[[1]]
Rome
April 10 / [18]81
My dear Brian *1,
We have been here for the best part of fortnight in this august city:-- & I know you will
be kindly glad to hear of our impressions thereupon. I can easily give Hyacinth's *2.
She would prefer green fields and flowers & insects a thousand times over to these
Ruins, Sculptures, Pictures & Churches with which this place is stuffed & loaded.
Our 2 excursions from Rome to Tivoli, & to Albano & Frascati charmed her her. The air &
the woods & flowers were to me too a relief after so thorough a drenching with sight-seeing as the "necessities" of travel here impose on one. Then too the finding Mr &
Mrs Morgan here has been a great relief & pleasure, & they have been most kind to
us.
Rome as a city of ruins is very disappointing to me, so few of them are
[[2]] in an intelligible state of preservation & such as there are representatives of
people & events separated by such a vast interval of time or intercalated with the other so abruptly
that they appear to have no more in common than the fossils of widely separated
geological beds whose strata had been faulted & dislocated. Here you have
something of the Caeser, at the next turn something of Constantines, with perhaps a
monument of the Kingly period opposite it, then a vestige of the Republic , then of
Volscius & the Goths, & so forth, to which you have to add the memorials
innumerable of that complicated era when Heathendom and Christendom took it turn
about to vex history. One heartily wishes that some more of those masters of Rome
had destroyed every vestige of all his predecessors work, or else let them all alone!
as it is, what little History of Rome I had is reduced to the ruinous state in which I find
the memorials of it, & the objective vestiges of events not worth recording take a
firmer hold on the memory than the
[[3]] written records of world disturbing events which have left no visible evidence of
their identity or efforts. I spent hours at the Palace of the Caesars, & as many in
Hadrian's Villa, & I declare that if you were to change their positions & take me
blindfold to either, I should not know which I was at! Each have a stadium & its
Palestra, & a theatre & a library & so forth, & in both cases these are separated by
gigantic mounds of ruins that have no distinguishing character of any sort. I think
however that I can picture Rome as it was in the Republic better than before-- a city
of no improving character as a whole, formed of a vast multitude of low buildings with
slanting roofs belonging to the lower classes, with here & there a magnificent
veranda, & scattered public buildings of still greater magnificence contrasting
strangely with the hovels around-- In fact a sort of Benares with architecture of a very
different type. Judging from the frescoes
[[4]] the ordinary peasants & townsman's house must have been very like what we
see now in & around Rome, & the house with the atrium, peristyle, impluvium & so
forth must have been confined to the wealthy & few & far between. Again it appears
to me that the vast extent of the public buildings & private ones of the upper classes,
the prodigious amount of material put into these, the vast amount of wrought stones
of incredible magnitude & hardness, & the lavish decoration of mosaics that required
much time for many hands to produce them, all bespeak a prodigious disproportion
of a very poor working class whose labour was forced or paid for by the smallest coin
& coarsest food. The civilisation that produced such buildings as we have in Italy,
Egypt, & Assyria had I suppose this element in common of a prodigality of forced or
very cheap labor[sic]. These stupendous buildings are the
[[5]] Stonehenge, & the monoliths, of a barbarous people in so far as means
employed are concerned. It is true that St Peters is as big a thing as any that the
ancient Romans produced, but it does not represent the brute strength that the
Coliseum does as an expenditure of human labor or muscular power.
The last sage remark turns me to the churches, an endless theme. The first thing
that must shock every traveller from the south, is the difference in the style of
architecture from the southern gothic, & the fact that one is adapted to pictorial
decoration the other not. & this leads to the enquiry how it was that architecture &
painting being sister arts should be so culturally divorced in the north! Of the
churches here the grandest in my view are the St. Maria degli Angeli & the
Pantheon. These surprise you with the vastness of their proportions on entering,
which St Peters does not. In fact to appreciate the latter you must see into the
galleries of the dome and look down on the human beings like ants below & up to the
tier upon tier of gigantic heads of
[[6]] the mosaics that rear themselves aloft coming inward to the head of the dome.
This last, the interior of the dome produces an overpowering effect, heightened
perhaps by the height at which you stand & the slimness of the rail that separates
you from the gulf below & the infinite space above crowded with great faces glaring
at you.
The dome itself seen from outside is very inferior in proportions to St Pauls, which
seen from Waterloo bank is exceedingly beautiful, as indeed is the whole building
which had the advantage of being the design of one man of surpassing genius in
many lines of thought & action.
As to the pictures & sculptures it is dangerous to begin upon them in a letter & so I
will draw this epistle to a close.
We leave this tomorrow for Orvieto, Perugia, Chiusi *2, Siena & Florence. & then go
to Venice.
[[7]] Hyacinth is already much the better for her trip, & will I hope return with renewed
health. The Grays are most agreeable & most considerate travelling companions.
With united love to you both |Ever affe[ctionatel]y y[ou]rs | Jos D Hooker [signature]
ENDNOTES
1. Brian Houghton Hodgson (1801--1894). A pioneer naturalist and ethnologist
working in India and Nepal where he was a British civil servant. Joseph Hooker
stayed at Hodgson’s house in Darjeeling periodically during his expedition to India
and the Himalayas, 1847--1851, and named one of his sons after him.
2. Lady Hyacinth Hooker, née Symonds then Jardine (1842--1921). Joseph Hooker's
second wife, they married in 1876.
3. Clarified as Chiusi in a different hand, or later by JDH.
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