It is certainly sweet to be merry at the right moment; but the right
moment hardly seems to me the ten days of the Roman Carnival. It was
my rather cynical suspicion perhaps that they wouldn’t keep to my
imagination the brilliant promise of legend; but I have been justified
by the event and have been decidedly less conscious of the festal
influences of the season than of the inalienable gravity of the place.
There was a time when the Carnival was a serious matter--that is a
heartily joyous one; but, thanks to the seven-league boots the kingdom
of Italy has lately donned for the march of progress in quite other
directions, the fashion of public revelry has fallen woefully out of
step. The state of mind and manners under which the Carnival was kept in
generous good faith I doubt if an American can exactly conceive: he can
only say to himself that for a month in the year there must have been
things--things considerably of humiliation--it was comfortable to
forget. But now that Italy is made the Carnival is unmade; and we are
not especially tempted to envy the attitude of a population who have
lost their relish for play and not yet acquired to any striking extent
an enthusiasm for work. The spectacle on the Corso has seemed to me, on
the whole, an illustration of that great breach with the past of which
Catholic Christendom felt the somewhat muffled shock in September, 1870.
A traveller acquainted with the fully papal Rome, coming back any time
during the past winter, must have immediately noticed that something
momentous had happened--something hostile to the elements of picture
and colour and “style.” My first warning was that ten minutes after
my arrival I found myself face to face with a newspaper stand. The
impossibility in the other days of having anything in the journalistic
line but the _Osservatore Romano_ and the _Voce della Verità_ used to
seem to me much connected with the extraordinary leisure of thought and
stillness of mind to which the place admitted you. But now the slender
piping of the Voice of Truth is stifled by the raucous note of eventide
vendors of the _Capitale_, the _Libertà_ and the _Fanfulla_; and Rome
reading unexpurgated news is another Rome indeed. For every subscriber
to the _Libertà_ there may well be an antique masker and reveller less.
As striking a sign of the new régime is the extraordinary increase of
population. The Corso was always a well-filled street, but now it’s
a perpetual crush. I never cease to wonder where the new-comers are
lodged, and how such spotless flowers of fashion as the gentlemen who
stare at the carriages can bloom in the atmosphere of those _camere
mobiliate_ of which I have had glimpses. This, however, is their own
question, and bravely enough they meet it. They proclaimed somehow, to
the first freshness of my wonder, as I say, that by force of numbers
Rome had been secularised. An Italian dandy is a figure visually
to reckon with, but these goodly throngs of them scarce offered
compensation for the absent monsignori, treading the streets in their
purple stockings and followed by the solemn servants who returned on
their behalf the bows of the meaner sort; for the mourning gear of the
cardinals’ coaches that formerly glittered with scarlet and swung with
the weight of the footmen clinging behind; for the certainty that you’ll
not, by the best of traveller’s luck, meet the Pope sitting deep in the
shadow of his great chariot with uplifted fingers like some inaccessible
idol in his shrine. You may meet the King indeed, who is as ugly, as
imposingly ugly, as some idols, though not so inaccessible. The other
day as I passed the Quirinal he drove up in a low carriage with a single
attendant; and a group of men and women who had been waiting near
the gate rushed at him with a number of folded papers. The carriage
slackened pace and he pocketed their offerings with a business-like
air--hat of a good-natured man accepting handbills at a street-corner.
Here was a monarch at his palace gate receiving petitions from his
subjects--being adjured to right their wrongs. The scene ought to have
thrilled me, but somehow it had no more intensity than a woodcut in an
illustrated newspaper. Homely I should call it at most; admirably so,
certainly, for there were lately few sovereigns standing, I believe,
with whom their people enjoyed these filial hand-to-hand relations. The
King this year, however, has had as little to do with the Carnival as
the Pope, and the innkeepers and Americans have marked it for their own.
