The three companions went from Malta to Messina, where, in wretched weather, they had divers small misadventures, shared with Rohan-Chabots. Hurrell kept, that week, a sort of journal of events; and the pages describing the capture of lodgings at Palermo seem worth transcription, since they show the revered Vicar of S. Mary-the-Virgin defeated by female diplomacy, and in the unexpected rôle of a sprinter.[107]
‘We got to Palmero about eleven or twelve next morning [Feb. 11, 1833]: the sea calm, the sun hot, and everything beautiful to a degree. Here we knew that there was to be a scramble for rooms; so when we anchored, [Newman] and I made a rush for the ladder, and were first in the boat; but unfortunately, when we were in it we found that we had mistaken the landing-place. Our boat was nearest the Quay; and we had to clear out round all the others to make for the custom-house and town, which were a mile off; also, our boat had only one man. So we saw two other boats give us the go-by, in one of which was the wife of the Governor of Moldavia and Wallachia:[108] they landed about four minutes
before us, and we thought to make up our way by running. I was soon left behind by [Newman] and the boatman. When they passed the Countess, I saw her tap a fellow on the shoulder, who ran off for a coach, in which she set off as hard as she could for the Albergo di Londra. We found afterward that she had secured Page’s whole house by letter; and not contented with this, she had two servants ahead, who, when [Newman] came up with them, raced him; and being fresh, they contrived to keep ahead by a foot or two, so as just to bespeak Jaquerie’s whole house before he could speak to the landlord. On this, we despaired, and put up with the first place we could find to hide our noses in: luckily, it had no fleas! and that was more than we had bargained for.’ Newman, in his own letters, does not single out for praise the one negative charm of their temporary dwelling. “It is astonishing,” he says from the depth of English decency, “how our standard falls in these parts!”
The Archdeacon, with his attendant spirits, was off at four in the morning for Egesta. They had a carriage to themselves, drawn by three mules with bells, and a boy and a guide, besides the driver; much æsthetic rapture and next to nothing to eat, seems to have been their portion. But the culminating point, the complete satisfaction of the heart’s desire, was Rome. ‘All the cities I ever saw are but as dust, even dear Oxford inclusive, compared with its majesty and glory,’ writes Newman to the Rose Hill auditory. This enthusiasm of his was not without its scruples and torments. He adds an occasional colophon of genuine self-comfort, being sure that ‘our creed,’ the while, is ‘purer than the Roman’: a matter which, apparently, Hurrell forgot to dwell upon. He never had to rid himself of the least taint of the Pharisee, although he had been scandalised enough at Naples. That alien city of all badness had given his notions of its nominal religion a rude shock. Frederick William Faber, passing through Cologne in 1839, got, unwillingly, the very same sort of painful disedification which Froude got at Naples.[109] The
sadness of the decay of an ideal, even though a misplaced and mistimed one, hangs over some of the letters sped towards holy Oxford.
To the Rev. John Keble, March 16, 1833.
‘Rome.—… I should like to be back at the election much; sed fata vetant. Being abroad is a most unsatisfactory thing, and the idleness of it deteriorating. I shall connect very few pleasing associations with this winter, and I don’t think I shall come home much wiser than I went. The only μάθησις on which I can put my hand, as having resulted from my travels is, that the whole Christian system all over Europe “tendit visibiliter ad non esse.”[110] The same process which is going on in England and France is taking its course everywhere else; and the clergy in these Catholic countries seem as completely to have lost their influence, and to submit as tamely to the State, as ever we can do in England…. Egesta … by good luck we have been able to see, though we were obliged to abandon the rest of our Sicilian expedition. It is the most strangely romantic place I ever saw or conceived.[111] It is no use attempting to describe it, except that the ruins of the city stand on the top of a very high hill, precipitous on three sides, and very steep on the other, literally towering up to heaven, with scarcely a mule-track leading to it, and all round the appearance of an interminable solitude. After going some miles through a wild uninhabited country, you approach it by winding up a zigzag path cut in the face of what looks a perpendicular and inaccessible rock, and, till you have got some way up, it wears so little the appearance of a track, that without guides no one would venture on. At the top the old walls of the town can be distinctly traced, where one would think that mortal foot had never or rarely been, and numbers of tooled stones [are] scattered in all directions, evidently the remains of
well-finished buildings. Here and there is a broken arch which makes one fancy the remains to be Roman, and in the most conspicuous place a fine theatre, nearly perfect. When you come to the ascent on the opposite side, you all at once see the Temple, in what seems a plain at the bottom, with its pediments and all its columns perfect, and only differing from what it was at first in the deep rich colouring of the weather-stains. When we saw it there was a large encampment of shepherds in the front of it, with their wolf-dogs and wild Salvator-like dresses; and, by-the-by, as we found afterwards, with no great objection to lead Salvator-like lives; for when by some accident we were separated from one another, they got round [Newman] shouting “Date moneta!” and, he thinks, would certainly have taken it by force, except for a man with a gun who is placed there by Government, as custode of the Temple, and who came up when the others were getting most troublesome. On getting close to the Temple, we found that it stands on the brink of a precipitous ravine 200 or 300 feet deep, which gives a grandeur to the whole scene even beyond what it gets from the mountains and the solitude. Compared with Egesta, Pæstum is a poor concern, and so is Naples when compared with Palermo.
‘But Rome is the place, after all, where there is most to astonish one, and [it is] of all ages, even the present. I don’t know that I take much interest in the relics of the Empire, magnificent as they are, although there is something sentimental in seeing (as one literally may), the cows and oxen Romanoque foro et lautis mugire Carinis. But the thing which most takes possession of one’s mind is the entire absorption of the old Roman splendour in an unthought-of system: to see their columns, and marbles, and bronzes, which had been brought together at such an immense cost, all diverted from their first objects, and taken up by Christianity: St. Peter and St. Paul standing at the top of Trajan’s and Antonine’s columns, and St. Peter buried in the Circus of Nero, with all the splendour of Rome concentrated in his mausoleum. The immense quantity of rare marbles, which are the chief ornament of the Churches here, could scarcely have been collected except by the centre of an universal Empire,
which had not only unlimited wealth at its command, but access to almost every country; and now one sees all this dedicated to the Martyrs. Before I came here I had no idea of the effect of coloured stone in architecture; but the use Michael Angelo has made of it in St. Peter’s shows one at once how entirely that style is designed with reference to it, and how absurd it was in Sir C. Wren to copy the form when he could copy nothing more. The coloured part so completely disconnects itself from the rest, and forms such an elegant and decided relief to it, that the two seem like independent designs that do not interfere. The plain stone-work has all the simplicity of a Grecian temple, and the marbles set it off just as a fine scene or a glowing sky would. I observe that the awkwardness of mixing up arched and unarched architecture is thus entirely avoided, as all the arched work is coloured, and the lines of the uncoloured part are all either horizontal or perpendicular. So Michael Angelo adds his testimony to my theory about Gothic architecture.