A Roman Holiday

It is certainly sweet to be merry at the right moment; but the

right moment hardly seems to me the ten days of the Roman

Carnival. It was my rather cynical suspicion perhaps that they

wouldn't keep to my imagination the brilliant promise of legend;

but I have been justified by the event and have been decidedly

less conscious of the festal influences of the season than of the

inalienable gravity of the place. There was a time when the

Carnival was a serious matter--that is a heartily joyous one;

but, thanks to the seven-league boots the kingdom of Italy has

lately donned for the march of progress in quite other

directions, the fashion of public revelry has fallen woefully out

of step. The state of mind and manners under which the Carnival

was kept in generous good faith I doubt if an American can

exactly conceive: he can only say to himself that for a month in

the year there must have been things--things considerably of

humiliation--it was comfortable to forget. But now that Italy is

made the Carnival is unmade; and we are not especially tempted to

envy the attitude of a population who have lost their relish for

play and not yet acquired to any striking extent an enthusiasm

for work. The spectacle on the Corso has seemed to me, on the

whole, an illustration of that great breach with the past of

which Catholic Christendom felt the somewhat muffled shock in

September, 1870. A traveller acquainted with the fully papal

Rome, coming back any time during the past winter, must have

immediately noticed that something momentous had happened--

something hostile to the elements of picture and colour and

"style." My first warning was that ten minutes after my arrival I

found myself face to face with a newspaper stand. The

impossibility in the other days of having anything in the

journalistic line but the Osservatore Romano and the

Voce della Verit used to seem to me much connected with

the extraordinary leisure of thought and stillness of mind to

which the place admitted you. But now the slender piping of the

Voice of Truth is stifled by the raucous note of eventide vendors

of the Capitale, the Libert and the

Fanfulla; and Rome reading unexpurgated news is another

Rome indeed. For every subscriber to the Libert there may

well be an antique masker and reveller less. As striking a sign

of the new r**** is the extraordinary increase of population.

The Corso was always a well-filled street, but now it's a

perpetual crush. I never cease to wonder where the new-comers are

lodged, and how such spotless flowers of fashion as the gentlemen

who stare at the carriages can bloom in the atmosphere of those

camere mobiliate of which I have had glimpses. This,

however, is their own question, and bravely enough they meet it.

They proclaimed somehow, to the first freshness of my wonder, as

I say, that by force of numbers Rome had been secularised. An

Italian dandy is a figure visually to reckon with, but these

goodly throngs of them scarce offered compensation for the absent

monsignori, treading the streets in their purple stockings and

followed by the solemn servants who returned on their behalf the

bows of the meaner sort; for the mourning gear of the cardinals'

coaches that formerly glittered with scarlet and swung with the

weight of the footmen clinging behind; for the certainty that

you'll not, by the best of traveller's luck, meet the Pope

sitting deep in the shadow of his great chariot with uplifted

fingers like some inaccessible idol in his shrine. You may meet

the King indeed, who is as ugly, as imposingly ugly, as some

idols, though not so inaccessible. The other day as I passed the

Quirinal he drove up in a low carriage with a single attendant;

and a group of men and women who had been waiting near the gate

rushed at him with a number of folded papers. The carriage

slackened pace and he pocketed their offerings with a business-

like air--hat of a good-natured man accepting handbills at a

street-corner. Here was a monarch at his palace gate receiving

petitions from his subjects--being adjured to right their wrongs.

The scene ought to have thrilled me, but somehow it had no more

intensity than a woodcut in an illustrated newspaper. Homely I

should call it at most; admirably so, certainly, for there were

lately few sovereigns standing, I believe, with whom their people

enjoyed these filial hand-to-hand relations. The King this year,

however, has had as little to do with the Carnival as the Pope,

and the innkeepers and Americans have marked it for their own.