It was advertised to begin at half-past two o’clock of a certain
Saturday, and punctually at the stroke of the hour, from my room across
a wide court, I heard a sudden multiplication of sounds and confusion
of tongues in the Corso. I was writing to a friend for whom I cared
more than for any mere romp; but as the minutes elapsed and the hubbub
deepened curiosity got the better of affection, and I remembered that I
was really within eye-shot of an affair the fame of which had ministered
to the daydreams of my infancy. I used to have a scrap-book with a
coloured print of the starting of the bedizened wild horses, and the use
of a library rich in keepsakes and annuals with a frontispiece commonly
of a masked lady in a balcony, the heroine of a delightful tale further
on. Agitated by these tender memories I descended into the street; but
I confess I looked in vain for a masked lady who might serve as a
frontispiece, in vain for any object whatever that might adorn a tale.
Masked and muffled ladies there were in abundance; but their masks were
of ugly wire, perfectly resembling the little covers placed upon strong
cheese in German hotels, and their drapery was a shabby water-proof
with the hood pulled over their chignons. They were armed with great tin
scoops or funnels, with which they solemnly shovelled lime and flour
out of bushel-baskets and down on the heads of the people in the street.
They were packed into balconies all the way along the straight vista of
the Corso, in which their calcareous shower maintained a dense, gritty,
unpalatable fog. The crowd was compact in the street, and the Americans
in it were tossing back confetti out of great satchels hung round their
necks. It was quite the “you’re another” sort of repartee, and less
seasoned than I had hoped with the airy mockery tradition hangs about
this festival. The scene was striking, in a word; but somehow not as
I had dreamed of its being. I stood regardful, I suppose, but with a
peculiarly tempting blankness of visage, for in a moment I received
half a bushel of flour on my too-philosophic head. Decidedly it was an
ignoble form of humour. I shook my ears like an emergent diver, and had
a sudden vision of how still and sunny and solemn, how peculiarly and
undisturbedly themselves, how secure from any intrusion less sympathetic
than one’s own, certain outlying parts of Rome must just then be. The
Carnival had received its deathblow in my imagination; and it has been
ever since but a thin and dusky ghost of pleasure that has flitted at
intervals in and out of my consciousness.
I turned my back accordingly on the Corso and wandered away to the
grass-grown quarters delightfully free even from the possibility of
a fellow-countryman. And so having set myself an example I have been
keeping Carnival by strolling perversely along the silent circumference
of Rome. I have doubtless lost a great deal. The Princess Margaret has
occupied a balcony opposite the open space which leads into Via Condotti
and, I believe, like the discreet princess she is, has dealt in no
missiles but bonbons, bouquets and white doves. I would have waited
half an hour any day to see the Princess Margaret hold a dove on her
forefinger; but I never chanced to notice any preparation for that
effect. And yet do what you will you can’t really elude the Carnival. As
the days elapse it filters down into the manners of the common people,
and before the week is over the very beggars at the church-doors seem to
have gone to the expense of a domino. When you meet these specimens of
dingy drollery capering about in dusky back-streets at all hours of
the day and night, meet them flitting out of black doorways between the
greasy groups that cluster about Roman thresholds, you feel that a love
of “pranks,” the more vivid the better, must from far back have
been implanted in the Roman temperament with a strong hand. An
unsophisticated American is wonderstruck at the number of persons, of
every age and various conditions, whom it costs nothing in the nature of
an ingenuous blush to walk up and down the streets in the costume of a
theatrical supernumerary. Fathers of families do it at the head of an
admiring progeniture; aunts and uncles and grandmothers do it; all
the family does it, with varying splendour but with the same good
conscience. “A pack of babies!” the doubtless too self-conscious alien
pronounces it for its pains, and tries to imagine himself strutting
along Broadway in a battered tin helmet and a pair of yellow tights. Our
vices are certainly different; it takes those of the innocent sort to be
so ridiculous. A self-consciousness lapsing so easily, in fine, strikes
me as so near a relation to amenity, urbanity and general gracefulness
that, for myself, I should be sorry to lay a tax on it, lest these other
commodities should also cease to come to market.
I was rewarded, when I had turned away with my ears full of flour, by
a glimpse of an intenser life than the dingy foolery of the Corso.
