If I find my old notes, in all these Roman connections, inevitably
bristle with the spirit of the postscript, so I give way to this
prompting to the extent of my scant space and with the sense of
other occasions awaiting me on which I shall have to do no less. The
impression of Rome was repeatedly to renew itself for the author of
these now rather antique and artless accents; was to overlay itself
again and again with almost heavy thicknesses of experience, the last of
which is, as I write, quite fresh to memory; and he has thus felt almost
ashamed to drop his subject (though it be one that tends so easily to
turn to the infinite) as if the law of change had in all the years had
nothing to say to his case. It’s of course but of his case alone that he
speaks--wondering little what he may make of it for the profit of others
by an attempt, however brief, to point the moral of the matter, or in
other words compare the musing _mature_ visitor’s “feeling about Rome”
with that of the extremely agitated, even if though extremely inexpert,
consciousness reflected in the previous pages. The actual, the current
Rome affects him as a world governed by new conditions altogether and
ruefully pleading that sorry fact in the ear of the antique wanderer
wherever he may yet mournfully turn for some re-capture of what he
misses. The city of his first unpremeditated rapture shines to memory,
on the other hand, in the manner of a lost paradise the rustle of whose
gardens is still just audible enough in the air to make him wonder if
some sudden turn, some recovered vista, mayn’t lead him back to the
thing itself. My genial, my helpful tag, at this point, would doubtless
properly resolve itself, for the reader, into a clue toward some such
successful ingenuity of quest; a remark I make, I may add, even while
reflecting that the Paradise isn’t apparently at all “lost” to visitors
not of my generation. It is the seekers of _that_ remote and romantic
tradition who have seen it, from one period of ten, or even of five,
years to another, systematically and remorselessly built out from their
view. Their helpless plaint, their sense of the generally irrecoverable
and unspeakable, is not, however, what I desire here most to express;
I should like, on the contrary, with ampler opportunity, positively to
enumerate the cases, the cases of contact, impression, experience,
in which the cold ashes of a long-chilled passion may fairly feel
themselves made to glow again. No one who has ever loved Rome as Rome
could be loved in youth and before her poised basketful of the finer
appeals to fond fancy was actually upset, wants to stop loving her;
so that our bleeding and wounded, though perhaps not wholly moribund,
loyalty attends us as a hovering admonitory, anticipatory ghost, one
of those magnanimous life-companions who before complete extinction
designate to the other member of the union their approved successor. So
it is at any rate that I conceive the pilgrim old enough to have become
aware in all these later years of what he misses to be counselled and
pacified in the interest of recognitions that shall a little make up for
it.
It was this wisdom I was putting into practice, no doubt, for instance,
when I lately resigned myself to motoring of a splendid June day “out
to” Subiaco; as a substitute for a resignation that had anciently taken,
alas, but the form of my never getting there at all. Everything that
day, moreover, seemed right, surely; everything on certain other days
that were like it through their large indebtedness, at this, that and
the other point, to the last new thing, seemed so right that they come
back to me now, after a moderate interval, in the full light of
that unchallenged felicity. I couldn’t at all gloriously recall, for
instance, as I floated to Subiaco on vast brave wings, how on the
occasion of my first visit to Rome, thirty-eight years before, I had
devoted certain evenings, evenings of artless “preparation” in my room
at the inn, to the perusal of Alphonse Dantier’s admirable _Monastères
Bénédictins d’ltalie_, taking piously for granted that I should get
myself somehow conveyed to Monte Cassino and to Subiaco at least: such
an affront to the passion of curiosity, the generally infatuated
state then kindled, would any suspicion of my foredoomed, my all
but interminable, privation during visits to come have seemed to me.
Fortune, in the event, had never favoured my going, but I was to give
myself up at last to the sense of her quite taking me by the hand, and
that is how I now think of our splendid June day at Subiaco. The note
of the wondrous place itself is conventional “wild” Italy raised to the
highest intensity, the ideally, the sublimely conventional and wild,
complete and supreme in itself, without a disparity or a flaw; which
character of perfect picturesque orthodoxy seemed more particularly
to begin for me, I remember, as we passed, on our way, through that
indescribable and indestructible Tivoli, where the jumble of the
elements of the familiarly and exploitedly, the all too notoriously
fair and queer, was more violent and vociferous than ever--so the whole
spectacle there seemed at once to rejoice in cockneyfication and to
resist it. There at least I had old memories to renew--including that
in especial, from a few years back, of one of the longest, hottest,
dustiest return-drives to Rome that the Campagna on a sirocco day was
ever to have treated me to.
