Roman pictures

by Percy Lubbock

But how was it that they came to be so English? Oh, they recurred again to the strophe of Leonora—who was Teresa’s sister, you understand, and Berta’s mother. Leonora and Teresa, they were daughters of the house of Shacker—I never arrived at the true form of the name, which can’t have been this; but they passed rather lightly over the strain of the Shackers, and I had only a doubtful glimpse of a Polish nobleman, an exile from an ungrateful country, who had once upon a time sought refuge in Rome, and had found in Rome a piece of good fortune in the midst of many and unmerited disasters. He had found a wife—and this was the point where Teresa flung up her hands and eyes in a mute effusion of piety for the shade invoked. In those old days, it appeared, there was a high and noble worship of art, of true art, that you wouldn’t meet with anywhere now; and the proof was that a woman, a pure and splendid young sculptress from Virginia, could follow the calling of her art and carve the chaste marble in her studio, here in Rome, and be worshipped herself and respected by the chivalry of the other carvers and painters around her—oh, Teresa couldn’t express the beauty of the homage that had encircled this grand severe young figure, white as the stone she chipped, whose life was dedicated like a nun to the service of art. No man could touch her, none, save only the poor Polish outcast—one of the handsomest men of his time indeed, but now slipping on the brink of starvation and despair. Oh what a romance! The snow-white marble had taken fire; the handsome Pole became the father of Leonora and Teresa, the fair young sculptress their mother.

And so I now, about twenty minutes after our first meeting, possessed their history. Already they felt I was a friend; and Berta, who might reasonably think it was her turn to make a speech, began to hope that perhaps we might chance upon her brother—she believed he was with a party of companions in the park, not far off. Her brother? Yes, we now reached the next generation, the children of the aged patriot. They were two, Berta and Luigi; and Berta couldn’t help wishing that I and her brother might become acquainted, we had such a deal in common. Luigi, she said, was dreadfully clever; he wrote articles in a newspaper, at least he would do so if he had the chance; but a man without influence was so terribly helpless, and Luigi was so awfully proud. Teresa interposed to the effect that Luigi, like the rest of them, was indeed half a stranger in Rome, though circumstances had compelled him to be born and to live there. “Ah,” said Berta, “if only he could get on to a nice position in London—everybody is happy who goes to London, I think!” Luigi’s great distress, according to Teresa, was that in Rome he was able to meet so few nice Englishmen. “And you,” said Berta, “you are in business, yes?” They both looked at me expectantly; it was the first question they had put me, and it was followed by a close and lengthy cross-examination. I came out of it rather badly; I could give my story nothing like the brilliance of theirs, though I obediently supplied them with the details they demanded. They noted my information, but they hardly seemed to be impressed by it. Berta presently suggested that we should turn back towards the tea-garden and look for Luigi.

We discovered Luigi surrounded by a group of young companions who certainly weren’t nice Englishmen. They looked to me like decidedly second-rate Italians, but it didn’t appear that Luigi found them uncongenial. They were all lounging and talking round one of the little tables, and Luigi’s chair and his straw hat were tilted back at the same angle, and while he volubly held forth to the circle his loud black eye (he had the same plum-like eye as his sister and his aunt) was scanning and following the stream of people who passed on their evening promenade. He watched with care; Berta pointed him out to me as we approached, and she waved her parasol to summon him; but he shook his forefinger in reply without shifting his tilt or interrupting his discourse. Berta waved more urgently, and her thumb flicked out sideways in my direction as she looked at him; and Luigi then stared at me very frankly, lifted himself from his place and came forward to join us. He was a short and sturdy young man, smartly appointed, with a flashing smile that was polite, indifferent, insolent—that was anyhow very great. He paid no attention to his sister and his aunt, beyond waiting for them to pronounce an introduction. He smiled upon me and he spoke—and there was a sad drop in his style when he spoke, for his English came of a meaner strain than that of his ladies. It was not less fluent, it was more correct; but it had a vulgar flatness that wasn’t inherited from the sculptress of Virginia. He was a pretty young gentleman so long as he was silent, but he was common and dingy and commercial when he opened his mouth. I suppose he had successfully caught the intonation of the Englishmen he had been able to meet in Rome.

