THE ROMAN PEOPLE
I. The Italians.
There are four great movements which moulded the political intellectual and moral life of other European countries without leaving their impress on Italy. Feudalism and scholasticism took less hold there than in Germany England or France; the spirit of chivalry never touched the Italian, and Puritanism, of course, left him scatheless. Feudalism had little affinity with a people democratic to the core, scholasticism had little attraction for the most open-minded and the least didactic nation on earth, and neither the chivalry of the Frank nor the Puritanism of the Anglo-Saxon awoke echoes in a people whose self-interestedness and lack of the sense of personal responsibility are only equalled by the absence of all illusions, and whose hatred of shams is as radical as their freedom from hypocrisy.
Compared with the non-Latin peoples the lines of Italian development have been intellectual rather than on the side of character and conduct. The intellect of Italy has constantly spread a banquet before the spirit of Europe, as the beauty of the land from north to south has offered a feast of material beauty to every generation. Italian quickness in appropriating an idea is matched by Italian open-mindedness; you never meet in Italy the wall of thick-headed self-righteous prejudice—that array of pre-judgments which an Italian has aptly called idols—which the Englishman never fails to brandish when confronted by a new idea. Perhaps it is the fact that the Italians are the least prejudiced people on the face of the earth which makes living in their country delightful to Northerners. Some of our countrymen have certainly reason to be pleased that this is so; but the Italian illimitable tolerance of the foibles and eccentricities of others does not mean that they acquit us of bad manners and provincialism.
Italian intellect, the familiarity with and the play of ideas in the Italian, is not the same thing as a lofty idealism; and when a Dane recently wrote that the Italians possess the highest humanistic qualities and therefore are also nearer the supernatural than other people, he made, I think, this mistake. He confused ideas with idealism. The Italian gift par excellence is le sens très vif des réalités,[4] a vivid hold on the real; and this realism is the source at once of their qualities and their defects. The Italian has only one use for an idea, he must see it as it is. Hence he strips everything, tears away its drapery, exposes it to the garish pitiless light of fact. There is nothing which deserves in itself and always reverence—for him a spade is a spade, a fiasco a fiasco, a corpse a corpse. There is none of that prevenient idealism which in the north draws a veil over the crudities of sense, and helps to illuminate the half-truths they reveal. It is easy to see that such a quality as this is intellectually valuable, but morally disastrous. The special loveliness of the nature formed in the north is the persuasion that there are things one is not to see, not to hear. That northern "custody of the senses" which is not an ascetical exercise, but an inner illumination thrown upon them.
THE "SPANISH STEPS," PIAZZA DI SPAGNA
Erected for the Romans at the expense of a Frenchman in the eighteenth century. The Piazza takes its name from the Spanish Embassy to the Vatican which has its residence here. At the Sacred Heart Convent attached to the church of the Trinità de' Monti, at the top of the steps, generations of girls of Roman families have been educated. The Egyptian obelisk came from the gardens of Sallust and was placed here by Pius VI. See page [141].
The intellectual limitation "thus far shalt thou go and no farther," which the Englishman willingly imposes on himself, is impossible to the Italian, whose moral qualities have to reckon with the intellectual liberty which is proper to his genius. The passionate love of intellectual truth for its own sake is one of these moral qualities, and the people who do not possess it inevitably contract certain moral defects. These are not the defects of the Italian; he is not a hypocrite in his moral relations, not a snob in social concerns, not a prig in matters of intellect, and has no faculty for the mystical self-deceptions of the Northerner. His complete democracy of sentiment is shown in many pleasant ways. It is difficult for the average Englishman to imagine that rank should make no difference, to understand the dignified and simple relations which subsist between classes in Italy. A man in a good coat is not ashamed to be seen talking with a friend in fustian; people of entirely different walks in life may be seen buttonholing each other; and a Roman prince arm in arm with a man of the lower bourgeoisie is no infrequent spectacle. "We are all people of consideration in this house," said a Roman to me—"on the floor below there is a Senator, upstairs there is a teacher of languages, and I am a shopkeeper." Sovereignty too, in spite of the heavy etiquette of the House of Savoy, is democratic in Italy. The King does not live in inaccessible penetralia, and the man of the people when he comes across the man to whom he invariably refers as sua maestà will speak his mind to him. King Humbert assisted at the inauguration of Bocconi's big shop in the Corso and congratulated him on this new piece of commercial enterprise in the city; which is as though King Edward VII. should pay an inaugural visit to Whiteley's. Queen Margaret has always attended some Sunday lectures given in Rome by the association for the higher education of women—no Englishman could have imagined Queen Victoria attending, say, a university extension lecture at Bedford College. The Latin believes much more than we do in the principle of authority, and cares infinitely less about its representatives.
Italian civilisation is imperialistic and social, not individualistic. There is a greater sense of public decorum (as distinguished, however, from private decency) than among us, and more sacrifice of the individual to the society. One consequence of this is that there is less of that eccentricity, which is the individualism of the poorly endowed, less personal initiative, less enterprise, and nothing of that spirit of adventure which is the Anglo-Saxon's romance. The Italian would always, in spite of loud complainings to a just heaven, rather "bear the ills he has than fly to others that he knows not of." Just now it is the fashion in Italy to regard the "individualism" of modern Italians as the reason for their failure to co-operate. But a want of cohesion (mental and moral) is mistaken for individualism. It is certain that the Englishman is an "individualist" yet he achieves everything by co-operation; it is certain that he possesses that sign-manual of individualism—initiative, and certain that the Italian does not. Italy is not suffering from an orgy of individualism in her people but from an orgy of egotism—which is quite a different matter.
It is a fact worth noting that every nation believes its own family life to be the purest and most solid. The truth is that family life plays a more important part in Italy than in England, and Latin parents everywhere sacrifice themselves more for their children than we do. So strong is the blood tie that it has been said that there is nothing at the back of the Italian character but the love of family. Children make far more difference in the life of an Italian than in the life of an Englishman; and when love and devotion and obedience are required of them, they have already seen in their parents as in a mirror how life and personal comfort and personal ambition can be squandered for love. An English parent can leave all he has away from his children, and he frequently leaves the elder provided for and the younger not provided for at all. A Latin parent cannot do this, and it is a signal witness to the sense of obligation towards those they bring into the world which subsists among the Latin races.
If the blood tie is strong in Italy, friendship is very rare. As in the family relations so here it is the lack of marked individualism which is the determinant. It requires little effort to come up to the family standard; such effort, too, while it may lead to self-repression seldom brings about self-development. To come up to the standard of your peers outside the home requires on the contrary an exercise of all the individual powers; and friendship belongs to the individualistic peoples, those who prize personal rather than tribal and family character; to a people with no moral indolence, with the initiative and the power to become something on their own account, and to stand by themselves. The one "provincialism" of the Italian is—perhaps—his suspicion of all who stand without the blood tie: the adventurous spirit of the Anglo-Saxon which has colonised three continents has led him to a very different estimate of reliance on and co-operation with his fellow-men, and the capacity for genuine friendship outside the blood tie may claim to have always acted as an anti-barbaric note in Anglo-Saxon civilisation.
