Rome. Far away across the church and down the nave, somewhere near the
great portals at the end, there was a side-door, and a broad lane from
this door had been cleared through the crowd. Rome was very soon to
issue from the door, it was for Rome that the lane was kept open along
the roaring church. But a church, do I say?--it was the temple of Rome,
the “great main cupola” of the Roman genius. It stands upon the hill of
the Vatican in our day, and it has stood there for some little time; but
its rightful place is the Capitol, the mount of triumph--it is there
that the temple belongs. Kings and queens were led captive to that
shrine, the multitude mocked and jeered at their abasement; and I see
what is wanting to the due completeness of the resounding assembly in St
Peter’s--it is the presence of captive kings and queens, brought low by
the power of Rome, over whom the multitude might exult with glee and
ferocity. And indeed the multitude would, it is easy to see; _I_
shouldn’t, nor Father Holt, nor the rest of us up here, and that is why
we feel thus cut off from the tumult beneath us; but the pilgrims would
delight in deriding the poor dazed wretches, and their reverence for the
majesty of Rome would be the more enhanced. This joy, which they would
have tasted upon the Capitol, is denied them upon the tomb of Peter; but
they have lost nothing else by the shifting of the shrine. Rome above
all, Rome the wonder of the world, is still the attraction of their
worship; and from the door of the temple that we watch with strained
expectation, suddenly hushed as the great moment approaches, Rome is
about to emerge and appear before us. Look, it is there--a high swaying
throne or pedestal, borne upon the shoulders of faithful knaves, and an
ancient white-robed figure that sits aloft, springing upright and
subsiding again with outstretched hand, and a smile, a fixed immemorial
smile in a blanched face, beneath a pair of piercing eyes: Rome, Rome
indeed.
V. VIA GIULIA
And Cooksey took me to tea, that same day, with his little old friend
Mr. Fitch. I was greatly charmed by Mr. Fitch, who was small and frail
and wore a dust-coloured beard; and his first suspicion of me (he was
afraid of the young) was allayed when he found that I knew and adored a
particular Roman church or two, remote and neglected, which he didn’t
suppose that a casual intruder like myself would have discovered. I
remember how Cooksey threw an arm of patronage around me and explained
that he had been my guide to the holy places of the city; but Mr. Fitch
caught my eye with a twinkle of intelligence, quickly withdrawn, which
set up a happy understanding between us on the spot. He did the honours
of his apartment with pleasant chirps and fidgets, hospitably bustling
about the tea-tray, beaming and fussing and apologizing, with bird-like
cries to the stout maid-servant who was energetically seconding his
welcome.
Mr. Fitch was a scholar, a student, who worked daily in the library of
the Vatican. I believe he was a hundred years old, and indeed he looked
it; but he didn’t appear to have _grown_ old, only to have suffered a
slow deposit of time to accumulate upon his person. Time was deep upon
his hair and face and clothes; but a few score years more or less could
have made no difference to the cheerful little bird-spirit in his
breast, and it was because he was shy and defenceless, not because he
was old, that he feared the onslaught of the young. A young person,
however, who was found to have made his way unaided to the church of San
Cesareo, far away among the vineyards on the verge of the city, was one
towards whom Mr. Fitch could hop and twitter in kindly confidence, and
he did so. Before we parted he invited me to lunch with him a day or two
later, and I fully understood that this was for him a remarkable
demonstration. “Gina!” he called, and Gina, the voluble maid-servant,
came from the kitchen with a run, to receive his command concerning the
festival. She was delighted, she swept me into the happy plan, she
seemed to be immediately arranging a treat for two merry little
children, for me and Mr. Fitch. We were like children between her broad
palms, all but hugged to her bosom; and with dancing eyes she told us to
leave it all to her--she would do something splendid. “Gina will see to
it,” said Mr. Fitch; and he asked her whether he shouldn’t invite some
other young thing to join the party--what about the giovanotto who had
called the other day? “Quel poverino?” said Gina--yes, the very thing.
So we should be a party of three; and Gina clapped her hands and ran
back to the kitchen, as though to set about her preparations there and
then.
