THE OLD ROME AND THE NEW
AND OTHER STUDIES
By the same Author
BILLY AND HANS:
A TRUE HISTORY
With Pictures by LIZA STILLMAN
ONE SHILLING
BLISS, SANDS & Co., BURI.KIGH STREET,
LONDON
The Old Rome and the New
AND
Other Studies
W. J. STILLMAN
AUTHOR OK "ON THE TRACK OF ULYSSES," "EARLY ITALIAN
PAINTERS," ETC.
LONDON
GRANT RICHARDS
9 HENRIETTA STREKT, COVENT GARDEN
l8 97
To
Professor CHARLES ELIOT NORTON of Harvard
University, sole survivor of that luminous circle in
which once shone Lowell, Longfellow, Emerson,
Holmes, Agassis, etc. circle to whose intellectual
hospitality I owe my imprimatur for American
letters this Volume is affectionately dedicated, in
memory of our forty years of fraternal relation
and sympathy.
THE AUTHOR
b
35.') 1 9
PREFACE
The papers comprised in this volume have been
printed in various magazines and reviews in
England and America during the years between
1867 (My Experience in a Greek Quarantine) to
1895 (The Old Rome and the New), the only earlier
paper being " The Subjective of It" the date of
tvhich I cannot recall, nearer than to say that it
^vas one of the first contributions I made to the
Atlantic, when Lowell was the Editor, and its
articles were printed anonymously. They are
selections from the wreckage of a life which has
reached the limits beyond which it cannot be said
that there is no hope, but at which reasonable men
should be resigned if there should be none, and
at which the highest good seems tranquillity, and
the highest ivisdom resignation. Of that life in
its entirety, not uninteresting in adventure, and
marked by some strange experiences in men and
things, I hope shortly to tell the story. The most
of what I have written during it is well lost, un-
signed in pages of periodicals from which I have
no desire to hunt it out. But the natural and
harmless vanity of a man who has earned his
bread by literature is to hope that something may
survive him, which shall serve to keep him alive,
at least in the memory of his descendants and
PREFACE
those of the friends ivho walked the same road
with him, at the same time. And with this let
us be content few, indeed, are they whose writing
survives their epoch, and in the multitudinous drift
of humanity into oblivion, let us console ourselves
that we are always in the enormous majority.
Beginning, as most young writers do, with more
ambition than sound knowledge of my competence,
I had the good fortune to learn soon that the
opinions of young men are rarely worth preserving,
though their art may be so, and I then decided
that I would publish nothing before I should be
forty: when I was forty I postponed to fifty : at
fifty I said, sixty is not too late: and at sixty I
had still too much to learn and I would trust to
seventy. And now, at seventy, I would fain wait
a little longer, were eighty assured, feeling my
incompetence more keenly than even at thirty.
Partial infractions of such a resolution could not
be avoided by a man who had only his pen in
place of a fortune, but I can honestly say that of
my own ambition I have sent out nothing between
book-covers except from a sense of the obligation
to make known things which I thought the world
ought to know, like the history of the Cretan in-
surrection of 1866, and the heroic revolt of the
Slavs of Herzegovina in 1876. But I have been
true to my principles in that, though what I wrote
in my immaturer state is now put forth in a book,
I have revised and re-considered what I then wrote,
and am prepared to stand or fall in the opinion
of my critics by what is printed. Whatever there
PREFACE
is of narration in the following pages is fact, even
to the curious experience recorded in " The Subjec-
tive of It" with the exception of an unimportant
detail in the Quarantine story, which as a whole is
a re-arrangement of actual incidents, but dratvn
from two distinct experiences; but where they are
the expression of opinions I hold them with a
deference for that collective wisdom which finally
prevails over all error. I belong to my epoch and
do not pretend to be wiser than it; and if in
relation to Art I hold my opinions strongly, it is
because I have done my best during fifty years to
fit myself by the study of all early and great Art
to form them. If in the two Art studies there
are repetitions, this was hardly to be avoided in
two papers written with a long interval for differ-
ent periodicals on the same theme. The same idea
appears in different relations, and to condense the
two into a single article I found impossible. Let
me hope that repetitio juvat.
Milford, Surrey, 1897.
