Part 5

The moment in which one takes his first look at Rome is an epoch in his life. Even if his education should have been a most illiberal one, and he himself should be as strenuous an opponent of pontifical prerogatives as John of Leyden or Dr. Dowling, he is sure to be, for the time, imbued in some measure with the feelings of a pilgrim. The sight of that city which has exercised such a mighty influence on the world, almost from its very foundation, fills his mind with "troublings of strange joy." His vague notions of ancient history assume a more distinct form. The twelve Caesars pass before his mind's eye like the spectral kings before the Scotch usurper. The classics which he used to neglect so shamefully at school, the historical lessons which he thought so dull, have been endowed with life and interest by that one glance of his astonished eye. But if he loved the classics in his youth,--if the wanderings of AEneas and the woes of Dido charmed instead of tiring him,--if "Livy's pictured page," the polished periods of Sallust and Tacitus, and the mighty eloquence of Cicero, were to him a mine of delight rather than a task,--how does his eye glisten with renewed youth, and his heart swell as his old boyish enthusiasm is once more kindled within it! He feels that he has reached the goal to which his heart and mind were turned during his purest and most unselfish years; and if he were as unswayed by human respect as he was then, he would kneel down with the travel-worn pilgrims by the wayside to give utterance to his gratitude, and to greet the queen city of the world: _Salve, magna parens!_

I shall not easily forget the cloudless afternoon when I first took that long, wearisome ride from Civita Vecchia to Rome. There was no railway in those days, as there is now, and the diligence was of so rude and uncomfortable a make that I half suspected it to be the one upon the top of which Hannibal is said to have crossed the Alps, (_summa diligentia_.) I shared the _coupe_ with two other sufferers, and was, like them, so fatigued that it seemed as if a celestial vision would be powerless to make me forgetful of my aching joints, when (after a laborious pull up a hill which might be included among the "everlasting hills" spoken of in holy writ) our long-booted postilion turned his expressive face towards us, and banished all our weariness by exclaiming, as he pointed into the blue distance with his short whip-handle, "_Ecco! Roma! San Pietro!_"

A single glance of the eye served to overcome all our fatigue. There lay the world's capital, crowned by the mighty dome of the Vatican basilica, and we were every moment drawing nearer to it. It was evening before we found ourselves staring at those dark walls which have withstood so many sieges, and heard the welcome demand for passports, which informed us that we had reached the gate of the city.

I was really in Rome,--I was in that city hallowed by so many classical, historical, and sacred associations,--and it all seemed to me like a confused dream. Twice, before the diligence had gone a hundred yards inside the gate, I had pinched myself to ascertain whether I was really awake; and even after I passed through the lofty colonnade of St. Peter's, and had gazed at the front of the church and the vast square which art has made familiar to every one, and had seen the fountains with the moonbeams flashing in their silvery spray, I feared lest something should interrupt my dream, and I should wake to find myself in my snug bedroom at home, wondering at the weakness which allowed me to be seduced into the eating of a bit of cheese the evening before. It was not so, however; no disorganizing cheese had interfered with my digestion; it was no dream; and I was really in Rome. I slept soundly when I reached my hotel, for I felt sure that no hostile Brennus lay in wait to disturb the city's peace, and the grateful hardness of my bed convinced me that all the geese of the capital had not been killed, if the enemy should effect an entrance.

There are few people who love Rome at first sight. The ruins, that bear witness to her grandeur in the days of her worldly supremacy, oppress you at first with an inexpressible sadness. The absence of any thing like the business enterprise and energy of this commercial age makes English and American people long at first for a little of the bustle and roar of Broadway and the Strand. The small paving stones, which make the feet of those who are unaccustomed to them ache severely, the brick and stone floors of the houses, and the lack of the little comforts of modern civilization, render Rome a wearisome place, until one has caught its spirit. Little does he think who for the first time gazes on those gray, mouldering walls, on which "dull time feeds like slow fire upon a hoary brand," or walks those streets in which the past and present are so strangely commingled,--little does he realize how dear those scenes will one day be to him. He cannot foresee the regret with which he will leave those things that seem too common and familiar to deserve attention, nor the glowing enthusiasm which their mention will inspire in after years; and he would smile incredulously if any one were to predict to him that his heart, in after times, will swell with homesick longings as he recalls the memory of that ancient city, and that he will one day salute it from afar as his second home.

