Cosa vide Henry James
Premessa
Henry James visitò l'Italia
parecchie volte tra il 1869 e il 1909. Nel 1873 trascorse parecchio tempo
a Roma pubblicò su periodici Americani ampi resoconti del suo soggiorno.
Nel 1909 questi resoconti, insieme con quelli di altri viaggi in Italia,
furono riuniti nelle Italian Hours. Nel 1873 Roma era soggetta a
rapidi sconvolgimenti a causa del suo nuovo ruolo di capitale del Regno
d'Italia, ed Henry James, sebbene acceso sostenitore del nuovo governo,
tuttavia non poté fare a meno di notare che stavano per essere cancellati
alcuni degli aspetti più pittoreschi della Roma papale.
Questa pagina contiene dei brani del libro relativo alla Roma del 1873
Excerpts:
Capitol
Hill
..I walked 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 is
n'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.
.. 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 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.
|
Colosseum
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 (Note: a reference to Shakespeare's King Lear: "Half-way
down Hangs one that gathers samphire, dreadful trade". Samphire or
sea fennel or sea asparagus grows on sea-cliffs. James had in mind
the children plucking samphire off the Dover cliffs.).
|
SS. Giovanni e
Paolo
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 .. 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 seem 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 of 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.
|
St. John Lateran
.. as to the great
front of the church
overlooking the Porta S.
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 the 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 judgement, and which all Christians must for ever
ascend on their knees; before you is the city gate which open 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. |
Santa Maria Maggiore
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 it 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 brightness,
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 is n'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. |
St. Peter's
Taken as a walk not
less than 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 did n'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 has
n'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 "Pietà", 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 innumerable - points at which this element seems to
mass itself in air 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 dream 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
that in 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 for the finer comfort,
for the blessing, exactly, of its example, its protection and its
exclusion. |
Villa Borghese
.. at Villa Borghese
the walkers have the best of it; for they are free of those adorable
outlying corners and bosky byways which the rumble of barouches
never reaches. In March the place becomes a perfect epitome of the
spring. You cease to care much for the melancholy greenness of the
disfeatured statues which has been your chief winter's intimation of
verdure: and before you are quite conscious of the tender streaks
and patches in the great quaint grassy arena round which the Propaganda
students, in their long skirts, wander slowly, like dusky seraphs
revolving the gossip of Paradise, you spy the brave little violets
uncapping their azure brows beneath the high-stemmed pines. One's
walks here would take us too far, and one's pauses detain us too
long, when in the quiet parts under the wall one comes across a
group of charming small school-boys in full-dress suits and white
cravats, shouting over their play in clear Italian, while a grave
young priest, beneath a tree, watches them over the top of his book.
It sounds like nothing, but the force behind it and the frame round
it, the setting, the air, the chord struck, make it a hundred
wonderful things. |
Villa Ludovisi
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 ground 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.
...A morning
with L. B. at Villa Ludovisi, which we agreed that we should n'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 clipping 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, methinks 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. |
The Protestant cemetery
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 does n'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. |
Colonna Gardens
I went yesterday
to the Colonna
gardens - an adventure that would have reconverted me to Rome if
the thing were n'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 did n't
take such a colour in the blue air. Delightful, at any rate, to
stroll and talk there in the afternoon sunshine. |
St. Paul's without the Walls
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. |
Santa Sabina
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 and 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. |
The
Gesù
On the 31st we went to the musical
vesper-service at the Gesù - 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-scène nevertheless. 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 does n'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 à 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! |
Villa Mellini
A delightful walk
last Sunday 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 a 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 midsummer - 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 overcrowding 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. |
The Pincio
The last three of
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, longing, 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 their 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. ...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 régime. 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
"aestethic 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". |
Villa Medici
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 did n't have to be a Frenchman to come and live
and dream and work at the Académie 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 Hébert 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 façade 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 should n't be.
|
Villa Madama
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 façade, 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 belittered 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
farmhouse, with muddy water in the old pièces d'eau and
dunghills on the old parterres. The "feature" is the contents of the
loggia: a vaulted roof 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, mouldering 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 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 story-seeker the tale.
|
Villa Albani
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 à la Stendhal. A lot of vague ecstatic descriptions and
anecdotes would n'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 portée, 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.
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