Part 7 (1/2)

Their relation to him is the supremely poetic fact of a situation which even one who knows of it merely by hearsay cannot refuse to feel. The tragical effect of the situation is in the straining and sundering of family ties among those who take one side or the other in the difference of the monarchy and papacy. I do not know how equally Roman society, in the large or the small sense, is divided into the Black of the Papists and the White of the Monarchists (for the mediaeval names of Neri and Bianchi are revived in the modern differences), but one cannot help hearing of instances in which their political and religious opinions part fathers and sons and mothers and daughters. These are promptly noted to the least-inquiring foreigner, and his imagination is kindled by the attribution of like variances to the members of the reigning family, who are reported respectively blacker and whiter if they are not as positively black or white as the n.o.bles. Some of these are said to meet one another only in secret across the gulf that divides them openly; but how far the cleavage may descend among other cla.s.ses I cannot venture to conjecture; I can only testify to some expressions of priest-hatred which might have shocked a hardier heretical substance than mine.

One Sunday we went to the wonderful old Church of San Clemente, which is built three deep into the earth or high into the air, one story above or below the other, in the three successive periods of imperial, mediaeval, and modern Rome. It was the day when the church is illuminated, and the visitors come with their Baedekers and Hares and Murrays to identify its antiquities of architecture and fresco; it was full of people, and, if I fancied an unusual proportion of English-speaking converts among them, that might well have been, since the adjoining convent belongs to the Irish Dominicans. But I carried with me through all the historic and artistic interest of the place the sensation left by two inscriptions daubed in black on the white convent wall next the church. One of these read: _”VV. la Repubblica”_ (Long live the Republic), and the other: _”M. ai Preti”_ (Death to the Priests). No attempt had been made to efface them, and as they expressed an equal hatred for the monarchy and the papacy, neither laity nor clergy may have felt obliged to interfere.

Perhaps, however, it was rightly inferred that the ferocity of one inscription might be best left to counteract the influence of the other.

I know that with regard to the priests you experience some such effect from the atrocious attacks in the chief satirical paper of Rome, The name of this paper was given me, with a deprecation not unmixed with recognition of its cleverness, by an Italian friend whom I was making my creditor for some knowledge of Roman journalism; and the sole copy of it which I bought was handed to me with a sort of smiling abhorrence by the kindly old kiosk woman whom I liked best to buy my daily papers of. When I came to look it through, I made more and more haste, for its satire of the priests was of an indecency so rank that it seemed to offend the nose as well as the eye. To turn from the paper was easy, but from the fact of its popularity a painful impression remained. It was not a question of whether the priests were so bad as all that, but whether its many readers believed them so, or believed them bad short of it, in the kind of wickedness they were accused of.

There can be no doubt of the constant rancor between the Clericals and the Radicals in their different phases throughout Italy. There can be almost no doubt that the Radicals will have their way increasingly, and that if, for instance, the catechism is kept in the public schools this year, it will be cast out some other year not far hence. Much, of course, depends upon whether the status can maintain itself. It is, like the status everywhere and always, very anomalous; but it is difficult to imagine either the monarchy or the papacy yielding at any point.

Apparently the State is the more self-a.s.sertive of the two, but this is through the patriotism which is the political life of the people. It must always be remembered that when the Italians entered Rome and made it the capital of their kingdom they did not drive out the French troops, which had already been withdrawn; they drove out the papal troops, the picturesque and inefficient foreign volunteers who remained behind. Every memorial of that event, therefore, is a blow at the Church, so far as the Church is identified with the lost temporal power.

One of the chief avenues is named Twenty-second September Street because the national troops entered Rome on that date; the tablets on the Porta Pia where they entered, the monument on the Pincio to the Cairoli brothers, who died for Italy; the statues of Garibaldi, of Cavour, of Victor Emmanuel everywhere painfully remind the papacy of its lost sovereignty. But the national feeling has gone in its expression beyond and behind the patriotic occupation of Rome; and no one who suffered conspicuously, at any time in the past, for freedom of thought through the piety of the fallen power is suffered to be forgotten. On its side the Church enters its perpetual protest in the self-imprisonment of the pope; and here and there, according to its opportunity, it makes record of what it has suffered from the State. For instance, at St. John Lateran, which theoretically forms part of the Leonine City of the Popes and is therefore extraterritorial to Italy, a stretch of wall is suffered to remain scarred by the cannon-shot which the monarchy fired when it took Rome from the papacy.

