We ended, at last, in one of those refrigerator hotels to which our travels had made us accustomed, in one of the hollow, dull, untoward caverns of which I was presently put to bed and to sleep. "Oh, Rome, my country, City of the Soul!" Oh, Byron, were you an Esquimau?
XIV
Our unpalatial palace--"Cephas Giovanni"--She and George Combe turned out to be right--A rousing temper--Bright t.i.tian hair--"All that"s left of him"--The pyramidal man of destiny--The thoughts of a boy are long, long thoughts-- Clausilia Bubigunia--Jabez Hogg and the microscope--A stupendous surprise--A lifetime in fourteen months--My father"s jeremiades--"Thank Heaven, there is such a thing as whitewash!"--"Terrible lack of variety in the old masters"-- "The brazen trollop that she is!"--Several distinct phases of feeling--Springs of creative imagination roused--The Roman fever--A sad book--Effects of the death-blow--The rest is silence.
We arrived in Rome on the 17th of January, 1858, at eleven o"clock at night. After a day or two at Spillman"s Hotel, we moved into lodgings in the Via Porta Pinciana, the Palazzo Larazani. The street extended just below the ridge of the Pincian Hill, and was not far from the broad flight of steps mounting upward from the Piazza d" Espagna, on the left as you go up. In spite of its resounding name, our new dwelling had not a palatial aspect. It was of no commanding height or architectural pretensions; a stuccoed edifice, attached on both sides to other edifices. The street, like other Roman streets, was narrow; it was dirty like them, and, like them, was paved with cobble-stones. The place had been secured for us by (I think) our friends the Thompsons; Mr.
Thompson--the same man who had painted my father"s portrait in 1853--had a studio hard by. The Thompsons had been living in Rome for five years or more, and knew the Roman ropes. They were very comfortable people to know; indeed, Rome to me would have been a very different and less delightful place without them, as will hereafter appear. The family consisted of Cephas Giovanni Thompson, the father and artist; his wife and his two sons and one daughter. "Cephas Giovanni," being interpreted, means plain Peter John; and it was said (though, I believe, unjustifiably) that Peter John had been the names originally given to Thompson by his parents at the baptismal-font, but that his wife, who was a notable little woman, a sister of Anna Cora Mowatt, the actress, well known in America and England seventy years ago, had persuaded him to translate them into Greek and Italian, as more suitable to the romantic career of an artist of the beautiful. I fancy the story arose from the fact that Mrs. Thompson was a woman who, it was felt, might imaginably conceive so ambitious a project. She was small, active, entertaining, clever, and "s.p.u.n.ky," as the New-Englanders would have said; indeed, she had a rousing temper, on occasion. Her husband, on the other hand, had the mildest, wisely smiling, philosophic air, with a low, slow voice, and a beard of patriarchal fashion and size, though as yet it was a rich brown, with scarcely a thread of silver in it. Brown and abundant, also, was his hair; he had steady, bright, brown eyes, and was rather under the average height of Anglo-Saxon man. But for all this mild-shining aspect of his, his dark eyebrows were sharply arched, or gabled rather; and my mother, who had absorbed from her former friend, George Combe, a faith in the betrayals of phrenology, expressed her private persuasion that good Mr. Thompson had a temper, too. She and George Combe turned out to be right in this instance, though I am not going to tell the tale of how we happened to be made acquainted with the fact. Little thunder-storms once in a while occur in human skies as well as in the meteorological ones; and the atmosphere is afterwards all the sweeter and softer. No people could be more good, honest, and kind than the Thompsons.
There was no other artist in Rome who could paint as well as Mr.
Thompson. That portrait of my father, to which reference has been made, which now hangs in my house, looks even better, as a painting, to-day than it did when it was fresh from his easel. Rubens could not have laid on the colors with more solidity and with truer feeling for the hues of life. But the trouble with Thompson was that he had never learned how to draw correctly; and this defect appeared to some extent in his portraits as well as in his figures. The latter were graceful, significant, full of feeling and character; but they betrayed a weakness of anatomical knowledge and of perspective. They had not the conventional incorrectness of the old masters preceding Raphael, but an incorrectness belonging personally to Thompson; it was not excessive or conspicuous to any one, and certainly not to Thompson himself. But his color redeemed all and made his pictures permanently valuable. He was at this time painting a picture of Saint Peter being visited by an angel, which was rich and beautiful; and he had some sketches of a series based on Shakespeare"s Tempest; and standing on one side in the studio was a glowing figure of a woman in Oriental costume, an odalisque, or some such matter, which showed that his sympathy with life was not a restricted one. Later in our acquaintance he fell in love with the bright t.i.tian hair of my sister Rose, and made a little portrait of her, which was one of his best likenesses, apart from its admirable color; it even showed the tears in the child"s eyes, gathering there by reason of her antipathy to posing.
