George Eliot's Life, as Related in Her Letters and Journals. Vol. 2 (of 3)

Let me see what I most delighted in, in Rome. Certainly this drive from the Clivus to the Coliseum was, from first to last, one of the chief things; but there are many objects and many impressions of various kinds which I can reckon up as of almost equal interest: the Coliseum itself, with the view from it; the drive along the Appian Way to the tomb of Cecilia Metella, and the view from thence of the Campagna bridged by the aqueduct; the baths of Titus, with the remnants of their arabesques, seen by the light of torches, in the now damp and gloomy spaces; the glimpse of the Tarpeian rock, with its growth of cactus and rough herbage; the grand, bare arch brickwork of the Palace of the Cæsars rising in huge masses on the Palatine; the theatre of Marcellus bursting suddenly into view from among the crowded mean houses of the modern city, and still more the Temple of Minerva and Temple of Nerva, also set in the crowded city of the present; and the exterior of the Pantheon, if it were not marred by the Papal belfries – these are the traces of ancient Rome that have left the strongest image of themselves in my mind. I ought not to leave out Trajan's column, and the forum in which it stands; though the severe cold tint of the gray granite columns, or fragments of columns, gave this forum rather a dreary effect to me. For vastness there is perhaps nothing more impressive in Rome than the Baths of Caracalla, except the Coliseum; and I remember that it was among them that I first noticed the lovely effect of the giant fennel, luxuriant among the crumbling brickwork.

Among the ancient sculptures I think I must place on a level the Apollo, the Dying Gladiator, and the Lateran Antinous: they affected me equally in different ways. After these I delighted in the Venus of the Capitol, and the Kissing Children in the same room; the Sophocles at the Lateran Museum; the Nile; the black, laughing Centaur at the Capitol; the Laughing Faun in the Vatican; and the Sauroktonos, or Boy with the Lizard, and the sitting statue called Menander. The Faun of Praxiteles, and the old Faun with the infant Bacchus, I had already seen at Munich, else I should have mentioned them among my first favorites. Perhaps the greatest treat we had at the Vatican was the sight of a few statues, including the Apollo, by torchlight – all the more impressive because it was our first sight of the Vatican. Even the mere hurrying along the vast halls, with the fitful torchlight falling on the innumerable statues and busts and bas-reliefs and sarcophagi, would have left a sense of awe at these crowded, silent forms which have the solemnity of suddenly arrested life. Wonderfully grand these halls of the Vatican are; and there is but one complaint to be made against the home provided for this richest collection of antiquities – it is that there is no historical arrangement of them, and no catalogue. The system of classification is based on the history of their collection by the different popes, so that for every other purpose but that of securing to each pope his share of glory, it is a system of helter-skelter.

Of Christian Rome, St. Peter's is, of course, the supreme wonder. The piazza, with Bernini's colonnades, and the gradual slope upward to the mighty temple, gave me always a sense of having entered some millennial new Jerusalem, where all small and shabby things were unknown. But the exterior of the cathedral itself is even ugly; it causes a constant irritation by its partial concealment of the dome. The first impression from the interior was, perhaps, at a higher pitch than any subsequent impression, either of its beauty or vastness; but then, on later visits, the lovely marble, which has a tone at once subdued and warm, was half-covered with hideous red drapery. There is hardly any detail one cares to dwell on in St. Peter's. It is interesting, for once, to look at the mosaic altar-pieces, some of which render with marvellous success such famous pictures as the Transfiguration, the Communion of St. Jerome, and the Entombment or Disentombment of St. Petronilla. And some of the monuments are worth looking at more than once, the chief glory of that kind being Canova's Lions. I was pleased one day to watch a group of poor people looking with an admiration that had a half-childish terror in it at the sleeping lion, and with a sort of daring air thrusting their fingers against the teeth of the waking "mane-bearer."

We ascended the dome near the end of our stay, but the cloudy horizon was not friendly to our distant view, and Rome itself is ugly to a bird's-eye contemplation. The chief interest of the ascent was the vivid realization it gave of the building's enormous size, and after that the sight of the inner courts and garden of the Vatican.

Our most beautiful view of Rome and the Campagna was one we had much earlier in our stay, before the snow had vanished from the mountains; it was from the terrace of the Villa Pamfili Doria.

