And so it was. These two suns of warmth and light, as Dante calls them, founded each his own great spiritual family, worked wherever their beloved Master sent them, in separate fields, but from that morning moment in the Church of San Giovanni in Laterano to the end of their blessed lives they were, as the old chronicle says, “One heart and one soul in God.”
Of the riches and glories of the Lateran Basilica and the Lateran Palace it is not for me to write. The mere lists of them occupy whole chapters in the guidebooks and even there they have to be much boiled down, often only a word or two indicating objects and places of paramount interest to Catholic travellers; and these slighting mentions are defaced for us, even in such valuable and sweet-minded works as Augustus Hare’s “Walks in Rome,” by a question mark or an exclamation mark, intended to denote ridicule, inserted after the word “miracle” or “relic,” to show that the writer was anxious to be exonerated from any suspicion of sharing the pious beliefs of devout persons on such subjects. I have seen one or two Catholic guidebooks to Rome, but they were meagre and unsatisfactory, more pamphlets than books. If a really good modern one exists, I should be grateful to any reader who would tell me about it.
There are some very ancient ones indeed, compiled between the Seventh and the Tenth centuries, which were apparently well known and readily available for the pilgrims of the age of Faith, although, so far as I know, there are but very few copies of any of them in existence now. They are called the “Salzburg,” the “Einsiedeln,” and the “Malmesbury” guides, and must make interesting reading not only for their own sake, but on account of the actual descriptions of the city which has undergone so many changes and revolutions of its topography during the last thousand years of its history. The changes of the last fifty years have been perhaps the most surprising of all, considering that they were not brought about by the time-honoured means of war and pillage, but forced upon Rome under the comprehensive but sometimes mendacious name of “improvements.” There was plenty of room for improvements, and where these have been genuine nobody would wish to quarrel with them, although even some of them were not needed, as claimed, for the health of the city. The Ghetto, for instance, was an eyesore—and looked, with its squalid crowds of rag-pickers and old-clothes dealers, as if it must be a hot-bed of disease. It was precisely the contrary. When the old pestilence or the new cholera were carrying off many hundreds a day in the better parts of the city, there was not a single case in the Ghetto. My brother points out, in “Ave, Roma Immortalis,” that the regulation confining them to that tiny district, from the gates of which they might not issue after dark, though intended as a measure of repression, was really a great advantage to them, in that behind those gates they were protected from robbery and violence and governed themselves according to their own queer laws without any interference from the municipal authorities. Certain industries they monopolised altogether. I remember that whenever a new carpet was to be put down in my mother’s house, Lucia, the housekeeper, would send one of her underlings to summon “la Giudea” to sew it—and fierce old Lucia would never have let a Jewess cross the threshold had she been able to find a Christian to undertake the task! I was always glad when this happened, for Lucia’s particular Jewess was a most cheery, sociable soul, who would sit on the hard stone floor all day making her huge needle fly in and out of the heavy carpet-stuff, and look up and shake her black ringlets and greet me with the merriest of smiles every time I passed through the room. Not only such coarse work, but all the finest of darning was entrusted to her. Some disastrous rent in new broad-cloth—“un sette” as the Italians call it, because it always outlines the figure seven—would come back from her dark thin hands so deftly mended that it was difficult to find the place; did some careless guest drop a lighted cigarette on one of the satiny damask table-cloths—quick, send it to the Giudea and the Signora herself may forget that it ever was burnt! Darning and patching came to the women naturally, I suppose, seeing that the chief industry of the Ghetto consists in mending old clothes and selling them for new. Pius IX set the Jews free from all the old humiliating restrictions of their life in Rome, but until the Ghetto was swept away by the present Government, they clung to it tenaciously, and no wonder, for it was their very own, a little fortress of Jewry where no Christian ever came to disturb them, either at work or worship.
