Humanly Speaking

"You here, Bagster?" I exclaimed, as in the Sistine Chapel I saw an anxious face gazing down into a mirror in which were reflected the dimmed glories of the ceiling. There was an anxiety as of one who was seeking the Truth of Art at the bottom of the well.

One who is in the habit of giving unsolicited advice is likely to take for granted that his advice has been acted upon, even though experience should teach him that this is seldom the case. I had sagely counseled Bagster to go to the New Hampshire woods, in order to recuperate after his multifarious labors. I was therefore surprised to find him playing truant in Rome.

My salutation did not at first cause him to look up. He only made a mysterious sign with his hand. It was evidently a gesture which he had recently learned, and was practiced as a sort of exorcism.

"I am not going to sell you cameos or post cards," I explained.

When he recognized a familiar face, Bagster forgot all about the Last Judgment, and we were soon out-of-doors and he was telling me about himself.

"I meant to go to Chocorua as you suggested, but the congregation advised otherwise, so I came over here. It seemed the better thing to do. Up in New Hampshire you can't do much but rest, but here you can improve your taste and collect a good deal of homiletic material. So I've settled down in Rome. I want to have time to take it all in."

"Do you begin to feel rested?" I asked.

"Not yet. It's harder work than I thought it would be. There's so much to take in, and it's all so different. I don't know how to arrange my material. What I want to do, in the first place, is to have a realizing sense of being in Rome. What's the use of being here unless you are here in the spirit?

"What I mean is that I should like to feel as I did when I went to Mount Vernon. It was one of those dreamy autumn days when the leaves were just turning. There was the broad Potomac, and the hospitable Virginia mansion. I had the satisfying sense that I was in the home of Washington. Everything seemed to speak of Washington. He filled the whole scene. It was a great experience. Why can't I feel that way about the great events that happened down there?"

We were by this time on the height of the Janiculum near the statue of Garibaldi. Bagster made a vague gesture toward the city that lay beneath us. There seemed to be something in the scene that worried him. "I can't make it seem real," he said. "I have continually to say to myself, 'That is Rome, Italy, and not Rome, New York.' I can't make the connection between the place and the historical personages I have read about. I can't realize that the Epistle to the Romans was written to the people who lived down there. Just back of that new building is the very spot where Romulus would have lived if he had ever existed. On those very streets Scipio Africanus walked, and C?sar and Cicero and Paul and Marcus Aurelius, and Epictetus and Belisarius, and Hildebrand and Michelangelo, and at one time or another about every one you ever heard of. And how many people came to get emotions they couldn't get anywhere else! There was Goethe. How he felt! He took it all in. And there was Shelley writing poetry in the Baths of Caracalla. And there was Gibbon."

"But we can't all expect to be Shelleys or even Gibbons," I suggested.

"I know it," said Bagster, ruefully. "But if one has only a little vessel, he ought to fill it. But somehow the historical associations crowd each other out. When I left home I bought Hare's 'Walks in Rome.' I thought I would take a walk a day as long as they lasted. It seemed a pleasant way of combining physical and intellectual exercise. But do you know, I could not keep up those walks. They were too concentrated for my constitution. I wasn't equal to them. Out in California they used to make wagers with the stranger that he couldn't eat a broiled quail every day for ten days. I don't see why he couldn't, but it seemed that the thought of to-morrow's quail, and the feeling that it was compulsory, turned him against what otherwise might have been a pleasure. It's so with the 'Walks.' It's appalling to think that every morning you have to start out for a constitutional, and be confronted with the events of the last twenty-five centuries. The events are piled up one on another. There they are, and here you are, and what are you going to do about them?"

"I suppose that there isn't much that you can do about them," I remarked.

"But we ought to do what we can," said Bagster. "When I do have an emotion, something immediately turns up to contradict it. It's like wandering through a big hotel, looking for your room, when you are on the wrong floor. Here you are as likely as not to find yourself in the wrong century. In Rome everything turns out, on inquiry, to be something else. There's something impressive about a relic if it's the relic of one thing. But if it's the relic of a dozen different kinds of things it's hard to pick out the appropriate emotion. I find it hard to adjust my mind to these composite associations."

"Now just look at this," he said, opening his well-thumbed Baedeker: "'Santa Maria Sopra Minerva (Pl. D. 4), erected on the ruins of Domitian's temple of Minerva, the only medi?val Gothic church in Rome. Begun A.D., 1280; was restored and repainted in 1848-55. It contains several admirable works of art, in particular Michelangelo's Christ.'"

"It's that sort of thing that gets on my nerves. The Virgin and Minerva and Domitian and Michelangelo are all mixed together, and then everything is restored and repainted in 1848. And just round the corner from Santa Maria Sopra Minerva is the Pantheon. The inscription on the porch says that it was built by Agrippa, the son-in-law of Augustus. I try to take that in. But when I have partially done that, I learn that the building was struck by lightning and entirely rebuilt by the Emperor Hadrian.