Of smaller churches I remember especially Santa Maria degli Angeli, a church formed by Michael Angelo by additions to the grand hall in the Baths of Diocletian – the only remaining hall of ancient Rome; and the Church of San Clemente, where there is a chapel painted by Masaccio, as well as a perfect specimen of the ancient enclosure near the tribune, called the presbytery, with the ambones or pulpits from which the lessons and gospel were read. Santa Maria Maggiore is an exquisitely beautiful basilica, rich in marbles from a pagan temple; and the reconstructed San Paolo fuori le Mura is a wonder of wealth and beauty, with its lines of white-marble columns – if one could possibly look with pleasure at such a perverted appliance of money and labor as a church built in an unhealthy solitude. After St. Peter's, however, the next great monument of Christian art is the Sistine Chapel; but since I care for the chapel solely for the sake of its ceiling, I ought rather to number it among my favorite paintings than among the most memorable buildings. Certainly this ceiling of Michael Angelo's is the most wonderful fresco in the world. After it come Raphael's School of Athens and Triumph of Galatea, so far as Rome is concerned. Among oil-paintings there I like best the Madonna di Foligno, for the sake of the cherub who is standing and looking upward; the Perugino also, in the Vatican, and the pretty Sassoferrato, with the clouds budding angels; at the Barberini Palace, Beatrice Cenci, and Una Schiava, by Titian; at the Sciarra Palace, the Joueurs de Violon, by Raphael, another of Titian's golden-haired women, and a sweet Madonna and Child with a bird, by Fra Bartolomeo; at the Borghese Palace, Domenichino's Chase, the Entombment, by Raphael, and the Three Ages – a copy of Titian, by Sassoferrato.

We should have regretted entirely our efforts to get to Rome during the Holy Week, instead of making Florence our first resting-place, if we had not had the compensation for wearisome, empty ceremonies and closed museums in the wonderful spectacle of the illumination of St. Peter's. That, really, is a thing so wondrous, so magically beautiful, that one can't find in one's heart to say it is not worth doing. I remember well the first glimpse we had as we drove out towards it, of the outline of the dome like a new constellation on the black sky. I thought that was the final illumination, and was regretting our tardy arrival, from the détour we had to make, when, as our carriage stopped in front of the cathedral, the great bell sounded, and in an instant the grand illumination flashed out and turned the outline of stars into a palace of gold. Venus looked out palely.

One of the finest positions in Rome is the Monte Cavallo (the Quirinal), the site of the pope's palace, and of the fountain against which are placed the two Colossi – the Castor and Pollux, ascribed, after a lax method of affiliation, to Phidias and Praxiteles. Standing near this fountain one has a real sense of being on a hill; city and distant ridge stretching below. Close by is the Palazzo Rospigliosi, where we went to see Guido's Aurora.

Another spot where I was struck with the view of modern Rome (and that happened rarely) was at San Pietro in Vincoli, on the Esquiline, where we went to see Michael Angelo's Moses. Turning round before one enters the church, a palm-tree in the high foreground relieves very picturesquely the view of the lower distance. The Moses did not affect me agreeably; both the attitude and the expression of the face seemed to me, in that one visit, to have an exaggeration that strained after effect without reaching it. The failure seemed to me of this kind: Moses was an angry man trying to frighten the people by his mien, instead of being rapt by his anger, and terrible without self-consciousness. To look at the statue of Christ, after the other works of Michael Angelo at Rome, was a surprise; in this the fault seems to incline slightly to the namby-pamby. The Pietà in St. Peter's has real tenderness in it.

The visit to the Farnesina was one of the most interesting among our visits to Roman palaces. It is here that Raphael painted the Triumph of Galatea, and here this wonderful fresco is still bright upon the wall. In the same room is a colossal head, drawn by Michael Angelo with a bit of charcoal, by way of carte-de-visite, one day that he called on Daniele di Volterra, who was painting detestably in this room, and happened to be absent. In the entrance-hall, preceding the Galatea room, are the frescoes by Raphael representing the story of Cupid and Psyche; but we did not linger long to look at them, as they disappointed us.

