Delphi Complete Works of William Dean Howells

by William Dean Howells

  How much our pale Northern faith has suffered from the elimination of the drama which is so large an element in the worship of the South could not be conjectured without offence to both. Drama I have said, but, if I had said opera, it would have been equally with the will merely to recognize the fact and not to censure it. Many have imagined a concert of praise in heaven, and portrayed it as a spectacle of which the elder Christian worship seems emulous. Go, therefore, to Rome, dear fellow-Protestant, with any measure of ignorance short of mine, but leave as much of your prejudice behind you as you can. You are not more likely to become a convert because of your tolerance; in fact, you may be the safer for it; and it will prepare you for a gentler pleasure than you would otherwise enjoy in the rites and ceremonies which seem exotic in our wintrier world, but which are here native to the climate, or, at least, could not have had their origin under any but oriental or meridional skies. The kindlier mood will help you to a truer appreciation of that peculiar keeping of the churches which the stranger is apt to encounter in his approach. Be tender of the hapless mendicants at the door; they are not there for their pleasure, those blind and halt and old. Be modestly receptive of the good office of the whole tribe of cicerones, of custodians, of sacristans; they can save you time, which, though it is not quite the same as money, even in Rome is worth saving, and are the repository of many rejected fables waiting to be recognized as facts again. I, for instance, committed the potential error of wholly rejecting with scorn the services of an authorized guide to the Church of St. John Lateran because he said the tariff was three francs. But after wandering, the helpless prey of my own Baedeker, up and down the huge temple, I was glad to find him waiting my emergence where I had left him, in the church porch, one of the most pathetic figures that ever wrung the remorseful heart.

  His poor black clothes showed the lustre of inveterate wear; his waistcoat would have been the better for a whole bottle of benzine; his shoes, if they did not share the polish of those threadbare textures, reciprocated the effect of his broken-spirited cuffs and collar, and the forlorn gentility of his hat. His beard had not been shaved for three days; I do not know why, but doubtless for as good a reason as that his shirt had not been washed for seven. It was with something like a cry for pardon of my previous brutality that I now closed with his unabated demand of a three-franc fee, and we went with him wherever he would, from one holy edifice to another of those that constitute the church; but I will not ask the reader to follow us in the cab which he mounted into with us, but which would not conveniently hold four. Let him look it all up in the admirably compendious pages of Hare and Murray, and believe, if he can, that I missed nothing of that history and mystery. If I speak merely of the marvellous baptistery, it is doubtless not because the other parts were not equally worthy of my wonder, but because I would not have even an enemy miss the music of the singing doors, mighty valves of bronze which, when they turn upon their hinges, emit a murmur of grief or a moan of remorse for whatever heathen uses they once served the wicked Caracalla at his baths. Not to have heard their rich harmony would be like not having heard the echo in the baptistery of Pisa, a life-long loss.

  Heaven knows how punctiliously our guide would have acquainted us with every particular of the Lateran group, which for a thousand years before the Vatican was the home of the popes. We begged off from this and that, but even indolence like mine would not spare itself the sight of the Scala Santa. That was another of the things which I distinctly remembered from the year 1864, and I did not find the spectacle of the modern penitents covering the holy steps different in 1908. Now, as then, there was something incongruous in their fashions and aspirations, but one could not doubt that it was a genuine piety that nerved them to climb up and down the hard ascent on their knees, or, at the worst, that it was good exercise. Still, I would rather leave my reader the sense of that most noble facade of the church, with its lofty balustraded entablature, where the gigantic Christ and ten of his saints look out forever to the Alban hills.

