Part 6 (2/2)

So it is with the Anglo-Saxon in Italy. We have not their _finesse_, or the mental and temperamental qualities which balance their moral defects; the Englishman adopts these with interest and his national virtues are shed like a garment. It is therefore perhaps fortunate that Italian women give Englishmen small encouragement to turn themselves into _diavoli incarnati_; for it must be recorded that the English and American wife in Italy runs no such risk: she remains herself, the national character does not wear off like a poor veneer, she does not outrage native susceptibilities without acquiring native graces, and distinguished women of our race have for the past two hundred years brought their native virtues to Italy while adopting Italian causes with an enthusiasm which did not yield even to that of Italians themselves. In Rome the English wife of General La Marmora, the two Talbots who became Gwendoline Borghese and Mary Doria, the American wife of Garibaldi, and the Scotch wife of the triumvir Aurelio Saffi (still alive), all played a conspicuous Italian role.

There are more people with great temperaments among the Latin races than among ourselves; and as it is ”plenty of temperament” which is wanted for the creations of art it is not difficult to understand why the Italians are artistic and we are not. And the Italians are a people of artists. In England where one man in a thousand may possess the artistic temperament it is difficult to realise the keen observation, the appreciation of technique for its own sake, the intuitive way of gauging and grouping the data of the senses, the balance and proportion implied in a race where one man in ten judges as an artist. Wagner expresses, in a letter to Boto, his admiration of the Italian att.i.tude to art--the open-mindedness and delicate feeling in artistic questions which make him ”understand again,” after a visit there, ”the matchlessly productive spirit to which the new world owes all its art since the Renaissance.” When Edward VII.

visited Rome the _Times_ and other English newspapers compared the consummate yet simple scheme of decoration with the tasteless and meaningless banner and bunting displays which London witnesses on similar occasions. The love of beauty--the Greek horror of deformity--is so strong with this people that its imperatives take precedence of moral considerations--of pity, delicacy, kindliness. The uneducated Italian shows his instinctive disgust at what is ugly or horrible and, as we have seen, no prevenient idealism checks the impulse.

It is an important truth that Italians learn from the outside and that Northern peoples get from without only what they bring from within; that Italians have, perhaps, as little ethical awareness as they have signal and abiding aesthetical awareness. But that uninterrupted vision of reality which has relegated moral vision to the second place has bestowed on Europe not what is crude and naked and bare, but another mode of seeing, of feeling, of being--one of the great modes of human expression--art. This people who have been called ”prodigals of themselves” have been so prodigal of their gifts that the hand which stripped the veil from the objects of sense is also the hand which clothed them, returning them to us with the crudity gone, replaced with new meaning, by new vision--expressed for ever in higher terms. The ruthless vision which saw so much, and suffered no illusion, saw also something which we did not see; and revealing to us what lay beyond our sight held up a mirror in which the real looks back at us as the ideal.

The imagination of the Kelt, said Matthew Arnold, ”with its pa.s.sionate, turbulent, indomitable reaction against the despotism of fact” has never succeeded in producing a masterpiece of art. Here we have a clue to the truth--which the Greek had already taught us--that _interpretation_ is not left only to the peoples whose vision is turned inwards; that when, for such, the external seems bared of all meaning, the realist may restore it to us with the new vision in it.

II. _The Romans._

In no European country has the secular conflict between race and race, province and province, been keener than in Italy--Lombards, Venetians, Tuscans, Romans, and Neapolitans have formed not only politically but morally antagonistic communities; and Italy has yet to create that moral unity which is no more a tradition of her past than is the civil unity she has already achieved.

Nowhere, during the era of the _Risorgimento_, was this antagonism more keenly felt than in Rome and by the Romans who have always divided the inhabitants of that ”geographical expression,” Italy, into ”Romans” and ”Italians.” To this day the difficulties of moral union are fed by the incompatibilities and the jealousies of ”north” and ”south.” To the warm Southerner, Lombards and Piedmontese are a nation of shopkeepers; to the Northerner, the Neapolitan, the Calabrese, and the Sicilian are as brilliant impossible and mediaeval Irishmen.

