His spiritual delight was still loftier when he moved into the interior of the churches and palaces, where arches, flat piers, and round columns made of all possible types of marble mixed with ones made of basalt, lapis lazuli cornices, porphyry, gold, and antique stones, were all combined in harmony, subjected to the well-considered idea, and above them all rose the immortal creation of the paintbrush. They were loftily beautiful, these well-considered ornamentations of the hall, full of regal majesty and architectural luxury, which always knew how to respectfully bow before painting in that fruitful age when the artist was both an architect and a painter and even a sculptor all at the same time. The powerful creations of the paintbrush, which will never be repeated today, rose gloomily before him on the darkened walls, still ineffable and impossible to imitate. Going ever deeper into the contemplation of them, he felt how his taste, the pledge of which had been preserved in his soul, was developing. And compared with this majestic, beautiful luxury, how base did the luxury of the nineteenth century now seem to him, the petty, insignificant luxury that was good only for decorating stores, bringing to the fore the activity of craftsmen in gilding, furniture, wallpaper, carpentry, and a pile of other crafts, and depriving the world of the Raphaels, the Titians, and the Michelangelos, reducing art to the level of craftsmanship.24 How base this luxury seemed to him, striking only the first glance and then viewed indifferently, compared to the majestic idea of decorating walls with the eternal creations of painting, compared to this beautiful idea the owner of a palace had, to give himself an eternal object of enjoyment in his hours of rest from business and from the noisy clamor of life, when he could seclude himself in a corner, on an antique sofa, far from everyone, silently fixing his gaze and at the same time entering more deeply in soul into the mysteries of painting, invisibly maturing in the beauty of his soul’s thoughts. For art greatly elevates a person, lending nobility and a marvelous beauty to the movements of the soul. Compared to this immutable, fruitful luxury, which surrounded a person with objects that moved and educated the soul, how base did present-day petty ornaments seem to him, which are broken and tossed aside every year by agitated fashion, the strange, incomprehensible spawn of the nineteenth century, before which wise men silently bowed, the blighter and destroyer of everything that is colossal, majestic, and holy. With these meditations, the thought came to him involuntarily: Is this not the reason for the indifferent coldness that envelops the present-day age, the mercantile, base calculation, the early dulling of feelings that have not yet had time to develop and arise? They have carried the icons out of the temples—and the temple is no longer a temple; bats and evil spirits inhabit it.
The more closely he looked, the more he was struck by the unusual fruitfulness of that age, and he involuntarily exclaimed: “When and how were they able to do all that!” This magnificent side of Rome seemed to grow before his eyes with every passing day. Galleries and galleries, with no end to them… Over there, in that church as well, a miracle of painting has been preserved. And there on that crumbling wall, a fresco that is about to disappear still has the power to amaze. And there, atop raised marbles and pillars collected from ancient pagan temples, gleams a plafond that was decorated by an unfading paintbrush. All of this resembled hidden gold mines covered by ordinary earth, known only to the miner. What fullness he felt in his soul every time he returned home; how different was this feeling, embraced by the serene solemnity of silence, from those agitated impressions that senselessly filled his soul in Paris, when he would return home tired, exhausted, seldom able to verify the sum of his impressions.
