are different from what you have always believed. The Past doesn't seem
to be in the past, but in the present. There is an air of
contemporaneousness about everything. Do you remember that story of
Jules Verne about a voyage to the moon? When the voyagers got a certain
distance from the earth they couldn't any longer drop things out of the
balloon. The articles they threw out didn't fall down. There wasn't any
down; everything was round about. Everything they had cast out followed
them. That's the way Rome makes you feel about history. That which
happened a thousand years ago is going on still. You can't get rid of
it. The Roman Republic is a live issue, and so is the Roman Empire, and
so is the Papacy.
"The other day they found a ruined Arch of Marcus Aurelius in Tripoli,
and began to restore it. New Italy is delighted at this confirmation of
its claims to sovereignty in North Africa. The newspapers treat Marcus
Aurelius as only a forerunner of Giolitti. By the way, I never heard of
Giolitti till I came over here. But it seems that he is a very great
man. But when ancient and modern history are mixed up it's hard to do
any clear thinking. And when you do get a clear thought you find out
that it isn't true. You know Dr. Johnson said something to the effect
that that man is little to be envied whose patriotism would not gain
force upon the plain of Marathon, or whose feelings would not grow
warmer among the ruins of Rome. Marathon is a simple proposition. But
when one is asked to warm his enthusiasm by means of the Roman
monuments, he naturally asks, 'Enthusiasm over what?' Of course, I don't
mean to give up. I'm faint though pursuing. But I'm afraid that Rome is
not a good place to rest in."
"I'm afraid not," I said, "if you insist on keeping on thinking. It is
not a good place in which to rest your mind."
II
I think Bagster is not the first person who has found intellectual
difficulty here. Rome exists for the confusion of the sentimental
traveler. Other cities deal tenderly with our preconceived ideas of
them. There is one simple impression made upon the mind. Once out of the
railway station and in a gondola, and we can dream our dream of Venice
undisturbed. There is no doge at present, but if there were one we
should know where to place him. The city still furnishes the proper
setting for his magnificence. And London with all its vastness has, at
first sight, a familiar seeming. The broad and simple outlines of
English history make it easy to reconceive the past.
But Rome is disconcerting. The actual refuses to make terms with the
ideal. It is a vast storehouse of historical material, but the
imagination is baffled in the attempt to put the material together.
When Scott was in Rome his friend "advised him to wait to see the
procession of Corpus Domini, and hear the Pope
Saying the high, high mass
All on St. Peter's day.
He smiled and said that these things were more poetical in the
description than in reality, and that it was all the better for him
not to have seen it before he wrote about it."
Sir Walter's instinct was a true one. Rome is not favorable to
historical romance. Its atmosphere is eminently realistic. The
historical romancer is flying through time as the air-men fly through
space. But the air-men complain that they sometimes come upon what
they call "air holes." The atmosphere seems suddenly to give way under
them. In Rome the element of Time on which the imagination has been
flying seems to lose its usual density. We drop through a Time-hole,
and find ourselves in an inglorious anachronism.
I am not sure that Bagster has had a more difficult time than his
predecessors, who have attempted to assort their historical material.
For in the days before historical criticism was invented, the history
of Rome was very luxuriant. "Seeing Rome" was a strenuous undertaking,
if one tried to be intelligent.
There was an admirable little guide-book published in the twelfth
century called "Mirabilia Urbis Romæ." One can imagine the old-time
tourist with this mediæval Baedeker in hand, issuing forth, resolved
to see Rome in three days. At the end of the first day his courage
would ooze away as he realized the extent of his ignorance. With a
hurried look at the guide-book and a glance at the varied assortment
of ruins, he would try to get his bearings. All the worthies of sacred
and profane history would be passing by in swift procession.
"After the sons of Noah built the tower of confusion, Noah with all
his sons came to Italy. And not far from the place where Rome now is
they founded a city in his name, where he brought his travail and life
to an end." To come to the city of Noah was worth a long journey. Just
think of actually standing on the spot where Shem, Ham, and Japhet
soothed the declining years of their father! It was hard to realize
it all. And it appears that Japhet, always an enterprising person,
built a city of his own on the Palatine Hill. There is the Palatine,
somewhat cluttered up with modern buildings of the Cæsars, but
essentially, in its outlines, as Japhet saw it.
