Italian Hours

The After-Season in Rome

One may at the blest end of May say without injustice to anybody

that the state of mind of many a forestiero in Rome is one

of intense impatience for the moment when all other

forestieri shall have taken themselves off. One may

confess to this state of mind and be no misanthrope. The place

has passed so completely for the winter months into the hands of

the barbarians that that estimable character the passionate

pilgrim finds it constantly harder to keep his passion clear. He

has a rueful sense of impressions perverted and adulterated; the

all-venerable visage disconcerts us by a vain eagerness to see

itself mirrored in English, American, German eyes. It isn't

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 isn't simply

that St. Peter's, the Vatican, the Palatine, are for ever ringing

with the false note of the languages without style: it is the

general oppressive feeling that the city of the soul has become

for the time a monstrous mixture of watering-place and 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 her all to

yourself. "You may like her more or less now," I was assured at

the height of the season; "but you must wait till the month of

May, when she'll give you all she has, to love her. 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

happy Frenchman of the Acad*** de France, "renait a

ellememe." Indeed I was haunted all winter by an irresistible

prevision of what Rome must be in declared spring. Certain

charming places seemed to murmur: "Ah, this is nothing! Come back

at the right weeks 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 tumble in odorous spray and the warm radiant

air distil gold for the smelting-pot that the genius loci

then dips his brush into before making play with it, in his

inimitable way, for the general effect of complexion."

A month ago I spent a week in the country, and on my return, the

first time I approached the Corso, became conscious of a change.

Something delightful had happened, to which at first I couldn't

give a name, but which presently shone out as the fact that there

were but half as many people present and that these were chiefly

the natural or the naturalised. We had been docked of half our

irrelevance, our motley excess, and now physically, morally,

************ 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 who lay in landaus poising their lace-fringed

parasols; but they had scarce more than a light-gloved dandy

apiece hanging over their carriage doors. By the parapet to the

great terrace that sweeps the city stood but three or four

interlopers looking at the sunset and with their Baedekers only

just showing in their pockets--the sunsets not being down among

the tariffed articles in these precious volumes. I went so far as

to hope for them that, like myself, they were, under every

precaution, taking some amorous intellectual liberty with the

scene.

Practically I violate thus the instinct of monopoly, since it's a

shame not to publish that Rome in May is indeed exquisitely worth

your patience. 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. It's almost as if

the old all-papal paradise had come back. The weather for a month

has been perfect, the sky an extravagance of blue, the air lively

enough, the nights cool, nippingly cool. and the whole ancient

greyness lighted with an irresistible smile. Rome, which in some

moods, especially to new-comers, seems a place of almost sinister

gloom, has an occasional art, as one knows her better, of

brushing away care by the grand gesture with which some splendid

impatient mourning matron--just the Niobe of Nations, surviving,

emerging and looking about her again--might pull off and cast

aside an oppression of muffling crape. This admirable power still

temperamentally to react and take notice lurks in all her

darkness and dirt and decay--a something more careless and

hopeless than our thrifty northern cheer, and yet more genial and

urbane than the Parisian spirit of blague. The collective

Roman nature is a healthy and hearty one, and you feel it abroad

in the streets even when the sirocco blows and the medium of life

seems to proceed more or less from the mouth of a furnace. But

who shall analyse even the simplest Roman impression? It is

compounded of so many things, it says so much, it involves so

much, it so quickens the intelligence and so flatters the heart,

that before we fairly grasp the case 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 insidious message

to those who incline to ramble irresponsibly and take things as

they come, is ushered in with the first breath of spring, and

then grows and grows with the advancing season till it wraps the

whole place in its tenfold charm. As the process develops you can

do few better things than go often to Villa Borghese and sit on

the grass--on a stout bit of drapery--and watch its exquisite

stages. It has a frankness and a sweetness beyond any relenting

of our clumsy climates even when ours leave off their

damnable faces and begin. Nature departs from every reserve with

a confidence that leaves one at a loss where, as it were, to

look--leaves one, as I say, nothing to do but to lay one's head

among the anemones at the base of a high-stemmed pine and gaze up

crestward and sky-ward along its slanting silvery column. You

may watch the whole business from a dozen of these choice

standpoints and have a different villa for it 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 odours 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 medieval

missal, and "compose" so extremely well with the still more

processional cypresses and with stretches of golden-russet wall

overtopped by ultramarine. 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 wood 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 grow is the most

delightful in the world. Villa Ludovisi has been all winter the

residence of the lady familiarly known in Roman society as

"Rosina," Victor Emmanuel's morganatic wife, the only familiarity

it would seem, that she allows, for the grounds were rigidly

closed, to the inconsolable regret of old Roman sojourners. Just

as the nightingales began to sing, however, the quasi-august

padrona departed, and the public, with certain

restrictions, have been admitted to hear them. The place takes,

where it lies, a princely ease, and there could be no better

example of the expansive tendencies of ancient privilege than

the fact that its whole vast extent is contained by the city

walls. It has in this respect very much the same enviable air of

having got up early that marks 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 "striking

scenic 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 melancholy more charged with

associations--poetic, romantic, historic; 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 insidiously contrasted. They make between them

one of the solemn places of Rome--although indeed when funereal

things are so interfused 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 gives us the impression

of our 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 peep at the wide purple of the

Campagna. Shelley's grave is here, buried in roses--a happy grave

every way for the very type and figure of the Poet. Nothing could

be more impenetrably tranquil than this little corner in the bend

of the protecting rampart, where a cluster of modern ashes is

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 them--with an effect of poetic justice. It is a wonderful

confusion of mortality and a grim enough admonition of our

helpless promiscuity in the crucible of time. But the most

touching element of all is the appeal of the pious English

inscriptions among all these Roman memories; touching because of

their universal expression of that trouble within trouble,

misfortune in a foreign land. Something special stirs the heart

through 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 to refine, but the injunction to

the reader in the monument to Miss Bathurst, 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 cropt in its bloom," affects us irresistibly as a case for

tears on the spot. The whole elaborate inscription indeed says

something over and beyond all it does say. 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; yet who can say that one doesn't

constantly meet 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

and omits no detail, seizing the opportunity to mention by the

way that she had already lost her husband by a most mysterious

visitation. The appeal to one's attention and the confidence in

it are withal most moving. The whole record has an old-fashioned

gentility that makes its frankness tragic. You seem to hear the

garrulity of passionate grief.

To be choosing these positive commonplaces of the Roman tone for

a theme when there are matters of modern moment going on may seem

none the less to require an apology. But I make no claim to your

special correspondent's faculty for getting an "inside" view of

things, and I have hardly more than a pictorial 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, recalling

too forcibly that unnatural husband who was heard to wish that

his wife would "either" get well--! He had his reasons, and Roman

tourists have theirs in the shape of a vague longing for

something spectacular at St. Peter's. If it takes the sacrifice

of somebody to produce it let somebody then be sacrificed.

Meanwhile we have been having a glimpse of the spectacular side

of the Religious Corporations Bill. 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,

strictly, unless 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 popular uprisings.