existence, with night watchmen of its own, who dared not step beyond the
limits of their beat; defined by parishes, there were separate charities
for each Region, separate funds for giving dowries to poor girls,
separate 'Confraternite' or pious societies to which laymen belonged,
and, in a small way, a sort of distinct nationality. There was rivalry
between each Region and its neighbours, and when the one encroached upon
the other there was strife and bloodshed in the streets. In the public
races, of which the last survived in the running of riderless horses
through the Corso in Carnival, each Region had its colours, its right of
place, and its separate triumph if it won in the contest. There was all
that intricate opposition of small parties which arose in every mediaeval
city, when children followed their fathers' trades from generation to
generation, and lived in their fathers' houses from one century to
another; and there was all the individuality and the local tradition
which never really hindered civilization, but were always an
insurmountable barrier against progress.
Some one has called democracy Rome's 'Original Sin.' It would be more
just and true to say that most of Rome's misfortunes, and Italy's too,
have been the result of the instinct to oppose all that is, whether good
or bad, as soon as it has existed for a while; in short, the original
sin of Italians is an original detestation of that unity of which the
empty name has been a fetish for ages. Rome, thrown back upon herself
in the dark times, when she was shorn of her possessions, was a true
picture of what Italy was before Rome's iron hand had bound the Italian
peoples together by force, of what she became again as soon as that
force was relaxed, of what she has grown to be once more, now that the
delight of revolution has disappeared in the dismal swamp of financial
disappointment, of what she will be to all time, because, from all time,
she has been populated by races of different descent, who hated each
other as only neighbours can.
The redeeming feature of a factional life has sometimes been found in a
readiness to unite against foreign oppression; it has often shown itself
in an equal willingness to submit to one foreign ruler in order to get
rid of another. Circumstances have made the result good or bad. In the
year 799, the Romans attacked and wounded Pope Leo the Third in a solemn
procession, almost killed him and drove him to flight, because he had
sent the keys of the city to Charles the Great, in self-protection
against the splendid, beautiful, gifted, black-hearted Irene, Empress of
the East, who had put out her own son's eyes and taken the throne by
force. Two years later the people of Rome shouted "Life and Victory to
Charles the Emperor," when the same Pope Leo, his scars still fresh,
crowned Charlemagne in Saint Peter's. One remembers, for that matter,
that Napoleon Bonaparte, crowned in French Paris by another Pope, girt
on the very sword of that same Frankish Charles, whose bones the French
had scattered to the elements at Aix. Savonarola, of more than doubtful
patriotism, to whom Saint Philip Neri prayed, but whom the English
historian, Roscoe, flatly calls a traitor, would have taken Florence
from the Italian Medici and given it to the French king. Dante was for
German Emperors against Italian Popes. Modern Italy has driven out
Bourbons and Austrians and given the crown of her Unity to a house of
Kings, brave and honourable, but in whose veins there is no drop of
Italian blood, any more than their old Dukedom of Savoy was ever Italian
in any sense. The glory of history is rarely the glory of any ideal; it
is more often the glory of success.
The Roman Republic was the result of internal opposition, and the
instinct to oppose power, often rightly, sometimes wrongly, will be the
last to survive in the Latin race. In the Middle Age, when Rome had
shrunk from the boundaries of civilization to the narrow limits of the
Aurelian walls, it produced the hatred between the Barons and the
people, and within the people themselves, the less harmful rivalry of
the Regions and their Captains.
[Illustration: SANTA FRANCESCA ROMANA]
These Captains held office for three months only. At the expiration of
the term, they and the people of their Region proceeded in procession,
all bearing olive branches, to the temple of Venus and Rome, of which a
part was early converted into the Church of Santa Maria Nuova, now known
as Santa Francesca Romana, between the Forum and the Colosseum, and just
within the limits of 'Monti.' Down from the hills on the one side the
crowd came; up from the regions of the Tiber, round the Capitol from
Colonna, and Trevi, and Campo Marzo, as ages before them the people had
thronged to the Comitium, only a few hundred yards away. There, before
the church in the ruins, each Region dropped the names of its own two
candidates into the ballot box, and chance decided which of the two
should be Captain next. In procession, then, all round the Capitol, they
went to Aracoeli, and the single Senator, the lone shadow of the
Conscript Fathers, ratified each choice. Lastly, among themselves, they
used to choose the Prior, or Chief Captain, until it became the custom
that the captain of the First Region, Monti, should of right be head of
all the rest, and in reality one of the principal powers in the city.
