James Russell Lowell, A Biography; vol. 1/2

by Horace Elisha Scudder

The anxiety, also, which Lowell felt over his father’s illness benumbed his faculties and made him restless; but with fair weather, better news came, and the travellers gave themselves up more unreservedly to the pleasures which the great city afforded them. But Rome does not thrill one from the start. It takes time for its ancient hands to get that clutch which at last never loosens, and Lowell at first seemed somewhat unaffected. “I like,” he wrote to his father, just before Christmas, “to walk about in the fine sunshine and get unexpected and unguide-booked glimpses of fine scenery, but systematic sight-seeing is very irksome to me. Though we have been in Rome now nearly as long as we were in Florence, I have not learned to like it as well. We were able to enjoy Florence sincerely and without any reproaches, because we had not heard of your illness. Then, too, the churches here are nearly all alike. Going to see them is like standing to watch a procession of monks,—the same thing over and over again, and when you have seen one you have seen all. There is a kind of clumsy magnificence about them, like that of an elephant with his castle on his back and his gilded trappings, and the heaviness somehow weighs on one. There is no spring and soar in their architecture as in that of the Lombard churches I have seen. The Roman columns standing here and there look gentleman-like beside them, and reproach them with their tawdry parvenuism. The finest interior in Rome is that of the Sta. Maria degli Angeli, which Michelangelo made out of a single room in the baths of Diocletian. Even the size of St. Peter’s seems inconsiderable in a city where the Coliseum still stands in crater-like ruin, and where one may trace the foundations of a palace large enough almost for a city.... Yesterday I walked out upon the Campagna, but by a different gate from my favorite San Sebastiano. Leaving the Porta del Popolo, we followed the road as far as the Ponte Molle, then turned to the right on the hither bank of the Tiber, which we followed as far as the confluence of the Tiber and Anio, where was once the city of Antemnæ. As it had been destroyed by Romulus, however, there was nothing to be seen of the old Sabine stronghold except the flatiron-shaped bluff on which it stood, the natural height and steepness of which, aided no doubt by art, must have made the storming of it no very agreeable diversion. The view from the top is very beautiful, and it is a good place to study the Campagna scenery from,—I mean the Campagna in a state of nature. Below us flowed the swift and dirty Tiber, and the yet swifter and dirtier Anio. In front the Campagna wallowed away as far as the line of snow-streaked mountains which wall it in. Herds of cattle and of horses dotted it here and there, the gray cows looking like sheep in the distance to an eye used always to expect red in kine. Sometimes a sort of square tower rose, lonely and with no sign of life about it. Looking more carefully, however, it would turn out to be no tower at all, but only the cottage of a shepherd perched high above the inundation of malaria on the top of some ruinous tomb. Add malaria and the idea of desolation to an Illinois prairie, and you have the Campagna. Where Antemnæ had stood there now rose a conical wigwam built wholly of thatch, surmounted by a cross, at the door of which stood a woman in scarlet bodice and multitudinous petticoat, with a little girl ditto, ditto, but smaller. Seeing us get out a pocket spyglass, a boy of about eighteen years contrived to muster energy enough to come out and stare at us. He was dressed in sheepskin breeches with the wool on, short wide jacket, red waistcoat, and hat turned up at the side, and would have looked extremely well in a landscape—but nowhere else. A smaller boy came up with more impetuosity—fat, rosy-cheeked, Puck-like, and with eyes that looked as if their normal condition was that of being close-shut, but which once opened to the width necessary to take in the extraordinary apparition of three forestieri at once, would require some maternal aid to get back again. Large hawks were sliding over the, air above us, and there was no sound except the sharp whistle of a peasant attending a drove of horses in the pasture below. Jemmy will like to know that the horses are belled here (I mean in the fields) as cows are with us, only that the bells are large enough for a town school. To-night I am going to make the giro of the churches to see the ceremonies with which Christmas is ushered in. First an illumination at Santa Maria Maggiore and the cradle of the Saviour carried in procession at ten o’clock, then mass at midnight in the San Luigi dei Francesi, then mass at St. Peter’s at three o’clock A.M. I have not seen a ceremony of the church yet that was impressive, and hope to be better pleased to-night.”

