THE church and convent of S. Onofrio crown the steepest slope of the Janiculan. Our cocchieri always insisted, more or less strenuously, that we should alight at the bottom of the short Salita di S. Onofrio, and ascend on foot while the debilitated horses followed at their ease. Our first drive thither was upon a delicious morning in February, when the atmosphere was crystalline to the Sabine Hills. The terrace before the church-portico was clean and sunny, the prospect so enchanting, that we hung over the parapet guarding the verge of the hill, for a long quarter of an hour. Under the Papacy, S. Onofrio was barred against women, except upon the 25th of April, the anniversary of the death of Torquato Tasso, for whose sake, and that alone, strangers would care to pass the threshold.
Beyond the tomb of Tasso, and that of the lingual prodigy, Cardinal Mezzofanti, the church offers no temptation to sight-seers. We therefore turned almost immediately into the cloisters of the now sparsely inhabited monastery. The young priests and acolytes are winning honest bread by honest labor elsewhere. Gray-bearded monks stumble along the corridors, keep up the daily masses, and sun themselves among the salad and artichoke beds of the garden.
“Slow to learn!” said Caput, shaking his head before a fresco in the side-arcade of the church.
It represented St. Jerome, gaunt, wild-eyed and distraught with the sense of his impotence and sinfulness, at the moment thus described by him;—“How often, when alone in the desert with wild beasts and scorpions, half dead with fasting and penance, have I fancied myself a spectator of the sins of Rome, and of the dances of its young women!”
Victor Emmanuel had biting reasons of his own for knowing what is the sway of the flesh and the devil, leaving the world out of the moral sum. Merciful humanitarian as well as wise ruler, he led would-be saints into the wholesome air of God’s working-day world.
The passage from the church to the conventual buildings is decorated with unlovely scenes from the life of that unlovely hermit, S. Onofrio. His neglected nakedness and ostentatious contempt for the virtue very near akin to commonplace godliness, make one wonder the more at the sweet cleanliness of the halls and rooms nominally under his guardianship.
“Ecco!” said our guide, opening the door of a large chamber.
Directly opposite, in strong relief against the bare wall, stood a man. Dressed in the doublet and hose worn by Italian gentlemen two hundred years ago, he leaned lightly on the nearest wainscot, with the easy grace of one who listens, ready to reply to friend or guest. The beautiful head was slightly bent,—a half-smile lighted features that were else sad. A step into the room, a second’s thought dispelled the illusion. Some of the company said it had never existed for them. For myself, I gladly own that I was startled by the life-like expression of figure and face. It is a fresco, and critics say, cheap and tawdry,—a mere trick, and not good even as a trick. I got used, after awhile, to disagreement with the critics, and when a thing pleased me, liked it, in my own heart, without their permission. This fresco helped me believe that this was Tasso’s room; that he had trodden this floor, perhaps leaned against the wall over there, while he looked from that window upon the Rome that had done him tardy justice by summoning him to receive in her Capitol the laureate’s crown.
Wrecked in love and in ambition; robbed and maligned; deserted by friends and hounded by persecutors; confined for cause as yet unknown, for seven years in a madman’s cell, he was at fifty-one—uncheered by the blaze of popular favor shed upon him at evening-time—bowed in spirit, infirm in body. The Coronation was postponed until Spring in consideration for his feeble health. The ceremony was to surpass all former literary pageants, and preparations for it were in energetic progress when Tasso removed, for rest and recuperation, to the Convent of S. Onofrio. He had worked hard that winter in spite of steadily-declining strength. He would rally his forces against the important day that was to declare his life to have been triumph, not failure. We recall the bitterer address of Wolsey at the door of the convent in which he had come to lay his bones, in reading Tasso’s exclamation to the monks who welcomed him: “My fathers! I have come to die amongst you!” When informed by his physician that the end was very near, he thanked him for the “pleasant news” and blessed Heaven for “a haven so calm after a life so stormy.”