Cora Thompson, the daughter, was the most good-natured and sunny-tempered of girls; she may have been fifteen at this time; she inherited neither the handsomeness of her father nor the sharp-edged cleverness of her mother; but she was lovable. Of the two boys, the younger was named Hubert; he was about ten years old, small of his age, and not robust in make or const.i.tution. He was, however, a smart, rather witty youth, a little precocious, perhaps, and able to take care of himself. Some five and twenty years after the date of which I am now writing I was at a large political dinner in New York and was there introduced to a Mr. Thompson, who was the commissioner of public works, and a party boss of no small caliber and power. He was an immense personage, physically likewise, weighing fully three hundred pounds, and, though not apparently advanced in years, a thorough man of the world and of munic.i.p.al politics. After we had conversed for a few minutes, I was struck by a certain expression about my interlocutor"s eyebrows that recalled long-forgotten days and things. I remembered that his name was Thompson, and had an impression that his initials were H. O. "Are you little Hubert Thompson?" I suddenly demanded. "Why, of course I am--all that"s left of him!" he replied, with a laugh. So this was the boy whom, a quarter of a century before, I could have held out at arm"s-length. We talked over the old days when we played together about the Roman streets and ruins. Nothing more reveals the essential strangeness of human life than this meeting after many years with persons we have formerly known intimately, who are now so much changed in outward guise. We feel the changes to be unreal, and yet, there they are! Grover Cleveland was being groomed for his first Presidential term then; Hubert was one of his supporters in New York, and he presented me to the pyramidal man of destiny. Poor Hubert died, lamentably, not long after. He was a good and affectionate son. He was perhaps too kind-hearted and loyal for the political role which he enacted.
The elder Thompson boy was called Edmund, or, in my vernacular, Eddy.
There were in his nature a gravity, depth, and sweetness which won my heart and respect, and we became friends in that intimate and complete way that seems possible only to boys in their early teens. For that matter, neither of us was yet over twelve; I think Eddy was part of a year my junior. But you must search the annals of antiquity to find anything so solid and unalterable as was our friendship. He was the most absolutely good boy I ever knew, but by no means goody-goody; he had high principles, n.o.ble ambitions, strong affections, the sweetest of tempers; his seriousness formed a healthy foil to my own more impetuous and hazardous character. "The thoughts of a boy are long, long thoughts"; and not in many long lifetimes could a t.i.the of the splendid projects we resolved upon have been carried out. We were together from morning till night, month after month; we walked interminably about Rome and frequented its ruins, and wandered far out over the Campagna and along the sh.o.r.es of famous Tiber. We picked up precious antique marbles, coins, and ancient curiosities of all sorts; we hunted for sh.e.l.ls and b.u.t.terflies and lizards; our hearts were uplifted by the martial music of the French army bands, which were continually resounding throughout Rome; and we admired the gleaming swords of the officers and the sharp, punctual drill and marching of the red-legged rank and file. We haunted the lovely Villa Borghese, the Pincian Hill, the Villa Pamphili Doria; we knew every nook and cranny of the Palace of the Csesars, the Baths of Caracalla, the Roman Forum, the Coliseum, the Egerian Grove; we were familiar with every gate that entered Rome; we drank at every fountain; we lingered through the galleries of the Vatican and of the Capitol; we made St. Peter"s Church our refuge in inclement weather; we threaded every street and by-way of the city; we were on friendly and confidential terms with the custode of every treasure. And all the time we talked about what we thought, what we felt, what we would do; there is no looking backward in boys" confidences; they live in the instant present and in the infinite future. Eddy and I arranged to spend one lifetime in Central Africa, in emulation of the exploits of David Livingstone; there, freed from all civilized burdens, we would live, and we would run, catch the wild goat by the hair, and hurl our lances in the sun. At another epoch of our endless lives we would enter the army and distinguish ourselves in heroic war; we would have swords like sunbeams and ride steeds like Bucephalus. Then, and interleaved with all this, as it were, there was an immense life of natural history; we would have a private museum to rival the famous ones of nations. Eddy was especially drawn towards insects, while my own predilection was still for conchology; and both of us spent hours every week in cla.s.sifying and arranging our respective collections, not to speak of the time we devoted to hunting for specimens. Eddy had a green net at the end of a stick, and became very skilful in making his captures; and how we triumphed over a "swallow-tail," so difficult to catch, or an unfamiliar species! Eddy had his pins and his strips of cork, and paper boxes; and his collections certainly were fairer to look upon, to the ordinary view, than mine; moreover, his was the more scientific mind and the nicer sense of order. For the display of my snail-sh.e.l.ls I used bits of card-board and plenty of gum-arabic; and I was affluent in "duplicates,"
my plan being to get a large card and then cover it with specimens of the sh.e.l.l, in serried ranks. I also called literature to my aid, and produced several little books containing labored descriptions of my collection, couched, so far as possible, in the stilted and formal phraseology of the conchological works to which I had access, but with occasional outbursts after a style of my own. Here is a chapter from one of them; a pen-and-ink portrait of the sh.e.l.l is prefixed to the original essay:
"CLAUSILIA BUBIGUNIA
"This handsome and elegant little sh.e.l.l is found in mossy places, or in old ruins, such as the Coliseum--where it is found in immense numbers--or the Palace of the Caesars. But in Italy it is common in any mossy ruin, in the small, moss-covered holes, where it is seen at the farthest extremity. After a rain they always crawl out of their places of concealment in such numbers that one would think it had been raining clausilias. The sh.e.l.l, in large and fine specimens, is five-eighths of an inch in length. The young are very small and look like the top part of the spire of the adults. This sh.e.l.l is also largest in the middle, shaped something like a grain of wheat. It has nine whorls, marked by small white lines, which look like fine white threads of sewing-cotton; and just below them are marks which look like very fine and very small st.i.tches of white cotton. The color of the sh.e.l.l, down to next to the last whorl, is a brown color, but the very last whorl is a little lighter. The sh.e.l.l is covered all over with fine lines, but they need to be looked at through a magnifying-gla.s.s, they are so fine. The lip is turning out, and very thin; inside there are three ridges, two on the top part of the mouth, and the other, which is very small, is below. The sh.e.l.l, when the animal is out of it, is semi-transparent, and the little colomella, or pillar, can be indistinctly seen through."