It was advertised to begin at half-past two o'clock of a certain

Saturday, and punctually at the stroke of the hour, from my room

across a wide court, I heard a sudden multiplication of sounds

and confusion of tongues in the Corso. I was writing to a friend

for whom I cared more than for any mere romp; but as the minutes

elapsed and the hubbub deepened curiosity got the better of

affection, and I remembered that I was really within eye-shot of

an affair the fame of which had ministered to the daydreams of my

infancy. I used to have a scrap-book with a coloured print of the

starting of the bedizened wild horses, and the use of a library

rich in keepsakes and annuals with a frontispiece commonly of a

masked lady in a balcony, the heroine of a delightful tale

further on. Agitated by these tender memories I descended into

the street; but I confess I looked in vain for a masked lady who

might serve as a frontispiece, in vain for any object whatever

that might adorn a tale. Masked and muffled ladies there were in

abundance; but their masks were of ugly wire, perfectly

resembling the little covers placed upon strong cheese in German

hotels, and their drapery was a shabby water-proof with the hood

pulled over their chignons. They were armed with great tin scoops

or funnels, with which they solemnly shovelled lime and flour

out of bushel-baskets and down on the heads of the people in the

street. They were packed into balconies all the way along the

straight vista of the Corso, in which their calcareous shower

maintained a dense, gritty, unpalatable fog. The crowd was

compact in the street, and the Americans in it were tossing back

confetti out of great satchels hung round their necks. It was

quite the "you're another" sort of repartee, and less seasoned

than I had hoped with the airy mockery tradition hangs about

this festival. The scene was striking, in a word; but somehow not

as I had dreamed of its being. I stood regardful, I suppose, but

with a peculiarly tempting blankness of visage, for in a moment I

received half a bushel of flour on my too-philosophic head.

Decidedly it was an ignoble form of humour. I shook my ears like

an emergent diver, and had a sudden vision of how still and sunny

and solemn, how peculiarly and undisturbedly themselves, how

secure from any intrusion less sympathetic than one's own,

certain outlying parts of Rome must just then be. The Carnival

had received its deathblow in my imagination; and it has been

ever since but a thin and dusky ghost of pleasure that has

flitted at intervals in and out of my consciousness.

I turned my back accordingly on the Corso and wandered away to

the grass-grown quarters delightfully free even from the

possibility of a fellow-countryman. And so having set myself an

example I have been keeping Carnival by strolling perversely

along the silent circumference of Rome. I have doubtless lost a

great deal. The Princess Margaret has occupied a balcony opposite

the open space which leads into Via Condotti and, I believe, like

the discreet princess she is, has dealt in no missiles but

bonbons, bouquets and white doves. I would have waited half an

hour any day to see the Princess Margaret hold a dove on her

forefinger; but I never chanced to notice any preparation for

that effect. And yet do what you will you can't really elude the

Carnival. As the days elapse it filters down into the manners of

the common people, and before the week is over the very beggars

at the church-doors seem to have gone to the expense of a domino.

When you meet these specimens of dingy drollery capering about in

dusky back-streets at all hours of the day and night, meet them

flitting out of black doorways between the greasy groups that

cluster about Roman thresholds, you feel that a love of "pranks,"

the more vivid the better, must from far back have been implanted

in the Roman temperament with a strong hand. An unsophisticated

American is wonderstruck at the number of persons, of every age

and various conditions, whom it costs nothing in the nature of an

ingenuous blush to walk up and down the streets in the costume of

a theatrical supernumerary. Fathers of families do it at the head

of an admiring progeniture; aunts and uncles and grandmothers do

it; all the family does it, with varying splendour but with the

same good conscience. "A pack of babies!" the doubtless too self-

conscious alien pronounces it for its pains, and tries to imagine

himself strutting along Broadway in a battered tin helmet and a

pair of yellow tights. Our vices are certainly different; it

takes those of the innocent sort to be so ridiculous. A self-

consciousness lapsing so easily, in fine, strikes me as so near a

relation to amenity, urbanity and general gracefulness that, for

myself, I should be sorry to lay a tax on it, lest these other

commodities should also cease to come to market.

