December 28, 1872.--In Rome again for the last three days--that second
visit which, when the first isn’t followed by a fatal illness in
Florence, the story goes that one is doomed to pay. I didn’t drink of
the Fountain of Trevi on the eve of departure the other time; but I feel
as if I had drunk of the Tiber itself. Nevertheless as I drove from
the station in the evening I wondered what I should think of it at this
first glimpse hadn’t I already known it. All manner of evil perhaps.
Paris, as I passed along the Boulevards three evenings before to take
the train, was swarming and glittering as befits a great capital. Here,
in the black, narrow, crooked, empty streets, I saw nothing I would
fain regard as eternal. But there were new gas-lamps round the spouting
Triton in Piazza Barberini and a newspaper stall on the corner of the
Condotti and the Corso--salient signs of the emancipated state. An hour
later I walked up to Via Gregoriana by Piazza di Spagna. It was all
silent and deserted, and the great flight of steps looked surprisingly
small. Everything seemed meagre, dusky, provincial. Could Rome after all
really _be_ a world-city? That queer old rococo garden gateway at
the top of the Gregoriana stirred a dormant memory; it awoke into a
consciousness of the delicious mildness of the air, and very soon, in
a little crimson drawing-room, I was reconciled and re-initiated....
Everything is dear (in the way of lodgings), but it hardly matters, as
everything is taken and some one else paying for it. I must make up my
mind to a bare perch. But it seems poorly perverse here to aspire to
an “interior” or to be conscious of the economic side of life. The
æesthetic is so intense that you feel you should live on the taste
of it, should extract the nutritive essence of the atmosphere. For
positively it’s _such_ an atmosphere! The weather is perfect, the sky as
blue as the most exploded tradition fames it, the whole air glowing
and throbbing with lovely colour.... The glitter of Paris is now all
gaslight. And oh the monotonous miles of rain-washed asphalte!
_December 30th_.--I have had nothing to do with the “ceremonies.” In
fact I believe there have hardly been any--no midnight mass at the
Sistine chapel, no silver trumpets at St. Peter’s. Everything is
remorselessly clipped and curtailed--the Vatican in deepest mourning.
But I saw it in its superbest scarlet in ‘69.... I went yesterday with
L. to the Colonna gardens--an adventure that would have reconverted me
to Rome if the thing weren’t already done. It’s a rare old place--rising
in mouldy bosky terraces and mossy stairways and winding walks from the
back of the palace to the top of the Quirinal. It’s the grand style
of gardening, and resembles the present natural manner as a chapter of
Johnsonian rhetoric resembles a piece of clever contemporary journalism.
But it’s a better style in horticulture than in literature; I prefer
one of the long-drawn blue-green Colonna vistas, with a maimed and
mossy-coated garden goddess at the end, to the finest possible quotation
from a last-century classic. Perhaps the best thing there is the
old orangery with its trees in fantastic terra-cotta tubs. The late
afternoon light was gilding the monstrous jars and suspending golden
chequers among the golden-fruited leaves. Or perhaps the best thing is
the broad terrace with its mossy balustrade and its benches; also its
view of the great naked Torre di Nerone (I think), which might look
stupid if the rosy brickwork didn’t take such a colour in the blue
air. Delightful, at any rate, to stroll and talk there in the afternoon
sunshine.
_January 2nd,_ 1873.--Two or three drives with A.--one to St. Paul’s
without the Walls and back by a couple of old churches on the Aventine.
