Italian Hours

From A Roman Note-Book

December 28, 1872.--In Rome again for the last three days--that

second visit which, when the first isn't followed by a fatal

illness in Florence, the story goes that one is doomed to pay. I

didn't drink of the Fountain of Trevi on the eve of departure the

other time; but I feel as if I had drunk of the Tiber itself.

Nevertheless as I drove from the station in the evening I

wondered what I should think of it at this first glimpse hadn't I

already known it. All manner of evil perhaps. Paris, as I passed

along the Boulevards three evenings before to take the train, was

swarming and glittering as befits a great capital. Here, in the

black, narrow, crooked, empty streets, I saw nothing I would fain

regard as eternal. But there were new gas-lamps round the

spouting Triton in Piazza Barberini and a newspaper stall on the

corner of the Condotti and the Corso--salient signs of the

emancipated state. An hour later I walked up to Via Gregoriana by

Piazza di Spagna. It was all silent and deserted, and the great

flight of steps looked surprisingly small. Everything seemed

meagre, dusky, provincial. Could Rome after all really be

a world-city? That queer old rococo garden gateway at the top of

the Gregoriana stirred a dormant memory; it awoke into a

consciousness of the delicious mildness of the air, and very

soon, in a little crimson drawing-room, I was reconciled and re-

initiated.... Everything is dear (in the way of lodgings), but it

hardly matters, as everything is taken and some one else paying

for it. I must make up my mind to a bare perch. But it seems

poorly perverse here to aspire to an "interior" or to be

conscious of the economic side of life. The ******** is so

intense that you feel you should live on the taste of it, should

extract the nutritive essence of the atmosphere. For positively

it's such an atmosphere! The weather is perfect, the sky

as blue as the most exploded tradition fames it, the whole air

glowing and throbbing with lovely colour.... The glitter of Paris

is now all gaslight. And oh the monotonous miles of rain-washed

asphalte!

December 30th.--I have had nothing to do with the

"ceremonies." In fact I believe there have hardly been any--no

midnight mass at the Sistine chapel, no silver trumpets at St.

Peter's. Everything is remorselessly clipped and curtailed--the

Vatican in deepest mourning. But I saw it in its superbest

scarlet in '69.... I went yesterday with L. to the Colonna

gardens--an adventure that would have reconverted me to Rome if

the thing weren't already done. It's a rare old place--rising in

mouldy bosky terraces and mossy stairways and winding walks from

the back of the palace to the top of the Quirinal. It's the grand

style of gardening, and resembles the present natural manner as a

chapter of Johnsonian rhetoric resembles a piece of clever

contemporary journalism. But it's a better style in horticulture

than in literature; I prefer one of the long-drawn blue-green

Colonna vistas, with a maimed and mossy-coated garden goddess at

the end, to the finest possible quotation from a last-century

classic. Perhaps the best thing there is the old orangery with

its trees in fantastic terra-cotta tubs. The late afternoon light

was gilding the monstrous jars and suspending golden chequers

among the golden-fruited leaves. Or perhaps the best thing is the

broad terrace with its mossy balustrade and its benches; also its

view of the great naked Torre di Nerone (I think), which might

look stupid if the rosy brickwork didn't take such a colour in

the blue air. Delightful, at any rate, to stroll and talk there

in the afternoon sunshine.