The Italians have another strongly distinctive feature. They are a more passionate but a less sentimental people than we. I suppose the Germans are the most sentimental people of Europe, and we come next. But in Italy the Englishman is not credited with sentiment. According to the Italian press, for example, he has "the patriotism of the pound sterling." For my part I regard the Italian as the least sentimental man in Europe; we, on the contrary, both as individuals and as crowds, are governed by our sentimentality. The whole British middle class would make war to-morrow to satisfy a sentimentalism which the Latin peoples regard as exclusively their own. Those who recollect that the reception accorded to Garibaldi put into the shade the entry into London of the bride of our future King, ought not to accuse the English of lack of disinterested sentiment. The Italians have the sentiment of the beautiful the grandiose and the fit—but they are the last people in the world to be put out of their course by a scruple or an élan. On the other hand there is a real sense in which the Englishman is devoid of a quality which is allied to the Latin graciousness. England shows a want of pride in and sentiment towards dependencies like the Channel Islands or Ireland which we should not find in France or Italy. She forgets, neglects, has no grip, and takes no hold on the imagination. Other nations have exploited their colonies and dependencies and the British suzerain is not appealed to in vain for protection under his flag—but something lacks, and so it comes about that the foreigner frequently likes our justice but not ourselves.
AT THE FOOT OF THE SPANISH STEPS, PIAZZA DI SPAGNA, ON A WET DAY
That sentiment which comes of a certain noble graciousness in peoples is shown in other ways in Italy. It is a moving thing to see the sons bear the coffin of father or mother, to see men of all classes follow the dead on foot; and then there is the Latin gracious treatment of birthdays and anniversaries, the Latin power of making a fête, of "fêteing you," surrounding you with the feeling that you are of importance for the moment, that content is really reigning round you; the many ways in which the sentiments of piety to the hearth and piety to the dead are expressed; the power of handling life lightly and of expressing feeling appropriately.
The Italian though he is not so "intense," in the slang sense, as we, and gives way to less emotional sentiment, is far more impressionable. On the other hand he is not ashamed to betray emotion, or to speak of his agitazione; and it will astonish the Englishman to be told that although the Italian is so quick of feeling that one may think he is at the death grip with a man in the street to whom he is only narrating his unexpected meeting with a relative from the country, he studiously avoids those sentimental "scenes" which are so dear to the Anglo-Saxon. The hot-blooded Italian speaks of the "furor francese"—that unmatched capacity for summing the intellectual points of a case and exhausting its emotional possibilities in one lightning moment,—and it is a fact that they judge the French people to be far more mobile and inconstant than themselves.
In common with other Latins, they have more vanity than we, but less self-consciousness, more simplicity, and none of that mauvaise honte which betrays that the Englishman has not got his emotions under control. But there is in the best Englishman an excellent sort of simplicity which frees him from attending to the personal point which is always present to the Italian whether he is dealing with matters public or private. On the other hand the Italians are completely free of the French bête noir, chauvinisme. And they have another great moral superiority: in America every one brags on his own account; in England we plump for national brag—there is a howling blast of the national trumpet always chilling the air round an Englishman. But the Italians do not brag; they have, indeed, no reason at all to act as parvenus. Their scepticism applies to themselves even more than to others, and no people are so ready for self-depreciation. According to them A, B, and C—the other nations of the earth—can accomplish this or that, while "un italiano non è buono a niente." In nothing, I believe, would Italians achieve greater distinction than in medicine, where a distinguished tradition of the art of healing goes hand in hand not only with the intellectual gifts of the people, but with an unrivalled delicacy of intuition. In no country are there better doctors, men armed at all points with the science of their age; yet as an Italian has remarked "Among us the physician counts as less than nothing while in France he takes rank as a scientific authority."
The Italian and the Irishman are the only amiable men in Europe—we must go as far as Japan to find their equals. Both people have the desire to please—or is it a mark of ancient breeding?—the self-effacement, the courteous absence of self-assertion so difficult to the Englishman. The Italian will offer you the reins of his horses, and any and all of those privileges and advantages which the English owner regards as inalienably his. The traditional hospitality of cold climates is indeed nowhere greater than in England, but there is no more entirely hospitable host than the Italian when he admits you to his house.
Nowhere are crowds so good-natured or so well-behaved. Yet the Italians complain louder than any other people, and have not French buoyancy in the troubles and tragedies of life. Who will believe it if we add that they have an admirable patience? The Englishman makes his holiday miserable by his indignation if the train is late, if some one steps on his toes, if he has to wait an hour while his dinner is cooking. The Italian takes all these things as part of the day's work or play, and finds his amusement in them besides. That is another great distinction—he cares for life for its own sake. The Englishman cares for it for some end he has in view, and the end may be noble or mean. With quicker sympathy and much quicker response than ours, they are a less kindly people; and what is it in the Italians that allows you to find them all at once in undress, the veneer gone, and the raw material left? The Englishman would find it hard, too, to understand a certain terrible outsideness, something callous and pitiless in the uneducated Italian: self-interest looms too large, and an apparent want of power of self-sacrifice—outside the blood tie—I take to be the great moral weakness of the Italian character.
We shall already have understood that the Italian does not wait to be told these things by others—he is the first to judge himself; he has no illusions. In England we are fond of throwing a veil over our national defects or of calling them by some fine name, but the Italian of all ranks has put the defects of his qualities over and over again in the crucible of his terrible love of reality with its quick perception of shams; and to understand the defects of Italians one has only to read their own masterly appreciations of national character.
ROMAN PEASANT CARRYING COPPER WATER POT
The Italian race is, I believe, prepotent in mixed marriages. In marriages between German and Italian or English and Italian the child shares indeed some of the mental characteristics of Angle or Teuton, but the personality is an Italian personality. This prepotence of the Latin people I take to be the effect of what some one has called "a great temperament"—the one quality which we may be quite sure has belonged to every remarkable man. Of all the great races the men of modern Germany leave least trace of themselves. It is noteworthy that the instances of mixed marriages are nearly all instances of women of the English German and American races intermarrying with Italian men; but whichever way it is, it remains as true of Italy as of France that "the ménage is always in the country of the Latin partner."
The Italians say: "inglese italianizzato diavolo incarnato," and this is also true of Americans and may be true of Teutons. Two Italian girls who spent a season in London described to me their attempts to imitate what they called "lo stiff," the stiff reserved manner of the Englishman of breeding. They failed, it seems, woefully, for they could not acquire "lo stiff" and they lost their own pretty manners. So it is with the Anglo-Saxon in Italy. We have not their finesse, or the mental and temperamental qualities which balance their moral defects; the Englishman adopts these with interest and his national virtues are shed like a garment. It is therefore perhaps fortunate that Italian women give Englishmen small encouragement to turn themselves into diavoli incarnati; for it must be recorded that the English and American wife in Italy runs no such risk: she remains herself, the national character does not wear off like a poor veneer, she does not outrage native susceptibilities without acquiring native graces, and distinguished women of our race have for the past two hundred years brought their native virtues to Italy while adopting Italian causes with an enthusiasm which did not yield even to that of Italians themselves. In Rome the English wife of General La Marmora, the two Talbots who became Gwendoline Borghese and Mary Doria, the American wife of Garibaldi, and the Scotch wife of the triumvir Aurelio Saffi (still alive), all played a conspicuous Italian rôle.