{Illustration: VILLA D’ESTE, TIVOLI}
That was to be more than made up on this later occasion by an hour of
early evening, snatched on the run back to Rome, that remains with me as
one of those felicities we are wise to leave for ever, just as they are,
just, that is, where they fell, never attempting to renew or improve
them. So happy a chance was it that ensured me at the afternoon’s end
a solitary stroll through the Villa d’ Este, where the day’s invasion,
whatever it might have been, had left no traces and where I met nobody
in the great rococo passages and chambers, and in the prodigious alleys
and on the repeated flights of tortuous steps, but the haunting Genius
of Style, into whose noble battered old face, as if it had come out
clearer in the golden twilight and on recognition of response so deeply
moved, I seemed to exhale my sympathy. This was truly, amid a conception
and order of things all mossed over from disuse, but still without
a form abandoned or a principle disowned, one of the hours that one
doesn’t forget. The ruined fountains seemed strangely to _wait_, in the
stillness and under cover of the approaching dusk, not to begin ever
again to play, also, but just only to be tenderly imagined to do so;
quite as everything held its breath, at the mystic moment, for the drop
of the cruel and garish exposure, for the Spirit of the place to steal
forth and go his round. The vistas of the innumerable mighty cypresses
ranged themselves, in their files and companies, like beaten heroes
for their captain’s, review; the great artificial “works” of every
description, cascades, hemicycles, all graded and grassed and
stone-seated as for floral games, mazes and bowers and alcoves and
grottos, brave indissoluble unions of the planted and the builded
symmetry, with the terraces and staircases that overhang and the arcades
and cloisters that underspread, made common cause together as for one’s
taking up a little, in kindly lingering wonder, the “feeling” out of
which they have sprung. One didn’t see it, under the actual influence,
one wouldn’t for the world have seen it, as that they longed to be
justified, during a few minutes in the twenty-four hours, of their
absurdity of pomp and circumstance--but only that they asked for
company, once in a way, as they were so splendidly formed to give it,
and that the best company, in a changed world, at the end of time,
what could they hope it to be but just the lone, the dawdling person of
taste, the visitor with a flicker of fancy, not to speak of a pang of
pity, to spare for them? It was in the flicker of fancy, no doubt, that
as I hung about the great top-most terrace in especial, and then again
took my way through the high gaunt corridors and the square and bare
alcoved and recessed saloons, all overscored with such a dim waste
of those painted, those delicate and capricious decorations which the
loggie of the Vatican promptly borrowed from the ruins of the Palatine,
or from whatever other revealed and inspiring ancientries, and which
make ghostly confession here of that descent, I gave the rein to my
sense of the sinister too, of that vague after-taste as of evil things
that lurks so often, for a suspicious sensibility, wherever the terrible
game of the life of the Renaissance was played as the Italians played
it; wherever the huge tessellated chessboard seems to stretch about us;
swept bare, almost always violently swept bare, of its chiselled and
shifting figures, of every value and degree, but with this echoing
desolation itself representing the long gasp, as it were, of
overstrained time, the great after-hush that follows on things too
wonderful or dreadful.