I walked down by the back streets to the steps mounting to the
Capitol--that long inclined plane, rather, broken at every two paces,
which is the unfailing disappointment, I believe, of tourists primed for
retrospective raptures. Certainly the Capitol seen from this side isn’t
commanding. The hill is so low, the ascent so narrow, Michael Angelo’s
architecture in the quadrangle at the top so meagre, the whole place
somehow so much more of a mole-hill than a mountain, that for the first
ten minutes of your standing there Roman history seems suddenly to have
sunk through a trap-door. It emerges however on the other side, in the
Forum; and here meanwhile, if you get no sense of the sublime, you get
gradually a sense of exquisite composition. Nowhere in Rome is more
colour, more charm, more sport for the eye. The mild incline, during
the winter months, is always covered with lounging sun-seekers, and
especially with those more constantly obvious members of the Roman
population--beggars, soldiers, monks and tourists. The beggars and
peasants lie kicking their heels along that grandest of loafing-places
the great steps of the Ara Coeli. The dwarfish look of the Capitol is
intensified, I think, by the neighbourhood of this huge blank staircase,
mouldering away in disuse, the weeds thick in its crevices, and climbing
to the rudely solemn facade of the church. The sunshine glares on this
great unfinished wall only to light up its featureless despair, its
expression of conscious, irremediable incompleteness. Sometimes, massing
its rusty screen against the deep blue sky, with the little cross and
the sculptured porch casting a clear-cut shadow on the bricks, it seems
to have even more than a Roman desolation, it confusedly suggests Spain
and Africa--lands with no latent _risorgimenti_, with absolutely
nothing but a fatal past. The legendary wolf of Rome has lately been
accommodated with a little artificial grotto, among the cacti and the
palms, in the fantastic triangular garden squeezed between the steps of
the church and the ascent to the Capitol, where she holds a perpetual
levee and “draws” apparently as powerfully as the Pope himself. Above,
in the piazzetta before the stuccoed palace which rises so jauntily on a
basement of thrice its magnitude, are more loungers and knitters in the
sun, seated round the massively inscribed base of the statue of Marcus
Aurelius. Hawthorne has perfectly expressed the attitude of this
admirable figure in saying that it extends its arm with “a command which
is in itself a benediction.” I doubt if any statue of king or captain
in the public places of the world has more to commend it to the general
heart. Irrecoverable simplicity--residing so in irrecoverable Style--has
no sturdier representative. Here is an impression that the sculptors of
the last three hundred years have been laboriously trying to reproduce;
but contrasted with this mild old monarch their prancing horsemen
suggest a succession of riding-masters taking out young ladies’
schools. The admirably human character of the figure survives the rusty
decomposition of the bronze and the slight “debasement” of the art; and
one may call it singular that in the capital of Christendom the portrait
most suggestive of a Christian conscience is that of a pagan emperor.
You recover in some degree your stifled hopes of sublimity as you
pass beyond the palace and take your choice of either curving slope to
descend into the Forum. Then you see that the little stuccoed edifice
is but a modern excrescence on the mighty cliff of a primitive
construction, whose great squares of porous tufa, as they underlie each
other, seem to resolve themselves back into the colossal cohesion of
unhewn rock. There are prodigious strangenesses in the union of
this airy and comparatively fresh-faced superstructure and these
deep-plunging, hoary foundations; and few things in Rome are more
entertaining to the eye than to measure the long plumb-line which drops
from the inhabited windows of the palace, with their little over-peeping
balconies, their muslin curtains and their bird-cages, down to the
rugged constructional work of the Republic. In the Forum proper the
sublime is eclipsed again, though the late extension of the excavations
gives a chance for it.
