Shortly after our settlement in the Eternal City, which has so much more time to be seen than the so-journer has to see it, I pleased myself with the notion of surprising it by visiting in a studied succession the many different piazzas. This, I thought, would acquaint me with the different churches, and on the way to them I should make friends with the various quarters. Everything, old or new, would have the charm of the unexpected; no lurking ruin would escape me; no monument, whether column or obelisk, statue, “storied urn or animated bust” or mere tablet, would be safe from my indirect research. Before I knew it, I should know Rome by heart, and this would be something to boast of long after I had forgotten it.
I could not say what suggested so admirable a notion, but it may have been coming by chance one day on the statue of Giordano Bruno, and realizing that it stood in the Campo di Fieri, on the spot where he was burned three hundred years ago for abetting Copernicus in his sacrilegious system of astronomy, and for divers other heresies, as well as the violation of his monastic vows. I saw it with the thrill which the solemn figure, heavily draped, deeply hooded, must impart as mere mystery, and I made haste to come again in the knowledge of what it was that had moved me so. Naturally I was not moved in the same measure a second time. It was not that the environment was, to my mind, unworthy the martyr, though I found the market at the foot of the statue given over, not to flowers, as the name of the place might imply, but to such homely fruits of the earth as potatoes, carrots, cabbages, and, above all, onions. There was a placidity in the simple scene that pleased me: I liked the quiet gossiping of the old market-women over their baskets of vegetables; the confidential fashion in which a gentle crone came to my elbow and begged of me in undertone, as if she meant the matter to go no further, was even mattering. But the solemnity of the face that looked down on the scene was spoiled by the ribbon drawn across it to fasten a wreath on the head, in the effort of some mistaken zealot of free thought to enhance its majesty by decoration. It was the moment when the society calling itself by Giordano Bruno's name was making an effort for the suppression of ecclesiastical instruction in the public schools; and on the anniversary of his martyrdom his effigy had suffered this unmeant hurt. In all the churches there had been printed appeals to parents against the agnostic attack on the altar and the home, and there had been some of the open tumults which seem in Rome to express every social emotion. But the clericals had triumphed, and an observer more anxious than I to give a mystical meaning to accident might have interpreted the disfiguring ribbon over Bruno's bronze lips as a new silencing of the heretic.
I certainly did not construe it so, and, if my notion of serially visiting the piazzas of Rome was not prompted by my chance glimpse of the Campo di Fiori, it was certainly not relinquished because of any mischance in my meditated vision of it. I had merely reflected that I could not hope to carry out my scheme without greater expense both in time and money than I could well afford, for, though cabs in Rome are swift and cheap, yet the piazzas are many and widely distributed; and I finally decided to indulge myself in a novelty of adventure verging close upon originality. It had always seemed to me that the happy strangers mounted on the tiers of seats that rise from front to back on the motor-chariots for seeing New York and looking down, even from the lowest place, on the life of our streets had a peculiar, almost a bird's-eye view of it which I might well find the means of a fresh impression. But I never had the courage, for reasons which I have not the courage to give, though the reader can perhaps imagine them. In Rome I did not feel that the like reasons held; of all the unknown, I was one of the most unknown; by me nobody would be put to the shame of recognizing an acquaintance on the benches of the like chariot, or forced to the cruelty of cutting him in my person. When once I had fully realized this, it was only a question of the time when I should yield to the temptation which renewed itself as often as I saw the stately automobile passing through the storied streets, with its English legend of “Touring Rome” inscribed on the back of the rear seat. There remained the question whether I should go alone or whether I should ask the countenance of friends in so bold an enterprise. When I suggested it to some persons of the more courageous sex, they did not wait to be asked to go with me; they instantly entreated to be allowed to go; they said they had always wished to see Rome in that way; and we only waited to be chosen by the raw and blustery afternoon which made us its own for the occasion.
It was the eve of the last sad day of such shrunken and faded carnival as is still left to Rome, and there were signs of it in the straggling groups of children in holiday costume, and in here and there a pair of young girls in a cab, safely masked against identification and venting, in the sense of wild escape, the joyous spirits kept in restraint all the rest of the year. Already in the Corso, where our touring-car waited for us at the first corner, a great cafe was turning itself inside out with a spread of chairs and tables over the sidewalk, which we found thronged on our return with spectators far outnumbering the merrymakers of the carnival. Our car was not nearly so packed, and when we mounted to the benches we found that the last and highest of them was left to the sole occupancy of a young man, well enough dressed (his yellow gloves may have been more than well enough) and well-mannered enough, who continued enigmatical to the last. There was a German couple and there were some French-speaking people; the rest of us were bound in the tie of our common English. The agent of the enterprise accompanied us, an international of undetermined race, and beside the chauffeur sat the middle-aged, anxious-looking Italian who presently arose when we made our first stop in the Piazza Colonna and harangued us in three languages—successively, of course—concerning the Column of Marcus Aurelius. He did not use the megaphone of his American confrere; and from the shudder which the first sound of his voice must have sent through a less fastidious substance than mine I perceived that an address by megaphone I could not have borne; to that extreme of excess even my modernism could not go. As it was, there was an instant when I could have wished to be on foot, or even in a cab, with a red Baedeker in my hand; and yet, as the orator went on, I had to own that he was giving me a better account of the column than I could have got for myself out of the guide-book. He spoke first in French, with an Italian accent and occasionally an Italian idiom; then he spoke in English, and then in a German which suffered from his knowledge of English.
