It Is The Voluble Sorrow Common To All The Emotional Visitors In Rome
That The Past Of The Different Generations Has Not Been Treated By The
Present With Due Tenderness, And The Colosseum Is A Case Notoriously In
Point.
But, if it was an Italian archaeologist who destroyed the wilding
growths in the Colosseum and scraped it to
A bareness which nature is
again trying to clothe with grass and weeds, it ought to be remembered
that it is another Italian archaeologist who has set laurels all up and
down the slopes of the Forum, and has invited roses and honeysuckles to
bloom wherever they shall not interfere with science, but may best help
repair the wounds he must needs deal the soil in researches which seem
no mere dissections, but feats of a conservative, almost a constructive
surgery. It is said that the German archaeologists objected to those
laurels where the birds sing so sweetly; perhaps they thought them not
strictly scientific; but when the German Kaiser, who always knows so
much better than all the other Germans put together, visited the Forum,
he liked them, and he parted from the Genius Loci with the imperial
charge, "Laurels, laurels, evermore laurels." After that the emotional
tourist must be hard indeed to please who would begrudge his laurels to
Commendatore Boni, or would not wish him a perpetual crown of them.
IV
THE ANGLO-AMERICAN NEIGHBORHOOD OF THE SPANISH STEPS
It is not every undeserving American who can have the erudition and
divination of the Genius Loci in answer to his unuttered prayer during a
visit to even a small part of the Roman Forum. But failing the company
of the Commendatore Boni, which is without price, there are to be had
for a very little money the guidance and philosophy, and, for all I
know, the friendship of several peripatetic historians who lead people
about the ruins in Rome, and instruct them in the fable, and doubtless
in the moral, of the things they see. If I had profited by their
learning, so much greater, or at least securer, than any the average
American has about him, I should now be tiring the reader with knowledge
which I am so willingly leaving him to imagine in me. If he is like the
average American, he has really once had some nodding acquaintance with
the facts, but history is apt to forsake you on the scene of it, and to
come lagging back when it is too late. In this psychological experience
you feel the need of help which the peripatetic historian supplies to
the groups of perhaps rather oblivious than ignorant tourists of all
nations in all languages, but preferably English. We Anglo-Saxons seem
to be the most oblivious or most ignorant; but I would not slight our
occasionally available culture any more than I would imply that those
peripatetic historians are at all like the cicerones whom they have so
largely replaced. I believe they are instructed and scholarly men; I
offer them my respect; and I wish now that I had been one of their daily
disciples, for it is full sixty years since I read Goldsmith's _History
of Rome._ As I saw them, somewhat beyond earshot, they and their
disciples formed a spectacle which was always interesting, and, so far
as the human desire for information is affecting, was also affecting.
The listeners to the lecturers would carry back to their respective
villages and towns, or the yet simpler circles of our ordinary city
lift, vastly more association with the storied scene than I had brought
to it or should bring away. In fact, there is nothing more impressive in
the floating foreign society of Rome than its zeal for self-improvement.
No one classes himself with his fellow-tourists, though if he happens to
be a traveller he is really one of them; and it is with difficulty I
keep myself from the appearance of patronizing them in these praises,
which are for the most part reverently meant. Their zeal never seemed to
be without knowledge, whatever their age or sex; the intensity of their
application reached to all the historical and actual interests, to the
religious as well as the social, the political as well as the financial;
but, fitly in Rome, it seemed specially turned to the study of
antiquity, in the remoter or the nearer past. There was given last
winter a series of lectures at the American School of Archaeology by the
head of it, which were followed with eager attention by hearers who
packed the room. But these lectures, which were so admirably first in.
the means of intelligent study, seemed only one of the means by which my
fellow-tourists were climbing the different branches of knowledge. All
round my apathy I felt, where I did not see, the energy of the others;
with my mind's ear I heard a rustle as of the turning leaves of
Baedekers, of Murrays, of Hares, and of the many general histories and
monographs of which these intelligent authorities advised the
supplementary reading.
If I am not so mistaken as I might very well be, however, the local
language is less studied than it was in former times, when far fewer
Italians spoke English. My own Italian was of that date; but, though I
began by using it, I found myself so often helped for a forgotten
meaning that I became subtly demoralized and fell luxuriously into the
habit of speaking English like a native of Rome. Yet tacitly, secretly
perhaps, there may have been many people who were taking up Italian as
zealously as many more were taking up antiquity. One day in the Piazza
di Spagna, in a modest little violet of a tea-room, which was venturing
to open in the face of the old-established and densely thronged parterre
opposite, I noted from my Roman version of a buttered muffin a tall,
young Scandinavian girl, clad in complete corduroy, gray in color to the
very cap surmounting her bandeaux of dark-red hair.
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