I was rewarded, when I had turned away with my ears full of

flour, by a glimpse of an intenser life than the dingy foolery of

the Corso. I walked down by the back streets to the steps

mounting to the Capitol--that long inclined plane, rather, broken

at every two paces, which is the unfailing disappointment, I

believe, of tourists primed for retrospective raptures. Certainly

the Capitol seen from this side isn't commanding. The hill is so

low, the ascent so narrow, Michael Angelo's architecture in the

quadrangle at the top so meagre, the whole place somehow so much

more of a mole-hill than a mountain, that for the first ten

minutes of your standing there Roman history seems suddenly to

have sunk through a trap-door. It emerges however on the other

side, in the Forum; and here meanwhile, if you get no sense of

the sublime, you get gradually a sense of exquisite composition.

Nowhere in Rome is more colour, more charm, more sport for the

eye. The mild incline, during the winter months, is always

covered with lounging sun-seekers, and especially with those more

constantly obvious members of the Roman population--beggars,

soldiers, monks and tourists. The beggars and peasants lie

kicking their heels along that grandest of loafing-places the

great steps of the Ara Coeli. The dwarfish look of the Capitol is

intensified, I think, by the neighbourhood of this huge blank

staircase, mouldering away in disuse, the weeds thick in its

crevices, and climbing to the rudely solemn facade of the church.

The sunshine glares on this great unfinished wall only to light

up its featureless despair, its expression of conscious,

irremediable incompleteness. Sometimes, massing its rusty screen

against the deep blue sky, with the little cross and the

sculptured porch casting a clear-cut shadow on the bricks, it

seems to have even more than a Roman desolation, it confusedly

suggests Spain and Africa--lands with no latent

risorgimenti, with absolutely nothing but a fatal past.

The legendary wolf of Rome has lately been accommodated with a

little artificial grotto, among the cacti and the palms, in the

fantastic triangular garden squeezed between the steps of the

church and the ascent to the Capitol, where she holds a perpetual

levee and "draws" apparently as powerfully as the Pope himself.

Above, in the piazzetta before the stuccoed palace which rises so

jauntily on a basement of thrice its magnitude, are more loungers

and knitters in the sun, seated round the massively inscribed

base of the statue of Marcus Aurelius. Hawthorne has perfectly

expressed the attitude of this admirable figure in saying that it

extends its arm with "a command which is in itself a

benediction." I doubt if any statue of king or captain in the

public places of the world has more to commend it to the general

heart. Irrecoverable simplicity--residing so in irrecoverable

Style--has no sturdier representative. Here is an impression

that the sculptors of the last three hundred years have been

laboriously trying to reproduce; but contrasted with this mild

old monarch their prancing horsemen suggest a succession of

riding-masters taking out young ladies' schools. The admirably

human character of the figure survives the rusty decomposition of

the bronze and the slight "debasement" of the art; and one may

call it singular that in the capital of Christendom the portrait

most suggestive of a Christian conscience is that of a pagan

emperor.

You recover in some degree your stifled hopes of sublimity as you

pass beyond the palace and take your choice of either curving

slope to descend into the Forum. Then you see that the little

stuccoed edifice is but a modern excrescence on the mighty cliff

of a primitive construction, whose great squares of porous tufa,

as they underlie each other, seem to resolve themselves back into

the colossal cohesion of unhewn rock. There are prodigious

strangenesses in the union of this airy and comparatively fresh-

faced superstructure and these deep-plunging, hoary foundations;

and few things in Rome are more entertaining to the eye than to

measure the long plumb-line which drops from the inhabited

windows of the palace, with their little over-peeping balconies,

their muslin curtains and their bird-cages, down to the rugged

constructional work of the Republic. In the Forum proper the

sublime is eclipsed again, though the late extension of the

excavations gives a chance for it.