  XIV. TIVOLI AND FRASCATI

  One of the most agreeable illusions of travel is a sort of expectation that if you will give objects of interest time enough they will present themselves to you, and, if they will not actually come to you in your hotel, will happen in your way when you go out. This was my notion of the right way of seeing Rome, but, as the days of my winter passed, so many memorable monuments failed not merely to seek me out, but stiffly held aloof from me in my walks abroad, that I began to feel anxious lest I should miss them altogether. I had, for instance, always had the friendliest curiosity concerning Tivoli and Frascati as the two most amiable Roman neighborhoods, and hoped to see both of them in some informal and casual sort; but they persisted so long in keeping off on * their respective hills that I saw something positive on my part must be done. Clearly I must make the advances; and so when, one morning of mid-March, a friend sent to ask if we would not motor out to Tivoli with him and his family, I closed eagerly with the chance of a compromise which would save feeling all round. My friend has never yet known how he was bringing Tivoli and me together after a mutual diffidence, but, as he was a poet, I am sure he will be glad to know now.

  Our road across the Campagna lay the greater part of the distance beside the tram-line, but at other points parted with it and stretched rough, if lately mended, and smooth, if long neglected, between the wide, lonely pastures and narrow drill-sown fields of wheat. The Campagna is said to be ploughed only once in five years by the peasants for the proprietors, who have philosophized its fertility as something that can be better restored by the activities of nature in that time than by phosphates in less. As they are mostly Roman patricians, they have always felt able to wait; but now it is said that northern Italian capital and enterprise are coming in, and the Campagna will soon be cropped every season, though as yet its chief yield seemed to be the two-year-old colts we saw browsing about. For some distance we had the company of the different aqueducts, but their broken stretches presently ceased altogether, and then for other human association we had, besides the fencings of the meadows, only the huts and shelters scattered among the grassy humps and hollows. There were more humps than I had remembered of the Campagna, and probably they were the rounded and turfed-over chunks of antiquity which otherwhere showed their naked masonry unsoft-ened and unfriended by the passing centuries. At times a dusty hamlet, that seemed to crop up from the roadside ditches, followed us a little way with children that shouted for joy in our motor and dogs that barked for pleasure in their joy. Women with the square linen head-dress of the Roman peasants stood and stared, and sallow men, each with his jacket hanging from one of his shoulders, seemed stalking backward from us as we whirled by. Here and there we scared a horse or a mule, but we did not so much as run over a hen; and both man and beast are becoming here, as elsewhere, reconciled to the automobile. Now and then a carter would set his team slantwise in our course and stay us out of good-humored deviltry, and when he let us pass would fling some chaff to the fresh-faced English youngster who was our chauffeur.

  “I suppose you don’t always understand what those fellows say,” I suggested from my seat beside him.

  “No, sir,” he confessed. “But I give it to ’em back in English,” he added, joyously.

  He rather liked these encounters, apparently, but not the beds of sharp, broken stone with which the road was repaired. It was his belief that there was not a steam-roller in all Italy, and he seemed to reserve an opinion of the government’s motives in the matter with respect to motors, as if he thought them bad.

  The scenery of the Campagna was not varied. Once we came to a battlemented tomb, of mighty girth and height, as perdurable in its masonry as the naked, stony hills that in the distance propped the mountains fainting along the horizon under their burden of snow. But as we drew nearer Tivoli the hills drew nearer us, and now they were no longer naked, but densely covered with the gray, interminable stretch of the olive forests. The olive is the tree which, of all oth
ers, is the friend of civilized man; it is older and kinder even than the apple, which is its next rival in beneficence; but these two kinds are so like each other, in the mass, that this boundless forest of olives around Tivoli offered an image of all the aggregated apple-orchards in the world. Where the trees came closest to the road they seemed to watch our passing, each with its trunk aslant and its branches akimbo, in a humorous make-believe of being in some joke with us, like so many gnarled and twisted apple-trees, used to children’s play-fellowship. You felt a racial intimacy with the whimsical and antic shapes which your brief personal consciousness denied in vain; and you rose among the slopes around Tivoli with a sense of home-coming from the desert of the Campagna. But in the distance to which the olive forests stretched they lost this effect of tricksy familiarity. They looked like a gray sea against the horizon; more fantastically yet, they seemed a vast hoar silence, full of mystery and loneliness.

