All These Things Beautifully Abound In Rome Now, As
They Always Have Abounded, And There Is No Reason To Fear That They Will
Cease To Abound.
Rome grows, and as Italy prospers it will grow more and more, for there
must forever be a great and famous capital where there has always been
one.
The place is so perfectly the seat of an eternal city that it might
well seem to have been divinely chosen because of the earth and heaven
which are more in sympathy there than anywhere else in the world. The
climate is beyond praise for a winter which is mild without being weak;
there is a summer of tolerable noonday heat, and of nights deliciously
cool; the spring is scarcely earlier than in our latitudes, but the fall
is a long, slow decline from the temperature of October to the lowest
level of January without the vicissitudes of other autumns. The
embrowning or reddening or yellowing leaves turn sere, but drop or cling
to their parent boughs as they choose, for there is seldom a frost to
loosen their hold, and seldom a storm to tear them away.
So it is said by those who profess a more intimate acquaintance with the
Roman meteorology than I can boast, but from the little I know I can
believe anything of it that is of good report. Everywhere the prevalence
of the ilex, the orange, the laurel, the pine, flatters January with an
illusion of June, and under our hotel windows I was witness of the
success of the sycamore leaves in keeping a grip of their native twigs
even after the new buds came to push them away. In the last days of
March a plum-tree hung its robe of white blossoms over the wall of the
Capuchin convent from the garden within; but the almond-trees had been
in bloom for six weeks before, and the deeper pink of the peach had more
warmly flushed the suburbs for fully a fortnight.
Still, a mild winter and an endurable summer will not of themselves make
a great capital, and it was probably the Romans themselves who in the
past made Rome the capital of the world, first politically and then
religiously. Whether they will make it so hereafter remains to be seen.
In the sense of all the Italians being Romans, I believe, with my
profound faith in the race, that they are very capable of doing it; and
they will have the help of the whole world in the work, or what is most
liberal and enlightened in the whole world. As it is, Rome has a pull
with Occidental civilization which forever constitutes her its head
city. The only European capitals comparable with her are London, Paris,
and Berlin; one cannot take account of New York, which is merely the
commercial metropolis of America, with a possibility of becoming the
business centre of both hemispheres. Washington is still in its nonage
and of a numerical unimportance in which it must long remain almost
ludicrously inferior to other capitals, not to dwell upon its want of
anything like artistic, literary, scientific, and historical primacy. It
is the voluntary political centre of the greatest republic of any time
and of a nation which is already unrivalled in its claim upon the
future. But it is not of the involuntary and unconscious growth of a
capital like London, which is the centre of a mighty state, deep-rooted
in the past, and the capital of that Anglo-Saxon race of which we are
ourselves a condition, and of a colonial empire without a present equal.
Paris is France in the sense of representing the intense life of a
nation unsurpassed in the things which enlighten and ennoble the human
intellect and advance mankind. Berlin is the concentration of the strong
will of a state which has made itself great out of the weak will of
sundry inferior states, homogeneous in their disunity more than in any
positive quality, and which stands for a political ideal more nearly
reactionary, more nearly mediaeval, than any other modern state. Berlin
is not German as Paris is French, and Rome is not so exclusively
Italian. In fact, her greatness, accomplished and destined, lies in just
the fact that she is not and never can be exclusively Italian. Human
interests too universal and imperative for the control of a single race,
even so brilliant and so gifted as the Italian race, which is naturally
and necessarily in possession, centre about her through history,
religion, art, and make every one at home in the city which is the
capital of Christendom. Now and then I saw some shining and twinkling
Japs going about with Baedekers, and I imagined them giving a modest and
unprejudiced mind to Rome without claiming, tacitly or explicitly, the
right to dispute the Italian theory and practice in its control. But
every Occidental stranger (if any one of European blood is a stranger in
the home of Christianity) I knew to be there in a mood more or less
critical, and in a disposition to find fault with the Rome which is now
making, or making over.
We journeyers or sojourners can do this without expense or inconvenience
to ourselves, and we can easily blame the Italian conception of the
future city which, to name but one fact, has made it possible for us to
visit her in comfort at every season and to come away without having
come down with the Roman fever. In spite of the sort of motherly, or at
the worst step-motherly, welcome which she gives to all us closely or
distantly related children of hers; in spite of her immemorial fame and
her immortal beauty; in spite of her admirable housekeeping, in which
she rises every morning at daybreak and sweeps clean every hole and
corner of her dwelling; in spite of her wonderful sky, her life-giving
air; in spite of the level head she keeps in her political affairs, and
the miraculous poise she maintains between the antagonism of State and
Church; in spite of her wise eclecticism in modern improvements; in
spite of her admirable hygiene, which has constituted her one of the
healthiest, if not the healthiest city in Europe; in spite of the
solvency which she preserves amid expenses to which the vast scale of
antiquity obliges her in all her public enterprises (a thing to be
hereafter studied), we, the ungracious offspring of her youth, come from
our North and West and censure and criticise and carp.
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