There are more people with great temperaments among the Latin races than among ourselves; and as it is "plenty of temperament" which is wanted for the creations of art it is not difficult to understand why the Italians are artistic and we are not. And the Italians are a people of artists. In England where one man in a thousand may possess the artistic temperament it is difficult to realise the keen observation, the appreciation of technique for its own sake, the intuitive way of gauging and grouping the data of the senses, the balance and proportion implied in a race where one man in ten judges as an artist. Wagner expresses, in a letter to Boïto, his admiration of the Italian attitude to art—the open-mindedness and delicate feeling in artistic questions which make him "understand again," after a visit there, "the matchlessly productive spirit to which the new world owes all its art since the Renaissance." When Edward VII. visited Rome the Times and other English newspapers compared the consummate yet simple scheme of decoration with the tasteless and meaningless banner and bunting displays which London witnesses on similar occasions. The love of beauty—the Greek horror of deformity—is so strong with this people that its imperatives take precedence of moral considerations—of pity, delicacy, kindliness. The uneducated Italian shows his instinctive disgust at what is ugly or horrible and, as we have seen, no prevenient idealism checks the impulse.
It is an important truth that Italians learn from the outside and that Northern peoples get from without only what they bring from within; that Italians have, perhaps, as little ethical awareness as they have signal and abiding æsthetical awareness. But that uninterrupted vision of reality which has relegated moral vision to the second place has bestowed on Europe not what is crude and naked and bare, but another mode of seeing, of feeling, of being—one of the great modes of human expression—art. This people who have been called "prodigals of themselves" have been so prodigal of their gifts that the hand which stripped the veil from the objects of sense is also the hand which clothed them, returning them to us with the crudity gone, replaced with new meaning, by new vision—expressed for ever in higher terms. The ruthless vision which saw so much, and suffered no illusion, saw also something which we did not see; and revealing to us what lay beyond our sight held up a mirror in which the real looks back at us as the ideal.
The imagination of the Kelt, said Matthew Arnold, "with its passionate, turbulent, indomitable reaction against the despotism of fact" has never succeeded in producing a masterpiece of art. Here we have a clue to the truth—which the Greek had already taught us—that interpretation is not left only to the peoples whose vision is turned inwards; that when, for such, the external seems bared of all meaning, the realist may restore it to us with the new vision in it.
II. The Romans.
In no European country has the secular conflict between race and race, province and province, been keener than in Italy—Lombards, Venetians, Tuscans, Romans, and Neapolitans have formed not only politically but morally antagonistic communities; and Italy has yet to create that moral unity which is no more a tradition of her past than is the civil unity she has already achieved.
Nowhere, during the era of the Risorgimento, was this antagonism more keenly felt than in Rome and by the Romans who have always divided the inhabitants of that "geographical expression," Italy, into "Romans" and "Italians." To this day the difficulties of moral union are fed by the incompatibilities and the jealousies of "north" and "south." To the warm Southerner, Lombards and Piedmontese are a nation of shopkeepers; to the Northerner, the Neapolitan, the Calabrese, and the Sicilian are as brilliant impossible and mediæval Irishmen.
CHAPEL OF THE PASSION IN THE CHURCH OF SAN CLEMENTE
The church, which is in the street leading from the Lateran to the Colosseum, belongs to the Irish Dominicans.
Midway between these two, neither north nor south, stands and always has stood the Roman: by sympathy, proclivity, and geographical position a little more south than north; but by history achievement and tradition independent of either. Florence represents the fine flower of the Italian spirit, the South its poetry, Venice and the North its civil greatness. What is notable everywhere is an incomparable productiveness in all activities of the human intellect, all fineness of the human spirit. But Rome has not produced. After that one act of creation, the Roman polity, Rome has been sterile; its function has been not to create but to criticise. Like the great Church which has developed within its borders, Rome has been the lawgiver, the critic of other men's gifts, but has laid no claim—when once we cede her initial gift of an infallible magisterium—to charismata. And so the Roman possesses in its highest terms the gift of criterion. Some witty person—a Frenchman of course—said that England was an island and every Englishman was an island; and so we may say that Rome was arbiter of the world and every Roman possesses that keen vivid abounding gift of arbitrament.
Rome therefore is not Italy for taste, art, delicacies of sentiment, for the great creations of the intellect the spirit and the imagination—Rome is the ancient mistress of the world; and the rôle the function and the influence of Rome must all be viewed in relation to her gift of infallible criterion, of world dominance.
The Roman of to-day not only lives in the city of the Roman who gave laws to the known world, he thinks his thoughts and to a great extent lives his life. He is the result of the grandiose memories of the past playing upon such a temperament as his. He lives surrounded by vague memories, understanding that it was something exceedingly great which fell, leaving him in the midst of these ruins. And the Roman has a supreme indifference—he looks upon every event with the same tolerance, the same sentiment of Emerson's "fine Oxford gentleman" that "there is nothing new and nothing true, and no matter." One procession passes him by to honour Giordano Bruno, victim of theological bigotry; another passes to the Vatican to render homage to the power which crushed Bruno: the Roman looks out upon both with the same eyes, the same indifferent dignity. "The Roman apathy," say some; but others call it a superiority, Roman largeness of outlook, the Roman freedom from what is petty and intolerant.
Who are the modern Roman people? Are they the genuine survivors of the rulers of the world? That there has been an immense influx of alien blood since the fifth century is certain. The incredible depletion of the Roman population in some periods was repaired by immigration from other parts of Italy; but Roman characteristics at the present day are too well marked to allow us to suppose that Rome has been at any time swamped by foreign admixture, or that the persistence of these characteristics can be accounted for merely by the continuity of Roman civilisation and the Roman milieu. The Romans of to-day, therefore, are the same people as the Romans of the great epoch—but with a difference. They are Romans with the energy sapped out; with the power of self-sacrifice for a public good gone, and with it the power to impose themselves on the nations, on their fellows. Romans with no heroes and no martyrs.
A RUSTIC DWELLING IN THE ROMAN CAMPAGNA
Nowhere, in fact, can the Italian character be seen so unspoiled as in Rome, where fewer outside influences and neither education nor social polish have conspired to modify the characteristics of the nation who were once the buontemponi of Europe. The people of classic Rome had always been men of a certain roughness, whose heroic qualities were formed at the expense of delicacy of sentiment. This rudeness of mind, of sentiment, of taste showed itself in every part of the Roman life. While Athenians watched the tragedies of Sophocles in theatres which could only hold a select audience, the Romans crowded into huge amphitheatres where a hundred thousand men and women gloated over the sufferings of sentient creatures—animals or men, it made no difference; the same hideous "practical jokes," as Walter Pater notes, being impartially meted out to both. Centuries after Athens met to applaud the periods of Pericles, the Roman ladies were turning down their thumbs that they might be sated with the spectacle of the last agony of the vanquished in the arena. The refined symposia of Greece became in Rome barbaric banquetings where the guests prolonged the pleasures of the table by vomiting what they had already eaten. The stern self-repression, the admirable power of devotion in a public cause, the contempt of pleasure and of life, the animus lucis contemptor of the early Republic, were qualities which did not descend to the Romans of the Empire.
