For the rest, Italy was mostly an emotion and the emotion
naturally centred in Rome. The American parent, curiously enough,
while bitterly hostile to Paris, seemed rather disposed to accept
Rome as legitimate education, though abused; but to young men
seeking education in a serious spirit, taking for granted that
everything had a cause, and that nature tended to an end, Rome
was altogether the most violent vice in the world, and Rome
before 1870 was seductive beyond resistance. The month of May,
1860, was divine. No doubt other young men, and occasionally
young women, have passed the month of May in Rome since then, and
conceive that the charm continues to exist. Possibly it does --
in them -- but in 1860 the lights and shadows were still
mediaeval, and mediaeval Rome was alive; the shadows breathed and
glowed, full of soft forms felt by lost senses. No sand-blast of
science had yet skinned off the epidermis of history, thought,
and feeling. The pictures were uncleaned, the churches
unrestored, the ruins unexcavated. Mediaeval Rome was sorcery.
Rome was the worst spot on earth to teach nineteenth-century
youth what to do with a twentieth-century world. One's emotions
in Rome were one's private affair, like one's glass of absinthe
before dinner in the Palais Royal; they must be hurtful, else
they could not have been so intense; and they were surely
immoral, for no one, priest or politician, could honestly read in
the ruins of Rome any other certain lesson than that they were
evidence of the just judgments of an outraged God against all the
doings of man.
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