Delphi Complete Works of William Dean Howells

by William Dean Howells

  But no doubt it will go further than it has yet gone, in the way that is for the good and comfort of mankind. In one of the newer quarters, of which the Baths of Diocletian form the imperial centre, my just American pride was flattered by the sign on a handsome apartment-house going up in gardened grounds, which advertised that it was to be finished with a lift and steam-heating. Many of the newer houses are already supplied with lifts, but central heating is as yet only beginning to spread from the hotels, where steam has been installed in compliance with the impassioned American demand to be warm all round when one is in-doors. New Rome is not going so fast and so far but that it will keep, to whatever end it reaches, one of the characteristic charms of the old and older Rome. I shall expect to see when I come back in 1951 the same or the like corners of garden walls, with the tops of shining foliage peering over them, that now enchant the passer in the street; from the windows of my electric-elevatored, steam-heated apartment I shall look down into the seclusion of gardens, with the golden globes of orange espaliers mellowing against the walls, and the fountain in the midst of oleanders and of laurels

  “Shaking its loosened silver in the sun.”

  Slim cypresses will then as now blacken through the delicate air against the blue sky, and a stone-pine will spread its umbrella over some sequestered nook. By that time the craze for the eucalyptus which now possesses all Italy will be over, and every palm-tree will be cut down, while the ilex will darken in its place and help the eternal youth of the marbles to a greener old age of moss and mould in the gloom of its spreading shade. All these things beautifully abound in Rome now, as they always have abounded, and there is no reason to fear that they will cease to abound.

  Rome grows, and as Italy prospers it will grow more and more, for there must forever be a great and famous capital where there has always been one. The place is so perfectly the seat of an eternal city that it might well seem to have been divinely chosen because of the earth and heaven which are more in sympathy there than anywhere else in the world. The climate is beyond praise for a winter which is mild without being weak; there is a summer of tolerable noonday heat, and of nights deliciously cool; the spring is scarcely earlier than in our latitudes, but the fall is a long, slow decline from the temperature of October to the lowest level of January without the vicissitudes of other autumns. The embrowning or reddening or yellowing leaves turn sere, but drop or cling to their parent boughs as they choose, for there is seldom a frost to loosen their hold, and seldom a storm to tear them away.

  So it is said by those who profess a more intimate acquaintance with the Roman meteorology than I can boast, but from the little I know I can believe anything of it that is of good report. Everywhere the prevalence of the ilex, the orange, the laurel, the pine, flatters January with an illusion of June, and under our hotel windows I was witness of the success of the sycamore leaves in keeping a grip of their native twigs even after the new buds came to push them away. In the last days of March a plum-tree hung its robe of white blossoms over the wall of the Capuchin convent from the garden within; but the almond-trees had been in bloom for six weeks before, and the deeper pink of the peach had more warmly flushed the suburbs for fully a fortnight.

  Still, a mild winter and an endurable summer will not of themselves make a great capital, and it was probably the Romans themselves who in the past made Rome the capital of the world, first politically and then religiously. Whether they will make it so hereafter remains to be seen. In the sense of all the Italians being Romans, I believe, with my profound faith in the race, that they are very capable of doing it; and they will have the help of the whole world in the work, or what is most liberal and enlightened in the whole world. As it is, Rome has a pull with Occidental civilization which forever constitutes her its head city. The only European capitals comparable with her are London, Paris, and Berlin; one cannot take account of New York, which is merely the commercial metropolis of America, with a possibility of becoming the business centre of both hemispheres. Washington is still in its nonage and of a numerical unimportance in which it must long remain almost ludicrously inferior to other capitals, not to dwell upon its want of anything like artistic, literary, scientific, and historical primacy. It is the voluntary political centre of the greatest republic of any time and of a nation which is already unrivalled in its claim upon the future. But it is not of the involuntary and unconscious growth of a capital like London, which is the centre of a mighty state, deep-rooted in the past, and the capital of that Anglo-Saxon race of which we are ourselves a condition, and of a colonial empire without a present equal. Paris is France in the sense of representing the intense life of a nation unsurpassed in the things which enlighten and ennoble the human intellect and advance mankind. Berlin is the concentration of the strong will of a state which has made itself great out of the weak will of sundry inferior states, homogeneous in their disunity more than in any positive quality, and which stands for a political ideal more nearly reactionary, more nearly mediaeval, than any other modern state. Berlin is not German as Paris is French, and Rome is not so exclusively Italian. In fact, her greatness, accomplished and destined, lies in just the fact that she is not and never can be exclusively Italian. Human interests too universal and imperative for the control of a single race, even so brilliant and so gifted as the Italian race, which is naturally and necessarily in possession, centre about her through history, religion, art, and make every one at home in the city which is the capital of Christendom. Now and then I saw some shining and twinkling Japs going about with Baedekers, and I imagined them giving a modest and unprejudiced mind to Rome without claiming, tacitly or explicitly, the right to dispute the Italian theory and practice in its control. But every Occidental stranger (if any one of European blood is a stranger in the home of Christianity) I knew to be there in a mood more or less critical, and in a disposition to find fault with the Rome which is now making, or making over.

