Chapter XIII: The Forum

Julia of Assisi, fresh from the heart of things Franciscan, had been painfully struck by the heartlessness of Rome. In all the grandeur and the pride of the Seven Hills there is something which made her say to herself, as soon as she arrived, that it wasn’t the same as Assisi--a weak phrase, but she found the right expression before long. A want of heart!--for a time she wandered disconsolate, feeling that it was no place for her. What then was delight to discover in Rome her old friend and ally Professor Minchin--a man, as I believe, of European reputation, and a man for whom Julia has one of the frankest and most gurgling of passions. See her, hear her, on a perfect morning in the Forum, as she presents him with the party she has collected for the treat of a tour, under his guidance, among the excavated ruins. He knows them intimately, from the temple to the sewer; there _is_ a heart of things Roman after all, and the Professor undertakes to reveal it. Not in the great bleak galleries and the tawdry churches, but here among broken columns and crumbling masonry, still half buried in historic dust--here is that human and homely touch, or note, or message (for either word is used, if we follow Julia), which at first one took to be lacking altogether in Rome. The darling Professor had made all the difference to her enjoyment of the place; no wonder that she whinnied and panted in her enthusiasm, while she tried to keep us in a bunch and to marshal us properly for our treat.

The Professor seemed conscious of Julia as of some disturbance in the air, some unexplained flutter or flicker that confused him slightly; but he brushed it aside, he vaguely greeted the rest of us, and he flung himself immediately into the zeal of his task. Miss Turnbull, I know, was a young woman easily stirred to ideal raptures, but I soon acknowledged that the Professor was irresistible. He had the appearance partly of a moth and partly of a scarecrow; and the mixture, as I recall it, surprisingly gives him the likeness of a soft and ragged rain-cloud, swept by a kindly gust. He veered at high speed across the broken floor of the Forum, and Julia had much difficulty in holding the half-dozen of us in her embrace while she trundled us after him. The Professor had his view of the particular drain or paving-stone where the study of Rome begins; and there was nothing for it, said Julia, but to accept his rule and to squeeze as we might into the awkward pit or cleft in which the fundamental object is to be found. “Mind the tail of your skirt, Mrs. Rollesby,” cried Julia, growing heated; “there’s room for Kathleen at this end, out of the puddle; wait, Professor, wait--I want Mr. Ram to hear this; really, Mr. Ram, if you crouch you can easily get in.” We were a handful, but Julia kept her head; the most trying member of the party was the Professor, who heeded nothing but the book which he had drawn from his pocket and from which he was gleefully reading aloud--translating as he went, for it was an ancient text.

It wasn’t the best situation for a classical lecture, and Mr. Ram, splashing in the puddle, sighed faintly in good Italian. “Per l’amor di Dio!” he murmured; he was very helpless, and the girl called Kathleen seized him with a manly arm and set him to rights on his perch. Crouching, scuffling, apologizing, we wedged ourselves about the lecturer--with sudden changes of pressure when Mrs. Rollesby leaned and peered over her capacious bosom (she may have been one of Emmeline’s heroines) to see what was happening to her skirt. Under the Professor’s elbow sat a bewildered maiden with a pulled-out neck like a hen’s, and she distracted the whole company by taking notes of the lecture on a little pad--scrawling down words like “republican (said to be)” and “(?) Etruscan,” which we all tried to read. Julia listened fervently, her lips moving in the effort to get the message of the paving-stone by heart; and the message ran on, ran on, now translated from the ancient book, now poured forth at an amazing rate in the exposition of the Professor. He was inspired; he stood upon the mouth of the sewer (if sewer it was--“masonry doubtful (perhaps),” obscurely noted the hen-necked girl)--he stood there and flourished his book and flaunted his interpretation and ransacked the ages, casting up the history of races, of immigrations, of the colour of men’s hair, of the obscenities of their religion, of the shapes of their water-pots; and he whipped open his book again and triumphantly quoted, he dashed it away to remind us of Pelasgic sources and Punic infusions and Iberian influences; and perhaps I rather recall the heads of his discourse as they reached the bewildered pad than as they fell from the Professor, but they were various and bristling and abundant; for it all came in, it all came round, it all came finally back to the stone on which Mr. Ram was trying to twist himself into a tolerable attitude without spoiling his trousers. “Ah,” exclaimed Julia uncontrollably, “how one _feels_ it on the very spot!” Mr. Ram seemed to think so too; he raised himself, ruefully inspecting the damp green traces it had left on the very spot. The Professor dived again into his book like a man possessed.

