Travels With Henry James

by Henry James

  Verona, which was my last Italian stopping-place, is under any circumstances a delightfully interesting city; but the kindness of my own memory of it is deepened by a subsequent ten days’ experience of Germany. I rose one morning at Verona, and went to bed at night at Botzen! The statement needs no comment, and the two places, though but fifty miles apart, are as painfully dissimilar as their names. I had prepared myself for your delectation with a copious tirade on German manners, German scenery, German art, and the German stage—on the lights and shadows of Innsbruck, Munich, Nuremberg, and Heidelberg; but just as I was about to put pen to paper, I glanced into a little volume on these very topics, lately published by that famous novelist and moralist, M. Ernest Feydeau, the fruit of a summer’s observation at Hamburg. This work produced a reaction, and if I chose to follow M. Feydeau’s own example when he wishes to qualify his approbation, I might call his treatise by any vile name known to the speech of man, but I content myself with pronouncing it—superficial. I then reflect that my own opportunities for seeing and judging were extremely limited, and I suppress my tirade, lest some more enlightened critic should come and pronounce me superficial. Its sum and substance was to have been that—superficially—Germany is ugly; that Munich is a nightmare, Heidelberg a disappointment (in spite of its charming Castle), and even Nuremberg not a joy for ever. But comparisons are odious; and if Munich is ugly, Verona is beautiful enough. You may laugh at my logic, but you will probably assent to my meaning. I carried away from Verona a certain mental picture upon which I cast an introspective glance whenever between Botzen and Strassburg the oppression of external circumstance became painful. It was a lovely August afternoon in the Roman Arena—a ruin in which repair and restoration have been so gradually and discreetly practised that it seems all of one harmonious antiquity. The vast stony oval rose high against the sky in a single, clear, continuous line, broken here and there only by strolling and reclining loungers. The massive tiers inclined in solid monotony to the central circle, in which a small open-air theatre was in active operation. A small section of the great slope of masonry facing the stage was roped off into an auditorium, in which the narrow level space between the footlights and the lowest step figured as the pit. Footlights are a figure of speech, for the performance was going on in the broad glow of the afternoon, with a delightful, and apparently by no means misplaced, confidence in the good-will of the spectators. What the piece was that was deemed so superbly able to shift for itself I know not—very possibly the same drama that I remember seeing advertised during my former visit to Verona—nothing less than La Tremenda Giustizia di Dio. If titles are worth anything this product of the melodramatist’s art might surely stand upon its own legs. Along the tiers above the little group of regular spectators was gathered a sort of free-list of unauthorized observers, who although beyond ear-shot must have been enabled by the generous breadth of Italian gesture to follow the tangled thread of the piece. It was all deliciously Italian—the mixture of old life and new, the mountebank’s booth (it was hardly more) grafted upon the antique circus, the dominant presence of a mighty architecture, the loungers and idlers beneath the kindly sky, upon the sun-warmed stones. I never felt more keenly the difference between the background to life in the Old World and the New. There are other things in Verona to make it a liberal education to be born there—though that it is one for the contemporary Veronese, I don’t pretend to say. The Tombs of the Scaligers, with their soaring pinnacles, their high-poised canopies, their exquisite refinement and concentration of the Gothic idea, I cannot profess, even after much worshipful gazing, to have fully comprehended and enjoyed. They seemed to me full of deep architectural meanings, such as must drop gently into the mind, one by one, after infinite tranquil contemplation. But even to the hurried and preoccupied traveller the solemn little chapel-yard in the city’s heart, in which they stand girdled by their great swaying curtain of linked and twisted iron, is one of the most impressive spots in Italy. Nowhere else is such a wealth of artistic achievement crowded into so narrow a space; nowhere else are the daily comings and goings of men blessed by the presence of manlier art. Verona is rich, furthermore, in beautiful churches—several with beautiful names: San Fermo, Santa Anastasia, San Zenone. This last is a structure of high antiquity, and of the most impressive loveliness. The nave terminates in a double choir—that is, a sub-choir or crypt, into which you descend, and wander among primitive columns whose variously grotesque capitals rise hardly higher than your head, and an upper choral level into which you mount by broad stairways of the most picturesque effect. I shall never forget the impression of majestic chastity that I received from the great nave of the building on my former visit. I decided to my satisfaction then that every church is from the devotional point of view a solecism that has not something of a similar absolute felicity of proportion; for strictly formal beauty seems best to express our conception of spiritual beauty. The nobly serious effect of San Zenone is deepened by its single picture—a masterpiece of the most serious of painters, the severe and exquisite Mantegna.

  THE AFTER-SEASON AT ROME

  May 20, 1873

  The Spanish Steps, ca. 1908.