January 2nd, 1873. --Two or three drives with A.--one to

St. Paul's without the Walls and back by a couple of old churches

on the Aventine. I was freshly struck with the rare distinction

of the little Protestant cemetery at the Gate, lying in the

shadow of the black sepulchral Pyramid and the thick-growing

black cypresses. Bathed in the clear Roman light the place is

heartbreaking for what it asks you--in such a world as

this--to renounce. If it should "make one in love with

death to lie there," that's only if death should be conscious. As

the case stands, the weight of a tremendous past presses upon the

flowery sod, and the sleeper's mortality feels the contact of all

the mortality with which the brilliant air is tainted.... The

restored Basilica is incredibly splendid. It seems a last pompous

effort of formal Catholicism, and there are few more striking

emblems of later Rome--the Rome foredoomed to see Victor

Emmanuel in the Quirinal, the Rome of abortive councils and

unheeded anathemas. It rises there, gorgeous and useless, on its

miasmatic site, with an air of conscious bravado--a florid

advertisement of the superabundance of faith. Within it's

magnificent, and its magnificence has no shabby spots--a rare

thing in Rome. Marble and mosaic, alabaster and malachite, lapis

and porphyry, incrust it from pavement to cornice and flash back

their polished lights at each other with such a splendour of

effect that you seem to stand at the heart of some immense

prismatic crystal. One has to come to Italy to know marbles and

love them. I remember the fascination of the first great show of

them I met in Venice--at the Scalzi and Gesuiti. Colour has in no

other form so cool and unfading a purity and lustre. Softness of

tone and hardness of substance--isn't that the sum of the

artist's desire? G., with his beautiful caressing, open-lipped

Roman utterance, so easy to understand and, to my ear, so finely

suggestive of genuine Latin, not our horrible Anglo-Saxon and

Protestant kind, urged upon us the charms of a return by the

Aventine and the sight of a couple of old churches. The best is

Santa Sabina, a very fine old structure of the fifth century,

mouldering in its dusky solitude and consuming its own antiquity.

What a massive heritage Christianity and Catholicism are leaving

here! What a substantial fact, in all its decay, this memorial

Christian temple outliving its uses among the sunny gardens and

vineyards! It has a noble nave, filled with a stale smell which

(like that of the onion) brought tears to my eyes, and bordered

with twenty-four fluted marble columns of Pagan origin. The

crudely primitive little mosaics along the entablature are

extremely curious. A Dominican monk, still young, who showed us

the church, seemed a creature generated from its musty shadows I

odours. His physiognomy was wonderfully de l'emploi, and

his voice, most agreeable, had the strangest jaded humility. His

lugubrious salute and sanctimonious impersonal appropriation of

my departing franc would have been a master-touch on the stage.

While we were still in the church a bell rang that he had to go

and answer, and as he came back and approached us along the nave

he made with his white gown and hood and his cadaverous face,

against the dark church background, one of those pictures which,

thank the Muses, have not yet been reformed out of Italy. It was

the exact illustration, for insertion in a text, of heaven knows

how many old romantic and conventional literary Italianisms--

plays, poems, mysteries of Udolpho. We got back into the carriage

and talked of profane things and went home to dinner--drifting

recklessly, it seemed to me, from aesthetic luxury to social.

On the 31st we went to the musical vesper-service at the Gesu--

hitherto done so splendidly before the Pope and the cardinals.

The manner of it was eloquent of change--no Pope, no cardinals,

and indifferent music; but a great mise-en-sc****************. The church is gorgeous; late Renaissance, of great

proportions, and full, like so many others, but in a pre-eminent

degree, of seventeenth and eighteenth century Romanism. It

doesn't impress the imagination, but richly feeds the curiosity,

by which I mean one's sense of the curious; suggests no legends,

but innumerable anecdotes la Stendhal. There is a vast dome,

filled with a florid concave fresco of tumbling foreshortened

angels, and all over the ceilings and cornices a wonderful outlay

of dusky gildings and mouldings. There are various Bernini saints

and seraphs in stucco-sculpture, astride of the tablets and door-

tops, backing against their rusty machinery of coppery

nimbi and egg-shaped cloudlets. Marble, damask and tapers

in gorgeous profusion. The high altar a great screen of twinkling

chandeliers. The choir perched in a little loft high up in the

right transept, like a balcony in a side-scene at the opera, and

indulging in surprising roulades and flourishes.... Near me sat a

handsome, opulent-looking nun--possibly an abbess or prioress of

noble lineage. Can a holy woman of such a complexion listen to a

fine operatic barytone in a sumptuous temple and receive none but

ascetic impressions? What a cross-fire of influences does

Catholicism provide!