And the principal church of Monti also held preeminence over others. The
Basilica of Saint John Lateran was entitled 'Mother and Head of all
Churches of the City and of the World'; and it took its distinctive name
from a rich Roman family, whose splendid house stood on the same spot as
far back as the early days of the Empire. Even Juvenal speaks of it.
Overthrown by earthquake, erected again at once, twice burned and
immediately rebuilt, five times the seat of Councils of the Church,
enlarged even in our day at enormous cost, it seems destined to stand on
the same spot for ages, and to perpetuate the memory of the Laterans to
all time, playing monument to an obscure family of rich citizens, whose
name should have been almost lost, but can never be forgotten now.
Constantine, sentimental before he was great, and great before he was a
Christian, gave the house of the Roman gentleman to Pope Sylvester. He
bought it, or it fell to the crown at the extinction of the family, for
he was not the man to confiscate property for a whim; and within the
palace he made a church, which was called by more than one name, till
after nearly six hundred years it was finally dedicated to Saint John
the Baptist; until then it had been generally called the church 'in the
Lateran house,' and to this day it is San Giovanni in Laterano. Close by
it, in the palace of the Annii, Marcus Aurelius, last of the so-called
Antonines, and last of the great emperors, was born and educated; and in
his honour was made the famous statue of him on horseback, which now
stands in the square of the Capitol. The learned say that it was set up
before the house where he was born, and so found itself also before the
Lateran in later times, with the older Wolf, at the place of public
justice and execution.
In the wild days of the tenth century, when the world was boiling with
faction, and trembling at the prospect of the Last Judgment, clearly
predicted to overtake mankind in the thousandth year of the Christian
era, the whole Roman people, without sanction of the Emperor and without
precedent, chose John the Thirteenth to be their Pope. The Regions with
their Captains had their way, and the new Pontiff was enthroned by
their acclamation. Then came their disappointment, then their anger.
Pope John, strong, high-handed, a man of order in days of chaos, ruled
from the Lateran for one short year, with such wisdom as he possessed,
such law as he chanced to have learnt, and all the strength he had.
Neither Barons nor people wanted justice, much less learning. The Latin
chronicle is brief: 'At that time, Count Roffredo and Peter the
Prefect,'--he was the Prior of the Regions' Captains,--'with certain
other Romans, seized Pope John, and first threw him into the Castle of
Sant' Angelo, but at last drove him into exile in Campania for more than
ten months. But when the Count had been murdered by one of the
Crescenzi,'--in whose house Rienzi afterwards lived,--'the Pope was
released and returned to his See.'
Back came Otto the Great, Saxon Emperor, at Christmas time, as he came
more than once, to put down revolution with a strong hand and avenge the
wrongs of Pope John by executing all but one of the Captains of the
Regions. Twelve of them he hanged. Peter the Prefect, or Prior, was
bound naked upon an ass with an earthen jar over his head, flogged
through the city, and cruelly put to death; and at last his torn body
was hung by the hair to the head of the bronze horse whereon the stately
figure of Marcus Aurelius sat in triumph before the door of the Pope's
house, as it sits today on the Capitol before the Palace of the Senator.
And Otto caused the body of murdered Roffredo to be dragged from its
grave and quartered by the hangman and scattered abroad, a warning to
the Regions and their leaders. They left Pope John in peace after that,
and he lived five years and held a council in the Lateran, and died in
his bed. Possibly after his rough experience, his rule was more gentle,
and when he was dead he was spoken of as 'that most worthy Pontiff.' Who
Count Roffredo was no one can tell surely, but his name belongs to the
great house of Caetani.