CONTENTS
PAGE
THE OLD ROME AND THE NEW ... 1
MARATHON AND ITS BRIGANDS ... 25
MY EXPERIENCE IN A GREEK QUARANTINE . 40
AN AMERICAN'S REVERIE OVER LONDON . . 63
JOHN RUSKIN . . . . . 92
A FEW OF LOWELL'S LETTERS . . . 128
THE DECAY OF ART . . . . 168
THE REVIVAL OF ART . . . .198
THE SUBJECTIVE OF IT . . . . 232
THE PHILOSOPHERS' CAMP 265
THE OLD ROME AND THE NEW
THERE is something in the fascination of Rome
that escapes my power of analysis. A genera-
tion has passed, and a second is on its way, since
I first came under its witchery; everything is
changed in it that can be changed in a city;
what can be done to break the antique charm
has been done, as if in malice mutilation, reno-
vation, desecration: and still it keeps the charm,
like a masterpiece of Greek sculpture which has
gone through the hands of barbarians, and come
out shattered, maimed, and so defaced that only
the eye of an artist can see what the artist
meant by it. It is not its history nor its topo-
graphy, neither its architecture nor its art, that
makes it what it is : something of all these,
perhaps, but beyond these something that defies
definition a kind of spiritual polarity which
made it from the beginning the point to which
turned whatever there was of aspiration in the
Old World, and, long before the first wall was
built on either Aventine or Palatine, determined
its history fatally ; and that, time after time,
when an enemy had broken its strength and
subjected its people, brought the remnant back
to renew the struggle against time, and make
the declaration of eternity, " Urbs Eterna." It
A
2 THE OLD ROME AND THE NEW
is not by many the oldest imperial site, and it
has absorbed cities centuries older than itself,
and which were probably such when the Ager
Romanus was being formed by the eruptions of
the Alban volcanoes. For Rome is built on some
of the newest land on the earth, and Father
Tiber once found the sea at the northern edge of
the plain. The wandering tribes of Latin shep-
herds, who built their huts on the Aventine,
probably came down from their Sabine hills as
soon as the cinders turned to soil, and goats found
browsing and sheep grazing; and ever since men
have obeyed this unique attraction.
In Hellas humanity found the expression of the
virtues and qualities, weak and strong, of its
youth : art, poetry, the perception of the beautiful,
the first maturing of philosophic intuition, the
harmony and the inspiration of a happy, healthy,
intellectual life, over which no shadow of oppres-
sion, spiritual or political, had come the perfect
perception of the beautiful and the ideal which is
the visible form of the spiritually true; and with
these defects of youth, that precocious humanity
which was never to become manhood, but which
would never again be rivalled as youth. In Rome
humanity "came of age," as we say of the
youth of twenty-one; judgment and power and
common sense, the strong hand of empery, the
fixed determination of him who has found his
vocation, namely, to rule the world, came to it.
Here the civic virtues set up their school ; heroism
of the sterner vein, law, which brought the
THE OLD ROME AND THE NEW 3
sacrifice of the impulse to principle, and the
individual to the state, and so evolved civilisation
and empire. What the Greek was in his bloom-
time he remains, less the virtues which belong
to youth, plus the vices of decay. So the Roman
ran through the flush of manhood to its decline;
youth he never had, and a serene and sublime old
age he did not reach, but the manhood was long
and tenacious, dying finally by the vices of man-
hood as the Greek by the vices of youth, yet
dying hard and late. It was as if the Roman
character were exhaled from the soil, and possessed
from birth a dogged vitality like that of some of
the lower organisms, foreign to all ideal beyond
that of the Civis Romanus ; producing at no epoch
the finer fruits of the human nature ; borrowing
its religion from Etruria, Greece, Egypt, Jerusalem,
or Constantinople, its art from Athens or Tuscany ;
no great original artist* ever to this day coming
to the surface from the depths of that state-
incrusted existence. All that was finest the
Roman had to borrow, but he borrowed it as he
learned to use it. Only one thing Rome created
for humanity as Greece had created art the
organisation of the res publica and law, which is
its logarithm.
But why Rome should have fallen where it did
is to me inexplicable. Climb the Capitol tower,
and you see below you a group of insignificant
* With the sole exception, so far as I know, of Giovanni Costa, the
living landscape painter, one of the type of Th. Rousseau, whom he
resembles more than any other.
