III
As for my friend Bagster, now that he has come to Rome, I hope he may stay long enough to allow it to produce a more tranquilizing effect upon him. When he gives up the attempt to take it all in by an intellectual and moral effort, he may, as the saying is, "relax."
There is no other place in which one may so readily learn the meaning of that misused word "urbanity." Urbanity is the state of mind adapted to a city, as rusticity is adapted to the country. In each case the perfection of the adaptation is evidenced by a certain ease of manner in the presence of the environment. There is an absence of fret and worry over what is involved in the situation. A countryman does not fret over dust or mud; he knows that they are forms of the good earth out of which he makes his living. He may grumble at the weather, but he is not surprised at it, and he is ready to make the best of it.
This adaptation to nature is easy for us, for we are rustics by inheritance. Our ancestors lived in the open, and kept their flocks and were mighty hunters long before towns were ever thought of. So when we go into the woods in the spring, our self-consciousness leaves us and we speedily make ourselves at home. We take things for granted, and are not careful about trifles. A great many things are going on, but the multiplicity does not distract us. We do not need to understand.
For we have primal sympathies which are very good substitutes for intelligence. We do not worry because nature does not get on faster with her work. When we go out on the hills on a spring morning, as our forbears did ten thousand years ago, it does not fret us to consider that things are going on very much as they did then. The sap is mounting in the trees; the wild flowers are pushing out of the sod; the free citizens of the woods are pursuing their vocations without regard to our moralities. A great deal is going on, but nothing has come to a dramatic culmination.
Our innate rusticity makes us accept all this in the spirit in which it is offered to us. It is nature's way and we like it, because we are used to it. We take what is set before us and ask no questions. It is spring. We do not stop to inquire as to whether this spring is an improvement on last spring or on the spring of the year 400 B.C. There is a timelessness about our enjoyment. We are not thinking of events set in a chronological order, but of a process which loses nothing by reason of repetition.
Our attitude toward a city is usually quite different. We are not at our ease. We are querulous and anxious, and our interest takes a feverish turn. For the cities of our Western world are new-fangled contrivances which we are not used to, and we are worried as we try to find out whether they will work. These aggregations of humanity have not existed long enough to seem to belong to the nature of things. It is exciting to be invited to "see Seattle grow," but the exhibition does not yield a "harvest of a quiet eye." If Seattle should cease to grow while we are looking at it, what should we do then?
But with Rome it is different. Here is a city which has been so long in existence that we look upon it as a part of nature. It is not accidental or artificial. Nothing can happen to it but what has happened already. It has been burned with fire, it has been ravaged by the sword, it has been ruined by luxury, it has been pillaged by barbarians and left for dead. And here it is to-day the scene of eager life. Pagans, Christians, reformers, priests, artists, soldiers, honest workmen, idlers, philosophers, saints, were here centuries ago. They are here to-day. They have continuously opposed each other, and yet no species has been exterminated. Their combined activities make the city.
When one comes to feel the stirring of primal sympathies for the manifold life of the city, as he does for the manifold life of the woods, Rome ceases to be distracting. The old city is like the mountain which has withstood the hurts of time, and remains for us, "the grand affirmer of the present tense."