University of Virginia Library

23. CHAPTER XXIII.
A SCENE IN THE CORSO.

On the appointed afternoon, Kenyon failed not to make
his appearance in the Corso, and at an hour much earlier
than Miriam had named.

It was carnival time. The merriment of this famous
festival was in full progress; and the stately avenue of
the Corso was peopled with hundreds of fantastic shapes,
some of which probably represented the mirth of ancient
times, surviving through all manner of calamity, ever
since the days of the Roman empire. For a few afternoons
of early spring, this mouldy gayety strays into the
sunshine; all the remainder of the year, it seems to be
shut up in the catacombs or some other sepulchral storehouse
of the past.

Besides these hereditary forms, at which a hundred
generations have laughed, there were others of modern
date, the humorous effluence of the day that was now
passing. It is a day, however, and an age, that appears
to be remarkably barren, when compared with the prolific
originality of former times, in productions of a scenic
and ceremonial character, whether grave or gay. To

own the truth, the carnival is alive, this present year, only
because it has existed through centuries gone by. It is
traditionary, not actual. If decrepit and melancholy
Rome smiles, and laughs broadly, indeed, at carnival time,
it is not in the old simplicity of real mirth, but with a
half-conscious effort, like our self-deceptive pretence of
jollity at a threadbare joke. Whatever it may once have
been, it is now but a narrow stream of merriment, noisy
of set purpose, running along the middle of the Corso,
through the solemn heart of the decayed city, without extending
its shallow influence on either side. Nor, even
within its own limits, does it affect the mass of spectators,
but only a comparatively few, in street and balcony, who
carry on the warfare of nosegays and counterfeit sugar-plums.
The populace look on with staid composure; the
nobility and priesthood take little or no part in the matter;
and, but for the hordes of Anglo-Saxons who annually
take up the flagging mirth, the carnival might long
ago have been swept away, with the snow-drifts of confetti
that whiten all the pavement.

No doubt, however, the worn-out festival is still new to
the youthful and light-hearted, who make the worn-out
world itself as fresh as Adam found it on his first forenoon
in Paradise. It may be only age and care that chill
the life out of its grotesque and airy riot, with the impertinence
of their cold criticism.

Kenyon, though young, had care enough within his
breast to render the carnival the emptiest of mockeries.
Contrasting the stern anxiety of his present mood with
the frolic spirit of the preceding year, he fancied that so

much trouble had, at all events, brought wisdom in its
train. But there is a wisdom that looks grave, and sneers
at merriment; and again a deeper wisdom, that stoops to
be gay as often as occasion serves, and oftenest avails
itself of shallow and trifling grounds of mirth; because,
if we wait for more substantial ones, we seldom can be
gay at all. Therefore, had it been possible, Kenyon would
have done well to mask himself in some wild, hairy visage,
and plunge into the throng of other maskers, as at the
carnival before. Then, Donatello had danced along the
Corso in all the equipment of a Faun, doing the part
with wonderful felicity of execution, and revealing furry
ears which looked absolutely real; and Miriam had been
alternately, a lady of the antique régime, in powder and
brocade, and the prettiest peasant-girl of the Campagna,
in the gayest of costumes; while Hilda, sitting demurely
in a balcony, had hit the sculptor with a single rosebud, —
so sweet and fresh a bud that he knew at once whose
hand had flung it.

These were all gone; all those dear friends whose
sympathetic mirth had made him gay. Kenyon felt as
if an interval of many years had passed since 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 shabby street of decaying palaces;
and even the long, blue streamer of Italian sky, 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 baskets brimming
over with bouquets, for sale at the street-corners,
or borne about on people's heads; while bushels upon
bushels of variously colored confetti were displayed, looking
just like veritable sugar-plums; so that a stranger
would have imagined that the whole commerce and business
of stern old Rome lay in flowers and sweets. And,
now, in the sunny afternoon, there could hardly be a
spectacle more picturesque than the vista of that noble
street, stretching into the interminable distance between
two rows of lofty edifices, from every window of which,
and many a balcony, flaunted gay and gorgeous carpets,
bright silks, scarlet cloths with rich golden fringes, and
Gobelin tapestry, still lustrous with varied hues, though
the product of antique looms. Each separate palace 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 the street below. In
the balconies that projected along the palace fronts, stood
groups of ladies, some beautiful, all richly dressed, scattering
forth their laughter, shrill, yet sweet, and the musical
babble of their voices, to thicken into an airy tumult
over the heads of common mortals.

All these innumerable eyes looked down into the street,
the whole capacity of which was thronged with festal
figures, in such fantastic variety that it had taken centuries
to contrive them; and through the midst of the
mad, merry stream of human life, rolled slowly onward a

never-ending procession of all the vehicles in Rome,
from the ducal carriage, with the powdered coachman
high in front, and the three golden lackeys clinging in
the rear, down to the rustic cart drawn by its single
donkey. Among this various crowd, at windows and
in balconies, in cart, cab, barouche, or gorgeous equipage,
or bustling to and fro afoot, there was a sympathy
of nonsense; a true and genial brotherhood and sisterhood,
based on the honest purpose — and a wise one,
too — of being foolish, all together. The sport of mankind,
like its deepest earnest, is a battle; so these festive
people fought one another with an ammunition of sugar-plums
and flowers.

Not that they were veritable sugar-plums, however,
but something that resembled them only as the apples
of Sodom look like better fruit. They were concocted
mostly of lime, with a grain of oat or some other worthless
kernel in the midst. Besides the hail-storm of confetti,
the combatants threw handfuls of flour or lime into
the air, where it hung like smoke over a battle-field, or,
descending, whitened a black coat or priestly robe, and
made the curly locks of youth irreverently hoary.