Nothing in Rome helps your fancy to a more vigorous backward

flight than to lounge on a sunny day over the railing which

guards the great central researches. It "says" more things to you

than you can repeat to see the past, the ancient world, as you

stand there, bodily turned up with the spade and transformed from

an immaterial, inaccessible fact of time into a matter of soils

and surfaces. The pleasure is the same--in kind--as what you

enjoy of Pompeii, and the pain the same. It wasn't here, however,

that I found my compensation for forfeiting the spectacle on the

Corso, but in a little church at the end of the narrow byway

which diverges up the Palatine from just beside the Arch of

Titus. This byway leads you between high walls, then takes a bend

and introduces you to a long row of rusty, dusty little pictures

of the stations of the cross. Beyond these stands a small church

with a front so modest that you hardly recognise it till you see

the leather curtain. I never see a leather curtain without

lifting it; it is sure to cover a constituted scene of

some sort--good, bad or indifferent. The scene this time was

meagre--whitewash and tarnished candlesticks and mouldy muslin

flowers being its principal features. I shouldn't have remained

if I hadn't been struck with the attitude of the single

worshipper--a young priest kneeling before one of the sidealtars,

who, as I entered, lifted his head and gave me a sidelong look so

charged with the languor of devotion that he immediately became

an object of interest. He was visiting each of the altars in turn

and kissing the balustrade beneath them. He was alone in the

church, and indeed in the whole region. There were no beggars

even at the door; they were plying their trade on the skirts of

the Carnival. In the entirely deserted place he alone knelt for

religion, and as I sat respectfully by it seemed to me I could

hear in the perfect silence the far-away uproar of the maskers.

It was my late impression of these frivolous people, I suppose,

joined with the extraordinary gravity of the young priest's face-

-his pious fatigue, his droning prayer and his isolation--that

gave me just then and there a supreme vision of the religious

passion, its privations and resignations and exhaustions and its

terribly small share of amusement. He was young and strong and

evidently of not too refined a fibre to enjoy the Carnival; but,

planted there with his face pale with fasting and his knees stiff

with praying, he seemed so stern a satire on it and on the crazy

thousands who were preferring it to his way, that I half

expected to see some heavenly portent out of a monastic legend

come down and confirm his choice. Yet I confess that though I

wasn't enamoured of the Carnival myself, his seemed a grim

preference and this forswearing of the world a terrible game--a

gaining one only if your zeal never falters; a hard fight when it

does. In such an hour, to a stout young fellow like the hero of

my anecdote, the smell of incense must seem horribly stale and

the muslin flowers and gilt candlesticks to figure no great

bribe. And it wouldn't have helped him much to think that not so

very far away, just beyond the Forum, in the Corso, there was

sport for the million, and for nothing. I doubt on the other hand

whether my young priest had thought of this. He had made himself

a temple out of the very elements of his innocence, and his

prayers followed each other too fast for the tempter to slip in a

whisper. And so, as I say, I found a solider fact of human nature

than the love of coriandoli.

One of course never passes the Colosseum without paying it one's

respects--without going in under one of the hundred portals and

crossing the long oval and sitting down a while, generally at

the foot of the cross in the centre. I always feel, as I do so,

as if I were seated in the depths of some Alpine valley. The

upper portions of the side toward the Esquiline look as remote

and lonely as an Alpine ridge, and you raise your eyes to their

rugged sky-line, drinking in the sun and silvered by the blue

air, with much the same feeling with which you would take in a

grey cliff on which an eagle might lodge. This roughly

mountainous quality of the great ruin is its chief interest;