How he spent his Christmas is told in a letter to Miss Fay:—

“Let me tell you about Christmas week, first premising that I go to church ceremonies here merely that I may see for myself that they are not worth seeing. Otherwise they are great bores and fitter for children. The chief quality of the music is its interminableness, made up of rises and falls, and of the ceremonies generally you may take a yard anywhere as of printed cotton, certain that in figure and quality it will be precisely like what has gone before, and what will follow after. On Christmas eve the Presepio, a piece of the manger in which the Saviour was cradled, was carried in procession at the church of Santa Maria Maggiore. Torches were stuck in the ground for nearly a quarter of a mile from the church, and ghostly dragoons in their long white cloaks (like Leonora’s lover) appeared and vanished at intervals in the uncertain light. The interior of the church is fine, but completely ruined by the trumpery hangings put up for the occasion. There were ambassadors’ boxes, as at the opera, and rows of raised seats on each side near the high altar, for such ladies as chose to come in black, with black veils upon their heads. I stood among the undistinguished faithful, and it being a fast, there was such a smell as if Wethersfield had been first deluged and then cooked by subterranean fires. I stood wedged between some very strong devotees (who must have squandered the savings of a year in a garlic debauch) in abject terror lest my head should be colonized from some of the overpopulated districts around me.

“At the end of the church I could dimly see the Pope, with a mitre on and off at intervals. There was endless Gregorian chanting, then comparative silence, with sudden epidemics among the crowd of standing painfully on tiptoe to stare at nothing; then more endless Gregorian chantings, more epidemics, and a faint suspicion of frankincense among the garlic; then something incomprehensible performed in dumb show by what seemed automaton candles, then an exceedingly slim procession with the Presepio, which I could not see for the simple reason that it was inclosed in a silver case. At this point the Hallelujahs of the choir were fine. Having now fairly bagged my spectacle, I crowded my way out at the risk of my ribs (for stone doorways are not elastic), and went home to smoke a cigar preparatory to a midnight excursion to San Luigi dei Francesi, where, according to rumor, there was to be fine music. Here I found more sight-seeing Inglesi, more garlic, more populous neighbors, more endless Gregorian chanting, more automaton candles, and at midnight a clash of music from a French band, not so good as our Brigade Band at home.

“Christmas day, went to St. Peter’s to hear mass celebrated by the Pope in person. Here were all kinds of antique costumes,—gentlemen in black velvet doublets with slashed sleeves and ruffs, other gentlemen in crimson ditto ditto, officers of the Swiss Guard in inlaid corselets, and privates of ditto in a kind of striped red and yellow barber’s pole uniform invented by Michelangelo, cardinals, bishops, ambassadors, etc., but not nearly so large a crowd as I expected. The music was good, and the whole ended by the Pope’s being carried through the Basilica blessing the people at intervals as he went along. I stood quite near and had a good view of his face. He looks like a fatter Edward Everett. This is one of the greatest ceremonies of the year. After it was over I stood in the piazza watching the equipages of the cardinals. Speaking of cardinals: I was walking the other day with an English friend, and we saw a cardinal coming toward us accompanied by his confessor and two footmen. Behind followed his carriage with a cocked-hatted coachman and another footman. Should we bow? He was old enough to deserve it, cardinal or not, so we bowed. Never did man get such percentage for an investment. First came off his Eminence’s hat. At a respectful interval came that of the confessor, at another respectful interval those of the coachman and footmen. It was like a detachment of the allied army marching on Dunsinane with a bough.

“I have spoken rather disrespectfully of the music here, but I have heard good since I came. On New Year’s day the Jesuits have a great celebration in the church of the Gesu. I took a two hours’ slice of it in the afternoon. The music was exceedingly fine, a remarkably well-trained choir accompanied by the finest organ in Rome. The soprano was a boy with a voice that, with my eyes shut, I could not have distinguished from that of a woman. We are having also, every Tuesday, concerts by the St. Peter’s choir, with music of Palestrina, Guglielmi, Mozart, etc. The music of Palestrina has a special charm for me, reminding me more than any I ever heard of the æolian harp with its dainty unexpectedness....

“In its modern architecture Rome does not please me so much as Florence, Pisa, Lucca, or Siena, on all of which the religion and politics of the Middle Ages have stamped themselves ineffaceably. The characteristic of Roman architecture is ostentation, not splendor, much less grace. Of course I am speaking generally—there are exceptions. But even in size the Roman remains dwarf all modern attempts.... There is something epic in the gray procession of aqueduct arches across the Campagna. They seem almost like the building of Nature, and are worthy of men whose eyes were toned to the proportions of an amphitheatre of mountains and of a city which received tribute from the entire world. Exceeding beautiful are the mountains which sentinel Rome,—the purple Alban mount, the gray-peaked Monte Gennaro, the hoary Lionessa, and farther off the blue island-like Soracte.