I am putting here, however, my cart before my horse, for the hour just
glanced at was but a final tag to a day of much brighter curiosity,
and which seemed to take its baptism, as we passed through prodigious
perched and huddled, adorably scattered and animated and even crowded
Tivoli, from the universal happy spray of the drumming Anio waterfalls,
all set in their permanent rainbows and Sibylline temples and classic
allusions and Byronic quotations; a wondrous romantic jumble of such
things and quite others--heterogeneous inns and clamorous _guingettes_
and factories grabbing at the torrent, to say nothing of innumerable
guides and donkeys and white-tied, swallow-tailed waiters dashing out
of grottos and from under cataracts, and of the air, on the part of
the whole population, of standing about, in the most characteristic
_contadino_ manner, to pounce on you and take you somewhere, snatch you
from somebody else, shout something at you, the aqueous and other uproar
permitting, and then charge you for it, your innocence aiding. I’m
afraid our run the rest of the way to Subiaco remains with me but as
an after-sense of that exhilaration, in spite of our rising admirably
higher, all the while, and plunging constantly deeper into splendid
solitary gravities, supreme romantic solemnities and sublimities, of
landscape. The Benedictine convent, which clings to certain more or less
vertiginous ledges and slopes of a vast precipitous gorge, constitutes,
with the whole perfection of its setting, the very ideal of the
tradition of that _extraordinary in the romantic_ handed down to us, as
the most attaching and inviting spell of Italy, by all the old academic
literature of travel and art of the Salvator Rosas and Claudes. This is
the main tribute I may pay in a few words to an impression of which a
sort of divine rightness of oddity, a pictorial felicity that was almost
not of this world, but of a higher degree of distinction altogether,
affected me as the leading note; yet about the whole exquisite
complexity of which I can’t pretend to be informing.
All the elements of the scene melted for me together; even from the
pause for luncheon on a grassy wayside knoll, over heaven knows what
admirable preparatory headlong slopes and ravines and iridescent
distances, under spreading chestnuts and in the high air that was cool
and sweet, to the final pedestrian climb of sinuous mountain-paths that
the shining limestone and the strong green of shrub and herbage made as
white as silver. There the miraculous home of St. Benedict awaited us
in the form of a builded and pictured-over maze of chapels and shrines,
cells and corridors, stupefying rock-chambers and caves, places all
at an extraordinary variety of different levels and with labyrinthine
intercommunications; there the spirit of the centuries sat like some
invisible icy presence that only permits you to stare and wonder. I
stared, I wondered, I went up and down and in and out and lost myself
in the fantastic fable of the innumerable hard facts themselves; and
whenever I could, above all, I peeped out of small windows and hung over
chance terraces for the love of the general outer picture, the splendid
fashion in which the fretted mountains of marble, as they might have
been, round about, seemed to inlay themselves, for the effect of the
“distinction” I speak of, with vegetations of dark emerald. There above
all--or at least in what such aspects did further for the prodigy of the
Convent, whatever that prodigy might for do _them_--was, to a life-long
victim of Italy, almost verily as never before, the operation of the
old love-philtre; there were the inexhaustible sources of interest and
charm.
{Illustration: SUBIACO}
These mystic fountains broke out for me elsewhere, again and again, I
rejoice to say--and perhaps more particularly, to be frank about it,
where the ground about them was pressed with due emphasis of appeal by
the firm wheels of the great winged car. I motored, under invitation
and protection, repeatedly back into the sense of the other years,
that sense of the “old” and comparatively idle Rome of my particular
infatuated prime which I was living to see superseded, and this even
when the fond vista bristled with innumerable “signs of the times,”
unmistakable features of the new era, that, by I scarce know what
perverse law, succeeded in ministering to a happy effect. Some of these
false notes proceed simply from the immense growth of every sort of
facilitation--so that people are much more free than of old to come and
go and do, to inquire and explore, to pervade and generally “infest”;
with a consequent loss, for the fastidious individual, of his
blest earlier sense, not infrequent, of having the occasion and the
impression, as he used complacently to say, all to himself. We none of
us had anything quite all to ourselves during an afternoon at Ostia,
on a beautiful June Sunday; it was a different affair, rather, from the
long, the comparatively slow and quite unpeopled drive that I was to
remember having last taken early in the autumn thirty years before, and
which occupied the day--with the aid of a hamper from once supreme old
Spillman, the provider for picnics to a vanished world (since I suspect
the antique ideal of “a picnic in the Campagna,” the fondest conception
of a happy day, has lost generally much of its glamour). Our idyllic
afternoon, at any rate, left no chord of sensibility that could possibly
have been in question untouched--not even that of tea on the shore at
Fiumincino, after we had spent an hour among the ruins of Ostia and
seen our car ferried across the Tiber, almost saffron-coloured here and
swirling towards its mouth, on a boat that was little more than a big
rustic raft and that yet bravely resisted the prodigious weight. What
shall I say, in the way of the particular, of the general felicity
before me, for the sweetness of the hour to which the incident just
named, with its strange and amusing juxtapositions of the patriarchally
primitive and the insolently supersubtle, the earliest and the latest
efforts of restless science, were almost immediately to succeed?