January 4th.--A drive with A. out of Porta San Giovanni

and along Via Appia Nuova. More and more beautiful as you get

well away from the walls and the great view opens out before you-

-the rolling green-brown dells and flats of the Campagna, the

long, disjointed arcade of the aqueducts, the deep-shadowed blue

of the Alban Hills, touched into pale lights by their scattered

towns. We stopped at the ruined basilica of San Stefano, an

affair of the fifth century, rather meaningless without a learned

companion. But the perfect little sepulchral chambers of the

Pancratii, disinterred beneath the church, tell their own tale--

in their hardly dimmed frescoes, their beautiful sculptured

coffin and great sepulchral slab. Better still the tomb of the

Valerii adjoining it--a single chamber with an arched roof,

covered with stucco mouldings perfectly intact, exquisite figures

and arabesques as sharp and delicate as if the plasterer's

scaffold had just been taken from under them. Strange enough to

think of these things--so many of them as there are--surviving

their immemorial eclipse in this perfect shape and coming up like

long-lost divers on the sea of time.

January 16th.--A delightful walk last Sunday with F. to

Monte Mario. We drove to Porta Angelica, the little gate hidden

behind the right wing of Bernini's colonnade, and strolled thence

up the winding road to the Villa Mellini, where one of the greasy

peasants huddled under the wall in the sun admits you for half

franc into the finest old ilex-walk in Italy. It is all vaulted

grey-green shade with blue Campagna stretches in the interstices.

The day was perfect; the still sunshine, as we sat at the twisted

base of the old trees, seemed to have the drowsy hum of mid-

summer --with that charm of Italian vegetation that comes to us

as its confession of having scenically served, to weariness at

last, for some pastoral these many centuries a classic. In a

certain cheapness and thinness of substance--as compared with the

English stoutness, never left athirst--it reminds me of our own,

and it is relatively dry enough and pale enough to explain the

contempt of many unimaginative Britons. But it has an idle

abundance and wantonness, a romantic shabbiness and

dishevelment. At the Villa Mellini is the famous lonely pine

which "tells" so in the landscape from other points, bought off

from the axe by (I believe) Sir George Beaumont, commemorated in

a like connection in Wordsworth's great sonnet. He at least was

not an unimaginative Briton. As you stand under it, its far-away

shallow dome, supported on a single column almost white enough to

be marble, seems to dwell in the dizziest depths of the blue. Its

pale grey-blue boughs and its silvery stem make a wonderful

harmony with the ambient air. The Villa Mellini is full of the

elder Italy of one's imagination--the Italy of Boccaccio and

Ariosto. There are twenty places where the Florentine story-

tellers might have sat round on the grass. Outside the villa

walls, beneath the over-crowding orange-boughs, straggled old

Italy as well--but not in Boccaccio's velvet: a row of ragged and

livid contadini, some simply stupid in their squalor, but some

downright brigands of romance, or of reality, with matted locks

and terribly sullen eyes.

A couple of days later I walked for old acquaintance' sake over

to San Onofrio on the Janiculan. The approach is one of the

dirtiest adventures in Rome, and though the view is fine from the

little terrace, the church and convent are of a meagre and musty

pattern. Yet here--almost like pearls in a dunghill--are hidden

mementos of two of the most exquisite of Italian minds. Torquato

Tasso spent the last months of his life here, and you may visit

his room and various warped and faded relics. The most

interesting is a cast of his face taken after death--looking,

like all such casts, almost more than mortally gallant and

distinguished. But who should look all ideally so if not he? In a

little shabby, chilly corridor adjoining is a fresco of Leonardo,

a Virgin and Child with the donatorio. It is very small,

simple and faded, but it has all the artist's magic, that

mocking, illusive refinement and hint of a vague arriere-

pensee which mark every stroke of Leonardo's brush. Is it the

perfection of irony or the perfection of tenderness? What does he

mean, what does he affirm, what does he deny? Magic wouldn't be

magic, nor the author of such things stand so absolutely alone,

if we were ready with an explanation. As I glanced from the

picture to the poor stupid little red-faced brother at my side I

wondered if the thing mightn't pass for an elegant epigram on

monasticism. Certainly, at any rate, there is more intellect in

it than under all the monkish tonsures it has seen coming and

going these three hundred years.

