One may at the blest end of May say without injustice to anybody that
the state of mind of many a _forestiero_ in Rome is one of intense
impatience for the moment when all other _forestieri_ shall have
taken themselves off. One may confess to this state of mind and be no
misanthrope. The place has passed so completely for the winter months
into the hands of the barbarians that that estimable character the
passionate pilgrim finds it constantly harder to keep his passion clear.
He has a rueful sense of impressions perverted and adulterated; the
all-venerable visage disconcerts us by a vain eagerness to see itself
mirrored in English, American, German eyes. It isn’t simply that you are
never first or never alone at the classic or historic spots where
you have dreamt of persuading the shy _genius loci_ into confidential
utterance; it isn’t simply that St. Peter’s, the Vatican, the Palatine,
are for ever ringing with the false note of the languages without style:
it is the general oppressive feeling that the city of the soul
has become for the time a monstrous mixture of watering-place and
curiosity-shop and that its most ardent life is that of the tourists who
haggle over false intaglios and yawn through palaces and temples. But
you are told of a happy time when these abuses begin to pass away, when
Rome becomes Rome again and you may have her all to yourself. “You may
like her more or less now,” I was assured at the height of the season;
“but you must wait till the month of May, when she’ll give you _all_ she
has, to love her. Then the foreigners, or the excess of them, are gone;
the galleries and ruins are empty, and the place,” said my informant,
who was a happy Frenchman of the Académie de France, _“renait a
ellememe.”_ Indeed I was haunted all winter by an irresistible prevision
of what Rome _must_ be in declared spring. Certain charming places
seemed to murmur: “Ah, this is nothing! Come back at the right weeks and
see the sky above us almost black with its excess of blue, and the
new grass already deep, but still vivid, and the white roses tumble in
odorous spray and the warm radiant air distil gold for the smelting-pot
that the _genius loci_ then dips his brush into before making play with
it, in his inimitable way, for the general effect of complexion.”
A month ago I spent a week in the country, and on my return, the first
time I approached the Corso, became conscious of a change. Something
delightful had happened, to which at first I couldn’t give a name, but
which presently shone out as the fact that there were but half as
many people present and that these were chiefly the natural or the
naturalised. We had been docked of half our irrelevance, our motley
excess, and now physically, morally, æesthetically there was elbow-room.
In the afternoon I went to the Pincio, and the Pincio was almost dull.
The band was playing to a dozen ladies who lay in landaus poising their
lace-fringed parasols; but they had scarce more than a light-gloved
dandy apiece hanging over their carriage doors. By the parapet to the
great terrace that sweeps the city stood but three or four interlopers
looking at the sunset and with their Baedekers only just showing in
their pockets--the sunsets not being down among the tariffed articles
in these precious volumes. I went so far as to hope for them that,
like myself, they were, under every precaution, taking some amorous
intellectual liberty with the scene.
Practically I violate thus the instinct of monopoly, since it’s a
shame not to publish that Rome in May is indeed exquisitely worth your
patience. I have just been so gratified at finding myself in undisturbed
possession for a couple of hours of the Museum of the Lateran that I can
afford to be magnanimous. It’s almost as if the old all-papal paradise
had come back. The weather for a month has been perfect, the sky an
extravagance of blue, the air lively enough, the nights cool, nippingly
cool, and the whole ancient greyness lighted with an irresistible smile.
Rome, which in some moods, especially to new-comers, seems a place of
almost sinister gloom, has an occasional art, as one knows her better,
of brushing away care by the grand gesture with which some splendid
impatient mourning matron--just the Niobe of Nations, surviving,
emerging and looking about her again--might pull off and cast aside an
oppression of muffling crape. This admirable power still temperamentally
to react and take notice lurks in all her darkness and dirt and decay--a
something more careless and hopeless than our thrifty northern cheer,
and yet more genial and urbane than the Parisian spirit of _blague_.
The collective Roman nature is a healthy and hearty one, and you feel it
abroad in the streets even when the sirocco blows and the medium of life
seems to proceed more or less from the mouth of a furnace. But who shall
analyse even the simplest Roman impression? It is compounded of so
many things, it says so much, it involves so much, it so quickens the
intelligence and so flatters the heart, that before we fairly grasp
the case the imagination has marked it for her own and exposed us to a
perilous likelihood of talking nonsense about it.
The smile of Rome, as I have called it, and its insidious message to
those who incline to ramble irresponsibly and take things as they come,
is ushered in with the first breath of spring, and then grows and grows
with the advancing season till it wraps the whole place in its tenfold
charm. As the process develops you can do few better things than
go often to Villa Borghese and sit on the grass--on a stout bit of
drapery--and watch its exquisite stages. It has a frankness and a
sweetness beyond any relenting of _our_ clumsy climates even when ours
leave off their damnable faces and begin. Nature departs from every
reserve with a confidence that leaves one at a loss where, as it were,
to look--leaves one, as I say, nothing to do but to lay one’s head among
the anemones at the base of a high-stemmed pine and gaze up crestward
and sky-ward along its slanting silvery column. You may watch the whole
business from a dozen of these choice standpoints and have a different
villa for it every day in the week. The Doria, the Ludovisi, the Medici,
the Albani, the Wolkonski, the Chigi, the Mellini, the Massimo--there
are more of them, with all their sights and sounds and odours and
memories, than you have senses for. But I prefer none of them to the
Borghese, which is free to all the world at all times and yet never
crowded; for when the whirl of carriages is great in the middle regions
you may find a hundred untrodden spots and silent corners, tenanted at
the worst by a group of those long-skirted young Propagandists who
stalk about with solemn angularity, each with a book under his arm, like
silhouettes from a medieval missal, and “compose” so extremely well
with the still more processional cypresses and with stretches of
golden-russet wall overtopped by ultramarine. And yet if the Borghese is
good the Medici is strangely charming, and you may stand in the little
belvedere which rises with such surpassing oddity out of the dusky heart
of the Boschetto at the latter establishment--a miniature presentation
of the wood of the Sleeping Beauty--and look across at the Ludovisi
pines lifting their crooked parasols into a sky of what a painter would
call the most morbid blue, and declare that the place where _they_ grow
is the most delightful in the world. Villa Ludovisi has been all winter
the residence of the lady familiarly known in Roman society as “Rosina,”
Victor Emmanuel’s morganatic wife, the only familiarity it would
seem, that she allows, for the grounds were rigidly closed, to the
inconsolable regret of old Roman sojourners. Just as the nightingales
began to sing, however, the quasi-august _padrona_ departed, and the
public, with certain restrictions, have been admitted to hear them.