Nothing in Rome helps your fancy to a more vigorous backward flight than
to lounge on a sunny day over the railing which guards the great central
researches. It “says” more things to you than you can repeat to see the
past, the ancient world, as you stand there, bodily turned up with the
spade and transformed from an immaterial, inaccessible fact of time into
a matter of soils and surfaces. The pleasure is the same--in kind--as
what you enjoy of Pompeii, and the pain the same. It wasn’t here,
however, that I found my compensation for forfeiting the spectacle on
the Corso, but in a little church at the end of the narrow byway which
diverges up the Palatine from just beside the Arch of Titus. This byway
leads you between high walls, then takes a bend and introduces you to a
long row of rusty, dusty little pictures of the stations of the cross.
Beyond these stands a small church with a front so modest that you
hardly recognise it till you see the leather curtain. I never see a
leather curtain without lifting it; it is sure to cover a constituted
_scene_ of some sort--good, bad or indifferent. The scene this time was
meagre--whitewash and tarnished candlesticks and mouldy muslin flowers
being its principal features. I shouldn’t have remained if I hadn’t
been struck with the attitude of the single worshipper--a young priest
kneeling before one of the sidealtars, who, as I entered, lifted his
head and gave me a sidelong look so charged with the languor of devotion
that he immediately became an object of interest. He was visiting each
of the altars in turn and kissing the balustrade beneath them. He was
alone in the church, and indeed in the whole region. There were no
beggars even at the door; they were plying their trade on the skirts
of the Carnival. In the entirely deserted place he alone knelt for
religion, and as I sat respectfully by it seemed to me I could hear in
the perfect silence the far-away uproar of the maskers. It was my
late impression of these frivolous people, I suppose, joined with the
extraordinary gravity of the young priest’s face--his pious fatigue,
his droning prayer and his isolation--that gave me just then and there a
supreme vision of the religious passion, its privations and resignations
and exhaustions and its terribly small share of amusement. He was
young and strong and evidently of not too refined a fibre to enjoy the
Carnival; but, planted there with his face pale with fasting and his
knees stiff with praying, he seemed so stern a satire on it and on
the crazy thousands who were preferring it to _his_ way, that I half
expected to see some heavenly portent out of a monastic legend come down
and confirm his choice. Yet I confess that though I wasn’t enamoured of
the Carnival myself, his seemed a grim preference and this forswearing
of the world a terrible game--a gaining one only if your zeal never
falters; a hard fight when it does. In such an hour, to a stout young
fellow like the hero of my anecdote, the smell of incense must seem
horribly stale and the muslin flowers and gilt candlesticks to figure no
great bribe. And it wouldn’t have helped him much to think that not so
very far away, just beyond the Forum, in the Corso, there was sport for
the million, and for nothing. I doubt on the other hand whether my young
priest had thought of this. He had made himself a temple out of the very
elements of his innocence, and his prayers followed each other too
fast for the tempter to slip in a whisper. And so, as I say, I found a
solider fact of human nature than the love of _coriandoli_.
One of course never passes the Colosseum without paying it one’s
respects--without going in under one of the hundred portals and crossing
the long oval and sitting down a while, generally at the foot of the
cross in the centre. I always feel, as I do so, as if I were seated in
the depths of some Alpine valley. The upper portions of the side toward
the Esquiline look as remote and lonely as an Alpine ridge, and you
raise your eyes to their rugged sky-line, drinking in the sun and
silvered by the blue air, with much the same feeling with which you
would take in a grey cliff on which an eagle might lodge. This roughly
mountainous quality of the great ruin is its chief interest; beauty
of detail has pretty well vanished, especially since the high-growing
wild-flowers have been plucked away by the new government, whose
functionaries, surely, at certain points of their task, must have felt
as if they shared the dreadful trade of those who gather samphire.
Even if you are on your way to the Lateran you won’t grudge the twenty
minutes it will take you, on leaving the Colosseum, to turn away under
the Arch of Constantine, whose noble battered bas-reliefs, with the
chain of tragic statues--fettered, drooping barbarians--round its
summit, I assume you to have profoundly admired, toward the piazzetta of
the church of San Giovanni e Paolo, on the slope of Caelian. No spot in
Rome can show a cluster of more charming accidents. The ancient brick
apse of the church peeps down into the trees of the little wooded walk
before the neighbouring church of San Gregorio, intensely venerable
beneath its excessive modernisation; and a series of heavy brick
buttresses, flying across to an opposite wall, overarches the short,
steep, paved passage which leads into the small square. This is flanked
on one side by the long mediaeval portico of the church of the two
saints, sustained by eight time-blackened columns of granite and marble.
