The Mother City

ONLY those who have known trouble can know Rome.

The statement, when scrutinized, seems to involve no discrimination, and therefore to be hardly worth making. But indiscriminateness is sometimes worth while, especially when it concerns the Catholic heart of the world. And there is a distinction here: it debars the very young, and the callous and flippant, and the followers of those philosophies that deny or refuse suffering. For all the rest of the world, Rome waits with healing in her hands.

It makes absolutely no difference what kind of trouble drags itself to her ancient gates. She has known and fathomed all kinds herself, and most of them over and over. Loss, failure, treachery, cruelty, desertion, disgrace, sin,—oh, yes, alas! plenty of sin,— destruction, all but annihilation, and the pangs of re-birth. There is literally nothing that she does not understand.

She makes no manner of fuss about her tremendous experience; she does not even invite us to come and sorrow with her. She simply sits and waits upon her Seven Hills. Nor yet, when we do come, does she rise and go forth to meet us with welcome and sympathy, There is not the slightest touch of demonstration in all the abounding comfort which she knows how to give. For she does not give it; that is the truth. Unless we know how to take it for ourselves, we shall never have it. And just here lies the strong secret of her wise beneficence.

How quiet she is! As still and serene as if she were the bride of the morning star, beatissima. Where all is immortal, her calm is the most immortal thing about her. Did she ever speak out? One wonders. Back in those proud early days, when her children were piling glory upon glory for her, when she was the mistress of the world, did she ever exult and sing? And then, when those same children turned against her, and when, from without, savage hordes fell upon her, did she lament? Perhaps; but one doubts it. The youth of Rome is as hard to imagine as the youth of the Campagna which girdles her, and which is her super-self, her soul. Have they not together existed forever, and do they not know that all human accidents only serve to form character which shall at last be worthy of its destiny, and that exultation and lamentation are therefore aside from the mark?

Certainly they are still enough now — the two of them who are one. Not necessarily still to the outer ear; tramcars and automobiles have nothing to do with such a hush of the spirit as broods over Rome. Or, perhaps, after all, they have much to do with it; for they are the signs of the new life which flows steadily through the old streets, like the Tiber drawing fresh waves from ancient sources, and which makes the repose of the city a living, instead of a dead, thing. Arrested tumult clamors forever, beating impotently against the barrier of chance which cut it off before it could redeem itself. A city like Perugia, deserted by modern activity, is loud with petty old battle and conflict, vociferating restlessly in one’s inner ear. Even Siena, remote and subdued; even Assisi, sitting down in the beloved footprints of Saint Francis — even these silent places know nothing of the fathomless depth of peace which Rome understands. For she has never ceased to redeem her old distresses by the new hopes and efforts of generation after generation, and she is constantly in process of fulfillment. It may even be not too much to say that the spell of her ruins and churches, instead of suffering from her apartment houses and electric lights, actually owes its vitality to them.

I have said that she will not talk about herself, that she will not explain herself to those who visit her. But they can explain her to themselves and thus can really learn. They cannot do it at once, — they must wait; perhaps they must even go away and come again. Great lessons take time, take patience, take brooding, take unconsciousness.

The humble disciple must wander unhurried through Forum and Colosseum, and climb the Palatine. He must sit on old bits of marble (how old!), beneath broken pillars and arches, and think what all these things stand for: how here, over these very stones, went Scipio, Cato, Cæsar, Horace, how the most important affairs of the world were determined here. He must re-create the old days till he sees the triumphal processions sweep past him, and hears the shouts and the music, and glories in the victory. His heart must be wrung with the old pain too — the anguish of the captive, the shame of the oppressor. Then, stern and stricken in soul, he must catch the sudden flaunt of a scarlet poppy out of the tail of his eye, and, looking up quickly, he must find the whole bright contemporary Italian day smiling at him. Nay, it is something more than the day that smiles at him out of that blue, blue sky, beyond and above the slender columns of the ruined temple; and a most reassuring voice says, ‘Yes, even so. So it has been, and so it is, and so it shall be, eternally so as I have decreed.’

It is not so much a return to the present that the mind makes, after a session like this, as an association of past and present and future in one comprehensive now. Heaven and Rome eternally are — the One working through the other stupendous things, the sum of which is not yet complete. Of course, there is no hurry then, no room for complaint or fear, no anxiety. It is this that makes Rome so still: she knows that God is God.

In a sense, time is nothing to her; and yet it is everything. It is certainly everything to the pilgrim who weighs his little feather in the huge scales before him, and is heartened and ashamed. Forty years! That is the most that the average pilgrim has yet to look forward to living when he comes to Rome for comfort. Forty years! Why, the very stones might laugh at him. The length of time is hardly enough to settle a fallen fragment in its place and make it comfortably ready to share the life of the earth which has reclaimed it; it was not enough to solve many a single problem out of the thousands that vexed the city in the old days.