There follows a detailed and loving description of the animal inhabiting the sh.e.l.l, which I must reserve for a future edition. Of another species of snail, Helix strigata, our learned author observes that "This sh.e.l.l is, when dead, one of those which is found on the banks of the Tiber. It is a strange circ.u.mstance that, although it is a land sh.e.l.l, it should be found more on the banks of a river than anywhere else, and also only on the banks of the Tiber, for it is not found on the banks of any other river. Any one would think that dead sh.e.l.ls were gifted with the power of walking about, for certainly it is an inexplicable wonder how they got there." Of Helix muralis we are informed that "The Romans eat these snails, not the whole of them, but only their feet. In ancient times the most wealthy people used to eat snails, and perhaps they ate the very ones which the poorest people eat nowadays. It is most probable, for there are a great many different kinds of snails round Rome, and the Romans would probably select the best." I may perhaps be permitted to remark that the correct orthography of this writer fills me with astonishment, inasmuch as in later life I have reason to know that he often went astray in this respect. Of the uniform maturity of the literary style, I have no need to speak.
Eddy"s father was in the habit of giving him an income of two or three pauls a week, dependent on his good behavior and punctual preparation of his lessons; and since Eddy was always well behaved and faithful in his studies, the income came in pretty regularly. Eddy saved up this revenue with a view to buying himself a microscope, for the better prosecution of his zoological labors; being, also, stimulated thereto by the fact that I already possessed one of these instruments, given me by my father a year or two before. Mine cost ten shillings, but Eddy meant to get one even more expensive. I had, too, a large volume of six hundred pages on The Microscope, Its History, Construction, and Uses, by Jabez Hogg, the contents of which I had long since learned by heart, and which I gladly communicated to my friend. At length Eddy"s economies had proceeded so far that he was able to calculate that on his twelfth birthday he would possess a fortune of five scudi, and he decided that he would buy a microscope at that figure; it is needless to add that the microscope had long since been selected in the shop, and was decidedly superior to mine. We could hardly contain our impatience to enter upon the marvellous world whereof this instrument was the key; that twelfth birthday seemed long in coming, but at last it came.
I was to go with my friend to the shop to see him make the purchase; and I was at his house betimes in the morning. But what a stupendous surprise awaited me! Eddy was too much excited to say anything; with a face beaming with emotion, he led me into the sitting-room, and there, upon the table, was a microscope. But such a microscope! It was of such unheard-of magnificence and elaborateness that it took my breath away, and we both stood gazing at it in voiceless rapture. It was tall and elegant, shining with its polished bra.s.s and mirrors, and its magnifying powers were such as to disclose to us the very heart of nature"s mystery. It was quiet Mr. Thompson"s birthday present to his son. That gentleman sat smiling in his armchair by the window, and presently he said, with a delightful archness, "Well, Eddy, I suppose you are ready to give me back all that money you"ve been collecting?" Eddy grinned radiantly. He spent his savings for microscope-slides and other appurtenances, and for weeks thereafter he could hardly take his eye away from the object-lens. He was luminous with happiness, and I reflected his splendor from my sympathetic heart. Dear old Eddy! In after years he entered West Point and became a soldier, and he died early; I never saw him after parting from him in Italy in 1859. But he is still my first friend, and there has been no other more dear.
I am not aware that Rome has ever been described from the point of view of a twelve-year-old boy, and it might be worth doing; but I have delayed attempting it somewhat too long; the moving pictures in my mind have become too faded and confused. And yet I am surprised at the minuteness of some of my recollections; they have, no doubt, been kept alive by the numerous photographs of Rome which one carries about, and also by the occasional perusal of The Marble Faun and other Roman literature. But much is also due to the wonderful separateness which Rome retains in the mind. It is like nothing else, and the spirit of it is immortal. It seems as if I must have lived a lifetime there; and yet I cannot make out that our total residence in the city extended over fourteen months. Certainly no other pa.s.sage of my boyhood time looms so large or is rooted so deep.
