...Rome is simply the most satisfying lake of picturesqueness and guilty suggestiveness known to this child. Other places have single features better than anything in Rome, perhaps, but for an ensemble Rome seems to beat the world. Just a FEAST for the eye from the moment you leave your hotel door to the moment you return. Those who say that beauty is all made up of suggestion are well disproved here. For the things the eyes most gloat on, the inconceivably corrupted, besmeared and ulcerated surfaces, and black and cavernous glimpses of interiors, have no suggestions save of moral horror, and their "tactile values," as Berenson would say, are pure gooseflesh. Nevertheless the sight of them delights. And then there is such a geologic stratification of history! I dote on the fine equestrian statue of Garibaldi, on the Janiculum, quietly bending his head with a look half-meditative, half-strategical, but wholly victorious, upon Saint Peter's and the Vatican. What luck for a man and a party to have opposed to it an enemy that stood up for nothing that was ideal, for everything that was mean in life. Austria, Naples, and the Mother of harlots here, were enough to deify anyone who defied them. What glorious things are some of these Italian inscriptions—for example on Giordano Bruno's statue:—
A BRUNO
il secolo da lui divinato
qui
dove il rogo arse.
—"here, where the faggots burned." It makes the tears come, for the poetic justice; though I imagine B. to have been a very pesky sort of a crank, worthy of little sympathy had not the "rogo" done its work on him. Of the awful corruptions and cruelties which this place suggests there is no end.
Our neighbors in rooms and commensaux at meals are the J. G. Frazers—he of the "Golden Bough," "Pausanias," and other three-and six-volume works of anthropological erudition, Fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge, and a sucking babe of humility, unworldliness and molelike sightlessness to everything except print.... He, after Tylor, is the greatest authority now in England on the religious ideas and superstitions of primitive peoples, and he knows nothing of psychical research and thinks that the trances, etc., of savage soothsayers, oracles and the like, are all feigned! Verily science is amusing! But he is conscience incarnate, and I have been stirring him up so that I imagine he will now proceed to put in big loads of work in the morbid psychological direction.
Dear Fanny ... I can write no more this morning. I hope your Christmas is "merry," and that the new year will be "happy" for you all. Pray take our warmest love, give it to your mother and Mary, and some of it to the brothers. I will write better soon. Your ever grateful and affectionate
W. J.
Don't let up on your own writing, so say we both! Your letters are pure blessings.
To James Sully.
Rome, Mar. 3, 1901.
Dear Sully,—Your letter of Feb. 8th arrived duly and gave me much pleasure qua epistolary manifestation of sympathy, but less qua revelation of depression on your own part. I have been so floundering up and down, now above and now below the line of bad nervous prostration, that I have written no letters for three weeks past, hoping thereby the better to accomplish certain other writing; but the other writing had to be stopped so letters and post-cards may begin.