Roba Di Roma
REVIEWS AND LITERARY NOTICES.
By . 2 vols. 8vo. pp. 355, 869. London: Chapman & Hall. 1863.
THE father of the celebrated Mr. Jonathan Wild was in the habit of saying, that “ travelling was travelling in one part of the world as well as another ; it consisted in being such a time from home, and in traversing so many leagues ; and he appealed to experience whether most of our travellers in France and Italy did not prove at their return that they might have been sent as profitably to Norway and Greenland.” Fielding himself, the author of this sarcasm, was a very different kind of traveller, as his Lisbon journal shows ; but we think he told no more than the truth in regard to the far greater part of those idle people who powder themselves with dust from the highways and blur their memories with a whirl through the galleries of Europe. They go out empty, to come home unprofitably full. They go abroad to escape themselves, and fail, as Goethe says they always must, in the attempt to jump away from their own shadows. And yet even the dullest man, if he went honestly about it, might bring home something worth having from the dullest place. If Ovid, instead of sentimentalizing in the “ Tristia,” had left behind him a treatise on the language of the Getæ which he learned, we should have thanked him for something more truly valuable than all his poems. Could men only learn how comfortably the world can get along without the various information which they bring home about themselves ! Honest observation and report will long continue, we fear, to be one of the rarest of human things, so much more easily are spectacles to be had than eyes, so much cheaper is fine writing than exactness. Let any one who has sincerely endeavored to get anything like facts with regard to the battles of our civil war only consider how much more he has learned concerning the splendid emotions of the reporter than the events of the fight, (unless he has had the good luck of a peep into the correspondence of some pricelessly uncultivated private,) and he will feel that narrative, simple as it seems, can be well done by two kinds of men only,—those of the highest genius and culture, and those wholly without either.
It gradually becomes clear to us that the easiest things can be done with ease only by the very fewest people, and those specially endowed to that end. The English language, for instance, can show but one sincere diarist, Pepys ; and yet it would seem a simple matter enough to jot down the events of every day for one’s self without thinking of Mrs. Posterity Grundy, who has a perverse way, as if she were a testatrix and not an heir, of forgetting precisely those who pay most assiduous court to her. One would think, too, that to travel and tell what you have seen should be tolerably easy; but in ninetynine books out of a hundred does not the tourist bore us with the sensations he thinks he ought to have experienced, instead of letting us know what he saw and felt ? If authors would only consider that the way to write an enlivening book is not by seeing and saying just what would be expected of them, but precisely the reverse, the public would be gainers. What tortures have we not seen the worthiest people go through in endeavoring to get up the appropriate emotion before some famous work in a foreign gallery, when the only sincere feeling they had was a praiseworthy desire to escape ! If one does not like the Venus of Milo, let him not fret about it, for he may be sure she never will.
Montaigne felt obliged to separate himself from travelling-companions whose only notion of their function was that of putting so many leagues a day behind them. His theory was that of Ulysses, who was not content with seeing the cities of many men, but would learn their minds also. And this way of taking time enough, while we think it the best everywhere, is especially excellent in a country so much the reverse of fast as Italy, where impressions need to steep themselves in the sun and ripen slowly as peaches, and where carpe diem should be translated take yourown time. But is there any particular reason why everybody should go to Italy, or, having done so, should tell everybody else what he supposes he ought to have seen there? Surely, there must be some adequate cause for so constant an effect.