But the pa.s.sion for Rome (unless one be a Byron) is not a plant of sudden growth, and I dare say that, during those first frigid weeks, I may have shared my father"s whimsical aversion to the city. He has described, in his journals, how all things seemed to be what they should not; and he was terribly disgusted with the filth that defiled the ruins and the street corners. He was impressed by the ruins, but deplored their nakedness. "The marble of them grows black or brown, it is true,"
says he, "and shows its age in that way; but it remains hard and sharp, and does not become again a part of nature, as stone walls do in England; some dry and dusty gra.s.s sprouts along the ledges of a ruin, as in the Coliseum; but there is no green mantle of ivy spreading itself over the gray dilapidation." We stumbled upon the Fountain of Trevi in one of our early rambles, not knowing what it was. "One of these fountains," writes my father, referring to it, "occupies the whole side of a great edifice, and represents Neptune and his steeds, who seem to be sliding down with a cataract that tumbles over a ledge of rocks into a marble-bordered lake, the whole--except the fall of water itself--making up an exceedingly c.u.mbrous and ridiculous affair." He goes to St. Peter"s, and "it disappointed me terribly by its want of effect, and the little justice it does to its real magnitude externally; as to the interior, I am not sure that it would not be even more grand and majestic if it were less magnificent, though I should be sorry to see the experiment tried. I had expected something dim and vast, like the great English cathedrals, only more vast and dim and gray; but there is as much difference as between noonday and twilight." The pictures, too, were apt in these first days to go against the grain with him.
Contemplating a fresco representing scenes in purgatory, he broke forth: "I cannot speak as to the truth of the representation, but, at all events, it was purgatory to look at this poor, faded rubbish. Thank Heaven, there is such a thing as whitewash; and I shall always be glad to hear of its application to old frescoes, even at the sacrifice of remnants of real excellence!" Such growlings torture the soul of the connoisseur; but the unregenerate man, hearing them, leaps up and shouts for joy. He found the old masters, in their sacred subjects, lacking in originality and initiative; and when they would represent mythology, they engendered an apotheosis of nakedness. His conclusion was that "there is something forced, if not feigned, in our taste for pictures of the old Italian school." Of the profane subjects, he instances the Fornarina, "with a deep bright glow on her face, naked below the waist, and well pleased to be so, for the sake of your admiration--ready for any extent of nudity, for love or money--the brazen trollop that she is!
Raphael must have been capable of great sensuality to have painted this picture of his own accord, and lovingly." These are the iconoclasms of the Goth and Vandal at their first advent to Rome. They remained to alter their mood, and extol what they had before a.s.saulted; and so did my father, as we shall see presently. But at first he was sick and cold and uncomfortable; and he consoled himself by hitting out at everything, in the secret privacy of his diary, since opened to the world. With warmer weather came equanimity and kinder judgments; but there is a refreshing touch of truth and justice even in these mutterings of exasperation.
It was not so much, I suppose, that Rome was cold as that my father had expected it to be otherwise. When one is in a place where tradition and a.s.sociation invite the soul forth to be warmed and soothed and rejoiced, and the body, venturing out, finds nothing but chill winds and frigid temperature and discomfort, the shock is much greater and more disagreeable than if one had been in some northern Canada or Spitzbergen, where such conditions are normal. Ice in the arctic circle is all right and exhilarating, but in the Piazza of St. Peter"s it is an outrage, and affects the mind and heart even more than the flesh.
Circ.u.mstances caused my father to pa.s.s through several distinct phases of feeling while he was in Rome. First, his own indisposition and the inclement weather depressed and exasperated him.
Time, in due course, brought relief in these respects, and he began to enjoy himself and his surroundings. Anon, the springs of creative imagination, long dormant in him, were roused to activity by thoughts connected with the Faun of Praxiteles in the Capitol. He now became happy in the way of his genius and immediately took a new interest in all things, looking at them from the point of view of possible backgrounds or incidents for the romance which had begun to take form in his mind. He describes what he saw con amore, and all manner of harmonious ideas bloom through his thoughts, like anemones and other flowers in the Villa Pamphili and the Borghese. This desirable mood continued until, after our return to Rome from the Florentine visit, my sister caught the Roman fever. She lay for weeks in danger of death; and her father"s anxiety about her not only destroyed in him all thoughts of literary production and care for it, but made even keeping his journal no longer possible for him. That strain, so long continued, broke him down, and he never recovered from it so as to be what he had been before. Nevertheless, when she became convalescent, the reaction from his dark misgivings made him, for a time, as light-hearted as a boy; and, the carnival happening to be coincident with her recovery, he entered into the fun of it with a zest and enjoyment that surprised himself. But, again, it presently became evident that her recovery was not complete, and probably never would be so; the injury to her health was permanent, and she was liable to recurrences of disease. His spirits sank again, not so low as before, but, on the other hand, they never again rose to their normal level. It was in this saddened mood that he once more took up the Roman romance and finished it; it is a sad book, and when there is a ray of sunshine across the page, it has a melancholy gleam. After we returned to Concord, his apprehensions concerning Una"s unsound condition were confirmed; and, in addition, the bitter cleavage between North and South inspired in him the gloomiest forebodings. A wasting away of his whole physical substance ensued; and he died, almost suddenly, while in years he might be considered hardly past the prime of his life. A sensitive eye can trace the effects of the death-blow all through The Marble Faun, and still more in Septimius and Grimshawe, published after his death. In The Dolliver Romance fragment, which was the last thing he wrote, there is visible once more some reminiscence of the old sunshine of humor that was so often apparent in his time of youth and vigor; but it, too, has a sad touch in it, such as belongs to the last rays of the star of day before it sinks below the horizon forever. Night follows, and the rest is silence.