Mr. Fitch lived in the Via Giulia, deep in the depth of Rome, not far
from the great mass of the Farnese palace. He had the craziest little
apartment, a tangle of rooms with bare tiled floors, in which his funny
frumpy English furniture, which might have come straight (and no doubt
it had) from his mother’s parlour at Cheltenham, looked strangely
shocked and ill at ease. Forty years of the Via Giulia (it can hardly
have been less) had not reconciled the mahogany overmantel and the
plush-topped tea-table to the ramshackle ways of foreign life; mutely
they protested, keeping themselves _to_ themselves, wrapped in their
respectability. Mr. Fitch, I think, had never so much as noticed their
plight; he sat on a chair, he made tea on a table, and one chair or
table was as good as another for the purpose. He himself looked homely
and frumpy enough, to be sure, lodged there under the wing, so to speak,
of Julius the Pope; but _he_ didn’t feel at a loss, and he tripped along
the proud-memoried street of his abode, with his decent English beard
and his little mud-gaiters on his boots, as brisk as a sparrow. He
accompanied us down the street and left us to go and invite the
“poverino” to meet me at lunch; I see him waving us good-bye at some
grand dark street-corner, where he turned and pattered off on his
errand. Cooksey treated him with large protective kindness and contempt,
out of which the old man seemed to slip with a duck of his head and a
gleam of fright and amusement in his two bright eyes.
The luncheon-party, a day or two later, was a great success. I climbed
to the apartment on the stroke of the hour, but the other young man was
already there before me, and Mr. Fitch ceremoniously performed an
introduction. The name of the youth was Maundy, and he proved to be one
of those aspiring priests, novices, seminarists--I don’t know what their
rightful name may be, but you know them well, you remember how they
converge in long lines upon the Pincian Hill towards evening, how they
pick up their skirts and romp with the gaiety of the laity upon the
greensward of the Villa Borghese. Maundy was his name, and he didn’t
look, for his part, as though he had had much romping; he was pale and
meagre, he reclined in a contorted cat’s-cradle of thin arms and legs on
one of Mr. Fitch’s fringed and brass-nailed arm-chairs. If Gina’s word
for him meant a poor young specimen of chilly lankness she was right;
his limp black soutane (is it a soutane?) couldn’t disguise his
sharp-set knees or the lean little sticks of his arms. He jumped up,
however, quite alert and spritely for our introduction, and he greeted
me with a friendly high-piping composure that made it unnecessary to
pity him. I had begun to pity him, as I always do feel compassionate, so
gratuitously, at the sight of his kind--at the sight of the young
novices, caught and caged and black-skirted in their innocence,
renouncing the world before they have had the chance to taste it; but
Maundy turned the tables upon me in a moment, and he revealed himself as
a perfectly assured young son of the world, with whom I had no call to
be sympathetically considerate. He shook hands with me, using a gesture
which at that time, so long ago, was reputed a mark of distinction--I
forget how it went exactly, but I think the pair of clasped hands was
held high and waved negligently from side to side. Maundy achieved it
with an air, not failing to observe that I had stepped forward to meet
him with the ordinary pump-handle of the vulgar.
And so we sat down to Gina’s admirable meal, and Mr. Fitch was in a
flutter of pleasure and excitement, and Maundy talked and talked--he led
the conversation, he led it almost beyond our reach, he led it so
masterfully that it hardly escaped him at all. Mr. Fitch lost his hold
on it at once; he sat with his head on one side, making small clucking
noises of assent and question now and then, while Maundy piped and swept
away from us in his monologue. But no, I oughtn’t to say that he left us
both behind, for he kept turning and waiting for me to catch him up, he
flatteringly showed me that he wished for my company. “Such a blessing,”
he said, “to get away from piety”--and he intimated with a smile that it
was I who represented the impious. He desired my company, not my talk;
and he might have been breaking out with the relief of unwonted freedom,
soaring forth into topics that were discouraged in the congregation of
the poor caged lambs; and I dare say he enjoyed the spread of his wings
among the tinted and perfumed vapours of his fancy. It was all beyond
Mr. Fitch, who clearly couldn’t explain him with my ready mixture of
metaphor; Mr. Fitch was bewildered. But to me the fancies of Maundy were
sufficiently familiar; I knew the like of them from of old, and I fear
we both took a certain pleasure in noting the bedazzlement of our host.
The good soul, he sat and plied us with food and wine, while Maundy
rattled away in his emancipation and I assumed the most impious look (I
had small opportunity for more than looks) that I could accomplish.
