doubt, just as any Sunday crowd must do in the
planet Mars, if the inhabitants are human. There was a _vacherie_ nearby
where not many persons were drinking milk or even coffee; it is never
the notion of the Italians that amusement can be had only through the
purchase of refreshments.
[Illustration: 29 THE LITTLE STADIUM WITH ITS GRADINES]
I did not get as far as the Casino till the last Sunday of our Roman
stay, though we came again and again to the park (as we should call it,
rather than villa), sometimes to walk, sometimes to drive, and always to
rejoice in its loveliness. It was not now a very guarded, if once a very
studied, loveliness; not quite neglect, but a forgottenness to which it
took kindly, had fallen upon it; the drives seemed largely left to take
care of themselves, the walks were such as the frequenters chose to make
over the grass or through the woods; the buildings--the aviary, the
conservatory, the dairy, the stables--which formed part of the old
pleasance, stood about, as if in an absent-minded indifference to their
various roles. The weather had grown a little more wintry, or, at least,
autumnal, as the season advanced toward spring, and one day at the end
of February, when we were passing a woody hollow, the fallen leaves
stirred crisply with a sound like that of late October at home. We had
been at some pains and expense to put home four thousand miles away, but
this sound was the sweetest and dearest we had heard in Rome, and it
strangely attuned our spirits to the enjoyment of the fake antiquities,
the broken arches, pediments, columns, statues, which, in a region
glutted with ruin, the landscape architect of the Villa Borghese had
fancied putting about in pleasing stages of artificial dilapidation. But
there was nothing faked in the dishevelled grass of the little stadium,
with its gradines around the sides, and the game of tennis which some
young girls were playing in it. Neither was there anything ungenuine in
the rapture of the boy whom we saw racing through the dead leaves of
that woody hollow in chase of the wild fancies that fly before boyhood;
and I hope that the charm of the plinths and statues in the careless
grounds behind the soft, old, yellow Casino was a real charm. At any
rate, these things all consoled, and the turf under the pines, now
thickly starred with daisies, gave every assurance of being original.
When we came last the daisies were mingled with clustering anemones,
which seem a greatly overrated sort of flower, crude and harsh in color,
like cheap calico. If it were not for their pretty name I do not see how
people could like them; yet the children that day were pouncing upon
them and pulling them by handfuls; for the Villa Borghese is now state
property and is free to the children of the people in a measure quite
beyond Central Park. They can apparently pull anything they want, except
mushrooms; there are signs advising people that the state draws the line
at mushrooms.
It was once more a Sunday, and it was a free day in the Casino. The
trodden earth sent up its homely, kindly smell from many feet on their
way to the galleries, which we found full of people looking greater
intelligence than the frequenters of such places commonly betray. They
might have been such more cultivated sight-seers as could not afford to
come on the paydays, and, if they had not crowded the room so, one might
have been glad as well as proud to be of their number. They did not
really keep one from older friends, from the statues and the pictures
which were as familiarly there in 1908 as in 1864. In a world of
vicissitudes such things do not change; the Sacred and Profane Love of
Titian, though it had changed its name, had not changed its nature, and
was as divinely serene, as richly beautiful as before. The Veroneses
still glowed from the walls, dimming with their Venetian effulgence all
the other pictures but the Botticellis and the Francias, and comforting
one with the hope that, if one had always felt their beauty so much, one
might, without suspecting it, have always had some little sense of art.
