On The Campagna.
There was an indefinable charm, to a lively man like Caper, in spending a day in the open country around Rome. Whether it was passed, gun in hand, near the Solfatara, trying to shoot snipe and woodcock, or, with paint-box and stool, seated under a large white cotton umbrella, sketching in the valley of Poussin or out on the Via Appia, that day was invariably marked down to be remembered.
On one of those golden February mornings, when the pretty English girls tramp through the long grass of the Villa Borghese, gathering the perfumed violets into those modest little bouquets, that peep out from their setting of green leaves, like faith struggling with jealousy, Caper, Rocjean, and a good-natured German, named Von Bluhmen, made an excursion out in the Campagna.
They hired a one-horse vetturo in the piazza di Spagna, and packing in their sketching materials and a basket well filled with luncheon and bottles of red wine, started off, soon reaching the Saint Sebastian gate. Further on, they passed the tomb of Cecilia Metella, and saw streaming over the Campagna the Roman hunt-hounds, twenty couples, making straight tails after a red fox, while a score of well-mounted horsemen—here and there a red coat and white breeches—came riding furiously after. Along the road-side were handsome open carriages, filled with wit and beauty, talent and petticoats; and bright were the blue eyes, and red the healthy cheeks of the English girls, as they saw how well their countrymen and lovers led off the chase. Englishmen have good legs.
Continuing along the Appian way, either side of which was bordered by tombs crumbling to decay; some of them covered with nature's lace, the graceful ivy, others with only a pile of turf above them, others with shattered column and mutilated statue at their base—the occupants of the vetturo were silent. They saw before them the wide plain, shut in on the horizon by high mountains, with snow-covered peaks and sides, while they were living in the warmth of an American June morning; the breeze that swept over them was gentle and exhilarating; in the long grass waving by the way-side, they heard the shrill cries of the cicadas; while the clouds, driven along the wide reach of heaven, assuming fantastic forms, and in changing light and shadow mantling the distant mountains, gave our trio a rare chance to study cloud-effects to great advantage.
'I say, driver, what's your name?' asked Rocjean of the vetturino.
'Cæsar, padrone mio,' answered the man.
'Are you descended from the celebrated Julius?' asked Caper, laughing.
'Yes, sir, my grandfather's name was Julius.'
'"That every like is not the same, O Cæsar!
The heart of Brutus yearns to think upon,"
soliloquized Caper; and as by this time they had reached a place where both he and Rocjean thought a fine view of the ruined aqueduct might be taken, they ordered the driver to stop, and taking out their sketching materials, sent him back to Rome, telling him to come out for them about four o'clock, when they would be ready to return.
While they were yet in the road, there came along a very large countryman, mounted on a very small jackass; he was sitting side-saddle fashion, one leg crossed over the other, the lower leg nearly touching the ground; one hand held a pipe to his mouth, while the other held an olive branch, by no means an emblem of peace to the jackass, who twitched one long ear and then the other, in expectation of a momentary visit from it on either side of his head. Following, at a dutiful distance behind, came a splendid specimen of a Roman peasant-woman, a true contadina: poised on her head was a very large round basket, from over the edge of which sundry chickens' heads and cocks' feathers arose, and while Caper was looking at the basket, he saw two tiny little arms stuck up suddenly above the chickens, and then heard a faint squall—it was her baby. An instantaneous desire seized Caper to make a rough sketch of the family group, and hailing the man, he asked him for a light to his cigar. The jackass was stopped by pulling his left ear—the ears answering for reins—and after giving a light, the man was going on, when Caper, taking a scudo from his pocket, told him that if he would let him make a sketch of himself, wife, and jackass, he would give it to him, telling him also that he would not detain them over an hour.
'If you'll give me a buona mano besides the scudo, I'll do it,' he answered.
The buona mano is the ignis fatuus that leads on three fourths of the Italians; it is the bright spark that wakes them up to exertion. No matter what the fixed price for doing any thing may be, there must always be a something undefined ahead of it, to crown the work when accomplished. It makes labor a lottery; it makes even sawing wood a species of gambling. Caper promised a buona mano.
