The Roman Question

by Edmond About

"My dear friend," he used to say,

"I know but two ways of writing about Rome. You must choose for yourself. If you declaim against the priestly government, its abuses, vices, and injustice; against the assassinations, the uncultivated lands, the bad air, the filthiness of the streets; against the many scandals, the hypocrisies, the robberies, the lotteries, the Ghetto, and all that follows as a matter of course, you will earn the somewhat barren honour of having added the thousand and first pamphlet to those which have appeared since the time of Luther. All has been said that can be said against the Popes. A man who pretends to originality should not lend his voice to the chorus of brawling reformers. Remember, too, that the Government of this country, though very mild and very paternal, never forgives! Even if it wished to do so, it cannot. It must defend its principle, which is sacred. Don't close the gates of Rome against yourself. You will be so glad to revisit it, and we shall be so happy to receive you again! If you wish to support a new and original theme, and to gain fame which will not be wholly unprofitable, dare to declare boldly that everything is good—even that which all agree to pronounce bad. Praise without restriction an order of things which has been solidly maintained for eighteen centuries. Prove that everything here is firmly established, and that the network of pontifical institutions is linked together by a powerful logic. Bravely resist those aspirations after reform which may haply urge you to demand such and such changes. Remember that you cannot disturb old constitutions with impunity; that the displacement of a single stone may bring down the whole edifice. How do you know, that the particular abuse which most offends you is not absolutely necessary to the very existence of Rome? Good and evil mixed together form a cement more durable than the elaborately selected materials of which modern utopias are made. I who tell you this have been here many years, and am quite comfortable and contented. Whither should I go if Rome were to be turned topsy-turvy? Where should we establish our dethroned sovereigns? Where would a home be found for Roman Catholic worship? You have no doubt been told that some people are dissatisfied with the administration: but what of that? They are not of our world. You never meet them in the good society you frequent. If the demands of the middle class were to be complied with, everything would be overturned. Have you any wish to see manufactories erected round St. Peter's and turnip fields about the fountain of Egeria? These native shopkeepers seem to imagine the country belongs to them because they happen to be born in it. Can one conceive a more ridiculous pretension? Let them know that Rome is the property in copartnership of people of birth, of people of taste, and of artists. It is a museum confided to the guardianship of the Holy Father; a museum of old monuments, old pictures, and old institutions. Let all the rest of the world change, but build me a Chinese wall round the Papal States, and never let the sound of the railway-whistle be heard within its sacred precincts! Let us preserve for admiring posterity at least one magnificent specimen of absolute power, ancient art, and the Roman Catholic religion!"

This is the language of foreign inhabitants of Rome of the old stamp,—estimable people, and sincere believers, who have gone on year after year witnessing the ceremonies of St. Peter's, and the Fête des Oignons in the St. John Lateran, till they have acquired an ecclesiastical turn of thought and expression, a habit of seeing things through the spectacles of the Sacred College, and a faith which has no sympathy with the outer world. I do not share their opinions, and I have never found their advice particularly useful; but they interest me, I like them, and I sincerely pity them. Who can tell what events they are destined to witness in their time? Who can foresee the spectacles which the future reserves for them, and the changes that their habits will be made to undergo by the Italian revolution? Already their hearing is distracted by the locomotives that rush between Rome and Frascati; already the shriek of the steam-blast daily and nightly hisses insolently at the respectable comedy of the past between Rome and Civita Vecchia. Steamboats, another engine of disorder, furnish the bi-weekly means of an invasion of the most dangerous character. Those dozens of travellers who throng the streets and the squares are about as much like our good old foreign tourists, as the barbarians of Attila were like the worthy Spaniard who came to Rome on purpose to see Titus Livius.

Examine them carefully; they are of every possible condition; for now that travelling costs next to nothing, everybody is able to afford himself a sight of Rome. Briefless barristers, physicians without practice, office-clerks, poor students, apprentices, and shop-boys drop down like hail on the Eternal City, for the sake of saying that they have taken the Communion in it. The Holy Week brings every year a swarm of these locusts. Their entire impedimenta consist of a carpet-bag and an umbrella, and of course they put up at a hotel. In fact hotels have been built on purpose to receive them. When everybody hired houses, there was no need of hotels. The 'Minerva' is the type of the modern Roman caravansary. Your bed is charged half-a-crown per night; you dine in a refectory with a traveller at each elbow. The character of the travelling class which invades Rome about Easter is illustrated by the conversation which you hear going on around you at the table d'hôte of the 'Minerva.' The following is a specimen:—

One says triumphantly, "I have done two museums, three galleries, and four ruins, to-day."

"I stuck to the churches," says another, "I had floored seventeen by one o'clock."

"The deuce you had! You keep the game alive."

"Yes, I want to have a whole day left for the suburbs."

"Oh, burn the suburbs! I've got no time to see them."

If I have a day to spare, I must devote it to buying chaplets."[5]