The Weather Had Grown A Little More Wintry, Or, At Least,
Autumnal, As The Season Advanced Toward Spring, And One Day At The End
Of February, When We Were Passing A Woody Hollow, The Fallen Leaves
Stirred Crisply With A Sound Like That Of Late October At Home.
We had
been at some pains and expense to put home four thousand miles away, but
this sound was
The sweetest and dearest we had heard in Rome, and it
strangely attuned our spirits to the enjoyment of the fake antiquities,
the broken arches, pediments, columns, statues, which, in a region
glutted with ruin, the landscape architect of the Villa Borghese had
fancied putting about in pleasing stages of artificial dilapidation. But
there was nothing faked in the dishevelled grass of the little stadium,
with its gra-dines around the sides, and the game of tennis which some
young girls were playing in it. Neither was there anything ungenuine in
the rapture of the boy whom we saw racing through the dead leaves of
that woody hollow in chase of the wild fancies that fly before boyhood;
and I hope that the charm of the plinths and statues in the careless
grounds behind the soft, old, yellow Casino was a real charm. At any
rate, these things all consoled, and the turf under the pines, now
thickly starred with daisies, gave every assurance of being original.
When we came last the daisies were mingled with clustering anemones,
which seem a greatly overrated sort of flower, crude and harsh in color,
like cheap calico. If it were not for their pretty name I do not see how
people could like them; yet the children that day were pouncing upon
them and pulling them by handfuls; for the Villa Borghese is now state
property and is free to the children of the people in a measure quite
beyond Central Park. They can apparently pull anything they want, except
mushrooms; there are signs advising people that the state draws the line
at mushrooms.
It was once more a Sunday, and it was a free day in the Casino. The
trodden earth sent up its homely, kindly smell from many feet on their
way to the galleries, which we found full of people looking greater
intelligence than the frequenters of such places commonly betray. They
might have been such more cultivated sight-seers as could not afford to
come on the paydays, and, if they had not crowded the room so, one might
have been glad as well as proud to be of their number. They did not
really keep one from older friends, from the statues and the pictures
which were as familiarly there in 1908 as in 1864. In a world of
vicissitudes such things do not change; the Sacred and Profane Love of
Titian, though it had changed its name, had not changed its nature, and
was as divinely serene, as richly beautiful as before. The Veroneses
still glowed from the walls, dimming with their Venetian effulgence all
the other pictures but the Botticellis and the Francias, and comforting
one with the hope that, if one had always felt their beauty so much, one
might, without suspecting it, have always had some little sense of art.
But it was probably only a literary sense of art, such as moves the
observer when he finds himself again in the presence of Canova's Pauline
Borghese. That is there, on the terms which were those no less of her
character than of her time, in the lasting enjoyment of a publicity
which her husband denied it in his lifetime; but it had no more to say
now than it had so many, many years ago. As, a piece of personal history
it is amusing enough, and as a sermon in stone it preaches whatever
moral you choose to read into it. But as the masterpiece of the
sculptor it testifies to an ideal of his art for which the world has
reason to be grateful. Criticism does not now put Canova on the height
where we once looked up to him; but criticism is a fickle thing,
especially in its final judgments; and one cannot remember the behavior
of the Virtues in some of the baroque churches without paying homage to
the portrait of a lady who, whatever she was, was not a Virtue, but who
yet helped the sculptor to realize in her statue a Venus of exceptional
propriety. Tame, yes, we may now safely declare Canova to have been, but
sane we must allow; and we must never forget that he has been the
inspiration in modern sculpture of the eternal Greek truth of repose
from which the art had so wildly wandered, He, more than any other,
stayed it in the mad career on which Michelangelo, however remotely, had
started it; and we owe it to him that the best marbles now no longer
strut or swagger or bully.
It was by one of those accidents which are the best fortunes of travel
that I visited the Villa Papa Giulio, when I thought I was merely going
to the Piazza del Popolo, to which one cannot go too often. A chance
look at my guide-book beguiled me with the notion that the villa was
just outside the gate; but it was a deceit which I should be glad to
have practised on me every February 17th of my life. If the villa was
farther off than I thought, the way to it lay for a while through a
tramwayed suburban street delightfully encumbered with wide-horned oxen
drawing heavy wagon-loads of grain, donkeys pulling carts laden with
vegetables, and children and hens and dogs playing their several parts
in a perspective through which one would like to continue indefinitely.
But after awhile a dim, cool, curving lane leaves this street and
irresistibly invites your cab to follow it; and sooner than you could
ask you get to the villa gate. There a gatekeeper tacitly wonders at
your arriving before he is well awake, and will keep you a good five
minutes while he parleys with another custodian before he can bring
himself to sell you a ticket and let you into the beautiful, old,
orange-gray cloistered court, where there is a young architect with the
T-square of his calling sketching some point of it, and a gardener
gently hacking off from the parent stems such palm-leaves as have
survived their usefulness.
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