I wondered, even at seven years of age, how sculptors in the flesh could come and carve original conceptions among the unspeakably successful attempts of those who were already thinnest dust, yet whose names have so much personality in them that a sovereign presence fills the place where they are spoken,—sculptors whose statues step as it were unexpectedly (themselves surprised) into sight, with none of the avoirdupois of later stone-work; that heaviness which, in some of the finest of these modern figures, causes them to pause involuntarily, as if snowed upon. The high degree of smoothness of the old statues, as well as their mellowed whiteness, may give life; added to that wonderful deep cutting in all crevices and detail of nature, such as gives, in literature, the life to Balzac's endlessly studied facts of situation. The sugary porousness of much of the inferior marble of to-day arrests the eye, and troubles it. Story's Cleopatra is smooth, close-fibred as glass, and the snowstorm has not been allowed to drift upon the folds of her robe, the interstices of her modeling. She, with a few others of still later date, comes near to the old art, which has as much possibility for our imaginative survey as the plot of "The Marble Faun," so marvelously, so intricately, so unslavishly finished. In looking at the Dying Gladiator, we wonder whether he has already passed on from mastering the thought of his approaching death to the remembrance of his wife and children; or whether upon the agony of the physical pang and the insult to courage, which his wound has brought him to endure, is yet to break the pathos of a hero's regret for the relinquished sweetness of love and home.
The Marble Faun suggests the problem as to whether he has for an instant stopped laughing, or will not immediately laugh; and what has a little while ago, or will suddenly cause, the animal fury of gladness to turn this jocund athlete into a dancing, bewilderingly enticing companion, chiming with guffaws and songs. Cleopatra's watchful melancholy partook also of classic momentariness, and I hoped she would spring to her feet. I liked very much to go to Mr. Story's studio, and I thought that for so slight a figure he was remarkably fearless.
The arches of triumph, which my mother studied reverently, seemed to me too premeditated and unnecessary; although an architect could no doubt have explained why, even to the present day, the little door for the little cat should supplement the big door of all space, which one would at first take to be a hero's best environment. Not thus unnecessary appeared the Coliseum; haunted by wild beasts, especially lions, leaping (I imagined) in hobgoblin array from the cavernous entrances which were pointed out to me as connected in the days of triumphant tyranny with their donjons. Many tender thoughts filled my reflections as I saw pilgrims visiting, and kneeling before, the black cross in the centre, and the altars around the walls. I delighted to muse within the circular ruin, upon whose upper rim, jagged but sunlit, delicate vegetation found a repentant welcome. The circular form of the ruin is full of eloquence, as one approaches from the Forum. What would be grace in a smaller structure is tragedy in so immense a sweep, which melts into vagueness, or comes mountainously upon you, or swirls before you in a retreating curve that figures the never-changing change of eternity.
The tomb of Cecilia Metella, and other successive tombs of the Appian Way beyond the walls, gave me my first impression of death that really was death. There could be, I reflected, looking at the sepulchres of these old Romans, no pretty story about the poor folk having gone to heaven comfortably from their apparent bodies. Here were the ashes of them, after a thousand years, in contemptible little urns; and they were expected to enjoy, in that much impaired state, sundry rusty bric-a-brac, dolls, and tear-vials of spookish iridescence, until, in the vast lapse of time, even a ghost must have got tired. Unaided by the right comment, I was dragged down considerably by those pagan tombs; and as an antidote, the unexplained catacombs were not sufficiently elevating. I did not read the signs of the subterranean churches aright, any more than the uncultivated Yankee reads aright an Egyptian portraiture. Monkish skulls and other unburied bones, seen by the light of moccoletti, were to me nothing but forms of folly. The abounding life of Catholicity was hardly understood by our party, which for some reason seemed inclined to impute the most death to the faith which has the most form. We did not gather how this abounding life can afford, though making more of our little fleshly sojourn than any other patron, to compare a skull with the life of the spirit, and relegate it to ornamentation and symbol.