  We journeyers or sojourners can do this without expense or inconvenience to ourselves, and we can easily blame the Italian conception of the future city which, to name but one fact, has made it possible for us to visit her in comfort at every season and to come away without having come down with the Roman fever. In spite of the sort of motherly, or at the worst step-motherly, welcome which she gives to all us closely or distantly related children of hers; in spite of her immemorial fame and her immortal beauty; in spite of her admirable housekeeping, in which she rises every morning at daybreak and sweeps clean every hole and corner of her dwelling; in spite of her wonderful sky, her life-giving air; in spite of the level head she keeps in her political affairs, and the miraculous poise she maintains between the antagonism of State and Church; in spite of her wise eclecticism in modern improvements; in spite of her admirable hygiene, which has constituted her one of the healthiest, if not the healthiest city in Europe; in spite of the solvency which she preserves amid expenses to which the vast scale of antiquity obliges her in all her public enterprises (a thing to be hereafter studied), we, the ungracious offspring of her youth, come from our North and West and censure and criticise and carp. I have seldom conversed with any fellow-visitor in Rome who could not improve her in some phase or other, who could not usefully advise her, who, at the best, did not patronize her. I offer myself as almost the sole example of a stranger who was contented with her as she is, or as she is going to be without his help; and I am the more confident, therefore, in suggesting to Rome an expedient by which she can repair the finances which her visitors say are so foolishly and wastefully mismanaged in her civic schemes. A good round tax, such as Carlsbad levies upon all sojourners, if laid upon the multitudinous tourists joining in such a chorus of criticism of Rome would give them the indefeasible right to their opinions and would help to replete a treasury which they believe is always in danger of being exhausted.

  III. THE COLOSSEUM AND THE FORUM

  As I have told, the first visit I paid to the antique world in Rome was at the Colosseum the day after
our arrival. For some unknown reason I was going to begin with the Baths of Caracalla, but, as it happened, these were the very last ruins we visited in Rome; and I do not know just what accident diverted us to the Colosseum; perhaps we stopped because it was on the way to the Baths and looked an easier conquest. At any rate, I shall never regret that we began with it.

  After twoscore years and three it was all strangely familiar. I do not say that in 1864 there was a horde of boys at the entrance wishing to sell me postcards — these are a much later invention of the Enemy — but I am sure of the men with trays full of mosaic pins and brooches, and looking, they and their wares, just as they used to look. The Colosseum itself looked unchanged, though I had read that a minion of the wicked Italian government had once scraped its flowers and weeds away and cleaned it up so that it was perfectly spoiled. But it would take a good deal more than that to spoil the Colosseum, for neither the rapine of the mediaeval nobles, who quarried their palaces from it, nor the industrial enterprise of some of the popes, who wished to turn it into workshops, nor the archeology of United Italy had sufficed to weaken in it that hold upon the interest proper to the scene of the most stupendous variety shows that the world has yet witnessed. The terrible stunts in which men fought one another for the delight of other men in every manner of murder, and wild beasts tore the limbs of those glad to perish for their faith, can be as easily imagined there as ever, and the traveller who visits the place has the assistance of increasing hordes of other tourists in imagining them.

  I will not be the one to speak slight of that enterprise which marshals troops of the personally conducted through the place and instructs them in divers languages concerning it. Save your time and money so, if you have not too much of either, and be one of an English, French, or German party, rather than try to puzzle the facts out for yourself, with one contorted eye on your Baedeker and the other on the object in question. In such parties a sort of domestic relation seems to grow up through their associated pleasures in sight-seeing, and they are like family parties, though politer and patienter among themselves than real family parties. They are commonly very serious, though they doubtless all have their moments of gayety; and in the Colosseum I saw a French party grouped for photography by a young woman of their number, who ran up and down before them with a kodak and coquettishly hustled them into position with pretty, bird-like chirpings of appeal and reproach, and much graceful self-evidencing. I do not censure her behavior, though doubtless there were ladies among the photographed who thought it overbold; if the reader had been young and blond and svelte, in a Parisian gown and hat, with narrow russet shoes, not too high-heeled for good taste, I do not believe he would have been any better; or, if he would, I should not have liked him so well.

