Rome

Here we are.

That mysterious nocturnal incident peculiar to Rome has already

occurred--sure sign that the nights are growing sultry. It happens about

six times in the course of every year, during the hot season. You may

read about it in the next morning's paper which records how some young

man, often of good family and apparently in good health, was seen

behaving in the most inexplicable fashion at the hour of about 2 a.m.;

jumping, that is, in a state of Adamitic nudity, into some public

fountain. It goes on to say that the culprit was pursued by the police,

run to earth, and carried to such-and-such a hospital, where his state

of mind is to be investigated. Will our rising generation, it gravely

adds, never learn the most elementary rules of decency?

If I have not had the curiosity to inquire at one of these

establishments what has been the result of the medical examination, it

is because I will wager my last shirt that the invalid's health leaves

nothing to be desired. The genesis of the affair, I take it, is this. He

is in bed, suffering from the heat. Sleep refuses to come. He has

already passed half the night in agony, tossing on his couch during

those leaden hours when not a breath of air is astir. In any other town

he would submit to the torture, knowing it to be irremediable. But Rome

is the city of fountains. It is they who are responsible for this sad

lapse. Their sound is clear by day; after midnight, when the traffic has

died down, it waxes thunderous. He hears it through the window--hears it

perforce, since the streets are ringing with that music, and you cannot

close your ears. He listens, growing hotter and more restless every

moment. He thinks.... That splash of waters! Those frigid wavelets and

cascades! How delicious to bathe his limbs, if only for a moment, in

their bubbling wetness; he is parched with heat, and at this hour of the

night, he reflects, there will not be a soul abroad in the square. So he

hearkens to the seductive melody, conjuring up the picture of that

familiar fountain; he remembers its moistened rim and basin all alive

with jolly turmoil; he sees the miniature cataracts tumbling down in

streaks of glad confusion, till the longing grows too strong to be

controlled.

The thing must be done.

Next day he finds a handful of old donkeys solemnly inquiring into his

state of mind....

I can sympathise with that state of mind, having often undergone the

same purgatory. My room at present happens to be fairly cool; it looks

north, and the fountain down below, audible at this moment, has not yet

tempted me to any breach of decorum. Night is quiet here, save for the

squeakings of some strange animals in the upper regions of the

neighbouring Pantheon; they squeak night and day, and one would take

them to be bats, were it not that bats are supposed to be on the wing

after sunset. There are no mosquitoes in Rome--none worth talking about.

It is well. For mosquitoes have a deplorable habit of indulging in a

second meal, an early breakfast, at about four a.m.--a habit more

destructive to slumber than that regular and legitimate banquet of

theirs. No mosquitoes, and few flies. It is well.

It is more than merely well. For the mosquito, after all, when properly

fed, goes to bed like a gentleman and leaves you alone, whereas that

insatiable and petty curiousness of the fly condemns you to a

never-ending succession of anguished reflex movements. What a

malediction are those flies; how repulsive in life and in death: not to

be touched by human hands! Their every gesture is an obscenity, a

calamity. Fascinated by the ultra-horrible, I have watched them for

hours on end, and one of the most cherished projects of my life is to

assemble, in a kind of anthology, all the invectives that have been

hurled since the beginning of literature against this loathly dirt-born

insect, this living carrion, this blot on the Creator's reputation--and

thereto add a few of my own. Lucian, the pleasant joker, takes the fly

under his protection. He says, among other things, that "like an honest

man, it is not ashamed to do in public what others only do in private."

I must say, if we all followed the fly's example in this aspect, life

would at last be worth living....

Morning sleep is out of the question, owing to the tram-cars whose

clangour, both here and in Florence, must be heard to be believed. They

are fast rendering these towns uninhabitable. Can folks who cherish a

nuisance of this magnitude compare themselves, in point of refinement,

with those old Hellenic colonists who banished all noises from their

city? Nevermore! Why this din, this blocking of the roadways and general

unseemliness? In order that a few bourgeois may be saved the trouble of

using their legs. And yet we actually pride ourselves on these

detestable things, as if they were inventions to our credit. "We made

them," we say. Did we? It is not we who make them. It is they who make

us, who give us our habits of mind and body, our very thoughts; it is

these mechanical monsters who control our fates and drive us along

whither they mean us to go. We are caught in their cog-wheels--in a

process as inevitable as the revolution of the planets. No use lamenting

a cosmic phenomenon! Were it otherwise, I should certainly mope myself

into a green melancholy over the fact, the most dismal fact on earth,

that brachycephalism is a Mendelian dominant. [19] No use lamenting.

True.

But the sage will reserve to himself the right of cursing. Those morning

hours, therefore, when I would gladly sleep but for the tram-car

shrieking below, are devoted to the malediction of all modern progress,

wherein I include, with fine impartiality, every single advancement in

culture which happens to lie between my present state and that

comfortable cavern in whose shelter I soon see myself ensconced as of

yore, peacefully sucking somebody's marrow while my women, round the

corner, are collecting a handful of acorns for my dessert.... The

telephone, that diabolic invention! It might vex a man if his neighbour

possessed a telephone and he none; how would it be, if neither of them

had it? We can hardly realise, now, the blissful quietude of the

pre-telephone epoch. And the telegraph and the press! They have huddled

mankind together into undignified and unhygienic proximity; we seem to

be breathing each other's air. We know what everybody is doing, in every

corner of the earth; we are told what to think, and to say, and to do.

