The day that we arrived in Rome the unclouded sun was yellow on the
white dust of the streets, which is never laid by a municipal
watering-cart, though sometimes it is sprinkled into mire from the
garden-hose of the abutting hotels; and in my rashness I said that for
Rome you want sun and you want youth. Yet there followed many gray days
when my age found Rome very well indeed, and I would not have the
septuagenarian keep away because he is no longer in the sunny sixties.
He may see through his glasses some things hidden even from the eyes of
the early forties. If he drives out beyond the Porta Pia, say, some
bright afternoon, and notes how the avenue between the beautiful old
villas is also bordered by many vacant lots advertised for sale as well
as built up with pleasant new houses, he will be able to carry away with
him the significant fact that a convenient and public-spirited
trolley-line has the same suburban effect in Rome, Italy, as in Rome,
New York. If he meets some squadrons of cavalry or some regiments of
foot, in that military necessity of constant movement which the civilian
can never understand, he may make the useful reflection that it is much
better to have the troops out of the city than in it, and he can praise
the wisdom of the Italian government accordingly. On the neighboring
mountains the presence or absence of snow forms the difference between
summer and winter in Rome, and will suggest the question whether, after
all, our one continental weather is better than the many local weathers
of Europe; and perhaps he will acquire national modesty in owning that
there is something more picturesque in the indications of those azure or
silvery tops than in his morning paper's announcement that there is or
is not a lower pressure in the region of the lakes.
At any rate, I would not have him note the intimations of such a drive
at less worth than those of any more conventional fact of his Roman
sojourn. If one is quite honest, or merely as honest as one may be with
safety, one will often own to one's self that something merely
incidental to one's purpose, in visiting this memorable place or that,
was of greater charm and greater value than the fulfilment of a direct
purpose. One happy morning I went, being in the vicinity, to renew the
acquaintance with the Tarpeian Rock, which I had hastened to make on my
first visit to Rome. I had then found it so far from such a frightfully
precipitous height as I had led myself to expect that I came away and
rather mocked it in print. But now, possibly because the years had
moderated all my expectations in life, I thought the Tarpeian Rock very
respectably steep and quite impressively lofty; either the houses at its
foot had sunk with their chimneys and balconies, or the rock had risen,
so that one could no longer be hurled from it with impunity. We looked
at it from an arbor of the lovely little garden which we were let into
beyond the top of the rock, and which was the pleasance of some sort of
hospital. I think there were probably flowers there, since it was a
garden, but what was best was the almond-tree covering the whole space
with a roof of bloom, and in this roof a score of birds that sang
divinely.
[Illustration: 36 THE BATHS OF DIOCLETIAN]
I am aware of bringing a great many birds into these papers; but really
Rome would not be Rome without them; and I could not exaggerate their
number or the sweetness of their song. They particularly abounded in the
cloistered and gardened close of the Cistercian Convent, which three
hundred years ago ensconsed itself within the ruinous Baths of
Diocletian. I have no fable at hand to explain what seems the special
preference of the birds for this garden; it is possibly an idiosyncrasy,
something like that of the cats which make Trajan's Forum their favorite
resort. All that I can positively say is that if I were a bird I would
ask nothing better than to frequent the cypresses of that garden and
tune my numbers for the entertainment of the audience of extraordinary
monsters in the aisles below, which bea'in plinths of clipped privet and
end marble heads of horses, bulls, elephants, rhinoceroses, and their
like. I do not pretend to be exact in their nomination; they may be
other animals; but I am sure of their attention to the birds. I am not
quite so sure of the attention of the antique shapes in the rooms of the
Ludovisi collection looking into the close. I fancy them preoccupied
with the in-doors cold, so great in all Italian galleries, and scarcely
tempered for them by the remote and solitary brazier over which the
custodians take turns in stifling themselves. They cannot come down
into the sun and song of the garden, to which the American tourist may
return from visiting them, to thaw out his love of the beautiful.
They are not so many or so famous as their marble brothers and sisters
in the Vatican Museum, but the tourist should not miss seeing them.
Neither should he miss any accessible detail of the environing ruins of
the Diocletian Baths. Let him not think because they are so handy, and
so next door, as it were, to the railway station where he arrives, and
to Cook's office where he goes for his letters next morning, that they
are of less merit than other monuments of imperial Rome. They are not
only colossally vast, but they are singularly noble, as well as so
admirably convenient. Because they are so convenient, the modern Romans
have turned their cavernous immensity to account in the trades and
industries, and have built them up in carpenters' and blacksmiths' and
plumbers' shops, where there is a cheerful hammering and banging much
better than the sullen silence of more remote and difficult ruins. In
color they are a very agreeable reddish brown, though not so soft to the
eye as the velvety masses of the Palatine, which at any distance great
enough to obscure their excavation have a beauty like that of primitive
nature. I do not know but you see these best from the glazed terrace of
that restaurant on the Aventine which is the resort of the well-advised
Romans and visitors, and from which you look across to the mount of
fallen and buried grandeur over a champaign of gardens and orchards. All
round is a landscape which I was not able to think of as less than
tremendous, with the whole of Rome in it, and the snow-topped hills
about it--a scene to which you may well give more than a moment from the
varied company at the other tables, where English, German, French, and
Americans, as well as Italians, are returning to the simple life in
their enjoyment of the local dishes, washed down with golden draughts of
local wine, served ciderwise in generous jugs.
