Travels with Henry James by Henry James

Author:Henry James
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781568585789
Publisher: Nation Books
Published: 2016-09-15T16:00:00+00:00

THE AFTER-SEASON AT ROME

May 20, 1873

The Spanish Steps, ca. 1908.

ONE MAY SAY WITHOUT INJUSTICE TO ANY BODY THAT THE state of mind of a great many foreigners in Rome is one of intense impatience for the moment when all other foreigners shall have departed. One may confess to this state of mind, and be no misanthrope. Rome has passed so completely for the winter months into the hands of the barbarians that that estimable character, the “quiet observer,” finds it constantly harder to concentrate his attention. He has an irritating sense of his impressions being perverted and adulterated; the venerable visage of Rome betrays an unbecoming eagerness to see itself mirrored in English, American, German eyes. It is not simply that you are never first or never alone at the classic or historic spots where you have dreamt of persuading the shy genius loci into confidential utterance; it is not simply that St. Peter’s, the Vatican, the Palatine, are for ever ringing with English voices: it is the general oppressive feeling that the city of the soul has become for the time a monstrous mixture of the watering-place and the curiosity-shop, and that its most ardent life is that of the tourists who haggle over false intaglios, and yawn through palaces and temples. But you are told of a happy time when these abuses begin to pass away, when Rome becomes Rome again, and you may have it all to yourself. “You may like Rome more or less now,” I was told during the height of the season; “but you must wait till the month of May to love it. Then the foreigners, or the excess of them, are gone; the galleries and ruins are empty, and the place,” said my informant, who was a Frenchman, “renaît à elle-méme,” Indeed, I was haunted all winter by an irresistible prevision of what Rome must be in spring. Certain charming places seemed to murmur: “Ah, this is nothing! Come back in May, and see the sky above us almost black with its excess of blue, and the new grass already deep, but still vivid, and the white roses tumbling in odorous spray over the walls, and the warm radiant air dropping gold into all our coloring.”

A month ago I spent a week in the country, and on my return, the first time I went into the Corso, I became conscious of a change. Something very pleasant had happened, but at first I was at a loss to define it. Then suddenly I comprehended—there were but half as many people, and these were chiefly good Italians. There had been a great exodus, and now, physically, morally, aesthetically, there was elbow-room. In the afternoon I went to the Pincio, and the Pincio was almost dull. The band was playing to a dozen ladies, as they lay in their landaus, poising their lace-fringed parasols; but they had only one light-gloved dandy apiece hanging over their carriage-doors. By the parapet of the great terrace which sweeps

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