We had but skirted the old gold-and-brown walls of Castel Fusano, where
the massive Chigi tower and the immemorial stone-pines and the afternoon
sky and the desolate sweetness and concentrated rarity of the picture
all kept their appointment, to fond memory, with that especial form of
Roman faith, the fine aesthetic conscience in things, that is never,
never broken. We had wound through tangled lanes and met handsome sallow
country-folk lounging at leisure, as became the Sunday, and ever so
pleasantly and garishly clothed, if not quite consistently costumed, as
just on purpose to feed our wanton optimism; and then we had addressed
ourselves with a soft superficiality to the open, the exquisite little
Ostian reliquary, an exhibition of stony vaguenesses half straightened
out. The ruins of the ancient port of Rome, the still recoverable
identity of streets and habitations and other forms of civil life, are
a not inconsiderable handful, though making of the place at best a very
small sister to Pompeii; but a soft superficiality is ever the refuge of
my shy sense before any ghost of informed reconstitution, and I plead my
surrender to it with the less shame that I believe I “enjoy” such scenes
even on such futile pretexts as much as it can be appointed them by the
invidious spirit of History to _be_ enjoyed. It may be said, of course,
that enjoyment, question-begging term at best, isn’t in these austere
connections designated--but rather some principle of appreciation that
can at least give a coherent account of itself. On that basis then--as
I could, I profess, _but_ revel in the looseness of my apprehension,
so wide it seemed to fling the gates of vision and divination--I won’t
pretend to dot, as it were, too many of the i’s of my incompetence.
I was competent only to have been abjectly interested. On reflection,
moreover, I see that no impression of over-much company invaded
the picture till the point was exactly reached for its contributing
thoroughly to character and amusement; across at Fiumincino, which the
age of the bicycle has made, in a small way, the handy Gravesend or
Coney Island of Rome, the cafés and _birrerie_ were at high pressure,
and the bustle all motley and friendly beside the melancholy river,
where the water-side life itself had twenty quaint and vivid notes and
where a few upstanding objects, ancient or modern, looked eminent and
interesting against the delicate Roman sky that dropped down and down
to the far-spreading marshes of malaria. Besides which “company” is ever
intensely gregarious, hanging heavily together and easily outwitted;
so that we had but to proceed a scant distance further and meet the
tideless Mediterranean, where it tumbled in a trifle breezily on the
sands, to be all to ourselves with our tea-basket, quite as in the good
old fashion--only in truth with the advantage that the contemporary
tea-basket is so much improved.