XV
The Roman carnival in three moods--Apples of Sodom--Poor, battered, wilted, stained hearts--A living protest and scourge--Dulce est desipere in loco--A rollicking world of happy fools--Endless sunshine of some sort--Greenwich Fair was worth a hundred of it--They thundered past, never drawing rein--"Senza moccolo!"--Nothing more charming and strange could be imagined--Girls surprised in the midst of dressing themselves--A Unitarian clergyman with his fat wife--Apparent license under courteous restraint--He laughed and pelted and was pelted--William Story, as vivid as when I saw him last--A too facile power--A deadly shadow gliding close behind--Set afire by his own sallies--"Thy face is like thy mother"s, my fair child!"--Cleopatra in the clay-- "War nie sein Brod mit thranen a.s.s."
THE Roman carnival opened about a month after our arrival in Rome. The weather was bad nearly all the time, and my father"s point of view was correspondingly unsympathetic. The contrast between his mood now and a year later, when he was not only stimulated by his daughter"s recovery from illness, but, also, was looking at everything rather as the romancer than as the man, is worth bringing out. My father likewise describes the carnival in the romance; there we see it in a third phase--as art. But the pa.s.sages in the note-books are written from the realistic stand-point. In her transcriptions of the journals for the press my mother was always careful to omit from the former everything that had been "used" in the book; the principle, no doubt, was sound, but it might be edifying for once, in a way, to do just the opposite, in order to mark, if we choose to take the trouble, what kind of changes or modifications Hawthorne the romancer would make in the work of my father the observer of nature. Take your Marble Faun and turn to two of the latter chapters and compare them with the corresponding pages in my excerpts from the journals in the Biography. In the latter you will find him always in a critical and carping humor; seeing everything with abundant keenness, but recognizing nothing worth while in it.
The bouquets, he noticed, for example, were often picked up out of the street and used again and again; "and," he adds, "I suppose they aptly enough symbolized the poor, battered, wilted, stained hearts that had flown from one hand to another along the muddy pathway of life, instead of being treasured up in one faithful bosom. Really, it was great nonsense."
It is true--such uncongenial interpretation--if you feel that way about it. And I remember, in my rambles along the famous thoroughfare, seeing a saturnine old fellow in a dingy black coat and slouch hat, with a sour snarl on his unprepossessing features, who made it his business, all day, to cuff and kick the little boys whom he caught throwing confetti, or picking up the fallen bouquets, and to shove the latter down into the sewer which ran beneath the street, through the apertures opening underneath the curb. He seemed to have stationed himself there as a living protest and scourge against and of the whole spirit of the carnival; to hate it just because the rest of the world enjoyed it, and to wish that he might make everybody else as miserable and uncharitable as he was. He was like a wicked and ugly Mrs. Partington, trying to sweep back the Atlantic of holiday merriment with his dirty mop. But this crabbed humor of his, while it made him conspicuous against the broad background of gayety, of course had no effect on the gayety itself. The flood of laughter, jocundity, and semi-boisterous frolic continued to roll up and down the Corso all day long, never attempting to be anything but pure nonsense, indeed, but achieving, nevertheless, the wise end of nonsense in the right time and place--that of refreshing and lightening the mind and heart. Dulce est desipere in loco--that old saw might have been made precisely to serve as the motto of the Roman carnival; and very likely it was actually suggested to its renowned author by some similar sport belonging to the old Roman days, before Christianity was thought of. The young fellows--English, American, or of whatever other nationality--would stride up and down the overflowing street hour after hour, clad in linen dust-coats down to their heels, with a bag of confetti slung on one side and another full of bouquets on the other; and they would plunge a warlike hand into the former and hurl ammunition at their rivals; or they would, pick out a bunch of flowers from the latter for a pretty girl--not that the flowers were worth anything intrinsically, nor was that their fault--but just to show the fitting sentiment. There was only one rule, the unwritten one that everybody was to take everything that came with a smile or a laugh, and never get angry at anything; and this universal good-humor lifted the whole affair into a wholesome and profitable sphere. Then there was the double row of carriages forever moving in opposite directions, and pa.s.sing within easy arm"s-reach of each other; and the jolly battle was waged between their occupants, with side conflicts with the foot-farers at the same time. And as the same carriages would repa.s.s one another every forty minutes or so, the persons in them would soon get to recognize one another; and, if they were of the sterner s.e.x, they would be prepared to renew desperate battle; or if there was a pretty girl or two in one of them, she would be the recipient of a deluge of flowers or of really pretty bonbons. It was all play, all laughter, all a new, rollicking world of happy fools, of comic chivalry, of humorous gallantry. For my part, I thought it was the world which I had been born to live in; and I was too happy in it to imagine even that anybody could be less happy than I was. My sole grief was when my supply of confetti had given out, and I had no money to buy more. I used to look at those great baskets at the street-corners, filled with the white agglomeration, with longing eyes, and wish I had it all in my pockets.
I picked up the fallen bouquets, muddy or not, with no misgiving, and flung them at the girls with the unquestioning faith of boyhood. I looked up at the people in the windows and on the draped balconies with romantic emotions, and exchanged smiles and beckonings with them. The February days were never long enough for me; I only wished that the whole year was made up of those days; if it rained, or was cold, I never knew it. There was an endless sunshine of some sort which sufficed for me. But my father, at this epoch, could catch not a glimpse of it. "I never in my life knew a shallower joke than the carnival at Rome; such a rainy and muddy day, too; Greenwich Fair (at the very last of which I a.s.sisted) was worth a hundred of it."
