[Illustration: 41 THE MARBLE FAUN]
In the days of the earlier sixties, we youth who wished to be thought
elect did not feel ourselves so unless we were deeply read in
Hawthorne's romance of _The Marble Faun._ We made that our aesthetic
handbook in Rome, and we devoutly looked up all the places mentioned in
it, which were important for being mentioned; though such places as the
Tarpeian Rock, the Forum, the Capitoline Museum, and the Villa Bor-ghese
might secondarily have their historical or artistic interest. In like
manner Story's statue of Cleopatra was to be seen, because it was the
“original” of the imaginary sculptor Kenyon's Cleopatra, and a certain
mediaeval tower was sacred because it was universally identified as the
tower where the heroine Hilda lived dreaming and drawing, and fed the
doves that circled around its top. We used to show the new arrivals
where Hilda's tower was, and then stand with them watching the pigeons
which made it unmistakable. I should then have thought I could never
forget it, but I must have passed it several times unnoting in my latest
Roman sojourn, when one afternoon in a pilgrimage to the Via del Gambero
a contemporary of that earlier day glanced around the narrow piazza
through which we were passing and, seeing a cloud of doves wheeling
aloft, joyfully shouted, “Look! There is Hilda's tower!” and if Hilda
herself had waved to us from its battlements we could not have been
surer of it. The present vanished, and we were restored to our
citizenship in that Rome of the imagination which is greater than any
material Rome, and which it needs no archaeologist to discover in its
indestructible integrity.
No one to-day, probably, visits the Capitoline Museum for the Faun of
Praxiteles because it gave the romance its name; but at my latest sight
of it I remembered it with a thrill of the young piety which first drew
me to it, and involuntarily I looked again for the pointed, furry ears,
as I had done of old, to make sure that it was really the Marble Faun of
Hawthorne. I was now, however, for no merit of mine, in official and
scientific company with which it would have been idle to share my
satisfaction in the verification of the Faun's ears. Instead of boasting
it, I listened to very interesting talk of the deathless Dying
Gladiator, who is held to have been originally looked at more from below
than he has been seen in modern times, and who is presently to be lifted
to something like his antique level. He, in fact, requires this from the
spectator who would feel all his pathos, as we realized in sitting down
and looking a little upward at him.
[Illustration: 42 MARCUS AURELIUS WITH OUT-STRETCHED ARM]
In his room and in the succession of the rooms filled with his immortal
bronze and marble companions I was as if with ghosts of people I had
known in some anterior life. They were so familiar that I felt no need
to go about asking their names, even if the archaeologists had in
several cases given them new names. I should have known certain of them
by traits which remain in the memory long after names have dropped out
of it. Julius Caesar, with his long Celtic upper-lip, still looked like
the finer sort of Irish-American politician; Tiberius again surprised me
with the sort of racial sanity and beauty surviving in his atrocious
personality from his mother's blood; but the too Neronian head of
Nero, which seems to have been studied from the wild young miscreant
when trying to look the part, had an unremembered effect of chubby
idiocy. A thing that freshly struck me in the busts of those
imperialities, which of course must have been done in their lifetimes,
was not merely that the subjects were mostly so ugly and evil but that
the artists were apparently safe in showing them so. The men might not
have minded that, but how had the sculptors managed to portray the women
as they did and live? Perhaps they did not live, or live long; they are
a forgotten tribe, and no one can say what became of any given artist
after executing the bust of an empress; his own execution may have
immediately followed. But what is certain is that those ladies are no
lovelier in their looks than they were in their lives; to be sure, in
their rank they had not so great need of personal charm as women of the
lower class. The most touching face as well as the most dignified and
beautiful face among them is that of the seated figure which used to be
known as that of Agrippina but which, known now as that of a Roman
matron, does not relieve the imperial average of plainness. The rest
could rival the average American society woman only in the prevailing
modernity of their expression; imperial Rome was very modern, as we all
know, and nothing in our own time could be more up to date than the
lives and looks of its smart people.
The general impression of the other marbles of the Capitoline Museum
remains a composite of standing, sitting, stooping, and leaning figures,
of urns and vases, of sarcophaguses and bas-reliefs. If you can be
definite about some such delightful presence as that old River dozing
over his fountain in the little cold court you see first and last as you
come and go, it is more than your reader, if he is as wise as you wish
him, can ask of you. I have been wondering whether he could profitably
ask of me some record of my experiences in the official and scientific
company with which I was honored that day at the Campidoglio; but I
should have to offer him again a sort of composite psychograph of
objects printed one upon another and hardly separable in their
succession. There would be the figure of Marcus Aurelius, commanding us
with outstretched arm from the back of the bronze charger which would
not obey Michelangelo when he bade it “Go,” not because it was not
lifelike, but because it was too fat to move. Against the afternoon
sky, looking down into the piazza with dreamy unconcern from their
vantage would be the statues on the balustrated roof of the museum.