Now Rome’s unsightly, darkened, stained exterior, so reviled by foreigners, seemed to him even more in harmony with these inner treasures. After all this, it would have been unpleasant for him to emerge onto a fashionable street with gleaming stores, foppish people, and equipages—it would be distracting and blasphemous. He preferred this modest silence of the streets, this special expression of the Roman populace, this phantom of the eighteenth century that still flashed along the street, now in the form of a black-clothed priest with a tricorn hat, black stockings, and shoes, now in the form of an antique purple cardinal’s coach with gilded axles, wheels, cornice rails, and coats of arms—all this seemed to be in harmony with the pomp of Rome: these lively, unhurried folk, picturesquely and calmly walking about the streets, with a half-cloak or a jerkin thrown onto their shoulders, without the burdensome expression on their faces that had so struck him on the blue-jacketed workers and the whole populace of Paris. Here even destitution appeared in a kind of bright form, carefree, unfamiliar with agony and tears, carelessly and picturesquely extending its hand; the vivid regiments of monks, who cross the streets in long white or black vestments; the dingy red-haired Capuchin whose light-camel color suddenly flashes in the sun; finally, the population of artists who have gathered from all corners of the world, who have abandoned here the narrow shreds of European apparel and now appear in free, picturesque garb; their majestic, imposing beards, copied from the portraits of Leonardo da Vinci and Titian, which are so unlike those monstrous, narrow little beards that the Frenchman reshapes and clips five times a month.25 Here the artist has felt the beauty of long wavy hair and has allowed it to spill out in curls. Here even the German with his crooked legs and the unwieldiness of his figure has taken on a dignified expression, spreading his golden locks over his shoulders, draping himself with the ethereal folds of a Greek tunic or the velvet attire known as “cinquecento,” which only artists in Rome have adopted.26 The traces of austere serenity and quiet labor are reflected in their faces. The very conversations and opinions heard on the streets, in the cafés, in the osterias, were opposite to or unlike those that he had heard in the cities of Europe. Here there was no talk about stocks falling in value, about debates in the Chambers, about Spanish affairs: Here one heard people talking about an ancient statue that had recently been discovered, about the merits of the painting of the great masters, arguments and disagreements rang out about the work of a new artist that had been exhibited, talk about folk festivals, and finally, private conversations in which the person revealed himself, the kind of conversations that have been crowded out of Europe by boring social discussions and political opinions, which have driven the heartfelt expression from people’s faces.
Often, he would leave the city in order to look around its environs, and then he was struck by different miracles. The mute, deserted Roman fields were beautiful, sprinkled with the remains of ancient temples, with an inexpressible serenity spreading all around, in one place flaming with solid gold from the yellow flowers that merge together, in another place gleaming with the fiery color of a fanned coal from the petals of wild poppy.27 These fields presented four marvelous views in all four directions. From one side—they connected with the horizon in a single sharp, flat line, the arches of the aqueducts seemed to be standing in the air and were as if pasted onto the gleaming silver sky. From another side—the hills shone over the fields, not tearing themselves away choppily and hideously, as in Tyrol or Switzerland, but curving in harmonious, flowing lines, and as they inclined, illuminated by the marvelous luminosity of the air, they were ready to fly off into the sky; along their base ran the long arcade of the aqueducts, resembling a long foundation, and the top of the hills seemed to be an ethereal continuation of the marvelous construction, and the sky above them was no longer silver, but the inexpressible color of a spring lilac. From the third side—these fields were also crowned with hills, which rose up closer and higher, protruding more powerfully with their front rows and receding into the distance in ethereal ledges. The fine light-blue air clothed them in a marvelous spectrum of colors; and through this ethereal blue veil shone the barely visible houses and villas of Frascati, in one place finely and lightly touched by the sun, in another place receding into the bright mist of the dusty groves that were barely visible in the distance. And when he suddenly turned back, then the fourth side of the view appeared to him: The fields ended with R
ome itself. The corners and lines of the houses, the roundness of the domes, the statues of St. John Lateran, and the majestic dome of St. Peter shone sharply and clearly, with St. Peter’s dome growing higher and higher the farther one got from it, and finally remaining imperiously alone on the entire half-horizon, when the whole city had completely disappeared.28