But there were other pioneers to be remembered. "Saturn, being
shamefully entreated by his son Jupiter," founded a city on the
Capitoline Hill. One wonders what Shem, Ham, and Japhet thought of
this, and whether their sympathies were with Jupiter who was seeking
to get a place in the sun.
It is hard to understand the complicated politics of the day. At any
rate, a short time after, Hercules came with a band of Argives and
established a rival civic centre. In the meantime, Janus had become
mixed up with Roman history and was working manfully for the New
Italy. On very much the same spot "Tibris, King of the Aborigines"
built a city, which must be carefully distinguished from those before
mentioned.
All this happened before Romulus appeared upon the scene. One with a
clear and comprehensive understanding of this early history might
enjoy his first morning's walk in Rome. But to the middle-aged pilgrim
from the West Riding of Yorkshire, who had come to Rome merely to see
the tomb of St. Peter, it was exhausting.
But perhaps mediæval tradition did not form a more confusing
atmosphere than the sentimental admiration of a later day. In the
early part of the nineteenth century a writer begins a book on Rome in
this fashion: "I have ventured to hope that this work may be a guide
to those who visit this wonderful city, which boasts at once the
noblest remains of antiquity, and the most faultless works of art;
which possesses more claims to interest than any other city; which has
in every age stood foremost in the world; which has been the light of
the earth in ages past, the guiding star through the long night of
ignorance, the fountain of civilization to the whole Western world,
and which every nation reverences as the common nurse, preceptor, and
parent."
This notion of Rome as the venerable parent of civilization, to be
approached with tenderly reverential feelings, was easier to hold a
hundred years ago than it is to-day. There was nothing to contradict
it. One might muse on "the grandeur that was Rome," among picturesque
ruins covered with flowering weeds. But now a Rome that is obtrusively
modern claims attention. And it is not merely that the modern world is
here, but that our view of antiquity is modernized. We see it, not
through the mists of time, but as a contemporary might.
When Ferrero published his history we were startled by his realistic
treatment. It was as if we were reading a newspaper and following the
course of current events. Cæsar and Pompey and Cicero were treated as
if they were New York politicians. Where we had expected to see
stately figures in togas we were made to see hustling real-estate
speculators, and millionaires, and labor leaders, and ward
politicians, who were working for the prosperity of the city and,
incidentally, for themselves. It was all very different from our
notions of classic times which we had imbibed from our Latin lessons
in school. But it is the impression which Rome itself makes upon the
mind.
One afternoon, among the vast ruins of Hadrian's Villa, I tried to
picture the villa as it was when its first owner walked among the
buildings which his whim had created. The moment Hadrian himself
appeared upon the scene, antiquity seemed an illusion. How
ultra-modern he was, this man whom his contemporaries called "a
searcher out of strange things"! These ruins could not by the mere
process of time become venerable, for they were in their very nature
novelties. They were the playthings of a very rich man. There they lie
upon the ground like so many broken toys. They are just such things as
an enormously rich man would make to-day if he had originality enough
to think of them. Why should not Hadrian have a Vale of Tempe and a
Greek theatre and a Valley of Canopus, and ever so many other things
which he had seen in his travels, reproduced on his estate near
Tivoli?
An historian of the Empire says: "The character of Hadrian was in the
highest degree complex, and this presents to the student a series of
apparently unreconciled contrasts which have proved so hard for many
modern historians to resolve. A thorough soldier and yet the
inaugurator of a peace policy, a 'Greekling' as his Roman subjects
called him, and saturated with Hellenic ideas, and yet a lover of
Roman antiquity; a poet and an artist, but with a passion for
business and finance; a voluptuary determined to drain the cup of
human experience and, at the same time, a ruler who labored
strenuously for the well-being of his subjects; such were a few of the
diverse parts which Hadrian played."