January 21st.--The last three or four days I have

regularly spent a couple of hours from noon baking myself in the

sun of the Pincio to get rid of a cold. The weather perfect and

the crowd (especially to-day) amazing. Such a staring, lounging,

dandified, amiable crowd! Who does the vulgar stay-at-home work

of Rome? All the grandees and half the foreigners are there in

their carriages, the bourgeoisie on foot staring at them

and the beggars lining all the approaches. The great difference

between public places in America and Europe is in the number of

unoccupied people of every age and condition sitting about early

and late on benches and gazing at you, from your hat to your

boots, as you pass. Europe is certainly the continent of the

practised stare. The ladies on the Pincio have to run the

gauntlet; but they seem to do so complacently enough. The

European woman is brought up to the sense of having a definite

part in the way of manners or manner to play in public. To lie

back in a barouche alone, balancing a parasol and seeming to

ignore the extremely immediate gaze of two serried ranks of male

creatures on each side of her path, save here and there to

recognise one of them with an imperceptible nod, is one of her

daily duties. The number of young men here who, like the

coenobites of old, lead the purely contemplative life is

enormous. They muster in especial force on the Pincio, but the

Corso all day is thronged with them. They are well-dressed, good-

humoured, good-looking, polite; but they seem never to do a

harder stroke of work than to stroll from the Piazza Colonna to

the Hotel de Rome or vice versa. Some of them don't even

stroll, but stand leaning by the hour against the doorways,

sucking the knobs of their canes, feeling their back hair and

settling their shirt-cuffs. At my cafe in the morning several

stroll in already (at nine o'clock) in light, in "evening"

gloves. But they order nothing, turn on their heels, glance at

the mirrors and stroll out again. When it rains they herd under

the portes-coch*** and in the smaller cafes.... Yesterday

Prince Humbert's little primogenito was on the Pincio in

an open landau with his governess. He's a sturdy blond little man

and the image of the King. They had stopped to listen to the

music, and the crowd was planted about the carriage-wheels,

staring and criticising under the child's snub little nose. It

appeared bold cynical curiosity, without the slightest

manifestation of "loyalty," and it gave me a singular sense of

the vulgarisation of Rome under the new regime. When the Pope

drove abroad it was a solemn spectacle; even if you neither

kneeled nor uncovered you were irresistibly impressed. But the

Pope never stopped to listen to opera tunes, and he had no little

popelings, under the charge of superior nurse-maids, whom you

might take liberties with. The family at the Quirinal make

something of a merit, I believe, of their modest and inexpensive

way of life. The merit is great; yet, representationally, what a

change for the worse from an order which proclaimed stateliness a

part of its essence! The divinity that doth hedge a king must be

pretty well on the wane. But how many more fine old traditions

will the extremely sentimental traveller miss in the Italians

over whom that little jostled prince in the landau will have come

into his kinghood? ... The Pincio continues to beguile; it's a

great resource. I am for ever being reminded of the "aesthetic

luxury," as I called it above, of living in Rome. To be able to

choose of an afternoon for a lounge (respectfully speaking)

between St. Peter's and the high precinct you approach by the

gate just beyond Villa Medici--counting nothing else--is a proof

that if in Rome you may suffer from ennui, at least your ennui

has a throbbing soul in it. It is something to say for the

Pincio that you don't always choose St. Peter's. Sometimes I lose

patience with its parade of eternal idleness, but at others this

very idleness is balm to one's conscience. Life on just these

terms seems so easy, so monotonously sweet, that you feel it

would be unwise, would be really unsafe, to change. The Roman air

is charged with an elixir, the Roman cup seasoned with some

insidious drop, of which the action is fatally, yet none the less

agreeably, "lowering."