He sat down, looking rather spent with his effort, and on the way to our next stop, at the Temple of Neptune, the agent examined us upon our necessities in the article of language. He himself spoke such good English that we could not do otherwise than declare that we could get on perfectly with an address in French. The German pair, perhaps from patriotic grudge, denied a working knowledge of the unfriendly tongue. The solitary on the back seat, being asked in his turn, graciously answered, “Toutes les langues me sont egales,” and thereafter we suffered with the orator only through French and German.
The reply which decided the matter launched us upon yet wider conjecture regarding the unknown: was he a retired courier, a concierge out of place, a professor of languages on his holiday, or merely an amateur of philological studies? His declared proficiency was manifested in unexpected measure as we drove away from the Temple of Neptune on through the narrow street leading to it. Every motor has its peculiar note, and our car had something like the scream of a wild animal in pain, such as might have justly alarmed a stouter spirit than that of the poor little cab-horse which we encountered at the corner of this street. It reared, it plunged; when our chauffeur held us in it still backed and filled so dangerously that the mother and children overflowing the cab followed the example of the driver in spilling to the ground. Then our good international, the agent, jumped down and, mounting to the coachman's seat, took the reins and urged the horse forward, while its driver pulled it by the bridle. All was of no effect till the solitary of the back seat rose in his place and shouted to the frightened creature in choice American: “What d' you mean, there? Come on! Come on, you fool!” Then, as if it had been an “impenitent mule” in some far-distant Far-Western incarnation, this Eoman cab-horse recognized the voice of authority; it nerved itself against the imaginary danger, and came steadily forward; our agent regained his place, and we moved shriekingly on to the next object of interest. It was not quite the note blown from level tubes of brass in the progress of a conqueror, but we did not lack the cheers of a disinterested populace, which at several points impartially applauded our orator's French and German versions of his not always tacit Italian.
Our height above the cheers helped preserve us from the sense of anything ironical in them, and there was an advantage in the outlook from our elevation which the wayfarer in cab or on foot can only imagine. No such wayfarer can realize the vast scope and compass of our excursion, which was but one of two excursions made on alternate afternoons by the Touring-Rome wagons. It included, perhaps not quite in the following order, after the Temple of Neptune, such objects of prime importance as the Palazzo Madama, where Catharine de' Medici once dwelt and where the Italian Senate now holds its sessions; the Fountain of Trevi, the Pantheon, the Piazza Navona, the new Palace of Justice and the Cavour monument beyond the Tiber, the Castle of Sant' Angelo, the Vatican and St. Peter's, the Janiculum and the Garibaldi monument on it, and the stupendous prospect of the city from that supreme top, the bridge that Horatius held in Macaulay's ballad, the island in the Tiber formed after the expulsion of the Tarquins by the river sand and drift catching on the seed-corn thrown into the stream from the fields consecrated to Mars, the Temple of Fortune, the once-supposed House of Rienzi, and the former Temple of Vesta; the Palatine Hill and the Aventine Hill, the Circus Maximus, the Colosseum, the Campidoglio, the Theatre of Marcellus, the worst slum in Rome, where the worst boy in Rome, flown with Carnival, will try to board your passing car; back to Piazza Colonna through Piazza Monte Citerio, where the Italian House of Deputies meets in the plain old palace of the same name.
The mere mention of these storied places will kindle in the reader's fancy a fire which he will feel all the need of if ever he verifies my account of them in touring Rome on so cold an afternoon as that of our excursion. The wind rose with our ascent of every elevation, if it did not fall with our return to a lower level; on the Janiculum it blew a blizzard in which the incongruous ilexes and laurels bowed and writhed, and some groups of almond-trees in their pale bloom on a distant upland mocked us with a derisive image of spring. At the foot of the steps to the Campidoglio, where some of our party dismounted to go up and view the statue of Marcus Aurelius, it was so cold that nothing but the sense of a strong common interest prevented those who remained from persuading the chauffeur to go on without the sight-seers. But we forbore, both because we knew we were then very near the end of our tour, and because we felt it would have been cruel to abandon the lady who had got out of the car only by turning herself sidewise and could not have made her way home on foot without sufferings which would justly have brought us to shame. Certain idle particulars will always cling to the memory which lets so many ennobling facts slip from it; and I find myself helpless against the recollection of this poor lady's wearing a thick motoring-veil which no curiosity could pierce, but which, when she lifted it, revealed a complexion of heated copper and a gray mustache such as nature vouchsafes to few women.
The crowd, which thickened most in the Piazza di Venezia, had grown more and more carnivalesque in attire and behavior. We had been obliged to avoid the more densely peopled streets because, as our international explained, if the car had slowed at any point the revellers would have joined our excursion of their own initiative and accompanied us to the end in overwhelming numbers. They wellnigh blocked the entrance of the Corso when we got back to it, and the cafe where we had agreed to have tea was so packed that our gay escapade began to look rather gloomy in the retrospect. But suddenly a table was vacated; a waiter was caught, in the vain attempt to ignore us, and given such a comprehensive order that we could see respect kindling in his eyes, and before we could reasonably have hoped it be spread before us tea and bread and butter and tarts and little cakes, while scores of hungry spectators stood round and flatteringly envied us. In this happy climax our adventure showed as a royal progress throughout. We counted up the wonders of our three hours' course in an absolutely novel light; and we said that touring Rome was a thing not only not to be despised, but to be forever proud of.