He kept us at last so long in our narrow pit that we must surely have laid the foundations of Rome and tunnelled its drains with all thoroughness; the notes on the pad were still dubious, but Mrs. Rollesby began to wonder if we hadn’t now reached the surface of the soil--she too had taken her share of the ooze of the ages. She signed to Julia with winks and nudges--and Mr. Ram appealed to Julia with a woeful smile, to which Kathleen added an imperative frown; everybody looked to Julia to take action--everybody except the maiden with the pad, intent upon the uncertainties of learning. The Professor was Julia’s property, it was for her to deal with him; and he had clearly forgotten that we were still underground, he didn’t even notice that the reason why he couldn’t get at the pocket in his coat-tail (he made a sketchy motion towards it now and then) was that the hen’s-neck stretched in the way. We might just as well be sitting comfortably in the sun, and between her responsibility and her rapture poor Julia was flustered. “Soon, very soon--the blue-eyed infusion predominant--I’ll get him to move in a moment--their pots were shallower”: Julia tried to whisper encouragingly to Mrs. Rollesby without dropping the thread of the message. (I don’t answer for her version of it.) But the Professor swept over her head, beaming in the zest of his approach to the real inwardness, the ultimate significance, the true truth of the origin of Rome--it appeared that we were only there, even now, and the first damp stone, so homely and said to be so Etruscan, had still to be laid. We were to stick in our cleft indefinitely, I thought, for Julia’s tactful advances and coughs made no impression. The hen-necked girl scratched out “Etruscan” and wrote wildly “theory abandoned (if at all)”; and the Professor struck her forcibly on the jaw as he flung out upon the climax, the glad surprise to which he had been gradually leading us--his discovery of the solution, the answer to all the queries of the distracted student.

“But first,” he said, “I fear I must disturb you.” He explained with apologies that we should be better able to judge the weight of his argument if we followed him--and he was gone, leaping to the upper air with a sudden agility that brought on one of the tiresome attacks to which Mrs. Rollesby is subject on being startled. These attacks take the form of an extraordinary surging and quaking of the bosom, and she has to be seized and supported and propelled to a spot where she can sit on something less painful than a heap of brickbats. So she says; but the girl Kathleen (who proved to be her niece) declared rather brutally that a little smart exercise would do her all the good in the world. “If she _will_ gobble at breakfast she’ll palpitate before lunch--naturally,” said Kathleen, who was as taut and muscular as a young tree. With all this the Professor had given us the slip, our party was adrift and scattered, Mr. Ram saw a chance of escape--he feared and detested Kathleen. But Julia signalled so excitedly through a gap in some ruinous brickwork, not far off, that she drew us together again for the Professor’s revelation. Mrs. Rollesby, still surging, was somehow hoisted through the gap, and here we found a more convenient space and a less Etruscan boulder, on which she was deposited. There was more room; but it seemed that the secret of Rome still lurks in rather confined and dingy places. The Forum on a spring morning is a sweet spot, and Mr. Ram assured me that he loved every stone of it; the columns tower against the blue sky, roses scramble among the mouldering walls, the dark ilex-crown of the Palatine hangs nobly on its height. But the Professor dragged us away from the view and the roses, he thrust us into a dusty corner where there was nothing to be seen except the blank face of the brickwork to which he joyously pointed. Now, he said, we could perceive for ourselves the conclusion to which his argument had tended; and he shone so radiantly with his glee in the surprise prepared for us that Julia bravely gave a cry and a gasp of recognition on behalf of all. He was enchanted with his success. “I knew you would see it at once,” he said proudly; “_that_ speaks for itself.” He patted and caressed it with the hand of a collector, a connoisseur; it appeared to be a little rim or ledge of greyish cement between the reddish bricks.

His triumph illuminated the shabby corner. Julia’s falsity, Mrs. Rollesby’s palpitation, Mr. Ram’s uneasy mistrust in the neighbourhood of Kathleen--he was rapt above all these in his blissful vision. I don’t know that any of us attained to a share in it; for even Julia, who perhaps came nearest, was so much disturbed by her own rashness and by the fear of being unmasked that she was altogether thrown out in her absorption of the message. She was soon in a fearful state of muddle between the homely touch and the human note, and if the Professor had had eyes for anything post-Iberian (but the pad must surely have got this word wrong) he couldn’t have failed to see that her attention wandered. I attribute my own confusion in the matter of the sewer and the grey cement in the first place to the hen-necked girl (whom Julia addressed as “Hicksie dear”)--for the eye was fatally drawn by her pad; and secondly to Mrs. Rollesby’s alarming attack--which in spite of her niece’s treatment abated little on the boulder, some of the symptoms being so tumultuous that they even affected the Professor in his cloud. Mr. Ram, moreover, was inclined to attach himself to me, as the only member of the party who wasn’t rather rough with him; for the dry bones of learning, he said, left him cold, and he wanted to point out to somebody that the past only lives for us when it is touched by a poetic imagination. So he pointed it out to me, and in principle I agreed with him; but I couldn’t admit that the Professor was wanting in poetry. To me he seemed romantically poetic, and though his argument escaped me I appreciated the spirit of his dream.