The Roman Type
Not only Roman characteristics but the Roman type also have descended. The large round massive Roman head still contrasts with the narrow pointed head of the Tuscan. The type still admired in women is the tipo giunonico, the type of Juno and of the Roman matron—large massive and imposing. The Roman has a ruddy fresh complexion, the swarthy southern skin being comparatively rare; he has black hair, is burly and tends to obesity. His expression is tranquil and contented, and Signor Aristide Gabelli in his essay on Rome and the Romans bids us observe that the type has improved, that we no longer see the hard, bitter, threatening expression of the busts in the Capitol and Vatican, the prominent jaw and cheek bones have been softened; and the Roman of the city, at any rate, wears a more genial and humane expression than his classic ancestor. At a church function, among the Roman peasants—though I fear the type was more frequent in the "eighties"—one may see a face which might serve as the model for Jove, for a Roman poet or philosopher. It is such a face as could never be met with even among the best specimens of our peasantry. Muffled in his great fur-collared cloak, dirty and ragged, with eyes which seem to look from a soul that harbours every noble aspiration, our old peasant who can certainly neither read nor write, is probably cogitating why Checco refused to give him the wine at three sous the measure, or whether he would have done better to put the franc the forastiero gave him into shoes, instead of following Peppe's suggestion as to lottery numbers. So much for the wonders which an old civilisation can confer without any effort or any preparation.
PROCESSION WITH THE HOST AT SUBIACO
Many assert that the Trasteverini are the only lineal descendants of the Romans. The legend is that Trastevere was colonised by the Greeks brought by Aeneas, and the Greco-Roman type may frequently be seen there in absolute perfection—women of the people having the classic features and the noble bearing of empresses. They are a more robust race than the Romans on the other side of the Tiber, the black hair of the women is still more luxuriant, the character more passionate and vindictive, the language coarser, the reputation of the women not so fair.
In common with all Italians the Romans are more graceful than English men and women. The simple dignity and grace of the pose and carriage, with no stiffness or awkwardness, makes it easy to distinguish an Italian among Englishmen Germans or Americans whether he is sitting or standing. They have the small Latin bones and small hands and feet; the foot, however, is flatter than ours, and every one from the children to the soldiers drags his feet along the ground. But the walk is so unstilted that Italians form a natural procession, whereas a procession in England is achieved with much difficulty and is not really pleasing to the eye when it is achieved. Have you ever noticed the mesquin gesture—the fear to let himself go which is so closely allied to the knowledge that he cannot do it gracefully—with which one commonplace Englishman bids good-bye to another? You will see nothing like this in Italy. The ample Roman gesture—that Italian gesture of reassurance which seems to the Englishman quite sacerdotal—is the property of every one; and a woman of the people will hail an omnibus with the classic gesture that her ancestor might have used when bidding Olympian Jove stay his thunderbolt.
The Italians have the Latin eye and eyebrow; one never sees the unmodelled elementary eye, with its gaze bon enfant, of our younger civilisation. Naturally resonant, the voices of Italians are in all classes harsh and unmodulated; and there is no better evidence of the general ignorance in Rome than the uneducated speaking voices which make it impossible to distinguish a princess from a peasant at her prayers. The possession of a strong natural organ, quite untutored, is here joined to the Roman love of noise and racket; and the result is that the people scream at each other as if they were deaf, and you can only be sorry they are not also mute. It is an odd thing to hear the deep bass voice of some of the women alternating with the high thin tenor of many of the men; one may often mistake in this way the sex of unseen speakers. The deep voices of the women remind one that the contralto, and even the contro tenore, have been cultivated con amore in Italy: on the other hand a labourer in the fields or your servant-man in the kitchen region can be heard singing in high falsetto like a girl. What one will never hear in Italy are the affected speaking voices cultivated by Englishmen: the Italian does not "put on side" either in his voice or his manners, and nothing is more noticeable perhaps on one's return to England than the absurdly affected voice of the men.
There is no Roman dialect in the sense in which there is a Venetian a Piedmontese and a Neapolitan dialect—habitually spoken by all classes among themselves. The Romanesco spoken in Rome by the people is a debased Italian, not a real dialect. The purest Italian is, as we all know, spoken in Tuscany, where there is no dialect, and the best pronunciation is the Roman. Hence the proverb: "The Tuscan language in the Roman mouth," Lingua toscana in bocca romana.
The Roman's Character
The pride of the Roman is his chief characteristic; it keeps him from some of the pettinesses of his neighbours and is occasionally the idol to which self-interest is sacrificed. But the same people who are too proud to work are not too proud to beg. This kind of pride, indeed, is to be found a little everywhere in Italy, and I have known a distinguished Italian with a starving family who would consent to give lessons in "Italian literature" but not in "Italian grammar." In France where there is the maximum of self-respect this kind of pride is unknown. The Roman pride, however, is consistent with hearty ways and with great frankness and sincerity of nature. The Roman, indeed, is not only famous for his bad language, but for his out-spokenness in all directions: he tells you just what he thinks of you, and will by no means conceal his own humble origin when he becomes a great man; he will not insist that his ancestor was a count or at least a baron as an Italian from another province might do. But the Roman pride is a disease; it clamours for its own license and respects no one else's liberty; it plays into the hands of the Latin lawlessness, and the Roman spirit of revolt has tormented the popes ever since Constantine deserted the capital of the West. The Roman resents what he calls prepotenza, but a self-disciplined law-abiding people can hardly understand the stupid prepotenza say of the cabmen in Rome—a majority of whom are Romans. The Roman lad or the Roman man takes it into his head to make a bee-line in your direction, to walk over that particular piece of road or pavement, and the feeble sense of righteous indignation he possesses is only kindled if you attempt to thwart him. The satyr-like—half-childish, half-malignant—cult of the dispetto, the miserable pleasure taken in deliberately inconveniencing you, are so many proofs of an undisciplined nature—and where shall we see so many undisciplined faces as in Rome?—albeit that here it masquerades as the just orgoglio of a people descended from gods and heroes. "Non me lo dica, perchè io sono romano" (Do not say it to me, for I am a Roman), is a warning phrase repeated in perfect good faith, as who should say: "Do not provoke this son of a god."
GIRL SELLING BIRDS IN THE VIA DEL CAMPIDOGLIO
The Forum in the background. The road marks the old Clivus Capitolinus. See page [30].
The Roman's most pleasing characteristic is his genuineness; that, and a certain magnanimity, a certain nobleness of mind. The Roman has no "jesuitry," and he will not say behind your back what he dare not say to your face. In contrast to other Italians is his roughness—a legacy of old Rome—a rudeness of spirit which is a curious compound of pride in the past, of age-long absence of mental cultivation—of a moral quality, brutal sincerity, and of a mental quality, a terrific realism. They are also, perhaps, the best hearted people in Italy; and a dear old Roman friend used to declare that the Romans and the English were the kindest hearted people in the world.