The man told his wife that the Signore was to make a ritratto, a picture of them all, including the jackass, at which she laughed heartily, showing a splendid set of brilliantly white teeth. A finer type of woman it would be hard to find, for she was tall, straight, with magnificent bust and broad hips. Her hair, thick and black, was drawn back from her forehead like a Chinese, and was confined behind her head with two long silver pins, the heads representing flowers; heavy, crescent-shaped, gold earrings hung from her ears; around her full throat circled two strings of red coral beads. Her boddice of crimson cloth was met by the well-filled out-folds of her white linen shirt, the sleeves of which fell from her shoulders below her elbows, in full, graceful folds; her skirt was of heavy white woolen stuff, while her blue apron, of the same material, had three broad stripes of golden yellow, one near the top and the other two near each other at the bottom; the folds of the apron were few, and fell in heavy, regular lines. A full, liquid-brown pair of eyes gazed calmly on the painter, as she stood beside her husband, easily, gracefully; without a sign from the artist, taking a position that the most studied care could not have improved.
'Benissimo!' cried Caper, 'the position couldn't be better;' and seizing his sketch-book and pencils, unfolding his umbrella and planting its spiked end in the ground, and arranging his sketching-stool, he was in five minutes hard at work. As soon as he could draw the basket, he told the woman she might take it from her head and put it on the ground, for he believed the weight must incommode her. This done, she resumed her position, and Caper, working with all his might, had his sketch sufficiently finished before the hour was over to tell his group that it was finished, at the same time handing the man a scudo and a handsome buona mano.
Rocjean and Von Bluhmen, who had assiduously looked on, now and then joking with the contadino and his wife, proposed, after the sketch was finished, that Caper should ask his friends to help them finish their luncheon; this was joyously agreed to, and the party, having left the road and found a pleasant spot, under a group of ilex-trees, were soon busy finishing the eatables. It was refreshing to see how the handsome contadina emptied glass after glass of red wine. The husband did his share of drinking; but his wife eclipsed him. Having learned from Caper that his first name was Giacomo, she shouted forth a rondinella, making up the words as she went along, and in it gave a ludicrous account of Giacomo, the artist, who took a jackass's portrait, herself and husband holding him, and the baby squalling in harmony. This met with an embarrassment of success, and amid the applause of Rocjean, Caper, and Von Bluhmen, the contadino, wife, and baggage departed. She, however, told Caper where she lived in the Campagna, and that she had a beautiful little sister, whose ritratta he should take, if he would come to see her.
[It is needless to inform the reader that he went.]
Lighting cigars, Rocjean and Caper declared they must have a siesta, even if they had to doze on their stools, for neither of them ever could accustom himself to the Roman fashion of throwing one's self on the ground, and sleeping with their faces to the earth. Von Bluhmen, a fiery amateur of sketching, walked off to take a 'near view' of the aqueduct, and the two artists were left to repose.
'I say, Caper, does it ever come into your head to people all this broad Campagna with old Romans?' asked Rocjean.
'Yes, all the time. Do you know that when I am out here, and stumble over the door-way of an old Roman tomb, or find one of those thousand caves in the tufa rock, I often have a curious feeling that from out that tomb or cave will stalk forth in broad daylight some old Roman centurion or senator, in flowing robe.'
'Do you ever think,' asked Rocjean, 'of those seventy thousand poor devils of Jews who helped build the Coliseum and the Arch of Titus? Do you ever reflect over the millions of slaves who worked for these same poetical, flowing-robed, old senators and centurions? Ma foi! for a Republic, you men of the United States have a finished education for any thing but republicans. The great world-long struggle of a few to crush and destroy the many, you learn profoundly; you know in all its glittering cruelty and horror the entire history, and you weave from it no god-like moral. Nothing astonished me more, during my residence in the United States, than this same lack of drawing from the experience of ages the deduction that you were the only really blessed and happy nation in the world. Your educated men know less of the history of their own country, and feel less its sublime teachings, than any other race of men in the world. The instruction your young men receive at school and college, in what way does it prepare them to become men fit for a republic?'
'You are preaching a sermon,' said Caper.
'I am reciting the text; the sermon will be preached by the god of battles to the roar of cannons and the crack of rifles, and I hope you'll profit by it after you hear it.'
'Well,' interrupted Caper, 'what do you think of the English?'
'For a practical people, they are the greatest fools on the earth. Thoroughly convinced at heart that they have no esprit, they rush in to show the world that they have a superabundance of it.... It interferes with their principles, no matter; it touches their pockets, behold it is gone, and the cold, flat, dead reality stares you in the face.'