beauty of detail has pretty well vanished, especially since the

high-growing wild-flowers have been plucked away by the new

government, whose functionaries, surely, at certain points of

their task, must have felt as if they shared the dreadful trade

of those who gather samphire. Even if you are on your way to the

Lateran you won't grudge the twenty minutes it will take you, on

leaving the Colosseum, to turn away under the Arch of

Constantine, whose noble battered bas-reliefs, with the chain of

tragic statues--fettered, drooping barbarians--round its summit,

I assume you to have profoundly admired, toward the piazzetta of

the church of San Giovanni e Paolo, on the slope of Caelian. No

spot in Rome can show a cluster of more charming accidents. The

ancient brick apse of the church peeps down into the trees of the

little wooded walk before the neighbouring church of San

Gregorio, intensely venerable beneath its excessive

modernisation; and a series of heavy brick buttresses, flying

across to an opposite wall, overarches the short, steep, paved

passage which leads into the small square. This is flanked on one

side by the long mediaeval portico of the church of the two

saints, sustained by eight time-blackened columns of granite and

marble. On another rise the great scarce-windowed walls of a

Passionist convent, and on the third the portals of a grand

villa, whose tall porter, with his cockade and silver-topped

staff, standing sublime behind his grating, seems a kind of

mundane St. Peter, I suppose, to the beggars who sit at the

church door or lie in the sun along the farther slope which leads

to the gate of the convent. The place always seems to me the

perfection of an out-of-the-way corner--a place you would think

twice before telling people about, lest you should find them

there the next time you were to go. It is such a group of

objects, singly and in their happy combination, as one must come

to Rome to find at one's house door; but what makes it peculiarly

a picture is the beautiful dark red campanile of the church,

which stands embedded in the mass of the convent. It begins, as

so many things in Rome begin, with a stout foundation of antique

travertine, and rises high, in delicately quaint mediaeval

brickwork--little tiers and apertures sustained on miniature

columns and adorned with small cracked slabs of green and yellow

marble, inserted almost at random. When there are three or four

brown-breasted contadini sleeping in the sun before the convent

doors, and a departing monk leading his shadow down over them, I

think you will not find anything in Rome more sketchable.

If you stop, however, to observe everything worthy of your water-

colours you will never reach St. John Lateran. My business was

much less with the interior of that vast and empty, that cold

clean temple, which I have never found peculiarly interesting,

than with certain charming features of its surrounding precinct--

the crooked old court beside it, which admits you to the

Baptistery and to a delightful rear-view of the queer

architectural odds and ends that may in Rome compose a florid

ecclesiastical fa***. There are more of these, a stranger jumble

of chance detail, of lurking recesses and wanton projections and

inexplicable windows, than I have memory or phrase for; but the

gem of the collection is the oddly perched peaked turret, with

its yellow travertine welded upon the rusty brickwork, which was

not meant to be suspected, and the brickwork retreating beneath

and leaving it in the odd position of a tower under which

you may see the sky. As to the great front of the church

overlooking the Porta San Giovanni, you are not admitted behind

the scenes; the term is quite in keeping, for the architecture

has a vastly theatrical air. It is extremely imposing--that of

St. Peter's alone is more so; and when from far off on the

Campagna you see the colossal images of the mitred saints along

the top standing distinct against the sky, you forget their

coarse construction and their inflated draperies. The view from

the great space which stretches from the church steps to the city

wall is the very prince of views. Just beside you, beyond the

great alcove of mosaic, is the Scala Santa, the marble staircase

which (says the legend) Christ descended under the weight of

Pilate's judgment, and which all Christians must for ever ascend

on their knees; before you is the city gate which opens upon the

Via Appia Nuova, the long gaunt file of arches of the Claudian

aqueduct, their jagged ridge stretching away like the vertebral

column of some monstrous mouldering skeleton, and upon the

blooming brown and purple flats and dells of the Campagna and the

glowing blue of the Alban Mountains, spotted with their white,

high-nestling towns; while to your left is the great grassy

space, lined with dwarfish mulberry-trees, which stretches across

to the damp little sister-basilica of Santa Croce in Gerusalemme.

During a former visit to Rome I lost my heart to this idle

tract,[1]

[1] Utterly overbuilt and gone--1909.]

and wasted much time in sitting on the steps of the church and

watching certain white-cowled friars who were sure to be passing

there for the delight of my eyes. There are fewer friars now, and

there are a great many of the king's recruits, who inhabit the

ex-conventual barracks adjoining Santa Croce and are led forward

to practise their goose-step on the sunny turf. Here too the poor

old cardinals who are no longer to be seen on the Pincio descend

from their mourning-coaches and relax their venerable knees.

These members alone still testify to the traditional splendour of

the princes of the Church; for as they advance the lifted black

petticoat reveals a flash of scarlet stockings and makes you

groan at the victory of civilisation over colour.

