Somehow, From Its Form And
From The Great Propriety Of Its Decoration, It Far Surpasses St.
Peter's. The Antic Touch
Of the baroque is scarcely present in it, for,
being newly rebuilt after the fire which destroyed the fourth-century
Basilica in 1823, its faults are not those of sixteenth-century excess.
It would be a very bold or a very young connoisseur who should venture
to appraise its merits beyond this negative valuation; and timid age can
affirm no more than that it came away with its sensibilities unwounded.
Tradition and history combine with the stately architecture, which
reverently includes every possible relic of the original fabric, to
render the immense temple venerable; and as it is still in process of
construction, with a colonnaded porch in scale and keeping with the body
of the basilica, it offers to the eye of wonder the actual spectacle of
that unstinted outlay of riches which has filled Rome with its
multitudes of pious monuments - monuments mainly ugly, but potent with
the imagination even in their ugliness through the piety of their
origin. Where did all that riches come from?
Out of what unfathomable opulence, out of what pitiable penury, out of
what fear, out of what love? One fancies the dying hands of wealth that
released their gift to the sacred use, the knotted hands of work that
spared it from their need. The giving continues in this latest Christian
age as in the earliest, and Rome is increasingly Rome in a world which
its thinkers think no longer believes.
From San Paolo we were going to another shrine, more hallowed to our
literary sense, and we drove through the sweet morning sunshine and
bird-singing, past pale-pink clouds of almond bloom on the garden
slopes, with snowy heights far beyond, to the simple graveyard where
Keats and Shelley lie. Our way to the Protestant cemetery held by some
shabby apartment-houses of that very modern Rome which was largely so
jerry-built, and which I would not leave out of the landscape if I
could, for I think their shabbi-ness rather heightens your sense of the
peaceful loveliness to which you come under the cypresses, among the
damp aisles, so thickly studded with the stones recording the death in
exile of the English strangers lying there far from home. In a faulty
perspective of memory, I had always seen the graves of the two poets
side by side; but the heart of Shelley rests in a prouder part of the
cemetery, where the paths between the finer tombs are carefully kept;
and the dust of Keats lies in an old, plain, almost neglected corner,
well off beyond a dividing trench. It seems an ungracious chance which
has so parted the two poets so inextricably united in their fame; it is
as if here, too, the world would have its way; but, of course, it is
only at the worst an ungracious chance. Keats, at least, has the
companionship of the painter Severn, the friend on whose "fond breast
his parting soul relied," and who has here followed him into the dust.
A few withered daisies had been scattered in the thin grass over the
poet, and one hardly dared lift one's eyes from them to the
heartbreaking epitaph which one could not spell for tears.
VIII
A FEW VILLAS
It was but a few minutes' walk from the hotel to the Porta Pinciana,
and, if you took this short walk, you found yourself almost before you
knew it in the Villa Borghese. You might then, on your first Sunday in
Rome, have fancied yourself in Central Park, for all difference in the
easily satisfied Sunday-afternoon crowd. But with me a difference began
in the grove of stone-pines, and their desultory stretch toward the
Casino, where in the simple young times which are now the old we had
hurried, with our Kugler in our hands and other reading in our heads, to
see Titian's Sacred and Profane Love (it has got another name now) and
Canova's Pauline Bonaparte, who was also the Princess Borghese, and all
the rest of the precious gallery. However, if I had any purpose of
visiting the Casino now, I put it aside, and contented myself with the
gentle sun, the gentle shade, and the sweet air, which might have had
less dust in it, breathing over grass as green in late January as in
early June. I did not care so much for a mounted corporal who was
jumping his horse over a two-foot barrier in the circular path rounding
between the Villa Borghese and the Pincian Hill, though his admirers
hung in rows on the rail beside it so thickly that I could hardly have
got a place to see him if I had tried. But there was room enough to the
fathers and mothers who had brought their children, and young lovers who
had brought each other for the afternoon's outing, just as the people in
Central Park do, and, no doubt, just as any Sunday crowd must do in the
planet Mars, if the inhabitants are human. There was a _vacherie_ nearby
where not many persons were drinking milk or even coffee; it is never
the notion of the Italians that amusement can be had only through the
purchase of refreshments.
I did not get as far as the Casino till the last Sunday of our Roman
stay, though we came again and again to the park (as we should call it,
rather than villa), sometimes to walk, sometimes to drive, and always to
rejoice in its loveliness. It was not now a very guarded, if once a very
studied, loveliness; not quite neglect, but a forgottenness to which it
took kindly, had fallen upon it; the drives seemed largely left to take
care of themselves, the walks were such as the frequenters chose to make
over the grass or through the woods; the buildings - the aviary, the
conservatory, the dairy, the stables - which formed part of the old
pleasance, stood about, as if in an absent-minded indifference to their
various roles.
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