January 26th.--With S. to the Villa Medici--perhaps on the

whole the most enchanting place in Rome. The part of the garden

called the Boschetto has an incredible, impossible charm; an

upper terrace, behind locked gates, covered with a little dusky

forest of evergreen oaks. Such a dim light as of a fabled,

haunted place, such a soft suffusion of tender grey-green tones,

such a company of gnarled and twisted little miniature trunks--

dwarfs playing with each other at being giants--and such a

shower of golden sparkles drifting in from the vivid west! At the

end of the wood is a steep, circular mound, up which the short

trees scramble amain, with a long mossy staircase climbing up to

a belvedere. This staircase, rising suddenly out of the leafy

dusk to you don't see where, is delightfully fantastic. You

expect to see an old woman in a crimson petticoat and with a

distaff come hobbling down and turn into a fairy and offer you

three wishes. I should name for my own first wish that one didn't

have to be a Frenchman to come and live and dream and work at the

Acad*** de France. Can there be for a while a happier destiny

than that of a young artist conscious of talent and of no errand

but to educate, polish and perfect it, transplanted to these

sacred shades? One has fancied Plato's Academy--his gleaming

colonnades, his blooming gardens and Athenian sky; but was it as

good as this one, where Monsieur Hebert does the Platonic? The

blessing in Rome is not that this or that or the other isolated

object is so very unsurpassable; but that the general air so

contributes to interest, to impressions that are not as any other

impressions anywhere in the world. And from this general air the

Villa Medici has distilled an essence of its own--walled it in

and made it delightfully private. The great fa*** on the gardens

is like an enormous rococo clock-face all incrusted with images

and arabesques and tablets. What mornings and afternoons one

might spend there, brush in hand, unpreoccupied, untormented,

pensioned, satisfied--either persuading one's self that one would

be "doing something" in consequence or not caring if one

shouldn't be.

At a later date--middle of March.--A ride with S. W. out

of the Porta Pia to the meadows beyond the Ponte Nomentana--

close to the site of Phaon's villa where Nero in hiding had

himself stabbed. It all spoke as things here only speak, touching

more chords than one can now really know or say. For these

are predestined memories and the stuff that regrets are made of;

the mild divine efflorescence of spring, the wonderful landscape,

the talk suspended for another gallop.... Returning, we

dismounted at the gate of the Villa Medici and walked through the

twilight of the vaguely perfumed, bird-haunted alleys to H.'s

studio, hidden in the wood like a cottage in a fairy tale. I

spent there a charming half-hour in the fading light, looking at

the pictures while my companion discoursed of her errand. The

studio is small and more like a little salon; the painting

refined, imaginative, somewhat morbid, full of consummate French

ability. A portrait, idealised and etherealised, but a likeness

of Mme. de---(from last year's Salon) in white satin, quantities

of lace, a coronet, diamonds and pearls; a striking combination

of brilliant silvery tones. A "Femme Sauvage," a naked dusky girl

in a wood, with a wonderfully clever pair of shy, passionate

eyes. The author is different enough from any of the numerous

American artists. They may be producers, but he's a product as

well--a product of influences of a sort of which we have as yet

no general command. One of them is his charmed lapse of life in

that unprofessional-looking little studio, with his enchanted

wood on one side and the plunging wall of Rome on the other.

January 30th.--A drive the other day with a friend to

Villa Madama, on the side of Monte Mario; a place like a page out

of one of Browning's richest evocations of this clime and

civilisation. Wondrous in its haunting melancholy, it might have

inspired half "The Ring and the Book" at a stroke. What a grim

commentary on history such a scene--what an irony of the past!

The road up to it through the outer enclosure is almost

impassable with mud and stones. At the end, on a terrace, rises

the once elegant Casino, with hardly a whole pane of glass in its

fa***, reduced to its sallow stucco and degraded ornaments. The

front away from Rome has in the basement a great loggia, now

walled in from the weather, preceded by a grassy be littered

platform with an immense sweeping view of the Campagna; the sad-

looking, more than sad-looking, evil-looking, Tiber beneath (the

colour of gold, the sentimentalists say, the colour of mustard,

the realists); a great vague stretch beyond, of various

complexions and uses; and on the horizon the ever-iridescent

mountains. The place has become the shabbiest farm-house, with

muddy water in the old pi*** d'eau and dunghills on the

old parterres. The "feature" is the contents of the loggia: a

vaulted roof and walls decorated by Giulio Romano; exquisite

stucco-work and still brilliant frescoes; arabesques and

figurini, nymphs and fauns, animals and flowers--gracefully

lavish designs of every sort. Much of the colour--especially the

blues--still almost vivid, and all the work wonderfully

ingenious, elegant and charming. Apartments so decorated can have

been meant only for the recreation of people greater than any we

know, people for whom life was impudent ease and success.

