ascent through the woods of Monte Cavo, are the Campi d'Annibale, the
former crater of the volcano of Mons Latialis, grass fields whose
legend Pascarella tells us: that when Hannibal encamped there the
Romans raised the necessary money by selling the ground of the enemy's
camp! A strange, unexpected place; a great green basin, bleak and
bare, marked only by fences like some northern hill-top; on such fell
sides shall the Romans camp above the Tyne and Tweed.
We climbed up through the woods, Antonia and I, following the keeper
in his riding boots, silent, or at most exchanging a word about the
flowers, all blue, borage, squill, and dog violets, among the fallen
leaves. And little by little there unrolled, deep below us, the dim
green plain with a whiteness which is St. Peter's; and then there
unfolded, gradually, unexpected, the pale blue of one lake and of a
second. Till, near the top, they had both turned into steely mirrors,
tarnished, as by breath, by the rapidly passing clouds. And the pink
of the leafless woods stretches away, soft and feathery, to distant
towns and villages. And we ascend, with the wind arising to meet us,
always through softly winding paths, to the summit of the Latin
mountain. To a long, gaunt, white, empty house, a circle of ancient
moss-grown walls, a circle of old, wind-bent, leafless beeches, with
the whole world of earliest Rome misty below, and thin clouds passing
rapidly overhead. This is that sort of natural altar, visible as such
even from the streets of Rome, of the Latin Jove, which, when we saw
it again later from the ridge near Castel Gandolfo, above the deep
circular chasm (fringed with asphodel) of the lake, seemed to smoke
with a superhuman sacrifice.
How Renan, in the _Prêtre di Némi_, has rendered, without
descriptions, the charm of that outlook towards Rome from this lower
portion of the Latin hills! They cover a very small amount of country,
volcanic and isolated; they are a kind of living whole in themselves,
with their towns, woods, and those two deep lakes hidden in their
fastnesses. The most living range of hills, surely, out of which the
greatest life has spread, the vastest, perhaps, in the world.
Up there one looks not merely into space unlimited, but into time.
What a strange country this Roman one! How different from the rest of
Italy; this, with its great plain, its isolated groups of hills, its
disdain of river-valley and gorge; a country set aside for different
destinies.
And yet I own that what these hills represent most to me is the
keenness of the air, the sweetness of those straight-boled, pinkish,
leafless woods, the freshness of sprouting grass and flowers.
_March_ 20.
IV.
A RIVER GOD.
We have been bicycling these two days in the campagna; sunny, windy
days, the hills faint in the general blueness. About three miles along
the Via Ardeatina we alighted and sat on the grass in a little valley.
A little valley between two low grass hills; a stream, a few reeds,
two or three scant trees in bud, and the usual fences, leading up to
the mountain, framed in, with its white towns, between the green
slopes. Grass still short and dry; larks, invisible, singing; a flock
of sheep going along with shepherds stopping to set the new-born,
tottering lambs to suck.
At the valley's mouth, over a wide horse-trough where a donkey cart
was watering, a little recumbent river god, rudely carved and much
time-stained.
_March_ 16.
V.
THE PANTHEON.
A bright day of iciest tramontana, cutting you in two in the square,
under the colonnades, and in the narrow chink-opening of the great
green bronze doors.
Almost entirely empty, that great round place, the light, the cold
haunting its grey dome. At the high-altar some priests in purple; the
Crucifix and pictures veiled in violet silk. And in the organ loft,
buttoned up in great coats, five wretched musicians; not on high, but
in a sort of cage set down by the altar. Such singing! but an alto,
two tenors and a bass, as in Marcello's psalms. And, frightful as was
the performance, I was fascinated by their unaccompanied song:
something of long vague passages, and suspended cadences, fitting, in
its mixture of complexity and primitiveness, its very rudeness,
barbarousness of execution, into the great round bleak temple, with
the cold windy sky looking down its roof, the bleakness of outdoors,
enclosed, as it were, within doors.
_Palm Sunday_, 1899.
VI.
SANTI QUATTRO CORONATI.
I went into several small churches to see the sepulchres. Not like our
Tuscan ones; wretched things, mainly tinsel and shabby frippery.
At Santa Prisca we trespassed into orchards, almond trees barely
green, artichokes and dust-heaps, with the belfries of the Aventine
behind, the pillared loggia of San Saba, and the great blocks of the
Baths of Caracalla in front. The church, shut on ordinary days, was
quite empty, only a dozen Franciscans at office, kneeling by the frame
of lighted candles, one of which was extinguished with each verse of
hoarse liturgy by a monk kneeling apart.