It was the spirit of those old fine men, the scholars of the great revival, to whom the glory of antiquity was disclosed in the recovery of the lost books and the forgotten tongue; and even more, perhaps, it was the spirit of the artist, the lover of the marble and the bronze, who stood in breathless expectation while the spade unearthed the buried goddess and gave her back after long eclipse to a newly adoring world. As Poggio over a brown Greek manuscript, as Michael over the great smooth limbs that had lain for a thousand years of oblivion in the soil of the vineyard--so our Professor was hailing no less than a revelation in his turn. What is the mere fidget of the foreground, the present, the transient, compared with the huge unchanging past, where everything is secured and established under the appearance of eternity?--and how, when the obstruction is wonderfully pierced, the page restored, the earth of the present shovelled away, shall we refrain from dashing headlong into the world thrown open, serenely offering itself to our exploration? “There, there’s the appropriate country”--for no man can think rarely and intensely in the rattle of things proceeding, changing, palpitating, catching the eye momently with their ambiguous queries. A scholar shares the blest opportunity of the higher mathematician, and the two of them share it with the artist; all three, and doubtless the saint for a fourth, inhabit a region of completed things, of motionless truth. It is not to say that they are calm and motionless themselves--the Professor almost dances and leaps in the inspiration of his research, returning again and again to the wonder of the speaking brickwork. But the truth that he seeks is there before him, eternally disposed for the hand, the eye, the brain--and I am not afraid of Mr. Ram’s own word, for the poetic imagination--that is able to discern and seize it.

To the Professor it was as lovely as a lyric of Sappho or a torso of the golden age. His fingers rested on the battered brick, the rubbish, the rubble--whichever it was that held the secret--with a touch that might have been laid on the exquisite curves of the perfect marble. His statue had come to the light, he chanted its beauty, he was ready to linger over its gracious lines for the benefit even of a few ignorant gapers like ourselves. Homely indeed!--and human!--Julia was wide of the mark. It was divine, if the word means anything, in its immortal completeness; and as for homeliness, why it carries you off into the clouds, a soft tattered cloud yourself, so that the earth with its gapers and its great fat panting gobblers is forgotten--or would be if it weren’t for the singular moanings of the dying storm in Mrs. Rollesby’s breast. These, as I have said, did occasionally penetrate to the Professor; he glanced earthward with a puzzled look, as though he asked himself whether he had heard or only fancied the report of some commotion. Only fancy, he concluded; and he returned to the height of his discourse--which all this time you must imagine to have been ranging onward, sweeping backward, darting and circling as vivaciously as ever. The wretched Hicksie tore leaf after leaf from her pad, scattering fresh interrogations as fast as the last were answered. Julia was still bright and eager, but her bad conscience was beginning to show in the flush of her dishevelment. The Professor alone didn’t flag; we had given up all thought of the roses and the view, and we gazed stonily at his vigour. Oh, the common earth of the present had little with which to retain such a man; he was caught into the past, into the loving celebration of his statue, his lyric--which is my figure for the secret revealed to his exploring and divining scholarship. I envy him as I envy an artist and a saint, or even a mathematician; there, there’s where I would be, where things stand still and are silent, and you roam among them, chanting the rapture of your research, till you drop. That is a life.