  On the earlier day which I began speaking of I found that I was insensibly attaching myself to an English-hearing party of the personally conducted, in the dearth of my own recollections of the local history, but I quickly detached myself for shame and went back and meekly hired the help of a guide who had already offered his services in English, and whom I had haughtily spurned in his own tongue. His English, though queer, was voluminous; but I am not going to drag the reader at our heels laden with lore which can be applied only on the spot or in the presence of postal-card views of the Colosseum. It is enough that before my guide released us we knew where was the box of Caesar, whom those about to die saluted, and where the box of the Vestals whose fatal thumbs gave the signal of life or death for the unsuccessful performer; where the wild beasts were kept, and where the Christians; where were the green-rooms of the gladiators, who waited chatting for their turn to go on and kill one another. One must make light of such things or sink under them; and if I am trying to be a little gay, it is for the readers’ sake, whom I would not have perish of their realization. Our guide spared us nothing, such was his conscience or his science, and I wish I could remember his name, for I could commend him as most intelligent, even, when least intelligible. However, the traveller will know him by the winning smile of his rosy-faced little son, who follows him round and is doubtless bringing himself up as the guide of coming generations of tourists. There had been a full pour of forenoon sunshine on the white dust of the street before our hotel, but the cold of the early morning, though it had not been too much for the birds that sang in the garden back of us, had left a skim of ice in damp spots, and now, in the late gray of the afternoon, the ice was visible and palpable underfoot in the Colosseum, where crowds of people wandered severally or collectively about in the half-frozen mud. They were, indeed, all over the place, up and down, in every variety of costume and aspect, but none were so picturesque as a little group of monks who had climbed to a higher tier of the arches and stood looking down into the depths where we looked up at them, denned against the sky in their black robes, which opened to show their under robes of white. They were picturesque, but they were not so monumental as an old, unmistakable American in high-hat, with long, drooping side-whiskers, not above a purple suspicion of dye, who sat on a broken column and vainly endeavored to collect his family for departure. Whenever he had gathered two or three about him they strayed off as the others came up, and we left him sardonically patient of their adhesions and defections, which seemed destined to continue indefinitely, while we struggled out through the postal-card boys and mosaic-pin men to our carriage. Then we drove away through the quarter of somewhat jerry-built apartment-houses which neighbor the Colosseum, and on into the salmon sunset which, after the gray of the afternoon, we found waiting us at our hotel, with the statues on the balustrated wall of the villa garden behind it effectively posed in the tender light, together with the eidolons of those picturesque monks and that monumental American.

  We could safely have stayed longer, for the evening damp no longer brings danger of Roman fever, which people used to take in the Colosseum, unless I am thinking of the signal case of Daisy Miller. She, indeed, I believe, got it there by moonlight; but now people visit the place by moonlight in safety; and there are even certain nights of the season advertised when you may see it by the varicolored lights of the fireworks set off in it. My impression of it was quite vivid enough without that, and the vision of the Colosseum remained, and still remains, the immense skeleton of the stupendous form stripped of all integumental charm and broken down half one side of its vast oval, so that wellnigh a quarter of the structural bones are gone.

  With its image there persisted and persists the question constantly recurrent in the presence of all the imperial ruins, whether imperial Rome was not rather ugly than otherwise. The idea of those world-conquerors was first immensity and then beauty, as much as could survive consistently with getting immensity into a given space. The question is most of all poignant in the Forum, which I let wait a full fortnight before moving against it in the warm sun of an amiable February morning. On my first visit to Rome I could hardly wait for day to dawn after my arrival before rushing to the Cow Field, as it was then called, and seeing the wide-horned cattle chewing the cud among the broken monuments now so carefully cherished and, as it were, sedulously cultivated. It is doubtful whether all that has since been done, and which could not but have been done, by the eager science as much involuntarily as voluntarily applied to the task, has resulted in a more potent suggestion of what the Forum was in the republican or imperial day than what that simple, old, unassuming Cow Field afforded. There were then as now the beautiful arches; there were the fragments of the temple porches, with their pillars; there was the “unknown column with the buried base”; there were all the elements of emotion and meditation; and it is possible that sentiment has only been cumbered Avith the riches which archaeology has dug up for it by lowering the surface of the Cow Field fifteen or twenty feet; by scraping clean the buried pavements; by identifying the storied points; by multiplying the fragments of basal or columnar marbles and revealing the plans of temples and palaces and courts and tracing the Sacred Way on which the magnificence of the past went to dusty death.
After all, the imagination is very childlike, and it prefers the elements of its pleas-ures simple and few; if the materials are very abundant or complex, it can make little out of them; they embarrass it, and it turns critical in self-defence. The grandeur that was Rome as visioned from the Cow Field becomes in the mind’s eye the kaleidoscopic clutter which the resurrection of the Forum Romanum must more and more realize.

  If the visitor would have some rash notion of what the ugliness of the place was like when it was in its glory, he may go look at the plastic reconstruction of it, indefinitely reduced, in the modest building across the way from the official entrance to the Forum. One cannot say but this is intensely interesting, and it affords the consolation which the humble (but not too humble) spirit may gather from witness of the past, that the fashion of this world and the pride of the eyes and all ruthless vainglory defeated themselves in ancient Rome, as they must everywhere when they can work their will. If one had thought that in magnitude and multitude some entire effect of beauty was latent, one had but to look at that huddle of warring forms, each with beauty in it, but beauty lost in the crazy agglomeration of temples and basilicas and columns and arches and statues and palaces, incredibly painted and gilded, and huddled into spaces too little for the least, and crowding severally upon one another, without relation or proportion. Their mass is supremely tasteless, almost senseless; that mob of architectural incongruities was not only without collective beauty, but it was without that far commoner and cheaper thing which we call picturesqueness. This has come to it through ruin, and we must give a new meaning to the word vandalism if we would appreciate what the barbarians did for Rome in tumbling her tawdry splendor into the heaps which are now at least paint-able. Imperial Rome as it stood was not paintable; I doubt if it would have been even photographable to anything but a picture post-card effect.