For myself, I decided that if I were some poor hurried fellow-countryman of mine, doing Europe in a month and obliged to scamp Rome with a couple of days, I would not fail to spend two of them in what I must always think of as a triumphal chariot. I resolved to take the second excursion, not the next day perhaps, but certainly the day after the next, and complete the most compendious impression of ancient, mediaeval, and modern Rome that one can have; but the firmest resolution sometimes has not force to hold one to it. The second excursion remains for a second sojourn, when perhaps I may be able to solve the question whether I was moved by a fine instinct of proportion or by mere innate meanness in giving our orator at parting just two francs in recognition of his eloquence. No one else, indeed, gave him anything, and he seemed rather surprised by my tempered munificence. It might have been mystically adjusted to the number of languages he used in addressing us; if he had held to three languages I might have made it three francs; but now I shall never be certain till I take the second excursion with a company which imperatively requires English as well as French and German, and with no solitary in yellow gloves to whom all languages are alike.
To this end I ought to have thrown a copper coin into the Fountain of Trevi as we passed it. You may return to Rome without doing this, but it is well known that if you do it you are sure to come back. The Fountain of Trevi is alone worth coming back for, and I could not see that it poured scanter streams than it formerly poured over brimming brinks or from the clefts of the artificial rocks that spread in fine disorder about the feet of its sea-gods and sea-horses; but they who mourn the old papal rule accuse the present Italian government of stinting the supply of water. To me there seemed no stint of water in any of the fountains of Rome. In some a mere wasteful spilth seems the sole design of the artist, as in the Fontana Paolina on the Janiculum, where the cold wash of its deluge seemed to add a piercing chill to our windy afternoon. The other fountains have each a quaint grace or absolute charm or pleasing absurdity, whether the waters shower over groups of more or less irrelevant statuary in their basins or spout into the air in columns unfurling flags of spray and keeping the pavement about them green with tender mould. The most sympathetic is the Fountain of the Triton, who blows the water through his wreathed horn and on the coldest day seems not to mind its refluent splash on his mossy back; in fact, he seems rather to like it.
He is one of many tritons, rivers, sea-gods, and aqueous allegories similarly employed in Rome and similarly indifferent to what flesh and blood might find the hardship of their calling. I had rashly said to myself that their respective fountains needed the sun on them to be just what one could wish, but the first gray days taught me better. Then the thinly clouded sky dropped a softened light over their glitter and sparkle and gave them a spirituality as much removed from the suggestion of physical cold as any diaphanous apparition would suggest. Then they seemed rapt into a finer beauty than that of earth, though I will not pretend that they were alike beautiful. No fountain can be quite ugly, but some fountains can be quite stupid, like, for instance, those which give its pretty name to the Street of the Four Fountains and which consist of two extremely plain Virtues and two very dull old Rivers, diagonally dozing at each other over their urns in niches of the four converging edifices. They are not quite so idiotic under their disproportionate foliage as the conventional Egyptian lions of the Fountain of Moses, with manes like the wigs of so many lord chancellors, and with thin streams of water drooling from the tubes between their lips. But these are the exceptional fountains; there are few sculptured or architectural designs which the showering or spouting water does not retrieve from error; and in Rome the water (deliciously potable) is so abundant that it has force to do almost anything for beauty, even where, as in the Fontana Paolina, it is merely a torrent tumbling over a facade. It is lavished everywhere; in the Piazza Navona alone there are three fountains, but then the Piazza Navona is very long, and three fountains are few enough for it, even though one is that famous Fountain of Bernini, in which he has made one of the usual rivers—the Nile, I believe—holding his hand before his eyes in mock terror of the ungainly facade of a rival architect's church opposite, lest it shall fall and crush him. That, however, is the least merit of the fountain; and without any fountain the Piazza Navona would be charming; it is such a vast lake of sunshine and is so wide as well as long, and is so mellowed with such rich browns and golden grays in the noble edifices.
I do not know, now, what all the edifices are, but there are churches, more than one, and palaces, and the reader can find their names in any of the guidebooks. If I were buying piazzas in Rome I should begin with the Navona, but there are enough to suit all purses and tastes. The fountains would be thrown in, I suppose, along with the churches and palaces; but I really never inquired, and, in fact, not having carried out my plan of visiting them all, I am in no position to advise intending purchasers. What I can say is that if you are in a hurry to inspect, that kind of property, and in immediate need of a piazza, you cannot do better than take the wagon for touring Rome. In two days you can visit every piazza worth having, including the Piazza di Spagna, where there is a fountain in the form of a marble galley in which you can embark for any fairyland you like, through the Via del Babuino and the Piazza del Popolo. Come to think of it, I am not so sure but I would as soon have the Piazza del Popolo as the Piazza Navona. If the fountains are not so fine, they are still very fine, and the Pincian Hill overtops one side of the place, with foliaged drives and gardened walks descending into it.
Everything of importance that did not happen elsewhere in Rome seems to have happened in the Piazza del Popolo, and I may name as a few of its attractions for investors the facts that it was here Sulla's funeral pyre was kindled; that Nero was buried on the left side of it, and out of his tomb grew a huge walnut-tree, the haunt of demoniacal crows till the Madonna appeared to Paschal II. and bade him cut it down; that the arch-heretic Luther sojourned in the Augustinian convent here while in Rome; that the dignitaries of Church and State received Christina of Sweden here when, after her conversion, she visited the city; that Lucrezia Borgia celebrated her betrothal in one of the churches; that it used to be a favorite place for executing brigands, whose wives then became artists' models, and whose sons, if they were like Cardinal Antonelli, became princes of the Church. So I learn from Hare in his Walks in Rome, and, if he enables me to boast the rivalry of the Piazza Navona in no such array of merits, still I will not deny my love for it. Certainly it was not a favorite place for executing brigands, but the miracle which saved St. Agnes from, cruel shame was wrought in the vaulted chambers under the church of her name there, and that is something beyond all the wonders of the Piazza del Popolo for its pathos and for its poetry. But, if the Piazza Navona had no other claim on me, I should find a peculiar pleasure in the old custom of stopping the escapes from its fountains and flooding with water the place I saw flooded with sun, for the patricians to wade and drive about in during the very hot weather and eat ices and drink coffee, while the plebeians looked sumptuously down on them from the galleries built around the lake.