I was freshly struck with the rare distinction of the little Protestant
cemetery at the Gate, lying in the shadow of the black sepulchral
Pyramid and the thick-growing black cypresses. Bathed in the clear Roman
light the place is heartbreaking for what it asks you--in such a world
as _this_--to renounce. If it should “make one in love with death to lie
there,” that’s only if death should be conscious. As the case stands,
the weight of a tremendous past presses upon the flowery sod, and the
sleeper’s mortality feels the contact of all the mortality with which
the brilliant air is tainted.... The restored Basilica is incredibly
splendid. It seems a last pompous effort of formal Catholicism, and
there are few more striking emblems of later Rome--the Rome foredoomed
to see Victor Emmanuel in the Quirinal, the Rome of abortive councils
and unheeded anathemas. It rises there, gorgeous and useless, on its
miasmatic site, with an air of conscious bravado--a florid advertisement
of the superabundance of faith. Within it’s magnificent, and its
magnificence has no shabby spots--a rare thing in Rome. Marble and
mosaic, alabaster and malachite, lapis and porphyry, incrust it from
pavement to cornice and flash back their polished lights at each other
with such a splendour of effect that you seem to stand at the heart of
some immense prismatic crystal. One has to come to Italy to know marbles
and love them. I remember the fascination of the first great show of
them I met in Venice--at the Scalzi and Gesuiti. Colour has in no other
form so cool and unfading a purity and lustre. Softness of tone and
hardness of substance--isn’t that the sum of the artist’s desire? G.,
with his beautiful caressing, open-lipped Roman utterance, so easy to
understand and, to my ear, so finely suggestive of genuine Latin, not
our horrible Anglo-Saxon and Protestant kind, urged upon us the charms
of a return by the Aventine and the sight of a couple of old churches.
The best is Santa Sabina, a very fine old structure of the fifth
century, mouldering in its dusky solitude and consuming its own
antiquity. What a massive heritage Christianity and Catholicism are
leaving here! What a substantial fact, in all its decay, this memorial
Christian temple outliving its uses among the sunny gardens and
vineyards! It has a noble nave, filled with a stale smell which
(like that of the onion) brought tears to my eyes, and bordered with
twenty-four fluted marble columns of Pagan origin. The crudely primitive
little mosaics along the entablature are extremely curious. A Dominican
monk, still young, who showed us the church, seemed a creature generated
from its musty shadows I odours. His physiognomy was wonderfully _de
l’emploi_, and his voice, most agreeable, had the strangest jaded
humility. His lugubrious salute and sanctimonious impersonal
appropriation of my departing franc would have been a master-touch on
the stage. While we were still in the church a bell rang that he had to
go and answer, and as he came back and approached us along the nave he
made with his white gown and hood and his cadaverous face, against the
dark church background, one of those pictures which, thank the Muses,
have not yet been reformed out of Italy. It was the exact illustration,
for insertion in a text, of heaven knows how many old romantic and
conventional literary Italianisms--plays, poems, mysteries of Udolpho.
We got back into the carriage and talked of profane things and went home
to dinner--drifting recklessly, it seemed to me, from aesthetic luxury
to social.
On the 31st we went to the musical vesper-service at the Gesu--hitherto
done so splendidly before the Pope and the cardinals. The manner of it
was eloquent of change--no Pope, no cardinals, and indifferent music;
but a great _mise-en-scène_ nevertheless. The church is gorgeous; late
Renaissance, of great proportions, and full, like so many others, but in
a pre-eminent degree, of seventeenth and eighteenth century Romanism.
It doesn’t impress the imagination, but richly feeds the curiosity,
by which I mean one’s sense of the curious; suggests no legends, but
innumerable anecdotes à la Stendhal. There is a vast dome, filled with a
florid concave fresco of tumbling foreshortened angels, and all over
the ceilings and cornices a wonderful outlay of dusky gildings
and mouldings. There are various Bernini saints and seraphs in
stucco-sculpture, astride of the tablets and door-tops, backing against
their rusty machinery of coppery _nimbi_ and egg-shaped cloudlets.
Marble, damask and tapers in gorgeous profusion. The high altar a great
screen of twinkling chandeliers. The choir perched in a little loft high
up in the right transept, like a balcony in a side-scene at the opera,
and indulging in surprising roulades and flourishes.... Near me sat a
handsome, opulent-looking nun--possibly an abbess or prioress of noble
lineage. Can a holy woman of such a complexion listen to a fine operatic
barytone in a sumptuous temple and receive none but ascetic impressions?
What a cross-fire of influences does Catholicism provide!
