Recollections of My Childhood and Youth

by Georg Brandes

XLIII.

It was a real trouble to me that the Pope, in his exasperation over the conquest of Rome--in order to make the accomplished revolution recoil also on the heads of the foreigners whom he perhaps suspected of sympathy with the new order of things--had closed the Vatican and all its collections. Rome was to me first and foremost Michael Angelo's Sistine Chapel, Raphael's Stanzas and Loggias, and now all this magnificent array, which I had travelled so far to see, was closed to me by an old man's bad temper.

But there was still enough to linger over in Rome. The two palaces that seemed to me most deserving of admiration were the Farnese and the Cancellaria, the former Michael Angelo's, the latter Bramante's work, the first a perpetuation in stone of beauty and power, the second, of grace and lightness. I felt that if one were to take a person with no idea of architecture and set him in front of these buildings, there would fall like scales from his eyes, and he would say: "Now I know what the building art means."

Luini's exquisite painting, Vanity and Modesty, in the Galleria Sciarra, impressed me profoundly. It represented two women, one nun- like, the other magnificently dressed. The latter is Leonardo's well- known type, as a magically fascinating personality. Its essential feature is a profoundly serious melancholy, but the beauty of the figure is seductive. She is by no means smiling, and yet she looks as though a very slight alteration would produce a smile, and as though the heavens themselves would open, if smile she did. The powerful glance of the dark blue eyes is in harmony with the light-brown hair and the lovely hands. "It would be terrible to meet in real life a woman who looked like that," I wrote; "for a man would grow desperate at his inability to win her and desperate because the years must destroy such a marvel. That is why the gracious gods have willed it otherwise; that is why she does not exist. That is why she is only a vision, a revelation, a painting, and that is why she was conceived in the brain of Leonardo, the place on earth most favoured by the gods, and executed by Luini, that all generations might gaze at her without jealousy, and without dread of the molestations of Time."

One day, at the Museo Kircheriano, where I was looking at the admirable antiquities, I made acquaintance with a Jesuit priest, who turned out to be exceedingly pleasant and refined, a very decent fellow, in fact. He spoke Latin to me, and showed me round; at an enquiry of mine, he fetched from his quarters in the Collegio Romano a book with reproductions from the pagan section of the Lateran Museum, and explained to me some bas-reliefs which I had not understood. His obligingness touched me, his whole attitude made me think. Hitherto I had only spoken to one solitary embryo Jesuit,--a young Englishman who was going to Rome to place himself at the service of the Pope, and who was actuated by the purest enthusiasm; I was struck by the fact that this second Jesuit, too, seemed to be a worthy man. It taught me how independent individual worth is of the nature of one's convictions.

Most of the Italians I had so far been acquainted with were simple people, my landlord and his family, and those who visited them, and I sometimes heard fragments of conversation which revealed the common people's mode of thought to me. In one house that I visited, the mistress discovered that her maid was not married to her so-called husband, a matter in which, for that matter, she was very blameless, since her parents had refused their consent, and she had afterwards allowed herself to be abducted. Her mistress reproached her for the illegal relations existing. She replied, "If God wishes to plunge anyone into misery, that person is excused."--"We must not put the blame of everything upon God," said the mistress.--"Yes, yes," replied the girl unabashed; "then if the Devil wishes to plunge a person into misery, the person is excused."--"Nor may we put the blame of our wrongdoing on the Devil," said the mistress.--"Good gracious," said the girl, "it must be the fault of one or other of them, everybody knows that. If it is not the one, it is the other."

At the house of the Blanchettis, who had come to Rome, I met many Turin and Roman gentlemen. They were all very much taken up by an old Sicilian chemist of the name of Muratori, who claimed that he had discovered a material which looked like linen, but was impervious to bullets, sword- cuts, bayonet-thrusts, etc. Blanchetti himself had fired his revolver at him at two paces, and the ball had fallen flat to the ground. There could be no question of juggling; Muratori was an honourable old Garibaldist who had been wounded in his youth, and now went about on crutches, but, since we have never heard of its being made practical use of, it would seem that there was nothing in it.

I did not care to look up all the Italians to whom I had introductions from Villari. But I tried my luck with a few of them. The first was Dr. Pantaleoni, who had formerly been banished from the Papal States and who left the country as a radical politician, but now held almost conservative views. He had just come back, and complained bitterly of all the licentiousness. "Alas!" he said, "we have freedom enough now, but order, order!" Pantaleoni was a little, eager, animated man of fifty, very much occupied, a politician and doctor, and he promised to introduce me to all the scholars whose interests I shared. As I felt scruples at taking up these gentlemen's time, he exclaimed wittily: "My dear fellow, take up their time! To take his time is the greatest service you can render to a Roman; he never knows what to do to kill it!"

The next man I went to was Prince Odescalchi, one of the men who had then recently risen to the surface, officially termed the hero of the Young Liberals. Pantaleoni had dubbed him a blockhead, and he had not lied. He turned out to be a very conceited and frothy young man with a parting all over his head, fair to whiteness, of strikingly Northern type, with exactly the same expressionless type of face as certain of the milksops closely connected with the Court in Denmark.