It is evident that the difficulty with the historians who find these
unreconciled contrasts is that they try to treat Hadrian as an
"ancient" rather than as a modern. The enormously rich men who are at
present most in the public eye present the same contradictions.
Hadrian was a thorough man of the world. There was nothing venerable
about him, though much that was interesting and admirable.
Now what a man of the world is to a simple character like a saint or a
hero, that Rome has been to cities of the simpler sort. It has been a
city of the world. It has been cosmopolitan. "Urbs et orbis" suggests
the historic fact. The fortunes of the city have become inextricably
involved in the fortunes of the world.
A part of the confusion of the traveler comes from the fact that the
Roman city and the Roman world are not clearly distinguished one from
the other. The New Testament writer distinguishes between Jerusalem as
a geographical fact and Jerusalem as a spiritual ideal. There has
been, he says, a Jerusalem that belongs to the Jews, but there is also
Jerusalem which belongs to humanity, which is free, which is "the
mother of us all."
So there has been a local Rome with its local history. And there has
been the greater Rome that has impressed itself on the imagination of
the world. Since the destruction of Carthage the meaning of the word
"Roman" has been largely allegorical. It has stood for the successive
ideas of earthly power and spiritual authority.
Rome absorbed the glory of deeds done elsewhere. Battles were fought
in far-off Asia and Africa. But the battlefield did not become the
historic spot. The victor must bring his captives to Rome for his
triumph. Here the pomp of war could be seen, on a carefully arranged
stage, and before admiring thousands. It was the triumph rather than
the battle that was remembered. All the interest culminated at this
dramatic moment. Rome thus became, not the place where history was
made, but the place where it was celebrated. Here the trumpets of
fame perpetually sounded.
This process continued after the Empire of the Cæsars passed away. The
continuity of Roman history has been psychological. Humanity has "held
a thought." Rome became a fixed idea. It exerted an hypnotic influence
over the barbarians who had overcome all else. The Holy Roman Empire
was a creation of the Germanic imagination, and yet it was a real
power. Many a hard-headed Teutonic monarch crossed the Alps at the
head of his army to demand a higher sanction for his own rule of
force. When he got himself crowned in the turbulent city on the Tiber
he felt that something very important had happened. Just how important
it was he did not fully realize till he was back among his own people
and saw how much impressed they were by his new dignities.
Hans Christian Andersen begins one of his stories with the assertion,
"You must know that the Emperor of China is a Chinaman and that all
whom he has about him are Chinamen also." The assertion is so logical
in form that we are inclined to accept it without question. Then we
remember that in Hans Christian Andersen's day, and for a long time
before, the Emperor of China was not a Chinaman and the great
grievance was that Chinamen were the very people he would not have
about him.
When we speak of the Roman Catholic Church, we jump at the conclusion
that it is the church of the Romans and that the people of Rome have
had the most to do with its extension. This theory has nothing to
recommend it but its extreme verbal simplicity. As a matter of fact,
Rome has never been noted for its pious zeal. Such warmth as it has
had has been imparted to it by the faithful who have been drawn from
other lands; as, according to some theorists, the sun's heat is kept
up by a continuous shower of meteors falling into it.
To-day, the Roman Church is more conscious of its strength in
Massachusetts than it is near the Vatican. At the period when the
Papacy was at its height, and kings and emperors trembled before it in
England and in Germany, the Popes had a precarious hold on their own
city. Rome was a religious capital rather than a religious centre. It
did not originate new movements. Missionaries of the faith have not
gone forth from it, as they went from Ireland. It is not in Rome that
we find the places where the saints received their spiritual
illuminations, and fought the good fight, and gathered their
disciples. Rome was the place to which they came for judgment, as Paul
did when he appealed to Cæsar. Here heretics were condemned, and here
saints, long dead, were canonized. Neither the doctrines nor the
institutions of the Catholic Church originated here. Rome was the
mint, not the mine. That which received the Roman stamp passed current
throughout the world.