Doubtless there are other monuments of the kind, but their enumeration would not throw greater light on a situation which endures with no apparent promise of change. The patience of the Church is infinite; it lives and it outlives. Remembering that Arianism was older than Protestantism when Catholicism finally survived it, we must not be surprised if the Roman Church shall hold out against the Italian State not merely decades, but centuries. In the meanwhile to its children from other lands it means Rome above all the other Romes; and on us, its step-children of different faiths or unfaiths, its prison-house--if we choose so to think of the Vatican--has a supreme claim, if we love the sculpture of pagan Rome or the painting of Christian Rome.

We swarm to its galleries in every variety of nationality, with guide-books in every tongue, and we are very queer, for the most part, to any one of our number who can sufficiently exteriorate himself to get the rest of us in perspective. It is probably well that most of us do not stagger under any great knowledge of the crus.h.i.+ng history of the place, which has been the scene of the most terrible experiences of the race, the most touching, the most august. Provisionally ignorant, at least, we begin to appear at the earliest practicable hour before the outermost stairway of the Vatican, and, while the Swiss Guards still have on their long, blue cloaks to keep their black and yellow legs warm, mount to the Sistine Chapel. Here we help instruct one another, as we stand about or sit about in twos and threes or larger groups, reading aloud from our polyglot Baedekers while we join in identifying the different facts. Here, stupendously familiar, whether we have seen it before or not, is Michelangelo's giant fresco of the Judgment, as prodigious as we imagined or remembered it; here are his mighty Prophets and his mighty Sibyls; and here below them, in incomparably greater charm, are the frescos of Botticelli, with the grace of his Primavera playing through them all like a strain of music and taking the soul with joy.

[Ill.u.s.tration: 34 SISTINE CHAPEL, VATICAN PALACE]

It is the same crowd in the Raphael Stanze, but rather silenter, for by now we have taught ourselves enough from our Baedekers at least to read them under our breaths, and we talk low before the frescos and the canvases. Some of us are even mute in the presence of the School of Athens, whatever reserves we may utter concerning the Transfiguration.

If we are honest, we more or less own what our impressions really are from those other famous works, concerning which our impressions are otherwise altogether and inexpressibly unimportant; it is a question of ethics and not aesthetics, as most of our simple-hearted company suppose it to be; and, if we are dishonest, we pretend to have felt and thought things at first-hand from them which we have learned at second-hand from our reading. I will confess, for my small part, that I had more pleasure in the coloring and feeling of some of the older canvases and in here and there a t.i.tian than in all the Raphaels in the Stanze of his name.

I was not knowing his works for the first time; no one perhaps does that, such is the multiplicity of the copies of them; and I vividly remembered them from my acquaintance with the originals four decades before, as I had remembered the Michelangelos; but in their presence and in the presence of so many other masterpieces in the different rooms, with their horrible miracles and atrocious martyrdoms, I realized as for the first time what a b.l.o.o.d.y religion ours was. It was such relief, such rest, to go from those broilings and beheadings and crucifixions and Sayings and stabbings into the long, tranquil aisles of the museum where the marble men and women, created for earthly immortality by Greek art, welcomed me to their serenity and sanity. The earlier G.o.ds might have been the devils which the early Christians fancied them, but they did not look it; they did not look as if it was they that had loosed the terrors upon mankind out of which the true faith has but barely struggled at last, now when its relaxing grasp seems slipping from the human mind. I remembered those peaceful pagans so perfectly that I could have gone confidently to this or that and hailed him friend; and though I might not have liked to claim the acquaintance of all of them in the flesh, in the marble I fled to it as refuge from the cruel visions of Christian art. If this is perhaps saying too much, I wish also to hedge from the wholesale censure of my fellow-sight-seers which I may have seemed to imply. They did not prevail so clutteringly in the sculpture galleries as in the Sistine Chapel and the Stanze. One could have the statues as much to one's self as one liked; there were courts with murmuring fountains in them; and there was a view of Rome from a certain window, where no fellow-tourist intruded between one and the innumerable roofs and domes and towers, and the heights beyond whose snows there was nothing but blue sky. It was a beautiful morning, with a sun mild as English summer, which did not prevent the afternoon from turning cold with wind and raining and hailing and snowing. This in turn did not keep off a fine red sunset, with an evening star of glittering silver that brightened as the sunset faded. At Rome the weather can be of as many minds in March as in April at New York.