We visited only four artists' studios in Rome: Gibson's, the sculptor; Frey's, the landscape painter; Riedel's, genre painter, and Overbeck's. Gibson's was entirely disappointing to me, so far as his own sculptures are concerned; except the Cacciatore, which he sent to the Great Exhibition, I could see nothing but feeble imitations of the antique – no spontaneity and no vigor. Miss Hosmer's Beatrice Cenci is a pleasing and new conception; and her little Puck a bit of humor that one would like to have if one were a grand seigneur.

Frey is a very meritorious landscape painter – finished in execution and poetic in feeling. His Egyptian scenes – the Simoon, the Pair in the Light of Sunset, and the Island of Philæ – are memorable pictures; so is the View of Athens, with its blue, island-studded sea. Riedel interested us greatly with his account of the coincidence between the views of light and colors at which he had arrived through his artistic experience, and Goethe's theory of colors, with which he became acquainted only after he had thought of putting his own ideas into shape for publication. He says the majority of painters continue their work when the sun shines from the north – they paint with blue light.

But it was our visit to Overbeck that we were most pleased not to have missed. The man himself is more interesting than his pictures: a benevolent calm and quiet conviction breathes from his person and manners. He has a thin, rather high-nosed face, with long gray hair, set off by a maroon velvet cap, and a gray scarf over his shoulders. Some of his cartoons pleased me: one large one of our Saviour passing from the midst of the throng who were going to cast him from the brow of the hill at Capernaum – one foot resting on a cloud borne up by cherubs; and some smaller round cartoons representing the Parable of the Ten Virgins, and applying it to the function of the artist.

We drove about a great deal in Rome, but were rather afflicted in our drives by the unending walls that enclose everything like a garden, even outside the city gates. First among our charming drives was that to the Villa Pamfili Doria – a place which has the beauties of an English park and gardens, with views such as no English park can show; not to speak of the columbarium or ancient Roman burying-place, which has been disinterred in the grounds. The compactest of all burying-places must these columbaria be: little pigeon-holes, tier above tier, for the small urns containing the ashes of the dead. In this one traces of peacocks and other figures in fresco, ornamenting the divisions between the rows, are still visible. We sat down in the sunshine by the side of the water, which is made to fall in a cascade in the grounds fronting the house, and then spreads out into a considerable breadth of mirror for the plantation on the slope which runs along one side of it. On the opposite side is a broad, grassy walk, and here we sat on some blocks of stone, watching the little green lizards. Then we walked on up the slope on the other side, and through a grove of weird ilexes, and across a plantation of tall pines, where we saw the mountains in the far distance. A beautiful spot! We ought to have gone there again.

Another drive was to the Villa Albani, where, again, the view is grand. The precious sculptures once there are all at Munich now; and the most remarkable remnants of the collection are the bas-relief of Antinous, and the Æsop. The Antinous is the least beautiful of all the representations of that sad loveliness that I have seen – be it said in spite of Winckelmann; attitude and face are strongly Egyptian. In an outside pavilion in the garden were some interesting examples of Greek masks.

Our journey to Frascati by railway was fortunate. The day was fine, except, indeed, for the half hour that we were on the heights of Tusculum, and longed for a clear horizon. But the weather was so generally gloomy during our stay in Rome that we were "thankful for small mercies" in the way of sunshine. I enjoyed greatly our excursion up the hill on donkey-back to the ruins of Tusculum – in spite of our loquacious guide, who exasperated George. The sight of the Campagna on one side, and of Mount Algidus, with its snow-capped fellows, and Mount Albano, with Rocca di Papa on its side, and Castel Gandolfo below on the other side, was worth the trouble – to say nothing of the little theatre, which was the most perfect example of an ancient theatre I had then seen in that pre-Pompeian period of my travels. After lunching at Frascati we strolled out to the Villa Aldobrandini, and enjoyed a brighter view of the Campagna in the afternoon sunlight. Then we lingered in a little croft enclosed by plantations, and enjoyed this familiar-looking bit of grass with wild-flowers perhaps more, even, than the greatest novelties. There are fine plantations on the hill behind the villa, and there we wandered till it was time to go back to the railway. A literally grotesque thing in these plantations is the opening of a grotto in the hillside, cut in the form of a huge Greek comic mask. It was a lovely walk from the town downward to the railway station – between the olive-clad slopes looking towards the illimitable plain. Our best view of the aqueducts was on this journey, but it was the tantalizing sort of view one gets from a railway carriage.