Teresa began to recount with vivacity the story of our acquaintance. Luigi listened to her for a moment and then murmured a few quick words of Italian, I don’t know what they were, before which poor Teresa seemed to drop like a stone. He had cut her short in the middle of a word and her mouth hung open; but she said no more, she dumbly signalled to Berta, and two anxious women stood waiting before Luigi for their orders. He turned away from them and they understood; they spoke up bravely, reminded me (or told me) that I had promised to take tea with them on the following day, and declared that they must now hasten back to convey their old man home. They hurried away, and Luigi immediately displayed his smile again, suggesting that I should walk with him. His young friends appeared to hail him, to invite us both into their party; but he denied them without a glance, with the same slight shake of his forefinger, talking to me and drawing me off as he did so. He talked familiarly; he asked no questions, and at first he was chiefly concerned to explain to me the great disadvantage at which a gentleman almost necessarily finds himself in Rome. It is all very well if you are rich; but if you aren’t, and if you happen to be a gentleman, why then Luigi thought there was no place in the world where you were so rottenly situated as in Rome. Roman society is utterly snobbish, and a gentleman doesn’t care to push among people who think themselves too good for him; and the company of a lot of bounders is unpleasant to a gentleman, and Luigi could assure me that it was a treat for him to shake hands with a gentleman, and not only a gentleman, mind you, but a man of the world, the right sort. He was pleased to imply that I was the right sort, and he cordially took my arm.

Luigi was odious. With a gush of memory from across the years it returns to me, the odiousness of Luigi. There was a touch of gallantry about Teresa and Berta, a swing of bravery in their pretensions—and a real impulse of unselfishness, poor creatures, in their care and respect for this vulgar youth. He was their pride, the object of their disinterested ambition; they took thought for him and used their simple arts on his behalf; and Luigi repaid them by spending an hour in implying to me that his family were an unfortunate drag upon a spirited gentleman. I soon understood that I wasn’t to judge him by the dreadful commonness of his womankind; he was in the unlucky possession of a rarer refinement, a loftier pride, a diviner discontent than the rest of his house; and yet here he was, tied and handicapped, as I could see for myself, by a family incapable of profiting by his example. We took incidentally a brief glance at the loyalty with which he stuck to them, admitting the claim on him of two foolish women and a helpless old man, however unworthy; that was the kind of good fellow he was—too faithful and dutiful, perhaps, to do justice to the power that was in him. But though it was splendid of him to make the sacrifice, it was also very distressing that such a remarkable nature should be sacrificed at all; so back we came to the miserable scope that this infernal old Rome has to offer to the talents of a gentleman, if he is not prepared to cringe and crawl for his opportunity. Luigi had much to say of it, and he passed an agreeable hour.

The sun burned lower, the great lordly pines were smitten with gold, the shadows crept along the green dells of the open park; and there came a moment at last when rebellion seized me, and I actually turned upon Luigi with a passionate outburst. It didn’t last long, and he took very little notice of it; he merely paused, checked the flow of his lament, and proceeded again when I held my peace. Not long ago, you remember, I had been told at considerable length that my poor old Rome was no place for an artist; and that tirade of the opera-singer now came over me, while my companion ingeminated his cry that it was a place unworthy of Luigi. The opera-singer seemed the less fatuous of the two. I can easily bear to hear the name of art re-uttered in Rome, for the thousand-millionth time, in any connexion, on any pretext. Is Rome a step-mother to the arts?—it may well be so, and very likely Rome has thought nothing of smashing an artist, carelessly, disdainfully, at all the changes of the moon since the suckling of the twins. I can imagine that it may lie in the character of Rome to be often brutal to the arts; and by all means let an artist (though not that egregious Bannock indeed, for choice) stand up and hurl out his reproach. But when Luigi, in the face of Rome, maunders on with his vulgar stuff about the feelings of a gentleman, I rebel—I say that to mention these flimsy refinements in the noble great park of the Borghese is more than my sense of fitness will endure. A gentleman!—what has Rome to do with this nonsense of gentility, tediously and querulously droning in the mouth of Luigi? No, Luigi; Rome, I believe, has had some slight acquaintance with greatness and grandeur since the twins fell out with each other, but Rome hasn’t the mind to contemplate your precious distinctions. You might as well suggest to a poet of heroism, to the chanter of an immemorial saga, that he should study the manners of a tea-party in a suburban drawing-room.