_January 4th._--A drive with A. out of Porta San Giovanni and along Via
Appia Nuova. More and more beautiful as you get well away from the walls
and the great view opens out before you--the rolling green-brown dells
and flats of the Campagna, the long, disjointed arcade of the aqueducts,
the deep-shadowed blue of the Alban Hills, touched into pale lights by
their scattered towns. We stopped at the ruined basilica of San Stefano,
an affair of the fifth century, rather meaningless without a learned
companion. But the perfect little sepulchral chambers of the Pancratii,
disinterred beneath the church, tell their own tale--in their hardly
dimmed frescoes, their beautiful sculptured coffin and great sepulchral
slab. Better still the tomb of the Valerii adjoining it--a single
chamber with an arched roof, covered with stucco mouldings perfectly
intact, exquisite figures and arabesques as sharp and delicate as if the
plasterer’s scaffold had just been taken from under them. Strange enough
to think of these things--so many of them as there are--surviving their
immemorial eclipse in this perfect shape and coming up like long-lost
divers on the sea of time.
_January 16th._--A delightful walk last Sunday with F. to Monte Mario.
We drove to Porta Angelica, the little gate hidden behind the right wing
of Bernini’s colonnade, and strolled thence up the winding road to the
Villa Mellini, where one of the greasy peasants huddled under the wall
in the sun admits you for half franc into the finest old ilex-walk in
Italy. It is all vaulted grey-green shade with blue Campagna stretches
in the interstices. The day was perfect; the still sunshine, as we sat
at the twisted base of the old trees, seemed to have the drowsy hum of
mid-summer--with that charm of Italian vegetation that comes to us as
its confession of having scenically served, to weariness at last, for
some pastoral these many centuries a classic. In a certain cheapness
and thinness of substance--as compared with the English stoutness, never
left athirst--it reminds me of our own, and it is relatively dry enough
and pale enough to explain the contempt of many unimaginative Britons.
But it has an idle abundance and wantonness, a romantic shabbiness
and dishevelment. At the Villa Mellini is the famous lonely pine which
“tells” so in the landscape from other points, bought off from the axe
by (I believe) Sir George Beaumont, commemorated in a like connection in
Wordsworth’s great sonnet. He at least was not an unimaginative Briton.
As you stand under it, its far-away shallow dome, supported on a single
column almost white enough to be marble, seems to dwell in the dizziest
depths of the blue. Its pale grey-blue boughs and its silvery stem make
a wonderful harmony with the ambient air. The Villa Mellini is full
of the elder Italy of one’s imagination--the Italy of Boccaccio and
Ariosto. There are twenty places where the Florentine story-tellers
might have sat round on the grass. Outside the villa walls, beneath the
over-crowding orange-boughs, straggled old Italy as well--but not in
Boccaccio’s velvet: a row of ragged and livid contadini, some simply
stupid in their squalor, but some downright brigands of romance, or of
reality, with matted locks and terribly sullen eyes.
A couple of days later I walked for old acquaintance’ sake over to San
Onofrio on the Janiculan. The approach is one of the dirtiest adventures
in Rome, and though the view is fine from the little terrace, the church
and convent are of a meagre and musty pattern. Yet here--almost like
pearls in a dunghill--are hidden mementos of two of the most exquisite
of Italian minds. Torquato Tasso spent the last months of his life here,
and you may visit his room and various warped and faded relics. The most
interesting is a cast of his face taken after death--looking, like all
such casts, almost more than mortally gallant and distinguished. But
who should look all ideally so if not he? In a little shabby, chilly
corridor adjoining is a fresco of Leonardo, a Virgin and Child with
the _donatorio_. It is very small, simple and faded, but it has all the
artist’s magic, that mocking, illusive refinement and hint of a vague
_arriere-pensee_ which mark every stroke of Leonardo’s brush. Is it the
perfection of irony or the perfection of tenderness? What does he mean,
what does he affirm, what does he deny? Magic wouldn’t be magic, nor the
author of such things stand so absolutely alone, if we were ready with
an explanation. As I glanced from the picture to the poor stupid little
red-faced brother at my side I wondered if the thing mightn’t pass for
an elegant epigram on monasticism. Certainly, at any rate, there is more
intellect in it than under all the monkish tonsures it has seen coming
and going these three hundred years.
