CHAPTER XLVIII
A SCENE IN THE CORSO
On the appointed afternoon, Kenyon failed not to make his appearance inthe Corso, and at an hour much earlier than Miriam had named.
It was carnival time. The merriment of this famous festival was in fullprogress; and the stately avenue of the Corso was peopled with hundredsof fantastic shapes, some of which probably represented the mirth ofancient times, surviving through all manner of calamity, ever since thedays of the Roman Empire. For a few afternoons of early spring, thismouldy gayety strays into the sunshine; all the remainder of theyear, it seems to be shut up in the catacombs or some other sepulchralstorehouse of the past.
Besides these hereditary forms, at which a hundred generations havelaughed, there were others of modern date, the humorous effluence of theday that was now passing. It is a day, however, and an age, that appearsto be remarkably barren, when compared with the prolific originalityof former times, in productions of a scenic and ceremonial character,whether grave or gay. To own the truth, the Carnival is alive, thispresent year, only because it has existed through centuries gone by. Itis traditionary, not actual. If decrepit and melancholy Rome smiles,and laughs broadly, indeed, at carnival time, it is not in the oldsimplicity of real mirth, but with a half-conscious effort, like ourself-deceptive pretence of jollity at a threadbare joke. Whatever it mayonce have been, it is now but a narrow stream of merriment, noisy of setpurpose, running along the middle of the Corso, through the solemn heartof the decayed city, without extending its shallow influence on eitherside. Nor, even within its own limits, does it affect the mass ofspectators, but only a comparatively few, in street and balcony, whocarry on the warfare of nosegays and counterfeit sugar plums. Thepopulace look on with staid composure; the nobility and priesthood takelittle or no part in the matter; and, but for the hordes of Anglo-Saxonswho annually take up the flagging mirth, the Carnival might long agohave been swept away, with the snowdrifts of confetti that whiten allthe pavement.
No doubt, however, the worn-out festival is still new to the youthfuland light hearted, who make the worn-out world itself as fresh as Adamfound it on his first forenoon in Paradise. It may be only age andcare that chill the life out of its grotesque and airy riot, with theimpertinence of their cold criticism.
Kenyon, though young, had care enough within his breast to render theCarnival the emptiest of mockeries. Contrasting the stern anxiety of hispresent mood with the frolic spirit of the preceding year, he fanciedthat so much trouble had, at all events, brought wisdom in its train.But there is a wisdom that looks grave, and sneers at merriment; andagain a deeper wisdom, that stoops to be gay as often as occasionserves, and oftenest avails itself of shallow and trifling grounds ofmirth; because, if we wait for more substantial ones, we seldom can begay at all. Therefore, had it been possible, Kenyon would have done wellto mask himself in some wild, hairy visage, and plunge into the throngof other maskers, as at the Carnival before. Then Donatello had dancedalong the Corso in all the equipment of a Faun, doing the part withwonderful felicity of execution, and revealing furry ears, which lookedabsolutely real; and Miriam had been alternately a lady of the antiqueregime, in powder and brocade, and the prettiest peasant girl of theCampagna, in the gayest of costumes; while Hilda, sitting demurely in abalcony, had hit the sculptor with a single rosebud,--so sweet and fresha bud that he knew at once whose hand had flung it.
These were all gone; all those dear friends whose sympathetic mirth hadmade him gay. Kenyon felt as if an interval of many years had passedsince 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 shabbystreet of decaying palaces; and even the long, blue streamer of Italiansky, 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 basketsbrimming over with bouquets, for sale at the street corners, or borneabout on people's heads; while bushels upon bushels of variously coloredconfetti were displayed, looking just like veritable sugar plums; sothat a stranger would have imagined that the whole commerce and businessof stern old Rome lay in flowers and sweets. And now, in the sunnyafternoon, there could hardly be a spectacle more picturesque than thevista of that noble street, stretching into the interminable distancebetween two rows of lofty edifices, from every window of which, andmany a balcony, flaunted gay and gorgeous carpets, bright silks, scarletcloths with rich golden fringes, and Gobelin tapestry, still lustrouswith varied hues, though the product of antique looms. Each separatepalace 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 thestreet below. In the balconies that projected along the palace frontsstood groups of ladies, some beautiful, all richly dressed, scatteringforth their laughter, shrill, yet sweet, and the musical babble of theirvoices, to thicken into an airy tumult over the heads of common mortals.
All these innumerable eyes looked down into the street, the wholecapacity of which was thronged with festal figures, in such fantasticvariety that it had taken centuries to contrive them; and through themidst of the mad, merry stream of human life rolled slowly onward anever-ending procession of all the vehicles in Rome, from the ducalcarriage, with the powdered coachman high in front, and the three goldenlackeys clinging in the rear, down to the rustic cart drawn by itssingle donkey. Among this various crowd, at windows and in balconies, incart, cab, barouche, or gorgeous equipage, or bustling to and fro afoot,there was a sympathy of nonsense; a true and genial brotherhood andsisterhood, based on the honest purpose--and a wise one, too--of beingfoolish, all together. The sport of mankind, like its deepest earnest,is a battle; so these festive people fought one another with anammunition of sugar plums and flowers.
Not that they were veritable sugar plums, however, but something thatresembled them only as the apples of Sodom look like better fruit.They were concocted mostly of lime, with a grain of oat, or some otherworthless kernel, in the midst. Besides the hailstorm of confetti, thecombatants threw handfuls of flour or lime into the air, where it hunglike smoke over a battlefield, or, descending, whitened a black coat orpriestly robe, and made the curly locks of youth irreverently hoary.
