It was a real trouble to me that the Pope, in his exasperation over the
conquest of Rome--in order to make the accomplished revolution recoil
also on the heads of the foreigners whom he perhaps suspected of
sympathy with the new order of things--had closed the Vatican and all
its collections. Rome was to me first and foremost Michael Angelo's
Sistine Chapel, Raphael's Stanzas and Loggias, and now all this
magnificent array, which I had travelled so far to see, was closed to
me by an old man's bad temper.
But there was still enough to linger over in Rome. The two palaces that
seemed to me most deserving of admiration were the Farnese and the
Cancellaria, the former Michael Angelo's, the latter Bramante's work,
the first a perpetuation in stone of beauty and power, the second, of
grace and lightness. I felt that if one were to take a person with no
idea of architecture and set him in front of these buildings, there
would fall like scales from his eyes, and he would say: "Now I know
what the building art means."
Luini's exquisite painting, _Vanity and Modesty_, in the Galleria
Sciarra, impressed me profoundly. It represented two women, one
nun-like, the other magnificently dressed. The latter is Leonardo's
well-known type, as a magically fascinating personality. Its essential
feature is a profoundly serious melancholy, but the beauty of the
figure is seductive. She is by no means smiling, and yet she looks as
though a very slight alteration would produce a smile, and as though
the heavens themselves would open, if smile she did. The powerful
glance of the dark blue eyes is in harmony with the light-brown hair
and the lovely hands. "It would be terrible to meet in real life a
woman who looked like that," I wrote; "for a man would grow desperate
at his inability to win her and desperate because the years must
destroy such a marvel. That is why the gracious gods have willed it
otherwise; that is why she does not exist. That is why she is only a
vision, a revelation, a painting, and that is why she was conceived in
the brain of Leonardo, the place on earth most favoured by the gods,
and executed by Luini, that all generations might gaze at her without
jealousy, and without dread of the molestations of Time."
One day, at the Museo Kircheriano, where I was looking at the admirable
antiquities, I made acquaintance with a Jesuit priest, who turned out
to be exceedingly pleasant and refined, a very decent fellow, in fact.
He spoke Latin to me, and showed me round; at an enquiry of mine, he
fetched from his quarters in the Collegio Romano a book with
reproductions from the pagan section of the Lateran Museum, and
explained to me some bas-reliefs which I had not understood. His
obligingness touched me, his whole attitude made me think. Hitherto I
had only spoken to one solitary embryo Jesuit,--a young Englishman who
was going to Rome to place himself at the service of the Pope, and who
was actuated by the purest enthusiasm; I was struck by the fact that
this second Jesuit, too, seemed to be a worthy man. It taught me how
independent individual worth is of the nature of one's convictions.
Most of the Italians I had so far been acquainted with were simple
people, my landlord and his family, and those who visited them, and I
sometimes heard fragments of conversation which revealed the common
people's mode of thought to me. In one house that I visited, the
mistress discovered that her maid was not married to her so-called
husband, a matter in which, for that matter, she was very blameless,
since her parents had refused their consent, and she had afterwards
allowed herself to be abducted. Her mistress reproached her for the
illegal relations existing. She replied, "If God wishes to plunge
anyone into misery, that person is excused."--"We must not put the
blame of everything upon God," said the mistress.--"Yes, yes," replied
the girl unabashed; "then if the Devil wishes to plunge a person into
misery, the person is excused."--"Nor may we put the blame of our
wrongdoing on the Devil," said the mistress.--"Good gracious," said the
girl, "it must be the fault of one or other of them, everybody knows
that. If it is not the one, it is the other."
At the house of the Blanchettis, who had come to Rome, I met many Turin
and Roman gentlemen. They were all very much taken up by an old
Sicilian chemist of the name of Muratori, who claimed that he had
discovered a material which looked like linen, but was impervious to
bullets, sword-cuts, bayonet-thrusts, etc. Blanchetti himself had fired
his revolver at him at two paces, and the ball had fallen flat to the
ground. There could be no question of juggling; Muratori was an
honourable old Garibaldist who had been wounded in his youth, and now
went about on crutches, but, since we have never heard of its being
made practical use of, it would seem that there was nothing in it.
I did not care to look up all the Italians to whom I had introductions
from Villari. But I tried my luck with a few of them. The first was Dr.
Pantaleoni, who had formerly been banished from the Papal States and
who left the country as a radical politician, but now held almost
conservative views. He had just come back, and complained bitterly of
all the licentiousness. "Alas!" he said, "we have freedom enough now,
but order, order!" Pantaleoni was a little, eager, animated man of
fifty, very much occupied, a politician and doctor, and he promised to
introduce me to all the scholars whose interests I shared. As I felt
scruples at taking up these gentlemen's time, he exclaimed wittily: "My
dear fellow, take up their time! To take his time is the greatest
service you can render to a Roman; he never knows what to do to kill
it!"
The next man I went to was Prince Odescalchi, one of the men who had
then recently risen to the surface, officially termed the hero of the
Young Liberals. Pantaleoni had dubbed him a blockhead, and he had not
lied. He turned out to be a very conceited and frothy young man with a
parting all over his head, fair to whiteness, of strikingly Northern
type, with exactly the same expressionless type of face as certain of
the milksops closely connected with the Court in Denmark.