_January 21st._--The last three or four days I have regularly spent a
couple of hours from noon baking myself in the sun of the Pincio to get
rid of a cold. The weather perfect and the crowd (especially to-day)
amazing. Such a staring, lounging, dandified, amiable crowd! Who does
the vulgar stay-at-home work of Rome? All the grandees and half the
foreigners are there in their carriages, the _bourgeoisie_ on foot
staring at them and the beggars lining all the approaches. The great
difference between public places in America and Europe is in the number
of unoccupied people of every age and condition sitting about early and
late on benches and gazing at you, from your hat to your boots, as you
pass. Europe is certainly the continent of the practised stare. The
ladies on the Pincio have to run the gauntlet; but they seem to do so
complacently enough. The European woman is brought up to the sense
of having a definite part in the way of manners or manner to play in
public. To lie back in a barouche alone, balancing a parasol and seeming
to ignore the extremely immediate gaze of two serried ranks of male
creatures on each side of her path, save here and there to recognise
one of them with an imperceptible nod, is one of her daily duties.
The number of young men here who, like the coenobites of old, lead the
purely contemplative life is enormous. They muster in especial force
on the Pincio, but the Corso all day is thronged with them. They are
well-dressed, good-humoured, good-looking, polite; but they seem never
to do a harder stroke of work than to stroll from the Piazza Colonna to
the Hotel de Rome or _vice versa_. Some of them don’t even stroll, but
stand leaning by the hour against the doorways, sucking the knobs of
their canes, feeling their back hair and settling their shirt-cuffs. At
my cafe in the morning several stroll in already (at nine o’clock) in
light, in “evening” gloves. But they order nothing, turn on their heels,
glance at the mirrors and stroll out again. When it rains they herd
under the _portes-cochères_ and in the smaller cafes.... Yesterday
Prince Humbert’s little _primogenito_ was on the Pincio in an open
landau with his governess. He’s a sturdy blond little man and the image
of the King. They had stopped to listen to the music, and the crowd was
planted about the carriage-wheels, staring and criticising under the
child’s snub little nose. It appeared bold cynical curiosity, without
the slightest manifestation of “loyalty,” and it gave me a singular
sense of the vulgarisation of Rome under the new regime. When the Pope
drove abroad it was a solemn spectacle; even if you neither kneeled nor
uncovered you were irresistibly impressed. But the Pope never stopped to
listen to opera tunes, and he had no little popelings, under the charge
of superior nurse-maids, whom you might take liberties with. The family
at the Quirinal make something of a merit, I believe, of their
modest and inexpensive way of life. The merit is great; yet,
representationally, what a change for the worse from an order which
proclaimed stateliness a part of its essence! The divinity that doth
hedge a king must be pretty well on the wane. But how many more fine old
traditions will the extremely sentimental traveller miss in the Italians
over whom that little jostled prince in the landau will have come
into his kinghood? ... The Pincio continues to beguile; it’s a great
resource. I am for ever being reminded of the “aesthetic luxury,” as I
called it above, of living in Rome. To be able to choose of an afternoon
for a lounge (respectfully speaking) between St. Peter’s and the high
precinct you approach by the gate just beyond Villa Medici--counting
nothing else--is a proof that if in Rome you may suffer from ennui, at
least your ennui has a throbbing soul in it. It is something to say for
the Pincio that you don’t always choose St. Peter’s. Sometimes I lose
patience with its parade of eternal idleness, but at others this very
idleness is balm to one’s conscience. Life on just these terms seems so
easy, so monotonously sweet, that you feel it would be unwise, would be
really unsafe, to change. The Roman air is charged with an elixir, the
Roman cup seasoned with some insidious drop, of which the action is
fatally, yet none the less agreeably, “lowering.”
_January 26th._--With S. to the Villa Medici--perhaps on the whole
the most enchanting place in Rome. The part of the garden called the
Boschetto has an incredible, impossible charm; an upper terrace, behind
locked gates, covered with a little dusky forest of evergreen oaks.
Such a dim light as of a fabled, haunted place, such a soft suffusion
of tender grey-green tones, such a company of gnarled and twisted little
miniature trunks--dwarfs playing with each other at being giants--and
such a shower of golden sparkles drifting in from the vivid west! At
the end of the wood is a steep, circular mound, up which the short trees
scramble amain, with a long mossy staircase climbing up to a belvedere.
