I Strongly Urge The Reader To Fortify Himself On
This Point, For Otherwise He Will Miss Such Significance As The Place
May Possibly Have For Him.
Let him not trust to his impressions from
his general reading; there is nothing so treacherous; he may have
General reading enough to sink a ship, but unless he has a cargo taken
newly on board he will find himself tossing without ballast on those
billowy slopes of the Palatine, where he will vainly try for definite
anchorage.
The billowy effect of the Palatine, inconvenient to the explorer, is its
greatest charm from afar, in whatever morning or evening light, or sun
or rain, you get its soft, brownish, greenish, velvety masses. Distance
on it is best, and distance in time as well as space. If you can believe
the stucco reconstruction opposite the Forum gate, ruin has been even
kinder to the Palatine than to the Forum, with which it was equally ugly
when in repair, if taken in the altogether, however beautiful in detail.
As you see it in that reproduction, it is a horror, and a very vulgar
horror, such a horror as only unlimited wealth and uncontrolled power
can produce. If you will think of individualism gone mad, and each
successive personality crushing out and oversloughing some other,
without that regard for proportion and propriety which only the sense of
a superior collective right can inspire, you will imagine the Palatine.
Mount Morris, at One Hundred and Twenty-fifth Street, if unscrupulously
built upon by the multimillionaires thronging to New York and seeking to
house themselves each more splendidly and spaciously than the other,
would offer a suggestion in miniature of what the Palatine seems to have
been like in its glory. But the ruined Mount Morris, even allowing for
the natural growth of the landscape in two thousand years, could show no
such prospect twenty centuries hence as we got that morning from a bit
of wilding garden near the Convent of San Bonaventura, on the brow of
the Palatine. Some snowy tops pillowed themselves on the utmost horizon,
and across the Campagna the broken aqueducts stalked and fell down and
stumbled to their legs again. The Baths of Caracalla bulked up in
rugged, monstrous fragments, and then in the foreground, filling the
whole eye, the Colosseum rose and stood, and all Rome sank round it. The
Forum lay deep under us, vainly struggling with the broken syllables of
its demolition to impart a sense of its past, and at our feet in that
bit of garden where the roses were blooming and the plum-trees were
blowing and the birds were singing, there stretched itself in the grass
a fallen pillar wreathed with the folds of a marble serpent, the emblem
of the oldest worship under the sun, as I was proud to remember without
present help. It was the same immemorial, universal faith which the
Mound Builders of our own West symbolized in the huge earthen serpents
they shaped uncounted ages before the red savages came to wonder at
them, and doubtless it had been welcomed by Rome in her large, loose,
cynical toleration, together with cults which, like that of Isis and
Osiris, were fads of yesterday beside it. Somehow it gave the humanest
touch in the complex impression of the overhistoried scene. It made one
feel very old, yet very young - old with the age and young with the youth
of the world - and very much at home.
VI
PERSONAL RELATIONS WITH THE PAST
I was myself part of the antiquity with which I have been trying to be
honest; and, though my date was no earlier than the seventh decade of
the nineteenth century, still so many and such cataclysmal changes had
passed over Rome since my time that I was, as far as concerned my own
consciousness, practically of the period of the Pantheon, say. The
Pantheon, in fact, was among my first associations with Rome. I lodged
very near it, in the next piazza, so that, if we were not
contemporaries, we were companions, and I could not go out of my hotel
to look up a more permanent sojourn without passing by it. Perhaps I
wished to pass by it, and might really have found my way to the Corso
without the Pantheon's help.
I have no longer a definite idea why I should have made my sojourn in
the very simple and modest little street called Via del Gambero, which
runs along behind the Corso apparently till it gets tired and then
stops. But very possibly it was because the Via del Gambero was so
simple and modest that I chose it as the measure of my means; or
possibly I may have heard of the apartment I took in it from wayfarers
passing through Venice, where I then lived, and able to commend it from
their own experience of it; people in that kind day used to do such
things. However it was, I took the apartment, and found it, though
small, apt for me, as Ariosto said of his house, and I dwelt in it with
my family a month or more in great comfort and content. In fact, it
seemed to us the pleasantest apartment in Rome, where the apartments of
passing strangers were not so proud under Pius IX. as they are under
Victor Emmanuel III. I do not know why it should have been called the
Street of the Lobster, but it may have been in an obscure play of the
fancy with the notion of a backward gait in it that I came to believe
that, in the many improvements which had befallen Rome, Via del Gambero
had disappeared. Destroyed, some traveller from antique lands had told
me, I dare say; obliterated, wiped out by the march of municipal
progress. At any rate, I had so long resigned the hope of revisiting the
quiet scene that when I revisited Rome last winter, after the flight of
ages, and one day found myself in a shop on the Corso, it was from
something like a hardy irony that I asked the shopman if a street called
Via del Gambero still existed in that neighborhood.
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