The Spirit of Rome Part 6

A meadow near the Tiber, of gra.s.s 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 gra.s.s 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 gra.s.s 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 advertis.e.m.e.nts 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 pa.s.s 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 Mediaeval 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 bas.e.m.e.nts behind the h.o.a.rdings 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 advertis.e.m.e.nt of Anzio, in English, setting forth to the traveller its merits connected with Nero, and I think Coriola.n.u.s--Nero and Coriola.n.u.s as elements of _reclame_!

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 s.p.a.ce, 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 mediaeval 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 pa.s.sages 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 gla.s.s 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 pa.s.sage--a dirty, tawdry church, with a few frowsy, s.l.u.ttish 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. .h.i.therto 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 ill.u.s.trated h.o.a.rdings 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 Ma.s.s at a side altar. Eight small boys blocking the way, with a crowd of s.l.u.ttish, tawdry worshippers, with the usual Roman church stifling dirty smell. These Roman churches, all save the basilicas, are inconceivably ill kept, frowsy, musty, tawdry, s.l.u.ttish: they belong not to G.o.d, 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, Ma.s.s 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 s.l.u.ttish Rome.

Poets really make places. I cannot pa.s.s the Consolazione Hospital without thinking of Pompilia's death there; and the imaginary bishop, of whom there is no visible trace, haunts Sta. Pra.s.sede.

VI.