Chapter 5

CHAPTER V. Christina

The brilliant Roman winter came round again, and Rowland enjoyed it,
in a certain way, more deeply than before. He grew at last to feel that
sense of equal possession, of intellectual nearness, which it belongs
to the peculiar magic of the ancient city to infuse into minds of a
cast that she never would have produced. He became passionately,
unreasoningly fond of all Roman sights and sensations, and to breathe
the Roman atmosphere began to seem a needful condition of being. He
could not have defined and explained the nature of his great love, nor
have made up the sum of it by the addition of his calculable pleasures.
It was a large, vague, idle, half-profitless emotion, of which perhaps
the most pertinent thing that may be said is that it enforced a sort of
oppressive reconciliation to the present, the actual, the sensuous--to
life on the terms that there offered themselves. It was perhaps for this
very reason that, in spite of the charm which Rome flings over
one's mood, there ran through Rowland's meditations an undertone of
melancholy, natural enough in a mind which finds its horizon insidiously
limited to the finite, even in very picturesque forms. Whether it is one
that tacitly concedes to the Roman Church the monopoly of a guarantee
of immortality, so that if one is indisposed to bargain with her for
the precious gift, one must do without it altogether; or whether in an
atmosphere so heavily weighted with echoes and memories one grows
to believe that there is nothing in one's consciousness that is not
foredoomed to moulder and crumble and become dust for the feet, and
possible malaria for the lungs, of future generations--the fact at least
remains that one parts half-willingly with one's hopes in Rome, and
misses them only under some very exceptional stress of circumstance. For
this reason one may perhaps say that there is no other place in which
one's daily temper has such a mellow serenity, and none, at the same
time, in which acute attacks of depression are more intolerable. Rowland
found, in fact, a perfect response to his prevision that to live in Rome
was an education to one's senses and one's imagination, but he sometimes
wondered whether this was not a questionable gain in case of one's not
being prepared to live wholly by one's imagination and one's senses. The
tranquil profundity of his daily satisfaction seemed sometimes to
turn, by a mysterious inward impulse, and face itself with questioning,
admonishing, threatening eyes. "But afterwards...?" it seemed to
ask, with a long reverberation; and he could give no answer but a shy
affirmation that there was no such thing as afterwards, and a hope,
divided against itself, that his actual way of life would last forever.