But it was probably only a literary sense of art, such as moves the
observer when he finds himself again in the presence of Canova's Pauline
Borghese. That is there, on the terms which were those no less of her
character than of her time, in the lasting enjoyment of a publicity
which her husband denied it in his lifetime; but it had no more to say
now than it had so many, many years ago. As, a piece of personal history
it is amusing enough, and as a sermon in stone it preaches whatever
moral you choose to read into it. But as the masterpiece of the
sculptor it testifies to an ideal of his art for which the world has
reason to be grateful. Criticism does not now put Canova on the height
where we once looked up to him; but criticism is a fickle thing,
especially in its final judgments; and one cannot remember the behavior
of the Virtues in some of the baroque churches without paying homage to
the portrait of a lady who, whatever she was, was not a Virtue, but who
yet helped the sculptor to realize in her statue a Venus of exceptional
propriety. Tame, yes, we may now safely declare Canova to have been, but
sane we must allow; and we must never forget that he has been the
inspiration in modern sculpture of the eternal Greek truth of repose
from which the art had so wildly wandered, He, more than any other,
stayed it in the mad career on which Michelangelo, however remotely, had
started it; and we owe it to him that the best marbles now no longer
strut or swagger or bully.
It was by one of those accidents which are the best fortunes of travel
that I visited the Villa Papa Giulio, when I thought I was merely going
to the Piazza del Popolo, to which one cannot go too often. A chance
look at my guide-book beguiled me with the notion that the villa was
just outside the gate; but it was a deceit which I should be glad to
have practised on me every February 17th of my life. If the villa was
farther off than I thought, the way to it lay for a while through a
tramwayed suburban street delightfully encumbered with wide-horned oxen
drawing heavy wagon-loads of grain, donkeys pulling carts laden with
vegetables, and children and hens and dogs playing their several parts
in a perspective through which one would like to continue indefinitely.
But after awhile a dim, cool, curving lane leaves this street and
irresistibly invites your cab to follow it; and sooner than you could
ask you get to the villa gate. There a gatekeeper tacitly wonders at
your arriving before he is well awake, and will keep you a good five
minutes while he parleys with another custodian before he can bring
himself to sell you a ticket and let you into the beautiful, old,
orange-gray cloistered court, where there is a young architect with the
T-square of his calling sketching some point of it, and a gardener
gently hacking off from the parent stems such palm-leaves as have
survived their usefulness. Beyond is the famous fountained court, and a
classic temple to the right, and other structures responsive to the
impulses of the good Pope Julius III., who was never tired of adding to
this pleasure palace of his. It was his favorite resort, with all his
court, from the Vatican, and his favorite amusement in it was the
somewhat academic diversion of proverbs, which Ranke says sometimes
“mingled blushes with the smiles of his guests.”
Lest the reader should think I have gone direct to Ranke for this
knowledge, I will own that I got it at second-hand out of Hare's _Walks
in Rome,_ where he tells us also that the pope used to come to his villa
every day by water, and that “the richly decorated barge, filled with
venerable ecclesiastics, gliding through the osier-fringed banks of the
Tiber,... would make a fine subject for a picture.” No doubt, and if
I owned such a picture I would lose no time in public-spiritedly
bestowing it on the first needy gallery. Our author is, as usual,
terribly severe on the Italian government for some wrong done the villa,
I could not well make out what. But it seems to involve the present
disposition of the Etruscan antiquities in the upper rooms of the
casino, where these, the most precious witnesses of that rather
inarticulate civilization, must in any arrangement exhaust the most
instructed interest. Just when the amateur archaeologist, however, is
sinking under his learning, the custodian opens a window and lets him
look out on a beautiful hill beyond certain gardens, where a bird is
singing angelically. I suppose it is the same bird which sings all
through these papers, and I am sorry I do not know its name. But we will
call it a blackcap: blackcap has a sweet, saucy sound like its own note,
and is the pretty translation of _caponero,_ a name which the bird might
gladly know itself by.
