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_ On the appointed afternoon, Kenyon failed not to make his appearance
in the Corso, and at an hour much earlier than Miriam had named.
It was carnival time. The merriment of this famous festival was in
full progress; and the stately avenue of the Corso was peopled with
hundreds of fantastic shapes, some of which probably represented the
mirth of ancient times, surviving through all manner of calamity, ever
since the days of the Roman Empire. For a few afternoons of early
spring, this mouldy gayety strays into the sunshine; all the remainder
of the year, it seems to be shut up in the catacombs or some other
sepulchral storehouse of the past.
Besides these hereditary forms, at which a hundred generations have
laughed, there were others of modern date, the humorous effluence of
the day that was now passing. It is a day, however, and an age, that
appears to be remarkably barren, when compared with the prolific
originality of former times, in productions of a scenic and ceremonial
character, whether grave or gay. To own the truth, the Carnival is
alive, this present year, only because it has existed through
centuries gone by. It is traditionary, not actual. If decrepit and
melancholy Rome smiles, and laughs broadly, indeed, at carnival time,
it is not in the old simplicity of real mirth, but with a
half-conscious effort, like our self-deceptive pretence of jollity at
a threadbare joke. Whatever it may once have been, it is now but a
narrow stream of merriment, noisy of set purpose, running along the
middle of the Corso, through the solemn heart of the decayed city,
without extending its shallow influence on either side. Nor, even
within its own limits, does it affect the mass of spectators, but only
a comparatively few, in street and balcony, who carry on the warfare
of nosegays and counterfeit sugar plums. The populace look on with
staid composure; the nobility and priesthood take little or no part in
the matter; and, but for the hordes of Anglo-Saxons who annually take
up the flagging mirth, the Carnival might long ago have been swept
away, with the snowdrifts of confetti that whiten all the pavement.
No doubt, however, the worn-out festival is still new to the youthful
and light hearted, who make the worn-out world itself as fresh as Adam
found it on his first forenoon in Paradise. It may be only age and
care that chill the life out of its grotesque and airy riot, with the
impertinence of their cold criticism.
Kenyon, though young, had care enough within his breast to render the
Carnival the emptiest of mockeries. Contrasting the stern anxiety of
his present mood with the frolic spirit of the preceding year, he
fancied that so much trouble had, at all events, brought wisdom in its
train. But there is a wisdom that looks grave, and sneers at
merriment; and again a deeper wisdom, that stoops to be gay as often
as occasion serves, and oftenest avails itself of shallow and trifling
grounds of mirth; because, if we wait for more substantial ones, we
seldom can be gay at all. Therefore, had it been possible, Kenyon
would have done well to mask himself in some wild, hairy visage, and
plunge into the throng of other maskers, as at the Carnival before.
Then Donatello had danced along the Corso in all the equipment of a
Faun, doing the part with wonderful felicity of execution, and
revealing furry ears, which looked absolutely real; and Miriam had
been alternately a lady of the antique regime, in powder and brocade,
and the prettiest peasant girl of the Campagna, in the gayest of
costumes; while Hilda, sitting demurely in a balcony, had hit the
sculptor with a single rosebud,--so sweet and fresh a bud that he knew
at once whose hand had flung it.
These were all gone; all those dear friends whose sympathetic mirth
had made him gay. Kenyon felt as if an interval of many years had
passed since the last Carnival. He had grown old, the nimble jollity
was tame, and the maskers dull and heavy; the Corso was but a narrow
and shabby street of decaying palaces; and even the long, blue
streamer of Italian sky, above it, not half so brightly blue as
formerly.
Yet, if he could have beheld the scene with his clear, natural
eyesight, he might still have found both merriment and splendor in it.