Boswell, in a letter to Sir Andrew Mitchell, says, that, if he could only see Rome, “it would give him talk for a lifetime.” The utmost stretch of his longing is to pass “ four months on classic ground,” after which he will come back to Auchinleck uti conviva satur,—a condition in which we fear the poor fellow returned thither only too often, though unhappily in no metaphorical sense. We rather think, that, apart from the pleasure of saying he had been there, Boswell was really drawn to Italy by the fact that it was classic ground, and this not so much by its association with great events as with great men, for whom, with all his weaknesses, he had an invincible predilection. But Italy has a magnetic virtue quite peculiar to her, which compels alike steel and straw, finding something in men of the most diverse temperaments by which to draw them to herself. Like the Siren, she sings to every voyager a different song, that lays hold on the special weakness of his nature. The German goes thither because Winckelmann and Goethe went, and because he can find there a sausage stronger than his own ; the Frenchman, that he may flavor his infidelity with a bitter dash of Ultramontanism, or find fresher zest in his chattering boulevard after the sombre loneliness of Rome ; the Englishman, because the same Providence that hears the young ravens when they cry is careful to furnish prey to the courier also, and because his money will make him a Miior in partibus. But to the American, especially if he be of an imaginative temper, Italy has a deeper charm. She gives him cheaply what gold cannot buy for him at home, a Past at once legendary and authentic, and in which he has an equal claim with every other foreigner. In England he is a poor relation whose right in the entail of home traditions has been docked by revolution; of France his notions are purely English, and he can scarce help feeling something like contempt for a people who habitually conceal their meaning in French ; but Rome is the mother-country of every boy who has devoured Plutarch or taken his daily doses of Florus. Italy gives us antiquity with good roads, cheap living, and, above all, a sense of freedom from responsibility. For him who has escaped thither there is no longer any tyranny of public opinion ; its fetters drop from his limbs when he touches that consecrated shore, and he rejoices in the recovery of his own individuality. He is no longer met at every turn with “ Under which king, bezonian ? Speak, or die ! ” He is not forced to take one side or the other about table-tipping, or the merits of General Blank, or the constitutionality of anarchy. He has found an Eden where he need not hide his natural self in the livery of any opinion, and may be as happy as Adam, if he be wise enough to keep clear of the apple of High Art. This may be very weak, but it is also very agreeable to certain temperaments; and to be weak is to be miserable only where it is a duty to be strong.
Coming from a country where everything seems shifting like a quicksand, where men shed their homes as snakes their skins, where you may meet a threestory house, or even a church, on the highway, bitten by the universal gad-fly of bettering its position, where we have known a tree to be cut down merely because “ it had got to be so old,” the sense of permanence, unchangeableness, and repose which Italy gives us is delightful. The oft repeated non è più come era prima may be true enough of Rome politically, but it is not true of it in most other respects. To be sure, gas and railroads have got in at last; but one may still read by a lucerna and travel by vettura, if he like, using Alberti as a guide-book, and putting up at the Bear as a certain keen-eyed Gascon did three centuries ago.
Mr. Story has taken Italy with due deliberation, having lived there now some fifteen years. He has thus been enabled to let things come to him, instead of running after them; and his sensations have had time to ripen slowly toward the true moment of projection, without being shaken and hurried, or huddled one atop of the other. We doubt if the picturesque can be profitably done by the job, for in æsthetics the proverb that half a loaf is better than no bread does not hold. An Italian festa, we suspect, if you make it a matter of business, will turn its business-side to you, and you will go away without having been admitted to the delightful confidence of its innocent gayety and unpremeditated charm. Tourists must often have remarked, in making an excursion to a ruin or bit of picturesque scenery, that what chance threw in to boot was by far the best part of their bargain, for the most beautiful experiences come not by observation. The crumbling temple lured them forth, but it was only to see a sunset or to hear a nightingale.