Forty years! As one sits among the tombs on the Appian Way and looks back to see the funeral processions pass, there is an unbroken succession of mourners silently moving up to take their places as the mourned, and between mourned and mourner there is but the space between summer cloud and cloud. Literally on the heels of one another, the generations press to the kindly tomb. One can only smilingly pity the sorrow of a person who laid his beloved away two thousand and seventy years ago, and took his place beside her two thousand and thirty years ago. Their two urns must appear precisely as old the one as the other.

But there is another way of looking at this time question that makes for shame rather than for smiling. What about Rome herself, the immortal, yet the supremely human? She has a soul that suffers and hopes, that is rent with vicissitudes vaster than any that ever fell to one mortal lot; and in all her twenty-seven hundred years, she has never known the relief of death. It is little wonder that she is grave, with a profound melancholy breathing through all her ancient ways; and, perhaps, if we knew God better, we should find it equally little wonder that she is so undisturbed. But the latter effect is admirable, however we may reason or speculate about it; and it abashes one who compares it with his own feverish outcries over his few transient troubles. Ah, Rome, mother! when thou hast borne so many and such bitter woes, and art so grandly at peace, can we not at least be still?

Mother! That is what Rome is to us all, whether or not we choose to acknowledge the relationship — the mightiest mother of men that ever took shape in a city. Mother of our physical life first of all, in the civilization that has its roots securely in her; then mother of our souls in our religion. We of the Far West are so remote in space and time, in sect and language and education, that we are often quite unconscious of the obscure maternal bond, and do not even recognize it when we feel it gripping our hearts at the first glimpse of the blue Dome across the Campagna. Yet it is nothing else than a filial impulse that actuates our profound response, our sense of belonging, our feeling of returning from a far country. We cannot come to stay, for, after all, the far country is ours now and we love it best; but it is worth everything to us, in the deepening and strengthening of life, to grope our way back to old sources and find a brimming fountain-head.

It is as mother that she gathers us — or lets us gather ourselves — about her mighty knees in the midst of her ruins and churches, and takes us back to her mighty heart to learn once more of her. I have said that she never practices any demonstration; but it may happen to one now and then to feel a slow arm enfolding him as he sits on the slope of the Palatine in the mellow late afternoon. There is no pressure in the embrace, nor any individual selection. It is like the embrace of the colonnades about the Piazza of Saint Peter’s, or, better still, like the embrace of the arm of God in that greatest of great pictures on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel. All souls and all ages are held in it in a wide, free compass. Yet, oh, how it comforts! Healing and strength, control and reassurance, are in its encircling gesture; and one feels the faith of all past and future things as one lingers there.

Also I have said that Rome never speaks. But there is an eloquence in her silence that surpasses any sound. This is especially true of the Campagna, the city’s super-self. That is an amazing silence out there, instinct with so many songs and sighs, shouts and murmurs, that one listens more intently to it than to any orchestra.

What does it all mean — this undertone, this surging, interminable chant that breaks upon the ear, as one loiters among the tombs or wanders away over the grassy fields? What but the race-song, the human symphony, that, beginning to utter itself untold thousands of years ago, is not finished yet ? The same themes are in it from age to age; one generation calls to another in familiar cadences. From the grass that covers the dust which once was an Etruscan village come the voices of our comrades. It behooves us to stoop very carefully then, kneel very reverently, before we lay our ears to this august sod. One cannot cast one’s self on the Campagna as on the slope of a New England orchard.

Yet, for all their familiarity, their essential sameness, the themes which we hear are not the exact counterparts of the themes of the twentieth century. There is development in the latter; at least, we must believe that there is, or we shall hardly have the heart to go on singing. But there is an appeal in the former, too, which they did not know when they were first uttered, which they have acquired from listening to the later movements of the great symphony. ‘You are going to save us at last, are you not?’ —somewhat thus runs the anxious burden of their inquiry. ‘ We have waited a long time, and we are not yet satisfied that our old pain was worth while, our blind, groping effort. Unless we have given birth to our saviors, it were better not to have been.’

The stimulus of an unexplored country, waiting to be shaped to human ends, is as nothing compared to the urging of the Roman Campagna, where the past cries to the present for justification. One kneels in the grass, and looks out across the mysterious, rolling country, with its scattered, broken columns and its marching aqueducts, to the Dome, the abiding Dome, hung in the air; and one bows the head as one thinks how far short of our destiny we have all come in two thousand years.

Just as Rome owes half its significance to the Campagna, so the Campagna depends upon Rome for the secret of its spell. There are moments and places among the gently swelling hills when one can almost look about as on common grass and flowers, when the sky and the distant mountains wear the careless serenity which belongs to Nature in her universal moods. Both relief and disappointment lie in the experience. One’s heart is lightened of a load, but something precious vanishes. One has only to climb a slope, however, or travel to a bend in the road, and, looking citywards, find the Dome, to be smitten with a renewed realization of awful import in every blade and stone. It is Nature herself that vanishes then, clothing herself with a solemn garb of significance above her simple, familiar robes, just as the priest before the altar veils himself, becomes more than himself, in his chasuble.