If your mind is, as ours was in that place, to drive farther and see the
chapter-house of the Knights of Malta, clinging to the height over the
Tiber, and looking up and down its yellow torrent and the black boats
along the shore, with universal Rome melting into the distance, you must
not fail to stop at the old, old Church of St. Sabina. You will
naturally want to see this, not only because there in the cloister (as
the ladies can ascertain at the window let into the wall for their
dangerous eyes to peer through from the outside) is the successor of the
orange-tree transplanted from the Holy Land by St. Dominic six or seven
hundred years ago; not only because one of the doors of the church,
covered with Bible stories, is thought the oldest wood-carving in the
world, but also because there will be sitting in his white robes on a
bench beside the nave an aged Dominican monk reading some holy book,
with his spectacles fallen forward on his nose and his cowl fallen back
on his neck, and his wide tonsure gleaming glacially in the pale light,
whom nothing in the church or its visitors can distract from his
devotions.
It is very, very cold in there, but he probably would not, if he could,
follow you into the warm outer world and on into the garden of the
Knights, who came here after they had misruled Malta for centuries and
finally rendered a facile submission to General Bonaparte of the French
Republican army in 1798. Their fixing here cannot be called anything so
vigorous as their last stand; but, without specific reference to the
easy-chairs in their chapter-house, it may be fitly called their last
seat; and, if it is true that none of plebeian blood may enjoy the
order's privileges, the place will afford another of those satisfactions
which the best of all possible worlds is always offering its admirers.
Even if one were disposed to moralize the comfortable end of the poor
Knights harshly, one must admit that their view of Rome is one of the
unrivalled views, and that the glimpse of St. Peter's through the
key-hole of their garden-gate is little short of tin-rivalled. I could
not manage the glimpse myself, but I can testify to the unique character
of the avenue of clipped box and laurel which the key-hole also
commands. Lovers of the supernatural, of which I am the first, will like
to be reminded, or perhaps instructed, that the Church of the Priory
stands on the spot where Remus had a seance with the spiritual
authorities and was advised against building Rome where he proposed,
being shown only six vultures as against twelve that Romulus saw in
favor of his chosen site. The fact gave the Aventine Hill the fame of
bad luck, but any one may safely visit it now, after the long time that
has passed.
I do not, however, advise visiting it above any other place in Rome.
What I always say is, take your chances with any or every time or place;
you cannot fail of some impression which you will always like recurring
to as characteristically delightful. For instance, I once walked home
from the Piazza di Spagna with some carnival masks frolicking about me
through the sun-shotten golden dust of the delicious evening air, and I
had a pleasure from the experience which I shall never forget. It was as
rich as that I got from the rosy twilight in which I wandered homeward
another time from the Piazza di Venezia and found myself passing the
Fountain of Trevi, and lingered long there and would not throw my penny
into its waters because I knew I could not help coming back to Rome
anyhow. Yet another time I was driving through a certain piazza where
the peasants stand night long waiting to be hired by the proprietors who
come to find them there, and suddenly the piety of the Middle Ages stood
before me in the figure of the Brotherhood of the Misericordia, draped
to the foot and hooded in their gray, unbleached linen. The brothers
were ranged in a file at the doors of the church ready to visit the
house of sickness or of mourning, barefooted, with their eyes showing
spectrally through their masks and their hands coming soft and white out
of their sleeves and betraying the lily class that neither toils nor
spins and yet is bound, as in the past, to the poorest and humblest
through the only Church that knows how to unite them in the offering and
acceptance of reciprocal religious duties.
In Rome, as elsewhere in Catholic countries, it seemed to me that the
worshippers were mostly of the poorer classes and were mostly old women,
but in the Church of the Jesuits I saw worshippers almost as well
dressed as the average of our Christian Scientists, and in that church,
whose name I forget, but which is in the wide street or narrow piazza
below the windows of the palace where the last Stuarts lived and died,
my ineradicable love of gentility was flattered and my faith in the
final sanctification of good society restored by the sight of gentlemen
coming to and going from prayer with their silk hats in their hands.
