Italian Hours

A Few Other Roman Neighbourhoods

If I find my old notes, in all these Roman connections,

inevitably bristle with the spirit of the postscript, so I give

way to this prompting to the extent of my scant space and with

the sense of other occasions awaiting me on which I shall have to

do no less. The impression of Rome was repeatedly to renew itself

for the author of these now rather antique and artless accents;

was to overlay itself again and again with almost heavy

thicknesses of experience, the last of which is, as I write,

quite fresh to memory; and he has thus felt almost ashamed to

drop his subject (though it be one that tends so easily to turn

to the infinite) as if the law of change had in all the years had

nothing to say to his case. It's of course but of his case alone

that he speaks--wondering little what he may make of it for the

profit of others by an attempt, however brief, to point the moral

of the matter, or in other words compare the musing mature

visitor's "feeling about Rome" with that of the extremely

agitated, even if though extremely inexpert, consciousness

reflected in the previous pages. The actual, the current Rome

affects him as a world governed by new conditions altogether and

ruefully pleading that sorry fact in the ear of the antique

wanderer wherever he may yet mournfully turn for some re-capture

of what he misses. The city of his first unpremeditated rapture

shines to memory, on the other hand, in the manner of a lost

paradise the rustle of whose gardens is still just audible enough

in the air to make him wonder if some sudden turn, some recovered

vista, mayn't lead him back to the thing itself. My genial, my

helpful tag, at this point, would doubtless properly resolve

itself, for the reader, into a clue toward some such successful

ingenuity of quest; a remark I make, I may add, even while

reflecting that the Paradise isn't apparently at all "lost" to

visitors not of my generation. It is the seekers of that

remote and romantic tradition who have seen it, from one period

of ten, or even of five, years to another, systematically and

remorselessly built out from their view. Their helpless plaint,

their sense of the generally irrecoverable and unspeakable, is

not, however, what I desire here most to express; I should like,

on the contrary, with ampler opportunity, positively to enumerate

the cases, the cases of contact, impression, experience, in which

the cold ashes of a long-chilled passion may fairly feel

themselves made to glow again. No one who has ever loved Rome as

Rome could be loved in youth and before her poised basketful of

the finer appeals to fond fancy was actually upset, wants to stop

loving her; so that our bleeding and wounded, though perhaps not

wholly moribund, loyalty attends us as a hovering admonitory,

anticipatory ghost, one of those magnanimous life-companions who

before complete extinction designate to the other member of the

union their approved successor. So it is at any rate that I

conceive the pilgrim old enough to have become aware in all these

later years of what he misses to be counselled and pacified in

the interest of recognitions that shall a little make up for it.

It was this wisdom I was putting into practice, no doubt, for

instance, when I lately resigned myself to motoring of a splendid

June day "out to" Subiaco; as a substitute for a resignation that

had anciently taken, alas, but the form of my never getting there

at all. Everything that day, moreover, seemed right, surely;

everything on certain other days that were like it through their

large indebtedness, at this, that and the other point, to the

last new thing, seemed so right that they come back to me now,

after a moderate interval, in the full light of that unchallenged

felicity. I couldn't at all gloriously recall, for instance, as I

floated to Subiaco on vast brave wings, how on the occasion of my

first visit to Rome, thirty-eight years before, I had devoted

certain evenings, evenings of artless "preparation" in my room at

the inn, to the perusal of Alphonse Dantier's admirable

Monast*** B******** d'ltalie, taking piously for

granted that I should get myself somehow conveyed to Monte

Cassino and to Subiaco at least: such an affront to the passion

of curiosity, the generally infatuated state then kindled, would

any suspicion of my foredoomed, my all but interminable,

privation during visits to come have seemed to me. Fortune, in

the event, had never favoured my going, but I was to give myself

up at last to the sense of her quite taking me by the hand, and

that is how I now think of our splendid June day at Subiaco. The

note of the wondrous place itself is conventional "wild" Italy

raised to the highest intensity, the ideally, the sublimely

conventional and wild, complete and supreme in itself, without a

disparity or a flaw; which character of perfect picturesque

orthodoxy seemed more particularly to begin for me, I remember,

as we passed, on our way, through that indescribable and

indestructible Tivoli, where the jumble of the elements of the

familiarly and exploitedly, the all too notoriously fair and

queer, was more violent and vociferous than ever--so the whole

spectacle there seemed at once to rejoice in cockneyfication and

to resist it. There at least I had old memories to renew--

including that in especial, from a few years back, of one of the

longest, hottest, dustiest return-drives to Rome that the

Campagna on a sirocco day was ever to have treated me to.