The place takes, where it lies, a princely ease, and there could be no
better example of the expansive tendencies of ancient privilege than the
fact that its whole vast extent is contained by the city walls. It has
in this respect very much the same enviable air of having got up early
that marks the great intramural demesne of Magdalen College at Oxford.
The stern old ramparts of Rome form the outer enclosure of the villa,
and hence a series of “striking scenic effects” which it would be
unscrupulous flattery to say you can imagine. The grounds are laid out
in the formal last-century manner; but nowhere do the straight black
cypresses lead off the gaze into vistas of a melancholy more charged
with associations--poetic, romantic, historic; nowhere are there
grander, smoother walls of laurel and myrtle.
I recently spent an afternoon hour at the little Protestant cemetery
close to St. Paul’s Gate, where the ancient and the modern world are
insidiously contrasted. They make between them one of the solemn places
of Rome--although indeed when funereal things are so interfused it seems
ungrateful to call them sad. Here is a mixture of tears and smiles, of
stones and flowers, of mourning cypresses and radiant sky, which gives
us the impression of our looking back at death from the brighter side
of the grave. The cemetery nestles in an angle of the city wall, and the
older graves are sheltered by a mass of ancient brickwork, through whose
narrow loopholes you peep at the wide purple of the Campagna. Shelley’s
grave is here, buried in roses--a happy grave every way for the very
type and figure of the Poet. Nothing could be more impenetrably tranquil
than this little corner in the bend of the protecting rampart, where a
cluster of modern ashes is held tenderly in the rugged hand of the Past.
The past is tremendously embodied in the hoary pyramid of Caius Cestius,
which rises hard by, half within the wall and half without, cutting
solidly into the solid blue of the sky and casting its pagan shadow upon
the grass of English graves--that of Keats, among them--with an effect
of poetic justice. It is a wonderful confusion of mortality and a grim
enough admonition of our helpless promiscuity in the crucible of time.
But the most touching element of all is the appeal of the pious English
inscriptions among all these Roman memories; touching because of their
universal expression of that trouble within trouble, misfortune in
a foreign land. Something special stirs the heart through the fine
Scriptural language in which everything is recorded. The echoes of
massive Latinity with which the atmosphere is charged suggest nothing
more majestic and monumental. I may seem unduly to refine, but the
injunction to the reader in the monument to Miss Bathurst, drowned in
the Tiber in 1824, “If thou art young and lovely, build not thereon,
for she who lies beneath thy feet in death was the loveliest flower ever
cropt in its bloom,” affects us irresistibly as a case for tears on the
spot. The whole elaborate inscription indeed says something over and
beyond all it does say. The English have the reputation of being the
most reticent people in the world, and as there is no smoke without fire
I suppose they have done something to deserve it; yet who can say that
one doesn’t constantly meet the most startling examples of the insular
faculty to “gush”? In this instance the mother of the deceased takes
the public into her confidence with surprising frankness and omits
no detail, seizing the opportunity to mention by the way that she had
already lost her husband by a most mysterious visitation. The appeal
to one’s attention and the confidence in it are withal most moving. The
whole record has an old-fashioned gentility that makes its frankness
tragic. You seem to hear the garrulity of passionate grief.
To be choosing these positive commonplaces of the Roman tone for a theme
when there are matters of modern moment going on may seem none the
less to require an apology. But I make no claim to your special
correspondent’s faculty for getting an “inside” view of things, and I
have hardly more than a pictorial impression of the Pope’s illness and
of the discussion of the Law of the Convents. Indeed I am afraid
to speak of the Pope’s illness at all, lest I should say something
egregiously heartless about it, recalling too forcibly that unnatural
husband who was heard to wish that his wife would “either” get well--!
He had his reasons, and Roman tourists have theirs in the shape of a
vague longing for something spectacular at St. Peter’s. If it takes the
sacrifice of somebody to produce it let somebody then be sacrificed.
Meanwhile we have been having a glimpse of the spectacular side of the
Religious Corporations Bill. Hearing one morning a great hubbub in the
Corso I stepped forth upon my balcony. A couple of hundred men were
strolling slowly down the street with their hands in their pockets,
shouting in unison “Abbasso il ministero!” and huzzaing in chorus. Just
beneath my window they stopped and began to murmur “Al Quirinale, al
Quirinale!” The crowd surged a moment gently and then drifted to the
Quirinal, where it scuffled harmlessly with half-a-dozen of the king’s
soldiers. It ought to have been impressive, for what was it, strictly,
unless the seeds of revolution? But its carriage was too gentle and
its cries too musical to send the most timorous tourist to packing
his trunk. As I began with saying: in Rome, in May, everything has an
amiable side, even popular uprisings.