May 20, 1873
ONE MAY SAY WITHOUT INJUSTICE TO ANY BODY THAT THE state of mind of a great many foreigners in Rome is one of intense impatience for the moment when all other foreigners shall have departed. One may confess to this state of mind, and be no misanthrope. Rome has passed so completely for the winter months into the hands of the barbarians that that estimable character, the “quiet observer,” finds it constantly harder to concentrate his attention. He has an irritating sense of his impressions being perverted and adulterated; the venerable visage of Rome betrays an unbecoming eagerness to see itself mirrored in English, American, German eyes. It is not simply that you are never first or never alone at the classic or historic spots where you have dreamt of persuading the shy genius loci into confidential utterance; it is not simply that St. Peter’s, the Vatican, the Palatine, are for ever ringing with English voices: it is the general oppressive feeling that the city of the soul has become for the time a monstrous mixture of the watering-place and the curiosity-shop, and that its most ardent life is that of the tourists who haggle over false intaglios, and yawn through palaces and temples. But you are told of a happy time when these abuses begin to pass away, when Rome becomes Rome again, and you may have it all to yourself. “You may like Rome more or less now,” I was told during the height of the season; “but you must wait till the month of May to love it. Then the foreigners, or the excess of them, are gone; the galleries and ruins are empty, and the place,” said my informant, who was a Frenchman, “renaît à elle-méme,” Indeed, I was haunted all winter by an irresistible prevision of what Rome must be in spring. Certain charming places seemed to murmur: “Ah, this is nothing! Come back in May, and see the sky above us almost black with its excess of blue, and the new grass already deep, but still vivid, and the white roses tumbling in odorous spray over the walls, and the warm radiant air dropping gold into all our coloring.”
A month ago I spent a week in the country, and on my return, the first time I went into the Corso, I became conscious of a change. Something very pleasant had happened, but at first I was at a loss to define it. Then suddenly I comprehended—there were but half as many people, and these were chiefly good Italians. There had been a great exodus, and now, physically, morally, aesthetically, there was elbow-room. In the afternoon I went to the Pincio, and the Pincio was almost dull. The band was playing to a dozen ladies, as they lay in their landaus, poising their lace-fringed parasols; but they had only one light-gloved dandy apiece hanging over their carriage-doors. By the parapet of the great terrace which sweeps the city stood three or four quiet observers looking at the sunset, with their Baedekers peeping out of their pockets; the sunsets not being down with their tariff in these precious volumes, I good-naturedly hoped that, like myself, they were committing the harmless folly of taking mental possession of the scene before them.
It is the same good-nature that leads me to violate the instinct of monopoly, and proclaim that Rome in May is worth waiting for. I have just been so gratified at finding myself in undisturbed possession for a couple of hours of the Museum of the Lateran that I can afford to be magnanimous. And yet I keep within the bounds of reason when I say that it would be hard as a traveller or student to pass pleasanter days than these. The weather for a month has been perfect, the sky magnificently blue, the air lively enough, the nights cool, too cool, and the whole gray old city illumined with the most irresistible smile. Rome, which in some moods, especially to new-comers, seems a terribly gloomy place, gives on the whole, and as one knows it better, an indefinable impression of gaiety. This contagious influence lurks in all its darkness and dirt and decay—a something more careless and hopeless than our thrifty Northern cheerfulness, and yet more genial, more urbane, than mere indifference. The Roman temper is a healthy and happy one, and you feel it abroad in the streets even when the scirocco blows, and the goal of man’s life assumes a horrible identity with the mouth of a furnace. But who can analyze even the simplest Roman impression? It is compounded of so many things, it says so much, it suggests so much, it so quickens the intellect and so flatters the heart, that before we are fairly conscious of it the imagination has marked it for her own, and exposed us to a perilous likelihood of talking nonsense about it.
The smile of Rome, as I have called it, and its intense suggestiveness to those who are willing to ramble irresponsibly and take things as they come, is ushered in with the first breath of spring, and it grows and grows with the advancing season, till it wraps the whole place in its tenfold charm. As the process goes on, you can do few better things than go often to the Villa Borghese, and sit on the grass (on a stout bit of drapery) and watch its exquisite stages. It is a more magical spring than ours, even when ours has left off its damnable faces, and begun. Nature surrenders herself to it with a frankness which outstrips your most unutterable longings, and leaves you, as I say, nothing to do but to lay your head among the anemones at the base of a high-stemmed pine, and gaze up crestward and skyward along its slanting silvery column. You may look at the spring in Rome from a dozen of these choice standpoints, and have a different villa for your observations every day in the week. The Doria, the Ludovisi, the Medici, the Albani, the Wolkonski, the Chigi, the Mellini, the Massimo—there are more of them, with all their sights, and sounds, and odors, and memories, than you have senses for. But I prefer none of them to the Borghese, which is free to all the world at all times, and yet never crowded; for when the whirl of carriages is great in the middle regions, you may find a hundred untrodden spots and silent corners, tenanted at the worst by a group of those long-skirted young Propagandists, who stalk about with solemn angularity, each with a book under his arm, like silhouettes from a mediaeval missal, and “compose” so extremely well with the picturesqueness of cypresses, and of stretches of golden-russet wall overtopped by the intense blue sky. And yet if the Borghese is good, the Medici is strangely charming; and you may stand in the little belvedere which rises with such surpassing oddity out of the dusky heart of the Boschetto at the latter establishment—a miniature presentation of the wand of the Sleeping Beauty—and look across at the Ludovisi pines lifting their crooked parasols into a sky of what a painter would call the most morbid blue, and declare that the place where they grew is the most delightful in the world. The Villa Ludovisi has been all winter the residence of the lady familiarly known in Roman society as “Rosina,” the king’s morganatic wife. But this, apparently, is the only familiarity which she allows, for the grounds of the villa have been rigidly closed, to the inconsolable regret of old Roman sojourners. But just as the nightingales began to sing, the august padrona departed, and the public, with certain restrictions, have been admitted to hear them. It is a really princely place, and there could be no better example of the expansive tendencies of ancient privilege than the fact of its whole vast extent falling within the city walls. It has in this respect very much the same sort of impressiveness as the great intramural demesne of Magdalen College at Oxford. The stern old ramparts of Rome form the outer enclosure of the villa, and hence a series of picturesque effects which it would be unscrupulous flattery to say you can imagine. The grounds are laid out in the formal last-century manner; but nowhere do the straight black cypresses lead off the gaze into vistas of a more fictive sort of melancholy; nowhere are there grander, smoother walls of laurel and myrtle.