This staircase, rising suddenly out of the leafy dusk to you don’t see
where, is delightfully fantastic. You expect to see an old woman in a
crimson petticoat and with a distaff come hobbling down and turn into
a fairy and offer you three wishes. I should name for my own first wish
that one didn’t have to be a Frenchman to come and live and dream and
work at the Académie de France. Can there be for a while a happier
destiny than that of a young artist conscious of talent and of no errand
but to educate, polish and perfect it, transplanted to these sacred
shades? One has fancied Plato’s Academy--his gleaming colonnades, his
blooming gardens and Athenian sky; but was it as good as this one, where
Monsieur Hebert does the Platonic? The blessing in Rome is not that this
or that or the other isolated object is so very unsurpassable; but that
the general air so contributes to interest, to impressions that are not
as any other impressions anywhere in the world. And from this general
air the Villa Medici has distilled an essence of its own--walled it in
and made it delightfully private. The great façade on the gardens
is like an enormous rococo clock-face all incrusted with images and
arabesques and tablets. What mornings and afternoons one might
spend there, brush in hand, unpreoccupied, untormented, pensioned,
satisfied--either persuading one’s self that one would be “doing
something” in consequence or not caring if one shouldn’t be.
_At a later date--middle of March_.--A ride with S. W. out of the Porta
Pia to the meadows beyond the Ponte Nomentana--close to the site of
Phaon’s villa where Nero in hiding had himself stabbed. It all spoke as
things here only speak, touching more chords than one can _now_ really
know or say. For these are predestined memories and the stuff that
regrets are made of; the mild divine efflorescence of spring, the
wonderful landscape, the talk suspended for another gallop....
Returning, we dismounted at the gate of the Villa Medici and walked
through the twilight of the vaguely perfumed, bird-haunted alleys to
H.’s studio, hidden in the wood like a cottage in a fairy tale. I spent
there a charming half-hour in the fading light, looking at the pictures
while my companion discoursed of her errand. The studio is small and
more like a little salon; the painting refined, imaginative, somewhat
morbid, full of consummate French ability. A portrait, idealised and
etherealised, but a likeness of Mme. de---(from last year’s Salon)
in white satin, quantities of lace, a coronet, diamonds and pearls; a
striking combination of brilliant silvery tones. A “Femme Sauvage,”
a naked dusky girl in a wood, with a wonderfully clever pair of shy,
passionate eyes. The author is different enough from any of the numerous
American artists. They may be producers, but he’s a product as well--a
product of influences of a sort of which we have as yet no
general command. One of them is his charmed lapse of life in that
unprofessional-looking little studio, with his enchanted wood on one
side and the plunging wall of Rome on the other.
_January 30th._--A drive the other day with a friend to Villa Madama,
on the side of Monte Mario; a place like a page out of one of Browning’s
richest evocations of this clime and civilisation. Wondrous in its
haunting melancholy, it might have inspired half “The Ring and the Book”
at a stroke. What a grim commentary on history such a scene--what an
irony of the past! The road up to it through the outer enclosure is
almost impassable with mud and stones. At the end, on a terrace, rises
the once elegant Casino, with hardly a whole pane of glass in its
façade, reduced to its sallow stucco and degraded ornaments. The front
away from Rome has in the basement a great loggia, now walled in from
the weather, preceded by a grassy be littered platform with an immense
sweeping view of the Campagna; the sad-looking, more than sad-looking,
evil-looking, Tiber beneath (the colour of gold, the sentimentalists
say, the colour of mustard, the realists); a great vague stretch beyond,
of various complexions and uses; and on the horizon the ever-iridescent
mountains. The place has become the shabbiest farm-house, with muddy
water in the old _pièces d’eau_ and dunghills on the old parterres.