I make no claims to antiquarian knowledge; for I do not love antiquity for itself alone. It is only by force of association that antiquity has any charms for me. The pyramids of Egypt would awaken my respect, not so much by their age or size, as by the remembrance of the momentous scenes which have been enacted in their useless and ungraceful presence. Show me a scroll so ancient that human science can obtain no key to the mysteries locked up in the strange figures inscribed upon it, and you would move me but little. But place before me one of those manuscripts (filled with scholastic lore, instinct with classic eloquence, or luminous with the word of eternal life) which have come down to us from those nurseries of learning and piety, the monasteries of the middle ages, and you fill me with the intensest enthusiasm. There is food for the imagination hidden under those worm-eaten covers and brazen clasps. I see in those fair pages something more than the results of the patient toil which perpetuated those precious truths. From those carefully penned lines, and brilliant initial letters, the pale, thoughtful face of the transcriber looks upon me--his contempt of worldly ambition and sacrifice of human consolations are reflected there--and from the quiet of his austere cell, he seems to dart from his serene eyes a glance of patient reproach at the worldlier and more modern age which reaps the fruit of his labour, and repays him by slandering his character. Show me a building whose stupendous masonry seems the work of Titan hands, but whose history is lost in the twilight of the ages, so that no record remains of a time when it was any thing but an antique enigma, and its massive columns and Cyclopean proportions will not touch me so nearly as the stone in Florence where Dante used to stand and gaze upon that dome which Michel Angelo said he would not imitate, and could not excel.

Feeling thus about antiquities, I need not say that those of Rome, so crowned with the most thrilling historical and personal associations, are not wanting in charms for me. Yet I do not claim to be an antiquarian. It is all one to me whether the column of Phocas be forty feet high or sixty,--whether a ruin on the Palatine that fascinates me by its richness and grandeur, was once a Temple of Minerva or of Jupiter Stator; or whether its foundations are of travertine or tufa. I abhor details. My enjoyment of a landscape would be at an end if I were called upon to count the mild-eyed cattle that contribute so much to its picturesqueness; and I have no wish to disturb my appreciation of the spirit of a place consecrated by ages of heroic history, by entertaining any of the learned conjectures of professional antiquarians. It is enough for me to know that I am standing on the spot where Romulus built his straw-thatched palace, and his irreverent brother leaped over the walls of the future mistress of the nations. Standing in the midst of the relics of the grandeur of imperial Rome, the whole of her wonderful history is constantly acting over again in my mind. The stern simplicity of those who laid the foundations of her greatness, the patriotic daring of those who extended her power, the wisdom of those who terminated civil strife by compelling the divided citizens to unite against a foreign foe, are all present to me. In that august place where Cicero pleaded, gazing upon that mount where captive kings did homage to the masters of the world, your mere antiquarian, with his pestilent theories and measurements, seems to me little better than a profaner. When I see such a one scratching about the base of some majestic column in the Forum (although I cannot but be grateful to those whose researches have developed the greatness of the imperial city,) I do long to interrupt him, and remind him that his "tread is on an empire's dust." I wish to recall him from the petty details in which he delights, and have him enjoy with me the grandeur and dignity of the whole scene.

The triumphal arches,--the monuments of the cultivation of those remote ages, no less than of the power of the state which erected them,--the memorials of the luxury that paved the way to the decline of that power--all these things impress me with the thought of the long years that intervened between that splendour and the times when the seat of universal empire was inhabited only by shepherds and their flocks. It wearies me to think of the long centuries of human effort that were required to bring Rome to its culminating point of glory; and it affords me a melancholy kind of amusement to contrast the spirit of those who laid the deep and strong foundations of that prosperity and power, with that of some modern sages, to whom a hundred years are a respectable antiquity, and who seem to think that commercial enterprise and the will of a fickle populace form as secure a basis for a state as private virtue, and the principle of obedience to law. I know a country, yet in the first century of its national existence, full of hope and ambition, and possessing advantages such as never before fell to the lot of a young empire, but lacking in those powers which made Rome what she was. If that country, "the newest born of nations, the latest hope of mankind," which has so rapidly risen to a power surpassing in extent that of ancient Rome, and bears within itself the elements of the decay that ruined the old empire,--wealth, vice, corruption,--if she could overcome the vain notion that hers is an exceptional case, and that she is not subject to that great law of nature which makes personal virtue the corner-stone of national stability and the lack of that its bane, and could look calmly upon the remains of old Rome's grandeur, she might learn a great lesson. Contemplating the patient formation of that far-reaching dominion until it found its perfect consummation in the age of Augustus, (_Tantae molis erat Romanam condere gentem_,) she would see that true national greatness is not "the hasty product of a day"; that demagogues and adventurers, who have made politics their trade, are not the architects of that greatness; and that the parchment on which the constitution and laws of a country are written, might as well be used for drum-heads when reverence and obedience have departed from the hearts of its people.