  If Tivoli does not flourish so frankly on its oil as Frascati on its wine, it is perhaps because it has of late years tacitly prospered as much on the electricity which its wonderful and beautiful waterfalls enable it to furnish as abundantly to Rome as our own Niagara to Buffalo. The scrupulous Hare, whose Walks in Rome include Tivoli, does not, indeed, advise you to visit the electrical works, but he says that if you have not strength enough for all the interests and attractions of Tivoli it will be wise to give yourself entirely to the cascades and to the Villa d’Este, and this was what we instinctively did, but in the reverse order. Chance rewarded us before we left the villa with a sight of the electric plant, which just below the villa walls smokes industriously away with a round, redbrick chimney almost as lofty and as ugly as some chimney in America. On our way to and fro we necessarily passed through the town, which, with its widish but not straightish chief street, I found as clean as Rome itself, and looking, after the long tumult of its history, beginning well back in fable, as peaceable as Montclair, New Jersey. It had its charm, and, if I could have spent two weeks there instead of two hours, I might impart its effect in much more circumstance than I can now promise the reader. Most of my little time I gladly gave to the villa, which, with the manifold classic associations of the region, attracts the stranger and helps the cataracts sum up all that most people can keep of Tivoli.

  The Villa d’Este is not yet a ruin, but it is ruinous enough to win the fancy without cumbering it with the mere rubbish of decay. Some neglected pleasances are so far gone that you cannot wish to live in them, but the forgottenness of the Villa d’Este hospitably allured me to instant and permanent occupation, so that when I heard it could now be bought, casino and all, for thirty thousand dollars, nothing but the want of the money kept me from making the purchase. I indeed recognized certain difficulties in living there the year round; but who lives anywhere the year round if he can help it? The casino, standing among the simpler town buildings on the plateau above the gardens, would be a little inclement, for all its frescoing and stuccoing by the sixteenth-century arts, and in its noble halls, amid the painted and modelled figures, the new American proprietor would shiver with the former host and guests after the first autumn chill began; but while it was yet summer it Avould be as delicious there as in the aisles and avenues of the garden which its balustrated terrace looked into. From that level you descend by marble steps which must have some trouble in knowing themselves from the cascades pouring down the broken steeps beside them, and companionably sharing their seclusion among the cypresses and ilexes. You are never out of the sight and sound of the plunging water, which is still trained in falls and fountains, or left to a pathetic dribble through the tattered stucco of the neglected grots. It is now a good three centuries and a half since the Cardinal Ippolito d’.Este had these gardens laid out and his pleasure-house built overlooking them; and his gardener did not plan so substantially as his architect. In fact, you might suppose that the landscapist wrought with an eye to the loveliness of the ruin it all would soon fall into, and, where he used stone, used it fragilely, so that it would ultimately suggest old frayed and broken lace. Clearly he meant some of the cataracts to face one another, and to have a centre from which they could all be seen — say the still, dull-green basin which occupies a large space in the grounds between them. But he must have meant this for a surprise to the spectator, who easily misses it under the trees overleaning the moss-grown walks which hardly kept themselves from running wild. There is a sense of crumbling decorations of statues, broken in their rococo caverns; of cypresses carelessly grouped and fallen out of their proper straightness and slimness; of unkempt bushes crowding the space beneath; of fragmentary gods or giants half hid in the tangling grasses. It all has the air of something impatiently done for eager luxury, and its greatest charm is such as might have been expected to be won from eventual waste and wreck. If there was design in the treatment of the propitious ground, self-shaped to an irregular amphitheatre, it is now obscured, and the cultiavted tourist of our day may reasonably please himself with the belief that he is having a better time there than the academic Roman of the sixteenth century.

