Chapter 23

Venerable Mrs. Jameson, author of a little library of writings on Italian art, was likewise of our company occasionally; and she evinced a marked liking for my father, which was remarkable, inasmuch as he was able to keep no sort of pace with her in her didactic homilies, which were delivered with a tranquil, ex-cathedra manner, befitting one who was the authority on her subject; one would no more have thought of questioning her verdicts than those of Ruskin; but I should have liked to see the latter and her together, with a difference between them. Her legs were less active than her mind, and most of our expeditions with her were made in carriages, from which she dispensed her wisdom placidly as we went along, laying the dust of our ignorance with the droppings of her erudition, like a watering-cart. However, she so far condescended from her altitudes as to speak very cordially of my father's books, for which he expressed proper acknowledgment; and she had a motherly way of holding his hand in hers when he took leave of her, and looking maternally in his face, which made him somewhat uneasy. "Were we to meet often," he remarked,

"I should be a little afraid of her embracing me outright--a thing to be grateful for, but by no means to be glad of!" We drove one day to some excavations which had just been opened near the tomb of Cecilia Metella, outside the walls of Rome. Both Christian and Roman graves had been found, and they had been so recently discovered that, as my father observed, there could have been very little intervention of persons (though much of time) between the departure of the friends of the dead and our own visit. The large, excavated chambers were filled with sarcophagi, beautifully sculptured, and their walls were ornamented with free-hand decoration done in wet plaster, a marvellous testimony to the rapid skill of the artists. The sarcophagi were filled with the bones and the dust of the ancient people who had once, in the imperial prime of Rome, walked about her streets, prayed to her gods, and feasted at her banquets. My father remarked on the fact that many of the sarcophagi were sculptured with figures that seemed anything but mournful in their demeanor; but Mrs. Jameson said that there was almost always, in the subject chosen, some allusion to death, instancing the story of Meleager, an Argonaut, who, I think, slew the Calydonian boar, and afterwards his two uncles, who had tried to get the boar's hide away from Meleager's beloved Atalanta; whereupon the young hero was brought to death by his mother, who in turn killed herself. It is one of the most thoroughgoing of the classic tragedies, and was a favorite theme for the sculptors of sarcophagi. Certainly, in the sarcophagi of the Vatican the bas-reliefs are often scenes of battle, the rush of men and horses, and the ground strewn with dead; and in others, a dying person seems to be represented, with his friends weeping along the sides of the sarcophagus; but often, too, the allusion to death, if it exists at all, is very remote. The old Romans, like ourselves, had individual ways of regarding the great change; according to their mood and faith, they were hopeful or despairing. But death is death, think of it how we will.

I think it was on a previous occasion that I went with my father, afoot, along this same mighty Appian Way, beside which rise so many rounded structures, vast as fortresses, containing the remains of the dead of long ago, and culminating in the huge mass of the Cecilia Metella tomb, with the mediaeval battlements on its summit. And it was on that walk that we met the calf of The Marble Faun: "A well-grown calf," my father says in his notes, "who seemed frolicsome, shy, and sociable all at the same time; for he capered and leaped to one side, and shook his head, as I passed him, but soon came galloping behind me, and again started aside when I looked round." How little I suspected then (or the bull-calf either, for that matter) that he was to frolic his way into literature, and go gambolling down the ages to distract the anxious soul of the lover of Hilda! Another walk of ours was to the huge, green mound of the Monte Testaccio; it was, at that period, pierced by numerous cavities, in the dark coolness of which stores of native wines were kept; and they were sold to customers at the rude wooden tables in front of the excavations, in flasks shaped like large drops of water, protected with plaited straw. When, nowadays, in New York or other cities here, I go to an Italian restaurant, I always call for one of these flasks, and think, as I drink its contents, of that afternoon with my father. It was the first time I had been permitted to taste a fermented liquor. I liked it very much, and got two glasses of it; and when we rose to depart I was greatly perplexed, and my father was vastly tickled, to discover a lack of coherence between my legs and my intentions. It speedily passed off, for the wines are of the lightest and airiest description; but when, a little later on in life, I came to read that Horatian verse describing how, turning from barbaric splendors such as the Persians affect, he binds his brows with simple myrtle, and sips, beneath the shadow of his garden bower, the pure vintage of the native grape, I better appreciated the poetry of the theme from having enjoyed that Testaccionesque experience.