Through the streets of Rome trotted in brown garb and great unloveliness a frequent monk, brave and true; and each of these, I was led by the feminine members of the family, to regard as a probable demon, eager for my intellectual blood. A fairer sight were the Penitents, in neat buff clothes of monastic outline, their faces covered with their hoods, whose points rose overhead like church steeples, two holes permitting the eyes to peep with beetle glistenings upon you. They went hurryingly along, called from their worldly affairs; and my mother imparted to me her belief that they were somewhat free of superstition because undoubtedly clean. Sometimes processions of them, chanting, came slowly through the city, bearing the dead to burial. I did not know, then, that the chanting was the voicing of good, honest, Bible-derived prayers; I thought it was child's play, useless and fascinating. In the churches the chanting monks and boys impressed me differently. Who does not feel, without a word to reveal the fact, the wondrous virtue of Catholic religious observance in the churches? The holiness of these regions sent through me waves of peace. I stepped softly past the old men and women who knelt upon the pavements, and gazed longingly upon their simpler spiritual plane; I drew back reluctantly from the only garden where the Cross is planted in visible, reverential substance. For the year ensuing this life in Rome, I entertained the family with dramatic imitations of religious chants, grumbling out at sundown the low, ominous echoings of the priests, answered by the treble, rapid and trustful, of the little choristers, gladly picturing to myself as I did so the winding processions in St. Peter's.
In the square beneath our windows, during Lent, booths were set, and countless flat pancake-looking pieces of dough were caught up by a white-capped and aproned cook, with a long-handled spoon, and fried in olive oil placed in a caldron at the booth's door, to be served to passers in the twinkling of an eye. I watched this process until I grew to regard Lent as a tiresome custom. Having tested the cakes, I found them to be indistinct in taste, for all their pretty buff tint, and the dexterous twist of the cook's wrist as he dumped them and picked them up. If they had been appetizing I should have been sharply interested in the idea of becoming a Catholic, but their entire absence of relish convinced me that the Italians lacked mental grasp and salvation at a single swoop: and this in spite of the fact that one of my mother's most valued friends, Mrs. Ward, had lately joined the Church. It was her husband who said of her, "Whatever church has Anna, has St. Anna!" Perhaps the most exquisite speech ever uttered by a husband.
Before this serious season of pancakes, which was all Lent was to me at the time of which I speak, the Carnival had rushed upon my sight, carrying all our friends through its whirlpool. Every gay cloth, shawl, and mat that could be brought into service I had rejoiced to see displayed upon the balconies. A narrow, winding street the Corso seemed, being so full, and the houses so high; and a merry blue strip of heaven far away overhead, glancing along the housetops, assured us space still existed. Sudden descents of flowers upon one's shoulders and lap in the carriage, from a window or a passer, or a kindly feeling stranger in another carriage, made one start in mirthful response. Sudden meetings with dear friends, or friends who seemed almost dear in the cheerful hurly-burly, became part of the funny scrimmage. At each side-street sat on a stony standing horse a beautifully proportioned and equipped guard, in gleaming helmet and calm demeanor.
To stand or sit at the windows beside the show was an experience full of pleasure; and if the window was on a level with the heads of the huddling passers, one could be in all the merriment yet not jostled; one could easily pick out a pretty woman or a handsome man to whom to throw a bouquet; and one could see energetic revelers, already well supplied with flowers, reaching high windows with bouquets by means of those wooden contrivances which can be extended or contracted at will, and look like impracticable ladders. The fair recipient at the lattice never failed to respond with an ecstatic smile if this Jacob's ladder had been sufficiently long to reach her welcoming hand. Meantime, many bunches of flowers, some large and elegant, some small and merely gay of color, were being thrown aloft or flung downward, making fountains and cataracts of flowers. Sometimes these bouquets fell into the street dejectedly, upon whose pavement little ragamuffins were always ready to pounce for them, and sell them again as fast as possible to passers who had exhausted their supply, had become mad with the Carnival, and caught sight, in that very moment, of some cherished comrade to whom they wished to throw a greeting. There was an intoxicating enjoyment in being singled out as the recipient of fragrant flowers, sent with a laugh of the eyes; or of a handful of sugared almonds, tossed with a gay shout of compliment. If the passer who thus honored us was a complete stranger, meeting us for this one moment in racial kindness, we felt the untrammeled bonhomie which, God knows, we were expected to feel as a matter of course not for a moment only, but for life.
Upon all these things I delighted to think and afterwards to ponder, because I realized that they were of vital interest to the intelligence which was to me greatest and dearest.