On another rise the great scarce-windowed walls of a Passionist convent,
and on the third the portals of a grand villa, whose tall porter,
with his cockade and silver-topped staff, standing sublime behind his
grating, seems a kind of mundane St. Peter, I suppose, to the beggars
who sit at the church door or lie in the sun along the farther slope
which leads to the gate of the convent. The place always seems to me the
perfection of an out-of-the-way corner--a place you would think twice
before telling people about, lest you should find them there the next
time you were to go. It is such a group of objects, singly and in their
happy combination, as one must come to Rome to find at one’s house
door; but what makes it peculiarly a picture is the beautiful dark
red campanile of the church, which stands embedded in the mass of
the convent. It begins, as so many things in Rome begin, with a stout
foundation of antique travertine, and rises high, in delicately quaint
mediaeval brickwork--little tiers and apertures sustained on miniature
columns and adorned with small cracked slabs of green and yellow marble,
inserted almost at random. When there are three or four brown-breasted
contadini sleeping in the sun before the convent doors, and a departing
monk leading his shadow down over them, I think you will not find
anything in Rome more _sketchable_.
If you stop, however, to observe everything worthy of your water-colours
you will never reach St. John Lateran. My business was much less with
the interior of that vast and empty, that cold clean temple, which I
have never found peculiarly interesting, than with certain charming
features of its surrounding precinct--the crooked old court beside it,
which admits you to the Baptistery and to a delightful rear-view of
the queer architectural odds and ends that may in Rome compose a florid
ecclesiastical façade. There are more of these, a stranger jumble
of chance detail, of lurking recesses and wanton projections and
inexplicable windows, than I have memory or phrase for; but the gem
of the collection is the oddly perched peaked turret, with its yellow
travertine welded upon the rusty brickwork, which was not meant to be
suspected, and the brickwork retreating beneath and leaving it in the
odd position of a tower _under_ which you may see the sky. As to the
great front of the church overlooking the Porta San Giovanni, you are
not admitted behind the scenes; the term is quite in keeping, for the
architecture has a vastly theatrical air. It is extremely imposing--that
of St. Peter’s alone is more so; and when from far off on the Campagna
you see the colossal images of the mitred saints along the top standing
distinct against the sky, you forget their coarse construction and their
inflated draperies. The view from the great space which stretches from
the church steps to the city wall is the very prince of views. Just
beside you, beyond the great alcove of mosaic, is the Scala Santa, the
marble staircase which (says the legend) Christ descended under the
weight of Pilate’s judgment, and which all Christians must for ever
ascend on their knees; before you is the city gate which opens upon the
Via Appia Nuova, the long gaunt file of arches of the Claudian aqueduct,
their jagged ridge stretching away like the vertebral column of some
monstrous mouldering skeleton, and upon the blooming brown and purple
flats and dells of the Campagna and the glowing blue of the Alban
Mountains, spotted with their white, high-nestling towns; while to your
left is the great grassy space, lined with dwarfish mulberry-trees,
which stretches across to the damp little sister-basilica of Santa Croce
in Gerusalemme. During a former visit to Rome I lost my heart to this
idle tract,{1}
{1} Utterly overbuilt and gone--1909.
and wasted much time in sitting on the steps of the church and watching
certain white-cowled friars who were sure to be passing there for the
delight of my eyes. There are fewer friars now, and there are a great
many of the king’s recruits, who inhabit the ex-conventual barracks
adjoining Santa Croce and are led forward to practise their goose-step
on the sunny turf. Here too the poor old cardinals who are no longer
to be seen on the Pincio descend from their mourning-coaches and
relax their venerable knees. These members alone still testify to the
traditional splendour of the princes of the Church; for as they advance
the lifted black petticoat reveals a flash of scarlet stockings and
makes you groan at the victory of civilisation over colour.