And what was the secret after all? I picture it vaguely as a brilliant divination and revival of the past, the result of the play of the Professor’s penetrating insight upon the vast amassment of his learning. I think of his jubilant glee as aroused, how naturally, by some great spectacle of the ancient world that he perceives in the light of his patient faithful studies. Alas, it is vague to me; but he sees it as clearly, no doubt, beneath the dust and rubbish of the Forum, as I see the green-veiled woman who strays drearily into our corner, murmuring over her red handbook “to our right lie the rude substructures of the peristyle.” And in point of fact I am quite as wide of the mark as Julia herself. The Professor was not the man to have spent good time and good thought over the visionary fancies I ascribed to him; not for him to be a mere “popularizer of the specious”--a phrase that he utters with hissing scorn, for it is one of his side-hits at the showier lore of a “sister university.” No, the Professor took a different view of the scholar’s privilege. It is for the scholar to find a loose stone or an insidious chink in the work of his predecessors and to leave it tightened and slopped; then as he dies he tells himself that he has done something which needed doing--not every man can say as much. Was it a small thing?--it may seem a small thing to you or me, but the Professor retorts that in these matters our clumsy measure is of no authority; if a fact has been inserted where no fact was, then truth is the better for it--and with what sort of scale, pray, will you undertake to estimate the betterment of truth? All this nonsense of torsos and secrets and lyrics may be well enough in a pretty book; but the Professor has been putting a great deal of energy into an explanation, which I seem to have totally misunderstood, of the point that had baffled--or worse, that had deceived and misled--all researchers before him. He has demonstrated his own theory, and when I mention that it has found complete acceptance even at the “sister university” (where to be sure they consider it a trifling matter--they _would_!) I think we may assume that a fanciful amateur, vacantly gaping, is not likely to find a flaw in it. Here is something accomplished for a man to rest upon with satisfaction--so much so that even now, after an hour of mercurial discourse, the Professor is still prepared to go springing off to the next dusty corner and rude substructure that speaks for itself in support of his view.

But what is it, what is it? At this distance of time I long to know, but I confess that at the moment, what with the wear and tear of the various distractions I have described, I could only agree with Mr. Ram that the day was indeed growing “sultry”--I never heard this word on the lips of anyone else--and that it would be pleasant to seek a little repose and refreshment. Mr. Ram looked at his watch--“Time for a little _vino_, a little _spaghetti_,” he insinuated gently and playfully; and though he spoke aside to me, the suggestion was caught up with promptitude by Mrs. Rollesby. All eyes were again directed upon Julia, and poor harassed Julia had once more to begin coughing and sniffing significantly at each of the Professor’s full slops. Kathleen indeed told her aunt plainly that lunch on the top of “all that stodge” at breakfast would be disastrous for one so lately startled; and Mr. Ram drew a sharp breath between his teeth as she added, swinging round at him and pointing to his waist, “Yes, and for you too, Mr. Ram--you’d much better come for a tramp with me before you lay on any more of that deposit.” Hicksie also seemed to have no thought of food or rest; her scribbling was by this time almost delirious in the fever of its queries, but she stuck to it. And the Professor ran on, ran on, blind to Mrs. Rollesby, deaf to Julia--until it happened as before, he suddenly apologized for being compelled to disturb us again, and was gone. This time he was gone so imperceptibly that Mrs. Rollesby was unfluttered; she was consulting Mr. Ram with regard to the handiest place for her lunch. Might we decently take it that the lecture was finished? Not so--Julia, beckoning me to follow, had dashed in pursuit of the Professor; we saw her scrambling up a steep bank to a sort of platform among the ruins, elevated and exposed, where he was renewing his exposition to an audience of one--for the faithful Hicksie had kept pace with him and was sitting at his feet, bent already over a new page. Julia gained the height and doubled his audience; and Mr. Ram and I, glancing at each other rather guiltily, suggested that they seemed very well as they were. The Professor was clearly quite unconscious of the dwindling of his audience; we seized our chance.

Over our _sorso di vino_, as Mr. Ram still called it, I was inclined to think that we had indeed been very near the heart of things Roman that morning--very near, if not completely in touch with it. The Professor’s single-minded certainty was contagious; he held his faith as a grain of mustard-seed, and his passion almost convinced me that we waste our time in our random researches, away from his guidance, after the heart of Rome. Suppose Julia was right, and it was the Professor who had really the clue--for indeed there was a quality in his faith, with its blankness to vulgar appeals, which hadn’t been noticeable on the whole among the rest of our band. Unfortunately I couldn’t put my question to Mr. Ram; he was pre-occupied with his own more tender, more understanding and sensitive love of every stone of the Forum. It hurt him to see the Forum treated as a class-room, and he blamed himself for having suffered Miss Julia to include him, much against his rule, in the class. He didn’t wish to speak of the Professor, but rather of the impression that the Forum, familiar as it was, had made upon himself last evening in a strangely “bistred” afterglow, whatever that may be. But with all his tenderness the faith of Mr. Ram was a languid thing beside that of the Professor, and I returned to the impression that the Forum had made upon myself in the iridescent halo (thus I capped Mr. Ram) of the Professor’s ardour. Where had I seen the like of it? Nowhere at all, I reflected, except perhaps in one place--and that was the great church, when the genius of Rome came riding and swaying over the heads of the multitude. Those eager votaries, yelling their homage--the Professor dancing in his zeal: they had come to Rome with something in common, their single mind.