It would be a very bold or very incompetent observer of the Roman situation who should venture upon a decided opinion of the relations of the monarchy and the papacy. You hear it said with intimations of special authority in the matter, that both king and pope are well content with the situation, and it is clearly explained how and why they are so; but I did not understand how or why at the moment of the explanation, or else I have now forgotten whatever was clear in it. I believe, however, it was to the effect that the pope willingly remained self-prisoned in the Vatican because, if he came out, he might not only invalidate a future claim upon the sovereign dignity which the Italian occupation had invaded, but he might incur risks from the more unfriendly extremists which would at least be very offensive. On his part, it was said that the king used the embarrassment occasioned by the pope's attitude as his own defence against the anti-Clericals, who otherwise would have urged him to far more hostile measures with the Church. The king and the pope were therefore not very real enemies, it was said by those who tried to believe themselves better informed than others.
To the passing or tarrying stranger the situation does not offer many dramatic aspects. When you are going to St. Peter's, if you will look up at the plain wall of the Vatican palace you will see two windows with their shutters open, and these are the windows of the rooms where Pius X. lives, a voluntary captive; the closed blinds are those of the rooms where Leo XIII. died, a voluntary captive. Whatever we think of the wisdom or the reason of the papal protest against the occupation of the States of the Church by the Italian people, these windows have their pathos. The pope immures himself in the Vatican and takes his walks in the Vatican gardens, whose beauty I could have envied him, if he had not been a prisoner, when I caught a glimpse of them one morning, with the high walls of their privet and laurel alleys blackening in the sun.
But otherwise the severest Protestant could not cherish so unkind a feeling toward the gentle priest whom all men speak well of for his piety and humility. It is a touching fact of his private life that his three maiden sisters, who wish to be as near him as they can, have their simple lodging over a shop for the sale of holy images in a street opening into the Piazza of St. Peter's. We all know that they are of a Venetian family neither rich nor great; their pride and joy is solely in him, as it well might be, and it is said that when they come to hear him in some high function at the Sistine Chapel their rapture of affection and devotion is as evident as it is sweet and touching.
Their relation to him is the supremely poetic fact of a situation which even one who knows of it merely by hearsay cannot refuse to feel. The tragical effect of the situation is in the straining and sundering of family ties among those who take one side or the other in the difference of the monarchy and papacy. I do not know how equally Roman society, in the large or the small sense, is divided into the Black of the Papists and the White of the Monarchists (for the mediaeval names of Neri and Bianchi are revived in the modern differences), but one cannot help hearing of instances in which their political and religious opinions part fathers and sons and mothers and daughters. These are promptly noted to the least-inquiring foreigner, and his imagination is kindled by the attribution of like variances to the members of the reigning family, who are reported respectively blacker and whiter if they are not as positively black or white as the nobles. Some of these are said to meet one another only in secret across the gulf that divides them openly; but how far the cleavage may descend among other classes I cannot venture to conjecture; I can only testify to some expressions of priest-hatred which might have shocked a hardier heretical substance than mine.
One Sunday we went to the wonderful old Church of San Clemente, which is built three deep into the earth or high into the air, one story above or below the other, in the three successive periods of imperial, mediaeval, and modern Rome. It was the day when the church is illuminated, and the visitors come with their Baedekers and Hares and Murrays to identify its antiquities of architecture and fresco; it was full of people, and, if I fancied an unusual proportion of English-speaking converts among them, that might well have been, since the adjoining convent belongs to the Irish Dominicans. But I carried with me through all the historic and artistic interest of the place the sensation left by two inscriptions daubed in black on the white convent wall next the church. One of these read: “VV. la Repubblica” (Long live the Republic), and the other: “M. ai Preti” (Death to the Priests). No attempt had been made to efface them, and as they expressed an equal hatred for the monarchy and the papacy, neither laity nor clergy may have felt obliged to interfere. Perhaps, however, it was rightly inferred that the ferocity of one inscription might be best left to counteract the influence of the other. I know that with regard to the priests you experience some such effect from the atrocious attacks in the chief satirical paper of Rome, The name of this paper was given me, with a deprecation not unmixed with recognition of its cleverness, by an Italian friend whom I was making my creditor for some knowledge of Roman journalism; and the sole copy of it which I bought was handed to me with a sort of smiling abhorrence by the kindly old kiosk woman whom I liked best to buy my daily papers of. When I came to look it through, I made more and more haste, for its satire of the priests was of an indecency so rank that it seemed to offend the nose as well as the eye. To turn from the paper was easy, but from the fact of its popularity a painful impression remained. It was not a question of whether the priests were so bad as all that, but whether its many readers believed them so, or believed them bad short of it, in the kind of wickedness they were accused of.