{Illustration: THE FAÇADE OF ST. JOHN LATERAN, ROME.}
If St. John Lateran disappoints you internally, you have an easy
compensation in pacing the long lane which connects it with Santa
Maria Maggiore and entering the singularly perfect nave of that most
delightful of churches. The first day of my stay in Rome under the
old dispensation I spent in wandering at random through the city,
with accident for my _valet-de-place_. It served me to perfection and
introduced me to the best things; among others to an immediate happy
relation with Santa Maria Maggiore. First impressions, memorable
impressions, are generally irrecoverable; they often leave one the
wiser, but they rarely return in the same form. I remember, of my coming
uninformed and unprepared into the place of worship and of curiosity
that I have named, only that I sat for half an hour on the edge of the
base of one of the marble columns of the beautiful nave and enjoyed a
perfect revel of--what shall I call it?--taste, intelligence, fancy,
perceptive emotion? The place proved so endlessly suggestive that
perception became a throbbing confusion of images, and I departed with
a sense of knowing a good deal that is not set down in Murray. I have
seated myself more than once again at the base of the same column;
but you live your life only once, the parts as well as the whole. The
obvious charm of the church is the elegant grandeur of the nave--its
perfect shapeliness and its rich simplicity, its long double row of
white marble columns and its high flat roof, embossed with intricate
gildings and mouldings. It opens into a choir of an extraordinary
splendour of effect, which I recommend you to look out for of a fine
afternoon. At such a time the glowing western light, entering the high
windows of the tribune, kindles the scattered masses of colour into
sombre bright-ness, scintillates on the great solemn mosaic of the
vault, touches the porphyry columns of the superb baldachino with ruby
lights, and buries its shining shafts in the deep-toned shadows that
hang about frescoes and sculptures and mouldings. The deeper charm even
than in such things, however, is the social or historic note or tone or
atmosphere of the church--I fumble, you see, for my right expression;
the sense it gives you, in common with most of the Roman churches, and
more than any of them, of having been prayed in for several centuries by
an endlessly curious and complex society. It takes no great attention to
let it come to you that the authority of Italian Catholicism has lapsed
not a little in these days; not less also perhaps than to feel that, as
they stand, these deserted temples were the fruit of a society leavened
through and through by ecclesiastical manners, and that they formed for
ages the constant background of the human drama. They are, as one
may say, the _churchiest_ churches in Europe--the fullest of gathered
memories, of the experience of their office. There’s not a figure one
has read of in old-world annals that isn’t to be imagined on proper
occasion kneeling before the lamp-decked Confession beneath the altar of
Santa Maria Maggiore. One sees after all, however, even among the
most palpable realities, very much what the play of one’s imagination
projects there; and I present my remarks simply as a reminder that one’s
constant excursions into these places are not the least interesting
episodes of one’s walks in Rome.
I had meant to give a simple illustration of the church-habit, so to
speak, but I have given it at such a length as leaves scant space to
touch on the innumerable topics brushed by the pen that begins to take
Roman notes. It is by the aimless _flânerie_ which leaves you free to
follow capriciously every hint of entertainment that you get to know
Rome. The greater part of the life about you goes on in the streets;
and for an observer fresh from a country in which town scenery is at the
least monotonous incident and character and picture seem to abound. I
become conscious with compunction, let me hasten to add, that I have
launched myself thus on the subject of Roman churches and Roman walks
without so much as a preliminary allusion to St. Peter’s. One is apt to
proceed thither on rainy days with intentions of exercise--to put the
case only at that--and to carry these out body and mind. Taken as a walk
not less than as a church, St. Peter’s of course reigns alone. Even
for the profane “constitutional” it serves where the Boulevards, where
Piccadilly and Broadway, fall short, and if it didn’t offer to our use
the grandest area in the world it would still offer the most diverting.
Few great works of art last longer to the curiosity, to the perpetually
transcended attention. You think you have taken the whole thing in, but
it expands, it rises sublime again, and leaves your measure itself poor.