It was in Rome, too, that I first came in contact with death. It aroused my liveliest curiosity, but, as I remember, no alarm; partly, I suspect, because I was unable to believe that there was anything real in the spectacle. The scene has been woven into the texture of the Italian romance; it is there described almost as it actually presented itself to the author's observation. A dead monk of the Capuchin order lay on a bier in the nave of their church, and while we looked at him a stream of blood flowed from his nostrils. We went down afterwards, I recollect, into the vaults, and saw the fine, Oriental loam in which the body was to lie; and it seems to me there were arches and other architectural features composed of skulls and bones of long-dead brothers of the order. He must have been a fantastic and saturnine genius who first suggested this idea.

Another subterranean expedition of ours was to the Catacombs, the midnight passages of which seemed to be made of bones, and niches containing the dust of unknown mortality, which were duskily revealed in the glimmer of our moccoli as we passed along in single file. Sometimes we came to chambers, one of which had in it a bier covered with glass, in which was a body which still preserved some semblance of the human form. There were occasional openings in the vaulted roof of the corridors, but for the most part the darkness was Egyptian, and for a few moments a thrill of anxiety was caused by the disappearance either of my sister Una or of Ada Shepard; I forget which. They were soon found, but the guide read us a homily upon the awful peril of lifelong entombment which encompassed us. But the air was dry and cool, and the whole adventure, from my point of view, enjoyable.

Again, we went down a long flight of steps somewhere near the Forum, till we reached a pitch-black place, where we waited till a guide came up from still lower depths, down into which we followed him--each with a moccolo--till we felt level earth or stone beneath our feet, and stood in what I suppose is as lightless a hole as can exist in nature. It was wet, too, and the smell of it was deadly and dismal. This, however, was the prison in which the old Romans used to confine important prisoners, such as Jugurtha and the Apostle Peter; and here they were strangled to death or left to starve. It was the Mamertine Prison. I did not like it. I also recall the opening of an oubliette in the castle of San Angelo, which affected me like a nightmare. Before leaving Concord, in 1853, I had once tumbled through a rotten board into a well, dug by the side of the road ages before, and had barely saved myself from dropping to the bottom, sixty feet below, by grabbing the weeds which grew on the margin of the hole. I was not much scared at the moment; but the next day, taking my father to the scene of the accident, he remarked that had I fallen in I never could have got out again; upon which I conceived a horror of the well which haunts me in my dreams even to this day. Only a tuft of grass between me and such a fate! I was, therefore, far from comfortable beside the oubliette, and was glad to emerge again into the Roman sunshine.

One night we climbed the Pincian Hill, and saw, far out across Rome, the outlines of St. Peter's dome in silver light. While we were thinking that nothing could be more beautiful, all of a sudden the delicate silver bloomed out into a golden glory, which made everybody say, "Oh!" Was it more beautiful or not? Theoretically, I prefer the silver illumination; but, as a matter of fact, I must confess that I liked the golden illumination better. We were told that the wonder was performed by convicts, who lay along the dome and applied their matches to the lamps at the word of command, and that, inasmuch as the service was apt to prove fatal to the operators, these convicts were allowed certain alleviations of their condition for doing it. I suppose it is done by electricity now, and the convicts neither are killed nor obtain any concessions. Such are the helps and hindrances of civilization!

Shortly after this, on a cool and cloudy night, I was down in the Piazza, del Popolo and saw the fireworks, the only other pyrotechnic exhibition I had witnessed having been a private one in Rock Park, which, I think, I have described. This Roman one was very different, and I do not believe I have ever since seen another so fine. The whole front of the Pincian was covered with fiery designs, and in the air overhead wonderful fiery serpents and other devices skimmed, arched, wriggled, shot aloft, and detonated. A boy accepts appearances as realities; and these fireworks doubtless enlarged my conceptions of the possibilities of nature, and substantiated the fables of the enchanters.

[IMAGE: THE MARBLE FAUN]