At the same time with this acrid contest of quicklime,
which caused much effusion of tears from suffering eyes,
a gentler warfare of flowers was carried on, principally
between knights and ladies. Originally, no doubt, when
this pretty custom was first instituted, it may have had a
sincere and modest import. Each youth and damsel,
gathering bouquets of field flowers, or the sweetest and
fairest that grew in their own gardens, all fresh and virgin

blossoms, — flung them, with true aim, at the one, or few,
whom they regarded with a sentiment of shy partiality at
least, if not with love. Often, the lover in the Corso may
thus have received from his bright mistress, in her father's
princely balcony, the first sweet intimation that his passionate
glances had not struck against a heart of marble.
What more appropriate mode of suggesting her tender
secret could a maiden find, than by the soft hit of a rose-bud
against a young man's cheek.

This was the pastime and the earnest of a more innocent
and homelier age. Now-a-days, 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
a basketful, you find them miserably wilted, as if they
had flown hither and thither through two or three carnival
days already; muddy, too, having been fished up from
the pavement, where a hundred feet have trampled on
them. You may see throngs of men and boys who thrust
themselves beneath the horses' hoofs to gather up bouquets
that were aimed amiss from balcony and carriage;
these they sell again, and yet once more, and ten times
over, defiled as they all are with the wicked filth of
Rome.

Such are the flowery favors — the fragrant bunches
of sentiment — that fly between cavalier and dame, and
back again, from one end of the Corso to the other. Perhaps
they may symbolize, more aptly than was intended,
the poor, battered, wilted hearts of those who fling them;
hearts which — crumpled and crushed by former possessors,

and stained with various mishap — have been passed
from hand to hand, along the muddy street-way of life,
instead of being treasured in one faithful bosom.

These venal and polluted flowers, therefore, and those
deceptive bonbons, are types of the small reality that
still subsists in the observance of the carnival. Yet the
government seemed to imagine that there might be excitement
enough — wild mirth, perchance, following its
antics beyond law, and frisking from frolic into earnest —
to render it expedient to guard the Corso with an imposing
show of military power. Besides the ordinary force
of gendarmes, a strong patrol of Papal dragoons, in steel
helmets and white cloaks, were stationed at all the street-corners.
Detachments of French infantry stood by their
stacked muskets in the Piazza del Popolo, at one extremity
of the course, and before the palace of the
Austrian embassy, at the other, and by the column of
Antoninus, midway between. Had that chained tiger-cat,
the Roman populace, shown only so much as the tips of
his claws, the sabres would have been flashing and the
bullets whistling, in right earnest, among the combatants
who now pelted one another with mock sugar-plums and
wilted flowers.

But, to do the Roman people justice, they were restrained
by a better safeguard than the sabre or the bayonet:
it was their own gentle courtesy, which imparted a
sort of sacredness to the hereditary festival. At first
sight of a spectacle so fantastic and extravagant, a cool
observer might have imagined the whole town gone mad;
but, in the end, he would see that all this apparently unbounded

license is kept strictly within a limit of its own;
he would admire a people who can so freely let loose
their mirthful propensities, while muzzling those fiercer
ones that tend to mischief. Everybody seemed lawless;
nobody was rude. 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 this Gothic
race was still softened by the insensible influence of a
moral atmosphere more delicate, in some respects, than
we breathe at home. Not that, 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 more
decorously, as well as more airily and delightfully, in
Rome, than in any Anglo-Saxon city.

When Kenyon emerged from a side-lane into the
Corso, the mirth was at its height. Out of the seclusion
of his own feelings, he looked forth at the tapestried and
damask-curtained palaces, the slow-moving, double line of
carriages, and the motley maskers that swarmed on foot,
as if he were gazing through the iron lattice of a prison-window.
So remote from the scene were his sympathies,
that it affected him like a thin dream, through the dim,
extravagant material of which he could discern more
substantial objects, while too much under its control to
start forth broad 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 of the lofty palaces, and roaring
upward to the sky, with melody so powerful that it
almost grew to discord. Next came a body of cavalry
and mounted gendarmes, with great display of military
pomp. They were escorting a long train of equipages,
each and all of which shone as gorgeously as Cinderella's
coach, with paint and gilding. Like that, too, they were
provided with coachmen, of mighty breadth, and enormously
tall footmen, in immense, powdered wigs, and all
the splendor of gold-laced, three-cornered hats, and embroidered
silk coats and breeches. By the old-fashioned
magnificence of this procession, it might worthily have
included his Holiness in person, with a suite of attendant
Cardinals, if those sacred dignitaries would kindly have
lent their aid to heighten the 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 municipal authorities
of Rome, — illusive shadows, every one, and
among them a phantom, styled the Roman Senator, —
proceeding to the Capitol.

The riotous interchange of nosegays and confetti was
partially suspended, while the procession passed. One well-directed
shot, however, — it was a double handful of powdered
lime, flung by an impious New Englander, — hit
the coachman of the Roman Senator full in the face, and
hurt his dignity amazingly. It appeared to be his opinion,
that the Republic was again crumbling into ruin, and
that the dust of it now filled his nostrils; though, in fact,
it would hardly be distinguished from the official powder
with which he was already plentifully bestrewn

While the sculptor, with his dreamy eyes, was taking
idle note of this trifling circumstance, two figures passed
before him, hand in hand. The countenance of each was
covered with an impenetrable black mask; but one
seemed a peasant of the Campagna; the other, a contadina
in her holiday costume.