I jumble my memories as a tribute to the whole idyll--I give the golden
light in which they come back to me for what it is worth; worth, I mean,
as allowing that the possibilities of charm of the Witch of the Seven
Hills, as we used to call her in magazines, haven’t all been vulgarised
away. It was precisely there, on such an occasion and in such a place,
that this might seem signally to have happened; whereas in fact the mild
suburban riot, in which the so gay but so light potations before the
array of little houses of entertainment were what struck one as really
making most for mildness, was brushed over with a fabled grace, was
harmonious, felicitous, distinguished, quite after the fashion of some
thoroughly trained chorus or phalanx of opera or ballet. Bicycles were
stacked up by the hundred; the youth of Rome are ardent cyclists, with
a great taste for flashing about in more or less denuded or costumed
athletic and romantic bands and guilds, and on our return cityward,
toward evening, along the right bank of the river, the road swarmed with
the patient wheels and bent backs of these budding _cives Romani_ quite
to the effect of its finer interest. Such at least, I felt, could only
be one’s acceptance of almost any feature of a scene bathed in that
extraordinarily august air that the waning Roman day is so insidiously
capable of taking on when any other element of style happens at all to
contribute. Weren’t they present, these other elements, in the great
classic lines and folds, the fine academic or historic attitudes of
the darkening land itself as it hung about the old highway, varying
its vague accidents, but achieving always perfect “composition”? I
shamelessly add that cockneyfied impression, at all events, to what I
have called my jumble; Rome, to which we all swept on together in the
wondrous glowing medium, _saved_ everything, spreading afar her wide
wing and applying after all but her supposed grand gift of the secret
of salvation. We kept on and on into the great dim rather sordidly papal
streets that approach the quarter of St. Peter’s; to the accompaniment,
finally, of that markedly felt provocation of fond wonder which had
never failed to lie in wait for me under any question of a renewed
glimpse of the huge unvisited rear of the basilica. There was no renewed
glimpse just then, in the gloaming; but the region I speak of had been
for me, in fact, during the previous weeks, less unvisited than ever
before, so that I had come to count an occasional walk round and about
it as quite of the essence of the convenient small change with which the
heterogeneous City may still keep paying you. These frequentations in
the company of a sculptor friend had been incidental to our reaching
a small artistic foundry of fine metal, an odd and interesting little
establishment placed, as who should say in the case of such a mere
left-over scrap of a large loose margin, nowhere: it lurked so
unsuspectedly, that is, among the various queer things that Rome
comprehensively refers to as “behind St. Peter’s.”
We had passed then, on the occasion of our several pilgrimages, in
beneath the great flying, or at least straddling buttresses to the left
of the mighty façade, where you enter that great idle precinct of fine
dense pavement and averted and sacrificed grandeur, the reverse of the
monstrous medal of the front. Here the architectural monster rears its
back and shoulders on an equal scale and this whole unregarded world
of colossal consistent symmetry and hidden high finish gives you the
measure of the vast total treasure of items and features. The outward
face of all sorts of inward majesties of utility and ornament here
above all correspondingly reproduces itself; the expanses of golden
travertine--the freshness of tone, the cleanness of surface, in the
sunny air, being extraordinary--climb and soar and spread under the
crushing weight of a scheme carried out in every ponderous particular.
Never was such a show of _wasted_ art, of pomp for pomp’s sake, as
where all the chapels bulge and all the windows, each one a separate
constructional masterpiece, tower above almost grassgrown vacancy; with
the full and immediate effect, of course, of reading us a lesson on
the value of lawful pride. The pride is the pride of indifference as to
whether a greatness so founded be gaped at in all its features or not.
My friend and I were alone to gape at them most often while, for the
unfailing impression of them, on our way to watch the casting of our
figure, we extended our circuit of the place. To which I may add, as
another example of that tentative, that appealing twitch of the garment
of Roman association of which one kept renewing one’s consciousness, the
half-hour at the little foundry itself was all charming--with its quite
shabby and belittered and ramshackle recall of the old Roman “art-life”
of one’s early dreams. Everything was somehow in the picture, the
rickety sheds, the loose paraphernalia, the sunny, grassy yard where a
goat was browsing; then the queer interior gloom of the pits, frilled
with little overlooking scaffoldings and bridges, for the sinking
fireward of the image that was to take on hardness; and all the
pleasantness and quickness, the beguiling refinement, of the three or
four light fine “hands” of whom the staff consisted and into whose type
and tone one liked to read, with whatever harmless extravagance, so many
signs that a lively sense of stiff processes, even in humble life, could
still leave untouched the traditional rare feeling for the artistic.
How delightful such an occupation in such a general setting--those of
my friend, I at such moments irrepressibly moralised; and how one might
after such a fashion endlessly go and come and ask nothing better; or if
better, only so to the extent of another impression I was to owe to him:
that of an evening meal spread, in the warm still darkness that made no
candle flicker, on the wide high space of an old loggia that overhung,
in one quarter, the great obelisked Square preceding one of the Gates,
and in the other the Tiber and the far Trastevere and more things than
I can say--above all, as it were, the whole backward past, the mild
confused romance of the Rome one had loved and of which one was exactly
taking leave under protection of the friendly lanterned and garlanded
feast and the commanding, all-embracing roof-garden. It was indeed a
reconciling, it was an altogether penetrating, last hour.
1909.