Maundy threw off a light word or two about his place of residence and
instruction in Rome--the seminary, the college, I forget how he referred
to it. He seemed disdainful of all its other inmates; he couldn’t regard
them as companions for a person of intelligence and fine feeling. How he
came to have placed himself among them, submitting to their rule, he
didn’t explain at the time, but I afterwards made out a little of his
history. He had written a great deal of poetry at Oxford, and he had
kept an old silver oil-lamp burning night and day before a Greek
statuette, and he had had his favourite books bound in apricot linen,
and he had collected thirty-five different kinds of scented soap--and I
know it sounds odd, but he appeared to consider these achievements as
natural stages on the path to Rome. He didn’t go quite so far as to say
that he repented of having made the journey and embraced the Roman
discipline; but after a year in the college or the seminary his mind, I
think, was in a state of more painful confusion than he allowed me to
see. Somehow the argument at one end, the Oxford end, where he had
draped his dressing-table with an embroidered rochet (he told me so),
seemed to have so little in common with the argument at the other, the
Roman end, where he walked out with his young associates for exercise in
the Villa Borghese and not one of them had heard of the poetry of Lionel
Johnson; and somehow he had perceived the discrepancy without
discovering where the chain of his reasoning had failed, and in the
privacy of his discontent he was still floundering backwards and
forwards, trying to persuade himself of the soundness of all the
links--and perhaps seeking with a part of his mind (a growing part) to
be convinced that he had reasoned wrong. Something of this kind, I
believe, was fretting his life in Rome, and how it may have ended I
never knew; he didn’t confide his troubles to me--he simply hailed me as
one who would possibly understand what it meant to him to have once, in
an eating-house of Soho, been introduced to Aubrey Beardsley.
“The _passion_ of his line,” he said, referring to that artist; and
again, “The passion of his _line_!”--and he described the scene in Soho,
mentioning that the impression had wrought upon him so potently that
afterwards he had sat up all night, with some golden Tokay beside him in
a blue Venetian glass (not drinking it, only refreshed by the sight of
it), and had written a poem, a sonnet of strange perfumes and fantastic
gems, which he had dedicated in Latin to the hero of the evening. And
then he had gone out into the dawn, and had wandered through Leicester
Square to Covent Garden, and had bought a bunch of mauve carnations;
and he had thought of sending them, with the sonnet, to the master who
had inspired him--but then he had returned to his lodging and had burnt
the sonnet, heaping the carnations for a pyre, having resolved to guard
the experience, whole and rounded and complete, in the secrecy of a
faithful memory. He pointed out that to share these things is to lose
them; as soon as you turn them into words for another’s eye they cease
to be perfectly yours, they are dissipated into the common air; which
was why a friend of his, at Oxford, had insisted that one should write
no words, paint or carve no colour or line, but only make one’s images
and pictures and poems out of the rainbow-tinted substance of memory,
that exquisite material always awaiting and inviting the hand of an
artist. So one avoids, you see, the sick disillusion of the writer who
flings forth his maiden fancy to the ribaldry of the crowd; and Maundy
himself had tried to rise to this height of disinterested passion, and
in the dying perfume of the mauve carnations he had sacrificed what he
saw to be a vulgar ambition. Oh yes, depend upon it, the greatest works
of art have never been seen of any but their maker; and to Maundy it was
a beautiful thought, the thought of the white secret statues locked away
by the thousand in their secluded shrines, safe from the world, visited
now and again by the one and only adorer who possessed the key. “But
stay,” said Mr. Fitch, “have you considered--” oh yes, Maundy had felt
the weight of that objection, and Dickson after all (Dickson was the
friend at Oxford) had written and printed his volume, but that was
because he had found no other way to rid himself of an obsession; the
white statue in his case had become more real than life, and he had
cast it forth to retain--to retain, you might say, his sanity.
Well, we must publish or go mad; that is the melancholy conclusion. Mr.