What between winters in Rome and summers in one or the other mountaintown, with intervals of absence now at Florence and now at Siena, Mr. Story has had such opportunities as fall to the lot of very few foreigners. For, in studying the ways of a people, it is as with wild animals,— you must be long enough among them to get them wonted, so that you may catch them at unawares, His book is on the whole a delightful one, and would have been so without qualification, had he confined it to a relation of his own experiences. Where he narrates or describes, he is always lively and interesting ; where he disserts or grows learned, he gives up his vantage-ground, and must consent to be dull like everybody else. Anybody can be learned, anybody except Dr. Holmes dull; but not everybody can be a poet and artist. The chapter on the Evil Eye is a marvel of misplaced erudition. The author has hunted all antiquity like a policeman, and arrested high and low on the least suspicion of a squint. Horace and Jodocus Damhouder, (to whose harmless Dam our impatience tempts us to add an n,) Tibullus and Johannes Wouwerus, St. Augustine and Turnebus, with a motley mob of Jews, Christians, Greeks, Romans, Arabians, and Lord-knows-whats, are all thrust into the dock cheek by jowl. For ourselves, we would have taken Mr. Story’s word for it, without the attestation of these long-winded old monsters, who wrote about charms and enchantments in a style as potent in disenchantment as holy-water, and who bored their own generation too thoroughly to have any claim upon the button of ours. Every age is sure of its own fleas without poking over the rag-bag of the past; and of all things, a superstition has the least need of proving the antiquity of its pedigree, since its very etymology is better than the certificate of all the Heralds' Colleges put together. We are surprised that so clever and lively a man as Mr. Story should not have seen that in such matters one live fact is better than fifty dead ones, and that even in history it is not so much the facts as what the historian has contrived to see in them that gives life to his work.
But learning makes a small part of Mr. Story’s book; only, as the concluding chapter happens to bristle with quotations and references, thickly as the nave of St. Peter’s on a festival with bayonets, this is the last taste left in the mouth. The really valuable parts of the book (and they make much the larger part of it) are those in which the author relates his own experiences. After so many volumes stuffed like a chiffonnier’s basket with the shreds of ancient Rome, it is really refreshing to come upon a book which makes us feel that Italy is still inhabited by very human beings, and contains something more than the tombs of the Scipios, and inscriptions interesting only to people who think a dead Roman donkey better than a living Italian lion. The chapters on Street-Music in Rome, on Games, on Caffes and Theatres, on Villeggiatura and the Vintage, on the Ghetto, the Markets, and Summer in the City, are all of them delightful and new. They really teach us something, while the learning, we are sorry to say, does nothing of the kind. Several of these chapters our readers will remember enjoying in the “ Atlantic.” They are good for those who have been in Italy, for those who are going thither, and, above all, for those who must stay at home. They contain the most cheerful and picturesque descriptions of Italian life and scenery we have ever met with. And we cannot be too thankful to Mr. Story that he leaves a theme so poetical in itself to be poetical, without any officious help from himself, and that, though an artist, he does not enter on any of those disquisitions which would have made Sir Joshua shift his trumpet. On the whole, we are inclined to forgive him the polyglot lumber of his chapter on the Evil Eye in consideration of the scenery and galleries which he has spared us. We think we see symptoms that the Nature-mania which began with Rousseau is on the decline, and that men and their ways are getting into fashion again as worth study. The good time is perhaps coming when some gallant fellow will out with it that he hates mountains, and will be greeted with a shout of delight from his emancipated brethren.
Mr. Story is a person of very remarkable endowments. An accomplished musician and poet, (we ought to have said before how remarkably good the translations in these volumes are,) a skilful draughtsman, the author of reputable lawbooks, he would seem to have been in danger of verifying the old saw, had he not proved himself so eminently a master in sculpture. We think the country is deeply indebted to Mr. Story for having won so complete a triumph at the London World’s Fair with his Cleopatra and Libyan Sibyl, at a time when English statesmen and newspapers were assuring the world that America was relapsing into barbarism. Those statues, if we may trust the unvarying witness of judicious persons, are conceived and executed in a style altogether above the stone-cutting level of the day, and give proof of real imaginative power. Mr. Story’s genius and culture, with the fresh spur of so marked a success, will, we are sure, produce other works to his own honor and that of his country. For we feel that we have a country still, — feel it the more deeply for our suffering, and our hope deferred, — and out of the darkness of to-day we have still faith to see a fairer America rising, a higher ideal of freedom, to warm the soul of the artist and nerve the arm of the soldier.