A gifted representative of a name which is classical in the history of the drama, some years ago gave to the world a journal of her residence in Rome. She called her volume "A Year of Consolation"--a title as true as it is poetical. Indeed I know of nothing more soothing to the spirit than a walk through these ancient streets, or an hour of meditation amid these remains of fallen majesty. To stand in the arena of the Coliseum in the noonday glare, or when those ponderous arches cast their lengthened shadows on the spot where the first Roman Christians were sacrificed to make a holiday for a brutalized populace,--to muse in the Pantheon, that changeless temple of a living, and monument of a dead, worship, and reflect on the many generations that have passed beneath its majestic portico from the days of Agrippa to our own,--to listen to the birds that sing amid the shrubbery which decks the stupendous arches of the Baths of Caracalla,--to be overwhelmed by the stillness of the Campagna while the eye is filled with that rolling verdure which seems in the hazy distance like the waves of the unquiet sea--what are all these things but consolations in the truest sense of the word? What is the bitterest grief that ever pierced a human heart through a long life of sorrows, compared to the dumb woe of that mighty desolation? What are our brief sufferings, when they are brought into the august presence of a mourner who has seen her hopes one by one taken from her, through centuries of war and rapine, neglect and silent decay?

Among all of Rome's monuments of antiquity, there are few that impress me so strangely as those old Egyptian obelisks, the trophies of the victorious emperors, which the pontiffs have made to contribute so greatly to the adornment of their capital. It is almost impossible to turn a corner of one of the principal streets of the city without seeing one of these peculiar shafts that give a fine finish to the perspective. If their cold granite forms could speak, what a strange history they would reveal! They were witnesses of the achievements of a power which reached its noonday splendour centuries before the shepherd Faustulus took the foundling brothers into his cottage on the banks of the Tiber. The civilization of which they are the relics had declined before the Roman kings inaugurated that which afterwards reclaimed all Europe from the barbarians. Yet there they stand as grim and silent as if they had but yesterday been rescued from the captivity of the native quarry, and had never seen a nobler form than those of the dusty artisans who wrought them--as dull and unimpressible as some of the stupid tourists whom I see daily gazing upon these glorious monuments, and seeing only so much brick and stone.

MODERN ROME

Acknowledging as I do the charms which the Rome of antiquity possesses for me, it must still be confessed that the Rome of the present time enchants me with attractions scarcely less potent. Religion has consecrated many of the spots which history had made venerable, and thus added a new lustre to their associations. I turn from the broken columns and gray mouldering walls of old Rome to those fanes, "so ancient, yet so new," in which the piety of centuries has found its enduring expression. Beneath their sounding arches, by the mild light of the lamps that burn unceasingly around their shrines, who would vex his brain with antiquarian lore? We may notice that the pavement is worn away by the multitudes which have been drawn thither by curiosity or devotion; but we feel that Heaven's chronology is not an affair of months and years, and that Peter and Paul, Gregory and Leo, are not mere personages in a drama upon the first acts of which the curtain long since descended. Who thinks of antiquity while he inhabits that world of art which Rome encloses within her walls? Those are not the triumphs of a past age alone; they are the triumphs of to-day. The Apollo's bearing is not less manly, its step not less elastic, than it was in that remote age when its unknown sculptor threw aside his chisel and gazed upon his finished work. To-day's sunshine is not more clear and golden than that which glows in the landscapes of Claude Lorraine, though he who thus made the sunbeams his servants has been sleeping for nearly two centuries in the dusty vaults of _Trinita de' Monti_. Were Raphael's deathless faces more real while he was living than they are now? Were Guido's and Domenichino's triumphs more worthy of admiration while the paint was wet upon them? or were the achievements of that giant of art, Michel Angelo, ever more wonderful than now? No; these great works take no note of time, and confer upon the city which contains them something of their own immortality.

I have heard people regret that so many of our artists should expatriate themselves, and spend their lives in Rome or Florence. To me, however, nothing seems more natural; and if I were a painter, or a sculptor, I feel certain that I should share the common weakness of the profession for a place of residence in harmony with my art. What sympathy can a true artist feel with a state of society in which he is regarded by nine people out of ten as a useless member, because he does not directly aid in the production of a given quantity of grain or of cloth? Every stroke of his brush, every movement of his hands in moulding the obedient clay, is a protest against the low, mean, materialistic views of life which prevail among us; and it is too much to ask of any man that he shall spend his days in trying to live peaceably in an enemy's camp. When figs and dates become common articles of food in Lapland, and the bleak sides of the hills of New Hampshire are adorned with the graceful palm tree and the luxuriant foliage of the tropics, you may expect art to flourish in a community whose god is commerce, and whose chief religious duty is money-getting.