With the inherited aversion and all the old traditions strong in us, we children of Rome never set foot there more than once or twice in all our lives. Our home was at the other end of the city, on the noble heights of the Esquiline, and almost all that we loved best grouped itself in that quarter. I have the most delightful recollections of the walk from Santa Maria Maggiore, our own Church, to the great free spaces round the Lateran. The last part of the way led through the Via San Giovanni, on the right side of which were scarcely any buildings at all, but only a long wall overhung, in the late spring, with masses of yellow Banksia roses, their trailing wreaths hanging so near our heads that we had but to spring and snatch to carry away big handfuls of the flowers, and what flowers! Yard-long arcs of ruffled honey tossed up against that Roman blue, every petal of the million a wing of translucent gold in sun and breeze; no stem, no foliage visible through the crowded blooms, except where the trailers tapered to the last tiny cluster of unopened buds, set like yellow pearls in the green calix, tapered to a point so delicate that the faintest breath would set them waving and quivering as if mad to burst their bonds and flutter in the sunshine like the rest. And their perfume, that perfume of warm wax, the purest and sweetest in this world, filled the whole street—not altogether honestly perhaps, for, by a rare harmony of the eternal fitness of things, the long wall on which they grew sheltered, in the middle of a beautiful garden, a wax factory where Church candles of every size were made, from the four-foot pillar, painted like a missal, that serves for the Paschal candle in Church, to the slim taper that the poorest could buy to light before the picture of their patron saint. It was worth while to be young, with every sense unspoiled, and to go dancing along that road on a summer afternoon; to stop where a low gateway led into the hidden garden and buy from the gardener’s wife some of her fat bunches of red carnations and lavender, for the sake of the Blessed St. John, whose especial flowers they are—also the cones of lavender made by tying a bundle just below the flowers, then turning the stalks back over these and tying them again to form an egg-shaped casket from which nothing could escape, and within which the flowers themselves could crumble to fragrant dust that would keep your linen sweet for at least ten years from the day they were gathered. We never felt the summer had really come till the 24th of June, when the Feast of John the Baptist was kept in and around the Church of St. John the Evangelist. On the eve the Piazza was always the scene of a great fair, the only one held in Rome, during the whole year, except that of the “Befana”[14] in the heart of winter, on the eve of the Epiphany. Of course the “Eve of St. John” is the midsummer eve that was regarded with special and superstitious veneration not only by the pagans of Southern Europe, but by our own Teutonic and Scandinavian ancestors as well, from the times of the Druids themselves; for all it has been the festival of fire—because, I imagine, people wanted to scare away the dead who are supposed to leave their graves and. revisit their old haunts on that night, but still more, in the beginning of man-made worships, to render homage to the sun at the moment of his supreme triumph during those two or three days of midsummer. The bonfires were the great feature of the Roman fair; scores of them were lighted in the broad Piazza, and the boys and young men chased each other through them, trying to clear the flames at a leap and screaming out unintelligible old songs that probably served their ancestors for charms. The Feast of St. John is the first day on which it is considered safe to eat fresh figs, and the booths around the Piazza were piled up with baskets of these. We used to get the big purple ones, bursting with crimson syrup, some weeks earlier, but the Romans do not consider them as real figs. They are called “Fior di fico”; the pale green sort, with firm rose-coloured pulp and holding each its drop of amber gum on the tip, is the real fig, and it stays with us right through the summer. In Tuscany I used to climb into a fig tree (their smooth bark and fat low branches afford delightful seats) and stay there half the day, with a book, eating all I could desire of the ripe fruit and quite forgetting the feast when dinner time came. But when I was young the word “dyspepsia” had not crossed the Atlantic, and it had never dawned on any of us that any one could possibly be upset by such a trifle as mere food, whatever the kind or quantity indulged in! Once, I remember, our faithful “O Sté” of Rocca di Papa was terribly concerned because Marion, aged eight, whom he had conducted to the Fair at Grotia Ferrata, had eaten, as the old man thought, a little too voraciously. “The Signorino has frightened me,” he said tremblingly to our governess as he restored the youngster to her in the evening. “Twelve eggs and half a sucking pig he consumed for his dinner—I could not stop him—but I pray that he may come to no harm!”