After Sta. Prisca, San Clemente, very Byzantine and fine in the gloom,
and then to that dear church of the Santi Quattro Coronati, which has
beckoned to me ever since my childhood; and which, with its
fortified-looking apse, its yard and great gate-tower, looks like a
remote abbey one would drive to, forgotten, hidden, unheard of, for
hours and hours from some out-of-the-way country town. "We'll take you
to so and so," one's host would say, and one would never have heard
the name before.... And there it is, above the modernest slums of
modern Rome!
The church was darkish; a little light from the sunset just picking
out some green and purple of the broken pavement; the tapers of a
curtained-off chapel, and tapers above the sepulchre, throwing a broad
weak yellow light up to the arched triforium, to the grated gallery
whence came the voices of nuns chanting the Lamentations.
From round the illuminated sepulchre rose, like a flock of birds on
our entrance, a bevy of kneeling nuns in _béguine_ cloak and cap. And
in the apse, before the high-altar, was stretched on the slabs, with a
night-light at each corner, something dark and mysterious: the
crucifix, the form barely defined, shrouded in violet.
When the nuns went away a number of children, tiny, tiny girls came
in, and knelt round that veiled mysterious thing; a baby at the end of
their procession. One of the little girls could not resist, and lifted
a corner of the violet silk. But her elder sister quickly slapped her,
pulled her kerchief straight, and all was order and piety.
The dear church, quite empty save for these children, was full of the
smell of the fresh flowers round the sepulchre. A holy, fragrant,
venerable, kindly church, safe-hidden behind its pillared atrium and
gate-tower; and looking from afar like a hillside fortress among the
jerry-built modern streets.
_Maundy Thursday_, 1899.
VII.
BEYOND PONT MOLLE.
A meadow near the Tiber, of grass and daisies, tufted with
yellow-hearted jonquils. Larks and sun and wind overhead; in the
distance the pale mountains, patched with snow. All round, the pale
green embosomings of the soft earth hills. If the Umbrians got their
love of circular hill lines at home, they learned in Rome the real
existence of the green grass valleys and hills unbroken by
cultivation, like those behind Perugino's _Crucifixion_ and Spagna's
_Muses_.
All round, as I sit in that place, the dry last year's stalks dance in
the wind above the new grass and flowers. O Easter, Resurrection,
Renovation!
The larks proclaim it!
_Easter_, 1899.
SPRING 1900.
I.
OUTSIDE THE GATES.
Rome took hold of me again as usual, yesterday, bicycling near Porta
S. Sebastiano. On the walls which enclose those remote forsaken vignas
(fit abode for lamias and female vampyres, as in Frau von Degen's
tale), nay, even on the gates of old Rome are painted great
advertisements exhorting the traveller to go to such or such a
curiosity shop. The Arch of Drusus was surrounded by a band of
Cookites, listening inattentively to their Bear Leader; and the whole
Via Appia, to beyond Cecilia Metella, was alive with cabs and landaus.
But such things, which desecrate Venice and spoil Florence, are all
right in Rome; Rome, somehow, knows how to subdue them all to her
eternal harmony. That all the vulgarities of all the furthest lands
should all pass through Rome, like all the barbarians, the nations and
centuries, seems proper and fit. The spirit of the place requires
them, as much as the captives who came in the triumphs, as the Goths
and Huns, as the pilgrims of the Mediæval Jubilees, and it subdues
them: subdues them, as it subdues with the chemistry of this odd
climate of crumble and decay, the new dreadful houses; as it has
made, with the marvellous rank Roman vegetation, a sort of Forum or
Palatine of the knocked-down modern houses, the empty unfinished
basements behind the hoardings under my window. Driving at midnight
from the station, my eye and mind were caught not merely by Castor and
Pollux under the electric light, and by the endless walls of high
palaces, but also by a colossal advertisement of Anzio, in English,
setting forth to the traveller its merits connected with Nero, and I
think Coriolanus--Nero and Coriolanus as elements of _réclame_!