[Illustration: 30 CASINO OF THE VILLA DORIA AND GARDENS]
Villa Papa Giulio is but a little place compared with something on the
scale of the Villa Pamfili Doria though from its casino it has a charm
far beyond that. What it may once have been as to grounds and gardens
there is little to show now, and the Pamfili Doria itself had not much
to show in gardens, though it had grounds, and to spare. It is, in fact,
a large park, though whether larger than the Villa Borghese I cannot
say. But it has not been taken by the state, and it is so far off on its
hills that it is safe from the overrunning of city feet. It is safe even
from city wheels, unless they are those of livery carriages, for
numbered cabs are not suffered in its proud precincts. You partake of
this pride when you come in your rubber-tired _remise,_ and have the
consolation of being part of the beautiful exclusiveness. It costs you
fifteen francs, but one must suffer for being patrician, even for a
single afternoon. Outside we had the satisfaction of seeing innumerable
numbered cabs drawn up, and within the villa gates of meeting or passing
the plebeians who had come in them, and were now walking while we were
smoothly rolling in our victoria. The day was everything we could ask,
very warm and bright below the Janiculum, on which we had mounted, and
here on the summit delicious with cool currents of air. There had been
beggars, on the way up, at every point where our horses must be walked,
and we had paid our way handsomely, so that when we went back they bowed
without asking again; this is a convention at Rome which no
self-respecting beggar will violate; they all touch their hats in
recognition of it.
The beautiful prospect from a certain curve of the drive after you have
passed the formal sunken garden, at which you pause, is the greatest
beauty of the Villa Pamfili Doria. You stop to look at it by the impulse
of your coachman, and then you keep on driving round, in the long
ellipse which the road describes, through grassy and woody slopes and
levels, watered by a pleasant stream, and through long aisles of pine
and ilex. We thought twice round was enough, and told the driver so, to
his evident surprise and to our own regret, so far as the long aisle of
ilex was concerned, for I do not suppose there is a more perfect thing
of its kind in the world. The shade under the thick sun-proof roofing of
horizontal boughs was practically as old as night, and on our second
passage of its dim length it had some Capuchin monks walking down it,
who formed the fittest possible human interest in the perspective. Off
on the grass at one side some Ursuline nuns were sitting with their
pupils, laughing and talking, and one nun was playing ball with the
smaller girls, and mingling with their shouts her own gay, innocent
cries of joy as she romped among them. Nothing could have been prettier,
sweeter, or better suited to the place; all was very simple, and
apparently the whole place was hospitably free to the poor women who
ranged over it, digging chiccory for salad out of the meadows. The
daisies were thick as white clover, and the harsh purple of the anemones
showed everywhere.
The casino is plainer than the casino of the Villa Borghese, and is not
public like that; its sculptures have been taken to the Doria palace in
the city; and there is no longer any excuse for curiosity even to try
penetrating it. It stands on the left of the road by which you leave the
villa, and to the right on the grassy incline in full view of the casino
was something that puzzled us at first. It did not seem probable that
the gigantic capital letters grown in box should be spelling the English
name Mary, but it proved that they were, and later it proved that this
was the name of the noble English lady whom the late Prince Pamfili
Doria had married. Whether they marked her grave or merely commemorated
her, it was easy to impute a pathos to the fancy of having them there,
which it might not have been so easy to verify. You cannot attempt to
pass over any ground in Rome without danger of sinking into historical
depths from which it will be hard to extricate yourself, and it is best
to heed one's steps and keep them to the day's activities. But one
could not well visit the Villa Pamfili Doria without at least wishing to
remember that in 1849 Garibaldi held it for weeks against the whole
French army, in his defence of republican Rome. A votive temple within
the villa grounds commemorates the invaders who fell in this struggle;
on a neighboring height the Italian leader triumphs in the monument his
adoring country has raised to him.
