Italian Yesterdays, vol. 1

by Mrs. Hugh Fraser

It has always seemed to me that one of the most perfect experiences within the grasp of mortals would be that of a child brought up in seclusion by an adored parent, only known to its heart and mind as such—and to find, on reaching maturity and coming out into the world, that the beloved one was the ruler of a mighty empire, venerated and feared by millions of men. How that knowledge would transfigure and ennoble the memories of childhood, of the protecting companionship bestowed, the being rocked to sleep in those strong arms, of the sunny play-hours of childhood’s day watched by those wise and loving eyes!

All this was Rome to me, through many a long year before the doors were opened and the glory of her was made known to my mind. Then the old indulgent comradeship, accessible to every mood of youthful joy and sorrow, became tinged with awe and yet was doubly cherished; it grew a thousand times more precious, yet, like some holy relic that one wraps in silk and gold, had to be enshrined with other sacrednesses in the sanctuaries of memory. One was no longer Rome’s careless child, to whom all her yesterdays were playthings of equal value with her wild flowers of to-day. She called—and there was no disobeying the new command. The nursery door was closed forever, and one took one’s place silently and gladly in the last, lowest rank of her subjects and soldiers.

From that moment one began to learn, weakly and imperfectly, it is true. At first the greatness of the new knowledge overwhelmed one. I remember writing to the great French Prelate who received me into the Church, that I felt like a beggar suddenly admitted into the palace of his King, dazzled with the warmth and splendour, yet utterly ignorant of which way to turn or how to comport himself in those august surroundings. I fancy others have experienced the like bewilderment, and happy they, if they fell into such wise and loving hands as those which were held out to me and finally helped me to fix on a study which, far from making the most serious of all subjects dry and unattractive, enriched it with the warmest touches of human feeling—the holy glory of the true romance.

Such study, such reading, is really within reach of all in these days of almost universal translation and simplification; but so many know nothing of how to obtain the right books—so many, indeed, are utterly unconscious that there is anything to know beyond the few distorted facts doled out in non-Catholic schools, that even the most unassuming effort to share these riches with them may be useful and welcome. Modern life is apt to be a dry, unflowery affair, but that is because our own laziness of mind permits it to become so. If we choose to take the past, it is ours; and I defy any one to claim his inheritance therein and not find a heart-warming thought, a refreshment and a fragrance for every moment of solitude, a chapter of high romance for every day of the long, working year!

A romance must be a love story, and of all the love stories of time, that of Rome is the most marvellous. Certain girl children, we are told, were born so beautiful that, like Helen of Troy, Lucrezia Borgia—and she whose soul was of equal loveliness with what the chronicler calls “the supreme and royal beauty” of her body, Saint Radegonde, Queen of France, they were passionately loved, passionately defended, passionately sung, from the hour of their birth. And Rome, from the hour when the first hut was built on the right bank of the yet nameless river, when the stones of her first low wall wrote her name on that predestined soil, has been loved with a personal passion that has not its like in the world’s history. So, we know, she will be loved to the end. The very hatreds that have attacked her, the cataclysms that have exhausted themselves in attempts to annihilate her, the cupidity and treachery that have bargained for her whom no price can buy, no hand of man can hold, all testify to the desire of the nations to call her theirs. Above and beyond the clamours of earth, she pursues her immortal destiny, “mother of all earth’s orphans” as Byron called her, the nurse of every noble and humble soul, the home and property of the poorest, most ignorant Catholic—but no man’s henchwoman, no King’s chattel; now as in the past, and till earth’s last sunrise, the true mistress of the world.

Could she be less, marked at her birth for empire, first of nations and then of souls? What has not been brought to her by tribute humanity since nature bore her in flame and upheaval, cradled her in sunshine and nurtured her with balm? Looking at her to-day and remembering her past, what wonderful pictures are unrolled before our eyes! Let us go back to the first of which history speaks, and call up the time when the nameless river flowed past the yet nameless hills that were to become the judgment seats of the world.