“In art also Rome is wondrously rich, especially in sculpture. For the study of painting I have seen no gallery like that of the Uffizi at Florence. And let me advise you, my dear Maria, to see all the Titians (of which there are many and good) in England. To me he is the greatest of the painters. This has one quality and that has another, but he combines more than any. I would rather be the owner of his ‘Sacred and Profane Love’ in the Borghese collection than of any single picture in Rome.[92]

“What do I do? I walk out upon the Campagna, I go to churches and galleries inadvertently (for I will not convert Italy into a monster exhibition), and I walk upon the Pincio. Here one may see all the Fashion and the Title of Rome. Here one may meet magnificent wet-nurses, bareheaded and red-bodiced, and insignificant princesses Paris-bonneted and corseted. Here one may see ermine mantles with so many tails that they remind you of the Arabian Nights. Here one may see the neat, clean-shirted, short-whiskered, always-conceited Englishman, feeling himself quite a Luther if he have struggled into a wide-awake hat; or the other Englishman with years of careful shaving showing unconquerably through the newly-assumed beard which he wears as unconsciously as Mrs. Todd might the Bloomer costume for the first time. Here you may see the American, every inch of him, from his hat to his boots, looking anxious not to commit itself. Here you may see all the foreign children in Rome, and among them Mabel, seeming as if her whole diet were capers, and that they had gradually penetrated and inspired her whole constitution. I have seen no pair of legs there which compared with hers either for size or for untamable activity. Here you may see the worst riding you can possibly imagine: Italians emulating the English style of rising in the stirrups and bumping forlornly in every direction; French officers, reminding one of the proverb of setting a beggar on horseback, and John Bulls, with superfluous eyeglass wedged in the left eye, chins run out over white chokers, and a general upward tendency of all the features as who should say, ‘Regard me attentively but awfully; I am on intimate terms with Lord Fitzpollywog.’ On Saturday evenings we are ‘at home.’ We have tea, cake, and friends.... The evening before last I went to a musical party at Mrs. Rich’s. You know what an English musical party is. Your average Englishman enjoys nothing beyond ‘God save the Queen,’ and that because he can either beat time or swell the chorus with his own private contribution of discord. But I saw here the dogged resolution of the people who have conquered America and India. There was no shrinking under long variations on the pianoforte, and I could well imagine a roast beef and plum-pudding basis under the solid indifference which outlasted a half-hour’s fiddling. Miss Fanny Erskine, a niece of our hostess, sang well, especially in German, and Emiliani is really a fine artist with the violin.”

In an earlier letter to Dr. Howe, Lowell had said: I begin to think myself too old to travel. As to men,—as I used to say at home,—the average of human nature to the square foot is very much the same everywhere; and as to buildings and such like monuments, I bring to them neither the mind nor the eye of twenty. In almost all such I find myself more interested, as they are exponents and illustrations of the spiritual and political life and progress of the people who built them. The relations of races to the physical world do not excite me to study and observation (only to be fruitfully pursued on the spot) in any proportion to the interest I feel in those relations to the moral advance of mankind, which one may as easily trace at home, in their history and literature, as here. But of Rome hereafter. I feel as if I should continue a stranger and foreigner during my whole six months’ residence here.” A month or so later he revised a little of this judgment in a letter to his father, in which he wrote: “You need not be afraid of our getting attached to Europe. I find the modes of life here more agreeable to me in some respects, but nothing can replace Elmwood. In regard to our coming home, the exact time will depend entirely on the accounts we get of your health. I do not wish to have the money we have spent thrown away, for I see no chance of our ever coming hither again, and so I wish to do everything as thoroughly as I can. I have profited already, I think, in the study of art. I make it a rule now on entering a gallery to endeavor to make out the painters of such pictures as I like by the internal characteristics of the works themselves. After I have made up my mind, I look at my catalogue. I find this an exceedingly good practice. Of all the more prominent painters, I can now distinguish the style and motive almost at a glance. Sometimes I make a particular study of a particular artist, if any gallery is especially rich in his works. Life is rather more picturesque here than with us, and I find that I am accumulating a certain kind of wealth which may be useful to me hereafter. The condition and character of the people also interest me much, and I think that my understanding of European politics will be much clearer than before my visit to Europe. To understand properly, however, requires time and thought and the power of dissociating real from accidental causes. I wish to see well what I see at all—and, if possible, would like to visit Germany, France, and England before coming home.”