[Illustration: THE FA*** OF ST. JOHN LATERAN, ROME.]

If St. John Lateran disappoints you internally, you have an easy

compensation in pacing the long lane which connects it with Santa

Maria Maggiore and entering the singularly perfect nave of that

most delightful of churches. The first day of my stay in Rome

under the old dispensation I spent in wandering at random through

the city, with accident for my valet-de-place. It served

me to perfection and introduced me to the best things; among

others to an immediate happy relation with Santa Maria Maggiore.

First impressions, memorable impressions, are generally

irrecoverable; they often leave one the wiser, but they rarely

return in the same form. I remember, of my coming uninformed and

unprepared into the place of worship and of curiosity that I have

named, only that I sat for half an hour on the edge of the base

of one of the marble columns of the beautiful nave and enjoyed a

perfect revel of--what shall I call it?--taste, intelligence,

fancy, perceptive emotion? The place proved so endlessly

suggestive that perception became a throbbing confusion of

images, and I departed with a sense of knowing a good deal that

is not set down in Murray. I have seated myself more than once

again at the base of the same column; but you live your life only

once, the parts as well as the whole. The obvious charm of the

church is the elegant grandeur of the nave--its perfect

shapeliness and its rich simplicity, its long double row of white

marble columns and its high flat roof, embossed with intricate

gildings and mouldings. It opens into a choir of an extraordinary

splendour of effect, which I recommend you to look out for of a

fine afternoon. At such a time the glowing western light,

entering the high windows of the tribune, kindles the scattered

masses of colour into sombre bright-ness, scintillates on the

great solemn mosaic of the vault, touches the porphyry columns of

the superb baldachino with ruby lights, and buries its shining

shafts in the deep-toned shadows that hang about frescoes and

sculptures and mouldings. The deeper charm even than in such

things, however, is the social or historic note or tone or

atmosphere of the church--I fumble, you see, for my right

expression; the sense it gives you, in common with most of the

Roman churches, and more than any of them, of having been prayed

in for several centuries by an endlessly curious and complex

society. It takes no great attention to let it come to you that

the authority of Italian Catholicism has lapsed not a little in

these days; not less also perhaps than to feel that, as they

stand, these deserted temples were the fruit of a society

leavened through and through by ecclesiastical manners, and that

they formed for ages the constant background of the human drama.

They are, as one may say, the churchiest churches in

Europe--the fullest of gathered memories, of the experience of

their office. There's not a figure one has read of in old-world

annals that isn't to be imagined on proper occasion kneeling

before the lamp-decked Confession beneath the altar of Santa

Maria Maggiore. One sees after all, however, even among the most

palpable realities, very much what the play of one's imagination

projects there; and I present my remarks simply as a reminder

that one's constant excursions into these places are not the

least interesting episodes of one's walks in Rome.

I had meant to give a simple illustration of the church-habit, so

to speak, but I have given it at such a length as leaves scant

space to touch on the innumerable topics brushed by the pen that

begins to take Roman notes. It is by the aimless fl*****

which leaves you free to follow capriciously every hint of

entertainment that you get to know Rome. The greater part of the

life about you goes on in the streets; and for an observer fresh

from a country in which town scenery is at the least monotonous

incident and character and picture seem to abound. I become

conscious with compunction, let me hasten to add, that I have

launched myself thus on the subject of Roman churches and Roman

walks without so much as a preliminary allusion to St. Peter's.

One is apt to proceed thither on rainy days with intentions of

exercise--to put the case only at that--and to carry these out

body and mind. Taken as a walk not less than as a church, St.