4 THE OLD ROME AND THE NEW
elevations in the midst of a wide plain, bounded
on two sides by ranges of limestone hills, the
nurseries of the Volscian, Hernican, Sabine, Um-
brian, and Etruscan powers; and on the other
two the plain melts into the sea, some fifteen
miles away. It is neither a sea site nor a hill
site, this group of little hillocks, which the ancients
called their seven monies and we call the "seven
hills." Nor, puzzling my brains for years, have I
ever been able to understand why, from physical
causes, Rome should have been Rome, and Athens
only Athens. I used to think, when reading the-
-dEneid at school, that ^neas was a fiction of
Roman vanity, envious of the demigod founders
of other states; but, divested of some of the
purely mythological elements, the Trojan migra-
tion to Latium is shown, by the most recent
archaeological discoveries, to have some foundation
in fact. To get at it, however, we must first
understand that the Trojans were a race of the
same stock as the Greeks, and that the feud
which ended in a struggle that is known, or
symbolised, as the siege of Troy, was really the
first recorded of the rivalries by which the Greeks
committed racial suicide, not a war between Asia
and Europe. The more I study the evidences of
authenticity in the ancient traditions, even those
which are so mingled with theistic mythology
that we have generally considered them as in-
explicable fable, the more I am convinced that
usually these traditions contain a solid basis of
historical fact. Through the series relating to
THE OLD ROME AND THE NEW 5
the Greek and Italian civilisations there runs a
thread indicating an extremely early community,
and that the movement began in Italy and went
eastward to Asia Minor, returning later through
Greece to Italy. Of this movement, known in all
the early traditions as Pelasgic, the Greek and
Trojan agglomerations were final and contem-
porary results. Amongst the traditions bearing
directly on the Pelasgic origin of Troy is one
recorded by Yirgil, who says that Dardanus came
from Italy. He is supposed to have gone from
Cortona, which was the stronghold and latest
refuge of the Pelasgi, so far as we know, and we
have the tradition of the building of the first
walls of Troy by Hercules and Neptune, who were
distinctly Pelasgic gods, of the stock of Saturn,
whose realm was Italy. The worship of Athena,
the patroness of Troy, and the protection offered
by Juno, the patroness of the Argives, the heirs
and descendants of the wall-building Pelasgi in
the Peloponnesus, a protection so warm as to
cool her friendship for the Argives themselves,
are further arguments for the identity of the
races; and the subsequent migrations of Trojans
and Greeks together to Italy and Sicily bring us
almost to historical tradition. Segestse was settled
by a band of Greeks with a Trojan leader, and
the earliest traditions of Trojan movements
mention the presence of Greeks. Virgil represents
the settlement in the Tiber region of ^3neas and
his clan, while we have the corresponding tradi-
tion that Falerii was founded by a colony from
6 THE OLD ROME AND THE NEW
Argos, who built there a copy of the great temple
of Hera in the Argolid. The recent excavations
on the site of that city show that, though for
centuries considered Etruscan, and really included
in the so-called Etruscan league against Rome,
Falerii was never Etruscan, but for centuries
preserved its Greek character, becoming Italicised
only shortly before the period of the great Roman
movement northward, not far from the time
when Veii came under the rule of Rome.
The systematic excavations being made in the
country about Rome have had for one surprising
result, besides showing that the Greek individuality
of Falerii was preserved till the Roman conquest,
the indication that the influence of the Greek
colonisation of that city, or something accom-
panying it, extended over the entire region,
traces of the same arts being found at Antemnae,
Lanuvium, Alatri, and Veii. This does not apply
to the ordinary art of Etruria, which was derived
from the Greek, but took on a colour of Etruscan
temperament in its development ; for this Faliscan
art is quite distinct in all its forms from anything
Etruscan, and it maintains its type to the period
just prior to the Roman dominion. The objects
found in the Faliscan excavations, now in the new
Roman museum of the Villa Julia, give us the
history of that city from the earliest period of
Italic civilisation to the destruction by the Romans.