You never let the ponderous leather curtain bang down behind you--your
weak lift of a scant edge of whose padded vastness resembles the
liberty taken in folding back the parchment corner of some mighty folio
page--without feeling all former visits to have been but missed attempts
at apprehension and the actual to achieve your first real possession.
The conventional question is ever as to whether one hasn’t been
“disappointed in the size,” but a few honest folk here and there, I
hope, will never cease to say no. The place struck me from the first as
the hugest thing conceivable--a real exaltation of one’s idea of space;
so that one’s entrance, even from the great empty square which either
glares beneath the deep blue sky or makes of the cool far-cast shadow of
the immense front something that resembles a big slate-coloured country
on a map, seems not so much a going in somewhere as a going out. The
mere man of pleasure in quest of new sensations might well not know
where to better his encounter there of the sublime shock that brings
him, within the threshold, to an immediate gasping pause. There are
days when the vast nave looks mysteriously vaster than on others and
the gorgeous baldachino a longer journey beyond the far-spreading
tessellated plain of the pavement, and when the light has yet a quality
which lets things loom their largest, while the scattered figures--I
mean the human, for there are plenty of others--mark happily the scale
of items and parts. Then you have only to stroll and stroll and gaze and
gaze; to watch the glorious altar-canopy lift its bronze architecture,
its colossal embroidered contortions, like a temple within a temple, and
feel yourself, at the bottom of the abysmal shaft of the dome, dwindle
to a crawling dot.
Much of the constituted beauty resides in the fact that it is all
general beauty, that you are appealed to by no specific details, or that
these at least, practically never importunate, are as taken for granted
as the lieutenants and captains are taken for granted in a great
standing army--among whom indeed individual aspects may figure here
the rather shifting range of decorative dignity in which details, when
observed, often prove poor (though never not massive and substantially
precious) and sometimes prove ridiculous. The sculptures, with the sole
exception of Michael Angelo’s ineffable “Pieta,” which lurks obscurely
in a side-chapel--this indeed to my sense the rarest artistic
_combination_ of the greatest things the hand of man has produced--are
either bad or indifferent; and the universal incrustation of marble,
though sumptuous enough, has a less brilliant effect than much later
work of the same sort, that for instance of St. Paul’s without the
Walls. The supreme beauty is the splendidly sustained simplicity of the
whole. The thing represents a prodigious imagination extraordinarily
strained, yet strained, at its happiest pitch, without breaking. Its
happiest pitch I say, because this is the only creation of its strenuous
author in presence of which you are in presence of serenity. You
may invoke the idea of ease at St. Peter’s without a sense of
sacrilege--which you can hardly do, if you are at all spiritually
nervous, in Westminster Abbey or Notre Dame. The vast enclosed clearness
has much to do with the idea. There are no shadows to speak of, no
marked effects of shade; only effects of light innumerably--points at
which this element seems to mass itself in airy density and scatter
itself in enchanting gradations and cadences. It performs the office of
gloom or of mystery in Gothic churches; hangs like a rolling mist along
the gilded vault of the nave, melts into bright interfusion the mosaic
scintillations of the dome, clings and clusters and lingers, animates
the whole huge and otherwise empty shell. A good Catholic, I suppose, is
the same Catholic anywhere, before the grandest as well as the humblest
altars; but to a visitor not formally enrolled St. Peter’s speaks less
of aspiration than of full and convenient assurance. The soul infinitely
expands there, if one will, but all on its quite human level. It marvels
at the reach of our dreams and the immensity of our resources. To be so
impressed and put in our place, we say, is to be sufficiently “saved”;
we can’t be more than the heaven itself; and what specifically celestial
beauty such a show or such a substitute may lack it makes up for in
certainty and tangibility. And yet if one’s hours on the scene are not
actually spent in praying, the spirit seeks it again as for the finer
comfort, for the blessing, exactly, of its example, its protection and
its exclusion. When you are weary of the swarming democracy of your
fellow-tourists, of the unremunerative aspects of human nature on Corso
and Pincio, of the oppressively frequent combination of coronets on
carriage panels and stupid faces in carriages, of addled brains and
lacquered boots, of ruin and dirt and decay, of priests and beggars and
takers of advantage, of the myriad tokens of a halting civilisation, the
image of the great temple depresses the balance of your doubts, seems to
rise above even the highest tide of vulgarity and make you still believe
in the heroic will and the heroic act. It’s a relief, in other words, to
feel that there’s nothing but a cab-fare between your pessimism and one
of the greatest of human achievements.