The masking day, and the ensuing night of the moccolo, were the culminating features of the carnival; and it was on the afternoon of this day, I think, that the horse-race, with bare-backed horses, took place. The backs of these horses, though bare of riders, had attached to them by strings little b.a.l.l.s with sharp points in them, which, as the horses ran, bobbed up and down, and did the office of spurs. The race was preceded by a thundering gallop of cavalry down the whole length of the Corso (the street having been cleared of carriages beforehand), ostensibly to prevent anybody from being run over by the race-horses; but, as a matter of fact, if any one were killed, it was much more likely to be by the ruthless riding of these helmeted dragoons than by the riderless steeds. They thundered past, never drawing rein, no matter what stood or ran in their way; and then, after an interval, during which the long crowds, packed back on the opposite sidewalks, craned forward as far as they dared to see them, came the eight or ten racers at a furious pace. They were come and gone in a breath; and finally, after the body of them were pa.s.sed, came a laggard, who had been left at the post, and was trying to make up for lost time. I believe it was this horse who actually killed somebody on the course. The race over, back into the street thronged the crowd, filling it from wall to wall; then there was a gradual thinning away, as the people went home for supper; and finally came the night and the moccoli, with the biggest crowd of all. I was there with my twist of moccolo and a box of matches; except the moccoli, there was no other illumination along the length of the Corso. But their soft lights were there by myriads, and made a lovely sight, to my eyes at least. "Senza moccolo!" was the universal cry; young knights-errant, singly or in groups, pressed their way up and down, shouting the battle-cry, and quenching all lights within reach, while striving to maintain the flame of their own; using now the whisk of a handkerchief, now a puff of breath, now the fillip of a finger; contriving to extinguish a fair lady"s taper with the same effusion of vain words wherewith they told her of their pa.s.sion. Most of the ladies thus a.s.sailed sat in the lower balconies, elevated only a foot or two above the level of the sidewalk; but those in the higher retreats made war upon one another, and upon their own cavaliers; none was immune from peril. The cry, uttered at once by such innumerable voices far and near, made a singular murmur up and down the Corso; and the soft twinkling of the lights, winking in and out as they were put out or relighted, gave a singular fire-fly effect to the whole illumination. It seemed to me then, and it still seems in the retrospect, that nothing more charming and strange could be imagined; and through it all was the constant blossoming of laughter, more inextinguishable than the moccoletti themselves. The colors of the tapestries and stuffs dependent from the windows and balconies glowed out in light, or were dimmed by shadow; and the faces of the thousandfold crowd of festival-makers glimmered forth and were lost again on the background of the night, like the features of spirits in the glimpses of a dream. How long it all lasted I know not; but it had its term, like other mortal things, even in this fairyland of carnival; and when the last light was out the carnival was no more, and Lent, unawares, had softly settled down upon us with the darkness.
But let us now listen to my father when, for the second time, he made proof of the carnival in the year following our return from Florence, and after Una had left her sick-room and could be at his side. "The weather has been splendid," he writes, "and the merriment far more free and riotous than as I remember it in the preceding year. Tokens of the festival were seen in flowers on street-stands, or borne aloft on people"s heads, while bushels of confetti were displayed, looking like veritable sugarplums, so that a stranger might have thought that the whole commerce and business of stern old Rome lay in flowers and sweets.
One wonders, however, that the scene should not be even more rich and various when there has been so long a time (the immemorial existence of the carnival) to prepare it, and adorn it with shapes of gayety and humor. There was an infinite number of clowns and particolored harlequins; a host of white dominoes; a mult.i.tude of masks, set in eternal grins, or with monstrous noses, or made in the guise of monkeys, bears, dogs, or whatever beast the wearer chooses to be akin to; a great many men in petticoats, and almost as many girls and women, no doubt, in breeches; figures, too, with huge, bulbous heads and all manner of such easy monstrosities and exaggerations.. It is strange how the whole humor of the thing, and the separate humor of each individual character, vanishes the moment I try to grasp it and describe it; and yet there really was fun in the spectacle as it flitted by--for instance, in the long line of carriages a company of young men in flesh-colored tights and chemises, representing a party of girls surprised in the midst of dressing themselves, while an old nurse in the midst of them expressed ludicrous horror at their predicament. Then the embarra.s.sment of gentlemen who, while quietly looking at the scene, are surrounded by groups of maskers, grimacing at them, squeaking in their ears, hugging them, dancing round them, till they s.n.a.t.c.h an opportunity to escape into some doorway; or when a poor man in a black coat and cylinder hat is whitened all over with a half-bushel of confetti and lime-dust; the mock sympathy with which his case is investigated by a company of maskers, who poke their stupid, pasteboard faces close to his, still with the unchangeable grin; or when a gigantic female figure singles out some shy, harmless personage, and makes appeals to his heart, avowing her pa.s.sionate love in dumb show, and presenting him with her bouquet; and a hundred other nonsensicalities, among which the rudest and simplest are not the least effective. A resounding thump on the back with a harlequin"s sword, or a rattling blow with a bladder half full of dried pease or corn, answers a very good purpose. There was a good deal of absurdity one day in a figure in a crinoline petticoat, riding on an a.s.s and almost filling the Corso with the circ.u.mference of crinoline from side to side. Some figures are dressed in old-fashioned garbs, perhaps of the last century, or, even more ridiculous, of thirty years ago, or in the stately Elizabethan (as we should call them) trunk hose, tunics, and cloaks of three centuries since. I do not know anything that I have seen queerer than a Unitarian clergyman (Mr. Mountford), who drives through the Corso daily with his fat wife in a one-horse chaise, with a wreath of withered flowers and oak leaves round his hat, the rest of his dress remaining unchanged, except that it is well powdered with the dust of confetti. That withered wreath is the absurdest thing he could wear (though, perhaps, he may not mean it to be so), and so, of course, the best. I can think of no other masks just now, but will go this afternoon and try to catch some more." You see, he has that romance in view again.