The first pages of this record .tell the universal
story of the Italic tribes from the shores of the
Basilicata to the Apennines a common civilisation
THE OLD ROME AND THE NEW 7
extending back to an epoch of immense antiquity,
which the students of it think they can carry
back beyond fifteen centuries B.C. It is probable
that this was a composite race in which the
Siculi, the Umbri, and the Pelasgi were the prin-
cipal elements, the last dominating until merged
in the Italic. The distinctive Greek contributions
in the stratification of the deposits begin not
later than the eighth century B.C., Attic pottery
being found in the tombs, but of an extremely
archaic type; and the evidence grows stronger
till the sixth century, when the ceramics are very
largely of well-known Attic types, and, though
always accompanied by home-made ware of a
rude character, finally reach the highest attain-
ment of Greek production. The tombs also give
evidence of great riches and intimate commerce
with Greece, vases being found bearing names of
Attic painters. During the sixth and fifth cen-
turies the Attic influence is supreme; with the
fourth a change takes place, and the imported
work appears no longer, but in its place a Faliscan
art, which is in some cases of extreme beauty,
though it is the beauty of the decline of art,
which continues till the time of the destruction.
The fragments of the statuary found in the
temples are of a pure Greek art, and though of
terra cotta they are as fine as anything of the
fourth and third centuries discovered in Greece.
The inscriptions which appear in the fourth
century are in Latin, archaic but distinctly Latin,
and one vase, which is an excellent copy of Greek
8 THE OLD ROME AND THE NEW
work, bears the names of the Olympian deities
in the Greek characters of the time, but in Latin
"Minerva" for "Athena," "Cupido" for "Eros," and
"Zeus Pater" for "Zeus." The Latinisation has
become complete. The beginning of this change,
and the severance from Greece and the loss of
Greek commerce must have taken place about
a century before the time of the capture of Veii
and Falerii by the Romans.
The slight researches in the Ager Veientinus
have given similar objects; and as we know that
the patroness of Veii was Juno, shown by the
Legend of the taking of the city and the removal
of the image of that goddess to the Aventine, we
may expect that in the future systematic excava-
tions we shall find the same evidences of the
affinity of that city with Falerii which we find
both nearer and farther away. Thus, the revela-
tions of archaeology confirm the Virgilian tradition,
and that other which states that before Rome
there was an Hellenic influence imposed on the
development of the Tiber valley, and that, under
the hypothesis that the Trojan and Greek were
of the same stock, it may literally be true that a
Trojan chief led a band of emigrants to the Latin
shores; but the tradition of the foundation of
Alba Longa, like that of every other foundation
by the Greek migrations, must be taken as mean-
ing that the emigrants occupied a city already in
existence, and apparently united with the former
population. When the same kind of researches
which have been so productive at Falerii shall
THE OLD ROME AND THE NEW 9
have been carried out at Ardea, Lavinium, and
Laurentum, localities particularly identified with
the traditions of the .ZEneid, and at which no
excavations have been made, we shall know more
about the general character and local variations
of the so-called Trojan migration; but we know
already there is the highest probability that they
were all under the same influences, and that the
line of demarkation of the region so influenced
was somewhat to the north of Falerii, beyond
which the immigration imposing itself on the com-
posite Italic element was Etruscan, no evidence of
which is found in Falerii or in the Latin towns;
and as on both sides of this line appears the
evidence of the earlier uniform Italic civilisation,
we have the right to assume that the Hellenic and
Etruscan immigrations were so nearly coincident
that the one locally excluded the other, and that
they were both superposed on the Italic popula-
tion, which here became Latin and in the north
Etruscan. Of this so modified stock, the central
point of gathering became Rome on the south
and Clusium on the north.
From that time forward Rome has been the
most powerful centre of attraction on the surface
of the earth, first to the Old World, and later to
the New. Even to-day, wreck as it is of its old
glory, it is more peculiarly the " city of the soul "
than any other that we visit. With due respect
for the theories of others, this is to me un-
accounted for by any evident reason ; neither the
republic, nor the empire, nor the church can
10 THE OLD ROME AND THE NEW
explain it, but rather this mysterious attraction
explains them. When I first came to Rome there
was a curious phenomenon which struck me the
gathering together of peasants from the outlying
villages on festal days, at certain localities where
there was no visible attraction, neither wine shop
nor lottery office, and not even an open place for
the gathering, but a narrow street and a narrower
sidewalk. One of these spots, which I was in the
habit of passing, I found, by reference to the map
of the ancient city, to be in the space once occupied
by the forum of Nerva; and the only solution of
the problem that appears to me is that, in a
remote epoch, this had been the marketing place
of the ancestors of these peasants, who, by the
unintelligent, hereditary habit, always gathered
there to hear the news and meet their gossips or
clients. Rome was then full of such survivals of
ancient customs, some of which continue, as may
be seen in the Piazza Montanara, where the agri-
cultural labourers still go in their picturesque
costumes to make their engagements with the
padroni.