That excursion must have been made for the Feast of Sant’ Antonio, our Blessed Saint Anthony of Padua, for, as it falls on the 13th of June, it is the occasion of the sale of the first piglings of the season, and everybody makes it a point of honour to eat roast sucking pig on that day, unless he buys the little pinky white thing to fatten for the winter. This is why, in some of the representations of St. Anthony, there is a little pig lying at his feet. I saw a funny sight in Sorrento once on the day of his feast. There were baby pigs for sale everywhere, all along the deep lanes that intersect the Penisola, and a young seminarist, in ecclesiastical hat and soutane, had made up his mind to take one home as a present to his family. Anxiously he looked at and felt of a dozen or so before he made his choice; then came the bargaining for the price—half the fun to both buyer and seller. The boy was of the country and knew just what he ought to pay; the owner, seeing his costume, had taken him for a greenhorn and tried to impose upon him; the duel was long and vivacious. At last the matter was settled, the right sum paid, and then the seminarist undertook to carry his fairing home. But the pig refused to go, and a much more amusing duel than the first one took place before my eyes, the little pig slipping away from its would-be captor’s hands and scuttling off in a cloud of dust down the lane, the seminarist in pursuit, his soutane flying, his three-cornered hat pushed back, his round young face crimson with excitement, while the man who had sold him the animal looked on in roars of laughter. Finally the pig was conquered, and the last I saw of him was his wriggling hindquarters and curled-up tail protruding from the folds of the cassock in which the boy had rolled him up and tucked him under his arm, while he raced for home, triumphant, yet fearful that the obstinate little beast would get the best of him on the road.
One interest that generally came with the spring and early summer was that of making the round of the studios, where the artists let their friends look at the result of the year’s work before leaving town on their vacation wanderings. Sometimes the studio and its surroundings were more attractive than the productions it contained and then it required some self-control to keep one’s eye, under the jealous observation of the artist, on the canvases or the statues, instead of on the view from the windows or the beautiful draperies and curios which the wealthiest ones were even then beginning to collect around them. This has always seemed to me to be a mistake. The old idea was that the artist’s workshop should contain nothing unconnected with his work or at any rate contributive to it. On entering the studio of a modern successful artist one has to pinch oneself to make sure one is not in a bric-à-brac establishment where spoils from all the curiosity shops in Europe have been tumbled together in view of a quick sale. There is none of the impressive space and concentration of purpose that one felt in the old ascetic studio with its hard north light, its aged painting table, its few seriously thought-out pictures, and its shoals of preparatory drawings and sketches. There were no “studio teas” in those days; the artist opened the door himself and told one frankly whether the visit were well-timed or not; if he were prosperous his one familiar, some humble “Giuseppe” or “Antonio,” came in at the end of the day to wash the brushes and perhaps sweep the floor; most of the time there were no chairs except one for the model and one for the painter. But the atmosphere of work was there, and the respect for it struck every one who crossed the threshold, so that voices were lowered and even the most enthusiastic admiration very soberly expressed.
I always felt like an ignorant intruder when I had penetrated into one of these sanctuaries, but there were some from which I could not keep away. One belonged to Hébert, the then president of the French Academy in Rome. He was a grave, dark-eyed man with a low voice and much indulgence for youth and ignorance, and he never asked one for comments or ideas—just let one stand before his glowing paintings and dream—as his Madonnas seemed to dream—in silent happiness. Not that his superb Armenian beauties were really Madonnas at all; their loveliness was mysterious but not spiritual; the unfathomable eyes had seen all the glory and the tragedy of earth, but they had never looked on Heaven; the glowing cheeks had never paled with awe, the exquisite idle hands could never have been folded in prayer. It was perfect beauty, but beauty unbaptised, a type which might have served for a Cleopatra, could Cleopatra have lived without sin, but never for Mary of Nazareth.
One year, I remember, Hébert had devoted all his time to one great allegorical canvas, the Shunamite of the Canticle seeking news of her Beloved from the maidens by the gate. The faint eastern dawn was paling the sky and bringing out mistily a few features of the city in the background, as a train of girls who had been to fetch water were returning from the well. They were human girls, and had been chattering gaily as they approached the gate; then the words died on their lips, the foremost ones fell back, crowding those behind, for they were met by the Shunamite, a maid in all the white beauty of first youth, undraped, naked as truth, and pure as Eve on the morning of her creation, her eyes shining with love through brimming tears, and her hands stretched out entreatingly as she asked, “Have ye seen my Beloved, ye daughters of Jerusalem?”
It was a strange picture; the thought was the same that Titian expressed in his “Divine and Earthly Love,” which is, to me, the most beautiful of his paintings. Hébert had got away from his own gorgeous traditions altogether and had painted with true inspiration. The girl’s body was like a slender reed of flame, just hovering on earth before rising to Heaven.