Peter's of course reigns alone. Even for the profane

"constitutional" it serves where the Boulevards, where Piccadilly

and Broadway, fall short, and if it didn't offer to our use the

grandest area in the world it would still offer the most

diverting. Few great works of art last longer to the curiosity,

to the perpetually transcended attention. You think you have

taken the whole thing in, but it expands, it rises sublime again,

and leaves your measure itself poor. You never let the ponderous

leather curtain bang down behind you--your weak lift of a scant

edge of whose padded vastness resembles the liberty taken in

folding back the parchment corner of some mighty folio page--

without feeling all former visits to have been but missed

attempts at apprehension and the actual to achieve your first

real possession. The conventional question is ever as to whether

one hasn't been "disappointed in the size," but a few honest folk

here and there, I hope, will never cease to say no. The place

struck me from the first as the hugest thing conceivable--a real

exaltation of one's idea of space; so that one's entrance, even

from the great empty square which either glares beneath the deep

blue sky or makes of the cool far-cast shadow of the immense

front something that resembles a big slate-coloured country on a

map, seems not so much a going in somewhere as a going out. The

mere man of pleasure in quest of new sensations might well not

know where to better his encounter there of the sublime shock

that brings him, within the threshold, to an immediate gasping

pause. There are days when the vast nave looks mysteriously

vaster than on others and the gorgeous baldachino a longer

journey beyond the far-spreading tessellated plain of the

pavement, and when the light has yet a quality which lets things

loom their largest, while the scattered figures--I mean the

human, for there are plenty of others--mark happily the scale of

items and parts. Then you have only to stroll and stroll and gaze

and gaze; to watch the glorious altar-canopy lift its bronze

architecture, its colossal embroidered contortions, like a temple

within a temple, and feel yourself, at the bottom of the abysmal

shaft of the dome, dwindle to a crawling dot.

Much of the constituted beauty resides in the fact that it is all

general beauty, that you are appealed to by no specific details,

or that these at least, practically never importunate, are as

taken for granted as the lieutenants and captains are taken for

granted in a great standing army--among whom indeed individual

aspects may figure here the rather shifting range of decorative

dignity in which details, when observed, often prove poor (though

never not massive and substantially precious) and sometimes prove

ridiculous. The sculptures, with the sole exception of Michael

Angelo's ineffable "Pieta," which lurks obscurely in a side-

chapel--this indeed to my sense the rarest artistic

combination of the greatest things the hand of man has

produced--are either bad or indifferent; and the universal

incrustation of marble, though sumptuous enough, has a less

brilliant effect than much later work of the same sort, that for

instance of St. Paul's without the Walls. The supreme beauty is

the splendidly sustained simplicity of the whole. The thing

represents a prodigious imagination extraordinarily strained, yet

strained, at its happiest pitch, without breaking. Its happiest

pitch I say, because this is the only creation of its strenuous

author in presence of which you are in presence of serenity. You

may invoke the idea of ease at St. Peter's without a sense of

sacrilege--which you can hardly do, if you are at all spiritually

nervous, in Westminster Abbey or Notre Dame. The vast enclosed

clearness has much to do with the idea. There are no shadows to

speak of, no marked effects of shade; only effects of light

innumerably--points at which this element seems to mass itself in

airy density and scatter itself in enchanting gradations and

cadences. It performs the office of gloom or of mystery in Gothic

churches; hangs like a rolling mist along the gilded vault of the

nave, melts into bright interfusion the mosaic scintillations of

the dome, clings and clusters and lingers, animates the whole

huge and otherwise empty shell. A good Catholic, I suppose, is

the same Catholic anywhere, before the grandest as well as the

humblest altars; but to a visitor not formally enrolled St.

Peter's speaks less of aspiration than of full and convenient

assurance. The soul infinitely expands there, if one will, but

all on its quite human level. It marvels at the reach of our

dreams and the immensity of our resources. To be so impressed and

put in our place, we say, is to be sufficiently "saved"; we can't

be more than the heaven itself; and what specifically celestial

beauty such a show or such a substitute may lack it makes up for

in certainty and tangibility. And yet if one's hours on the scene

are not actually spent in praying, the spirit seeks it again as

for the finer comfort, for the blessing, exactly, of its example,

its protection and its exclusion. When you are weary of the

swarming democracy of your fellow-tourists, of the unremunerative

aspects of human nature on Corso and Pincio, of the oppressively

frequent combination of coronets on carriage panels and stupid

faces in carriages, of addled brains and lacquered boots, of ruin

and dirt and decay, of priests and beggars and takers of

advantage, of the myriad tokens of a halting civilisation, the

image of the great temple depresses the balance of your doubts,

seems to rise above even the highest tide of vulgarity and make

you still believe in the heroic will and the heroic act. It's a

relief, in other words, to feel that there's nothing but a cab-

fare between your pessimism and one of the greatest of human

achievements.