Your paterfamilias, in pre-telegraph days, used to hammer out a few

solid opinions of his own on matters political and otherwise. He no

longer employs his brain for that purpose. He need only open his morning

paper and in it pours--the oracle of the press, that manufactory of

synthetic fustian, whose main object consists in accustoming humanity to

attach importance to the wrong things. It furnishes him with opinions

ready made, overnight, by some Fleet Street hack at so much a column,

after a little talk with his fellows over a pint of bad beer at the

Press Club. He has been told what to say--yesterday, for instance, it

was some lurid balderdash about a steam-roller and how the Kaiser is to

be fed on dog biscuits at Saint Helena--he has been "doped" by the

editor, who gets the tip--and out he goes! unless he take it--from the

owner, who is waiting for a certain emolument from this or that caucus,

and trims his convictions to their taste. That is what the Press can do.

It vitiates our mundane values. It enables a gang to fool the country.

It cretinises the public mind. The time may come when no respectable

person will be seen touching a daily, save on the sly. Newspaper reading

will become a secret vice. As such, I fear, its popularity is not likely

to wane. Having generated, by means of sundry trite reflections of this

nature, an enviable appetite for breakfast, I dress and step out of

doors to where, at a pleasant table, I can imbibe some coffee and make

my plans for loafing through the day.

Hot, these morning hours. Shadeless the streets. The Greeks, the Romans,

the Orientals knew better than to build wide roadways in a land of

sunshine.

There exists an old book or pamphlet entitled "Napoli senza

sole"--Naples without sun. It gives instructions, they say (for I have

never seen it) how foot passengers may keep for ever in the shade at all

hours of the day; how they may reach any point of the town from another

without being forced to cross the squares, those dazzling patches of

sunlight. The feat could have been accomplished formerly even in Rome,

which was always less umbrageous than Naples. It is out of the question

nowadays. You must do as the Romans do--walk slowly and use the tram

whenever possible.

That is what I purpose to do. There is a line which will take me direct

to the Milvian bridge, where I mean to have a bathe, and then a lunch at

the restaurant across the water. Its proprietor is something of a

brigand; so am I, at a pinch. It is "honour among thieves," or "diamond

cut diamond."

Already a few enthusiasts are gathered here, on the glowing sands. But

the water is still cold; indeed, the Tiber is never too warm for me. If

you like it yet more chill, you must walk up to where the Aniene

discharges its waves whose temperature, at this season, is of a kind to

tickle up a walrus.

Whether it be due to the medley of races or to some other cause, there

is a singular variety of flesh-tints among the bathers here. I wish my

old friend Dr. Bowles could have seen it; we used to be deeply immersed,

both of us, in the question of the chromatophores, I observing their

freakish behaviour in the epidermis of certain frogs, while he studied

their action on the human skin and wrote an excellent little paper on

sunburn--a darker problem than it seems to be. [20]

These men and boys do not grow uniformly sunburnt. They display so many

different colour-shades on their bodies that an artist would be

delighted with the effect. From that peculiar milky hue which, by reason

of some pigment, contrives to resist the rays, the tints diverge; the

reds, the scarcer group, traversing every gradation from pale rose to

the ruddiest of copper--not excluding that strange marbled complexion

concerning which I cannot make up my mind whether it be a beauty or a

defect; while the xanthous tones, the yellows, pass through silvery gold

and apricot and café au lait to a duskiness approaching that of the

negro. At this season the skins are still white. Your artist must come

later--not later, however, than the end of August, for on the first of

September the bathing, be the weather never so warm, is officially, and

quite suddenly, at an end. Tiber water is declared to be "unhealthy"

after that date, and liable to give you fever; a relic of the days when

the true origin of malaria was unknown.

A glance at the papers is sufficient to prove that bathing has not yet

begun in earnest. No drowning accidents, up to the present. Later on

they come thick and fast. For this river, with its rapid current and

vindictive swirling eddies, is dangerous to young swimmers; it grips

them in its tawny coils and holds them fast, often within a few yards of

friend or parent who listens, powerless to help, to the victim's cries

of anguish and sees his arm raised imploringly out of that serpent-like

embrace. So it hurries him to destruction, only to be fished up later in

a state, as the newspapers will be careful to inform us, of "incipient

putrefaction."

A murderous flood....

That hoary, trickling structure--that fountain which has forgotten to be

a fountain, so dreamily does the water ooze through obstructive mosses

and emerald growths that dangle in drowsy pendants, like wet beards,

from its venerable lips--that fountain un-trimmed, harmonious, overhung

by ancient ilexes: where shall a more reposeful spot be found? Doubly

delicious, after the turmoil and glistening sheen by the river-bank. For

the foliage of the oaks and sycamores is such that it creates a kind of

twilight, and all around lies the tranquillity of noon. Here, on the

encircling stone bench, you may idle through the sultry hours conversing

with some favourite disciple while the cows trample up to drink amid

moist gurglings and tail-swishings. They gaze at you with gentle eyes,

they blow their sweet breath upon your cheek, and move sedately onward.

The Villa Borghese can be hushed, at such times, in a kind of

enchantment.

"You never told me why you come to Italy."

"In order," I reply, "to enjoy places like this."

"But listen. Surely you have fountains in your own country?"

"None quite so golden-green."

"Ah, it wants cleaning, doesn't it?"

"Lord, no!" I say; but only to myself. One should never pass for an

imbecile, if one can help it.