There would be the sense, rather than the vision, of the white shoulders
of Castor and Pollux beside their steeds above the dark-green garden
spaces on either hand; there would be the front of the Church of Ara
Coeli visible beyond the insignificance of Rienzi's monument; and
filling in the other end of the piazza which Michelangelo imagined, and
not the Romans knew, there would be the palace of the senator, to which
the mayor and the common council of modern Rome now mount by a double
stairway, and presumably meet at the top in proceeding to their
municipal labors. Facing the museum would be the palace of the
Conservatori, where in the noblest of its splendid halls the present
company would find itself in the carved and gilded arm-chairs of the
conservators, seated at an afternoon tea-table and restoring itself from
the fatigues of more and more antique art in the galleries about. After
this there would be the gardened court of the palace, with a thin lawn,
and a soft little fountain musing in the midst of it, and the sunset
light lifting on the wall where the fragments of Septimius Severus's
marble map of Rome order themselves in such coherence as archaeology can
suggest for them.
In the palace of the Senator (who was not, as I dare say the reader
ignorantly supposes, a residuum of the old Roman senate, but was the
dictator whom the mediaeval republic summoned from within or without
to be its head and its safeguard from the aristocracy) there would be,
beyond the chamber where the actual city council of Rome meets under the
presidency of the mayor, the great public rooms bannered and memorialled
around with heroic and historic blazons; and last there would be the
private room where the syndic devotes himself to civic affairs when he
can turn from the sight of the Roman Forum, with a peripatetic
archaeologist lecturing a group of earnest Americans, while long,
velvety shadows of imperial purple stretch from the sunset on the softly
rounded and hollowed ruins of the Palatine.
But, if each of these bare facts could be parted from the others and
intelligently presented, what would it avail with the reader who has
never seen the originals of my psychograph? It is from some such
question, and not from want of a hospitable will, that I hesitate to ask
him to go with me on a golden morning of March and spend it in the Villa
Medici on the Pincian Hill. If I could I should like to pour its
yellowness and mellowness round him, perfumed with a potpourri of
associations from the time of Lucullus down through every mediaeval and
modern time to that very day, when I knew Carolus Duran to be living
somewhere in these beauteous bounds as the head of the French Academy
which has its home in them. The academic garden-paths, with a few happy
people wandering between their correctly balanced passages of box; the
blond facade of the casino looking down with its statues and reliefs on
these parterres; a young girl vanishing up an aisle of the grove beside
the garden into whatever dream awaited her youth in the leafy dusk; an
old American pair gazing after her from the terrace, with the void of
the vanished years aching in their hearts for the Rome that was once
young with them: does this represent to the reader an appreciable
morning in the Villa Medici? He may be grateful to me if he does, and if
he likes. I cannot do more for him without doing less, and yet I know it
is a palette rather than a picture I am giving him.
[Illustration: 43 IN THE VILLA MEDICI]
All the while I was there, the guest of the French nation by the payment
of fifty centimes gate-money, I was obscurely resenting its retention of
a place which Bonaparte bestowed upon the First Republic with so much
other loot from Italy. But now I have lately heard that the magnanimous
Third Republic is going to restore it to the people rightfully its
owners, and the remembrance of my morning in the Villa Medici will
remain a pure joy. So few joys in this world, even in the very capital
of it, are without some touch of abatement. I could not so much as visit
the Catacombs of Domatilla without suffering a frustration which, though
incidental merely, left a lasting pang of unrequited interest. As we
drew toward the place, I saw in a field the beginning of one of those
domestic dramas which are not attributable to Italy alone. Three
peasants, a man and two women, were engaged in controversy which, on his
side, the man supported with both hands flapping wildly at the heads of
the women, who alertly dodged and circled around him in the endeavor to
close in upon him. It was instantly conjecturable, if not apparent, that
they were his wife and daughter, and that he was the worse for the
vintage of their home acre, and would be the better for being got into
the house and into bed. The conjecture enlisted the worthier instincts
of the witness on the side of the mother and daughter; but he was in no
hurry to have the animated action brought to a close, and was about to
tell his cabman to drive very, very slowly, when suddenly the cab
descended into a valley, and when the eager spectator rose to his former
level again the stone wall had risen with him, and he never knew the end
of that passage of real life.