The performance of ritual implies a certain measure of mechanism, and
the wonder is that in the Catholic churches it is not more mechanical
than it actually is. I was no great frequenter of functions, and I
cannot claim that my superior spirituality was ever deeply wounded;
sometimes it was even supported and consoled. I noted, without offence,
in the Church of San Giuseppe how the young monk, who preached an
eloquent sermon on the saint's life and character, exhausted himself
before he exhausted his topic, and sat down between the successive heads
of his discourse and took a good rest. It was the saint's day, which
seemed more generally observed than any other saint's day in Rome, and
his baroque church in Via Capo le Case was thronged with people, mostly
poor and largely peasants, who were apparently not so fatigued by the
preacher's shrill, hard delivery as he was himself. There were many
children, whom their elders held up to see, and there was one young girl
in a hat as wide as a barrel-head standing up where others sat, and
blotting out the prospect of half the church with her flaring brim and
flaunting feathers. The worshippers came and went, and while the monk
preached and reposed a man crept dizzyingly round the cornice with a
taper at the end of a long pole lighting the chandeliers, while two
other men on the floor kindled the candles before the altars. As soon as
their work was completed, the monk, as if he had been preaching against
time, sat definitely down and left us to the rapture of the perfected
splendor. The high-altar was canopied and curtained in crimson, fringed
with gold, and against this the candle-flames floated like yellow
flowers. Suddenly, amid the hush and expectance, a tenor voice pealed
from the organ-loft, and a train of priests issued from the sacristy and
elbowed and shouldered their way through the crowd to the high-altar,
where their intoning, like so many
“Silver snarling trumpets 'gan to glide,”
and those flower-like flames and that tenor voice seemed to sing
together, and all sense of mortal agency in the effect was lost.
[Illustration: 37 CHURCH OF ST. JOHN LATERAN AND LATERAN PALACE]
How much our pale Northern faith has suffered from the elimination of
the drama which is so large an element in the worship of the South could
not be conjectured without offence to both. Drama I have said, but, if I
had said opera, it would have been equally with the will merely to
recognize the fact and not to censure it. Many have imagined a concert
of praise in heaven, and portrayed it as a spectacle of which the elder
Christian worship seems emulous. Go, therefore, to Rome, dear
fellow-Protestant, with any measure of ignorance short of mine, but
leave as much of your prejudice behind you as you can. You are not more
likely to become a convert because of your tolerance; in fact, you may
be the safer for it; and it will prepare you for a gentler pleasure than
you would otherwise enjoy in the rites and ceremonies which seem exotic
in our wintrier world, but which are here native to the climate, or, at
least, could not have had their origin under any but oriental or
meridional skies. The kindlier mood will help you to a truer
appreciation of that peculiar keeping of the churches which the stranger
is apt to encounter in his approach. Be tender of the hapless mendicants
at the door; they are not there for their pleasure, those blind and halt
and old. Be modestly receptive of the good office of the whole tribe of
cicerones, of custodians, of sacristans; they can save you time, which,
though it is not quite the same as money, even in Rome is worth saving,
and are the repository of many rejected fables waiting to be recognized
as facts again. I, for instance, committed the potential error of wholly
rejecting with scorn the services of an authorized guide to the Church
of St. John Lateran because he said the tariff was three francs. But
after wandering, the helpless prey of my own Baedeker, up and down the
huge temple, I was glad to find him waiting my emergence where I had
left him, in the church porch, one of the most pathetic figures that
ever wrung the remorseful heart.
His poor black clothes showed the lustre of inveterate wear; his
waistcoat would have been the better for a whole bottle of benzine; his
shoes, if they did not share the polish of those threadbare textures,
reciprocated the effect of his broken-spirited cuffs and collar, and the
forlorn gentility of his hat. His beard had not been shaved for three
days; I do not know why, but doubtless for as good a reason as that his
shirt had not been washed for seven. It was with something like a cry
for pardon of my previous brutality that I now closed with his unabated
demand of a three-franc fee, and we went with him wherever he would,
from one holy edifice to another of those that constitute the church;
but I will not ask the reader to follow us in the cab which he mounted
into with us, but which would not conveniently hold four. Let him look
it all up in the admirably compendious pages of Hare and Murray, and
believe, if he can, that I missed nothing of that history and mystery.
If I speak merely of the marvellous baptistery, it is doubtless not
because the other parts were not equally worthy of my wonder, but
because I would not have even an enemy miss the music of the singing
doors, mighty valves of bronze which, when they turn upon their hinges,
emit a murmur of grief or a moan of remorse for whatever heathen uses
they once served the wicked Caracalla at his baths. Not to have heard
their rich harmony would be like not having heard the echo in the
baptistery of Pisa, a life-long loss.
Heaven knows how punctiliously our guide would have acquainted us with
every particular of the Lateran group, which for a thousand years before
the Vatican was the home of the popes. We begged off from this and that,
but even indolence like mine would not spare itself the sight of the
Scala Santa. That was another of the things which I distinctly
remembered from the year 1864, and I did not find the spectacle of the
modern penitents covering the holy steps different in 1908. Now, as
then, there was something incongruous in their fashions and aspirations,
but one could not doubt that it was a genuine piety that nerved them to
climb up and down the hard ascent on their knees, or, at the worst, that
it was good exercise. Still, I would rather leave my reader the sense of
that most noble facade of the church, with its lofty balustraded
entablature, where the gigantic Christ and ten of his saints look out
forever to the Alban hills.