[Illustration: BASILICA OF ST JOHN LATERAN]
It is hard to see past terror in present peace; it is not easy to fancy
the rough rabble of Rome in those days, strangely clad, more strangely
armed, far out in the waste fields about the Lateran, surging up like
demons in the lurid torchlight before the house of the Pope, pressing
upon the mailed Count's stout horse, and thronging upon the heels of the
Captains and the Prefect, pounding down the heavy doors with stones, and
with deep shouts for every heavy blow, while white-robed John and his
frightened priests cower together within, expecting death. Down goes the
oak with a crash like artillery, that booms along the empty corridors; a
moment's pause, and silence, and then the rush, headed by the Knight and
the leaders who mean no murder, but mean to have their way, once and for
ever, and buffet back their furious followers when they have reached the
Pope's room, lest he should be torn in pieces. Then, the subsidence of
the din, and the old man and his priests bound and dragged out and
forced to go on foot by all the long dark way through the city to the
black dungeons of Sant' Angelo beyond the rushing river.
[Illustration: SAN GIOVANNI IN LATERANO]
It seems far away. Yet we who have seen the Roman people rise, overlaid
with burdens and maddened by the news of a horrible defeat, can guess at
what it must have been. Those who saw the sea of murderous pale faces,
and heard the deep cry, 'Death to Crispi,' go howling and echoing
through the city can guess what that must have been a thousand years
ago, and many another night since then, when the Romans were roused and
there was a smell of blood in the air.
But today there is peace in the great Mother of Churches, with an
atmosphere of solemn rest that one may not breathe in Saint Peter's nor
perhaps anywhere else in Rome within consecrated walls. There is mystery
in the enormous pillars that answer back the softest whispered word from
niche to niche across the silent aisle; there is simplicity and dignity
of peace in the lofty nave, far down and out of jarring distance from
the over-gorgeous splendour of the modern transept. In Holy Week,
towards evening at the Tenebrae, the divine tenor voice of Padre
Giovanni, monk and singer, soft as a summer night, clear as a silver
bell, touching as sadness itself, used to float through the dim air with
a ring of Heaven in it, full of that strange fatefulness that followed
his short life, till he died, nearly twenty years ago, foully poisoned
by a layman singer in envy of a gift not matched in the memory of man.
Sometimes, if one wanders upward towards the Monti when the moon is
high, a far-off voice rings through the quiet air--one of those voices
which hardly ever find their way to the theatre nowadays, and which,
perhaps, would not satisfy the nervous taste of our Wagnerian times.
Perhaps it sounds better in the moonlight, in those lonely, echoing
streets, than it would on the stage. At all events, it is beautiful as
one hears it, clear, strong, natural, ringing. It belongs to the place
and hour, as the humming of honey bees to a field of flowers at noon, or
the desolate moaning of the tide to a lonely ocean coast at night. It is
not an exaggeration, nor a mere bit of ill nature, to say that there are
thousands of fastidiously cultivated people today who would think it all
theatrical in the extreme, and would be inclined to despise their own
taste if they felt a secret pleasure in the scene and the song. But in
Rome even such as they might condescend to the romantic for an hour,
because in Rome such deeds have been dared, such loves have been loved,
such deaths have been died, that any romance, no matter how wild, has
larger probability in the light of what has actually been the lot of
real men and women. So going alone through the winding moonlit ways
about Tor de' Conti, Santa Maria dei Monti and San Pietro in Vincoli, a
man need take no account of modern fashions in sensation; and if he will
but let himself be charmed, the enchantment will take hold of him and
lead him on through a city of dreams and visions, and memories strange
and great, without end. Ever since Rome began there must have been just
such silvery nights; just such a voice rang through the same air ages
ago; just as now the velvet shadows fell pall-like and unrolled
themselves along the grey pavement under the lofty columns of Mars the
Avenger and beneath the wall of the Forum of Augustus.