Standing on the outer rim of the Pincian terrace, watching the primrose die to grey after a sunset in spring, I have gazed over towards St. Peter’s and tried to see the land as it looked to Rome’s builders, the shepherds who fled hither from their ruined homes in the Alban Hills and halted on the southern side of the yellow river, unbridged and unnamed as yet. For it was surely the river that stayed their panic flight only eighteen miles from where the twin volcanoes had vomited fire from the craters that are now the limpid lakes of Nemi and Albano. Though near, the spot seemed safe for the first night. Doubtless they told each other that the next day they would find a ford and travel twice as far again to the low, dark line of the Cimmerian Hills to the northward. But here, at any rate, was herbage and water for the sheep and kine they had saved, and unbroken solitude, where, under the rough skin canopy spread from bough to bough, the women—the few who had found strength to travel—could nurse their babies and sleep for one night unmolested by hostile tribes.

So they rested, the younger men keeping watch by the two or three campfires built to scare away the wolves and foxes. And the morning came, a morning of March, with a leap of the sun from behind the Sabine ramparts, and the dew pearled on oak and wild olive branch overhead, on moss and fern beneath, with the little wild almond trees on the slopes across the river snowy with newly burst blossoms, while the first lark soared up towards the sun-shot blue in an ecstasy of song, and the swallows, just back from the shores of Africa, wheeled lower and lower and darted upward again, with angry cries, when they found their last year’s home invaded by men and beasts. They made friends with men’s dwellings later, and, forgetting the crannies of the woodlands, have built in the eaves of palaces for many a century now, but I take it that in swallow sagas those first traditions have been winged down and are still twittered about, with due respect, when the patriarchs hold their sky conclaves in the autumn and the spring, and drill the fledglings for three weeks before the great semestral migration.

From where the tired shepherds had halted on the high land to the southeast of the river, the empty cradle of unborn Rome would look very fair in the clear spring morning, and but short debate must have decided, for those men of few words, that here the gods meant them to stay. So here, as we can still trace, Romulus, the wolf’s nursling, marked (after enquiring of the wise men of Etruria as to the commands of the gods concerning the foundation of a city) the lines for his wall, ploughing, as the legend says, with white Campagna steers, on his chosen hill the Palatine, where the new altar, raised over a pit in which the first-fruits of the year and a handful of soil from each man’s former home had been buried, already sent up clouds of incense into the sweet spring air on that memorable 21st of April, 754 B.C. And Remus, his twin, wolf-nursed like him, was angry that his own hill, the Aventine, had not been awarded the honours, mocked at his brother’s commands, and sprang across the mystic furrow, to be instantly slain by Celer, Romulus’ faithful henchman, thus conferring the baptism of human blood which almost till our own times was prescribed by necromancers as the only means of rendering great strongholds stable and impregnable.

It is strange to find that from the very birthday of Rome she knew how to levy tribute of the higher kind from other nations. When the frightened Alban shepherds, mostly men little regarded heretofore in the rich city of Alba Longa, spread their skin tents and then threw up their windowless cane huts on the banks of the Tiber, Etruria, a few score of miles to the north, possessed a written language, learned hierophants, bold and scientific architects, full-grown arts of surpassing beauty, marble amphitheatres, great cities supplied with indefectible streams of pure water, and a costly and complicated system of drainage. Rome sends humble enquiries to Etruria, beseeching to be taught how to address and propitiate the great gods. Etruria gladly condescends to reply, and in a given time, though not without much strife and bloodshed, Etruria becomes first a tributary and then a vassal of the adolescent Empress of the world, who, through all the centuries of her after history, repeats that requisition. Rough, practical, hard-handed, and strong, yet avid of beauty, she will have all that is fairest and most precious. Her Art consisted in appreciation; she resolved to possess; the world had to be conquered to give her what she desired, but the world gave—Greece her sculpture and painting and poetry, the Orient its silks and jewels and spices, the South its gold and grain, its wild beasts and hordes of slaves, the North its furs and warriors, the West its granite and lead; the seas swarmed with her laden fleets, and the whole known world became a vast diagram of white converging roads choked with spoils for Rome.