But here it seems all right; becoming only one of those immense
ironies of Time, more dignified than any of Time's paltry creatures of
which this place is full. Time, whose presence, whose very cruelties
and gigantic jests, brings such peace to the soul in this place. Peace
because hope. This litter, this dust-heap (for it is after all not
much better, few great or precious or perfect things remaining),
dust-heap or rag-fair symbolised by its own most barbarous and vilest
and most venerable parts along the Tiber and under the Capitoline,--this
Rome accustoms one to take patience and heart of grace. It helps one
to conceive the fact that life comes everywhere out of death and
subdues it; to feel that, as there are centuries in the Past, so there
will be centuries and centuries in the Future. It helps the
imagination with its remnants of old, used-up theatre scenes, to guess
at all the scene-shifting that will be accomplished, and to take its
stand, be it only in the emotion of an instant, as witness of the
vague phantasmagoria of the future. Why despair? Why be impatient?
only give time, only secure all the possible tickets in the lottery
of chance, and our hopes must at last be realised, all will be all
right. 'Tis only our miserable impatience, our miserable sense of our
own impotent mortality, which makes us fret: and Rome bids us take
patience and comfort.
We despair of the future, for one reason, because we attribute to the
future our own growing sense of fatigue, the feelings of evening. But
the future will, for those to whom it belongs, be morning, with the
vigour and buoyancy of the awakening. Our ideal would be to preserve
in the future the beautiful things--certain flowers of tradition and
privilege--of the past. 'Tis a delusion. We might as well hope to keep
the old leaves on the trees into next summer. But after the old leaves
have fallen and the trees have stood bare, new ones will come, not the
same, but similar.
_March_ 11.
II.
LATTER-DAY ROME.
As a matter of fact Rome has never been so much Rome, never expressed
its full meaning so completely, as nowadays. This change and
desecration, this inroad of modernness, merely completes its eternity.
Goethe has an epigram of a Chinese he met here; but a Chinese of the
eighteenth century completed Rome less than an American of the
nineteenth. Not only all roads in space, but all roads across Time,
converge hither.
_March_ 11.
III.
SANTA BALBINA.
Went to take the English seeds to the gardener at S. Saba, and got in
return some plants of border pinks. The most poetical and real place
in all Rome.
Afterwards bicycled to S. Balbina. Impression of primitive church (the
outside has from a distance a look as of something in a Pinturicchio
fresco) given over to the Franciscan nuns--thirty--who look after two
hundred unruly girls off the streets. Their thick grey cloaks are
folded on the pews; images, screens, lecterns, all the litter of a
priestly lumber-room, poked here and there, a little portable iron
pulpit, not unlike a curtained washstand, in front of a beautiful tomb
of a grave mediæval person above a delicate mosaic of the Cosmatis,
and a small coloured Rue Bonaparte St. Joseph on the episcopal mosaic
throne in the apse!
_March_ 15.
IV.
THE CATACOMBS.
To-day Catacombs of S. Domitilla in Via Sette Chiese, with Maria,
Guido and Pascarella. The impression of walking for miles by
taper-light between those close walls of brown friable stone, or that
soft dusty ground, in a warm vague stifling air; the monotonous rough
sides, the monotonous corners, the widenings in and out of little
Galla Placidia-like crypts, with rough hewn pillars and faded
frescoes; of the irregularly cut pigeon-holes, where bits of bone
moulder, and the brown earth seems half composed of bone.
That brown soft earth of the Catacombs, the stuff you would scratch
off the damp walls with your nail; rotting stone, rotting bone: the
very soil of Rome lilackish like cocoa, friable, light, which used
somehow to give me the horrors already as a child; the soil in which
the gardener of S. Saba grows his pinks and freesias without a spade
or hoe visible anywhere; the soil which seems to demand no plough; the
farthest possible from the honest and stiff clay, demanding human
work, of nature; the Roman soil, a _compost_, as Whitman would say,
ready manured! The work of man in this earth (of which a pinch
transported into church front or roof produces great tufts of fennel
and wild mignonette), the work of man in it merely to have died!
No sense of the ages in these Catacombs, or of the solemnity of death,
or of the sweetness of religion; black narrow passages gutted for
centuries, the poor wretched human remains (save those few turned up
by the modern spade) packed, sent off, made presents of, sold to all
the churches and convents of Christendom; bits of bones in cotton
wool, with faded labels, in glass cases, such as we see in sacristies,
&c., or enclosed in glories of enamel and gold!
But all gone, gone, those poor humble inhabitants, who were so anxious
to be entire for the resurrection of the body!--patrician ladies,
slaves, soldiers, eunuchs, theologians--all gone piecemeal all over
the distant earth! the corridors swept and empty, the pigeon-holes
with only a little brown cocoa-like dust!