"That information comes like the call of the conductor to change cars, just as one has comfortably settled down on the train. We must forget all about Agrippa and Augustus, and remember that this building was built by Hadrian. But it turns out that in 609 Boniface turned it into a Christian church. Which Boniface? The Pantheon was adorned with bronze columns. If you wish to see them you must go to St. Peter's, where they are a part of the high altar. So Baedeker says, but I'm told that isn't correct either. When you go inside you see that you must let by-gones be by-gones. You are confronted with the tomb of Victor Emmanuel and set to thinking on the recent glories of the House of Savoy. Really to appreciate the Pantheon you must be well-posted in nineteenth-century history. You keep up this train of thought till you happen to stumble on the tomb of Raphael. That, of course, is what you ought to have come to see in the first place.

"When you look at the column of Trajan you naturally think of Trajan, you follow the spiral which celebrates his victories, till you come to the top of the column; and there stands St. Peter as if it were his monument. You meditate on the column of Marcus Aurelius, and look up and see St. Paul in the place of honor.

"I must confess that I have had difficulty about the ruins. Brick, particularly in this climate, doesn't show its age. I find it hard to distinguish between a ruin and a building in the course of construction. When I got out of the station I saw a huge brick building across the street, which had been left unfinished as if the workmen had gone on strike. I learned that it was the remains of the Baths of Diocletian. Opening a door I found myself in a huge church, which had a long history I ought to have known something about, but didn't.

"Now read this, and try to take it in: 'Returning to the Cancelleria, we proceed to the Piazza Campo de' Fiori, where the vegetable market is held in the morning, and where criminals were formerly executed. The bronze statue of the philosopher Giordano Bruno, who was burned here as a heretic in 1600, was erected in 1889. To the east once lay the Theatre of Pompey. Behind it lay the Porticus of Pompey where C?sar was murdered, B.C. 44.'

"It economizes space to have the vegetable market and the martyrdom of Giordano Bruno and the assassination of Julius C?sar all close together. But they are too close. The imagination hasn't room to turn round. Especially as the market-women are very much alive and cannot conceive that any one would come into the Piazza unless he intended to buy vegetables. Somehow the great events you have read about don't seem to have impressed themselves on the neighborhood. At any rate, you are conscious that you are the only person in the Piazza Campo de' Fiori who is thinking about Giordano Bruno or Julius C?sar; while the price of vegetables is as intensely interesting as it was in the year 1600 A.D. or in 44 B.C.

"How am I to get things in their right perspective? When I left home I had a pretty clear and connected idea of history. There was a logical sequence. One period followed another. But in these walks in Rome the sequence is destroyed. History seems more like geology than like logic, and the strata have all been broken up by innumerable convulsions of nature. The Middle Ages were not eight or ten centuries ago; they are round the next block. A walk from the Quirinal to the Vatican takes you from the twentieth century to the twelfth. And one seems as much alive as the other. You may go from schools where you have the last word in modern education, to the Holy Stairs at the Lateran, where you will see the pilgrims mounting on their knees as if Luther and his protest had never happened. Or you can, in five minutes, walk from the Renaissance period to 400 B.C.

"When I was in the theological seminary I had a very clear idea of the difference between Pagan Rome and Christian Rome. When Constantine came, Christianity was established. It was a wonderful change and made everything different. But when you stroll across from the Arch of Titus to the Arch of Constantine you wonder what the difference was. The two things look so much alike. And in the Vatican that huge painting of the triumph of Constantine over Maxentius doesn't throw much light on the subject. Suppose the pagan Maxentius had triumphed over Constantine, what difference would it have made in the picture?

"They say that seeing is believing, but here you see so many things that are different from what you have always believed. The Past doesn't seem to be in the past, but in the present. There is an air of contemporaneousness about everything. Do you remember that story of Jules Verne about a voyage to the moon? When the voyagers got a certain distance from the earth they couldn't any longer drop things out of the balloon. The articles they threw out didn't fall down. There wasn't any down; everything was round about. Everything they had cast out followed them. That's the way Rome makes you feel about history. That which happened a thousand years ago is going on still. You can't get rid of it. The Roman Republic is a live issue, and so is the Roman Empire, and so is the Papacy.

"The other day they found a ruined Arch of Marcus Aurelius in Tripoli, and began to restore it. New Italy is delighted at this confirmation of its claims to sovereignty in North Africa. The newspapers treat Marcus Aurelius as only a forerunner of Giolitti. By the way, I never heard of Giolitti till I came over here. But it seems that he is a very great man. But when ancient and modern history are mixed up it's hard to do any clear thinking. And when you do get a clear thought you find out that it isn't true. You know Dr. Johnson said something to the effect that that man is little to be envied whose patriotism would not gain force upon the plain of Marathon, or whose feelings would not grow warmer among the ruins of Rome. Marathon is a simple proposition. But when one is asked to warm his enthusiasm by means of the Roman monuments, he naturally asks, 'Enthusiasm over what?' Of course, I don't mean to give up. I'm faint though pursuing. But I'm afraid that Rome is not a good place to rest in."

"I'm afraid not," I said, "if you insist on keeping on thinking. It is not a good place in which to rest your mind."