But through all one's remembrance of the Roman winter a sentiment of spring plays enchantingly, like that grace of Botticelli's Primavera in his Sistine frescos. It is not a sentiment of summer, though it is sometimes a summer warmth which you feel, and except in the steam-heated hotels it does not penetrate to the interiors. In the galleries and the churches you must blow your nails if you wish to thaw your fingers, but, if you go out-of-doors, there is a radiant imitation of May awaiting you. She takes you by your thick glove and leads you in your fur-lined overcoat through sullen streets that open upon sunny squares, with fountains streaming into the crystal air, and makes you own that this is the Italian winter as advertised--that is, if you are a wanderer and a stranger; if you are an Italian and at home you keep in the out-door warmth, but shun the sun, and in-doors you wrap up more thickly than ever, or you go to bed if you have a more luxurious prejudice against s.h.i.+vering. If you are a beggar, as you very well may be in Rome, you impart your personal heat to a specific curbstone or the spot which you select as being most in the path of charity, and cling to it from dawn till dark. Or you acquire somehow the rights of a chair just within the padded curtain of a church, and do not leave it till the hour for closing. The Roman beggars are of all claims upon pity, but preferably I should say they were blind, and some of these are quite young girls, and mostly rather cheerful. But the very gayest beggar I remember was a legless man at the gate of the Vatican Museum; the saddest was a sullen dwarf on the way to this cripple, whose gloom a donative even of twenty-five centessimi did not suffice to abate.

XII. SUPERFICIAL OBSERVATIONS AND CONJECTURES

It had seemed to me that in the afternoons of the old papal times, so dear to foreigners who never knew them, I used to see a series of patrician ladies driving round and round on the Pincio, reclining in their landaus and s.h.i.+elding their complexions from the November suns of the year 1864 with the fringed parasols of the period. In the doubt which attends all recollections of the past, after age renders us uncertain of the present, I hastened on my second Sunday at Rome in February, 1908, to enjoy this vision, if possible. I found the Pincio unexpectedly near; I found the suns.h.i.+ne; I found the familiar winter warmth which in Southern climates is so unlike the summer warmth in ours; but the drive which I had remembered as a long ellipse had narrowed to a little circle, where one could not have driven round faster than a slow trot without danger of vertigo. I did not find that series of apparent principessas or imaginable marchesas leaning at their lovely lengths in their landaus. I found in overwhelming majority the numbered victorias, which pa.s.s for cabs in Rome, full of decent tourists, together with a great variety of people on foot, but not much fas.h.i.+on and no swells that my sn.o.bbish soul could be sure of. There was, indeed, one fine moment when, at a retired point of the drive, I saw two private carriages drawn up side by side in their encounter, with two stout old ladies, whom I decided to be dowager countesses at the least, partially projected from their opposing windows and lost in a delightful exchange, as I hoped, of scandal. But the only other impressive personality was that of an elderly, obviously American gentleman, in the solitary silk hat and long frock-coat of the scene. There were other Americans, but none so formal; the English were in all degrees of informality down to tan shoes and at least one travelling-cap. The women's dress, whether they were on foot or in cabs, was not striking, though more than half of them were foreigners and could easily have afforded to outdress the Italians, especially the work people, though these were there in their best.

[Ill.u.s.tration: 35 PIAZZA DEL POPOLO FROM THE PINCIAN HILL]

There was a band-stand in the s.p.a.ce first reached by the promenaders, and there ought clearly to have been a band, but I was convinced that there was to be none by a brief colloquy between one of the cab-drivers (doubtless goaded to it by his fair freight) and the gentlest of Roman policemen, whose response was given in accents of hopeful compa.s.sion:

CABMAN: _”Musica, no?”_ (No music?)

POLICEMAN: ”_Forse l' avremo oramai”_ (Perhaps we shall have it presently.)