If we are to believe the censorious Hare, the love of the hero's
countrymen went rather far when the Roman municipality, to please him,
tried to change the course of the Tiber in conformity with a scheme of
his, and so spoiled the beauty of the Farnesina garden without
effecting a too-difficult piece of engineering. The less passionate
Murray says merely that “a large slice of this garden was cut off to
widen the river for the Tiber embankment,” and let us hope that it was
no worse. I suppose we must have seen the villa in its glory when we
went, in 1864, to see the Raphael frescos in the casino there, but in
the touching melancholy of the wasted and neglected grounds we easily
accepted the present as an image of the past. For all we remembered, the
weed-grown, green-mossed gravel-paths of the sort of bewildered garden
that remained, with its quenched fountain, its vases of dead or dying
plants, and its dishevelled shrubbery, were what had always been; and it
was of such a charm that we were gratefully content with it. The truth
is, one cannot do much with beauty in perfect repair; the splendor that
belongs to somebody else, unless it belongs also to everybody else,
wounds one's vulgar pride and inspires envious doubts of the owner's
rightful possession. But when the blight of ruin has fallen upon it,
when dilapidation and disintegration have begun their work of atonement
and exculpation, then our hearts melt in compassion of the waning
magnificence and in a soft pity for the expropriated possessor, to whom
we attribute every fine and endearing quality. It is this which makes us
such friends of the past and such critics of the present, and enables us
to enjoy the adversity of others without a pang of the jealousy which
their prosperity excites.
There was much to please a somewhat peculiar taste in our visit to the
Farnesina. The gateman, being an Italian official, had not been at the
gate when we arrived, but came running and smiling from his gossip with
the door-keeper of the casino, and this was a good deal in itself; but
the door-keeper, amiably obese, was better still in her acceptance of
the joke with which the hand-mirror for the easier study of the roof
frescos was accepted. “It is more convenient,” she suggested, and at the
counter-suggestion, “Yes, especially for people with short necks,” she
shook with gelatinous laughter, and burst into the generous cry, “Oh,
how delightful!” Perhaps this was because she, too, had experienced the
advantage of perusing the frescos in the hand-mirror's reversal. At any
rate, she would not be satisfied till she had returned a Roland for that
easy Oliver. Her chance came in showing a Rubens in one of the rooms,
with the master's usual assortment of billowy beauties, when she could
say--and she ought to have known--that they had eaten too much macaroni.
It was not much of a joke; but one hears so few jokes in Rome.
Do I linger in this study of simple character because I feel myself
unequal to the ecstasies which the frescos of Raphael and his school in
that pleasure dome demanded of me? Something like that, I suppose, but I
do not pride myself on my inability. It seemed to me that the coloring
of the frescos had lost whatever tenderness it once had; and that what
was never meant to be matter of conscious perception, but only of the
vague sense which it is the office of decoration to impart, had grown
less pleasing with the passage of time. There in the first hall was the
story of Cupid and Psyche in the literal illustration of Apuleius, and
there in another hall was Galatea on her shell with her Nymphs and
Tritons and Amorini; and there were Perseus and Medusa and Icarus and
Phaeton and the rest of them. But, if I gave way to all the frankness of
my nature, I should own the subjects fallen silly through the old age of
an outworn life and redeemed only by the wonderful skill with which they
are rendered. At the same time, I will say in self-defence that, if I
had a very long summer in which to keep coming and dwelling long hours
in the company of these frescos, I think I might live back into the
spirit which invented the fables, and enjoy even more the amusing taste
that was never tired of their repetition. Masterly conception and
incomparable execution are there in histories which are the dreams of
worlds almost as extinct as the dead planets whose last rays still reach
us and in whose death-glimmer we can fancy, if we will, a unity of life
with our own not impossible nor improbable. But more than some such
appeal the Raphaels and the Giulio Romanos of the Farnesina hardly make
to the eye untrained in the art which created them, or unversed in the
technique by which they will live till the last line moulders and the
last tint fades.
We came out and stood a long time looking up in the pale afternoon light
at the beautiful face of the tenderly aging but not yet decrepit casino.
It was utterly charming, and it prompted many vagaries which I might
easily have mistaken for ideas. This is perhaps the best of such
experiences, and, after you have been with famous works of art and have
got them well over and done with, it is natural and it is not unjust
that you should wish to make them some return, if not in kind, then in
quantity. You will try to believe that you have thought about them, and
you should not too strictly inquire as to the fact. It is some such
forbearance that accounts for a good deal of the appreciation and even
the criticism of works of art.