  ONE MAY SAY WITHOUT INJUSTICE TO ANY BODY THAT THE state of mind of a great many foreigners in Rome is one of intense impatience for the moment when all other foreigners shall have departed. One may confess to this state of mind, and be no misanthrope. Rome has passed so completely for the winter months into the hands of the barbarians that that estimable character, the “quiet observer,” finds it constantly harder to concentrate his attention. He has an irritating sense of his impressions being perverted and adulterated; the venerable visage of Rome betrays an unbecoming eagerness to see itself mirrored in English, American, German eyes. It is not simply that you are never first or never alone at the classic or historic spots where you have dreamt of persuading the shy genius loci into confidential utterance; it is not simply that St. Peter’s, the Vatican, the Palatine, are for ever ringing with English voices: it is the general oppressive feeling that the city of the soul has become for the time a monstrous mixture of the watering-place and the curiosity-shop, and that its most ardent life is that of the tourists who haggle over false intaglios, and yawn through palaces and temples. But you are told of a happy time when these abuses begin to pass away, when Rome becomes Rome again, and you may have it all to yourself. “You may like Rome more or less now,” I was told during the height of the season; “but you must wait till the month of May to love it. Then the foreigners, or the excess of them, are gone; the galleries and ruins are empty, and the place,” said my informant, who was a Frenchman, “renaît à elle-méme,” Indeed, I was haunted all winter by an irresistible prevision of what Rome must be in spring. Certain charming places seemed to murmur: “Ah, this is nothing! Come back in May, and see the sky above us almost black with its excess of blue, and the new grass already deep, but still vivid, and the white roses tumbling in odorous spray over the walls, and the warm radiant air dropping gold into all our coloring.”

  A month ago I spent a week in the country, and on my return, the first time I went into the Corso, I became conscious of a change. Something very pleasant had happened, but at first I was at a loss to define it. Then suddenly I comprehended—there were but half as many people, and these were chiefly good Italians. There had been a great exodus, and now, physically, morally, aesthetically, there was elbow-room. In the afternoon I went to the Pincio, and the Pincio was almost dull. The band was playing to a dozen ladies, as they lay in their landaus, poising their lace-fringed parasols; but they had only one light-gloved dandy apiece hanging over their carriage-doors. By the parapet of the great terrace which sweeps the city stood three or four quiet observers looking at the sunset, with their Baedekers peeping out of their pockets; the sunsets not being down with their tariff in these precious volumes, I good-naturedly hoped that, like myself, they were committing the harmless folly of taking mental possession of the scene before them.

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sp; It is the same good-nature that leads me to violate the instinct of monopoly, and proclaim that Rome in May is worth waiting for. I have just been so gratified at finding myself in undisturbed possession for a couple of hours of the Museum of the Lateran that I can afford to be magnanimous. And yet I keep within the bounds of reason when I say that it would be hard as a traveller or student to pass pleasanter days than these. The weather for a month has been perfect, the sky magnificently blue, the air lively enough, the nights cool, too cool, and the whole gray old city illumined with the most irresistible smile. Rome, which in some moods, especially to new-comers, seems a terribly gloomy place, gives on the whole, and as one knows it better, an indefinable impression of gaiety. This contagious influence lurks in all its darkness and dirt and decay—a something more careless and hopeless than our thrifty Northern cheerfulness, and yet more genial, more urbane, than mere indifference. The Roman temper is a healthy and happy one, and you feel it abroad in the streets even when the scirocco blows, and the goal of man’s life assumes a horrible identity with the mouth of a furnace. But who can analyze even the simplest Roman impression? It is compounded of so many things, it says so much, it suggests so much, it so quickens the intellect and so flatters the heart, that before we are fairly conscious of it the imagination has marked it for her own, and exposed us to a perilous likelihood of talking nonsense about it.

  The smile of Rome, as I have called it, and its intense suggestiveness to those who are willing to ramble irresponsibly and take things as they come, is ushered in with the first breath of spring, and it grows and grows with the advancing season, till it wraps the whole place in its tenfold charm. As the process goes on, you can do few better things than go often to the Villa Borghese, and sit on the grass (on a stout bit of drapery) and watch its exquisite stages. It is a more magical spring than ours, even when ours has left off its damnable faces, and begun. Nature surrenders herself to it with a frankness which outstrips your most unutterable longings, and leaves you, as I say, nothing to do but to lay your head among the anemones at the base of a high-stemmed pine, and gaze up crestward and skyward along its slanting silvery column. You may look at the spring in Rome from a dozen of these choice standpoints, and have a different villa for your observations every day in the week. The Doria, the Ludovisi, the Medici, the Albani, the Wolkonski, the Chigi, the Mellini, the Massimo—there are more of them, with all their sights, and sounds, and odors, and memories, than you have senses for. But I prefer none of them to the Borghese, which is free to all the world at all times, and yet never crowded; for when the whirl of carriages is great in the middle regions, you may find a hundred untrodden spots and silent corners, tenanted at the worst by a group of those long-skirted young Propagandists, who stalk about with solemn angularity, each with a book under his arm, like silhouettes from a mediaeval missal, and “compose” so extremely well with the picturesqueness of cypresses, and of stretches of golden-russet wall overtopped by the intense blue sky. And yet if the Borghese is good, the Medici is strangely charming; and you may stand in the little belvedere which rises with such surpassing oddity out of the dusky heart of the Boschetto at the latter establishment—a miniature presentation of the wand of the Sleeping Beauty—and look across at the Ludovisi pines lifting their crooked parasols into a sky of what a painter would call the most morbid blue, and declare that the place where they grew is the most delightful in the world. The Villa Ludovisi has been all winter the residence of the lady familiarly known in Roman society as “Rosina,” the king’s morganatic wife. But this, apparently, is the only familiarity which she allows, for the grounds of the villa have been rigidly closed, to the inconsolable regret of old Roman sojourners. But just as the nightingales began to sing, the august padrona departed, and the public, with certain restrictions, have been admitted to hear them. It is a really princely place, and there could be no better example of the expansive tendencies of ancient privilege than the fact of its whole vast extent falling within the city walls. It has in this respect very much the same sort of impressiveness as the great intramural demesne of Magdalen College at Oxford. The stern old ramparts of Rome form the outer enclosure of the villa, and hence a series of picturesque effects which it would be unscrupulous flattery to say you can imagine. The grounds are laid out in the formal last-century manner; but nowhere do the straight black cypresses lead off the gaze into vistas of a more fictive sort of melancholy; nowhere are there grander, smoother walls of laurel and myrtle.

