A Roman Soliloquy

...For perchance when that boy walks forth from the garden of his childhood and looks serenely if sadly out upon the world of men, he will pause some evening on his homeward way almost at the spot where Gibbon heard the monks chanting vespers in the Temple of Jupiter and conceived the design of a literarj'^ monument for a Rome that had declined and fallen...

...Love it was that was the secret of the martyr's strength, the secret of the Church the empire so vainly sought to crush...

...Imperial Rome and Christian Rome were reconstructed on the ground where once wild beasts wrestled and gladiators sweated and fair and flawless virgins won their crowns...

...In that illusion-fostering light I gazed far out beyond the fields, hoping for some impressive memento of the grandeur that was Rome...

...and so that music among the ruins of the Colosseum on a moonlit night in summer reminds me that love and faith—the love that believes and the faith that gives itself without reserve—are the only truly undying things in the city which men call eternal...

...One had but to look up to those tiers and tiers of broken arches and see the throngs and hear the shouting...

...what drew the eyd and distressed the fancy in the sunset glow was the leprous ruins of the Claudian aqueduct...

...Both the Papacy and the modern city are, it is true, alive...

...once, as though to stress the already overwhelming contrast between the past and the present, between the quick and the dead, it whistled shrilly and derisively as we caught sight of some tender green things growing out of the crumbling pile...

...And so it came to pass that my first and ineffacable memory lithograph of Rome was neither Michelangelo's architectural triumph nor Victor Emmanuel's incongruous monument, neither the orange tree planted by Saint Dominic beside the Church of Santa Sabina nor even a pair of decrepit columns surmounted by a block of travertine in the Forum to constitute the portals of the past...

...And it may be that the observer will recall that once when that empire was at the summit of its splendor and renown two fanatical Jews— trouble-makers they and incendiaries, for had they not disturbed men's thoughts?—lay yonder in the pestilential Mamertine prison awaiting execution...

...Modem Rome is not papal Rome...

...And today they are ornamental things, those once potent, those once sacred symbols, and outlanders and descendants of savages literally tread them under foot in the very city of the Caesars...

...For empires fall and sports decay, but love lives on and on...

...Yes, the past is here...

...For religion, cavil as we will, lives on in this city of thei dead...

...bobbed-haired tourists with Kokomo, Indiana, inflections uttering commonplaces on the site of Sallust's villa...

...Rome is the Eternal City because it is so redolent of the past...

...And we who come hither from the ends of the earth, from states unborn when Caesar fell, we who lisp in strange tongues and wear queer garments and think so many thoughts unthinkable alike on the Palatine in the days of the Gracchi and on the Pincio when Galileo from the garden of his sumptuous prison scrutinized the stars, what can this sepulchre of cities mean to us ? The answer I found, incongruously enough, in the Gallery of Modern Art in the Julian valley, where stands a bronze statuette by Daniele de Strobel, II FanciuUo e la Morte...

...A truth, yes...

...Without water men cannot live, and here was evidence, so eloquent because so mute, that generations which thirsted once and had theii' thirst appeased are thirstless now forever...

...the letters that symbolized the imperial civilization...

...And as he gazes on, the boy may reflect that the fair and prideful Forum is as wretched a thing as the poor blind beggar who haunts the portico of Saint Paul's Outside the Walls, and that the Mamertine, with its altar and its perennial spring, and with its black walls smoothed by countless reverent hands and its pavement worn by the endless passing of devotional feet, is as much a tribute to the two Jews who once lay there and as much a triumph of the ideas for which they died as the matchless basilica of Saint Peter's across the Tiber...

...A nude boy, digging with a' mattock, has unearthed a skull, and the artist has fixed forever the resulting mood of horror and perplexity and dawning realization...

...The mattock falls from his hands and he turns away his head, this Hamlet so pathetically young, for beyond and beneath the warmth and the fragrance of the summer day and the flowers and the sunshine of that summer garden, he has glimpsed a truth of life and of history clear and implacable and grim...

...Probably he was only carrying delicacies to some invalid in one of the little white houses yonder, but he was treading the same Flaminian way which through the Christian centuries evangelists and missionaries have trod to bear from the city to the world the good tidings of peace...

...A modern railroad station opening upon the Baths of Diocletian...

...within the very shadow of the Aurelian Wall a jazz band interpreting Yes, We Have No Bananas...

...And then last night, "when the moon's lamp was prodigal of light," I visited the Colosseum...

...Then, from the city, through the dust raised by the passing of the troops, emerged a brown-robed monk, a basket on his arm, the quiet light of purpose in his eyes and a smile induced of inner joy lurking in his bearded face...

...Could there have been a more cruelly graphic reminder that the title of Eternal City thinly hide^ a bitter paradox...

...but the city lives—and shall ultimately die—^because it is human, while the Papacy lives because it is divine...

...Long I sat in the shadows on a bit of old marble and mused...

...As I stood leaning on the parapet a troop of Italian cavalry came by at a walk, the hoofs of the horses clattering on the stones...

...And there Hamlet will find at his feet the ruins of the ForumHere stood the marsh which the Tarquin drained, and here the pomp and pride and glory of the greatest material empire the world has ever known...

...Upon the steps of the gay red and yellow trolley cars—ironic reminder of the scarlet and gold of the legions of imperial Rome—are graven the historic initials, S. P. Q. R. To know even a little history is to have the imagnation fired at sight of those letters, the letters that went wherever Roman arms and Roman equity went, the letters that took their place in the court and in the field beside the standards and the eagles—the letters that symbolized what seemed so strong and aggressive, so certain to endure...

...but not the whole truth...

...sometimes it is the way of life toi blast our visions that we may see the truth...

...But, it might be argued, the past endures...

...The other morning I walked out to the famous Milvian Bridge where Constantine defeated Maxentius...

...and their playing, oddly enough, harmonized perfectly with the mood and the place...

...Winding about, the train approached the time-scarred aqueduct from every angle...

...But Saint Peter's—is not that alive ? Yes, gloriously alive and inconceivably beautiful with its profusion of bright gold and cool marble, the lamps ever burning about the Fisherman's Tomb revealing so impressively what it is and what it means...

...Inevitably the realization comes that the empire is as a grinning skull upturned by the random stroke of a gardener's spade while the truth of the Lord remaineth forever...

...You cannot ignore the aqueduct, or the remnants of the Circus Maximus or the Catacombs along the Appian Way...

...But Saint Peter's stands today something apart from Rome...

...Near me two young Italian boys played softly on guitars—not jazz, thank heaven, but sweet and lulling music, for their sweethearts were with them...

...And when, still whistling, the train rattled through one of the aqueduct's blackened arches, we knew that verily we had passed through the gates of Rome...

...And it required but little imagination to see, not those gawky boys and weary officers, but the legions of imperial Rome returning from some conquest in Gaul or Spain or Britain, the garlanded victor in his chariot and the captives dragging behind him in chains...

...The hope was not realized...

...Indeed, to thd Papacy ever so many things in the Rome of today—like the names of streets and the bumptiousness of monuments—are standing insults and taunts of defiance...

...The longer you stay in Rome and the better you come to know it, the more clearly you see that that greenery growing on the aqueduct but not drawing its sustenance therefrom is a symbol of the antithesis between the past and the present in the so-called Eternal City...

...And thus it is that the past is with us in Rome...

...Whatever it may have been and whatever it may have meant when the Popes were earthly rulers and the arbiters of kingg, today Saint Peter's, alive with a life that is not of earth, stands apart equally from the living present and from the dead and desecrated past...