Midway between these two, neither north nor south, stands and always has stood the Roman: by sympathy, proclivity, and geographical position a little more south than north; but by history achievement and tradition independent of either. Florence represents the fine flower of the Italian spirit, the South its poetry, Venice and the North its civil greatness. What is notable everywhere is an incomparable productiveness in all activities of the human intellect, all fineness of the human spirit. But Rome has not produced. After that one act of creation, the Roman polity, Rome has been sterile; its function has been not to create but to criticise. Like the great Church which has developed within its borders, Rome has been the lawgiver, the critic of other men's gifts, but has laid no claim--when once we cede her initial gift of an infallible _magisterium_--to _charismata_. And so the Roman possesses in its highest terms the gift of _criterion_. Some witty person--a Frenchman of course--said that England was an island and every Englishman was an island; and so we may say that Rome was arbiter of the world and every Roman possesses that keen vivid abounding gift of _arbitrament_.

[Ill.u.s.tration: CHAPEL OF THE Pa.s.sION IN THE CHURCH OF SAN CLEMENTE

The church, which is in the street leading from the Lateran to the Colosseum, belongs to the Irish Dominicans.]

Rome therefore is not Italy for taste, art, delicacies of sentiment, for the great creations of the intellect the spirit and the imagination--Rome is the ancient mistress of the world; and the role the function and the influence of Rome must all be viewed in relation to her gift of infallible criterion, of world dominance.

The Roman of to-day not only lives in the city of the Roman who gave laws to the known world, he thinks his thoughts and to a great extent lives his life. He is the result of the grandiose memories of the past playing upon such a temperament as his. He lives surrounded by vague memories, understanding that it was something exceedingly great which fell, leaving him in the midst of these ruins. And the Roman has a supreme indifference--he looks upon every event with the same tolerance, the same sentiment of Emerson's ”fine Oxford gentleman”

that ”there is nothing new and nothing true, and no matter.” One procession pa.s.ses him by to honour Giordano Bruno, victim of theological bigotry; another pa.s.ses to the Vatican to render homage to the power which crushed Bruno: the Roman looks out upon both with the same eyes, the same indifferent dignity. ”The Roman apathy,” say some; but others call it a superiority, Roman largeness of outlook, the Roman freedom from what is petty and intolerant.

Who are the modern Roman people? Are they the genuine survivors of the rulers of the world? That there has been an immense influx of alien blood since the fifth century is certain. The incredible depletion of the Roman population in some periods was repaired by immigration from other parts of Italy; but Roman characteristics at the present day are too well marked to allow us to suppose that Rome has been at any time swamped by foreign admixture, or that the persistence of these characteristics can be accounted for merely by the continuity of Roman civilisation and the Roman _milieu_. The Romans of to-day, therefore, are the same people as the Romans of the great epoch--but with a difference. They are Romans with the energy sapped out; with the power of self-sacrifice for a public good gone, and with it the power to impose themselves on the nations, on their fellows. Romans with no heroes and no martyrs.

[Ill.u.s.tration: A RUSTIC DWELLING IN THE ROMAN CAMPAGNA]

Nowhere, in fact, can the Italian character be seen so unspoiled as in Rome, where fewer outside influences and neither education nor social polish have conspired to modify the characteristics of the nation who were once the _buontemponi_ of Europe. The people of cla.s.sic Rome had always been men of a certain roughness, whose heroic qualities were formed at the expense of delicacy of sentiment. This rudeness of mind, of sentiment, of taste showed itself in every part of the Roman life. While Athenians watched the tragedies of Sophocles in theatres which could only hold a select audience, the Romans crowded into huge amphitheatres where a hundred thousand men and women gloated over the sufferings of sentient creatures--animals or men, it made no difference; the same hideous ”practical jokes,” as Walter Pater notes, being impartially meted out to both. Centuries after Athens met to applaud the periods of Pericles, the Roman ladies were turning down their thumbs that they might be sated with the spectacle of the last agony of the vanquished in the arena. The refined symposia of Greece became in Rome barbaric banquetings where the guests prolonged the pleasures of the table by vomiting what they had already eaten. The stern self-repression, the admirable power of devotion in a public cause, the contempt of pleasure and of life, the _animus lucis contemptor_ of the early Republic, were qualities which did not descend to the Romans of the Empire.

_The Roman Type_

Not only Roman characteristics but the Roman type also have descended.