At the same time with this acrid contest of quicklime, which caused mucheffusion of tears from suffering eyes, a gentler warfare of flowerswas carried on, principally between knights and ladies. Originally, nodoubt, when this pretty custom was first instituted, it may have had asincere and modest import. Each youth and damsel, gathering bouquetsof field flowers, or the sweetest and fairest that grew in their owngardens, all fresh and virgin blossoms, flung them with true aim at theone, or few, whom they regarded with a sentiment of shy partiality atleast, if not with love. Often, the lover in the Corso may thus havereceived from his bright mistress, in her father's princely balcony,the first sweet intimation that his passionate glances had not struckagainst a heart of marble. What more appropriate mode of suggestingher tender secret could a maiden find than by the soft hit of a rosebudagainst a young man's cheek?
This was the pastime and the earnest of a more innocent and homelierage. 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 abasketful, you find them miserably wilted, as if they had flown hitherand thither through two or three carnival days already; muddy, too,having been fished up from the pavement, where a hundred feet havetrampled on them. You may see throngs of men and boys who thrustthemselves beneath the horses' hoofs to gather up bouquets that wereaimed amiss from balcony and carriage; these they sell again, and yetonce more, and ten times over, defiled as they all are with the wickedfilth of Rome.
Such are
the flowery favors--the fragrant bunches of sentiment--that flybetween cavalier and dame, and back again, from one end of the Corso tothe other. Perhaps they may symbolize, more aptly than was intended,the poor, battered, wilted hearts of those who fling them; heartswhich--crumpled and crushed by former possessors, and stained withvarious mishap--have been passed from hand to hand along the muddystreet-way of life, instead of being treasured in one faithful bosom.
These venal and polluted flowers, therefore, and those deceptivebonbons, are types of the small reality that still subsists in theobservance of the Carnival. Yet the government seemed to imagine thatthere might be excitement enough,--wild mirth, perchance, following itsantics beyond law, and frisking from frolic into earnest,--to render itexpedient to guard the Corso with an imposing show of military power.Besides the ordinary force of gendarmes, a strong patrol of papaldragoons, in steel helmets and white cloaks, were stationed at all thestreet corners. Detachments of French infantry stood by their stackedmuskets in the Piazza del Popolo, at one extremity of the course, andbefore the palace of the Austrian embassy, at the other, and by thecolumn of Antoninus, midway between. Had that chained tiger-cat, theRoman populace, shown only so much as the tip of his claws, the sabreswould have been flashing and the bullets whistling, in right earnest,among the combatants who now pelted one another with mock sugar plumsand wilted flowers.
But, to do the Roman people justice, they were restrained by a bettersafeguard than the sabre or the bayonet; it was their own gentlecourtesy, which imparted a sort of sacredness to the hereditaryfestival. At first sight of a spectacle so fantastic and extravagant, acool observer might have imagined the whole town gone mad; but, in theend, he would see that all this apparently unbounded license is keptstrictly within a limit of its own; he would admire a people who canso freely let loose their mirthful propensities, while muzzling thosefiercer ones that tend to mischief. Everybody seemed lawless; nobody wasrude. 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 thisGothic race was still softened by the insensible influence of a moralatmosphere more delicate, in some respects, than we breathe at home. Notthat, 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 moredecorously, as well as more airily and delightfully, in Rome, than inany Anglo-Saxon city.
When Kenyon emerged from a side lane into the Corso, the mirth was atits height. Out of the seclusion of his own feelings, he looked forth atthe tapestried and damask-curtained palaces, the slow-moving double lineof carriages, and the motley maskers that swarmed on foot, as if he weregazing through the iron lattice of a prison window. So remote fromthe scene were his sympathies, that it affected him like a thin dream,through the dim, extravagant material of which he could discern moresubstantial objects, while too much under its control to start forthbroad 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 ofthe lofty palaces, and roaring upward to the sky with melody so powerfulthat it almost grew to discord. Next came a body of cavalry and mountedgendarmes, with great display of military pomp. They were escorting along train of equipages, each and all of which shone as gorgeously asCinderella's coach, with paint and gilding. Like that, too, they wereprovided with coachmen of mighty breadth, and enormously tall footmen,in immense powdered wigs, and all the splendor of gold-laced, threecornered hats, and embroidered silk coats and breeches. By theold-fashioned magnificence of this procession, it might worthily haveincluded his Holiness in person, with a suite of attendant Cardinals,if those sacred dignitaries would kindly have lent their aid to heightenthe 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 municipalauthorities of Rome,--illusive shadows, every one, and among them aphantom, styled the Roman Senator,--proceeding to the Capitol.
The riotous interchange of nosegays and confetti was partiallysuspended, while the procession passed. One well-directed shot,however,--it was a double handful of powdered lime, flung by an impiousNew Englander,--hit the coachman of the Roman Senator full in the face,and hurt his dignity amazingly. It appeared to be his opinion that theRepublic was again crumbling into ruin, and that the dust of it nowfilled his nostrils; though, in fact, it would hardly be distinguishedfrom the official powder with which he was already plentifully bestrewn.
While the sculptor, with his dreamy eyes, was taking idle note of thistrifling circumstance, two figures passed before him, hand in hand. Thecountenance of each was covered with an impenetrable black mask; but oneseemed a peasant of the Campagna; the other, a contadina in her holidaycostume.