It was impossible to bid the cabman drive back for the close of the
scene; the abrupt conclusion must be accepted as final; but it is proof
of the charm I found in the gentle guide who presently began to marshal
us among the paths of the subterranean sanctuary and cemetery that for
the moment my bitter sense of loss was assuaged, and it only returns now
at long intervals. Such as the woman actors in this brief scene were
some early Christians might have been, and it must have been the
stubborn old pagan spirit I saw surviving in the husband and father. He
was probably such a vessel of wrath as, being filled with Bacchus, would
have lent itself to the persecuting rage of Domitian and helped drive
the emperor's gentle cousin Domatilla into the exile whence she returned
to found a Christian cemetery in her villa. One understands, of course,
under the villa; for the catacombs in some places reach as many as five
levels below the surface. I will not follow the reader with that kind
guide who will cheer his wanderings through those sunless corridors of
death, where many of the sleepers still lie sealed within their tombs on
either hand, and show him by the smoky taper's light the frescos which
adorn the cramped chapels. I prefer to stand at the top of the entrance
and ask him if he noticed how the artist sometimes seemed not to know
whether he was pagan or Christian, and did not mind, for instance,
putting a Mercury at the heads of the horses in an Ascent of Elijah.
Perhaps the artist was really a pagan and thought a Greek god as good as
a Hebrew prophet any day; art was probably one of the last things to be
converted, having a presentiment of the dark and bloody themes the new
religion would give it to deal with.
The earthy scent of the catacomb will cling to the reader's clothes, and
he will have two minds about keeping for a souvenir the taper which he
carried, and which the guide wraps in a bit of newspaper for him; he may
prefer the flower which he is allowed to gather from the tiny garden at
the entrance to the catacombs. Yet these Catacombs of Domatilla are
among the cheerfulest of all the catacombs, and a sense of something
sweet and appealing invests them from the memory of the gentle lady
whose piety consecrated them as the last home of the refugees and
martyrs. They are of the more recent Roman excavations, but I do not
know whether later or earlier than those which have revealed the house
of the two Christian gentlemen, John and Paul, of unknown surname, where
they suffered death for their faith, under the Passionist church named
for them. Twenty-four rooms on the two stories have been opened, and
there are others yet to be opened; when all are laid bare they will
perfectly show what a Roman city dwelling of the better sort was like in
the mid-imperial time. The plan differs from that of the average
Pompeian house as much as the plan of a cross-town New York dwelling
would differ from that of the average Newport cottage. The rooms are
incomparably smaller than those of the mediaeval palaces of the Roman
nobles, and the decoration is sometimes crudely mixed of pagan and
Christian themes and motives; the artists, like the painters of the
Domatilla catacombs, were probably lingering in the old Greek tradition.
The young Passionist father who showed us through the church and the
house under it made us wait half an hour while he finished his lunch,
but he was worth waiting for. He was a charming enthusiast for both,
radiantly yet reverently exulting in their respective treasures, and
justly but not haughtily proud of the newly introduced electricity which
lighted the darkness of the underground rooms and corridors. He told us
he had been twenty years a missionary in Rumania, where he had possibly
acquired the delightful English he spoke. When he would have us follow
him he said, “All persons come this way,” and he politely spoke of the
wicked emperor whose bust was somehow there as Mr. Commodus. With all
his gentleness, however, that good father had a certain smiling severity
before which the spirit bowed. He had made us wait half an hour before
he came to let us into the church, and during the hour we were with him
there he kept the door locked against an unlucky lady who arrived just
too late to enter with us. Not only this, but he utterly refused to go
back with her singly and show her the things we had seen. Perhaps it
would not have been decorous; they do not let ladies, either singly or
plurally, into the garden of the convent, which is memorable among many
other facts as being the retreat of Mr. Commodus when he suffered from
sleeplessness, and where he once carelessly left his list of victims
lying about, so that his friend Marcia found it and, reading her name in
it, joined with other friends in his assassination. The sex has indeed
had much restraint to bear from the Church, but in some respects it has
been rendered fearless in the assertion of its rights. With poor women
one of these is the indefeasible right to ask alms, and I admired the
courage, almost the ferocity, of the aged crone whom I had promised
charity in coming to the place and who rose up as I was being driven
past her, in going away, and stayed my cabman with a clamor which he
dared not ignore. Her reproaches continued through the ensuing
transaction, and followed him away with stings which instinct and
experience taught her how to implant in his tenderest sensibilities.