In the political struggle for the New Italy, Rome had the same
symbolic character. Mazzini was never so eloquent as when portraying
the glories of the free Rome that was to be recognized, indeed, as the
mother of us all. The Eternal City, he believed, was to be the
regenerating influence, not only for Europe but for all the world. All
the romantic enthusiasm of Garibaldi flamed forth at the sight of
Rome. All other triumphs signified nothing till Rome was the
acknowledged capital of Italy. Silently and steadily Cavour worked
toward the same end. And at last Rome gathered to herself the glory
of the heroes who were not her own children.
If we recognize the symbolic and representative character of Roman
history, we can begin to understand the reason for the bewilderment
which comes to the traveler who attempts to realize it in imagination.
Roman history is not, like the tariff, a local issue. The most
important events in that history did not occur here at all, though
they were here commemorated. So it happens that every nation finds
here its own, and reinforces its traditions. In the Middle Ages, the
Jewish traveler, Benjamin of Tudela, found much to interest him. In
Rome were to be found two brazen pillars of Solomon's Temple, and
there was a crypt where Titus hid the holy vessels taken from
Jerusalem. There was also a statue of Samson and another of Absalom.
The worthy Benjamin doubtless felt the same thrill that I did when
looking up at the ceiling of the Church of Santa Maria Maggiore. I was
told that it was gilded with the first gold brought from America. The
statement, that the church was founded on this spot because of a
vision that came to Pope Liberius in the year 305 A.D., left me
unmoved. It was of course a long time ago; but then, I had no mental
associations with Pope Liberius, and there was no encyclopædia at hand
in which I might look him up. Besides, "the church was reërected by
Sixtus III in the year 432, and was much altered in the twelfth
century." But the gold on the ceiling was a different matter. That was
romantically historical. It came from America in the heroic age. I
thought of the Spanish galleons that brought it over, and of Columbus
and Cortés and Alvarado. After that, to go into the Church of Santa
Maria Maggiore was like taking a trip to Mexico.
In the course of my daily walks, I passed the Church of Santa
Pudenziana, said to be the oldest in Rome, and recently modernized. It
is on the spot where Pudens, the host of St. Peter, is said to have
lived with his daughters Praxedis and Pudentiana. This is interesting,
but the English-speaking traveler is likely to pass by Pudaentiana's
church, and seek out the church of her sister St. Praxed. And this not
for the sake of St. Praxed or her father Pudens or even of his guest
St. Peter, but for the sake of a certain English poet who had visited
the church once.
Close to the Porta San Paolo is the great tomb of the Roman magnate,
Gaius Cestius, which was built before the birth of Christ. One can
hardly miss seeing it, because it is near one of the most sacred
pilgrimage places of Rome, the grave of John Keats.
Each traveler makes his own Rome; and the memories which he takes away
are the memories which he brought with him.
III
As for my friend Bagster, now that he has come to Rome, I hope he may
stay long enough to allow it to produce a more tranquilizing effect
upon him. When he gives up the attempt to take it all in by an
intellectual and moral effort, he may, as the saying is, "relax."
There is no other place in which one may so readily learn the meaning
of that misused word "urbanity." Urbanity is the state of mind adapted
to a city, as rusticity is adapted to the country. In each case the
perfection of the adaptation is evidenced by a certain ease of manner
in the presence of the environment. There is an absence of fret and
worry over what is involved in the situation. A countryman does not
fret over dust or mud; he knows that they are forms of the good earth
out of which he makes his living. He may grumble at the weather, but
he is not surprised at it, and he is ready to make the best of it.
This adaptation to nature is easy for us, for we are rustics by
inheritance. Our ancestors lived in the open, and kept their flocks
and were mighty hunters long before towns were ever thought of. So
when we go into the woods in the spring, our self-consciousness leaves
us and we speedily make ourselves at home. We take things for granted,
and are not careful about trifles. A great many things are going on,
but the multiplicity does not distract us. We do not need to
understand.