Our excursion to Tivoli, reserved till nearly the end of our stay, happened on one of those cruel, seductive days that smile upon you at five o'clock in the morning, to become cold and cloudy at eight, and resolutely rainy at ten. And so we ascended the hill through the vast, venerable olive grove, thinking what would be the effect of sunshine among those gray, fantastically twisted trunks and boughs; and paddled along the wet streets under umbrellas to look at the Temple of the Sibyl, and to descend the ravine of the waterfalls. Yet it was enjoyable; for the rain was not dense enough to shroud the near view of rock and foliage. We looked for the first time at a rock of Travertine, with its curious petrified vegetable forms, and lower down at a mighty cavern, under which the smaller cascade rushes – an awful hollow in the midst of huge, rocky masses. But – rain, rain, rain! No possibility of seeing the Villa of Hadrian, chief wonder of Tivoli: and so we had our carriage covered up and turned homeward in despair.

The last week of our stay we went for the first time to the picture-gallery of the Capitol, where we saw the famous Guercino – the Entombment of Petronilla – which we had already seen in mosaic at St. Peter's. It is a stupendous piece of painting, about which one's only feeling is that it might as well have been left undone. More interesting is the portrait of Michael Angelo, by himself – a deeply melancholy face. And there is also a picture of a bishop, by Giovanni Bellini, which arrested us a long while. After these, I remember most distinctly Veronese's Europa, superior to that we afterwards saw at Venice; a delicious mythological Poussin, all light and joy; and a Sebastian, by Guido, exceptionally beautiful among the many detestable things of his in this gallery.

The Lateran Museum, also, was a sight we had neglected till this last week, though it turned out to be one of the most memorable. In the classical museum are the great Antinous, a Bacchus, and the Sophocles; besides a number of other remains of high interest, especially in the department of architectural decoration. In the museum of Christian antiquities there are, besides sculptures, copies of the frescoes in the Catacombs – invaluable as a record of those perishable remains. If we ever go to Rome again the Lateran Museum will be one of the first places I shall wish to revisit.

We saw the Catacombs of St. Calixtus, on the Appian Way – the long, dark passages, with great oblong hollows in the rock for the bodies long since crumbled, and the one or two openings out of the passages into a rather wider space, called chapels, but no indications of paintings or other detail – our monkish guide being an old man, who spoke with an indistinct grunt that would not have enlightened us if we had asked any questions. In the church through which we entered there is a strangely barbarous reclining statue of St. Sebastian, with arrows sticking all over it.

A spot that touched me deeply was Shelley's grave. The English cemetery in which he lies is the most attractive burying-place I have seen. It lies against the old city walls, close to the Porta San Paolo and the pyramid of Caius Cestius – one of the quietest spots of old Rome. And there, under the shadow of the old walls on one side, and cypresses on the other, lies the Cor cordium, forever at rest from the unloving cavillers of this world, whether or not he may have entered on other purifying struggles in some world unseen by us. The grave of Keats lies far off from Shelley's, unshaded by wall or trees. It is painful to look upon, because of the inscription on the stone, which seems to make him still speak in bitterness from his grave.¹¹

Letter to Mrs. Congreve, 4th April, 1860.