Everywhere, and all day long, there had been tokens of the festival,
in the baskets brimming over with bouquets, for sale at the street
corners, or borne about on people's heads; while bushels upon bushels
of variously colored confetti were displayed, looking just like
veritable sugar plums; so that a stranger would have imagined that the
whole commerce and business of stern old Rome lay in flowers and
sweets. And now, in the sunny afternoon, there could hardly be a
spectacle more picturesque than the vista of that noble street,
stretching into the interminable distance between two rows of lofty
edifices, from every window of which, and many a balcony, flaunted gay
and gorgeous carpets, bright silks, scarlet cloths with rich golden
fringes, and Gobelin tapestry, still lustrous with varied hues, though
the product of antique looms. Each separate palace had put on a gala
dress, and looked festive for the occasion, whatever sad or guilty
secret it might hide within. Every window, moreover, was alive with
the faces of women, rosy girls, and children, all kindled into brisk
and mirthful expression, by the incidents in the street below. In the
balconies that projected along the palace fronts stood groups of
ladies, some beautiful, all richly dressed, scattering forth their
laughter, shrill, yet sweet, and the musical babble of their voices,
to thicken into an airy tumult over the heads of common mortals.
All these innumerable eyes looked down into the street, the whole
capacity of which was thronged with festal figures, in such fantastic
variety that it had taken centuries to contrive them; and through the
midst of the mad, merry stream of human life rolled slowly onward a
never-ending procession of all the vehicles in Rome, from the ducal
carriage, with the powdered coachman high in front, and the three
golden lackeys clinging in the rear, down to the rustic cart drawn by
its single donkey. Among this various crowd, at windows and in
balconies, in cart, cab, barouche, or gorgeous equipage, or bustling
to and fro afoot, there was a sympathy of nonsense; a true and genial
brotherhood and sisterhood, based on the honest purpose--and a wise
one, too--of being foolish, all together. The sport of mankind, like
its deepest earnest, is a battle; so these festive people fought one
another with an ammunition of sugar plums and flowers.
Not that they were veritable sugar plums, however, but something that
resembled them only as the apples of Sodom look like better fruit.
They were concocted mostly of lime, with a grain of oat, or some other
worthless kernel, in the midst. Besides the hailstorm of confetti,
the combatants threw handfuls of flour or lime into the air, where it
hung like smoke over a battlefield, or, descending, whitened a black
coat or priestly robe, and made the curly locks of youth irreverently
hoary.
At the same time with this acrid contest of quicklime, which caused
much effusion of tears from suffering eyes, a gentler warfare of
flowers was carried on, principally between knights and ladies.
Originally, no doubt, when this pretty custom was first instituted, it
may have had a sincere and modest import. Each youth and damsel,
gathering bouquets of field flowers, or the sweetest and fairest that
grew in their own gardens, all fresh and virgin blossoms, flung them
with true aim at the one, or few, whom they regarded with a sentiment
of shy partiality at least, if not with love. Often, the lover in the
Corso may thus have received from his bright mistress, in her father's
princely balcony, the first sweet intimation that his passionate
glances had not struck against a heart of marble. What more
appropriate mode of suggesting her tender secret could a maiden find
than by the soft hit of a rosebud against a young man's cheek?
This was the pastime and the earnest of a more innocent and homelier
age. Nowadays the nosegays are gathered and tied up by sordid hands,
chiefly of the most ordinary flowers, and are sold along the Corso, at
mean price, yet more than such Venal things are worth. Buying a
basketful, you find them miserably wilted, as if they had flown hither
and thither through two or three carnival days already; muddy, too,
having been fished up from the pavement, where a hundred feet have
trampled on them. You may see throngs of men and boys who thrust
themselves beneath the horses' hoofs to gather up bouquets that were
aimed amiss from balcony and carriage; these they sell again, and yet
once more, and ten times over, defiled as they all are with the wicked
filth of Rome.
Such are the flowery favors--the fragrant bunches of sentiment--that
fly between cavalier and dame, and back again, from one end of the
Corso to the other. Perhaps they may symbolize, more aptly than was
intended, the poor, battered, wilted hearts of those who fling them;
hearts which--crumpled and crushed by former possessors, and stained
with various mishap--have been passed from hand to hand along the
muddy street-way of life, instead of being treasured in one faithful
bosom.