[Illustration: VILLA D'ESTE, TIVOLI]

That was to be more than made up on this later occasion by an

hour of early evening, snatched on the run back to Rome, that

remains with me as one of those felicities we are wise to leave

for ever, just as they are, just, that is, where they fell, never

attempting to renew or improve them. So happy a chance was it

that ensured me at the afternoon's end a solitary stroll through

the Villa d' Este, where the day's invasion, whatever it might

have been, had left no traces and where I met nobody in the great

rococo passages and chambers, and in the prodigious alleys and on

the repeated flights of tortuous steps, but the haunting Genius

of Style, into whose noble battered old face, as if it had come

out clearer in the golden twilight and on recognition of response

so deeply moved, I seemed to exhale my sympathy. This was truly,

amid a conception and order of things all mossed over from

disuse, but still without a form abandoned or a principle

disowned, one of the hours that one doesn't forget. The ruined

fountains seemed strangely to wait, in the stillness and

under cover of the approaching dusk, not to begin ever again to

play, also, but just only to be tenderly imagined to do so; quite

as everything held its breath, at the mystic moment, for the drop

of the cruel and garish exposure, for the Spirit of the place to

steal forth and go his round. The vistas of the innumerable

mighty cypresses ranged themselves, in their files and companies,

like beaten heroes for their captain's, review; the great

artificial "works" of every description, cascades, hemicycles,

all graded and grassed and stone-seated as for floral games,

mazes and bowers and alcoves and grottos, brave indissoluble

unions of the planted and the builded symmetry, with the terraces

and staircases that overhang and the arcades and cloisters that

underspread, made common cause together as for one's taking up a

little, in kindly lingering wonder, the "feeling" out of which

they have sprung. One didn't see it, under the actual influence,

one wouldn't for the world have seen it, as that they longed to

be justified, during a few minutes in the twenty-four hours, of

their absurdity of pomp and circumstance--but only that they

asked for company, once in a way, as they were so splendidly

formed to give it, and that the best company, in a changed world,

at the end of time, what could they hope it to be but just the

lone, the dawdling person of taste, the visitor with a flicker of

fancy, not to speak of a pang of pity, to spare for them? It was

in the flicker of fancy, no doubt, that as I hung about the great

top-most terrace in especial, and then again took my way through

the high gaunt corridors and the square and bare alcoved and

recessed saloons, all overscored with such a dim waste of those

painted, those delicate and capricious decorations which the

loggie of the Vatican promptly borrowed from the ruins of the

Palatine, or from whatever other revealed and inspiring

ancientries, and which make ghostly confession here of that

descent, I gave the rein to my sense of the sinister too, of that

vague after-taste as of evil things that lurks so often, for a

suspicious sensibility, wherever the terrible game of the life of

the Renaissance was played as the Italians played it; wherever

the huge tessellated chessboard seems to stretch about us; swept

bare, almost always violently swept bare, of its chiselled and

shifting figures, of every value and degree, but with this

echoing desolation itself representing the long gasp, as it were,

of overstrained time, the great after-hush that follows on things

too wonderful or dreadful.

