It Is The Same Crowd In The Raphael Stanze, But Rather Silenter, For By
Now We Have Taught Ourselves Enough From Our Baedekers At Least To Read
Them Under Our Breaths, And We Talk Low Before The Frescos And The
Canvases.
Some of us are even mute in the presence of the School of
Athens, whatever reserves we may utter
Concerning the Transfiguration.
If we are honest, we more or less own what our impressions really are
from those other famous works, concerning which our impressions are
otherwise altogether and inexpressibly unimportant; it is a question of
ethics and not aesthetics, as most of our simple-hearted company suppose
it to be; and, if we are dishonest, we pretend to have felt and thought
things at first-hand from them which we have learned at second-hand from
our reading. I will confess, for my small part, that I had more pleasure
in the coloring and feeling of some of the older canvases and in here
and there a Titian than in all the Raphaels in the Stanze of his name.
I was not knowing his works for the first time; no one perhaps does
that, such is the multiplicity of the copies of them; and I vividly
remembered them from my acquaintance with the originals four decades
before, as I had remembered the Michelangelos; but in their presence and
in the presence of so many other masterpieces in the different rooms,
with their horrible miracles and atrocious martyrdoms, I realized as for
the first time what a bloody religion ours was. It was such relief, such
rest, to go from those broilings and beheadings and crucifixions and
Sayings and stabbings into the long, tranquil aisles of the museum where
the marble men and women, created for earthly immortality by Greek art,
welcomed me to their serenity and sanity. The earlier gods might have
been the devils which the early Christians fancied them, but they did
not look it; they did not look as if it was they that had loosed the
terrors upon mankind out of which the true faith has but barely
struggled at last, now when its relaxing grasp seems slipping from the
human mind. I remembered those peaceful pagans so perfectly that I could
have gone confidently to this or that and hailed him friend; and though
I might not have liked to claim the acquaintance of all of them in the
flesh, in the marble I fled to it as refuge from the cruel visions of
Christian art. If this is perhaps saying too much, I wish also to hedge
from the wholesale censure of my fellow-sight-seers which I may have
seemed to imply. They did not prevail so clutteringly in the sculpture
galleries as in the Sistine Chapel and the Stanze. One could have the
statues as much to one's self as one liked; there were courts with
murmuring fountains in them; and there was a view of Rome from a certain
window, where no fellow-tourist intruded between one and the innumerable
roofs and domes and towers, and the heights beyond whose snows there was
nothing but blue sky. It was a beautiful morning, with a sun mild as
English summer, which did not prevent the afternoon from turning cold
with wind and raining and hailing and snowing. This in turn did not keep
off a fine red sunset, with an evening star of glittering silver that
brightened as the sunset faded. At Rome the weather can be of as many
minds in March as in April at New York.
But through all one's remembrance of the Roman winter a sentiment of
spring plays enchantingly, like that grace of Botticelli's Primavera in
his Sistine frescos. It is not a sentiment of summer, though it is
sometimes a summer warmth which you feel, and except in the steam-heated
hotels it does not penetrate to the interiors. In the galleries and the
churches you must blow your nails if you wish to thaw your fingers, but,
if you go out-of-doors, there is a radiant imitation of May awaiting
you. She takes you by your thick glove and leads you in your fur-lined
overcoat through sullen streets that open upon sunny squares, with
fountains streaming into the crystal air, and makes you own that this is
the Italian winter as advertised - that is, if you are a wanderer and a
stranger; if you are an Italian and at home you keep in the out-door
warmth, but shun the sun, and in-doors you wrap up more thickly than
ever, or you go to bed if you have a more luxurious prejudice against
shivering. If you are a beggar, as you very well may be in Rome, you
impart your personal heat to a specific curbstone or the spot which you
select as being most in the path of charity, and cling to it from dawn
till dark. Or you acquire somehow the rights of a chair just within the
padded curtain of a church, and do not leave it till the hour for
closing. The Roman beggars are of all claims upon pity, but preferably I
should say they were blind, and some of these are quite young girls, and
mostly rather cheerful. But the very gayest beggar I remember was a
legless man at the gate of the Vatican Museum; the saddest was a sullen
dwarf on the way to this cripple, whose gloom a donative even of
twenty-five centessimi did not suffice to abate.
XII
SUPERFICIAL OBSERVATIONS AND CONJECTURES
It had seemed to me that in the afternoons of the old papal times, so
dear to foreigners who never knew them, I used to see a series of
patrician ladies driving round and round on the Pincio, reclining in
their landaus and shielding their complexions from the November suns of
the year 1864 with the fringed parasols of the period. In the doubt
which attends all recollections of the past, after age renders us
uncertain of the present, I hastened on my second Sunday at Rome in
February, 1908, to enjoy this vision, if possible.
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