Intellectually, no people in Italy have more talent: it is a key which opens many doors to say that the Roman is talented but not cultured. There is no real culture in any class, but there is a facility unmatched even in this land of natural gifts. The one exception to the general ignorance which exists by the side of an extraordinary quickness is an interesting one: every Roman is an archaeologist; to be unable to take your part in an archaeological discussion would be to write yourself down as an impossible ignoramus. On this subject every Roman is alert, and I was present when the foundations for the first houses which now lead to Porta Salara were being dug, and a marble relief was found which the workmen at once told me was "the rape of Lucretia." Imagine a bricklayer in London proffering a similar observation! With the general ignorance there is also in the upper class a widespread intellectual apathy; many of the Roman aristocracy have never visited the Palatine, and when it was suggested to a young Roman that she had never seen the Capitol, she answered: "Oh yes, I saw it the day I was married." Part of the Capitol buildings are the registry offices of Rome where the obligatory civil marriage takes place. The drive on the Pincio, which is not larger than the tract of the park from Hyde Park corner to the Marble Arch, satisfies the most exacting ambition; and the fussy foreigner who spends his time in museums and galleries is regarded as a harmless and well-meaning lunatic.
Every human being is the product of contrasts; but the Roman is more so than other men: to explain, not what he is, but what he is not we have, I think, only to look at the contradictions, the inconsequence of a character which in the expressive Italian phrase is sconclusionato, it comes to no conclusion. For the Roman though he is turbulent is easily led; he is at once obstinate and teachable; he is not fin but he throws a terrible light on all things; without being "finto" (feigned) he puts self-interest first. He is both ingenuous and suspicious; to his overweening pride he joins considerable diffidence; and the tongue which babbles of his personal affairs is the tongue of a man who has a profound distrust of his neighbour.
A fine critic with a child's simplicity, he is sceptical and superstitious, credulous and incredulous, seeing the works of the oracle but allowing it to deceive him. Joined to his indifference is a faculty for staking his all on some absurd punctilio: his interest in ideas is greater than in many parts of Italy, his ambitions and pleasures more materialist. The changes which the Roman has witnessed in unchanging Rome are met in himself by changeableness and fickleness of purpose, though the conception of the majestic, the grandiose, the eternal is always there. What are we to say of a people who can unite the pettiest spite with a magnanimous tolerance?
The denizen of the eternal city is proverbially campanilista, which may be translated "attached to the village pump"; and while on the other hand he has a sense of public decorum unequalled in Europe, the blasé Roman fritters time and talents in petty preoccupations, in distractions which are neither dignified nor stately, and eats and gambles to show his distrust of human effort in general, of all human achievement since the incomparable days when his heroes walked the earth.
The Roman does not merge in you, and he no longer imposes himself on you. He is not free of obsequiousness; and such customs as the baciamano (hand-kissing) are said to derive from the fact that the Romans have been "the hosts of Europe" and have learnt to depend on its bounty. A readier explanation is certainly afforded in that aspect of Catholic Christianity which has always encouraged personal humiliations and servilism in the inferior clergy and the laity: but perhaps the real explanation is to be found in the fact that the present day Roman is the descendant of the Empire, not of the Republic, and Christianity, as we know, easily adopted as its own the servilisms of the later Empire, with those Byzantine proclivities for despotism and adulation which at last led the independent Roman to burn his incense before the "genius" of the most infamous of the Caesars.
The Romans and the "Italians"
It is said that the Roman belittles things, that he is an easy despiser. Perhaps the gift of criterion nourished among the grandeurs of classical and Christian Rome is a sorry preparation for enthusiasm over the sights to be seen in other men's cities. The fact too that his pride sometimes forbids his stooping to means which ensure the success of his "Italian" brother who comes fortune-seeking to Rome, joined to his sincerity and hatred of humbug are, he thinks, the reasons why as a rule he is cordially detested by other Italians. The "clericals" have another explanation; the Romans are hated, according to them, because they would take no part in the doings which led to the union of Italy and the invasion of Rome. We may give a little weight to all these reasons and yet understand that the Roman is disliked on other counts. His pride, so think other Italians, is altogether too immoderate for his achievements; and when they entered Rome they found a people devoid of the mental and moral qualities which make fine manners—a certain amount of self-forgetting and graciousness of mind.
ENTRANCE TO ARA COELI FROM THE FORUM
The ever-open door of the popular Franciscan Church on the Capitol hill, which became in the middle ages the centre of the civic life of the Roman people. See pages [6], [57].
After "the Italians" entered the city, these provincial animosities waxed fast and furious. Men from the north were dubbed buzzuri, Neapolitans got nicknamed cafoni, and to this day a residence of twenty or thirty years does not preserve the hapless "forestiere" and his family from such epithets as buzzuri and villani if they presume to come to words with "a Roman of Rome." On the other hand "the Italians" returned these compliments with interest: the Romans were unlicked cubs, maleaucati, lazy, ignorant—the proud tetragram S.P.Q.R. was rendered by the Neapolitans Sono Porci Questi Romani "these Romans are pigs"; while the Roman, finding in the Neapolitan a man still dirtier than himself, retorted that the "Neapolitans' sky is beautiful, and it is clean, because they can't reach it" ("Il cielo di Napoli è bello, ed è pulito, perchè non arrivano a sporcarlo").
At the same time it is an indubitable fact that Italians who live among the Romans come to prefer them to their other compatriots; and I have heard this preference expressed by people so far apart as an educated Piedmontese and an uneducated Calabrese. Perhaps they learn from the Romans tolerance, the smallness of small things, and the greatness of great ones. Perhaps they realise that the Roman has learnt with an admirable patience and teachableness the new lessons that have been put before him. Thrown from easy circumstances into the vortex of the struggling life of the new capital—overtaxed and underfed—he has suffered as much as the newcomers for a political change which he demanded less loudly than they; and it is to his fair credit that a revolution has taken place in Rome without bloodshed, without violence, without undue bitterness, and that the element of crime and lawlessness has not been supplied by him. The Roman is not a hero, and not a saint, but neither is he a Camorrista and mafioso like the men of the South, nor a teppista[5] like the men of the North.
Roman Customs and Roman Satire
The customs of the Romans have been depicted by the inimitable art of Pinelli, their ways of thinking and feeling by Belli in his sonnets and in the modern sonnets of Pascarella. Here the satire, the cynicism, the rude intellect, the ignorance, the self-interest, meet us in every picture.
Nothing and nobody have ever escaped the Roman satire, which turns everything into ridicule and burlesque. From the end of the fifteenth century the torso called after the tailor Pasquino, and the statue of Marforio kept up a running fire of wit and mockery. When Pope Sixtus V. who was of the humblest origin made his sisters countesses, Pasquin appeared in a dirty shirt. Asked by Marforio the reason, he replied the next day, "Perchè la mia lavandaia è diventata contessa," "because my washerwoman has become a countess." Pius VI. encumbered Rome with inscriptions recording his "munificence"; when bread became dear Pasquin seized the occasion to exhibit a tiny loaf with the legend munificentia Pii Sexti; and when Urban VIII. died the following epitaph alluding to the bees in his coat of arms, recorded his nepotism:
How well he fed his bees
How ill he fed his sheep.
All this is very unlike the ideas held by some Catholics who cry "outrage" at the least criticism, and would consider the jests of Pasquin and Marforio sufficient to keep the Pope a prisoner in the Vatican. The popes thought differently; and preserved what face they could under the stinging satire of the Romans.
Pasquin gave place to the capo-comico Cassandrino, who was delighting every class in Rome at Palazzo Fiano in the Corso when the Italians broke upon the scene.