Truly the life of an artist in Rome is about as near the perfection of earthly happiness as is commonly vouchsafed to mortal man. The tone of society, and all the surroundings of the artist, are so congenial that no poverty nor privation can seriously interfere with them. The streets, with their architectural marvels, the trim gardens and picturesque cloisters of the old religious establishments, the magnificent villas of the neighbourhood of the city, and the vast, mysterious Campagna, with its gigantic aqueducts and its purple atmosphere, and those glorious galleries which at the same time gratify the taste of the artist and feed his ambition,--these are things which are as free to him as the blessed sunlight or the water that sparkles in the countless fountains of the Holy City. I do not wonder that artists who have lived any considerable time in Rome are discontented with the feverish restlessness of our American way of life, and that, after "stifling the mighty hunger of the heart" through two or three wearisome years in our western world, they turn to Rome as to a fond mother, upon whose breast they may find that peace which they had elsewhere sought in vain.

The churches of Rome impress me in a way which I have never heard described by any other person. I do not speak of St. Peter's, (that "noblest temple that human skill ever raised to the honour of the Creator,") nor do I refer to those other magnificent basilicas in which the Christian glories of eighteen centuries sit enthroned. These have a dignity and majesty peculiarly their own, and the most thoughtless cannot tread their ancient pavement without being for the time subdued into awe and veneration. But the parish churches of Rome, the churches of the various religious orders and congregations, and those numerous little temples which are so thickly scattered through the city, attract me in manner especially fascinating. There is an air of cosiness and at-home-ativeness about them which cannot be found in the grander fanes. Some of them seem by their architectural finish to have been built in some fine street or square, and to have wandered off in search of quiet to their present secluded positions. It is beneath their arches that the Roman people may be seen. Before those altars you may see men, women, and children kneeling, their lips scarcely moving with the petitions which are heard only in another world. No intruding tourists, eye-glassed and Murrayed, interfere with their devotions, and the silence of the sacred place is unbroken, save by the rattling of a rosary, or at stated times by the swell of voices from the choir chapel. These are the places where the real power of the Catholic religion makes itself felt more unmistakably than in the grandest cathedrals, where every form and sound is eloquent of worship. I remember with pleasure that once in London, as I was passing through that miserable quarter which lies between Westminster Abbey and Buckingham Palace, I was attracted by the appearance of a number of people who were entering a narrow doorway. One or two stylish carriages, with crests upon their panels, and drivers in livery, stood before the dingy building which seemed to wear a mysterious air of semi-cleanliness in the midst of the general squalour. I followed the strange collection of the representatives of opulence and the extremest poverty through a long passage-way, and found myself in a large room which was tastefully fitted up for a Catholic chapel. The simplicity of the place, joined with its strictly ecclesiastical look, the excellent music, the crowded and devout congregation, and the almost breathless attention which was paid to the simple and persuasive eloquence of the preacher, who was formerly one of the chief ornaments of the established church, whose highest honours he had cast aside that he might minister more effectually to the poor and despised,--all these things astonished and delighted me. To see that church preserving, even in its hiddenness and poverty, its regard for the comeliness of God's worship, and adorning that humble chapel in a manner which showed that the spirit which erected the shrines of Westminster, Salisbury and York, had not died out, carried me back in spirit to the catacombs of Rome, where the early Christians left the abiding evidences of their zeal for the beauty of the house of God. I was at that time fresh from the continent, and my mind was occupied with the remembrance of the gorgeous churches of Italy. Yet, despite my recollection of those "forests of porphyry and marble," those altars of _lapis lazuli_, those tabernacles glittering with gold, and silver, and precious stones, and those mosaics and frescoes whose beauty and variety almost fatigue the sense of the beholder,--I must say that it gave me a new sense of the dignity and grandeur of the ancient Church, to see her in the midst of the poverty and obscurity to which she is now condemned in the land which once professed her faith, and was once thickly planted with those institutions of learning and charity which are the proudest monuments of her progress. A large ship, under full sail, running off before a pleasant breeze, is a beautiful sight; but it is by no means so grandly impressive as that of the same ship, under close canvas, gallantly riding out the merciless gale that carried destruction to every unseaworthy craft which came within its reach.