[Illustration: PIAZZA COLONNA]
Perhaps it is true that the impressions which Rome makes upon a
thoughtful man vary more according to the wind and the time of day than
those he feels in other cities. Perhaps, too, there is no capital in all
the world which has such contrasts to show within a mile of each
other--one might almost say within a dozen steps. One of the most
crowded thoroughfares of Rome, for instance, is the Via del Tritone,
which is the only passage through the valley between the Pincian and the
Quirinal hills, from the region of Piazza Colonna towards the railway
station and the new quarter. During the busy hours of the day a carriage
can rarely move through its narrower portions any faster than at a foot
pace, and the insufficient pavements are thronged with pedestrians. In a
measure, the Tritone in Rome corresponds to Galata bridge in
Constantinople. In the course of the week most of the population of the
city must have passed at least once through the crowded little street,
which somehow in the rain of millions that lasted for two years, did not
manage to attract to itself even the small sum which would have sufficed
to widen it by a few yards. It is as though the contents of Rome were
daily drawn through a keyhole. In the Tritone are to be seen magnificent
equipages, jammed in the line between milk carts, omnibuses and
dustmen's barrows, preceded by butcher's vans and followed by miserable
cabs, smart dogcarts and high-wheeled country vehicles driven by rough,
booted men wearing green-lined cloaks and looking like stage bandits;
even saddle horses are led sometimes that way to save time; and on each
side flow two streams of human beings of every type to be found between
Porta Angelica and Porta San Giovanni. A prince of the Holy Roman Empire
pushes past a troop of dirty school children, and is almost driven into
an open barrel of salt codfish, in the door of a poor shop, by a
black-faced charcoal man carrying a sack on his head more than half as
high as himself. A party of jolly young German tourists in loose
clothes, with red books in their hands, and their field-glasses hanging
by straps across their shoulders, try to rid themselves of the
flower-girls dressed in sham Sabine costumes, and utter exclamations of
astonishment and admiration when they themselves are almost run down by
a couple of the giant Royal Grenadiers, each six feet five or
thereabouts, besides nine inches, or so, of crested helmet aloft,
gorgeous, gigantic and spotless. Clerks by the dozen and liveried
messengers of the ministries struggle in the press; ladies gather their
skirts closely, and try to pick a dainty way where, indeed, there is
nothing 'dain' (a word which Doctor Johnson confesses that he could not
find in any dictionary, but which he thinks might be very useful);
servant girls, smart children with nurses and hoops going up to the
Pincio, black-browed washerwomen with big baskets of clothes on their
heads, stumpy little infantry soldiers in grey uniforms, priests,
friars, venders of boot-laces and thread, vegetable sellers pushing
hand-carts of green things in and out among the horses and vehicles with
amazing dexterity, and yelling their cries in super-humanly high
voices--there is no end to the multitude. If the day is showery, it is a
sight to see the confusion in the Tritone when umbrellas of every age,
material and colour are all opened at once, while the people who have
none crowd into the codfish shop and the liquor seller's and the
tobacconist's, with traditional 'con permesso' of excuse for entering
when they do not mean to buy anything; for the Romans are mostly civil
people and fairly good-natured. But rain or shine, at the busy hours,
the place is always crowded to overflowing with every description of
vehicle and every type of humanity.
Out of Babel--a horizontal Babel--you may turn into the little church,
dedicated to the 'Holy Guardian Angel.' It stands on the south side of
the Tritone, in that part which is broader, and which a little while ago
was still called the Via dell' Angelo Custode--Guardian Angel Street. It
is an altogether insignificant little church, and strangers scarcely
ever visit it. But going down the Tritone, when your ears are splitting,
and your eyes are confused with the kaleidoscopic figures of the
scurrying crowd, you may lift the heavy leathern curtain, and leave the
hurly-burly outside, and find yourself all alone in the quiet presence
of death, the end of all hurly-burly and confusion. It is quite possible
that under the high, still light in the round church, with its four
niche-like chapels, you may see, draped in black, that thing which no
one ever mistakes for anything else; and round about the coffin a dozen
tall wax candles may be burning with a steady yellow flame. Possibly, at
the sound of the leathern curtain slapping the stone door-posts, as it
falls behind you, a sad-looking sacristan may shuffle out of a dark
corner to see who has come in; possibly not. He may be asleep, or he may
be busy folding vestments in the sacristy. The dead need little
protection from the living, nor does a sacristan readily put himself out
for nothing. You may stand there undisturbed as long as you please, and
see what all the world's noise comes to in the end. Or it may be, if the
departed person belonged to a pious confraternity, that you chance upon
the brothers of the society--clad in dark hoods with only holes for
their eyes, and no man recognized by his neighbour--chanting penitential
psalms and hymns for the one whom they all know because he is dead, and
they are living.