"Clowns, or zanies," he resumes, after fresh inspection, "appear in great troupes, dancing extravagantly and scampering wildly; everybody seems to do whatever folly comes into his head; and yet, if you consider the matter, you see that all this apparent license is kept under courteous restraint. There is no rudeness, except the authorized pelting with confetti or blows of harlequins" swords, which, moreover, are within a law of their own. But n.o.body takes rough hold of another, or meddles with his mask, or does him any unmannerly violence. At first sight you would think that the whole world had gone mad, but at the end you wonder how people can let loose all their mirthful propensities without unchaining the mischievous ones. It could not be so in America or in England; in either of those countries the whole street would go mad in earnest and come to blows and bloodshed were the populace to let themselves loose to the extent we see here. All this restraint is self-imposed and quite apart from the presence of the soldiery."
This mood, we see, is far more gentle and sympathetic than the former one; there is sunshine within as well as without; and, indeed, I remember with what glee my father took part in the frolic, as well as looked on at it; he laughed and pelted and was pelted; he walked down the Corso and back again; he drove to and fro in a carriage; he mounted to Mr. Motley"s balcony and took long shots at the crowd below. The sombre spirit of criticism had ceased, for a time, to haunt him.
[IMAGE: WILLIAM WETMORE STORY]
We went quite often to the studio of William Story, whom my father had slightly known in Salem before he became a voluntary exile from America.
Mr. Story was at this time a small, wiry, nervous personage, smiling easily, but as much through nervousness as from any inner source or outward provocation of mirth, and as he smiled he would stroke his cheeks, which were covered with a short, brown beard, with the fingers and thumb of his right hand, while wrinkles would appear round his bright, brown eyes. "He looks thin and worn already," wrote my father; "a little bald and a very little gray, but as vivid as when I saw him last; he cannot, methinks, be over thirty-seven." He was thirty-nine in 1858. "The great difficulty with him, I think, is a too facile power,"
my father goes on; "he would do better things if it were more difficult for him to do merely good ones. Then, too, his sensibility is too quick; being easily touched by his own thoughts, he cannot estimate what is required to touch a colder and duller person, and so stops short of the adequate expression." He commented on the vein of melancholy beneath the sparkle of his surface, as if, in the midst of prosperity, he was conscious of a "deadly shadow gliding close behind." Boys of twelve are not troubled with insight, unless of that unconscious, intuitive kind that tells them that a person is likeable, or the reverse, no matter what the person may do or say. I liked Mr. Story, and thought him as light of spirit as he seemed; not that he was not often earnest enough in his talks with my father, to whom he was wont to apply himself with a sort of intensity, suggesting ideas, and watching, with his nervous smile, my father"s reception of them; plunging into deep matters, beyond my comprehension, dwelling there a few minutes, and then emerging again with a sparkle of wit; he was certainly very witty, and the wit was native and original, not memorized. When he got into the current of drollery, he would, as it were, set himself afire by his own sallies, and soar to astonishing heights, which had an irresistible contagion for the hearers; and he would sometimes, sitting at a table with pen and paper at hand, ill.u.s.trate his whimsicalities with lightning sketches of immense cleverness, considering their impromptu character. I have preserved a sheet of letter-paper covered with such drawings. The conversation had got upon Byron, whom Mr. Story chose to ridicule; as he talked, he drew a head of "Byron as he thought he was," followed by one of "Byron as he was," and by another of "Byron as he might have been,"
showing a very p.r.o.nounced negro type. Then he made a portrait of "Ada, sole daughter of my house and heart," and wrote under it, "Thy face was like thy mother"s, my fair child!" a hideous, simpering miss, with a snub nose and a wooden mouth--"A poet"s dream!" He also showed the appearance of the Falls of Terni, "as described by Byron," and added studies of infant phenomena, mother"s darlings, a Presidential candidate, and other absurdities, accompanying it all with a running comment and imaginative improvisations which had the charm of genius in them, and made us ache with laughter, young and old alike. Such a man, nervous, high-strung, of fine perceptions and sensibilities, must inevitably pa.s.s through rapid and extreme alternations of feeling; and, no doubt, an hour after that laughing seance of ours, Mr. Story was plunged deep in melancholy. Yet surely his premonitions of evil were unfulfilled; Story lived long and was never other than fortunate.
Perhaps he was unable to produce works commensurate with his conceptions; but unhappiness from such a cause is of a n.o.ble sort, and better than most ordinary felicities.
I remember very well the statue of Cleopatra while yet in the clay.