The “feature” is the contents of the loggia: a vaulted roof and walls
decorated by Giulio Romano; exquisite stucco-work and still brilliant
frescoes; arabesques and figurini, nymphs and fauns, animals and
flowers--gracefully lavish designs of every sort. Much of the
colour--especially the blues--still almost vivid, and all the work
wonderfully ingenious, elegant and charming. Apartments so decorated can
have been meant only for the recreation of people greater than any
we know, people for whom life was impudent ease and success. Margaret
Farnese was the lady of the house, but where she trailed her cloth of
gold the chickens now scamper between your legs over rotten straw. It is
all inexpressibly dreary. A stupid peasant scratching his head, a
couple of critical Americans picking their steps, the walls tattered and
befouled breast-high, dampness and decay striking in on your heart, and
the scene overbowed by these heavenly frescoes, moulering there in their
airy artistry! It’s poignant; it provokes tears; it tells so of the
waste of effort. Something human seems to pant beneath the grey pall
of time and to implore you to rescue it, to pity it, to stand by it
somehow. But you leave it to its lingering death without compunction,
almost with pleasure; for the place seems vaguely crime-haunted--paying
at least the penalty of some hard immorality. The end of a Renaissance
pleasure-house. Endless for the didactic observer the moral, abysmal for
the storyseeker the tale.
_February 12th_.--Yesterday to the Villa Albani. Over-formal and (as my
companion says) too much like a tea-garden; but with beautiful stairs
and splendid geometrical lines of immense box-hedge, intersected
with high pedestals supporting little antique busts. The light to-day
magnificent; the Alban Hills of an intenser broken purple than I had
yet seen them--their white towns blooming upon it like vague projected
lights. It was like a piece of very modern painting, and a good example
of how Nature has at times a sort of mannerism which ought to make
us careful how we condemn out of hand the more refined and affected
artists. The collection of marbles in the Casino (Winckelmann’s)
admirable and to be seen again. The famous Antinous crowned with lotus
a strangely beautiful and impressive thing. The “Greek manner,” on the
showing of something now and again encountered here, moves one to feel
that even for purely romantic and imaginative effects it surpasses any
since invented. If there be not imagination, even in our comparatively
modern sense of the word, in the baleful beauty of that perfect young
profile there is none in “Hamlet” or in “Lycidas.” There is five hundred
times as much as in “The Transfiguration.” With this at any rate to
point to it’s not for sculpture not professedly to produce any emotion
producible by painting. There are numbers of small and delicate
fragments of bas-reliefs of exquisite grace, and a huge piece (two
combatants--one, on horseback, beating down another--murder made eternal
and beautiful) attributed to the Parthenon and certainly as grandly
impressive as anything in the Elgin marbles. S. W. suggested again the
Roman villas as a “subject.” Excellent if one could find a feast of
facts à la Stendhal. A lot of vague ecstatic descriptions and anecdotes
wouldn’t at all pay. There have been too many already. Enough facts are
recorded, I suppose; one should discover them and soak in them for
a twelvemonth. And yet a Roman villa, in spite of statues, ideas and
atmosphere, affects me as of a scanter human and social _portee_, a
shorter, thinner reverberation, than an old English country-house,
round which experience seems piled so thick. But this perhaps is either
hair-splitting or “racial” prejudice.
{Illustration: ENTRANCE TO THE VATICAN, ROME}
_March 9th._--The Vatican is still deadly cold; a couple of hours there
yesterday with R. W. E. Yet he, illustrious and enviable man, fresh from
the East, had no overcoat and wanted none. Perfect bliss, I think, would
be to live in Rome without thinking of overcoats. The Vatican seems
very familiar, but strangely smaller than of old. I never lost the sense
before of confusing vastness. _Sancta simplicitas!_ All my old friends
however stand there in undimmed radiance, keeping most of them their
old pledges. I am perhaps more struck now with the enormous amount of
padding--the number of third-rate, fourth-rate things that weary the eye
desirous to approach freshly the twenty and thirty best. In spite of the
padding there are dozens of treasures that one passes regretfully; but
the impression of the whole place is the great thing--the feeling that
through these solemn vistas flows the source of an incalculable part of
our present conception of Beauty.