We did not have it at all that Sunday, possibly because it was the day after the a.s.sa.s.sination of the King of Portugal, and the flags were at half-mast everywhere. So we went, such of us as liked, to the parapet overlooking the Piazza del Popolo, and commanding one of those prospects of Rome which are equally incomparable from every elevation. I, for my part, made the dizzying circuit of the brief drive on foot in the dark shadows of the roofing ilexes (if they are ilexes), and then strolled back and forth on the paths set thick with plinths bearing the heads of the innumerable national great--the poets, historians, artists, scientists, politicians, heroes--from the ancient Roman to the modern Italian times. I particularly looked up the poets of the last hundred years, because I had written about them in one of my many forgotten books, till I fancied a growing consciousness in them at this encounter with an admirer; they, at least, seemed to remember my book. Then I went off to the cafe overlooking them in their different alleys, and had tea next a man who was taking lemon instead of milk in his. Here I was beset with an impa.s.sioned longing to know whether he was a Russian or American, since the English always take milk in their tea, but I could not ask, and when I had suffered my question as long as I could in his presence I escaped from it, if you can call it escaping, to the more poignant question of what it would be like to come, Sunday after Sunday, to the Pincio, in the life-long voluntary exile of some Americans I knew, who meant to spend the rest of their years under the spell of Rome. I thought, upon the whole, that it would be a dull, sad fate, for somehow we seem born in a certain country in order to die in it, and I went home, to come again other Sundays to the Pincio, but not all the Sundays I promised myself.

On one of these Sundays I found Roman boys playing an inscrutable game among the busts of their storied compatriots, a sort of ”I spy” or ”Hide and go whoop,” counting who should be ”It” in an Italian version of ”Oneary, ory, ickory, an,” and then scattering in every direction behind the plinths and bushes. They were not more molestive than boys always are in a world which ought to be left entirely to old people, and I could not see that they did any harm. But somebody must have done harm, for not only was a bust here and there scribbled over in pencil, but the bust of Machiavelli had its nose freshly broken off in a jagged fracture that was very hurting to look at. This may have been done by some mistaken moralist, who saw in the old republican adviser of princes that enemy of mankind which he was once reputed to be. At any rate, I will not attribute the mutilation to the boys of Rome, whom I saw at other times foregoing so many opportunities of mischief in the Villa Bor-ghese. One of them even refused money from me there when I misunderstood his application for matches and offered him some coppers.

He put my tip aside with a dignified wave of his hand and a proud backward step; and, indeed, I ought to have seen from the flat, broad cap he wore that he was a school-boy of civil condition. The Romans are not nearly so dramatic as the Neapolitans or Venetians or even as the Tuscans; but once in the same pleasance I saw a controversy between school-boys which was carried on with an animation full of beauty and finish. They argued back and forth, not violently, but vividly, and one whom I admired most enforced his reasons with charming gesticulations, whirling from his opponents with quick turns of his body and many a renunciatory retirement, and then facing about and advancing again upon the unconvinced. I decided that his admirable drama had been studied from the histrionics of his mother in domestic scenes; and, if I had been one of those other boys, I should have come over to his side instantly.

The Roman manners vary from Roman to Roman, just as our own manners, if we had any, would vary from New-Yorker to New-Yorker. Zola thinks the whole population is more or less spoiled with the conceit of Rome's ancient greatness, and shows it. One could hardly blame them if this were so; but I did not see any strong proof of it, though I could have imagined it on occasion. I should say rather that they had a republican simplicity of manner, and I liked this better in the shop people and work people than the civility overflowing into servility which one finds among the like folk, for instance, in England. I heard complaints from foreigners that the old-time deference of the lower cla.s.ses was gone, but I did not miss it. Once in a cafe, indeed, the waiter spoke to me in _Voi_ (you) instead of _Lei_ (lords.h.i.+p), but the Neapolitans often do this, and I took it for a friendly effort to put me at my ease in a strange tongue with a more accustomed form. We were trying to come together on the kind of tea I wanted, but we failed, if I wanted it strong, for I got it very weak and tepid. I thought another day that it would be stronger if I could get it brought hotter, but it was not, and so I went no more to a place where I was liable to be called You instead of Lords.h.i.+p and still get weak tea. I think this was a mistake of mine and a loss, for at that cafe I saw some old-fas.h.i.+oned Italian types drinking their black coffee at afternoon tea-time out of tumblers, and others calling for pen and ink and writing letters, and ladies sweetly asking for newspapers and reading them there; and I ought to have continued coming to study them.

