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 tip 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.