There can be no doubt of the constant rancor between the Clericals and the Radicals in their different phases throughout Italy. There can be almost no doubt that the Radicals will have their way increasingly, and that if, for instance, the catechism is kept in the public schools this year, it will be cast out some other year not far hence. Much, of course, depends upon whether the status can maintain itself. It is, like the status everywhere and always, very anomalous; but it is difficult to imagine either the monarchy or the papacy yielding at any point. Apparently the State is the more self-assertive of the two, but this is through the patriotism which is the political life of the people. It must always be remembered that when the Italians entered Rome and made it the capital of their kingdom they did not drive out the French troops, which had already been withdrawn; they drove out the papal troops, the picturesque and inefficient foreign volunteers who remained behind. Every memorial of that event, therefore, is a blow at the Church, so far as the Church is identified with the lost temporal power. One of the chief avenues is named Twenty-second September Street because the national troops entered Rome on that date; the tablets on the Porta Pia where they entered, the monument on the Pincio to the Cairoli brothers, who died for Italy; the statues of Garibaldi, of Cavour, of Victor Emmanuel everywhere painfully remind the papacy of its lost sovereignty. But the national feeling has gone in its expression beyond and behind the patriotic occupation of Rome; and no one who suffered conspicuously, at any time in the past, for freedom of thought through the piety of the fallen power is suffered to be forgotten. On its side the Church enters its perpetual protest in the self-imprisonment of the pope; and here and there, according to its opportunity, it makes record of what it has suffered from the State. For instance, at St. John Lateran, which theoretically forms part of the Leonine City of the Popes and is therefore extraterritorial to Italy, a stretch of wall is suffered to remain scarred by the cannon-shot which the monarchy fired when it took Rome from the papacy.
Doubtless there are other monuments of the kind, but their enumeration would not throw greater light on a situation which endures with no apparent promise of change. The patience of the Church is infinite; it lives and it outlives. Remembering that Arianism was older than Protestantism when Catholicism finally survived it, we must not be surprised if the Roman Church shall hold out against the Italian State not merely decades, but centuries. In the meanwhile to its children from other lands it means Rome above all the other Romes; and on us, its step-children of different faiths or unfaiths, its prison-house—if we choose so to think of the Vatican—has a supreme claim, if we love the sculpture of pagan Rome or the painting of Christian Rome.
We swarm to its galleries in every variety of nationality, with guide-books in every tongue, and we are very queer, for the most part, to any one of our number who can sufficiently exteriorate himself to get the rest of us in perspective. It is probably well that most of us do not stagger under any great knowledge of the crushing history of the place, which has been the scene of the most terrible experiences of the race, the most touching, the most august. Provisionally ignorant, at least, we begin to appear at the earliest practicable hour before the outermost stairway of the Vatican, and, while the Swiss Guards still have on their long, blue cloaks to keep their black and yellow legs warm, mount to the Sistine Chapel. Here we help instruct one another, as we stand about or sit about in twos and threes or larger groups, reading aloud from our polyglot Baedekers while we join in identifying the different facts. Here, stupendously familiar, whether we have seen it before or not, is Michelangelo's giant fresco of the Judgment, as prodigious as we imagined or remembered it; here are his mighty Prophets and his mighty Sibyls; and here below them, in incomparably greater charm, are the frescos of Botticelli, with the grace of his Primavera playing through them all like a strain of music and taking the soul with joy.
It is the same crowd in the Raphael Stanze, but rather silenter, for by now we have taught ourselves enough from our Baedekers at least to read them under our breaths, and we talk low before the frescos and the canvases. Some of us are even mute in the presence of the School of Athens, whatever reserves we may utter concerning the Transfiguration. If we are honest, we more or less own what our impressions really are from those other famous works, concerning which our impressions are otherwise altogether and inexpressibly unimportant; it is a question of ethics and not aesthetics, as most of our simple-hearted company suppose it to be; and, if we are dishonest, we pretend to have felt and thought things at first-hand from them which we have learned at second-hand from our reading. I will confess, for my small part, that I had more pleasure in the coloring and feeling of some of the older canvases and in here and there a Titian than in all the Raphaels in the Stanze of his name.
I was not knowing his works for the first time; no one perhaps does that, such is the multiplicity of the copies of them; and I vividly remembered them from my acquaintance with the originals four decades before, as I had remembered the Michelangelos; but in their presence and in the presence of so many other masterpieces in the different rooms, with their horrible miracles and atrocious martyrdoms, I realized as for the first time what a bloody religion ours was. It was such relief, such rest, to go from those broilings and beheadings and crucifixions and Sayings and stabbings into the long, tranquil aisles of the museum where the marble men and women, created for earthly immortality by Greek art, welcomed me to their serenity and sanity. The earlier gods might have been the devils which the early Christians fancied them, but they did not look it; they did not look as if it was they that had loosed the terrors upon mankind out of which the true faith has but barely struggled at last, now when its relaxing grasp seems slipping from the human mind. I remembered those peaceful pagans so perfectly that I could have gone confidently to this or that and hailed him friend; and though I might not have liked to claim the acquaintance of all of them in the flesh, in the marble I fled to it as refuge from the cruel visions of Christian art. If this is perhaps saying too much, I wish also to hedge from the wholesale censure of my fellow-sight-seers which I may have seemed to imply. They did not prevail so clutteringly in the sculpture galleries as in the Sistine Chapel and the Stanze. One could have the statues as much to one's self as one liked; there were courts with murmuring fountains in them; and there was a view of Rome from a certain window, where no fellow-tourist intruded between one and the innumerable roofs and domes and towers, and the heights beyond whose snows there was nothing but blue sky. It was a beautiful morning, with a sun mild as English summer, which did not prevent the afternoon from turning cold with wind and raining and hailing and snowing. This in turn did not keep off a fine red sunset, with an evening star of glittering silver that brightened as the sunset faded. At Rome the weather can be of as many minds in March as in April at New York.
