Page:The Atlantic Monthly Volume 3.djvu/462

 456  Roba di Roma. [April, thronged along. The Trasteverini were going home, with their jackets hanging over one shoulder. Women, in their rough woollen gowns, stood in the doorways bare-headed, or looked out from windows and balconies, their black hair shining under the lanterns. Lights were twinkling in the little cavernous shops, and under the Madonna-shrines far within them. A funeral procession, with its black banners, gilt with a death's-head and cross-bones, was passing by, its wavering candles borne by the confraternità, who marched carelessly along, shrouded from head to foot in white, with only two holes for the eyes to glare through.

It was dirty, but it was Rome; and to any one who has long lived in Rome even its very dirt has a charm which the neatness of no other place ever had. All depends, of course, on what we call dirt. No one would defend the condition of some of the streets or some of the habits of the people. But the soil and stain which many call dirt I call color, and the cleanliness of Amsterdam would ruin Rome for the artist. Thrift and exceeding cleanness are sadly at war with the picturesque. To whatever the hand of man builds the hand of Time adds a grace, and nothing is so prosaic as the rawly new. Fancy for a moment the difference for the worse, if all the grim, browned, rotted walls of Rome, with their peeling mortar, their thousand daubs of varying grays and yellows, their jutting brickwork and patched stonework, from whose intervals the cement has crumbled off, their waving weeds and grasses and flowers, now sparsely fringing their top, now thickly protruding from their sides, or clinging and making a home in the clefts and crevices of decay, were to be smoothed to a complete level, and white-washed over into one uniform and monotonous tint. What a gain in cleanliness! what a loss in beauty! One old wall like this I remember on the road from Grotta Ferrata to Frascati, which was to my eyes a constant delight. One day the owner took it into his head to white-wash it all over, to clean it, as some would say. I look upon that man as little better than a Vandal in taste, one from whom "knowledge at one entrance was quite shut out." Take another modern instance: substitute for the tiled roofs of Rome, now so gray, tumbled, and picturesque with their myriad lichens, the cold, clean slate of New York, or the littering zinc of Paris, should we gain or lose? The Rue de Rivoli is long, white, and uniform, all new and all clean; but there is no more harmony and melody in it than in the "damnable iteration" of a single note; and even Time will be puzzled to make it picturesque, or half as interesting as those old houses displaced in the back streets for its building, which had sprouted up here and there, according to the various whims of the various builders. Those were taken down because they were dirty, narrow, unsightly. These are thought elegant and clean. Clean they certainly are; and they have one other merit, that of being as monotonously regular as the military despotism they represent. But I prefer individuality, freedom, and variety, for my own part. The narrow, uneven, huddled Corso, with here a noble palace, and there a quaint passage, or archway, or shop, the buildings now high, now low, but all barnacled over with balconies, is far more interesting than the unmeaning uniformity of the Rue de Rivoli. So, too, there are those among us who have the bad taste to think it a desecration in Louis Napoleon to have scraped the stained and venerable old Notre Dame into cleanliness. The Romantic will not consort with the Monotonous, Nature is not neat, Poetry is not formal, and Rome is not clean.

These thoughts, or ghosts of thoughts, flitted through my mind, as the carriage was passing along the narrow, dirty streets, and brought with them after-trains of reflection. There may be, I thought, among the thousands of travellers that annually winter at Rome, some to whom the common out-door pictures of modern Roman life would have a charm as special as the galleries and antiquities, and to whom a