Fitch stared doubtfully, and I shook my head like one whose hold upon
his senses is precarious indeed. Maundy was quick to interpret my
movement, and it encouraged him to yet giddier flights. He was hovering
upon the climax of one of these when Gina happened to come clattering in
with a dish; and she paused, sinking back upon her heels, the dish held
high before her, and she threw up her head and she flashed out such an
amusing challenging bantering look at Maundy, where he flourished his
thin fingers in the zest of his eloquence, that I have never forgotten
the picture of her mirth and her plumpness as it was framed at that
moment in the doorway. “Ah, the poor little fellow,” she said to
herself, “he loves to talk!” And she too began to talk, breaking into
his monologue with unabashed and ringing frankness; she set down her
dish on the table with a dancing gesture, whipping her hands away from
it like an actress in a play, and she stood by his side, patting him on
the shoulder, approving him, scolding him, bidding him eat, eat!--and
Maundy turned round to her with a peal of sudden light laughter, a burst
of naturalness that changed his whole appearance; so that Gina had
transformed the temper of the party and had raised it at once to a
breezier level of gaiety than it would ever have touched without her. It
was delightful; I couldn’t understand a word she said, for her words
flew shining and streeling over our heads as quick as thought, and I
dare say Maundy answered their spirit rather than their meaning; but he
responded well, he had some good neat conversational turns of idiom
that he shot back at her with a knowing accent, and she chuckled, she
threatened him, she bustled out of the room with a smile for me and Mr.
Fitch and a last fling of playfulness over her shoulder for Maundy. Mr.
Fitch had said that Gina would “see to it,” and he was quite right; we
started afresh in a much better vein, all three of us, after her
incursion.
Mr. Fitch produced a bottle of “vino santo” at the end of the meal and
charged our glasses. The sacred liquor was exceedingly good, and he took
heart from it to talk more freely. Gina had relaxed the strain of
Maundy’s preciosity, and he had begun to cross-question our host about
his occupation, his early life, his establishment in Rome, with an
inquisitive and youthful familiarity under which the old man shyly and
prettily expanded. He told us how in the dim ages he had received a
commission to do a little historical research among the manuscripts of
the Vatican, and how he had taken his seat in the library, with a pile
of volumes around him, and had never left it again from that moment to
this. His first commission was long ago fulfilled, but it had revealed a
point of singular interest, some debatable matter in connexion with a
certain correspondence about a question raised in a contemporary version
of an unofficial report of a papal election in the seventeenth
century--yes, a matter which had chanced to be overlooked by previous
investigators; and Mr. Fitch, sitting fast in his chair at the library,
day after day, year after year, had been enabled to throw a little light
upon the obscurity, and had even published a small pamphlet--“not, I
must admit, for the very cogent reason that prompted your friend at
Oxford, but from a motive that I justify as a desire for historical
accuracy, and that I condemn as vanity”; and Mr. Fitch, so saying,
beamed upon us with a diminutive roguishness, more sparrow-like than
ever, which he immediately covered by plying us anew with the sacred
bottle.
And then he told us of the long evenings he had spent, year after year,
in wandering among the ancient byways of the city--every day, when he
was turned out of the library at the closing hour, he had set forth to
explore the grand shabby old city that had now perished, he said,
bequeathing little but its memory to the smart new capital of to-day.
Rome had changed around him, he only had remained the same; but he could
truthfully claim that he knew nothing, save by report, of Rome’s
rejuvenation--say rather of its horrible pretentious bedizenment in the
latest fashion; for he had long abandoned his old pious pilgrimages, he
now went no farther than his lodging here and the library over there,
and he was proud to declare that he had never set eyes on a quarter of
the monstrosities of which he heard tell. There was a break of
indignation in his voice as he spoke of them; he had loved that Rome of
the far-away golden evenings, it was all he ever _had_ loved except his
work, and he had been robbed of it, bit by bit, till nothing was left
him but his well-worn seat among the state-papers and the pontifical
dust that nobody had taken the trouble to clear away. I don’t mean that
he said all this, but it was all in his gentle regretful tone; he seemed
to stand solitary and disregarded among the riot of modernity, and to
utter a little tiny dismal reproach, barely audible in the din--the
plaintive “how _can_ you, how _can_ you?” of a small bird whose nest has
been trampled down by a pack of stupid louts on a holiday. It was hard
on him; the louts might just as well have stamped and scuffled
somewhere else; but so it was, they had violated his wonderful Rome, and
nobody noticed the sad small squeak of protest that arose here and there
from a scholar, a student, a lover.
