“The Secretary of this Society conferred upon me a most unexpected honour when he asked me to open this meeting. I could have wished that he had selected some one more worthy of that honour, for not only am I unaccustomed to public speaking, but I may truly say that I never made a speech in my life. I will therefore hope that my many deficiencies—my more than many deficiencies, may be either overlooked or pardoned.
“But, though the Secretary could have found many persons in Rome better able to address you, with more power of doing justice to their subject than myself, he could not have found one to whom Rome was dearer, about whose heart all its sympathies were more tenderly and closely entwined. Long and intimate family association, perhaps the very fact of having a birthplace in the once beautiful Villa Strozzi, have added to that sense which comes to so many, of looking upon Rome as a second home—a home as familiar almost, quite as tenderly beloved, as the home in far-away England. How truly Chateaubriand has said that those who have nothing left in life should turn their footsteps to Rome: there the very stones can waken into speech; there the very dust beneath our feet can kindle into memories of a past ever fresh and ever sacred. To those who come here first as strangers, the decay, the stagnation, the ruin of everything may be oppressive; they may see only the bareness of the stuccoed streets, they may grumble at the rough pavements, they may be wearied with the petty discomforts and difficulties of daily and practical life:—but no matter! If they only stay here long enough, the love of Rome will insidiously creep upon them; they will feel it difficult to tear themselves away from it; and, when they have left it, it will ever come back to them—in silent hours, in visions of the night—grand ruins lying in silent slumbrous solitude; desolate vineyards flower-carpeted; beautiful villas, where the ancient ilex avenues are peopled with marble statues, relics of a mythical past which in Rome seems almost as real as the present; and above all, the recollection of a mighty purple dome embossed upon a sky whose sunset glory recalls the splendours of the New Jerusalem—first a sapphire, then a chalcedony, then an emerald, then a chrysopraz, last an amethyst.
“In regard to how many Roman scenes do we echo such thoughts as Clough has expressed in his beautiful lines to the Alban Mount:—
‘Alba, thou findest me still, and, Alba, thou findest me ever,
Now from the Capitol steps, now over Titus’s arch,
Here where the large grassy spaces stretch from the Lateran portal,
Towering o’er aqueduct lines lost in perspective between,
Or from a Vatican window, or bridge, or the high Coliseum,
Clear by the garlanded line cut of the Flavian ring.
Beautiful can I not call thee, and yet thou hast power to o’ermaster,
Power of mere beauty; in dreams, Alba, thou hauntest me still.’
“What Madame Swetchine says of life, that you find in it exactly what you put into it, is also true of Rome, and those who come to it with least mental preparation are those least fitted to enjoy it. That preparation, however, is not so easy as it used to be. In the old days, the happy old days of vetturíno travelling, there were so many quiet hours, when the country was not too beautiful, and the towns not too interesting, when Gibbon, and Merivale, and Milman were the pleasantest of travelling companions, and when books of art and poetry served to illustrate and illuminate the graver studies which were making Italy not only a beautiful panorama, but a country filled with forms which were daily growing into more familiar acquaintance. Perugia and Spoleto, Terni and Civita Castellana, led fitly up then to the greater interests of Rome, as courtiers to a king. But in the journeys of the present, the hurried traveller has not these opportunities of preparation, and must rest upon his home-knowledge, and such reading as he can find time for in Rome itself. To such travellers—to those, I mean, who wish to take away from Rome something more than a mere surface impression—I would give one piece of advice gathered from long experience: Never see too much; most of all, never see too much at once; never try to ‘do’ Rome. Better far to leave half the ruins and nine-tenths of the churches unseen, and to see well the rest, to see them not once, but again and often again, to watch them, to learn them, to live with them, to love them, till they become a part of your life and your life’s recollections.
“Thus, too, in the galleries. What can be carried away by those who wander over all the Vatican at once but a hopeless chaos of marble limbs, at best a nightmare of Venuses and Mercurys and Jupiters and Junos? But if the traveller would benefit by the Vatican, let him make friends with a few of the statues, and pay them visits, and grow into greater intimacy:—then will the purity of their outlines, the majestic serenity of their godlike grace, have power over him, raising his spirit to a perception of creations of beauty of which he had no idea before, and enabling him to discern the traces of that noblest gift of God which men call ‘genius’ in the humblest works of those who, while they have found the true and right path which leads to the great end, are still very far off.
“I would urge those who are sight-seeing at Rome to read twice about that which they see, before they see it, to prepare themselves for the sight, and after they have seen it, to fix the sight in their recollection. I would also urge all archaeologists to believe that it is not in one class of Roman interests alone that much is to be learnt; that those who devote themselves exclusively to the relics of the kings and the Republic, to the walls, or to the vexed questions concerning the Porta Capena, and who see no interest in the reminiscences of the Middle Ages, and the memorials of the saints and of the popes, take only half the blessing of Rome, and the half which has the least of human sympathy in it. They are blind of one eye, because they see with the other: they are like the foolish Athenians, who have lately pulled down the noble Venetian towers on the Acropolis because they were not Greek.
“Besides this, one should recollect that important relics of Pagan Rome are to be found elsewhere—at Nismes and Treves beyond the Alps, and at many places in Northern Italy; but the memorials of Christian Rome, and of its early bishops and martyrs, are to be found only in Rome and its neighbourhood.