It must be remembered that the Roman would never accept servile occupations; the industries he chose were perforce those which required no plant and no capital, but also those which left him independent—such were the making of Roman pearls and mosaics, watchmaking, the favourite crafts of butcher, tanner, and carter, or the river industries of fisherman, boatman, and wharf porter. The most picturesque of his amusements were the dance, the mandoline, the lute, the song and serenade, and that improvisation for which he was always famous. One may still see the tarantella danced on the "Spanish steps" in May by the artists' models, dressed in the old Roman costume which persisted till Napoleonic times—the half Spanish dress of the girls and the short velvet jacket, feathered hat, and knee-breeches of the youths.
When the Roman railway was built, things were conducted in truly homely fashion; the train which was timed to leave at 10.30 was still in the station at 11. When at length it got under way, it might be put back again to land two peasants who had got into the wrong train. If you fumed and fretted, you were told to remember how long the journey would have taken before the day of railways. The Roman indeed had then and has now no sense of time—least of all has he learnt the proverb which he supposes is ever on the lips of our countrymen "times is money." If you enquire of a Roman the hour of mass he replies "About ten, or half-past, or eleven—thereabouts." The shopkeeper, the waiter in a café, used to take no notice whatever of you when you entered his premises; he continued tranquilly to read his paper or finish his cigar, and only marvelled that there could in your opinion be any reason sufficiently urgent to warrant your disturbing these occupations. The Roman's time is as eternal as his city, and one of the lessons he has yet to learn is its value for other things than money-making. No one answers a letter; your lawyer or your banker think themselves as unobliged to satisfy your curiosity as to the fate of your cheque or your business as the butcher and the baker. The Roman learns on his moral side, but remains so obtuse on the material side as to be a perpetual illustration of the reputation he has for strong-headedness, for "putting Trajan's column in his head," and refusing to budge like a mule. The Romans indeed are haunted by the past, and they are perhaps the people of Europe who have least grip on the present.
IN THE CHURCH OF ARA COELI
See pages [57], [230]-[31], and [interleaf, page 138].
It is in their folklore, the popular rhymes and tales, the customs and amusements of the people, that we realise that no loyalty or reverence can exist by the side of that passion for laying bare; and understand the coarseness which waits on the wide-eyed gaze of the Roman, unsparing and gross, because it is the result of what Ricasoli has called "the real poverty of the poor"—a moral poverty. The Roman goes to see some tight-rope dancers and describes the treat it was for him:
Above all there's the great pleasure of the height,
For if any one of them were to fall,
Nothing in the world could save him.
He goes to the play. This is his impression of the tragedy:
The last act when he kills himself and her
I can tell you was just satisfying
(M' ha proprio soddisfatto).
Or take his summary of the problems life presents:
... a sto paese tutto er busilli
Sta ner magnà allo scrocco e ddì orazione.
"The whole difficulty in this life is how to eat without paying for it, and to get your prayers said."
But the scene may change, and the same Roman is called upon to go forth into the campagna with the beneficent confraternità dell' Orazione e Morte in search of the body of some victim of violence. He is found pancia all' aria and brought back to his family; but amidst the keen observation of all that happens, of the situation, there is not a pitiful or generous sentiment; the scenes suggest nothing of interest but the faithful gross record of purely external impressions. Yet these men have trudged along the heavy roads, up and down, stumbling and struggling through the dark night to perform the act of pity which teaches them, apparently, so little.
Tragedy, comedy, a funeral, a marriage, the visit to your dead, the game of hazard, the incidents of an assassination, all these things come under the same clear, coarse, unintimate, unloving observation of a people who hold, wisely enough, that "L'occhi so' fatti pe' guardà"—the eyes are made for looking—but who care as little how they look as they trouble to select what shall be looked upon.
"Che bella giornata; che peccato che non s' impicchi nessuno" is the traditional greeting to a fine day, repeated even now with a modern humorous sense of its ghastliness. "What a fine day! what a pity no one is going to be hanged!" And the Roman's liking for distraction and noise is not sated even when he goes to bed. Before 1870 serenaders waked, and charmed, the sleeping city; but the Roman who is supposed to have been "killed between a policeman and official red tape," still reminds us that he is not so very dead after all, or that the guardia "non s' è fatto viva," for he now roars down the thoroughfares in the small hours of the night, thus procuring for himself the pleasure of disturbing you—a form of recreation with which even the police have too much sympathy to interfere. For the Roman tolerates other men's lawlessness but has no respect for their liberty.
The "Coltello" and Crime
As with children who cannot "play the game," his games of chance degenerate into quarrelling and killing. The terrible habit of carrying, stowed away in a pocket at the back of the trousers, or up the sleeve, what the Romans call "the instrument" gives them a ready means of converting hot blood into hot deed. The coltello used to be, and still is at times, the favourite gift of a girl to her lover—to have used it with deadly effect is in her eyes a necessary sign of prowess, and to feel it always ready is in his sight the welcome earnest of power to assert his virility. Italian crime is committed in hot blood; sudden rage or "love" supply the motive, and there is very little of the premeditated cold-blooded crime of which Dickens gives us an example in the details of Nancy's murder in Oliver Twist. The worst crimes of violence, however, are brought about from motives so futile as to seem incredible when they are mirrored in some ghastly assassination. It is enough to disagree with your comrade, to win a litre of wine from him, to refuse to withstand the police—to find yourself on the way to Sant' Antonio or the Consolazione with three inches of steel in your stomach, nay not unfrequently in your back. Primitive, terrible, childish, barbaric, this love of blood, this power of "seeing red" in a quarrel, has made the Italian the bravo of Europe, and makes the total of Italian homicides at the present day exceed those in England, Germany, Belgium, France, and Austria put together. Ninety-five homicides for every million of the population contrast in Italy with six for every million in England. In the time of the Venetian pope Clement XIII., in the middle of the eighteenth century, the proportion of homicides in Rome was twenty-five times higher than this.
Is the Italian more cruel, more brutal, more wanton than his fellows? To the first two questions I should answer No, to the last, Yes. The cruelties of the French Revolution, the coarse brutalities of England even down to the century just passed, the horrors recently revealed in the German army, would at no time have found their counterpart in Italy. But the Italian—the Roman—is wanton, he is an egoist who sates his impulses without any reference at all to the other people and the other interests involved. He is wanton, for he lacks the sense of personal responsibility; wanton, for he carries on life and government with no regard to justice. The Italian is a child of nature, a combination of his own two conceptions of "faun"-like irresponsible grace and "satyr"-like animality; an undisciplined creature living in the conditions of modern civilisation. But although the Italians are a vital people, a people alert on the side of the self-protecting instincts, and with the egoism of the vital temperament, they are not an inhumane people: they have in abundance the imaginative sympathy which instructs and softens, and if they lack the sense of justice they are in some ways more merciful than we.
DOORWAY OF THE MONASTERY OF S. BENEDICT (SAGRO SPECO) AT SUBIACO
See interleaf, pages [82] and [86].