The Faun of Praxiteles, as the world knows, attracted my father, though he could not have visited it often; for both in his notes and in his romance he makes the same mistake as to the pose of the figure: "He has a pipe," he says in the former, "or some such instrument of music in the hand which rests upon the tree, and the other, I think, hangs carelessly by his side." Of course, the left arm, the one referred to, is held akimbo on his left hip. That my father's eyes were, however, already awake to the literary and moral possibilities of the Faun is shown by his further observations, which are much the same as those which appear in the book. "The whole person," he says, "conveys the idea of an amiable and sensual nature, easy, mirthful, apt for jollity, yet not incapable of being touched by pathos. The Faun has no principle, nor could comprehend it, yet is true and honest by virtue of his simplicity; very capable, too, of affection. He might be refined through his feelings, so that the coarser, animal part of his nature would be thrown into the background, though liable to assert itself at any time. Praxiteles has only expressed the animal part of the nature by one (or, rather, two) definite signs--the two ears, which go up in a little peak, not likely to be discovered on slight inspection, and, I suppose, they are covered with downy fur. A tail is probably hidden under the garment. Only a sculptor of the finest imagination, most delicate taste, and sweetest feeling would have dreamed of representing a faun under this guise; and, if you brood over it long enough, all the pleasantness of sylvan life, and all the genial and happy characteristics of the brute creation, seem to be mixed in him with humanity--trees, grass, flowers, cattle, deer, and unsophisticated man." This passage shows how much my father was wont to trust to first impressions, and even more on the moral than on the material side. He recognized a truth in the first touch--the first thought--which he was wary of meddling with afterwards, contenting himself with slightly developing it now and then, and smoothing a little the form and manner of its presentation. The finest art is nearest to the most veritable nature--to such as have the eye to see the latter aright. Rome, like other ancient cities which have fallen from the positive activity of their original estate, has one great advantage over other places which one wishes to see (like London, for instance), that the whole business of whoever goes there, who has any business whatever, is to see it; and when the duty-sights have been duly done, the sight-seer then first begins to live his true life in independence and happiness, going where he lists, staying no longer than he pleases, and never knowing, when he sallies forth in the morning, what, or how many, or how few things he will have accomplished by nightfall.

The duty to see is indeed the death of real vision; the official cicerone leads you anywhere but to the place or thing that you are in the mood to behold or understand. But with his disappearance the fun and the pageant begin; one's eyes are at last opened, and beauty and significance flow in through every pore of the senses. It is in this better phase of his Roman sojourn that I picture my father; he trudges tranquilly and happily to and fro, with no programme and no obligations, absorbing all things with that quiet, omnivorous glance of his; pausing whenever he takes the fancy, and contemplating for moments or minutes whatever strikes his fancy; often turning aside from egregious spectacles and giving his attention to apparent trifles, to the mere passing show; pondering on the tuft of flowers in a cranny of the Coliseum wall, on the azure silhouette of the Alban Mountains, on the moss collected on the pavement beneath the aperture in the roof of the Pantheon, on the picturesque deformity of old, begging Beppo on the steps of the Piazza, d' Espagna. I am trudging joyously beside him, hanging on to his left hand (the other being occupied with his hook-headed cane), asking him innumerable questions, to which he comfortably, or abstractedly, or with humorous impatience, replies; or I run on before him, or lag behind, busy with my endless occupation of picking up things to me curious and valuable, and filling with them my much-enduring pockets; in this way drinking in Rome in my own way, also, and to my boyish advantage. He tells me tales of old Rome, always apposite to the occasion; draws from me, sometimes, my private views as to persons, places, and scenes, and criticises those views in his own terse, arch, pregnant way, the force and pertinency whereof are revealed to me only in my later meditations upon them. It is only after one has begun to deal in this way with Rome that its magic and spell begin to work upon one; and they are never to be shaken off. Anxiety and pain may be mingled with them, as was the case with my father before we said our final farewell to the mighty city; but it is thereby only the more endeared to one. Rome is one of the few central facts of the world, because it is so much more than a fact. Byron is right--it is the city of the soul.

On one of the last evenings of our first season we went to the Thompsons', and were there shown, among other things, a portfolio of sketches. There is in The Marble Faun a chapter called "Miriam's Studio," in which occurs a reference to a portfolio of sketches by Miriam herself; the hint for it may have been taken from the portfolio of Mr. Thompson, though the sketches themselves were of a very different quality and character. The latter collection pleased me, because I was just beginning to fill an album of my own with such lopsided attempts to represent real objects, and yet more preposterous imaginative sallies as my age and nature suggested. My father was interested in them on account of the spiritual vigor which belongs to the artist's first vision of his subject. In their case, as well as in his own, he felt that it was impossible, as Browning put it, to "recapture that first, fine, careless rapture." But the man of letters has an advantage over the man of paint and canvas in the matter of being able to preserve the original spirit in the later, finished design.

Towards the close of this first season in Rome the Bryants came to town, and the old poet, old in aspect even then, called on us; but he was not a childly man, and we youngsters stood aloof and contemplated with awe his white, Merlin beard and tranquil but chilly eyes. Near the end of May William Story invited us to breakfast with him; the Bryants and Miss Hosmer and some English people were there; and I understood nothing of what passed except the breakfast, which was good, until, at the end of the session, my father and Story began to talk about the superstition as to Friday, and they agreed that, of course, it was nonsense, but that, nevertheless, it did have an influence on both of them. It probably has an influence on everybody who has ever heard of it. Many of us protest indignantly that we don't believe in it, but the protest itself implies something not unlike believing.