What did Maundy think of it all? Mr. Fitch brightened in hospitable care
for our amusement; he didn’t often have two young things to lunch with
him, and he mustn’t blight the occasion with his griefs; and so he
recovered his spirit and tried to set Maundy off again in one of his
droll tirades. What _did_ Maundy think of it? Oddly enough the question
of Rome, in the light in which it appeared to Mr. Fitch, hadn’t
seemingly occurred to him; Maundy’s Rome had been predominantly a matter
of Spanish altar-lace and rose-tinted chasubles, and a year by the Tiber
had brought him to think that Oxford is now more purely, more daintily
Roman than the city of the Popes; and that was really his only
conclusion on the subject, and I don’t believe he had given a thought to
the Roman romance, vanished or vanishing, that had inspired the
tenderness of Mr. Fitch. Maundy knew nothing of San Cesareo, nothing of
the enchanted evenings among the ruins and the cypresses that were still
to be recaptured, I could give Mr. Fitch my word for it, even in the
desolation of to-day. “Ah yes, no doubt of it,” said Mr. Fitch, “if one
happens to be twenty years old to-day!”--but this he threw out in
passing, and he returned to the strange case of Maundy, which perplexed
and troubled him. It seemed that Maundy, whenever he went wandering
through Rome, had only one interest in view; I forget what it was, but
it had something to do with a point of ritual that Maundy excessively
cherished; and he used to go hunting round the city to discover the
churches in which it was properly observed, keeping a black-list of
those which failed to make good. It was the only aspect in which San
Cesareo could engage him, and Mr. Fitch and I had both neglected it.
With Rome ancient or modern Maundy was otherwise little concerned. He
listened blankly to Mr. Fitch’s melancholy regrets; for him they were
the mild ravings that you naturally expect from the very old. He was
ignorant of the past, so ignorant that it couldn’t raise the least stir
in his imagination; he had lived upon flimsiness, upon a little
sentiment and a little second-hand art, and he hadn’t the stomach, I
suppose, for Rome. It was curious to see how his insensibility puzzled
Mr. Fitch. Maundy’s glibness about unknown artists, about poems that
hadn’t been written and statues that drove you mad, had certainly
surprised and impressed him; but the gulf of vacuity that yawned beneath
Maundy’s culture was a shock. Of course it only showed what a
featherweight of a tatter it was, that culture; if you are thus artistic
in the void, with the empty inane below you, it proves that your art
hasn’t substance enough to make it drop. But Mr. Fitch was too humble
and kindly for that harsh judgment, and he seemed to be beating about in
his courtesy to find an explanation more honourable to Maundy. Surely
the young man was very able, very original and brilliant; if he spurned
the treasures of the past he must have some clever new reason for doing
so. I think I could have told Mr. Fitch that Maundy’s reason was no
newer than simple ignorance; and perhaps I began to parade my own
slender stock of learning to mark the contrast. But Mr. Fitch was
unconvinced, and I still see him eyeing young Maundy with a sort of
hesitating admiration, hovering on the edge of a question that he
couldn’t formulate. As for Maundy, he was thoroughly at ease; Mr. Fitch
had confessed that the name of Aubrey Beardsley was unknown to him.
Anyhow the party had been most successful, and Mr. Fitch might go
trotting back to his afternoon’s work with the pleased sense that two
very young people had made friends under his and Gina’s auspices. He
liked to observe that Maundy and I were making a plan to meet next day,
and he blessed our alliance, taking credit for the good thought of
acquainting Maundy’s brilliance with my--my what?--my honest and
old-fashioned enthusiasm. Gina too was satisfied; she stood at her
kitchen-door as we went out, and she cordially invited us to come again.
She pointed out that Maundy set me an example with his soutane and his
aspiration to the priesthood, and she assured me that I couldn’t do
better than to place myself under his guidance; but at the same time she
allowed that it wasn’t for all of us to aim so loftily, and perhaps I
was wise to be content with a lower standard. She cheerily dismissed us;
she had developed these reflections in twenty seconds of farewell. We
descended to the street, the three of us, and Mr. Fitch waved his hat as
he sped off to his happy labours, and Maundy and I turned away in the
direction of his seminary, where it was now time for him to rejoin his
black-skirted brethren. I was rather proud to be seen walking beside his
sweeping robe and clerical hat; it seemed so intimately Roman. But I
found to my surprise that Maundy was quite uneasy and apologetic about
it; he hated his uniform, he well understood that a man should feel shy
of its company. “If I were you,” he said, twitching his skirt
disdainfully, “I should hate to appear in public along with _this_.” He
was an odd jumble of cross-purposes, poor Maundy, and here was another
glimpse of his natural mind. He was more of a self-conscious school-boy
than ever he was of a musk-scented sonnetteer; but in either character I
am afraid, or I hope, that he didn’t fit comfortably into his Roman
retreat. I can’t think that the cage was to hold him much longer.
VI. VILLA BORGHESE