Margaret Farnese was the lady of the house, but where she trailed

her cloth of gold the chickens now scamper between your legs over

rotten straw. It is all inexpressibly dreary. A stupid peasant

scratching his head, a couple of critical Americans picking their

steps, the walls tattered and befouled breast-high, dampness and

decay striking in on your heart, and the scene overbowed by these

heavenly frescoes, moulering there in their airy artistry! It's

poignant; it provokes tears; it tells so of the waste of effort.

Something human seems to pant beneath the grey pall of time and

to implore you to rescue it, to pity it, to stand by it somehow.

But you leave it to its lingering death without compunction,

almost with pleasure; for the place seems vaguely crime-haunted--

paying at least the penalty of some hard immorality. The end of

a Renaissance pleasure-house. Endless for the didactic observer

the moral, abysmal for the storyseeker the tale.

February 12th.--Yesterday to the Villa Albani. Over-formal

and (as my companion says) too much like a tea-garden; but with

beautiful stairs and splendid geometrical lines of immense box-

hedge, intersected with high pedestals supporting little antique

busts. The light to-day magnificent; the Alban Hills of an

intenser broken purple than I had yet seen them--their white

towns blooming upon it like vague projected lights. It was like a

piece of very modern painting, and a good example of how Nature

has at times a sort of mannerism which ought to make us careful

how we condemn out of hand the more refined and affected artists.

The collection of marbles in the Casino (Winckelmann's) admirable

and to be seen again. The famous Antinous crowned with lotus a

strangely beautiful and impressive thing. The "Greek manner," on

the showing of something now and again encountered here, moves

one to feel that even for purely romantic and imaginative effects

it surpasses any since invented. If there be not imagination,

even in our comparatively modern sense of the word, in the

baleful beauty of that perfect young profile there is none in

"Hamlet" or in "Lycidas." There is five hundred times as much as

in "The Transfiguration." With this at any rate to point to it's

not for sculpture not professedly to produce any emotion

producible by painting. There are numbers of small and delicate

fragments of bas-reliefs of exquisite grace, and a huge piece

(two combatants--one, on horseback, beating down another--murder

made eternal and beautiful) attributed to the Parthenon and

certainly as grandly impressive as anything in the Elgin marbles.

S. W. suggested again the Roman villas as a "subject." Excellent

if one could find a feast of facts la Stendhal. A lot of vague

ecstatic descriptions and anecdotes wouldn't at all pay. There

have been too many already. Enough facts are recorded, I suppose;

one should discover them and soak in them for a twelvemonth. And

yet a Roman villa, in spite of statues, ideas and atmosphere,

affects me as of a scanter human and social portee, a

shorter, thinner reverberation, than an old English country-

house, round which experience seems piled so thick. But this

perhaps is either hair-splitting or "racial" prejudice.

[Illustration: ENTRANCE TO THE VATICAN, ROME]

March 9th. --The Vatican is still deadly cold; a couple of

hours there yesterday with R. W. E. Yet he, illustrious and

enviable man, fresh from the East, had no overcoat and wanted

none. Perfect bliss, I think, would be to live in Rome without

thinking of overcoats. The Vatican seems very familiar, but

strangely smaller than of old. I never lost the sense before of

confusing vastness. Sancta simplicitas! All my old friends

however stand there in undimmed radiance, keeping most of them

their old pledges. I am perhaps more struck now with the enormous

amount of padding--the number of third-rate, fourth-rate things

that weary the eye desirous to approach freshly the twenty and

thirty best. In spite of the padding there are dozens of

treasures that one passes regretfully; but the impression of the

whole place is the great thing--the feeling that through these

solemn vistas flows the source of an incalculable part of our

present conception of Beauty.