Finally, on the 24th of May, we left our Pincian palace, and got into and on the huge _vettura_ which was to carry us to Florence, a week's journey. It was to be one of the most delightful and blessed of our foreign experiences; my father often said that he had enjoyed nothing else so much, the vetturino (who happened to be one of the honestest and sweetest-tempered old fellows in Italy) taking upon himself the entire management of everything, down to ordering the meals and paying the tolls, thus leaving us wholly unembarrassed and free from responsibility while traversing a route always historically and generally scenically charming. But we were destined, on the threshold of the adventure, to undergo one of those evil quarters of an hour which often usher in a period of special sunshine; for we were forced into a desperate conflict with our servant-girl, Lalla, and her mother over a question of wages. The girl had done chores for us during our residence at the Palazzo Larazani, and had seemed to be a very amiable little personage; she was small, slim, and smiling, and, though dirty and inefficient, was no worse, so far as we could discover, than any other Roman servant-girl. When we had fixed on the date of our departure, Lalla had been asked how much warning she wanted; she replied, a fortnight; which, accordingly, was given her, with a few days thrown in for good measure. But when the day arrived she claimed a week's more pay, and her old mother had a bill of her own for fetching water. According to my observation, travelling Americans have little or no conscience; to avoid trouble they will submit to imposition, not to mention their habit of spoiling tradesmen, waiters, and other foreign attendants by excessive tips and payments. But my father and mother, though apt enough to make liberal bargains, were absolutely incorruptible and immovable when anything like barefaced robbery was attempted upon them; and they refused to present Lalla and her mother with a single baioccho more than was their due. Moreover, the patrone, or proprietor, of the Palazzo had mulcted them some six scudi for Lalla's profuse breakages of glass and crockery during our stay.

It was early morning when we set out, and only the faithful Thompsons were there to bid us farewell. Lalla and her tribe, however, were on hand, and violently demanded the satisfaction of their iniquitous claims. "No!" said my father, and "No!" said my mother, like the judges of the Medes and Persians. Thereupon the whole House of Lalla, but Lalla and her mother especially, gave us an example of what an Italian can do in the way of cursing an enemy. Ancient forms of malediction, which had been current in the days of the early Roman kings, were mingled with every damning invention that had been devised during the Middle Ages, and ever since then; and they were all hurled at us in shrill, screaming tones, accompanied by fell and ominous gestures and inarticulate yells of superheated frenzy. Nothing could surpass the volubility of this cursing, unless it were the animosity which prompted it; no crime that anybody, since Cain slew Abel, had or could have committed deserved a tenth part of the calamities and evil haps which this preposterous family called down upon our heads, who had committed no crime at all, but quite the contrary. When, in after-years, I heard Booth, as Richelieu, threaten "the curse of Rome" upon his opponents, I shuddered, wondering whether he had any notion what the threat meant. Through it all my mother's ordinarily lovely and peaceful countenance expressed a sad but unalterable determination; and my father kept smiling in a certain dangerous way that he sometimes had in moments of great peril or stress, but said nothing; while Mr. Thompson indignantly called upon the cursers to cease and to beware, and my dear friend Eddy looked distressed to the verge of tears. He squeezed my hand as I got into the _vettura_, and told me not to mind--the Lalla people were wicked, and their ill-wishes would return upon their own heads. A handful of ten-cent pieces, or their Roman equivalent, would have stopped the whole outcry and changed it into blessings; but I think my father would not have yielded had the salvation of Rome and of all Italy depended upon it. His eyes gleamed, as I have seen them do on one or two other occasions only, as we drove away, with the screams pursuing us, and that smile still hovered about his mouth. But we drove on; Gaetano cracked his long whip, our four steeds picked up their feet and rattled our vehicle over the Roman cobble-stones; we passed the Porta del Popolo, and were stretching along, under the summer sunshine, upon the white road that led to Florence. It was a divine morning; the turmoil and the strife were soon forgotten, and for a week thenceforward there was only unalloyed felicity before us. Poor, evil-invoking Lalla had passed forever out of our sphere.

XVIII

In Othello's predicament--Gaetano--Crystals and snail- shells--Broad, flagstone pavements--Fishing-rods and blow- pipes--Ghostly yarns--Conservative effects of genius--An ideal bust and a living one--The enigma of spiritualism--A difficult combination to overthrow--The dream-child and the Philistine--Dashing and plunging this way and that--Teresa screamed for mercy--Grapes and figs and ghostly voices--My father would have settled there--Kirkup the necromancer--A miraculous birth--A four-year-old medium--The mysterious touch--An indescribable horror--Not even a bone of her was left--Providence takes very long views.