In those days the Pope was king; life was cast
in the mediaeval mould; all progress was an
offence, not only to the custom of the place, but
to the fitness of it, and the new-comer had hardly
ceased to be new when he became conservative
and citizen of this imperial Lotophagitis. Exis-
tence was a dream, and almost as cheap as one ;
there was no morning paper to harry our serenity,
or thrust the daily disaster of a distant and in-
THE OLD ROME AND THE NEW 11
different community on our tranquillity; we
learned of most events when they had ceased to
be startling. After the church, art was the theme
of most thought, and the artist was the most
important being after the priest. Roman life had
its tides high spring at Christmas and Easter, and
dead ebb at midsummer but there was never any
bustle or fever of business ; there was no growth ;
there were no new houses ; there was no blocking
the streets with building material, no laying of
drains or disturbance of the soil, no enterprise,
and no new trades. The head of the great hospital
of St. Spirito was one of my friends, and in con-
junction with him and two or three capitalists I
organised a syndicate to supply the hospitals and
city with American ice at the price, delivered at
Civita Vecchia, of the snow, which was otherwise
the only resource, delivered at the pits on the
Alban hills, where it was stored for summer use.
But the offer was refused; it would have dis-
turbed the vested rights of the snow-harvesters.
The sick in the hospitals had been so served for
hundreds of years, and might be still. Every
innovation was resisted as of the devil, and the
possible horse of Troy for stealthy invasion. Rome
had so maintained its position for the centuries of
the papal rule ; why change ?
Outside this compact, grey, silent city, in which
the picturesqueness of the ensemble was so in
contradiction to the stiffness and general ugliness
of the details, was a cordon of gardens and vine-
yards overlying ancient villa sites, abounding in
12 THE OLD ROME AND THE NEW
the most interesting material ; ruins in an almost
infinite variety in their pathetic abandon to the
dissolving influences of nature baths, tombs,
temples, theatres, palaces, aqueducts; and outside
them, and the most picturesque of all, the old
Aurelian wall, which meandered across highway
and through villa grounds, a simulacrum of de-
fence, but a most eloquent record of dead empire,
marking the recession of its inhabited region ;
then, beyond the debatable ground between occu-
pation and desolation, came the Campagna. The
Campagna of Rome has become the commonplace
of poet and orator when they have to deal with
fallen grandeur, but no poet or orator, unless he
were a painter, ever saw more than a fraction of
its beauty; few even of the landscape painters
have seen it all. There were, in those years of
which I write, some who passed their lives in the
hunt for its " subjects " ; painting till the twilight
came on; hurrying in to pass the gates before
they closed for the night, reckless of the chill and
the night-mists which even in midsummer follow
the day, content to run the risks of malaria if
so they might catch the intoxicating impressions
of that unique and supreme nightfall, with its
tremulous purple sky behind the purpler Alban
hills at the east, and its mellow gold at the west,
blinding the eyes more by the expanse of its
glow than its brilliancy, more by the deep in-
tensity of its light than by glare ; by that luminous
depth which is more the quality of the Italian
atmosphere than the intensity of its blue, or the
THE OLD ROME AND THE NEW 13
variety of colour on the sunset clouds. He who
lived amidst these influences in the young enthu-
siasm of art and beautiful nature will remember
the Campagna as he will remember no other
landscape on earth; it is like a phrase of the
noblest poetry, ineffaceable from its unapproach-
able simplicity. In those days, the joyous fra-
ternity of the brush were to be seen on every
road that led into the Campagna, at almost every
season of the year. Down the Tiber, even within
the city walls, pictures made to hand met the eye
at every turn of the river; one found Claude and
Turner wherever one went.
That phase of Rome is gone forever gone as
surely as the simplicity and stern morality of the
republic, the splendour of the empire, or the
moral oppression of the papal rule. Rome can
no more be the home of art again than it can
be the seat of universal empire or the patrimony
of St. Peter. What has come is not so clear. The
Romans of to-day have none of the distinctive
virtues of either preceding epoch, except military