A chapter much longer than any I have written here might well be devoted
to the study of the clerical or secular guides in the minor churches of
Rome. They are of every manner and degree of kindliness, mixed with a
fair measure of intelligence and a very fitting faith in the legends of
their churches. You soon get on terms of impersonal intimacy with them,
and you cannot come away without sharing their professional zeal, and
distinguishing for the moment in favor of their respective churches
above every other. It did not matter whether it was that newest church
in the Quartiere dei Prati, or that most venerable among the oldest
churches, the Church of San Gregorio: I found a reason for agreeing with
the sacristan upon its singular claims. These were especially enforced
by the good dame, the only woman sacristan I remember, who would not
spare us a single object of interest in San Gregorio's, which is indeed
for the visitor of Anglo-Saxon race supremely rich in its associations
with the conversions of his ancestors from heathenism.
[Illustration: 44 THE BATHS OF CARACALLA]
Being myself of Cymric blood, and of a Christianity several hundred
years older than that of the ordinary Anglo-Saxon traveller, I am afraid
that it was from a rather patronizing piety that I visited the church
where the great St. Gregory dismissed to their mission in England St.
Augustine and his fellow-apostles on one of the greatest days of the
sixth century. I might have stayed to imagine them kneeling among the
people who then thronged the genially irregular piazza, but as we came
up some ecclesiastical students were playing ball there, their robes
tucked into their girdles for their greater convenience, and we made our
way at once into the church. It forms one of a consecrated group of
edifices enshrining the memory of the best of the popes, who was also
the greatest; and here or in the adjacent convents a score of miracles
were wrought through the heavenly beauty of his life. Of these miracles,
of whose inspiration you must feel the poetry even if you cannot feel
their verity, the loveliest has its substantial witness in one of the
little chapels next the church. There you may see with your eyes and
touch with your hands the table at which St. Gregory fed every morning
twelve poor men, till one morning a thirteenth appeared in the figure of
Christ the Lord, as if to own them His disciples. The chapel which
enshrines the table is one of three, quaint in form and rich in art,
standing in the garden called St. Silvia's, after the mother of St.
Gregory. As we came out through it the westering sun poured the narrow
court before the chapel full of golden light and threw the black shadow
of a cypress across the way that a file of Comaldolese monks were taking
to the adjoining convent. They were talking cheerily together, and swung
unheeding by in their white robes so near that I could almost feel the
waft of them across the centuries that parted their faith and mine.
We had come to St. Gregory's from the Baths of Caracalla, which we had
set out to see on the first of our Roman holidays, and, after turning
aside for the Coliseum, had now visited on next to the last of them. The
stupendous ruin could scarcely have been growing in the ten or twelve
weeks that had passed, but a bewildering notion of something like this
obsessed me as I saw it bulking aloof in overhanging cliffs and
precipices, through the cool and bright April air, against a sky of
absolute blue. As if it had been cast up out of the earth in some
convulsive throe of nature, it floundered over its vast area in
shapeless masses which seemed to have capriciously received the effect
of human design in the coping of the inaccessible steeps, in the arches
flinging themselves across the spaces between the beetling crags, in the
monstrous spring and sweep of the vaults, in the gloom of the cavernous
apertures of its Titanic walls. For the moment its immensity dwarfed the
image of all the other fragments of the Roman world and set definite
bounds to their hugeness in the mind. It seemed to have been not so much
a single edifice as a whole city, the dwelling instead of the resort of
the multitudes that once thronged it. The traces of the ornamentation
which had enriched it everywhere and which it had taken ages of ravage
to strip from it, accented its savage majesty, and again the sentiment
of spring in the fresh afternoon breeze and sunshine, and the innocent
beauty of the blooming peach and cherry in the orchards around, imparted
to it a pathos in which one's mere brute wonder was lost. But it was a
purely adventitious pathos, and it must be owned here, at the end, that
none of the relics of ancient Rome stir a soft emotion in the beholder,
and, as for beauty, there is more of it in some ivy-netted fragment of
some English abbey which Henry's Cromwell “hammered down” than in the
ruin of all the palaces and temples and theatres and circuses and baths
of that imperial Rome which the world is so well rid of.