Nature always stands for God, and the priest always stands for man; but it is when they stand for both together that they command our best adoration. In like manner, the Dome, which represents the principle of the incarnation of God in man, works the most inevitable of all transformations upon the world about it. The human garment of the Campagna is wrought of ruins and roads and buried cities, aqueducts and broken walls, shepherds’ huts and glimpses of white towns on distant hills; but the great clasp, holding it all together, is the blue Dome in the air.

In another figure, the Dome is the magical helmet which the Campagna has only to don to step from its simplicity into a position of profound significance. Nothing else arrests and moves us so potently, nor can we ever escape its dominance. We climb Monte Cavo only to sit and look at it across the purple plain. We go to Frascati, and turn our backs on the enchanted gardens that we may search out the blue curve in the hazy distance, and, having found it, give ourselves over to its contemplation. What an inscrutable air of expectation it has! It waits even more than it warns and commands; it waits and watches. In the mean time, those buried Campagna tongues urge us: how long? how long?

It is hard to see how any one can think of Rome as a dead city when it wears this expectancy. Sometimes it carries itself almost as if it had not yet begun to live at all. It treats its great past as a glorious, solemn, and costly throne on which it has climbed to sit and await its future. In the Sistine Chapel, in one of the triangles devoted to the ancestors of Christ, there is a woman who seems to me to have taken the very attitude of Rome. She is seated on the ground, the common throne of our race, — and no less glorious, solemn, and costly than any other seat, — and she leans with one elbow on her knee and her cheek against her hand. The other hand hangs down before her, empty, yet not nerveless, a strong, vital hand, ready to grasp and hold. Her whole bearing is that of one who waits, but there is no suggestion of vagueness or idleness about her. Her head is erect, and her wide eyes gaze forward, outward, steady and bright. What is it that she sees?

Even so, Rome gazes over the heads of the present generations, not ignoring them, but pointing their attention forward with hers, absorbed in the wonderful vision of things to come. We know now that the vision of the woman in the Sistine Chapel was the first coming of Christ; but Rome’s anticipation is still obscure to us. Perhaps she does not see it clearly herself; she only divines it. But she is so very sure of it that we must be sure, too.

No mother of men would be perfectly fitted for her great function unless she could sympathize with joy as well as with sorrow; for, mostly sober though life is, it still has hours of sufficient ecstasy. And doubtless this paper’s opening sentence ought to have for its corollary the statement that only those who have known delight can know the Eternal City. Certainly, Rome has moods of glory which meet and challenge the most exultant heart. Take her in mid-spring, when the roses are blooming everywhere, rioting over the walls and the gateways, climbing the stems of the tall stone pines, lurking amid the ruins, dancing from window to window down the length of a sober street; when the fountains flash in the open squares, and dream among the bird-haunted shadows of the ilex groves; when the Forum and Palatine are soft with vines and gay with poppies; when the marbles in the museums glow and the mosaics in the churches sparkle like jewels; when the Campagna grass is so thick with flowers that one can hardly walk, and the larks singing over it are ‘unbodied joys.’ Rome is a sheer intoxication then. There is nothing to do but give one’s self over to her in her present aspect, not remembering her past or speculating upon her future, but glorying utterly with her in her immediate day. One sits by the hour in the Borghese or Medici gardens, dreaming with the fountains; one occupies an intense, narrow shadow on the edge of the Colosseum arena, and looks up at the great sweep of the sun-baked walls, with little care for their significance, but with a dazzled appreciation of their mountain-range effect against the vivid sky; one even kneels on the old pavements of the serene, cool churches, and forgets that they were not made yesterday. Color and fragrance, warmth and song — that is Rome in May.

But that is also Paris and Naples; and there is all the difference in the world between the spring moods of the two latter cities and that of Rome. Spring, to an habitually sober heart, is a disturbing, tormenting affair in Paris or Naples. It is so reckless in its disregard of the graver aspects of life, so wholly committed to the cause of pleasure. If you cannot rejoice with it, it leaves you in the lurch. With a precipitate gesture, it flings its beautiful, grave winter garment into the fire and springs forth in a nakedness which does all very well for the strong and the glad, but which disconcerts the pensive. Rome does not do that. She divests herself soberly and deliberately, not flinging her garment from her, but laying it aside. Then, in the midst, of her revels, she keeps her wise, watchful eyes on her children; and when she sees any of them flag and falter, she points to the ample, abandoned folds, lying close at hand. ’Go and creep back again,’ she counsels. ‘The stress is too much for you. I understand. It was so with me once, too. One has to suffer a great deal before one learns how to bear sustained delight. Go and shelter yourselves and rest. I will join you pretty soon.’

Thus, though she understands joy, there is no thoughtlessness in her abandon, no real forgetfulness of the burden of the years. She invites her children to dance with her, coaxing them gently; but when they will not, she covers them with her cloak and then lays them down where she can find them again quickly.

Rome has many watchwords, but perhaps Quietness is the best of them all. Over her gates might be written, ’In returning and in rest shall ye be saved; in quietness and confidence shall be your strength.’

Returning! One wonders about that. Some of us have wandered so far. And ‘are they not all the seas of God?’ One wonders very much. But at least such partial returning as we can all make from time to time is profoundly good for us; and we acknowledge a regeneration in the touch of our Mother City.