  Academic it all is, however hastily and nonchalantly, and I feel that I have so signally failed to make the charm of the villa felt that I am going to let a far politer observer celebrate the beauties of the other supreme interest of Tivoli. When Mr. Gray (as the poet loved to be called in print) visited the town with Mr. Walpole in May, 1740, the Villa d’Este by no means shared the honors of the cataracts, and Mr. Gray seems not to have thought it worth seriously describing in his letter to Mr. West, but mocks the casino with a playful mention before proceeding to speak fully, if still playfully, of the great attraction of Tivoli: “Dame Nature... has built here three or four little mountains and laid them out in an irregular semicircle; from certain others behind, at a greater distance, she has drawn a canal into which she has put a little river of hers called the Anio,... which she has no sooner done, but, like a heedless chit, it tumbles down a declivity fifty feet perpendicular, breaks itself all to shatters, and is converted into a shower of rain, where the sun forms many a bow — red, green, blue, and yellow.... By this time it has divided itself, being crossed and opposed by the rocks, into four several streams, each of which, in emulation of the greater one, will tumble down, too: and it does tumble down, but not from an equally elevated place; so that you have at one view all these cascades intermixed with groves of olive and little woods, the mountains rising behind them, and on the top of one (that which forms the extremity of the half-circle’s horns) is seated the town itself. At the very extremity of that extremity, on the brink of the precipice, stands the Sibyls’ Temple, the remains of a little rotunda, surrounded with its portico, above half of whose beautiful Corinthian pillars are still standing and entire.”

  For the reader who has been on the spot the poet’s words will paint a vivid picture of the scene; for the reader who has not been there, so much the worse; he should lose no time in going, and drinking a cup of the local wine at a table of the restaurant now in possession of Mr. Gray’s point of view. I do not know a more filling moment, exclusive of the wine, than he can enjoy there, with those cascades before him and those temples beside him; for Mr. Gray has mentioned only one of the two, I do not know why, that exist on this enchanted spot, and that define their sharp, black shadows as with an inky line just beyond the restaurant tables. One is round and the other oblong, and the round one has been called the Sibyls’, though now it is getting itself called Vesta’s — the goddess who long unrightfully claimed the temple of Mater Matuta in the Forum Boarium at Rome. As Vesta has lately been dispossessed there by archaeology (which seems in Rome to enjoy the plenary powers of our Boards of Health), she may have been given the Sibyls’ Temple at Tivoli in compensation; but all this does not really matter. What really matters is the mighty chasm which yawns away almost from your feet, where you sit, and the cataracts, from their brinks, high or low, plunging into it, and the wavering columns of mist weakly striving upward out of it: the whole hacke
d by those mountains Mr. Gray mentions, with belts of olive orchard on their flanks, and wild paths furrowing and wrinkling their stern faces. To your right there is a sheeted cataract falling from the basins of the town laundry, where the toil of the washers melts into music, and their chatter, like that of birds, drifts brokenly across the abyss to you. While you sit musing or murmuring in your rapture, two mandolins and a guitar smilingly intrude, and after a prelude of Italian airs swing into strains which presently, through your revery, you recognize as “In the Bowery” and “Just One Girl,” and the smile of the two mandolins and the guitar spreads to a grin of sympathy, and you are no longer at the Cafe Sibylla in Tivoli, but in your own Manhattan on some fairy roof-garden, or at some sixty-cent table d’hote, with wine and music included.

  It was a fortnight later that we paid our visit to Frascati, not proudly motoring now, but traversing the Campagna on the roof of a populous tram-car, which in its lofty narrowness was of the likeness of an old-fashionable lake propeller. The morning was, like most other mornings in Rome, of an amiability which the afternoons often failed of; but none of us passengers for Frascati doubted its promise as we gathered at the tram-station and tried for tickets at the little booth in a wall sparely containing the official who bade us get them in the car. We all did this, whatever our nation — American, English, German, or Italian — and then we mounted to the hurricane-deck of our propeller and entered into a generous rivalry for the best seats. We had a roof over our heads, and there were curtains which we might have drawn if we could have borne to lose a single glimpse of the landscape, or if we would not rather have suffered the chill which our swift progress evoked from the morning’s warmth after we left the shelter of the city streets. We passed through stretches of the ancient aqueducts consorting on familiar terms with rows of shabby tenement-houses, and whisked by the ends of wide, dusty avenues of yet incomplete structure, and by beds of market-gardens, and by simple feeding-places for man and beast, with the tables set close in front of the stalls. An ambitiously frescoed casino had a gigantic peacock painted over a whole story, and the peach-trees were in bloom in the villa spaces. When we struck into the Campagna we found it of like physiognomy with the Campagna toward Tivoli.