[Illustration: THE COLONNADE OF ST. PETER, ROME.]

This might serve as a Lenten peroration to these remarks of mine

which have strayed so woefully from their jovial text, save that

I ought fairly to confess that my last impression of the Carnival

was altogether Carnivalesque.. The merry-making of Shrove Tuesday

had life and felicity; the dead letter of tradition broke out

into nature and grace. I pocketed my scepticism and spent a long

afternoon on the Corso. Almost every one was a masker, but you

had no need to conform; the pelting rain of confetti effectually

disguised you. I can't say I found it all very exhilarating; but

here and there I noticed a brighter episode--a capering clown

inflamed with contagious jollity, some finer humourist forming a

circle every thirty yards to crow at his indefatigable sallies.

One clever performer so especially pleased me that I should have

been glad to catch a glimpse of the natural man. You imagined for

him that he was taking a prodigious intellectual holiday and that

his gaiety was in inverse ratio to his daily mood. Dressed as a

needy scholar, in an ancient evening-coat and with a rusty black

hat and gloves fantastically patched, he carried a little volume

carefully under his arm. His humours were in excellent taste, his

whole manner the perfection of genteel comedy. The crowd seemed

to relish him vastly, and he at once commanded a glee-fully

attentive audience. Many of his sallies I lost; those I caught

were excellent. His trick was often to begin by taking some one

urbanely and caressingly by the chin and complimenting him on the

intelligenza della sua fisionomia. I kept near him as long

as I could; for he struck me as a real ironic artist, cherishing

a disinterested, and yet at the same time a motived and a moral,

passion for the grotesque. I should have liked, however--if

indeed I shouldn't have feared--to see him the next morning, or

when he unmasked that night over his hard-earned supper in a

smoky trattoria. As the evening went on the crowd

thickened and became a motley press of shouting, pushing,

scrambling, everything but squabbling, revellers. The rain of

missiles ceased at dusk, but the universal deposit of chalk and

flour was trampled into a cloud made lurid by flaring pyramids of

the gas-lamps that replaced for the occasion the stingy Roman

luminaries. Early in the evening came off the classic exhibition

of the moccoletti, which I but half saw, like a languid

reporter resigned beforehand to be cashiered for want of

enterprise. From the mouth of a side-street, over a thousand

heads, I caught a huge slow-moving illuminated car, from which

blue-lights and rockets and Roman candles were in course of

discharge, meeting all in a dim fuliginous glare far above the

house-tops. It was like a glimpse of some public orgy in ancient

Babylon. In the small hours of the morning, walking homeward from

a private entertainment, I found Ash Wednesday still kept at bay.

The Corso, flaring with light, smelt like a circus. Every one was

taking friendly liberties with every one else and using up the

dregs of his festive energy in convulsive hootings and

gymnastics. Here and there certain indefatigable spirits, clad

all in red after the manner of devils and leaping furiously about

with torches, were supposed to affright you. But they shared the

universal geniality and bequeathed me no midnight fears as a

pretext for keeping Lent, the carnevale dei preti, as I

read in that profanely radical sheet the Capitale. Of this

too I have been having glimpses. Going lately into Santa

Francesca Romana, the picturesque church near the Temple of

Peace, I found a feast for the eyes--a dim crimson-toned light

through curtained windows, a great festoon of tapers round the

altar, a bulging girdle of lamps before the sunken shrine

beneath, and a dozen white-robed Dominicans scattered in the

happiest composition on the pavement. It was better than the

moccoletti.

1873.