I am putting here, however, my cart before my horse, for the hour

just glanced at was but a final tag to a day of much brighter

curiosity, and which seemed to take its baptism, as we passed

through prodigious perched and huddled, adorably scattered and

animated and even crowded Tivoli, from the universal happy spray

of the drumming Anio waterfalls, all set in their permanent

rainbows and Sibylline temples and classic allusions and Byronic

quotations; a wondrous romantic jumble of such things and quite

others--heterogeneous inns and clamorous guingettes and

factories grabbing at the torrent, to say nothing of innumerable

guides and donkeys and white-tied, swallow-tailed waiters dashing

out of grottos and from under cataracts, and of the air, on the

part of the whole population, of standing about, in the most

characteristic contadino manner, to pounce on you and take

you somewhere, snatch you from somebody else, shout something at

you, the aqueous and other uproar permitting, and then charge you

for it, your innocence aiding. I'm afraid our run the rest of the

way to Subiaco remains with me but as an after-sense of that

exhilaration, in spite of our rising admirably higher, all the

while, and plunging constantly deeper into splendid solitary

gravities, supreme romantic solemnities and sublimities, of

landscape. The Benedictine convent, which clings to certain more

or less vertiginous ledges and slopes of a vast precipitous

gorge, constitutes, with the whole perfection of its setting, the

very ideal of the tradition of that extraordinary in the

romantic handed down to us, as the most attaching and

inviting spell of Italy, by all the old academic literature of

travel and art of the Salvator Rosas and Claudes. This is the

main tribute I may pay in a few words to an impression of which a

sort of divine rightness of oddity, a pictorial felicity that was

almost not of this world, but of a higher degree of distinction

altogether, affected me as the leading note; yet about the whole

exquisite complexity of which I can't pretend to be informing.

All the elements of the scene melted for me together; even from

the pause for luncheon on a grassy wayside knoll, over heaven

knows what admirable preparatory headlong slopes and ravines and

iridescent distances, under spreading chestnuts and in the high

air that was cool and sweet, to the final pedestrian climb of

sinuous mountain-paths that the shining limestone and the strong

green of shrub and herbage made as white as silver. There the

miraculous home of St. Benedict awaited us in the form of a

builded and pictured-over maze of chapels and shrines, cells and

corridors, stupefying rock-chambers and caves, places all at an

extraordinary variety of different levels and with labyrinthine

intercommunications; there the spirit of the centuries sat like

some invisible icy presence that only permits you to stare and

wonder. I stared, I wondered, I went up and down and in and out

and lost myself in the fantastic fable of the innumerable hard

facts themselves; and whenever I could, above all, I peeped out

of small windows and hung over chance terraces for the love of

the general outer picture, the splendid fashion in which the

fretted mountains of marble, as they might have been, round

about, seemed to inlay themselves, for the effect of the

"distinction" I speak of, with vegetations of dark emerald. There

above all--or at least in what such aspects did further for the

prodigy of the Convent, whatever that prodigy might for do

them--was, to a life-long victim of Italy, almost verily

as never before, the operation of the old love-philtre; there

were the inexhaustible sources of interest and charm.

[Illustration: SUBIACO]

These mystic fountains broke out for me elsewhere, again and

again, I rejoice to say--and perhaps more particularly, to be

frank about it, where the ground about them was pressed with due

emphasis of appeal by the firm wheels of the great winged car. I

motored, under invitation and protection, repeatedly back into

the sense of the other years, that sense of the "old" and

comparatively idle Rome of my particular infatuated prime which I

was living to see superseded, and this even when the fond vista

bristled with innumerable "signs of the times," unmistakable

features of the new era, that, by I scarce know what perverse

law, succeeded in ministering to a happy effect. Some of these

false notes proceed simply from the immense growth of every sort

of facilitation--so that people are much more free than of old to

come and go and do, to inquire and explore, to pervade and

generally "infest"; with a consequent loss, for the fastidious

individual, of his blest earlier sense, not infrequent, of having

the occasion and the impression, as he used complacently to say,

all to himself. We none of us had anything quite all to ourselves

during an afternoon at Ostia, on a beautiful June Sunday; it was

a different affair, rather, from the long, the comparatively slow

and quite unpeopled drive that I was to remember having last

taken early in the autumn thirty years before, and which occupied

the day--with the aid of a hamper from once supreme old Spillman,

the provider for picnics to a vanished world (since I suspect the

antique ideal of "a picnic in the Campagna," the fondest

conception of a happy day, has lost generally much of its

glamour). Our idyllic afternoon, at any rate, left no chord of

sensibility that could possibly have been in question untouched-

-not even that of tea on the shore at Fiumincino, after we had

spent an hour among the ruins of Ostia and seen our car ferried

across the Tiber, almost saffron-coloured here and swirling

towards its mouth, on a boat that was little more than a big

rustic raft and that yet bravely resisted the prodigious weight.