Such contrasts are not lacking in Rome. There are plenty of them
everywhere in the world, perhaps, but they are more striking here, in
proportion as the outward forms of religious practice are more ancient,
unchanging and impressive. For there is nothing very impressive or
unchanging about the daily outside world, especially in Rome.
Rome, the worldly, is the capital of one of the smaller kingdoms of the
world, which those who rule it are anxious to force into the position of
a great power. One need not criticise their action too hardly; their
motives can hardly be anything but patriotic, considering the fearful
sacrifices they impose upon their country. But they are not the men who
brought about Italian unity. They are the successors of those men; they
are not satisfied with that unification, and they have dreamed a dream
of ambition, beside which, considering the means at their disposal, the
projects of Alexander, Caesar and Napoleon sink into comparative
insignificance. At all events, the worldly, modern, outward Italian
Rome is very far behind the great European capitals in development, not
to say wealth and magnificence. 'Lay' Rome, if one may use the
expression, is not in the least a remarkable city. 'Ecclesiastic' Rome
is the stronghold of a most tremendous fact, from whatever point of view
Christianity may be considered. If one could, in imagination, detach the
head of the Catholic Church from the Church, one would be obliged to
admit that no single living man possesses the far-reaching and lasting
power which in each succeeding papal reign belongs to the Pope. Behind
the Pope stands the fact which confers, maintains and extends that power
from century to century; a power which is one of the hugest elements of
the world's moral activity, both in its own direct action and in the
counteraction and antagonism which it calls forth continually.
It is the all-pervading presence of this greatest fact in Christendom
which has carried on Rome's importance from the days of the Caesars,
across the chasm of the dark ages, to the days of the modern popes; and
its really enormous importance continually throws forward into cruel
relief the puerilities and inanities of the daily outward world. It is
the consciousness of that importance which makes old Roman society what
it is, with its virtues, its vices, its prejudices and its strange,
old-fashioned, close-fisted kindliness; which makes the contrast between
the Saturnalia of Shrove Tuesday night and the cross signed with ashes
upon the forehead on Ash Wednesday morning, between the careless
laughter of the Roman beauty in Carnival, and the tragic earnestness of
the same lovely face when the great lady kneels in Lent, before the
confessional, to receive upon her bent head the light touch of the
penitentiary's wand, taking her turn, perhaps, with a score of women of
the people. It is the knowledge of an always present power, active
throughout the whole world, which throws deep, straight shadows, as it
were, through the Roman character, just as in certain ancient families
there is a secret that makes grave the lives of those who know it.
The Roman Forum and the land between it and the Colosseum, though
strictly within the limits of Monti, were in reality a neutral ground,
the chosen place for all struggles of rivalry between the Regions. The
final destruction of its monuments dates from the sacking of Rome by
Robert Guiscard with his Normans and Saracens in the year one thousand
and eighty-four, when the great Duke of Apulia came in arms to succour
Hildebrand, Pope Gregory the Seventh, against the Emperor Henry the
Fourth, smarting under the bitter humiliation of Canossa; and against
his Antipope Clement, more than a hundred years after Otto had come back
in anger to avenge Pope John. There is no more striking picture of the
fearful contest between the Church and the Empire.
[Illustration: PIAZZA DI SAN GIOVANNI IN LATERANO]