My outburst took another form, however; these sentiments let it loose, but it was differently worded. Luigi only stared and waited till I had finished. I ended on the cry that seemed never to be far from my lips in those days, the cry of envy at the sight of the fortunate folk who could do their cringing, if it had to be done, in Rome. I said that I should willingly crawl the length and breadth of the city for the reward of an abiding place within the walls; I shouldn’t mind what pope or king might think of me. Luigi very naturally felt that I hadn’t quite grasped his situation. He resumed his discourse, and he began to point out to me that in my place and with my opportunities he would indeed go far. No doubt, for example, I had very influential friends. Not very? Well, only give him the chance of a footing in England, an opening that would bring him into the society of gentlemen—and he developed his theme still further, guiding it, as I presently noticed, into preciser detail than before. The sun had hardly faded from the tree-tops when I learned that a person in my position, with my advantages, was just the person whose hand Luigi had long desired to shake. And what did he take my position to be, and where, pray, did he recognize its advantages? I didn’t put the question as plainly as this, for indeed I had no wish to meet Luigi when he came to detail. I clung to generalities, and I suggested that there were plenty of most ungentlemanly people in London. “I’m sure I shouldn’t think any of your friends ungentlemanly,” said Luigi.

What are you to do with a youth like that? I own that I felt a little excited by the thought that somebody, were it only Luigi, should turn to me for patronage; and Luigi would certainly never discover just how much of it I had to dispense. And yet he had taken my measure fairly enough; he didn’t suppose that my own credit was very high, but I could “mention his name,” he said, in certain quarters, and he shot out a suggestion or two which showed that he had already considered the ground and was prepared. Any chance was a chance worth seizing; any simple Englishman thrown in his way might be a step on his ladder. But he was shrewd; and when he found that his hints were left lying where they fell, he turned aside to disparage his unfortunate family again—his sister, his aunt, his father, a bunch of futility that hindered a man in his effort to announce and express himself in the world. In a few words it was delicately implied that anybody who lent a hand to Luigi would never be embarrassed by Luigi’s family—the admirable youth would see to that. He was rather uneasy to think that already his women had engaged me to visit them; he knew, to be sure, that their pride and delight was to serve Luigi, but a prudent man doesn’t entrust his business to the bungling devotion of two ignorant women. With this in mind he insinuated that I needn’t trouble myself with their officious invitations; though if I cared to see something of the town under his guidance, why indeed he was very much at my disposal. Rome the inexhaustible! The sacred place as Luigi saw it was quite unlike the city of Deering’s vision, or of Jaff’s, or of Cooksey’s; but he too was convinced that his was the real and only Rome, such as it was—a poor thing compared with the Strand of London.

VII. VIA DELLA PURIFICAZIONE

THERE is a little dirty wedge of the streets of old Rome, there is or there still was a few days ago, which runs up the hill of the Ludovisi, on the way to the Pincian Gate. The garden of the Ludovisi crowned the hill, I suppose, in the days of Kenyon and Roderick Hudson, and now the vast new inns of the tourist stand there; but even before the time of Rowland and Roderick the old streets had encroached up to the very edge of the garden, and there they are still, with the great hotels towering above them—a handful of tangled byways between the boulevard on one side and the tram-line on the other. These papal relics are exceedingly squalid, I must own, what with the cabbage-stalks in the mud and the underclothing that hangs drying in the windows; but they are charmingly named, and Luigi’s family lived in the Via della Purificazione.