  I recently spent an afternoon hour at the little Protestant cemetery close to St. Paul’s Gate, where the ancient and the modern world are most impressively contrasted. They make between them one of the solemn places of Rome—although, indeed, when funereal things are so interfused with picturesqueness, it seems ungrateful to call them sad. Here is a mixture of tears and smiles, of stones and flowers, of mourning cypresses and radiant sky, which almost tempts one to fancy one is looking back at death from the brighter side of the grave. The cemetery nestles in an angle of the city wall, and the older graves are sheltered by a mass of ancient brickwork, through whose narrow loopholes you may peep at the purple landscape of the Campagna. Shelley’s grave is here, buried in roses—a happy grave every way for a poet who was personally poetic. It is impossible to imagine anything more impenetrably tranquil than this little corner in the bend of the protecting rampart. You seem to see a cluster of modern ashes held tenderly in the rugged hand of the Past. The past is tremendously embodied in the hoary pyramid of Caius Cestius, which rises hard by, half within the wall and half without, cutting solidly into the solid blue of the sky, and casting its pagan shadow upon the grass of English graves—that of Keats, among others—with a certain poetic justice. It is a wonderful confusion of mortality and a grim enough admonition of our helpless promiscuity in the crucible of time. But to my sense, the most touching thing there is the look of the pious English inscriptions among all these Roman memories. There is something extremely appealing in their universal expression of that worst of trouble—trouble in a foreign land; but something that stirs the heart even more deeply is the fine Scriptural language in which everything is recorded. The echoes of massive Latinity with which the atmosphere is charged suggest nothing more majestic and monumental. I may seem unduly sentimental; but I confess that the charge to the reader in the monument to Miss Bathurst, who was drowned in the Tiber in 1824: “If thou art young and lovely, build not thereon, for she who lies beneath thy feet in death was the loveliest flower ever crept in its bloom”—seemed to me irresistibly a case for tears. The whole elaborate inscription, indeed, was curiously suggestive. The English have the reputation of being the most reticent people in the world, and, as there is no smoke without fire, I suppose they have done something to deserve it; but for my own part, I am for ever meeting the most startling examples of the insular faculty to “gush.” In this instance the mother of the deceased takes the public into her confidence with surprising frankness, omits no detail, and embraces the opportunity to mention by the way that she had already lost her husband by a most mysterious death. Yet the whole elaborate record is profoundly touching. It has an air of old-fashioned gentility which makes its frankness tragic. You seem to hear the garrulity of passionate grief.

  To be choosing this well-worn picturesqueness for a theme, when there are matters of modern moment going on in Rome, may seem to demand some apology. But I can make no claim to your special correspondent’s faculty for getting an “inside view” of things, and I have hardly more than a picturesque impression of the Pope’s illness and of the discussion of the Law of the Convents. Indeed, I am afraid to speak of the Pope’s illness at all, lest I should say something egregiously heartless about it, and recall too forcibly that unnatural husband who was heard to wish that his wife would get well or—something! He had his reasons, and Roman tourists have theirs in the shape of a vague hankering for something spectacular at St. Peter’s. If it takes a funeral to produce it, a funeral let it be. Meanwhile, we have been having
a glimpse of the spectacular side of the Religious Corporations Act. Hearing one morning a great hubbub in the Corso, I stepped forth upon my balcony. A couple of hundred men were strolling slowly down the street with their hands in their pockets, shouting in unison, “Abbasso il ministero!” and huzzaing in chorus. Just beneath my window they stopped and began to murmur, “Al Quirinale, al Quirinale!” The crowd surged a moment gently, and then drifted to the Quirinal, where it scuffled harmlessly with half a dozen of the king’s soldiers. It ought to have been impressive, for what was it essentially but the seeds of revolution? But its carriage was too gentle and its cries too musical to send the most timorous tourist to packing his trunk. As I began with saying: in Rome, in May, everything has an amiable side, even émeutes!