No one can understand the disposition of the Italian in any part of the peninsula who does not appreciate in it a certain mildness—something expressed by the Italian mitezza but not by our English meekness—which preserves him from excesses from which other peoples are not free. The Romans of antiquity boasted no such sentiments; from that cruel period there has come down to us one story of humanity—the humanity of a dog; the compassion shown by a dog for one of a group of victims executed in the neighbouring Mamertine prison, and callously thrown out upon the steps of the highway of civilisation—the Roman Forum. But as a population the Romans of the modern city are not cruel.
If you look in upon the Roman as he watches the public torture of prisoners in the first part of last century you will have the story in brief of his irresponsibility, his unstrenuous attitude towards all such matters. He shrieks with delight at the writhings of the victims, but will shout with pleasure if one of them succeeds in making good his escape. Little has been done to instruct the spirit of the ignorant Roman, yet few such scenes of repulsive cruelty to animals as Naples and Florence present are to be laid at his door; and the best of the population need fear no competitors in human and merciful sentiment. What the country cries out for is for these better sentiments to have the force of a public opinion—a civilising agent as yet completely absent in Italy. No force in the country helps the Italian to that "self-reverence" the lack of which Mrs. Barrett Browning discerned in him. Nowhere in Europe is callousness to human life so great;[6] nowhere in Europe, writes an enlightened Italian priest, is there so much cruelty to animals as here; yet so unaccustomed are the people to that best form of moral education—moral suasion—a gradual civilising of spirit, that they are incapable of putting two and two together, and still urge the ignorant argument that if you inculcate humanity to animals while there is so much to be done for men, you are somehow wronging the latter; they suggest, apparently, that by kicking a dog you are somehow helping a baby. It is to be hoped that the thesis of the priest above quoted, that the protection of animals is a real means of education, may be accepted boldly by the better clergy now that Leo. XIII. has called such protection altamente umano e cristiano. Visitors are outraged by the disgusting cruelties which even the children in Italy are the first to practise, and no amount of sophistry will make them believe that such conduct is decent in the superior animal. That secular Italy will be obliged to take up the subject is certain, and one hopes that then the clergy will return to the simpler spontaneous religious feeling of the country—marred by scholastic dogmas—which gave a patron saint to the lesser creation, and which still places in every stable and cattle-shed of Umbria the image of "S. Antony, protector of animals."
Law and Justice
Those who know what it is to feel "righteous indignation" must suffer in a country where justice is not understood and not appreciated by any one. The Italians still know how to make laws, and legislation here is ahead not only of the sentiment of the country but of the laws of most European peoples—what they have forgotten is how to administer them. It is no exaggeration to say that at present Italian tribunals exist for the sake of the criminal; absurd "extenuating circumstances," which can hardly be taken seriously, are always forthcoming, and as a distinguished Italian declared in the Senate the guilty man here must indeed be an unfortunate wretch (un povero disgraziato) if he cannot manage to escape a condemnation. In place of the inexorable penalty which would alone meet the case in a land where lawlessness has prescriptive rights and where capital punishment does not exist, there is a pleasing uncertainty about all penalties. With a poor sense of humour as conspicuous as the poor sense of justice, a bench of judges will gravely listen to a succession of false witnesses, vulgar perjurers, mere play-actors, who spring up hydra-headed in support of every villain or rascal, be the matter a murder or an affair of two francs.
The terrorisation exercised by the knife and the vendetta has caused the Roman for centuries to enter into a shell of reserve; if an assassination takes place—in broad daylight or in the dark, it does not matter—no one sees it; the guardia arrives round the corner in time to make the "legal verifications" as soon as the misdeed is safely accomplished, and if the victim shrieked first neither he nor any one else happened to hear it. The desire to live in peace, seeing nothing, hearing nothing, making no enemies, has affected a whole people—with the result that the protected person is the malefactor. The more audacious he is, the more he affects in the city the allures of the brigand, the more successful he will be in evading the law, in gaining the support rendered by the silence or the false witness of all who encounter him. The people, writes Aristide Gabelli, "seek by silence and dissimulation their own safety rather than the public safety at their own proper peril." The consequence is, of course, that there is not the least co-operation with the law. The Roman, indeed, feels humiliated by the necessity for seeking its aid; government and law are abhorrent to him, and he alludes to the former as "questo porco di governo"—if you are unable to defend yourself the alternative is not the arm of the law but to stop at home.
The police service of Rome includes three corps—the carabineers, who hunt in couples, in three-cornered hat and cloak and sword; the municipal guard who wear a cocked hat, with cocks' feathers on feast days, and a black uniform turned up with orange; the Guardie di Pubblica Sicurezza, in black piped with blue, and a capote. These last, called questurini because they depend from the Questura, are disliked by all Romans who call them "avanzi di galera," gaolbirds and assassins. As a matter of fact it is difficult to find men of civil condition to enter the corps; such work is eminently distasteful to a Roman, and "set a thief to catch a thief" is the principle on which he supposes the governo acts.
CHAPEL OF SAN LORENZO LORICATO AT S. BENEDICT'S, SUBIACO
See [interleaf, page 86].
Crispi tried to form one police force for the city; at present if you apply to a guardia di P.S. your business is sure to concern the absent municipal guard, while the carabineers do nothing but support each other in the arduous task of standing at street corners watching the follies of men, criminals and victims.[7] To the municipal guard—the popular force, called pizzardoni—is entrusted the maintenance of decency and order in the city, and they often brave the wrath of their fellow citizens in its accomplishment. All matters not connected with municipal legislation pertain to the State police, who arrest thieves and act in criminal affairs. Soldiers, too, have certain civil duties; they are frequently called upon to act as police, they are called out to help if a house falls down, to form the cordon in case of a fire, and may in certain circumstances arrest a malefactor.
The soldiers form the most respectable and the only disciplined part of the male population in a city like Rome. One often sees, of course, battalions of men from all the Italian provinces, youths of twenty just enrolled, and among them there is seldom a vicious face. For these are the mothers' sons, and they compare very favourably with our "Tommies." The same cannot be said of the other youths who throng the city. Perhaps seven-tenths of the crime is committed by lads in their teens and early twenties; I have heard a Senator declare that there are boys of twelve in the prisons who are already perfetti criminali; and surely nowhere in Europe are boys and youths worse trained. The most appalling phenomenon, however, is the existence of a degraded type, of all and every age, usually belonging to the decently-clothed classes, whose outrages on decency were described by an Italian in a Roman newspaper as "enough to sicken the coarsest navvy." These practices, according to some old Romans, are one of the results of the French occupation, but such an explanation of occurrences which are to be met with nowhere else in Europe or out of it, must be taken with all reserve. Gaolbirds like these molest women with impunity; and the amor proprio of the vile nature awakes just in time to heap further outrage when this molestation is resented. Women have always been hustled in the Roman streets, and as Italian ladies are only now beginning to walk unaccompanied, the foreign visitors bear the brunt of the amiable practice still in vogue of not moving on the narrow pavements, but leaving the lady to take the gutter. Such conduct from men to women contrasts strangely with the courtesy so often extended even to beggars; and a woman of the people, a servant or a porteress, will invite the beggar who is interrupting your conversation to desist, with such phrases as: "Move aside a little; Do me this pleasure."
