A Few Other Roman Neighbourhoods - Page 2

loyalty attends us as a hovering admonitory,
anticipatory ghost, one of those magnanimous life-companions who
before complete extinction designate to the other member of the
union their approved successor. So it is at any rate that I
conceive the pilgrim old enough to have become aware in all these
later years of what he misses to be counselled and pacified in
the interest of recognitions that shall a little make up for it.

It was this wisdom I was putting into practice, no doubt, for
instance, when I lately resigned myself to motoring of a splendid
June day "out to" Subiaco; as a substitute for a resignation that
had anciently taken, alas, but the form of my never getting there
at all. Everything that day, moreover, seemed right, surely;
everything on certain other days that were like it through their
large indebtedness, at this, that and the other point, to the
last new thing, seemed so right that they come back to me now,
after a moderate interval, in the full light of that unchallenged
felicity. I couldn't at all gloriously recall, for instance, as I
floated to Subiaco on vast brave wings, how on the occasion of my
first visit to Rome, thirty-eight years before, I had devoted
certain evenings, evenings of artless "preparation" in my room at
the inn, to the perusal of Alphonse Dantier's admirable
Monastères Bénédictins d'ltalie, taking piously for
granted that I should get myself somehow conveyed to Monte
Cassino and to Subiaco at least: such an affront to the passion
of curiosity, the generally infatuated state then kindled, would
any suspicion of my foredoomed, my all but interminable,
privation during visits to come have seemed to me. Fortune, in
the event, had never favoured my going, but I was to give myself
up at last to the sense of her quite taking me by the hand, and
that is how I now think of our splendid June day at Subiaco. The
note of the wondrous place itself is conventional "wild" Italy
raised to the highest intensity, the ideally, the sublimely
conventional and wild, complete and supreme in itself, without a
disparity or a flaw; which character of perfect picturesque
orthodoxy seemed more particularly to begin for me, I remember,
as we passed, on our way, through that indescribable and
indestructible Tivoli, where the jumble of the elements of the
familiarly and exploitedly, the all too notoriously fair and
queer, was more violent and vociferous than ever--so the whole
spectacle there seemed at once to rejoice in cockneyfication and
to resist it. There at least I had old memories to renew--
including that in especial, from a few years back, of one of the
longest, hottest, dustiest return-drives to Rome that the
Campagna on