But through all one's remembrance of the Roman winter a sentiment of spring plays enchantingly, like that grace of Botticelli's Primavera in his Sistine frescos. It is not a sentiment of summer, though it is sometimes a summer warmth which you feel, and except in the steam-heated hotels it does not penetrate to the interiors. In the galleries and the churches you must blow your nails if you wish to thaw your fingers, but, if you go out-of-doors, there is a radiant imitation of May awaiting you. She takes you by your thick glove and leads you in your fur-lined overcoat through sullen streets that open upon sunny squares, with fountains streaming into the crystal air, and makes you own that this is the Italian winter as advertised—that is, if you are a wanderer and a stranger; if you are an Italian and at home you keep in the out-door warmth, but shun the sun, and in-doors you wrap up more thickly than ever, or you go to bed if you have a more luxurious prejudice against shivering. If you are a beggar, as you very well may be in Rome, you impart your personal heat to a specific curbstone or the spot which you select as being most in the path of charity, and cling to it from dawn till dark. Or you acquire somehow the rights of a chair just within the padded curtain of a church, and do not leave it till the hour for closing. The Roman beggars are of all claims upon pity, but preferably I should say they were blind, and some of these are quite young girls, and mostly rather cheerful. But the very gayest beggar I remember was a legless man at the gate of the Vatican Museum; the saddest was a sullen dwarf on the way to this cripple, whose gloom a donative even of twenty-five centessimi did not suffice to abate.
It had seemed to me that in the afternoons of the old papal times, so dear to foreigners who never knew them, I used to see a series of patrician ladies driving round and round on the Pincio, reclining in their landaus and shielding their complexions from the November suns of the year 1864 with the fringed parasols of the period. In the doubt which attends all recollections of the past, after age renders us uncertain of the present, I hastened on my second Sunday at Rome in February, 1908, to enjoy this vision, if possible. I found the Pincio unexpectedly near; I found the sunshine; I found the familiar winter warmth which in Southern climates is so unlike the summer warmth in ours; but the drive which I had remembered as a long ellipse had narrowed to a little circle, where one could not have driven round faster than a slow trot without danger of vertigo. I did not find that series of apparent principessas or imaginable marchesas leaning at their lovely lengths in their landaus. I found in overwhelming majority the numbered victorias, which pass for cabs in Rome, full of decent tourists, together with a great variety of people on foot, but not much fashion and no swells that my snobbish soul could be sure of. There was, indeed, one fine moment when, at a retired point of the drive, I saw two private carriages drawn up side by side in their encounter, with two stout old ladies, whom I decided to be dowager countesses at the least, partially projected from their opposing windows and lost in a delightful exchange, as I hoped, of scandal. But the only other impressive personality was that of an elderly, obviously American gentleman, in the solitary silk hat and long frock-coat of the scene. There were other Americans, but none so formal; the English were in all degrees of informality down to tan shoes and at least one travelling-cap. The women's dress, whether they were on foot or in cabs, was not striking, though more than half of them were foreigners and could easily have afforded to outdress the Italians, especially the work people, though these were there in their best.
There was a band-stand in the space first reached by the promenaders, and there ought clearly to have been a band, but I was convinced that there was to be none by a brief colloquy between one of the cab-drivers (doubtless goaded to it by his fair freight) and the gentlest of Roman policemen, whose response was given in accents of hopeful compassion:
CABMAN: “Musica, no?” (No music?)
POLICEMAN: “Forse l' avremo oramai” (Perhaps we shall have it presently.)
We did not have it at all that Sunday, possibly because it was the day after the assassination of the King of Portugal, and the flags were at half-mast everywhere. So we went, such of us as liked, to the parapet overlooking the Piazza del Popolo, and commanding one of those prospects of Rome which are equally incomparable from every elevation. I, for my part, made the dizzying circuit of the brief drive on foot in the dark shadows of the roofing ilexes (if they are ilexes), and then strolled back and forth on the paths set thick with plinths bearing the heads of the innumerable national great—the poets, historians, artists, scientists, politicians, heroes—from the ancient Roman to the modern Italian times. I particularly looked up the poets of the last hundred years, because I had written about them in one of my many forgotten books, till I fancied a growing consciousness in them at this encounter with an admirer; they, at least, seemed to remember my book. Then I went off to the cafe overlooking them in their different alleys, and had tea next a man who was taking lemon instead of milk in his. Here I was beset with an impassioned longing to know whether he was a Russian or American, since the English always take milk in their tea, but I could not ask, and when I had suffered my question as long as I could in his presence I escaped from it, if you can call it escaping, to the more poignant question of what it would be like to come, Sunday after Sunday, to the Pincio, in the life-long voluntary exile of some Americans I knew, who meant to spend the rest of their years under the spell of Rome. I thought, upon the whole, that it would be a dull, sad fate, for somehow we seem born in a certain country in order to die in it, and I went home, to come again other Sundays to the Pincio, but not all the Sundays I promised myself.