_April 10th._--Last night, in the rain, to the Teatro Valle to see a
comedy of Goldoni in Venetian dialect--“I Quattro Rustighi.” I could but
half follow it; enough, however, to be sure that, for all its humanity
of irony, it wasn’t so good as Molière. The acting was capital--broad,
free and natural; the play of talk easier even than life itself; but,
like all the Italian acting I have seen, it was wanting in _finesse_,
that shade of the shade by which, and by which alone, one really knows
art. I contrasted the affair with the evening in December last that I
walked over (also in the rain) to the Odeon and saw the “Plaideurs” and
the “Malade lmaginaire.” There, too, was hardly more than a handful of
spectators; but what rich, ripe, fully representational and above
all intellectual comedy, and what polished, educated playing! These
Venetians in particular, however, have a marvellous _entrain_ of their
own; they seem even less than the French to recite. In some of the
women--ugly, with red hands and shabby dresses--an extraordinary gift of
natural utterance, of seeming to invent joyously as they go.
_Later_.--Last evening in H.’s box at the Apollo to hear Ernesto Rossi
in “Othello.” He shares supremacy with Salvini in Italian tragedy.
Beautiful great theatre with boxes you can walk about in; brilliant
audience. The Princess Margaret was there--I have never been to
the theatre that she was not--and a number of other princesses in
neighbouring boxes. G. G. came in and instructed us that they were the
M., the L., the P., &c. Rossi is both very bad and very fine; bad where
anything like taste and discretion is required, but “all there,” and
more than there, in violent passion. The last act reduced too much,
however, to mere exhibitional sensibility. The interesting thing to me
was to observe the Italian conception of the part--to see how crude
it was, how little it expressed the hero’s moral side, his depth,
his dignity--anything more than his being a creature terrible in mere
tantrums. The great point was his seizing Iago’s head and whacking it
half-a-dozen times on the floor, and then flinging him twenty yards
away. It was wonderfully done, but in the doing of it and in the evident
relish for it in the house there was I scarce knew what force of easy
and thereby rather cheap expression.
_April 27th_.--A morning with L. B. at Villa Ludovisi, which we agreed
that we shouldn’t soon forget. The villa now belongs to the King, who
has lodged his morganatic wife there. There is nothing so blissfully
_right_ in Rome, nothing more consummately consecrated to style. The
grounds and gardens are immense, and the great rusty-red city wall
stretches away behind them and makes the burden of the seven hills
seem vast without making _them_ seem small. There is everything--dusky
avenues trimmed by the clippings of centuries, groves and dells and
glades and glowing pastures and reedy fountains and great flowering
meadows studded with enormous slanting pines. The day was delicious,
the trees all one melody, the whole place a revelation of what Italy
and hereditary pomp can do together. Nothing could be more in the
grand manner than this garden view of the city ramparts, lifting
their fantastic battlements above the trees and flowers. They are all
tapestried with vines and made to serve as sunny fruit-walls--grim old
defence as they once were; now giving nothing but a splendid buttressed
privacy. The sculptures in the little Casino are few, but there are two
great ones--the beautiful sitting Mars and the head of the great Juno,
the latter thrust into a corner behind a shutter. These things it’s
almost impossible to praise; we can only mark them well and keep them
clear, as we insist on silence to hear great music.... If I don’t praise
Guercino’s Aurora in the greater Casino, it’s for another reason; this
is certainly a very muddy masterpiece. It figures on the ceiling of
a small low hall; the painting is coarse and the ceiling too near.
Besides, it’s unfair to pass straight from the Greek mythology to the
Bolognese. We were left to roam at will through the house; the custode
shut us in and went to walk in the park. The apartments were all open,
and I had an opportunity to reconstruct, from its _milieu_ at least, the
character of a morganatic queen. I saw nothing to indicate that it
was not amiable; but I should have thought more highly of the lady’s
discrimination if she had had the Juno removed from behind her shutter.
In such a house, girdled about with such a park, me thinks I could be
amiable--and perhaps discriminating too. The Ludovisi Casino is small,
but the perfection of the life of ease might surely be led there. There
are English houses enough in wondrous parks, but they expose you to too
many small needs and observances--to say nothing of a red-faced butler
dropping his h’s. You are oppressed with the detail of accommodation.