A wet day for the first time since we left Paris! That assists our consciences considerably in urging us to write our letters on this fourth day at Rome, for I will not pretend that writing a letter, even to you, can be anything more alluring than a duty when there is a blue sky over the Coliseum and the Arch of Constantine, and all the other marvels of this marvellous place. Since our arrival, in the middle of Sunday, I have been gradually rising from the depth of disappointment to an intoxication of delight; and that makes me wish to do for you what no one ever did for me – warn you that you must expect no grand impression on your first entrance into Rome, at least, if you enter it from Civita Vecchia. My heart sank, as it would if you behaved shabbily to me, when I looked through the windows of the omnibus as it passed through street after street of ugly modern Rome, and in that mood the dome of St. Peter's and the Castle of St. Angelo – the only grand objects on our way – could only look disappointing to me. I believe the impression on entering from the Naples side is quite different; there one must get a glimpse of the broken grandeur and Renaissance splendor that one associates with the word "Rome." So keep up your spirits in the omnibus when your turn comes, and believe that you will mount the Capitol the next morning, as we did, and look out on the Forum and the Coliseum, far on to the Alban mountains, with snowy Apennines behind them, and feel – what I leave you to imagine, because the rain has left off, and my husband commands me to put on my bonnet. (Two hours later.) Can you believe that I have not had a headache since we set out? But I would willingly have endured more than one to be less anxious than I am about Mr. Lewes's health. Now that we are just come in from our walk to the Pantheon he is obliged to lie down with terrible oppression of the head; and since we have been in Rome he has been nearly deaf on one side. That is the dark "crow that flies in heaven's sweetest air" just now; everything else in our circumstances here is perfect. We are glad to have been driven into apartments, instead of remaining at the hotel, as we had intended; for we enjoy the abundance of room and the quiet that belong to this mode of life, and we get our cooking and all other comforts in perfection at little more than a third of the hotel prices. Most of the visitors to Rome this season seem to come only for a short stay; and, as apartments can't be taken for less than a month, the hotels are full and the lodgings are empty. Extremely unpleasant for the people who have lodgings to let, but very convenient for us, since we get excellent rooms in a good situation for a moderate price. We have a good little landlady, who can speak nothing but Italian, so that she serves as a parlatrice for us, and awakens our memory of Italian dialogue – a memory which consists chiefly of recollecting Italian words without knowing their meaning, and English words without knowing the Italian for them.

I shall tell you nothing of what we have seen. Have you not a husband who has seen it all, and can tell you much better? Except, perhaps, one sight which might have had some interest for him, namely, Count Cavour, who was waiting with other eminences at the Turin station to receive the Prince de Carignan, the new Viceroy of Tuscany. A really pleasant sight – not the prince, who is a large, stout "mustache," squeezed in at the waist with a gold belt, looking like one of those dressed-up personages who are among the chessmen that the Cavours of the world play their game with. The pleasant sight was Count Cavour, in plainest dress, with a head full of power, mingled with bonhomie. We had several fellow-travellers who belonged to Savoy, and were full of chagrin at the prospect of the French annexation. Our most agreeable companion was a Baron de Magliano, a Neapolitan who has married a French wife with a large fortune, and has been living in France for years, but has now left his wife and children behind for the sake of entering the Sardinian army, and, if possible, helping to turn out the Neapolitan Bourbons. I feel some stirrings of the insurrectionary spirit myself when I see the red pantaloons at every turn in the streets of Rome. I suppose Mrs. Browning could explain to me that this is part of the great idea nourished in the soul of the modern saviour, Louis Napoleon, and that for the French to impose a hateful government on the Romans is the only proper sequence to the story of the French Revolution.

Oh, the beautiful men and women and children here! Such wonderful babies with wise eyes! such grand-featured mothers nursing them! As one drives along the streets sometimes, one sees a madonna and child at every third or fourth upper window; and on Monday a little crippled girl, seated at the door of a church, looked up at us with a face full of such pathetic sweetness and beauty that I think it can hardly leave me again. Yesterday we went to see dear Shelley's tomb, and it was like a personal consolation to me to see that simple outward sign that he is at rest, where no hatred can ever reach him again. Poor Keats's tombstone, with that despairing, bitter inscription, is almost as painful to think of as Swift's.

And what have you been doing, being, or suffering in these long twelve days? While we were standing with weary impatience in the custom-house at Civita Vecchia, Mr. Congreve was delivering his third lecture, and you were listening. And what else? Friday.– Since I wrote my letter we have not been able to get near the post-office. Yesterday was taken up with seeing ceremonies, or, rather, with waiting for them. I knelt down to receive the pope's blessing, remembering what Pius VII. said to the soldier – that he would never be the worse for the blessing of an old man. But, altogether, these ceremonies are a melancholy, hollow business, and we regret bitterly that the Holy Week has taken up our time from better things. I have a cold and headache this morning, and in other ways am not conscious of improvement from the pope's blessing. I may comfort myself with thinking that the King of Sardinia is none the worse for the pope's curse. It is farcical enough that the excommunication is posted up at the Church of St. John Lateran, out of everybody's way, and yet there are police to guard it.

Italy, 1860.