On one of these Sundays I found Roman boys playing an inscrutable game among the busts of their storied compatriots, a sort of “I spy” or “Hide and go whoop,” counting who should be “It” in an Italian version of “Oneary, ory, ickory, an,” and then scattering in every direction behind the plinths and bushes. They were not more molestive than boys always are in a world which ought to be left entirely to old people, and I could not see that they did any harm. But somebody must have done harm, for not only was a bust here and there scribbled over in pencil, but the bust of Machiavelli had its nose freshly broken off in a jagged fracture that was very hurting to look at. This may have been done by some mistaken moralist, who saw in the old republican adviser of princes that enemy of mankind which he was once reputed to be. At any rate, I will not attribute the mutilation to the boys of Rome, whom I saw at other times foregoing so many opportunities of mischief in the Villa Bor-ghese. One of them even refused money from me there when I misunderstood his application for matches and offered him some coppers. He put my tip aside with a dignified wave of his hand and a proud backward step; and, indeed, I ought to have seen from the flat, broad cap he wore that he was a school-boy of civil condition. The Romans are not nearly so dramatic as the Neapolitans or Venetians or even as the Tuscans; but once in the same pleasance I saw a controversy between school-boys which was carried on with an animation full of beauty and finish. They argued back and forth, not violently, but vividly, and one whom I admired most enforced his reasons with charming gesticulations, whirling from his opponents with quick turns of his body and many a renunciatory retirement, and then facing about and advancing again upon the unconvinced. I decided that his admirable drama had been studied from the histrionics of his mother in domestic scenes; and, if I had been one of those other boys, I should have come over to his side instantly.
The Roman manners vary from Roman to Roman, just as our own manners, if we had any, would vary from New-Yorker to New-Yorker. Zola thinks the whole population is more or less spoiled with the conceit of Rome's ancient greatness, and shows it. One could hardly blame them if this were so; but I did not see any strong proof of it, though I could have imagined it on occasion. I should say rather that they had a republican simplicity of manner, and I liked this better in the shop people and work people than the civility overflowing into servility which one finds among the like folk, for instance, in England. I heard complaints from foreigners that the old-time deference of the lower classes was gone, but I did not miss it. Once in a cafe, indeed, the waiter spoke to me in Voi (you) instead of Lei (lordship), but the Neapolitans often do this, and I took it for a friendly effort to put me at my ease in a strange tongue with a more accustomed form. We were trying to come together on the kind of tea I wanted, but we failed, if I wanted it strong, for I got it very weak and tepid. I thought another day that it would be stronger if I could get it brought hotter, but it was not, and so I went no more to a place where I was liable to be called You instead of Lordship and still get weak tea. I think this was a mistake of mine and a loss, for at that cafe I saw some old-fashioned Italian types drinking their black coffee at afternoon tea-time out of tumblers, and others calling for pen and ink and writing letters, and ladies sweetly asking for newspapers and reading them there; and I ought to have continued coming to study them.
As to my conjectures of republican quality in the Romans, I had explicit confirmation from a very intelligent Italian who said of the anomalous social and political situation in Rome: “We Italians are naturally republicans, and, if it were a question of any other reigning family, we should have the republic. But we feel that we owe everything, the very existence of the nation, to the house of Savoy, and we are loyal to it in our gratitude. Especially we are true to the present king.” It is known, of course, that Menotti Garibaldi continues the republican that his father always was, but I heard of his saying that, if a republic were established, Victor Emmanuel III. would be overwhelmingly chosen the first president. It is the Socialists who hold off unrelentingly from the monarchy, and not the republicans, as they can be differenced from them. One of the well-known Roman anomalies is that some members of the oldest families are or have been Socialists; and such a noble was reproached because he would not go to thank the king in recognition of some signal proof of his public spirit and unselfish patriotism. He owned the generosity of the king's behavior and his claim upon popular acknowledgment, but he said that he had taught the young men of his party the duty of ignoring the monarchy, and he could not go counter to the doctrine he had preached.
If I venture to speak now of a very extraordinary trait of the municipal situation at Rome, it must be without the least pretence to authority or to more than such superficial knowledge as the most incurious visitor to Rome can hardly help having. In the capital of Christendom, where the head of the Church dwells in a tradition of supremacy hardly less Italian than Christian, the syndic, or mayor, is a Jew, and not merely a Jew, but an alien Jew, English by birth and education, a Londoner and an Oxford man. More yet, he is a Freemason, which in Italy means things anathema to the Church, and he is a very prominent Freemason. With reference to the State, his official existence, though not inimical, is through the fusion of the political parties which elected him hardly less anomalous. This combination overthrew the late Clerical city government, and it included Liberals, Republicans, Socialists, and all the other anti-Clericals. Whatever liberalism or republicanism means, socialism cannot mean less than the economic solution of regality and aristocracy in Europe, and in Italy as elsewhere. It does not mean the old-fashioned revolution; it means simply the effacement of all social differences by equal industrial obligations. So far as the Socialists can characterize it, therefore, the actual municipal government of Rome is as antimonarchical as it is antipapal. But the syndic of Rome is a man of education, of culture, of intelligence, and he is evidently a man of consummate tact. He has known how to reconcile the warring elements, which made peace in his election, to one another and to their outside antagonists, to the Church and to the State, as well as to himself, in the course he holds over a very rugged way. His opportunities of downfall are pretty constant, it will be seen, when it is explained that if a measure with which he is identified fails in the city council it becomes his duty to resign, like the prime-minister of England in the like case with Parliament, But Mr. Nathan, who is as alien in his name as in his race and religion, and is known orally to the Romans as Signor Nahtahn, has not yet been obliged to resign. He has felt his way through every difficulty, and has not yet been identified with any fatally compromising measure. In such an extremely embarrassing predicament as that created by the conflict between the labor unions and the police early in April, and eventuating in the two days' strike, he knew how to do the wise thing and the right thing. As to the incident, he held his hand and he held his tongue, but he went to visit the wounded workmen in the hospital, and he condoled with their families. He was somewhat blamed for that, but his action kept for him the confidence of that large body of his supporters who earn their living with their hands.