It was raining all day, dull, dismal. Yet coming out of that place,
out of that brown crumbly darkness, what was not the interest of the
wet grey sky! How great the beauty, the movements of the lazy clouds!
How complex and lovely the bare lane of wattled dry reeds--the
ineffable exquisiteness of patches of green corn, of a few scant pink
blossoms, of the shoots of elder! I remember the solemnity of the
subterranean tombs at Perugia; the grisliness of the Beauchamp crypt
at Warwick. But these catacombs, emptiness, desolation and that old
brown lilacky, crumbly Roman earth, in which no plough need move nor
spade,--that _terriccio_, that pot-mould of the past.
_March_ 16.
V.
THE RIONE MONTI.
Yesterday, in gusty weather, wandered round muddy streets of Rione
Monti, and entered some churches. S.S. Cosmae Damiano in Forum: it has
got lost, so to speak, in the excavations, and you seek it through
blind alleys and a long dark passage--a dirty, tawdry church, with a
few frowsy, sluttish people; and behind the ballroom chandeliers above
the altar, a Ravenna apse, gold and blue; and lambs in procession on a
green ground.
Then S. Pietro in Vincoli, which has a delightful position, with its
big palm and tower and a certain Romantic Catherine Sforza character;
also, what always refreshes me in Rome, its early Renaissance
character, before Jesuits, &c. &c., an imported thing from Tuscany,
and the fact of the tomb of the Pollajuolos! Michel Angelo's _Moses_
somehow belongs to Rome--has Rome's grandeur, emphasis, and Rome's
theatrical quality. All round are buried seventeenth-century prelates.
Cinthio Aldobrandini, &c., setting forth glories, but with skeletons
as supporters!
Decidedly Rome was never more Roman than at present--the pulling down
and building and excavating, the inappropriate jostlings of time and
character merely add to the eternal quality, serene and ironical.
Besides, these demolitions have disclosed many things hitherto hidden,
and soon destroyed: here in Rione Monti, for instance, above the
tram-lines, great green walls, boulders from Antiquity, and quiet
convent gardens, with spaliered lemons, suddenly displayed above the
illustrated hoardings of a street to be. In the midst of it, in a
filthy, half modern, crowded street, a rugged Lombard church porch,
dark ages all over: the object of my search, St. Praxed's church; but
it was walled up, and I entered by a door in a side lane. Entered to
remain on threshold, a Mass at a side altar. Eight small boys blocking
the way, with a crowd of sluttish, tawdry worshippers, with the usual
Roman church stifling dirty smell. These Roman churches, all save the
basilicas, are inconceivably ill kept, frowsy, musty, tawdry,
sluttish: they belong not to God, but to Rome--the same barbarous Rome
of the tumble-down houses, the tattered begging people, the whole
untidy squalor of its really Roman parts. Nothing swept and garnished;
nothing evincing one grain of past or present reverence--a
down-at-heel indifferent idolatry. At last the crowd streamed out,
Mass being over, and I entered--and, oh wonder! found myself in a
place of all Byzantine splendour: that little chapel, tapestried with
crimson silk, lit with hanging lamps, its vaults a marvellous glory of
golden--infinite tinted golden--mosaics with great white angels. A bit
of Venice, of S. Mark's in this sluttish Rome.
Poets really make places. I cannot pass the Consolazione Hospital
without thinking of Pompilia's death there; and the imaginary bishop,
of whom there is no visible trace, haunts Sta. Prassede.
VI.
AMPHORÆ.
In the afternoon we went to the Via Appia, and in the excavations of
Villa Lugari, among sprouting corn and under the song of larks, saw
those amphoræ Pascarella had told us of, which, after holding pagan
wine, were used to bury Christian children. To me there is nothing
repulsive in the thought of this burial in the earth's best product.
VII.
MASS AT THE LATERAN.
To-day, on the way to Porta Furba (the country, where one sees it near
the gate, is beginning to be powdered over with peach blossom), I went
into the Lateran, and heard and saw a beautiful canonical Mass. Here
was the swept and garnished (but it was behind glass doors!)
sanctuary, the canons dainty in minever, a splendid monsignore,
grey-haired, in three shades of purple; exquisite white and gold
officiating priests, like great white peacocks, at the altar; the
perfect movement of the incensing, perfect courtesy and dignity of the
mutual salutations; and a well-played organ, on a reed stop, giving an
imitation Bach _musette_. The whole ceremony, rather like the 6/8 of
that _musette_, perhaps a trifle too much of the dancing element, but
grave and very perfect. Why should not, at some future period, our
philosophers sit in carved oak stalls, in minever and purple, and
salute and be saluted, and speak with intervals of _musettes_ on the
organ? It would suit Renan at least; and surely this, which is so
venerable and sanctioned by time in our eyes, would have seemed quite
as odd and grotesque a thing if foretold to St. Paul.