April 10th. --Last night, in the rain, to the Teatro Valle

to see a comedy of Goldoni in Venetian dialect--"I Quattro

Rustighi." I could but half follow it; enough, however, to be

sure that, for all its humanity of irony, it wasn't so good as

Moli**. The acting was capital--broad, free and natural; the

play of talk easier even than life itself; but, like all the

Italian acting I have seen, it was wanting in finesse,

that shade of the shade by which, and by which alone, one really

knows art. I contrasted the affair with the evening in December

last that I walked over (also in the rain) to the Odeon and saw

the "Plaideurs" and the "Malade lmaginaire." There, too, was

hardly more than a handful of spectators; but what rich, ripe,

fully representational and above all intellectual comedy, and

what polished, educated playing! These Venetians in particular,

however, have a marvellous entrain of their own; they seem

even less than the French to recite. In some of the women--ugly,

with red hands and shabby dresses--an extraordinary gift of

natural utterance, of seeming to invent joyously as they go.

Later.--Last evening in H.'s box at the Apollo to hear

Ernesto Rossi in "Othello." He shares supremacy with Salvini in

Italian tragedy. Beautiful great theatre with boxes you can walk

about in; brilliant audience. The Princess Margaret was there--I

have never been to the theatre that she was not--and a number of

other princesses in neighbouring boxes. G. G. came in and

instructed us that they were the M., the L., the P., &c. Rossi is

both very bad and very fine; bad where anything like taste and

discretion is required, but "all there," and more than there, in

violent passion. The last act reduced too much, however, to mere

exhibitional sensibility. The interesting thing to me was to

observe the Italian conception of the part--to see how crude it

was, how little it expressed the hero's moral side, his depth,

his dignity--anything more than his being a creature terrible in

mere tantrums. The great point was his seizing Iago's head and

whacking it half-a-dozen times on the floor, and then flinging

him twenty yards away. It was wonderfully done, but in the doing

of it and in the evident relish for it in the house there was I

scarce knew what force of easy and thereby rather cheap

expression.

April 27th.--A morning with L. B. at Villa Ludovisi, which

we agreed that we shouldn't soon forget. The villa now belongs to

the King, who has lodged his morganatic wife there. There is

nothing so blissfully right in Rome, nothing more

consummately consecrated to style. The grounds and gardens are

immense, and the great rusty-red city wall stretches away behind

them and makes the burden of the seven hills seem vast without

making them seem small. There is everything--dusky avenues

trimmed by the clippings of centuries, groves and dells and

glades and glowing pastures and reedy fountains and great

flowering meadows studded with enormous slanting pines. The day

was delicious, the trees all one melody, the whole place a

revelation of what Italy and hereditary pomp can do together.

Nothing could be more in the grand manner than this garden view

of the city ramparts, lifting their fantastic battlements above

the trees and flowers. They are all tapestried with vines and

made to serve as sunny fruit-walls--grim old defence as they once

were; now giving nothing but a splendid buttressed privacy. The

sculptures in the little Casino are few, but there are two great

ones--the beautiful sitting Mars and the head of the great Juno,

the latter thrust into a corner behind a shutter. These things

it's almost impossible to praise; we can only mark them well and

keep them clear, as we insist on silence to hear great music....

If I don't praise Guercino's Aurora in the greater Casino, it's

for another reason; this is certainly a very muddy masterpiece.

It figures on the ceiling of a small low hall; the painting is

coarse and the ceiling too near. Besides, it's unfair to pass

straight from the Greek mythology to the Bolognese. We were left

to roam at will through the house; the custode shut us in and

went to walk in the park. The apartments were all open, and I had

an opportunity to reconstruct, from its milieu at least,

the character of a morganatic queen. I saw nothing to indicate

that it was not amiable; but I should have thought more highly of

the lady's discrimination if she had had the Juno removed from

behind her shutter. In such a house, girdled about with such a

park, me thinks I could be amiable--and perhaps discriminating

too. The Ludovisi Casino is small, but the perfection of the life

of ease might surely be led there. There are English houses

enough in wondrous parks, but they expose you to too many small

needs and observances--to say nothing of a red-faced butler

dropping his h's. You are oppressed with the detail of

accommodation. Here the billiard-table is old-fashioned, perhaps

a trifle crooked; but you have Guercino above your head, and

Guercino, after all, is almost as good as Guido. The rooms, I

noticed, all pleased by their shape, by a lovely proportion, by a

mass of delicate ornamentation on the high concave ceilings. One

might live over again in them some deliciously benighted life of

a forgotten type--with graceful old sale, and immensely

thick walls, and a winding stone staircase, and a view from the

loggia at the top; a view of twisted parasol-pines balanced, high

above a wooden horizon, against a sky of faded sapphire.