How much more I have to write about Rome! How I should like to linger over every particular object that has left an image in my memory! But here I am only to give a hasty sketch of what we saw and did at each place at which we paused in our three months' life in Italy.

It was on the 29th of April that we left Rome, and on the morning of the 30th we arrived at Naples – under a rainy sky, alas! but not so rainy as to prevent our feeling the beauty of the city and bay, and declaring it to surpass all places we had seen before. The weather cleared up soon after our arrival at the Hotel des Étrangers, and after a few days it became brilliant, showing us the blue sea, the purple mountains, and bright city, in which we had almost disbelieved as we saw them in the pictures. Hardly anything can be more lovely than Naples seen from Posilippo under a blue sky: the irregular outline with which the town meets the sea, jutting out in picturesque masses, then lifted up high on a basis of rock, with the grand Castle of St. Elmo and the monastery on the central height crowning all the rest; the graceful outline of purple Vesuvius rising beyond the Molo, and the line of deeply indented mountains carrying the eye along to the Cape of Sorrento; and, last of all, Capri sleeping between sea and sky in the distance. Crossing the promontory of Posilippo, another wonderful scene presents itself: white Nisida on its island rock; the sweep of bay towards Pozzuoli; beyond that, in fainter colors of farther distance, the Cape of Miseno and the peaks of Ischia.

Our first expedition was to Pozzuoli and Miseno, on a bright, warm day, with a slipshod Neapolitan driver, whom I christened Baboon, and who acted as our charioteer throughout our stay at Naples. Beyond picturesque Pozzuoli, jutting out with precipitous piles of building into the sea, lies Baiæ. Here we halted to look at a great circular temple, where there was a wonderful echo that made whispers circulate and become loud on the opposite side to that on which they were uttered. Here, for our amusement, a young maiden and a little old man danced to the sound of a tambourine and fife. On our way to Baiæ we had stopped to see the Lake Avernus, no longer terrible to behold, and the amphitheatre of Cumæ, now grown over with greensward, and fringed with garden stuff.

From Baiæ we went to Miseno – the Misenum where Pliny was stationed with the fleet – and looked out from the promontory on the lovely isles of Ischia and Procida. On the approach to this promontory lies the Piscina Mirabilis, one of the most striking remains of Roman building. It is a great reservoir, into which one may now descend dryshod and look up at the lofty arches festooned with delicate plants, while the sunlight shoots aslant through the openings above. It was on this drive, coming back towards Pozzuoli, that we saw the Mesembryanthemum in its greatest luxuriance – a star of amethyst with its golden tassel in the centre. The amphitheatre at Pozzuoli is the most interesting in Italy after the Coliseum. The seats are in excellent preservation, and the subterranean structures for water and for the introduction of wild beasts are unique. The temple of Jupiter Serapis is another remarkable ruin, made more peculiar by the intrusion of the water, which makes the central structure, with its great columns, an island to be approached by a plank bridge.

In the views from Capo di Monte – the king's summer residence – and from St. Elmo one enjoys not only the view towards the sea, but the wide, green plain sprinkled with houses and studded with small towns or villages, bounded on the one hand by Vesuvius, and shut in, in every other direction, by the nearer heights close upon Naples, or by the sublimer heights of the distant Apennines. We had the view from St. Elmo on a clear, breezy afternoon, in company with a Frenchman and his wife, come from Rome with his family after a two years' residence there – worth remembering for the pretty bondage the brusque, stern, thin father was under to the tiny, sickly looking boy.

It was a grand drive up to Capo di Monte – between rich plantations, with glimpses, as we went up, of the city lying in picturesque irregularity below; and as we went down, in the other direction, views of distant mountain rising above some pretty accident of roof or groups of trees in the foreground.

One day we went, from this drive, along the Poggio Reale to the cemetery – the most ambitious burying-place I ever saw, with building after building of elaborate architecture, serving as tombs to various Arci-confraternità as well as to private families, all set in the midst of well-kept gardens. The humblest kind of tombs there were long niches for coffins, in a wall bordering the carriage-road, which are simply built up when the coffin is once in – the inscription being added on this final bit of masonry. The lines of lofty sepulchres suggested to one very vividly the probable appearance of the Appian Way when the old Roman tombs were in all their glory.