As to my conjectures of republican quality in the Romans, I had explicit confirmation from a very intelligent Italian who said of the anomalous social and political situation in Rome: ”We Italians are naturally republicans, and, if it were a question of any other reigning family, we should have the republic. But we feel that we owe everything, the very existence of the nation, to the house of Savoy, and we are loyal to it in our grat.i.tude. Especially we are true to the present king.” It is known, of course, that Menotti Garibaldi continues the republican that his father always was, but I heard of his saying that, if a republic were established, Victor Emmanuel III. would be overwhelmingly chosen the first president. It is the Socialists who hold off unrelentingly from the monarchy, and not the republicans, as they can be differenced from them. One of the well-known Roman anomalies is that some members of the oldest families are or have been Socialists; and such a n.o.ble was reproached because he would not go to thank the king in recognition of some signal proof of his public spirit and unselfish patriotism. He owned the generosity of the king's behavior and his claim upon popular acknowledgment, but he said that he had taught the young men of his party the duty of ignoring the monarchy, and he could not go counter to the doctrine he had preached.

If I venture to speak now of a very extraordinary trait of the munic.i.p.al situation at Rome, it must be without the least pretence to authority or to more than such superficial knowledge as the most incurious visitor to Rome can hardly help having. In the capital of Christendom, where the head of the Church dwells in a tradition of supremacy hardly less Italian than Christian, the syndic, or mayor, is a Jew, and not merely a Jew, but an alien Jew, English by birth and education, a Londoner and an Oxford man. More yet, he is a Freemason, which in Italy means things anathema to the Church, and he is a very prominent Freemason. With reference to the State, his official existence, though not inimical, is through the fusion of the political parties which elected him hardly less anomalous. This combination overthrew the late Clerical city government, and it included Liberals, Republicans, Socialists, and all the other anti-Clericals. Whatever liberalism or republicanism means, socialism cannot mean less than the economic solution of regality and aristocracy in Europe, and in Italy as elsewhere. It does not mean the old-fas.h.i.+oned revolution; it means simply the effacement of all social differences by equal industrial obligations. So far as the Socialists can characterize it, therefore, the actual munic.i.p.al government of Rome is as antimonarchical as it is antipapal. But the syndic of Rome is a man of education, of culture, of intelligence, and he is evidently a man of consummate tact. He has known how to reconcile the warring elements, which made peace in his election, to one another and to their outside antagonists, to the Church and to the State, as well as to himself, in the course he holds over a very rugged way. His opportunities of downfall are pretty constant, it will be seen, when it is explained that if a measure with which he is identified fails in the city council it becomes his duty to resign, like the prime-minister of England in the like case with Parliament, But Mr. Nathan, who is as alien in his name as in his race and religion, and is known orally to the Romans as Signor Nahtahn, has not yet been obliged to resign. He has felt his way through every difficulty, and has not yet been identified with any fatally compromising measure. In such an extremely embarra.s.sing predicament as that created by the conflict between the labor unions and the police early in April, and eventuating in the two days' strike, he knew how to do the wise thing and the right thing. As to the incident, he held his hand and he held his tongue, but he went to visit the wounded workmen in the hospital, and he condoled with their families. He was somewhat blamed for that, but his action kept for him the confidence of that large body of his supporters who earn their living with their hands.

It is said that the common Romans do not willingly earn their living with their hands; that they like better being idle and, so far as they can, ornamental. In this they would not differ from the uncommon Romans, the moneyed, the leisured, the pedigreed cla.s.ses, who reproach them for their indolence; but I do not know whether they are so indolent as all that or not. I heard it said that they no longer want work, and that when they get it they do not do it well--a supposed effect of the socialism which is supposed to have spoiled their manners. I heard it said more intelligently, as I thought, that they are not easily disciplined, and that they cannot be successfully a.s.sociated in the industries requiring workmen to toil in large bodies together; they will not stand that. Also I heard it said, as I thought again rather intelligently, that where work is given them to do after a certain model, they will conform perfectly for the first three or four times; then their fatal creativeness comes into play, and they begin to better their instruction by trying to improve upon the patterns--that is, they are artists, not artisans. They must please their fancy in their work or they cannot do it well. From my own experience I cannot say whether this is generally or only sometimes true, but I can affirm that where they delayed or erred in their work they took their failure very amiably. I never saw sweeter patience than that of the Roman matron who had undertaken a small job of getting spots out of a garment, and who quite surpa.s.sed me in self-control when she announced, day after appointed day, that the work was not done yet or not done perfectly; she was politeness itself.