He loved even more to look at these fields from the terrace of one of the villas in Frascati or Albano at the hour of the setting sun. They seemed then to be a boundless sea, shining and rising out of the dark railings of the terrace; their declivities and lines disappeared in the light that embraced them. At first, they still seemed greenish, and one could still see tombs and arches scattered about them here and there; then they let a pale yellow shine through them in the rainbow hues of light, barely showing the ancient remains, and finally, they became more and more purple, swallowing up even the immense dome itself and merging into a single dense crimson, and only the golden strip of the sea sparkling in the distance divided them from the horizon, which was the same purple as the fields. Nowhere, never before had he had occasion to see a field transformed into flame just like the sky. For a long time, full of inexpressible rapture, he would stand looking at such a view, and then he would stand there simply, not enraptured, having forgotten everything, when the sun itself had disappeared, the light of the horizon quickly went out, and the light of the darkened fields went out even more quickly, in a single instant; the evening established its dark image everywhere, as fireflies rose up over the ruins in fiery fountains, and the clumsy winged insect that flies standing up, like a person, known as a “devil,” senselessly hit him in the eyes. Only then did he feel the coming cold of the southern night penetrate him all through, and he hastened to the city streets so as not to catch a southern fever.29
Thus his life flowed by in the contemplation of nature, arts, and antiquities. In the midst of this life he felt more than ever the need to penetrate more deeply into the history of Italy, which he had known up to now only in episodes and fragments; without that history, the present seemed incomplete to him, and he avidly set about reading archives, chronicles, and notes. Now he could read them not like a stay-at-home Italian who enters body and soul into the events he reads about and does not see the mass of the whole from behind the people and events that surround him. Now he could look over everything calmly, as if from a Vatican window. His sojourn outside Italy, in sight of the noise and movement of active peoples and states, served as a strict corrective to all his conclusions and imparted a versatility and an all-encompassing quality to his eye. As he read now, he was even more struck, and at the same time more impartially struck, by the majesty and brilliance of the past epoch of Italy. He was amazed by such a rapid, multifarious development of humanity in such a cramped corner of the earth, by such a powerful movement of all forces. He saw how humanity seethed here, how each city spoke its own language, how each city had whole volumes of history, how all at once, all the forms and types of civic life and government arose here: the agitated republics of strong, refractory characters and the absolute despots among them; a whole city of kingly merchants, entangled by occult governmental threads beneath the phantom of the sole power of the doge; foreigners summoned to live among the locals; powerful thrusts and repulsions in the bowels of an insignificant little city; the almost fairytale brilliance of the dukes and monarchs of tiny lands; Maecenases, patrons, and persecutors; a whole series of great men who came into collision with each other all at the same period; the lyre, the compass, the sword, and the palette; temples that were erected in the midst of battles and unrest; enmity, bloody revenge, magnanimous traits, and heaps of romantic events of private life in the midst of a political and social whirlwind and the marvelous connection between them: such an astounding expansion of all aspects of political and private life, such an awakening in such a cramped space of all the elements of the person, of the sort that happens in other places only in parts and over large expanses!30 And all of this disappeared and passed suddenly, everything froze like cooled lava, and it was all thrown out of the memory of Europe like old, worthless trash. Nowhere, not even in the journals, did poor Italy show its uncrowned brow, an Italy deprived of political significance and of influence on the world along with it.
“Will its glory,” he thought, “really never be resurrected? Are there really no means for recovering its past brilliance?” And he recalled the time when he was still at the university in Lucca, and he had raved deliriously about the renewal of Italy, he remembered how it was the cherished idea of youth, how over their drinks the youths would dream of it good-naturedly and simpleheartedly; and now he saw how myopic those youths were and how myopic politicians are when they reproach the people for their nonchalance and laziness. He now sensed with perturbation a great finger before which mute humanity is cast into the dust—a great finger that traces world events from on high. It summoned from Italy’s milieu its own persecuted citizen, a poor Genoese, who all by himself killed his fatherland by showing the world an unknown land and other broad routes.31 The world horizon expanded, the movements of Europe began to seethe with a vast sweep, ships began rushing around the world, setting in motion the powerful forces of the north. The Mediterranean Sea was left empty; like a river channel that has grown shallow, bypassed Italy grew shallow. Venice stands, reflecting its extinguished palaces in the waves of the Adriatic, and the heart of a foreigner is penetrated by lacerating compassion when the bent-over gondolier draws him under the desolate walls and ruined railings of the silent marble balconies. Ferrara has grown mute, inducing fright with the wild gloominess of its ducal palace. Italy’s leaning towers and architectural miracles look desolate over the country’s whole expanse, as they find themselves in the midst of a generation that is indifferent to them. A ringing echo resounds in the once noisy streets, and the poor cab rides up to a dirty osteria that has taken up residence in a magnificent palace. Italy has ended up in a beggar’s sackcloth, and the pieces of its darkened regal clothing hang on it in dusty rags.