Courtship and Marriage
It will be astonishing to many, no doubt, to hear that courtship in Italy is a prosaic affair. Of passion there is plenty and to spare, but the tragic element does not enter every day, and then no sentiment comes in to disturb matters. After the first etiquette of the situation is over, and the letters vowing that you have il paradiso nel cuor—which are duly discounted by the peasant fiancée—have been written, things run uneventfully enough. A young Abruzzese servant—from the most saving population of Italy—became enthusiastic when recounting the virtues of his proposed bride to his mistress, which culminated with: "Signorina mia, è piena di biancheria"—"she is full of house linen."
There is among all Italian women more dignity in their relations with men than there is among English women. The Italian woman has a noble reticence, a power of self-protection, which imposes itself on lover and husband. She is not accustomed, as we are in modern times, to walking abroad unaccompanied, and there is no doubt that here the Englishwoman shows a self-respecting demeanour which is everywhere recognised as entitling her to all the respect she feels for herself. What I speak of is the Italian woman's attitude towards the man to whom she is engaged or married, in comparison with the Englishwoman's. The former will not serve her husband as an English or German frau will; nor, before marriage, will she lay herself out to keep the man at any cost as the English girl of the servant class will do. Here Italian self-respect is greater than English. The Roman woman of the lowest class habitually displays this personal dignity and reticence in the streets; and nowhere in Rome will you see such scenes as are to be witnessed on any bank holiday at a seaside place in England, on Saturday evenings in London, or in country towns after dark, among men and women of the lower middle class.
The Italian woman will avoid scandal to herself and hers at whatever cost; she will suffer any deprivation or loss to compass this, to keep her trouble from the eyes of the curious world. There is none of that vulgarity of soul—consummated in modern times among Anglo-Saxon peoples—which hastens to wash dirty linen in public. This is one reason why divorce is so distasteful in Italy, and especially to the women, who would one and all suffer individually in order to bind the man, to preserve the family and its honour, in preference to the enjoyment of the personal freedom which the looser bond implies.
STEPS OF THE DOMINICAN NUNS' CHURCH OF SS. DOMENICO AND SISTO
This and the church of Santa Caterina da Siena form a Dominican corner of Rome on a spur of the Quirinal. The garden of Palazzo Aldobrandini is seen in the background. See pages [6], [171].
A traditional characteristic of the Roman is that he has always given a fairer share of life to women than other Italians. Since the day when Romulus called the Roman curiae after the thirty Sabine women who had thrown themselves into the breach for the Romans, and conferred on them special privileges, the Roman woman has played a dignified part in the life of the city. As priestesses the vestals possessed privileges shared by none but the emperor; and the idea of the Roman matron, the wife not "in the hand" of her husband, was a Roman contribution to social ethics two thousand years before the idea occurred to Englishmen. There is nothing that antiquity has handed down to us more dignified than the seated female figures in Roman museums. These views of women ceased, naturally enough, when Rome which had been the greatest political became the greatest clerical city in the world; but the Roman tradition was handed on in the Italian universities outside Rome, which admitted women five hundred years before they were allowed to share in the benefits of those colleges of Cambridge and Oxford which their money and influence had done so much to endow.
The women of the people still, however, enjoy in Rome "an almost unlimited liberty." The Roman man shares his recreations with his wife, and the wife-kicking which is such a plague spot in the life of the common people in England, is not one of them. English fair-play to women is indeed merely a matter of class; it has never penetrated to the lower strata, and in the English middle as in the English lower class the men are still "the lords of creation." This conjugal relation in fact remains a bulwark of a certain coarseness which no one can deny to the Englishman, and which is registered in the Italian's firm opinion that English wives are bought and sold in open market. In other parts of Italy, however, in Calabria and the Abruzzi (even Piedmont is conspicuous for want of gallantry), the wife is regarded simply as a chattel, and the brutal husband aims his blow at his wife's face in order that the neighbours may recognise il segno del marito. The sufficient explanation è suo (it is his own) is the same which will be given you if a youth maltreats a dog; and in both cases the moral quality of the argument is as ignoble as it can be.
Socially, the talents of the Romans are not higher than our own. The Italian people have not the social gifts which are the privilegium of their Latin neighbour. On the society of ancient Rome was superimposed clerical Rome—a city where the sex which makes society was nowhere, where the pezzo grosso in every drawing-room was a Roman cardinal, not a great lady; and there can be little doubt that this has not proved a civilising influence on the Roman. But in natural gifts of disposition the Italian greatly excels us; and in no English gathering can the charm be approached which Italians will impart to an alfresco party, an impromptu festa—often including a great mixture of classes—when the simplicity, the unfailing good humour, and the successful efforts to please are a lesson to the Englishman. The Italians by gathering together make a natural festa, as by walking they make a natural procession—something that is graceful and unselfconscious, absolutely simple without missing stateliness.
The Romans and Art
The art history of Rome is as distinct from that of the rest of Italy as is its social, its religious, or its political history. We look in vain to Rome for a first-rate picture, a first-rate poem, even—with the exception of Palestrina—for a first-rate composer.[8] The fatal facility which hampers all Italians, who can achieve with little labour what less gifted peoples travail to attain, meets in the Roman that curious inconclusiveness, that strange universal sterility, which begins with the character itself. Nevertheless the Roman has not failed to give us what it is his function to give—he has always been a fine-art critic; every great thing has come before him, and of all he has been an incorruptible judge, seldom deceived, using all the powers of finezza, of ridicule, of satire, and of fine judgment at his command, to raise or to create a standard of fine work. If there is one art which may be said to be not only the gift of Italy but to have remained Italian, it is singing; and here the Roman has kept in the forefront both as critic and executant. The Italian really loves a voice—the Englishman loves the sentimental rendering of a theme; and the criterion of vocal sound which the Italian possesses, he finds, perhaps, in his own throat. "Roman throats and chests must, in some particular way, be differently constructed from those of other people" wrote Walter Pater; and the resonant voices of Italians may be due to the absence of the protruding German and English chin which captures and muffles so many of our vocal tones.
The classical Roman had no taste: we wonder to-day that the Roman, dazzled with rich marbles, should adopt the expedient of painted columns in a scheme of decoration; but he did the same in the house of Germanicus on the Palatine. That there is a distinction between taste and artistic sensibility there can be no doubt whatever, and it is equally true that the former is often mistaken for the latter. The subject is an interesting one; but here we can only record the two facts—that the Roman all through the centuries has been a sensitive to artistic impressions, and a fine judge of the arts, and that he has never possessed that gift of a certain refinement of sentiment—taste.
After all that has been said of the Romans, it is sad to have to record that it will soon be difficult to find genuine Roman families. The old "Romano de Roma"—the man whose ancestors, like himself, were born all' ombra del Cupolone, under the shadow of the great cupola—is disappearing, giving place to more successful, more industrious, and 'cuter men—preserving up to the last moment of his life those habits and customs which cause him and his house to suggest Noah and his ark to the more modern Italian; but also learning up to the last hour of his life new ideas, such as must also have importuned the patriarch and his family when the waters receded leaving him and the ark high and dry on Ararat, and the daughters of men began to weave their toils round the sons of God.
PORTA SAN PAOLO
Gate in the Aurelian wall rebuilt by Belisarius. This is the gate of the Ostian Way leading to the basilica of S. Paul's—one of the seven great pilgrimage churches—of which the Kings of England were Protectors.