Here the billiard-table is old-fashioned, perhaps a trifle crooked; but
you have Guercino above your head, and Guercino, after all, is almost
as good as Guido. The rooms, I noticed, all pleased by their shape, by
a lovely proportion, by a mass of delicate ornamentation on the high
concave ceilings. One might live over again in them some deliciously
benighted life of a forgotten type--with graceful old _sale_, and
immensely thick walls, and a winding stone staircase, and a view from
the loggia at the top; a view of twisted parasol-pines balanced, high
above a wooden horizon, against a sky of faded sapphire.
_May 17th._--It was wonderful yesterday at St. John Lateran. The spring
now has turned to perfect summer; there are cascades of verdure over
all the walls; the early flowers are a fading memory, and the new grass
knee-deep in the Villa Borghese. The winter aspect of the region about
the Lateran is one of the best things in Rome; the sunshine is nowhere
so golden and the lean shadows nowhere so purple as on the long grassy
walk to Santa Croce. But yesterday I seemed to see nothing but green
and blue. The expanse before Santa Croce was vivid green; the Campagna
rolled away in great green billows, which seemed to break high about the
gaunt aqueducts; and the Alban Hills, which in January and February
keep shifting and melting along the whole scale of azure, were almost
monotonously fresh, and had lost some of their finer modelling. But the
sky was ultramarine and everything radiant with light and warmth--warmth
which a soft steady breeze kept from excess. I strolled some time about
the church, which has a grand air enough, though I don’t seize the point
of view of Miss----, who told me the other day how vastly finer she
thought it than St. Peter’s. But on Miss----‘s lips this seemed a very
pretty paradox. The choir and transepts have a sombre splendour, and
I like the old vaulted passage with its slabs and monuments behind
the choir. The charm of charms at St. John Lateran is the admirable
twelfth-century cloister, which was never more charming than yesterday.
The shrubs and flowers about the ancient well were blooming away in the
intense light, and the twisted pillars and chiselled capitals of the
perfect little colonnade seemed to enclose them like the sculptured rim
of a precious vase. Standing out among the flowers you may look up and
see a section of the summit of the great façade of the church. The robed
and mitred apostles, bleached and rain-washed by the ages, rose into the
blue air like huge snow figures. I spent at the incorporated museum a
subsequent hour of fond vague attention, having it quite to myself.
It is rather scantily stocked, but the great cool halls open out
impressively one after the other, and the wide spaces between the
statues seem to suggest at first that each is a masterpiece. I was in
the loving mood of one’s last days in Rome, and when I had nothing else
to admire I admired the magnificent thickness of the embrasures of the
doors and windows. If there were no objects of interest at all in the
Lateran the palace would be worth walking through every now and then,
to keep up one’s idea of solid architecture. I went over to the
Scala Santa, where was no one but a very shabby priest sitting like a
ticket-taker at the door. But he let me pass, and I ascended one of the
profane lateral stairways and treated myself to a glimpse of the Sanctum
Sanctorum. Its threshold is crossed but once or twice a year, I believe,
by three or four of the most exalted divines, but you may look into it
freely enough through a couple of gilded lattices. It is very sombre
and splendid, and conveys the impression of a very holy place. And yet
somehow it suggested irreverent thoughts; it had to my fancy--perhaps on
account of the lattice--an Oriental, a Mahometan note. I expected every
moment to see a sultana appear in a silver veil and silken trousers and
sit down on the crimson carpet.
Farewell, packing, the sharp pang of going. One would like to be able
after five months in Rome to sum up for tribute and homage, one’s
experience, one’s gains, the whole adventure of one’s sensibility. But
one has really vibrated too much--the addition of so many items isn’t
easy. What is simply clear is the sense of an acquired passion for the
place and of an incalculable number of gathered impressions. Many
of these have been intense and momentous, but one has trodden on the
other--there are always the big fish that swallow up the little--and
one can hardly say what has become of them. They store themselves
noiselessly away, I suppose, in the dim but safe places of memory and
“taste,” and we live in a quiet faith that they will emerge into vivid
relief if life or art should demand them. As for the passion we needn’t
perhaps trouble ourselves about that. Fifty swallowed palmfuls of the
Fountain of Trevi couldn’t make us more ardently sure that we shall at
any cost come back.
1873.