For we have primal sympathies which are very good substitutes for
intelligence. We do not worry because nature does not get on faster
with her work. When we go out on the hills on a spring morning, as our
forbears did ten thousand years ago, it does not fret us to consider
that things are going on very much as they did then. The sap is
mounting in the trees; the wild flowers are pushing out of the sod;
the free citizens of the woods are pursuing their vocations without
regard to our moralities. A great deal is going on, but nothing has
come to a dramatic culmination.
Our innate rusticity makes us accept all this in the spirit in which
it is offered to us. It is nature's way and we like it, because we are
used to it. We take what is set before us and ask no questions. It is
spring. We do not stop to inquire as to whether this spring is an
improvement on last spring or on the spring of the year 400 B.C. There
is a timelessness about our enjoyment. We are not thinking of events
set in a chronological order, but of a process which loses nothing by
reason of repetition.
Our attitude toward a city is usually quite different. We are not at
our ease. We are querulous and anxious, and our interest takes a
feverish turn. For the cities of our Western world are new-fangled
contrivances which we are not used to, and we are worried as we try to
find out whether they will work. These aggregations of humanity have
not existed long enough to seem to belong to the nature of things. It
is exciting to be invited to "see Seattle grow," but the exhibition
does not yield a "harvest of a quiet eye." If Seattle should cease to
grow while we are looking at it, what should we do then?
But with Rome it is different. Here is a city which has been so long
in existence that we look upon it as a part of nature. It is not
accidental or artificial. Nothing can happen to it but what has
happened already. It has been burned with fire, it has been ravaged by
the sword, it has been ruined by luxury, it has been pillaged by
barbarians and left for dead. And here it is to-day the scene of eager
life. Pagans, Christians, reformers, priests, artists, soldiers,
honest workmen, idlers, philosophers, saints, were here centuries ago.
They are here to-day. They have continuously opposed each other, and
yet no species has been exterminated. Their combined activities make
the city.
When one comes to feel the stirring of primal sympathies for the
manifold life of the city, as he does for the manifold life of the
woods, Rome ceases to be distracting. The old city is like the
mountain which has withstood the hurts of time, and remains for us,
"the grand affirmer of the present tense."
THE AMERICAN TEMPERAMENT
I
Stopping at some selected spot on the mountain road, the stage-driver
will direct the stranger's attention to a projecting mass of rock
which bears some resemblance to a human countenance. There is the "Old
Man of the Mountains," or the "Old Woman," as the case may be.
If the stranger be of a docile disposition he will see what he is told
to see. But he will be content with the vague suggestion and will not
push the analogy too far. The similitude is strictly confined to the
locality. It is enough if from a single point the mountain seems
almost human. From any other point it will seem to be merely
mountainous.
A similar caution is necessary in regard to the resemblances between a
nation and an individual. When we talk of a national character or
temperament, we are using an interesting and bold figure of speech.
We speak of millions of people as if they were one. Of course, a
nation is not one kind of person; it is composed of many kinds of
persons. These persons are diverse in character. All Scotchmen are not
canny, nor all Irishmen happy-go-lucky. Those who know a great many
Chinamen are acquainted with those who are idealists with little taste
for plodding industry. It is only the outsider who is greatly
impressed by the family resemblance. To the more analytic mind of the
parent each child is, in a most remarkable degree, different from the
others.
When we take such typical characters as John Bull and Brother Jonathan
as representing actual Englishmen or Americans, we put ourselves in
the way of contradiction. They are not good likenesses. An English
writer says: "As the English, a particularly quick-witted race, tinged
with the colors of romance, have long cherished a false pride in their
reputed stolidity, and have accepted with pleasant equanimity the
figure of John Bull as their national signboard, though he does not
resemble them, so Americans plume themselves on the thought that they
are dying of nervous energy."
There is much truth in this. One may stand at Charing Cross and watch
the hurrying crowds and only now and then catch sight of any one who
suggests the burly John Bull of tradition. The type is not a common
one, at least among city dwellers.
But when we attribute a temperament to a nation, we do not necessarily
mean that all the people are alike. We only mean that there are
certain ways of thinking and feeling that are common to those who have
had the same general experience. The national temperament is
manifested not so much in what the people are as in what they admire
and instinctively appreciate.