There she sat in the centre of the large, empty studio, pondering on Augustus and on the asp. The hue of the clay added a charm to the figure which even the pure marble has not quite maintained. Story said that he never was present while the cast of one of his statues was being made; he could not endure the sight of the workmen throwing the handfuls of plaster at the delicate clay. Cleopatra was substantially finished, but Story was unwilling to let her go, and had no end of doubts as to the handling of minor details. The hand that rests on her knee--should the forefinger and thumb meet or be separated? If they were separated, it meant the relaxation of despair; if they met, she was still meditating defiance or revenge. After canva.s.sing the question at great length with my father, he decided that they should meet; but when I saw the marble statue in the Metropolitan Museum the other day I noticed that they were separated. In the end the artist had preferred despair. Such things indicate the man"s character, and, perhaps, explain his failure to reach the great heights of art. He could not trust a great idea to manage itself, but sought subtler expression through small touches, and thus, finally, lost the feeling of the larger inspiration. A little more of the calm, Greek spirit would have done him good.
He had many projects for other statues, which he would build up in fancy before my father and discuss with him. His words and gestures made the ideas he described seem actual and present, but he seldom got them into marble; he probably found, upon trial, that they did not belong to sculpture. He had the ambition to make marble speak not its own language merely, but those of painting and of poetry likewise; and when this proved impossible he was unhappy and out of conceit with himself, On the other hand, he did good work in poetry and in prose; but neither did these content him. After all, my father"s observation hit the mark; things came too easy to him. Goethe speaks the word for him:
"Wer nie sein Brod mit thranen a.s.s, Er kennt euch nicht, ihr ewige Machte!"
XVI
Drilled in Roman history--Lovely figures made of light and morning--What superb figures!--The breath and strength of immeasurable antiquity--Treasures coming direct from dead hands into mine--A pleasant sound of coolness and refreshment--Receptacles of death now dedicated to life--The Borghese is a forest of Ardennes--Profound and important communings--A smiling deceiver--Of an early-rising habit-- Hauling in on my slack--A miniature cabinet magically made t.i.tanic--"If I had a murder on my conscience"--None can tell the secret origin of his thoughts--A singularly beautiful young woman--She actually ripped the man open--No leagues of chivalry needed in Rome--A resident army--Five foot six-- Corsets and padding--She was wounded in the house of her friends.
We children had been drilled in Roman history, from Romulus to Caesar, and we could, and frequently did, repeat by heart the Lays of Ancient Rome by Macaulay, which were at that period better known, perhaps, than they are now. Consequently, everything in Rome had a certain degree of meaning for us, and gave us a pleasure in addition to the intrinsic beauty or charm that belonged thereto. Our imagination thronged the Capitol with senators; saw in the Roman Forum the contentions of the tribunes and the patricians; heard the populus Roma.n.u.s roar in the Coliseum; beheld the splendid processions of victory wind cityward through the Arch of t.i.tus; saw Caesar lie bleeding at the base of Pompey"s statue; pondered over the fatal precipice of the Tarpeian Rock; luxuriated in the hollow s.p.a.ces of the Baths of Caracalla; lost ourselves in gorgeous reveries in the palace of the Caesars, and haunted the yellow stream of Tiber, beneath which lay hidden precious treasures and forgotten secrets. And we were no less captivated by the galleries and churches, which contained the preserved relics of the great old times, and were in themselves so beautiful. My taste for blackened old pictures and faded frescoes was, indeed, even more undeveloped than my father"s; but I liked the brilliant reproductions in mosaic at St.
Peter"s and certain individual works in various places. I formed a romantic attachment for the alleged Beatrice Cenci of Guido, or of some other artist, and was very sorry that she should be so unhappy, though, of course, I was ignorant of the occasion of her low spirits. But I liked much better Guide"s large design of Aurora, partly because I had long been familiar with it on the head-board of my mother"s bedstead.
Before her marriage she had bought a set of bedroom furniture, and had painted it a dull gold color, and on this surface she had drawn in fine black lines the outlines of several cla.s.sical subjects, most of them from Flaxman; but in the s.p.a.ce mentioned she had executed an outline of this glorious work of the Italian artist. I knew every line of the composition thoroughly; and, by-the-way, I doubt if a truer, more inspired copy of the picture was ever produced by anybody. But the color had to be supplied by the observer"s imagination; now, for the first time, I saw the hues as laid on by the original painter. In spite of time, they were pure and exquisite beyond description; these lovely figures seemed made of light and morning. Another favorite picture of mine was the same artist"s "Michael Overcoming the Evil One," and I even had the sense to like the painting better than the mosaic copy.
Raphael"s "Transfiguration" I also knew well from the old engraving of it that used to hang on our parlor wall from my earliest recollections; it still hangs yonder. But I never cared for this picture; it was too complicated and ingenious--it needed too much co-operation from the observer"s mind. Besides, I had never seen a boy with anything approaching the muscular development of the epileptic youth in the centre. The thing in the picture that I most approved of was the end of the log in the little pool, in the foreground; it looked true to life.
But my delight in the statues was endless. It seems to me that I knew personally every statue and group in the Vatican and in the Capitol.
Again and again, either with my parents, or with Eddy, or even alone, I would pa.s.s the warders at the doors and enter those interminable galleries, and look and look at those quiet, stained-marble effigies.