{Illustration: THE COLONNADE OF ST. PETER, ROME.}
This might serve as a Lenten peroration to these remarks of mine which
have strayed so woefully from their jovial text, save that I ought
fairly to confess that my last impression of the Carnival was altogether
Carnivalesque.. The merry-making of Shrove Tuesday had life and
felicity; the dead letter of tradition broke out into nature and grace.
I pocketed my scepticism and spent a long afternoon on the Corso. Almost
every one was a masker, but you had no need to conform; the pelting rain
of confetti effectually disguised you. I can’t say I found it all
very exhilarating; but here and there I noticed a brighter episode--a
capering clown inflamed with contagious jollity, some finer humourist
forming a circle every thirty yards to crow at his indefatigable
sallies. One clever performer so especially pleased me that I should
have been glad to catch a glimpse of the natural man. You imagined for
him that he was taking a prodigious intellectual holiday and that
his gaiety was in inverse ratio to his daily mood. Dressed as a needy
scholar, in an ancient evening-coat and with a rusty black hat and
gloves fantastically patched, he carried a little volume carefully
under his arm. His humours were in excellent taste, his whole manner the
perfection of genteel comedy. The crowd seemed to relish him vastly,
and he at once commanded a glee-fully attentive audience. Many of his
sallies I lost; those I caught were excellent. His trick was often
to begin by taking some one urbanely and caressingly by the chin and
complimenting him on the _intelligenza della sua fisionomia_. I kept
near him as long as I could; for he struck me as a real ironic artist,
cherishing a disinterested, and yet at the same time a motived and
a moral, passion for the grotesque. I should have liked, however--if
indeed I shouldn’t have feared--to see him the next morning, or when he
unmasked that night over his hard-earned supper in a smoky _trattoria_.
As the evening went on the crowd thickened and became a motley press of
shouting, pushing, scrambling, everything but squabbling, revellers. The
rain of missiles ceased at dusk, but the universal deposit of chalk and
flour was trampled into a cloud made lurid by flaring pyramids of the
gas-lamps that replaced for the occasion the stingy Roman luminaries.
Early in the evening came off the classic exhibition of the
_moccoletti_, which I but half saw, like a languid reporter resigned
beforehand to be cashiered for want of enterprise. From the mouth of
a side-street, over a thousand heads, I caught a huge slow-moving
illuminated car, from which blue-lights and rockets and Roman candles
were in course of discharge, meeting all in a dim fuliginous glare
far above the house-tops. It was like a glimpse of some public orgy in
ancient Babylon. In the small hours of the morning, walking homeward
from a private entertainment, I found Ash Wednesday still kept at bay.
The Corso, flaring with light, smelt like a circus. Every one was taking
friendly liberties with every one else and using up the dregs of his
festive energy in convulsive hootings and gymnastics. Here and there
certain indefatigable spirits, clad all in red after the manner of
devils and leaping furiously about with torches, were supposed to
affright you. But they shared the universal geniality and bequeathed
me no midnight fears as a pretext for keeping Lent, the _carnevale dei
preti_, as I read in that profanely radical sheet the _Capitale_. Of
this too I have been having glimpses. Going lately into Santa Francesca
Romana, the picturesque church near the Temple of Peace, I found a feast
for the eyes--a dim crimson-toned light through curtained windows,
a great festoon of tapers round the altar, a bulging girdle of lamps
before the sunken shrine beneath, and a dozen white-robed Dominicans
scattered in the happiest composition on the pavement. It was better
than the _moccoletti_.
1873.