May 17th.--It was wonderful yesterday at St. John Lateran.

The spring now has turned to perfect summer; there are cascades

of verdure over all the walls; the early flowers are a fading

memory, and the new grass knee-deep in the Villa Borghese. The

winter aspect of the region about the Lateran is one of the best

things in Rome; the sunshine is nowhere so golden and the lean

shadows nowhere so purple as on the long grassy walk to Santa

Croce. But yesterday I seemed to see nothing but green and blue.

The expanse before Santa Croce was vivid green; the Campagna

rolled away in great green billows, which seemed to break high

about the gaunt aqueducts; and the Alban Hills, which in January

and February keep shifting and melting along the whole scale of

azure, were almost monotonously fresh, and had lost some of their

finer modelling. But the sky was ultramarine and everything

radiant with light and warmth--warmth which a soft steady breeze

kept from excess. I strolled some time about the church, which

has a grand air enough, though I don't seize the point of view of

Miss----, who told me the other day how vastly finer she thought

it than St. Peter's. But on Miss----'s lips this seemed a very

pretty paradox. The choir and transepts have a sombre splendour,

and I like the old vaulted passage with its slabs and monuments

behind the choir. The charm of charms at St. John Lateran is the

admirable twelfth-century cloister, which was never more charming

than yesterday. The shrubs and flowers about the ancient well

were blooming away in the intense light, and the twisted pillars

and chiselled capitals of the perfect little colonnade seemed to

enclose them like the sculptured rim of a precious vase. Standing

out among the flowers you may look up and see a section of the

summit of the great fa*** of the church. The robed and mitred

apostles, bleached and rain-washed by the ages, rose into the

blue air like huge snow figures. I spent at the incorporated

museum a subsequent hour of fond vague attention, having it quite

to myself. It is rather scantily stocked, but the great cool

halls open out impressively one after the other, and the wide

spaces between the statues seem to suggest at first that each is

a masterpiece. I was in the loving mood of one's last days in

Rome, and when I had nothing else to admire I admired the

magnificent thickness of the embrasures of the doors and windows.

If there were no objects of interest at all in the Lateran the

palace would be worth walking through every now and then, to keep

up one's idea of solid architecture. I went over to the Scala

Santa, where was no one but a very shabby priest sitting like a

ticket-taker at the door. But he let me pass, and I ascended one

of the profane lateral stairways and treated myself to a glimpse

of the Sanctum Sanctorum. Its threshold is crossed but once or

twice a year, I believe, by three or four of the most exalted

divines, but you may look into it freely enough through a couple

of gilded lattices. It is very sombre and splendid, and conveys

the impression of a very holy place. And yet somehow it suggested

irreverent thoughts; it had to my fancy--perhaps on account of

the lattice--an Oriental, a Mahometan note. I expected every

moment to see a sultana appear in a silver veil and silken

trousers and sit down on the crimson carpet.

Farewell, packing, the sharp pang of going. One would like to be

able after five months in Rome to sum up for tribute and homage,

one's experience, one's gains, the whole adventure of one's

sensibility. But one has really vibrated too much--the addition

of so many items isn't easy. What is simply clear is the sense of

an acquired passion for the place and of an incalculable number

of gathered impressions. Many of these have been intense and

momentous, but one has trodden on the other--there are always the

big fish that swallow up the little--and one can hardly say what

has become of them. They store themselves noiselessly away, I

suppose, in the dim but safe places of memory and "taste," and we

live in a quiet faith that they will emerge into vivid relief if

life or art should demand them. As for the passion we needn't

perhaps trouble ourselves about that. Fifty swallowed palmfuls of

the Fountain of Trevi couldn't make us more ardently sure that we

shall at any cost come back.

1873.