These venal and polluted flowers, therefore, and those deceptive
bonbons, are types of the small reality that still subsists in the
observance of the Carnival. Yet the government seemed to imagine that
there might be excitement enough,--wild mirth, perchance, following
its antics beyond law, and frisking from frolic into earnest,--to
render it expedient to guard the Corso with an imposing show of
military power. Besides the ordinary force of gendarmes, a strong
patrol of papal dragoons, in steel helmets and white cloaks, were
stationed at all the street corners. Detachments of French infantry
stood by their stacked muskets in the Piazza del Popolo, at one
extremity of the course, and before the palace of the Austrian embassy,
at the other, and by the column of Antoninus, midway between. Had
that chained tiger-cat, the Roman populace, shown only so much as the
tip of his claws, the sabres would have been flashing and the bullets
whistling, in right earnest, among the combatants who now pelted one
another with mock sugar plums and wilted flowers.
But, to do the Roman people justice, they were restrained by a better
safeguard than the sabre or the bayonet; it was their own gentle
courtesy, which imparted a sort of sacredness to the hereditary
festival. At first sight of a spectacle so fantastic and extravagant,
a cool observer might have imagined the whole town gone mad; but, in
the end, he would see that all this apparently unbounded license is
kept strictly within a limit of its own; he would admire a people who
can so freely let loose their mirthful propensities, while muzzling
those fiercer ones that tend to mischief. Everybody seemed lawless;
nobody was rude. If any reveller overstepped the mark, it was sure to
be no Roman, but an Englishman or an American; and even the rougher
play of this Gothic race was still softened by the insensible
influence of a moral atmosphere more delicate, in some respects, than
we breathe at home. Not that, after all, we like the fine Italian
spirit better than our own; popular rudeness is sometimes the symptom
of rude moral health. But, where a Carnival is in question, it would
probably pass off more decorously, as well as more airily and
delightfully, in Rome, than in any Anglo-Saxon city.
When Kenyon emerged from a side lane into the Corso, the mirth was at
its height. Out of the seclusion of his own feelings, he looked forth
at the tapestried and damask-curtained palaces, the slow-moving double
line of carriages, and the motley maskers that swarmed on foot, as if
he were gazing through the iron lattice of a prison window. So remote
from the scene were his sympathies, that it affected him like a thin
dream, through the dim, extravagant material of which he could discern
more substantial objects, while too much under its control to start
forth broad awake. Just at that moment, too, there came another
spectacle, making its way right through the masquerading throng.
It was, first and foremost, a full band of martial music,
reverberating, in that narrow and confined though stately avenue,
between the walls of the lofty palaces, and roaring upward to the sky
with melody so powerful that it almost grew to discord. Next came a
body of cavalry and mounted gendarmes, with great display of military
pomp. They were escorting a long train of equipages, each and all of
which shone as gorgeously as Cinderella's coach, with paint and
gilding. Like that, too, they were provided with coachmen of mighty
breadth, and enormously tall footmen, in immense powdered wigs, and
all the splendor of gold-laced, three cornered hats, and embroidered
silk coats and breeches. By the old-fashioned magnificence of this
procession, it might worthily have included his Holiness in person,
with a suite of attendant Cardinals, if those sacred dignitaries would
kindly have lent their aid to heighten the frolic of the Carnival.
But, for all its show of a martial escort, and its antique splendor of
costume, it was but a train of the municipal authorities of Rome,
--illusive shadows, every one, and among them a phantom, styled the
Roman Senator,--proceeding to the Capitol.
The riotous interchange of nosegays and confetti was partially
suspended, while the procession passed. One well-directed shot,
however,--it was a double handful of powdered lime, flung by an
impious New Englander,--hit the coachman of the Roman Senator full in
the face, and hurt his dignity amazingly. It appeared to be his
opinion that the Republic was again crumbling into ruin, and that the
dust of it now filled his nostrils; though, in fact, it would hardly
be distinguished from the official powder with which he was already
plentifully bestrewn.
While the sculptor, with his dreamy eyes, was taking idle note of this
trifling circumstance, two figures passed before him, hand in hand.
The countenance of each was covered with an impenetrable black mask;
but one seemed a peasant of the Campagna; the other, a contadina in
her holiday costume. _
Read next: VOLUME II: CHAPTER XLIX - A FROLIC OF THE CARNIVAL
Read previous: VOLUME II: CHAPTER XLVII - THE PEASANT AND CONTADINA
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