In a spasm of spiritual compassion, he was ready to burst into tears. But a consoling, majestic idea came all by itself into his soul, and he sensed by means of another, higher instinct that Italy had not died, that its irresistible, eternal dominion over the whole world could be perceived, that its great genius eternally floated over it, that genius which had at the very beginning bound up the fate of Europe in its breast, which had introduced the cross into the dark European forests, which had seized with its civic spear the savage people on the edge of those forests, which had first seethed here with world trade, cunning politics, and the complexity of civic mainsprings, and which then rose up in all the brilliance of the intellect, crowning its brow with the holy crown of poetry, and which when Italy’s political influence had begun to disappear, had unfolded over the world with triumphant wonders—arts that granted humanity unknown delights and divine feelings that had not before risen out of the bosom of its soul. When in turn the age of art had hidden itself, and people, plunged into calculation, had grown cold to it, it floated and spread above the world in the howling wails of music, and on the banks of the Seine, the Neva, the Thames, the Moscow River, the Mediterranean and Black Seas, within the walls of Algiers and on distant, recently savage islands, enraptured applause thunders for resonant singers. Finally, the genius of Italy now threateningly holds sway in the world by means of its very decrepitude and ruin: These majestic architectural miracles have remained like phantoms to reproach Europe for its petty Chinese luxury, its toylike fragmentation of thought. And this marvelous collection of defunct worlds, and the charm of their combination with eternally blossoming nature—all this exists in order to awaken the world, in order that the inhabitant of the north, as if through a dream, would sometimes imagine this south, in order that the dream of it would tear him out of the milieu of a cold life devoted to occupations that make the soul go stale—would tear him out, shining for him with a prospect that recedes unexpectedly into the distance
, with a vision of the nocturnal Colosseum by moonlight, with Venice as it beautifully dies, with the invisible heavenly brilliance and the warm kisses of the miraculous air—in order that at least once in his life he would be a beautiful person…
At such a solemn moment the prince was reconciled with the ruin of his fatherland, and then he could see in everything the embryos of an eternal life, an eternally better future, which the world’s eternal Creator eternally prepares for it. At such moments, he very often became lost in thought about the present-day significance of the Roman people. He saw in it material that was as yet untapped. Not once had it yet played a role in Italy’s brilliant epoch. The names of Italy’s popes and aristocratic houses had been noted on the pages of history, but the people had remained unnoticed. They had not been engaged by the course of interests that moved within and outside them. They had not been touched by education and had not flung up in a whirlwind the forces hidden inside them. Something infantilely noble was contained in their nature. This pride in the Roman name, as a result of which part of the city, considering themselves the descendants of the ancient quirites, would never enter into marriages with other parts of the city.32 These features of their character, a mixture of amiability and passions, which display the people’s bright nature: A Roman has never forgotten either an evil or a good, he is either good or evil, either a spendthrift or a miser, virtues and vices exist in their virgin layers and have never been mixed into indefinite images, as in an educated person, all of whose nasty little passions are under the supreme control of egoism. This incontinence and this urge to splurge money on everything—the habit of powerful peoples—all this had significance for the prince. This bright, unfeigned merriment, which other peoples no longer have—wherever he had been, it seemed to him that they tried to amuse the common people; here, on the contrary, the people amused themselves. The people themselves want to be participants, at Carnival time you can hardly restrain them, they are ready to squander everything they have saved over a year during that week and a half; they’ll plant everything into their costume alone: They’ll dress up as a clown, a woman, a poet, a doctor, a count, they’ll talk nonsense and give lectures to people who are listening and not listening. And this merriment embraces everyone like a whirlwind—from the forty-year-old to the little child: The very last old bachelor, who has nothing to dress up in, will turn his jerkin inside out, smear his face with soot, and run there, to the motley crowd. And this merriment comes right out of their soul; it is not the effect of intoxication—these very same people will hiss away a drunk if they meet one on the street.
The Nose and Other Stories Page 27