It is said that the common Romans do not willingly earn their living with their hands; that they like better being idle and, so far as they can, ornamental. In this they would not differ from the uncommon Romans, the moneyed, the leisured, the pedigreed classes, who reproach them for their indolence; but I do not know whether they are so indolent as all that or not. I heard it said that they no longer want work, and that when they get it they do not do it well—a supposed effect of the socialism which is supposed to have spoiled their manners. I heard it said more intelligently, as I thought, that they are not easily disciplined, and that they cannot be successfully associated in the industries requiring workmen to toil in large bodies together; they will not stand that. Also I heard it said, as I thought again rather intelligently, that where work is given them to do after a certain model, they will conform perfectly for the first three or four times; then their fatal creativeness comes into play, and they begin to better their instruction by trying to improve upon the patterns—that is, they are artists, not artisans. They must please their fancy in their work or they cannot do it well. From my own experience I cannot say whether this is generally or only sometimes true, but I can affirm that where they delayed or erred in their work they took their failure very amiably. I never saw sweeter patience than that of the Roman matron who had undertaken a small job of getting spots out of a garment, and who quite surpassed me in self-control when she announced, day after appointed day, that the work was not done yet or not done perfectly; she was politeness itself.
On the other hand, some young ladies at a fashionable concert which the queen-mother honored with her presence did not seem very polite. They kept on their immense hats, as women still do in all public places on the European continent, and they seized as many chairs as they could for friends who did not come, and at supreme moments they stood up on their chairs and spoiled such poor chance of seeing the queen-mother as the stranger might have had. While the good King Umberto lived the stranger would have had many other chances, for it is said that the queen showed herself with him to the people at the windows of their palace every afternoon; but in her widowhood she lives retired, though now and then her carriage may be seen passing through the streets, with four special policemen on bicycles following it. These waited about the doorway of the concert-hall that afternoon and formed a very simple, if effective, guard. In fact, it might be said that in its relations with the popular life the reigning family could hardly be simpler. The present king and queen are not so much seen in public as King Umberto and Queen Margherita were, but it is known from many words and deeds that King Victor Emmanuel wishes to be the friend, if not the acquaintance, of his people. When it was proposed to push the present tunnel, with its walks and drives and trolley-lines, under the Quirinal Palace and gardens, so as to connect the two principal business quarters of the city, the king was notified that the noise and jar of the traffic in it might interfere with his comfort. He asked if the tunnel would be for the general advantage, and, when this could not be denied, he gave his consent in words to some such effect as “That settles it.” When the German Emperor last visited Rome he is said to have had some state question as to whether he should drive on a certain occasion to the Palatine with the king's horses or the pope's. He who told the story did not remember how the question was solved by the emperor, but he said, “Our king walked.”
All this does not mean republican simplicity in the king; a citizen king is doubtless a contradiction in terms anywhere out of France, and even there Louis Philippe found the part difficult. But there is no doubt that the King of Italy means to be the best sort of constituional king, and, as he is in every way an uncommon man, he will probably succeed. One may fancy in him, if one likes, something of that almost touching anxiety of thoughtful Italians to be and to do all that they can for Italy, in a patriotism that seems as enlightened as it is devoted. If I had any criticism to make of such Italians it would be that they expected, or that they asked, too much of themselves. To be sure, they have a right to expect much, for they have done wonders with a country which, without great natural resources except of heart and brain, entered bankrupt into its national existence, and has now grown financially to the dimensions of its vast treasury building, with a paper currency at par and of equal validity with French and English money. If the industrial conditions in Italy were so bad as we compassionate outsiders have been taught to suppose, this financial change is one of the most important events accomplished in Europe since the great era of the racial unifications began. No one will pretend that there have not been great errors of administration in Italy, but apparently the Italians have known how to learn wisdom from their folly. There has been a great deal of industrial adversity; the cost of living has advanced; the taxes are very heavy, and the burdens are unequally adjusted; many speculators have been ruined, and much honestly invested money has been lost. But wages have increased with the prices and rents and taxes, and in a country where every ounce of coal that drives a wheel of production or transportation has to be brought a thousand miles manufactures and railroads have been multiplied.
The state has now taken over the roads and has added their cost to that of its expensive army and navy, but no reasonable witness can doubt that the Italians will be equal to this as well as their other national undertakings. These in Rome are peculiarly difficult and onerous, because they must be commensurate with the scale of antiquity. In a city surviving amid the colossal ruins of the past it would be grotesque to build anything of the modest modern dimensions such as would satisfy the eye in other capitals. The Palace of Finance, at a time when Italian paper was at a discount almost equal to that of American paper during the Civil War, had to be prophetic of the present solvency in size. The yet-unfinished Palace of Justice (one dare not recognize its beauty above one's breath) must be planned so huge that the highest story had to be left off if the foundations were to support the superstructure; the memorial of Victor Emmanuel II. must be of a vastness in keeping with the monuments of imperial Rome, some of which it will partly obscure. Yet as the nation has grown in strength under burdens and duties, it will doubtless prove adequate to the colossal architectural enterprises of its capital. Private speculation in Rome brought disaster twenty-five years ago, but now the city has overflowed with new life the edifices that long stood like empty sepulchres, and public enterprises cannot finally fail; otherwise we should not be digging the Panama Canal or be trying to keep the New York streets in repair. We may confide in the ability of the Italians to carry out their undertakings and to pay the cost out of their own pockets. It is easy to criticise them, but we cannot criticise them more severely than they criticise themselves; and perhaps, as our censure cannot profit them, we might with advantage to ourselves, now and then, convert it into recognition of the great things they have accomplished.