VIII.
STAGE ILLUSION.
I feel that, among other good things, Rome, while it gave my childhood
notions of dignity, of time and solemn things, kept my eye and fancy
on very short commons. How stunted are the trees (all except the
weeds) here! how flowerless the hedges! how empty of life, grace,
detail the country!
I remember the sort of rapture of the first acquaintance with Tuscan
valleys, hills, woods, fields, and all the lovely fulness of dainty
real detail.
Rome, as I said before, is all theatre scenes; marvellous _coup
d'oeils_, into which, advancing (from the Capitol) from opposite the
Palatine palms, from the Lateran steps, from the Tiber quays, you
find nothing _to go on with_; and in so far it fits, it symbolises,
perhaps, its own history--for what is history but a series of such
admirable theatrical views; mere delusion, and behind them prose,
mere prose? The reality of Rome is, one feels it, in its distant hills.
There you can penetrate; thence history streamed.
_March_ 19.
IX.
SANTA MARIA IN COSMEDIN.
After wandering between tremendous hailstorms about the Aventine (the
black sky and turbid Tiber from S. Alessio, in odd contrast with the
lemons and oranges and freesias of S. Sabina, and with the chill empty
churches), I waited for a Mass at S. M. in Cosmedin. Garlands (how
poor and inartistic compared to the Tuscan and Venetian ones!) hanging
in porch and box strewn at the door. The church, just restored, very
swept and garnished still, with its Byzantine delicacy of fluted
ribbed columns, carved precious ambones and carpet of lovely marbles,
a place for the perfect ritual and splendid vestments of an
aristocratic worship, slowly filled with, oh! such a poor, poor,
wretched congregation, while the two priests, two sacristans and small
choir-boys looked on (with a glance at watch) like people preparing
for a play and waiting for a full house; the bell-ringer occasionally
hanging on to the rope near the door, and giving a jump as he let go.
I don't mean merely poor in fortune, in ragged draggled clothes, the
sweepings of those rag-fair quarters, but poor in wretched, ill-grown,
ill, dull, stupid bodies and souls, draggle-tailed like their clothes,
only two savage-looking peasants having dignity or grace. More like an
Irish congregation than an Italian, the two policemen, the women
nursing their babies, the dreary sickly nuns, the broken,
idiot-looking shabby elderly men in overcoats.
At last the priests and choir-boys, to match, went in procession to
the altar, and the service began; merely chants with a response from
the crowd. But as soon as they began everything seemed to pull
together, to be all right, to have significance....
Is it possible that of religious things only the æsthetic side is
vital, universal, is what gives or seems to give a meaning, deludes us
into a belief in some spirituality? Sometimes one suspects as much:
that the unifying element is not so much religion, as, after all, art.
_March_ 23.
X.
INSCRIPTIONS.
These are fragments of inscriptions from the Macellus Liviæ, of the
time of Valens and Gratian, now transferred to the porch of S. Maria
in Trastevere: "Maceus vixit dulcissime cum suis ad supremam diem. C.
Gannius primogenitus vix: ann. VII. Desine jam mater lacrimis rinovare
querellas--namque dolor talis non tibi contigit uni." So at least I
read.
Another states that "M. Cocceius Ambrosius Aug: Lib: præpositus
vestis albæ triumphalis (?) fecit." When he had lived with Nice (?)
his wife forty-five years eleven days "sine ulla querela."
Also, "Dis Manib. Rhodope fecerent (?) Berenice et Drusilla delicatæ
dulcissimæ suae (_sic_)."
Also, "Attidiæ felicissimæ uxori rariosimæ Fl: Antoninus."
How these inscriptions, of which I copied out a few yesterday during a
heavy shower in the portico of S. M. in Trastevere, make one feel,
again by this magic of Rome, the other half of the truth: How little
the centuries matter, how vain are these thousands of years, which
exist only in our thoughts, how solely important are the brief pangs
of us poor obscure shortlived forgotten creatures!
_March_ 30.
XI.
PALAZZO ORSINI, FORMERLY SAVELLI.