The large round ma.s.sive Roman head still contrasts with the narrow pointed head of the Tuscan. The type still admired in women is the _tipo giunonico_, the type of Juno and of the Roman matron--large ma.s.sive and imposing. The Roman has a ruddy fresh complexion, the swarthy southern skin being comparatively rare; he has black hair, is burly and tends to obesity. His expression is tranquil and contented, and Signor Aristide Gabelli in his essay on Rome and the Romans bids us observe that the type has improved, that we no longer see the hard, bitter, threatening expression of the busts in the Capitol and Vatican, the prominent jaw and cheek bones have been softened; and the Roman of the city, at any rate, wears a more genial and humane expression than his cla.s.sic ancestor. At a church function, among the Roman peasants--though I fear the type was more frequent in the ”eighties”--one may see a face which might serve as the model for Jove, for a Roman poet or philosopher. It is such a face as could never be met with even among the best specimens of our peasantry.

m.u.f.fled in his great fur-collared cloak, dirty and ragged, with eyes which seem to look from a soul that harbours every n.o.ble aspiration, our old peasant who can certainly neither read nor write, is probably cogitating why Checco refused to give him the wine at three sous the measure, or whether he would have done better to put the franc the _forastiero_ gave him into shoes, instead of following Peppe's suggestion as to lottery numbers. So much for the wonders which an old civilisation can confer without any effort or any preparation.

[Ill.u.s.tration: PROCESSION WITH THE HOST AT SUBIACO]

Many a.s.sert that the _Trasteverini_ are the only lineal descendants of the Romans. The legend is that Trastevere was colonised by the Greeks brought by Aeneas, and the Greco-Roman type may frequently be seen there in absolute perfection--women of the people having the cla.s.sic features and the n.o.ble bearing of empresses. They are a more robust race than the Romans on the other side of the Tiber, the black hair of the women is still more luxuriant, the character more pa.s.sionate and vindictive, the language coa.r.s.er, the reputation of the women not so fair.

In common with all Italians the Romans are more graceful than English men and women. The simple dignity and grace of the pose and carriage, with no stiffness or awkwardness, makes it easy to distinguish an Italian among Englishmen Germans or Americans whether he is sitting or standing. They have the small Latin bones and small hands and feet; the foot, however, is flatter than ours, and every one from the children to the soldiers drags his feet along the ground. But the walk is so unstilted that Italians form a natural procession, whereas a procession in England is achieved with much difficulty and is not really pleasing to the eye when it is achieved. Have you ever noticed the _mesquin_ gesture--the fear to let himself go which is so closely allied to the knowledge that he cannot do it gracefully--with which one commonplace Englishman bids good-bye to another? You will see nothing like this in Italy. The ample Roman gesture--that Italian gesture of rea.s.surance which seems to the Englishman quite sacerdotal--is the property of every one; and a woman of the people will hail an omnibus with the cla.s.sic gesture that her ancestor might have used when bidding Olympian Jove stay his thunderbolt.

The Italians have the Latin eye and eyebrow; one never sees the unmodelled elementary eye, with its gaze _bon enfant_, of our younger civilisation. Naturally resonant, the voices of Italians are in all cla.s.ses harsh and unmodulated; and there is no better evidence of the general ignorance in Rome than the uneducated speaking voices which make it impossible to distinguish a princess from a peasant at her prayers. The possession of a strong natural organ, quite untutored, is here joined to the Roman love of noise and racket; and the result is that the people scream at each other as if they were deaf, and you can only be sorry they are not also mute. It is an odd thing to hear the deep ba.s.s voice of some of the women alternating with the high thin tenor of many of the men; one may often mistake in this way the s.e.x of unseen speakers. The deep voices of the women remind one that the contralto, and even the _contro tenore_, have been cultivated _con amore_ in Italy: on the other hand a labourer in the fields or your servant-man in the kitchen region can be heard singing in high falsetto like a girl. What one will never hear in Italy are the affected speaking voices cultivated by Englishmen: the Italian does not ”put on side” either in his voice or his manners, and nothing is more noticeable perhaps on one's return to England than the absurdly affected voice of the men.

There is no Roman dialect in the sense in which there is a Venetian a Piedmontese and a Neapolitan dialect--habitually spoken by all cla.s.ses among themselves. The _Romanesco_ spoken in Rome by the people is a debased Italian, not a real dialect. The purest Italian is, as we all know, spoken in Tuscany, where there is no dialect, and the best p.r.o.nunciation is the Roman. Hence the proverb: ”The Tuscan language in the Roman mouth,” _Lingua toscana in bocca romana_.

_The Roman's Character_

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