What shall I say, in the way of the particular, of the general

felicity before me, for the sweetness of the hour to which the

incident just named, with its strange and amusing juxtapositions

of the patriarchally primitive and the insolently supersubtle,

the earliest and the latest efforts of restless science, were

almost immediately to succeed?

We had but skirted the old gold-and-brown walls of Castel Fusano,

where the massive Chigi tower and the immemorial stone-pines and

the afternoon sky and the desolate sweetness and concentrated

rarity of the picture all kept their appointment, to fond memory,

with that especial form of Roman faith, the fine aesthetic

conscience in things, that is never, never broken. We had wound

through tangled lanes and met handsome sallow country-folk

lounging at leisure, as became the Sunday, and ever so pleasantly

and garishly clothed, if not quite consistently costumed, as just

on purpose to feed our wanton optimism; and then we had addressed

ourselves with a soft superficiality to the open, the exquisite

little Ostian reliquary, an exhibition of stony vaguenesses half

straightened out. The ruins of the ancient port of Rome, the

still recoverable identity of streets and habitations and other

forms of civil life, are a not inconsiderable handful, though

making of the place at best a very small sister to Pompeii; but a

soft superficiality is ever the refuge of my shy sense before any

ghost of informed reconstitution, and I plead my surrender to it

with the less shame that I believe I "enjoy" such scenes even on

such futile pretexts as much as it can be appointed them by the

invidious spirit of History to be enjoyed. It may be said,

of course, that enjoyment, question-begging term at best, isn't

in these austere connections designated--but rather some

principle of appreciation that can at least give a coherent

account of itself. On that basis then--as I could, I profess,

but revel in the looseness of my apprehension, so wide it

seemed to fling the gates of vision and divination--I won't

pretend to dot, as it were, too many of the i's of my

incompetence. I was competent only to have been abjectly

interested. On reflection, moreover, I see that no impression of

over-much company invaded the picture till the point was exactly

reached for its contributing thoroughly to character and

amusement; across at Fiumincino, which the age of the bicycle has

made, in a small way, the handy Gravesend or Coney Island of

Rome, the caf* and birrerie were at high pressure, and

the bustle all motley and friendly beside the melancholy river,

where the water-side life itself had twenty quaint and vivid

notes and where a few upstanding objects, ancient or modern,

looked eminent and interesting against the delicate Roman sky

that dropped down and down to the far-spreading marshes of

malaria. Besides which "company" is ever intensely gregarious,

hanging heavily together and easily outwitted; so that we had but

to proceed a scant distance further and meet the tideless

Mediterranean, where it tumbled in a trifle breezily on the

sands, to be all to ourselves with our tea-basket, quite as in

the good old fashion--only in truth with the advantage that the

contemporary tea-basket is so much improved.

I jumble my memories as a tribute to the whole idyll--I give the

golden light in which they come back to me for what it is worth;

worth, I mean, as allowing that the possibilities of charm of the

Witch of the Seven Hills, as we used to call her in magazines,

haven't all been vulgarised away. It was precisely there, on such

an occasion and in such a place, that this might seem signally to

have happened; whereas in fact the mild suburban riot, in which

the so gay but so light potations before the array of little

houses of entertainment were what struck one as really making

most for mildness, was brushed over with a fabled grace, was

harmonious, felicitous, distinguished, quite after the fashion of

some thoroughly trained chorus or phalanx of opera or ballet.