I recently spent an afternoon hour at the little Protestant cemetery close to St. Paul’s Gate, where the ancient and the modern world are most impressively contrasted. They make between them one of the solemn places of Rome—although, indeed, when funereal things are so interfused with picturesqueness, it seems ungrateful to call them sad. Here is a mixture of tears and smiles, of stones and flowers, of mourning cypresses and radiant sky, which almost tempts one to fancy one is looking back at death from the brighter side of the grave. The cemetery nestles in an angle of the city wall, and the older graves are sheltered by a mass of ancient brickwork, through whose narrow loopholes you may peep at the purple landscape of the Campagna. Shelley’s grave is here, buried in roses—a happy grave every way for a poet who was personally poetic. It is impossible to imagine anything more impenetrably tranquil than this little corner in the bend of the protecting rampart. You seem to see a cluster of modern ashes held tenderly in the rugged hand of the Past. The past is tremendously embodied in the hoary pyramid of Caius Cestius, which rises hard by, half within the wall and half without, cutting solidly into the solid blue of the sky, and casting its pagan shadow upon the grass of English graves—that of Keats, among others—with a certain poetic justice. It is a wonderful confusion of mortality and a grim enough admonition of our helpless promiscuity in the crucible of time. But to my sense, the most touching thing there is the look of the pious English inscriptions among all these Roman memories. There is something extremely appealing in their universal expression of that worst of trouble—trouble in a foreign land; but something that stirs the heart even more deeply is the fine Scriptural language in which everything is recorded. The echoes of massive Latinity with which the atmosphere is charged suggest nothing more majestic and monumental. I may seem unduly sentimental; but I confess that the charge to the reader in the monument to Miss Bathurst, who was drowned in the Tiber in 1824: “If thou art young and lovely, build not thereon, for she who lies beneath thy feet in death was the loveliest flower ever crept in its bloom”—seemed to me irresistibly a case for tears. The whole elaborate inscription, indeed, was curiously suggestive. The English have the reputation of being the most reticent people in the world, and, as there is no smoke without fire, I suppose they have done something to deserve it; but for my own part, I am for ever meeting the most startling examples of the insular faculty to “gush.” In this instance the mother of the deceased takes the public into her confidence with surprising frankness, omits no detail, and embraces the opportunity to mention by the way that she had already lost her husband by a most mysterious death. Yet the whole elaborate record is profoundly touching. It has an air of old-fashioned gentility which makes its frankness tragic. You seem to hear the garrulity of passionate grief.
To be choosing this well-worn picturesqueness for a theme, when there are matters of modern moment going on in Rome, may seem to demand some apology. But I can make no claim to your special correspondent’s faculty for getting an “inside view” of things, and I have hardly more than a picturesque impression of the Pope’s illness and of the discussion of the Law of the Convents. Indeed, I am afraid to speak of the Pope’s illness at all, lest I should say something egregiously heartless about it, and recall too forcibly that unnatural husband who was heard to wish that his wife would get well or—something! He had his reasons, and Roman tourists have theirs in the shape of a vague hankering for something spectacular at St. Peter’s. If it takes a funeral to produce it, a funeral let it be. Meanwhile, we have been having a glimpse of the spectacular side of the Religious Corporations Act. Hearing one morning a great hubbub in the Corso, I stepped forth upon my balcony. A couple of hundred men were strolling slowly down the street with their hands in their pockets, shouting in unison, “Abbasso il ministero!” and huzzaing in chorus. Just beneath my window they stopped and began to murmur, “Al Quirinale, al Quirinale!” The crowd surged a moment gently, and then drifted to the Quirinal, where it scuffled harmlessly with half a dozen of the king’s soldiers. It ought to have been impressive, for what was it essentially but the seeds of revolution? But its carriage was too gentle and its cries too musical to send the most timorous tourist to packing his trunk. As I began with saying: in Rome, in May, everything has an amiable side, even émeutes!