'You are a Frenchman, Rocjean, and you do them injustice. Had Shakspeare no esprit?' asked Caper.
'Shakspeare was a Frenchman,' replied Rocjean.
'We—ll!'
'Prove to me that he was not?'
'Prove to me that he was!'
'Certainly. The family of Jacques Pierre was as certainly French as Raimond de Rocjean's. Jacques Pierre became Shakspeare at once, on emigrating to England, and the 'Immortal Williams,' recognizing the advantages to a poor man of living in a country where only the guineas dance, took up his abode there and made the music for the money to jump into his pockets.'
'Very ingenious. But in relation to Byron, Shelley, Keats, Tennyson, and—as we are in Italy—Rogers?'
'Mon ami, if you seriously prefer ice-cream and trifle to venison and dindon aux truffes, choose. If either one of the four poets—I do not include Rogers among poets—ever conceived in his mind, and then produced on paper, a work, composed from his memory, of things terrible in nature, more sublime than Dante's Inferno, I will grant you that he had esprit and imagination; otherwise, not. It is of the English as a nation, however, that I make my broad and sweeping assertion, one that was fixed in my mind yesterday, when I saw a well-dressed and well-educated Englishman deliberately pick up a stone, knock off the head of a figure carved on a sarcophagus, found in one of those newly-discovered tombs on the Via Latina, and put the broken head in his pocket.... What man, with one grain of esprit or imagination in his head, would mutilate a work of ancient art, solely that he might possess a piece of stone, when memory had already placed the entire work forever in his mind. Basta! enough. Look at the effect of the sunlight on the Albanian mountains. How proudly Mount Gennaro towers over the desolate Campagna! Hallo! Von Bluhmen down there is in trouble. Come along.'
Throwing down his umbrella, under which he had been sitting in the shade, Rocjean grasped the iron-pointed shaft, into which the handle of the umbrella fitted, and, accompanied by Caper, rushed to the rescue of the German. It was none too soon. While sketching, a shepherd, with a very large flock of sheep, had gradually approached nearer and nearer the spot where the artist was sitting at his task; his dogs, eight or ten in number, fierce, shaggy, white and black beasts, with slouching gait and pointed ears and noses, followed near him. As Von Bluhmen paid no attention to them, the shepherd had wandered off; but one or two of his dogs hung back, and the artist, dropping a pencil, suddenly stooped to pick it up, when one of the savage creatures, thinking or 'instincting' that a stone was coming at him, rushed in, with loud barking, to make mince-meat of the German noble. He seized his camp-stool, and kept the dog at bay; but in a moment the whole pack were down on him. Just at this instant, in rushed Rocjean, staff in hand, beating the beasts right and left, and shouting to the shepherd, who was but a short distance off, to call off his dogs. But the pecorajo, evidently a cross-grained fellow, only blackguarded the artists, until Rocjean, whose blood was up, swore if he did not call them off, he would shoot them, pulling a revolver from his pocket and aiming at the most savage dog as he spoke. The shepherd only blackguarded him the more, and, just as the dog grabbed him by the pantaloons, Rocjean pulled the trigger, and with foaming jaws and blood pouring from his mouth, the dog fell dead at his feet. The shot scared the other dogs, who fled, tails under. The shepherd ran for the entrance of a cave, and came out in a minute with a single-barreled gun: coming down to within twenty feet of Rocjean, he cocked it, and taking aim, screamed out: 'Give me ten scudi for that dog, or I fire.'
'Do you see that pistol?' said Rocjean to the shepherd, while he held up his revolver, 'I have five loads in it yet.' And then advancing straight toward him, with death in his eyes, he told him to throw down his gun, or he was a dead man.... Down fell the gun. Rocjean picked it up. 'To-morrow,' said he, 'inquire of the chief of police in Rome for this gun and for the ten scudi!'
They were never called for.
'You see,' said Caper, as, shortly after this little excitement, the one-horse vetturo, bearing Cæsar and his fortunes, hove in sight, and they entered and returned to Rome; 'you see how charming it is to sketch on the Campagna.'
'Very,' replied Von Bluhmen; 'but, my dear Rocjean, how long were you in America?'
'Twelve years.'
'Main Gott! they were not wasted.'