Bicycles were stacked up by the hundred; the youth of Rome are

ardent cyclists, with a great taste for flashing about in more or

less denuded or costumed athletic and romantic bands and guilds,

and on our return cityward, toward evening, along the right bank

of the river, the road swarmed with the patient wheels and bent

backs of these budding cives Romani quite to the effect of

its finer interest. Such at least, I felt, could only be one's

acceptance of almost any feature of a scene bathed in that

extraordinarily august air that the waning Roman day is so

insidiously capable of taking on when any other element of style

happens at all to contribute. Weren't they present, these other

elements, in the great classic lines and folds, the fine academic

or historic attitudes of the darkening land itself as it hung

about the old highway, varying its vague accidents, but achieving

always perfect "composition"? I shamelessly add that cockneyfied

impression, at all events, to what I have called my jumble; Rome,

to which we all swept on together in the wondrous glowing medium,

saved everything, spreading afar her wide wing and

applying after all but her supposed grand gift of the secret of

salvation. We kept on and on into the great dim rather sordidly

papal streets that approach the quarter of St. Peter's; to the

accompaniment, finally, of that markedly felt provocation of fond

wonder which had never failed to lie in wait for me under any

question of a renewed glimpse of the huge unvisited rear of the

basilica. There was no renewed glimpse just then, in the

gloaming; but the region I speak of had been for me, in fact,

during the previous weeks, less unvisited than ever before, so

that I had come to count an occasional walk round and about it as

quite of the essence of the convenient small change with which

the heterogeneous City may still keep paying you. These

frequentations in the company of a sculptor friend had been

incidental to our reaching a small artistic foundry of fine

metal, an odd and interesting little establishment placed, as who

should say in the case of such a mere left-over scrap of a large

loose margin, nowhere: it lurked so unsuspectedly, that is, among

the various queer things that Rome comprehensively refers to as

"behind St. Peter's."

We had passed then, on the occasion of our several pilgrimages,

in beneath the great flying, or at least straddling buttresses to

the left of the mighty fa***, where you enter that great idle

precinct of fine dense pavement and averted and sacrificed

grandeur, the reverse of the monstrous medal of the front. Here

the architectural monster rears its back and shoulders on an

equal scale and this whole unregarded world of colossal

consistent symmetry and hidden high finish gives you the measure

of the vast total treasure of items and features. The outward

face of all sorts of inward majesties of utility and ornament

here above all correspondingly reproduces itself; the expanses of

golden travertine--the freshness of tone, the cleanness of

surface, in the sunny air, being extraordinary--climb and soar

and spread under the crushing weight of a scheme carried out in

every ponderous particular. Never was such a show of

wasted art, of pomp for pomp's sake, as where all the

chapels bulge and all the windows, each one a separate

constructional masterpiece, tower above almost grassgrown

vacancy; with the full and immediate effect, of course, of

reading us a lesson on the value of lawful pride. The pride is

the pride of indifference as to whether a greatness so founded be

gaped at in all its features or not. My friend and I were alone

to gape at them most often while, for the unfailing impression of

them, on our way to watch the casting of our figure, we extended

our circuit of the place. To which I may add, as another example

of that tentative, that appealing twitch of the garment of Roman

association of which one kept renewing one's consciousness, the

half-hour at the little foundry itself was all charming--with

its quite shabby and belittered and ramshackle recall of the old

Roman "art-life" of one's early dreams. Everything was somehow in

the picture, the rickety sheds, the loose paraphernalia, the

sunny, grassy yard where a goat was browsing; then the queer

interior gloom of the pits, frilled with little overlooking

scaffoldings and bridges, for the sinking fireward of the image

that was to take on hardness; and all the pleasantness and

quickness, the beguiling refinement, of the three or four light

fine "hands" of whom the staff consisted and into whose type and

tone one liked to read, with whatever harmless extravagance, so

many signs that a lively sense of stiff processes, even in humble

life, could still leave untouched the traditional rare feeling

for the artistic. How delightful such an occupation in such a

general setting--those of my friend, I at such moments

irrepressibly moralised; and how one might after such a fashion

endlessly go and come and ask nothing better; or if better, only

so to the extent of another impression I was to owe to him: that

of an evening meal spread, in the warm still darkness that made

no candle flicker, on the wide high space of an old loggia that

overhung, in one quarter, the great obelisked Square preceding

one of the Gates, and in the other the Tiber and the far

Trastevere and more things than I can say--above all, as it were,

the whole backward past, the mild confused romance of the Rome

one had loved and of which one was exactly taking leave under

protection of the friendly lanterned and garlanded feast and the

commanding, all-embracing roof-garden. It was indeed a

reconciling, it was an altogether penetrating, last hour.

1909.